Hong Kong: New round of heritage funding opens

The Development Bureau today invited applications for the second round of a funding scheme that offers financial support for activities related to built heritage conservation.

The Government launched Batch I of its Funding Scheme for Public Engagement Projects of the Built Heritage Conservation Fund as a pilot programme in 2017, inviting professional bodies involved in the conservation of built heritage to submit applications.

More than 16,000 participants took part in a series of public engagement activities, ranging from exhibitions and thematic lectures, to site visits and an online forum.

Eligibility for the new round of funding has been extended to local non-profit organisations with experience in built heritage conservation.

Applicants may submit project proposals that correspond to three priority themes, namely Looking After Our Heritage Buildings, Engaging Young People in Heritage Conservation and Our Built Heritage & Our Community: Education, Religion & Heritage.

Applications will close at noon on October 3.

Click here for details and to access the application form.

This story has been published on: 2023-07-03. To contact the author, please use the contact details within the article.
International community cannot tolerate Japans nuclear-contaminated water dumping

08:49, July 03, 2023 By Global Times editorial ( Global Times

Japan's dangerous move.Illustration:Liu Rui/GT

Japan is making final preparations for dumping nuclear-contaminated wastewater into the sea. According to local media reports, Japan's nuclear regulator finished inspecting a newly completed system to release radioactive water from the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear plant into the sea, presenting a posture that everything is ready. Rafael Mariano Grossi, director General of the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), will visit Japan from Tuesday to Friday, and the IAEA's final assessment report on Japan's dumping plan will soon be released. Will Grossi's attitude, or the IAEA's final assessment, change Japan's decision to dump wastewater into the sea? It seems unlikely.

In fact, the Japanese side officially approved the dumping plan as early as July 22 last year. Since then, it has been working intensively on implementing the plan. At the same time, it has been spending a lot of effort on public relations, never taking seriously of the strong concerns at home and abroad, and failing to conduct adequate and well-intentioned consultations with stakeholders. And the IAEA is being targeted by the Japanese side as a priority in networking. Although the organization cannot give Japan a "license" and a "talisman" for dumping nuclear-contaminated water into the sea, the Japanese side may make an issue of how the IAEA writes its assessment report and draws its conclusions.

We still urge the IAEA to uphold the principles of objectivity, professionalism and impartiality, develop an assessment report that can stand the test of science and history, and not endorse the Japanese side's dumping plan. Tokyo's calculation is to force the international community to accept that what's done is done. Japan hopes that after resisting the pressure for some time, perhaps the international community's attention will turn to other areas, and the opposition to dumping nuclear-contaminated wastewater into the sea will weaken. We cannot let such a scheme succeed.

Now we need to be particularly vigilant that some governments and the Japanese side have reached a political deal over the issue of the wastewater dumping plan, which is a colluded betrayal of the public interest of mankind and marine ecology. Washington was the first to give Tokyo the green light for geopolitical reasons and then persuaded its other allies. The South Korean government has also started to release ambiguous messages frequently despite strong opposition from the public. To dispel the public's doubts, some lawmakers from the South Korean ruling party even went to the seafood market in groups to drink seawater from the breeding pond, and "even the fish in the pond found it ridiculous." Some European governments have also relaxed their attitude over the issue.

There have been concerns, objections, and questions about the discharge of nuclear-contaminated wastewater into the sea from ASEAN countries, Pacific Island countries, and others including Japan. Although the US and Japanese governments have tried to marginalize such voices, they have never disappeared. China's position as a major power is clear and has remained unchanged. The discharge of nuclear-contaminated wastewater into the sea is a matter of common interest for the international community, not a private matter for Japan. So China urges the Japanese side to stop pushing forward with the dumping plan, effectively dispose of the nuclear-contaminated water in a scientific, safe and transparent manner, and accept strict international supervision. This is a voice from a scientific and all-human perspective, which is justified and couldn't be alone.

In order to promote the safety of seafood from Fukushima, the Japanese government once attempted to use Fukushima's seafood in the meals of primary and secondary schools in the prefecture. However, all schools in Fukushima prefecture rejected this proposal. According to reports, content of Cs-137 in fish recently caught in the harbor of the Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Plant is 180 times that of the standard maximum stipulated in Japan's food safety law, which is extremely alarming.

In this situation, claiming that the contaminated wastewater is safe is nothing but a lie. As officials from Pacific island countries have said, if the so-called "treated water" meets the standards and can be discharged, why doesn't Japan use this contaminated wastewater in its own country, especially in its agricultural sector?

Japan does have other more appropriate choices. The Japanese government has considered five different treatment options, but it ultimately chose the cheapest and easiest one, which is to discharge the contaminated wastewater into the ocean. From a technical standpoint, this is the solution with the lowest economic cost to Japan, but it releases the highest amount of radioactive substances into the global environment. Japan is unwilling to spend money on safely treating the contaminated wastewater but is willing to invest in public relations. According to recent reports from South Korean media, Japanese officials made political donations worth over EUR 1 million to the staff of the IAEA Secretariat and there has been no response to this matter so far.

According to a German marine scientific research institute, with the world's strongest currents along the coast of Fukushima, radioactive materials could spread to most of the Pacific Ocean within 57 days from the date of discharge. However, Japan has failed to provide a comprehensive and systematic monitoring plan for the disposal of nuclear-contaminated wastewater into the sea. The current monitoring scope is small, with few sampling points and low frequency, making it difficult to timely detect abnormal situations such as discharging pollutants in levels that exceed the stipulated standards. In short, Japan's forceful disposal of nuclear-contaminated water into the sea is illegal and violates a series of international legal obligations, constituting a crime against all of humanity. China and the international community's forces of justice stand together against such behavior and will never compromise or tolerate it.

(Web editor: Zhong Wenxing, Liang Jun)
Good morning and welcome to the A.M. Alert!

CALIFORNIA ELECTEDS RESPOND TO SCOTUS ANTI-LGBTQ DECISION

LGBTQ Pride Month did not end the way advocates hoped it would: With a U.S. Supreme Court victory.

Instead, the nations highest court ruled 6-3 Friday that private businesses have a First Amendment right to discriminate against LGBTQ patrons by refusing them service.

The case, 303 Creative LLC v. Elenis, stems from a challenge to Colorados anti-discrimination law. It was filed by a Christian website designer who said that her religious beliefs prevented her from creating wedding websites for same-sex couples.

Consider what a contrary approach would mean. Under Colorados logic, the government may compel anyone who speaks for pay on a given topic to accept all commissions on that same topic  no matter the underlying message  if the topic somehow implicates a customers statutorily protected trait, Justice Neil Gorsuch wrote in the majority opinion.

California elected officials responded with broad condemnation of the decision.

California Gov. Gavin Newsom said in a statement that this radical Supreme Court majority once again shows its willingness to bend the Constitution to favor conservative views and undo decades of progress.

The governor went on to say that this decision is just the latest blow from a court that seems hellbent on rolling back basic rights, protections, and freedoms that generations of Americans have fought so hard for.

Former U.S. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, D-San Francisco, wrote in a tweet that no business or organization open to the public should be allowed to mask discrimination behind the guise of free speech or religious liberty.

California Sen. Dianne Feinstein said in a statement that this is the first time the SCOTUS has granted businesses the right to deny services to a protected class of people.

Im fearful it has now opened the door for other forms of discrimination by businesses claiming First Amendment protections, Feinstein said.

State Sen. Scott Wiener, D-San Francisco, in a statement called the ruling dangerous and horrifying, with major implications for LGBTQ anti-discrimination laws in employment, housing and other contents.

The court is taking us down a road where discrimination against LGBTQ people is constitutionally protected. This attack isnt happening in a vacuum. Its part of a well-funded, concerted legal strategy by right wing extremists to hijack the First Amendment and use it as a tool to validate and constitutionally protect anti-LGBTQ discrimination, Wiener said.

KOUNALAKIS CAMPAIGN BANKS CASH, ENDORSEMENTS

Lt. Gov. Eleni Kounalakis bid for the big chair is bringing in some big money.

On Friday, her gubernatorial campaign spokesman  David Beltran of Bearstar Strategies  announced that she has raised $2.3 million in the just over two months since she jumped into the race. Kounalakis heads into 2024 with $6.7 million in the bank and a growing list of supporters from across the state, Beltran said in an email to The Bee.

Among those supporters?

Former Secretary of State and 2016 Democratic presidential nominee Hillary Clinton, as well as former California Sen. Barbara Boxer.

Both Kounalakis and former State Controller Betty Yee are hoping to be the first woman to serve as California governor. Yee told the San Francisco Chronicle in April that she is running, though she has not yet formally launched her campaign.

QUOTE OF THE DAY

Grateful to serve as the 71st Speaker of the California Assembly. I am humbled by the trust placed in me and I am proud to lead the Assembly. Lets get to work!

- Newly minted Assembly Speaker Robert Rivas, D-Salinas, via Twitter.

Best of The Bee:
An air tanker drops fire retardant behind homes in Chino Hills in 2020. (Irfan Khan / Los Angeles Times)

As the first heat wave of summer plunges California into yet another wildfire season, some environmental groups are taking aim at a commercial fire retardant that most residents have grown all too familiar with during recent, devastating fire years.

Phos-Chek, that neon-pink goo that airplanes dump over wildfires, is a sticky slurry of ammonium phosphate designed to coat vegetation and other fuels to deprive advancing flames of oxygen. Fire authorities swear by the product, calling it indispensable.

But critics argue that officials are overlooking the product's ecological risks. Studies have shown the retardant can harm plants, fish and other species, including steelhead trout and Chinook salmon. It can also act as a fertilizer that grows more vegetation, which can later act as fuel for fires.

"Fire retardant has more adverse effects on endangered species than any other thing the federal government does, and theres not even a close second," said Andy Stahl, executive director of Forest Service Employees for Environmental Ethics, an advocacy group that recently sued the U.S. Forest Service over its use of aerial retardant.

Now, the manufacturer is marketing a new, colorless retardant that is intended to be sprayed on private lawns, roadsides and institutional landscapes in advance of fire season. The product has many of the same ingredients as the aerial spray, and is intended to remain on vegetation until the first major rainfall.

The pool area of a residence is covered in fire retardant in the Fairview fire burn area near Hemet in 2022. (Luis Sinco/Los Angeles Times)

Experts say the idea of preventative spray is compelling, particularly given the severity of the West's worsening wildfire crisis, but worry that there's "no such thing as a free lunch."

"This is one proposed solution to that problem  at least a partial solution  which is to render the vegetation less flammable, and that's pretty cool," said Hugh Safford, a researcher at UC Davis and former ecologist with the Forest Service.

"But given that we know that ammonium phosphate has effects, particularly in aquatic systems, and given that we dont know much, if anything, about turning this into a roadside application that then lasts on the vegetation for a year, I would assume that anyone who has issues with aerial application is going to have the same issues with roadside spray."

Read more: Aerial fire retardant drops are attacked as ineffective and environmentally harmful

Perimeter Solutions, the Clayton, Mo.-based manufacturer, said its newest product, Phos-Chek Fortify, offers long-term protection against wildfires. In promotional videos, crews are seen spraying the material along roadsides and on the grounds of the Santa Barbara County ranch and "Western White House" of former President Reagan.

Jeff Emery, the companys president of global fire safety, said in an email that ground-applied roadside use has proven to measurably reduce the frequency of new ignitions, preventing fires in high-risk areas while also protecting potential evacuation routes away from impacted communities.

The use of ground applications for retardant allows more precise delivery to ensure avoidance of waterways when applying this life-saving tool along roadways, Emery said. Perimeter Solutions is proud of the role we are serving to protect vulnerable communities from risk and to act as stewards to the environment to minimize the impact of fire on our forests, wildlife, and communities.

Joshua Trees, cactuses and grasses were stained red from fire retardant drops during the 2020 Bobcat fire in Juniper Hills. (Allen J. Schaben/Los Angeles Times)

Read more: Judge says fire retardant drops are polluting streams but allows them to continue

Critics arent convinced.

When it comes to preventative spraying along roadsides, Timothy Ingalsbee, a former wildland firefighter and executive director of the nonprofit Firefighters United for Safety, Ethics and Ecology, argued that resources would be better spent hardening homes and communities and conducting controlled burns, which are more effective and actually less damaging than chemical warfare.

Ingalsbee has long been critical of how fire authorities use air-dropped retardant in wilderness areas, saying the material is overused and frequently deployed in areas where its effectiveness is limited. The new product, he said, will only help the manufacturer earn even more profits. He calls the use of both materials "a government boondoggle."

It is true that a lot of ignitions do start along roads, but how many roads do we have? he said.

Stahl, of Forest Service Employees for Environmental Ethics, said the product's fertilizer qualities also made it a particularly bad choice for such applications.

"Although you may retard an ignition or a fire spread for this season, what you've done is grown a lot more biomass to burn in the next year," he said.

A horse stands in a yard that is colored pink from retardants drops in Hemet during the Fairview fire in 2022. (Irfan Khan/Los Angeles Times)

The debate over the environmental effects of retardant reached a fever pitch recently when a Montana judge ruled partly in favor of the FSEE on its charges that the Forest Service was violating the Clean Water Act with its use of aerial retardant. The Clean Water Act prohibits the discharge of pollutants into U.S. waters without a permit.

U.S. District Judge Dana Christensen agreed that dumping the chemical retardant from planes is a violation of the nations clean water law.

However, Christensen stopped short of preventing the Forest Service from using the material, noting that doing so could conceivably result in greater harm from wildfires  including to human life and property and to the environment  by preventing the USFS from effectively utilizing one of its fire fighting tools.

The judge instead ordered the Forest Service to obtain a permit from the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency to cover its discharge of retardant into waterways, a process that could take up to three years. The Forest Service must provide the court with status reports on its progress toward that permit every six months, but can continue to use the retardant in the meantime.

Many who fight fires said banning the use of retardant would be catastrophic for California and the West, where wildfires are burning larger, hotter and faster than ever before.

The judges call was absolutely the right decision, said Ken Pimlott, former director of the California Department of Forestry and Fire Protection. If the ability of the Forest Service to utilize that product had been hampered, it would have had cascading impacts.

While water cools fires, Pimlott said, it often evaporates so quickly that it doesn't provide ground crews with enough time to build containment lines to stop the blaze. Retardant, on the other hand, coats the vegetation and slows the spread of fire, allowing crews more time to move in.

"Retardant plays a key role," he said. "Its just one of the tools in the toolbox for fighting fires, but its an integral piece."

Read more: Wildfire burn areas in California are growing ever larger due to greenhouse gas emissions

Indeed, crews in California are increasingly turning to the material. Over the last three years, Cal Fire dropped 45 million gallons of aerial retardant, compared with 32 million gallons of water, according to agency data .

Safford, of UC Davis, said longer-term studies are needed to fully understand the ecological effects of the roadside spray. Though Phos-Chek's negative effects on aquatic environments are well established, less is known about its effect on microbiology, insects, soils and plants, including the ability of leaves to photosynthesize or transpire water while covered in the material, he said.

Still, the ability to apply the product with some precision is a benefit. "Many, many ignitions start in dry vegetation next to roads," he said. "Spraying on and around powerlines and telephone poles is a great idea, because telephone poles and powerlines and telephone systems go down when fire burns through them."

When asked whether the products encouraged grasses and other vegetation to grow, Emery said the amount of phosphate included in Phos-Chek is "not as high as what you would find in a direct fertilizer application," and is further diluted after it rains.

He noted that all Phos-Chek retardants are included on the U.S. Forest Service Qualified Product List, meaning "the product has gone through stringent testing protocols administered by the Forest Service and that it meets all performance, mammalian and fish toxicity and environment safety requirements."

Meanwhile, dozens of California government organizations, as well as private and commercial landowners have begun using Phos-Chek Fortify.

The California Department of Transportation is currently conducting a study of the roadside spray as a "potential tool for future use," the agency said.

A house and yard near Hemet are covered in pink fire retardant in the Fairview fire burn zone in 2022. (Luis Sinco/Los Angeles Times)

In 2019, Phos-Chek Fortify was sprayed along a four-mile stretch of Route 118 through Rocky Peak in the Santa Susana Mountains, near the border of Los Angeles and Ventura counties, where 37 wildfires were recorded the year prior, Emery said. No fires were recorded there in 2019.

In 2021, it was applied along Lake Nacimiento Road in San Luis Obispo County, where "no fires were recorded in the treated area the rest of the summer," he said.

And last year, the retardant was applied along the roadside in Wildcat Canyon in San Diego County, where a wildfire did ignite. "What was projected to be a half-acre to one-acre fire was reduced in size 99% due to the proactive application of Phos-Chek," he said.

That application came soon after the San Diego County Board of Supervisors awarded a contract to Perimeter Solutions to apply Phos-Chek Fortify along 260 miles of roads in key evacuation corridors.

San Diego resident Sandra Martinez expressed concern about the decision during the board meeting.

"Water does make things run downhill," she said. "The toxicity will affect things that are not in the area where it is deposited, and possibly end up in our oceans, affecting our ocean life, so it will affect everything in its pathway."

Chuck Westerheide, a spokesman for the county, said San Diego is continuing the program this year and has already applied Phos-Chek Fortify to 20 miles of roads, with plans for 20 more. The material is not applied within 100 feet of any waterways, he said.

"The mix may not stop a fire from starting, but it will slow the growth of the fire, allowing Cal Fire crews more time to arrive and contain it," he said.

Times staff writer Alex Wigglesworth contributed to this report.

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This story originally appeared in Los Angeles Times.
They came from 59 countries with one goal: U.S. Citizenship

On the eve of Independence Day, 264 men, women, and children ended their immigration journeys and became U.S. citizens. The swearing-in ceremony, held at Faneuil Hall, included immigrants from 59 countries  among them, Albania, Great Britain, Egypt, Bangladesh, Ukraine, and Russia.

Rania Elfekih said it took her five years to arrive at this moment. She immigrated from Tunisia.

Its a beautiful country, Elfekih said. We have nice weather all year round and all my familys there.

Elfekih, a physician, said shell miss her home country  but treasures the opportunities the U.S. offers.

I am a scientist, she said. So, for me, the United States is like a land of research and advancement and science.

Lovely Aktershima is from Bangladesh. She, too, will miss her family back home. But U.S. citizenship means reunification with her husband.

Luis Ruvio came to the U.S. from El Salvador six years ago.

This was a dream come true for me, he said  and Ruvio hopes citizenship will increase the chance his daughter will have a good future.

I know people wait, a very, very long time to become a U.S. citizen, Ruvio said. In my case, I got it right on time.

U.S. Citizenship commonly takes at least a year  with residency requirements and working knowledge of the English language, U.S. history, and civics.

For Beatrice Miwa, becoming a U.S. citizen is going hand-in-hand with her current service in the U.S. Army. Miwa, 23, dreamed of going to college in the U.S. and plans to do so once her military service is over. When she was handed her citizenship certificate Miwa, who is from Brazil, said, Im very proud of myself and yeah, its like a dream come true.

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A camper was acting aggressively. So his counselor got some water, Florida cops say

Summer camp was anything but fun and games last Monday at a school on the Space Coast of Florida.

According to an arrest affidavit from the police department, a 74 year old female counselor was arrested on child abuse charges at Surfside Elementary School in Satellite Beach at around 2:45 p.m.

Satellite Beach police officers went to the school after witnesses said they saw the counselor throw water on a boy who was acting aggressively while playing with other youngsters.

Officers spoke with a witness who said that the counselor asked for help in controlling the boy. A co-worker escorted him to another classroom, yet the child continued to act out, returning to his original classroom, and banging on the door, the report says.

In an effort to get the boy to stop striking her door and to comply, the counselor filled a toy shaped like a cup with water and doused the boy with it, says the report. She also grabbed the camper by the shoulders, calling him spoiled, witnesses say, before he ran away.

Police reviewed surveillance video that captured the tense encounter.

Police say the counselor admitted to officers that she threw the water to convince the boy to behave.

The Connecticut native was arrested and taken to Brevard County Jail on $500 bond and charged with one count of battery.

It is unclear if she is still employed by the camp at Surfside.
CANTON  A 16-year-old is mentally competent to stand trial for the shooting death of Craig Blackshear last summer, according to the judge overseeing the teen's case.

Anthony Moore, of Canton, had entered a not guilty by reason of insanity plea earlier this year and was court-ordered to undergo an evaluation by Psycho-Diagnostic Clinic.

According to a finding by Judge Kristin Farmer issued June 26, the clinic's report, which was sealed, concludes that Moore is competent to stand trial and was not suffering from any severe mental disease when he was accused of shooting and killing Blackshear last July.

Fatal stabbing: Canton man charged with aggravated murder after fatal stabbing at apartment complex

Moore, who was 15 when charged, withdrew his insanity-related plea and entered a not guilty plea to charges of murder and felonious assault last week in Stark County Common Pleas Court.

According to police records, the 45-year-old Blackshear was shot around 10:20 p.m. July 7, 2022, on the porch of a home in the 1800 block of Fourth Street NW in Canton.

Moore was initially charged as a juvenile but his case was later transferred to adult court because of the seriousness of the charges.

A codefendant, Megan Coladonato, 37, of Pike Township, also was arrested and charged with complicity to murder.

Coladonato was accused of aiding the teen during Blackshear's shooting by stoking an argument between herself and the victim, leading to the teen to shoot Blackshear multiple times, according to police records.

In February, she plead guilty to two felony counts of obstructing justice and tampering with evidence and was sentenced to 18 months in prison.

Moore has a final pre-trial hearing set for July 21. A trial date has not been set.

Reach Amy at 330-775-1135 or amy.knapp@indeonline.com.

On Twitter: @aknappINDE

This article originally appeared on The Repository: Anthony Moore to stand trial in fatal shooting of Craig Blackshear
Idaho GOP

The Republican Party has nearly 600,000 members in our state. While all Republicans are grounded in principles of freedom, prosperity, and opportunity, it is absurd to imagine or ask for no variation on the viewpoints or good-faith judgment of our members or elected officials.

In this spirit, the Canyon County Republican Women Executive Board expresses deep disappointment in the current leadership of the Idaho GOP. Rather than work to enact policies that represent the preferences of most Idaho Republicans, they worked to purge the party of those who do not share their fanatical, revisionist views.

Last week, the IDGOP Central Committee demoted the current and future president of the Idaho Federation of Republican Women from a voting member of the Executive Board to a non-voting position. As an affiliate of the Idaho Federation of Republican Women (which is chartered by the National Federation of Republican Women), Canyon County Republican Women is disheartened that our extensive record of volunteer service on behalf of Idaho Republicans has been discounted.

The Idaho Young Republicans and College Republicans were also downgraded to non-voting seats. Perhaps the most alarming effect of this will be the loss of two groups  women and young adults  whose engagement is so critical for the future of the Republican Party.

We are also opposed to the vote of no confidence for Republican Gov. Brad Little and many of our Republican legislators for their veto/vote on one complicated piece of legislation. CCRW stands with Gov. Little and those 14 legislators, including our own Julie Yamomoto, who acted in good faith and proceeded based on feedback from constituents and legal counsel and do not deserve to be held in no confidence or censured in any way.

Sara Adams, President; Jamie Wood, 1st Vice President; Lori Bishop, 2nd Vice President; Tracey Wasden, Past President; Theresa Bradford, Secretary; Kay Bradford, Treasurer

Death penalty

Forget the cost of the death penalty. There are far more serious death penalty issues. Rep. Horman claims that it serves the purpose of exacting justice for the victims while deterring similar abhorrent behavior from others. In fact, the murder rate in non-death penalty states has remained consistently lower than the rate in death penalty states, and the gap has grown since 1990, per the Death Penalty Information Center. With DNA testing there is a greater chance of a conviction being overturned. If we want justice for homicide victims, shouldnt we also want justice for homicide suspects wrongly convicted? If proven innocent after execution, what do we tell their family? Lastly, the death penalty goes explicitly against biblical teachings when stoning was used to execute people for certain sins. When asked about this, Jesus replied: Let him who is without sin among you be the first to throw a stone at her. (John 8:7). What saddens me is that many Christian churches do not express dismay with our state legislature over death penalty laws.

Glenn McGeoch, Meridian

Affirmative action

After killing affirmative action, Clarence Thomas said he is painfully aware of the social and economic ravages which have befallen my race. He makes an argument that instead of wasting resources on affirmative action, we should spend more resources solving foundational problems of racial minorities. He ignores the benefit of students interacting and learning from minorities. Unfortunately, by continually siding with the white conservative majority, including the democracy-killing and wealth gap-widening Citizens United decision, he hypocritically blew up any hope of closing the income gap between whites and minorities. He continually votes for laws that maintain the status quo of wealth gap racism. Affirmative action was flawed but better than nothing. Diversity makes us stronger and more resilient. Clarence Thomas voted for weakness and fragility. The pictures of him smiling on his VIP vacation trips around the world paid for by his white billionaire friends, he appears to be unaware of the plight of his Black brethren.

Kurt Smith, Boise
One of the most popular roller coasters at Carowinds is still shut down after a crack was discovered on one of the pillars that holds part of it hundreds of feet off the ground.

Fury 325, one of the tallest, fastest, longest roller coasters in North America, has been closed since Friday, when the crack was reported. The 325-foot tall tall ride debuted in 2015 featuring a 1.2-mile track and speeds of to 95 mph.

Park officials said that its maintenance team is conducting a thorough inspection, and the ride wont be open until repairs have been completed, The Charlotte Observer previously reported. Inspectors from the North Carolina Department of Labors Elevator and Amusement Device Bureau are also investigating Fury 325 and its damages.

NC begins Carowinds roller coaster review after rare crack found. Heres what we know.

Who inspects Carowinds roller coasters?

Because Carowinds is on the North Carolina-South Carolina state line, each rides state inspection is completed by the state where it is located. So Fury 325, nestled on the North Carolina side of the park, is licensed and inspected yearly by the North Carolina Department of Labor prior to opening.

Our Elevator and Amusement Device Bureau said the ride has not been problematic in the past, an NCDOL spokesperson told The Charlotte Observer of the Fury 325. The Observer also requested previous inspection files for the roller coaster conducted since its opening.

Carowinds also conducts its own inspections

Carowinds says many of its rides and attractions are designed and built by some of the best ride manufacturers in the world and inspected every day by park employees. The amusement park says its rides are examined daily, too.

Its not clear when the crack on the roller coaster occurred or whether inspectors missed it.

Mechanics and electricians cycle the rides unoccupied each morning to ensure the ride and its systems are functioning properly, the park website says about ride safety. Ride associates also conduct operation tests each day prior to opening, including running a cycle with an associate, to examine the experience and cleanliness. The rides also undergo additional weekly and monthly inspections.

Park officials say employees look for several elements during inspections, including restraint systems, ride structures, ride control and drive systems.

Theres ride maintenance in the off-season, too, the park says.

During the few months the park is closed, our rides and maintenance associates are busy dismantling, cleaning, inspecting, and repairing the rides to ensure they are in top shape for the next season, the Carowinds website says.

State investigation at Carowinds

At this time, its still unclear what exactly caused part of the ride to break.

We will be able to make a full assessment and provide further information as it becomes available, a spokesperson for the state Department of Labor told The Charlotte Observer. Safety always has been and always will be our top priority at the North Carolina Department of Labor.

Its also unclear how long an investigation could take and when the ride will be repaired and reopened.
Florida first lady Casey DeSantis is set to mark her first solo appearance of the campaign cycle in Iowa Thursday for the launch of the grassroots group Mamas for DeSantis on behalf of her husband Gov. Ron DeSantis (R).

DeSantis will launch the group alongside Iowa Gov. Kim Reynolds (R) outside of Des Moines in Johnston.

As the mom and dad of young children, Gov. DeSantis and First Lady Casey DeSantis know that when parents are engaged, America prospers, according to an invitation for the event, first obtained by the Des Moines Register. We need every mama and every grandmama in every corner of the country to stand up and fight back by electing Ron DeSantis president of the United States of America.

Last year, the first lady launched Mamas for DeSantis ahead of her husbands reelection campaign in Florida. The effort garnered 1.1 million mothers to mobilize for the governor.

DeSantis has been described as major political asset to her husband, with supporters touting her charismatic presence in the governors mansion and on the campaign trail.

The feedback has been really solid, and its not just about him, but its also about Casey, Bob Vander Plaats, an influential conservative Christian leader in Iowa, told The Hill last month. The wife or the spouse always speaks a lot as well to the faith community.

For the latest news, weather, sports, and streaming video, head to The Hill.
Charges filed against Seymour driver who hit Amish buggy in crash that killed baby

An Amish buggy was hit from behind June 6 in Webster County. The wreck killed a baby, who was ejected from the buggy, and injured the parents.

A Webster County driver who hit an Amish buggy, resulting in the death of a baby boy and sending his parents to the hospital, has been charged.

Julia Young, 38, of Seymour, was charged with second-degree involuntary manslaughter, operating a motor vehicle in a careless and imprudent manner involving an accident, and failure to maintain financial responsibility on a motor vehicle.

If convicted on the most serious charge, Young faces up to seven years in jail.

Young, who was not injured in the crash, was driving a 1999 Mercedes south on Highway C, two miles north of Seymour, when she attempted to pass an Amish buggy from behind.

According to the Missouri State Highway Patrol, Young's vehicle hit the buggy from behind shortly after 5 p.m. on June 6.

The infant, who was not named in the report, was ejected from the vehicle along with his mother, Barbara Schwartz, 24, of Seymour.

More: How often are horse-drawn buggies hit by vehicles in Missouri? More than you think

Sammy and Barbara Schwartz suffered moderate injuries in the wreck and were transported to CoxSouth hospital along with the baby, who later died in the emergency room.

A warrant was issued late last week and Young was arrested and posted a $5,000 bond.

Young is scheduled to make her first court appearance before Judge Justin Michael Evans at 10 a.m. July 18.

This article originally appeared on Springfield News-Leader: Seymour driver who hit Amish buggy, killing baby, has been charged
Charlotte girls dont feel safe at school. Whats CMS doing about worries in new study?

Female Charlotte-Mecklenburg Schools students harbor fears about two realities of modern-day public education, according to a women and girls study at the University of North Carolina Charlotte.

Those fears center around shootings and issues on school buses.

The study also says female students want greater access to mental health services in schools.

Its important for us to have a focus on women and girls, Michelle Meggs, the executive director of the Women + Girls Research Alliance, told the Charlotte Observer. The Charlotte region talks a lot about gender equity. Their voices arent elevated as much as they should be. We talk a lot about it, but we dont do a lot.

The Women + Girls Research Alliance is a research organization based at UNC Charlotte. The alliances latest findings, released June 19 after more than 150 women and girls from around Charlotte and CMS participated in discussions in October, found many of the same issues impacted adults and students.

About 30 of the districts teen girls took part. They focused on safety issues that included the effects of cyberbullying, bullying on buses and students in abusive situations having access to a trusted adult.

Girls, specifically, need to feel safer at school, according to the study. Participants were unanimous in their desire to develop safe spaces and networks where women and girls can receive social support.

These spaces allow women and girls to build confidence, express vulnerability, develop relationships, and create opportunities for mentoring, the study states. These safe spaces can help to close the generation gap between women and girls and can increase access to needed information and resources.

Solutions offered

The survey results offered an array of solutions to problems raised by students, including:

 gathering feedback from student leaders to identify school-specific solutions

 increasing exposure to diverse, living-wage career paths

 increasing financial literacy education

 increasing health literacy education.

CMS students, Meggs says, also offered solutions such as investing in training that supports student safety  including active shooter drills.

There have been 386 school shootings in the U.S. since the 1999 Columbine High School massacre in Colorado, according to a database maintained by The Washington Post. Of those, 46 occurred in 2022  the highest number of any year on record.

CMS told the Observer schools hold active shooter survival training for teachers and staff throughout the year. Each school has emergency and safety plans in place, and students go through two lockdown drills annually.

The district installed scanners in middle and high schools to detect weapons, but reporting by The Charlotte Observer revealed problems with the devices sounding alarms on three-ring binders and other personal items. And a confidential field test conducted on the Evolv scanners revealed they arent foolproof.

Girls still dont feel heard, seen and taken seriously, Meggs said. The community needs to also get involved so girls know were investing in them and their future.

Meggs says women and girls can support each other by creating networks and safe spaces where women can receive social support and developing cross-generational mentorship opportunities.

Practice empathy, self-belief and kindness towards others, she said.

CMS bus safety

Susan Vernon-Devlin, executive director of communications for CMS, told the Observer bus drivers this summer will receive training on how to handle emergency situations and behavior incidents. Those actions were planned prior to the surveys release.

As always, we encourage students to speak with their driver if there is a safety concern or problem, Vernon-Devlin said.

A 2019 report from the National Center for Educational Statistics found school buses were among places where students reported being bullied. Though, places such as the hallway or stairwell, inside the classroom and in the cafeteria ranked significantly higher.

CMS has a list of rules students must follow, too, according to the transportation page on the districts website. Those include bringing good classroom conduct onto school buses, refraining from using profane language or gestures and no acts of vandalism, throwing objects from the windows of the bus or conduct or behavior that interferes with safe and expeditious transportation, among others.

Violations will result in out-of-school suspension and permanent removal of transportation privileges, according to CMS. Video cameras have been installed on some buses, as well.

Other issues identified

Participants  both adults and students  identified several issues along with safety, including economic security, and health and well-being. Many Charlotte-area women and girls feel a lack of social support and equity and inclusion.

Participants said financial stability increases access to resources needed to maintain health and safety. A lack of financial stability increases stress and can force (women and girls) to stay in unsafe conditions, according to the study.

At safety tables, participants said racial bias is a source of stress and poor mental health for women of color, according to the study.

One of the things that remains with me is one of the students shared that it was the first time she felt heard and seen, Meggs said. She felt like her ideas and suggestions were taken seriously. People really listened, and she felt she was in a safe space.

Meggs says officials will use the findings will steer the Womens + Girls Research Alliance to drive grants, advocacy and groups it will work with in the community.
United Airlines CEO Scott Kirby apologized for hopping on a private plane to get out of the New York area last week while thousands of United passengers were stranded because the airline canceled so many flights.

Taking a private jet was the wrong decision because it was insensitive to our customers who were waiting to get home, Kirby said in a statement issued by the airline. I sincerely apologize to our customers and our team members who have been working around-the-clock for several days  often through severe weather  to take care of our customers.

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Kirby concluded by promising to better demonstrate my respect for the dedication of our team members and the loyalty of our customers.

Kirby caught the private flight from Teterboro, New Jersey, to Denver on Wednesday, when United canceled 750 flights  one-fourth of its schedule for the day. That figure does not include flights on United Express.

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United canceled nearly 3,000 flights last week, with the largest number at its Newark Liberty International Airport hub in New Jersey, which was hit by thunderstorms for much of the week.

United Airlines CEO Scott Kirby testifies before the Senate Commerce, Science, and Transportation in the Russell Senate Office Building on Capitol Hill, Dec. 15, 2021, in Washington. (Chip Somodevilla/AP)

Kirby blamed disruptions in Newark last weekend on a shortage of Federal Aviation Administration air traffic controllers. He said in a note to employees that the FAA frankly failed us by reducing the rate at which planes could arrive and depart the airport, where United is the dominant carrier.

Canceled flights left United planes and crews out of position, hobbling the airline when bad weather hit on Sunday, Kirby said.

As United continued to struggle throughout the week, Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg, whose department includes the FAA, said on Twitter that airlines had recovered from the storms with the exception of United. He drove home the point by including a bar graph that compared Uniteds cancellation rate with the rest of the industry.

Uniteds operation improved through the week. The percentage of canceled flights fell from 26% on Wednesday to 18% Thursday and 8% through Friday evening, according to tracking service FlightAware. However, even on Friday, United was on pace to lead all U.S. carriers in canceled flights for a seventh straight day.

United vowed to fix its operation in time for the July 4 holiday weekend, which promises to be a hectic one at the nations airports. More than 2.7 million people were screened Thursday at Transportation Security Administration checkpoints, and Friday was expected to bring similar crowds  possibly bigger.

United passengers have taken to social media and talked to reporters about long airport lines and sleeping in airports after flights were canceled.

Unions representing the airlines pilots and flight attendants have joined in the criticism, accusing United management of poor planning, a lack of crew schedulers, and operating too many flights.

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Chicago-based United said it did not pay for the CEOs flight on Wednesday. The airline declined to say whether Kirby frequently takes private planes.
BEIJING  Chinas defense minister reaffirmed the countrys military relations with Russia during a meeting Monday with the head of Russias Navy, the first formal military talks between the friendly neighbors since a short-lived mutiny by Russian mercenary group Wagner.

Minister of National Defense Li Shangfu told Russian Adm. Nikolai Yevmenov that China hoped for increased exchanges, joint exercises and other forms of cooperation that would take defense ties to reach a new level, the Chinese Defense Ministry said after the two met in Beijing.

The Chinese and Russian navies have close exchanges and frequent interactions, the ministry quoted Li as saying. It is hoped that the two sides will strengthen communication at all levels, regularly organize joint training, joint patrols and joint war games.

China operates the worlds largest navy by number of hulls and vastly outstrips Russias Navy in both size and technical ability. The countries fleets have held a series of exercises and joint maneuvers since Russias full-on invasion of Ukraine last year, as have their air forces.

The military cooperation embodies the Chinese and Russian governments informal alliance to oppose the U.S.-led liberal world order. They align their foreign policies and positions at the United Nations, where Beijing has consistently provided diplomatic cover for Moscow.

While saying it is neutral in the Ukraine war, China has stood solidly beside Russia, accusing the U.S. and NATO of provoking Moscow and of fueling the bloodshed by helping arm Ukraine.

China has refused to condemn the invasion or to refer to it as one in deference to Moscow, but also has said it would not provide Russia with military assistance or weapons for the conflict.

Since the abortive rebellion led by Wagner chief Yevgeny Prigozhin, China has said it backed Russian efforts to stabilize the situation in the country. The march on Moscow that Prigozhin launched and then called off last month posed the greatest challenge to President Vladimir Putins two decades in power.

The recent developments have very much made Russia the junior partner in the relationship with China. War-related sanctions have made the Russian economy heavily dependent on energy purchases from China and India.

Putin, Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi and Chinese leader Xi Jinping are set to meet Tuesday at a virtual summit that will mark the Russian presidents first multilateral meeting since the Wagner revolt.

The summit of the Shanghai Cooperation Organization, a security grouping founded by Russia and China to counter Western alliances from East Asia to the Indian Ocean, is an apparent indication Putin still enjoys some support.
(Bloomberg) -- Chinas growing youth unemployment rate could trigger political problems if not properly handled, warned a prominent economist who has advised President Xi Jinpings government.

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The issue of youth unemployment will likely continue for the next decade and continue to worsen in the short term, said Liu Yuanchun, who has provided guidance to Beijing on the economy, including by giving a lecture to the top decision-making Politburo in April 2022.

If not handled properly, it will spark other social problems beyond the economic arena, even becoming a trigger for political problems, he said in a joint report published last week by a Renmin University of China think tank, China Macroeconomy Forum.

Screenshots of the 110-page document were shared on Chinas Twitter-like Weibo over the weekend, with users highlighting the authors warnings on political risks.

Last year, Xi faced the biggest challenge to Communist Party power during his decade-plus tenure, when nationwide protests  led by students  erupted over strict Covid Zero rules, with some calling for the Chinese leader to step down.

Read more: China Youth Jobless Rate Hits Record 20.8% in Challenge for Policymakers

Chinas unemployment rate among those aged between 16 and 24 reached a record of 20.8% in May. The nations slowing economy combined with a flood of new graduates in the market are handing policymakers a challenge with few easy fixes.

Chinas youth unemployment rate stems from a stagnating private sector scarred by Covid restrictions, according to the report authors, who also include Liu Xiaoguang, of Renmin University, and Yan Yan, from China Chengxin International Credit Rating Co.

Adopting subsidy policies alone cannot fundamentally resolve the issue of insufficient private investment, the authors wrote. The key lies in improving the rule of law, and improving the protection of private property rights, to make up for peoples loss of confidence in the rule of law since the pandemic.

China imposed some of the worlds harshest anti-epidemic controls. In Shanghai, authorities put its 25 million residents under lockdown for nearly two months, erecting metal barriers outside residential compounds in a bid to eradicate community infections. Pandemic control enforcers even went into peoples homes to disinfect their clothes and furniture, with residents challenging the legality and scientific value of the practice.

Liu and his co-authors identified a clear way to defuse the pressure building among unemployed young people: A more robust economic recovery and labor market recovery are needed.

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China Says It Wants More Cooperation With Russias Military

(Bloomberg) -- China said it wants closer ties with Russias military, a sign Moscow still has Beijings support after the aborted Wagner mutiny.

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Chinese Defense Minister Li Shangfu said in a meeting Monday with Nikolai Yevmenov, commander-in-chief of Russias navy, that with the joint efforts of both sides, the relations between the two militaries will continue to deepen and solidify, constantly make new progress and reach a new level.

Li said he hoped the two navies could strengthen communication, regularly hold joint exercises and expand practical cooperation, according to a statement from Defense Ministry in Beijing.

Read: Xis Bet on Putin Looks Even More Risky After Russian Mutiny

The comments add to signs Beijing is shoring up ties with Moscow in the wake of the Wagner mercenary groups uprising last month, the biggest ever threat to Vladimir Putins rule. Chinas Foreign Ministry said shortly afterward that it supported Russias actions to maintain national stability, and Foreign Minister Qin Gang met with Russian Deputy Foreign Minister Andrey Rudenko.

China has maintained ties with Putin since he ordered a full-scale invasion of Ukraine early last year, and has refused to join US-led sanctions over the war. Beijing and Moscow share a mutual interest in challenging US dominance in the world order, as they face increasingly fraught ties with wealthy democracies.

Li was sanctioned by Washington in 2018 over a Russian arms purchase, and China has refused to resume high-level military dialog with the US until those curbs are lifted.

(Updates with details throughout.)

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BEIJING (Reuters) - China is sending a military-run hospital ship to the Pacific to where it will call in at Kiribati, Tonga, Vanuatu, the Solomon Islands and East Timor at a time of growing competition with the United States and its allies for influence in the region.

The 14,300 metric ton "Peace Ark", which is bigger than a typical Chinese destroyer, will offer medical aid to Chinese citizens and residents of the countries it visits on its ninth humanitarian "Harmony Mission", the defence ministry said in a statement late on Sunday.

"It is to present our image as a responsible big country", navy spokesperson Liu Wensheng said in a statement.

The ship, painted white with red crosses on its sides, was commissioned in 2008 and has sailed to more than 40 countries.

China has been building ties in the Pacific in recent years to the consternation of the United States and allies Australia and New Zealand, that have long seen the region as their sphere of influence.

China signed a security pact with the Solomon Islands last year and hopes to build similar ties with other Pacific countries. Its foreign minister has said relations with the Solomon Islands can serve as a model.

The United States has pledged to triple funding for the region and it opened an embassy in the Solomon Islands in February after a 30-year absence. It is also planning an embassy in Vanuatu.

In May, the U.S. opened an embassy in Tonga and signed a defence pact with Papua New Guinea.

(Reporting by Albee Zhang and Ryan Woo; Editing by Robert Birsel)
Republican Presidential hopeful Chris Christie said in an interview that both President Biden and his opponent, former President Trump, are both past their sell-by date as the former New Jersey governor hopes to make an impact in the 2024 election race.

In a New York Times op-ed published Saturday, Maureen Dowd asked Christie about his thoughts on the recent talk and concerns about Bidens age in office.

President Biden, 80, who is already the oldest person to serve as president, has had his age and mental health called out as a concern by many voters amid the president announcing his reelection campaign in April.

I think hes beyond his sell-by date, and I think Trump is, too, by the way, Christie told Dowd, also saying that he believes Bidens family should let him go home.

I think his family should let him go home, Christie said. Are they actually motivated by love for this guy, or is it motivated by the grift?

Christie also told Dowd that he isnt fazed with being a target of Trumps latest insults, where he commented on the former governors weight, referring to him as Sloppy Chris Christie.

Im not going to say it never bothers me, Christie told the Times. Trump is no Adonis, so coming from him? Who cares? Look in the mirror. I always thought it was very funny that he has this vision of himself. He told me one time the reason he ties his ties so long is that it slenderizes him and I should do the same thing.

Christie, who announced his second presidential campaign in early June, joins a list of other candidates looking to take on Trump, the current front-runner in the GOP primary race, and win the partys nomination in 2024.

Christie also believes that Vice President Harris is a problem for Biden and will hurt his chances of getting reelected.

I dont think Dan Quayle hurt George Bush 41, Christie said. But George Bush 41 wasnt 82 years old.

For the latest news, weather, sports, and streaming video, head to The Hill.
FILE - Horse trainer Bob Baffert leaves federal court July 12, 2021, in the Brooklyn borough of New York. Churchill Downs is extending Baffert's suspension through 2024. Churchill Downs Incorporated announced Monday, July 3, 2023, it was continuing Baffert's ban citing continued concerns regarding the threat to the safety and integrity of racing he poses to CDI-owned racetracks. (AP Photo/John Minchillo, File)

Churchill Downs is extending Hall of Fame trainer Bob Bafferts suspension through 2024, keeping the two-time Triple Crown winner from entering horses in the Kentucky Derby and other races for an additional year.

Churchill Downs Inc. announced Monday it was continuing Bafferts ban at least through the 2024 calendar year, citing continued concerns regarding the threat to the safety and integrity of racing he poses to CDI-owned racetracks.

Baffert initially was suspended for two years after 2021 Kentucky Derby winner Medina Spirit failed a postrace drug test and was later disqualified.

In a statement, Churchill Downs said Baffert continues to peddle false narratives about Medina Spirits failed drug test for a steroid, betamethasone, that is legal in Kentucky but is banned on race day.

A trainer who is unwilling to accept responsibility for multiple drug test failures in our highest-profile races cannot be trusted to avoid future misconduct, CDI said.

The company went on to say it will re-evaluate Bafferts status after 2024.

Baffert, in a statement posted on Twitter, said he was at a loss to understand the decision, defending using a topical ointment on Medina Spirit to treat a skin infection and arguing that it did not involve a disregard of the rules.

In the interests of the sport we all love, I have made no public comments on this unfortunate episode for an extended period of time, so the suggestion that I continue to peddle false narratives is patently false, Baffert said.

Asked for further comment, a CDI spokesperson deferred to the statement.

Medina Spirit collapsed and died in December 2021 after a workout in California.

Baffert's suspension comes with horse racing at a crossroads, following the deaths of 12 horses within a month at Churchill Downs that led the storied track to look into causes, while the Horseracing Integrity and Safety Authority launched a parallel investigation. Trainer Saffie Joseph Jr. recently was reinstated by Churchill Downs after two of his horses died in the lead-up to the Kentucky Derby this year.

Baffert returned to the Triple Crown trail earlier this year at the Preakness after being suspended from that race and the Belmont in 2022 in connection with a different, 90-day ban in Kentucky that Maryland and New York honored. His National Treasure won the Preakness, giving him a record-breaking eighth victory in the race hours after another 3-year-old horse he trained broke his left front leg while racing and was euthanized on the track.

You cant do it without the group of owners that I have that have stuck by me through all this negative, this bad stuff thats happened to me in the last few years, Baffert said after winning the Preakness in May. And theyre loyal, they stuck with me, and I give them all the credit.

Baffert's team earlier this year sued Churchill Downs and sought a temporary injunction to stop the suspension, arguing the track never provided advance notice or reached out to explain the two-year ban. Baffert, the face of the sport and its most visible figure, argued the situation had hurt his reputation.

Churchill Downs pushed to have the case dismissed, citing nine medication violations by Baffert-trained horses as justification.

___

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Family's long wait for justice ends with sentencing in fatal road-rage case

WOODBURY  A family's long wait for justice has ended with a prison term for a road-rage killer.

Everett E. Moore of Clayton received a 24-year term for the aggravated manslaughter of Joseph Pirri, a 32-year-old Blackwood man on March 7, 2018.

Moore, 58, "heavily slashed" Pirri's face as the victim sat in his car on Tanyard Road near Mail Avenue in Deptford, according to the Gloucester County Prosecutor's Office.

Road-rage attack killed a family man

Pirri, the married father of a son and stepdaughter, was "just trying to get home from work" when the assault occurred during a severe storm, according to a GoFundMe campaign to help his family.

More: Speeding preceded fiery accident Prison term for driver in crash that killed owner of Cucina Carini in Mount Laurel

He was just an amazing person all around, Megan Pirri, the slain mans wife said in an interview Monday. Our home was always filled with laughter and joy.

Pirri, a Pitman High School graduate, "would do anything for anyone and he did multiple times," said Betty Jean Hampton of Lindenwold, the victim's mother-in-law.

"He carried these qualities with him even in death, as he was an organ donor," she said at the June 29 sentencing hearing. "Joe's donations were able to save the lives of three people."

Pirri's thoughtfulness also showed when he proposed to his wife, who had a daughter, Alyssa, from an earlier relationship.

"He got down on one knee and asked her to be his step-daughter," said Hampton.

Joseph Pirri of Blackwood is shown with his wife Megan, son Gino, and stepdaughter Alyssa Baker.

Moore did not address the family at the hearing, she noted.

But Pirri's wife had scornful words for Moore at the hearing.

"Your act was vicious, it was cold, and it was violent," said the widow, pointing out she had spent part of her first wedding anniversary at her husband's grave.

"What you did to Joe that day, my husband, a step-father, and father, was horrific and evil," she said.

The sentence brought justice, but no satisfaction, Pirri added in the interview.

Its just hard for me, she said. Even if (Moore) is in prison, he can still see his family. He can smile and laugh."

The only way we can see Joe is photos, video and a headstone.

Joseph Pirri, who worked at LKQ Auto Parts in West Deptford, was able to describe Moore and his pickup truck after the attack. But he died in a hospital eight days later.

Moore, a construction worker, was arrested on April 25, 2018 after investigators were able to identify his vehicle.

Moore, who was also found guilty of weapons offenses, must serve more than 20 years before parole eligibility under the states No Early Release Act.

Before imposing the sentence, Superior Court Judge Kevin Smith addressed the legal system's distinction between justice and vengeance, said Hampton.

"That hit home for us," she said in an interview.

"At the same time, she said of Moore, "I dont forgive the man at all for what he did. Hes a monster."

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: Everett Moore was convicted of killing Joseph Pirri in highway attack
Cleric of Russian-linked church, former criminal, gets sentenced thanks to Security Service evidence

A novice of the Pochaiv Lavra of Ukraine (UOC-MP, Ukrainian Orthodox Church of the Moscow Patriarchate), who justified Russias armed aggression against Ukraine, has been sentenced to five years of imprisonment.

Source: press service of the Security Service of Ukraine (SSU); Ternopil Oblast Prosecutors Office; an Ukrainska Pravda source in law enforcement

Quote from the Prosecutors Office: "A novice of the Pochaiv Lavra, previously accused of murder, who resided on the monastery's premises since 2017, shared posts in support of occupying the territories of our country and the glorification of the Russian soldiers, for whose victory he asked to pray, using Russian social media platforms VKontakte and Odnoklassniki.

The video materials he shared contained public calls for supporting the occupying administration of the aggressor state."

Details: The investigation team has established that Alexander Smirnov spent 15 years in a correctional facility for a gang murder.

The SSU remarks that after 24 February 2022, he has actively shared the narratives of Russian propaganda via his accounts on the Odnoklassniki and VKontakte social media platforms that are banned in Ukraine.

During the search in his monastic cell, the mobile phones he had been using for sharing the banned content were seized.

The examination, initiated by the SSU, has confirmed the facts of his sabotage activity in favour of the aggressor state.

Based on collected evidence, the court found the defendant guilty of violating two articles of the Criminal Code of Ukraine, such as:

Article 436-2.3 (justification, deeming lawful, denying armed aggression of Russia against Ukraine, and the glorification of its participants);

Article 111-1.1 (collaborationist activity).

Smirnov has been convicted to five years of imprisonment with confiscation of property and deprivation of the right to hold posts in Ukraine's law enforcement agencies, state governmental bodies, local authorities and in bodies that provide public services for the term of 15 years.

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UN High Commissioner for Human Rights Volker Turk said addressing climate change was a human rights issue (Fabrice COFFRINI)

Climate change threatens to deliver a "truly terrifying" dystopian future of hunger and suffering, the United Nations' human rights chief warned Monday.

Volker Turk slammed world leaders for only thinking of the short term while dealing with the climate crisis.

Turk told a UN Human Rights Council debate on the right to food that extreme weather events were wiping out crops, herds and ecosystems, making it impossible for communities to rebuild and support themselves.

"More than 828 million people faced hunger in 2021. And climate change is projected to place up to 80 million more people at risk of hunger by the middle of this century," said Turk.

"Our environment is burning. It's melting. It's flooding. It's depleting. It's drying. It's dying," he said, evoking a "dystopian future".

"Addressing climate change is a human rights issue... there is still time to act. But that time is now," he said.

The 2015 Paris Agreement saw countries agree to cap global warming at "well below" two degrees Celsius above average levels measured between 1850 and 1900 -- and 1.5C if possible. The global mean temperature in 2022 was 1.15C above the 1850-1900 average.

On current policy trends, the planet will be 2.8C warmer by the end of the century, according to the UN's IPCC climate science advisory panel.

"We must not deliver this future of hunger and suffering to our children, and their children. And we don't have to," Volk said.

"We, the generation with the most powerful technological tools in history, have the capacity to change it."

Turk said world leaders "perform the choreography of deciding to act and promising to act and then get stuck in the short term".

He called for an end to "senseless subsidies" of the fossil fuel industry, and said the Dubai COP28 climate summit in November and December needed to be the "decisive game-changer that we so badly need".

Turk urged the world to "shun the green-washers" as well as those who cast doubt on climate science, driven by their own greed.

The Human Rights Council's 53rd session runs until July 14.

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The Ministry of Reintegration of Temporarily Occupied Territories called on the Zaporizhzhya City Council to formally dismiss the Kremlin-installed head of the Russian occupation authority in Zaporizhzhya Oblast, Yevhen Balytskyi, on July 2.

The Ministry of Reintegration stated that Balytskyi has been found guilty of treason and was sentenced to 15 years in prison in absentia. However, he is still listed officially as a council member.

"He has publicly supported the Russian occupation," the ministry stated.

"He voluntarily collaborated with the Russian authorities and was appointed as the 'head' of the temporarily occupied part of Zaporizhzhya Oblast. But for some reason, formally, he still is a member of Zaporizhzhya City Council."

Read also: $2 million in assets belonging to Yanukovych-era education minister seized by Ukrainian court

Balytskyi was elected to the Zaporizhzhya City Council in 2020 as a member of the Opposition Bloc  the pro-Russian successor to exiled president Viktor Yanukovychs Party of Regions. He began to collaborate with Russian invasion forces from the onset of the full-scale Russian invasion.

Shortly afterwards, he was appointed as the head of the so-called "Zaporizhzhya Military-Civilian Administration  the occupation authority for the occupied area of Zaporizhzhya Oblast.

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Read the original article on The New Voice of Ukraine
Dick Biondi greets Pamela Enzweiler, who was in 1961 the president of his fan club and later the director/producer of a film about his life. (Pam Enzweiler-Pulice)

For the generation of kids who came into their teens during the early 1960s, the soundtrack of their nights came from transistor radios buried under pillows, the music slightly muffled but DJ Dick Biondis voice loud and clear and unforgettable.

Biondi died June 26 and obituaries have chronicled his 90 years: the more than six decades in the radio business; the couple dozen stations that employed his rapid-fire, enthusiastic delivery; his induction into the Radio Hall of Fame and other honors that came his way; and the many current radio stars who were influenced by him.

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One of those current stars is Bob Sirott, the media mainstay currently found weekday mornings on WGN-AM 720. He devoted part of his Monday program to Biondi, playing clips from Biondis radio past and portions of the many times he interviewed the DJ on radio and TV.

You had to be here and listening to really understand the magic he created, Sirott told me. There was an intimacy to him. You really believed that he was talking directly to you and doing so with a voice that was natural and real, nor at all like that of an announcer.

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He was a rebel too and that never changed. In his later years, he was sometimes accused of being phony but he was not. Everything in the world, in life, changed but not Dick Biondi. He remained authentic and there was comfort in that.

Another youngster listening in the 60s was Pam Enzweiler in her Villa Park bedroom. He was the voice of my youth and far beyond, she told me.

Chicago radio personality Dick Biondi died June 26 at age 90. (WLS-FM / HANDOUT)

She first heard him when he worked at WLS-AM 890 from 1960 to 1963, where the native New Yorker dubbed himself The Wild I-Tralian. He was a sensation, becoming, without much argument, the first U.S. DJ to play the Beatles (Please Please Me) and so many of the other songs that introduced much of the nation to rock n roll. His 9:30 p.m.-to-midnight show nightly commanded a stunning 60% share of all listeners (translating to millions of teenage ears in 38 states and Canada).

Enzweiler met Biondi in person when, she said, after some begging, my dad drove me and my friend Joan, and my sister and her friend, to the Hillside Shopping Center, where the DJ was making a promotional appearance.

Biondi was tireless in such off-air activities, appearing at ribbon cuttings, proms, sock hops and charity events. While most DJs, then and now, were loath to mingle in this fashion, Biondi did so with relish, endearing himself to packs of teens who became devoted listeners.

She remembers, He was wrapping things up but still made time for us. He was as kind as could be, the nicest guy.

Enzweiler started a Biondi fan club and wrote a newsletter that she distributed at sock hops and schools. She came downtown to join the groups of kids who routinely gathered outside the old WLS studio at Michigan Avenue and Wacker Drive to watch Biondis show live.

Biondi left Chicago in 1963. Enzweiler would attend Willowbrook High School and the College of DuPage, work in the hospitality business, marry a man named George Pulice, get divorced and start a video production company.

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I lost track of him, Enzweiler, who now goes by Pam Enzweiler-Pulice, once told me. Even though he was back on Chicago radio for a time (from 1967 to 1972 on WCFL-AM 1000 and WMAQ-AM 670) and then he was all over the country, working in real obscurity in Myrtle Beach for a decade. But I tracked down his phone number and called. I wondered if he would even remember me.

When he heard her name, Biondi said, Pam, where have you been?

The two kept in touch by phone. He later returned to local airwaves for decades starting at WBBM-FM 96.3 in 1983, then WJMK-FM 104.3 and finally WLS-FM 94.7.

Over the years, they discussed the possibility of making a film about his life. In 2014, they got to work on what is now a lively hourlong documentary, filled with old clips (film and sound) and the more than 50 interviews she has conducted. She is on camera and Biondi is too, of course, but so are musicians such as Bobby Rydell, the ever-elusive Brian Wilson, Frankie Valli and Ronnie Rice, and broadcasters like Sirott.

A number of Midwestern venues have been having special screenings of the movie, The Voice that Rocked America: The Dick Biondi Story, as Enzweiler-Pulice continues to raise the funds needed to finish the film. The next takes place Sunday at The Acorn in Three Oaks, Michigan.

This has really been a labor of love and it is almost finished, says Enzweiler-Pulice. I do think the film does Dick justice. At previous screenings, there has been a lot of laughter, some tears. People learned some things they never knew about him. I feel he was a national treasure and it has been an honor to know him.

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He was such a humble man. Maybe thats one of the reasons his impact and influence have been underappreciated. I hope this movie gets him the respect that he deserves, that it rekindles the memories of so many of us.

The Voice That Rocked America: The Dick Biondi Story screens 1 p.m. July 9 at The Acorn, 107 Generations Drive, Three Oaks, Michigan; www.acornlive.org

rkogan@chicagotribune.com
The Colorado website designer's win is one of dozens of federal cases where religious beliefs and LGBTQ+ rights have clashed  and the pattern might not be what you think

Viewed over decades, the Supreme Court's record on religion-related cases is more complicated than recent headlines suggest. Phil Roeder/Moment via Getty Images

Does a Colorado designers belief that marriage is between one man and one woman merit an exemption to state law barring discrimination against LGBTQ+ people? On June 30, 2023, the Supreme Court decided 6-3 that the answer is yes: Requiring a conservative Christian business owner to create wedding websites for gay couples would violate the free speech clause of the First Amendment.

Creating a website constitutes an expressive activity protected by the First Amendment, Justice Neil Gorsuch wrote in the majority opinion, and Colorados anti-discrimination law would compel an individual to create speech she does not believe. Thus, designer Lorie Smith has the right to follow her conscience about a matter of major significance and refuse her services for same-sex weddings.

303 Creative v. Elenis is the latest of a trio of Supreme Court cases where conservative Christian plaintiffs have argued that they should have the constitutionally protected right to refuse service to LGBTQ+ people. In 2018, it was a Colorado baker refusing to bake a cake for a gay wedding. In 2021, it was a Catholic adoption agency arguing it should not be forced to place foster children with gay couples and thus be exempt from Philadelphias nondiscrimination policy.

These cases are no doubt important, signaling a broader trend on the current court, which has frequently ruled in favor of Christian plaintiffs on high-profile cases, particularly when it comes to cases that also involve gender and sexuality  although the Colorado bakers win was a narrow one that avoided broader questions about civil rights, free speech and free religious exercise.

The big-picture view, however, is more complicated.

As sociologists of religion and sexuality, we have analyzed every federal court case between 1990 to 2020 that involves religious beliefs and LGBTQ+ peoples rights  a total of 62 cases. From this analysis, we know that the ruling in 303 Creative LLC v. Elenis runs counter to legal patterns of the past 30 years.

The latest Supreme Court rulings make it seem as if cases that deal with plaintiffs faith are usually successful in federal courts. More broadly, however, the opposite is true. Throughout U.S. history, litigants have drawn from ideas about religious liberty to attempt to justify violating the law, whether related to taxes, child labor, desegregation or dress codes. Most of the time they lose, and cases related to LGBTQ rights are no exception.

Three types of claims

Cases that involve religious freedom can take many forms. We focused our analysis on three types: those based on the free exercise clause of the First Amendment; those about free speech, as in 303 Creative, that are also based on the First Amendment; and religion claims citing Title VII of the Civil Rights Act, which prohibits employment discrimination.

We found that in only 21 of the 62 cases did a federal court side side with the religious litigant. Whats more, courts ruled in favor of the litigants specific religion-based legal claim  as opposed to some other element of their argument  in only three cases.

Lorie Smith, left, the owner of 303 Creative, prepares to speak outside the Supreme Court on Dec. 5, 2022. Kent Nishimura / Los Angeles Times via Getty Images

In our analysis, cases focused on wedding-related services, like 303 Creative, were the most likely to have justices side with the party bringing forth a religion-based claim, or to remand the case for further proceedings. In cases related to employment, housing, incarceration, education or physical and mental health care, on the other hand, federal courts were unlikely to side with religion-based claims.

The relative success of wedding-related cases points to a broader trend we observed. Over time, fewer cases dealt with plaintiffs opposition to LGBTQ+ identity and more on LGBTQ+ relationships, specifically same-sex marriage.

Take Ward v. Polite, a 2012 case where a graduate student in a masters counseling program requested that she be allowed to refer gay and lesbian clients seeking relationship advice to another counselor, even though she, according to case documents, had no problem counseling gay and lesbian clients. The university believed that Wards refusal to counsel gay and lesbian clients in relationships violated its code of ethics and expelled her from the program.

She sued the university, claiming it had violated her right to freely exercise her religion. The 6th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals criticized the university for not having an exception clause to its nondiscrimination policy, which students like Ward could have used to request to transfer a client, and remanded the case for additional proceedings.

Not always the usual story

Our findings also revealed that federal court cases about faith and sexual orientation often affirm a stereotype that gender scholar Janet Jakobsen calls the usual story about religion and LGBTQ+ rights: that the two are in tension with one another.

In other words, even when the court doesnt side with litigants whose cases are related to their faith, most lawsuits about these topics give the impression that religious beliefs endorse heterosexuality over any alternative. The majority of cases brought over the past 30 years  50 of the 62 in our sample  were indeed brought by people who say their religious beliefs oppose LGBT identities or relationships.

Still, there are examples of plaintiffs who use religion-based claims to advance LGBTQ+ rights.

A supporter of same-sex marriage waves a pride flag in front of the U.S. Supreme Court to celebrate the eighth anniversary of the Obergefell v. Hodges decision. Anna Moneymaker/Getty Images

For instance, attorney Robin Joy Shahar sued the attorney general of Georgia, Michael Bowers, after he withdrew his job offer to her upon finding out that she married her partner, another woman, in a religious ceremony. The case, Shahar v. Bowers, was eventually decided in 1997, when sodomy laws were still on the books, and long before U.S. states legally recognized same-sex marriages  a fact the court emphasized by putting quotation marks around every reference to Shahars marriage and wedding.

Shahar, who had held a Jewish wedding ceremony at her synagogue, argued that the attorney general had violated her right to freely exercise her religion, among other rights. But the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 11th Circuit sided with Bowers, reasoning that the interests of the government  in this case the attorney generals office  outweighed Shahars individual rights.

Other litigants have integrated their religious beliefs or identity into federal court arguments, seeking to protect LGBTQ+ people and their rights. In our analysis, the court ruled against each of their religion-based claims.

The road ahead

Today, hours after the courts decision was announced, it is too early to predict the consequences of the ruling. Its worth noting, however, that the Supreme Court declined to consider Smiths claims that Colorados law violated the free exercise clause of the First Amendment. In other words, they were willing to consider  and ultimately decided  that the law violated her right to create, or not create, content based on her religious beliefs. Yet they were not willing to consider whether the law impeded her ability to freely practice her faith.

In this way, the court did not overturn precedent related to other forms of religious freedom.

Still, as Justice Sonia Sotomayor noted in her dissent  joined by Justice Elena Kagan and Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson  this ruling leaves open the possibility that other religious business owners will claim their services are expressive acts of speech and thus refuse to serve LGBTQ+ people.

Today, the Court, for the first time in its history, grants a business open to the public a constitutional right to refuse to serve members of a protected class, Sotomayor wrote. The law in question targets conduct, not speech, for regulation, and the act of discrimination has never constituted protected expression under the First Amendment.

This article is republished from The Conversation, an independent nonprofit news site dedicated to sharing ideas from academic experts. If you found it interesting, you could subscribe to our weekly newsletter.

It was written by: Kelsy Burke, University of Nebraska-Lincoln and Emily Kazyak, University of Nebraska-Lincoln.

Read more:



Kelsy Burke receives funding from the National Science Foundation.

Emily Kazyak receives funding from the National Science Foundation.
Kashish Bastola, a rising sophomore at Harvard University, speaks outside of the U.S. Supreme Court in Washington on Thursday. In a 6-3 vote, the justices ruled that race-conscious admissions programs at Harvard and the University of North Carolina are unconstitutional. (Kent Nishimura / Los Angeles Times)

For the record:

10:37 a.m. July 3, 2023: An earlier version of this column incorrectly stated that John Adams, a principal drafter of the Declaration of Independence, owned slaves. He did not.



The Fourth of July should never be celebrated without revisiting the hallowed words that crown the Declaration of Independence and symbolize the American Dream.

And right now, its fair to ask whether that majestic passage fits with the Supreme Courts landmark decision banning race-conscious affirmative action in university admissions  or is it in conflict.

The sentence most of us studied in school:

We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights, that among these are life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.

The nations founders backed their revolutionary split from Great Britain with this solemn proclamation: We mutually pledge to each other our lives, our fortunes and our sacred honor.



It was a noble declaration of principles that carried no legal weight and had little resemblance to real life  even for many of the signers. For the majority of them  including principal drafters Thomas Jefferson and Benjamin Franklin  their fortunes included slaves, who were treated the opposite of equals.

Slavery continued legally in America for 89 more years. It took the Civil War, the deaths of an estimated 620,000 soldiers and arguably Americas greatest president, Abraham Lincoln, to abolish slavery.

Although the Declaration of Independence proclaimed that all men are created equal, it was silent about women. They were not allowed to vote for 143 more years.

All men were created equal except slaves, Native Americans and other people of color. Native Americans were butchered in the name of progress and Manifest Destiny.

In California, Chinese immigration was prohibited by exclusion acts into the 20th century. The Alien Land Act of 1913 barred Japanese immigrants from owning property.

Housing discrimination based on race, ethnicity, religion  whatever  was legal and common in California until the mid-1960s. A heroic Gov. Pat Brown, a skittish Democratic-controlled Legislature and ultimately the California Supreme Court and U.S. Supreme Court outlawed discrimination in home selling and renting.

On July 4, 1776, all Americans definitely had not been created equal. And today they still havent been. But weve made good progress toward leveling lifes playing field, taking steps the founders never could have envisioned.

Back to the conservative courts historic affirmative action ruling last week: On a 6-3 vote, it struck down university policies that use race as a factor in deciding which students get admitted.

Many universities have focused too much on race, Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. asserted.

They have concluded, wrongly, that the touchstone of an individuals identity is not challenges bested, skills built or lessons learned but the color of their skin, Roberts wrote for the majority. Our constitutional history does not tolerate that choice.

He also wrote that an individuals race may never be used against him in the admissions process.

My laymans interpretation of that: A white or Asian American applicant, for example, should not be denied admission solely for the purpose of making room for a Black or Latino student.

For the minority, Justice Sonia Sotomayor wrote: The majoritys vision of race neutrality will entrench racial segregation in higher education because racial inequality will persist so long as it is ignored.

Supporters of affirmative action say that admission to a prestigious university provides an invaluable leg up in a graduates pursuit of a successful career and helps to mitigate generations of systemic racism.

For the record, Ive always believed that we shouldnt fight discrimination by discriminating.

Its uncomfortable, however, to side with this far-right court that was shaped by Donald Trump, the most distasteful president in history.

Given our political polarization, I suspect that if affirmative action could be placed on the California ballot next year, it might well be approved. Voters likely would think: If Trumps against affirmative action, it must be good policy.

Its a paradox that this deep-blue state has twice voted against affirmative action in public education, contracting and employment based on race, ethnicity and gender.

The first time was in 1996. The campaign was especially nasty. Affirmative action supporters ran TV ads equating opponents with Ku Klux Klansmen in white robes and hoods. That backfired. Californians voted by a 9-percentage-point margin to ban affirmative action.

Inspired by the Black Lives Matter movement, the Legislature placed a measure on the 2020 ballot to reinstate affirmative action. It lost overwhelmingly by 14 percentage points.

So, when Gov. Gavin Newsom railed against the courts ruling last week, it sounded awkward because, after all, the justices had voted basically the way Californians did just three years earlier.

Right-wing activists  including those donning robes  are trying to take us back to the era of book bans and segregated campuses, Newsom declared.

While the path to equal opportunity has now been narrowed for millions of students[California] campus doors remain open for all who want to work hard  and our commitment to diversity, equity and equal opportunity has never been stronger.

But on affirmative action, California voters are with Florida  a state whose conservative policies Newsom obsessively denounces.

California has always prided itself on being a national leader on groundbreaking issues. And it clearly is on affirmative action, whether Newsom likes it or not.

In fact, other states could learn a lot from California about how to diversify their universities without race-based affirmative action.

As Times education writers Teresa Watanabe and Debbie Truong reported, University of California campuses have made notable strides. Black and Latino students represented 43% of the admitted first-year class of Californians for fall 2022, compared with only about 20% before affirmative action was banned a quarter century ago.

Were still agonizing over to what extent one person in the pursuit of happiness is allowed to shove aside someone else. Its a question guaranteed to generate political fireworks.

Sign up for Essential California, your daily guide to news, views and life in the Golden State.

This story originally appeared in Los Angeles Times.
Coming Home to Charleston Twenty years ago, Charleston became the focus of Out Travelers first cover story. To celebrate this anniversary, we revisit the LGBTQ+ past and present of this South Carolina city. Charleston is renowned for its cobblestone streets, Rainbow Row of waterfront houses, antebellum architecture, fine dining, and more  and deservedly so. But its long past time for this South Carolina gem to take its place as an LGBTQ+ travel destination, in part because of its little-known but refreshing queer history and culture. Perhaps the most European of all American cities, Charleston has a history dating back over 350 years to its founding in honor of King Charles II of England. Due to its safe inlet harbor location at the confluence of the Ashley, Cooper, and Wando rivers, the city has always been subject to international influences  some beneficial and some not. For example, the wealth generated from its port and resulting shipping trade (including the trafficking of enslaved persons) helped fund cultural and artistic ventures, giving a sophisticated veneer to the citys early abhorrent foundation. Despite the unsavory parts of its history, Charleston has emerged as a modern community that is proud yet mindful of its past and how that story has impacted its culture and character. Today, out travelers will appreciate Charleston as an intersectional foodie paradise, featuring locally sourced seafood, meats, and produce prepared using Native American, European, West African, and Gullah Geechee influences, among others. Try Charleston mainstays like the Grocery and its daily menu, the Charleston Grill with its modern twist on traditional Southern fare, or the legendary Stellas. LGBTQ+ couples looking for a romantic evening can dine at the sophisticated Peninsula Grill. For LGBTQ+ nightlife, out travelers can head to Dudleys on Ann Street for drinks, dancing, drag shows, karaoke, billiards, and lots of late-night fun with chosen family. Charlestons history is replete with LGBTQ+ culture and characters. Founding Father Alexander Hamilton was suspected by some of having an unusually bromantic relationship with South Carolina patriot John Laurens, an early abolitionist who wanted to use his future inheritance of 40 enslaved men to create a fighting force against the British during the Revolutionary War. In a more sordid chapter of the towns history, bisexual writer, actress, and Charleston native Ada Agnes Jane McElhenney stole funds raised for a monument to her late grandfather, former Vice President John C. Calhoun, which she used to flee her hometown for New York City in 1834. Once there, she changed her name to Ada Clare and became known as the Queen of Bohemia before dying tragically after a bite by a rabid dog. In 1946, gay couple John Zeigler, Jr. and Edwin Peacock opened the Book Basement, which served as an early safe and affirming space for the local LGBTQ+ community. And British expatriate author Dawn Langley Simmons, one of the first individuals to undergo gender-affirming surgery in the U.S., called Charleston home until her death in 2000. An exciting resource to learn more about Charlestons LGBTQ+ history up close is the Real Rainbow Row, a self-guided walking tour that visits over 20 sites of importance. One of the stops is the Avery Research Center for African American History and Culture, which includes an exhibition featuring scientists and romantic partners Joseph Towles and Colin Turnbull. The Real Rainbow Row is a great way to explore the city on foot while connecting with our communitys past. Learn more at CharlestonCVB.com/lgbtq. If youre looking for a more traditional tour of the history of Charleston, a good place to start is Museum Mile on Meeting Street, where youll find six museums, five historic houses, and plenty of historic parks and examples of Charlestons unique architecture. You can also visit the historic Ansonborough neighborhood, with architecture dating back to the citys reconstruction, following a devastating 1838 fire that destroyed 1,100 buildings and a quarter of the downtown area. Civil War buffs can visit Fort Sumpter in Charleston Harbor, which took the first enemy fire during the war that ultimately ended the practice of slavery in the country. And of course, theres the iconic Rainbow Row: Charlestons famed collection of 13 brightly colored and ridiculously Instagrammable houses on East Bay Street. For the shopaholics, be sure to visit King Street and the Shops at Charleston Place. Charleston is also renowned for its natural beauty and water-based activities. There are miles of pristine beaches like Isle of Palms, Kiawah Island, and Folly (the choice of local gays). You can even go deep-sea fishing, take part in your favorite water sports, or simply view the citys skyline from a twilight dinner cruise. With its mix of history, culture, fine dining, outdoor activities, and, yes, LGBTQ+ history and community, Charleston is well worth a visit by discerning out travelers.

Charleston is renowned for its cobblestone streets, Rainbow Row of waterfront houses, antebellum architecture, fine dining, and more  and deservedly so. But its long past time for this South Carolina gem to take its place as an LGBTQ+ travel destination, in part because of its little-known but refreshing queer history and culture.

Perhaps the most European of all American cities, Charleston has a history dating back over 350 years to its founding in honor of King Charles II of England. Due to its safe inlet harbor location at the confluence of the Ashley, Cooper, and Wando rivers, the city has always been subject to international influences  some beneficial and some not. For example, the wealth generated from its port and resulting shipping trade (including the trafficking of enslaved persons) helped fund cultural and artistic ventures, giving a sophisticated veneer to the citys early abhorrent foundation.

Despite the unsavory parts of its history, Charleston has emerged as a modern community that is proud yet mindful of its past and how that story has impacted its culture and character. Today, out travelers will appreciate Charleston as an intersectional foodie paradise, featuring locally sourced seafood, meats, and produce prepared using Native American, European, West African, and Gullah Geechee influences, among others. Try Charleston mainstays like the Grocery and its daily menu, the Charleston Grill with its modern twist on traditional Southern fare, or the legendary Stellas. LGBTQ+ couples looking for a romantic evening can dine at the sophisticated Peninsula Grill.

For LGBTQ+ nightlife, out travelers can head to Dudleys on Ann Street for drinks, dancing, drag shows, karaoke, billiards, and lots of late-night fun with chosen family.

Charlestons history is replete with LGBTQ+ culture and characters. Founding Father Alexander Hamilton was suspected by some of having an unusually bromantic relationship with South Carolina patriot John Laurens, an early abolitionist who wanted to use his future inheritance of 40 enslaved men to create a fighting force against the British during the Revolutionary War.

In a more sordid chapter of the towns history, bisexual writer, actress, and Charleston native Ada Agnes Jane McElhenney stole funds raised for a monument to her late grandfather, former Vice President John C. Calhoun, which she used to flee her hometown for New York City in 1834. Once there, she changed her name to Ada Clare and became known as the Queen of Bohemia before dying tragically after a bite by a rabid dog.

In 1946, gay couple John Zeigler, Jr. and Edwin Peacock opened the Book Basement, which served as an early safe and affirming space for the local LGBTQ+ community. And British expatriate author Dawn Langley Simmons, one of the first individuals to undergo gender-affirming surgery in the U.S., called Charleston home until her death in 2000.

An exciting resource to learn more about Charlestons LGBTQ+ history up close is the Real Rainbow Row, a self-guided walking tour that visits over 20 sites of importance. One of the stops is the Avery Research Center for African American History and Culture, which includes an exhibition featuring scientists and romantic partners Joseph Towles and Colin Turnbull. The Real Rainbow Row is a great way to explore the city on foot while connecting with our communitys past. Learn more at CharlestonCVB.com/lgbtq.

If youre looking for a more traditional tour of the history of Charleston, a good place to start is Museum Mile on Meeting Street, where youll find six museums, five historic houses, and plenty of historic parks and examples of Charlestons unique architecture. You can also visit the historic Ansonborough neighborhood, with architecture dating back to the citys reconstruction, following a devastating 1838 fire that destroyed 1,100 buildings and a quarter of the downtown area. Civil War buffs can visit Fort Sumpter in Charleston Harbor, which took the first enemy fire during the war that ultimately ended the practice of slavery in the country. And of course, theres the iconic Rainbow Row: Charlestons famed collection of 13 brightly colored and ridiculously Instagrammable houses on East Bay Street. For the shopaholics, be sure to visit King Street and the Shops at Charleston Place.

Charleston is also renowned for its natural beauty and water-based activities. There are miles of pristine beaches like Isle of Palms, Kiawah Island, and Folly (the choice of local gays). You can even go deep-sea fishing, take part in your favorite water sports, or simply view the citys skyline from a twilight dinner cruise.

With its mix of history, culture, fine dining, outdoor activities, and, yes, LGBTQ+ history and community, Charleston is well worth a visit by discerning out travelers.
Yevgeny Pisarenko, the commander of Akhmat, a Chechen armed formation that is fighting on the Russian side, has been killed in combat in Donbas.

Source: Russian Kremlin-aligned media RBC, citing Apta Alaudinov, Pisarenko's successor

Details: In his statement, Alaudinov thanked the deceased fighters parents for "raising such a hero".

Dmitry Kulko, a Russian war correspondent, also reported the death of Pisarenko, aka Velikii ("The Great"), on his Telegram channel.

"Velikii (The Great) was a fellow countryman of mine who served in the Stavropol riot police and received the rank of colonel. When the special military operation [the Russian term for the war in Ukraine  ed.] started, he went to the front as a volunteer soldier to protect the residents of Donbas," he wrote.

The date of Pisarenkos death was not specified.

The Akhmat battalion has been participating in combat action in Ukraine since the beginning of the war.

Background:

In June, the Russian Ministry of Defence issued an order obliging all "voluntary formations" to sign a contract with the Defence Ministry by 1 July "in order to increase the efficiency of their deployment" in the war against Ukraine; mercenaries from the Akhmat unit were the first to sign this document on camera.

Journalists fight on their own frontline. Support Ukrainska Pravda or become our patron!
Community member stuns Redditors with offer posted on telephone pole: I hope someone takes me up on it

Fruit trees are the multi-hyphenate rock stars of the plant world: they provide food, shelter, and shade. And one generous Redditor is out to change some lives by offering free fruit trees to their neighbors.

In the post shared to the r/NoLawns subreddit, the user showed off a flyer they made and posted around their neighborhood.

The flier offers to buy and plant fruit trees at no cost to anyone who wants one. The Redditor is offering peach, cherry, apple, and plum trees, among others.

Put up a bunch of these fliers. I hope someone takes me up on it, the Redditor captioned their photo.

Planting fruit trees is the gift that keeps on giving  literally. A fruit tree may take a few years to produce fruit, but once its fruiting, it can be a source of healthy, delicious food for decades. No matter what part of the world you live in, theres a fruit tree suited to your climate.

A fruit tree can provide an abundance of free food that could otherwise cost you a pretty penny at the supermarket. Peaches, cherries, apples, and plums, like the Redditor is offering, can often cost more than $5 a pound during peak season. And growing your own will provide you with a near-unlimited supply.

You dont need to wait for someone to put fruit trees in your yard for free, though. The international nonprofit The Fruit Tree Planting Foundation offers an easy, step-by-step fruit tree planting guide.

What a wonderful idea, wrote one Redditor. I hope it, pardon the pun, bears fruit.

Some counties do this for free, noted one Redditor. In the county I grew up in, you could get one free fruit tree a year if you are a homeowner.

One person said they would gladly take up the Redditor on the offer and give you a home-cooked meal or desserts as a thank you.

Join our free newsletter for easy tips to save more, waste less, and help yourself while helping the planet.
Yellow crab on the beachGetty Images/Bob Stefko

From the "Little Mermaid" character Sebastian to pet hermit crabs, people think crabs are wonderful  but some experts believe the way we treat crabs is downright barbaric.

"If crustaceans screamed when they were dropped into boiling water, I doubt we'd still be having these kinds of discussions."

Like many other decapods (the class that also includes lobsters, shrimp, crayfish and prawns), crabs are a popular food item. It is common to prepare them by dropping them while still alive into a boiling pot, then cracking open their shells to suck or scoop out their tasty inner flesh.

Related

Climate change is making crabs lose their sense of smell  and seafood may never be the same

Of course, even if humans weren't regularly sending crabs to a boiling death, we have so polluted the oceans that crabs are losing their sense of smell and failing to develop healthy shells. In other cases, literally billions of crabs have disappeared due to climate change. Overall, it seems that humans are much kinder in practice to fictional crabs than to real ones. But scientists supposedly tell us that crabs are nothing more than stupid sea bugs. Is that truly the case?

"I think we should separate the question of whether an animal is intelligent from whether they are sentient (i.e., can experience positive and negative feelings)," Dr. Andrew Crump, a lecturer in animal cognition and welfare at Royal Veterinary College, told Salon by email. "Intelligence isn't, on its own, relevant to the question of whether we should care about animal welfare. But sentience is. The human case illustrates this point  we don't think that people with lower IQs are less capable of suffering."

From there, Crump informed Salon that experiments on crabs and hermit crabs have revealed "remarkable cognitive abilities." Even if crabs can't master Cartesian metaphysics, "the evidence for pain, anxiety, and other feelings in decapods is much more compelling."

Want more health and science stories in your inbox? Subscribe to Salon's weekly newsletter The Vulgar Scientist.

"Electrical stunning devices have also been developed, at least for larger decapods. More research is needed, but there's some compelling evidence that these render crabs and lobsters insensible, so they can then be humanely slaughtered using other methods."

Crump is referring to the fact that crabs repeatedly demonstrate an aversion to experiences that they have learned can result in adverse consequences to their bodies. One could argue that this aversion is mere instinct or reflex, like a command that was pre-programmed into a machine. Since that is true, how does one then differentiate a superficial impulse from a deeper emotion?

"In the past, the reactions to trauma (that would result in pain in humans) were dismissed in non-human animals as 'reflex' reactions, like when the doctor taps on your knee," Gregory Jensen from the University of Washington's School of Aquatic and Fishery Sciences wrote to Salon. "But what I've always argued is that there is no incentive to avoid that trauma if there is no negative association with it (i.e., pain). If we look at all the pain-inducing defenses that different animals (and plants) have, it is ridiculous to conclude that they all developed to protect them from humans."

Even if we cannot definitively state whether crabs are capable of more complex emotions, "it makes perfect sense that pain is a universally unpleasant experience," Jensen said.

Dr. Edward Pope, an associate professor in marine biology at Swansea University, explained to Salon by email that "pretty much anything with a nervous system will be able to detect damage to itself. Whether that signal is then processed as 'pain' is a little more nuanced. The term 'sentience' is used a lot in this kind of research, which broadly means the capacity to have feelings, both negative and positive. The evidence for sentience in decapod crustaceans (crabs, lobster and shrimp) is pretty good."

"Pretty much anything with a nervous system will be able to detect damage to itself. Whether that signal is then processed as 'pain' is a little more nuanced."

Pope added that, when the British government commissioned the London School of Economics and Political Science to perform a meta-analysis on the evidence of sentience in both cephalopods (octopuses, squids, etc.) and decapods by reviewing more than 300 studies, it "concluded the evidence for sentience was strong for both groups of animals." Indeed, even on occasions when a test failed to prove sentience, "it was overwhelmingly because the work had not been done (lack of evidence, not evidence of absence)."

There is not enough scientific information about the most humane ways to slaughter decapods. Certainly boiling them alive or dismembering them alive is extremely painful, but it is not easy to kill them humanely in one stroke, as Crump observed to Salon. For instance, a crab's central nervous system is better described as a decentralized nervous system.

"You can't simply destroy one central brain to kill the animal (like you could for a fish, say)," Crump explained. "To abolish nervous system activity, I'd tentatively recommend stabbing crabs through two ganglia (one at the front and the other at the back of the body) and slicing lobsters down the midline (through all thirteen ganglia). These methods require skill and training, so should probably be left to trained cooks."

Crump added, "Electrical stunning devices have also been developed, at least for larger decapods. More research is needed, but there's some compelling evidence that these render crabs and lobsters insensible, so they can then be humanely slaughtered using other methods."

Jensen said that for himself, "when I cook crab, I first chill them down to the point where they are unresponsive. When dropped into the water they seem to be killed by the temperature shock before they 'wake up.'" Like Crump, he also suggested stabbing or breaking down the middle to simultaneously destroy their brain and thoracic ganglion. Another advantage of this method is that it makes it easier to fit multiple crabs into one pot, since you can throw away the guts and carapace. "I think this is a very humane method. (I usually don't do this because I don't need the space and think the body meat tastes better when they're cooked whole)."

Jensen later added, darkly, "If crustaceans screamed when they were dropped into boiling water, I doubt we'd still be having these kinds of discussions."

Read more

about marine biology
'I was crazy': 50 Cent on 20 years of 'Get Rich or Die Tryin'

50 Cent performing in Tel Aviv in July 2022 (JACK GUEZ)

As 50 Cent heads out on a world tour marking the 20th anniversary of hip-hop classic "Get Rich or Die Tryin'", he told AFP it's probably his last on this scale.

"I won't be able to tour like this again. My film and TV production stuff doesn't allow me," said the rapper, who will soon be seen alongside Sylvester Stallone in "Expendables 4".

He took "a huge pay cut" to shift from music to TV a decade ago -- most notably with hit show "Power" -- but saw it as a strategic business decision.

"My audience is older. With my film and TV work I'm speaking to my core audience directly. I don't want to lose them... They made me a success."

50 Cent, real name Curtis Jackson, turns 48 this week as he prepares to embark on the "Final Lap" tour across North America, Europe and Australasia, with more dates due to be added in Asia and beyond.

It has already sold more than 600,000 tickets, which the ever-modest "Fiddy" says with a chuckle "would be impressive for other guys, but I'm 50 Cent".

The one thing that could lure him back after this would be if his old mentors -- Eminem and Dr Dre -- came with him.

"If I could get Em and Dre out the house, that would get me back touring but I don't think that'll happen," he said.

- 'Wouldn't stop growing' -

Launched in February 2003, his debut was one of the fastest selling records of all time, boosted by a colourful backstory of true-life gangsterism, including time in prison and an attempted assassination in which he was shot nine times.

Debut single "In Da Club" is still a huge hit thanks to its evergreen refrain, "Hey, Shorty, it's your birthday".

And the rapper is still 114th on Spotify's worldwide rankings despite not releasing a studio album since 2014.

There was debate over which single to launch at the time, with Dr Dre pushing for "If I Can't".

"But I thought, no, we gotta go with 'Go Shorty, it's your birthday'. Coz every day is someone's birthday and makes the song relevant again," said Jackson.

"And the shit wouldn't stop growing. I got a plaque now because it's been played a billion times on Spotify. We weren't even listening to shit on Spotify back then."

He remembers the moment, sitting on a tour bus heading for Washington DC, when he heard that the album had gone past 800,000 sales in the first week.

"At the time I thought if I could pray for just one thing, it was for that record to be a success. But one thing I learned about myself is I just want more wishes," he said, laughing.

"There was so much success and energy it started to feel like I could have whatever I want. The album was called 'Get Rich or Die Tryin' and I was, like, 'No, let me die later. This feels great.'"

All the adulation and partying went to his head, of course.

"If they had clinically tested me at the time, they would have said I was crazy."

- 'Moving too fast' -

Despite the whirlwind of sudden fame, Jackson parlayed the success into a mini-empire, creating clothing lines, video games, health foods and fragrances -- as well as his own high-end champagne and cognac.

The latter recently landed him in some bother with Remy Martin, who sued him for allegedly copying their bottle.

"They felt I was moving too fast, so they put some pressure on me," he said.

"They picked the wrong guy coz I spend a million dollars a year on legal fees anyway -- just for recreational purposes it feels like sometimes."

He has settled the suit and agreed to change the bottle, and adds that his new cognac is up there with Remy Martin's fabled Louis XIII vintage.

"Jesus Christ would drink that shit," he said.

pgr-er/gil/smw
With Crimea under Russian occupation, war not over yet  Zelenskyy

President Volodymyr Zelenskyy has said that the ultimate goal of Ukraine under his leadership is the liberation of Crimea, and only then will it mean that "the war is over", and Zelenskyy will not consider "peace" without Crimea a "victory".

Source: Zelenskyy in an interview with CNN

Details: In particular, Zelenskyy said that his ultimate goal is to liberate Crimea, which was annexed in 2014: "We cannot imagine Ukraine without Crimea. And while Crimea is under the Russian occupation, it means only one thing: the war is not over yet."

When asked if there was any scenario in which there could be peace without Crimea, Zelenskyy said: "It will not be victory then."

He has also commented on the Wagner Groups rebellion in Russia and said that the Russian dictator's reaction was weak.

Quote: "We see Putins reaction. Its weak.

Firstly, we see he doesnt control everything. Wagners moving deep into Russia and taking certain regions shows how easy it is to do. Putin doesnt control the situation in the regions.

All that vertical of power he used to have is just crumbling down."

Details: Zelenskyy has said that Ukrainian intelligence reports indicate that the Kremlin is measuring Prigozhin's support, and that half of Russia supports the Wagner leader and his rebellion.

The president has also commented on his meeting with the head of the US Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), Bill Burns, who recently visited Kyiv and met with him and Ukrainian intelligence officials.

Zelenskyy has said he was "surprised" to see his meeting with Burns reported in the media.

Quote: "My communication with the CIA chief should always be behind the scenes. We discuss important things  what Ukraine needs and how Ukraine is prepared to act.

We dont have any secrets from CIA, because we have good relations, and our intelligence services talk with each other.

The situation is pretty straightforward. We have good relations with the CIA chief and we are talking. I told him about all the important things related to the battlefield which we need."

Journalists fight on their own frontline. Support Ukrainska Pravda or become our patron!
Crumbling shipwreck reemerges after dam collapses in Ukraine. See the 500-year-old find

Once submerged in the riverbed, a centuries-old shipwreck reemerged following the devastating collapse of a dam in a Russia-controlled region of southern Ukraine.

The crumbling boat  and several other ancient artifacts  resurfaced along the shore of Khortytsia, the largest island in the Dnieper River, the Khortytsia National Reserve said in a June 30 Facebook post.

National park employees found the 500-year-old shipwreck while surveying a previously submerged shoreline of Khortytsia, the park said. The boat was about 22 feet long and made of oak.

The boat might be linked to a Russian settlement that existed on the island from the 10th to 14th century, officials said. The settlement relied on boats for fishing, trade and transportation.

Video footage shared by Sky News shows the half-buried boat resting on the riverbed. Several people worked to dig up the boat.

Ancient ceramic pieces, flints and fragments of bombs were also found along the coastline recently, the park said in an Instagram post.

Water levels around Khortytsia have dropped following the destruction of the Kakhovka Dam, park officials said, as the island and nature reserve are upstream from the dam. The southern edge of the island was once part of the Kakhovka reservoir, according to the nature reserves website.

What we know about the Kakhovka Dam collapse

The Kakhovka Dam collapsed on June 6, sending floodwaters roaring downstream, photos show.

Water rushes through a breach in the Kakhovka Dam in a Russia-controlled area of southern Ukraine on Tuesday, June 6.

The dams destruction flooded countless homes and fields, prompting the evacuation of thousands, BBC reported. The floodwaters reportedly uprooted landmines and carried large amounts of industrial materials with it, sparking safety concerns.

Photos show several neighborhoods of Kherson, a large port city along the Dnieper River downstream from the Kakhovka Dam, during the worst of the flooding.

Streets in Kherson flooded on Wednesday, June 7, after the Kakhovka Dam collapsed.

A neighborhood of Kherson was flooded with oil-polluted water on Saturday, June 10, following the destruction of the Kakhovka Dam.

Upstream, the collapse of the Kakhovka Dam has led to waterways and canals drying up, leaving thousands of fish to die, the Associated Press reported. The sudden loss of the reservoir was a long-term environmental catastrophe.

The cause of the collapse remains uncertain. The dam might have collapsed due to structural failures or targeted efforts, CNN reported.

Ukraine and Russia, however, have accused each other of attacking the dam, BBC reported.

The fragmented ship was excavated in pieces and will be preserved and restored, park officials said.

Khortytsia is about 320 miles southeast of Kyiv, Ukraines capital city which also sits along the Dnieper River.

Facebook Translate and Google Translate were used to translate Facebook and Instagram posts from Khortytsia National Reserve.

Farmer stumbles on Roman artifact  weighing over 6,000 pounds  in Spain, photo shows

Broken pottery turns out to be wine jars forgotten by Romans over 2,000 years ago

Someone buried treasure and vanished. Archaeologists just found it 3,000 years later
A Cuban migrant boat arrived at Truman Waterfront Park in Key West, and 3 are in custody

A Cuban migrant boat with three men on board landed at Truman Waterfront Park in Key West, according to the U.S. Border Patrol.

All three men aboard the makeshift vessel were taken into custody Sunday by Border Patrol agents and will be processed for removal, Adam Hoffner, division chief for U.S. Customs and Border Protections Miami sector.

They did not have any medical issues, Hoffner said.

Such landings occurred several times a day starting late last year and into the early part of this year, but have become far less frequent in recent months.

Maritime migration to South Florida  mostly to the Keys  from Cuba and Haiti became such a problem for U.S. officials that the federal government shut down Dry Tortugas National Park off Key West in January because the number of Cuban migrants arriving there overwhelmed park rangers.

That prompted both a federal and state response.

The Biden administration increased Coast Guard and Customs patrols. And Gov. Ron DeSantis issued an executive order mobilizing the National Guard and several state police agencies to help patrol the air and water to prevent migrant boats from getting through.

These efforts have been effecting in significantly slowing landings. Weeks go by now without the arrival of migrant boats in the Keys.

Migrants are still fleeing

This doesnt mean people have stopped trying to flee their countries en route to either the U.S. or neighboring island nations. Far from it.

The Coast Guard and Customs Air and Marine Operations are still stopping several boats a week from Cuba in the Florida Straits.

And, boats from Haiti with large numbers of people on board are being stopped by the Coast Guard and authorities from other nations before they reach the Straits.

On Saturday, the Royal Bahamas Defense Force stopped a 40-foot boat near Turks and Caicos with 189 people from Haiti on board.

The boat, which the Defense Force and Royal Turks and Caicos Islands Police say was a smuggling vessel, was carrying 139 men, one boy and 49 women, according to the police department.

Turks and Caicos police Chief Trevor Botting said his nation and the Bahamas are dealing with an unprecedented increase in maritime migration. Since the beginning of 2023, he said 21 boats, mostly from Haiti, have been stopped trying to reach either Turks and Caicos or the Bahamas, and 2,600 migrants have been detained.

The number of vessels and persons detained exceeds all previous years totals, and we are just six months into 2023, Botting said in a statement.
Back in 1995, a pair of British writers named Simon Corble and Nobby Dimon took an old Alfred Hitchcock movie about an innocent guy on the run and turned it into a wild, challenging ride for four live actors. Even though the 1935 movie, which was based on a novel by John Buchan (once the governor general of Canada), had scores of characters and locations from London to the Flying Scotsman train to the remote Highlands, four Monty Python-esque performers played everyone from music hall performers to crofters and sheriffs to children.

The joke in this hit farce was the implausibility of their collective task. The 39 Steps was rewritten again by Patrick Barlow in 2005 and, ever since, it has been, as the British like to say, a good little earner.

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I last saw The 39 Steps at the Drury Lane Theatre in Oakbrook Terrace in 2012; thats the very theater doing this show again this summer, presumably on the theory that memories are short. This time, the show is under the direction of Johanna McKenzie Miller and stars the Broadway actor Gavin Lee as the main hero, along with Caitlin Gallogly, Zuhdi Boueri and Tom Detrinis (all visiting actors) playing the rest of the roles. To be frank, this new production is not as good as the previous effort, notwithstanding the formidable comedic talent on the stage, beginning with Lee, a bona fide star well known for (among other things) his very delicious Squidward in SpongeBob SquarePants.

Gavin Lee and Caitlin Gallogly in The 39 Steps at Drury Lane Theatre. (Brett Beiner/HANDOUT)

There are three problems. One is that the show moves too slowly. Another is that the overarching storytelling just isnt clear enough. In order for the farce to be funny, the audience has to know what is going on it that which is being spoofed. And some people around me did not.

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The third is that the new production seems to miss the main joke, which is that the actors have been given a herculean task here and the fun comes with the audience empathizing with their struggles. To put that another way, the cast is not just playing the characters, it is also playing four actors with an absurd assignment and in order for that to work, the audience has to invest in the enormity of that task. Here, and with only a few exceptions, were just not in enough on the big joke and also we dont feel the emotional weight of what is being attempted (unlike, say, as we do at the hilarious Peter Pan Goes Wrong on Broadway or as ideally is the case at the Charles Ludlam classic The Mystery of Irma Vep, arguably the first to come up with this idea).

All that said, fans of old-school British farce will likely have a few good laughs in the company of highly skilled physical actors working clever material. The individual scenes in this show are very deftly performed on Angie Weber Millers set, its the big picture that still needs the work.

Chris Jones is a Tribune critic.

cjones5@chicagotribune.com

Review: The 39 Steps (2.5 stars)

When: Through Aug. 13

Where: Drury Lane Theatre, 100 Drury Lane, Oakbrook Terrace

Running time: 2 hours, 10 minutes

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Tickets: $85-$95 at 630-530-0111 and www.drurylanetheatre.com
DA: New Bedford gunshot victim died behind wheel in attempt to drive self to hospital

A young man who was shot in New Bedford early Monday morning died behind the wheel as he tried to drive himself to the hospital, authorities said.

Officers responding to a report of shots fired in the area of Tallman and North Front streets shortly after midnight spoke with witnesses who said they heard loud bangs that sounded like gunshots, according to the Bristol District Attorneys Office.

During a subsequent search of the area, the DAs office said officers found Lorenzo Gomes, 20, of New Bedford, suffering from apparent gunshot wounds inside his vehicle on Belleville Avenue.

Gomes attempted to drive to the hospital before losing consciousness in his vehicle, according to investigators. He was rushed him to Saint Lukes Hospital, where he was pronounced dead.

There was no immediate word on any suspects in the shooting.

Massachusetts State Police detectives assigned to the DAs office are assisting New Bedford police with a homicide investigation.

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Dan Cox says he has not filed to run for House, has reported FEC filing for fraud

Former Maryland Republican gubernatorial candidate Dan Cox said on Tuesday that he has not filed to run for Rep. David Trones (D-Md.) seat in the House, after a form was filed with the Federal Election Commission (FEC) under his name on Monday.

Cox, a former Maryland state delegate, said in a tweet that he has not filed to run for Marylands 6th congressional district and has reported this matter to the FEC for fraud.

Maryland Gov. Wes Moore (D) defeated Cox in the states gubernatorial race last year and became the states first Black governor.

Former Maryland Gov. Larry Hogan (R) had spoken out against Cox, who he said was a big loss for the Republican Party after he won GOP gubernatorial primary last year.

Cox, who was endorsed by former President Trump, prominently denied the results of the 2020 presidential election and echoed Trumps disproven claims. He also organized buses for attendees of Trumps Washington, D.C., rally Jan. 6, 2021, from which scores of Trump supporters marched on and rioted at the Capitol.

Cox also sought to impeach Hogan in February 2022 for the governors imposition of COVID-19 restrictions.

Before running for governor, Cox ran for Marylands 8th Congressional District in 2016. He lost that race to Rep. Jamie Raskin (D) in the general election after winning the GOP primary.

Republicans have an uphill battle in the state of Maryland after the state most recently elected Moore with more than 64 percent of the vote. President Biden also carried the state in 2020 with more than 65 percent of the vote.

Trone announced in May that he would be running for Sen. Ben Cardins (D-Md.) seat after the senator announced he would retire after his current term ends.

Maryland state Del. Joe Vogel (D) announced a bid for Trones seat in May. If elected, he would become the latest member of Generation Z elected to Congress.

In a statement following the filing, the Vogel campaign said, Marylanders overwhelmingly rejected Dan Cox at the ballot box in 2016 and in 2022  and they will again in 2024. His extremism is completely out of step with the voters of Marylands 6th Congressional District.

 Updated July 4 at 10:48 a.m.

For the latest news, weather, sports, and streaming video, head to The Hill.
Good morning, Chicago.

Weekend thunderstorms wreaked havoc across Chicago, resulting in flooding the National Weather Service described as potentially life-threatening, swamping highways, halting some Chicago Transit Authority services and damaging dozens of homes.

For around 5,000 ComEd customers across Chicagoland, the storms interrupted power, with the electric company reporting nearly 100 active outages as of late Sunday afternoon.

Torrential rains also put a damper on the first NASCAR Chicago Street Race as standing water covered parts of the course and fans waited in the rain for the races to resume. NASCAR officials declared Cole Custer the winner of the Xfinity Series Race on Sunday after lightning forced officials to shut it down Saturday with just under half the laps completed. Shane van Gisbergen won his NASCAR Cup Series debut, chasing down Justin Haley and Chase Elliott in a memorable finish to the series first street race.

Here are the top stories you need to know to start your day.

Subscribe to more newsletters | Puzzles & Games | Todays eNewspaper edition

The cars flew through tight turns around Grant Park on roads like DuSable Lake Shore Drive and Michigan Avenue, kicking up mist from the wet courses puddles. Above the zooming cars, the citys picturesque skyscrapers pierced fog clouds still lingering from the afternoons storms.

The stands slowly filled up after the delays. Drivers deftly passed one another in front of fans who braved the showers to watch the spectacle.

The 34-year-old New Zealand native became the first driver to win his Cup Series debut since Johnny Rutherford in the second qualifying race at Daytona in 1963.

It wasnt exactly a perfect day for racing, but drivers dealt with the obstacles as if they had driven our streets forever, writes Paul Sullivan. Theres no such thing as a slow lane in Chicago.

The Guardians looked as though they were on their way to an easy win after waiting out yet another long rain delay before things took a wild turn.

Legendary Chicago rock disc jockey and personality Richard Dick Biondi has died, WLS-AM 890 announced on Saturday night. He was 90.

Hollywood actors may be days from joining screenwriters in what would be the first two-union strike in the industry in more than six decades, with huge consequences for film and television production. Here is a look at how it could play out, and why its happening.

The transience of the retail world is key to Lane Call, which playwrights Len Foote and Scott OKen based on their experiences working at a Venture in Norridge, where they met in 1984. Young employees come and go, using the job as a steppingstone to real careers, while the threat of store closures or buyouts is ever-present. Stores change; job stays the same, muses the middle-aged manager of the factorys fictionalized Venture.
Dead body discovered along Delaware River in Bucks County. Who was he? Police don't know

Police in Bucks County need the public's help to identify a man discovered dead Monday on the shores of Delaware River in Bristol Township.

The unknown man was wearing a gray, green and camouflage zip-up hoody, gray sweatpants, and black sneakers, said Meredith Buck, Bucks County coroner. The ethnicity and race of the victim are not known, said Buck. No other details were released.

The Bristol Township Police Department did not return calls seeking comment on the case.

The body was discovered near the 6200 block of Radcliffe Street near the Delaware River-Turnpike Bridge, Buck said.

Officials have yet to determine a cause of death for the unknown man, who possibly drowned.

Last week, police were dispatched to Radcliffe Street, following reports of an unknown male attempting to steal a boat docked at the waterside. When confronted by the neighbors, the unknown man allegedly jumped into the river.

A unknown man was found dead Monday on the shores of the Delaware River in Bristol Township. Last week, an unknown man attempting to steal a boat jumped into the water upstream. (Courtesy of GoogleEarth.)

More: Man attempting to steal Pontoon boat in Bristol lost in Delaware River: Police

Investigation: Falls man allegedly threatens to shoot police prompting Levittown standoff

In the hours that followed, New Jersey State Police and the United States Coast Guard searched the river using boats and planes. Bristol Township police said the neighbors had tossed a flotation device into the water in order to help the man. But he quickly went underwater and did not re-surface, officers said.

Anyone with information is asked to contact the Bristol Township Police Department at 267-812-3000 or the Bucks County Coroners Office at 267-880-5040.

This article originally appeared on Bucks County Courier Times: Dead Body found along Delaware River in Bucks County unidentified
Iraq is ranked by the United Nations as one of the world's five countries most impacted by some effects of climate change (Asaad NIAZI)

Thousands of dead fish have washed ashore in southeast Iraq, prompting an official investigation into the wildlife disaster that officials said Monday may be linked to drought conditions.

An AFP photographer saw thousands of small fish washed up on the banks of the Amshan river in Majar al-Kabir, an area in Maysan province that borders Iran.

The region is home to fabled marshes in the floodplain of the Tigris river, already suffering from the effects of global warming.

Iraq's agriculture ministry on Sunday announced it was forming a committee to look into the causes of the fish deaths, according to state news agency INA.

Environmental campaigner Ahmed Saleh Neema said "a rise in temperatures" leading to increased evaporation, coupled with reduced water flow contributed to "a lack of oxygen and high salinity" in the river.

Largely arid Iraq is ranked by the United Nations as one of the world's five countries most impacted by some effects of climate change.

It endures blistering summer heat and frequent dust storms. Declining rain over the past four years as well as upstream dams have reduced the flow of the Tigris and Euphrates rivers where ancient civilisations flourished.

Khodr Abbas Salman, a Maysan province official overseeing its marshes for the Iraqi environment ministry, told AFP that "according to terrain analyses we have conducted, the level of oxygen (in the water) is zero, in addition to a rise in salinity levels".

He joined a mission on Monday to inspect the deaths of "tonnes" of fish, he said, noting the Amshan's waters are home to nine species.

The fish "keep dying even now", he said.

Samples from both the fish and the water will be "analysed... to determine if there is any presence of chemical substances", Salman added.

But the high salinity levels may be enough to cause considerable damage.

The water can no longer "be used for agriculture. It would scourge the land if farmers use it for irrigation", Salman said.

He warned of further risks of pollution in the water and surrounding lands the more animals die.

"Any dead animal rots... which raises the level of pollution," he said. "The water's toxicity might increase and infiltrate the land too."

In a similar phenomenon in 2018, fishermen in the central province of Babylon found dead carp in their thousands, but an investigation failed to discern what had caused it.

str-tgg/gde/ami/hkb
Dear Canadian snowbirds:

I hope youre enjoying your summer up North. Were looking forward to seeing you next season when you make your yearly migration to Florida.

As a full public-service newspaper columnist here, I want to apologize to those of you who may be offended by the recent bid for attention by one of our elected officials.

This is campaign season here, what might best be described as the Stupid Olympics. New record lows are being set on nearly a daily basis.

So, if youve seen our U.S. Sen. Rick Scott make his marble-mouthed way through a viral 35-second video that warns certain people not to step foot in Florida, please accept our apologies.

If youre a socialist, communist, somebody who believes in big government, I would think twice, think twice, if youre thinking about taking a vacation or moving to Florida, Scott said. Were the free state of Florida. We dont actually believe in socialism.

Im warning socialists and communists not to travel to Florida. They are not welcome in the Sunshine State.pic.twitter.com/ZB4RVz6XdK  Rick Scott (@ScottforFlorida) June 27, 2023

You may have noticed that Scotts reference to socialism extends beyond the textbook description of a country in which property and the means of production are centrally controlled by the government. Scotts also counting a socialist as somebody who believes in big government.

I think he means you, Canadians, with your universal, single-payer health care system, your well-funded, sustainable Canada Pension Plan Fund, and your lavish big-government funding of higher education, which allows university students to pay only about 25 percent of their college costs.

Even your federal minimum wage, which is $16.65 an hour, is more than double the $7.25 federal minimum wage in the U.S.  a clear demonstration in your countrys willingness to allow big government to intrude into the world of free enterprise.

More: DeSantis' own immigrant story in conflict with his opposition to "birthright citizenship"

More: Florida's E-verify law creating hole in agriculture, construction, hospitality jobs

More: Trump document case: Unlocking the secrets of Mar-a-Lago bathroom doors

You clearly exhibit too much faith in the benefits of big government programs to improve the lives of people to be welcomed in Scotts imagination of Florida.

Please dont be offended.

First of all, getting schooled on government social programs by Rick Scott is like taking a banking seminar from John Dillinger.

Scotts area of expertise in government social programs is in looting them. He pleaded the Fifth Amendment against self-incrimination 75 times rather than explain his role in the wholesale fraud against Medicare perpetrated by his hospital chain. It was the biggest health-care fraud case in the country at the time, one that resulted in a $1.7 billion fine.

So, Scotts a comically inappropriate messenger in the self-appointed role of government watchdog. Hes also way off base.

In his travel advisory, Scott goes on to claim that socialists arent welcome in Florida because we like freedom, liberty, capitalism and things like that.

But we really like socialism here in Florida. Youre not alone on that, Canadians.

Robert Claveau, a Canadian snowbird, relaxes in the shade of his umbrella on Thursday, December 14, 2017, on Palm Beach in Florida. (Calla Kessler / The Palm Beach Post)

For example, we here in Florida count on the rest of America to socialize the costs we may experience during hurricane season. We rely on FEMA  the Federal Emergency Management Agency  to take tax dollars collected in other states that dont experience hurricanes to pay to rebuild our under-insured beach houses in Florida if a storm hits.

Last year, it was Hurricane Ian. FEMA paid Floridians more than $2 billion through 23 Disaster Recovery Centers set up across the state, including in Palm Beach County.

Thank you, taxpayers of Iowa, Kentucky and Idaho.

Floridians in 26 counties received individual payments through the federal program, including paying for hotel rooms for Floridians while their damaged homes were being repaired.

FEMA also retroactively renewed the flood insurance that some Floridians had allowed to lapse in order to cover storm damage from Ian, while the U.S. Small Business Administration paid $562 million in low-cost disaster loans to Florida homeowners in the wake of the storm.

U.S. Sen. Rick Scott stands before a group of Palm Beach County local officials during a talk about hurricane-season preparedness during an appearance in Jupiter, on June 5, 2023.

Socialism was running amok in Florida after Hurricane Ian, which would have been a better time for Scott to issue his travel advisory and to say that big government needs to stay out of Florida while we use our love of free enterprise to pick ourselves up by our own bootstraps.

But instead, he issued a statement saying that he would work hard to make sure Floridians got every dollar they could from the federal safety-net programs.

As we work to get communities back on their feet, I wont stop fighting to make sure that the federal government keeps showing up, Scott said.

And socialism is also thriving in Florida on a state level.

Frank Cerabino

It turns out that many of the counties in Florida that are the most vocal anti-socialists are also the biggest recipients of taxpayer handouts from the rest of the state.

The 67 counties in Florida all raise money through property taxes to fund their basic government services, which include police, fire, trash collection, libraries and schools. But 29 Florida counties dont collect enough taxes from their own residents to pay for government services they need and want.

Florida calls them fiscally constrained counties, and requires taxpayers in other Florida counties to subsidize the services received by those living in the poorer counties.

Pure socialism. This is very similar to what you Canadians did in your Constitution Act of 1982, when you established equalization payments to provide reasonably comparable services among the wealthier and poorer provinces in Canada.

So, dont mind Rick Scott. Hes just an embarrassing chucklehead.

Carry on. Well see you next season.

Frank Cerabino is a columnist at The Palm Beach Post, part of the USA TODAY Florida Network. You can reach him at fcerabino@gannett.com.

This article originally appeared on Palm Beach Post: Dear Canadians: Disregard Rick Scott's socialist warning for Florida
As temperatures across the globe soar, its important to be on the lookout for a related health threat  heat stroke. Knowing the symptoms and what to do when you spot them could mean the difference between life and death.

What is heat stroke, and what are the risk factors?

Heat stroke and heat exhaustion are life-threatening, heat-related illnesses that occur when your body gets too hot. In the U.S., on average, yearly heat-related deaths outnumber hurricane and flood-related fatalities combined, according to National Weather Service data.

Risk factors for heat-related illnesses are high heat and high humidity, so monitoring the weather and limiting your time outside are the best preventative measures. When you check the weather forecast, look at the heat index, which takes both temperature and humidity into account. If it is 91 degrees Fahrenheit or higher, take steps to stay cool, like drinking lots of water, avoiding exercising outside during the hottest times of day, and taking breaks to cool down in the shade.

What are the signs of heat stroke?

According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), signs you should look out for include:

Body temperature of 103 degrees Fahrenheit or higher

Hot, red, dry, or damp skin

Fast, strong pulse

Headache

Dizziness

Nausea

Confusion

Loss of consciousness

Even if you dont have heat stroke, you still could be at risk for heat exhaustion. Symptoms are similar and include heavy sweating, dizziness, and fainting. Signs that set heat exhaustion apart from heat stroke include cold, pale, and clammy skin, along with a fast, weak pulse.

What should you do if you or someone is suffering from heat stroke?

If you or someone else is experiencing symptoms of heat stroke, call 911 immediately, as it is a medical emergency. If you are assisting someone with heat stroke, move them to a cooler place that is out of the sun. Help to cool them down by applying cold, wet cloths to their skin.

The person can also be immersed in a cold water bath. In fact, a cold bath is the most effective way to quickly lower your core body temperature, according to the Mayo Clinic.

If you are the person suffering from heat stroke symptoms, have others help you with these tasks, if possible.

Why should you care about heat stroke?

Heat-related illnesses are potentially fatal. During a recent heat wave in the South, several people died, including a Texas postal employee who was working his route. Texas experienced record temperatures that week, a possible sign of what is to come in a warming world.

A recent report confirmed that our planets changing climate is making heat waves, storms, and droughts worse.

Extreme heat events are more extreme than ever, Stephanie Herring, one of the authors of the report and a scientist at NOAA, told NPR. Research is showing theyre likely to become the new normal in the not so distant future.

For instance, in October 2021, parts of South Korea experienced average temperatures that were seven degrees Fahrenheit higher than average. Scientists think this could be the norm by 2060 if we dont do anything to reduce the amount of planet-warming gases were putting out.

And its not just the changing climate thats causing the spike in heat waves. It turns out that the way we develop our cities is having a big impact as well.

According to the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), heat waves are occurring more frequently and with greater intensity across major cities in the U.S. The agency pointed out that as cities develop, they often lose green spaces, which are replaced with concrete and buildings. These urban heat islands can lead to higher temperatures.

What can I do about heat stroke?

Make sure to take the steps outlined above to protect yourself. In addition, the United Nations lists recommendations on how you can reduce your climate impact. These include switching to renewable energy, taking public transportation or biking, and switching to an electric vehicle.

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Defenders liberate 37 square kilometres in Ukraines east and south in one week

Ukrainian defence forces are continuing to advance on the Bakhmut, Melitopol and Berdiansk fronts, liberating 37 square kilometres over the past week.

Source: Hanna Maliar, Deputy Minister of Defence of Ukraine, on Telegram

Quote: "Both offensive and defensive actions continue in the east. We are advancing on the Bakhmut front, while the enemy continues to attack on the Lyman, Avdiivka and Marinka sectors. The enemy is trying to force our troops out of their positions, but is receiving a worthy repel. Heavy fighting is currently taking place there."

Details: Maliar added that last week, as a result of the improved operational situation and the levelling of the front line, the liberated area increased by nine square kilometres.

At the same time, the number of Russian attacks in the east doubled over the week  the occupiers fired 11,753 times in 7 days (6,457 the week before).

In the south, the Ukrainian Defence Forces are advancing on the Melitopol and Berdiansk fronts, in particular, in the areas of Novodarivka, Pryiutne, Novodanylivka, Robotyne, Novosilka and Staromaiorske.

Maliar said that the defenders had succeeded on all fronts in the south, liberating 28.4 square kilometres over the past week.

In total, the area liberated in the south has now reached 158.4 square kilometres.

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Activists whod long opposed mayoral control over Chicago Board of Education appointments won a victory in 2021 when Illinois legislators voted to shift authority over the states largest school system to a board chosen by the people.

Two years later, just before 1 a.m. on May 26 in the waning hours of the Senates session, many of those same lawmakers hurriedly passed an amendment extending by nine months the deadline theyd given themselves to pass a map of 20 districts from which the new school board will eventually be elected.

In the moment, the deadline extension brought relief to many who took issue with the proposed maps. But pushing the map deadline also shortens the time candidates realistically have to spread their message, raising questions about whether the elected school board will be able to achieve its goal of better representing the interests of the community.

Instead of July 1, the district map is now due next April, just seven months before the first school board representatives will be elected.

A lot of people who think they have an opportunity to run now may not, said Taschaunda Hall, a mom and member of the children and parents advocacy group Kids First Chicago. People get discouraged or they get busy and then the people who were interested, who were excited, that excitement has fizzled down. And now what are we left with?

The Tribune spoke with three people who are considering running for a board position. All agreed that delaying the map deadline negatively affects grassroots, community-backed candidates and favors more well-heeled choices.

For those with money, it doesnt matter, said community organizer Dwayne Truss of the Austin neighborhood, who was appointed to the Chicago Board of Education in 2019 by then-Mayor Lori Lightfoot and served until 2022. Truss says Lightfoot replaced him on the board because he did not support a proposal for a new high school on the Near South Side.

As soon as they know what the map is, what its going to look like, (candidates are) going to hit the ground running because they will have all that infrastructure together. It could potentially put the  more independent candidates behind the eight ball.

Truss says he is open to running for one of the board seats but added that having more time to run would not completely level the playing field between special interest-backed candidates and community-backed candidates.

There are about nine and a half billion reasons why groups arent going to stay out, he said, referring to the rough dollar amount of CPS annual budget.

Sylvia Y. Jones is a minister, organizer and the vice president of the South/West Area Civic League of Chicago who said shes committed to running for a board seat. Jones said she started campaigning a year ago because she believes there are forces trying to prevent community leaders like her from winning these elections.

Theres a lot of people that dont want this. They dont want this. And I know they dont want it so theyre going to do anything they can to possibly make it hard for those who are going to come in like myself and speak truth to power, she said.

Brian J. Gaines is a political science professor at the University of Illinois and has spent his career studying elections and public opinion. He agrees that more time for candidates in competitive, nonpartisan local races helps close the gap caused by large discrepancies in the funding of candidates.

A lot of the reason it takes time is because getting a message out means scheduling a lot of appearances, he said.

Gaines added that knowing ones district is particularly critical for school board elections because, while the total number of people will be similar between districts, the districts will differ in how many constituents have children in the schools.

So, all else equal, you want to know pretty far in advance what the districts look like, he said. Whats the right message for that district? Is it a lot of retirees who dont actually have kids in school and you want to make abstract appeals to the way they think schools should be run? Or are you talking to parents of kids who are in a program that is being discontinued or being redesigned and thats what they are going to be thinking about?

Adding to the importance  and potential confusion  is that in the transition to a fully elected board, 10 members will be chosen by voters and 10 members will be appointed in 2024. The appointed seats will be up for election in 2026, when the shift to a fully elected board will be complete. The board president will be elected at large, bringing the total number of board members to 21, a threefold increase over its current size.

Its hard to estimate the optimal amount of time a candidate needs to get their message out. There is such a thing as too much time, but too little time can truncate a campaign. Ideally, for a competitive, nonpartisan local election that is also a new position, Gaines said, candidates should have 12 months to stand up a campaign. And there is always a chance a group will sue if they are unhappy with the map, which could result in further delays.

A lot of maps are immediately challenged, Gaines said.  There is definitely some risk to pushing back redistricting.

The Illinois General Assembly will have the opportunity to figure out the map during the upcoming fall session. If they dont, the legislature will revisit the matter in 2024.

April is a deadline, but that doesnt necessarily mean that we have to wait until then to do it, Sen. Robert Martwick of Chicago, who has long championed the move to an elected school board system, told the Tribune in May. I think one of the mistakes here was we just didnt have enough time. I think we could have started this process earlier.

The first boundary map proposal was released to the public less than two months before the original July 1 deadline.

I am committed to and confident that we will complete the map in more than enough time for people to evaluate the districts, consider the communities involved and make the decision to run, said Chicago state Rep. Ann Williams, who leads the House Democrats CPS Districting Working Group. Whether the map boundary is drawn on one block or another doesnt really matter. If you are engaged and interested, just like running for any office, I would highly recommend, go for it.

Williams added its critical to get the maps right.

Natasha Dunn, a mother of former and current CPS students and co-founder of the Black Community Collaborative, is thinking hard about running for a board seat and is glad legislatures delayed the maps.

If the maps are drawn so that you have that representation, then the idea is that it shouldnt be as hard to engage that community, Dunn argued.

But she agrees with the issues her other board member hopefuls expressed.

How do you run a campaign, how do I activate the constituents when I dont know who they are? I dont know who they are without the map, she said. Understanding what my district is will allow me the opportunity to be able to fundraise properly  and be able to do some of the legwork that is necessary to be able to run a campaign.

Even if the map deadline was not pushed, there are other sections of the legislation that the candidates say make it an uphill battle for independent candidates. The 2021 bill did not grant compensation for the role or allow undocumented citizens to vote, two things advocates say would help increase community representation on the board.

It is systemically already built against the kind of candidates you (want) to present themselves, Truss said.

He added there are still things people can do to prepare for their run even before they know how their district boundaries may shape up.

Put your campaign infrastructure together, educate yourself as to all the rules of the role, put together a campaign committee, putting together people who can help you raise money, he said. Start working on your game plan, and then, when the time comes you can execute it.
A Danish frigate in Norway in May.

On June 22, Denmarks Ministry of Defense announced what companies would be building its next patrol ships. The new type of vessel is designed to be modular and upgradeable for years and even decades to come, allowing the same hulls and bones of the ship to serve even as the tools and technologies change with the times.

While Denmark is a small country, its possession of Greenland ensures it has an outsized role to play in the Arctic. With global climate change and thawing ice, the Arctic was already going to become a more trafficked and contested part of the globe. And that was before Russias invasions of Ukraine, first in 2014 and then at massive scale in 2022, put a deep freeze on cooperation between all of the Arctic states. As a founding member of NATO, Denmark has long been part of a defensive military alliance, ready to respond to Russian threats. New patrol ships will enable the countrys navy to operate more capably where needed for decades to come.

A rethinking of the design will mean that we in the maritime domain are future-proof to handle changing needs. This applies, for example, to dealing with hybrid threats in a faster and more flexible way than before, said Torben Mikkelsen, the head of the Danish Defense Ship program, according to Shephard News.

Observers expect the new patrol vessels will be based on a ship template called the OMT MPV80, built by Odense Maritime Technology and SH Defence. OMT is a naval design and advising firmits one of the three major parts of the named consortium responsible for producing Denmarks new patrol vessels, alongside Terma, a naval military contractor, and PensionDanmark, a pension fund.

The OMT MPV80 debuted at the DSEI arms exhibition in 2021. It was built with SH Defenses modular Cube system as an essential characteristic. CEO of OMT Kare Groes Christiansen told Naval News that they had made a ship that was born Cubed.

Cubed? Christiansen is referring to the Cube modular system, made by SH Defense. It is a system of packaging equipment in modules that are all designed to fit the footprint of shipping containers. The Cube modules are designed to fit on decks or into storage, letting existing vessels use the system. The OMT MPV80, designed for Cube utilization, will have spots for a Cube to be loaded through open side panels. Once the Cube system equipment is slotted in, the ship can use that equipment while underway, and then when it returns to port after a patrol or a mission, the crew can swap out what modules it carries.

Consider a ship designed for use with the Cube. Before it goes out on patrol, it could take on mine-laying modules, with shipping crate-sized mine storage and conveyor belts slotting in, letting the vessel turn the sea into an inhospitable domain, obstructing safe passage and protecting ports from hostile intrusion.

Alternatively, the same kind of vessel could be outfitted with mine-hunting modules. Storage, a work station, and launch space for mine-hunting underwater robots could fit inside a crate. Rather than build a control station for the minehunting robots into the body of the ship, a shipping container-shaped control room can plug in, letting the vessel work as a minehunter when it needs to be, but also letting it take on other missions at other times.

Other possibilities abound. The vessel could carry extra torpedoes, anti-air missiles, or depth charges for more of a naval combatant role. The Cubes could contain salvage arms and rescue boats, allowing the patrol vessel to serve more of a coast guard and life-saving role. With a base design that accommodates some deck guns for protection and a helipad to launch crewed and possibly uncrewed aircraft, the OMT MPV80 design seems well positioned to perform whatever Denmark might ask of it, alone or in support of allied navies.

The consortiums announcement of the agreement for a new patrol vessel emphasized the modularity as a way to future-proof the ships. While naval operations entail risk, ensuring that the tools and equipment needed can be installed on the ships as soon as they are ready for use ensures that outdated weapons or sensors are unlikely to hinder such a ship.

The Danish ship HDMS Thetis seen in 2013.

These new patrol vessels are designed to replace Denmarks existing fleet of Thetis ocean patrol ships, which operate in the icy waters around Denmarks possession of Greenland and the Faroe Islands. These vessels are ice-rated, and entered service in the early 1990s. While sea ice has declined precipitously since then, its still a durable presence and risk in Arctic and near-Arctic operations. Designing for the future means designing for one where naval operations may follow the warming water north, and staying on the edge of the sea ice.

Watch a video about the type of vessel below:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GFEzBIxf0OM
A Michigan man accused of attacking a police officer with a flagpole during the insurrection at the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021 has been arrested in Florida, officials said.

Jeremy Rodgers, 28, of Midland, Michigan, faces several felony and misdemeanor charges, including assaulting a federal officer with a deadly or dangerous weapon, according to court records. He was arrested Friday in Orlando, Florida, and made his initial court appearance there. The case will be prosecuted in District of Columbia federal court.

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According to court documents, Rodgers joined with others in objecting to Democrat Joe Bidens 2020 election victory over then-President Donald Trump. A mob stormed the Capitol to try to stop Congress from certifying election results for Biden over Trump, a Republican, authorities have said. Five people died in the violence.

According to the criminal complaint, surveillance video shows Rodgers carrying a blue flag attached to a wooden flagpole as he approaches a line of law enforcement officers guarding the entrance to the East Rotunda Door. Investigators said Rodgers used his flagpole to strike a U.S. Capitol police officer three times on the helmet and then swung the flagpole twice more in the direction of officers.

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Rodgers also used the flagpole to prevent officers from closing the door so that he could enter the building, prosecutors said. Once inside, Rodgers removed railings so the others in the crowd could enter the building, officials said.

Rodgers was part of a crowd that pushed through a police line outside the entrance to the House Chamber, investigators said. After another scuffle with police, Rodgers paraded through the Rotunda waving his flag before finally leaving, officials said.

Online court records didnt list an attorney for Rodgers who might speak on his behalf.

More than 1,000 people have been arrested in nearly all 50 states for alleged crimes related to the Capitol breach, according to officials. More than 350 people have been charged with assaulting or impeding law enforcement.
Flag of Austria

Austria does not impede the transit of military equipment and weapons from the European Union to Ukraine through its territory, the Minister of Foreign Affairs of Austria, Alexander Schallenberg, said in an interview with German TV channel ORF on July 2.

Schallenberg said that the transportation of goods between EU countries has always taken place without any issues, and that this transit does not violate Austrian neutrality.

Since the signing of the Amsterdam Treaty and the reform of the federal constitution almost 20 years ago, these measures within the EU fall under the scope of neutrality, he explained.

Read also: Switzerland may renounce neutrality to provide military aid to Ukraine, Reuters reports

This means that there is no opposition [to the transit of weapons].

Austrian Chancellor Karl Nehammer has hinted that his country, and other neutral countries, would not support proposals to provide guarantees of security to Ukraine on behalf of the EU.

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Read the original article on The New Voice of Ukraine
PARIS (AP)  In the lush surroundings of Paris Musee Rodin, the landscapes of artist Marta Roberti formed the backdrop on Monday for the latest Dior couture collection by designer Maria Grazia Chiuri.

The designs, inspired by power, feminism and the divine, shone against Robertis fantastical creations of exotic birds and ethereal trees. Actors Natalie Portman and Rosamund Pike were among VIP attendees captivated by the fusion of these imaginative realms of threads and thoughts.

Heres a look at some highlights from Mondays fall-winter 2023 collections:

DIVINE GODDESSES OF DIOR STRUT AMID BIRDS AND TREES

The collection by Chiuri drew its strength from the past, a salute to timelessness. A crepe cape with long, draping sleeves set the classical tone, with the gathered plaits of the models hair a throwback to times past. Subtle and understated, the adornments of pearl or gold earrings added a quiet elegance, while tunic shapes and classical banding played up the nostalgic silhouettes, all marked by loose proportions and understated charm.

Yet, this was no mere repeat of history. The shimmer and sparkle lent the collection a vibrant, modern heartbeat. The restrained sophistication was occasionally punctuated with Renaissance sleeves  a Chiuri signature from her time at Valentino  bridging past and present. And amidst the classical musings, a white apron-shirt, pristine and fresh, broke the ethereal continuity, presenting a fashion-forward mix.

Robertis goddess-inspired works of art lining the walls breathed life into the runway, transforming it into a modern pantheon where models, resembling exquisite deities, seemed to float by. The sculpted jackets and coats, folded beneath the chest, along with the serene palette of white, beige, silver, and pale gold, all mirrored classical statues and columns.

Pearls, iridescently entwined with silver threads, accentuated numerous ensembles, symbolizing purity.

In Chiuris hands, the essence of femininity  with its strength and fragility  took center stage.

PARIS PARADOXICAL ENERGY: BAZ LUHRMANN SPEAKS ON COUTURE AND CONFLICT

In an interview at Paris Rodin Museum before the Dior couture show, acclaimed director Baz Luhrmann touched on the complex issue of attending a glamorous fashion event amidst the backdrop of recent civil unrest in France. The protests, triggered by the tragic police shooting of Nahel, a 17-year-old boy of north African descent, stand in stark contrast to the haute couture spectacle, a contrast that Luhrmann described as a paradoxical energy in Paris.

Reflecting on the tension, Luhrmann acknowledged the deep-seated sorrow and public outcry pervading Paris. He recognized the legitimacy of the protests, saying, There are things going on that really have a legitimate cause.

Amidst such tragedies, he said, the vital role of art and beauty underscored their significance as essential sources of hope.

CELINE SAID NON BECAUSE OF RIOTS

French house Celine, owned by LVMH Moet Hennessy Louis Vuitton, decided to cancel its Paris Fashion Week show Sunday over the nationwide riots. The Celine menswear show, like last season, was scheduled outside the official men's calendar.

The house's designer Hedi Slimane called it inconsiderate to hold a runway show when the French capital was bereaved and bruised. Other LVMH houses such as Dior, which went ahead to stage runways like most other brands, held a different view.

SCHIAPARELLI: ROSEBERRYS WHIMSICAL WONDERLAND

After breaking the internet with his last show in January, featuring eye-catching animal heads, the question on everyones lips was how designer Daniel Roseberry could match the energy  and controversy  with his latest couture outing for Schiaparelli. The answer? A delightful showcase of archetypal couture that was not short of whimsical moments, including a model strutting down the runway in a gigantic sheep fleece, paired playfully with sheep trotter heels.

This season, Roseberry continued to delve into the world of exaggerated proportions, staying true to the ironic touches that were defining elements of the houses founder, Elsa Schiaparelli. The first look, in contrasting black and white, evoked a chic, saucy nun, her habit swooshing fluidly with every step.

Large geometric lapels adorned with glittering gold floral jewelry became focal points, while Surrealist touches, like gold clasps in the shape of human ears, provided an unexpected twist. Corsets were a recurring theme, lending an edgy feel to a collection that had plenty of provocative moments, such as dark, lava-like dresses appearing to hang precariously from two pegs on the models' breasts.

However, some looks seemed to teeter on the edge of couture parody, such as a giant silver quilt, defying description, which enveloped the model so completely it almost swallowed her whole.

Regardless, Roseberrys ability to spark discussion proves that he is becoming a formidable force in the fashion world.

IRIS VAN HERPEN FUSES COUTURE AND FUTUR

The couture landscape literally took a deep dive into the future at Iris Van Herpens latest showcase in Paris. The Dutch visionary, known for her fearless fusion of technology and fashion, presented an ethereal fall collection for 2023 that transported the audience to a futuristic underwater universe, accentuated by 80s geometric aesthetics.

The designs, awash with contrasting whites and blacks punctuated by metallic accents and soft oceanic tones, were reminiscent of architectonic landscapes. Van Herpen said she was challenging the status quo by being inspired by a possible future of waterborne urbanism that coexists with marine ecosystems. It's a powerful statement in an era of rising sea levels and increasing vulnerability of our urban landscapes.

Van Herpens aquatic and futuristic themes emerged resplendent Monday, combining her dual passions for the organic world and the metaverse.

This seasons pieces merged the kinesis of aquatic life with the stasis of geometric shapes. Corsetry with ribbed detailing mirrored the exoskeletons of deep-sea creatures, while delicate layers of fabric floated like translucent jellyfish, their undulating movements echoing in the sweep and flow of her designs.

Footwear provided a unique spectacle, the pearl-like boots seeming to grow organically over the models feet.

There were moments when the designers undersea musing became a tad heavy-handed, as evidenced by a turquoise green gown with a ribbed bodice and circular sleeves. Despite these instances, the collection retained its allure.

VALLIS EXAGGERATED PROPORTIONS AND DRAMATIC DROPS

Giambattista Valli, the Italian couturier celebrated for his joyful excess and extravagant volumes, unveiled his latest couture collection. Daring and decadent, the opening looks were a study in Vallis signature play with proportions, juxtaposing monochromatic shades and epochs in a series of ensembles. The first dress, with its rivulets of tulle in the underskirt, cleverly resembled the crystal formations of an underground cave  all against the charm of a 1950s bustier top. It was a great mix.

Drawing from Vallis flair for color and movement, the collection had the drop as its cornerstone, seen in the fluidity of shoulders, busts, and bows. An unforgettable piece was a black mermaid gown where the white silk bust plunged into a dramatically dropped train. Continuing this theme was a floor-length Chinese silver gown adorned with oversized dropped bows resembling giant clams - that looked like they might eat up their admirer!

The collections high point was Vallis innovative trompe loeil creations, blurring the line between the front and back of the gowns. One standout piece, echoing the lingerie-esque front seen in his previous collections, was juxtaposed with a grandiose tiered tulle train, transforming the gown into a walking contradiction of sexy and ethereal. The juxtaposition, as Valli would put it, was like sketching a line on white paper while thinking of lavish bouquets of flowers - the foundation of his creative process.
Im running. Shells explode around me. Sometimes they roar like thunder; sometimes they whistle on approach. Large parts of the forest are on fire. Smoke rolls by like dry ice.

Run. Run. Run, says Dima. I follow him over the fallen trunks of trees felled by artillery; over shell craters that have become pools; through the deep grooves of old vehicle tracks. Im slowing down now. My ill-fitting helmet is slick with sweat. Droplets sting my eyes.

Dont touch anything! shouts Dima as he turns to motion to a wooden box lying on the earth. It could be mined. We are in the Forest of Surprises on the front lines of Kreminna, running to the Ukrainian trenches near the zero-contact line. There, Ukrainians and Russians are killing each other just metres apart.

Up in the sky, Mavic drones are scouting for movement. In the distance are three lines of Russian brigades. All I see is Dima just ahead of me, a commander in the Dnipro 1 Battalion, zig-zagging through lethal hail to deliver a drone to his comrades. Strip it all away: the tech and the money; the politics and the endless tweeting. This is what war comes down to: men running through forests praying that the shells wont hit them.

***

We are proud that Dnipro 1 was the first volunteer battalion to form in 2014 to fight the Russians. Its earlier that day, and over a year since I last saw battalion commander Yuriy Bereza, one-time politician and full-time warrior. His beard has grown since I embedded with his unit in Rubizhne on the eastern front. It hangs from his chin like a Kung-Fu masters; he even caresses it in that slow, pensive way. Im not cutting it until we win, he says with a smile.

Sitting on the P66 highway that reaches across the border into Russia, Kreminna was one of the first places the Russians targeted last February. The citys mayor, Volodymyr Struk, who was reportedly in their pay, was found shot in the heart in early March. Unknown patriots, was Kyivs terse explanation. But they could not stop the Russians taking the city in April. They have held it ever since.

When the Ukrainians pushed the enemy out of the nearby town of Lyman on 1 October, Kreminna became integral to sustaining Moscows invasion. The Russians understand that if they lose Kreminna, their entire line of defence will fall, said Luhansks Regional Governor. They have, accordingly, built up significant fortifications in the city and the surrounding forests. The Kremlin has also sent in troops from around Kharkiv and the northern theatre to bolster their line of defence. Re-taking the city is now vital to Kyivs counter-offensive.

Dimas battalion is stationed in a building that, until recently, was occupied by Russians. That wasnt us, he says sheepishly, pointing to a mound of rubbish left outside. It was the Russians  we havent had a chance to clear it up yet. In a place where assault rifles loll against walls, his embarrassment strikes me as incongruous and oddly sweet  a leftover refinement from before the world went mad.

In his HQ, Bereza sits drinking coffee. We met in April, right? I nod. Well, since then, the battalion has been involved in many battles. Kharkiv, Leman, Izyeum, Kopiansk, Kreminna. All the difficult fighting.

A couple of days earlier, I spoke to Dima over the phone. It was hard today, he told me. Russians were attacking with everything  artillery, drones, tanks, planes. We got to a clearing in the forest and then suddenly I saw 100 of them charging towards us Fuck man That was hard. More than 90% of the soldiers in Dnipro 1 have been injured once; more than 70% twice; almost 50% three times. Since March, 22 of his 600 comrades have been killed.

Dima, a commander in the Dnipro 1 Battalion

I ask Bereza about the situation on the front. He sighs. The main problem since we last met is that we still havent received anything from the lend-lease list [an agreement in which the US agreed to supply material, including weapons, to Ukraine]. We have only old cars and Soviet weapons. We dont even need powerful weapons  just mortars and artillery. Get those and we can liberate Kreminna in two weeks. Officially, we are promised lots of things, including Bradleys and Brownings. Practically, we dont see anything  and we are in the most intense places with the most intense fighting.

As an explosion pierces the air, Dima interrupts. This is the way it works. First, lend-lease [equipment] goes to Special Forces. Second, to the airborne brigades. Third, to operative units of the National Guard. Then, if something is left over, it comes to us. But it never does. There are a lot of weapons in the country  we know which units have them. But the way the general staff share them is not the best. Sometimes weapons are given to troops who are not prepared. Its the result of bad decision-making. Bereza goes on to explain that many Western weapons are not on the front line because they are deployed according to the agreement negotiated in March 2022. A lot has changed since then. Its stupid, he says.

The following day, I saw their frustration simmer over when, in the middle of a conversation with Dima, Bereza got a call. Dont fucking give me excuses! Dont tell me what the situation is here. I am here  I tell you what the situation is! he bellowed into his phone. We are fighting intensely, and you dont give us machine guns or snipers? Every day we let the Russians escape. Why cant we put machine guns in position? Why do I have to wait days for this shit? Where are my fucking weapons?

Now, though, Dima is clear: The situation on the front is totally different from on paper  from what middle-management officers think. We need to be able to change orders based on a changing reality. If a soldier fights, he risks death. But the people who fight in the paper army carry no risk. Its just another day. We need to change this. They are writing while we are dying.

A message pings on Berezas phone. He grins. The air force is using UK-supplied Storm Shadow missiles, he tells me.

But will that be enough for the counteroffensive to succeed? They both grimace. Not only do we not have enough weapons, but the Russians have completely mined the front, Bereza replies. They also have a lot of brigades on their second and third lines. So we must first destroy those, for which we need more long-range missiles, and only then think about breaking through.

Dima weighs in: We are very grateful for Western weapons. But sometimes Western countries and politicians think they can give us 20 bullets and a piece of Ukrainian territory will be liberated. These are arguments made from maths and physics  but for the counter-offensive to be successful, you have to kill a specific amount of Russian troops to break through. This is the equation. Not the amount of bullets, but the amount of dead Russians.

Also  and we dont like to admit it, but I will  the quality of the new soldiers is getting worse. Before it was just volunteers, now its conscripts and theyre not so motivated. Before, when we lost comms with the troops, we knew they wouldnt abandon the positions. But now we need to coordinate every step  speaking constantly to the sergeants to micro-manage everything.

There is a broader political dimension to all this. Western countries have supplied weapons to Ukraine on the understanding that they will make significant gains against the enemy. For the first time, Ukrainian comms have let Kyiv down. Many in London and Brussels and Washington appear to believe that the counter-offensive means thousands of Ukrainians charging the Russian lines and breaking through  but here on the front, it just doesnt work like that. The counteroffensive is military dancing, Bereza concludes. We move our troops from point to point to make them think we will break through in that exact place. And when they move, we destroy them, draining their reserves. It could last for months without a breakthrough. Its not a miracle.

Another explosion sounds. Ooh, an Excalibur, says Bereza excitedly.

***

Ok, then, if you havent changed your mind, you can come to the zero-contact line. But David, please understand its very dangerous. Its lunchtime and we are sitting in the bases kitchen. Bereza is fastidiously cutting courgettes into small slices in preparation for dinner. I am offered a bowl of small raw cloves of garlic to munch on.

Dima needs to deliver a drone to the battalions trench on the zero-contact line  and is letting me accompany him. I shouldnt really be going, and Dima is clearly nervous about the trip. David, you wont wear that on the front, will you? he asks, pointing to my white T-shirt. I assure him I have packed something far less incongruous.

Half an hour later, as we are getting ready, he rips the Velcro Press sign off my body armour. The Russians, he explains, want to kill journalists. It will make me more of a target. We get in the 44 and start to drive.

Putin declares war on Prigozhin

By David Patrikarakos

Dima asks me if Ive had first aid training. Can I use a tourniquet? Give CPR? There are only two of us; he needs to know that Ill be able to do something if he gets hit. As we approach the front, the road disappears and Dima stops to put the tires on four-wheel-drive mode. In war you need to be a good driver, he says. Because if youre not a good driver, youre dead. Dima has messaged ahead to the trench that we are almost there. We pass two bullet-ridden vehicles by the side of the road. Thats war, he says, before turning up the music on his phone. Creedence Clearwater Revival are belting out Fortunate Son. Fucking Vietnam! roars Dima with delight. We need a fucking helicopter!

As we enter the Forest of Surprises, the sun disappears behind trees and the sound of shelling begins. The surprises here include tanks, mines, drones and artillery, to name a few. Dima explains that we are now so close to the Russian positions that the combat is almost face-to-face. The scenery around us transforms into flames. Smoke clogs the air, squeezing out the oxygen; the ground is a veil of ash. Small fires rage everywhere. Look what the fucking Russians have done to my country, says Dima. If they cannot take the country, they will destroy everything in it.

The vehicle bounces around, weaving in and out of felled trees and shell craters, which we need to do anyway for security: set a straight course and a drone might be able to calculate our trajectory and call in a strike. In this sense at least, the smoke is good because it gives us cover from the enemy overhead.

As we approach the front, Dima begins to focus on the hard end of his job. Our commander says that out here we have two missions, he adds. The first is: dont die. The second is: kill Russians. We especially need to observe the first, because if you die, you cant kill Russians, he says with a smile.

The shelling is louder now. Dima points out the different effects of different kinds of weaponry. Artillery fells trees at the base. Rockets obliterate them. This war is becoming an ecological catastrophe almost as much as a human one. Ukrainian soldiers appear. They are walking in single file along the side of the path, moving between positions or simply rotating out. We are now officially right on the front. We park up and get out. Dima puts the boxed-up drone under his arm and tells me to follow him all the way  staying close. We run through the front as shells go off around us. Eventually, we reach a small clearing and there, beneath a canopy of branches acting as camouflage, three small steps lead down into the earth.

This is the trench by the zero-contact line. I scuttle down as a shell explodes. Inside are six men packed into a space of about 77 feet. A radio sounds in the background. Dima hands over the drone and chats to the guys. The rotation here is three days on the front, six days back at base. I ask one of the soldiers, Olek, what his role is. Nowadays, I try to kill Russians, he replies.

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As we wait for the shelling to subside, I am handed some Indian tonic water caked in sand. The guys start to laugh at my helmet. Back in Odesa, I managed to source only an olive green one, which made me look like a soldier, so I was also handed a black cover to cover it. But according to the soldiers here, I look more like a priest. I sheepishly take it off.

When its time to leave, we scramble out of the trench to the sound of buzzing. Faster, faster, faster! yells Dima. A small, black Ukrainian drone whirrs past, making its way through the trees toward the Russian positions. As we draw closer to the car, I slow down to look at the sun shining through the trees: its strangely beautiful. Suddenly a shell explodes off to the right. Dima gesticulates furiously at me to hurry. The Forest of Surprises is no place for sightseeing.

***

The following morning at the base, after our successful mission, Bereza presents me with a signed Battalion flag. My fixer Rodion is impressed. This is a huge honour, David, he tells me. The flag [of a battalion] is very sacred. It says: We respect you, we trust you  you are one of us.

Im not one of them, though. Im just an observer. I dashed only once through the front under fire with Dima. These men do it almost every day. Are they heroes? I remember something Dima told me the day before, as we were discussing the problem with weapons and central command.

They say we are an army of heroes, he told me. But we dont need heroes. We need soldiers who live. Heroism is complete fucking bullshit. You only create heroes when someone somewhere has made a mistake. At the heart of every heroic story is a human life. A mother without a son. A daughter without a father. A country without its citizens. Lets have no more fucking heroes.
Should domestic abusers have the right to be armed? The Supreme Court could upend protections for survivors

The US Supreme Court will hear arguments this fall in a case involving federal law that prohibits domestic violence offenders from possessing a firearm. (AP)

In 2019, Zackey Rahimi allegedly assaulted his ex-girlfriend in a Texas parking lot and threatened to shoot her. She escaped and applied for a restraining order, and Rahimi was placed under a protective order that prevented him from possessing firearms.

But later that year, within a matter of weeks, and in flagrant violation of the order against him, he was involved in five other shootings in the state.

He was charged with violating federal law that prohibits people subject to domestic violence protection orders from possessing them, pleaded guilty, and was sentenced to six years in prison.

The Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals upheld the decision, rejecting his argument that the law infringed on his Second Amendment rights.

Then, after the US Supreme Court issued a landmark ruling in a Second Amendment case last year, the appeals court reversed its decision, vacated his conviction, and opened a pathway for another major Supreme Court case that could radically reshape the nations gun laws during a growing crisis for gun violence.

On the last day of its latest term, the Supreme Court announced plans to hear arguments in a case that asks whether the government can prohibit domestic violence offenders from owning firearms, setting up another major Second Amendment test before the nations highest court.

Oral arguments in United States v Rahimi will begin later this year.

It will be one of only a handful of Second Amendment cases before the nine-member panel in recent years, after the courts conservative supermajority ruling last year struck down a New York law that placed limits on gun owners abilities to carry their firearms outside of their home.

If the Supreme Court upholds the lower courts decision, it will upend decades of protections for domestic violence survivors and open the door for people convicted of abusing their partners or their children to have a protected Second Amendment right to own a gun, even if a court finds that they are a credible threat.

The Fifth Circuits extreme and reckless decision is a death sentence for women and families, according to Janet Carter, senior director of issues and appeals at gun reform advocacy group Everytown Law. The Supreme Court must reverse this dangerous ruling. Domestic abusers do not have  and should not have  the constitutional right to possess a firearm.

The new constitutional test for gun laws

Last June, the aaSupreme Courts conservative majority ruled 6-3 to overturn New York state law that only allowed residents who could prove a special need to possess concealed-carry licences to receive them.

The decision in New York State Rifle & Pistol Association Inc v Bruen  authored by Justice Clarence Thomas  also established a new test for gun laws against the Second Amendment, ruling that such restrictions should be consistent with the Nations historical tradition of firearm regulation.

US Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas (AP)

Justice Stephen Breyer, who retired at the end of that years chaotic term, warned in his dissent that broadly throwing restrictions against gun ownership into doubt would jeopardize protections for domestic violence survivors.

He emphasized the prevalence of guns in both domestic disputes, noting one study that found that a woman is five times more likely to be killed by an abusive partner if that partner has access to a gun, and that the consequences of gun violence are borne disproportionately by communities of color, and Black communities.

Many states have tried to address some of the dangers of gun violence just described by passing laws that limit, in various ways, who may purchase, carry, or use firearms of different kinds, he wrote. The court today severely burdens states efforts to do so.

He argued that it is both constitutionally proper and necessary for courts to consider the serious dangers and consequences of gun violence that compels states to regulate firearms.

Federal restrictions on gun ownership for domestic violence offenders have been in place for nearly 30 years. Nearly half of US states extend similar protections for dating partners, and 12 states include similar protections under temporary restraining orders.

Every year, more than 600 American women are fatally shot by intimate partners, a rate of roughly one every 14 hours, according to FBI reporting. Firearms are used to commit more than half of all intimate partner homicides in the US.

Federal law prohibits anyone convicted of a misdemeanor crime of domestic violence or who is subject to protection orders resulting from a domestic violence incident from possessing a firearm.

Hardly a model citizen: The case of Zackey Rahimi

Rahimi was subject to a domestic violence order in February 2020. Between December 2020 and January 2021, he was allegedly involved with five more shootings.

First, after someone who bought drugs from him started talking trash on social media, he fired into that persons home with an AR-15 rifle, according to prosecutors.

Zackey Rahimi is at the centre of a forthcoming case at the US Supreme Court that could determine the fate of federal law that protects domestic violence survivors from gun violence (Tarrant County Corrections Center)

The very next day, after colliding with another car, he allegedly shot at the driver, fled, and came back to the scene to fire more shots. Three days later, he fired several rounds into the air. A few weeks after that, in an apparent road rage incident, he slammed his brakes on a highway, followed a truck off an exit, then fired several shots at another car traveling behind it. Days later, after a friends credit card was declined at a fast food restaurant, he pulled out a gun and fired several shots in the air.

Rahimi was indicted by a federal grand jury, finding that he violated a federal ban on the possession of a firearm by anyone who is the subject of a domestic violence restraining order. He pleaded guilty.

But in February, less than one year after the Bruen ruling, three Republican-appointed judges on a federal appeals court unanimously took the side of the domestic violence offender, whose attorneys argued that the new standard from the Supreme Court would effectively strike down federal law that prohibits people like him from owning a gun.

Rahimi, while hardly a model citizen, is nonetheless part of the political community entitled to the Second Amendments guarantees, all other things equal, Donald Trump-appointed judge Cory T Wilson wrote.

The test in Justice Thomass opinion in the Bruen case suggested that any restrictions on gun ownership should pass a historical analogue. The appeals court argued that there was no such thing in federal law that blocks domestic violence offenders from owning firearms.

Our ancestors would never have accepted such a policy, according to Judge Wilson.

The decision was widely derided by law enforcement agencies, civil rights group and gun reform advocates, warning that the loss of such basic protections imperil families across the country.

A group of 25 state attorneys general and a separate coalition of public health experts filed briefs in support of the governments appeal to the Supreme Court urging that the justices swiftly reject the lower-court ruling.

It is common sense that people who are under active restraining orders for domestic violence should not be able to get guns, New York Attorney General Letitia James said in a statement that the time.

This is a basic protection that states and the federal government have long imposed, and the efforts to undo this law will have grave consequences for survivors of domestic abuse, law enforcement, and the general public, she added. States must have the ability to protect our communities from gun violence and prevent dangerous people from getting guns.

Typically, the Supreme Court will not immediately hear a case within a year after a related ruling so that the issue can work its way through lower courts before reaching the nine justices.

But US Solicitor General Elizabeth Prelogar told the court that the appeals court decision threatens grave harms for victims of domestic violence.

Lawyers for Rahimi have asked the justices to uphold the lower-court ruling.

Bruen is less than a year old, J Matthew Wright wrote in court filings. Lower courts are just beginning to grapple with the impacts of that case, he added.
[Source]

Underground homes that provide shelter for apocalyptic scenarios  primarily a nuclear fallout  are now being built in Japan, with one non-profit organization spearheading the effort.

Why theyre doing it: Japans interest in fallout bunkers reportedly grew last year as its neighbor North Korea continued to refine its ballistic missiles and Russia threatened to use nuclear weapons against Ukraine. So far, neither situation appears to have an end in sight, with Pyongyang recently warning about a war of revenge against the U.S. and Moscow displaying signs of instability after an attempted insurrection.

Additionally, some Japanese worry about a China-Taiwan conflict and natural disasters. To top it all, Japan is the only country on Earth to ever experience a nuclear attack, the catastrophic effects of which have continued to linger for decades.

Whos making them: The Japan Nuclear Shelter Association, a nonprofit, is leading the effort to raise awareness and encourage people to build their own bunkers.

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On May 10, the organization opened a model nuclear shelter at its office in Tsukuba, Ibaraki Prefecture. Since then, it has hosted around 40 tours for politicians, government agencies, construction professionals and the media. While the facility is still closed to the public, the nonprofit has grown its membership to around 30 companies in just a year.

Features: The model bunker was reportedly built with specifications similar to those legally required in Switzerland. According to the organization, the 48-square-meter structure  with a living space of 25.6 square meters  can house four adults, three children and one pet for up to two weeks.

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It features a blast-proof door with a thickness of 200 millimeters, an air filtration system and a portable toilet. It can withstand a bombing similar to Hiroshima and Nagasaki if it is constructed at least a kilometer from the center, the organization said.

Other models: Growth View Inc., a construction firm based in Hachinohe, Aomori prefecture, has also launched a model nuclear shelter. For 6.6 million yen (approximately $45,600), the 10-square-meter bunker comes with 80-millimeter-thick walls lined with lead panels to protect from radiation. It also features an electric source, an air conditioning and filtration system, emergency kits and external surveillance cameras. Supplies can help occupants survive for up to two weeks.

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Downtown Oshkosh alley to be transformed into public art gathering space with help of WEDC grant

A view of Algoma Alley in downtown Oshkosh.

OSHKOSH  Oshkoshs Algoma Alley Activation Project in the 400 block of Main Street has received a $30,845 Vibrant Spaces grant from the Wisconsin Economic Development Corporation.

The funds will be used to add seating and lighting to the project space, Jessica Meidl, manager of the Downtown Oshkosh Business Improvement District, said in a news release.

Algoma Alley is along the alley on Algoma Boulevard between North Main Street and Division by the 400 W. N. Main St. public parking lot. It is designed to serve as a place for community events, including pop-up art galleries and local musical groups weekly meetings.

Artist proposals to create eight murals for the space are being sought through July 29 by the Downtown Oshkosh Business Improvement District and Oshkosh Art Collective. Artists can apply for mural spaces of multiple sizes at https://events.eventzilla.net/e/algoma-alley-artist-application-2138590271. Mural artists are expected to be selected and announced by Aug. 13 with murals to be completed between Sept. 1 and Oct. 23 and an artist reception set for late October or early November.

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The alley was selected for the project based on public ownership of the alley, support of the surrounding business and property owners, and the general need for improved public spaces throughout downtown Oshkosh, the project's website states.

The hope is the investment in the alley will bring visitors and future residents to the 10 businesses and 15 residential units surrounding the space.

By beautifying and activating underutilized public spaces throughout our Central City, we are encouraging foot traffic and activity, which makes spaces like the Algoma Alley safer and more inviting for visitors and residents of downtown Oshkosh, Meidl said in the release.

Public art has also had such a tremendous impact on the quality of life in Oshkosh and we are excited to provide more paid opportunities to local artists that the community will be able to enjoy, Meidl added. Additionally, by adding seating and lighting we hope to encourage more programming and activity within the alley.

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The Algoma Alley project is a continuation of the City of Oshkoshs Imagine Oshkosh plan, which encourages the expansion of arts and culture in the central city area.

The theme for the alley is a "Wisconsin Native Nature Flow," which incorporates native animals, plants and other wildlife that flows from land on the eastern walls to water to air/sky on the west side of the alley.

In addition to public art, the Downtown Oshkosh Business Improvement District will oversee the installation of wayfinding/entry signage, lighting, 3D art, planters and seating, the project website states.

Contact Brandon Reid at 920-686-2984 or breid@gannett.com. Follow him on Twitter at @breidHTRNews.

This article originally appeared on Oshkosh Northwestern: Oshkosh Algoma Alley to add seating, lighting with WEDC grant funds
Common bottlenose dolphins swimming in Coffee Bay in South Africa.

Seeing a majestic superpod or stampede of hundreds of free-ranging dolphins swimming and surfacing in the ocean is not only a spectacle for the eye, but can help scientists better monitor populations of the marine mammal. A study published in June in the journal Ecology and Evolution found that using unoccupied aerial systems, or drones, to photograph bottlenose dolphins can inform their conservation efforts.

[Related: How echolocation lets bats, dolphins, and even people navigate by sound.]

When a dolphin swims up to the surface to breathe, their blowhole and dorsal fin are visible. Measuring the distance between these two body parts can help researchers estimate their total lengthand therefore the dolphins age. The team on the study developed a technique of inferring age based on length for each dolphin measured in a group. The spots that appear with age on some cetaceans like Indo-Pacific bottlenose dolphins can also reveal the animals age to scientists.

This method can help us quantify the age-structure of free-ranging populations, co-author and PhD candidate at the University of Hawaii at Manoa Fabien Vivier said in a statement. Healthy dolphin populations usually contain a certain proportion of newborn, immature, and mature animals, while deviances from this distribution may be interpreted as a population growth or decline.

Earlier studies on using drone photos to measure the body condition and sizes of large whales showed encouraging results, but this is the first to show how this aerial approach can be used to study smaller mammals like bottlenose dolphins.

Because it is difficult working with free-ranging animals, we could not be sure if it would work out as planned, said Vivier.

In the study, the team collaborated with a swim with the dolphins program called Dolphin Quest Oahu to test out this measuring method on that population of bottlenose dolphins. They then took what they learned with those dolphins and applied it to free-ranging dolphins by collaborating with the worlds longest running dolphin research project, Sarasota Dolphin Research Program in Florida.

The research program provided the team with the total body length, distance between the blowhole and dorsal fin, and age for many of the individuals within their study community. They used this data to test the accuracy of this measurement method and age estimates on the free-range dolphins.

[Related: Male dolphins form alliances to help each other pick up mates.]

Our hope in developing and using this method is that we can quickly monitor the health of free-ranging dolphin populations, said Vivier. This may facilitate the detection of early signs of population changes, for example, a decrease in the number of calves, and provide important insights for timely management decisions.

This method was initially developed for bottlenose dolphins that are found in temperate and tropical waters around the world. This species, known for their intelligence and echolocation, are well studied due to their proximity to humans, but can also run a high risk of injury due to their closeness to people.

Currently, the team is applying it to the spinner dolphins, which have a longer snout and smaller stature than bottlenose dolphins, in the main Hawaiian Islands. These mammals are known in the Pacific Ocean for their habit of leaping from the water and spinning in the air before plunging back into the water.
A rare lizard imperiled by oil and gas and mining operations in southeast New Mexico and West Texas was proposed for federal protection as an endangered species after years of debate.

The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service proposed Friday that the dunes sagebrush lizard be listed as endangered under the Endangered Species Act, in response to a petition and 12-month finding by the agency.

The lizard dwells exclusively in shinnery oak sand dunes in the Permian Basin region of New Mexico and Texas, which are threatened by oil and gas development and sand mining in the area to support extraction.

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The Permian is the U.S. busiest oilfield, producing about 5.7 million barrels of oil per day, almost of the about 12 barrels per day produced nationwide.

That production risked damaging and fragmenting the dunes sagebrush lizards habitat, read the announcement from the Fish and Wildlife Service, while also contributing to climate change that also impacted the species.

The proposal was set to publish in the Federal Register July 3, with a public comment period running until Sept. 1.

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The Endangered Species Act provides a critical safety net for imperiled species like the dunes sagebrush lizard, said Shawn Sartorius, supervisor of the agencys New Mexico Ecological Services Field Office. Habitat loss and fragmentation as well as climate change are pushing this rare species closer to extinction.

The dunes sagebrush lizard is a small, light brown phrynosomatid lizard (family Phrynosomatidae, genus Sceloporus). Shinnery oaks provide food, shade and a breeding ground for the Dunes sagebrush Lizard.

Lizard protection debate began in 1980s

The Service proposed the species be listed previously but withdrew the proposal in 2012 under pressure from the oil and gas industry and officials in Texas, read a report from the Center for Biological Diversity.

The debate on conserving the species dates back to September 1985 when the Service first classified the lizard as a candidate for listing, records show, then declassified in 1991.

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It was reclassified and declassified as a candidate species several times through out the 1990s, with the Center petitioning for a listing first in June 2002, and the Service found it was warranted in 2004 but precluded by higher priorities and again proposed in 2010.

That proposal was withdrawn by the agency in 2012, and the Center filed another petition in 2018 which led to the Services latest finding.

Industry threatens lizards survival in Permian Basin

Today, the Center reported more than 95 percent of shinnery oak dunes ecosystem was destroyed by oil and gas operations, and the mining of sand used in drilling, along with herbicides for livestock grazing.

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This fragments its habitat, making it difficult for the lizard to find mates, advocates for the species said.

Im relieved the precious dunes sagebrush lizard is finally on the path to protection, said Michael Robinson, senior conservation advocate at the Center. Im saddened and disgusted, however, that the Service allowed the lizards habitat to be destroyed for decades.

It grows to about 2.5 inches long and has the second-smallest range of any lizard in North America, read a report from the Center, where it hunts for insects and spiders in the dunes and burrows under the sand to avoid extreme heat.

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The dunes sagebrush lizard is marvelously adapted for life in extreme environments, but it needs our help to survive the oil and gas industrys destruction, Robinson said. The Service needs to move quickly to implement these long-overdue protections.

If ultimately listed as endangered  the highest status of risk under the Endangered Species Act, the Fish and Wildlife Service would develop a plan to restore its population and likely set aside areas of critical habitat where lizard population could be recovered.

Ahead of the listing, private landowners in region looking to conserve the species and avoid restrictions to their land should it be listed, signed agreements known as candidate conservation agreements on (CCA) on federal land and candidate conservation agreements with assurances (CCAA) on state and private land.

More: Lesser prairie chicken could lose federal protections in New Mexico if GOP has its way

In signing the agreements, landowners agree to take on certain conservation practices while still developing their land.

The Fish and Wildlife Service estimated about 100 ranchers and 100 oil and gas operators were already enrolled in these programs, covering 85 percent of the lizards range in New Mexico.

Conservation efforts for imperiled species can be greatly expanded through collaborative approaches that foster cooperation and the exchange of ideas among stakeholders, read a statement from the Fish and Wildlife Service.

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The agreements are facilitated by Carlsbad-based Center for Excellence (CEHMM), and Director Emily Wirth said the organization aided in moving 500 wells and associated infrastructure from dunes sagebrush lizard habitats since the program began 2008.

There could be more, she said, as oil and gas companies in the 15 years of the program have learned to shift operations away from areas that could impact the lizard.

"It's disappointing given the cooperative conservation that's happening with CEHMM, the private landowners and oil and gas industry," she said. "There's a tremendous amount of conservation going on out there. Industry has gotten to the point where they can do it in house."

More: River snakes in New Mexico see habitat cuts, drawing lawsuit against federal government

Ahead of the final determination, Wirth said landowners can still enroll in CEHMM's programs to avoid federal restrictions.

She said most of the local oil and gas industry is already enrolled but new companies coming to the Permian Basin amid growth in fossil fuel production should consider the programs.

That's because earlier this year the lesser prairie chicken, a grouse species dwelling in a range similar to the dunes sagebrush lizard, was listed as endangered in its southern distinct population segment (DPS), which a norther DPS in several other states was listed as threatened.

This meant several landowners in the area enrolled in response to the chicken listing, and would continue to see benefits if the lizard is also listed.

"The good news is for landowners already enrolled in our programs, nothing changes," Wirth said. "We'll continue what we've always done. We'll continue our work out on the landscape."

Adrian Hedden can be reached at 575-628-5516, achedden@currentargus.com or @AdrianHedden on Twitter.

This article originally appeared on Carlsbad Current-Argus: Dunes sagebrush lizard could see protection amid oil and gas threats
Duxbury firefighters saved the day and helped rescue 3 baby turkeys from a storm drain.

According to Duxbury Fire PIO, 3 baby turkeys were stuck in a storm drain. One firefighter climbed down, with a gas meter attached, and corralled them into a 5-gallon bucket.

The turkeys were reunited with their momma chirping her appreciation.

#DXFD was called to rescue 3 baby turkeys in a storm drain. One firefighter climbed down, with a gas meter attached, and corralled them into a 5 gallon bucket. They were reunited with their watchful momma chirping her appreciation  pic.twitter.com/mqyHFEDCjG  Duxbury Fire PIO (@DXFD_PIO) July 2, 2023

This is a developing story. Check back for updates as more information becomes available.

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Janine Lariviere arranges flowers cut from her backyard for a table in remembrance of her son Ellis, in her Brooklyn home, June 22, 2023. (Sarah Blesener/The New York Times)

NEW YORK  Ellis Lariviere was an eighth grader at Saint Anns, an elite private school in Brooklyn Heights, and he had a lot going for him. Teachers praised him as an abundantly talented artist, in a school that trumpeted the arts, and they described him as a positive presence in his classes. He had friends at school and an older brother who was thriving there. Ellis liked to cook for his family, and he imagined himself one day being a professional. He also had dyslexia and an attention deficit disorder, and he struggled to express complex thoughts in writing.

On Feb. 3, 2021, the school informed his mother by email that, despite recent progress, he could not return for ninth grade.

Ellis asked his parents if it was the schools decision or theirs. When they told him, he just cried a lot, said his mother, Janine Lariviere. He didnt want comfort from me. He was very hurt. This is the most painful thing for me, because I didnt know how to protect him.

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Three months later, in the family home in Red Hook, Brooklyn, Ellis ended his life. He was 13.

This April, his parents filed suit against the school, its head and its trustees, arguing that its practices caused their sons death and demanding changes in school policies. In their suit, they quote the last line of Ellis suicide note: Dont let the school do an assembly about this.

The suit pits a prestigious private schools right to select its student body against its responsibilities to the students under its care. If a student develops a learning disability after being accepted, does the school still owe him the attention and education it promised?

For Ellis family, the suit also keeps him present in their lives and provides shape to their grieving process, as they seek meaning in his death and their own pain.

Suicide is a complex act, with multiple contributing factors that can be impossible to know. But of one thing his family is convinced: Had they said he could go to the high school, his grandfather said, hed be alive today.

An Oasis Without Grades

Saint Anns, a secular school founded in an Episcopal church basement in 1965, has been a proud outlier among New Yorks private schools. It does not give students grades, and it promises parents and students, We celebrate each childs attributes  talented musician, gifted reader, remarkable artist  while encouraging all of our students to believe that they can excel in myriad pursuits.

The schools iconoclastic founding headmaster, Stanley Bosworth, who used to tell prospective parents that he did not like bankers children but would admit those of artists, articulated the house philosophy: If the student learns best under the table, youd better get under the table with him.

It is a package that has served New Yorks creative community, including Lena Dunham and Jennifer Connelly and the children of Susan Sarandon and Tim Robbins and painter Julian Schnabel. The school has balanced this loosey-goosey, no-grades ethos with a no-nonsense record of placing graduates into elite colleges. In 2004, The Wall Street Journal named it as the nations top private school in the percentage of graduates it sent to the most selective colleges. Tuition starts at $53,750 for kindergarten.

For Roger Gural and Lariviere, the schools focus on the arts made it an appealing choice for their two sons. Lariviere is an artist; Gural, the son of one of New Yorks major real estate developers, ran the lavishly praised Arcade Bakery in TriBeCa until rheumatoid arthritis drove him to close it in 2019. A giant loom dominates the familys otherwise spare living room. (The couple are married; the boys take Larivieres last name, with Gural as their middle name.)

I didnt want to send my kids to prep school, Lariviere said recently. The emphasis on art implied that they would be accepted and nurtured as individuals. Art to me was kind of code for not neurotypical. Not that I thought of my kids that way, but I thought there was room to be not conventional people. She also liked knowing that her sons could remain at the school from kindergarten through 12th grade, avoiding the fraught circus of applying to New Yorks middle schools and high schools.

For his first two years at Saint Anns, Ellis flourished, according to his teachers reports, which Gural shared with The New York Times. Ellis was an outstanding student, one wrote, and obviously artistically gifted. Teachers praised his empathy and care for other students.

Then in second and third grades, his dyslexia and problems with language formation started to require extra attention, his father said. The family hired a tutor to work with him.

The school recommended a neuropsychological evaluation and suggested an evaluator, who found that he had a high IQ and good reading comprehension but that he had trouble retrieving letters and numbers when writing, Gural said.

Lariviere asked the evaluator whether Ellis belonged at Saint Anns, or whether the family should consider a school for students with learning differences. She said, He can do it with support, Lariviere said. I asked, What about these specialized schools? And she said, That would be overkill, and that Ellis might be bored.

Saint Anns thought otherwise. One month into third grade, Gabe Howard, the head of the lower school, told the couple that Ellis should go elsewhere for fourth grade, adding, We just dont think we can help him, Lariviere said.

The couple were shocked by this, since the neuropsychologist had just said that he could succeed at Saint Anns with tutoring and other support. Also, Gural said, the schools position seemed to be at odds with its rhetoric.

They spend so much time saying, Were about, Each child has their own path to reach their own potential, no two experiences are the same, he said. She shouldve said, Heres our plan for your son to succeed. Instead, it was just, Find a new school.

Through its director of communications, Saint Anns declined to answer questions about Ellis experience or the schools general policies and procedures, including those around teacher training for students with special needs, citing the familys lawsuit. In a letter to parents in June, the school said the suit contained a number of inaccurate and misleading allegations and that it would vigorously defend itself against any false allegations contained in this lawsuit.

On a May afternoon in the familys home, Gural spoke wearily, with palpable anger. He wore a stained yellow hoodie, his reddish hair and beard a little shaggy. Still deep in loss, he seemed held together now by what he sees as a great wrong. His pandemic project, an acoustic guitar, rested beside the couch.

Unlike schools that give grades, Saint Anns had no formal standards that it required students to meet, Gural said. Moreover, Ellis third grade teachers continued to give him positive reports, even as the administration said he should look elsewhere. So Gural asked: What benchmarks was Ellis not meeting?

The school ultimately allowed Ellis to return for fourth grade. When Lariviere told an administrator that Saint Anns should inform parents that it sometimes asked students to leave, she said she was told, We cant do that because the parents would be stressing out their kids. And I said, I wouldnt have applied to the school if I knew that this happened.

It was the start of a tense relationship with the school that would culminate five years later, when Ellis was in eighth grade.

Seeking Answers

Private schools are not legally required to keep students through high school graduation, especially when a student develops disabilities that overmatch the schools resources, said David C. Bloomfield, a professor of education leadership, law and policy at Brooklyn College and the City University of New York Graduate Center.

But the school makes an ethical commitment, he said. Schools like Saint Anns are not just educational institutions. Theyre communities with human commitments to the children in their charge. Saint Anns thrives on being a community, and one would think that Saint Anns would be wholly transparent about standards and expectations, academic as well as behavioral.

In the days following Ellis suicide in May 2021, the grief Gural felt was really intense and overwhelming physically, he said. He wrote to the head of the school, Vincent Tompkins, describing how he lifted his sons lifeless body and placed it on his bed to cover it with a blanket.

Youre just hit with waves of uncontrollable convulsions of pain, he said recently at his kitchen table in Red Hook. Theres a tremendous amount of guilt and regret. Theres levels of stress that are so far above what youve ever experienced in your life. Theres layers upon layers of the experience that, if you were only dealing with one of them, would be completely overwhelming, and youve got 50 layers.

The family searched for answers. How was it that a school that prided itself on nurturing the talents of every student could tell their son after nine years that he no longer had a place there? What responsibility did the school have, to them and to other families, to disclose its process of counseling out certain students who did not meet unspecified criteria?

The parents also questioned themselves. Ellis had always had been up and down emotionally, Gural said, and they had shielded him from some of their conversations with the school. When they told him that the school would not allow him to return the next year, it was devastating, Gural said.

I look back now and I think, like, should I have been more sensitive to this day when he got upset? Gural said. But there was not any marked difference in his personality or behavior right before he committed suicide.

Lariviere was frustrated that a school that had been very supportive when Ellis came out as gay in fifth grade could not accommodate his learning differences, even with the family paying for tutors and learning specialists. Why is his neurodiversity beyond the pale? she asked.

The questions were particularly acute during the pandemic, when young people were already dealing with severe emotional disruptions. Suspected suicide attempts among adolescents Ellis age were up 49% in 2021 compared with pre-pandemic levels, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

Gural demanded that Tompkins explain to the community how, in the middle of all this talk of DEI, three professionals got together and decided that their institution has no place for a bright, creative, caring gay child because he has learning differences.

When the school informed parents that a student had died by suicide, without also telling them that the student had recently been asked to leave the school, Gural was incensed.

I was apoplectic, he said. Because it did not contextualize in any way what the issues were in my sons suicide. And it says the school is being proactive to deal with this mental health crisis. Here they are, presenting information about my sons death in the most flattering way possible. Totally dishonest.

Jeffrey Gural, Ellis grandfather, also pressed the schools board of trustees. The elder Gural is chair of GFP Real Estate LLC (formerly Newmark Holdings and Newmark Knight Frank), a major developer with an ownership stake in more than 50 buildings, including the iconic Flatiron Building. On a Zoom call with members of the board after Ellis death, he demanded that Tompkins resign and that the school inform other schools that one of its students had killed himself after being denied a seat in ninth grade.

I cant bring Ellis back, but I just want to do whatever I can to make sure that no family has to go through this again, he said in an interview. After that call, he tried writing to the board but got no answers, he said.

Literally, I got one response saying, Dont email the board anymore, he said. From their lawyer. Oh, really? My grandsons dead. Are you threatening me? What are you going to do to me? What else can Saint Anns do to me?

Without commenting on Ellis familys lawsuit, Lars Mehlum, a professor of psychiatry and suicidology at the University of Oslo, said that the impulse to assign responsibility for a loved ones suicide is a common part of the grieving process.

Its normal, something that is part of the adaptation to grief or to the reality of death, he said. But only to a certain extent, because you can also be trapped inside of that, and you can be derailed from adapting to the life you have now that that person is dead. And there can be some reality to it  somebody did something wrong  but very often its only partially correct.

Hardest for survivors, Mehlum added, can be knowing that the person chose to end his or her life, and to leave them behind. This causes a lot of pain, he said, and if by any means you can find some alternative to this idea that the person did it out of free will, then it can be a comfort.

In the two years since Ellis death, his parents have turned the circumstances over in their heads again and again. Ellis had never been asked to repeat a class or been disciplined for behavioral issues. There was no grading structure in which he had failed. His midyear reports from eighth grade note his problems with writing and organization, but also his progress, and they praise him for his creative thinking and contributions to his classes.

Gural fixed on messages from the school, like one from Tompkins: [W]e believe that differences in aptitude  in one child preternatural dexterity on the violin, in another precocious ability to decode a novel, in a third the ability to create marvels with a brush and canvas  make for the richest possible learning environment. What if Ellis wanted to be an artist like his mother or a baker like his father? What was the harm to the school in nurturing him for that path?

What, Gural asked, is the benefit to the institution by not having him there?

Clara Hemphill, founder of InsideSchools.org, a guide to New Yorks public schools, said private schools counsel out students fairly regularly, with few if any restrictions.

My experience is that none of the private schools do a very good job serving kids with special needs, she said. As a generalization, public schools have the will but not the capacity, and the private schools have the capacity but not the will. And if your child has special needs, youre in a very, very tough place.

Saint Anns declined to answer questions about its practice of counseling out. The board president, Mino Capossela, told Gural in an email that there is no single fixed policy for determining that a student should leave the school, but that each case is considered individually.

One month after Ellis death, Saint Anns announced that it was forming a working group to review its resources for providing academic and mental health support for students. The review found, among other things, that the schools staff to support students was proportionally about half that of peer schools. In any year, one-quarter to one-third of the schools 1,000-plus students have a psychological diagnosis requiring an accommodation plan. The school asks an average of five students each year to leave, the review found. Since the review, the school added two members to its student support staff.

At the end of 2021, Tompkins announced that the 2022-23 school year would be his last as head of school.

The familys lawsuit, which they withheld until Ellis older brother was out of Saint Anns and at the University of Chicago, mainly demands that the school overhaul its practice of counseling out, making it more transparent to families and more consistent with the schools mission statement and literature, and bolster the support staff to match that of comparable schools. The suit also seeks unspecified compensatory damages, punitive damages, attorneys fees, and costs. Any money received will go into a foundation to help other students like Ellis, Gural said.

Gural compared the schools treatment of his son to bullying, which was once widely unpunished, but now regularly results in corrective lawsuits.

Imagine if some student said to my son, Youre stupid, you dont belong here, and we went to the school about it, and the school did nothing, and he took his own life, he said. But in this case, its the school whos the bully. The school is saying to my son, You dont belong.

He added, as if addressing the school: I feel terrible. I made mistakes. I can forgive you. You had this responsibility at the school to be honest and disclose honestly what your policies were and you failed. OK. Youre human, Im human, I failed. Lets collaborate. Lets try to move forward in a way that will make this community better for kids, and make some meaning out of my loss, out of my sons suffering.



If you are having thoughts of suicide, call or text 988 to reach the 988 Suicide and Crisis Lifeline or go to SpeakingOfSuicide.com/resources for a list of additional resources.

c.2023 The New York Times Company
At 10:14 a.m. on July 4, 2022, an Independence Day parade in the Chicago suburb of Highland Park turned deadly in a way community members could not have imagined.

Seven people were killed after a gunman opened fire from a rooftop above the parade route. A day later, Robert Bobby Crimo III was charged with seven counts of first-degree murder and other crimes.

A year after the tragedy, emotions still run high as Highland Park continues to heal while remembering the victims and showing the resolve to move forward.

Read the stories below for the latest as Highland Park marks the one-year anniversary of the shooting.

Expand Autoplay Image 1 of 124 A person walks down Central Avenue on June 24, 2023, in Highland Park, just across from where last years Fourth of July parade shooting took place. (Shanna Madison/Chicago Tribune)

Shane Selig often volunteered to provide security for the Highland Park Independence Day parade, a typically low-stress job where the biggest threat to public safety occurred when people carelessly walked in front of floats or children darted into the street to grab poorly tossed candy.

These are the so-called dangers that weighed mostly heavily on his mind as he pedaled down Central Avenue on July 4, 2022. The parade had begun about 15 minutes earlier, bringing the usual mix of marching bands, local veterans and politicians that made it one of the most well-attended Fourth of July events along the North Shore.

Thats when Selig heard the pop.

>>> Read the full story here







Thousands of people participate in the Community Walk down Central Avenue as part of a day honoring the victims and survivors of the Highland Park shooting on July 4, 2023, in Highland Park. (Stacey Wescott/Chicago Tribune)

People gathered outside City Hall for a memorial ceremony before walking en masse along the street where the shooting occurred. Community leaders praised the towns resilience and honored the memory of the victims of the shooting.

>>> Read the full story here







State Rep. Bob Morgan stands in the 600 block of Central Avenue at Port Clinton Square shopping area, June 29, 2023, in Highland Park. It is the location Morgan rushed to from two blocks away to help gunshot victims and traumatized residents during a mass shooting at the Fourth of July parade in 2022. He pushed for legislation that led to the state's ban on assault weapons and high-capacity magazines. (John J. Kim/Chicago Tribune)

In the immediate aftermath of last years mass shooting at Highland Parks Fourth of July parade came the expected questions when such a tragedy unfolds: Who was the gunman? Where had his weapon come from?

And in Illinois, a state run by gun control-minded Democrats, could laws be bolstered and were police using them as effectively as possible?

>>> Read the full story here







Map showing locations of mass shootings in Illinois since the Highland Park Fourth of July parade shooting a year ago. (Claire Malon)

As loved ones continue to mourn the loss of those killed in the tragic shooting on July 4, 2022, countless Illinois families have come to share in their grief, learning for themselves what its like to lose a loved one to gun violence.

In total, there have been 54 mass shootings in Illinois since that day, resulting in 50 deaths and 225 injuries, according to data from the Gun Violence Archive, which defines a mass shooting as four or more people shot in a single event, not including the gunman.

>>> Read the full story here







Jacob Rolfe, left, a rising junior at Highland Park High School, and recent graduate Spencer Sabath on June 15, 2023, in Highland Park. (Brian Cassella/Chicago Tribune)

One year after a horrific mass shooting shattered the notion of public safety in Highland Park, community leaders and citizens of all ages are still reckoning with what it takes to make safe space.

>>> Read the full story here







A chalk message left below a portrait of Irina and Kevin McCarthy, who attended the parade with their 2-year-old son, Aiden, reads "He will be OK" at a memorial near the Central Avenue scene where they died, July 7, 2022, three days after a mass shooting at the Fourth of July parade in Highland Park. (Brian Cassella/Chicago Tribune)

After nearly a year, the guardianship battle has escalated over a boy whose parents were killed in the mass shooting at the Fourth of July parade in Highland Park.

>>> Read the full story here







Highland Park shooting victim Cooper Roberts throws out a ceremnoial first pitch before a baseball game between the Milwaukee Brewers and the Chicago Cubs, July 3, 2023, in Milwaukee. (Morry Gash/AP)

Cooper Roberts, the 9-year-old paralyzed from the waist down in last years July 4 Highland Park parade shooting, threw out the first pitch at Mondays game between the Chicago Cubs and his favorite team, the Milwaukee Brewers, who have shown their support since soon after the tragedy.

Within days of the shooting, the Brewers learned Cooper is a fan, and his favorite player is outfielder Christian Yelich. The organization paid tribute to him by hanging a jersey in the dugout bearing the boys last name and Yelichs 22 uniform number.

>>> Read the full story here







Pictures of the seven victims are displayed at memorial in Port Clinton Square on July 11, 2022, one week after a mass shooting at the Fourth of July parade in Highland Park. (Brian Cassella / Chicago Tribune)

The parents of a toddler. A father of eight and a grandfather to many. A synagogue employee known for her kindness. A family man who loved the arts.

A mass shooting during the Highland Park Independence Day parade has now claimed the lives of at least seven people and left some two dozen others injured, ranging in age from 8 to 85 years old.

>>> Read the full story here







On an idyllic summer morning, from a rooftop high above the Highland Park Independence Day parade, a gunman aimed down at the floats and lawn chairs and strollers and opened fire. The high school marching bands members sprinted for their lives, still carrying their flutes and saxophones. Bystanders scooped up young children and fled. In all, seven people were killed.

>>> Read the full story here







A Lake Forest police officer walks down Central Ave on July 4, 2022, after a shooter fired on the northern suburbs Fourth of July parade. (Brian Cassella / Chicago Tribune)

See photos from Tribune photographers of the Highland Park mass shooting and the aftermath.

>>> Read the full story here
In this image made from video, Georgias imprisoned former president Mikheil Saakashvili attends a court hearing from hospital via video link in Tbilisi, Monday, July 3, 2023. Saakashvili appeared severely emaciated on Monday in videolink testimony to a court considering an abuse-of-power case against him. He and his supporters claim he was poisoned in prison and has lost half of his body weight since he was arrested in October 2021. (Pool Photo via AP)

TBILISI, Georgia (AP)  Georgia's imprisoned former president Mikheil Saakashvili appeared severely emaciated on Monday in videolink testimony to a court considering an abuse-of-power case against him.

Saakashvili and his supporters claim he has been poisoned while imprisoned and that he now weighs about 60 kilograms (132 pounds), half of what he weighed when he was arrested in October 2021.

From a private clinic where he was being held, he told the court that despite his poor health, he was spiritually fit and determined to serve the country," according to local news site Agenda.

Saakashvili, who served as Georgias president in 2004-13 and led the so-called Rose Revolution protests that drove the previous president out of office, left for Ukraine after the end of his second term. He was later convicted in absentia of abuse of power and sentenced to six years in prison.

He was arrested in October 2021 after returning to Georgia to try to bolster opposition forces before nationwide municipal elections.

He is now on trial on charges connected to the violent dispersal of an opposition rally in 2007.

Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy on Monday called for Georgia to send Saakashvili to Ukraine for medical treatment and said the Georgian ambassador would be called to the foreign ministry and encouraged to leave Ukraine within two days for consultations with his government.

Saakashvili holds Ukrainian citizenship and was governor of the Odesa region in 2015-16.
Ken Paxton, the suspended attorney general of Texas, traveled to China with other attorneys general in a secretive trip that included meetings with government officials and did so against the advice of his staff who expressed worry over potential Chinese Communist Party influence, according to sources and internal documents obtained by Fox News Digital.

The shadowy trip  facilitated by the Attorney General Alliance (AGA) and Conference of Western Attorneys General (CWAG)  was a 10-day excursion taking place between Oct. 30, 2019, and Nov. 8, 2019, and included stops in the Chinese cities of Beijing, Hangzhou, Shanghai and Macau, according to an itinerary of the trip reviewed by Fox News Digital.

"My first thought was this is a terrible decision to have made," said one individual with knowledge of the trip, speaking on condition of anonymity in order to avoid retribution. "Under no set of circumstances as a U.S. law enforcement official should you willingly go to China."

Paxton  accompanied on the trip by his wife Angela, a Texas state senator  was not required to report the trip and ultimately attended against wishes from staffers who raised potential government influence and surveillance concerns, officials familiar with the matter said.

TEXAS BUSINESSMAN CONNECTED TO KEN PAXTON IMPEACHMENT ARRESTED BY FBI

Ken Paxton, the suspended Texas attorney general, speaks during the Conservative Political Action Conference in Dallas on Aug. 5, 2022.

The documents showed AGA and CWAG arranged lavish accommodations and travel for Paxton and the other attorneys general who attended. And the top state law enforcement officers, both Republicans like Paxton and Democrats including then-Hawaii Attorney General Clare Connors, met with both Chinese government officials and private sector representatives.

READ ON THE FOX NEWS APP

Multiple individuals, who requested anonymity to avoid retribution, confirmed the authenticity of the trip and documents. Fox News Digital is withholding their names to protect their identities.

TEXAS ATTORNEY GENERAL KEN PAXTON HIRES PROMINENT LAWYER FOR IMPEACHMENT TRIAL

In addition to Paxton, his wife and Connors, then-Attorneys General Hector Balderas of New Mexico, Mark Brnovich of Arizona and Wayne Stenehjem of North Dakota; former Connecticut Deputy Attorney General Margaret Chapple; and Utah Attorney General Sean Reyes joined the trip. Balderas, Brnovich and Reyes brought their wives.

Attendees such as Connors and Brnovich, for example, reported the trip due to disclosure laws in their state, filings show.

Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton and his wife Angela are pictured outside the Supreme Court on Nov. 1, 2021.

AGA Executive Director Karen White and executives from Microsoft, Alibaba, JUUL and various other companies and law firms were also listed on the trip attendee list.

"The international delegations are centered around matters to include Consumer Protection, organized crime, and cybercrime, all of which are priorities in other countries and the United States bilateral security relations," AGA Deputy Director and General Counsel Tania Maestas told Fox News Digital in a statement. "The United States and has extensive cultural ties and a mutually beneficial economic relationship and continues to build them through these delegations."

"The China International Delegation surrounded issues like combating counterfeit goods and violations of intellectual property laws," Maestas continued. "Meetings with Chinese officials regarding counterfeit vaping products flooding the U.S. market also assists further protections for U.S. consumers as state attorneys general have regulatory and enforcement responsibility under the national tobacco settlements and ongoing matters related to vaping."

CHINESE TECH COMPANIES ARE EXPLOITING US GREEN ENERGY GOALS, FORMER STATE DEPARTMENT OFFICIALS WARN

Chinese President Xi Jinping arrives for the second plenary session of the National People's Congress in Beijing on March 7.

On the trip, the delegation first traveled to Beijing where they stayed at a Four Seasons hotel.

In Beijing, the attorneys general met with Chinese federal court officials and Chinese prosecutors; met with the general counsel of the state-run China State Construction and Engineering; toured the Microsoft offices; and participated in several historical tours including one to Tiananmen Square, the site of an infamous government massacre of protesting students in 1989.

They then traveled to Hangzhou where they stayed in a Sheraton resort. Their short stay in the city was highlighted by an all-day visit to the headquarters for Alibaba, the hundred-billion-dollar e-commerce platform closely regulated by the Chinese government.

CCP-BACKED TECH COMPANIES ARE POISED TO CASH IN ON BIDEN'S CLIMATE BILL, NATIONAL SECURITY EXPERTS WARN

After Hangzhou, the delegation traveled to Shanghai where they stayed at a Waldorf Astoria hotel. In addition to sightseeing in the city, they met with leaders at law firm Squire Patton Boggs Shanghai and anonymous "local officials."

In their final leg of the trip, the delegation traveled to Macau where they stayed at the Venetian Macau. The main purpose of the leg was leisure.

The gondola lobby of the Venetian Casino and Hotel in Macau, China, one of the luxury accommodations provided to Paxton and the other attorneys general during their 2019 trip.

"The Attorney General Alliance serves as a bipartisan forum where Attorneys General work in cooperation to share ideas, build relationships, and foster enforcement through meetings, panels, working groups, and social activities," Maestas, AGA's deputy director and general counsel, said.

"Importantly, AGA provides a unique environment where attorneys general can interact and discuss policy initiatives, leading to development of key long-term relationships with both state and international partners," she continued.

The AGA began as the Conference of Western Attorneys General, which still exists today as an AGA program, according to its website. CWAG's most recent financial audit covering its finances for the year ending June 30, 2022, shows it had nearly $7.5 million in total assets.

The AGA has received criticism for allegedly selling access to special interests, Axios reported last year. Chris Toth, who acted as the executive director of the National Association of Attorneys General, made the comments in his retirement letter last June.

TX GOV. GREG ABBOTT NAMES JOHN SCOTT AS TEMPORARY ATTORNEY GENERAL FOLLOWING KEN PAXTON'S HISTORIC IMPEACHMENT

"I have become increasingly alarmed at the growing influence of lobbyist and corporate money in the attorney general arena, particularly involving entities that are being investigated and/or sued by AGs," Toth wrote in the letter, singling out AGA and CWAG, saying it "seems to exist for no other reason than to provide access by such actors to attorneys general."

"But the AGA funding model, e.g., a minimum contribution of $10k to attend their annual meeting, forecloses access to all but the most well-funded persons and groups," Toth wrote. "There is clearly no functional vetting mechanism for who gains access and who can essentially buy programming at AGA meetings."

The Microsoft China Headquarters building is pictured in Haidian District, Beijing, on Aug. 10, 2021. Paxton and the other trip attendees toured this facility.

Toth said that "this places AGs in a very compromising and potentially embarrassing situation," adding that "AGA is overwhelmingly dependent on corporate and lobbyist money for its activities."

"Dues only account for a very small share of its revenue," Toth wrote. "That means when you go on a delegation, some lobbyist or corporation is paying for that. When you have your room and airfare paid for, some portion of that is coming from someone you are investigating or suing."

Toth's former group distanced themselves from his comments, saying they were "his statements alone" and were not on behalf of the National Association of Attorneys General.

The Texas House voted in May to impeach Paxton after a months-long House investigation into him that led to 20 charges alleging abuse of power, obstruction of justice, bribery and abuse of public trust. The impeachment triggered an automatic suspension of Paxton who must now wait until the end of August for the Texas Senate impeachment trial.

"The ugly spectacle in the Texas House today confirmed the outrageous impeachment plot against me was never meant to be fair or just. It was a politically motivated sham from the beginning," Paxton said in a statement after the House impeachment.

Paxton and his wife's offices did not respond to Fox News Digital's inquiries for this story.
 Clay Cook 2018--Cumberland Falls

Perhaps most known for world-class bourbon, horse racing, and bluegrass music, Kentucky is also an underrated natural beauty. Home to the largest cave system in the world  Mammoth Cave National Park  Kentucky also has rolling hills, gorgeous farmland and country roads winding between its growing cities, Lexington and Louisville.

We Kentuckians take pride in our commonwealths natural beauty and strive to protect it from harm. Unfortunately, that doesnt mean that we dont have our fair share of environmental challenges. Last year, Eastern Kentucky saw historic flooding that took more than 40 lives, and, as has become all too common across the country, has struggled with water contamination. Areas in Western Kentucky are still recovering from the historic tornado damage sustained in December 2021.

Senator Whitney Westerfield at the second annual American Conservation Coalition Summit, 2023

Even though our environmental challenges may be similar to other parts of the country, its imperative to realize that our solutions may look very different. This isnt to say government  at all levels: federal, state and local  doesnt have any role in solving environmental challenges, but it is to suggest government alone cannot be our savior. Diverse, innovative solutions that fit the local area are the path forward. Environmental protection in the Bluegrass State, for instance, is approached differently than environmental protection in the Beehive State, where the second annual American Conservation Coalition Summit was held earlier this month. Despite this, they are equally as effective.

Surrounded by beautiful mountains and the Great Salt Lake, at the Summit, we had important discussions about environmental leadership and local knowledge. During a panel with state elected officials from Utah, Washington and Kentucky, we discussed our states unique environmental challenges and how state legislatures worked to solve them. The national dialogue regarding environmental issues has been dominated by the effects of climate change  but the truth is that environmental issues are local issues.

While the federal government can have a role in addressing our challenges, without local knowledge, those efforts are destined to fail. Setting arbitrary standards or mandating a certain form of energy, especially without understanding and adjusting to the local needs, and economic interests, the heavy hand of government often lands the hardest on local communities.

Troy Hillerich uses a tractor to help with the preparation for planting next year on rented farmland on Seatonville Road in Jefferson County. Hillerich is 27 and a self-taught farmer who has help from family in Fern Creek.

Environmental solutions must not leave local communities behind.

Environmental solutions need to benefit both our natural environment and Kentuckian communities. When environmental rules and regulations come from federal bureaucrats, however well-intended, local communities and their needs are often left behind. When solutions come from the ground up, with feedback from critical stakeholders, both our environment and our communities are better off.

For example, farmers in Kentucky have begun to embrace regenerative agriculture, farming practices that enrich soil and biodiversity for future crops and generations. This embrace was not mandated by the government but has been adopted enthusiastically because it's common sense that benefits both farmers and the land they steward. In fact, natural climate solutions such as regenerative agriculture could account for one-third of the emissions reductions we need to reach climate goals. At the same time, farms that utilize these techniques have been found to be 78% more productive than conventional operations.

In the energy sector, Kentucky has long been known as a coal state, but the tide is turning. Since 1995, weve reduced carbon emissions by nearly 30%, and though we lag a bit behind on clean energy, progress is being made. A once-retired coal plant, for instance, is now converting to a solar facility, promising both jobs and clean energy for the surrounding community.

These are just a few examples of how local environmental and energy leadership proves to be more effective than a top-down, federally-led strategy. Protecting the commonwealth and allowing our communities to flourish simply requires a Kentucky state of mind.

Senator Whitney Westerfield represents SD-03 in the Kentucky State Senate. Danielle Butcher Franz, based in Lexington, serves as executive vice president of the American Conservation Coalition (ACC).

This article originally appeared on Louisville Courier Journal: Environmental rules without local understanding are designed to fail.
After Erie Coke was indicted in November on charges that it violated federal air pollution rules for years, the corporation was without legal representation as the criminal case against advanced in U.S. District Court in Erie.

That situation has changed. Erie Coke is now in a position to prepare a defense.

Erie Coke has hired lawyers.

They want until Sept. 4 to file pretrial motions along with the company's co-defendant, Anthony Nearhoof, the last superintendent of the plant that made coke  a derivative of coal produced by heating coal in high-temperature ovens  at the foot of East Avenue in Erie. The plant closed due to environmental problems in December 2019.

Lawyers for Erie Coke and Nearhoof asked for the Sept. 4 deadline in a joint motion they filed on Thursday before U.S. District Judge Susan Paradise Baxter.

The former Erie Coke plant at the foot of East Avenue, shown in January, 2021, was shut down in December 2019 following a protracted legal battle between the company and the Department of Environmental Protection.

The deadline for filing pretrial motions had been July 5 for Nearhoof. Erie Coke never had a deadline because it was without lawyers at the start of the case, according to the motion. A federal grand jury in Erie returned the indictment on Nov. 15.

The lawyers for Erie Coke and Nearhoof said they want the same deadline for filing pretrial motions so they are on the same schedule in the case, according to Thursday's motion. The lawyers said they need until Sept. 4 to file the pretrial motions partly because of the large amount of evidence the U.S. Attorney's Office has provided them in the pretrial discovery process.

"Defendants and their counsel have begun to review all of the discovery provided by the government, but because of its volume, and in light of the nature and scope of the allegations, they have not yet been able to fully evaluate pretrial motions," according to the motion.

Erie Coke's corporate links detailed in new filing

No matter when the lawyers for Erie Coke file their pretrial motions, the lawyers' appearance on the docket clears up two issues that had clouded the case: whether Erie Coke still exists as a corporate entity, and whether that entity would hire lawyers.

New fencing surrounds the site of the former Erie Coke Corp. plant, at the foot of East Avenue, shown this spring.

Erie Coke Corp. still exists as wholly owned subsidiary of an entity called Garner LLC, Erie Coke's lawyers said in a motion filed May 25, five days after the lawyers were admitted to represent Erie Coke in U.S. District Court in Erie.

Garner LLC, a holding company, is owned by another holding company, Cooper Meridian LLC, according to other court records, filed in 2019. Cooper Meridian, according to the records, is owned by trusts controlled by the family of J.D. Crane, the Buffalo-area businessman who owned Erie Coke until he died at 92 in 2014.

Crane bought Erie Coke from the Pittsburgh-based Koppers Inc. in 1987. After Crane died, his grandson headed Erie Coke. Crane's company also owned Tonawanda Coke, Erie Coke's sister plant, near Buffalo. That plant closed in 2018 due to environmental violations. Tonawanda Coke also filed for bankruptcy, unlike Erie Coke. Tonawanda Coke was demolished in 2021.

The lawyers for Erie Coke in the criminal case are from Buffalo. The lead lawyer, Rodney Personius, declined to comment.

Erie Coke was arraigned in absentia on Dec. 7 at the federal courthouse in Erie. No person appeared to represent the corporation in court, leaving the federal magistrate judge who handled the arraignment, Richard A. Lanzillo, to enter the plea of not guilty on Erie Coke's behalf.

Sentencing rescheduled for 2nd ex-Erie Coke employee charged

Erie Coke faces the possibility of large fines if convicted, though none of its top corporate officials were indicted. Nearhoof, the plant superintendent, was one of two individuals charged in the case. The other person is a supervisor at the plant, David Stablein, who worked under Nearhoof.

Workers contracted by the Environmental Protection Agency clean up the former Erie Coke Corp. plant in January 2021.

The Pittsburgh-based U.S. Attorney's Office for the Western District of Pennsylvania charged Stablein in a separate case in December. He pleaded guilty in February to a felony conspiracy count of violating the federal Clean Air Act. He was charged with working with the Nearhoof to deliberately bypass environmental monitoring systems to prevent the detection of air-quality violations at Erie Coke from October 2015 to September 2018.

Stablein faces up to five years in federal prison. Baxter had scheduled his sentencing for Friday at the federal courthouse in Erie, but she rescheduled the hearing for Aug. 2. Stablein, 54, of Fairview Township, is free on an unsecured bond of $10,000.

Nearhoof, 41, of Pittsburgh, pleaded not guilty at his arraignment on Nov. 17, two days after he was indicted with Erie Coke as a corporation. He has had a lawyer since the start of the case, and he is also free on an unsecured bond of $10,000.

Erie Coke saga pitted environmental agencies vs. company

The eight-count indictment against Nearhoof and Erie Coke Corp. charges them with conspiring to violate the Clean Air Act for four years, ending in December 2019, by deliberately bypassing the pollution monitors. They are also accused of tampering with measurements on heating systems that emitted contaminants and pollutants into the air, including the chemicals benzene, toluene and xylene, according to the U.S. Attorney's Office. The EPA classifies benzene as a known carcinogen.

The indictment alleges Nearhoof and Erie Coke bypassed the pollution monitors to reduce "the likelihood of enforcement actions by state and federal regulators," avoid the cost of repairs and maximize "revenues and profits by running the plant as much as possible."

The 137-employee Erie Coke plant made coke by heating coal in batteries of ovens to burn off impurities and create a fuel source that is used in a variety of industries, including steel mills, according to the indictment. Industries had operated since 1833 on the 183-acre East Avenue site  on Lake Erie just east of Presque Isle Bay and coke production began there in 1925.

The closing of the Erie Coke plant, in December 2019, ended a protracted legal battle between the company and the state Department of Environmental Protection. The DEP announced in July 2019 that it would not renew the plants Title V operating permit because of persistent violations of environmental rules.

The site is getting cleaned up in a government-funded project that the federal Environmental Protection agency has estimated will cost more than $7 million. To help recover the costs, the EPA in August 2021 placed a $1 million lien on three parcels on the site. Erie Coke still owns the property. The lien will get paid when the property is sold.

Contact Ed Palattella at epalattella@timesnews.com. Follow him on Twitter @ETNpalattella.

This article originally appeared on Erie Times-News: Erie Coke Corp. finally hires lawyers in Clean Air Act case
FILE PHOTO: Amfitriti, a bulk carrier part of Black Sea grain deal, and other commercial vessels wait to pass the Bosphorus strait off the shores of Yenikapi in Istanbul

(Reuters) -The European Union is considering a proposal for the Russian Agricultural Bank to set up a subsidiary to reconnect to the global financial network as a sop to Moscow, the Financial Times said on Monday.

With the bank under sanctions, the move aims to safeguard the Black Sea grain deal that allows Ukraine to export food to global markets, the newspaper said.

The European Commission had no comment, while the Kremlin, in response to a question about the report, said it had nothing to announce about the deal's implementation.

The United Nations and Turkey brokered the Black Sea Grain Initiative for an initial 120 days last July to help tackle a global food crisis worsened by Moscow's invasion of Ukraine, one of the world's leading grain exporters. It has been extended three times since but is due to expire later this month.

More than 32 million tonnes of mostly corn and wheat have been exported by Ukraine under the deal.

Moscow reiterated on Monday it was pessimistic about the prospects for renewing the deal because no progress had been made in implementing accompanying agreements that pertain to Russian exports.

There was little immediate reaction in global grain markets on Monday with wheat prices virtually unchanged.

"There is general belief in the market that the Ukrainian shipment deal will not be extended unless Russia gets substantive concessions," one European grains trader said.

"Easing the banking sanctions would be a quick method of giving Russia something," the trader said, adding there remained many doubts about whether the deal would be extended.

Russia last week said that it saw no reason to extend the grain deal because the West had acted in an "outrageous" way over the agreement, though it assured poor countries that Russian grain exports would continue.

'CREATIVE WAYS'

Moscow's plan, proposed through U.N.-brokered talks, would let the bank unit handle payments related to grain exports, the paper said, citing unnamed sources.

The new unit would be allowed to use the SWIFT global financial messaging system, which was closed to the largest Russian banks after Russia's invasion of Ukraine, it added.

The U.N. declined to comment on the FT report.

"I don't think it would help me to talk in any detail about what the U.N. is doing," Deputy U.N. spokesperson Farhan Haq told reporters on Monday,

He added that U.N. officials had been in touch with "a number of nations, including European nations, to find creative ways in which exports of food and fertilizer from the Russian Federation could be could be expedited."

Responding to the Financial Times report, Ukraine's Foreign Minister told the state broadcaster that should the EU make any decision, Kyiv will react strongly. But he added that for now nothing concrete had been decided.

"We should not make any concessions to Russia in order to preserve the grain corridor," Kuleba said, adding that it is Russia that needs to adhere to its obligations.

Ukraine's foreign ministry ambassador at large, Olha Trofimtseva, accused Moscow of blackmail, saying on the Telegram messaging app that "a blackmailer does not stop if you fulfil his demands. He just comes up with new demands."

As two of the world's top agricultural producers, Russia and Ukraine are major players in grain and oilseed markets ranging from wheat and barley to rapeseed and sunflower oil. Russia is also dominant in the fertiliser market.

Apart from the restoration of SWIFT access, Russia is also seeking resumption of supplies of farm machinery and parts as well as the removal of curbs on insurance and reinsurance.

(Reporting by Jahnavi Nidumolu in Bengaluru; Additional reporting by Pavel Polityuk in Kyiv, Michael Hogan in Hamburg and Gabriela Baczynska in Brussels and Nigel Hunt in London and Michelle Nichols in New York; Editing by Kim Coghill, Clarence Fernandez, David Goodman, David Evans, Marguerita Choy and Sonali Paul)
(Bloomberg) -- The European Union is taking up the cause of work-from-home protections and rights.

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Over thirty European Union lawmakers have signed a document launched Monday that would ultimately ensure access to co-working spaces, prohibit tracking workers computers at home and protect them from having to send or respond to emails outside of working hours.

The non-binding document was developed and launched by the Future Workforce Alliance, a forum of politicians, business leaders and academics focused on policy changes in response to the digital transformation of work environments. Their aim is to set out official EU guidelines and best practices for companies with hybrid or remote workers and to create a legal definition of what constitutes a healthy relationship with technology in the workplace for employees on the job from home or in other remote locations.

The remote work, hybrid models and flexible work-life relationships are an added value for our economy, business and workers, said Dragos Pislaru, chair of the European Parliament Committee on Employment and Social Affairs and a signatory of the charter. These should not come at the cost of our people with blurred lines between personal and professional life, increasing burnout rates and loneliness.

The charter is building on the EUs right to disconnect proposal, an earlier call to grant EU employees legal rights to switch off work-related tasks and electronic communication beyond office hours. The policy, already enforced in several EU member states such as France, Spain and Belgium, is backed by a majority of the European Parliament and could become EU law towards the end of this year, according to Ben Marks, co-founder of the Future Workforce Alliance.

The EUs stepped-up focus on remote-worker rights comes as managers everywhere are fretting about productivity and losing touch with employees. At the same time, workers are determined to hold on to flexibility  despite some feeling increasingly lonely at home. Theres also mounting concerns about deteriorating mental health among workers as businesses havent quite figured out how to strike the right balance between work and life in the hybrid world.

I honestly dont believe that we need to overregulate, I just want to explore together with the private sector to what extent we can rely on self-regulation, Pislaru. The private sector is quite proactive, he said, adding that some companies have already started to come up with codes of conduct and internal regulations that actually are a source of inspiration for EU legislators.

Companies in Europe have been experimenting with the four-day work week, while the Netherlands became one of the first countries to establish work-from-home as a legal right. Last week, a cross-party group of UK lawmakers, together with experts such as Nobel laureate Daniel Kahneman, the Israeli-American psychologist and economist, backed a manifesto which calls for policy-makers to include wellbeing measures in their decision-making process.

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European Commission Executive Vice President Frans Timmermans delivers a speech about climate change to students at Tsinghua University in Beijing on July 3, 2023. (GREG BAKER)

A top EU climate official said Monday there is a "contradiction" between China's ambitious goals to combat global warming and its continued building of coal-fired power plants.

European Commission Vice President Frans Timmermans said in Beijing he was "convinced that China is willing to go in the right direction".

"But at the same time, it's also true that... more coal-fired power plants are opened," Timmermans said in a speech at Tsinghua University.

"And that seems to be in contradiction."

China is also the biggest emitter of the greenhouse gases driving climate change, such as carbon dioxide (CO2), and its emissions pledges are seen as essential to keeping global temperature rise well below two degrees Celsius.

However, China relied on coal for nearly 60 percent of its electricity last year.

Greenpeace said in April that China has approved a major surge in coal power so far this year, accusing it of prioritising energy supply over its pledge to reduce emissions from fossil fuels.

The jump in approvals for coal-fired power plants has added to concerns that China will backtrack on its goals to peak emissions between 2026 and 2030 and become carbon-neutral by 2060.

Timmermans' comments come on the heels of record-setting heatwaves and flooding across China in recent weeks that have underscored the potential impacts of continued upticks in global temperatures.

He also warned of the consequences of not restricting global warming to 1.5 degrees Celsius, saying this would lead to a "significant and widespread increase in adverse impacts of climate change, including in extreme weather events".

China's top climate centre announced at the weekend that 2023 has seen a record number of high-temperature days over a six-month period.

Beijing logged its hottest June day ever recorded, the national weather service said last month, as swaths of northern China sweltered in 40-degree heat.

Heavy sustained rainfall in central and southern China has also led to severe flooding in recent days, with more than 14,000 people forced to evacuate in Hunan Province, according to state news agency Xinhua.

The United Nations has warned it is near-certain that 2023-2027 will be the warmest five-year period ever recorded, as greenhouse gasses and the El Nino climate phenomenon combine to send temperatures soaring.

Beijing has repeatedly urged developed nations in recent years to honour their climate finance pledges.

China has rejected the idea that it should no longer be considered a developing country, even though it is now the world's second-biggest economy.

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PARIS  Amid the rows of fighter aircraft, drones and helicopters at the Paris Air Show here last month, an uptick in the displays of one key class of ground-based systems stood out: the radars and launchers of missile defense.

Feted as the first salon hosted at Le Bourget Paris since the COVID-19 pandemic, the event was also the first such air show since Russia invaded Ukraine in February 2022. Since then, many of Kyivs neighbors and allies have rushed to donate air and missile defense systems and to take stock of their own inventories.

On the sidelines of the show, European officials met to discuss the continents varied proposals for developing new air and missile defense systems, with Germany leading a 17-nation-strong initiative to procure off-the-shelf capabilities, and France pushing for a smaller, organic approach to building up European industry.

French President Emmanuel Macron used the forum to argue against the Berlin-led Sky Shield effort, first announced by Chancellor Olaf Scholz in October 2022, which would bring together a combination of air and missile defense systems  procured from both European and non-European companies. Specifically, German officials have cited Raytheons Patriot system and the Arrow 3 system developed by Israel Aerospace Industries (IAI) as key components of the Sky Shield system.

Macron warned at his conference against relying on non-European systems and that an Iron Dome-like missile defense initiative, as Israel has it, could not work for the whole continent of Europe.

When we talk air defense, we would be wrong to rush into capacity. The question is, first of all, strategic, he said June 19 at the air show, speaking to representatives from 20 European nations as well as NATO.

What Ukraine shows is we can only give Kyiv what we have and produce, he continued. What comes from non-European countries is less manageable. It is subject to timetables, priorities and sometimes even authorizations from third countries, he added.

A recent report by the Washington, D.C.-based Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS) assessed that Europes militaries lack sufficient systems to counter long-range guided and unguided missiles, and while militaries possess a number of short- and medium-range systems, many are dated and originally of Soviet stock.

Europes piecemeal approach to air and missile defense at the national level is no longer a sustainable strategy, the report said.

Germanys vision for the European Sky Shield Initiative (ESSI) would combine existing short-, medium-, and long-range air and missile defense systems coming from Europe, the United States, and Israel.

To date, 17 European nations have committed to supporting the endeavor, including Belgium, Bulgaria, the Czech Republic, Estonia, Finland, Hungary, Latvia, Lithuania, the Netherlands, Norway, Romania, Slovakia, Slovenia, Sweden and the United Kingdom. As of this articles writing, France and Italy are unaffiliated, although German officials have asserted the door remains open for new members.

But the French presidents address at the air show left little doubt that Paris is not keen to sign onto Sky Shield. Macron used the forum to announce that the Franco-Italian-built SAMP/T missile defense system was officially delivered and operational in Ukraine, following deliveries in May. Its really Europe protecting Europe, and thus at the heart of our project, he said.

He also announced a joint procurement by five European nations  France, Belgium, Cyprus, Estonia and Hungary  of Mistral 3 air defense missiles produced by weapons-maker MBDA. Some of those nations have also committed to the Sky Shield effort.

The French-led initiative will be overseen by the ministrys procurement arm Direction Generale de lArmement (DGA) on behalf of the partner nations. The total number of missiles to be ordered remains unconfirmed, although French defense officials stated on June 20 that it could be near 1,000.

MBDA did not respond to inquiries on how the missiles are to be divided between the participating nations or when the deliveries would begin. The production rate for the Mistral, which is currently 20 units per month, will climb by 40 percent  or 28 units per month  in 2024, a company spokesperson told Defense News in an email.

Other missile manufacturers at the show were eager for Germanys effort to move forward. In June, lawmakers in Berlin gave the green light to approve an advance payment for the procurement of Arrow 3 components, as part of a deal that could reportedly total $4.3 billion.

In an interview with Defense News, IAIs chief executive Boaz Levy hailed the move as a step in the right direction to be able to deliver the systems on time.

Our goal currently is to finalize and have a contract signed before the end of the year to be able to deploy the first Arrow 3s to Germany by 2025, Levy said.

He added that training would likely be a matter of a few months, with parts happening in Israel and Germany.

Levy advertised the system as complementary to Germanys own defensive architecture. The Arrow 3 will add another layer of protection and allow German forces to not only control their territory but also their allies and neighbors as it has a huge footprint, he said.

The system boasts a two-stage interceptor capable of targeting missiles launched more than 2,000 kilometers away.

Since the news first broke last year that Germany was considering the Arrow 3 system, with the countrys air force as a key proponent, experts have debated how difficult it would be to integrate a non-NATO system with European equipment.
Every Barbie-inspired outfit Margot Robbie has worn on the 'Barbie' press tour so far

Every Barbie-inspired outfit Margot Robbie has worn on the 'Barbie' press tour so far

It seems that Margot Robbie is the only one committing to the pink "Barbie" theme. Jon Kopaloff/Stringer via Getty Images

Margot Robbie looked like a princess in her "Barbie" inspired-gown for the European premiere.

On the "Barbie" global press tour, she's donned outfits channeling different versions of the famous doll.

Here are all the outfits, some of which were direct copies of those worn by Barbie dolls.

The "Barbie" global press tour began in Los Angeles, where Margot Robbie went for a modern Barbie look.

Robbie posed in front of a pink 1956 Chevy that was used in the movie. Jon Kopaloff/Getty Images

Robbie's stylist, Andrew Mukamal, said on Instagram that this outfit was inspired by the 2015 Pink & Fabulous Barbie doll.

The "Barbie" star wore a halter Valentino minidress and white Manolo Blahnik heels, according to Elle.

Here's what the '56 Chevy looks like in the trailers.

The car looks more like a toy in Barbie Land. Warner Bros.

In the highly anticipated movie, Robbie plays the titular character as she goes on a journey of self-discovery. The movie, directed by Greta Gerwig, has a star-studded cast that includes Ryan Gosling, Will Ferrell, Issa Rae, Helen Mirren, and John Cena.

Next on the tour was Australia, where Robbie channeled the outfit worn by the first Barbie doll.

Robbie wore a black-and-white strapless dress for a press event. She kept the sunglasses on for a fan event in Australia. Caroline McCredie Photography / Barbie Media / James Gourley / Getty Images

Barbie was first released in 1959, and the doll wore a striped swimsuit, black heels, and sunglasses.

Robbie wore the swimsuit in the first trailer for the movie.

In the scene, Barbie is depicted as a giant among children. Warner Bros

Robbie then attended Vogue's "Barbie" celebration party at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Sydney.

While this outfit isn't based on a particular Barbie doll, the Versace pink metallic minidress still fits the movie's color theme. Don Arnold / WireImage

This Versace look doesn't appear to have been inspired by a Barbie doll but is reminiscent of a look once worn by the model Claudia Schiffer.

At the "Barbie" premiere in Seoul, South Korea, Robbie went a step further when she wore two Barbie-inspired outfits.

Margot channeled the 1985 Day to Night edition of Barbie. Han Myung-Gu / WireImage / Barbie Media

The 1985 Day to Night edition of Barbie featured a reversible skirt that allowed children to change between the two outfits, hence why Robbie had her own transformation on the night.

The next day, Robbie dressed as a '60s Barbie when arriving at a Seoul press conference.

Robbie's outfit was completed with a small heart-shaped bag and pink heels. Han Myung-Gu / WireImage

Mukamal said on Instagram that this outfit was inspired by the 1964 Sparkling Pink version of Barbie.

Robbie jumped to the '90s for inspiration for the premiere in Naucalpan de Juarez, Mexico.

Robbie even had similar accessories to match the doll's. Hector Vivas / Getty Images / Tiktok / bxmbobarbie

According to Page Six, Robbie was wearing a sheer long-sleeved top over a strapless neon pink Balmain minidress to the carpet.

Robbie stuck with the 90s for her next outfit at the Mexico photocall at Four Seasons Hotel Mexico City.

This look was inspired by the 1992 Totally Hair edition of "Barbie." Hector Vivas / Getty Images / Yvonne Hemsey / Getty Images

According to InStyle, Robbie is wearing a Pucci minidress with Chanel bow-like earrings and Manolo Blahnik heels.

At the "Barbie" World Premiere in LA California, Robbie opted for a classy 60s Barbie look.

Robbie was channeling the 1961 Solo in the Spotlight doll, complete with the diamond choker necklace and pink handkerchief. Axelle / Bauer-Griffin / FilmMagic / Barbie Media / Mattel, Inc

Harper's Bazaar reported that the glittering gown is a custom Schiaparelli dress.

Robbie stayed in 1960 for the London premiere with a look inspired by "Enchanted Evening" Barbie.

Margot Robbie's look at the "Barbie" premiere in London was inspired by "Enchanted Evening" Barbie. Jed Cullen / Dave Benett / WireImage / Mattel

According to InStyle, the Vivienne Westwood gown featured a tulle stole to mimic the original Barbie's faux fur, a rosette applique, and a train that resembles the one you could detach from the doll's hip.

Robbie also wore a stacked pearl collar and PVC pumps.

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Everything student-loan borrowers need to know about what will happen when payments restart this fall without broad debt relief

Biden announced a new plan to transition borrowers back into repayment after the Supreme Court struck down his broad debt relief. Getty Images

Biden announced a new plan to transition borrowers back into repayment after his broad debt relief was struck down.

The plan includes a 12-month "on-ramp" period and a new income-driven repayment plan.

Here's everything borrowers need to know before payments resume in October.

Student-loan borrowers are not getting broad debt cancellation anytime soon  and they still have to resume payments in just a few months.

Last week, the Supreme Court struck down President Joe Biden's plan to cancel up to $20,000 in student debt for federal borrowers. By a 6-3 ruling, the high court ruled that the president overreached his authority by using the HEROES Act of 2003 to enact the debt relief, which allows the Education Secretary to waive or modify student-loan balances in connection with a national emergency.

But Biden is trying again. He announced just hours after the high court's decision that Education Secretary Miguel Cardona has started the process of using the Higher Education Act of 1965, which allows the secretary to waive or compromise student loans without the reliance on a national emergency.

That process could take a lot longer than Biden's first debt relief proposal, meaning borrowers will have to resume payments in October without any reduction to their balances. But Cardona announced a plan to ease that process, as well.

"We're creating an on-ramp for repayment for up to one year for those who need it," Cardona said during a Friday press briefing. "This means although interest will accrue starting September 1st and payments are due starting in October, we'll help borrowers who are struggling to make payments avoid harsh financial consequences, such as delinquencies and wage garnishments. Borrowers who can make payments should."

Along with the on-ramp period, Cardona also said his department has finalized a new income-driven repayment plan for borrowers. Here's everything borrowers need to know before they get hit with a student-loan bill this fall.

An on-ramp period for borrowers who miss payments in the first 12 months

According to an Education Department fact sheet, the department will implement a 12-month "on-ramp" period running from October 1, 2023 to September 30, 2024 to ensure "financially vulnerable borrowers who miss monthly payments during this period are not considered delinquent, reported to credit bureaus, placed in default, or referred to debt collection agencies."

As Cardona noted, interest will still accrue on borrowers balances during this time so he recommends borrowers who can make payments on their loans should do so. Additionally, any missed payments will not count toward borrowers' loan forgiveness progress under Public Service Loan Forgiveness or any of the income-driven repayment plans.

A new income-driven repayment plan

Along with the on-ramp period, the department has finalized its new income-driven repayment  called the Saving on a Valuable Education, or SAVE plan  which it says is "the most affordable repayment plan in history."

Here are the elements of the new plan that will go into effect this summer:

The plan increases the income exemption from 150% above the poverty line to 225%, meaning that borrowers earning $32,800 or less or a family of four earning $67,500 or less will not owe student-loan payments

The plan eliminates remaining interest on student-loan balances if a borrower makes their monthly payments, meaning their balance won't grow due to unpaid interest

And the plan does not require a spouse to cosign the application.

How do I apply for the SAVE plan?

If a borrower is already enrolled in the REPAYE plan  an existing income-driven repayment plan  they will automatically be put on the SAVE plan when it becomes available. For borrowers who are not already enrolled, they can apply for an income-driven repayment plan at studentaid.gov and select the REPAYE Plan, which will automatically enroll them in the SAVE plan.

The application for SAVE will become available later this summer, and borrowers will be notified once it is up.

How do I know if I'm already on the REPAYE plan?

If a borrower is enrolled in an income-driven repayment plan, they can go to studentaid.gov and select the "My Aid" page, which will list their repayment plan. If the website says the borrower is on REPAYE, they do not need to take any additional action to enroll in SAVE. If the borrower is not on a REPAYE plan, they will need to switch to that plan in order to receive the benefits of SAVE.

What SAVE Plan benefits are coming next year?

In July 2024, the department plans to implement the following benefits:

Payments on undergraduate student loans will be reduced from 10% to 5% of borrowers' discretionary income

Borrowers with original balances of $12,000 or less will receive loan forgiveness on their remaining balances after ten years of payments

Borrowers will automatically receive credit toward forgiveness for any periods in deferment or forbearance

And borrowers who are 75 days late on payments will automatically be enrolled in an income-driven repayment plan if they agreed to allow the department to access their tax information.

When borrowers will find out how much they owe in October

Borrowers will be receive a bill either in September or October, at least 21 days before the payment due date, with their payment amount and when it is due. Borrowers who have left school within the last six months have an automatic grace period, so their first bill might be delayed.

Borrowers who have loans currently in default can take part in the Fresh Start initiative, which will return their loans to good standing before payments resume.

Read the original article on Business Insider
Social Security checks wait to be mailed in 2005 from the U.S. Treasury's Fiscal Services facility in Philadelphia. (Bradley C Bower/AP)

It has been nearly 40 years since Congress was able to find common ground on the future of Social Security. While millions of people depend on the system as a lifeline, politicians have done little to slow the erosion of the programs finances.

If the projections in the latest trustees report come to pass, the program without change would pay promised benefits into 2033, at which point the incoming revenue would be sufficient to cover roughly 77% of promised benefits.

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That is not a long time, considering that the Social Security Administration expects someone turning 79 today to live long enough to feel the impact of these changes.

Many Americans mistakenly believe that this outlook means the nation has 10 years to think about the problem. It doesnt. The forecast isnt a guarantee. It is a stern warning about what might happen even in a robust economy.

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The truth is that if the economy doesnt cooperate, the consequences of Social Security will arrive sooner and hit harder than anyone expects. No one knows when benefits might be reduced, nor how much. At this point, no one even knows how the government would allocate a systemwide reduction of benefits to the individual.

As gloomy as all of that might sound, the harder part of the issue for Americans to digest is how quickly the problem is growing. Many voters tend to discount any concern about future benefits as the same old story. They see the latest warning as the same train coming down the same tracks only a year closer in time.

In reality, the train is larger, moving faster, on less stable tracks. Since 2019, the size of the gap between what Social Security has promised and what it expects to pay has grown by nearly $10 trillion  more than 40%.

Another way to look at that change in the size of the concern since 2019 is: For every $1 that the program has collected in payroll taxes, it has generated roughly $2 of promises that no one expects it to keep.

It is possible, of course, that Congress will find the common ground to make those promises good, but the prospects of a resolution dwindle as the size of the problem grows.

To illustrate, Democrats last August proposed new legislation under the Social Security 2100 brand. Back in 2019, that brand of legislation meant that the program would pay higher benefits into the next century  more than 80 years. In 2021, the sponsor of the legislation claimed that his revised proposal would provide only five years of expanded benefits and keep the program solvent for four extra years.

The effectiveness of the changes declined in part because the problem that it hoped to solve had grown by $6 trillion between 2019 and 2021.

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The GOP, on the other hand, offers little more than platitudes about protecting the benefits of those in or near retirement. Yet none of the candidates mention what taxes they are willing to raise to keep the promise that has been made to those Americans who are 78 and younger.

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As a presidential candidate in 2016, Donald Trump promised that economic growth would offset the need for benefit reductions or higher taxes. His vision was the economic Holy Grail, a painless solution for Social Security. In reality, the programs actuarial balance declined by 25% during his presidential term despite an economy with the lowest unemployment rate in 50 years.

There is only one fact about Social Security on which all experts agree. The longer we wait, the harder it gets. Today, we are now looking at a rate increase of 3.61% to keep the program solvent because about 15 years ago, Congress couldnt muster the resolve to increase the payroll tax by 1.92%.

One thing should resonate in the mind of every voter. If Congress wouldnt tackle the problem when it was small and required gradual change, one must ask why anyone believes that a future Congress will undertake the task when challenges are larger and the cost great.

The passage of time is financial cancer to Social Security.

Brenton Smith is policy adviser for the Heartland Institute, a think tank in Arlington Heights.

Submit a letter, of no more than 400 words, to the editor here or email letters@chicagotribune.com.
The former Chester County animal control director has been sentenced to 18 years in prison after pleading guilty to drug violations, according to South Carolina prosecutors and court records.

Ace Donovan Hembree pleaded guilty Friday at the Chester County Courthouse to two counts of meth trafficking and possession of a weapon during a violent crime, according to the S.C. Attorney Generals Office. Hembree was involved in a methamphetamine drug dealing scheme that also involved the countys former top elected official.

Hembree was indicted by the S.C. State Grand Jury.

Hembree had past convictions for drugs and was arrested in September 2020 with more than 260 grams of meth and a weapon, prosecutors said Friday, and in previous court hearings. Hembree was involved in large scale meth trafficking during 2020 before he was arrested, prosecutors said.

Judge Eugene Griffith sentenced Hembree, according to a statement from Johnny James, assistant attorney general.

Hembree was involved with former Chester County Supervisor Kenneth Shane Stuart in the drug scheme, prosecutors said. Stuart was the top elected official in Chester County from 2015 until September 2020 when he, Hembree and a third person were charged in the drug deals.

Stuart had hired Hembree to the animal control job, James said.

Stuart used his official county truck with the Chester County seal on it to move meth because the defendants believed the official truck driven by the countys top official would be less likely to be stopped by police, James said.

The drug deals went on through 2020 until arrests were made in September 2020, James said.

Stuart is serving a sentence of at least seven years after pleading guilty in October 2022, according to prosecutors and records.

Chester County is a mostly rural area of around 32,000 people between Rock Hill and Columbia.
Rep. Will Hurd (R-Texas) speaks on the House floor as the House of Representatives debates the articles of impeachment against then-President Donald Trump at the Capitol in Washington, on Dec. 18, 2019.

Rep. Will Hurd (R-Texas) speaks on the House floor as the House of Representatives debates the articles of impeachment against then-President Donald Trump at the Capitol in Washington, on Dec. 18, 2019.

Former GOP Rep. Will Hurd said he refuses to lie about being in support of former President Donald Trump, even if it risks his ability to get on the stage as a GOP presidential candidate in the upcoming primary debate.

Im not going to support Donald Trump. I recognize the impact that has on my ability to get access to the debate stage, but I cant lie, Hurd told CNNs Dana Bash on State of the Union on Sunday.

It would be easy to say, I will do it, and then, when it comes down, change your mind. But I just  I cant do that.

Hurd represented Texas 23rd congressional district from 2015 to 2021  the district that includes Uvalde, where the massacre at an elementary school recently occurred. Hurd was once the sole Black Republican in the House and has been a staunch Trump critic since 2016. He has said that Trump is a failed politician and may even be too old to run for the presidency.

Hurd officially pitted himself against Trump in June by announcing his bid for the 2024 presidency. But as a requirement for the GOPs first primary debate next month, candidates must pledge to support the eventual Republican party nominee, among other requirements.

Former Vice President Mike Pence and Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, along with former President Donald Trump and a number of other GOP hopefuls, are all seeking the top spot for the 2024 presidential election.

I have taken one oath, and thats to protect the Constitution. I take one pledge. Thats when I put my hand on the heart and pledge to the flag of the United States, Hurd said Sunday, adding that he recently took just one vow, his wedding date last year.

Hurds office did not immediately respond to HuffPosts request for comment.

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White House Press Secretary Stephanie Grisham (L) listens to U.S. President Donald Trump talk to reporters before he boards Marine One and departing the White House November 08, 2019Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images

Former White House communications director and press secretary Stephanie Grisham said Sunday that she witnessed former President Donald Trump show off documents to people at his Mar-a-Lago estate in Florida.

MSNBC host Alex Witt asked Grisham about the former president's indictment for his alleged role in mishandling national security documents at his sprawling West Palm Beach residence.

"Is it plausible Trump was showing classified documents to people in private meetings?" Witt asked Grisham.

"The short answer is yes," Grisham replied. "I watched him show documents to people at Mar-a-Lago on the dining room patio. So he has no respect for classified information. Never did. You know, listening to that exchange every time, it just makes me so angry."

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"Ominous sign": Legal experts say Jack Smith "closing in" after piercing Trump's "inner circle"

"He talks specifically that he should have declassified it, but he didn't. So there, I think, is proof. I believe also there's a portion of that audio where he says, you know, this is off the record. And I know Donald Trump knows the rules of reporters and he knows if it needs to be off the record that they can't talk about it. So I think he was covering himself in that regard," she continued."

"And, you know, I was thinking about this earlier. I just want to say to your viewers, I don't think people understand how hard it is to get your classified permission. I remember when I was going through it to get all of mine. I got held up because of a $13 kindercare bill that I did not know about, and so I couldn't get it. They go through everything about it. It's very difficult to get a security clearance. And I think people, you know, they miss that in the weeds, obviously. But to be showing it to people who haven't gone through the extreme vetting that you go through to get a clearance, it's you know, it's a disservice to the country, but it also puts people in danger potentially."

Witt followed by asking Grisham "how high" her security clearance was during her time working for Trump. "And I've got to think, given that you get held up for a $13, whatever it was, I mean, that's got to be almost offensive that Donald Trump goes around and shows it very liberally to people," she added.

Want a daily wrap-up of all the news and commentary Salon has to offer? Subscribe to our morning newsletter, Crash Course.

"It is," Grisham agreed. "And it's you know, of course, it's offensive to me. Sure. But again, there are sources and methods out there that could be put in danger. I think that, you know, I can't stress enough how by being so loose with this stuff, he's potentially putting people in danger. And yeah, I had a top security clearance and it's very, very hard to obtain. So it's very important and it's vital to our country and our national security. The only people with these clearances have access to any of these documents."

Last month, Grisham vocalized similar sentiments on CNN, stating that she was not surprised by the details of Trump's indictment.

"It all rang true," she said, describing the ex-president's illusory logic. "'Why don't we just take those documents out? It wouldn't be a problem, right?' That's so him."

"Why didn't he give them back? It's because he thinks those are his," she added. "He's like a child holding on to his little toy train and nobody is going to take it from him."

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about Trump's legal mess
Ex-'Top Gear' host Jeremy Clarkson's controversial column about Meghan Markle was sexist but not racist, UK media regulator says

Jeremy Clarkson photographed at the ITV Autumn Entertainment Launch in August, left, and Meghan Markle photographed at The Invictus Games in the Netherlands in April, right. Nick England via Getty Images, Samir Hussein via Getty Images

Jeremy Clarkson's column about Meghan in The Sun was sexist, according to IPSO.

The UK media regulator has rejected a complaint that the column was racist.

The Sun published a front-page summary of the findings on Saturday.

Jeremy Clarkson's controversial column about Meghan Markle in The Sun has been deemed sexist by Britain's Independent Press Standards Organisation (IPSO).

In the since-deleted column, which was published online and in print in December 2022, Clarkson wrote that he hated Meghan and dreamed of her being paraded "naked through the streets."

"Meghan, though, is a different story. I hate her," the former "Top Gear" presenter wrote in the article. "Not like I hate Nicola Sturgeon or Rose West. I hate her on a cellular level," he added, referencing Scotland's former First Minister Nicola Sturgeon and the English serial killer Rose West.

"At night, I'm unable to sleep as I lie there, grinding my teeth and dreaming of the day when she is made to parade naked through the streets of every town in Britain while the crowds chant, 'Shame!' and throw lumps of excrement at her," Clarkson wrote of Meghan.

The column was heavily criticized and IPSO's chief executive Charlotte Dewar said the organization received over 25,100 complaints from the public in a summary of its findings posted to the media regulator's website on Friday.

IPSO wrote that it was prompted to launch its investigation into the column after complaints from two women's organizations, The Fawcett Society and The WILDE Foundation (Women Into Literature, Development & Empowerment).

According to the findings published by IPSO's complaints committee, the column breached Clause 12 (Discrimination) of the Editors' Code of Practice as it contained "pejorative and prejudicial" references to the duchess' sex.

IPSO, a UK-based independent press regulator, investigates complaints about stories that may breach its Editors' Code of Practice, a set of rules that a number of British newspapers and magazines regulated by IPSO have agreed to follow, according to its website.

The organization's regulation standards have been called into question in recent years, however. In 2016, the UK's National Union of Journalists (NUJ) called IPSO a "pointless so-called regulator" after it stated that press regulation had not improved since the 2012 Leveson Inquiry was published, as The Guardian reported. The Leveson Inquiry was a public report into the culture, practices, and ethics of the British press chaired by Sir Brian Leveson in the wake of the News International phone-hacking scandal.

Still, IPSO's ruling appears to be a historic one. It marks the first time since IPSO was established in 2014 that a complaint on the basis of sexism has been upheld, according to a statement issued to The Fawcett Society's website on Saturday.

IPSO said the article was sexist but rejected allegations of racism

The committee referenced Clarkson's comparison of Meghan to Sturgeon and West in its ruling, saying that "the only clear common characteristic between the three" was their gender and Clarkson's hatred of them.

The ruling also cited an extract from Clarkson's column in which he wrote that Meghan used "vivid bedroom promises" to turn Prince Harry into a "warrior of woke."

It wrote that these comments could be interpreted as a reference to stereotypes about women using their sexuality to gain power and implied that Meghan's sexuality, rather than any of her attributes or accomplishments, were the source of her power.

Prince Harry and Meghan Markle in their Netflix docuseries "Harry & Meghan." Netflix

However, the committee rejected a complaint that alleged a portion of the article was racist.

The complaint argued that Clarkson's suggestion that Meghan transformed Harry into a "warrior of woke" was racist as the phrase references anti-racism activism. The complaint also alleged that the sexualized language used in this portion of the article was an "indirect reference" to Meghan's race, as it invoked "racially-charged tropes in which Black women are sexually objectified more than white women."

In its ruling, IPSO said it "acknowledged the strength and sincerity of the complainants' view," but concluded that the portion of the article referenced "did not provide a basis to establish that there was a pejorative reference to race."

The committee also rejected a complaint that the opinion column was inaccurate and that it harassed the duchess, IPSO reports.

The Sun has published a front-page summary of IPSO's findings

At IPSO's request, The Sun published a summary of the organization's findings on its front page and on its digital edition on Saturday.

"After Jeremy Clarkson's column was published in December, both The Sun and Jeremy Clarkson apologized. We said we regretted publishing the article and removed it from our website," a spokesperson for The Sun told Insider.

"The Sun accepts that with free expression comes responsibility," the spokesperson said. They added that the publication has a long history of campaigning for women, including its campaign to strengthen legislation on domestic abuse.

Clarkson wrote in a tweet on December 19, 2022, that he was "horrified to have caused so much hurt" and that his comments about parading Meghan naked through the streets was a "clumsy reference" to a scene in "Game of Thrones."

And in a statement shared in a since-removed Instagram post in January 2023, Clarkson expressed his remorse regarding the column and said he had reached out privately to the Duke and Duchess of Sussex, People reported.

However, in a statement sent to People, a spokesperson for the couple rejected Clarkson's claim, saying he only reached out to Harry.

Harry publicly addressed Clarkson's column about Meghan in a January interview, telling ITV News presenter Tom Bradby in an interview that Clarkson's words were "horrific and hurtful and cruel."

"It also encourages other people around the UK and around the world, men particularly, to go and think that it's acceptable to treat women that way," he added.

Harry also criticized his family for not speaking publicly against Clarkson, specifically mentioning his stepmother, Queen Camilla.

"To use my stepmother's words recently as well, there is a global pandemic of violence against women," Harry said. "It's no longer a case of me asking for accountability, but at this point, the world is asking for accountability and the world is asking for some form of comment from the monarchy. But the silence is deafening, to put it mildly."

Representatives for the Duchess of Sussex and The Fawcett Society did not immediately respond to Insider's request for comment. Representatives for Clarkson and The WILDE Foundation could not be reached.

Read the original article on Insider
Experts say no scientific proof that root of elephant apple tree can cure rabies

Health experts have warned there is no cure for rabies once symptoms of the infection appear, contradicting false posts in Myanmar that advise people not to go to the hospital and instead cure themselves by chewing on the root of an elephant apple tree. Experts say rabies -- usually spread through a bite or scratch from an infected animal -- is nearly always fatal once clinical signs appear but its onset can be prevented with immediate medical care.

"If someone gets infected with rabies and is showing symptoms, don't take them to the hospital because they won't be accepted," reads a Burmese-language Facebook post shared here on June 8, 2023.

Rabies is a fatal but preventable viral disease that is most often spread through the bite or scratch of an infected animal, usually a dog.

The post, which has been shared more than 500 times, claims a patient with rabies symptoms in Ann Township -- in Myanmar's western Rakhine state -- was sent home from a hospital so they would not infect others.

It says people can instead use a Burmese medicine that will cure rabies in one or two days.

"Get the roots of an elephant apple tree and leave them around the person who's infected. When it's around them, if they feel like biting, they can bite on the roots and the syrup from the root will cure them of rabies in one or two days."

The elephant apple is native to parts of tropical Asia, and the fruit's juice is used in traditional Burmese medicine as a remedy for rabies and epilepsy (archived links here and here).

What appear to be pictures of the fruit are shared alongside numerous images of snarling dogs in the post.

Screenshot of the false Facebook post, captured on July 3, 2023

Similar claims were shared hundreds of times elsewhere on Facebook here, here and here.

But health experts told AFP the claim is false.

Dr Thurein Hlaing Win, country manager for public health website Hello Sayarwon, told AFP there is no cure for rabies once symptoms appear (archived link).

"There is no scientific proof that chewing elephant apple roots or other herbal [remedies] can cure rabies," he said in an email on June 9.

Jenna Sherman, program manager for Meedan's Digital Health Lab, added there is "no effective cure for rabies" (archived link).

"If someone believes they have been infected with rabies, they need to seek out medical care immediately to get a set of shots that prevents the rabies infection from taking hold in the body," she told AFP in an email on June 15.

Andre Coetzer, spokesperson for the Global Alliance for Rabies Control also stressed the importance of taking medication immediately after possible exposure to the infection (archived link).

"While the use of traditional remedies will not be discouraged in many communities, it is of the utmost importance that the use of Post-Exposure Prophylaxis (PEP) be completed," he told AFP in an email on June 29.

"This is the only confirmed way (with 100 percent effectiveness) to prevent the onset of rabies in humans."
(Reuters) - Relatives of jailed Russian opposition leader Alexei Navalny have filed a class-action lawsuit against the penal colony where he is being held over its refusal to let them visit him.

The Navalny family intends to take the case as far as the Constitutional Court, the politician said on Monday in a post on his official Instagram page, which is run by his lawyers and allies.

"I am a convict. And they never cease to remind me that I am like everyone else. But I've had 0 (zero) visits in the last year. 0 (zero) long visits, 0 (zero) short visits and 2 (two) phone calls 11 months ago, Navalny said.

The post names Navalnys wife Yulia, his parents and his children, Dasha and Zakhar, as the plaintiffs.

Navalny, 47, is serving sentences totalling 11-1/2 years in the IK-6 penal colony in Melekhovo, about 235 km (145 miles) east of Moscow, on fraud and other charges that he says were trumped up to silence his criticism of President Vladimir Putin.

The Kremlin routinely declines to comment on his case, saying it is a matter for the prison service. Reuters has requested comment from the prison authorities.

A new trial for alleged "extremist" activity began against Navalny last month, which could extend his prison term by decades. Acquittals of opposition figures are practically unheard of in Russia.

Navalny has filed numerous complaints against the penal colony since his imprisonment, all of which have been rejected. One complaint over prison officials refusal to grant him writing equipment made it to Russias Supreme Court.

Prisoners are "as a general rule" entitled to three long and three short visits per year in penal colonies like the one in Melekhovo, as well as at least six phone calls, Navalny said in the Instagram post.

"The constitution guarantees the rights of my children  they have the right to see me, and I am obliged to participate in their upbringing. The constitution guarantees the rights of my elderly parents, I am obliged, as best I can, to take care of them," Navalny wrote, noting that his parents were barred from entering the courtroom during his latest trial in June.

(Reporting by Lucy Papachristou; Editing by Mark Trevelyan)
Family to tell first penicillin patient's story at conference

Mr Alexander was injured in the Blitz in Southampton during World War Two.

The family of the first patient to be treated for a bacterial infection with penicillin hope his story will inspire pharmaceutical companies to develop new life-saving antibiotics.

Albert Alexander, from Berkshire, was treated with the antibiotic in Oxford in 1941, demonstrating its effects.

He was injured when serving as a police officer during World War Two.

His 89-year-old daughter is due to join antibiotic experts at a conference in Glasgow to tell her ancestor's story.

Albert Alexander's family said it had been an emotional journey to his home village

Sheila LeBlanc, along with Mr Alexander's two granddaughters, will attend the World Congress of Basic & Clinical Pharmacology in the Scottish city on Monday.

They travelled from their hometown Redlands, in California, to take part in the event.

On a visit to the graveyard in Newbury in which he is buried, they described the journey as "overwhelming".

Granddaughter Linda Willason said "There is really no words - the whole fact we got to come over here, bring [Sheila] and do all this - we're very grateful.

"I think we all take it all for granted - you get sick, you go to the hospital, you get an injection. But this is getting serious now and really something that needs dealt with."

The event follows previous research published in 2022 revealing that more than 1.2 million people died worldwide in 2019 from infections caused by bacteria resistant to antibiotics.

UK health officials previously warned antimicrobial resistance (AMR) was a "hidden pandemic" that could emerge in the wake of Covid-19 unless antibiotics were prescribed responsibly.

Sir Alexander Fleming discovered penicillin in 1928 at St Mary's Hospital in London, but scientists in Oxford developed it into a viable drug.

Born in Woodley, Berkshire, Mr Alexander was on duty when he was injured in an air raid in Southampton and developed blood poisoning.

Sir Alexander Fleming discovered penicillin in 1928

He was transferred to Oxford's Radcliffe Infirmary, where he was treated with the newly-discovered antibiotic, and showed immediate improvement.

But penicillin could not be isolated in time to complete the cure and he died on 15 March 1941.

However, the episode proved penicillin worked on humans and many other people who were injured during the war in the following years benefitted from the antibiotic.

Professor Michael Barrett, a microbiologist at the University of Glasgow, said when looking at the impact of penicillin on the war "timing was everything".

He added: "By having Albert there in that condition to treat at that time and to show the potential to work we probably shaved a year off the Second World War."

But professor Barrett has said there is currently not enough investment into new antibiotics and he has warned that this could lead to a potential crisis.

He will join Mr Alexander's family at the conference in Glasgow.

Follow BBC South on Facebook, Twitter, or Instagram. Send your story ideas to south.newsonline@bbc.co.uk.
Sammy Valerio feeds a bottle of milk to a young lamb with the help of Gil Ma, the director of The Farm at Gardner Village in West Jordan, on Tuesday, June 20, 2023. | Scott G Winterton, Deseret News

I gotta grab an apple for these guys, then Ill be right with you.

Thats Gil Ma talking, resident farmer at The Farm at Gardner Village in West Jordan.

These guys are his horses.

Gils love affair with horses  with all animals, for that matter  dates back to his childhood, when he needed support and couldnt find any at home.

His parents, hell tell you, were serial closet abusers, the kind of people who smacked you around physically, sexually, emotionally, verbally and mentally  and went to church on Sunday.

I didnt want there to be a God if he was like my parents, is how Gil puts it after hes distributed his apples and sits down to talk. Hes wearing overalls over a snap-button shirt, with a well-worn straw cowboy hat and a Santa Claus beard  just the uniform youd expect for a 58-year-old man who has dedicated his life to making sure animals have a good home.

In addition to horses, The Farm is filled with cows, goats, sheep, donkeys, pigs, alpacas, bunnies, turkeys, ducks, roosters, chickens and even a few emus. The one thing all these animals have in common is nobody else wanted them. All have been rescued.

Gil Ma, the director of the farm at Gardner Village in West Jordan, introduces Kalli Pendley and her daughter Ellie Pendley to Prudence the kissing alpaca on Tuesday, June 20, 2023. | Scott G Winterton, Deseret News

Gil could tell you the rescue story about each and every one of the dozens of animals currently in residence at The Farm, but for context, he begins with the rescue story about the person who made all this possible: himself.

The abuse started before he can literally remember. I blocked out the first seven years of my life, he says matter-of-factly. It wasnt until he finally got professional help when he was much older that bits and pieces of memory returned  enough to satisfy him why the first seven years had been repressed.

He joined the U.S. Army at 16 to get out of the house and away from his parents. At 17 he shipped out to a base in Alaska. The army was followed by a Latter-day Saint mission to Korea, and that was followed by college and a career as a pharmaceutical rep. He never really went home again.

Life for some reason was never easy. His marriage failed; his six children grew up and scattered their separate ways. He got laid off from his job when the drug he represented went generic. His parents never owned up to a single thing theyd done to him.

Every time the pressure would build up, Gil retreated to the sanctuary of animals.

All my life animals have been my therapy, he says. Animals can heal you.

Gil Ma, the director of the farm at Gardner Village in West Jordan. talks with three of the horses at the farm on Tuesday, June 20, 2023. | Scott G Winterton, Deseret News

He especially bonded with animals that had also known abuse. It started with a horse named Dolly that was blind in one eye. Gil rescued Dolly. Hes been rescuing animals ever since.

Eleven years ago, after hed lost his job and discovered that new sales rep jobs were scarce for a man in his late 40s, he turned his animal-rescue therapy into a business when Gardner Village allowed him space to set up a petting zoo.

Gil established his Farm Animal Rescue nonprofit (therescuefarm.com) in the southwest corner of the property and started bringing in animals to rehabilitate and re-home. Since 2012, The Farm has been a revolving door of rescued animals. To date, 119 horses  almost one per month  have been adopted from the petting zoo, along with hundreds of other animals, including cows (Youd be surprised how many people like cows as pets, Gil says).

Along the way, thousands of visitors  from schoolkids to senior citizens and everything in between  have rubbed shoulders with the animals, holding bunnies, brushing horses, petting goats, stroking alpacas, feeding chickens, riding donkeys.

Gil Ma, the director of the farm at Gardner Village in West Jordan, talks with a school group that has come to tour the farm on Tuesday, June 20, 2023. | Scott G Winterton, Deseret News

Gil has a front row seat to watch the magic happen, when peoples spirits are lifted simply by communing with the farm animals.

We rescue the animals but they rescue people, he likes to say.

This is especially true for people who are victims of abuse. I can spot them when they come in; I can see it in their eyes, says Gil. I see them light up when they hold an animal.

There are other places that can do what we do  rescue animals  but its important for this place to exist so people can come here and heal.

This is my purpose, to share with other people that there is hope in healing.

Gil, by the way, isnt Gils real name. He was born Russ Murdock. Several years ago, when he started rescuing animals, he decided to go by something that didnt remind him daily of his abusive past. He chose Gil because the initials stand for God Is Love (his assumed last name, Ma, dates back to his days as a missionary in Korea).

Hes content now in the belief that God isnt like his parents: I know hes not an angry guy. All his rules, all his commandments, are nothing more than a loving father telling you, Look, if you do these things its going to hurt you or somebody else, so dont do them.

His hope is that he can keep rescuing animals until, as they say, the cows come home. They rescued him. Hes repaying the favor.
People gather to watch others playing in the mud in a paddy field on Asar Pandra, or paddy planting day at Bahunbesi, Nuwakot District, 30 miles north of Kathmandu, Nepal, Friday, June 30, 2023. Nepalese people celebrate the festival by planting paddy, playing in the mud, singing traditional songs, eating yogurt and beaten rice.(AP Photo/Niranjan Shrestha)

KATHMANDU, Nepal (AP)  Thousands of farmers and their families across Nepal celebrated an annual paddy festival by planting rice, splashing in the muddy fields and enjoying a special feast.

The farmers were joined by other villagers, visitors from the cities and tourists visiting the Himalayan nation.

Rice is a staple food for millions of Nepalese and the crop is generally planted once a year in July and harvested about four months later.

Farmers and their families sang traditional songs to welcome the rain that is needed for the rice to grow and thanked the gods for sending the precipitation on time.

After planting lines of rice, they splashed in the muddy fields, smeared each other with mud and sand, and danced more before culminating the celebration with a feast.

The day is also known as dahi chiura for the yogurt and beaten rice that comprises one of the main dishes eaten during the feast.

Elsewhere in the country, people ate yogurt and puffed rice with mangos and bananas to mark the day at home.

The government has declared National Paddy Day a holiday and tried to encourage people to continue or return to farming rice, as many increasingly look to take up other professions.
Father of 3 struck by lightning while walking with wife on Kansas farm, family says

Before a Kansas storm rolled in, a husband and wife went for a walk on their family farm.

But as they were walking on Friday, June 30, lightning struck Matthew Campbell, loved ones said. His wife, Jen, was thrown by the force, then she immediately started CPR and called 911.

Matthew was rushed to a hospital, where he was listed in critical yet stable condition, according to a GoFundMe from family members.

It is a waiting game at this point to see how significantly the strike affected him, his sister, Keli Campbell, said on the fundraising page.

Two days later, Keli Campbell said Matthew has a small liver laceration and minimal burns. He was sedated, intubated and put on dialysis so his kidneys could recover.

Matthew and Jen Campbell are parents to three children, according to the GoFundMe, and owners of Woolly Bee Farm.

We bought an old farmhouse in Wamego and the accompanying land to start our dream - a functional family farm, Jen wrote on their farms website. We want a fulfilling and ... (knowledgeable) lifestyle for our children. We want them to grow up surrounded by the outdoors, taking responsibility for what they can, learning where their food comes from, and respecting the source of the meat we eat. We also want to share these values with our community.

The couple harvests flowers, honey, berries, meats, eggs and garlic, which they sell at the Manhattan Farmers Market.

Community members and businesses in the Manhattan and Wamego area have asked for help in supporting Woolly Bee Farm.

Please keep Matt, Jen and Family in your thoughts and prayers and if you can support in anyway, it ... would be appreciated, the Downtown Farmers Market of Manhattan said on Facebook.

Woolly Bee Farm joined us this past week at market, the Wamego Community Market said.  ... Please pray for healing and comfort as they recover from the storm injuries.

We have a long-standing relationship with Jen and Matt, Radinas Coffeehouse & Roastery said. You may recognize Jen from her number of years with us and particularly from on the Hill. You have enjoyed their fresh-cut flowers in our lobbies and their fresh produce and honey in many of our products.

Our amazing friends at @woollybeefarm were in a terrible accident last night and are in desperate need of support, Manhattan Brewing Company said. If you know Matt and Jenn, you know how they embody the best of us.

Wamego is about 40 miles northwest of Topeka.

5-year-old boy killed after tree completely demolished house, Missouri official says

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Lightning strike kills man and hospitalizes 6-year-old child, Texas sheriff says
Anyone planning a major, controversial event in Chicago should pay attention to the likelihood of mayoral turnover. Once a new administration is in place, once-silent aldermen quickly find their sharp-tongued voices. So it went with NASCAR: That was a Lori Lightfoot deal, summed up what the denizens of City Hall had to say.

Much of the media followed suit. Is it worth it? asked an Axios reporter. Remains to be seen. Lots of accountability reporting to be done in coming weeks.

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Heres a head start on some of that accountability reporting: Did you see the weather?

Simply put, NASCAR was virtually rained out of existence this past weekend. Saturdays Xfinity Series Loop 121 first was postponed to Sunday morning because of lightning, and then called off entirely by NASCAR officials. The marquee event, known as the NASCAR Cup Series, was also compromised by conditions that necessitated both a shortening of the number of laps (from 100 to 75) and a later start time, by which point many of the outdoor stands were empty. Not that the crowds ever were as expected. It was pouring rain all weekend.

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Compounding the weather-related disappointments: Saturdays big concert by the headline act The Chainsmokers was canceled, as was the planned Sunday concert by Charley Crockett and Miranda Lambert, due to flooding in Lower Hutchinson Field, NASCAR said on the events website. Pictures emerged on social media of one local music act, JC Brooks, playing to just a handful of soggy viewers on Saturday.

Fans and staff put up with the constant rain during the NASCAR Cup Series race at Grant Park on July 2, 2023. (Antonio Perez/Chicago Tribune)

NASCAR fans who chose to stay in town mostly were stuck all weekend in their expensive hotel rooms or wandering around wondering when the weather would break and the action could start. For NASCARs hardworking Chicago team, the weekend must have been a cruel disappointment.

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Given the change to blue skies on Monday, it would have made sense to have postponed events until then. But NASCAR, undoubtedly thinking of the future and nervous of what might happen with a new mayor, apparently decided that was too big an ask of the city, and opted to wrap things up in the Sunday rain instead.

Put all of that together and you have a weekend offering little usable data and no reasonable conclusion other than fairness dictates allowing NASCAR to come back next year and try again (the contract between NASCAR and Chicago runs for three years, but allows for either party to pull out with six months notice).

Its impossible to quantify the potential economic impact of a weekend where many clearly decided to stay home, given the conditions, and so much of what was planned never actually took place in anything approaching the intended circumstances. Its true that the promised global TV broadcasts did showcase downtown Chicago, but hardly in a setting the city could have wanted or easily anticipated.

Fans along South Michigan Avenue try to catch a glimpse of the action after they tear down a tarp blocking the view as the NASCAR Cup Series race gets underway on July 2, 2023, in Grant Park. (Brian Cassella/Chicago Tribune)

There was inconvenience, but Chicago did not grind to a halt, any more than it did during the Taylor Swift concert. Hotels did fill up. Its also clear that some people liked the idea, while others did not. There was no significant conduct or crime issues at the race, although the weather might have impacted that too. Troublemakers in Chicago like to stay dry.

So there is only one conclusion. Give NASCAR another shot next year, and hold most of that accountability reporting until it will make some sense.

Join the discussion on Twitter @chitribopinions and on Facebook.

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Submit a letter, of no more than 400 words, to the editor here or email letters@chicagotribune.com.
The two Fayetteville police officers named in a lawsuit filed by the family of a Fayetteville woman killed by police last year responded in court filings to the allegations leveled against them in the suit, according to court documents.

Jada Johnson, 22, was killed by Officer Zacharius Borom in her grandfathers Colgate Drive living room July 1, 2022, after Borom and other officers responded to multiple 911 calls placed by Johnson and her grandparents. Johnson believed her estranged boyfriend was attempting to break into the home, but an official said that when officers arrived on the scene, they found no evidence to support that. Johnsons grandparents, Rick and Elena Iwanski, contend their granddaughter was in the midst of a mental health crisis when she was killed after pulling out a gun and threatening to harm herself.

Jada Johnson in a November 2019 photo. Johnson, 22, was fatally shot by a Fayetteville police officer July 1, 2022. The two officers present when she was killed recently responded to allegations posed in an April lawsuit filed on behalf of Johnson's family.

Johnson was shot 17 times in front of her toddler and grandparents.

The Iwanskis filed a lawsuit against the officers and the city of Fayetteville on April 7.

"Defendants wrongful and intentional acts caused Ms. Johnsons death, allowing Plaintiffs to recover in North Carolina under wrongful death and survivorship claims. In addition, Defendants outrageous actions, in violation of North Carolina law, resulted in Plaintiff suffering extreme emotional distress; they committed negligence by failing to meet their duty of care in their official duties; and the City of Fayetteville committed negligence by failing to exercise due care in the hiring, training, and supervision of the officers," the complaint states. "Finally, Defendants intentional and unjustified physical acts constituted assault and battery."

In their answers to the complaint, Borom and Rugg largely denied much of the family's version of events and provided several new details.

New details emerge

In their accounts of the moments before Johnson was shot, Rugg and Borom alleged Johnson "struggled" with Rugg for the pistol when he attempted to take it from her. After Rugg tackled her, Johnson "fell to her left side with the pistol underneath her left breast," according to answers filed by Rugg and Borom. Borom claimed after he first shot Johnson, she "reached back over her body for her gun," prompting him to fire another round of shots.

According to court documents, Rugg and Borom also made the following claims:

Rick Iwanski allegedly told Rugg and Borom that his granddaughter suffered from acute schizophrenia and may have been on drugs or intoxicated.

Borom and Rugg told Johnson she could hold her daughter if she put the gun down.

Johnson wanted to call her sister, and Rick Iwanski handed his cellphone to her so she could do so. When handed the phone, she instead called her ex-boyfriend.

Johnson asked for fentanyl.

Borom stated he told Rick Iwanski that Johnson needed to be taken to the hospital.

Johnson believed Borom and Rugg were working with her ex-boyfriend to kill her, according to a statement from Borom.

Borom claimed Johnson pushed the female police officer as the officer tried to convince her to step outside to wait for an ambulance.

Rather than three police officers initially responding to Johnson's and her grandparents' 911 calls, Borom, a female police officer and a Fayetteville State University intern were the first to respond, according to statements from Rugg and Borom. The family's suit had described the intern as another police officer.

Next steps

In a motion filed June 28, the city of Fayetteville again argued the court should dismiss the complaint, stating it was not liable due to governmental immunity  a claim the Iwanskis lawyers have contested. Governmental immunity prevents claims against local governments for injuries caused by their employees acting within the scope of their duties in the performance of governmental functions.

As of Friday afternoon, a decision had not been made on that motion. The case was selected for mediation on May 4, according to the court record.

Borom and Rugg will not face criminal charges, a decision that Attorney General Josh Stein announced on May 24 after a review of the case by his office's Special Prosecutions Section.

Public safety reporter Lexi Solomon can be reached at ABSolomon@gannett.com.

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This article originally appeared on The Fayetteville Observer: Fayetteville police officers respond to allegations in Jada Johnson suit
Fed up with UK and Scotland, Orkney Islands look to Norway

Fed up with UK and Scotland, Orkney Islands look to Norway FILE PHOTO: Exterior of Iron Age building Midhowe Broch on the island of Rousay, Orkney, Scotland

By Sarah Young

LONDON (Reuters) - Britain's Orkney Islands, an archipelago about 10 miles off the north coast of Scotland, is considering "alternative forms of governance" which could include becoming part of Norway, its council leader said on Monday.

Orkney, made up of about 70 islands and with a population of 22,000 people, was considering its future after being financially neglected by the Scottish and British governments for years, council leader James Stockan said.

Orkney's historic Nordic connections give it options, Stockan believes. The islands were part of Norway for about 500 years until 1472 and he says Orcadians regularly ask him for a return to that country given the shared cultural affinity.

"At the moment we're not getting that support coming through from other governments and we would just like to see what other alternatives is there for us," Stockan told BBC Radio on Monday.

A row over funding for new ferries between the islands and Scotland has brought Orkney's situation to a head.

Stockan has proposed a motion for the council to "explore options for alternative models of governance that provide greater fiscal security and economic opportunity". Councillors will decide whether to back it or not on Tuesday.

Among the options as well as rejoining Norway are other British arrangements, like becoming a crown dependency, the system of government in the Channel Islands, or a model like the Faroe Islands, a self-governing part of Denmark.

In 2014, Scotland rejected ending the more than 300-year-old union with England in a referendum. Orkney has since looked at strengthening its autonomy.

From the late 1970s, large volumes of Britain's North Sea oil have been processed on Orkney, but the island has not seen sufficient benefits, Stockan said. With new opportunities from offshore wind farms, he wants the islands to see a greater return.

Stockan wasn't clear about how Orkney's return to Norway, 250 miles across the North Sea, would work.

In an email a spokesperson for Norway's foreign ministry made no comment on whether the Orkney or UK authorities had been in contact with Norway's government but said: "This is a domestic and constitutional British matter. We have no view regarding this motion."

Stockan said there were loose ends to be tied up from 1469 over the dowry which Christian I, King of Denmark, Norway and Sweden, failed to pay when his daughter married Scotland's James III, gifting Orkney instead.

There was no mention of the dowry from 554 years ago in the UK government's response to the question over Orkney's future.

"We will always be stronger together as one United Kingdom," a government spokesman said.

(Additional reporting by Victoria Klesty in Oslo; Editing by David Holmes)
Officials across the country are urging Americans to practice firework safety as accidents send people to the hospital in different states.

Almost 75% of all fireworks-related injuries in the U.S. last year happened during the month surrounding the Fourth of July, the U.S. Consumer Product Safety Commission said in late June. There were 11 reported fireworks-related deaths in 2022, mostly associated with mortar-style devices. Victims ranged in age from 11 to 43. There were also 10,200 fireworks-related injuries in 2022.

One person was killed and four others injured Tuesday morning in east Texas in an incident involving fireworks explosions and other incendiaries, the Upshur County Sheriff's Office said in a statement.

On Monday night, a woman died and nine other people were injured after fireworks exploded at a home in western Michigan, authorities said,

On Sunday, a 58-year-old man in Illinois was critically injured when a commercial-grade firework exploded in his face, the Lake County Sheriff's Office said. "He lit a firework, which did not detonate as expected," the sheriff's office said. "The man looked into the tube housing of the firework and it discharged, striking his face and then exploding."

A man in Indiana was injured Sunday night when a firework was "launched into his vehicle, exploding and causing injury," the Bargersville Fire Department said. Investigators are looking into where the fireworks came from.

Earlier in the weekend, firework injuries were reported in New Hampshire and Kansas, with three serious injuries across two incidents on Saturday. An outbuilding in Lexington Township in Kansas was on fire and fireworks were actively exploding when firefighters arrived around 10:15 p.m. on Saturday. Rescue workers dragged the victims to safety.

A Maryland explosion on Tuesday is believed to have been caused by someone either manufacturing or modifying fireworks ahead of the Fourth of July, CBS affiliate WUSA reported. Two people were rushed to the hospital after the incident. The damage to the home was extensive enough that it was condemned.

Most injuries and deaths caused by fireworks are preventable, the CPSC said. The safety agency and the Department of Homeland Security have released safety tips:

Never let young kids play with or ignite fireworks, including sparklers. Sparklers burn at temperatures of about 2,000 degrees Fahrenheit. Only use fireworks outside. Have a safety perimeter. If you have ground-based fireworks, keep viewers at least 35 feet away. For aerial fireworks, you'll want spectators to move back to a distance of about 150 feet.Keep a hose or bucket of water handy.Light fireworks one at a time, then move back quickly. Never try to re-light or pick up fireworks that have not fully ignited.Let duds sit for 5-10 minutes before you put them in a bucket of water.Check the firework laws where you live. Only set off fireworks labeled for consumer use, not ones labeled for professional use. Don't use fireworks while impaired by alcohol or drugs.Soak used and unused fireworks in water for a few hours before discarding.

Officials also suggest considering safer alternatives to fireworks, such as party poppers, bubbles, silly string or glow sticks.

Safety tips for Fourth of July sparklers

Young adults turn to apps and websites to make new friends

Shark bite puts New York beachgoers on high alert
Heres what the first Fourth of July celebration looked like

An 1876 engraving titled Declaration of Independence, July 4th, 1776. | J. Trumbull, W.L. Ormsby, Library of Congress via Associated Press

Past Fourth of July traditions looked different than todays  long before the dawn of the annual Nathans Famous Hot Dog Eating Contest and the extravagant Macys fireworks show.

In 1776, founding fathers Thomas Jefferson, Benjamin Franklin, John Adams, Roger Sherman and Robert R. Livingston wrote the Declaration of Independence, officially severing ties with England.

A year later, the United States of America turned one year old, and the very first Fourth of July celebration was held in the city of Philadelphia.

To celebrate the newfound independence of 13 states, ships lined up on the Delaware River and fired 13 cannon shots.

But that wasnt all. Even though John Adams, second president of the United States and chairman of the marine committee at the time, said in a letter to his daughter Abigail Adams that he was too old to delight in pretty descriptions, he described the festivities in some detail to her.

Aboard the Delaware Frigate, an armed ship with a role in the American Revolutionary War, Adams said that the wharves and shores, were lined with a vast concourse of people, all shouting and huzzaing, in a manner which gave great joy to every friend to this country, and the utmost terror and dismay to every lurking tory.

Related

He was accompanied by John Hancock, another signer of the Declaration of Independence, and officials from the Marine Committee. Together they ate dinner at 3 while a band of captured Hessians played music for them.

The toasts were in honour of our country, and the heroes who have fallen in their pious efforts to defend her, he wrote.

In the evening, I was walking about the streets for a little fresh air and exercise, and was surprised to find the whole city lighting up their candles at the windows, he said, calling it the most splendid illumination he ever saw.

Although the idea of celebrating the day was not conceived until the second of that July in 1777, and not said out loud until the third, Adams said he was amazed at the universal celebration he observed.

While the Fourth of July was glorious, Adams disagreed with other founding fathers on when American independence should be celebrated.

According to the National Constitution Center, Adams believed the right date was July 2, since that was when the Continental Congress declared freedom from Great Britain. But the document declaring this independence took two days to draft.

The two early presidents, who were friends  and sometimes foes  Adams and Jefferson, argued over the date. Coincidentally, they both died on the Fourth of July, 1826.
First heat wave of the summer bears down on SoCal. Antelope and Santa Clarita valleys hit triple digits

The sun is out as visitors walk past the Astronomers Monument at the Griffith Observatory recently in Los Angeles. (Brian van der Brug / Los Angeles Times)

Southern Californians should brace for another few days of high temperatures, as the first heat wave of the summer continues to bear down on the region, increasing the risk of wildfires and heat-related illness.

High pressure brought hot conditions to the mountains, deserts and interior valleys Monday, with cloudy skies at the beaches and warm temperatures over the coastal valleys. Tuesday and Wednesday were expected to be slightly cooler but still toasty. Significant cooling is expected Thursday, with triple-digit temperatures expected again next week.

The hottest temperatures were seen in the Antelope Valley, which reached 105 degrees Monday. Saugus reached 101 degrees in the Santa Clarita Valley, and Woodland Hills saw a high of 97 degrees, according to the National Weather Service.

"This is fairly normal  July and August are our hottest months in Southern California for interior areas," NWS forecaster David Gomberg said. "It's certain we've seen worse heat waves that lasted a longer duration, so I would call this a more routine heat wave."

The weather service issued a heat warning until Monday at 8 p.m. for the Santa Clarita Valley, the Antelope Valley and its western and eastern foothills. A heat advisory was also issued for Cuyama Valley, the San Luis Obispo County mountains, Santa Barbara County's interior mountains, northern Ventura County's mountains, the Interstate 5 corridor, the western San Gabriel Mountains and the 14 Freeway corridor.

High temperatures were expected to moderate Tuesday to around 80 degrees in downtown Los Angeles and the upper 80s and mid-90s in the valleys. Santa Clarita and Woodland Hills were still expected to be hottest at 93 to 95 degrees. Deserts were expected to cool down to below 100.

By Thursday, temperatures are expected to drop into the 80s in the valleys and 70s along the coast. It could warm up again early next week around Monday and Tuesday, with temperatures pushing back up into the triple digits for most of the valleys.

On Sunday, Los Angeles County's health officer urged the public to prepare against heat-related illness, especially outdoor workers, older adults, young children, athletes and people with chronic medical conditions susceptible to effects from extreme heat.

The county health agency advised people to stay hydrated by drinking water, avoid going outside during the hottest hours, wear lightweight clothing with a hat or an umbrella and use sunscreen. Children and pets should never be left inside cars, even if the windows are open.

Signs of heatstroke include a body temperature of 103 degrees or higher, dry, red or damp skin, a fast heart pulse, nausea, dizziness, confusion and passing out, according to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Seek medical attention immediately if you're experiencing these symptoms, move to a cooler place and apply cool cloths to your skin.

The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration has predicted a warmer than normal summer. The temperature map shows that in California, especially northern parts of the state, there will be a 33% to 50% probability that temperatures will be above average.

Through Thursday, wildfire risk is heightened for interior valleys, lower mountains and deserts, where vegetation is starting to dry out, Gomberg said. Santa Clarita and the Antelope Valley are "really dry and susceptible to more fire threat issues," he said. Higher elevations aren't as dry as past seasons because of all of the rain and snow Southern California received this winter.

Residents can prepare for wildfires by staying up-to-date on evacuation procedures, installing multipaned windows and weather stripping around doorways to keep ash and smoke out of the house and having an action plan.

Sign up for Essential California, your daily guide to news, views and life in the Golden State.

This story originally appeared in Los Angeles Times.
Flight headed for Bermuda returns to Charlotte due to cabin odor

For the second time in five days emergency crews responded to the Charlotte Douglas International Airport Sunday.

According to American Airlines a flight that departed from Charlotte heading for Bermuda had to return midflight due to an odor in the cabin.

There were concerns about a possible fuel leak.

The plane did land safely and passengers later boarded another flight to their tropical destination.

Airport officials say it did not disrupt service on any runways.

Full Statement from American Airlines:

American Airlines flight 2044 with service from Charlotte (CLT) to Bermuda (BDA) returned to CLT due to a reported odor in the cabin. The aircraft landed safely and without incident. Our maintenance team will inspect the aircraft and customers have boarded a replacement aircraft for BDA. We never want to disrupt our customers travel plans and apologize for the inconvenience.

RELATED: Plane makes emergency landing at Charlotte airport; all passengers safe

RELATED: Smoke in cockpit of a plane headed to Charlotte puts crew in hospital
Florida man dead in reported drowning at Edisto Beach on Sunday, local officials say

A Florida man died after being pulled from the ocean at Edisto Beach on Sunday afternoon, according to Colleton County Fire-Rescue Chief Barry McRoy.

Around 3:30 p.m., local and county agencies were dispatched to the 100 block of Palmetto Boulevard, nearby Coots Bar & Grill, in response to a report of a drowning.

Nick Valdez, 57, was swimming with friends when they turned around and found him under the water, Colleton County Coroner Richard Harvey said Monday morning.

When an Emergency Medical Services team got to Valdez, he did not have a pulse but the team still attempted to revive the him, the coroner explained. EMS contacted an emergency room doctor who told the team to stop resuscitation efforts.

Harvey said its unclear whether the death was related to rip currents in the area. According to screenshots from the Edisto Beach live camera, a red flag  meaning high hazards due to strong surf and/or currents  was posted at Edisto Beach State Park, which is north of Coots Bar & Grill.

Results from an autopsy will identify what caused Valdezs death, Harvey said.

The Florida mans death on Edisto Beach comes less than a month after a 26-year-old Norwegian woman, Liv Andersen, died shortly after being rescued from the ocean near the 800 block of Palmetto Boulevard.

According to what was recounted to Harvey, Andersen was with another woman who was sunbathing when her friend looked up and couldnt see Andersen, so she went down to the water and found an unresponsive Andersen.

As of Monday, Andersens cause of death has not yet been identified.

This is a developing story.
The forceful arrest Saturday in Akron of a 31-year-old man wanted on domestic violence and drug charges has garnered criticism and possible bail money from local activists who are circulating cellphone videos on social media.

The videos begin moments before an officer delivers two of the three punches thrown to Jordan Ely Sr.'s face and head in a busy parking lot on Copley Road. One video ends with Ely in handcuffs with a bloody mouth, crying out "no" over and over again.

The videos on Twitter and Facebook have been viewed more than 10,000 times.

This screenshot of a bystander's cellphone video captures the forceful arrest of Jordan D. Ely Sr., 31, who was taken into custody on a felony drug charge and misdemeanors for resisting arrest and obstruction of justice.

The Beacon Journal on Sunday reached out to the Akron Police Department, which agreed to allow a reporter to view body-worn camera footage depicting what led to the quick escalation of force, how officers initially approached Ely and how he responded. Police publicly released the footage Monday.

Ely was charged with misdemeanor resisting arrest and obstruction of official business, as well as felony drug abuse after police searched his vehicle and found what they entered into evidence as a 2.5-gram baggie with white powder that field-tested positive for fentanyl. The substance will be sent for further testing.

Ely's 1-year-old son, who was released into the custody of the boy's mother, was the only other occupant in the vehicle during his father's two-minute altercation with police.

Based on social media video, body-worn camera footage from the Akron Police Department and the arresting officer's report, this is what happened.

Why Akron police stopped Jordan Ely

About 7 p.m. Saturday while patrolling West Akron, two officers in Akron police Car 8 ran "a registration check" on an orange Ford Escape heading south on Wildwood Avenue. The temporary tags on the vehicle, which is registered to Ely's mother, had expired two weeks earlier. An onboard computer system notified the two officers that the vehicle was linked to Ely, who did not have an active driver's license.

The system also told police that Ely had several criminal warrants for unresolved cases, including two domestic violence cases before the Akron Municipal Court and a felony fentanyl possession charge filed by the Summit County Sheriff's Office in June 2020.

The officers caught up with the Ford Escape as it turned into the Family Dollar on Copley Road. The officers, according to their report, flipped on their lights and sirens as Ely parked the Ford Escape and started walking away.

Body-worn police footage shows escalation in seconds

In the officers' body-worn camera footage, Ely is seen walking back to the open driver's side vehicle door and turning toward the two patrolmen and then beginning to step backward away from them.

An officer asked, "What's up, man?" The other patrolman told Ely, "Get on the ground."

In their report, the officers said they moved in fast "to prevent him from accessing any potential weapons or contraband in the vehicle."

"Please, sir," Ely said in the footage as officers put their hands on him. "Please don't do this to me. I can't. I can't. I can't, officers."

Ely's hands were open and empty as officers moved in to cuff them. One officer tackled Ely by holding his legs together even after they went to the ground.

The chest-mounted cameras are mostly obscured during the 60 seconds of grappling that ensued.

This is where the cellphone footage posted on social media begins.

Cellphone footage captures punches to the face

As one officer continued to wrestle with his legs, Ely was partially seated with his body twisted onto his left hip. From behind, the second officer briefly wrapped his left arm around and under Ely's neck before delivering two closed fists to his head and face.

Ely planted his left arm on the pavement and pushed his body with the officers on him. The officers continued to order Ely to stop resisting and give up his hands. The officer then threw a third punch and flattened Ely to the ground on his stomach, occasionally using a knee in his back when Ely tried to twist upward.

The officers still hadn't handcuffed Ely, who pulled his hand free again as a woman, recording with her cellphone, said: Dont move, bro. Dont move.

Others recording the incident reassured Ely that the encounter was all on tape. They also criticized police.

Ely took one last look at an arresting officer and then faced the pavement as he was handcuffed.

I cant breathe. I can't breathe. I got asthma," he said.

Medics treat and release Jordan Ely at the scene

Backup units arrived and quickly confirmed that a medic had been called as Ely insisted that he did nothing worth getting stopped.

I wasnt trying to fight you. I didnt swing at you, officer, Ely said on the body-worn camera footage.

Well, your tags are expired. You got a bunch of warrants, an officer replied. So, if you just listened to us, none of this would have happened.

"I'm sorry. I'm just scared," Ely told the officer.

"I don't care if you're scared," the officer replied.

The "Code 32" call for a medical unit was answered. Paramedics treated and released Ely on scene, according to the arresting officers' report. Ely was then transported by Akron police to the county jail, where he appeared remotely Monday morning on a video screen in the felony arraignment courtroom on the seventh floor of the Harold K. Stubbs Justice Center.

Victim in Ely's domestic violence cases wants to drop the charges

Ely's warrants, not counting the contempt-of-court charges, stem from five unresolved criminal cases. The oldest involved a temporary restraining order from a domestic violence incident in October 2010 at a hotel on West Market Street where Ely was also charged in September 2021 with assault.

The mother of Ely's son told the Beacon Journal on Monday that the domestic violence charges likely involved her.

"I tried to drop them," the woman said of the charges against her son's father. "(The authorities) said I have to wait until he's picked up."

The other charges against Ely involve drug paraphernalia and damaging or endangering from 2021. He was last arrested by Akron police Jan. 19, 2023, in a domestic violence case. Court records indicate he was arraigned the next day and released on a $10,000 bond. He only had to pay 10%, or $1,000 plus $50 in fees.

Ely did not appear at his pretrial hearing on Feb. 2 when court records show a judge reissued an arrest warrant.

His mother told the Beacon Journal on Monday that the authorities gave no indication he was wanted on outstanding warrants in Summit County and Akron when the family picked him up from jail on March 28.

"They're just making up stuff," Ely's mother said of his arrest Saturday. "I don't understand. I don't know how he got six warrants out of nowhere."

Bond set higher after previous failures to appear

Criminal justice reform advocates with the Akron Bail Fund attended his felony arraignment Monday. One said the group is interested in Ely's case, which has drawn attention in online activism circles for the force and escalation on display in the video.

What isn't in the social media video but present in the officer-worn camera footage is the confiscation of drugs found in Ely's vehicle while his 1-year-old son was inside.

"You can't be a dad with drugs," a bystander in the video said to Ely as he asked police what will happen to his son.

In arraignment court, a visiting judge took into account the $1,000 bonds Ely has posted in the past as the prosecutor's office recommended the same, and a public defender argued for less.

Jordan Ely Sr. holds his head in his hand as a visiting judge sets the bond for new charges of resisting arrest, obstruction of justice and felony drug possession Monday following a forceful arrest by Akron police Saturday.

"I'm thinking along the lines of $25,000," the judge said. "Since $10,000 (or $1,000 at 10%) didn't ensure his presence, we'll set it at $20,000."

Ely is scheduled on July 13 to go again before Akron Municipal Court Judge Nicole Walker, who set his bail in January and then signed the warrant for his arrest in February when he didn't show.

How Akron will investigate its use of force

Akron Police Capt. Dave Laughlin said the two officers' actions will be reviewed, as is standard for the more than 200 times each year that officers use force.

The results of the internal investigation will be forwarded to the independent police auditor and Citizens Police Oversight Board, Laughlin said.

Ely's mother said someone from a group protesting for police reform has pledged to come up with Ely's bond as she considers hiring an attorney to represent her son in his criminal case as well as in regard to the way in which he was arrested.

"I just don't see that any of this is worth beating him and spitting on him," the mother said, referring to how an officer's chewing gum bounced off Ely during the arrest. "I can't even watch the tape. It hurts."

Police Chief Steve Mylett is withholding official comment on the case until the use-of-force investigation is completed, Laughlin said.

At the request of the Beacon Journal and to provide more transparency with only the more forceful half of the incident circulating online, the chief agreed to release a redacted version of the officers' body-worn camera footage, Laughlin said.

Reach reporter Doug Livingston at dlivingston@thebeaconjournal.com or 330-996-3792.

This article originally appeared on Akron Beacon Journal: Cellphone video on social media shows man's forceful Akron arrest
Former Eton master admits killing his 84-year-old mother at their Cotswolds home

Former Eton College master Matthew Corry has pleaded guilty to the manslaughter of his elderly mother Beatrice Corry

A former master at Eton College has admitted killing his elderly mother at the home they shared in the Cotswolds after moving in with her during lockdown.

Matthew Corry appeared before a judge at Bristol Crown Court where he pleaded guilty to the manslaughter of 84-year-old Beatrice Corry.

He will be sentenced next week and a judge said he was considering imposing hospital orders on the 45-year-old.

Police were called to Mrs Corrys apartment in Chipping Campden High Street shortly after midnight on Jan 6 where she was found suffering from head injuries.

She was taken to hospital but subsequently died from her injuries.

Corry, who had moved in with his mother in April 2020, was arrested at the scene and was subsequently charged with her murder.

At a previous hearing he pleaded not guilty, but appearing at Bristol Crown Court via video link on Monday he admitted manslaughter.

During a short hearing Anna Vigars KC, prosecuting, informed the court that the plea was acceptable to the Crown.

A lovely, selfless woman

Corry, a former pupil at the Papplewick preparatory school in Ascot, Berks, became a biology teacher and was a master at Eton College until 2008.

After leaving Eton he took up a position at a preparatory school in Oxford and is also thought to have taught at a boarding school in Cumbria.

Most recently he was working as a biology teacher at the independent Godolphin and Latymer school in west London, where fees are almost 25,000 a year.

It is thought he left that post in April 2020 and moved in with his mother, who was herself a retired teacher.

She was an active volunteer in Chipping Campden, serving as a key member of the local history group.

David Pegg, a member of the towns history group, paid tribute to her. He said: She was a lovely, selfless woman who did a lot of volunteering. Beatrice was extremely well-known.

Corry was remanded into custody to be sentenced on July 10.

Judge Peter Blair KC said two psychiatrists had already prepared reports on Corry and the court would be considering imposing hospital orders with restrictions when he is sentenced.

The judge told him: Matthew Corry you will need to cooperate with arrangements for you to be transported to Bristol Crown Court next Monday.

In terms of your remand status you will continue to be remanded into custody, albeit you have been transferred to hospital where you currently are.

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Former head of Ukrainian Security Service in Crimea to stand trial for high treason

Oleh Kulinich, the former head of the Main Directorate of the Security Service of Ukraine in the Autonomous Republic (AR) of Crimea, is to stand trial.

Source: press services of the State Bureau of Investigation (SBI) and the Security Service of Ukraine (SSU)

Quote: "In April 2023, SBI officers concluded an investigation for criminal proceedings on high treason against Oleh Kulinich, Former Head of the SSU Main Directorate in the AR of Crimea.

The defendant deliberately delayed familiarisation with the case file, so investigators were forced to apply to the court to limit the relevant time limits.

The case file has now been submitted to the court."

Details: Kulinich was arrested on 16 July 2022 during a special operation by the SBI and the SSU. He was served with a notice of suspicion of high treason and the establishment of a criminal organisation.

The court chose to remand the accused in custody as a preventive measure in Kulinich's case. He is still in custody to this day.

The SBI uncovered new facts and evidence of the SSU colonel's illegal activities and served him with a notice of suspicion of committing other criminal offences, namely:

being AWOL from duty, committed by a serviceman under martial law;

acquisition of military weapons and ammunition by an official with abuse of office by prior conspiracy by a group of persons under martial law;

unlawful possession of firearms without a permit, etc.

Ukrainian law enforcement agencies established that Oleh Kulinich was involved in covert cooperation with the Russian Federal Security Service and received the operational nickname Kotyhoroshko.

Following the instructions of the Russian FSB, former Ukrainian National Security and Defence Council (NSDC) Deputy Secretary Volodymyr Sivkovych (a former KGB officer) and former head of the Ukrainian Presidents Office Andrii Kliuiev, who have been hiding from justice in Moscow since 2014, established a so-called "political office" to monitor the activities of influential Ukrainian politicians, senior officials and law enforcement officers, and to seek out agents of influence in their midst to control political processes in Ukrainian society.

The SBI served a notice of suspicion of high treason on Volodymyr Sivkovych and three Russian FSB officers on espionage charges in July 2022.

As established, Sivkovych, through his proxies, controls various companies and entities in Ukraine that are used as a cover for the activities of criminal organisation members and finance their facilitators.

The investigation also established that Kulinich was a confidant of Sivkovych. He actively cooperated with the FSB's "political office". He followed the instructions of his supervisors to infiltrate "his people" into various state and law enforcement agencies, conduct intelligence and subversive activities against Ukraine, engage in espionage, and incite Ukrainian citizens to commit treason.

The investigation found that Kulinich had prior knowledge of the plans of the Russian Armed Forces to attack mainland Ukraine from the temporarily occupied territory of the Autonomous Republic of Crimea but deliberately concealed this crucial information from his superiors and forbade them to send any documentation on this matter to the Central Office of the SSU.

He deliberately blocked any attempts to inform the SSU leadership and the public about the actual situation in the area in the first hours of the invasion, failed to take any measures to protect state sovereignty, ordered the personnel to leave the place of service, and later issued service weapons to people who were not part of the SSU.

Moreover, the official left the place where he was permanently stationed and left for Kyiv on 24 February. Investigators found a stash of weapons and his documents from his time in the KGB in one of the apartments where Kulinich lived.

Background:

Oleh Kulinich was appointed Head of the SSU Main Directorate in the Autonomous Republic of Crimea in October 2020.

Zelenskyy fired him from this post in March 2022.

Ukrainian security forces arrested Kulinich in July 2022. The investigation and detention of Kulinich was personally supervised by Vasyl Maliuk, the head of the SSU.

In April 2013, law enforcement officers made public intercepts from conversations between former SSU officer Kulinich and former NSDC Secretary Volodymyr Sivkovych.

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A four-time felon, who is already serving a 20-year prison sentence for aggravated battery, was sentenced to eight years in prison Friday in connection with a 2018 Crete Township shooting.

Tomas Rekasius, 31, of Orland Park, was found guilty by Judge Amy Bertani-Tomczak in a Sept. 21 bench trial of aggravated discharge of a firearm and armed habitual criminal, both felony charges, according to a news release from the Will County states attorneys office.

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Rekasius attorney did not respond Monday to requests for comment.

On June 28, 2018, the victim, who Rekasius knew from prison, was pulling into his garage when Rekasius pulled into the driveway in a minivan, prosecutors said. The victim had been working on Rekasius Subaru Outback at the time, which was parked in the driveway, they said.

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The victim walked over to Rekasius car and told him he needed additional parts to complete the repair job. Rekasius became upset and pointed a semi-automatic pistol the man, who put his hands up and said his child was home, prosecutors said.

Rekasius continued to point the gun at the man as he backed out of the driveway, according to the release. Rekasius drove off, but when he saw the man step into the street, Rekasius stopped the minivan, got out of the vehicle and fired a shot in the mans direction before fleeing the scene, prosecutors said.

We are fortunate that no one was injured when Rekasius fired shots from his weapon, but his conduct demonstrates that he is a dangerous and volatile loose cannon who needs to be behind bars, Will County States Attorney James Glasgow is quoted in the release. The law-abiding citizens of Will County have an absolute right to be protected from indiscriminately violent offenders like Tomas Rekasius.

Rekasius was previously convicted in Champaign County for manufacturing and delivering controlled substances, and he has a prior felony conviction for possession of controlled substances while on probation for another felony drug-related offense, according to the release.

At the time of this shooting, Rekasius was out on bond in Cook County for aggravated battery strangulation, for which he is now serving a 20-year prison sentence, according to the release.

Rekasius will not receive credit in this case for time served, according to the release, which means will begin his eight-year sentence after the completion of the Cook County sentence. He will have to serve 85% of the eight-year sentence and then serve three years of mandatory supervised release, or parole.
A former OceanGate advisor said the Titanic submersible tried to reach the surface before it imploded, indicating those on board knew something had gone wrong

OceanGate's Titan submersible imploded on June 18 while on a trip to the Titanic. OceanGate

A former OceanGate advisor said the Titan sub dropped its weights before it imploded on June 18.

Rob McCallum told The New Yorker that it tried to ascend before losing contact with its mother ship.

McCallum is at least the second person to say OceanGate tried aborting the dive before disaster hit.

A former OceanGate advisor said the Titan submersible dropped its ballast and tried to ascend moments before going missing, likely meaning that the five people inside were already aborting the dive when it imploded.

Rob McCallum, an expedition consultant who previously gave OceanGate advice on marketing and logistics, told The New Yorker that he received early reports about the Titan's fateful final dive.

"The report that I got immediately after the event  long before they were overdue  was that the sub was approaching thirty-five hundred meters," he told the New Yorker's Ben Taub.

McCallum said the submersible had "dropped weights," which meant the dive was aborted, and then lost communication with its mother ship.

McCallum is the cofounder of the adventure-expedition company EYOS Expeditions. He's previously led dives to the Titanic's shipwreck and other deep-sea spots. But he used submarines designed to reach depths of 19,000 feet and a submersible that, unlike OceanGate's, was approved to reach extreme depths by the marine-classification society DNV.

He was in regular contact with OceanGate CEO Stockton Rush at one point and visited OceanGate's workshop, per the New Yorker. McCallum is at least the second person to publicly state that the Titan likely tried to ascend before it imploded.

James Cameron, a deep-sea expert who directed the "Titanic," also told ABC News on June 24 that he heard from "inside the community" that the Titan had dropped its weights and that those on board were "trying to manage an emergency."

The vessel lost contact with its mother ship on June 18, about 1  hours into its journey carrying five people some 13,000 feet underwater to the shipwreck of the Titanic.

At such depths, the Titan likely imploded with so much force that those inside were killed instantly, with no time to realize the hull had collapsed.

Authorities are still investigating the implosion, and it's currently unclear whether the five passengers were aware of the impending danger or had advance warning of hull failure.

But Cameron's and McCallum's accounts of the dive timeline suggest that at least one person on board had  for reasons still unknown  discovered beforehand that something went wrong and chose to abort the journey.

Rush was piloting the submersible at the time, and he was likely in charge of the dive.

OceanGate previously aborted the Titan's dives when the submersible lost one of its propulsion systems and another time when several floats became detached from the vessel. The company has aborted more of the Titan's dives than it has completed, per The New York Times.

Former passengers said the Titan regularly ran into issues with its battery and ballast system.

Photos taken on Wednesday appear to show authorities unloading debris from the Titan submersible at the Canadian Coast Guard pier in St. John's, Newfoundland.

A representative for OceanGate told Insider that the company had no further information to provide.

July 4, 2023: This story was updated to reflect a response from OceanGate.

Read the original article on Insider
A former OceanGate finance director said some engineers in the Titanic-submersible company were teenagers who earned $15 an hour at one point, report says

OceanGate Expeditions' Titan submersible. OceanGate Expeditions via AP, File

A former director at OceanGate said the company hired engineers in their early 20s or late teens.

She told The New Yorker that some of them were paid around $15 an hour at one point.

The director said she left OceanGate as it was still prepping its sub for commercial tours.

A former finance director for OceanGate said the company at one point hired several teenagers to be engineers.

The unnamed former executive, who was the director of finance and administration, told The New Yorker's Ben Taub that some of the company's engineers were in their late teens or early 20s.

At one point, some of these employees were paid about $15 an hour, she told Taub.

It's unclear exactly what sort of work OceanGate assigned these employees or when the company hired them. However, the former finance director told Taub she left soon after OceanGate fired David Lochridge, its chief submersible pilot for the Titan. Lochridge said he was fired in 2018.

In 2018, OceanGate was preparing and testing the Titan for underwater tours that would take customers to depths of around 13,000 feet to view the Titanic shipwreck.

The former finance director's claim came as Taub highlighted that OceanGate hired college-age interns to design and build the Titan's electrical system.

"The whole electrical system  that was our design. We implemented it, and it works," Mark Walsh, a Washington State University Everett graduate, told his university's school paper in 2018. Walsh graduated in 2017, the school paper said.

He said he and another student, Nick Nelson, were initially hired by OceanGate as interns but were later given full-time positions in the company's electrical-engineering team. Walsh was put in charge of this team, which included two other WSU interns at the time, he told the school paper.

The Titan imploded on June 18, instantly killing the five people in the vessel. Authorities are still investigating the cause of the implosion.

One of the passengers on board was OceanGate CEO Stockton Rush, who repeatedly ignored safety warnings about the Titan's hull and disregarded concerns about OceanGate's "experimental approach" with deep-sea submersibles.

Rush's previous complaints about stringent safety regulations and his ambition to innovate have come into the spotlight since the Titan went missing and was subsequently found destroyed. However, the CEO's coworkers and his friends have defended him, saying he was committed to safety and cared for other people.

When contacted for this story, a representative for OceanGate told Insider that the company had no further information to provide.

July 4, 2023: This story was updated to reflect a response from OceanGate.

Read the original article on Insider
Former Penn State student charged with felony after alleged sexual assault in dorm

A former Penn State student was charged after allegedly assaulting a female student when he returned with her to his on-campus dormitory.

Joshua Robinson, 19, was charged Friday with felony sexual assault. The affidavit of probable cause filed by university police states that Robinson and the woman started consensually kissing but Robinson then removed the womans clothes without her consent and assaulted her. She later received medical treatment at Mount Nittany Medical Center.

In interviews with police following the incident, Robinson admitted knowing that the woman was bleeding and intentionally disposed of his bed sheets. He reportedly told his friends that he had an emergency, according to police interviews.

His internet history showed that he searched the internet for What is sexual assault and Penn State sexual assault process after the incident, according to the affidavit of probable cause.

Penn State spokeswoman Lisa Powers said that Robinson withdrew from the university in February.

No defense attorney was listed.
Dmitry Medvedev, Deputy Chairman of the Russian Security Council and former President of Russia, has once again resorted to intimidating the world with a nuclear apocalypse, although he also said that a nuclear winter could be avoided if the West fulfils all of Russia's demands.

Source: Medvedev on Telegram and in an article for the Russian state-run Rossiyskaya Gazeta

Quote from Medvedev: "I would like to point out one thing that politicians of all stripes do not want to admit: the nuclear apocalypse is not only possible but also quite likely. Why? There are at least two reasons.

The first one. The world is in a confrontation much worse than during the Cuban Missile Crisis since our adversaries have decided to actually defeat the largest nuclear power, Russia. They are undoubtedly complete morons, but this is the case.

And the second reason is quite prosaic: nuclear weapons have been used before, by well-known parties, in certain locations, and therefore there is no taboo!"

Details: Medvedev traditionally proceeded with humiliating Western politicians in his article and boasting that Russia had allegedly been able to suppress Prigozhin's "armed rebellion" and "capture Bakhmut".

The deputy head of the Russian Security Council also claims that Russia is not suffering from international isolation and sanctions as ties with the "global South and the equally global East" have increased significantly, the economy has been developing in such a way that "production growth is much higher than in Europe", and the success in construction is allegedly "impressive".

He also suddenly claimed that Russia had "never tried to deter NATO" but only asked not to invite "former parts of our country, especially those with which we have territorial disputes".

Medvedev asserts that Russia's goal is "to eradicate the threat of Ukraine's membership in NATO" and that it will "achieve it".

He said that since "countries in conflict are not accepted into NATO", it means that the Russian war in Ukraine will be "permanent because it is a matter of Russia's existence".

Medvedev claimed that the war in Ukraine had become a "total confrontation" between the notional collective West and the "rest of the world" and that this confrontation "will be very long and will last for decades".

The Deputy Chairman of the Russian Security Council believes that all of this may end in either a third world war, which will end in a nuclear winter, or "the search for the most difficult compromises over a long period of time", which will lead to a new "respectful" world order that "will be based on the balance of interests of all countries".

According to Medvedev, "communicating a lot, being patient, showing endurance", and seeking compromises is better than "hunkering down together on the day of the Apocalypse".

Therefore, Russia is allegedly "ready to seek reasonable compromises", but only on its terms, i.e., to stop any anti-Russian sentiment, "destroy and ban the Kyiv regime", and accept that part of Ukraine will be occupied.

Medvedev claims that "the West will have to accept this if it does not want an apocalyptic end to our imperfect civilisation".

Journalists fight on their own frontline. Support Ukrainska Pravda or become our patron!
Former sheriff who nabbed 'Green River Killer' to run for Washington governor

FILE - Then-Rep. Dave Reichert, R-Wash., speaks on Nov. 6, 2018, at a Republican party election night gathering in Issaquah, Wash. Reichert filed campaign paperwork with the state Public Disclosure Commission on Friday, June 30, 2023, to run as a Republican candidate. (AP Photo/Ted S. Warren, File) (ASSOCIATED PRESS)

SEATTLE (AP)  A former sheriff and congressman known for his work that led to the capture of the Green River Killer" has entered the race to become Washingtons next governor.

Former King County Sheriff and U.S. Rep. Dave Reichert, 72, filed campaign paperwork with the state Public Disclosure Commission on June 30 to run as a Republican candidate to replace Democratic Gov. Jay Inslee, who is not seeking a fourth term.

Reichert, who has not officially announced his campaign, joins a growing field of gubernatorial candidates, including a pair of prominent Democrats  Washington Attorney General Bob Ferguson and Washington Public Lands Commissioner Hilary Franz. Republican candidates include Yakima doctor Raul Garcia and Richland School Board member Semi Bird.

Reichert served two terms as sheriff and was the first detective assigned to the Green River killings, named for the river where the first bodies were found in 1982. Gary Ridgway, who killed 49 women, was arrested and convicted in 2003 during Reichert's second term.

Ridgway said he likely committed more than 71 murders and is serving a sentence of life without parole.

Reichert was elected to Congress in 2004 and retired after his seventh term in 2019.

While in Congress, he worked to expand the Alpine Lakes Wilderness Area and introduced national bills to improve the foster care system and combat sex trafficking.

Inslee, the longest-serving governor in office in the U.S. and only the second Washington governor to be elected to three consecutive terms, announced in May he would not seek a fourth term.

A primary election is set for August 2024, leading to a general election in November.
A Franklin Circuit Court jury has returned a verdict in favor of a former Kentucky School for the Deaf teacher, awarding her damages totaling $240,000 in a 2019 whistleblower lawsuit against the Department of Education.

Deanna Glasser, in a lawsuit against former principal Toyah Robey and former Education Commissioner Wayne Lewis, alleged that her contract was not renewed after she spoke out about problems at the residential school in Danville, including possible danger to students.

Under state law, the commissioner is the superintendent at the school and the Kentucky Board of Education. Kentuckys Whistleblower Act prohibits retaliation or discrimination against an employee who reports in good faith to appropriate authorities about suspected abuse or violations of law.

The lawsuit is among the examples of people who were voicing complaints ranging from student safety to bed bugs to bad food at the public school, which was founded in 1823.

Glassers contract was wrongfully not renewed because she reported violations of law, discrimination against students at the school with disabilities, abuse of authority, and actions creating a substantial danger to the health and safety of students, according to the lawsuit.

The jurys verdict signified they agreed Glassers contract wasnt renewed as an act of retaliation for speaking up about the deprivation of rights of deaf students and staff, Glassers attorney JoEllen S. McComb said.

The jury awarded Mrs. Glasser, a highly qualified and experienced deaf educator, damages for lost wages and benefits and additional compensatory damages resulting from her non-renewal totaling $65,000, McComb said. And the jury awarded punitive damages against the Kentucky Department of Education based upon the malicious or reckless retaliatory motive of KSD Principal Toyah Robey in recommending the non-renewal in violation of Mrs. Glassers right to speak up and advocate for the rights of Deaf students.

We believe it is fair to say the jury made its award of $175,000 against KDE under the punitive damages instruction in part for not holding Principal Robey responsible for her actions that led to 33 deaf students being deprived of services to which they were entitled by law for three months.

Kentucky Department of Education officials said they will appeal.

The case stems from the nonrenewal of a teacher at the Kentucky School of the Deaf in 2019. The Kentucky Department of Education disagrees with the determination in this case and intends to appeal, said spokesperson Toni Konz Tatman.

Robey retired in May of this year.

In a 2019 Herald-Leader article, Robey said she had an open door policy.

Parents have my phone number and are welcome to call at anytime, said Robey. I cant address problems that I am not aware of.... I have nothing to hide. I love that school. I would put my staff up against anybody.

Is every school perfect every day? Absolutely not, said Robey. We are always working. There have been improvements since we have been there: the rigor, the expectations and focus on academics and making sure that we have got the supports our kids need and that they are growing.
A former Titan-sub passenger says they were told an implosion would be like a can of Coke being crushed with a sledgehammer

Titan debris being unloaded from the Horizon Arctic. Paul Daly/The Canadian Press via AP

A passenger of the Titan sub said they discussed implosions, The New York Times reported.

Bill Price said pressure at those depths was likened to a Coke can being crushed by a sledgehammer.

The Titan imploded on a trip to the Titanic in June, killing all five on board.

A former passenger on the Titan submersible said that the effects of an implosion on board were discussed during his expedition, The New York Times reported.

Bill Price, who ran a California travel business before retiring, said that he recalled conversations on the Titan's mothership in which analogies were used to convey the extreme pressure the vessel would come under, including a can of Coke being smashed by a sledgehammer.

Another comparison was that of an elephant standing on one foot with 100 elephants on top of it, suggesting that death from an implosion would be instantaneous.

"In a macabre way," Price told the Times, "it was reassuring."

The Titan imploded on June 18 during a trip to see the wreckage of the Titanic, killing all five people on board.

Price told the Times that on his first dive on the vessel in 2021, the trip was aborted because of problems with its propulsion system.

He told the publication that when a system for dislodging ballast and returning to the surface also didn't work, passengers had to activate a backup plan by rocking the vessel from side to side to dislodge ballast, which eventually worked.

Despite the malfunctions, the vessel made another dive the following day, during which Price saw the Titanic's wreckage, he told the Times.

"The fact that we went through that  we experienced some worst-case scenarios, and we overcame it  my thinking was, 'We can do this,'" Price said.

In the wake of last month's disaster, concerns from experts about the safety of the vessel and its experimental design have emerged.

A group of experts on deep-sea technology as far back as 2018 questioned the safety of the vessel.

But OceanGate CEO Stockton Rush, who was among those killed, insisted that despite its experimental design, the sub was safe, adding that passengers were made aware of the risks.

CBS reported last year that passengers were asked to sign a disclaimer before their trip stating that the vessel was experimental and had not been approved by independent watchdogs or regulators.

One former passenger told the BBC that you had to sign a waiver that mentioned death three times on the first page alone, "so it's never far from your mind."

Investigators in Canada and the US have launched an inquiry into the disaster amid reports that OceanGate avoided safety rules by operating in international waters.

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A portrait of one legendary Fort Worth resident by another legendary resident is headed to the National Portrait Gallery in Washington.

Artist Sedrick Huckaby debuted his portrait of Opal Lee, who was in attendance, on Saturday morning at the Talley Dunn Gallery in Dallas.

The oil painting portrays Fort Worths Grandmother of Juneteenth sitting at her dining table, holding an open book, wearing a floral blouse, looking to her right. The only indication someone else is there  in this case, Huckaby  is a half full coffee cup.

Juneteenth recognizes when Texas slaves learned of their freedom after the Emancipation Proclamation. Lee earned a Nobel Peace Prize nomination after years of advocating to make Juneteenth a federal holiday. Her efforts included a walk from Fort Worth to the nations capital. Lee got her wish in 2022 when President Joe Biden signed a law making Juneteenth a federal holiday.

Another portrait of Lee hangs in the state Capitol.

Huckaby works in painting, sculpture, and drawing, reflecting on large themes, such as family, faith, heritage, and community. Fort Worth has long been central to his work. In 2020, he told D Magazine, I was making art about Fort Worth, but always in other places.

Getting to know his subjects is important to his process, as is doing justice for them. The assignment to paint Lee, now a Fort Worth icon, was irresistible.

Coincidentally he met Lee when he was a child entering art competitions.

She was always teaching about Juneteenth. She was always teaching about our heritage and and taking pride in who you are, he recalled.

They became closer as he began visiting her for the portrait.

I visited her on several occasions and did small studies: some pastel, some drawing, some small paintings. And Id take that back to the studio to create this large piece. The piece is special to me because I know her, Huckaby said.

Lee, who sat in front of the painting with Huckaby before a large crowd, didnt have much to say about the painting or the National Gallery. She had a lot to say about injustice.

Theres so much homelessness and joblessness and the health care that some people cant afford and climate change that we are responsible for, she said.

Lee and her granddaughter Dione Sims, who was also in attendance, discussed their massive plans for a National Juneteenth Museum in the Historic Southside, one of the few remaining historically Black neighborhoods in the city. The museum, theater, business incubator and affordable housing project is beging designed by the renowned global architecture firm Bjarke Ingels Group, or BIG.

its really going to convert and revitalize the Historic Southside, Sims said.

It replaces Lees former Juneteenth Museum, a set of three buildings that recently burned down.

In 2020, the Huckabys opened a community center in a bungalow once owned by Sedricks grandmother. Kinfolk House is a gallery, performance hall, and educational center for the Polytechnic Heights neighborhood, a historically Black and Latino community. Its not a $70 million project designed by a star architect. But Sedrick sees similarities between the Juneteenth Museum and Kinfolk House.

I see it two ways. They reside and benefit their communities. But also Juneteenth is about freedom. What do we do with freedom? Our response to that question is we make art in the community, he said.
He found a love for cigars in the Navy. His popular Mississippi Coast shop welcomes all.

Clifton Williams never imagined that his retirement from a 20-year career as a Navy journalist would lead him to become the proud owner of Pass Christians beloved cigar shop.

Originally from Chicago, Williams worked for the Chicago Tribune in his youth before enrolling in college. Finding college not to his liking, he decided to join the U.S. Navy, being assigned to Public Affairs because of his prior journalism experience.

Throughout his service, he had the opportunity to travel the world, exploring fascinating destinations from Bali to Spain and Australia.

Thats the best thing about it is just going all over the world, seeing different places, said Williams. He mentioned that he had stepped foot on six of the seven continents. If I had stayed back home in the Midwest, that probably wouldnt have happened.

Williams spent 18 years of his service in the fleet, being assigned to ships that could deploy at a moments notice. During his time at sea, he discovered a shared enjoyment among his fellow sailors, smoking cigars. He found the simple pleasure of enjoying a fine cigar while witnessing breathtaking sunrises at sea to be therapeutic.

His final duty station was the Navy base in Gulfport where he ultimately retired from the Navy in 2014 after 20 years of service. Because of his love for cigars, he started frequenting Cigars in the Pass, located in downtown Pass Christian.

Cigars in the Pass owner Clifton Williams poses for a portrait inside a room within his business where all the cigars are stored at Cigars in the Pass in Pass Christian on Tuesday, June 27, 2023.

While he had no intentions of remaining on the Gulf Coast after his military service, he found himself increasingly enjoying the people and community. He decided to begin lending a helping hand to the then owners of Cigars in the Pass by becoming a part-time employee at the shop. He soon found himself fully dedicated to the profession as he started working full-time.

On May 26, 2020, Williams purchased Cigars in the Pass from its previous owners. In only four years, he had transitioned from customer to part-time employee, to full-time employee, to owner of Pass Christians premier cigar shop.

Cigars in the Pass welcomes visitors with its charming exterior, where the flags of each military service branch proudly adorn the building. The front yard and patio provides patrons with a cozy fire-pit and ample seating, creating a warm and welcoming environment. Stepping inside, guests have plenty of tables, chairs, televisions, and even a full service bar to choose from.

The best thing about this place is the people, said Williams. Like the Navy, the shop provides a space for customers to unwind, enjoy a cigar, and engage in friendly conversations with fellow enthusiasts.

Also noting the natural urge to mingle and chat with strangers in the shop, Williams said when you smoke a cigar, youre doing at least 30 minutes of just nothing other than smoking a cigar and talking to someone.

Williams takes pride in offering a welcoming environment, especially for newcomers who may feel intimidated by cigar culture. He is always ready to lend a helping hand and share his knowledge, ensuring that everyone feels comfortable and at ease.

Military flags decorate the outside of Cigars in the Pass in Pass Christian on Tuesday, June 27, 2023.

With a large selection of cigars and accessories, as well as 19 beers on tap, Cigars in the Pass has become a popular spot for locals in Pass Christian. The shop hosts several events throughout the year, featuring live music and good times, with the next scheduled for September 9.

Contrary to misconceptions, Williams wants people to know that cigar shops are not intimidating places. Instead, Cigars in the Pass is a gathering spot where people can relax, hang out, and enjoy good company.

This welcoming atmosphere holds a special significance for the expansive military veteran community along the Gulf Coast. Many have found camaraderie and enjoyment in the shop, especially over a fine cigar with fellow veterans.

Cigars in the Pass owner Clifton Williams lights a cigar as he sits in the lounge area at Cigars in the Pass in Pass Christian on Tuesday, June 27, 2023.
Five confirmed dead in aftermath of North Myrtle Beach plane crash

Five people were killed in a July 2 plane crash in North Myrtle Beach, the FAA and Horry County Coroners Office said on Monday.

Officials said the investigation remains ongoing, and identities of those involved have not yet been released.

Tamara Willard, the countys chief deputy coroner, said July 3 that four people, including the planes pilot, died on scene. A fifth person died shortly after at the Grand Strand Regional Medical Center.

Willard said officials are still working to contact next of kin before releasing the victims names.

In its initial report, the FAA said a single-engine Piper PA32 crashed under unknown circumstances soon after departing from a Grand Strand Airport runway late Sunday morning.

The aircraft is registered to Joseph Farnese, an aviation medical examiner from North Caldwell, New Jersey. No further information was immediately available.

The incident happened around 11:30 a.m., near Dye Course at Barefoot Resort.

North Myrtle Beach Police spokesman Patrick Wilkinson said Pete Dye Drive at Barefoot Resort will remain closed through July 4 as the investigation continues.
Keeping the art of two piano and one-piano, four-handed performance thriving is a mission of Claire Aebersold and Ralph Neiweem, faculty members and Piano Duo in Residence at the Music Institute of Chicago. The married couple has been highlighting the musical genre since cofounding the Chicago Duo Piano Festival in 1988.

The festival is marking its 35th anniversary season July 7-16 at Nichols Concert Hall, 1490 Chicago Ave. in Evanston.

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It feels pretty much like a miracle to have all these wonderful years behind us of friendships and so many people from around the world coming together to celebrate this wonderful genre of two piano and four-handed music, said Aebersold, who serves as co-artistic director of the festival with her husband.

The 35th Anniversary Season of the Chicago Duo Piano Festival, founded by Artistic Directors Claire Aebersold and Ralph Neiweem, and produced by the Music Institute of Chicago, runs from July 7-16 at Nichols Concert Hall in Evanston. (Michelle Kaffko/Provided by Michelle Kaffko)

Neiweem added, Like so many performing artistic organizations, were celebrating the fact that we made it through the pandemic shutdown years and are back on our feet. It looks like things are moving forward into the future now.

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Looking back on the history of the organization, Neiweem praised the hard work of the many people who have helped to make the festival successful. He added that luck has also played a part.

Weve made this into an international event, Neiweem said. Weve managed to bring some of the most important piano duos performing today to our festival. Weve sponsored a couple of international competitions.

Aebersold added the pair has brought in many teachers for students from all ages ranging from seven to 90.

Being sponsored by the Music Institute of Chicago and performing in the Music Institutes wonderful Nichols Concert Hall have also contributed to the festivals success, Neiweem noted.

The festival will feature four concerts and two master classes.

Aebersold and Neiweem will perform the Gala Opening Concert, Bringer of Jollity, 7:30 p.m. July 7.

Neiweem said this concert is a celebratory toast to the 35th year so the pair chose a program that would have a lot of popular appeal. The title of the concert comes from Jupiter from Gustav Holsts The Planets, one of the pieces in the program.

There will be other selections by Schubert, Brahms, Richard Strauss, Milhaud, Chabrier, and Ravel. There will be both two piano and one piano, four-handed pieces.

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The second concert at 4 p.m. on July 9, will feature Inna Faliks and Daniel Schlosberg performing Mahlers Symphony No. 6, arranged for four hands by Alexander Zemlinsky.

Inna is one of MICs most distinguished alumnae and teaches at UCLA, Neiweem said. She enjoys a major solo career.

Schlosberg has appeared as a featured soloist with the Chicago Symphony Orchestra.

Concert number three at 7:30 p.m. July 11 is a Faculty Concert. Performers include Elaine Felder and Milana Pavchinskaya, Inah Chiu and Sung Hoon Mo, Louise Chan and Susan Tang, Maya Brodotskaya and Olga Ulitsky, Xiaomin Liang and Jue He, Marie Alatalo and Weiwen Ma, and Matthew Hagle and Mio Isoda-Hagle. They will be performing works by Mozart, Shostakovich, Guastavino, Mendelssohn, William Bolcom, and Brahms.

On July 14 at 7:30 p.m., Duo Amadeae, sisters Esther Park and Sun-A Park, will perform a concert of Americana. The program will feature a new arrangement of Gershwins American in Paris by Logan Skelton.

The Duo Amadeae, sisters Esther Park (left) and Sun-A Park, will perform a concert on July 14 at Nichols Concert Hall in Evanston, as part of the 35th Anniversary Season of the Chicago Duo Piano Festival. (Duo Amadeae/Provided by Duo Amadeae)

We played together as children, said Esther Park. Professionally we went our own ways. We never played together until I was at my first job at Eastern State University and I had colleagues who wanted to perform Bartons Sonata for two pianos and percussion.

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Esther said she would do it if her sister would perform with her. That was the launch of their professional career as a duo.

I think the thing that makes us enjoy performing together is our closeness, Sun-A Park said. Shes my sister but shes also my best friend. I think we also share a similar musical language and personality.

Esther added, I know what to expect from my sister at all times without having to spell it out. We had the same teachers all throughout our musical upbringing so we have similar musical aesthetics and taste.

Esther currently teaches at Columbus State University in Columbus, Georgia. Sun-A teaches at the University of Central Florida in Orlando, Florida.

The sisters won an international competition at the Chicago Duo Piano Festival in 2016. This will be their third time performing at the festival.

We enjoy how supportive and warm the audience has been every time weve visited, Sun-A said.

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Their July 14 program will feature all American composers.

That program will include Snazzy Sonata by living composer Judith Lang Zaimont. Shes one of the most important and celebrated female American composers, Esther reported.

The two pianists will also be teaching a master class, sharing their love of duo performance and letting the students know that the duo piano repertoire can be really insightful and joyful to play, Esther said.

The two master classes are 1 p.m. July 9 with Inna Faliks and Daniel Schlosberg, and 10 a.m. July 15 with Duo Amadeae, Esther Park and Sun-A Park.

Tickets to the Gala Opening Concert, Guest Duo Concerts, and Faculty Concert are $30 at the door; $25 in advance; $20 for students and seniors. Admission to a Final Student Concert at 2 p.m. on July 16 and master classes are free. For further information, reservations, or free livestream access to programming, visit chicagoduopianofestival.org.

Myrna Petlicki is a freelance reporter for Pioneer Press.
Sunday marked the busiest air travel day on record, the TSA said

Travel chaos is affecting US airports on the eve of Independence Day, with more than 100 million Americans under extreme weather warnings.

More than 3,000 flights were delayed or cancelled within, into, or out of the US on Monday, according to FlightAware.

Sunday saw the highest number of US airport passengers ever, Transportation Security Administration data showed.

Storms threaten a swathe of the eastern US, while the south and west continue to bake in a heatwave.

United Airlines remained the carrier worst affected by the delays on Monday, accounting for over 300 postponed flights, according to data from the FlightAware website.

The carrier experienced more than 5,000 delays and cancellations over the past week, far outpacing those of any other US airline.

In a letter to employees on Saturday, chief executive Scott Kirby said thunderstorms at United's largest hub, in Newark, New Jersey, had created an "extended limited operating environment".

The situation was "one of the most operationally challenging weeks I've experienced in my entire career," Mr Kirby said.

The airline said it was compensating customers worst hit by the chaos with 30,000 frequent flier miles - estimated to be worth $360 (283) by Time Magazine.

But the offer did little to assist one Atlanta family, who recounted their experience of being stuck in three different airports over five days.

It came after Mr Kirby was forced to apologise on Friday after he chartered a private jet from New York state to Colorado amid the disruption.

Secretary of Transportation Pete Buttigieg said on Sunday the reason US travel has been "so chaotic" is because of severe weather, which he said had "put enormous pressure on the system".

He told CBS the Federal Aviation Administration would hire 1,500 new air traffic controllers this year and another 1,800 next year.

Heading into the Fourth of July long weekend, industry officials had been concerned that a new 5G rollout around airports might interfere with aircraft technology.

But a Department of Transportation spokesperson told CBS News there were no major flight disruptions related to the matter.

Thunderstorms - some with large hail - were forecast on Monday across the east from Mississippi to Massachusetts, as well as in states further north such as Montana and Minnesota.

The heatwave across the US south will remain in effect, with record-breaking numbers expected to shift up the west coast into California and Oregon.

More than 150,000 residents in the US Midwest were still without power after storms over the weekend, including over 40,000 people in Missouri.
Fourth of July fireworks are a Sacramento tradition, but for how much longer? | Opinion

Fireworks represent one of Californias last great bastions of local control. Communities proudly ban or sanction the sale of safe and sane fireworks at their own discretion. San Jose bans them. Sacramento embraces them. Go figure.

The pyrotechnic sizzle on a Sacramento Fourth of July is as core to our local culture as the motorized claw machines that pick up our fallen leaves at the onset of winter. The reappearance of the neighborhood firework stand in late June at the nearby grocery parking lot is part of an established seasonal rhythm. No product has such a limited sales lifespan as the firework.

Opinion

The real local engine behind our beloved fireworks is not the handful of national manufacturers coining clever product names such as Atomic Salsa. Our true providers are the armies of volunteers from churches and high school booster groups who operate the stands as their big fund-raisers of the year.

Beware, the army is dwindling. It is a reminder that nothing is immune to change.

Jason Lee, the fire marshal for the Sacramento Fire Department, has a pragmatic view on the citys July 4 pastime. We would rather have folks be able to use legal fireworks than using illegal fireworks, he said. That is why we would rather folks utilize safe and sane, state-approved fireworks.

He has some statistics to back it up. In 2021, when we all were perhaps a little loopy coming out of the pandemic, Sacramento firefighters confiscated 2,500 pounds of illegal fireworks during the Fourth period. Residents called for help 84 times.

Things were saner last year. The fire department responded to 20 fewer calls about fireworks. The unsafe and the unsane confiscation plummeted to a mere 350 pounds.

The local bureaucracy of the Sacramento fireworks, says Lee, starts with the citys Revenue Division. This is where the big manufacturers apply to resurrect each and every local stand from June28 to July 4.

Legal fireworks await buyers at a Sacramento fireworks stand Tuesday. The fireworks may only be sold or used until July 4.

Once past the Revenue Division, the Fire Department is notified detailing which local booth organization is going to run the approved stand. We often see the same fireworks booth vendors, the same organizations, year after year, Lee said.

But their numbers our dwindling. About 10 years ago, we had about 150 fireworks booths, he said. This years number is down to 97.

That is a drop worth noting. Is a Sacramento tradition dying?

Still sparkling

Fear not. At least for now

Even though the number of booths has been reduced, the number of fireworks being sold is the same, even more, said Lee.

These nonprofits have proven to be a political force to never be reckoned with in the county. Roger Dickinson, a Sacramento County supervisor from 1994 to 2010, remembers only one time when the legality of residential fireworks ever reached the board.

Manufacturers wanted to briefly sell fireworks locally before New Years Eve, 2000. It was a slam dunk.

We allowed it, said Dickinson in a recent interview, soon after he had coincidentally purchased his own stash of sparklers from a stand near his North Sacramento home  staffed by a local church.

Our Sacramento fund-raising fun has changed over the years. These days, you dont have Bingo, Dickinson observed. You dont have a lot of things that nonprofits used to use as fundraisers. Fireworks become a mainstay for some.

A secret ingredient lies behind Californias appearance of local control when it comes to fireworks. Credit the Office of the State Fire Marshal for saving us from ourselves when it comes to our desire to light things that go boom, the prospects for things getting out of hand.

In the U.S., it turns out no uniform definition exists of a firework that is legally safe and sane.

Firework safety and sanity is left to each state. The nation, mirroring our politics, is all over the pyrotechnic map.

The Face Off fireworks fountain is lit Wednesday, June 28, 2023, near Sacramento Fire Department Station 4.

California in this regard is, well, California.

California has more stringent fireworks regulations than the national standard, only allowing consumer fireworks that are tested and approved by the State Fire Marshal, said Kara Garrett, associate program analyst for the fire marshal.

An example. Firework sparks.

Sparks cannot exceed 10 feet in height, she said.

This regulation is a full 2 feet shorter in vertical sparkling than, say, Fairfax County in Virginia.

The U.S. Products Safety Commission sets the ceiling for the explosive ingredients inside the fireworks. From there, it is up to the locals.

Celebration and vigilance

As we celebrate our country and independence, this is also a moment for vigilance. Scanning the threats to our access to safe and sane fireworks, there is clearly the federal government. And the State Fire Marshal. And our ever-changing economy and the potential that nonprofits can make money some easier way.

Could the local political winds shift?

Dickinson suggests a potentially powerful constituency has yet to be fully heard in the discussion, perhaps due to a language barrier. This stakeholder may be right under your feet.

I do have a great deal of sympathy for peoples dogs who are bothered or disturbed by the fireworks, he said. I dont know how to fix that.

The future of Sacramento neighborhood fireworks shows may be as tenuous as it is for many so cherished. For now, celebrate. Sacramento, light those sparkling beams.
(Bloomberg) -- French authorities will maintain a massive police deployment overnight in an effort to ensure a continued drop in the unrest that has hit the country for the past week.

Most Read from Bloomberg

While the violence has ebbed, the shooting of Nahel, a 17-year-old of North African descent, remains a flashpoint in a crisis over racism and inequality in France that has highlighted serious tensions in the countrys ethnically mixed suburban neighborhoods.

Some 45,000 police and other forces will be on the ground across the country, the same as the past few nights, Interior Minister Gerald Darmanin said.

The instructions are the same, he said. As soon as theres something that doesnt comply with the law or is creating public disorder: firmness, arrest, presentation before a judge.

The number of vehicles burned or buildings damaged has dropped each night since peaking on Thursday while the number of nightly arrests has fallen since Friday, government data show. All told, some 3,200 people have been arrested since unrest began a week ago.

In addition to going after official buildings, one attack in particular has brought widespread condemnation  the ramming of a burning car into the home of the mayor of LHay-les-Roses, a Paris suburb. His wife and two young children escaped the house through a back door.

Democracy itself is under attack, the mayor, Vincent Jeanbrun, said on Monday after leading a march surrounded by supporters through the town. Each of its symbols is being targeted today.

Thats enough! he shouted, the chant picked up and repeated back by the crowd.

Meeting Mayors

On Tuesday, Emmanuel Macron will meet with the mayors of about 220 towns hit by violence to discuss the situation.

The unrest is another political minefield for the French president after he pushed through an increase in Frances retirement age this year that was preceded by months of strikes and protests. Images of riot police once again battling in the streets further tarnish the countrys reputation, potentially adding to the economic toll just as the government faces pressure to speed up debt reduction.

Finance Minister Bruno Le Maire will meet with a Citroen car dealer whos lot was ransacked and other store owners in a town south of Paris on Tuesday.

The French opposition at both ends of the political spectrum has seized on the crisis as evidence that the government is failing to ensure public safety and narrow economic disparity.

Labor unrest and street demonstrations happen regularly in France but have taken on a more intense and confrontational tone in recent years, reflecting divisions within French society. Before the pension protests and the pandemic, the so-called Yellow Vest movement caused widespread property damage.

Nahel, whose last name has officially been withheld by authorities, was buried Saturday in Nanterre, his hometown where he was shot at close range in a car. The officer who fired the gun has been charged with murder and is in pre-trial detention. Laurent-Franck Lienard, a lawyer for the officer, told Europe 1 radio that the policeman believed he needed to shoot.

--With assistance from James Regan.

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FILE PHOTO: Former member of French Captain Philippe Kieffer's green berets commando Leon Gautier, 96 years old, attends an interview with Reuters in Ouistreham

PARIS (Reuters) - Leon Gautier, the last surviving member of the French commando unit that waded ashore on D-Day alongside allied troops to begin the liberation of France, died on Monday. He was 100 years old.

Gautier was one of 177 French green berets who stormed the Normandy beaches defended by Hitler's forces in 1944.

French President Emmanuel Macron described Gautier and his comrades as "heroes of the Liberation".

"We will not forget him," Macron wrote on Twitter.

Just last month, Gautier presented a student marine commando with his green beret at a passing out parade at Colleville-Montgomery, near the spot where he had landed on Sword Beach in a hail of enemy fire at the age of 21.

In a poignant moment during that ceremony, the young marine knelt on one knee to allow Gautier, who was in a wheelchair, to straighten his beret.

Gautier spoke to Reuters in 2019 at his house several hundred metres from the remnants of a German bunker he and comrades from the special forces of French Captain Philippe Kieffer had secured before pushing inland.

He recalled how he had been too young to join the army when Hitlers forces occupied France in World War Two, and so enrolled in the navy.

He was on board one of the last French warships to sail for Britain to join the Free French Forces of General Charles de Gaulle as the Germans swept across the northern half of France in 1940.

Decades later he still grappled with the violence of war.

"War is a misery. Not all that long ago, and perhaps you find this silly, but I would think perhaps I killed a young lad, perhaps I orphaned children, perhaps I widowed a woman or made a mother cry," he said.

"I didnt want that. Im not a bad man. You kill a man whos done nothing to you. Thats war and you do it for your country."

(Reporting by Richard Lough; Editing by Andrew Heavens)
Froze Zone has what it takes, winning Best Ice Cream Stand in Central Mass.

Tom Cousineau of Worcester and his kids, Cameron, 11, and Layla, 13, made their way to the soft serve section at Froze Zone Monday.

When the last licks were done in the Telegram & Gazettes search for Best Ice Cream Stand in Central Massachusetts, West Boylstons Froze Zone was the clear choice of taste-testing readers.

After more than 135,000 votes and countless spoonfuls, the heated, frozen-treat competition saw Froze Zone coast past Trombettas Farm of Marlborough, the other finalist.

Owned and operated by the 29-year-old gelatician Anthony Surabian, the 6-year-old Froze Zone scooped it out against a strong lineup of tasty destinations throughout the region, with readers having the final say.

Froze Zone topped Trombetta's with 58% of the 135,034 total votes. The count was 78,793 to 56,241.

The bracket-style contest began with 16 stands and included four knockout rounds, with Froze Zone and Trombetta's squaring off for weeklong voting that ended at 6 a.m. Monday.

Trombetta's is a 45-year-old family business started by Charles Paul Trombetta Sr. and carried on by his three children, Charles Paul Trombetta Jr., Anthony Trombetta and Laura Barsamian.

Monday, Surabian said he feels his customers made the difference.

I have customers that absolutely love my product, appreciate what myself, my wife and my team do, Surabian said. Ive had so many come in and saying, Were rooting for you. I think thats what made the difference.

The search for the best stand in the region was a spirited one. Some readers offered a chilly reception to Froze Zone being listed as a contestant, citing its specialty of gelato and other non-traditonal ice cream offerings. We gave it a spot because of its standing as a destination for a summer treat.

Gelato is a form of ice cream," Surabian said. "The only difference is butter fat levels are lower, which makes it healthier.

"To me, its just ice cream, just better. Its creamier and stronger in flavor.

Surabian said one the key factors that helped establish his name recognition and build a loyal fanbase was opening a stand at the Worcester Public Market.

It gave me a lot of foot traffic of people trying my product because its people from all over Worcester, especially in the beginning, especially on the weekends, go in there, Surabian said.

For those wondering what victory tastes like, Surabian - who was getting together frozen treats for a wedding he was catering Monday - said he might whip up a special gelato in recognition of being named the Best Ice Cream Stand in Central Massachusetts.

Surabian woke at 7 a.m. Monday to a barrage of congratulatory text messages.

For everyone who voted for me, I appreciate taking the effort in doing that, Surabian said. And anyone who voted against me or never tried it, I hope this gives them a reason to stop in the store and see what were talking about.

And Surabian had nothing but nice words for the competitions runner-up, Trombetta's Farm.

Any shop, especially who makes its own ice cream, I know how hard it is to make it and keeping up with making it, Surabian said. And I know Trombetta's Farm is a great ice cream shop that a lot of people love.

Earlier contest Pizza Madness: I Love Frankie's finishes No. 1 in Worcester's Best Pizza contest

Froze Zone of West Boylston won the Best Ice Cream Stand in Central Mass. reader-poll contest Owner Anthony Surabian with some of his flavors.

This article originally appeared on Telegram & Gazette: Froze Zone of W. Boylston wins Best Ice Cream Stand in Central Mass.
There hasnt been a Democratic candidate for the Idaho Legislature from District 27 since 2002, and until recently, 11 Idaho counties didnt have a local Democratic party.

Idaho Democratic Party leaders announced Friday that every Idaho county now has a Democratic organization. And next year each of Idahos 35 legislative districts will have a Democratic candidate vying for a seat in the Republican-dominated Legislature, party leaders told the Idaho Statesman.

In the November general election, 11 legislative districts didnt have a Democratic candidate for the Idaho Legislature, and Democrats lost one of their 12 House seats after a tightly contested Central Idaho election. More than half of the 105 races for open seats in the Legislature didnt have a Democratic candidate.

Republicans trounced Democrats in races for Congress and statewide constitutional offices, such as governor and superintendent for public instruction. The closest margin in statewide races was the attorney general contest, which was decided by 149,000 votes and featured a Democratic candidate with high-profile GOP support.

But Idaho Democrats hope to have three candidates  two House and one Senate  in most legislative districts and at least one candidate in every district, said Jared DeLoof, the executive director of the state party.

That goal is specifically about the places where it seems, to the average voter, like the Democrats have given up on running for the Legislature, DeLoof said. Were going to go back out there, and were going to run people.

Dark counties initiative unites rural Democrats

Buoyed by record fundraising, the party is targeting previously untapped rural areas of the state through its dark counties initiative.

Two years ago, there were 11 dark counties with no Democratic Party infrastructure. The only Democratic Party presence in Boise County was an adopt-a-highway sign, and no local party represented Clark Countys 20 registered Democrats.

Now, Boise County has a new Democratic chairman, Jared Dawson, who plans to challenge House Majority Leader Megan Blanksma, R-Hammett, in next years election, DeLoof said, and the newly organized Clark County Democrats had a float in last months Dubois Friday Night Rodeo parade.

Democrats have organized in all 44 counties in Idaho for the first time in decades, party leaders said. In other words, every county has a precinct committee captain, county chair or another type of volunteer working on behalf of the party.

If you wanted to run for office as a Democrat in Oneida County, there was no one for you to call, DeLoof said. We are planting the seeds for things that we really believe are going to pay off for Idaho Democrats in the future.

The state party is focused on regaining lost seats in battleground districts, said House Assistant Minority Leader and Democratic Party Chairwoman Lauren Necochea, D-Boise. That includes District 6, which covers Moscow and the University of Idaho, and District 26, where Republican Rep. Jack Nelson, of Jerome, narrowly won election in a district that includes heavily Democratic Blaine County.

Democrats are unlikely to win elections in rural, heavily conservative counties like Boise and Clark. But their emergence will be a check on the dominant Republican Party thats growing more extreme, Necochea said.

The severe harm of single-party rule in Idaho is what we have to fight back against, she said. When Republican candidates are only looking over the shoulder to the right, looking for the even more extreme person to come and unseat them, then we end up with the kind of the policy outcomes where legislators vote to jail librarians and imprison doctors.

Democratic fundraising outpaces GOP

The Democrats outreach efforts are backed by record fundraising. During the previous election cycle, 2021-2022, the Idaho Democratic Party raised $2.4 million, according to Federal Election Commission filings. Thats the most money the party has raised in an election cycle without a presidential race.

The Democrats outpaced Republicans 2.5 to one during the most recent cycle and are breaking away again this year, raising $624,000 to the GOPs $155,000. Both parties get most of their funding from individual donors.

Whether the fundraising begets electoral success remains to be seen. But the party leaders said the money sustains long-term programs, like the dark counties initiative, voter registration programs and citizenship classes for Idahos Hispanic community.

We can do those things year in and year out, which is kind of the David and Goliath story, DeLoof said. This is how over time we make incremental change and we fight back against ... the Idaho Republican Party.
Gadsden State Cherokee will offer additional academic classes in the fall semester, according to a news release from the community college.

The new courses are U.S. History I; Human Growth and Development; Fundamentals of Oral Communication; Human Anatomy and Physiology I & II; Introduction to Business; Introduction to Humanities; Precalculus Algebra; and Nursing Concepts I.

Developmental courses  Elementary Algebra and Intermediate College Algebra  also will be available, according to the release.

Current academic offerings will continue: Poultry Production; Principles of Biology; General Microbiology; English Composition I; Advanced Evidence Clinical Reasoning; Orientation to College; and General Psychology.

It is important that we increase accessibility to academic courses to the students in our area, said Leslie Burton, Gadsden State Cherokees facilities director. We want to be as convenient as possibly by offering courses closer to home.

The new academic courses will be offered in both traditional and hybrid formats, according to the release, and will be open to dual enrollment students.

The credits earned in these classes will go towards a students credential at Gadsden State or it will seamlessly transfer to a four-year university for students, Burton said.

Students can complete the nursing program and the Poultry Science 2+2 Program with Auburn University at the Cherokee campus.

Our nursing program has a great reputation for educating some of the best nurses in our area, Burton said. We are also proud of our unique partnership with Auburn University that allows students to attend Gadsden State their freshman and sophomore years studying poultry science, and their junior and senior years at Auburn.

Students who complete the program will receive a bachelors degree in Poultry Science, and "will be prepared to work in one of the largest industries in Alabama, Burton said.

Visit www.gadsdenstate.edu/cherokee for more information.

This article originally appeared on The Gadsden Times: Gadsden State Cherokee expands academic offerings
A Gadsden woman has been charged with criminally negligent homicide in the November 2022 death of a Jacksonville State University student struck by a vehicle while in a crosswalk on campus.

Olivia Lowrey, 19, was arrested Wednesday and bonded out of the Jacksonville City Jail. A court date is set for Aug. 1, according to a Facebook post by the Jacksonville Police Department.

Police say Leah Tarvin was struck by Lowreys vehicle on Nov. 2, 2022, while crossing Alabama Highway 21 in front of JSUs Brewer Hall.

Tarvin, 22, from Holly Pond, was treated at the scene and airlifted to UAB Hospital in Birmingham, where she died Nov. 4. She was a forensic investigations major and a member of the Marching Southerners band.

Reporting at the time stated that Lowrey stopped at the scene. Jacksonville police subsequently launched an investigation, assisted by state troopers from the citys Alabama Law Enforcement Agency post.

According to the Facebook post, investigators reviewed cellphone and vehicle data and surveillance camera footage; interviewed multiple witnesses to the incident; and consulted GPS data experts.

JSU officials in a statement following the accident bemoaned the number of incidents at campus crosswalks on Alabama Highways 21 and 204, noting that four pedestrians had been injured in three similar incidents in 2022.

They asked people to contact the state Department of Transportation, noting that the university and city were limited on the steps they could take with state highways.

An ALDOT official told Al.com that the intersections had recently been upgraded and were marked with advanced warning signs and other devices to warn drivers to yield for pedestrians, which is required by state law.

This article originally appeared on The Gadsden Times: Gadsden woman charged in fatal JSU incident
Mikheil Saakashvili at a court hearing on July 3, 2023

Mikheil Saakashvili, former Georgian president and current Ukrainian citizen, made a remote appearance in a court hearing for the first time in several months, revealing a noticeable deterioration in his health, Saakashvilis former spokeswoman, Daryna Chyzh, wrote on Facebook on July 3.

I may be physically weak, but Im very strong inside, Im very strong! I didnt commit a crime against Georgia, Chyzh quoted Saakashvili as saying in court.

Mtavari, an independent Georgian TV station, aired footage of Saakashvili's statement from the Vivamed clinic in Tbilisi, Georgia.

Saakashvili reacted to the statements of the speaker of the Georgian parliament, Shalva Papuashvili, who had previously claimed that the European supporters of the former president should apologize to the Georgian people.

Papuashvili said that Georgia was sacrificed by Mikheil Saakashvilis Georgian and foreign friends to organize riots.

It turns out that the European Parliament should apologize for demanding my release, Saakashvili said, in reference to Papuashvili.

I want to tell the so-called speaker of the parliament that you should apologize for bringing me to such a condition, you should apologize to the members of the European Parliament, to my family, to me, to the Ukrainian state and to all Georgians for the fact that the founder of the Georgian state is in such a condition."

Papuashvili, look at me carefully, he said in court and lifted his T-shirt up, showing his skinny and cadaverous body.

Saakashvili has been incarcerated since his return to Georgia in autumn 2021, prior to the local elections. It was his first return since the end of his second presidential term in 2013. He has been sentenced to six years in prison following several cases opened against him by the Georgian government.

Read also: Saakashvili slams Georgia for refusal to return missile systems to Ukraine

The politician has undertaken several hunger strikes in protest of what he deems politically motivated arrest. Saakashvili's legal team, family, and supporters assert that he requires overseas treatment due to his grave health condition, attributed to his hunger strikes and maltreatment.

Saakashvili's attorney, Shalva Khachapuridze, announced in November 2022 that his client had been diagnosed with dementia and tuberculosis. Saakashvili has suggested that he may have been poisoned by Russian agents.

Read also: Foreign Ministry calls on Georgia "to stop abusing" Saakashvili and send him to Ukraine

Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy said in February 2023 that the Georgian government was killing Saakashvili and called for his release to Ukraine or elsewhere.

The European Parliament passed a resolution calling for Saakashvili to be released for treatment abroad.

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Read the original article on The New Voice of Ukraine
New Mexico Sen. Gay Kernan (R-42) said she was stepping down from the post effective Aug. 1 and could be replaced by a member of the State House of Representatives also from Hobbs.

Kernan, who served in the Legislature for 21 years since she was appointed by former Gov. Gary Johnson in 2002, represented portions of Eddy, Lea and Chaves counties during her time in office.

She was most recently ranking member of the Senate Tax, Business and Transportation Committee and a member of the Senate Education Committee during the last legislative session.

More: City of Carlsbad passes 2024 $81M spending plan

New Mexico Sen. Gay Kernan during a panel discussion on oil and gas wastewater, July 14, 2021 at New Mexico State University Carlsbad.

She denied her resignation was due to any medical issues, and said she started considering leaving the post after the last session which concluded in March, planning to focus more on her family and avoid long drives up to Santa Fe to convene with other lawmakers.

Ive been considering this for a while now. Its time for me to focus more on my family priorities, Kernan said in an interview with the Carlsbad Current-Argus. Its time for me to be a little closer to home. Traveling has become a little more challenging for me.

Shes stepping down with about a year left in her term, after being reelected in 2020.

More: State lawmakers seek long-term fix for lost tax revenue for City of Carlsbad

But she said the gap will give the senator chosen as Kernans successor a chance to attend interim meetings and get up to speed ahead of the 2024 session.

In New Mexico, legislative vacancies are filled via recommendations from the county commissions represented by the district and ultimately chosen by the governor.

This will mean Kernans home Lea County, along with Eddy and Chaves counties will all have a voice in her replacement.

More: Oilfield lawmakers claim success in killing bills aimed at energy pollution in New Mexico

It gives the new person the ability to attend interim meetings and be really ready for the session, Kernan said. They go in really prepared.

State Rep. Larry Scott (R-62) introduced legislation in the 2023 New Mexico Legislature to provide a long-term fix for lost tax revenue in Carlsbad and Hobbs.

That person could be New Mexico Rep. Larry Scott (R-62), who said he was officially applying for consideration for the post and planning to meet with the three county commissions that will make the recommendation.

Co-founder of Lynx Petroleum Consultants, Scott said his experience in the oil and gas industry, which he said was a primary source of state funding, was needed in the Senate, along with knowledge and representation of southeast New Mexico.

More: A look at what bills impacting Carlsbad passed and died in 2023 legislative session

Oil and gas was credited with up to half, about $7 billion, in revenue for the New Mexicos General Fund in a recent State financial analysis, and Scott said he planned to educate lawmakers from other parts of the state on the importance of fossil fuels, if chosen for the Senate.

I think, given the importance of these industries, there needs to be more experience in both houses. I think its lacking in the Senate, he said. I think I can bring practical, on-the-ground experience, and make a difference to those senators who seem so opposed to our oil and gas industry.

Scott said he decided to apply for the recommendation following Kernans announced resignation, and that he would not seek her seat if she remained in office.

More: Bill fixing lost tax revenue in Carlsbad passes NM House waits for governor's signature

I have a great deal of respect for her, Scott said of Kernan. She was a calm voice in the Senate. Ive been a reliable conservative voice on all issues that came before me in the House. The progressives are pushing too far on these issues.

He said his priority in office would be to support the oil and gas industry and defend it from extreme environmental regulations pushed by Democrats in recent years.

The state currently floats on an ocean of oil and gas money, Scott said. I would like to see us trust in that a little more.

More: Higher oil and gas fees could next go to New Mexico Senate despite industry concerns

In stepping down from her post, Kernan joined southeast New Mexican Sen. Cliff Pirtle (R-32) leaving the chamber after Pirtle said he would not seek another term earlier this spring. Rep. Candy Spence Ezzell (R-58) signaled she would run to succeed Pirtle in the 2024 election.

This would maintain Republicans stronghold in New Mexicos southeast region, despite the resignations, and Sen. David Gallegos (R-41) said he hoped the GOP could take the fight to the opposing majority party and its administration in Santa Fe.

We need a team player and someone willing to stand up to state government, Gallegos said of Kernans successor. I think we have a really good chance to pick up some seats (in the next election), he said. People are really tired of whats been going on in Santa Fe.

Adrian Hedden can be reached at 575-628-5516, achedden@currentargus.com or @AdrianHedden on Twitter.

This article originally appeared on Carlsbad Current-Argus: Gay Kernan to resign from New Mexico Senate after 21 years in office
Red tourism injects vitality into China's old revolutionary base

Xinhua) 08:50, July 03, 2023

Photo taken on April 23, 2021 shows a local resident reading a book at a "Red" Bookstore in Zunyi, southwest China's Guizhou Province. (Xinhua/Ou Dongqu)

GUIYANG, July 2 (Xinhua) -- China's leading liquor maker Kweichow Moutai, with more than 100 overseas distributors, has its roots in the city of Zunyi in southwest China's Guizhou Province.

The local red soil, rich in chili pepper cultivation, is also home to China's famous Lao Gan Ma chili sauce, an essential ingredient in Chinese kitchens and a cherished necessity for Chinese students studying abroad.

Zunyi also gained household recognition among Chinese people primarily due to a crucial meeting held in the city by the Red Army which has helped shape modern China.

In January 1935, an enlarged meeting of the Political Bureau of the Communist Party of China (CPC) Central Committee was held in Zunyi during the Long March. The meeting focused on rectifying the left-leaning errors in military and organizational affairs and established the correct leadership of the new Central Committee, as represented by Mao Zedong.

The Zunyi Meeting is regarded as a crucial turning point of the Long March, leading to the ultimate success of the Chinese revolution. Since then, Zunyi has become a sacred place for generations of CPC members, and the footprints of the Red Army are forever imprinted on the city's culture and spirits.

Decades later, the site of the Zunyi Meeting is teeming with tourists this summer. Yang Hongru, a 72-year-old visitor from northeast China's Heilongjiang Province, went all the way to Guizhou and Zunyi was her first stop in the province.

"Bearing the history in mind, I came to the site for a more profound understanding of China's past," Yang said.

To meet the growing demand among visitors, the memorial hall of the Zunyi Meeting announced that it would remain open at night for tourists starting from May 20 amid China's red tourism boom.

People visit the venue of the 1935 Zunyi Meeting in southwest China's Guizhou Province, Jan. 28, 2021. (Xinhua/Ou Dongqu)

Last year alone, Zunyi received a total of 81.86 million visitors, raking in 85.7 billion yuan (about 12 billion U.S. dollars). Approximately 18 percent of the tourists were drawn to the red tourism sites among various attractions.

Every Saturday, the Red Army Street close to the site of the Zunyi Meeting resounds to the melodies sung by the local "red song" art ensemble. The ensemble comprises over 180 members, all of whom are retirees from the city, with the eldest aged 84 and the youngest aged 57.

With an average age of nearly 70 years old, the elderly members are quite familiar with the songs themed on China's revolutionary era.

"We didn't know each other until our shared passion for music and a collective desire to preserve and carry forward China's revolutionary spirit brought us together," said Chen Huiyan, 60, deputy head of the art ensemble.

Chen added that younger generations are also interested in their performances and would join their chorus from time to time.

Qi Mingchen, a fourth grader from Zunyi Cultural Elementary School, is among the city's energetic youngsters who voluntarily embrace the responsibility of carrying forward Zunyi's revolutionary glory and the Red Army spirit.

A year ago, Qi volunteered to become an exhibition guide at the memorial hall of the Zunyi Meeting. During holidays and spring and summer breaks, the little boy will come to the exhibition hall and tell stories of the Red Army's Long March to visitors.

Born in Zunyi, Qi loves the revolutionary stories of his hometown. So far, he has delivered nearly 20 presentations as the exhibition guide. "I can still feel the influence of the Red Army in our daily life," Qi said.

Zunyi's "red genes" have brought tangible benefits to the locals in modern days. Official data released in 2022 showed that Zunyi had seen its GDP exceed 400 billion yuan over the past decade, treble the 2012 level.

Rooted in its revolutionary past, the city is now embarking on a new chapter of development while retaining its historical significance.

(Web editor: Zhang Kaiwei, Liang Jun)
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Triton College held a graduation and end-of-year celebration June 8, 2023 for more than 110 students in the Adult Education Program, including 14 who completed their GED. The ceremony was held on the community college's campus in River Grove. (Triton Community College /Handout)

A Franklin Park man was the keynote speaker at the GED graduation and celebration marking the end of the academic year held at Triton College held in June, delivering an address that college leaders said they found inspiring.

Juan Silva-Castro, of Franklin Park, was among the students who competed the high school-equivalency diploma program at the community college, officials announced in a news release.

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Triton held its General Educational Development, or GED, graduation and end-of-year celebration June 8, in the Robert M. Collins Center on campus in River Grove, where 112 students from the Adult Education program were recognized.

Silva-Castro began taking classes at Triton when he first moved to Franklin Park in 2022. He wanted to learn how to do electrical work around his house, and thought Triton was a convenient and friendly atmosphere to take electronic classes, according to the schools release.

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My advisors at Triton told me that I could obtain a GED with all of the classes I was taking, he stated in the release. It was a no-brainer. I instantly fell in love with the campus.

With his high school diploma-equivalent now in-hand, the father of two adult daughter said he plans to eventually get a bachelors degree.

I want to go as far as I can, he said.

Juan Silva-Castro was the keynote speaker at the Triton College graduation and end-of-year celebration June 8, 2023 held for more than 110 students in the Adult Education Program. Silva-Castro was one of 14 who completed their GED. The ceremony was held on the community college's campus in River Grove. (Triton Community College/Handout)

The GED completion ceremony honored those who finished programs in ESL, as well as Westlake Health Foundation Scholarship Program completers, Board of Trustees Scholarship recipients, National Adult Education Honor Society inductees and Illinois High School Diploma graduates.

For us, its the best day of the year, said Jacqueline Lynch, dean of Adult Education. Our graduates, completers, scholars and inductees have bright futures ahead of them. We are very proud of their accomplishments.

The 14 students who completed the GED program were given the full graduation experience by walking into the auditorium with their caps and gowns as the enduring Pomp and Circumstance graduation anthem was played, the release states.

Also, Lynch said, the largest single group of graduates were the 51 ESL completers, who received special recognition at the ceremony. She said that group of students represented 18 countries and spoke seven different languages.

Other recognitions included nine former Adult Education students who completed the Health Career Program with the support of the Westlake Health Foundation Scholarship. Nine ESL and GED students received Board of Trustees Scholarships and 29 students were inducted into the National Adult Education Honor Society, according to the release.

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The graduates started the ceremony with their tassel on the right side of their cap, because they earned the right to be here, but then they moved it, turning the corner to the left side to signify a new stage in their life, said Lynch. It truly shows how education changes your life.

According to the release, Lynch said students who take part in Triton College programs arrive with diverse educational backgrounds and a myriad goals.

Our goal is to support them as they move along their individual pathway even after they exit from the program. We are honored to be their education partner, she said.
A national organization is getting ready to roll out a plan to fight for diversity. The NAACP met with its Georgia leaders for an emergency meeting. Their plan involves colleges and universities.

The meeting went very well. It was very well attended by over 100 of the units. We are just outlining our strategy moving forward, said Georgia NAACP Attorney Gerald Griggs.

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Griggs said it is time to fight, to keep diversity on college campuses.

The strategy is to reach across the state and make contact with every institution of higher learning, all of the colleges and reaffirm their diversity pledge, he said.

Griggs said the call for action comes after the Supreme Court decided to end Affirmative Action at colleges and universities, when it comes to admissions.

But Griggs said the Supreme Court ruling appears to preserve some consideration of race in a narrowly tailored way, such as an essay.

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Race by decision can of course not be the sole admission decision factor, but it can be weighed with other factors to make that decision. We need for all Georgia schools, all Georgia cooperations, to commit to diversity no matter what, Griggs said.

Griggs said that is why starting Monday, the Georgia NAACP will start reaching out to every Georgia school via phone call and letter, to ask them to join in on the diversity pledge.

They cannot use a quota system, but they can definitely use a plus factor to rate race as a plus to build diversity. They need to have an end time and it needs to be narrowly tailored not using racially stereotypes and not a net negative for the non-minority group. That is the rule, they have to craft their admissions policy based on that rule.

Griggs said they will continue to fight for diversity.

We are going to make sure that we apply activism and advocacy with the colleges to make sure the colleges understand what the court actually said, he said.

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Georgians from Bibb County and across the state packed a downtown Macon sanctuary on a sweltering Sunday afternoon to express support and solidarity for Temple Beth Israel and the wider Jewish community.

What Temple Beth Israel Rabbi Elizabeth Bahar initially expected to be a relatively modest event turned into a celebration of Macons unity and diversity with more than 900 people attending a service at Mulberry Street United Methodist Church.

A Service of Unity and Love, was held nine days after a handful of extremists gathered outside Temple Beth Israel, shouting antisemitic rhetoric and hanging a caricature of a Jewish man wrapped in a Pride flag in effigy from a Macon street sign.

The extremists returned the next day in an attempt to disrupt several hundred Maconites who had gathered on the steps of Temple Beth Israel to express their support for Middle Georgias Jewish community.

The response to the antisemitic rhetoric was clear Sunday, whether from elected officials or religious leaders.

We are with you, the Rev. Ted Goshorn of Mulberry Street UMC told Bahar and her congregation. Look at all the people gathered here today. We have gathered in response to hatred, saying as one Not here, not in Macon, thats not who we are. We stand in solidarity with our Jewish brothers and sisters. We are with you.

The sprawling event featured music from Congregation Bet Haverim in Atlanta  which brought standing applause from the attendees , Temple Beth Israel and the Community Church of God and remarks from local and religious leaders, including Macon-Bibb County Mayor Lester Miller, Rep. Sanford Bishop, Mike Kaplan, the Rev. John R. Johnson of St. Joseph Catholic Church, Pastor Jason McClendon and Imam Shaikh Adam Fofana, who read a passage from the Quran.

This is a community with a long history of standing together, a community where diversity is our strength, Miller said. Where every person is valued and where were stand together against discrimination in every form, because thats who we are.

Sen, Jon Ossoff speaks Sunday during A Service for Unity and Love at Mulberry Street United Methodist Church. The event was put together after an antisemitic group gathered outside Temple Beth Israel last week.

Sen. Jon Ossoff, the first Jewish senator from Georgia, was the events keynote speaker. He related a story about a relative who survived the Holocaust and came to the U.S. in search of a new life.

America still represents to the world the values of universality, of human rights, of tolerance, of love, of kindness, that are the only antidote to the forces of hatred and genocide which have and will rise again, he said. There is nothing inevitable about the defeat of these ideas. It requires work, it requires commitment, it requires political action, it requires faith. It requires exactly what were doing in this space right now.

What draws so many people to America is this, the fact that when something happens like what happened last weekend, folk of all belief or no belief, people of every race, every age, every class, every background, will come to a church to stand behind a rabbi and synagogue and affirm that we love each other.

The Rev. Ted Goshorn with Mulberry Street United Methodist Church hugs Rabbi Elizabeth Bahar with Temple Beth Israel Sunday during  A Service for Unity and Love held at Mulberry Methodist. The event was put together after an antisemitic group gathered outside the Temple last week.

Rabbi Bahar said watching the extremists raise Nazi salutes and hearing their hateful rhetoric was frightening for her and her congregation, but the community response has been heartening.

She emphasized that Jews are disproportionately victims of religiously motivated hate crimes, calling the increase in antisemitism in the United States alarming and adding it is often the canary in the coal mine, leading to other forms of discrimination against religious groups, racial and ethnic minorities and the LGBTQ+ community.

I know what unchecked antisemitism can lead to, she said, noting that she is the granddaughter of Holocaust survivors who lost much of their family in Nazi concentration camps. And while antisemitic activity most directly affects the Jewish community, it doesnt ever stop there. Conspiracy theories fuel other forms of hatred, discrimination and bias. It undermines of very democracy.

Bahar said the U.S. District Attorney for Middle Georgia Peter Leary, who was in attendance, the Bibb County Sheriffs Office and the FBI had been in regular contact.

I am blown away by your presence here, she said. Here in Macon, we have collectively responded against hatred and bigotry.
ZAMOSC, Poland (Reuters) - An agreement on extending the deployment of three German air defence units to Poland is being held up by fraught separate negotiations on the establishment of a maintenance hub in Poland for Leopard tanks damaged in Ukraine.

"Time is of the essence ... We believe the talks (on the maintenance hub) should, if at all possible, be completed within the next 10 days so that we know in what direction to plan," German Defence Minister Boris Pistorius said on Monday.

Pistorius was speaking after talks with his Polish counterpart, Mariusz Blaszczak, in the Polish town of Zamosc.

German and Polish companies are involved in the negotiations on the maintenance hub, as well as both countries' governments, and the main problems are seen on the companies' side.

Pistorius' remark about the need to see in what direction to plan was seen as a veiled threat to choose a location outside Poland for the tank maintenance hub.

Together with three Patriot air defence units, some 300 German soldiers have been based in Zamosc, about 50 km (31 miles) from the Ukrainian border, since February to protect the southern town and its crucial railway link to Ukraine.

In a public statement after the talks on Monday, Pistorius did not address a request by Blaszczak for the extension of the German Patriot deployment until the end of the year.

"The complete subordination of Belarus, the transfer of nuclear weapons to Belarus, the Wagner Group, all show that the threats (from Russia) are real," said Blaszczak.

"Therefore, we would like to emphasize that we are interested in the Patriot system staying on Polish soil at least until the end of this year."

Relations between Berlin and the ruling nationalist Law and Justice (PiS) party in Warsaw have been strained, with both sides at odds over a range of topics - from arms deliveries to Kyiv to an EU migration deal rejected by Poland.

Poland has been on alert for a possible spillover of the war in neighbouring Ukraine, especially since two people were killed in the region last November by what Warsaw concluded was a stray Ukrainian air defence missile.

As a result, Berlin offered to deploy three of its Patriot units to Poland to help secure its air space.

Germany has also pledged to send Patriot units to Lithuania to protect the July 11-12 NATO summit in Vilnius.

(Reporting by Sabine Siebold and Anna Wlodarczak-Semczuk, Editing by Miranda Murray, William Maclean)
A 10-year-old girl was injured Saturday after a shooting in Sacramentos South Natomas area, authorities said.

The victim was shot just after 10 p.m. near the 2000 block on San Juan Road, according to the Sacramento Police Department. Officers arrived on scene in response to a large disturbance, police said in a statement.

Upon arrival, officers heard gunshots and located the juvenile victim with at least one non-life-threatening gunshot wound, according to law enforcement.

Police said a 33-year-old man was detained at the scene. He was arrested and booked into the Sacramento County Main Jail on Sunday on charges relating to assaulting and endangering a child, according to jail records, as well as charges related to firearms possession.

He is expected to appear Wednesday in Sacramento Superior Court, jail records show.

The girl was transported to an area hospital for her injuries, according to the Police Department.

The department said it is investigating the incident and asks witnesses with information to call the dispatch center at 916-808-5471 or Sacramento Valley Crime Stoppers at 916-444-4357.

Callers can remain anonymous and may be eligible for up to $1,000 in reward.
(Bloomberg) --

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Malis military leader Assimi Goita appointed Amadou Keita as minister of mines in a government reshuffle on Saturday, according to a presidential decree.

Keita replaces Alousseni Sanou, who is also finance minister and who stood in for former mines and energy minister Lamine Traore after he resigned on May 31. Traore stepped down after power cuts in the West African nation fueled discontent and hampered businesses.

Mali is one of Africas top gold producers and home to mines operated by companies including Barrick Gold, B2Gold Corp, Resolute Mining and AngloGold Ashanti.

Keita, who most recently served as minister of higher education, is among 16 ministers with new portfolios in Prime Minister Choguel Kokalla Maigas cabinet. The changes follow a June 18 referendum on a new constitution that extends Goitas powers and that could see him run in the next elections.

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Republican presidential candidate and Miami Mayor Francis Suarez has called the arguments by some of his presidential rivals to end American birthright citizenship "really idiotic," and suggested he might not have become a U.S. citizen without the existence of the 14th Amendment.

"Our Founding Fathers decided that people born here were immediately citizens. Cracking open the Constitution to eliminate that right seems really idiotic," Suarez, whose parents were both immigrants from Cuba, told the Daily Caller last week.

"My parents both came here to escape communism. They came legally, but I became a citizen because I was born here. We need to close our borders to illegal immigration not open up the Constitution. One out of every five Americans is Hispanic. We can get their votes, but this isnt a way to do it," he added.

MEXICAN GOVERNMENT LAMENTS DESANTIS IMMIGRATION LAWS, WARNS OF DISCRIMINATION AND RACIAL PROFILING

Francis Suarez, mayor of Miami, speaks during an event at the Ronald Reagan Presidential Foundation and Institute in Simi Valley, California, US, on Thursday, June 15, 2023.

The 14th Amendment, which was ratified in July 1868, grants citizenship to anyone "born or naturalized in the United States," and has become a point of contention amid the migrant crisis at the U.S. border with Mexico.

Former President Donald Trump first promised to end birthright citizenship in 2018 in response to massive migrant caravans made up of largely Central and South Americans heading to the border by traversing through Mexico. He ultimately didn't follow through, but vowed in May to do so again if elected to another term.

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A number of other Republican presidential candidates have also signaled they would look to end certain aspects of birthright citizenship, including former U.N. Ambassador Nikki Haley, businessman Vivek Ramaswamy, and Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis.

MORE NYC MIGRANTS IN CITY SHELTERS THAN HOMELESS FOR FIRST TIME EVER: TIPPING POINT

Former U.S. President Donald Trump gestures to the crowd at a campaign event on July 1, 2023, in Pickens, South Carolina.

Former Arkansas Gov. Asa Hutchinson has sided with Suarez, telling the Daily Caller last week that such vows to end birthright citizenship through executive order were "empty promises" and "disrespectful to our Constitution."
The Federal Bureau of Investigation headquarters in Washington, April 16, 2023. (Julia Nikhinson/The New York Times)

WASHINGTON  An intensive drive by right-wing Republicans in Congress to vilify the FBI with charges of political bias has imperiled a program allowing spy agencies to conduct warrantless surveillance on foreign targets, sapping support for a premier intelligence tool and amplifying demands for stricter limits.

The once-secret program  created after the 9/11 attacks and described by intelligence officials as crucial to stopping overseas hackers, spy services and terrorists  has long faced resistance by Democrats concerned that it could trample on Americans civil liberties. But the law authorizing it is set to expire in December, and opposition among Republicans, who have historically championed it, has grown as the GOP has stepped up its attacks on the FBI, taking a page from former President Donald Trump and his supporters.

Theres no way were going to be for reauthorizing that in its current form  no possible way, said Rep. Jim Jordan, R-Ohio, a key ally of Trumps who is leading a special House investigation into the weaponization of government against conservatives. Were concerned about surveillance, period.

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At issue is a program that allows the government to collect  on domestic soil and without a warrant  the communications of targeted foreigners abroad, including when those people are interacting with Americans. Leaders of both parties have warned the Biden administration that Congress will not renew the law that legalized it, known as Section 702, without changes to prevent federal agents from freely searching the email, phone and other electronic records of Americans in touch with surveilled foreigners.

Since the program was last extended in 2018, the GOPs approach to law enforcement and data collection has undergone a dramatic transformation. Disdain for the agencies that benefit from the warrantless surveillance program has moved into the party mainstream, particularly in the House, where Republicans assert that the FBIs investigations of Trump were biased and complain of a broader plot by the government to persecute conservatives  including some of those charged for storming the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021  for their political beliefs. They argue that federal law enforcement agencies cannot be trusted with Americans records, and should be prevented from accessing them.

You couldnt waterboard me into voting to reauthorize 702, said Rep. Matt Gaetz, R-Fla., who backed the program in 2018. These 702 authorities were abused against people in Washington on January 6 and they were abused against people who were affiliated with the BLM movement, and Im equally aggrieved by both of those things.

Congress created Section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act in 2008, and has renewed the program twice since, largely thanks to the overwhelming support of Republican lawmakers. But significant turnover on Capitol Hill has brought a new generation of Republicans less protective of Washingtons post-9/11 counterterrorism powers, and about half of House Republicans have never cast a vote on it.

This will be a first impression for many of them, said Rep. Darin LaHood, R-Ill., a supporter of the program who is part of the Intelligence Committees six-member working group trying to determine how Congress can restrict the program without hamstringing it. The thought that 702 and FISA just focused on terrorism  I think that narrative has to be changed. We need to focus on China, we need to focus on Russia, we need to focus on Iran and North Korea.

The Biden administration has been making a similar case to lawmakers, appealing to them to renew the Section 702 program, which National Security Adviser Jake Sullivan has said was crucial to heading off national security threats from China, Russia, cyberattacks and terrorist groups.

But far-right lawmakers have embarked on a louder and more politically loaded effort to fight the measure. They have seized on official determinations that federal agents botched a wiretap on a Trump campaign adviser and more recent disclosures that FBI analysts improperly used Section 702 to search for information about hundreds of Americans who came under scrutiny in connection with the Jan. 6 attack and the Black Lives Matter protests after the 2020 murder of George Floyd by a police officer.

Justice Department and FBI officials have attempted to defend themselves from lawmakers outrage over those revelations, pointing to steps they have taken to restrain the opportunities agents are permitted to examine the communications of Americans collected under Section 702. They credit those changes with reducing the number of such queries from about 3 million in 2021 to about 120,000 last year.

But their opening salvos have not swayed skeptical Democrats whose support the Biden administration is expected to need for an extension of the spying program.

In recent years, Capitol Hill has welcomed several new Democrats with backgrounds in national security who favor extending the program. But convincing others is a challenge, as most members of the party  including Rep. Hakeem Jeffries of New York, the minority leader  have voted against extensions. Even President Joe Biden voted against the law to legalize the program in 2008, when he was a senator.

Democratic supporters have been adamant that any reauthorization will have to include significant limitations on how and when agents may comb their databases for information on Americans, in the hopes that those safeguards will allay lawmakers long-standing concerns about the potential for abuses.

Weve been very clear with the administration that there is not going to be a clean reauthorization  theres no path to that, said Rep. Jason Crow, D-Colo., who is also part of the Intelligence Committees Section 702 working group.

He suggested that the restrictions would include limits on when agents could query their databases for information about Americans, and requirements that warrants be obtained in some circumstances.

Rep. Chris Stewart, R-Utah, who is a member of the Intelligence Committees working group and the weaponization panel, said some members of his party might be persuaded to reauthorize the program with deep reforms.

But therell still be a number who are just never going to authorize this, Stewart added. Being on the weaponization committee, Ive seen insights into some of their thinking  and there are a number of them who just wont ever come on board.

The administration has signaled it is open to discussing other changes in theory. But officials from the FBI and Justice Department pushed back this month on specific proposals during their first public appearance on Capitol Hill to discuss the matter, rankling lawmakers.

I dont have any doubt about the foreign intelligence value of this, but the U.S. person aspect of this is really concerning to the Congress, Sen. Jon Ossoff, D-Ga., told the officials during a hearing of the Judiciary Committee. I dont think youve effectively made the case that there shouldnt be a warrant requirement.

The committee chair, Sen. Dick Durbin, D-Ill., did not find the changes to be sufficient. If the reforms that youve mentioned in 2021 and 2022 are the only reforms that youre bringing to this committee as we discuss the future of Section 702, Ive got to see more, he told agency officials.

c.2023 The New York Times Company
A Boyd County grand jury decided not to file criminal charges after a man died in police custody, Kentucky State Police announced Friday.

Clarence Wilkerson, 34, died in March while in custody of the Ashland Police Department. The Kentucky State Medical Examiners Office ruled that Wilkersons death was accidental  the official cause being acute methamphetamine intoxication, KSP said in a news release.

The case was presented to the Boyd County grand jury last week after an investigation was completed, according to KSP.

A report was issued by the grand jury that no criminal charges were to be filed, KSP said in a news release.

Bystander video  which sparked criticism of how police handled the incident  showed Wilkerson suffering from health issues while being put into the back of a patrol car. The video has since been removed online.

Wilkerson had methamphetamine, amphetamines and THC in his blood, KSP said previously. He also had a prior heart condition which included congestive heart failure, hyperlipidemia, and diabetes, the police press release said.

Law enforcement previously said Wilkerson was being pursued and detained on outstanding 2017 misdemeanor charges.

The Ashland police officers who were on the scene of Wilkersons arrest were John McCormick, Chris Brislin and Tony Floyd, KSP said.

Ashland Police Chief Todd Kelley confirmed to the Daily Independent in Ashland that all officers involved in the incident were placed on administrative leave, per department procedure. Kelley also confirmed to the Daily Independent an internal investigation was being conducted.

We conducted a thorough investigation and all evidence we collected lead to the grand jury deciding not to press charges, state trooper Shane Goodall told the Herald-Leader Monday.

Civil rights attorney Ben Crump, who has represented the families of George Floyd, Breonna Taylor and others who died in incidents with police, previously said he had been retained by Wilkersons family. Crump was not immediately available for comment Monday morning.

This is a developing story and may be updated.

Reporter Rick Childress contributed to this story.
It was clean, white lines at Dior's couture show in Paris (Alain JOCARD)

There were no frills or heels for Christian Dior as the label took over the Rodin Museum in Paris on Monday, putting on a fitting homage to Greek goddesses for the opening day of haute couture week.

The show opened with a long white woollen dress and matching cape, while other designs used pleats to evoke classical-era statues.

The clothes were full of clean, vertical lines and subtle shades of white, black, beige, gold and silver, with flat sandals that added to the atmosphere of antiquity.

"Actually, these clean lines hide remarkable complexity," Dior designer Maria Grazia Chiuri told AFP.

"It was a work of subtraction. I wanted to remove the sheath, the lining -- these elements that characterise constructed couture outfits," she said.

She quoted the house's founder, who said his dresses shared an "apparent simplicity" with ancient statues.

Lightening the construction without losing the shape was the biggest challenge, Chiuri said.

She produced several twists on the iconic silhouette of Christian Dior's New Look, structured by the fitted "Bar" jacket, including lighter, more comfortable versions and one made from stretch brocade fabric "to allow you to move like in sportswear".

The decor, designed by Italian artist Marta Roberti, added to the mood with its animals, goddesses and wild landscapes.

Unlike most couture outfits, which are designed as one-off bespoke pieces for ultra-special occasions, the new collection included separate elements that could be mixed and matched.

"There is no roadmap in haute couture," Chiuri said.

"This collection is not for the red carpet as we imagine it today. These are not items that are necessarily designed to be seen by others -- they are more for the person who is wearing them."

neo/er/js
A chalk message left below a portrait of Irina and Kevin McCarthy, who attended the parade with their 2-year-old son, Aiden, reads "He will be OK" at a memorial near the Central Avenue scene where they died, July 7, 2022, three days after a mass shooting at the Fourth of July parade in Highland Park. (Brian Cassella/Chicago Tribune)

After nearly a year, the guardianship battle has escalated over a boy whose parents were killed in the mass shooting at the Fourth of July parade in Highland Park.

Aiden McCarthys grandparents are fighting over who should become permanent guardian of the 3-year-old orphan. His parents, Irina and Kevin McCarthy, were among seven people killed when a gunman opened fire during the parade.

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The alleged gunman, Robert Crimo III, has been charged with seven counts of murder and numerous other crimes for injuries to dozens of other people. His father, Robert Crimo Jr., has been charged with seven counts of reckless conduct for helping his son get a firearm owners license, though police previously had reported that the son had threatened to kill himself and everyone.

A GoFundMe for Aiden McCarthy raised $3.3 million, which has been put in a court-ordered trust, to go for his care and upbringing. Chicago Trust Co. will administer the trust, and attorneys for the parties involved already have made more than $75,000 in fees from it.

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Aidens grandmothers  Kevins mother , and Irinas mother  were named in court as the boys temporary co-guardians. They take turns taking care of Aiden at his parents home in Highland Park. Each is asking to become his permanent guardian.

Aidens aunt and uncle, who live in Iowa, previously were named temporary guardians and are also asking to be made permanent guardians.

Aidens maternal grandfather, Michael Levberg, also helps take care of Aiden, and has asked to be co-guardian with his wife.

Aiden and Michael Levberg have been named in some previous Tribune stories about the shooting, but the paper is not using the names of other relatives named in court documents in this story because of safety concerns.

[ [Don't miss] Highland Park, a year later: Coverage of the one-year anniversary of the shooting ]

[ [Don't miss] Highland Park, a year later: Reclaiming a town, rebuilding resiliency, finding a voice ]

The attorneys for Levberg and his wife have argued in court that the couple is better suited to take care of Aiden and his estate, because they had helped take care of him regularly since he was born. They say his paternal grandmother only occasionally cared for him, and that she is single and about 70 years old, and would have difficulty taking care of the boy by herself. Michael Levberg is 65 and sole owner of New Homes Inc., and his wife is 62.

The maternal grandparents also have made claims on the estate of Kevin McCarthy, Aidens father, of which Kevins mother is the administrator.

The paternal grandmother has countered by asking for a jury trial to resolve the case. Her attorney has alleged in court documents that despite a court order to take care of Aiden at his familys home in Highland Park, the maternal grandparents have been taking him to their home in Lincolnshire and having him sleep in their bed with them.

The paternal grandmothers attorney wrote that the brazen conduct of the maternal grandparents was profoundly confusing to Aiden, and asked that the judge order them to stop keeping Aiden in their home and sleeping with him.

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Sen. Dick Durbin conducts the Senate Judiciary Committee hearing titled After the Highland Park Attack: Protecting Our Communities from Mass Shootings, in Hart Building on July 20, 2022. Behind him is a photo of Aiden McCarthy, 2, whose parents Irina and Kevin were killed in the Highland Park shooting. (Tom Williams/CQ-Roll Call)

Irina and Kevin McCarthy are depicted along with the other five victims at a memorial near the Central Avenue site, July 7, 2022, three days after the mass shooting at the Fourth of July parade in Highland Park. (Brian Cassella / Chicago Tribune)

The maternal grandparents recently filed a motion asking the court to let Aiden stay at their home, arguing, among other points, that they must relive the trauma of the events of July 4, 2022, every time they go past the bedroom of their daughter and son-in-law.

The couple also asked the court to end the boys required monthly trips to visit is aunt and uncle in Iowa, which they called a disruption to his routine and stability. The judges order on that motion has not been entered into the record.

In another sign of tensions between the grandparents, last year, the maternal grandparents had called the police to file a missing-person report while Aiden was at a family pool party. Police went to Aidens home, but no charges were filed.

Marc Schwartz is the court-appointed guardian ad litem, an attorney meant to make recommendations to the judge on what is in the boys best interests.

The court ordered Schwartz to submit a written opinion last October, but court papers indicate he is still finalizing his report. The court is waiting for an evaluation of who should get guardianship by two court-appointed specialists, psychologist Dr. Robert Shapiro and psychiatrist Dr. Louis Kraus.

The maternal grandparents attorney, Matthew McQuiston, argued that the orders for evaluation are void, writing that the Illinois Probate Act should govern guardianship, not the Marriage and Dissolution of Marriage Act, which addresses parental custody. That issue has yet to be decided.

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Previously, the grandparents disagreed over whether Aiden should get therapy, since he had not been told that his parents died. A court order provided for therapy at the discretion of the guardian ad litem.

The original judge handling the case, Lake County Judge Elizabeth Rochford, was elected last year to the Illinois Supreme Court. The case is now on its fourth judge, Lake County Associate Judge Donna-Jo Vorderstrasse.

Chicago Tribunes Jonathan Bullington and freelancer Clifford Ward contributed.

rmccoppin@chicagotribune.com
In the span of 24 hours, the Supreme Court last week rolled back decades of civil rights progress.

On Thursday, the courts conservative supermajority ended affirmative action. On Friday, it said anti-LGBTQ+ discrimination was constitutional. And again on Friday, it denied student loan forgiveness to 26 million Americans who signed up for financial help.

Its a grim moment for anyone who cares about ensuring that there are federal protections for people routinely facing discrimination or economic disadvantages. But there is something else happening in the background that gives reason for hope: Senate Democrats have been rapidly filling federal judgeships with people with backgrounds in civil rights, abortion rights, voting rights and defending people too poor to afford their own lawyers. And some of these new judges are potential contenders for future Supreme Court seats.

The courts latest decisions, which were all handed down in 6-3 rulings along ideological lines, are precisely the endgame that conservatives have been working toward. For decades, theyve been laser-focused on reshaping the courts as Democrats dithered. Its no coincidence that all six of the courts GOP-appointed justices are members of the ultraconservative legal organization the Federalist Society, or that all were essentially handpicked by the same powerful Federalist Society leader, Leonard Leo, to become Supreme Court justices.

Those six justices were all lower court judges first. That was baked into the plan, too. With Supreme Court seats as the ultimate goal, conservatives have been strategically filling U.S. district and U.S. appeals court seats with anti-LGBTQ, anti-abortion Federalist Society members. When Donald Trump became president, they hit the jackpot: Knowing that Trump could not care less about who got a court seat as long as he got credit for a win, The Federalist Society fed him a pipeline of its favorite judicial picks for his entire four years in the White House. All three of Trumps Supreme Court nominations, virtually all of his appeals court judges and even some of his district court judges are members of the Federalist Society.

Simply put, conservatives played a wildly successful long game for the courts when progressives didnt. Democrats have never had an operation like this in place.

But things have shifted in recent years. Progressive judicial advocacy groups like Demand Justice have cropped up and been screaming about the need to level the ideological playing field on the courts. Senate Democrats, perhaps tired of losing all the time, smartened up and now get fired up about the importance of the courts and judicial nominations. Joe Biden, a former longtime chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee, made judicial nominations a top priority before he was even sworn in as president.

Even now, with the Supreme Courts conservative majority taking aim at virtually every constituency in the Democratic Party, progressives are coming off a series of major, if little-noticed, victories in the Senate when it comes to fighting back on the courts.

Senate Majority Leader Charles Schumer (D-N.Y.) has been amping up the confirmations of progressive judges to federal seats in recent weeks.

Senate Majority Leader Charles Schumer (D-N.Y.) has been amping up the confirmations of progressive judges to federal seats in recent weeks.

In the last three weeks, Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.) lined up and confirmed six of Bidens most trailblazing judicial nominees to date, some of whom are certainly contenders for future Supreme Court seats. All are civil rights attorneys. All have been priorities for progressive judicial advocacy groups. All are relatively young, meaning they likely have decades ahead of them in their lifetime appointments. And all bring badly needed diversity to the federal bench.

Theres Dale Ho, 46, a prominent voting rights attorney with the American Civil Liberties Union. In 2019, he went before the Supreme Court and successfully challenged Trumps plan to include a citizenship question on the 2020 census. Last month, he was confirmed 50-49 to the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York.

The Senate also just confirmed Julie Rikelman, 51, considered one of the best abortion rights attorneys in the country. Rikelman served as the litigation director for the Center for Reproductive Rights since 2011, and most recently, she argued on behalf of the abortion clinic at the center of last years Supreme Court case that led to Roe v. Wade being overturned. Two weeks ago, she was confirmed 51-43 to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the First Circuit.

Nusrat Choudhury, a longtime civil rights attorney, was confirmed 50-49 to the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of New York, despite opposition from Republicans and Democrat Joe Manchin. Choudhury, 47, is now the first Muslim American woman on the federal bench.

Schumer also pushed through the confirmations of Hernan Vera, a former staff attorney at the Mexican American Legal Defense and Educational Fund who now serves on the U.S. District Court for the Central District of California; Casey Pitts, a labor law attorney who is now the only openly LGBTQ+ judge on the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California; and Natasha Merle, the former deputy director of litigation for NAACP Legal Defense & Educational Fund who now sits on the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of New York.

This wave of confirmations came just weeks after the Senate confirmed 49-year-old Nancy Abudu, another civil rights attorney and the first Black woman ever confirmed to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 11th Circuit.

Bringing diversity to the courts matters for so many reasons. Judges of different genders, races and experiential backgrounds reflect the diversity of the millions of people they serve, and bring much more well-rounded judicial decision-making to the federal bench. They help to confine biases that can undercut federal court litigation. Perhaps most importantly at a time like this, when public confidence in the Supreme Court is in the toilet, having a diversity of judges can increase faith in the nations courts.

Brian Fallon, executive director of Demand Justice, has been celebrating the significance of the recent batch of confirmations for weeks.

The last month has seen the Senate confirm some of the most groundbreaking judicial picks of the Biden era, Fallon said. We have not seen a commitment like this to elevating civil rights lawyers since the 1970s under [former President Jimmy] Carter.

Several of these nominees are candidates for the Supreme Court in the future, he added, ensuring that Bidens imprint with these picks will last for decades to come.

The Leadership Conference on Civil and Human Rights, a coalition of more than 200 national civil and human rights organizations, also hailed the recent wave of confirmations of civil rights attorneys, declaring on Twitter, THIS is the kind of judiciary our nation needs & deserves.

BREAKING: Since last week, the Senate has confirmed six civil rights lawyers to the federal bench.



Congrats to Judges Hernan Vera, Casey Pitts, Dale Ho, Nusrat Choudhury, Julie Rikelman, and Natasha Merle.



THIS is the kind of judiciary our nation needs & deserves. #CourtsMatterpic.twitter.com/sCWkOqHubt  The Leadership Conference (@civilrightsorg) June 21, 2023

The timing, amid a flurry of notable  and controversial  federal court cases at the Supreme Court, stands out, too. Most of Bidens recently confirmed judges had been waiting for their votes for months, if not for more than a year, due to stiff GOP opposition and Democratic absences in a Senate where Democrats hold a razor-thin 51-49 majority. Hos confirmation had stalled for more than 650 days.

Schumer had to wait for every single Democrat to be in Washington in order to schedule all of these nominees votes, or at least have enough Democrats present to outnumber the Republicans present. Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.) was out for months battling shingles. Sen. John Fetterman (D-Pa.) was out for weeks getting mental health treatment.

As soon as both returned to the Senate, Schumer wasted no time scheduling Hos confirmation vote in early June, only to be temporarily sidelined again by Sen. Patty Murray (D-Wash.), who was absent due to a sinus infection.

The stars finally aligned a few weeks ago.

Whether public defenders, civil rights, legal aid, election, or voting rights attorneys  weve fought for judicial diversity to ensure each potential judge has the background and experiences to build a more fair and equitable America, Schumer told HuffPost in a statement. Senate Democrats have worked to make a judicial system that better reflects our country.

All six of these recently confirmed judges fit into Bidens broader push to bring badly needed diversity to the federal bench, both in terms of demographics like race or gender and in terms of professional backgrounds. With Schumers help in the Senate, the president has confirmed record numbers of public defenders and civil rights attorneys to lifetime federal judgeships, a shift from the more traditional corporate lawyers tapped for these jobs.

Biden has confirmed a total of 136 people to lifetime federal judgeships  more than the past three presidents had confirmed by this point in their presidencies. As of last month, 66% of his nominees have been women and 70% of his judges who have been confirmed have been women. Additionally, 65% of his nominees have been people of color, and 64% of his judges that have been confirmed have been people of color.

His confirmations break down to 100 U.S. district court judges, 35 U.S. appeals court judges and one Supreme Court justice, Ketanji Brown Jackson.

Jackson dissented on all three of the Supreme Courts most controversial decisions last week, leading or joining blistering critiques of the conservative majoritys decisions. In some of her more choice quotes, she accused the majority of approaching the affirmative action case with a let-them-eat-cake obliviousness to racism, and in the LGBTQ+ rights case, effectively deciding to demote gays and lesbians for second-class status.

As the Supreme Courts first Black woman and first former public defender, Jacksons personal and professional background have a profoundly different impact on her approach to law than, say, Justice Samuel Alito, a conservative white man who was previously a deputy U.S. attorney general and U.S. attorney known for prosecuting white collar crimes.

The White House regularly touts the diversity of its judicial nominees, particularly in moments like this.

President Biden told the American people he would make upholding the rule of law with deeply qualified judicial nominees who represent the diversity of our nation a core priority. Fulfilling that promise is one of his proudest accomplishments, White House spokesman Andrew Bates said in a statement.

The last two weeks alone saw the confirmation of six diverse judges who have experience as civil rights attorneys, Bates said. President Biden is determined to keep driving forward with more barrier-breaking nominees.

Schumer sees the bigger picture with the courts, too. He said Democrats need to buckle in for a sustained push to restore balance to the courts.

The ill-founded and disappointing decisions from the Supreme Court are a stark reminder that it will take a sustained effort to rebalance our federal courts and restore the values that have made the United States a beacon for freedom, democracy, equality, and opportunity, Schumer said in a statement. Senate Democrats will continue to approve fellow Americans for the federal courts who far better reflect the values, diversity, experiences, and perspectives of the American public.

For progressive judicial advocates like Fallon, its a game changer that the White House and Senate Democratic leader are even talking about judges in this way. And its part of a new long game.

Now that Biden and Schumer have gone to such lengths to prioritize these kinds of lawyers for the bench, the pressure on future administrations to follow suit will be immense, said Fallon.

It is a big deal, he emphasized, in the sense that young law school graduates can now safely pursue careers aligned with their sense of idealism and know that such service will not be considered a political liability if they someday wish to pursue a lifetime appointment.

Related...
The Supreme Court ruled last week that Harvards admissions process, which factored race into decisions about which candidates to accept, was unconstitutional. The college is still allowed to consider whether applicants are relatives of alumni, though, which has led a civil rights group to file a complaint in light last weeks decision.

Lawyers for Civil Rights filed the complaint on Monday, alleging that admitting applicants based on whether their relatives attended the university violates the Civil Rights Act. Each year, Harvard College grants special preference in its admissions process to hundreds of mostly white students  not because of anything they have accomplished, but rather solely because of who their relatives are, the complaint reads, going on to quote Chief Justice John Roberts majority opinion last week: A benefit provided to some applicants but not to others necessarily advantages the former group at the expense of the latter.

The complaint, filed with the Department of Educations Office for Civil Rights, notes that both 70 percent of applicants with relatives at Harvard and applicants whose relatives are Harvard donors are white. The results of this preferential treatment are substantial, the complain reads, noting that from 2014-2019 donor-related applicants were seven times more likely to be admitted, and legacy applicants were six times more likely to get into the nations most prestigious higher-learning institution.

The Supreme Courts decision to end race-based affirmative action in college admissions drew harsh criticism, with many pointing out that race is only one of several factors outside of academic merit that universities consider. So often, we just accept that money power, and privilege are perfectly justifiable forms of affirmative action, while kids growing up like I did are expected to compete when the ground is anything but level, Michelle Obama wrote in response to the ruling.

President Biden said that he will ask the Department of Education to hes asking the Education Department to scrutinize legacy admissions and other ways universities expand privilege instead of opportunity.

Democrats in Congress want to take action, too. Sen. Jeff Merkely (D-Ore.) and Rep. Jamaal Bowman (D-N.Y.) said that they plan to reintroduce the Fair College Admissions for Students Act, which they first introduced last year, which would end legacy admissions at schools that accept federal funding. Bowman explained to Rolling Stone that legacy admission policies allow big donors, the wealthy elite, and those who were able to attend certain higher education institutions to secure admission spots for their family members, while simultaneously shutting poor people and people of color out of the most prestigious institutions.

That is un-American, that is undemocratic, and that is unacceptable, Bowman added.

More from Rolling Stone

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Click here to read the full article.
FILE PHOTO: Students and pedestrians walk through the Yard at Harvard University in Cambridge

By Daniel Wiessner

(Reuters) -Three civil rights groups filed a complaint against Harvard on Monday, claiming its preferential policy for undergraduate applicants with family ties to the elite school overwhelmingly benefits white students, days after the U.S. Supreme Court struck down its race-conscious admissions policies.

The groups filed a complaint with the U.S. Department of Education claiming that Harvard's preferences for "legacy" applicants violates a federal law banning race discrimination for programs that receive federal funds, as virtually all U.S. colleges and universities do.

Last week, the Supreme Court said race-conscious policies adopted by Harvard University and the University of North Carolina to ensure that more non-white students are admitted are unconstitutional. The decision was a major blow to efforts to attract diverse student bodies and is expected to prompt new challenges to admission policies.

Harvard College is the undergraduate school of Harvard University.

The groups in Monday's complaint said the Supreme Court ruling had made it even more imperative to eliminate policies that disadvantage non-white applicants.

Harvard did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

The groups are represented by Lawyers for Civil Rights, a Boston-based nonprofit that describes itself on its website as working with "communities of color and immigrants to fight discrimination."

Ivan Espinoza-Madrigal, the group's executive director, said the Supreme Court last week made clear that any policies that disadvantage racial groups are unlawful by noting that "eliminating racial discrimination means eliminating all of it."

"Your family's last name and the size of your bank account are not a measure of merit, and should have no bearing on the college admissions process, he said in a statement.

Legacy policies, which are common at U.S. colleges and universities, have become increasingly controversial

President Joe Biden, a Democrat, in remarks following las week's Supreme Court ruling, said schools should consider eliminating legacy policies because they expand privilege instead of opportunity.

Several prominent lawmakers from both parties made similar comments. Representative Barbara Lee, a Democrat from California, called legacy policies "affirmative action for white people" in a tweet.

According to Monday's complaint, nearly 70% of Harvard applicants with family ties to donors or alumni are white and are about six times more likely to be admitted than other applicants.

About 28% of Harvard's class of 2019 were legacies, the groups said in the complaint. That means fewer admissions slots were available for non-white applicants who are far less likely to have family ties to the school, they said.

The groups are asking the Department of Education to investigate Harvard's admission practices and order the school to abandon legacy preferences if it wants to continue receiving federal funding. Michael Kippins, one of the lawyers who filed the complaint, said in an email that Lawyers for Civil Rights has not ruled out filing a lawsuit against Harvard in the future.

When the Supreme Court heard the Harvard and UNC cases last October, a lawyer for the group that had sued the schools argued that eliminating legacy preferences "would make Harvard far less white, wealthy, and privileged."

Conservative Justices Neil Gorsuch and Clarence Thomas appeared to agree, pressing Harvard's lawyer on why the school could not get rid of the legacy policy instead of granting separate preferences to non-white students.

The lawyer, Seth Waxman, told the court that there was no evidence that ending legacy preferences would lead to a more diverse student body.

(Reporting by Daniel Wiessner in Albany, New York; Editing by Alexia Garamfalvi and Leslie Adler)
Getty

Activists are taking aim at Harvard's preference for legacy applicants in the wake of a landmark Supreme Court ruling.

A federal civil rights complaint alleges Harvard is breaking the law with its current preferences.

Internal university data illustrates that white applicants overwhelmingly benefit from the current standards.

A civil rights group is taking aim at Harvard's preferences for legacy students, illustrating the coming fights after the Supreme Court effectively gutted affirmative action.

The complaint filed with the Department of Education's Office for Civil Rights, argues that the Ivy League school is disproportionately favoring white students by offering them a leg up in the competitive admissions process if familial ties to Harvard either through past graduates or a relation to a wealthy donor.

"At the same time that Donor and Legacy Preferences disproportionately advantage white applicants, they systematically disadvantage students of color, including Black, Latinx, and Asian Americans," the complaint filed by Lawyers for Civil Rights states.

Legacy and other admissions preferences are facing renewed scrutiny in the wake of Chief Justice John Roberts' ruling that struck down the ability of universities to use race among an array of factors when considering an applicant's admission. Legacy preferences in particular have been found to overwhelmingly favor white applicants. Critics have deemed the current situation "affirmative action for white people."

A study of Harvard's internal data found that nearly 70% donor-related applicants are white, roughly the same rate applies to legacy-related applicants as well. Universities closely protect admissions data, but Harvard was forced to turn its over due to a lawsuit that eventually became the landmark Supreme Court case. Internal

The complaint also cites a study that found from 2014-2019 "donor-related applicants were nearly 7 times more likely to be admitted compared to non-donor-related applicants." While "legacy applicants were nearly 6 times more likely to be admitted compared to nonlegacy applicants."

The lawyers group filed the complaint on behalf of The Chica Project, the African Community Economic Development of New England (ACEDONE), and the Greater Boston Latino Network. The community groups argue that such an overwhelming benefit violates the Civil Rights Act of 1964, because they carry a disproportionate impact on applicants' of color.

"Because Harvard only admits a certain number of students each year, a spot given to a legacy or donor-related applicant is a spot that becomes unavailable to an applicant who meets the admissions criteria based purely on his or her own merit," the complaint states.

A spokesperson for Harvard did not immediately respond to a request for comment. Rakesh Khurana, the dean of Harvard College, previously defended the standards before the Supreme Court's landmark 6-3 ruling last week that struck down race-conscious admissions programs used by Harvard and the University of North Carolina.

"Harvard hopes that its alumni will remain engaged with the college for the rest of their lives, and this consideration [legacy preferences] is one way that it encourages them to do so," Khurana testified before the case eventually reached the high court.

Chief Justice John Roberts writing for the 6-3 conservative majority found that colleges had for far too long used race as a consideration among an array of factors when it came to admissions standards.

"Many universities have for too long...concluded, wrongly, that the touchstone of an individual's identity is not challenges bested, skills built, or lessons learned but the color of their skin," he wrote. "Our constitutional history does not tolerate that choice.

The civil rights complaint comes after Education Secretary Miguel Cardona urged colleges to take a hard look at legacy preferences they might offer.

"In the wake of this ruling, they could further tip the scales against students who already have the cards stacked against them," Cardona said in a statement to The Associated Press.

Read the original article on Business Insider
The Georgia Department of Agriculture is bringing back its law enforcement arm, and the new head, Harlan Proveaux, wants his officers to be the Peach State's go-to on all aspects of agricultural crime.

"Animal cruelty cases, drugs and agriculture arena, agro-terrorism, those type things, we want to be the subject matter experts," Proveaux told the USA Today Network. "So when all local law enforcement has those type cases, we're a resource that they can call that will come in and support them with investigation and prosecution of those type cases."

Harlan Proveaux

The Department of Agriculture, which oversees Georgia's largest economic sector, last had law enforcement powers in 2013. Agricultural Commissioner Tyler Harper, who was sworn in this year, has re-instated them, with Proveaux joining the department as the inspector general and director of the Law Enforcement & Emergency Management Division. Proveaux's most recent job was in the Georgia Department of Emergency Management and Homeland security.

"The opportunity here gives me a chance to combine both my emergency management experience and my law enforcement experience in this role, which was very intriguing to me," he said.

Proveaux said he hopes to have 10 sworn officers, depending on what the General Assembly tasks his office with. These officers will be separate from the department's current inspectors who enforce civil violations, which means Proveaux's officers will not be investigating issues like soil amendments, another recent area of focus of the agency (the general assembly appropriated $550,000 in the budget this year for two additional soil amendment enforcement inspectors).

More: Georgia farmer laments use of 'free' soil amendment; pays in other ways

Also: Soil amendment bill, adding more local control, must wait another year for House vote

But that does not mean that the officers will not be working with other employees of the agency.

"The law enforcement division is unique in the Department of Agriculture as we're our support division," he said. "We support every other division in the Department of Ag, so that inspectors when when they go out, if they run into something that's unlawful ... then they can turn that over to us."

There will be at least one federally-funded officer focused solely on labor trafficking, an issue that came to the forefront in recent years with the Blooming Onion case brought by federal prosecutors in the Southern District of Georgia in late 2021, one of the largest labor trafficking cases ever prosecuted involving foreign agricultural laborers brought here on seasonal visas.

Beyond troubling: Current, former government officials tied to human trafficking probe in Georgia

"The feds, the state, (Georgia Bureau of Investigation), the Department of Agriculture have partnered together to create a task force, and we're going to support that, the Feds are going support us in putting a person on that task force to pay attention," Proveaux said. "We don't want folks that are being trafficked to work ... happening in our state. So we're going to concentrate on that to make sure it doesn't."

Proveaux also thinks the officers can cross train with emergency management staff for when natural disasters strike. He said they've already begun having conversations with outside agencies, including the Department of Natural Resources and local government in Forest Park, which hosts a major farmer's market.

"There's no law enforcement agency, federal, state, (or) local, that we're not talking to and joining forces with," he said.

This article originally appeared on Augusta Chronicle: Dept. of Agriculture gets new law enforcement head, Harlan Proveaux
Heat dome to challenge record highs in northwestern US beyond Fourth of July

Heat dome to challenge record highs in northwestern US beyond Fourth of July

As the true "dog days of summer" get underway, AccuWeather forecasters say Mother Nature is poised to crank up the thermostat across the northwestern United States and portions of southwestern Canada.

High temperatures soared to levels well above the historical average during the holiday and will continue to do so in the following days. Intense summer heat will also elevate the risk for heat-related illnesses, especially as folks host outdoor parties, head out to cool off at the pool or lake, or take part in other outdoor activities.

"The heat is due to a northward bulge of the jet stream that will allow a heat dome to remain over the northwestern U.S. and western British Columbia, Canada," AccuWeather Meteorologist Nicole LoBiondo explained.

A large area of the U.S. from Northern California through Washington state will bake under intense heat through midweek.

"High temperatures through at least Wednesday are setting up to run 10-20 degrees Fahrenheit above the historical average for this time of year," said LoBiondo. "Record high temperatures will be challenged from Medford, Oregon, to the southwestern Canadian coast."

Even though temperatures are expected to throttle back a bit on Thursday, they will remain above historical average.

AccuWeather forecasters say the Interstate 5 corridor will be the zone that receives some of the most intense heat from this event.

Wednesday morning, heat advisories and excessive heat warnings were in effect from parts of Northern California to south-central and southwestern Washington, according to the National Weather Service.

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For cities like Portland, Oregon, high temperatures in early July typically top out in the upper 70s to near 80. This week, 90s will be common, and the City of Roses may even reach the century mark on Wednesday, according to the latest forecast.

Record high temperatures of 97 from 1972 and 96 from 2015 are in jeopardy on Tuesday and Wednesday, respectively, in Portland.

Farther north, Seattle can also challenge its daily record high of 91 on Wednesday that was set in 2015. Currently, temperatures are expected to peak in the low 90s.

"With the holiday, residents who are planning to be outside for extended periods of time should pack plenty of water and even an umbrella to provide some shade," said LoBiondo.

As the heat builds, another factor that could further worsen outdoor conditions is wildfire smoke. AccuWeather forecasters say some wildfire smoke is expected to linger on Wednesday, though some improvement may be possible.

This smoke is from western Canadian wildfires, some of which were sparked earlier this year by Mother Nature's own fireworks display: lightning.

Near-surface smoke arrived in parts of Washington and Oregon late Monday and Tuesday and will shift into parts of the northern Plains by midweek.

In the smokiest areas, high temperatures may not soar quite as high, given the limited nature of the sunshine. However, air quality will take a significant hit in these areas, likely reaching unhealthy or dangerous levels for some individuals.

In addition to the record-challenging heat in the Northwest, conditions will remain quite hot across the Southwestern states this week.

On Sunday, Phoenix experienced its highest temperature reading so far in 2023 when the mercury reached a sizzling 115.

In fact, Phoenix hasn't recorded a high temperature below 110 since the end of June. Historical average temperatures for the city in early July hover around 107, so any measure of heat above that threshold is significant.

AccuWeather forecasters say almost no relief is on the way as temperatures in Phoenix are expected to climb above the 110-degree threshold daily through at least early next week.

It's a similar story in Las Vegas. After Sin City set a new record for the latest date that a 100-degree reading was observed in a calendar year on Friday, temperatures soared to 111 and 112 degrees on Sunday and Monday, respectively. The region will continue to have highs in the triple digits into next week.

Want next-level safety, ad-free? Unlock advanced, hyperlocal severe weather alerts when you subscribe to Premium+ on the AccuWeather app. AccuWeather Alerts are prompted by our expert meteorologists who monitor and analyze dangerous weather risks 24/7 to keep you and your family safer.
Here's the latest on House Bill 1020 with state Supreme Court hearing to come this week

As a number of new state laws took effect in Mississippi with the start of the new fiscal year Saturday, one of the most discussed and argued over pieces of legislation remains blocked.

House Bill 1020, the controversial plan to implement state control over certain areas of the legal system in Jackson and Hinds County, remains locked in multiple court battles, with a case before the Mississippi Supreme Court scheduled for this week.

Multiple aspects of the bill and an accompanying bill remain blocked by order of a federal judge, including the appointment of judges and the requirement that events in much of downtown Jackson get state approval.

Here's what you need to know on ongoing court challenges to HB 1020 and Senate Bill 2343:

Attorney Cliff Johnson, Director of the Roderick and Solange MacArthur Justice Center, speaks during a hearing on Wednesday, May 10, in Hinds County Chancery Court in Jackson, where a judge heard arguments about a Mississippi law that would create a court system with judges who would be appointed rather than elected.

What is the status of the court cases?

There are currently two main challenges against HB 1020 and SB 2343.

In a challenge based on state courts, a Hinds County Chancery Court judge ruled in May that HB 1020 could take effect, seemingly allowing for the appointment of the temporary judges, the creation of the new Capitol Complex Improvement District court and the expansion of that CCID area. Plaintiffs in that case appealed the decision to the state supreme court, which is expected to hear that appeal this week.

In a separate case, based in federal courts, there have been multiple hearings with oral arguments before U.S. District Judge Henry Wingate. Most recently, on Thursday, Wingate extended the order blocking the state's event permitting requirement from taking effect. Wingate has yet to rule on plaintiff's request for a more permanent preliminary injunction, which would block the laws from taking effect until the legal disputes have been settled.

U.S. District Judge Henry Wingate, shown in this Aug. 19, 2022 photograph taken in Jackson, Miss.

When is the next hearing in each case?

The Mississippi Supreme Court will hear arguments on the case at 10:30 a.m. Thursday, in the En Banc Courtroom at the Gartin Justice Building in Jackson.

The next oral arguments in the federal case have yet to be announced.

Will there be a recusal?

Mississippi Supreme Court Chief Justice Michael Randolph exits the Thad Cochran United States Courthouse in Jackson on Wednesday, June 14, after oral arguments were heard concerning House Bill 1020. The bill would create a Mississippi law that would establish a court system with judges who would be appointed rather than elected.

The plaintiffs have filed multiple motions requesting that Chief Justice Michael Randolph recuse himself from Thursday's proceedings.

Randolph was initially listed as a defendant in both the state and federal cases, though he has since been removed from both. Nonetheless, the plaintiffs argue in court documents that Randolph should recuse due to the fact that he is the state official that would appoint the judges under HB 1020.

Furthermore, in a later supplement filed to the state supreme court, the plaintiffs mention that Randolph directly addressed Wingate in the federal case, a sign that they say points to his entanglement in it. Randolph, who was seeking his removal as a named party, also spoke on the success of previous judges he has appointed.

As of Friday afternoon, Randolph had not announced whether he would recuse himself from the case. During the June appearance before Wingate, the chief justice said his staff was working on its response.

What are the two sides arguing in the state case?

Attorneys Gerald Kucia, left, and Rex Shannon, both with the Mississippi Attorney General's Office, exit the Thad Cochran United States Courthouse in Jackson on Monday, May 22, following a day in federal court where a judge heard arguments about a Mississippi law that would create a court system with judges who would be appointed rather than elected.

Lawyers from the office of the attorney general, which is tasked with defending state laws against any legal challenges, have argued in both state and federal courts that the bills should not be delayed from becoming law because they are intended to reduce crime in the capital city, and thus delaying them could cause harm. Furthermore, the state's attorneys have argued that the plaintiffs show no likelihood of success on the merits. In other words, they argue that the individuals challenging the laws cannot show that they have a good chance of ultimate success.

On the other side, the plaintiffs, who in the state case are Jackson residents, argue that the Mississippi constitution stipulates that circuit court judges "shall be elected" by residents of the county, and that depriving them of the ability to elect the judges that represent them violates that part of the constitution. Furthermore, the plaintiffs have argued that the law represents discrimination against Hinds County residents when compared to residents of other counties, who do elect all of their circuit court judges.

This article originally appeared on Mississippi Clarion Ledger: Mississippi Supreme Court to hear HB 1020 challenge in Jackson MS
Scene of Baltimore mass shooting and victims inset (Metro Crime Stoppers Of Maryland/Facebook)

A high school graduate and a 20-year-old man became the latest victims of Americas spate of gun violence and mass shootings this weekend.

Kylis Fagbemi, 20, and Aaliyah Gonzalez, 18, were partying at a block party in the Brooklyn Homes area of South Baltimore, Maryland, in the early hours of Sunday morning when gunfire broke out.

In total, 30 people were shot  including the two victims killed.

Among the 28 who survived, half were children.

Baltimore police believe at least two shooters are behind the attack and are seeking those involved, while the victims families and the community come to terms with the tragedy.

Heres what we know so far:

The victims

On Sunday afternoon, police identified the two victims killed in the attack.

Aaliyah Gonzalez, 18, was shot and killed on the scene.

Kylis Fagbemi, 20, was rushed to hospital where he succumbed to his injuries.

Aaliyah Gonzalez, 18, died when at least two shooters opened fire (Facebook)

Gonzalezs heartbroken mother paid tribute to her daughter in a Facebook post, sharing photos of her recent high school graduation.

MY BABY!!! Worst day of my life! I cannot do life without her. I NEED HER!!, she wrote.

Why would they do this to a perfect angel. I love you so much baby. I didnt get there fast enough. God this is a mistake!!! Please!!

In a follow-up post, she added: I always said, No matter how much I say I love you, I love you more than that.

Kylis Fagbemi, 20, and Aaliyah Gonzalez, 18, were both killed (Metro Crime Stoppers)

The shooting

At around 12.35am on Sunday morning, Baltimore police received multiple calls reporting a shooting on the 800 block of Gretna Court.

Officers responded to the scene, where the community had been holding its annual Brooklyn Day block party, to find 30 victims suffering from gunshot wounds.

One female victim was pronounced dead on the scene while nine victims were rushed to local hospitals and 20 walked into area hospitals across the region. One male victim died at the hospital from his injuries.

Among the 28 victims who survived, three were in critical condition and 14 were minors.

The aftermath of the mass shooting (Copyright 2023 The Associated Press. All rights reserved)

The non-fatal female victims injured were one 13-year-old, one 14-year-old, two 15-year-olds, three 16-year-olds, two 17-year-olds, two 18-year-olds, three 19-year-olds, one 20-year-old, one 23-year-old and one 32-year-old.

The non-fatal male victims injured were one 13-year-old, one 15-year-old, two 16-year-old, two 17-year-olds, three 18-year-olds, one 22-year-old and one 31-year-old.

Witnesses revealed how they initially mistook the gunfire for fireworks going off.

The shots were just going on and on and on, Lakell Nelson, 54, told the Baltimore Sun.

But, reality set in when two women told her they had been shot.

A person looks out at the scene of the mass shooting (Copyright 2023 The Associated Press. All rights reserved)

I kinda didnt believe them at first because they were walking up the street. I said, Show me, and the girl was like, I was shot in my butt, she said.

When she turned around, I saw the hole through her shorts.

Ms Nelson said she drove the two women to a local hospital.

The shooters

Baltimore Police said that they believe there was at least two shooters in the attack.

Acting Baltimore Police Commissioner Richard Worley told Fox Baltimore on Sunday afternoon: We know for sure there are more than one. We dont know how many.

As of Monday morning, the suspects identities remain unknown and no arrests had been made.

Mayor Brandon Scott described the actions of the soooters as cowardly and urged people to come forward with information.

This was a reckless, cowardly act that happened here and that has permanently altered many lives and cost two people their lives, he said in a press conference on Sunday.

I want those who are responsible to hear me, and hear me very clearly.

Members of Baltimore community walk through crime scene (Copyright 2023 The Associated Press. All rights reserved)

Speaking to the perpetrators, he said: We will not stop until we find you, and we will find you. Until then, I hope that every single breath you take, that you think about the lives that you took, think about the lives that you impacted here tonight.

He added: Treat this as if it were your family. How you would want people to treat it if you were mourning, if this was your neighborhood, if this was an event in your community that this happened at. We want you to treat it that way because thats how we have to treat each other as Baltimoreans.

Anyone with information is urged to contact Homicide detectives at 410-396-2100. Those who wish to remain anonymous may utilise the Metro Crime Stoppers tip line, at 1-866-7LOCKUP. You may also text tips through the Metro Crime Stoppers of Maryland website.
In the immediate aftermath of last years mass shooting at Highland Parks Fourth of July parade came the expected questions when such a tragedy unfolds: Who was the gunman? Where had his weapon come from?

And in Illinois, a state run by gun control-minded Democrats, could laws be bolstered and were police using them as effectively as possible?

Experts have suggested what was on the books  if properly understood and implemented  potentially could have prevented the alleged shooter from obtaining the high-powered semi-automatic rifle used to rain bullets down on paradegoers, killing seven and wounding dozens more.

Ensuing efforts centered on so-called red flag gun laws and other measures designed to take away firearms from those whose backgrounds suggest they should not have access to them. And a Tribune analysis of available state data shows that the push by politicians, advocates and police leaders to use them more often seems to have had an effect in the year since the mass shooting, including significant spikes in the use of the red flag laws and formal warnings to Illinois State Police about people who should not own firearms.

In a period running from approximately the date of the shooting through May 31, state police received more than 11,800 so-called clear and present danger reports, notifying them that someone might be too dangerous to be granted a gun license. That is more than double the number received during the same period the prior year, state data shows.

The use of a separate tool, the firearms restraining order, the form for the states red flag law, has also jumped since the Highland Park attack.

The orders, which judges can use to take guns away from people they consider a threat, were granted 228 times in the 3  years from the laws inception in January 2019 through early August 2022. Just from then until May, there have been another 146 granted, nearly tripling the rate of usage based on a monthly average.

Additionally, changes to the firearms restraining order law were incorporated this year in a sweeping measure from the Democratic-controlled state legislature  currently entangled in state and federal legal challenges  that bans more than 100 high-powered guns, including the type used in the shooting, and ammunition magazines with the capacity of holding more than 10 rounds in long guns and 15 in handguns.

Increases in the use of state law can be attributed to heightened awareness, Illinois State Police Director Brendan Kelly told the Tribune in a recent interview.

The awareness is growing, and that is where the thrust of our effort has to be. Its simply making people aware that they have this option, Kelly said. And then, as we do that, eliminating any barriers or challenges that may be there from a technical standpoint or a legal standpoint to simplifying the process.

Still, gaps in the available data remain. Theres no data available from the courts that show the number of firearms restraining orders that are requested but denied by a judge, leaving an incomplete picture of whether more have been requested after Highland Park or if judges have been more likely to grant them.

At the same time, lawmakers still need to consider a series of recommendations from a state police-led panel assembled prior to the Highland Park shooting to find ways to further strengthen the law. Illinois also still lags behind other states in its use of firearms restraining orders despite the efforts by law enforcement officials, legislators and others.

The events of Highland Park raised the firearms restraining orders profile significantly across the state, Kelly said, speaking for Illinois. While its not clear that the red flag laws we have here would have definitely prevented that circumstance, it did catalyze and ignite a lot of conversation among law enforcement, mental health professionals, school administrators, and other stakeholders about why or why not these tools are being used on a daily basis.

Although distinct, firearms restraining orders and clear and present danger reports have generally the same purpose. Firearm restraining orders, however, must be granted by a judge and can only be requested by law enforcement or certain people close to the subject in question. Clear and present danger reports can be filed by other individuals, including school administrators and mental health professionals, and can be used by state police in determining whether to revoke someones firearm owners identification card or deny a FOID card application.

State police changed the way the latter are handled in direct response to gaps exposed by the particulars of the case of Robert Crimo III, the alleged Highland Park gunman who awaits trial on murder charges.

His father, Robert Crimo Jr., also awaits trial on felony reckless conduct charges for helping his son acquire a FOID card more than two years before the shooting, despite reports to police that the son tried to kill himself and threatened to kill others, according to authorities.

The younger Crimo was able to obtain a FOID card just months after Highland Park police in September 2019 filed a clear and present danger report. That was because the report wasnt retained after it was determined he didnt have a firearm permit at the time or a pending application for one, state police have said.

After the July 4 shooting, the state police codified in its administrative rules the agencys ability to retain clear and present danger reports even if the subject doesnt have a FOID card or a pending application on file and isnt deemed to be an imminent threat. The agency would be able to use such reports in evaluating future FOID card applications.

According to the state police, as a result of the rule changes, it retained 6,413 clear and present danger reports that previously could have had to be discarded out of a total of 11,812 reports filed from July 1, 2022 through May 31. Those 6,413 reports represented instances where the subject did not have a FOID card or pending application.

Those 11,812 reports also resulted in 5,181 FOID cards being revoked or applications being denied, more than double the 2,378 revocations and denials during the same period the previous year.

The Illinois Criminal Justice Information Authority, a state agency focused on research and analysis, told the Tribune they do not have data showing how many firearm restraining order petitions were filed overall. The Administrative Office of the Illinois Courts also does not have that information. Cook County Chief Judge Timothy Evans office approved the Tribunes request to receive local FRO data, but that data was not made available before press time.

Kelly acknowledged the gap, saying even his agency cant track the number of total firearm restraining order requests because it only learns of the orders once judges have signed off.

If theres a mechanism to be developed that would show that, I think that could reveal what are the fact patterns that result in a firearms restraining order being denied? he said. What does the court see that says, Hey, this may not be enough or this does meet the burden of proof?

Its a relevant question, added Kelly, due to the higher burden of proof for a firearms restraining order compared to a clear and present danger report.

Prosecutors do not directly request firearm restraining orders; that must be done by police, a relative or someone else close to the subject. But state law allows prosecutors to assist in filing petitions, and some states attorneys offices in Illinois have integrated themselves into the process.

DuPage County has had 95 firearm restraining orders granted since the law took effect in 2019. Thats more than any other county in Illinois. Cook County had the second most petitions filed with 64, followed by Lake County with 49 and Kane County with 17, according to state police data.

Republican DuPage County States Attorney Robert Berlin credits the countys high number of petitions to an aggressive push for training and awareness among prosecutors and police.

We have direct contact with the police on these matters. And we want to make sure that theyre done correctly, Berlin said.

In Lake County, home to Highland Park, the prosecutors office has hosted training sessions for local law enforcement and other interested parties on firearms restraining orders in response to the July Fourth shooting. The most recent session, in late June, had more than 60 participants.

Eric Rinehart, the countys Democratic top prosecutor, agreed the spike in firearms restraining orders since the shooting could probably be attributed to increased awareness. The tragedy sparked significant public conversations about red flag laws, as well as clear and present danger notifications.

Its important that we think about all of the different ways that we can regulate who has firearms, Rinehart said. I think we are all committed to developing a multilateral approach and collaborative approach with law enforcement, with schools and with health care providers, to make sure that we are finding, identifying and then isolating individuals who should not have firearms.

Rinehart stressed that firearms restraining orders are only one way of taking guns from potentially dangerous people. Any judge presiding over a criminal case can order a defendant to turn over their weapons as a condition of being released on bond, for example.

Of the firearms restraining orders requested in Lake County, most have to do with the gun owners potential mental health issues, not a criminal case, Rinehart said. He also said his office is working to spread word about clear and present danger reports, recently sending a letter to local schools reminding administrators of their obligation to notify state police if they believe someone poses a threat.

Chicagos endemic gun violence is largely carried out by those who do not own guns legally, limiting the reach of FROs. But law enforcement in Cook County told the Tribune that FROs are still in the mix.

A spokesperson for Democratic States Attorney Kim Foxx did not make anyone available for an interview. But in answers to written questions, the office stated that Cook County assistant states attorneys assigned to the offices mental health and domestic violence units help people with emergency firearms restraining order petitions when the petitioner needs help.

As part of the gun and magazine ban, lawmakers extended the duration of when firearms restraining orders can go into effect from six months to up to one year, with a renewal option.

Ed Sullivan, a contract lobbyist for the Illinois State Rifle Association, which is one of several gun rights entities challenging Gov. J.B. Pritzkers gun and magazine ban in court, said no one wants firearms to end up in the wrong hands. But hes concerned the firearms restraining order law could have adverse effects on legal gun owners, particularly if theyre involved in messy court disputes with ex-spouses.

We feel that the red flag law is unfortunately going in the wrong direction and can ultimately harm law-abiding citizens through false accusations, and well be tracking that to see if indeed that pans out, said Sullivan.

After the shooting, state Rep. Bob Morgan, a Deerfield Democrat who was with his family at the Highland Park parade when the first shots were fired, headed a working group of lawmakers focused on finding ways to reduce gun violence.

The result was the gun and magazine ban, which is currently awaiting rulings in separate legal challenges to the Illinois Supreme Court and 7th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals over the laws constitutionality.

Going forward, Morgan wants to review the process by which a gun owner accused in an order of protection for domestic violence would have to surrender their firearms.

Currently, such gun owners are generally required to turn in their guns to other FOID card holders in certain court proceedings if theyre named in such a petition. But this spring, the Illinois House passed a broad firearms safety bill that included a provision that would require them to only surrender their guns to law enforcement until the matter is resolved. The measure, however, hasnt made it through the Senate.

Morgan emphasized efforts still need to be made to educate the public about the laws Illinois has in place.

The vast majority of discussions around education and implementation of the firearms restraining orders are still relatively in their infancy, Morgan said.

____
Hispanics now the largest racial group in Texas  but not in Austin

Hispanics have become the largest racial demographic group in Texas, new estimates from the U.S. Census Bureau show, capping years of population shifts and providing a potential blueprint for the U.S. as it tracks toward becoming majority-minority.

In July 2022, Latinos made up 40.2% of the state's population, according to estimates, while non-Hispanic white people accounted for 39.8%. It's the first time since the mid-1800s that non-Hispanic white Texans don't compose the largest population in the state.

The shift isn't a surprise. For decades, the share of nonwhite or mixed-race Texans has grown due to immigration, interracial marriage and more people identifying with their ancestral ethnicities. In 2004, the population of non-Hispanic white people dropped below 50% for the first time in almost two centuries.

Considering those factors and Texas' large border with Mexico, the milestone isn't much of a stand-alone achievement, said state Sen. Jose Menendez, D-San Antonio. Of more significance, he said, is the potential influence that Latinos' growing population could have.

"The Hispanic population has had an influence on our food, on our culture, on our music, on our literature, on our art, on so many things, and that's wonderful," Menendez said. "But I think where we should strive to have a bigger impact is ... what can we do to help them achieve higher numbers, proportional numbers in higher education and academia and leadership positions?"

Menendez, who also chairs the Texas Senate Hispanic Caucus, said the numbers of Latinos across the state are not properly represented in government leadership at all levels. Hispanic populations are diverse within themselves, and Latinos subscribe to various political and ideological beliefs.

He said Texas should model itself after states he believes have done well in electing officials who are representative of the population, like California and Florida.

While Latinos made up 40.2% of the state's population and non-Hispanic white people accounted for 39.8% of Texans, Austin's non-Hispanic white population was 47.8% of the city's people and its Hispanic population made up 33.1%.

Austin-area colleges and universities: How diverse are students, employees?

White population remains largest in Austin, Travis County

The white non-Hispanic population in Austin and Travis County remains the largest racial bloc, according to July 2022 estimates, though both have higher concentrations of Latinos than the U.S. overall.

Census figures show Austin's non-Hispanic white population is 47.8% of the city's people, while its Hispanic population makes up 33.1%. Travis County's data are similar. In the U.S., non-Hispanic white people account for 58.9% of the population, whereas Hispanics make up 19.1%.

Brittney Rodriguez, chief operating officer of the Greater Austin Hispanic Chamber of Commerce, said a variety of reasons contribute to the disparity between Austin and the state. As the cost of living in the city rises, Latino residents are being priced out of places they've long lived, she said, and minority-owned businesses are closing at higher rates, leading minority entrepreneurs to relocate.

Austin breaks into top 10 list of largest U.S. cities. See how other Texas cities ranked.

Latinos face substantial barriers in health care and education, Rodriguez added. In Austin, Latinos tend to rely heavily on public transportation, meaning they wake up earlier in the morning for work and arrive home later in the evening.

"I think those are the areas that we've got to be much more conscientious of safeguarding to ensure that the city that we love is kept intact, and the parts of the city that we love are safeguarded for future generations to also enjoy. It's what makes Austin so great," Rodriguez said.

In 2019, the median income for Hispanic households in Travis County was 2.3 times less than that of white households, according to the 2022 community health assessment for Austin and the county. The assessment also found that Latinos were most likely not to have graduated from high school compared with other racial groups.

Several recent legislative and political actions have taken aim at the intersection of education and race that could affect marginalized groups' access to higher education. Texas lawmakers recently passed Senate Bill 17, which prohibits public colleges and universities in the state from maintaining or establishing diversity, equity and inclusion offices and from requiring anyone to provide DEI statements or participate in DEI training starting in 2024.

Texas legislative regular session ends. What higher education bills passed?

On Thursday, the U.S. Supreme Court issued a ruling prohibiting the consideration of race in public and private college admissions nationwide, essentially overturning affirmative action initiatives. The move is expected to affect thousands of students applying for colleges and universities in Texas.

Challenges to Latinos detrimentally affect other populations, experts say

Financial and representative deficiencies faced by Latinos have the potential to translate to widespread issues across populations, said Jacqueline Angel, a University of Texas professor of public affairs and sociology. She asserted that those who express apathy toward challenges affecting other populations will probably experience the pitfalls of those challenges, too.

"A healthier state is a more productive state, and we know that if one doesn't have access to affordable health care, as well as available health care, then that's not going to be possible," Angel said. "We need a healthy nation. We need a healthy state. We need healthy communities that bring everyone together, not tear them apart."

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Angel said people tend to fear those who are different from themselves, but Latinos are leading the charge to allay fears by demonstrating the positive benefits of a multicultural society. Rodriguez cited the role Latinos take in society as proof of those benefits.

"These men and women are an integral part of your, mine and everyone else's day-to-day," Rodriguez said. "From the food on your table to the roadways you drive on, these are the folks who are contributing so much work and making it possible."

Correction: An earlier version of this article misrepresented Hispanic population estimates in Travis County by citing estimates for the U.S. The article has been updated to contain the most accurate information.

This article originally appeared on Austin American-Statesman: Hispanics now the largest racial demographic in Texas  but not Austin
Historic homes of Fayetteville that are still lived in

Cumberland County has dozens of homes that appear on the National Historical Register list, with some dating back to the early 19th Century.

Some homes, like the 1897 E.A. Poe House on Bradford Avenue, and the 1800s Sanford House and 1907 McDiarmid home, both on Dick Street, have been turned into museums or private businesses.

Some homes, however, still have residential occupants.

Heres a look at some of the historical homes in the city, according to Cumberland County property records and deeds.

Taylor-Utley House

According to documents filed with the North Carolina Division of Archives and History, the Taylor-Utley House was built about 1848 in the village of Belmont, a small settlement of Haymount that was a mile from Fayetteville city limits.

The property was purchased by Capt. James A.J. Bradford, commander of the nearby U.S. Arsenal in Fayetteville, and sold to local merchant William Taylor, who built the two-and-one-half story frame dwelling for his family. According to records, Taylors home and property were placed in a trust in 1857 to cover his debts, and he defaulted on the house and lot the following year.

The Taylor-Utley House on Hay Street was built about 1848 and was most recently a behavioral health center. It is now for sale, according to realtor sign outside the home.

Joseph Utley, a local merchant, then purchased the land. After Utleys death in 1877, the property was transferred to his four unmarried daughters. Neil McQueen, who became sheriff of Cumberland County in 1885, was a later owner.

The Greek Revival-style home is at 916 Hay St.

The Stedman House was built about 1925.

Stedman house

The two-story Stedman House was built about 1925 and is the only existing example of the Italian Renaissance Revival style within the city, according to historical records.

The house was built for Frank Haywood Stedman, a Fayetteville native and successful businessman who helped organize the Cross Creek Building and Loan Association in Fayetteville in 1905. He also organized and served as president of the Cumberland Savings and Trust Co. and the Caledonian Savings and Trust Co. Stedman was a delegate to the 1924 Democratic National Convention and served for several years on the North Carolina State Board of Conservation and Development.

After his banks failed, Stedman was forced to sell his home in May 1936. It was deeded to Elizabeth Gilbert, the wife of J. Warren Pate, who was president of Cumberland Savings & Loan. The Stedman House remained in the Pate family until March 1979

The Rufus C. Brown House known as Brownlea was built in 1939.

Brownlea or Rufus C. Brown House

In 1939, a new home was built for local business owner Rufus C. Brown, who was a partner for a local plywood manufacturing company known as Rankin and Brown Co., according to historical records. Brown was also vice president of the Home Federal Savings and Loan Association, a local bank.

The two-story Colonial Revival-style house became known as Brownlea by April 1940. After Browns death in 1973, the property was passed on to his wife and six daughters.

The Verdery home was built in 1936.

Verdery

A two-story Colonial Revival style home was built in 1936 for Dr. William C. Verdery, who came to Fayetteville in 1919 shortly after the establishment of Camp Bragg, according to historical records.

During his brief tenure in public health, Verdery also established a baby clinic in one of the citys villages and treated patients during the influenza epidemic at Camp Bragg and in Fayetteville.

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After being honorably discharged from the Army in 1920, Verdery joined the staff at Cumberland Hospital, where he practiced until 1925. He later practiced at Pitman Hospital in Fayetteville, specializing in obstetrics and pediatrics.

According to records, Verderys daughter, Stuart Verdery-Kerr, his only child, later occupied the home at 1428 Raeford Road.

The McMillian-Rankin House was built about 1851.

McMillian Rankin House

The McMillian Rankin House was added to the National Historic Register in 2007 when the Haymount Historic Districts boundaries were increased.

The one-story gable home is the second oldest in the district and was built about 1851 for John Waddell Jr. and purchased in 1872 by Daniel McMillan. It remained in the McMillan family until 1920 when Claude Rankin, a cashier at Cumberland Savings & Trust Co. and assistant treasurer of the Cape Fear Fair Association purchased it. Rankin was later the owner of Claude Rankin and Son Insurance Co.

Century-old Fayetteville home closer to preservation

Colton-Clark-Monoghan House

The Colton-Clark-Monoghan home was built about 1835 for the Rev. Simeon Colton, the first principal of the Donaldson Academy, according to historical records.

The Colton-Clark-Monoghan home was built about 1835.

It was purchased in 1889 by Edward Lee Clark. In 1907, Clarks daughter Etta Bell Monaghan moved into her childhood home with her husband Edward J. Monaghan. The home remained in the Clark and Monaghan families until it was sold in 1955.

Staff writer Rachael Riley can be reached at rriley@fayobserver.com or 910-486-3528.

This article originally appeared on The Fayetteville Observer: Fayetteville, NC historic homes that are privately owned
Hit-and-run crash that killed man riding scooter may have been intentional, cops say

A hit-and-run crash that killed a 61-year-old man riding a scooter may have been intentional, Utah police reported.

The man died after a collision with another vehicle at 1:15 a.m. Monday, July 3, Salt Lake City police said in a news release. The other driver left the scene without stopping.

A preliminary investigation showed the other driver turned around before striking the scooter, police told KSTU.

Although the investigation continues, the crash appears to have been intentional, police said in the news release.

They do not know if the two drivers knew each other, police said. They have no information on the other driver or vehicle.

Police and emergency crews responded to the crash, but the scooter rider did not survive. His name has not been released pending notification of his family.

Detectives urged the driver to call 911 and turn themselves in. They ask that anyone with information call 801-799-3000 and reference case number 23-144525.

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[Source]

Hong Kong police are offering a reward of 1 million Hong Kong dollars (approximately $127,600) for information leading to each arrest of eight self-exiled pro-democracy activists.

Pro-democracy activists: The activists are former pro-democracy lawmakers Nathan Law, Ted Hui and Dennis Kwok, unionist Mung Siu-tat, lawyer Kevin Yam and activists Finn Lau, Anna Kwok and Elmer Yuen, reported the Associated Press.

The activists  seven men and one woman  are currently living abroad in the U.S., Britain, Canada and Australia, all of which have have suspended their extradition treaties with Hong Kong.

Accusations: According to police, the eight activists have violated the territory's National Security Law, with offenses ranging from collusion with foreign forces to inciting secession. The police have obtained arrest warrants from the court for the activists, who continue to remain vocal against Beijings crackdown on dissent.

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About the law: The bounties reportedly mark the first time police have issued rewards for information on suspects accused of violating the legislation since it was introduced in 2020 to prohibit sedition, secession and subversion against Beijing. There have since been over 260 people arrested under the National Security Law.

Enforcing the law: Steven Li, chief superintendent of the police's National Security Department, noted that police have extraterritorial jurisdiction to pursue suspects overseas who threaten the city's national security.

However, they cannot arrest them if they remain overseas.

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Were absolutely not staging any show or spreading terror. Were enforcing the law, Li said, urging the activists to return and surrender for a reduction in their sentences.

Freedom in Britain: Law, who currently resides in Britain, believes that the charges are an attempt to suppress their voices.

I am just a Hongkonger who speaks out for Hongkongers, Law tweeted. I hope that all friends on the list are well, and I ask Hongkongers not to cooperate with any related pursuit or bounty actions. We should not limit ourselves, self-censor, be intimidated or live in fear.

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British Security Minister Tom Tugendhat also tweeted his support for the activists.

Hong Kongers in the UK enjoy exactly the same freedoms as the rest of us, he wrote. These warrants are trying to interfere with our internal affairs. [Law] and his fellow pro-democracy activists are under our protection, and enjoy our full support.

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(Bloomberg) -- Hong Kongs Chief Executive John Lee pledged a lifetime of police pursuit for eight democracy activists who fled abroad to evade national security charges, one day after authorities put a HK$1,000,000 ($127,650) bounty on each.

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The first rewards to be issued in relation to security crimes were announced, along with arrest warrants, by chief superintendent Steve Li at a news conference Monday. They apply to former lawmakers Nathan Law, Dennis Kwok, and Ted Hui, lawyer Kevin Yam as well as activists Finn Lau, Anna Kwok, Elmer Yuan and unionist Mung Siu-tat.

Lee said at a regular press briefing in the city Tuesday the arrest warrants sent a strong message that acts endangering national security wont be tolerated.

I also want to tell the criminals that the only way to manage the destiny of being an abscondee, who will be pursued for life, is to surrender, he added, encouraging friends and family members of the eight to provide information to the police.

All those targeted are currently residing in countries such as the US, UK, Canada and Australia  nations whose governments have publicly condemned the Beijing-drafted national security law. None of the people Hong Kong named as suspects are likely to return, making their prospect of arrest in the territory close to zero.

Hong Kong authorities could try to persuade other jurisdictions to hand over the individuals. The UK government has previously alerted people in Britain named in a Hong Kong national security case to avoid traveling to countries that have extradition treaties with the Chinese territory.

Thailand has bowed to pressure from the Chinese Communist Party to deport Uyghurs to China, while Beijing has been accused of pressuring Turkey to do the same. Chinese authorities have also apparently kidnapped individuals living overseas: Hong Kong bookseller Gui Minhai was snatched from his home in Thailand in 2015, before resurfacing in China.

The bounties will likely add to concerns the crackdown on rights under the China-imposed legislation is diminishing Hong Kongs rule of law, which for decades has been a foundational pillar of its standing as an international financial center. The UK last year withdrew its top judges from the citys Court of Final Appeal over such concerns.

US State Department spokesperson Matthew Miller called on Hong Kong to withdraw the bounties, saying the NSL threatened the fundamental freedoms of people all over the world. Australias government said in a statement the rewards showed the corrosive effects of the NSL on the rule of law in Hong Kong. UK Foreign Secretary James Cleverly asked the Hong Kong government to stop targeting those who stand up for freedom and democracy.

Chinese Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Mao Ning said Tuesday at a regular press briefing in Beijing that her government opposed nations interference in legal matters. She also called on countries to respect Chinas sovereignty and to stop providing a safe haven for fugitives.

The Hong Kong government said Monday that even after fleeing the city the eight activists had continued to commit offenses under the security law, which asserts global jurisdiction for cases involving terrorism, secession, subversion and collusion with foreign powers. Those offenses carry sentences as long as life in prison.

The fugitives should not have any delusion that they could evade their legal liabilities by absconding from Hong Kong, a government spokesperson said in a statement. The authorities also warned Hong Kong residents that funding the eight activists could violate the national security law.

Many of the wanted individuals have remained active on social media since leaving the Chinese territory. A Hong Kong student was arrested by security police earlier this year over a series of pro-independence comments she allegedly posted on social media while studying in Japan, local media including the South China Morning Post reported, showing the long-arm of security legislation.

See: Hong Kong Supercharges 1938 British Sedition Law to Curb Dissent

Some 260 individuals, between the ages of 15 to 90, have been arrested for acts endangering national security in the past three years, Li, the police official, said Monday. He added that two-thirds of those had been charged. That figure includes arrests under the colonial sedition law that has been revived by security police.

The security law and years of strict Covid curbs sparked a population exodus in Hong Kong. From the end of 2019 through 2022, the citys population fell by about 187,300 to 7.33 million.

As Hong Kong tries to repair its image and woo talent back now pandemic curbs have lifted, Thomas Kellogg, the executive director of Georgetown Center for Asian Law, said firms should be aware of the reputational risks of operating in the hub.

The government is not going to soft-pedal implementation of the NSL as part of its effort to win back foreign investment, he added.

--With assistance from Ka Ho Cheuk, Ellen Milligan, Jon Herskovitz and Philip Glamann.

(Updates with comments from Chinas Foreign Ministry.)

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The Houston skyline in November 2017. Credit: Callie Richmond for The Texas Tribune

Houston officials sued the state of Texas on Monday to stop a sweeping law aimed at gutting all kinds of local ordinances and sapping the power of the states bluer urban areas.

The law  House Bill 2127, dubbed the Death Star bill by opponents  was signed into law by Gov. Greg Abbott in June, marking Texas Republicans biggest attempt yet to kneecap local governments in a yearslong assault on Texas major metropolitan areas, often governed by Democrats.

[Texas Republicans ended a patchwork of local rules they say hurt business. They also eroded powers of city councils.]

The law prevents cities and counties from creating local ordinances that go further than whats allowed under broad areas of state law, an attempt to overturn cities progressive policies. Among those policies are mandated water breaks for construction workers in Dallas and Austin, a component of the law thats gained more criticism as Texas experiences a drastic summer heat wave.

Leaders of local governments across the state criticized the proposal as a massive power grab that would upend how the state has operated for nearly a century and prevent them from responding to local needs. Under the new state law, cities and counties could not pass local rules that touch on broad fields regulated by state law  like labor, agriculture, finance and natural resources. The laws broad language, they have argued, makes it difficult to determine which local ordinances are now illegal and will prompt a litany of lawsuits.

In Houston, the law would overturn local ordinances regulating tow-truck companies, outdoor music festivals, noise regulations and boarding homes, Houston Mayor Sylvester Turner said at a Monday press conference. But the full extent of what local laws would become illegal remains unclear.

What this means is that cities like the city of Houston cannot pass ordinances in these areas unless the state of Texas explicitly gives us permission to do so, Turner said. That is a total reversal from the way things have been in this state for more than a century.

In the lawsuit filed Monday in Travis County court, Houston leaders argue that the new law violates the state constitution and significantly weakens cities authority to self-govern. The law conflicts with a portion of the constitution that allows cities to enact their own laws, they argue. In order for the law to take effect, voters would have to approve a constitutional amendment, they said.

The state constitution already forbids cities from enacting laws inconsistent with the constitution or laws passed by state lawmakers. Houston officials see an opening there to strike down the law, arguing a local ordinance cant conflict with state law if there isnt a specific state law the ordinance would directly conflict with, the lawsuit says.

Abbott and business lobbying groups, particularly the National Federation of Independent Business, have long pushed for a wide-ranging law like HB 2127 that negates city rules like mandated water breaks and paid sick leave ordinances in Austin, Dallas and San Antonio  which courts had prevented from taking effect.

Proponents of the bill on Monday blasted the involvement of California-based civil rights attorney Marissa Roy  who works with Local Solutions Support Center, an organization that bills itself as a national hub to counter state laws that undermine local governments ability to self-govern  in the lawsuit.

I am not surprised that leftist cities are working with activists from California to try and slow down the implementation of HB 2127, state Rep. Dustin Burrows, a Lubbock Republican who authored the law, wrote in a tweet Monday. I have confidence this bill will become law, and help ensure Texas economy thrives for future generations.

The new law is the most wide-ranging effort to-date by Texas Republicans to undercut the leaders of the states large urban areas. In recent years, lawmakers have passed laws to prevent cities and counties from requiring landlords to rent to tenants with federal housing vouchers or regulating fracking within their limits. If cities and counties want to raise property taxes a certain amount each year or rein in their police budgets, they have to get voter approval under legislation approved in the past few years. Local governments can no longer enact mask mandates or require schools or businesses to close if theres a COVID-19 outbreak under a new law passed this year.

HB 2127 is slated to take effect Sept. 1.

Join us for conversations that matter with newly announced speakers at the 2023 Texas Tribune Festival, in downtown Austin from Sept. 21-23.

Correction, July 18, 2023 at 6:56 p.m. : Correction: An earlier version of this story incorrectly stated that Local Solutions Support Center, an organization that seeks to counter state policies that undermine local government's ability to self-govern, was based in California. Local Solutions Support Center is an organization with team members based in states across the country.
First son Hunter Biden took photos of his Porsche dashboard as he sped his way to Sin City in the summer of 2018.

President Biden's son took a photo on Aug. 2 of his Porsche dashboard that showed him driving 172 miles per hour.

BIDEN SLAMMED AFTER REPORT REVEALS NUMBER OF GRANDCHILDREN HIS AIDES INSTRUCTED TO SAY PUBLICLY: MONSTERS

President Biden's son Hunter Biden took a photo on Aug. 2 of his Porsche dashboard driving 172 mph toward Sin City.

The younger Biden was traveling to Las Vegas when he hit that speed, the New York Post reported.

The Daily Mail also reported on Sunday that texts on the computer showed the younger Biden coordinating with prostitutes for a hot tub party during that same trip.

"I don't have a bathing suit and I really really wanted to wear a cute bathing suit," a woman saved under a contact named "Cheryl." "I don't have any money to buy one so then I'm just going to have to be naked right?"

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"Honestly babe the problem is you have too many girls there," "Cheryl" wrote the day after the event. "I understand you like a lot of girls."

"Thats fine do one at a time," she added.

The Daily Mail also reported on Sunday that texts on the computer showed President Biden's son coordinating with prostitutes for a hot tub party.

Additionally, the Daily Mail reported that the younger Biden filmed himself appearing to smoke crack while driving through Arlington, Virginia, in June 2018.

Hunters attorney did not immediately respond to Fox News Digitals request for comment.

Former Trump aide Garrett Ziegler heads Marco Polo, which uploaded the photos from the younger Bidens infamous laptop.

The elder Biden is facing backlash from conservatives following a report that his aides have been told to say publicly that he only has six grandchildren, omitting Hunter Bidens 4-year-old estranged daughter.

The presidents son, Hunter Biden, settled his child support case in Arkansas last week, ending a years-long paternity dispute over his 4-year-old daughter, whom both the president and the first lady refuse to acknowledge as their seventh grandchild.

First son Hunter Biden filmed a video of himself appearing to smoke crack while cruising in a car going through a residential area of Virginia outside the nations capital.

Announced in a court filing on Thursday, Hunter agreed to give his daughter some of his paintings, and the mother of the child, Lunden Alexis Roberts, agreed to withdraw her counterclaim to change their child's last name to "Biden."

White House aides have been told during strategy meetings that the president and first lady Jill Biden have six, not seven, grandchildren, two people familiar with the discussions told the newspaper.

In April, Biden listed six of his grandchildren by name during a "take your child to work day" event at the White House.

Fox News Digitals Jessica Chasmar contributed reporting.
David Weiss, the U.S. attorney tasked with investigating Hunter Biden's tax filings, denied retaliating against an IRS whistleblower who claimed that Weiss was blocked from filing charges outside his home district.

The whistleblower, Gary Shapley, told the House Ways and Means Committee in May that Attorney General Merrick Garland was not telling Congress the truth when he asserted in earlier testimony that Weiss, who is based in Delaware, had the authority to file charges outside his home district, including in California and Washington, D.C.

Weiss, in a letter sent Friday to House Judiciary Committee Chairman Rep. Jim Jordan, R-Ohio, said that the Justice Department did not retaliate against any IRS official for making protected disclosures to Congress, and that he believes he could file charges outside his home district if the investigation leads in that direction.

In the letter, Weiss didn't directly address the claims that he was blocked from filing charges outside his home district, but insisted that he has been granted "ultimate authority" over the investigation into Hunter Biden, "including responsibility for deciding where, when and whether to file charges."

Weiss also said he has been assured that he could be granted the special authority needed to file charges in the District of Columbia, the Central District of California, or any other district where charges could be brought in this matter.

U.S. Attorney David C. Weiss at a press conference in New Castle, Del. (Saquan Stimpson / USA Today Network )

Weiss' letter served as a response to a letter Jordan sent to him the week before accusing Weiss of refusing to cooperate with the committee and calling his rationale for doing so "unpersuasive."

Weiss, in his letter, disputed Jordan's accusations, saying he is unable to provide documentation or answer any specific questions about Hunter Biden because the investigation is still ongoing.

Jordan's office did not immediately respond to a request for comment. A spokesperson for the U.S. Attorney's Office in the District of Delaware declined to comment.

Weiss also left open the possibility that he might be able to provide some form of testimony to the committee.

At the appropriate time, I welcome the opportunity to discuss these topics with the Committee in more detail, and answer questions related to the whistleblowers allegations consistent with the law and Department policy, Weiss wrote.

This article was originally published on NBCNews.com
HURRICANE MURMANSK

With Ukraine seemingly poised to receive the modern F-16 jets that it has long campaigned for sometime in the near future, a unique discovery in a forest in that country sheds light on a previous effort to deliver fighter aircraft to it to help force out an invading power. The planes  eight World War II-era British-built Hawker Hurricanes  were unearthed while authorities were dealing with an unexploded bomb, another legacy of the Soviet conflict with Nazi Germany that lasted between 1941 and 1945.

https://twitter.com/GlasnostGone/status/1675393908111560704?s=20

The Hurricanes  or the remains of them  were discovered south of Kyiv, where the Soviets had apparently buried them at the end of World War II. At the time, of course, Ukraine was part of the Soviet Union, its people fighting alongside the Russians against the Nazis.

These aircraft were part of the Lend-Lease program, an enormous U.S. effort to put aid into the hands of other Allied nations fighting against Nazi Germany. After the United Kingdom, the Soviet Union was the biggest beneficiary of Lend-Lease, receiving $11.3 billion in arms, oil, food, and materiel as it battled to turn the tide of the Nazi German invasion, launched under Operation Barbarossa in June 1941.

A map shows U.S. Lend-Lease shipments to the Soviet Union in World War II, by route. U.S. State Department

Lend-Lease aid arrived free of charge, with arms to be used until returned or destroyed. In practice, most of the equipment was destroyed, but anything retained after the end of the agreement had to be paid for. Its almost certain that the Hurricanes were concealed in the forest after the war to avoid these costs. Reports suggest they were moved by tractors from a nearby airfield, broken up, and then dumped in a shallow ravine. They were then covered with soil.

As well as U.S.-made arms, Lend-Lease also sourced weapons from other Allies, including the Hurricanes from the United Kingdom, which were paid for by the United States. Starting in late 1941, the Soviet Union received 2,776 Hurricane Mk II aircraft, which, alongside the P-39 Airacobra and P-40 Tomahawk/Kittyhawk, were among the first generation of Lend-Lease fighters provided.

A contemporary poster from the U.K. Office for Emergency Management showing British military aid supplied to the Soviet Union. National Archives

Before the first Lend-Lease Hurricanes arrived in the Soviet Union, the U.K. Royal Air Force also deployed some of its own aircraft to the Soviet Arctic, where they provided air defense of the critical port of Murmansk and also began to train Soviet pilots on the type.

U.K. Royal Air Force Hurricane Mk IIBs at Murmansk-Vaenga airfield in the Soviet Union. Imperial War Museum

The excavation of the eight aircraft is now being handled by Ukraines State Aviation Museum, which plans to eventually put one or more of the Hurricanes on permanent display.

It is very rare to find this aircraft in Ukraine, Oleks Shtan, a former airline pilot who is leading the excavation, told the BBC. Its very important for our aviation history because no Lend-Lease aircraft have been found here before.

Photos of the Hurricanes so far show only heavily corroded and twisted metal, but with eight aircraft having been discovered, there are likely to be enough components to reassemble and restore at least one of them. Indeed, similar finds in the past have even led to airworthy warbird rebuilds, but there are so far no signs that this is being considered. Compared to the Supermarine Spitfire or P-51 Mustang, relatively few Hurricanes and Sea Hurricanes still fly today, with a little more than a dozen airworthy examples around the globe.

A different Soviet Hurricane wreck undergoes restoration near Moscow, Russia. parfaits/Wikimedia Commons

At the same time, reports suggest that, prior to being disposed of in the forest, the Hurricanes already had much of their more valuable equipment removed, including their weapons, radios, instruments, and even useful scrap metal.

https://twitter.com/mbarnesn16/status/1675519151102730240?s=20

While the Hurricane is best remembered for being the leading destroyer of German aircraft in the Battle of Britain, it went on to have a significant career in Soviet hands. In fact, at one point in 1942, it was the most numerous Western-supplied fighter in Soviet use, operated by both the air force and the naval air arm, from land bases.

The Hurricane was a strong, easy-to-fly machine, Oleks Shtan explained. The Hurricane also proved itself suitable for operations from rough airstrips, essential for supporting ground troops on the front lines.

It was stable as a gun platform and suitable for inexperienced pilots, Shtan added. A reliable aircraft.

The guns in question were a pair of locally installed 20-mm ShVAK cannons and two 12.7-mm UBK heavy machine guns, which provided a significant weight of fire  superior to any other Soviet-flown single-engine fighter as of 194142. This, coupled with a relatively low top speed and rate of climb, made the Hurricane more suitable as a bomber destroyer, a role in which it also served with Soviet air defense units.

A Soviet Hurricane that was shot down during action against Finnish forces in March 1942. Both Finland and the Soviet Union operated Hurricanes in World War II. SA-kuva/Wikimedia Commons

On the other hand, the Hurricane was outclassed by the Luftwaffes Messerschmidt Bf 109F/G fighter which it frequently encountered, meaning that many leading Soviet aces preferred to fly other, more modern types. With the continued flow of new and more capable fighters via Lend-Lease, together with the emergence of a new generation of Soviet-made aircraft, the Hurricane has tended to be overlooked in historical accounts, although it clearly made an important contribution at a critical time and was still the mount of multiple Soviet aces.

Soviet fighter ace Boris Safonov, who was credited with 20 aerial kills, based on Soviet records. He flew 44 combat sorties in Hurricanes and posted two victories on the type: a Bf 109 and a Heinkel He 111. Wikimedia Commons

The full-scale invasion of Ukraine by Russia has led to other, more macabre examples of the legacy of World War II being brought into focus.

Last month, after the destruction of the Kakhovka Dam on the Dnipro River, the subsequent drainage of the huge reservoir behind it left mudflats that were littered with skeletons, purportedly of soldiers killed during battles in World War II.

While there is a possibility that some of the resulting video footage was staged to an extent  theres no doubt that the area saw intense fighting during that previous conflict. In particular, it was here that the Soviet Army launched a major counteroffensive against the Germans in 1943, with almost four million soldiers involved.

https://twitter.com/UKikaski/status/1668009657275654147?s=20

Today, the Dnipro River is seeing more intense fighting, as the Ukrainian Armed Forces continue their counteroffensive against the Russian occupation.

As for the Hurricanes, its significant that, despite the ongoing conflict, so much effort is being devoted to their recovery. While these are now very rare aircraft, more important is the resonance with Ukraines situation today and, in particular, its need for weapons to continue its fight against Russian aggression. In this sense, there are powerful parallels with the Lend-Lease program of World War II.

With a Hurricane in the background, RAF fighter pilots pose with the Soviet sentry assigned to guard their aircraft, while operating from Murmansk. Photo by FPG/Hulton Archive/Getty Images

The Hurricanes are a symbol of British assistance during the years of the Second World War, just as we are very appreciative of British assistance nowadays, Valerii Romanenko, the head of research at Ukraines State Aviation Museum, told the BBC. The U.K. is one of the largest suppliers of military equipment to our country now.

The United Kingdom was quick to send shoulder-launched anti-aircraft and anti-tank weapons to Ukraine and its decision, earlier this year, to send 14 of its main Challenger 2 main battle tanks helped launch a broader international effort to get similar equipment to Ukraine.

Britain was also the first to announce it would begin training Ukrainian pilots to operate modern NATO-standard fighters. However, Ukrainian requests for the aircraft themselves have so far been ignored in London, which has determined its not in a position to hand over any of its Typhoon jets.

https://twitter.com/shashj/status/1623236293177098241?s=20

In 1941 Britain was the first who supplied fighter aircraft to the Soviet Union in [a] mass scale, Romanenko added. Now the U.K. is the first country which gives Storm Shadow cruise missiles to our armed forces. The delivery of Storm Shadow, which is a high-end tactical air-launched cruise missile, also set a new precedent for arms donations to Ukraine. We now know that its integration with Soviet-built Su-24 Fencer strike jets came with the help of another U.K. component  pylons from retired Tornado strike jets.

https://twitter.com/Osinttechnical/status/1675281779043729409?s=20 https://twitter.com/OSINTI1/status/1675501220822228994?s=20

As such, when one or more of these Hurricanes finally gets put on display, they will serve not only as a reminder of the British and Allied military assistance that helped defeat Nazi Germany but also of the ongoing military support received by Ukraine from the United Kingdom and elsewhere.

Contact the author: thomas@thedrive.com
Zaporizhzhia Nuclear Power Plant has been reconnected to its only available backup power line for the first time in four months, the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) reported on July 3.

Since early March, the plant has relied only on a single main power line for external electricity needed for reactor cooling and other critical nuclear safety functions. The backup line is now energized and ready to feed the station should the primary line become unavailable or damaged.

The 330 kilovolt (kV) backup power line was cut on March 1 due to damage on the opposite bank of the Dnipro River and restored on July 1, the IAEA wrote. Before Russia's full-scale war, the Zaporizhzhia nuclear plant had six backup lines and four main lines of 750 kV.

"While the reconnection of the backup power line is positive, the plant's external power situation remains highly vulnerable, underlining the precarious nuclear safety and security situation at the site," said IAEA chief Rafael Grossi.

Ukrainian authorities start training to prepare for possible Russian attack on Zaporizhzhia nuclear plant Large-scale special exercises have begun in Ukraine to prepare for a potential Russian attack at the occupied Zaporizhzhia nuclear power plant, the state nuclear energy agency Energoatom reported on June 29. The Kyiv IndependentDinara Khalilova

Russian forces have occupied the Zaporizhzhia plant, the largest nuclear plant in Europe, since March 2022. Throughout the all-out war, the plant has been fully disconnected from the Ukrainian power grid seven times due to Russian attacks on the country's energy infrastructure.

On June 20, President Volodymyr Zelensky announced, citing intelligence data, that Moscow was considering a terrorist attack on the nuclear power plant through radiation leakage.

Several days later, Ukraine's military intelligence chief Kyrylo Budanov told the New Stateman that Russia had completed preparations for the attack.

According to the exiled mayor of the satellite city of Enerhodar, Dmytro Orlov, about 100 employees of the Russian state-owned nuclear company Rosatom as well as several Ukrainian collaborators, had left the occupied station as of July 2.
I'm an American who drove outside the US for the first time. Here are 7 things that surprised me.

I drove myself around Iceland. Talia Lakritz/Insider

I visited Iceland in June and rented a car to drive myself around.

It was my first time driving outside the US.

I was surprised by unpaved roads, traffic circles, and beautiful views right off the highway.

I'd never driven outside the US until this summer, when I rented a car to drive myself around Iceland.

At Reykjavik's famous Rainbow Street. Talia Lakritz/Insider

I've visited countries with different driving rules than the US, such as New Zealand and Scotland, but I either used public transportation or was traveling with friends who felt more comfortable taking the wheel.

While researching my trip to Iceland, I found that renting a car is widely regarded as the best way to see the country since there isn't much public transportation. I'm a pretty experienced driver, having gotten my license almost 15 years ago, but I was still surprised by some aspects of driving abroad.

While booking my rental car, I was surprised to find that most of the available cars had manual transmissions.

A white SUV in Iceland. Talia Lakritz/Insider

Most people in Europe learn to drive cars with stick shifts, and the vast majority of cars sold there have manual transmissions. However, I don't know how to drive stick, so I made sure to double check that I was booking a car with automatic transmission.

I made a reservation with Economy Rent A Car through Hotwire, a third-party booking site where I tend to find lower prices. I paid $348.66 for five days.

When I landed in Iceland, I expected to pick up my rental car at the airport, but only a few companies were actually located onsite.

Car rental counters at the Iceland airport. Talia Lakritz/Insider

At Iceland's Keflavik International Airport, only four rental car companies have counters in the arrivals terminal: Avis, Budget, Europcar, and Hertz.

The rental company I used, Economy Rent A Car, was located about a 10-minute ride away via a shuttle that only came every 30 minutes, which could be one reason why it was cheaper than its competitors.

While other airports  including airports in the US  have this setup, as a first-time driver out of the country, it was the first time I had experienced it.

I found that unpaved roads are fairly common in Iceland.

A gravel road in Iceland. Talia Lakritz/Insider

There are three types of roads in Iceland: paved roads, gravel roads, and F-1 or mountain roads that are only open for parts of the summer and require four-wheel drive to navigate safely.

According to Frommer's, only about one third of all roads in Iceland are paved.

I found that all of the main streets and highways were paved, but roads leading to many tourist sites such as waterfalls or rural hotels were made of gravel. Because gravel roads can kick up rocks and damage the body or windshield of a car, my rental company recommended gravel protection insurance as part of its platinum insurance package, which cost 31 (about $34) per day.

I also learned that not all unpaved paths are meant to be driven on.

A car stuck in black sand in Iceland. Talia Lakritz/Insider

While visiting a black sand beach in Vik, I encountered a group of tourists whose car got stuck in the sand. I tried to help them push the vehicle out of the hole, but it just kept sinking deeper.

There was a one-lane gravel road that led to the beach, but it appeared that this group drove too close to the shore and ended up in the soft sand by mistake. I made a mental note to proceed with caution on unpaved roads and to make sure I had my rental company's phone number for roadside assistance saved in my contacts.

I'm not used to driving around traffic circles, but I learned quickly since they're everywhere in Iceland.

A traffic circle in Iceland. Talia Lakritz/Insider

I've seen traffic circles while riding buses in other countries like Scotland and Israel, but I rarely encounter them while driving myself in the US. It took me a few days to feel confident in navigating these two-lane roundabouts, which often replace traffic lights at intersections, but I got the hang of it by the end of my five-day trip.

I was amazed to see such beautiful landscapes and majestic waterfalls located just off the main highway.

Seljalandsfoss, a waterfall on the south coast of Iceland. Talia Lakritz/Insider

While driving two-and-a-half hours from Reykjavik to Vik, I followed Iceland's main highway, Route 1, for most of the trip. As I journeyed further along the south coast, I couldn't believe how so many gorgeous sites were located so close to the highway. Whenever I noticed a waterfall or scenic spot from the road, it was easy to take a quick detour to check it out.

In my experience, views like that are usually the long-awaited reward at the end of a challenging hike.

Compared to driving in New York City, Iceland was a breeze. I don't think I heard a single person honk their horn.

Behind the wheel in Iceland. Talia Lakritz/Insider

Though I grew up in the Midwest, I've now lived in New York City for over 10 years and have become accustomed to its aggressive driving style. I was surprised to find that even if a driver didn't zoom through a light as soon as it turned green, drivers in Iceland seemed content to wait patiently instead of blasting their horns.

Read the original article on Insider
I'm a drag queen who hosts brunches and trivia nights. The constant attacks are terrifying, but parents thank me for making a safe space for queer kids.

Missy Steak performed at a Massachusetts high school despite far-right harassment and hate. Missy Steak/Spiff Photos

Missy Steak is a Boston-based drag queen who's been working for almost eight years.

She hosts drag brunches, but says recent attacks from conservatives can be terrifying.

Despite that, Missy says it's important to continue creating safe spaces for LGBTQ+ people.

This as-told-to essay is based on a conversation with Missy Steak, a 30-year-old drag queen from Boston, Massaschusetts, about her time as a performer and the recent rhetoric and threats against drag performers. The following has been edited for length and clarity.

Earlier this year, I was invited to perform at Newton North High School for their ToBeGlad Day, which was a celebration of trans, queer, and gay people and the futures they have in their lives. The Queer Student Union invited a bunch of professionals, including myself, to speak, answer questions, and perform. It was completely organized by the students, and I was honored to go.

I had a feeling that there might be a negative reaction, especially watching the anti-drag legislation and discourse happening across the country.

About a week before the event, a local blogger wrote an article taking down the school and criticizing the decision to book me. He took old photos and performances out of context, and the comments on the blog were filled with death threats and rants about grooming and pedophilia.

And then a week later, it was picked up by Fox News. And that got thousands of comments on it.

I had never been through that before. A day before the event, there was a protest against me at the town hall  thankfully, there was a counterprotest to support me that completely outnumbered the actual protest, with over 100 counterprotesters.

And that gave me the strength to attend the ToBeGlad event the next day. The auditorium was full, and it was a great event.

But I'm not here to convince anyone to like drag. It should be so easy to respect things that aren't your cup of tea.

But these people want me dead  it doesn't matter how dumb I think their argument is, or how little logic they're standing on, they have their target. Trans people, queer people, that's their target.

Missy Steak's faced death threats, far-right conspiracy theories, and threats to her family and friends. Missy Steak

Drag is a reclamation of all the things I was too afraid to enjoy as a kid

The first time I ever performed in drag was at a "virgins" show.

The punk show was called "Don't Ask, Don't Tell" in Allston, Massachusetts. It was an opportunity for people who have never done drag to try it out. I didn't have a drag mother or a mentor, but I still put on a pink wig  one that I still have to this day.

Drag became a reclamation of all the things I was too afraid to enjoy as a kid, from Sailor Moon and Wonder Woman to Princess Peach. I loved watching cartoons and playing with Barbies, so drag heals that inner child that loved pink, loved sparkles, and wanted to be the pretty Barbie.

My thing with drag is that it's just really fun. I love it  I like to have a good time, make people laugh, and produce fun looks. For me, drag sort of incorporates a lot of mediums I've done since I was growing up. I can draw a little, sing a little, dance a little, act a little. With drag, I get to do all of that. That's what drew me to drag in the first place and keeps me invested in it.

I knew I had to perform at that high school

I've come full circle now as I've started my own virgin pageant, Big Mx Steak. I hold those shows sacred because they really bring the spirit of drag to places across Boston.

One thing I've learned is that the opportunities to work drag brunches, corporate parties, and Pride Month events aren't going to come unless you go looking for them. Every job I've ever had in Boston was either a connection I made from another gig or a cold call or email.

And I just remind myself that it's work. That's the whole thing with story hours, too. It's insane that anyone would think that drag queen story hour with children and families is some malicious plan or something  it's work. To get up that early, put on that much makeup, drive to a library in costumes and do the event can be a lot. But we were booked and asked to be there.

One of the reasons I had to perform at Newton North High School was because I wondered: what would my life look like if I had seen a drag queen perform when I was a teenager?

How different would I have been if I had been given all this freedom to enjoy the things I was afraid to enjoy?

A ton of the students and their parents reached out to me to thank me after the performance, and I truly think their lives could be different from this. Even if it was just one student in that auditorium, I'm proud I made a difference.

Read the original article on Insider
Yuri Linna still recalls the stories of his father serving in Finland's military, fighting against Soviet troops in a dispute over land about 80 years ago.

Linna, a Finnish immigrant who now lives in Palm Bay, got his respect for the active military and veterans from those stories. And that led him to his tradition of honoring them, as well as first responders and medical workers, by placing flags in front of homes throughout his neighborhood before three holidays  Memorial Day, Independence Day and Veterans Day.

Yuri Linna, at right, a proud American citizen who immigrated from Finland, has been placing U.S. flags in front of homes in his Palm Bay neighborhood in advance of Memorial Day, Independence Day and Veterans Day, He was joined Friday by his wife, Janice, and his friend and neighbor, Neil Fischer. They want to honor members of the military, veterans, first responders and others who serve their community and the nation.

He and his wife, Janice, continued their tradition on Friday, in The Lakes at Waterstone and Heron Bay at Waterstone neighborhoods in southeast Palm Bay, placing 700 flags about 15 feet apart from one another near the roadside in front of homes.

Linna says he has been doing this since 1999, starting with 25 flags in his previous hometown of Boca Raton, then in Wellington beginning in 2002 and in Palm Bay beginning in 2007. Each year, he adds to the number of 12-by-18-inch flags he plant, this year reaching 700. He pays for each flag, which now runs at about $2 apiece.

Independence Day events: Fireworks, parades, cookouts and concerts: How to celebrate the 4th of July in Brevard

"This has been very well-received," said Linna, an electronics engineer, who retired Friday after 38 years with the electronics company Philips, where he specialized in medical products. "We have not had any negative comments" from local residents.

Yuri Linna has been placing flags in front of homes throughout his Palm Bay neighborhood since 2007 in advance of Memorial Day, Independence Day and Veterans Day.

Among his neighbors in Palm Bay is Neil Fischer, who several years ago decided to join the Linnas in their three-time-a-year flag-planting endeavor.

"I've seen people come to tears" when they see the display, Fischer said, particularly people with a military connection. "It's something to truly behold. It's so emotional. It just left an indelible impression in my mind."

U.S. flags line the roadside in front of homes in The Lakes at Waterstone development in Palm Bay.

Fischer, a retired teacher, said he has seen grandparents walking hand-in-hand with their young grandchildren to view the rows of flags on display, while explaining the symbolism as it ties to military service and protecting the rights of Americans.

Linna said, while he, his wife and Fischer do the flag-planting themselves, others in the neighborhood help them gather up the flags after the holidays for storage until the next holiday comes around. He says anyone who would like to join in the effort for future holidays can email him at YuriLinna@gmail.com

Janice Linna, a native of Alabama, says the flag display fits right in with her patriotic nature.

Be safe over holiday: Brevard beachgoers reminded to stay near lifeguards, think safety over holiday weekend

"I just have always has a tender spot in my heart for the service members and their families," she said. "This is a small gesture on our part" to honor them, as well as to emphasize the freedoms that Americans have.

Yuri Linna moved to the United States from Finland in 1979 and became a U.S. citizen in 2005.

In reflecting on the flag displays he spearheads three times a year, Linna said: "It's been fun and enjoyable for us. God is blessing us, and we want to bless others."

Dave Berman is business editor at FLORIDA TODAY. Contact Berman at dberman@floridatoday.com, on Twitter at @bydaveberman and on Facebook at www.facebook.com/dave.berman.54

This article originally appeared on Florida Today: Military, first responders honored with Palm Bay neighborhood flag display
The 15th Indonesia-Malaysia-Thailand Growth Triangle (IMT-GT) Summit on the sidelines of ASEAN Summit in Labuan Bajo

JAKARTA (Reuters) - Indonesian President Joko Widodo on Monday urged his ministers to maintain a "healthy" state budget in anticipation of global geopolitical and economic risks and as the country gears up for elections next year.

Speaking during a routine cabinet meeting, Jokowi, as the president is known, highlighted outsized spending by the country's security agencies including the defence ministry which has been modernising Indonesia's ageing military equipment.

"We have to maintain a healthy state budget. We need to be focused and alert for the risk of crisis," Jokowi said, warning that ministers must "be careful on purchasing goods". He also highlighted high spending by the national police and intelligence agencies.

Defence Minister Prabowo Subianto, who is set to mount a third bid for the presidency next year, in January finalised an $800-million deal to buy 12 Mirage 2000-5 fighter jets, which some critics said were too old.

Indonesia also bought 42 Rafale fighter jets for $8.1 billion in February and is in the advanced stages of finalising a deal to buy F-15 fighter jets, according to Prabowo.

The defence ministry's total budget was pegged at 134.3 trillion rupiah ($8.93 billion), while the country's total spending was estimated to reach 3,061 trillion rupiah ($200 billion) in 2023, according to the finance ministry.

The government is targeting a 2023 budget deficit of 2.84% of GDP.

Jokowi also urged his ministers to help maintain political and economic stability ahead of the 2024 polls when the world's third-largest democracy will choose lawmakers and a new president.

($1 = 15,038.0000 rupiah)

(Reporting by Ananda Teresia; Editing by Kanupriya Kapoor)
JAKARTA (Reuters) - Foreign arrivals to Indonesia in May were up 9.21% compared to the previous month thanks to international events, data from the statistics bureau showed on Monday.

The Southeast Asian country recorded 945,590 tourist arrivals in May versus 865,810 in April, data showed.

In May last year, foreign arrivals stood at 354,920 as the government had just started to ease coronavirus restrictions.

"[The increase] came as there were some events that happened in May, such as the ASEAN summit," Pudji Ismartini, deputy head of Statistics Indonesia, said in a press conference.

She was referring to the meeting of Southeast Asian leaders that was held in the tourism destination, Labuan Bajo in East Nusa Tenggara province.

Malaysia, Australia and Singapore were still the top three source markets, as in the previous two months.

Indonesia received 4.12 million visitors in the first five months of 2023, equal to 70% of the total arrivals in 2022.

Earlier this year, the country's tourism ministry revised up its target of foreign arrivals in 2023 to 8.5 million visitors from 7.4 million following positive results in the first quarter.

(Reporting by Stefanno Sulaiman; Editing by Kanupriya Kapoor)
Inferno of illegal fireworks burns building to ground, California cops say. Two arrested

Two men have been arrested after illegal fireworks ignited in a public storage unit and created a fire, California officials said.

On June 14, police responded to calls of a large fire at a Public Storage in southeast San Jose, according to a June 30 news release by the San Jose Police Department.

Officials said the blaze happened after illegal fireworks went off in a storage unit.

Witnesses reported the scene looked like something out of a Call of Duty video game, KRON reported.

Due to the mass of the fire, the entire unit burned down and the things stored inside were unsalvageable, officials said.

A couple with an 8-year-old daughter who were storing their items before moving from the South Bay to Sacramento lost everything, KRON reported.

Telling the child the day before her birthday party that everything was gone was the hardest day of my life, the father said.

The cause of the actual fire is still unknown, Sgt. Jorge Garibay told CBS News.

An investigation by San Joses fire and police departments led to other storage units containing 38,000 pounds of illegal fireworks, as well as methamphetamine, cocaine, marijuana, $4,800 in cash and a semi-automatic gun, the release said.

Two men, age 45 and 25, were arrested and booked into Santa Clara County Jail, CBS News reported.

San Jose is 50 miles southeast of San Francisco.

Man tosses lit firework into Pride event crowd, injuring several, California cops say

Man looks into firework tube before it explodes in his face, Illinois cops say

Man firebombed home over parking dispute in Missouri, feds say
Social media influencer Jackie Miller James, who simultaneously went through brain surgery and a C-section in May, is now awake, according to a statement shared by her family.

At nine months pregnant, James suffered a brain aneurysm. James was she was put in a medically-induced coma, and her baby girl was hospitalized in the neonatal intensive care unit for 12 days due to the traumatic nature of her birth.

On July 2, nearly one month after the last update on her condition, James' family revealed in a statement that she is conscious and has been transferred to a neurological rehabilitation hospital.

James' daughter "continues to grow into a happy, healthy and animated little angel," the family said in a message posted to the social media influencer's Instagram page.

The new mom was recently "reunited" with her baby. James spends "a great deal of each day with her entire family," they added.

James is also on an "incredibly long road to recovery," according to the statement. Doctors are "pleased" by her recently tests and evaluations and, the family said, she's "performing above expectations" relative to her current stage of recovery.

"Thanking each and every one of you from the bottom of our hearts for your continued love. We are eternally grateful for this strong community that continues to support our girl," the family concluded in the statement, adding that any future updates will come from James herself "if and when she is ready."

After James' medical emergency in May, her family started a GoFundMe where they described what happened. They said one week ahead of her due date, James experienced severe brain bleeding and was found by her husband, Austin. She was immediately hospitalized, put in a coma and underwent at least five brain surgeries. (TODAY.com verified the validity of the GoFundMe page with a spokesperson for the fundraising platform.)

On June 6, the family provided an update on her condition, sharing that James' newborn was out of the neonatal intensive care unit but the new mom was expected to remain in the hospital for the "foreseeable future."

The fundraising page, created by James' sisters, has raised more than $300,000 of its $450,000 goal. The donations are intended to cover health care costs outside of insurance, including speech therapy, physical therapy and home modifications. Any unused funds will be donated to similar charities, according to the GoFundMe post.

James gained a social media following after posting beauty and relationship content, including photos from her wedding in 2022. When her story was first shared in early June, James had about 30,000 Instagram followers, including Sofia Richie and Adrienne Bailon-Houghton. Her account now has more 76,000 followers.

This article was originally published on TODAY.com
International center for investigating Russian aggression against Ukraine opens at The Hague

International center for investigating Russian aggression against Ukraine opens at The Hague

The International Center for the Prosecution of the Crime of Aggression against Ukraine (ICPA) has opened at The Hague, the Netherlands, on July 3, the European Commission reported on its website.

The newly established Center will be key to investigating Russias crime of aggression against Ukraine and facilitating case building for future trials, the EU body said.

It will also provide a structure to support and enhance ongoing and future investigations into the crime of aggression, and contribute to the exchange and analysis of evidence gathered since the start of the Russian aggression.

The center, set up with the support of the European Commission, is composed of selected national prosecutors that are already participating in the Joint Investigation Team, to which the center is linked in its operations.

Read also: The Hague to set up register of damage caused to Ukraine by Russian aggression

The participating experts will be able to work together daily, exchange evidence quickly, and agree on a common strategy. This work is essential to prepare for future trials, be they before national or international courts, including a possible tribunal for the crime of aggression or the International Criminal Court (ICC) for crimes within its jurisdiction, the Commission emphasized.

Evidence of countless international crimes committed by Russia is piling up, said European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen.

The new international prosecution center will play a key role in making sure that the perpetrators are brought to justice, including for the crime of aggression. We will leave no stone unturned to hold Putin and his henchmen accountable.

Read also: The Hague, not the hang, Ukraine wants to prosecute Putin, not eliminate him  UA intelligence

Ukrainian Prosecutor General Andriy Kostin took part in the centers opening ceremony, the Office of the Prosecutor General of Ukraine reported on Telegram.

This is the beginning of the end of impunity for the crime of aggression, the agency quoted Kostin as saying.

From today, Ukrainian prosecutors will be working in The Hague. JIT representatives from Lithuania, Latvia, Estonia, Poland, and Romania will join them in the ICPAs work at the initial stage. The U.S. special prosecutor for the crime of aggression will support the centers activities. Other countries and institutions will be able to join in the coming months.

The establishment of the ICPA is a clear signal that the world is united towards ensuring the responsibility of the Russian regime for the crime of aggression, genocide and war crimes in Ukraine, the prosecutor general added.

Read also: In The Hague, Zelenskyy calls for and tribunal and trial for Putin, Russia to pay compensation to Ukraine

Russia began its full-scale invasion of Ukraine on Feb. 24, 2022. Since then, the invading forces have launched missile and drone strikes not only along the front line, but also on cities and villages deep in the rear. Russian missiles hit civilian and critical infrastructure, causing civilian casualties.

On May 9, 2023, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy held an online summit of Core Group leaders on the establishment of the Special Tribunal for the crime of aggression against Ukraine, which involved 37 countries.

Ukrainian Foreign Minister Dmytro Kuleba previously explained that the special tribunal is actually the only possibility to hold Russias top political and military leadership accountable for the crime of aggression against Ukraine.

The European Parliament and PACE have supported the establishment of the tribunal in a number of resolutions.

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
Jaafar Ashtiyeh/AFP via Getty Images

Israeli forces launched a major military operation on Monday in the Palestinian city of Jenin, on the occupied West Bank, according to multiple media reports. CBS News reports that drone strikes on the Jenin refugee camp, which Israeli officials have described as a center of terrorist activity, began in the early hours of Monday morning, and that hundreds of Israeli troops were deployed in the area later in the day. At least eight Palestinians have been killed so far and more than 50 injured, local health officials told BBC News.

CBS quoted an Israeli military spokesman, Lt. Col. Richard Hecht, saying that "the goal of the operation was to confiscate or destroy weapons belonging to Palestinian militants," and that up to 2,000 Israeli troops would be deployed in the West Bank, the largest military escalation since 2006. BBC News described the Jenin refugee camp, which is home to roughly 18,000 people, as the "stronghold of a new generation of Palestinian militants," and reported "intense exchanges of fire" between Israeli and Palestinian forces into Monday evening. The Israeli military said it had cut off electricity and telephone service to the refugee camp, making communication and news reporting difficult.

Israeli Foreign Minister Eli Cohen said the military operation was targeting "proxies of Iran" such as Hamas and Islamic Jihad, and that Israel did not intend to "hold ground" in the West Bank. Palestinian Prime Minister Mohammad Shtayyeh, on the other hand, told BBC News that the raid was "an attempt to erase the refugee camp completely and displace the residents." In neighboring Jordan, the government called the Israeli operation a violation of international law. The U.S. government, however, expressed support for "Israel's security and right to defend its people against Hamas, Palestinian Islamic Jihad and other terrorist groups."
Israeli Foreign Minister Eli Cohen talks during a news conference with Cyprus Foreign Minister Constantinos Kombos and Greek Foreign Minister Nikos Dendias at the Presidential Palace in Nicosia,

JERUSALEM (Reuters) - Israel linked on Monday its pending decision on recognising the Moroccan claim on Western Sahara to Morocco hosting a repeatedly postponed forum of foreign ministers involved in a U.S.-sponsored regional normalisation drive.

Morocco upgraded ties with Israel in 2020, encouraged by then U.S. President Donald Trump, who recognised Rabat's rule over Western Sahara, where the Algeria-backed Polisario Front demands an independent state. Trump's successor, President Joe Biden, has not followed through by opening a consulate there, however.

Diplomatic sources have said that Morocco could establish full relations with Israel - with their current mid-level diplomatic missions repurposed as embassies - in exchange for Israeli recognition of Morocco's claim.

But Morocco, citing Israeli policies on the Palestinians, last month postponed a so-called Negev Forum of Israel and Arab states, which it had been due to convene.

Asked at a briefing to foreign media what Israel sought in return for a recognition of Western Sahara as Moroccan, and whether it planned to open a consulate in the territory, Israeli Foreign Minister Eli Cohen linked a decision to the conference.

"We are right now working in regards to this issue and our plan is to have our final decision in the Negev Forum," he told reporters, adding that he expected the Moroccan-hosted event to take place in September or October.

(Writing by Dan Williams; Editing by Peter Graff)
Israelis take to the airport to protest judicial overhaul

Opponents of the Israeli government's controversial judicial reform see it as a threat to democracy (JACK GUEZ)

Hundreds of protesters gathered on Monday at Israel's Ben Gurion airport near Tel Aviv for the latest demonstration against the government and its planned legal reform, an AFP correspondent reported.

Blowing horns, banging drums and holding placards reading "Democracy will win," the crowd blocked the access of vehicles to the airport's main international arrival and departure terminal.

Opponents of the controversial overhaul proposals, which would give politicians more power over the courts, believe they could open the way to more authoritarian government.

"We need to show that the protest is not asleep, we are here, we're awake," Smadar Bonen, 46, told AFP.

"The protest really showed that they (politicians) can't do whatever they want, not that easily," said Bonen, a Tel Aviv area resident.

Demonstrators have kept up the pressure with weekly rallies against the government of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, who returned to power in December at the head of a coalition with ultra-Orthodox Jewish and extreme-right allies.

In March, nearly three months after the reform agenda was unveiled, Netanyahu announced a "pause" to allow for talks with the opposition on the legislation which was moving through parliament and split the nation.

The talks, however, failed to yield understandings, and Netanyahu has said he intends to press ahead with the reforms -- albeit with some changes.

Police said they had arrested four people "for violating public order" during the demonstration at the airport, emphasising the need to maintain "the accessibility of traffic routes in the airport for emergency and rescue personnel".

The protest has not affected the airport's flight schedule, a spokeswoman for the Israel Airports Authority told AFP.

Ruth Regev, a retiree from the central city of Ramat Gan, said she was "so worried" by the government's plan.

"I think this is a critical time, for Israeli society, for Israeli democracy, for my children, for my grandchildren."

rsc-jjm/jd/ami
Mounted police disperse demonstrators trying to block the entrance to Israel's main international airport during a protest against plans by Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu's government to overhaul the judicial system, at Ben Gurion Airport in Lod, near Tel Aviv, Israel, Monday, July 3, 2023. Thousands of Israelis blocked traffic and snarled movement at the country's main international airport. (AP Photo/Ohad Zwigenberg)

JERUSALEM (AP)  Thousands of Israelis blocked traffic and snarled movement at the country's main international airport on Monday, the latest mass demonstration over Benjamin Netanyahu's contentious planned judicial overhaul that has divided the nation.

The Netanyahu governments push to pass several overlapping reforms to the countrys judiciary has plunged Israel into an unprecedented crisis and divided an already highly polarized country.

Protesters waving Israel's blue-and-white national flag and blowing horns blocked the main thoroughfare outside Ben Gurion Airport's main terminal and demonstrated inside the arrivals hall. Several flights had significant delays, according to the airport website.

Protesters periodically scuffled with police, who dispatched mounted officers to the scene. Police said officers arrested at least 37 people for creating a public disturbance.

Were against dictatorship, demonstrator Rami Matan said. Were against the rules that the ugly government of Netanyahu" wants to impose, Matan said.

Netanyahu and his ultranationalist and ultra-Orthodox political allies are pressing ahead with plans to pass several contentious changes to Israels judicial system after attempts to reach a compromise with opposition lawmakers disintegrated. The planned overhaul has drawn rebuke from the Biden administration and consternation from American Jews.

Netanyahu ally Simcha Rotman, who chairs parliament's Constitution, Law and Justice Committee and has spearheaded the overhaul, said Monday that he would bring a bill to strip the Supreme Court of its authority to strike down government decisions it deems unreasonable this week.

That reasonability standard" was used by the Supreme Court earlier this year to upend the appointment of a Netanyahu ally as interior minister because of a conviction for bribery when he served in the role in the 1990s and a 2021 plea deal for tax evasion.

Critics say removing that standard would allow the government to pass arbitrary decisions and grant it too much power.

Last week, over 100 Israeli air force reservists signed a letter saying they would refuse to show up for duty if the government moves forward with the plan.

Netanyahu and his allies came to power after November's election, Israel's fifth in under four years, all of which were largely referendums on the longtime leader's fitness to serve while on trial for corruption.

Netanyahu, whose corruption trial has dragged on for nearly three years, and his allies in his nationalist religious government say the overhaul is needed to rein in an overly interventionist judiciary and restore power to elected officials.

Critics say the plan would upend Israels delicate system of checks and balances and push the country toward dictatorship.
Jacksonville Sheriffs Office says it has found missing endangered woman in the Northside

UPDATE: JSO says that Powe has been located. They thank everyone who assisted in the search to bring her home.

The Jacksonville Sheriffs Office is searching for a missing and endangered woman in the Northside of Jacksonville.

>>> STREAM ACTION NEWS JAX LIVE <<<

Dayjah D. Powe was reported missing by her family. She was last seen around 3000 Dunn Ave. at around 3:00 p.m. on Sun., Jul. 2.

Powe was seated in a grey 2013 Dodge Journey like the vehicle pictured above. The Florida tag number on the Dodge is: 43B-XXN.

JSO says that Powe suffers from memory loss due to a brain injury. She has failed to return home and has not been heard from since.

Powe is 34 years old, is 5-foot-4-inches tall and weighs 100 pounds. She has brown eyes and black hair. She was last seen wearing a black and white sundress.

If you have information that could lead to finding Powe you are asked to contact the Jacksonville Sheriffs Office at 904-630-0500 or 911.

Click here to download the free Action News Jax news and weather apps, click here to download the Action News Jax Now app for your smart TV and click here to stream Action News Jax live.
MSNBCs Jen Psaki on Sunday highlighted the reemergence of a very old GOP playbook that is attempting to sow division in America ahead of the 2024 presidential election.

Psaki pointed out how Republicans are attempting to recruit Muslim Americans to join their attacks on the trans community. The former Biden White House press secretary noted the GOPs hypocrisy, given how Muslim Americans were public enemy number one not so long ago with right-wingers relentlessly fearmongering over Shariah.

It harkens back to President Richard Nixons infamous Southern strategy in the 1968 election when the GOP made a concerted effort to reach white Southerners who used to vote for Democrats by playing to their fears of African Americans and the Civil Rights Movement, said Psaki.

This is the same old GOP playbook, she added. Another cynical ploy to tear at the fabric of our society and damage the idea that out of many, we are one. All because they want so desperately to regain the White House.

Watch the video here:

We're noticing the reemergence of an old ploy straight from the GOP playbook, only this time the party has a new target...@jrpsaki breaks it down. pic.twitter.com/wZ55u20476  Inside with Jen Psaki (@InsideWithPsaki) July 2, 2023

Related...
Turner-Smith, the British ex-model and Queen & Slim actress, joins Evan Peters, Jared Leto and Greta Lee in the highly anticipated third film in the Tron franchise.

British beauty Jodie Turner-Smith is joining the Tron universe.

The highly anticipated third film in the popular science fiction franchise is on the way, and the former model-slash-Queen & Slim actress is officially joining the cast, per The Hollywood Reporter.

Jodie Turner-Smith attends the 74th Annual Parsons Benefit in May in New York City. The British model-turned-actress has joined the cast of the third Tron film, according to reports. (Photo: Dimitrios Kambouris/Getty Images for Parsons School of Design)

Details remain under wraps for the upcoming action-adventure, including who Turner-Smith is playing. She will be joined, however, by Evan Peters (Dahmer  Monster: The Jeffrey Dahmer Story), Greta Lee (Past Lives) and veteran actor Jared Leto, whose company, Paradox, will co-produce.

The film is set to begin production this August in Vancouver.

The first Tron, starring Jeff Bridges, premiered in 1982, with its sequel, Tron: Legacy hitting theaters in 2010. While the first two films were set inside computers and games, the new film, titled Tron: Ares, will focus on the emergence of a sentient program that crosses over into the human world that is not ready for contact, according to The Hollywood Reporter.

Tron: Ares is just one of many upcoming roles for the Anne Boleyn actress. As theGrio previously reported, Turner-Smith is set to appear in the upcoming Star Wars Disney+ series, The Acolyte, alongside Amandla Stenberg. The mystery-thriller will take viewers into a galaxy of shadowy secrets and emerging dark-side powers in the final days of the High Republic era, per Variety.

Turner-Smith, who is married to Canadian actor and Fatal Attraction star Joshua Jackson, also is set to appear in Bad Monkey, Deadline reports, the upcoming Apple TV+ series based on the novel of the same name.

TheGrio is FREE on your TV via Apple TV, Amazon Fire, Roku and Android TV. Also, please download theGrio mobile apps today!

The post Jodie Turner-Smith joins Tron 3 appeared first on TheGrio.
Syria's President Bashar al-Assad (R) meeting with Jordan's Foreign Minister Ayman Safadi in Damascus (-)

Syrian President Bashar al-Assad and Jordan's top diplomat Ayman Safadi met Monday in Damascus and discussed war refugees and a crackdown on cross-border drug smuggling, Amman's foreign ministry said.

Safadi's visit comes at a time of increasing regional engagement with the Assad regime, peaking with Damascus's return to the Arab League after years of isolation since Syria's war began in 2011.

The meeting "focused on the issue of refugee returns and the necessary measures to facilitate the voluntary return" of Syrian refugees from Jordan, the foreign ministry said in a statement.

Assad and Safadi also discussed "humanitarian, security and political" steps towards a "comprehensive solution" to Syria's crisis, it added.

Syria was suspended from the Arab League in 2011 over Assad's brutal crackdown on pro-democracy protests which spiralled into a conflict that has killed more than 500,000 people and displaced millions.

In May, the pan-Arab body readmitted Damascus, despite no political settlement to the conflict in sight.

Arab states hope to find a solution for the millions of Syrian refugees living in neighbouring countries, including 1.3 million in Jordan.

Several Arab countries are also seeking increased security cooperation with Syria, which has turned into a narco-state with a roaring illegal trade in the stimulant drug captagon.

The Jordanian statement said Safadi discussed with Assad "the dangers posed by drug smuggling across the Syrian border into the kingdom, and the need for cooperation to confront it".

During his visit, Jordan's foreign minister also met with his Syrian counterpart, Faisal Mekdad.

The two discussed a "joint committee to combat drug smuggling" that would meet in Amman "as soon as possible", the Jordanian foreign ministry said.

Jordanian security forces have tightened border controls in recent years and occasionally announce thwarted drugs and weapons smuggling attempts from Syria.

kt/ami/srm
Jordan's foreign minister calls for investment into war-torn Syria to speed up refugee returns

Syria Foreign Minister Faisal Mekdad, right, meets with his Jordan counterpart Ayman Safadi in Damascus, Syria, Monday, July 3, 2023. Jordan's top diplomat Monday called for international investment into crisis-hit Syria's crippled infrastructure in order to speed up refugee returns. Safadi made these remarks following a visit to Damascus, where he met with Syrian President Bashar Assad and his counterpart Faisal Mekdad. (AP Photo/Omar Sanadiki)

DAMASCUS, Syria (AP)  Jordan's foreign minister Monday called for international investment into conflict-ravaged Syria's crippled infrastructure to speed up refugee returns.

Ayman Safadi made the remarks during a visit to the capital Damascus, where he met with Syrian President Bashar Assad and his counterpart, Faisal Mekdad.

Jordan, which shares a border with the war-torn country and hosts some 1.3 million Syrian refugees, played a crucial role in the once-pariah state's return to the Arab League. It hosted regional talks in May between Syrian, Saudi, Iraqi and Egyptian officials in an initiative to reach a political solution to the years-long crisis.

Syrias uprising-turned civil war, now in its 13th year, has killed nearly half a million people and displaced half of its prewar population of 23 million. Syrians in both government-held territory and an opposition-held enclave in the country's northwest suffer from rampant poverty and crippled infrastructure.

We have offered everything we can to ensure them a dignified life, Safadi said at a news conference following his meetings. But what we are sure of is that the refugees futures lie in their country.

The Jordanian foreign minister said that securing critical infrastructure and basic necessities will speed up voluntary refugee returns, especially as international aid for refugees continues to decline.

Assad in a statement released by his office echoed similar sentiments, saying that investment in infrastructure and reconstruction would create the best environment for refugee returns.

We reaffirm that the refugee file is a solely humanitarian and moral issue that should not be politicized in any way, the statement read.

Anti-refugee sentiment has soared in Lebanon and Turkey, two other neighboring countries hosting Syrian refugees.

But while government-held Syria receives humanitarian aid through United Nations agencies, Western-led sanctions have made it difficult for Damascus to fix electricity, water and other infrastructure decimated in the conflict and more recently by a devastating 7.8 magnitude earthquake in February.

Western countries, most vocally the United States and the United Kingdom, say that Syria is still not safe for return. U.N. agencies and human rights organizations say the same, with groups like Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch saying they have documented cases of arbitrary detention and disappearances.

Safadi's meetings with Mekdad and Assad also discussed the humanitarian crisis in Syria, steps toward a political solution to the conflict, and drug smuggling, which has become a lucrative industry in the economically shattered country.

___

Chehayeb reported from Beirut.
A missing 12-year-old girl from Jacksonville has been found, the Jacksonville Sheriffs Office said.

The Florida Department of Law Enforcement issued an AMBER Alert for 12-year-old Fernanda Arias and she was listed as a kidnapped child.

FDLE said in the alert that she was believed to be in the company of Jorge Reyes and they may be traveling in a dark-colored 2-door Honda with a large rear spoiler.

Reyes is described as a white, Hispanic male from Jacksonville. His age, height, weight, hair color were listed as unknown by FDLE.

Earlier Monday morning, JSO asked for the communitys help in locating Fernanda.

[DOWNLOAD: Free Action News Jax app for alerts as news breaks]

According to JSO, on Monday just before 3 a.m., officers responded to Beach Boulevard and Peach Drive to a reported missing child.

Police said Fernanda was seen leaving her home in the dark-colored 2-door Honda with a large rear spoiler before she was reported missing.

JSO said this continues to be an active investigation.

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Judge blocks new Florida election law, signed by DeSantis this spring, calling it the 'latest assault on the right to vote'

Mary Collante gets Ramon Figueroa,19, to fill out a form as she signs him up to vote during a voter registration drive by members of the Florida Immigrant Coalition on October 4, 2012 in Pompano Beach, Florida. Efforts to get people to register to vote for the upcoming presidential election ends on Tuesday the 9th when the voting rolls close in Florida. Joe Raedle/Getty Images

A federal judge has temporarily blocked enforcement of a new election law in Florida.

The law imposed new limits on voter registration and get-out-the-vote operations.

The judge said those provisions likely violate the US Constitution.

Calling it Florida's "latest assault on the right to vote," a federal judge on Monday put a temporary hold on a new election law that would have imposed more limits on voter registration efforts.

In May, Gov. Ron DeSantis signed SB 7050, a package of Republican-sponsored reforms to Florida's election system, including a ban on non-citizen immigrants helping register voters. Groups that retained certain voter registration information, such as for get-out-the-vote operations, could under the law also face felony prosecution.

In a blistering decision, US Judge Mark Walker of the Northern District of Florida, agreed with plaintiffs that such provisions are likely illegal.

"Florida may, of course, regulate elections, including the voter registration process," Walker, an appointee of former President Barack Obama, wrote in the 58-page ruling. "Here, however, the challenged provisions exemplify something Florida has struggled within recent years; namely, governing within the bounds set by the United States Constitution."

The Florida chapter of the NAACP, one of the groups that sued over the law, had argued that the ban on retaining any voter information violated the First Amendment right to free speech by preventing them from sharing a "pro-voting message." Critics also argued that the limit on non-citizen participation on registration drives violated the right to equal protection under federal law.

The office of Florida Secretary of State Cord Byrd, named as a defendant in the case, did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

Walker, in his ruling, noted that the decision is not final. But he nonetheless framed the ruling in grand, patriotic terms, noting it came a day before the country recognizes its independence. In particular, he highlighted one plaintiff, Veronica Herrera-Lucha, an immigrant from El Salvador who has permanent residency in the US and works as the the Florida field director for a voter registration group, Mi Vecino.

"Herrera-Lucha, a noncitizen who, herself, lacks the right to vote, has spent years registering and encouraging citizens to exercise that solemn right," Walker wrote. "She may, at least for now, continue to do so and add more voices to the millions of others signing a more perfect Union into existence."

Have a news tip? Email this reporter: cdavis@insider.com

Read the original article on Business Insider
District Attorney Deborah Gonzalez is awaiting a ruling on whether she violated a judge's order.

Western Circuit Superior Court Judge Eric Norris is expected to issue an order soon on the question of whether the circuits district attorney will be held in contempt of court.

In a nearly four-hour hearing last week, Norris heard evidence and legal arguments stemming from the decision of District Attorney Deborah Gonzalez to dismiss a rape and child molestation charge after a jury was selected for a trial.

Gonzalez has already admitted to violating the victims rights under the Georgia Crime Victims Rights known as Marsys Law. The girl was 14 in 2021 when she alleged she was raped by the man, now 42 years old.

But Watkinsville attorney Kevin Epps filed a contempt of court order motion because he contends that Gonzalez did not turn over documents in a violation of the judges order. Epps had sought the documents through subpoena and the open records act.

Those numerous records, according to Epps, included 19 e-mails that might be related to a trip Gonzalez made to Selma, Ala., during the time the rape trial was scheduled and a murder trial was to follow the next week.

The courtroom, the smallest in the courthouse, was packed for the hearing.

Two people actually broke down in tears during the proceedings: the mother of the girl, as she sat next to her lawyers, and Jennifer De la Vega, the executive assistant for Gonzalez, who broke down under cross-examination by Epps as she attempted to describe how she searched for documents sought by the subpoena.

Gonzalez was represented in the hearing by Athens attorney Ken Dious, who told the judge he had eyesight problems. Due to that medical condition, Dious had sought a continuance of the hearing, but Norris denied the request. Dious, who took on the case the previous week, was assisted by an attorney, who read to him parts of documents that were entered as evidence.

DA problems: District Attorney Deborah Gonzalez withdraws written policies; cites disputes in lawsuits

Dismissal: Rape dismissal reversed as Athens man now faces trial on felony charges

Also in attendance were two lawyers from the Prosecuting Attorneys Council of Georgia, who are now handling the case against the defendant after Gonzalez recused her office from the case.

Robert Smith, the general counsel, and Peter Skandalakis, the executive director, both took seats in the courtrooms jury box to observe the hearing. The case could be re-indicted despite the dismissal and the defendant faces other criminal charges.

Norris said he will privately review the documents that Gonzalez did not release under the subpoena.

But the judge did ask Epps what he would request as punishment if he finds the district attorney in contempt.

I just dont want her incarcerated, Epps replied.

But he urged the judge to seek evidence not only on her work cellphone, but also her personal cellphone.

During her testimony, Gonzalez testified she would not release her personal cellphone for a Cellebrite examination, which can also determine if a text has been deleted.

In defense of Gonzalez, Dious argued ardently that Marsys Law was not designed for discovery of evidence as Epps is seeking, nor does it outline a punishment for contempt. He also argued that Epps wants attorneys fee, but again that is not provided in Marsys Law.

Dious argued the law, passed by the state Legislature about four years ago, is confusing and vague and cannot be used to hold Gonzalez in contempt.

Epps did file a motion asking for $14,227 in attorneys fees, but he told the judge that if Gonzalez would acknowledge she is in contempt of the court order and provide the documents ordered by the subpoena, he would waive those fees.

The Marseys Law case against Gonzalez began with a hearing on May 19. As a result of that hearing, the district attorneys office recused itself from the prosecution of the defendant and Gonzalez admitted to violating the Marsys Law.

Epps followed this by having subpoenas served on Gonzalez and others in the district attorneys office as he sought certain documents. When Epps asserted that he didnt get those documents, he filed a contempt of court motion against Gonzalez.

Another hearing was held on this issue on May 25. Norris issued an order giving the district attorney 15 days or until June 19 to provide those documents.

After that date, Epps filed a motion for contempt alleging that Gonzalez did not comply with the judges order as she still withheld numerous documents that she contended were not relevant to the rape case.

And that is why we are here today, said the judge, who has the next move.

This article originally appeared on Athens Banner-Herald: Judge Norris to rule on contempt motion against DA in Athens
Declaration Of Independence

Copy of the United States Declaration Of Independence - Stock Photo Credit - Getty Images/iStockphotoMark Stahl

During our own time of troubles, it is important to remember that in 1776 the men in powdered wigs who drew up the Declaration of Independence overcame political difficulties far more perilous than our own. Throughout the 1770s and 1780s, in fact, one wrong move in the Continental Congress might well have led to the secession of a regional bloc of states, whether New England, the Middle states, or the Southern states, with possibly cataclysmic consequences for all thirteen: continental civil war.

An apt metaphor capturing the spirit of the early republic is that of a shotgun wedding. If the New England, Middle, or Southern states had split apart into separate confederacies, civil wars would have broken out over finances, commerce, and, most of all, land. For this reasonthe prevention of bloody mayhemthe founders reluctantly bound themselves into one Union. They united with the guns of civil war pointing at their backs, but, to their everlasting credit, they also practiced the art of cooperative political maneuvering in order to save the Union from self-destruction.

Consider early July 1776. American founding myth would have us believe that after years of British abuses and usurpations, the leaders of the thirteen colonies amiably adopted the unanimous Declaration of Independence.

In fact, the battle over the Declaration of Independence was an epic tale of secession threats, fears of intercolonial bloodshed, and furtive politics engineered to rescue the Middle states from tragically falling into civil war against New England and the Southern states.

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Observers of the American scene had long since forecast that an independent America would self-destruct in civil wars. As James Otis, patriot and author of the influential The Rights of the British Colonies Asserted and Proved, averred in 1765, Were these colonies left to themselves tomorrow, America would be a mere shambles of blood and confusion. An English traveler visiting the colonies in 1759 and 1760 concurred, warning, Were they left to themselves, there would soon be civil war from one end of the continent to the other.

These were hardly isolated forebodings. After the British Parliament enacted the Coercive Acts in 1774 to punish Boston for its wreckage of more than 340 chests of tea in the harbor, newspapers were filled with anxious prognostications about the consequences of independence: American civil wars.

Read More: The Origins of the Declaration of Independences Most Famous Words

Whenever the fatal period shall arrive, Reverend Samuel Seabury of New York asserted that year, in which the American colonies shall become independent on Great Britain, a horrid scene of war and bloodshed will immediately commence. The interests, the commerce of the different provinces will interfere: disputes about boundaries and limits will arise. There will be no supreme power to interpose; but the sword and bayonet must decide the dispute.

Most of all, Seabury worried about the aggressive tendencies of the four tightly-bound New England colonies. In the event of independence, Seabury predicted, those colonies would form one Republic, and, as a result, a state of continual war with New England, would be the inevitable fate of this province [New York], till submission on our part, or conquest on their part, put a period to the dispute.

By this time, the founders had already witnessed firsthand the deadly centrifugal forces of disunion acting upon the Continental Congress. Most menacing, four of the five delegates from South Carolina had walked out of the First Congress in an act of nullification of the Continental Association, a proposed trade embargo against Britain that South Carolinians argued grossly disadvantaged their staple-crop economy far more than the diversified economies of the Northern colonies.

According to the South Carolina delegates, the nonexportation clause of the Continental Association, as written, overwhelmingly favored the Northern Colonies due to a combination of existing legal patterns of commerce, ship ownership, trade relationships, and those colonies expertise in smuggling. Therefore, they demanded a revision, exempting rice and indigo for the sake of the economic survival of their constituents.

When other delegates pushed back, the planters stiffened, declaring not only that they would not sign the embargo without this exemption but also that they would take their leave and return to South Carolina. To evidence their sincerity, they did actually stage a walkout. To prevent the break-up of the Union, the Congress compromised, yielding on rice but not on indigo.

As one South Carolinian delegate, John Rutledge, explained it, defense of their home colonys economic interests motivated the walkout. The Continental Association, he argued, was biased in favor of the Northern colonies. And, he professed trenchantly, he could never consent to our becoming dupes to the people of the North.

By early 1776, the imperial situation had worsened considerably, forcing the question of independence upon the delegates with new urgency. Among other galvanizing events, Lord Dunmore in Virginia had issued an emancipation proclamation freeing all enslaved people who would join British forces, sending shock waves through the Southern states; King George III had declared all-out war on the colonies; and some New Englanders were contemplating the formation of a Northern confederacy because so many delegates from the Middle and Southern colonies continued to insist on reconciliation with Britain.

Primarily owing to the fact that New England soldiers were the ones dying on the front lines in the war with Britain, that regions delegates in Congress were desperate to obtain a lifesaving military and naval alliance with France. And, as most everyone agreed, King Louis XVI was never going to ally with America until it first declared independence.

Therefore, numerous New England delegates began privately to consider forming a Northern confederation for the purpose of issuing a united declaration of independence. As Sam Adams of Massachusetts wrote to his cousin John Adams, referring to a conversation he had recently held with Benjamin Franklin, We agreed that it must soon be brought on, & that if all the Colonies could not come into it, it had better be done by those of them that inclined to it. I told him that I would endeavor to unite the New England Colonies in confederating, if none of the rest would join in it. He approved of it, and said, if I succeeded, he would cast in his lot among us.

In spite of the known risks of disunion, by June 8the first day of formal debates on a resolution for independence for all thirteen statesrepresentatives from the Middle colonies and South Carolina refused to go along. According to Thomas Jefferson, many of the delegates from those colonies drew a bright red line on the floor of the Continental Congress. That if such a declaration should now be agreed to, Jefferson recorded, these delegates must (now) retire & possibly their colonies might secede from the Union: That such a secession would weaken us more than could be compensated by any foreign alliance.

So tense and precarious were the battles over independence that the delegates shut down debates altogether, postponing further consideration until July 1, when they agreed they would cast definitive votes.

A letter written by South Carolinian Edward Rutledge in late June to fellow delegate John Jay of New York casts light on at least one American leaders desperate fears of confederation and independence. Chiefly, Rutledge warned about the present and future dangers of New England dominating the American confederated government. Rutledge made explicit reference, too, the two means by which that region would exercise its oppression: military and naval might and power politics exploiting a weak constitution.

Bragging that he did not fear losing military engagements against New England, the South Carolinian did insist to Jay that entering into a single confederated government with that region of America was a dangerous proposition. The force of their arms I hold exceeding cheap, Rutledge declaimed, but I confess I dread their overruling influence in council, I dread their low cunning, and those levelling principles which men without character and without fortune in general possess, which are so captivating to the lower class of mankind, and which will occasion such a fluctuation of property as to introduce the greatest disorder.

Nevertheless, as scheduled, the delegates voted on independence on July 1, but before this they heard speeches. The most emotional and impassioned of them was delivered by Pennsylvanian John Dickinson, who begged the other delegates to reject independence. One reason he gave for this course of action was that if the thirteen colonies ever embarked upon a common path of independence the New England colonies would not long remain faithful to the American Union.

Looking into what he called the Doomsday Book of America, Dickinson conjectured that New England would break off from the rest within twenty or thirty years of a declaration of independence, making war on New York to gain control of the Hudson River, with unknown cascading consequences for all the colonies. This scenario of American civil war sparked at the Hudson River, he said, was too dreadful to contemplate.

Still, they voted on July 1, and the results were disastrous. Only nine states cast ballots for independence. Pennsylvania and South Carolina voted no. Delaware divided, rendering its vote null, and New York abstained, because it lacked permission either way.

This was a moment of extraordinary peril for the American Union because by now diehard New England and Virginia, for sure, had no intention of backing down on independence, and, as the vote evidenced, a supermajority of Congress (nine colonies) was ready to move immediately to a declaration. So, the delegates agreed to work overnight to break the impasse, revoting the matter of independence the following day.

We do not know what was saidor threatenedduring the debates of July 1 or later that day and night. What is certain, however, is that the Middle colonies and South Carolina were left with a life-and-death decision to make. Were they going to engage as allies in a war with New England and the other pro-independence statesor against them.

Especially the Middle colonies, squeezed as they were geographically between the New England and Southern colonies, were caught in an impossible military situation. Doubtlessly, if they did not aid New England and the Southern colonies in their war effort, allowing free passage on roads and rivers, as well supplying their armies, chances were that Pennsylvania, Delaware, and New York would become the worst fields of blood on the continent in the expanding imperial civil war, now pitting American against American.

Therefore, for the sake of self-preservation, the Middle colonies and South Carolina chose the lesser of two evils. On July 2, under an injunction of Join or Die, they threw in their lot with the pro-independence colonies. On that day, twelve states voted for independence, with New York promising to assent to the resolution as soon as it received formal approval by its state legislature. It was indeed a shotgun wedding, one that created a nation.

The Continental Congress formally adopted the resolution for independence on July 2, catapulting the U.S. into an unpredictable future. Two days later, the delegates ratified the unanimous Declaration of Independence, dissolving all political bands with Britain and proclaiming to the world that when a long train of abuses and usurpations, pursuing invariably the same Object evinces a design to reduce them under absolute Despotism, it is their right, it is their duty, to throw off such Government, and to provide new Guards for their future security.

As Delaware delegate Thomas McKean later recalled about the high-pressure, perilous days of early July, Unanimity in the thirteen states, an all-important point on so great an occasion, was thus obtained. The dissension of a single state might have produced very dangerous consequences.

The founders did it. They adopted the improbable Declaration of Independence. They formed a republic and won the war. And, in the Treaty of Paris, they successfully secured the entire trans-Appalachian West stretching to the Mississippi River, doubling the size of the nation.

George Washington, John Adams, James Madison, and the rest accomplished these stunning feats not only in spite of the tactical advantages of the British army and navy, but also in spite of the overwhelming centrifugal forces of disunion and civil wars that were acting on them every day.

That is one reason Adams predicted that the sacred day the thirteen states launched into independence will be the most memorable Epocha, in the History of America. I am apt to believe that it will be celebrated, by succeeding Generations, as the great anniversary Festival. It ought to be commemorated, as the Day of Deliverance by solemn Acts of Devotion to God Almighty.
Boulder, Colo., Flagstaff, Ariz., and Salt Lake City are among the communities opting for alternatives to traditional July 4 displays.

Fireworks at the Monroe County Fairgrounds in Bloomington, Ind., on Saturday. (Jeremy Hogan/SOPA Images/LightRocket via Getty Images)

As Americans gather to celebrate the Fourth of July, hot and dry conditions across much of the country are prompting fears that fireworks could spark wildfires  and some cities are even opting to replace traditional displays with drone light shows.

Among them: Boulder, Colo., Flagstaff, Ariz., and Salt Lake City.

As temperatures rise and fire danger increases, we must be conscientious of both our air quality and the potential for wildfires, Salt Lake City Mayor Erin Mendenhall said last week.

"The shift from traditional fireworks to a laser light show was the responsible action to take due to extreme fire risk with the dry and hot conditions, Flagstaff City Manager Greg Clifton said in a press release. It is extremely important to have a safe celebration and be fire aware. And it is also important to have a yearly celebration that we can all anticipate and plan on."

Read more about how some cities are replacing fireworks on Yahoo News

Except for the pandemic, Boulder had put on a Fourth of July fireworks show annually since 1941. Not this year.

"The shift from traditional fireworks to drones was not an easy decision and based on a number of factors, including increased fire danger fueled by climate change," the city explained. While the show is going to be a bit different, it promises to be a fantastic show.

Illegal firework sparks brush fire in Arizona

A sign in the foothills of the Sandia Mountains that border Albuquerque, N.M., on Friday. (Susan Montoya Bryan/AP)

The risk of wildfires sparked by fireworks is real, particularly in the drought-stricken West.

During a planned fireworks display in Prescott, Ariz., on Saturday, a firework that was set off by a spectator caused a brush fire. When firefighters arrived, the blaze was already half an acre in size, but they were able to extinguish it with help from the U.S. Forest Service.

"Our forests, especially up here in Prescott, and the surrounding areas, all around, can be just dry tinderboxes, Jeff Jones, a firefighter with the Prescott Fire Department, told Fox affiliate KSAZ in Phoenix, which has not had measurable rain in more than 100 days.

We haven't had rain in the recent past, and they're so dry, Jones said. The wrong firework going off at the wrong time can end up being disastrous."

"Illegal fireworks use its just that  Illegal, the fire department said in a statement. The wrong day, with the wrong wind combined with the wrong humidity could be disastrous for our forests. Remember  Carelessness is the greatest source of forest fires in our community!"

Blazes sparked by fireworks can be costly. In 2021, according to the National Fire Protection Association, more than 12,000 fires were started by fireworks, including 2,082 structure fires, 316 vehicle fires and 9,866 outside and other fires, causing dozens of civilian injuries and $59 million in property damage.

Replacing fireworks with  Silly String?

Fireworks at the fairgrounds in Bloomington, Ind., on Saturday. (Jeremy Hogan/SOPA Images/LightRocket via Getty Images)

Meanwhile, encouraging people to choose alternatives to traditional Fourth of July fireworks has led to some backlash.

Last week, the U.S. Forest Service in New Mexico urged residents to consider celebrating with safer, alternative methods, including glow sticks, noisemakers and red, white and blue Silly String.

Environmentalists balked at the idea that federal land managers would suggest using aerosol cans of sticky party string in the outdoors.

These are alternatives for children and young people to do in lieu of fireworks in their neighborhood or on their property. That way, wed like to keep things contained to your property and your neighborhood, George Ducker, wildfire prevention and communications coordinator with the New Mexico Forest Service, told the Associated Press. Were certainly not advocating folks go out into the forest and, you know, shoot off Silly String.
James Mike Denham is a professor of history and director of the Lawton M. Chiles Jr. Center at Florida Southern College, where he has taught since 1991.

"We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their creator with certain unalienable rights, that among these are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness."  Declaration of Independence, 1776

Was a more succinct, stirring assertion of freedom ever written?

Yet U.S. history is rife with contradiction. All men are created equal was penned in the midst of legally sanctioned human bondage. The courageous settling of America and its expansion westward lived alongside the unpleasant reality of the slaughter of indigenous peoples who were in the way. And the 13th, 14th and 15th amendments to the Constitution guaranteeing freedom, equality before the law and voting rights to former slaves were largely negated by a series of state-sponsored Jim Crow laws.

Such contradictions flow throughout the American story. Ignoring them or pretending they dont exist or  worse  mandating that they not be taught hardly seems a path to better understand our fellow citizens and the history of how we got to the present day. Acknowledging reality would appear basic to any sort of self-improvement program  and if America is anything, it is a rocky but real self-improvement project quite unlike anything in recorded history.

James Mike Denham is professor of history and director of the Lawton M. Chiles Jr. Center at Florida Southern College, where he has taught since 1991. Denham, 66, previously was an instructor at Florida State University and Georgia Southern University and has held fellowships at West Point, Harvard and Columbia, among other institutions.

Q. Many signers of the Declaration of Independence and delegates to the Constitutional Convention as well as four of the first five presidents were slave owners. They were certainly not unaware of the paradox. George Washington himself, while asserting the need for independence from England, wrote to a friend that its absence will make us as tame, and abject slaves, as the blacks we rule over with such arbitrary sway. How does one square the inspirational ideals expressed by our forebearers  the very real risks they took and the sterling documents they created  with the reality of widespread slave ownership?

A. It is the great stain of American history. Its the most perplexing, unanswerable question that someone like Thomas Jefferson or Patrick Henry would be a slaveholder. The only way to explain it is the context of the time, the world these people grew up in  the fact that the Royal African Company was supplying Africans to the American colonies, as many as they could acquire, the tremendous amount of land available for settlement and, most unfortunately, the belief or at least the acceptance as fact that these people were inferior and were made for this, that they were trading one civilization for another  Africa being a land where buying and selling human beings had been a common thing. Land was money. Slaves were money. The Europeans and then Americans made this into an industry. Slavery was literally the most lucrative enterprise in the world at the time.

Q. Domestically, the war of independence from England was a much messier and more convoluted affair than is commonly recognized, with many colonists supporting the mother country. What are some of the myths about the war and some of the less well-known but highly salient aspects of that revolution?

A. One of the things we forget about the American Revolution is that it lasted seven years  seven years! What was the conflict between the patriots and the loyalists like? It was a bloodbath. The worst atrocities were committed  killing, burning villages, rape and plunder  and it was like that because it was really a civil war, Americans versus Americans. John Adams said that in America during that time we were cut into thirds  a third strongly supported the revolution, a third strongly opposed it and a third were just trying to get away from everything and didnt care.

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Theres this myth that all the loyalists were rich, fat cats  mean spirited, totally denigrating the poor, hardworking patriots who were suppressed by them. Nothing is further from the truth. Like any period in history, its tremendously complicated. There were rich loyalists and poor loyalists. John Hancock was one of the richest men in the colonies. He found it not only in his spirit but also in his best interest to join the patriots side. There were many people in the back country who took a loyalty oath to England to get land or other goodies. Some were loyalists because the people they hated in their villages were patriots. And many animosities were brought over from their mother countries. So its very difficult to generalize.

Q. What factors might have altered the outcome in favor of the British?

A. There were tipping points throughout the entire conflict and particularly in the beginning. In the first couple of campaigns Washingtons army was just waxed, run out of Long Island  barely escaped and nearly destroyed. If not for fate or bad weather it might have been a very short revolution.

The other thing about the war was its international aspect. This was also very much a world war. We talk of the First and Second world wars but they were more like the seventh and eighth world wars. The American revolution involved France, Spain, Holland, the League of Armed Neutrality  a coalition of Baltic powers  all of whom ganged up on Britain because it had become so powerful. They saw it in their own best interest to support, indirectly if not directly, the Americans. By the end of the war, England was getting it from all sides. And the British public had had it  seven years, all that money, all that blood and treasure  so they made peace.

Q. A journal kept by one of the delegates to the Constitutional Convention records that when Benjamin Franklin was asked, What have we got  a republic or a monarchy? he replied, A republic  if you can keep it. Weve managed to keep it so far, but in your estimation are fatal cracks starting to appear, as evidenced by widespread election denial, attacks on the Capitol and retreats into political silos that merely confirm whatever biases we already harbor?

A. Our country is based not just on e pluribus unum  out of many, one  but also on consensus and compromise, and the idea from the very beginning that nobody gets everything they want. Unfortunately, in our hypersensitive information age, everybody has access to constant information and the people who are giving it out have economic motives in dividing people and making people angry. Nobody can agree on facts anymore. Nobody wants to compromise. One of my favorite phrases is dont let the perfect be the enemy of the good. I guess we all strive for perfection, but our own notion of perfection may be something that is very different from another persons.

The committee chosen to draft a declaration of independence for the 13 North American British colonies is shown at work in this 19th century engraving. The five members are, from left, Benjamin Franklin, Thomas Jefferson, John Adams, Philip Livingston and Roger Sherman. On July 1, 1776, the committee submitted their draft to the Continental Congress, which voted on July 2 for final separation, and approved and formally adopted the Declaration of Independence on July 4. (AP Photo)

Our country is also based on people having a common notion of what facts are, of being connected in a civil way, of having an understanding that representative democracy really is a good thing. Sometimes I wonder whether some people are willing to junk that idea. In a democracy, nobody gets everything they want. But some people seem determined to have it their way and are willing to do anything to get it.

Q. Theres never been a revolution in history in which the pursuit of happiness was a stated objective. In these times of harsh partisanship and inability to agree on basic facts, are Americans becoming less happy with who we are as a people and as a nation? Does e pluribus unum still hold?

A. That was the most brilliant phrase thats ever been written  the pursuit of happiness. Unfortunately, we have descended into a period where there are vast numbers of people who think the only good pursuit of happiness is their own pursuit, and every other type of happiness ought to be banned. Im not talking about the most egregious kind of behavior that no one supports. But there are people trying to ban not only the pursuit of happiness but of thinking a certain way, writing a certain way, learning a certain way  because it doesnt conform to their own specific notion of what is right and wrong.

Q. We have always been a nation of immigrants. At the time of the revolution, much of the population were either immigrants or children thereof. Today in Florida about a fifth of the population still speak Spanish. Six percent identify as Asian. One in five was born in another country. We are a very diverse state. What strengths do immigrants bring and why do many consider immigration and diversity a mortal threat?

A. They consider it a threat because of the striking disparities of their race, their ethnicity, of their beliefs, of their religion  and thats always been the case. It rises and falls based on a lot of different factors, including economics. Most immigrants come with tremendous ambition. Theyre young, energetic, they work incredibly hard  in construction, picking crops, washing dishes. In large part, theyre after the American dream  to be independent and to pursue their own happiness.

This likeness of Thomas Jefferson by Charles Wilson Peale hangs in Philadelphia's Independence Hall, where Jefferson's Declaration of Independence was reported to the Continental Congress June 28, 1776.

But many want to close the borders entirely  and thats not something new. It goes back to the colonial period and the mass migration of the late 19th century. I think its always going to be with us. With the 24-hour news cycle, people get ginned up. One person commits a heinous crime and the whole group gets cast with aspersions. Some people in our government dont want to solve it because its a very compelling political argument if you can frame the other side negatively. Both sides are guilty and there are those who are simply determined not to deal with this problem.

Q. There is a movement afoot in Florida and elsewhere to ban books, sanitize the past so that no student feels uncomfortable, prohibit the teaching of certain subjects and to literally rewrite history. What consequences, directly or indirectly, flow from such actions to censor history, deny access to reading materials and in general quell dissenting viewpoints?

A. The first thing that totalitarian countries do is control an understanding of the past. Censorship and dictating what people can or cannot freely enquire about is one of the greatest tools of autocracies. The fact that a government, a governor, a legislature, a president can ban a book is just reprehensible. What seems to be going on is a solution in search of a problem. Or at least an open attack to garner animosity for cheap political gain. Its very disturbing.

We all talk about slippery slopes  you read "Catcher in the Rye" and the next thing you know youre going to be a homosexual or a communist or whatever. To me the real slippery slope is this banning of books and trying to dictate what teachers or professors or scholars who have dedicated their lives to seeking truth get to say, do or write. Tolerance of disagreeable ideas is the price we pay for a free society.

Thomas R. Oldt

Q. For all our problems, there is no doubt that this country has come a long way in overcoming adversity and prejudice. Many people and many nations have made the mistake of counting us out as a country, so as we celebrate Independence Day, what thoughts would you like to share with our readers about the countrys prospects?

A. To a certain degree, were always going to have this problem and it might even get worse. But I think we need to go into this with the idea that we have to make our own peace with things we may not like, that we have to understand that were not  or our group or organization or political party is not  all-knowing and has all the answers and should have total control over the country. And if we dont, the whole worlds going to come to an end. We have to understand that we live in a diverse society and that our experiment will not last if we descend into squabbling factions or groups.

Thomas R. Oldt can be reached at tom@troldt.com.

This article originally appeared on The Ledger: On July 4th, Florida Southern professor reflects on changing nation
Freedom and democracy  theyre not just for July 4th anymore!

Seriously. The ideas and institutions that define our country have drawn more attention in recent years than at any time I can remember. Since Donald Trump tried to steal a second term, the nuts and bolts of the Constitution and our election system have become everyday topics in the media. Democrats rightly call Trumps schemes an assault on democracy, and they rightly warn that he could try again.

In addition to making that case, President Biden hopes to change the perception that the GOP holds some kind of patent on Freedom. He laid out his vision of freedom in April, emphasizing abortion and voting rights along with gun control and a fair shot at building a good life. Meanwhile his likely opponent in next years presidential race is calling for freedom from prosecutors and promising pardons for January 6 rioters.

This is a good day to revisit the Founders conception of freedom. It wasnt the freedom from want and fear that President Roosevelt proposed in 1941; the founders stopped well short of that kind of grandiosity and still were seen by many as hopeless idealists. Nor was it the freedom to do whatever you feel like doing; Thomas Jefferson and friends werent peddling anarchy.

What the irate colonists demanded was freedom from coercion. With their Declaration of Independence, they notified King George III that his ability to coerce Americans was canceled. Then they went further, asserting that all men are born with the same rights the signers were claiming and that no government can justifiably violate them. Protecting those rights is in fact governments primary job.

This was pretty wild stuff in the 18th century, but the old boys really went off the deep end on the subject of democracy. A government without a monarch? People choosing their own leaders? Astonished Europeans agreed: the Americans foolishness would lead to chaos and tyranny.

They had a point, and the Founders knew it. Several had studied the history of democratic governments in ancient Greece and Rome, which invariably descended into mob rule and then reverted to autocracy. The body of people  do not possess the discernment and stability necessary for systematic government, lamented Alexander Hamilton. Thomas Jefferson, the most optimistic of the bunch, believed self-rule might work if citizens were educated, informed, and immune to the lure of factions, demagogues and materialism. You have to wonder if anyone took side bets.

The architects of our government feared democracys proven capacity to self-destruct. They didnt want popular opinion to guide policy, which would invite factions to compete for government favor at the expense of individual rights. But they did want voters to wield the power to hire and fire  directly, in the case of the House, and through the state legislatures for the Senate and the presidency (legislatures chose our senators until 1913, and the electors they chose for presidential elections were not at first bound to popular vote results).

The passions and prejudices of the masses would find expression in the House, if things went according to plan, while the smaller and less volatile Senate would provide guardrails. Thats right  the framers of the Constitution were looking for a calming influence from the body that today includes Josh Hawley, J.D. Vance, Elizabeth Warren and Bernie Sanders. But democracy often plugs square pegs into round holes. Even with state legislatures and the electoral college sandwiched between candidates for office and their voters, the United States took rule of the people further than most of the world thought possible.

Understanding our founding as a balancing act, performed without a net and above a sea of skepticism, can help us appreciate the most revolutionary of all revolutions. It left us the gifts of freedom and democracy. If the founders were here today, they would remind us that the latter can safeguard the former  but can also devour it.

Michael Smith is a freelance opinion writer in Georgetown, Kentucky.
Julys full moon is closer to Earth. Heres when to get the best view from Pennsylvania

The buck full moon will be the first supermoon of the year, and Pennsylvania residents may be able to get a good look as fireworks decorate the sky for the Fourth of July.

The buck moon became full at 7:39 a.m. Monday morning, and will appear full until Tuesday evening.

The night of the Fourth of July should be mostly clear before 2 a.m. in State College, the National Weather Service reports, but a chance of thunderstorms is forecast before 7 p.m. The low will be around 64 degrees, and there is a 30% chance of rain.

NASA and many publications recognize the buck and three more supermoons in 2023: two in August and one in September. The definition of a supermoon varies, and some publications only recognize the two in August as supermoons as they will be the brightest.

What is the buck supermoon?

Julys full moon is known as the buck moon because this time of year is when male deers antlers are in full-growth mode, according to the Old Farmers Almanac.

The term supermoon was coined by astrologer Richard Nolle in 1979 as either a new or full Moon that occurs when the Moon is within 90% of perigee, its closest approach to Earth, NASAs website reads.

Supermoons can appear brighter and larger than typical full moons, Space.com reports.

More full moons in 2023

Heres when to see more full moons in 2023, with information from Space.com:

Aug. 1: Sturgeon supermoon

Aug. 30: Blue supermoon (appears biggest and brightest of the year)

Sept. 29: Harvest supermoon

Oct. 28: Hunters moon

Nov. 27: Beaver moon

Dec. 26: Cold moon

The blue supermoon will be Augusts second full moon, and Forbes says the best times to see it will be the evenings of Aug. 30 and Aug. 31.

These moons have multiple names, and many come from Indigenous cultures. The Farmers Almanac uses Indigenous moon names, along with monikers from colonial America and other North American sources.

The Central Pennsylvania Observers will host a free, public stargazing event from 9:30 to 11:30 p.m. Aug. 4 at Tudek Park. The club also hosts public astronomy meetings from 7 to 9 p.m. the first Thursday of each month at South Hills Business School.
June was hottest in Jersey since 1976 - forecasters

It has been the second warmest June since records began in 1894

Jersey had its warmest June since 1976, according to meteorologists

Temperatures averaged 18.4C (65F), only 0.3C (0.55F) less than they were 47 years ago when there was a long period of hot weather.

It has been the second warmest June since records began in 1894, said forecasters.

Jodie Stock, senior Jersey meteorologist, said: "If we look at the 30-year climate average for June, it should be 16.3C, so that's two degrees higher than the average for the time of year."

Follow BBC Jersey on Twitter and Facebook. Send your story ideas to channel.islands@bbc.co.uk.
PROVIDENCE  A 26-year-old Providence man has been convicted of murder and multiple other felonies in the drive-by shooting of a 24-year-old Warwick woman killed while talking to a friend on a city street.

The conviction of Isaiah Pinkerton came nearly two years after Miya Brophy-Baermann was shot on Aug. 1, 2021, while standing along Olney Street at about 3:30 on a Sunday morning. She had earlier attended a party nearby.

Brophy-Baermann, a University of Rhode Island graduate, had recently received a master's degree from Northeastern University and started working as a speech-language pathologist. Investigators at the time said they didn't believe she was the shooter's intended target.

For more than a year, no one was arrested in the murder, but on Aug. 24, 2022, Pinkerton and another Providence man, Shawn Mann, were charged by secret indictment. Mann, 32, still faces trial.

Miya Brophy-Baermann at her graduation from Northeastern University.

Pinkerton found guilty of murder, possession of a ghost gun

On Thursday, a jury convicted Pinkerton of 10 felonies. In addition to murder, he was convicted of drive-by shooting, conspiracy, possessing a ghost gun (untraceable because it didn't have a serial number) and discharging a firearm while committing a crime of violence, among other charges.

Judge Robert D. Krause also found Pinkerton guilty of two counts of possession of a firearm by a person previously convicted of a violent crime. Pinkerton will be sentenced at a later date.

The trial started Wednesday, June 21, with a friend of Brophy-Baermann among the first to testify. Sheron Robinson said that while he was with Brophy-Baermann, a car approached and he heard gunshots and saw the flash of a muzzle, but could not see the person holding the gun.

More: Mother of woman killed in Providence grapples with grief, social media and anonymous reward

On the guilty verdict, Rhode Island Attorney General Peter Neronha said, "It has been nearly two years since Miya lost her life, and while we are painfully aware that nothing can return her to her family and friends, I hope this verdict brings some semblance of peace to everyone impacted by this unnecessary and tragic loss. The state proved beyond a reasonable doubt that the defendant was responsible for this senseless murder, and the jury decided swiftly and decisively to return a guilty verdict on all counts."

"I am grateful to the Providence Police Department for their outstanding work and partnership during the investigation and prosecution of this complex case," Neronha said.

Providence Journal Reporter Mark Reynolds contributed to this story

This article originally appeared on The Providence Journal: Isaiah Pinkerton convicted in murder of Miya Brophy-Baermann
'It's just a plug': A rival EV CEO isn't sold on Tesla's charging tech  even as giants like Ford and GM sign on

"What we're really comparing is, is it a screw cap or is it a cork on the bottle, not the quality of the wine," Lucid Motors CEO Peter Rawlinson said. "It's rather bizarre." REUTERS/Caitlin O'Hara

Tesla has been dominating headlines as more automakers switch to its charging tech.

But Peter Rawlinson, the CEO of Tesla rival EV-maker Lucid, isn't convinced the tech is a shoo-in.

Rawlinson told Bloomberg in an interview that the hype around the charger is "rather bizarre."

While automaker after automaker signs on to use Tesla's well-regarded charging technology, one rival executive isn't completely sold yet.

Bloomberg reports that Gabriel Daoud, an analyst at Cowen, referenced the Tesla charger earlier this month, saying: "It's just a plug." Peter Rawlinson, the CEO of Lucid, echoed those exact words in an interview, according to the outlet.

"What we're really comparing is, is it a screw cap or is it a cork on the bottle, not the quality of the wine," Rawlinson told Bloomberg. "It's rather bizarre."

In recent months, Ford, GM, Volvo, Rivian, and others have said they'll soon offer compatibility with Tesla's North American Charging Standard, known as NACS. But for now, the Lucid is sticking with the Combined Charging System, or CCS, that until recently, all other non-Tesla carmakers had been using or planning to use for their electric vehicles.

Part of Tesla's long-time advantage has been its exclusive Supercharger network, which many owners say is a better charging experience than the alternatives. But now, Elon Musk is sharing the wealth of those advantages with other EV companies and working to make his way the industry standard.

Lucid's Rawlinson had first-hand experience with the making of the NACS connector  then just known as the Tesla charging connector  through his previous role as chief engineer of the Model S with Musk.

(Interestingly, Musk has tried to claim in recent years that Rawlinson was never chief engineer at Tesla, and the two reportedly aren't exactly on good terms.)

Rawlinson has noted the Tesla's Supercharger network's reliability, and said Lucid will likely move to NACS eventually, according to Bloomberg. But Rawlinson is cautious about adopting the Tesla plug before it has been standardized.

"If you've got the most advanced technology in the world, you're a bit reluctant to risk that," Rawlinson told Bloomberg, referring to his own company. Rawlinson has regularly touted the superiority of his company's vehicle tech during quarterly earnings calls.

Meanwhile, "If you haven't got the most advanced technology in the world, you're not really incentivized to tread that warily," Rawlinson said, perhaps a slight to other car companies.

One of Rawlinson's concerns was Tesla having access to so much more charging data.

"Whoever controls this  if it isn't an open, impartial standard, if it's owned by one company  has access to a lot of consumer data," the executive told Bloomberg. "It's who owns that data, and making it genuinely open-sourced, that would worry me."

Read the original article on Business Insider
Just ahead of Independence Day, the Supreme Court has released several rulings that have kept progressivism at bay and righted America yet again, reminding Americans everywhere that freedom and the Constitution reign supreme in this country  not a political party, a particular community, a newfangled socialist idea or an old racist policy.

President Joe Bidens student loan forgiveness program is a compelling example. Knowing Biden didnt have the authority to institute true loan forgiveness  only Congress has that power  he did it anyway for political points. Millions of Americans, strapped with robust monthly payments, enjoyed a lengthy hiatus, believing the idea would actually be permanent.

Authority aside, the concept in and of itself is asinine: Arbitrary college loan forgiveness is a page right out of a socialists playbook and a slippery slope toward why Winston Churchill said socialism is the philosophy of failure its inherent virtue is the equal sharing of misery.

Justice Elena Kagan attempted to make a persuasive argument and failed miserably. A portion of her dissent:

So imagine the horrific. A terrorist organization sets off a dirty bomb in Chicago. Beyond causing deaths, the incident leads millions of residents (including many with student loans) to flee the city to escape the radiation. They must find new housing, probably new jobs. And still their student-loan bills are coming due every month. To prevent widespread loan delinquencies and defaults, the Secretary wants to discharge $10,000 for the class of affected borrowers. Is that legal? Of course it is; it is exactly what Congress provided for.

What about the generations before who paid theirs back? What about my parents? If college loans should be wiped away, per Bidens bizarre logic, why not rent? Why not a mortgage? Why not a car loan? Where does loan forgiveness really end? The idea was always absurd, and yet Biden wrapped millions of Americans up in the blanket of relief and waited for the Supreme Court to tear it away. That there were three justices who actually thought Bidens plan was sound and that he had the authority to do this is nauseating. Imagine our countrys economy five years from now if this had been left to stand.

The Supreme Courts decision in the affirmative action case was yet another stop gap. The best way to stop racial discrimination is to stop discriminating based on race. Affirmative action has simply continued this practice in college admissions, where, as Justice Clarence Thomas wrote in his opinion, almost all of lifes outcomes may be unhesitatingly ascribed to race.

This, too, was the problem many Americans have had with critical race theory percolating into our K-12 schools. Thomas, a black man who grew up in the segregated South, slammed this, writing, Such a view is irrational; it is an insult to individual achievement and cancerous to young minds seeking to push through barriers, rather than consign themselves to permanent victimhood.

Finally, the Supreme Courts decision affirming the right to free speech in the 303 Creative v. Elenis case, which has already been misconstrued as one that allows people of faith to discriminate based on identity, or in this case, the LGBTQ+ community. Not so.

Colorados Anti-Discrimination Act would have compelled Lorie Smith to create websites celebrating messages with which she does not agree. The majority simply ruled that this is unconstitutional: No one, Christian or gay, atheist or Jewish, should be forced to speak (create, etc.) in a way that defies ones conscience. This ruling protects all people.

As Justice Neil Gorsuch wrote in the majority opinion, (T)he opportunity to think for ourselves and to express those thoughts freely is among our most cherished liberties and part of what keeps our Republic strong. Of course, abiding the Constitutions commitment to the freedom of speech means all of us will encounter ideas we consider unattractive, misguided, or even hurtful, But tolerance, not coercion, is our Nations answer.

Through Congress, the left and the right often use laws to advance a particular cause, be it loan forgiveness, racism or bigotry. But this country must remain indentured to nothing but the idea of liberty and justice for all; the idea, as Thomas said, that all men are created equal, are equal citizens, and must be treated equally before the law. The Supreme Court is not always right, but they were this session and they have kept the lamps of liberty burning just a bit longer.
Four years after the federal public defender for Kansas, Melody Brannon, filed quite a damning disciplinary complaint against problem prosecutor Terra Morehead  a serial offender with a long rap sheet of misconduct findings  Brannon finally got a letter back last week from the Kansas Office of the Disciplinary Administrator. Thats the office that in theory sanctions prosecutors when need be.

Because its also the office that in practice almost never does any such thing, it found that Morehead was in the clear again: After carefully reviewing the material, and deliberating over the facts and rules, said the June 23 letter, the review committee found that probable cause does not exist and that there is not sufficient evidence to prove a violation of the Kansas Rules of Professional Conduct. The review committee  made up of other prosecutors, as always  has directed this office to notify you of the dismissal of this complaint.

The complaint included the fact that between 2013 and 2016, Morehead and others requested recordings of inmate calls from a Kansas pretrial detention center without excluding attorney phone numbers from their requests.

As a result, she heard attorney-client calls in at least nine cases, yet never reported this to either defense counsel or the district court. After the scandal made news in 2016, a federal judge held the office in contempt. More than 100 prisoners have sought relief because of the violations, and an investigation into the prosecutors conduct has led to more than 10 sentences being reduced or vacated.

But for Morehead, there never are any consequences. Its taken four years to get a letter saying she didnt do anything, Brannon told me.

Lamonte McIntyre was exonerated in part on evidence that Morehead colluded with now-indicted former police detective Roger Golubski.

How does she still have a law license?

Even among those prosecutors known for doing whatever it takes to win, Morehead is a lifetime standout: How does she still have a law license? Our office fields this question about Terra Morehead on a regular basis, says Brannons complaint. She is a career prosecutor who has abused her power for decades and repeatedly directed her abuse towards the people of Wyandotte County, one of the poorest and most vulnerable communities in Kansas while she worked in the DAs office there. U.S. Attorneys Office management  well aware of her history occasionally responds to her wrongdoing by limiting her reach within the office. But the dust eventually settles, and she goes right back to doing what she does.

Again, thats because she pays no price for cheating. And thats because, while the states disciplinary office for lawyers handles certain kinds of violations very well  steal from your client, or have sex with him, and that violation will be punished  the kind of abuses that Morehead is known for will not.

Like what? In 1994, Morehead prosecuted Lamonte McIntyre for a double murder in Kansas City, Kansas, that she had to have known he did not commit. After 23 years in prison, McIntyre was exonerated, in part on evidence that showed that Morehead had coerced a witness, knowingly presented false testimony and suppressed exculpatory evidenceall in collusion with now-indicted former police detective Roger Golubski. Shed also had a relationship with the judge who presided over McIntyres trial, and yet had neither recused herself nor disclosed this to the defense.

In 2000, Morehead used 10 of 12 peremptory strikes to prevent Black people from serving on the jury in a state murder case. The 10th Circuit later found that at least one peremptory challenge was substantially motivated by race.

In 2003, DEA Agent Timothy McCue sideswiped a car, then he chased down its driver, Barron Bowling, beat and arrested him. Bowling was acquitted and sued, eventually winning damages for assault, battery, and excessive use of force. KCKPD Detective Max Seifert resisted pressure to cover up McCues conduct; he investigated and documented the incident, and later testified at Bowlings criminal trial. After Bowlings acquittal, Morehead began falsely telling others in the law enforcement community that Seifert had botched investigations and was not credible. In police training sessions, she even used Seifert as an example of a problematic officer whose credibility problem would have to be disclosed to defense counsel in any criminal case.

Seeks harshest mandatory minimum penalty

In 2007, as a federal prosecutor, Morehead adopted one unbreakable rule: If a person charged with a federal crime requested pretrial release, she would seek the harshest possible statutory mandatory minimum penalty. Even if the district court ruled that the person was entitled to release, Morehead would not withdraw the notice.

In 2016, on the morning Gregory Orozco was to go on trial for drug trafficking, Morehead filed to double his sentencing exposure, and for the first time disclosed exculpatory evidence that should have been made available to the defense team much earlier.

She downplayed the importance of this as a lack of candor that the district court later described as quite troubling. During Orozcos trial, Morehead let a defense witness know, through his lawyer, that his testimony would have adverse consequences, so the witness decided not to testify.

The district court later concluded that Morehead had substantially interfered with Orozcos Sixth Amendment right to present a defense. It vacated his conviction and dismissed the indictment with prejudice. The 10th Circuit affirmed the district courts finding, though it disagreed that dismissal with prejudice was the appropriate remedy.

In 2021, U.S. District Court Judge Daniel Crabtree dramatically reduced the prison sentence of a man convicted on drug and counterfeiting charges because Morehead had not been forthcoming with evidence the defense had a right to during her prosecution of Jay Giannukos.

She failed in her duty to do justice and that misconduct provides the reason for the substantial variance reflected in the custody component of Mr. Giannukos sentence, Crabtree said. He reduced Giannukos sentence from 20 years to nine.

State unconcerned about wrongful convictions

So how is it that this pattern of behavior  and this is sampling rather than a complete list  has never been punished?

Mike Warner, a state and federal prosecutor in Kansas and Missouri for more than 30 years, and someone who has worked with Morehead, told me thats because the federal investigation of prosecutor malfeasance has always been historically weak and that state authorities seemingly care more about office management and financial improprieties than prosecutors who wrongfully convict people and sentence them to long prison terms. So even when a prosecutor wrongly convicts someone of murder or sends dozens of defendants to long prison terms tainted by Sixth Amendment violations, not much really happens.

In part, he said, thats because state attorney disciplinary offices are commonly staffed by individuals with either a prosecutorial or law enforcement background. This makes it easier, I think, for them to excuse or rationalize prosecutorial misconduct.

Two other complaints against Morehead are still going forward, one of them involving the Orozco case. But Morehead has asked for and been granted a delay, and as Brannon told me, well all be dead and gone before anything happens.

The real problem is that the system is set up in a way that treats the most powerful people in it, prosecutors, as if they were the most vulnerable. As long as thats the case, the damage caused by this design flaw  a classic feature, not a bug  can only continue, mostly unacknowledged and reliably unaddressed.
Twitter has more than 24 million users in India, by one estimate

In July 2022, Twitter took the Indian government to court over its orders to block certain accounts and tweets. Several free speech experts hailed it as a significant lawsuit.

It was the first instance of a social media company suing the government over its content takedown orders, often criticised for being arbitrary and opaque.

Last week the Karnataka High Court dismissed Twitter's case and imposed a fine of 5m rupees ($61,000; 48,000) on the company for not complying with the contested orders for over a year. Twitter has more than 24 million users in India, by one estimate.

The verdict has left many digital rights experts worried.

"The judgement reposes untrammelled power in the state to issue blocking orders that bypass procedural safeguards," said Radhika Roy, a lawyer and spokesperson for digital rights organisation Internet Freedom Foundation.

She added that the court could have countered "the rampant misuse" of law to take down unfavourable content on the internet, rather it has ended up legitimising it.

Commentators are apprehensive about Twitter's next move. Will the social media giant comply with the take down orders or appeal the judgement?

The case was filed by Twitter under its previous leadership. Under new owner Elon Musk, the company has complied with takedown orders.

After a recent meeting with Prime Minister Narendra Modi in the US, Mr Musk said that the company has no choice "but to obey local government laws" or it risks getting shut.

The recent judgement raises concerns about free speech since the government has been accused of increasing its censorship of online content in recent years. Federal minister Rajeev Chandrasekhar has said that all foreign Internet platforms had to comply with Indian laws.

In 2022, India blocked 3,417 Twitter URLs, while only eight Twitter URLs had been blocked in 2014.

The case

Twitter's case was that 39 orders of the federal government to block access to accounts and tweets went against the law - India's information technology law allows the government to block online content that "threatens the security of the state" and public order among other things.

It said that the government does not have the power to block accounts, but only specific tweets.

Further, it said that the orders had not been properly reasoned and that the grounds required for taking down content had not been made out by the government.

Also, users whose accounts and tweets were being blocked had not been informed by the government.

The government argued that the orders were legal. It said that the contested content was posted by "anti-India campaigners" and that if such users were informed about the action being taken against them, they may choose to tweet anonymously and cause more harm.

Therefore, it was appropriate that only Twitter was informed about these orders, the government said.

Since the law requires these orders to be confidential, it is not clear which accounts and tweets were challenged.

However, one instance cited in the judgement reveals that at least one account had posted tweets related to the farmer's protest in 2021 against new farm laws brought by the government.

Last year, Twitter blocked a number of accounts linked to farmer protests

'Anti-India campaigners'

The court has now said that the government has the power to block not just tweets, but entire accounts as well.

These orders could extend indefinitely. It also added that when the government is blocking content, the user does not necessarily have to be informed.

Under the law, users or the company hosting the information - such as Twitter - have to be given a notice and a chance to be heard in court before a blocking order is passed.

In cases of emergency, the government can immediately block a website and give notice later.

The orders also need to have details in writing about why a website needed to be blocked. Twitter argued that this was missing in the orders the government had passed.

However, the court looked at the tweets and accounts in contention and found that they had "outrageous", "treacherous and anti-national" content which could threaten national security and public order. It said that these details had been shared with Twitter.

Further, the court accepted the government's arguments that detailed reasons had been shared with Twitter in review meetings that had taken place before the blocking order was passed.

The court also said that giving notice to users was discretionary. The users in question "comprised of terrorists" and "foreign adversaries who intend to discredit and destabilise India and jeopardise national security on communal lines".

Thus, it accepted the government's argument that it was "not desirable" to issue notice to such "anti-India" campaigners.

End of the road?

Experts say that this judgment limits users' ability to defend their right to free speech.

Users "won't be given a chance to defend themselves before a blocking order is passed" said Sachin Dhawan, a programme manager at digital rights research body Centre for Communication Governance.

"Even after an order is passed, they will be left in the dark about why their content has been blocked" he added.

As a result, "a process which was already shrouded in secrecy will become even more opaque," he said. Mr Dhawan added that this undermined "basic due processes" such as giving a "notice and a hearing" to an aggrieved party.

However, another significant case pending before the Delhi High Court may lead to a different outcome.

It relates to a satirical dowry calculator website being blocked by the government without the website's founder being given a notice.

In May last year, the High Court directed the government to provide the founder a copy of the order and give him a hearing, during which the ban was upheld. The court is now hearing whether the website can be blocked.

The court's order to provide a copy to the founder "inspires hope", Ms Roy from Internet Freedom Foundation said. However, the final verdict is yet to be decided.

BBC News India is now on YouTube. Click here to subscribe and watch our documentaries, explainers and features.

Read more India stories from the BBC:
Kate Middleton photographed at Young V&A on June 28, 2023, left, and Prince Harry and Meghan Markle during their interview with Oprah Winfrey in 2021. Max Mumby/Indigo/Getty Images, Harpo Productions/Joe Pugliese/Handout via REUTERS/File Photo

Kate Middleton reportedly played a key role in the response to Harry and Meghan's Oprah interview.

The line "recollections may vary" in the palace's statement was said to be pushed forward by Kate.

Royal author Valentine Low spoke to anonymous sources with knowledge of the response.

Kate Middleton, the Princess of Wales, was instrumental in wording Buckingham Palace's response to the Duke and Duchess of Sussex's interview with Oprah Winfrey in 2021, according to royal author Valentine Low.

Prince Harry and Meghan made a series of allegations about the royal family in their first major interview since resigning from royal duties which aired in the US on March 7 and the UK on March 8, 2021. Meghan said that Kate made her cry over bridesmaid dresses in 2018 and that an unnamed family member made comments about their son Archie's skin tone before he was born.

In a statement released on behalf of the Queen on March 9, 2021, Buckingham Palace said that "the whole family is saddened to learn the full extent of how challenging the last few years have been for Harry and Meghan."

"The issues raised, particularly that of race, are concerning. While some recollections may vary, they are taken very seriously and will be addressed by the family privately," it continued.

"Harry, Meghan and Archie will always be much loved family members," the statement concluded.

In an excerpt from the updated edition of his 2022 book, "Courtiers: The Hidden Power Behind the Crown," which was published in The Times of London on Friday, Low spoke to anonymous royal sources who reflected on how the palace's statement was drafted.

Low wrote that while some people have attributed the now-famous "recollections may vary" line to King Charles' private secretary, Clive Alderton, more than one source has attributed it to Jean-Christophe Gray, Prince William's private secretary, who had been in his role for less than three weeks at the time of the interview.

At least two senior royal officials were against the inclusion of the line because of the feared reaction from the Sussexes, according to Low. But one person who was instrumental in its inclusion was Kate, an anonymous source told the author.

"It was Kate who clearly made the point, 'History will judge this statement and unless this phrase or a phrase like it is included, everything that they have said will be taken as true,'" the source said.

"She does not get as much credit as she should, because she is so subtle about it. She is playing the long game. She has always got her eye on, 'This is my life and my historic path and I am going to be the Queen one day,'" the source added.

Kate's involvement has not been officially confirmed by Buckingham Palace. Kensington Palace declined to comment when contacted by Insider and representatives for Buckingham Palace and the Duke and Duchess of Sussex did not respond to Insider's request for comment.

Nonetheless, Low's book is "authoritative and well researched," Richard Fitzwilliams, a royal commentator told Insider. Low is a royal correspondent for The Times and has worked at the publication since 2008, according to his author page on the publication's digital edition. As part of his role, he has traveled across the world with the royal family, including a visit to Russia with the late Queen Elizabeth and the Galapagos Islands with Charles.

The updated version of "Courtiers" will be available to purchase on July 6, according to The Times.

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When will Kentuckys weather clear up? New forecast shows less severe storms

More thunderstorms are in the forecast for Kentucky this week, but none are expected to be as severe as the ones that have swept through the region in recent days.

There are chances for thunderstorms almost every day this week in the region, but they wont be as severe, according to meteorologist John Gordon from the National Weather Service. This biggest chance for a thunderstorm will be Thursday.

This is nothing like the last two weeks. Were on a major decrease from where we were the last two weeks, Gordon said.

Gordon said the recent organized storm activity has been unusual for the summer, with storms riding on top of high-pressure ridges and fronts stalling over a certain area. He said those patterns are gone and more typical summer weather is expected this week.

This is typical air-mass thunderstorms that we get in the summer, Gordon said.

The high temperatures in the region for this week are in the mid 80s, according to the NWS. Most of the week will feature warm days and muggy nights.

More typical summer weather returns for most of this week. Best chance of storms is Thursday, otherwise warm and muggy with afternoon pop-up storms each day. #kywx #inwx pic.twitter.com/zuuEwiiEQm  NWS Louisville (@NWSLouisville) July 3, 2023

The forecast for Eastern Kentucky is similar, with chances of thunderstorms every day, including a 60-70% chance on Thursday, according to the NWS office in Jackson. Severe weather is possible for Western Kentucky Wednesday and it will probably feature wind damage, the NWS branch in Paducah said.

In the last week, Kentucky has seen storms with multiple hazards, including tornadoes, large hail, damaging winds and torrential rainfall. On June 25, a storm brought tornadoes to Hardin and Russell counties along with damaging winds in Madison, Bullitt Edmonson, Grayson and Warren counties.

Severe weather caused a tree to fall on home on Merewood Drive in Lexington, Ky., on Sunday, July 2, 2023. The storms caused damage around the city and power outages.

Just a few days later, a large rain storm left a couple of drivers in Lexington stranded due to high water in the road. The Lexington Fire Department had to respond and rescue people from their cars.

The most recent severe storm hit Sunday and left tens of thousands in Fayette County without power. The National Weather Service confirmed a tornado in Casey County with wind speeds as high as 105 mph.

The storm also caused downed trees. A large tree fell on a house on Merewood Drive shortly before 4:45 p.m., according to Maj. Derek Roberts with the Lexington Fire Department.

The occupants of the home were inside the home when the tree collapsed but they were not injured.
With a little over a month left before most students in the Fort Worth area head back to school, a local organization is offering workshops to help parents pinpoint areas where their kids need to catch up.

The education advocacy organization Parent Shield Fort Worth is holding a series of literacy clinics at several locations across the city throughout the month of July. During the check-ins, staffers from school districts in the Fort Worth area will give students brief assessments to determine whether theyre reading on grade level, and educators and advocates will be on hand to talk to parents about how to use that information to advocate for their childrens needs.

Although students in the Fort Worth area have made progress in reading since the pandemic, an official in the Fort Worth Independent School District told its board last week that the district is still seeing worrisome declines in early literacy indicators among Black students in third grade and below. Officials say theyre working with the districts new leadership team to give added support to campuses in the district that need the most help.

Literacy clinics help parents prep for school year

Trenace Dorsey-Hollins, the groups president, said shes met with countless parents in the city who are concerned about their childrens reading level, but dont feel like they have enough information to do anything about it. In one case, a mother told Dorsey-Hollins that her daughter consistently made As and Bs, but she knew the girl struggled to read.

Once we started really telling her youre not alone, she just broke down crying, Dorsey-Hollins said.

Dorsey-Hollins said the literacy checkups are designed to help parents like that woman feel more empowered to take control of the childrens education. When a child scores below grade level on the evaluation, representatives from the organization will sit down with parents to talk about their options, she said. For some parents, that may mean holding their childs school accountable, she said. For others, it may mean changing schools. In those cases, the organization can help families look at school choice options and decide which is the best fit for their student, and manage the transfer process, she said.

By holding the check-ups over the summer, the group hopes to help parents put their kids on a better footing for the start of the school year, Dorsey-Hollins said. Many students still have gaps in their learning left over from remote schooling during the pandemic. If parents have a better idea of how their kids are doing academically, they can be better positioned to take a more active role in their childrens education going forward, she said. That information can also help them work with their childs new teacher to put together a plan to close those gaps, she said.

The main thing is that they know what kind of conversation they need to have going into the start of the year, she said.

Fort Worth ISD sees declines in early literacy among Black students

Across all public school districts and charter schools in Fort Worth, 46% of students in grades 3-8 scored on grade level or better in reading on last years STAAR exam, according to an analysis of state data by the nonprofit Fort Worth Education Partnership. That total was up from just 33% of students in those grades the year before. Results of the 2023 STAAR reading exam are expected in mid August.

During a Fort Worth ISD school board meeting Tuesday evening, Sara Arispe, the districts associate superintendent of accountability and data quality, said the district had made gains in early literacy among its youngest students since the pandemic. In last springs end-of-year testing, 81% of the districts pre-kindergarten students scored on track in phonological awareness, which is the understanding of how sounds go together to make up words. Although the district still fell three points short of its goal, that figure represents steady growth, and places the district ahead of where it was before the beginning of the pandemic.

Phonological awareness is an early indicator of reading ability, and researchers say students who dont develop those skills often struggle to learn to read later on.

But Arispe said African-American pre-kindergartners made up the only group that didnt improve in phonological awareness. This year, 75% of pre-K African-American students tested on track in phonological awareness, down from 76% last year. During the 2021-22 school year, about 21% of the districts students were Black.

African-American students in kindergarten through third grade were also the only group to decline in reading fluency on end-of-year MAP exams. This year, 44% of African-American students in those grades met or exceeded grade level expectations on the test, down from 45% last year. English learners held steady at 49% compared to last year, and all other student groups improved.

Superintendent Angelica Ramsey said the district will shift its budget strategy in the coming year toward a model that provides greater support to its highest-need campuses. She compared the strategy to a visit to a doctors office: Not all patients need the same thing, so doctors have to work with them to diagnose the problem and come up with a plan to treat it. Likewise, she said the needs of each school are different, and the level and type of support campuses get from the district should take those differences into account.

Trustee Wallace Bridges said he was bothered by the lack of progress in reading scores among African-American students. Bridges, who is Black, said parents in his district approach him with questions about what the school district is doing to fix the problem. For those families, the issue isnt abstract, he said  their own child or grandchild cant read at grade level, and theyre worried. He told district leaders that he wants to see more progress.

Im really concerned when I see a population of students that we are unable to move the needle, Bridges said. We are just spending too much money, and we are not reaching that group.

To schedule an appointment for a literacy clinic, go to parentshield.org/freedomjuly.
Participants march and chant slogans at a rally protesting the Supreme Court's ruling against affirmative action on Harvard University Campus in Cambridge, Mass., on July 1, 2023.

Participants march at a rally protesting the Supreme Court's ruling against affirmative action on Harvard University's campus in Cambridge, Mass., on July 1, 2023. Credit - Getty ImaZiyu Julian Zhu/Xinhua News Agency

There is good reason Supreme Court Associate Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson worked into her much-talked about dissent in the cases where the majority killed race-based affirmative action, her sense that education saves lives.

So, I write this with no hyperbole intended. Some of us are probably going to die.

Yes. The net effect of the decision to end, at all but the nations military academies, race-conscious affirmative action but leave in place admissions preferences for athletes, people related to faculty, alumni, and major donors  a group that a 2019 study published by the National Bureau of Economic Research found included 43% of Harvard Universitys white students and just 16% of other groups  is going to be that significant.

Read More: The Infamous 96 Know Firsthand What Happens When Affirmative Action Is Banned

The reason is a simple matter of math, but also the complicated but foreseeable effects of what it means when a country, only growing more diverse by the hour, fails to do all that it can to develop a well-educated and diverse workforce. As Justice Jackson wrote in her dissent:

Beyond campus, the diversity that UNC pursues for the betterment of its students and society is not a trendy slogan. It saves lives. For marginalized communities in North Carolina, it is critically important that UNC and other area institutions produce highly educated professionals of color. Research shows that Black physicians are more likely to accurately assess Black patients pain tolerance and treat them accordingly (including, for example, prescribing them appropriate amounts of pain medication). For high-risk Black newborns, having a Black physician more than doubles the likelihood that the baby will live, and not die.

The idea that a nation needs an educated workforce is at most times  outside of a presidential campaign swing through a part of America where college-graduation rates sit below the national average  beyond dispute. Away from the ecosphere where alarmist conservative information outlets assign continued white dominance oxygen-like importance, the same is true of U.S. Census Bureaus population projections. They indicate that by 2045, white Americans will no longer comprise the American majority.

Yet when we talk about affirmative action, much of the focus is what it means for colleges and universities, for individual students and their sincere hopes and dreams. And there are, no matter what Associate Justice Clarence Thomas wrote in his concurring opinion or seethed about since his Yale University Law School years, well-documented educational and social benefits to a diverse student body. But it also matters a great deal what happens after those accepted to these institutions graduate. If we do not have a diverse group of students reflective of our country on campus, we will not, as the nation itself becomes one with no single racial or ethnic majority, have a diverse professional workforce. The absence of that will have a profound effect on our courts, our schools, our hospitals, and just about every other major institution and function of American life. If nothing else, know this: companies with more diverse leadership also tend to be more profitable for the simple reason that different experiences and perspectives often produce different ideas.

Higher education has so long been central to American conceptions of leadership and readiness to captain the critical institutions and experiences that shape all of our lives that nine out of the first 10 Presidents  all white  were college men, most of them educated at the College of William & Mary or Harvard University. (The 11th President was educated at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, one of the schools, along with Harvard University, at the center of the affirmative-action cases decided last week.)

Read More: The Infamous 96 Know Firsthand What Happens When Affirmative Action Is Banned

And in the 1940s when the U.S. government planned for the post-war future and what turned out to be one of the largest, longest, widest-spread economic boons, Congress passed what would become colloquially known as the GI Bill. The policy was supposed to cover the cost of a college education for some 15 million soldiers returning from the battlefields of World War II, keep them off the unemployment rolls, prevent another depression, and better equip the country with a workforce ready for the coming world. But the GI Bill got the unanimous support of Congress and President Franklin Roosevelts signature in 1944 only after what ought to be a notorious compromise: States rather than the federal government would administer access to the benefit, a demand of Southern members of Congress worried about how to maintain a social order with white people at the top and Black people at a nearly inescapable bottom if education and other relatively new federal creations like the 40-hour workweek and Social Security were available to everyone.

Overall, the share of American adults with bachelors degrees or more rose from 4.6% in 1945 to 25% in 1995, according to the National Archives. (That figure is almost 34% today.) But Southern administrators denied GI Benefits to most of the more than 1 million Black returning soldiers. Black veterans were also denied the bills housing benefits that helped large numbers of white male GIs get bank loans and buy homes after the war.

All of that has something to do with the way that higher education remains such a profound source of anxiety and attention, the base element of a potent cocktail thats left some people drunk on entitlement and belligerent or at least irrational about anyone else getting a sip.

But there is a way in which the narrative about affirmative action gets spun in such a way that it seems raceless, We just want fairness, says Shaun Harper, a professor and provost of business and education at the University of Southern California Marshall School of Business, about the language often used of late by those who argued that race-based affirmative action simply had to end. White people feel that they are being discriminated against and their highly deserving children are the victims of reverse racism.

How else does one explain why debate, disputes, and court cases related to affirmative action have all but raged since only a few years after it began? Why else did two of the whitest states in the union  Idaho and New Hampshire  bother to ban affirmative action in college admissions, public-agency hiring, and several other arenas in 2020 and 2012, respectively?

How else shall we make sense of all the chatter about fairness in college admissions when the K-12 feeder system is anything but? Here, in the wealthiest country in the world, we have a patchwork quilt of education policy and quality yet one persistent pattern. That is a massive funding gap between K-12 schools serving mostly white students and those educating kids who are not, says Kimberly Robinson, a onetime roommate of Justice Jackson at Harvard Law, who today serves as a professor of law, education, and human development as well as public policy at the University of Virginia. Thats the school that Thomas Jefferson built in 1819, the start of what the university describes as a bold experiment  a public university designed to advance human knowledge, educate leaders and cultivate an informed citizenry. As recently as 2016, the nations K-12 racial school funding gap amounted to about $23 billion, according to a report released in 2019 by EdBuild, an education research and funding advocacy organization.

We do not distribute educational opportunity equally, Robinson says. What I think is so interesting is the perception that we have equal educational opportunity. People think we have that.

Read More: How the End of Affirmative Action Could Affect the College Admissions Progress

If there are any bits of good news on the access-to-education front, they are this: Community colleges and other schools that enroll most of the people who apply  all but about 150 to 190 of the most selective schools  have in the last decade seen overall college-graduation rates (after six years) rise to a high of 62.3%. And while transfer and completion rates at community colleges after six years suggest theres much work to be done, in the last decade or so, the number of colleges trying to connect community-college students with opportunities to complete their educations at schools up and down the prestige ladder has grown, says Nolvia Delgado, executive director at Kaplan Educational Foundation.

Still, it is the more selective colleges and universities, which have higher graduation rates for all groups of students and often lead to greater professional opportunities, that are at the center of public conversations about considering race in admissions. And, according to Tim Wise, an activist and the author of books like Under the Affluence: Shaming the Poor, Praising the Rich and Sacrificing the Future of America and Dispatches From the Race War, far too many of these discussions echo the arguments once made by the likes of David Duke, a former Ku Klux Klan Grand Wizard who in the 1990s managed to secure nearly 40% of the vote in Louisianas Republican gubernatorial primary with a version of white-grievance politics including opposition to affirmative action on the grounds that it discriminated against white Americans.

The way we talk about the debate has shifted over the years, but the idea that accounting for historic and ongoing disparities in education, access to the resources and knowledge of the tactics that allow some students to test well, family inexperience with the college-going process, or the added obligations that a poor student, for example, may need to take on to help keep their family housed causes harm to others  that is, allowing special consideration for Black and Latino applicants means fewer opportunities for white and Asian ones  remains at the heart of the arguments made by affirmative-action opponents, including conservative activist Edward Blum, co-founder and president of Students for Fair Admission, which was the plaintiff in the affirmative-action cases decided last week.

Hes a man with a crusade, says Wise, who first encountered Blum in Houston in the 1990s when Blum was challenging a program that sought to diversify who receives public contracts for goods and services like construction. And hes spent the last three decades, in and out of court, more or less shopping for the perfect victim of affirmative action. Blum was directly involved in affirmative-action cases that went before the court in 2003, 2013 and 2016, which did not produce the results he wanted. In 2013 he was also involved in a case that ultimately toppled a key provision of the Voting Rights Act. In a decision similar to the majoritys view in the affirmative-action cases decided last week, the majority held that federal oversight of changes to voting districts and voting-related activities in places with a history of discriminatory activity was no longer necessary. It effectively differentiated and victimized those states, and it was the states and counties subject to the law that were in need of the courts protection.

And yet Students for Fair Admissions never produced a single student with a specific and personal claim of direct harm, says Aarti Kohli, executive director of the Asian Law Caucus, an affiliate of Asian Americans Advancing Justice, the nations largest and only pan Asian civil rights organization. Instead, the organization submitted statistical analyses and argued that Asian American students had now become the victims of affirmative action at Harvard and white and Asian students at UNC. It traded on the racist appeal of the model minority myth  the idea that Asian Americans are uniformly smart, capable, hardworking, and humble living evidence that theres nothing wrong with America or its systems except whatever ails Black people themselves  and garnered a lot of public attention with news stories that seemed to accept Blums claims as fact, Kohli says. Students for Fair Admissions even purported to speak for Asian Americans, she says, as if Blums take were the Asian American view, which it is not.

Read More: The Ambitions of the Civil Rights Movement Went Far Beyond Affirmative Action

Affirmative-action opponents like Blum have argued lately that not even people of color favor race-based considerations. But the nations attitudes about affirmative action are complex and often difficult for pollsters to accurately capture, says Sally Chen, an economic-justice program manager with Chinese for Affirmative Action, a California-based civil rights group. Chen is also a Harvard University graduate, a first-generation college graduate and one of only two students who submitted a brief to the Supreme Court in the Harvard University case. The precise language of poll questions about affirmative action and the language in which they are asked appears to significantly shape the measurement of Asian American opinion, Chen says. Those where pollsters ask respondents if they support values that were the goals of affirmative action and do so in more than one language tend to produce data showing a majority of Asian Americans support affirmative action. Whats more, social media platforms and other channels of information exchange have, over the course of the case, been inundated with false information in multiple languages and dialects to which Chen and her colleagues have begun to organize pushback.

In the face of such intense misinformation, I am proud to see that there is still a very strong contingent of Asian Americans who support affirmative action, Chen says, even if TikTok is flooded with I didnt get into blah, blah, blah university videos.

A majority of all but two subgroup of Asian Americans supported affirmative action in a multilingual Pew Research Center poll of 7,006 adults completed in January. Chinese American and Vietnamese American support came close at 45% and 48%, respectively.

In many ways, the language and the methods keep evolving, but the point remains unchanged. Justify racial exclusion and subordination for social, economic, and psychological gain and then, when the consequences of those choices show up in exponential disparities, point to that as so-called evidence that the oppressed group should continue to be constrained to a position from which it is difficult, if not a statistical anomaly, to climb.

Read More: How the Supreme Courts Affirmative Action Decision Affects the AAPI Community

Of course, if declaring the enduring influence of race and ethnicity in life opportunities and outcomes simply over because you say so retains some appeal, consider this: a diverse collection of doctors and biological scientists, many of them far from the manor born, probably saved your life in the last five years.

In January 2020, when then President Donald Trump, a man history will no doubt consider a specialist in the dark arts of white grievance and entitlement politics, went over to the National Institutes of Health, he wanted to meet with the people most essential to the work. At the table were world-renowned vaccine and infectious-disease specialists like Dr. Anthony Fauci, Dr. Barney Graham, and the man who led the human-genome project, Dr. Francis Collins, director of the NIH. They are all older white men. Sitting next to Graham was Kizzmekia Corbett, an NIH research fellow, a then 34-year-old Black scientist whom Graham had named the scientific lead of the vaccine-development team.

When Corbett and her team  scientists scattered all over the country, including a white man who, like Corbett, was the first in his family to go to college, and a Chinese American immigrant trained at an American school  figured out the molecular key to a working coronavirus vaccine and early human trials proved effective, Corbett and Graham were working from their respective homes. But they each broke down and cried.

Today, Corbett, a viral immunologist, is an assistant professor of Immunology and Infectious Diseases at Harvards T.H. Chan School of Public Health and an assistant professor at the Harvard Radcliffe Institute. Shes there and she was at the NIH, her mother told me back in 2020, because her third-grade teacher, a Black woman, told her parents an ugly truth: get this child to a better school district, do anything you must because this one will never allow a little Black girl into the classes to develop the capacity the teacher could see Corbett already had.

That is the thing. None of us know where or how or even what form tomorrows challenges will take. Assuming that the answers and the leadership needed to face and surmount them rests with one shrinking population poses a tremendous risk to all of us.

Or as Justice Jackson said in her dissent, Do not miss the point that ensuring a diverse student body in higher education helps everyone, not just those who, due to their race, have directly inherited distinct disadvantages with respect to their health, wealth, and wellbeing.
What we know so far about the mass shooting at Brooklyn Homes in South Baltimore

A mass shooting at a block party early Sunday morning in South Baltimores Brooklyn neighborhood killed two people and wounded 28 others  a victim tally that rivals any act of gun violence in the city in at least several decades.

What happened?

The gunfire erupted on the 800 block of Gretna Court in the Brooklyn Homes complex after midnight Sunday morning during the communitys Brooklyn Day celebration  an annual toast to the South Baltimore neighborhood with grilled foods, pony rides, face painting, dance competitions, music from a DJ, and appearances by Baltimore rappers Roddy Rackzz and OTR Chaz. Parents in the crowd before the shooting had babies strapped to their backs, residents said.

Acting Baltimore Police Commissioner Richard Worley said Sunday that the event was unpermitted, meaning police were not told about it in advance. He said he would be looking into what officers did once it was determined there was a large party.

While there has been a police presence at previous Brooklyn Day celebrations, residents noted there was not one this year. The president of the Fraternal Order of Police lodge representing Baltimore Police officers raised concerns Sunday that the patrol shift at the time of the shooting was short-handed. Councilwoman Phylicia Porter, who represents the neighborhood on the Baltimore City Council, said she was infuriated about the shooting, calling it a breakdown in security protocols and a grave failure of our systems.

Residents recalled multiple false alarms of gunshots as fireworks exploded during the block party ahead of July Fourth, as well as mentions during the party of someone having a gun.

But the unmistakable pops of gunfire that rang out about 12:35 a.m. ET prompted the hundreds of attendees to run away.

Investigators believe at least two shooters opened fire on the crowd. He said its not known whether the shootings were targeted or the result of shooters firing indiscriminately.

Who was hurt?

More than three-quarters of the 30 victims were teenagers, with children as young as 13 being struck by gunfire.

Of the 30 people killed or injured in the shooting, 23 were teenagers  15 of them under 18. More than half were female.

Aaliyah Gonzales, 18, died at the scene. Kylis Fagbemi, 20, died at a hospital.

Two more people, who were not hit by gunfire, suffered minor injuries and were treated at hospitals, according to police.

The number of injuries from gunshots alone made the shooting likely the largest in Baltimore history. Official data about mass shootings dates back only to 2014, but no Baltimore shootings with more than a dozen victims have been logged since then. No records of larger acts of violence in Baltimore could be located Sunday.

By its victim count, the shooting is surpassed by the Pratt Street riot, a Civil War conflict that killed at least 11 civilians and five soldiers, and injured many more.

Kris Brown, president of the national gun violence prevention group Brady, said in a statement that the shooting came during what is usually the countrys deadliest weekend every year.

Already, 2023 is on track to set the record for the highest number of mass shootings of any year in U.S. history, Brown said.

What happens now?

Police had not publicly identified any suspects in the shooting by Sunday night. Officials encouraged those with information or video footage to share it with police. Those with information are asked to call investigators at 410-396-2100, or make an anonymous tip by calling the Metro Crime Stoppers tip line at 1-866-7LOCKUP or a texting a tip through the Metro Crime Stoppers of Maryland website.

The tip-taking nonprofit said on social media Sunday that anyone who provides information that leads to an arrest and charges can receive a cash reward of up to $8,000.

Meanwhile, residents reeled from the horror Sunday, telling reporters theyve seen a drastic decline in resources in the South Baltimore neighborhood over recent years.

The Mayors Office for Neighborhood Safety and Engagement said Sunday that it would immediately start a response within the community to address trauma, working with community-based organizations and city agencies. The Brooklyn Homes Community Center will serve as a central place for various city agencies to provide residents immediate aid and services.

Those who are in emotional distress following the traumatic event, but dont know who to reach, can contact the 988 Helpline for mental health support by dialing 988.

The Baltimore Community Mediation Center offers a variety of conflict resolution services that are free to the community, including confidential mediation sessions, conflict resolution training and large group facilitation.
The News

Tesla says it delivered more than 466,000 vehicles in the second quarter of this year, smashing expectations from Wall Street analysts, following price cuts this year.

Competitor BYD, Chinas top-selling car brand, also announced record sales: The company delivered 700,244 vehicles this quarter, its best-ever.

Weve curated three expert views on what this means for the auto industry.

Insights

Tesla started slashing its prices earlier this year, prompting questions on whether other automakers would follow suit. While some Western manufacturers like Ford have actually raised prices on some of their electric offerings, other dealerships are offering lower prices on vehicles to stay competitive. Meanwhile, one analyst said that the growing competition of Chinese brands in markets like Europe would likely mean EV prices continue to fall. 

Its not just price cuts that have spurred Teslas record quarter: In the U.S., new incentives to shop electric, including a $7,500 federal tax credit, might be factoring into the companys growth. Tesla is the leading EV manufacturer in the U.S., where competing Chinese brands have yet to gain a foothold.

Demand for batteries to power electric vehicles has led to manufacturers, including Tesla, to source graphite  a key component of batteries  from countries like Madagascar and Mozambique. Limited Western investment on graphite mining, coupled with the U.S.s plans to cut reliance on China for critical minerals, has led to fears of a shortage.

Know More

Consumers are rapidly turning to electric vehicles over traditional gas-powered cars. That transition is most significant in China, where consumers purchased 6.8 million electric vehicles last year. Chinese buyers tend to shop domestically, with 80% of sales stemming from local manufacturers, and BYD holds a 11% market share.

Much of Chinas growth in EV sales stemmed from temporary government subsidies that promoted the purchase of cars.
S. Korea to make 8-hour college entry exam easier in bid to help address fertility crisis

[Source]

The South Korean government has unveiled a plan to make its national college entrance exam easier to help address private education spending and the country's declining fertility rate.

Key details: The plan, announced on June 26, came after South Korean President Yoon Suk Yeol criticized killer questions  complex questions that are usually not part of the countrys public school curriculum contained in the countrys eight-hour College Scholastic Ability Test, also known as Suneung.

We will cut the vicious cycle of killer questions in exams, which leads to excessive competition among students and parents in private education, Lee Ju-ho, South Koreas education minister, said at a briefing last week.

About the killer questions: Some of the notoriously difficult exam's past questions have required a deep understanding of math and science and knowledge about monetary and macroeconomic policy. One such example reportedly mentions the Bretton Woods Agreement, a 20th-century collective international currency exchange regime.

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Expensive fees: To give their children a better chance at doing well on the college entrance exam, countless South Korean parents have resorted to private academies or cram schools known as hagwons.

In 2022, parents spent around 26 trillion won (approximately $19.88 billion) on private education, which includes hagwons. Each month, they spend an average of 410,000 won (approximately $314) per child on private education.

Declining fertility rate: Some researchers and policymakers have blamed education costs for South Korea's declining fertility rate, among other issues, since many couples would rather not pay millions of won for their children's education. South Korea currently has one of the world's highest costs for raising a child.

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The country's fertility rate fell to 0.78 in 2022, but a rate of 2.1 is needed for a stable population.

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Worlds oldest person dies at 119 in Japan
[Source]

A California restaurant has become the first in the U.S. to serve lab-grown chicken on its menu.

Alternative meat: Bar Crenn, a Michelin-starred establishment in San Francisco, began serving cultivated tempura-fried chicken with a burnt chili aioli to select patrons on Saturday.

By offering cultivated chicken, owner and chef Dominique Crenn was able to bring meat back to the restaurant's menu after she removed it in 2018 due to concerns about the impact of factory farming on animals and the environment.

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Whats in the meat: Cultivated meat is developed from cells sourced from a living animal, a fertilized egg or a special bank of stored cells that are then grown in large bioreactors with the assistance of nutrients such as amino acids.

Its truly an honor to serve Upsides cultivated chicken at Bar Crenn and introduce cultivated meat to the U.S., Crenn said in a statement. Its the first time meat has made it back on my menu since 2018 because Upside Chicken is the first meat that I feel good about serving.

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Regulatory approval: The introduction of cultivated chicken at the restaurant follows a series of approvals from the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) and the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) granting lab-grown meat producers Upside Foods and Good Meat approval to begin producing and selling their cultivated chicken to the public.

Upside Foods received its "no questions" letter from the FDA in November, signifying that it had no further safety concerns regarding the product. Good Meat received a similar letter in March. Both companies obtained USDA approval in June, with the requirement that the menu items must be labeled as "cell-cultivated."

First to taste: Upside Foods held a social media contest to determine the very first customers to try the product at Bar Crenn. The winners, who were asked to pay a nominal fee of $1 to taste the delicacy, also received a tour of Upside Food's Engineering, Production and Innovation Center.

While the cultivated chicken at Bar Crenn will not be immediately accessible to general customers, there are additional opportunities already planned.

In a statement, Upside Foods CEO Dr. Uma Valeti called the sale of cultivated chicken at Bar Crenn a "giant leap towards a world where people no longer have to choose between the foods they love and a thriving planet," officially marking the debut of lab-grown mean in U.S. restaurants.

What comes next: Later this year, Upside Foods plans to introduce monthly dinner services featuring their product. Interested individuals can sign up on the Bar Crenn website to secure their spot.

Good Meat also has plans to debut its product in a restaurant, although a date has not been disclosed. The company is also collaborating with chef and restaurateur Jose Andres to bring their cultivated chicken to China Chilcano in Washington, D.C.

In November last year, Good Meat served cultivated chicken to current and former world leaders during a dinner hosted by the Singapore government in the second week of the 2022 United Nations Climate Change Conference.
Leon Gautier in 2014 on the Sword beach in Normandy where he landed (Joel SAGET)

The last surviving Frenchman to participate in the Allied invasion of Normandy in 1944 died Monday aged 100, local authorities said.

Leon Gautier was among 177 Frenchmen who participated in the landings on June 6, 1944, which marked the start of a rollback of Nazi Germany's domination of western Europe.

He belonged to the Kieffer commando, made up of French fighters who continued to battle the Nazis alongside the US, Britain and other Allied forces even after the French government surrendered to Germany in 1940.

He died in hospital in Caen early Monday, the mayor of nearby Ouistreham Romain Bail said, close to the Normandy beaches where the fierce battles are commemorated every year.

The landings on June 6, 1944, known as D-Day, were the largest amphibious wartime operation ever.

The assault was led by US, British and Canadian troops, with a smaller participation of Australian, Belgian, Czech, Dutch, French, Greek, New Zealand, Norwegian, Rhodesian and Polish troops.

Some 18,000 paratroopers were dropped into the invasion area, and Allied air forces provided air support for thousands of naval vessels carrying more than 130,000 ground troops in the landings.

Over 4,000 Allied troops died on the first day of the invasion, which eventually provided the attackers with a foothold in western France to push back the Germans.

Gautier -- who had lived in Ouistreham since the 1990s -- joined the Free France movement in London, headed by Charles de Gaulle, in 1940.

He went to fight in Congo, Syria and Lebanon before joining the Normandy assault.

After the war, he became a campaigner for peace, pointing to his wartime experiences.

"You kill people on the other side who never did anything to you, who have families, and children. For what?" he said during a celebration for his 100th birthday last year.

"Ouistreham is very sad today, the loss of this father, this grandfather has orphaned us," said mayor Bail, calling Gautier "a local hero whom everybody knew" and "an ardent defender of freedom".

mac-et/jh/rox
Lawyer Whose License Was Suspended After Father's Complaint Charged With His Murder

A Florida lawyer who was accused of stealing from his familys trust fund is now charged with murder in connection with his fathers death.

Brandon Labiner, 34, was charged Monday with first-degree murder with a firearm in the death of his father, attorney Paul Labiner. Boca Raton police found Labiners body in the building where his law firm operated, according to a press release from the Boca Raton police department. Brandon Labiner has not yet entered a plea, and his lawyer did not respond to HuffPosts request for comment.

Brandon Labiner is seen in court on Monday.

Brandon Labiner is seen in court on Monday.

According to a heavily redacted probable cause statement obtained by HuffPost, the elder Labiner, 68, was found Saturday in a pool of blood in the stairwell of the buildings parking garage. He was pronounced dead at the scene.

Police said that he sustained four gunshot wounds, one in his upper chest, two in his lower body, and one more in his head.

Video surveillance from inside the parking garage shows a man riding a bicycle, removing a gun from a drawstring backpack, and confronting the victim in a scuffle before leaving the frame, authorities said.

Police tracked down Brandon Labiner the following day. He was barricaded in a building about three miles from the crime scene.

Labiner, who had an active arrest warrant for DUI in a separate county, was taken into custody without incident after crisis negotiators spoke with his attorney.

During a search of his office, investigators found a drawstring backpack, a bicycle that matched the one in the surveillance footage, and a gun matching the one used to kill Paul Labiner, police said.

According to court documents filed with the Florida State Bar, Brandon Labiner was a personal injury attorney before his law license was suspended in April. He had in the past worked at his fathers law firm, and his father initiated the bar complaint, accusing him of misappropriating funds and altering documents.

Labiner is accused of stealing almost $450,000 from his familys trust between June and August 2022 by allegedly forging bank documents to make it seem as though his father illegally transferred the money to the law firms account.

Paul Labiner also filed a lawsuit against his son over the alleged theft from the trust, according to WPTV.

Per WPTV, the 2022 suit alleged that Brandon Labiner had injured his father in a physical altercation at the law firm.

Brandons poor work ethic and subpar performance as a plaintiffs attorney caused the volume of cases to drastically dwindle to what Plaintiff believes is not more than a handful of viable cases, the suit said.

Brandon Labiner appeared in court Monday. He was ordered to be held without bond and was told he could not have contact with the victims family, who are also his own family, WPTV reported.

Related...
Yuan Yuan, a performer of China's traditional Huangmei Opera, reached a new peak in her career this year. In May, she was presented with the Plum Performance Award, the highest award for traditional Chinese theatrical art.

The piece she performed in the final round of the competition was the fictional story of Lin Yufei, a young communist who sacrificed her life in the 1920s in order to realize her communist ideals.

The opera titled "The Communist Manifesto" was created by the Anhui Huangmei Opera Theatre in east China's Anhui Province to commemorate the centenary of the Communist Party of China (CPC) in 2021. A leading performance artist at the theatre and a member of the CPC at the same time, Yuan has been exploring the creation of modern-themed Huangmei Operas since 2011.

That year, she participated in the performance of another opera inspired by the heroic deeds of Chinese communist pioneers titled "Hong Mei Zan" or "Ode to the Red Plum Flower." It was the first time she had played a lead character in an opera.

Yuan recalled that, when preparing for that role, she found herself facing a number of challenges. From the costume she wore to the arrangement of her singing, everything was different from performing traditional operas.

"The spirit of revolutionary pioneers is conveyed using the soft, gentle tune of Huangmei Opera, integrating contemporary aesthetics and traditional opera performance. Every performance can be both a challenge and a breakthrough for us," said Yuan.

To overcome the difficulties and enhance the opera's presentation, Yuan visited Huangmei Opera composer Shi Bailin for inspiration, so as to better determine how the characters should sing and move. In addition, she also incorporated a western orchestra and digital screen into the opera, adding further modern innovations to the stage presentation.

A decade later, when creating "The Communist Manifesto," she and her colleagues took a further step forward by combining classic revolutionary-themed music with traditional dancing. Over a period of more than two years, the opera has garnered immense popularity among theatergoers.

Huangmei Opera is a national-level form of intangible cultural heritage in China. From Yuan's perspective, the secret of its development in the new era lies in the combination of tradition and innovative ideas.

In recent years, Anhui Huangmei Opera Theatre has produced a number of modern-themed Huangmei Operas inspired by contemporary events, such as the fight against corruption and rural revitalization. Yuan was a delegate to the 20th CPC National Congress in 2022, and subsequently brought the congress' guiding principles onto the stage.

"Only when we performers have strong faith can we create profound works," said Yuan, adding that she wishes to continue promoting and publicizing the fine traditional Chinese culture by portraying more characters who are resilient, amiable and of high moral character.
At least 8 dead after Israel launches major military operation in West Bank

At least eight Palestinians were killed and dozens of people were wounded in an Israeli strike against a militant stronghold in the occupied West Bank on Monday, according to officials.

Israel struck the targets with drones and deployed hundreds of troops to the area in a major military operation, killing eight and wounding 50 people  10 critically  the Palestinian Health Ministry said.

Our Palestinian people will not kneel, will not surrender, will not raise the white flag, and will remain steadfast on their land in the face of this brutal aggression, said Nabil Abu Rudeineh, a spokesperson for Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas, in a statement.

Lt. Col. Richard Hecht, an Israeli army spokesman, said the forces are not planning to hold ground, but are aiming to destroy and confiscate weapons.

Israeli Defense Forces (IDF) said on Telegram theyre operating in a focused counterterrorism operation at a camp allegedly occupied by terrorists in the city of Jenin.

Israeli troops had pushed inside the Jenin refugee camp Monday, without an indication of when the action would cease.

Ahead of the operation, IDF posted a video arguing the Jenin camp is a hotspot for terrorism and a main base for multiple terrorist organizations for the manufacturing of weapons and distribution of weapons.

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According to the video, the IDF is pushing to eliminate the terrorist infrastructure in the camp in the military operation, the largest Israeli campaign in the West Bank in nearly two decades.

Some videos shared online showed Israeli forces destroying streets in Jenin, which Palestinian health authorities say are impeding the assistance of ambulances and emergency vehicles.

Violence between militant groups and Israeli forces has soared this year in apparent tit-for-tat exchanges. Israel last month also launched mass air strikes in Gaza targeting the Palestinian Islamic Jihad militant group after rocket strikes from the terrorist group.

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has led a hardline coalition in his country that has sparked fear of more violence between Israel and Palestinians in the occupied West Bank and Gaza Strip.

The Associated Press contributed.

For the latest news, weather, sports, and streaming video, head to The Hill.
At least 10 dead as Israel launches one of its biggest military operations in West Bank in years

At least 10 Palestinians have been killed in raids by Israeli forces on the Palestinian city of Jenin, one of the largest incursions into the occupied West Bank in 20 years.

More than 50 people were injured in the attack that included airstrikes, with the death toll likely to rise, according to the Palestinian health ministry.

Israel targeted what it described as a unified command centre for militants of the Jenin Brigades in the densely populated refugee camp in the city.

Israel says its forces found explosives during a search of a mosque. In a statement, the Israeli Defence Forces said soldiers found explosive devices, weapons and military equipment it claims were affiliated with terrorist organisations in the area.

But residents of the area, which has been at the heart of an escalating spiral of violence over the last year, told The Independent that civilian infrastructure has been hit.

They described being shaken awake at midnight by the bombing before seeing military bulldozers charge through the neighbourhoods. Israeli military confirmed to The Independent that it had struck Jenin refugee camp with aircraft, reviving for the first time a tactic it had largely halted during the past two decades since the Intifada, a Palestinian uprising against Israels open-ended occupation.

It started at midnight with bombing and then large groups of soldiers attacked Jenin from different entrances simultaneously. Later they used bulldozers to cut a path through the neighbourhoods, Mustafa Sheta, director of Jenins Freedom Theatre and community centre told The Independent. He said his theatre  a well-known community and cultural centre  had been damaged by projectiles which landed nearby while civilians from the area were sheltering there.

Bulldozers came to the street either side of the theatre  we dont know the extent of the damage, he added. He said he understood snipers had been deployed to the top of adjacent buildings. The Israeli military denied a direct attack on the theatre saying it was only hitting military targets, and shared drone footage on Twitter which appeared to show the theatre intact.

For more than a year, army raids in cities like Jenin have been linked to a series of deadly attacks by Palestinians against Israelis and rampages by settler mobs against Palestinian villages. The Israeli military said it was striking terrorist infrastructure targets and armed gunmen in the Jenin camp and shared a document claiming Jenin was a stronghold of terrorist activity, where 50 per cent of the population are affiliated to militant groups.

Israeli drones fly over Jenin during the military operation (Reuters)

Hamas, which governs in Gaza, said on Monday that it was ready to intervene if Israel goes too far and persists in its aggression in Jenin.

Rights groups including Amnesty International have said that Jenin refugee camp has been at the centre of Israels escalating military crackdown. The group said Israel is recklessly endangering desperate and marginalised people in its operation.

Theres already been a frightening toll of Palestinian civilian deaths and injuries from Israels military assaults this year, and once again the Israeli military is recklessly endangering desperate and marginalised people, Kristyan Benedict, Amnesty International UKs crisis response manager, said.

Coming after Israels massive five-day offensive in Gaza in May, the Jenin attack seems to show that the Israeli military is increasingly abandoning what little restraint it previously had and wilfully endangering the lives of Palestinian civilians, including children, older people and people with disabilities, he added.

Palestinian journalist Shireen Abu Akleh was shot dead in the camp last May, and its residents continue to be subjected to relentless military raids which amount to collective punishment, said Philip Luther, Amnestys Middle East and North Africa research and advocacy director in a report in January.

Palestinians described Mondays operation as a real war and an invasion.

People were expecting something to happen, the hospitals were asking for donations, said Sarah Abu al-Rob, a Palestinian journalist from Jenin. This is an invasion and a siege, for the first time since 2002 the camp is surrounded, she added.

A Palestinian ambulance driver, Khaled Alahmad, said: There were strikes from the sky targeting the camp, every time we drive in, around five to seven ambulances and we come back full with injured people, he added.

Palestinians said electricity was cut off across the refugee camp. And the military blocked roads and took over houses and buildings, according to Palestinian news agency Wafa.

The humanitarian situation is very difficult and is getting worse. All the roads are closed, no ambulances, vehicles or people are allowed to pass into the camp or inside its alleyways, said Mahmoud al-Saadi, director of the Palestinian Red Crescent Society in Jenin. The streets and infrastructure are completely destroyed, the water and electricity are cut all across the camp.

Until 21 June, when it carried out a strike near Jenin, the Israeli military had not used drone strikes in the West Bank since 2006. But the growing scale of the violence meant such tactics may continue, a military spokesperson said. Israeli defence minister Yoav Gallant said the operation was proceeding as planned, but gave no indication when the incursion would end. Fighting was continuing by mid-afternoon local time, some 14 hours after Israel entered the camp.

An Israeli military spokesperson said the operation would last as long as needed and suggested forces could remain for an extended period. It could take hours, but it could also take days. We are focused on our goals, he said.

The Israeli military said that a brigade-sized force  roughly 2,000 soldiers  was taking part in the operation and that military drones had carried out a series of strikes to clear the way for the ground forces.

Palestinians protest against the invasion (Reuters)

A spokesperson for Palestinian president Mahmoud Abbas called the operation a new war crime against our defenceless people.

The Jenin operation led to protests across the occupied West Bank, including at a checkpoint near the city of Ramallah, where a 21-year-old Palestinian was killed by Israeli fire.

Israels air defence systems were put on alert for possible rocket fire from the blockaded Gaza Strip after several Palestinian factions vowed retaliation.

Our Palestinian people will not kneel, will not surrender, will not raise the white flag, and will remain steadfast on their land in the face of this brutal aggression, Nabil Abu Rudeineh, a spokesperson for the Palestinian president, said in a statement.

We have seen the reports and are monitoring the situation closely, a White House spokesperson said. We support Israels security and right to defend its people against Hamas, Palestinian Islamic Jihad, and other terrorist groups.

More than 140 Palestinians have been killed so far this year by Israeli fire in the West Bank, according to the Associated Presss count, almost half of them affiliated with militant groups.

Civilians have also been killed, including a two-year-old in June and a 15-year-old girl in a raid on Jenin camp last week.

Last week, the UN Security Council urged Israel and the Palestinians to avoid actions that can further inflame tensions in the volatile West Bank.

The statement was backed by both the US and Russia in a moment of unity on a divisive issue, reflecting the widespread international concern at the escalating violence, especially by Israeli forces and settlers.

However, on Monday, a White House spokesperson said: We have seen the reports and are monitoring the situation closely. We support Israels security and right to defend its people against Hamas, Palestinian Islamic Jihad, and other terrorist groups.
Lee Pace





Our favorite Intergalactic Emperor Daddy is back on the scene!

Lee Pace

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This past Thursday, our favorite house-building, skirt-wearing, proudly-married, out actor Lee Pace celebrated the release of the second season of his Apple TV+ sci-fi series Foundation at the series' official premiere in London.

Though he showed up to the red carpet in a polished and perfectly-tailored navy suit, the garment that really helped him steal all the spotlight was the leather Prada top he rocked. Once the 44-year-old hit the after-party, though, the blazer came off and his biceps came out! And it was all captured for eternity in photos to help remind us that Pace is, indeed, the Daddy to end all Daddies! Welcome to the gun show, girls, gays, and theys!

Scroll through to see more pics of Lee Pace exercising his right to bare arms. And catch Season 2 of Foundation when it premieres on Apple TV+ on July 14.

Lee Pace

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Lee Pace

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Lee Pace

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Lee Pace

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Lee Pace

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Lee Pace

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Lee Pace

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Lee Pace

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Lee Pace

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Neil GorsuchChip Somodevilla/Getty Images

Legal scholars pushed back on former acting Solicitor General Neal Katyal's claim that the Supreme Court may be compelled to reexamine a recent case after evidence surfaced that the claim at the heart of the case may have been fabricated.

In the federal lawsuit filed preemptively seven years ago by Lorie Smith, the graphic artist cited a request from a man who says he never asked to work with her, according to the Associated Press. But Smith cited a man named Stewart in 2017 court documents including a website service request from him, which detailed his phone number and email address.

When Melissa Gira Grant, a writer for The New Republic, contacted Stewart, he said that no such thing had happened. Stewart told the outlet that he was not gay, has been married to a woman for 15 years and is a web designer himself.

The Supreme Court on Friday ruled in favor of the Christian web designer in Littleton, Colo., who argued that free speech protections allowed her to reject designing wedding websites for same-sex couples.

Katyal suggested that the Supreme Court should revisit the ruling given the evidence.

"The Supreme Court has a procedure to seek a rehearing, so to say, 'Hey Supreme Court, there's a new fact that emerged and we need you to revisit your ruling,' so that's possible. The Supreme Court can also on its own ask for a briefing on this new question on whether this case is made up," Katyal told MSNBC.

Related

Fraud "justice": Anti-LGBTQ decision based on a fake case showcases the Supreme Court's illegitimacy

"Conservatives right now are defending the decision saying that Roe v. Wade, Roe wasn't pregnant at the time of the decision and that's different," he continued. "Roe was pregnant at the time of the filing of the complaint so she was having the exact problem that she was trying to remedy, namely seeking an abortion because she was pregnant. Here, this web designer has never once done a website for an LGBT couple. It's the exact opposite situation it's totally hypothetical and made up. I think the Colorado attorney general should consider bringing a rehearing petition before the U.S. Supreme Court."

But legal scholars pushed back on Katyal's argument.

"I think this is a nonstarter," former U.S. Attorney Barb McQuade, a University of Michigan law professor, told Salon. "The Court glossed over standing in this case because a plaintiff is permitted to make a facial challenge to a law on the ground that yet violates the First Amendment."

"If the allegations about fabrication are true, then the lawyers may have an ethics problem to address with their state bar, but it will not affect the outcome of the case," McQuade added.

Related

Report reveals anti-LGBTQ case now before Supreme Court may have been "fabricated"

Leah Litman, a law professor at the University of Michigan, told Salon that parties are "free to file a motion for reconsideration or rehearing," but ultimately, it will be up to the court to decide whether to do anything about it.

"Attorneys are subject to judicial discipline & discipline from bar organizations if they lie to the court," Litman said.

Longtime Harvard Constitutional scholar Laurence Tribe told Salon that Katyal "certainly knows that no state attorney general has any such authority," adding that he doesn't take Katyal literally when he suggests that.

"But it would be a mistake to let that obscure the central fact that the entire case was based on entirely hypothetical 'worries' that the web designer claimed to have about how the state's officers might come after her under the state anti-discrimination laws if a same-sex couple were to ask her to design a wedding site for them and if she were to refuse," Tribe said. "In my view, the disgraceful fact, which in no way depends on the falsity of the allegations about the fellow who supposedly asked Lorie Smith to design a website for a same-sex wedding, is the very fact that the Supreme Court's majority was willing to render what amounted to an advisory opinion that it would never have done but for its eagerness to denigrate same-sex marriage and LGBTQ rights generally and that, under Article III, it had no business doing."

Want a daily wrap-up of all the news and commentary Salon has to offer? Subscribe to our morning newsletter, Crash Course.

In 303 Creative LLC v. Elenis, Smith claimed that a state anti-discrimination law prevented her from entering the wedding website business. The law would not allow her to publish a message on her website that let her express her religious beliefs.

The statement read: "I will not be able to create websites for same-sex marriages or any other marriage that is not between one man and one woman. Doing that would compromise my Christian witness and tell a story about marriage that contradicts God's true story of marriagethe very story He is calling me to promote."

Justice Neil Gorsuch, writing on behalf of the majority, stated that a lower court had determined a reasonable assumption based on Colorado's actions in previous cases involving same-sex marriages. The majority of the court concluded that the state of Colorado could not legally require her to create websites that conveyed messages conflicting with her belief that marriage should only be between a man and a woman.

Sherrilyn Ifill, former president of the NAACP Legal Defense Fund, said that the claim in the case "is potential fraud on the Court," which "warrants investigation, potential vacatur & disciplinary proceedings."

"It also should be seen as a consequence of the Court's apparent zeal to hear this case which did not meet standing even w/o fraud," Ifill tweeted. In another tweet, she added that attorneys "are prohibited by ethical & procedural rules from making misrepresentations to the Court. If this story about 'Stewart' was made by her lawyers in briefs, or at arguments, it's a serious issue."

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Letters to the Editor: Homelessness in L.A. is up again. Does a solution even exist?

Battered recreational vehicles that serve as shelter for homeless people line a street in downtown Los Angeles. (Luis Sinco / Los Angeles Times)

To the editor: I've studied the issue of homelessness in Los Angeles County for many years, reading everything I can get my hands on. I've come to several conclusions. ("Homelessness continues to soar, jumping 9% in L.A. County, 10% in the city," June 29)

First, in regard to the 75,000 people who are homeless in Los Angeles County, there are 75,000 different stories and reasons for the condition these people are in.

Second, the answer to helping them would be to hire an army of social workers who would each have a manageable case load to get to the bottom of each client's problems and needs.

My third and final conclusion is that the cost of doing this would be prohibitive. I'm just as perplexed and frustrated now as when I began my search for an answer.

Ron Garber, Duarte

..

To the editor: What if we shelter 100% of Los Angeles' homeless people? Then what? Getting people off the streets and into safe environments is just one of many necessary steps to take. Do we keep these people housed and supported forever?

Until there is a big-picture program focused on providing the system and resources that enable a large portion of the homeless population to become self-sufficient, the problem will get worse. For those unable or unlikely to become self-sufficient, other action is necessary, as temporary housing is no answer.

There is likely no problem we can't solve if we look at the big picture. We need public forums to explore better approaches. Does anyone expect a different result if we keep doing the same thing?

Sid Pelston, Marina del Rey

..

To the editor: The fact that homelessness in Los Angeles has increased by 10% only underscores the vital importance of returning the constitutional right of bankruptcy back to student loan debt.

Student loan debt is the only type of consumer debt that is uniquely stripped of the right to declare bankruptcy, and this has resulted in millions of Americans being trapped in a lifetime of indentured servitude.

Further, in light of the Supreme Court decision overturning President Biden's debt cancellation plan, we can expect a massive increase in the already colossal homelessness epidemic. This increase will only be exacerbated in Los Angeles, where the cost of living has far outpaced wages.

If bankruptcy rights were restored to both federal and private student loan debt, this would be a significant tool in the arsenal to combat increasing homelessness.

Lisa Ansell, Beverly Hills

..

To the editor: The definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over and expecting different results. Could it be that our policies are contributing to homelessness?

It is hard to keep roof over ones head, especially for people at the bottom of economic scale in a place as expensive as Los Angeles. At some point many are faced with bad choices.

Meanwhile, with best intentions we have made living on public streets an acceptable option. Today it may seem to a person like the least bad option to take, but it is a trap. Addiction and violence quickly follow, even if they were not the cause of one's problems at first.

Serge Dubovitsky, Los Angeles

..

To the editor: Some news outlets are reporting that the rise in Los Angeles' homeless population is proof that the money and energy Mayor Karen Bass is spending on the problem are not working.

Let me just remind readers that the current numbers were derived six months ago, when Bass had just barely taken office. We'll have to wait for data on the effectiveness of current programs until the next homeless count.

Joel Robbins, Moorpark

This story originally appeared in Los Angeles Times.
U.S. Supreme Court justices pose for their official photo in October. (Olivier Douliery / AFP via Getty Images)

To the editor: I grew up believing the U.S. Supreme Court was the elite institution underlying American greatness. It led to my becoming an attorney. As such, I am saddened that the once credible court has devolved into the American College of Cardinals. ("Supreme Court rules Christian web designer can turn away business related to same-sex weddings," June 30)

In their decision last year overturning Roe vs. Wade, the cardinals effectively placed Christian beliefs over other religious beliefs that do not hold life begins at conception. For example, Jewish belief is that life begins upon first breath taken after delivery; Islam holds life begins at 120 days after conception.

Now, with its decision allowing a website designer to turn away same-sex couples who are getting married, the cardinals have decreed LGBTQ+ folks are second-class citizens, putting the United States in league with Uganda.

The cardinals have lost all respect by anyone not in the Federalist Society. Their recent decisions fly in the face of precedent. Ethical lapses have personally benefited some of the justices. This court is in line to be the most disgraced government entity.

Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. is believed to care deeply about his legacy. That legacy is being severely diluted and will dissipate soon.

Bruce N. Miller, Playa del Rey

..

To the editor: The Supreme Court's decision to legalize business discrimination against gay couples sickens me with rage and grief. How is this law any different than one allowing discrimination based on the color of a person's skin?

Once and for all, why can't some religious people acknowledge that being gay is not a choice? However, following any particular religion is.

Were I a business owner, I would tell anyone walking through my door wearing a Christian cross that their kind is not welcome. I could easily claim some religious belief to justify this, and apparently the Supreme Court would back me up.

Evelyn Quinn, Pasadena

..

To the editor: Im waiting for the Roberts court in its next session to rule that Brown vs. Board of Education was wrong, making it legal to practice "separate but equal."

I also await its ruling that the Civil Rights Act of 1964 is unconstitutional because it violates the implied "right to free association" in the 1st Amendment and the "takings clause" of the 5th Amendment.

Since the court has accepted someone's claim that her Christian faith requires her to turn away customers seeking wedding-related services for same-sex unions  something not in any Bible Ive seen  will those who claim their religious beliefs don't allow them to serve Black people be allowed to discriminate?

Im certain that through the lens of history, Roberts will join Chief Justice Roger B. Taney in disgrace.

Daniel Fink, Beverly Hills

This story originally appeared in Los Angeles Times.
Levine on anti-LGBTQ legislation: These laws and actions will not stand

Rachel Levine remained optimistic about the LGBTQ+ communitys future in the U.S. at an event about health inequity.

During Thursdays event, hosted by The Washington Post, associate editor Jonathan Capehart and the nations assistant secretary for health discussed the recent slew of bills in state legislatures that target the LGBTQ+ community.

These bills aimed to ban gender-affirming care, restrict drag performances and encourage the misgendering of children, among other measures.

As the highest ranking government official who is openly transgender, Levine said anti-LGBTQ+ bills create obstacles to achieving health equity.

These politically and ideologically motivated laws and actions are harming youth, particularly transgender youth, their families, and even their providers who are under siege in many parts of the country, Levine said to Capehart.

But she asserted her belief that anti-LGBTQ+ legislation will not be the final word on the current discourse.

I think that these laws and actions will not stand, Levine said.

In May, The Human Rights Campaign reported that more than 520 such bills have been introduced across the nation, and 70 of them were signed into law.

Its not where the government belongs, Levine added.

Notably, Levine did not seem to be discouraged by this rising political movement. Reflecting on Pride month, she saw this years celebration as a step in the direction of transforming the narrative around LGBTQ+ people.

I think things are changing, Levine said, referring to the public discourse around the topic. I think that since Transgender Day of Visibility and, now, the momentum weve developed at Pride, I think that the conversation is changing.

As June came to an end, she said she believed the country will continue to have these discussions and, by doing so, move past this tumultuous time for the community.

We should have pride all summer, Levine said, encouraging the public to keep the LGBTQ+ conversation going.

Levine cited her experience meeting individuals affected by the anti-gay and trans laws as a reason for her positive outlook.

At the same time, I see these young people and their families. And I meet their doctors who are having such struggles, Levine said when Capehart asked about her optimism. But I sense a positive change that I think is going to continue, despite the challenges that we face.

She also praised the Biden administrations leadership for showing support of the LGBTQ+ community, and the initiatives in states and municipalities for changing hearts and minds.

For the latest news, weather, sports, and streaming video, head to The Hill.
License for former KS assistant chief revoked after he and chief broke into home: records

A former Kansas assistant chief, who broke into a house alongside his chief without a warrant and then broke a camera, had his license revoked.

Neither Curtis Matthew Tyra or John Vincent Matula, the former assistant chief and former chief in Herington, could be reached for comment. Both had been charged in the May 18, 2021, break-in and have successfully completed diversion, court records show.

Tyras officer certification was revoked in May. Its unclear if Matula also faces possible revocation.

Citing state law, the Kansas Commission of Peace Officers Standards and Training (KSCPOST), which oversees officer certification, would not say whether Matula has been or will be investigated.

Cases can be referred to KSCPOST and criminal cases typically prompt an investigation.

Here is what the investigative report says about the May 18, 2021, incident:

The Herington Police Department had served a warrant and condemned a home on March 10, 2021. The homeowner could go to the home to clean and work on it, but couldnt sleep there.

When she went to the home on May 18, 2021, she saw an Herington Police Department vehicle parked in the alley behind her home.

She discovered Matula kicked open the back door of her residence, damaging it in the process, the report said, and then he and Tyra entered the residence without a search warrant.

Matula and Tyra were still there when the woman went inside. Matula ordered her to leave, the report says.

She came back the next day and found a camera, which had been mounted on the corner of the home, lying broken in the street, the report says. Many items were out of place.

Video from a porch camera showed (Tyra) walk onto the porch and disappear for a few seconds, the report says, adding thats when the woman believed he ripped down the corner camera and broke it during this time. (Tyra) then appeared back in view of the functional camera, removed it from where it was mounted, and set it down.

Tyra was charged with criminal trespass  a misdemeanor. He successfully completed diversion and was taken off of it in April, court records show. Matula was originally charged with criminal trespass and criminal damage to property  both are misdemeanors. He successfully completed diversion and was taken off of it in June, court records show.

Diversion is similar to a probationary period where, if successfully completed, the charges will be dropped.

Matula worked for the department from November 2020 to September 2021 as chief of the roughly seven-person department. Tyra worked for the department from January 2018 to July 2018 and then from August 2018 to February 2022, the KSCPOST investigative report says.

Matula resigned around the time charges were filed, according to The Abilene Reflector-Chronicle and court records. A city clerk did not know if Tyra resigned or was terminated and a call to the interim city manager for those details was not immediately returned.
Photo: Sean Rayford (Getty Images)

Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.) found out the hard way this weekend that while Pickens, South Carolina, might be Trump Country, it definitely isnt Graham Countrydespite being full of Grahams own constituents and the county where he grew up. Graham was booed for a full, excruciating five minutes in his home state this weekend as he tried to introduce Donald Trump at a rally.

The boos started almost immediately after Graham thanked the crowd for coming to Pickens, a town with not quite 4,000 people, to support Trump on Saturday. Graham, who grew up in Pickens County, let the crowd boo for a bit before trying to appeal to them. Well, you want to find something in common? Graham asked the crowd. Ive come to like President Trump, and he likes himself, and we got that in common. And Im going to help him become president of the United States.

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Even Trump didnt think Graham was really worth defending. When the former president mentioned the senator during his speech, the crowd booed again. You know, you can make mistakes on occasion. Even Lindsey down here, Sen. Lindsey Graham. We love Sen. Graham, Trump said. Were going to love him. Hes half and half. When we need those liberal votes, we need him. We know the good ones. We know the bad ones, too, Trump said.

Trump then casually asked Graham if he could campaign for himthough Graham is not even up for election this yearwhich felt more like a boast about his own popularity over the senators. Im going to have to work on these people. Hes there when you need him, Trump told the crowd. Do you mind if I come down and campaign a little for you, Lindsey? He was one of my earliest endorsements from the go, and I appreciate it, Lindsey.

Trump: You can make mistakes on occasion. Even Lindsey down here, Senator Lindsey Graham.



Crowd: boo



Trump: I know it's half and half. But when I need some of those liberal votes, hes always there to help me. pic.twitter.com/yloBbhSOMo  Acyn (@Acyn) July 1, 2023

I honestly cannot imagine a more humiliating daypolitically speaking, at least (we wont get into his personal life here)for Lindsey Graham.

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New Model Y electric vehicles are parked in the early morning in a parking lot outside the plant of the US electric car manufacturer Tesla.

To date, there are about 17,000 Tesla charging stations and more than 130,000 public charging stations across the US. Tesla owners are often effusive about its app and the effectiveness and speed of NACS (North American Charging Standard), while those using CCS (Combined Charging System) complain of broken stations and apps that are confusing and unintuitive. With behemoth automakers like Ford and GM switching over to Tesla's NACS, CCS station owners will need to improve reliability and consider adding Tesla adapters too or face a fade into oblivion.

Tesla owners may not be happy about the shift, as theyve enjoyed access to their own fiefdom of chargers for years. Now theyll have to make room for non-Tesla EVs and could face more wait time. Overall, it looks like a competitive fight that will benefit the consumer.

"My guess is that what we will see is by 2027, there will probably be no more new EVs built for North America with CCS ports," Sam Abuelsamid, an analyst at Guidehouse Insights, told Business Insider.

One company thats bucking the wave is Volkswagen, which says it's committed to the CCS standard. Thats no wonder: CCS provider Electrify America was partially founded with $2 billion from the VW emissions Dieselgate settlement. The charging network has 840 stations and plans to double its number of chargers by 2026. Others, like Toyota and Nissan, have not yet commented on the possibility.

Here's the rundown of companies making the switch and those strongly considering it.

Automakers already committed to NACS going forward

Ford

In May, Ford CEO Jim Farley surprised the market by unveiling an agreement with Tesla to allow current Ford EV owners to use Tesla Superchargers across the US and Canada starting early next year. And Fords next-generation of EVs will include Teslas charging plug, eliminating the need for an adapter.

General Motors (Chevrolet, Buick, GMC, Cadillac)

Within a couple of weeks of Fords announcement, General Motors followed suit. Access to the Tesla network will begin in early 2024 for GM customers using an adapter, and GM will start building EVs with a NACS inlet port starting in 2025. After that, GM says it will make CCS adapters available for drivers of NACS-enabled vehicles. The company is also planning to integrate the Tesla Supercharger Network into its vehicle and mobile apps for payment and service, as well.

Rivian

In June, Rivian announced it had signed an agreement with Tesla for access to Teslas Supercharger network across the US and Canada. Sometime next year (as early as spring 2024, Rivian says), the electric automaker will make NACS adapters available for its R1T pickup and R1S SUV. And next-generation Rivian vehicles (2025 and later) will include a NACS charge port as standard.

Volvo

Volvo intends to manufacture only electric cars by 2030. With that goal in mind, Volvo says its US-market vehicles will be equipped with NACS charging ports starting from 2025. The Swedish automaker made a splash with its recent debut of the affordable EX30 EV, and it also offers the all-electric models XC40, EX90, and C40 Recharge.

Companies actively considering moving to NACS

Hyundai

Hyundai president Jaehoon Chang told investors in June that the company would consider shifting to Tesla's standard, but its still weighing its options. Kia and Hyundai both use the 800-volt battery architecture for fast charging; a Kia EV6 or Hyundai Ioniq 6, for example, can replenish up to 80 percent of its range in less than 20 minutes on a CCS DC fast charger. Teslas Superchargers, however, employ a 400-volt architecture and cant charge Hyundai and Kia vehicles as effectively.

Stellantis (Jeep, Chrysler, Alfa Romeo, Ram, Maserati, Dodge, Renault, Fiat, and more)

According to The Washington Post, Stellantis is pulling together a network of public electric vehicle chargers (including theTesla standard) in the US, Canada and Europe. At this juncture, it remains to be seen if Stellantis will move ahead with a plan for its own network or will join together with the others on NACS.

While the conglomerate Stellantis doesnt currently sell any all-electric vehicles, it does sell three plug-in gas-electric hybrids: the Dodge Hornet, Alfa Romeo Tonale, and Chrysler Pacifica. An electric commercial van is in the works this year, as well as an all-electric Ram Rev pickup.
Shanghai History Museum announced the founding of its alliance with eight other museums in the Yangtze River Delta region on June 28.

The nine member institutions are the museums of Wuxi, Changzhou, Suzhou and Nantong in Jiangsu province, Ningbo, Huzhou, Jiaxing and Zhoushan in Zhejiang province, and the Shanghai History Museum.

One of the first projects of the alliance will be an exhibition on China's patriotic entrepreneurs in the early 1900s, which will be jointly held by the nine museums. The exhibition will take place next year, first at Shanghai History Museum, followed by tours in the other member institutions.

Zhou Qunhua, director of Shanghai History Museum, said that Zhejiang and Jiangsu provinces have much in common with Shanghai in terms of traditional culture.

"Each institution has its specialty and advantages and we plan to establish a team of mentors, who will share their experience and expertise with staff members of all the museums in the alliance," said Zhang Liang, head of the Ningbo Museum.

The new alliance will share resources on the research of the distinctive culture characteristics of the Yangtze River Delta region, information about their collection and technologies involved in the protection of cultural relics.
An administrative complaint filed against a local healthcare practice, alleging that state rules were violated, has been resolved through a settlement agreement.

The Star-Banner has obtained a copy of the agreement. Here's what we know:

The sanction

The final order from the Florida Department of Health says that Cardiothoracic & Vascular Surgical Associates' surgery registration would be suspended for 21 days. The suspension was set to start 14 days from the filing date of the final order accepting the agreement. That final order was entered on June 16.

The practice also agreed to pay the cost of the state investigation, totaling $828.44.

No wrongdoing admitted

Under the heading "Stipulated facts," the settlement agreement notes that the "Respondent neither admits not denies the allegations of fact contained in the Administrative Complaint."

Surgical Specialists of Ocala

In the future

State officials said the local entity cannot violate state or federal rules/laws relating "to the operation or the ability to operate an office surgery registration." Any violation could lead to disciplinary action.

The violation

Settlement: Alleged Medicare kickback scheme settled. Ocala business, two docs will pay $490K combined

Last year, the state Department of Health filed an administrative complaint against Cardiothoracic & Vascular Surgical Associates, PA., alleging the group failed to comply with the standard of care requirements for office surgery.

Specifically, during a state inspection at the practice office, 1920 SW 20th Place, Ocala, conducted July 20, 2021, inspectors learned that paramedics were providing anesthesia care, which is a violation of the Florida Administrative Code.

Resolution still pending

A related administrative complaint was filed against Dr. Ravi Chandra, who was listed as the designated physician for Cardiothoracic & Vascular Surgical Associates. According to that document, the surgeon must be assisted by a qualified anesthesia provider such as an anesthesiologist, a certified registered nurse anesthetist, a physician assistant or, in certain circumstances, a registered nurse.

According to the Department of Health website, the complaint against Chandra remains pending. His license is listed as clear and active.

The Star-Banner's Jim Ross contributed to this story. Contact Austin L. Miller at austin.miller@starbanner.com or @almillerosb

This article originally appeared on Ocala Star-Banner: Settlement reached in DOH complaint against local healthcare provider
For the first time in 30 years, the Kansas City Council includes Latino representation.

But despite the importance of that minority representation, the two new council members bringing that diversity to the council say whats most important is what they do next, and how they use their experiences as Latinos living in Kansas City to help lead the city.

Johnathan Duncan, newly elected councilman for the sixth district, said that it is incumbent on the council members to be there for the community and co-govern.

KC native, and elected councilman for the fourth district, Crispin Rea said that having lived experience as a minority is vital to preparing for the new role.

While their approaches may differ, both Rea and Duncan share a hope to build a better and safer city by working in communities to push for that change.

I work hard to remind myself of where I came from

Rea said growing up in a low-income neighborhood on the East Side in Kansas City, he saw that his neighborhood was not invested in, and there were high rates of crime and gang activity.

He said he was influenced by his mothers work in the community at the Local Investment Commission, which inspired him to go into public service as a career to further support his community .

Those first-hand experiences of growing up in an under-resourced neighborhood in Kansas City, and professionally working in the community provided him with valuable perspective.

I feel like my connections to the community will allow me to meet folks where they are and bring some credibility to the city government for those who havent always been represented in city hall, Rea said.

Duncan, similar to Rea, shared the importance of being involved in the community.

Duncan added how vital he believes it is to work on co-governance with local residents.

Duncan details in a position statement linked to his website more information about both his identity and background of growing up as a Black, Mexican-American, white man and working to accept all those identities. He said his vision for Kansas City is grounded in his lived identity.

Having representatives of color in positions is no longer enough, community members want to know their issues are being addressed, he said.

Its important that we show up for those communities  representation is not liberation, Duncan said.

A connection to the community

Building close relationships in their communities is a high priority for both Rea and Duncan, who have both spent their professional careers and campaigns doing so in various community organizations.

Before running for city council, Rea previously worked for Mattie Rhodes, a nonprofit based in Kansas City whose goal is to help build a stronger city by helping the most vulnerable through different community strategies, according to their website.

Rea sat on their board of directors as a volunteer. His job was to engage the community to provide input to police, and help families find resources to help with a variety of issues.

John Fierro, president and CEO of Mattie Rhodes, said Rea helped establish the Latino Advocacy Task Force during his time with Mattie Rhodes in response to the increased number of homicides involving Hispanic teenagers, a role which he feels helped prepare Rea to serve on the city council.

He has demonstrated throughout his professional career that he is a leader of all people. He is very proud of his Hispanic heritage, but he is about making a difference for all individuals, and all communities, Fierro said.

The Sunrise movement KC chapter, a national nonprofit working to make climate issues a priority, endorsed Duncan during hiscampaign.

Laela Zaidi, volunteer leader who did election work for Duncans campaign, said the local movement wants a green new deal for the city, and for the city to invest in Black, Latino, working-class communities and places that have been historically left behind in policy making.

For her its important to have people in office who share a similar story or have comparable struggles, because it affects their worldview and values.

For me this representation needs to be more than just somebody who looks like me but knows how to plan and make decisions because theres a lot of power, Zaidi said.

She believes Duncan is someone who has always put the community first and listens, Zaid said, noting that when she worked with him she felt taken care of, and that for her that was a reflection of his story.

It provides our young people with hope

Being a voice for underrepresented communities is a priority both elected officials share, but it is not the only one.

Working to set a good example, particularly with youth, is also a vital part of their public identities.

Rea said education and a connection with the youth is an important piece of his journey to the city council.

During his time with Mattie Rhodes, he also served as Vice President for the Kansas City Public School Board, working with Hispanic students from Northeast High School.

Ive spent most of my career being the only Mexican-American in those professional spaces, so I know how important it is while in that position to set a good example for those who are looking up to you, Rea said.

Edgar Palacios with the Latinx Education Collaborative, an organization focused on building the Latino community around issues of education, also shared this was an exciting time for the Latino community in Kansas City.

Palacios said Rea is incredibly reflective and a representative of the community. Hes somebody who has been very present and proximate to issues in the city.

He is excited that Rea cares and knows about the school system.

He understands ... the politics and policies so its great now to have someone in city council who has an understanding of both the education system and the heart of our community, Palacios said.

Theres impact in listening to the youth, Duncan said as he shared his experience working with the younger generation.

I think that by organizing and collaborating with youth organizations like Sunrise, and Vote16 and listening to their concerns, involving them, even if they cant vote  they are still able to feel as though they are part of this government. Duncan said.

Leaving an impact

Both council members and their supporters believe their election will have a broader impact than on just the Kansas City metro.

Chief Program Officer Erica Andrade with El Centro was thrilled to see Rea win his election. Although her non-profit covers Wyandotte County, she believes there is still an impact that will be made there too.

Andrade said she hopes the, election into the city council, breaking a 30 gap in representation, will inspire others to become more civically engaged. It proves there is power in who you vote for and I also hope it inspires other Latinos to run for elected positions.

Another similarity both councilmen shared is their hopes after their time working for the city.

Rea said in his time with the council he hopes to restore some of the hope and trust thats been lost in the public perception of government.

I would like to look back on my time on the council and see measurable results in reducing homicides or violent crimes and making Kansas City neighborhoods safer  as someone that was ethical and acted with integrity, who not only set an example for the Hispanic community but the entire city, Rea said.

On the same note, Duncan shared his goal of assuring the poor and working class are seen and heard in their government.

Winning was a goal of this campaign, but it was never the primary goal, said Duncan.

The long term goal of this campaign is to engage and organize the working class in my district, as part of a much broader movement to build power among the poor and working class.
Man accused of killing and dismembering girlfriend is tied to disappearance of second woman

Joseph Jorgensen, 40, is accused of murdering his girlfriend Manijeh Mani Starren and dumping her body in an ice cooler (St Paul Police Department)

A Minnesota man accused of murdering his girlfriend and dumping her dismembered remains in an ice cooler has been linked to the disappearance of a second woman, authorities say.

Joseph Jorgenson, 40, was arrested last week during a standoff with police as they raided his Maplewood home looking for Manijeh Mani Starren, 34, who had been reported missing on 1 May, the Saint Paul Police Department said.

Mr Jorgenson was initially charged three felonies including arson and trying to disarm a police officer by taking his AR-15 rifle after resisting arrest.

Police analysed surveillance video at at the apartment, and found that Starren tried to flee the address on 21 April. She was never seen alive again.

Her remains were found wrapped in plastic bags in a cooler at a storage facility in Woodbury that had been rented in the name of Mr Jorgensons roommate, according to court documents.

After charging Mr Jorgenson with second degree murder, St Paul police said they hold grave fears for Fanta Xayavong, 33, who was last seen with him before her disappearance in 2021.

Manjieh Mani Starren was reported missing by her family in May. Her remains were found in coolers in a Minnesota storage facility, and her former boyfriend Joseph Jorgenson has been charged with her murder (Facebook)

To put it bluntly, were concerned for her safety also, Saint Paul Police Department spokesman Sergeant Mike Ernster told a press conference Friday.

Ms Xayavong is described as 54 and 120 pounds, and her last known location was Shoreview, police said.

According to a criminal complaint, police studied Mr Jorgensons social media posts, ATM transactions, and phone activity after receiving a missing persons report for Starren, a mother of three.

They found footage from 21 April that showed her boyfriend chase her out of the address and push her back in, police said.

Jorgenson is the only one that comes out of that unit, and Mani is never seen again, Mr Ernster said. He did not report her missing to police. Instead, he just went on with his life without saying anything to anyone.

Fanta Xayavong, 33, has been missing since 2021. Police have linked her disappearance to Joseph Jorgenson (Facebook)

The complaint states that Mr Jorgenson was seen carrying two duffle bags and a suitcase from her apartment, and loading them into a pick up truck.

Crime scene technicians detected large amounts blood on a sofa and in the floor of the living room and kitchen indicating someone had been seriously injured or killed at the address.

Extensive efforts had been made to try to clean up the apartment, the criminal complaint stated. Police believe Mr Jorgenson purchased cleaning supplies on Starrens bank cards from a Dollar Tree store.

His internet search history allegedly showed he had looked up jugular, how to clear cookies from an Android phone, what police do with missing person reports and "lime for soil, which can be used to speed up body decomposition.

Investigators also found disturbing messages sent by Mr Jorgenson to the missing woman on Facebook, according to the affidavit.

In one written days before her disappearance, he wrote: Hope u die of a kidney infection u b**** c*** terrible f****** mother.

When police raided his home on 26 June, police said Mr Jorgenson attempted to barricade himself in his bedroom and allegedly started a fire.

After police sprayed a chemical irritant into the room, he allegedly ran out yelling that he had a weapon and was going to kill officers.

According to an affidavit, he told police Starren struggled with drug addiction and was supposed to have checked herself into a treatment facility.

Starrens family have set up a GoFundMe account to cover her funeral expenses.

We also cannot fathom the pain the family is feeling at this point, but we do hope that this investigation's result wil bring them some level of solace, Mr Ernster said on Friday.
Wichita police have arrested a man in connection with the City Nightz mass shooting early Sunday that injured 11 people.

Brandon Young, 31, of Florissant, Missouri, was arrested and booked on suspicion of two counts of aggravated battery, police spokesperson Juan Rebolledo said in news release.

The shooting took place just before 1 a.m. in the City Nightz nightclub on North Washington, Wichita Police Lt. Aaron Moses said during a news conference at the scene.

Police arrested Young outside of the nightclub and found a gun on him, Rebolledo told The Eagle in an email.

Initial reports said nine people were injured as result of the shooting.

We have seven people who have been shot. We have two people who have been trampled during the mass exodus out (of) the club, Moses previously said, noting the investigation was still in the preliminary stage.

Two additional shooting victims drove themselves to the hospital and were admitted Sunday afternoon with minor injuries, Rebolledo said.

The victims injuries range from minor to critical but non-life threatening, Rebolledo added.

Authorities had the parking lot adjacent to City Nightz taped off after an early Sunday shooting broke out at the nightclub.

The gunshot victims included seven men and two women between the ages of 22 and 34. The two people who were trampled were a 30-year-old woman and a 31-year-old man.

Shots were fired from at least four guns during the incident, Moses said.

We have also seized an additional four firearms at this time and we are investigating whether those firearms match the ballistic evidence that we recovered from inside the scene, police said.

It is not yet known what led to the shooting and if there was more than one shooter.

WPD is working with state and federal law enforcement partners to identify all individuals involved in the shooting and hold them accountable for their actions, the department said.
As website designer Lorie Smith battled Colorados public accommodation law, she claimed that one day after filing her lawsuit, a man requested she design a website for his upcoming same-sex marriage.

But the man, identified in the request as Stewart, says he has been married to a woman for more than a decade and never submitted the inquiry.

The Supreme Court on Friday handed Smith a victory in her pre-enforcement lawsuit, ruling along ideological lines that Colorado could not compel the evangelical Christian to design same-sex wedding websites if she expanded her business to offer them for opposite-sex couples. The ruling was one of a handful of landmark cases the court considered this term  one that struck a significant blow to LGBTQ rights.

The justices opinions made no reference to the supposed request, and Smith only briefly mentioned it in filings at the Supreme Court.

But the development has raised new scrutiny of Smith and her conservative lawyers years-long effort to claw back LGBTQ+ protections, as they had cited the request on multiple occasions in the lower courts while asserting that she had authority to challenge Colorados law.

Im just really disappointed in the ongoing and sustained attacks on the LGBTQ community in this country, and Im also disappointed and concerned about the lack of rigor thats been shown by the lawyers in this case, said Stewart, who agreed to be interviewed by The Hill on the condition that his last name not be used.

Theres some evidence there which is easily refutable and easily proven to be incorrect and has been in the case filings for the last five plus years, he continued. So its concerning that that could make it all the way to the Supreme Court without anybody checking.

Two Democratic-appointed judges and one Republican-appointed judge on a lower appeals court panel all agreed that Smith had authority to bring her lawsuit regardless of the request.

The lower court went on to uphold Colorados law as constitutional in a divided ruling, leading Smith to appeal to the Supreme Court.

The high courts justices did not weigh in on the legal standing issue, as they only agreed to hear Smiths free speech claims. The courts six conservatives sided with the web designer Friday, dealing a significant blow to LGBTQ protections in one of the biggest cases of the term.

Stewart said he only learned of his purported connection to the case when contacted last week by The New Republic, which first reported the mans denial.

He confirmed the email and phone number listed on the supposed request belonged to him, but he said he has been married to a woman for more than a decade.

Like Smith, Stewart also runs a website and graphic design company. The request listed the senders IP address, which corresponds to the San Francisco area, where Stewart lives.

I did not submit the request. I dont know who did. I dont know what their motivations would be, said Stewart.

Alliance Defending Freedom (ADF), the Christian legal organization that represented Smith, said in a statement that the designer doesnt do background checks on incoming requests to determine if they are genuine, and that it doesnt impact the outcome because her lawsuit was a pre-enforcement challenge.

Whether Lorie received a legitimate request or whether someone lied to her is irrelevant, the group said. No one should have to wait to be punished by the government to challenge an unjust law. Moreover, Lorie has received other wedding requests and has been unable to respond to any request because that put her at risk of punishment for violating Colorados unjust law.

Fridays win was the latest and most significant development of ADFs years-long fight against Colorados law, which prevents businesses that serve the public from discriminating on protected characteristics, including sexual orientation.

The group also represented cake baker Jack Phillips, whom Colorado investigated more than a decade ago when he refused to make a cake for a same-sex wedding, in violation of the law.

Phillips also brought his challenge to the Supreme Court in 2018, but the justices disposed of it on narrower grounds, ruling that the investigation had impermissibly shown hostility toward Phillipss religious beliefs.

ADF had filed Smiths pre-enforcement challenge to Colorados law roughly two years prior to that decision.

The designer had not yet offered wedding websites, but her lawsuit said she wanted to expand her business, 303 Creative, because she believes that God is calling her to promote and celebrate His design for marriage.

The purported request was sent to Smiths company one day after she filed her lawsuit in September 2016, according to court filings.

My wedding. My name is Stewart and my fiancee is Mike. We are getting married early next year and would love some design work done for our invites, placenames etc. We might also stretch to a website, the request read.

Smith cited the supposed request as part of her argument that she had authority to sue, saying she faced a credible threat of enforcement.

Colorado contended that she had no legal standing and that the supposed request was irrelevant because it was sent after the lawsuit began. The 10th Circuit U.S. Court of Appeals sided with Smith on the standing issue, but its reasoning did not depend on the request.

Assuming Appellants offer wedding-related services to the public as they say they will, there is no reason to then conclude that Appellants will fail to attract customers. Nor is there reason to conclude that only customers celebrating opposite-sex marriages will request Appellants services. In short, we find nothing imaginary or speculative about Appellants apprehensions that they may violate CADA if they offer wedding-based services in the manner that they intend, wrote the two judges, who were appointed in the Clinton era.

At a Friday news conference following the Supreme Courts ruling, Colorado Attorney General Phil Weiser (D) said he didnt know any details about the mans denial of sending the request.

Our position in this case has been there is no website development happening, there is no business operating, he said. This was a made-up case without the benefit of any real facts or customers. The Supreme Court in our view should never have decided this case or address the merits without any basis in reality.

Updated 2:06 p.m.

For the latest news, weather, sports, and streaming video, head to The Hill.
A man described as 'extremely drunk' by fellow passengers tried to open a plane's door mid-flight, forcing an emergency landing, report says

A Jet2 Boeing 737. Robert Smith/MI News/NurPhoto via Getty Images

A flight from Turkey to Scotland was forced into an emergency landing on Sunday night.

Passengers told MailOnline an "extremely drunk" passenger tried to open the plane's exit in mid-air.

The man was arrested by police in Bulgaria before the plane continued to Glasgow with a two-hour delay.

A Jet2 flight from Turkey to Scotland was forced into an emergency landing on Sunday after a passenger tried to open the exit mid-journey, MailOnline reported.

The Boeing 737 was one hour into the five-hour journey from the tourist hotspot of Bodrum, Turkey when it was diverted to Sofia, Bulgaria, per Flightradar24.

Passengers on the budget airline  whose sister service is the UK's largest tour operator  restrained the man when they noticed he was trying to open the emergency exit, according to MailOnline.

One traveler told the outlet the man was "extremely drunk" and "looked like he'd maybe woken up and didn't know where he was or anything."

"I realised what was happening when people started screaming and shouting," they added. "I felt petrified for my children's lives and everybody's safety on the plane."

The crew was then alerted and Bulgarian police boarded the plane at Sofia Airport. A video obtained by MailOnline appears to show passengers shouting at the suspect as he's escorted down the aisle in handcuffs.

The plane eventually landed in Glasgow at 3:12 a.m. local time after being delayed by almost two hours, per FlightStats.

It follows a similar terrifying incident on an Asiana Airlines flight in May, when a man succeeded in opening the emergency exit as the plane was coming in to land in South Korea.

"Flight LS124 from Bodrum to Glasgow diverted to Sofia Airport last night, so that a disruptive passenger could be offloaded by police. After a short delay, the flight continued to Glasgow," a Jet2 spokesperson told Insider.

"We would like to apologize to all affected customers for any inconvenience caused. As a family friendly airline, we take a zero tolerance to disruptive passenger behaviour, and everyone's health, comfort and well-being will always be our number one priority."

Sofia Airport did not immediately respond to Insider's request for comment.

Read the original article on Insider
A man was shot Monday afternoon in north Statesville, investigators said.

Officers got the call around 4 p.m. on North Tradd Street off of Brevard Street for a person lying in the road with a gunshot wound.

The area where the shooting happened isnt far from the sheriffs office and the courthouse.

ALSO READ: CMPD investigating home shooting in northwest Charlotte

At the scene, police found 43-year-old Brandis Teon Imes, lying in the driveway with a gunshot wound to his leg.

Officers say Imes was taken to a local hospital by EMS.

Investigators said there was a car seen leaving the scene, but they dont yet have a good description of that vehicle.

Witnesses told Channel 9s Dave Faherty they heard only a single shot fired. They said the man who was shot was found at the end of a driveway leading to North Tradd Street.

Theres no word yet on what led up to the shooting, but officers say its an isolated incident.

This is a developing story. Check back for updates.

(WATCH BELOW: Double shooting in Statesville sends teens to hospital)
Man steals forklift at Lowes, runs over 73-year-old outside Home Depot, cops say

A 20-year-old has been arrested in the killing of a woman in a Home Depot parking lot, Maryland officials said.

At 12:40 a.m. on July 2, deputies with the Charles County Sheriffs Office were dispatched to a Lowes Home Improvement store in Waldorf on reports of a theft, according to a post on Facebook by the department.

Bryce Caleb Timothy Brown, of Waldorf, is accused of breaking into the Lowes, stealing a forklift and ramming it through the rear gates, officials said.

He then made his way to a Home Depot parking lot, about half a mile east of the Lowes, deputies said.

Gloristine Pinkney, 73, was asleep in her car when Brown struck the vehicle with the stolen forklift, officials said.

Pinkney got out of the car after the crash and started running away, according to the release.

Deputies say Brown followed her on the forklift and ran her over before fleeing the scene in her car.

Pinkney was found underneath the forklift, officials said. She was pronounced dead at the scene.

Deputies said the suspect and the victim didnt know each other.

Brown was arrested on July 2 and charged with murder, assault and theft among other charges, the release said. He was booked into the Charles County Detention Center.

Waldorf is about 60 miles southwest of Baltimore.

2-year-old dies after shes pinned between vehicles days before birthday, coroner says

Hit-and-run crash that killed man riding scooter may have been intentional, cops say

Man convicted of running over Costco shopper gets lengthy prison sentence, reports say
Margot Robbie looked like she stepped right out of a Barbie box in 2 hot-pink looks inspired by the 1985 Day-to-Night doll

Margot Robbie channeled the Day-to-Night Barbie. Han Myung-Gu/WireImage/Chung Sung-Jun/Getty Images

Margot Robbie paid tribute to a 1980s doll at the Seoul premiere of "Barbie" on Sunday.

She channeled the Day-to-Night Barbie with two pink Versace ensembles.

Robbie even carried a sparkly, retro phone on the red carpet.

Margot Robbie dove into the Barbie archives for a red-carpet look.

Robbie, 33, is currently on a press tour for the "Barbie" movie. She stars in the film, directed by Greta Gerwig, alongside Ryan Gosling as Ken.

On Sunday, she attended the premiere in Seoul, South Korea, wearing two ensembles that would be familiar to eagle-eyed Barbie fans.

Robbie's Versace outfits paid tribute to the Day-to-Night Barbie that was released in 1985, as Robbie's stylist Andrew Mukamal shared on Instagram.

The original doll was sold in a two-piece suit, but her jacket could be removed and her skirt reversed so she was in a party dress. Mattel also separately sold a Day-to-Night Ken.

So naturally, Robbie appeared on the red carpet in two outfits to look just like the doll.

Robbie's "day" ensemble consisted of a pink blazer with white lapels, a pink pencil skirt, and white-and-pink pumps.

It looked almost exactly like the 1985 Barbie doll's outfit.

She paired the power suit with accessories. Han Myung-Gu/WireImage

She paired the ensemble with a pink neck scarf, a white hat with pink detailing, a pink clutch, and a sparkly, retro cell phone.

The phone looked exactly like the brick phones used in the '80s, aside from the color, making it the perfect accessory.

And for her "night" look, Robbie donned a sparkly, pink dress, nodding to Barbie's reversible skirt.

Margot Robbie attends the Seoul premiere of "Barbie" in July 2023. Chung Sung-Jun/Getty Images

The skirt of the knee-length dress was hot pink, like her first outfit, and featured layers of tulle that created volume.

Light-pink sparkles covered the gown's form-fitting bodice, and Robbie completed the ensemble with pink, open-toe heels and another pink clutch.

Robbie has been using actual Barbie-doll outfits as her fashion inspiration for much of the film's tour, including the first-ever Barbie doll.

Read the original article on Insider
Marijuana businesses sue to block new fees that will cost the industry millions of dollars

A group of medical marijuana businesses and an advocate for the industry have sued the state over fee increases they argue violate the Oklahoma Constitution.

A new fee structure that went into effect June 1 raises licensing fees for dispensaries, processors, laboratories and grow operations. Before the law, the Oklahoma Medical Marijuana Authority charged a flat $2,500 for every licensed business.

But now those fees have increased, with some businesses now having to fork over thousands more each year. For example, the largest grow operations must pay $50,000 a year to stay in business.

The lawsuit filed Friday argues that the legislation raising fees was equivalent to a "revenue-raising" measure. Under Oklahoma law, a revenue bill needs more votes to pass than traditional legislation. Because the bill that raised fees didn't get a supermajority vote in the Legislature and was passed in the final days of the 2022 session, the petitioners said it could not become law.

More: Oklahoma's medical marijuana agency 'ready to really get going'

The distinction in the law making it a revenue-raising measure instead of a simple fee increase, according to the lawsuit, is that the bill didn't add any regulations that the additional fees would have paid for.

"In other words, the thrust of the legislation is not regulatory in nature but is designed to raise revenue instead," the lawsuit states. "Even if licensing fees provide some financial support to the OMMA, those fees are not closely tied to the cost of service for which they are imposed."

An indoor medical marijuana farm in Oklahoma City.

Change to licensing fees could cost medical marijuana businesses nearly $30 million a year, lawsuit says

The petitioners estimate that the authority's licensing fee revenue could increase by at least $28,580,000 each year. The true number could be higher than that because some businesses would be categorized into different tiers based on the size of the business.

"Our challenge to (the law) is about more than cannabis. This is a constitutional question that affects every Oklahoma taxpayer. We are respectfully requesting that the court consider our plea," said Jed Green, founder of Oklahomans for Responsible Cannabis Action and one of the petitioners in the lawsuit. "Our medical marijuana program has been revenue-positive since Day One. It has contributed hundreds of millions of dollars in revenue the last five years. The license fee increases on our industry are not needed to support regulation."

More: Oklahoma producing 64 times more marijuana than licensed users consume, report shows

Along with claiming the fees are an unconstitutional revenue-raising scheme, the lawsuit argues that House Bill 2179 created a discriminatory "special law" because it includes a tiered fee system for some businesses but not others.

The other parties in the case include Pharside, a medical marijuana grower; Oklahoma Natural Cures, a dispensary; and marijuana processor Bingo 101.

This article originally appeared on Oklahoman: Oklahoma medical marijuana dispensaries sue state over fee increase
This photo taken on May 28, 2023 shows a C919, China's self-developed large passenger aircraft, before its first commercial flight in east China's Shanghai. [Photo/Xinhua]

The C919, China's first domestically developed narrow-body large passenger jet, which was put into commercial operation in late May, is expected to further boost the capacity of the air travel market and drive the comprehensive upgrade of the country's civil aviation industrial chain, experts said.

Since May 29, Shanghai-based China Eastern Airlines has been using a C919 aircraft on its regular round-trip flights between Shanghai Hongqiao International Airport and Chengdu Tianfu International Airport in Sichuan province.

The State-owned China Eastern, one of the largest domestic carriers in terms of fleet size, operates more than 20 daily flights between Shanghai and Chengdu. The new C919 aircraft will allow the carrier to become more unhurried in arranging its flights on the route, it said.

With more C919 aircraft likely to enter the commercial passenger flight market, China Eastern will use the model built by Commercial Aircraft Corp of China for more domestic flights. The airline said Sichuan and Chongqing in Southwest China are building a world-class airport cluster, and the region presents significant growth prospects as air travel demand is surging.

"COMAC's C919 production capacity is on growth track, and we are optimistic about the development of the large aircraft industrial chain in China. In the next 20 years, the value of orders for domestically developed aircraft is expected to exceed 1 trillion yuan ($137.7 billion).More domestically developed components in the industrial chain are expected to emerge," said a research report of Zheshang Securities.

So far, COMAC has received orders for around 1,200 planes of the C919 model from home and abroad. These include both confirmed and intended orders, the company said.

As the air travel market continues to recover from the negative impact of COVID-19 and the number of air travelers grows fast in China, the C919 is expected to help meet rising demand.

The C919 aircraft model, which made its maiden flight in 2017 after a decade of development, received its type certificate, or design approval, in September last year. Comparable to the Airbus A320 and the Boeing B737 series, the C919 has 158 to 168 seats and a flying range of 4,075-5,555 kilometers.

"The manufacture of the C919 will help guide upstream and downstream industries in Shanghai to better lay out their businesses, and give full play to an agglomeration effect. Thus, the aircraft manufacturer, suppliers of parts and the local economy can all achieve growth," said Lin Zhijie, an aviation industry analyst and a columnist at Carnoc, a major civil aviation website in China.

After China optimized its pandemic response measures and restarted quarantine-free international travel in January, the country's air travel market has been on track to a steady recovery. In May, the sector transported 5.2 million people, up 2.8 percent over April, and reached 94.8 percent of the level recorded in the same period of 2019 before the pandemic, according to the Civil Aviation Administration of China.

With China's peak season of air travel arriving in summer, domestic carriers have ramped up efforts to launch or resume more flights to meet growing demand. For the period from June 20 to Oct 10, Guangzhou-based China Southern Airlines plans to add more than 12,000 flights and bring its total number of flights operating during the period to over 250,000. Stated differently, China Southern will operate 2,212 flights per day on average during the 113-day period.

During summer, China Southern plans to add about 150 flights daily on average. Particularly, the carrier will add more flights that connect major cities with popular tourism destinations.

Han Wensheng, general manager of China Southern, said the carrier is paying close attention to the C919 aircraft and maintaining constant communication with COMAC. It will follow relevant procedures to advance subsequent work regarding the potential purchase of more C919 aircraft.

For its international routes, China Southern recently launched flights that connect Beijing Daxing International Airport with London's Heathrow Airport. It also resumed flights that connect Guangzhou, Guangdong province, and Rome, as well as flights that connect Shenzhen, Guangdong province, and Sydney. The airline also increased the frequency of its flights that connect Guangzhou with Paris and Sydney.

China Southern said it has resumed nearly half of international flights compared with the pre-pandemic period. These flights cover markets like Southeast Asia, Japan, South Korea, Australia and Europe.

From July 1 to Aug 31, Tianjin Airlines plans to operate more than 200 routes, and launch flights to four new cities, including Nantong and Yangzhou in Jiangsu province. The carrier will also launch new flights or increase the frequency of flights that connect Chongqing and Lijiang, Yunnan province; Tianjin and Kunming, Yunnan province; and Xi'an, Shaanxi province, and Guilin, Guangxi Zhuang autonomous region.

With international traffic and domestic air travel back to the pre-pandemic levels, US aircraft manufacturer Boeing Co projected in late June that global demand for 42,595 new commercial jets is expected by 2042, valued at $8 trillion.

"The aviation industry has demonstrated resilience and adaptability after unprecedented disruption, with airlines responding to challenges, simplifying their fleets, improving efficiency and capitalizing on resurgent demand," said Brad McMullen, Boeing's senior vice-president of commercial sales and marketing.

Looking to the future of the air travel market, the latest forecast reflects further evolution of passenger traffic tied to global growth of the middle-income group, investments in sustainability, and continued growth of low-cost carriers, McMullen said.

Particularly, the Asia-Pacific market is expected to represent more than 40 percent of global demand, with half of that coming from China. In the next 20 years, new single-aisle airplanes will account for more than 75 percent of all new deliveries, up slightly from the 2022 outlook, and totaling more than 32,000 airplanes, Boeing forecast.

Facing a vast international market, the C919 still needs to continuously consolidate its foundation in industrial chain upgrading, market-oriented expansion and commercial operation for further development, industry experts said.

"Airlines should provide timely and comprehensive feedback to COMAC about their experiences in subsequent commercial flights involving the C919, and support COMAC and relevant suppliers in gradually improving more technical details," said Li Xiaojin, a professor of aviation economics at Civil Aviation University in Tianjin.

"COMAC should also seek breakthroughs in more core technologies. The proportion of self-developed components in the overall value chain of the C919 is not high enough, especially due to the lack of materials and technologies in the manufacture of some parts like aviation engine blades. Breaking those bottlenecks will be key to further mass production, delivery and cost controls," Li said.

The C919 is not only designed to meet the development demand of the civil aviation industry, but can help drive significant progress in areas like new materials, modern manufacturing, advanced propulsion system and automatic control; what's more, it can drive the growth of numerous high-tech industries in China, Li said.
Marines shoot down Russian helicopter with Javelin anti-tank missile system

Ukrainian marines shot down a Russian Ka-52 attack helicopter on 2 July from a Javelin portable anti-tank missile system on the Berdiansk front.

Source: press service of the 36th Marine Brigade named after Rear Admiral Mykhailo Bilynskyi

Quote: "The 309th Russian helicopter was shot down by the marines of the 36th Marine Brigade named after Rear Admiral Mykhailo Bilynskyi."

Details: It is noted that an anti-tank brigade of the Ukrainian Marines shot down the Alligator Ka-52 helicopter using a Javelin system on the Berdiansk front.

Ukrainska Pravda reported that this happened on Sunday, 2 July.

Journalists fight on their own frontline. Support Ukrainska Pravda or become our patron!
Each week, this series by Marion Technical College shares MarionMade! stories of our many wonderful people, places, products and programs in the greater Marion community. To read more positive stories of Marion, or to share some of your own, visit us at marionmade.org or on social media.

For 50 years, Laipplys Printing and Marketing Solutions Inc. has been serving the needs of the Marion community. Ron and Effie Laipply started the company and now a second generation of the family serves the community.

Marion has been good to us  and they still are today! Ron Laipply exclaims.

Effie Gasuras moved to the United States from Greece at age 11. Her uncle ran a shoe shop in downtown Bucyrus, where Ron Laipply worked. Effie and Ron met and fell in love. The couple married in 1967 and moved to Marion to open their business, originally called Big Red Q Quickprint, on Main Street in 1973.

Laipply's Printing and Marketing Solutions is located at 270 E. Center St., Marion, a historic home built in the 1930. The business provides Marion with full service printing, graphic design and direct mailing.

Effie ran the printing business with two small children in her arms while Ron worked a full-time job at Swan Hose and took business classes in the evening. The printing business went through the roof. After winning national sales awards with the franchise, Ron quit his second job to work side-by-side with Effie full-time.

Ron and Effie Laipply moved to Marion in 1973 and opened their printing business while raising two children. They focused on providing excellent customer service. They are grateful for the support from the Marion community and take pride in supporting other local businesses.

Marions been very good to us. They supported us and we support them! Effie Laipply said.

The couple moved the business to 270 E. Center St. in 1982, a historic home built in the 1830s by Judge Ozias Bowen, which was a stop on the Underground Railroad.

Its the oldest standing building in Marion, said Jacqueline (Laipply) Psyhogios, daughter of Effie and Ron Laipply.

Laipplys Printing and Marketing Solutions held a ribbon cutting to celebrate its 50th year. Employees are in the front row in blue shirts made by Hesslers. From left: Jesse James, Dee Hempfield, Sheila Thomas, Mikaelee Bowmer, Katie Messmer and Ila Moodespaugh; on the porch are Ron Laipply, Effie Laipply, Jacqueline (Laipply) Psyhogios and Bill Psyhogios.

Psyhogios returned from a successful career in New York City as an executive in the fashion industry to join the family business. She and her husband, Bill, bought the business and continue the familys tradition of quality products and superior customer service.

We evolve with the times. We started out with the old-fashioned printing presses. We had the first color copier in Marion; the first fax machine; and the first digital presses, Psyhogios said. We evolve, innovate, market and plan.

Bill and Jacqueline (Laipply) Psyhogios are the owners of Laipply's Printing and Marketing Solutions. Jacqueline grew up in Marion. She graduated from Ohio University and spent 16 years in New York City as an executive with Liz Claiborne. She returned home in 2008 to join the family business, which she and her husband purchased from her parents.

This full-service local company works to help businesses, nonprofits and individuals with everything from print and design needs to marketing and direct mail solutions from inboxes to mailboxes with the latest technology. This includes graphic design work, targeted mailing lists, promotional products and more.

Many people say, I didnt know you did that! Ask and give us a chance to say, Yes, we can! Psyhogios said.

Laipplys serves clients across the nation with their smiling customer service.

We put pride into everything we do, Psyhogias said of her team.

Ron, Effie and Jacqueline celebrated the 50th anniversary with an open house where they gave away a basket including $500 worth of local gift cards.

There is no better way to thank our community than to help drive additional customers and dollars to our fellow, local businesses, Psyhogias said.

Only one of four businesses survive 15 years or longer, according to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics. Psyhogias credits the familys hard work, excellent employees, and support of the Marion community for this 50-year milestone.

Its so important to shop local. Give us a chance to impress you! Psyhogias said.

Laipplys is open Monday through Thursday from 9 a.m. to 5 p.m. and Friday from 9 a.m. to 4 p.m. For more information, call 740-387-9282, email info@laipplyqprint.com or go to laipplyqprint.com.

This article originally appeared on Marion Star: Laipply's Printing and Marketing Solutions celebrates 50 years
Mark Zuckerberg reportedly wants to follow in Elon Musk and Tim Cook's footsteps, and sell products in China  but his past criticisms of China could haunt him

Chinese President Xi Jinping, left, talks with Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg, right, during a dinner in 2015. Zuckerberg has a history of criticizing Chinese policies. Ted S. Warren-Pool/Getty Images

Meta is in talks with Chinese tech company Tencent to bring its VR headsets to the country, WSJ reported.

But CEO Mark Zuckerberg's past criticisms of China's policies may pose a challenge to his plans.

Zuckerberg has previously slammed China for restricting free speech and stealing intellectual property.

Mark Zuckerberg will likely not be getting a royal welcome in China  like the one Elon Musk got in May  anytime soon.

Meta is reportedly in talks with Chinese tech giant Tencent Holdings to bring its Quest virtual-reality headsets to the country, The Wall Street Journal first reported. The company has been trying to break into China since 2021, when Zuckerberg questioned why Apple and Tesla are allowed to sell their products in the country, but Meta is not, according to the Journal.

But Zuckerberg's efforts to win over Chinese government officials may be eclipsed by his past criticisms of China, posing a potential hurdle for his virtual reality plans.

In 2019 at Georgetown University, a decade after China banned Facebook over accusations that the platform violated China's censorship rules, Zuckerberg slammed China for limiting free speech with its strict media regulations, known by experts as The Great Firewall.

Zuckerberg specifically put China on blast for restricting its residents from posting political content related to pro-Hong Kong activism on TikTok, which he said could set a dangerous precedent for the internet at-large.

"While our services like WhatsApp are used by protesters and activists everywhere due to strong encryption and privacy protections, on TikTok, the China-based app growing quickly around the world, mentions of these same protests are censored, even here in the US," Zuckerberg said the 2019 speech. "Is that the internet we want?"

In that same speech, Zuckerberg said he was worried that China's values could spread to other parts of the world.

"China is building its own internet focused on very different values, and is now exporting their vision of the internet to other countries," Zuckerberg said . "A decade ago, almost all of the major internet platforms were American. Today, six of the top ten are Chinese."

A year later, Zuckerberg once again chided the Chinese government, this time over China's history of stealing intellectual property.

"I think it's well-documented that the Chinese government steals technology from American companies," Zuckerberg said during a 2020 congressional hearing.

Now Zuckerberg needs those same officials he has criticized, but Meta's past efforts to win over Chinese authorities fell short, like in 2016, when he proposed a censorship tools to get back into the country.

"I wanted our services in China because I believe in connecting the whole world," he said during his 2019 speech. "I worked hard to make this happen. But we could never come to agreement on what it would take for us to operate there, and they never let us in."

If Zuckerberg gets his way this time and Quest headsets enter the Chinese market, it could be a boon for the company.

But only time will tell whether Zuckerberg's plans to bring its virtual reality tech to the country will become an actual reality.

Meta and Tencent didn't immediately respond to Insider's request for comment before publication.

Read the original article on Business Insider
New marketplace at San Luis Ranch features ice cream shop, brewery and more

An ice cream shop, a brewery and a coffeehouse are among the tenants coming to a new marketplace at San Luis Ranch housing development in San Luis Obispo.

SLO Ranch Farms and Marketplace will open with a number of new restaurants and shops in early 2024.

The whole concept is to be community focused, community oriented and to have our roots in locals and local businesses, Jacob Grossman, project manager said.

In addition to eateries and shops, SLO Ranch Farms and Marketplace will feature a public museum, organic farm and community garden plots.

The new development is an expansion of the San Luis Ranch neighborhood which offers diverse housing and recreational spaces.

Our goal has always been to create a family-friendly gathering space  not just for the San Luis Ranch neighborhood, but for the entire San Luis Obispo community, Grossman said.

Construction is proceeding at the SLO Ranch Farms and Marketplace at the San Luis Ranch housing development in San Luis Obispo. It will feature an ice cream shop, a brewery, a coffeehouse and other tenants and is set for a 2024 opening.

A lot of the people we attract are going to be able to walk and ride their bikes from across the street as well as surrounding communities, he added.

SLO Ranch Farms will feature two historic buildings including a barn and home built in the early 1900s. They will be used as a part of the Agricultural Heritage Center on-site.

Where we feel that were unique is our roots and connection to our 40 acres of farmland and San Luis Obispos roots in the agrarian culture, Grossman said.

A lot of our tenants will use homegrown ingredients in their establishment, so its really a farm-to-table experience, he said.

Negranti Creamery

Negranti Creamery plans to open its fourth San Luis Obispo County scoop shop at SLO Ranch Farms and Marketplace.

Based in Paso Robles, the creamery was founded by Cal Poly graduate Alexis Negranti in 2010.

Negranti started the creamery after searching for a healthy ice cream she could serve to her family, said Arete Food Group president Seth Brink, whose company partners with Negranti Creamery.

Negranti Creamery uses locally produced sheeps milk to produce frozen treats that are safe for lactose-intolerant people.

Brink said Negranti Creamery is looking forward to opening a new store at SLO Ranch Farms and Marketplace.

Its a meeting place, so thats whats really attracting us to the area, Brink said. Were super excited about what the project has to offer, not only us, but the other tenants too.

Negranti Creamery plans to open its SLO Ranch Farms location at the end of 2023. The business currently has locations in Paso Robles, Atascadero, and Boise, Idaho.

Construction is proceeding at the SLO Ranch Farms and Marketplace at the San Luis Ranch housing development in San Luis Obispo. It will feature an ice cream shop, a brewery, a coffeehouse and other tenants and is set for a 2024 opening.

Lucys Coffee Co.

Lucys Coffee Co., which features drinks made from locally roasted coffee beans, will be opening its second location in San Luis Obispo.

The company was founded by Lisa Hess and is named after her daughter, Lucy.

Hess said she was excited about the concept of SLO Ranch Farms from the start and was eager to join the development.

I think what theyre doing with the space is amazing, Hess said, referring to the variety of local vendors and organic farming space.

Hess said she looks forward to branching out from the original Lucys location, 1279 Laurel Lane in San Luis Obispo, to reach new customers, such as visitors traveling to the area.

With the new SLO Ranch Farms location, Hess hopes to add some new dishes to the menu as well as expand the stores grab and go options.

The new location is expected to open at the start of 2024.

Construction is proceeding at the SLO Ranch Farms and Marketplace at the San Luis Ranch housing development in San Luis Obispo. It will feature an ice cream shop, a brewery, a coffeehouse and other tenants and is set for a 2024 opening.

Paso Robles Brewing Co.

Paso Robles Brewing Co. is excited to announce its second location after opening its flagship brewery in Paso Robles in 2022, said brewery owner Ryan Bonner.

The brewery specializes in a unique process to store and deliver its beer to customers.

Instead of putting all your beer into kegs, we put the batch into a single tank, Bonner said. It looks really great but its also just really great for the quality of the product.

With the new location, Bonner said he looks forward to getting to know the locals in the area.

Were going to try to make a home for the people that live in the area. Somewhere they can go year in and year out, Bonner said.

The Paso Robles location is very involved with the local community, especially firefighters, police and veterans and thats something were hoping to do with the second location as well, Bonner said.

The SLO Ranch Farms location is expected to open in 2024.
A Leitersburg man has been charged with killing his fiancee's aunt, who was found in her home Sunday after apparently being strangled with a vacuum cord, according to court documents.

John Kevin Hickman, 46, of Leiter Street, was charged with first- and second-degree murder and other charges, including false imprisonment, according to documents from Washington County District Court.

Hickman continued to be held without bond Monday afternoon at the Washington County Detention Center after refusing to appear remotely via video for a bond review hearing at district court early that afternoon.

Assistant Public Defender Garrett Byron had no comment for this report.

Truck stop saga continues: Residents fighting Williamsport-area truck stop approval cite unfairness in decision

Washington County sheriff's deputies responded to the 12900 block of Little Antietam Road, south of Leitersburg, around 8 p.m. Sunday and found Bobbie Louise Martin, 72, dead in her home, according to a news release from the sheriff's office.

Police went to the home to do a well-being check on Martin after Hickman told emergency service officials that Martin hadn't been heard from in several days, according to charging documents.

While deputies were at Martin's home, Hickman called his fiancee, Martin's niece, and was apologizing to her and telling his fiancee that he hurt Bobbie and was going to turn himself in, a detective wrote in charging documents.

Martin's niece is referred to as both Hickman's wife and fiancee in the charging documents.

Hickman claims to have been diagnosed with a mental-health disorder, that his medication has not been working, that he's been hearing voices in his head, and that he didn't remember what happened, according to charging documents. He allegedly told a detective that he'd reached out for help with his mental-health issue, but could not get any help.

When detectives interviewed Hickman at the sheriff's office, Hickman said he drove his fiancee's car from their home in Leitersburg to Martin's house to pick up a trap and release cage for a rat, according to court records. Hickman told detectives he remembered meeting Martin at her front door and handing her her newspaper, but he didn't remember anything after that until he was driving on Eastern Boulevard, according to charging documents.

Hickman appeared to have blood splatter on his left arm, which he allegedly told a detective was Martin's blood, charging documents state.

Martin's fiancee told investigators she got a call from Hickman that her aunt's house was locked and he couldn't get in contact with Martin, charging documents state. She told detectives that Hickman didn't return home and stopped answering calls. When the fiancee "responded" to Martin's home, Hickman texted her, apologizing, saying in the texts that he'd hurt her, and that he was going to turn himself in, according to charging documents.

Hickman told a detective he was going to walk to the Hagerstown Police headquarters to turn himself in, charging documents state. The detective told him to stay where he was and notified Hagerstown Police, who met Hickman behind a nearby restaurant.

According to court records, Hickman is a registered sex offender with the state of Maryland.

He is on the registry for first- and third-degree sex offenses for which he was convicted in 2002. His release date for those crimes is listed as Oct. 19, 2018, according to the online registry.

This article originally appeared on The Herald-Mail: Hagerstown-area man charged in murder of fiancee's aunt
Phosphate rock is used in the production of electric car batteries, including the Tesla Model 3 (iStock/ Getty Images)

A huge phosphate rock deposit discovered in Norway contains enough minerals to meet the global demand for batteries and solar panels for the next 100 years, according to the mining company that controls it.

Norge Mining said up to 70 billion tonnes of the non-renewable resource may have been uncovered in south-western Norway, alongside deposits of other strategic minerals like titanium and vanadium.

Phosphate rock contains high concentrates of phosphorus, which is a key component for building green technologies but currently faces significant supply issues.

Phosphorus was first discovered in 1669 by German scientist Hennig Brandt, who was searching for the philosophers stone. While it proved ineffective in turning ordinary metals into gold, it has become an essential component in lithium-iron phosphate batteries in electric cars, as well as for solar panels and computer chips.

Russia previously controlled the worlds largest ultra-pure phosphate rock deposits, with the European Union warning that these critical raw materials have a high supply risk.

The EU is currently almost entirely dependent on imports of phosphate rock from the rest of the world, according to a report from The Hague Centre for Strategic Studies, with China, Iraq and Syria also home to large deposits.

The report, which was published before the discovery of the massive Norwegian deposit, warned that the EU should be concerned about phosphate rock shortages.

An article in the scientific journal Nature last year warned of imminent supply disruptions of phosphorus, citing Russias invasion of Ukraine and the subsequent economic sanctions as a potential cause of market volatility.

The global economy consumes an estimated 50 million tonnes of phosphorus each year, with scientists warning earlier this year that the planet could face a phosphogeddon if supply trends continue.

The buyers market is becoming increasingly crowded by limited trade  due to political instability in several source countries, as well as international sanctions imposed on others, Norge Mining noted in a June blog post. This is forcing importers to fear an impending crisis.

Tesla CEO Elon Musk announced in Shanghai on 7 January, 2020, that Model 3 vehicles made in China would used lithium iron phosphate batteries (Getty Images)

Norways Minister of Trade and Industry, Jan Christian Vestre, said last month that the government was considering fast-tracking a giant mine in Helleland once analysis is completed on 76 kilometres of drill cores. If approval is given, the first major mine could begin operation by 2028.

The politician said Norways obligation was to develop the worlds most sustainable mineral industry following the discovery of the minerals.

The mining plans already have the support of the European Raw Materials Alliance, according to local reports, while local consultations continue.

A spokesperson for the European Commission described the discovery as great news for meeting the objectives of the Commissions raw material objectives, with Norge Mining telling Euractiv that the projected 4,500-metre-deep ore body would theoretically be capable of meeting global demand for the next century.
The 1975 frontman Matty Healy opened up about his reasoning for making controversial remarks while playing an emotional gig in London.

Healy, the bands frontman frontman, has been criticised in recent years his actions, and has faced accusations of misogyny, racism and antisemitism.

This led to the singer being called out by Rina Sawayama during her Glastonbury set in June. While introducing a new song titled STFU!!, she told the crowd: Tonight, this goes out to a white man that watches Ghetto Gaggers, and mocks Asian people on a podcast... he also owns my masters... Ive had enough.

Healy previously said he watched Ghetto Gaggers  a brand of racially charged pornographic videos in which women of colour are reportedly put in submissive positions to white men  during an appearance on the Adam Friedland Show podcast.

He also owned the parent company of the label that Sawayama is signed  Dirty Hit Records  from 2018 until April 2023, when he left for unknown reasons.

During a 1975 gig at Finsbury Park on Sunday (2 July), Metro.co.uk reports Healy as saying: Im not someone who takes things for granted. The 1975 isnt a dry band. Theres a lot of irony in it. Like, Love Me, for example  it doesnt make sense unless Im taking the p*** out of myself.

He continued: I was always trying stuff. And some stuff I got right and some stuff I got wrong.

But, do you know what? Theres a lot of things Ive said, jokes that Ive made, theres probably a couple of f***ing songs Id take back if I had the chance.

Healy suggested his actions stem from an attempt to make his fans laugh.

What I mean is that I really am only doing this because I want to make you guys laugh and feel good, he said, adding: Thats what my favourite art does and thats what Im trying to do. I get a bit excited.

He then told the audience he was f***ing proud of myself.

Matty Healy of The 1975 (Getty Images)

Also on the Adam Friedland Show podcast, Healy referenced the US rapper Ice Spice. , the hosts of the podcast mistakenly identified the rapper as being from Hawaiian Inuit and Chinese heritage, mocking each accent.

Later in the podcast, the hosts, comedians Adam Friedland and Nick Mullen, performed impressions of Japanese people working in concentration camps, while Healy was heard joining in.

Healy addressed the podcast controversy in an interview with The New York Times in May.

Asked if he had been baiting his fans with the remarks, he said: A little bit. But it doesnt actually matter. Nobody is sitting there at night slumped at their computer, and their boyfriend comes over and goes, Whats wrong, darling? and they go, Its just this thing with Matty Healy. That doesnt happen.
The News

Haiti has received less than a quarter of the humanitarian aid it needs, United Nations Secretary-General Antonio Guterres said on a visit to Port-au-Prince, urging greater global support for the gang-ravaged nation.

More than 5 million people  almost half of the countrys population  are in need of humanitarian assistance, but just 23% of the $720 million in aid the U.N. seeks has been pledged.

Weve curated three expert views on what this means for Haiti.

Insights

The international communitys focus on Haitis security situation has crowded out the conversation on how to deliver basic aid to Haitians, Sophie Orr, Americas regional director for the International Committee of the Red Cross, told Miami Herald. Nearly half of the population dont have access to drinking water, while schools and medical clinics remain shut. Haitis profound humanitarian needs are alarming and on the scale of those my organization sees in armed conflicts around the world, Orr wrote.

A deadly vigilante movement dubbed bwa kale has grown in the Haitian capital of Port-au-Prince as civilians attempt to fill the law enforcement vacuum that underfunded police forces have created. The movement has resulted in a sharp drop in kidnappings and murders in neighborhoods where people were afraid of leaving their homes, The New York Times reported. I support vigilance groups, but I dont like the way they do it, a street seller in Haiti said.

Associates of Yevgeny Prigozhin, the head of Russia's Wagner mercenary group, had planned a secret trip to Haiti as late as February, The Wall Street Journal reported, to offer their services to the government to win back control of the capital. The U.N. has estimated that gangs control 80% of the country's cities.

Know More

Haiti has suffered a string of crises in recent years, including the assassination of its president in 2021, resulting in instability that gangs have capitalized on to take control of swathes of the country.

In a huge show of force, late last year gangs took control of the countrys largest oil terminal, bringing the economy to a standstill.

The economic slowdown  Haitis GDP has fallen each of the past four years  has pushed more than 70,000 to flee this year alone.

The U.N. has called for an international military intervention, but despite interest in contributing, no country has agreed to lead a deployment, with some wary of supporting the unelected government of Prime Minister Ariel Henry.
Dmitry Medvedev, Deputy Chairman of Russias Security Council, believes that Russia should temporarily suspend diplomatic relations with the UK, Finland, Poland and the Baltic states.

Source: an article by Medvedev in Rossiyskaya Gazeta (Russian Newspaper), an official Russian government media outlet

Quote: "It would be better to temporarily suspend diplomatic relations with Finland and similar countries (such as Poland, the Baltic states and, of course, the UK), or at least downgrade their level for a while."

Details: Medvedev also said that the results of the all-out confrontation between Russia and the West should be enshrined in a new document like the Helsinki Act.

In the article, in his traditional manner, Medvedev attempts to convince readers that Russia's war against Ukraine is an "all-out confrontation between the notional collective West and the rest of the world" that will last for decades. Medvedev once again warns that this confrontation has brought the world to the brink of World War III, and if that happens, there will be a nuclear winter, epidemics and famine.

Medvedev also maintains that Russia's goal is to "eliminate the threat of Ukraine's membership of NATO" - a goal it is apparently going to achieve.

"If countries involved in conflict are not accepted into NATO, that means that the conflict will be permanent, because this is a question of Russia's existence," he also threatens.

In his article, Medvedev mentions some "reasonable compromises" that Russia is supposedly prepared to make, but then immediately lays down some conditions: the overthrow of the legitimate Ukrainian government and a legislative ban on the so-called "Nazi Kyiv regime" in Europe. He also threatens that "the West will have to accept this, unless it wants an apocalyptic end to our imperfect civilisation".

Journalists fight on their own frontline. Support Ukrainska Pravda or become our patron!
Uruguayan Foreign Minister Francisco Bustillo, Brazilian Foreign Minister Mauro Vieira, Governor of Misiones Oscar Herrera Ahuad, Argentine Foreign Minister Santiago Cafiero, Paraguayan Foreign Minister Julio Arriola and Bolivian Foreign Minister Rogelio Mayta at the Iguazu Falls in Argentina (NELSON ALMEIDA)

The South American trade bloc Mercosur opened a two-day summit on Monday with host Argentina calling for an update to a long-paused trade deal with the European Union which it said was the product of an asymmetrical relationship.

Observers have low expectations for the summit's ability to give final shape to the pact stalled by EU concerns over environmental protections, particularly in the Brazilian Amazon.

Mercosur countries Argentina, Brazil, Paraguay and Uruguay reached an agreement in principle with the 27-member EU in 2019 after two decades of negotiations.

The EU has since proposed a "side letter" to the agreement with extra environmental guarantees, rankling South American leaders.

Brussels wants any deal with Mercosur nations to include compliance with commitments made under the 2015 Paris climate accords.

On Monday, Argentine Foreign Minister Santiago Cafiero said deepening ties between Mercosur and the EU was "necessary in an international context of conflict and growing uncertainty."

For this to happen, however, the 2019 draft agreement needed an "update" as it "reflects an unequal effort between asymmetrical blocs," he told fellow ministers gathered at Puerto Iguazu.

Cafiero pointed out that under the draft deal, Mercosur will scrap tariffs on 95 percent of agricultural imports from Europe, which reciprocates with only 82 percent.

And he said the agreement as it stands had an excessive focus on environmental issues at the expense of economic and social considerations in largely agricultural and developing Mercosur members.

- 'Mistrust and sanctions' -

The ministers met ahead of Tuesday's gathering of Argentine President Alberto Fernandez with his counterparts from Uruguay, Paraguay and Brazil: Luis Lacalle Pou, Mario Abdo Benitez, and Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva.

The bloc, founded in 1991, represents 62 percent of South America's population and 67 percent of the continent's gross domestic product.

Brazil's Lula has led criticism of the EU's environmental demands, telling reporters last month that "strategic partners should have a relationship of mutual trust, not mistrust and sanctions."

Deforestation in the Amazon surged under Lula's predecessor, far-right ex-president Jair Bolsonaro, in office from 2019-2022.

And while veteran leftist Lula has cast himself as the anti-Bolsonaro on environmental policy, he told European Commission head Ursula von der Leyen in June he had concerns over the additional environmental guarantees.

Lula accused EU lawmakers of trying to legislate "outside their territory" with measures that "change the balance of the agreement."

Brazil will take up Mercosur's rotating presidency until the end of the year.

The EU's top diplomat, Josep Borrell, acknowledged recently that the environmental proposals were not well received by the South American countries and said Europe was awaiting a concrete response.

Given the divide, Bruno Binetti, an expert on international affairs at the Inter-American Dialogue, a think tank in Washington, said the most that could come out of the Argentina summit was "a specific agenda" with "demands."

"But I don't think we are at that stage," he told AFP.

Brazil's Foreign Minister Mauro Vieira said his country would submit a draft counter-proposal to the EU within days.

He added the bloc would resume work on a bid by Bolivia to join Mercosur.

rsr-mr/mlr/dw
Chinese dance festival amazes London audience

Xinhua) 09:01, July 03, 2023

An artist performs during the Silk Road Dance Festival in London, Britain, July 1, 2023. A Chinese dance show was held in east London on Saturday evening, offering the local audience a sensory cultural feast. (Xinhua/Li Ying)

LONDON, July 1 (Xinhua) -- A Chinese dance show was held in east London on Saturday evening, offering the local audience a sensory cultural feast.

The Silk Road Dance Festival, held for the second time, showcased a variety of Chinese dance styles, including Dunhuang dance, contemporary dance, classic dance, and ethnic dances, such as Tibetan dance and Inner Mongolian dance.

"We've seen so many different types of dance from different parts of China and the dances have been beautiful and very elegant," William Adlington, an audience, told Xinhua after watching the show.

Impressed by a dance featuring Chinese silk fans and long-sleeve movements, Adlington said that he adored the "flowing actions" of the costumes and props.

"We are blessed in London with different communities, for instance, the Chinese community, and being able to see wonderful shows like this," Adlington said.

The dance programs were jointly presented by dancers of different ages and backgrounds, including professional dancers, Chinese university students in the UK, and students from local middle and primary schools.

The Silk Road Dance Festival, hosted by UK China Performing Arts (UKCPA), made its debut in 2019 but had to be put on hold for four years due to the COVID-19 pandemic.

"We host the Silk Road Dance Festival to create a platform for everyone to share their passion and enjoy Chinese dance together," said Zhou Hangyu, founder of the UKCPA.

Artists perform during the Silk Road Dance Festival in London, Britain, July 1, 2023. A Chinese dance show was held in east London on Saturday evening, offering the local audience a sensory cultural feast. (Xinhua/Li Ying)

Artists perform during the Silk Road Dance Festival in London, Britain, July 1, 2023. A Chinese dance show was held in east London on Saturday evening, offering the local audience a sensory cultural feast. (Xinhua/Li Ying)

Artists perform during the Silk Road Dance Festival in London, Britain, July 1, 2023. A Chinese dance show was held in east London on Saturday evening, offering the local audience a sensory cultural feast. (Xinhua/Li Ying)

Artists perform during the Silk Road Dance Festival in London, Britain, July 1, 2023. A Chinese dance show was held in east London on Saturday evening, offering the local audience a sensory cultural feast. (Xinhua/Li Ying)

An artist performs during the Silk Road Dance Festival in London, Britain, July 1, 2023. A Chinese dance show was held in east London on Saturday evening, offering the local audience a sensory cultural feast. (Xinhua/Li Ying)

Artists perform during the Silk Road Dance Festival in London, Britain, July 1, 2023. A Chinese dance show was held in east London on Saturday evening, offering the local audience a sensory cultural feast. (Xinhua/Li Ying)

Artists perform during the Silk Road Dance Festival in London, Britain, July 1, 2023. A Chinese dance show was held in east London on Saturday evening, offering the local audience a sensory cultural feast. (Xinhua/Li Ying)

Artists perform during the Silk Road Dance Festival in London, Britain, July 1, 2023. A Chinese dance show was held in east London on Saturday evening, offering the local audience a sensory cultural feast. (Xinhua/Li Ying)

An artist performs during the Silk Road Dance Festival in London, Britain, July 1, 2023. A Chinese dance show was held in east London on Saturday evening, offering the local audience a sensory cultural feast. (Xinhua/Li Ying)

An artist performs during the Silk Road Dance Festival in London, Britain, July 1, 2023. A Chinese dance show was held in east London on Saturday evening, offering the local audience a sensory cultural feast. (Xinhua/Li Ying)

Children perform during the Silk Road Dance Festival in London, Britain, July 1, 2023. A Chinese dance show was held in east London on Saturday evening, offering the local audience a sensory cultural feast. (Xinhua/Li Ying)

Artists perform during the Silk Road Dance Festival in London, Britain, July 1, 2023. A Chinese dance show was held in east London on Saturday evening, offering the local audience a sensory cultural feast. (Xinhua/Li Ying)

(Web editor: Zhang Kaiwei, Liang Jun)
You are here: Business

A BYD Seagull is displayed at the 20th Shanghai International Automobile Industry Exhibition in Shanghai, east China, April 18, 2023. [Photo/Xinhua]

Chinese carmakers are speeding up their efforts to explore overseas markets with their advantage in the new energy vehicle sector, which will help the country's vehicle exports to hit a record this year.

China started to see its exports soar from 2021, and the figure is expected to reach 4.5 million units this year, of which NEVs are likely to total 1 million units, said Liu Anmin, a board member of the China Automotive Engineering Research Institute.

Liu gave the estimate at an event organized by the CAERI and the China World National Culture Promotion Society last week in Beijing.

The estimate would mark a surge in China's vehicle exports from 2022.

In 2022, China's NEV exports stood at 679,000 units, up 120 percent year-on-year, according to the China Association of Automobile Manufacturers.

They pushed the total number of vehicle exports to 3.11 million units in the year, up 54.4 percent year-on-year.

"The growing number of NEV models will help Chinese carmakers further explore overseas markets, especially developed ones," said Liu.

"Their exports will shift from products to the whole industrial chain, and their overseas networks of sales and aftersales will improve accordingly," said Liu.

At the event, the CAERI extended invitations to diplomats from several countries to visit NEV companies in major car-producing cities from Chongqing to Shanghai.

Chao Peipei, a director of the CAERI, said the diplomats will visit factories, learn about their developments, test drive the latest vehicles and hold talks with such companies to explore potential collaboration opportunities.

Dino Kusnadi, minister of the Indonesian embassy in China, said that Indonesia has abundant opportunities for market development in the NEV sector.

He expressed his eagerness to collaborate with Chinese automotive companies in boosting the NEV sector's development in Indonesia.

The CAERI has also established a working group to facilitate Chinese carmakers' go-global efforts.

It will provide a range of services, including testing and certification, local policy consultation, as well as overseas resource coordination, said the institute.

Chinese carmakers are speeding up their efforts to go global. Last week, China's largest NEV maker BYD partnered with Jamaica's ATL Automotive to offer its vehicles in 10 Caribbean countries.

According to their deal signed on Monday, ATL Automotive will take direct control of the sales and aftersales of BYD in Jamaica, Trinidad and Tobago, Cayman, Curacao, Barbados, Aruba, Antigua, Saint Lucia, Guyana and Suriname.

"In the coming year, together with ATL, we will complete the construction of 10 showrooms and offer better user experiences, promoting sustainable mobility in the region," said Neva Zhang, BYD's manager of Caribbean and Central American countries.

ATL Automotive's Executive Chairman Adam Stewart said the company's discussions with BYD have been ongoing for the better part of a year and a half, so ATL is thrilled to finally sign on the dotted line.

"BYD is a simply incredible company with a history much like ours in the sense that it started humbly with one salesman knocking on the doors of phone companies trying to sell them batteries, much like my father in the very early days of Appliance Traders.

"It has since transformed into one of the world's leading car companies that represents an exciting future for the global industry," said Stewart.

Also last week, Aion, the NEV arm of State-owned GAC, signed a memorandum of understanding for business cooperation with Thai distributor Gold Integrate.

This marked Aion's first effort to explore the overseas market.

The agreement covers the establishment of an Aion subsidiary in Thailand, which will work closely with the country's top automobile distributor to explore the Thai market.

Thailand is the largest automobile manufacturer and exporter in Southeast Asia.

It is also the region's largest electric vehicle market, with the EV industry supported by positive government policies, such as tax and fee reductions, consumer cash subsidies, and investment support.

Aion said it will bring its cutting-edge technology to Thai consumers, introducing a steady supply of models that have proven highly popular among Chinese and international buyers.

Some other carmakers are producing their models in overseas markets.

Last week, Russian automobile manufacturer Avtotor said it will begin to manufacture Chinese carmaker's BAIC BJ40 off-roader at its Kaliningrad plant in July.

Preparations for production have already started, according to Russian news agency Tass.

It said that the company has already produced several off-roaders in a test, with preparations for the launch of serial production nearing completion.

Avtotor started to assemble cars from BAIC in April 2023.

Its BAIC X35 and BAIC U5 Plus were the first models assembled at the plant. The company plans to produce seven models of the brand by the end of 2023, said Tass.
Brazilian President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva (L) meets with French President Emmanuel Macron in Paris, June 23, 2023, where they spoke about trade (Ludovic MARIN)

The South American trade bloc Mercosur opens a two-day summit Monday with a deal with the European Union on the agenda, but few expect leaders to reach consensus on how to fulfill EU demands on environmental protections.

The EU and the Mercosur countries -- Argentina, Brazil, Paraguay and Uruguay -- are trying to finalize a trade deal after reaching an agreement in principle in 2019, following two decades of negotiations.

But ratification by the EU's 27 members has stalled, notably over European concerns about Mercosur countries' environmental protections -- particularly in the Amazon rainforest.

The EU has proposed a "side letter" to the agreement, with extra environmental guarantees, rankling South American leaders and slowing down progress to notching a final agreement.

Brussels wants any deal with Mercosur nations to include compliance with various commitments made as part of the 2015 Paris climate accords, which are currently voluntary.

The Mercosur summit, to be held in Puerto Iguazu, Argentina, will bring together Argentine President Alberto Fernandez and the presidents of Uruguay, Paraguay and Brazil: Luis Lacalle Pou, Mario Abdo Benitez and Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva, who will take up the bloc's pro-tempore presidency until the end of the year.

The bloc represents 62 percent of South America's population and 67 percent of the continent's gross domestic product.

Brazil's Lula has led the criticism of the EU's environmental demands, telling reporters last month that "strategic partners should have a relationship of mutual trust, not mistrust and sanctions."

Deforestation in the Amazon surged under Lula's predecessor, far-right ex-president Jair Bolsonaro, in office from 2019-2022.

But although veteran leftist Lula has cast himself as the anti-Bolsonaro on environmental policy, he told European Commission head Ursula von der Leyen in June that he had concerns over the additional environmental guarantees.

Lula accused EU lawmakers of trying to legislate "outside their territory" with measures that "change the balance of the agreement."

The EU's top diplomat, Josep Borrell, acknowledged recently that the environmental proposals have not been well-received by the South American countries and said that Europe is waiting for a concrete response to their requests.

Despite Brazil's criticisms, leaders there still hope to reach a deal.

Latin America's largest economy wants to reach a "well-balanced" result "for both parties," Mauricio Carvalho, secretary for economic and financial affairs at the Ministry of Foreign Affairs told AFP.

For Bruno Binetti, an expert on international affairs at the Inter-American Dialogue think tank in Washington, "the most" that can come out of the summit is "a specific agenda before the EU," with "demands."

"But I don't think we are at that stage," he told AFP.

rsr/mel/mr/nro/st
A Miami-Dade police officer revived a dead company to use as the business vessel for a $275,479 COVID-19 relief loan fraud. Thats in Samuel Harris admission of facts with Fridays guilty plea to one count of wire fraud.

Harris, 43, will learn his sentence at 8:30 a.m. Sept. 25 from Federal Judge Robert Scola in Miamis Wilkie D. Ferguson U.S. Courthouse.

It infuriates me to learn that one of my officers was arrested for fraud, Miami-Dade Police Director Alfredo Freddy Ramirez III said. The action of this officer not only violated the trust of the community, but took advantage of a system that was in place to help businesses in need due to COVID-19. My officers are held to the highest standards of professionalism, accountability, and ethical conduct. I have complete confidence that the United States Attorneys Office has conducted a thorough investigation into the matter.

Miami-Dade police said Harris, who was charged May 3, had been with the agency for four years, 10 months, and worked uniform patrol out of the Kendall District office. Before the year of his fraud, OpenPayrolls.com says, Harris made $71,772 in 2019.

Then, came 2020 and the COVID pandemic.

READ MORE: A Florida lawyers $1.6 million COVID-19 fraud cash got used on a jet, house and a Trump golf club

Oregen Digital and Harris fraud scheme

Harris registered Oregen Digital with the state on Sept. 22, 2015, state records say. In 2016, Harris let the company be dissolved administratively by not filing the annual paperwork.

But, with COVID-19 spreading and the government offering relief loans via the Paycheck Protection Program (PPP) and Economic Injury Disaster Loan (EIDL) programs, Harris reinstated Oregen Digital on June 15, 2020. Harris also opened Oregens first corporate bank account for which he was the only signatory, his admission of facts says.

When Harris filed for a PPP loan on June 29, he claimed on a faux IRS Form W-3 that Oregen employed 10 people and paid them $602,781 in 2019. That turned into PPP loan proceeds of $125,579, money that went into Oregons account.

The next day, Harris filed an EIDL application that claimed Oregen had 10 employees and grossed $859,480 in revenues from Feb. 1, 2019, through Jan. 31, 2020. That got Oregen a $10,000 advance on what would be a total of $149,900 in EIDL money.

IRS-Criminal Investigations, the Small Business Administration Office of the Inspector General and the FBI Miami Area Corruption Task Force, including Miami-Dade police professional compliance bureau officers, handled the investigation. The Miami-Dade County Office of the Inspector General helped with the prosecution, which was handled by Assistant U.S. Attorney Edward N. Stamm.
Four years after a West Miami-Dade wife claimed her husband was being aggressive and scary when she shot and killed him, she has been charged with first-degree murder.

According to the arrest warrant by Miami-Dade police Detective Michael Brajdic, Aimee Martinezs story about why and how she shot Osmanny Montano crumbled under the weight of the evidence. As weighty as any of that evidence: a pillow.

After Martinezs arrest last Thursday, she pleaded not guilty to first-degree murder. The 35-year-old remains in Miami-Dade Corrections custody with no bond granted, customary for a first-degree murder charge.

Osmanny Montano was 34 years old.

READ MORE: Miami-Dade police officer admits $275,000 COVID-19 loan fraud

Martinezs story about shots fired in the condo

County marriage license records say a deputy clerk married Montano and Martinez in Coral Gables on Oct. 18, 2018. Theyd been married eight days shy of five months when Martinez called 911 around 7:30 on a Sunday morning.

Martinez advised that her husband attacked her, and she shot him, the arrest warrant form said. She advised that her husband got up after he was shot and came at her again, at which time she shot him a second time. [Martinez] advised the 911 operator that her husband was shot in the neck and under the ribs, and that her husband was located on the stairs. 

Martinez met the first Miami-Dade officers outside Unit No. I-6 at 4730 SW 67th Ave., in the Oasis Condominium Townhouse Complex. Montano was on the stairwell, shot in the left chest and left neck as Martinez had said. She said the gun, a Smith & Wesson M&P .40 caliber, was hers.

Investigators later determined the couples 2-year-old son had been on the same room when Martinez shot Montano.

Martinez said the couple were sleeping in different rooms because Montano, a U.S. Army veteran, was dealing with a post-traumatic stress disorder episode. She told police Montano came upstairs and began screaming at her. Upon the argument heading downstairs, she said, Montano began hitting himself and threw keys at her.

She told police thats when she went back upstairs, got a gun from a clothes basket next to her bed and concealed it under her buttocks. Martinez said when Montano came in and figured out she had a gun under her, he tried to get it. She said he got on top of her and, from a distance of no more than two feet, she shot him twice.

[Martinez] acknowledged that although [Montano] was aggressive and scary, he had never really hit her before, the arrest report said.

The shooting scene and the investigation

Investigators saw a pillow on the bedroom floor between the bed and a closet, near the hamper where Martinez said she got the gun.

No defects were observed to the pillow at first observation, but upon unfolding the pillow, burning and soot was observed in the center portion of the pillow along with a projectile hole, the arrest affidavit said. Upon turning the pillow over, a hole was observed on the opposite side. There was no observable blood on the pillow.

Two casings were found. One was near the headboard of the bed. The second was inside the bedroom closet, the door of which had a projectile strike mark.

There was no blood pooling or blood spatter located in the area of the pillow, wall, closet door or area of the bed in which [Martinez] claimed to be seated at the time [Montano] was shot, the affidavit said.

Chief Miami-Dade Medical Examiner Kenneth Hutchins noted there was no soot, which is left by a close range shooting, or strippling, which is the burning of Montanos clothes or skin and another sign of a shooting from close range.

After Miami-Dade police firearms analyst John Mancini tested the gun by firing into several pillows, investigators concluded the burn patterns matched the pattern from the pillow being folded over the gun when it was fired. When asked about the hole in the pillow, Martinez denied shooting through a pillow and that nobody in the home had shot through a pillow.

[Martinezs] statement, in which she claims she shot [Montano] while he was on top of her, attempting to gain control of her firearm is completely refuted by the physical evidence, the affidavit said.
Michael Neely, innovator and leader in L.A. homeless and drug treatment services, has died at age 74

Michael E. Neely in 1998. (Cheryl Branch)

Michael E. Neely, a Vietnam veteran who evolved from the fiery leader of Skid Rows March to the Sea to become one of the most innovative and influential minds in Los Angeles homeless and social services policy, has died at age 74.

A former Marine and recovering drug addict, Neely was living in a cardboard box on Skid Row in 1988 when he came up with the idea of sending a team of formerly unhoused people out to guide their peers through the maze of social services. The concept was a prototype for Mayor Karen Bass Inside Safe program to get people out of encampments.

Under his direction, the agency developed into a national model offering mental, medical and drug treatment care, housing, outreach, harm reduction and prison reentry services.

Long before they became watchwords of modern social service practice, Neely championed concepts like racial equity, cultural competency, lived experience and the special needs of LGBTQ+ homeless youth. An intellectual who knew where every body in L.A. politics was buried, he had the ear of leaders at the city, state and federal level. But he never lost his focus on the lives of homeless people.

Neely died at home June 13 after a brief hospitalization. A memorial service is set for July 8.

Read more: Homelessness continues to soar, jumping 9% in L.A. County, 10% in the city

We lost a giant, said Cheryl Branch, a nonprofit executive and the mother of Neelys youngest son, Daniel.

Born in 1948 in New Orleans, Neely was raised in Chicagos Black middle class among others who had joined the Great Migration north, fleeing the racism, poverty and lynchings of the South.

He attended St. Emma Military Academy outside Richmond, Va., the only military boarding school in the U.S. dedicated to young Black and Native American men.

His college education was interrupted when he enlisted in the Marines, serving in Vietnam as a marksman in the 2nd Battalion, 9th Infantry. He returned with a then little-understood post-traumatic stress disorder that led to a substance use problem.

After he moved to Los Angeles, drugs cost him an aerospace job and an apartment in Hollywood. He stayed in shelters, SRO hotel rooms and encampments on Skid Row and in downtown. After getting clean he quickly rose as a major voice for other homeless individuals.

After the city bulldozed an urban campground he helped head with Ted Hayes, leader of the self-help homeless group Justiceville, they led a homeless March to the Sea in 1987 to raise awareness of conditions on Skid Row, briefly camping at Palisades Park in Santa Monica, with stops in Beverly Hills and Malibu.

We want to hit areas of affluence and influence, Neely told The Times at the time.

Read more: Homeless people fight to save lives, and stay alive, as L.A.s fentanyl crisis worsens

Neely joined community groups, assailed the City Council and Board of Supervisors at meetings and sat in at the city of Santa Barbara protesting policing of homeless people, which his daughter Lauren Lees said led to his arrest. But the protests didn't seem to work.

So he turned to the Community Redevelopment Agency, then a major L.A. power player and developer and an unlikely funder of a grass-roots group of formerly unhoused people. Nobody was hiring people with what we now call lived experience in those days, said Herb Hatanaka, executive director of Special Service for Groups (SSG), Neelys funding sponsor. But Mike had not only a very good vision, he had a clear sense of how to implement it. 

The CRA awarded him $58,600 in 1988 and he opened the Homeless Outreach Program with five employees in a storefront on Sixth Street on Skid Row. The yellow-capped and T-shirted HOP team found homeless people in the streets and got them the services they were entitled to, including drug and alcohol rehabilitation.

Tanya Tull, a pioneer of the housing first policy, remembered calling Neely out during this period for yelling at her during a meeting. He apologized and they became lifelong friends.

He was angry and intense, she said. But he never forgot what he came from, and was willing to speak out to say what needed to be said.

In 1992, Neely's agency expanded as the multi-service Homeless Outreach Program Integrated Care Services (HOPICS). Neely drew up a blueprint for the program on a bar napkin for a grant proposal, said Branch.

Neely was selected as a Hesselbein Fellow of the Peter Drucker Foundation (now Leader to Leader Institute), where he was mentored by Jim Collins, author of "Good To Great," in leadership and management techniques, smoothing his rough edges, Tull said. He became a real leader.

He retired from HOPICS and in 2011 was appointed to the Los Angeles Homeless Services Commission, the only member with personal experience of homelessness. "He was the voice of the homeless on that board," said Larry Adamson, a former commissioner and chief operating officer of Midnight Mission.

Neely highlighted the overrepresentation of Black people in the homeless population, and fought for funds for South Los Angeles mom and pop homeless agencies and against Skid Row groups he believed exploited workers with training wages.

He mentored other leaders including Sarah Dusseault, a former commissioner and member of Committee for Greater L.A., which is pushing for housing on city land.

He was very astute, read every document, she said. But he always brought it back to people and humanity, away from numbers."

He was like a conscience for the commission, said Hatanaka.

In 2017, Neely left the commission to join the Los Angeles County Commission for Older Adults, in part to forge a link to the aging homeless population. "How can you reasonably expect an individual who is damn near 80 years old to survive [shelters] ... unless we have specialized facilities?" he said.

Neely knew every great hole-in-the-wall breakfast and lunch joint in Los Angeles, where he would regale friends and colleagues with his infectious sense of humor. Seated next to him at a public hearing, you were in constant danger of laughing out loud at his sotto voce commentaries.

He was a member of multiple boards and advisory groups, including state commissions on Homeless Veterans and on African American Males and Substance Abuse, the L.A. County Commission on Narcotics and Dangerous Drugs and the Congressional Black Caucus Veterans Brain Trust. The Strategic Actions for a Just Economy, where he was board treasurer since 2019, gave him its Community Champion award this year.

He was a great man, but he was a better father, said Lees. In addition to Lees, Neely is survived by his sons, Daniel and Edward Neely; brothers, Mark and Marvin Neely; sisters, Lynda Neely and Gordette Brent; and nephews, nieces and grandchildren.

His memorial is July 8 from 11 a.m. to 3 p.m. at the SSG/HOPICS Weber Community Center at 5849 Crocker St., Los Angeles, 90003.

Sign up for Essential California, your daily guide to news, views and life in the Golden State.

This story originally appeared in Los Angeles Times.
Michael Yeldon's killer now faces 25 years after last minute plea deal before trial

The 18-year-old charged with killing a man at Attucks Court in 2021 took a last second plea deal before his trial Monday that would substantially decrease his time served in prison.

Iris Jenkins pleaded no contest to the court on one count of second-degree murder, one count of attempted second-degree murder and possession of a weapon by a convicted felon. In return, the State Attorney's Office announced they would not prosecute his aggravated assault charge.

Assistant State Attorney Amy Shea, the attorney prosecuting Jenkins, told the News Journal that as part of the plea there is a stipulation that Jenkins be sentenced to a maximum of 25 years in prison. According to Florida Statutes, second-degree murder with a firearm requires a sentence of 25 years to life.

Ready for trial?: 18-year-old Pensacola man preparing to face jury in 2021 Attucks Court shooting

Jenkins arrested: Pensacola police arrest 17-year-old in homicide of 22-year-old at Attucks Court

What did Iris Jenkins do on Aug. 14, 2021?

On Aug. 14, 2021, 22-year-old Michael Yeldon Jr. was driving his car at the Attucks Court housing complex around 7:30 p.m. with passenger Cedric Lockett Jr.

Jenkins then began firing into the vehicle. After Yeldon was shot, his vehicle struck an apartment building.

Michael Anthony Yeldon Jr.

Yeldon was transported to Baptist Hospital and succumbed to his injuries Aug. 15 while surrounded by his family, his father, Michael Anthony Yeldon Sr., told the News Journal in 2021.

The night of the incident, Yeldon drove to pick up Lockett and a third person named Willie McKay, according to Jenkins' arrest report.

Lockett told authorities they believed they were going to "meet some females." Once in the vehicle, McKay told Yeldon he need to stop by Attucks Court.

"Once at Attucks Court, Yeldon drove around in the complex for a brief period," the report states. "At one point, Lockett saw three males standing on a corner inside the complex. He heard McKay shout something as he opened the rear passenger door to exit the vehicle as it approached the males."

Lockett told authorities that McKay had partially exited the vehicle when Lockett said he heard gunshots. He said he heard McKay shout for Yeldon to drive, but the car would not accelerate and began to slowly roll.

The arrest report states Jenkins was dating a woman named Ly'Niya Purifoy during the incident. While Purifoy and Jenkins were dating, she was pregnant with McKay's child, according to the report.

"Jenkins and McKay do not get along," the report says. "They have been arguing for weeks and making threats toward each other's life."

Purifoy told detectives that McKay contacted her the day of the shooting, saying he was going to kill Jenkins in Attucks Court.

Yeldon was seemingly caught in the crossfire.

Speedy trial: Pensacola teen jailed for 2 years on murder charges demands speedy trial before judge

Iris Jenkins submitted a demand for speedy trial

A defendant's motion for a speedy trial "binds the accused and the state," according to Florida's Rules of Criminal Procedure, and tells the court that the defense is ready for trial within five days from the motion.

Once a demand for speedy trial motion is filed, a judge must hold a calendar call within five days. During the calendar call, the court "shall set the case for trial to commence at a date no less than five days nor more than 45 days from the date of the calendar call."

Jenkins submitted his demand for speedy trial May 16 and had his calendar call before a judge May 22, meaning he then has 45 days to go to trial, according to Florida's Rules of Criminal Procedure.

His 45-day limit for speedy trial is Thursday.

The specific reasons for Jenkins demanding a speedy trial is unclear, as the discussion falls under attorney-client privilege, but the Sixth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution guarantees a person the right to a speedy trial.

Additionally, the Speedy Trial Act of 1972 provides time limits for district and federal court cases. Florida's Rules of Criminal Procedure also outline the requirement of speedy trial for Florida cases.

This article originally appeared on Pensacola News Journal: Iris Jenkins faces 25 years for murder of Michael Yeldon in Pensacola
Thousands of Iranian dissidents crowded the streets of a Paris neighbourhood on Saturday while western opponents of the government in Tehran gathered for a politically star-studded event aimed at poking a finger in the eye of the Ayatollahs supporters.

Despite warnings from French authorities and the US Embassy in Paris that alleged threats of a terror attack made a large outdoor event unwise, there were no incidents over the weekend as Iranian dissident activists mingled with prominent current and former officials from the US, UK and other European nations. If that threat of a terror attack was real, it was hard to spot the concern of French authorities on Saturday, given that police did not provide more than a handful of officers to patrol the area, those on the scene told The Independent.

Dissidents with the National Council of Resistance of Iran (NCRI) and the Peoples Mojahedin Organization of Iran (MEK) have long held a chequered relationship with the west, in addition to their long campaign against the Iranian government. This year is no exception to that dynamic. Formerly classified as a terrorist group by the US, the MEK now resides in Albania, where just weeks ago a massive police raid was blamed for the death of a senior MEK member while others sustained serious injuries  all, the MEK alleged, at the behest of Irans government. The same day, French authorities moved to cancel Saturdays rally.

Varying explanations for the raid were presented in the hours following, but over the weekend a top Iranian official tweeted that computers seized from the MEK by Albanian police had been transferred to Iranian custody, a development first reported on Monday in Iranian state media. A senior NCRI official fumed about the news in a statement to The Independent, demanding that the US State Department take a position on Albanias collaboration with Irans intelligence agencies; the Biden administration had previously reacted to the raid by calling it a police action while carefully avoiding any suggestion of Iranian involvement.

The Independent has reached out to the State Department for comment on the news of the computers being transferred to Iranian custody. The agency had previously issued a brief statement in the wake of the raid depicting it as a typical law enforcement action and noting that the Biden administration doesnt view the MEK as a viable political alternative to the regime in Tehran.

NCRI president-elect Maryam Rajavi also had sharp words for the State Department specifically in her address on Sunday.

As for the advocates of appeasement within the US State Department, who concurrently backed the tragedy in [Albania], it is enough to note that the mullahs waved their turbans and lavished them with commendations, she insisted.

Ms Rajavi also questioned: Why do [Ayatollah Ali] Khameni and [Iranian President Ebrahim] Raisi demonstrate such fear over a gathering taking place 5,000 kilometres away from Tehran?

Seemingly growing efforts by Tehran to punish the MEK and the Biden State Departments rejection of the group as a viable alternative-in-waiting to the Iranian regime made Saturday and Sundays events all the more of a coup for the NCRI and MEK; with increasing support from prominent members of the DC and London foreign policy establishments, the position of the current administration is looking all the more tenuous. That fact was hammered home by the virtual address of Sundays convention by former Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, characterised by The Independents sources as maintaining one of, if not the, friendliest relationship between the State Department and MEK during his tenure.

Other VIPs at Sundays event were equally impressive gets for the dissident group, especially given the State Departments coldness: former UK Prime Minister Liz Truss, who appeared remotely, 2024 presidential candidate Mike Pence, former Sen Joseph Lieberman, ex-House of Commons speaker John Bercow, Trump national security adviser John Bolton and a dozen sitting members of the US Congress from both parties. Members who have attended the NCRIs events in Washington typically skew conservative or towards the hawkish wing of foreign policy thought in the US government.

VIPs including Mike Pence, John Bolton and others take a group photograph at the 2023 Free Iran rally hosted by the NCRI (NCRI)

Mr Pence used his remarks to lash out at Joe Bidens White House for supposedly working overtime to restore the Iran nuclear deal signed in 2015 under the Obama administration (and later abandoned by Donald Trump).

Now, a new administration is threatening to unravel all of the progress we made in marginalising the tyrannical regime in Tehran, Mr Pence claimed.

They are working overtime to restore the Iran Nuclear Deal, putting Tehran back on the fast track to obtaining nuclear weapons.

He also claimed that Iran could develop a nuclear weapon in a year if sanctions were rolled back and the 2015 deal snapped back into place.

Ms Truss, meanwhile, appeared to take aim at the west for appeasement of the Iranian regime  remarks that were timely in the wake of the Albanian police action and accusations of similar betrayals by the French.

Theres been too much appeasement. Theres been too much wishful thinking, theres been too much hope that things would change when it was evident that things were not going to change and have not changed, she said.

Former House of Commons speaker John Bercow delivers remarks at the 2023 NCRI Free Iran summit in Paris (NCRI)

Then speaking of Iran along with Russia and other authoritarian governments, she argued: We need to be clearwe wont treat these countries as part of the normal international system.

While Saturdays rally went off without incident, the NCRI is no stranger to facing the threat of more serious revenge plots carried out by agents of Irans government.

The rally and convention attended by Mr Pence and others was targeted in 2018 in a terror plot that was uncovered and halted by authorities, who arrested an Iranian diplomat and five others accused of planning a bombing. The diplomat, Assadolah Assadi, was sentenced in Belgium to 20 years in prison and the French government blamed Irans intelligence ministries for being behind the plans.

The Iranian foreign ministry publicly condemned France over the weekend for allowing the rally to go forward, after a court battle resulted in a victory for the dissidents over authorities who had hoped to call it off.
An air-raid warning was issued at Odesa Oblast after 03:00 in the morning on 3 July due to the threat of Russian Kalibr missiles from the Black Sea.

Source: Map of air-raid warnings; Ukraine's Air Force

Details: An air-raid warning was issued in Odesa Oblast at 03:10

Ukraines Air Force noted that there was a missile threat due to the launch of Kalibr cruise missiles from the Black Sea.

Update: The all-clear was given in Odesa Oblast at 03:51.

Journalists fight on their own frontline. Support Ukrainska Pravda or become our patron!
The Mississippi Democratic Party chair announced he will resign. What happens next?

What happens next for the Mississippi Democratic Party would be pure speculation now that party chair Tyree Irving announced his resignation, effective July 22, one party official said.

"Even though his resignation has been tendered, we still haven't officially done anything," Congressional District 1 Chair Andre DeBerry said in a phone interview Monday.

Mississippi Today broke the news of Irving's resignation on Sunday, less than a week after the party chair came under fire by Secretary of State Candidate Shuwaski Young for writing emails to some National Democratic Committee staffers criticizing Mississippi Democratic Party Executive Director Andre Wagner.

Neither Irving nor Wagner responded to requests for comment.

Tyree Irving

Regardless of whether the party decides to accept Irving's resignation, state Democrats will move forward, DeBerry said.

"The party is more than one or two or three or four people," DeBerry said. "It's an organizational piece, so I would think that, if they would, in fact, change the (party) head, I don't think it would really impact the party itself because of the organizational structure that's out there. That's not predicated on who's at the top."

Election 2023: Democratic candidate again calls for his party leader to be removed, replaced

Mississippi Democratic Party leaders still plan to meet Thursday to discuss Irving's letter of resignation, DeBerry said.

The meeting initially was scheduled after a petition was circulated among party leaders over the weekend asking for an emergency meeting to seek Irving's removal, according to Mississippi Today.

It is not the first time Young has called for Irving's removal from party leadership.

After losing to Republican Rep. Michael Guest in November, Young said he would not run for office again if Irving remained chair. Young later changed his mind and announced his candidacy for Secretary of State.

An attempt to reach Young for comment Monday was unsuccessful, but according to a statement he released last week, Young said he was shocked by Irving's emails, adding Irving has "undermined democracy and railroaded critical  relationships that would benefit Mississippi."

Do you have a story to share? Contact Lici Beveridge at lbeveridge@gannett.com. Follow her on Twitter @licibev or Facebook at facebook.com/licibeveridge.

This article originally appeared on Mississippi Clarion Ledger: Tyree Irving Mississippi Democratic Party chair resigns after tirade
In 1775, tensions between American colonists and their British overlords had reached a boiling point, sparking the Revolutionary War. Although not part of the 13 colonies, and far detached from the campaigns in the East, Mississippi has several obscure but direct connections to the conflict.

During the 1770s, Mississippi was under British control and referred to as West Florida. However, only a handful of settlers had ventured into the vast lands between the Mississippi River and the Appalachian Mountains.

These early settlers never anticipated that the war raging in New England would ever affect them. Much like their counterparts in the East, most settlers in the territory found themselves torn between loyalties.

One such figure was James Willing, who was born in Philadelphia but eventually settled in Natchez. Facing bankruptcy and poverty, Willing attempted to rally the diverse settlers in the area to overthrow British rule to no avail.

In 1777, Willing returned to Philadelphia and successfully convinced the Continental Congress to grant him permission to combat British influence along the Mississippi River. Armed with a commission as a Captain in the Continental Navy and a small ship he purchased, the Rattletrap, Willing set sail.

The Rattletrap was a galley, equipped with a small sail, oars, and two small swivel-guns. With a crew of over 100 men, Willing navigated the Mississippi River, seizing property and goods from supposed British Loyalists. While a few of his crew were enlisted as some of the first Continental Marines, many were actually pirates and bandits who took advantage of the situation to plunder indiscriminately.

Interestingly, a significant number of settlers along the river held no allegiance to Britain and were just as detached from the fledgling United States. Upon reaching Natchez, Willing and his armed band intimidated the town into declaring neutrality, although many locals joined their ranks. The crew looted affluent businesses and homes, pillaging goods, slaves, and even farm animals.

The British responded by sending the sloop Rebecca up the river to confront the Rattletrap. Willings men managed to surprise the British, capturing the ship near Natchez, renaming it the Morris. The two ships continued their raiding activities, targeting British shipping near New Orleans and the Gulf of Mexico.

Despite his anti-British sentiment, the Spanish governor in New Orleans, Bernardo de Galvez, disapproved of Willing and his pirate crew. Galvez urged Oliver Pollock, the American agent in the city, to petition Congress to disband Willings group. However, before any action was taken, the tide of the war shifted dramatically.

Encouraged by American victories in the East, the entry of France into the conflict, and the desire to expand their territorial holdings, Spain joined the war in 1779. Galvez promptly led an expedition toward Baton Rouge, capturing multiple forts before seizing the city. His forces then proceeded up the Mississippi River toward Natchez.

Arriving at British Fort Panmure, Galvez demanded its surrender. Surprisingly, the British garrison acquiesced, ceding control of the entire lower Mississippi River to the Spanish. Galvez and his men continued their Gulf Coast Campaign, capturing the Mississippi Coast from the British as they headed toward Pensacola.

With that, Mississippi shifted from British to Spanish control after a brief campaign with minimal casualties. Subsequently, all land east of the Mississippi River fell under American control. While the Mississippi Gulf Coast now belonged to Spain, internal issues and pressure from the United States would later undermine Spanish authority in the region.

Following the British defeat, thousands of loyalists from the East sought refuge in Louisiana and Mississippi, hoping to escape persecution from their former neighbors. American veterans also settled in the state, establishing new communities and contributing to its growth.

Grave-sites for many of these Revolutionary War era veterans and figures, from both sides, are scattered across Mississippi today. Many of their descendants still reside in the state.

Beyond American independence and the annexation of what is now Mississippi, the influence of the Revolutionary War influenced the states culture. For instance, Greenville was named in honor of General Nathanael Greene, while Kosciusko pays tribute to Polish-born American General Tadeusz Kosciuszko.

While the American Revolution may have only played a minor role in Mississippis history, it served as a crucial foundation for the states formation. Subsequent events, such as the War of 1812 and the American Civil War, would overshadow this early history.
The Modesto City Council has approved labor agreements for the majority of its employees that will cost the city $92.3 million over four years.

The agreements call for the citys civilian employees to receive pay increases totaling 13% over the four years, along with other enhancements. The citys police officers will receive pay increases totaling 17%, as well as other enhancements over four years.

Council members unanimously approved three labor agreements with the citys civilian workers  from accounting clerks and electricians to utilities workers and community service officers  on June 13 and unanimously approved on June 27 a labor agreement with the Modesto Police Officers Association.

The pay increases and other incentives also apply to employees not represented by the unions. So City Manager Joe Lopez and his department directors and Police Chief Brandon Gillespie and his captains also will receive increases.

The agreements are from July 1 through June 30, 2027, and apply to 1,130 city employees  everyone but the firefighters, who still have a year left on their current labor agreement. The Fire Departments managers, including Chief Alan Ernst, also did not receive pay increases. Theirs will be tied to the new labor agreement with the firefighters union.

Councilman David Wright acknowledged in an interview that the labor agreements come with a price tag.

He said Modesto is struggling to attract and keep good employees and too many are leaving to go to work for nearby agencies, including Tracy, the Modesto Irrigation District and Stanislaus County. He added that it is hard to hire and keep good police officers because of a statewide shortage.

The pay increases come after voters in November approved Measure H, the 1% sales tax increase that is expected to bring in about $41.8 million annually to the citys general fund budget. The budget primarily pays for public safety and other basics. Not including the Measure H funding, the citys current general fund is about $178 million.

Wright said the labor agreements fit in with Measure Hs goal of delivering better public safety and other services.

Were just having a hard time keeping employees, he said. One of the issues is salaries. Wright said the higher compensation will let Modesto compete for and keep excellent employees. We want quality police officers. We want quality employees  people we can count on to serve residents.

Sales tax money is going to more than raises

Modesto is spending its Measure H money on more than employee raises.

The city expects to spend $27.1 million of its Measure H funding in 2023-24 budget, which starts July 1, on such projects as replacing playgrounds at eight park and replacing three park bathrooms, hiring four more park rangers, which will bring the number of rangers to a dozen, hiring five more community service officers and one more animal control officer.

The city also will add a tree pruning crew and a forestry crew to help with the backlog in city tree maintenance. And Modesto will fix sidewalks, curbs and gutters damaged by tree roots at roughly 500 locations.

At least $41 million of the labor agreements total cost of $92.3 million over the four years will not come from the general fund. The fund makes up about a third of the citys total operating budget.

Human Resources Director Christina Alger told council members the citys compensation policy has been to pay its civilian workers 7.5% below the median among comparable jurisdictions. She said the labor agreements bring the city within 5% below the median.

She said the police officers total compensation was 6.6% below the median among comparable agencies. She said the new labor agreement brings their compensation to the median.

Alger said in an interview that Modesto compares its civilian compensation against the compensation offered by Bakersfield, Fresno, Livermore, Manteca, Roseville, Sacramento, Stockton, Tracy, Turlock and Stanislaus County.

She said Modesto compares its police officers compensation against the compensation offered by Bakersfield, Elk Grove, Hayward, Livermore, Manteca, Sacramento, Stockton, Tracy, Turlock and Stanislaus County.

The staff reports and council presentation did not list what Modesto employees now make. But the California State Controllers government compensation website provides some detail for 2022.

It shows one police officers base pay was $96,226 while another had a base pay of $106,800. A police lieutenant had a base pay of $137,089. An airport maintenance crew leader was paid $69,217 while an accounting technician II was paid $63,597.

The citys director of community and economic development was paid $175,022, and the city manager was paid $254,588. None of this includes overtime and specialty and incentive pay.

City workers get two more paid holidays

So the total wages for the police officer with the base pay of $96,626 were $221,771. That includes $112,884 in overtime, $1,000 in lump sum pay and $11,261 in other pay. And the city managers total wages in 2022 were $279,753. That included $982 in overtime, $10,018 in lump sum pay and $14,165 in other pay.

The labor agreements also have more enhancements, including adding two more paid holidays: Juneteenth and Cesar Chavez Day. That increases the number of paid holidays for the city from 11 to 13. The enhancements include a 2.5% pay increase for having a bachelors degree and 4% for a masters. The city also will contribute more toward employees health insurance.

The labor agreements add a sixth step with a 5% pay increase starting in July 2025. Currently, employees whose performance meets expectations can receive five annual 5% step increases in their pay.

Some $62.2 million of the labor agreements total cost of $92.3 million over the four years consists of the salary and step increases. There also is $7.7 million in what the city calls market rate adjustments for some employees who the city says are underpaid based on what comparable jurisdictions pay for the same work.
You are here: Business

Employees work at the Tesla Gigafactory in Shanghai, east China, Nov. 20, 2020. [Photo/Xinhua]

The U.S. electric carmaker Tesla delivered 466,140 vehicles in the second quarter of 2023, up 83 percent year on year, said the company's report Sunday.



About 96 percent of the deliveries were those of its Model Y crossover and Model 3 entry-level sedan, it said.

Meanwhile, Tesla said it produced 479,700 vehicles in the second quarter, up from 258,580 a year earlier, beating analysts' expectations.
More than 100,000 take part in Colombia's largest-ever Pride parade

The LGBTQ community is a frequent target of violence in Colombia, with at least 39 LGBTQ people killed in 2022, according to authorities (Juan BARRETO)

More than 100,000 people were on the streets in Colombia's capital Bogota on Sunday to take part in the largest-ever LGBTQ Pride parade in the country's history, the city's mayor said.

Claudia Lopez, Bogota's first lesbian mayor, addressed crowds waving rainbow flags and performing dances in the central Simon Bolivar Park.

"Here we will continue, every day and hour marching with pride for what we are, because we have the same duties and we claim for the same rights. Not one more, not one less," she said.

Lopez later wrote on Twitter: "Forty years ago in the first Pride March there were 30 people, today we are +100,000! The biggest march in history!"

Pride parades also took place in cities including Medellin, Cali, and Barranquilla.

"I have been attending the march for 11 years, and it has been a long time since I saw a march with so many people," Camila, a businesswoman, told AFP.

"People's perceptions are changing and that means a lot."

The LGBTQ community is a frequent target of violence in Colombia, with at least 39 LGBTQ people killed in 2022, according to authorities.

Colombia's ombudsman's office reported in March that of 394 cases of "violence by prejudice" investigated last year, 238 were against transgender people, 61 against lesbian women, 123 against gay men and 21 against bisexual people.

Human rights activist Danilo Huertas, who took part in the Bogota parade, said it was "in memory of all the people who have been victims of conflict" for their sexual orientation, "but also a day to celebrate because... we have made progress."

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More Than a Month After Thailands Election, We Still Dont Know Who Will Lead the Country. Here Are All the Ways It Could Go

Fans of Pita Limjaroenrat, seen holding pictures of him

Photos of Move Forward Party candidate Pita Limjaroenrats face adorn handheld fans outside the Thai parliament building in Bangkok, where pro-democracy protesters gathered on May 23, 2023, to demand that senators back Pita as the countrys next Prime Minister. Credit - Peerapon BoonyakiatSOPA Images/LightRocket/Getty Images

Thailands National Assembly will begin its first of potentially several prolonged rounds of voting to select the next Prime Minister on July 13, more than eight weeks after nationwide elections appeared to turn a new chapter in the countrys politics from nearly a decade of junta control.

The election results were widely seen as a repudiation of the military government that has ruled since 2014 after seizing power in a coup. But for the fresh class of parliament members that took their seats in Bangkok on Monday, the first order of businessto form a new governmentis far from straightforward.

Only the seats in the lower house, which is made up of 500 representatives, were up for election in May. Meanwhile, the selection of the next Prime Minister depends also on the votes of the upper house, made up of 250 junta-appointed senators, leaving what comes next very uncertain.

Heres what to knowand all the ways it could play out.

What were the results of the election and who are the major players?

The Move Forward Party, a progressive opposition party led by 42-year-old Harvard grad and former Grab executive Pita Limjaroenrat, emerged from the election with 151 seats won: the most of any party but not enough for a majority. Move Forward campaigned on an ambitious platform promising to curb the influence and power of the military and the monarchy over the nation. It also supported same-sex marriage and social welfare programs.

Widely expected to top the polls but instead coming closely behind Move Forward with 141 seats won was Pheu Thai, a populist opposition party rooted in nostalgia for the past rule of former Prime Minister Thaskin Shinawatra, who was ousted in a 2006 coup and whose younger sister became Prime Minister in 2011 but was ousted in 2014. Thaskins 36-year-old daughter Paetongtarn Shinawatra was one of three Pheu Thai candidates for Prime Minister this year.

The Bhumjaithai Party, a conservative party that had aligned with the military-backed coalition government after the 2019 election, came in third with 71 seats. Anutin Charnvirakul, the current Health Minister and the champion of the countrys recent cannabis legalization, is the partys Prime Minister candidate.

The junta-aligned parties of Palang Pracharath and United Thai Nationrepresented by Deputy Prime Minister Prawit Wongsuwon and incumbent Prime Minister Prayuth Chan-ocha, a former general who has led Thailand since the 2014 coupwon just 40 and 36 seats, respectively.

Scenario 1: Move Forwards coalition alliance forms the government, and Pita becomes Prime Minister

After the election, Move Forward and Pheu Thai came together with six other parties to form a 312-seat coalition alliance. Confident in the public mandate shown by the election, Pita told reporters last week that he has enough Senate support to become Prime Minister, but whether thats true remains to be seen.

There are also lingering doubts over whether Pita will even be eligible to become Prime Minister.

Pita has been battling a controversy, which threatens to upend his candidacy for the premiership, over shares he allegedly inherited in a defunct broadcaster. Local electoral laws forbid those owning media shares from being elected to the House of Representatives.

Read More: What to Know About the Controversy That Could Keep Thailands Progressive Party Leader From Taking Office

The case bears uncanny resemblance to the dissolution of Future Forward, Move Forwards predecessor, in 2019. Future Forwards leader Thanathorn Juangroongruangkit, who was the Prime Minister nominee of an anti-junta coalition at the time, was disqualified after the Constitutional Court ruled that he held shares in a media company.

Other political opponents of the junta have suffered similar fatesthe Thai Rak Thai Party, founded by former Prime Minister Thaksin, was dissolved in 2007 after the Constitutional Court found it guilty of breaking election laws.

Past history says opposition political parties who have made headway, whether that be Thai Rak Thai, whether that be Future Forward  they were quickly disbanded by the constitutional court, Mark S. Cogan, an associate professor of peace and conflict studies at Japans Kansai Gaidai University, tells TIME. [Move Forward] bears the same risks as all the other past failed, vanquished political parties in the country.

Scenario 2: Pita is sidelined or disqualified, and Pheu Thai takes the lead in the same coalition

The two leading opposition parties, Move Forward and Pheu Thai, have emphasized unity since the election ended, though there have been reports of cracks in their alliance as each side jostles for power in whatever government is ultimately formed. For weeks, the two parties were locked in negotiations over the lower house speakership, for which the vote is set to take place on Tuesday. The role is seen as crucial to the appointment of the Prime Minister, since the speaker controls the agenda of House sessionswhich means it can influence the timeline of Prime Minister votes.

In a show of compromise and unity, late Monday night after the opening session of the new parliament, the eight-party coalition alliance announced that it would endorse Wan Muhamad Noor Matha, a veteran Thai politician of the Prachachart Party, for House Speaker.

Still, getting Senate support looks to be a tough battle for Pita, whose vehemently anti-junta party has vowed not to work with the military-aligned Palang Pracharath and United Thai Nation parties. Move Forward has also championed the amendment of Section 112, a controversial lese-majeste law criticized by pro-democracy activists but upheld by the junta and royalists, including Move Forwards coalition partner Pheu Thai.

Theres a strong likelihood that Pita will not receive enough support to be approved as Prime Minister, and thats mostly due to the military-appointed Senate, Napon Jatusripitak, a visiting fellow at Singapores ISEAS-Yusof Ishak Institute, tells TIME.

Should Pita fail to become Prime Minister, whether by falling short of the necessary votes or by being disqualified by the Election Commission, the situation would be desirable for Pheu Thai, Katsuyuki Takahashi, a professor at the College of ASEAN Community Studies in Thailands Naresuan University, tells TIME.

If Pita is disqualified, no [prime minister] candidate exists in the Move Forward Party, Takahashi says. The Pheu Thai Party has three candidates.

Scenario 3: Pheu Thai forms a coalition government with conservatives and without Move Forward

While Move Forward has from the outset positioned itself as anti-junta and pro-reform of the monarchy, the populist Pheu Thai has demonstrated more ambiguity in its political alignment. Some local commentators have speculated that Pheu Thai may even abandon Move Forwards coalition alliance and join forces with parties more favorable to the military and the monarchy in order to gain the ultimate edge.

But such a move could be risky and shortsighted. According to Cogan, partnering with conservative forces would spell doom for the credibility of Pheu Thai among a significant segment of its supporters, many of whom represented the pro-Thaksin red shirts during violent clashes against yellow-clad monarchists a decade ago.

That is like making a deal with the devil, says Cogan. I cant imagine these diehard red-shirts, diehard Thaksin supporters, being forced to make a coalition with the very same people who overthrew the Thaksin government in the first place. What credibility would you have with your own constituents, with your own supporters?

A Pheu Thai betrayal may also not be the worst outcome for Move Forward, Titipol Phakdeewanich, dean of the political science faculty at Ubon Ratchathani University, tells TIME, as it would leave the leading opposition party well-placed to capture even more support in the next election.

The supporters of Move Forward will be upset, Titipol says. That would also send them another landslide in the House of Representatives.

Scenario 4: Conservative forces form a minority government

If the junta-appointed Senate votes against both Move Forwards and Pheu Thais candidates for Prime Minister, it could leave room for a minority coalition of conservative parties in the lower house to nominate their own Prime Minister candidate, who would likely be viewed much more favorably by the Senate.

Among top contenders for such a coalition is Anutin, though experts say that if he were to succeed in getting the premiership, his government would be hamstrung both by the fact that an opposition coalition may still rule the lower house and by the amount of dealmaking that would have had to take place between so many small conservative groups just to form his Senate-enabled governing minority coalition.

Anutin would be a very weak prime minister. It would be a very fragile coalition, simply alone by the concessions that he would have to make, says Cogan. And there would be a lot of pressure to maintain, essentially, the political status quo.

Such a precarious balance could also be short-lived. As soon as May next year, the Senates voting power for the Prime Minister is set to expireat which point a government made up of a minority coalition in the lower house would no longer be tenable.

Scenario 5: The military retains power

Experts tell TIME that the possibility of yet another military coupafter Thailand experienced two in less than 10 yearsisnt likely, but ultimately cant be ruled out.

If the Prime Minister vote drags on, this will give Prayut time to submit the annual military reshuffle list and appoint key military positions to loyalists, setting pawns in place for another potential coup after the reshuffle takes effect on October 1.

It is possible though not plausible that a coup would happen while Thailand awaits a new Prime Minister, Paul Chambers, lecturer and advisor on international affairs at Naresuan University, tells TIME, adding thats only if the archroyalist establishment realizes that [Pita] will indeed become Prime Minister and is determined to stop him [by] using military force.

However, with the odds stacked against Pitafrom resistance in the Senate to any number of political machinations by opponents or alliesa coup may not even be necessary to keep him away from the premiership and keep the military in power. There are so many alternatives for the establishment, says Chambers.

Meanwhile, says Napon, the visiting fellow at the ISEAS-Yusof Ishak Institute: There is no deadline, so [Prayut] is currently the caretaker prime minister and he can continue to fulfill that role until the next Prime Minister is elected.
Lindsey GrahamSean Rayford/Getty Images

Sen. Lindsey Graham, R-S.C., faced an onslaught of jeers and boos from Trump supporters during a MAGA rally in his home state of South Carolina on Saturday night. The former president did little to defend the conservative lawmaker, aside from stating that Graham enlisted "liberal" support for Trump's re-election campaign. Trump also assured the crowd that he would get Graham "straight," seemingly referencing allegations that the South Carolina Republican is gay. MSNBC's "Morning Joe" panelists poked fun at the situation, stating that Graham had endured "ritualistic humiliation" at the hands of ardent Trumpers. "With friends like these, I mean, Lindsey Graham is someone who has, by many accounts, sullied his reputation over and over by his robust defense of Donald Trump," said Jonathan Lemire, who was subbing in as a host. "Yes, he broke with him occasionally on foreign policy issues. Yes, he briefly did the night of Jan. 6 before coming running back. He is still one of Trump's staunchest defenders, and, man, Donald Trump gave him little to no support or cover right there."

"Yeah, that was what we call ritualistic humiliation, I believe," said Politico's deputy managing editor, Sam Stein, who appeared as a panelist on the segment. "In his home state, it's brutal. To a degree, Graham invites this stuff. I was recalling how a couple weeks ago, Lindsey Graham had gone to some conventions, like, if you can't support a 14-week abortion ban federally, you don't deserve to be president. Trump has refused to support the ban, but Graham is supporting Trump for president. Lindsey invites this kind of stuff occasionally."
HSBC, which allows customers to register as gender-neutral, is the top ranking bank in Stonewalls annual Equality Index - Chris J. Ratcliffe/Bloomberg

The majority of High Street banks are members of diversity schemes run by the controversial charity Stonewall, The Telegraph can reveal.

Lenders are facing questions over their links to the charity amid a backlash over closing the bank accounts of some people with gender-critical views.

A vicar who questioned his building societys Pride branding had his account closed, while a Scottish blogger believes action was taken by his bank over his stance on gender issues.

Stonewalls Diversity Champions scheme includes guidance to employers on gender-neutral spaces and the use of pronouns. The company also runs a top 100 index that measures employers on diversity and inclusion.

HSBC, which allows customers to register as gender-neutral, is the top ranking bank in Stonewalls annual Equality Index, and Natwest, which is still one-third owned by the Government, is linked to the charity.

Barclays, which offers private medical cover for employees transitioning, and Nationwide, which encourages staff to use pronouns in email signatures, are also among Stonewalls top 100 employers. Santander is a member of the index, while TSB is a member of the Diversity Champions Scheme.

Lloyds Banking Group, which runs its own branches as well as Halifax and Bank of Scotland, was the only major lender to fail to respond to queries about the scheme, but was previously named as the countrys top employer by Stonewall.

Blower cartoon

A number of high-profile organisations including the BBC, Channel 4, the Cabinet Office, and the Department of Health have stopped working with Stonewall amid concerns over its schemes.

Guidance has included describing mothers as a parent who has given birth, to remove gendered language and to allow those who self-identify as women to use female toilets and changing rooms.

The Information Commissioner has previously found that the index and the Diversity Champions scheme allowed Stonewall to exercise a significant degree of influence over the policies that participating members operate.

Last week Nigel Farage, the former Brexit Party leader, revealed that his bank had closed his account, and two former Brexit Party MEPs revealed that their accounts were also closed.

Since then, members of the public have accused banks of shutting down their accounts. Among them was Rev Richard Fothergill, a customer of Yorkshire Building Society for 17 years, whose account was closed days after he wrote to the bank to complain about its public messaging during Pride month.

Stuart Campbell, who runs the pro-independence Wings Over Scotland blog, had his accounts shut by First Direct, owned by HSBC, which he believes was over his stance on gender issues.

Barclays recently had to pay out 21,500 in compensation to the Core Issues Trust, a Christian ministry, after shutting its account over its stance on gender identity.

The establishment are trying to force me out of the UK by closing my bank accounts.



I have been given no explanation or recourse as to why this is happening to me.



This is serious political persecution at the very highest level of our system.



If they can do it to me, they pic.twitter.com/O4xQ1h79ub  Nigel Farage (@Nigel_Farage) June 29, 2023

Banks are facing pressure from the Government to explain account closures, and Jeremy Hunt, the Chancellor, has ordered an investigation.

However, UK Finance, the industry trade body, defended the rights of banks to shut accounts as they see fit, arguing that lenders only do so after conducting an extensive review.

Tide, an online business bank, became the latest to face questions on Monday as the hosts of Triggernometary, a free speech YouTube show and podcast, said they would take it to the Financial Ombudsman after their account was closed.

Konstantin Kisin, one of the hosts, said he had been told the issue was because of the podcast, which has more than half a million subscribers, receiving donations, but added that this doesnt seem to be a very credible explanation.

We cant possibly be the only organisation thats a business and accepts donations, he said.

Tide said any decisions on account closures had no connection whatsoever to a members beliefs and that it was categorically false to suggest otherwise.

Craig Mackinlay, the Tory MP for South Thanet, said he was concerned that decisions were being made by activist banking staff and lenders were hurting those who dared air a view.

With most banks signed up to Stonewall, one wonders if too much discretionary power now sits with some activist banking staff, he said. Diversity, inclusion and equality works both ways including the right to a variety of opinions in a free society.

On Monday, Mr Farage said there was no coincidence about banks signing up for Stonewall membership and shutting down the accounts of those who were gender critical.

A spokesman for Stonewall said that it did not pressure banks on operational decisions, adding: There are no requirements in the Diversity Champions programme over how members engage with any customers, and we do not seek to influence operational decisions for any Diversity Champion on matters such as these.

Our Diversity Champions programme simply provides resources and guidance to support member organisations to include and support LGBTQ+ colleagues at 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.
How much does Eagle pay city employees? Search our 2023 salary database

The city of Eagle has 77 employees. They make from $16 an hour to nearly $65 an hour.

The highest-paid employee is Planning and Zoning Director William Vaughan, a full-time worker who was hired in 1996 and makes $64.44 an hour, or over $134,000 annually, according to payroll data.

Long-Range Planning and Parks Director Nichoel Baird-Spencer makes $57.03 an hour, or $118,000 per year, also full time, the second highest salary at City Hall. She was hired in 2004.

The lowest-paid employee is Parks Public Works Technician Jon Thomas, who makes $16 an hour, or $33,000 per year.

Eagles full-time mayor, Jason Pierce, makes $36.69 an hour, over $76,000 annually.

The average pay is $27.19 an hour, equivalent to over $56,000 a year for a full-time city employee.

Below is a searchable database showing the salaries of all city employees as of May 2023. Some searches will contain multiple pages of results.

The Idaho Statesman obtained this data through a public records request. Heres how and why we did it:
The Museum of Space History in Alamogordo, New Mexico planned a members day for the International Space Hall of Fame Foundation (ISHFF).

ISHFF supports the museum's education and exhibit programs and this year invited a special guest, and NASA Astronaut, John Daniel Danny Olivas.

Members Day, otherwise known as, the BIG BANG festival will be from 10 a.m. to 5 p.m., on the Fourth of July at 3198 State Route 2001. It will include educational activities, free movies and a free museum tour.

Gates open at 6 p.m. and close at 8 p.m., while the firework show begins at 9:15 pm which is open to any Foundation members.

Olivas, an El Pasoan, said he was excited to speak on members day, providing all eager minds with information to their questions on space.

In an interview Olivas said he was inspired to become an astronaut when he was seven years old from a family trip to Houston, Texas.

More: Apollo moon program launched former astronaut Danny Olivas' interest in space exploration

Olivas received his bachelors degree from the University of Texas at El Paso. He went on to receive his masters degree from University of Houston and his PhD from Rice University. Olivas worked in space since 1996 with Jet Propulsion Laboratory.

He began with NASA as an Astronaut in 1998 where he was a part of two space missions and five space walks.

I left NASA in 2010 and worked for the defense and private sector for 12 years. I just recently joined Collins Aerospace in Houston, Texas, working on the next generation space suit, said Olivas.

Olivas, along with his wife Marie Schwarzkopf, sit on the International Space Hall of Fame board. Olivas serves as an adviser astronaut, and Schwarzkopf is the secretary of the board.

We have been big fans of the museum for as long as I can remember, Olivas said. I will be participating in two astronaut talks for Members Day.

Olivas said he will talk to the audience about how was able to get to the position of being 250 miles above the surface of the planet, outside of a spacecraft.

I hope to have some time for some Q&A, answer some folks questions, Olivas said. If they have questions regarding whats next for NASA, or what is next for space exploration, is there life out there or even how you use the restroom in space.

Olivas said when he worked for NASA, a lot of the items he had throughout the time, are at the museum and have been archived. He said he admires the education and outreach that the museum does in the area and recognize the region's contribution to the space program.

The whole purpose of this is really to try and get people to go to the museum and understand what is going on with ISHFF, Olivas said. All the proceeds will go to the foundation and the objective is to support the museum. The money is going to a good cause, ISHFF is a non-profit organization that is really trying to inspire the next generation of explorers, scientist, and people like me, a stargazer.

Olivas said there is a dinner scheduled in the evening, Dinner with an astronaut, where there are limited number of tickets and guests will have dinner with Olivas and could speak to him about a number of topics.

Members day is not limited to old members. Anyone can become a member that same day, said Public Relations and Marketing Director Cathy Harper. So, if you want to come and enjoy everything, we have to offer that day, come become a member in the lobby and enjoy the day.

An individual membership costs $35 and family memberships cost $75. Both memberships allow you to get into any Association of Science Technology Centers (ASTC) museum for free with other benefits. For more information visit the New Mexico space museum site.

Juan Corral can be reached at JCorral@gannett.com or on twitter at @Juan36Corr.

This article originally appeared on Alamogordo Daily News: Museum of Space History hosts members day with Astronaut Danny Olivas
Nathan Law pictured in Taipei, Taiwan in November 2022

A pro-democracy campaigner who fled Hong Kong has told the BBC his life has become more dangerous because of a bounty offered for his arrest.

Nathan Law, who lives in the UK, is among eight exiled activists wanted by the territory's police.

Authorities are offering rewards of HK$1 million (100,581; $127,637) for information leading to their capture.

Mr Law said he needed to be "more careful" about divulging his whereabouts as a result of the bounty.

The eight activists targeted are accused of colluding with foreign forces - a crime that can carry a sentence of life in prison. The offence comes under Hong Kong's draconian security law, which was imposed three years ago after widespread pro-democracy protests took place in 2019.

The UK's Foreign Secretary James Cleverly said the UK would "not tolerate any attempts by China to intimidate and silence individuals in the UK and overseas."

"We call on Beijing to remove the National Security Law and for the Hong Kong authorities to end their targeting of those who stand up for freedom and democracy," he said in a statement.

Under the national security law, hundreds of pro-democracy campaigners have been arrested and convicted in Hong Kong.

Beijing has said the law is needed to bring stability to the city, but critics say it is designed to squash dissent.

The eight named in this announcement are all based in the UK, the US and Australia - countries which do not have extradition treaties with China.

"They have committed very serious offences that endanger national security," Steven Li, chief superintendent of the national security department, said.

He added that while Hong Kong police could not arrest them while they remained abroad, they would not stop chasing them.

Mr Law, one of the most prominent figures in the pro-democracy movement, said that while he felt his situation was "relatively safe" in the UK, he would have to be more vigilant as a result of the bounty's announcement.

"There could possibly be someone in the UK - or anywhere else - to provide informations of me to (the Hong Kong authorities). For example, my whereabouts, where they could possibly extradite me when I'm transiting in certain countries," Mr Law said.

"All these things may put my life in to dangerous situations if I'm not careful enough of who I meet or where I go. It makes me have to live in a more careful life."

Writing on Twitter, Mr Law urged others not to cooperate with the authorities on the matter and said: "We should not limit ourselves, self-censor, be intimidated, or live in fear."

This sentiment was echoed by one of the other exiled activists - Anna Kwok, executive director of the Hong Kong Democracy Council - who said the bounty was aimed at intimidating her and her fellow activists.

"We are united in our fight for freedom and democracy in our home, Hong Kong," she said in a statement.

Australia's Foreign Minister Penny Wong said her government was "deeply disappointed" by the announcement and said Australia "remains deeply concerned by the continuing erosion of Hong Kong's rights, freedoms and autonomy."

The other six activists named in the announcement are Ted Hui, Dennis Kwok, Mung Siu-tat, Elmer Yuen, Finn Law and Kevin Yam.

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WASHINGTON (AP)  President Joe Biden will host Swedens prime minister at the White House on Wednesday in a show of solidarity as the United States presses for the Nordic nations entry into NATO, a bid stalled by objections from two members of the Western military alliance.

Biden and Prime Minister Ulf Kristersson plan to review our growing security cooperation and reaffirm their view that Sweden should join NATO as soon as possible, the White House said a statement Saturday. The leaders also will discuss the war in Ukraine and China.

Sweden and neighbor Finland dropped their long-standing military neutrality after Russia invaded Ukraine in February 2022 and applied for NATO membership, seeking protection under the organizations security umbrella.

Finland, which shares an 832-mile (1,340 kilometer) border with Russia, joined NATO in April. Sweden, which has avoided military alliances for more than 200 years, has seen its ascension delayed by Turkey and Hungary; NATO requires the unanimous approval of all members to expand.

NATO had hoped the road to Swedens membership would be smoothed out before the alliances summit July 11-12 in Vilnius, the capital of Lithuania. Swedens entry would be a highly symbolic moment and the latest indication of how Russias war is driving countries to join the alliance.

But Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan has resisted, with his government accusing Sweden of being too lenient toward groups that it says pose a security threat, including militant Kurdish organizations and people associated with a 2016 coup attempt in Turkey.

This past week, he condemned Sweden over a Quran-burning protest. Swedish police allowed the protest outside a mosque in central Stockholm, citing freedom of speech after a court overturned a ban on a similar Quran-burning.

NATO Secretary-General Jens Stoltenberg said he would gather senior officials from Turkey, Sweden and Finland this coming Thursday to try to overcome Turkeys objections.

Hungary also has yet to ratify Swedens bid. Hungarian lawmakers said a long-delayed parliamentary vote on that would not would not happen until the autumn legislative session.

Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbans government has alleged that Swedish politicians have told blatant lies about the condition of his countrys democracy. High-ranking Hungarian officials have said they support Swedens membership bid while also making vague demands from Stockholm as conditions for approval.
FILE - Servicemen of the United States 101 Airborne Division run during an exercise at the Mihail Kogalniceanu Air Base, near the Black Sea port of Constanta, Romania, Friday, March 31, 2023. Russias armed forces are bruised but by no means beaten in the war in Ukraine, a top NATO military officer said Monday, as he laid out the biggest revamp to the organizations military plans since the Cold War should Moscow dare to widen the conflict. (AP Photo/Vadim Ghirda, File)

BRUSSELS (AP)  Russias armed forces are bruised but by no means beaten in the war in Ukraine, a top NATO military officer said Monday, as he laid out the biggest revamp to the organizations military plans since the Cold War should Moscow dare to widen the conflict.

They might not be 11 feet tall, but they are certainly not 2 feet tall, the Chair of the NATO Military Committee, Admiral Rob Bauer, told reporters. So, we should never underestimate the Russians and their ability to bounce back.

U.S. President Joe Biden and his NATO counterparts are set to endorse a major shakeup of the alliances planning system at a summit in the Lithuanian capital Vilnius next week.

NATO, as an organization, does not provide weapons or ammunition to Ukraine. Its sought to avoid being dragged into a wider war with nuclear-armed Russia. At the same time, it is massively reinforcing the security of member countries near Russia, Ukraine and Belarus.

Around 40,000 troops are on standby from Estonia in the north down to Romania on the Black Sea. About 100 aircraft take to the skies in that territory each day, and a total of 27 warships are operating in the Baltic and Mediterranean Seas. Those numbers are set to rise.

Under its new plans, NATO aims to have up to 300,000 troops ready to move to its eastern flank within 30 days. The plans divide its territory into three zones  the high north and Atlantic area, a zone north of the Alps, and another in southern Europe.

Bauer said that NATOs new planning is based on the strength of the Russian army before President Vladimir Putin launched the war on Ukraine almost 17 months ago. He said the war has depleted Russias army, but not its navy or air force.

Of Russias ground forces, around 94% is now engaged in the war in Ukraine, Bauer said.

What we see in general is that the Russians are careful around NATO. They are not for seeking a conflict with NATO. I think that is a sign that they are very, very busy, he said. In the land domain, I dont think they have a lot of forces available to do anything to anyone else.

But we are convinced that the Russians are going to reconstitute, he said. We will continue to look at them as a serious threat, in the maritime, and in the air especially, and in space, they are still very, very, capable, let alone of course in nuclear.

A revolt by Wagner mercenaries in Russia late last month raised deep security concerns in Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania and Poland after a deal was reached for their leader, Yevgeny Prigozhin, to be allowed to take refuge in Belarus.

Lithuanian President Gitanas Nauseda said that neighboring countries would face a heightened danger if the Wagner Group deploys its serial killers just over their border.

Vilnius lies around 35 kilometers (22 miles) from the Belarus border.

Lithuania wants to have a permanent NATO presence on its territory. Germany signaled last week that it would be prepared to base soldiers there if requested. For the moment, though, NATO sees no imminent threat coming from Belarus.

Were confident we know whats going on, and right now we see no changes. But that doesnt take our eye off what we need to do every day, Major General Matthew Van Wagenen told reporters. If we needed to change posture, we could do it rapidly.

NATOs 31 member countries took part in a force generation conference last week in an effort to understand how many troops and how much equipment the alliance might have at its disposal to respond to any Russian attack, both in the short and longer term.

Both officers were upbeat about the results, although they declined to provide details for security reasons. Experts and some NATO diplomats, however, have expressed doubt about the willingness of member countries to put a total of 300,000 troops on standby.

I would classify it as highly successful, Van Wagenen said. I can assure you, we are in a position right now that we know whats missing and how we need to grow this in the future.

In terms of NATOs ability to execute the plans, should they be needed in the future, Bauer welcomed the expected commitment in Vilnius by Biden and his counterparts to boost defense spending, which should help provide commanders with the equipment they need.

In 2014, NATO committed to move toward spending 2% of GDP on their military budgets by 2024. At their July 11-12 summit, the leaders will set the 2% figure as a spending floor, rather than a ceiling to aim for.

___

Follow the APs coverage of the war at https://apnews.com/hub/russia-ukraine
[Source]

Members and supporters of Nepals LGBTQ+ communities are celebrating after the countrys Supreme Court temporarily permitted the registration of same-sex marriages.

About the order: The court on Thursday ordered the prime minister, the Council of Ministers and other relevant ministries to establish a transitional mechanism to ensure the registration of LGBTQ+ marriages. This will come in the form of a separate register of marriages for those couples. However, the order is temporary pending a final ruling. It remains unclear when the court will make that decision.

How Nepal treats LGBTQ+ communities: Nepal has already some of the most progressive laws on LGBTQ+ rights in Asia, having outlawed discrimination against the community since 2007.

In 2013, the country introduced a third gender category for citizenship documents, followed by passports two years later. This year, the Supreme Court also ordered the government to recognize the non-heterosexual marriage of a Nepali with a foreigner and issue a spousal visa. Unfortunately, discrimination against the community allegedly persists in areas such as jobs, health and education.

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Why it matters: The interim ruling paves the way for non-traditional marriages in a Hindu-majority country that remains largely conservative.

Sunil Babu Pant, the countrys first openly gay former parliamentarian, hailed the decision as a huge victory, according to AP News.

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One couple, Surendra Pandey and Maya Gurung, who wed at a Hindu temple six years ago, are among those finally registering their marriage. This court ruling has established that we are equal citizens of this country, Gurung told AP.

Whats next: It remains to be seen whether Nepal becomes the second Asian state to legalize same-sex marriage. In the meantime, the country  which houses eight of the worlds 10 highest mountains  aims to become the next big travel destination for LGBTQ+ tourists.

In April, Nepal launched its first trekking guide training program for LGBTQ+ individuals. So far, anecdotal evidence reportedly suggests that many members of the community visit the country, making it important to train people who are comfortable with them and understand them better, coordinator Himal Pandit told CNN.

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Chinese City Sorry for Shaming People Wearing Pajamas in Public
Chinese naval hospital ship Peace Ark has set off for home after offering diagnosis and treatment to more than 13,000 patients in Indonesia during its seven-day mission, Nov 18, 2022. [Photo/Xinhua]



Peace Ark, the largest hospital ship of the People's Liberation Army Navy, will soon set off for a number of countries in South Pacific for humanitarian medical work, according to Senior Captain Liu Wensheng, spokesman for the PLA Navy.

Liu said on Sunday evening in Beijing the floating hospital will visit Kiribati, Tonga, Vanuatu, the Solomon Islands and East Timor during the Harmonious Mission 2023 operation.

This will be the ninth Harmonious Mission voyage for the vessel.

With a displacement of over 10,000 metric tons, the ship has more than 100 medical staff working in 16 clinical and auxiliary departments. It harbors multiple operating rooms and nursing stations and can accommodate roughly 1,000 patients at once. It has a blood bank and exam rooms that are capable of diagnosing and treating a variety of illnesses.

So far, Peace Ark has taken part in 10 overseas missions, providing medical services for roughly 250,000 people from 43 countries and regions since its commission in 2008.
Newsom hits the road to campaign for Biden in Idaho, building his own base in red states

In the last three months, Gov. Gavin Newsom has given more than $3 million to President Biden and other Democrats in Republican-run states such as Mississippi, Tennessee and Florida. (Hannah Wiley/Los Angeles Times)

At a private fundraiser in the middle of Donald Trump's America, California Gov. Gavin Newsom was on a mission to help President Biden.

Newsom, who hit the road during the Fourth of July holiday weekend, told a group of roughly 50 Democrats gathered in the backyard of a mansion overlooking the Boise foothills Saturday to make the "powerful case for why we should be passionate, enthusiastic about Bidens reelection.

At a time when states like Idaho, where registered Republicans outnumber Democrats by more than 4 to 1, are enacting laws to restrict abortion, gay rights and advance other culturally divisive pillars of the GOP agenda, Newsom said only one man could be trusted to turn the tide: Biden.

The 80-year-old president has used his years in office to aggressively fight for Democratic priorities, Newsom told them, including LGBTQ+ rights, gun control and clean energy, while rebuilding the American economy post-COVID and keeping democracy afloat.

Im really proud of this president, and I hope you are as well," Newsom said to a crowd happy to have one of the party's rising stars.

Saturday's swing through Idaho didn't just energize Biden's much-neglected base in such a conservative corner of the West. It helped build a future one for Newsom.

Many of the Democrats who flocked to hear Newsom speak in Idaho and at a separate fundraising event earlier that day in Bend, Ore., said they thought the 55-year-old liberal governor offered a glimpse into the future of their party, a bolder, more charismatic and younger potential heir of Biden's legacy in the post-Trump years.

He looks like an incredible presidential candidate, said Russ Buschert, an Idaho Democratic Party trustee.

Michele Anderson, a real estate broker in Bend and former Bay Area resident, praised Newsom for using his "pretty impactful" voice and his willingness to take a stand on the most critical issues facing the nation while pushing back against Republicans eroding the progress made during the country's recent history.

Read more: Newsom's pestering of 'sixth grade bully' DeSantis seeps into presidential race

I appreciate a lot that Joe Biden has done, but I think its time for that next generation of leaders, too," Anderson said. "And I see Gavin Newsom being a part of that.

Newsom says he has no interest in the White House and that his cross-country travels are to promote his party and president before the 2024 election.

But his stumping for Biden tees Newsom up nicely for other job prospects, said Rob Stutzman, a Republican consultant in California. His public feuding with Republicans fills a "void" in his party and sends a message that he's a Democrat willing and unafraid to take on the MAGA wing of the GOP  a crusade that helps elevate Newsom's national profile and build a database of supporters along the way.

"Hes putting in time and effort that no one else outside the White House appears to be," Stutzman said. "Hes acting like the candidate in waiting.

"Someday it may pay off for him."

The visit to Idaho, which kicked off Newsom's second tour through red states over the past few months, was all about shoring up enthusiasm for Biden's accomplishments and touting party accomplishments, while showering beleaguered local Democrats with some love, attention and a little campaign cash from his political action committee Campaign for Democracy.

Read more: Newsom launches national campaign to fight 'authoritarian leaders'

Newsom cut the Idaho Democratic Party a $10,000 check for the event, the maximum allowed; it's a sliver of the more than $3 million he's funneled to Biden and Democrats in Republican-run states such as Florida, Tennessee and Mississippi over the last three months. This week, he'll have private meetings with Democrats in Montana during an annual family Fourth of July vacation, with a stop later in Utah.

The swing through Republican-led states gives Newsom the chance to remind local Democrats how critical they are in fighting back against what he described as a GOP-led "rights regression."

You think Trump, if he gets back into office, is not going to demand a third term? Give me a break, Newsom said. You think Jan. 6 is the last we are going to see.... Give me a break."

Newsom's foray deeper into the national political arena has evolved since last year, when he ripped his party for not being aggressive enough in the face of Republican victories on the local, state and national level, including at the U.S. Supreme Court.

Im just trying to move from lament and critique to action and responsibility," Newsom said in an interview with The Times in Boise. "No one wants to hear a critic. What are you going to do? And I had to answer the what am I going to do' question.

Im trying to build something," he said. "But Im trying to be complementary of the work thats already being done."

But Newsom also has to contend with any side effects of his campaigning in red states like Idaho, one of the top states where Californians are fleeing, according to data analyzed by the nonpartisan Public Policy Institute of California. During Newsom's tenure as governor, California has seen a surge in homelessness and a worsening housing shortage and affordability crisis, some of the issues cited in a recent PPIC poll showing that about 4 in 10 Californians are considering leaving the state.

Read more: 4 in 10 California residents are considering packing up and leaving, new poll finds

Californias far-left governor came to Boise to raise money for Idaho Democrats...and to export his litany of failed policies, including skyrocketing housing costs," Idaho Republican Party Chairwoman Dorothy Moon said in a statement. "People are fleeing California in droves because they dont want to live as serfs in Prince Gavins kingdom. Im pretty sure his visit here to normal America violates some kind of California travel restriction.

California Republican Party Chairwoman Jessica Millan Patterson said the state's struggles should "serve as a warning to the rest of the nation."

"While Newsom runs a shadow presidential campaign, its increasingly clear he wants to take his failures from his own state straight to the White House," Millan Patterson said in a statement. "You dont want what Gavin Newsoms selling.

Newsom has dismissed that criticism as tired Republican talking points and a distraction from the cultural issues that underlie his trip.

Im not giving a California stump speech, never have in any of the red states Ive been to," he said, adding that his assignment isn't a "Visit California" campaign. "Thats not what this is about. I talk about the Democratic Party and our values, and I think theres a lot to brag about in that respect.

Mike Madrid, a Republican political consultant and co-founder of the anti-Trump group The Lincoln Project, said Newsom's brand appeals to Democrats throughout the country, including in swing states, who are looking for a leader "unashamed and unapologetic" about running defense against Republicans.

While Democrats in decades past focused on the economy and shied from the more divisive cultural issues of their time, Madrid said, Newsom's focus on LGBTQ+ and transgender rights, on gun control and environmental issues appeals to the white-collar, college-educated members of his party, along with certain Latino voters looking for a political home.

That could be a winning strategy in a deeply divided America in the middle of a culture war, Madrid said. As voters are looking for a champion on cultural issues, "Gavin Newsom is that champion."

At least for now, Newsom is shrugging off the presidential compliments and sticking to the script.

I guess I should be humbled by that, he said. But thats not why Im here.

Sign up for Essential California, your daily guide to news, views and life in the Golden State.

This story originally appeared in Los Angeles Times.
Next Generation Air Dominance

The U.S. Air Forces effort to introduce a new, stealth sixth-generation crewed tactical jet has taken an important step forward with the establishment of a flight test unit for the Next Generation Air Dominance, or NGAD program. Edwards Air Force Base in California is home to the newly created Air Dominance Combined Test Force (CTF), which will be responsible for flight testing the new fighter and related systems as well as continued trials of the F-22 Raptor stealth fighter  a platform that NGAD is planned to replace and which is meanwhile contributing to the NGAD development program.

On June 30, the Air Force announced that, during a change of command ceremony on June 9, the F-22 Raptor Combined Test Force formally transitioned into the Air Dominance Combined Test Force. According to the service, this will be tasked with flight testing the Next Generation Air Dominance (NGAD) family of systems.

F-22 Raptors assigned to the 411th Flight Test Squadron, 412th Test Wing, out of Edwards Air Force Base, California, conduct a test sortie over the Pacific Ocean. Photo courtesy of Kyle Larson/Lockheed Martin

This statement makes it clear that as well as the crewed sixth-generation combat jet that will be at the centerpiece of NGAD, the new unit will run integrated test campaigns to prove different elements within what is a much broader family of systems initiative. After all, NGAD also includes efforts focused on the development of advanced drones with high degrees of autonomy, as well as new jet engines, weapons, electronic warfare suites, sensors, networking ecosystems, battle management capabilities, and more.

The Air Dominance CTF is part of the 411th Flight Test Squadron at Edwards. The change of command saw Lt. Col. Michael Coleman take over from Lt. Col. David Schmitt which is seen in the video embedded below.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kF3g2XY8vG8

411th Flight Test Squadron. Air Force Historical Research Agency

The establishment of the Air Dominance CTF shows that we are becoming more integrated and more lethal, while also shaping the future of air combat, Coleman said, in an Air Force statement. We do not fight as individual platforms, but rather we leverage a system of systems approach across the entire kill chain. We will be an integral part of fielding a family of innovative platforms and systems through NGAD that will enable the Air Force to control the skies in a highly contested environment, he added.

A close crop of a Lockheed Martin artwork showing a notional crewed combat aircraft component of the Next Generation Air Dominance program, or NGAD refueling from a tanker. Lockheed Martin

In April, we celebrated 70 years of having zero combat loses due to an aerial attack, Coleman continued in reference to the fact that no U.S. soldier has been killed by hostile air action since the Korean War. This CTF is laser-focused on ensuring that legacy continues, he said.

Few other details of the Air Dominance CTF were announced, but the Air Force did confirm that the unit is comprised of representatives from the developmental test (DT) and operational test (OT) communities, as well as program offices, and support contractors.

Traditionally, the developmental test phase verifies that a given systems design meets all technical specifications and that all contract requirements have been satisfied. Developmental testing is then followed by operational testing, in which the system (or systems) will be evaluated in an operationally representative environment doing operationally representative tasks. In doing so, procedures and tactics will be developed for its combat use.

According to the Air Force: The convergence of DT and OT allows the CTF to test systems against contracted design, while simultaneously testing for real-world operational environments. This combined test environment allows capability delivery at the speed of relevance for the warfighter.

This approach also reflects the Air Forces ambition, in its own words, to deliver rapid and innovative warfighting capabilities.

However, it will be interesting to see how a combined DT/OT effort for NGAD avoids the pitfalls of the F-35 Joint Strike Fighter program, which has recently been criticized by the Air Force for acquisition malpractice. One part of this criticism relates to what is known as concurrency.

An F-35A from the Integrated Test Force takes off from Edwards Air Force Base for the first time in the new Technology Refresh 3, or TR-3, configuration, in January this year. U.S. Air Force/Edwards Air Force Base

In the context of the F-35, this involved a combined development and production process. Although it was supposed to inject upgrades more quickly, while also speeding up production and bringing down costs, the opposite turned out to be the case. It seems reasonable to question whether apparently running developmental and operational tests concurrently could also bring its own pitfalls.

The Air Force is likely banking on its strategy of leveraging open-architecture standards to ensure that design changes and other upgrades can be seamlessly integrated into NGAD on a rolling basis. Prior experimental risk reduction efforts related to what would become NGAD go back to at least the mid 2010s, as well. In addition, at least one NGAD demonstrator has also been flying for years now, with as many as three reportedly active more recently.

As well as pushing the NGAD program forward toward becoming operational, the Air Dominance CTF will continue to enhance the capabilities of the in-service F-22 to maintain lethality against immediate threats. As well as its continued position as the Air Forces silver bullet fighter, the F-22 is already being used as a surrogate for various kinds of NGAD-related testing, as you can read about here.

An F-22 Raptor from the 411th Flight Test Squadron, 412th Test Wing, takes off from Edwards Air Force Base, California. U.S. Air Force photo by Giancarlo Casem



Setting up an NGAD-focused flight test unit at Edwards is the latest in a series of milestones that signal that the pace of work on the program is now accelerating, although it remains almost entirely under wraps. In contrast to previous competitive fighter combat aircraft programs, the Air Force has so far not released any details of prime contractors involved in NGAD, or potential teaming arrangements under which different companies may be working together on their proposals.

Any specifics on technical and programmatic details of NGAD are also classified.

What we do know is that the Air Force plans to make a final decision on the NGAD combat jet design sometime in 2024. A report recently emerged indicating that, in terms of the crewed combat jet, at least, the Air Force will pick from two prime contractors or teams of contractors. Citing unnamed sources involved in the [NGAD] program, the same report also noted the aforementioned point that there are now three NGAD demonstrators in existence, although exactly what they consist of and how they are being used has not been revealed.

A recent teaser from the Lockheed Martins Skunk Works appears to hint at a possible configuration for the NGAD crewed combat jet. Lockheed Skunk Works

This information suggests that, at one point, three prime contractors or teams  assumed to be Boeing, Lockheed Martin, and Northrop Grumman  had been involved in competing for NGAD. You can read our takes on these various revelations here.

Meanwhile, in May this year, the Air Force release a classified contract solicitation for the engineering, manufacturing, and development (EMD) phase of the NGAD program. Describing NGAD as the future replacement of the F-22, the release of this document formally launched the source-selection process, providing industry with the Air Forces requirements for NGAD. You can read more about this here.

Clearly, the stakes are high in the NGAD program, especially as the combat aircraft component that is eventually selected may well be Americas last advanced high-performance crewed tactical aircraft.

As to how many examples of the NGAD combat jet may be acquired, this remains subject to change, although Secretary of the Air Force Frank Kendall has said that plans call for around 200 copies of the aircraft, each of which will likely cost multiple hundreds of millions of dollars. These jets are planned to operate alongside at least 1,000 Collaborative Combat Aircraft (CCA) drones, testing of which will presumably also be handled by the Air Dominance CTF.

A rendering of different tiers of advanced drones flying together with a stealthy F-35A Joint Strike Fighter. Lockheed Martin Skunk Works

The CCA program, however, is just one effort related to fielding future uncrewed aircraft and there is also potential for the Air Force to order hundreds, or even thousands more drones of various other types to support the NGAD and broader air power capabilities. These, too, would almost certainly be involved in integrated test campaigns run by the Air Dominance CTF.

With the Air Force hoping to have NGAD combat jets starting to enter operational service in the early part of the next decade, there is every indication that the Air Dominance CTF will be a very busy enterprise, especially as the service has also confirmed that there is no planned F-22 retirement date as of now.

Overall, firm details about NGAD remain tantalizingly scarce. But the announcement of the changes within the Edwards test force provides another indication that momentum is gathering behind what promises to be a revolutionary air combat program.

Contact the author: thomas@thedrive.com
Nurse having affair with patient failed to call 999 when he died with his trousers down

Penelope Williams has been struck off by a disciplinary panel - WALES NEWS SERVICE

An NHS nurse who took part in a sexual relationship with a patient failed to call an ambulance when he died in the back of his car with his trousers down during a secret late night rendezvous, a disciplinary committee has heard.

Penelope Williams had been having a year-long affair with the dialysis patient when he suffered heart failure while they were together in a hospital car park.

Ms Williams, who had hidden the relationship from her managers, failed to call 999 and instead rang a colleague who turned up and performed CPR, the panel heard. Now, the nurse has been struck off by the Nursing and Midwifery Council who warned she had brought the nursing profession into disrepute.

The panel heard Ms Williams started working for the Betsi Cadwaladr University Health Board in North Wales as a registered nurse in a renal haemodialysis unit in October 2019.

Her patient  known only as Patient A  was one of the units regulars. Ms Williams and Patient A began a sexual relationship in January 2021 and she did not tell bosses about it, the panel was told.

In January of the following year, a colleague  known only as Colleague One  received a phone call from Ms Williams who was crying and distressed and asking for help because someone had died, the committee heard. The colleague told her to call an ambulance, but Ms Williams failed to do so, the panel was told.

The colleague later arrived at the student nursing car park at Spire private hospital, in Wrexham, where she met Ms Williams and could see Patient A in the back of a car with his trousers down, the committee was told.

Colleague one went to check Patient A who was unresponsive, so she called 999 asking for police and ambulance before starting CPR, the panel heard. He died from heart failure and chronic kidney disease triggered by a medical episode, the committee was told.

He started groaning and suddenly died

Ms Williams initially told police Patient A had sent her a message on Facebook explaining he was unwell, and so she came to meet him. But she later admitted she and Patient A were in a sexual relationship and said they had previously arranged to meet at the car park that evening, the panel heard.

During a formal meeting with managers, Ms Williams claimed that she met with Patient A and sat in the back of his car for about 30-45 minutes just talking.

Mrs Williams denied any sexual relationship. She further explained that Patient A started groaning and suddenly died, the committee said.

The health board carried out a disciplinary hearing in May 2022 and Ms Williams admitted to having an intimate relationship with Patient A which she did not disclose to her employer. The Health Board panel expressed concern that Mrs Williams did not call an ambulance following Patient As collapse even when Colleague One advised her to and fired her.

The committee concluded that the nurses behaviour breached guidance on clear sexual boundaries, and struck her off from the register. The panel said: Mrs Williams has acted to put patients at risk of harm by failing to contact emergency services when the patient became unwell and when prompted by her colleague.

Mrs Williams has brought the nursing profession into disrepute and breached one of the fundamental tenets of the profession by engaging in an intimate relationship with a patient in breach of guidance on clear sexual boundaries.

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Freshers Aminu Sadiya (L) and Mercy Sunday are concerned about taking the loan but not getting jobs after graduating

There is a buzz in the home of Esther Abu, where mother and daughters have just heard about a new law that will see poor Nigerian families given loans to send their children to university.

Mrs Abu's youngest, a teenager who speaks like she is rapping, is leaving secondary school next month. She loves computer engineering but knows that her mother, a single parent whose salary as a street sweeper hardly provides enough food for the family - and has to be supplemented from alms given mostly by her church - does not have the money to send her to university.

Her eldest completed secondary school two years ago and immediately began work as a hair stylist to support the family who live in Mararaba, a congested suburb on the outskirts of Abuja.

"As a girl I dreamed of working as a doctor," says 21-year-old Eunice.

Both now have a chance, albeit slim, of reviving their dreams, as the government says it will provide loans to pay the tuition fees for people from such poor backgrounds. However many questions have been raised about the scheme.

Since coming into office at the end of May, President Bola Tinubu has carried out a raft of reforms at lightning pace - ending fuel subsidies, devaluing the naira, sacking the head of the central bank and security chiefs - and his latest aims to revamp Nigeria's ailing tertiary education sector.

For decades, fees have been kept low by the government to encourage enrolment in a country where many are poor and there is a high level of illiteracy.

While medicine students at the University of Lagos in Nigeria's richest state pay just 25,000 naira (32; $26) per year, their peers at the University of Ghana in Accra pay 3,500 cedis (242, $308).

But such low fees have not been matched by government funding over time which has led to schools with obsolete equipment, overcrowded classrooms, and poor remuneration for lecturers and other staff.

An average Nigerian university professor takes home less than 500,000 naira (570; $725) a month, while a graduate assistant gets 160,000.

These conditions have led to incessant strikes, which saw universities closed for eight months last year - the ninth stoppage in 13 years.

The strikes and lack of adequate funding have eroded confidence in Nigeria's public universities, leaving people to enrol at expensive private establishments or to study abroad, especially in Eastern Europe.

By introducing the loans, President Tinubu has given universities a free rein to increase tuition fees, which the government reckons students from poor families can now afford.

The president says the scheme "will expand access to education to all Nigerians regardless of their backgrounds".

The zero-interest loan will be paid back as monthly deductions of 10% of the salaries of beneficiaries two years after they complete a mandatory post-graduate paramilitary service.

"But what if they finish school and don't get a job?" asks Mrs Abu in a low voice that hushed the room.

It is a question has been repeated across Nigeria by students and their parents since the scheme was announced two weeks ago.

Every year, huge numbers of graduates are pumped into Nigeria's labour market but only a few find a job.

In the last survey, in 2020, one in three of those who wanted to work were unemployed, and millions of graduates were doing jobs below their skillset such as working as hair stylists.

Ayuba Mayah thinks the loan will be a burden when he leaves school

"I know at least 200 graduates in my village who returned to farming after going to school because of no jobs," says Ayuba Mayah, a student at the College of Education in Zuba, Abuja.

He is not going to take the loan, he says, to avoid that burden hanging around his neck while job-hunting after graduating. Instead, he is working to pay for his education.

Aminu Sadiya and Mercy Sunday, who are both studying economics at the same college, agree that getting a job is their main concern about taking the loan.

"My parents did not think of a loan before they sent me to school, they will find a way to pay the fees," says Ms Sunday, whose parents are farmers.

Though Mr Tinubu has promised to halve the unemployment rate in three years by creating millions of jobs for young people, the new law is mute about graduates who can't repay the loan because they are unemployed.

However, those who become self-employed risk a two-year jail term or fine if they refuse to pay back the loan as 10% of their monthly profits.

But the loan is not available to all - it is specifically for students that come from homes with an income of less than 500,000 naira annually.

In theory, millions could benefit, but the conditions for acquiring a loan are stringent.

Poor families will have to prove they earn that little, which means they will have to provide bank statements which many of them are unlikely to have.

Applicants are also required to provide at least two guarantors:

a senior civil servant

lawyer with at least 10 years experience

judicial officer or justice of peace

It has been pointed out that poor Nigerians are unlikely to know such people, and where they do, have a slim chance of such a person standing as a guarantor for a loan.

Even after meeting the requirements, applicants are not guaranteed the loan as it is subject to the availability of funds.

"They should just say they don't want anyone to access the loan," says Vanessa Macaulay, a third-year Mass Communication student at the Yaba College of Technology in Lagos.

The president of the universities lecturers' union also describes the loan conditions as "not practicable", adding that more than 90% of students won't meet the "requirements".

But other academics such as Professor Mudashiru Mohammed, who heads the Education Management department at state-owned Lagos state university, says despite tuition fees of just 30,000 naira (34, $43) per semester, many of his students cannot pay.

Funding for education has improved recently but it still falls short of the UN-recommended 15-20% of the annual national budget

He says the conditions were necessary to ensure people paid up, in a country where most see government loans as free money.

While it is hard to measure the financial background of students in public tertiary schools, many at the University of Abuja tell the BBC they are from low-income homes.

Their education is funded by parents and guardians who are junior civil servants, private security guards and company drivers.

Combined earnings in such families are often just above the threshold, putting the loan out of reach, even though they are not well-off by Nigerian standards.

These families have already taken hits from transport fares that have doubled, while the cost of food has also soared recently.

Now, they will have to deal with tuition fees which have gone up in some universities - which have been mulling increases since last year - by as much as 200%.

The loan is strictly for tuition and excludes other fees such as accommodation and food, which usually account for a higher proportion of the total cost of university.

"If they are not paying for everything, then what is the point of it? Who will buy books, pay for hostel, feeding," asks Mrs Abu, the chatter long extinguished in her home.

"They should have made the loans available to every student," says Caleb Issac a self-sponsored part-time student at the National Open University in Abuja.

In his spare time he works as a marketer for a transport company and fears a hike in fees will be hard on him.

This is not Nigeria's first attempt at a students' loan - an initial plan in 1972 by the military government crumbled because beneficiaries refused to repay, says Prof Mohammed.

"Maybe the president should have first concentrated on creating jobs," says Mrs Abu.

The lack of jobs, other fees involved and a lack of clarity about what will happen to employees who default on repayments, mean the loan does not work for her family, she says.

"Better if my daughters learn trades and get small jobs than go to school and face jail," she says.
Nikki Haley Says She 'Absolutely' Would Sign 15-Week Abortion Ban If GOP Had The Votes

GOP presidential candidate Nikki Haley on Sunday said she is unapologetically anti-abortion, adding, though, that lawmakers from both parties would need to find consensus on the issue for a national ban to pass.

In an interview with Fox News Sunday, the former U.S. ambassador the United Nations said enacting a federal law on abortion would require a majority in the House of Representatives, 60 votes in the Senate and a presidential signature.

We do have to be honest with the American people on what is feasible on the national level on abortion, Haley said, before declaring herself absolutely pro-life.

Haley estimated there are 45 lawmakers in the Senate who are opposed to abortion, meaning theres a long way to go.

Haley said senators from both sides should look for areas of common ground, including on the fact that contraception should be available, as well as consensus that no state law should put a woman in jail or give her the death penalty for having an abortion.

She added lawmakers should encourage good quality adoptions and agree to ban late-term abortions and that doctors who are against the medical procedure should not be forced to perform it.

Lets start there and whatever 60 Senate votes come to, whether thats 15 weeks, I absolutely would sign it, she continued.

As governor of South Carolina, Haley signed a 20-week abortion ban in 2016.

WATCH: Part One of our exclusive interview with @NikkiHaley to discuss this weeks Supreme Court rulings and the GOPs talk of a national abortion ban. Tune In! #FoxNewsSundaypic.twitter.com/05TSAWSpna  Fox News Sunday (@FoxNewsSunday) July 2, 2023

Last month, former Vice President Mike Pence pushed all of his rivals for the 2024 GOP presidential nomination to come out in support of a 15-week abortion ban despite the fact that this position is not popular with voters.

The party underperformed in last Novembers midterm elections, with many attributing the result to voters dissatisfaction with the GOPs handling of the issue in the wake of the Supreme Court overturning Roe v. Wade last summer.

Fourteen states have passed full bans on the procedure since the Dobbs v. Jackson Womens Health Organization decision.

Former President Donald Trump, the front-runner in the GOP presidential race, has not explicitly come out in favor of a national ban on abortion but has said there of course remains a vital role for the federal government in protecting unborn life.
Photo Illustration by Luis G. Rendon/The Daily Beast/Getty/Netflix

Getting a movie made can be a nightmare. Just ask ND Stevenson, the creator of the beloved graphic novel Nimona, now an animated film on Netflix. I cant even imagine what it would be like if this movie went smoothly, Stevenson said in an interview with The Daily Beasts Obsessed, shortly before the films June 30 release.

In 2015, two years after the graphic novel hit shelves to wide acclaim, Fox Animation acquired the rights for Nimona; Fox-owned Blue Sky Studios (Ice Age) was set to produce a film adaptation. But in 2019, Disney took over Blue Sky when it acquired 21st Century Fox. In 2021, with the film 75-percent completed, Disney shut down Blue Sky, canceling Nimona in the process. Though Disney claimed this was because of ongoing issues with the pandemic, a number of Blue Sky employees claimed that Disney had issues with its queer themes, which are rarely seen in mainstream Western animation, including a same-sex kiss.

However, all hope was not lostNetflix came to the rescue in 2022, officially reviving the project alongside Annapurna Pictures. Eight years after that first announcement, the Nimona movie is finally here. The movie died and came back a couple times, Stevenson said, a hopefulness in his voice. If none of these outsized, dramatic events happened to it, I dont know what this movie would be. I dont think Id recognize it.

Nimona Defied Disney to Become 2023s Best Animated Film

That idea of rebirth also happens to be at the heart of Nimonas story. Stevensonwho also created Netflixs She-Ra and the Princesses of Powercrafted a defiantly, joyously queer world. While Nimona often takes the form of a human girl, as a shapeshifter, shes able to turn herself into any creature she desires. Nimona doesnt conform to any particular gender, something that queer fans have adored about the character since the comic debuted.

But the queerness in Nimona runs deeper than its spunky central characterit explores the idea of chosen family, same-sex romance, and how powerful institutions perceive queerness as other, and therefore a threat to normalcy. Its also something that resonates on a personal level with Stevenson, who came out as queer and, later, trans in the decade since he first released Nimona.

With Nimona finally available for audiences to watch, we spoke to Stevenson over Zoom about the films complicated production process, how his own gender identity informed the story, and why he thinks Nimonas themes feel so impactful nowperhaps even more so than they did than when it first launched as a webcomic in 2012.

After so much time in development, Nimona was shelved. How did the film come back to life?

The whole movie has been a truly wild ride. Its been almost exactly eight yearsI looked it up. June 2015 was when it was optioned [by Fox Animation] to become an animated motion picture. And then, in between then and now Ive never been able to predict what will happen next. When we found out that Blue Sky was getting shut down, it was devastating. And it wasnt just because of the movie. It was also [about] all these amazing people who were out of a job. It was the only major animation studio on the East Coastit was like this holdout when everything else was happening on the West Coast. It was just really sad to see that this movie would never see the light of day, when so many amazing people have worked so hard on it.

Blue Sky shut down on a Tuesday, and there was supposed to be a screening [of Nimona] on Thursday. We went ahead and did it virtually, and it became kind of this goodbye party. And I think the whole time, there was this energy there. There was a part of me that kind of knew that this wasnt the end. I feel like when you have that momentum it couldnt be the end of the story there.

And it certainly wasnt!

These awesome producers at Blue Sky just picked up their phones and started making calls. I think it was a month or two later [after the studio closed] that they struck the deal with Annapurna and that the movie was still truckin. I felt like I knew the whole time that this wasnt the end, but I still didnt quite let myself believe that it was really happening.

So being here now with the whole crew in New York, were riding so high on this, and were all still having to pinch ourselves a little bit, being like, This is real. This is happening. This movie is going to be out there! Its a really good feeling.

What was it like having your work adapted to a feature film?

When I set out to make Nimona as a comic [in 2012], I had no idea what I was doing. I was still just figuring out how to make comics. One of my favorite things about the book is you can see me learning how to draw as it goes on. The comic is so scrappy, and its so free-form. All of the choices that Im making in it are very intuitive. To not only start to realize that this story had broader appeal than I had expected, but also that it had this life outside of me, even when it was published as a graphic novel I was realizing that it wasnt just this quirky little passion project that I had going onpeople were seeing themselves in it.

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And even more people saw themselves in it when it transitioned from webcomic to graphic novel.

When it ended up hitting the shelves of major bookstores and getting nominated for a National Book Award [in 2015], [I had] this realization that this was bigger than Id expected it to be, that it was kind of taking on a life of its own. That didnt mean that it was easy to hand over the keysto have it be made into a movie. The characters were very personal. I felt very protective of them. But, like everything else along this journey, it was this practice in letting go, kind of opening my hands and letting it be what it was going to be.

We all know the stories of creators whove had their work adapted. Theres really anything that can happen, theres no guarantee that youre going to like whats made, and theres no guarantee its gonna match your vision. I had to just hope for the best.

How involved were you during production?

I had various levels of involvement with the movie at different times. Sometimes I was pretty hands-off. Sometimes I was pretty involved in the daily cycle of things. But I think overall, I was pretty open to having changes made. I told the story I set out to tellthe movie is going to be its own thing. But I still have insights into the characters and into the world and why certain choices are being made so that even if the choice was different in the movie, at least it would come from that same kernel of truth.

The film departs from the graphic novel in some pretty significant waysBallister is a very different character, the retro-futurist world feels a lot more developed, and Nimona herself gets more of a backstory. Were there elements that you were especially protective and wanted to maintain in the film? Were there elements that you were especially protective of and wanted to keep in the film?

I think for me, the biggest thing that I wanted to stay true to was Nimona [played by Chloe Grace Moretz in the movie] herself. It was always trying to bring it back to her. Ballister [voiced by Riz Ahmed] is the character that a lot of people relate to. Hes a little bit of a straight mannot actually a straight man, but you get it. Nimona is a character whos mysterious and intense. Shes the character that makes the story what it is, and I just really wanted to make sure that her character was being honored. So while all of these other things are changing, it was always re-centering on, Where is Nimona? What is she feeling? Where did she come from? Because she really is this spark that makes the story what it is.

I think as soon as she fell into place, everything else could build on her, and she could be the catalyst that creates this explosion that is this movie.

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One thing thats really interesting about Nimona is how beloved it is by the queer community, and especially trans folks. Yet its queerness is more subtle and less overt than something like She-Ra. Were you conscious of Nimonas queerness when you were writing it?

I think that I was conscious of it in some ways, but I certainly was nowhere near close to figuring myself out. It would be years until I came out as gay, and then years beyond that to come out as trans.

But looking back, it is so obviously there! It is all over the place in the story. I was very drawn toward gay characters and gay relationships [at the time]. I think I knew that there was a part of me that I hadnt yet tapped intothat making comics was my way of sort of living vicariously through these characters. The trans stuff, I dont think that I understood that yet.  Looking back and reading it and seeing it all over the placeIm like, Oh, my God. I just wanna grab my tiny baby head and shake it a little bit. But also, I had to go on the journey that I did. And the comic was part of that.

In the 11 years since you first published Nimona, have you seen the impact of it change for readers? Do you think the story affects them differently now, as it does you?

Whats cool about a process like this is [learning] that there are things that have stayed relevant, and theres things that were even more timely than expected.  But I dont think that any of us expected some of the themes of the movie, even when they were intended, to be as timely as they are. Especially the rapid reactionary backlash to the visibility of trans people in the U.S.none of us predicted that in the exact form that it ended up taking.

This movie is all about empathy and love and understanding, while also not needing to understand every single thing about someone in order to love them. I hope that thats the message that the movie puts out therethat people can be OK with maybe not understanding every single reason why a trans person is presenting the way they do or living their lives the way they do. You dont need to understand that to love them.But also, [its about how] the more you get to know someone, the more you will understand them.

That theme resonated with me, as I watched. Theres this really beautiful line from Nimona, about just wanting to be seen that I think speaks to the very core of the movie.

I love that line.

The performances in the film especially help make that message clear. Were you involved in casting, and how did it feel to kind of hear the voices for the first time?

When it came to casting, I was like, Im a little too close to this one. Yall have to take it away. So [later], hearing a voice like Riz [Ahmed] as Ballister was like, Oh my God, of course! His voice is in the comic in my brain now.

Hearing a voice given to my inner voice [a.k.a. Nimona] is so cool and so wild. [Moretz] makes all these choices that are so unexpectedshe's Nimona! She has that unpredictable aspect, and unpredictable to me as well! Just hearing her explode into this character and bring this life to her, it's so absolutely [Nimona].

One of the really cool things about it being Chloe is that I was coming of age around the era of Kick-Ass back in 2010, and theres no way that [Moretzs character] Hit Girl did not in some way inform Nimona. Looking back, it feels meant to be.

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I agreeMoretz inhabits the role beautifully. What do you think the impact of Nimona has going forward, now that its coming to a new audience in a different era?

I think that Nimona is going to remain relevant, but it is especially relevant right now. The theme of this story is that when we point at someone and say, This is the bad guy! Everyone, look over there, that is very often not true. We focus on the bad guys, the villains, the monsters, because usually there is something that is way more complicated and a little bit more uncomfortable [to face instead].

Evil doesnt always look like evil. It looks like something that is shiny and expected and safe and normal. Theres something easy about looking at something lurking in the shadows and assuming it's evil. Thats something that's very human in a lot of ways: to focus on the thing that's gonna be easier for us to be afraid ofor hate.

But this story asks you to question why it is so easy to point at the most visible thing and be like, That is the bad thing. It is about looking beneath the surface and asking what [do we think] looks like good and evil to us. Thats what we're seeing so much right now, especially at these times of mass moral panics. You see the characters in the movie go through that evolution as well and start to question why theyve been doing things this way for their entire liveswhy theyve never questioned it before. I think that is something thats really important for us to question too.

Read more at The Daily Beast.

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The surprisingly chaotic days leading to a $54.3 billion state budget obscured one disappointing outcome: The Democrats who run the table in Trenton simply wasted a big chance to finance long-overdue and systemic change.

In some ways, you could reach the same conclusion every June when the budget negotiations in Trenton reach a climax and enter the closed rooms before they tack on the pork and tweak budget language in ways that benefit a power broker or donor.

But this year was different. It may be years, possibly decades, before New Jersey finds itself so flush with cash to tackle long-festering and chronic problems. It has been a bounteous time, a confluence of federal pandemic aid, healthy revenue collections and savings from refinanced debt.

It gave the state the resources to repair and invest in ways creative and long-term and necessary. Yet that federal pandemic aid is running out and revenues are declining as signs of a recession hover on the horizon. The window is closing.

If there ever was a time to do the grimy work of revamping Motor Vehicle Commission operations or unemployment insurance systems that failed to churn out checks during the height of the COVID lockdowns, this was the time to do it.

Instead, the state is once again resorting to temporary, Band-Aid repairs, leaving consumers and workers to contend with computer systems that rival the creaky EMERAC model of the 1957 Hepburn-Tracy movie Desk Set.

For years, commuters have been plagued by a crumbling transit system. At the outset of Gov. Phil Murphys reign, he vowed to fix NJ Transit even it kills him.

Business Manager of the International Union of Operating Engineers, Local 825, Greg Lalevee, NJ First Lady, Tammy Murphy, NJ Governor, Phil Murphy, US Secretary of Transportation Transportation, Pete Buttigieg, Amtrak Chairman of the Board, Tony Coscia and President and CEO of NJ Transit, Kevin Corbett are shown at the ceremonial ground breaking of the Portal Bridge, in Kearny. Monday, August 1, 2022

Well, hes still alive and apparently well, with a healthy crop of hair, but the agency is staring at a projected $1 billion operating deficit by 2026, a problem that may require fare hikes, service cuts (service alignments, as Transportation Commissioner Diane Gutierrez-Scaccetti calls them) and layoffs. Hardly the long-term vision for a transit agency that should be expanded and modernized for the ambitious climate-change goals of the state.

"It is not something that we solve in one year and it goes away, its something that is structural to our operating budget and has to have a long-term solution," she told reporters in April.

Dont look for any long-term solution in this budget. For years, the idea of creating a steady, dedicated revenue stream for NJ Transits operations was bandied about  even the 2017 candidate Murphy momentarily flirted with the idea of creating a special tax for the agency.

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But instead, it's more of the same old rob-Peter-to-Pay-Paul method of paying for day-to-day operations by siphoning money from the turnpike authority, its own budget for capital construction, and an account for clean energy projects.

There are other long-simmering needs. Affordable housing remains one of the nagging burrs right beneath the gloss of Murphys stronger, fairer slogan. For all the talk of the flight of New Jersey residents to low-tax states to the south, advocates are more concerned about attracting and retaining young, up-and-coming families who are crammed into apartments with soaring rents. The housing stock is woefully inadequate.

Governor Phil Murphy and Hoboken Mayor Ravinder Bhalla are shown at the ResilienCity Park opening. The park is the largest of its kind in the state and among the biggest in the country. It is designed to detain stormwater during heavy rain and help mitigate flooding. Monday, June 12, 2023

I think we overall view this as a pretty big missed opportunity, said Peter Chen, senior policy analyst for New Jersey Policy Perspective, a liberal think tank. They're just throwing the money out left and right, instead of shoring up the sort of structural problems that had been around for a long time and will continue to be around.

Thats not to say there arent admirable features of the spending plan. Murphy should be applauded for restoring the states obligation to the pension fund with a full payment, rather than skipping or shorting it, as previous administrations did. Hes expanding preschool funding for public schools and doubling the size of a child care tax credit for families earning less than $80,000. His salting away a healthy $10 billion surplus is helping restore confidence in the states fiscal picture on Wall Street.

But for the most part, it is an election-year giveaway budget stuffed with the Mother of All Short-Term Thinking ideas: sending out generous rebates in time for a crucial election season when all 120 seats in the Legislature are up for grabs.

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Murphy, Senate President Nicholas Scutari and Assembly Speaker Craig Coughlin reached a compromise on a plan to create a tax credit program that promises to slash the property tax bill of seniors homeowners by 50% or up to $6,500.

These Democrats  the party of the blue-collar voters and the disenfranchised, you may remember  agreed to send the windfall to households with income of up to $500,000.

Asked to explain giving a break to the wealthiest, who more than likely have the means to pay the property taxes while maintaining a winter home in Florida, Coughlin basically said they wanted to encourage as many seniors as possible to remain in New Jersey.

Hardly a persuasive answer. The more likely reason is that the promised benefit  which wont be launched until 2026  is a program Democrats can promote in their campaign TV ads and mailers in the fall election.

It could shore up votes in crucial, swing areas like the 11th Legislative District, home to wealthy enclaves, where incumbent Democrat Vin Gopal is being challenged by Steve Dnistrian, a public relations executive.

Despite the tense negotiations over this program, it may never see the light of day. There is no guarantee that the lawmakers will be eager to pay the $1.3 billion tab for the program in three years, especially if the current droop in revenues remains a downward trend.

In the meantime, lawmakers beefed up last years vote-buying gimmick, the ANCHOR rebate, by an extra $250 for seniors and renters.

The rebate-stuffed budget comes amid warnings from a bipartisan chorus of economists who predicted last week that even without StayNJ, the state is likely to fall $12.5 billion to $18.5 billion short of the projected expenditures needed to continue current services and state aid from the beginning of next year to 2028.

New Jersey fiscal policy has been hampered for decades by the failure to look ahead, said Mark Magyar, director of the Steve Sweeney Center For Public Policy at Rowan University.

Right now, the Democrats, who have maintained a majority for nearly two decades, are looking over their shoulder at a restive Republican Party that made surprising gains in the 2021 elections and are now campaigning with the aid of a more favorable legislative map. Democrats are jittery.

This year, with the extra billions on hand, could have been the time to look to the future. But instead, the budget finances the immediate future of the November elections.

This article originally appeared on NorthJersey.com: NJ budget 2024 shows cash buys votes, doesn't fix issues
A New Jersey Superior Court judge allegedly filmed "inappropriate" public TikTok videos of himself over a two-year span and potentially broke several judicial conduct rules, according to a complaint filed Friday.

Gary Wilcox, a Bergen County criminal judge, is accused of posting videos of himself lip-syncing songs with explicit lyrics, sometimes while in his chambers.

The complaint, which was filed by the disciplinary counsel for the Advisory Committee on Judicial Conduct, says Wilcox started the TikTok account under the alias "Sal Tortorella" and posted 40 videos between March 2021 and April 2023. The complaint specifically refers to five videos in which Wilcox allegedly lip-synced to songs containing lyrics that were sexually explicit or violent or featured racist terms.

The videos were filmed in various locations, though at least one was in Wilcox's chambers, with law books clearly visible in the background, the complaint says.

In 11 videos posted to TikTok, the complaint says, "either the content  e.g., including references to violence, sex, and misogyny  location  i.e., in chambers, in the courthouse, and in a bed  or Respondent's physical appearance  e.g., wearing his judicial robes and/or partially dressed while lying in bed  were inappropriate and brought disrepute to the Judiciary."

Judge Gary Wilcox oversees the Randy Manning trial at Bergen County Courthouse on Wednesday, May 11, 2023. Manning is on trial and accused of shooting Rhian "Kampane" Stoute and setting his body on fire in a vacant house in Englewood in August 2011.

Rihanna, Nas and Busta Rhymes

The complaint says the judge "recorded several TikTok videos in his chambers, including songs which contained profanity, graphic sexual references to female and male body parts, and/or racist terms."

Songs that the complaint says he lip-synced included "Jump" from Rihanna and "Sure Thing" by Miguel.

In another video, the complaint says, the judge was wearing "a 'Beavis and Butt-Head' T-shirt while walking through the courthouse with 'Get Down' by Nas playing in the background."

The complaint says that in another video, the judge "smiles at the camera with the following screen text visible: 'When an ex-girlfriend calls you "Santa" because of your new white beard.'"

In the background, "Touch It" by Busta Rhymes is playing.

"By his conduct in posting these and similar videos to TikTok, [Wilcox] exhibited poor judgment and demonstrated disrespect for the Judiciary and an inability to conform to the high standards of conduct expected of judges," the complaint says.

The TikTok account in question appears to have been deleted.

Wilcox will have 20 days to submit a written formal answer to the complaint, though that time could be extended, a courts spokesperson said. The answer must contain a "candid disclosure" of all facts within the scope of the complaint, an affirmative defense, any possible mitigating circumstances and any constitutional challenges to the proceedings.

Bergen County: Teen in road rage crash who injured 5 Bergen students is sentenced to 5 years in prison

After receiving an answer, the Advisory Committee on Judicial Conduct will schedule a formal hearing. Wilcox did not immediately respond to a message left with his chambers requesting comment.

If it's determined that Wilcox violated the Code of Judicial Conduct, the committee has several types of discipline that it can hand down. The committee can issue its own private discipline or it can request that the state Supreme Court issue public discipline, including a public reprimand, admonition, censure, suspension or, in serious cases, beginning proceedings to remove the judge from the bench.

This article originally appeared on NorthJersey.com: Bergen County NJ judge made 'inappropriate' TikToks, complaint says
North Carolina Is Providing Free Meals to Millions of Kids This Summer

This article was originally published in NC Newsline.

In North Carolinas push to curb childhood hunger, schools will provide locally sourced food to millions of youth this summer.

The North Carolina summer nutrition program offers free meals to kids and teenagers under the age of 18. Administered by the North Carolina Department of Public Instruction, the program typically takes place in economically distressed areas so that they can serve the most food-insecure students. While students receive meals in school, once the academic year ends, they might not have enough food at home.

According to the North Carolina Department of Health and Human Services, 1.2 million people experience food insecurity  394,000 of them children.

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The support comes in lieu of the dwindling resources from the federal COVID-19 public health emergency.

NCDPI calls on sponsors of the summer meal program to participate in the Farm to Summer Initiative. This includes serving locally sourced foods, connecting farmers with communities to learn about agriculture and nutrition, and hosting cooking classes.

The public will be able to access food from schools, public housing centers, playgrounds, camps, parks, medical centers, faith-based facilities, and libraries. Providers also offer fitness activities for children and their general communities.

In a press release, State Superintendent Catherine Truitt expressed concerns about acquiring community sponsors.

Our goal is to increase the number of community sponsors that can partner with us to help provide reimbursable meals to food-insecure children, Truitt said. School and summer meals provide students with essential nutrition for growth, development, and learning. Participation in school and Summer Nutrition Programs also provide educational enrichment and support social-emotional learning.

More families might rely on summer meal programs as the resources from the P-EBT program subside. P-EBT is a temporary service that distributes food assistance benefits to eligible families during the COVID-19 public health emergency, which ended on May 11.

Eligible children and teens who attended school in person during the school year will receive a one-time benefits payment over the summer if they applied by the end of May.

Related

Rhode Island Unlikely To Provide Universal School Meals For Public School Kids

NCDHHS aims to reduce the food insecurity rate from its current 10.9% to 10% by December 2024.

Statewide, there is a push to get more citizens food and nutrition services and to increase participation in the Special Supplemental nutrition program for women and children. They also want to get more community-based organizations involved and increase breastfeeding support services.

These strategies are outlined in the NCDHHS State Action Plan for Nutrition Security.

We often take for granted the healthy and nutritious food we keep in our refrigerators and pantries  but many families struggle to put food on the table every day, said NCDHHS Chief Deputy Secretary for Opportunity and Well-Being Susan Gale Perry. Our goal with this plan is to ensure everyone can get the food and nutrition they need to thrive, and fewer North Carolinians experience hunger.

NC Newsline is part of States Newsroom, a network of news bureaus supported by grants and a coalition of donors as a 501c(3) public charity. NC Newsline maintains editorial independence. Contact Editor Rob Schofield for questions: info@ncnewsline.com. Follow NC Newsline on Facebook and Twitter.
South China's Guangdong province has allowed private vehicles from the Hong Kong Special Administrative Region to drive across the border to enter the province starting Saturday. [Photo/Xinhua]



A total of 309 private cars from Hong Kong entered the city of Zhuhai in Guangdong province via the Hong Kong-Zhuhai-Macao Bridge from Saturday to 8 pm on Sunday  the first two days of a new travel scheme for vehicles from the special administrative region, according to Hong Kong Special Administrative Region government.

The "Northbound Travel for Hong Kong Vehicles" scheme, which allows private car owners from the SAR to drive to Guangdong via the bridge without having to apply for a Chinese mainland private vehicle registration plate, was hailed by car owners and Hong Kong's transportation chief as "convenient and efficient, taking integration of the Greater Bay Area to a higher level".

At nine minutes past midnight on Saturday, a Hong Kong car bearing license plate number LL7999 became the first private vehicle from the city to enter Guangdong under the new policy. It took only a few seconds for it to pass through customs clearance using the "one-stop" clearance system.

The vehicle's owner  a Hong Kong resident surnamed Lee  said he was excited about being the first driver to cross the HZMB under the new policy.

"I felt incredibly lucky," he said.

Lee, who went to Zhuhai for a two-day visit, said the new policy has made travel to Guangdong much more convenient, and the customs facilities are excellent. He had applied for the permit early, but said he didn't expect to be among the first batch of drivers to get the green light. He planned to explore business opportunities in Zhuhai, go sightseeing and visit friends.

As the first Hong Kong car owner under the scheme, Lee was greeted with a bouquet of flowers when he arrived in Zhuhai on Saturday, which also marked the 26th anniversary of Hong Kong's return to the motherland.

Fang Zhibo, a senior officer from the border inspection station of the HZMB, said his station has opened 22 car inspection lanes to help handle vehicle clearance procedures.

"The current vehicle handling capacity is nearly 600 vehicles per hour, which is about 20 percent higher than before," he said.

Within the first hour of the policy coming into effect, 11 private vehicles from Hong Kong had entered Guangdong via the HZMB, figures by the Hong Kong government showed.

Upon entering Guangdong, a vehicle is allowed to stay in the province for 30 consecutive days, or a total of 180 days per year.

Before the scheme was implemented, Hong Kong car owners had to obtain cross-boundary vehicle licenses carrying Hong Kong and mainland plates to travel to the mainland. Eligible applicants for these permits are usually business owners and highly skilled professionals.

At a launch ceremony of the new policy on Saturday, Secretary for Transport and Logistics Lam Saihung said it would make it easier for Hong Kong residents to conduct short-term business, travel and official activities in the Guangdong-Hong Kong-Macao Greater Bay Area, taking the region's integration to a higher level.

More than 16,400 people had applied to participate in the scheme since officials started taking applications on June 1. Among them, 7,700 were selected via computer balloting.

Lam said 4,000 eligible applicants lodged formal applications, with 400 of them having been issued permits so far.

According to Lam, the application process takes about 10 working days if vehicle owners provide full information, including details about their vehicle and the driver. They also need to fulfill vehicle inspection and insurance requirements.

Hong Kong vehicles have their steering wheels on the right side, while those on the mainland have steering on the left. Recognition of car plates from Hong Kong also poses an issue for Hong Kong vehicle owners driving in Guangdong.

The Guangdong Provincial Department of Public Security urged Hong Kong drivers to study and familiarize themselves with traffic regulations on the mainland. All traffic accidents occurring in Guangdong will be handled according to mainland traffic rules and relevant regulations, the department said in a statement on Saturday.

Shenzhen is also preparing for an expected surge of cars with HK plates. Shenzhen's traffic bureau said the upgrading of parking lots to recognize license plates from Hong Kong has been prioritized in places such as busy commercial areas and hospitals, where more Hong Kong residents are expected to visit.

According to the Hong Kong government, following the full resumption of normal travel between Hong Kong and the mainland earlier this year, daily two-way traffic flow on the HZMB in May saw more than 5,300 vehicles passing through  about 130 percent of pre-pandemic levels. The heaviest daily two-way traffic flow recorded on the bridge in May was 8,500 vehicles, a record since the bridge's opening in October 2018.
Staff cuts, long commutes, rising costs: Hotel workers say they simply can't keep up

Hotel workers picket in front of the Intercontinental Hotel on Sunday in downtown. (Genaro Molina/Los Angeles Times)

For the record:

10:28 p.m. July 3, 2023: An earlier version of this story said 62 contracts for workers represented by Unite Here Local 11 at Southern California hotel sites expired Friday at midnight. Sixty-one contracts expired.





Thousands of Southern California hotel workers took to picket lines Sunday, wearing red union T-shirts and chanting for others to join their fight for better wages and benefits in a region they say has become increasingly unaffordable.

I couldnt sleep last night, said Diana Rios Sanchez, a supervisor and former room attendant at the InterContinental in downtown Los Angeles, where picketing started as early as 6 a.m.



At midnight on Friday, contracts expired at 61 regional hotel sites where non-management employees, including front-desk staff and those who work in restaurants and clean rooms, are represented by Unite Here Local 11. More than 32,000 hospitality workers across Southern California and Arizona are represented by the union.

Sanchez said pandemic staff cuts mean there are hundreds of fewer workers at the hotel where she works. Employees are "now basically doing the job of two or three," she said.

Read more: Thousands of hotel workers across Southern California walk off the job

Rising housing costs in Los Angeles have forced workers to move farther from their jobs. Brenda Mendoza, a uniform attendant at the JW Marriott, drives two hours from Apple Valley to get to work and says she's not alone.

A lot of the workers I train have moved away, because theyre not able to live where we are right now. The gas has gone up, and everythings expensive, Mendoza said.

The union is demanding a $5 immediate hourly wage increase and a $3 boost each subsequent year of the three-year contract, for a total of $11. The union has also made proposals related to healthcare, pensions, workload and a policy against the use of E-Verify, a federal system for checking employment eligibility, to protect immigrant workers.

Seventeen hotels across Los Angeles and Orange counties were experiencing work stoppages Sunday. Workers chanted, Unete, unete  a la lucha unete! (Join, join, join the fight, join!) as they marched outside hotels downtown.

At the Sheraton Hotel near Universal Studios, pizzas arrived in the afternoon for strikers, some of whom brought their kids along.

Rep. Adam B. Schiff (D-Burbank), who is running for U.S. Senate, joined the picket line at the Sheraton along with state Sen. Maria Elena Durazo (D-Los Angeles), who served as Unite Here Local 11 chapter president from 1989 to 2006.

Read more: Unionized hotel workers reach deal with biggest employer on eve of July 4 weekend and planned strike

These workers," Schiff said, "ought to be able to live somewhere near where they work and have decent wages and healthcare, and retirement that they can make a living on."

The congressman said those who "serve us whenever we stay in hotels are at risk of homelessness on any day of the week. We just need to make sure the economy is working for everyone."

Durazo says the hotel industry needs "to step up" to support workers. "It may hurt them, but it hurts the workers far more."

A housekeeper at the Viceroy Santa Monica expressed anger with management, who brought in temporary workers Thursday in case of a work stoppage, she said, noting that about 10 recent immigrants arrived, suitcases in tow.

The contract was "still in force," said the hotel housekeeper of 40 years. "We told the company that we felt betrayed."

Wilson Medina works two jobs: as a houseman at the Sheraton Universal Hotel and as a mechanic. Hes also a new father: Three weeks ago, his son was born prematurely and had to spend time in the neonatal intensive care unit.

Noting that looming hospital bill, Medina said better healthcare is one of the main reasons he walked off the job. He hopes contract negotiations lead to more affordable benefits for his family.

I know I'm not the only new father or new parent dealing with this, he said.

The strike is the second major action staged by the union in recent weeks. On June 22, Unite Here Local 11 gathered hundreds of demonstrators on Century Boulevard near Los Angeles International Airport to bring attention to the issue of low-paid tourism workers being priced out of the area.

City Councilmembers Hugo Soto-Martinez and Nithya Raman and Assemblywoman Wendy Carrillo (D-Los Angeles) were among scores of people arrested while participating in the demonstration.

Sign up for Essential California, your daily guide to news, views and life in the Golden State.

This story originally appeared in Los Angeles Times.
Oakdale police officers were out of compliance in state-mandated training, grand jury says

The Stanislaus County Civil Grand Jury found that as many as half of the Oakdale Police Departments officers were out of compliance with state-mandated training over a period of several years.

The investigation was prompted by a complaint by an Oakdale resident who claimed OPD officers ineffectively handled a domestic violence call in 2021.

The grand jury found that in the latter part of that year, half of OPDs 14 patrol officers were out of compliance with domestic violence training, according to a report released in June.

Of particular concern, according to the report, was that three of the officers were out of compliance in domestic violence training for three to four years and another was out of compliance for seven years.

A statement released by the Police Department said, The OPD Management Team and Training Unit agree that officers enrolled in ongoing training are better equipped with prevailing practices and skills, enabling them to respond to the jobs challenges and perform their duties proficiently. OPD is committed to adhering to POST training requirements and state-mandated training to ensure the safety and well-being of our community and our officers, and we work continuously to improve our policies and procedures to better serve the needs of our community.

City Manager Bryan Whitemyer added that the numbers cited in the report include officers on workers compensation or light duty status, who are not able to attend training.

Oakdale Police Chief Jerry Ramar said the city received only one complaint regarding the handling of a domestic violence call in 2021 and an internal affairs investigation determined the accusations were unfounded.

Officers out of compliance with other mandated training

In 2022, OPD responded to 116 domestic calls, according to the grand jury report.

Domestic calls are potentially the most dangerous calls law enforcement handles. Peace officers must be prepared to manage these calls to ensure everyones safety, the report says.

While the grand jury focused on domestic violence training, it also found that officers were out of compliance in perishable skills training, which is required by the California Commission on Peace Officer Standards and Training (POST).

POST requires that officers complete training every two years for use of force, tactical firearms, driver training, arrest and control and strategic communication.

The grand jury found that a minimum of four officers were out of compliance with mandated training pursuant to state law and POST regulations as of Jan. 1, 2023.

The Bee contacted POST Monday. A spokesperson directed The Bee to send questions about the report by email but said no one would be available to provide an answer for several days due to the Fourth of July holiday.

A POST certificate is required in order to become a peace officer, but POST does not have the authority to suspend or revoke an officers certificate for lack of training, according to the grand jury report.

But there could be exposure for the city for liability, said Oakdale Councilman Fred Smith, who is a reserve deputy with the Stanislaus County Sheriffs Office.

The grand jury agreed, saying a lack of training could result in less effective policing for the residents of Oakdale and could be introduced as evidence against an officer and the agency in the event of a lawsuit.

City staff not taking it seriously, councilman says

Smith said he became aware of the training issue shortly after being elected in 2020. He said he brought it to the attention of Whitemyer and the police chief at the time, Scott Heller, but felt they were dismissive of the issue.

The big deal to me is that the staff was not taking it seriously, Smith said. I think that the report is necessary to maybe change some things in the city.

The community of Oakdale deserves a little better but the officers also deserve better, Smith added. It is up to the department and their management to schedule training.

Whitemyer said Smith did not not address the issue with him until January 2023. He said the city does take the issue of training seriously and appreciates the grand jurys report.

All of this at the end of the day was helpful because we want to comply, Whitemyer said. It was our goal before we missed the mark, it is our goal going forward.

According to the report, Oakdale officials told grand jury members that COVID-19 restrictions, scheduling conflicts and class unavailability were the primary reasons for falling behind on training.

Based upon facts gathered during (grand jurys) investigation, none of those reasons were found to have merit, the report says.

The report says that the Stanislaus County Sheriffs Regional Training Division was closed in April and May of 2020 due to COVID restrictions but that makeup sessions were offered later in the year and that other training went on as scheduled. The division offered training courses almost monthly, according to the report.

Whitemyer said getting officers into training during the pandemic was harder for small departments like Oakdale.

Sometimes they have to make choices, we have to have people patrolling the town, he said. Smaller agencies, we have to be judicious in how we schedule our officers for training. Our ultimate goal is that everyone receives the appropriate training in the appropriate time as required by POST or the state of California.

As of June 5, all officers working on patrol are in compliance, Ramar said.

The chief will provide a response to the Grand Jury report at a regularly scheduled City Council meeting later this summer, according to the statement from the Police Department.
The State Attorney's Office has decided which criminal charges to file against Keyon Quintell Jones, 19, who was taken into custody in May and accused of a number of burglaries.

Here's what we know:

Charges that have been filed

Court records show the state has charged Jones with burglary of a dwelling while armed; attempted burglary of a dwelling while wearing a mask; attempted burglary of a dwelling while armed; grand theft more than $20,000; two counts of possession of a firearm by a delinquent; and resisting an officer without violence.

Charges that are not being pursued

When arrested, Jones had been held on eight counts of burglary of a conveyance while armed; two counts of burglary of a conveyance while armed wearing a mask; four counts of grand theft of a firearm; three counts of petit theft $100 or more but less than $750; two counts of petit theft; possession of a firearm by a convicted felon; possession of a firearm during the commission of a felony; possession of a firearm/ammunition by a delinquent; and use of a weapon during the commission of a felony.

Why weren't the other charges pursued?

In a court filing, Assistant State Attorney Adam Smith said the evidence was insufficient to prove guilt beyond a reasonable doubt at trial.

Who is representing Jones?

Assistant Public Defender Lenn Ferrer.

Conservative LGBT group: Anti-Trump video shared by DeSantis campaign is 'homophobic'

What's next?

Jones has a September court date. It will be a pre-trial conference where the judge and lawyers from the prosecution and the defense will discuss the status of the case. Jones, from Weirsdale, has been in custody since his May 4 arrest. Bail is set at $152,000.

About the case

Jones is accused of burglarizing vehicles and homes between late 2022 and 2023. Money and other items were stolen. Authorities believe a second person maybe connected to the break-ins.

Contact Austin L. Miller at austin.miller@starbanner.com or @almillerosb

This article originally appeared on Ocala Star-Banner: Which criminal charges will accused burglar, 19, face?
OceanGate's former finance director said she quit when Stockton Rush asked her to be the Titanic submersible's chief pilot after firing the original one for raising safety issues: report

OceanGate's Titan submersible imploded on June 18. Ocean Gate/Handout/Anadolu Agency via Getty Images

A former OceanGate finance director said Stockton Rush asked her to be the head pilot for the Titan.

She told The New Yorker that she quit when the OceanGate CEO urged her to replace the former pilot.

The pilot, David Lochridge, previously said he was fired for noting concerns about the sub's safety.

A former director of finance and administration for OceanGate said the company's CEO, Stockton Rush, asked her in 2018 to become the chief pilot for the Titan submersible  a suggestion that led to her quitting her job.

The former director  who was not named  talked to The New Yorker's Ben Taub about her encounter with Rush.

Rush asked her about becoming the submersible's head pilot after firing David Lochridge, the submarine pilot originally billed for the role, she told Taub.

Lochridge was initially sued by OceanGate in 2018, but he countersued the organization and alleged that he was fired after raising key concerns about the Titan's hull. In his report, Taub also detailed conversations between Lochridge and other submersible experts who raised concerns about the Titan's safety in exchanges with Rush.

Soon after Lochridge was fired, Rush asked the finance director to fill in for the pilot, she told Taub.

"It freaked me out that he would want me to be head pilot, since my background is in accounting," she told the New Yorker.

She said she "did not trust" Rush because Lochridge was no longer working at OceanGate and quit her job as soon as she found a new role elsewhere, Taub reported.

The former director added that some of OceanGate's engineers were teenagers when they worked for the company, while others were in their early twenties, the New Yorker reported. Some of the engineers were also paid $15 per hour at one point, the former director told Taub.

The Titan imploded on June 18 while carrying five people  including Rush  to the wreck of the Titanic some 13,000 feet underwater. It lost contact with its mother ship around 1  hours into its descent, and it was likely thousands of feet beneath the surface when its hull collapsed.

Before the Titan's final dive, Rush was repeatedly cautioned by submersible experts about the experimental nature of his vessel. But he pushed back against their warnings, citing his desire to innovate and belief that industry safety standards were too strict.

Rush believed his vessel was sound enough to run tours to the Titanic reliably, and he told a friend in 2018 that he would shut OceanGate down before operating an unsafe vessel.

When contacted for this story, a representative for OceanGate told Insider that the company had no further information to provide.

July 4, 2023: This story was updated to reflect a response from OceanGate.

Read the original article on Insider
OceanGate's Stockton Rush said he took it as a 'serious personal insult' when a former advisor warned him about the Titanic sub's risks, and threatened to sue when the consultant declined to work for OceanGate: report

CEO of OceanGate exhibitions, poses at Times Square in New York, U.S. April 12, 2017. Shannon Stapleton/Reuters

Stockton Rush once bristled in 2018 when warned that his Titanic submersible posed safety risks.

Rush called warnings from other industry players a "serious personal insult," per The New Yorker.

Rush also threatened to sue a former advisor who sent him a cautionary email, the outlet reported.

OceanGate CEO Stockton Rush said he felt personally insulted when a fellow submersible enthusiast and expedition consultant cautioned in 2018 that the Titan wasn't ready for commercial deep-sea tours.

Rob McCallum, the cofounder of EYOS Expeditions and a former advisor to OceanGate, emailed Rush in March 2018, warning him that he was using a "prototype un-classed technology in a very hostile place," reported The New Yorker's Ben Taub.

"As much as I appreciate entrepreneurship and innovation, you are potentially putting an entire industry at risk," McCallum warned Rush, per Taub.

Rush responded four days later, complaining of "industry players who try to use a safety argument to stop innovation and new entrants from entering their small existing market," Taub reported.

Rush said that his vessel's technology "flies in the face of submersible orthodoxy, but that is the nature of innovation," according to Taub.

"We have heard the baseless cries of 'you are going to kill someone' way too often. I take this as a serious personal insult," Rush wrote.

Rush's response also came after a cofounder of Triton Submarines, a company that also makes deep-sea submersibles, wrote days before to OceanGate with a warning that people could die in the Titan.

McCallum worked with Triton to lead at least one expedition to the Titanic shipwreck. Triton's submersible, unlike the Titan, was certified to reach extreme depths by the marine society DNV. Apart from this expedition, McCallum also twice took tourists to see the Titanic  which is around 13,000 feet underwater  using submarines that were rated to reach 19,000 feet.

McCallum wrote back to Rush after the OceanGate CEO's irate email, and listed several of his concerns with the Titan, per The New Yorker.

"In your race to Titanic you are mirroring that famous catch cry 'she is unsinkable,'" the expedition leader wrote, according to the outlet.

Taub reported that Rush then asked McCallum to work for OceanGate, and that when the latter declined, he was threatened with a lawsuit from the CEO.

They stopped emailing each other afterward, Taub reported. McCallum previously advised OceanGate on marketing and logistics, and visited its Seattle workshop as it was working on the Cyclops I, the predecessor to the Titan.

His exchange with Rush also happened about two months after OceanGate fired its chief submersible pilot, David Lochridge, who said in a lawsuit that he was terminated after raising safety issues with the Titan's hull.

Lochridge said one of his key concerns was that the submersible didn't have a proper system to alert OceanGate if the hull  made from an unusual mix of carbon fiber and titanium  was suffering from issues that could lead to a breach.

OceanGate started running its annual tours to the Titanic in 2021, and was deploying the Titan on its third commercial expedition when it disappeared on June 18.

The authorities later announced that the Titan likely imploded thousands of feet underwater, after remote vehicles found debris of the submersible on the sea floor.

Rush, who died aboard the submersible, has since come under the spotlight for his previous comments criticizing industry safety regulations and amid emerging reports that he ignored warnings from other experts. However, the CEO's colleagues and close friends have defended him, saying he prioritized safety above ambition.

When contacted for this story, a representative for OceanGate told Insider that the company had no further information to provide.

July 4, 2023: This story was updated to reflect a response from OceanGate.

Read the original article on Insider
More than 2,100 Oklahoma women received abortion services in Kansas and Colorado last year after Oklahoma banned nearly all abortions, according to new state reports that provide a look at the impact of patchwork abortion laws.

A new report from the Kansas Department of Health and Environment shows that 2,026 Oklahoma residents received an abortion in that state in 2022, up from 137 in 2021. In Colorado, 198 Oklahomans received abortions last year, up from 12 in 2021, according to that states Department of Public Health and Environment.

The two states are among only three in Oklahomas region where women can get an abortion; New Mexico is the other, but 2022 statistics are not available.

The numbers reflect only about seven months in which Oklahoma women seeking to terminate a pregnancy were not allowed to do so in their home state. If the patterns of 2022 repeat this year, Kansas and Colorado would be likely to report higher numbers of Oklahoma women receiving abortion services.

Reported abortions in Oklahoma drop to zero after Gov. Stitt signs bill modeled after Texas

No abortions were reported in Oklahoma after May 2022, when Gov. Kevin Stitt signed a law that allowed people to file civil claims against anyone who helped a woman obtain an abortion. The law was based on a similar one approved months earlier in Texas.

The law in Texas drove many women from that state to Oklahoma before Oklahoma legislators copied the legislation. Up until Stitt signed that law, there had been 2,160 abortions in Oklahoma, with more than half provided for residents of Texas, according to the Oklahoma State Department of Health.

The rush of Texan women to Oklahoma because of the civil law was an early glimpse of what would happen nationally after June 2022, when the U.S. Supreme Court struck down its abortion rights precedents and left it up to states to write their own abortion laws.

As most abortions were banned in Oklahoma, Texas, Arkansas and Missouri, women went to Kansas and Colorado. Kansas reported 12,318 abortions in 2022, up from 7,849 in 2021. Nearly 3,000 Texas women received abortions in Kansas last year, up from 233 the year before, according to Kansas statistics. Colorado reported a total of 14,154 abortions in 2022, up from 11,580 in 2021.

More: Oklahoma lawmakers pass nation's most restrictive abortion law

Reports from the Oklahoma Health Department show there were 4,145 abortions for Oklahoma residents in 2021 and 4,177 in 2020. Last year, there were 898 for Oklahoma residents before the Texas-style law went into effect.

The Oklahoma Legislature and the governor also approved criminal laws that were triggered when the U.S. Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade and Planned Parenthood v. Casey.

In the year after Oklahoma passed the first total abortion ban since Roe, we have worked to help patients overcome unbelievable barriers to care, Anamarie Rebori Simmons, director of communications and marketing for Planned Parenthood Great Plains, said last week.

During that time, weve expanded our patient navigation services with the generous help of supporters and the critical network of local abortions funds. We continue to provide Oklahomans assistance with travel, lodging and the cost of care, knowing that those hurdles are overwhelming for many of the people we serve. Patients deserve local care in their communities, but while thats not available, were committed to helping them get to states like Kansas, where they have rights to make their own health care decisions.

Tony Lauinger, chairman of Oklahomans for Life, said he wasnt surprised at the statistics from Kansas and Colorado regarding abortion services provided for Oklahoma residents.

The abortion industry is doing everything they can to facilitate out-of-state abortions  through their offers to help with travel and hotel rooms, Lauinger said. They go to the hilt to try to facilitate the killing of unborn children. Our hope is that there will be many unborn children who will be born in Oklahoma this year instead of being aborted. Its the case where not all unborn childrens lives will be saved, but we hope a lot of them will.

Rights and restrictions

Kansas voters last year effectively upheld their state constitutions guarantee of bodily autonomy, including abortion.

This year, the Oklahoma Supreme Court struck down the states new criminal and civil laws after finding that the state constitution includes an inherent right of a pregnant woman to terminate a pregnancy when necessary to save her life."

The laws required a medical emergency for an abortion to save a womans life, something the court said was not required under the state constitution.

More: Oklahoma Supreme Court strikes down two state abortion bans

The court left in place a law from 1910 that bans most abortions unless necessary to preserve a mothers life. The court took no position on the broader question of whether there is a right to elective abortion.

Lauinger said he and others opposed to abortion are concerned that an initiative petition drive may be launched in Oklahoma to guarantee a broader state constitutional right to abortion. Such a drive might be supported by the fact that an overwhelming majority of Oklahomans dont favor the lack of exceptions now in state law, he said.

Lauinger, who has been working to restrict abortion in Oklahoma for decades, is now supporting legislation that would make exceptions for life of the mother; for a medical emergency that threatens the physical health of the mother; for rape reported to law enforcement; and for incest with a minor reported to law enforcement.

A poll this year showed about 70% of Oklahomans support those exceptions, but only those exceptions, Lauinger said.

Demonstrators are shown at the Oklahoma state Capitol in May 2022, the last month of that year in which an abortion was reported to the Oklahoma State Department of Health.

According to the state Health Department report on abortions in 2021  the last full year in which abortions were available in Oklahoma  59 were reported as necessary to avert the death of the mother.

Also, 324 women who received an abortion that year said their physical health was at risk, while 394 said there may be a problem affecting the health of the fetus. Twenty-one women cited forcible rape and 11 cited incest as the reason for seeking an abortion. Women could give more than one answer.

More: US Reps. Cole, Bice oppose paying expenses for US military women traveling for abortions

Planned Parenthood Great Plains has seen an increase in appointments at its Oklahoma health centers for contraception, ranging from 5% to 15%, Simmons said.

In November, the organization opened a health center in Lawton that sees patients for services including birth control, testing for HIV and sexually transmitted infections, emergency contraception, gender-affirming care and general wellness care.

Since we opened Lawton in late 2022, weve been proud to see continued increase in patient volume and were excited that residents have turned to us as a local health care provider, Simmons said.

This article originally appeared on Oklahoman: About 2,100 Oklahoma women got abortions in Kansas, Colorado in 2022
The James Beard Awards arent as well known as the Oscars, but they are the culinary equivalent  and Maxine Peabody, born and raised in Olympia, is a key player in the Philadelphia restaurant that took top honors in June.

Peabody, the daughter of Olympia musicians Vince Brown and Monica Peabody, is the general manager of Friday Saturday Sunday, which was chosen Outstanding Restaurant by a national group of experts.

It was very surreal  crazy, Peabody said. None of us wanted to think we were going to win because we didnt want to curse it.  We didnt make a plan for if we won.

The small restaurant, owned by Chad and Hanna Williams, serves a seasonal eight-course tasting menu, with a la carte options only in the bar. Current dishes include grilled quail with curried liver pate, crispy sweetbreads with egg-yolk jam, and Meyer lemon semifreddo, a frozen dessert made with cream and egg yolks.

At the end of the meal, before dessert, we serve a tea thats basically made from all the vegetables we used that night, Chad Williams told Philadelphia Magazine in June. We do some things that are fun to eat with your hands.  Not all fine dining needs to be with a knife and fork.

The couple opened Friday Saturday Sunday in 2016, keeping the name of the venerable restaurant that previously occupied the space and changing just about everything else. They switched to a tasting menu when they were allowed to reopen after the pandemic lockdown. At the time, they could seat just eight people in the dining room, which normally holds 36.

Peabody started work at the restaurant in 2017 and now oversees the front of house  basically, everything but the kitchen, which is chef Chad Williams domain.

Olympia native Maxine Peabody is the general manager of restaurant Friday Saturday Sunday, which was just honored with a James Beard Award.

She found recognition not by having a career goal but simply by following what appealed to her, moving from barista at San Francisco Street Bakery and Olympia Coffee Roasting Co., to bartender, to restaurant host and beyond.

Ive never had one defining life plan for myself, she told The Olympian. When I was younger, I never imagined myself as an adult.  I kept trying things out.

Her parents were on her side every step of the way.

Theyve always been my number-one supporters, she said. They have allowed me to live a life that is not traditional and maybe not always going with what other people would think is the right path. Their support has led me to building a pretty cool life.

She graduated from Olympia High School in 2008, but she didnt spend all that much time there. I unschooled in freshman year, she said. I read The Teenage Liberation Handbook, and my parents were very supportive. They are very classic Olympia.

Peabody designed her own curriculum that year, then returned to public school in sophomore year because she missed her friends. As a junior and senior, she did Running Start classes at South Puget Sound Community College.

Once I was back in school, I was very much into getting good grades and working very hard, she said. Running Start is a lot harder than high school, because we were taking college classes.

She looked at colleges and then decided to take a year off. That year never ended. She initially imagined staying in Philadelphia for just a short time, too, but now its been more than a decade.

Her work at Friday Saturday Sunday started as a part-time job and just kept on growing.

It was a natural progression, where I kept asking for more responsibility and Hanna kept finding more things for me to do, Peabody said. I became her assistant manager, and in 2020, when (Hanna and Chad) had their baby, I was promoted to general manager.

Its a funny story, she added. I never really thought I would go into management. I was content bartending, but it just worked out that way.

Since the Beard awards were presented last month, things have changed at Friday Saturday Sunday. Reservations are filling as soon as they open, Peabody said, and most bar customers are committing to the full tasting menu.

The Williamses plan to start more restaurants  and that means new opportunities ahead on Peabodys meandering path.

Were definitely going to build on that momentum, she said. We have plans to open other spots, which I would love to be a part of. We have a lot of staff that has been here since day one, and I see a lot of us taking this opportunity to grow within the company.
Aubrey Sus Title I Strings nonprofit won the grand prize in Utahs MyImpact Challenge in June 2023. | Hank McIntire

As a junior at Skyline High School, Audrey Su founded a 501(c)3 nonprofit called Title I Strings to bring free string-instrument music education to Utahs Title I elementary schools. Last month, she took home the grand prize in Utah and an honorable mention at nationals in the MyImpact Challenge, a nationwide civic-engagement contest launched by the Bill of Rights Institute.

Teams of middle school and high school students came to Utah Valley University on June 14 to share projects they had developed in response to observed community needs, as well as the actions they took to meet those needs. Utahs Civic Thought and Leadership Initiative, along with the Utah Civic Learning Collaborative and YouthLinc, hosted the event.

Aubrey based her project on the founding principle of equality. To deny a child equal music education is to forgo them a valuable opportunity to find confidence, creativity and passion in all walks of life, she said.

Audrey cites data that students in music programs consistently score higher than those who never participate, regardless of their socioeconomic status, and such programs can help fight some of the most enduring problems that face our youth today  depression and anxiety. Were expanding our own worldviews, becoming more conscientious people, and doing our part to help these underserved children find equality, justice, and respect, she said.

Each team, in line with specific contest criteria, was expected to connect their project to Americas founding principles, including the ones outlined below, which have helped shape our republic and maintain our fundamental rights to life, liberty and equality:

Natural rights (liberty, equality, justice and other inalienable rights).

Consent and republican government (minority rights, consent of the governed and a representative democracy).

Limited government (respect for the rule of law, due process).

Constitutional/auxiliary precautions (separation of powers, checks and balances and federalism).

Bill of rights (including freedoms of religion, speech, press, petition, assembly and private property).

In addition, projects were to reflect at least one of the civic virtues outlined by the Bill of Rights Institute. These included courage, honor, humility, integrity, justice, moderation, prudence, respect and responsibility.

The MyImpact Challenge gave high schoolers the opportunity to engage with these civic virtues while serving their community in unique ways.

Students from the American Preparatory Academy started a project called the Constitution Live and presented it at the MyImpact Challenge at UVU in June. | Hank McIntire

Students from American Preparatory Academy bring together communities across Utah to read the Constitution. The Constitution Live teams poster explained that increased understanding can heal the divisiveness in our country and that we want to encourage respect and responsibility among Americans and promote popular sovereignty in order to heal our country. Elise Christenson explained what the experience taught her: I can make a difference even though Im only in high school, she said.

Nial Reay of Monticello High School noticed after the COVID-19 pandemic that students seemed less engaged in school, particularly in the science class that he found very interesting. He saw a need, talked to the teacher, worked hard and donated his earned money to purchase supplies  frogs, in this case. Nial is now helping seventh graders learn about dissection. He sees his project creating greater equality as he shares his love of science with younger students who might otherwise not have this benefit.

One-third of the MyImpact projects in Utah addressed gun-safety concerns, clearly an issue that our students think a lot about. Other projects covered the topics of fast fashion, which leads to environmentally unsustainable and unethical labor practices; protecting freedom of expression for Asian Americans; and performing sneaky service around school. To see more projects, view the nationwide winners for 2023 here. Teachers interested in adding more civics to their classrooms can learn more about the MyImpact Challenge here.

As Matthew Brogdon, senior director of the Center for Constitutional Studies, told participants that day: If you dont have a healthy civil society, you cant very well have a functioning constitutional government. We can be proud that these Utah youth are promoting a healthy civil society through a viable government based on ordered liberty and the rule of law.

Lisa R. Halverson and Glori H. Smith are Civics Education Fellows at Utah Valley Universitys Center for Constitutional Studies.
Aaron and Melissa Klein

With the U.S. Supreme Courts license to discriminate ruling in 303 Creative Services v. Elenis, the review of other anti-LGBTQ+ discrimination cases is beginning, with an Oregon bakerys case up first.

The court Friday ordered review of Melissa Klein v. Oregon Department of Labor in light of the 303 Creative decision, which upheld a conservative Christian website designers right to turn away same-sex couples seeking wedding websites. In the Klein case, the high court vacated lower courts' ruling that Kleins business had illegally discriminated against a female couple seeking a cake for a commitment ceremony and ordered the Oregon Court of Appeals to reconsider the case.

Klein and her husband, Aaron, were running Sweet Cakes by Melissa in Gresham, Ore., in 2013 when a lesbian couple, Rachel Cryer and Laurel Bowman, approached them about creating the cake for their commitment ceremony (same-sex marriage was not yet legal). The Kleins refused, citing their conservative Christian beliefs against same-sex unions. Aaron Klein was quoted as saying the lesbian couples relationship was an abomination.

The Oregon Bureau of Labor and Industries found that the bakery had violated state law banning discrimination based on sexual orientation in public accommodations as well as other venues. The Oregon Court of Appeals and the state Supreme Court upheld this finding. The Kleins appealed to the U.S. Supreme Court, which ordered review of the case in 2019 in view of its 2018 ruling in Masterpiece Cakeshop, vacating a Colorado ruling against a baker who declined to make a wedding cake for a same-sex couple.

Last year, the Oregon Court of Appeals found once again that the Kleins had committed illegal discrimination but ordered the Bureau of Labor and Industries to reconsider the $135,000 fine it had imposed on the Kleins, as the large fine supposedly reflected bias toward religion. That was reduced to $30,000. But they went back to the Supreme Court, and the discrimination ruling against them will be reconsidered again.

First Liberty, the right-wing legal group that represents the Kleins, celebrated the high courts order. Its a win when the Supreme Court vacates a bad lower court decision like it did for Aaron and Melissa  but the case is not over, Kelly Shackleford, First Libertys president, CEO, and chief counsel, said in an email to the Christian Post, a conservative site. The Kleins have been fighting for the First Amendment for over a decade and we will stand with them no matter how long it takes to get the victory they deserve.

The Kleins have closed their Oregon business but have reopened in Montana, according to business records.
Give Orkney back to Oslo? Out of the question says UK

Far-flung Orkney, off Scotland's northeast coast, wants to explore alternative methods of government (Adrian DENNIS)

The UK on Monday rejected a possible bid by Orkney to break away and join Norway, after the leader of the remote islands off Scotland's northeast coast complained of neglect by both London and Edinburgh.

The North Sea archipelago was controlled by the king of Norway until 1472 when it was handed over to Scotland with the Shetland Islands as part of the dowry for a dynastic marriage between his daughter and a Scottish king.

Now, according to the motion for a council debate taking place Tuesday on Orkney, it is time to explore "alternative models of governance" to give the islands greater economic opportunity.

"On the street in Orkney, people come up and say to me: 'When are we going to pay back the dowry? When are we going back to Norway?'" council leader James Stockan told BBC radio.

"There is a huge affinity and a huge deep cultural relationship there," he said, arguing that Orkney was being "failed dreadfully" by the Scottish and UK governments.

Other options would include becoming a self-governing "Crown dependency" such as Guernsey, Jersey or the Isle of Man, Stockan said.

Crown dependencies are territories that come under the sovereignty of the British Crown but are not part of the United Kingdom.

However, the motion was given short shrift by the UK government in London.

"First and foremost, there is no mechanism for the conferral of Crown dependency or overseas territory status on any part of the UK," Prime Minister Rishi Sunak's spokesman told reporters.

"But fundamentally, we are stronger as one United Kingdom, we have no plans to change that," he added.

Liam McArthur, the islands' Liberal Democrat representative in the devolved Scottish parliament, also argued against the motion.

In the Orcadian newspaper, he warned the council against "the dangers from putting up barriers between or creating divisions within communities."

While it appears far-fetched, Orkney separatism poses a potential dilemma for the Scottish National Party -- which controls the Edinburgh government and itself wants to break free of London.

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A four-time felon, who is already serving a 20-year prison sentence for aggravated battery, was sentenced to eight years in prison Friday in connection with a 2018 Crete Township shooting.

Tomas Rekasius, 31, of Orland Park, was found guilty by Judge Amy Bertani-Tomczak in a Sept. 21 bench trial of aggravated discharge of a firearm and armed habitual criminal, both felony charges, according to a news release from the Will County states attorneys office.

Rekasius attorney did not respond Monday to requests for comment.

On June 28, 2018, the victim, who Rekasius knew from prison, was pulling into his garage when Rekasius pulled into the driveway in a minivan, prosecutors said. The victim had been working on Rekasius Subaru Outback at the time, which was parked in the driveway, they said.

The victim walked over to Rekasius car and told him he needed additional parts to complete the repair job. Rekasius became upset and pointed a semi-automatic pistol the man, who put his hands up and said his child was home, prosecutors said.

Rekasius continued to point the gun at the man as he backed out of the driveway, according to the release. Rekasius drove off, but when he saw the man step into the street, Rekasius stopped the minivan, got out of the vehicle and fired a shot in the mans direction before fleeing the scene, prosecutors said.

We are fortunate that no one was injured when Rekasius fired shots from his weapon, but his conduct demonstrates that he is a dangerous and volatile loose cannon who needs to be behind bars, Will County States Attorney James Glasgow is quoted in the release. The law-abiding citizens of Will County have an absolute right to be protected from indiscriminately violent offenders like Tomas Rekasius.

Rekasius was previously convicted in Champaign County for manufacturing and delivering controlled substances, and he has a prior felony conviction for possession of controlled substances while on probation for another felony drug-related offense, according to the release.

At the time of this shooting, Rekasius was out on bond in Cook County for aggravated battery strangulation, for which he is now serving a 20-year prison sentence, according to the release.

Rekasius will not receive credit in this case for time served, according to the release, which means will begin his eight-year sentence after the completion of the Cook County sentence. He will have to serve 85% of the eight-year sentence and then serve three years of mandatory supervised release, or parole.
Owner of Seminole Towne Center mall in Sanford owes more than $800K in property taxes

Editors note: This story is available as a result of a content partnership between WFTV and the Orlando Business Journal.

The owner of a well-known Sanford mall is more than $800,000 behind on its property taxes, Orlando Business Journal has learned  and it appears to be part of a larger trend for a firm known for buying distressed malls.

Seminole Mall Realty Holding LLC, a subsidiary of New York-based Kohan Retail Investment Group  which co-owns Seminole Towne Center along with Hollywood-based 4th Dimension Properties  is delinquent $824,020 on 2022 property taxes as of June 27, Seminole County Tax Collector records showed.

The total includes debt owed on four of six total parcels registered to Seminole Mall Realty Holding, which together account for the bulk of the Seminole Towne Center mall at 200 Towne Center Circle. The mall is Central Floridas fifth-largest retail center with 1.15 million square feet of rentable building area, based on OBJ research.

Click here to read the full story on the Orlando Business Journals website.
Pa. has the 2nd most 'Major League Eaters' in the nation. How many and who are they?

You won't believe what William "Wild Bill" Myers can do with a pile of chicken wings, or Larell Marie The Real Deal Mele with a plate of hot dogs.

These Pennsylvanians take competitive eating to another level, and they helped our state rank No. 2 in the nation for the number of native "Major League Eaters," according to Gambling.com.

The website compiled this list as the nation turns its eyes to Coney Island on the Fourth of July, home of the Super Bowl of competitive eating contests at Nathans Famous Hot Dog-Eating Contest.

Pennsylvania ranks No. 2 for number of Major League Eaters, according to Gambling.com

The site also ranked Pennsylvania at seventh place among the top 10 best states for competitive eating.

Pennsylvania's Major League Eaters are:

Lebanon native takes the title: Meet Lebanon's nationally ranked eater

Read about Larell Marie Mele: Long Pond woman hungry for Nathan's title

George Chiger of Pocono Pines will compete in Nathans Famous Hot Dog Contest on July 4 in Coney Island.

Major League Eating (MLE) is the world body that oversees all professional eating contests. In its roster there are currently 50 professional competitive eaters  both men and women.

Competitive eating is a popular activity in the United States, Canada and Japan, where participants compete against each other to eat large quantities of food, usually in a short period  often with a chance to win prizes, including cash.

"The world of professional competitive eating isnt for the faint of heart. To be a Major League Eater you have to be physically and mentally prepared for consuming vast amounts of food in a short amount of time," a Gambling.com spokesperson said. "Many competitive eaters, like those competing in the Nathans Hot Dog Eating Contest, practice stretching out their stomachs for the main event by drinking gallons of milk or water very quickly, or by downing lots of filling, fibrous foods like watermelon and oatmeal in a matter of minutes."

Chiger and Mele of the Poconos actually trained together for the Nathan's contest, pushing each other to eat more, faster.

Deitz, of Lebanon, got his competitive eating career at, naturally, a Lebanon Bologna eating contest and went on to compete in many other events  some of which even featured healthy foods such as kale.

Top male and female international eaters from England, Canada, South Korea, Japan, Brazil, Australia and the United States will compete in the Nathan's contest contest this year.

Could this year's winner be from Pennsylvania? Tune into ESPN tomorrow to find out.

Pennsylvanians take competitive eating to another level, earning the state seventh place out of the top 10 best states for competitive eating according to Gambling.com.

This article originally appeared on York Daily Record: Pa. has the second most 'Major League Eaters' in the nation
A 5-year-old girl died after being carried down a California river, according to a sheriffs office.

The Mendocino County Sheriffs Office said it got a 911 call about a missing child, who had been swept down the river in Covelo, at around 8:25 p.m. on Saturday, July 1, according to a news release.

After passersby found the girl, they tried life saving measures, the sheriffs office said.

Deputies said medical personnel also tried to save the girl after she was taken to an ambulance. Despite those efforts, the child died.

The sheriffs office said it is investigating the drowning in Covelo, which is about 200 miles northwest of Sacramento.

The National Weather Service warned of DEADLY cold river temperatures in a June 27 tweet.

Think twice before you jump into local rivers without a life jacket. It may be the last decision you ever make, NWS Sacramento said on Twitter.

Sara Kennedy, the boating education and outreach coordinator for California State Park, told SFGATE that typically the state will see gradual snow melt in the spring. However, this year, with the hottest days upcoming, we may see a massive snowmelt event during the 4th of July weekend.

Portions of rivers that may have been good, calm swimming holes in past years, may no longer look the same and may now be a dangerous place to swim, in a very remote area with no resources close by to rescue a swimmer in distress, Kennedy told the outlet.

You are the ones drowning. CA park official issues pointed warning to this specific group

Crews find body of 4-year-old in Kings River. He had been missing since Sunday

Body found in river is identified as 14-year-old missing for months, New York cops say
Patriot SAM downed Russian aircraft in Bryansk Oblast on May 13

The operator of the Patriot air defense system against the background of the destroyed Russian targets

A Patriot surface-to-air missile system featured in a video posted by the Ukrainian Air Force to mark Anti-Aircraft Forces Day on July 3.

The system has a kill count of downed aircraft marked on its side, where three helicopters can be seen on one of the video frames dated May 13  the day of a number of Russian aircraft were downed in Russia's Bryansk Oblast.

Screenshot of the Air Force of Ukraine video

Three helicopters and a drone are seen on the Patriots side, with the date May 13 beneath them. There are two more planes displayed as well, without an clear date.

Screenshot of the Air Force of Ukraine video

Two Russian Mi-8 helicopters and Su-34 and Su-35 fighter jets crashed almost simultaneously in Russias Bryansk Oblast on May 13. Their crews were killed. According to Air Force spokesperson Yuriy Ihnat, Russia may actually have lost three helicopters.

The helicopters were supposed to launch guided bombs against Ukrainian settlements in the north. He claimed, however, that Russian air defense was involved in "Russian aircraft falling [from the sky].

In the video, anti-aircraft troops speak about their successful work protecting the Ukrainian sky from Russian missiles and drones, using S-300, Buk-M1, NASAMAS, and IRIS-T SAM systems.

Russia has lost a total of 309 helicopters and 315 warplanes since the start of the full-scale invasion against Ukraine.

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
[Source]

A new study has found that people who live near green spaces, such as parks and places surrounded by vegetation, are more likely to be biologically younger.

Key details: For the study, which was published in Science Advances on Wednesday, researchers from Northwestern Universitys Feinberg School of Medicine in Chicago looked into data gathered from 1986 to 2006 about 924 Black and white participants living in Birmingham, Alabama; Oakland, California; Chicago and Minneapolis.

Gathering data: The team followed the participants for over two decades and took note of the presence of major parks and vegetation near their residences using satellite imaging.

In addition, they analyzed blood samples from the participants during the 15th and 20th year of the study to figure out their biological ages.

More from NextShark: Last known Irrawaddy dolphin in northeastern Cambodia dies after fishing net entanglement

Variables that could impact the results, such as income, education and smoking habits were kept in mind as the findings were analyzed.

The results: The researchers found that participants surrounded by around 30% of vegetation within a three-mile radius were 2.5 years biologically younger on average than those who live near around 20% or less of green space.

Living near more greenness can help you be younger than your actual age, the studys lead author, Kyeezu Kim, told AFP. "We believe our findings have significant implications for urban planning in terms of expanding green infrastructure to promote public health and reduce health disparities."

More from NextShark: S. Korean scientists find gene that can help regulate leukemia progression in new study

Disparity due to race: The study also found a disparity in the benefits of living near green spaces based on race, noting that some Black participants with the same surroundings as the studys white participants were only biologically younger by one year, while the white participants were found to be biologically younger by three years.

Kim explained that there are many factors to consider when looking into the disparity, such as stress, qualities of the surrounding green space, and other social support.

Other disparities: Aside from race, the study noted that its female participants were more likely to be biologically younger than its male participants.

More from NextShark: California poll: Most believe UC, CSU colleges unaffordable; 4-year degree not the only way to succeed

The researchers explained that this could be due in part to the traditional social role as a caregiver that "increase [women's] use of residential surrounding greenness... Research indicates that the use of green space differs by sex; for example, women can visit parks more often potentially for social interaction and cohesion or as part of caring for children."

Commenting on the study: Last month, Kim explained the significance of the team's findings to Northwestern Now, saying, Our research shows that the environment we live in, specifically our community and access to green spaces, is also important for staying healthy as we age."

More from NextShark: New York Health Department releases its first-ever AAPI health report
Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg had the perfect take-down for Ron DeSantis over the weekend, after the Republican presidential hopeful posted an anti-LGBT+ campaign video.

The video, posted on Friday, was described as homophobic by a number of LGBT+ members of the Republican party, as well as by critics on the other side of the aisle.

Seemingly making a dig at Donald Trump for not being homophobic enough, the video includes clips of the former president where he appeared to embrace the LGBT+ community in the wake of the 2016 mass shooting at gay nightclub Pulse.

The second part of the video shifts to Mr DeSantis and his own comments and policies on drag acts and transgender rights.

But, in a bizarre move, the video appears to try to portray the Florida governor as masculine, with his image spliced with images of muscular, shirtless men and several Hollywood actors, including Brad Pitt.

Although Mr Buttgieg didnt comment directly on the video, he managed to work in a few jabs at Mr DeSantis during an intervew with CNNs State of the Union on Sunday.

Im going to leave aside the strangeness of trying to prove your manhood by putting up a video that splices images of you in between oiled-up shirtless bodybuilders and just get to the bigger issue that is on my mind whenever I see this stuff in the policy space, Mr Buttigieg told host Dana Bash.

Which is, again, who are you trying to help? Who are you trying to make better off? And what public policy problems do you get up in the morning thinking about how to solve?

He added that his own departments work on flooding and infrastructure development was the focus for him and many other politicians.

These are the kinds of problems that most of us got into government, politics, and public service in order to work on, Mr Buttigieg said.

To wrap up Pride Month, lets hear from the politician who did more than any other Republican to celebrate it



pic.twitter.com/FT7LdW4vls  DeSantis War Room  (@DeSantisWarRoom) June 30, 2023

And I just dont understand the mentality of somebody who gets up in the morning thinking that hes going to prove his worth by competing over who can make life hardest for a hard-hit community that is already so vulnerable in America.

While Mr DeSantis sought to attack his main rival in the GOP presidential race over his LGBT+ stance, Mr Trump was widely condemned for his own anti-LGBT+ actions during his time in the White House.

Mr Trump faced repeated accusations of homophobia after failing to acknowledge Pride month, banning US embassies from hanging rainbow flags, and announcing via Twitter that he would ban transgender people from serving in the military.
Peter Hellyer, prolific writer who chronicled the UAE's rise over nearly five decades, dies at 75

FILE - Peter Hellyer, visits an ancient Christian monastery on Siniyah Island in Umm al-Quwain, United Arab Emirates, Thursday, Nov. 3, 2022. Peter Hellyer, a British born writer with wide-ranging interests who spent nearly five decades chronicling the history, natural beauty and modern transformation of the United Arab Emirates, has died at the age of 75, local media reported Monday, July 3, 2023. (AP Photo/Kamran Jebreili, File)

DUBAI, United Arab Emirates (AP)  Peter Hellyer, a U.K.-born writer who spent nearly five decades chronicling the history, natural beauty and modern transformation of the United Arab Emirates, has died peacefully at the age of 75, local media reported Monday.

Hellyer, who was granted UAE citizenship and awarded the country's highest civilian honor, helped found the state-run WAM news agency and established its English service. He also helped establish an archaeological group that uncovered several historical sites.

Sheikh Mohammed bin Zayed Al Nahyan, the president of the UAE, said on Twitter that Hellyer's dedicated service to UAE over the course of decades had left notable marks in the fields of antiquities, the environment and the media.

"With his passing, we lost a model of commitment and giving," Sheikh Mohammed wrote.

Hellyer came to the UAE in 1975 to make a documentary film about Sheikh Zayed bin Sultan Al Nahyan, Sheikh Mohammed's father and the founder and first president of the federation of seven sheikhdoms.

He stayed on to chronicle its dramatic rise from a sparsely populated desert nation to an ultra-modern hub of tourism and commerce, home to the futuristic cities of Dubai and Abu Dhabi, and the world's tallest skyscraper.

Hellyer wrote several articles and books on the country's rise, including the official history of its vital oil industry, as well as a broader, maritime history of the Gulf nation. He co-founded WAM with the late Palestinian journalist Ibrahim al-Abed and later served as director of external information and research at the National Media Council, a government regulatory body.

He co-founded and led the Abu Dhabi Islands Archaeology Survey from 1991 to 2006 and was involved in several discoveries shedding light on the history of the Persian Gulf, including a 1,400-year-old Christian monastery unearthed on Sir Bani Yas Island near the border with Saudi Arabia.

He wrote widely on the UAE's desert ecology. He chaired the Emirates Natural History Group in the early 1990s and launched its journal, Tribulus, at which he was a longtime editor. He also founded a local birdwatching society.

He was awarded the Abu Dhabi Medal in 2013  the country's highest civilian honor. Organizers hailed him as a self-taught jack-of-all-trades whose devotion to this land and its people is expressed through his commitment to protecting the countrys fragile ecosystems and history in a time of rapid development.

He continued writing about the UAE in regular columns for The National, an English-language newspaper founded in 2008 that he had advised in its early years.

The National was among several local media outlets that reported his death. A family member did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

Peters enormous role in documenting the UAEs past and present cannot be exaggerated, said Mina Al-Oraibi, the editor-in-chief of The National.

Peter and his long-time friend, the late Ibrahim Al-Abed, were instrumental in laying the foundations for the UAEs media scene and never hesitated to advise and support any journalist who reached out to them. We will miss his writings in The National and thank him for his years of contribution."

In his final column for The National, published last December, he marveled at what he said had been a golden year for UAE archaeology. He expressed particular fascination at the recent discovery of artifacts dating back more than 400,000 years, before the emergence of Homo sapiens.

Most exciting of all? he wrote. Theres still much more to learn about the history of this land.
NEW CITY  A petition movement has garnered more than 2,800 names demanding Rockland District Attorney Thomas Walsh resign over his no-jail plea deal for two rabbis who admitted causing the 2021 adult home fire in which firefighter Jared Lloyd and resident Oliver Hueston died.

While petition organizers and supporters, including dozens of Rockland volunteer firefighters, don't believe Walsh will resign, they say they want to send a message about how the plea deal disrespects Lloyd and Hueston, their families, and first responders. Walsh is running on the Democratic and Republican ballot lines Nov. 7.

Some are also considering a longshot write-in campaign.

Rabbis Nathaniel Sommer and son Aaron appear in Rockland County Court to accept a plea bargain in their manslaughter case June 20, 2023. They were charged in the death of Spring Valley firefighter Jared Lloyd and facility resident Oliver Hueston, who were killed in a fire at the Evergreen Court nursing home.

The case involves two major Rockland constituencies  the Orthodox Jewish community and the county's firefighters  with emotions running high. Firefighters blast what they see as a light sentence. Leaders of the Orthodox community have largely refrained from offering public comment, but some have denounced what they feel are antisemitic comments on social media and in media reports about the plea deal.

Petition supporters counter that their goal is not bigotry but to show Walsh and county residents that their pain runs deep and personal.

Under the deal, Rabbi Nathaniel Sommer, 71, and his son Aaron, 28, will not serve jail or prison time for their guilty pleas in causing the fire at the Evergreen Court Home for Adults in Spring Valley.

Nathaniel Sommer pleaded to two felony counts of manslaughter, admitting his use of a 20-pound propane blowtorch to cleanse the kitchen and ovens for Passover caused the fire. His son admitted to a misdemeanor reckless endangerment charge.

The plea bargain means the men will not face a public trial. Judge Kevin Russo accepted the plea agreement June 20, and will sentence the men Sept. 20.

"I am not confident that it will work, but I love the fact that it will put pressure on him," former Spring Valley Fire Chief Michael Johnson said of Walsh and the petitions. "I suggest a write-in of Jared Lloyd. I know that would never work, obviously. It's more about the pressure that we're here and to embarrass him."

Rivkie Feiner of Spring Valley acts as a moderator during a Five Town Supervisors' Coalition to Combat Hatred and Promote Unity in Rockland County in 2020.

'This was a horrible accident'

Rivkie Feiner, an Orthodox Jewish community activist, said the tragic deaths of Lloyd and Hueston should not pit people against Orthodox Jews.

"This is a tragedy, but they didn't do anything malicious," she said. "I don't appreciate the Orthodox community being a target. I get that people are upset. I am, too. I absolutely know that as Orthodox Jews we never intentionally hurt people. The way this has played out in social media has been a shame. This was a horrible accident, something that happened by mistake."

More: Rabbis who caused Evergreen Court fatal fire get plea with DA for no jail time

She said the Orthodox community doesn't take what happened at Evergreen Court as anything but tragic and she's sure the Sommers feel pain from the loss of life. Nathaniel Sommer, a first responder for an ambulance corps, had been koshering for years without incident.

"No one in the community is taking this lightly," Feiner said of the two deaths. "No one should think otherwise. We support first responders. Community members are first responders."

Thomas Walsh is not talking, but party bosses are

Walsh has repeatedly declined to comment on the calls for his resignation or on the plea deal itself, a decision that has been questioned by the county's political chairs.

Rockland GOP Chair Lawrence Garvey said Walsh has some explaining to do.

The family and the firefighting community and the first-responder community and everyone has a right to understand what happened, Garvey said. And to the extent that District Attorney Walsh has to be part of that explanation, he absolutely should. They absolutely have a right to understand what happened to make their feelings known and to be angry if they feel that justice wasn't served.

Rockland Democratic Chair Schenley Vital agreed, writing in a statement: "I urge District Attorney Walsh, as well as our federal and state representatives to address our community. We are in pain, and deserve to hear from our leaders."

Jared Lloyd's mother, Sabrail Davenport speaks outside the Rockland County Court June 20, 2023. Rabbis Nathaniel Sommer and son Aaron accepted a plea deal in the death of Spring Valley firefighter Jared Lloyd and facility resident Oliver Hueston, who were killed in a fire at the Evergreen Court nursing home.

Seeking answers

Others have been more pointed in castigating the DA's silence.

Rockland Legislator Laurie Santulli, R-Congers, a firefighter, has been outspoken on the plea deal, the investigation, and the response to the two deaths from elected officials. She has asked that Walsh and his lead investigator Matt Wohl explain the rationale behind the plea agreement and the details before the Legislature's Public Safety Committee.

"Ive been bombarded with emails and calls from firefighters and citizens," she said. "They have questions. I have questions that need answers. We want to know the reasoning behind the light plea deal."

Santulli said she strongly doubts Walsh will voluntarily appear or allow his investigators or prosecutors to discuss the case. No hearing date has been set. Committee Chair Toney Earl, D- Ramapo, told Santulli he doesn't feel it's appropriate to ask Walsh to appear since sentencing is pending.County Legislator Charles Falciglia, R-Ramapo, took to his Facebook page this week to blast Walsh. He supported Santulli for making her views public.

"Should Tom Walsh resign? Tom Walsh has been another Rockland political lifer and it is time to turn the page," Falciglia wrote. "He should take the honorable route and step down as he has lost the confidence and trust of our county residents."

Rockland County District Attorney Thomas Walsh speaks at the Rockland County Fire Training Center on April 1, 2021 about the investigation of the fatal fire at the Evergreen Court Home for Adults in Spring Valley.

Officials stop short of targeting Thomas Walsh

Some elected officials in the county have offered more nuanced responses to the plea deal, taking issue with the deal but not with the DA. This approach contrasts with the full-throated sort of condemnation some have had for other events, such as New York City Mayor Eric Adams' attempts to house asylum seekers in Rockland.

Officials have uniformly reaffirmed their support for the county's volunteer firefighters, whose ranks approach 2,000, including those who no longer actively fight fires.

County Executive Ed Day said he fully supports calls for the incarceration of the Sommers.

"As a former first responder, I am appalled at the fact that the Lloyd and Hueston families will not get the justice they deserve," Day, a retired NYPD commander, said.

He said he has spoken at length with Lloyd's family, who believe some jail time is warranted. "Their position is that the victims are serving a death sentence and the families are serving a life sentence," Day said. Day said that at times the judicial system falls short, but "I feel the same anger as everyone else and encourage everyone to direct their questions to the prosecution and judge in hopes of garnering answers."

More: At Jared Lloyd's Spring Valley firehouse, a plea deal in his death hits hard

Assemblyman Kenneth Zebrowski, one of the Democrats who lost a 2019 primary for district attorney, said: "I stand with the firefighting community and believe these crimes should have resulted in incarceration.

He added that as a former opponent of Walshs, "Im not going to comment on whether he should or should not be in the office."

A push for stronger code enforcement

Zebrowski and GOP state Sen. William Weber are pressing for a state law to enhance zoning and code enforcement, saying that first responders and neighborhoods are now at risk.

They noted that questions have been raised about the competence of inspections done by the Spring Valley Building Department over a few decades. The state stepped in and deputized the county government in 2021 to inspect, issue violations, and prosecute.

"Due to an overall culture of non-compliance, I have reintroduced significant legislation in the New York State Senate to transfer the penalty of unpaid code enforcement fines to landowners' tax bills," Weber said. "The safety of our volunteer firefighters and residents is paramount."

Weber, who has family in law enforcement, said he found the plea agreement disappointing and Walsh needs to explain his reasoning.

"I find it disturbing that the charges brought by the Rockland County District Attorney's office against multiple prior defendants did not result in convictions," Weber said. "The accepted pleas of a second-degree felony and second-degree reckless endangerment, a misdemeanor, were presumably offered in light of the previous court decisions. While five and three years of probation are not ideal, these penalties are better than the prior court dismissals."

U.S. Rep. Mike Lawler, R-Rockland, who emerged as a Rockland power broker in his first term, also took a dim view of the no-jail plea but didn't echo calls for Walsh to resign.

He said he supported Walsh's prosecution in the Evergreen Court cases and there should be accountability for those responsible for the deadly fire, regardless of the intent.

"It is my hope that when the court considers sentencing in the weeks to come, they will strongly consider the wishes of the Lloyd and Hueston families and the need to ensure this type of reckless conduct never happens again," Lawler said. "Jail time must be on the table."

Kristen Ann Ross started petition drives demanding District Attorney Thomas Walsh resign over a no-jail plea bargain in fatal Spring Valley adult home fire

Signatures on petitions, and write-in long shots

At least 24 letters from fire companies and volunteer firefighter organizations have been sent to Walsh, condemning the plea and pulling no punches in who they blame for it. Walsh, a former judge, won election to a four-year term in 2019.

Among the notes in Walsh's inbox is a scorching letter from the Spring Valley Fire Department that declared the DA persona non grata in the village.

"YOU and your staff are not welcome at any Spring Valley Fire Department function or event held in the Village of Spring Valley or anywhere else," the letter read. "May you have triple the amount of sleepless nights that the family members and Fellow first responders have had since the fire."

There are two petitions started by First Responders For Justice. One is for local residents and one for national supporters. As of Friday, the Rockland-based petition had garnered 1,253 names while the national petition had 1,586 supporters.

Kristen Ann Ross, who started the petition drives, said she's hoping for 100,000 signatures by Sept. 20, when Russo sentences the Sommers.

"I know thats a high number to hope for," she said. "But Jared's family and the other gentleman's family deserve justice."

Writing in Lloyd's name for district attorney would never work, she said, but is a grand gesture.

"I would be open to talking to people interested in a write-in campaign," she said. "It's more about pressure. (Walsh is) on radio silence now."

One person who doesn't think a write-in campaign would work is civil rights attorney Michael Diederich, who lost an independent run against Walsh in November 2019 on his Serve Rockland line. He said that if people put up his name and he won, he'd serve. But he said he doesn't have the finances or desire to campaign.

"I dont know anyone in the history of the United States who has won a write-in on the county level," he said.

Steve Lieberman covers government, breaking news, courts, police, and investigations. Reach him at slieberm@lohud.com. Twitter: @lohudlegal. Read more articles and bio. Our local coverage is only possible with support from our readers.

This article originally appeared on Rockland/Westchester Journal News: Petitions build for Rockland DA to resign over plea in fire deaths
Gavel in courtroom

The family of two brothers killed in a police shooting in 2020 has settled a lawsuit with Phoenix City Council for $1 million.

On Monday, councilmembers unanimously voted in favor of the settlement to Lillian Cocreham, mother of George and Emmett Cocreham, who were killed during a police shooting. The settlement comes as the city waits for the U.S. Department of Justice to finish its investigation into the citys Police Department, including its use of force.

Lillian Cocreham's attorney, Bradley Biggs, said that the settlement was in part vindication for the family.

"Anytime you go up against the city, its hard," Biggs said, "and for the victims, it's going to be an uphill battle."

More than anything, he said, Lillian just wanted to have her story heard.

The city declined to comment on the settlement.

George and Emmett Cocreham died after police responded to a 911 call from Emmett Cocrehams mother.She thought Emmett would hurt or kill her, according to a recording of the 911 call.

Police got to her house near 22nd Street and Indian School Road, and according to a critical incident briefing, they found Emmett and George arguing with each other. Since 2019, the Phoenix Police Department has produced critical response briefing videos with summaries of police shootings that include some bodycam footage, 911 calls and a narration of the events that led to the shooting.

In the critical incident briefing, police said George had a rifle and pointed it at Emmett when police fired. Both men were shot and killed. It was unclear who shot Emmett.

The original $12 million lawsuit filed in April 2021 claimed that George never fired a rifle and that it was later found inside the home, nowhere near either brother.

Police said evidence showed George fired the rifle in a critical incident briefing. The video from the body-worn camera does not clearly capture the men or a visible gun because of the distance and the fence obstructing the view.

The suit filed against the city, the Police Department, then-police Chief Jeri Williams, and 16 other police officers, alleged that police failed to defuse the situation or provide evidence that George fired his gun and ultimately shot the brothers without justification.

In the body-worn camera video, the brothers are heard and seen shouting at each other in the backyard of the house.

Police officers who were at a distance behind a fence loudly told one of them to drop a gun, and the two men went back inside the house through the back door.

Two minutes later, an officer with a rifle climbed onto the top of a police SUV and looked over the back fence and overgrown brush.

In that officer's body camera footage, Emmett walked up to the back door, and George opened the door from inside the house. The officer shouted, hes got the  and then Oh, oh, before shooting at them from the top of the cruiser.

Police had responded to calls from the family before and, according to the lawsuit, had usually helped defuse the disturbance without force.

The suit claimed that officers at this call should have known from past experience that "restraint, calmness and patience would have brought the situation under control.

In a previous report, a family member told The Arizona Republic they had lived in Arizona for six generations and had family that worked in public safety agencies.

According to an uncle, George and Emmetts father had served as a fire captain in Phoenix.

Their father had died four years before the shooting, and the brothers were the only family left to their mother before they were killed.

"She has no one to give her love to, and she feels as though she lost her purpose in life," the claim said.Between 2008 and 2018, Phoenix paid out about $26 million in settlements, according to reporting from KJZZ.

In 2023 there have been 16 Phoenix police shootings so far that have left seven dead.

This article originally appeared on Arizona Republic: Phoenix settles police shooting lawsuit for $1M with Cocreham family
Photographer sees a splash in Australia  then is shocked when he checks his footage

Dylan Golden spent the morning of June 28 in Guerilla Bay in Australia with his drone. After about two hours of photographing whales in the area, he was ready to head home when he saw a splash.

The photographer sent his drone out to investigate  and he was shocked by what he found, he told the Australian Broadcasting Corporation.

Golden spotted what he believed to be a very rare juvenile white humpback whale swimming alongside a grown humpback whale, he wrote in an Instagram post. He was able to capture a photo and short video of the two creatures swimming through the bay.

I was shocked. I didnt know how to react or really believe it was one until I looked back on the footage and saw how white it was, Golden told the Australian Broadcasting Corporation. I was in awe.

Golden has been photographing whale migration since he was 14-years-old, he told The Guardian. This is the first time hes seen a white whale.

It was really, really cool to see, he said. Ive just never seen anything like it before.

Guerilla Bay is on the southeastern coast of Australia, about 190 miles south of Sydney.

White humpbacks in Australia

Goldens discovery comes just weeks after a tourist flying over the Great Barrier Reef caught an all-white whale on camera. The sighting was confirmed by the White Whale Research Center in a June 16 post.

White whales are a rarity, and there are only a handful in the world, Vanessa Pirotta, a whale expert at Macquarie University, told the Australian Broadcasting Corporation.

On the eastern coast of Australia, there is only one known white whale, Migaloo.

Migaloo was last spotted in 2020, and experts could not confirm if the June 16 sighting was him.

It does not provide us with the amount of information we would require to identify Migaloo, Pirotta told 9 News. It could be him or possibly another white-ish whale as part of this east Australian humpback whale population.

Similarly, experts have not been able to confirm if Goldens sighting was really a white humpback.

Olaf Meynecke, a marine scientist from Griffith University, speculated that the whale was just a few days old, which is why it appeared white, he told The Guardian.

Oceania Project founder Wally Franklin said its worth investigating the whale, but the sighting itself is not conclusive proof of another all-white humpback, according to the Australian Broadcasting Corporation.

It is very difficult to declare it as an albino whale, but Id be interested to see more information about it, Franklin told the outlet.

Tourist spots something strange lurking in ocean below plane  it was a rare creature

Drones search for whale carcass instead discovers pleasant surprise. See the video

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Journalists have shared photographs of military camps in Belarus, where mercenaries from Yevegny Prigozhins Wagner Group are likely to be housed.

Source: Sirena (Siren), an independent Russian news outlet focusing on the war in Ukraine; Belaruski Hajun, a Belarusian military monitoring group

Details: Sirena reported that the camps are being constructed in the Asipovicy district, in the southwest of Mahiliou Oblast.

According to Sirena, the pictures were taken by a local resident. They show M-30 tents with wooden bunks and floors. Each tent is designed to accommodate up to 60 persons and can be set up in under 30 minutes.

Quote from Belaruski Hajun: "Several days ago we counted around 298 tents on the satellite images of the camp in the village of Cel near Asipovicy. Each tent can accommodate up to 30 people. Given the fact that some of the tents serve [non-residential] utility purposes, we can say that the camp can accommodate around 8,000 people.

We would also like to note that the photos confirm earlier reports that bunk beds and toilets, wooden two-tier bunk beds, benches and tables were being constructed and tents were being set up in the village of Cel."

Background:

Russian media outlet Verstka reported that camps were being built in Belarus to house Wagner PMC militants after the agreement between Alexander Lukashenko and Yevgeny Prigozhin.

The State Border Guard Service of Ukraine denied this information. The State Border Guard Service of Ukraine stressed that the intelligence service closely monitors the situation in Belarus, which is an ally of the Russian aggressor state.

On 27 June, Alexander Lukashenko, self-proclaimed President of Belarus, said that Belarus was not building camps for the Wagner PMC but would "help with accommodation" if necessary.

" We are not building any camps yet. But if they want to (I understand they are looking at certain areas), we will accommodate them. Put up tents, if you like. But for now, they are in Luhansk in their camps. We offered them one of the abandoned camps. They are welcome  the fence is there, and everything is in place. Put up your tents. We will help them as much as we can until they decide what to get up to," the Belarusian dictator said.

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The Buncombe County Courthouse in Asheville April 12, 2023.

ASHEVILLE - A Black man whose struggle with white officers was captured on bystander video and drew cries of concern from a crowd, including that he could not breathe, has been offered a plea deal.

Devon Whitmire, who is facing five felonies and four misdemeanors  five of them assault charges  did not appear in Superior Court July 3. But Buncombe County Assistant District Attorney Katie Kurdys announced the offer at that hearing where Whitmire's attorney was present.

Neither Kurdys nor Public Defender Brooks Kamczik gave any description of the offer. Kurdys said the deadline to accept was Aug. 28.

The announcement signals a possible detour from what Kyrdys and Kamczik have said was the case's likely path to a trial.

Whitmire, 27, remains in the county jail under an $85,000 bond. His charges in the Superior Court case are:

Two felony counts of assault on a law enforcement officer, inflicting physical injury.

Three felony counts of malicious conduct by a prisoner, spitting on law enforcement officers.

One misdemeanor count of resisting an law enforcement officer.

Three misdemeanor counts of assaulting a law enforcement officer.

The day of his arrest, Asheville Police Department officers were in the Erskine-Walton neighborhood south of the River Arts District and said they recognized Whitmire as having an open warrant for communicating threats. He appeared to make no threatening motions in a camera phone video taken by his fiancee, with one arm in a sling and a phone in his other hand while he leaned on a car, wearing flipflops.

But after asking the three APD officers surrounding him to "back up" so he could remove a gun, they grabbed him and a struggle ensued on the ground.

The struggle continued even after Whitmire was handcuffed as officers tried to search him. While Whitmire initially said he was armed, he said multiple times during the struggle he didn't have a gun, something born out by the search. It's not clear why he said he had a weapon.

The bystander video showed an officer at one point using an "arm bar" across Whitmire's neck while he lay on the ground, something the Citizen Times described as "pinning"  but that police recently disputed in an edited video of the incident.

In video footage, members of a group of neighbors that APD characterized as "hostile" can be heard growing increasingly upset, with some shouting that officers were "doing too much" and "he can't breathe," drawing comparisons to some high-profile fatal police encounters with Black men.

While the arm restraint appeared to meet APD's definition of a chokehold, a form of lethal force, police officials and District Attorney Todd Williams said no department policies or laws appear to have been broken.

At a previous hearing, at which a bond reduction was also denied, Judge Edwin Clontz faulted Whitmire for lying about his identity and struggling  but also said police were wrong to lay hands on him before asking him to submit. Clontz declined to talk about the neck hold at the May 22 hearing, saying that was for later proceedings.

On June 2, Whitmire's mother told the Citizen Times her son has multiple mental health problems and that she had been trying to get him involuntarily committed and called asking for that. Instead officers arrested him, using what Conita Whitmire said she saw as excessive force.

More: Chuck Edwards' Asheville crime summit mostly not about crime, or violence; what was said

Asheville passes $240M budget; pay increases for police, other staff; uses fund balance

Joel Burgess has lived in WNC for more than 20 years, covering politics, government and other news. He's written award-winning stories on topics ranging from gerrymandering to police use of force. Got a tip? Contact Burgess at jburgess@citizentimes.com, 828-713-1095 or on Twitter @AVLreporter. Please help support this type of journalism with a subscription to the Citizen Times.

This article originally appeared on Asheville Citizen Times: Plea deal offer to Asheville man; violent arrest was captured on video
Poland deploys 500 more police officers to bolster security at Belarus border

Poland continues to strengthen its border with Belarus

Another 500 police officers will be sent to the Polish-Belarusian border to boost Polish border security amid growing tension between two countries, Interior Minister of Poland Mariusz Kaminski wrote on Twitter on July 2.

"Due to the tense situation on the border with Belarus I have decided to bolster our forces with 500 Polish police officers from preventive and counter-terrorism units," the minister wrote.

These officers will reinforce the 5,000 border guards and 2,000 soldiers already deployed along the border.

Tension between Poland and Bealrus has been high for several years. Polish forces at the border were fired on from Belarusian territory on June 14, 2021.

Belarusian dictator Alexander Lukashenko claimed in 2021 that he would not stop illegal migrants from crossing into the European Union from Belarusian territory.

Read also: Belarus to extend Polish border fortifications

Migrants testified that Belarus helped them to cut through border fences with the EU by providing them with wire cutters and axes, sparking protests against migration at the border. In response, Lithuania and Poland began to construct walls along their borders with Belarus.

A set of fortifications in Belarus's Brest Oblast, referred to as the "Khrenin Line," has provided Polish authorities with another reason for concern.

On June 26, the Polish military reported the completion of construction of a defense line on the countrys borders with Russias Kaliningrad Oblast exclave.

On June 27, Polish President Andrzej Duda stated that the Wagner mercenary company's presence in Belarus could be a potential danger for his country. Deputy Prime Minister Jarosaw Kaczynski said on June 29 that Poland will reinforce its eastern border due to that threat.

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
Performer Mathis Menagerie at PoleCon in 2022 Lakin Jones/PoleCon

PoleCon, a pole dancing convention, is moving its 2024 event out of Florida over anti-LGBTQ+ laws.

CEO Colleen Jolly said the law prevented minors from attending the con, which includes drag performers.

Jolly hoped the situation would raise awareness about anti-LGBTQ+ legislation.

A popular pole dancing convention has decided to move its 2024 convention out of Florida, citing the state's anti-LGBTQ+ laws and its ban on drag.

In an interview with Insider, Colleen Jolly, the CEO and owner of PoleCon, said that though she had hoped to hold the convention in Orlando due to the size of the pole community there, keeping the convention inclusive for LGBTQ+ attendees meant moving it, she said.

"Unfortunately, a growing number of states are making these really broad laws in the name of protecting children, but they're not protecting children at all," Jolly said. "They're just about controlling and harming trans and queer folks."

Jolly told Insider the convention also needed to be moved because a small contingent of its attendees are under 18 years old.

The 1,300-person event typically sells less than 10 tickets to minors accompanied by their parents, Jolly said. Despite that, Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis's law prohibits children from attending "adult live performances," which includes drag shows  and some pole dancers perform in clothing that does not match their gender assigned at birth, Jolly said.

Jolly said hotels she spoke to in Orlando were unwilling to risk legal repercussions to host the event.

In the past, the convention has never run into issues over minor attendees, Jolly added. Minors and their parents must be together at all times during PoleCon, and parents can ask organizers which showcases or workshops are more suitable for their children.

"PoleCon maintains that parents should make the decisions for their children for which showcases and workshops to attend during PoleCon," Jolly wrote in a blog post discussing the decision to move the convention. "This is not about drag; it never was."

Jolly said the convention is meant to showcase a range of identities and experiences in the pole community. Some performances highlight Black and Latine performers, while others have performers from the LGBTQ+ community. Other showcases are specifically for younger attendees to perform at.

For Jolly, part of the convention's goal is growing the pole community and adding additional events along with the annual PoleCon.

Ultimately, Jolly said, she hopes that people pay attention to laws restricting the LGBTQ+ community, even if they think the law has nothing to do with them.

"If you're a cisgender straight person, you're probably not paying attention to these laws because you don't think they could impact you in any way, which, while shitty, is human nature," Jolly said.

"I'm hoping we can draw more attention to these laws so people realize, number one, real people are being hurt by these," Jolly continued: "And number two, you might lose out on your fun hobby because of this law. So maybe if you care about your fun hobby, you'll actually start to care about these real humans too."

Representatives for DeSantis did not respond to Insider's request for comment.

Read the original article on Insider
Police in Salisbury are investigating after a 49-year-old man was shot Sunday.

The Salisbury Police Department said the shooting was reported just after 11:30 p.m. Sunday on W. Jake Alexander Boulevard, east of Interstate 85.

One person was found shot, and he was taken to the hospital. Police said the victim died at the hospital.

SEE MORE: 1 shot at Salisbury Burger King, police say

The victim was identified as Otha Keith Sherrill.

Police didnt say if a suspect is wanted for the shooting.

According to SPD, the shooting appears to be an isolated incident. The department said the shooting is being considered a homicide investigation.

(WATCH: Storms knock dozens of trees onto homes, cars in Salisbury)
RICHMOND, Ind.  Richmond police say a city police officer was battered by a local man after being sent to a scene of a reported disturbance.

Raymond L. Lewis Sr., 53, was charged Friday in Wayne Superior Court 2 with battery against a public safety official, a Level 6 felony carrying up to 30 months in prison, and two misdemeanors  resisting law enforcement and disorderly conduct.

The Richmond man was arrested May 7 after police were sent to his home along North 18th Street when dispatchers received a report of a "physical domestic" incident there.

Police entered the home by kicking in the front door after no one responded to knocking, but officers heard what sounded like "several males and females screaming, arguing and yelling very loudly" inside.

Once in the house, an officer reported, he saw seven individuals on a stairway, including one woman who was striking another.

More: Convicted Richmond killer pursues early release from prison

Lewis, described as "extremely hostile and aggressive," then "stormed down the stairs" and expressed outrage that officers had entered his home.

As police tried to place handcuffs on Lewis, he reportedly fought and struggled with officers and shoved one, resulting in a knee injury, before also punching that man in the left shoulder.

As the struggle continued, two efforts were made to use an electronic stun device to subdue Lewis. The second attempt was successful, an officer wrote in an affidavit.

While he maintained it was not necessary, Lewis was taken to Reid Hospital for an examination before being delivered to the Wayne County jail.

Asked to take a breath test to measure his level of intoxication, Lewis reportedly said, "I've been sitting on my purch all day drinking. I'm drunk. I'm not blowing."

The other individuals found in the house "did not want to speak about what had occurred," an officer wrote.

An initial hearing in the case is set for July 20.

Douglas Walker is a news reporter for The Star Press. Contact him at 765-213-5851 or at dwalker@muncie.gannett.com.

This article originally appeared on Richmond Palladium-Item: Police: Officer shoved, punched by Richmond man
Police still searching for shooters who killed at least 2 people at Baltimore block party

Tables are left on their side in the area of a mass shooting incident in the Southern District of Baltimore, Sunday, July 2, 2023. Police say two people were killed and 28 were wounded in a mass shooting that took place during a block party just after midnight. | Julio Cortez, Associated Press

On Sunday morning, at least two shooters opened fire during a neighborhood block party in Baltimore, Maryland  leaving two people dead and 28 injured.

Partygoers were celebrating an annual community event known as Brooklyn Day in the Brooklyn Homes neighborhood when the shooters began firing, per The Baltimore Sun.

This was a reckless, cowardly act that happened here and has permanently altered many lives and cost two people their lives, Mayor Brandon Scott said at a news conference, per the Sun.

Aaliyah Gonzales, 18, died at the scene and Kylis Fagbemi, 20, died shortly after being transported to the hospital, police said. Twenty-eight other victims  ages ranging from 13 to 32  were shot and sustained wounds, with three in critical condition as of Sunday evening.

It was so many kids. It was chaos, resident Terry Brown told the Sun. Parents were running around looking for their children, hollering and screaming, and dont know if their child has a bullet in them.

Plastic cups and trash were scattered everywhere and tables were upended as many fled the scene trying to escape the bullets, per The Associated Press.

Acting Baltimore Police Commissioner Richard Worley said there were at least two unidentified shooters involved, per the Sun. The police are still actively searching for them and investigating a motive.

Anyone with videos or information is urged to call the Metro Crime Stoppers tip line at 1-866-7LOCKUP.

Related
Washington County Democrats to host U.S. Congressional candidate

The meeting of United Democrats of Washington County on Wednesday will feature Maryland State Del. Joseph Vogel, D-Montgomery, a candidate for the 6th Congressional District. The current officeholder, Democrat David Trone, will be running for the U.S. Senate to replace Democrat Ben Cardin.

Born in Montevideo, Uruguay, Vogel came to the U.S. with his family as a toddler, according to a news release from the United Democrats. He is a graduate of George Washington University and has a master's in public policy from Harvard University. He was elected to the Maryland State House this year and has been particularly active in the issues of mental health and the opioid crisis, according to the release.

The UDWC meets at 7 p.m. in the Community Room of the Washington County Free Library at 100 S. Potomac St. in downtown Hagerstown. Doors open at 6:30 p.m. Registered Democrats and their guests are welcome.

Washington County Republican Club to host annual picnic July 15

The Washington County Republican Club will have its annual picnic July 15 at the Potomac Fish & Game Club, rain or shine, according to a flyer on the club's website.

The picnic runs from 1 to 7 p.m., with food served at 4 p.m. The cost is $10 per person, with children 6 and younger admitted free.

To buy tickets in advance, visit www.wcrclub.com/picnic.

Do you have politics-related news in Washington County?

If you have any politics-related items that would be of interest to Washington County voters, send them to news@herald-mail.com.

This article originally appeared on The Herald-Mail: Washington County's United Democrats, Republican Club to host events
DUBAI (Reuters) -Pope Francis said the burning of the Muslim holy book, the Koran, has made him angry and disgusted and that he condemned and rejected permitting the act as a form of freedom of speech.

"Any book considered holy should be respected to respect those who believe in it," the pope said in an interview in the United Arab Emirates newspaper Al Ittihad, published on Monday. "I feel angry and disgusted at these actions.

"Freedom of speech should never be used as a means to despise others and allowing that is rejected and condemned."

A man tore up and burned a Koran in Sweden's capital Stockholm last week, resulting in strong condemnation from several states, including Turkey whose backing Sweden needs to gain entry to the NATO military alliance.

While Swedish police have rejected several recent applications for anti-Koran demonstrations, courts have over-ruled those decisions, saying they infringed freedom of speech.

On Sunday, an Islamic grouping of 57 states said collective measures are needed to prevent acts of desecration to the Koran and international law should be used to stop religious hatred.

(Reporting by Maha Eldahan; Editing by Edmund Klamann and Raju Gopalakrishnan)
According to the court's decision, the fraudster must return funds to the company

A cashier at Nova Poshta, a prominent Ukrainian postal service, has been found guilty of embezzling approximately UAH 190,000 ($5,000) from a branch located in Kyiv Oblast, with the intention of using the stolen money for gambling, the Makariv District Court of Kyiv Oblast announced on June 20.

The deceitful cashier created fictitious electronic requests from clients to obtain cash, all while unbeknownst to her own mother, to whom she redirected the stolen funds.

Read also: Ex-Prosecutor Offices investigator Sus sentenced to nine years in prison for embezzelment

In an attempt to conceal her crime, she printed and personally signed documents attesting to cash transfers, by assuming the roles of both the cashier and clients.

She is required by the court to return the misappropriated funds to Nova Poshta.

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
Power outage updates: Latest from Kentucky Utilities on when service could be restored

Severe weather caused a tree to fall on home on Merewood Drive in Lexington, Ky., on Sunday, July 2, 2023. The storms caused damage around the city and power outages. (Ryan C. Hermens/rhermens@herald-leader.com)

The more than 24,000 power outages across Louisville Gas and Electric & Kentucky Utilities service area Monday are not expected to be fully resolved until Wednesday, according to social media posts from the company.

Sunday evenings severe storms across Kentucky knocked out power to about 60,000 KU customers, spokesperson Daniel Lowry said. As of Monday morning, about half of those customers had power restored.

Lowry said he unable to confirm an exact time for when all power outages would be fixed but expected customers would see an update Monday afternoon.

It takes awhile, but our crews are busy and trying to work as safely and quickly as possible, Lowry said.

Fayette Countys conditions continue to be assessed and have an estimated 20,179 customers without power.

Neighborhoods such as Lansdowne, Carriage Lane and Zandale appear to be most impacted, according to the live outage map on the LG&E and KU website.

As of 2 p.m., the map shows an estimated 374 service events.

Over 200 wires are down across the KU service territory and at minimum 20 utility poles are down in Lexington, Lowry said. KU has also seen many trees, limbs and power lines down as well.

For live updates LG&E and KU customers can access their storm center map and view user responses from the companys Twitter page.
Barbie

We have to laugh.

A disturbing new video has come to the surface on social media showing Kent Christmas, a Christian pastor from Tennessee, complaining about the upcoming live-action Barbie movie starring Margot Robbie and Ryan Gosling.

I curse in the name of the lord this new Barbie movie that has been released full of transexual, and transgender, and homosexuality, the preacher criticizes.

Later, he calls on God to make a holy judgment on the movie.

 (@)

To be clear, there are only a few LGBTQ+ actors in the Barbie film, like Hari Nef, Scott Evans, and Alexandra Shipp. The movie also features a gigantic cast of actors such as Issa Rae, Emma Mackey, Sharon Rooney, Nicola Coughlan, Dua Lipa Kingsley Ben-Adir, Simu Liu, John Cena, America Ferrara, Will Ferrell, and Helen Mirren to its fair to say that the ratio of LGBTQ+ talent in the film isnt as overwhelming as this preacher claims.

Moreover, given that all actors are playing Barbie or Ken dolls, theres just no sexuality in any of the characters in the film. This is even suggested in the trailer when Ken asks Barbie to stay the night but legitimately doesnt know what theyd spend the night doing. These are toys without genitals.

Its quite a big stretch for anyone to claim that this Barbie movie is full of transgender and homosexuality when it comes to its casting, character details, or storyline. Queer people are, indeed, excited to see it  which doesnt make the actual movie any queerer.

Anti-LGBTQ+ rhetoric is trendy among conservatives right now, and this is yet another nonsensical example of the points these people are trying to make.

Barbie opens July 21 in theaters.
President Biden heads to South Carolina this week

President Joe Biden is heading to South Carolina on Thursday.

The details of his visit have not yet been released.

The Palmetto State will play an important role in the 2024 presidential election; it will be the first state to hold the Democratic primary.

PREVIOUS: Supreme Court strikes down Biden student loan forgiveness plan

It not clear yet what part of South Carolina Biden will be in.

Former President Donald Trump stopped by South Carolina on Saturday to celebrate Independence Day. The former president is seeking reelection on the Republican ticket.

This is a developing story. Check back for updates.

(WATCH BELOW: Trump stops in South Carolina along campaign trail)
Editor's Note: In honor of Pride month, we will feature profiles of five Milwaukee Black LGBTQ+ elders. They were part of a research project for the mobile app lgbt milWALKee that was made possible by the fiscal sponsorship of the Cream City Foundation and grants from SC Johnson and the Greater Milwaukee Foundation. Their oral history interviews have since become the cornerstone of the House of History, a program of Diverse & Resilient dedicated to collecting and sharing Milwaukees Black LGBTQ+ history. The website houseofhistory.org will launch soon.

As a young child, Janice Toy always felt different and didnt want to do the normal things expected of boys. She always knew herself to be a girl, though the world saw it differently. When she played pretend with the other children, she would say things like I should be the Mama, and for Halloween she always chose a feminine costume.

When the My Buddy doll came out in 1985, a doll designed for young boys, she desperately wanted one.

It gave me the sense that I could play with a doll, like other girls  they were always able to play with dolls and carry their dolls different places, so that kind of gave me that feeling that I could have a doll too, Toy said.

She cried and cried and begged and begged her mother for the doll, and remembers that Christmas present to this day.

Toy, better known by her stage name, Janice Colby, grew up on the north side of Milwaukee. While attending North Division High School, her choir performed at the Apollo theater, Carnegie Hall, and the White House. Janice graduated in the top 10% of her class and received a full-ride scholarship from WE Energies to attend Lane College in Jackson, Tennessee.

No matter what I was going through, I always had somebody that I knew I could count on, you know? Toy said. And you don't find that, especially in this type of lifestyle, that you have someone that genuinely can say that they love you and wholeheartedly mean it, you know?

'No matter what, I was always gonna be her child

Janice Toy

After returning home from college and years of pushing down her feelings, trying to meet the expectations of her church that she be attracted to women, not want to be one, Toy had found the freedom to be herself in a new city. Meeting other transgender people, knowing she was not the only one, gave her the confidence to tell her mother.

When I came out to her, she told me that she already knew, she was just waiting for me to kind of tell her, and she told me that no matter what I choose to do in this life, always be the best at it, Toy said. And no matter what, I was always gonna be her child.

With the unconditional love and support of her mother, she began to physically transition. Three years later, in 1996, Toy legally changed her name. By this time, she had begun a legendary performance career. She started performing in gay bars and worked her way into pageant life. Pageants resembled Miss America competitions, complete with swimsuits, evening gowns, and a talent portion, but they differed in that contestants had been assigned male at birth.

Cameron Overton

Toy won an astounding 17 pageants during her performance career, which included being crowned the first ever Miss PrideFest in 2002. She stood out from the rest of the competition as a big girl with great fashion who always had cute, custom-made gowns, and performed convincingly. A lot of people thought she resembled Broadway actress and recording artist Jennifer Holiday. She began performing as Holliday, once even getting the opportunity to perform with Holliday at the Black LGBTQ+ bar Barbie Dolls.

Not only did she win pageants, she also performed in several states and at many of Milwaukees LGBTQ+ bars on both the north and south sides. Her favorite music to perform was gospel, but she could only do that in what was called the Black bars.

The south side bars in Walkers Point were open to everyone in the LGBTQ+ community, but most Black people didnt feel very welcome there. In the bars owned and operated by Black LGBTQ+ people on the north side, Toy said, the music was different, people looked like her, and it was a place to live and be happy.

Love, loss and opening doors for others unconditionally

Janice Toy

One night at the bar Toy made eye contact with a tall, handsome man. She went up to him to ask the time but forgot to hide her phone. He looked at the phone in her hand and they both laughed. Theyve been together every day since.

Toy and her husband, Antony, got married in Chicago. They couldnt marry in Milwaukee before same-sex marriage was legal because the one document she was not allowed to change was her birth certificate, and birth certificates were required for marriage in Wisconsin.

In 2021, Janice received a cancer diagnosis, and her husband and mother were determined to help her beat it.

I was scared and I was like, well Lord, I didn't want to go through this you know, and I said if it's my time, I'm just going to go ahead and go, she said. I don't want to go through the chemo and lose my hair and go through all the different changes that it was going to take me through.

Her mom was there for Toy, every day, taking her to treatments and appointments, cooking and cleaning, and motivating her to keep fighting. During one of her chemotherapy appointments, her mother complained of not feeling well. She checked into the ER, was admitted to the hospital with COVID-19, and died soon afterward. Burying her mother was the hardest thing she ever had to do.

Recently Toy reflected on her legacy and what she wants to give the world. In her early 20s, she was a founding member of SHEBA (Sisters Helping Each Other Battle Adversity), a support group for other Black women of trans experience. Through it, she helped other women like herself for nearly 30 years.

I opened up my door to some of the girls because their family had put them out, and I took em right on in, because I wanted them to have the same experience of being loved like I had, Toy said.

Other LGBTQ+ elders profiled include:

Brenda Coley: Activism started at a young age

Ronnie Grace: Dancer, movie extra and beloved AIDS activist

Tyra Neal: A trans pioneer, the first to legally change name in Wisconsin

Dynasty Scott: A nurse who celebrated and provides safe spaces for LGBTQ community

Cameron Overton is the executive pastor at Zao MKE Church, a queer and trans led congregation on the east side of Milwaukee. He is also an assistant professor and the program director for the master of social work program at Alverno College.

This article originally appeared on Milwaukee Journal Sentinel: Pride Month profile of Janice Toy, founding member of SHEBA, performer.
Yevgeny Prigozhin, founder of the Wagner Private Military Company (PMC), claimed that his "march of justice" was targeted against traitors, and at the moment he is expecting "next victories on the front".

Source: audio recording published by the Grey Zone Telegram-channel, which, according to Russian media outlets, is closely associated with the Wagner Group

Details: Prigozhin claimed that the "march of justice" of the Wagner PMC had fighting against traitors and for the mobilisation of society as its goals.

"And I think that we managed to achieve much. I am sure that in the near future you will see our next victories in the front," he stated.

He did not specify whose victories he considers his own and did not provide any information about his whereabouts. It is unknown when the audio was recorded.

The latest statement of Prigozhin was published on 26 June.

Background:

Journalists fight on their own frontline. Support Ukrainska Pravda or become our patron!
In his first voice message since June 26, Wagner Group founder Yevgeny Prigozhin claimed he expects "further victories at the front" without providing any further details.

The message was published on the Telegram channel Grey Zone, affiliated with the private mercenary Wagner Group, on July 3.

Earlier, Ukraine's military intelligence chief Kyrylo Budanov said that Wagner mercenaries would no longer fight in Ukraine following Prigozhin's failed rebellion against the Russian military.

According to Budanov, Prigozhin plans to redeploy most of his forces previously engaged in Russia's war against Ukraine to Africa.

Petro Burkovskyi: Decoding Prigozhins rebellion The Wagner Groups armed rebellion has displayed little evidence of being a successful challenge to Putins regime, but it has created a strong argument in support of Ukraines accelerated accession to NATO. The military drama that unfolded in Russia from June 23 to 24, orchestrated by Wagner The Kyiv IndependentPetro Burkovskyi

The mercenary boss also claimed in the latest message that his short-lived insurrection was aimed at "fighting traitors and mobilizing (Russian) society."

"And I think that we have succeeded in much of these," added Prigozhin.

It is not clear when the audio was recorded. Prigozhin didnt mention anything about his whereabouts, which have been subject to speculations and rumors since the end of the Wagner rebellion on June 24.

Prigozhin launched a "march for justice" against Russian military leaders on June 23 after the Russian army allegedly targeted Wagner troops in Ukraine. His mercenaries occupied Rostov and marched 200 kilometers to Moscow, only to abruptly end the rebellion less than 24 hours after its start.

As a result of an undisclosed agreement between Wagner's leader and the Kremlin, Prigozhin and his contractors were allowed to leave for Belarus to avoid persecution.

Belarusian dictator Alexander Lukashenko claimed on June 27 that Prigozhin had arrived in the country. However, there are still no visual or other confirmations of the Wagner boss' whereabouts.

Russia's Federal Security Service has been reportedly assigned to liquidate Prigozhin.
Programs for tracking users of online messengers created at request of Russian authorities  The New York Times

Russia is developing the production of new digital means of monitoring users on Telegram, WhatsApp and Signal messenger apps to suppress internal opposition to the war against Ukraine.

Source: The New York Times, citing its sources

Details: The publication notes that it received "hundreds of files from a person with access to the internal records." About 40 of these detailed the surveillance tools.

Quote: "To aid an internal crackdown, Russian authorities had amassed an arsenal of technologies to track the online lives of citizens. After it invaded Ukraine, its demand grew for more surveillance tools. That helped stoke a cottage industry of tech contractors, which built products that have become a powerful  and novel  means of digital surveillance.

The technologies have given the police and Russias Federal Security Service, better known as the F.S.B., access to a buffet of snooping capabilities focused on the day-to-day use of phones and websites. The tools offer ways to track certain kinds of activity on encrypted apps like WhatsApp and Signal, monitor the locations of phones, identify anonymous social media users and break into peoples accounts."

Details: The publication writes that Russian dictator Vladimir Putin is increasingly relying on technology to gain political power, as Russia faces military setbacks in Ukraine, painful economic sanctions and ruptures in the leadership after the attempted rebellion of the Wagner Private Military Company.

Russian digital rights activist Alena Popova says that people have become extremely paranoid as a result, since one can never be sure if a communication with someone in Russia is secure. The authorities have very aggressive traffic monitoring. According to her, previously they only used it with political activists, but now it affects everybody who voices opposition to the Russian war in Ukraine.

In particular, the Citadel group of companies, which was once partially controlled by Russian businessman Alisher Usmanov, is developing these technologies for surveillance.

According to the US State Department, Citadel has bought many of Russia's largest manufacturers of digital listening equipment and controls 60 to 80% of the telecommunications monitoring technology market.

The United States announced sanctions against the Citadel and its current owner Anton Cherepennikov in February.

MFI Soft, Vas Experts and Protei are also involved in the creation of telecommunication listening systems and more advanced tools for the intelligence services of the Russian Federation.

In particular, one of the MFI Soft programs, which is a subsidiary of Citadel, NetBeholder, can detect when people make voice calls or send files through encrypted chat applications such as Telegram, Signal and WhatsApp. The program cannot intercept specific messages, but can determine whether someone is using several phones, make a map of the communication network, tracking communication with others, as well as where certain phones were on a certain day.

With full access to information about subscribers of the telecommunications network, the NetBeholder system can also determine which region of Russia each user comes from or which country a foreigner came from.

Another product may collect passwords entered on unencrypted websites.

Protei offers products that provide transcription of intercepted phone calls into voice text, as well as tools for detecting "suspicious behaviour," as indicated in one of the documents.

Citadel and Protei did not respond to NYT requests for comment.

VAS experts said that the need for their tools has "increased due to the complex geopolitical situation" and the number of threats within Russia. The company said it "develops telecom products which include tools for lawful interception and which are used by FSB officers who fight against terrorism," adding that if the technology "will save at least one life and people's well-being then we work for a reason."

The publication notes that now the Russian special services are able to track conversations even in encrypted messaging applications.

The same NetBeholder can pinpoint when someone is sending a file or making a voice call on encrypted apps like WhatsApp, Signal or Telegram. This gives the FSB access to important metadata  general communication information, such as who is talking to whom, when and where, and whether a file is attached to a message.

Developers of Signal, Telegram and WhatsApp reported that they have few protection mechanisms against such surveillance. But there is a possibility to encrypt messages, as well as functions that help complicate the identification and tracking of traffic in the messenger app.

The outlet writes that Russian developers have attempted to sell their technology for surveillance in Eastern Europe, Central Asia, as well as in Africa, the Middle East and South America.

Journalists fight on their own frontline. Support Ukrainska Pravda or become our patron!
How to properly cook this popular Texas meat two separate ways for Fourth of July

Fourth of July and barbecue go hand in hand for Texas meat-lovers.

Ribs are one of the most popular meats Texans searched how to grill on Google this year, according to Google Trend data.

Whether youre barbecuing or grilling, here are some tips for cooking ribs for your Independence Day meal.

Types of ribs

There are three common types of ribs to choose from:

Spareribs: Flavorful and rich in fat but is a tough meat that requires cooking in extra low heat with more time on the grill to become tender.

St. Louis-style ribs: Even-sized ribs that lay flat on the grill

Baby back ribs: Smaller, leaner and meatier

Barbecue vs grilling

Barbecuing is the process of cooking over a low flame for a long time. This process is also for smoking meat.

Grilling is simply cooking over a fire hot and fast.

Bone side down vs meat side down

Overall, ribs are cooked bone side down.

When smoking ribs, some barbecue enthusiasts suggest cooking the meat bone-side down mostly for presentation purposes. However, when wrapping the meat, a guide by Barbecue FAQ suggests flipping the ribs so its meat side down in the foil or butcher paper.

How to barbecue ribs

If youre looking to barbecue your ribs, one Food Network recipe recommends baking prepared ribs in an oven at 250 degrees Fahrenheit before transferring the meat to a grill.

Once on a grill, cook for about five minutes on each side on medium high heat until browned and slightly charred.

How to grill ribs

One method outlined on Steven Raichlens Barbecue Bible website suggests grilling prepared ribs on indirect, medium heat.

The recipe recommends placing the ribs  bone side down  in the center of the grill grate over the drip pan and away from the heat. Cover the grill and cook for 45 minutes before moping the ribs with a mop sauce on both sides and cooking for 45 minutes to an hour longer.
Prosser hires new interim school superintendent. Shes no stranger to the Yakima Valley

A longtime Yakima Valley educator has stepped up to lead the Prosser School District.

Kimberly Casey has accepted an offer to be the districts interim superintendent for one year. The Prosser School Board unanimously approved her contract.

Her first day on the job is Monday, July 3.

We are thrilled to have a veteran educational leader of Kims caliber join the Prosser team as interim superintendent this next school year, said Prosser School Board President Jason Rainier in a provided statement.

Kim has deep roots in the Valley. She understands our community and her demonstrated commitment to visibility, engagement and communication is just what Prosser needs at this time.

Kimberly Casey

Casey replaces Matthew Ellis, the Prosser native and five-year superintendent who recently left to take a new job as head of the Tillamook School District in Oregon.

Shell earn an annual salary of $180,000 as interim superintendent. Thats about $12,000 less than what Ellis made.

The Prosser School Board will begin its search for a permanent superintendent in early fall.

Casey told the Tri-City Herald in a short phone conversation last week that she plans to apply.

Ive lived in the Lower Valley for 19 years and my goal is to be the Prosser superintendent, she said.

Casey comes to Prosser after a year as superintendent of the 520-student Soap Lake School District in Grant County. The Prosser district serves 2,400 students.

Before that, she spent 6 1/2 years as the Grandview High School principal, and also conducted a superintendent internship with the district from August 2020 to April 2022.

She also worked as a CTE teacher at Compass High School and previously taught at Eastern Washington University and Yakima Valley College. Her background is in business education.

In a statement, she said she looks forward to working collaboratively with the Prosser community to ensure each student receives the best education possible.

As the interim superintendent of the Prosser School District, I am dedicated to promoting open communication and maintaining an open door policy. My vision is to foster a culture of educational excellence, where students, parents and staff feel heard and supported, Casey said.
Protesters face off with police at Israeli airport in judicial crisis Protest at Ben Gurion International Airport, in Lod

By Rami Amichay

BEN GURION AIRPORT, Israel (Reuters) -Thousands of anti-government protesters converged on Israel's Ben Gurion Airport on Monday, some scuffling with police who sought to keep them from blocking access to the terminal for most flights in and out of the country.

Protesting against a plan by Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to overhaul the judiciary, dozens in the crowd entered the arrivals hall dancing and with megaphones chanted, "Democracy!" Police officers eventually escorted them out.

Outside, the sidewalk overflowed with protesters carrying flags, blowing horns and banging drums. A cordon of police lined the road as vehicles slowly drove past. Horse-mounted police were called in to stand guard. At one point they parted the mass of people so an airport bus could complete its route.

Earlier in the day, demonstrators briefly shut off access to a major Israeli seaport.

The legislative push, unveiled after Netanyahu regained power in late December atop a hard-right coalition, has set off unprecedented protests, stirred concerns for Israel's democratic health and dented the economy.

Police have pledged to keep Ben Gurion operating and an airports authority spokesman said so far there had been no unusual flight delays. Thirty-seven protesters were arrested.

One notice circulated online called on demonstrators to arrive at Ben Gurion with suitcases and passports, suggesting a ruse for bypassing hundreds of police deployed as reinforcements.

Netanyahu doused some of the furore in March by pausing the legislation and holding compromise talks with the opposition. Those negotiations proved fruitless, and he is now pursuing what he deems a scaled-back version of the overhaul. The opposition says the changes remain dangerous.

Netanyahu has defended the reforms as restoring balance between the various branches of government and redressing what he and his coalition allies see as judicial overreach. Critics fear a bid by Netanyahu to curb court independence even as he argues his innocence in a long-running corruption trial.

The mid-sized Ben Gurion handles 90,000 passengers a day in July, an airport spokesperson said. Minister for police Itamar Ben-Gvir had said that any attempt to paralyse it would constitute "harm to national security".

Protesters had previously flocked to Ben Gurion in March, attempting to disrupt a visit by U.S. Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin and preventing Netanyahu from taking off for talks in Italy. Austin ended up cutting his visit short while Netanyahu flew to Rome after reaching Ben Gurion by helicopter.

(Reporting by Rami Amichay, Dan Williams, Ari Rabinovitch and Steven Scheer; Editing by Howard Goller)
Two Black Lives Matter banners were pulled down from Metropolitan AME and another historically Black church and burned during clashes between pro-Donald Trump supporters and counterdemonstrators in December 2020.Supporters of President Donald Trump who are wearing attire associated with the Proud Boys attend a rally at Freedom Plaza, Dec. 12, 2020, in Washington.

On Friday, a judge awarded more than $1 million to Metropolitan African Methodist Episcopal Church in downtown Washington, D.C. The historic Black church sued the Proud Boys for tearing down and burning a Black Lives Matter banner during one of their racist protests in 2020.

In addition, Superior Court Associated Judge Neal A. Kravitz banned the hateful group and its leaders from being anywhere near the Metropolitan African Methodist Episcopal Church or making threats or defamatory remarks against the institutionor its pastorfor five years.

Read more

However, the ruling turned out to be a default judgment issued after the defendants refused to show up in court. In December 2020, two Black Lives Matter banners were ripped down from Metropolitan AMEas well as another historically Black churchand burned during battles between Trump supporters and the former presidents detractors.

Desecration left behind by the Proud Boys happened after weekend rallies by thousands of Trump supporters who believed his false claims that he won a second term. These events were the cause behind dozens of arrests, stabbings and police officers being injured.

It also led to Metropolitan AME suing the Proud Boys and their leaders, stating that they violated D.C. and federal law by trespassing and demolishing religious property in a bias-related conspiracy. The hate groups leader, Henry Enrique Tarrio, publicly admitted to setting fire to one banner. Prosecutors said it was one that was stolen from Asbury United Methodist Church.

Tarrio pleaded guilty in July 2021 to two misdemeanor criminal charges of property destruction and attempted possession of a high-capacity magazine. He was eventually sentenced to more than five months in jail.

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Black puppeteer Megan Piphus Peace recently shared a behind-the-scenes look at Sesame Streets famous Wash Day episode. Peace, who is a puppeteer for the long-running television series, voices the character Gabrielle. The actress shared the BTS footage on her Instagram.

I couldnt help but smile while puppeteering. Im making the content I needed as a little girl through Gabrielle. Peace wrote in the text of the video she posted. In the video, Peace can be seen beaming with a smile as her puppet Gabrielle gets her hair washed by Auntie Kayla.

As the video continues, the camera pulls out and Peaces followers can see another Black woman standing off set visibly excited as she watches the scene play out. Peace identifies the woman as the shows producer.

There were so many wet eyes on set, Peace captioned on the video. And our producer, a Black woman, does the happy dance celebrating this moment.

An Important Episode

Black hair, especially Black womens hair, continues to be at the center of socio-political conversations. The Wash Day episode extends the long-running attempt at normalizing the nuances and needs of Black hair. Another landmark event for Black hair can be traced back to Viola Daviss character Analise Keating who in an episode of the critically acclaimed television series, How To Get Away With Murder, takes her wig off during a night-time beauty routine.

As Davis said of that moment in an interview with the New York Times, The TV and film business is saturated with people who think theyre writing something human when its really a gimmick. But if I took the wig off in a brutal, private moment and took off the makeup, it would force them to write for THAT woman.

The full Sesame Street episode blurb, reads thus, Its Wash Day today and Gabrielle gets to spend special time with her Auntie Kayla, who combs, shampoos, conditions, and detangles her hair. Then, at the end, Gabrielle gets to pick out a new style for her hair!

The inclusion of the steps and processes everyday Black people employ in washing their hair also helps heighten the cultural importance of that episode.

The First Black Woman Puppeteer

Along with steering a landmark episode, Peace also became Sesame Streets first full-time, Black, female puppeteer in the shows over 50 year history. Peace began puppetry at age 10 and taught herself puppetry and ventriloquism by watching VHS tapes. As she tells CNN in an interview, I realized how you can captivate the attention of a child with a puppet. My soul was just lifted by being able to make kids anywhere from kindergarten to sixth-grade smile and laugh.

In the Instagram post she made celebrating the Wash Day episode, Peace shows several clips of her children watching the episode at home when it aired. While they watch she turns the camera on her self and shows off her natural hair which she is rocking in twists.

The post Puppeteer Shows Touching Behind-The-Scenes Footage of Sesame Streets Black Hair Episode appeared first on 21Ninety.
I put Trader Joe's $9 and Supergoop's $38 'invisible' sunscreen to the test, and I've already bought another bottle of the dupe

Many people have called Trader Joe's facial sunscreen a dupe for Supergoop's Unseen Sunscreen. Jen Glantz

I compared Supergoop's Unseen Sunscreen with Trader Joe's daily facial sunscreen dupe.

I liked how Supergoop's sunscreen made my skin feel very smooth after wearing it all day.

I usually forgot I was wearing Trader Joe's sunscreen at all, even while working out.

Growing up in Florida, I spent a lot of quality time in the sun. But, unfortunately, unless I was sitting on a lounge chair or walking at the beach, I didn't put on sunscreen. Even as an adult, I hardly wear it, mostly because I have such sensitive skin and even the smallest amount is enough to make my T-zone breakout with acne.

But as we enter summer, I find myself eager to reverse that habit and prevent further sun damage by wearing sunscreen every day.

I turned to popular recommendations and decided to test out two very similar sunscreens: Supergoop's Unseen Sunscreen ($38 for 1.7 ounces) and Trader Joe's daily facial sunscreen ($9 for 1.7 ounces). The two chemical sunscreens are said to have comparable oil-free consistencies and transparent (leaving no white cast) finishes. They're also both water- and sweat-resistant and fragrance-free.

Here's how the cheap and expensive products stacked up.

I was nervous about the texture of Trader Joe's sunscreen at first.

The texture of the sunscreen was very thin. Jen Glantz

Trader Joe's website describes the $9 SPF-40 sunscreen as oil-free, translucent, and fragrance-free, which I thought was too good to be true.

But when I squeezed some into the palm of my hand, I was impressed by the thin texture. It was different from the cream-based sunscreens I've used in the past but still felt very silky.

The sunscreen rubbed right into my skin.

The sunscreen's texture was very lightweight. Jen Glantz

I was worried it wouldn't feel smooth when I rubbed it onto my face, but I was shocked by how it absorbed instantly and looked invisible.

I usually feel like there's a layer of product on my skin when I put any type of cream on it, but my skin felt bare  almost like I just had a very sheer powder on.

The Trader Joe's sunscreen helped my makeup glide right on.

I tested out makeup on top of the sunscreen. Jen Glantz

I went to apply my daily makeup and was nervous that my impression of the sunscreen would change. But even after I put on foundation, bronzer, and blush, my skin didn't feel weighed down with product.

The sunscreen rested well on my skin and looked more matte once I put makeup on top of it.

Though my skin felt a little more oily than usual, it was still less so than with other sunscreens or moisturizers I've tried.

I wore this sunscreen during a high-intensity workout and forgot I had it on.

The sunscreen didn't pill or burn during my workout. Jen Glantz

I decided to do a late-afternoon, high-intensity workout class to see how the sunscreen would feel after a 45-minute sweat.

I took off my makeup, washed my face with a cleanser, and reapplied the sunscreen before heading to class.

Halfway through the class, I started sweating a lot more but didn't feel like the sunscreen was running down my face.

Overall, the sunscreen wasn't pilling, and it didn't make my eyes burn.

I didn't feel the urge to wash the Trader Joe's sunscreen off toward the end of the day.

My skin looked a little more oily than usual. Jen Glantz

By the end of the day, I'm usually rushing to wash my face because my skin just feels so dirty and gross. But when I wore Trader Joe's sunscreen, I didn't have that same urge.

Halfway through the day, I forgot I'd even applied it.

My skin looked a little oilier than usual and my forehead had some shiny spots. But I didn't break out or feel irritated after a full day of wearing the sunscreen.

The sunscreen is effective for everyday use, but a higher SPF would be more beneficial for the outdoors.

Octocrylene helps with the product's water resistance. Jen Glantz

Dermatologist Noor Hanif Said from Renaissance Dermatology Specialist Clinic said one good ingredient in Trader Joe's sunscreen is octocrylene, an effective UV filter with UVB protection, the rays responsible for tanning and burning skin.

This ingredient also improves the product's water resistance, which was very useful during my workout class.

"Although it provides broad-spectrum protection, the SPF 40 rating means it blocks about 97.5% of UVB rays," Said told Insider.

He also said that although this sunscreen is sufficient for everyday use, an SPF of 50+ might be more appropriate for extended outdoor activity.

Supergoop's Unseen Sunscreen texture was like a liquid gel.

Supergoop's sunscreen was more gel-like. Jen Glantz

I was excited to test out Supergoop's $38 SPF-40 sunscreen. Based on its website description, this is "100% invisible, weightless, scentless sunscreen."

When I squeezed it into my hand, it looked and felt like a liquid gel. Although it wasn't creamy, it wasn't as thin in texture as Trader Joe's sunscreen either.

I wasn't as impressed with the initial results of the Supergoop sunscreen.

Supergoop's sunscreen had an oily sheen to it. Jen Glantz

The sunscreen is marketed as oil-free, but when I applied it on my face, my skin started to look oily within a few minutes.

My eyes also started to tingle a little within the first 30 minutes of application.

My makeup sat well on top of the Supergoop sunscreen.

My skin didn't look dry while wearing the Supergoop sunscreen underneath. Jen Glantz

I applied my usual makeup on top of the sunscreen, and it glided on as if I was wearing a thin layer of moisturizer. I also felt like it gripped my makeup and made it stay on longer.

I don't usually wear moisturizer or primer, so when I wore this sunscreen all day, my skin didn't look as dry as usual, which was a nice perk.

The Supergoop sunscreen didn't hold up during my workout.

The Supergoop sunscreen felt uncomfortable during my workout. Jen Glantz

I took off my makeup and reapplied the sunscreen before I did a 30-minute, at-home workout. It settled onto my skin and didn't make my eyes burn this time around.

Halfway through the workout, though, I started to sweat and it felt like the sunscreen was falling off my face. I had to take a towel to wipe it off because I was uncomfortable.

If I was doing an outdoor workout with this sunscreen, I'd especially want to reapply afterward since it seemed like most of it came off with my sweat.

My skin felt smooth when I took it all off.

Supergoop's formula has a lot of antioxidant-rich ingredients. Jen Glantz

Even though this formula describes itself as lightweight, I felt like I was wearing sunscreen all day. It was refreshing to take it off my skin at the end of the day.

But I noticed that when my skin was bare, it felt healthier, which might be because the formula has a lot of antioxidant-rich ingredients.

I was expecting to break out from this sunscreen since it felt thicker than Trader Joe's formula, but I didn't. My skin felt clean and looked blackhead-free the next day.

Supergoop's sunscreen is great for outdoor wear, according to a dermatologist.

Supergoop's mineral formula is better for sensitive skin. Jen Glantz

Dermatologist Mariano Busso said that the sunscreen's key ingredients, like titanium dioxide and zinc oxide, protect against harmful UV rays. He said these provide broad-spectrum coverage, protect skin from sunburn, and lower the risk of skin cancer.

"They act as a barrier to protect the skin's surface that reflects UV rays, preventing skin penetration," Busso told Insider. "These minerals are gentle and are less likely to cause skin irritation or allergic reactions compared to certain chemical sunscreen ingredients."

Because of those benefits, I'd pick this sunscreen if I were spending the day at the beach or outside.

I preferred Trader Joe's sunscreen over Supergoop's.

Trader Joe's sunscreen was more convenient for me. Jen Glantz

After trying out both sunscreens, I found myself picking up Trader Joe's bottle on a consistent basis. It didn't interfere with my makeup, workouts, or other daily activities, and it had more of a sheer, matte texture.

I was shocked that I ended up liking the less expensive sunscreen option, but it sat nicely on my skin and truly looked and felt invisible.

Read the original article on Insider
Putin expected to meet Xi Jinping and other world leaders for first time since Wagner insurrection

All eyes will be on Vladimir Putin this week, with the Russian president expected to make his first appearance on the world stage since the Wagner insurrection threatened his steel grip on power.

Putin is scheduled Tuesday to attend a virtual summit of the Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO), a broadly-pro Russian regional security grouping led by Beijing and Moscow.

But while the leaders of the nations assembled have so far provided a sympathetic audience for Putin, his appearance  albeit virtually  could offer something of a window as to the extent of their support after last weekends near-crisis.

In the brief, chaotic insurrection, Wagner  a private mercenary group led by warlord Yevgeny Prigozhin  took control of key military facilities in two Russian cities. As thousands of fighters marched toward Moscow, where the Kremlin deployed heavily armed troops to the streets, it seemed as if civil war was on the verge of breaking out.

A secretive deal abruptly ended the rebellion, with Wagner fighters pulling back and Prigozhin sent to Belarus. But one week later, much remains unclear about the inner workings of the deal, the fate of Wagner, and what this means for Putins regime.

These questions will likely be on the minds of other leaders attending Tuesdays virtual summit, including Chinas Xi Jinping, and Indias Narendra Modi  whose country is hosting this years gathering  as well as representatives from Asian states including Pakistan, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan and Uzbekistan  many of whom, like Putin, are strongmen rulers.

Experts believe Putin will use the forum to project an image of power, and reassure Moscows partners  and by extension the world  that he remains firmly in control.

Its virtual, so theyre not going to be there in person, otherwise they would be standing alongside each other, fellow strongmen showing strength, said Derek Grossman, a senior defense analyst at the RAND Corporation, a US-based think tank.

According to Grossman, many of the leaders assembled at the summit look to Russia and China almost as models for how they want to run their societies as authoritarian regimes.

If Putin is kind of shaken by this (insurrection) visibly, then that would tell them something  that even even the strongest of strongmen is not necessarily immune to potential insurgencies within their countries, Grossman said.

Participants of the 22nd meeting of the Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO) leaders' summit in Samarkand, Uzbekistan on September 16, 2022. - Murat Kula/Anadolu Agency/Getty Images

The China-Russia vision

Founded in 2001 by China, Russia and several former Soviet states in Central Asia to combat terrorism and promote border security, the SCO has grown in size and reach in recent years, amid efforts by Xi and Putin to counter Western influence.

Iran is expected to become a full member this year, after signing a memorandum of obligations at last years summit; Belarus, a close Russian partner that helped launch the initial invasion of Ukraine, is also invited as an observer state, and could soon seek full membership, experts say.

Xi and Putin, long the worlds two most powerful autocrats, have established close ties in recent years, declaring a friendship with no limits in February 2022, shortly before Putin launched his invasion of Ukraine.

China has since refused to condemn the war and instead provided much-needed diplomatic and economic support for Russia, while blaming NATO for provoking the conflict and amplifying Kremlin misinformation.

But Putins faltering war has placed pressure on the China-Russia partnership.

(Xi) doesnt want to completely spoil Chinas relationships in Europe over this, he doesnt want China to become a bigger target of NATO than it already was before the war, said Grossman, though he noted the larger benefits of the Russia-China relationship outweigh whatever doubts Xi may have about the faltering war and its impact on Chinas global image.

On Tuesday, Xi will deliver a keynote speech to the summit via video link, according to the Chinese Foreign Ministry. For Putin, a clear demonstration of support from Xi would be of significant value.

Yasuhiro Matsuda, a professor at the Institute for Advanced Studies on Asia at the University of Tokyo, suggested that Beijing was in a difficult position because Russia is losing, and its not something that China can control.

After Putin invaded, the ideal outcome for China was a quick victory for Russia, in which Zelenskys administration collapsed and Europe and the US were powerless to act, said Matsuda.

That was the best scenario for China  and its gone already, Matsuda said.

On Tuesday, Xi Jinping also has to show his authority and power to the domestic audience. So he will behave as he behaved before, he added.

Authoritarian regimes look to Moscow

Western powers and observers in democratic countries have widely cast the failed insurrection in Russia as a moment of weakness for Putin. But it may be viewed very differently by fellow authoritarian leaders attending the summit, who have previously faced their own power struggles, experts noted.

SCO member Kazakhstan saw deadly protests in 2022, fueled by widespread discontent with the government. The ensuing violence saw more than 160 people killed and thousands detained, with authorities requesting troops from Russia to help contain the unrest.

By contrast, Putin managed to end the Wagner insurrection before it reached the capital, without bloodshed. He sent his challenger, Prigozhin, into exile and may even gain control over any Wagner fighters who agree to sign contracts with the Russian military.

In the eyes of the Chinese and other members of (the SCO), this is an amazing achievement, because not many statesmen can do that, said Alexander Korolev, a senior lecturer in politics and international relations at the University of New South Wales in Australia.

Thats not to say the other members wont have questions about what happened, Korolev said.

(But) I think they understand that (the insurrection) is not the end of Putins regime, he said. In authoritarian regimes, leaders do get challenged from time to time, and he has demonstrated to the world and to his elites that he can handle enormous challenges.

The India question

In a sea of authoritarian leaders, Indias Modi remains something of an odd man out.

Democratically elected Modi, who attends this years SCO summit fresh from his meeting with US President Joe Biden during a state visit to Washington, has become a key figure in Western efforts to counter Chinas growing influence in the Indo-Pacific.

India stands apart from the rest in the SCO, but I dont think they feel uncomfortable in the least because their foreign policy is really all about being friends to all, enemies to none. I dont see them speaking up or anything like that, said RANDs Grossman.

This years summit, though virtual, is being hosted by India. The groupings defense and foreign ministers attended in-person meetings in the Indian state of Goa earlier this year.

India has strong ties with Russia, which remains Indias biggest arms supplier. New Delhi has not taken a definitive side on the Ukraine war, and its continued purchase of Russian oil has helped prop up Moscows economy  to the dismay of some Western partners.

Modi made headlines at last years in-person SCO summit in Samarkand, Uzbekistan, when he told Putin that now is not the time for war, appearing to directly rebuff the invasion. But Indias continued economic support of Russia has undermined that message of peace  and last years statement may be as far as Modi is willing to go, Grossman said.

CNNs Simone McCarthy and Nectar Gan contributed reporting.

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ZNPP

Russian dictator Vladimir Putin may consider ordering an attack on the occupied Zaporizhzhya Nuclear Power Plant (ZNPP) to bolster his frayed authority inside Russia, The Times said in a July 3 article.

Read also: Zelenskyy says Russia could blow up Zaporizhzhya NPP remotely, even after its de-occupation

The publication suggests that Putin, seeking to uphold his image among his followers, may resort to drastic measures due to the stalled invasion of Ukraine, which has become a "massive strategic blunder."

The recent mutiny by the Wagner mercenaries could further spur Putin's drastic decision-making, The Times suggests. The article highlights the warm public reception the mercenaries received in Rostov-on-Don, which they briefly controlled on June 24.

Interestingly, The Times claims that Putin didn't quell the armed coup by overpowering Wagner leader Prigozhin, but through negotiation.

This is a perilous moment for Putin's regime, hence the heightened risk for the region, the report reads.

In an attempt to regain political favor, Putin might be tempted to intensify the war, looking for a quick victory.

Read also: Russian invaders leaving Zaporizhzhya NPP amid fears of terrorist attack, says military intelligence

The publication suggests that Putin's intent in regaining the military initiative is not only to decisively beat Ukraine, but also to prove to a dispirited Russian military and public that he is still in control.

Following the explosion at the Kakhovka Hydroelectric Power Station, which The Times attributes to Russian forces, the newspaper warns of a possible terror strike on the Zaporizhzhya Nuclear Power Plant.

"After the Russians blew up the dam at the Kakhovka hydroelectric station, it's conceivable they have plans to target the Zaporizhzhya nuclear power plant," the article said.

The newspaper argues that NATO countries should warn Moscow that any disruptive actions targeting the ZNPP would be met with a robust response.

Read also: Zaporizhzhya NPP reconnects to backup power line after four-month absence

"That would be the quickest way to end this cruel war and neutralize Putins corrupt regime," the authors conclude.

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Read the original article on The New Voice of Ukraine
Putin will speak with leaders of China and India in his first summit since the Wagner insurrection

FILE- Russian President Vladimir Putin, left, gestures while speaking to Chinese President Xi Jinping during the Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO) summit in Samarkand, Uzbekistan, Sept. 16, 2022. Putin will this week participate in his first multilateral summit since an armed rebellion rattled Russia. Analysts say his participation at a virtual summit of the Shanghai Cooperation Organization on Tuesday is an opportunity to show he is in control after a short-lived insurrection by Wagner mercenary chief Yevgeny Prigozhin. . (Sergei Bobylev, Sputnik, Kremlin Pool Photo via AP, File)

NEW DELHI (AP)  President Vladimir Putin will participate this week in his first multilateral summit since an armed rebellion rattled Russia, as part of a rare international grouping in which his country still enjoys support.

Leaders will convene virtually on Tuesday for a summit of the Shanghai Cooperation Organization, a security grouping founded by Russia and China to counter Western alliances from East Asia to the Indian Ocean.

This years event is hosted by India, which became a member in 2017. It's the latest avenue for Prime Minister Narendra Modi to showcase the countrys growing global clout.

The group so far has focused on deepening security and economic cooperation, fighting terrorism and drug trafficking, tackling climate change and the situation in Afghanistan after the Taliban took over in 2021. When the foreign ministers met in India last month, Russia's war on Ukraine barely featured in their public remarks but the fallout for developing countries on food and fuel security remains a concern for the group, analysts say.

The forum is more important than ever for Moscow, which is eager to show that the West has failed to isolate it. The group includes the four Central Asian nations of Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan and Uzbekistan, in a region where Russian influence runs deep. Others include Pakistan, which became a member in 2017, and Iran, which is set to join on Tuesday. Belarus is also in line for membership.

This SCO meeting is really one of the few opportunities globally that Putin will have to project strength and credibility," said Michael Kugelman, director of the Wilson Centers South Asia Institute.

None of the member countries has condemned Russia in U.N. resolutions, choosing instead to abstain. China has sent an envoy to mediate between Russia and Ukraine, and India has repeatedly called for a peaceful resolution of the conflict.

For Putin personally, the summit presents an opportunity to show he is in control after a short-lived insurrection by Wagner mercenary chief Yevgeny Prigozhin.

Putin will want to reassure his partners that he is very much still in charge, and leave no doubt that the challenges to his government have been crushed, said Tanvi Madan, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution.

India announced in May that the summit would be held online instead of in-person like last year in Samarkand, Uzbekistan, where Putin posed for photographs and dined with other leaders.

For New Delhi at least, the optics of hosting Putin and Chinas leader Xi Jinping just two weeks after Modi was honored with a pomp-filled state visit by U.S. President Joe Biden would be less than ideal.

After all the fanfare Modi received from American leaders on his recent visit, it would have been too soon (for India) to be welcoming Chinese and Russian leaders, Kugelman said.

Indias relationship with Moscow has stayed strong throughout the war; it has scooped up record amounts of Russian crude and relies on Moscow for 60% of its defense hardware. At the same time, the U.S. and its allies have aggressively courted India, which they see as a counterweight to Chinas growing ambitions.

A key priority for India in the forum is to balance its ties with the West and the East, with the country also hosting the Group of 20 leading economies' summit in September. It's also a platform for New Delhi to engage more deeply with Central Asia.

India glorifies in this type of foreign policy where its wheeling and dealing with everybody at the same time, said Derek Grossman, an Indo-Pacific analyst at the RAND Corporation.

New Delhi, observers say, will be looking to secure its own interests at the summit. It will likely emphasize the need to combat what it calls cross-border terrorism  a dig at Pakistan, whom India accuses of arming and training rebels fighting for independence of Indian-controlled Kashmir or its integration into Pakistan, a charge Islamabad denies.

It may also stress the need to respect territorial integrity and sovereignty  a charge often directed towards its other rival, China. India and China have been locked in an intense three-year standoff involving thousands of soldiers stationed along their disputed border in the eastern Ladakh region.

Analysts say China, seeking to posture itself as a global force, is becoming a dominant player in forums like the SCO, where interest for full membership from countries like Myanmar, Turkey and Afghanistan has grown in recent years.

The limitation with the SCO is that China and Russia are trying to turn it into an anti-Western grouping, and that does not fit with India's independent foreign policy, said Madan.

The SCO could also prove challenging for Washington and its allies in the long run.

For countries uncomfortable with the West and their foreign policies, the SCO is a welcome alternative, mainly because of the roles Russia and China play. ... I think that highlights just how relevant and concerning this group could be for a number of Western capitals, especially if it keeps expanding," said Kugelman.
Vladimir Putin; A destroyed tank lies in rubble, in central MariupolPhoto illustration by Salon/Getty Images

Ten days ago, the world was on tenterhooks as it watched an apparent mutiny (and perhaps coup attempt) by the Wagner mercenary group, which is led by oligarch Yevgeny Prigozhin, against Vladimir Putin's regime and its military commanders. But as quickly as the crisis began, it ended abruptly in a type of anticlimax one day later as Prigozhin's forces stopped their march on Moscow, stood down, and agreed to return to their barracks. Prigozhin has apparently accepted a type of exile in the former Russian Republic of Belarus, where he was promised amnesty by Putin. For now, at least, a civil war or other type of armed conflict inside Russia has been averted.

The punditry and many other professional Russia-Putin watchers quickly reached a consensus that whatever the final outcome of these recent events may be, one thing is certain: Putin has been greatly weakened and huge holes have punched in the appearance of his total control and power over Russia and its military. Ultimately, it is not a matter of if Putin will be brought down (in large part by the failure to win a quick victory in Ukraine) but when and by who.

Matthew Schmidt, a professor of national security and political science at the University of New Haven and an expert on Russia, defense, intelligence and foreign policy, has reached a different conclusion. Schmidt believes that Putin may actually be stronger (in the short term) because of how he was able to stop Prigozhin's mutiny, further cementing his position as a strongman leader. In this conversation, Schmidt explains why the punditry and experts reached what he sees as very premature (and incorrect) conclusions about the recent events in Russia  and how those errors are indicative of broader misunderstandings that the West holds about Putin and Russian society and politics.

Schmidt also details why the recent crisis in Russia will likely not have an immediate impact on the war in Ukraine as many have hoped. He cautions that the war in Ukraine will ultimately end in the streets of Moscow when the Russian people decide to overthrow Putin. Schmidt warns that the Ukrainian counteroffensive will likely take some time to succeed and that Western weapons and assistance will not be a type of magical solution to the brutal and bloody battles that lie ahead.

This conversation has been edited for clarity and length.

What do we actually know about the recent events in Russia with Vladimir Putin and a revolt or insurrection by Prigozhin's Wagner mercenary force? Where are we now?

Anybody who is telling you that they have a good, definitive idea about what's going on with Putin and these events you shouldn't trust. There are scenarios that I can draw for you. The common consensus seems to be that Putin is weaker now, that Prigozhin showed that Putin cannot control his country, and this is going to mean that Putin is going to face more threats to his power and that he is severely undermined and damaged. No one in the elite defected from the Kremlin. I think many people were waiting to see what was going to happen with Prigozhin's moves, they were cautious. But in the end, no one left Putin's orbit. Putin has shown the elites that he still has the loyalty of the security services. I think Putin is stronger today, but in the long term he's doomed. The problem is that the war is happening now.

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Now observers are waiting to see if Prigozhin is going to fall out of a window anytime soon  which I also believe is not going to happen anytime soon. He's useful; he can fall out of a window at any time, so there's no rush. And now Putin has his putative enemy basically under his control in a foreign state. Putin now has the best fighters on the battlefield under the direct control of his generals. What has Putin really lost? There is another lesson here from what happened last weekend. Prigozhin takes two major cities without any resistance. Now everybody in the West says, "Oh, my God, that shows Putin's control is weak!" But anyone who has lived in Russia or lived in the Soviet Union or studied it knows that the key to Russian and Soviet control of society was apathy.

That has to be considered as an explanation for why nobody resisted Prigozhin. I am also quite certain that Prigozhin never intended to take Moscow. He's not stupid. He never had the capability to accomplish that goal. Prigozhin must have known that would be a suicide mission. His goal was to create exactly what he said, which is pressure to get rid of Shoigu and Gerasimov.

As you watched the pundit and talking head 24/7 cable news machine spin up into crisis mode what did you find most frustrating about the dominant narrative?

"Putin isn't stupid. Putin's economy is weak. All he has is the military. Putin will not risk the total destruction of his military."

They were hungry to find explanations for things that there wasn't enough data to have an explanation for. Few if any of the pundits and talking heads were willing to step up and say, "We don't know". They were doing what they were asked to do, which was to explain things. We experts and pundits owe it to the public to tell them when we don't know something and from there a real conversation about current events  especially developing events like in Russia last week  can start.

Words have actual meanings. Was this a "coup"? A rebellion? An "insurrection"? Something else?

Prigozhin's military success was impressive. But he did not have the political side of the equation solved. A "coup d'etat" has both of those dimensions. I prefer the term "mutiny" to describe what happened with Prigozhin and Wagner PMC, which is simply to say that here is a group of troops who decided to not follow the orders that they were given by their leaders. That term also does not require that we determine a reason or motive. It is descriptive language. The term "insurrection" is almost synonymous with "coup d'etat" and the idea that you are trying to overthrow the government. The evidence does not point in that direction at this early point.

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Prigozhin is a mercenary. Was this just about the money?

Let's look at the data that we actually have. Prigozhin was criticizing his commanders for months. He threatened to pull out of Bakhmut until his commanders gave him more ammunition and support. Then what Prigozhin claimed is that the Russian military directly bombed his troops in their barracks. That is a huge claim. I have not seen Prigozhin's allegation proven convincingly. But let's take Prigozhin at his word for now. Believe it or not, I think he is very much motivated by a sense of honor. Prigozhin doesn't need the money. That is not his driving motivation. Also, Prigozhin was not attacking Putin, he was very careful about that. Putin was not attacking Prigozhin directly either. They were leaving each other an exit ramp to get what they wanted and also to save face.

Again, I am dubious that his ultimate goal was to march on Moscow. Prigozhin was using military force to send a signal of intention. He had no intention of ever marching to Moscow, his forces would have been crushed. Putin had no intention of allowing Prigozhin's forces to get to Moscow because that potentially could have swayed some of the oligarchs against him. Putin was not going to let that happen.

Given all the misdirection and confusion about Russia and what is actually happening domestically, how do we in the West and elsewhere determine the truth about the mutiny and other political matters? How do you suggest we better pierce that opaque Russian box to use that metaphor?

Look at people's actual words and do not assume that everybody is lying. Yes, they may be lying about details, but the actual words will tell you important and true things. The second thing you have to look for is evidence that people believe in the ideology they profess. Does the public at large believe in the ideology? Do the elites around Putin believe in ideology? Or are the elites and the public apathetic? If you see evidence that continues to show apathy, or support for the ideology, then Putin is not going anywhere.

The Soviet system, and Putin's Russia, depend on people's political apathy to rule. Putin rose to power by essentially buying off Russian society with oil and gas money. He offered a higher quality of material life in exchange for people's apathy towards political rights and foreign policy.

How are the Ukrainians processing the mutiny in Russia and what it may mean for the outcome of the war and counteroffensive?

I was talking to a reporter yesterday, from Ukraine. When I explained that I thought Putin did not end up weaker, and that he is going to stay in power for the foreseeable future, she asked what does the mutiny really mean for the battlefield? I told her that I don't think it means much yet. It is too soon to tell. The Ukrainians have not yet had a chance to exploit the mutiny and what it may mean or not for Putin and Russia and the war. The problem that Ukraine has is turning lethal success on the battlefield into political conditions at home in Moscow. Ukraine can have lots of success on the battlefield and not actually do that. That is my sincere worry. In the end, I think the war ends in the streets of Moscow. The Russian people must overthrow the Putinist regime. But there's going to be a guy after Putin. He may be worse than Putin. He may be slightly better. And then there's going to be a guy after that guy. That person is the most likely chance for Russia to have a democratic system. That outcome is decades in the future.

Russia will lose the ground war in Ukraine. Russia will be forced to concede territory, albeit not all the Ukrainian territory they conquered. Russia will continue to be an existential threat to Ukraine until a new democratic leader emerges in Russia decades in the future. Ukraine will have to maintain one of the largest armies in the world; it will have to maintain extraordinary levels of competency; it will have NATO forces in Ukraine in large numbers; Ukraine will be like Germany was in the 70s. Ukraine will have to rebuild itself. But Ukrainians right now want to believe in a quick, rapid victory. Unfortunately, Ukraine's counteroffensive is not going to accomplish that. Ukraine's leaders have chosen the safer route. For Ukraine to achieve a faster victory and force Putin to settle will require taking Crimea  but that is the hardest military objective.

How do military professionals such as yourself assess a counteroffensive and its success or failure? What are the metrics?

What observers tend to look at are the colors on the map and how the territory changes hands. Attrition is another metric. How many vehicles of what type are being destroyed? How many people are being killed? How many are being taken off the line because of injury, total casualties? What the public does not see is what is happening at the National Security Council, for example. How can we move the war in Ukraine to a political conclusion using military force? That does not fit into a sound bite, which explains why the general public and commentariot are not engaging with those questions and themes.

How are you evaluating the Ukrainian counteroffensive?

Their counteroffensive is making progress, and that progress is slow and plodding. What they're trying to do is protect against failure. A large failure really hurts the Ukrainians because it will impede their ability to continue the counter offensive in other places. I don't see any surprise moves yet, and to be honest that's what I'm waiting for. The Ukrainian military is also trying to develop units that have figured out how to breach Russian lines. Once they have some units that have learned how to conduct those operations successfully, those units can go and train and then lead larger parts of the counteroffensive in other areas. That's something that people outside of military experience just don't pay attention to.

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America's "systemic racism" isn't just domestic: Consider who dies around the world in our wars

We are also not seeing combined arms maneuvering (Cam) by the Ukrainians. CAM is what makes the Western militaries so good, it was designed with the Soviet military approach in mind. NATO has always assumed it would fight with fewer men and fewer guns. It's an approach tailor-made to fight Russia, which has largely retained its Soviet culture in the armed forces. But it takes time to learn, and time is not on Ukraine's side. But it's partially why I think Zelenskyi is being patient with the start of the full counteroffensive. He's trying to get more and better training in place. He's in no real rush, and every week of training time is worth yards of success and buckets of blood saved.

There was a recent video of the Bradley infantry fighting vehicles and the Leopard tanks being severely damaged and destroyed during a failed breaching operation against the Russians. Of course, you had all the online and other armchair generals making proclamations about that one small battle and of course jumping to incorrect and premature conclusions. What difference will Western equipment and armaments really make in the war? How do we explain to the public what these systems are capable of or not?

A good general would never say that a battle is won because of the equipment. A good general will always say that you must have competent, brave soldiers with competent brave leaders who understand that their job is to take care of their soldiers, and the soldiers will take care of the mission. It's just that simple. You need the right weapons  or alternatively weapons that are close enough to being the right ones. The Ukrainians are getting the right weapons now. A huge critique I have of the Biden administration is that the US should have just given the Ukrainians the weapons and other support they needed much earlier. It would have made a huge difference in the war.

The Ukrainians do need more training. That is a large explanation for what delayed the counteroffensive. We should not underestimate their extraordinary capacity to learn quickly, to learn well, to be brave, and where they didn't have time to learn well, to substitute bravery for the technical capabilities they may have lacked. Ukrainian society is totally behind the war. The Ukrainians are going to win. What that victory looks like is what remains to be determined.

Putin has continued to make threats of using nuclear weapons if he deems it necessary. Are those threats credible?

The chance of Putin actually using nuclear weapons is very small. Why is that? There are two types of nuclear weapons. The media gets confused. The media hears "nukes" and they think of New York being destroyed. This is not what Putin would do, it makes no sense to achieve his political aims. Battlefield nukes are what we should focus on more. But again, battlefield nukes are not really going to offer Putin either a political, psychological, or tactical advantage. It's just not a useful weapon. The US has said, publicly and privately, that NATO will enter the fight, and you, Vladimir Putin will lose your military. Putin isn't stupid. Putin's economy is weak. All he has is the military. Putin will not risk the total destruction of his military.

You are not psychic. But how do you think Putin and Prigozhin are feeling right now?

Prigozhin is probably struggling to find his identity. He is also likely scared for his life and that of his family. Putin, I believe, is riding high for the moment and feels like he now has more undisputed control over the military than he has had during the entire war in Ukraine. Putin feels very good about that.

Read more

about the war in Ukraine
By Anthony Deutsch

THE HAGUE (Reuters) - Russian President Vladimir Putin's recent comments about payments to the Wagner group was "like direct evidence" that Wagner's mercenaries were an illegal arm of the Russian army in the war, Ukraine's top prosecutor told Reuters this week.

Putin said last week that Wagner and its founder, Yevgeny Prigozhin, had received almost $2 billion from Russia in the past year.

Ukrainian Prosecutor General Andriy Kostin made the comments in The Hague where he was attending the opening of the International Centre for the Prosecution of the Crime of Aggression on Monday.

Kostin said his office had identified Prigozhin as a suspect during investigations this year and that Wagner fighters were responsible for some of the most serious war crimes since the Feb. 24, 2022 invasion.

While Russia attempts to distinguish between Wagner forces and its military, Putin's comments last week about state budget spending on Wagner was "like direct evidence that they are not only de facto, but probably, illegally, also are part of the Russian army." The use of mercenaries by states in armed conflict is banned under the Geneva Conventions.

Among more than 93,000 incidents of potential war crimes Kostin's office was investigating were many atrocities Wagner forces committed, Kostin said.

They are "among the most severe crimes against our civilians and our prisoners of war," Kostin said.

The Wagner Group poses a threat not only to Ukraine, but to peace and security in many countries, including in Latin America, Africa and the Middle East, he said.

Kostin appealed to allies, including the U.S. and Britain, to classify Wagner as a terrorist organisation so it can be prosecuted and its assets frozen.

"Prigozhin is already a suspect in criminal proceedings in Ukraine, but the main thing is to stop the activity of such groups," he said.

(Reporting by Anthony Deutsch; Editing by Josie Kao)
State officials are investigating after they said a rabid bobcat attacked three camp counselors on an island in Connecticut last week.

According to the Deep River Fire Department in Middlesex County, the incident took place just after 2:00 a.m. on Friday at the Selden Neck State Park in Lyme.

The area where the attack took place is just over 35 miles south of Hartford and no fatalities were reported.

Crews responded to the scene for a report of multiple people injured by an animal on Selden Neck Island, the department wrote in a press release.

State officials in Connecticut are investigating after a rabid bobcat attacked three campers on an island on June 30, 2023. The Deep River Fire Department reported the attack took place just after 2:00 a.m. at the Selden Neck State Park in Lyme

Three adults and nine juveniles were taken from the island to the shore and all three adults were hospitalized for treatment for unspecified injuries, the fire department said.

No other injuries were reported.

Sleeping in a hammock

The state Department of Energy and Environmental Protection (DEEP) could not immediately be reached by USA TODAY, but officials with the agency told the New York Times an investigation was launched after learning one of the counselors was attacked while sleeping in a hammock.

The victim was among three adults counselors leading a group of youth campers participating in the states Wilderness School, the Times reported.

According to the outlet, the adults killed the bobcat following the attack and the animal was sent to a state lab where it tested positive for rabies.

According to its website, the school a program of the State of Connecticut, Department of Children and Families  "serves as an enrichment program for young people looking to make positive changes." For some attendees, the site says, the school serves as "a prevention or intervention service."

Michael Williams, deputy commissioner with the Connecticut Department of Children and Families, said the staff members were attacked while on an off-site expedition with local youth.

The Wilderness School, Williams said, offers year-round wilderness programs ranging in length from one day to 20-day expeditions that include hiking, camping, canoeing and other experiences.

The group, he told USA TODAY, was in an authorized area for camping.

"Due to their courageous and outstanding efforts, the safety of the youth was maintained, and they were not harmed," Williams said.

'Appear as large as possible'

According to the National Park Service and DEEP, bobcats are slightly larger than house cats and have a bobbed tail. Adult male bobcats typically weigh 18 and 35 pounds while females weigh from 15-30 pounds.

Anyone who comes into contact with a bobcat should not run from it, officials said. If approached, "try to appear as large as possible and back away slowly." If attacked, fight back, NPS says.

According to a fact sheet from the state's website, in bobcats have been historically viewed as a threat to agriculture and game species. "The state even had a bounty on bobcats from 1935-1971," according to DEEP. "By the early 1970s, a large increase in the value of bobcat pelts raised concerns that the population could be overharvested."

Natalie Neysa Alund covers breaking and trending news for USA TODAY. Reach her at nalund@usatoday.com and follow her on Twitter @nataliealund.

This article originally appeared on USA TODAY: Rabid bobcat attacks Connecticut camp counselors at Selden Neck Park
Smyrna police are cracking down on drivers who run red lights. Cameras are installed at Cumberland Boulevard and Spring Road to capture red-light runners in the act.

Beginning Monday, they will operate around the clock in each direction of the busy intersection not far from Truist Park and the Cumberland Mall.

[DOWNLOAD: Free WSB-TV News app for alerts as news breaks]

For the next 30 days, police will issue warnings to drivers. After the month-long warning period, $70 citations will be issued to the vehicle owners.

In social media posts, the Smyrna Police Department said a comprehensive evaluation was conducted to determine where red-light running commonly occurs and where red-light safety cameras are most likely to improve road safety and reduce red-light running.

Another intersection is slated to get the cameras: South Cobb Drive at the East-West Connector. Police have not said when they will be operational.

The cameras will definitely help, said driver William Silvery, who passes through this intersection every day and has seen red-light runners.

He thinks the photo enforcement will make an impact.

More so than having police here, he said. I think itll catch those who are not thinking or being wise.

TRENDING STORIES:

Police said they will review all video recorded by the cameras before they issue any citation. Smyrna police call red-light running a deadly epidemic, saying one third of all deaths at intersections happen at those with traffic lights.

If the driver doesnt agree with the violation  or the registered owner wasnt driving at the time  the citation can be contested with the Office of Administrative Review.

Police said points will not be assessed on driving records and violations will not affect insurance rates.

This citation is not considered a moving violation, Smyrna police said on social media. It is a civil citation holding the registered owner responsible for the violation (like a parking ticket).

Lola Aja also regularly passes through Cumberland Boulevard and Spring Road.

Personally for me, I dont run red lights, she said. I hate when I see people running red lights. So it would be good to have things that enforce people to have good behavior, hopefully.

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IN OTHER NEWS
Remains identified, one man charged after body found in barrel in Upstate lake

The Spartanburg County Coroner's Office has identified a body that was found inside a barrel floating in Lake Thicketty last week. One individual has been charged in connection with the incident by the Cherokee County Sheriff's Office.

Spartanburg County Coroner Rusty Clevenger identified the decedent as Jeffrey Darin Sutphin, 56, of Chesnee, according to a press release on July 1.

Eric Shawn Fetzer, 25, of Chesnee, was charged with destruction, desecration and removal of human remains by the Cherokee County Sheriff's Office on June 30, according to a release from the department.

The Cherokee County Detention Center's website shows Fetzer was released on a $5,000 surety bond.

"Investigators expect to make additional arrests regarding this incident in Cherokee County in the coming days in regard to the human remains being placed into Lake Thicketty," the Cherokee County Sheriff's Office statement said Friday.

On Monday afternoon, Clevenger told the Spartanburg Herald-Journal that an autopsy was conducted, but his office is currently awaiting toxicology results. The results will take about six weeks, he said.

Sutphin was previously declared missing on June 4, according to a press release from the Cherokee Sheriff's Office on June 23. He was last seen on Rutherfordton Highway leaving a Chesnee business on June 4 around 8 p.m., driving a gold 2006 Jeep Liberty, the release said.

Although the body was found in Cherokee County, the Spartanburg County Sheriff's Office also opened an investigation because officials believe the death occurred in Spartanburg County.

The body was found around 1:45 p.m. on Thursday on the shore of Lake Thicketty in the Macedonia community of Gaffney, according to a release from the Cherokee coroner on Thursday evening.

Deputies found the barrel near the shore and upon opening it found human remains. It appears the body had been in the container for a number of days," coroner Dennis Fowler said.

Later that day, investigators determined that the death occurred in Spartanburg County. The remains were then transferred to Clevenger's office Friday morning, according to Fowler.

"(Cherokee County Sheriff's Office) is charging (Fetzer) with disposal of the human remains, how it got to that point I don't know," Corporal John Burgess, with the Spartanburg County Sheriff's Office, said Monday afternoon. "We don't have anything further to release yet."

The Herald-Journal reached out to Cherokee Sheriff Steve Mueller for further information Monday afternoon, but did not immediately receive any response.

Chalmers Rogland covers public safety for the Spartanburg Herald-Journal and The Greenville News. He can be reached by email at crogland@shj.com.

This article originally appeared on Herald-Journal: Remains identified, man charged after body found in barrel in lake
New restaurant to continue evolution of the international food scene in State College

Andy Lee, a Penn State alumnus, plans to open a Korean fried chicken restaurant in downtown State College at the end of August. The goal of Tasty K, Lee said, is to bring more diversity into State College with food that will be based on Korean recipes.

The restaurant will be take-out only, which Lee said is a result of the COVID-19 pandemic.

COVID affected so much on the restaurant industry and eating experience, Lee wrote in an email. Consumers are now used to getting their food to go and eating at home comfortably.

The restaurant is looking to hire its own delivery drivers, Lee added, so that they wont be dependent on apps that cost the business 20-30% of the sale.

The restaurant is planning to host seasonal events  including giveaways, Lee wrote.

There will be three kinds of chicken on the menu, according to an article published by Onward State. Lee told the CDT that his favorite is the Galbi flavor, which is soy sauce based.

Not only by food, but also with many events that focus on giving back to the community, we are going to leave positive foot marks on the Happy Valley, he wrote.

Lee Anne Jeffries, president of the Downtown State College Improvement District, said that she was excited to welcome Tasty K to downtown.

Its wonderful to watch the evolution of the international food scene here in State College as it continues to diversify, she wrote in an email.

Lee also teased future plans for more restaurants in State College.

Cant tell you guys about other items yet, he wrote. But many more international foods will be available in State College in the future ...

Tasty K is set to open on Aug. 21 at 325 East Calder Way.
Retail crime is a 'spiraling problem' in Kansas, the state's AG says, as rising drug use leads to a surge in shoplifting in Wichita

John Coletti/Getty Images

Organized retail crime is rising in Wichita, Kansas, according to a report by CNN.

Rising drug use in the area is leading to a surge in shoplifting, local crime officials say.

Items being targeted include Lego sets, jewelry, beauty products, and Tide detergent.

Wichita, Kansas, is becoming a hotbed for retail crime, according to a report by CNN.

Kansas Attorney General Kris Kobach told CNN that it was a "spiraling problem" in the state that left both store employees and the general public "frustrated."

"To see this much retail crime, it's shocking," Captain Casey Slaughter, who leads Wichita Police Department's property crimes bureau, told CNN.

Retail crime is rising across the US. Organized retail crime at retailers was 26.5% higher in 2021 than in the previous year, according to a study by the National Retail Federation. Target said organized retail crime has led to more than $400 million in profit losses in 2022. Cities including San Francisco have seen a huge exodus of retailers, in part due to concerns about crime.

It's a problem in Wichita, too. Retail theft in the city in 2023 so far is up 35% over the five-year average, Slaughter told CNN.

Slaughter said that thieves were "basically taking anything that can be quickly carried out of the store," and would often sell them on online marketplaces or at small stores afterwards. He said that the most stolen items reported by retailers included expensive clothing and footwear, Lego sets, jewelry, beauty products, sporting goods, power tools, and Tide detergent.

"Property crime is an emerging problem in Wichita," Joe Sullivan, Wichita's police chief, said at a Sedgwick County board of commissioners meeting in April. "I'm very concerned about the sudden rise in burglary and retail theft."

One of the city's Victoria's Secret stores loses around $30,000 a month to theft, the fourth-highest of the retailer's stores in the US, Sullivan said. He added that outdoor leisure retailer Cabela's said that its Wichita store was its worst for loss nationwide.

"There's a small number of people committing the vast majority of this large number of crimes," Sullivan said.

In Derby, a smaller city to the south of Wichita, retail crime is primarily from big box stores, the city's police chief Robert Lee said during an April meeting.

"What we see now is much more organized rings of shoplifters," Lee said. "We see them where they can more easily dispose of the property that they steal quickly: They don't have to go to pawn shops anymore, they just take care of it on social media and sell it that way, but we see them now much more likely to confront store employees, confront the police, and use extraordinary means to facilitate their escape. We see a lot of high-speed pursuits as results of shoplifts."

Local crime officials say that drugs, and in particular fentanyl, a synthetic drug like heroin but 50 times more potent, appear to be driving a lot of the retail crime. Drug-associated deaths by Sedgwick County residents increased by 91% from 2015 to 2020, according to county data, largely due to a sharp rise in opioid-associated deaths.

Actions retailers across the US have taken to reduce theft include putting tags on high-value items or storing them in locked cabinets, hiring more security guards, and, in the case of Home Depot, introducing power tools that won't work if thieves steal them.

Read the original article on Business Insider
A significant share of older Americans underestimate how long their retirement is going to last: i.e., how long they are going to live.

Most people know that the average American lives to an age between 75 and 80. Less well known, apparently, is that life expectancy rises with age. At age 60, an American man can expect to reach 82; a woman, 85.

That knowledge is called longevity literacy, and many of us dont have it. In a 2022 survey by the insurer TIAA, one-quarter of Americans underestimated the life expectancy of a 60-year-old. Another 28 percent said they didnt know it.

Even among baby boomers, the youngest of whom are nearing 60, more than two-fifths of survey respondents either guessed low on longevity or punted on the question.

We were kind of shocked to get the data, said Surya Kolluri, the head of TIAA Institute, which produced the report.

Kolluri said he was particularly dismayed over the large share of respondents who could not answer the longevity question, which was multiple choice.

We gave them the answer and they still said, Eh, I dont know, he said.

Confusion over human lifespan complicates the business of planning for retirement, a phase of life for which many Americans are already underprepared.

More than two-fifths of baby boomers have no retirement savings, even as the postwar generation enters retirement years, census data show.

The median boomer household held $134,000 in retirement savings in 2019, according to a NerdWallet analysis.

By most accounts, even that figure is not nearly enough. Human longevity doesnt stop rising at 60. An American who retires at 65 can expect to live to 85, according to Social Security projections.

We dont know why people are so off in their expectations, said Gal Wettstein, a senior research economist at Boston College. I think there is some evidence that people dont account for the fact that theyve already lived to a certain age when they try to guess how long they might live.

The biggest financial risk facing retirees is outliving your savings, Wettstein said, citing research from the schools Center for Retirement Research.

That fact, too, is lost on many Americans. People approaching retirement wrongly assume that stock market volatility is their biggest financial peril, Wettstein said. In fact, the far greater risk is living so long that your money runs out.

Increasing lifespans ranks as one of the great human advances of the past century. An American born in 1900 could expect to reach 47. By 1950, life expectancy had risen to 68. U.S. lifespan peaked at 79 in 2019, then dropped during the COVID-19 pandemic.

The longevity bonus has become more pronounced over time, as we outlive various perils that killed our forebears. A Stanford researcher examined people who live past 65 in developed countries and found that human lifespans increase by three years with every generation.

But such nuances are lost on many people outside the scholarly community.

Researchers at the Employee Benefit Research Institute have repeatedly surveyed Americans of all ages about longevity and found consistent befuddlement.

One of the consistent things is that there were 20 percent of people who dont know, who couldnt give an answer, said Craig Copeland, director of wealth benefits research at the institute. So, youre starting out with one-fifth of people with no idea of how long they were going to live.

Retirees fared somewhat better on survey questions about longevity. In 2022, Copeland said, more than half of retired persons demonstrated knowledge that an American at 65 can expect to live 20 more years. Even in this group, however, one-fifth of respondents didnt answer the question.

Boston College researchers have found that many working-age Americans are pessimistic about how long they are going to live, and underestimate their own expected longevity, Wettstein said.

Even people in their 50s and 60s tend to think theyre not going to live very long, or not as long as the life expectancy of a person their age, he said. Where that kind of flips is in peoples 70s, which is late for making decisions about retirement.

Women show much greater longevity literacy than men. In the TIAA survey, 43 percent of women answered the lifespan question correctly, compared to 32 percent of men.

That concerns me, Kolluri said of the male respondents, because what it implies to me is that theyre incurring longevity risk, that they will outlive their money.

People with greater literacy about human lifespans are more likely to save for retirement, Kolluri said. They are also more likely to have calculated how much money they will need. And they are more likely to be satisfied in retirement.

Lack of longevity literacy leaves many Americans unprepared to finance retirement. There are other factors.

Millions of Americans count on Social Security to see them through retirement. But monthly Social Security checks to retired workers average around $1,800, much less than the typical family spends in retirement.

Prior generations of retirees tapped employer-funded pensions. That income source has gradually given way to employer-sponsored retirement plans.

Yet, according to an AARP analysis, nearly half of Americans have no access to retirement plans at work, especially at smaller firms with fewer employees.

Workers who do save for retirement often dont save enough. In the latest Retirement Confidence Survey from the Employee Benefit Research Institute, only 64 percent of workers voiced confidence that they would have enough money to live comfortably through their retirement years.

Another measure, Boston Colleges National Retirement Risk Index, finds that roughly half of working-age American households are at risk of being financially unprepared for retirement.

Just as worrisome, perhaps, only about one-third of households are aware that they are unprepared.

Many families overestimate how much money they have on hand for retirement and underestimate how much more they will need. Homeowners often focus too much on the rising value of their home, and too little on how much they owe on the mortgage. Workers with retirement accounts may underestimate how far those funds will go. A $100,000 retirement nest egg translates to only about $600 in monthly retirement income. Too often, researchers say, a household has two wage earners but only one partner actively saving for retirement.

Outliving ones retirement savings is only the largest among several risks Americans face when entering retirement. Another is covering the costs of long-term care.

More than half of Americans entering retirement today will eventually require long-term services and supports, at an average cost of $120,900, according to federal research.

A semi-private room in a nursing home is about $100,000 a year, and that is a lot of money, Wettstein said. No doubt, for a lot of people, that would run through their savings very quickly.

A recent analysis by the National Council on Aging found that 80 percent of people over 60 lack the financial resources to cover long-term care.

You have this idea that Medicare will cover some of those costs, whereas in fact Medicare doesnt generally cover most of those costs, said Genevieve Waterman, director of economic and financial security at the National Council on Aging.

Worried about financing retirement? The National Council on Aging offers an Age Well Planner, and many investment sites feature retirement income calculators.

For the latest news, weather, sports, and streaming video, head to The Hill.
RICHMOND , Ind.  A Richmond man has been charged with murder in the fatal stabbing of a local woman.

Tommy W. Earl, 67, was arrested Friday afternoon, not long after the killing of the woman  identified in an affidavit as 59-year-old Michelle Dionne Peacock  at Merle Henderson Apartments, 81 S. 14th St., where Earl resides.

According to the court document, Earl approached the victim in a gazebo south of the apartment building and cut her throat with a straight razor.

The victim "bled severely from the laceration" and was pronounced dead at the scene, a Richmond police detective reported.

Earl remained at the scene, still armed with the razor, when police arrived and allegedly threatened to kill one officer. He was taken into custody after police used an electronic stun device to subdue him.

Later examined at Reid Hospital, Earl reportedly told investigators he and the woman "had problems in the past," and he decided to attack her after he observed her, from his fourth-floor apartment, sitting in the gazebo.

"Earl made the comment he was glad he did it and would do it again," detective Tom Legear wrote in a report.

At least two employees of a lawn care business who were working in the area at the time told police they had witnessed the attack.

Earl  being held without bond Monday in the Wayne County jail, was also charged with intimidation, a Level 6 felony carrying a maximum 30-month sentence, and resisting law enforcement, a misdemeanor.

In Indiana, a murder conviction carries a prison term of up to 65 years.

Local court records reflect no prior charges against the Richmond man.

Douglas Walker is a news reporter for The Star Press. Contact him at 765-213-5851 or at dwalker@muncie.gannett.com.

This article originally appeared on Richmond Palladium-Item: Richmond man charged with murder in woman's stabbing
This is me. New riot photos, details from warrant for E. WA man arrested near Obama home

New court documents detail a deeper involvement by an Eastern Washington man in the Jan. 6 insurrection at the U.S. Capitol.

The warrant for Taylor Tarantos participation in the riot was issued Thursday morning, the same day he was arrested with 400 rounds of ammunition and material to make explosives near the home of former President Barack Obama.

The 37-year-old Pasco man was arrested that day near the Obamas D.C. home. At the time D.C. Metropolitan Police said he was arrested on a warrant related to the January 2021 riot, but the details of those charges werent available until Monday.

He was booked into the D.C. Metropolitan Jail on Friday, but has not yet been charged in that incident outside the Obamas.

New court documents detail the charges that led to a warrant for his arrest. They paint a picture of someone accused of being actively involved in nearly every major moment of the attack on the Capitol.

Taranto, a Navy veteran, is a one-time Pasco school board candidate and former webmaster for the Franklin County Republican Party.

Taylor Taranto is seen motion toward scaffolding outside of the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, in this image included in court documents.

Jan. 6 involvement

Investigators say Taranto attended a rally near the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, then joined the larger group of protesters as it moved toward the Capitol building where lawmakers were certifying the vote to declare Joe Biden the next president of the United States.

Once there, Taranto is accused of picking up some metal scaffolding on the ground and throwing it. A photo shows Taranto motioning toward the scaffolding, with a line of police in the background.

Around 2:30 p.m., as the Capitol was breached, security footage shows Taranto entering the building.

Taylor Taranto is seen entering the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, in this image included in court documents.

Taranto has been claiming on social media to have seen Ashli Babbitt get shot, and the court documents place him where she was attempting to break through a glass window between protesters and the lawmakers being evacuated.

At approximately 2:42 p.m., Taranto was captured on video standing at the entrance to the Speakers Lobby, an area behind the House chamber where Congresspeople were evacuating from the House chamber to a safe location, investigators wrote. Around this time, a rioter attempted to jump through a glass window and was shot by a United States Capitol Police officer.

Afterward officers began pushing rioters out of the building. Thats when Taranto and David Walls Kaufman are accused of attacking MPD Officer Jeffrey Smith.

The officers widow, Erin Smith, filed a wrongful death civil suit against the two in 2021.

In those documents, Taranto admits to being at the riot, but claims he was there to document it. He is shown wearing a black hoodie and a Make Space Great Again hat, a reference to the U.S. Space Force, and wielding a black cane, that investigators believe was a Ka-Bar TDI Self Defense Cane.

Taylor Taranto is seen clashing with Capitol police during the riot at the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, in this image included in court documents. Taranto is circled in yellow. David Walls-Kaufman, his codefendant in a lawsuit for wrongful death of MPD Officer Jeffrey Smith is circled in red.

The company describes it as a vital defense tool where traditional weapons are prohibited. The canes weigh more than two pounds.

Investigators say that in the scuffle Taranto handed Kaufman the weapon, which he used to hit Smith in the face and head repeatedly.

Smith died by suicide nine days later as he was scheduled to return to work. Smiths widow said in an Op-Ed in the Washington Post, published in January 2022, that two medical examiners have testified that post-concussive syndrome and brain injury were the real causes of (her husbands) death because the concussion he suffered led to severe depression and suicide.

Taranto claimed in court documents filed in the civil suit that he was just at the Capitol as an independent member of the press. But the investigators said no evidence was presented to show he was there as part of news gathering.

By 2:56 p.m. Taranto and other rioters had been pushed out of the building through the upper House doors, said the documents. They then began to gather on the central steps on the East side of the building.

Taranto stood on the steps for some time. While there, he listened to speeches by others assembled there, and at various times yelled and cheered on other people standing in the vicinity, smoked a cigarette, and took photos with his phone. Taranto also fought with other rioters, using his cane to fend them off, investigators wrote.

Taranto is seen standing just feet from Jacob Chansley, the rioter known as the Qanon Shaman.

Chansley, who achieved notoriety during the attack, is best known for images showing him sitting in the President of the Senates chair, which is traditionally the Vice President of the United States.

Taylor Taranto is seen near the Qanon Shaman on the steps outside of the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, in this image included in court documents.

Former Vice President Mike Pence was a target of rioters during the breach of the building.

Taranto also was identified using cell phone data by people who know him through employment and his social media accounts using the pseudonym Eraci Taranot, an anagram of his wifes name.

Kaufman was later criminally charged for his role in the riot, but Taranto had not been.

Kaufman entered a plea deal in his criminal case, and was sentenced to two months in jail, a $500 fine and $500 restitution. The plea deal, signed in January, also included an agreement from Kaufman to cooperate with investigators in additional cases before his sentencing.

Taranto was identified as being in D.C. at Kaufmans June 13 sentencing hearing when NBC News reporter Ryan J. Reilly observed him acting erratically in the courtroom.

Taranto was made to leave by U.S. Marshals because he would not stop trying to use his phone to take video in the courthouse, according to Reilly. Federal courts do not allow the use of photography or video.

A few days later Taranto also participated in a livestream where he described being there when Babbitt was shot.

Investigators said that during the livestream, Taranto and the host reviewed footage of the riot and Taranto pointed himself out in multiple sections saying, Thats me screaming, and This is me.

According to court documents, Taylor Taranto identified himself in this photo during a livestream. Taranto is speaking in the bottom left.

Taranto had been going back and forth between the Tri-Cities and D.C. over the past two years to participate in various protests, living in his van outside the D.C. jail most recently.

His social media accounts last place him in the Tri-Cities as recently as April. He had posted video of himself at the Easter Day drag brunch protests at a Richland restaurant.

Tarantos arrest

Taranto was arrested Thursday as he ran toward the Obamas Kalorama neighborhood home after being spotted by law enforcement agents. He was stopped by Secret Service agents before he could reach the home. Its unclear if he had weapons with him at the time of his arrest.

Early that morning Taranto had been reposting conspiracy theories about the home. The conspiracy theories, posted on Truth social by Trump, claimed that there were secret tunnels beneath the Obama house, that it contained a War Room and was funded by left-wing philanthropist George Soros.

Taranto later posted that he had them surrounded.

Taranto is due in court Wednesday. He is currently on a 72-hour detention hold. Its unclear if new charges will be presented at this hearing.

The current charges against Taranto on the warrant include:
France has faced several days of rioting and destruction following protests over the death of Nahel Merzouk - REUTERS/Pascal Rossignol

Thousands have been arrested. An estimated 6,000 cars have been burnt or destroyed. And countless shops have been looted or destroyed.

But even if order is fully restored in France in the coming days, civil unrest will surely only worsen in a country that is drowning in debt. And this time, President Macron wont be able to buy off banlieues with yet another round of extra spending.

The riots wont bankrupt France  but they will bring forward the moment of reckoning.

It remains to be seen whether the worst riots France has witnessed since 2005 have petered out, or whether the violence will return. One point is surely clear, however. The petrol bombs and Molotov cocktails will have inflicted huge damage on the French economy.

At the peak, 1,500 cars were being set alight each night, according to Ministry of the Interior data. Even on a quiet Sunday, the total was still running well into the hundreds. An estimated 500 buildings were subject to arson on Thursday night.

French President Emmanuel Macron slashed fuel taxes and boosted benefits following widespread protests in 2019 - YVES HERMAN/POOL/AFP via Getty Images

Early estimates from insurers suggest the damage could cost 100 million euros. But, of course, the overall bill will end up being far higher. Shops were boarded up over the weekend, even along the Champs-Elysees.

Night time curfews and travel restrictions will have damaged the restaurant trade. And in many countries, the UK included, governments issued travel advisory warnings, deterring visitors over the busy summer period.

This is significant: France is the worlds top tourist destination, where travel accounts for 10pc of GDP. The total cost of the current unrest will dwarf that of repairing a few shop windows.

And the timing could not have been worse. In the past, French governments have bought off bouts of civil violence with increases in public spending. After three weeks of riots in 2005, the last major eruption in the suburbs, Nicolas Sarkozy promised a Marshall Plan for the banlieues, with billions pledged towards better housing and transport.

After the gilets jaunes protests in 2019, President Macron slashed fuel taxes and ramped up benefits to buy off the mostly rural protesters. In the coming days, we can perhaps expect to hear about some big spending pledges to fix the crisis.

The trouble is, France cant spend its way out of this disaster. Over the last decade, its finances have deteriorated dramatically. The UK may be in dire straits, but Frances position is even worse.

Its total debt to GDP ratio has already hit 112pc of GDP, compared to 100pc in the UK, and 67pc in Germany. Further, this is forecast to keep on rising for the rest of the decade. The budget deficit will hit 4.7pc of GDP this year, even with the economy recovering from the pandemic, and is projected to reach 4.4pc of GDP next year.

France has one of the largest structural deficits in the developed world. State spending already consumes close to 60pc of GDP, and with a tax-to-GDP ratio of 45pc, France already ranks second out of the OECD nations for the amount the government squeezes out of the economy.

There is no scope for increasing taxes, nor can it hope to borrow much more. It has already overtaken Italy as the third largest national debtor in the world  at least measured by the money owed instead of a percentage of output  and ranks only behind the far larger American and Japanese economies.

Indeed, the rating agencies are already displaying nerves over the levels of debt France is racking up. In May, Fitch downgraded Frances debt to AA-minus.

Political deadlock and (sometimes violent) social movements pose a risk to Macrons reform agenda and could create pressures for a more expansionary fiscal policy or a reversal of previous reforms, the agency noted dryly as it delivered its verdict. If it was alarmed in May, Fitch and the rest of the rating agencies may be a lot more worried now.

Macron just about managed to ram his pension reform through using a Presidential decree, but his is now a lame duck administration. And whatever the response to last weekends riots, we can be confident it wont include trimming welfare budgets or tougher measures to force unemployed young people into jobs (even if, just like Britain, there is plenty of evidence that there are lots of vacancies).

As the UK found out in very different circumstances last September, there comes a point at which governments simply cant issue more and more debt to pay for extra spending.

You may never quite know when that moment will arrive but, when it does, it does so with brutal clarity. Previous Presidents of the Fifth Republic, and indeed 2017 Macron, would have responded to a weekend of violent riots with a blitz of extra spending. In 2023, he doesnt have the fiscal space.

Even worse, he is meant to be cutting spending over the next few years to try and slim down the state, and bring the budget back into balance, and that is only going to make the problems in the most deprived areas even worse.

The rioting and arson and unrest will hit the economy hard, and create demands for yet more spending, at precisely the moment when neither can be afforded.

It may not happen this month, or indeed for the next six months  but eventually the markets will catch up with how unsustainable the French economy has become.

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The risk of nuclear disaster in Ukraine skyrocketed with the destruction of the Kakhovka dam. Residents nearby are preparing for the worst.

Maxar satellite imagery of the before/after close-up views of Nova Kakhovka dam and hydroelectric power facility. Satellite image (c) 2023 Maxar Technologies

In June, a controlled explosion caused the Ukrainian Kakhovka hydroelectric dam to collapse.

An international investigative group says it's "highly likely" Russian forces were behind the attack.

The nearby Zaporizhzhia nuclear plant relies on water reserves to cool its power reactors.

Residents near the Zaporizhzhia nuclear power plant in Ukraine are preparing for a meltdown after a critical dam collapsed last month, threatening the water supply needed to cool the plant's nuclear reactors.

The New York Times reported Nadiya Hez, a nurse who lives in an area close enough to the plant to bear the brunt of any potential nuclear fallout, now keeps iodine tablets on hand and has made an old root cellar available to hide in with her husband and their 1-year-old son, should catastrophe strike nearby.

"I'm terrified," Olena Pareniuk, a Ukrainian bio-radiologist in Kyiv, told the outlet.

In October, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy warned that Russian forces, who had captured the key piece of infrastructure, rigged the dam to explode, Insider previously reported. An international investigative group said after the explosion it's "highly likely" Russian forces were behind the attack.

Zelenskyy said the loss of the dam could flood a vast area and deprive the south of Ukraine of its water supply. It did, killing at least 52 people, Reuters reported. He also said the loss of the dam could also endanger the Zaporizhzhia Nuclear Power Plant, which draws on the reservoir at nearby Kakhovka for cooling.

Now, the more dire of the Ukrainian leader's predictions may come true. While the Zaporizhzhia plant's reactors currently have several months worth of water from an existing cooling pond, according to the UN's International Atomic Energy Agency, it is critical for the safety of the plant to find a new water source to cool the reactors.

According to the IAEA, only one of the six reactors at the plant remains hot. The others are in a state of cold shutdown, lowering the risk of meltdown due to loss of cooling. However, the height of the cooling pond is declining by up to 1 centimeter per day due to site usage and evaporation, according to a Friday statement from the IAEA.

Though a drainage system is currently replenishing the water, lowering the reduction rate, the agency is urgently seeking solutions for a new way to keep the plant cool.

Representatives for the UN's International Atomic Energy Agency did not immediately respond to Insider's request for comment.

The security of the Zaporizhzhia plant  Europe's largest nuclear power plant  has been of paramount concern since the beginning of Russia's invasion of Ukraine, with Russian leader Vladimir Putin targeting the plant early on.

In response, five basic principles for the protection of the plant were established by IAEA Director General Rafael Mariano Grossi at the United Nations Security Council. The principles state there should be no attack from or against the plant and that it should not be used as storage or a base for heavy weapons like rocket launchers, artillery systems and munitions, and tanks.

Recently, however, the IAEA has received reports of mines placed around the Zaporizhzhia Nuclear Power Plant, a violation of the UN principles and a significant risk to the security of the nuclear reactors.

"We need full access to be able to confirm that the five principles have not been violated, and we will continue to request the necessary access to all those areas essential to nuclear safety and security so that we can deliver on this mandate, including that the plant should not be used as storage or base for heavy weapons and munitions," Grossi said in a Friday IAEA statement, adding that the agency's investigative team that monitors the site had not reported any shelling or explosions over the past week and that the Russian military presence at the site appears unchanged.

He added: "We are reinforcing our own presence at the plant to monitor compliance with these principles that are of paramount importance for protecting the plant and preventing a major nuclear accident during the war."

Read the original article on Business Insider
The Lexington family injured in a car crash while on vacation in Hawaii last week are close to meeting a $30,000 fundraising goal to cover medical costs.

The performance of the Smith familys GoFundMe page comes as Bekah Smith, the daughter of River Bluff High School Principal Jacob Smith, is recovering from surgery in a Honolulu hospital to heal injuries from last weeks crash.

Jacob, Bekah and Jacobs son Banks were all injured when the car they were traveling in hydroplaned, crossed the median and collided head-on with an oncoming car before the vehicle struck a roadside lava wall, according to a Facebook post from Radius Church in Lexington, where the Smiths attend.

As of Monday morning, the GoFundMe had raised some $27,000 out of a $35,000 goal, with more than 300 individual donations.

Bekah Smith had a successful surgery on Sunday in a Honolulu hospital, the family shared on a Caring Bridge page to document her recovery. Bekah had been flown to an intensive care unit in the state capital after the crash on the big island of Hawaii, while Jacob and Banks were admitted to a hospital in Hilo with less serious injuries.

Radius Pastor John Reeves said two church members had flown to Hawaii at the end of last week to assist the family. The church held a prayer vigil for the family on Thursday after news of the accident broke, drawing around 100 people, including family members and River Bluff students.

Jacob Smith has been with the Lexington 1 school district for about a decade and was promoted to principal at River Bluff ahead of the 2021-22 school year.

The school district sent an email Friday to staff and families at the high school with a message from the principal.

He asked me to please express his appreciation for all the support, care and concern shown to his family, chief communications officer Libby Roof wrote in the email. The support from home and in Hawaii has been overwhelming. The family is so grateful.

The family continues to pray for a full recovery for everyone involved in the accident and appreciates your continued support.
Robots and humans can coexist: Robot conducts orchestra for the first time in S. Korea

[Source]

An android robot conducted an orchestra for the first time in Seoul on Friday.

The performance: The robot, EveR 6, led the countrys national orchestra in performing three pieces at the Seoul Haeorum Grand Theater.

At the event, which was held by the National Orchestra of Korea, both EveR 6 and a human conductor, Choi Soo-yeoul, performed solo stages before ending with a collaborative performance. The robot bowed to the audience before successfully making movements with its arms to lead the orchestra in serenading attendees.

Movements by a conductor are very detailed, Choi told Reuters. The robot was able to present such detailed moves much better than I had imagined. Rather than one replacing the other, I think the recital showed that robots and humans can coexist and complement each other.

More from NextShark: Elderly Asian Woman Brutally Beaten in SF in 2019 Dies 1 Year Later

EveR 6s weaknesses: Despite EveR 6s notable performance, Choi and audience members believe the robot can still be improved.

EveR 6s critical weakness is that it cannot listen, Choi said, noting that he and musicians had to put a lot of effort into understanding the robot, according to Reuters.

More from NextShark: Zhang Zhizhen becomes first Chinese mens singles player to win at French Open in 86 years

Lee Young-ju, an audience member who studies Korean traditional music, said that the humanoid robot lacked breath or the ability to collectively and instantly direct the orchestra.

It seemed there was some work to be done for the robot to do the job, Lee was quoted saying.

About EveR 6: The humanoid robot was developed by the Korea Institute of Industrial Technology last year. It is modeled after the human body and is capable of emotional expressions.

More from NextShark: Diversity activist who claimed to be Latino, Arab, South Asian outed as white by her mother

Other robot conductors around the globe include the 2008 Asimo by Honda, the 2017 Yumi in Switzerland, the 2018 second-generation Artificial Intelligence robot Alter 2 in Japan and the 2020 third-generation robot Alter 3.

More from NextShark: Pacific Islanders Make Up 33% of Patients Hospitalized in Hawaii for COVID-19
This is what roller coaster enthusiasts are saying about Carowinds and Fury 325

Carowinds patrons had varying takes Monday on how a crack in the structure of a popular roller coaster would impact their confidence in the parks safety and inspection protocols.

Carowinds temporarily shut down Fury 325 over the weekend due to a crack on one of the rides support beams. Fury 325 is billed as North Americas tallest and fastest giga roller coaster.

Carowinds roller coaster shut down days after a crack appeared while people were riding

According to Carowinds, the ride puts out 1-1.5 million rides per year. That makes it one of the parks most popular rides.

Photos and videos posted online, show that a pillar had completely cracked by Friday.

Luke Chang of Greensboro is a roller coaster enthusiast and a Carowinds passholder.

I rode it the day before the support fully cracked, Chang said Monday.

I dont think (the supports) are checked enough, but from my understanding, they did their job. I think procedures need to be stricter on how many times theyre checked.

Carowinds is an amusement park that straddles the South Carolina-North Carolina border, just off Interstate 77 in Fort Mill. Carowinds officials said rides undergo daily inspections to ensure proper function and structural integrity.

When are Carowinds roller coasters like Fury 325 inspected for maintenance, safety?

Chang said he is disappointed at how the crack will impact Furys availability.

This has never really happened, so I can understand, but I still am pretty frustrated about what went on here. Its just upsetting because its most likely gonna be down for the rest of the year. Its just sad, Chang said.

Some Carowinds patrons view the crack in the support beam as an isolated incident that doesnt reflect poorly on the parks overall safety.

Aidan Stammen is a roller coaster enthusiast who traveled with his family from Ohio to visit Carowinds.

I was kinda sad about it because it was gonna be my first time on it, Stammen said. Ive always wanted to come to Carowinds because of Fury, and thats really why we came down here.

It doesnt really concern me safety-wise because I think its been designed so well that if it has a crack like that, it can easily be fixed, Stammen said.

NC begins Carowinds roller coaster review after rare crack found. Heres what we know.

Fury 325 was manufactured by Bolliger & Mabillard, a company whose rides have been dubbed the Cadillacs of roller coasters. Their rides are more expensive to make than other manufacturers, and their coasters have garnered a reputation for quality, reliability and safety, according to Great American Thrills, a website that writes about amusement parks and roller coasters.

There has never been a death or catastrophic failure on a B&M roller coaster.

North Carolina residents Brittany and Travis, who did not want to be fully identified, were visiting Carowinds Monday. The two had different opinions about what kinds of concerns the crack should raise.

I am not going on that ride. Even if its fixed and open, I am not going on it, Brittany said. I did hear that its been a little shaky for a while, so this seems like a problematic thing.

Travis took an opposite approach.

Ive just always been under the opinion that if I ride a roller coaster, Im risking my life every time. So if I can see people go up and come back down safely, then I assume Im not that heavy, Travis said.

Fury 325 opened in 2015, making it Carowinds second newest roller coaster. This has sparked some confusion among visitors who wonder how such a new ride could face structural issues.

Ive been coming to Carowinds my whole life, and I rode the Fury when it first was built. It was a fun time, Travis said. But Top Gun has been here since I was a kid, and its perfectly fine, so whats wrong with this one?

Top Gun is the former name of the roller coaster Afterburn, which opened in 1999.

At least one person in Charlotte region who writes about roller coasters also had been discussing what this temporary closure means.

Brandon Stoff, a roller coaster YouTuber based at Carowinds, documents the latest in theme park news on his channel Theme Park Predictions.

Stoff said Fury 325s unique track design will be helpful in the repair process and in ensuring rider safety.

That section of track is a sideways angle turn, and youre traveling at a very high speed, so theres a lot of pressure on that piece of track, Stoff said.

Fury has a big I-Box track. Its designed to act almost like a support as well, so it doesnt even necessarily need a support there. Obviously, they should still have one and they do.

I wouldnt worry. If anything, its going to implement new procedures going forward to make sure nothing like this happens again.

For this to happen on a B&M, you just dont hear about that stuff. Im sure they are shocked and so is Carowinds, but this is a machine. Stuff does break. When it does, you fix it.
The Rudy Farias case: Everything we know about 'missing' Houston man's 'disappearance,' how he was found

Rudolph "Rudy" Farias IV, was reported missing in 2015. Was he, really? Texas Center for the Missing

Rudolph "Rudy" Farias' mom said he went missing in 2015.

Eight years later, she announced that Farias was found outside a church, covered in old bruises and unable to speak.

Private investigators, locals, and an activist now say that the whole story is likely a scam.

Eight years ago, Houston mother Janie Santana told police that her 17-year-old son named Rudolph Farias IV took his two dogs for a walk in his Houston neighborhood. First one dog, then the second, returned to the family home, but "Rudy," as he was known, had vanished, she said.

This week, Santana resurfaced, announcing that her son was found again, collapsed outside a church, his thin, frail body bloodied and covered in old bruises.

"It's him!!! It's our Rudy," family members wrote on Facebook last week, calling his return a miracle. "He's been found and he's alive and in the hospital right now."

Farias remains too traumatized to speak, they wrote on Facebook.

The "miracle" story spread far and wide, but within days a darker side of the story began to surface.

Insider spoke to four private investigatorswho worked on the missing persons case over the years, and all of them cast doubt on Santana's story, saying she repeatedly lied to them about her son, provided fake leads, and attempted to fundraise of his disappearance.

Neighbors, too, told local news outlets that Farias wasn't missing  he was frequently spotted around the community.

Voting records show thatFarias voted three times since he was reported missing.

On Wednesday, an activist who said he attended a police interview of Farias told reporters that after running away, the then-teen had quickly turned around and returned home. Since then, he has endured years of lies, abuse, drugging and "slave"-like conditions at the hands of his mother, Houston activist Quanell X said in a press conference.

The Houston Police Department soon posted to Twitter that they were not commenting on their interviews with Farias and his mother. Neither would they say whether some reporting about the "specifics of the interviews" is "entirely factual."

On Thursday, however, Houston Police confirmed in a new press conference that they have learned Farias returned home on March 8, 2015  just one day after he was reported missing.

"Mother Janie continued to deceive police," said Lt. Christopher Zamora of the Houston Police Department.

"She insisted her nephew was the person family and friends have seen coming and going," he added. "Currently the DA has declined any charges for making fictitious reports and failure to ID."

Zamora declined to say whether Farias is a "victim" in the case.

"I'm not going to say whether he's a victim or not," he said. "We're going to give respect to everybody that's involved."

Who is Rudy Farias?

With so much doubt cast on Santana's truthfulness about her son, there are are also questions around the legitimacy of original news stories about the teens "disappearance."

Early stories about the missing person's case say Farias suffered from depression and anxiety after suffering great losses in his life.

Both his father and the brother who was his best friend had recently died untimely deaths.

His father, a Houston Police officer, committed suicide in 2014, at age 51, in the wake of an internal affairs ticket-rigging investigation, The Houston Chronicle reported at the time.

Rudolph Farias III, a 21-year police veteran, shot himself in his police vehicle while still in uniform, just hours after he and three other officers were ordered to turn in their badges, CBS News reported then.

A few years before losing his father to suicide, when he was 14, Farias lost his older brother to a motorcycle accident, one of the private investigators who spoke to Insider, Brenda Paradise, told Dateline.

Farias and his mother were two of the first people to reach the accident scene, Paradise told NBC News.

"He's just had so much thrown at him the past few years," the private investigator said at the time.

"He watched his best friend die right in front of him," she added. "His brother was his best friend in the world. He's just gone through so much more than anyone his age ever should."

On Wednesday, though, Paradise told Insider alarm bells were ringing in her head about the case since 2015  before her interview with Dateline on the case.

The mom gave investigators the wrong year of birth for her son and only provided photos of him from when he was 14  telling Paradise that if he looked younger, "there would be more empathy," she said.

"I would love to hear that he's truly been missing all these years, and has finally been found," Paradise said.

"I mean, God, I'd love to hear that he was found and is getting help," she added. "But I just don't trust anything that comes from that family."

TX Center 4 Missing (@TXCenter) July 2, 2023

How was Rudy Farias found?

In posting last weekend about his remarkable reappearance, the Farias family did not reveal his location, but said he was at a hospital.

"They say it's for his protection and safety," the family's initial post said of hospital personnel. But the family described his alleged condition in detail.

Farias is spending much of his time curled in a fetal position in his hospital bed, his family at his side. He has little memory, and is barely able to speak.

"He flinches if you try to touch him or hug him, thinking we are going to strike him," the post said.

"He thinks his name is Julio Torres and he's 14. The doctors said not to correct him, to just go with it for now until he can begin to receive further treatment, to begin healing and recovery."

Physically, "Rudy is in pretty bad shape," the family's post said.

"He has cuts, soft tissue tumors, small hole openings and swelling on the soles of his feet, along with bruising, old and new buts/scrapes on his body, old dry blood on his head and hair."

He's clearly "been through hell," the family post said. "God only knows what he has endured during his time away from home."

It was unclear Thursday if Farias was back home or with his mother.

Who is the mother of Rudy Farias?

Santana has not returned multiple requests for comment from Insider.

She had told private investigators that she was a "medical assistant," but they could never verify that, investigator team Barbara and Martin Renteria told Insider.

During their investigation, Santana didn't let the Renterias speak to other family members.

Barbara Renteria said she was able to talk to his grandmother on one occasion when Janie was not around. The grandmother told her Rudy didn't vanish into thin air while walking two dogs, but had run away after arguing with Janie.

Houston Police said that as of Thursday the district attorney would not be pressing charges against Janie Santana for lying.

"I did the interview," Sgt. Stephen Jimenez said at the press conference. "I'm trained to listen for plausible cause. I'm trained to listen to statements that could get charges. And there were no statements made during this investigation so far."

Read the original article on Insider
Russia deploys over 180,000 troops to 2 major eastern fronts  Commander of Ukraine's East Group of Forces

Russia has deployed over 180,000 troops to the Lyman-Kupiansk and Bakhmut fronts.

Source: Serhii Cherevatyi, spokesman for the Skhid (East) Group of Forces of the Armed Forces of Ukraine on the national 24/7 newscast; Hanna Maliar, Ukraines Deputy Defence Minister, on Telegram

Quote from Cherevatyi: "A rather powerful group of forces has been deployed [on the Lyman-Kupiansk front]: over 120 enemy units.

This includes air assault and mechanised units, units of the Bars combat army reserve, territorial forces, and new Storm Z assault companies that recruited people with criminal records. [...]

More than 180,000 [Russian troops have been deployed] across the area of responsibility [of the Skhid (East) Group of Forces]... The Lyman-Kupiansk front is longer, which is why the enemy is concentrating their forces there. Meanwhile, there are around 50,000 [Russian] troops on the Bakhmut front."

Details: Meanwhile, Maliar reported on Monday, 3 July, that a "fight for seizing the initiative" was underway on the Bakhmut front.

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President Volodymyr Zelenskyy has said that the Russians attacked residential buildings and a Security Service of Ukraine building in Sumy with Iranian drones on the night of 2-3 July.

Source: Zelenskyys address

Quote: "Unfortunately, our state does not yet have enough high-quality air defense systems to protect our entire territory and shoot down all enemy targets. The enemy is taking advantage of this, as it did today, when it launched another terrorist attack on the city of Sumy with an Iranian drone, hitting residential buildings and the building of the Security Service of Ukraine."

Details: Zelenskyy added that it is necessary to do everything "possible and impossible" to make the air defence in Ukraine the strongest.

Background: As of 18:00 in Sumy, two people were killed and 19 were injured as a result of a Shahed drone attack.

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Russias Central Election Commission (CEC) may postpone "elections" in the temporarily occupied territories of Ukraine if the situation there deteriorates, Russian CEC head Ella Pamfilova has said.

Source: the Kremlin

Quote from Pamfilova: "It is fully funded, entirely from the federal budget, so what was needed has been done. But nevertheless, since the situation is really difficult, anything can happen.

And if force majeure circumstances arise  the situation in a certain district may deteriorate sharply, we realise that there is a serious threat to the lives and health of the residents there  we have the right to postpone these elections in a particular district. We will certainly exercise this right if there are serious reasons for doing so."

Details: Pamfilova added she understood that "the situation is difficult, that martial law is in effect", but nevertheless, the amendments that have now been adopted make it possible to hold elections subject to certain conditions.

The so-called "authorities" in these regions, appointed by the occupiers, have allegedly asked for the elections to be held.

Pamfilova said that in order to hold "elections" in the occupied territories, "very good contacts have already been established with all law enforcement agencies: the Ministry of Defence, the FSB, the Ministry of Internal Affairs, and the National Guard of Russia".

She also added that it would be even possible to vote in the occupied territories without an internal passport. "You can provide some kind of identity document issued by public authorities", she said.

The Russians have also decided to allow even residents of the occupied territories who have moved to Russia or been deported there to vote in the "elections".

However, Pamfilova said there will be no electronic voting in the occupied territories of Ukraine.

Background:

It was reported earlier that Russia plans to hold "elections" in the occupied territories of Ukraine on 10 September.

The European Union has condemned Russia for its intention to hold sham elections in Ukraines occupied territories in September 2023.

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Russian occupiers attacked Sumy with drones, hitting a residential building

One person was killed and another 16 were injured in a Russian suicide drone attack on the center of Sumy City, the Sumy regional administration reported on Telegram on July 3.

As of 10:49 am, four enemy drones are believed to have hit the center of the city, damaging one administrative and two residential buildings. Evacuation of residents and fire fighting efforts were ongoing at time of publication.

Sumy authorities are finding housing for the residents of the damaged buildings.

Settlements in Sumy Oblast situated along the Russian border suffer constantly from Russian shelling, often conducted from within Russian territory. Twelve explosions and five shelling incidents were recorded during the night and morning of July 3 alone.

Read also:

Sumy ODA

Sumy ODA

Sumy ODA

DSNS

DSNS

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Read the original article on The New Voice of Ukraine
Russian government says that Security Service agent was going to blow up Aksyonov

The Russian Federal Security Service (FSB) has said that the Security Service of Ukraine was preparing an attempt to kill a Kremlin protege in Crimea, Sergey Aksyonov, but the recruited Russian had been arrested.

Source: RIA Novosti

Details: The FSB stated that it had prevented an attempt to kill Aksyonov by detaining a Russian citizen who was allegedly recruited by the Security Service of Ukraine and had been "trained in Ukraine in mine explosives."

According to the Russian propaganda agency, the man "planned to blow up Aksyonov's car, but he was caught taking a bomb from a hiding place" (although the video shows a version where a car was used to blow up the house).

The video shows footage of the Russian citizen's arrest and "confession statements", but it is unclear from them where he was "recruited", where he was arrested, or who is behind it.

Quote from the detainee: "In December 2022, I was recruited by the Special Services of Ukraine, by a handler called Ihor. After that, I was given the code name Karatyst (karate enthusiast) and was trained at a training ground for sabotage operations, in disguise and applying makeup, avoiding capture, and so on.

Then I was assigned to go to the Crimea, to Simferopol. First, I needed to rent a house, buy a phone, and get a job.

I contacted Ihor every day and waited for further instructions. I was waiting to be told the address where the car was located so that I could plant a bomb there. So that later this car could be driven to Sevastopolskaya Street to blow up Sergey Aksyonovs cottage."

,        

Details: The Russian expert says that a combined type of explosive device was being prepared: "fragmentation and incendiary." The package with the components was found right during the arrest.

The FSB opened cases under articles on attempted terrorist attacks and the illegal purchase of explosives.

Aksyonov thanked the Russian secret services for "preventing the assassination attempt."

He also said that "it is possible to eliminate the terrorist threat from Kyiv only by completing the goals of the special operation."

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Viktor Grozdov,77, was pulled out from an explosion crater in the central street of the frontline town of Avdiivka (Genya SAVILOV)

Viktor Grozdov was in a hole.

Wearing a cap and thick glasses, the Ukrainian pensioner was lying at the bottom of a shell crater, trying to pick himself up and gather the food that had spilled out of his shopping bags.

In the eastern Ukrainian town of Avdiivka, battered by shelling since 2014, Grozdov had strayed into the crater while returning from a grocery store in April this year.

An AFP team pulled him out, found his shopping and saw him on his way back home.

This week journalists tracked him down again, with help from local officials, since the town has almost no communications.

"I was walking along the avenue and thought I'd quickly walk round the hole where the shell fell -- or a bomb, I don't know," recalled Grozdov, sitting in his flat near the town's former cinema.

"I stumbled as I stepped and fell in. I tried to get out but the earth was loose and slipping under me, I couldn't get out at all."

Despite having no intact buildings, mains water or electricity, Avdiivka still has 1,719 inhabitants, according to Vitaliy Barabash, the head of the town's military administration.

"Around 60 percent are people aged 65 and over," he told AFP.

A suburb of the city of Donetsk built around a huge coke fuel plant, Avdiivka is eerie and very dangerous.

It gets shelled on average 30 times per day, the town's chief said.

"In the last four months or so, there hasn't been a day without aerial or rocket strikes."

Grozdov uses a stick to walk outside and keeps to routes he knows well.

- 'Won't go anywhere' -

Despite his poor vision adding a further obstacle, Grozdov, a wiry 77-year-old, is determined to stay where his wife and son are buried.

"Whatever happens, I won't go anywhere now," he said.

"My soul is at home, it's not trying to leave. I'm not anxious, I've become calm."

In his flat, all the windows have glass blown out and there is a sheet hung across one.

The wallpaper is peeling around formal family photographs.

There is a radio set on his bed and bottles of sunflower oil and tinned food in the bath.

Volunteers bring Grozdov water and supplies, and he can cook on a camping stove.

When shelling starts, Grozdov said he hides in the bathroom and sometimes lies flat on the floor.

He appears to pay no attention to the sound of incoming tank rounds outside.

After his mother was killed when he was a baby, he grew up in a children's home in Donetsk.

He then worked at Avdiivka's coke plant most of his life.

He hinted at a life of great difficulty -- his late son was a violent drug addict and hit him in the head, causing him to lose vision in one eye.

On the ground floor of his block of flats, a strike has left a shell stuck in the wall of the landing.

Grozdov's neighbour, 63-year-old Vitaliy Zemin, sits in the cellar carving wooden animals -- a hippo, a turtle, a monkey -- wearing a head torch.

"It distracts you from the thoughts a person has all the time: about people, about Ukraine, about why there isn't any peace," he said.

- 'Russian roulette' -

The main respite for residents is a public shelter in a cellar where volunteers provide food and hot drinks, and they can use Wi-Fi, watch TV and charge devices.

Around 25 people sat there on Wednesday, mostly wearing headphones and engrossed in phones and tablets.

Pavel, 65, whose spectacles only have one arm, was watching war news on a tablet.

The retired factory worker said this was the only time he could relax.

"It's safe in the cellar. There's light, there's internet. At home you wonder if a strike will hit you or not -- it's like Russian roulette."

- 'Such despair' -

"Sometimes I feel such despair, I would go to the end of the world not to see these destroyed buildings," he said, insisting he must guard his home from looters after his family left.

In a sad development for residents, the shelter's water supply via a deep bore-hole --- opened in March -- has fouled up with sand and mud, meaning the washing machines and showers cannot be used.

"It's impossible to clean up," said Barabash, the head of the town's administration.

"We'll need a new one," he said, promising this in the "near future".

am-video/as/lcm/ach
Russians give cash payments and hepatitis A vaccine to Russian passport holders only in Oleshky, Kherson Oblast

The Russians in the temporarily occupied town of Oleshky in Kherson Oblast are giving financial assistance of 10,000 roubles [about US$112  ed.] to holders of Russian passports only. Residents of Oleshky also need to be vaccinated against hepatitis A in order to receive this financial assistance [which the locals are in desperate need of following last months floods  ed.].

Source: Yevhen Ryshchuk, Mayor of Oleshky, in a comment to Ukrinform news agency

Quote: "The occupiers are providing vaccines against hepatitis A, typhoid and, it seems, tetanus. They said they would do three, but they do only one, against hepatitis A."

Details: The mayor added that the three vaccinations are given to the military and local "police officers".

Background: The temporarily occupied town of Oleshky in Kherson Oblast was flooded after the occupiers blew up the Kakhovka hydroelectric power plant.

After the tragedy, hundreds of people in occupied Oleshky died because the Russians refused to have them evacuated. The water also flooded the unique house-museum of Ukrainian artist Polina Raiko.

The National Resistance Center also reported that an epidemic could arise due to the flooding of cemeteries, a cattle burial site and a biothermic pit [for disposing of animal carcasses  ed.] in the temporarily occupied part of Kherson Oblast.

Journalists fight on their own frontline. Support Ukrainska Pravda or become our patron!
Villagers in war-torn Yemen observe Eid tradition to deepen bonds, unity

Xinhua) 09:19, July 03, 2023

A local troupe member wearing the mask of a monster celebrates the Eid al-Adha festival at Al-Maazbah village in Ibb Province, Yemen, on July 1, 2023. (Photo by Mohammed Mohammed/Xinhua)

SANAA, July 2 (Xinhua) -- The sound of drums and tambourines fills the air as local theatrical troupe members wearing outlandish masks walk along the roads between villages in the southern Yemeni province of Ibb.

Villagers follow the troupe joyously as they were entertained by the uproarious antics and jests of the masked performers.

This is the way how for centuries villagers in the Al-Maazbah District of Ibb have celebrated Eid al-Adha, one of the most important festivals for Muslims across the world.

A local troupe member wearing the mask of a monster celebrates the Eid al-Adha festival at Al-Maazbah village in Ibb Province, Yemen, on July 1, 2023. (Photo by Mohammed Mohammed/Xinhua)

These customs have been passed down through generations, reflecting the strong bonds within local communities. At the core of the traditions is the practice of "mutual visits," symbolizing unity and togetherness during the holiday season.

During the Eid Al-Adha holiday, many villagers visit neighboring villages to sing songs and perform traditional dances. They are accompanied by local troupes donning strange attire and wearing masks that resemble monsters and mythical creatures. These performers, known as the "prince of the feast," are very good at filling the procession with playful banter and laughter.

"The good-natured skirmishes among masked jesters are all part of the revelry," said Abraheem al-Fareh, a local villager. "'The prince of the feast' has the power to entertain as he pleases, without causing annoyance or displeasure," he added.

Yemeni villagers banter with local troupe members wearing masks of monsters to celebrate the Eid al-Adha festival at Al-Maazbah village in Ibb Province, Yemen, on July 1, 2023. (Photo by Mohammed Mohammed/Xinhua)

A warm and grand welcome is extended to the visitors upon their arrival at the neighboring village. Drums are beaten in the background as dances and traditional chants and songs are performed. The festivities culminate at the village's central parade ground, where the visitors are embraced with open arms.

This visit is reciprocated the next day, as the host villagers perform the same ritual by paying a visit to those who had visited them.

"This celebration is a treasured inheritance from our ancestors. It fosters a sense of kinship, camaraderie, and delight," al-Fareh said.

Such celebrations have special meaning for the villagers, who consider them a vital part of their community during Eid al-Adha. Even those who have been engrossed in their own pursuits and spent most of the year in far-off cities and regions will travel back to their villages for the Eid al-Adha holiday, demonstrating their dedication to their roots and shared heritage.

Local villagers hope similar customs could flourish in other parts of Yemen to foster social unity.

"The tradition gives all of us an unforgettable experience. It reminds us how good it feels to be friendly and kind to others, especially when our country is divided by war," al-Fareh added.

Yemen's civil war flared in late 2014 when the Houthi group seized control over much of the country's north and forced the internationally-recognized government out of the capital Sanaa.

The war has not only brought an immense humanitarian crisis to the Arab country but also separated many families and communities.

According to the United Nations, 4.5 million Yemenis, or 14 percent of the population, have been forced to flee their homes because of the conflict.

"Our steadfast hold onto the Eid al-Adha tradition is a testament to the indomitable spirit and unwavering resilience of the Yemeni people," al-Fareh said.

(Web editor: Zhang Kaiwei, Liang Jun)
US airmen work on GBU-31 Joint Direct Attack Munitions at Incirlik Air Base in Turkey in June 2017. US Air Force/Airman 1st Class Kristan Campbell

Electronic warfare is a pervasive if less visible of the fighting between Russia and Ukraine.

Russia in particular has waged a major electronic-warfare campaign against Ukrainian forces.

Russian jamming seems to be affecting Ukraine's communications and US-provided weapons, experts say.

Russian jamming has become so effective that Ukraine  as well as the US and NATO  can no longer assume that Joint Direct Attack Munition glide bombs and other smart weapons will hit their targets.

That's the conclusion of an analysis by Britain's Royal United Services Institute. "Jamming is not causing the JDAMs to stop working, but it is risking their accuracy," according to RUSI researcher Thomas Withington.

While anti-jamming upgrades to JDAM may mitigate the problem, Russian electronic-warfare systems can simply drown out the GPS guidance signal from satellites. "The problem may well be the sheer power of the jamming signal that can be brought to bear," Withington said.

The warning comes after Pentagon documents leaked in April revealed concerns that Russian jamming was reducing the accuracy of American guided weapons, including JDAM as well as HIMARS rockets.

Ukrainian troops fire M142 HIMARS rockets toward Bakhmut in May. Serhii Mykhalchuk/Global Images Ukraine via Getty Images

The effect on JDAM is particularly significant, as it is arguably the simplest and most cost-effective smart bomb. By attaching fins and a GPS guidance system to cheap, old-fashioned "dumb" bombs, Ukraine could produce long-range guided weapons at a fraction of the cost of special precision-guided munitions that are in short supply.

The JDAM Extended Range bombs sent to Ukraine reportedly have a range of up to 50 miles, allowing launch aircraft to remain safely out of range of Russian air defenses.

These GPS-guided munitions initially offered Ukraine hope of offsetting Russian superiority in manpower and weapons. Indeed, HIMARS proved crucial in Ukraine's limited counteroffensive in summer 2022, as rockets devastated Russian headquarters and supply dumps.

That Russia is developing countermeasures shouldn't be surprising. All weapons eventually lose some effectiveness as the enemy adapts. Nor is it a secret that the Russian military, like its Soviet predecessor, devoted great effort to developing a variety of electronic-warfare systems.

In particular, Withington pointed to the Russian Army's R-330Zh Zhitel, a mobile truck-mounted jamming system specifically designed to disrupt GPS and satellite communications in the 100 MHz to 2 GHz wavebands. "Signals from the U.S. GPS satellites which JDAM kits use are transmitted on wavebands from 1.164 GHz to 1.575 GHz," according to Worthington. "These fall squarely within the R-330Zh's catchment area."

A Russian R-330Zh Zhitel electronic-warfare jamming station in July 2018. Denis Abramov/Russian Defense Ministry via Mil.ru

Worthington claims to have seen official documents that put the R-330Zh range at 18.6 miles, with a 10kW-strong jamming signal. This is "notably stronger than the strength of the GPS signal arriving from space," he noted. "Moreover, the closer the GPS receiver is to the R-330Zh's jamming antenna, the stronger the jamming signal becomes."

In theory, the Selective Availability Anti-Spoofing Module upgrade to JDAM in the early 2000s should ensure that JDAM will only respond to authorized M-Code encrypted military GPS signals. However, Russian jammers may still be able to disrupt the signals through "sheer brute force" jamming beams, Withington said.

Russia could also intercept M-Code signals and retransmit them with slight alterations to a JDAM, causing the bomb to miss. Efforts to bypassing Russian interference by using signals from multiple GPS satellites could in turn be countered by employing multiple jammers.

Russia's counter-GPS efforts are part of a massive electronic-warfare campaign that has also disrupted Ukrainian radio communications and drone operations.

Russian forces "now employ approximately one major EW system per 10 kilometers [6.2 miles] of frontage, usually situated approximately 7 kilometers [4.3 miles] from the frontline," according a recent RUSI report on Russian tactics. This jamming has contributed to a Ukrainian drone loss rate that RUSI estimates to be as high as 10,000 UAVs per month.

A Ukrainian army officer uses a radio at a frontline position in Kharkiv Oblast in May 2022. John Moore/Getty Images

According to the RUSI report, Russian EW troops are also "highly capable" at intercepting and decrypting Ukrainian radio communications. In one case, they appeared to intercept and decode an encrypted radio message from Ukrainian troops calling in a fire mission in real time, allowing Russian commanders to send "pre-emptive warning" to their units.

Nonetheless, Russian electronic warfare has limitations. Emitting jamming beams discloses a jammer's location, and Ukraine appears to have located and destroyed Russian systems such as the R-330Zh. Ironically, smothering the airwaves with powerful jamming beams may also be disrupting Russian GPS and radio communications.

"Russia's GLONASS GNSS constellation transmits some signals which are similar to GPS," Withington noted. There is evidence that "the Russian Army regularly suffers electromagnetic fratricide to this end. The force often exhibits scant concern for jamming friendly signals when attacking its enemies."

Jamming hasn't made JDAM obsolete. Like other facets of warfare, electronic warfare is like a chess game, where move is followed by countermove. Either way, US engineers "may have to rethink how they safeguard JDAMs for the wars of tomorrow, based on the conflicts of today," said Withington.

Michael Peck is a defense writer whose work has appeared in Forbes, Defense News, Foreign Policy magazine, and other publications. He holds a master's in political science. Follow him on Twitter and LinkedIn.

Read the original article on Business Insider
Russia's Medvedev says standoff with West to last decades, Ukraine conflict 'permanent'

By Andrew Osborn

LONDON (Reuters) - Dmitry Medvedev, Russia's former president, has warned that Moscow's confrontation with the West will last decades and that its conflict with Ukraine could become permanent.

Medvedev, once seen in the West as a liberal moderniser, has emerged as one of Russia's most outspoken hawks since Moscow launched what it called a "special military operation" in Ukraine last year.

Now deputy head of the Security Council, his views reflect some of the thinking at the Kremlin's top level, according to Russian officials.

In an article for the government's Rossiiskaya Gazeta newspaper, he said tensions between Russia and the West were "much worse" than during the 1962 Cuban missile crisis when the world teetered on the edge of a nuclear conflagration.

A nuclear war was "quite probable" but was unlikely to have any winners, said Medvedev, who has repeatedly said Western support for Ukraine increases the chances of nuclear conflict.

He cited sharp differences over Ukraine, the direction of humankind, and the way the world order was structured.

"One thing that politicians of all stripes do not like to admit: such an Apocalypse is not only possible, but also quite probable," wrote Medvedev.

Western analysts cast what they say is Medvedev's "nuclear sabre-rattling" as a tactic aimed at frightening the West to reduce military support for Ukraine and to instead lean on Kyiv to start peace talks with Moscow.

Many countries in the West, which say they are helping Ukraine defend itself from a brutal colonial war of conquest, have promised to stand by Kyiv for as long as it takes.

The United States, Ukraine's biggest financial and military backer, has said it does not want to engage in a direct conflict with Russia to avoid the risk of a nuclear war.

Ukraine says it won't negotiate until it has driven every Russian soldier from its territory.

Medvedev said Moscow was still committed to stopping Ukraine join NATO.

"Our goal is simple - to eliminate the threat of Ukraine's membership in NATO. And we will achieve it. One way or another," he said.

Given NATO's rule about not admitting countries entangled in territorial conflicts, he said the conflict with Ukraine could become "permanent" given its existential nature for Moscow.

The only way to de-escalate tensions between Russia and the West was to enter into tough negotiations, he said.

"The confrontation will be very long and it is too late to tame the recalcitrants (i.e. us)," said Medvedev. "The confrontation will last for decades."

(Reporting by Andrew Osborn; Editing by Guy Faulconbridge and Frank Jack Daniel)
Major oil hubs Saudi Arabia and Russia announced oil supply cuts in what Saudi Arabia described as an attempt to stabilize markets.

Saudi Arabias move was announced in the state-run Saudi Press Agency, which said that the kingdom will extend July cuts of 1 million barrels per day into August. For that month, Saudi Arabia is expected to produce 9 million barrels.

The state news agency cited a source who described the cuts as having the goal of supporting the stability and balance of oil markets. The cuts could drive up oil prices, which oil producers like Saudi Arabia may benefit from.

Russia will also cut its exports of the fuel.

Within the efforts to ensure the oil market remains balanced, Russia will voluntarily reduce its oil supply in the month of August by 500,000 barrels per day by cutting its exports by that quantity to global markets, Russia Deputy Prime Minister Alexander Novak said, according to Reuters. Novaks office declined to tell the news outlet whether its oil production would be cut, or only its exports.

The Saudi cuts are an extension of prior cuts announced for July that were expected to raise fuel prices in the U.S. and other countries.

Over the course of the past month, prices for international benchmark Brent crude have hovered between $70 and $80 per barrel, down from as high as $87 per barrel in April.

As part of their sanctions against Russia in light of its invasion of Ukraine, many western countries  including the U.S.  have barred imports of Russian oil.

Meanwhile, the G7, the European Union and Australia have imposed a de facto price cap on Russian oil that is transported by sea by restricting access to services such as insurance for Russian oil thats sold above a certain price point.

For the latest news, weather, sports, and streaming video, head to The Hill.
A Saudi woman was given 30 years in prison for criticizing the Neom megacity project on Twitter

Human rights activists welcome diplomats with protest boards as Saudi Arabia marks its statehood day with a reception in an hotel on September 22, 2022 in The Hague, Netherlands. Pierre Crom/Getty Images

A Saudi woman was recently jailed for 30 years for criticizing the Neom megacity on Twitter.

Fatima al-Shawarbi objected to ousting people from their homes to make way for the project.

A human-rights group said Saudi authorites are stepping up the persecution of dissidents.

Saudi Arabia imprisoned a woman for 30 years for criticizing the Neom megacity project on Twitter, according to an activist group.

ALQST, a UK-based human rights group, said a Saudi court sentenced Fatima al-Shawarbi to 30 years during a recent appeal hearing.

She is in her 20s and from Al-Ahsa province, the group said.

The Saudi justice system is cloaked in secrecy, often leaving activist groups as the only sources of information about cases.

ALQST said that it relies on its contacts for information, and needed to keep their identities secret for fear of reprisals. Officials at the Saudi embassy in London did not respond to Insider's request for information

ALQST said al-Shawarbi was convicted over anonymous tweets in which she criticized Saudi Arabia's treatment of people forcibly removed from their homes to make way for the construction of the planned city.

It said she was arrested in 2020. Per the group, she also criticized Saudi Arabia's treatment of women, and called for a constitutional monarchy rather than the system of absolute rule that now exists.

Human Rights Watch in a 2020 report said that imprisoned female dissidents are often refused contact with family members and those in the outside world.

Lina Alhathloul, a researcher at ALQST, told Insider that al-Shawarbi had recently joined a hunger strike with several other women prisoners.

They include Salma al-Shehab, a Leeds University PhD student arrested in 2020 for criticizing the Saudi government on Twitter. Al-Shawarbi's current condition is unknown, said Alhathloul.

Alhathoul said it was not known how Saudi authorities managed to establish that al-Shawarbi wrote the critical tweets.

She said she al-Shawarbi told friends to raise the alarm and publicize her case if she fell silent on social media for a prolonged period.

Neom is the signature project of Saudi Arabia's autocratic leader, Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman. The crown prince plans to construct the city across a 10,200 square mile area in the Tabuk Province in northwestern Saudi Arabia.

The UN in an April report said Saudi Arabia was trampling human rights in its push to complete the project, forcibly evicting thousands of the local Huweitat tribe from their homes.

The report said that Saudi security services shot dead tribe member Abdul Rahim al-Huwaiti as he resisted eviction in 2020, and that three other members of the tribe who resisted eviction were sentenced to death.

Saudi authorities have also ruthlessly persecuted those who've criticised the treatment of the Huweitat, and the killing of al-Huwaiti, said Alhathloul.

Saudi Arabia has long been criticized for its human rights record, with Amnesty International saying the state uses torture, arbitrary arrests and detainment, and violation of the rights to free speech and free assembly.

Despite criticism from human rights groups, Saudi Arabia continues to attract wealthy Western companies to invest in Neom.

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Should state legislatures have unchecked power to enact virtually any laws about how federal elections are run, including the drawing of Congressional districts?

That was the question in a major U.S. Supreme Court case that last week pitted two South Carolina public officials at the top of the states legal hierarchy Attorney General Alan Wilson and Supreme Court Chief Justice Don Beatty  against each other.

Yes, said Wilson, who joined a dozen state attorneys general who weighed in last fall in a friend-of-the-court brief in the high court case. The issue involved a theory called the independent state legislature that says state legislatures should have virtually absolute authority to set rules for their states federal elections.

No, said Beattys Conference of Chief Justices, a national organization of all state chief justices on whose board of directors Beatty sits.

Last week, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled 6-3 in a decision agreeing with Beattys group and dozens of other interested parties. Many of them filed briefs warning of the dangers of allowing state legislatures act as they please when it came to passing laws about federal elections.

State legislatures do not have exclusive and independent authority when it comes to the role the Constitution gives the states in setting up federal elections, wrote Chief Justice John Roberts in the majority opinion.

The case revolved around how to interpret what is known as the Elections Clause in the 236-year-old federal Constitution. That clause says in part, The Times, Places and Manner of holding Elections for Senators and Representatives, shall be prescribed in each State by the Legislature thereof.

The brief Wilson signed on to said the Elections Clause gives state legislatures the power to set the rules of federal elections and that state courts should not be able to review a legislatures actions.

South Carolina Attorney General Alan Wilson speaks at the State House during a recent press conference on human trafficking.

The Elections Clause does not let courts act as legislatures, said the brief Wilson took part in.

Beattys group took the opposite approach, saying that the Elections Clause does not bar state court review of state laws governing federal elections under state constitutional provisions.

As such, state courts are the ultimate interpreters of the meaning of state law, Beattys group wrote in its brief. The conference brief said its fillings purpose was to seek guidance from the Supreme Court and was not in support of either party to the lawsuit.

South Carolina Supreme Court Chief Justice Donald Beatty

The high courts ruling was awaited by many, in large part because of the role unchecked and highly partisan legislatures might play in setting rules for their states in future federal Congressional and presidential elections.

In an October 2022 article in The Atlantic, retired conservative Judge Michael Luttig warned of the danger of the high courts approving the independent state legislature theory, saying it would give to state legislatures exclusive... and judicially unreviewable power both to redraw congressional districts for federal elections and to appoint state electors who quadrennially cast the votes for president and vice president on behalf of the voters of the states.

Such an extreme theory formed the centerpiece of former President Donald Trumps efforts to overthrow the 2020 presidential election, whereby Trumps allies sought to have some Republican legislatures in states where now-President Joe Biden won the popular vote submit false slates of electors, wrote Luttig, a widely respected conservative judge formerly on the 4th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals.

The ruling was one of the most important constitutional cases for representative government in America., Luttig tweeted Tuesday after the decision came out.

Agreeing with Luttig was University of South Carolina constitutional law professor Thomas Crocker, who said in an interview that the independent legislature idea was always a fringe legal theory based on a strained reading of the Constitution.

A high court decision affirming the independent state legislature theory would have been unnatural in the scheme of how our democracy works, Crocker said.

Giving legislatures absolute control over elections goes against every other impulse in American governing bodies, in which we have always had checks and balances, said Crocker.

One puzzling matter, Crocker said, is why Wilson  who represents the states executive branch of government  felt moved to become an advocate for vastly increased powers for the legislature when it comes to federal election laws.

Its not entirely clear to me why the executive branch would necessarily be on the side of the legislature versus on the side of the courts, Crocker said. You can see why the State Supreme Court doesnt want to be cut out of its ordinary governing power, which is to interpret state law.

Robert Kittle, a spokesman for Wilson, and S.C. Court Administrator Tonnya Kohn, who speaks for Beatty, were asked for comment but neither responded.

Roberts majority opinion noted that the concept of judicial review of legislative actions is deeply embedded in American democracy. It has been since even before the states adopted a federal Constitution, he wrote.

Since early in our Nations history, courts have recognized their duty to evaluate the constitutionality of legislative acts, Roberts wrote.

Elections are complex affairs, demanding rules that dictate everything from the date on which voters will go to the polls to the dimensions and font (type faces) of individual ballots, Roberts wrote.

Legislatures must provide a complete code for congressional elections, including regulations relati[ng] to notices, registration, supervision of voting, protection of voters, prevention of fraud and corrupt practices, counting of votes, duties of inspectors and canvassers, and making and publication of election return, wrote Roberts.

Wilson is known for signing on to friend of the court briefs that often take partisan conservative positions in cases before the U.S. Supreme Court.

Beattys group, in its filing, said it files friend of the court briefs rarely, only when critical interests of the state courts are at stake.

The ruling, in a North Carolina case called Moore v. Harper that involved Congressional redistricting, had been long awaited.

Reaction varied. The Wall Street Journals conservative editorial page said the ruling would give rise to frivolous lawsuits. Partisans routinely challenge state ballot laws in election years, and state courts often intervene at the last minute... The Courts Moore ruling will invite more such legal mischief.

The New York Times liberal editorial page wrote the courts decision upholds the nations traditional checks and balances and eliminates the ability of a rogue legislature to set new electoral rules immune from judicial review... (the ruling) does protect the vital role of courts in the American system.

In his majority decision, Roberts was joined by the courts three liberal justices  Elena Kagan, Sonia Sotomayor and Ketanji Brown Jackson and two conservative justices appointed by former President Donald Trump, Brett Kavanaugh and Amy Coney Barrett.

Dissenters were justices Clarence Thomas, Neil Gorsuch and Samuel Alito.
Scientists discover concerning possible reason that seals are losing their fur  the findings may have horrible implications

The overheating of our planet affects living things everywhere, including seals. Scientists have found that seals are losing their fur, probably as a result of rising temperatures.

Karina Acevedo-Whitehouse, a professor at the University of Queretaro in Mexico, conducted a study of 13 Guadalupe fur seals in the San Benito archipelago off the west coast of Mexico between 2017 and 2018.

She and her team found that nine of the 13 seals showed visible signs of alopecia (the scientific term for hair loss) and that all 13 of the seals had unusually brittle hair.

Structural changes, although less severe, were detected even in samples collected from fur seals that appeared to have normal fur, she said. This suggests that the changes are gradual and this alopecia only appears after the fur has undergone extensive structural damage.

After ruling out other factors, Acevedo-Whitehouse and her team concluded that the hair loss was likely a result of nutritional deficiencies caused by rising sea surface temperatures.

Average sea surface temperatures have been rising steadily for the past century and are at an all-time high. Studies have found that, in warmer conditions, seals feed on a different and less nutritious variety of squid than they usually eat, as their preferred prey begins to disappear. This, according to Acevedo-Whitehouse, probably accounts for the hair loss.

While other seals rely on heavy layers of blubber to keep warm, fur seals do not have these thick layers of fat and rely instead on their thick fur layers for insulation. Losing that fur would pose a clear and obvious danger to fur seals ability to continue to survive in the wild.

This is another likely example of the far-reaching consequences of overheating our planet with air pollution and planet-warming gas emissions.

Though all aspects of life are threatened, marine life is particularly damaged by changes to our planets climate. And since that damage often happens out of sight of humans, it goes unremarked upon too often. Recently, nearly 200 countries in the United Nations came together to sign a High Seas Treaty to protect oceans and their biodiversity.

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Scientists find shocking new use for cocoa beans that could affect our entire planet  and it has nothing to do with chocolate

A novel way to counter climate change is taking place in the German port city of Hamburg.

Its a process that begins with cocoa bean shells going in one end of a factory and coming out as a black powder called biochar, which is doing its part to slow climate change.

What is biochar?

Biochar is the black powder mentioned above, and its produced by  in this case  heating cocoa husks in a room that has no oxygen to a temperature of 1,112 degrees Fahrenheit, according to Phys.org. Biochar producers can also use other organic wastes as raw materials.

The process prevents plant-warming toxic gases from entering the atmosphere, and the final product can be turned into fertilizer or an ingredient for concrete that is environmentally friendlier than traditional concrete, per Phys.org.

How does the process work?

Biochar captures the carbon dioxide present in the husks of the cocoa shells from the European plant mentioned above, and this method can be implemented by any other facility.

If the cocoa shells were discarded conventionally, the carbon within the unused byproduct would be released into the atmosphere during its decomposition.

Rather than following the usual disposal method, where the carbon within the unused cocoa shells would be released into the atmosphere, which heats up the planet, it is instead stored in the biochar for a very long time.

David Houben, an environmental scientist at the UniLaSalle Institute in France, told Phys.org that the biochar could hold onto the planet-warming gas for centuries.

Why is biochar important?

The United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) says that biochar could potentially capture billions of tons of the environmentally damaging gases released by our species every year.

This is important because human activities, such as electricity production and transportation, spew around 77 billion tons of planet-warming gases into the atmosphere each year. So far, this warming has triggered an increase in heatwaves, floods, droughts, and forest fires over the past few decades.

Some experts believe implementing renewable energy to reduce the amount of planet-warming emissions into the atmosphere isnt enough and that it may already be too late to prevent the most damaging effects of a warming planet.

Thats why carbon sequestration, or the process of removing the planet-warming gases weve already injected into the atmosphere, is considered so important by many climate experts, and the use of biochar does exactly that.

However, the production of biochar is still difficult to scale up to the levels where it could actually slow the overheating of the planet.

To ensure the system stores more carbon than it produces, everything needs to be done locally, with little or no transport. Otherwise it makes no sense, Houben, the environmental scientist, told Phys.org.

However, even though challenges remain, the number of biochar initiatives is increasing rapidly. As reported by Phys.org, the production of biochar is expected to nearly double this year compared to last year.

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Trans rights demonstrators at Supreme Court

In a week that saw negative Supreme Court rulings for LGBTQ+ people and other marginalized groups, the court took one positive action: It let stand a lower court ruling that held that gender dysphoria is a protected characteristic under the Americans With Disabilities Act, a federal law passed in 1990.

That means a transgender womans lawsuit against the sheriff of Fairfax County, Va., and other county officials can proceed. The U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit ruled last year that gender dysphoria is covered by the ADA and therefore people with the condition have grounds to sue if they believe they have suffered discrimination because of it.

Kesha Williams, a trans woman who was held in a Fairfax County jail for six months, said in her suit that she was housed with men and there she experienced delays in medical treatment and harassment by guards and other inmates. The trial court had ruled that the ADAs language excludes gender identity disorders not resulting from physical impairments, Williams could not sue for discrimination under the law.

But the Fourth Circuit found that such language is outdated and at odds with current understanding of conflicts between ones sense of gender and the gender assigned at birth. American Psychiatric Association has removed gender identity disorder from its Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders and added gender dysphoria, which it defines as clinically significant distress felt by some trans people. Being transgender is not a disability, but many experience this distress, Fourth Circuit Judge Diana Gribbon Motz wrote in the majority opinion. A transgender persons medical needs are just as deserving of treatment and protection as anyone elses, the judge added.

Fairfax County appealed to the Supreme Court, but a majority of the justices, in an order issued Friday, declined to hear the case, therefore allowing the Fourth Circuit ruling to stand and Williamss lawsuit to go forward. The denial came without comment, although one factor could have been that no other circuit had made a contrary ruling and set up a conflict for the high court to settle.

However, in a dissent, conservative Justice Samuel Alito had much to say. Justice Clarence Thomas, a fellow right-winger, joined Alito in the dissent.

This case presents a question of great national importance that calls out for prompt review, Alito wrote. He continued, This decision will raise a host of important and sensitive questions regarding such matters as participation in womens and girls sports, access to single-sex restrooms and housing, the use of traditional pronouns, and the administration of sex reassignment therapy (both the performance of surgery and the administration of hormones) by physicians and at hospitals that object to such treatment on religious or moral grounds.

The Fourth Circuits ruling could lead to lawsuits against people who refuse to use a trans persons chosen pronouns, against institutions that segregate facilities by birth gender, and against health care providers, Alito wrote. In short, the Fourth Circuits ruling leaves a great many people and institutions under the looming threat of liability, forcing them to change their behavior  behavior that may be deeply rooted in moral or religious principles  or face an unending stream of lawsuits. If it is at least possible that the ADA does not require these results, we should be willing to resolve the question now rather than later, he asserted.

The Fourth Circuits ruling is binding only on the states within the circuit  Maryland, North Carolina, South Carolina, Virginia, and West Virginia  but it is an important precedent just the same, according to trans rights advocates.

By declining to hear this case, the Supreme Court implicitly acknowledges what those who have seriously examined the issue have concluded: The ADA protects people who experience gender dysphoria, including transgender and nonbinary people, from being discriminated against on that basis, Olivia Hunt, policy director for the National Center for Transgender Equality, told the Associated Press.
SDOT getting closer to more accessible waterfront with new bike lane design

The Seattle Department of Transportation is getting closer to making the Seattle waterfront more accessible with a new bike lane design.

Weve reached the 30% design milestone of a protected bike lane on Alaskan Way from Virginia Street to Broad Street! The connection creates an intuitive, safer route for people biking and scooting between the future Waterfront Bike Path and the Elliott Bay Trail, said SDOT.

The Waterfront Bike Path will be a two-way protected bike lane on the west side of Alaskan Way from South King Street to Virginia Street, according to SDOT. The bike lane is part of SDOTs Alaskan Way Safety Project.

The safety project will create an intuitive, safer connection for people biking between the Waterfront Bike Path and the Elliott Bay Trail by building a new protected bike lane on the west side  also creating a buffer between people walking and driving, said SDOT. In response to community feedback, the design includes intersection improvements, lane reductions, and sidewalk and curb ramp repair.

Here are the bike lane designs and explanations from SDOT:

SDOT expects to finalize the design this year and start construction in 2024.

The department said they are working with the Waterfront Seattle Program, the Port of Seattle, and local bike advocates to reimagine a more walkable and pedestrian-friendly waterfront.

It is proposing the following improvements:

A protected bike lane on the west side of Alaskan Way. Along with an east-side, two-way path from Blanchard Street to Wall Street for use on sailing days, when the west side bike lane in front of Pier 66 is closed.

Lane reductions on Alaskan Way between Virginia Steet and Broad Street, going from two northbound and two southbound lanes to one lane in each direction to make the area safer for pedestrians.

Intersection safety improvements like adding Leading Pedestrian Intervals to make people more visible to those driving. Also, more bike traffic signals, No Turn on Red signs, shorter pedestrian crossing distances, and car left turn lanes at select intersections.

Sidewalk repair and updating ADA-compliant curb ramps along the project corridor to improve access for people walking and rolling.

SDOT is asking for your input, reach out to AlaskanWaySafety@seattle.gov with comments or questions.

Im pleased to see the robust design weve arrived at having worked rigorously within SDOT  including input from our Chief Safety Officer  and collaborated closely with the Port of Seattle and Cascade Bicycle Club in the last year, said SDOT Deputy Director of Capital Projects, Francisca Stefan. The new facility closes a crucial gap in the bike network to make it safer, and works with the complex needs at this cruise ship gateway.
Have you seen her? DeKalb County police searching for disabled, missing woman

DeKalb County police are asking for the publics help locating a missing disabled woman who disappeared on Sunday morning.

Police say 72-year-old Myrtha Chenevert was last seen at her residence in Lithonia around 4 a.m. on Sunday. She is listed at 5-foot-10, 172 pounds and was last seen wearing a blue dress and white sneakers.

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Officials say Chenevert is under the State of Georgias guardianship. She is a diagnosed schizophrenic and has recently become more outwardly aggressive towards strangers.

She is believed to be attempting to travel to Chicago, Illinois where she has family by way of hitchhiking.

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Anyone who has information regarding her whereabouts are asked to contact DKPD at 770-724-7710.

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The African Union and United Nations envoys in Somalia have lauded Burundi peacekeepers for their sterling stabilization efforts in Somalia.

Mohammed El-Amine Souef, the special representative of the Chairperson of the AU Commission for Somalia and head of the AU Transition Mission in Somalia (ATMIS), and Anita Kiki Gbeho, the UN Secretary-General's Deputy Special Representative for United Nations Assistance Mission in Somalia, cited Burundi's key contributions to peace and stability in Africa, especially in Somalia and Central Africa.

Souef said Burundi has contributed immensely to the ideal universal peace mainly through political solutions anchored on mediation and constant engagement in favor of peace and security, according to a statement issued by the ATMIS Sunday in Mogadishu, the capital of Somalia.

Burundian troops serving with the ATMIS on Saturday joined their country to celebrate 61 years of independence from colonial rule.

"Burundi has never resisted investing in peace operations which for many people represent the unique hope for finding lasting peace like in Somalia and Central Africa," he said Saturday evening in Mogadishu during the celebrations.

Gbeho also lauded Burundian peacekeepers for their courage and sacrifice and pledged the UN's commitment to continue supporting the AU Mission. "With more than 3,000 Burundian troops committed to the largest AU peace support operation, you are making a difference daily to the security of the Somali people," she noted.

Sam Okiding, ATMIS force commander, said the Burundian troops have played a key role in pacifying Somalia and protecting the civilian population in their area of responsibility. "The Burundi contingent in Somalia has been at the forefront in fostering peace and stability in their Areas of Responsibility, and we commend you for your selfless efforts," Okiding said.

ATMIS Deputy Force Commander Marius Ngendabanka in charge of Operations and Plans, who hails from Burundi, outlined the contributions of Burundian troops since their deployment to Somalia in 2007 and reiterated their commitment to the peacebuilding process.

Ngendabanka said the Burundi contingent, currently deployed in Sector Five in Middle Shabelle, has demonstrated its support for Africa's peace and freedom initiatives hence serving as an example to other African countries.

Burundi is one of the ATMIS Troop Contributing Countries alongside Djibouti, Ethiopia, Kenya, and Uganda.
By Ngouda Dione and Diadie Ba

DAKAR (Reuters) -Senegal President Macky Sall will not run for reelection next year, he said in a speech on Monday, ending widespread speculation that he would seek a third term his critics said would have been illegal.

Rumours that Sall would try to extend his stay in power have fuelled bouts of unrest since 2021 in which dozens have been killed, shaking Senegal's reputation for calm in a restive region.

"There has been much speculation and commentary on my eventual candidature on this election," Sall said in a televised speech. "The 2019 term was my second and last term."

"My decision, carefully considered... is not to run as a candidate in the upcoming election on Feb. 25, 2024. And this, even though the constitution grants me the right," he said.

Sall's announcement will likely quell fears of a democratic backslide in Senegal.

Some had worried he would follow other regional leaders, including in Ivory Coast and Togo, who used changes to the constitution as an excuse to reset their mandate and extend their hold on power.

Regional leaders including the presidents of Niger, Mohamed Bazoum, Guinea Bissau's Umaro Sissoco Embalo, and the African Union Commission Chairperson Moussa Faki Mahamat, praised Sall's decision, while Bazoum added that it will ease tensions.

Sall's decision will trigger a search for a successor to lead the ruling party just months before the February polls. It is unclear who will run for many of the main parties.

Supporters at his party headquarters in an upscale neighbourhood in the capital were divided on Monday evening after Sall's speech. Some applauded, while others cried.

"That's his choice, and he is our leader. We accept his decision, and we will support whoever he designates," said a female supporter in tears.

Unrest last month was sparked by the sentencing of popular opposition leader Ousmane Sonko to two years in jail on charges stemming from an alleged rape - accusations he denies and says were politically motivated to stop him from running in the elections.

Rioters, angered in part by what they saw as Sall's serial sidelining of opponents, torched buildings and vehicles and threw stones at police, who responded with tear gas.

At least 16 people were killed in the clashes, some whose relatives said that security forces opened fire with live rounds.

(Reporting by Ngouda Dione, Diadie Ba and Bate Felix; Writing by Edward McAllister; Editing by Leslie Adler, Bill Berkrot and David Gregorio)
Sex-crime suspect who sought hitman to kill 14-year-old accuser gets prison sentence

A Kentucky man was sentenced to more than six years in prison for trying to arrange the murder of a 14-year-old boy to prevent the teen from testifying against him in a trial.

John Michael Musbach, 34, of Haddonfield, must also pay a $30,000 fine, according to the U.S. Attorneys Office for New Jersey.

Musbach sought a hitman in 2016 to kill a New York boy whom he had victimized in an online child-pornography crime one year earlier, prosecutors said.

He wanted to prevent the boy from testifying at a trial for endangering the welfare of a child, authorities alleged.

Musbach paid $20,000 in bitcoin to the operator of a website that offered murder-for-hire services, but the purported "hitman" simply kept the money and did nothing to the boy.

Hackers help unravel scheme

Mom sues after being charged with murder Chicago mom accused of telling son to shoot man sues police after murder charges dropped

According to a criminal complaint, Musbach made the payment after the website's administrator told him a 14-year-old was not too young to be killed.

When Musbach eventually requested a refund, the complaint says, the "hitman" disclosed his business was a scam. The website administrator then demanded $10,000 to refrain from reporting Musbach to law enforcement.

The complaint does not say whether Musbach paid the additional amount.

Musbach was arrested for the hitman scheme in 2019 after authorities heard from a hacker who had accessed the murder-for-hire website.

6 dead in house fire, 1 in custody 6 dead, 1 critical in South Carolina house fire, man arrested on attempted murder charge

A guilty plea

Musbach pleaded guilty in February to using the internet with the intent that a murder be committed,

U.S. District Judge Joseph H. Rodriguez also ordered Musbach to pay a fine of $30,000 at a June 27 hearing in Camden federal court.

He also is to serve three years on supervised release.

This article originally appeared on Cherry Hill Courier-Post: NJ sex-crime suspect sentenced for hiring hitman to kill 14-year-old
New Zealands Shane van Gisbergen became the first driver in over half a century to win in his NASCAR Cup Series debut after a triumph Sunday at the inaugural Chicago Street Race.

The race was delayed due to lightning and heavy rain, forcing NASCAR to shorten it from 100 laps to 75.

Driving Trackhouse Racings Project 91, van Gisbergen took the lead on lap 71, passing Justin Haley after a restart. A late caution for a two-car wreck involving Bubba Wallace and Ricky Stenhouse Jr. on lap 74 sent the race into a two-lap overtime, where the Kiwi held off the challenge by Haley before eventually winning the Grant Park 220 by 1.259 seconds.

Haley finished in second place, while Chase Elliot finished in third place. Christopher Bell, who won stages 1 and 2, finished in 18th place after being involved in pile up that blocked the track on the 50th lap and crashing out from the top spot.

Man, what an experience in the crowd out here, this was so cool, van Gisbergen said on the NBC broadcast after the race. This is what you dream of, so hopefully I can come and do more.

A three-time Australian Supercars champion, van Gisbergen becomes the first driver to win in his first start in the NASCAR Cup Series since 1963 and only the seventh in series history to do so.

Johnny Rutherford was the last driver to accomplish the feat after winning a points-paying qualifying race at Daytona in 1963, according to NASCAR.com.

Trackhouse Racings Project 91 is a racing program created to give international drivers an opportunity at racing in NASCAR. Previously, former F1 champion Kimi Raikkonen raced the No. 91 in 2022, finishing in 37th place at Watkins Glen, and at the Circuit of the Americas in 2023, where he finished in 29th place.

The racing was really good, everyone was respectful. It was tough but a lot of fun, van Gisbergen said. The fans in Australia and New Zealand, the response this week and the coverage has been  I cant explain it.

Like the response and the support Ive got from everyone and even over here how welcoming everyone is, I cant believe it. Dream come true.

The 34-year-old was asked if he would consider racing in the Cup Series full time replying, Im doing more year in Australia and then Id love to come over here.

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Shell still selling Russian gas

British-Dutch fossil fuel giant Shell, which promised to stop selling Russian fossil fuels on March 8, 2022, continues to sell Russian hydrocarbon products, according to a report by the monitoring NGO Global Witness on July 2.

In 2022, Shell accounted for 12% of Russia's maritime trade in liquefied natural gas (LNG), and the company was among the five largest sellers of LNG in Russia, the NGO notes in their report.

In May 2023, Shell bought out the cargo of a tanker that was sailing from the port of Sabetta on Russias Yamal Peninsula to its final destination in Hong Kong. Analysts suggest that this tanker is capable of transporting up to 160,000 cubic meters of LNG.

Read also: Russian ruble drops to 12-month low as Shell pulls out of Sakhalin-2 oil and gas field project

Ukrainian authorities have repeatedly called on Shell to leave the Russian oil and gas market. In a letter to Shell CEO Wael Sawan, Oleh Ustenko, advisor to Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy on economic affairs, advised against taking an estimated $1 billion from the Russian budget, calling it "pure blood money."

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Read the original article on The New Voice of Ukraine
The Fresno County coroner has identified a suspect killed in a deputy-involved shooting on Friday.

He was identified Sunday as 30-year-old Tyler Kennedy Deel.

The shooting occurred around 4 p.m. near the intersection of Clovis and Balch avenues in southeast Fresno.

The Fresno County Sheriffs Office received a call of Deel becoming violent and threatening family members with a knife.

A deputy arrived within 10 minutes of the call and located Deel walking near a shopping center on the northeast corner of Kings Canyon Road and Clovis Avenue, carrying a five-foot tree branch, according to the sheriffs office.

The deputy pulled his patrol vehicle into the shopping center and ordered Deel to drop the branch and surrender. The sheriffs office said Deel pulled out a knife and threw it at the deputy and missed him.

Deel charged at the deputy with a tree branch. The deputy then retreated and fired multiple shots, striking Deel. He was pronounced dead at the scene behind a Valero gas station.

The deputy was not injured, authorities said.

The Fresno Police Department is handling the investigation into the deputy-involved shooting, because the shooting occurred within city limits.

Deels prior run-in with law enforcement

Deel appeared in Fresno Superior Court in 2016 after he fought with co-workers at McDonalds, said he hated officers and injured a police officers head with a baton. Deel pleaded no contest.

A judge said Deel could be sentenced to probation. At the time, he had been in jail since the Sept. 4, 2015, attack at McDonalds on Kings Canyon Road near Clovis Avenue.

Deel faced up to seven years in prison, but the judge delayed Deels sentencing hearing after a defense lawyer said the defendant suffered a seizure before he assaulted a Fresno police officer.

After the attack, jail medical staff learned that Deel has bipolar disorder, causing extreme shifts in mood and energy. The judge said Deel also suffers from Huntingtons disease, a fatal genetic disorder that causes the progressive breakdown of nerve cells in the brain.

The judge ordered Deel to be sent to prison for about 45 days, so prison officials could evaluate him and make a sentencing recommendation. He was sentenced in 2017 to seven years in prison, with credit for time served in Fresno County Jail, court records show. Deel was released to the custody of his mother in December 2018 and sentenced to probation.
Wanted: New homes for over 2,000 massive metal shipping containers that once served as a makeshift barrier at Arizona's southern border. Price: $500 to $2,000 each.

They may come with stains, rust, holes, "a multitude of dents," scratches, cracks and a controversial place in Arizona's political history.

Former Republican Gov. Doug Ducey's shipping container wall, which he took down in December under pressure from the Biden administration, has so far cost Arizonans over $194 million, according to state financial records.

After months spent contemplating what to do with the 20 and 40-foot big metal boxes, the state's administrative agency has put them up for sale.

For now, the containers are available to government entities and nonprofits that can find uses for them, though the Arizona Department of Administration says any left by October will be available for public sale. Early buyers are turning the containers into storage, and Democratic Gov. Katie Hobbs has signaled interest in making them available to turn into affordable housing units.

But some may not be in great shape. The containers are 10 to 20 years old, according to a very high-energy video created by the department, and this deal is buyer beware. "Buyer must agree to purchase without viewing the shipping container," the Arizona Department of Administration warns on its for-sale site. "No refunds."

Best case scenario: Arizona recoups 2% of project's cost

Exactly how much the state could recoup if it sells all the containers isn't clear. The containers are priced differently based on size and condition, and a breakdown of how many fall into each category is not available. If all were sold at the maximum price, the state would recover approximately $4 million  or just 2% of what the border project cost.

"Ooh, ouch," said Stephen Pauken, the city manager in Bisbee, Arizona, when he heard the gap between state spending and what it will get back from selling the beat-up boxes.

"There's a lot of things in the state that money could have been spent on," he said. "Just name one and I'll agree with you. Everything is more important than buying containers to double stack them at the border."

But Pauken, despite being "perturbed" by the use of state resources on an "ugly" border barrier, also saw a chance for savings in the state's surplus of containers.

The city previously planned to buy two containers to store supplies for its ongoing restoration of Camp Naco, a more than century-old U.S. Army encampment that housed Black regiments known as Buffalo Soldiers. But the city was able to secure the state's leftovers for about 50% savings, he said.

It opted to buy additional containers for other city departments to use as storage for everything from excess PVC pipe and garbage cans to tools, a purchase first reported by the Herald/Review in Cochise County. The city has yet to receive the 13 containers it ordered for just shy of $28,000, which also covers fees to transport them from their temporary home at the Arizona State Prison Complex in Tucson.

Other orders for containers have come in from state agencies, including the Department of Water Resources and the Department of Veterans' Services. The water agency ordered one container to use as storage in Phoenix, where it will keep office cubicle components, according to a department spokesperson. The veteran service agency ordered nine, which will be scattered at the department's facilities across the state for storage, a spokesperson said.

Purchasing the containers rang up at over $20 million, a slice of the more than $194 million the state has paid to date to put up and take down Ducey's border wall, according to state purchasing and contract records. The biggest chunk of the money for the ill-fated project covered labor, according to the contracts, which authorized over $200 million for the project.

Arizonans paid $6,750 per 40-foot container and $5,700 for each of the smaller 20-foot ones, according to the state's initial contract with supplier AshBritt, Inc., an emergency response contractor that often works for governments after natural disasters. AshBritt ran afoul of federal campaign finance rules in 2018 over a large donation in support of former President Donald Trump while also doing government contract work.

Hobbs' spokesperson reiterated the governor's past criticisms of her predecessor's project, and touted a recent announcement shifting $25 million of state border security funds to law enforcement in border communities.

"From day one, Gov. Hobbs has denounced this political stunt as a waste of taxpayer dollars," spokesperson Christian Slater said. "Instead, we are putting border security money to good use by giving border communities the funds they need to staff up, improve technology, and buy additional supplies for their operations."

Help wanted: Labor shortage hits hard in rural West Texas as US slams door on migrants

Environmentalists decry destruction from shipping containers

Apart from the small amount of money the state is able to get back, opponents of Ducey's wall say it created other lasting effects. Laiken Jordahl, southwest conservation advocate at the Center for Biological Diversity, said desert grasslands, trees and washes were bulldozed to make way for the makeshift barrier.

"The damage that was inflicted from this political stunt, it's totally heart-wrenching," Jordahl said. "And while it's tempting to laugh about how just how ridiculous the whole situation was, it caused very real and lasting damage to fragile ecosystems in the borderlands."

The Center for Biological Diversity joined the federal government in opposing Ducey's action, and has said the shipping containers blocked migration corridors for endangered jaguars, ocelots and streams that provide an oasis for migratory birds, among other environmental impacts.

Ducey announced his border project in August, just hours before the first bus-sized boxes were double stacked on the state's border with Mexico and weeks after the Biden administration said it planned to fill gaps along the border. The Ducey administration said the containers were temporary, but that it was done waiting on the Biden administration to act on border security, an issue for which Ducey and other Republican governors have often criticized the Democratic president.

Ducey 'stands by the project'

The temporary wall project ultimately came at a significant cost to Arizonans, but Ducey, who left office in January, hasn't had a change of heart.

"He stands by the project," Daniel Scarpinato, a former Ducey chief of staff. "Arizona has been hard hit by the border crisis, and the Biden administration has ignored it even as it has gotten worse and worse."

The border container project, Scarpinato said, "did result in getting the administration's attention when almost nothing else would."

For subscribers: I belong here: What it's like to grow up undocumented and without DACA in Arizona

Reach reporter Stacey Barchenger at stacey.barchenger@arizonarepublic.com or 480-416-5669. Follow her on Twitter @sbarchenger.

This article originally appeared on USA TODAY NETWORK: Arizona's shipping container border wall boxes are now for sale
(Bloomberg) -- Singapore Deputy Prime Minister Lawrence Wong will become chairman of the central bank as well as the investment strategies committee of the sovereign wealth fund GIC Pte, according to separate statements Monday.

Most Read from Bloomberg

Wong, who is also the citys finance minister, is succeeding Tharman Shanmugaratnam at both the Monetary Authority of Singapore and GIC. His MAS appointment will be from July 8 to May 31, 2026 and his GIC role is effective July 7. Wong, broadly seen as the prime minister-in-waiting, has been deputy chairman of MAS since June 2021.

Minister for Trade and Industry Gan Kim Yong was named deputy chairman of the MAS.

Tharman, a former deputy prime minister, announced his decision in June to leave all government positions to contest an upcoming presidential election in the city-state. He has been MAS chairman since 2011.

The MAS board informs the government of the regulatory, supervisory and monetary policies of the central bank. Singapores policymakers expect this years economic growth to remain sluggish and range from 0.5%-2.5% amid Chinas weaker-than-expected rebound and dimming global landscape.

--With assistance from Natalie Choy.

(Adds additional detail and background throughout.)

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A Singaporean woman is making headlines after being rewarded with a Rolex for a decade of service as a cleaner.

How she started: Tan Ai Tee, 67, began working with restaurant group Paradise Group in 2013. She started in the kitchen of its Seafood Paradise restaurant, sorting orders and serving customers until it closed in 2016. She then became a cleaner at Paradises headquarters, working from 8 a.m. to 2 p.m. five days a week. She now calls her colleagues at the company her family.

Her first-ever watch: The Rolex, valued at around 10,000 Singaporean dollars (approximately $7,400), is not only Tans first Rolex  it is also her first-ever timepiece. She received the watch at an annual company event on March 6, along with 97 other employees.

In the past, she also received 2.5- and 5-gram Suisse gold bars for her fifth and eighth years of service, respectively. She plans to give her new Rolex to her daughter.

More from NextShark: Asian American becomes 4th officer who responded to Capitol riot to die by suicide

No retirement in sight: Tan has no plans to quit her job. Although her husband, 76, has already retired, she wants to continue working.

"As long as I am healthy enough to keep working, why not?" she told The Straits Times. "I like waking up early and staying active. I think I will fall ill easily if I stop. I also feel very appreciated by the bosses here, so I intend to keep going as long as I can."

The bigger picture: Paradise rewarded a total of 330 employees in its March 6 event, drawing praise online. All 98 workers who served for at least 10 years received a Rolex regardless of their position.

More from NextShark: Rapper Brittanya Karma Passes Away at 29 From COVID-19

Paradise is not the only Singaporean company to make headlines for rewarding its staff this year, as others have also bounced back from losses due to COVID-19. Last month, Singapore Airlines announced that its staff would receive up to eight months worth of bonuses after hitting a record net income of 2.16 billion Singaporean dollars (approximately $1.6 billion) at the end of March, with passenger capacities rising to 79% of pre-COVID levels.

More from NextShark: Cilantro, intestines and pig's blood?: Here's how Pizza Hut Taiwan decides on its viral toppings

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We didnt know if youd come home: Tiger Woods daughter Sam, 14, gives moving speech at Hall of Fame
Six people found dead in house fire thats being investigated as murder, SC sheriff says

Six people were found dead and another was critically injured following a fire at a South Carolina home thats being investigated as murder, the Colleton County Sheriffs Office said Sunday night.

At about 11 a.m., deputies responded to a fire at a house on Folly Creek Lane in Green Pond, the sheriffs office said in a news release.

The Colleton County Coroners Office has not publicly identified the six victims who died, and information about their causes of death was not available.

After being discovered, the one surviving victim was taken to a local hospital, according to the release. The sheriffs office said the surviving victim is in critical condition, but further information about their status was not available.

Ryan Lenard Manigo, 33, was charged with attempted murder in connection to the surviving victim, according to the release. The sheriffs office said additional charges are pending the victims identifications and autopsy results.

There was no word how the sheriffs office connected Manigo to the fire, or how the blaze was determined to be an intentional criminal act.

Manigo is being held at the Colleton County Detention Center while awaiting a bond hearing, jail records show.

Despite the arrest, the investigation is ongoing and the sheriffs office asks anyone with information to call 843-549-2211.

In addition to the sheriffs office, the South Carolina Law Enforcement Divisions arson team is assisting with the investigation.
More than half of Americans believe US Supreme Court justices decide cases largely on the basis of their partisan political views, a figure that has shot up 10 percentage points from January 2022.

That figure  53 per cent  appears to be driven by the gulf between perceptions of the conservative supermajority court among Republican and Democratic voters following several controversial rulings at the end of its latest term, according to new polling from ABC News/Ipsos.

Roughly three-quarters of Republican voters and 26 per cent of Democratic voters support the courts decision to reject affirmative action in university admissions. Sixty-eight per cent of Republicans approve of the decision to allow businesses to deny services to same-sex couples. And 71 per cent of Republicans support the courts ruling against President Joe Bidens plan to cancel student loan debts, compared to just 17 per cent of Democrats.

Overall, a bare majority of Americans (52 per cent) support the courts decision against race-conscious admissions in higher education.

That majority includes majorities among white (60 per cent) and Asian (58 per cent) Americans, while 52 per cent of Black Americans disapprove of the ruling.

Despite their views on affirmative action, most Americans still do not believe that Black and Hispanic students have a fair chance of getting into the college of their choice compared to their white and Asian student counterparts.

Roughly two-thirds of Americans believe that white and Asian students have a fair chance for admission to the college of their choice, compared to only 47 per cent and 50 per cent of respondents who would say the same for Black and Hispanic students, respectively.

Americans views on the courts actions against student debt cancellation also track closely with their age, polling finds.

Older Americans are more likely to support the courts actions  61 per cent of people age 65 and older endorsed the ruling that struck down the presidents plan, while only 40 per cent of people aged 30 to 49 and 31 per cent of those under 30 years old support the ruling.

I know there are millions of Americans  in this country who feel disappointed and discouraged, or even a little bit angry, about the courts decision today on student debt. And I must admit, I do, too, Mr Biden said in remarks from the White House on 30 June following the courts decision.

Public support for the decision making at the nations highest court  with three justices appointed by Donald Trump during his one-term presidency  sank precipitously in the wake of the decision to overturn Roe v Wade and revoke a constitutional right to abortion care last summer.

Following that ruling, among other actions under the courts new conservative majority, the court has come under greater public scrutiny, alongside the decades of maneuvers among Republican officials to seat similarly ideologically minded judges across the federal judiciary, the actions of Justice Clarence Thomass wife Ginni Thomas surrounding attempts to reject 2020 election results, and a series of investigative reports that revealed apparent ethics lapses among conservative justices.

Such scrutiny has called the courts legitimacy into question, with Democratic lawmakers and critics of the court pressing for ethics investigations, impeachment proceedings and the resignation of justices.
 Flash

The U.S. Capitol building is seen in Washington, D.C., the United States, Nov. 4, 2022. [Photo/Xinhua]

The United States has become the most profound source of instability worldwide, Richard Haass, who is stepping down as president of the U.S. Council on Foreign Relations, said Friday.

After running the organization for two decades, Haass said he has come to a disturbing conclusion that the most serious danger to the world's security right now is the United States itself, he told The New York Times in an interview.

The unraveling of the American political system means that for the first time in his life, the internal threat has surpassed the external threat, he added.

Instead of being the most reliable anchor in a volatile world, the United States has become the most profound source of instability and an uncertain exemplar of democracy, Haass was quoted by the newspaper as saying.

"Our domestic political situation is not only one that others don't want to emulate ... But I also think that it's introduced a degree of unpredictability and a lack of reliability that's really poisonous. For America's ability to function successfully in the world, I mean, it makes it very hard for our friends to depend on us," he added.

After exploring other countries for most of the past half-century, Haass is ready to explore his own, as "the challenges at home have prompted a man who has spent his entire career as a policymaker and student of world affairs to turn his attention inward," said the New York Times.

The question is whether America has changed in the long run. "I should have a nickel...For every non-American, every foreign leader who said to me: I don't know what's the norm and what's the exception anymore," said Haass.

Born in Brooklyn and raised on Long Island, Haass is a veteran of four administrations, one Democrat and three Republican, said the newspaper.
SLO County projects to get more than $13 million in state funds. Heres where money will go

Millions of dollars in state funding are headed to the Central Coast to support projects related to energy development, land preservation, storm repairs and more.

San Luis Obispo County will receive more than $13 million of that funding, according to a news release from California State Sen. John Laird, D-Santa Cruz.

About $20 million total will be allocated to District 17, which is represented by Laird and includes Santa Cruz and San Luis Obispo Counties, along with parts of Monterey and Santa Clara Counties.

The money is allocated in the California state budget for the 2023-2024 fiscal year, which Gov. Gavin Newsom approved on June 27.

While California faces another difficult budget year, it is heartening to be able to secure funding for numerous important projects that will assist in securing and improving our quality of life, Laird said in the release.

From work to expand the Salinas Dam to help for an organization that works with homeless people, heres a look at which SLO County projects are set to receive state funding.

The 135-foot-tall concrete Salinas Dam was completed in January 1942 by the U.S. Army. San Luis Obispo has rights to the water, and the county administers the park and dam.

Which SLO County projects will get state funding?

SLO County supervisors have lobbied for funding to expand the Salinas Dam at Santa Margarita Lake for years without success.

Now, the state will give the county $500,000 to help conduct feasibility analysis regarding ownership, retrofit, and possible expansion of the Salinas Dam to secure future water supplies, the release said.

The dam, owned by the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, was built in 1941 to service Camp San Luis Obispo during World War II. It has a storage capacity of 23,843 acre-feet of water, according to the San Luis Obispo County Public Works Department.

In Atascadero, El Camino Homelessness Organization will receive $150,000 to fund a dining structure large enough to serve dinner to 80 to 100 people per night, the news release said.

South County projects will also benefit from a large chunk of state funding.

During a series of extreme storms in January, the Arroyo Grande Creek levee failed and flooded parts of Oceano.

As part of the recent round of funding, the state will give SLO County $1.23 million to help fund repairs to the levee, according to Laird.

A broccoli field was flooded in Oceano as Arroyo Grande Creek overtopped the levee on Jan. 10, 2023.

Offshore wind energy, storm repair projects get funding

On the coast, projects related to storm damage and offshore wind energy will collect state funding.

To enhance flood safety, the state gave Morro Bay $300,000 to repair 150 linear feet of failed corrugated metal pipe in its storm drain, the news release said.

Additionally, the county was awarded $750,000 for staffing to support offshore wind development, the release said.

In June, the U.S. Bureau of Ocean Energy Management issued leases to three companies expected to build massive floating wind farms 20 miles off the coast of SLO County in a 376-square-mile area of the Pacific Ocean known as the Morro Bay wind energy area.

Cal Polys Center for Coastal Marine Sciences will receive $150,000 to assess biological, wildlife and ecosystem conditions in the Morro Bay wind energy area to help determine if offshore wind energy projects should be developed there, according to Laird.

The wind turbines planned off the San Luis Obispo County coast would be similar to Ocean Winds WindFloat Atlantic floating offshore wind energy project near Portugal. They are each about 688 feet tall, or about twice the height of the Statue of Liberty.

Diablo Canyon land preservation, economic development

The state allocated a total of $10 million to efforts to preserve land around Diablo Canyon nuclear power plant.

The California State Coastal Conservancy will use $5 million of that to develop a conservation easement on 12,000 acres of land surrounding Diablo Canyon Power Plant, Laird said.

That funding will also be used to map future coastal and interior public trail locations, conduct public and tribal outreach, and undertake tasks in anticipation of the transfer to State Parks the 2400-acre unit of Diablo Canyon Lands known as Wild Cherry Canyon, the release said.

The other $5 million will be used to plan regional economic development and clean energy projects for a 600-acre parcel at the power plant site, Laird said.

Diablo Canyon Nuclear Power Plant on June 1, 2023.

What about other District 17 counties?

Other counties in District 17 won state funding for various projects, too.

Santa Cruz County will receive $500,000 in state funding for improvements to the Stockton Avenue Bridge, while the city of Santa Cruz will get $1 million to develop recreation and tourism on West Cliff Drive, according to Laird.

The state allocated $750,000 for vulnerable farm workers, day workers and indigenous language speaking families who were heavily storm impacted  50 in northern Monterey County and 150 in Santa Cruz County, the release said.

Monterey County will also receive $1 million for wildfire prevention and eucalyptus removal, along with $230,000 to update a Federal Emergency Management Agency hydrologic model of the Carmel River, the release said.

The state gave $1 million to Seaside High School to build a multicultural arts center, $1 million for the city of Marina to build a senior center, and $84,000 to the city of Monterey for lighting and bollard improvements to the Old Fishermans Wharf, Laird said.

Santa Clara County received $1 million in state funding to improve railroad grade separations and $350,000 to a pedestrian safety project, according to Laird.
Son rushes in as dad falls from jet ski and struggles to swim, cops say. Dad found dead

A son rushed to reach his father after he fell off a jet ski and struggled to stay afloat on a Georgia river, officials said.

Then, days after the dad disappeared under the surface of the water, he was found dead, according to the Georgia Department of Natural Resources Law Enforcement Division.

The search for the missing father kicked off Thursday, June 29, when game wardens were called to a report of a jet ski incident. It happened in the Warners Landing area of the Satilla River in Brantley County.

The operator of the jet ski was seen by his son, from across the river, falling into the water when he hit the throttle, state officials wrote in a news release. The son began to swim towards him when he saw the father struggling to swim and then go under.

The fathers disappearance sparked a multi-day search involving a flight crew, river patrols and sonar technology. Then on July 2, game wardens and Wayne County officials found the missing mans body, officials said.

He was identified as 55-year-old Steve Elkins of Atkinson.

Brantley County is roughly 100 miles southwest of Savannah.

Dad killed when head hits bridge during boating trip with kids, Georgia officials say

12-year-old dies after getting trapped under boat with family aboard, Georgia cops say
Supporters of Senegal's President Macky Sall (C) claim a revision of the constitution allows him to run again even though he has served two terms (GUY PETERSON)

Popular Senegalese opposition leader Ousmane Sonko called on the public on Sunday night to "come out en masse" ahead of a speech in which President Macky Sall is expected to announce whether he will seek a controversial third term.

"We must come out to confront the Macky Sall regime and say that it is not up to him to choose the candidates that will face each other in the next presidential election," Sonko said on social media.

Sonko was sentenced in early June to two years in prison for "corrupting" a young woman, sparking protests that left at least 16 people dead.

The conviction makes him ineligible to stand in next year's presidential elections.

Sonko has claimed that the court case was engineered to prevent him from running, a charge authorities deny. He has been blocked in by the authorities at his home -- or "illegally held", according to him -- since May 28.

Sall, meanwhile, was first elected in 2012 and again in 2019.

While the constitution stipulates that a president cannot serve more than two terms, his supporters present him as their candidate for 2024 and argue that a constitutional revision in 2016 reset the counter to zero.

Sonko said that if he is arrested, "I call on all the Senegalese people to stand up as one and come out en masse and this time put an end to this criminal regime".

If the president announces his candidacy for a third mandate, he added, "I believe it's incumbent on all the Senegalese people to stand up, to face him".

"If we have to put up a fight, it must be definitive... The days and weeks to come will be crucial," he added.

amt/fio/smw/mtp
A Southwest Airlines flight scheduled to arrive in Kentucky made an emergency landing in Columbus Sunday morning.

>> TRENDING: 3 hospitalized after crash in Dayton overnight

John Glenn Columbus International Airport received an alert shortly before 9 a.m. from a Southwest flight stating that they needed to make an emergency landing due to pressurization issues, a spokesperson for the airport told WBNS.

The flight was headed to Louisville Muhammad Ali International Airport from Baltimore/Washington International Thurgood Marshall Airport before having to make the emergency landing.

During the need for an emergency landing, crews on board requested priority handling from air traffic controllers, the spokesperson said in a statement.

With coordination between air traffic controllers and crews on board, the airplane was able to land with no reported injuries.

The aircraft was taxied to the gate and deboarded. It was then placed out of service for further review.

Passengers boarded another aircraft to continue their trip to Louisville Muhammad Ali International Airport, their intended destination.

We apologize to these Customers for their delayed arrival and thank them for their patience. Our Crews train extensively for these types of events and there is no higher priority at Southwest than the Safety of our Crew and Customers, the spokesperson said.
A Southwest plane bound for Louisville, Kentucky made an emergency landing in Ohio on Sunday morning, airline officials said.

A Southwest plane bound for Louisville, Kentucky made an emergency landing in Ohio on Sunday morning, airline officials said.

Flight 2082 which departed Baltimore was headed for the Louisville International Airport but had to make an emergency stop in Columbus, "after an apparent pressurization issue in flight," according to a statement from Southwest.

No injuries were reported, the airline said.

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Passengers got on another plane to continue trip

Upon landing, the aircraft taxied to a gate where the flight and passengers deboarded the plane and got on another one to continue the trip.

"The original aircraft is out of service for a review," Southwest said in its statement. "We apologize to these customers for their delayed arrival and thank them for their patience."

Natalie Neysa Alund covers breaking and trending news for USA TODAY. Reach her at nalund@usatoday.com and follow her on Twitter @nataliealund.

This article originally appeared on USA TODAY: Southwest plane to Louisville makes emergency landing in Columbus
We spent 24 hours on the USS Dwight D. Eisenhower aircraft carrier. Here are 5 fun facts

Here are five things to know about the USS Dwight D. Eisenhower, a nuclear-powered aircraft carrier, where Daytona Beach News-Journal photographer Nadia Zomorodian spent Friday through Saturday.

The aircraft carrier is known as Ike

A plane prepares to land on the Navy's USS Dwight D. Eisenhower, a nuclear-powered aircraft carrier, in the Atlantic Ocean, Friday, June 30, 2023. News-Journal photographer Nadia Zomorodian recently spent 24 hours on the ship.

The aircraft carrier, a CVN-69, is named after the 34th president of the United States. Before becoming president, Gen. Dwight D. Eisenhower was the commander of Operation Overlord, the code name for the allied D-Day invasion on June 6, 1944, of Nazi-occupied France. Mamie Eisenhower, the president's widow, christened the carrier at 11:11 a.m. Oct. 11, 1975. The carrier, known as Ike, was commissioned on Oct. 18, 1977.

Some of Ike's missions

A crew member on the Navy's USS Dwight D. Eisenhower, a nuclear-powered aircraft carrier, in the Atlantic Ocean, Friday, June 30, 2023. News-Journal photographer Nadia Zomorodian recently spent 24 hours on the ship.

The carrier became the second nuclear-powered aircraft carrier to pass through the Suez Canal in 1990 as it responded to Iraq's invasion of Kuwait. It was ready in case Iraq invaded Saudi Arabia and participated in the United Nations embargo against Iraq. The carrier also participated in Operation Uphold Democracy, a 1994 effort to restore the democratically elected government of Haiti. On Oct. 3, 2006, the carrier deployed for seven months to support ground troops in Iraq and Afghanistan.

The future of the USS Dwight D. Eisenhower

The Navy is considering delaying the carriers planned deactivation in 2027, according to a story in USNI News. The Navy is looking to get one more deployment out of the 46-year-old ship. According to the article, the biggest issue is the amount of nuclear fuel left in the carrier. Carriers are planned for a 50-year life. They undergo refueling and overhaul at 25 years.

Armaments

Crew members on the Navy's USS Dwight D. Eisenhower, a nuclear-powered aircraft carrier, in the Atlantic Ocean, Friday, June 30, 2023. News-Journal photographer Nadia Zomorodian recently spent 24 hours on the ship.

The aircraft carrier added weapons after an overhaul at Newport News Shipbuilding in October 1985. Additions included a close-in weapons system, NATO Sea Sparrow Missile System and an anti-submarine warfare module.

Personnel and power and speed

Crew members on the Navy's USS Dwight D. Eisenhower, a nuclear-powered aircraft carrier, in the Atlantic Ocean, Friday, June 30, 2023.

The Eisenhower is a Nimitz class aircraft carrier powered by two nuclear reactors. It can reach speeds of 30-plus knots or 34.5 mph. The ship has a crew and air wing totaling about 5,000 people. It has approximately 60 aircraft.

This article originally appeared on The Daytona Beach News-Journal: USS Dwight D. Eisenhower aircraft carrier: 5 things to know
Videos of troops and military equipment moving through downtown Philadelphia spread online last month, sparking false claims on social media platforms that the U.S. government was preparing to invoke martial law. The posts spread quickly, garnering millions of views and thousands of shares.

What was really happening? Parade preparations for Flag Day and the U.S. Armys birthday in historic Philadelphia. The military vehicles were on the move as part of the citys annual Stars and Stripes Festival, held this year on June 14, when members of the Pennsylvania National Guard showed off military equipment to the public, according to Maj. Travis Mueller, a Pennsylvania National Guard public affairs officer.

Heading into the July Fourth holiday Tuesday, more troops and military equipment will be present in urban areas as part of citywide celebrations, including the Boston Pops Fireworks Spectacular, the National Independence Day Parade in Washington, D.C., and the Armed Forces River Parade in San Antonio. Military flyovers are being planned for events across Oregon, Colorado and Vermont, among other states.

These celebrations offer more opportunity for the spread of rumors like those that took hold in Philadelphia. One way to stand down the panic? If you see military troops in your city or town, check out local law enforcement and local military bases social media accounts, or states National Guard pages on Twitter and Facebook, where public affairs officers often post about service members and equipment appearing in public before planned activities.

The unsubstantiated rumors of martial law sparked by troops spotted on Philly streets is just one of many incidents of such images spawning disinformation online. Such conspiracies go back to the 1970s, when so-called black helicopters became a symbol of a military takeover of the U.S. But theyve grown in frequency since 2020, when myths about voter fraud eroded the publics confidence in U.S. democracy, experts said.

The whole idea is quite preposterous. Were so far from any situation in which martial law would be declared that its laughable, said William Banks, a Syracuse University law professor who wrote a book about the domestic role of the U.S. military. The fact that its become a part of disinformation campaigns is concerning.

In addition to parades and other public events sparking concerns, the arrival of summer  annual training season for the National Guard and Reserve  means more troops on the move and more conjecture about a military takeover.

What people are seeing now is what people have seen every summer for as long as Ive been alive, Banks said. Folks are taking their summer National Guard duty right now and riding convoys to wherever theyre going to be. For many of us, its a regular scene in the summer on the highways.

Rumors spread online this month when a military convoy was spotted on state roads near Idaho Falls. The Idaho National Guard had posted the planned movement on its Facebook page on June 13, alerting the public that its 148th Field Artillery Regiment would be moving tracked vehicles the next day from its training area back to its armory. Dont be alarmed! the post warned. Still, a video of the convoy was posted by a worried onlooker and went viral on social media. One post that received more than one million views warned, BREAKING NEWS! Tank group on the highway in Idaho falls today!

The Idaho Army National Guard's 148th Field Artillery Regiment conducted direct-fire training at the Orchard Combat Training Center in Boise, Idaho, on June 8. Videos of the unit's equipment being moved from the training area back to the armory on June 13 was one of several recent military movements that sparked false claims online of the looming invocation of martial law. (Crystal Farris via DVIDS)

A few days later, some social media accounts shared videos of low-flying helicopters in the Bay Area, describing their presence as an undeclared military drill. The MV-22 Ospreys and Sikorsky White Hawks seen over Marin County, California, on June 16, were security for President Joe Bidens planned fundraising visit, the San Francisco Gate reported.

In February, false reports spread that combat had come to San Diegos shores, when the U.S. Army Special Operations Command conducted training around the city. This despite the citys high concentration of military bases and routine exercises, and an advisory issued in advance by Naval Base Coronado. Residents told local television stations they were caught off guard by low-flying helicopters and explosions.

Adding to the confusion? Several social media accounts  some of them verified on Twitter and boasting tens of thousands of followers  have falsely claimed that all of these movements are signs the military is preparing for an impending violent event and the invocation of martial law.

Inconceivable and utterly absurd is how legal expert and retired Army officer Geoffrey Corn describes the various martial law conspiracies. If ever anyone tried to illegally invoke martial law, it would be stopped by military leaders, Congress and the courts, said Corn, director of the Center for Military Law and Policy at Texas Tech University.

The leaders of the DOD would look at this and say, We dont have legal authority to do what youre asking, Corn said, adding that As soon as Congress got wind of it, it would create a political crisis, and the federal courts would shut it down.

A rise in martial law conspiracies

The presence of military equipment has been a long-standing trigger for conspiracies. Stories of black helicopters and their role in covert operations started in the 70s but gained more attention in 1995, when former Rep. Helen Chenoweth, R-Idaho, held congressional hearings about black helicopters allegedly targeting ranches in the rural West.

False claims about alleged government preparations to declare martial law are becoming an uncomfortable American tradition. In 2015, U.S. Army Special Operations was preparing to hold what it called a routine multi-state training exercise called Operation Jade Helm, spurring rumors of a covert effort to impose martial law. Such was the widespread panic that the Texas governor deployed the Texas state guard to monitor special operations troops. In 2018, former CIA director Michael Hayden attributed the Jade Helm panic to Russian disinformation targeting Texas, according to the Texas Tribune.

While these types of conspiracies date back decades, rumors of the government invoking martial law have been on the rise since former national security adviser Michael Flynn publicly called for former President Donald Trump to impose martial law to force a new election after his 2020 loss, said Syracuse University law professor Banks. Flynns status in the conservative movement and experience as an Army lieutenant general lent weight to his espoused theories that ballot tampering had lost Trump the election  theories proven false by multiple state and federal investigations.

At the time, Flynn retweeted an ad from a conservative political organization that called on Trump to suspend the Constitution, declare martial law and order the military to oversee a new election.

Flynn called over and over and over again in 2020 for the invocation of martial law, Banks said. Hes a widely followed guy in certain circles and by virtue of his rank, he had a lot of credibility.

The Covid-19 pandemic also gave rise to false claims about martial law being declared to invoke a nationwide quarantine  some of the rumors reaching so many people that the National Security Council spoke out to debunk them. Text message rumors of a national #quarantine are FAKE. There is no national lockdown, the NSC tweeted.

The Pentagon also debunked other viral claims about impending martial law in 2020, including one Twitter post that showed a video of Army equipment being moved by rail with the comment, Coming soon? Then-Pentagon spokesman Jonathan Rath Hoffman said the video showed joint light tactical vehicles being transported by Army Material Command from a factory in Oshkosh, Wisconsin, to then-Fort Bragg, now-Fort Liberty, North Carolina.

Former Illinois Republican Congressman Adam Kinzinger, a lieutenant colonel in the Air National Guard, has been working to counter some of the conspiracies he sees online, while battling his own frustration that so many fellow Americans could be so gullible.

I think there is a real importance in exposing the ludicrous-y of it, he told Military Times.

Kinzinger put that in practice, responding sarcastically, he thought, to a tweet about the alleged impending military takeover of Philadelphia. As a Guardsman let me just say, this is exactly what you think it is and not drill weekend or summer training. No, its a takeover of whatever you love by whoever you hate. That sarcasm was lost on some, who took his post to be confirmation of their worst fears.

Kinzinger has battled what he sees as a flood of disinformation that has enveloped his party, including debunked claims of voter fraud in the 2020 election. He was one of only two Republicans on the congressional committee that investigated the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the Capitol, and ultimately left Congress over his partys embrace of such claims.

You can fight to try to tell the truth, you can fight against the cancer in the Republican Party of lies of conspiracy of dishonesty, Kinzinger told ABC This Week when he announced he was leaving Congress.

He wants to see the military be similarly pro-active to spot disinformation about military activities online, and act swiftly to correct the record.

I think its important for people to see that when they hear something like the government is going to take over Philadelphia, that they actually are aware of what that conspiracy is before they just take someones word for it, he said.

As a Guardsman let me just say, this is exactly what you think it is and not drill weekend or summer training. No, its a takeover of whatever you love by whoever you hate https://t.co/lO1L3oddaB  Adam Kinzinger (@AdamKinzinger) June 18, 2023

Retired Army colonel David Maxwell, a former U.S. Army Green Beret, cautioned against vilifying or attacking believers in unfounded conspiracy theories.

We are naturally suspicious of the government, said Maxwell of his fellow American citizens.

This disinformation reinforces that idea that we have to support and defend the Constitution of the United States against all enemies, but we dont realize that the enemy that is attacking us is not our government, not our military, but the outside forces. That is the real paradox, said Maxwell, now a senior fellow at the Washington, D.C.-based think tank, Foundation for Defense of Democracies.

He suggested attacking the baseless claims themselves with a four-pronged strategy, represented by the somewhat unwieldy acronym R-U-E-A: recognizing adversarial strategies, understanding how those adversaries implement their plans, exposing those plans to the affected public and finally attacking the bad actors strategy to undermine its efforts.

On the positive side, the U.S. has very engaged citizenry, he said. But its informed by bad ideas and influenced by Russia and China, Iran and North Korea, as well as other bad actors.

A brief history of U.S. martial law

Since the United States was founded on July 4, 1776, martial law has been enacted at least 68 times. The figure varies because one states governor allegedly declared martial law 30 times, but official records dont show all of these declarations. A few of these declarations made their mark on what the U.S. could see today.

General Andrew Jackson declared martial law for the first time in U.S. history in 1814 before the Battle of New Orleans to guard Louisiana territory from British attack. Local authorities and members of the press criticized the generals controversial actions.

Until the mid-1800s, martial law couldnt be declared because it was incompatible with the U.S. Constitution, according to Joseph Nunn, counsel for the Brennan Center for Justice, a non-partisan law and policy institute. In a seminal case, Luther v. Borden, the U.S. Supreme Court decided in 1849 to rule in favor of an entity attempting to declare martial law to prevent a state government overthrow. Based on that case, all U.S. states theoretically have the legal ability to declare martial law when warranted, which helps explain why 57 of those 68 cases of martial law were declared by states.

Nunn said the federal level is a different story. The U.S. government has declared martial law 11 times since 1776, but that was more than two centuries ago, and the Supreme Court hasnt clearly defined whether it currently has the legal authority to do so.

Martial law is a historical phenomenon  largely confined to the period between the start of the Civil War and the end of World War II, Nunn said.

On Dec. 7, 1941, immediately after the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, Hawaiis governor declared martial law on the islands. U.S. President Franklin Roosevelt approved the move, and the islands remained under military rule for nearly three years. Civilians charged with crimes went before military tribunals and the military controlled more mundane aspects of life, like traffic, parking and trash pickup.

After Hawaii, the use of state- or territory- level martial law ticked up, particularly as civil unrest grew during the Civil Rights Movement, but the actual implementation of martial law looked less like all-out military rule and more like a state governor calling upon the national guard for riot control.

When groups peddle claims that a military exercise schemes to declare martial law, Nunn said they likely think of the military rule in Hawaii and not the more frequently exhibited use of controlling riots. The most recent declaration of martial law in U.S. history happened in Maryland about 60 years ago, when the government imposed martial law that lasted over a year in the town of Cambridge, during the racially-charged civil unrest known as the Cambridge Riot of 1963.

Unlikelihood of martial law in modern-day U.S.

What stands in the way of declaring martial law? All the federal and state bodies that are already in charge, enforcing their own laws with their own forces, like the police departments that now exist in all 50 states, Nunn said. Their resources are so large and so heavily armed you dont necessarily need the military to come to a situation with federal force, he added.

Martial law is the absence of law, legal scholar Banks said. So, if martial law should ever be invoked, it should be in situations of a very extreme breakdown in civil authority, where the government isnt operating and cant operate normally, and where the courts are no longer open and operating.

That would only conceivably happen in cases like a catastrophic nuclear attack or a plague that kills a majority of the population, said retired Army officer Corn.

In any other instance, Corn believes a declaration of martial law would prompt immediate legal challenges, and that troops would balk.

I think military leadership would refuse to obey, Corn said. The militarys oath is to the Constitution, and we would expect that any military leaders  advised on what the limits of their legal authority are domestically  would step up and not follow such an order.
State authorities are investigating an shooting involving a Gallatin officer Saturday.

Two officers approached a suspicious vehicle Saturday in the parking of the city greenway on College Street.

When officers asked the one of the occupants to get out of the vehicle, a struggle ensued.

Police say they found a handgun on Devon Derantez Rutherford, 20, during the struggle and kicked the gun away. Police said Rutherford then produced a second weapon and fired a shot, striking one of the officers.

A second officers fired his service weapon, fatally shooting Rutherford.

The injured officer was transported to a local hospital for treatment of non-life threatening injuries.

Tennessee Bureau of Investigation is conducting an investigation to determine the events that led to the shooting.

Officers involved in the shooting were not named by TBI.

The investigation remains ongoing.

Reach reporter Craig Shoup by email at cshoup@gannett.com and on Twitter @Craig_Shoup. To support his work, sign up for a digital subscription to www.tennessean.com.

This article originally appeared on Nashville Tennessean: State investigating a shooting involving Gallatin officer Saturday
From steamed turtles to donkey burgers, here are 5 dishes that surprised me in China

Spriha Srivastava during a recent trip to China. Spriha Srivastava

I love trying different cuisines, but I wouldn't say I'm adventurous.

I tried Chinese delicacies like wonton soup, hotpot, Peking duck, and pork and shrimp dim sums.

I also saw steamed turtles, donkey burgers, sea cucumber, and octopus dim sums.

I love food, but I'm not the one to go on unconventional food journeys. Food, however, is a very important part of any holidays my family or I take where we love to try local delicacies, jot down recipes, and bring back spices.

During my recent trip to China, I spent a lot of time walking around the markets, visiting food stalls, and trying local flavors. By the end of my six-day trip, I had eaten everything from wonton soup to hotpot to Peking duck to pork and shrimp dim sums.

I was also intrigued by what was on the menu and sometimes on display. Here are five items that caught my attention.

1. Steamed turtles

Steamed Turtles with chilli oil at a restaurant in Beijing. Spriha Srivastava

This tray caught my eye as soon as I entered the restaurant.

My tour guide, Michael, and I had spent the morning climbing the Great Wall of China. I was famished and looking forward to a hot cup of Oolong tea and some chicken noodles.

I saw this tray of steamed turtles. I took a little peek and realized that there were a few more trays behind the counter ready to go. The manager told us that this was selling fast.

Soft-shell steamed turtles are a delicacy in the Jiangsu Province in China, according to the restaurant owner. The meat and the skin of the turtle are also sometimes used for turtle soup  a dish popular around the world.

2. Donkey burgers

Donkey Burger served in a breakfast buffet in Tianjin, China. Spriha Srivastava

"Have you ever had a donkey burger?" the waiter at the breakfast buffet in my hotel asked me.

"I have never had a donkey burger," I replied.

Donkey Burger at a breakfast buffet in Tianjin, China. Spriha Srivastava

"You must. It is delicious and it's our special today," the waiter said.

A donkey burger is (perhaps unsurprisingly) a hamburger-style dish that is very popular in the Heibei province in China, according to TasteAtlas.com. While donkey meat is a popular street food option, it is also found on the menu in some high-end restaurants in China.

The donkey burger had chunks of meat and was served with dressings on the side.

3. Sea cucumber

Sea cucumber served in a hotel in China. Spriha Srivastava

Sea cucumbers are creatures that live on the floor of the ocean. They have leathery skin and a bland taste and are often eaten raw, pickled, or fried.

The cucumber was cut into small pieces and was on display at the World Economic Forum's Summer Davos in Tianjin at a reception night organized by the city of Dalian.

While sea cucumbers are often eaten as a form of meat, according to the Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center, they have also been used as a form of traditional Chinese medicine for treating fatigue, arthritis, and cancer.

Sea cucumbers are popular not just in China but a number of other Asian countries including Japan and South Korea.

4. Octopus dim sum

Octopus dim sum sold in a restaurant in Beijing, China. Spriha Srivastava

Dim sums are less surprising and I have had a lot of seafood dim sums.

But this dim sum was stuffed only with octopus meat. If you have ever had 0ctopus, you will know that they taste similar to lobsters and the meat is chewy but also tender.

The owner of the dim sum stall said that octopus dim sums are less popular across China and his most popular dish was prawn and pork dim sum, but added that a few people try the octopus dim sum as well.

5. Spicy chicken feet

Spicy chicken feet served in a restaurant in Beijing, China. Spriha Srivastava

This may not be a very surprising dish for a lot of you. A quick Google showed me that this is a popular Asian delicacy that is served across the world, but it was a first for me.

According to Foreignpolicy.com, chicken feet are quite popular across China and the rest of the world, including in Jamaica, Mexico, and Peru. Chilli chicken feet can be found on the menu of a number of Asian restaurants no matter where you are.

The taste of chicken feet depends on how you prepare it and there are several ways to cook it.

The preparation I saw was marinated in chili sauce and left overnight and then stir-fried with more chili and sesame oil.

Update July 3, 2023: This story was updated to include the historical context of the foods mentioned.

Read the original article on Insider
Former White House adviser Stephen Miller sent a testy message to top law schools over the weekend following the Supreme Courts decision banning colleges from using affirmative action in their admission decisions.

The Republican gadfly preemptively pestered 200 of the nations law school deans with the threat of legal action if they violate, circumvent, bypass, subvert or otherwise program around the ruling in Students for Fair Admissions cases against Harvard and the University of North Carolina.

In its decision, the Supreme Court determined colleges cannot consider race as a factor in admissions based on the 14th Amendments equal protection clause.

Miller, who served as a top adviser to President Donald Trump from 2017 to 2021 and is now the president of America First Legal, announced his legal plans in a smug Twitter video on Saturday.

BREAKING: @America1stLegal sent a legal threat letter to every law school in America: comply with the Supreme Court ruling on affirmative action  or see you in court.



If youre a victim of discrimination call us at 1-877-AFL-5454 pic.twitter.com/BsUbaMYM1L  Stephen Miller (@StephenM) June 30, 2023

In the video, he told followers, Today, we sent a warning letter to the deans of 200 law schools around America, telling them that they must obey the Supreme Courts ruling striking down illegal racial discrimination and affirmative action.

If they try to violate, circumvent, bypass, subvert or otherwise program around that ruling, we are going to take them to court, Miller went on. We are going to hold them to account.

Further details about the campaign were not clear. HuffPost has reached out to America First Legal requesting more information about its plans.

While this weeks Supreme Court decision dealt a heavy blow to the practice of race-conscious college admissions, the opinion does not bar university applicants from discussing race outright.

The ruling, authored by Chief Justice John Roberts, still allows prospective students to discuss race in regard to their individual life experiences.

Affirmative action policies emerged after the civil rights movement of the 1960s, aiming to increase educational opportunities for Black and Latino students.

The policies incited accusations of reverse racism from white Americans, and in recent years, conservatives have argued affirmative action unfairly disadvantages Asian American college applicants.

Asian American students claims were the basis for both of the cases that led the Supreme Court to declare affirmative action programs in colleges unconstitutional.

Stephen Miller speaks during a television interview outside the White House on August 20, 2020.

Stephen Miller speaks during a television interview outside the White House on August 20, 2020.

Studies show that abandoning the practice will have profound effects on the number of Black and Latino students accepted into the nations most selective schools.

In a dissenting opinion, Justice Sonia Sotomayor wrote, The Court subverts the constitutional guarantee of equal protection by further entrenching racial inequality in education, the very foundation of our democratic government and pluralistic society.

Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson authored a dissent regarding the case against UNC, writing, It is no small irony that the judgment the majority hands down today will forestall the end of race-based disparities in this country, making the colorblind world the majority wistfully touts much more difficult to accomplish.

Millers America First Legal group has made a habit of inserting itself into hot-button conservative conflicts.

In May, the group hinted at action against beer giant Anheuser-Busch after its flagship brand Bud Light partnered with transgender influencer Dylan Mulvaney.

America First Legal asked shareholders upset with companies promoting transgender, LGBTQ and PRIDE products to get in contact, signaling possible plans for a class-action suit.

In 2021, AFL filed suit against the Biden administration, accusing them of discriminating against white farmers in its $1.9 billion COVID relief plans.

During the 2022 midterm elections, the group paid for radio ads accusing President Joe Biden and his administration of broad discrimination, asking, When did racism against white people become OK?

Related...
 Flash

Qu Dongyu delivers a speech after being re-elected as director-general of the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) in Rome, Italy, July 2, 2023. [Photo/Xinhua]

Qu Dongyu was re-elected as director-general of the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) here on Sunday during the ongoing 43rd session of the FAO Conference.

Qu was first elected in June 2019 to head the UN agency and is the first Chinese national to serve in the position.

Since assuming office, Qu has actively led the FAO to address the challenges concerning global food security and contribute to the food and agricultural development of all countries, especially developing countries. His efforts have been extensively recognized by FAO member nations.

Founded in 1945 and headquartered in Rome, Italy, FAO is a specialized UN agency leading cooperation in food and agriculture. The organization plays a vital role in global food and agricultural policy exchanges, standard-setting, information gathering and statistics.
OceanGate CEO Stockton Rush and the submersible pilot Randy Holt communicating with a support ship. Wilfredo Lee/AP

OceanGate hired teenage interns to design the Titan's electrical systems, The New Yorker reported.

"The whole electrical system  that was our design," the former intern Mark Walsh said in 2018.

A community college that sent interns to OceanGate stopped offering internships with it in 2019.

OceanGate CEO Stockton Rush employed college-aged interns to design the electrical systems for the Titan submersible that vanished on June 18, according to The New Yorker.

The New Yorker reported Saturday that Rush ignored numerous safety warnings from experts and hired interns from Washington State University to work on the Titan.

"The whole electrical system  that was our design, we implemented it, and it works," the former intern Mark Walsh told Washington State University's college newspaper in February 2018.

Walsh graduated in 2017 with a degree in electrical engineering, according to the college newspaper. He started as an intern before joining OceanGate full-time as their electrical-engineering lead.

Walsh also told the college newspaper that he hired a few interns from his alma mater and was keen to hire more to join him at OceanGate.

Insider was unable to independently verify which part of the Titan's electrical system Walsh's cohort of interns worked on. Representatives for OceanGate did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

Walsh's claim that a group of interns had created the electrical system on the Titan submersible is the latest of several bombshell revelations about what was happening behind the scenes at Rush's company.

The ambitious seafaring company previously touted its partnerships with NASA, Boeing, and the University of Washington on the Titan's design. These claims were later denied by Boeing and the University of Washington, who said they did not work on the Titan submersible.

Washington State University said in a statement to the local daily newspaper the Everett Herald on June 22 that they did not "have an alliance with OceanGate."

"Our relationship with OceanGate was through WSU Everett graduates who were working for the company and who were interested in giving back to their alma mater by mentoring a senior capstone project," Corrie Wilder, Washington State University Everett's executive director of marketing and communications told Insider.

Wilder told Insider that such projects help "provide students with expertly supervised practical experience" and "do not constitute formal contracts or partnerships" with the university.

"The hosting of WSU Everett capstone projects at OceanGate ended when those WSU alums left the company," Wilder added.

Walsh's LinkedIn page said he worked at OceanGate for two years before he left the firm in 2019.

Besides Washington State University, OceanGate was also taking in interns from Everett Community College's Ocean Research College Academy, per the Herald. However, the college stopped offering internships with OceanGate in 2019.

Ardi Kveven, the academy's executive director, told the Herald that "there was often a disconnect between the exploration community, which embraced pushing the envelope, and the more methodical scientific community."

Rush's previous comments on the Titan's development have come into the spotlight after multiple reports said that he ignored multiple safety warnings from experts.

All five passengers aboard the Titan, including Rush, were declared dead after the submersible imploded during a dive to the Titanic shipwreck on June 18.

Representatives for Everett Community College's Ocean Research College Academy did not immediately respond to requests for comment sent outside regular business hours.

Editor's note: July 4, 2023  This story has been updated with responses from Washington State University.

Read the original article on Insider
Spectators watch the annual Independence Day fireworks display outside the Philadelphia Museum of Art in Philadelphia. ED JONES/AFP via Getty Images

Philadelphia officials are urging residents to refrain from "celebratory" gunfire on July 4.

District Attorney Larry Krasner said firing a gun in the air is both dangerous and a crime.

"Don't do stupid," Krasner urged Philadelphians.

Officials are urging Philadelphians to use their brains on July 4, with the city's top prosecutor specifically asking residents not to get too drunk and start firing their guns into the air.

"Celebration should be safe," District Attorney Larry Krasner told reporters during a Monday morning press conference in West Philadelphia. "Obviously that takes different forms. Don't get behind the wheel intoxicated. Don't do stupid. This stuff is obvious."

Perhaps less obvious, at least to some, is that bullets that go up must come down. Unfortunately, Krasner said, "this city has a very sad, sad history of people who, either on New Year's Eve or around the Fourth of July, or on some other holiday, think it's a good time to take their guns and fire them in the air. Please don't do this."

Last year, two Philadelphia police officers were struck by bullets during a Fourth of July celebration on the Benjamin Franklin Parkway, prompting scores of celebrants to flee the scene and a massive response from law enforcement. Investigators later said the bullets came from the same weapon, but no perpetrator was ever arrested, with the gun possibly having been fired from more than a mile away, WHYY reported.

In January, an 87-year-old woman who was celebrating the New Year on the front steps of her home in the Port Richmond neighborhood was struck by a bullet just after midnight. The woman, who received stitches, told a local ABC affiliate that she agreed whoever was firing their gun into the air was "stupid."

"If it hit my head, I probably wouldn't be here," the woman said.

Krasner  who said there are at least four active cases in Pennsylvania where people are being prosecuted for celebratory gunfire  warned that the practice can also be dangerous for the perpetrator. He pointed to a case where a man, "drunk as a skunk," was killed by police who were responding to calls about gunfire in an alley, a shooting he described as justified.

"They don't know whether you're just there to shoot in the air or you're there to do a whole lot more than that," he said of police. "There are better things to do with your time."

Vonda Hairston, chief of court operations with the Philadelphia Sheriff's Office, said the city  where a pandemic-era spike in gun violence has only begun falling this year  said residents thinking of celebrating with a firearm should refamiliarize themselves with the concept of gravity.

"What goes up must come down," Hairston said. "So we are pleading with anyone and everyone who believes this a fun thing to refrain from it. Not just tomorrow, but every day."

Have a news tip? Email this reporter: cdavis@insider.com

Read the original article on Business Insider
The Spirit Airlines ticket counter turned chaotic at Orlando International Airport last Tuesday evening, and the wild scene was all caught on camera.

According to an arrest affidavit from the Orlando Police Department, an Ohio man involved in a scuffle with an officer ended up arrested.

According to the police report, officers went to the ticket counter around 9:30 p.m. to investigate a disturbance, with people becoming aggressive with the Spirit staff and threatening them.

In widely shared cellphone footage after officers arrived, a group of passengers and Spirit employees gather around, yelling and screaming.

Then a man in a light shirt and slacks takes down a uniformed officer, straddling him on the ground as a screaming woman in pink hovers over both of them.

READ MORE: Drunk man shocked at Orlando airport

Stop! Stop! she yells as she throws her body onto the men who are intertwined on the ground. Nooooo! Nooooo!

Oh, my God, oh, my God, oh, my God, says a different woman off camera, about 20 feet away. Lets not...

Two uniformed officers manage to pull the passenger off of the cop and pin him down as bystanders zoom in with their cameras and more police race to the scene.

READ MORE: Passenger melts down over crying baby

The report says that the man taking down the officer in the video is Edward Hariston, 41. Investigators say he was arguing with a ticket agent over delays and then escalated matters by reaching over the counter and hitting the workers computer keyboard.

When an officer arrived to defuse the situation and remove one of Haristons hands from the keyboard, things got more out of control and turned physical, according to the police report.

We both fell onto the ground and Hariston put one of his arms around my neck in a choke hold and began to squeeze, restricting my airway, making it unable for me to breathe, the officer wrote. I began to get dizzy and immediately spotty, as my airflow was restricted, and I was beginning to lose consciousness.

Hariston was arrested and taken to the hospital for medical evaluation, then transported to the Orange County Jail, held on $50,450 bond.

He is facing one count of attempted first-degree murder of a law enforcement officer, resisting arrest with violence, battery on a law enforcement officer and disorderly conduct.

Spirit did not immediately respond to the Miami Heralds request for comment, but a witness to the melee, passenger Marianne Capoverdi, told WESH-Channel 2 in Orlando that before the incident tensions were very high because we were not feeling like we were getting much information.

I was scared, added passenger Brenda Garrison.It was really scary.
Student-loan borrowers who qualified for the first debt-relief plan are not yet guaranteed relief under Biden's new route

The Supreme Court ruled in a 6-to-3 decision that Biden's loan-forgiveness plan was unconstitutional. Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images

Biden wants to cancel student debt under a new law after the Supreme Court struck down his plan.

He said he would use the Higher Education Act, which requires hearings and public comment.

It's unclear at this point who would qualify for student-debt relief under Biden's new plan.

It's unclear who would get student-loan forgiveness under President Joe Biden's new plan.

Last week, the Supreme Court struck down Biden's first plan to cancel up to $20,000 in student debt using the HEROES Act of 2003, which allows the education secretary to waive or modify student-loan balances in connection with a national emergency, like COVID-19.

It's not the end of the road. Just hours after the court handed down the decision, Biden announced a new plan to cancel student debt using the Higher Education Act of 1965, which doesn't require a national emergency for relief.

The Higher Education Act says the US Education Department can "enforce, pay, compromise, waive, or release any right, title, claim, lien, or demand" related to federal student debt. The education secretary, Miguel Cardona, announced on Friday that he had started the negotiated-rulemaking process  which includes hearings and public comment  to get the ball rolling on using that law.

The HEROES Act, in contrast, did not require negotiated rulemaking and would have allowed the department to move through implementation much quicker. Given the new standards surrounding the Higher Education Act, it's not yet guaranteed that the same borrowers who benefitted from Biden's first proposal would qualify for the president's new plan.

"The Department will design the parameters of the program with public participation over the coming months," the department's FAQ stated. "However, the Secretary has directed his staff to explore policy options for debt relief that will help as many people as possible."

It's unclear what those policy options would be at this point, but the department's FAQ said that "the Secretary has begun a new rulemaking process to consider other ways to provide debt relief to as many working and middle-class borrowers as possible."

Bharat Ramamurti, the deputy director of the National Economic Council, also said during a Friday press briefing that "one of the things about the rulemaking process is that we can't actually prejudge its outcome. Part of how we do this process is that we initiate it, we put a proposal on the table, we work with stakeholders to get their input. That ends up shaping the scope of the proposal."

The new process for implementing Biden's debt-relief plan under the Higher Education Act could take months, and borrowers are still scheduled to resume payments in October. To provide additional relief, Cardona announced a 12-month "on-ramp" period following the payment resumption to ensure that borrowers who missed payments were not reported to credit agencies. The department has also finalized its new income-driven repayment plan  known as the SAVE plan  which is expected to make borrowers' monthly payments cheaper.

Given the prolonged timeline for relief, some Democratic lawmakers want Biden to consider additional measures so borrowers do not have to resume payments without the loan forgiveness they were counting on. Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez of New York told CNN on Sunday that "people should not be incurring interest during this 12-month on-ramp period."

"So, I highly urge the administration to consider suspending those interest payments," she said.

Rep. Ro Khanna urged Biden to extend the student-loan-payment pause again under the Higher Education Act  even though the debt-ceiling bill the president recently signed into law codified the end of that pause.

"Now that SCOTUS has blocked student debt relief, @POTUS must use his executive authority under the Higher Education Act to cancel up to $50,000 of debt and extend the pause on student loans," Khanna wrote on Twitter. "Student debt is crushing young people. We can't abandon them."

Read the original article on Business Insider
A U.S. Supreme Court ruling letting a business owner refuse to create wedding websites for same-sex couples could cast a long shadow over a court case challenging part of Jacksonvilles human rights ordinance.

The Jacksonville lawsuit doesnt focus on gay people, but Fridays Supreme Court ruling about a Colorado web designer shifted boundaries on how business owners First Amendment rights apply to laws against discrimination.

That could have a big impact on how a judge in Jacksonville decides the suit the Queen of Angels Catholic Bookstore filed in February seeking an injunction to ensure the citys HRO couldnt be used to require employees to address transgender people by pronouns reflecting their sex at birth.

The fallout: Supreme Court First Amendment ruling on LGBTQ rights: What's it mean for Florida?

The Jacksonville lawsuit: Rejecting transgender labels, Catholic store's lawsuit fights Jacksonville human rights law

Trauma session: How this years Florida legislative session reopened wounds, left scars

A string of similar lawsuits could follow soon, said one scholar.

Were going to see a lot of these right-not-to-speak cases coming up, said Clay Calvert, an emeritus professor at the University of Floridas law school and a fellow at the right-leaning American Enterprise Institute.

Figures of religious icons were among items for sale at the Queen of Angels Catholic Store in this 2012 photo. The store, which was sold to a new owner in 2017 and now operates on San Jose Boulevard in Mandarin, is suing to challenge Jacksonville's human rights ordinance as an infringement on religious and free-speech rights.(Photo: Bob Self/Florida Times-Union)

The ruling in the Supreme Court case, 303 Creative LLC v Elenis, wont change how anti-discrimination ordinances like Jacksonvilles are enforced for things like being served at a restaurant or getting a hotel room, Calvert said.

But he said the ruling could allow more people to refuse services that are personal expressions of the people being hired  website creators, calligraphers, maybe hairstylists.

Those different jobs connect because their work could, at least in some cases, be so personal that a court would consider their product speech, and the Supreme Court ruling prioritized peoples First Amendment free-speech rights over rules banning discrimination.

Lawyers for the owner of Queen of Angels and Colorado web designer Lorie Smith both argued their clients will do business with anyone but said the businesses shouldnt have to do things owners find violate their values.

Lorie Smiths win at the Supreme Court was a win for every Americans free speech rights. The Court affirmed that the government cannot coerce anyone to speak a message that violates their core beliefs, Queen of Angels attorney Hal Frampton said by email.

A tiny framed image of the Virgin Mary with the Baby Jesus is one of the items for sale at the Queen of Angels Catholic Store in this 2012 photo.

We are hopeful that this win will continue to impact other cases  where we are seeing laws that restrict free speech and impose their own ideology on individuals who dont agree, said Frampton, senior counsel at the religion-oriented legal group Alliance Defending Freedom. Like Lorie, Christie DeTrude, owner of the bookstore, should not have to wait for the government to punish her to fight these unjust laws.

Alliance Defending Freedom has handled both cases for the plaintiffs.

Both Smiths and DeTrudes businesses went to court before they had been charged with violating anti-discrimination laws, asking judges upfront for orders protecting them from laws they argued violated their free-speech rights.

In Jacksonville, Chief U.S. District Judge Timothy Corrigan rejected a request for a preliminary injunction and dismissed the cases original complaint in June. But Corrigan said a new version of the complaint could be filed by the end of this work week.

He also told lawyers for both sides to develop arguments about whether the bookstore qualified for an exemption that Jacksonvilles law allows for religious corporations, businesses that lawyers told the judge they hadnt found much description of in earlier court cases. If the exemption fits the bookstore, Calvert said the Jacksonville case might be rendered moot and the store could get a pass on Jacksonvilles law regardless.

This article originally appeared on Florida Times-Union: Jacksonville HRO lawsuit may be shaped by Supreme Court LGBTQ ruling
What the Supreme Courts Student Loan Decision Will Mean for Black Women

In a significant blow to the Biden administrations plans, the Supreme Court has ruled against the program to forgive student loan debt for over 43 million borrowers in the United States. According to ABC News, the 6-3 decision, written by Chief Justice John Roberts, concluded that the Department of Education exceeded its authority by attempting to eliminate more than $400 billion in federal student loan debt.

The program aimed to cancel $10,000 in student debt for borrowers earning less than $125,000, with an additional provision of up to $20,000 for borrowers who received Pell grants, using emergency powers due to the pandemics economic hardships.

Six Republican-led states, including Nebraska, Missouri, Arkansas, Iowa, Kansas, and South Carolina, challenged the programs legality, claiming executive overreach. The Biden administration argued that the plan was lawful under the 2003 HEROES Act, which allows the government to provide relief to student loan recipients during a national emergency.

Roberts rejected the administrations argument, writing precedent requires that Congress speak clearly before a Department Secretary can unilaterally alter large sections of the American economy.

Justice Elena Kagan criticized the courts decision, contending that it overstepped its authority.

From the first page to the last, todays opinion departs from the demands of judicial restraint, Kagan said in her dissent. At the behest of a party that has suffered no injury, the majority decides a contested public policy issue properly belonging to the politically accountable branches and the people they represent.

Black Women Will Suffer The Most

Earlier this month, The Motley Fool revealed that Black women are uniquely burdened by student loan debt. Black women have more student loan debt than any other group. Black women typically carry an average of $41,466 in undergraduate student loan debt within one year of graduating.

The increasing problem underscores the immediate need for specific remedies to tackle the systemic obstacles contributing to this inequality.

I was ashamed about my [student loan] debt, Tanisha Watkins, Ph.D. told 21Ninety. Im in a Facebook group that talks about student loan forgiveness. Seeing other peoples numbers made me realize WOAH! Being part of this group has put in perspective that a 6-figure student loan debt is a lot, but there are people who have more. It put things in a bigger perspective.

Whats Next?

The Supreme Courts ruling is a setback for President Joe Biden, who made addressing student loan debt a significant campaign promise. The loan forgiveness program was unveiled just before the 2022 midterm elections, with Biden highlighting the life-changing impact it would have on middle-class Americans.

According to USA Today the Biden administration will now work to forgive student loan debt through the Higher Education Act of 1965. That piece of legislation authorizes the education secretary to modify, waive or compromise federal student loan under certain circumstances.

The post What the Supreme Courts Student Loan Decision Will Mean for Black Women appeared first on 21Ninety.
A 53-year-old Pennsylvania man is in custody after being arrested in connection with the fatal shooting of two men and a dog Saturday night in Pylesville, according to the Harford County Sheriffs Office.

Pennsylvania State Police took the suspect into custody two hours after the double homicide just before 9 p.m. ET Saturday. Investigators believe he shot and killed Timothy Wayne Witherite, 62, and David Joseph Octavec, 70, as well as a family dog, the sheriffs office said in a Sunday news release.

Harford deputies responded to the 1700 block of Scott Road, less than half a mile from the Pennsylvania-Maryland border, at about 8:49 p.m. ET Saturday for a report of two people being shot, and found the men suffering from gunshot wounds to their upper bodies, according to the release. Both Pylesville residents died at the scene.

Investigators believe the suspect shot Witherite inside the home and Octavec outside the home before fleeing, according to police, who said the suspect was known to the victims but that the motive for the shooting is still under investigation.

The suspect is being held in a Pennsylvania jail pending his extradition to Maryland, police said.

Those with information on the homicide are asked to call investigators at 443-409-3154 or anonymously use the Metro Crime Stoppers tip line at 1-866-7LOCKUP.

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Sweden will not get Turkey's nod for NATO bid unless it stops sheltering 'terrorists' -Erdogan

ANKARA (Reuters) - Turkey will not lift its opposition to Sweden joining NATO unless it stops harbouring groups Ankara considers to be terrorists, President Tayyip Erdogan said on Monday.

Sweden and Finland applied for NATO membership last year, ditching long-held policies of military non-alignment after Russia's invasion of Ukraine. Applications for membership must be approved by all NATO members, but Turkey and Hungary have yet to clear Sweden's bid.

Turkey has repeatedly said that Sweden needs to take additional steps against supporters of the outlawed Kurdistan Workers' Party (PKK) and members of a network Ankara holds responsible for a 2016 coup attempt. Turkey treats both groups as terrorist organisations.

Turkey expects Sweden to stop harbouring members of both groups, Erdogan said in a speech after a cabinet meeting.

"Everyone should acknowledge that they cannot form a friendship with Turkey by allowing terrorists to demonstrate in the most central squares of their cities," he said.

In recent months, demonstrators in Stockholm waved flags showing support for the PKK, which is also deemed a terrorist group by Turkey's Western allies, including Sweden.

"Our position, expectations and promises that were made have been all clear. At the moment, we defend the same principles that we defended last year. We just want them to remain faithful to what they signed," Erdogan also said.

Sweden says it has upheld its part of a deal struck with Turkey in Madrid last year aimed at addressing Ankara's security concerns, including bringing in a new anti-terrorism law this month. But Turkey says Sweden's change of legislation was "meaningless" while PKK supporters hold protests in the country.

NATO Secretary-General Jens Stoltenberg last month said that Sweden and Turkey would convene a high level meeting in Brussels on the possible accession of Sweden to NATO before the alliance's summit in Vilnius this month.

A demonstration in Stockholm last week on the first day of Muslim Eid al Adha holidays which included burning of a Koran further angered Turkey.

(Reporting by Huseyin Hayatsever and Ezgi Erkoyun, Editing by William Maclean)
By Johan Ahlander

KARLSKRONA, Sweden (Reuters) - When Sweden joins NATO, it will help the alliance redress its vulnerability in northwest Europe  the Baltic Sea, a shared waterway with Russia with a bottleneck for access to ports in eight states including Germany.

Sweden's key to keeping the waters navigable in a conflict is its world-leading submarine fleet, which analysts say holds some of the most advanced conventional submarines ever built.

"The Swedish submarine fleet is well prepared for this environment and will add greatly to NATO's overall submarine capabilities in the Baltic," a NATO official told Reuters.

The shallow Baltic, called a "flooded meadow" by some in marine circles, has an average depth of around 60 meters, making it too shallow for the nuclear-powered submarines that comprise the bulk of Russia's submarine fleet and all of the U.S navy's.

Sweden has three advanced Gotland-class submarines and one older model which will be retired when two new design A26 vessels are delivered in 2027 and 2028, giving it five by the end of the decade.

Q: What makes the Swedes so strong?

Experience. Sweden has been operating submarines in the Baltic since 1904. None of the neighbouring countries have been as active underwater as the Swedes.

"We have regional expertise, which fills a gap, expertise that NATO doesn't have," said Submarine Flotilla Commander Fredrik Linden.

The Baltic is also a complex waterway: With lots of rivers feeding it, it has widely varying salinity levels. These change both the buoyancy of a submarine and the way sound travels under water, and it takes local knowledge to navigate successfully.

Sweden's submarines can stay underwater for weeks.

While submerged, conventional submarines run on battery power. Most need to resurface after a couple of days so their diesel engines can run to recharge the batteries.

But Swedish submarines have liquid oxygen stored in tanks on board to run the diesel engines underwater to recharge the batteries, so they can stay submerged for longer and reduce the risk of detection.

Q: How will they help in future?

In 30 or 40 years or maybe sooner, underwater warfare will likely be autonomous, says Sebastian Bruns, Senior Researcher at the Institute for Security Policy at Kiel University. In anticipation of that, Sweden has two new submarines on order, due to be delivered in 2027 and 2028.

Known as the A26, the SAAB Kockums-built vessels will be bigger and more versatile than the Gotlands and have a unique feature: a 1.5 meter diameter dive-lock, called a multi mission-portal, in the bow.

This will let remotely operated vehicles (ROVs), autonomous vehicles or groups of divers in and out easily. Bruns says that makes the submarine ideal for seabed warfare  for instance the protection or destruction of pipelines or other critical infrastructure on the seabed.

"Seabed warfare is the hottest issue right now in naval circles," said Bruns, referring to the 2022 explosions that wrecked the Nord Stream gas pipelines that run beneath the Baltic.

ROVs can perform tasks such as retrieving or placing objects on the seabed, scanning large areas, or placing or destroying mines. They can also plunge deeper than regular submarines.

(Edited by Sara Ledwith)
Officials are warning the public to use caution if youre swimming on the south shore of Edgartown after numerous reports of Portuguese man o wars washing up on the beach.

The man o war is a venomous predator, often mistaken for a jellyfish, that lurks up to six inches above the waterline on the beach, looking for small fish or crustaceans to feed on, according to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA). The animal is a species of siphonophore and may be blue, violet, or pink.

Their tentacles contain stinging nematocysts, which arent typically deadly to humans but cause extremely painful welts on exposed skin.

The Edgartown Parks Department says if you see the animal in the water, the best thing to alert a lifeguard or park patrol on South Beach or a Ranger if youre on Norton Point.

The tentacles contain stinging nematocysts, microscopic capsules loaded with coiled, barbed tubes that deliver venom capable of paralyzing and killing small fish and crustaceans. While the man o wars sting is rarely deadly to people, it packs a painful punch and causes welts on exposed skin, the Edgartown Parks Department wrote on Facebook.

No beaches have been closed yet due to their presence.

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By Fabian Hamacher and Ann Wang

FANGSHAN, Taiwan (Reuters) - Taiwan's military carried out live fire drills on its strategically-located southern coast on Monday, firing missiles from highly mobile armoured cars to destroy targets close to shore in a simulation of repelling invading forces.

China, which views democratically governed Taiwan as its own territory, has ramped up military pressure over the past three years to try to assert its sovereignty claim, and the island's armed forces routinely practice seeing off a Chinese attack.

Camouflaged Taiwan army Humvees roared around the coastal drill area in Pingtung county's Fangshan near the far southern tip of the island, before firing off U.S.-made TOW anti-tank missiles to destroy static targets near the shoreline.

"Most of the drills we carried out today involved live artillery because the defence exercise needs to be similar to actual combat, allowing our army to be confident and have the capability to protect our homeland," Defence Ministry spokesperson Sun Li-fang told reporters.

Pingtung, which looks out on the Taiwan Strait, South China Sea, Pacific Ocean and Bashi Channel that separates Taiwan from the Philippines, is a highly strategic spot to watch Chinese military activity, and a potential landing site in an invasion.

Taiwan holds its most important drills, the annual Han Kuang exercises, at the end of this month, with a focus on combating a blockade and preserving the fighting ability of its forces.

Those drills are expected to see air force jets operating at civilian airports, including the island's main international airport at Taoyuan, to practice using their facilities in case air bases are rendered unusable in a war.

China practised precision strikes and blockading the island in drills around it in April after Taiwan President Tsai Ing-wen met U.S. House of Representatives Speaker Kevin McCarthy in Los Angeles.

Beijing has never renounced using force to bring the island under its control. Taiwan rejects Beijing's sovereignty claims and has vowed to defend its freedom and democracy.

(Reporting by Fabian Hamacher and Ann Wang; Writing by Ben Blanchard; Editing by Clarence Fernandez)
Pouring GreenLight treatment in a bee hive.

An RNA-enriched sugar syrup is poured into a beehive as part of the trial for a new varroa mite treatment that could pave the way for an agricultural revolution when it comes to treating for pests. Credit - Peter Essick

After more than a decade in the industry, commercial beekeeper Liana Teigen Moreno thought she knew what she was doing when it came to making honey. A hipster pixie with a platinum crew cut and bright blue eyes, Teigen tends to 800 beehives in northern Florida. Her experience at the University of Floridas Honey Bee Research Lab in Gainesville taught her everything she needed to know about bee diseases, knowledge that came in handy late last year when she realized that an insidious parasite that she had first learned about working her way through college as a part-time beekeeper had decimated her hivesdespite her best efforts. I wasnt quite thinking that I was immune, but Id gotten a little cocky, she confesses.

She is not alone. American beekeepers lost nearly half their managed bee colonies this year, according to an annual bee survey released by the nonprofit research group Bee Informed Partnership on June 22. Its a staggering blow for an industry that not only provides honey, but vital pollination services for nearly a third of the fruits and vegetables Americans eat, from blueberries to strawberries, peaches, melons and cucumbers.

When it comes to agricultural animals, domesticated bees are as important to the U.S. food supply as cows, chickens and pigs, yet the losses continue to climb. This years 48% annual loss, covering the 2022-2023 winter season, is up from 2021-2022s 39%, and nearly on par with 2020-2021s 50.8% mortality ratethe worst since the survey started in 2008. Climate change, pesticide-laden crops, and declining wild plant biodiversity all play a role in honeybee colony death, but the biggest threat is the varroa destructor, an invasive, parasitic mite smaller than a pin head that nonetheless extracts a big toll from the bees it feeds upon. Varroa mites have plagued beekeepers ever since arriving in the U.S. from Asian honeybees in the mid 1980s, but in recent years, commercially available treatments have lost their efficiency, even as the mites viral load increases. Varroa mites are the number one threat, says Teigen. Its something that beekeepers have been struggling to control for years, and to be honest, its starting to feel a bit like a losing battle. Really what we need to turn the tide is more tools in our tool belt.

Read more: The Bee Whisperers of Slovenia Have a Plan to Save Colonies From Climate Change

A new tool is in the pipeline: Boston-based biotechnology company Greenlight Biosciences has developed an anti-mite RNA treatment for beehives that uses a similar technology to Pfizers breakout COVID-19 vaccine. Only in this case the RNA is used to suppress a protein vital to the reproductive system of the varroa mite, instead of creating a dummy protein designed to prime the human immune response. If DNA is the blueprint at the core of cell development in every species on earth, RNA is the cement mixer creating custom protein building blocks. Each RNA formula is so specifically tailored that it only works on one targeta precision strike compared to a wide-spectrum pesticides fire-bombing, which can cause collateral damage in other, beneficial, insects.

Still in its infancy, this RNA-based technology heralds a new revolution in preventing disease and staving off pests across the agricultural spectrum, from the botrytis that beards blueberries and grapes with fuzzy gray mold to the Colorado potato beetle and maize-munching fall armyworm that are devastating crops from North America to southern Africa, and even the spider mites that suck sap from common houseplants. RNA manipulation has the potential to become a powerful new tool in the treatment of some of agricultures most pernicious pests, says Andrey Zarur, who co-founded Greenlight Biosciences in 2009, with the goal of finding biological solutions to the overuse of chemicals as pesticides, herbicides, and fungicides in the worlds food system. RNA will be as revolutionary to our food supply as it has already been to human health through the COVID vaccines.

Unlike their wild pollinator cousins, honeybees are in no danger of going extinct. When a beekeeper like Teigen loses half her colonies, she builds new ones by splitting what remains and restocking them with young queens, who will go on to lay thousands of eggs for their new hives. But the process is time consuming and labor intensive, and it means decline in honey production as well as pollination services. When beekeeper Barry Hart launched his honey business in Fargo, Ga., in 1986, a 10% loss would have been considered catastrophic. These days he is happy if he can keep it below 40%, and hive splitting is an essential part of his annual workload, slotted between pollination gigs and honey production. Used to be, the only thing I ever worried about was black bears, he says, in a southern Georgia drawl. Now its mites I cant even see without my readers.

Modern agriculture would not exist without modern beekeeping. Of the 100 crops that account for 90% of the worlds food supply, 71 rely on bee pollination, according to the Food and Agriculture Organization. Take Californias $5 billion almond crop for example. For six weeks, starting every February, 1.35 million acres of almond trees burst into bloom. Like avocado, apple, and peach trees, their pollen is too heavy to be carried by the wind, and so they must be pollinated by insects in order to produce nuts. But decades of industrial monocropping, combined with heavy pesticide use to keep those commodity crops healthy, have decimated native pollinators. To get the job done, beekeepers from all corners of the United States haul their hivessome 1.2 millionto Californias central valley by the semi load.

Beekeepers earn about $200 a hive for their effort, more than they would ever make producing honey, but it comes with a cost. Billions of bees buzzing around one small area are a pathogen playground. Its like a cesspool, says Hart, who nonetheless goes every year. Every beekeeper from the bottom of the ladder to the top is there. You have no idea who your bees are sitting next to, what kind of viruses they have, and whether they have mites.

Read more: Beekeepers Working Harder Than Ever As Nearly Half of U.S. Honeybee Colonies Died Last Year

After layovers in North Dakota for alfalfa pollination and Florida for oranges, among other crops, Hart brings his bees back to Georgia to harvest their honey and prepare for winter. By then the mite population, acquired in Californias almond orchards, has grown exponentially. The varroa mite is not a tick, but it acts like one, hopping from one foraging bee to another, sinking its barbed tongue into the torso and feeding on haemolymph, the insectile equivalent of blood. On a human scale, says Teigen, it would be like having a tick the size of a sewer rat sucking from your gut.

On a fully grown bee, an adult varroa is a nuisance and a viral vector. In the hives wax-walled brood cells, where nurse bees tend to the next generation, it is a population bomb. Varroa mites reproduce when a pregnant mite, hitchhiking into the hive on the torso of an adult bee, sneaks into a brood cell hosting a larval bee. Worker bees stuff the cell with brood food, a combination of honey and protein-rich pollen designed to nurture the developing pupa, and cap it with wax until the bee is ready to emerge. Meanwhile, the female varroa mite gets to work, depositing her offspring in the cell and feeding on the developing bee larva. The mites children mate, and by the time the fully grown bee is ready to emerge from her cell, she is both weakened from nutrient loss and carrying a new cohort of pregnant varroa mites ready to spread the good news, deadpans Teigen. As elegant and beautiful as a honeybee colony is, varroa mites come in and weaponize it. As beekeepers, we want to be raising bees, but we end up raising mites as well.

Beekeeper and researcher Liana Teigen uses a smoker to calm bees before looking for their queen. Her work is part of an ongoing trial for Greenlight Biosciences, a biotech startup that uses RNA technology to treat for common agricultural pests. Peter Essick

Many of the young bees emerge unable to fly, afflicted with deformed wings, carrying viruses, and so depleted that they cannot fulfill their primary function of tending to the next generation of young broods. In this way, a healthy-seeming hive can collapse over the course of just a few weeks. Beekeepers have access to multiple products designed to combat mites in beehives, from vaporized forms of formic and oxalic acids that must be applied while wearing protective equipment, to potent insecticides and miticides that render any resulting honey unsellable due to their toxic residues. The problem is that both kinds of treatments harm bees, and increasingly they are becoming less effective against mites. When Teigen saw the mite devastation in her own hives despite previous applications of her usual treatments, she overreacted, trying a different formulation that ended up killing as many bees as it saved. Treating my bees is a necessary evil, she says. But a lot of times I feel like Im crossing my fingers and hoping that it isnt too strong or that the queen wont accidentally get killed in the process.

Hart, who used to treat his bees twice a year for mites, now has to increase the frequency, throwing his tight pollination schedule off and further reducing his honey yields. Its gotten to the point where if were gonna stay in business, were gonna have to do something else, because mites are getting harder and harder to kill, he says.

That something else looks like nothing Hart had ever seen before, at least not before Greenlight approached him with an offer to trial their new mite treatment on some of his colonies. Instead of a spray or a vapor, the Greenlight version, which doesnt have a commercial name yet as it is still in regulatory review at the Environmental Protection Agency, looks like a white, padded mailer filled with syrup. One side is perforated, and when it is placed inside of a hive, the RNA-laden sugar solution drips down into the honeycomb, where nurse bees take it up to feed their brooddousing any mites that happen to be hiding in the cells in the process. Because the RNA is designed to suppress only one protein essential for varroa mite development, it has no impact on the bees.

If the varroa mite weaponizes the elegance of bee reproduction for its own procreative ends, Greenlights RNA solution weaponizes that weaponization by stopping the reproductive cycle in its tracks. If they can come up with good evidence that its working, that it doesnt have side effects, and that its effective in the field at low cost to the beekeeper, thats exactly what beekeepers need, says Nathalie Steinhauer, science coordinator for the Bee Informed Partnership, which runs the annual colony-loss survey. If anything, its good to have a new [option], so that we dont have to rely as much on the few existing treatments that are already gathering resistance in the varroa mites.

Eli Powell, a microbiologist at the University of Texas, Austins Nancy A. Moran Research and Lab Group, which focuses on insect and bacterial genomics, calls Greenlights RNA solution positive. We need new ideas in order to combat a lot of these problems that bees are facing. At the Moran Lab, he and his colleagues have developed an RNA solution that tackles another bee pathogen called nosema. His team has genetically modified bee gut bacteria to produce anti-nosema RNA within the bees digestive system, a different delivery mechanism that shares the same base RNA technology. I dont see anything but growth in terms of using these types of approaches, he says.

When Hart first tried the treatment as part of a Greenlight trial two years ago, he had his doubts. How could something that wasnt even designed to kill mites work? But the contraceptive effect soon became evident. Within a few weeks he could tell just by lifting a lid which beehives had been treated, and which had received a placebo. Because at the end of the trial, most of those would be dead. The others will be full of happy healthy bees.

Teigen is now in the process of testing the Greenlight miticide on nucsmini colonies designed to breed queensto make sure it has no adverse impact. A queen will mate with dozens of drones on her maiden flight, collecting spermatozoa before returning to her hive for a lifetime of egg-laying. If she mates well, she will have enough sperm to last a few years. But if she runs out, or doesnt mate at all, her hive will turn against her. It is essential to ensure that the Greenlight treatment doesnt impact her flight, or her subsequent ability to lay eggs. After Teigens bad experience overtreating her bees last year with a common chemical miticide, she is eager to see a product on the market that does the job without hurting her beloved bees. Putting an insecticide in a box of bugs to kill one bug, but not the other bug, has always felt very counter intuitive, she says. Having something with a much lower stake would be life changing, for me and my bees. (While the RNA treatment has no impact on the bees honey, neither Hart nor Teigen will sell any of the honey produced by bees in the trial, nor will they harvest honey produced during a treatment.)

Greenlight is in the final stages of regulatory approval for its first RNA solution, designed to combat the potato beetle, but its varroa mite treatment is still months away. The company submitted the solution for regulatory review at the EPA in February, and the process can take up to two years. But the elegant aspect of RNA-based treatments is their versatility. Now that the company understands the varroa mite system down to the individual protein level, it doesnt take much to switch the formulation to target other varroa proteins. Or even other mites for that matter. Which could come in handy. Another invasive mite, called Tropilaelaps, is already wreaking havoc among Asian and European hives, and has recently been spotted on U.S. soil. It reproduces at an even faster rate. At least until it meets a fragment of RNA with its name on it.
Tell City police officer and suspect killed in gunfight at hospital

A Tell City, Indiana, police officer and a suspect in a domestic dispute were shot and killed Monday morning at Perry County Memorial Hospital.

A state police official said Tell City Police Department Sgt. Heather Glenn, 47, and Sean Hubert, 34, both died after a gunfight involving multiple law enforcement agencies.

Investigators released additional information about the incident Monday morning. According to an Indiana State Police news release, the shooting followed an investigation into a "domestic dispute" between Hubert and an unnamed female victim.

The victim reportedly suffered injuries and was receiving treatment at Perry County Memorial Hospital early Monday morning when Glenn, who was investigating the incident, spoke with her and then took part in a search for Hubert.

After police left the hospital, the victim reportedly advised healthcare personnel that Hubert was on his way there.

Local police and sheriff's deputies responded around 12:50 a.m. Monday and a struggle with Hubert ensued.

"Sergeant Glenn made contact and attempted to arrest Hubert," the ISP release states. "Glenn attempted to deploy an electronic-controlled weapon but it was ineffective."

The ISP said Hubert produced a firearm during the altercation and Glenn suffered a fatal gunshot wound. Officers with the Tell City and Cannelton Police departments returned fire and struck Hubert.

Both Glenn and Hubert were pronounced dead at the scene.

Just after 10:25 a.m. Monday, a Deaconess Health System spokesperson said Perry County Memorial Hospital's emergency room remained open, but all other services were closed due to the overnight shooting.

"The hospital is also working closely with local law enforcement, and all questions regarding the incident should be directed to Indiana State Police," a news release states.

Glenn worked for the Perry County Sheriff's Office and the Tell City Police Department for nearly 20 years.

Tell City Police Chief Derrick Lawalin said Glenn's death represented a "tremendous loss" for the agency.

"We've lost a dear colleague, a dear friend," Lawalin said. "Sgt. Glenn, she's a cornerstone of our department. We are truly heartbroken."

Lawalin said the agency's "thoughts and prayers" were with Hubert's family as well.

The Evansville Police Department extended condolences to Glenn's family and Tell City police Monday morning.

The ISP described the investigation as "ongoing" as of 11 a.m. Autopsies for Glenn and Hubert have been scheduled.

This story was updated at 11:45 a.m. Monday.

Houston Harwood can be contacted at houston.harwood@courierpress.com

This article originally appeared on Evansville Courier & Press: Tell City police officer killed at Perry County Memorial Hospital
How to tell if a contact is still in your eye  and find it when it's lost

Volodymyr Kalyniuk/Getty Images

Many contact users have "lost" their lenses in their eyes.

It can be hard to tell whether a contact is still in your eye, doctors say.

Luckily, contacts can't ever slip behind the eye.

If you're one of the 45 million Americans who wear contact lenses, you might have experienced the anxiety that happens when you can't tell whether a contact is still in your eye.

While it may seem unlikely to people who haven't worn contacts, it's common for lenses to slip out of place and become difficult to find, says Dr. Inna Lazar, an eye doctor with Greenwich Eye Care in Greenwich, Connecticut. When that happens, the most important thing to remember is "don't panic," Lazar said.

"It's crucial to stay calm and not to rub your eyes, as this can potentially cause the lens to tear or damage your eye," she said.

Here's how to tell if a contact is still in your eye  and get it out safely.

Start by washing your hands

Before you start fishing around for a lost lens, wash your hands very well. That way, you won't introduce any germs or dirt that could irritate your eye more.

Check your vision

If you're not sure whether the contact is still in your eye, start by checking your vision. The differences in vision can be slight, so cover the other eye, Lazar says. Then, evaluate your vision in the eye where the contact is missing.

"If your vision is blurry or distorted in one eye, it could be a sign that the lens has moved out of place," she said.

Use a mirror and light

If your vision is blurry, the contact might have fallen out of your eye or just slipped out of its usual spot. In that case, you need to look for it elsewhere in your eye. Do this with a mirror and a bright light, like a makeup light or ring light. A magnifying mirror can also help.

"You might see the edge of the lens peeking out from under the eyelid," or on the sclera, the white part of the eye, Lazar said.

Close your eyes and roll them

Still can't find that lens? Try closing your eyes and rolling them. That can reposition the contact, making it easier to spot. If that doesn't work, add artificial tears to your eyes to help the lens move more freely. Blinking rapidly might also help.

Try 'slide and seek'

If moving your eyes doesn't work, try what Lazar calls "slide and seek." Close your eye and gently feel over the lid. A bump or ripple could be your lens.

Once you have an idea of where the lens might be, look in the opposite direction (if it's in the right part of your eye, look left). Then, with your eye closed, "gently massage your eyelid to coax the lens back into place," Lazar said.

Check your lids

Oftentimes, lost lenses are in the eyelids, Lazar says. This is especially common if you have dry eyes. Start by checking your bottom lid by pulling it downward.

"Then, inspect the upper area by pulling your upper eyelid up while looking down," she said. Since it can be tricky to see your lid, you might need to have someone help you with your search.

Remember, it can't get behind your eye

Some people worry that their contacts have traveled to the back of their eyes and are lost forever. But that's impossible.

"A contact lens cannot get 'lost' behind your eye due to the structure of your eye," Lazar said. That's because the conjunctiva, the membrane that covers the front of the eye, forms "a pocket that prevents objects from going behind your eye."

Call your doctor if you're uncomfortable

When you've tried all that and still can't find your lens, it's time to contact your doctor. They'll be able to use their equipment to see if the lens is still in your eye, or to treat any discomfort you're experiencing. Don't feel silly calling your doctormost eye doctors have helped patients retrieve a missing contact before.

"Safety should always come first when dealing with your eyes," Lazar said. "If you're ever in doubt, reach out to an eye doctor for advice."

Read the original article on Insider
By Tassilo Hummel

PARIS (Reuters) -Defiant gatherings were held outside town halls across France on Monday following a wave of rioting triggered by the fatal police shooting of a teenager of north African descent.

Police made fewer than 160 arrests overnight, offering some relief for President Emmanuel Macron in his fight to reimpose order, just months after rolling protests over an unpopular pension reform and a year out from hosting the Olympics.

The death of Nahel, a 17-year-old with Algerian and Moroccan parents, has tapped a deep vein of anti-police resentment in the poor and racially mixed suburbs of major French cities -- known as banlieues -- where Muslim communities of north African descent in particular have long accused police of racial profiling and violent tactics.

Since he was shot last Tuesday, rioters have torched cars, looted stores and targeted town halls, state schools and state-owned properties. Paris suburbs and Marseille in the south have been flashpoints.

What started as an uprising in the banlieues' high-rise estates morphed into a broader outpouring of hate and anger toward the state and opportunistic violence.

The unrest, though, has not prompted the kind of government soul-searching on race which followed turmoil over similar incidents in other Western countries, such as Black Lives Matter protests in the United States or race riots at times in Britain.

Instead, the French government points to underprivilege in low-income urban neighbourhoods and juvenile delinquency, a reflection of the state's belief that citizens are united under a single French identity, regardless of race or ethnicity.

Interior Minister Gerald Darmanin took aim at families who had allowed children to wreak havoc on the streets, saying the average of those arrested was 17 with some as young as 12.

"It's not up to the national police or the gendarmerie or the mayor or the state to solve the problem of a 12-year-old setting fire to a school. It's a question of parental authority," Darmanin said during a visit to Reims.

Some 45,000 police would be deployed for a fourth consecutive night, he said, to try to keep a lid on unrest which has seen more than 5,600 cars torched, 1,000 private properties burned down or damaged and 250 police stations attacked.

Relatives of Nahel have urged calm.

His grandmother said on Sunday the rioters were using his death as an excuse to cause mayhem: "We don't want them to smash things up," she told BFM TV. "Nahel is dead, that's all there is."

A crowdfunding campaign launched by a far-right polemicist for the police officer who fired the shot at the teenager had raised more than 1 million euros by Monday.

MEETING MAYORS

In the town of Persan south of Paris, where rioters smashed the town hall's windows and damaged its facade in an arson attack, dozens of local residents denounced the unrest - one of scores of similar "citizens' gatherings" nationwide on Monday.

"Let these wrongdoers hear it and let them know that hatred will never prevail," Mayor Valentin Ratieuville told them.

Some bystanders engaged in animated debate over who was to blame for the unrest, revealing the divisions over identity that run deep through French society.

"We should cut everything, family allowances, everything related to welfare subsidies. Come on! If they are not happy, they return home to their country," one pensioner who gave his name as Alain said.

"Yes, sir, but let me tell you something. They might have foreign origins, foreign ancestors, but these kids are French," responded Fatma, her head covered in an Islamic headscarf.

In mid-April, Macron gave himself 100 days to bring reconciliation and unity to a divided country after rolling strikes and sometimes-violent protests over his raising of the retirement age, which he had promised in his election campaign.

Macron postponed a state visit to Germany to deal with the crisis. He was due to meet the leaders of parliament on Monday and more than 220 mayors of towns and cities that have been affected by riots on Tuesday.

Vincent Jeanbrun, the mayor of the Paris suburb of L'Hay-les-Roses, whose home was attacked while his wife and children were asleep inside on Saturday, on Monday described the situation as "a real nightmare".

"I myself grew up in L'Hay-les-Roses in these large housing blocks," Jeanbrun, a member of the centre-right Les Republicains party, told BFM TV. "Our life was modest, we didn't have much, but we wanted to overcome it, we had hope that we would make it with hard work."

In Nanterre, on the western outskirts of Paris, flowers and other tributes mark the spot where Nahel was shot almost a week ago. Graffiti calls for revenge.

The police officer involved has acknowledged firing a lethal shot. His lawyer Laurent-Franck Lienard has said he did not intend to kill the teenager.

(Reporting by Tassilo Hummel; Writing by Richard Lough; Editing by Lincoln Feast and Alison Williams)
Genetic testing has begun on the Orkney island of Westray for a gene variant linked to a higher risk of breast cancer.

A landmark study found one in 100 people with Orcadian grandparents had a specific mutation of the BRCA1 gene.

Researchers found most of them could trace their ancestry to Westray, which has a population of just 600 people.

All adults on Westray who have grandparents from the island are being offered the test for the gene variant.

There are many other BRCA gene variants which can leave women at a higher risk of ovarian and breast cancer.

But the Orkney variant BRCA1 V1736A is believed to be the first time a geographic ancestral link has been made in the UK.

Gina Rendall, operations manager at the Westray development Trust, is one of the first taking part in the testing scheme.

She said: "It is hugely important that testing is rolled out, we're just a pinpoint in the whole thing.

"Knowledge is power in this case, it's giving you information for making a proper healthcare plan for the rest of your life.

"There are a lot of anxious folk out there, if we can be preventative on this, it is going to save money and save lives."

Gina Rendall will be one of the first to take part in the scheme

The Westray Development Trust is providing 15,000 towards the testing programme.

Ms Rendall added: "When the link to the variant was discovered the news had a deep impact on our small community.

"I'm really proud to be from Westray and of the Trust's pledge to support the pilot."

Earlier this year a team of geneticists visited Westray to tell the community about the gene and the plans to offer testing and support.

Identifying the variant was the result of 25 years of research by Zosia Miedzybrodzka, professor of genetics at Aberdeen University and director of the NHS North of Scotland Genetic Service.

Prof Miedzybrodzka said: "We highlighted that this gene alteration started some 400 years ago in Westray.

"It will not have come without a price. Some people will have found that scary, daunting, maybe a bit upsetting.

"What we are offering is for people to have a test and take control of their destiny by being able to take preventative healthcare measures."

Prof Miedzybrodzka says she wants testing to be successful so it can be rolled out to others in Orkney and the rest of Scotland.

BRCA genes are present in every person, both men and women, but when a fault occurs in one of them it can result in DNA damage and lead to cells becoming cancerous.

People with a genetic variant have a 50% chance of passing it on to their children.

map

Awareness of the faulty gene was raised a decade ago when Hollywood actress Angelina Jolie had a double mastectomy after discovering the BRCA1 variant.

The operation was said to reduce her chances of getting breast cancer from 87% to 5%.

However, the NHS advises that risk-reducing surgery is not the only option.

It also advises awareness of changes to breasts, annual breast screenings and MRI scans can help detect breast cancer, while lifestyle changes like healthy eating and exercise can "sometimes reduce risk".

There is currently no reliable screening test for ovarian cancer, it adds.
Thai king inaugurates parliament as Move Forward looks to lead new government

Thai king inaugurates parliament as Move Forward looks to lead new government FILE PHOTO: Move Forward Party holds press conference on talks with coalition party, in Bangkok

By Chayut Setboonsarng and Panu Wongcha-um

BANGKOK (Reuters) - Thailand's King Maha Vajiralongkorn inaugurated the opening of parliament on Monday, setting the stage for an attempt by the progressive Move Forward Party to form a government after its surprise election win six weeks ago.

Move Forward won big support from youth voters and the capital Bangkok, campaigning overwhelmingly on social media on an anti-establishment platform that could complicate its effort to win enough support to form a coalition government.

It will team up in parliament with the populist heavyweight Pheu Thai Party after the two won the lion's share of seats, trouncing parties allied with a royalist military that has controlled government since a 2014 coup.

The two are part of an eight-party alliance and have played down talk of a rift over the house speaker post, which could determine the passage of flagship legislation and timing of key votes.

Late on Monday, in what is being seen as a compromise between Move Forward and Pheu Thai, the alliance nominated veteran politician Wan Muhamad Noor Matha for house speaker and gave a deputy speaker position each to the two main parties.

Wan Noor, 79, of the Prachachart Party has been closely allied with Pheu Thai in the past, and served in its administration led by billionaire Thaksin Shinawatra between 2002 and 2005.

Parliament is expected to endorse the speaker on Tuesday.

Analysts say a Move Forward-led government is still not a certainty.

The speaker is expected later this month to table a joint session of parliament to decide on a prime minister, which requires the votes of more than half of the 750 members of the bicameral legislature.

The alliance is backing Move Forward leader Pita Limjaroenrat, 42, to become premier and Pita needs 376 votes to secure the post. He currently has 312.

He will need 64 more votes from either rival parties or members of a conservative-learning Senate that was appointed under the military and has previously locked horns with Move Forward over some of its policies.

Pita last week said he had secured enough support in the Senate. He also faces an investigation for breaching election rules, which could further complicate his bid, Kiatkwankul said.

"Worst-case, they become a formidable opposition ... No matter how it turns out, it is not the end of Move Forward and democratic forces," he added.

(Additional reporting by Panarat Thepgumpanat; Editing by Martin Petty, Kanupriya Kapoor)
(Bloomberg) -- A coalition of Thai pro-democracy parties settled a dispute over the powerful parliament speakers position, edging closer to forming a new government as the parliament met for the first time after the May election.

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Wan Muhamad Noor Matha, 79, a former speaker and leader of the Prachachat Party, was chosen as consensus candidate for the speakers job after Move Forward and Pheu Thai, the largest parties in the coalition, wrangled over the issue for weeks. The stage is now set for the first sitting of the 500-member lower chamber on Tuesday, where lawmakers are scheduled to elect the speaker and two deputies.

The coalitions prime ministerial candidate Pita Limjaroenrat said the bloc was confident of securing enough support from lawmakers in a joint sitting of the parliament to be convened by the new speaker for the premiers election. Talks with members of the 250-member Senate  stacked with allies of the pro-military royalist establishment  have progressed well, he said.

The peoples mandate expressed on May 14 has a high possibility of becoming reality, he told reporters late on Monday.

Although Pitas coalition has the support of about 312 lawmakers, its still short of the 376 votes needed to ensure his win. Doubts remain over how the Senate will vote, with many opposing Pitas bid as he has stuck to a campaign pledge to seek amendments to Article 112 of the criminal code. That law punishes criticism of the king and other top royals by as much as 15 years in prison.

Investors are counting on the premier appointment to end a political impasse that has unnerved markets and prompted foreign funds to dump the nations stocks and bonds since the May 14 polls.

The 42-year-old Pita is also facing a probe by the election body that may lead to his disqualification.

Earlier, King Maha Vajiralongkorn urged the newly elected lawmakers to maintain integrity and to accord top priority to national interests as he presided over the traditional opening ceremony at the parliament on Monday. The event was also attended by Queen Suthida, Prime Minister Prayuth Chan-Ocha and his cabinet, members of the military-appointed Senate and other dignitaries.

How the nation will prosper depends on your intellect, capability and integrity as you perform your duties while holding the countrys and the peoples interests paramount, King Vajiralongkorn said in a televised address.

Thailands benchmark stock index is the worst performer in Asia this year. with foreign investors offloading a net $3.1 billion since the end of 2022, the most among Asias emerging markets. The baht is the second-biggest loser in Southeast Asia since the May vote.

Most businesses have temporarily frozen new investment decisions until clearer directions from the new government emerge and as exports remain weak, Kriengkrai Thiennukul, chairman of the the Federation of Thai Industries, said last month.

The May polls saw a defeat of the military-backed, pro-royalist establishment in a country that has seen at least a dozen successful coups since 1932, when a revolution ended centuries of absolute monarchy. Prayuth, a former military chief, has ruled Southeast Asias second largest economy since he seized power in a coup in 2014.

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Your letters to the editor for July 2, 2023:

A thank you for a fellow driver's kindness

I just want to express my sincere thanks to a fellow driver.

While traveling down Minnesota Avenue on Saturday, June 24, I stopped for the red light at 6th Street. A woman stopped in the right hand lane (next to me) and motioned to me that my right back tire appeared to be wobbling. I waved in the typical SD fashion to her that I gratefully received the message, and then we each continued down Minnesota Avenue as the light turned green.When I was able to pull over to assess the situation, I found that the wheel was fine; however, the hubcap was barely hanging onto the wheel.

All I needed to do was tap on the hubcap to reattach it, but couldnt help but think how this woman saved me the cost of a new hubcap. This was simply a case of someone trying to do the right thing, and I certainly appreciated being the recipient of her kindness.Just a reminder that there are still good Samaritans in our community.Thank you!

 Linda Olsen, Sioux Falls

A voice for protecting property rights

PUC, Landowners and Constituents,

I am respectively requesting that the SD PUC carefully reviews Summit Carbons application. Please do not allow this application to move forward in September if construction and operation of the pipeline will produce minimal adverse effects on the environment and/or the citizens. We are fortunate that the SD Public Utilities Commission is an outstanding group.

If built as Carbon Solutions intends its pipeline will come within 750 or less of constituents. They do not want this pipeline which brings with it the potential for loss of life in the event it leaks or ruptures. CO2 pipelines differ from oil and gas, according to the Pipeline Safety Trust, they are more prone to rupture.

We also do not want carbon sequestration, which is not well-regulated in South Dakota CO2 pipelines have never been constructed at the lengths proposed and raise grave concerns because they are under-regulated and pose numerous safety hazards and land use issues.

Laying this pipe at 4 when the frost line is 4 to 6 just seems to be problematic. I am for Property Rights, I join the request No Eminent Domain for Private Gain. Please protect Brown County and all South Dakota residents.

Doing nothing is not an option! We need to work together for Property Rights!

 Carl Perry, House of Representatives, Aberdeen

More: Future morality is not found in the religious realm, keep speaking out against eminent domain: Your letters

My disabilities don't make life hard, the people in it do

"I wish I could live on disability," is something that I hear frequently as a disabled person.

South Dakota is not the most kind place to live when you are different than everybody else. No one seems to understand what it's like to get up every morning and face challenges that seem insurmountable and have no one to turn to.

"We don't like people who live off the government," is something I'm told repeatedly, by my own community members.

I wish they could step into my life and see what it's like to be me. Spend one day with the life long effects of a traumatic brain injury. Spend one day with intrusive PTSD thoughts that no amount of therapy can make go away. Spend one day with the disorder I inherited from my father, grandfather, great grandmother and great-great grandmother.

You may have heard of it. It's the second most severe mental disorder in the world, after schizophrenia. It's called Bipolar disorder, yet people frequently laugh at the word, as they laugh at me, and tell me that it's "All in my head," or worse, call me a "Bipolar B****" when they don't even know me, or know anything about my character or who I really am as a person, underneath that diagnosis.

I carry the scars on my body from ex-boyfriends and one ex-husband who tried to choke, punch, slap, and beat my brain disease out of me. I came up with one sentence to explain what life is like, living with disabilities. "My disabilities are not what make life hard, but people who think they don't exist do."

Tamara Ellis, Aberdeen

Happy Fourth of July: Stand tall, be proud of this great nation

Two hundred forty-seven years ago, in 1776, after affixing his signature to the Declaration of Independence, John Adams wrote to his wife Abigail, explaining the significance of what he and the founding fathers had done.In his letter, he stated, I am apt to believe that it will be celebrated, by succeeding Generations, as the great anniversary Festival. It ought to be commemorated, as the Day of Deliverance by solemn Acts of Devotion to God Almighty. It ought to be solemnized with Pomp and Parade, with Shews, Games, Sports, Guns, Bells, Bonfires and Illuminations from one End of this Continent to the other from this Time forward forever more.One year later, in 1777, the first official 4th of July celebration was held in Philadelphia. Ever since, Americans have celebrated our countrys independence exactly as predicted by John Adams.This year, as we celebrate, let us express our thanks that we are a nation of hope, opportunity and peace. Let us never forget the sacrifices so many have made to keep our country free.Happy 4th of July! Stand tall and be proud to be a citizen of this great nation. God bless America!Jay Backer, Chair, Senate District 12 Republicans, Graceville, Minnesota

Stand your ground? Not when it comes to CO2 pipelines

How many times have you said the Pledge of Allegiance? If you are like me, it is hundreds if not thousands of times. Ever think about the ending? With Liberty and Justice for All.

The CO2 pipeline being surveyed to cross South Dakota farmland threatens the very idea of "liberty and justice for all." Why? Because like it or not, South Dakota is letting CO2 pipeline surveyors show up on anyone's farm, unannounced, move their heavy equipment across farmer's fields tearing up crops as they go and then drill. All this as a prelude to trenching across fields to install a liquid CO2 pipeline which will disrupt and freeze the soil around the pipe thereby reducing production all along the miles of pipeline - permanently.

What about the Liberty of an American farmer to do with his/her own land, what he/she wants to do with it? Where is it that we lose that Liberty to multi-billion-dollar corporations so they can make a buck and farmers can foot a permanent reduction in their production and in the value of their farm?

Where is the Justice that allows teams of lawyers and their hired guns to kick you off YOUR OWN property so they can profit? What happens to your Second Amendment that keeps these folks safe? Why can't landowners defend their land?

Stand your Ground? Not in South Dakota. Not even if you are standing on your own ground!

These CO2 pipelines are a scheme to pump US taxpayer cash into the pockets of out of staters and foreign owners. There is no benefit to South Dakota, but the burden is shouldered by South Dakota farmers.

Meanwhile, there is not even a whisper from most Republicans, Democrats, or even our Governor. Perhaps the hundred or so farms and farmers aren't a big enough constituency for the Governor or elected officials to care about.

Liberty and Justice for all? Not for South Dakota farmers and their families or their future generations.

 Jeff Barth, Sioux Falls

More: There's cause for concern about Sioux Falls water, sewer rate increases: Your letters

A round of applause for Johnson's protection of SD's farming economy

I applaud Rep. Dusty Johnson for introducing bipartisan legislation to protect the backbone of South Dakota's economyour farmers.Agriculture is the primary industry in South Dakota, with nearly 30% of our economic input relying on our farmers. Representing nearly a third of our state's population, when our farmers succeed, South Dakota succeeds.Despite the challenges posed by drought, supply chain disruptions, and rising costs, farmers are resilient. However, some states have recently imposed regulations that could make it more difficult for farmers to access one of the most important tools they need to produce our foodpesticides. This could lead to declining crop yields, it could threaten farmers' livelihoods, and it could increase prices for consumers. Thankfully, Congressman Dusty Johnson is leading the effort to address this issue.Pesticides are key to pest and weed management. They help to protect the plants that produce our food. Their use helps to reduce soil erosion, promote soil health, and increase our food supply. Up to 40% of crops are lost to pests and diseases each year. Without pesticides, losses could be as high as 85%, meaning that twice the land and resources would be needed to produce the same amount of food.Farmers use these tools because they are safe for their families, their neighbors, consumers, and the environment. Each pesticide undergoes a rigorous development and review processtaking 11 years on averagebefore farmers can use them. This ensures the pesticides on the market have met high health and environmental safety standards and are safe for use according to science-based Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) specifications.Congressman Johnson's bipartisan billthe Agricultural Labeling Uniformity Actaims to ensure states can't directly contradict the EPA's scientific findings and review process, which could jeopardize the availability of critical crop protection tools.The bill will provide certainty for farmers and consumers alike that the tools supporting our modern agriculture system and food supply will remain safe and available.South Dakota's farmers thank Rep. Johnson for reaffirming the EPA's rigorous pesticide review process, ensuring protection for a safe, abundant food supply. We urge all members of Congress to support this bipartisan legislation. Kevin Deinert, South Dakota Soybean Association president, Washington, D.C.

How to submit a letter to the editor:

Letters need to be roughly 300 to 500 words, and will need to include first and last name, address, city and title. Addresses wont be publicized, of course, but its a way for us to make sure those who submit a letter are who they say they are.

Letters will run on Sundays in print and online as we receive them. There may be moments, however, when we don't have any as we work to solicit interest and actively rebuild this part of our coverage for readers.

You can submit those to News Director Shelly Conlon by emailing sconlon@argusleader.com or submit them through our online form here, which also is sent directly to the news director.

This article originally appeared on Sioux Falls Argus Leader: A thank you to kind drivers; applause for Johnson's protection of farmers: Your letters
Thousands of hotel employees in the Los Angeles area walked off from their positions Sunday to strike in an effort to demand higher wages and better benefits packages.

In a news release, Unite Here Local 11, the union representing the hotel workers, said that a majority (96 percent) of members voted earlier this month in favor to authorize the strike. The union said they plan to create a hospitality workforce housing fund in addition to demanding for better wages, health care benefits, pension and safer workloads.

Our members were devastated first by the pandemic, and now by the greed of their bosses, Unite Here Local 11 president Kurt Petersen said in a statement. The industry got bailouts while we got cuts. Now, the hotel negotiators decided to take a four-day holiday instead of negotiating. Shameful.

The union has been negotiating with local hotels for a new contract since April, asking for their hourly wages to be increased by $5, followed by annual $3 bumps over the proposed three-year contract, according to The New York Times.

Representatives for the hotels said the union has not been bargaining in good faith, with Keith Grossman, a spokesperson for the bargaining group of more than 40 Los Angeles and Orange County hotels, telling the Times that the hotels want to continue to provide strong wages, affordable quality family health care and a pension.

Grossman also said the hotels offered to increase the pay for housekeepers who work in Beverly Hills and downtown Los Angeles area hotels from $25 per hour to $31 per hour by January 2027, the Times reported.

Westin Bonaventure, the biggest hotel in the Los Angeles area, announced it came to an agreement with its workforce a day before their contracts expired.

Hotel workers join a list of other workers in different industries who have either threatened to strike or walked off their job in the past months, pushing for better pay and working conditions.

For 14 years I saw how my mother worked as a housekeeper and fought hard to raise me, Jennifer Flores, a front desk supervisor at the InterContinental Los Angeles Downtown, said in a statement. I am striking because it is my turn to fight for a better future for me and my son.

For the latest news, weather, sports, and streaming video, head to The Hill.
'Rental ads saying no to kids forced us to sofa surf'

'It's been made very clear to me that having teenage sons isn't the ideal,' says Sara

Thousands of adverts for rental homes posted by private landlords and lettings agents say children or pets are not welcome, BBC analysis shows.

There are no laws explicitly stopping this, but MPs are considering more protections for renters in England.

Under existing equality laws, blanket bans on children have been shown to indirectly discriminate against women.

A single mother of three told the BBC she and her son had been sofa-surfing while searching for a place to rent.

Sara, who has three children aged between 15 and 23, said it was a shock that so many of the properties she was looking at stated that no children were allowed, including teenagers.

"I suppose they think that they're going to have wild parties, or that they're messy, but my children aren't like that," she said.

Estate agent body Propertymark said a government cap on deposits in England made landlords more wary of damage - specifically in relation to pets.

The National Residential Landlords Association said it recognised how important pets were to many tenants and that any bans on children reflected "the actions of a minority of rogue landlords".

BBC News created software that collected private rental listings from property websites OpenRent and Zoopla over a four-day period in May, then removed adverts for rooms in shared accommodation.

We found:

Almost one quarter (24%) of OpenRent adverts showed a preference that said families were not allowed to rent the homes - about 1,800 of just under 8,000 in our sample

Over 300 Zoopla listings explicitly said children were not wanted, although this was less than 1% of those we looked at

Some 73% of sampled OpenRent listings said tenants with pets were not welcome, compared with 6% on Zoopla

OpenRent - an online agent - allows landlords to tick a preferences box to specify whether children and pets are welcome, whereas Zoopla listings are posted by property agents and only sometimes mention the subject.

Housing charity Shelter said the full scale of the issue was not clear, because it was only after enquiring about a property than prospective tenants were told they were not welcome.

'My son needs security'

Single parent Sara, was looking to rent near Lewes in East Sussex but the 53-year-old and her son Jake, 15, have been sofa-surfing - leaving him feeling "very unsettled".

"It's been made very clear to me that having teenage sons isn't the ideal," she said.

She said that being in receipt of housing benefit also made landlords and agents reluctant to let to her.

Proposed changes to the law for renters do not include any policy on children in private rental housing, although the government has promised to bring forward legislation on the issue in England "at the earliest opportunity".

The Scottish government said in a statement that reform of the private rental sector was needed and it had consulted on a new strategy that included launching a housing regulator for the sector.

Nearly 200 agents - or 2% of the Zoopla adverts we analysed - explicitly said children were not welcome.

The Property Ombudsman, which helps settle rental disputes, said in March that blanket bans on renting to families breached its code of practice because they disproportionately affect women, who are more likely to live with their children.

"It's already unlawful under the Equality Act to have an outright blanket ban on renting to families because this is a type of indirect discrimination," said Rose Arnall, a solicitor at Shelter, who represented the tenant in the case.

Blanket bans on tenants with children in Wales and Scotland were also a likely breach of the Equality Act, Shelter said.

Caroline Brosnan, a senior lawyer at Russell Cooke, said a landlord needed to consider whether not allowing children would stand up in court.

While it would be reasonable to stop children living in a residence such as a bedsit in accommodation with multiple occupants, justifying a ban in a semi-detached house would be much more difficult, she said.

Cost of living: Tackling it together

Can you challenge a ban on children?

Renters in England can challenge a letting agent that says children are not permitted in private rental property, says Shelter.

This is when an agent refuses to rent you a property that is suitable and affordable, just because you have children.

Before a complaint is made, you must show you can afford the rent, and check the property is a suitable size.

If a complaint is unsuccessful, it is possible to take it to the Property Ombudsman or the Property Redress Scheme.

Shelter in England has a guide here

Blanket bans on tenants with children in Wales and Scotland were also a likely breach of the Equality Act, Shelter said, while in Northern Ireland there are various equality laws that could be relevant.

Those living in Northern Ireland who suspect they have been denied a tenancy because of their dependents can make a complaint with help from the charity Housing Rights.

About one in six lettings agents in the Zoopla listings we analysed were advertising properties that explicitly banned tenants with pets.

Under the Renters (Reform) Bill, being considered by Parliament, tenants would be given the legal right to request to keep a pet in their home, which the landlord cannot unreasonably refuse.

Animal lover Sarah Plant said she had never encountered problems renting with her two cats when she lived in France, but struggled in the UK.

She said that when she told lettings agents about her cats she said she would "never hear back, it's an instant no".

She eventually found somewhere, but it was a place that needed some work.

Adam Hyslop, OpenRent's founder, told the BBC that allowing landlords to show their preferences helped renters prioritise their searches.

"The decision of who to let to is entirely with the landlord. We also do not prevent tenants from enquiring about any property," he said.

A Zoopla spokesperson said over 95% of rental listings on Zoopla "make no reference to homes being unsuitable to pets or children".

"We're unable to find clear evidence that agents are adopting blanket bans when uploading rental listings to Zoopla which would be in breach of guidance."

Any agent that lists on Zoopla must abide by both its code of conduct and the law and the website recommends agents use "inclusive language and avoid marketing homes as unsuitable for a certain type of renter", it said.

Propertymark said the BBC's findings showed the importance of professional property agents because "blanket bans on advertising materials through a letting agent are demonstrably lower when compared with adverts by private landlords".

Method

BBC News created software to collect over 120,000 rental listings from Zoopla and 11,000 from OpenRent advertised between 26-29 May. We then removed house shares and homes marketed as retirement properties from both samples.

Our analysis of OpenRent adverts relied on its site design, which used tickboxes to welcome or exclude families and pets.

Adam Hyslop, OpenRent's founder, said the BBC's approach of looking at a static snapshot of listings "is not likely to be accurate" due to more popular property listings spending less time on the website.

OpenRent is an agent where listings can be cross-posted to Zoopla, so before analysing Zoopla adverts we removed any cross-posted OpenRent posts. We then used lists of common terms such as "no pets" and "no children" to filter listings.

Additional reporting by Maryam Ahmed and Jo Mathys

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Three new deans begin duties this summer at the University of Alabama

New deans will assume their duties this summer at the University of Alabama's Honors College, the nursing school and the law school.

Tiffany Sippial will begin her tenure as dean of UA's Honors College on July 5, while William S. Brewbaker III will start as dean of UA's School of Law on July 10.

More: Steven Hood named vice president of student life at University of Alabama

Julie Sanford will begin as dean of UA's Capstone College of Nursing on Aug. 1.

Here's a closer look at the new deans:

Tiffany Sippial

Sippial comes to UA from Auburn University, where she served five years as director of the Honors College. She also served as a professor of history.

She earned bachelor of arts degrees in Spanish and art history from Southwestern University, and then went on to earn a master of arts in Latin American studies and a doctorate in Latin American history from the University of New Mexico.

Tiffany Sippial will begin her tenure as dean of the University of Alabama's Honors College on July 5.

Sippials research has focused on the experience of women in Latin America and she's written two books about Cuba. She's described as a strong advocate for international student experiences, in a UA news release.

I am honored and humbled to serve as dean of the University of Alabamas nationally ranked and widely celebrated Honors College, Sippial said in the news release. This is truly a dream opportunity to support and empower people, foster new initiatives, and guide growth in a college already considered a leader in honors education.

William S. Brewbaker III

Brewbaker was the William Alfred Rose Professor of Law at UA's School of Law before being named dean.

He's a graduate of Vanderbilt University and the University of Virginia School of Law. He practiced law in Birmingham from 1986 to 1992, before leaving law practice to pursue a master of laws degree in health care law at Duke University.

William S. Brewbaker III was recently named the new dean for the University of Alabama School of Law. He'll begin the new duties July 10.

Brewbaker became a full-time faculty member with the UA School of Law in 1993 and has taught courses in health care law, property law, antitrust and jurisprudence, as well as seminars in bioethics, law and economics, and Christian legal thought. His research interests include health care law and legal philosophy. He also had a stint as interim dean at UA's law school in 2013-14.

Our goal will be to continue and improve upon our rich tradition of excellence in research, teaching and service to our profession, the state of Alabama and our nation," Brewbaker said in a UA news release. "We want to provide an outstanding educational experience for every one of our students while they are in law school and great professional opportunities when they graduate. Im looking forward to seeing what we can accomplish together.

Julie Sanford

Sanford comes to UA after serving four years as dean and professor with the School of Nursing at the University of Mississippi Medical Center in Jackson, Mississippi.

She earned a bachelor of science degree in nursing from UA, a master of science in Nursing in adult health nursing and nursing education at the University of South Alabama and a doctor of nursing science degree from Louisiana State University.

Julie Sanford will begin her tenure as dean of the University of Alabama's Capstone College of Nursing on Aug. 1.

In academic nursing since 1993, Sanford has served as director of the James Madison University School of Nursing and in other academic roles at Spring Hill College and the University of Southern Mississippi. She also worked as an emergency department nurse and progressed to professor at the University of South Alabama. Sanfords scholarly interests include the health status of informal caregivers, program development, decision-making, patient safety and the scholarship of teaching and learning.

Our world is changing, and we have the opportunity in academic nursing to shape our future and prepare nurses who are patient-centered and practice-ready. The next three to five years will be a time of transformation in nursing education with the transition to competency-based education, Sanford said in a UA news release.

Reach Ken Roberts at ken.roberts@tuscaloosanews.com.

This article originally appeared on The Tuscaloosa News: New deans named at UA's law school, nursing school and Honors College
Three kids killed after driver stops in middle of bridge on I-95, Florida troopers say

A 10-year-old was among three children killed in a crash on Interstate 95 near the Florida-Georgia line, state troopers say.

It happened at about 7:40 a.m on Saturday, July 1, in Nassau County, north of Jacksonville, according to Florida Highway Patrol.

A 10-year-old, 12-year-old and 14-year-old died at the scene, and two others were critically hurt, troopers said. None of the children have been identified.

Investigators said a sedan carrying six people was traveling south on the highway when, for an unknown reason, the driver stopped in the center lane of the bridge separating Georgia and Florida.

An SUV traveling behind it didnt have time to react and rammed the back of the sedan, according to troopers.

The sedans driver, a 24-year-old man, suffered serious injuries, troopers said in a report.

Two other passengers, a 47-year-old and a 14-year-old, had critical injuries. Their conditions werent known as of Monday, July 3.

Investigators said the six people in the sedan were from Bay Shore, New York, a hamlet on the South Shore of Long Island.

The 23-year-old driver of the SUV, from Apex, North Carolina, suffered minor injuries, troopers said.

Authorities didnt release additional information.

Hit-and-run crash that killed man riding scooter may have been intentional, cops say

3-year-old not in car seat dies as intoxicated driver slams into pole, Texas cops say

2-year-old dies after shes pinned between vehicles days before birthday, coroner says
Titan passenger who died aboard the submersible gave a presentation before the fatal dive. He talked about previously being stuck underwater for 3 days without communication.

French explorer Paul-Henri Nargeolet had been to the Titanic wreckage 37 times before his fateful last expedition with OceanGate's Titan submersible. OceanGate Expeditions/Handout via REUTERS

Titan submersible passenger Paul-Henri Nargeolet was reportedly once stuck underwater for 3 days without communication.

Nargeolet was one of five passengers who died on OceanGate's submersible bound for the Titanic.

Christine Dawood told NYT her husband, Shahzada, one of the other passengers, was "lapping everything up" from OceanGate's presentations.

A passenger who died on OceanGate's Titan submersible bound for the Titanic had reportedly once been stuck underwater for three days without communication on a prior trip.

Christine Dawood  the wife of British-Pakistani businessman Shahzada Dawood and mother of their son, 19-year-old Suleman Dawood, both of whom died on the Titan's latest expedition to the Titanic wreckage  told The New York Times that on the fateful last trip, Paul-Henri Nargeolet had given a presentation about his prior trips to the Titanic.

The 77-year-old French explorer, nicknamed "Mr. Titanic," was a veteran deep sea diver who had been on 37 successful trips to the shipwreck before embarking on OceanGate's fatal trip last month.

During his presentation, Nargeolet recalled once being "stuck down there for three days and the sub was out of communication," Christine Dawood told the Times.

Her husband wasn't fazed by the story and remained eager to go on the trip, she added.

"Oh, my god, this is so cool," she recalled him saying. "He was lapping everything up. He had this big glow on his face talking about all this nerdy stuff."

The other passengers onboard the submersible were OceanGate CEO Stockton Rush and British billionaire Hamish Harding.

After a days long international search effort, the US Coast Guard and OceanGate said all five passengers are believed to be dead. Coast Guard officials said their search turned up debris found near the Titanic wreckage that was "consistent with the catastrophic loss of the pressure chamber" and then a "catastrophic implosion." The Coast Guard later said it had begun recovering debris and "presumed human remains" from the Titan submersible.

Besides Nargeolet, other former passengers on the Titan submersible have also recalled losing communication while on the vessel.

Mike Reiss, a writer and producer for "The Simpsons," said the Titan ran into communication issues on his trip to the Titanic with OceanGate last year.

"I took four different dives with the company, one to the Titanic and three off of New York City, and communication was lost, at least briefly, every single time," Reiss told CNN. "It just seems baked into the system. I don't blame the submarine as much as I blame deep water, but you would always lose it and come back."

Read the original article on Insider
Valerii Zaluzhnyi at the Rivne NPP

Commander-in-Chief of the Armed Forces of Ukraine, General Valerii Zaluzhnyi, and Chief of Ukraines General Staff, Lieutenant General Serhiy Shaptala, have visited the Rivne Nuclear Power Plant (NPP) to discuss plans in case an emergency occurs at the Russian-occupied Zaporizhzhya NPP, the General Staff reported on July 3.

Zaluzhnyi and Shaptala, together with Ukrainian nuclear operator Energoatoms head Petro Kotin and Rivne NPP Director General Pavlo Kovtoniuk, said they were working out the issue of information exchange between the military and the energy sector.

This is necessary to analyze, plan and forecast possible scenarios for the development of events at the Zaporizhzhya NPP, the General Staff reported.

Read also: Nuclear security specialist on potential terrorist attack at ZNPP

(Weve) agreed on close cooperation for a timely response to certain situations, the report states.

President Volodymyr Zelenskyy held an on-site meeting of the Headquarters of the Supreme Commander-in-Chief at the Rivne NPP on July 1. Zaluzhnyi was also in attendance.

Threat to Zaporizhzhya Nuclear Power Plant  What is known

Zelenskyy said on June 22 that Russia is considering a scenario of a terrorist attack at the nuclear plant it has seized and has prepared everything for this.

The head of Ukrainian military intelligence, Kyrylo Budanov, said on June 25 that the Russians had completed preparations for a possible terrorist attack at the occupied Zaporizhzhya Nuclear Power Plant. Explosives have been deployed near four of ZNPPs six reactors.

Dmytro Orlov, the mayor of Enerhodar, where the ZNPP is located, announced on July 2 that a number of employees from Rosatom, Russias nuclear operator, as well as local collaborators, had already left the ZNPP and the town.

Ukraine has begun large-scale drills in Zaporizhzhya, Dnipropetrovsk and Kherson oblasts, amid the risk of possible Russian terrorist attack at the ZNPP.

Read also: Russian forces mining Zaporizhzhya NPP, says Ukrainian intelligence

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
By Andrea Shalal

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - U.S. Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen will travel to Beijing from July 6-9 for meetings with senior Chinese officials on a broad range of issues, including U.S. concerns about a new Chinese counterespionage law, a senior Treasury official said on Sunday.

Yellen's long-anticipated trip is part of a push by President Joe Biden to deepen communications between the world's two largest economies, stabilize the relationship and minimize the risks of mistakes when disagreements arise, the official told reporters.

It comes just weeks after Secretary of State Antony Blinken visited Beijing and agreed with Chinese President Xi Jinping to stabilize ties and ensure the two countries' intense rivalry does not veer into conflict. China protested loudly when Biden subsequently referred to Xi as a "dictator," but analysts say the remark had little impact on efforts to improve ties.

The Treasury chief plans to tell China's new economic team that Washington will continue to defend human rights and its own national security interests via targeted actions against China, but wants to work with Beijing on urgent challenges such as climate change and debt distress faced by many countries.

"We seek a healthy economic relationship with China, one that fosters growth and innovation in both countries," the official said. "We do not seek to decouple our economies. A full cessation of trade and investment would be destabilizing for both our countries and the global economy."

The official, speaking on condition of anonymity, declined to give details on which Chinese officials Yellen would meet in Beijing. A second administration official told Reuters that Yellen was expected to meet the Chinese Vice Premier He Lifeng.

Yellen would underscore Washington's determination to strengthen its own competitiveness while responding with allies to what Washington calls "economic coercion" and unfair economic practices by China, the first official said.

One clear area of concern involved China's new national security and espionage law, and the potential implications for foreign and U.S. firms, the official added.

"We have concerns with the new measure, and how it might apply, that it could expand the scope of what is considered by the authorities in China to be espionage activity," the official said, citing possible spillovers to the broader investment climate and the economic relationship.

While no major "breakthroughs" were expected, Treasury officials hope to have constructive conversations and build longer-term channels of communication with China's new economic team, including at the sub-cabinet level, the official said.

U.S. officials would also reiterate concerns about human rights abuses against the Uyghur Muslim minority, China's recent move to ban sales of Micron Technology memory chips, and moves by China against foreign due diligence and consulting firms.

Yellen would also talk with Chinese officials about a long-awaited U.S. executive action curbing outbound investment in China in certain critical sectors, and "make sure they don't think something is more sweeping than it is or than it's intended to be," the official said.

(Reporting by Andrea Shalal; editing by Ross Colvin and Nick Zieminski)
As federal and state officials prepare to renegotiate the rules governing the Colorado River, the regions tribal nations are demanding seats at the table  seats that could make or break the basins future.

The Biden administration recently announced the official launch of the process to revamp the rivers long-term operational guidelines, which are set to expire at the end of 2026.

Since the Bureau of Reclamation and the seven basin states agreed to those guidelines in 2007, megadrought conditions coupled with overconsumption have endangered the Colorado Rivers two key reservoirs: Lake Powell and Lake Mead.

With so much at stake for the entire system and for the indigenous populations that have long relied on this resource, the regions 30 federally recognized tribes  who collectively have rights to about a quarter of the basins waters  are pushing for equal footing in determining the rivers future.

Tribes must be involved, they have to be involved, at the very beginning. At the very beginning  not after decisions have been made, and those decisions being forced upon tribes, Gov. Stephen Roe Lewis of the Gila River Indian Community told The Hill.

Tribes have substantial water supplies that are essential to a successful conclusion of the guideline process, Lewis added.

Of the 30 tribes in the basin, 22 have recognized rights to consume 3.2 million acre-feet of system water annually, according to a policy brief from the Water & Tribes Initiative in the Colorado River Basin.

That total is equivalent to 22 to 26 percent of the basins average water supply, per the policy brief, written with the support of the University of Colorado Law Schools Getches-Wilkinson Center for Natural Resources, Energy, and the Environment.

The over-tapped Colorado River Basin  which serves 40 million people  is split into a lower and an upper basin, which respectively include California, Arizona and Nevada, and Colorado, Wyoming, Utah and New Mexico. Many of the 30 tribes cross state lines.

A 1922 compact granted annual water allocations of 7.5 million acre-feet to each basin, while a 1944 treaty then gave an additional 1.5 million acre-feet to Mexico. For reference, a typical suburban U.S. household uses about an acre-foot of water each year.

Within these broader allocations is a water rights system  often referred to as first in time, first in right  that stems from the mid-19th century homesteading and gold rush era. Farmers and miners were able to secure and divert water in the order of their arrival in a region, rather than according to their proximity to a given river.

Tribal nations were only recognized as a part of this system when a 1908 Supreme Court case, Winters v. United States, established that the priority date for water rights on Native American reservations took precedence over those of most existing users.

And even after that recognition, it wasnt until almost a century later that tribes began recovering these rights. Through settlements with state and federal officials, some tribes have in the past few decades obtained annual water allocations  although not necessarily from the original river to which their rights applied.

As it stands today, 11 of the 30 tribes in the Colorado River region still have unresolved water rights claims, which, if resolved, could increase their collective share to about 24 to 29 percent of the basins annual water supply, the Water & Tribes Initiative policy brief found.

That remains this untold story of how tribal water has helped prop up the system for at least a decade or so, said Daryl Vigil, co-director of the initiatives Water & Tribes in the Colorado River Basin program and water administrator for the Jicarilla Apache Nation.

Striving for parity of sovereignty at the negotiating table

What the tribal nations are seeking ahead of the post-2026 talks is a sovereigns approach, in which the negotiations table includes 38 sovereigns: seven basin states, 30 tribes and one federal government, Lewis explained.

The Gila River governor expressed cautious optimism about the prospects of such an arrangement, as Department of Interior Secretary Deb Haaland in March 2022 committed to including tribes at the table in developing the post-2026 guidelines.

Vigil offered a mix of hope and skepticism, noting that Indigenous people are often propped up for lots of hope but end up disappointed. Nonetheless, he is continuing to steer federal officials toward accepting a structured framework that would recognize parity of sovereignty among the seven states and 30 tribes.

Theres a whole lot of forward movement, Vigil said. But Ill celebrate the day that thats structuralized.

There are certain big picture principles on which the tribes leaders tend to agree, according to Jason Hauter, a tribal rights attorney and member of the Gila River Indian Community. But he stressed that tribes are not this monolithic thing.

The nature of each tribes water rights is different, as is their physical proximity to water resources and infrastructural capacity, noted Hauter, a partner at the law firm Akin Gump Strauss Hauer & Feld, which serves as outside counsel for the Community.

The biggest benefit of having a seat at the table is understanding whats being discussed among the basin states, United States, earlier in the process rather than as a kind of afterthought, he said.

The Gila River Indian Community has extensive experience engaging with both federal and state officials. That engagement led Congress to pass the Arizona Water Settlements Act in 2004, under which the tribe gained the single largest entitlement to water from the Central Arizona Project, a massive conduit that transports water from the Colorado River across Arizona each year.

A judicious participant in regional water management, the Community in 2010 launched a strategic initiative to sell a portion to neighboring users, while also unveiling a network of underground storage sites to maintain a stable supply at home.

Cementing their influence in the basin, Gila River leaders played a key role in formulating Arizonas 2019 drought contingency plan. In exchange for storing water in Lake Mead through 2026, the Community receives money from the Arizona Water Bank and the Bureau of Reclamation.

Hauter recalled a planning process in which the Community had to be very engaged due to the threat of cuts and real costs to high-priority water users.

Our water was going to be the first to be cut, Lewis said, noting that tribal leaders therefore pushed their federal trustee  the U.S. government  to act in their best interest.

Because of the significance of our water settlement, and the amount of water in our settlement, we use that as a leverage point, Lewis said.

This past April, the Community agreed to leave more water in Lake Mead over the next three years, in return for up to $150 million from the federal government. The Interior Department also invested $83 million in a Community pipeline project that seeks to expand water reuse.

Touting the benefits of basinwide collaboration, Lewis said he hopes federal officials will recognize that tribes can bring very innovative, very thought out, sophisticated approaches.

Negotiating a resource amid uncertainty over rights

Partnership among Colorado River stakeholders, according to the experts, will be essential to the negotiations process that the Interior Department launched in June. The talks will specifically focus on drafting new rules to replace the outdated 2007 Colorado River Interim Guidelines for Lower Basin Shortages and the Coordinated Operations for Lake Powell and Lake Mead.

The Interior Departments announcement came just weeks after the seven Colorado River Basin states resolved a year of conflict over short-term water consumption cutbacks, submitting a proposal to the Bureau of Reclamation offering to conserve about 13 percent of their total river allocations by the end of 2026.

The Bureau of Reclamation has yet to officially approve the plans, which would provide temporary stabilization for the basin until the post-2026 terms materialize.

As those long-term discussions begin, the Interior Department said regulators will start gathering feedback, including new strategies to account for the current and projected hydrology of the Colorado River system.

But to make accurate hydrological projections, Michael Kotutwa Johnson, a University of Arizona indigenous resilience expert, said he believes all the outstanding cases concerning tribal water rights need to first be adjudicated.

Then we can move on to a more sustainable future because we know what each party has, added Johnson, who is also a member of the Hopi Tribe. We know that the tribes have reserved water rights, but we dont know how much their reserved water rights are.

Seventeen tribes have recognized water rights in the Lower Basin, with the biggest shares held by the Colorado River Indian Tribes and the Gila River Indian Community: 662,400 acre-feet from Arizona and 56,846 acre-feet from California for the former, and 653,500 acre-feet from Arizona for the latter, per the policy brief.

In the Upper Basin, five tribes currently have recognized water rights, with the largest allocation belonging to the Navajo Nation: 606,660 acre-feet from New Mexico and 81,500 acre-feet from Utah.

The Navajo Nation is also one of 11 tribes that has unresolved claims  and its path toward realizing its rights in Arizona may have become more difficult.

The Supreme Court ruled last month that the U.S. does not have a trust duty to take affirmative steps toward securing water for the Navajo Nation, whose population is struggling to access clean water.

Even tribes with recognized rights often lack the infrastructure necessary to make the most of them, the Water & Tribes Initiative found.

Eric Edwards, an assistant professor of agricultural and resource economics at North Carolina State University, and his colleagues recently published a study showing that tribal nations are likely only using a fraction of their entitlements  and are thereby sacrificing hundreds of millions of dollars in revenue each year.

But as basinwide demand has begun to surpass reliable supply, other users have grown anxious about what further development of tribal rights could mean for them, according to the Water & Tribes Initiative.

The idea that states would suffer tremendously from an expanded recognition of tribal claims may be a red herring, however, as many users simply dont want to cut back on their development, Johnson said.

The tribes can also bring a different value system too  the whole value of what water really is, added Johnson, who himself practices traditional Hopi dry farming.

While it might be ideal to settle all the outstanding water rights settlement cases before embarking on negotiations, Hauter said he believes it would be impossible to settle all of the cases immediately and that the result of the talks isnt going to change the ability of tribes to ultimately reach settlement.

Vigil agreed that settling the claims is important, as these resolutions will determine access to basic infrastructure and the ability to build economies. But he also stressed that the choice to move forward is up to each individual tribe.

Edwards, the North Carolina economist, agreed that settling the remaining cases now would be advantageous, but said that such a scenario is unlikely.

Negotiations are going to have to go forward, and 2026 is kind of a long ways off, maybe, in the political cycle, he said. But in terms of tribal water negotiations, thats like a blink of the eye.

Stewards of the land and the water

If the 30 tribes do assume their seats at the table, there wont be a one-size-fits-all approach to the development of individual tribal water rights and conservation strategies, the experts agreed.

But for many communities, such tactics could include pivoting toward more durable infrastructure, boosting operational efficiency in agriculture and improving access to clean water, according to Hauter.

An additional option for certain tribes could involve taking bigger sums of financial resources in lieu of larger allocations of water, Vigil said.

Other creative possibilities include leasing water to neighbors or leaving water in Lake Mead in exchange for payment, similar to the Gila River Indian Communitys approach to its allocations from the Central Arizona Project, added Edwards.

Were in a new age of Colorado River water allocations, he said. There may be the opportunity to view the tribes water rights differently.

Tribes could potentially keep full autonomy over their water rights while engaging in agreements that honor that autonomy and also free up some water, Edwards added.

What will be most critical, however, is the promotion of a consensus-based approach in which tribes are at the table, as equal partners, according to Lewis, the governor of the Gila River Indian Community.

Yet at the same time, Lewis stressed that theres no silver bullet thats going to address all the needs and concerns of every tribe.

Looking toward the upcoming talks, Vigil said he remains absolutely hopeful that we get to that proverbial table, expressing pride in the fact that the tribes have built their stature themselves.

Hauter, meanwhile, said he perceives a willingness for shared sacrifice, while noting that the details of how thats shared is really where the conversations get difficult.

Looking back at the journey thus far and toward what lies ahead, Lewis said he had previously thought of himself as a water protector but now also sees himself as a water diplomat.

There are traditional indigenous value systems about protecting the water, the governor continued. Were just translating what we call our Ootham Himdag  were translating that into a present day and future approach of being caretakers and stewards of the land and the water.

Thats whats important to our people. Thats what we want to show as an example, he added.

For the latest news, weather, sports, and streaming video, head to The Hill.
Former President Trump, who has now been indicted over his handling of classified records, said in 2016 that a president under an indictment would cause a constitutional crisis, statements first noted by a CNN KFILE review.

Trump made the comments about then-presidential candidate Hillary Clinton at a rally in Reno, Nev., Nov. 5, 2016, KFILE noted.

We could very well have a sitting president under felony indictment and ultimately a criminal trial, Trump said at the rally. It would grind government to a halt.

Trumps remarks came just days after then-FBI Director James Comey announced the bureau was relaunching an investigation into Clintons private email server and her handling of classified information.

Comeys decision has been heavily criticized by Clinton and other Democrats, who argue it played a huge role in her loss in the 2016 presidential election.

Trump is now facing federal charges after government officials discovered hundreds of documents, including some that were classified, at his Mar-a-Lago home in Florida.

Trump is now seen as the front-runner for the GOP presidential nomination, even as he is subject to a slew of legal battles in courtrooms from Florida to New York to Washington, D.C.

The former president pleaded not guilty to 37 federal counts of mishandling classified documents last month in connection to the documents found at his private Mar-a-Lago residence last summer. Trump has maintained that the documents he took were declassified and that he had the right to take them.

Trump faces other legal issues as well.

He could face a second federal indictment over efforts to interfere with the transfer of power after the 2020 election leading up to and including the Jan. 6, 2021, attacks on the Capitol. Charges in that case have not yet been announced but may increase Trumps legal woes.

The remarks in Nevada werent the only time that Trump suggested there could be a crisis if a president were under an indictment.

He also made similar remarks at a rally Nov. 3, 2016, in Concord, N.C., CNNs KFILE found.

If she were to win, it would create an unprecedented Constitutional crisis that would cripple the operations of our government, he said. She is likely to be under investigation for many years, and also it will probably end up  in my opinion  in a criminal trial. I mean, you take a look. Who knows? But it certainly looks that way.

For the latest news, weather, sports, and streaming video, head to The Hill.
Trump news  live: Ex-Trump press secretary says she saw him show documents to Mar-a-Lago guests

Former Trump administration press secretary Stephanie Grisham has claimed that she saw Donald Trump showing off documents to guests at Mar-a-Lago, as she slammed his lack of respect for the nations secrets.

I watched him show documents to people at Mar-a-Lago on the dining room patio, Ms Grisham told MSNBC.

He has no respect for classified information [and] never did.

Her comments come after the former president was charged with 37 felonies last month over his handling of classified documents on leaving the White House.

While his legal troubles are heating up, a conservative billionaire network is reportedly working to ensure he doesnt win the 2024 Republican primary, according to a new report.

Americans for Prosperity Action, a network of political organisations created by Charles and David Koch, will spend money for the first time on the Republican presidential primary. It has already raised more than $70million to fund races that officials hope will help the Republican party move past Mr Trump, according to The New York Times.

Key Points

Ex-Trump press secretary says she watched him show documents to guests at Mar-a-Lago

09:40 , Rachel Sharp

Former Trump administration press secretary Stephanie Grisham has claimed that she saw Donald Trump showing off documents to guests at Mar-a-Lago, as she slammed his lack of respect for the nations secrets.

I watched him show documents to people at Mar-a-Lago on the dining room patio, Ms Grisham told MSNBC.

He has no respect for classified information [and] never did.

Her comments come after the former president was charged with 37 felonies last month over his handling of classified documents on leaving the White House.

.@glennkirschner2 .@CheriJacobus .@BadBradRSR .@PamKeithFL .@MalcolmNance Do you think it's plausible that Trump showed classified docs to unauthorized people? "The short answer is yes, he never had respect for classified information." - Stephanie Grisham pic.twitter.com/71Ui7EoOxG  ChattJazz     (@ChattJazz) July 1, 2023

Weird apocalyptic campaign video earns Trump more mockery

08:30 , Oliver O'Connell

Donald Trump has been mocked for a bizarre, black and white campaign video where he gives a weird apocalyptic message about taking the country back in 2024.

Click through to watch:

Trump mocked for weird apocalyptic campaign video

Ex-Trump aide reportedly joins Giuliani in cooperating with special counsel

06:15 , Oliver O'Connell

A former Trump campaign aide has joined Rudy Guiliani in cooperating with the special counsel in the Department of Justices2020 election probe, according to a new report.

Mike Roman, a senior adviser on Donald Trumps 2020 campaign in charge of Election Day operations, is cooperating with federal prosecutors working for special counsel Jack Smith in the criminal investigation reviewing the efforts to overturn the 2020 election, according to CNN.

Gustaf Kilander reports.

Ex-Trump aide joins Giuliani in cooperating with special counsel in election probe

Trump loses bid to throw out E Jean Carroll defamation lawsuit

03:45 , Oliver O'Connell

Donald Trump has lost his bid to throw out the first defamation lawsuit brought against him by E Jean Carroll.

On Thursday, US district judge Lewis Kaplan in Manhattan rejected the former presidents claims that he had absolute presidential immunity from the civil case, paving the way for the magazine columnist to pursue around $10m in damages from him.

Rachel Sharp reports.

Trump loses bid to throw out E Jean Carroll lawsuit

Angry onlookers shout dog killer at George Santos

01:45 , Oliver O'Connell

Angry protesters called congressman George Santos a dog killer on Friday as the Republican made an appearance at a Long Island federal court house, his first hearing since pleading not guilty last month to a 13-count indictment related to fraud and money laundering charges.

Josh Marcus reports.

Onlookers shout dog killer at George Santos as he arrives for fraud hearing

ICYMI: SCOTUS strikes down Bidens plan to cancel student loan debts

Sunday 2 July 2023 23:45 , Oliver O'Connell

The US Supreme Court has struck down President Joe Bidens plan to cancel student loan debts for millions of Americans, reversing his campaign-trail promise as borrowers prepare to resume payments this summer.

Chief Justice John Roberts delivered the 6-3 decision from the courts conservative majority on 30 June.

Alex Woodward filed this report:

Supreme Court strikes down Bidens plan to cancel student loan debts

DeSantis hits back at Trump disloyalty claim

Sunday 2 July 2023 21:45 , Oliver O'Connell

Florida Governor Ron DeSantis on Thursday hit back at former president Donald Trumps allegation that the Sunshine State executive is betraying him by mounting a presidential campaign of his own during an appearance on Fox News.

Mr DeSantis, who currently trails the twice-impeached, twice-indicted ex-president by a wide margin in most polls of likely GOP primary voters, told Fox host Jesse Watters that no politician  even a former president such as Mr Trump  is entitled to support from anyone after Watters raised Mr Trumps criticisms during a televised interview.

Andrew Feinberg reports.

DeSantis hits back at Trump disloyalty claim: Politicians have to earn support

The fake gay marriage case in the middle of the Supreme Courts latest threat to LGBT+ rights

Sunday 2 July 2023 19:45 , Oliver O'Connell

Alex Woodward writes about how a crucial piece of evidence in the case appears to have been fabricated.

A man who is named throughout the case, and whose phone number and email address were attached in court filings, claims he has nothing to do with it.

The fake gay marriage case in the Supreme Courts latest threat to LGBT+ rights

Republicans are planning a national abortion ban says senator who once worked at a Planned Parenthood warns

Sunday 2 July 2023 17:45 , Oliver O'Connell

When a draft of the Supreme Courts Dobbs v Jackson opinion that would overturn Roe v Wade leaked in May of last year, US Senator Tina Smith had only three words.

This is bulls***, the Minnesota Democrat tweeted. She had similar words when Walgreens announced in March of this year it would not dispense abortion pills in states where abortion remained legal.

She spoke with Eric Garcia of The Independent.

Senator who worked at Planned Parenthood warns of an abortion ban if the GOP wins

Koch to fund Trumps primary opponents

Sunday 2 July 2023 15:55 , Graig Graziosi

The network of political organisations established by brothers Charles and David Koch will continue to fund conservative causes  so long as they arent backing Donald Trump.

The Kochs network, Americans for Prosperity Action, is reportedly funding candidates that will help the Republican party move past Mr Trump, a spokesperson told The New York Times.

The network has already raised more than $70m.

This will be the first year the network will take on a primary race, with the groups intent reportedly aimed at stopping Mr Trump  the clear Republican front-runner  from winning the primary. The Times reports that a top official in the network, Emily Seidel, wrote to the groups donors that it was time to have a president in 2025 who represents a new chapter.

Despite recent rulings, Biden says it would be a mistake to expand Supreme Court

Sunday 2 July 2023 15:45 , Oliver O'Connell

President Joe Biden has said it would be a mistake to expand the Supreme Court, despite its recent rulings against affirmative action in higher education, LGBT+ rights, and student loan debt forgiveness.

The high court overturned decades of policies when it ruled this week that race-based admissions were not constitutional, preventing universities from considering race as a factor in student applications.

Read more...

Biden says expanding Supreme Court would be mistake, despite recent rulings

RFK Jr says he is proud to have Trumps praise

Sunday 2 July 2023 13:45 , Oliver O'Connell

Yes, hes running as a Democrat...

Robert F Kennedy Jr says he is proud to have Trumps praise

SCOTUS allows Colorado designer to deny LGBT+ customers

Sunday 2 July 2023 11:15 , Oliver O'Connell

A wedding website designer may refuse to create work for people in the LGBT+ community if it conflicts with their religious beliefs, the Supreme Court ruled on Friday.

In a 6-3 decision, the conservative majority of the court ruled in favour of Lorie Smith, a Colorado-based website creator, who wanted to refuse service to same-sex couples but couldnt as it was a violation of a public accommodation law.

Read more...

Supreme Court allows Colorado designer to deny LGBT+ customers in ruling

Even as indictment loomed, Trump demanded to get my boxes back from feds

Sunday 2 July 2023 08:15 , Oliver O'Connell

As Donald Trumps lawyers began preparing for a federal indictment, the ex-president was allegedly still hoping to get the documents and boxes seized from Mar-a-Lago back, according to a report.

Mr Trump referred to the classified material as my boxes and my documents and asked his lawyers to retrieve the material, sources with direct knowledge of the matter told Rolling Stone.

Read more...

Trump demanded to get my boxes back from feds as indictment loomed

'Oh God, I try not to think about that

Sunday 2 July 2023 05:15 , Oliver O'Connell

President Joe Biden summed up perhaps most foreign policy experts thoughts when asked if he thought Mr Trump would have tipped off Russian President Vladimir Putin to the abortive coup attempt waged by Wagner Group leader Yevgeny Prigozhin over last weekend.

Oh God, I try not to think about that, Mr Biden said.

Biden groans when asked if Trump would have tipped Putin off to coup attempt

Did DeSantis break the law with Texas border trip?

Sunday 2 July 2023 02:15 , Oliver O'Connell

The presidential campaign of Florida Governor Ron DeSantis has been accused of breaking the law after the team shared an image on Twitter of the candidate exiting a helicopter that records show is owned by the Texas Department of Public Safety.

Gustaf Kilander explains why that might be an issue.

DeSantis accused of breaking the law with Texas border trip

Pence meets with Zelensky in Ukraine

Saturday 1 July 2023 23:15 , Oliver O'Connell

Former vice president Mike Pence visited with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky in a sign of solidarity with Ukraine even as many Republicans sour on support for Ukraine, CNN first reported.

Read more...

Mike Pence meets with Zelensky in Ukraine

Trump celebrates Supreme Court decision on affirmative action

Saturday 1 July 2023 21:15 , Oliver O'Connell

Former President Donald Trump celebrated the Supreme Courts decision to reject affirmative action programmes at US colleges and universities on Wednesday morning, calling it a a great day for America.

In a post on Truth Social, Mr Trump said that the ruling was amazing.

Trump celebrates Supreme Court ruling on affirmative action: The way it should be!

DeSantis earnings jump due to book advance

Saturday 1 July 2023 15:41

Republican presidential hopeful and Florida Governor Ron DeSantis saw his earnings spike this year from a book deal.

He earned $1.25million as an advance for the memoir he released earlier this year, according to an annual financial disclosure form, significantly boosting his net worth.

The book titled The Courage to be Free was published by HarperCollins in February and made the New York Times bestsellers list the following month.

House GOP expand their Hunter Biden investigation

Saturday 1 July 2023 15:15 , Oliver O'Connell

House Republicans on Thursday requested voluntary testimony from nearly a dozen Justice Department officials involved in the investigation of President Joe Bidens son Hunter as GOP lawmakers widen their scrutiny into what they claim is improper interference by the agency.

Read more...

Republicans expand their Hunter Biden investigation by seeking an interview with the lead prosecutor

Three investors charged in $22m Trump Media insider trading case

Saturday 1 July 2023 13:15 , Oliver O'Connell

Three investors in the special purpose acquisition company (SPAC) that took Trump Media public have been indicted for insider trading concerning the deal, making $22m in alleged illegal trades.

Read more...

Trump Media investors charged in $22m insider trading case

Christie says McCarthy spoke correctly about Trump the first time

Saturday 1 July 2023 10:15 , Oliver O'Connell

Former New Jersey governor and presidential Republican presidential candidate Chris Christie told CNN that House Speaker Kevin McCarthy was right in his initial assessment about whether former president Donald Trump was the strongest candidate to beat Joe Biden in a general election contest.

Earlier this week, Mr McCarthy said he was not sure that Mr Trump was the strongest candidate to beat Mr Biden.

Eric Garcia reports.

Chris Christie says McCarthy spoke correctly about Trump the first time

DeSantis says if elected he would abolish education, energy and IRS agencies

Saturday 1 July 2023 08:45 , Oliver O'Connell

Gov Ron DeSantis of Florida said in an interview on Fox News on Wednesday morning that he supports eliminating multiple federal government agencies including the Internal Revenue Service (IRS).

To fight woke ideology...

DeSantis says he would abolish education and energy departments and IRS

Trumps GOP support dips slightly after second indictment

Saturday 1 July 2023 05:45 , Oliver O'Connell

Former President Donald Trumps criminal indictment on charges of mishandling government secrets appears to have dented his popularity among Republicans  but only slightly - according to a new poll from The Associated Press-NORC Center for Public Affairs Research.

Read more...

Trump's GOP support dips slightly after his indictment over classified documents, AP-NORC poll finds

Voices: Kevin McCarthy knows he crossed the line with Donald Trump

Saturday 1 July 2023 03:45 , Oliver O'Connell

Few people embody Republicans relationship and acquiescence to Donald Trump more than House Speaker Kevin McCarthy.

Eric Garcia charts the latest developments in their relationship.

Kevin McCarthy knows he crossed the line with Donald Trump

New DeSantis-backed laws in Florida address immigration, guns and more

Saturday 1 July 2023 01:45 , Oliver O'Connell

Employers who hire immigrants in the country illegally will face tough punishments and gun owners will have more freedoms when more than 200 new Florida laws take effect Saturday, many of which Gov. Ron DeSantis will highlight as he seeks the Republican presidential nomination.

Read more:

Florida's new DeSantis-backed laws address immigration, guns and more

Biden blames GOP for student loan ruling

Saturday 1 July 2023 00:45 , Oliver O'Connell

President Joe Biden insisted Friday that this fight is not over after the Supreme Court struck down his $400 billion student loan forgiveness plan. Biden blamed Republicans opposition, aiming to direct the ire of millions of borrowers toward them rather than his own party in next years elections.

The president planned an afternoon address to lay out a series of actions to provide continued relief to 43 million student loan borrowers, and in the meantime tried to stay on the political offensive against the GOP.

Biden blames GOP for student loan ruling as 2024 political consequences loom

Biden: It would be a mistake to expand Supreme Court

Friday 30 June 2023 23:45 , Oliver O'Connell

President Joe Biden has said it would be a mistake to expand the Supreme Court, despite its recent rulings against affirmative action in higher education, LGBT+ rights, and student loan debt forgiveness.

Read more...

Biden says expanding Supreme Court would be mistake, despite recent rulings

Voices: The Supreme Court just made me a second-class citizen

Friday 30 June 2023 22:45 , Oliver O'Connell

Skylar Baker-Jordan reacts to todays Supreme Court ruling.

The Supreme Court just made me a second-class citizen

Trump: They got me on nothing

Friday 30 June 2023 22:40 , Oliver O'Connell

Donald Trump: "It turns out with me I did nothing wrong...They got me on nothing. Got me on nothing and all of the things that they do have. It's like the pundits are saying, 'Wow, that's nothing.'" pic.twitter.com/3YIo38pJpz  Republican Accountability (@AccountableGOP) June 30, 2023

Watch: Trump receives a warm welcome in Philadelphia

Friday 30 June 2023 22:26 , Oliver O'Connell

"F**k you traitor!" - screams heard as Donald Trump arrived at #MomsForLiberty conference in Philadelphia



Video by Olga Fe Desk@freedomnews.tv to license pic.twitter.com/UZFi7WZfly  Oliya Scootercaster  (@ScooterCasterNY) June 30, 2023

Republicans are planning a national abortion ban, warns senator who once worked at a Planned Parenthood

Friday 30 June 2023 22:15 , Oliver O'Connell

When a draft of the Supreme Courts Dobbs v Jackson opinion that would overturn Roe v Wade leaked in May of last year, US Senator Tina Smith had only three words.

This is bulls***, the Minnesota Democrat tweeted. She had similar words when Walgreens announced in March of this year it would not dispense abortion pills in states where abortion remained legal.

Eric Garcia spoke with Ms Smith for The Independent.

Senator who worked at Planned Parenthood warns of an abortion ban if the GOP wins

Full story: Biden reveals new path to student debt relief

Friday 30 June 2023 21:55 , Oliver O'Connell

President Biden on Friday hit out at the Republican state officials and legislators who supported the lawsuit which enabled the Supreme Court to strike down his student debt forgiveness initiative, accusing many of them of hypocrisy for taking money from pandemic-era relief programmes while opposing relatively meager relief for student loan borrowers.

Some of the same elected Republicans, members of Congress who strongly opposed relief for students, got hundreds of thousands of dollars themselves ... several members of Congress got over a million dollars  all those loans are forgiven, he said.

The hypocrisy is stunning, he said.

Andrew Feinberg in Washington, DC, and Alex Woodward in New York filed this report.

Biden reveals new path to student debt relief

Trump makes Georgia probe prediction in latest grievance-laden rant

Friday 30 June 2023 21:35 , Oliver O'Connell

Heres what the twice-indicted, twice-impeached former president posted to Truth Social at lunchtime today:

I predict that the Racist District Attorney in Atlanta, with the per capita WORST crime record in the Country, Fani Willis, where murderers get away with murder, and are seldom charged and almost never prosecuted, will be dropping all charges against me for lack of a case. I made a PERFECTLY LEGAL PHONE CALL, AS PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED STATES, ABOUT AN ELECTION THAT I STRONGLY FEEL WAS RIGGED AND STOLLEN. NONE of the MANY LAWYERS on the call minded my words, or even hinted at wrongdoing. SCAM!

Lawyer Ron Filipkowski noted the odd timing of the prediction:

This makes me think that he, or his lawyers, were told something. Maybe not, but this seems rather random for him to make this prediction today. pic.twitter.com/VakCVDFnVD  Ron Filipkowski (@RonFilipkowski) June 30, 2023

Friday 30 June 2023 21:30 , Oliver O'Connell

Watch live: Karine Jean-Pierre holds White House briefing

Watch: Biden announces new path for student debt relief

Friday 30 June 2023 21:14 , Oliver O'Connell

Biden: I'm announcing today a new path consistent with today's ruling to provide student debt relief to as many borrowers as possible as quickly as possible. We will ground this new approach in a different law than my original plan with the higher education act. pic.twitter.com/d70zEDIPf4  Acyn (@Acyn) June 30, 2023

Biden outlines new path to student loan forgiveness after SCOTUS decision

Friday 30 June 2023 21:10 , Oliver O'Connell

BREAKING: President Biden announces he will seek student loan forgiveness through an alterative legal authority -- the Higher Education Act of 1965 -- after the SCOTUS defeated his plan today.  Joey Garrison (@joeygarrison) June 30, 2023

Latest Trump campaign video mocked for weird apocalyptic tone

Friday 30 June 2023 20:45 , Oliver O'Connell

While the footage was posted on Mr Trumps own Truth Social site, it was later posted on Twitter where it was roundly ridiculed by social media users.

Rachel Sharp reports.

Trump mocked for weird apocalyptic campaign video

Three charged in $22m Trump Media insider trading case

Friday 30 June 2023 20:15 , Oliver O'Connell

Three investors in the special purpose acquisition company (SPAC) that took Trump Media public have been indicted for insider trading concerning the deal, making $22m in alleged lillegal trades.

Michael Shvartsman, Gerald Shvartsman and Bruce Garelick were named in a federal indictment unsealed on Thursday (29 June) in Manhattan federal court.

All three were charged with trading in securities of Digital World Acquisition Corporation (DWAC) based on non-public information about the companys planned business combination with Trump Media & Technology Group  founded by former President Donald Trump  the parent company of social media platform Truth Social.

They were arrested on Thursday morning in Florida.

Trump Media investors charged in $22m insider trading case

DeSantis hits back at Trump disloyalty claim

Friday 30 June 2023 20:00 , Oliver O'Connell

Florida Governor Ron DeSantis on Thursday hit back at former president Donald Trumps allegation that the Sunshine State executive is betraying him by mounting a presidential campaign of his own during an appearance on Fox News.

Mr DeSantis, who currently trails the twice-impeached, twice-indicted ex-president by a wide margin in most polls of likely GOP primary voters, told Fox host Jesse Watters that no politician  even a former president such as Mr Trump  is entitled to support from anyone after Watters raised Mr Trumps criticisms during a televised interview.

Andrew Feinberg reports on the rest of the Florida governors remarks.

DeSantis hits back at Trump disloyalty claim: Politicians have to earn support

Fox reaches $12m settlement with former producer Abby Grossberg

Friday 30 June 2023 19:53 , Oliver O'Connell

Fox Corporation has reached a $12m settlement in a lawsuit from a former Fox New producer who alleged a culture of misogyny at the network and accused Fox lawyers of pressuring her into making misleading statements in a blockbuster defamation case from a voting machines company.

Alex Woodward has the latest.

Fox reaches $12m settlement over toxic workplace lawsuit from former producer

DeSantis slammed for backing use of radioactive waste in road study

Friday 30 June 2023 19:45 , Oliver O'Connell

Republican presidential hopeful Ron DeSantis is under fire after giving the go-ahead to the study of radioactive mining waste in the use of road-building projects.

On Thursday, the Florida governor greenlit a bill adding phosphogypsum, which has been linked to cancer, to a list of materials that can be studied by the Florida Department of Transportation and used in road construction in the state.

Gustaf Kilander reports.

DeSantis slammed after backing use of radioactive waste in road study

Angry onlookers shout dog killer at George Santos

Friday 30 June 2023 19:35 , Oliver O'Connell

Angry protesters called congressman George Santos a dog killer on Friday as the Republican made an appearance at a Long Island federal court house, his first hearing since pleading not guilty last month to a13-count indictment related to fraud and money laundering charges.

Onlookers shout dog killer at George Santos as he arrives for fraud hearing

Trump makes Georgia probe prediction in latest grievance-laden rant

Friday 30 June 2023 19:30 , Oliver O'Connell

Heres what the twice-indicted, twice-impeached former president posted to Truth Social at lunchtime today:

I predict that the Racist District Attorney in Atlanta, with the per capita WORST crime record in the Country, Fani Willis, where murderers get away with murder, and are seldom charged and almost never prosecuted, will be dropping all charges against me for lack of a case. I made a PERFECTLY LEGAL PHONE CALL, AS PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED STATES, ABOUT AN ELECTION THAT I STRONGLY FEEL WAS RIGGED AND STOLLEN. NONE of the MANY LAWYERS on the call minded my words, or even hinted at wrongdoing. SCAM!

Lawyer Ron Filipkowski noted the odd timing of the prediction:

This makes me think that he, or his lawyers, were told something. Maybe not, but this seems rather random for him to make this prediction today. pic.twitter.com/VakCVDFnVD  Ron Filipkowski (@RonFilipkowski) June 30, 2023

Watch: SCOTUS decisions activates young people to speak out and vote, says Psaki

Friday 30 June 2023 19:25 , Oliver O'Connell

"All of this is going to have a huge impact I suspect on the courts and popularity of the courts. These type of decisions are something that activates young people. Activates them to speak out, to vote, to have their voice heard."@jrpsaki on SCOTUS decisions w/ @mitchellreports pic.twitter.com/2qeO83ubNY  Inside with Jen Psaki (@InsideWithPsaki) June 30, 2023

Sources: Prosecutors are prepared to hit Trump and his allies with new charges

Friday 30 June 2023 20:20 , Oliver O'Connell

The Department of Justice is prepared to seek indictments against multiple figures in former president Donald Trumps orbit and may yet bring additional charges against the ex-president in the coming weeks, The Independent has learned.

Andrew Feinberg filed this exclusive report for The Independent.

Prosecutors are prepared to hit Trump and his allies with new charges, sources say

Geraldo Rivera praises affirmative action in final Fox News appearance

Friday 30 June 2023 18:45 , Oliver O'Connell

Geraldo Rivera used his final appearance on Fox News to praise affirmative action amid the Supreme Court ruling against colleges considering race in their admissions process.

The Fox News host revealed on Thursday that he was quitting the network after he claimed that he had been fired from The Five.

Gustaf Kilander and Shweta Sharma have the story.

Geraldo Rivera praises affirmative action in final Fox News appearance

Watch: LAAD president slams SCOTUS ruling in favour of a Christian web designer who opposed same-sex weddings

Friday 30 June 2023 18:25 , Oliver O'Connell

I think that this is an open license to discriminate against LGBTQ people in America. https://t.co/Ebc8JosA0A  The Recount (@therecount) June 30, 2023

Supreme Court deals major blow to LGBT+ rights

Friday 30 June 2023 18:15 , Oliver O'Connell

A wedding website designer may refuse to create work for people in the LGBT+ community if it conflicts with their religious beliefs, the Supreme Court ruled on Friday.

In a 6-3 decision, the conservative majority of the Court ruled in favor of Lorie Smith, a Colorado-based website creator, who wanted to refuse service to same-sex couples but couldnt as it was a violation of a public accommodation law.

The Court argued that the public accommodation law in Colorado impedes Ms Smiths First Amendment right to deny conveying messages she disagrees with.

Ariana Baio reports on todays decision.

Supreme Court allows Colorado designer to deny LGBT+ customers in ruling

Christie says McCarthy spoke correctly about Trump the first time

Friday 30 June 2023 17:45 , Oliver O'Connell

Former New Jersey governor and presidential Republican presidential candidate Chris Christie told CNN that House Speaker Kevin McCarthy was right in his initial assessment about whether former president Donald Trump was the strongest candidate to beat Joe Biden in a general election contest.

Earlier this week, Mr McCarthy said he was not sure that Mr Trump was the strongest candidate to beat Mr Biden.

Eric Garcia reports.

Chris Christie says McCarthy spoke correctly about Trump the first time

Report: Top Trump aide revealed as individual he allegedly showed classified map

Friday 30 June 2023 20:18 , Oliver O'Connell

The identity of an aide to Donald Trump whose voice was heard in an audio recording wherein the former president can be heard brandishing a paper he explicitly claims is classified has been revealed.

Read more...

Top Trump aide revealed as individual he allegedly showed classified map, report says

Hours before arrest, Jan 6 fugitive shared Trump post revealing Obamas address

Friday 30 June 2023 16:55 , Oliver O'Connell

A January 6 rioter on the run from the law who was arrested outside the Washington DC home of former President Barack Obama shared a social media post by ex-president Donald Trump revealing his predecessors address hours before he was detained.

Taylor Taranto, 37, was arrested on Thursday on charges stemming from his activities during the Capitol riot in early 2021. But he was also discovered to have several firearms and the materials needed to make a Molotov cocktail in the neighbourhood of the US capital where the Obamas live.

The matter is being reviewed by the FBIs Joint Terrorism Task Force.

Gustaf Kilander has the story.

Jan 6 fugitive shared Trump post revealing Obamas address hours before arrest

RFK Jr says he is proud to have Trumps praise

Friday 30 June 2023 16:45 , Oliver O'Connell

Robert F Kennedy Jr., the longshot presidential candidate and latest scion of the storied Kennedy political dynasty, appears to be leaning in to the Democrat in name only label that is beginning to follow his campaign.

John Bowden explains.

Robert F Kennedy Jr says he is proud to have Trumps praise

US envoy for Iran has security clearance suspended

Friday 30 June 2023 16:15 , Oliver O'Connell

The US special envoy for Iran, Rob Malley, had his security clearance suspended pending a review of allegations he may have mishandled classified information, said US officials.

Namita Singh has the details.

US envoy for Iran has security clearance suspended amid probe

Trump demanded get my boxes back from feds

Friday 30 June 2023 15:45 , Oliver O'Connell

As Donald Trumps lawyers began preparing for a federal indictment, the ex-president was allegedly still hoping to get the documents and boxes seized from Mar-a-Lago back, according to a report.

Mr Trump referred to the classified material as my boxes and my documents and asked his lawyers to retrieve the material, sources with direct knowledge of the matter told Rolling Stone.

Ariana Baio reports.

Trump demanded to get my boxes back from feds as indictment loomed

Biden groans when asked if Trump would have tipped Putin off to coup attempt

Friday 30 June 2023 15:15 , Oliver O'Connell

President Biden on Thursday said he tries not to consider the national security issues that wouldve been in play had Donald Trump defeated him in the 2020 election and remained in the White House during Russias war on Ukraine.

Andrew Feinberg reports.

Biden groans when asked if Trump would have tipped Putin off to coup attempt

Ex-Trump aide reportedly joins Giuliani in cooperating with special counsel

Friday 30 June 2023 15:08 , Oliver O'Connell

A former Trump campaign aide has joined Rudy Guiliani in cooperating with the special counsel in the Department of Justices2020 election probe, according to a new report.

Mike Roman, a senior adviser on Donald Trumps 2020 campaign in charge of Election Day operations, is cooperating with federal prosecutors working for special counsel Jack Smith in the criminal investigation reviewing the efforts to overturn the 2020 election, according to CNN.

Gustaf Kilander has the details.

Ex-Trump aide joins Giuliani in cooperating with special counsel in election probe

Trump loses bid to throw out E Jean Carroll defamation lawsuit

Friday 30 June 2023 15:00 , Oliver O'Connell

Donald Trump has lost his bid to throw out the first defamation lawsuit brought against him by E Jean Carroll.

On Thursday, US district judge Lewis Kaplan in Manhattan rejected the former presidents claims that he had absolute presidential immunity from the civil case, paving the way for the magazine columnist to pursue around $10m in damages from him.

The former president had claimed that he had absolute presidential immunity from the lawsuit and that many of his statements about the magazine columnist were protected under free speech rights because they were his opinion.

Read the full story here:

Trump loses bid to throw out E Jean Carroll lawsuit

Trump deadline to respond to trial date set for 10 July

Friday 30 June 2023 14:58 , Oliver O'Connell

A Florida federal judge is giving Donald Trumps defence team until 10 July to respond to special counsel Jack Smiths request to delay his federal criminal trial until December.

New: Trump deadline to respond to DOJ request to have trial starting in December pushed back to July 10 after Trump valet Walt Nauta had his arraignment postponed until next Thursday, per minute order from Judge Cannon  delays already starting to add up on this docket.  Hugo Lowell (@hugolowell) June 30, 2023

Watch: Ron DeSantis talks about his war on woke text books

Friday 30 June 2023 14:47 , Oliver O'Connell

Gov. Ron DeSantis (R-FL) on "woke" textbooks at Moms for Liberty summit:



We've been actively involved in rejecting textbooks that have ideological indoctrination  And guess what happens, because were an 800-pound gorilla, they make the appropriate changes to the textbooks. pic.twitter.com/Q5ph34zy0U  The Recount (@therecount) June 30, 2023

Moms for Liberty gathering draws Trump, DeSantis

Friday 30 June 2023 14:45 , Oliver O'Connell

Former President Donald Trump and Florida Governor Ron DeSantis, the main rivals for the Republican presidential nomination, are speaking today at the annual gathering of Moms for Liberty, a two-year-old group that has fiercely opposed instruction related to race and gender identity in the nations classroom.

Trump, DeSantis among 2024 GOP hopefuls set to appear at Moms for Liberty gathering

Exclusive: Prosecutors are prepared to hit Trump and his allies with new charges, sources say

Friday 30 June 2023 14:15 , Oliver O'Connell

The Department of Justice is prepared to seek indictments against multiple figures in former president Donald Trumps orbit and may yet bring additional charges against the ex-president in the coming weeks, The Independent has learned.

According to sources familiar with the matter, the department has made preparations to bring what is known as a superseding indictment  a second set of charges against an already-indicted defendant that could include more serious crimes  against the ex-president, and could do so in a number of different venues, depending on how prosecutors feel the case they have brought against him in a Florida federal court is proceeding.

Andrew Feinberg reports for The Independent.

Prosecutors are prepared to hit Trump and his allies with new charges, sources say

ICYMI: Paul Ryan says former president is only GOP candidate who would lose to Biden

Friday 30 June 2023 13:45 , Oliver O'Connell

Former House Speaker Paul Ryan says he believes any 2024 Republican presidential candidate could beat incumbent president Joe Biden provided they are not named Donald Trump, but that it will be a disaster if we nominate Trump.

Mr Ryan, a Trump adversary and member of the board of Fox Newss parent company, made the remarks in an appearance on CNBCs Squawk Box on Wednesday morning.

Read more...

Paul Ryan says Trump is only Republican candidate who would lose to Biden in 2024

Were electing idiots: Cheney lays out damning problem with US politics

Friday 30 June 2023 13:15 , Oliver O'Connell

Former Rep Liz Cheney of Wyoming took aim at the state of American politics, telling a crowd at the 92nd Street Y in New York that the country is electing idiots.

Look, I think that the country right now faces hugely challenging and fundamentally important issues, Ms Cheney said during an appearance at the community center, in quotes reported by The Hill. What weve done in our politics is create a situation where were electing idiots.

Abe Asher reports on what else the former representative had to say.

Liz Cheney lays out damning problem with US politics: Were electing idiots

Ron DeSantis hits back at Trump claims hes disloyal: Politicians have to earn support

Friday 30 June 2023 12:45 , Rachel Sharp

DeSantis on Trump claims that hes disloyal: Politicians have to earn support. Theyre not entitled to it. No more excuses on the issues Americans care about, Im here to get stuff done. pic.twitter.com/Eji1cuY26i  Jesse Watters (@JesseBWatters) June 30, 2023

Report says top Trump aide revealed as individual he allegedly showed classified map

Friday 30 June 2023 12:15 , Oliver O'Connell

The identity of an aide to Donald Trump whose voice was heard in an audio recording wherein the former president can be heard brandishing a paper he explicity claims is classified has been revealed.

John Bowden reports on the aides identity.

Top Trump aide revealed as individual he allegedly showed classified map, report says

Trump loses bid to throw out E Jean Carroll case

Friday 30 June 2023 11:45 , Rachel Sharp

Donald Trump has lost his bid to throw out the first lawsuit brought against him by E Jean Carroll.

The former president had claimed that he had absolute presidential immunity from the lawsuit and that many of his statements about the magazine columnist were protected because they were his opinion.

He argued that Ms Carroll consented to his statements by purposely waiting decades to go public, until he was in the White House, leaving him no choice but to defend himself.

Ultimately, he said the case should be thrown out.

On Thursday, US district judge Lewis Kaplan in Manhattan rejected this claim saying there was no merit to his argument.

Joe Biden gives emphatic response to question on Hunter Biden texts

Friday 30 June 2023 11:15 , Oliver O'Connell

President Joe Biden is facing increasing pressure to answer questions  in detail  about his son Hunter Biden and a concerning text message that has been unearthed as the questions surrounding the latters business activities are growing more serious.

And on Wednesday, the president bristled at a reporter who asked him about it, just days after Karine Jean-Pierre, his press secretary, was inundated with questions on the topic at her daily news briefing.

Mr Biden was boarding Marine One as he began a trip to Chicago to tout his administrations economic record when a reporter questioned him about one message in which the younger Biden appears to directly put pressure on an individual named Henry Zhao to resolve an unknown matter  while explicitly naming his father as an interested party.

John Bowden has the story.

Biden gives emphatic response to question about troubling Hunter text

WATCH: Trump releases bizarre apocalyptic campaign video

Friday 30 June 2023 10:45 , Rachel Sharp

Weird apocalyptic video posted by Trump on Truth Social tonight: This is the final battle  pic.twitter.com/lBzgqCRYz3  Ron Filipkowski (@RonFilipkowski) June 30, 2023

Top Democrat says GOP had evidence disproving Biden bribery claims in 2019

Friday 30 June 2023 10:15 , Oliver O'Connell

The top Democrat on the House Oversight Committee has released evidence that casts significant doubt on GOP claims that the FBI ignored evidence that President Joe Biden accepted a bribe from a Ukrainian energy mogul during his time as vice president.

In a letter to House Oversight Committee chair James Comer, Maryland Representative Jamie Raskin reminded his GOP counterpart that Congress has had evidence that directly contradicts the allegations levied against Mr Biden in an FBI form which Republicans have claimed to be proof of alleged corruption on the part of the president.

Andrew Feinberg has the details.

GOP had evidence disproving Biden bribery claims in 2019, top Democrat says

Ex-Trump official joins Guiliani in cooperating in 2020 election probe

Friday 30 June 2023 09:45 , Rachel Sharp

Donald Trumps legal troubles appear to be heating up, with his former campaign official Mike Roman reportedly cooperating with investigators probing the former presidents efforts to overturn the 2020 election.

Two sources told CNN on Thursday that Mr Roman has taken a proffer agreement to cooperate with special counsel Jack Smiths office in its investigation.

Mr Roman was involved in Mr Trumps scheme to put forward fake electors to certify the election in his favour in states that President Joe Biden had won.

This revelation comes after it was reported that Rudy Guiliani had also taken such an agreement.

Under a proffer agreement, an individual shares information with investigators on the agreement that that information cannot be used against them in court.

House GOP expand their Hunter Biden investigation by seeking an interview with the lead prosecutor

Friday 30 June 2023 08:15 , Oliver O'Connell

House Republicans on Thursday requested voluntary testimony from nearly a dozen Justice Department officials involved in the investigation of President Joe Bidens son Hunter as GOP lawmakers widen their scrutiny into what they claim is improper interference by the agency.

Read more...

Republicans expand their Hunter Biden investigation by seeking an interview with the lead prosecutor

Pence meets with Zelensky in Ukraine

Friday 30 June 2023 06:15 , Oliver O'Connell

Former vice president Mike Pence visited with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky in a sign of solidarity with Ukraine even as many Republicans sour on support for Ukraine, CNN reported.

Eric Garcia reports on the 2024 candidates visit.

Mike Pence meets with Zelensky in Ukraine

Did DeSantis break the law with Texas border trip?

Friday 30 June 2023 04:15 , Oliver O'Connell

Gustaf Kilander reports.

DeSantis accused of breaking the law with Texas border trip

Three charged with insider trading in Trump Media deal

Friday 30 June 2023 03:15 , Oliver O'Connell

Three investors in the special purpose acquisition company (SPAC) that took Trump Media public have been indicted for insider trading concerning the deal, making $22m in alleged lillegal trades.

Michael Shvartsman, Gerald Shvartsman and Bruce Garelick were named in a federal indictment unsealed on Thursday (29 June) in Manhattan federal court.

All three were charged with trading in securities of Digital World Acquisition Corporation (DWAC) based on non-public information about the companys planned business combination with Trump Media & Technology Group  founded by former President Donald Trump  the parent company of social media platform Truth Social.

They were arrested on Thursday morning in Florida.

Trump Media investors charged in $22m insider trading case

Christie says McCarthy spoke correctly about Trump the first time

Friday 30 June 2023 02:15 , Oliver O'Connell

Former New Jersey governor and presidential Republican presidential candidate Chris Christie told CNN that House Speaker Kevin McCarthy was right in his initial assessment about whether former president Donald Trump was the strongest candidate to beat Joe Biden in a general election contest.

Earlier this week, Mr McCarthy said he was not sure that Mr Trump was the strongest candidate to beat Mr Biden.

Eric Garcia reports.

Chris Christie says McCarthy spoke correctly about Trump the first time

Trumps GOP support dips slightly after his indictment, poll finds

Friday 30 June 2023 01:15 , Oliver O'Connell

Former President Donald Trumps criminal indictment on charges of mishandling government secrets appears to have dented his popularity among Republicans  but only slightly - according to a new poll from The Associated Press-NORC Center for Public Affairs Research.

Sixty percent of Republicans now have a favorable view of Trump, down slightly from April, when 68% of Republicans said they had a favorable view of the 2024 GOP presidential front-runner. The poll found 38% of Republicans have an unfavorable view of Trump, an uptick from 30% in April.

Read more...

Trump's GOP support dips slightly after his indictment over classified documents, AP-NORC poll finds

Exclusive: Prosecutors are prepared to hit Trump and his allies with new charges, sources say

Friday 30 June 2023 00:15 , Oliver O'Connell

The Department of Justice is prepared to seek indictments against multiple figures in former president Donald Trumps orbit and may yet bring additional charges against the ex-president in the coming weeks, The Independent has learned.

According to sources familiar with the matter, the department has made preparations to bring what is known as a superseding indictment  a second set of charges against an already-indicted defendant that could include more serious crimes  against the ex-president in the Southern District of Florida.

But prosecutors may also choose to bring additional charges against Mr Trump in a different venue, depending on how they feel the case they have brought against him in is proceeding.

Andrew Feinberg reports for The Independent.

Prosecutors are prepared to hit Trump and his allies with new charges, sources say

Biden is wrapping a campaign fundraising blitz aimed at making a bold early statement

Thursday 29 June 2023 23:15 , Oliver O'Connell

President Joe Biden has cozied up to high-dollar donors at posh Upper East Side penthouses and on West Coast decks gussied up with floral arrangements and flags in recent weeks. He has two more fundraisers in New York on Thursday that will close out an end-of-quarter campaign blitz his team believes will put him on strong financial footing for a contest they expect to set new spending records.

Fridays events will be Bidens 9th and 10th fundraising receptions of the past two weeks, numbers that have been matched by Vice President Kamala Harris, first lady Jill Biden, and second gentleman Doug Emhoff. The Biden campaign has been mum on how much he has raised at the often free-wheeling events, but it is broadcasting confidence in the size of the haul ahead of the July 15 reporting date.

Read more...

Biden is wrapping a campaign fundraising blitz aimed at making a bold early statement

Trump celebrates Supreme Court decision on affirmative action

Thursday 29 June 2023 22:45 , Oliver O'Connell

Former President Donald Trump celebrated the Supreme Courts decision to reject affirmative action programmes at US colleges and universities on Wednesday morning, calling it a a great day for America.

In a post on Truth Social, Mr Trump said that the ruling was amazing.

Abe Asher has the story.

Trump celebrates Supreme Court ruling on affirmative action: The way it should be!

Biden groans when asked if Trump would have tipped Putin off to coup attempt

Thursday 29 June 2023 22:30 , Oliver O'Connell

President Biden on Thursday said he tries not to consider the national security issues that wouldve been in play had Donald Trump defeated him in the 2020 election and remained in the White House during Russias war on Ukraine.

Specifically, Mr Biden told MSNBCs Nicolle Wallace that he actively attempts to keep such thoughts out of his head when Wallace asked if he thought Mr Trump would have tipped off Russian President Vladimir Putin to the abortive coup attempt waged by Wagner Group leader Yevgeny Prigozhin over the weekend.

Andrew Feinberg reports.

Biden groans when asked if Trump would have tipped Putin off to coup attempt

Trump says DeSantis campaign like a rock heading to Hell

Thursday 29 June 2023 22:15 , Oliver O'Connell

Another day, another potshot at Ron DeSantiss 2024 campaign. Heres what former president Donald Trump had to say today:

The DeSanctimonious campaign is DEAD! His polls are dropping like a rock heading to Hell, and the DOJ/FBI are continuing their illegal and outrageous weaponization against me only because I am leading Biden by so much. Its called ELECTION INTERFERENCE, and they have NO FEAR against DeSanctus - Hes the one that they are dying to run against, dispute their DISINFORMATION CAMPAIGN!

Watch: Biden says theres still a lot of really good Republicans'

Thursday 29 June 2023 22:00 , Oliver O'Connell

President Biden: "By the way, there's still a lot of really good Republicans."@NicolleDWallace: "Out in the country?"



Biden: "No, and in the Senate!" pic.twitter.com/YrSSgVWxED  The Recount (@therecount) June 29, 2023

Report: Top Trump aide revealed as individual he allegedly showed classified map

Thursday 29 June 2023 21:45 , Oliver O'Connell

The identity of an aide to Donald Trump whose voice was heard in an audio recording wherein the former president can be heard brandishing a paper he explicity claims is classified has been revealed.

John Bowden has the story.

Top Trump aide revealed as individual he allegedly showed classified map, report says

Watch: Biden defends poll numbers

Thursday 29 June 2023 21:28 , Oliver O'Connell

"I know the polling numbers are not good, but they were the same way when I ran and won  everybody thought I was gonna get clobbered in the primary; I got 80 million votes in the last election."



 President Biden to @NicolleDWallace pic.twitter.com/TIYTHZMnbp  The Recount (@therecount) June 29, 2023

Trump to deliver remarks in Iowa on 7 July

Thursday 29 June 2023 21:15 , Oliver O'Connell

Former President Donald Trump will deliver remarks at an event in Council Bluffs, Iowa on 7 July.

45th President of the United States Donald J. Trump to Deliver Remarks in Council Bluffs, Iowahttps://t.co/BFZes2AzgF pic.twitter.com/GJ5FuxNaVC  Liz Harrington (@realLizUSA) June 29, 2023

Lev Parnas reacts to Raskin evidence

Thursday 29 June 2023 20:50 , Oliver O'Connell

Lev Parnas took to Twitter in reaction to Rep Jamie Raskins release of evidence that casts doubt on Republican claims that the FBI ignored evidence the President Biden accepted a bribe from a Ukrainian energy mogul.

He wrote:

Ranking Member Jamie Raskin introduces evidence that I provided to the @OversightDems that debunks the lies and conspiracy theories that Rudy Giuliani, @RepMTG, @RepJamesComer and their corrupt cohorts in the @GOP have been pushing on the American people.

@RepRaskin - Despite being interviewed as part of a campaign by Mr. Giuliani and his proxies in 2019 and 2020 to procure damaging information about the Biden family, Mr. Zlochevsky explicitly and unequivocally denied those allegations. Specifically, Mr. Zlochevsky denied (1) that anyone at Burisma had any contacts with then former Vice President Biden or his representatives while Hunter Biden served on the Burisma board, and (2) that former Vice President Biden or his staff in any way assisted Mr. Zlochevsky or Burisma,.

Ranking Member Jamie Raskin introduces evidence that I provided to the @OversightDems that debunks the lies and conspiracy theories that Rudy Giuliani, @RepMTG, @RepJamesComer and their corrupt cohorts in the @GOP have been pushing on the American people. @RepRaskin - Despite  Lev Parnas (@levparnas) June 29, 2023

Raskin: GOP had evidence disproving Biden bribery claims in 2019

Thursday 29 June 2023 20:30 , Oliver O'Connell

The top Democrat on the House Oversight Committee has released evidence that casts significant doubt on GOP claims that the FBI ignored evidence that President Joe Biden accepted a bribe from a Ukrainian energy mogul during his time as vice president.

In a letter to House Oversight Committee chair James Comer, Maryland Representative Jamie Raskin reminded his GOP counterpart that Congress has had evidence that directly contradicts the allegations levied against Mr Biden in an FBI form which Republicans have claimed to be proof of alleged corruption on the part of the president.

Andrew Feinberg reports.

GOP had evidence disproving Biden bribery claims in 2019, top Democrat says

Watch: Bannon rages at Comer over Fox interview

Thursday 29 June 2023 20:00 , Oliver O'Connell

Steve Bannon is fuming after another feckless interview this morning on Fox by James Comer, who looked like a fool again trying to answer questions on the Hunter Biden investigation: Your staff has to have you ready! Youre not serious. Its all performative. pic.twitter.com/63lDJyl9eZ  Ron Filipkowski (@RonFilipkowski) June 29, 2023

DeSantis mocked for apparently photoshopped campaign photo

Thursday 29 June 2023 19:45 , Oliver O'Connell

Presidential hopeful Ron DeSantis has been ridiculed for a seemingly photoshopped campaign photograph that has resurfaced as the Republican presidential primary begins to take shape.

The image was taken for Mr DeSantiss brief campaign for Senate in 2015 ahead of the 2016 election when incumbent Florida Senator Marco Rubio was running for president before campaigning for re-election to the upper chamber.

Read on...

DeSantis mocked for apparently photoshopped resurfaced campaign photo

EXCLUSIVE: Prosecutors are prepared to hit Trump and his allies with new charges, sources say

Thursday 29 June 2023 19:18 , Oliver O'Connell

The Department of Justice is prepared to seek indictments against multiple figures in former president Donald Trumps orbit and may yet bring additional charges against the ex-president in the coming weeks, The Independent has learned.

According to sources familiar with the matter, the department has made preparations to bring what is known as a superseding indictment  a second set of charges against an already-indicted defendant that could include more serious crimes  against the ex-president, and could do so in a number of different venues, depending on how prosecutors feel the case they have brought against him in a Florida federal court is proceeding.

Read the full story by The Independents Andrew Feinberg in Washington, DC.

Prosecutors are prepared to hit Trump and his allies with new charges, sources say

Federal grand jury still investigating aspects of classified documents case, report says

Thursday 29 June 2023 19:00 , Oliver O'Connell

Three weeks after Donald Trump was indicted on charges of illegally retaining classified national security documents and obstructing the governments efforts to reclaim them, a federal grand jury in Miami is still investigating aspects of the case, The New York Times reports, citing people familiar with the matter.

Per the Times:

In recent days, the grand jury has issued subpoenas to a handful of people who are connected to the inquiry, those familiar with it said. While it remains unclear who received the subpoenas and the kind of information prosecutors were seeking to obtain, it is clear that the grand jury has stayed active and that investigators are digging even after a 38-count indictment was issued this month against Mr. Trump and a co-defendant, Walt Nauta, one of his personal aides.

Prosecutors often continue investigating strands of a criminal case after charges have been brought, and sometimes their efforts go nowhere. But at other times post-indictment investigations result in additional charges against people who have already been accused of crimes in the case. The investigations can also be used to bring new charges against new defendants.

Watch: Would Chris Christie pardon Donald Trump?

Thursday 29 June 2023 18:40 , Oliver O'Connell

The former New Jersey governor weighs in on the power of the president to pardon people and whether it would apply to Donald Trump were he convicted of the various crimes of which he is accused.

'I don't think I would pardon him,' says Chris Christie, one of Donald Trump's most outspoken critics in the 2024 GOP primary field, in regards to Trump's ongoing prosecution over the DOJ's classified documents probe pic.twitter.com/NGaq9xXxLY  NowThis (@nowthisnews) June 29, 2023

Joe Biden gives emphatic response to question about troubling Hunter text

Thursday 29 June 2023 18:20 , Oliver O'Connell

President Joe Biden is facing increasing pressure to answer questions  in detail  about his son Hunter Biden and a concerning text message that has been unearthed as the questions surrounding the latters business activities are growing more serious.

And on Wednesday, the president bristled at a reporter who asked him about it, just days after Karine Jean-Pierre, his press secretary, was inundated with questions on the topic at her daily news briefing.

John Bowden in Washington, DC, reports on what the president has said so far.

Insider trading: Trump Media investors charged in $22m case

Thursday 29 June 2023 18:05 , Oliver O'Connell

Three investors in the special purpose acquisition company (SPAC) that took Trump Media public have been indicted for insider trading concerning the deal, making $22m in alleged lillegal trades.

Michael Shvartsman, Gerald Shvartsman and Bruce Garelick were named in a federal indictment unsealed on Thursday (29 June) in Manhattan federal court.

All three were charged with trading in securities of Digital World Acquisition Corporation (DWAC) based on non-public information about the companys planned business combination with Trump Media & Technology Group  founded by former President Donald Trump  the parent company of social media platform Truth Social.

They were arrested on Thursday morning in Florida.

Full story here:

Trump Media investors charged in $22m insider trading case

Trump hails Supreme Court decision on affirmative action

Thursday 29 June 2023 17:45 , Oliver O'Connell

Donald Trump hails Supreme Court decision on affirmative action as a great day for America.

The former president posted on Truth Social:

This is a great day for America. People with extraordinary ability and everything else necessary for success, including future greatness for our Country, are finally being rewarded. This is the ruling everyone was waiting and hoping for and the result was amazing. It will also keep us competitive with the rest of the world. Our greatest minds must be cherished and thats what this wonderful day has brought. Were going back to all merit-basedand thats the way it should be!

Heres our coverage of the ruling:

Supreme Court bans colleges from considering race in admissions

Did DeSantis break the law with Texas border trip?

Thursday 29 June 2023 17:30 , Oliver O'Connell

The presidential campaign of Florida Governor Ron DeSantis has been accused of breaking the law after the team shared an image on Twitter of the candidate exiting a helicopter that records show is owned by the Texas Department of Public Safety.

Mr DeSantis was in Eagle Pass, Texas on Monday to visit the US-Mexico border when the campaign shared the photo with the caption MISSION: Stop the invasion STATUS: Critical LEAD: @RonDeSantis.

Legal experts now say that the use of Texas government resources in a political ad is a campaign finance violation.

Gustaf Kilander reports.

DeSantis accused of breaking the law with Texas border trip

Pence meets with Zelensky in Ukraine

Thursday 29 June 2023 17:15 , Oliver O'Connell

Former vice president Mike Pence visited with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky in a sign of solidarity with Ukraine even as many Republicans sour on support for Ukraine, CNN reported.

Eric Garcia has the latest:

Mike Pence meets with Zelensky in Ukraine

Is Rudy Giuliani negotiating a plea deal over efforts to overturn 2020 election?

Thursday 29 June 2023 16:55 , Oliver O'Connell

Slate has followed up on reporting by CNN and The New York Times this week that Rudy Giuliani, former Mayor of New York and Donald Trumps personal attorney during his administration, has voluntarily met with investigators from Special Counsel Jack Smiths office as part of a proffer agreement.

This raises the possibility that he might flip against his former boss ex-president Trump.

Per Robert Katzberg, former federal prosecutor who has defended high-profile white-collar criminal cases for more than four decades, writing in Slate:

While the Times was not specific about what Giulianis voluntary interview means, such proffer sessions are almost always the final step towards a plea deal. If one is consummated in Smiths investigation of Trumps efforts to overturn the 2020 electionwhich were spearheaded by Giulianiit would both be a deeply ironic end for one of the countrys most bulldog former prosecutors and also a devastating blow to the former president.

As someone deeply enmeshed in the New York City white collar criminal defense world during Giulianis tenure as US Attorney for the Southern District of New York, reports that he sat for an extensive proffer session with prosecutors investigating the events surrounding the Jan 6 riot boggles the mind.

He further explains the process:

Once counsel concludes the client has something valuable to offer prosecutors and that the client can be an effective witness, the next step can be taken. Counsel contacts the prosecutors and arranges an attorneys proffer, in which the lawyer, without the client, meets prosecutors to outline the general contours of what the client can provide. If the contours are unacceptable, say the client wants an agreement he will not be prosecuted for providing evidence against a lesser target, the session ends quickly. If, however, both sides see the prospect for getting something they want without giving up too much, the session gets more and more specific. It is only if the attorneys factual representations offer enough for prosecutors to offer sufficiently reduced criminal exposure, and thus, a realistic deal may be available, that the next to last step, the client proffer, is taken. Giuliani has reportedly now taken that step.

You can read the full piece here.

Christie says McCarthy spoke correctly about Trump the first time

Thursday 29 June 2023 16:45 , Oliver O'Connell

Former New Jersey governor and presidential Republican presidential candidate Chris Christie told CNN that House Speaker Kevin McCarthy was right in his initial assessment about whether former president Donald Trump was the strongest candidate to beat Joe Biden in a general election contest.

Earlier this week, Mr McCarthy said he was not sure that Mr Trump was the strongest candidate to beat Mr Biden.

Eric Garcia reports from Washington, DC.

Chris Christie says McCarthy spoke correctly about Trump the first time

Click here to read the full blog on The Independent's website
Trump's Own Words About An Indicted President Come Back To Bite Him

Former President Donald Trump was deeply critical of the notion of a candidate running for president under indictment in 2016, seven years before he was arrested twice on felony charges during his 2024 presidential campaign.

In 2016 comments unearthed by CNNs KFile on Monday, Trump slammed his then-opponent, Hillary Clinton, saying she had no right to run for president because she was under federal investigation over her handling of classified information on a private email server during her time as secretary of state.

We could very well have a sitting president under felony indictment and ultimately a criminal trial, Trump said at a Nov. 5, 2016, campaign rally in Reno, Nevada. It would grind government to a halt.

At another rally on Nov. 3, 2016, in Concord, North Carolina, Trump said it would create an unprecedented constitutional crisis that would cripple the operations of our government if Clinton won the election while under investigation.

She has no right to be running, he said.

Trump, the leading contender for the 2024 Republican presidential nomination, was indicted last month on 37 felony counts in connection to his handling of classified documents after leaving the White House. Federal prosecutors presented evidence that he knowingly broke the law, obstructed their investigation and refused to return sensitive documents despite repeated government efforts to retrieve them.

In April, the Manhattan District Attorneys office charged him with 34 felony counts in a separate case involving an alleged scheme to cover up an affair via hush money payments in order to influence the 2016 presidential election.

No charges were brought against Clinton. Though the Justice Department probe determined that her office had been extremely careless in its handling of classified information, investigators concluded she had not acted with criminal intent.

Trump has repeatedly called for the prosecution and jailing of rivals and adversaries accused of mishandling classified information.

Some of his public comments on the subject were cited by prosecutors in his indictment last month. The document listed Trumps remarks from campaign speeches in 2016 about the importance of protecting classified information  suggesting he was aware of how serious it was to fail to do so.

We cant have someone in the Oval Office who doesnt understand the meaning of the word confidential or classified, Trump said on Sept. 6, 2016.

Related...
Twitter is facing a $700,000 lawsuit over unpaid bills for work including clearing out its Australian office and fitting-out its Singapore location

Elon Musk and the Twitter logo. Jonathan Raa/Getty Images

An Australian project management company is suing Twitter for around $700,000 of unpaid bills.

That includes work fitting-out Twitter's Singapore office, and clearing out its Australian one.

It's the latest in a myriad of lawsuits accusing Elon Musk's company of failing to pay bills.

Twitter is facing another lawsuit accusing it of not paying bills  including for work clearing out the company's Australian office.

Facilitate, an Australian project management company, filed the lawsuit seeking $700,000 in the Northern District of California on Thursday, Reuters first reported.

It says it carried out work on four of Twitter's offices around the world, with around $400,000 spent on a "full office fit-out construction" in Singapore.

The first invoice for that is dated October 28, 2022  just one day after Elon Musk bought Twitter, the lawsuit says. That's a week before its first round of mass layoffs affected the Singapore office, Insider previously reported.

The Singapore office was first opened in 2015, and staff were briefly kicked out over a rent dispute in January before Musk ultimately made a late payment, Insider's Kali Hays reported.

From last September through to mid-March, three invoices totaling $40,000 relate to "decommissioning" Twitter's Australia office and putting its contents in storage, according to the suit.

The Sydney Morning Herald reported last July that Twitter was closing down its Sydney office, telling staff to work from home indefinitely.

Facilitate is also claiming over $250,000 for work at Twitter's London and Dublin offices, primarily related to installing sensors in work predating Musk's takeover.

The London office has already been involved in another lawsuit, as the landlord  King Charles III's Crown Estate  accused Twitter of failing to pay rent.

According to a May lawsuit filed by six ex-employees, Musk told one of his advisors in a 4 a.m. conversation that "he would only pay rent over his dead body."

Last month, a judge ruled that the local sheriff should help evict Twitter from its Boulder, Colorado office after not paying rent for months, per the Denver Business Journal.

"Following the acquisition, Facilitate corresponded about its outstanding invoices with its remaining contacts at the company," Facilitate's lawsuit says.

"They gave no indication that Twitter disputed it owed the amounts on the invoices and offered no justification for not paying."

Insider contacted Twitter for comment. The company responded with an automated message that didn't address the inquiry.

Read the original article on Business Insider
Richard Balfe

Two British peers were among the 50 people who attended a party organized by the Russian ambassador to the UK at his opulent residence in West London in June, to mark the creation of Russias independence from the Soviet Union, UK newspaper The Guardian reported on July 2.

Andrei Kelin, the Russian ambassador, spoke at the event where he sought to justify his countrys bloody invasion of Ukraine, while those attending included the Conservative Lord Balfe and cross-bencher Lord Skidelsky.

The ambassador also accused Britain of making a big strategic miscalculation by taking a confrontational approach with Moscow.

Balfe confirmed to The Guardian that he was present at the event where, according to the UK peer, he held a perfunctory conversation with the Russian defense attache. The peer said he believed that eventually there would have to be a negotiated settlement in which Ukraine gave up some territory to Russia.

Ukraine is, to be honest, a mess of a country, Balfe said.

It was knocked together by (former UK Prime Minister Winston) Churchill and (Soviet dictator Joseph) Stalin towards the end of World War II.

He added that he believed Crimea is most definitely Russian and that Moscow had legitimate claims on Donetsk and Luhansk, while there should be negotiations around a land corridor to Crimea.

Skidelsky, an economist and crossbencher who has been a member of the Conservatives, Labour and the Social Democratic Party, said he was opposed to the Russian invasion of Ukraine, but attended because I wanted to show my respect and affection for the Russian people on their national day, especially in these circumstances.

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
Two killed, 28 injured and manhunt on for gunmen: How a Baltimore block party turned into a bloodbath

Scene of the shooting and two victims killed inset (Metro Crime Stoppers Of Maryland/Facebook)

A fun, neighbourhood block party turned into a horrific bloodbath over July 4 weekend when at least two shooters opened fire on partygoers, killing two people and wounding 28 others.

The mass shooting unfolded in the Brooklyn Homes area of South Baltimore, Maryland, in the early hours of Sunday morning as hundreds gathered for the annual community celebration.

Kylis Fagbemi, 20, and Aaliyah Gonzalez, 18, died in the attack.

Now, more than 24 hours on, the shooters are still at large.

Heres what we know so far:

The shooting

At around 12.35am on Sunday morning, Baltimore police received multiple calls reporting a shooting on the 800 block of Gretna Court.

Officers responded to the scene, where the community had been holding its annual Brooklyn Day block party, to find 30 victims suffering from gunshot wounds.

One female victim was pronounced dead on the scene while nine victims were rushed to local hospitals and 20 walked into area hospitals across the region. One male victim died at the hospital from his injuries.

Among the 28 victims who survived, three were in critical condition and 14 were minors.

Police on scene of the mass shooting (Copyright 2023 The Associated Press. All rights reserved)

The non-fatal female victims injured were one 13-year-old, one 14-year-old, two 15-year-olds, three 16-year-olds, two 17-year-olds, two 18-year-olds, three 19-year-olds, one 20-year-old, one 23-year-old and one 32-year-old.

The non-fatal male victims injured were one 13-year-old, one 15-year-old, two 16-year-old, two 17-year-olds, three 18-year-olds, one 22-year-old and one 31-year-old.

Witnesses revealed how they initially mistook the gunfire for fireworks going off.

The shots were just going on and on and on, Lakell Nelson, 54, told the Baltimore Sun.

But, reality set in when two women told her they had been shot.

Police tape cordoning off crime scene (AP)

I kinda didnt believe them at first because they were walking up the street. I said, Show me, and the girl was like, I was shot in my butt, she said.

When she turned around, I saw the hole through her shorts.

Ms Nelson said she drove the two women to a local hospital.

The victims

On Sunday afternoon, police identified the two victims killed in the attack.

Aaliyah Gonzalez, 18, was shot and killed on the scene.

Kylis Fagbemi, 20, was rushed to hospital where he succumbed to his injuries.

Gonzalezs heartbroken mother paid tribute to her daughter in a Facebook post, sharing photos of her recent high school graduation.

MY BABY!!! Worst day of my life! I cannot do life without her. I NEED HER!!, she wrote.

Kylis Fagbemi, 20, and Aaliyah Gonzalez, 18, were both killed (Metro Crime Stoppers)

Why would they do this to a perfect angel. I love you so much baby. I didnt get there fast enough. God this is a mistake!!! Please!!

In a follow-up post, she added: I always said, No matter how much I say I love you, I love you more than that.

The shooters

Baltimore Police said that they believe there was at least two shooters in the attack.

Acting Baltimore Police Commissioner Richard Worley told Fox Baltimore on Sunday afternoon: We know for sure there are more than one. We dont know how many.

As of Monday morning, the suspects identities remain unknown and no arrests had been made.

Mayor Brandon Scott described the actions of the soooters as cowardly and urged people to come forward with information.

This was a reckless, cowardly act that happened here and that has permanently altered many lives and cost two people their lives, he said in a press conference on Sunday.

I want those who are responsible to hear me, and hear me very clearly.

Aftermath of the mass shooting (Copyright 2023 The Associated Press. All rights reserved)

Speaking to the perpetrators, he said: We will not stop until we find you, and we will find you. Until then, I hope that every single breath you take, that you think about the lives that you took, think about the lives that you impacted here tonight.

He added: Treat this as if it were your family. How you would want people to treat it if you were mourning, if this was your neighborhood, if this was an event in your community that this happened at. We want you to treat it that way because thats how we have to treat each other as Baltimoreans.

Anyone with information is urged to contact Homicide detectives at 410-396-2100. Those who wish to remain anonymous may utilise the Metro Crime Stoppers tip line, at 1-866-7LOCKUP. You may also text tips through the Metro Crime Stoppers of Maryland website.
State Police searching for hit-and-run driver who left motorcyclist with life-threatening injuries

Massachusetts State Police are investigating a hit-and-run crash that left two people hurt early Sunday morning.

According to police, the crash involved a 2003 Honda Accord and a 2016 Honda CB300 motorcycle.

Police were called to the intersection of South St. and the Arborway across from the Forest Hills MBTA station around 2 a.m. Sunday.

When they arrived, they found both the operator of the motorcycle and their passenger had been ejected. Neither was wearing a helmet.

The passenger, a 22-year-old Boston man, was rushed to Beth Israel Hospital with life-threatening injuries. At last check, he was listed in critical condition.

The motorcycle operator, a 24-year-old Boston man, was taken to Brigham and Womens Hospital with non-life-threatening injuries.

According to state police, a Honda Accord attempted to make an illegal left turn from the Arborway to South St., colliding with the motorcycle in the eastbound lane of the Arborway.

The driver of the Accord did not stop and drove away from the scene, heading south.

Troopers are working to locate the driver and the car.

The ongoing investigation into the crash is being conducted by the State Police-Milton Barracks, the State Police Collision Analysis and Reconstruction Section, the State Police Crime Scene Services Section, and the State Police Detective Unit for Suffolk County.

JUST IN: @MassStatePolice searching for driver of Honda Accord who crashed into motorcycle -- leaving the operator hurt and his passenger with life-threatening injuries -- in early-morning crash in Jamaica Plain. @boston25 https://t.co/O8Tq4efzgj  Julianne Lima (@JulianneLimaTV) July 2, 2023

BREAKING OVERNIGHT: Apparent crash involving at least one car and a motorcycle shuts down busy intersection in Jamaica Plain across from the Forest Hills @MBTA station.



What we're learning from @bostonpolice from 8-10 AM on @boston25 pic.twitter.com/c29MsyRlSW  Julianne Lima (@JulianneLimaTV) July 2, 2023

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
Perry posted on his Instagram that he wants to help Josephine Wright from having to sell her South Carolina home after being sued by local developers over the property.

Tyler Perry is helping an elderly lady stay in her home despite developers trying to force her out.

Josephine Wright, 93, says that developers, Bailey Point Investment, have tried to make her sell her home in Hilton Head, South Carolina, according to People. She says shes been harassed in attempts to get her to vacate after she refused to sell the house.

Wrights home reportedly has been in her family since the end of the Civil War, and shes lived in the house for over three decades. Perry posted a video of Wright telling a local TV news team, WSAV, about her plight on his Instagram page.

TheGrio Awards Icon Tyler Perry speaks at theGrio Awards on Oct. 22, 2022, at the Beverly Hilton in Beverly Hills, California. (Screenshot/theGrio)

The news package stated that the investment group that owns the property behind Wrights home claims that her house is on their property. As a result, the group has filed a lawsuit against Wright, who has 40 grandchildren, 50 great-grandchildren and 16 great-great-grandchildren.

Ive pretty much been a fighter most of my life, Wright told WSAV. She went on to say that the lawsuit from Bailey Point puzzled me at first, but then it got me angry.

Perry responded to the story with the caption, Ive pretty much been a fighter all my life, said 93-year-old Josephine Wright. Well, that makes two of us. Ms. Wright, please tell me where to show up and what you need to help you fight.

The writer-director helped others in similar situations. This past February, he once pledged $750,000 to keep low-income senior citizens in Atlanta from being displaced from their homes.

Perry is one of many helping Wright keep her house. A local organization, the Jonesville Preservation Society, is on the case, garnering support from neighbors and local officers to stop the developers.

TheGrio is FREE on your TV via Apple TV, Amazon Fire, Roku and Android TV. Also, please download theGrio mobile apps today!

The post Tyler Perry pledges to help 93-year-old woman keep her house appeared first on TheGrio.
WASHINGTON  U.S. Ambassador to Russia Lynne Tracy saw American journalist Evan Gershkovich on Monday, the second visit by Biden administration officials since the Wall Street Journal reporter was arrested in March.

U.S. consular officials, including Tracy, were last able to see Gershkovich on April 17, about two weeks after Russian government officials arrested him. A Moscow court ruled last month that Gershkovich must remain in prison until Aug. 30.

"Ambassador Tracy reports that Mr. Gershkovich is in good health and remains strong, despite his circumstances," a State Department spokesperson said. "U.S. Embassy officials will continue to provide all appropriate support to Mr. Gershkovich and his family, and we expect Russian authorities to provide continued consular access."

The spokesperson called on Russia to release Gershkovich, reiterating that the charges are baseless.

"We also call for the immediate release of Paul Whelan, the spokesperson added. Mr. Whelan has been wrongfully detained in Russia for more than four years. Both men deserve to go home to their families now."

Gershkovich, who is being held at Moscows Lefortovo Prison, was first detained on March 30 on suspicion of espionage in the interests of the American government, Russias Federal Security Service said in a statement reported by Russian state media. Russian authorities have not offered any evidence to support the charges.

In an interview with NBC News' Tom Llamas last week, Roger Carstens, the special presidential envoy for hostage affairs, said that "it remains to be seen" how the recent events in Russia with the Wagner mercenary group and Russian President Vladimir Putin affect Gershkovich's case.

"If theres one surprise Ive had in this business in 3 years of doing this job, its that the opposing side is always willing to talk to us almost no matter how much tension. And there have been times when weve been at loggerheads with Russia, and yet weve still been able to garner a release of Trevor Reid and Brittney Griner," Carstens said at a panel discussion at the Aspen Ideas Festival. "So my thought is even though the Wagner Group might introduce some chaos and ambiguity into the system, I think were still going to find a way to have this conversation and bring Evan home."

Carstens said he believes Gershkovich's case is likely to progress "along the lines that we saw with Brittney Griner, Trevor Reed and Paul Whelan."

The Biden administration secured the releases of Reed and Griner from Russia last year.

This article was originally published on NBCNews.com
Is the UK getting hotter, and what causes heatwaves?

Boy in fountain

The Met Office says hot summers are happening more frequently.

Weather readings dating back more than a century point to long-term changes in the UK's temperature.

Is the UK getting hotter?

Yes, Britain has been slowly getting warmer since the 19th Century. In the past three decades, the UK has become 0.9C warmer.

The 10 hottest years since 1884 have all happened since 2002. And none of the coldest years has been recorded this century.

In 2022 the UK smashed its highest temperature record when 40.3C was recorded at Coningsby in Lincolnshire in July.

The previous record was 38.7C in Cambridge in 2019.

More than half of the UK's oldest active weather stations recorded their hottest day ever in 2022, according to Met Office data.

The UK recorded its hottest average temperature for June on record in 2023.

The average monthly temperature of 15.8C exceeded the previous highest average June temperature, recorded in 1940 and 1976, by 0.9C.

Met Office scientists said climate change made the long period of warm weather twice as likely.

A graphic visualising the temperature change between the previous high and the new 2022 record for weather stations across the UK. A number of stations such as sheffield, Durham and Bradford broke their record by a significant margin of four degrees, with the biggest increase at Bramham in West Yorkshire which beat its record by more than six degrees

Last year was the UK's warmest year on record, with the average annual temperature exceeding 10C for the first time.

When does hot weather become a heatwave?

A heatwave is a period of hot weather where temperatures are higher than is expected for the time of year.

In the UK, the Met Office declares a heatwave when it records at least three days in a row with maximum temperatures exceeding a set temperature.

That threshold varies by county.

A UK map showing that more than half (57 of 109) of weather stations with at least 50 years of data broke their all-time high in 2022. Other years with records still standing are 2019 and 2006 with nine records, while 1990 has six and 1976 with 7. There are 22 records set in other years still standing

Heatwaves usually happen in summer when high pressure develops over an area.

They can also bring so-called "tropical nights" - when night-time temperatures fail to drop below 20C.

That can make it hard to sleep at night and the body can suffer, as it fails to sufficiently cool down.

The Met Office says it's not clear whether heatwaves are becoming more frequent because of their sporadic nature.

Why are we seeing these changes?

Climate change is causing global temperatures to rise. Greenhouse gases, like carbon dioxide, released into Earth's atmosphere in large volumes are trapping the sun's heat, causing the planet to warm.

This has brought more extreme weather, including record-breaking high temperatures across the world.

Periods of intense heat do occur within natural weather patterns, but scientists say that globally they are becoming more frequent, more intense and are lasting longer as a result of global warming.

The UK is also seeing more dramatic rainfall as a result of climate change

In the UK, the Met Office has warned that summers like 2018 are 30 times more likely now than before the Industrial Revolution - the point when humans starting producing the emissions that are responsible for climate change.

A report on climate extremes in the UK found that recent years have seen both higher maximum temperatures and longer warm spells.

That trend is predicted to continue. It's possible that by 2100, the UK could see 40C days every three to four years.

Is hot weather dangerous?

Hot weather can be dangerous particularly for the vulnerable, including elderly people, children and people with underlying health conditions.

Spending too much time in high temperatures or in the sun, can cause health issues such as heat stroke and cardiovascular failure.

Man in a lorry cab wiping sweat from his brow with a towel

There are also indirect effects like poorer mental health and an increase in accidents such as car crashes and drownings.

In August 2003, 20,000 people died following a heatwave in Europe lasting 10 days, according to the Met Office.

The higher death rate starts to kick in once the thermometer passes 25C-26C.

How do you keep cool when it's hot?

Where possible, you should modify your routine and behaviour to adapt to the heat.

If you can, travel in the morning or evening when temperatures are lower.

Wear a high-factor sunscreen and a hat if you are going to spend time in the sun.
UK saw hottest June on record in 2023: Met Office

Last year England had its joint hottest summer on record, leading to train cancellations (Niklas HALLE'N)

The UK this year has seen its hottest June on record, both in terms of mean temperature and the average maximum temperature, the British Meteorological Office said Monday.

"The average mean temperature of 15.8 degrees Celsius (60.44 degrees Fahrenheit) for June 2023 in the UK is the highest in a series since 1884," the Met Office said in a statement.

The average temperature in June 2023 was 0.9 degrees higher than a previous joint record of 14.9 degrees registered in June of 1940 and 1976, according to provisional figures.

"It's officially the hottest June on record for the UK," said the Met Office's Mark McCarthy.

On the hottest day in June, the temperature reached 32.2 degrees Celsius, McCarthy said.

"What's striking is the persistent warmth for much of the month, with temperatures widely into the mid 20s Celsius for many and even into the low 30s at times," he added.

The four countries that make up the UK -- England, Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland -- also reported "their respective warmest June on record", the Met Office said.

Water use restrictions have been imposed in parts of southeastern England amid record demand for drinking water.

Scotland meanwhile has put regions on water scarcity alert as a result of concerns about the water level in its rivers and lochs.

Last year England had its joint hottest summer on record, tied with 2018, and the fourth hottest for the whole of the UK, leading to school closures and train cancellations.

Temperatures exceeded 40 degrees Celsius for the first time.

"Alongside natural variability, the background warming of the Earth's atmosphere due to human induced climate change has driven up the possibility of reaching record high temperatures," Paul Davies of the Met Office said.

Mel Evans, head of climate at environmental campaign group Greenpeace UK, said temperature records were "falling like domino tiles", blaming fossil fuels for global warming.

Evans criticised UK Prime Minister Rishi Sunak for being "asleep at the wheel" and failing to take action on climate change.

"If the heatwaves, droughts and wildfires raging around the world aren't enough to shake Sunak out of his complacency, people will be wondering what on earth will."

Sunak's own advisory body on climate change last week criticised the government for the slow pace of its transition to clean energy, warning time was running out to meet its goals.

He also lost his international environment minister, Zac Goldsmith, who accused Sunak of "apathy" on environmental policy.

acl/phz/rox
A person drinks water during hot weather

The UK had the hottest June on record, the Met Office has confirmed.

The average monthly temperature of 15.8C (60.4F) exceeded the previous highest average June temperature, recorded in 1940 and 1976, by 0.9C.

Climate change made the chance of surpassing the previous joint record at least twice as likely, scientists also said.

Records were broken in 72 of the 97 areas in the UK from which temperature data is collected.

As well as the overall UK June record, England, Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland each recorded their warmest June since the Met Office started collecting the data in 1884.

Chart showing temperatures recorded in June since 1890

"It's officially the hottest June on record for the UK, for mean temperature as well as average maximum and minimum temperature," said Met Office's Climate Science Manager Mark McCarthy.

"An increase of 0.9C may not seem a huge amount, but it's really significant because it has taken the average daytime and the night time temperature for the whole of the UK," Paul Davies, Met Office chief meteorologist and climate extremes principal fellow, told BBC News.

"That's significant in a warming climate and because of the consequential impacts on society," he added.

He also said that while the UK recorded a higher one-off temperature of 40.3C last summer, the difference last month was the sustained heat both day and night.

The west of the UK was often hotter than the east, which had increased cloud levels suppressing daytime temperatures, the Met Office said.

Map showing temperature records broken in UK in June

Rain was also in short supply for much of the month, with just 68% of the average June rainfall.

Wales was particularly dry, with just over half of its average monthly rainfall.

The Met Office used a supercomputer to analyse the temperatures and identify the fingerprint of climate change on the weather.

"We found that the chance of observing a June beating the previous joint 1940/1976 record of 14.9C has at least doubled since the 1940s," explains Mr Davies.

"Alongside natural variability, the background warming of the Earth's atmosphere due to human-induced climate change has driven up the possibility of reaching record-high temperatures," he added.

Climate change is driving extreme weather events around the world.

The world has warmed by about 1.1C since the industrial revolution about 200 years ago.

Greenhouse gases have been pumped into the atmosphere by activities such as burning fuels, which have heated up the Earth's atmosphere.

Last year the UK recorded temperatures above 40C for the first time. Scientists said that would have been "virtually impossible without climate change".

Dr Richard Hodgkins, senior lecturer in physical geography at University of Loughborough says it is notable how the warm weather "fits expectations of a changing climate in the UK".

He said researchers have been predicting patterns where weather appears to get "stuck", which would mean longer heatwaves.

The hot June was "somewhat like a typical weather event for the UK, but stretched out in time much longer than normal," he added.

The dry and warm weather last month affected wildlife and nature with environment groups warning of fish deaths and flowering plants wilting.

Nature is being "pounded by extreme weather without a chance to recover", the Wildlife Trusts told BBC News.

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During the war, Unilever Russia profits doubled

Multinational firm Unilever has been included in Ukraines list of international sponsors of war, the National Agency for Corruption Prevention (NACP) reported in a press release on July 3.

The company, known as a global leader in the food and household chemicals market, owns over 400 brands including Domestos, Axe, Rexona, Dove, Calve, Rama, Brooke Bond, Lipton, Creme Bonjour, CIF, Knorr, Sunsilk, Timotei, CLEAR, Chysta Liniya, and others.

The decision to include Unilever in the list is based on the fact that the company pays significant taxes to the Russian state budget while operating in the Russian Federation, thereby supporting the aggressors economy and contributing to the continuation of Russias war against Ukraine.

Unilever employs over 3,000 workers in Russia. In 2022, the Russian market accounted for 1.4% of Unilevers turnover and 2% of its net profit, which increased by 24.9% compared to 2021, amounting to EUR 8.03 billion ($8.7 billion). The companys revenue reached EUR 60.1 billion ($65.5 billion), marking 14.5% growth. Unilevers sales increased across all categories, with the highest growth in cosmetics sales (20.8%).

Read also: Vast majority of global corporations continue operations in Russia, says President's Office

Following the full-scale invasion, the company pledged to suspend all imports and exports to and from Russia, as well as cease all media and advertising expenses. However, Unilever Russias profit doubled from 4.8 billion rubles (EUR 56 million or $61 million) in 2021 to over 9.2 billion rubles (EUR 108 million or $118 million) last year.

Furthermore, thanks to the substantial profit increase (91%), Unilever Russia LLC managed to increase its capital to 34.5 billion rubles (EUR 353 million or $385 million) in 2022 from 25.3 billion rubles (EUR 259 million or $282 million) in 2021, representing a 37% rise. The company paid approximately $50 million in taxes to the Russian budget for the year 2022.

Unilever has stated that its stance on conducting business in Russia remains unchanged. Consequently, its facilities in Omsk, Yekaterinburg, St. Petersburg, and Tula are continuing their operations to ensure the availability of their brands in retail outlets.

Read also: Ukraine declares Mondelez international  makers of Milka and Oreo  sponsor of war

Unilever cannot claim to be against the war while simultaneously supporting Putins war machine, said Oleksandr Novikov, the head of the NACP.

We have included this company in the list of international sponsors of the war because their hundreds of millions in tax contributions to the Russian budget help finance the war against Ukraine and may indirectly fund certain groups of Russian mercenaries. Unilever, under the leadership of its new CEO, Heiner Schumacher, needs a fresh start to uphold human rights values. If Unilever fails to leave Russia, history will remember its complicity in this war.

The NACP believes that Unilevers actions indicate its unwillingness to join the coalition of ethical and responsible businesses that have chosen the side of democracy and freedom. By making substantial contributions to the Russian state budget, Unilever not only supports the Russian economy but also indirectly supports the actions of the aggressor.

Read also: Ukraine lists worlds largest offshore drilling company as international sponsor of war

The following companies are also included in this list: Procter&Gamble, OpenWay Group, Danieli, TMS Tankers Ltd., Minerva Marine Inc., Thenamaris Ships Management, Delta Tankers Ltd., Dynacom Tankers Management Ltd., Leroy Merlin, ComNav Technology, Mondi Group/Mondi PLC, eKassir, Liberian International Ship & Corporate Registry, Bonduelle, Auchan Holding, Metro Cash & Carry, Buzzi Unicem, Yves Rocher, Xiaomi, Raiffeisen Bank International, OTP Bank, Mondelez International, and Geely.

Inclusion in this list ensures that these companies are added to the World-Check database. The database tracks individuals and organizations with an elevated risk profile and is used worldwide to detect and manage financial, regulatory, and reputational risks. Interaction with the World-Check database helps protect the international financial sector from sponsors of the Russian war, as cooperation with such entities poses a danger to socially responsible businesses.

Read also: McDonalds, Coca-Cola and the great corporate exodus. List of companies leaving Russia

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Read the original article on The New Voice of Ukraine
The decision to establish the court was made by the National Security and Defense Council

Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy has signed a decree establishing a separate court for the protection of investors' rights and assets in the country, according to a message on the presidents website on June 30.

The decision to form this court was made by Ukraine's National Security and Defense Council on June 23. The council, in an effort to expedite judicial reform and combat corruption within the justice system, also decided to request that the Ukrainian parliament increase punishment for corruption. The proposal suggests 10 to 15 years imprisonment for judges found guilty of corruption, along with asset seizure.

Read also: What to know about Stanislav Kravchenko  Ukraines new Supreme Court Chief Justice

The National Security and Defense Council also aims to enhance the role of citizen juries and conduct evaluations of all Supreme Court judges. They decree has also tasked the government, in collaboration with the Venice Commission, with formulating a plan to reform the Constitutional Court of Ukraine.

Read also: Ukraine to receive 90% of major global investments only after wars conclusion  Fiala

In December 2020, the parliament passed the law "On State Support for Investment Projects with Significant Investments," also known as the investment nanny law.

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Read the original article on The New Voice of Ukraine
Ukraines IT exports grew by 9.5% in May, still lower than last year

Ukraine's IT exports grew to $590 million

The volume of IT exports in May 2023 grew by 9.5% compared to April, but it remains lower than last year's figures, the Lviv IT Cluster reported on July 3, referring to data from the National Bank of Ukraine.

Ukraine's IT exports amounted to $2.8 billion in the first five months of 2023. Thus, export revenues from IT-industry are 12% less this year than in the same period last year.

The difference amounted to $374 million.

May shows a positive trend regardless of this slower growth, the Lviv IT Cluster wrote. In general, exports revenues dropped at the beginning of the year compared to the previous one.

"This May, the share of IT in the structure of total service exports was 41%. Last year, it was 47.5%," CEO at Lviv IT Cluster Stepan Veselovskyi said.

Read also: European Innovation Council allocates EUR 20 million for Ukrainian tech start-ups

"This once again reminds us that IT, as one of the backbone industries of the economy, needs support today. Given the current trend, there is every chance that the sector will end 2023 with the same revenue figure as in 2022  $7.3 billion. This means that for the first time the tech sector will not show growth."

He also voiced the need to establish a clear mechanism for short businesstrips abroad for men of military age, who are banned from leaving the country during wartime. Such a mechanism would allow companies to at-tract new clients and sign new contracts.

It was reported recently that Ukrainian tech companies have managed to exempt 1,000 employees from military service.

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Read the original article on The New Voice of Ukraine
Ukraine managed to increase grain exports in the past marketing year

Despite the occupation of much of its agricultural lands, ongoing Russian naval blockade, and EU restriction on exports, Ukraine has managed to export 48.99 million tons of grain and legumes between July 1, 2022 and June 30, 2023, Ukrainian news agency Interfax-Ukraine reported on July 3, citing government data. Notably, this is 641,000 tons more than in 2021/2022.

In this period, Ukraine grain exports had the following breakdown:

Read also: Ukraine to build grain terminal in Nigeria

 Wheat: 16.84 million tons (-10.6% compared to the previous year);

 Barley: 2.7 million tons (-52.9%);

 Rye: 18 thousand tons (-88.9%);

 Corn: 29.13 million tons (+24.4%).

Furthermore, in the 2022/2023 marketing year, Ukraine shipped 153.6 thousand tons of flour, which is 2.2 times more than the previous year when the exports stood at 70.7 thousand tons.

Read also: EU to gradually ease restrictions on agricultural imports from Ukraine to five countries

Previously, it was reported that the European Commission extended the ban on Ukrainian grain imports to five EU countries until at least Sept. 15.

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Read the original article on The New Voice of Ukraine
Ukraine reclaimed an occupied village during its counteroffensive with far fewer troops than Russia, The New York Times reports

A Ukrainian soldier holds a kitten inside a destroyed building located in the village of Neskuchne which was recaptured from Russians on June 9. Ashley Chan/SOPA Images/LightRocket via Getty Images

Ukraine entered the fourth week of its counteroffensive as Russia laid out a strong defense.

In one of their earliest victories, Ukraine reclaimed a cluster of villages around eastern Ukraine.

NYT reported that one village, Neskuchne, was liberated with roughly 70 Ukrainian troops.

Ukraine recaptured a small village in the Donetsk region with about half the troops Russia had, representing one of the country's earliest victories during its slow-moving counteroffensive operation, The New York Times reported.

Ukraine is now in the fourth week of its much-anticipated counteroffensive that began in early June. Officials, including US Joint Chiefs of Staff Gen. Mark Milley, warned the counteroffensive would take longer than some anticipated, giving timelines of up to 10 weeks. Since the operation began, Ukraine has made incremental gains.

The slow advancement is partly caused by Russia's fortified defensive line in occupied territories  some of which have been set up since the outset of the invasion. This includes minefields, anti-vehicle barricades, and trench labyrinths. Ukraine's troops are also operating with considerably less manpower than Moscow.

In Neskuchne, a small village in the eastern Donetsk region that Russia has occupied since last spring, Ukraine relied on 70 soldiers  mostly volunteers  from the 129th Territorial Defense Brigade to face 150 Russian soldiers from the 60th Separate Motorized Rifle Brigade, the Times reported. According to the Times, Russia also has a contingent of troops known as the Storm Z unit that consists of former inmates.

Ukrainian soldiers told the newspaper that reclaiming the village was a slow and painstaking process.

One soldier from the 129th brigade told the Times that his troops had to "liberate house after house," initially believing that there were no more than 20 Russians in the village.

According to the Times, Ukrainian soldiers first moved in on Neskuchne by foot before carrying out an artillery attack with small drones. On the second day of the attack, the troops were supported by another 20 soldiers from a nearby brigade.

Russian troops retreated by June 9, the Times reported. More than a dozen Russian soldiers were killed and wounded, and six Ukrainian soldiers died, according to the report.

Ukrainian troops later recaptured three other settlements, BBC reported.

Ukrainian Deputy Defense Minister Hanna Malyar said that soldiers advanced 300 to 1,500 meters in southern Ukraine, according to the Institute for the Study of War.

Read the original article on Business Insider
Ukraine notes progress after 'difficult' week, upsurge in Bakhmut fighting FILE PHOTO: Ukrainian servicemen operate a Gepard self-propelled anti-aircraft gun during their combat shift in Kyiv region

By Pavel Polityuk

KYIV (Reuters) -Ukraine said on Monday its troops had regained more ground along eastern and southern fronts in what President Volodymyr Zelenskiy described as progress in a "difficult" week for Kyiv's counteroffensive against Russian forces.

Deputy Defence Minister Hanna Maliar also noted a surge in fighting around the shattered eastern city of Bakhmut, captured by Russian forces in May after 10 months of battles.

"Last week was difficult on the front line. But we are making progress," Zelenskiy wrote on the Telegram messaging app.

"We are moving forward, step by step! I thank everyone who is defending Ukraine, everyone who is leading this war to Ukraine's victory!"

In an initial report on Telegram, Maliar said the Ukrainian military took back 37.4 square kilometres (14.4 square miles) of territory in heavy fighting in the past week.

She said Russian forces were attacking near Lyman, in the northern Donetsk region and near Avdiivka and Mariinka, long-contested cities further south - to the west of Bakhmut.

In a later report, Maliar said fighting near Bakhmut had intensified and "a struggle is underway to seize the initiative.

"Today, the enemy attempted to advance in this sector. And our forces achieved a measure of success," she wrote. "The situation is changing rapidly and control over positions can be lost and regained twice within a day."

Russian forces, she said, were setting up three defensive lines on certain fronts. Ukrainian forces had advanced near a village south of Bakhmut, while fighting was continuing to the north and the city experienced heavy exchanges of fire.

General Oleksander Syrskyi, in charge of Ukraine's land forces, reported advances of troops on the fringes of Bakhmut and "effective destruction of Russians".

Earlier in the day, Maliar said Ukraine had reclaimed 9 square km over the past week along the eastern front "as a result of improving the operational (tactical) position and aligning the front line".

In the south, Ukraine had regained 28.4 square km of territory, bringing the total area of recaptured territory along that front to 158.4 square km.

Russia, which launched its invasion in February 2022, said at the weekend its forces had repelled Ukrainian attacks near villages ringing Bakhmut and in areas further south, particularly near the hilltop town of Vuhledar. It also reported success in containing Ukrainian troops in the northeast.

Russian Defence Minister Sergei Shoigu said on Monday that a brief mutiny by the Wagner mercenary group last month had not affected Russia's "special military operation" in Ukraine.

"The provocation did not affect the actions of army groups (involved in the operation)," he told a ministry meeting.

Reuters could not confirm the battlefield accounts.

(Additional reporting by Lidia Kelly in Melbourne, Writing by Dan Peleschuk, Editing by Robert Birsel, Timothy Heritage, Ron Popeski and Richard Chang)
Key developments on July 2:

Maliar: Ukraine 'creating conditions for a speedy advance' in Berdiansk, Melitopol directions

Ukraine advances on southern flank of Bakhmut; Russia deployed two air force regiments on the northern flank

Russia launches offensive near Avdiivka, Marinka, Lyman

Southern Forces report engaging in heavy combat near Antonivsky Bridge

Ukraine is attacking Russian forces in the Berdiansk and Melitopol directions in southeastern Zaporizhzhia Oblast, "creating conditions for a speedy advance," Deputy Defense Minister Hanna Maliar said on July 2.

Maliar reported fierce fighting across all fronts as Russian forces were pushing back. In the southeastern front, for example, Ukrainian forces are facing "intense enemy resistance, remote mining and redeployment of (Russian) military reserves," according to the official.

The Armed Forces reported that Ukraine made some progress on the southern flank of Bakhmut  one of the axes where Kyiv is launching its ongoing counteroffensive.

The authorities said there was "partial success" on the southern flank near the villages of Klishchiivka and Kurdiumivka. On the northern flank, Maliar said Russia deployed two air assault regiments to prevent a further Ukrainian advance.

Ukraine had more success south of Bakhmut, where more villages like the southwestern Ivanivske are located, rather than in the north  an open field where every movement is easily detected.

The reports of Ukrainian advance in recent days come nearly a month into the long-awaited Ukrainian counteroffensive, raging on the Bakhmut front, the southern part of Donetsk Oblast, and in Zaporizhzhia Oblast.

Its a lottery: How Ukraines assault brigade counterattacks near Bakhmut Editors note: The Kyiv Independent spent a day with soldiers from the 80th Separate Assault Brigade in June, and the story is comprised of interviews with them about their experience near Bakhmut. The soldiers are identified by their names or callsigns, and their deployment locations are not reveal The Kyiv IndependentAsami Terajima

The high-stakes operation, launched in early June, has found limited success so far though the main force has not been committed yet, with several settlements liberated from Russian control, including some positions occupied by Russia since 2014.

The Ukrainian counterattacks near Bakhmut may force Russia to decide whether to pull defending forces from other regions of Ukraine, the Institute for the Study of War, a D.C.-based think-tank analyzing the war in Ukraine, said in its July 1 report.

Ukraine's forces are advancing daily by "at least 500 meters" despite lacking military hardware like F-16 fighter jets, Commander-in-Chief of the Armed Forces Valerii Zaluzhnyi told the Washington Post.

But Russian forces are also launching offensives, the Ukrainian authorities say.

Deputy Defense Minister Maliar also reported on July 2 that Russian forces were on the attack near Avdiivka and Marinika in the southern Donetsk Oblast, as well as near Lyman, a liberated city in the northern Donetsk Oblast.

The Russians have advanced near Svatove, a Moscow-occupied town in Luhansk Oblast, according to Maliar. The villages of Bilohorivka  a liberated village in Luhansk Oblast  and Sriblianka, a village located on the northern edge of Donetsk Oblast, are under fire, she added.

Fighting near the Antonivsky Bridge

Heavy fighting is raging near the destroyed Antonivsky Bridge in Kherson Oblast, according to Southern Operational Command spokeswoman Natalia Humeniuk.

Earlier on July 1, the U.K. Defense Ministry reported that Ukraine has "almost certainly" restarted deploying personnel to the east bank of the Dnipro River since around June 23 in what could be preparations for an offensive near the ruined Kakhovka Dam.

Fighting has intensified on the Dnipro River's east bank, controlled by Russian forces, according to the U.K. Defense Ministry. Russia also appears to be deploying forces to the area near Kakhovka to bolster its defense in the southern sector, it added.

The intelligence report came nearly a month after Russia destroyed the Kakhovka Hydroelectric Power Plant and the dam on June 6, unleashing major floods and causing an environmental disaster in the south of Ukraine.

"Combat around the bridge head is almost certainly complicated by the flooding, destruction, and residual mud from the collapse of the Kakhovka Dam on June 6, 2023," the report says.

The shape of the river has been altered by the destruction of the Kakhovka Dam upstream close to a month ago.

The Institute for the Study of War (ISW), a D.C.-based think-tank analyzing the war in Ukraine, reported for the first time in April 2023 that it observed reliable geolocated footage of Ukrainian positions on the east bank, indicating a Ukrainian presence in some small areas there.
Key developments on July 3:

Russian drone strike on Sumy kills 2, injures 19

Prigozhin, Shoigu break their silence following Wagner's armed rebellion

Defense Ministry says Ukraine liberated over 37 square kilometers in past week

Writer Victoria Amelina dies after being injured in Kramatorsk strike

New body for investigating Russian crime of aggression opens office in The Hague

Ukraine designates Unilever 'international sponsor of war.'

The Sumy Oblast Military Administration reported on July 3 that a Russian drone strike on the northern city of Sumy had killed two people and injured 19 others.

Four of the injured are still receiving treatment in the hospital. According to the military administration, two of them are in intensive care, and the other two are in moderate condition.

Fifteen other victims have returned home after receiving medical treatment for less serious injuries, including a five-year-old child.

Russia launched four Iranian-made Shahed-136 drones at the city center of Sumy at around 10:49 a.m. local time. The attack reportedly damaged two apartment buildings and an administrative building, the military administration said.

Sumy is located approximately 40 kilometers from the Russian border. Russian forces regularly target Sumy Oblast, resulting in civilian casualties and damage to infrastructure.

How Russia uses Iranian drones to try to overwhelm Ukraines air defense Russias been shelling civilian housing and infrastructure since the war escalated on Feb. 24 and has a body count in the thousands to show for it. But recently, Moscow prioritized attacking power plants throughout Ukraine, damaging more than a third with big missile and loitering munition attacks. The Kyiv IndependentIgor Kossov

Prigozhin, Shoigu break their silence following Wagner's armed rebellion

In his first voice message since June 26, Yevgeny Prigozhin, the founder of the Wagner Group, expressed his anticipation of "further victories at the front." However, he did not elaborate on the specifics or provide any additional details.

The message was published on a Telegram channel associated with the Wagner Group, rather than that of the Concord Group, Prigozhin's press service.

It is not clear when or where the message was recorded. Speculation and rumors regarding Prigozhin's whereabouts have persisted ever since the conclusion of the Wagner short-lived rebellion on June 24.

In early June, the Russian Defense Ministry issued a decree set to force Wagner mercenaries under its influence.

This led to an armed rebellion, with Prigozhin and his forces stopping short of Moscow before agreeing to relocate to Belarus in a deal apparently brokered by Belarusian dictator Alexander Lukashenko.

Russian Defense Minister Sergei Shoigu also broke his silence for the first time since the Wagner rebellion, claiming that such "provocations" and "destabilization attempts" did not impact the loyalty of the Russian military.

Russian state news agency RIA Novosti quoted Shoigu as saying that "the provocation did not affect the activities of military units."

Prigozhin and Shoigu have had a longstanding public feud for months, with Prigozhin claiming that the Russian Defense Ministry was not providing Wagner forces enough ammunition during the 10-month-long battle for Bakhmut, resulting in larger casualties.

This Week in Ukraine Ep. 14  Wagners mutiny attempt in Russia, and its consequences Episode #14 of our weekly video podcast This Week in Ukraine is dedicated to Wagner mercenary groups failed attempt to take on the Russian military establishment and its consequences. Host Anastasiia Lapatina is joined by the Kyiv Independents reporter Francis Farrell. Listen to the audio vers The Kyiv IndependentAnastasiia Lapatina

Defense Ministry says Ukraine liberated over 37 square kilometers in past week

Deputy Defense Minister Hanna Maliar reported on July 3 that Ukrainian forces had liberated 28.4 square kilometers in the south and nine square kilometers in the east over the past week.

According to Maliar, Ukrainian forces are actively pursuing successful offensive operations aimed at reaching Melitopol and Berdiansk in Zaporizhzhia Oblast.

These operations are specifically focused on advancing through the Novodarivka-Pryiutne, Novodanylivka-Robotyne, and Novosilka-Staromaiorske directions, Maliar added.

The area liberated in Ukraine's south now amounts to 158.4 square kilometers total.

Both offensive and defensive operations have been observed along the eastern front line. Russian forces are attempting to advance toward Lyman, Avdiivka, and Marinka, while the Ukrainian defense in these regions is exhibiting formidable resistance, according to Maliar.

Ukrainian troops are also making headway in the Bakhmut direction, Maliar added.

Counteroffensive underway: We overestimated Russians and underestimated ourselves Editors Note: The Kyiv Independent introduces soldiers interviewed for the story by their first names or callsigns due to security reasons. DONETSK OBLAST  Islams mind was empty of thoughts and feelings as he crawled carefully towards the Russian trenches near Siversk, with grenades prepared.  The Kyiv IndependentIgor Kossov

Writer Victoria Amelina dies after being injured in Kramatorsk strike

The writers' association PEN Ukraine confirmed that Ukrainian writer and war crimes researcher Victoria Amelina had succumbed to her injuries from the June 27 missile strike on Kramatorsk.

Amelina was in Kramatorsk with a delegation of Colombian writers and journalists when Russian forces fired two Iskander missiles at the city, hitting a popular restaurant downtown.

Kramatorsk is located some 55 kilometers from the front line in Donetsk Oblast, and many foreign journalists went there to regroup, as well as Ukrainian soldiers on leave. The city has been a frequent target of Russian missiles.

"Doctors and paramedics in Kramatorsk and Dnipro did everything they could to save her life, but the injuries were fatal," the statement reads.

"In the last days of Victorias life, her closest people and friends were with her."

Amelina made the decision to train to become a war crimes researcher after the start of the full-scale invasion and joined the human rights organization Truth Hounds. She had been documenting Russian war crimes on de-occupied territories in the eastern, southern, and northern parts of Ukraine.

Amelina was working on completing her first non-fiction book in English titled "War and Justice Diary: Looking at Women Looking at War" about women documenting Russian war crimes and living through war.

How a celebrated Ukrainian writer turned into a war crimes researcher Russias full-scale invasion of Ukraine has galvanized Ukrainians into action, compelling them to figure out how they can contribute to their countrys victory. Oftentimes, it has called for a radical departure from the known comforts of their daily lives. Thats exactly what happened to Ukrainian The Kyiv IndependentKate Tsurkan

New body for investigating Russian crime of aggression opens office in The Hague

The European Commission announced on July 3 that the International Center for the Prosecution of Crimes of Aggression against Ukraine (ICPA) opened an office in The Hague.

"Russia's invasion of Ukraine continues to bring unspeakable horrors, every day. Deeply worrying news about deliberate attacks against civilians, including children, have become a cruel daily reminder of the bloodshed that Putin brought back to our continent," European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen said.

According to von der Leyen, the ICPA will "play a key role in making sure that the (Russian) perpetrators are brought to justice, including for the crime of aggression."

Supported by the EU since March, the ICPA consists of prosecutors hailing from Ukraine, the EU, the U.S., and the International Criminal Court (ICC). Its primary objective is to gather evidence as the initial phase towards establishing a tribunal to hold the Russian leadership accountable for its war against Ukraine.

Departing EU diplomat: Civilian casualties in Ukraine may be 3 times higher than UN estimates From the indiscriminate killings of civilians in Bucha, Izium and Mariupol, to the everyday terror of long-range missile strikes, Russias full-scale invasion of Ukraine has shocked the world in its devastation and brutality. Behind the tragic headlines, Ukrainian state institutions are faced with t The Kyiv IndependentFrancis Farrell

Ukraine designates Unilever 'international sponsor of war'

Ukraine's National Corruption Prevention Agency (NACP) added British corporation Unilever to its "international sponsors of war" list on July 3 for continuing to do business in Russia.

Unilever previously pledged to cease operations in Russia but has failed to do so.

According to the NACP, Unilever paid about $50 million in taxes to the Russian state budget in 2022. Unilever's profit in Russia increased from $61 million in 2021 to more than $117 million last year.

More than 3,000 people work for Unilever in Russia, the anti-corruption agency wrote. In 2022, Russian business accounted for 1.4% of the corporation's turnover and 2% of its net profit, which grew by 24.9% compared to 2021, amounting to eight billion euros.

"We have included this company in the list of international sponsors of war because their hundreds of millions in tax contributions to the Russian budget help to finance the war against Ukraine, and in this way may even indirectly finance some Russian mercenary groups," said the NACP chief Oleksandr Novikov.

"Unilever must leave Russia now, or history will remember its complicity in this war."

Unilever is one of the world's leading suppliers of food, personal, and home care products. It owns over 400 brands and sells products in more than 190 countries, including Ukraine.
The Air Force of Ukraine has posted a video to mark Anti-Aircraft Forces Day, showing how various units of the Air Force destroy Russian aerial targets on a daily basis.

Source: Air Force of the Armed Forces of Ukraine on YouTube

Quote: "We stood up and fired! The Russians wanted to destroy our air defence the most! They wanted an easy ride in the Ukrainian sky. And they hit the anti-aircraft missile forces... But we stood up... And fired... And struck them."

Details: The video shows the operators of various air defence systems, including the S-300 air defence system, the Buk-M1 air defence system, the NASAMS air defence system, the Iris-T air defence system and the Patriot air defence system, as well as how they keep lists of destroyed Russian aerial targets, simply applying special markings to air defence equipment.

"Today, soldiers from the anti-aircraft missile forces continue to destroy the occupier in the Ukrainian sky with the most modern weapons in the world," the Air Force concluded.

For reference: 3 July is Anti-Aircraft Forces Day in the Air Force of the Armed Forces of Ukraine. This professional holiday for anti-aircraft gunners was introduced in 2011.

Background:

Ukrainian defenders destroyed 13 Russian Shahed kamikaze drones out of 17 launched on the night of 2-3 July.

Journalists fight on their own frontline. Support Ukrainska Pravda or become our patron!
Active hostilities continue on the Bakhmut front, and there is a threat of an offensive towards the city of Chasiv Yar. Oleksandr Syrskyi, Commander of the Ground Forces of the Armed Forces of Ukraine, has personally visited the area of hostilities to study the situation on the ground.

Source: Syrskyi, in an interview with Ukrainska Pravda

Quote: "The Bakhmut front has become an arena of active hostilities again. Its pretty hot there right now. Both sides are trying to seize the initiative in order to turn the situation in their favour. The enemy is desperately clinging to positions and strongholds that were formerly occupied by Wagner Group fighters.

Events unfold and change very rapidly, with some positions changing hands twice a day.

I went to the area of hostilities again to study the situation in detail, carry out some assigned combat tasks and increase the effectiveness of offensive operations. This work is not done in the silence of offices, but requires direct communication with all categories of servicemen."

Details: Syrskyi said that there is never silence in Bakhmut: Russia makes extensive use of mortars, heavy machine guns, anti-tank missiles and snipers in the city to fire on Ukrainian positions, "trying to hit everything that moves", and adjusts artillery fire from high-rise buildings.

The Russians prime target is military equipment.

They are also attempting to deploy units to the most threatening fronts to conduct counterattacks in an attempt to destabilise the situation, cause losses to Ukraine and disrupt the logistics of the defence forces.

There is still a threat of Russian offensive operations from Bakhmut in the Chasiv Yar area, Syrskyi said.

Quote: "The enemy is actively responding to all our actions and actively creating a deep echelon defence, which consists of three positions on some fronts. The occupying forces are doing everything they can to get us bogged down in their defences, but they are not succeeding because our actions are active and manoeuvrable.

Our defenders continue to advance on the southern flank of Bakhmut, with partial success, and are fighting hard on the northern flank.

In the city of Bakhmut itself, our troops are hitting enemy positions using all available assets and depriving the enemy of the opportunity to move within the city."

Background:

On 20 May, Yevgeny Prigozhin, founder of the Wagner Group, claimed that his army had taken full control of the destroyed city of Bakhmut in Donetsk Oblast, and that his mercenaries would leave it by the end of the spring. Yet in fact, fighting for the city of Bakhmut was still ongoing: the Defence Forces of Ukraine were attempting to act on the flanks in order to encircle the occupiers.

At the end of May, the Armed Forces of Ukraine suspended their advance on the flanks on the Bakhmut front, and there was a temporary lull in Bakhmut at the beginning of June.

On 29 June, Oleksandr Syrskyi, Commander of the Ground Forces of the Armed Forces of Ukraine, said the defenders were advancing on the Bakhmut front.

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Over the course of the past week, the Ukrainian army struck 94 clusters of Russian forces and 19 ammunition storage points.

Source: Hanna Maliar, Ukraines Deputy Defence Minister, on Facebook

Details: Last week, Ukraines defence forces were able to strike high-priority Russian military targets on average every 70 minutes.

Over the course of the past seven days, they struck:

94 clusters of Russian forces;

22 anti-aircraft missile systems;

19 ammunition storage points;

7 command posts.

Previously: Earlier on Monday, Maliar reported that Ukraines defence forces are continuing to advance on the Bakhmut, Melitopol and Berdiansk fronts, liberating 37 square kilometres over the past week.

Journalists fight on their own frontline. Support Ukrainska Pravda or become our patron!
(Reuters) - President Volodymyr Zelenskiy said on Monday he would summon Georgia's ambassador to Ukraine over what he decried as the "public execution" of that country's jailed former president who had appeared unwell and severely emaciated at a court hearing.

In his nightly video message, Zelenskiy urged Georgian authorities to allow Mikheil Saakashvili, who holds Ukrainian citizenship, to come to Kyiv for medical treatment.

"The world once again has witnessed how the Kremlin, sadly at the hands of the Georgian government, is killing Mikheil Saakashvili," Zelenskiy said.

"Ukraine has repeatedly called on the Georgian authorities to stop this public execution," he said. "No authority in Europe has the right to execute people. Life is a fundamental European value."

Zelenskiy said he had asked Ukraine's foreign ministry to summon the Georgian ambassador and propose that the diplomat return home for 48 hours for consultations on the matter.

Ukrainian Foreign Minister Dmytro Kuleba, writing on Telegram, said the ambassador would be summoned on Tuesday for a "tough conversation" and called on Georgia to end its "mockery" of the former president.

It was not clear whether the ambassador was being expelled.

Saakashvili, who served as president of ex-Soviet Georgia from 2004 to 2013, is serving a six-year sentence for abuse of power, a charge he and his supporters say was politically motivated.

In a video shot during a court hearing, an emaciated Saakashvili lifted his shirt to show protruding ribs while judges deliberated at another site.

Saakashvili has asked to be transferred abroad for treatment. He has staged multiple hunger strikes while in prison and alleges he has been poisoned.

The 55-year-old Saakashvili secured Ukrainian citizenship while working under previous Ukrainian government administrations in a variety of capacities.

He was originally tried and sentenced in absentia for abuse of power on cases related to presidential pardons issued while he was in office, and for allegedly ordering the beating of a political opponent.

He is currently on trial on separate charges of violently dispersing an anti-government rally in November 2007.

Saakashvili swept to power in 2004 after Georgia's pro-democracy Rose Revolution ousted his predecessor. He launched anti-corruption reforms, but his outspoken nature frequently upset opponents.

He returned to Georgia in 2021 on the eve of local elections and was arrested soon after entering the country.

(Reporting by Ron Popeski; Editing by Bill Berkrot)
Based on an analysis of data from various sources, analysts at the Institute for the Study of War (ISW) note that on 2 July, the Ukrainian forces launched a counteroffensive in six frontline areas and achieved success in some of them.

Source: report by the Institute for the Study of War

Details: The report states that on 2 July, Ukrainian troops conducted counteroffensive operations in six areas of the front, and some of them achieved success.

Experts also recall that Russian troops carried out another series of missile attacks on the south of Ukraine and Kyiv on 2 July.

They also point out that the Russian Ministry of Defence (MoD) is aiming to strengthen its grip on the country's information space by damaging the reputation of a few Russian military bloggers who have not adopted the MoD's preferred narrative on the purported defeat of a Ukrainian force on the east (left) bank of Kherson Oblast on 1 July.

On 1-2 July, the Russian Defence Ministry claimed that Russian troops successfully repelled the Ukrainian landings near the Antonivka Bridge.

At the same time, some Russian bloggers, contrary to reports by the Ministry of Defence, noted that the fighting was still ongoing and that Ukrainian forces were holding certain positions at the Antonivka Bridge as of 2 July.

According to experts, it is likely that the Russian Ministry of Defence is seeking to censor some Kremlin-linked bloggers out of fear that they might expose Russian military failures to Putin during monthly working groups of military bloggers held in the Kremlin.

Experts add that the confrontation between the Russian MoD and the military blogger community over a minor combat operation may be a sign that the Russian military command believes it has no further victories to share with Putin in the middle of the ongoing Ukrainian counteroffensive.

"The Russian MoDs attempt to overstate a potential tactical Russian victory near the Antonivka Bridge and its efforts to restrict opposing information has backfired," the analysts note.

At the same time, Putin continues to face a choice: either to side with the Russian Defence Ministry to protect his damaged reputation or to maintain support among the ultranationalist milbloggers and their information channels.

According to the report, Putin may therefore choose to continue appeasing the military blogger community and put the blame on the Russian MoD for Ukraine's military setbacks, which is a far simpler task.

This course of action may allow Putin to maintain support for the war among the Russian ultra-nationalist camp at the expense of the Russian Defence Ministry. But there is a risk for Putin: further undermining confidence in the Russian Defence Ministry could allow other ambitious Russian figures to advance their interests at the expense of the ministry, as Prigozhin tried to do.

To quote the ISWs key takeaways for 13 May:

Ukrainian forces reportedly conducted counteroffensive operations in six sectors of the front on 2 July and made gains in some of these areas.

Russian forces conducted another series of drone and missile strikes targeting southern Ukraine and Kyiv on 2 July.

The Russian MoDs conflict with the milblogger community over a trivial combat operation may indicate that the Russian military command does not think it has any other successes to report to Putin amidst the ongoing Ukrainian counteroffensive.

The Russian MoDs attempt to overstate a potential tactical Russian victory near the Antonivka Bridge and its efforts to restrict opposing information has backfired.

Putin continues to face the choice of either siding with the Russian MoD to defend its weakened reputation or maintaining his support among pro-war ultranationalist milbloggers and their patronage networks.

Russian and Ukrainian forces continued to engage in positional battles along the Kupyansk-Svatove-Kreminna frontline.

Ukrainian and Russian forces continued to conduct limited ground attacks around Bakhmut and along the Avdiivka-Donetsk City line.

Ukrainian forces reportedly conducted limited offensive operations in western Donetsk Oblast and have advanced as of 2 July.

Russian sources claimed that Russian and Ukrainian forces conducted limited offensive operations in the western Donetsk-eastern Zaporizhia oblasts border area.

Russian sources claimed that Ukrainian forces maintain limited positions in east (left) bank Kherson Oblast near the Antonivka Bridge as of 2 July.

Kremlin Spokesperson Dmitry Peskov stated that Russian officials plan to create regional centres for the development of drones in Nizhny Novgorod as well as in occupied Sevastopol, Crimea, and Mariupol, Donetsk Oblast.

Ukrainian and Belarusian sources reported that Belarusian President Alexander Lukashenko and other Belarusian officials and citizens are actively involved in the deportation of Ukrainian children from occupied territories to Belarus.

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Ukrainian military liberates over 37 sq. km last week, says official

Ukrainian military in Zaporizhzhia Oblast, June 26, 2023

The Ukrainian Armed Forces liberated another 9 sq. km in the east and 28.4 sq. km in the south last week, Deputy Defense Minister Hanna Maliar reported on Telegram on July 3.

Both offensive and defensive operations continue in the east, she said. The Ukrainian military is advancing in the Bakhmut area, while the Russians are conducting offensive operations in the Lyman, Avdiyivka and Maryinka sections of the front.

The enemy is trying to oust our troops from their positions but is receiving a decent rebuff, Maliar said.

Heavy fighting is underway there now.

Meanwhile, the Ukrainian army continues its offensive operation in the Melitopol and Berdyansk areas in the south. In particular, troops advanced towards Novodarivka  Pryiutne, Novodanylivka  Robotyne, and Novosilka Staromaiorske.

Earlier on June 28, the Commander-in-Chief of the Armed Forces of Ukraine, General Valerii Zaluzhnyi, said that opinions expressed in the West that Ukraines counter-offensive is going slower than expected anger him.

This is not a show, Zaluzhnyi said.

Read also: Ukrainian military shows liberated Blahodatne in Donetsk Oblast  video

Its not a show where the whole world is watching and betting on or anything. Every day, every meter, is paid for with blood.

In total, Ukraines Defense Ministry announced the liberation of nine settlements in the south and east in June.

The Armed Forces of Ukraine also confirmed the liberation of the territories near the town of Krasnohorivka, Donetsk Oblast, which had been under Russian occupation since 2014.

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Read the original article on The New Voice of Ukraine
Special Operations Forces soldiers on the Donetsk front have killed a Russian machine gun crew that was preventing the Ukrainian defenders from taking offensive actions.

Source: Command of the Special Operations Forces of the Armed Forces of Ukraine

Quote: "The Donetsk front. A Russian machine gun crew was preventing our brothers-in-arm from taking offensive actions.

A direct hit from a 9K111 Fagot anti-tank missile system devastated the occupiers nest."

Details: A Ukrainian Special Operations Forces operator who goes under the name of Spencer said that the defenders asked the special forces to kill the Russian crew: "The guys contacted us on the radio and asked for help, so we killed them."

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Writer Victoria Amelina was injured during a Russian attack on Kramatorsk

Ukrainian writer Victoria Amelina has passed away in hospital from injuries sustained during a June 27 Russian attack on Kramatorsk, writers association PEN Ukraine announced on July 3.

Doctors and paramedics in Kramatorsk and Dnipro City did everything possible in order to save her life, but ultimately, her wound proved fatal. Victoria's family and friends were with her in her last minutes.

"Since the beginning of Russias full-scale invasion of Ukraine, Victoria Amelina has expanded her work far beyond literature," PEN Ukraine wrote.

"In 2022 she joined the human rights organization Truth Hounds. She has been documenting Russian war crimes on de-occupied territories in the eastern, southern and northern parts of Ukraine, in particular in Kapytolivka near Izyum where she found the diary of Volodymyr Vakulenko, a Ukrainian writer killed by the Russians."

Amelinas first English-language non-fiction book War and Justice Diary: Looking at Women Looking at War, will be soon be available in European bookstores.

Victoria Amelina was born on January 1st, 1986, in Lviv. She moved to Canada with her father, while she was in school, but soon returned to Ukraine. In 2007 she received her masters in computer technology in Lviv and worked in international IT companies until 2015.

Following the publication of her first novel in 2014, she suspended her work in IT in order to dedicate herself to literature.

In 2021 Victoria received the Joseph Conrad-Korzeniowski literature prize in Poland. That same year, she founded the New York Literature Festival in the in the village of New York in Donetsk Oblast.

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Read the original article on The New Voice of Ukraine
Editor's Note: The names of the people from the Russian-occupied territories interviewed by the Kyiv Independent for this story have been changed to protect their identity, as they have shared sensitive information that could place them in danger.

As Russia largely exhausted its military potential on the battlefield, the Kremlin continued its silent warfare in occupied territories to convert millions of Ukrainians into Russian citizens.

Russian President Vladimir Putin signed an executive order in late April that set a deadline for applying for Russian citizenship in the occupied areas of Ukraine. Those who refuse and elect to hold onto their Ukrainian passports face losing their property rights, prison sentences, and deportation from their homes.

Experts say that with the executive order, Putin is looking to expel those unsympathetic to his regime from the occupied territories while potentially setting the stage for further invasions under the pretext of "protecting Russian citizens."

They also warn that it paves the way for the mass surveillance of Ukrainians.

Holding Russian citizenship in the occupied territories also means that Moscow could conscript locals and force them to fight against their own country.

Passportization, or issuing passports in a foreign territory, is not a new move by the Kremlin.

After annexing Crimea in 2014, Russia forced citizenship on over two million people on the peninsula through automatic passportization, a practice that grants citizenship en masse to residents of occupied territories without their consent or input and, in some cases, even in their absence.

Three years later, the Kremlin expanded its passportization to include parts of Ukraine's eastern Luhansk and Donetsk oblasts, occupied by Russia in 2014. Instead of automatic passportization, a blatant violation of international law, the Kremlin shifted tactics in an attempt to coerce Ukrainians to take on Russian citizenship themselves.

Russia has extended its passportization even further into the Ukrainian territories Russia claims to have annexed since its full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022.

"(The executive order) is like a vacuum cleaner. It is now picking up all the loopholes that have allowed people under occupation to live without needing a Russian passport," Oleksandr Pavlichenko, the executive director of the Ukrainian Helsinki Union for Human Rights, told the Kyiv Independent.

How Kherson residents resisted Russian occupation (VIDEO) Russian forces entered Kherson, a city in southern Ukraine, at the very beginning of the full-scale invasion. For two months, Kherson residents were openly protesting against the occupation. Later, as Russia tightened its grip, some Khersonians continued their protest in more subtle ways  despite The Kyiv IndependentOlena Makarenko

Forced passportization

Under Putin's executive order, anyone living in the Russian-occupied parts of Kherson, Zaporizhzhia, Luhansk, and Donetsk oblasts who refuses to accept Russian citizenship will be considered a foreigner and could face deportation starting on July 1, 2024.

Following sham referendums, Russia illegally declared the annexation of these regions on Sept. 30, 2022, totaling the number of annexed provinces to five with Crimea. A majority of states in the UN General Assembly do not recognize the move.

The summer 2024 deadline in Putin's decree follows a first deadline that has made it mandatory for Ukrainians living in these territories to register and provide the Russian authorities with fingerprints and passport photographs by October 2023.

"This entails Russia receiving a broad range of personal data, which cannot be considered safe when it is transmitted to Moscow," Alyona Luneva, director of advocacy at Ukraine's ZMINA human rights center, told the Kyiv Independent.

Legal repercussions leave even less room for resistance against the new rules in the occupied territories.

According to Putin's decree, if locals refuse to register, they will be banned from working and removed from their place of registration  a requirement that could result in the loss of property ownership, Pavlichenko said.

"This property ownership right can be declared invalid. It can be revoked, meaning they will lose their rights to that real estate," said Pavlichenko.

Amid the ongoing situation, a disturbing trend has emerged: individuals who resist and stand against Russian occupation, even indirectly by not having a Russian passport, now find themselves confronted with the alarming prospect of facing even harsher penalties.

And locals of the annexed regions who resist face prison time or deportation without the option to return as Russia deems these individuals a threat to national security.

Even referring to these territories as Russian-occupied on social media could meet the "threat to the national security" criteria. A donation for Ukraine's army or volunteers could be considered as financing "terrorism or extremism" or both.

With these tactics, Russia is trying to intimidate locals while also forcing those who oppose the regime to flee the occupied regions, as it did in Crimea, Luneva said.

"Those who refused (to take a Russian passport) are considered a foreigner on their own land with certain restrictions, knowing that they may be persecuted or expelled any time Russia wants," said Luneva.

Russia has already sent some of its citizens to prison for high treason over their opposition to the Putin regime or the war in Ukraine.

A woman from Moscow and another in Russian-occupied Melitopol in Zaporizhzhia Oblast were arrested for donating to the Ukrainian military. Both face up to 20 years in prison for high treason.

And Russian opposition journalist Vladimir Kara-Murza, who is also a British citizen, was jailed for 25 years for posts about Russian atrocities in Ukraine and for criticizing the Kremlin.

"Russia follows this path by creating alarming court trials to demonstrate that they can fabricate charges and imprison or, at best, deport anyone," said Pavlichenko.

EXCLUSIVE: Escaping forced conscription in Russian-occupied Donetsk Editors Note: The names of the people interviewed by the Kyiv Independent for this story have been changed to protect their identity as they have shared sensitive information that could place them and their families in danger. Stepan didnt see daylight for nearly four months. Since mid-February, The Kyiv IndependentAlexander Khrebet

Carrot-and-stick approach

Human rights activist Pavlichenko said that before, Russia used a carrot approach by trying to incentivize Ukrainians to obtain Russian citizenship in occupied Luhansk and Donetsk oblasts when it began passportization in those areas in 2017.

But that carrot gradually transformed into a stick as Russian authorities in the occupied territories made it harder each year to live without Russian citizenship or at least have a Russian proxy-issued identification card.

Over time, this resulted in locals being stripped of their entitlement to social benefits, such as maternity, sick leave, and pensions. Securing an office job became virtually impossible without a Russian passport. The dire circumstances forced an increasing number of people to seek Russian citizenship.

Nonetheless, those who resisted acquiring Russian citizenship could still find ways to live and work in the occupied parts of Luhansk and Donetsk oblasts.

Now, Putin's decree has switched gears, wielding a full-blown "stick" approach by terminating social benefits and threatening the deportation of those who reject Russian citizenship by the summer of 2024.

Ukraine's Ombudsman Dmytro Lubynets told the Kyiv Security Conference in late May that over 13 million people are currently living under Russian occupation or in proximity to the frontline.

Olena from Antratsyt in Luhansk Oblast, occupied by Russia since 2014, is an example of quiet resistance to becoming a Russian citizen. (Editor's note: The name has been changed to protect her identity.)

Over the course of the six years since Russia began its forced passportization campaign in Donetsk and Luhansk oblasts, Olena managed to keep her Ukrainian passport.

That changed in late May when the local administration signaled that any social welfare would be unavailable for those who don't hold Russian citizenship. Olena was told it is "impossible to have a Russian bank account without a passport" and that any payments would be made through Russian banks.

"They threaten to withhold payments. They do everything so that we apply for the passports ourselves," Olena told the Kyiv Independent.

Olena said she delayed having Russian citizenship as long as she could. "But we don't have any choice now. If you live with wolves, you howl like a wolf," she said, referring to the Russian proverb.

"Not only have they occupied us, but they have also oppressed us," Olena said, adding that she wished she had left Antratsyt in 2014 when Russia occupied the town. "With our pennies now, it's very difficult (to leave)," she said.

Even if you have enough money, it is still hard to leave the Russian-occupied territories with Ukrainian documents only.

Roman (Editor's note: The name has been changed to protect his identity.), a native of Donetsk, also occupied by Russia since 2014, avoided becoming a Russian citizen as he didn't want to have any documents Moscow or its proxies are issuing in the occupied parts of Donetsk Oblast.

He appeared apprehensive regarding Putin's recent legislation, concerned that this development may prompt suspicion of him from Russian authorities, as he holds neither a proxy nor a Russian passport.

"They don't know I'm in Donetsk because I've never contacted the local authorities. I don't even have a local phone number," Roman told the Kyiv Independent while still in Donetsk.

Roman was able to flee to Lithuania shortly after talking to the Kyiv Independent. He was interrogated by the Russian FSB twice, with his lack of Russian citizenship raising suspicion.

"The FSB will interrogate, but not having Russian documents is not an offense so far," Luneva said.

However, Luneva warned that the Russian security services would closely watch those who stayed without obtaining a passport, which could be seen as a sign of disloyalty.

"If people stay, some of those will be under FSB watch as they live there without Russian passports," Luneva said.

Pavlichenko said this policy of coercive passportization, in violation of the Geneva Conventions, also allows Moscow to conscript Ukrainians into the Russian army while Moscow is waging a brutal war against Ukraine.

According to Article 51 of the fourth convention, the occupying power is prohibited from coercing civilians into serving in its armed or auxiliary forces, and any form of pressure or propaganda to induce voluntary enlistment is forbidden.

Nevertheless, Russia has been conscripting Ukrainians in Crimea since 2015. Moscow also forcibly conscripted thousands of Ukrainians from Donetsk and Luhansk oblasts, starting just a week before Russia unleashed its full-scale invasion of Ukraine  even those who held only Ukrainian documents.

Many forcibly conscripted men are believed to be thrown into the battles as cannon fodder and killed in action, fighting against their own country.

Pavlichenko said this alleged Russian crime is much deeper in its consequences, as it creates a negative attitude not only toward Russia but also to Ukraine.

"Ukraine cannot protect them, and they are forced to fight against Ukraine. People can be killed, get maimed, or injured. Or captured by Ukrainian forces and punished for being in the Russian army," said Pavlichenko.

Escaping Russian army: The story of one Ukrainian forced to fight against his homeland Editors Note: The name of the person interviewed by the Kyiv Independent for this story has been changed to protect his identity as he has shared sensitive information that could place him and his family in danger. If Russia orders us to invade the entire galaxy, we will, the The Kyiv IndependentAlexander Khrebet

Contradicting signs from Kyiv

Putin's decree has provoked conflicting signals from Kyiv over whether people in the occupied territories should obey forced Russian passportization.

Ombudsman Dmytro Lubinets advised Ukrainians under occupation to take Russian citizenship to survive the occupation. In late May, the Ukrainian Parliament Commissioner for Human Rights repeated the plea that Ukraine would not prosecute those who accepted Russian passports under duress.

"If you cannot leave for various reasons, and in order to survive, you are forced to get a Russian passport  take it and survive," Lubinets told national television.

Contradicting the ombudsman, Deputy Prime Minister Iryna Vereshchuk called on those Ukrainians under Russian occupation not to take Russian passports.

"My recommendations to Ukrainians in the temporarily occupied territories remain the same: Do not take Russian passports, do not cooperate with the occupiers, flee if possible, wait for the Armed Forces (if you stay)," Vereshchuk, who also serves as the minister for the reintegration of the temporarily occupied territories, said in May.

Before the full-scale invasion, Russia forced its passports on over three million Ukrainians, granting them in occupied Crimea and Donbas.

Russian Prime Minister Mikhail Mishustin claimed in late May that his country has converted another 1.5 million since it illegally annexed parts of four occupied Ukrainian regions in October 2022.

Amid Russia's invasion, the Ukrainian parliament amended the law, clarifying that forcibly acquired Russian citizenship will not be recognized and does not lead to Ukrainian passport loss.

Yet, the law is ambiguous as it overlooks "voluntary" Russian citizenship applications fueled by Russia's influence.

Unlike with automatic passportization, which grants a resident new citizenship unilaterally, Russia has made it appear that Ukrainians are taking on Russian citizenship of their own volition through these coercive tactics, Luneva said, adding that conflicting signals from Kyiv are causing confusion in occupied territories.

"Ukraine must make it clear that obtaining a Russian passport under duress is neither a crime nor collaboration," said Luneva.

How Russia has attempted to erase Ukrainian language, culture throughout centuries Editors Note: This is episode 3 of Ukraines True History, a video and story series by the Kyiv Independent. The series is funded by the Institute for War and Peace Reporting within the program Ukraine Forward: Amplifying Analysis. The program is financed by the MATRA Programme of the Embassy o The Kyiv IndependentDaria Shulzhenko

Note from the author:

Hello dear reader,

I am Alexander Khrebet, the author of this story.

While this article was edited, "Roman" texted me from Lithuania. He managed to flee. The Russian FSB interrogated him twice  when he crossed from occupied Donetsk Oblast to the Russian Rostov region and on the Russia-EU border. However, millions of Ukrainians are still forced to remain under Russian occupation.

The Kyiv Independent strives to bring you updates from these regions and the people who live there. And your support sustains our journalism. If you enjoy our work, please consider joining our membership or supporting us with a one-time donation.
Your ultimate guide to July 4 in Sacramento: Fireworks, free displays, events, more

Despite July 4 landing on a Tuesday this year, it shouldnt stop you from taking full advantage of the holiday, even if you have to return to work Wednesday.

Sacramento has various events and activities in store for the day. Heres your ultimate guide to July 4 in the capital region:

Fireworks displays

Several fireworks displays will go off on July 4 night across the Sacramento area.

This includes Sutter Health Park in West Sacramento and Hagan Community Park in Rancho Cordova, which will have carnival rides, concerts and races. Depending on where you go, the event may either be free or have an admission.

Looking for fireworks? These Sacramento-area shows are set for the Fourth of July

July 4 events

Besides fireworks, Sacramento will also be hosting plenty of events for families and friends.

There are the July 4-themed cruises you can take on the Sacramento River where you can enjoy the citys skyline and fireworks at night. Or you can partake in a bike parade at Arden Park.

Drakes: The Barn in West Sacramento is also having a July 4 event, featuring a live DJ and silent disco.

Fourth of July events in Sacramento 2023: Fireworks, city cruise, parade and party

Buy your own fireworks

Want to have your own firework fun?

If you havent seen it already, fireworks stands are spread out across the capital region. You can snag your own sparklers and rockets and make your own colorful display at home.

Where can I buy fireworks in Sacramento? This map shows area locations

Know the law

Fireworks are fun, but getting in trouble with the law isnt.

Before you hand over cash for your fireworks, make sure youre following local regulations, such as buying safe and sane fireworks.

These are fireworks that are approved by the State Fire Marshall.

Were those illegal fireworks? Heres what Sacramento law says  and how to report the blasts

It sounds like a war zone. Sacramento tries to prevent the explosion of illegal fireworks

And if you need help choosing the best fireworks for you, The Bee has you covered. We tested out $100 worth of fireworks from a local stand.

We bought $100 worth of fireworks in Sacramento. Watch us blow up the best ones

Last-minute shopping

You wont be the only one observing the holiday  some retail stores and banks are, too.

If you need a last-minute ingredient for your July 4 barbecue, a handful of stores will remain open for the day, including Walmart and Sprouts.

Is Raleys open? What about Trader Joes? Whats open and closed on July 4 in Sacramento

Have a question? Email us at servicejournalists@sacbee.com.
UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres speaking during a press conference in Port-au-Prince in July 2023 (Richard PIERRIN)

United Nations Secretary-General Antonio Guterres on Monday called for international support for Haitian police to deal with the country's "unprecedented" wave of violence in recent months.

"I have come here from Haiti, where the security situation is rapidly deteriorating, and humanitarian needs are soaring," Guterres said in Trinidad and Tobago, where the Caricom summit for Caribbean countries was opening.

"I reiterate my call on all partners to increase support for Haiti's national police -- in the form of financing, training, or equipment," the UN chief said.

Guterres traveled to Haiti at the weekend to spotlight violence and chaos in the country, where he has been calling for a robust international effort to help the beleaguered police in fighting rampant criminal gangs.

For months he has raised the alarm about the situation in the Western Hemisphere's poorest country, which has been wracked by spiralling violence, worsening public health conditions and political instability.

"We must collectively do more to help the Haitian people chart a path towards elections and a political solution," Guterres said, calling for "a drastic improvement in the security situation."

He said support for the police was needed to "dismantle the gangs that have created this unprecedented violence."

UN officials have offered increasingly grim assessments of the impact of gang shootings, kidnappings and rapes on the Haitian population.

Last week, UNICEF executive director Catherine Russell said after a trip to Port-au-Prince that the world was "failing the Haitian people."

Prime Minister Ariel Henry has been seeking international intervention for nearly a year, but no country has yet stepped up although Brazil and Canada are the most involved in the discussions.

jt-pgf/lab/jh/mlm
This is a locator map for Lebanon with its capital, Beirut. (AP Photo) (ASSOCIATED PRESS)

BEIRUT (AP)  The U.N. peacekeeping force on the Lebanon-Israel border said Monday its commander is in contact with officials in both countries over tensions regarding two tents set up by the militant Hezbollah group last month.

Israel filed a complaint with the United Nations in June claiming that Hezbollah had set up tents several dozen meters (yards) inside of Israeli territory.

The area where the tents were erected in Chebaa Farms and the Kfar Chouba hills were captured by Israel from Syria during the 1967 Mideast war and are part of Syrias Golan Heights that Israel annexed in 1981. The Lebanese government says the area belongs to Lebanon.

Israeli media reported Sunday that Hezbollah evacuated one of the two tents but there has been no confirmation from the Iran-backed Lebanese group.

The head of the U.N. peacekeeping force known as UNIFIL, Maj. Gen. Aroldo Lazaro, continues to be in direct contact with authorities on both sides of the Blue Line to resolve the situation of the tents, UNIFIL said in a statement sent to The Associated Press. The borderline demarcated after Israels withdrawal from southern Lebanon in 2000 is known as the blue line.

UNIFIL added: We are looking into reports that a tent has been moved north of the Blue Line. UNIFIL added that any unauthorized presence or activity near the Blue Line is a concern, and has the potential to increase tension and misunderstandings.

The head of Hezbollahs parliamentary bloc Mohammed Raad said Saturday that the tents are in Lebanon. He added, referring to Israel: You cannot remove two tents because there is resistance and strong men in this country.

Israel and Hezbollah fought to a draw in a monthlong war in Lebanon in 2006. Last week, Hezbollah said it shot down an Israel drone flying over a village in southern Lebanon. Hezbollah has in the past claimed downing Israeli drones, and Israels military also has said in the past that they have shot down Hezbollah drones.

Israel considers Hezbollah its most serious immediate threat, estimating it has some 150,000 rockets and missiles aimed at Israel.
The United States military is this year executing the most historic and transformative change to military justice since the creation of the Uniform Code of Military Justice in 1950. On Dec. 28, 2023, the decision to charge and try a service member for sexual assault and 13 other special victim related crimes will be removed from commanders and will rest in the hands of independent military prosecutors. The offices housing these specialized litigators became fully operational on July 1, 2023.

But the secretary of defense has one crucial outstanding task left: create uniform prosecution standards across all the services, which he can do with a stroke of a pen. This final action  or failure to act  could make or break the success of the independent special victims prosecution offices.

In 2021, service members past and present raised their voices to the Independent Review Commission on Sexual Assault in the Military. They identified the command-driven justice system as a perpetrator of broken trust for survivors and criminally accused navigating the military justice landscape. The secretary of defense and the Congress listened.

On Dec. 28, 2021, the historic legislation removing commanders from prosecuting special victim cases became law. On July 1, the new Offices of Special Trial Counsel, or OSTC, in the Department of the Navy, the Army, and the Air Force made their groundbreaking debut.

On June 9, 2023, after five years of rigorous study, data collection, and stakeholder engagement, the Defense Advisory Committee on the Investigation, Prosecution, and Defense of Sexual Assault in the Armed Forces, or DAC-IPAD, released a report to the secretary of defense and Congress recommending Secretary Lloyd Austin revise Appendix 2.1 of the MCM to establish uniform prosecution standards that align with the prosecution principles contained in the United States Justice Manual.

In its report, the DAC-IPAD included a proposal to create a statement of prosecutorial practices and policies that every judge advocate can use when exercising prosecutorial discretion. The proposed prosecution standards provide that counsel for the government refer charges to a court-martial only if they believe that the service members conduct constitutes an offense under the Uniform Code of Military Justice, or UCMJ, and that the admissible evidence will probably be sufficient to obtain and sustain a conviction when viewed objectively by an unbiased fact finder.

This is not a radical idea  in fact, admissible evidence to obtain and sustain a conviction is the gold standard used by prosecutors across the United States Department of Justice. Presently, the military uses the much lower standard of probable cause to send a case to trial and that is not the industry standard.

The DAC-IPAD is comprised of current and former United States district court judges, a state circuit court judge, a former clerk of court for federal bankruptcy court, federal and state prosecutors, a defense appellate counsel, the federal public defender for Washington, D.C., a nationally recognized criminologist, the nations top forensic nurse examiner, a former Department of Defense general counsel, a former DoD associate deputy general counsel, a deputy assistant secretary at the Department of Education, and the executive director of the National Crime Victim Law Institute. Many committee members have prior military service as judge advocates (including these two authors who both served as Army judge advocates) and have the expertise and judicial prowess to underwrite such a recommendation that elevates the referral standard.

This policy detail is essential, and timing is everything.

Presently, the military does not have uniform standards to properly guide its prosecutors and each OSTC is writing its own so-called business rules that will detail how judge advocates screen, charge, and refer cases. Shrouded in a veil of secrecy, these rules are deemed pre-decisional by the Pentagon so the public has had no visibility, input, or oversight of their development.

If the secretary of defense does not move swiftly, each service may create different standards governing prosecutorial decision-making. Uniform prosecution standards issued by the secretary of defense would assure service members that criminal cases are being evaluated consistently to avoid charging disparities and unfavorable trial outcomes for both victims and accused.

Uniform prosecution standards also would forever put to rest the militarys archaic practice of using the less rigorous standard of probable cause to refer a case to court-martial. Over the last decade, the probable cause referral standard has likely been the culprit for the abysmal conviction rate in sexual assault cases in the armed forces. Additionally, the military is the only jurisdiction in the United States of America that uses probable cause (the standard of proof to obtain a warrant) to refer a case to a felony level trial where the burden of proof is beyond a reasonable doubt. The probable cause standard to refer a case to court-martial has plagued military sexual assault prosecutions for years. As the military professionalizes lawyers in its ranks with the establishment of independent offices charged with prosecuting special victim crimes, it must also adopt uniform principles of prosecution on par with the Department of Justice. And its prosecutors across all services should use the heightened referral standard of admissible evidence to obtain and sustain a conviction.

Secretary Austin need only adopt the DAC-IPADs proposal contained in Appendix G of its newly released report. The proposed standards provide military prosecutors policies and practices that promote the reasoned exercise of prosecutorial authority that will contribute to the fair, evenhanded administration of the UCMJ. Furthermore, the promulgation of these standards by Secretary Austin will establish trust that important prosecutorial decisions will be made rationally and objectively based on an individualized assessment of the facts and circumstances of each case. Establishing the rules now and making them uniform sends a message to sexual assault victims, those criminally accused, and the American public that the militarys new prosecutorial offices will abide by policy designed to prevent unwarranted preferral and referral disparities  both actual and perceived.

The implementation of independent special victim prosecution offices is imminent. The policy guiding these new offices must ensure uniformity, reliability, and consistency that is vital to any prosecutorial function. Without uniform guidance from the secretary, each OSTC may have conflicting standards for screening cases, preferring charges, and referring cases to trial. Worse, prosecutors within each services OSTC could use different standards for exercising prosecutorial discretion. Disparate case outcomes will only exacerbate the problem of broken trust in the militarys handling of sexual assault cases. Without uniform prosecution standards, a decades effort at military justice reform and the success of the independent special victim prosecution offices will be in jeopardy.

The Hon. Paul Grimm is a retired United States district court judge and professor of the practice of law and director of the Bolch Judicial Institute at Duke Law School. Meghan Tokash is a federal prosecutor with the Department of Justice and served as a commissioner on the Secretary of Defenses Independent Review Commission on Sexual Assault in the Military. When she was an active duty Army judge advocate, Ms. Tokash served as Gen. Austins senior trial counsel for U.S. Forces-Iraq from 2010-2011.

Both Judge Grimm and Ms. Tokash are members of the Defense Advisory Committee on the Investigation, Prosecution, and Defense of Sexual Assault in the Armed Forces. Their opinions are their own and not those of the full DAC-IPAD, the Department of Justice or the Duke Law School.

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The Universe has sped up to an extreme level, scientists confirm

(Independent)

The universe went in extreme slow motion at its beginning, and has dramatically sped up since, scientists have found.

The discovery, predicted by Einsteins general theory of relativity, was finally confirmed after scientists observed the universe soon after the Big Bang.

Einsteins theory suggests that we should be able to see the distant universe, when it was much older than it is today, running much more slowly. But scientists have not been able to actually look that far and confirm the theory.

Now scientists have used bright quasars as a sort of space clock, allowing them to measure time when the universe was much older than it is today.

Looking back to a time when the universe was just over a billion years old, we see time appearing to flow five times slower, said Geraint Lewis from the University of Sydney, lead author on the new research.

If you were there, in this infant universe, one second would seem like one second  but from our position, more than 12 billion years into the future, that early time appears to drag.

Professor Lewis and other researchers gathered data from 200 quasars for the research. Quasars are very active supermassive black holes that sit in the middle of early galaxies, and hence provide a reliable way to look back at a much younger universe.

Previous researchers have done the same using supernovae, or massive exploding stars. Those are useful but they are also difficult to see at the very very long distances of the early universe, meaning that the confirmation was limited only to about half the age of the cosmos.

Now by using quasars scientists were able to look much further back, to just a tenth of the age of the universe, when it was only a billion years old.

Thanks to Einstein, we know that time and space are intertwined and, since the dawn of time in the singularity of the Big Bang, the universe has been expanding, Professor Lewis said.

This expansion of space means that our observations of the early universe should appear to be much slower than time flows today.

In this paper, we have established that back to about a billion years after the Big Bang.

The work is described in a new paper, Detection of the cosmological time dilation of high-redshift quasars, published in Nature Astronomy.
FILE PHOTO: The headquarters of the U.S. Food and Drug Administration is shown in Silver Spring near Washington

(Reuters) -The U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) has declined to approve Amneal Pharmaceuticals' drug designed to help control symptoms in Parkinson's disease patients for a longer duration, citing inadequate safety data.

Shares of the company tumbled 14.8% to $2.6 in choppy after-market trading on Monday.

The health regulator, in a complete response letter, has requested additional data as it was not convinced beyond doubt about the safety of one of the ingredient, carbidopa, used in the drug, even though some studies have demonstrated the safety of the other component, levodopa, the company said.

The agency has not identified efficacy or manufacturing issues with the treatment.

The drug is a new formulation of carbidopa-levodopa, the standard of care for Parkinson's, and is designed to allow it to remain in the small intestine for a longer period, helping in its consistent absorption.

The company said it would work with the FDA to address the issues.

The complete response letter comes as a surprise, said Barclays analyst Balaji Prasad. The decision will likely delay a launch to until at least the first half of 2024, he added.

Amneal has been looking to rake in more than $500 million in revenues from its specialty business by 2027.

The decision does not impact 2023 forecast as it did not include the revenue from the drug, the company said.

Amneal has another Parkinson's drug, Rytary, on the market but has been struggling to gain a foothold in the treatment space. Only 4% of patients use the drug since its approval in 2015, as per company estimates.

Parkinson's is a brain disorder that causes unintended or uncontrollable movements and is the second most-deadly neurodegenerative disease after Alzheimer's.

There is no cure currently, but medicines and other therapies can help relieve symptoms.

(Reporting by Raghav Mahobe, Khushi Mandowara and Sriparna Roy in Bengaluru; Editing by Pooja Desai, Shweta Agarwal and Sriraj Kalluvila)
By Daniel Trotta and Brendan Pierson

(Reuters) - In state after state, conservative lawmakers this year have banned medical procedures for transgender youth. Now, a growing number of federal judges are blocking those laws from taking effect.

U.S. district court judges have halted such laws in six states - Alabama, Arkansas, Florida, Indiana, Kentucky and Tennessee - finding that they infringe on the constitutional guarantee to equal protection under the 14th Amendment.

Two lawsuits challenging laws in Montana and Georgia have yet to be ruled on, and in Oklahoma the opposing sides in May agreed to set aside the law until the court case is heard.

The court rulings offer temporary relief from the recent rush of bills banning transgender youth from receiving treatments such as puberty blockers and hormone therapy. Twenty states have passed such measures, with the bulk of them signed into law this year.

"It's quite noteworthy that the results in these cases have so far been so consistent," said Tobias Wolff, a University of Pennsylvania law professor specializing in constitutional law and LGBTQ rights. "And it's not because the law in this area was such a slam dunk. It's because the facts are so clearly against these laws."

Many conservative lawmakers have endorsed the laws as part of an effort to defend traditional values and portray Democrats as out of touch on issues of sex and religion.

Democrats, LGBTQ advocacy groups and health providers say the bans unjustly target a vulnerable community for whom gender-affirming care can be life-saving.

"The courts are starting to find very consistently that these laws are ridiculous," said Kevin Jennings, chief executive of Lambda Legal, a civil rights organization focused on LGBTQ issues. "They violate the equal protection clause, they're motivated by animus not science and they serve no state interest."

Judges, including three appointed by Republican former President Donald Trump, have found that gender-affirming care is medically necessary for transgender youth suffering from gender dysphoria - the stress caused by the divergence between one's gender identity and sex assigned at birth.

The judges also have said laws banning such care violate a parent's right to make healthcare decisions for their children.

"Courts are really taking time to understand and recognize the humanity of the families and children impacted by these bans," said Cynthia Cheng-Wun Weaver, litigation director for the Human Rights Campaign, the largest LGBTQ advocacy in the United States.

Supporters of the laws are undeterred, saying the courts have erred and that the prevailing medical consensus will change.

Matt Sharp, senior counsel for the Alliance Defending Freedom, which has advocated for the laws in multiple states, said states regularly regulate the medical profession based on age and procedure.

"Courts get it wrong sometimes," Sharp said. "This is still early in the process."

Jay Richards, director of the Heritage Foundation's DeVos Center for Religion and Civil Society, said judges were too easily influenced by a "toxic ideology" promoted by groups such as the American Academy of Pediatrics and the World Professional Association for Transgender Health.

"Judges have busy schedules and very little time to study the scientific details," Richards said.

In most of the states where judges have weighed in, the laws are blocked from taking effect while the challenges play out in court.

In Arkansas, however, a judge appointed by Democratic former President Barack Obama issued a permanent injunction striking down the law.

The lawsuits have been filed by advocacy groups such as the American Civil Liberties Union, the Human Rights Campaign and Lambda Legal on behalf of families of transgender youth.

Those groups have said they will challenge more of the state laws but are limited by funding constraints, legal resources and finding families willing to undertake the arduous process of suing their state governments.

(Reporting by Daniel Trotta and Brendan Pierson; Editing by Colleen Jenkins and Diane Craft)
US warns Americans against traveling to China due to risk of wrongful detention

[Source]

The U.S. State Department has issued an updated travel advisory to warn Americans to rethink their trips to mainland China due to the arbitrary enforcement of local laws and the risk of wrongful detention.

Counterespionage law: The travel advisory comes after China passed a counterespionage law and a law to sanction foreign critics. The State Department noted that U.S. citizens may be detained without access to U.S. consular services or information about their alleged crime.

The Peoples Republic of China (PRC) government arbitrarily enforces local laws, including issuing exit bans on U.S. citizens and citizens of other countries, without fair and transparent process under the law, the U.S. advisory stated.

Prosecuting foreign nationals: According to the advisory, Chinese authorities also appear to have broad discretion to deem a wide range of documents, data, statistics, or materials as state secrets and to detain and prosecute foreign nationals for alleged espionage.

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Americans may be taken into custody if caught conducting research in sensitive areas, are seen participating in demonstrations or found sending messages critical of Chinas policies.

Although no cases were cited, a 78-year-old U.S. citizen was found guilty of espionage and sentenced to life in prison in May.

There were similar advisories issued for Hong Kong and Macao.

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(Reuters) - The U.S. is deeply concerned about efforts to interfere with Guatemala's first-round presidential election result, U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken said on Sunday, a day after Guatemala's top court ordered ballots be reviewed.

Blinken added the U.S. government endorsed findings from observers including the Organization of American States over the vote's validity, and said undermining the outcome would be a "grave threat to democracy with far reaching implications."

Guatemala's top court on Saturday ordered ballots from the June 25 election to be reviewed after the front-runner's party and allies challenged the results, setting up the potential for a recount before the runoff vote set for Aug. 20.

Sandra Torres, a former first lady who won the first round, has alleged votes were manipulated. Bernardo Arevalo, who bucked forecasts to become a close runner-up to Torres, described Torres' vote review request as lacking legal merit and endangering the electoral process.

In a public statement addressed to the international community, Guatemala's Foreign Ministry requested respect for its sovereignty and the principle of non-intervention in internal affairs.

It also said the government respected the independence of its electoral authorities and judicial branch.

Guatemala's Supreme Electoral Tribunal on Sunday said it would abide by the court decision and instruct its local branches to review the ballots within five days.

It had already concluded a review on June 30, it added.

The European Union, which monitored the vote and backed the results announced by the Electoral Tribunal, called on Guatemala's institutions and political parties to respect the electoral process and what it called the "clearly manifested will of citizens."

(Reporting by Daina Beth Solomon in Mexico City and Sofia Menchu in Guatemala City; Editing by Muralikumar Anantharaman and Josie Kao)
Some of the families of the four University of Idaho students killed in Moscow last fall oppose tearing down the off-campus home where the crime occurred before suspect Bryan Kohbergers murder trial in October.

A date has yet to be set for demolition of the King Road home, according to the university. But U of I wants to remove the six-bedroom house from the property before Aug. 21, when students return to Moscow for the fall semester, university spokesperson Jodi Walker told the Idaho Statesman last week.

The four victims were U of I seniors Kaylee Goncalves and Madison Mogen, both 21; and junior Xana Kernodle and freshman Ethan Chapin, both 20. With two other housemates, the three women rented the home just north of new Greek Row, while Chapin was Kernodles boyfriend and stayed over the night of their deaths.

Kohberger, 28, a former graduate student at Washington State University, is charged with four counts of first-degree murder and one count of felony burglary. The state intends to seek the death penalty if he is convicted.

Shanon Gray, attorney for the Goncalves family, said the university is disregarding families requests that the home be left standing until after Kohbergers trial. The murder trial is scheduled to start in Latah County on Oct. 2.

The university asked for the families opinions on the demolition and then proceeded to ignore those opinions and pursue their own self-interests, Gray said in an email to the Statesman. The home itself has enormous evidentiary value as well as being the largest, and one of the most important, pieces of evidence in the case.

Crews last week began work to demolish the off-campus King Road home where four University of Idaho students were killed in November 2022, in Moscow, Idaho, as pictured here on June 28, 2023.

Last week, crews were at the boarded-up King Road property to begin preparations for tearing down the home, Walker said. Meeting an Aug. 21 deadline would entail demolishing it within the next seven weeks.

Our focus right now is on removing the personal items and making those available to the families, Walker told the Statesman in an email. We know that these items are extremely important and care needs to be taken to ensure they can retrieve the items of their loved ones. This will take some time.

U of I: Defense, prosecution do not object to demolition

Following the November killings, the owner of the King Road rental home donated the property to the university, the school announced in February  along with announcing its intent to demolish it. The home was most recently assessed at a value of about $344,000, according to previous Statesman reporting.

Members of the Mogen and Kernodle families also oppose the destruction of the home until after the trial, Gray said. Gray told the Statesman he does not represent the Chapin family and is unsure where they stand on the matter.

Members of the Chapin, Mogen and Kernodle families did not respond to the Statesmans requests for comment.

Along with the Goncalves family, Gray represents Mogens family in tort claims filed in May against the university, city of Moscow and Idaho State Police. The legal step preserves the two families right to sue each of the government entities if they choose related to the deaths of their children, the Statesman previously reported.

Walker said that university officials have remained in regular communication with the four victims families since taking ownership of the house.

On June 17, Gray sent an email to U of I identifying the wishes of the Goncalves, Mogen and Kernodle families about leaving the home untouched for the time being. Gray provided the Statesman with an email response from university attorney Kent Nelson documenting that request, which also noted the tort claims filed by Gray on behalf of the Goncalveses and Mogens.

 (O)ur research has not revealed any civil action you could file to create a duty in the university to preserve the house, Nelson wrote. The university has good-faith reasons for wanting to demolish the house and the university did not own the house when the homicides occurred. In addition, the defendant was not, and is not, affiliated with the university in any way.

Crews begin work to demolish the off-campus King Road home where four University of Idaho students were killed in November 2022, in Moscow, Idaho, as pictured on June 28, 2023.

Nelson added that neither the prosecution nor defense objected to the property being destroyed, and also wrote that it had been released from the criminal proceedings. He told Gray that U of I needed cogent argument that cited relevant case law, rules or statutes from the families to deviate from its plan to move forward with demolition of the house.

He requested that by the end of the day on June 23.

Gray said Nelson sent him the email response on June 22, which provided him with a single day. Gray did not respond to the Statesman about whether he met that deadline.

The University of Idaho is choosing to demolish the home on King Road despite the wishes of the victims families, Gray told the Statesman. By waiting to demo the King Road home until after the trial, (it) would honor the families wishes and support the judicial process if the home is needed in the future by the prosecution, defense or jurors.

For now, the university appears to be maintaining its plans to raze the King Road house ahead of students returning to campus.

We appreciate that the families, as well as the entire university community, are working through their grief and navigating their own paths forward in these trying circumstances, Nelson wrote to Gray. The university believes demolishing the house will promote healing for members of all of the families, as well as for our students, the larger university community and the Moscow community writ large.
Vietnam has banned the yet-to-be-released Barbie film from domestic distribution over a scene featuring a map that depicted Chinas claimed territory in the South China Sea.

State-run media outlet Tuoi Tre newspaper reported on Monday that the countrys film department had banned the movie because the map labeled as Chinese territory parts of the sea that Vietnam claims as its own, calling it offending.

China uses a nine-dash, U-shaped line to illustrate its claims over vast areas of the South China Sea. This includes areas where Vietnam claims its continental shelf sits, according to Reuters.

The highly-anticipated film, starring Margot Robbie, Issa Rae and Ryan Gosling, was originally slated to premiere in Vietnam on July 21, the same date as the U.S. release, according to Tuoi Tre.

We do not grant license for the American movie Barbie to release in Vietnam because it contains the offending image of the nine-dash line, Vi Kien Thanh, the head of Vietnams Department of Cinema, said in a statement.

This is just the latest example in which Vietnam has banned a film for its depiction of the South China Sea. The nine-dash line from China was rejected by an international arbitration ruling by a Netherlands court in 2016, but China has refused to accept the courts ruling, Reuters reported.

Vietnamese officials pulled DreamWorkss animated film Abominable in 2019 and banned the viewing of Sonys action movie Unchartered last year due to the same reason.

For the latest news, weather, sports, and streaming video, head to The Hill.
HANOI (Reuters) - Vietnam has banned Warner Bros' highly-anticipated film "Barbie" from domestic distribution over a scene featuring a map that shows China's unilaterally claimed territory in the South China Sea, state media reported on Monday.

The U-shaped "nine-dash line" is used on Chinese maps to illustrate its claims over vast areas of the South China Sea, including swathes of what Vietnam considers its continental shelf, where it has awarded oil concessions.

"Barbie" is the latest movie to be banned in Vietnam for depicting China's controversial nine-dash line, which was repudiated in an international arbitration ruling by a court in The Hague in 2016. China refuses to recognise the ruling.

In 2019 the Vietnamese government pulled DreamWorks' animated film "Abominable" and last year it banned Sony's action movie "Unchartered" for the same reason. Netflix also removed an Australian spy drama "Pine Gap" in 2021.

"Barbie", starring Margot Robbie and Ryan Gosling, was originally slated to open in Vietnam on July 21, the same date as in the United States, according to state-run Tuoi Tre newspaper.

"We do not grant license for the American movie 'Barbie' to release in Vietnam because it contains the offending image of the nine-dash line," the paper reported, citing Vi Kien Thanh, head of the Department of Cinema, a government body in charge of licensing and censoring foreign films.

Warner Bros did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

Vietnam and China have long had overlapping territorial claims to a potentially energy-rich stretch in the South China Sea. The Southeast Asian country has repeatedly accused Chinese vessels of violating its sovereignty.

(Reporting by Phuong Nguyen; Editing by Kanupriya Kapoor)
Margot Robbie Han Myung-Gu / WireImage

Vietnam is withdrawing from the Barbie World.

The upcoming "Barbie" movie from Warner Bros. has been banned in Vietnam due to a scene with a map showing territory in the South China Sea that China has unilaterally claimed, Reuters reports. Chinese maps use the "nine-dash line" to show this disputed territory. In 2016, a Hague international tribunal ruled that China has no legal basis behind its claim to the area, which Vietnam has contested.

"We do not grant license for the American movie 'Barbie' to release in Vietnam because it contains the offending image of the nine-dash line," Vi Kien Thanh, head of the Department of Cinema in Vietnam, reportedly said.

Starring Margot Robbie, "Barbie" is expected to be one of the biggest movies of the summer, and it was scheduled to be released in Vietnam on July 21, when it also hits theaters in the United States. But it's not the first movie to face a ban in Vietnam for this same reason. In 2022, the Tom Holland action film "Uncharted" was also banned in Vietnam because a map "contained an illegal image of the infamous nine-dash line," Vi Kien Thanh reportedly said.

The animated movie "Abominable" was also pulled in Vietnam over a scene showing the "nine dash line" on a map in 2019, as was the show "Pine Gap" in 2021. "Netflix's violations angered and hurt the feelings of the entire people of Vietnam," the Authority of Broadcasting and Electronic Information said at the time.

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Farmers plant rice in fields outside Hanoi at night as they try to beat a looming heatwave, a practice that is becoming more common across north and central Vietnam (Nhac NGUYEN)

It's 3 am and pitch black when rice farmer Tran Thi Lan heads into water-logged fields on the outskirts of Hanoi to begin planting, desperate to finish before the day's brutal heat arrives.

Planting in the dark has become a saviour for countless farmers in north and central Vietnam during increasingly hot summers as South and Southeast Asian nations battle record-high temperatures this year.

"It's so hard to plant the rice when the strong sun is directly on my back and the warm water in the field splashes my face," Lan, 47, told AFP.

Lan had managed a few days of daytime planting during a brief respite from the heat.

But she switched to night work as another heatwave descended on northern Vietnam in early July, with forecasters predicting a long stretch where daily temperatures would exceed 37 degrees Celsius (98 degrees Fahrenheit).

"With not enough light, the planting might not be on a straight line," Lan acknowledges, as she quickly buries some roots into a patch of paddy illuminated by her head lamp.

Like Lan, 62-year-old farmer Nguyen Hung Phuong will now work from 4 pm to 9 pm and again from 3 am to 9 am.

"With extremely high temperatures, it's very uncomfortable and exhausting to work during daytime, although of course I can see more clearly," Phuong said.

Working at night made him "more productive and less distracted", he said.

Night planting began a few years ago at Nguyen Thi Hanh's farm.

"Our parents did not have head lamps. The weather was also not as hot," 56-year-old Hanh said.

Night planting has its advantages for the rice, which Hahn said is sensitive to extremes in temperature.

"It's in fact much better because the water is cooler, and more suitable for the young plant", Hanh said.

Day or night, farmers such as Lan and Phuong can earn up to $40 a day, a large sum in a country where labourers in rural areas normally earn around $250 each month.

But the work is so tough that hardly anyone wants to do it, Lan said.

"Planting in the dark takes much more time compared to during the day," she said.

"But we just need to keep going," Lan said, worrying that, in a few years, no one would be left to do this work.

"The younger ones have all quit for less hard jobs."

tmh/aph/rbu/pbt
Qu Dongyu re-elected as FAO director-general

Xinhua) 09:21, July 03, 2023

Qu Dongyu delivers a speech after being re-elected as director-general of the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) in Rome, Italy, July 2, 2023. Qu Dongyu was re-elected as director-general of the FAO here on Sunday during the ongoing 43rd session of the FAO Conference. (Xinhua/Jin Mamengni)

ROME, July 2 (Xinhua) -- Qu Dongyu was re-elected as director-general of the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) here on Sunday during the ongoing 43rd session of the FAO Conference.

Qu was first elected in June 2019 to head the UN agency and is the first Chinese national to serve in the position.

Since assuming office, Qu has actively led the FAO to address the challenges concerning global food security and contribute to the food and agricultural development of all countries, especially developing countries. His efforts have been extensively recognized by FAO member nations.

Founded in 1945 and headquartered in Rome, Italy, FAO is a specialized UN agency leading cooperation in food and agriculture. The organization plays a vital role in global food and agricultural policy exchanges, standard-setting, information gathering and statistics.

Qu Dongyu delivers a speech after being re-elected as director-general of the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) in Rome, Italy, July 2, 2023. Qu Dongyu was re-elected as director-general of the FAO here on Sunday during the ongoing 43rd session of the FAO Conference. (Xinhua/Jin Mamengni)

Qu Dongyu (2nd L) receives congratulations after being re-elected as director-general of the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) in Rome, Italy, July 2, 2023. Qu Dongyu was re-elected as director-general of the FAO here on Sunday during the ongoing 43rd session of the FAO Conference. (Xinhua/Jin Mamengni)

Qu Dongyu (L) shakes hands with Marie-Claude Bibeau, Chairperson of the 43rd session of the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) Conference, after being re-elected as director-general of the FAO in Rome, Italy, July 2, 2023. Qu Dongyu was re-elected as director-general of the FAO here on Sunday during the ongoing 43rd session of the FAO Conference. (Xinhua/Jin Mamengni)

Qu Dongyu (C) receives congratulations after being re-elected as director-general of the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) in Rome, Italy, July 2, 2023. Qu Dongyu was re-elected as director-general of the FAO here on Sunday during the ongoing 43rd session of the FAO Conference. (Xinhua/Jin Mamengni)

Qu Dongyu (C) receives congratulations after being re-elected as director-general of the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) in Rome, Italy, July 2, 2023. Qu Dongyu was re-elected as director-general of the FAO here on Sunday during the ongoing 43rd session of the FAO Conference. (Xinhua/Jin Mamengni)

United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) Director-General Qu Dongyu (C) attends the 43rd session of the FAO Conference in Rome, Italy, July 2, 2023. Qu Dongyu was re-elected as director-general of the FAO here on Sunday. (Xinhua/Jin Mamengni)

This photo taken on July 2, 2023 shows a scene at the 43rd session of the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) Conference in Rome, Italy. Qu Dongyu was re-elected as director-general of the FAO here on Sunday. (Xinhua/Jin Mamengni)

(Web editor: Zhang Kaiwei, Liang Jun)
A stock image of a phone displaying the Virgin Media logo

Some Virgin Media email users have been unable to access their inboxes for over two weeks, with no date for when the issue will be fixed.

Customers first started reporting problems on Monday, 19 June.

Virgin Media said all users can now send and receive emails again but some still cannot access messages from before the disruption.

One user, a retired IT professional, told the BBC he wasn't "100% sure these emails are ever going to be recovered".

Phil Westlake, who used to design IT systems for several large UK companies, has lost access to his historic emails and said that in his experience disaster recovery plans in large organisations would stipulate that the situation should be resolved in a few hours.

"I'm struggling, and I guess anybody with any IT background, would struggle to understand why that's so difficult to to get it back," he said.

Virgin Media apologised "unreservedly" for the inconvenience caused.

It has previously said that all emails were "safe and secure".

'Frustrating'

The firm operates several email services including @virginmedia.com, @ntlworld.com, @blueyonder.co.uk and @virgin.net.

The BBC has asked the company how many people have been affected.

In an email to customers sent on 23 June, Axel Wehrle, director of customer service for Virgin Media wrote: "Unfortunately a part of the hardware that manages our mailbox platform experienced a failure, which overloaded the servers and caused service disruption for some email users."

One Cambridgeshire customer, who did not wish to be named, told the BBC the extended problems were "frustrating" and "upsetting". Her emails contained messages of condolence following her husband's death. She also needs access to the email as executor of his will.

Another user, Ian, who is based in Merseyside, said the problems had disrupted charity auctions he was organising.

"[My inbox] has all the details of the donors, donations, and everything else to do with the campaign... and I simply must not have lost any information/contacts/emails etc. or it will be catastrophic.

"My entire life is on that email account as I have had it for approximately 25 years," he said.

A Virgin Media spokesperson told the BBC: "Following a recent issue with our email service, all Virgin Media email users are able to send and receive emails as normal.

"Unfortunately a small proportion of impacted users are currently unable to view historic emails in their inboxes.

"We know that this will be frustrating for those who have important emails and documents saved in their inboxes, and we apologise unreservedly for the inconvenience this is causing.

"Fixing this issue is taking longer than we anticipated but our teams are working flat out to fully restore all historic emails as soon as possible."

The company has reported the email issue to the Information Commissioner's Office, but stressed that the incident was not a data breach and no users' data or personal information had been accessed or compromised in any way.
A husband and wife, and the womans 97-year-old mother, will be laid to rest later this week after they were stabbed and beaten to death at random late last month inside a home in Newton.

The wake for 73-year-old Jill DAmore, 74-year-old Bruno DAmore, and 97-year-old Lucia Arpino will be held Wednesday at Newtons Our Lady Help of Christians Church from 4 p.m. to 8 p.m., according to Andrew J. Magni & Son Funeral Home.

Christopher Ferguson, 41, was ordered held without bail on June 27 on charges of murder, two counts of assault and battery with a dangerous weapon causing serious bodily injury, and burglary in their deaths.

Christopher Ferguson

Officers responding to a 911 call placed by a friend of the couple around 10:15 a.m. on Sunday, June 25, found all three of the victims suffering from apparent stab wounds and blunt-force trauma inside their home at 49 Broadway Street, according to Middlesex District Attorney Marian Ryan.

Man charged in Newton triple homicide had prior run-in with law enforcement, documents show

There were obvious signs of forced entry into the home on Broadway, including broken glass and missing screens from the basement windows, according to police. Ryan added that there were also obvious signs of struggle in one of the bedrooms, including broken furniture and a crystal paperweight covered in blood.

Salt-of-the-earth, wonderful people: Priest remembers husband and wife, mother, murdered in Newton

Photos: Police investigating triple homicide in Newton

Photos: Police investigating triple homicide in Newton

Photos: Police investigating triple homicide in Newton

Photos: Police investigating triple homicide in Newton

Photos: Police investigating triple homicide in Newton

Photos: Police investigating triple homicide in Newton

Photos: Police investigating triple homicide in Newton

Photos: Police investigating triple homicide in Newton

Newton murders

Newton murders

Our Lady Help of Christians Church had planned to celebrate the DAmores 50th wedding anniversary in a post-Communion blessing on the final Sunday of June.

The reason for the friend going there was because there was a planned 50th-anniversary celebration and Mass that morning which was supposed to start at 10 a.m., a prosecutor told the court during Fergusons hearing. The couple that was supposed to be there, Gilda and Bruno DAmore, were not at the Mass. When the friend got to the residence, she saw that the side door was unlocked...In a bedroom, she discovered both of the DAmores, as well as Ms. Dmores mother, Lucia Arpino, apparently deceased all in the same bedroom.

A funeral Mass for the DAmores and Arpino will be held at Our Lady Help of Christians Church at 10:30 p.m. Thursday.

Ferguson is due back in court for a probable cause hearing on July 25.

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After Wagner's mutiny, Russia's military is now fighting with war bloggers because they won't celebrate its few wins the way they want

Russian Defence Minister Sergei Shoigu attends the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation (SCO) meet in New Delhi, India, April 28, 2023. REUTERS/Adnan Abidi

Russia's claims of a small battlefield victory have drawn criticism from military bloggers.

The milbloggers won't celebrate with Moscow, causing the defense ministry to clash with the writers.

A US think tank wrote that the conflict may indicate a lack of success to report to Putin.

Still grappling with the fallout of the paramilitary Wagner Group's armed rebellion, Russia's defense ministry is looking to celebrate its few battlefield victories in Ukraine, but it's run into a problem and is now clashing with a community of military bloggers, influential voices in discussions of the war.

Ukrainian forces have made small territorial gains during their month-long counteroffensive in the eastern and southern regions, though they have also met considerable resistance by Russian troops dug in along defensive lines.

Russia's defense ministry claimed in a series of statements on Telegram over the weekend that in one particular incident, its military successfully prevented a group of Ukrainian soldiers from attempting to land boats near the Antonivsky Bridge, which is located over the Dnipro River in the Kherson region.

Russian military bloggers, or milbloggers, have disputed some of the defense ministry's claims, according to a Sunday assessment by the Institute for the Study of War (ISW), a Washington-based think tank. The milbloggers, said Ukrainian forces had managed to establish positions and that fighting was ongoing.

These writers then became targets of the ministry's ire and were accused of distributing false information and undermining Moscow's claims.

"It is likely that the Russian MoD seeks to censor some Kremlin-affiliated milbloggers out of a concern that these ultranationalists may expose Russian military failures" to Russian President Vladimir Putin, ISW experts wrote in their analysis. "The Russian MoD's conflict with the milblogger community over a trivial combat operation may indicate that the Russian military command does not think it has any other successes to report to Putin amidst the ongoing Ukrainian counteroffensive."

The Russian milblogger community plays an important role in online pro-war ultranationalist spaces, and some of its members have even met with Putin personally.

"One milblogger noted that Russian defense officials worry that milbloggers' coverage of the war endangers their official positions and implied that the Russian MoD may be attempting to recover from the Wagner Group's rebellion," the ISW analysis noted. While that may be the case, exaggerating Ukraine's battlefield losses is not a new tactic from Russian military leadership, which has consistently propagated unreliable information about the 16-month-long war and continues to do so in the wake of a recent mutiny.

A still image from video, released by Russia's Defence Ministry, shows Defence Minister Sergei Shoigu during what it said to be an inspection of a storage base of the country's Western Military District at an unknown location in the course of Russia-Ukraine conflict, in this image taken from footage released June 8, 2023. Russian Defence Ministry/Handout via REUTERS

Wagner Group mercenaries, led by the organization's founder and chief Yevgeny Prigozhin, carried out their short-lived rebellion against Russia's defense ministry in late June after months of rising tensions between the two factions. After quickly capturing the southern city of Rostov-on-Don, Wagner traveled toward Moscow, nearly reaching the city, before Belarus President Alexander Lukashenko brokered negotiations between the Kremlin and Prigozhin.

As part of the deal, Prigozhin was cast into exile in Belarus, and Wagner fighters were given the options of returning to their homes in Russia, signing contracts with Russia's defense ministry, or joining their boss in Belarus. Pentagon Press Secretary Air Force Brig. Gen. Pat Ryder said last week that the US has observed Wagner "elements" in the Russian-occupied territories of Ukraine.

Ukrainian forces, meanwhile, continue to make use of their huge inventory of heavy Western armor  including advanced tanks and infantry fighting vehicles from the US and its NATO allies  to liberate territory in eastern and southern Ukraine.

The General Staff of the Armed Forces of Ukraine said in a Monday Facebook update that in the Zaporizhzhia and Kherson regions  where Moscow claimed its successes over the weekend  Russian forces "are on the defensive" and concentrating "their main efforts on preventing the advance of Ukrainian troops."

"Last week was difficult on the frontline. But we are making progress. We are moving forward, step by step!" Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy wrote Monday on Twitter in a post that included a video showing intense combat footage. "I thank everyone who is defending Ukraine, everyone who is leading this war to Ukraine's victory!"

Read the original article on Business Insider
Want a taste of York County? A popular restaurant week returns with new deals, menus

A live cooking competition kickoff and new restaurants highlight the second YoCo Taste Trail Week this summer.

Visit York County announced the taste trail week will return Aug. 6-13. Some of York Countys most popular eateries will offer specials and prix fixe menu deals. The second-year taste trail is modeled after similar, popular events in the area like Queens Feast Charlotte Restaurant Week and Restaurant Week South Carolina.

It also borrows from the popular YoCo Brew Trail of area breweries and the YoCo Taste Trail that preceded the full week event.

York County is home to award winning culinary experts who continue to put this region on the map as a destination for foodies, said Visit York County president and CEO Andy Clinton.

Restaurants are key to the area economy and to the visitor experience, Clinton said. The summer dates of the taste trail week are strategic, as a way to give back to restaurants.

YoCo Taste Trail Week brings our restaurants a new level of exposure and puts York Countys culinary scene on the map, said chef Jon Fortes of the Flipside Restaurant Group. As a small business, we rely on support from locals and visitors, and this is an opportunity for us to connect with clientele during one of our slower times of the year.

Fortes will join chef Rob Masone from Kounter and Kre8 Xperiences in a live-action cooking competition in late July at The Power House, to kick off the taste trail week activities.

Full event week menus havent been determined. Listed participating restaurants so far include The Flipside Restaurant, Hobos, Kounter, Legal Remedy Brewing and Old Town Kitchen & Cocktails in Rock Hill. Fort Mill adds Epic Chophouse, Flipside Cafe, Fortes Mill Eatery, Hobos, The Improper Pig and Salmeris Italian Kitchen. Theres also Clover Harvest in Clover.

Reservations or call ahead seating are recommended.

Are food staple US Foods, with its distribution site in Fort Mill, returns to sponsor the taste trail week. Area president Todd Hansen with US Foods said the company is proud to continue that support.

Our local restaurateurs are the lifeblood of this community, and it is exciting to see the growth of the industry as new establishments open their doors and continue to enhance the local culinary scene, Hansen said.

For more on participating restaurants, and the event as it approaches, check visityorkcounty.com.
War cannot end while Crimea is under Russian occupation, says Zelenskyy

War cannot end while Crimea is under Russian occupation, says Zelenskyy

The war against Russian aggression cannot end while Crimea is under Russian occupation, President Volodymyr Zelenskyy said in an interview with US television channel CNN on July 2.

While the thrust of Kyivs efforts has been focused on recapturing territory in the south and east of Ukraine, Zelenskyy said that his ultimate goal was to liberate Crimea, the peninsula annexed by Russia in 2014 in violation of international law.

We cannot imagine Ukraine without Crimea, he said.

And while Crimea is under Russian occupation it means only one thing: the war is not over yet.

Read also: Ukraine's military advances prompts Russia to bolster defenses in northern Crimea

Asked whether there was any scenario under which there could be peace without Crimea, Zelenskyy said: Then it would not be victory.

Reports indicate that numerous fortification lines are being constructed between the border with mainland Ukraine and the Russian logistical hub in Dzhankoi, located in the north of Crimea. Russian troops have been observed moving near the ongoing construction.

Defense Minister Oleksii Reznikov previously stated that Ukraine would regain control of Crimea without fighting, alluding to a strategy of isolating and besieging the peninsula.

Read also: Occupation authorities target Ukrainian patriotic messages across Crimea

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
Although some rain showers and thunderstorms are in the weather forecast for State College for Monday afternoon and evening, dryer weather should be around by the time fireworks are set off Tuesday evening.

Alyson Hoegg, senior meteorologist at AccuWeather, said as of Monday afternoon, some showers and thunderstorms have popped up across the western part of the state and are moving into Centre County.

Although they wont be widespread, she expected some showers and thunderstorms to be around until the early hours of Monday evening, she said, probably through 10 or 11 p.m.

Those storms could produce some locally heavy rainfall. So that would be our biggest concern here as we go through the evening hours (Monday night). Once we get past that, it will largely dry out here later on (Monday night), Hoegg said, noting that anyone planning to be out and about Monday evening should have an umbrella handy if possible.

As far as the Fourth of July holiday, the weather looks a little drier during the day, she said. The best chance for any storm activity Tuesday will be to be east of Centre County, anywhere from the Susquehanna Valley through portions of eastern Pennsylvania.

A spotty shower or thunderstorm in State College Tuesday afternoon isnt ruled out, but the chances are smaller compared to Monday, she said.

If theres anything around, it could be brief, heavy downpour during the afternoon (Tuesday). Storms will be pretty quick moving so if anyones out and about at any of the festivities or picnics outside, it would just be a brief downpour and then the storm should move out pretty quickly, Hoegg said.

Those looking forward to ending Independence Day with a fireworks display are in luck: Hoegg said dryer weather is expected.

Even though its still going to be very warm and humid through the day (Tuesday) and into (Tuesday) night, the threat for any precipitation should come to an end by the time fireworks get underway Tuesday night, she said.

She continued: The one thing to keep in mind with (Tuesday), temps are going to be in the low 80s  but it is going to be quite humid so the real feel temperatures are going to be in the middle and upper 80s, maybe approaching 90 during the middle of the afternoon tomorrow. So folks should definitely stay hydrated throughout the day because it is going to be very warm, humid and sticky outside.
The priest selected by Pope Francis to lead Vatican investigations of child sex abuse helped cover up such abuse in Argentina, according to a watchdog group.

Victor Manuel Fernandez, 60, was chosen Saturday to lead the Dicastery for the Doctrine of the Faith, which handles sex abuse allegations against members of the clergy.

Bishop Accountability, a U.S.-based organization that tracks allegations against priests, called Fernandezs appointment baffling and troubling.

Fernandezs recent handling of a clergy sex abuse case in his home archdiocese of La Plata raises great concern, said Bishop Accountability co-director Anne Barrett Doyle. In his response to allegations, he stood in stout support of the accused priest and refused to believe the victims.

La Plata priest Eduardo Lorenzo was accused of child sex abuse in February 2019. Fernandez publicly backed the alleged perv and said the accusers had alternate motivations. While Lorenzo was investigated by police, Fernandez traveled to celebrate Mass with him.

Even as more accusers came forward later in the year, Fernandez kept Lorenzo at his post. He was only removed in October 2019 as the criminal case progressed.

Lorenzo died by suicide in December 2019, hours after a judge issued a warrant for his arrest. In announcing Lorenzos death, Fernandez made no mention of the allegations against him.

For his handling of this case, Fernandez should have been investigated, not promoted to one of the highest posts in the global church, said Doyle. Nothing about his performance suggests he is fit to lead the Popes battle against abuse and cover-up.

Francis has publicly stated that a major goal of his papacy is to root out abusive priests and those who cover up their crimes.

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Water safety: The most important tip is simpler than you think

School's out for summer and that can only mean one thing: families are packing their beach bags and heading out for some fun in the water. Others are retreating to the backyard pools of friends and neighbors.

But as kids' days shift to floaties and building sand castles, it's on parents to make sure they're safe.

"It really doesn't take a long time for children to have problems swimming or feel like they need some help," said Desiree Ramos Reiner, external affairs office for the American Red Cross Greater New York region, "and it's hard to tell unless you're really watching the kids."

Children race and jump into the pool as youngsters and adults enjoy some time at the Playland pool in Rye, June 30, 2023.

Important water tip for parents this summer: Name a 'water watcher'

The single most important thing parents can do this summer is to designate an adult as a "water watcher," she said.

It sounds simple, but it's easy to get distracted by other summer concerns like setting up the picnic or scrolling on your phone, Ramos Reiner said. But it takes a diligent set of eyes to ensure kids are safe in the water.

One way to make sure there's no confusion over who is supposed to be the water watcher is to designate the person with some sort of tag, such as a lanyard.

This is especially critical for young children and in residential pools.

Among children's drowning incidents in the U.S. from 2018 to 2020 where the location was known, 80% were in residential settings, according to a report issued last month by the U.S. Consumer Product Safety Commission. And 91% of those drownings were kids younger than 5.

Anane Dixon from New Rochelle holds 19-month old Amaari Dixon as they enjoy some time at the Playland pool in Rye, June 30, 2023.

Hundreds of kids drown each year in U.S.

Even the most experienced swimmers aren't 100% "drown-proof," said Sarah Sebe, founder of Sunsational Swim School, which has over 2,000 certified swim instructors nationwide.

And each year, hundreds of kids drown, many of which are younger than 5.

Sodus Point Beach Park was busy with visitors, some who played in Lake Ontario.

According to the CPSC's latest data:

There was an average of 371 pool- or spa-related fatal drownings reported each year between 2018 and 2020 for kids younger than 15.

Fatal drownings decreased 7% for kids younger than 15 in 2020 from the year before at 340, down from 367.

In 2020, fatal drownings of kids under 5 in pools or spas increased 10% with 279 fatalities, compared to 254 fatalities in 2019. Seventy-five percent involved children younger than 5.

Among drowning fatalities between 2018 and 2020 where the race of the victim was identified, African American accounted for 21% of the deaths. African Americans accounted for 45% of drowning deaths of kids between ages 5 and 14 where the race was known.

Lake Ontario by Durand Eastman Park is filled with people enjoying the weather and cooling off in the water Sunday, July 26, 2020. This stretch of water attracts boaters who often anchor not far from the shore. Durand Eastman Beach is closed but many use whatever stretch of sand is available to hang out and swim from.

Tips to keep your kids safe while in and around water

Ramos Reiner isn't the only one emphasizing the importance of designating a water watcher this summer.

Samantha Pfeffer, whose family founded the Water Guardian Foundation after her 2-year-old sister Saige drowned in 2015, said at a Westchester County weekly update meeting last week that the foundation has that given out over 5,000 water guardian tags to pediatric practices, nursery schools and swim programs.

Whichever trusted adult is wearing the tag, which comes on a yellow lanyard, is charged with keeping an eye on kids as they swim, but also if they have access to water and aren't swimming.

Drowning often doesn't happen during "swim time," but rather when parents are distracted and kids shouldn't be near the water at all, Pfeffer said.

The foundation provided 500 guardian tags to the county, which are being distributed at county pools.

Families enjoy some time on the sand and in the water at Playland beach in Rye, June 30, 2023.

Here are other tips to stay safe this swim season:

Make sure kids have basic water skills before taking them swimming. Classes can start as young as 6 months, Ramos Reiner said.

There are different risks in a pool versus the beach. At the beach, be aware of rip currents, which can be sometimes be spotted from the shore. Waves will continue on either side of the rip current, which will be a calmer area between them, Ramos Reiner said.

Make sure kids are swimming with a buddy and that they stay near the lifeguard chair. The farther they get from a lifeguard, the longer it'll take for help to arrive if they need it, Ramos Reiner said.

Make sure pools have proper fencing around them so kids can't get in when no one is there.

When it comes to flotation devices, the safest thing to buy children is a U.S. Coast Guard approved life jacket, Ramos Reiner said. Life jackets come in different sizes based on weight.

Download the Red Cross Swim Safety app, which has water safety tips and videos kids can watch.

Sebe said parents should also learn the signs of drowning and know how to do CPR in case of emergencies.

Instead of thinking of swim lessons as another recreational activity for kids if they're interested in it, parents should see lessons as "an essential life skill," Sebe said in an email.

"In reality, basic swim skills (how to float, swim to the edge, climb out of the pool, etc.) are as crucial as teaching a child to look both ways before crossing the street," Sebe said.

Contact Diana Dombrowski at ddombrowski@gannett.com. Follow her on Twitter at @domdomdiana.

This article originally appeared on Rockland/Westchester Journal News: How to keep kids safe while swimming at beaches, pools this summer
Jill Wine-Banks thinks there is more to come in the classified documents case against former President Donald Trump.

Wine-Banks, a prosecutor in the Watergate scandal that ended Richard Nixons presidency, over the weekend talked about whether Trump will receive a fair trial  on charges of allegedly mishandling the top-secret materials  before a jury in heavily red Fort Pierce, Florida.

A hung jury for Trump is a risk in Florida, Wine-Banks acknowledged to MSNBCs Mehdi Hasan.

But there is no way that there will be an acquittal, she said.

I say that because jurors take very seriously the guidance from the judge that says you must judge on the evidence in this courtroom, Wine-Banks continued. And based on whats already publicly known about the evidence, the case is very strong.

And there are cases in New Jersey, waiting to happen, she added. I cant imagine based on the tape that there wont be an indictment in New Jersey for showing a classified document to a person without security clearance. So, I think there is more to come from classified documents.

Related...
Spectacular movies of lightning spreading across the Earth have just been released by the European weather agency Eumetsat.

They were made by a new instrument that was placed 36,000km above equatorial Africa in December.

The imager, once fully commissioned, will become a key tool for forecasters as they track the emergence of violent storms.

Lightning often precedes heavy rain, hail and even big gusts of wind.

Phil Evans, the director-general of Eumetsat, described the movies as "fantastic".

"The Americans have had an instrument like this over their part of the world for a few years now, but this is the first one for Europe and Africa," he told BBC News.

"Our imager is more sophisticated in terms of resolution and performance, so there's a lot of excitement about how its imagery can be used."

Artwork: Meteosat-12 is part of a multi-billion-euro upgrade to Europe's weather observing system

Eumetsat is the intergovernmental organisation charged with managing Europe's meteorological assets in orbit.

It's currently testing the recently launched Meteosat-12 platform, a next-generation weather-observing spacecraft that scientists expect to initiate a step change in so-called "nowcasting" - the forewarning of challenging atmospheric conditions on very short time horizons, in the order of just hours.

Monitoring lightning behaviour will be central to this capability.

Meteosat-12's lightning detector has four telescopic cameras focused on Europe, Africa, the Middle East and parts of South America.

Their detectors continuously look for the light pulses produced by cloud-to-ground, cloud-to-cloud and intra-cloud lightning flashes.

They can do this day or night, and will catch even a single lightning bolt.

"The minimum duration of a lightning [detection] is 0.6 milliseconds; that means 1,000 times faster than the blink of an eye," said Guia Pastorini from Leonardo, the Italian aerospace company that designed and built the instrument.

There is an impressive movie of lightning over the UK on 12 June.

"The location of the thunderstorms was captured really clearly from the satellite, and made even more fascinating by the development of a 'Mesoscale Convective System' or MCS," said BBC Weather forecaster Simon King.

"This is a thunderstorm which under certain circumstances grows larger and spawns more thunderstorms. The satellite picks up this area of cloud initially in south-east England but we then see the flashes of lightning develop on its forward edge as it grows and moves north-west."

Lightning is often a tracer for extreme weather

In Europe, forecasters already have very effective ground systems to detect lightning. The ATDNet (Arrival Time Difference Network) senses a discharge from its radio frequency emission. Radar is also used.

"But those lightning networks tend to detect mainly the cloud-to-ground lightning strikes, rather than the cloud-to-cloud, or intra-cloud lightning," explained Simon Keogh, the head of space applications and nowcasting R&D at the UK Met Office.

"Those cloud-to-ground strikes make up only about 10% of the lightning activity in the atmosphere. So, the other 90% is lightning activity within the cloud, which is what the optical satellite is detecting. I see these systems as being totally complementary."

Meteosat-12's view of Earth: Africa in particular should benefit from the new technology

And in Africa, where most lightning on Earth occurs, there are fewer radio frequency systems. The Meteosat information will, therefore, be particularly useful to forecasters.

The same applies to ocean monitoring. The imager is watching what's happening out over the Atlantic, which should improve the safe routing of long haul airliners.

Climate researchers are sure to be interested in the new imager's data. It'll help them develop much better statistics on the frequency of lightning over time.

The lightning imager comprises four separate telescopes (gold cylinders)

Atmospheric chemists, too, will be fascinated. The energy in lightning turns the "unreactive" nitrogen in the air into the "reactive" forms, which rain out as nitrates to fertilise soils.

Another potential benefit would be in helping to improve the models used to forecast where forest fires might start as a result of lightning strikes.

Testing of the spacecraft will continue through this year. The national forecasting agencies, such as the UK Met Office, Meteo France and DWD (the German Meteorological Service), should be using Meteosat-12 information on a routine basis early in 2024.
'Well known' that Kevin Spacey was 'up to no good', UK court told

Actor Kevin Spacey has denied 12 sexual offences against four men dating back two decades (Daniel LEAL)

A man who claims that Kevin Spacey sexually assaulted him said the Hollywood actor was an aggressive "predator" uncomfortable with his sexuality, a London court was told on Monday.

The alleged victim, who cannot be identified for legal reasons, claims that the Oscar-winning star began sexually assaulting him more than two decades ago.

But despite him making clear to Spacey that his advances were unwanted, the actor persisted, a jury at Southwark Crown Court in south London heard.

Spacey, 63, has pleaded not guilty to 12 sexual offences, including indecent assault, against four men between 2001 and 2013.

The alleged victim described Spacey, the former artistic director of London's Old Vic theatre, as a "slippery, snaky, difficult person".

Good-looking young men were warned to be on their guard because it was "well known that he was up to no good", he said, likening the actor to his serial killer character in the film "Se7en".

"He's a bit like that, a bit creepy," he said.

The prosecution has described Spacey, who won Oscars for "The Usual Suspects" and "American Beauty", as a "sexual bully", whose preferred method of assault was grabbing other men in the crotch.

His first alleged victim recounted in a videotaped police interview played to the jury that the actor grabbed him on several occasions, and was told to stop.

He told officers that Spacey once grabbed him painfully in a car. He pushed back and told the star: "Don't do that again or I will knock you out."

The actor allegedly replied: "That's such a turn-on to me, you're such a man."

The witness said Spacey's unwanted sexual overtures made him uncomfortable, ashamed and disgusted, so much so that he could not watch any drama with the actor in it.

"I can't stand watching the man. It makes me feel sick," he told police, describing Spacey as a "predator" who was "aggressive".

"He was obviously very messed up with his sexuality," he added.

Under cross-examination by Spacey's lawyer Patrick Gibbs, the alleged victim denied "100, one million percent" that he had any feelings for the actor, or that what happened led him to question his own sexuality.

He reported the claims to the police after publicity about other allegations against Spacey, he said.

His only motivation was "to tell the truth", he added.

phz/jit/rox
There were 264 new U.S. citizens added to the rolls in Boston's Faneuil Hall Monday

BOSTON - For Maria Moniz, the ceremony Monday that confirmed her status as a U.S. citizen was the culmination of her American Dream.

An immigrant from Cape Verde, she arrived in the Boston area 21 years earlier and, she said, worked two jobs, slept four or five hours, so she could bring her children to the United States. The family is based in Dorchester.

She worked hard, now, shes accomplished her American Dream, said Michel Varela, her adult son, one of the siblings Moniz worked so hard to bring to the U.S. He proudly took pictures of his mother standing with his siblings and even an 11-year-old granddaughter, in front of Faneuil Hall.

Now we are all American, Moniz said, adding that it felt great.

The new citizen was one of 264 people from 59 different countries, who gathered inside The Great Hall for a naturalization ceremony. The timing of the event, the day before the Fourth of July, gave the red, white and blue decorations added meaning.

Packed to the rafters, family and friends of the new Americans created at a naturalization ceremony at Faneuil Hall in Boston Monday.

Some became Americans for practical reasons: They are married to citizens or it helps ease travel to other countries. Some are joining family members who are established in the U.S.

A Quincy couple celebrated the wifes new status as a U.S. citizen.

Maria Moniz, 51, and her son, Michel Varela, celebrate her U.S. citizenship following a naturalization ceremony at Faneuil Hall Monday.

We are from Ghana, said Augustus Matekole, who has been a citizen for some time having arrived more than 20 years ago. He was attending his wifes naturalization ceremony, sitting in the balcony and filming the proceedings.

They both arrived in the United States as students; he was studying economics in Georgia and in Louisiana; his wife, Elisha, arrived just over seven years ago to study physics. While they hail from the same geographic area, they met in the United States and have been married for seven years.

This is an opportunity for us to bring our talents to the nation, to contribute to the nation and to meet wonderful people, Matekole said.

Augustus Matekole, an immigrant from Ghana, now a U.S. citizen, videos his wife's naturalization ceremony at Faneuil Hall Monday.

One family from Peabody celebrated the naturalization of their grandmother who traveled to the country from Kosovo. A Waltham man celebrated his wifes new citizenship, a move that would make it easier for them to travel together.

Her Indian citizenship was not benefitting her, said Alex of his wife Chinmoyee.

Family and friends packed the Great Hall to the rafters, cheering as their family members accepted their responsibilities as citizens. After declaring their fealty, and a lecture by Judge Janet E. Bostwick, of the federal bankruptcy court, on their duties and responsibilities as citizens (voting chief among them) the new Americans recited the Pledge of Allegiance for the first time.

In her remarks, the judge mentioned her familys immigration stories; telling the new citizens that she too, comes from immigrants. Her ancestors hailed from Belgium and Scotland.

My grandmother arrived on Ellis Island, Bostwick said, adding the ship that docked at the former New York immigration processing facility arrived so late there was no one to meet the arriving immigrants.

The family, Bostwick said, explaining that her grandmother was a child at the time, traveling with her siblings and parents, was forced to sleep at Ellis Island in a room whose windows were barred. Those bars, she speculated, must have seemed like an insurmountable obstacle to her family.

The judge likened those bars to obstacles in front of all those gathered Monday, all those who made the journey to the United States and to becoming citizens.

We are, each one of us, a part of the vital fabric of the nation, Bostwick said urging the new citizens to add their talents, ambitions and their own traditions to the great American fabric.

In reminding them that their voices matter, Bostwick urged them to fulfill their civic duties and remember to vote; reminding them that no one can require them to vote and no one can prevent them from voting. She also urged them to make their voices heard in all elections; not just in national elections, but in local elections for city council, for mayor and for school board members.

I am very proud to call you my fellow citizens, Bostwick said.

This article originally appeared on Telegram & Gazette: Boston welcomes new U.S. citizens in naturalization ceremony
Where is Kristin Smart? Scientists say they found human remains evidence in California yard

Paul Flores conviction for murdering Kristin Smart closed one chapter in the 27-year-old mystery, but it didnt answer her familys most enduring question.

Where is Kristins body?

Solving that final part of the crime remains a top priority for the San Luis Obispo County Sheriffs Office, and as it turns out, others as well.

Joining the effort are an environmental engineer, a scientist, a former FBI chemist and former prosecutor, who have banded together to look for Smart themselves.

Their findings from an innovative soil study  first reported by the Los Angeles Times  come from a familiar location: The backyard of Susan Flores, Paul Flores mother.

The team believes they have discovered evidence of a human decomposition event emitting from Susan Flores yard, but so far, no further known investigation by law enforcement has occurred there and the Sheriffs Office isnt commenting because the case remains active.

Susan Flores lawyer, Jeffry Radding, did not respond to multiple emails and phone calls asking for comment on the findings, and when a Tribune reporter visited Flores home to ensure she had a chance to address the allegations, her boyfriend, Mike McConville, took a photo of the reporter and threatened to call the police.

Cal Poly student Kristin Smart was 19 when she went missing after an off-campus party on Memorial Day weekend in 1996. On Oct. 18, 2022, Paul Flores was found guilty of murdering Smart after walking her back to the red bricks dorms after the party.

Kristin Smart knocked on soil testers door in college, he says

Tim Nelligan was in his junior year studying civil and environmental engineering at Cal Poly in 1996.

One week, he said, a tall blond woman knocked on his door  he lived off-campus  asking to use the phone. He let her in, she used their landline, then someone took her back to the dorms.

Then, about a week and a half later, that same woman was on the news. She was missing.

That was quite a shock, he told The Tribune.

He continued to follow the case over the years as he entered his environmental engineering career.

Fast forward to 2019: Nelligan had been an environmental engineer for two decades and owned Katahdin Environmental in San Clemente. One of his specialties, he said, is remediation, or reversing or stopping environmental damage, such as cleaning up storage tanks leaking underground.

Tim Nelligan stands next to one of the holes they created in Marcia Papichs yard to measure human decomposition molecules in February 2020, showing the hole he dug was 5 feet down. They were testing for evidence in the search for Kristin Smarts body.

He said he is very familiar with detecting volatile organic compounds underground and wondered if he could use that technology to help locate Smarts body.

Volatile organic compounds are gas molecules that have a high vapor pressure and low water solubility, according to the EPA. Many are human-made chemicals that are used and produced in the manufacture of paints, pharmaceuticals and refrigerants, while others emit from the natural decomposition process of living organisms.

Cal Polys motto is Learn by Doing, Nelligan said. So really, I was committed, and I decided Im going to do this.

Soil near Susan Flores yard tests positive for human decomposition molecules, team says

Nelligan reached out to Steve Hoyt, who was a Cal Poly lecturer in 1996 and received a doctorate in environmental science and now works as an environmental chemist in San Luis Obispo.

Hoyt founded Environmental Analytical Service, a lab that specializes in testing for volatile organic compounds in air and soil vapor, according to his companys website.

The two identified which molecules to test for based on research from a 2017 study that isolated the odor of death, as well as 2004 and 2008 studies that analyzed the odor of human remains and created a database of the volatile organic compounds emitted from those remains.

A 2015 study also found that volatile organic compounds expended from a decomposing human body were distinguishable from those that came from decomposing animals.

Environmental engineer Tim Nelligan installed soil vapor probes into Marcia Papichs Arroyo Grande yard in March 2023 to test for signs of human decomposition. Papich lives next door to Susan Flores, and he was testing for evidence of human decomposition in the search for Kristin Smarts body.

Hoyt told The Tribune the two selected 50 volatile organic compounds that were specific to the decomposition of human remains, based on the research.

Studies identifying the specific compounds expended from human remains date back two decades, most with the goal of creating tools to better train cadaver dogs.

Then, Nelligan and Hoyt set out to the home of Marcia Papich, who owns the house next door to Susan Flores on East Branch Street in Arroyo Grande. Papich agreed to let the two test the soil near the back fence, which she shares with Flores yard.

Their first test was in February 2020.

Nelligan said the two applied the same methodology that would be used if they were looking for vapor from an underground leak, only they specifically tested for the molecules that are present when a human body decomposes. It involves drilling several holes as much as five feet deep across an area and measuring the levels found in each one.

The method is industry standard for testing in the EPA, but, to Nelligans and Hoyts knowledge, this is the first time it has been used to detect human remains.

Nelligan said the pair applied an unbiased scientific approach to the testing and took control samples in other areas near Flores yard. They were prepared for the test to come back without any human decomposition molecules detected.

But the opposite happened.

The results from that first test showed there were several volatile organic compounds consistent with a decomposing human body concentrated at the border of Papichs and Flores yards.

I was shocked at the number of compounds, Hoyt told The Tribune. These are pretty unique compounds. They form like a fingerprint.

The pair tested the area again in December 2020, August 2021, and March 2023. All yielded the same result: Molecules only present when a human body decomposes were present next to Susan Flores back fence.

The two used computer modeling to create heat maps that showed red zones spreading into Papichs yard from beyond the fence line where volatile organic compounds were found at levels of more than 3,100 parts per billion in the soil in their highest concentrations.

Computer modeling from a team of scientists show how soil vapor sampling discovered human decomposition compounds in Marcia Papichs yard at 523 East Branch street, adjacent to Susan Flores fence and home at 529 East Branch St., in August 2021. The data shows compounds were found at more than 3100 parts per billion in the soil in the red zone.

Computer modeling from a team of scientists show how soil vapor sampling discovered human decomposition compounds in Marcia Papichs yard at 523 East Branch street, adjacent to Susan Flores fence and home at 529 East Branch St., in March 2023. The data shows compounds were found at more than 3100 parts per billion in the soil in the red zone, matching earlier results from two years prior.

Theres something compelling about this site that keeps bringing us back, and we keep finding the same results over and over again, Hoyt said. It means that, you know, its just not some fluky thing that happened once.

According to their data, more than 90% of the volatile organic compounds found when a human body decomposes were detected near the fence. The only compounds that were not detected were those associated with decomposing flesh, which would not be expected this long after Smarts disappearance, Nelligan said.

The men said sent their research to former FBI chemist Brian Eckenrode, who authored two of the studies that helped them isolate compounds to test for and later accompanied them on the March sampling. They said Eckenrode helped confirm their results and joined the team in 2021 when he retired from the FBI.

Eckenrode, who is now an associate professor in analytical chemistry at George Mason University, told The Tribune the method the two men used to collect human remains vapor was similar to what he used when he was collecting data for his research.

This is just the first time a method like this is being used in a case, he said.

The former FBI chemist attended the March 2023 test, where he helped collect more controls and confirm data from various test sites.

Tim Nelligan using a hand auger to dig a test hole in Marcia Papichs yard in December 2020. He was testing the soil for evidence of human decomposition in the search for Kristin Smarts body.

He said when anything decomposes underground, soil acts like a trap when it comes to the chemicals that are emitted, so they could be present for decades.

One of his studies at the University of Tennessee Knoxvilles Body Farm, Eckenrode said, included a body that had been decomposing for 20 years, and it yielded similar results to what Nelligan and Hoyt found near Susan Flores yard.

According to computer modeling of the data done by the team, volatile organic compounds were concentrated at the center portion of the fence shared between Papich and Susan Flores.

The amount of compounds and their concentration suggest it is likely a human decomposition event occurred in the area, Eckenrode said.

Alleged molecules are in area that had never been searched, podcaster says

Former prosecutor Tim Perry has since joined the men to help them communicate with law enforcement. He told The Tribune that after reviewing the mens work, 99 out of 100 prosecutors would authorize a search warrant.

Now its just the Sheriffs Offices option whether they want to leverage the science or not, he said.

According to his personal website, Perry served as assistant U.S. attorney in the Southern District of California from 2008 to 2014. He then was appointed to Gov. Gavin Newsoms chief of staff and deputy homeland security adviser at Californias Office of Emergency from 2019 to 2020 before later being appointed to the U.S. Department of Homeland Security under President Joe Bidens administration, serving as chief of staff for Immigration and Customs Enforcement from 2021 to 2022.

Tim Nelligan, right, stands with Steve Hoyt, center and his son, Mason Nelligan, as they install soil vapor probes in Marcia Papichs yard in December 2020. They were testing for evidence of human decomposition in the search for Kristin Smarts body.

The men have shared their findings with the Sheriffs Office and the Smart family.

In a text message with The Tribune, Stan and Denise Smart said they admire the teams commitment and scientific approach.

We long to lie her to rest in the presence of those who love and cherish her along with those who continue to work to this day to bring her home, they said. Our hope is that NO stone will be left unturned!

The Sheriffs Office said it cannot comment on the case because This case is on appeal and as such, it is still considered an active investigation.

San Luis Obispo County sheriffs Det. Greg Smith did tell the Los Angeles Times that the department is investigating the work to determine whether it might be useful in the case. Chief Deputy Nathan Paul also told the Los Angeles Times that sheriffs officials have been in touch with the FBI about the research.

The leading theory  and the theory Paul Flores was convicted on  was that at some point Smart was buried beneath Ruben Flores deck before she was moved in February 2020. Its unclear how the mens findings will affect that theory.

The men also shared their findings with Chris Lambert, host of the Your Own Backyard podcast, which investigated the case. Lambert told The Tribune the findings were interesting.

Because Kristins body is still outstanding, its compelling to me, he said. But Im careful and always cautiously optimistic with this stuff because its not definitive and its not tied to Kristin.

Lambert noted that Susan Flores yard has been searched twice over the past 27 years  once in 2000 by the Sheriffs Office and again in 2007 during the civil suit.

Lambert, who has obtained documents from the 2007 search, said he didnt know much about the results of the Sheriffs Office search in 2000, but said it was thought to be not thorough, adding that there was no intention to dig the yard at that time.

A large portrait of Kristin Smart in graduation attire is on display at a candlelight vigil for the missing woman in Arroyo Grande.

The 2007 search, however, did allow digs. Ground-penetrating radar, which is used to detect underground anomalies to isolate a potential excavation area, was used in the search, but it could not go within two feet of the fence dividing Flores yard from Papichs, Lambert said.

To Lamberts knowledge, the area near the fence has never been searched.

To make it more interesting, Lambert said, the Flores family had installed two planter boxes adjacent to the fence in June 1996, about a month after Smart disappeared. Lambert said he knows this because Paul Flores said in his interview with investigators in June 1996 he had to help clean up concrete at his mothers house.

Susan and Ruben Flores also both mentioned installing the planter boxes in their civil depositions, he said. Its also the area where former tenants of Susan Flores said they thought they heard an electronic watch beeping, Lambert said.

Lambert says he would like to see the findings followed up on by law enforcement, but understands there are restraints in what evidence can be used to obtain search warrants, especially since the findings are using a new approach.

He added that the data analyzed by Nelligan, Hoyt, Eckenrode and Perry indicates there was a human decomposition event in that area, which means it could be ancient just as much as it could be Smart.

Theres still so much we dont know about what happened, he said.

Lambert said its important to not jump to conclusions and try to make the findings fit into the prosecutions theory or the timeline as its currently known.

Because Kristins body has still not been recovered, anywhere that theres compelling evidence of where she could be I would like to see followed up on, Lambert said. Obviously, if its connected to the Flores family and the Flores family are suspected of having her body or moving her body, I would like to see those properties crossed off and thoroughly searched.

When it comes to the work theyve done, Nelligan said he hopes the data is compelling enough for the Sheriffs Office to take action.

He added that the team hopes to continue this work beyond Smarts case to help with other missing persons cases and cadaver dog training.
The White House grounds were evacuated Sunday after the U.S. Secret Service (USSS) discovered an "unknown item."

"U.S. Secret Service Uniform Division Officers located an unknown item on the White House complex," a USSS spokesperson told Fox News Digital.

"As a precaution, the White House grounds were evacuated, and the DC Fire Departments Hazmat team responded," the spokesperson said.

The White House in Washington, DC. An "unknown item" was located on the grounds Sunday, July 2, 2023.

DC Fire and EMS was contacted to evaluate, USSS said.

WASHINGTON DC POLICE ARREST MAN WHO ALLEGEDLY CARJACKED 3 VEHICLES AND SHOT, KILLED WOMAN AND TWO DOGS

A hazmat team was called out to the area of 18th St and Pennsylvania Ave. Secret Service units blocked off roads around the White House.

READ ON THE FOX NEWS APP

USSS did not provide more details about the "unknown item."

All road closures were later lifted, the spokesperson said.
A veteran former White Knoll Middle School teacher charged last August with assaulting a student has been acquitted after a jury trial last week in a Lexington County magistrates court, her attorney said.

The jury of five women and one man was out 20 minutes, said Columbia attorney Alex Postic, who tried the case with Chelsea Glover, an Orangeburg attorney.

Teacher Brenda Inabinette, 59, who testified in her own defense, walked out of the courtroom with her reputation intact, said Postic. She had been charged with third degree assault and battery. If found guilty, she could have been subject to 30 days in jail and a $500 fine.

Eight other witnesses testified on Inabinettes behalf about her character and teaching style, which Postic characterized as stern but caring.

The trial lasted about five hours, Postic said.

Prosecutor Joel Deason, general counsel for the Lexington County Sheriffs Department, had no immediate comment on the case.

In a press release last year, the sheriffs office quoted an unidentified student as telling school officials and deputies that he accidentally went to the wrong classroom after a trip to the restroom and that prompted the encounter with Inabinette.

An arrest warrant said Inabinette grabbed the students ID lanyard while it was around his neck and said, You make me want to strangle you, according to the sheriffs departments press release.

Postic said Inabinette was suspended briefly from teaching, and after the school district did its own internal investigation, she was reinstated in another position.

She maintained her innocence the whole time, Postic said.

Postic said he told the jury that an encounter took place betweeen Inabinette and the student but to describe what she did as a crime was overstating the situation, he said.

Glover, Postics co-counsel, said she had been a student of Inabinettes years ago in a seventh-grade English class in Orangeburg County.

Inabinette is a dedicated teacher who seeks the best for her students and gets them to excel not only in the subject but in life, Glover said in an interview.

Shes a tough teacher and she loves her students, said Glover, who volunteered her time to help Postic on the case.

Lexington County Magistrate Rebecca Adams presided.
BloomsburyUSA

A conference for female historians this weekend was plunged into turmoil when a prominent white academic speaking at the main event said her professional life would have been easier if she were Black.

She was identified by attendees of the Berkshire Conference of Women Historians, on social media and in an interview, as USC professor emerita of history Lois Banner, who co-founded the biennial event in the 1970s.

Bannerauthor of a 2012 biography of Marilyn Monroereportedly also said she wished she was a lesbian because they were good at building community and organizing. She did not respond to a request for comment.

She was immediately called out for her blatantly racist remarks, and refused to apologize, let alone listen, to the reason why her remarks were horrifying wrong [sic]. You wont change my mind, Im 84 years old, Stephanie Narrow, a doctoral student who attended the Friday night plenary session, tweeted.

The room is shaken, its palpable, Narrow added.

The Berks officers do not condone or support the inappropriate remarks made by one of the speakers tonight. A formal statement from the presidents will be made after the break.  Berkshire Conference of Women Historians (@BerksConference) July 1, 2023

Banners speech came after historian Deborah Gray White of Rutgers University had addressed the crowd on the subject of Black women in the profession.

Paul Renfro of Florida State University said Banners comments were tonally off and rambling even before she made this allusion to this desire that shes always had, to have dark skin, which is very, very, very problematic. 

And so when that happened, the awkward, sort of strange response that many in the audience had to the remarks that came before kind of mutated into almost sort of just complete discomfort and revulsion, Renfro told The Daily Beast. Some people gasped audibly, and some people began to walk out.

He said a white woman in the audience shouted at Banner that she had said something racist and Banner denied it. People of color began to walk out and when organizers didnt step in, Renfro said, he left, too.

After Banner finally finished talking, Deidre Cooper Owens, a Black historian at the University of Nebraska, took the podium and denounced her remarks.

The Berks Conference was a beautiful one until it was soiled by Lois Banners hatefully racist comments. Yes, I did speak out forcefully against her vitriol because she needed to keep Black womens name out of her mouth, Cooper Owens later tweeted.

More urgently, I needed that room to acknowledge the strength, brilliance, and bravery of Deborah Gray White, period. I refused to let a bigoted racist take away from Deborahs powerfully truthful speech.

The conference tweeted that night that its officers did not condone or support the inappropriate remarks made by one of the speakers tonight and promised a formal statement. Some chastised the organization for not naming Banner in the tweet or making a more forceful condemnation.

The group convened a talking session to discuss Banners comments the next day and afterward tweeted that the board and trustees listened, took careful notes, and are planning action. The conversation is not over and the board will have a statement and a concrete action plan soon.

The conversation, meanwhile, was already percolating on Twitter.

Princeton professor Tera Hunter, who did not attend the conference, called it another epic outburst of racism in feminist spaces that will go down as infamous in a long history. Colorado University assistant professor Ashleigh Lawrence-Sanders wrote that Banners speech should not be dismissed as comments as from a bygone era.

Many of us have heard similarly from grad colleagues or faculty colleagues. Many, many more think the very same silently, she tweeted.

Read more at The Daily Beast.

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Fish washed ashore Quintana Beach County Park / Anadolu Agency via Getty Images

From sea lions and dolphins in California to fish in Texas and whales on the East Coast, marine animals are ending up ashore injured or dead. While the reasons for each circumstance vary, experts posit that they all trace back to climate change.

Why are animals washing ashore?

The oceans are facing several stressors, including El Nino and uncharacteristic warming. The problem with warmer oceans is that it contributes to many other oceanic changes impacting the habitats and food sources for marine animals.

In the case of dolphins and sea lions in California, the largest contributing factor is a toxic algal bloom in the Pacific Ocean. While the waters in the area are not as warm as in some other areas, "that does not necessarily mean there is no climate connection," and "there remains some possibility that climate change may favor more toxic algae," Michael Milstein, a spokesperson for the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration Fisheries, told CNN. The algae produce a neurotoxin called domoic acid that harms animals, including humans.

In Texas, the waters are facing a "perfect storm" of unfavorable conditions, Bryan Frazier, the director of the Brazoria County Parks Department, told The New York Times. Tens of thousands of fish were victim to warming oceans, leading to less oxygen in the water. In addition, the seas were calmer and the skies were cloudy, preventing waves from forming and organisms from performing photosynthesis. Both things oxygenate the water, and with the warm water already having less oxygen, it became a deadly situation. "As we see increased water temperatures, certainly this could lead to more of these events occurring," said Katie St. Clair, the sea life facility manager at Texas A&M University at Galveston, to the Times, "especially in our shallow near-shore or inshore environments."

Across the East Coast, there have been instances of beached whales that were incorrectly attributed to offshore wind projects. Experts instead attribute the deaths to marine traffic, plastic pollution, noise pollution and climate change. Warming oceans are "bringing some whales closer to shore where they're more likely to come across boats, whether recreational, commercial or fishing fleets targeting the same fish species," according to National Geographic.

Marine environments are just as susceptible to climate change as ecosystems on land. "We're all seeing the world change around us, and the marine environment is no exception," remarked Rob Deaville, of the Zoological Society of London's Cetacean Strandings Investigation Programme, to National Geographic.

How will marine animals continue to be affected?

As climate change worsens, the outcomes for marine life will also be threatened. "Water can only hold so much oxygen at certain temperatures, and certainly we know that seawater temperatures are rising," St. Clair told NPR. "It is concerning and something that needs to be monitored." This will likely not be the last time large-scale deaths and illnesses come to marine populations.

The repercussions will also impact humans. According to a study published in the journal Nature Sustainability, more than 90% of the world's marine food is at risk due to climate change. This includes over 2,000 species of marine life contributing to feeding over 3 billion people worldwide. "Although we have made some progress with climate change, our adaptation strategies for blue food systems facing environmental change are still underdeveloped and need urgent attention," said Rebecca Short, the co-lead author of the study, to Reuters. Many of the problems stem from human activity.

"It's just scary because you normally see the ocean as this source of life, and the idea that we have a poisonous ocean as a result of climate change and human activity is just devastating," Geoff Shester, the California director and a senior scientist with Oceana, told CNN.

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When banks can close accounts  and what to do if yours is affected

bank accounts closed

Nigel Farage, a vicar who complained about a lenders support of Pride, and a free speech group  they have all made headlines after their bank accounts were shut down with little warning.

After obtaining documents from his previous bank, Farage discovered Coutts closed his bank accounts as his views do not align with our values.

It has sparked a backlash with banks accused of refusing customers because of their political beliefs, raising the question: what are your rights and what can you do if you fall victim?

A bank can shut a persons account at any time, with limited notice, for a long list of reasons and are generally not legally required to say why.

This can cause confusion and financial problems for many people, especially when they believe they havent done anything wrong. But the rules for account closures are clear. Here, Telegraph Money explains everything you need to know.

Politically exposed?

Former UKIP leader Nigel Farage says personal and business accounts with a major retail bank were closed because of commercial decision - Carl Court/Getty Images

Under the payment accounts regulations, banks can close an account for a long list of reasons.

These include if a person has knowingly used, or attempted to use the account for illegal purposes. The bank can also take action if incorrect information was given when applying for the account or the account holder is no longer legally a resident of the UK.

There is also increased scrutiny from banks regarding politically exposed people  such as Brexiteer Nigel Farage.

Banks and other financial institutions have to consider whether a politically exposed person is more susceptible to being involved in bribery or corruption because of their profession or position.

Under money-laundering regulations, banks are required to apply enhanced due diligence to politically exposed individuals to ensure that they are not using their institution for money-laundering or accepting cash from illegal sources.

If they can gather enough evidence to prove this, they can close a persons account  but, again, they do not have to give this as a reason to the account holder.

In 2018, the Financial Conduct Authority, the City watchdog, said it was aware that some banks no longer offer services to categories of customers they deem to be at high risk of money-laundering.

There is very little recourse for a politically exposed person who finds their accounts have been closed. More often than not, they are not allowed to open another bank account with any institution in the UK again.

Fraud

Third-party investigative bodies and credit reference groups often work with banks to find and scrutinise account holders who they suspect have committed financial fraud.

A bank can close a persons account if it, or a third-party, suspects they have committed, or been involved in fraudulent activity.

Like most other reasons for closing an account, the bank does not have to tell you why your account has been closed, and you only need to be suspected of fraud  and not convicted  for a bank to close the account.

If this happens, then there is a good chance you will not be allowed to hold a bank account again with most British financial institutions.

If you suspect that you have been a victim to identity fraud (when someone opens an account and steals money in your name) then you must contact your bank as soon as possible to alert them and they can begin to investigate.

The same goes for theft: for example, if someone steals your bank details or cards and withdraws or spends money fraudulently.

According to Citizens Advice, a bank should refund any money stolen from you as a result of fraud and identity theft. They should do this as soon as possible, ideally by the end of the next working day after you report the problem.

But a bank can refuse a refund if they find you acted fraudulently or were grossly negligent: for example, if you shared your pin or password with someone else.

Alasdair Walker, a financial adviser and founder of forum UK Personal Finance, said: As soon as there is any suspicion of fraud taking place by an account holder and someone is on their list and has a fraud marker they are unbanked and they can no longer get a bank account in the UK.

If someone was declared bankrupt, they could still get a basic bank account. But if a person gets a fraud marker, they are unable to get a bank account again. People dont need to be convicted of fraud, they just need to be suspected of fraud to lose the ability to get an account.

Some people inadvertently become entwined in fraud, with money being transferred from family or friends and can still lose their accounts if its suspected fraud. Thats it, no bank accounts from then on.

Credit

A bank can close your account if you have failed to repay loans or credit, and/or have a bad credit history.

When a bank closes an account it generally does not affect your credit rating. But if there is an outstanding overdraft or loan when it closes, the bank may give these debts to a credit recovery agency for them to chase, which will affect your rating.

If too many payments bounce from your account because there is no balance, then that is also grounds for closure.

Banks can also close an account if it seems it is dormant for too long. Generally, it deems an account as abandoned if the account holder fails to use the account, or does not contact the bank, for several years.

Furthermore, if the account has contained no money for several years, the bank may close the account if you have not replied to alerts or correspondence from the bank.

What can I do if my account is closed?

To put it simply: not a lot  especially as a bank does not have to give you a reason why your account has been closed.

If you have been suspected of fraud, money laundering or being a politically exposed person, it is likely you will either not be able to open another account, or will have to wait a very long time to be able to.

But, there are some simple steps you can take if you believe your account has been closed for the wrong reason, or you do not agree with the decision.

First and foremost: contact your bank, especially if you have been previously notified of the closure. Doing so means you have a greater chance of finding out why the account is closed, if it can be reopened or how you can retrieve any funds left in the account.

Making sure you keep all written and online communications with your bank is also vitally important.

Second, halt all direct deposits and withdrawals set up on your account soon after you receive notice about the closure.

Unless suspected fraud or another serious offence is the reason the bank closed your account, you may be able to set up another account with a rival bank or speak to the bank about opening a new pre-paid or second chance account.

You can also complain to the bank, and to the Financial Ombudsman Service (FOS), if you believe the closure is unjust or unfair, but you generally have to prove it.

The ombudsman can award compensation if you can prove the bank did not provide notice of the account closure, if you were treated unfairly or you lost money due to the account being closed incorrectly.

A notice on the FOS website says banks can close accounts whenever they want, but they still have to treat their customers fairly.

Businesses that provide bank accounts are generally entitled to close them  just as their customers are. But you should treat your customers fairly. You shouldnt close an account because of unfair bias or unlawful discrimination, it says.

Now read: Why you need power of attorney, no matter how old you are

This article is kept updated with the latest information.

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Why Biden's new plan to cancel student debt is going to take a lot longer than his first proposal

U.S. President Joe Biden is joined by Education Secretary Miguel Cardona (L) as he announces new actions to protect borrowers after the Supreme Court struck down his student loan forgiveness plan in the Roosevelt Room at the White House on June 30, 2023 in Washington, DC. Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images

After the Supreme Court struck down Biden's first student-debt relief plan, he announced he'll be trying again.

He started the process to use the Higher Education Act of 1965, but it will take longer this time.

That's because that Act requires Biden to hold public hearings and solicit feedback on the proposal.

President Joe Biden isn't letting Friday's Supreme Court decision stop him from trying to get student-debt relief to millions of borrowers. But it could take some time.

On Friday, the high court struck down Biden's first plan to cancel up to $20,000 in student debt for federal borrowers using the HEROES Act of 2003. That Act allows the Education Secretary to waive or modify student-loan balances in connection with a national emergency, like COVID-19  but the Supreme Court majority ruled Biden's usage of that act was an overreach of authority and cannot be implemented.

However, just hours after the Supreme Court handed down that decision, Biden and Education Secretary Miguel Cardona announced they'll be trying again, using the Higher Education Act of 1965.

"That will allow Secretary Cardona, who is with me today, to compromise, waive, or release loans under certain circumstances," Biden said during Friday remarks. "This new path is legally sound. It's going to take longer, but, in my view, it's the best path that remains to providing for as many borrowers as possible with debt relief."

The reason this process will take longer is because the Higher Education Act must go through the negotiated rulemaking process, in which it could take months  at minimum  to hold public hearings on the law and solicit public comment.

"Like I said, we have to do these public hearings," Bharat Ramamurti, deputy director of the National Economic Council, said during a Friday press briefing. "There has to be a certain amount of preparation to do the public hearings. You have to intake the comments that you get from the public, and then you have to decide whether to change your proposal accordingly before you do the next public hearing."

"It's going to be months," he added. "I think, as I said, even the typical rulemaking process typically takes months. But we are aiming to do it as quickly as possible. And so, we will give you more updates as we hit each milestone in that process."

Ramamurti noted that the first public hearing on the Higher Education Act will be in July, and the administration does not yet know when borrowers can expect a significant update. The HEROES Act, in contrast, exempted the administration from going through public comment and the negotiated rulemaking process, which is why Biden chose to go that route initially to try to get relief to borrowers more quickly.

Even as borrowers are continuing to wait for broad student-debt relief, it won't happen before payments resume in October. To ease the transition to repayment, Biden on Friday also announced a 12-month "on-ramp" period from October 1, 2023 to September 30, 2024 to ensure that borrowers who miss monthly payments do not get reported to credit agencies. Still, interest will accrue during this time, so Cardona recommended borrowers begin making payments again if they're financially able.

While Republican lawmakers lauded the Supreme Court decision, Democratic lawmakers celebrated Biden's effort to try again under the Higher Education Act.

"President Biden is right to fight back on behalf of working people in need of student debt cancellation," Warren wrote on Twitter on Friday. "The law is on his side. The President has the clear legal authority to cancel student debt under the Higher Education Act. In a democracy, we have the final say."

Read the original article on Business Insider
King Charles Is Having a 'Second Coronation' in Scotland. Here's Everything You Need to Know

Britain's King Charles III and Britain's Queen Camilla arrive to attend a National Service of Thanksgiving and Dedication inside St Giles' Cathedral in Edinburgh on July 5. Credit - Jonathan BradyPool/AFP/Getty Images

On Wednesday, July 5, Scotland will welcome King Charles III with a royal procession during the annual Holyrood Weekalso known as Royal Weekwhere the British monarch travels across the region to celebrate Scottish life, culture, and community.

This will be the first time that Scotland marks the coronation with its own royal festivities since Charles was crowned at Londons Westminster Abbey in May to mark his ascension to the royal throne following the death of his mother, Queen Elizabeth II, last September.

King Charles and Queen Camilla will take part in several ceremonial events and be joined in Edinburgh by Prince William and Kate, who serve the Scottish titles of the Duke and Duchess of Rothesay.

Scotland will welcome the new King and Queen in July with a series of events to mark the Coronation, First Minister Humza Yousaf said in an official statement. A Peoples Procession, a Royal Procession, a National Service of Thanksgiving, and a Gun Salute will take place in Edinburgh.

Read More: Do Brits Still Want the Monarchy? What Polls Say Ahead of Charles Coronation

Colloquially referred to as a second coronation, the ceremony at St Giles Cathedral is largely symbolic and is not officially a coronation. The event mirrors a Scottish celebration Queen Elizabeth II held in 1953, when she traveled there to recognize Scotlands historic place within the United Kingdom.

Below, what to know about the so-called Scottish coronation.

A general view of King Charles III And Queen Camilla arriving ahead of a national service of thanksgiving and dedication to the coronation of King Charles III and Queen Camilla at St Giles' Cathedral on July 05. Peter SummersWPA Pool/Getty Images

The full schedule for King Charles Scottish coronation celebration

The days events officially kick off at 1:15 p.m., when the Royal Procession will travel from the Palace of Holyroodhouse to the St. Giles Cathedral, arriving at West Parliament Square at 1:30 p.m.

At 2:05 p.m., the King and Queen will lead the royal procession and be followed by the Duke and Duchess of Rothesay. They will be escorted by the Royal Regiment of Scotland and accompanied by the Royal Marine Band of Scotland and the Pipes, Drums, and Bugles of the 2nd Battalion.

A National Service of Thanksgiving will then begin at 2:15 p.m. and be held at the Cathedral, where the new King will be presented with the Honours of Scotland, including a second crown.

The service is expected to end around 3:15 p.m. with a 21-gun salute from the 12 Regiment Royal Artillery, which will sound before the royal procession returns to Holyroodhouse around 3:30 pm.

The Red Arrows, Britains Royal Air Force Aerobatic Team, will celebrate the closing of the ceremony with a display in the Edinburgh sky at 3:40 p.m. The public is expected to line up along the Royal Mile to view the procession.

The Scottish Crown Jewels being carried to an awaiting car ahead of a national service of thanksgiving and dedication to the coronation of King Charles III and Queen Camilla at St Giles' Cathedral on July 5. Chris JacksonPool/Reuters

What are the Honours of Scotland?

The Honours of Scotland are the most important pieces of the Scottish royal regalia and include a crown, scepter, and sword made of gold, silver, and precious gems. They are currently stored away at Edinburgh Castle and will be escorted to the royal procession by military and police.

Dating back to the early 16th century, the Crown of Scotland was first worn by King James V of Scotland at the coronation of nine-month-old Queen Mary of Guise in 1540. The Honours were locked away in a chest when the English and Scottish Parliaments united under the Act of Union of 1707, which brought together the independent kingdoms of England and Scotland under Great Britain. They were rediscovered in 1818 by the famous novelist Walter Scott.

During Wednesdays ceremony, the Stone of Scone, also known as the Stone of Destiny, which was used as a seat in the coronation of Scottish kings for centuries, will also be present. It was last carried down to London from Scotland during King Charles coronation at Westminster Abbey in May.

Notably, a new Sword of State called The Elizabeth will be presented to the King as a symbol of Scotland. The sword was commissioned to replace the original Sword of State, also known as the Papal sword, which is believed to be a papal gift from Pope Alexander VI to King James IV in 1494. The original sword can no longer be used at public events because of its delicate condition.

Read More: The Long and Controversial History of the Coronation Crowns

The Honours of Scotland have immense historical significance, having been present at many major ceremonial events over the past five hundred years, Humza Yousaf said in his statement. Designed and crafted with care by some of Scotlands finest artisans, the Elizabeth Sword is a fitting tribute to the late Queen as Scotland prepares to welcome the new King and Queen next week.

Most recently, the Scottish Crown was placed on Queen Elizabeths coffin during a service at St Giles Cathedral before her funeral last September.

Anti-monarchy protesters gather near St Giles' Cathedral ahead of a National Service of Thanksgiving and Dedication in Edinburgh on July 5. Danny LawsonPool/AFP/Getty Images

Is there any opposition to the event?

Republic, an anti-monarchist campaign group, will be protesting along the planned procession route. Charles is having ANOTHER Coronation, this time in Edinburgh. Another pointless parade, another reckless waste of public money. So, of course, well be protesting it, it stated on its website.

Our Republic, another campaign group advocating for an elected head of state, is also planning to hold a demonstration.

Scottish authorities have reportedly launched security operations to prevent the anti-monarchy groups from disrupting the procession. During Charles coronation in May, British police arrested six individuals under the Public Order Act, a law to restrict protests that came into force days before the coronation. The arrests were heavily criticized for their heavy-handed security response, with the police later expressing regret and that those arrested would not face criminal prosecution.

Correction, July 5 The original version of this story referred to Wednesdays event as a second coronation. Although it is colloquially referred to as a second coronation, King Charles official coronation took place in London on May 6.
moving out

As many of my friends and family will tell you, I love the South. Ive grown up in Kentucky with a deep appreciation for Southern culture  sweet tea, country music, and weekend barbecues made my childhood feel complete. At my midwestern college, I am the first to jump to the defense of the South in heated discussions about politics.



But I cant live here anymore. Not out of choice, but because its too dangerous.

When Florida passed the Parental Rights in Education Act, also known as the "dont say gay" bill, a war against queer people in Republican legislatures began. The bill itself outlawed discussions surrounding LGBTQ+ people in public schools  and, in the nearly year-and-a-half since it was signed into law, the situation for LGBTQ+ people in Florida has only gotten worse. Florida has since outlawed access to gender-affirming care for minors, and even restricted this life-saving medical care for transgender adults too.

Florida is far from the only state to pass laws attacking queer and trans people; as of June 2023, 20 states have passed laws limiting or outlawing access to gender-affirming care for minors. Among those is my home state of Kentucky, whose SB150 bill outlawed gender-affirming care for minors while also banning any discussions of LGBTQ+ people in schools. Not only does the bill threaten trans people, but it also threatens any meaningful discussion of queerness  instead punishing students for curiosity and learning.

When SB150 passed, I saw a wave of fear rush over my community. One of my friends who is transgender led a protest at their school, and I watched as they spoke bravely to local news channels about their identity. They tearfully explained that they would not be able to receive the care they deserved if the law passed, and the devastating impacts this would have on their mental health.

In Kentuckys capital, State Senator Karen Berg argued against the bill, claiming that its passage would take the lives of transgender youth across the state. She spoke from experience  just two months before, Berg had lost her transgender son to suicide. Even before this bill passed, transgender people like Berg's son faced bullying and isolation; the bill meant trans youth would lose access to health care and find their existence erased in schools.

I cannot bring my child back, said Berg, but I can help other families. Her emotional testimony, pleading with her colleagues to reconsider the bill, went viral.

But none of this mattered to the Republican legislature. They watched her testimony with a blank, distant expression, and still chose to vote the bill into law. They ignored the protests outside the state capitol and the statistics blatantly stating that restricting gender-affirming healthcare would lead to spiking suicide rates. They did  and do  not care if queer children die. And so, SB150 passed and will go into effect later this month.

And so, with this, I now know that the South is no longer a safe space for me. Discussions of sexuality  or people like me  are now banned in schools. I cannot fathom the effect these laws would have had on me if I were still in the school system, and what the long-term impacts of suppressing queer identity will be for my generation.

I am far from the only person in this position. Gallup estimates that around 15 percent of Generation Z identifies as LGBTQ+, and many live in states affected by anti-queer legislation. As long as these bills continue to pass, the lives of these individuals are under fire.

When I applied for college back in the fall of 2021, my top priority was escaping a conservative area, fleeing from political persecution. I was aware of the discrimination I had been surrounded by for most of my upbringing and knew that I would not feel comfortable being myself if I continued to live in Kentucky. Many of my queer friends also fled to more progressive areas  and those who couldnt afford it ended up in the most progressive spots in my state.

With laws today even worse than they were then, I cannot imagine considering staying in my home state for college if I were applying now. I love Kentucky and the community that raised me, but I cannot live here or in any other Republican-dominated state safely until these laws are overturned. These laws will cause an exodus of my generation from red states, robbing many parts of America of vital culture and diversity.

Not all hope is lost. If people take these bills seriously and recognize the long-term consequences they hold, then perhaps Republican legislators will be more willing to listen. If Republicans feel as though their authority is threatened, then maybe we can make progress toward a safer future for LGBTQ+ Americans.

But that means we have to act now  before LGBTQ+ people and those who love them decide they can't remain here. By listening to trans voices, and engaging in dialogue, allies of the LGBTQ+ community can advocate for queer people at the state level. By protesting, voting, and proudly speaking against these bills, the social tide could change to better ensure safety for the community.

I love the South; its my home. I hope someday Ill be able to return and walk freely without feeling fear. My state does not deserve these laws, or the tyranny the Republican Party continues to assert on queer people. I hope that, with protest and time, I will be able to once again take pride in the place that fostered my queerness.

Molly Wilcoxson is currently a sophomore student at Grinnell College studying Anthropology. She is currently one of Campus Prides Summer 2023 Interns.

Views expressed in The Advocates opinion articles are those of the writers and do not necessarily represent the views of The Advocate or our parent company, equalpride.
Why the Canadian wildfires are still burning  and sending smoke across the U.S.

A wildfire burns near Fort St. John, British Columbia, Canada. July 2 on Monday. (Noah Berger/AP)

With hundreds of Canadian wildfires sending smoke across the northern United States, many Americans are wondering how long the bad air quality will continue and whether Prime Minister Justin Trudeaus government can do more to put out the flames.

While Canada does have a policy of letting fires in some remote areas burn out on their own, the government has also simply been overmatched by this years record-breaking fire season, which has so far burned more than 32,000 square miles.

Canada is also contending with other limitations and challenges  some of which are of its own making. Heres a rundown:

The fires are incredibly widespread and constantly starting anew

Smoke rises from the Big Creek wildfire, about 110 kilometres (68 miles) northwest of Mackenzie, British Columbia, Canada June 29, 2023. (BC Wildfire Service/Handout via Reuters)

As of Monday, there are 584 active fires in Canada, including three that started today, up from 501 last Thursday, according to the Canadian Interagency Forest Fire Center. Of those, 285 are considered out of control, 195 and are under control, and 104 are being held.

As fires get put out, new ones keep starting. The country has seen a total of 3,255 fires so far this year, and have burned an area roughly as large as the state of South Carolina  making this already the worst fire season in Canadian history  and summer has just begun.

Some of the fires hard to reach, and resources are limited

Trees scorched by the Donnie Creek wildfire in British Columbia. (Noah Berger/AP)

With a landmass second only to Russia, but with a population just one-ninth that of the U.S., Canada finds itself short of the manpower, money and equipment needed to effectively counter the extent of this summers wildfires.

Massive fires burning in remote areas  like some of those currently burning in northwestern Quebec  are often too out of control to do anything about, CNN reported on Saturday.

With so many fires across the whole country, resources are scarce, Dustan Mueller, a U.S. Forest Service deputy fire chief who has been in Canada assisting with its firefighting effort, told the Guardian.

If you have limited resources, and you have a lot of fires, what you do is you protect human life and property first, Robert Gray, a Canadian wildland fire ecologist, told CNN. You protect people, infrastructure, watersheds, so theres a prioritization system.

The weather, and climate change, are a factor

French firefighters battle fires north of Chibugamau, Quebec. (Quentin Tyberghien/AFP via Getty Images)

Scientists say that climate change is making weather conditions like heat and drought that lead to wildfires more likely, the BBC reported in June. Spring in Canada has been much warmer and drier than usual, creating a tinder-dry environment for these vast fires.

Given how much energy these fires have while they burn, it is pretty much impossible for them to stop unless large swaths of heavy rains come their way, Apostolos Voulgarakis, a professor of climate change at Imperial College London, told Newsweek.

Unfortunately, the forecast for the rest of the summer in Canada is for hot and mostly dry weather, Canadian fire scientist Mike Flannigan told the Associated Press last Thursday. Its a crazy year and Im not sure where its going to end.

Lack of federal coordination

Each Canadian province is responsible for fighting wildfires within its borders, so, for example, the neighboring provinces of Quebec and Ontario have no coordination to their responses to fires that may even span their border.

It has been an issue because we dont have a strong federal government and its left us in this mess right now, Gray told ABC News.

The good news

Firefighters from the organization Working On Fire in Mbombela, South Africa train in preparation for being sent to Alberta, Canada, June 13. (Shiraaz Mohamed/AFP via Getty Images)

Canada is getting a little help from its friends. U.S., Australian, New Zealand, South African, French, Spanish, Portuguese, Mexican, Chilean and Costa Rican firefighters have joined the struggle in Canada, the Guardian reported last Thursday. But Canadian policies, determined by each individual province, required some shifts in strategy.

American firefighters were surprised to find that in Canada they are expected to stop after a 12-hour shift, and that protecting timber on private land is not considered a priority north of the border, given limited resources.

Doing better next time

Smoke billows upwards from a planned ignition by firefighters tackling the Donnie Creek Complex wildfire south of Fort Nelson, British Columbia, Canada June 3, 2023. (B.C. Wildfire Service/Handout via Reuters)

Experts say that eastern Canadian provinces such as Quebec should start imitating their western counterparts and start deliberately burning out the underbrush every year before fire season starts, as Indigenous communities did for millennia.

In the wildlands of the Quebec forests there is no prescribed program to clean up the forest floor, John Gradek, a lecturer at McGill University in Montreal, told ABC News.
Wild turkey turns into feathery missile when drone gets too close, Minnesota video shows

A drone pilot recently learned what happens when you invade a wild turkeys privacy, and their new gadget paid the price, video shows.

Ashley Senarighi, of Minnesota, was practicing flying the drone when she spotted a turkey in a clearing beside a thicket of trees, the video shared June 24 to Facebook shows.

Im not sure what I was expecting to happen, but this wasnt it, she said in a Facebook post.

Senarighi brings the drone down low, just a few feet above the grass, and slowly approaches the wild turkey to get a better view, video shows.

The bird quickly takes notice of the buzzing intruder but keeps walking, video shows. Senarighi inches the drone even closer, until the turkey decides its too close and attacks, breaks into a run and flies into the drone.

The video turns into a blur of feathers and foliage as its knocked to the ground. The turkey also gives the machine a swift kick to make sure it got the message.

I had never flown a drone before in my life, and I bet I didnt have 45 minutes of flight time on it before the turkey took it down, Senarighi told Outdoor Life.

She ran out to the field to recover her drone and discovered why the turkey was extra testy.

I went running across the field in my flip flops, and when I was maybe 15 feet from the drone I jumped her flock of babies, she told the outlet. There were, Id guess, eight or 10 poults. Once I saw that, I understood.

The drone, the turkey and her poults were all unharmed, she added.

While turkeys arent generally known for their ability to fly, they are certainly capable, known to reach speeds up to 55 mph while airborne, according to experts.

Not-so-welcome creature washes up on Texas beach. It may have sneaked over on ship

Fishermen wrestle catfish from Texas lake with bare hands. See the monster catch

Cannibalistic creatures cover roads and homes, Nevada videos show. Absolutely foul

Driver needs rescue after strange creature she saved loses temper, TX officials say
Less than a week after the last round of Canadian wildfire smoke blotted out the skies of the Midwest and Northeast, prompting numerous air quality alerts, more ground-level smoke has returned to the United States. However, this time it has covered a broader scope across the northern states.

Air quality levels in the Northeast and Midwest had improved drastically by Monday following the latest incursion of wildfire smoke, thanks to thunderstorms across the regions that flushed the particles from the air. However, the smoke is forecast to shift out of the Canadian Rockies and Prairies into the neighboring northern Plains and Northwest U.S. into Wednesday, leading to poor air quality and low visibility, AccuWeather forecasters warn.

The smoke is forecast to reach cities like Seattle; Helena, Montana; and Grand Forks, North Dakota.

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The Northeast and Midwest won't escape the week without smoke clouding the sky, either. In the near term, poor air quality has been reported in some major cities such as Washington, D.C., New York City and Detroit, mainly due to lingering smoke from 4th of July fireworks. While this is likely to dissipate throughout the day Wednesday, air quality levels may be unhealthy for some during the morning hours.

Later this week, there is some smoke risk as well as the potential for poor air quality to return as a surface high slides into the Upper Midwest, bringing a northern wind into the region and in the Northeast, AccuWeather Meteorologist Joseph Bauer said.

"The general pattern through at least the middle portion of the month is supportive of having more episodes of smoke enter the Midwest and Northeast from Canada," he said. "As a result, more occurrences of poor air quality and hazy skies can occur in these areas more frequently."

Smoke billows from the Donnie Creek wildfire burning north of Fort St. John, British Columbia, Canada, Sunday, July 2, 2023. (AP Photo/Noah Berger)

AccuWeather meteorologists are currently monitoring if the Northeast and Midwest will endure the same level of smoke that they did the previous week. The latest indications are that while some high-level smoke in the form of hazy sunshine may return to the Northeast later this week, widespread low-level smoke from fires in eastern Canada may hold off into this weekend or perhaps later next week.

Over 600 active fires were burning across Canada as of Monday, according to the Canadian Interagency Forest Fire Centre (CIFFC). By Tuesday morning, the total acreage burned this year was over 21 million. For context, the state of South Carolina is approximately 20.5 million acres. The previous record was set in 1995 when wildfires burned more than 17.5 million acres across the nation.

Of the fires active on Tuesday, over 300 were considered to be "out of control." Since the start of the year, there have been 3,313 across Canada, according to the CIFFC, most of which started due to natural causes such as lightning strikes.

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The 360 shows you diverse perspectives on the days top stories and debates.

Illustration: Yahoo News; photos: Anna Moneymaker/Getty Images, Getty Images

Whats happening

Within hours of the Supreme Court striking down his student debt forgiveness plan, President Biden announced a new path he will use in an attempt to turn his promise to provide debt relief to millions of Americans into a reality.

Last summer, the president unveiled a plan that would have erased more than $400 billion in student loan debt  a program that would have benefitted an estimated 27 million borrowers. But on Friday, the courts six conservative justices ruled that the law the White House had built its scheme around, a statute known as the HEROES Act, did not grant the executive branch the authority to take such sweeping action without clear sign off from Congress.

Bidens new approach will instead rely on provisions in a different law called the Higher Education Act. That law, which essentially created the modern system of college funding when it passed in 1965, grants the secretary of education the power to compromise, waive or release federal student loans. The Biden administration has already used the HEA to forgive loans held by students who were exploited by for-profit universities or are unable to repay their loans because of a permanent disability.

Biden insisted that the new strategy is legally sound but cautioned that it will take longer to implement than the original plan because it will have to go through a lengthy federal rulemaking process. His announcement was also light on details, most notably on whether everyone who was eligible for forgiveness under the original proposal would qualify for the new plan.

In addition to a new approach to forgiveness, Biden announced an on-ramp for borrowers who may struggle to keep up with their loan payments when they resume. The Department of Education on Friday also finalized more generous income-based repayment rules that will significantly lower the monthly payments of low-income borrowers and allow them to have their remaining balances cleared after 10 years. Those new steps come on top of the expanded Public Service Loan Forgiveness program, which Biden has used to forgive more than $42 billion in debt held by people working in public service jobs like education and health care.

Why theres debate

Most Democrats praised Biden for wasting no time in launching a second attempt at widespread loan forgiveness, but there were many questions  from supporters and critics alike  about whether this new approach would also fail.

Some debt-relief advocates argue that an approach centered on the HEA is on much firmer legal ground than the previous plan, which they believe will allow it to survive scrutiny from the Supreme Court. Others are hopeful that the long rulemaking process will allow potential pitfalls of the program to be discovered and resolved before the final proposal is put before the courts.

But skeptics from both sides of the political spectrum say Bidens second attempt at debt relief is doomed to end up just like the first. Conservative pundits argue that simply repackaging a failed plan does nothing to address the fact that the law just doesnt provide Biden with such sweeping authority over student loans. Liberals, on the other hand, say the conservative justices will find any excuse to reject a Democratic priority they dislike, whatever the legal reasoning behind it.

Whats next

Regardless of what happens with Bidens new plan, the three-year pause on federal student loan payments and interest will end in the coming months.

Perspectives

The president has an obligation to keep trying

Now that the court has struck down Bidens first policy stab, Biden can, and must, swiftly exercise other legal authorities to automatically cancel debt. The courts ruling is not the death of debt cancellation  its merely a blockade on one channel to get there.  Eleni Schirmer, Guardian

The court will strike down any debt relief plan, regardless of its legal validity

The bottom line here is that the conservative majority is going to keep striking down liberal executive branch initiatives it doesnt like  text or context or no text.  Noah Feldman, Bloomberg

The Supreme Court will reject Bidens new power grab as well

Theres seldom education in the second kick of a mule  but the courts will have every reason to try over Mr. Bidens next illegal loan cancellation.  Editorial, Wall Street Journal

If Biden had relied on the HEA from the beginning, forgiveness may have already happened

As a matter of principle, the Biden administration should give its real reasons for a good policy, and it should do so under a statute that supports those reasons. Such a statute may exist in plain sight: the Higher Education Act of 1965.  Jed Shugerman, Atlantic

The income-based repayment plan has a chance to be just as transformative as debt relief

Measures like these work in smaller, less spectacular amounts, and can seem like mere bureaucratic tinkering at the margins, but the relief they can provide over time will soon add up to far more than a single-shot program.  Kevin T. Dugan, New York

Biden might actually be successful if he could curb his ambition a little

Either Biden complies with the law, in which case hell be limited to making minor tweaks that hell tout as student-loan relief, or hell go full-speed ahead with a program of similar scale to his original program, in which case hell be smacked down by the Supreme Court again.  Philip Klein, National Review

Congress is still the only branch that has the power to grant significant debt relief

Congress could pass a law that does exactly what Bidens executive order pretended to do.  If their bill really is that popular, either they can pressure enough Republicans to flip, or they can defeat enough Republicans for opposing it and thus take back Congress and immediately pass their bill in January 2025.  Timothy P. Carney, Washington Examiner

Bidens refusal to take bold, immediate action will doom his second plan too

The lengthy rulemaking process  will give opponents a chance to tee up a similar legal case as was decided today.  David Dayen, American Prospect executive editor

Biden should stop chasing headlines and focus on practical ways to help people afford education

Better for Mr. Biden, and everyone else, to focus on proposals that could make a meaningful dent in the cost of higher education.  Structural reform should be accomplished urgently  and in the clearest statutory language Congress can write.  Editorial, Washington Post

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A woman and child who fell off a ferry in the Baltic Sea have died, Swedish police said on Friday, when prosecutors announced a murder inquiry had been launched.

"The two people who fell from a ferry travelling to Karlskrona yesterday have died. They are a Polish woman born in 1985 and a Polish boy born in 2016," police said, adding that the next of kin had been notified.

Swedish Maritime Administration spokesperson Jonas Franzen told The Associated Press the child fell from a height of about 65 feet.

Separately, Sweden's Prosecution Authority said a preliminary inquiry into murder had been launched although there was "no suspect in the case".

"The purpose of the investigation is to try to clarify what happened," public prosecutor Stina Brindmark said.

Police asked for potential witnesses to come forward.

On Thursday, the Stena Spirit ferry, which was en route from Gdynia in Poland to Karlskrona in Sweden, alerted rescue services around 4:20 pm.

Stena Spirit ferry is seen in Gdynia, Poland on June 23, 2017. / Credit: Michal Fludra/NurPhoto via Getty Images

According to initial media reports, a child had fallen into the sea and the woman had jumped in after him.

However, Agnieszka Zembrzycka, a Stena Line spokesperson, told Polish media on Friday that the CCTV footage from the ship did not match this version of events.

She declined to provide further details pending the outcome of an inquiry into what had happened.

Ships and helicopters from Sweden and from NATO units that were in the area assisted in the rescue operation.

They were found about an hour later and transferred to a hospital in Karlskrona.

Anders Olsson, who was on the rescue helicopter that pulled the woman from the sea, told Swedish radio on Friday that she was "not responsive" and that first aid was administered to her.

In a separate incident in Scotland, a man died after falling overboard from a ferry near the port of Cairnryan on Saturday, BBC News reported.

Rescue crews were called to the Stena Superfast VIII ferry, which has a capacity of 1200 passengers, and the passenger was airlifted to hospital where he was pronounced dead, BBC News reported. Police said the death was not believed to be suspicious.

The Associated Press contributed to this report.

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California's reparations task force submits its recommendations
Lafayette police/file illustration

LAFAYETTE, Ind.  Rose Marie Harris started an argument with a Walmart employee inside the Veterans Memorial Parkway store about 4:55 p.m. Friday, then she got into a fight with police officers when they asked her to leave, according to Lafayette police reports.

When officers informed Harris, 30, of the 500 block of South Fourth Street in Lafayette, that she was being warned for trespassing and she needed to leave, Harris refused, police said.

When officers tried to arrest her, Harris grabbed a baton off of the officer's duty vest, according to police, who then restrained Harris on the ground and took back the baton, according to police.

During the fight, Harris spit and kicked officers, police said.

Officers jailed Harris on suspicion of disarming a law enforcement officer, intimation, battery on a police officer, trespassing and resisting law enforcement.

Harris remained jailed Monday afternoon in lieu of bond, according to online jail records.

Reach Ron Wilkins at rwilkins@jconline.com. Follow on Twitter: @RonWilkins2.

This article originally appeared on Lafayette Journal & Courier: Woman suspected of taking officer's baton and resisting
WORCESTER - Officers working the police department's Summer Impact Program, an effort to maximize police resources during peak hours, arrested an 18-year-old with a loaded firearm Sunday, according to police.

After officers noticed a passenger in the back seat of a passing car wearing a hooded sweatshirt and a ski mask, they turned their cruiser around and followed the vehicle onto Cutler Street. When police caught up with the vehicle, the passenger in question, later identified as Alexander Sembatya, 18, of 141 Cambridge St., Apt. 3, was walking outside the vehicle, according to police.

The officers noticed that the suspects sweatshirt pocket was hanging low and had an object inside that appeared to be a firearm, police said.

As officers approached Sembatya, he reached for the gun in his sweatshirt, according to police. Officers attempted to gain control of the firearm and place Sembatya in handcuffs, but he refused to comply and began to fight the officers, police said.

During the scuffle, the driver exited the car and started to run toward the officers. Sembatya was able to break away, police said.

While the officers chased after Sembatya, the driver screamed at officers and ran after them. Two other officers arriving on scene located Sembatya behind 61 Houghton St., according to police.

A firearm was located under a fence in the area of 50 Arthur St., along with the black mask, police said.

Sembatya is charged with carrying a firearm without a license, carrying a firearm without a license (loaded), possession of ammunition without a FID card, resisting arrest, assault and battery on a police officer, trespassing and disorderly conduct. He was arraigned Monday in Worcester District Court and is being held pending a dangerousness hearing Friday.

This article originally appeared on Telegram & Gazette: Worcester PD: Officers on Summer Impact Program apprehend teen with loaded gun
GENEVA (Reuters) - The heads of the World Bank and the World Trade Organization on Monday called for countries to boost efforts to make trade in global services more transparent and predictable, saying this could help developing countries reduce poverty.

Services such as tourism and telecommunications generate more than two-thirds of global GDP but barriers for services trade are higher than for goods, the joint report by the two institutions entitled 'Trade in Services for Development' said.

The WTO has a mandate to liberalise services but its member states have not collectively improved market access since 1997 when deals were struck on telecommunications, it said.

"There is a need to reignite international cooperation in the services sector," said World Bank President Ajay Banga and WTO Director-General Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala in the report's foreword.

"Such efforts need to expand trade and investment, reduce trade costs, bring about greater transparency and predictability on trade policy regimes and, ultimately, increase the participation of developing economies...," it said.

The report did not give prescriptive solutions, saying its aim was to "recall the benefits of advancing the negotiating agenda on trade in services and the opportunity costs of doing nothing". The two bodies stand ready to help governments, it said.

Banga began as World Bank president last month and asked staff to double down on development and climate efforts to accelerate the bank's evolution to tackle global problems.

(Reporting by Emma Farge; Editing by Christina Fincher)
The PEN Club of Ukraine has reported that the Ukrainian writer Victoria Amelina has died after being injured in Kramatorsk.

Source: PEN Ukraine

Quote: "With our greatest pain, we inform you that Ukrainian writer Victoria Amelina passed away on 1 July st in Mechnikov Hospital in Dnipro.

Her death was caused by fatal injuries which she incurred during the Russian missile attack on a restaurant in Kramatorsk on 27 June 2023."

Details: The PEN club explained that they were disseminating this sad news now that all of Victoria's relatives had learned about it and with their consent.

"Very soon her family members will announce the time and place of Victorias farewell gathering and funeral in Kyiv and Lviv," the PEN club of Ukraine added.

For reference: Victoria Amelina was born on 1 January 1986 in Lviv. During her school years, she moved to Canada with her father, but soon decided to return to Ukraine. She graduated with honours in 2007, receiving a master's degree in computer technologies from Lviv Polytechnic National University. She worked in international technology companies from 2005 to 2015.

Victoria's debut novel The Autumn Syndrome, or Homo Compatiens was published in 2014. The book was included in the top ten best prose publications according to the LitAccent of the Year 2014 award. The following year, the novel was republished, and it was shortlisted for the Valerii Shevchuk Prize.

In the same year, 2015, Victoria Amelina suspended her career in information technology to devote herself to writing. In 2016, her first children's book Someone, or The Water Heart, was published. Her next children's book Ee-stories of Eka's Excavator was published in 2021. The Staryi Lev Publishing House published Victoria's second novel Home for Home in 2017. The book was shortlisted for national and international awards: the LitAccent of the Year 2017, the UNESCO City of Literature Award, and the EU Prize for Literature Award. The Zaporizhzhia Book Society named Home for a Home the best prose book of the year.

Viktoria Amelina's works have been published in Polish, Czech, German, Dutch and English translations. Recently, the novel Home for Home was translated into Spanish.

In 2021, Victoria became the laureate of the Joseph Conrad Literary Award. In the same year, she founded the New-York Literary Festival, which took place in the village of New-York in the Bakhmut district of Donetsk Oblast.

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Zaporizhzhya NPP reconnects to backup power line after four-month absence

The Russian-occupied Zaporizhzhya Nuclear Power Plant (ZNPP) has managed to connect to the only available backup power transmission line for the first time in four months, according to International Atomic Energy Agency's (IAEA) Director-General Rafael Grossi on July 3.

However, Grossi went on to add that the situation with power supply at the site remains extremely fragile.

Grossi said that the plant is now linked to a 330 kV line. Previously, Zaporizhzhya NPP had relied on a single mainline of 750 kV for external electricity  necessary for reactor cooling and other essential functions. Prior to the full-scale invasion of Ukraine by Russia in 2022, the IAEA said that there were four 750 kV lines in operation.

Read also: Top military leadership visits Rivne NPP to discuss Zaporizhzhya NPP crisis

While the reconnection of the backup power transmission line is a positive development, the situation concerning the plants external power supply remains highly vulnerable, highlighting the unreliable state of nuclear and on-site security, said Grossi.

Kyrylo Budanov, the head of Ukrainian military intelligence, reported that Russians had completed preparations for a potential terrorist attack at the occupied Zaporizhzhya NPP. According to his information, explosive devices were placed near four out of the six power units.

On June 22, 2023, President Volodymyr Zelenskyy also said that Russia plans to carry out a terrorist attack at Zaporizhzhya NPP.

Read also:

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Read the original article on The New Voice of Ukraine
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky marked the U.S. Independence Day in an op-ed published Sunday lauding American exceptionalism and Western ideals of freedom and expressing thanks for the U.S. support and example of liberty.

Ukraine is grateful to the U.S. for providing both support for and an example of liberty, reads the sub-headline of Zelenskys Wall Street Journal op-ed, published ahead of the holiday.

The Kyiv leader harkened back to the U.S. founding as the greatest attempt in history to rid mankind of tyranny. He compared July 4, 1776  the day Americas founders adopted the Declaration of Independence  to Feb. 24, 2022  the day Russia invaded Ukraine.

The American people stood with us and, I am sure, will stand with us to the end. Today, as Americans celebrate their freedom and independence, we celebrate with you and envision the day when every inch of Ukraine is free of the cruel tyranny that seeks to extinguish us, Zelensky said.

Russias war on Ukraine is now in its 18th month as Kyiv mounts the early stages of a long-awaited counteroffensive.

Zelensy in his op-ed made reference to comments from Russian President Vladimir Putin a decade ago in which the Moscow leader took issue with the characterization of the U.S. as exceptional.

When any tyrant hates America and denies its exceptional role in the struggle for freedom, he recognizes his own inevitable defeat. To Russian tyranny I say the world needs more, not less, American exceptionalism, Zelensky wrote.

The Ukrainian president concluded with a warning that Russia could invade deeper into Europe  and that other countries like Iran could take up arms against free people elsewhere  if Russia were to succeed in Ukraine.

All such scenarios can be stopped only by the steadfast defense of freedom, those who aspire to freedom, and the alliances created to protect freedom, he wrote.

We Ukrainians and you Americans will never give up on freedom, he said.

For the latest news, weather, sports, and streaming video, head to The Hill.
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky said the Wagner Group rebellion last month shows Russian President Vladimir Putin is weak and unable to defend his country, saying the security situation in Russia was crumbling.

In a Sunday interview with CNNs Erin Burnett in Ukraine, Zelensky said Putins reaction to the attempted insurrection shows he doesnt control everything in Russia.

Wagners moving deep into Russia and taking certain regions show how easy it is to do, the Ukrainian leader said. Putin doesnt control the situation in the regions, he doesnt control the security situation. All of us understand his whole army is in Ukraine.

Zelensky has repeatedly said the Wagner rebellion is a good sign for Ukraine.

When news first broke of Wagner Group founder Yevgeny Prigozhins march, Zelensky quickly asserted everyone who chooses the path of evil destroys himself, joining other Ukrainian officials online in assessing that Russia was exposed as fragile by the rebellion.

At a news conference Saturday, he also said the insurrection greatly affected Russian power on the battlefield, according to CNN.

Ukraine is hoping to capitalize on the battlefield from the aborted rebellion.

Kyiv is amid a major counteroffensive in the east, where forces hope to push Russian troops out of its occupied territories in the Donetsk and Zaporizhzhia regions. Ukrainian troops are still moving slowly through entrenched Russian lines.

The uprising in Russia last month saw Prigozhin march on Moscow with thousands of mercenary troops behind his back.

Prigozhin halted his advance after reaching a deal with Putin that Belarusian leader Aleksander Lukashenko brokered.

Terrorism charges were dropped in exchange for safety guarantees for Prigozhin, who is now exiled in Belarus with the future of his mercenary group uncertain.

Putin is moving to crack down on the military, interviewing soldiers and officers to assess how much support Prigozhin may have had in the armed forces.

Zelensky told CNN on Sunday that Putin does not control the entire military, especially the middle layer and the lower rank of the armed forces.

All that vertical of power he used to have, he said, is just crumbling down.

For the latest news, weather, sports, and streaming video, head to The Hill.
In an interview with CNN, President Volodymyr Zelensky said that Ukraine's ultimate goal is to liberate Crimea and any "peace scenario" with the peninsula remaining under Russian control would "not be victory."

"We cannot imagine Ukraine without Crimea. And while Crimea is under Russian occupation, it means only one thing: the war is not over yet," said Zelensky.

Russia occupied the Crimean peninsula following the EuroMaidan Revolution in 2014, which ousted pro-Russian leader Viktor Yanukovych.

Since the start of the full-scale war, Russia has been using Crimea to launch missiles against Ukraine and as a logistic route to transfer equipment to the southern battlefield. Kyiv has repeatedly vowed to return Crimea to Ukraine.

Who does Crimea really belong to? Russias war against Ukraine began in Crimea. In February 2014, as the pro-Russian regime in Kyiv was killing protesters on the barricades of the EuroMaidan Revolution, thousands of Russian troops without insignia began occupying strategic locations and military bases in the Crimean Peninsula. Wit The Kyiv IndependentFrancis Farrell

In the CNN interview, Zelensky also commented on Wagner Group's short-lived rebellion, calling Russian dictator Vladimir Putin's reaction "weak."

"Firstly, we see he doesn't control everything. Wagner's moving deep into Russia and taking certain regions shows how easy it is to do. Putin doesn't control the situation in the regions," Zelensky told CNN on July 2.

"All that vertical of power he used to have is just crumbling down."

Zelensky also cited Ukrainian intelligence reports, saying the Kremlin was measuring support for Wagner boss Yevgeny Prigozhin, which has allegedly shown that half of Russia backed Prigozhin and his group's insurrection.

Prigozhin launched a "march for justice" against Russian military leaders on June 23 after the Russian army allegedly targeted Wagner troops in Ukraine. His mercenaries occupied Rostov and marched 200 kilometers to Moscow, only to abruptly end the rebellion less than 24 hours after its start.

As a result of an undisclosed agreement between Wagner's leader and the Kremlin, Prigozhin and his contractors were allowed to leave for Belarus to avoid persecution.
Volodymyr Zelenskyy

Kyiv has no secrets from the CIA due to their excellent relations and Ukrainian intelligence agencies maintain contact with their American counterparts, President Volodymyr Zelenskyy revealed during an interview with U.S. television channel CNN on July 3.

He also confirmed that he had met with CIA chief William Burns, who recently made a secret visit to Ukraine .

My communication with the CIA Director should always be behind the scenes, explained Zelenskyy.

We discuss important matters: Ukraines needs and how Ukraine is prepared to act. The situation is quite straightforward. We have good relations with the head of the CIA, and we communicate. I have informed him about all the important matters related to the battlefield that we require.

On July 1, The Washington Post reported that Bruin had made an undisclosed visit to Kyiv. The publication suggested that during the visit, Ukrainian authorities revealed their strategies for reclaiming territories occupied by Russia, and purportedly discussed initiating ceasefire negotiations with Moscow by the end of the year.

Read also:

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Read the original article on The New Voice of Ukraine
Mercenary chief Yevgeny Prigozhin said he expects "further victories at the front" for the Wagner Group in his first public comments since shortly after the rebellion he launched in Russia was suppressed, although it was not clear when they were made, the Kyiv Independent reported Monday.

In a video posted Monday on a Telegram channel, Prigozhin also claimed to have accomplished many of the goals of the brief revolt, which he said was intended at "fighting traitors and mobilizing (Russian) society."

After running through the southern city of Rostov-on-Don and getting within 120 miles of Moscow on June 24, the Wagner forces turned around after Prigozhin agreed to an offer of asylum in Belarus for him and his fighters mediated by Belarusian President Alexander Lukashenko. Since then, Lukashenko has said Prigozhin made it to his country, which is closely allied with the Kremlin, but the wealthy businessman has not been seen.

On Friday, Ukraine intelligence chief Kyrylo Budanov said Russia's Federal Security Service (FSB) has been tasked with killing Prigozhin, although he pointed out, "not all potential assassination attempts will be quick.''

There have been reports that Wagner troops have been settling in an abandoned military base in central Belarus, but Prigozhin doesn't mention his location in the video, according to the Independent, so it's hard to know whether he has joined them.

A Ukrainian soldier pets a kitten in a shelter under the Russian shelling on the front lines in the Zaporizhzhia region, Ukraine on July 2, 2023.

Developments:

 Ukrainian novelist-turned-war-crimes-researcher Victoria Amelina, whose works have been translated into English and at least eight languages, has died of injuries suffered in last month's Russian missile strike on a Kramatorsk pizza restaurant, Ukraine authorities announced. The attack killed at least a dozen people and wounded scores more.

 The U.S. ambassador to Russia, Lynne Tracy, reported that detained American journalist Evan Gershkovich was "in good health and remains strong, despite his circumstances," after meeting him Monday at the Lefortovo Prison in Moscow, the State Department said in a statement. The Wall Street Journal reporter has been held since March 30 on espionage charges he denies.

 Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan signaled Monday that his country is not ready to ratify Swedens membership in NATO, indicating the Swedes need to take a tougher stance against anti-Islamic demonstrations and groups Ankara considers terrorists.

 Russian drone strikes killed at least two people and injured 19 in the northern city of Sumy, officials said.

 Russian and Belarusian players were back in action at Wimbledon as the tournament got underway Monday. They were banned last year because of their countries' roles in the war in Ukraine and still can't represent their nations, competing instead as neutral athletes.

Russia says it foiled car-bombing attempt on head of Crimea

The Russian FSB said it prevented an assassination attempt on Sergey Aksyonov, the Moscow-designated head of occupied Crimea, the state-owned TASS news agency reported Monday. The FSB later posted a video in which the supposed perpetrator, which it described as a Russian national recruited and trained by Ukrainian intelligence services, confessed to his intentions, TASS said.

An FSB statement said the purported Ukrainian operative reached Crimea in June and was planning to blow up Aksyonov's motorcade but was apprehended at an unspecified date. "The bomber failed to follow through with his criminal plans as he was detained while removing an explosive device from a cache," the statement said, according to TASS.

Russia illegally annexed the Crimean peninsula in 2014 and made the port city of Sevastopol the base of its Black Sea Fleet.

Ukraine's slow progress coming 'step by step'

Ukrainian Deputy Defense Minister Hanna Mailar said on Telegram that Kyiv's forces have reclaimed more than 14 square miles of occupied territory in the last week, most of it in the south. However, she also acknowledged the difficulty of every gain in a counteroffensive that has been met with stiff Russian resistance.

Addressing the newly escalated fighting around the eastern city of Bakhmut, Maliar said "the situation is changing very rapidly. Control over the same positions can be lost and regained twice a day. The enemy actively reacts to all our actions and creates three lines of defense in threatening directions.''

Armed with modern weapons provided by the West, Ukraine aims to retake the four provinces in the east and south illegally annexed by Russia in the fall: Donetsk, Luhansk, Zaporizhzhia and Kherson. The early going has been slow and grinding.

"Last week was difficult on the frontline,'' Ukraine President Volodymyr Zelenskyy tweeted. "But we are making progress. We are moving forward, step by step!''

Invasion could last decades, end in nuclear war, Russian official says

Russia's invasion of Ukraine could last for decades and end in nuclear war, a top Russian official suggests.

Dmitri Medvedev, in a piece he wrote for the state-owned Rossiskaya Gazeta, says a "regional conflict" over the Donbas area of Ukraine has turned into a "total confrontation" against Western powers. He says the war represents the West's last chance to "maintain the status quo" and avoid losing global power and influence.

"You don't have to be a visionary to understand thatthe confrontation phase will be very long," writes Medvedev, the head of Russias Security Council who served as Russian president and Putin puppet from 2008-2012. "The standoff will last decades."

He suggests it could end with nuclear war resulting in no winners as millions of people die from the blasts, penetrating radiation and radioactive contamination.

"Such an Apocalypse is not only possible, but also quite probable," Medvedev says.

Top Russian general thanks troops for halting historic coup

Last month's mutiny against Russian President Vladimir Putin's regime collapsed because Russian troops remained faithful to their oath and military duty, Russias Defense Minister Sergei Shoigu said Monday.

Shoigu, who was an apparent target of the insurgency, broke his silence on the issue with military commanders at a conference call Monday. Shoigu, in excerpts that were published by Russian state media, said military personnel fulfilled their assignments "courageously and selflessly" in the face of the Wagner Group's aborted push toward Moscow. And Shoigu, who for months was lambasted on social media as incompetent by Prigozhin, credited Russia's regular soldiers with staving off Ukrainian troops that he said had failed to make major gains on the battlefield since their offensive began last month.

Prigohzin has said he had not planned on taking over the government, but multiple media reports indicated he had planned to force Shoigu out.

"The professional actions of our troops help minimize civilian casualties and save hundreds of lives," Shoigu said Monday. "I express my gratitude to the personnel for their faithful service."

Zelenskyy says Putin power 'crumbling'

Russia's brief, armed rebellion last month demonstrated Putin's weakness and his fading support among the Russian people, Zelenskyy says. In an interview with CNN recorded Sunday, Zelenskyy also reiterated his position that the war won't end until Ukraine has regained all territory seized by Russia  including Crimea, which Russia has occupied since 2014, years before invading Ukraine more than 16 months ago.

We cannot imagine Ukraine without Crimea. And while Crimea is under the Russian occupation, it means only one thing  the war is not over yet, he said.

Zelenskyy noted the rebellion by the Wagner mercenaries seized military installations in two Russian cities, showing "how easy it is to do." Ukraine intelligence reports indicated half the Russian people supported Prigozhin, he said.

"Putin doesnt control the situation in the regions," Zelenskyy said. All that vertical of power he used to have is just crumbling down.

Peace plans aplenty, but Ukraine draws line at conceding land

China has a 12-point plan. Brazil offered to lead a "peace club." The Vatican dispatched a papal trouble-shooter. An African delegation met with the leaders of both warring countries.

Sixteen months after Russia invaded Ukraine, the number of peace plans, initiatives and offers of mediation from third parties is proliferating. What doesn't appear to be expanding is Ukraine's appetite to consider them. Zelenskyy and his closest advisers have repeatedly said that while Ukraine is open to input from others, it doesn't need intermediaries for peace negotiations.

This is because Ukraine has ruled out compromises over its territory and sovereignty and Putin has shown no signs he's prepared to abandon his goal of completely dominating Ukraine. (Read more)

 Kim Hjelmgaard

Nuke plant's backup power line repaired, but safety 'not sustainable'

Ukraines Zaporizhzhia Nuclear Power Plant has been reconnected to its only available backup power line four months after it was lost, but the power situation at Europe's largest nuclear plant remains extremely fragile and is "not sustainable," the head of the International Atomic Energy Agency said Monday.

Rafael Mariano Grossi said work to reconnect the power line had been hampered by the "difficult security situation' in Ukraine's southern region. The ZNPP had been relying on a single main line for the external electricity it needs for reactor cooling and other essential nuclear safety and security functions. The plant, which has not generated electricity in months, had four such lines before the conflict began.

This article originally appeared on USA TODAY: Ukraine Russia war updates: Prigozhin predicts more wins in video
WikiCommons/Mzweh

The new king of the Zulu nation, whose claim to the throne has been contested by several of his 27 siblings, has been forced to deny that he was the subject of an attempted poisoning. The alleged poisoning comes after his most senior courtier died suddenlyin mysterious circumstancesand another was shot in an ambush.

King Misuzulu, the third eldest surviving son of the previous king, was crowned last year after bitter in-fighting among the extended family.

When his father, King Goodwill Zwelithini, died in 2021, Queen Mantfombi was appointed to decide who would become the next Zulu leader. She died before making a public pronouncement, leaving a will that named Misuzulu as the successor. That will prompted public and legal challenges from other branches of the family.

The start of Misuzulus reign has been turbulent with as many as four royal aides dying in recent months.

Media reports of an attempted poisoning were triggered by a statement from the Zulu nations traditional prime minister, which was reported by the The Times of London and the BBC.

Prince Mangosuthu Buthelezi said in the statement that Misuzulu opted to be treated in Eswatini (formerly Swaziland), rather than South Africa, saying: His Majesty felt uncomfortable seeking treatment in South Africa, as his parents had both received treatment in South Africa and subsequently died.

A spokesman told the Times that Misuzulu was now in perfect health after being examined to mitigate against any untimely eventuality, given the reports of Mr. Xabas sudden passing.

A day later, King Misuzulus head of communications, Prince Africa Zulu, tried to downplay the incident, telling the Mail & Guardian that the king had just gone for a check-up while paying a visit to his uncle, King Mswati III of Eswatini.

This was informed by the context of our current times of pandemics such as COVID-19 and other dangerous ailments, the statement said.

Although the Zulu Empire is no longer formally recognised as a country, its territory, forming part of South Africa, is largely autonomous and the traditional role still comes with significant power, prestige, palaces and financial stipends. Zulus are South Africas largest ethnic group.

Suggestions that Misuzulu was the subject of an attempted poisoning will stir comparisons with the killing of the kingdoms founder, Shaka Zulu, who was speared to death by jealous family members in 1828, and will be an unwelcome reminder of the instability and rivalry that has long bedevilled the kingdoms ruling family, worsened by polygamous traditions and no written constitution.

There will also be fears that it marks a dramatic end to over half a century of relative stability under Misuzulus father, Goodwill Zwelithini.

His death set off a renewed round of infighting as he had 28 children by six wives, and Misuzulus mother, Queen Mantfombi, was his second wife.

His first wife and her daughters launched court challenges to the validity of decrees naming Misuzulu as king.

Read more at The Daily Beast.

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In a display of community spirit, Moore & Giles, a leather goods company, closed its doors for a day and sent 90 of its 115 employees to volunteer at Park View Community Mission on Thursday.

The inaugural Community Give Back Day brought the companys workforce together for a collective effort to make a positive impact on the community. Led by Sackett Wood, CEO of Moore & Giles, the initiative showcased the companys commitment to corporate social responsibility and fostering a sense of unity among its employees.

We try and be a community-minded company and participate in different things in different places, but we have never found an opportunity where we could all, as a company, come together and work together, Wood said.

The idea for the Community Give Back Day was born from a desire to find an opportunity where the entire company could work together and make a substantial difference in just one day. Tray Petty, president of Moore & Giles, and Beverly McAuley, senior director of Sustainability & Education at Moore & Giles, proposed the concept earlier in the year and their colleagues unanimously embraced the idea, Wood said.

Todd Blake, executive director at Park View, said summertime is harder to get volunteers because they use so many college students from area universities so simply getting people to participate during this time is helpful.

For Moore & Giles to set aside profit and production to spend an entire day serving our neighbors is incredible. It takes over 2,000 volunteer hours per month to serve as many people as we do, and it can be really difficult to fill all of those hours in the summer. That theyre partnering with us to fill those hours and to help us complete a lot projects that we just havent been able to get to, today is a real gift to Park View and the neighbors we serve. I have loved getting to know them as we prepared for today, and theyre setting a high bar when it comes to serving the community.

Moore & Giles employees spent the day filling typical volunteer spots completing a lot of projects to make Park Views spaces more welcoming and safer for the community.

Park View, founded on acts of kindness and sharing meals with neighbors, provided the ideal setting for Moore & Giles employees to channel their energy and make a significant impact. Divided into teams, the volunteers took on various tasks throughout the day. From cleaning the carpets in the church to serving and rearranging the grocery store shelves, the teams worked tirelessly to improve the facilities, Wood said. Additionally, several teams dedicated their efforts to landscaping, enhancing outdoor spaces.

Todd and the staff have been great so I think its something that we will figure out how we do something like this and continue to do things like this going forward, he said.

The decision to take a day off from work for the Community Give Back Day was an easy one for Moore & Giles. Recognizing the significance of dedicating time to serve the community, the company prioritized the opportunity to make a meaningful difference. With the majority of their 115 employees participating, the event fostered a sense of unity, allowing colleagues who work together daily to come together for a shared purpose.

We can certainly take a day away from our business to do something for the community, Wood said. Its one day and its an easy thing to do and its good for our company. Its good for us to be together like this. We work together every day but we dont always get the chance to spend time with each other. Its great camaraderie.
On Friday, a new LOVE sign was unveiled at the Bower Center for the Arts in Bedford. The LOVE sign was a collaborative project with the Virginia Tourism Corporations LOVE-works program and Liberty High Schools art students. The design selected represents arts and culture in the community, and is hung in a prominent, high-traffic area available for photos and selfies. The Bower Center for the Arts' LOVE sign is now one of more than 60 signs recognized by the Virginia Tourism Corporation in the Central Virginia area. - Paige Dingler, The News & Advance
Amid ongoing drama within electoral boards and registrar offices in various localities around Virginia, outgoing Lynchburg registrar Christine Gibbons has filed a suit against the citys two electoral board members who did not reappoint her to the position.

The suit, filed in U.S. District Court for the Western District of Virginia, is a First Amendment challenge that alleges the new majority of Lynchburgs electoral board is intent on pressing the partisan falsehood  widely known as the Big Lie  that the defeat of Donald Trump for President in 2020 must have been procured by fraud, and the ancillary supposition that local election administrators who are not part of the Republican faction are not to be trusted.

The legal proceedings follow the boards decision to seek a new person for the position, which is within electoral boards purview to do. Registrars serve four-year terms and are appointed by electoral boards. While its not unusual for a board to choose a new registrar, many localities keep their registrars for several terms.

Its kind of inherent. I had hoped to be reappointed, but I have known for quite some time that there have been accusations of fraud in my office, Gibbons said. I just feel like our office has had senseless attacks on our character and our neutrality repeatedly over and over by Republican-authorized representatives.

Defendants in the suit are board secretary Betty Gibbs and board vice chair Steven Troxel, who were placed on the board in 2022 and 2023. The local circuit court appoints the three members of the electoral board on recommendations of the local political parties. A governors party gets the majority on the board.

Virginia has 133 local electoral boards and general registrars that are supposed to operate in a nonpartisan manner. However, state law requires that two of the three electoral board seats are for people that belong to whichever political party is in control of the governors office.

In response to an inquiry by Del. Kathy Byron, R-Lynchburg, Attorney General Jason Miyares opined on May 15 that electoral boards could choose to not reappoint a registrar if the choice doesnt rest on impermissible grounds, including political motivations.

Gibbons suit alleges that Gibbs and Troxels decision to replace her was motivated by politics  and cites incidents leading up to the 2020 election where Gibbs was allegedly outspoken with suspicion of election administrators, lingering in the office with intent to intimidate during the 2020 election cycle.

The Lynchburg Republican City Committee accused Gibbons of illegally scanning absentee ballots without a Republican representative present, but a judge dismissed the case in late 2020. It was around this time that Gibbs shared on Facebook: When the Electoral Board, Registrar, and Deputy Registrar are removed, things will change. Im glad City Council has been alerted. #DrainTheLynchburgSwamp.

The lawsuit also points to Gibbs attendance at Trumps Jan. 6, 2021, Stop the Steal rally that culminated in a mob storming the U.S. Capitol, resulting in injury and death.

While Gibbs asserted she was not part of the group that charged the Capitol, she was quoted in local media saying: I hope that the number of us sends a message to elected officials that we are not going to sit back and watch this election being stolen.

Neither Gibbs nor Troxel could be reached for comment at the time of this publication.

Its not unusual to see some changing of the guard on electoral boards as the party in charge changes amid gubernatorial elections, but the tensions popping up in a few electoral boards within the last year might be.

Historically, this wasnt the kind of problem that it is right now, said Stephen Farnsworth, a political science professor at the University of Mary Washington.

For decades, Republican governors, Democratic governors, appointed people more or less got along because everybody believed in the mission.

Gibbons is not the only Virginia registrar to become embroiled in electoral turmoil recently. This spring, Buckingham Countys election staff quit and a combative registrar was recently hired, then fired after a month on the job. (Gibbons suit asserts that the same registrar, Luis Gutierrez, was also among the candidates to be Lynchburgs next registrar.)

Meanwhile, Nottoway Countys registrar, Rodney Reynolds, was reappointed after applying for the job along with several others. Reynolds previous tenure as registrar was met with strife, amid a Republican electoral board member feuding with him. That resulted in the two Democrats on Nottoways electoral board voting to censure the Republican on the board last fall.

Bob Brink, a former Democratic delegate from Arlington County and former chairman of the State Board of Elections, thinks the drama that has ensued in various electoral boards and registrar offices may be canaries in the coal mine  indicative of a growing issue.

Im very concerned that what weve seen, you know, this dysfunction is not an outlier, Brink said.

This past year, Del. Mark Sickles, D-Fairfax, carried a resolution that would have prompted the states watchdog agency to study election governance in the state, but it failed to clear the legislature.

If it had, the Joint Legislative Audit and Review Commission would have reviewed the structure and procedures of state and local election officials. It would also have evaluated the potential for partisan pressures and influence in administrative decisions at the state and local level and developed recommendations for objective evaluation of performance of election officials.

We need to study professionalism of the registrar function, and maybe come up with some ideas to protect them from the whims of, you know, people responding to or reacting to whatever political mandate they may perceive, Sickles said.
The announcement that federal prosecutors have reached a plea deal with President Joe Biden's son Hunter over tax and gun charges marks the likely end of a five-year Justice Department investigation that has dogged the Biden family.

It doesn't, however, mean that congressional Republicans are done with their own wide-ranging probe into nearly every facet of Hunter Biden's business dealings, including examining foreign payments and other aspects of his finances.

Some of the Republican candidates hoping to face off against President Biden in the 2024 election are decrying the deal as evidence of an unfair justice system, particularly in light of the recent federal indictment of GOP front-runner Donald Trump, though there are obvious differences between the two cases.

Here's what to know about the charges, plea agreement, other probes involving the president's son and the politics:

WHAT ARE THE CHARGES?

According to a letter filed in U.S. District Court in Delaware, Hunter Biden has been charged with misdemeanor charges of failing to pay federal income tax. Court documents allege that he failed to pay more than $200,000 in federal income taxes for 2017 and 2018.

The federal probe into Hunter Biden began in 2018, bursting into public view in December 2020  one month after the presidential election  when he revealed that he had received a subpoena as part of the Justice Department's scrutiny of his taxes.

That subpoena sought information on the younger Biden's business dealings with a number of entities, including Burisma, a Ukraine gas company whose board he joined in 2014. That move sparked concerns about the perceptions of a conflict of interest, given the elder Biden was deeply involved in U.S. policy toward Ukraine.

An investigation by the then-Republican-controlled Senate did not identify any policies that were directly affected by Hunter Biden's work.

At the time of that subpoena, Hunter Biden said that he was "confident that a professional and objective review of these matters will demonstrate that I handled my affairs legally and appropriately, including with the benefit of professional tax advisors."

The younger Biden has also reached an agreement with the Justice Department on a charge that he illegally possessed a firearm while being a drug user.

Federal law prohibits people who use drugs from possessing firearms or ammunition, although a federal judge challenged the legality earlier this year. According to the Justice Department's Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives, between 1998 and 2014, nearly 100,000 prospective gun purchasers went home empty-handed because they were flagged as using illegal drugs.

WHAT DOES THE PLEA AGREEMENT MEAN?

By entering a plea, Hunter Biden avoids a trial, and it's unlikely that he will spend time in jail, although penalties are ultimately up to a judge.

Biden was charged under an information, a formal document that lays out the charges against him but doesn't require a vote by a grand jury, which would be an indictment.

A person familiar with the investigation said the Justice Department would recommend probation for the tax charges. But the decision to go along with any deal is up to a judge. The person was not authorized to speak publicly and spoke to The Associated Press on the condition of anonymity.

The charge of willful failure to file a tax return is rarely used as a primary charge by federal prosecutors, according to data from the Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse at Syracuse University. There were just 48 prosecutions in the last six fiscal years, according to TRAC.

The gun charge carries a maximum sentence of up to 10 years in prison, but the Justice Department says Hunter Biden has reached a pretrial agreement on that charge, too.

It is somewhat unusual to resolve a federal criminal case at the same time the charges are filed in court, though it is not totally unheard of.

WHAT HAPPENS NEXT?

The agreement essentially means the case is over, unless Hunter Biden fails to abide by it.

A deferred prosecution is an agreement offered by prosecutors in which a defendant must adhere to strict conditions, which will be known after he appears in court. A date for that appearance hasn't been set.

Usually a judge sets regular check-ins for the defendant to appear to ensure they are playing by the rules. If they don't, their deal is revoked and the criminal charges reinstated, which in Hunter Biden's case carry a maximum of a decade in prison. But if he does adhere to the rules, the case will be wiped from his record.

ISN'T THERE ANOTHER PROBE?

Yes. Congressional Republicans have been pursuing their own investigations into nearly every facet of Hunter Biden's business dealings, including examining foreign payments and other aspects of his finances.

The misdemeanor tax crimes that the younger Biden is set to plead guilty to are far more limited in scope than the allegations that have been pursued for years by congressional Republicans. On Tuesday, Rep. James Comer, the Republican chair of the House Oversight Committee, said that the "charges against Hunter Biden and sweetheart plea deal have no impact on" his panel's probe.

Even before he ran for president in 2020, Joe Biden has faced questions about his son's business dealings and drug addiction.

And there have been other controversies. While his father was vice president, Hunter joined the Naval Reserve and was discharged after testing positive for cocaine in his system, later revealing a yearslong struggle with addiction.

In the weeks before the 2020 election, Trump supporters used the existence of a laptop they said was connected to Hunter Biden  and the emergence of someone who maintains he had business discussions with him  to raise questions about Joe Biden's knowledge of his son's activities in Ukraine and China. President Biden has said he did not discuss his son's international business dealings with him and has denied having ever taken money from a foreign country.

WHAT ARE THE POLITICS?

News of the plea agreement comes days after Trump appeared in federal court on charges related to his retention of classified documents. In the wake of those 37 charges, Republicans across the country have levied criticism against the Biden administration, accusing the Justice Department of "politicization" and assailing Hunter Biden's business dealings.

The Trump charges came from a special counsel, appointed by Attorney General Merrick Garland to conduct an independent investigation to avoid any potential conflict of interest in the Justice Department. The Hunter Biden charges, meanwhile, were filed by the U.S. attorney for Delaware, Trump appointee David Weiss.

Some of the Republicans competing to potentially face off with Biden in the 2024 general election wasted no time taking their critique of the plea agreement public.

On his Truth Social platform, Trump on Tuesday said "the corrupt Biden DOJ just cleared up hundreds of years of criminal liability by giving Hunter Biden a mere 'traffic ticket.'

Biotech entrepreneur Vivek Ramaswamy tweeted Tuesday that "it's no accident that the farcical Hunter Biden 'plea deal' comes right after the Trump indictment," calling it "the perfect fig leaf to pretend that 'no one is above the law,' while absolutely putting certain people above the law."

Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, in a tweet, also decried the "sweetheart deal" and said that, were Biden "not connected to the elite DC class he would have been put in jail a long time ago."

Asked about the plea deal during a Tuesday night Fox News town hall, Sen. Tim Scott of South Carolina called perceptions of inequality in the justice system "dangerous" and implored voters "to thank God" for congressional Republicans' ongoing inquiry into the president's son.

___

Associated Press writers Lindsey Whitehurst, Colleen Long and Nomaan Merchant in Washington contributed to this report.

___

Photos: Hunter Biden through the years
The Rotary Clubs in Council Bluffs, Iowa continue to embrace the "Service Above Self" motto and strive to leave a legacy of kindness and transformation for future generations. The Council Bluffs Rotary Clubs are dedicated to creating positive change and impacting the lives of individuals and communities they serve.

Rotary International is a global network of volunteers dedicated to tackling various societal issues and promoting goodwill, with over 1.4 million members in more than 46,000 clubs. Rotary members believe in sharing the responsibility to act on the world's most persistent issues. Together the clubs work to promote peace, fight disease, provide clean water, sanitation and hygiene, save mothers and children, support education, award scholarships, grow local economies and protect the environment.

Council Bluffs has two active Rotary Clubs, Council Bluffs Noon and Council Bluffs Centennial. The 116 members meet regularly with a shared vision of fostering goodwill, promoting ethical practices and advancing peace and understanding.

"The Rotary Clubs in Council Bluffs are proud to serve our community and be part of the global Rotary network," said Brian Moon, President of the Council Bluffs Centennial Rotary. "The two clubs unite to serve our Council Bluffs community and the output of support is inspiring.

One of the remarkable aspects of the Council Bluffs Rotary Clubs is their unwavering dedication to local projects that address community needs. Whether it's supporting education, healthcare, environmental conservation or socioeconomic development, these clubs leverage their resources, skills and networks to implement sustainable solutions.

The Council Bluffs Rotary Clubs worked together on the 2023 Rotary District Grant, using the funding to install bike racks along portions of the Council Bluffs trail system including the new First Avenue Trail near Thomas Jefferson High School. The clubs have completed over 250 hours of volunteer service this year on projects like the book drive for incarcerated individuals, installing smoke alarms with American Red Cross, Rock the Block neighborhood clean-up, food drives, a winter item drive for those experiencing homeless and the Salvation Army bell ringing.

"Rotary is not just an organization; it is a movement fueled by compassion, generosity and a shared vision of a better world," said Chris LaFerla, President-elect of the Council Bluffs Noon Rotary Club. "We believe in the power of collaboration to bring positive change."

Collaboration and partnership are at the heart of the Council Bluffs Rotary Clubs. By joining forces with local organizations, government bodies and other community stakeholders, Rotary members pool their resources and expertise to maximize impact.

In a world often faced with challenges, the Rotary Clubs in Council Bluffs are a shining example of how individuals and local organizations can come together to effect meaningful change. Their dedication to service truly embodies the spirit of Rotary.

Both of the Council Bluffs Rotary Clubs are seeing new members and invite you to attend one of the meetings. The Centennial club meets at 7 a.m. on the first and third Wednesdays of the month in the Community Room of the Madison Ave. Hy-Vee. The Noon club meets at noon every Thursday at The Hoff Performing Arts Center. For more information about the Rotary Clubs in Council Bluffs and how to get involved, visit their websites: cbcentennialrotaryclub.org and portal.clubrunner.ca/6088.
Risen Son Christian Village held a patriotic parade followed by a cookout ahead of Independence Day Friday, June 30.

The celebration was held on Risen Sons campus in Council Bluffs, and this was the fourth year they hosted the event.

It started as a COVID project, a way we could still celebrate the Fourth, said Krystal Cary, Risen Son's director of wellness and lifestyles. So many of our residents have sacrificed and fought for our country, theyre very patriotic people, so we were gonna make it happen no matter what.

According to Cary, this years parade was the largest parade theyve had so far, and attracted the largest turnout.

Residents and their families lined up along the streets of the retirement community to cheer and wave as people walked and drove past American flags with the tune of America the Beautiful playing in the background.

The parade included the Underwood High School Marching Band, the local 4-H club with animals, the sheriffs and fire departments, McCormick Farmall tractors, motorcycles, the Risen Son Kings and Queens and the Absolute Dance Academy in Neola, among others.

The kids that came out were great, recently hired Underwood High School Band Director Ryan Miller said. We threw this together yesterday and they sounded amazing, I couldnt be more proud of them.

Miller, who also served as the lone percussionist at the parade, said the experience will help the band get a head start on their fall season, especially as it was his first performance with the band and several students first performance with the high school.

Following the conclusion of the parade, a party was held in one of Risen Sons parking lots, including an All-American Grill Out, live music, a dunk tank for some of the leadership and games such as cornhole.

This was the first year that the party has followed the parade, freeing up residents to enjoy time with their friends and families rather than having to worry about hosting them.

My whole goal when I started this was to mimic what small town Iowa gets to celebrate every Fourth of July, Cary said. Im hoping to bring that small town Iowa feel to our community and have all of the pomp and circumstance here for them to enjoy.
The Norfolk City Council convened on Monday in council chambers at city hall for its regularly scheduled meeting. All council members were present, with the exception of Justin Snorton. Also in attendance were 11 city staff members and more than 50 members of the community. The meeting laste
Moroccos role in regional food security was the focus of talks between Minister of Agriculture, Mohamed Sadiki, and his Spanish counterpart, Luis Planas.

The talks, held on the sidelines of the 43rd session of the Conference of the Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) held in Rome July 1  7, provided an opportunity to examine several issues of common interest, at both national and regional levels, including value chains, water, irrigation and animal and plant health.

As one of the most developed countries in Africa, Morocco can play a central role in eradicating problems linked to hunger and undernourishment on the continent, the Spanish minister, whose country holds the rotating presidency of the European Union from Saturday July 1, told MAP.

Praising Moroccos action in this area, the official pointed out that food sovereignty is one of the priorities of the Spanish presidency of the EU Council.

The Moroccan official on his part said the meeting discussed technical and economic agricultural cooperation between Rabat and Madrid, and the importance of the Moroccan-Spanish sanitary agreement, which guarantees a rapid flow and dynamic of trade in the sector between the two countries and naturally between Africa and Europe. He also underlined the importance of triangular cooperation in meeting the challenges facing the Mediterranean basin.

During the meeting, Sadiki reiterated the Kingdoms commitment to food security issues at national and regional level, an urgent matter to which Morocco attaches the utmost importance.

The FAO 43rd conference features a series of high-level roundtables on integrated water resources management and will elect the organizations Director General for the next four years (2023-2027), probably the incumbent Director-General, QU Dongyu of China, who was first elected in June 2019. He is standing unopposed to be re-elected. FAO chiefs may serve only two consecutive four-year terms.

As FAOs supreme governing body, the Conference also makes recommendations on global food and agricultural issues, and examines global governance policy issues.

The FAO Ministerial Conference is held every two years to approve the work program and budget of the UN organization for the following biennium.
Senegal is assuming this July 2023 the presidency of the African Union (AU) Peace and Security Council, the countrys Foreign ministry has announced.

After holding the presidency of the African Union (2022-2023), Senegal is again honored to assume, for the month of July, that of the Peace and Security Council of the continental organization, the ministry indicated.

Community responses to security challenges in Africa and the AU Peace and Security Councils field mission in the Sahel will be at the heart of this presidency, the ministry added. The West African country also looks to hold the consultative meeting with the AUs Economic, Social & Cultural Council (ECOSOCC) and review the AU Commission Chairpersons semi-annual report on elections on the continent.

Established in July 2004, the ECOSOCC is an advisory organ composed of different social and professional groups of AU Member States. The council provides an opportunity for African Civil Society Organizations (CSOs) to play an active role in contributing to the AUs principles, policies, and programs.

The Peace and Security Council (PSC) is the standing decision-making organ of the AU for the prevention, management, and resolution of conflicts. The council is made of 15 members with equal voting powers. All members are elected by the AU Executive Council and endorsed by the AU Assembly during its ordinary sessions.
The African Development Bank, AfDB, has made equity investment worth $11 million in Luxemburg-based BluePeak Private Capital Fund to support mid-size firms, including in the pharmaceuticals, agribusiness, manufacturing, and logistics sectors, across Africa.

The Abidjan-based bank in a statement said BluePeak  a flagship private capital fund  will provide growth capital to middle-sized companies with the potential to become pan African market leaders.

The Fund will target adding value to portfolio companies by enabling their expansion, recapitalization, and deleveraging. It is expected to make at least eight investments of $8 million to $25 million in companies with established cash flow generation, the statement added.

BluePeaks current portfolio of companies expands many areas; 22% agri-business, 22% manufacturing and packaging, 12% pharmaceuticals, 12% fintech and financial services, and 11% each in information technology and telecommunication, logistics, and commercial real estate.

AfDB said the investment promises several benefits. It will ensure the funds adherence to the best standards. By investing in BluePeak, the African Development Bank will support an indigenous fund manager with a strong knowledge of African markets to invest in underserved small and mid-size companies. Fund managers have identified investment opportunities across Africa, covering over 15 countries, it added.

The African Development Banks equity investment is expected to contribute to the creation of 1,142 full-time jobs. It will support the construction of 6.400 telecommunication towers, and an increase in the production of malaria drugs from 33 million units in 2022 to 75 million units in 2027.
Botswana and mining company De Beers have announced, after years of negotiations, a new diamond sales deal that gives the South African country a bigger share of rough stones from their joint venture.

Debswana, a joint venture between De Beers (a subsidiary of Anglo American, a UK-listed multinational mining company) and Botswanas government, sells 75% of its output to De Beers, with the balance taken up by state-owned Okavango Diamond Co. Under the new joint mining agreement, Botswana share of the rough stones extracted has been immediately raised from 25% a 30%, and it will rise to 50% within a decade, De Beers and government officials said. The new agreement covers a 10-year sales deal for Debswana rough diamond production through to 2033 and 25-year Debswana mining licenses.

Botswana supplies 70% of rough diamonds to De Beers that is the worlds leading diamond company. The new interim deal signed over the weekend means that the lucrative, decades-long diamond mining partnership, which had appeared on the verge of a breakdown in recent months, will continue.

While the details of the deal were still being worked out, it addresses one of the most significant grievances of the Botswana government, regarding the share of diamonds it receives in its joint mining venture with De Beers. De Beers had also agreed to invest as much as $825 million over the next 10 years to help develop the Botswana economy, the mining giant said in a statement.
Tangiers College of Legal, Economic and Social Sciences is organizing a Moroccan-Spanish scientific meeting on circular economy and tourism, in partnership with the International University of Andalusia and in coordination with the Cefal Foundation.

Participants to this 3rd edition seek to enable tourism stakeholders, professionals, students, and graduates of specialized tourism institutes to learn about effective ways to promote the circular economy and sustainable tourism.

They also aim to highlight the importance of what came to be known as renewable tourism in preserving the environment, in addition to sharing experiences in eco-tourism and to promote the sectors sustainability as it is one of the pillars of both Moroccan and Spanish economies.

Discussions will also focus on innovative tourism products, the position of sustainable tourism in national and international markets, and the importance of awareness-raising in mobilizing the community, tourism stakeholders and decision-makers to adopt sustainable tourism conditions.
I got my first pair in 2014. At the time, I was working for filmmaker and artist Grear Patterson, who swore by Mephistos. He told me Steven Spielberg wore them for decades, and that etched their provenance in my brain. The mix of quiet elegance, hard work, honor, and quality intrigued me. I wont say how many pairs I have now, but its well over 50. I am on my feet more than 16 hours a day, and I would say the Mephisto Match is a reliable, durable shoe, like a saddle that molds to your body. I work, skate, photograph, and dress up in them. I have every color including some rare duo- or tritone ones. The worst part is I even buy ones I know I will never wear, or ones not even in my size, just to put on a shelf like a tchotchke or to give to a friend as a gift. We all have to feed our spirit somehow. Chase Hall
The Goodwill Career Center will host a hiring event on July 13 to build a connection between hopeful job candidates and employers.

The event, which starts at 10:30 a.m., will be held at the Goodwill Career Center at 3740 Pepperell Parkway. Participants will have a chance to meet 15 employers with over 100 job opportunities.

Hiring events are a great opportunity to get in front of that employer, so that they can put a name with a face and you can have that conversation. It's a first impression kind of thing, said Dee Skipton, who has been the manager at the Goodwill Career Center manager for nearly five years.

Auburn University will offer a variety of jobs, including temporary employment, facilities management, non-faculty employment and student employment. The Auburn Police Department has 12 officer position available.

Skipton has hosted several of these events over the past few years as the Alabama economy continues to recover from the effects of the COVID-19 pandemic. Skipton sees the event as an opportunity for job seekers to make key connections, which is part of the Goodwill mission.

A lot of people don't know that when you come into our Goodwill store and you spend $1, 95 cents goes back into our Career Center," Skipton said. "Our Career Centers are being funded by our retail people, so we can do everything that we do at no cost.

The Career Center is hosting another hiring event on July 19 from 10 a.m. to noon. The event will offer over 200 full-time and part-time job opportunities with a wide variety of employers ranging from East Alabama Medical Center and East Alabama Mental Health Center to Aramark and HL Mando.
Three years after the death of George Floyd, local law enforcement agencies say theyre continuing to reflect on how their department operates.

Opelika Police Chief Shane Healey and Lee County Sheriff Jay Jones said their departments havent made any major changes within the past three years, but have continued growing their programs, growing relationships in the community and improving the training for their officers.

A lot of the things that we ultimately changed were things that we had already been talking about and working towards doing, Healey said. Policy wise, we were already ahead of the curve, and so some of the changes that came out nationally for some of this police reform were things that we had already done.

For example, the OPD had already prohibited officers using chokeholds several years prior.

The police reform that started after George Floyds death included a new Alabama state requirement for officers to receive training in implicit bias and de-escalation.

Thats something that the APOSTC is requiring now for all academy classes to have a block of instruction on implicit bias, and we certainly have engaged in that, Jones said. And internally, just reviewing our policies and procedures to ensure that we have the correct methods of operation in place to prevent, ultimately, the interactions that would lead to circumstances where theres not a good effort in communication.

Healey said the OPD also had the opportunity to create open conversation with the community. During these conversations, the citizens expressed three main things that they wanted the OPD to do: build relationships, build trust and continue to educate officers on new policies and procedures.

Out of this, the OPD established the Together Opelika campaign, which is a program to grow relationships and trust between the police department and the community through community engagement. The OPD also got several officers certified to instruct classes on implicit bias and de-escalation.

Healey and Jones said they believe its important that their departments mirror the racial makeup of the communities they serve, and this is something theyve both been working to improve even before May 2020.

Our mission is to serve the public, and it would seem that having an agency that was composed of individuals that provided a representational makeup of the community itself would be an appropriate way to operate, Jones said.

When Healey first took over the special services division, he said he looked at what the racial percentage should be for the OPD, and made it a goal for the department.

Weve made a good bit of progress, but were not there, he said. At the end of the day, we have to search for and get the best candidates to fill the job.

Both the OPD and LCSO look for the best qualified individuals to bring to their agency. Applicants must meet certain physical requirements and go through a vetting process.

While its a challenge to attract large numbers of applicants, Jones said the vetting process narrows down the number significantly. This is something Jones said was a challenge before 2020, and that his department hasnt seen any extra decrease in applicants because of the perception of law enforcement after George Floyds death.

To help with recruiting, these agencies are reaching out to younger kids. One program the OPD started in 2022 is the 20 Under 20 Student Exploratory Program, which gives students the opportunity to learn what police work is like.

They also look to recruit applicants in spaces that can bring in diversity.

According to data collected in the East Region of the U.S., Lee Enterprises received full or partial responses from 58 separate law enforcement agencies and 47 of those agencies gave some answers to questions regarding race demographics.

The East Region includes departments in New York, New Jersey, Virginia, North Carolina, South Carolina and Alabama.

Of those 47 agencies that responded, six have a department (regardless of size) that is made up of 95% or more white officers, however most of these communities are also overwhelmingly white.

Nine agencies did not answer department race demographics questions  with the reasons cited for not responding varying across departments. Some cited FOIA laws saying the information sought was not a public record, some said they do not collect this data and some did not provide any reason.

According to the data collected, the Opelika Police Department has 88 sworn members of which 66 are white, 14 are Black, 7 are Hispanic and 1 is biracial. There are 27 ranked officers and 4 of those are people of color. The department also has 25 civilian employees.

The Opelika community is 53% white, 37.4% Black, 6.3% Hispanic, 2.8% Asian and 2.6% biracial/other, according to the United States Census Bureau.

Out of the 88 sworn members, 4 are female.

The Lee County Sheriffs Office provided separate data for the sheriffs office and the Corrections Division, which presides over the Lee County Detention Center.

The LCSO has a total of 97 sworn personnel of which 75 are white, 20 are Black, 1 is Hispanic and 1 is Asian. There are 32 ranked officers of which 10 are people of color and 7 are female. The department also has 105 civilian employees.

According to the U.S. Census Bureau, Lee Countys race demographic is as follows: 67.4% white, 23% Black, 3.9% Hispanic, 4.2% Asian, 0.4% American Indian, 0.1% Pacific Islander and 1.8% biracial/other.

Out of the 97 sworn members, 10 are female.

In the Corrections Division within the LCSO, there are 66 deputies of which 19 are white, 47 are Black, 36 are male and 30 are female.

In this division, 8 deputies rank above corrections deputy.

Between 2017 and 2022, the years chosen for the survey, neither the OPD nor the LCSO have had any racial profiling complaints. During that time period, the OPD had one sworn officer face criminal prosecution in an excessive force complaint.

Jones said if the sheriffs office receives a complaint from a citizen about the way they were treated by one of the deputies, the individual is asked to come to the sheriffs office to talk in person and provide more information.

The Auburn Police Department declined interviews as well as providing numerical data but released the following statement:

We have a diverse workforce and constantly seek ways to ensure the demographics of the Police Department mirror the community we serve. We employ officers that are of various races, both male and female. The officers have backgrounds in a number of fields that lend to the success of our mission of serving and protecting the community. We do not discuss nor disclose other matters related to personnel issues or conduct, the APD stated.

Once hired, officers are given time to review and learn the Police Directives that mandate how they conduct themselves as sworn police officers of the Auburn Police Department, the APD continued. Officers are then required to attend the Police Academy. Upon completion of the academy, officers must complete a minimum 8-week field training (FTO) program before being allowed to work solo. The first year on the job is probationary. During the academy and after its completion, officers are regularly exposed to training that include: de-escalation, implicit bias, use of force and customer service.

The APD said in the past year, the department has made numerous community outreach efforts including: the implementation of the Eagle Watch Program, hosting National Night Out, Coffee with a Cop community events, the Back to School Supply Drive, DARE Camp for Auburn youth, hosting the City of Auburn Citizens Academy, introducing K9 trading cards, offering free community safety trainings and many other community-driven events.

The department also participated in Auburn Housing Authoritys Operation: CommUNITY Day, the Lee-Scott Softball charity game, the Mothers Against Drunk Driving Walk Like MADD campaign, Cops on Top, Special Olympic Torch Run, Bark in the Park (K9 demo), Auburn Universitys Global Community Day and more.

Diversity underrepresentation in policing Data gathered from October 2022 to May 2023 from nearly 120 law enforcement agencies in 14 states shows frequent disparity in the racial and ethnic makeup of the agencies compared to the communities they are hired to protect and serve.

Data gathered from October 2022 to May 2023 from nearly 120 law enforcement agencies in 14 states shows frequent disparity in the racial and ethnic makeup of the agencies compared to the communities they are hired to protect and serve.
ORLANDO, Fla.  After appointees of Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis took over Walt Disney Worlds governing district earlier this year, its firefighters were among the few employees who publicly welcomed them with open arms.

But that warm relationship is in jeopardy as a new district administrator has reopened negotiations on a contract that was approved last month by the unionized firefighters, promising pay raises and more manpower.

A vote on the contract originally was targeted for last month during a meeting of the Central Florida Tourism Oversight District board of supervisors. But it was never brought up, and it did not appear on an agenda released ahead of the next meeting scheduled for Wednesday.

Under the three-year contract proposal overwhelmingly approved by 200 firefighters and first responders, annual starting pay for firefighters would increase to $65,000, up from $55,000. It also promised hiring up to three dozen firefighters and paramedics.

At several meetings since the DeSantis-appointed supervisors took their seats this spring, Jon Shirey, who leads the firefighters' union, praised them for visiting firefighters at their stations around the 39-square-mile Disney World property.

The firefighters looked forward to collaborating with the new supervisors and administrator after years of clashing with their Disney-supporting predecessors, and viewed the appointments as an opportunity for a fresh start, he said.

Almost overnight, a change occurred that we have never experienced  transparency, open dialogue, the ability to sit down and have our issues heard and felt listened to, Shirey told board members last month. You have been able to build bridges that were long burned.

The feeling was mutual, with board chairman Martin Garcia saying last month that the supervisors were working with the firefighters to resolve their issues. Even so, Garcia made clear that the firefighters weren't the only district employees the board wanted to support.

We also need to let the (other) employees know, we love you, too. We care about you. We love you as much as we love our firefighters, Garcia said.

But the delay in approving the contract has alienated the firefighters' union, which last year endorsed the gubernatorial reelection campaign of DeSantis, who recently launched a campaign for the 2024 GOP presidential nomination.

The old contract expired four years ago, and the firefighters declared an impasse last year when the districts board was still controlled by Disney supporters. The Reedy Creek Professional Firefighters, Local 2117 have warned for years that they are understaffed, which poses a safety risk as the central Florida theme park resort grows.

Last month, District Administrator John Classe, who originally negotiated the new contract, was replaced by the board with Glenton Gilzean, a DeSantis ally who previously served as president and CEO of the Central Florida Urban League and will receive a $400,000 salary in his new job. The district also is paying Classe to stay on as a special adviser.

Board spokesperson Alexei Woltornist said negotiations with the union were continuing, without explaining why they were reopened with a contract already approved by the firefighters and first responders.

Administrator Gilzean is actively working with the fire department to finalize a deal that offers a competitive compensation package and gives firefighters the resources they need to protect the public, Woltornist said in an email to The Associated Press.

Officials with the firefighters' union did not comment.

While Gilzean may alienate the firefighters, whose support gave the DeSantis takeover some legitimacy, he may gain credibility with other constituencies within Disney's governing district and put some distance between himself and his predecessor, said Richard Foglesong, a Rollins College professor emeritus who wrote a definitive account of Disney Worlds governance in his book, Married to the Mouse: Walt Disney World and Orlando.

Hes an unproven administrator, yet here hes showing hes no pushover when dealing with a cantankerous group, which frankly impresses me, Foglesong said.

The DeSantis appointees took over the Disney World governing board earlier this year following a yearlong feud between the company and DeSantis. The fight began last year after Disney, beset by significant pressure internally and externally, publicly opposed a state law banning classroom lessons on sexual orientation and gender identity in early grades, a policy critics call Dont Say Gay.

As punishment, DeSantis took over the district through legislation passed by Florida lawmakers and appointed a new board of supervisors to oversee municipal services for the sprawling theme parks and hotels. But before the new board came in, the company made agreements with previous oversight board members that stripped the new supervisors of their authority over design and construction.

Disney sued DeSantis and the five-member board, asking a federal judge to void the governors takeover of the theme park district, as well as the oversight boards actions, on the grounds they were violations of companys free speech rights.

The board sued Disney in state court in an effort to maintain its control of construction and design at Disney World.

The district was created in 1967 when then-Florida Gov. Claude Kirk signed legislation authorizing it to regulate land use, enforce building codes, treat wastewater, control drainage, maintain utilities and provide fire protection at Disney World.

Such private governments arent uncommon in fast-growing Florida, which has more than 600 community development districts that manage and pay for infrastructure in new communities.

Disney attractions that don't exist anymore Disney rides that don't exist anymore Rainbow Caverns Mine Train (1956-1977) Submarine Voyage (1959-1998) America Sings (1974-1988) Journey Into Imagination (1983-1998) Horizons (1983-1999) Videopolis (1985-1989) Maelstrom (1988-2014) Dreamflight (1989-1998) Body Wars (1989-2007) Adventurers Club (1989-2008) The Great Movie Ride (1989-2017) ExtraTERRORestrial Alien Encounter (1995-2003) The Timekeeper (1994-2006) The Great Movie Ride (1989-2017) ExtraTERRORestrial Alien Encounter (1995-2003) The Timekeeper (1994-2006)
Indias crude oil imports from Russia hit a new record high of 2.2 million barrels per day (bpd) in June, having risen in 10 consecutive months, per data from analytics firm Kpler cited by Bloomberg.

As in May, Indian oil imports from Russia in June exceeded the combined imports from the next two biggest suppliers, Saudi Arabia and Iraq, according to Viktor Katona, head of crude analysis at Kpler.

Indian imports of the flagship Russian grade Urals jumped to another record of around 1.5 million bpd in June, Kpler data showed.

Indias oil imports from Russia have continued to surge in recent months as cheaper Russian crude exports find more and more buyers in the worlds third-largest crude oil importer.

In May, India shattered its previous record of imports of Russian crude and took in 1.96 million bpd of crude from Russiaan all-time high at the time.

In May, Indias Russian oil imports alone were higher than the 1.74 million bpd in Indias combined imports from the next four largest suppliers - Iraq, Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates (UAE), and the U.S.

Russian oil accounted for a massive 42% of all Indian crude imports, compared to negligible volumes India had imported before the Russian invasion of Ukraine.

More than a year since the war began, India has turned from a marginal buyer of Russian crude to the most important market for Moscows oil alongside China. Indian refiners, not complying with the G7 price cap and looking for cheap opportunistic purchases, have snapped up many of the Russian Urals cargoes, which used to go to northwest Europe before the EU embargo.

Going forward, India may soon hit its limits on imports of Russian crude, due to infrastructure constraints and the need to keep good trade relations with other crude oil suppliers, according to analysts at Kpler.

By Tsvetana Paraskova for Oilprice.com

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Rolling blackouts, freezing homes and skyrocketing electricity prices. A few decades ago, power outages in vast swathes of the United States were relatively rare and would normally be seen as black swan events. Unfortunately, mass blackouts have now become a regular feature of modern American life. Power outages have increased 64% from the early 2000s while weather-related outages have soared 78%. According to one analysis, the United States now records more power outages than any other developed country, with people living in the upper Midwest losing power for an average of 92 minutes every year compared to just 4 minutes in Japan.

Climate change and extreme weather events are largely to blame for this sad state of affairs. But the U.S. is not an exceptional case, with Europe feeling the adverse effects of a rapidly changing climate just as keenly as, if not worse than, the U.S. A closer look at the problem reveals that one fuel could be at the center of the conundrum: natural gas.

Over the past two decades, the shale revolution unlocked a deluge of cheap natural gas, and made it easier for the country to transition from coal-fired generation to natural gas plants. Indeed, natural gas is widely touted as the bridge fuel as the world gradually moves away from coal as the primary fuel used to generate electricity to renewables thanks to natural gas having a much cleaner emissions profile than coal. Gas now makes up ~41% of U.S. power generation, more than double its share in Europes energy mix at 19.6%.

The harsh reality is that natural gas plants, even relatively modern ones, are proving to have the worst failure rate when faced with extreme weather compared with other generation methods. During last years Arctic Blast, gas units accounted for 63% of the failures while representing just 44% of the total installed capacity. The countrys vast network of gas plants and pipelines--the largest in the world--and the regulations that govern them simply were never designed or built without the realities of extreme weather in mind. Gas facilities arent uniformly winterized, with many relying on single gas pipelines for supply. Meanwhile, many generators lack the ability to burn an alternate fuel or keep back-up gas on hand in case of emergencies. Related: Is OPEC Locked Into Supply Cuts With Oil Below $75?

More alarmingly, even the best gas generating facilities are showing a large degree of vulnerability. PJM Interconnection LLC is the operator of the countrys largest power grid, serving 65 million people in 13 states and Washington, DC, or about a fifth of Americans. The firms grid is generally considered to be one of the most reliable in the country thanks to its ample operating reserves and rich shale gas deposits. During the winter blast on Dec. 23, 2022, PJM called a maximum generation emergency action, meaning standby plants were supposed to run ramp up to full power. Whereas nearly 20% of those gas plants ran at 100% or more for at least an hour, more than 20% never got above even half capacity while many dropped to 0% output at some point during the emergency. PJM spokesperson Susan Buehler has conceded that generation performance during the storm was not acceptable, and added, What we need, and what we are working on with all of our stakeholders, regulators and policymakers, is for all of our resources to perform when called upon.

Mind you, PJM actually performed better than many neighboring grids, many of which reported widespread electricity interruptions or blackouts, leaving one to wonder how the countrys multiple, highly fragmented and aging grids will manage to stay afloat as Americans continue to consume ever increasing amounts of electricity. During the crisis, a large number of new-model combined-cycle gas plants failed, with some reporting mechanical issues, failures to start due to according to people familiar with the operations and official filings. Others couldnt get the fuel frozen wells, falling pipe pressure or compressor station failures. Others failed to get gas because they are supplied by utility pipelines that prioritize households and businesses first.

Thats a crisis thats coming. Its coming a lot closer and a lot nearer and a lot faster than even I thought a year ago when I first said were facing a reliability crisis, Mark Christie, a member of the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission, has told Bloomberg.

More Renewables And Grid Upgrades

Some experts suggest that extending the existing gas infrastructure can help solve the problem. Many, however, believe that grid upgrades and incorporating more renewable energy is the long-term solution.

For decades, the United States has been relying on an aging electrical grid that's increasingly unstable, underfunded and incapable of taking us to a new energy future. Despite being the wealthiest country in the world, the U.S. only ranks 13th in the quality of its infrastructure.

Indeed, our power grid is the weakest link in the ongoing energy transition.

A study by UC Berkeley and GridLab found that it will be economically feasible for renewable energy to power 90% of a reliable grid by 2035, while only depending on natural gas for 10% of annual electricity production. Unfortunately, whereas renewable power sources have grown dramatically in recent years, our aging electrical grid is simply incapable of fully integrating them into our energy use, leading to so much potential power wasted.

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But, as is usually the case, the biggest challenge remains funding: a Wood Mackenzie analysis has estimated it would cost a staggering $4.5 trillion for the US. to fully decarbonize, including constructing and operating new generation facilities; investing in transmission and distribution infrastructure, making capacity payments, delivering customer-facing grid edge technology and more. Suddenly, the $13 billion that the Biden-Harris Administration, through the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE), has allocated to upgrading the national grid looks puny.

By Alex Kimani for Oilprice.com

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Long-term contracts for LNG supply are back after a year of record-high prices and energy crises.

Efforts to protect LNG imports from the volatility in spot prices amid the many uncertainties in the natural gas market and geopolitics, and the increased attention to energy security has prompted all gas importers  including a previously reluctant Europe  to sign more long-term LNG deals in recent months.

Leading the LNG contracting is China, a major gas consumer and importer, which has always looked to protect its energy security. Last years energy crisis put an additional emphasis on security of supply in China, which is now signing long-term LNG deals as if the energy crisis is still at its peak.

China accounts for one-third of all long-term LNG contracts signed so far this year, according to estimates by Bloomberg.

Long-term LNG contracting has seen a flurry of deals in recent months, including from buyers in Europe, where energy security has taken center stage at the expense of concerns about emissions from natural gas imports.

For example, last month Germany signed a 20-year deal with U.S. firm Venture Global LNG to import 2.25 million tons of LNG per year from Venture Globals third project, CP2 LNG, as Europes biggest economy is looking to secure gas supply after Russia stopped deliveries.

Chinese buyers, for their part, have recently signed with Qatar the longest LNG term deals in the history of the industry while also discussing additional agreements with QatarEnergy and with U.S. LNG developers.

China Petroleum & Chemical Corporation, or Sinopec, is in discussions with Saudi Aramco on the development of the giant Saudi gas field Jafurah, which could include the construction of an LNG terminal to export part of the gas, Bloomberg reported earlier this year.

Sinopec already has a 5% stake in the development of the huge North Field East (NFE) expansion project in Qatar, the largest project in the history of the LNG industry. At the end of last year, QatarEnergy signed the longest-term contract in the history of the LNG industry in a deal to supply LNG to Sinopec for 27 years.

Last month, QatarEnergy signed a similar deal with another Chinese energy giant. QatarEnergy signed in June definitive agreements with China National Petroleum Corporation (CNPC), covering the long-term supply of LNG to China and partnership in the North Field East LNG expansion project (NFE). Under the terms of the deal, Qatar will supply 4 million tons of LNG per annum from the NFE project to CNPCs receiving terminals in China for 27 years.

Apart from Qatar, China is looking to sign more long-term deals with the top LNG exporter, the United States.

Just last week, Cheniere Energy signed a long-term deal with Chinas ENN to deliver LNG to the Chinese buyer for more than 20 yearsthe second such deal between Cheniere and ENN.

At present, China is moving forward with the implementation of carbon peaking & carbon neutrality, further accelerating the energy transformation, and Chinas natural gas market is full of potential, said ENN Natural Gas chairman Wang Yusuo.

Despite last years unprecedented decline in Chinese natural gas consumption and imports, China is looking to secure its long-term energy needs and avoid energy and power shortages that could undermine its growth targets.

Lockdowns and slower economic growth led last year to the first annual drop in Chinas gas consumption since 1990, while Chinas LNG imports fell by 20%, mainly due to reduced demand and high LNG spot prices.

This year, Chinese demand and LNG imports are set to rebound, although they are unlikely to reach pre-Covid levels, analysts say.

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Meanwhile, long-term LNG supply deals remain a priority for China.

Having ample supply in their portfolio allows them to manage future volatility, Toby Copson, global head of trading and advisory at Trident LNG in Shanghai, told Bloomberg.

I would expect to see more.

By Tsvetana Paraskova for Oilprice.com

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Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen will be the next top Biden admin official to try and calm spiraling relations with China, as the Treasury Department confirmed Sunday she'll travel to Beijing this week, Thursday through Sunday, for meetings with senior officials, in what will mark the first trip of her tenure.

"While in Beijing, Secretary Yellen will discuss with [Peoples Republic of China] officials the importance for our countries  as the worlds two largest economies  to responsibly manage our relationship, communicate directly about areas of concern, and work together to address global challenges," Treasury said in the statement.

However, a Treasury official sought to temper expectations, saying no breakthrough is expected, following Secretary of State Blinken's mid-June trip where he met with President Xi Jinping. Any positive opening created by Blinken's trip was damaged when within days of his return to Washington, President Biden during a campaign event in California called Xi a "dictator".

"The reason why Xi Jinping got very upset in terms of when I shot that balloon down with two box cars full of spy equipment is he didnt know it was there," Biden had said nearly two weeks ago. "No, Im serious," he added. "That was the great embarrassment for dictators, when they didnt know what happened."

Yellen had been in Paris at the time, and attempted to soften the remarks before a press conference, saying of Biden's remarks which had outraged Bejing officials, "With respect to the comments, I think President Biden and I both believe its critical to maintain communication to clear up misperceptions, miscalculations. We need to work together where possible." Related: Oil, EVs, And Big Tech Hit The Ground Running In The Second Half



"But we have disagreements, and we are also forthright in recognizing we do have disagreements," Yellen added. But as The Associated Press noted in follow-up, Biden has not reversed in assessment amid China's wrath:

President Joe Biden said Thursday that his comments calling Chinese leader Xi Jinping a "dictator" did not undermine progress in the U.S. relationship with China and that he expects to meet with Xi in the future.

Biden said his blunt statements regarding China are "just not something Im going to change very much."

Yellen's upcoming trip set amidst a backdrop of concerns over fragmenting global economy, as Barron's underscores, "US companies such as Apple that have long relied on China as a manufacturing base are moving production elsewhere, and tit-for-tat restrictions on exports of semiconductors shows how uneasy relations have become." The publication further noted a glimmer of optimism in markets on the news of Yellen's trip:

The Hang Seng Index rose 2.2% on Monday. China-exposed stocks such as Taiwan Semiconductor (2330.TAIWAN) and Nvidia (NVDA) were rising in premarket trading. Apple , (APPL) which recently topped a $3 trillion valuation, was little changed.

But the recent angry rhetoric from Beijing is likely to return this week for the time being, given former Vice President Mike Pence has added his voice to the Xi "dictator" commentary.

He told CBS's Margaret Brennan in a Sunday interview when asked if Xi is a dictator: "I think its a statement of fact." Pence said that "theres no more effective way to send a deafening message to communist China to check their military ambitions in the Asia Pacific" than continuing to steadily give arms to Ukraine to repel Russia.

"I guarantee you President Xi is watching whats happening in Ukraine very carefully," Pence asserted. "We give the Ukrainians, much more quickly than Joe Bidens doing now, we give them what they need to win this fight to repel the Russian invasion."

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He then pivoted to the case of Taiwan. "The United States of America should continue to be providing  Taiwan with the military means to defend themselves," he said. "What we want is a policy of deterrence." Pence is just coming off a trip to Kiev where he met with Zelensky days ago. Zelensky over the weekend took a swipe at Congressional GOP members who are not on board, warning that some Republicans have a "dangerous" message concerning lessening support for Ukraine. As for China, it has long condemned any comparisons between the Ukraine and Taiwan situations.

By Zerohedge.com

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When EU member states finally approved the bloc's latest sanctions package against Russia on June 23, perhaps the most interesting feature was a new anti-circumvention framework aimed at third countries. Although this framework for the moment very much remains an empty canvas, it has now given Brussels the legal tools to do two things: Draw up a list of products made in the bloc that it believes are being sent to Russia via third countries, and another register in which third countries can be named and hence will no longer be able to import things from the EU.

This move will, in theory, bring the EU closer to the "secondary sanctions" that the United States is already applying around the globe -- a framework designed to prevent or restrict third countries from trading with countries subject to U.S. sanctions. And there is little doubt that the new EU tool might come in handy going forward.

Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, and Poland have all pointed out that, in 2022, exports of potential dual-use goods -- items that can be used for both civilian and military purposes -- to Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, and Uzbekistan grew more than 62 percent, 83 percent, and 30 percent, respectively, compared to the previous year.

The EUs sanctions implementation envoy, David O'Sullivan, has in recent months traveled extensively to both Central Asia and places such as Armenia and Georgia to hammer home the message that items, or parts of them, imported from the EU to other countries have been found in Russian military equipment and weapons used in its war against Ukraine. A senior EU official with knowledge of the matter, speaking under the condition of anonymity, noted that we are seeing circumvention. Look at the envoy and where he is traveling. There is evidence that something is happening.

Deep Background: The big question, however, is if the EU will ever use this instrument. The smart money is that it wont, and that the lists will remain empty. Pretty much all of the EU officials I have spoken to essentially say the same thing: It is a last-resort measure, only to be used when all other things have failed -- notably, more intense diplomacy.

I hear that this is a tool designed for OSullivan to threaten the countries he travels to with, but nothing more. And people familiar with the topic also explain to me that Brussels isnt at all keen to push countries into the arms of Russia and China. This is the sort of tool that would accomplish exactly that.

As evidence, they point to countries like Serbia and Georgia that, despite their refusal to align with EU sanctions on Moscow -- even to the point of allowing Russian flights to land on their soil -- still havent faced any negative consequences from Brussels for their actions.

Finally, there is the issue of unanimity, which is needed for any listing under this new framework. Right now, it is hard to see all 27 EU member states seeing eye to eye on this.

Drilling Down

One of the reasons for the skepticism is that Germany, backed notably by Italy, worked very hard to make the sanctions text on this issue longer and more complicated. Several EU officials familiar with the matter told me that Germany was even keen to remove the possibility of listing specific third countries, but that this was resisted by most other EU member states.

When the sanctions package with this proposal was first presented by the European Commission in early May, there were hopes in Brussels that it would be agreed on rather quickly, as it wasnt the most comprehensive measures ever proposed by the EU. Yet it took nearly two months to reach an agreement, largely due to Berlin continuously insisting on various clarifications of the anti-circumvention language.

Having seen both the original text, as proposed by the European Commission, and the final version agreed by member states, it is clear just how difficult it will be to do anything with this anti-circumvention instrument. And it is obvious that the EU will first exhaust all diplomatic tools available before any restrictive measures are proposed.

Both documents spell out that the [EU] recognizes the efforts made by national authorities in many third countries to stem the flow of goods, technology, and services that are covered by the restrictive measures adopted by the [EU] in response to Russias war of aggression against Ukraine. The [EU] should further support third countries in that endeavor -- interestingly, the final agreed text adds with all available means at the end.

The adopted text also outlines other steps that first must be taken before a third country is targeted, which includes that the EU's foreign policy chief and the European Commission must brief the member states on all technical details and outreach actions taken before any proposal for sanctioning is to be submitted.

It is also stated that such info must include available trade data demonstrating that the alternative measures taken have been ineffective, as well as information about the efforts carried out by the [EU] to address the matter with the third country in question, and a clear indication that such efforts were not successful.

But thats not all. Before a decision is taken, Brussels must also inform and actively seek the views of the government of that third country on the basis of the preliminary findings set out in the technical analysis by the [European] Commission and the [EU's] intended remedial action.

Finally, it is clearly stated that the EU member states should be informed of all steps of the engagement and of the outcome and that a final decision only can be taken unanimously after the final outreach to that third country has been concluded.

By RFE/RL

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Some Indian refiners have paid in Chinese yuan for part of the crude oil cargoes they have bought from Russia, sources have told Reuters, as Moscow seeks alternatives to the U.S. dollar amid the sanctions while India looks to buy crude at discounts.

India has become a top customer of Russias crude, alongside China, after the Western sanctions and the price cap on Russian oil. Indias crude oil imports from Russia are estimated to have hit a new record high of 2.2 million barrels per day (bpd) in June, having risen in 10 consecutive months.

More than a year since the Russian invasion of Ukraine began, India has turned from a marginal buyer of Russian crude to the most important market for Moscows oil alongside China. Indian refiners, not complying with the G7 price cap and looking for cheap opportunistic purchases, have snapped up many of the Russian Urals cargoes, which used to go to northwest Europe before the EU embargo.

State-held giant Indian Oil Corporation became the first Indian state refiner to pay in yuan for Russian crude oil in June, according to three Reuters sources. At least two of the three private refiners have also settled crude trades in yuan in recent weeks, other sources told Reuters.

The first preference of the Indian refiners is to pay in U.S. dollars, but if thats not possible, for example, banks unwilling to settle trades with Russia in dollars, payments in other currencies are being made, such as in UAE dirhams or Chinese yuan, an anonymous government source told Reuters.

The yuan payments for Russian crude oil are part of both Russia and Chinas efforts to sideline the U.S. dollar as the currency of choice in international trade.

Over the past year, Russia has turned to trade in yuan in the wake of the Western sanctions on its exports, imports, and energy trade, as the Chinese currency has become Putins only alternative to reducing exposure to the U.S. dollar and the euro, and limiting the fallout of the sanctions that have seen Russian state assets seized in Western countries.

By Charles Kennedy for Oilprice.com

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Saudi Arabia is expected to reduce the price of its crude oil going to Asia in August to reflect market movements, a Reuters survey of six Asian refining sources showed on Monday.

Saudi Aramco, the worlds top crude oil exporter, is set to reduce the official selling price (OSP) for the flagship Saudi grade, Arab Light, by around $0.50 per barrel compared to the loadings for July, according to the Reuters poll.

Saudi Arabia typically announces on the fifth of each month the OSPs for the following month and its pricing policy is generally followed by most of the other large Middle Eastern crude oil exporters.

Last month, Saudi Arabia raised the OSP for its flagship grade Arab Light for Asia for July by $0.45 per barrel to a premium of $3.00 over the Oman/Dubai average, off which Middle East crude for Asia is priced. The price for July was the highest premium against the Oman/Dubai benchmark in six months.

The price hike came as a surprise to the market, which had expected a cut in prices.

A day before the price hike for July, the OPEC+ producers decided to keep the current cuts until the end of 2024, while OPECs top producer, Saudi Arabia, said it would voluntarily reduce its production by 1 million bpd in July, to around 9 million bpd. The cut could be extended beyond July, Saudi Energy Minister Prince Abdulaziz bin Salman said.

For August, Asian refiners expect the Saudis to cut the OSPs for Arab Extra Light, Arab Light, and Arab Medium, while some refiners expect Arab Heavy prices to be raised, according to the Reuters poll.

Last months unexpected price hike has reduced refining margins at the Asian refiners who now expect the Saudis to cut prices.

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Saudi needs to trim prices to reflect the market movements. They have gone a bit too far from the reality in the past few months, one respondent in the Reuters survey said.

By Tsvetana Paraskova for Oilprice.com

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Via AG Metal Miner

Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi recently visited the United States. During his stay, the two nations agreed to resolve six long-standing disputes at the World Trade Organization (WTO). U.S. steel news outlets watched this exchange particularly closely. This is because one of the subjects of debate was Indias imposition of retaliatory tariffs on U.S. products, including steel. Many analysts expect this development to stimulate trade between the U.S. and India while offering crucial tax benefits to Indian exporters.

According to a report in The Economic Times, U.S. Trade Representative Katherine Tai recently confirmed that India would remove the retaliatory tariffs it imposed in response to the U.S. Section 232 national security measures on steel and aluminum.

Indias Commerce Minister Piyush Goyal also confirmed these reports. Specifically, he mentioned that Mr. Modis visit to the U.S. led to a significant announcement from President Joe Biden and other high-ranking officials. In the announcement, Biden assured markets that most of Indias imported steel and aluminum products would not suffer additional scrutiny.

Indian and U.S. Steel News Outlets React Positively

So far, Indian experts seem to feel that excluding most Indian imports from additional scrutiny will prove a welcome relief for businesses. After all, the country is a major exporter of steel and aluminum products to the U.S. Earlier, to protect its domestic industry, the U.S. had imposed tariffs and trade restrictions on steel and aluminum imports from various countries, including India. With this new decision, the industry hopes to see a positive shift in the United States approach to trade relations with India.

The two countries plan to resolve the disputes through mutual agreement and subsequently inform the WTO in Geneva about the resolution. This is crucial considering the sheer volume of trade between the two nations. Indeed, the bilateral goods trade between India and the U.S. experienced a rise to $128.8 billion in 2022-23 from $119.5 billion in 2021-22. Moreover, many analysts expect these tariff cuts to reinstate and expand market opportunities for American agricultural producers and manufacturers.

The Move Ends Five Years of Harsh Tariffs

According to a news report in BusinessWorld, under the newly established market access agreement, the U.S. Department of Commerce will approve 70% of steel and 80% of aluminum applications for products originating in India. It will be the importers responsibility to submit applications on behalf of the exporters through the Section 232 exclusion process.

In 2018, the U.S. implemented import duties of 25% on specific steel products and 10% on certain aluminum products. At the time, officials cited concerns related to national security. In response, India imposed customs duties on 28 American products. India also lodged a complaint against the U.S. at the WTO concerning the imposition of these duties.

By Sohrab Darabshaw

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A 17-year-old was killed and another teenager was injured early Monday in a one-vehicle crash near Springfield, Nebraska.

The crash occurred about 12:25 a.m. at 168th Street and Fairview Road, according to a spokesman for the Sarpy County Sheriff's Office. A 2004 Lexus ES330 was headed eastbound on Fairview Road when the driver tried to turn onto 168th Street and lost control of the vehicle, which then rolled, according to the Sheriff's Office.

James Sullivan, the driver, was pronounced dead at the scene.

A 17-year-old passenger was taken to an Omaha hospital in critical condition with injuries that were not considered life-threatening.
A 67-year-old Lincoln man was sentenced last week to 14 years in federal prison after he was convicted of possessing child pornography while on parole for sexually assaulting a child.

John Burton was found guilty of the charge after a two-day jury trial in February. He faced a mandatory minimum of 10 years in prison because of the prior sex offense conviction.

According to a press release from the U.S. Attorneys Office, the FBI received a tip in April 2019 from a law enforcement agency in England that a computer with an IP address in Lincoln had twice accessed a child pornography website. That IP address led the FBI to Burtons residence.

At the time, Burton was on parole after serving 11 years in a Missouri prison for the sexual assault of a child younger than 14. He had been released in 2018 and was living in Lincoln with his elderly father.

A search warrant was executed on Burtons home in November 2020. Across multiple devices seized, investigators found more than 200 videos and 1,800 photos containing child pornography.

Burton was indicted in February 2021, and the case went to trial in February of this year.

According to court filings, Burtons defense argued at trial that its possible someone else  namely Burtons father  was the person who downloaded the child pornography. Multiple witnesses testified that Burtons father, who died before the trial began, had a history of child molestation allegations.

The jury was not convinced by Burtons argument, and they returned a guilty verdict in a little over an hour. Senior U.S. District Court Judge John Gerrard was similarly unimpressed.

The jury did not believe you, and neither do I, Gerrard said to Burton at sentencing.

Upon Burtons release from custody, he will be required to serve 10 years of supervised release. He has also been ordered to pay $21,000 in restitution.
Lassa Fever: Nigeria records five new deaths in three states

Five new deaths have been recorded in three states in the ongoing Lassa fever outbreak in Nigeria.

The states are Edo, Ondo and Bauchi.

The Nigeria Centre for Disease Control (NCDC) in its weekly situation report on the outbreak also said 15 new cases were reported in six states.

Reporting for week 12, NCDC said the 15 new cases were reported in Edo (4), Ondo (3), Plateau (2), Bauchi (3), Taraba (2) and Ebonyi (1) with five new deaths in Edo (2), Ondo (2) and Bauchi (1) States.

Specialist doctors leaving Nasarawa State  Official

The Nigeria Medical Association (NMA) has decried the exit of about 10 consultant physicians from the services of the Nasarawa State Government over poor staff welfare.

The NMA state chairman, Bulu Umaru, said 10 consultant physicians had left the service of the state government since June 2018.

According to him, some of the consultants were even leaving to take up jobs in neighbouring states with lower salaries in order to guarantee their career progression.

Abortion Subsidy: U.S. to stop paying to kill unborn babies  Pompeo

The U.S. will further clamp down on the use of foreign aid for non-governmental organisations that support abortions or work with groups that help women access the medical service, an official said.

The U.S. Secretary of State, Mike Pompeo, said this as he announced new limitations on the use of federal government funds in Washington.

We can continue to meet our critical global health goals while refusing to subsidise the killing of unborn babies, Mr Pompeo said.

He said the new measures would include strict prohibition on back door schemes meant to help funnel money to organisations working on womens health and that support abortion.

Number of Ebola cases in Congo exceeds 1,000

The number of Ebola cases in Congo has exceeded 1,000, as the second-largest outbreak of the virus continues to wreak havoc in the central African country.

A total of 629 people have died of Ebola in the outbreak in eastern Congo, which began shortly after the government declared an end to another outbreak in the west of the country in June 2018.

Some 320 people had recovered, placing the average survival rate within treatment centres at more than 60 per cent, the ministry statement said.

More than 91,000 people have been vaccinated against the virus since August.

Union advocates revitalisation of Nigerias healthcare system

The Medical and Health Workers Union of Nigeria (MHWUN) has appealed to President Muhammadu Buhari to revitalise the nations healthcare system by returning the management of health institutions to hospital administrators.

Josiah Biobelemoye, the president of the union, made the call at the 10th quadrennial delegate conference held under the theme: Advancing national campaign toward good governance, poverty alleviation and  Health for all for development.

Mr Biobelemoye explained that hospital administrators have not only been trained for such functions but also possess the professional attitude to manage these institutions without fear or favour of any professional body.

He described the past four years as the worst years in the health sector, attributing the challenges to the selfish interest and insensitivity of those at the helm of affairs in the sector to the plights of the masses.

Poor lung function in shorter people linked to increased risk of heart disease

Results from a study led by researchers from Queen Mary University of London has found that an association between shorter stature and a higher risk of heart disease is mainly attributed to our lungs.

In the study, published in the journal Communications Biology, researchers examined over 800 places in the human genome known to be associated with adult height and also evaluated data suggesting that lower height increases the risk of developing type 2 diabetes and coronary heart disease.

The authors found no evidence of a causal link between height and type 2 diabetes risk once an individuals body mass index was taken into account but reported a causal relationship between height and heart disease risk.

Time-restricted eating may prevent tumour growth

Researchers have already identified obesity as a risk factor for cancer, so some doctors recommend reducing caloric intake to help prevent tumours.

However, a new study now finds that prevention may be less about how many calories you consume and more about when you eat your meals.

The study suggests that rather than changing what they eat to prevent tumour growth, a person may benefit from simply timing their meals differently.
The Peoples Democratic Party (PDP) has won 111 seats in the House of Representatives, compared to a majority of 211 seats clinched by the ruling All Progressives Congress (APC).

According to the list of the ninth House of Representatives members-elect on the website of the Independent National Electoral Commission,
A suspect, Abdullahi Isa, has been arrested by the police on June 30th for dehumanising, locking up and starvating his wife for nearly two years in Maiduguri.

When contacted, the Women and Childrens rights activist, Comrade Lucy D. Yunana, explained that Bulama of Gwange (3) took her staff to the suspects residence where the woman had been locked up for nearly two years.

The suspect by the name Isa Abdullahi of Gwange (3) in Maiduguri Metropolitan Council is the husband of the survivor (name withheld).#

ALSO READ: Man arrested for robbing with fake gun

We were informed that it was the neighbours that fed her, she has not been given food but most of the time neighbours usually sneaked in and give her food.

Thankfully, our staff were conducting some awareness on SGBV in Gwange when Bulama of the area took our staff to the house where she was locked in and what they saw was indeed trrible and prompted us to inform the relevant authority to save the womans life.
Human rights activist and former federal lawmaker, Shehu Sani has condemned the alleged humongous severance packages handed to the ousted Service Chiefs.

The former senator made this known in a post via a recent tweet on his social media page.

Shehu Sani in the now-viral post, wondered why the ex-Service Chiefs should be rewarded with such enticing benefits by the Nigerian government after leaving the citizens of the country in the hands of terrorists and bandits.

READ ALSO: Shehu Sani reacts to viral video of presidential convoy (Video)

His reaction followed reports that the Chief of Defence Staff and the other Service Chiefs got bulletproof Sport Utility Vehicles (SUV), personal aides, guards and other perks of office, including generous allowance for medical treatment abroad, as retirement benefits.

Taking to his verified Twitter handle, he wrote: The other service chiefs left us with terrorists and were rewarded with ambassadorial appointments; these ones left us with bandits and were rewarded with SUVs.

President Bola Tinubu sacked all Service Chiefs, the Inspector-General of Police, Advisers and the Comptroller-General of Customs, a few weeks after his inauguration on May 29.

The former Lagos State governor also replaced them with new appointees.
July 02, (THEWILL)  The Federal Government has expressed strong objections to the European Unions (EU) alleged attempts to discredit the 2023 general elections in Nigeria.

The EU mission, on Tuesday, in its final report on the 2023 general elections, presented by its chief observer, Barry Andrews, said the 2023 elections lacked transparency, fraudulent and exposed enduring systemic weaknesses.

Faulting the report on Sunday, a statement by Dele Alake, Special Adviser to the President on Special Duties, Communication and Strategy, emphasised that February 25 presidential election, won by the All Progressives Congress (APC) candidate, President Bola Ahmed Tinubu, was transparent, fair and the most well-organised since Nigerias transition to civil rule in 1999.

Alake said, Sometimes in May, we alerted the nation, through a press statement, to the plan by a continental multi-lateral institution to discredit the 2023 general elections conducted by the Independent National Electoral Commission.

The main target was the presidential election, clearly and fairly won by the then candidate of All Progressives Congress, Bola Ahmed Tinubu.

While we did not mention the name of the organisation in the said statement, we made it abundantly clear to Nigerians how this foreign institution had been unrelenting in its assault on the credibility of the electoral process, the sovereignty of our country and on our ability as a people to organise ourselves.

We find it preposterous and unconscionable that in this day and age, any foreign organisation of whatever hue can continue to insist on its own yardstick and assessment as the only way to determine the credibility and transparency of our elections.

Now that the organisation has submitted what it claimed to be its final report on the elections, we can now categorically let Nigerians and the entire world know that we were not unaware of the machinations of the European Union to sustain its, largely, unfounded bias and claims on the election outcomes.

For emphasis, we want to reiterate that the 2023 general elections, most especially the presidential election, won by President Bola Tinubu/All Progressives Congress, were credible, peaceful, free, fair and the best organised general elections in Nigeria since 1999.

There is no substantial evidence provided by the European Union or any foreign and local organisation that is viable enough to impeach the integrity of the 2023 election outcomes.

Alake faulted the limited scope of the EUs assessment, highlighting the fact that their observers monitored the elections through only 11 analysts based in Abuja and 40 observers spread across the 36 states and the Federal Capital Territory.

He questioned the credibility of the EUs conclusions, given their limited coverage of the vast number of polling units, which amounted to over 176,000 across Nigeria.

Expressing doubts about the EUs independence, Alake said their report relied more on rumours, uninformed social media commentaries, and opposition talking heads.

He argued that the EUs final report seemed to sustain the same biased stance as their preliminary report released in March, casting doubts on its objectivity.

Alake emphasised that numerous non-partisan foreign and local observers, including the African Union, ECOWAS, Commonwealth Observer Mission, and the Nigerian Bar Association, had validated the credibility and transparency of the elections.

He highlighted the comprehensive report by the Nigerian Bar Association, which deployed over 1,000 observers throughout the country. According to their assessment, 91.8% of Nigerians rated the conduct of the national and state elections as credible and satisfactory.

Commending the INEC for defending the integrity of the election and rejecting the false narratives presented in the EU report, Alake said, It is heart-warming that INEC, through its National Commissioner for Information and Voter Education, Mr Festus Okoye, has come out to defend the integrity of the election it conducted by rejecting the false narratives in the EU report.

He also acknowledged INECs commitment to embracing ideas, innovations, and reforms aimed at further enhancing the integrity and credibility of the electoral process.

With the elections concluded, Alake said President Tinubu is now focused on the arduous task of nation-building, adding that despite ongoing legal challenges, Nigerians have expressed satisfaction with President Tinubus decisive leadership and his efforts to redirect the country towards fiscal sustainability and socio-economic reforms within just one month in office.

He charged the EU and other foreign interests to approach their assessments of Nigerias internal affairs with objectivity, allowing the country to move forward without undue interference.

As a country, we have put the elections behind us. President Tinubu is facing the arduous task of nation-building, while those who have reasons to challenge the process continue to do so through the courts.

In just one month in office, Nigerians appear satisfied with the decisive leadership of President Tinubu and the manner he is redirecting the country to the path of fiscal sustainability and socio-economic reforms.

We urge the EU and other foreign interests to be objective in all their assessments of the internal affairs of our country and allow Nigeria to breathe, he added.
Governor Agbu Kefas of Taraba State has imposed a 24-hour curfew on Karim town, the headquarters of Karim Lamido Government Area (LGA) and its environs effective July 2, 2023.

The curfew followed renewed communal conflicts in some parts of the local government area after the killing of over thirty lives.

According to the governors Chief Press Secretary, Yusuf Sanda in a statement, security agencies have been mandated to ensure strict compliance and any person or group of persons found violating the order should be dealt with in accordance with the law.

All ward heads, village heads, traditional rulers, and stakeholders in Karim Lamido LGA are advised to take note of the development, the statement concluded.

In other news, Kanyi Daily reported that President Bola Tinubu on Sunday departed Lagos for Abuja, Nigerias capital city.

Tinubu has been in Lagos since Tuesday last week after he returned from France.

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By Joshua Chibuzo Andrew, Owerri

Governor Hope Uzodinma of Imo state has stipulated the sum of N54.3million as the mandatory Permit fee for Governorship candidates in the state to display and disseminate their campaign messages.

This was brought to light Saturday by the G-12 chieftains of the Imo state Inter-Party Advisory Council (IPAC), who described the policy executed through the Imo Signage and Advertising Agency (IMSAA) as obnoxious and a deliberate stifling of opposition political views in utter violation of the constitution of the Federal Republic of Nigeria

.

Speaking on behalf of the 12 party chairmen of the Imo IPAC G-12, Elder Uchendu Ahaneku of the Action Alliance (AA) regretted that Governor Hope Uzodinma, through IMSAA may have deliberately contrived a policy contrary to the provisions of the constitution and Electoral Act to cripple the campaign activities of opposition political parties by barring them from conveying and selling their political manifestos to Imo people, through the obnoxious IMSAA restrictions.

From all intents and purposes the policy is deliberately targeted at opposition political parties and their governorship candidates; to stifle their voices, shut down their campaigns and confer an undue advantage to Governor Hope Uzodinma who is running in the same November 11 election to retain his seat as Governor of Imo state.

Until the governor proves otherwise, IMSAA has become a political tool used by Governor Uzodinma to harass and intimidate political parties and opponents through the obnoxious demand of N54.3million campaign permit fee, which paves the way for only APC to run an elaborate governorship campaign.

Ahaneku however noted that the party chieftains have already put machinery in motion to challenge the exploitative policy in the court of law.

Speaking also, Prince Marshal Okaforanyanwu of the Social Democratic Party accused Uzodinma of intentionally weaponizing IMSAA and other agencies of government for his unjust political advantage. He observed that nowhere in Nigeria has such devious machination to undermine the opposition through unlawful policies, been seen or heard of since Nigerias return to democracy in 1999.

Uzodinma is not interested in a fair contest come November 11, all his after is how he will return unopposed as governor. Ofcourse it has been the story of his life, he has never engaged in fair political context which is a true test of popularity among the citizens. Nevertheless , the opposition will not be cowed by the shenanigans of the Imo state government and for the avoidance of doubt, we shall interrogate this obnoxious lawin court and seek appropriate redress, Okaforanyanwu stressed.

Meanwhile, according to IMSAA the permit fee for governorship candidates to advertise and publicize their campaign messages is N54.3million with non-refundable processing fee of N100,000; site inspection fee of N50,000 and approval fee of N150,000, bring everything to a total of N54.3million for every Governorship candidate in Imo state.

IMSAA noted in their fee schedule that even after paying the stipulated N54.3million, that IMSAA reserves the right to reject any application.

Further study of the payment schedules shows that IMSAA may be bent on restricting the reach and spread of opposition governorship candidates when it added a clause to its fee demands that the permit allows candidates to display messages only within permitted areas of Imo state.

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President Bola Tinubu on Sunday arrived in Abuja from Lagos where he had observed the Eid-el-Kabir holidays.

The Presidents aircraft touched down at the Nnamdi Azikiwe International Airport, Abuja, around 05:00 pm local time.

Until Sunday, Tinubu has been away from Abuja for nearly two weeks.

In that time, he attended the summit for a New Global Financing Pact hosted by French President Emmanuel Macron in Paris and later moved to London for a private visit.

Tinubu who arrived in Lagos on Tuesday, June 27, spent the next few days visiting several monarchs in the Ogun State and Lagos.

They include the Paramount ruler of Ijebuland, Oba Sikiru Adetona, in Ijebu-Ode and Alake of Egbaland, Oba Adedotun Gbadebo, in Abeokuta.

While there, he affirmed that although the new naira policy of the Buhari administration left some sections of his campaign apparatus cash-strapped, it did not thwart his chances of victory in the February 2023 elections.

Tinubu who reflected on the challenges in the build-up to the 2023 presidential election recounted his concerns about the confiscation of funds and the failure of the cashless policy, saying he sought wisdom and guidance from Oba Adetona during his visit to the palace.

He thanked both monarchs for their loyalty and commitment during those crucial times in the 2023 election.

On Saturday, the President received his Bissau Guinean counterpart, Umaro Embalo, who paid him a courtesy visit.

Speaking of the private meeting between both leaders Tinubus Special Adviser on Special Duties, Communications and Strategy, Dele Alake, said the President is ready to lead the charge on the local and foreign scenes as the rest of Africa looks up to Nigeria.

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Everybody is looking up to Nigeria, especially in Africa and the ECOWAS region and President Tinubu is ready to take up the gauntlet, had said.

Alake said Tinubu recognises that other African nations are taking cues from Nigeria in terms of leadership. Therefore, he is prepared to step up to the challenge of providing a befitting example.

Saturdays visit also allowed Embalo, who is currently the Chairman of the ECOWAS Authority of Heads of State and Government, to reinforce the fraternal relations between the two countries, the spokesman revealed.

Tinubu returns amidst uncertainty about his list of prospective ministers, whom, according to sources who spoke to The PUNCH, are being background checked by the Department of State Services.

In March, the then Special Adviser to the president-elect, Alake, said Tinubu would convene his cabinet within one month of assuming office.

Alake said this is in line with the Fifth Amendment to the Constitution mandating presidents-elect and governors-elect to submit the names of their ministerial and commissioner nominees within 60 days of taking the oath of office for confirmation by the Senate or state House of Assembly.

He said, I told you in an earlier interview that it didnt take Asiwaju more than three weeks to form his cabinet as governor.

That was as at that time. I think 60 days is even too much.

A month, maximum, is enough for any serious government to form its cabinet and put a structure of government in place after the swearing-in.

In 2015, Nigerians lamented the delay by the Buhari administration in appointing ministers, which took about six months to form its cabinet.
President Bola Tinubu has rejected the European Union Elections Observation Mission, EU-EOM, report on the 2023 general elections in the country.

The government described it as a reflection of a plan to discredit the election, especially the presidential election won by President Bola Tinubu.

This is contained in a statement issued by Dele Alake, special adviser to the President on Special Duties, Communications and Strategy, on Sunday in Abuja.

Sometimes in May, we alerted the nation, through a press statement, to the plan by a continental multi-lateral institution to discredit the 2023 general elections conducted by the Independent National Electoral Commission.

The main target was the presidential election, clearly and fairly won by the then candidate of All Progressives Congress, Bola Ahmed Tinubu.

While we did not mention the name of the organisation in the said statement, we made it abundantly clear to Nigerians how this foreign institution had been unrelenting in its assault on the credibility of the electoral process, the sovereignty of our country and on our ability as a people to organise ourselves.

We find it preposterous and unconscionable that in this day and age, any foreign organisation of whatever hue can continue to insist on its own yardstick and assessment as the only way to determine the credibility and transparency of our elections, he stated.

Mr Alake said that with the submission of the organisations report, it has shown that it was the machinations of the European Union to sustain its unfounded bias and claims on the election outcomes.

He asserted that the 2023 general elections, especially the presidential election won by Tinubu, were credible, free, fair and the best organised general elections in Nigeria since 1999.

There is no substantial evidence provided by the European Union or any foreign and local organisation that is viable enough to impeach the integrity of the 2023 election outcomes.

It is worth restating that the limitation of EU final assessment and conclusions on our elections was made very bare in the text of the press conference addressed by the Head of its Electoral Observation Mission, Barry Andrews.

While addressing journalists in Abuja on the so-called final report, Andrews noted that EU-EOM monitored the pre-election and post-election processes in Nigeria from January 11 to April 11, 2023, as an INEC accredited election monitoring group.

Within this period, EU-EOM observed the elections through 11 Abuja-based analysts, and 40 election observers spread across 36 states and the Federal Capital Territory, according to him.

He stressed that: With the level of personnel deployed, which was barely an average of one person per state, we wonder how EU-EOM independently monitored elections in over 176,000 polling units across Nigeria.

We would like to know and even ask EU, how it reached the conclusions in the submitted final report with the very limited coverage of the elections by their observers who, without doubt, relied more on rumours, hearsay, cocktails of prejudiced and uninformed social media commentaries and opposition talking heads.

We are convinced that what EU-EOM called final report on our recent elections is a product of a poorly done desk job that relied heavily on few instances of skirmishes in less than 1000 polling units out of over 176,000 where Nigerians voted on election day.

Mr Alake said that the report was to merely sustain the same premature denunciation stance contained in EUs preliminary report released in March.

We strongly reject, in its entirety, any notion and idea from any organisation, group and individual remotely suggesting that the 2023 election was fraudulent.

Our earlier position that the technology-aided 2023 general elections were the most transparent and best organised elections since the return of civil rule in Nigeria has been validated by all non-partisan foreign and local observers such are the African Union, ECOWAS, Commonwealth Observer Mission and the Nigerian Bar Association.

Unlike EU-EOM that deployed fewer than 50 observers, the Nigerian Bar Association that sent out over 1000 observers spread across the entire country for same election gave a more holistic and accurate assessment of the elections in their own report.

NBA, an organisation of eminent lawyers and an important voice within the civic space, reported that 91.8 per cent of Nigerians rated the conduct of the national and state elections as credible and satisfactory. Any election that over 90% of the citizens considered transparent should be celebrated anywhere in the world, Mr Alake added.

He noted that the INEC, through its National Commissioner for Information and Voter Education, Festus Okoye, had come out to defend the integrity of the election it conducted by rejecting the false narratives in the EU report.

It is also gratifying that the electoral umpire, as an institution that is open to learning and continuous improvements, has also committed to taking on board more ideas, innovation and reforms that will further enhance the integrity and credibility of our electoral process.

As a country, we have put the elections behind us. President Tinubu is facing the arduous task of nation-building, while those who have reasons to challenge the process continue to do so through the courts.

In just one month in office, Nigerians appear satisfied with the decisive leadership of President Tinubu and the manner he is redirecting the country to the path of fiscal sustainability and socio-economic reforms.

We urge the EU and other foreign interests to be objective in all their assessments of the internal affairs of our country and allow Nigeria to breathe, the statement read in part.

NAN
Deji Elumoye in Abuja

President Bola Tinubu has recognised that Nigeria is being looked upon for leadership, and he is prepared to step up to the challenge, his Special Adviser on Special Duties, Communications, and Strategy, Mr. Dele Alake, has said.

Addressing journalists yesterday after the visit of President Umaro Sissoco Embalo of the Republic of Guinea Bissau to President Tinubu at his Ikoyi, Lagos residence, Alake explained that the visit was private.

Alake however, disclosed that President Embalo took the opportunity to express his solidarity and willingness to cooperate with Nigeria under the leadership of President Tinubu.

According to him: Everybody is looking up to Nigeria, especially in Africa and the ECOWAS region and President Tinubu is ready to take up the gauntlet.

He also highlighted that the visit allowed Embalo, who is currently the Chairman of the ECOWAS Authority of Heads of State and Government, to reinforce the fraternal relations between the two countries.

His words: President Embalo commended the laudable policy initiatives of President Tinubu in the last month and added that everyone in the international community has been commending the giant strides of the Nigerian leader.

He came to pay his solidarity and bond with a brother African Head of State, in the first instance, and in particular as a brother Head of State in West Africa.

This is a very commendable sign of things to come in the entire West African region in terms of the atmosphere being generated by Nigerias giant steps in the last one month, and the need for Nigeria to take its rightful place in African affairs.

On the entourage of the visiting Bissau-Guinean leader were his Special Adviser, Caramo Camara; Chief of Staff, Califa Soares and Diplomatic Advisor, Ambassador Alfredo Cabral; and Image Operator, Bonifacio Correia.

Lagos State Governor, Babajide Sanwo-Olu, who had earlier received the visiting President at the Presidential Wing of Murtala Muhammed International Airport, Ikeja, and the Chief of Staff to the President, Hon Femi Gbajabiamila were also present during the visit.
An Esan proverb says, Its in the mouth of an elder that the maize is strong. Thats, its an elder  with farming experience  that can decide if the corn is mature to harvest.

Figuratively, though, only the bold, courageous and unwavering can broach what the lily-livered cant contemplate.

Fittingly, His Royal Majesty, Omo NOba NEdo Uku Akpolokpolo, Oba Ewuare II, Oba of Benin, has lately admonished leaders to pursue the peoples collective interest.

Like his forebears  from Oba Erediauwa I to Oba Akenzua II down the ages  Oba Ewuare seldom speaks in public. When he does, its to tell truth to power.

Its usually when that power is present, either at the Palace of the Oba in downtown Benin City, the capital of Edo State, or when the Oba pays a visit to the subject.

If the subject visits the Royal Court, the Omo NOba will deliver his punch, as he formally responds to the subjects reason for the courtesy. (If the Oba visits, the uppercut will rank in his address)

It doesnt matter if the subject touches on the theme of the Obas remarks. Whats apt is, the Royal Father seizes on the moment to tell the subject the home truth.

Unlike most of his peer Royal Fathers, the Oba doesnt massage visitors egos in public, and draw their ears behind the scenes. On matters of public interest, hell censure them in the open!

On a thank-you-visit on June 20, former Minister of State for Budget and Planning, Prince Clem Agba, got a shocking appraisal from Oba Ewuare: Hed failed Edo people  on whose behalf he became Minister.

Agba ought to reciprocate in kind, and service the three senatorial districts of Edo State, rather than pander to sectional interest.

The Omo NOba noted Agbas appreciation of his intervention  writing to former President Buhari for Edo State to have two cabinet slots  that Agba benefitted from.

Yet, he said he couldnt remember seeing Agba on more than two occasions, first at a visit when the Oba complained about the flood in Benin, and at the expiration of Agbas tenure as Minister.

Omo NOba declared: I will keep certain things from the public domain. However, I am constrained to talk about them.

We interacted once in a while. It is true that my intervention to former President Buhari made you benefit from the office you held. We thank God for that.

But I was also wondering about many things, as you were a beneficiary of that office, Budget and Planning.

I was wondering if any of our people was also a beneficiary from your office! I am stating that they should thank you if anyone benefited from your being in the office.

Though he put Agba on the spot, saying he performed below expectation, Oba Ewuares posers were also directed at leaders with Agbas kind of opportunity.

He advised all Edo indigenes to use their good offices to attract development to the entire state, and to better the lots of the people.

An obviously dumbstruck Agba couldnt answer the pointed questions, or didnt want to, to avoid countering the revered Monarch. Either way, it wasnt a sign of good omen for Agba!

Agbas at the Palace to thank Oba Ewuare for his intervention that landed him cabinet appointment in 2019.

Hes also to brief the Oba on his stewardship, and efforts made to ensure the Benin Royal Museum  a project the Obas very passionate about  got an allocation from the Federal Government.

Agba began from the national level: I have come here with some of my friends and brothers, to thank His Royal Majesty, for his love for Edo State and your love for this country, Nigeria.

You will recall that after the elections, a lot of people thought that the country would go on fire; but His Royal Majesty continued to organize prayers to ensure that there is peace in our country, Nigeria.

So I thought it worthy of commendation that His Royal Majesty should be thanked for the prayers you offered to God and our ancestors.

On the homefront, Agba said: You will recall that in 2016, Edo State had one Minister in the cabinet of immediate past President of Nigeria, but in 2019, His Majesty wrote to the then Mr President to consider and let Edo have two Ministers.

I became a beneficiary of that prayer, and I happen to have become the first Minister from Edo North since 1999. I have come to His Majesty for that privilege of his prayers to Mr President, for which I am a beneficiary.

So, having done my job for three and half years and I completed it; I thought it wise to come back to His Majesty and thank you for your prayers; for your support and the advice that throughout the three and half years, I was a Minister So, I am indeed very grateful to His Majesty.

Agba took Oba Ewuares seeming rebuke with calmness, but some busybodies felt the Obas less charitable chiding Agba publicly, and denounced the Monarch.

But Agba issued a disclaimer and a cease-and-desist to the media warriors, as they werent known to him, nor fighting on his behalf.
The immediate past Minister of Finance, Mrs. Zainab Ahmed has landed a World Bank job as an Alternate Executive Director.

Baring hitches, she will resume at the banks headquarters in Washington on July 10.

However, there appears to be pushback from some interests who alleged that the former minister did not follow due process.

The Vanguard Newspaper quoted Washington sources as saying that Mrs. Ahmed circumvented appointment procedures by nominating herself.

The report also had it that the World Bank had requested for the nominations of three economists for an AED position, several months before the end of the President Muhammadu Buhari administration, but that the minister kept the letter to herself.

It was also alleged that the minister neither obtained President Buharis approval of her self-nomination nor the approval of the new President, Sen. Bola Tinubu.

However, a highly placed federal government source who is familiar with the World Bank system told Vanguard that Mrs. Ahmed did nothing wrong in the appointment.

According to the source, Its impossible (for her to nominate herself). And she didnt. She was validly nominated by the Ministry (of Finance) and President Buhari approved her nomination before he left.

This type of nomination is routine as a former DG Budget was nominated at the twilight of the Jonathan administration and nobody made any noise about it. Its truly unfair.

The former DG Budget was nominated as Executive Director, African Development Bank.

The source explained that the AED position is usually occupied by former Ministers of Finance (Governors of World Bank) or Permanent Secretaries in the Federal Ministries of Finance (Alternative Governor of World Bank).

He said, Also, please note that the ED from South Africa was a former South African Minister. The position is meant for either former Minister of Finance ( Governor World Bank) or Permanent Secretary Finance( Alternate Governor World Bank) ,i.e. those familiar with the development policy issues and transfer of real resources to developing countries.

And those who understand World Bank Executive Board issues and have helped in shaping World Bank decision making from the viewpoint of Authorities/member countries in recent times.

Its not a position for theoretical Economists who have not had any dealings with the Ministry of Finance in Sovereign member countries.
*Says army has bled, piled up wounded in action, number of widows, widowers swells

The Chief of Army Staff (COAS), Major General Taoreed Lagbaja, has enjoined troops of the Nigerian Army to complement their military effort with prayers for the success of the Army in its operational engagements and the corporate existence of Nigeria, as one indivisible entity amid contemporary security challenges bedeviling the nation.

The army chief made the clarion call yesterday at the interdenominational church service marking the Nigerian Army Day Celebration (NADCEL) 2023 held at the Mogadishu Military Cantonment, Abuja.

The army had last week commenced the commemoration of its 160th year of establishment since 1867, when 18 men known as the Glover Hausas of the Royal Navy were organised into a formidable force.

General Lagbaja stated that the army remained the pride of the nation and a force to reckon with in Africa and the world.

He noted that the interdenominational service was among the series of activities earmarked for all army formations and units to commemorate its establishment as a symbol of national unity and integration.

The Army chief said the occasion also provided the opportunity for prayers and supplications to be made to God Almighty on behalf of the Nigerian Army, the Armed Forces of Nigeria and the nation in general.

As we mark our 160th year, I must confess that our journey has not been a bed of roses, as the Nigerian Army, in the course of holding our nation together, has fought a civil war, participated in peacekeeping cum peace enforcement missions and is currently involved in combating terrorism, insurgency and other criminalities across the country, the army chief said.

General Lagbaja reiterated that the various engagements of the army within and outside the shores of Nigeria resulted in the loss of loved ones and breadwinners.

We have bled, we have piled up the wounded in action, and the population of our widows and widowers as well as orphans has swelled. Our sacrifices are for the love of God, humanity and country, he stated.

He, therefore, urged all army personnel to reflect on the security challenges and include them in their prayers, believing that God Almighty would crown the efforts of the army and the Armed Forces of Nigeria with success.

The COAS charged all personnel to continue to do their best to reciprocate governments gesture by remaining loyal, disciplined, patriotic and undaunting, as they combat security challenges in the various theatres of operations.

He pledged more commitment to troops welfare and wellbeing under his command.
The Joint Admissions and Matriculation Board (JAMB) has provided details on how UTME candidate Mmesoma Ejikeme allegedly changed her score from 249 to 362. The exam board also stated it had withdrawn her result.

Describing Ms Ejikemes case as the most pathetic for pulling the wool over Nigerians eyes, JAMB revealed that she had manipulated her UTME result to deceive the public and fraudulently obtained scholarship and other recognition.

According to a statement by JAMB spokesman Fabian Benjamin on Sunday, Ms Ejikeme tried to exploit the exam bodys system.

It is to be noted that the candidate had sent a message to the boards platform to request her UTME result, after which she manually inflated her scores and pasted same on the 2022 UTME result sheet, the statement explained.

It added, Unknown to her, the board had changed the design of the 2023 UTME result sheet. Her original result remains 249 as nothing can change that.

JAMB warned that the likes of Mmesoma are still out there, deceiving those who are always in a hurry to bestow honour on candidates without confirming from the board, promising the public that the Anambra student would be prosecuted.

The exam body also accused another UTME candidate, Atung Gerald in Kaduna, of claiming to have scored 380.

The board is constrained to set the records straight and wishes to state unequivocally that many of the results which many of these candidates are parading are fake, the JAMB statement stressed. In many instances, some of these candidates had actually obtained far lower scores than they are claiming and had used some funny software packages to manipulate their results to deceive unsuspecting members of the public.

(NAN)
Kemi Olaitan in Ibadan

Oyo State Governor, Seyi Makinde, has said the Ibadan Dry Port Project may likely come on stream quicker than expected because the present leadership of the country under President Bola Tinubu, understands the benefits of developing the economic value chain.

This is just as he said the dry port project would also benefit the state hugely because his administration would collaborate with the federal government more than ever before, stating that the recent change of government at the federal level would not affect the project negatively.

Makinde stated this at the weekend when he inspected several ongoing projects, including the Ibadan Inland Dry Port, the College of Agriculture and Renewable Energy, Iseyin, a campus of the Ladoke Akintola University of Technology, Ogbomoso; the Engineer Lere Adigun Housing Estate, Basorun and the Ibadan Circular Road.

According to him, the state has made good progress with regards to the projects, even though there is still a lot of work to be

done.

Noting that his administration had been creating wonderful opportunities through infrastructure building and other key developments, which have begun to attract investors.

The governor, therefore, urged the youths to key into the opportunities by contributing and getting the rewards, rather than leaving the country for foreign lands in search of imaginary greener pastures.

Makinde while fielding questions from journalists on the projects shortly after inspecting the Ibadan Circular Road Interchange at Egbeda LGA, said regarding the inspected projects: Well, I will say so far, so good, there is still a lot of work to be done but we are making a good progress. You have seen it as well.

We were on that campus (LAUTECH Campus, Iseyin) before the election and we have seen between then and now that a lot of progress has been made. And even here (Ibadan Circular Road), we have interested investors coming around to say what exactly are we projecting in terms of the opportunities in Oyo State?

To the people, we have many opportunities around here especially for our young folks. They should not Japa because if they are hardworking, they can contribute and get their rewards.

So, I will say we are creating opportunities across the spectrum and people are paying attention to what we are doing.
Nollywood star, Kunle Omisore aka 33films has celebrated his 50th birthday in grand style.

This is as his colleagues took to social media to celebrate him.

Taking to his Instagram page to share a photo of him in a traditional outfit, Kunle expressed gratitude to his creator for his new age.

Happy Glorious Birthday to me and God bless.

Finest.

See how he was celebrated by his colleagues:

Kunle Afod wrote, Happy birthday

Damola Olatunji wrote, Happiest birthday brotherly

Funke Etti wrote, HBD sir

Akin Olaiya wrote, Happy birthday

Faith Ojo wrote, Happy birthday to you sir

Bakare Zainab on her part took to her Instagram page to celebrate the actor.

This is 50!!? The Golden Jubilee. Mr 33. Mr. Omisore. May the good Lord bless you and grant you long life, sound health, and happiness.

His fans also said some words of prayers for him.

One TJ Rahman wrote, May it be the best day of your life this far & may your happiness grow with each passing day through the many birthdays that surely are ahead of you. Happy birthday to my birthday mate sir

One Abisola Omoatos wrote, Happy birthday to u big bro. Wish u many prosperous years with all heart desires granted

One Official Friday wrote, Happy birthday to you boss man long life and prosperity God bless your new Age.
Volodymyr Zelensky and Vladimir Putin

The President of Ukraine, Volodymyr Zelensky has claimed that the whole world wants to end the life of Russian President, Vladimir Putin.

He said this at a press conference in Kiev over the weekend.

Zelensky was asked at the press conference  whether he is in danger with his life or whether his life is threatened?

In response, the president of Ukraine said, To be honest, its more scary for Putin than for me. Because only Russia wants to kill me. On the other hand, the whole world wants to kill him (Putin).

During the press conference, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky also said that at least 21,000 Wagner mercenaries were killed while fighting with his country.

He said the Wagner Group had lost a large number of troops, especially in eastern Ukraine, where the most powerful army of his country is fighting.

The Ukrainian president said the Wagner groups insurgency had a major impact on Russian President Putins authority. It also has an impact on the battlefield. His countrys army will benefit from it.



We have to take advantage of this situation. We have to use this advantage to expel the enemies from the soil of our country. Zelensky said.


Shaibu argued that Tinubu wants to reward Wike with a ministerial job as a token of gratitude for manipulating the Rivers State presidential election in the presidents favour.

He noted that the outcomes in states like Rivers demonstrated how dubious the 2023 presidential election was.

There were allegations of massive rigging of the presidential election results in Rivers State said to have been carried out by Wike for the APC and Tinubu.

The special assistant stated this in a statement issued on Sunday night.

He also said it was tragic that Tinubu was planning on rewarding Wike with a ministerial portfolio despite the pending petition against the former governor which has attracted nearly 300,000 votes.

The statement reads partly: The Presidential election in Rivers State was clearly rigged as evidenced by what INEC has uploaded on IREV.

So far, nearly 300,000 Nigerians have signed a petition on change.org demanding visa bans against Governor Wike.

Tinubu is now on the verge of appointing Wike as a minister as a reward for that disgraceful election.

What a shame. And this is the character who claimed to have fought for the actualisation of June 12?

In other news, Kanyi Daily reported that the Innoson Group has reacted to the allegation of certificate forgery against Ejikeme Mmesoma by the Joint Admission and Matriculations Board (JAMB) that she inflated her result and announced herself as the top scorer for the 2023 Unified Tertiary Matriculation Examination.

The Innoson Group in a statement issued by its Head of Corporate Communications, Cornel Osigwe said Mmesoma doesnt have the brain to forge results.

Related
President Bola Tinubu, on Monday, held first security meeting with the service chiefs, including the National Security Adviser (NSA), Nuhu Ribadu, at the State House, Abuja.



Those in attendance include the Chief of Defence Staff, Maj. Gen. C.G Musa; Chief of Army Staff, Maj. Gen T. A Lagbaja; Chief of Naval Staff, Rear Admiral E. A Ogalla; Chief of Air Staff, AVM H.B Abubakar, Ribadu, as well as the Inspector General of Police, Kayode Egbetokun.

President Tinubu had returned to Abuja on Sunday after a the Sallah holidays in Lagos.
The final report of the European Union Election Observation Mission (EU EOM) on the 2023 general elections in Nigeria, spotlighting the noticeable flaws of the electoral process`, turned out to unsettle the Nigerian Presidency, making President Bola Tinubu to kick against the report and scolding the EU election observer team.



The Special Adviser to the President on Special Duties, Communications and Strategy, Dele Alake, in a statement, decried the report indicting the election managers, and by extension, winner of the February presidential election, Asiwaju Bola Tinubu. Alake, in the statement declared that the federal government strongly reject, in its entirety, any notion and idea from any organization, group and individual remotely suggesting that the 2023 election was fraudulent.

Alake recalled that the government had earlier in May alerted the nation, through a press statement, to the plan by a continental multi-lateral institution to discredit the 2023 general elections conducted by the Independent National Electoral Commission.

Alake added that the government made it abundantly clear to Nigerians how this foreign institution had been unrelenting in its assault on the credibility of the electoral process, the sovereignty of our country and on our ability as a people to organize ourselves.

He, therefore, declared that the 2023 general elections, most especially the presidential election, won by President Bola Tinubu of the All Progressives Congress, were credible, peaceful, free, fair and the best organized general elections in Nigeria since 1999.

The statement reads: Sometimes in May, we alerted the nation, through a press statement, to the plan by a continental multi-lateral institution to discredit the 2023 general elections conducted by the Independent National Electoral Commission. The main target was the presidential election, clearly and fairly won by the then candidate of the All Progressives Congress, Bola Ahmed Tinubu.

While we did not mention the name of the organization in the said statement, we made it abundantly clear to Nigerians how this foreign institution had been unrelenting in its assault on the credibility of the electoral process, the sovereignty of our country and on our ability as a people to organize ourselves. We find it preposterous and unconscionable that in this day and age, any foreign organization of whatever hue can continue to insist on its own yardstick and assessment as the only way to determine the credibility and transparency of our elections.

Now that the organization has submitted what it claimed to be its final report on the elections, we can now categorically let Nigerians and the entire world know that we were not unaware of the machinations of the European Union to sustain its, largely, unfounded bias and claims on the election outcomes.

For emphasis, we want to reiterate that the 2023 general elections, most especially the presidential election, won by President Bola Tinubu of the All Progressives Congress, were credible, peaceful, free, fair and the best organized general elections in Nigeria since 1999.

There is no substantial evidence provided by the European Union or any foreign and local organization that is viable enough to impeach the integrity of the 2023 election outcomes.

It is worth restating that the limitation of EU final assessment and conclusions on our elections was made very bare in the text of the press conference addressed by the Head of its Electoral Observation Mission, Barry Andrews.

While addressing journalists in Abuja on the so-called final report, Andrews noted that EU-EOM monitored the pre-election and post-election processes in Nigeria from January 11 to April 11, 2023 as an INEC-accredited election monitoring group.

Within this period, EU-EOM observed the elections through 11 Abuja-based analysts, and 40 election observers spread across 36 states and the Federal Capital Territory. With the level of personnel deployed, which was barely an average of one person per state, we wonder how EU-EOM independently monitored election in over 176,000 polling units across Nigeria.

We would like to know and even ask EU, how it reached the conclusions in the submitted final report with the very limited coverage of the elections by their observers who, without doubt, relied more on rumours, hearsay, cocktails of prejudiced and uninformed social media commentaries and opposition talking heads.

We are convinced that what EU-EOM called final report on our recent elections is a product of a poorly done desk job that relied heavily on few instances of skirmishes in less than 1,000 polling units out of over 176,000 where Nigerians voted on election day.

We have many reasons to believe the jaundiced report, based on the views of fewer than 50 observers, was to merely sustain the same premature denunciatory stance contained in EUs preliminary report released in March.

Our earlier position that the technology-aided 2023 general elections were the most transparent and best-organized elections since the return of civil rule in Nigeria has been validated by all non-partisan foreign and local observers such as the African Union, ECOWAS, Commonwealth Observer Mission and the Nigerian Bar Association.

Unlike EU-EOM that deployed fewer than 50 observers, the Nigerian Bar Association that sent out over 1000 observers spread across the entire country for same election gave a more holistic and accurate assessment of the elections in their own report.

NBA, an organization of eminent lawyers and an important voice within the civic space reported that 91.8 percent of Nigerians rated the conduct of the national and state elections as credible and satisfactory. Any election that over 90% of the citizens considered transparent should be celebrated anywhere in the world.

It is heart-warming that INEC, through its National Commissioner for Information and Voter Education, Mr. Festus Okoye, has come out to defend the integrity of the election it conducted by rejecting the false narratives in the EU report.

It is also gratifying that the electoral umpire, as an institution that is open to learning and continuous improvements, has also committed to taking on board more ideas, innovation and reforms that will further enhance the integrity and credibility of our electoral process.

As a country, we have put the elections behind us. President Tinubu is facing the arduous task of nation-building, while those who have reasons to challenge the process continue to do so through the courts. In just one month in office, Nigerians appear satisfied with the decisive leadership of President Tinubu and the manner he is redirecting the country to the path of fiscal sustainability and socio-economic reforms. We urge the EU and other foreign interests to be objective in all their assessments of the internal affairs of our country and allow Nigeria to breathe.
Dr. Nathan Alexander is a 34-year-old math professor at Morehouse College, an all-male historically black institution in Georgia, Atlanta.

On Friday, one of his students, Wayne Hayer, was unable to find a babysitter or arrange for someone to look after his baby girl, Assata. So Hayer brought Assata to Alexanders class.

But before he began teaching, Alexander offered to hold Assata so that Hayer could take take better notes in class, according to another student, Nick Vaughn, who shared the encounter on social media.

Micro-blogging Twitter user @original_vaughn wrote: Student came to class today with his child due to no babysitter or anybody to watch her while he was in class. My professor NATHAN ALEXANDER said Ill hold her so you can take good notes! #HBCU #morehouse #Respect 

Nathan Alexander replied thanking his student for the tweet and Twitter users replied, thaking him for his kindness.

Other students also commented with stories of how kind Nathan.

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Senyatse Lucas Phasha

Man stabs his four children to death in South Africa after accusing their mother of cheating and infecting him with HIV

The police in Mecklenburg outside Burgersfort have launched a manhunt for a 52 year old suspect Senyatse Lucas Phasha, who allegedly killed his four children at ga-Pasha village, Polokwane.

The bodies of the children were found at two different locations in the area.

The suspect allegedly informed a neighbor on Tuesday morning, 18 February 2020, about the murders and and also indicated to him the places where the bodies were.

The police were then informed and on arrival, the lifeless bodies of three children aged 09, 07 and 05 were found in the nearby bushes and that of a 3 year old was found next to the local mountain, at about 3 kilometers from the first scene.

Preliminary police investigations indicate that the suspect stopped the vehicle transporting the kids from school on Monday 17 February 2020. The driver, who apparently knows the father, stopped and let the kids go with their father.

Three of the children were found with stab wounds. The youngest was found with open wounds. The children were identified as follows:

 Katlego Pasha, 9 year old boy

 Joyce Pasha, 7 year old girl

 Tshepo Phasha, 5 year old girl

 Adel Phasha, 3 year old boy.

According to reports on social media, the man had taken to Facebook to accuse the childrens mother of cheating and infecting him with HIV. See his alleged post below.

The Provincial Commissioner of the South African Police Service in Limpopo, Lieutenant General Nneke Ledwaba, who also visited the scene has condemned this incident in the strongest possible terms, more so as it was allegedly perpetrated by someone who was supposed to protect these victims.

Four counts murder have been opened and Police investigations are continuing.
BLOOMINGTON  The Bloomington Police Department is teaming up with the Illinois Department of Transportation and Illinois State Police for a campaign that calls on drivers to quit speeding.

In a statement Monday, BPD said patrols will be ramped up in the city and across the state July 6-31 to cite drivers exceeding speed limits.

BPD Chief Jamal Simington said they've seen careless and risky driving increase in recent years, adding that speeding is relayed to officers as a top complaint at community events. He also reminded the public that speed limits are the law  and not a suggestion.

Bloomington joins the Town of Normal's police department in the campaign. The program is supported by IDOT funds.

The states with the most distracted teen drivers States With the Most Distracted Teen Drivers Male teens are at greater risk for vehicle fatalities Female teen drivers are more likely to wear a seat belt than males 15. Arkansas 14. Mississippi 13. Oklahoma 12. Alabama 11. Wisconsin 10. Missouri 9. Idaho 8. Kansas 7. Ohio 6. Nebraska 5. Wyoming 4. Iowa 3. Montana 2. North Dakota 1. South Dakota
About this story This story is part of a series looking at area lawmakers' takeaways from the recent legislative session.

Sen. Chapin Rose is a Republican who resides in Mahomet and represents the 51st Senate District. He is a former Champaign County prosecutor who served in the Illinois House from 2003 to 2013. He has been in the Illinois Senate since, where he serves as an assistant Republican leader.

Key votes

State budget: No.

Withhold state funds from libraries that ban books: No.

Permitting all-gender, multi-occupancy bathrooms: No.

Barring deceptive practices from anti-abortion pregnancy centers: No.

Lifting moratorium on new nuclear plants: Yes.

Bills sponsored

Senate Bill 1115: Makes disability benefits for university police officers injured in the line of duty equal to that of all other Illinois law enforcement officers. (passed)

Makes disability benefits for university police officers injured in the line of duty equal to that of all other Illinois law enforcement officers. (passed) Senate Bill 1604: Allows all counties besides Cook County to opt out of the elimination of cash bail (did not pass)

Allows all counties besides Cook County to opt out of the elimination of cash bail (did not pass) Senate Bill 1889: Allows any store employee to process the sale of prescriptions that have received final verification from a pharmacist. Currently, a pharmacist must be present. (passed)

Successes from session

Rose said he was particularly excited about the Aim High pilot program being made permanent. Started in 2019, the program provides merit-based scholarships Illinois students attending in-state public universities.

"That's a passion of mine  supporting our public institutions of higher education. And more importantly, supporting the students and their families to make this crazy, expensive thing somehow slightly more affordable. I'm very excited about Aim High. It obviously has a tie back to my hometown of Charleston ... I dreamed that up 10 years ago at this point. And now it's permanent and it's been expanded and it's doing great and it's working and it's a success. And, most importantly, it's helping families. I think thats pretty cool."

Disappointments from session

Rose was complimentary of this year's budget process in the Senate, where lead Democratic negotiators included their Republican counterparts  himself included in negotiations.

But he was disappointed in the end result, specifically with Democrats' refusal to push back the Jan. 1 sunset date of the "Invest in Kids" tax credit, which funds private school scholarships.

He was also upset with the $550 million earmarked for a health care program for mostly undocumented immigrants, which he said was crowding out resources for other needy programs. "The real problem is twofold: the lack of ability of the Democratic Party to say no to its progressive members, who just think money grows on trees, coupled with this complete insanity in the House Democratic Caucus."
As the New Patriotic Party (NPP) gears up for its forthcoming presidential primaries in November 2023, all eyes are on Hon. Alan John Kwadwo Kyerematen. Renowned as a seasoned politician, distinguished statesman, and a visionary leader, Alan Kyerematen offers a beacon of hope for the NPP in its pursuit to break the eight-year cycle of governance in Ghana.



The NPP has undoubtedly achieved significant milestones in its current tenure under the leadership of His Excellency Nana Addo Dankwa Akufo-Addo. The government's flagship programs such as the Free Senior High School, Planting for Food and Jobs, and One District One Factory have positively impacted the lives of Ghanaians and demonstrated the party's commitment to socio-economic development. However, with a strong opposition looming, the NPP must strategically position itself to secure victory in the 2024 general elections.



Hon. Alan John Kwadwo Kyerematen, a man whose exemplary track record in public service makes him the perfect candidate to rally the party towards success. With an extensive career spanning various portfolios, including Ambassador, Advisor at the United Nations Economic Commission for Africa (ECA), Trade and Industry, Alan Kwadwo Kyerematen possesses the necessary experience and expertise to drive economic growth and create job opportunities for the Ghanaian people.



Throughout his tenure as Minister of Trade and Industry, Alan Kyerematen spearheaded several initiatives that bolstered local industries and attracted foreign investment. He played a pivotal role in the successful implementation of the One District One Factory program, which aims to promote industrialization at the grassroots level, fostering economic empowerment within local communities. Alan Kyerematen's unmatched understanding of Ghana's economic landscape positions him as an ideal leader to consolidate and expand on these achievements.



Moreover, Hon. Alan John Kwadwo Kyerematen possesses exceptional leadership skills and unwavering dedication to service. He is widely admired for his humility, integrity, and ability to bridge gaps between different factions within the party. His charisma and approachable nature make him a unifying figure capable of rallying the NPP's diverse support base towards a common goal.



One significant factor that positions Kyerematen as an ideal choice to lead the NPP in 2024 is his appeal to the youth demographic. Being a man in touch with modern dynamics, he understands the aspirations and challenges faced by the younger generation. By championing youth empowerment through entrepreneurship and skills training, Alan Kyerematen offers a solution to the rising concerns of unemployment and ensures that the NPP remains relevant in a rapidly changing political landscape.



Additionally, Alan Kwadwo Kyerematen's immense popularity and acceptance among party faithfuls across the country further strengthen his candidacy. His deep understanding of the local communities and connection with ordinary Ghanaians foster trust and confidence. By assuring citizens that their voices will be heard and concerns addressed, Alan Kyerematen embodies the spirit of inclusive and responsive governance that Ghanaians yearn for.



As the NPP gears up for the 2023 presidential primaries, the party must identify a leader who not only possesses a proven track record but also brings fresh ideas, infectious energy, and a unifying force. Hon. Alan John Kwadwo Kyerematen embodies these qualities and offers a beacon of hope for the NPP to break the eight-year cycle in 2024. With his unparalleled experience, visionary leadership, and commitment to the welfare of the Ghanaian people, Alan Kyerematen is ready to lead the NPP to victory and steer Ghana towards a brighter future.



#AlanCash4President







Source: SAAC ESSUMAN (Minister Isaac)









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South Africa's Zulu King Misuzulu kaZwelithini is being treated in hospital for suspected poisoning, his traditional prime minister has said.



The king sought medical attention in Eswatini as he is uncomfortable with seeking treatment in South Africa, Chief Mangosuthu Buthelezi added.



This follows the sudden death of one of his senior advisers, also of suspected poisoning, Chief Buthelezi said.



However, the king's official spokesman said he was in "perfect health".



The monarch was currently not in hospital, and "unnecessary panic" should not be created, Prince Africa Zulu said, in what appeared to be an indirect reference to Chief Buthelezi's statement.



King Misuzulu was crowned in front of thousands of his subjects last October.



But a vicious power struggle has been raging within the royal family over the 48-year-old's accession, and tensions have also recently surfaced between the monarch and Chief Buthelezi.



The Zulu king does not have formal political power and the monarch's role within broader South African society is largely ceremonial, but he remains hugely influential with a yearly government-funded budget of several million dollars.



A faction within the family is challenging his claim to the throne in court, insisting that he is not the rightful heir of his late father, King Goodwill Zwelithini.



They insist that another son of the late king, Prince Simakade, should be the monarch.



King Zwelithini had six wives and at least 26 children.



His will has also been challenged in court by his first wife, Queen Sibongile Dlamini-Zulu, and her two daughters.



A court dismissed their case last year, but they said they would appeal against the ruling.



There is no suggestion that any members of the royal family are behind King Misuzulu's suspected poisoning.



The South African police have not yet commented on the claims.



In his statement, Chief Buthelezi said King Misuzulu's senior aide, Douglas Xaba who stayed with him, "passed on quite suddenly and that there are suspicions that he was poisoned".



"When His Majesty began to feel unwell, he suspected that he too may have been poisoned.



"He immediately sought out medical treatment in Eswatini. I am informed that His Majesty felt uncomfortable seeking treatment in South Africa, as his parents had both received treatment in South Africa and subsequently died," Chief Buthelezi said.



Chief Buthelezi added that while the king had recently appointed Prince Africa as the head of communications in his office, he, as the traditional prime minister, had an obligation to inform the Zulu nation of "this worrying situation".



"Our immediate concern is the King's wellbeing. We as the Zulu nation pray for His Majesty's full and swift recovery.



"Should there be any reason for further investigations, that will be attended to by the authorities," Chief Buthelezi said.



In his subsequent statement, Prince Africa said there appeared to be an "orchestrated agenda and a desperate narrative to communicate defamatory and baseless claims" about the king's health.



"Ultimately, this creates unnecessary panic and perceptions of instability in the Royal Crown," he added.

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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Extreme climate events are powerfully putting our lives, progress and futures at high risks (Fig.1 & Fig.2). The real climate impacts on socio-ecological systems and national economy are rising and endangering the genuine vision of the AU Agenda 2063, the UN Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), the Commonwealth Climate Charter and Paris Agreement for limiting global warming to 1.5oC.



It is collapsing coastal Earth systems, particularly causing substantial (in)visible damages to the Volta River Estuary (VRE), where Fuveme is located (Fig.3).



Besides galvanising for global journey to COP28UAE and beyond, this article highlights climate-induced Non-Economic Loss and Damage (NELD) to motivate and strengthen understanding of a critical need to reactivate innovative plans and solutions to minimise sufferings, while preserving environmental heritage for sustainability and prosperity.



Geozonal, delta prominence



VRE is in the south-eastern zone of Ghana. In addition to Ghana, the river itself spans the territorial boundaries of Togo, Benin, Ivory Coast, Mali and Burkina Faso, which are inhabited by 120 million people.



UNESCO recognises the delta as a biodiversity hotspot. The Volta River and Atlantic Ocean meet in-between Azizanya (near Ada Foah) and Kporkporkordzi (near Fuveme) within the shared geopolitical enclave co-inhabited by Ada, Anlo and Agave tribes.



Some settlements within 25km of the VRE are Agorme, Ada Foah, Nutekpor, Amedorme, Havui, Sogakope, Agorta and Adidokpo.



VRE uniquely exhibits the relics of savannas, wetlands and low-patched canopy forests, comprising species of borassus, baobabs, bamboos, oil palm, mangroves and coconut.





Oysters, crabs, insects and fishes like tilapia and shrimps are present. The coastal temperature alternates around 25 to 310C.



Emergency contexts of social climate impacts



The climate-induced NELDs are rapidly cascading across societal groupings, comprising aged, women, youth, children and persons with disabilities (PWDs).



Sea heating combines with storm floods from the Volta River to erode coastlines leading to significant loss and damage to human settlements, hydromobility and biodiversity with severe repercussions for food, heritage, shelter and well-being.



Comparing the destructive tidal havocs that happened in 2017 and 2021, it is clear that NELD had increased from 80 affected homes to nearly 4,000 marginalised households.



The incessant sea heating effects forced the disappearance of four indigenous villages alongside their rich social capital and biocultural properties from the Fuveme Island.



Today, some aged persons are homeless and/or co-habiting in temporal structures. Homelessness aggravates social, emotional and mental health issues for the aged and PWDs, who have no idea of when and how to reconstruct and resettle in their own decent homes again.



Socially cascading of the NELD, which was previously underestimated in scientific literature and reports, is currently impacting over 5,500 households.



Clearly, climate extremes have compounded social vulnerabilities and inequalities enabling a situation of living on less than US$1 a day to persist in the estuary.



Due to proximity to coastlines, the Fuveme Star of the Sea R.C. Basic School, for example, is daily impacted by frequent sea level rise.



Thousands of coconut trees are dead, uprooted or wilted at Havui, Azizanya and Fuveme (Fig. 2). For an aged farmer, such a loss is not just detrimental to survival, but also dignity, self-reliance and sustainability.



Mostly, recurrent sea level rise releases seaheat to manipulate atmospheric temperature that wilts phytospecies or injects highly concentrated seawater to alter hydroregimes that kill oysters, earthworms, turtles or whales.



Since human society depends on coastal biodiversity for survival, harmful impact of sea heating on oyster habitats, for instance, is leading to livelihood loss, broken homes, child poverty, social exclusion and ecological job loss.



In Fuveme, tidal waves often submerge the basic school, where teaching and learning infrastructure has considerably deteriorated. The tidal happenings worsen child absenteeism in the school and, eventually, necessitate temporal closures thereby jeopardising future aspirations of the children. The UN SDGs cannot be achieved if unfriendly climate conditions for school children continue in Fuveme and other coastal settlements.



Collective action, policy futures



The deprived coastal societies need urgent support because sea level rise is extensively damaging lives and properties (Fig.1 & Fig.2).



The social cost of NELD is so huge that it is beyond financial compensation. Yet, with renewed ecoentrepreneurial mindset, fresh solution for NELD can be co-created and sustained overtime. Abundant indigenous knowledge exists about sustaining heritage pride, green infrastructure and eco-friendly homes.



The greener support looked-for, though, is an enhanced governance, financial and technical capacity to effectively integrate indigenous and scientific tools for sustainable management of NELDs to advance the SDGs.



Furthermore, a national Nature-based Solution (NbS) policy is needed for fostering locally-led adaptation, eco-wise residential buildings, renewables and mangrove reforestation. An inclusive NbS policy can contribute to combating negative impacts of flooding, erosion and species depletion for improved sustainable local livelihoods, fishing and biodiversity services.

Also, a multi-stakeholders dialogue and cooperation to push forward a theory of sustainable change is advised because ocean risks are too big to bear by an individual.



Warfare



Human limits are socially tipping such that at Fuveme, climate change is no longer an emergency matter but also a serious warfare that stakeholders must sustainably join forces of skills, innovation, finance and leadership to win.



The local people are faced with catastrophic polycrises of coastal erosion, sea level rise and storm flooding. The Fuveme Star of the Sea R.C. Basic School is a needful school in a typical climate war zone that deserves public policy attention and collective humanitarian interventions to save lives.



The writer is a Research Fellow,

Earth System Governance Project,

Utrecht University, The Netherlands.







Source: graphiconline.com









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Director of Local Government Services at the Office of the President, Dennis Miracles Aboagye says although the New Patriotic Party couldn't clinch the Assin North parliamentary seat, the party however will shock Ghanaians in the 2024 elections.



According to him, the NPP will win majority of the seats in Parliament in 2024.



Dennis Miracles, speaking on Peace FM's morning show "Kokrokoo", admitted the faults of the New Patriotic Party that resulted in their defeat with their candidate, Charles Opoku, polling 12630 votes and the candidate of the opposition National Democratic Congress, James Gyakye Quayson polling 17245 votes to win the Assin North by-election.



This notwithstanding, Dennis Miracles has a strong conviction that the NPP will win not less than 140 parliamentary seats in next year's general elections.



"One thing I know for sure is that come December 7th, 2024, by 12 am, we the NPP would have won majority seats in Parliament. I am very confident about that...I can tell you we will win not less than 140 seats," he told host Kwami Sefa Kayi.





Source: Ameyaw Adu Gyamfi/Peacefmonline.com/Ghana









Disclaimer : Opinions expressed here are those of the writers and do not reflect those of Peacefmonline.com. Peacefmonline.com accepts no responsibility legal or otherwise for their accuracy of content. Please report any inappropriate content to us, and we will evaluate it as a matter of priority.

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The Vice President, Dr. Mahamudu Bawumia has called for a clean campaign devoid of acrimony and insults as the party's flagbearer race heats up.

Ten people including the Vice President have filed to contest the party's flagbearership and campaigning has intensified with some aspirants being accused of waging hate campaign.



Addressing party delegates on the final day of his Greater Accra tour, Dr. Bawumia said, as one family, it is important for all camps to understand that the party needs a united front to face the "main enemy" which is the NDC.



"We all should understand that the campaign we are having now is for internal election. The main enemy in 2024 is the NDC. As we embark on the campaign, let us not speak against each other," Dr. Bawumia said.



"We want peace, we want a clean campaign and we want a clean election. We don't want anyone to go out there and speak against opponents. Because after our elections, we will need everyone on board to tackle the NDC.



In a clear demonstration of his commitment to a clean campaign, Dr. Bawumia said he has asked his campaign staff and well-wishers to be mindful of their utterances in order to ensure the unity of the party.



"So I have told all my supporters and spokespersons that we want a clean campaign and they should not go out there and insult anyone", he added.



He further said; "We are one family so let's all stay together. When the contest is over, we will all come together as one family and make sure that the NDC doesn't come back to power. That is very important. Let's keep the NPP in power and we want unity in the NPP."



Dr. Bawumia rounded off his campaign in the Greater Region over the weekend with a visit to the Obom Domeabra Constituency.





Source: Peacefmonline.com/Ghana









Disclaimer : Opinions expressed here are those of the writers and do not reflect those of Peacefmonline.com. Peacefmonline.com accepts no responsibility legal or otherwise for their accuracy of content. Please report any inappropriate content to us, and we will evaluate it as a matter of priority.

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The Vice President, Dr. Mahamudu Bawumia has emphasized the importance of a clean and respectful campaign as the race for the party's flagbearership intensifies.



With ten individuals, including Dr. Bawumia himself, vying for the position, campaigning has grown more fervent, leading to some candidates resorting to personal attacks against their rivals.



During his final day of the Greater Accra tour, Dr. Bawumia addressed party delegates, emphasizing the need for unity within the NPP.



He stressed that, as a family, it was crucial for all factions to recognize that a united front is necessary to confront the "main enemy," which is the NDC.



Dr. Bawumia stated, "We must understand that the current campaign is an internal election. Our primary opponent in 2024 is the NDC. As we embark on this campaign, let us refrain from speaking ill of one another."





He continued, "We seek peace, a clean campaign, and a fair election. We do not want anyone to engage in attacks against their opponents. After the elections, we will require everyone's support to tackle the NDC."



In a demonstration of his commitment to a clean campaign, Dr. Bawumia revealed that he has urged his campaign staff and well-wishers to be mindful of their language to uphold party unity.



"I have instructed all my supporters and spokespersons that we must conduct a clean campaign, avoiding any form of insults," he stated.



"We are one family, and we must remain united. Once the contest concludes, we will come together as a cohesive force to ensure the NDC does not return to power. That unity is of utmost importance. Let us maintain the NPP's position of power and foster unity within the party."



Dr. Bawumia concluded his campaign in the Greater Region with a visit to the Obom Domeabra Constituency over the weekend, marking the end of his tour.









Source: graphiconline.com









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The opposition National Democratic Congress (NDC) held its 10th memorial lecture in Sunyani in the Bono Region to mark the passing of former President John Evans Atta Mills.



Organized by J.E.A Mills Memorial Heritage under the theme, The Man John Evans Atta Mills- Ten Years On, the lecture forms part of activities commemorating the tenth anniversary of his demise.



In a keynote address, Dean of Students, University of Energy and Natural Resources, (UENR) Prof. Dominic Otoo, described the late former Presidents demeanor as a source of inspiration as he stood against corruption and promoted the rule of law. He said President Atta Mills in his reign as the commander-in-chief of the Ghana Armed Forces and an educationist strengthened state institutions and encouraged good health for all, promoted equity by implementing a uniform pay policy for all public sector workers through the implementation of the Universal Single Pay structure otherwise known as Single Spine.



He further described the late President as an oasis of peace and a peace maker hence the accolade King of Peace (Asomdwehene) emphasising that the late President Atta Mills made no disparaging comment even when a section of the public spoke against his persona.



That is the man we all gather here today to remember and learn from. As a promoter and lover of peace, he earned the title of Asomdwehene (king of peace), he said.



Prof. Otoo said Mills legacy on education included promoting gender equality in schools, promoting school dropout retention, teacher development, adequate educational infrastructure, removing schools under trees, and abolishing the shit system.



As universities don he established two universities in his short country leadership. The University of Energy and Natural Resources where I teach in the Bono Region and the University of Health and Allied Sciences in Ho, he recounted.



We instituted this day to commemorate the character of John Evans Atta Mills. His character and leadership style must be a benchmark for candidates seeking political office in this country, he advised.



Private legal practitioner, Yaw Wiredu Peprah, former council chair of KNUST, and Sarah Mensah among other speakers eulogized the late Prof. John Evans Atta Mills as a man of peace, and integrity epitomized by his humility, candor, patience, equity, transparency, honesty, empathy, justice, truthfulness, and sacrifice as what he lived for.



Dignitaries present to observe the lecture included the President of Bono Regional House of Chiefs, Osagyefo Osadeoyo Agyemang Badu II, Yeji Manhene, Pimampim Yaw Kabrese, Johnson Aseidu Nketia Ato Ahoi, Alex Segbefia, Nii Lampty Vandapui, current and past MPs and NDC national and regional executives.



A book cataloging the speeches of Prof Mills at the UN Assembly titled Atta Mills Speaks was launched. The first copy was bought by Bono, Bono East, and Ahafo Region MPs Caucus of the party for GH50,000.





Source: Daily Guide









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Flag-raising ceremony, reception held to mark 26th anniversary of Hong Kong's return to motherland

Xinhua) 09:30, July 03, 2023

Helicopters carrying China's national flag and the flag of the Hong Kong Special Administrative Region are seen during a flag-raising ceremony held by the government of the Hong Kong Special Administrative Region to celebrate the 26th anniversary of Hong Kong's return to the motherland in Hong Kong, south China, July 1, 2023. The government of China's HKSAR on Saturday held a flag-raising ceremony and a reception to celebrate the 26th anniversary of Hong Kong's return to the motherland. (Xinhua/Lui Siu Wai)

HONG KONG, July 1 (Xinhua) -- The government of China's Hong Kong Special Administrative Region (HKSAR) on Saturday held a flag-raising ceremony and a reception to celebrate the 26th anniversary of Hong Kong's return to the motherland.

Vice Chairman of the National Committee of the Chinese People's Political Consultative Conference Leung Chun-ying, Chief Executive of the HKSAR John Lee, and Zheng Yanxiong, director of the Liaison Office of the Central People's Government in the HKSAR, attended the flag-raising ceremony at the Golden Bauhinia Square Saturday morning.

As China's national flag and the flag of the HKSAR were hoisted, helicopters of the Government Flying Service flew over Victoria Harbor to display the national flag and flag of the HKSAR.

Following the ceremony, a reception was hosted by the HKSAR government at the Hong Kong Convention and Exhibition Center. Before the reception began, a film was shown summarizing the HKSAR government's work over the past year.

In his speech at the reception, Lee said that over the past year, Hong Kong emerged from the shadow of economic contraction and returned to positive economic growth.

Lee said policies on attracting talent and enterprises as proposed in his policy address last October are gradually delivering results.

"In the coming year, my team and I will continue to actively visit the mainland and overseas, leading strong delegations representing different sectors to tell the world the good stories of Hong Kong and create more opportunities for our city," said the HKSAR chief executive.

Hong Kong will continue its efforts to proactively and actively integrate into the overall development of the country, including participating in and promoting the development of the Guangdong-Hong Kong-Macao Greater Bay Area and the Belt and Road Initiative, according to him.

On Saturday morning, central government agencies in Hong Kong, including the Liaison Office of the Central People's Government in the HKSAR, the Office for Safeguarding National Security of the Central People's Government in the HKSAR, and the Office of the Commissioner of the Chinese Foreign Ministry in the HKSAR, also held flag-raising ceremonies.

A reception celebrating the 26th anniversary of Hong Kong's return to the motherland is held at the Hong Kong Convention and Exhibition Center in Hong Kong, south China, July 1, 2023. The government of China's Hong Kong Special Administrative Region (HKSAR) on Saturday held a flag-raising ceremony and a reception to celebrate the 26th anniversary of Hong Kong's return to the motherland. (Xinhua/Lui Siu Wai)

A flag-raising ceremony is held by the government of the Hong Kong Special Administrative Region to celebrate the 26th anniversary of Hong Kong's return to the motherland, at the Golden Bauhinia Square in Hong Kong, south China, July 1, 2023. The government of China's HKSAR on Saturday held a flag-raising ceremony and a reception to celebrate the 26th anniversary of Hong Kong's return to the motherland. (Xinhua/Lui Siu Wai)

(Web editor: Zhang Kaiwei, Liang Jun)
Former Member of Parliament for Suhum, Fred Opare Ansah has admonished the camps of Dr. Mahamudu Bawumia and Alan Kwadwo Kyerematen not to take advantage of an incident that happened in Assin North prior to the constituency's by-election and pitch their candidates against each other.



The incident which was captured in a viral video showed the Vice President Dr. Bawumia joining the former Minister of Trade, Hon. Alan Kyerematen on stage while the latter was addressing constituents at Assin North.



In the video, Bawumia was ushered in and introduced while Alan was still speaking; a situation which has aggrieved most of Alan's fans.



Alan's camp sees the action as an intentional act to sabotage their candidate.



But the New Patriotic Party's national executives have rendered an apology to both candidates and blamed themselves for the mishap.



According to the National Youth Organizer of the NPP, Salam Mustapha who spoke to Kwami Sefa Kayi on Peace FM's morning show "Kokrokoo" weeks ago, it was not deliberate.



"There was no single attempt to embarrass Alan Kyerematen...There was a break in protocol", he explained, adding both Alan and Bawumia "deserve an apology".



Hon. Fred Opare Ansah, contributing to "Kokrokoo" show today, advised those trying to make capital gains out of the incident against Dr. Bawumia or Alan Kyerematen to desist from it.



"Those who are trying to take political advantage of this in their campaign should realize that if you cause disaffection or public ridicule for someone, it doesn't impact on just one person. It is a ridicule on the entire party", he cautioned.







Source: Ameyaw Adu Gyamfi/Peacefmonline.com/Ghana









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Actor Adjetey Anang has called for ceasefire between rap artiste Sarkodie, whose real name is Michael Owusu Addo and actress Yvonne Nelson as they throw dirt on each other concering their past romantic affair.



Yvonne Nelson, in her memoir, accused Sarkodie of causing her to abort her pregnancy after he impregnated her in 2010 but the musician, in his response compiled in his latest song, by inference described Yvonne Nelson as a promiscuous woman.



He also stressed that the abortion was her own idea, thus it wasn't done with his consent.



Sarkodie, after releasing his song titled "Try Me [RAW]", has received a strong backlash from the public with his fellow musician Blakk Rasta calling for a ban on his music and his ambassadorial deals taken away from him.



But to Adjetey Anang, neither Sarkodie nor Yvonne Nelson deserves the harsh criticisms.



He explained that it is clear that both celebrities are utterly embittered, therefore accusing each other but what they need is healing, not a backlash.



His suggestion is for people to be sensitive to what they are going through and hope there is calm.



"These are real issues that they've brought out and me, I can't condemn anybody. I can't judge anybody. I just hope that there is a healing...until you are shaped in a certain way, you wouldn't really understand properly...so whilst we are trying to analyze these things. Let us have a human touch; be a bit sensitive to these two people that we do not break them more apart but we should find that middle ground where do we have that convergence to heal them both because you can tell that both of them are really either bitter or you know hurt", he said on "United Showbiz" on UTV.





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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Amazon river dolphins. Credit: Jose Luis Mena

Research shows Amazon river dolphins are under threat from fishing and proposed new dams and dredging. Scientists have used satellite tags to track eight dolphins in the Peruvian Amazon, to discover where they went in relation to fishing areas and proposed dams and dredging sites.

On average, 89% of the dolphins' home "range" (the area they live in) was used for fishing. Dolphins were found to be an average of 252km from the nearest proposed dam and 125km from the nearest proposed dredging site.

While these are significant distances, the dolphins' ranges spanned over 50km on average, and dams and dredging can affect large stretches of river habitats.

Additionally, many Amazon river dolphinsalready an endangered specieslive closer to the proposed sites than the seven males and one female tagged in this study.

The research was carried out by the University of Exeter and Peruvian conservation organization Pro Delphinus. The paper, published in the journal Oryx, is entitled "Satellite-monitored movements of the Amazon River dolphin and considerations for their conservation."

"It's clear that the Amazon river dolphin is facing increasing threats from humans," said Dr. Elizabeth Campbell, of the Center for Ecology and Conservation on Exeter's Penryn Campus in Cornwall. "Fishing can deplete populations of the dolphins' prey, and dolphins are also at risk from intentional killing and bycatch (accidental catching).

"Bycatch has been known to be a threat to these dolphins for the last 30 years, but there's no real data on how many dolphins are caught per year."

The construction of dams, mainly in Brazil, is an expanding threat, with 175 dams operating or under construction in the Amazon basin, and at least 428 more planned over the next 30 years. Additionally, the Amazon Waterway has been approved and is under contract for construction.

This will involve dredging sites across four main rivers of the Amazon basin, and the expansion of ports to facilitate ship navigation across the Amazon, Ucayali and Maranon rivers.

But the researchers say the Peruvian government has an opportunity to protect biodiversity.

"Peru has a chance to preserve its free-flowing rivers, keeping them a safe and healthy habitat for river dolphins and many other species," Dr. Campbell said. "Given that many of these dams and dredging projects are still in the planning stage, we advise the government to consider the negative effects these activities have already had on river species elsewhere."

Dr. Campbell added, "River dolphin tracking programs should now be expanded to span multiple seasons, to track more females at our study sites and to increase the numbers tracked in other areas to improve our knowledge of the movement patterns of this species."

The Amazon River dolphin is found throughout the basins of the Amazon and Orinoco Rivers and is categorized as Endangered on the IUCN Red List.

More information: Satellite-monitored movements of the Amazon River dolphin and considerations for their conservation, Oryx (2023). DOI: 10.1017/S0030605322001557 Journal information: Oryx
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Northumbria PhD student Ramada Sukarmadji. Credit: Simon Veit-Wilson/Northumbria University

A mystery that has baffled astronomers and physicists for decades is a step closer to being solved thanks to a collaboration between Northumbria University and leading US aerospace technology organization, Lockheed Martin.

The solar corona is the outermost part of the sun's atmosphere, and yet it reaches temperatures millions of degrees hotter than the surface of the sun. It is shaped and powered by the sun's magnetic field, but the exact process through which the magnetic field transfers its energy to the coronal gas has remained elusive over the last 80 years.

One theory, known as the Parker nanoflare theory, which originated in 1988, suggests the heat generated when magnetic field lines within the corona break and reconnect results in a sudden burst of energy or "nanoflare."

In 2021, a team of researchers, led by Northumbria's Dr. Patrick Antolin found direct evidence that this reconnection produces a very rapid, sideways separation of reconnecting magnetic field lines along with a nanoflare, creating "nanojets." This phenomenon now constitutes the tell-tale sign of the nanoflare theory and could account for the solar corona's high temperature if prevalent in the corona.

However, nanojets are difficult to detect and predict. Any images and footage capturing the process in action has been purely by chance, with little known about how often nanojets occur and how they impact coronal heating. The small sizes and short timescales of nanojets also make it difficult for instruments to detect them with the current available resolutions.

In a bid to gather more evidence, Northumbria Ph.D. student Ramada Sukarmadji, under the supervision of Dr. Patrick Antolin, is working with scientists from the Lockheed Martin Solar and Astrophysics Laboratory (LMSAL), which is part of Lockheed Martin's Advanced Technology Center to develop machine learning algorithms which will automatically detect and record nanojets when they occur.

Ramada is a member of Northumbria University's world-leading Solar and Space Physics research group, which collaborates extensively with UK Research and Innovation, the UK Space Agency, the European Space Agency, the UK Met Office, and more than 40 industrial partnersincluding Lockheed Martin.

Dr. Patrick Antolin is a leading expert in magnetic reconnection and nanojets. His paper "Reconnection nanojets in the solar corona," published in Nature Astronomy in 2020, reported on the first discovery of nanojets in action resulting in coronal heating.

The Northumbria University and Lockheed Martin team will analyze existing footage of nanojets captured by NASA's Interface Region Imaging Spectrograph (IRIS) and the Solar Dynamics Observatory (SDO) Atmospheric Imaging Assembly, both of which Lockheed Martin Solar and Astrophysics Laboratory (LMSAL) designed, built, and operates. The IRIS team has devoted many weeks of observations to detecting nanojets. Using this data, the team will identify the spectral and intensity profiles unique to the nanojet when it occurs and use machine learning to create algorithms for further analysis.

Speaking about the research project, Ramada said, "Thanks to the work of my supervisor Dr. Antolin and others, we know nanojets exist and that reconnection-based heating may play a significant part in explaining why the solar corona reaches such high temperatures. However, at the moment we can only identify nanojet occurrences by eyewhat we need is a way of detecting them automatically, especially given the large amount of data that has been obtained for our project.

"They are very small and the limited evidence we have suggests there are probably more than we think, but to really understand them further we need to be able to detect them as they occur.

"By analyzing data from previous occurrences of nanojets we can essentially 'teach' a computer to identify nanojets through machine learning. This will allow us to capture future events and really develop our understanding of this phenomena and how it contributes to the heating of the Corona."

Speaking about Ramada's research, Dr. Antolin said, "Working with Ramada on nanojets has been pure joy. Her will to learn, impressive skillset and great eloquence make her an excellent researcher. She has done amazing work through these years that have not only helped establish nanojets as a significant cornerstone in solar physics but also elevated their importance by making further impactful discoveries."
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The Canadian wildfires that are burning out of control have brought hazy skies and polluted air to parts of the United States unprepared for itand that's affecting not just the people, but their pets and livestock, too.

An animal welfare expert from the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign offers some advice for animal caregivers to help them get their animals through these smoky days more safely.

"In this region, we're not used to dealing with polluted air," said Angela Green-Miller, an associate professor in the university's Department of Agricultural and Biological Engineering.

"We don't typically have filtration in our houses or commercial indoor animal production facilities, although some poultry and pig facilities have implemented air filtration systems to control the spread of airborne diseases," she said in a university news release. "These filtration systems should help mitigate some of the air quality issues, putting them in a slightly better position. But for everyone else, we're not equipped to handle this situation."

Concerns for animals are similar to those for people, Green-Miller said. It's important that they don't overexert themselves so they can avoid breathing deeply and pulling pollutants into their lungs.

Don't ride your horses, Green-Miller noted, so they won't have to breathe more deeply.

"If you normally run with your highly active dog to get some of that energy out, maybe take a walk instead or toss a toy indoors," she added. "And if you do have to go on that walk, keep monitoring weather conditions and pick a time of day when the air quality isn't as bad. That's the best we can do until the situation gets better."

In the meantime, farmers and pet owners should be watching for abnormal animal behavior while the smoky conditions continue.

"We might see animals behaving with a heightened sense of danger because smoke activates a flight response," Green-Miller said.

"As humans, we know that smoke is coming from a fire that's hundreds of miles away and that we're in no real danger and don't need to flee from it. Animals don't know that, so we may see flight responses engaged for some of our animals," she explained.

Among those behaviors could be more fearful responses, and potentially more defensive or aggressive postures, Green-Miller said.

"Again, there's really not much we can do to mitigate it, but, we certainly can be aware and think about how we interact and handle our animals so that we're not putting ourselves in danger," she said.

The consequences of these days of polluted air are not likely to be long-term for most animals, Green-Miller noted, but those with preexisting respiratory conditions are at a higher risk of health complications.

More information: The U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has more on the health hazards of wildfire smoke.

2023 HealthDay. All rights reserved.
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The semiconductor material (tungsten disulfide, WS 2 ) placed outside the tunnel junction (right) acts as an antenna and makes it possible to enhance the energy created in the tunnel junction. Credit: Sotirios Papadopoulos / ETH Zurich

The fast switching and modulation of light is at the heart, among other things, of modern data transfer, in which information is sent through fiber optic cables in the shape of modulated light beams. It has been possible for several years now to miniaturize light modulators and to integrate them into chips, but the light sources themselveslight emitting diodes (LEDs) or lasersstill pose problems to engineers.

A team of researchers at ETH Zurich led by Prof. Lukas Novotny, together with colleagues at EMPA in Dubendorf and at ICFO in Barcelona, have now found a new mechanism by which tiny but efficient light sources could be produced in the future. The results of their research have recently been published in the journal Nature Materials.

Trying the unexpected

"To achieve this, we first had to try the unexpected," says Novotny. For several years he and his coworkers have been working on miniature light sources that are based on the tunnel effect. Between two electrodes (made of gold and graphene in this case) separated by an insulating material, electrons can tunnel according to the rules of quantum mechanics. Under particular circumstancesthat is, if the tunnel process is inelastic, meaning that the energy of the electrons is not conservedlight can be created.

"Unfortunately, the yield of those light sources is rather poor because the radiative emission is very inefficient," explains postdoc Sotirios Papadopoulos. This emission problem is well-known in other areas of technology. In mobile phones, for instance, the chips that create the microwaves needed for transmission are only a few millimeters in size.

By contrast, the microwaves themselves have a wavelength of around 20 centimeters, which makes them a hundred times larger than the chip. To overcome this difference in size an antenna is needed (which, in modern phones, is actually no longer visible from the outside). Likewise, in the experiments of the Zurich researchers the wavelength of the light is much larger than the light source.

Semiconductor outside the tunnel junction

"One might think, then, that we were consciously looking for an antenna solutionbut in reality we weren't," says Papadopoulos. Like other groups before them, the researchers were investigating layers of semiconductor materials such as tungsten disulfide with a thickness of a single atom sandwiched between the electrodes of the tunnel junction in order to create light in this way.

In principle one would assume that the optimal position should be somewhere between the two electrodes, maybe a little closer to one than to the other. Instead, the researchers tried something completely different by putting the semiconductor on top of the graphene electrodecompletely outside the tunnel junction.

Surprising antenna action

Surprisingly, this apparently illogical position worked very well. The researchers found out the reason for this by varying the voltage applied to the tunnel junction and measuring the current flowing through it. This measurement showed a clear resonance, which matched a so-called exciton resonance of the semiconductor material.

Excitons are made of a positively charged hole, which corresponds to a missing electron, and an electron bound by the hole. They can be excited, for instance, by light irradiation. The exciton resonance was a clear sign that the semiconductor was not excited directly by charge carriersafter all, there were no electrons flowing through itbut rather that it absorbed the energy created in the tunnel junction and subsequently re-emitted it. In other words, it acted very much like an antenna.

Applications in nanoscale light sources

"For now, this antenna is not very good because inside the semiconductor so-called dark excitons are created, which means that not much light is emitted," Novotny concedes. "Improving this will be our homework for the near future." If the researchers are successful in making the light emission by the semiconductor more efficient, it should be possible to create light sources that measure only a few nanometers and are, thus, a thousand times smaller than the wavelength of the light they produce.

As there are no electrons flowing through the semiconductor antenna, there are also none of the unwanted effects that typically occur at boundaries and that can reduce the efficiency. "In any case, we have opened a door to new applications," says Novotny. Trying the unexpected has evidently paid off.

More information: Lujun Wang et al, Exciton-assisted electron tunnelling in van der Waals heterostructures, Nature Materials (2023). DOI: 10.1038/s41563-023-01556-7 Journal information: Nature Materials
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Model of the bitter taste receptor TAS2R14. The side chain residues relevant for ligand binding are shown in yellow. Credit: Antonella Di Pizio / Leibniz-LSB@TUM

Taste receptors for bitter substances are not only found on the tongue but also on cells outside the oral cavity. As a new study by the Leibniz Institute for Food Systems Biology at the Technical University of Munich now shows, extraoral bitter taste receptors could also serve as endogenous sensors for bile acids.

This discovery suggests that, in addition to food components, endogenous substances may have influenced the evolution of bitter taste receptors. Furthermore, the study provides new approaches to explore the health effects of food constituents in which extraoral bitter taste receptors are involved.

As taste sensors, bitter taste receptors serve to detect and avoid potential toxins in food. Relatively recent findings also indicate that bitter taste receptors are also found on cells of the lung, brain, and gastrointestinal tract, and on blood and sperm cells. A fact that suggests further, less well-studied receptor functions exist in the body, especially since the human body also produces bitter substances itself.

Based on these findings, the question arises whether bitter taste receptors evolved primarily as taste receptors or rather as endogenous sensors interacting with endogenous bitter substances. The latter, of course, would require that concentrations of endogenous substances in the corresponding body fluids be sufficient to activate endogenous bitter taste receptors on extraoral tissues and cells.

Bile acids are endogenous bitter substances

Bile acids are a good example of endogenous bitter substances and are present in various body fluids. Therefore, a team led by Maik Behrens from the Leibniz Institute in Freising, Germany, investigated which of the approximately 25 human bitter taste receptor types respond to physiologically relevant bile acid concentrations. For this purpose, the team used an established cellular test system and combined functional experiments with molecular modeling approaches. The eight bile acids tested included primary, secondary, tertiary, and conjugated bile acids. The study is published in the journal Communications Biology.

As the team shows, five bitter taste receptor types respond to the bile acids tested. "In this context, the measured activation thresholds of the receptors matched very well the bile acid concentrations reported for human body fluids in the literature," says Florian Ziegler, a doctoral student at the Leibniz Institute who contributed significantly to the study.

"Moreover, we were not only able to characterize the binding of bile acids to the bitter taste receptor TAS2R1 by modeling studies but even reproduced the differences of experimental activity data," adds Antonella Di Pizio, who heads the Molecular Modeling group at the Leibniz Institute.

Bile acids activate extraoral bitter taste receptors

"Our results suggest that there is indeed a physiological relationship between bile acids and certain extraoral bitter taste receptors and that the latter act as endogenous sensors of bile acid levels. They also support the hypothesis that not only external factors such as bitter food constituents have influenced the evolution of bitter taste receptors, but also endogenous ones," says principal investigator Maik Behrens.

However, further studies are urgently needed to clarify the exact biological functions of the extraoral receptors, the biologist continues. He adds, "Gaining a deeper understanding of these functions could provide valuable insights into the potential health effects of food components when they interact with the extraoral bitter taste receptor ligand systems."

More information: Florian Ziegler et al, Physiological activation of human and mouse bitter taste receptors by bile acids, Communications Biology (2023). DOI: 10.1038/s42003-023-04971-3 Journal information: Communications Biology

Provided by Leibniz Institute for Food Systems Biology
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Greenpeace has denounced the new proposal as 'GMO deregulation' by the back door.

The European Commission will on Wednesday put forward a proposal to ease current restrictions on genetically modified crops, which is already being denounced by environmental groups and leftwing lawmakers.

The plan could create a new frontline in the EU's Green Deal, elements of which center-right European lawmakers are already seeking to stall, arguing they would harm farmers.

The commission says the rules on GMOs (genetically modified organisms) need to be relaxed to grow crops that require fewer pesticides, are better adapted to climate change and need less water.

It wants to allow gene editing within a plant's existing DNAwhich is different from transgenic techniques that introduce a foreign DNA strands and create a distinct species.

"Plants produced by new genomic techniques can support sustainability," EU health commissioner Stella Kyriakides said in April.

"We are designing a regulatory framework that will strongly signal to farmers, researchers and industry that this is the way forward in the EU," she said.

In this area, the commission wants to reduce the tough restrictions that apply to GMOs, which include authorisations, labeling and monitoring.

The text of the project, seen by AFP, calls for the existing GMO rules to not apply to genetically edited crops where the modifications could have come about naturally or through traditional blending procedures of plant species.

Such new crops would be considered "equivalent" to conventional varieties, subject to conditions on the type and number of mutations, a publicly accessible listing, and labeling for the sale of seeds.

No produce coming from these new genomic techniques (NGT) will be able to carry the "bio" label however, and those with herbicide properties would be excluded from the light-touch regulatory approach.

Those that are pesticide resistant would remain in the restrictive regime governing GMOs.

Brussels currently has received 90 authorization requests for NGT crops, a third of which are in advanced research stages.

A few have reached the level of testing in open fields, such as corn in Belgium and potatoes in Sweden.

'Boost productivity'

Powerful agri-groups such as Copa-Cogeca have been calling for simplified rules to speed up sales of their products.

Some EU member countries and lawmakers in the European Parliament's center-right EPP grouping back that stance.

"We need to boost productivity and take into account the limited level of natural resources," Spain's agriculture minister Luis Planas said in mid-June, ahead of his country taking over the EU's rotating presidency.

He is looking to weigh this lifting of controls on NGTs against another EU text that aims to reduce the use of pesticides in European farming, but which has become bogged down in arguments over a feared reduction in crop yields.

The EPP, which is the biggest grouping in the parliament, is fiercely opposed to reduced pesticide use, and also a nature restoration law also being negotiated that seeks to repair damaged ecosystems.

Pascal Canfin, a lawmaker from the liberal Renew group who heads the parliament's environment committee, said the commission's NGT proposal could provide terms for a compromise.

"It is strongly backed by the EPP and offers a landing ground, with biotech solutions and natural solutionsthe restoration of ecosystemsin parallel," he said.

However leftwing lawmakers are against a "GMO deregulation" and are demanding a systematic risk analysis, compulsory labeling, and the means to detect and trace such products.

Environmental groups are also opposed.

Greenpeace denounced it as "GMO deregulation" through the back-door that "ignores potential dangers to the environment, bees and pollinators and human health" and will obscure from consumers what they are eating.

 2023 AFP
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Credit: Unsplash/CC0 Public Domain

As Southern Californians prepare to flood local beaches in anticipation of the Fourth of July holiday and an oncoming heat wave, experts are warning beachgoers to be vigilant about a surprising hazard: biting sea lions.

As of Tuesday, sea lions had injured at least two people at beaches in Orange County. Channel Islands Marine and Wildlife Institute, which serves Santa Barbara and Ventura counties, has recorded five recent incidents of animals biting beachgoers, including a surfer, paddle boarder, diver and two people on the beach, according to the facility's executive director, Sam Dover.

So what is behind this unusual behaviorand what should you do if you're bitten?

The marine mammals have been experiencing seizures or sickness by the hundreds because of an ongoing bloom of toxic algae, experts say.

But "it's not like this is a rabid sea lion running down the beach chasing people and biting them," said Dr. Alissa Deming of the Pacific Marine Mammal Center in Laguna Beach.

"They're either running into surfers if they're seizing erratically and accidentally biting them," she said. "If someone touches them, they can be hyper-reactive and reflexively fly their head back. It's not like they're attackingthey're in a comatose state and if they're spooked or bump into something, they may bite."

High concentrations of domoic acida neurotoxin produced by the marine algae Pseudo-nitzschiawere first found in waters near Santa Barbara and Ventura counties before making their way south to Los Angeles and Orange counties, according to Deming, the vice president of conservation medicine and science at the mammal center, which serves Orange County.

This algae bloom is one of the largest ever seen in the county, resulting in the most stranded sea lions the facility has dealt with, Deming said.

"This is the worst domoic acid event I've ever seen," she said, "and I've worked here for over 10 years."

Domoic acid events were first documented in the 1990s and have become increasingly common, more severe and longer-lasting in recent years. Algae blooms have historically been driven by climate change and ocean warming, particularly in El Nino years, when the ocean is warmer, and during years with a lot of rainfall, which results in the runoff of fertilizer, feeding the algae.

The algae, which grow during the spring and fall when the upwelling of water results in nutrients from deeper water rising to the surface, builds up in the food chain. Sea lions and dolphins eat the fish that consume the algae, resulting in brain damage, seizures and even death in the marine animals. The toxin doesn't usually affect humans unless they eat contaminated food.

Deming recommends that going into the holiday, the public be vigilant at beaches and try to stay at least 50 feetthe length of about four to six carsfrom sea lions and other marine mammals. She also urged beachgoers to leash their dogs in case they were to approach any sickened sea lions and to follow the instructions of lifeguards.

"If people give that animal space," Deming noted, "the chances of them getting bitten is very low."

But some people frolicking in the water might not be aware of a sickened animal nearby. "Swimmers and surfers are more at risk," she said.

If you're bitten, Deming said to seek medical attention immediately. Bites can became infected with bacteria from the sea lion's mouth or the ocean, and antibiotics could be necessary.

Humans aren't at risk of getting sickened from domoic acid from a sea lion bitethey would have to consume it to be affected. This can happen through the seafood that is captured in areas during blooms. The California Department of Public Health routinely monitors the coast to sample shellfish such as clams, mussels and scallops to test for domoic acid toxins. Commercial shellfish harvesters are required to provide samples every week to the department for analysis.

Among the recent documented incidents was a boy who was bitten Monday by a sea lion at Salt Creek Beach in Dana Point. The child, who has not been publicly identified, was wading in the water about 20 feet from shore, according to Danielle Kennedy, a spokesperson for O.C. Parks. He was treated by lifeguards, released to a guardian and referred to urgent care for treatment. Lifeguards closed the water out of caution.

Another injury caused by a sea lion was reported at Strands Beach at Salt Creek later that day, Kennedy said. The person declined to be treated; lifeguards then closed the water.

Salt Creek Beach was reopened Tuesday morning, and Strands Beach was reopened Wednesday morning. The public has been advised to contact a lifeguard if they see any sea lion, seal or other "aggressive marine mammals" in the area.

The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration reports that more than 1,000 marine mammals in Southern California have gotten sick or died this month due to the toxic algae.

The Los Angeles Unified School District has teamed up with the Marine Mammal Care Center in San Pedro, which serves Los Angeles County, to set up a triage space in the center's parking lot that will allow the organization to care for an additional 20 animals at a time.

John Warner, the chief executive of the mammal care center, said during a Tuesday news conference that L.A. County had seen "high numbers" of sea lions stranded on its beaches because of domoic acid since the beginning of June.

The Marine Mammal Care Center is at capacity, with 113 animalsabout 70 of them are sea lions with domoic acid toxicity. The rest of the animals are from pup season and aren't ready to be released.

"That's put additional strain on our capacity," he said, "which in regular years is enough to care for the marine mammals stranded here."

To care for the animals still stranded on beaches, Warner said the mammal center had partnered with city and county officials to set up a sea lion resting zone on Venice Beach to keep the animals sequestered from beachgoers.

The Pacific Marine Mammal Center has rescued four to six sea lions a day, and it is approaching capacity, Deming said. There are about 70 animals there now, with more than half of them sickened sea lions; there's space for about 10 to 15 more.

The center is working on setting up pens to accommodate 10 to 15 more animals with the hope that that would be enough for the Fourth of July weekend.

Dolphins have also been affected by the bloom of toxic algae, Deming said, but the poisoning is usually so severe that by the time rescuers get to the beach, the dolphins have died or are unresponsive to seizure medication and have to be euthanized.

The Pacific Marine Mammal Center has euthanized one dolphin and has responded to about eight to 10 dolphins that were already deceased or died while rescuers tended to the mammals.

When people come across a beached dolphin, Deming urges them to leave it alone even though their instinct may be to push it into the water. The dolphins beach themselves, she said, so they don't drown during seizures.

Deming said the Pacific Marine Mammal Center had asked the city's public works department and lifeguards to call the organization about deceased dolphins. The center has only three trucks and often is unable to pick up all of the animals about which they are alerted. In those cases, the center instructs public works employees to remove the dolphins from the beaches.

"We're prioritizing live animals," she added, "which is understandable."

2023 Los Angeles Times.

Distributed by Tribune Content Agency, LLC.
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The sun rises over fishing boats in the Atlantic Ocean, Sept. 8, 2022, off of Kennebunkport, Maine. The United Nations body that regulates the worlds ocean floor is preparing to resume negotiations in July 2023, that could open the international seabed for mining, including for materials vital for the green energy transition. Credit: AP Photo/Robert F. Bukaty, File

The International Seabed Authoritythe United Nations body that regulates the world's ocean flooris preparing to resume negotiations that could open the international seabed for mining, including for materials critical for the green energy transition.

Years long negotiations are reaching a critical point where the authority will soon need to begin accepting mining permit applications, adding to worries over the potential impacts on sparsely researched marine ecosystems and habitats of the deep sea.

Here's a look at what deep sea mining is, why some companies and countries are applying for permits to carry it out and why environmental activists are raising concerns.

WHAT IS DEEP SEA MINING?

Deep sea mining involves removing mineral deposits and metals from the ocean's seabed. There are three types of such mining: taking deposit-rich polymetallic nodules off the ocean floor, mining massive seafloor sulphide deposits and stripping cobalt crusts from rock.

These nodules, deposits and crusts contain materials, such as nickel, rare earths, cobalt and more, that are needed for batteries and other materials used in tapping renewable energy and also for everyday technology like cellphones and computers.

Engineering and technology used for deep sea mining are still evolving. Some companies are looking to vacuum materials from seafloor using massive pumps. Others are developing artificial intelligence-based technology that would teach deep sea robots how to pluck nodules from the floor. Some are looking to use advanced machines that could mine materials off side of huge underwater mountains and volcanoes.

Companies and governments view these as strategically important resources that will be needed as onshore reserves are depleted and demand continues to rise.

HOW IS DEEP SEA MINING REGULATED NOW?

Countries manage their own maritime territory and exclusive economic zones, while the high seas and the international ocean floor are governed by the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Seas. It is considered to apply to states regardless of whether or not they have signed or ratified it. Under the treaty, the seabed and its mineral resources are considered the "common heritage of mankind" that must be managed in a way that protects the interests of humanity through the sharing of economic benefits, support for marine scientific research, and protecting marine environments.

Mining companies interested in deep sea exploitation are partnering with countries to help them get exploration licenses.

More than 30 exploration licenses have been issued so far, with activity mostly focused in an area called the Clarion-Clipperton Fracture Zone, which spans 1.7 million square miles (4.5 million square kilometers) between Hawaii and Mexico.

Coral on Moore Reef is visible in Gunggandji Sea Country off coast of Queensland in eastern Australia on Nov. 13, 2022. The United Nations body that regulates the worlds ocean floor is preparing to resume negotiations in July 2023, that could open the international seabed for mining, including for materials vital for the green energy transition. Conservationists worry that ecosystems will be damaged by mining, especially without any environmental protocols. Credit: AP Photo/Sam McNeil, File

WHY IS THERE PRESSURE ON THE ISA TO ESTABLISH REGULATIONS NOW?

A clause of the U.N. treaty requires the ISA to complete regulations governing deep sea exploitation by July 2023.

Countries and private companies can start applying for provisional licenses if the U.N. body fails to approve a set of rules and regulations by July 9. Experts say its unlike it will since the process will likely take several years.

WHAT ARE THE ENVIRONMENTAL CONCERNS?

Only a small part of the deep seabed has been explored and conservationists worry that ecosystems will be damaged by mining, especially without any environmental protocols.

Damage from mining can include noise, vibration and light pollution, as well as possible leaks and spills of fuels and other chemicals used in the mining process.

Sediment plumes from the some mining processes are a major concern. Once valuable materials are taken extracted, slurry sediment plumes are sometimes pumped back into the sea. That can harm filter feeding species like corals and sponges, and could smother or otherwise interfere with some creatures.

The full extent of implications for deep sea ecosystems is unclear, but scientists have warned that biodiversity loss is inevitable and potentially irreversible.

"We're constantly finding new stuff and it's a little bit premature to start mining the deep sea when we don't really understand the biology, the environments, the ecosystems or anything else," said Christopher Kelley, a biologist with research expertise in deep sea ecology.

WHAT'S NEXT?

The ISA's Legal and Technical Commission, which oversees the development of deep sea mining regulations, will meet in early July to discuss the yet-to-be mining code draft.

The earliest that mining under ISA regulations could begin is in late 2024 or 2025. Applications for mining must be considered and environmental impact assessments need to be carried out.

In the meantime, some companiessuch as Google, Samsung, BMW and othershave backed the World Wildlife Fund's call to pledge to avoid using minerals that have been mined from the planet's oceans. More than a dozen countriesincluding France, Germany and several Pacific Island nations have officially called for a ban, pause or moratorium on deep sea mining at least until environmental safeguards are in place, although it's unclear how many other countries support such mining. Other countries, such as Norway, are proposing opening their waters to mining.

 2023 The Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed without permission.
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The three observatories in Hawai`i collaborating with the Euclid mission. (left to right) the Canada-France-Hawai`i Telescope (CFHT), the Subaru Telescope, and the University of Hawai`i Institute for Astronomy Pan-STARRS (PS1). Credit: CFHT, NAOJ, IfA

Launched on July 1, 2023, the European Euclid mission will observe billions of galaxies over one-third of the sky to create a map of the Universe. But Euclid's map will be in black and white; telescopes in Hawai'i, including the Subaru Telescope, are needed to determine the colors of the galaxies. The color data will be used to deduce the distance, thus creating a 3D map, uncovering the mysteries of dark matter and dark energy.

The European Space Agency (ESA) Euclid space telescope mission will explore the mysteries of dark matter, dark energy, and cosmic evolution.

Without atmospheric interference, Euclid can clearly capture the shape of galaxies and detect the gravitational lensing effect, in which the gravitational field of a foreground object distorts the image of a distant galaxy. But Euclid is equipped with only one filter in optical wavelengths, meaning that Euclid takes black and white images. To precisely determine the distance to galaxies, images taken with multiple filters are necessary. That is why collaboration with ground-based telescopes is essential.

Three observatories in Hawai'ithe Canada-France-Hawai'i Telescope (CFHT), the Subaru Telescope on Maunakea, and the University of Hawai'i Institute for Astronomy Pan-STARRS telescopes on Haleakala, Mauistarted the UNIONS project prior to the launch, to survey the northern sky in optical and near-infrared wavelengths.

This project will cover almost one-third of Euclid's observation area. "UNIONS is a consortium of telescopes in Hawai'i. CFHT equipped with MegaCam observes in shorter wavelength bands, the Subaru Telescope equipped Hyper Suprime-Cam (HSC) observes mainly in longer wavelength bands, and two Pan-STARRS telescopes equipped with a Gigapixel Camera observe in an intermediate wavelength band. Not only with Euclid, UNIONS scientists are also sharing data to conduct research collaboration," explains Satoshi Miyazaki, Director of Subaru Telescope, the significance of UNIONS. Interview with Professor Satoshi Miyazaki, Director of Subaru Telescope, NAOJ, about collaboration between Euclid and UNIONS. This video was filmed on 21 June 2023. Credit: NAOJ/Maunakea Observatories

The Subaru Telescope's most significant contribution to the collaboration, WISHES (Wide Imaging with Subaru HSC of the Euclid Sky), is in the near infrared, beyond the reach of Euclid's optical filter. "We established the WISHES project when we received an enthusiastic invitation that the contribution of the Subaru Telescope is crucial for the success of the Euclid mission," says Masamune Oguri at Chiba University, a member of the Euclid Consortium Board.

"I am excited about the launch because the time has come for many scientists' dreams to come true," says Miyazaki, who has been aware of the mission from since the 2000s. He believes that collaboration with cutting-edge international missions will be increasingly important for the Subaru Telescope. "Our collaboration with Euclid will be a role model."
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Credit: Dr. Gonzalo Araujo, Marine Research and Conservation Foundation, UK

Increasing opportunities for up-close encounters with sharks and other animals are making wildlife tourism one of the fastest growing tourism sectorsleading Australian ecology experts to venture to one of the world's main sites to investigate the effects of tourism on endangered whale sharks.

At Oslob in the Philippines, Flinders University Southern Shark Ecology Group and Global Ecology Lab joined local Filipino researchers to measure how the daily feeding regimes for resident whale shark population might have affected their behavior and physiology by assessing their activity and metabolic requirements.

Oslob is home to one of the world's largest whale shark (Rhincodon typus) tourism sites, and operators use 150kg to 400kg of food to attract the impressive animals to the picturesque location.

In the 12 years since feeding whale sharks began, mass tourism at the location has increased the size of shark aggregation as well as changed shark behavior, including "desensitization" to boat and human contact.

"By fitting 16 whale sharks with small accelerometers, similar to a fitness tracker, we found their daily movements and resulting metabolic rate increased by up to 55% in response to their quest for food at the tourism site," says Flinders University Honors researcher Christine Barry, who is now doing a Ph.D. at Murdoch University, WA. Credit: Dr Gonzalo Araujo, Flinders University

"Our bioenergetics model suggests that providing about 220kg of food per day would be sufficient to offset higher metabolic rate driven by tourism.

"However, the unknown long-term consequences of feeding whale sharks suggests that managers should focus on making changes to operating procedures to reduce the high activity we see at the site."

Supported by the Harry Butler Institute at Murdoch University and the Australian Institute of Marine Science, Barry hopes her current Ph.D. project will support management at West Australia's Ningaloo Reef by measuring the importance of foraging ground for this vulnerable species.

The Oslob study and data analysis were supported by Dr. Adrian Gleiss from the Harry Butler Institute and Flinders University Professor Corey Bradshaw, who both contributed to the article just published in the journal Biological Conversation.

Senior author Flinders University Professor Charlie Huveneers, Research Director of the Southern Shark Ecology Group, says the two-fold increase in whale shark activity was due to more rapid acceleration and altered tailbeat frequency and amplitude required by the sharks to move between and avoid each other and boats.

"While wildlife tourism has many benefits, including educational and conservation opportunities, we need to be mindful of a range of possible negative effects on the movement and activity of the animals targeted by tourism.

"Without adequate management and regulation, tourism could have a range of negative effects on whale sharks and their ecosystems, and therefore the industry relying on these whale sharks," he says.

Barry says whale shark tourism at Oslob is vital for international tourism and the local economy, and therefore understanding how to ensure sustainable practices is important.

"Feeding whale sharks is becoming an increasingly common strategy for tourism in the Indo-Pacific region, so it is essential to continue investigating how this might be affecting the endangered whale shark," she says.

More information: Christine Barry et al, Estimating the energetic cost of whale shark tourism, Biological Conservation (2023). DOI: 10.1016/j.biocon.2023.110164 Journal information: Biological Conservation
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Cross section of a hollow-core fibre fabricated by Leah Murphy. Credit: Leah Murphy. Credit: Leah Murphy

Scientists at the University of Bath have developed a mathematical model to explain how antiresonant hollow-core fibers guide light in a way that keeps data loss ultra-low. Until now, scientists had no complete explanation for this well-observed phenomenon.

Immense progress has been made in recent years to increase the efficiency of optical fibers through the design of cables that allow data to be transmitted both faster and at broader bandwidths. The greatest improvements have been made in the area of hollow-core fibersa type of fiber that is notoriously "leaky" yet also essential for many applications.

Now, for the first time, scientists have figured out why some air-filled fiber designs work so much more efficiently than others. The puzzle has been solved by recent Ph.D. graduate Dr. Leah Murphy and Emeritus Professor David Bird from the Center for Photonics and Photonic Materials at the University of Bath.

The researchers' theoretical and computational analysis gives a clear explanation for a phenomenon that other physicists have observed in practice: that a hollow-centered optical fiber incorporating glass filaments into its design causes ultra-low loss of light as it travels from source to destination.

Dr. Murphy said, "The work is exciting because it adds a new perspective to a 20-year-long conversation about how antiresonant, hollow-core fibers guide light. I'm really optimistic that this will encourage researchers to try out interesting new hollow-core fiber designs where light loss is kept ultra-low."

The communication revolution

Optical fibers have transformed communications in recent years, playing a vital role in enabling the enormous growth of fast data transmission. Specially designed fibers have also become key in the fields of imaging, lasers and sensing (as seen, for instance, in pressure and temperature sensors used in harsh environments).

The best fibers have some astounding propertiesfor example, a pulse of light can travel over 50km along a standard silica glass fiber and still retain more than 10% of its original intensity (an equivalent would be the ability to see through 50km of water).

But the fact that light is guided through a solid material means current fibers have some drawbacks. Silica glass becomes opaque when the light it is attempting to transmit falls within the mid-infrared and ultraviolet ends of the electromagnetic spectrum. This means applications that need light at these wavelengths (such as spectrometry and instruments used by astrophysicists) cannot use standard fibers.

In addition, high-intensity light pulses are distorted in standard fibers and they can even destroy the fiber itself.

Researchers have been working hard to find solutions to these drawbacks, putting their efforts into developing optical fibers that guide light through air rather than glass.

This, however, brings its own set of problems: a fundamental property of light is that it doesn't like to be confined in a low-density region like air. Optical fibers that use air rather than glass are intrinsically leaky (the way a hosepipe would be if water could seep through the sides).

The confinement loss (or leakage loss) is a measure of how much light intensity is lost as it moves through the fibers, and a key research goal is to improve the design of the fiber's structure to minimize this loss.

Hollow cores

The most promising designs involve a central hollow core surrounded and confined by a specially designed cladding. Slotted within the cladding are hollow, ultra-thin-walled glass capillaries attached to an outer glass jacket.

Using this set-up, the loss performance of the hollow-core fiber is close to that of a conventional fiber.

An intriguing feature of these hollow-core fibers is that a theoretical understanding of how and why they guide light so well has not kept up with experimental progress.

For around two decades, scientists have had a good physical understanding of how the thin glass capillary walls that face the hollow core (green in the diagram) act to reflect light back into the core and thus prevent leakage. But a theoretical model that includes only this mechanism greatly overestimates the confinement loss, and the question of why real fibers guide light far more effectively than the simple theoretical model would predict has, until now, remained unanswered.

Dr. Murphy and Professor Bird describe their model in a paper published this week in the journal Optica.

The theoretical and computational analysis focuses on the role played by sections of the glass capillary walls (red in the diagram) that face neither the inner core nor the outer wall of the fiber structure.

As well as supporting the core-facing elements of the cladding, the Bath researchers show that these elements play a crucial role in guiding light, by imposing a structure on the wave fields of the propagating light (gray curved lines in the diagram). The authors have named the effect of these structures "azimuthal confinement."

Although the basic idea of how azimuthal confinement works is simple, the concept is shown to be remarkably powerful in explaining the relationship between the geometry of the cladding structure and the confinement loss of the fiber.

Dr. Murphy, first author of the paper, said, "We expect the concept of azimuthal confinement to be important to other researchers who are studying the effect of light leakage from hollow-core fibers, as well as those who are involved in developing and fabricating new designs."

Professor Bird, who led the project, added, "This was a really rewarding project that needed the time and space to think about things in a different way and then work through all the details.

"We started working on the problem in the first lockdown and it has now been keeping me busy through the first year of my retirement. The paper provides a new way for researchers to think about leakage of light in hollow-core fibers, and I'm confident it will lead to new designs being tried out."

More information: Leah R. Murphy et al, Azimuthal confinement: the missing ingredient in understanding confinement loss in antiresonant, hollow-core fibers, Optica (2023). DOI: 10.1364/OPTICA.492058 Journal information: Optica
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When a light beam enters the photonic chip, it's guided to regions where a beam splitter divides the light wave into two parts. At each location, the Swiss-cheese-like structure of a thin layer of tantalum pentoxide alters numerous properties to the light wave, including its phase and polarization. Credit: S. Kelley/NIST

Researchers at the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) have devised a photonic circuit on a chip that transforms a single incoming beam of laser light into a panoply of new beams, each with a host of different optical properties.

The newly generated beamswhich retain the frequency of the original beamsimultaneously exit the circuit at different locations along the chip. That allows scientists and engineers to select the specific characteristics of one or more beams needed for a particular application.

Precision shaping and controlling beams of visible light are critical for diagnosing and studying human diseases, trapping atoms that form the basis of the world's most accurate clocks, quantum computing, and many other quantum-based technologies.

Doing so, however, typically requires bulky optics that occupy large amounts of laboratory space. The new NIST-designed device could eventually eliminate the need for such optics and help miniaturize the latest generation of atomic clocks and other devices, bringing them out of the laboratory and into the workplace. Small, portable versions of atomic optical clocks could dramatically improve navigation systems, especially underwater, where GPS is not available.

Most methods of shaping and guiding light on a chip, including those that employ metasurfaces, typically convert a single light beam with one set of properties into another single light beam with a different set of properties.

In contrast, "our device can generate a very large number of shaped beams from a single input beam," said NIST researcher Grisha Spektor. Multiple laser beams that simultaneously bombard a cloud of atoms from different directions are required to trap and cool the cloud so it can be used as the basis of an atomic clock. The newest generation of optical atomic clocks, likely to become the new international (SI) standard for defining the second, typically require six laser beams.

The researchers, who include scientists from Stanford University in California, the University of Colorado in Boulder and Octave Photonics in Boulder, described their work in the June 30 online edition of the journal Optica.

Three examples of how a new photonic chip built at NIST shapes an incoming light beam. A thin layer within the chip, made of tantalum pentoxide, forms a structure that can alter the polarization of an outgoing light beam (plane in which the beam vibrates) depending on its horizontal direction () and elevation above the layer (). The chip can reshape the beam to vibrate in a circular pattern or a radial pattern. In addition, the structure of the material can reshape the beam into a vortex, which alters its phase (the position of a light wave within its cycle of peaks and valleys). Credit: S: Kelley/NIST

The circuit generates these beams within an ultrathin layer of tantalum pentoxide 150 nanometers (billionths of a meter) thick, about one-hundredth the diameter of a human red blood cell. Tantalum pentoxide, often employed in optical coatings, has a high index of refraction and is almost perfectly transparent.

Using computer algorithms, Spektor and his colleagues imprinted the tantalum pentoxide layer with Swiss-cheese-like patterns tailored to generate multiple light beams, each with different properties. Because the photonic circuit consists of a single layer of material, it can be fabricated relatively easily and scaled up to larger dimensions as needed, Spektor said.

A laser beam enters the chip through a channel that guides the light to several different locations within the chip. At each location, the light stream is split in two. The structure of the tantalum pentoxide imparts a different phasethe position of a light wave within its cycle of peaks and valleysto each of the streams.

In addition, the polarization of each of the two split streamsthe plane in which the light wave vibratesis rotated relative to the other by 90 degrees. The two streams are then recombined and scattered in various ways that create outgoing light beams with practically any desired phase, polarization, direction, or divergence.

Physicists need several wide, or divergent, beams to corral clouds of atoms used in atomic clocks and other quantum technologies. Diverging beams offer another advantage: They can be generated within a tiny region of the chipless than one-tenth the width of a human hairenabling the chip to create many closely-spaced beams. The small amount of real estate needed to create the beams also leaves the rest of the chip free to perform other tasks and house additional detectors or electronics that a particular experiment or application may require.

The team's test results show that the chip device, once perfected, should be able to guide, shape, and deliver a virtually unlimited number of closely-spaced light beams at a variety of visible-light colors.

More information: G. Spektor et al, Universal visible emitters in nanoscale integrated photonics, Optica (2023). DOI: 10.1364/OPTICA.486747 Journal information: Optica
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Credit: Author provided

An Islamic State-linked group in Uganda attacked a school in June, killing more than 40 people, mostly students, in what seems to be an escalating trend of terrorism against schools. The attackers set fire to school dormitories and used machetes to kill and maim students.

This was the latest in a cycle of shocking attacks on schools around the world. The Nigerian group Boko Haram infamously kidnapped more than 200 girls from a school in 2014, and it has attacked other schools throughout the country.

Many more attacks have occurred since then. In Afghanistan, IS affiliate IS-K has repeatedly bombed educational institutions in recent years, often killing dozens of children or teens. In 2020 in Cameroon, sources suggest that separatists fighting for their own, independent state attacked a bilingual school, killing eight children.

Why would a group carry out such an attack, killing schoolchildren? These attacks are happening more frequently in recent years, and they also tend to be carried out by particular types of groups.

I recently co-wrote a book, Insurgent Terrorism: Intergroup Relations and the Killing of Civilians, with political scientists Victor Asal and R. Karl Rethemeyer, examining the use of terrorism (intentional civilian targeting) by rebel organizations in civil wars. We dedicated a chapter to understanding attacks on schools and discovered a few patterns.

First, attacks on schools are on the rise. In the years examined in our book, 19982012, we found a marked increase starting in the late 2000s during civil wars. In the 1990s and early 2000s, there fewer than 20 attacks per year on schools by rebel organizations. But between 2009 and 2012, there were more than 90 such attacks per year.

Examining more recent data on terrorism generally, and not only during civil wars, we see a similar increase starting in the late 2000s. The graphic below shows a massive increase in terrorist attacks on schools.

The annual average number of terrorist attacks on schools in the 1980s and 1990s, according to the Global Terrorism Database, was less than 60. In the 2000s, the average year saw nearly 80 school attacks. In the 2010s, there was an average of 250 terrorist attacks on schools per year. After the early 2010s peak, the number of attacks started to decrease, but numbers are still far above what they were in the 1990s or early 2000s.

The increase in terrorism against schools is in part because influential global networks such as al-Qaida and IS seem to encourage it, but also because groups learn from others that this is a good way to bring attention to their cause, to force a government to give in, or to intimidate a rival community.

A second pattern we noticed was that the organizations that carry out these kinds of attacks tend to have a few attributes in common. Groups that attack schools tend to be in alliances with other rebel or terrorist organizations. These alliances provide extra resources to groups, which are essential for large-scale attacks. For example, allies might provide explosives, vehicles or recruits. Cooperative relationships with other rebels can also contribute to heinous attacks because groups learn tactics from each other, and they might pressure each other to use extreme tactics.

This seems to be the case with the group behind the recent Uganda attack, the Allied Democratic Forces (ADF). It has been cooperating with IS since 2017 and has received funding from it. The funds and propaganda support seem to have enabled ADF to carry out increasingly vicious attacks. Additionally, other IS-affiliated groups have attacked schools, so it is possible that the main IS encourages this, or that the groups are learning from each other.

We found that groups that had recently been subjected to government crackdowns were more likely to subsequently target schools, while groups that had recently received government concessions didn't attack schools the following year. This is consistent with other research finding that government repression of religious freedom seems to lead to terrorist attacks on school.

The Uganda school attack, where boys and girls were killed and buildings set alight with people inside, was apparently intended to send a message to the government and its president Yoweri Museveni. Victims reported that the attackers said, "We have succeeded in destabilizing Museveni's country."

Interestingly, in our research, we did not find that religiously oriented groups, such as Islamist groups, were more likely than other types of groups to attack schools. Certainly, some Islamist groups have carried out these attackssuch as the recent Uganda school killings.

IS-K's attacks are intended to intimidate the mostly Shia Hazara minority community, consistent with IS-K's extreme religious views. But non-religious groups, such as the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia and the Communist Party of India (Maoist), have also repeatedly attacked schools.

Overall, attacks on schools occur because militant organizations see that they bring a great deal of attentionincluding from international news mediato their cause. Terrorism is fundamentally violent propaganda, and groups that use terrorism constantly innovate, seeking new tactics to help them stand out. They also hope the increasingly extreme methods will pressure governments to give up.

It seems likely that terrorist attacks against schools are going to continue. Governments should prioritize safeguarding educational institutions, and the international community should work harder to prevent these kinds of attacks.

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.
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A conventional polycondensation reaction can provide the simplest route to generating porous poly(aryl thioether)s. Controlling the temperature orients the reaction toward the regioselective multi-substitution of aryl fluorides, demonstrating a stepwise change in the porosity and optical band gap of the poly(aryl thioether)s. Credit: Angewandte Chemie International Edition (2023). DOI: 10.1002/anie.202304378

A facile technique for reproducibly creating Swiss-cheese-like nanomaterials has been developed by researchers at KAUST. This material, and the method required to create it, could help in the development of further advanced materials with applications in photocatalysis and optoelectronics.

Porous materials are low-density solids characterized by having a lot of empty space within the bulk of the substance. These voids give porous materials a very large surface area, which is excellent for adsorbing other chemicals and acting as an enhanced catalyst for chemical reactions.

Porous organic polymers, or POPs, have shown particular promise for these applications because of their high porosity and their chemical and thermal stability, as well as the flexibility to tailor chemical response to capture specific target molecules and enhance selected reactions.

Cafer Yavuz and colleagues from KAUST, collaborating with co-workers from Korea and the U.S., have demonstrated a simple "one-pot" catalyst-free process for creating a highly porous POP called poly(aryl thioether). "We've shown that polyarylthioethers can be produced simply from sodium sulfide and perfluorinated aromatics," says Yavuz.

"We believe that we have uncovered a powerful strategy that went against common understanding and could be used to build sulfur-based materials in a tunable fashion." Their work has been published in the journal Angewandte Chemie International Edition.

Poly(aryl thioether)s are made up of perfluorinated aromatic compounds bound together by sulfur linkers. One of the challenges in reproducibly creating the material is that the sodium sulfide can react with the perfluorinated aromatic compounds at a few different atomic sites: this means that a single reaction can create a combination of differing structures.

Yavuz and the team created their poly(aryl thioether) using a technique known as polycondensation. They show that through careful temperature control, they can ensure the formation of bonds at a particular atom over other possible atoms. This prevented random crosslinking and enabled a high level of control over the material's porosity.

They also demonstrated that the resultant porous organic polymer had a pore size of less than a nanometer and exhibited a high surface area of up to 753 square meters per gram of material. The team was able to demonstrate the utility of the substance by using it to remove organic micropollutants and toxic mercury ions from water.

"We would like to now prepare large-scale batches and provide these new porous materials for electronic or photocatalytic applications," says Yavuz. "For this, we will be working with the electronics industry and water treatment facilities."

More information: Doyun Kim et al, Covalent Scrambling in Porous Polyarylthioethers through a Stepwise SNAr for Tunable Bandgap and Porosity, Angewandte Chemie International Edition (2023). DOI: 10.1002/anie.202304378 Journal information: Angewandte Chemie International Edition
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SolO view in the EUV on 30 March 2022 showing a partial section of the Sun with gas at 1 million degrees. The red paths correspond to some of the rain tracks analyzed in this work. The Earth image has been overlaid to scale. Credit: Patrick Antolin. Background image: ESA/Solar Orbiter EUI/HRI

A team of astronomers from several European institutions led by Northumbria University in Newcastle has discovered "shooting stars" on the sun. Observations from the European Space Agency's Solar Orbiter (SolO) have revealed never-before-seen "falling star"-type phenomena or meteor-like fireballs occurring within the spectacular plasma displays known as coronal rain. The work will be presented this week at the National Astronomy Meeting (NAM 2023) by lead author Patrick Antolin, Assistant Professor at Northumbria University.

Although not real water, coronal rain is a condensation process in which some of the sun's fiery material clumps together due to sudden, localized temperature drops. The corona, which is the outermost part of the sun's atmosphere, is formed of gas at million-degree temperatures, and quick drops in temperature produce super-dense clumps of plasma that reach 250 kilometers wide. These fiery balls plummet back down towards the sun as gravity pulls them in at more than 100 kilometers per second.

The research will be published in a special issue of Astronomy & Astrophysics dedicated to SolO's first close perihelion to the sun. It is currently available on the pre-print server arXiv. In spring 2022, SolO cruised super close to the sun at a distance of only 49 million kilometersa third of the distance between the Earth and the sunallowing the best spatial resolution ever obtained of the solar corona.

Along with the first super-high-resolution images of the coronal rain clumps, SolO observed the heating and compression of gas immediately underneath them. The resulting spike in intensity below the clumps indicates that the gas is heated up to a million degrees, which lasts for a few minutes as they fall.

SolO view in the EUV on 1 April 2022 showing a partial section of the Sun with gas at 1 million degrees. The red paths correspond to some of the rain tracks analyzed in this work. The Earth image has been overlaid to scale Credit: Patrick Antolin. Background image: ESA/Solar Orbiter EUI/HRI

On Earth, "shooting stars" happen when meteoroids, or objects in space that range in size from dust grains to small asteroids, enter our atmosphere at high speeds and burn up. Only some meteors make it to the ground without disintegrating and those that do can produce huge craters.

But the sun's corona is thin and low in density and does not strip much material off the clumps, so scientists think most of the "shooting stars" make it to the solar surface intact. Their impacts have never been observed until now and SolO's observations have revealed that this process can produce a brief, strong brightening with an upward surge of material and shock waves that reheat the gas above.

"Shooting stars" and meteors in Earth's atmosphere are characterized by a trace behind the meteor's path, formed when heated material underneath strips off parts of the objecta process called ablation. The same happens to comets orbiting the sun. However, ablation does not occur in the solar corona because of its magnetic field. Instead, falling gas is partially ionized and follows the magnetic field lines, which act as giant tubes that funnel the gas. The compression and heat underneath prevents the clumps from producing tails and makes the phenomenon much harder to capture on the sun.

The project's lead author, Patrick Antolin, says, "The inner solar corona is so hot we may never be able to probe it in situ with a spacecraft. However, SolO orbits close enough to the sun that it can detect small-scale phenomena occurring within the corona, such as the effect of the rain on the corona, allowing us a precious indirect probe of the coronal environment that is crucial to understanding its composition and thermodynamics. Just detecting coronal rain is a huge step forward for solar physics because it gives us important clues about the major solar mysteries, such as how it is heated to millions of degrees."

"If humans were alien beings capable of living on the sun's surface, we would constantly be rewarded with amazing views of shooting stars," jokes Antolin, "but we would need to watch out for our heads."

These SolO observations have also confirmed earlier research which showed that coronal rain is far more pervasive than previously thought.
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The U.S. Supreme Court on Friday let stand a federal appeals court ruling that found people with gender dysphoria should be protected against discrimination under the Americans With Disabilities Act (ADA).

"By declining to hear this case, the Supreme Court implicitly acknowledges what those who have seriously examined the issue have concluded: the ADA protects people who experience gender dysphoria, including transgender and nonbinary people, from being discriminated against on that basis," Olivia Hunt, policy director for the National Center for Transgender Equality, told the Associated Press.

Justices Samuel Alito and Clarence Thomas dissented.

"The Fourth Circuit's decision makes an important provision of a federal law inoperative, and given the broad reach of the ADA and the Rehabilitation Act, will have far-reaching and important effects across much of civil society in that Circuit," Alito wrote. "Voters in the affected States and the legislators they elect will lose the authority to decide how best to address the needs of transgender persons in single-sex facilities, dormitory housing, college sports, and the like."

The 4th Circuit was the first federal appellate court to determine that the federal disabilities law protects transgender people who experience anguish because of the disparity between their assigned sex and their gender identity, the AP reported. The decision is only binding in certain states, those covered by the 4th Circuit. They are Maryland, North Carolina, South Carolina, Virginia, and West Virginia.

Some LGBTQ advocates see the ruling as potentially helpful for challenging legislation that would restrict access to gender-affirming medical care for transgender people, the AP reported.

"The overwhelming majority of Americans support nondiscrimination protections for LGBTQIA+ people, and today's decision means the ADA remains a mechanism that can help our communities secure those protections," Hunt said.

2023 HealthDay. All rights reserved.
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Strain,  (m m1), predicted by Eq. (6) as affected by soil pF and clay content for different combinations of soil organic matter (SOM, kg kg1) and bulk density (BD, g cm3): a) median SOM and 25% fractile BD; b) median SOM and median BD; b) c) median SOM and 75% fractile BD; d) minimum SOM and median BD; e) maximum SOM and median BD. Credit: Soil and Tillage Research (2022). DOI: 10.1016/j.still.2022.105589

Heavy machinery in the field can compress the soil, which can affect both plant growth and environmental conditions. However, it is important to know the difference between soil compaction in the lower layers of the soil and in the top 20 cm or so, which for plowed soil corresponds to the plow layer, also called topsoil.

Compaction of the lower layer of soil causes long-term damage, which is very important to avoid. In the case of the topsoil, compaction can be corrected through tillage, temperature changes from frost to thaw or rain and drought, and soil microbial activity.

"Nevertheless, it is common knowledge that the structure of the top layer of the soil greatly affects crop yield. Here we find a large pool of decomposable organic matter and a lively biological activity. A very large part of the root mass of plants is found in the topsoil. This means that non-optimal conditions for the oxygen-demanding chemical and biological processes can impair the crop's utilization of nutrients and lead to emissions of nitrous oxide and other gases. Therefore, it is extremely important that we also investigate the process of compaction of the topsoil," says senior researcher and emeritus Per Schjnning from the Department of Agroecology at Aarhus University.

In a recent scientific article entitled "An empirical model for prediction of topsoil deformation in field traffic" and published in Soil and Tillage Research, he has presented a new model that can predict the deformation of the topsoil caused by agricultural machinery.

For the lower soil layers, there is a certain amount of pressure that must not be exceeded to avoid damage to the soil. It is assumed that the soil is elastic up to this amount of pressure. The topsoil, on the other hand, consists of a mixture of large and small crumbs and clods that gradually deform. Therefore, a different approach is needed. A freshly plowed soil can actually be too loose. This is one of the reasons why furrow packers and rollers are used. On the other hand, the soil must not be compacted too much either. Therefore, a tool is needed to predict how much a given traffic compacts the soil.

The research is based on extensive field studies where Schjnning and his colleagues have measured and analyzed the mechanical forces under tires and the physical changes that occur in the topsoil as a result of field traffic over the course of many years. Based on the collected data and advanced statistical methods, he has developed an empirical model that can estimate the deformation of the topsoil.

"The model takes into account various soil propertiesorganic matter content, density before traffic, clay and water content. Similarly, knowledge of wheel load, tire type, and recommended and applied tire pressure is used. When we combine all these variables, the model can provide an estimate of the expected deformation in the topsoil. This can be extremely valuable knowledge for agricultural advisors and not least the farmer himself," explains Schjnning.

The new model has the potential to improve planning and management of agricultural activities. When the farmer has an accurate prediction of what will happen to the density of the topsoil if he chooses to drive a particular machine on a given field at a given time, he can more easily optimize the conditions for crop growth.

"This makes it easier for the farmer to choose the wheel fitment, weight and tire pressure of the machines, as well as the optimal time (moisture content) for a particular operation in the field," he says.

The model's application in practice

The model is based primarily on Danish soils, which are relatively sandy. If the model is to be applied more generally at an international level, it will require testing on more clayey soils and possibly adjusting it based on additional measurements. In addition, the shear forces that occur under traction wheels may give rise to skewed results.

"Our research group at Aarhus University has already developed a decision support system that makes it possible to simulate the traffic situation for the protection of the subsoil. It will be possible to incorporate the new model into this system and thus provide more realistic and relevant advice regarding the topsoil," explains Per Schjnning.

More information: Per Schjnning, An empirical model for prediction of topsoil deformation in field traffic, Soil and Tillage Research (2022). DOI: 10.1016/j.still.2022.105589
Annual Glens Falls Symphony July 3rd Summer Pops Concert and Youth Arts Experience!

VENUE CHANGE for the symphony (the fireworks are still outside): The Glens Falls Symphony presents the annual Summer Pops Concert at COOL Insuring Arena on Monday, July 3rd, beginning at 7:30pm. This annual family favorite Independence Day concert is FREE and open to all.

Cool Insuring Arena is located in Downtown Glens Falls 1 Civic Center Plaza, Glens Falls, NY 12801.

The Glens Falls Rotary will be out front of the arena main entrance with their famous bread dough trailer.

Returning for this years July 3rd concert is our Youth Arts Experience! From *6:00-7:30pm, multiple local arts organizations like the World Awareness Childrens Museum, the Chapman Museum, the Hyde Collection, Crandall Public Library, and the Wood Theater have engaging art activities for children of all ages! This will be in the front entrance of the arena (FREE).

FIREWORKS will still be at Crandall Park at dusk, courtesy of the Glens Falls Symphony.

Executive Director Jennifer Brink states, It is so wonderful to be able to bring this beloved concert on July 3, and we especially look forward to engaging young people with fun, inspiring art activities in the early evening.

This years theme is takes us to the movie theater with a program called Music of the Movies! Joining us on stage are local elected officials including NY State Senator Dan Stec and Assemblywoman Carrie Woerner to help us honor all military veterans, Queensbury Town Supervisor John Strough, and Glens Falls Mayor Bill Collins.

Grant Cottage Celebrates July 4th!Leashed dogs welcome.

Grant Cottage invites families and individuals of all ages to join in the festivities on July 4th for a memorable Family 4th Day celebration!

Open Tuesday through Sunday, 9:30am - 4pm

Located on the picturesque Mount McGregor, this event promises a day filled with captivating activities, historical exploration, and the joy of coming together as a community. "We are thrilled to host the Family 4th Day at Grant Cottage and provide a memorable experience for families and friends," said Beth J. Merrill, Executive Director of Grant Cottage.

Gates open at 9:30 am, welcoming guests to explore the stunning surroundings of Mount McGregor. Visitors are encouraged to bring their best 4-legged friends, as the outdoor areas are pet-friendly. Activities from the 1800s will engage and delight attendees of all ages. Children's games and pastimes such as croquet, hoops, marbles, and more will transport participants back in time, providing a unique and educational experience.

For more information and to set up tours click here.

Saratoga County Chamber to host Saratogas All-American Celebration

July 4 events include road race, live music and fireworks

Saratogas All-American Celebration is back this July 4th in downtown Saratoga Springs, courtesy of the Saratoga Chamber. The day will include the annual Firecracker4 Road Race, a free, family-friendly concert featuring local band Big Sky Country and a spectacular fireworks display.

Firecracker 4 begins at 9 a.m. at the Saratoga Springs City Center, 522 Broadway

Big Sky Country performs from 6 to 9 p.m. on stage at Ellsworth Jones Place

9 p.m. Revolutionary reenactor and historian Sean Kelleher on stage at Ellsworth Jones Place

Fireworks set off just after 9 p.m. from the top of the Saratoga Springs City Center Garage

The U.S. to welcome 47 new citizens, in Capital Region July 4

U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services and the New York State Supreme Court will welcome 47 new U.S. citizens during two special ceremonies Tuesday, July 4, to celebrate Independence Day.

The first occurs at 10 a.m. at Saratoga National Historic Park in Stillwater and the second at 5 p.m. at the Nelson A. Rockefeller Empire State Plaza.

In Albany, USCIS will present the citizenship candidates to New York State Supreme Court Acting Justice Richard Rivera who will administer the Oath of Allegiance and offer congratulatory remarks. New York State Office of General Services Commissioner Jeanette Moy and other elected officials and dignitaries will offer remarks and welcome the new citizens. The 27 citizenship candidates originate from the following 19 countries: Afghanistan, Albania, Bangladesh, Burma, Cameroon, Canada, China, El Salvador, Ghana, India, Iran, Liberia, Pakistan, Peru, Philippines, Poland, Sri Lanka, United Kingdom and Venezuela.

Tuesday, July 4, 5 p.m. Nelson A. Rockefeller Empire State Plaza Madison Ave. between Upper Swan and Eagle Streets Albany, NY 12223

At the Saratoga National Historical Park. USCIS Field Office Director Gwynne Dinolfo will administer the Oath of Allegiance and offer congratulatory remarks. Saratoga National Historical Park Superintendent Leslie Morlock and other elected officials and dignitaries will offer remarks and welcome the new citizens.

The 20 citizenship candidates originate from the following 16 countries: Bangladesh, Bolivia, Brazil, China, Colombia, Ghana, Guyana, India, Jamaica, Malaysia, Moldova, Pakistan, Peru, Philippines, Sudan and United Kingdom.

Tuesday, July 4, 10 a.m. Saratoga National Historic Park 648 Route 32 Stillwater, NY 12170

This ceremonies are part of USCIS annual Independence Day celebration of our nations 247th birthday and the anniversary of the Declaration of Independence. USCIS will welcome new U.S. citizens at Independence Day-themed naturalization ceremonies across the country.

Washington County to Participate in Statewide STOP-DWI JULY 4th High Visibility Engagement Campaign

STOP-DWI Impaired Driving High Visibility Engagement Campaign runs July 1 to 5.

Washington County police agencies and STOP-DWI Coordinators will participate in special efforts to bring awareness to the dangers of impaired driving. The statewide STOP-DWI High Visibility Engagement Campaign will start on July 1st and will end on July 5th. The Fourth of July extended weekend is historically a deadly period for impaired driving. This year the 4th of July falls on a Tuesday so we expect heavy traveling to begin on Saturday.

Americans love to celebrate the Fourth of July with family, friends, food and fireworks, but all too often the festivities turn tragic on the nation's roads. The fact is this iconic American holiday is also one of the deadliest holidays of the year due to impaired-driving crashes.

You can help to make a difference by Having a Sober Plan! Download our mobile app  Have a Plan and you will always be able to find a safe ride home www.stopdwi.org/mobileapp Impaired driving is completely preventable. All it takes is a little planning.
ATLANTIC CITY  Three people were arrested on drug charges Thursday, police said.

Detectives Christopher Dodson, Eric Evans, Alberto Valles and Kevin Perez, under the supervision of Sgt. Darrin Lorady, were conducting surveillance in areas that had been the subject of frequent complaints by residents and businesses, police said Sunday in a news release.

They were in the 500 block of New York Avenue at 9:49 p.m. Thursday when they saw Syhier Young clutching a handgun in his waistband.

As the detectives approached him, Young turned and began to walk away. The detectives soon saw him throw the gun and flee, police said. After a short pursuit, they arrested Young and recovered a loaded handgun. Young also was in possession of a small amount of cocaine.

Earlier, at 8:19 p.m., the detectives observed Anthony Savage and Kassandra Beebe engage in the distribution of cocaine from the front porch of an apartment in the first block of South Iowa Avenue, police said. Detectives saw Savage holding cocaine and converged on him.

Savage dropped the cocaine after seeing the detectives, police said. He was arrested, and the cocaine was recovered.

Beebe had entered the building but returned and was found to be in possession of several drugs, police said.

A search warrant was later served at Beebes residence in that same apartment building. Detectives recovered more than 24 grams of methamphetamine, 52 bags of heroin, 3 grams of cocaine and prescription pills, police said.

Beebe, 33, of Atlantic City, was charged with four counts of possession of a controlled dangerous substance, four counts of possession with intent to distribute, four counts of possession with intent to distribute within 1,000 feet of a school zone, possession of drug paraphernalia and loitering to distribute drugs.

Savage, 38, of Pleasantville, was charged with possession of CDS and possession with intent to distribute.

Beebe and Savage were released on summonses pending court.

Young, 19, of Atlantic City, was charged with unlawful possession of a weapon, possession of CDS, possession with intent to distribute, possession with intent to distribute within 500 feet of a public zone, possession of a weapon while committing a drug offense, obstruction of justice and resisting arrest. He was sent to the Atlantic County jail.
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AVALON  The borough has a new mayor for the first time in three decades with the swearing-in of John McCorristin on Monday morning.

Residents and visitors should not expect a major shift in how Avalon operates. McCorristin was former Mayor Martin Pagliughis chosen successor, and he further emphasized that connection by administering the oath of office to McCorristin, who was joined at the municipal hall by his wife, Lisa.

Ive been under Martys wing for a long time. Weve been great friends. Hes done a fabulous job with the borough of Avalon, McCorristin said.

Hes a builder in the community who has served on the Board of Education and was most recently a member of the five-person Borough Council. He joined council a decade ago and formerly served as council president.

McCorristin and Pagliughi worked together to create the Avalon Public Library in the early 2000s, leaving the county library system. The new library opened in 2005. McCorristin described the library as a great success.

Infrastructure and renovations to the recreation facilities will be a priority for McCorristin as he takes the reins in Avalon. He also plans to continue one of Pagliughis initiatives, keeping Avalon as one of the few beach towns in New Jersey without parking meters.

In part, McCorristin said free parking helps the boroughs downtown retail area along Dune Drive. On Monday, a sunny morning in the midst of a long holiday weekend, most businesses appeared packed, with a line of people awaiting an outdoor table at a pancake restaurant.

But the retail area is under pressure, said James McDermott, named president of Borough Council at the same meeting Monday. He previously served on the communitys Planning and Zoning Board.

Beach work complete in Avalon, set to start in Stone Harbor AVALON  With hopes high for the summer tourist economy in 2023, the borough is going to hav

Were certainly looking at our downtown area to make sure that we dont overdevelop the residential side of the community, McDermott said Monday.

He said in an interview after the meeting that preserving retail uses will be a priority for the new administration. Property values in Avalon have climbed quickly over the years, with average home prices in the millions of dollars and a total assessed value of $9.74 billion.

Thats great for tax rates and for real estate investors, but it can make it tough for business plans to make sense when most of the income comes in a brief three-month window.

The amount of money those grains of sand under the building are worth means you cannot operate a business, McCorristin said.

Most of the businesses in the downtown already have residential units upstairs. That has helped drive another area of concern, McCorristin said.

A lot of people dont want a restaurant underneath them, he said. But restaurants are a key part of a resort community.

Across the country, restaurants were hit especially hard by COVID-19 restrictions, but in Avalon, other factors started to squeeze businesses before the pandemic. McCorristin said about eight Avalon restaurants have closed over the past eight years.

The new mayor also mentioned the difficulty of hiring staff for the summer, describing it as a national problem, and one the borough will work to address well before the start of next summer.

Avalon's Pagliughi backs council member for new mayor AVALON  After more than three decades with Martin Pagliughi, Avalon is set to elect a new m

That is definitely a major issue in all of our departments, he said.

He also talked up plans for the Bay Park Marina at 54th Street, the next major project in the works.

McCorristin ran unopposed in the May municipal election, part of the Pagliughi-backed Team Avalon 2023, along with council incumbents Barbara Juzaitis and Sam Wierman.

Both McCorristin and McDermott praised Pagliughis efforts, saying he helped set Avalon on a good course, and that they planned to follow his example.

Were team Avalon, said McCorristin.
SEA ISLE CITY  Mark Lloyd never met Leo Weber, a man of a different generation who fought in a different war and died decades ago on a different continent.

But Lloyd felt a connection, one that grew as he learned more about Weber. He made a promise that he would make sure Webers belongings would find their way home.

It was a promise he was able to keep. But the collection of letters, papers, photos and even Webers Purple Heart medal nearly ended up in the trash.

Lloyd is the commander of VFW Post 1963 of Sea Isle City. As he tells the story, someone came to an event carrying a black plastic bag, asking for help in locating the owner of items Joe OConnor found in a chest on Pleasure Avenue on bulk trash day recently.

As OConnor described it in a later interview, he saw a cedar chest put out by the curb. He and his wife, Jean, are part-time residents of Sea Isle City and were out for a walk.

I hate to see things good stuff go to the landfill, OConnor said.

OConnor took a look at the chest and realized something interesting. The inside dimension of the apparently empty piece did not match the outside. There was more to it than met the eye.

OConnor was able to find the release that revealed an interior compartment. Inside, in addition to a strong smell of mothballs, were papers and other items. When he saw the Purple Heart, a service medal awarded to those killed or wounded in service in the United States military, he knew he found something that needed to be preserved.

As soon as I saw the Purple Heart, then I looked a little more carefully. Then, I thought, somebody threw this out by mistake, he said.

He posted images to social media and reached out to the local post of the Veterans of Foreign Wars to see if anyone knew the family of Leo Weber. OConnor handed the trove to Lloyd, who took it home. Later, Lloyd began to go through the items, and was astonished by what he saw.

There were letters, a rosary, and other personal items that Webber had with him when he died as a member of the Army Air Corps in World War II. In his pockets when he died were a small pocket knife, a 2-franc coin and a small medal with the image of Mary, the mother of Jesus. Among the papers were a letter to Webers family from President Franklin D. Roosevelt and another to Weber from his sweetheart back home.

He stands in the unbroken line of patriots who have dared to die that freedom might live, and grow, and increase its blessings, reads the letter from Roosevelt, in part.

Determined to serve

Additional papers showed how desperate Weber was to serve, going so far as to forge his fathers name on the induction papers at the age of 17. With two brothers in the service, Weber wanted to fight, and wanted very badly to serve on an air crew.

Ive got this guys whole life in front of me, Lloyd said he thought to himself when going through the find, spread out on a work bench in his garage. He saw from school papers that Weber wasnt a wiz at history or English but solid with math. Weber and Lloyd shared Philadelphia roots. Both came from big families in row homes.

There was a lot of things with Leo I could identify with, Lloyd said.

This was the kind of guy Lloyd would have hung out with when he was in high school.

Lloyd told the story as part of his Memorial Day speech this year, and many of those who attended asked what they could do to help. Using internet searches, a website devoted to the Mummers, stories in a Sea Isle City-focused news website and other means, they were able to find a niece and make a positive connection with Webers family.

A family friend was able to make the connection.

Mary Ann Niemi remembered her aunts trunk but never knew what it contained. Her aunt had a house on Pleasure Avenue in Sea Isle City, where she would also spend summers. And, no, the trunk was not supposed to be thrown away when she had the garage cleaned out.

Niemi grew up in Philadelphia and lives in Springfield, Pennsylvania. She inherited half of the Sea Isle property from her aunt. She got a call from a neighbor.

She said, Give me a call. Someone is looking for you in Sea Isle. I was, like, what did I do wrong? Niemi said.

She got in touch with Lloyd, who described an emotional conversation over the phone. Both were crying, Lloyd said. They arranged for Niemi and one of her daughters to come to Sea Isle, where the OConnors presented them with Webbers papers and possession.

Niemi had her plenty of family stories, but had never seen these items. In a recent interview, she talked about her grandmothers devastated reaction when two uniformed men arrived at their home in a German and Irish neighborhood in Southwest Philadelphia, about her own fathers service during the war and the difficulties she has had in her own life.

Weber had two brothers and two sisters, Niemis aunt Anna May Weber, later Anna May Hartford, Niemis father, Henry, who went by Harry, plus Jim and Mary. Harry served in the Battle of the Bulge, one of the most consequential battles against the Nazis, while Jim served in the Navy during the war.

Stories of Uncle Leo

Family history said their father did not want Leo to enlist.

Im not going to lose three sons in the war, Niemi quoted her grandfathers response to his youngest sons request, from the stories she heard. Undeterred, Leo Weber signed up anyway.

He got his wish, assigned to an air crew. Lloyd said he was sorry he could not know which aircraft Weber was assigned to, or what his position was on the plane.

He entered the service on April 22, 1943, and by that winter had been assigned to the Army Air Corps. Just 33 days later, he died in action over North Africa, on Feb. 19, 1944, and was buried in the American military cemetery in Nettuno, Italy, a coastal town south of Rome.

Niemi grew up with stories of Uncle Leo, who did not make it back from the war. She was close to her aunt Anna May Hartford, who bought property in Sea Isle City for $5,000 during the Depression and eventually had a home built there on Pleasure Avenue.

Anna May Hartford died in 2015. She had furniture and other items in the garage of her Sea Isle City home, now owned as a condominium by Niemi and a nephew from the Hartford side of the family. They had agreed to have someone clean out the garage, but Niemi said she never intended for the cedar chest to go, not even knowing the treasures it contains.

She expects to pass on the items to her adult daughters, and keep the items in the family, although at some point she could see some items being included in a museum display.

OConnor said he returned later to take another look at the cedar chest, but by that time it was gone, either grabbed by someone passing by or picked up by the trash collector.

Lloyds father was a World War II veteran who served in the Coast Guard, and his grandfather served in the Navy. Lloyd served in Vietnam in the Army.

For Lloyd, Webers story is one of the sacrifices made to ensure freedom in the United States.

I really had no idea how I was going to find Leo, Lloyd said.

The community in Sea Isle City, in Pennsylvania and beyond worked to make the connection.

I realized that Sea Isle City is more than a community. Its a family, Lloyd said.
They are there in most international conflicts like ghost fighters. They fight, kill, commit war crimes and yet cannot be held accountable to anyone. For they do not exist officially nor are bound by any law.

Mercenaries, like sea pirates and bounty hunters, sound like relics from the past, from a world governed more by brute force than laws, treaties and conventions. But the rebellion of Wagner Group against Russia proves that mercenaries are not only there but have to be reckoned with too.

Wagner Group is a Private Military Company (PMC) based at Petersburg, Russia. Founded in 2014 by Utkin, a former intelligence officer of Russia and businessman Yevgeny Prigozhin, with initial strength of 250, it is 50000 strong now. The Group is believed to be funded by the state and uses the infrastructure of the Russian army. And it operates outside of law because PMCs are prohibited in Russia.

The Group has been active in Syria, Libya, Central African Republic, Mali and Ukraine. For the invasion of Ukraine, the outfit recruited prison inmates from Russia and its members are accused of war crimes like murder, plunder, rape and custodial torture.

Blackwater, the US based PMC company is even older. It was set up in 1996 by former Navy SEAL officer Erik Prince and now functions under the name of Academi. It operated in Iraq and Afghanistan with US forces and was accused of many human rights violations.

But why do countries like of the USA and Russia use mercenaries when they have strong militaries of their own? It is because by using a proxy, they can deny their involvement in any conflict abroad, hide true figures of casualties of their forces and escape the accountability for the dirty work.

According to Sean Mcfate, the author or 2018 research paper, Mercenaries and War  Understanding Private Armies Today, Private force has become big business, and global in scope. No one truly knows how many billions of dollars slosh around this illicit market. All we know is that business is booming.

In recent times, mercenaries have been used in civil wars in Syria and Yemen as well as in the fight against terrorist organizations like ISIS and the Boko Haram. They have also been engaged in guarding and protecting vital private and public assets like oil installations and pipelines in the war zones.

Some countries like the UK, USA, France and Austria prohibit their citizens from fighting in a war between foreign countries. But the laws are weak and the mercenaries can get around them by operating under the cover of legitimate business of security agencies.

International effort to control the mercenary menace began with the passage of Protocol I of the Geneva Conventions in 1977. Article 47 of the Protocol I defines a mercenary as someone who fights in an armed conflict for personal gain without being a national, resident or member of the armed forces of parties to the conflict and is not on official duty on behalf of a third party state in the war zone. The article declared that a mercenary shall not have the rights of a combatant or prisoner of war.

The next big step forward was the United Nations Mercenaries Convention of 2001 which outlawed mercenaries and prohibited their recruitment, use, financing or training. But though the convention has been ratified by 37 countries, none of the permanent members of the Security Council - the USA, UK, France, China and Russia, have lent their weight to it.

Looking at the horror of human rights violations in the Ukraine war, the international community must renew its efforts to root out mercenaries. They have no place in civilized world.

Author is a retired IPS officer & DGP
Pune Airport is facing renewed criticism and public outcry due to allegations of mismanagement and luggage damage. Several c shedding light on the ongoing issue.

Almas Ashfaque, a passenger of Spice Jet who recently travelled from DXB Airport to Pune on flight SG52, told Mirror that the baggage handling at Pune Airport was exceptionally slow and disorganized. Priority bags were the last to arrive, leaving many passengers frustrated.

Furthermore, numerous passengers reported that their baggage was left behind at DXB Airport. Ashfaque mentioned receiving a Rs 200 voucher (equivalent to 10 AED) and was instructed to report the matter to customer care. The baggage was finally received at 5:35 am, well after most other passengers had claimed their luggage.

One disgruntled flyer, who had a flight with Akasa Air, tweeted, "@AkasaAir You have damaged my bag, and your staff at Pune airport, at midnight 12, are saying that we don't take any responsibility." The passenger expressed their dissatisfaction with the airline's response to the situation.

Another passenger, who flew with Indigo Airlines, shared their ordeal on Twitter, stating, "@IndiGo6E @DGCAIndia @aviation @Ministry_CA I had a flight on May 20th from Lucknow to Pune via Ahmedabad. Flight numbers 6968//6335, PNR IMVYXV. When I arrived at Pune airport, my checked-in baggage was fully broken, including my brand-new trolley and my daughter's first trolley. Despite raising a complaint, the airport staff failed to assist me adequately. They merely filled out a form and promised to call me back within four hours, but it has been 72 hours, and I haven't received any response. My complaint number is 6055759. It has been almost two months since I started tracking this issue. Please help.

When approached for comment, a representative from Indigo Airlines clarified that such incidents occur once a month, and they respond promptly to resolve them. He emphasized that last month, they successfully addressed similar complaints and compensated affected passengers. The airline assured the public that its staff is trained and actively engaged in handling luggage-related issues.

Mirror attempted to contact SpiceJet regarding the matter; however, we did not receive any response.
Fifteen-year-old entrepreneur Joey Evans is making healthy, gourmet dog treats  and profits  out of his Bettendorf home, earning more than $10,000 in sales so far.

"Joey's Famous Dog Treats" offers 25 homemade products, like biscuits varying in shape and size, training treats and other options.

"I do some gourmet treats with different icing, sprinkles, bacon bits," Evans said. "And then I do some birthday things, like I make birthday cakes as well, for pick-up locally."

The business originated after Evans' childhood dog, Libby, started having stomach issues after eating store-bought treats.

"I didn't like the ingredients that were in them, either," he said, adding that the ingredient list was lengthy. "So, I thought that I could do it better.  It was kind of like, 'If you can't read the ingredients, you probably shouldn't be eating it.' "

Evans then began researching healthier alternatives and experimented with his own recipes, eventually landing on five core ingredients: flour, oats, coconut oil and a flavoring  most commonly, peanut butter or bacon bits.

"Really simple, like human-grade," he said of the recipe's makeup. "I've tried some myself."

Looks may be deceiving, as Evans said Joey's Famous Dog Treats don't taste sweet, like cookies, but more like a biscuit or cracker (at least to a human).

Since he started making homemade treats for Libby regularly at age 10, Evans didn't initially intend on making a business out of it.

But in 2018, a year later, he started making treats for friends and family, eventually opening up an Etsy shop featuring new products and flavors.

In 2020, he launched a Joey's Famous Dog Treats website  where he now reaches around 800 customers nationwide, also gathering product feedback.

"That's really where I started to scale," Evans said of his website. "Within the past few months, I've been trying to get more into retail. I've done some (local) bars and breweries, and I'm getting into Teske's right now."

Joey's Famous Dog Treats fully operates out of Evans' family kitchen.

His mother, Jara, says her son solely self-sustains the business  aside from providing transportation to buy supplies.

"I don't think we've done anything except encourage him," she said. "At first, we were paying for the ingredients and stuff, but as soon as he started making money he buys all of his own stuff. He's had a checking account since he was 11, with a debit card."

Reflecting on how proud Jara is of Evans for self-running Joey's Famous Dog Treats at such a young age, she said it's also reflective of his personality.

"He is dedicated, but it's his love for animals he's had since he was a kid," she said. "A lot of young kids would play with trucks and cars, he had stuffed animals. That's why I think this business is great for him, because he cares about the animals."

Evans describes himself as always having an entrepreneurial mindset.

" Where, like, if I don't like the way something's done, I can always find a different way to do it better," he said. "Perseverance is a big one because there were some challenges along the way.  But that's, I feel, where I learned the most."

Since Evans self-runs the business, he finds it easier to balance with schoolwork.

Reflecting on the businesses' growth so far, Evans said he's proud of himself, particularly noting his website.

"But also, just the development of the products and ingredients and everything has come a long way too," he said. "So I'm definitely proud of that."

Evans advises other young, aspiring business-owners to just go for it.

"The hardest part was just getting started," he said. "If you have an idea, you just need to follow through with it."

Moving forward, Evans hopes to keep scaling Joey's Famous Dog Treats  though his long-term plan is yet to be determined.

"Business school stands out the most to me right now," he said. "But if things really go well for me, I don't know if I'll go to college in general. We'll just going to have to wait a couple more years to see."

Libby passed away last year, Jarah said.

Though he can't speak for his current dog, Stanley, Evans guesses his favorite treat flavor is peanut butter-bacon.

Both logos for Joey's Famous Dog Treats depict Evans' dogs  the original with Libby, and the newest design with Stanley.

Joey Evans makes treats for his business Joey's Famous Dog Treats
Some of the largest Hispanic population pockets reside in Moline, and the numbers are growing.

Along with population growth is an increase in Hispanic businesses and all the needs that come with it. The Quad-Cities now has a richer pool from which to draw for resources to help those who wish to help themselves  from business advice, to real estate and insurance help and legal assistance.

Greater Quad Cities Hispanic Chamber of Commerce Director Janessa Calderon said Moline was particularly rich with Hispanic culture. Mercado on Fifth, an outdoor market held every Friday night in the summer, has skyrocketed in popularity, practically since its start.

In 2022, a record 115 vendors took in almost $600,000 in revenue at the market that averaged nearly 5,000 people a night. In 2019, the market averaged 1,000 attendees a night.

According to the US Census Bureau, Hispanic businesses are on the rise nationwide, growing 8.2% from 2019-2020. Also in 2020, Hispanic-owned businesses yielded about $472.3 billion in annual receipts and employed about 2.9 million workers.

Generally, Mercado acts as an incubator for businesses that need help getting off the ground, Calderon said. One example is Las Salsas Dona Mary, a business that took years to get off the ground.

Owner Maria Garcia immigrated to the U.S. from Mexico in the mid-1980s and to the Quad-Cities in the mid-2000s. Four years ago, the family took the entrepreneurial leap. They picked two storefronts in Moline that were former restaurants because they thought they would be in turn-key condition. The goal was to use one for the kitchen and the other for the dining room.

But the family quickly ran into trouble. The air conditioner went out, the plumbing was bad, electrical upgrades were needed; the list was long. The landlord told them that any upgrades would be their responsibility.

As the Garcia family does when things get tough, they got tougher. Maria and her husband, Alejandro, took third-shift cleaning jobs to save enough money to fix the restaurant. Maria would wake up at 3 a.m. to clean, then come home to take the kids to school.

Last May, she added more to her plate by setting up a booth at Mercado. Every Thursday she prepared 150 homemade tortillas. Within hours, they were sold out. Because their Moline storefront was not ready to use by summer, the Garcias rented a kitchen to sell food until getting the city's approval to open the new place on Dec. 6, 2022.

The doors officially opened the following week. Finally, Garcia's dream was coming true.

The immigrant impact

Immigrants and refugees are among the biggest drivers of the Quad-Cities population and economic gains. Newcomers to the region are more likely to be of working age, between 25 and 64 years old. Immigrants also are more likely to open their own businesses and employ others than U.S.-born Quad-Citians.

Augustana professors Chris Strunk and Claire Bess studied the regions 2020 decennial census numbers and most recent American Community Survey five-year data. One major finding: From 2010 to 2019, the population of the metropolitan Quad-Cities increased by just 1.1%  from 376,00 to 381,000  while the foreign-born population grew by 3,694, an 18.6% increase.

The net effect, especially for places like the Quad-Cities, which have been losing population, especially on the Illinois side, for so long, immigrants really have a very positive impact because they're providing so many resources and creating jobs and doing jobs that most other people are not doing, Strunk said.

In the past few years, however, tighter immigration policies and pandemic-related immigration restrictions and backlogs have put additional roadblocks in the paths of newcomers looking to relocate in the Quad-Cities. On the whole, some 2 million immigrants who'd otherwise have worked in the United States have been shut out of the country, according to a Business Insider analysis of Census immigration data.

Calderon said stories like the Garcia's were fairly normal in the region. Trust is crucial in business, especially when someone is new to the community. Another vendor at Mercado that Calderon works with regularly through the Chamber speaks only Spanish. Multiple times, he has turned to the Chamber for help finding resources, such as an accountant or Realtor, whom he can easily communicate with when it comes to important business transactions.

"If you take yourself to a place where you don't speak the common language, you have to rely on your children," she said.

Javier Gonzalez knows exactly what that is like.

"I was that child for my grandmother," the State Farm Agent said. "Sometimes, you dont know whats going on. You're 10, 12, and you translate things, and you dont know what it is.

Gonzalez got his start in insurance after working retail for Aldi. He always dreamed of owning his own business and knew there was a need for a bilingual insurance agent in the area. To his knowledge, he is the only Spanish-speaking insurance agent State Farm employs in the region.

"With language barriers, frustration happens on both ends," he said, adding it's hard for providers who struggle to communicate and is equally hard for customers who don't understand what they are signing up for. "The conversations I have had with customers are, 'Wow. I didn't know I was signed up for that.' "

A common theme in the Hispanic community is accepting fate when things go wrong, he said. Culturally speaking, most people Gonzalez works with don't realize there are other resources available.

That is where he steps in and helps them find the "aha! moment." It's good for business, he said, but better for customers who now have an established person they can trust.

"They're most excited to be able to talk to someone that can speak the same language," he said. "They are more or less excited to learn that someone is there that they can reach out to and understand what they are saying."

Resilience is key

In December 2021, the Carrillo family found out how important community and family are when things go awry.

Miguel Carrillo received a notice on his phone that the smoke alarms were going off at his family business, Tienda Mexicana Abarrotes Carrillo. Davenport Fire crews rushed to the century-old building at 903 W. 3rd St.

Carrillo was in Muscatine at the time and had no idea how serious the fire was. The alert on his phone indicated only the alarm, and the security video he could see showed only smoke.

"I thought it was a false alarm," he said.

Shortly after, he received a call from a family member who told him how serious the fire really was. Carrillo called all other family members to let them know. Together, they gathered in the parking lot.

The family business occupied the building since 2009, making it an emotional sight to see. Once the fire was extinguished, the Carrillo family had to wait about a month before they were given the green light by the city to repair the building or walk away entirely. The family mulled it over, and like the Carrillo family does when times get tough, they persevered and decided to rebuild.

"We were looking at different options, maybe a different location, and maybe even doing something else, but we decided to come back to this location because it's a staple to the community, and it's a staple to our lives," he said.

Construction began in January 2022, and the outside of the building was completed by May. The quick turnaround is unusual for many businesses, but the whole family pitched in to help rebuild.

"We hired my brother's construction company, so while we were out of work with the grocery and restaurant, we all were working on construction," he said.

The restaurant and grocery store officially reopened in July 2022. Calderon said rebuilding often was a task the Chamber helped navigate, too. But sometimes, things have to be salvaged after the fact, especially when it comes to personal information.

"Sometimes, unfortunately, there are people who have been taken advantage of," she said.

During the COVID-19 pandemic, a few people unknowingly gave out their Social Security numbers to scammers. Many turned to the Chamber, looking for an accountant who spoke Spanish and could help.

Meeting other needs

Jazmin Newton owns a law firm in Davenport but operates within a six-county region.

Her firm, Newton Law, specializes in family law and takes cases ranging from custody, divorce, child support and sometimes adoption or termination of parental rights. Many people seek her services, because she is bilingual and understands the complications that come with the language barrier.

I have a lot of clients that only speak Spanish or their English is not fluent enough for where they could, for example, take the stand without an interpreter," she said.

From 1980 to 2019, the number of people in the United States who spoke a language other than English nearly tripled from 23.1 million to 67.8 million, according to the U.S. Census Bureau.

Anytime someone needs a lawyer it is generally a high-stress situation, Newton said. Being able to remove one barrier by speaking their native language helps ease the anxiety.

"I am dealing with people when they are in a bad situation and it's an emotionally stressful time," she said. "In general, it's easier for people that they are able to speak in the language they are comfortable with."

Cultural barriers can be hard to work around, too. In the United States, laws and statutes are much different than in Mexico, she said. In the real estate world, Alma Valadez Gonzalez has made it her mission to help first-time homeowners navigate complex matters.

Originally from Guadalajara, she immigrated to the United States in 2000, first landing in Chicago. Her family eventually moved to Muscatine, then to the Quad-Cities a few years ago.

For 10 years, Gonzalez worked as a lead in a production company

"I feel like a lot of us immigrants, once we find a job, we feel secure, safe and have a steady income. It's hard for us to transition to something new," she said. "Overall, I felt like I needed to do something more with my ability."

That ability is being bilingual and able to connect with other immigrants on issues they are facing as they tackle home ownership.

"When it comes to networking, from our culture, we are very community and family-oriented, so I think it's very natural for us to meet people and connect," she said. "I feel like they're able to trust me more to understand where they are coming from and what it's like to be an immigrant."

Part of that is understanding what resources are needed and which ones are available.

"A lot of immigrants, they think they need a lot of money down for a house, and that's not necessarily what you need. I just don't think a lot of this information is available," she said.

For that reason, the Hispanic Chamber has been a big resource to her. When clients come to her, they need information about lenders, insurance and home inspections. Through the Chamber, she's been able to make connections of her own and help her clients in return.

"Once I found out about this, I needed to be part of it," she said.

Photos: Dam Tacos to open Friday
The Quad Cities International Airport has been serving the region since 1935, but there's always room for improvement, according to the executive director.

The COVID-19 pandemic was particularly hard on air travel, but the airport in Moline has been slowly climbing its way back. Now, Executive Director Benjamin Leischner is involving the business community to push it to the next level.

Leischner has been with the airport since 2018, but he didn't always have his eyes to the skies. In school, he was considering a more clinical route.

"I was torn between medicine or aviation," he said.

When his twin brother went into medicine, Leischner decided he would follow his passion for aviation. He began flying commercially in college but he soon found his way into the engineering side.

Originally from Oregon, Leischner worked in New York and Colorado before heading back to the northwest, where he was planning to attend law school. Instead, Bellingham International Airport in Washington state called, offering him a part-time position as an airport firefighter.

He took a leap of faith and worked his way up the ladder, eventually being promoted to manager. He then moved on to the Seattle-Tacoma International Airport, where his goal was to work his way up to executive leadership.

Along the way, he got a call, asking if he was interested in leading the Quad Cities International Airport. Leischner instantly told the recruiter no and hung up. A follow-up email helped change his mind.

"I did not know what the Quad-Cities was," he said. "Once I started to look at the pamphlet that was put together about the community, about the airport and about the position, I, for some reason, felt that it was interesting."

When he was selected, he jumped in  ready for his first job as an executive director. He spent most of his first year absorbing details about airport operations and how it might boost the passenger load.

From 2015 to 2017 the Moline airport had a loss of nearly 65,000 passengers annually. Numbers slowly climbed and, by 2019, were up 3% compared with the year before. Leischner said projects were lined up to improve the airport, and things were beginning to look up.

Then, COVID struck

"We started to have a lot of ideas teed up and to move forward with ... other ones we had to push back and focus on our workforce and getting travel reintroduced safely," Leischner said.

Despite a brief recovery period, the pandemic pushed passenger counts down by 80%.

Next came what Leischner refers to as the "COVID recovery period." Passengers were trying to decide if it was safe to travel, and the slow resurgence gradually brought the numbers back up.

"This last six months, we're kind of back to where we were in 2019. We are out of the COVID recovery phase, and we as an airport have realized where we are going to be post-COVID," he said.

During the pandemic, flights were suspended as airlines evaluated how best to use their resources. Locally, this came in the form of suspended flights to Detroit and Minneapolis. Detroit has not come back, but Minneapolis was restored, briefly.

Delta Airlines announced in August 2022 the Minneapolis flight once again was suspended. The goal for legacy airlines like Delta is to feed into larger hubs, airport marketing manager Ashleigh Davis said.

"It doesn't make sense from a business perspective to have all the nonstop flights out of a small airport like ours," she said.

From the passenger perspective, the number of available flights out of the Quad-Cities dropped. From the airport perspective, the loss of flights meant a loss of revenue.

"Obviously it's a hit because you have less activity. It's a larger denominator, and it can run up costs. But we're a little bit unique in that we are a taxing district as well," Leischner said. "We have property taxes as a backstop if we choose to leverage them."

The airport chooses not to use its full taxing power and instead is able to level the costs with parking and other user fees.

"I view that as a much fairer way to pay the bills, where you can make the decision to pay for convenience versus you have to pay because of the proximity in which you live to (the airport)," he said.

A common misconception about the airport is its power to fight back when flights are dropped, or bring on new flights in general, he said. The airlines make all the decisions, based on passenger data.

In the case of the dropped Minneapolis and Detroit flights, Delta's focus was on its larger airports on the west and east sides of the U.S. Because Delta's large hub on the east is Atlanta, Detroit was dropped in favor of having flights come through the larger airport.

As for Minneapolis, Davis said, the flight simply was not in demand as the pandemic halted travel. Similarly, with the looming pilot shortage, the airline had to decide where to place the pilot. Because the flights from Minneapolis and Detroit were not performing as well as Delta wanted, they were put on the chopping block.

"It's a disappointing thing when the airlines have to make those difficult decisions, but we are still very fortunate when we look at some of our peers in Illinois who have lost some of their routes or their airports altogether," Leischner said

Focus shifts to business travel

With the larger airlines restructuring, conversations in Moline began to shift from a focus on leisure travel to a focus on business travel.

"The best value of the Quad Cities International Airport is for business travelers, because time is money," he said.

The airport is an attractive offering for companies like John Deere, the region's largest employer. Without it, Leischner said, it is possible Deere would have to relocate to an area with a nearby airport.

"If we don't start thinking more regionally and thinking like a community of half a million, we're almost going to force Deere into a larger market like we've seen with Caterpillar," he said.

Those traveling for leisure typically want to go someplace warm, and they want to go only once a year. Business travelers are more loyal because they are constantly on the move and benefit from consistent flights.

Davis said this helped from a data perspective as well. Once airlines can see the airport is consistently filling a certain flight because of business trips, it helps the airport secure that route.

"Business travels are always going to need to go to Denver, for example, multiple times a year, versus a leisure traveler who wants to go to Cancun once every two years," she said. "That does not guarantee a fuller plane like being able to say, 'We already have 15 businesspeople that have to go to Denver X amount of times.' That means our job to fill that plane just got a lot easier."

Airlines call this load factor. To ensure profitability, they want at least 80% of the flight to be full. Compared to airports of a similar size, Leischner said, the Quad-Cities is consistently filling the routes it has available.

"It's not a question of is the demand there, it's a supply issue," he said. "If we were able to get another route or additional frequency, unfortunately, that means another community just lost something."

The power of the pilot shortage

"The harsh reality is: There's not more resources coming on necessarily, and what's out there right now is out there until they can get caught up on that string of pilots," Leischner said of the trained-pilot shortage.

But the thriving business community in the region gives him hope that the airport will continue to grow. The Quad-Cities has a rich agricultural history but is on the cusp of branching out into larger sectors.

"I think we're poised as a community to redefine ourselves around the next generation around technology," he said.

Annually, the airport contributes about $700 million in economic value to the community, Leischner said. As it serves the entire region and beyond, it's positioned as a tool to help grow the community.

"I think of the Quad-Cities is the best-kept secret," he said. "We're a lot bigger than we give ourselves credit for.

"Destinations worth visiting are locations worth living."

That mantra plays into Leischner's goals. Work is being done with the Quad Cities Chamber of Commerce to gather data and create a portfolio of what the community needs from the airport and how it can better serve the community.

Once achieved, the next step is community action, which will be needed to advocate to the airlines to add service to the region.

"The airlines all admit, 'Yeah, you're filling airplanes. Yeah, we're making money. But quite literally, there's a pilot shortage, and we don't have the resources to add a route,' " he said.

In April 2022, United Airlines CEO Scott Kirby told analysts the shortage isn't expected to improve for several years.

The pilot shortage for the industry is real, and most airlines are simply not going to be able to realize their capacity plans because there simply arent enough pilots  at least not for the next five-plus years, he said.

The problem hit home in the Quad-Cities in 2019. American and United airlines had three to five flights a day leaving the Quad-Cities for Chicago. During the pandemic, that dropped to one flight per day, said Davis, the marketing manager. The pilot shortage prevented the airport from returning to three flights.

Airlines are desperately trying to find short-term fixes and have even flown the idea of increasing the mandatory retirement age for pilots from 65 to 67.

"That's only going to fix a little bit of the problem," Davis said.

Increased wages, sign-on bonuses and efforts to make licensing more affordable also are in motion, but these are long-term solutions. The Quad-City airport is working with local flight schools to increase the number of pilots using the hub, but it will take time to have an impact.

"It's as much as anybody can do to create interest in aviation," Davis said, "and make sure this doesn't happen again in another five to 10 years."

Major airlines like American and United have said they are fully staffed, but Leischner argues that is because they have taken pilots from regional airports, like the Quad-Cities, in order to staff the larger hubs.

"While the major airlines and legacy air carriers are not necessarily feeling the crunch, because they are keeping the big airplanes flying, it's the smaller communities ... that are really feeling the pinch," he said.

Alternatives to consider

With the pilot shortage years away from being solved, one alternate solution Leischner is considering is increasing cargo operations.

In addition to being the executive director of the airport, he is the president of the ground-handling service QCIA Airport Services, LLC. Employees of the LLC fuel aircraft, serve as passenger agents for those who need assistance and even perform cargo operations. With online shopping ramping up, Leischner sees another way to increase revenue.

"I don't think anybody can deny the emergence of global commerce and e-commerce," he said.

When in need of a product, most consumers' first thought is to check Amazon, he said. The online marketplace has exploded in the past several years, opening the door for a new way the airport can make money.

Because of the highway systems in the region, shipment of goods to the Quad-Cities is largely by truck. About 115 miles outside the area, however, the Chicago Rockford International Airport brings in so many shipments that it ranks as the 14th-largest cargo airport in the United States, according to the Bureau of Transportation Statistics.

"As e-commerce and those same-day delivery applications grow, they're going to have to expand that network to get into the periphery markets," he said.

Historically, the Quad-Cities airport has focused on passenger service instead of cargo, which opened the doors for other area airports, like Cedar Rapids and Peoria, to take advantage.

Increasing the cargo operations at the airport is in the works, Leischner said. Many companies already have established hubs in Rockford and Des Moines, but the Quad-Cities has an advantage because it's in the middle, he said.

"We have space, and we have capacity," he said. "We're working with several different developers and companies."

Photos: Airport travel delays picking up ahead of July 4 holiday
Four men face multiple charges related to separate eluding cases over the past several days in Scott County, two of which involved injuries.

Gerald Michael Evans Jr.

Scott County authorities have charged Evans, 47, Davenport, with eluding, operating while under the influence  second offense, driving while barred and interference with officials acts  inflicts bodily injury, court records state. The charges stem from acts authorities allege Evans took beginning at about 2 a.m. Monday near the intersection of Locust and Iowa streets in Davenport.

At that time, a uniformed Iowa State Patrol trooper in an unmarked squad saw a tan 2005 Buick LeSabre heading west at 60 mph in a 25-mph zone, records state. When troopers tried to stop the LeSabre, the driver, whom troopers later identified as Evans, did not obey their orders.

During the pursuit, the LeSabre reached speeds of 90 mph in a 45-mph zone, did not stop at at least one traffic signal, made a U-turn across three lanes of traffic and went off road for a short time.

The pursuit ended when troopers tackled Evans, at that point fleeing on foot, in the 100 block of West 65th Street in Davenport, authorities allege in court records. He failed to obey authorities commands to stop and, during the arrest, a troopers hands were injured, including abrasions.

When the troopers arrested him, Evans had signs of intoxication, including slurred speech and a smell of alcohol on his breath, court records state. Troopers gave him a field sobriety test, and he showed signs of impairment.

An initial breath test showed a BAC of .277, records state. A later breath test showed Evans had a breath alcohol content of .148.

Investigators also found an open beer bottle in the vehicle, court records state.

A check of his driving status showed he is barred until August 2024, records state.

After he was Mirandized, Evans told police hed had a couple of shots, court records state. Evans also told police he ran because he thought he had drugs on his person. Investigators found no drugs on Evans or in the LeSabre.

He remained in custody Tuesday, held on a $5,000 cash-only bond, according to the Scott County Jail website. His next court date was not available.

Thomas Eldon Jepsen

Jepsen, 40, Bellevue, has been charged with eluding, second-degree theft and driving while barred, court records state. Authorities allege that, at about 8:30 p.m. Sunday, Jepsen fled from Eldridge Police on a stolen Yamaha XVS950 motorcycle, which he then crashed.

Court records state the Yamahas plate was expired, and when Eldridge police ran it, they found it was registered to a trailer, court records state. Jepsen fled the ensuing stop in the 25000 block of North Scott Park Road, and the pursuit reached speeds of more than 100 mph, including in a barricaded construction zone.

According to court records:

Jepsen is also accused of passing other vehicles at high rates of speed and winding through traffic. Jepsen lost control and the Yamaha hit two vehicles and crashed.

Further investigation showed the motorcycle had been reported stolen in June from Davenport, that Jepsen was driving while barred and that he did not have a valid motorcycle license or insurance.

Jepsen remained in custody Tuesday, according to the jail website. To be released, he must post a $10,000 bond. His next court date was not available.

Isaac Christopher Coryn

Coryn, 19, Moline, faces charges of eluding, dominion/control of a firearm/offensive weapon by felon and possession of a controlled substance  methamphetamine, first offense, Scott County court records state. Authorities accuse him of fleeing Moline and Bettendorf police and of having a loaded shotgun in the 1994 Chevrolet Suburban he was driving.

Court records state:

Coryn fled from Moline Police at about 12:30 a.m. Saturday and crossed the Interstate 74 bridge, then continued fleeing from a Bettendorf officer after exiting the highway onto Middle Road.

During the ensuing pursuit, Coryn ignored traffic signals, drove on the wrong side of the road, drove through a construction zone and, at one point, reached speeds of 63 mph in a 35-mph zone, court records state.

An officer used a squad to force the Suburban to stop in the 600 block of 4th Street in Davenport. As he was being arrested, Coryn said there was a loaded shotgun on the front passenger seat.

When they looked, police found the weapon where Coryn said it would be. When they searched Coryn, they found a glass methamphetamine pipe and a plastic baggie containing methamphetamine. The total package weight of the meth was 1.32 grams.

After police read Coryn his Miranda rights, he told them he bought the shotgun on the street. He also told police he had not registered the Suburban and did not have insurance.

Coryn had a $5,000 cash-only bond and remained in custody Tuesday, according to the jail website.

Court records state his next court appearance is scheduled for July 11.

Brenden Scott Garrettson

Garrettson, 18, Davenport, has been charged with eluding in relation to a pursuit that began just before midnight on June 30 near North Brady Street at Kimberly Road in Davenport, court records state. The incident ended in a fiery crash at Northwest Boulevard and West 53rd Street.

According to court records:

A state patrol trooper tried to stop a silver 2007 Infiniti G35 for traveling 54 mph in a 35-mph zone and making an improper lane change. The driver, identified later as Garrettson, sped away from the trooper at a speed more than 25 mph over the speed limit.

At one point, Garrettson turned off the Infinitis lights. He also traveled through intersections at speeds of more than 100 mph.

The crash happened when Garrettson lost control and the Infiniti hit a tree. The vehicle became engulfed in flames.

A passenger in the car was injured during the pursuit, but details of the extent of those injuries, or how they occurred were not included.

Garrettson admitted to investigators that he fled from police and injured his passenger, but court records did not state whether that statement was made before or after he was read his Miranda rights.

He was free on Monday after posting a $5,000 bond.

His next court date has been set for July 11.

Photos: Col. Davenport House on the Rock Island Arsenal
A Davenport man arrested along with eight other men during a federal sex sting was found guilty by a jury last month for attempting to entice a child to engage in sex and traveling to meet the child.

On June 21 after a two-day trial in U.S. District Court, Peoria, Auston M. McLain, 38, was found guilty of one count each of attempted enticement of a minor and travel with the intent to engage in illicit sexual activities.

A charge of soliciting an obscene visual depiction of a minor was dropped.

U.S. District Court Judge Sara Darrow scheduled a sentencing hearing for Oct. 18. McLain is being held in the custody of the U.S. Marshals Service.

Attempted enticement of a minor carries a minimum prison term of 10 years and a maximum term of life. Travel with the intent to engage in illicit sexual activity carries a prison sentence of up to 30 years.

McLain was arrested in November of 2020 after he traveled from his Davenport apartment to a house in Rock Island to meet a boy for sex. The person McLain had been chatting with and agreed to meet was actually an undercover federal agent.

Only one of the mens cases is left to adjudicate. Jeffrey Alan Bosaw, of Bloomington, Illinois, is scheduled to go to trial on July 17 in U.S. District Court, Peoria. He is charged with one count of attempted enticement of a minor. Bosaw was 52 at the time of his arrest.

The other seven men have either been found guilty by a jury or entered into a plea agreement and have been sentenced.

Douglas L. Christensen, 58, of East Moline was sentenced Nov. 3, 2021, to 10 years in federal prison. He is currently being held in the Federal Correctional Institution in Danbury, Connecticut, according to the Bureau of Prisons website.

Michael Robert McKinney, 25, of Silvis was sentenced July 20, 2021, to 12 years in federal prison. He is currently being held in the Federal Correctional Institution in Marianna, Florida, according to the Bureau of Prisons website.

Douglas Michael Speer, 33, of Johnston, Iowa, was sentenced Oct. 20, 2021, to 11 years in federal prison. He is currently being held in the Federal Medical Center in Springfield, Missouri, according to the Bureau of Prisons website.

Nicholas Bryan Swank, 33, of Muscatine was sentenced Jan. 6, 2022, to 17  years in federal prison. He is currently being held in the U.S. Penitentiary in Marion, Illinois, according to the Bureau of Prisons website.

Charles Walter Christopher, 44, of West Liberty was sentenced Dec. 15, 2021, to 22 years in federal prison. He is currently being held in the U.S. Penitentiary in Thomson, Illinois, according to the Bureau of Prisons website.

Joseph Allen Wilcher, 42, of Cedar Rapids was sentenced Feb. 24, 2022, to 10 years in prison. He is currently being held at the Federal Medical Center, Fort Worth, Texas.

Damien Pernell Shepherd, 38, of Moline, was sentenced Nov. 22, 2022, to seven years and three months in prison. He is currently being held at the Federal Correctional Institution in Milan, Michigan.
The Lakota AI Camp has returned for a second year, from June 11-30, to bring Indigenous teens to the Black Hills for a three-week AI crash course camp while simultaneously learning Lakota culture and language.

The inspiration for a youth-based code camp came from co-founder Mason Grimshaws, a citizen of the Sicangu-Rosebud Lakota Nation, experience growing up on the Rosebud Nation and in Rapid City. Grimshaw said when he began his education at MIT, he wasnt entirely sure what he was passionate about. Once he discovered computer science, things just clicked.

I had never seen it (computer programming) before while I was growing up in Rosebud and Rapid City, and I just thought if I had seen this earlier it would have been really beneficial for me, Grimshaw said.

Indigenous people are not often in STEM spaces, according to census data. American Indian individuals make up less than 0.1% of computer programmers, while Native Hawaiian and Alaska Native individuals are only 0.07% and 0.05%, respectively.

I had this idea that I pitched to my friends, Grimshaw said. I said, Hey, you need researchers, but they dont exist, and I want to do a code camp, so lets do a code camp and I will create researchers here for you.

Another main component of the camp is language learning, which Grimshaw said is one of the first big pushes for Indigenous language-based AI research, called First Languages AI Reality or FLAIR.

Over the second week, Indigenous language researchers visited the camp to teach students about their learning and experience. One of the goals of the program is to be able to teach language-based AI to recognize Indigenous languages and promote learning.

The cultural aspect of the program is something that drew in rising senior Aiden Tunnissen, Oglala. This was Tunnissens first year at the camp.

If youre Indigenous, try and learn about your culture because you never know if it could just go away in a flash, Tunnissen said. You have to try and do what were doing to revive the language. Stick with the people and with your culture.

Eventually, Grimshaw said he hopes to have an app that will promote conversation and bridge the gap between learning when no fluent speakers or elders are present.

Its sort of an elder in a box, Grimshaw said. The simplest form is that it might be a pronunciation guide, so it can hear you speak and make suggestions, and the other would be in the very far future, but something that you can converse with.

Coupling language with programming is a multi-part project. The first week of the program teaches students a basic understanding of Python and data science. By the end of the first week, students create a prediction-based AI which they used this year to predict movie revenue.

The first weekend, students go out into the Black Hills to hike and learn about traditional plant medicines from a knowledge keeper, Linda Black Elk. At the end of week two, the students build a model that can identify plants from pictures taken during their hike.

We are incorporating that historic cultural knowledge so they can learn more about their own ancestors, Grimshaw said.

Sometimes these AI models may break, it may confuse one grassy plant for another, but this is all part of the learning process.

Im always impressed by the intuition that they get, they just seem to really understand how things work and theyre really smart, Grimshaw said. They surprise us all the time, honestly.

In the final week, students combine everything that they have learned to create an app that helps them speak Lakota. The created app can recognize something, like a chair, and tell the user the Lakota name of that object.

Access to broadband internet services are limited on reservations and Alaska Native villages, something that the camp takes into consideration.

Only 24-40% of Native households have reliable internet, Grimshaw said. So, in this space students get a laptop and are able to run things on the cloud.

On top of free camp tuition, students are equipped with Alienware laptops and Samsung phones so they can continue their education after the three weeks end.

On the last day of the camp, students demonstrate what theyve learned to community members and their families.

Xavier LaPointe, Sicangu and Oglala, is the youngest student this year, he just finished eighth grade. LaPointe said he was drawn to the camp by a desire to understand something he wasnt familiar with, coding.

I remember my first day seeing everyones computer because I was in the last row and there was so much happening, typing and stuff, LaPointe said. I was so confused because I didnt get it, but now I know what a lot of it means. Im still learning, though.

This year was Niesha Marshalls, Sicangu Lakota, second year attending the program. Marshall, a rising sophomore in high school, said she really enjoyed last years program and wanted to come back and learn more.

You get to make new friends and overall just have fun, Marshall said.

Partnership and funding for the program is supplied by the Patrick McGovern Foundation with support from META, but the directors are hoping to also begin to build funding from local businesses as well and create a more localized program.
David Ellermans family has owned and operated a swath of farmland north of Spearfish for 115 years.

Rudolph Rittberger, Davids grandfather, spent the years after the Great Depression working on erosion control projects in the area. Rittberger, the second husband of Davids grandmother, won conservation awards for his work in Lawrence County. He was named Conservation Man of the Year in 1982 and was a steward of the land for more than six decades until his death.

Today, the Ellermans have a tenant residing in the home, while another manages the land for them.

But the Ellermans feel their farm  and Rittbergers legacy of stewardship  is under threat.

Croell, Inc., is working with their neighbors to open a gravel pit across the street, a little more than 500 feet from the Ellermans' farm.

It just doesn't seem fair that we can have possession of this property for 115 years  that we can devote the kind of efforts that my grandfather did in terms of keeping the environment and the sustainable farming going  and then have these guys come in and just for the pure profit motive, destroy or potentially destroy the lion's share of that, Ellerman told the Journal in a phone interview.

Croell began in Iowa in the late 1960s and now operates 120 locations across nine states, providing ready-mix concrete and construction aggregate. General Manager Brian Marchant told the Journal they're not bad people. They employ close to 100 employees in South Dakota.

The company's submitted mining plan estimates a project lifespan of 25 years. The area sits just over a small hill from the Ellermans' property. The pit would operate from 6 a.m. to 6 p.m. The requested conditional use permit boundary is 129.6 acres. Only 10 acres can be mined at a time before reclamation must begin.

Marchant explained during an on-site Planning and Zoning meeting in late June that they estimate mining two-and-a-half acres per year, or about 250,000 tons of material annually.

After grading and excavating the mineable area and stockpiling topsoil for reclamation, theyll drill and blast into the Minnekota limestone to about 40 feet deep, following the vein uphill until they reach dirt, and then mining out and back to the original starting point. It'll be crushed and loaded onto trucks for transport, about six to 15 loads per day, according to Marchant and the submitted plans.

The proposed mine sits in a depression out of sight of houses, something Marchant said would limit dust and noise from the operation.

But Ellerman isnt convinced, saying dust and noise are two of their main concerns. Water is another. "Is it worth the risk?" he asked.

There's always a potential from blasting and from the water that they use for supposedly knocking the dust down and this kind of thing, that there could be alterations to the water supply for a ranch, either through contamination of the water or redirection of the water that would cause our wells to go dry, Ellerman said.

Croells plan doesnt anticipate any water discharge from the property. Marchant explained during the Planning and Zoning meeting the company will construct a pit at the bottom of the hill to catch any runoff  part of the reason they dont intend to obtain a surface water discharge permit from the South Dakota Department of Agriculture and Natural Resources. The water they use for crushing and dust control will come from the property owner's private well, according to their original application.

Ellerman expressed concerns with past environmental violations at Croell sites in Wyoming.

Wyoming Department of Environmental Qualitys records show three environmental violations between November 2008 and August 2010, totaling nearly $30,000 in penalties. The violations included mining more than 10 acres at a time, mining outside the permitted boundary, and failure to adequately salvage topsoil.

Marchant didn't deny previous violations, but said theyve had no violations in more than a decade.

"I'm not saying we don't have violations out there from years ago. We have people that work for us. We're all human," he said. "But if there is a violation, we rectify it and we correct it."

The Journal found no environmental violations listed later than August 2010 in Wyoming. South Dakotas Department of Agriculture and Natural Resources confirmed no violations in the past five years, but did not respond to requests for history going back further.

Planning and Zoning Committee member Mike Whalen told the Journal following the June 26 on-site meeting that it's a difficult decision to balance the wants of the neighbors with the county's need for gravel for construction.

One of his concerns for the proposed pit is the main road  Homestake  and its width for the amount of traffic that would be coming through.

"I have a little problem with a little bridge down here and how narrow it is," he said. "It'd be nice if there was a little turn off where you could pull over and wait for a truck to come by or for the truck to wait."

The speed limit on the gravel road  45 miles-per-hour  also worries him, and bringing it down will likely be something he brings up as part of any conditional use permit.

Whalen said he hadn't made up his mind yet and wanted to hear the public testimony during July's hearing.

Another gravel pit was proposed on the same property in 2001, but after public outrage, the company, Fisher Sand and Gravel, withdrew its request for a conditional use permit.

Nearby but smaller in size is another proposed gravel pit by North Star Construction. North Star is based out of Spearfish and has operated since 2000. The pit would operate 5 a.m. to 5 p.m. Monday through Friday seasonally, with between two and six truckloads per day  around 20,000 tons per year.

Theyre requesting a conditional use permit covering 81 acres; the application indicates no more than about 19 acres would be disturbed.

"We are proposing a small operation to serve our own projects, immediate neighbors, and a small network of contractors," North Star Construction owner Matt Polich wrote in the application. "We feel that our effect on the immediate neighbors would be minimal with the potential of developing future relationships to serve our community for the duration of our construction business."

There's good visibility for outgoing trucks, something Polich said during the Planning and Zoning meeting is a real plus for the project. Their application indicates no change to the natural drainage pattern and it says the added dust, noise and traffic will be "almost unnoticeable" due to its proximity to an existing mine.

One adjacent homeowner, Neal Bowman, said his house sits a little over 1,000 feet away from the proposed pit  something he's not happy about.

"I've already tried to fight it. I have a six-month-old son. I have two things of lupus and rheumatoid arthritis, so I can't really...and all the dust," he said, shaking his head.

The next public hearing on the conditional use permits for the proposed gravel pit sites is Thursday, July 6 at 1:30 p.m. The meeting will be held in the City of Deadwood City Hall Meeting Room at 102 Sherman Street.
The Department of Commerces National Telecommunications and Information Administration announced last week South Dakota will receive $207,227,523.92 to deploy affordable, reliable high-speed internet service.

Right now, 28,397 homes and small businesses in South Dakota lack access to a high-speed internet connection, according to NTIA.

[The] historic investment will help ensure that every household in South Dakota has access to affordable, high-speed internet, regardless of where they live, said U.S. Secretary of Commerce Gina Raimondo. Thanks to President Bidens leadership, we are working with Governor Noem to connect more South Dakotans to the digital economy and unlock new opportunities to learn, work and grow.

States, D.C., and territories will use funding from the BEAD program from President Bidens Bipartisan Infrastructure Law to administer grant programs within their borders.

The BEAD funding will be used to deploy or upgrade broadband networks. Once deployment goals are met, any remaining funding can be used on broadband adoption, training, and workforce development efforts, among other uses.

BEAD is part of the Internet for All initiative, a key component of President Bidens Investing in America agenda. Details related to the allocation for the states, D.C., and territories are available on internetforall.gov.

Eligible entities can begin submitting their Initial Proposals starting July 1. Once NTIA approves an initial proposal, entities will be able to access at least 20% of their allocated funds.
Its 1968. Hank Schwartzbauer boards a plane from Los Angeles to Billings. Hes a U.S. Navy sailor on furlough from the Vietnam War.

Its one of the many flights he took during his deployment.

He cant remember if they had a layover in Denver or if it was direct. He doesnt know the time of year. But he will always remember looking down and seeing that shiny, gold Zippo lighter.

He bends down to pick it up.

Turning it over in his hands, he sees engraved on one side the words 199th INF. BDE. and SP4 Ronald R. Roe on the other.

In that moment that I found it, I knew, in my mind, and in my heart, I knew that immediately I wanted it to be returned to him.

Schwartzbauer has reached out to various veteran organizations in an effort to return it to its owner or next of kin. He has had no success. All the avenues hes looked down have proven to be dead ends.

Schwartzbauer joined the Navy on Aug. 25, 1965 at the age of 18. He liked the uniforms.

He served on the USS Navasota (A0106), an oil tanker, until his honorable discharge on March 19, 1968.

While he didnt see direct combat, he watched as coffins were airlifted home. He knew other soldiers who committed suicide, watched people get lost at sea and ships collide. Death surrounded him, and so did fear.

I know one time we were refueling an aircraft carrier. And they were bringing coffins up from below, to load onto planes to ship back to the United States  I was manning a refueling station and saw these coffins. And several questions came to mind, he said. One of them is, I wonder who they are. I wonder where theyre from. I wonder if I knew any of them. And why are we here? And why the hell do they have to die? And that put a chip on my shoulder.

Following his discharge, he wanted to put all that death and suffering behind him. Life moved on. He did, too.

He went back to Montana and became a painter. He stayed in Billings working and doing odd jobs to make ends meet. He came to Casper in 1998 to see a friend from the past and never left. He volunteered with various veteran organizations to honor those who passed, ensuring no one was left behind or forgotten.

By all accounts, Schwartzbauer has led a quiet, normal life. Yet every couple of years, that shiny lighter would pop back into his head.

Through the moves and deaths of his parents, he lost all keepsakes from his time in the Navy, only holding it in his memories.

The lighter was even misplaced for 30 years.

It wasnt until one day last summer during a rummage sale after his brother died did that little gold lighter reappear. He was selling the whole Zippo collection when a buyer asked if he could only have Ronalds.

It could have been sold. An individual asked me how much I wanted for that lighter. And upon discovering that thats where that lighter was, I knew again that that lighter was not going to be sold or given to anyone other than the rightful owner.

And so the search started again. Schwartzbauer reached out to a veteran advocate at the VA who steered him to someone connected with veteran organizations. But that was another dead end. He then contacted the Star-Tribune in an effort to get the word out and try to find the lighters owner.

(Ill feel) just the gratification of knowing that I did the right thing and gave it to the right person or getting it back to the rightful owner.

He wants to make sure that Ronald or his next of kin know that he isnt forgotten. Hank wants to make sure that they feel what he has spent his entire life trying to make others feel: respected.
Two pending Missoula cases involving use of force by police likely wont see a courtroom until the fall.

The Missoula County Attorneys Office currently has two inquests awaiting their day in court because of scheduling challenges and a shortage of coroners, according to Missoula Chief Criminal Deputy County Attorney Matt Jennings. Coroners inquests are public inquiries held in courtrooms that examine the causes of and circumstances surrounding the death of a person when theyre killed by law enforcement.

Vance Ledeau, 34, was shot and killed by law enforcement at the Smokejumper Center last August. He was reportedly a robbery suspect, though very minimal details were provided in the aftermath of the shooting about Ledeaus death and the circumstances leading up to it. Nearly a year later, an inquest for Ledeau isn't on the county's calendar.

Gary T. Duncan, a 45-year-old Missoula resident, died from a gunshot wound at the Clinton Market in February, a news release from the Ravalli County Sheriffs Office stated.

"Sheriff Holton said the coroner's investigation concluded that the armed suspect/decedent displayed suicidal tendency and was ultimately killed by law enforcement at the scene," the news release stated.

A press release from the Missoula County Sheriff's Office sent out shortly after the incident claimed the scene was also a hostage situation involving the suspect's wife, but didn't provide any more details on what happened.

Inquests play an important role in the legal process. They are required by law for people who die in a prison or jail or in the custody of any law enforcement agent.

A coroner (not a judge) presides over an inquest before a coroners jury in a public courtroom. Evidence surrounding the persons death is presented to a jury, which then decides if the use of the force by law enforcement was justified. Deputy county attorneys present evidence and witnesses to the jury, but they arent legal representation for the person who died, or their families.

In an email, Jennings said the coroner Missoula County typically enlists for its inquests doesnt have dates available until the fall, but the county is trying to find another coroner with sooner availability.

When a person is killed by law enforcement, we have to use a civilian coroner and they have to be from another county, Jennings said. There are not many choices.

He explained civilian coroners usually have other jobs, like funeral directors, so presiding over inquests for other counties tend to be voluntary, add-on tasks for them. He said coroner shortages arent unique to Missoula, and his office uses the same coroners that most urban counties throughout the state use.

"So, their conflicts are because of the backlogs from other areas including ours," Jennings said.

Anaconda-Deer Lodge County Coroner Jessie Billquist-Jette oversaw recent coroners inquests in Missoula.

The county's last round of inquests was in March. A jury cleared two drug-related deaths at the Missoula jail of being caused by any criminal means. The back-to-back coroners inquests led a nine-person jury through the deaths of Wendy L. Gottfried, 30, and Maryjane F. Galloway, 37. Both women died of drug overdoses at the Missoula jail in a two-month period in late 2022.

The COVID-19 pandemic also spurred delays for Missoula's inquests and other court proceedings.

In 2019, the Billings Gazette found in 39 fatal police encounters statewide since 2012, every officer's actions were found to be justified at the end of a coroner's inquest.

Gov. Greg Gianforte signed House Bill 705 in May, brought by Scot Kerns, R-Great Falls, in this years legislative session, which revised Montanas current inquest laws to allow juries to select an option that a person died by suicide through police intervention, if the evidence supports such a claim.

House Bill 705 is to provide the jury with greater transparency in cases by allowing them the option, only if warranted, of suicide by law enforcement, Kerns said at a hearing for the bill in February. By amending the current law, we will bring transparency to police deadly force cases and allow critical evidence to be presented during the inquest.

A representative from the Montana Division of Criminal Investigation, the agency that handles use of force investigations across the state, spoke in support of the bill, while ACLU Montana staff spoke in opposition.
An independent commission of educators and researchers has outlined a plan to search for any children whose deaths at Indian boarding schools in Montana may have been forgotten.

The St. Labre Boarding School Investigation Commission, chaired by the former president of Little Big Horn College on the Crow Reservation Janine Pease, has been tasked with documenting any unmarked or undocumented graves at three boarding schools that housed Crow and Northern Cheyenne children for decades: St. Charles Mission School, St. Xavier Mission School and St. Labre Indian School.

Its important for us to respect the lives of our children and the experiences they had in boarding schools," Pease said during a presentation from the commission in Billings.

So much of the history thats been written about American Indians rests on the shoulders of male historians who tend to study the experiences of men, warriors and leaders, and so to look at the lives of children is a very important endeavor and privilege, she said.

Starting as early as 1819 with the Indian Civilization Act, the U.S. government campaigned to assimilate Indigenous peoples. Indian boarding schools administered by federal and religious authorities were a tool in that campaign. At their peak, according to recent academic research, hundreds of such schools dotted the country. It was the policy of many of these schools to impose European names on incoming children, cut their hair and forbid them from speaking their tribal languages. Coupled with strict assimilation policies, according to research from the U.S. Department of the Interior, were chronic cases of corporal punishment and sexual abuse afflicting children at the boarding schools.

A national reckoning with Indian boarding schools followed the revelation of unmarked graves of Native American children at former institutions in Canada and the United States. In 2021, the remains of 215 children were found on the campus of what was the Kamloops Indian Residential School in Canada. Some were as young as 3 years old. The U.S. DOI identified 53 burial sites at schools in the United States, and reported that more than 500 children died while in the custody of the schools.

Carlisle Indian Industrial School, a former Indian boarding school at what is now U.S. Army War College in Pennsylvania, alone saw more than 10,000 Indigenous children assigned there from 1879 to 1918. At least 186 children died at Carlisle during that time, the Gazette previously reported. Pease, an enrolled member of the Crow Tribe with a doctorate in education, identified three of those children as fellow tribal members.

In Montana, the DOI named more than a dozen Indian boarding schools. Those included the still operating schools of St. Labre in Ashland, St. Charles in Pryor and St. Xavier, now known as Pretty Eagle Catholic Academy, in St. Xavier. Of the three, only St. Labre still functions as a boarding school, with students able to stay on campus in dormitories through the school week.

In light of the news out of Kamloops, the St. Labre Indian School Educational Association chartered an independent commission to review and report the history of all three campuses overseen by the association and find any and all children whose lives may have ended there. The commission was formed in May 2022.

Richard Littlebear, a commission member who also holds a doctorate in education and recently retired as the president of Chief Dull Knife College on the Northern Cheyenne Reservation, attended a boarding school while growing up in Busby. The Northern Cheyenne man said he joined the commission wanting to learn how his own experiences fit into the larger story of Indian boarding schools. For many families, he said, their education was a traumatic experience and he hopes the commissions findings might be able to bring closure to some of the families sharing that trauma.

Other commission members include Anda Pretty On Top, a Crow woman with more than 30 years of experience as an educator, and Matthew Redinger, a former professor at Montana State University Billings with a PhD in history. Pretty On Top and Redinger are members of the St. Labre Board of Directors. Also joining the commission is Walter Fleming, the current head of the Department of Native American Studies at Montana State University.

To answer the question of if there are any children whose deaths at the three campuses went unreported, Pease said the commission will take three steps. The first is wading into the flood of documents available. Those include records containing attendance and health information, Redinger said, along with any documents maintained by the religious organizations that oversaw the schools. All three schools date back to the late 1800s.

The Catholic priests and nuns who ran these schools were famous for their record keeping in terms of making note of every occurrence that happened at schools, he said.

To assist in piecing together documents from archives maintained in Montana and as far away as Washington D.C., Redinger said the commission has retained Historical Research Associates, a private firm based out of Missoula to conduct nationwide research.

The second step for the commission, Pease said, will be to hold listening sessions for tribal members on the Crow and Northern Cheyenne reservations to share their memories of Indian boarding schools. Those oral histories, she said, offer a glimpse into the past that may be lost in official documentation. Peases great-uncle died while attending a boarding school in Crow Agency in 1903. During her own research, Pease couldnt find any mention of Benny for that entire year.

We know that there could be times when these stories have never been shared outside the confines of their own family dining room, or maybe its never been shared at all, so were planning to give that the utmost respect, Pease said.

The commissions final step will be combining the oral histories with the archival research in a report to the St. Labre Board of Directors. Although there is nothing to indicate at this point that there are any unmarked graves at the St. Labre campuses, Pease said the commission is prepared to invest in tools such as ground penetrating radar should its research prove otherwise.

The listening sessions will begin July 10 on the Northern Cheyenne Reservation. The commission is asking that only tribal members with information to share attend. The place and time of each listening session is as follows:

- Blessed Sacrament Church, Lame Deer: July 10 9:00 a.m.

- Christ the King Catholic Church, Busby: July 10 1:00 p.m.

- St. Labre Auditorium, Ashland: July 10 5:30 p.m.

- St. Dennis Meeting Hall, Crow Agency: July 11 9:00 a.m.

- Our Lady of Loretto Catholic Church, Lodge Grass: July 11 1:00 p.m.

- Pretty Eagle Catholic Academy Cafeteria, St. Xavier: July 11 5:00 p.m.

- St. Charles Mission School Cafeteria, Pryor: July 12 10:00 a.m.
There is no doubt that Virginia was critically important in securing American independence.

In terms of influencing the shape of the new nations ideals and form of government, Virginia really played a key role in the early history of our nation, said Karen Sherry, senior curator at the Virginia Museum of History & Culture.

In honor of the Fourth of July, here are 10 facts about events and people from Virginia that helped shape the American Revolution:

1. Virginia was the largest and wealthiest of

the 13 colonies.

During the Revolutionary era, Virginia was the most populated of the original 13 colonies, with approximately 538,000 residents by 1780. Virginia also had the largest number of slaves out of the 13 colonies, with over 140,000 by 1760. Slaves made up almost 40% of the colonys population by 1790. Slaves often worked in fields throughout Virginia to harvest crops like tobacco, which became the base of Virginias economy as wealthy slave owners could profit off cheap labor and the cash crops high demand.

2. Many of the Founding Fathers were from Virginia.

Three of the seven people that historian Richard B. Morris deemed Americas Founding Fathers are Virginia natives: Thomas Jefferson, James Madison and George Washington. Other notable Revolutionary era figures from Virginia include Patrick Henry, Richard Henry Lee, George Mason, James Monroe and George Wythe.

3. The Father of his Country was from Virginia.

George Washington, the first president of the United States who held office from 1789 to 1797, was born in Westmoreland County, Virginia. Though he did not sign the Declaration of Independence, Washington earned the title Father of his Country for his crucial role in fighting off the British while serving as the commander in chief of the Continental Army. Washington died and is buried at his Mount Vernon estate in Virginia, which is now a historical landmark where people can go to learn more about his life and legacy.

4. Thomas Jefferson was the primary author of the Declaration of Independence.

While Washington was known as the sword of Americas independence, Thomas Jefferson was labeled the pen. He was the first to put the pen  or quill  on the paper that would become the Declaration of Independence. Jefferson, who was born in Shadwell, Virginia, worked alongside John Adams, Benjamin Franklin, Robert Livingston and Roger Sherman to finalize the document. Jefferson died at his plantation, called Monticello, which is now a historical landmark near Charlottesville. Remarkably, Jefferson passed away on the 50th anniversary of the adoption of the Declaration of Independence, and only hours before John Adams.

5. Patrick Henry delivered the Give me liberty, or give me death speech in Richmond.

Taking his place among the sword and the pen, Hanover Countys Patrick Henry was sometimes called the voice of independence, Sherry said. As a politician and speaker, Henry is well-known for the famous Give me liberty, or give me death speech that he delivered during the Second Virginia Convention held at St. Johns Church in Richmond in 1775. These influential words soon became the rallying cry for the revolution against the British. Sherry noted that Henrys sentiments also inspired those seeking freedom from slavery, as Gabriel  an enslaved African American who led the 1800 slave revolt in Henrico County, now known as Gabriels Conspiracy  intended to wave a flag with death or liberty written on it.

6. James Madison is known as the Father of the Constitution.

Hailing from Port Conway, Virginia, James Madison is known not only as the fourth U.S. president but also as the Father of the Constitution. As a co-author of The Federalist Papers and a leader during the Constitutional Convention of 1787, Madison played a crucial role in drafting, promoting and ratifying the U.S. Constitution. Later on, Madison also proposed many of the amendments that would become the Bill of Rights in June 1789.

7. The Fifth Virginia Convention took place in Williamsburg and called for the Declaration of Independence.

The meeting was held in Williamsburg from May 6 to July 5, 1776. On May 15, members of the Convention declared that Virginia was independent from British rule. Additional resolutions were also adopted during the meeting: a call for the Virginia declaration of rights and the establishment of a republican constitution. But more importantly, members instructed the Continental Congress to declare U.S. independence. Virginia delegate Richard Henry Lee then met with members of the Second Continental Congress on June 7 in Philadelphia and proposed U.S. independence by saying these colonies are, and of right ought to be, free and independent states.

8. The Virginia Declaration of Rights, written by George Mason, included many of the political ideas that shaped the Declaration of Independence and the U.S. Constitution.

While Sherry noted George Mason may be a lesser-known figure of the Revolutionary era, the Fairfax native has strongly affected American political conversations. In June 1776, Mason drafted the Virginia Declaration of Rights, which incorporates several ideas echoed in the Declaration of Independence and the U.S. Constitution, including the assertion that all men are created equal, the notion that the governments purpose is to serve the people, the right to vote, the separation of powers within the U.S. government, and freedom of speech, press and religion. Mason originally opposed the ratification of the Constitution because he felt it gave too much power to the government and a Bill of Rights was needed. It was also Virginias Declaration of Rights that first designated Virginia as a commonwealth to emphasize the fact that people instead of the government should hold power.

9. The last major battle of the American Revolution ended on Virginia soil.

While the U.S. declared independence from Britain in 1776, it was not fully achieved until the conclusion of the Battle of Yorktown in 1781, Sherry said. The battle took place in Yorktown, Virginia, where outnumbered British forces surrendered to the Continental Army and French allies. This was the last major land battle before negotiations for peace between the U.S. and Britain began and the Treaty of Paris was signed.

10. James Armistead Lafayette, a Virginia-born slave, was crucial in helping the U.S. win the Revolutionary War.

James Armistead Lafayette was a slave born in Virginia and who served in the Continental Army as a double agent. Armistead worked under the Marquis de Lafayette, a commander of the U.S.-allied French forces, to infiltrate the British forces and relay crucial information to Lafayette while also feeding lies to the British troops. Armistead is credited with tipping Lafayette off about the British troops plans to move to Yorktown in the fall of 1781: information that helped U.S. and allied forces secure victory in the final battle of the Revolutionary War.

From the Archives: Beer in Richmond
For many Americans, the Fourth of July means it is time to gather for barbecues and fireworks displays. But Independence Day also serves as a time to commemorate the signing of the Declaration of Independence.

In honor of the Fourth, the Richmond Times-Dispatch spoke with several Virginia-based veterans about their service and what the holiday means to them.

Christopher Knaggs, a U.S. Navy veteran who served for over 30 years and was deployed in the Vietnam War, vividly remembers where he was on the 200th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence.

It was July 4, 1976, when Knaggs was riding in a submarine off the coast of Scotland while serving as a member of the U.S. Submarine force. He recalled enviously watching from his post in the open ocean as people ashore celebrated Independence Day with cookouts and rock music.

But as Knaggs submarine sailed by, the rock music stopped and, after a few minutes of silence, the sound of a bagpipe echoed from the beach  Knaggs realized partygoers were honoring him and his crew as they set off on a submarine mission patrol.

My captain told me that I would always remember that Fourth of July, and I have never forgotten that day, Knaggs said. A lot of fun things like fireworks and picnics are attached to the holiday, but as a veteran and learning more about it, Ive come to respect the holiday and what had happened during the Revolution a lot more.

This is also true for Stephanie Gaines, who served across the country as a member of the U.S. Army between 1990 and 2016.

To me, the Fourth of July is a celebration of our independence and how far we have come as a nation, Gaines said. I have traveled to many places as a result of my military service, and I have seen some other countries that do not have the same liberties as we do here in the United States. My military experiences made me more aware of how grateful I am to live in a free society.

Originally from New Jersey, Gaines decided to stay in Virginia after retiring from service at Fort Gregg-Adams.

Now an assistant regional manager for the Virginia Department of Veterans Services, Gaines said she strives to continue ensuring fellow Virginia-based veterans have access to resources they need to thrive after service.

I feel like everything is going to be okay

Ben King, who served in the psychological operations unit of the U.S. Army during the Iraq War, has also worked to assist fellow veterans since returning home in 2007. King, the operations director of the Virginia War Memorial, founded the Mindful Memorial Foundation to honor fellow service members through moments of mindfulness and gratitude.

While King said he had always been connected and interested in the military, he was inspired to begin serving his country after 9/11.

King was awarded the Purple Heart after an improvised explosive device struck a truck he was riding during a mission on New Years Eve in 2006. The driver of the truck was killed and King was injured. King returned to service a week after the strike, he said.

As a proud veteran and Purple Heart recipient, King said he felt a sense of accomplishment when returning home from service, but also has struggled with PTSD. He has found relief through practicing mindfulness and enjoying the sense of pride in serving his country.

When reflecting on the Fourth of July as a veteran, King said he remains inspired by the last sentence in the Declaration of Independence, which states: for the support of this declaration, ... we mutually pledge to each other our Lives, our Fortunes and our sacred Honor.

Independence, to me, means not only independence from something or someone else, but also freedom to develop what we want to be, King said. The American flag is optimistic: every time Ive seen the flag, whether here or in Iraq, I feel like everything is going to be okay.

Lindsay Church, who served in the U.S. Navy between 2008 and 2012, is also proud of their service, but has mixed feelings about the Fourth of July as someone who identifies as both a veteran and transgender person.

I do believe what we can be as a country and I proudly wore the uniform, but we are increasingly becoming a country where not everyone is free, Church said. It is not free to not have access to reproductive health care; it is not free to deny people access to gender-affirming care; it is not free to be bound by racism in our country.

As the executive director and co-founder of the Minority Veterans of America, Church hopes to support minority veterans and continue advocating for equitable policies for all U.S. citizens.

I struggle now because were not all free and the only way to work through it for me is to fight for more equitable policies, Church said.

As one of the first African Americans to serve as a U.S. Navy intelligence analyst, Vietnam War veteran Charles Talley said he is glad to have aided in protecting the country from adversaries.

The life we have here in America is a powerful tradition and we must spread that  its like adding kindling to a fire, Talley said. Weve got to keep that flame going to keep America bright.

Having served in a variety of roles since retiring from service  including as district commander of multiple American Legion posts in Virginia  Talley said he enjoys spending the Fourth of July connecting with the community and performing acts of service.

America is not great just because of the name, he said, but also the talents and people who have served this nation and helped it flourish.

Seeing the flag is always special for me

Jack Lanier, who spent over 23 years as an officer in the U.S. Army Medical Service Corps during the Vietnam War, echoed the sentiments of many veterans, saying he was honored to contribute to the freedoms Americans celebrate on the Fourth of July.

While Lanier is originally from North Carolina, he found himself at the Pentagon in Virginia serving as the principal deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense for Health Affairs during George H.W. Bushs presidential term.

Lanier retired from duty as a colonel and received a Ph.D. in public health. He was recruited to help establish the first public health program at Virginia Commonwealth University in 1992. Since then, Lanier has also served on the Virginia Veterans Services Foundation Board of Trustees.

It means a lot that Ive had the opportunity to help protect the freedom of our nation, Lanier said. Ive attended memorials, and seeing the flag is always special for me.

This Fourth of July is extra meaningful for Beverly Vantull, as this past June marked the 10-year anniversary of her retirement from active duty in the U.S. Army.

Beginning in 1999, Vantull served as a medical service officer around the world  including two deployments to Iraq  and across the U.S. until she retired near Fort Gregg-Adams in 2013.

Though she initially struggled with the transition to civilian life because of injuries, she said she found support from local veterans organizations.

It was her connections to these groups that inspired Vantull to get involved with helping fellow veterans, and she now serves as the program manager for the Virginia Women Veterans Program within the Virginia Department of Veterans Services.

As an African American woman, Vantull said she cherishes the opportunity she had to serve her country, noting that women could not fully serve in the U.S. Army until 1948, when the Womens Armed Services Integration Act became law.

Overall, when reflecting on the Fourth of July, Vantull captured the attitudes of many fellow veterans and Americans, stating that it is crucial to honor those who served their country.

As we look at this Independence Day, its important for us to take a moment to remember the sacrifice, service and importance of this holiday, she said. Its nice to have a day off, but we must not let those who gave the ultimate sacrifice and served before us be forgotten.

From the Archives: Fourth of July Fourth of July Fourth of July Fourth of July Fourth of July Fourth of July Fourth of July Fourth of July Fourth of July Fourth of July
PHILADELPHIA  Moms for Liberty, a parental rights group that has sought to take over school boards in multiple states, is looking to expand those efforts across the country and to other education posts in 2024 and beyond. The effort is setting up a clash with teachers unions and others on the left who view the group as a toxic presence in public schools.

The groups co-founder, Tiffany Justice, said during its annual summit over the weekend in Philadelphia that Moms for Liberty will use its political action committee next year to engage in school board races nationwide. It also will start endorsing at the state board level and elected superintendents.

Her comments confirm that Moms for Liberty, which has spent its first two years inflaming school board meetings with aggressive complaints about instruction on systemic racism and gender identity in the classroom, is developing a larger strategy to overhaul education infrastructure across the country.

Trump, DeSantis in Philly for Moms for Liberty summit amid protests Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis and former president Donald Trump were among the big names in Republican politics speaking at the controversial Moms

As the group has amassed widespread conservative support and donor funding, its focus on education ensures that even as voters turn their attention to the 2024 presidential race, school board elections will remain some of the most contentious political fights next year.

Moms for Liberty started with three Florida moms fighting COVID-19 restrictions in 2021. It has quickly ascended as a national player in Republican politics, helped along the way by the boards political training and close relationships with high-profile GOP groups and lawmakers. The groups support for school choice and the fundamental rights of parents to direct their childrens education has drawn allies such as Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, a leading GOP presidential contender, and the conservative Heritage Foundation.

The group has been labeled an extremist organization by the Southern Poverty Law Center for allegedly harassing community members, advancing anti-LGBTQ+ misinformation and fighting to scrub diverse and inclusive material from lesson plans.

Justice said in an interview that she and her co-founder, Tina Descovich, were two moms who had faith in American parents to take back the public education system in America and that they fully intend on reclaiming and reforming that system.

So far, the group has had mixed success at getting its preferred candidates elected. In 2022, slightly more than half of the 500 school board candidates it endorsed across the country won. In the spring of 2023, fewer than one-third of the nearly 30 candidates it endorsed in Wisconsin were elected.

Focusing on state-level candidates could give Moms for Liberty an opportunity to assert its influence on some of the positions that have more control in determining curriculum, said Jon Valant, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution who has studied education policy.

A close partnership with the conservative training organization the Leadership Institute and added money from a growing donor base also could help the Moms for Liberty run more electable candidates and help them win in 2024.

Monty Floyd, vice chair of the Moms for Liberty chapter in Hernando County, Florida, knows what its like to have the groups support in a political campaign. He ran for school board in 2022 and received the groups endorsement, as well as $250 from its Florida-based PAC.

Floyd lost that race but plans to run again in 2026, he told The Associated Press at the summit. He looks forward to seeing how the groups political influence grows and said that even more than the money, the national network of Moms for Liberty provides a great resource to a candidate.

The wealth of knowledge they have and the network of support and just the advocacy tips that were learning from the speakers today, he said. They have good advice to give. So you kind of learn a lot about what you can improve in your messaging.

Moms for Liberty may face obstacles, however, as its rising national presence has driven a countermovement of activists who oppose it, Valant said.

Randi Weingarten, president of the American Federation of Teachers, said she thinks groups such as Moms for Liberty have created more action and more energy among teachers unions.

We have 41 new units that we have organized as the AFT this year. Weve never had that, she said. She said the union would do what we have to do during elections to show the contrast between its endorsed candidates and Moms for Liberty candidates.

Beyond unions, Moms for Liberty is likely to face opposition from grassroots groups and voters who just dont agree with their vision of what public education should be, Valant said.

Martha Cooney, a Pennsylvania educator who was one of about 100 protesters dancing and holding signs outside the summit Saturday afternoon, agreed. She said that as Moms for Liberty tries to assert more political power, she and others will continue to stand in its way.

They are a very small minority who are trying to act like they represent this whole nation, and they do not, Cooney said.

Moms for Liberty did not answer questions on which races it would focus on in 2024, besides making it clear that it would not endorse in legislative races or the presidential election.

But even as the group says it will not get involved in the White House race, Republican candidates have tried to harness Moms for Libertys influence and broad network of more than 120,000 members in 45 states to woo its voting bloc and benefit their primary campaigns.

I think moms are the key political force for this 2024 cycle, DeSantis said in his address to attendees Friday.

Other Republican presidential candidates who appeared at the summit included former U.N. Ambassador Nikki Haley, former Arkansas Gov. Asa Hutchinson and biotech entrepreneur Vivek Ramaswamy, who brought his wife and two children to the stage Saturday. He pledged to prioritize parents rights and shutter the U.S. Department of Education if elected.
Call it a turf war waged in the air above Northern Virginia, with politicians across the country piloting the dogfight.

Airlines serving Virginia's two largest and busiest airports are dueling in Congress and through a barrage of advertisements over pending legislation to loosen restrictions on the number of flights and destinations allowed at Ronald Reagan Washington National Airport in Arlington County, just across the Potomac River from the U.S. Capitol.

A coalition led by Atlanta-based Delta Air Lines is pushing for changes that it contends would promote competition and lower prices for consumers, as well as more convenience for travelers in Washington and along the Interstate 95 corridor. It is also looking for a larger share of the market at Reagan National, where American Airlines is the dominant carrier.

United Airlines, with a major hub at Washington Dulles International Airport, is leading a coalition that strongly opposes the proposed changes, which it argues would overwhelm operating capacity at Reagan National.

They say it would result in more delayed flights and fewer options for cities within the 1,250-mile perimeter established more than 50 years ago to shift long-distance flights to more spacious Dulles in eastern Loudoun County.

Gov. Glenn Youngkin has joined the state's congressional delegation in trying to ground the legislation, alleging that it is a threat to state investments in the airports, managed by the Metropolitan Washington Airport Authority since 1987. They are aided by Maryland's two U.S. senators, Democrats Ben Cardin and Chris Van Hollen, who say regional control of flights also is essential to protecting Baltimore-Washington International Airport on the other side of the Capital Beltway.

"A flourishing @Dulles_ Airport and @Reagan_Airport are key elements in a thriving Virginia," Youngkin said in a recent post on Twitter. "The balanced two-airport system these premier aviation hubs comprise should be preserved and strengthened, not undermined."

Rob Damschen, the governor's deputy communications director, said Reagan National and Dulles are "key partners in Virginia's economic engine and operate with oversight from a single governing entity that understands the balance and needs of the region."

"The current proposed rule changes, based on just one of these entities in isolation, fundamentally misunderstand the complimentary structure of this partnership and the benefit to Virginians and all travelers passing through the commonwealth," Damschen said in a statement to the Richmond Times-Dispatch.

The Direct Capital Access Act, or DCA (mimicking the airport code for Reagan National), is pending in Congress both separately in the House of Representatives and potentially as part of the five-year reauthorization of the Federal Aviation Administration. The airport is one of three in the country subject to flight restrictions because of capacity, along with John F. Kennedy and LaGuardia airports in New York.

The "slot and perimeter" restrictions date to 1969, but Congress has intervened before, carving out limited exemptions to long-distance flights between Reagan National and 10 cities in the West, and adding more than 50 flight slots at the airport in the past 23 years. The legislation, proposed by Rep. Hank Johnson, D-Ga., would add up to 28 flights at Reagan National.

The FAA said last month that it takes no position on long-haul flights using narrow-bodied jets at Reagan National, but warned that the proposed additional flights "would likely have a negative impact on operational performance and consumer experience" at the airport, which it said is already one of the most prone to delays in the country.

Virginia's opposition to the legislation is led by U.S. Sens. Mark Warner and Tim Kaine, both Democrats and former Virginia governors, as well as members of the state's congressional delegation, who say the changes also would undermine the recent extension of Metro train service to Dulles.

"The Virginia delegation is sticking together on this and saying 'no,'" said Rep. Rob Wittman, R-1st, who represents parts of the Richmond area and previously much of the I-95 corridor through Fredericksburg.

But the Capital Access Alliance, the coalition pushing for legislation, touts endorsements by former Virginia political leaders, including Gov. Jim Gilmore, a Republican who served from 1998 to 2002.

Gilmore, in an opinion column in The Washington Post on Thursday, derided the "slot and perimeter" restrictions on flights at Reagan National as an "antiquated, mid-century regulation that continues to hamper the airport."

He said the rules force travelers, especially in the West, to use connecting instead of direct flights to reach their destination and drive up the costs of travel for government, private business and individual travelers who have to pay their own way.

Indirectly responding to a contrary editorial by his Republican predecessor, Gov. George Allen, Gilmore said, "I fully agree that Congress should not involve itself in airport operations. Indeed, it appears to have done so only at" Reagan National.

Allen, who as a U.S. senator threatened a filibuster to block a similar push for additional flights 20 years ago, called the proposed legislation "an overstep" in an opinion column the Post published.

"I feel as strongly today about the issue as I did then, when I told them they had no business intruding into our airports' operations  nor theirs in Phoenix, Las Vegas, San Francisco, Dallas or anywhere else," he wrote.

The legislation also received public backing from former Virginia House Speaker Bill Howell, a longtime Stafford County resident who says additional flights and destinations would benefit the people and businesses along I-95 whom he represented for more than 30 years in the General Assembly.

"It's time for Congress to update this anti-competitive rule and allow the free market to best regulate flight options from airports," Howell said in an opinion column published by The Washington Examiner.

The coalition behind the legislation also includes Virginia FREE, a business organization with strong connections in state politics. Chris Saxman, executive director and a former Republican state legislator, said the restrictions at Reagan National are "protectionist" and "a false barrier" to competition.

"It's a free enterprise nobrainer," Saxman said.

That is not the view of the Coalition to Protect America's Regional Airports, which includes Richmond International Airport. The airport has not had flights to Reagan National for 20 years, spokesman Troy Bell said, but it offers up to four connecting flights a day to Dulles.

"Some or all of these flights could be at risk  reducing the access options to or from Richmond  if the options out of (Dulles) were reduced," Bell said.

Proponents dispute suggestions that adding long-haul flights at Reagan National would diminish service to smaller regional airports. "The only way a flight gets cut is if the airline itself cuts it," said Brian Walsh, spokesman for the coalition advocating the changes.

But Rep. Abigail Span berger, D-7th, who represents localities along the I-95 corridor from Caroline County to Prince William County, sides with opponents.

"Right now, (Reagan National) already has the busiest runway in the country  and opponents of this legislation have successfully made the case that a perimeter extension would actually reduce flight options for Virginians, particularly the number of regional, shorthaul flights," Span berger said in a statement.

The overriding question is whether Congress should make decisions about Virginia airports, said RIC's Bell.

"Airports in general make local decisions about strategies and investments," he said. "This local influence is critical for airports to run effectively and efficiently."
Authorities declare Puerto Morelos ready for summer vacation

Puerto Morelos, Q.R.  The seaside town of Puerto Morelos says it is ready for the summer vacation season. Miguel Camara Ruiz, the Municipal Secretary of Sustainable Tourism, says they are anticipating an 85 percent hotel occupancy rate.

Camara Ruiz says that Puerto Morelos is reporting excellent numbers this year in terms of visitor arrivals in winter, Easter and long weekends. He says a high number of national visitors and also foreigners, mainly Americans, Canadians, Europeans and South Americans, have been arriving.

Tourists come to experience the best adventure destination in Mexico, according to the World Travel Awards, and are attracted by the Ruta de los Cenotes, the Great Mesoamerican Reef, the beaches, gastronomy and the atmosphere of tranquility and the warm treatment that the people of Puerto Morelos provide to the visitors, he explained.

He says that service providers expect a significant upturn, mainly in nautical activities, in the more than 20 parks on the Ruta de los Cenotes and in the demand for service in the gastronomic sector, which has been given a strong boost in this administration.

The boosts are expected thanks to the thousands of tourists who will arrive at the hotels of this tourist destination, to which will be added those who arrive at the homes of relatives and friends, he explained.

In addition, the beaches of Quintana Roo are forecast sargassum free for the upcoming 2023 summer season.

The 2023 Summer Vacation Operation will be launched with the participation of the National Guard and state and municipal police as well as the Mexican Navy and Civil Protection, whose elements will reinforce surveillance and security on roads, beaches and concentrated tourist points.

Guillermo Morales Lopez, coordinator of Civil Protection in the municipality, explained that the surveillance operation will be launched in which, in accordance with the protocols, joint efforts are made and work is done in close coordination with the Secretariat Public Safety and Transit, Firefighters, Navy and National Guard to guarantee visitors a peaceful stay, which will start after the last day of classes.

Unlike the Easter holiday season, we will seek to enable, with the support of the Navy, three bases to expedite emergency care in order to guarantee and protect the lives of local and foreign tourists, as well as the population, he said.

He explained that the summer holiday vacation season covers six weeks and that during those weeks, the days are longer with sunlight until at least 7:00 p.m. He says the extended days means a physical challenge for personnel and an administrative challenge for the Coordination.

Additional lifeguards will be on beaches and Public Security and Transit will deploy ground-based personnel and install random filters at the points with the highest influx of beach goers. Security tours will also be carried out tours with ATVs along beaches such as Ventana al Mar, Bahia Petempich and El Cid.
Cancun to host United States-Mexico-Canada Agreement Free Trade Commission

Cancun, Q. R.  Cancun will host an upcoming July meeting between U.S., Canada and Mexico trade representatives. The groups will participate in the third meeting of the United States-Mexico-Canada Agreement (USMCA) Free Trade Commission (FTC).

The United States Trade Representative Katherine Tai will travel to Cancun from July 6-7 to participate in the third meeting of the United States-Mexico-Canada Agreement (USMCA) Free Trade Commission (FTC), the USTR said in a press statement.

She will participate alongside Mexicos Secretary of Economy, Raquel Buenrostro, and Canadas Minister of International Trade, Export Promotion, Small Business and Economic Development, Mary Ng.

The USMCA is the foundational pillar of the trilateral trade relationship, driving regional economic growth and integration. In 2022, U.S. goods and services exports to USMCA parties was valued at nearly $790 billion, a 31 percent increase from 2012 and a 366 percent increase from 1993.

According to the U.S. Department of Commerce, U.S. exports of goods and services to Canada and Mexico supported an estimated 2.1 million jobs in 2021.

In Mexico, Ministers will review ongoing work by USMCA committees and working groups to continue implementation of the Agreement. They will discuss how the Parties can further facilitate economic growth and investment to increase competitiveness in North America.

The Ministers will also hear from private sector representatives and labor stakeholders on how the USMCA can benefit workers and small businesses in the three countries.

On the margins of the FTC meeting, Ambassador Tai will have separate bilateral meetings with Secretary Buenrostro and Minister Ng.

Ambassador Tai participated in the second meeting of the USMCA FTC in Vancouver, Canada in July 2022 and the United States hosted the inaugural meeting in May 2021.
First Maya Train cars hit highway bound for Cancun

Cancun, Q. R.  The first cars meant to run the Cancun  Merida Maya Train route are on their way. In a Monday Mayan Train progress report, Fonatur head Javier May announced the departure of the first cars.

According to May, the cars left the assembly plant in Ciudad Sahagun, Hidalgo at 5:00 a.m. Monday bound for Cancun. The cars were escorted by National Guard, who will make the entire journey through each of the states.

May says the first car left the assembly plant at 5:00 a.m. and is bound for Cancun. Photo: Fonatur July 3, 2023.

The first train of four wagons left the Alstom plant in Ciudad Sahagun, Hidalgo and is on its way to the workshop and depot in Cancun where it will arrive on July 8 for assembly and the start of static tests, he said.

National Guard escort the four Mayan Train cars heading for Cancun. Photo: La Guardia Nacional July 3, 2023.

The convoy is slow moving due to the oversized train cars, however, they are expected to arrive in Cancun July 8. On its way to Cancun are four cars. May explained that all four train cars left the Alstom plant in Ciudad Sahagun Monday morning and are headed to the Mayan Train garage in Cancun.

May, the General Director of the National Fund for the Promotion of Tourism (Fonatur), said in mid-August, the cars will run as a test between Cancun and Merida.

Pictured here are the first four Maya Train cars manufactured for the Cancun-Merida route. Photo: Fonatur July 3, 2023.

During the Monday morning update during the Presidential press conference, he said the cars were manufactured in Mexico with the best technology, with the highest quality and safety standards.

It is a comfortable, modern and safe train, the result of great coordination and the sum of efforts, he added.

In total, 42 cars are being produced in the Alstrom plant in Ciudad Sahagun. The director of Alstom Mexico, Maite Ramos Gomez, said the Maya Train is the most important project and the first in the entire history of the country with 72 percent national content, one hundred percent manufactured in Mexico, by hand of Mexican work and the talent of young engineers graduated from public institutions, as well as the experience of older adults.

He said that two more trains will be delivered in August, 13 for the month of December and the rest gradually in the following months.

The Maya Train workshop is located near the Cancun International Airport where a station is also currently being constructed that, when done, will connect to the train station and airport via minibuses.
Mexico opens jaguar exhibit in Chinas Hunan Museum

Mexico City, Mexico  The Hunan Museum in Changsha, in the Peoples Republic of China, has on display archaeological pieces from the ancient civilizations of Mexico.

The exhibition, the Jaguar, a Totem of Mesoamerica, is being shown for the first time. It opened July 2 and will remain in the Hunan province until September 18. From there, it will be placed in other Chinese venues for one year.

The jaguar exhibition is made up of fragments of murals, large-format ceramic and stone pieces that refer to the feline figure.

The exhibition shows the millennial presence of the jaguar in Mesoamerica dating back three millennia during which its image has been sculpted, traced, modeled and painted on material supports from numerous cultures.

The museographic proposal aims to transmit knowledge based on coexistence with this animal, through a selection of 146 archaeological and eight ethnographic objects, including fragments of Teotihuacan murals, Tlaloc pots, a Zapotec funerary urn and anthropomorphic figurines.

Mexicos Jaguar, a Totem of Mesoamerica exhibit will run until September 18, 2023. Photo: CNMyE / INAH

The exhit also showcases tombstones with bas-reliefs from the INAH collections, from the National Museum of Anthropology, the Templo Mayor Museum, the National Museum of World Cultures, the Teotihuacan Archaeological Zone, the Chiapas Regional Museum and the William Spratling.

The jaguar, a Mesoamerican totem, organized by the Ministry of Culture of the Government of Mexico through the National Institute of Anthropology and History (INAH) and the Beijing Kunyuan Culture and Museum Exhibition Co. Ltd, will tour five museums in the Peoples Republic of China from July 2023 to September 2024.

The latest exhibitions of Mexican heritage carried out in the Asian country included Stones from Heaven, Jade Civilizations (2012), which was presented at the Palace Museum in Beijing, and Mayas, the language of beauty (2014), at the National Museum of China in Beijing.

In June, Mexico opened its Ancient Mayan Exhibition in the Tokyo National Museum. On display are sculptures, ceremonial objects and ancient manuscripts, offering an approach to these three pre-Hispanic civilizations. The exhibit is open until September 3, 2023.

After Toyoko, the exhibition will run at the Kyushu National Museum in Fukuoka from October 3 to December 10, 2023 and then at the Osaka National Museum of Art from February 6 to May 6, 2024.
Summer holidays off to bad start for Yucatan boat owner

Progreso, Yucatan  A private boat carrying at least three people was completely destroyed by fire Saturday in Progreso. The boat, Lady Betriz, set sail late Saturday morning from the Port of Yucalpeten.

The at-sea fire was reported to Port officials around 1:00 p.m. by numerous people who saw the thick black smoke. Those on board were forced into the water due to the fast moving fire. The 44-foot-long vessel was seven kilometers from shore when the fire started.

Around two hours after leaving the Torre III Marina in the Port of Yucalpeten, the fire began. Navy personnel were accompanied by firefighters from the Ministry of Public Security (SSP) to rescue the crew and put out the fire.

The situation was controlled an hour later. The vessel was left at sea and later towed back to port. Those on board were medically evaluated without reports of serious injuries.
Onward NRV reported earlier this month reaching 73% of its private-sector fundraising goal of $2 million to fund operations through mid-2028.

The fundraising began in November 2022 and now enters a public phase. The results were released June 8 at the organizations quarterly investor event at The Highlander Hotel in Radford, with nearly 100 people present.

Additional, the organization, previously the New River Valley Economic Development Alliance, seeks $1 million in government support for the upcoming five-year period.

Sixty-eight investors have committed money to the campaign, which is led by CEO Bill Flattery of Carilion New River Valley Medical Center and President Pat Huber of New River Community College.

A new strategic plan, which has been completed, is due to appear on the organizations website soon. It can be found at https://www.onwardnrv.org.

The NRV business community exceeded the capital investment goals and met the job-creation goals in the organizations most recent five-year plan, the one covering 2018 through mid-2023, according to Executive Director Katie Boswell.

Onward NRV is a public-private economic development organization whose mission is to attract and retain jobs, investment and talent the valley.
Huge crowds lined both sides of the tracks as this northbound CSX crosses England Street

11 year old train enthusiast Brycen Wolfe on Bon Air patiently waits for the next locomotive

Hanover Concert Band Flutist Carolyn Elliott breaks out her Casey Jones outfit for the 2018 Ashland Train Day

Ashland takes to the rails with annual Train Day

ASHLAND -- Ashland Train Day is back again for 2018. This years event was held from 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. on Saturday, Nov. 3, at the Ashland Train Station at 112 N. Railroad Ave. in Ashland.

Sponsored and coordinated by Ashland Main Street Association, the annual event draws thousands of train enthusiasts to Ashland from all parts of the Richmond region.

The railroad-themed event is organized with the entire family in mind.

Railroad music and songs with will performed at the CSX Stage. There also will be miniature childrens train rides, childrens games and activities, model trains (Lego, wooden and electric), model train racing, memorabilia displays, a locomotive moon bounce, food- and railroad-related vendors, and Train Day mascots, the Engineer Bears.

Ashland Train Day is presented free of charge.

Since 2012, Ashland Kiwanians have provided significant volunteer service support for the event, and, in 2013, expanded Kiwanis participation as volunteers to include members from the Richmond Young Professionals Club, as well as many members of their sponsored Key and CKI clubs.

In addition to treating Train Day as one of the larger community service projects, the Kiwanis Club of Ashland operated its fundraising Hobo Diner, serving hamburgers, hot dogs, chips and water/soft drinks to hungry event attendees.

For more information, go to www.AshlandTrainDay.com. Follow on Twitter at @AshlandTrainDay.
" " Anthropologist Clyde Kluckhohn described skinwalkers as secret witches (mostly male, some female) who creep out in the night to take the form of swift-moving animals like the wolf and coyote. Image by 024-657-834 from Pixabay

The Navajo, or Dine, people of North America have a long-standing belief in magic and shapeshifting  and the skinwalker, or yee naaldlooshii, continues to stand as one of the more widely known examples of both. The Navajo skinwalker is believed to wander far across the American cultural landscape. Often reduced to a mere werewolf trope, this shadowy being frequently emerges in film, TV and even conspiracy theories. Yet the skinwalker's true nature belongs to the night.

The world beyond humanity's campfire has always seethed with danger. We have always populated the night with beings that blur the line between human and beast, the sacred and the profane, order and chaos. Archaeological discoveries in modern-day Germany date the contemplation of therianthropes (shapeshifting or half-animal beings) back to between 35,000 and 40,000 years in the past. More recent findings in Sulawesi, Indonesia, may push the date back even more, to at least 43,900 years ago. Either way, the concept remains a key feature of religion, myth and the fantastic.

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In his 1944 book "Navaho Witchcraft," noted anthropologist Clyde Kluckhohn explored magical traditions of contemporary Navajos. Specifically, in his book he examined the "influencing of events by supernatural techniques that are socially disapproved." Kluckhohn noted that English language translations like "witchcraft," are useful shorthand in this case, but they're not perfect. You can draw similarities between real or imagined European witches and skinwalkers, but the Navajo spirit world is undoubtedly unique.

Based on his interviews with Navajo people, Kluckhohn pieced together general descriptions of the various forms of "witchcraft" that existed within Navajo folk belief. He described skinwalkers as secret witches (mostly male, some female) who creep out in the night to take the form of swift-moving animals like the wolf and coyote. They were said to gather in foreboding places to work dark magic against their victims and engage in various taboo rituals of incest, corpse defilement and sibling murder.

So, what makes someone become a skinwalker?
 Oklahoma AG requests additional delay before state gets back to executions | Main | Does the Constitution limit the age at which a juve killer can be tried as an adult? 

October 14, 2014

Three Justices dissent from denial of certiorari in Jones/Ball acquitted conduct case

I am very disappointed to have to report that this morning the Supreme Court denied certiorari review in the notable federal drug sentencing case from DC involving Antwan Ball and his co-defendants concerning judicial fact-finding to increase a federal guideline sentence contrary to a jury acquittal. As I noted in this post last week, Jones v. US, No. 13-10026, was relisted by the Justices after their "long conference." Now today's SCOTUS order list has at the very end the news that cert has been denied in Jones v. US, No. 13-10026, with a three-page dissent from that decision authored by Justice Scalia and joined by Justices Thomas and Ginsburg. Mega-bummer!!!

Here is the bulk of Justice Scalia's dissent from the denial of cert in Jones (with emphasis in the original):

A jury convicted petitioners Joseph Jones, Desmond Thurston, and Antwuan Ball of distributing very small amounts of crack cocaine, and acquitted them of conspiring to distribute drugs. The sentencing judge, however, found that they had engaged in the charged conspiracy and, relying largely on that finding, imposed sentences that petitioners say were many times longer than those the Guidelines would otherwise have recommended. Petitioners present a strong case that, but for the judges finding of fact, their sentences would have been substantively unreasonable and therefore illegal. See Rita v. United States, 551 U.S. 338, 372 (2007) (SCALIA, J., joined by THOMAS, J., concurring in part and concurring in judgment). If so, their constitutional rights were violated. The Sixth Amendment, together with the Fifth Amendments Due Process Clause, requires that each element of a crime be either admitted by the defendant, or proved to the jury beyond a reasonable doubt. Alleyne v. United States, 570 U. S. ___, ___ (2013) (slip op., at 3). Any fact that increases the penalty to which a defendant is exposed constitutes an element of a crime, Apprendi v. New Jersey, 530 U.S. 466, 483, n. 10, 490 (2000), and must be found by a jury, not a judge, Cunningham v. California, 549 U. S. 270, 281 (2007). We have held that a substantively unreasonable penalty is illegal and must be set aside. Gall v. United States, 552 U.S. 38, 51 (2007). It unavoidably follows that any fact necessary to prevent a sentence from being substantively unreasonable  thereby exposing the defendant to the longer sentence  is an element that must be either admitted by the defendant or found by the jury. It may not be found by a judge. For years, however, we have refrained from saying so. In Rita v. United States, we dismissed the possibility of Sixth Amendment violations resulting from substantive reasonableness review as hypothetical and not presented by the facts of the case. We thus left for another day the question whether the Sixth Amendment is violated when courts impose sentences that, but for a judge-found fact, would be reversed for substantive unreasonableness. 551 U.S., at 353; see also id., at 366 (Stevens, J., joined in part by GINSBURG, J., concurring) (Such a hypothetical case should be decided if and when it arises). Nonetheless, the Courts of Appeals have uniformly taken our continuing silence to suggest that the Constitution does permit otherwise unreasonable sentences supported by judicial factfinding, so long as they are within the statutory range.... This has gone on long enough. The present petition presents the nonhypothetical case the Court claimed to have been waiting for. And it is a particularly appealing case, because not only did no jury convict these defendants of the offense the sentencing judge thought them guilty of, but a jury acquitted them of that offense. Petitioners were convicted of distributing drugs, but acquitted of conspiring to distribute drugs. The sentencing judge found that petitioners had engaged in the conspiracy of which the jury acquitted them. The Guidelines, petitioners claim, recommend sentences of between 27 and 71 months for their distribution convictions. But in light of the conspiracy finding, the court calculated much higher Guidelines ranges, and sentenced Jones, Thurston, and Ball to 180, 194, and 225 months imprisonment. On petitioners appeal, the D. C. Circuit held that even if their sentences would have been substantively unreasonable but for judge-found facts, their Sixth Amendment rights were not violated. 744 F. 3d 1362, 1369 (2014). We should grant certiorari to put an end to the unbroken string of cases disregarding the Sixth Amendment  or to eliminate the Sixth Amendment difficulty by acknowledging that all sentences below the statutory maximum are substantively reasonable.

I am especially disappointed that Justice Scalia and his joiners here could not garner one more vote to grant cert from any of the newer Justices who came on the Court after Blakely and Booker became the Sixth Amendment law of the land. Of course, Justice Alito has frequently shown his disaffinity for expanding the Sixth Amendment rights recognized in those cases. But Chief Justice Roberts joined the Blakely gang in applying (and arguably expanding) Sixth Amendment rights in Cunningham v. California and Justices Sotomayor and Kagan have "shown empathy" for defendants seeking expanded applications of the Sixth Amendment in more recent cases such as Alleyne. As I will explain in a future post, anyone (like me) hoping that Justices Sotomayor and Kagan might end up being even more committed to defendants' procedural rights at sentencing has to be deeply troubled by their disinclination to provide a fourth vote for granting cert in Jones.

Previous related posts on this case and acquitted conduct sentencing enhancements:

October 14, 2014 at 09:58 AM | Permalink

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One vote short of the four votes needed to grant Certiorari.

Posted by: Jim Gormley | Oct 14, 2014 10:00:49 AM

I understand Breyer's intransigence since he's been locked into acquitted conduct as the cornerstone of the USSG since the very beginning, but I'm totally at a loss to understand where Sotomayor and Kagan are on this. The split of the Justices (and seeming lack of courage and intellectual honesty) here is beyond ironic.

Posted by: Stan Adelman | Oct 14, 2014 10:27:47 AM

Perhaps someone's (or some-two's) worried about how a vote on the merits would come out . . .

Posted by: SH | Oct 14, 2014 10:37:46 AM

I think you are right, SH, but just elevating the debate by having this before SCOTUS would be very valuable and might even "shame" Justices like Kennedy or even Roberts to reconsider Watts.

Ultimately, as I will say in a coming post, I think Justices like Breyer, Kennedy and Roberts realize that taking up a case like this --- especially if/when the ruling below might be affirmed --- would give the court a(nother) black eye. I suspect Breyer Kennedy and Roberts, perhaps at the same time they made Sotomayor and Kagan happy by denying cert in the SS marriage cases, requested that Sotomayor and Kagan vote to deny in this case for the time being.

Posted by: Doug B. | Oct 14, 2014 11:18:32 AM

This may seem puzzling to many, at least those not SCOTUS-philes, with regard to the political makeup of the justices involved in the cert-denial / dissent of cert denial scuffle.

Scalia is not, last I heard, pro criminal, and Kagen / Sotomayor / Breyer were not heavy sentencing afficianados. What gives here?

The point I've been trying to make is that there is a "Constitutional Interpretation" split among the justices, and NOT a conservative/liberal split. For the most part, those who have followed rigid constitutional authority have been more aligned with the right (Thomas, Alito, Scalia) than the left (Kagan, Sotomayor, Breyer, Ginsburg). The left is more open to a "fluid" or "evolving" constitutional jurisprudence. (Notable was Kagan's preference for a foreign Constitution over the US Constitution which should frankly disqualify ANY judge, not just a Supreme Court justice, but I digress).

Scalia's remonstrance was indicative of providing one of those moments where people, if they get past the "What the Fudge?" reaction, realize the true nature of how Constitutional helps everyone, not just those of a particular political bent.

Posted by: Eric Knight | Oct 14, 2014 11:38:35 AM

This issue shows the complexity of the divisions of the USSC, which does not always come down on a strict liberal/conservative axis. Take a look at the Blakely break-down:

Scalia, J., delivered the opinion of the Court, in which Stevens, Souter, Thomas, and Ginsburg, JJ., joined. OConnor, J., filed a dissenting opinion, in which Breyer, J., joined, and in which Rehnquist, C. J., and Kennedy, J., joined except as to Part IVB. Kennedy, J., filed a dissenting opinion, in which Breyer, J., joined. Breyer, J., filed a dissenting opinion, in which OConnor, J., joined.

We saw something similar in certain Confrontation Clause rulings -- on certain issues, Scalia/Thomas (not always voting the exact same way) see certain constitutional clear lines that have pro-criminal rights results. Roberts/Alito are less formalist in various cases. This means, given Breyer's past actions, Sotomayor/Kagan is key here and might be more hesitant in expanding past cases than their predecessors.

The reference to the SSM denials seem a bit stretched though both probably have prudential elements. I agree the matter is due to be taken & the "black eye" concern seems overblown. But, the author is a lot more knowledgeable on the subject than I.

Posted by: Joe | Oct 14, 2014 12:19:31 PM

ETA: SCOTUSBlog has a post on this denial and also referenced Dunlap v. Idado.

http://www.scotusblog.com/2014/10/the-jury-acquits-the-judge-still-sentences-can-that-be/#more-219219

Posted by: Joe | Oct 14, 2014 12:21:12 PM

"Scalia is not, last I heard, pro criminal"

Scalia voted for the defendant in *every* Fourth Amendment case last term. Breyer, of course, voted against. One problem is that a line of argument that gets Scalia's vote inevitably loses Breyer, and vice versa.

The Justices are a bit more complicated than the popular media portrayal, especially, as noted by Joe above, on the Confrontation Clause and right to trial by jury.

Posted by: John Thacker | Oct 14, 2014 1:37:06 PM

I wasn't certain Scalia would be in Ball's camp here. Since he was (and Thomas too) the fact that at least Sotomayor wasn't interested suggests to me that they didn't think they could get five votes. A dissent from denial of cert is much better than a dissent in an opinion on the merits.

Posted by: Erik M | Oct 14, 2014 2:20:56 PM

Thomas wrote Peugh vs. US, which Scalia dissented from, so he's less surprising, I agree. But this was *the* best case to test this proposition, since the jury explicitly found the defendants not guilty and the judge essentially reversed. It really was the perfect test cases.

Note too, as Scalia does, that the lower courts have essentially been interpreting the Court's silence as consent to these kind of enhancements.

Posted by: John Thacker | Oct 14, 2014 4:22:05 PM

what this so-called issue proves is this group of retards now holding the bench of the USSC are both a joke and a criminal gang involved in destroying the United States Constitution.

Posted by: rodsmith | Oct 14, 2014 10:52:09 PM

John, just a point of clarification. Sotomayor wrote Peugh, to which Thomas dissented. But I agree that this was a very good test case. The only thing that would have made it better was if the acquitted conduct was less-directly related factually to the jury's finding of guilt. Here, you had three guys selling drugs together who were acquitted of conspiracy. Not disagreeing with the jury finding, but you can imagine the judge easily getting over the preponderance hurdle on the facts.

Peugh v. U.S.: Reversed and remanded, 5-4, in an opinion by Justice Sotomayor on June 10, 2013. Justice Ginsburg, Justice Breyer, and Justice Kagan joined the opinion in full and Justice Kennedy joined the opinion except as to Part III-C. Justice Thomas filed a dissenting opinion, in which Chief Justice Roberts, Justice Scalia and Justice Alito as to Parts I and II-C. Justice Alito filed a dissenting opinion in which Justice Scalia joined.

Posted by: TJH | Oct 15, 2014 12:31:05 PM

"One problem is that a line of argument that gets Scalia's vote inevitably loses Breyer,"

I believe that this largely because of bad lawyering. Because of the way that these two justices see the law you will never get them to agree on every case. But there is no good reason why a well-tailored argument can't pick up both votes in some cases.

Posted by: Daniel | Oct 15, 2014 4:03:38 PM

How can an individual now consent to serving on a jury, when a judge can overturn a not guilty verdict ? In fact, after being acquitted of conspiracy charges, the judge tried him again on the same count ( amounting to double jeopardy ) and found them guilty and denied them their jury verdict.

Just another FUBAR decision by our traitorous SCROTUM justices. So was their decision that the death penalty is unconstitutional for child molesters. Everyone dies, so the death penalty in and of itself is not unconstitutional ( nor cruel and unusual ), only the manner of execution can be cruel and unusual.

Jurisdiction - How can one submit to jurisdiction of a court that does not have to obey the verdict of the jury ?

I demand that the House Of Representatives impeach the 6 dishonorable justices who did not either vote to overturn the lower courts decision, or who didn't vote to review the unconstitutional sentence given.

Posted by: Michael Martin | Oct 18, 2014 1:34:53 PM

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Exclusion fences, cattle grids installed to keep animals from entering Zhongshan Park and nearby residential estate

Wild boar spotted in Bukit Panjang (left) and wild boar in Singapore (Photos: artrhsn/TikTok and Getty Images)

SINGAPORE  A total of 19 wild boars have been trapped and removed from the Bukit Panjang housing estate, and subsequently put down humanely by the National Parks Board (NParks), in response to two recent wild boar attacks.

This was revealed by Senior Minister of State for the Ministry of National Development, Tan Kiat How, in response to questions in Parliament on Monday (3 July).

According to The Straits Times, the first recent attack occurred on 1 May, when a 34-year-old woman, Durga Devi, was flung side to side and and later thrown onto a road by a wild boar. She suffered multiple wounds on her right calf, buttock and arm.

The second incident occurred last month, when a 40-year-old man was attacked by a wild boar at Zhenghua Nature Park while walking his dogs at night. He required more than 20 stitches on his left leg.

Installation of exclusion fences

Tan said in Parliament that NParks has been installing exclusion fences and cattle grids along a two-kilometre stretch at Zhenghua Nature Park, as a prevention method from animals entering the park and nearby residential areas.

Three other sites - in Chestnut Avenue, Bangkit Underpass and below the Gali Batu Flyover - were also identified as potential access points.

The fence at Bangkit Underpass was completed in late June, and fences for the other two sites will be completed by late August.

Food waste attracting wild boars

According to CNA, the Animal Concerns Research and Education Society (ACRES) had said that food waste left outside rubbish bins had been attracting wild boars to estates in Bukit Panjang last year.

The Straits Times reported that NParks will be working with grassroots organisations and the Holland-Bukit Panjang Town Council to inform residents on proper food waste management to reduce food waste that may potentially attract wild boars.

Stable number of wild boars

Tan said in Parliament that the number of wild boars in Singapores nature reserves is stable, based on a study conducted between 2019 and 2020.

The study found that the number of wild boars was 6.5 boars per square kilometre in nature reserves and 5.22 per square kilometre at nature parks. Tan said the figures are lower than larger forest reserves in the area with similar vegetation.

Around 50 wild board boars had been culled by NParks in Zhenghua Nature Park since 2019. Most of them were lone males in search of food in new territories.

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A moving walkway speeds a pilot between terminals at at LaGuardia Airport in Queens, Dec. 5, 2014. (Karsten Moran/The New York Times)

An airline passenger in Thailand had part of her leg amputated this past week after an accident on a moving airport walkway, Thai authorities said.

The accident, involving a 57-year-old woman, occurred Thursday in the domestic terminal of Don Mueang International, the older and smaller of two major airports that serve Bangkok, the capital.

Its unclear precisely what happened. Local news media initially reported that the womans leg had been pulled into the walkways machinery after she tripped on her suitcase. But her family said Saturday that she had been walking normally when part of the walkway collapsed.

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Whats clear is that her leg was amputated up to the kneecap after the accident. Thai authorities are now trying to determine if the accident resulted from human error or equipment malfunction.

Why It Matters: Walkways are widely used and seldom feared.

Such walkways are known as moving walks to government regulators and construction companies. Moving walks are often talked about in the same breath as escalators because they use similar technology and move at about the same speed  generally 100 feet per minute, or just over 1 mph.

The main difference is incline. An escalator sits at about 30 degrees, but a moving walks incline is typically no more than one-tenth of that. Many moving walks are flat.

Escalators and moving walks ease the movement of billions of people through airports, shopping malls and other public spaces each year. The National Elevator Industry, an industry group in the United States, estimates that about 105 billion passengers ride escalators annually  the worlds population, multiplied by 13  in the United States alone.

Escalators and moving walks are widely seen as very safe. But, like virtually any form of public transportation, they occasionally malfunction.

In Australia, for example, inspectors in the state of Queensland found two recent examples of moving walks that were operating with a missing pallet, the technical term for the metal slats that separate passengers from the whirring machinery below.

And in Thailand, a passenger at Don Mueang International Airport reported losing a shoe to the machinery of a moving walk in 2019, Thai news media outlets reported this past week.

Background: How likely is an accident on an airport walkway?

Data for the safety of moving walks is scarce. But if we go by escalator-safety data, the answer is not very.

An average of 2 deaths per year in the United States involve escalators, lower than the figure for elevators, according to a 2013 review of U.S. government data by the Center for Construction Research and Training, a nonprofit group in Maryland.

The risk of injury is higher: About 10,000 escalator-related injuries result in a trip to the emergency room in the United States each year. But even that figure is exceedingly small if you consider the sheer volume of escalator and moving walk trips that people take every day.

In Thailand, the moving walk where the accident occurred this past week had been used at Don Mueang International since 1996, the airports director, Karant Thanakuljeerapat, told reporters.

Don Mueang carried more than 13 million domestic passengers last year, and nearly twice as many in the years immediately before the coronavirus pandemic, according to government data. So, over nearly three decades, a moving walk there could have carried many tens of millions of passengers.

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Singapore Prime Minister Lee Hsien Loong in Parliament. (FILE PHOTO: Yahoo News Singapore)

SINGAPORE  Prime Minister Lee Hsien Loong said he retains full confidence in ministers K. Shanmugam and Vivian Balakrishnan, following investigations into their rentals of black-and-white bungalows along Ridout Road.

PM Lee added during his address Parliament on Monday (3 July) that there is nothing wrong with the two ministers renting the bungalows from Singapore Land Authority (SLA), provided that all procedures are properly followed.

His remarks came after probes by the Corrupt Practices Investigation Bureau (CPIB) and Senior Minister Teo Chee Hean found no criminal wrongdoing or improper conduct by Law and Home Affairs Minister Shanmugam as well as Foreign Minister Balakrishnan.

"As PM, my duty is not just to be satisfied that legally there was no wrongdoing, but whether, quite apart from the law, there was any other kind of misconduct or impropriety," PM Lee said.

"Ministers Shanmugam and Balakrishnan have done nothing wrong and they retain my full confidence. But this accounting in Parliament is not just to resolve the issue of the rentals on black-and-white properties in Ridout Road. important as that is, it's also a demonstration of how the PAP is determined to uphold the standards which it has set itself from the beginning in 1959."

Commitment to Singaporeans on government standards

PM Lee stated in Parliament that ministers in Singapore are paid a clean wage - they do not get perks, and so there are no official house to live in.

"You get a salary, its for you to judge what you need it for. Therefore, where ministers decide to live, whether they want to rent, whether they want to buy, these are personal choices," he explained.

When he first heard that Shanmugam and Balakrishnan had rented the Ridout Road bungalows, his assessment was that he did not believe there was wrongdoing.

However, with the issue attracting public interest after being highlighted by opposition politician and Reform Party chief Kenneth Jeyaretnam, PM Lee decided that it would be best to task the CPIB to establish definitively if there was any corruption or wrongdoing.

Apart from the legal question of whether there was criminal conduct, PM Lee also appointed SM Teo to conduct a broader review, including on SLAs processes, whether there was preferential treatment enjoyed by the ministers, and whether any privileged information was disclosed to them.

He added that Monday's Parliamentary discussions - which took nearly six hours - is his commitment to Singaporeans that the government will not tolerate any compromise or departure from its standards of honesty, integrity and incorruptibility.

"Whichever way the facts fall, it will be taken to the logical conclusion. This is the foundation not just for the people's trust in the PAP government, but also for the integrity and good functioning of our political system," he said.

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This was a 25.9 per cent rise from 2021 figures, with 'concerning rises' among youths and elderly, said Samaritans of Singapore

PHOTO ILLUSTRATION: Getty Images

SINGAPORE  Singapore reported 476 suicides in 2022, a "concerning rise" of 25.9 per cent from 378 cases in 2021 and the highest recorded suicide deaths since 2000, according to the Samaritans of Singapore (SOS).

The non-profit suicide prevention centre said in its annual media release on Saturday (1 July) that an increase in suicide deaths across most age groups was observed  particularly among youths and the elderly.

INFOGRAPHIC: Samaritans of Singapore

Citing data from the Immigration and Checkpoints Authority, SOS said that suicide remained the leading cause of death for youths aged 10 to 29 for the fourth consecutive year, constituting 33.6 per cent of all deaths within the age group.

At the same time, an 11.6 per cent increase in suicide deaths was reflected from the previous year, a rise from 112 to 125.

Individuals aged 70 to 79 registered the highest increase of 60.0 per cent in suicide deaths, a rise from 30 cases in 2021 to 48 in 2022.

INFOGRAPHIC: Samaritans of Singapore

Rise in numbers reflects 'unseen mental distress'

In its media release, SOS quoted Dr Jared Ng, senior consultant and medical director of Connections MindHealth, as saying that the rise in suicide numbers is "profoundly heartbreaking".

"This increase paints a picture of the unseen mental distress permeating our society, especially among our youths and the elderly," he said.

"It is crucial that we remain vigilant to the pressing issues that continue to heavily impact mental health, such as social isolation and loneliness. The time is now, to double our efforts in the realm of early detection and to actively encourage a culture of seeking help and watching out for one another."

SOS said that it observed a 27.0 per cent increase last year for the use of its services, which comprise the 24-hour hotline and CareText, as compared to 2021.

While suicide is a complex issue influenced by various factors, including mental health challenges, social pressures, and economic uncertainties, our collective efforts to address these underlying causes must take priority," said its chief executive officer Gasper Tan.

"We are committed to continue taking proactive steps to address the rising suicide numbers and provide support to those in need.

Over the years, SOS has introduced multiple efforts and programmes such as "Light in the Dark", a suicide attempters support group, and "Be A Samaritan", a first-responder community programme. Other efforts include collaborating with community partners in widening the safety net and raising awareness aimed at reducing stigma and encouraging help-seeking.

If you have thoughts of suicide or are feeling distressed, you can call the Samaritans of Singapore's 24-hour hotline at 1767. You can also email pat@sos.org.sg.

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Shoppers either pay 5-cent surcharge or bring their own reusable bags, but some say tote bags not big enough for their groceries

Shoppers express mixed reactions to the implementation of a plastic bag surcharge at NTUC FairPrice at Northpoint City, as customers will now be required to pay five cents for each plastic bag they take. (PHOTO: Yahoo Southeast Asia)

SINGAPORE The implementation of a disposable bag surcharge at major supermarket chains in Singapore from Monday (3 July) has garnered mixed reactions from shoppers.

While they generally complied to paying the surcharge upon paying for their supermarket items, they also expressed the limitations of bringing reusable tote bags to pack their items instead of using plastic bags.

Under the new mandatory charge, customers will be required to pay five cents for every disposable bag they take. Approximately 400 supermarkets from well-known chains such as NTUC FairPrice, Cold Storage, Giant, Sheng Siong and Prime, will participate in this move, accounting for about two-thirds of all outlets in Singapore.

The mandate applies to larger supermarket operators with an annual turnover exceeding $100 million.

Balancing convenience and cost in the plastic bag surcharge era

When Yahoo Southeast Asia visited NTUC FairPrice at Northpoint City on Monday morning, the queues were generally smooth-sailing at the check-out counters. The atmosphere was calm as the cashiers reminded customers about the new surcharge.

However, amid the general smoothness of the situation, there were a few customers who appeared unaware of the five cents surcharge. Some individuals seemed surprised when the cashier mentioned the additional fee.

Unlike them, Maureen Chong, a 62-year-old Yishun resident, emphasised the importance of bringing tote bags and said, "The surcharge is not just about the five cents. For older people, the cost can sometimes add up to 25 cents, which could be used to buy other things."

Jenny Mok, a 70-year-old retiree, stated that despite her using reusable bags, she sometimes needs to buy additional plastic bags due to the large volume of groceries she purchases.

She explained, "I try to bring my reusable plastic bags. Even though it may seem like we still use plastic, we reuse them for other purposes, like grocery shopping. However, I still have to buy additional bags if there are many groceries."

Scanning barcodes at self-checkout area

During the supermarket visit, two staff members at the self-checkout area were observed to be reminding shoppers about the five-cent surcharge and assisting them through the checkout process.

Customers who use self-checkout counters will have to scan a barcode for the disposable bags for each bag they take. According to FairPrice's previous statement, this "honour system" operates primarily on the assumption that customers will act honestly.

Tay Cheng Suah, a 70-year-old shopper, found the process of purchasing plastic bags simple. However, when asked about the honour system, he commented, "Depends on the individual - they can always circumvent the system. If there is nobody around, then they can take additional bags."

There were shoppers who were unaware that the disposable-bag surcharge kicked in on Monday. Caleb, 17, opted to put his purchased items for a friend's celebration into his backpack at the self-checkout counter. He stated that he would have brought a reusable bag, had he known about the start of the surcharge.

Self-checkout customers are required to scan the barcode individually for each bag they take, as part of FairPrice's system that relies on customer honesty. (PHOTO: Yahoo Southeast Asia)

Encouraging shopper responsibility

FairPrice Group's chief sustainability officer, Chan Tee Seng, emphasised the supermarket's full support for the policy and outlined their efforts to ensure a smooth transition.

According to him, their approach involves three key components: creating communication materials within the supermarket, providing reusable bags for those who may have forgotten their own, and reminding customers of the new surcharge.

"The final objective really is to help towards shifting the habits and the behaviours of all the shoppers to bring their own bag," Chan said. "We want to also assure everybody that we are doing our part to be vigilant to make sure that people do pay even in a self-checkout situation."

During her visit to the FairPrice outlet, Amy Khor, Senior Minister of State for Sustainability and the Environment, acknowledged the need for adjustments during the initial phase of implementing the surcharge.

She highlighted the introduction of bag racks in certain outlets by some supermarkets to facilitate the transition period and noted the progress being made.

"This morning at this supermarket, many people have actually brought their own reusable bags," she said. "I want to really encourage everybody to join us in this effort to reduce waste to safeguard the environment for future generations."

Shoppers embrace reusable bags as seen by the increased number of customers bringing their own, according to Khor's observation at the supermarket. (PHOTO: Yahoo Southeast Asia)

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SIOUX CITY  Friends urged Yasin Abdi to shoot Marlon White-Eyes during an early evening confrontation between the men.

Abdi didnt. But a short time later, when White-Eyes was observing a fight involving Abdi and his friends with a couple of passersby in the area of 14th Street and Ingleside Avenue, Abdi approached White-Eyes and opened fire, court documents said.

From five feet away, Abdi began shooting, firing seven shots in all, four of them hitting White-Eyes as he ran away. Three shots hit him in the back, the fourth in the hip/buttocks area, before Abdi and his friends fled the area.

Abdi, 20, of South Sioux City, was arrested Friday for the June 26 shooting of the 36-year-old White-Eyes, who died that evening at MercyOne Siouxland Medical Center.

Charged with first-degree murder, Abdi is being held on a $1 million bond in the Woodbury County Jail.

Abdi was named as the shooter by at least one of the men involved in the fight with him, and surveillance video taken by a camera at a nearby home helped investigators identify Abdi as the man who pulled the trigger.

In a complaint filed in Woodbury County District Court, Woodbury County Attorney James Loomis spelled out the events that led up to White-Eyes shooting:

Earlier that evening, Abdi was at an apartment building in the 800 block of 14th Street with brothers Joshua Thiergood and Reggie Tate, who live in the building with their mother. Roberto Hernandez Munoz also was with the three men, who initiated a confrontation with White-Eyes, who lived in the same apartment building. At one point, Abdi pulled a handgun out of the front pocket of his hoodie, pointed it at White-Eyes and threatened him as Thiergood and Tate encouraged him to shoot. No shots were fired, and White-Eyes went inside the apartment building and closed the front door.

Abdi, Thiergood, Tate and Hernandez Munoz soon turned their attention to two men walking past the area and began a fight with them. White-Eyes stepped outside the apartment building and approached the fighting, but was not involved. Abdi then walked up to White-Eyes and opened fire.

Police who responded to the shooting located Thiergood a short distance away and interviewed him. The following day, police talked to Tate, who identified Abdi as the shooter.

Loomis said Monday the investigation continues and he could not comment on whether anyone else could be charged in connection with the shooting.

Abdi has a history of minor assaults. In March, he pleaded guilty in Woodbury County to a simple misdemeanor charge of disorderly conduct and was fined $105 for a May 2021 fistfight with a fellow student at the Boys and Girls Home in Sioux City.

He pleaded guilty in Dakota County District Court in Nebraska in November 2022 to misdemeanor charges of carrying a concealed weapon and minor in possession. He was arrested after a June 2022 incident in which a South Sioux City police officer stopped a car full of minors who were drinking. The officer found a 9mm gun in the car, and none of the passengers claimed ownership. Abdi was fined $800.

He also pleaded guilty in Dakota County in October 2021 to misdemeanor third-degree assault and was fined $300.
The parental rights group Moms for Liberty is looking to expand its efforts to elect school board candidates in 2024 and beyond, as well as get involved in other education races.
JENIN, West Bank  Israel on Monday launched its most intense military operation in the occupied West Bank in nearly two decades, carrying out a series of drone strikes and sending hundreds of troops on an open-ended mission into a militant stronghold. At least eight Palestinians were killed and dozens wounded.

The crackdown was reminiscent of Israeli military tactics during the second Palestinian uprising in the early 2000s and came at a time of growing domestic pressure for a tough response to recent attacks on Israeli settlers, including a shooting last month that killed four Israelis.

The operation took place in the Jenin refugee camp  an area in the northern West Bank that has long been known as a bastion of militants. The fighting, which began shortly after midnight, continued past nightfall.

Throughout the day, black smoke rose from the crowded streets of the camp, a densely populated neighborhood that is home to some 14,000 people, while exchanges of gunfire rang out and drones could be heard buzzing overhead. Military bulldozers plowed through narrow streets, damaging buildings as they cleared the way for Israeli forces.

There are bulldozers destroying the streets, snipers are inside and on roofs of houses, drones are hitting houses and Palestinians are killed in the streets, said Jamal Huweil, a political activist in the camp, predicting the operation would fail.

The military blocked traffic in and out of Jenin, and the city resembled a ghost town. Streets were empty as armored Israeli vehicles patrolled. Piles of burning tires and garbage containers littered traffic circles. Power and water supplies were knocked out in the camp.

Palestinian youths occasionally threw stones at army vehicles before darting away.

With the sound of shooting and explosions in the background, at least 10 ambulances rushed to the overwhelmed local hospital as relatives checked to see if loved ones were inside. One ambulance arrived with a bullet hole in front.

The Palestinians and three Arab countries with normalized ties with Israel  Jordan, Egypt and the United Arab Emirates  condemned the incursion, as did the 57-nation Organization of Islamic Cooperation.

Late Monday, the Palestinian leadership in the West Bank held an emergency meeting and said it was halting its already limited contacts with Israel. Leaders said a freeze on security coordination would remain in place, and they vowed to step up activity against Israel in the United Nations and international bodies. They also planned to minimize contacts with the United States.

Israels prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, was unswayed.

In recent months, Jenin has turned into a safe haven for terrorism. We are putting an end to this, he said. He said the troops were destroying militant command centers and confiscating weapons supplies and factories. He claimed the operation was taking place with minimum harm to civilians.

Rear Adm. Daniel Hagari, the chief military spokesman, said there were a total of about 10 airstrikes  most of them aimed at keeping gunmen away from ground troops. He accused militants of operating next to a United Nations building and storing weapons inside a mosque.

He said Israel launched the operation because some 50 attacks over the past year had emanated from Jenin.

Neither the prime minister nor Hagari gave any indication when the operation would end.

U.N. Mideast envoy Tor Wennesland warned that the escalation in the West Bank was very dangerous. Asked about the Israeli drone attacks on residential areas, U.N. spokesman Farhan Haq said: "Attacks on heavily populated areas are violations of international humanitarian law."

Lynn Hastings, the U.N. humanitarian coordinator in the Palestinian areas, said on Twitter that she was alarmed by scale of Israeli forces operation" and noted the airstrikes in a densely populated refugee camp. She said the U.N. was mobilizing humanitarian aid.

UNRWA, the U.N. agency for Palestinian refugees, said many camp residents were in need of food, drinking water and milk powder.

Late Monday, hundreds of Palestinians left the camp to flee the fighting. The Israeli army said it was allowing people who wanted to leave to do so. The Palestinian Red Crescent rescue service said as many as 3,000 people had left by midnight, and they expected the exodus to continue.

The Palestinian Health Ministry said at least eight Palestinians were killed and 50 people were wounded  10 critically. The dead were identified as young men and Palestinian youths, including a 16-year-old boy and two 17-year-olds.

Separately, a 21-year-old Palestinian was killed by Israeli fire near the West Bank city of Ramallah, the ministry said.

The Jenin camp and an adjacent town of the same name have been a flashpoint since Israeli-Palestinian violence began escalating in spring 2022.

Israel says it has stepped up activity because the Palestinian Authority is too weak to maintain quiet. It also accuses its archenemy Iran of funding militant groups involved in the fighting.

Palestinians reject such claims, saying the violence is a natural response to 56 years of occupation, including stepped-up settlement construction by Israel's government and increased violence by Jewish settlers.

Jenin was a major friction point in the last Palestinian uprising.

In 2002, days after a Palestinian suicide bombing during a large Passover gathering killed 30 people, Israeli troops launched a massive operation in the camp. For eight days and nights, they fought militants street by street, using armored bulldozers to destroy rows of homes, many of which had been booby-trapped.

Mondays raid came two weeks after another violent confrontation in Jenin that included the shooting death of a 15-year-old girl and after the military said a pair of rockets were fired from the area last week.

Photos: Israel steps up Jerusalem home demolitions
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PAPILLION  An independent investigation into 52 election-related complaints received by Sarpy County resulted in no evidence of election fraud, voter suppression or criminal misbehavior.

The county issued a news release Friday with the results, which evaluated the 2020 general and 2022 primary elections at the behest of the Sarpy County Attorneys Office.

Investigator William W. Black, a 42-year Nebraska law enforcement veteran with extensive experience in criminal investigations, was hired to conduct the review after the complaints were received May 10, 2022.

"The County Attorneys Office directed Black to identify the individuals responsible for criminal wrongdoing if it occurred and to forward the evidence and a prosecutable case for specific crimes committed if present," according to the release.

No evidence of criminal wrongdoing was discovered.

Sarpy County Attorney Lee Polikov said his office takes concerns about elections seriously.

"At the conclusion of this investigation, I remain confident that Sarpy County elections are free, fair and devoid of fraudulent activity or criminal intent, Polikov said. The investigation was thorough and professional. The people of Sarpy County can take great comfort in the investigators diligence and these findings.

The county released a 32-page report describing the complaints and detailing the findings of the investigator, including isolated election-related issues caused by human error that did not influence the outcome of the elections, the release states.

One such instance includes a volunteer poll worker recording precinct pollbook information. They were confronted by other poll workers and stopped immediately.

Two people were found to have voted in Sarpy County after moving to nearby jurisdictions. Those voters didn't vote twice, however, and officials determined they would not be able to prove intent for criminal voter fraud.

Top Journal Star photos for June 2023
VALENTINE  It has been more than 72 years since Dale Dewayne Thompson of Valentine went missing in Korea.

Finally, in December, his remains were identified. He was flown back to Omaha on Tuesday and made a long and notable journey by car back home.

Everyone realizes the importance of it, said his great niece, Cindy Williams, also of Valentine. My mom (Cathy Duncan) and I rode in the procession from Atkinson to here (Valentine). Everywhere there were people lined up on the street.

They were there to witness, honor, cheer and feel deep respect.

We had real support, Williams said.

Dale, 18, and his 17-year-old brother, Gene, both still in high school at the time, enlisted in the Army together. That was on March 21, 1950, according to Dales obituary. Tensions had been brewing on the Korean Peninsula and war officially broke out on June 25.

What I can remember was that Granny Mable (their mother and Williams great-grandmother) was hesitant to let them go off to war, Williams said. Their father, Earl Thompson, had died in 1945 from a brain tumor.

Betty Schroeder, 89, of North Platte, was barely younger than Gene, and their cousin.

We lived in the country," she said. "I loved the country. We rode horses and played ball.

"One day we were playing ball and I heard them talk about going into the service. Betty was alarmed, but they said all the young men were going and they thought they should go too. They enlisted in the U.S. Army. They packed their little bags and went to town, and they were gone.

On their first leave Gene was so tickled and pleased, but Dale was apprehensive about going back.

The next leave was about three or four months later and again Gene was so full of it and Dale was apprehensive again, Schroeder said.

Private First Class Dale Thompson was reported missing on Dec. 2, 1950, during a battle near the Chosin Reservoir in North Korea, according to the United States Defense POW/MIA Accounting Agency.

Granny would have got the telegram, Williams said. Shortly thereafter the Army sent Gene home, not wanting to risk her losing him, too. They had a little sister, Williams grandmother, Carol, who was about 14 years old at the time.

So Gene came home, alone, and he was so sad because he realized Dale was not coming home with him, Schroeder said.

The boys mother cried for days. Days and weeks and months went by and she was so sure that he (was alive and) would be able to come home. She used to say Maybe hes in a concentration camp, or maybe something else, said Schroeder.

Recently Williams and Duncan discovered a headstone, already in place, for Dale, not far from his parents' marker. It reads, In Memory, Dale D. Thompson, 1932-1950, Missing in Action in Korea. They dont know who bought and placed it. His mother, maybe?

From time to time, as DNA science advanced, Gene and Carol would be contacted by the government for updated DNA samples, Williams said. Those contacts kept hope alive that one day Dales remains would be identified and returned home. Gene died in 2013 and Carol in 2003.

That day finally came this week.

Following a 2018 summit between former President Donald Trump and North Korean leader Kim Jong Un, the remains of 55 people were sent to Hawaii, where Thompsons remains were identified on Nov. 28, 2022. On May 11 the DPAA conducted a ceremony at Joint Base Pearl Harbor-Hickman, Hawaii, for Pfc. Thompson. The remains were flown to Omaha on Tuesday.

Pfc. Dale Dewayne Thompson was honored with a service Friday at New Hope Cemetery in Valentine.
Now that the Supreme Court has ended race-conscious affirmative action, the American education system will be left scrambling for a countermaneuveror several. The squabble over potential responses has already begun, with some advocating for a move to class-conscious admissions, while others insist that such schemes havent worked in the past and wont magically work now. I think nows the time to talk about one of the most glaringly racist aspects of our education system, one that heavily affects student success in achieving admission to selective colleges: traditional letter grading.

Conservatives reading this will no doubt jump to the conclusion that Im a crazy socialist lunatic who thinks academic standards dont matter. And they would be partially right: I am a crazy socialist lunatic, but I firmly believe that standards do matter. I am not one of those crusading lefty college professors who believes that basic math is racist or that hard work and punctuality are the hidden faces of 21st-century white supremacy. (Though I am no admirer of George W. Bush, I do think he was onto something when he suggested that some progressive education reforms are predicated on the soft bigotry of low expectations.)

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No, Im not opposed to traditional grading because of my bleeding liberal heart or because Im a snowflake who was born in the everyone-gets-a-trophy 90 s. Im opposed to grading because it doesnt work, and yes, because it is racist. Research has consistently shown that traditional grading is not objective, it largely fails to predict future success, and it tends to reflect racial bias. Given that grades are one of the most important factors in contemporary college admissions, rethinking the modern grading system in K12 schools will be a crucial step in any attempt to retain diversity in a postaffirmative action world.

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Although we think of grading as a time-honored element of education, the practice is actually a very recent development, only dating to the late 19th century. And it emerged at a particularly ugly moment of American history: as freed slaves increasingly took advantage of the American public school system, and undesirable European immigrants began to flood America, the native-born white elites who ran Americans educational apparatus became increasingly obsessed with rank-ordering as a way to gatekeep access to both employment and educational opportunities in this country. It is no coincidence that the birth of the modern letter grade system in the 1890s and the rise of standardized testing in the 1920s occurred at the exact peaks of the first and second waves of the eugenics movement, respectively.

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While the eugenic origins of standardized testing have been much discussed, the relationship between race science, white supremacy, and the emergence of the letter grade system is less familiar. But the rhetorical and practical overlap between eugenics, education reform, and the birth of the modern grading system is enough to fill a book. One need only look to the work of Francis Galtoncousin of Charles Darwin and father of the eugenics movementto see the extent to which a pathological obsession with letter grading was at the heart of race science from the beginning.

Galton speaks of grading human beings more than 75 times in his influential 1869 magnum opus Hereditary Genius. He also provides a handy graph, labeled Classification of Men According to Their Natural Gifts, which details how human beings might effectively be sorted using a system of letter grades. (Predictably, negroes scored grades no higher than D or C.). Later, so-called Fitter Family contests in the early 20th century would make the overlap between the new letter grade system and eugenics even more explicit. These contests assigned letter grades to individuals, and grade point averages to families, based on their perceived eugenic fitness.

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Of course, an ugly history alone is not reason enough to jettison an idea or practice, but it does give us reason to examine it more closely. And traditional letter grading does not stand up to scrutiny. A recent overview of decades worth of research found that the motivation to get good grades and the motivation to learn are inversely related, that graded students show decreased interest in the subject matter on which they are assessed, that ungraded students demonstrate increased intrinsic motivation compared with graded students, and that grades disincentivize intellectual risk-taking and make students more likely to avoid difficult subject matter.

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Studies also increasingly demonstrate that grades do not predict scholarly aptitude or the likelihood of future achievementone of the chief justifications often invoked in defense of traditional letter grades. A recent UNC study of graduate school admissions among biomedical Ph.D. students found no correlation between GRE scores or undergraduate grades and graduate school success. In other words, undergraduate grades failed to predict who would or would not succeed in graduate school. In contrast to widely held assumptions by admissions faculty and administrators about the predictive power of grades and general GRE test scores, the authors wrote, we found no correlation between these metrics and student publications or degree completion. These findings mirrored a similar study at UCSF. Other research shows similarly that there is little positive correlation between GPA and future career performance or earnings. Oh, and grades arent objective. Even math grades.

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So if grades dont predict future success, arent objective, and dont effectively motivate students, what do grades do well? Just what they were originally designed to do: racial and socioeconomic gatekeeping.

Not only does research show that grades dont work the way we want them to, it also demonstrates that grading tends to reflect racial bias: Assignments produced by white students frequently receive higher grades than identical assignments turned in by Black students. Likewise, teachers have been shown to frequently maintain pro-white bias; the Black-white test score gap is greatest in American counties with the highest degrees of racial prejudice; and teachers tend to give white students higher grades unless they use rubrics with specific criteria.

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And the consequences of this bias can be enormous. A single year of failing grades can have downstream ripple effects that last for years, changing the entire course of a students life: Once a high school student fails once, they are both much more likely to fail again and much less likely to graduate. When the high stakes of failing are married to traditional gradings racial bias problem, it is not hard to see the role our American GPA fetish can play in stymying campus diversitya problem that will become only more acute now that affirmative action is a thing of the past.

Related from Slate Joel Anderson This S Never Stops With White People: How Clarence Thomas Got to This Moment Read More

Fortunately, it is not just the case that studies show that traditional grading doesnt work and is racist. There are plenty of encouraging signs that other, less punitive and more equitable modes of assessmentso-called methods of ungradingdo work. In the wake of COVID-19 and the aftermath of George Floyds murder, ungrading gained traction as educators searched for new and more equitable ways to think about assessing students. Practices described as ungrading are heterogenous, ranging from literally abolishing grades to milder reforms like specifications grading or simply reducing the number of graded assignments in a course.

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In fact, many colleges and universities are already putting variations of ungrading into place. For example, nearly every top medical school has adopted a pass-fail model for much of their curriculum. Likewise, MIT has adopted a pass-fail model for all first-year undergraduate students, and from all appearances, this has not diminished that institutions ability to churn out top-tier scientists and field leaders. More recently, some colleges and universities have moved to getting rid of grades altogether. Of course, some scrooges will be pessimistic that students will be motivated to learn or meet academic standards in the absence of the carrot and stick that is traditional grading. And to these skeptics I would reiterate that grades fail to do this. The idea that grades motivate the average student is a myth that is not backed up by any significant body of research. Quite the opposite is the case.

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Moving to a better system of assessment will require us to jettison these kinds of long-held assumptions about grading, and that begins by recognizing that letter grading is not and has not been the norm in human civilization. The entirety of the Scientific Revolution transpired in a world without grades, and yet somehow Galileo was still motivated to look through his telescope. And despite critics who insist that grades prepare students for the harsh realities of the real world, thats bullshit too: Reviews in nearly every field and line of work that I am aware ofincluding in the field of educationare narrative, conversational, and predicated on dialogue rather than abject quantification.

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This is not to be pie-in-the-sky or to pretend that moving beyond traditional grading will be a smooth transition. It is an open question as to how college admissions procedures could be modified to accommodate a world without GPAs, but I have plenty of faith that they can. Skeptics of ungrading made versions of the same argument when some elite colleges and universities stopped requiring standardized testing, and despite conservative panic about declining standards, institutions that have taken up this practice have enjoyed an increase in diversity with no appreciable decline in the academic success of their student bodies. (My own institution was one of the earliest to go test-optional in the 1980s, and a decadeslong study found no difference in academic performance or graduation rates between students who did and did not submit test scores). There have been and still are kinks to work out with test-optional admissions practices, but they clearly demonstrate that we can beneficially transform the criteria we use to admit students without burning the entire system to the ground.

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While I appreciate the pragmatic objection that GPAs are deeply entrenched in both our educational system and the college admissions process and that this makes change difficult, I would counter by noting that a system that is demotivating, ineffective, and racist is not pragmatic either. This is not a question of if it aint broke, dont fix it. Traditional grading is very much broken, and we must figure out an alternative. Institutions do not have to explode grades tomorrow or find a one-size-fits-all solution that can be put into place immediately: They can simply start by giving their teachers and professors permission to try new grading schemes. I am fortunate to work at a college that accords faculty the freedom to experiment with alternate approaches to assessment, but not everyone is so lucky. The first step in a grading culture change must begin with a clear message to educators that it is OK to try new things.

At the very heart of the enlightenment ethos in the spirit of which Americas education system was founded is the idea that we are obligedregardless of our preconceived notions, gods, or cherished idealsto change our minds in response to new evidence. And the evidence is plain as day: We can do better than traditional letter grading. In a new landscape where diversity is under assault, we are morally obligated to do so.
In the New York urban-exploring scene back a decade ago, the Williamsburg Bridge was the Holy Grail. For photographers and graffiti artists who lurked beyond the Keep Out signs, in abandoned buildings and dusty subway tunnels, climbing to the summit of that bridge was like a pilgrimage. As long as you were up there, you were the king or queen of the city.

One photographer I know made a tiny snowman at the top. Another proposed to his girlfriend up there, and they climbed down together fiances. When I eventually made my trip to the top, I was surprised by the serene silence several hundred feet in the air above the buzzing city.

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But since then, the Williamsburg Bridge has taken on an entirely new reputation. To some now in that scene, its nicknamed Death Bridge. Thats because of subway surfing.

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More and more risk-taking young people are dying in New York in the newish trend in which they climb atop moving subway cars and often take videos. Just on Thursday night, a 14-year-old boy died attempting a surf on a train in Queens; a week earlier, another 14-year-old died outside a train in Brooklyn.

The Williamsburg Bridge has been especially deadly. A typical case was 15-year-old Zackery Noel Nazarios death earlier this year. As a Manhattan-bound J train crossed the bridge, Nazario exited a subway car and climbed up to the top. He presumably had turned to help his girlfriend climb up when his head struck something that knocked him onto the tracks. His girlfriend narrowly escaped injury. Another 15-year-old, KaVon Wooden, also died surfing on the Williamsburg Bridge; an unidentified 32-year-old man was killed there when he, too, lost his footing.

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The Metropolitan Transportation Authority says subway surfing incidents increased by 350 percent to 928 incidents in 2022, up from 206 in 2021. So far this year, the MTA has tracked an average of two people subway surfing every day on its subway system, though its likely the actual number is much higher. And the agency says it knows whats to blame: Viral videos of the stunt are popular on apps like TikTok and Instagram. Several videos show kids rushing onto a train as it pulls into the station, either grabbing onto the back of the train car or climbing up to the top as the trains fly down the tracks at 20 to 55 miles per hour.

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New York Mayor Eric Adams has suggested that quickly removing subway surfing content from social media could have prevented deaths like Nazarios. Some of these sites, theyre more addictive than drugs. People cant get off them. And you start duplicating this behavior, he said. I think the national government must come in and say, What is the corporate responsibility of social media?  Or as MTA chairman Janno Lieber put it, If they were running videos of people playing Russian roulette with live bullets, they would understand the consequences, and this is the equivalent for kids.

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I looked back to my own Williamsburg Bridge photos, and it wasnt hard for me to understand why these kids keep doing it. When I talked to a few, they told me they know why deaths tend to keep happening on the bridge. Theyve watched it happen in real time. And it has modified their behavior, if not convinced all of them to stop.

An 18-year-old known as K Dot told me he, too, was drawn to surf the bridge. Man, it was like the best view ever. It was really serene and beautiful. Other than dodging beams and stuff, its, like, a really picturesque moment, he told me, recalling the first time he train surfed. Personally, I stopped surfing the Williamsburg Bridge because I knew that shit was going to take somebody out one of these days. First it was some kid who hit his head. This guy was literally dodging beams, and he hit his head. He didnt die, he just got stitches on his forehead. And then, as we all know, KaVon died. After that, I was like, This bridge is Death Bridge. Literally, people are dying left and right on this bridge.

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Related from Slate Heather Schwedel Why So Many People Have Decided a Purple McDonalds Monster Is Killing Them With a Milkshake Read More

He was first exposed to train surfing through Instagram. In 2020, when he was 15, he watched a few video clips shot from the top of a subway car and added himself to a train surfing group. When they scheduled a time to meet up, he dressed in all black and met them near the bridge. We went to Williamsburg Bridge, and everybody got up top. But I was kind of hesitant, so I only sat down, he said.

The moment he decided never to surf again came abruptly. On his way home from work one night, he approached the DelanceyEssex platform to ride over the Williamsburg Bridgefrom the inside of the trainto go back home from work. And what do I see: The train conductor bugging out over the loud speaker. Hes yelling, NYPD to the back of the train! NYPD to the back of the train!  He took out his camera as he noticed familiar faces on the platform, other train-surfers he recognized from the scene. Then he saw his friend lying unconscious on the train tracks. I saw his face bloodied up. And that really broke me. I thought he was about to die. After that I was like, Nah, never,  he said.

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Maddox, a 15-year-old, also told me he quit train surfing because of how many people were getting hurt. He recalled being angry at a video circulating within the community of the aftermath of Nazarios death. They were like Welcome to New York, where you see a dead n-word on the track,  he said. If it was me in that situation, and I was just lying there, I wouldnt want anyone to make fun of me while Im split in half.

Maddox became enchanted by train surfing after he saw videos on TikTok. When he and a friend were riding the train, they egged each other on and climbed to the top. It became an addiction quickly. But after seeing other kids get hurt online, and after some of his own friends hit their heads, he lost interest. I thought I could be next. Its like testing your luck doing this stuff. It feels different seeing someone you know on the news. It feels crazy, he said.

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This is the same story with most subway surfers. Another teenager, who goes by Floxks, hasnt given up subway surfing yet, and he regularly posts videos. He first started just back-surfing, or holding onto the train as it roared down the tracks. Up until the last moment, I was second-guessingshould I, should I not, he recalled. It was such a cool-ass experience. I was just happy as fuck. He rode the train underground, only sticking his head out to the side to see ahead for one moment before he, too, narrowly escaped being hit by a sign. I weaved that shit, like, at the last two, three seconds. I was like, Im not doing that shit again. But thats the only time I almost got hurt.

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Floxks blamed deaths on a lack of preparation and not paying attention, citing the teen who turned back to his girlfriend. His videos can look spontaneous, but he said each surf is meticulously thought out and planned. When I surfed on the 5 train, I wasnt just like, Fuck it, Im going to go on top. Hell no. I checked that entire tunnel. I rode back and forth to make sure there were no metal beams hanging that could hit me head, he said. This is the type of stuff youre supposed to do. Youre supposed to check the area.

I asked him if he thought his videos were helping contribute to more kids trying to surf, and if a crackdown on the videos was warranted. Im not going to lie. I see what theyre doing, and its for the better. At first, when I started doing train surfing, I was like, This is cool. Then I introduced my friend. But now, looking back, people should never have been posting all this shit, he told me. When I first started, I dont know how many other people did it. I was thinking I was the only person, because I didnt see other people train-surf until mid-2021. And now its like everybody doing it, everybody is making it hot, and now everybody is hating on train surfing. Its like, Damn, I was just trying to have fun. 

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K Dot and Maddox also agreed. The censorship is fair because people are dying, K Dot said. Kids will still get the idea, whether through Instagram or not, but itd stop some, Maddox said. Though they both think back to their experiences surfing as fun, both said they didnt want to inspire more kids to try it.

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When Maddox explained how he got into exploring and train surfing, he cited a video that sounded familiar to me. Watching 2E with my mom as he takes photos in Domino Sugar factory, I was like, Imma do it,  he said, referring to the legendary urban explorer and photographer. I had a moment of shock. I was with 2E at Domino! I said. Thats the video that inspired me for this! Thank you, he said. We chatted for a bit about other videos Ive shot in the subway tunnels, documenting graffiti artists making massive pieces in abandoned subway stations.

After the call, I felt uneasy. I never subway surfed, but the videos that I shot exploring off-limits New York are still out there. Maddox said hes holding on to hours of footage from the tops of subway cars, no longer willing to glorify it. He is smarter than I was.
This is part of Two Bad, a series exploring Americans lackluster enthusiasm for the 2024 election and the problem of the third-party candidate.

A recent CNN poll pretty aptly describes the current state of play of the 2024 presidential cycle: Presumed Democratic nominee and current President Joe Biden is seen favorably by just 32 percent of Americans, while 56 percent view him unfavorably. Presumed Republican nominee and former President Donald Trump is viewed favorably by 33 percent of Americans, and unfavorably by 59 percent.

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Let that sink in. These are the favorites for the presidential nominees of the two major parties. Have we everin this modern, political, poll-tested eraseen two favorites be so thoroughly loathed this early in the process? Its so blegh that Biden world has resorted to bragging about its forecasted performance with voters who somewhat disapprove of the president, according to NBC News.

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That profound disappointment with the presumptive options has driven some outsize attention to fringe entrants in the 2024 race. How else to explain the smattering of polls that pegged studiously unserious candidate Robert F. Kennedy Jr. with 20 percent of the Democratic primary vote before hed even begun campaigning? Or the cavalcade of Silicon Valley megadonors and Hollywood celebrities ready to open their wallets and brandish their endorsement for this 70-year-old partial-pushup enthusiast?

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And yet: Despite the obvious and excessive fringe-candidate energy of this election cycle, there are stunningly few third-party candidates. Never have Americans been so dissatisfied with the options on offer from the two major parties, and rarely, at least in the past three decades, has a third-party candidate seemed less viable.

There are a handful of explanations. First, many of the wingnuts, whom one might expect to run on an alternative ticket, have signed up to run within the confines of the major party primaries. RFK Jr., whose platform and policiespredilections might be a more appropriate word herewould alienate him from even the strangest of third-party ballot lines, has decided to run as a regular old Democrat.

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Same for Marianne Williamson, who somehow has a much more modest woo-woo quotient than RFK, along with a handful of legitimate left-wing policies that would, in any other race, be championed by a left-wing third-party candidate hoping to keep the Democrat from bending too far to the right in the march to the general election.

Explaining this on the Republican side is more difficult, because the fringe candidates are kind of indistinguishable from the mainstream ones. Larry Elder, a former conservative talk-radio host who got mythically bludgeoned in his attempt to unseat California Gov. Gavin Newsom, would probably qualify as fringe in this moment. Same for Perry Johnson, the quality guru who failed to qualify for the ballot in his attempt to become Michigans governor in 2022. Mike Rogers, another conservative radio personality, and Francis Suarez, a crypto maximalist who is under FBI investigation, also certainly have third-party energy.

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I would be remiss to not mention that Dr. Cornel West, the philosopher, activist, and legend of the left, is actually running for president as a third-party candidate, previously on the Peoples Party ticket, now on the Green Party ticket. But he is one of very few who have declared themselves to be running outside the mainstream, and even his close ideological allies are rolling their eyes at his run.

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It is both a sign of strength of the two major parties and a sign of their weakness that this is the case. Despite the widespread dissatisfaction with both Democrats and Republicans, no third party has built anything resembling a foothold, a following, or an apparatus in years. In part this is because elections have gotten so expensive in the no-campaign-finance-rules era that only the big-timers can play, especially at the national level.

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But the two main political parties also know, in some sense, what theyre doing, and the third parties do not. The Libertarian Party, which has been, for a shockingly long time, the actual closest thing to a viable third party in this country, is in disrepair, as libertarianism has become functionally irredeemable in recent years, especially after the COVID crisis. The Green Partys 2020 presidential candidate, Howie Hawkins, won 0.2 percent of the nationwide vote; its 2016 candidate, Jill Stein, who is an effective politician only in the imaginations of Hillary Clintonheads who blame her for Clintons loss, is now the campaign manager for 2024 candidate West. The political organization No Labels, which is flirting with putting a pro-business moderate independent on the ballot line it somehow has in certain states, hasnt yet had the temerity to run a candidate, and it mostly functions as a D.C. punchlinethough Sen. Joe Manchin, embattled and unsettled in his current race, would surely like to believe otherwise.

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Still, the lack of third-party candidates is also a sign of major party weakness. In both Democratic and Republican primaries, insurgent campaigns have proven how easy it can be to outfox the sclerotic establishment and commandeer the party structure, and then use those successes to push the party in one direction or another. Bernie Sanders proved this twice in his failed presidential campaigns in 2016 and 2020, fundamentally shifting Democratic politics by pushing the party to the left and animating an entire generation of young and politically engaged voters. (The resuscitation of the Democratic Socialists of America was an effect of this, and the DSA has become a viable political entity, especially in local politics, though it, too, runs the bulk of its candidates as Democrats.)

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Donald Trump proved this as well, first by running for president in 2000 on the Reform Party ticket without making any impact, and then by running in the Republican primary in 2016 and winning it and becoming president, forever altering the course of American politics.

At this point, its inarguable that a much greater influence can be had by running within the two-party system than against it. Compare what Sanders and Trump have done to another failed 2000 bid, Ralph Naders, where he ran outside the party, moved the Democratic Party basically not at all in his direction, won 2.75 percent of the vote, and became a national villain and punchline for two decades.

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As it stands, probably not a single one of the fringey 2024 primary candidates mentioned above and running as a Democrat or Republican will see their name on next Novembers punch card. Its possible that, after losing primaries resoundingly to Biden and Trump, one or two of them will relocate to a third-party home. And because we are desperate for some political characters who are stranger and more interesting than the two guys who have in some manner occupied the White House uninterrupted since 2009, there may even be some sustained media attention on the third-party campaigns.

But it wont matter. Because even though the 2024 race is almost sure to be a rerun, the third-party remedy has proven not to be a real one.
This is part of Opinionpalooza, Slates coverage of the major decisions from the Supreme Court this June. Were working to change the way the media covers the Supreme Court. Sign up for the pop-up newsletter to receive our latest updates, and support our work when you join Slate Plus.

Last week, Judge Carlton Reeves of the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of Mississippi dismissed charges against Jessie Bullock for possessing a firearm as a convicted felon. Reeves determined that, under the Supreme Courts recent precedent in New York State Rifle & Pistol Association v. Bruen, the statute forbidding felons from owning firearms was unconstitutionalat least as it applied to Bullock. The decision marked a win for gun rights groups and opponents of mass incarceration alike. Perhaps as important, it exposed the folly of originalism as a judicial philosophy just as the Supreme Court was planning to hear a new case clarifying its Second Amendment jurisprudence and the actual extent of Bruen.

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As a matter of constitutional doctrine, this case represents a shiftReeves is the first judge to throw out such charges using Bruen. And as his thorough opinion makes clear, dozens of others have been asked to do so. Reeves became the first by faithfully applying the Supreme Courts own test to the gun law in question and the evidence presented. Since the Supreme Court has demanded that the government back up firearms regulations that reach the core of the Second Amendment with extensive historical examples, Reeves asked for just that. The prosecutors failed to deliver any examples, opting instead to argue that different language from prior cases should control this outcome. Its usually a bad idea not to give a judge what they ask for. But its also quite possible that the government simply couldnt deliverthere may not be evidence of a widespread practice of disarming felons in the founding and Reconstruction eras. None of the other post-Bruen cases Reeves could find included more than a handful of examplesnot enough to satisfy the reasoning of Bruen. Faithfully applying the law meant that Bullock must walk free.

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Reeves all but dared the Department of Justice to appeal his ruling. Given its track record during the Biden administration, it likely will. Also last week, the Supreme Court agreed to hear a similar case, which may serve as a preview of how it might consider Bullocks differentbut relatedsituation. The defendant in that case, Zackey Rahimi, is subject to a protective order his girlfriend filed against him after he allegedly assaulted her, firing a gun to intimidate a bystander during the assault. The U.S. Court of Appeals for the 5th Circuitwhich would hear any appeal of Bullocks caseruled in favor of Rahimi when he cited Bruen to argue that the law criminalizing his possession of firearms for people subject to such protective orders was unconstitutional. The DOJs chief argument is that there is a long-standing tradition that the government has the authority to disarm dangerous persons. The 5th Circuit wasnt convinced by the historical evidence the DOJ mustered. It remains to be seen whether the Supreme Court believes that any limiting principle at all should apply to the Second Amendment. With this court, if theres any principle that could persuade the justices to back away from conceiving of the Constitution as a suicide pact, its tragically going to be one that contributes to the mass incarceration of Black and brown people.

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Related from Slate Richard L. Hasen Theres a Time Bomb in Progressives Big Supreme Court Voting Case Win Read More

Reeves insight into the Supreme Courts methods and limitations gives us a preview of how these appeals may play out. In Bruen, the state and third parties supporting its law presented 700 years of historical examples to back up the sort of firearms regulations New York enforced. It wasnt enough. In Bruen, originalism lay exposed for its outcome-oriented approach. It became what no less preeminent an originalist than Justice Antonin Scalia described when discussing a different but related method of judicial analysisspecifically, discussions of legislative historya vehicle to justify policy preferences by giving arbitrary weight to different bits of history.

The Supreme Court has since used originalism to supercharge the rights guaranteed by the Second Amendment. In breathing new life into the Second Amendment, Reeves notes, the Court has unintentionally revealed how it has suffocated other fundamental Constitutional rights. Americans are waiting for Heller and Bruens reasoning to reach the rest of the Constitution. The current YOLO court has arbitrarily applied narrow and expansive interpretations to different terms to shrink most peoples rights and expand the governments power to violate them. Anything that carries the scent of progressive policy is ripe for the courts unelected elite lawyers to gut.

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Thursdays college admissions case served as a prime example of the courts anti-democracy in action. In Students for Fair Admissions, the court ruled that the 14th Amendment served as a barrier to affirmative action in university admissions. The court embraced the doctrine of colorblind constitutionalism to reach this decision, relying on the notion that in order to create an equitable society, the law needs to stop making any distinctions based on race. Thats not exactly a new trick for the Supreme Court, which has made plenty of bad law by ignoring the standard of review that Congress set out for itself in the 14th Amendment. Again, to get there, the court cherry-picked its historical examples and legislative history, the same trick pulled in Bruen and other cases. Ive written before on some of the other, abolitionist examples available to help us understand the Reconstruction Amendments. Those amendments were the product of a Congress that trusted neither the president nor the courts to uphold the abolitionist project and reserved for itself the power to interpret those bits of the Constitution. The Supreme Court, nearly from the first time it approached the Reconstruction Amendments, has fought hard to reclaim that power, whether it has any right to it or not. In Thursdays cases, it merely continued that tradition, ignoring any history that stands in the way of its preferred outcomes.

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Originalism is a house of cards. Its own methods can provide no justification for its supremacyor even useas a method of constitutional interpretation. Reeves points out that our Constitution is often at its best when We the People reject older interpretations. Each generation necessarily brings its own methods, values, and interpretations to the Constitution, making change inevitable.

There are ways we can push back. Congress has the authority to limit and regulate the Supreme Courts power of appellate review. Congress could also simply expand the court and let a friendly president appoint new justices who arent beholden to right-wing interests. Maybe just the threat of expansion or regulation would persuade some justices to reconsider their methods. Maybe that last ones a bit too optimistic. But any of those requires a Congress willing to act, and we wont get that without pressure from We the People. As Reeves concluded, the only real question is how long well let this go on.
This is part of Two Bad, a series exploring Americans lackluster enthusiasm for the 2024 election and the problem of the third-party candidate.

The numbers tell a dismal story for the American electorate: A lot of Americans are dissatisfied with Joe Biden. An April AP-NORC poll found that about half of Democrats, at the time, didnt want him to run again.

Donald Trump is faring better among his partys voters, but not too significantly. And lets not forget, hes also facing some pretty substantial legal issues.

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You might think, facing the exhausting prospect of a rehashed election, Americans would embrace an upstart challenger. And yet, with the possible exception of Ron DeSantis poll-lagging bid to beat Trump, all other candidates seem to be not very serious contenders. Robert F. Kennedy Jr. is grabbing headlines with his dangerous and bizarre conspiracy theories and sad shirtless bench presses. Marianne Williamson is doing kooky things like comparing her bullying of campaign staffers with Abraham Lincoln commanding the Union troops. Larry Elder and Vivek Ramaswamy have captivated virtually zero attention. Everyone running against Biden and Trump in the primaries for the two major parties seems fringe. And there isnt even any real enthusiasm building around a third-party candidate.

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But it hasnt always been this way. There have been serious third-party contenders in U.S. historycandidates who, as outsiders, shaped whole elections and whole political landscapes. We arent just talking about Ralph Nader and Ross Perot. The history of third-party candidates breaking or trying to break the grip of the Republican-Democratic binary starts in the 19th century. Its worth revisiting some of those attempts to see what it took for those candidates to make a dent in the two-party firmament and howor ifit could happen again.

1892: James Weaver, Peoples Party (Populists)

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Who Was He?

Weaver began his political career as a Republican in Iowa, opposed, in the years just before the Civil War, to the spread of slavery. (This was a matter not of noble principle but of concern for the livelihood of white Midwestern farmers; he also promoted the white settlement of Native American land.) After the war, he failed to win public office and joined the nascent Greenback Party, which demanded a greater money supply, expanded business regulations, and espoused more progressive labor policies. With support from the Democrats, he was elected to Congress but gained virtually no traction as a Greenback candidate for president in 1880. Weaver pivoted again, helping form the Peoples Party, also known as the Populists. The new group picked up the pieces of the Greenback Party and the Farmers Alliance movement and took on the cause of small farmers, who were at the mercy of large creditors and utterly reliant on the railroads for access to the market. The Populists sought federal regulations of those railroads, as well as an expansion of the currency, a graduated income tax, and collective bargainingall in an effort to harness the frustrations of the working class when the conservative wings controlled both major parties platforms. Some from the Farmers Alliance originally thought they could work with the two extant parties but grew impatient when the Democrats rejected their platform.

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Why Did He Join the Race?

The natural leader of the Populist Party was Farmers Alliance leader Leonidas L. Polk, who presided over the meeting that created the party. But Polk died suddenly in June 1892, leaving Weaver, the groups second-most-prominent figure, as his natural successor. Weaver easily won the nomination. And although the Populists knew they were a long shot to win the race, they had reason to believe that a radical shake-up was possible: Weavers generation had seen the death of one major party (the Whigs) and the birth of another (the Republicans).

What Happened?

Weaver crossed the country in a national speaking tour in hopes of winning the support of farmers, but the partys inclusion of Black farmers blocked any chance of success in the South, which went for the Democrat Grover Cleveland, who ultimately beat Benjamin Harrison to win the presidency. Still, Weaver won 22 electoral votesall in the West and Midwestand more than 1 million popular votes.

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Who Did He Take Votes From?

Modern historians dont consider Weaver a spoiler candidate since, in the 19th century, party membership was more fluid; single-issue parties pulled from factions within both the major parties, and they created alliances with other groups to promote their platforms. But some do note that his campaign forced the two other parties to address the demands of the working class. In the next election, Republicans nominated a conservative candidate favored by the banks, doubling down on the opposition. The Democrats, however, acceded to their left flanks demands, putting forward the free-silver candidate William Jennings Bryan. In that race, Weaver would lend Populist support to Bryan, acknowledging the practical limitations of their situation and essentially killing off his party.

1896: William Jennings Bryan, Democratic Party and Populist Party

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Who Was He?

Bryan was the candidate for two significant political parties in the 1896 presidential election: the Democrats and the Populists. At 36, he was and remains the youngest-ever major-party candidate for president. Bryan had been elected to Nebraskas House of Representatives as a Democrat in 1893, and became the editor of the Omaha World-Herald a year later.

The Great Commoner, as he was known, was a man of many words: He earned his populist reputation as a renowned orator who relied on charm and delivery that often swayed voters more than his actual policies did. Bryan promised to legislate on behalf of farmers interests in the South and West, and as he backed their priorities, he drew on his strong religiosity to win their approval and trust.

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Why Did He Join the Race?

Bryans commitment to diversifying the gold standard gave him his edge. After what he and many Democrats saw as a catastrophic Grover Cleveland term that yielded mass deflation in agricultural strongholds, the Democratic convention to nominate a candidate for the 1896 election became a stage to debate and solidify the partys position on the money question. Bryan was the man with the answer: He delivered his pro-silver Cross of Gold speech at the convention, enchanting the gatherings voters with a promise of prosperity. That speechwrought with religiosity and a populist spirit that, in Bryans interpretation, resisted immigration (especially from China) and disregarded Black Americanswon him the Democratic nomination over Cleveland, the incumbent.

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But in addition to that mainstay nomination, Bryan was also ticketed with a different vice presidential candidate for the Populist Party, which had formulated from a coalition of agitated farmers as a reaction to the rapid industrialization, mechanization, and financialization of the Gilded Age. By 1890, the party had won control of Kansas state Legislature, and the same states William Peffer became the Populists first senator. Then, in 1892, Weaver won 1 million votes in his third-party campaign for president. But this rise was accompanied by Southern Democrats attacks on the Populists. Bryans Democratic and reformist origins were divisive, as he represented a subsect of Populists that wanted to fuse with the Democrats rather than continue as a separate party. His 1896 race would prove both the partys apex and its downfall.

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What Happened?

Republican William McKinley beat Bryan in a landslide: 271 to 176 in the Electoral College, and by almost 1 million more ballots in the popular vote. McKinleys backing by Northeast elites, wealthy farmers, and skilled workers is credited with winning him the election. The Great Commoners loss led to the Populist Partys decline of power and prominence. His almost singularly white rural appeal rendered him unable to win any electoral voteheavy Northeast states. Winning Texas with 15 was his crowning achievement; in comparison, McKinley won New York, Pennsylvania, and Illinoisall with between 24 and 36 allocated votes. Bryan ran for president in two subsequent elections as the Democratic Partys nominee, losing each time, and eventually served two years as Woodrow Wilsons secretary of state. The Populist Party effectively split after Bryans 1896 loss into a socialist faction under Eugene V. Debs and a Democratic coalition, but its ethos and rhetoric had a long influence on presidential politics.

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Who Did He Take Votes From?

Because he represented both the Democratic and Populist parties (despite having different vice presidential candidates in each), his votes collapsed into his Democratic total. But his Populist campaign won him 27 of his 176 Electoral College votes, a number of them in the South and Great Plains.

1912: Eugene V. Debs, American Socialist Party

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Who Was He?

A five-time presidential candidate, Debs was a founding member of the International Workers of the World, a creator of countless unions, and a fierce labor activist whose work brought socialism to mainstream U.S. politics at the turn of the century. Born in 1855 in Terre Haute, Indiana, Debs dropped out of school at 14 and worked as a locomotive paint scraper, a fireman, an activist, and a labor organizer before entering politics. He was elected Terre Hautes city clerk in 1879 before gaining a seat in the Indiana General Assembly as a Democrat in 1885. As the century came to a close, industry boomed and wealth became concentrated in the hands of very few men. Debs worked on railroads that produced and supplied foundations for much of the Gilded Age wealth, and he led the American Railway Union. He gained further notoriety after offering solidarity to workers during the 1894 Pullman Strike, which eventually led to his being jailed on conspiracy charges. While in jail, it is said, Debs underwent his evolution from industrial cooperationist to revolutionary socialist and began formulating a new Social Democratic Party. He ran for president independently in 1900, and with the Socialist Party of America in 1904 and 1908. In 1912, though, he received a significant amount of votes and influenced the outcome of an election for the first time.

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Why Did He Join the Race?

Despite running several times before, Debs brought a unique and calculated working-class appeal to a field of reformists. The goal of his campaignwhich brought him on speaking tours across the countrywas to educate the nations workers about socialism, which he had extensively studied while in jail, and to translate Marxist ideas to the American experience. Gene, as his fans called him, offered a hopeful, anti-capitalist perspective that struck a chord with voters working in seemingly impossible, unchanging conditions.

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What Happened?

Debs mission earned him almost 1 million popular votes, 6 percent of the popular total, but no Electoral College votes. He continued his activism and anti-capitalist pursuits even after his loss and was incarcerated for his outright criticism of the First World War and the draft. Debs ran his final presidential campaign from prison, and won nearly 1 million votes once more.

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Who Did He Take Votes From?

Debs working-class voter base would have likely voted Democratic or not voted at all.

1912: Theodore Roosevelt, Progressive Party

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Who Was He?

Born in New York City to a wealthy family, Teddy Roosevelt was first elected as a Republican to the New York Assembly in 1882. By the turn of the 20th century, he saw a rapid rise in political prominence. In five years, he rose to be assistant secretary of the Navy under President William McKinley, became a war hero with his Rough Riders in Cuba, was elected governor of New York, and got tapped to be McKinleys vice president for his reelection campaign. After McKinley was assassinated in 1901, Roosevelt rose to the presidency to finish his predecessors term, and won a full term in 1904. As president, TR signed into law initiation bills for the Panama Canal and canal zones construction, created the National Park System (at the expense of Indigenous peoples), and imposed unprecedented regulations on big business.

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Roosevelt is remembered for his Western expansionist mystique, his trust busting, and his growth of presidential power. For his time, he represented a progressive Republicanism that challenged his more conservative successor, President William Howard Taft, at the 1912 GOP convention. After Taft narrowly won the nomination, though, Roosevelt split with the Republican Party.

Why Did He Join the Race?

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Roosevelt mounted his own convention under the new Progressive Party. Before leaving office in 1909, Roosevelt essentially chose Taft (who had been governor of the Philippines and secretary of war during his administration) to succeed him. Taft initially promised to continue Rooseveltian conservation, regulation, and expansion practices, but ultimately legislated further to the right, short of TRs standards. Thus, after the contentious RNC, Roosevelt assembled the dissenting GOP members into his own faction.

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What Happened?

Taft decided to not actively campaign, and Roosevelt garnered support with an anti-monopoly message he called New Nationalism. The Democratic nominee, Woodrow Wilson, countered Roosevelt with the idea of New Freedom, centering his message on tariff reductions, currency reforms, and direct senator elections. With Taft and Roosevelt dividing their portion of the electorate, Wilson won the Electoral College with a landslide 435 votes. Roosevelt came in second, with only 88, though he was just 2 million votes behind Wilson in the popular tally. Taft garnered a mere 8 electoral votes but was less than 1 million votes behind Roosevelt.

For Roosevelt, the loss set off a twilight in which he advocated for international U.S. military engagement and spoke in absolute favor of U.S. entry into World War I. The former assistant Navy secretary abhorred Wilsons decision to remain neutral for some time. All four of Roosevelts sons fought in the war after the U.S. entered combat. He died shortly after the conflict, in 1919.

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Who Did He Pull More Votes From?

Roosevelts ex-Republican affiliation and popularity from his presidency drew the partys entire progressive faction away from Tafts voting base. His choice to run ensured that the incumbent would not be reelected.

1924: Robert M. La Follete, Progressive Party

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Who Was He?

La Follette, more lovingly referred to as Fighting Bob, was a prominent lawyer and lifelong politician from Wisconsin. Starting his career as a Republican, La Follette was in the U.S. House for six years, governor of his state for five, and a U.S. senator for 19 years until his death. Throughout his career, he worked against corporate control and political corruption, instituting direct elections in Wisconsin and earning his nickname for his oratory fire. He was devoted to working on in-state reforms with in-state experts, regulating the railroad industry while also growing business, funding for public education, and protecting the rights of workers and farmers, a philosophy of priorities that has been remembered as the Wisconsin Idea.

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Why Did He Join the Race?

After La Follette supported Woodrow Wilsons 1912 campaign, thereby inciting a feud with fellow progressive Republican Teddy Roosevelt, his political allegiances shifted: He was uninvolved with creating Roosevelts aforementioned Progressive Party. La Follette opposed Wilsons military involvement in the Great War, believing that the investment would harm the American people and stifle his attempts at domestic reform. In 1922 La Follette was elected to serve another term in the Senate in a larger progressive congressional wave from Western states. La Follette turned this new bloc in Congress into an opposition group, and later into a political party for which he ran for president. His goal, he said, was to deconstruct private monopolies that had amassed too much power in a country that ought to be run by the people. This new, non-Roosevelt Progressive Party would represent the countrys laborers and farmers, not big business.

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What Happened?

La Follette was up against the incumbent from his old party, Calvin Coolidge, and little-known conservative Democratic Sen. John W. Davis from West Virginia. Davis leanings drove some progressive Democrats to vote for La Follette, and ultimately, La Follette won one state in the Electoral College: his home state of Wisconsin. But he did come in second in many other states, outperforming Davis in those. Overall, though, La Follette totaled almost 5 million votes, about half of Davis tally and less than a third of Coolidges. Still, for a third-party candidate, winning 16.6 percent of the popular vote was monumental.

Which Candidate Did He Pull More Votes From?

La Follette, whose Progressive Party was allied with the Socialist and Farmer-Labor parties, took a large share of votes from each major political party. His ideals appealed to many on the left, but his vice presidential candidate was a former progressive Democrat, and he attracted others from that side of the aisle for whom Davis was too extreme.

1948: Strom Thurmond, Dixiecrat Party

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Who Was He?

Strom Thurmond served in the Senate for 47 years, 5 months, and 8 days. Before that, he was the governor of South Carolina, was a city and county attorney, and fought in World War II. Through it all, he was a terrible racist, though he denied it, saying he opposed only excessive federal powers. Often touting his familial roots in the Confederacy and nostalgia for segregation-era policies, Thurmond in 1956 signed the Southern Manifesto against desegregation and holds the record for longest individual speech in the Senate: a 24-hour, 18-minute invective against the 1957 Civil Rights Act. Thurmonds disdain for integration and the pursuit of civil rights, he claimed, came from his intense belief in states rights, which became the foundation upon which he built his 1948 Dixiecrat presidential campaign.

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Why Did He Join the Race?

The 1948 Democratic National Convention proved to be a turning point for the character of the party. The convention sought to centralize civil rights in the partys mission, but the Southern Democrats felt that this was an aberrationnot just in their history of racism but also, they claimed, in expanding federal control to afford Black people any sort of equality with whites. With then-Gov. Thurmond as its leader, the group broke off and created the Dixiecrat Party for the upcoming election. Its members held their only convention in Birmingham, Alabama, in July and officially elected Thurmond as their standard-bearer. The Dixiecrats wanted to earn 127 electoral votes, making it impossible for either of the major parties to win the election, in which case the decision would belong to the House of Representatives. If the civil rights agendathe most contentious issue of the electionwas debated in the House, the Dixiecrats would have a chance at winning, they thought.

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What Happened?

Thurmond did not earn 127 electoral votes. He won only 39, from four states in the Deep South, and just 2.4 percent of the popular vote. Democratic incumbent Harry Truman (who had assumed the presidency after FDRs death) won with 303 electoral votes and a plurality of the popular vote (49.1 percent). Thurmond did not run for president again, but he continued his conservative states rights campaign in the GOP until he died in 2003, at age 100, just after leaving the Senate as its oldest-ever member.

Who Did He Take Votes From?

Thurmond voters came mostly from Trumans base, but the sitting president triumphed by making up for it with the help of another third-party campaign: Many of Progressive Henry Wallaces early supporters unexpectedly defected to voting for the presidents reelection, causing one of the biggest presidential upsets in history.

1968: George Wallace, American Independent Party

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Who Was He?

Wallace is remembered for his prolific anticivil rights campaign out of Alabama, saying proudly, in 1962, two years before the passage of the Civil Rights Act, Segregation now, segregation tomorrow, segregation forever. He was a Democrat who fought in World War II, attended law school, and served as the assistant states attorney before being elected to the state Legislature in 1946. In 62, he ran for governor for the first time and won his first of four nonconsecutive terms. (The state constitution forbade consecutive ones.) Wallaces politics were rooted in a deeply racist breed of populism that claimed to help the poor but focused on enforcing racial divisions and disparities in income, welfare, and access to education.

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Why Did He Join the Race?

The late 1960s marked an era of deindustrialization, divestment, and white flight from urban centers, resulting in a series of racialized riots. Many white Democrats, even some who viewed themselves as moderate or liberal on race issues, were entranced by Wallaces outspokenness and law and order platform. In 68, the Wallace campaign raised $9 million, and, like Thurmond before him, aimed to draw enough votes from Republican Richard Nixon and Democrat Hubert Humphrey that the election would move to the House. Wallace positioned himself in opposition to almost everything and everyone except the white working-class man: On the stump, he inveighed against hippies, the Supreme Court, and big government.

What Happened?

Wallace won an astounding 13.5 percent of the popular vote, five states in the SouthGeorgia, Mississippi, Alabama, Louisiana, and Arkansasand 46 electoral votes. Nixon narrowly won the popular vote, but he overwhelmingly won the Electoral College with 301 votes; Humphrey netted 191. Wallace attempted to win the presidential nomination on the Democratic ticket in 1972 and 1976, and never succeeded, but he won some states in his primaries along the way. After the 1968 race, he served two more terms as Alabamas governor and continued his states rights tirades, failing to significantly deliver on improved conditions for even the small subset of white working people he claimed to support.

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Who Did He Take More Votes From?

Wallaces 10 million votes came from voters on both sides; they were significant, and almost substantial enough to achieve his goal of sending the election to the House of Representatives. Had he made further gains on Nixon in either North Carolina or Tennessee and had Humphrey won New Jersey or Ohio, the election would likely have been sent to the legislature.

1980: John Anderson, Independent

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Who Was He?

A 10-term congressman from Illinois, Anderson began his career as a standard conservative, opposed to Medicare and funding for public education. He thrice sponsored constitutional amendments that would have made the U.S. an officially Christian nation. But starting in the late 60s, he shifted to the Republican Partys left: He supported civil rights bills and firearm regulations and opposed the Vietnam War. His supporters saw him as honest and principled, his detractors as pompous and out of touch.

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Why Did He Join the Race?

Like many third-party candidates, Anderson considered himself a reformer, frustrated by the failures of the system. He complained about special interest groups, partisan rancor, campaign finance issues, and politicians who prioritized electoral politics over the countrys actual needs. Convinced that conservative Democrats and more progressive Republicans would peel off to vote for him, he thought he stood a solid chance of winning over enough of a fractured electorate to cut through.

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What Happened?

First, he ran as a Republican. He was surprisingly popular among newspaper columnists, liberal Hollywood stars, and college students, mainly because he came off as more of a principled scholar than a polished politician, citing statistics and stubbornly sticking to his unpopular stances as he demanded that his party act more charitably and honorably. (This included asking farmers to support a grain embargo after the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan.) But even though the race was crowded with right-wing conservatives, Anderson turned off many voters with his grandiloquence and ultimately failed to win over the conservative base. It didnt help that he supported federally funded abortions for poor women and a 50-cent-per-gallon gasoline tax to deal with the oil crisis. After he lost six primaries, he withdrew to run instead as an independent.

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At first, he was a real contender, polling as high as 26 percent in a three-way race with Jimmy Carter and Ronald Reagan. He debated Reagan on TV. But as the race went along, Anderson was faced with the reality of running without a major partys resources, and he slipped in the polls. His supporters largely defected to their second choices, and Anderson finished with less than 7 percent of the popular vote.

Who Did He Take Votes From?

Its widely believed that he pulled more from Carter, the incumbent, than Reagan.

1992: Ross Perot, Independent

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Who Was He?

A colorful character with an eventful life, Perot went from being a Navy officer to an IBM salesman before making his fortune as the founder of a data processing company, which he then sold to General Motors in 1984. Not content with simply being ultrarich, Perot turned himself into a folk hero by staging a famous attempt, in 1969, to deliver medicine and food to American POWs in Vietnam. A decade later, he attained greater fame after he financed a mission to rescue a couple of employees in Iran. (Authorities later questioned how much of a role Perot really played in the rescue.) With his short stature and comically folksy sayings, Perot charmed Americans who saw him as an anti-politician.

Why Did He Join the Race?

Setting aside the matter of his pathological need to succeed (he famously became an Eagle Scout only a year after joining the Boy Scouts when he was 12), Perot seems to have convinced himself that he could, as an outsider, cut through the bureaucratic and political nonsense of Washington.

What Happened?

Perot ran against incumbent George H.W. Bush and Bill Clinton on the nostalgic idea of bringing back the imagined Norman Rockwellesque simpler times, appealing to a good number of conservative voters who appreciated his hard line on immigration and drugs. Liberals liked him too, especially when it came to his moderate policies on abortion and gay rights. Voters across the spectrum admired his fixation on fiscal responsibility and commonsense aphorisms. As a candidate, Perot won nearly 20 million votes, or 19 percent overall. It was the strongest third-party showing since 1912, and many believe that his candidacy permanently changed how we discuss the federal deficit.

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Today, however, a fashionable question to debate about Perots legacy is just how much he paved the way for the election of Donald Trump in 2016. Like Trump, Perot was a populist. He was a billionaire who had never previously held political office when he ran. He promised to disrupt the system, took his message directly to the voters without relying on normal media outlets, touted economic nationalism, had a weakness for conspiracy theories, mocked his opponents with childish taunts, and relied on his wealth for his celebrity. In 2000 Trump even considered running with the Reform Partythe party that Perot founded and ran under, more feebly, in 1996.

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Who Did He Take Votes From?

The eternal debate over Perots 1992 run is whether Perot cost Bush the election. He directed most of his attacks on his Republican rival, causing some strategists to blame him for Bushs loss. But modern experts have noted that the polling from the time shows that Perots support was politically broad. Most analysts agreed: Clinton was going to win the election, no matter what.

2000: Pat Buchanan, Reform Party

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Who Was He?

A creature of Washington since birth, Buchanan made a name for himself in the Nixon administration and later the Reagan White House, as well as a columnist and as the host of CNNs Crossfire. From the start, he was strident when it came to his deeply conservative beliefs and staked his place as the father of the culture warsparticularly when it came to gay rights, abortion, diversity, and immigration. He first ran for president in 1992, challenging George H.W. Bush for the Republican nomination, angry that the president had allowed increases in taxes and adamantly opposed to U.S. military intervention overseas. His extremism translated to some surprise success in New Hampshire, rattling the party. He tried again in 1996, this time giving another scare to the eventual nominee, Sen. Bob Dole.

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Why Did He Join the Race?

To Buchanan, the Republicans were no longer conservative enough; they were too tolerant of the moderates in their midst, too similar to one another, and, like the Democrats, too entrenched in the establishment to truly address the countrys ills. Buchanan left the GOP in 1999, ready to take his paleoconservative, isolationist platform to the voters. The Reform Party, thanks to Perots campaign in 1996, gave him something to work with: more than $12 million in matching federal campaign funds and a guaranteed place on a number of states ballots. Roger Stone floated the idea of the Reform Party as Buchanans next political home, and Buchanan jumped at the idea.

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What Happened?

Buchanan faced a momentary threat from Trump, who called off his campaign before it launched, citing the Reform Partys extremism. Buchanans actual opponent, the transcendental meditation advocate John Hagelin, won over Perots more moderate followers and launched a flurry of lawsuits over claims of election fraud in the partys primary. Hagelin would soon break from the Reform Party to host a separate convention on the same date as his old pals. (Perot would later state his opposition to Buchanan as the nominee.) Ultimately, Buchanan shook off his partys internal turmoil and made a case for right-wing support, launching a series of racist and homophobic ads. (Buchanan had often been accused of antisemitism and was a little too closely connected to white supremacist activists for the broader electorate. He also had a baffling tendency to defend Nazi war criminals.) The candidate ran with his old isolationist and culture war causes and may have alienated some of his own supporters among the white nationalist right by nominating Ezola B. Foster, a conservative Black woman, as his running mate.

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He won less than half of 1 percent of the national vote. The Reform Party was kneecapped by its own internal divisions and the exodus of moderates disturbed by the partys numerous ties to white supremacists and other extremists. Buchanan would renege on his promise to stay in the Reform Party shortly after the election, returning to the GOP in 2004.

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In the long run, Buchanans style of isolationist and nativist conservatism would emerge, after some dormancy in mainstream politics, in Trump. In the short run, though, Buchanans campaign was most influential in its simple presence on the ballot.

Who Did He Take Votes From?

Though Buchanans deliberate voters were archconservatives, some frustrated Al Gore supporters speculated that a confusing design in the Palm Beach, Florida, ballotthe infamous butterfly ballotmay have caused some voters to accidentally cast votes for Buchanan instead of Gore. Buchanan overperformed in Palm Beach compared to the towns demographics, and may have cost Gore a win in the stateand, by extension, the election.

2000: Ralph Nader, Green Party

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Who Was He?

A lawyer and writer who came to national prominence in the 60s for an expose on the automotive industrys safety issues, Nader gained an enthusiastic following for his environmental, anti-nuclear, and consumer-protection activism. He founded several progressive watchdog groups and successfully helped campaign for a number of major federal protections for consumers, the environment, and political transparency. As a result, in the early 70s progressive groups began floating his name as a presidential candidate. Nader rejected these overtures in 1972 and 1980, stood in as a write-in candidate in 1992, and represented various state Green parties in 1996.

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Why Did He Join the Race?

Like other third-party candidates, Nader believed that Republicans and Democrats would not listen without a challenge. And like other third-party candidates, he saw little difference between the two major parties, which he believed were under the control of corporate interests. Just as Buchanan believed that Republicans werent conservative enough, Nader believed that Democrats werent nearly progressive enough.

What Happened?

Nader ran on a progressive platform: campaign finance reform, universal health care, affordable housing, free higher education, a living wage, marijuana legalization, criminal justice reform, labor-friendly policies, environmental protections, and higher taxes for corporations. Thousands flocked to see him in large rallies, and he became a hero of the leftthat is, until it became clear he was a threat to Gore who refused to back down. Throughout his candidacy, Nader insisted that he had no responsibility to hinder George W. Bushthat both Republicans and Democrats were bad options, and that it could even be helpful for Democrats to learn lessons from and be energized by a Gore failureand campaigned in key electoral states rather than sticking to more progressive-friendly ones, making it clear he didnt want to win just the 5 percent of the popular vote that would secure the Green Party federal funding for the next election. Nader went on to receive 2.9 million votes, falling short of the 5 percent goal. But he did win 97,488 votes in Floridaa state Gore lost by only 537 votes. Theres a good reason many Democrats still bitterly blame Nader for Gores loss. If Buchanan harmed Gores chances, Nader, many believe, dealt the fatal blow.
This is part of Two Bad, a series exploring Americans lackluster enthusiasm for the 2024 election and the problem of the third-party candidate.

Two parties are too few to represent the broad pluralism of an incredibly diverse nation. Both the Democratic Party and the Republican Party draw majority unfavorable responses from Americans, and have for a decade. More than a quarter of Americans view both parties unfavorably. Close to half of Americans call themselves Independents, and more than 60 percent of Americans want more parties. Young people, especially, are eager for more political choice.

Demand is high. So where are the third parties?

Heres the problem: Our system of single-winner elections puts tremendous pressure on politicians and voters to consolidate around two options. If there can be only one winner, any vote for a minor party can only be a protestbut in a close election, that protest becomes a spoiler. In 2000, for example, Green Party candidate Ralph Nader drew crucial votes from Al Gore. If we want more parties, we need better, fairer voting rulesnot more protest candidates.

The need for more parties has increased considerably over the last decade. In 2000, Nader could credibly argue that the Democrats and Republicans were too similar, even if they were drifting apart. Today, Democrats and Republicans have split into conflicting realities, threatening the foundation of electoral legitimacy on which our democracy depends.

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Over the past three decades, Democrats and Republicans have sorted into two distinct geographical and cultural coalitions, with little shared real estateeither physical or mental. In todays highly nationalized culture-war politics, the two parties maintain and energize their coalitions through the never-ending, fear-inducing fight for the soul of the nation. If you feel as though your country is being stolen from you, it might seem perfectly reasonable to storm the U.S. Capitol, as many did on Jan. 6, 2021. And its hard to maintain a democracy when two competing partisan teams see each other as threats to their fundamental values and way of life.

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How do we escape this doom loop of escalating binary partisan warfare? The way out is to change our voting rules so more parties can play a productivenot destructiverole in our politics. The two-party system persists not because Americans want to maintain it, but because our antiquated system of single-winner plurality elections holds it in placeand makes it easy for the two parties to crush upstart opposition.

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Simple plurality elections may have been the default choice 250 years ago, when it was the only mode of voting yet invented. But the world has changed considerably since then. Most advanced democracies use proportional representation to elect their legislatures, and allow multiple parties to form, and better represent the nation as a result.

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Such a change may feel like a moonshot, but it doesnt require a constitutional amendment. Congress could enact proportional multimember districts with ordinary legislation. American democracy is not staticweve made major changes in the past, and moments of crisis are also moments of imagination and transformation.

In countries with proportional multiparty systems, citizens are more engaged. They vote at higher rates. Partisans dont hate each other so much. Legislatures are less geriatric. Citizens are happier.

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And proportional multimember districts would make gerrymandering irrelevant. With single-member districts in a two-party system, line-drawers have tens of thousands of possible maps from which to draw the winningest one. But larger districts mean fewer lines. More parties mean less predictable voting. And multimember districts with proportionality mean that a party with 50.1 percent of the vote wins only half of the seats, instead of all (one) of them.

The good news is that the United States could easily move to proportional representation for the U.S. Congress. The elections clause of the Constitution (Article I, Section IV) gives Congress the power to decide how the House should be elected, a power it has used repeatedly. In 1967, Congress used it to require that states use single-member districts. This act, the Uniform Congressional District Act, was passed as a Civil Rights measure to prevent Southern states from using at-large bloc voting, a system that had historically disenfranchised Black voters.

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They didnt consider proportional representation back in 1967, as the two-party system was functioning reasonably well. After all, landmark Civil Rights legislation had just been passed, with overwhelming cross-partisan support. But in the 56 years since, the two parties have sorted into two geographically distinct coalitions, fighting over diverging visions of Americas future and rooted in disparate narratives of the past. Knifes-edge majorities keep total control of Washington always one election awaya dynamic that has empowered extremists on the far right, who appear eager to throw everything into chaos rather than maintain a rotten status quo.

Proportional representation paves the way for new, flexible coalitions to emerge that allow for politics to realign and move forward, breaking the doom loop of escalating partisan fighting.

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Of course, not all proportional systems are the same. Israel, for example, uses an extreme form of hyperproportional representation, with closed party lists and the entire country as one electoral district. Italy uses a strange mixed quasi-majoritarian system that is constantly changing.

Ireland, Germany, and Denmark offer better models. In particular, the Danish model of an open-list proportional system, with multimember districts, would be a good fit for the United States. In such a system, parties put forth a list of candidates in each district, and voters choose a party or a candidate within the partys list. Either way, the votes aggregate to the partys overall vote share within the district. All told, about 4 out of 5 democracies around the world use some form of proportional representation to elect at least one of their houses of Congress.

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Parties win seats in proportion to their share of the vote within the district. For example, if five parties each got 20 percent of the vote in a five-member district, each party would get one seat in the legislature. Each partys most popular candidate would thus be elected. Think of it as combining the primary and the general election into one. Pick your favorite candidate and your favorite party all at once.

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Ideally, districts would be in the electoral sweet spot between five and seven memberslarge enough to ensure some diversity of representation, but not so large as to create excessive fragmentation. In a six-party system, right in that sweet spot, Id expect a center-left party (think Joe Biden), a progressive party (think Elizabeth Warren), and an economically populist, culturally moderate party (think Jon Tester or Sherrod Brown). On the right, Id expect a center-right party (think Larry Hogan or Charlie Baker), a traditional conservative values party (think Mike Pence), and a MAGA-ish populist party (think J.D. Vance or Josh Hawley). Under the current system, the parties are fused into two coalitions, distorted by the geography of where Republicans and Democrats win House and Senate seats, and pulled to confrontational extremes by the necessary bundling of issues.

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Maybe you are convinced that multiparty democracy and proportional representation offer an elegant solution to many of our problems. But why would elected Democrats and/or Republicans ever enact such a change?

For one thing, those who serve in public office understand better than anybody how broken and dysfunctional the system is. The Democratic Party and the Republican Party are just coalitions of groups and factions who have aligned together into parties to win power and enact policies. Both harbor deep internal divisions, which sometimes spill out into public. If given the option, these groups would probably prefer to compete as their own party and their own brand in a general election, rather than having to wage complicated fights in primary elections.

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There is also the potential for public pressure to bring about change. Americans are deeply dissatisfied with the two-party system. Voter turnout may be near historical highs in the United States, but this is hardly a sign of democratic health or enthusiasmit is civic engagement motivated by fear and anger, and deep distress.

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Americans are eager for a system in which all voters matter, not just those in the shrinking landscape of swing congressional districts (10 percent were competitive in 2022) or the vanishing number of swing states (are we really down to only 4 out of 50?), a system in which political conflicts dont always dig us into a deeper ditch at the center of our political trench warfare.

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In other democracies, electoral systems have changed when public dissatisfaction hits a boiling point. In the United States, we have repeatedly changed other aspects of our electoral system, particularly around candidate selection.

And states and cities are already experimenting with new electoral systems. Portland, Oregon, for example, just became the largest city in the U.S. to use proportional representation for its city council elections.

There is growing interest in fusion voting, a complementary electoral reform that would allow multiple political parties to nominate the same candidate. Its currently only legal in New York and Connecticut. New Jerseys state Supreme Court will hear a case this fall that seeks to overturn the states ban on fusion voting and allow the Moderate Party of New Jersey to choose its preferred candidate, even if a major party already nominated that candidate.

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If the plaintiffs arguing to relegalize fusion win, the chances of success go up elsewhere. Fusion is promising because it creates an opportunity for more parties to form, moving us toward multiparty democracy. Think of it as a form of quasi-proportional representation within the single-winner election, in which parties contribute a proportion of the vote for each candidate. It would be ideal for Senate elections, which are inherently single-winner affairs.

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Of course, there are other institutions that need to change as well to better represent the American peoplethe Senate, the courts, the Electoral College. But we have to start somewhere. Starting with a reform that doesnt demand a constitutional amendment has obvious advantages.

And, to be sure, more parties wont solve everything. Thats not possible, as politics isnt a problem to be solved. Its a space for us to hash out our disagreements without being so disagreeable that we turn to violence to settle our disputes. Whatever our other bigger problemsclimate, inequality, A.I., the list goes onif we cant make representative government work, everything else gets much harder to solve.
Florida-based HX5 LLC, its owner and CEO Margarita Howard, and affiliate HX5 Sierra LLC in Ohio have consented to pay $7,759,693.92 to resolve allegations of violation of the False Claims Act. The U.S. Government accused the parties of intentionally providing false data to the Small Business Administration (SBA) regarding their eligibility for federal contracts for small businesses controlled by socially and economically disadvantaged individuals.

The SBAs 8(a) business development initiative is intended to support small businesses owned by such disadvantaged individuals. Upon certification, these businesses become eligible for federal contracting preferences. The settlement announced today pertains to allegations that HX5, HX5 Sierra, and Howard dishonestly obtained six 8(a) contracts between January 1, 2015, and December 31, 2021.

Small business set-aside contracts assist small businesses, including socially disadvantaged companies, to compete in the American economy, stated Brian M. Boynton, Principal Deputy Assistant Attorney General, head of the Justice Departments Civil Division. When companies misrepresent their eligibility for such contracts, they prevent others from receiving the business opportunities Congress intended.

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Specifically, it was alleged that HX5 and Howard neglected to report distributions and payments to Howards family members, supposedly supplying SBA with false data concerning Howards assets. The government further claimed that if the accurate data had been supplied, it would have resulted in HX5s exclusion from the SBA 8(a) Program, rendering HX5 Sierra ineligible for 8(a) contracts.

This result demonstrates a coordinated effort among our agency partners to ensure that disregard for the integrity of small business contracting will not go unchecked, said U.S. Attorney Jason R. Coody for the Northern District of Florida.

Todays settlement sends a strong message that those responsible will be held accountable, added Special Agent in Charge Amaleka McCall-Brathwaite of the SBAs Office of Inspector Generals Eastern Region.

Due to the alleged fraudulent statements, HX5 unduly maintained its 8(a) Program participant status. Both HX5 and HX5 Sierra were awarded contracts by NASA, the U.S. Army, and the U.S. Air Force for which they were ineligible.

The civil settlement also includes resolving claims raised under the qui tam or whistleblower provisions of the False Claims Act by Vantage Systems Inc. In this agreement, Vantage Systems is set to receive $1,357,964.00.

Todays resolution sends a clear message to small businesses about the severe consequences of fraudulent claims. It reiterates the commitment of the government and law enforcement agencies to ensure transparency and fairness in allocating contracts and resources intended for small businesses.

For the latest, follow us on Google News.
Johannes Kaminski studies how climate change is depicted in national literatures.

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What comes to mind first when someone says science fiction? Is it spaceships? Or maybe lasers and aliens? For a long time, people have tended to belittle or disregard the literary value of the genre. But that is slowly beginning to change, even in academia.

"Characters in these novels are written very flat. But that is not the point," says Austrian scholar of comparative literature Johannes Kaminski, who is based at the Institute of World Literature at the Slovak Academy of Sciences (SAV).

"Take Solaris by Stanisaw Lem. Its a great example of how we can think about a planetary entity that is too complex to comprehend; the way that the characters are frustrated by not understanding how the planet works is very similar to how we are actually trying to figure out our own planet," he says.

In Kaminski's opinion, it is silly to say sci-fi is visionary; rather, it discusses complex issues that realist novels  those we take as the basis of how literature should be written  cannot do because they have to engage, first and foremost, with characters and literary style.

On the other hand, science fiction can depict the world as it is.

"Speculative fiction has more freedom to engage with a world that is in trouble," says the scholar.

The Slovak Spectator talked to Johannes Kaminski about his work, how issues and ideas tackled by sci-fi are relevant to us right now, and what brought him to work for the SAV.

Related article

Related article An American Philosopher in Slovakia: I have done my best work here Read more

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The future of humanity

What first attracted Kaminski to the SAVs Institute of World Literature was its roots.

Originally based on a socialist ideal, it was dedicated to the study of world literature because it wanted to document how individual nations' literatures gradually aim towards a socialist goal, the liberation of the working class.
Mass resignation of pediatricians, Central Bank Governor on trial, and Authors' reading month.

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Good evening. Here is the Monday, July 3 edition of Today in Slovakia - the main news of the day in less than five minutes.

Central Bank governor on trial

Peter Kazimir. (Source: TASR)

On Monday, the trial of Slovak Central Bank (NBS) governor and ex-finance minister Peter Kazimir started at the Specialised Criminal Court in Pezinok. He has been accused of bribery.

On Monday morning, he pleaded not guilty.

The governor denies paying former Financial Administration head Frantisek Imrecze almost 50,000 when the former served as finance minister in the Smer party-led government coalition in 2016. Imrecze, who himself has been convicted of bribery, but is a co-operating defendant in this case, claims the opposite.

In April, Kazimir was found guilty and ordered to pay a fine of 100,000 and given a suspended prison sentence of two years.

As both the prosecutor and the ex-minister appealed against the verdict, a main trial is now being held.

The trial is expected to run until mid-September.

Kazimir himself has been charged before, but the charges against him were scrapped, using the controversial Article 363.

Read more about Peter Kazimir:

Central bank governor guilty of corruption, judge says.

The central bank bosss guilty verdict gives Smer another martyr.

Slovakia's central bank governor again faces corruption charges.

More stories from The Slovak Spectator website

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 MONDAY

Literary scholar: Sci-fi allows civilisations to think long-term

The wildfires in Canada have worsened the quality of air in the US. (Source: TASR)

For a long time, people have tended to belittle or disregard the literary value of the genre. But that is slowly beginning to change, even in academia. Johannes Kaminski, based at the Institute of World Literature at the Slovak Academy of Sciences, studies how climate change is depicted in national literatures and what is the response.

"Sci-fi allows us to think about solutions in a way that is terrifying and maybe quite appropriate. Perhaps it matches reality more than ordinary fiction or realist literature," he says in an interview.

SONG/FILM/EVENT/WHATEVER FOR (WHICH DAY/TOMORROW)

Authors' reading month: Norway edition is here

Eliza Reid reads from her debut book at a July 15 event during the 2022 Authors' Reading Month in Bratislava. (Source: Dominika Bolgacova)

The festival is a series of daily events focusing on the national literature of the hosting country as well as another one, selected to be the Guest of Honour. This year it is Norway.

In addition to Norwegian crime books, attendees will be able to meet Instagram poet Alexander Fallo, Asne Seierstad, who wrote a book on the worst mass murderer in the history of Norway, and many others. For more information click here (in English).

In other news

A total of 24 political parties and one coalition wants to vie for seats in parliament in the September snap election , the Interior Ministry reported on Monday after the deadline for submitting election slates expired on Sunday. The only coalition consists of the OLaNO, Krestanska Unia (Christian Union) and Za Ludi parties.

, the Interior Ministry reported on Monday after the deadline for submitting election slates expired on Sunday. The only coalition consists of the OLaNO, Krestanska Unia (Christian Union) and Za Ludi parties. At the end of June, the state budget had a deficit of 2.796 billion in the first half of 2023 , an increase of 1.251 billion or 81 percent year-on-year, the Finance Ministry reported on Monday.

, an increase of 1.251 billion or 81 percent year-on-year, the Finance Ministry reported on Monday. Slovakia has a strong interest in normal, peaceful relations with Hungary, with a positive agenda directed towards the future and not the past , said Slovak Foreign Affairs Minister Miroslav Wlachovsky after meeting his Hungarian counterpart Peter Szijjarto in Budapest on Monday. Wlachovsky stressed that Slovakia would like to see Sweden as a NATO member at the alliance summit in Vilnius and hopes that Hungary will ratify its accession as soon as possible.

, said Slovak Foreign Affairs Minister Miroslav Wlachovsky after meeting his Hungarian counterpart Peter Szijjarto in Budapest on Monday. Wlachovsky stressed that Slovakia would like to see Sweden as a NATO member at the alliance summit in Vilnius and hopes that Hungary will ratify its accession as soon as possible. A total of 50 million from EU funds will be spent to support Roma patrols in villages , Prime Minister Ludovit Odor and Investment Minister Peter Balik announced. According to Odor, Roma patrols effectively maintain public order and are respected in villages.

, Prime Minister Ludovit Odor and Investment Minister Peter Balik announced. According to Odor, Roma patrols effectively maintain public order and are respected in villages. After extinguishing a fire that broke out at a grammar school in Bratislava last Friday night, firefighters found a dead body in the building. According to media, the victim was a student who died of smoke inhalation. The fire was set intentionally. The circumstances are under investigation.

WEATHER FOR TUESDAY:

From partly cloudy to overcast and occasionally showers or storms. Daily temperatures between 23 C to 30 C expected. Light breeze. (SHMU)

Thank you for subscribing and reading. It means a lot to us.

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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https://sputnikglobe.com/20230702/biden-greek-prime-minister-discuss-nato-economic-cooperation-1111630633.html

Biden, Greek Prime Minister Discuss NATO, Economic Cooperation

Biden, Greek Prime Minister Discuss NATO, Economic Cooperation

Biden held a conversation with the Greek Prime Minister to discuss NATO alliances, economic cooperation and maintaining security in the Aegean Sea. Earlier in the day, Biden thanked him for supporting Ukraine.

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Earlier in the day, the press service of the Greek prime minister said that Biden congratulated Mitsotakis on his re-election and thanked him for supporting Ukraine. "President Joe Biden spoke today with Prime Minister Kyriakos Mitsotakis of Greece The leaders underscored the close relations between our countries, including our strong defense partnership as NATO Allies, efforts to deepen our economic ties, and enduring people-to-people bonds. They pledged to continue the close cooperation between our governments on the full range of shared priorities, including maintaining stability in the Aegean," the White House said in a statement. Meanwhile, Greek media reported that Mitsotakis was planning to pay an official visit to the United States to meet with Biden in September.

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https://sputnikglobe.com/20230703/azov-militants-blackmail-museum-in-bid-to-distort-ussrs-role-in-wwii-1111638980.html

Azov Militants Blackmail Museum in Bid to Distort USSR's Role in WWII

Azov Militants Blackmail Museum in Bid to Distort USSR's Role in WWII

Western backers turn a blind eye to the fact that Kiev regime glorifies Nazi collaborators that took part in crimes again humanity, including persecution of Jews.

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The militants from the Azov Battalion* have blackmailed the administration of a local history museum in Mariupol and demanded that it change the exposition dedicated to WWII. Also, they have tried to seize a mortar from the exhibition, but museum workers made it dysfunctional to prevent the militants from making use of it.Museum keeper Andrey Ladkin told Sputnik that Azov militants wanted to rewrite Soviet history, especially the history of WWII. The effort to somehow revise that period is typical of the current Kiev regime since it is trying to glorify Nazi collaborators and dub them as freedom-fighters who opposed the Soviet Union. Heirs of these freedom-fighters blatantly use symbols of Nazi Germany, including the notorious black Wolfsangel (translated from German as Wolfs Hook)  the emblem on the flag of the Azov Battalion.*The Azov Battalion is a terrorist organization banned in Russia.

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The militants from the Azov battalion demanded that the Mariupol Museum of Local Lore change the exposition dedicated to the Great Patriotic War to please them The militants from the Azov battalion demanded that the Mariupol Museum of Local Lore change the exposition dedicated to the Great Patriotic War to please them 2023-07-03T14:15+0000 true PT0M52S

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Sergey Lebedev

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https://sputnikglobe.com/20230703/chinese-defense-head-russian-navy-commander-in-chief-meet-in-chinese-capital-1111633941.html

Chinese Defense Minister, Russian Navy Commander-in-Chief Meet in Beijing

Chinese Defense Minister, Russian Navy Commander-in-Chief Meet in Beijing

Chinese Defense Minister Li Shangfu has held a meeting with Commander-in-Chief of the Russian Navy Nikolay Yevmenov in Beijing, the Chinese Defense Ministry said on Monday.

2023-07-03T07:33+0000

2023-07-03T07:33+0000

2023-07-03T08:48+0000

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"Chinese Defense Minister Li Shangfu held a meeting with Commander-in-Chief of the Russian Navy Nikolay Yevmenov in Beijing on July 3," the ministry said in a statement. During the meeting, the minister expressed the hope that China will expand cooperation with the Russian Navy to jointly contribute to maintaining peace and stability in the region and across the world, the statement read. The Russian navy commander-in-chief, in turn, told the Chinese defense head during the meeting that Russia attaches great importance to the strengthening of cooperation between the military of the two countries, as quoted by the Chinese ministry. Russia is also ready to expand contacts with the Chinese Navy at all levels and conduct joint exercises and patrols, Yevmenov was quoted as saying.

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https://sputnikglobe.com/20230703/eu-mulls-reconnecting-russian-agricultural-bank-to-swift-via-subsidiary---reports-1111632719.html

Turkish Central Bank to End Supporting Lira With Foreign Exchange Reserves - Reports

Turkish Central Bank to End Supporting Lira With Foreign Exchange Reserves - Reports

Turkish Central Bank Governor Hafize Gaye Erkan has said that the bank will no longer use its foreign exchange reserves to support the exchange rate of Turkish lira, the Ekonomim news agency reported on Monday, citing sources.

2023-07-03T06:04+0000

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2023-07-03T11:13+0000

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Erkan held a meeting with the heads of banks on June 23, one day after the decision of the Central Bank to raise the key rate. The bankers have said that the meeting was productive and declared their readiness to do everything possible for the Turkish economy, Ekonomim reported.According to the news agency, Erkan said at that meeting that the Cental Bank will no longer use its reserves to support the lira rate.

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https://sputnikglobe.com/20230703/french-riots-legacy-of-the-colonial-past-or-result-of-free-immigration-1111642710.html

French Riots: Legacy of the Colonial Past or Result of Free Immigration?

French Riots: Legacy of the Colonial Past or Result of Free Immigration?

Tiberio Graziani, chairman at Vision & Global Trends International Institute for Global Analyses, and Alternative for Germany (AfD) MEP Gunnar Beck discussed the ongoing riots in France over the shooting of Nahel Merzouk.

2023-07-03T19:47+0000

2023-07-03T19:47+0000

2023-07-03T19:47+0000

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The riots broke out in the Parisian suburb of Nanterre on June 27 after police shot and killed 17-year-old Nahel Merzouk, a delivery driver of Algerian heritage, after pulling over his car. The officer who fired the fatal shot was soon charged with manslaughter.Since then the unrest has spread across France to Lyon and Marseille, and even to neighbouring Belgium and Switzerland. One firefighter has been killed and hundreds of police and gendarmes injured. President Emmanuel Macron has drawn ridicule by blaming the violence on video games.Tiberio Graziani put the situation down to a number of factors  not just immigration but the lack of integration, France's colonial history and the Brussels-dictated attacks on workers and pensioners' rights by Macron and his predecessors that provoke the Gilets Jaunes (Yellow Vests) protests of recent years. Gunnar Beck said France had an "extremely liberal" immigration policy and a series of governments had "let the problem fester in the so-called bidon-villes in the banlieus." Eric Zemmour, the leader of the right-wing French Reconquete (Reconquest) party, has warned: "We are in the early stages of a civil war. This is an ethnic revolt.Beck said the assault by rioters on the home of Vincent Jeanbrun, the mayor of the wealthy southern Parisian suburb of L'Hay-les-Roses, in which his wife suffered a broken leg, marked a "new stage" in the unrest.Graziani said immigration was the "workhorse" of Zemmour's party, but warned that "what we are seeing in France right now could happen in other parts of Europe."Both commentators agreed that Europe had learned nothing from the migrant crisis of 2015, which saw 2 million trafficked migrants from the Middle East and Africa settled in Europe, more than half of those in Germany, while thousands more drowned in the Mediterranean.The policies of European governments and the Brussels-based European Union "have not succeeded in managing, in one way or another, the so-called immigration issue in more than twenty years." Graziani said. "Even in countries considered more democratic and advanced, the problem of immigration and integration remains unresolved."Beck said Germany alone had accepted up to 7.5 million non-European migrants since 2018 alone.The police killing of Nahel Merzouk has drawn comparisons with the death of black US man George Floyd while resisting arrest by the Minneapolis police and the ensuing Black Lives Matter (BLM) protests and riots. Could a European equivalent of BLM coalesce?But Beck noted that equivalents to BLM already exist on the eastern side of the Atlantic. "Most parties on the left, and some parties in the centre, have become the lobbyists for more immigration and more anti-racist measures to accommodate them."

https://sputnikglobe.com/20230703/macron-asks-ministers-to-restore-order-in-france---reports-1111630755.html

https://sputnikglobe.com/20230703/nation-on-edge-violence-and-devastation-on-french-streets-1111634660.html

https://sputnikglobe.com/20230703/french-mayor-refuses-to-attend-meeting-with-macron-amid-riots-1111645940.html

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rioting in france over the police shooting of nahel merzouk, is immigration the cause of unrest in france and across europe?
https://sputnikglobe.com/20230703/fsb-thwarts-assassination-attempt-on-crimea-head-aksyonov-plotted-by-ukrainian-intel--1111633608.html

FSB Thwarts Ukrainian Assassination Plot Targeting Crimea Head

FSB Thwarts Ukrainian Assassination Plot Targeting Crimea Head

The Russian Federal Security Service (FSB) said on Monday that it had thwarted an assassination attempt on Sergey Aksyonov, the head of the Republic of Crimea, organized by the Ukrainian special services.

2023-07-03T06:59+0000

2023-07-03T06:59+0000

2023-07-03T11:32+0000

russia's special operation in ukraine

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video

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"An assassination attempt on the head of the Republic of Crimea, Sergey Aksyonov, organized by the Ukrainian special services, has been thwarted ... A citizen of Russia, born in 1988, who was recruited by the Ukrainian Security Service and took a course in reconnaissance and subversive activities on the territory of Ukraine, including training in mine blasting, was detained," the FSB said in a statement.The would-be-assassin planned to blow up the politicians car. He was apprehended by FSB after being caught red-handed while removing the stashed-away bomb.Law enforcement officials have opened a criminal case against the perpetrator on bomb possession and terrorism charges. Crimea and Sevastopol became Russian regions after a referendum held on 16 March 2014, when 97 percent of those who participated in the vote supported reunification.On 18 March 2014, Russian President Vladimir Putin, Crimean head Sergey Aksyonov and other officials signed a treaty on the accession of the Republic of Crimea and the city of Sevastopol to Russia. Under the treaty, all the residents of Crimea are recognised as citizens of Russia unless they signed an application stating that they wished to retain Ukrainian citizenship.

https://sputnikglobe.com/20230604/kiev-hoped-for-natos-direct-entry-into-ukraine-conflict-when-staging-shebekino-terror-attack-1110901190.html

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The FSB published footage showing the detention of a Russian citizen who planned to assassinate Crimean head Sergey Aksyonov The FSB published footage showing the detention of a Russian citizen who planned to assassinate Crimean head Sergey Aksyonov 2023-07-03T06:59+0000 true PT1M53S

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https://sputnikglobe.com/20230703/losses-from-riots-in-france-estimated-at-1bln--1111647235.html

Losses From Riots in France Estimated at $1Bln

Losses From Riots in France Estimated at $1Bln

The losses from the ongoing riots in France are estimated at over one billion euros ($1.09 billion), including over 200 retail outlets which had been plundered, over 300 banking centers destroyed and 250 vendor kiosks damaged.

2023-07-03T20:57+0000

2023-07-03T20:57+0000

2023-07-03T20:57+0000

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france

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"It is too early to give you the exact figures yet, but we're talking here over one billion euros, not including tourist industry losses," Roux de Bezieux said in an interview with French newspaper Le Parisien. He added that according to his data, over 200 retail outlets had been plundered, over 300 banking centers destroyed and 250 vendor kiosks damaged by the rioters. France has been on edge since last Tuesday, when a teenager was shot dead by a policeman for allegedly disobeying a traffic stop in Nanterre, a suburb of Paris. The officer who pulled the trigger on 17-year-old Nahel M. has been taken into custody on suspicion of voluntary manslaughter, but that has not stopped protesters. Violent protests have escalated into rioting and looting, prompting authorities in some parts of France to impose partial curfews and limitations on public transport. The French Interior Ministry has reported daily detentions and injuries to police officers.

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https://sputnikglobe.com/20230703/not-safe-to-dive-deep-sea-experts-warned-for-years-of-oceangates-submersible-design-1111643054.html

'Not Safe to Dive': Deep Sea Experts Warned for Years of OceanGate's Submersible Design

'Not Safe to Dive': Deep Sea Experts Warned for Years of OceanGate's Submersible Design

Since the disaster that killed five men near the wreck of the RMS Titanic last month, details have emerged about the companys fraught safety practices, including that diving experts had warned about the sub's unorthodox design.

2023-07-03T18:01+0000

2023-07-03T18:01+0000

2023-07-03T18:01+0000

americas

titan

titanic

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us department of labor

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When Stockton Rush, CEO of Oceangate Expeditions, launched his Titan submersible on June 18 to take himself and four other passengers to see the wreck of the Titanic 2.5 miles beneath the surface of the North Atlantic, it was on board a vehicle that almost every industry expert had long refused to associate themselves with.Some of those experts spoke with a US magazine recently, sharing their experiences with being either ignored or dismissed by Rush when they raised their concerns, or fired for pointing out problems, or threatened with litigation if they told others about the dangers they had witnessed.'You Can't Cut Corners in the Deep'Rob McCallum, one of the founders of EYOS Expeditions and the designer and leader of the Five Deeps Expedition to visit the five deepest sites in the world's oceans, said he had warned Rush years ago about the poor design of the Titan.Rush's design for the Titan, which was initially called Cyclops II, used a number of unorthodox features that Rush touted as innovative and cost-saving. However, for many of them, including essential safety-related items, it seems that experts in the field of deep sea diving raised concerns.The Cyclops II had been based on a previous submersible, Cyclops I, which Rush had purchased and retrofitted, adding a number of features such as converting its control systems to operate off a PlayStation 3 controller. The Cyclops I was only rated to a depth of 500 meters. For the Cyclops II (Titan), however, he only made incremental changes, such as substituting the sub's steel hull for a carbon fiber tube.McCallum said that Rush "wanted me to run his Titanic operation for him," since McCallum had already visited the wreck of the cruise liner and was well-known around the world as an expert at diving to much greater depths. However, upon seeing the Cyclops Is design, McCallum immediately knew there were going to be major issues.During a shallow water test in a marina, Cyclops I became stranded after just such a breakdown. He mused that the sub "was a mutt." McCallum said he advised Rush to get the Cyclops II inspected and approved by a marine-certification agency before attempting to take it down to the Titanic, but after Rush categorically dismissed the idea."Stockton didn't like that, McCallum said. "He didnt like to be told that he was on the fringe." McCallum said that as news spread that Rush was offering tourist visits to the Titanic, people would ring me, and say, 'We've always wanted to go to Titanic. What do you think?' And I would tell them, 'Never get in an unclassed sub. I wouldn't do it, and you shouldn't, either.'"Inadequate Acrylic WindowOther aspects of the Cyclops II/Titans design got warnings, too. The seven-inch-thick acrylic viewing port, for example, was only rated to about 1,300 meters, or about one-third of the depth of the Titanic wreck. Rush reportedly misrepresented the ability to determine if a problem was occurring with the acrylic, as well as the sub crews ability to react to that problem safely.One expert on acrylics told US media that Rush had misunderstood how acrylics are rated for depth safety - a system in which the depth number doesnt represent the safe depth to which one could dive using such a window, but rather the pressure at which the acrylic would fail. For safety, operators are only supposed to dive to one-sixth of that, which was given as its depth rating.'Capricious' Carbon Fiber HullExperts also warned about the Cyclops II/Titans carbon fiber hull. Patrick Lahey, the CEO of Triton Submarines, told a US magazine that the reason submarines don't use carbon fiber hulls is that "its a capricious f*cking material, which is the last f*cking thing you want to associate with a pressure boundary."Ramsay explained that "with titanium, theres a purpose to a pressure test that goes beyond just seeing whether it will survive." Titanium, he said, gradually strengthens as it's repeatedly exposed to incredible stresses, but carbon fiber slowly weakens with repeated exposures.After they raised their concerns with Rush, the OceanGate CEO said he took their worries as a "serious personal insult." After they informed the US Department of Labors Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) about the issues, Rush threatened them with massive lawsuits until they withdrew their reports from OSHA.At one point, Laheys business partner mused that "It doesnt get more sensational than dead people in a sub on the way to Titanic."David Lochridge, a submersible pilot with three decades of experience in submarines in both the UK Royal Navy and private industry, worked for Rush for several years and raised his safety concerns repeatedly. After Lochridge discovered fractures in the Titans carbon fiber hull, he pressed Rush for a detailed study of the hull for further fractures - pressure Rush resisted and ultimately fired Lochridge for.Disaster in the DeepDuring the June 18 dive, the Titan disappeared from contact about 90 minutes into its two-hour descent to the Titanic wreck, which sits at 3,800 meters (12,500 feet) of depth, and a US Navy submarine detection system nearby registered a sound that could have been an implosion.After four days of searching, wreckage from the Titan was discovered not far from the Titanic, and it was determined that the submersible had imploded due to the intense water pressure, instantly killing all five passengers on board, including Rush.Although investigators have said returning the bodies of the dead is unlikely to be possible and that the true cause of the implosion may never be determined due to the violence of the crush, the US and Canadian governments have pushed ahead with their probe. Whether it will lead to lawsuits is unclear, especially given the complex question of legal jurisdiction.

https://sputnikglobe.com/20230701/doomed-titan-submersible-reportedly-contained-discount-parts-past-shelf-life-1111595085.html

https://sputnikglobe.com/20230626/lawyer-up-jurisdiction-debates-will-complicate-lawsuits-expected-over-titan-implosion-1111479638.html

https://sputnikglobe.com/20230629/debris-from-titanic-tourism-sub-recovered-with-presumed-human-remains-1111534964.html

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https://sputnikglobe.com/20230703/sweden-belatedly-denounces-quran-burning-after-international-backlash-1111632481.html

Sweden Belatedly Denounces Quran-Burning After Global Backlash

Sweden Belatedly Denounces Quran-Burning After Global Backlash

Sweden's shifting attitudes toward Quran-burning illustrate a diplomatic tightrope between respect for free speech and religious sentiments and foreign policy considerations.

2023-07-03T05:21+0000

2023-07-03T05:21+0000

2023-07-03T07:43+0000

world

rasmus paludan

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stockholm

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organization of islamic cooperation (oic)

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The Swedish Foreign Ministry has condemned the recent Quran-burning on the first day of Islamic holiday Eid al-Adha, which sparked ire across the Muslim world, as "Islamophobic acts committed by individuals at demonstrations in Sweden."The Foreign Ministry further called the desecration of the Quran, or any other holy scripture, an "offensive and disrespectful act and a clear provocation," which "in no way reflects the views of the Swedish government."Lastly, it stressed that "expressions of racism, xenophobia and related intolerance have no place in Sweden or elsewhere in Europe."The somewhat belated condemnation came amid a massive backlash over the incendiary demonstration. Among others, the Organization of Islamic Cooperation, a 57-member body headquartered in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia, held a special crisis meeting, calling for measures to avoid and prevent further desecration of the Quran and concluding that international law must be used to stop religious hatred.OIC Secretary General Hissein Brahim Taha stressed the need to send a clear message that acts of desecration against the Quran are "not mere ordinary Islamophobia incidents." Following what he referred to as "despicable act" in Stockholm, he called for a stricter application of international law to prohibit the promotion of religious hatred.This condemnation echoed widespread denunciations that have included demonstrations near the Swedish embassy in the Iraqi capital, while Iraq, Kuwait, the United Arab Emirates and Morocco summoned Swedish envoys in protest.Furthermore, Iranian Foreign Minister Hossein Amirabdollahian tweeted on Sunday that his country would refrain from sending Tehran's new ambassador to Sweden, Hojjatollah Faghani, in protest against the Swedish government's permission to burn the Quran.The Quran burning outside Stockholm's main mosque last Wednesday followed a similar incident in January in which Rasmus Paludan, the leader of the fringe, right-wing Hard Line party, burned a copy of the holy book outside the Turkish Embassy in the Swedish capital, which further exacerbated tensions with Turkiye and cast a shadow of doubt over Sweden's NATO bid that hinges on Ankara's approval.The latest incident illustrates Sweden's conundrum with considerations of free speech, religious tolerance and political gain all weighed against each other. Perhaps, indicative of Sweden's shaky and ambiguous position, the country's Prime Minister Ulf Kristersson commented on the police decision, saying it was "legal but inappropriate."

https://sputnikglobe.com/20230702/iran-suspends-appointing-new-sweden-envoy-over-quran-burning-in-nordic-country-1111618851.html

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https://sputnikglobe.com/20230703/swedens-recent-quran-burning-to-further-imperil-nato-bid-1111633153.html

Sweden's Recent Quran Burning to Further Imperil NATO Bid

Sweden's Recent Quran Burning to Further Imperil NATO Bid

Turkiye has warned Stockholm that its NATO ambitions won't be granted as long as Qurans are allowed to be burned freely.

2023-07-03T11:41+0000

2023-07-03T11:41+0000

2023-07-03T11:41+0000

world

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ahmed aboul gheit

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stockholm

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Yet another Quran burning in Stockholm has triggered a sharp reaction by Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan, further endangering Sweden's chances to enter NATO in the near future. Stockholm's bid currently hinges on Turkiye's approval. Earlier, Turkish President Tayyip Erdogan slammed Sweden over the incident, saying Ankara will never bow down to a policy of provocation or threat and calling the action "despicable.""We will teach the arrogant Western people that it is not freedom of expression to insult the sacred values of Muslims," he was quoted as saying.How the Rest of the Muslim World Reacted?The desecration and burning of the Quran in Stockholm during the celebration of the first day of the Muslim holiday Eid al-Adha stirred strong backlash across the Islamic world.Iraq demanded that the Swedish authorities hand over the Iraqi immigrant responsible for the incendiary protest as dozens of Iraqis gathered for a protest outside the Nordic country's embassy in Baghdad.The Foreign Ministries of Jordan and the United Arab Emirates summoned the Swedish ambassadors to present them with a note of protest.Morocco recalled its ambassador from Sweden indefinitely for consultations in addition to "most vigorous condemnation of this offense and rejection of this unacceptable act that disregards the feelings of more than a billion Muslims during this sacred period of the great pilgrimage to Mecca and the blessed feast of Eid Al-Adha."Iran's Foreign Ministry called the desecration "provocative, ill-considered and unacceptable" and pledged to refrain from sending a new ambassador to Sweden.Kuwait said the burning was a "dangerous, provocative step that inflames the feelings of Muslims around the world" and called on the international community and governments "to take responsibility for swift action to renounce feelings of hatred, extremism and religious intolerance."The Yemeni government rejected the incident as a "deliberate provocation against the feelings of Muslims around the world on a holy Islamic occasion" and called for an end to the "repeated abuses" stemming from a "culture of hatred."Algeria, Afghanistan, Egypt, Indonesia, Lebanon, Syria, and Uzbekistan were joined by Arab League Cooperation Council for the Arab States of the Gulf Secretary-General Ahmed Aboul Gheit and Secretary General Jassim Mohamed Al-Budaiwi in expressing their condemnation.How Russia ReactedThe Russian Foreign Ministry stressed that the incident was carried out "with extreme cynicism and defiance," without clearly explaining the reasons for this act. It furthermore "resolutely rejected this indulgence of religious radicals on the part of Stockholm authorities." Russian President Vladimir Putin, during a visit to the ancient Juma mosque in Derbent in Russia's Republic of Dagestan, emphasized that disrespect for the Quran is a crime in Russia, unlike some other countries. The head of state also stressed that Russia would adhere to these legislative rules at all times.Repercussions for Sweden's NATO BidNATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg said that the alliance was working to complete the process of Sweden's accession to NATO before the summit to be held in Vilnius, Lithuania, on July 11-12. On July 6, another meeting will take place at NATO headquarters in Brussels, which will be attended by the foreign ministers of member states and Sweden, as well as heads of intelligence organizations and national security advisers.Against the backdrop of hostilities in Ukraine, Finland and Sweden decided to abandon their non-alignment and join the alliance last year. In order to do so, however, approval of all current members is required  which is where Sweden's bid hit a snag.

https://sputnikglobe.com/20230703/sweden-belatedly-denounces-quran-burning-after-international-backlash-1111632481.html

https://sputnikglobe.com/20230630/quran-burning-europe-has-gone-completely-mad---losing-its-mind-say-oman-diplomat-1111575288.html

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https://sputnikglobe.com/20230703/two-palestinians-dead-amid-israels-operation-in-west-bank-1111631365.html

Four Palestinians Dead Amid Israels Operation in West Bank

Four Palestinians Dead Amid Israels Operation in West Bank

At least four Palestinians died and another 10 were injured in the city of Jenin in the West Bank. The IDF said on the night from Sunday to Monday that they were "striking terrorist infrastructure in the Jenin area."

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The Israel Defense Forces (IDF) said on the night from Sunday to Monday that they were "striking terrorist infrastructure in the Jenin area." The Palestinian health ministry said later in the night that two Palestinians were killed and another 10 were injured during Israels operation in Jenin. A protest was held overnight in Ramallah against Israels operation in Jenin.The IDF said that Israeli security forces attacked the headquarters used by local militants in Jenin for planning terrorist attacks against Israel. The headquarters also housed a warehouse for the storage of weapons and explosives, the IDF said. The Palestinian health ministry said that one Palestinian was killed and another local resident was injured during an Israeli airstrike on Jenin that preceded the start of Israels operation.

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https://sputnikglobe.com/20230703/ukraine-has-only-one-option-all-in-offensive-before-nato-summit-in-vilnius-1111641528.html

Ukrainian Counteroffensive Running Out of Time  Russian Ex-General

Ukrainian Counteroffensive Running Out of Time  Russian Ex-General

Kiev is preparing the second stage of the counteroffensive because the first, despite using huge amounts of Western military equipment and Ukrainian troops, did not bring results, intel veteran Leonid Reshetnikov told Sputnik.

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Kiev is reportedly eager to receive an invitation to begin the process of joining NATO during the upcoming summit in Vilnius, according to a Ukrainian presidential aide.As Kiev expects a response to its membership application, which was submitted in September 2022, President Volodymyr Zelensky has stated that he will not attend the summit unless NATO leaders show "courage" in their decision.Leonid Reshetnikov, a retired lieutenant general of Russia's Foreign Intelligence Service (SVR), told Sputnik that the second stage of Ukraine's counteroffensive in the battlefield is expected by the time the Vilnius summit opens in just ten days. According to him, the Kiev regime needs results in order to get decisions in favor of further arms and financial support, and even NATO membership.According to Reshetnikov, reports indicate the possibility of introducing new elements, such as major provocations, similar to when Ukrainians blew up the Kakhovka Hydroelectric Power Plant.This offensive is expected to be launched before the upcoming summit in Vilnius. The ongoing nationwide mobilization signals growing understanding that Kievs current forces may not be sufficient to achieve a breakthrough.However, the primary objective for Ukraine remains to break through the Russian defense lines to reach the Sea of Azov and the border with Crimea, the expert noted.Reshetnikov likewise noted that the Ukrainian military is pursuing a strategy of sending inexperienced soldiers on frenzied attacks in a desperate bid to locate potential weak links in the Russian defense.The commander of the Ukrainian Armed Forces General Valery Zaluzhny recently told Western media that it would be impossible to conduct an offensive without additional supplies of NATO ammunition and aircraft. Reshetnikov believes that these statements serve a dual purpose: to garner increased Western support and to justify the lack of success so far.In an attempt to explain Kiev's shortcomings, Ukrainian Deputy Defense Minister Hanna Maliar has propagated the idea that Russian forces are conducting an offensive in four directions  Avdeyevka, Maryinka, Krasny Liman and Svatovo. However, Reshetnikov believes that this claim is purely a propaganda tactic to rationalize Ukrainian setbacks.As the Kiev regime prepares for the second phase of its counteroffensive, the prospects for success remain uncertain. Ukraine faces formidable challenges, including the need to revise tactics and strategy, the reliance on untapped reserves, and the potential introduction of new elements to tip the scales.The question remains whether these measures will be sufficient to break through the Russian defenses and achieve their "intended objectives". In the coming weeks, the world will see whether Ukraine's NATO-concerted efforts can produce the desired results, or whether more setbacks lie ahead.

https://sputnikglobe.com/20230703/ukraines-counteroffensive-fails-in-all-directions---shoigu-1111636724.html

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https://sputnikglobe.com/20230703/ukraine-to-receive-dozens-of-leopard-tanks-in-coming-weeks---germany-1111644554.html

Ukraine to Receive Dozens of Leopard Tanks in Coming Weeks - Germany

Ukraine to Receive Dozens of Leopard Tanks in Coming Weeks - Germany

Over the past weeks, the much-hyped Ukrainian "counteroffensive" resulted in severe losses for Kiev's forces, with multiple tanks and military vehicles being destroyed

2023-07-03T18:38+0000

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Pistorius mentioned a military aid package to Kiev prepared in May.Russian Defense Minister Sergey Shoigu said on Monday that Russian armed forces had destroyed 920 Ukrainian armored vehicles, including 16 Leopard tanks, in the Donbass and Zaporozhye regions in June.Western countries have been supplying Kiev with various types of weapon systems, including air defense missiles, multiple launch rocket systems, tanks, self-propelled artillery and anti-aircraft guns since Russia launched its military operation in Ukraine over a year ago. The Kremlin has consistently warned against further arms deliveries to Kiev.

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https://sputnikglobe.com/20230703/us-arms-daesh-in-syria-with-chemical-weapons--russian-intel-1111638392.html

US Arming Daesh in Syria With Chemical Weapons  Russian Intel

US Arming Daesh in Syria With Chemical Weapons  Russian Intel

The Russian Foreign Intelligence Service (SVR) said on Monday that Washington arms jihadists with dangerous chemicals.

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The SVR stressed that the US had handed over "missiles with warheads filled with poisonous substances" to the Daesh* terrorist organization in southern Syria. Deputy Commander of the US Central Command Vice Admiral James Malloy is responsible for such operations in southern Syria and the Damascus region, the SVR added. About a third of Syria remains occupied, including by the United States, which controls oil and food producing regions east of the Euphrates River. Washington holds military camps on these territories and trains jihadists.Syrian officials have slammed the US and its allies over the dirty war, and demanded that all foreign forces not explicitly invited by the Damascus government leave the country, and allow Syria to restore full control over its internationally recognized borders.*Daesh (also known as ISIS/ISIL/IS), Al-Qaeda and Islamic Party of Turkestan are terrorist organisations outlawed in Russia and many other states

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https://sputnikglobe.com/20230703/white-house-urges-action-on-gun-laws-after-baltimore-block-party-shooting-1111640339.html

White House Urges Action on Gun Laws After Baltimore Block Party Shooting

White House Urges Action on Gun Laws After Baltimore Block Party Shooting

The White House urged Congress on Monday to improve the national gun safety legislation after the shooting in Baltimore, Maryland, left 2 people killed and several dozens injured.

2023-07-03T12:47+0000

2023-07-03T12:47+0000

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Our communities cant wait for action on common sense gun laws  Congress must act, White House spokesperson Karine Jean-Pierre said on Twitter. She expressed condolences to all affected by the tragedy, adding that it left countless others traumatized and grieving. A mass shooting occurred on Sunday in Baltimore during a block party. Local media reported that police launched an investigation into the incident.

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https://sputnikglobe.com/20230703/youve-had-your-chips-netherlands-bans-sale-of-microchip-tools-to-china-1111637174.html

You've Had Your Chips: Netherlands Bans Sale of Microchip Tools to China

You've Had Your Chips: Netherlands Bans Sale of Microchip Tools to China

The Dutch government is one of several under pressure from Washington over the past year to emulate a US embargo on sales of microchips and the tools to make them to China.

2023-07-03T13:27+0000

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The Netherlands has imposed new restrictions on selling microchip-manufacturing equipment to China. The Dutch move follows suit on a US ban from last December on sales of chips to more than 30 Chinese companies on the pretext of "national security"But she added that only a "very limited" number of companies would be affected by the ban, and did not elaborate on precisely which equipment would be forbidden for export to which countries.However, the Dutch government had been under pressure from the US for the past year to enact such a ban. A deal was reportedly reached between Washington, The Hague and Tokyo in January this year for several key firms, including the Netherlands' ASML and Japan's Nikon and Tokyo Electron, to emulate US export restrictions on China.And last November, the UK's Department for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy ordered Nexperia, a Dutch subsidiary of China's Wingtech, to sell its controlling stake in Welsh microchip precursor factory Newport Wafer Fab for fear it could "undermine UK capabilities" in fields such as telecoms and facial recognition.The Chinese embassy in the Netherlands protested the latest escalation of the West's trade war with Beijing.

https://sputnikglobe.com/20230128/report-us-reaches-deal-with-netherlands-to-restrict-chinas-access-to-microchips-tech-1106779845.html

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Both French Wine and Once In A Lifetime lived to their billing as favourite with victories in the $142,148 third preliminary leg of a Pennsylvania Sire Stakes (PASS) event for three-year-old males Sunday afternoon (July 2) at Harrahs Philadelphia.

Rain started to come down as the seventh race field went to the gate, so by the time French Wine raced in the eighth contest, the oval had been downgraded to sloppy +2. The off conditions seemed not to bother the Bar Hopping colt, as Andy Miller guided him to the top past the :27.1 quarter and went to post splits of :55.4 and 1:24.4 before crossing the finish line in 1:53.3, a length ahead of Saint Louie. Julie Miller trains the sophomore, who seems to be peaking at a good time, for Andy Miller Stable Inc., Daniel and Jean Plouffe and One Legend Stable Inc.

The track was still rated sloppy for the other PASS division, the next race. This one was a romp for the sections defending champion, the Father Patrick colt Once In A Lifetime, who went to the quarter in :27.1, got a rest to a :57.1 half, then turned up the speed to hit the three-quarters in 1:25 and the finish in 1:53.3, six lengths to the good of Square Away while taking his second Sire Stakes win of the campaign. Tim Tetrick drove the sophomore for trainer Jim Campbell (who, ahem, won the Hambletonian last year) and the Sad Frog Farms.

There were three $20,000 divisions of this sections Stallion Series, and the only horse coming away with a second Stallion Series win was another Tim Tetrick-driven horse, the Southwind Frank gelding Express Man, who was first in 1:55.3 for trainer Scott Betts and the partnership of Tar Heel Racing, Stephen Moss, Gabrielle Hristko and James Chambers.

The Cantab Hall gelding I Got The Tab was a pocket rocket while taking his cut in a new mark of 1:54.1 (in the only Stallion Series event rated on a sloppy oval) for driver Joe Bongiorno, trainer and sister Jenn, and owners Glenn Goller and Stephen Demeter. These two joined the Sire Stakes winners as living up to chalk status. The only upset was a mild one, as the Fordham Road colt Battin A Thousand, a 4-1 shot, took no prisoners in equalling his lifetime mark of 1:55.3 for driver Yannick Gingras and trainer/owner Roger Hammer.

There was also a $20,000 Open Handicap Trot, conducted when the oval was still sloppy, which makes the 1:51.3 clocking posted by the Archangel gelding Lexus Kody even more remarkable. Take All Comers, 6-5 to Lexus Kodys even money, parked the winner to a stinging :26.1 quarter, and then after Lexus Kody posted midsplits of :55.1 and 1:23.2, came back for more late, but Lexus Kody prevailed by a half-length. Now three-for-four after a recent layoff, Lexus Kody was driven by Yannick Gingras for trainer Ron Burke and the partnership of Burke Racing Stable LLC and Weaver Bruscemi LLC and Phil Collura.

Credit announcer Mike Bozich with this note: The first horse Yannick Gingras won with today was named Battin A Thousand. And that horse described Yannicks day  he had six drives, and he won six races. Five of Gingras' sextet came with Burke-trained horses at least partially-owned by Weaver/Bruscemi.

Maria De Bruijn vaulted Vendor Bill around duelling horses into the final turn to snag the $9,900 American Harness Drivers Club (AHDC) Trot on the Sunday program.

Leaving from post six, De Bruijn floated Vendor Bill into fourth as Campbellini (driven by Dante Scattolini) yielded command to Big Sky Ex (Yogi Sheridan) through a :28.2 first quarter. Big Sky Ex soon endured pressure along the rim from even-money favourite Henderson Seelster (Neil Glasser), who was left parked after recovering from a break in stride at the start. Henderson Seelster pushed Big Sky Ex up the backstretch while De Bruijn had ample room to swing Vendor Bill off the pegs and catch brief cover. Past three-quarters in 1:27.2, De Bruijn swung Vendor Bill into action and seized the lead off the bottom corner. Vendor Bill slid clear to a length victory in a 1:58.2 mile with Big Sky Ex second, Masster Blue (Anthony Verruso) third off a pylon-skimming drive and Henderson Seelster back in fourth.

Michel Heijnen conditions Vendor Bill, a five-year-old gelding by Credit Winner, for owners MR Racing Inc. and De Bruijn. He paid $17.20 to win.

Sundays AHDC leg was a bonus preliminary added to the clubs Summer Series. Pocono Downs at Mohegan Pennsylvania will host the next preliminary of the Summer Series as scheduled next Sunday, July 9. First-race post time at Pocono Downs is 6 p.m. (EDT).

Racing resumes at Harrahs Philadelphia this Wednesday, July 5 at 12:25 p.m. (EDT).

(with files from PHHA / Harrah's Philadelphia and AHDC)
A crowd of more than 250 people gathered Sunday evening (July 2) at the Harness Racing Museum and Hall of Fame to celebrate the induction of the U.S. Hall of Fame class of 2023.

Owner/breeder/executive Frank Antonacci, trainer Per Eriksson and driver Lucien Fontaine headlined the group, which was honored during the annual induction dinner on the Museum lawn.

Also inducted into the Hall of Fame on Sunday were immortals Charlie Coleman, Dr. Gordon Gilbertson, Ira Malott, Margot Taylor, Edward Willis, Adios Scarlet and Exciting Speed. The Living Horse Hall of Fame welcomed 2017 Horse of the Year Hannelore Hanover and 2018 Horse of the Year McWicked, broodmares My Little Dragon and Road Bet, and stallion Yankee Glide.

Going into the Communicators Hall of Fame were racing writer Bob Roberts and Meadowlands Racetrack announcer Ken Warkentin.

Antonacci, known as Frank The Elder, is a second-generation member from one of harness racings most famous and successful families and joins his father, Guy Sonny, and uncle Frank in the Hall of Fame. Both were inducted in 2000.

The familys Lindy Farms and its affiliates have had four Hambletonian winners  Lindys Pride (1969), Probe (1989), Harmonious (1990) and Victory Dream (1994)  and campaigned two-time U.S. Horse of the Year Moni Maker.

Antonacci and his brother, Jerry, have either bred or owned multiple millionaires and world champions over the years. The Antonaccis also were influential in bringing European breeding to the U.S., most notably today with their homebred stallion International Moni, a son of French sire Love You and Moni Maker.

In addition, Antonacci has been a partner in the Red Mile and Tattersalls Sales Co., a trustee of the Harness Racing Museum & Hall of Fame since 2011, a director of the Hambletonian Society since 1993, and a past director of the U.S. Trotting Association.

Lindy Farms was honoured in 2021 with the Stan Bergstein-Proximity Award from the U.S. Harness Writers Association and is a past recipient of the Harness Horse Youth Foundations Service to Youth Award.

Im not going to give much of a speech here tonight because I dont think I could get through it, Antonacci said. So, lucky for you guys. But I do have a speech. If you look in your program, there is a QR code because I dont think I could get through my speech. So, please go look at the QR code. Its about 12 minutes. Its on page 53.

When youve got 12 minutes in the bathroom, please listen to it, added Antonacci with a laugh.

Swedish-born Eriksson was 24 years old when he trained his first Hambletonian winner, Prakas in 1985. In a span of seven years, he trained two more winners of the sports premier race for three-year-old trotters: Giant Victory in 1991 and Alf Palema in 1992. He is one of 12 trainers with at least three Hambletonian trophies in the races nearly 100-year history. All 12 are now in the Hall of Fame.

Prakas, Giant Victory and Alf Palema all were named Trotter of the Year by the U.S. Harness Writers Association in their Hambletonian-winning seasons.

Eriksson, who came to the U.S. in 1981 to work as a caretaker and returned to Sweden in 2001 to raise his family, also captured nine Breeders Crown trophies during his career in the States, a total that still ranks tied for seventh among trainers in the history of the event.

Other notable victories for Eriksson included the 1995 Hambletonian Oaks with Lookout Victory and triumphs in the Kentucky Futurity, Yonkers Trot, and World Trotting Derby.

He was voted Trainer of the Year in 1991 by the U.S. Harness Writers Association.

My QR code is on page 52, thank you, Eriksson said to laughter as he began his acceptance speech.

Im honoured to be elected to the Hall of Fame, and to be here with our family means a lot, he then continued. These 20 years in America made me who I am today. America is where my family was made, where our children were born, and [my wife] Tina and I forever will be thankful for American harness racing.

Fontaine, who passed away in September at the age of 83, just two months after his Hall of Fame selection, was a groundbreaking catch-driver who got his first win in 1960.

Beginning in 1965, the man known as Loosh put together a 15-year run among the top 20 drivers in North American purse earnings, with 10 seasons in the top 10. He also was among the top 20 drivers in wins 11 years. His career high came in 1968 when he posted 264 victories, the sixth-best single-season total in North American history at the time.

Fontaine retired at the age of 49 because of a heart attack and triple-bypass surgery, but not before accumulating 3,458 wins and collecting multiple driving titles at Yonkers Raceway. He also was a two-time champ at Monticello and perennially among the top drivers at Roosevelt.

He is best remembered for campaigning Forrest Skipper to a perfect 15-for-15 season in 1986 that resulted in Horse of the Year honours. Fontaines son, Marc, trained the four-year-old pacing stallion for owner Forrest Bartlett.

Marc Fontaine was unable to attend the ceremonies, so Bob Boni accepted on behalf of the family.

[Lucien] was a great horseman, and in addition to being a great horseman, and always a gentleman, he was also a strong advocate for horsemen, Boni said. I think this would be an extremely proud moment for him. Everybody knows what hes accomplished. I think the Hall of Fame is adding a real champion and a real star.

Previously, Marc Fontaine said about his father, Its very gratifying and satisfying to see him finally making it [to the Hall of Fame]. He didnt race to become in the Hall of Fame, but he worked very hard and was very successful. Were happy to see it recognized.

(USTA)
When Jesse Trimble and Melissa Lipscomb came to Culpeper County in August 2022, they were looking for a fresh start. Trimble came from Philadelphia in search of new opportunities and Lipscomb left Baltimore after a previous marriage had gone bad. They signed a one-year lease on an apartment, but were evicted after only four months.

Survey information provided by the Foothills Housing Network states that in the first six months of 2023, there were 275 unhoused people across Culpeper and the surrounding counties. The survey showed that 26 became unhoused due to evictions. Many who are unhoused resort to staying in cars, encampments and in the case of Trimble and Lipscomb, a hotel.

According to Cliff Lewis, pastor of the Culpeper Hope Community Church of the Nazarene, these issues happen often. He hopes to set up a system to help others like Trimble and Lipscomb.

Ive seen it quite a bit, Lewis said. We helped another young lady as well, in prayer and financially, and shes on her feet now and has a place.

When they came to Culpeper, the couple was eager to start their new lives together. Lipscomb signed a one-year lease for Apartment #5 at 306 North East St., a property owned by Frank Graham, which would have allowed them to stay until September 2023.

Trimble and Lipscomb began planting roots in town. Lipscomb got a position at Compass Counseling and Trimble started a work-from-home dispatch job, which he later lost due to internet connection issues.

According to the couple, Graham refused to fix the internet connection due to other priorities.

Trimble and Lipscomb said more issues with the apartment surfaced which Graham refused to address, including non-functional smoke alarms, a broken front door knob and the presence of three furnaces that would heat up the kitchen and forced the couple to keep a window open for circulation at all times.

The renters had officials from the town of Culpeper perform an inspection of the premises. According to a letter addressed to Graham from Gary Cole of the towns Department of Planning and Community Development, dated Nov. 15, 2022, the inspection confirmed the problems the couple had reported. Additional issues were found such as a dead rodent, flooding in the walkway to the door that required the use of a sump pump and a lack of carbon monoxide detectors.

A similar inspection conducted by Deputy State Fire Marshal Tony Dennis corroborated the towns findings. That inspection was confirmed by Virginia Department of Fire Programs communication manager Will Merritt.

On November 1, the couple received a failure-to-pay notice, which they disputed, having kept receipts from their payments.

Trimble and Lipscomb obtained financial assistance for rent from the Salvation Army, but when they approached Graham with the paperwork they were denied. According to the couple, they were informed via letter that Graham would not accept the third-party rental assistance due to previous experience.

According to the Department of Professional and Occupational Regulations website, Grahams refusal is a violation of a provision of the Virginia Fair Housing Law which went into effect in 2022.

Graham and his legal representation did not respond to requests for comment.

Trimble and Lipscombs lawyer, Dan Turczan of Waldman & Associates, would not speculate on possible housing discrimination.

The couple scrambled and were able to get $900 in rental assistance through local churches, including St. Stephens Episcopal Church, Family Community Church and Culpeper Presbyterian.

Trimble and Lipscomb managed to scrape the money together, but were again refused by Graham. In court, Trimble and Lipscomb found out Graham claimed the couple owed him more than $2,000 in back rent. According to Lipscomb, the moment she said yes, we owe rent, before explaining the situation further, was when they lost the eviction case.

However, the amount was in dispute due to inconsistencies between the ledgers from Apartments.com, Lipscombs receipts and what was claimed on the detainer.

According to Turczan, this situation is common due to the rules governing such situations, once the couple got the notice and five days had passed, any amount owed would give the landlord legal cause to evict a tenant.

Trimble and Lipscomb were able to get enough funds together through a GoFundMe page to pay for an appeal to postpone the eviction.

After sending a notice to Graham about pursuing a discrimination case for not accepting the financial assistance, a settlement was reached between all parties. Trimble and Lipscomb wouldnt have to pay anything, but they had to move out by Jan. 31.

The problem is that the Virginia Residential Landlord-Tenant Act favors the landlord, said Turczan. The result is that you have people like Ms. Lipscomb and Mr. Trimble who have legitimate concerns, but cant get a court to hear them because of a technicality.

Trimble and Lipscomb were more fortunate than many, and were able to get assistance to manage their plight.

Nearly six months after their eviction, Trimble and Lipscomb found a new place to live and filed a complaint with the Virginia Department of Fair Housing regarding their situation with Graham.

Were hoping that this teaches someone about their rights in this matter, that someone can learn about the process of an unlawful detainer summons from a renters point of view, said Trimble.
Gering Public Library and The Emporium Express Bean & Bottle are partners in wine, teaming up to cultivate a series of classes on the wines of Europe, including Italy, Spain and Portugal.

I want to make wines more approachable to everybody. They shouldnt be intimidating, Alexandria Schluter, of The Emporium Express, Bean & Bottle, said in a press release. Schluter will teach the classes at the Gering Emporium, 1650 10th St.

Due to space, class sizes are limited, so stop by the Gering Emporium location to register. Those age 21 and older can pay $10 for five 2 ounce pours and snacks. If you are interested in learning about wines, but not drinking you will still need to register, but there will be no charge.

Classes include: Italian wines, July 10, 6 p.m.; Italian wines, July 17, 6 p.m.; Spanish wines, July 24, 6 p.m.; Spanish wines, July 31, 6 p.m.; Portuguese wines, Aug. 21, 6 p.m.; Portuguese wines, Aug. 28, 6 p.m.

Let the library be your book sommelier, Sherry Preston, public services librarian, said.

We have new books about wines to pair with this program. You can also find a large number of oenophile magazines in our downloadable library app, Libby. If you are headed overseas, you can plan ahead with a travel book on your destination. We have travel books for all of these countries, and new books on wines too.

For more information, contact the Gering Public Library at 308-436-7433 or gpl@geringlibrary.org.
Around lunchtime on an average Thursday, a crowd begins to form behind the Scotts Bluff County Courthouse. The customers are intent on getting a taste of something that cant be found anywhere else.

Two local businesses have set up shop on the lawn. Though they seem to have little in common at a glance, the operators of the hot dog cart, Mikes Wild Dogs, and lemonade trailer, Lemon Love, have similar origin stories and have become integral parts of a growing food vendor scene in the Scottsbluff/Gering area.

Mikes Wild Dogs is owned and operated by Michael Wilson with help from his family. Wilson graduated from culinary arts school at the age of 19, and has worked many restaurant and construction jobs since then. When he arrived in Scottsbluff, he had a strong desire to share one of his specialties with his new neighbors.

When I moved to Nebraska five years ago  my wife is from here, Im from New Mexico  I wanted to introduce the community to my green chili. But there were so many taco trucks and Mexican restaurants that I needed a different avenue, Wilson said. Thats when I decided that since I love hot dogs, I would try a hot dog cart.

Around the same time, another bold idea was taking shape in the mind of Desiree Ramirez, inspired by the unforgettable taste of her childhood. Those memories and a desire for something new led to the creation of Lemon Love.

It started just with a love of lemonade as a little girl that my grandma used to make. I was just trying to go after that same flavor because I remember watching her, and I think lemonade makes people happy, Ramirez said.

Over the next three years  with some interruptions caused by the COVID-19 pandemic  both vendors began to build loyal fanbases. Ramirez said that although some people initially doubted whether a beverage-centric trailer could make a profit, the business took off fairly quickly.

People have really taken to it, she said. A drink trailer was kind of a new concept, so they really liked it.

Wilson said that his idea took a little bit longer to gain traction. Though several cities across America have thriving hot dog scenes, Mikes Wild Dogs had to build one from the ground up in Scottsbluff.

Im from Albuquerque, and we had hot dog carts all over the place, he said New York City, Chicago  they have a hot dog culture, but there wasnt one here. So it started off kind of slow at first, but people have taken to it and Ive developed quite a loyal fanbase. They come out wherever I set up.

Ramirez, who had a background in restaurant management in addition to working as a nail technician for 26 years, said that one of the best aspects of running a mobile business is interacting with people in a variety of different places.

I like the service industry, I like people. I can talk to anybody. I love the continual different faces and different vibe that I get every day. I can be somewhere different, have different scenery. And we get the customers that come all the time. Its a nice feeling and a happy business, and I like that, she said.

Although Wilson had initially hoped to set up shop in a brick-and-mortar location, he said he is thankful that the mobility of his hot dog cart gives him the opportunity to cook and interact with his customers at the same time.

We feed off the energy of the groups of people around us, Wilson said. Thats what I really love about the mobile part. It puts me right in the middle of events, in the middle of concerts, in the middle of places where there are people.

A thriving and friendly community has formed among local vendors since Wilson first arrived on the scene three years ago.

A lot of us do not see each other as competition, we see each other as friends, he said. I dont pay for my lemonade anymore, I trade a hot dog for lemonade. I trade a hot dog for a burrito or a taco. We trade our craft and we encourage each other and get to know each other. We grow together.

Ramirez said that friendships with other vendors are good for everybody involved, especially since they are some of the only people who can relate to the ups and downs of running such a business.

It helps when youre jumping in to have a buddy, someone you can turn to, talk to and ask questions. And theyre the only person whos going to understand what you mean when your stuff falls over or you run out of something or dont have enough room. It takes somebody thats in it to sympathize with you, she said.

Ramirez said that the learning curve is steep in the world of food trucks, and that it is not uncommon for newcomers to try and fail. Veteran vendor and Dairy King owner Dale Blehm said that this often happens because people underestimate just how much work it takes to operate a truck, trailer or cart.

First of all, they think its easy, but Ive got news for them, Blehm said. Theres a lot of times Ive worked from 7 in the morning to 2 the next morning. You work getting stuff ready, then you work until 2 and youre back up the next day. They think it looks like its really easy  Pretty soon it catches up with you.

Despite those difficulties, Wilson and Ramirez said that the Scottsbluff/Gering community has shown tremendous support to the vendors who have managed to weather the storm and stay in business. Ramirez expressed her hope that those with the drive will continue to see that level of enthusiasm from the public.

Its nice when people are willing to take a chance because it is hard work. When they put their all in, its nice when the community rewards them with support. Hopefully, they continue to do that, she said.

Wilson said that vendors do what they do out of love for their work and for their communities, and seeing that love returned is a great feeling.

We really like serving the community, and we really love the way the community has come out and embraced not only our hot dog cart, but the other food trucks, he said. We love seeing the fans develop and the fact that this community is supportive of us.

With a summer of festivals, fairs and concerts on the horizon, the future certainly seems busy and bright for local vendors. Though there are good and bad days, Ramirez said that selling lemonade has given her something more than just a job.

I love what I do, and I wouldnt trade it for anything. I think thats important, being happy, and Im happy now.
The twin born first  Erin Patricia Lewis, by a minute  was the fierce sister. The protective sister. The outgoing sister.

The sister who left first.

I will greatly miss every single second of being a twin, Sarah Rasby said at the funeral last summer. I have so much gratitude for everything she did for me as a sister, even during the last few years; what she gave to me was immeasurable.

Erin died June 24, 2022, more than three years after a devastating cardiac event left her alive but severely disabled.

She left behind her son Teddy, an inquisitive 5-year-old, and her partner Ty Prucha, a long-ago college classmate turned fiance. She left behind her mom and her older sister. And she left behind Sarah, her other half.

When Sarah married Nick Rasby in 2012, she told him: Youre marrying both of us.

She was everything to me, Sarah said. She was my go-to person for everything.

Sarah turned 40 in February. She lives in south Lincoln, in a mid-century ranch with Nick and their sons, Cohen, 10, and Bennet, 7.

She juggles parenting and teaching yoga and working on her doctorate degree at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln.

Her research field: Caregiving.

There is an apt name for the kind of caregiver that Sarah and her twins other loved ones became on Monday, Nov. 12, 2018: Sudden Caregivers.

Research has yet to deeply recognize or explore the experience of sudden caregivers, Sarah wrote in her dissertation proposal.

Sudden Caregiver: The ordinary before and the unfathomable after.

What to call what happened that night in 2018? An accident? An incident? The 12 Minutes That Broke Their Hearts?

For weeks, Erin hadnt been herself. She wasnt sleeping well. She had panic attacks  heart racing, palms sweating. It had been a year of change. Becoming a mom, starting a new job, building a dream house with Ty and coping with ongoing grief for her dad, whod died of colon cancer the year before.

Shed been worried enough to see a doctor and get hooked up to an EKG. Everything checked out.

Sarah replays that etched-in-time Monday evening. Erin calling Ty from the grocery store to say she couldnt drive home, that shed had a panic attack in the parking lot.

Ty picking her up with Teddy in the backseat and, as they approached home, seeing her body go limp. The frantic drive to the hospital ER.

Sarah was bathing her boys when the call came. At the hospital, a nurse called them into a private room: Erin hadnt been breathing when she arrived and doctors were working to revive her.

I ran out into the hallway hyperventilating and screaming No! Sarah remembers. No, no, no, no!

She slid down the wall, her hands and feet cramping.

She recognized the feeling. Im going into shock.

Breathe, she told herself. Breathe.

Its what she teaches others now, part of her research on the effects of self-compassion and mindfulness for family caregivers, a huge and hidden population in America  estimated at 38 million; many of them women. And many who struggle with isolation, anxiety, depression and their own declining health.

Its a staggering number, Sarah said. Those 38 million Americans need help.

What I think is whats needed most is a change in the social perspective that to be a caregiver means you have to go it alone.

And you cant predict when that will be.

Never in my life did I think Id be a caregiver for my 35-year-old sister.

***

All the emotions lived in this new world.

Hope next to heartache, optimism alongside despair.

You ARE healing, moment to moment, Sarah wrote in her journal, weeks after the accident. You are on your way back to being a mama at home with Teddy.

Two months later: I love you so much, Erin. I cant imagine how difficult this has been for you lately. My heart is so heavy.

Erins diagnosis was dire. A global ischemic injury  death of brain cells due to lack of oxygen to the brain.

Those panic attacks? Likely heart arrhythmias culminating in a perfect, near-fatal storm, Sarah says.

Erin spent months at Madonna Rehabilitation Hospital. Her mom and big sister Maggie took her to New Orleans for eight weeks of specialized therapy. Ty fixed up a small house and Erin moved in with round-the-clock care. The pandemic came and a hard road got harder.

For the last year of her life, Erin lived in a nursing home in Tekamah, close to their mom.

My mom was a fierce advocate for Erin, Sarah said. Ty and other family members were always on the same side of that. I didnt do this alone.

But when everything changed for Erin, everything changed for Sarah.

She didnt go to work  couldnt bear to go to work  for six weeks, and eventually sold her share in a Lincoln yoga studio to devote more time to her twin.

She was her sisters power of attorney. She advocated for Erin with her care teams and doctors. She dealt with insurance companies. She pushed for more treatment and better options.

She stayed by Erins side. Held her hand, played her music, combed her hair. The twins watched old movies together and reruns of Friends. Sarah recounted tales of their college exploits, and Erin laughed.

In late 2019, Sarah was asked to moderate a panel at the Rosalynn Carter Institute for Caregivers in Atlanta and, amazed by the support work started by the former First Lady, began reimagining her own life. She started her doctoral program while Erin was still alive and nearly quit in the months after she died.

Friends and faculty pulled her through.

Shes focused her research on the value of self-compassion techniques for caregivers and removing stigma around disability. In June, she led a six-week self-compassion series for caregivers at Madonna and is collecting data on its effects.

Shes driven to do the work well and shes very inquisitive, Holly Batton-Bowers, Sarahs co-advisor and co-investigator for the series, said. Its exciting to see her take this work in a direction it hasnt been before.

Sarah had a foundation for her work. Her father spent his career working at a sheltered workshop for people with developmental disabilities in Omaha.

He treated them just like hed treat anyone else. He instilled in us that people with disabilities deserve attention, positive relationships and value.

Eventually, Sarah saw beyond the heartbreak  Erin losing so much, her home, her voice, her ability to eat, drink, walk, talk  to appreciate the new version of her sister.

I still had my sister and I could tell her full being and soul were still very much there. And I loved her.

A friend of the twins, part of Erins army of helpers, witnessed that love.

The bond of twins, I dont think anyone who is not a twin can understand, Katy Martin said. Youre always fighting for your sister. Keeping her close to your chest.

***

Sarah and Erin shared a womb, but they had separate cribs. By the time they could climb they often ended up nestled together for the night.

Two peas.

Sarah, the quiet one; Erin, the social one.

The twins did everything together growing up, from T-ball to talent shows. They werent identical but close enough to make people look twice.

Mom called them the Twinks when they were small, and it stuck. Erin outweighed Sarah by a pound at birth and never gave up her role as mother hen.

She was always looking out for me, Sarah said. She always carried so much confidence for me.

When they were in sixth grade at Holy Ghost Catholic school in Omaha, Sarah ran for class president.

There was a recount. It turned out there were more ballots than there were students  and Erin had been in charge of counting the ballots. Then there was the year Sarah couldnt believe her long jump number at track and field day. She looked up, and there was Erin, winking at the judges table.

Erin looking out for Sarah again and wanting her to win.

Sarah wanted Erin to win, too.

The twin born second  only by a minute  loved Erin, the essence of Erin, the Erin who lived so bravely for so long after Nov. 12, 2018.

In the early months, Erin could repeat a few words. I. Am. Beautiful, Sarah would say. I. Am. Beautiful, her twin would answer. I. Am. Strong. I. Am. Strong. I. Am. Love. I. Am. Love.

Whats your name? Erin.

Whats your babys name? Teddy.

She could answer Yes and No.

Erin smiled when Teddy walked in the room. She laughed at Tys jokes. She cried.

She knew her people, the twins friend Katy says. Or maybe it was more that her heart knew.

Time passed and many friends stopped visiting, not knowing what to say. Erin began having seizures and ended up in the hospital five times with kidney infections. Her muscles were in a constant state of contraction. Sarah saw the pain in her eyes. The trickle of words slowed.

During Covid, it stopped, Sarah said. The isolation caused further decline.

When Sarah couldnt see her sister in person, she FaceTimed her, Erins phone mounted to the wall and set to automatically answer as a video call.

Hey, Sissy. I love you.

Erin would just light up when shed hear Sarahs voice, said Tammy Ellis, Erins hospice nurse. You could tell she and Sarah had that connection where she knew Sarah was always going to be there for her.

Sarah prayed with Erin in the morning and recited the Hail Mary, words carried over the ether, every night.

She had become the mother hen. Her sisters protector.

She went back to school for Erin and for all of the people who had an Erin in their lives.

All of the work I do is because of Erin and my caregiving experience for her.

Its been a year now since Erin passed.

She still feels a little numb. Deep wells of grief followed by periods of peace. Joy stirred by a memory. She feels sadness for Ty and Teddy and the future they lost.

Shes waiting. Letting herself be; treating herself with compassion.

Shes breathing.
Jean Foster and Emily Kiral had a lot on their plate this year as they wanted to eliminate school meal debt in Iredell-Statesville Schools.

They almost completely cleaned off the plate as between the efforts of their Clean Slate for a Full Plate campaign on AngelLink.com and others who donated directly to the school system, $32,000 was raised to pay off school meal debt.

It wasnt just us doing it by any means, but getting it out to the public and letting the public know it is how that ended up happening, Foster said.

Foster said with help from Angel Link and spreading the word through local media, they were glad to shine a light on the issue of student meal debt in the county.

I said over and over through the campaign that if we just got enough people to know about it, then we could take care of it, Foster said. This community is a giving community and theyre going to help kids when they can.

Kiral was originally inspired by a similar campaign online. After she shared it with Foster and later in the group Iredell Co. Family for Safe Schools and others on Facebook, the campaign got underway.

Its so important to make sure our children have food in their bellies to be able to focus and fuel their bodies and minds. As a community, it is our responsibility to raise these children to be happy, productive and healthy citizens, Kiral said.

With Iredell-Statesville School serving roughly 16,000 meals a day, it isnt surprising how much student meal debt is generated, especially in light of the past few years.

Federal funding had covered school meal costs during the pandemic, but Congress didnt renew the legislation that would have continued to fund such programs. Iredell-Statesville School policy is to feed every student, but at $3 a day per student, those numbers can add up quickly for those that dont qualify or simply havent applied for free or reduced meal programs.

Iredell-Statesville School Nutrition is very grateful for the fundraising efforts to help with student charges, School Nutrition Director Tina Wilson said as she explained the school systems policy. If the student does not have money, their account is charged $1.50 for breakfast and $3 for lunch which can add up very quickly when students dont have money. We made the decision not to deny a child a meal because we know that many of these students need the meals they receive at school. Hungry children cannot learn. We also do not want to embarrass a child or what is considered lunch shaming by denying them a meal.

Current law doesnt allow for school nutrition funds to pay off debt. Wilson said before COVID, there was around $10,000 in student charges by year end.

The demand was still there despite the lack of federal dollars to pay it, but Wilson said between the fundraiser and other organizations like churches, parents and clubs donating, the district only had to pay off $5,131.38 in debt at the end of the year.

I am very proud of my departments dedication to serve our students healthy and nutritious meals every day. We know that for many of our students, these are the only meals they receive. Its not just a job but a mission to make sure no child goes hungry, Wilson said.
Did you know more than 120 million adults in the United States have cardiovascular disease? In Iredell County alone, heart disease is the second leading cause of death.

To stay proactive in the fight against cardiovascular disease in Iredell County, Iredell Health System offers a wide range of heart and vascular care services. Iredells team of cardiologists and vascular surgeons utilize state-of-the-art technology to diagnose and treat cardiovascular diseases each and every day.

Supporting the health systems continuous commitment to delivering the highest quality cardiovascular care for the community, the Iredell Health Foundation is hosting its second annual Heart of Jazz, benefitting the Cardiac & Vascular Care Fund for Iredell Health System.

Proceeds from Heart of Jazz support the purchase of new cardiovascular equipment, provide patient assistance, and expand cardiovascular service offerings for the community.

Heart of Jazz will take place from 6-10 p.m. on Nov. 3, at The Brawley Estate in Mooresville. The event will feature a live musical performance by Mo Money, a five-piece jazz band comprised of the nations top studio musicians, songwriters, and producers  all of whom have national performance and recording credits. In addition, Heart of Jazz will have a silent auction, a cash bar, and hors doeuvres.

We are excited to again bring together jazz, fun, and spirits to support our patient assistance program and enhance cardiovascular services at Iredell Health System. Our ultimate goal is to provide advanced cardiac and vascular care to our community, and this annual event will play a significant role in achieving it, said Jen Balog, executive director of the Iredell Health Foundation.

Several sponsorship opportunities are available. Your participation in Heart of Jazz is a gift of heart health for your community.

For more details about the event and sponsorship opportunities, visit heartofjazz.org, email foundation@iredellhealth.org, or call 704-878-7669.
Like most kids, I had a dog while growing up. During our 17 years in the Philippines, we had several dogs. Cant remember their names, but do remember that one night during a party, one was killed by a typical steely boy trick: Lace a hot dog with rat poison. Throw it over your wall. Dog eats the hot dog, and dies. That is the end of your security system.

We later moved on base and bought another dog. Months later, we evacuated the base due to the impending volcanic eruption of Mt. Pinatubo. We left our dog in the care of our housekeeper. Have no idea what happened to mans best friend.

Aso, is the Tagalog word for dog. Though against the law, one report contends that half a million aso are slaughtered annually in the Philippines, for food. I remember hearing most Filipinos wouldnt eat American dogs because they were too fat, but I never investigated that cultural peculiarity.

Americans love their dogs, but not in such an all-consuming fashion as some Filipinos. In fact, Americans spend roughly $1,500 in basic annual expenses on Max, and Luna,  the two most favored names for male/female dogs in the U.S. Here are some other canine statistics: about 500,000 service dogs help people under the Americans with Disabilities Act; about 10 percent of those are trained therapy dogs.

To be objective, dogs arent always mans best friend. According to the CDC, there are more than 4.5 million dog bites a year in the U.S., with roughly 30-50 resulting in deaths.

Heres a story from the Philippines thats dogged me for years:

Some good friends were away in the states. Their Filipino housekeeper was left in charge, but theyd asked us to be on call in case of an emergency. Sometime after they left, their housekeeper called: Their dog was sick and wouldnt take his prescribed medicine. Could I please help?

I went over shortly after the call. Shed made several unsuccessful attempts to get the German shepherd to take the medicine in his food. After a few efforts at cajoling the dog to take the pill, I became more assertive: grasping him around the neck, I tried to force the pill into his mouth. He promptly spit out the pill but not before biting my hand.

I gave my apologies for my unwise and unsuccessful attempts to medicate the dog. With the high incidence of rabies in the Philippines, I left immediately for the emergency room at nearby Clark Air Force Hospital. It was Saturday, so no other clinics were open.

The corpsmen were very helpful, and dressed my wound, but we soon ran into a bureaucratic snafu. They agreed I should begin the rabies series of shots but couldnt decide if, or how much, I should be charged. Military personnel have free medical care, but civilians pay for most services. Vaccines however, were provided at no cost. The conundrum was, treat the rabies series (five shots, I believe) as regular vaccines, or charge me the $200-$300 dollar treatment fee. Finally, a wiser head called an off-duty admin officer, who said, Give the guy the shot. Well work out money matters later.

A few days later, our friends housekeeper called, Their dog had died. After notifying the hospital, they contacted the base vet. Arrangements were made to bring the dogs carcass on base; remove the head, and ship it to a lab in Japan for evaluation. In the meantime, I took my second rabies shot.

Fortunately, before it was time for shot number three, word from Japan confirmed the dog did not die of rabies. My wound was healing nicely, and with the good news about the dog, as well as the hospitals waiving my vaccine charge, I was able to smile and reach back many years to some lines from a favorite poem, An Elegy on the Death of a Mad Dog.

But soon a wonder came to light, that showd the rogues they lied. The man recoverd of the bite, the dog it was that died.  Oliver Goldsmith
The Rotary Club of Greater Statesville awarded six scholarships totaling $7500 to outstanding students from the Career Academy and Technical School (CATS) at the recent 2023 Awards Program at the CATS Conference Center located in Troutman.

The scholarships will provide financial assistance for students pursuing technical, vocational, trade, manufacturing and health-related fields while developing specific job skills needed in Iredell County to address the employment shortages in these critical areas. The recipients of these awards have outstanding credentials including past school and job success, academic ability, and community service.

Recipients and the schools they will be attending are Emily Monaghan, James Madison University, Toby Cavin, Mitchell Community College, Jayda Byers, UNC-Charlotte, Lily Jordan, Appalachian State University, Carley Bailey, UNC-Charlotte, and Draiven Porter, Universal Technical Institute.
The private company will assume the responsibilities of civil aviation operations, al-Baath reveals.

Al-Baath has learned that the Syrian government is considering granting the management and operation of Damascus International Airport to an undisclosed private company, with a 49 percent stake.

According to reliable sources within the Ministry of Transport, the government is pursuing a participatory train approach for the upcoming phase, aiming to foster a partnership with the private sector.

These sources, who have chosen to remain anonymous, informed Al-Baath newspaper that the ongoing discussions and meetings surrounding this matter highlight the crucial need for this partnership, given the challenging circumstances faced by the civil aviation sector in Syria. Consequently, this project aims to bolster the operations of the historic airport and address the current limitations.

What are the responsibilities of a private partner?

The private company will assume the responsibilities of civil aviation operations, encompassing various tasks and services related to passenger and cargo air transport. These include aircraft ownership, acquisition, leasing, and investment, flight organization, airline agency representation, and establishment of branches both domestically and internationally.

Furthermore, the private company will also take charge of ground services, ensuring the provision of essential infrastructure such as equipment, trucks, cranes, and ground vehicles that facilitate the smooth movement of arrivals and departures. Maintenance and rehabilitation services will also be provided.

Regarding the fate of workers and employees at Damascus airport, the sources have confirmed that their rights are safeguarded. They emphasized that there are no provisions permitting the private company to dismiss, terminate, or replace workers. On the contrary, there are assurances that compensation, incentives, and work-related benefits for the current airport team will be increased and enhanced.

It is worth noting that the government has enacted Law No. 5 of 2016, which pertains to public-private partnerships for the establishment, maintenance, rehabilitation, and operation of state-owned infrastructure and projects. This law provides the legal framework for the implementation of such initiatives.

This article was translated and edited by The Syrian Observer. The Syrian Observer has not verified the content of this story. Responsibility for the information and views set out in this article lies entirely with the author.
Chinese online literature surges in popularity overseas

People's Daily Online) 10:18, July 03, 2023

Photo shows a view of the online literature industry expo, a part of the 2023 China International Online Literature Week (CIOLW) in Hangzhou, east China's Zhejiang Province. (Xinhua/Xu Yu)

The overseas market value of Chinese online literature exceeded 3 billion yuan (about $414.5 million) and Chinese online literary works attracted more than 150 million overseas readers by the end of 2022, according to a report released recently by the online literature center of the China Writers Association (CWA).

The report said the total revenue for the country's major platforms in the online literature industry exceeded 23 billion yuan in 2022.

In recent years, China has made more solid progress in exporting Chinese online literary works, said Ouyang Youquan, a professor at the School of Humanities at Central South University.

The influence of Chinese online literature has continued to grow, given the increasing number and genres of literary works introduced in overseas markets and the expanding industrial chain of the Chinese online literature sector, Ouyang added.

Over the past 20-plus years, a large number of Chinese authors have produced numerous online literary works, said He Hong, director of the CWA's online literature center.

Online literary works with intriguing plots and cliffhangers pander to popular taste, and there are now more than 200 sub-categories of China's online literature genres, He added.

These are important factors behind why Chinese online literary works attract readers both at home and abroad, He pointed out.

The beauty of the traditional culture behind Chinese online literary works holds great appeal for overseas readers. For instance, Library of Heaven's Path, regarded as a fine example of a Chinese online literature export, has been translated into various foreign languages, including English, French and Turkish.

"The most important reason for the works continuing popularity is that it reveals the traditional Chinese culture behind teaching," said the books author.

Ouyang believes that fine traditional Chinese culture can transcend time and space and cross borders. By taking root in the cultural soil of China and "telling Chinese stories well," Chinese online literature has become a bridge for international cultural exchanges.

The strong vitality of China's online literary works is inseparable from the operating model of Chinese online literature platforms.

Webnovel, the international portal of China Literature, a leading online literature platform in China, has supported the exports of Chinese online literary works by launching a translation program. In addition, many overseas readers of Chinese online literary works have become creators.

To support authors of online literary works, Webnovel, in collaboration with National University of Singapore and Nanyang Technological University, initiated a global author incubation project in 2022 and rolled out the Webnovel 2023 Author Professionalization Initiative this February.

Industry insiders say that the dissemination of Chinese online literature overseas has helped global readers gain a better understanding of and develop a stronger interest in Chinese culture, which will better help spread Chinese online literary works in the rest of the world.

(Web editor: Hongyu, Liang Jun)




PARIS, July 2 (Xinhua) -- Violence continued in France after a police officer shot dead a 17-year-old teen on Tuesday. Over 1,300 people were arrested in the country Friday night, including 406 in Paris.

In addition, at least 719 people were arrested overnight from Saturday to Sunday in France, Interior Ministry said on Sunday.







Produced by Xinhua Global Service
Activists have highlighted that many of the incidents that occurred in the city appear to be orchestrated by Tahrir al-Sham, according to Damas Post.

The correspondent from Damas Post reported that a young man was killed and another was injured by stray bullets during a clash involving weapons in the city of al-Bab, located in the eastern countryside of Aleppo. The incident took place on Saturday evening following a dispute between al-Najjar and Al-Qadirani near the Turk Mosque in the Zamzam neighbourhood.

Furthermore, just two days ago, Hassan al-Waki, a young man with special needs, was fatally shot by three unidentified gunmen riding in a Santa Fe car near the al-Ihsan Mosque in Bab.

The recent surge in shooting and security-related incidents in -Bab has raised suspicions about Jabhat al-Nusra, also known as Hayat Tahrir al-Sham. This group, under the leadership of Abu Muhammad al-Julani, controls the Idleb region and aims to expand its influence while implementing its agenda in the areas controlled by the Syrian National Armys (SNA) Olive Branch and Euphrates Shield.

Activists have highlighted that many of these incidents appear to be orchestrated by Tahrir al-Sham, utilizing their weaponry and resources in the region. Their hostility is particularly targeted toward the Third Corps and the National Army in general. By causing chaos in these areas, they aim to portray them negatively through their manipulated media, presenting their project as the superior solution to all these issues.

Third Corps

On Sunday, the leadership of the Third Corps of the Syrian National Army, led by Sheikh Azzam al-Gharib, also known as Abu al-Ezz Saraqeb, held a meeting with local notables, revolutionaries, and the head of the local council in the city of Bab, located in the eastern countryside of Aleppo. The purpose of the meeting was to address the recent events occurring in the city.

During the discussions, all parties reached an agreement to provide support to revolutionary institutions and to reject any initiatives associated with Jabhat al-Nusra, Hayat Tahrir al-Sham (HTS), or the Islamic State (ISIS).

The leadership of the Third Corps is fully committed to resolving the turmoil in the liberated areas and dismantling detrimental projects like that of Hayat Tahrir al-Sham. Some believe that this group has played a role in the recent incidents, both in Bab and in the regions controlled by the National Army. Their motive appears to be tarnishing the reputation of these areas by spreading chaos and lawlessness, thereby presenting themselves as the supposed solution to all these problems.

Interim Government

The Syrian Interim Governments Ministry of Defense has announced its plans to establish a permanent emergency force in the city of Bab, located east of Aleppo. This decision comes in response to the recent security chaos witnessed during the days of Eid al-Adha.

According to an official statement released by the interim government, the Ministry of Defense has committed to deploying military reinforcements from the national army and military police to form this specialized force. The primary objective of this force will be to restore and maintain security and stability in Bab.

The interim government expressed its concern over the unfortunate events that unfolded in the city, resulting in the loss of a martyrs life and the injury of several others due to indiscriminate shooting from both sides engaged in conflict within the citys neighbourhoods. In light of these events, the Military Advisory Council instructed the deployment of additional military police personnel, supported by central forces from the Syrian National Army, to ensure security and stabilize the area.

This article was translated and edited by The Syrian Observer. The Syrian Observer has not verified the content of this story. Responsibility for the information and views set out in this article lies entirely with the author.
The United States has consistently opposed the Arab and Turkish efforts to foster closer ties with Syria, Athr Press writes.

Russian intelligence has issued a second warning in less than a month regarding suspicious activities by the United States in Syria. According to the Russian agency Sputnik, Director of the Russian Foreign Intelligence Service Sergey Naryshkin emphasized that James Miloy, the deputy commander of the US militarys Central Command, is allegedly leading terrorist activities of ISIS in southern Syria and Damascus. Naryshkin further claimed that the Biden administration is actively working to disrupt Arab-Syrian normalization and discredit the Syrian leadership. As part of these alleged efforts, the US is said to be preparing provocations, including the use of toxic chemicals.

The statement highlighted that these provocations would involve the application of toxic chemicals, similar to their previous use by fighters from the Hurras al-Din faction and gunmen from the Turkistan Islamic Party in the Syrian governorate of Idleb in May, which resulted in approximately 100 civilians being poisoned.

On May 30th, the Russian Foreign Intelligence Service previously reported that the United States was preparing terrorist attacks on crowded public places and government institutions in Syria. According to their information, the plan involved militants collaborating with secret cells of takfiri organizations based on Washingtons strategy.

The Russian agency asserted that the US military base in al-Tanf serves as a hub for criminal activities, where numerous ISIS fighters are trained. They highlighted that the American forces regularly replenish the ranks of terrorists and release them from prisons in the occupied northeastern part of Syria. Furthermore, the agency revealed that truck convoys transport small arms, ammunition, and anti-tank missile systems to these training camps.

The United States has consistently opposed the Arab and Turkish efforts to foster closer ties with Syria, particularly following Syrias readmission to the Arab League. The U.S. State Department Deputy Spokesperson, Videntant Patel, stated, We do not believe that Syria deserves to be readmitted to the Arab League at this time.

During the period of Arab rapprochement with Syria, the country witnessed a series of unusual military movements by the United States. These events commenced with the visit of US Chief of Staff Mark Milley in early March, followed by the announcement of the deployment of new weapons systems to US forces, including the HIMARS Missile. These developments have sparked discussions about Washingtons intention to establish an Arab military force in eastern Syria.

This article was translated and edited by The Syrian Observer. The Syrian Observer has not verified the content of this story. Responsibility for the information and views set out in this article lies entirely with the author.
President Assad emphasized that the Syrian government has implemented various legislative, legal, and reconciliation measures, al-Watan writes.

President Bashar al-Assad welcomed Jordanian Foreign Minister Ayman al-Safadi on Monday, engaging in discussions concerning bilateral relations and the issue of Syrian refugees. The focus of the talks revolved around facilitating the return of Syrian refugees to their homes and villages, prioritizing their safety and ensuring the necessary infrastructure, reconstruction, and rehabilitation measures are in place.

President Assad emphasized that the Syrian government has implemented various legislative, legal, and reconciliation measures to create an optimal environment for the refugees return. He emphasized the humanitarian and moral nature of the refugee situation, calling for it to remain detached from political considerations.

Minister Safadi, in turn, provided an update on Jordans recent efforts in facilitating the return of Syrian refugees. He shared new proposals developed in coordination with the Arab Contact Group and the United Nations. Safadi reiterated Jordans commitment to supporting stability in Syria and expressed his countrys desire to collaborate with the Syrian government in various areas to strengthen cooperation and facilitate the return of Syrian refugees.

He also highlighted the importance of gradually addressing the long-term impacts of the Syrian crisis as the most practical and beneficial approach.

This article was translated and edited by The Syrian Observer. The Syrian Observer has not verified the content of this story. Responsibility for the information and views set out in this article lies entirely with the author.
Your daily brief of the English-speaking press on Syria.

The foreign minister of Jordan urged for global investment in Syrias devastated infrastructure on Monday, with the aim of expediting the return of refugees to the war-torn country. Similarly, Lebanese Defense Minister Maurice Slim called upon France to assist Lebanon in repatriating Syrian refugees to their home country. Concurrently, there has been a significant wave of resignations by public servants in Lattkaia, with a staggering count of 900 resignations since the beginning of 2023.

Jordans FM Calls for Investment into War-Torn Syria to Speed up Refugee Returns

Jordans foreign minister Monday called for international investment into conflict-ravaged Syrias crippled infrastructure to speed up refugee returns, Asharq al-Awsat reported.

Ayman Safadi made the remarks during a visit to the capital Damascus, where he met with Syrian President Bashar Assad and his counterpart, Faisal Mekdad.

We have offered everything we can to ensure them a dignified life, Safadi said at a news conference following his meetings. But what we are sure of is that the refugees futures lie in their country.

The Jordanian foreign minister said that securing critical infrastructure and basic necessities will speed up voluntary refugee returns, especially as international aid for refugees continues to decline.

Assad in a statement released by his office echoed similar sentiments, saying that investment in infrastructure and reconstruction would create the best environment for refugee returns.

We reaffirm that the refugee file is a solely humanitarian and moral issue that should not be politicized in any way, the statement read.

Anti-refugee sentiment has soared in Lebanon and Turkiye, two other neighbouring countries hosting Syrian refugees.

But while government-held Syria receives humanitarian aid through United Nations agencies, Western-led sanctions have made it difficult for Damascus to fix electricity, water and other infrastructure decimated in the conflict and more recently by a devastating 7.8 magnitude earthquake in February.

Safadis meetings with Mekdad and Assad also discussed the humanitarian crisis in Syria, steps toward a political solution to the conflict, and drug smuggling, which has become a lucrative industry in the economically shattered country.

Poor wages push more workers to resign in Syrias Lattakia

The number of applied resignations from the public sector has reached 900 since early 2023, most pushed by poor wages, the head of the Workers Union in Latakia Governorate, on the Syrian coast, revealed on Monday.

In a statement to the pro-government al-Watan newspaper, Moneim Othman, head of the Workers Union in Latakia, said that most of the applied resignations are for workers, who do hard and tough jobs, or those who incur big transportation expenses due to far distances between their workplaces and residencies.

Workers, who resign, secure other jobs either on agricultural land or in shops or taxis or other jobs that at least save transportation expenses, according to Othman.

He added that workers have the right to resign, but the Union is not the party to accept or reject the resignation, but those for which they work, noting that many resignations have been rejected due to their impacts on workflow.

There are about 85,000 workers in both public and private sectors in Latakia, according to the official, who stressed that the issue of increasing resignations should be solved through improving the living conditions of the workers.

He noted that the Workers Union always calls for increasing the monthly wages by about ten folds in order for the workers to be able to secure their basics amid the dire economic conditions witnessed in the country.

He said, We have been calling for an increase in wages for the poor workers, who cannot do their duties or offer for costs of clothes for their children.

He confirmed that the increase in wages should be adequate in order to enable workers to secure all their families needs thus they can dedicate themselves full time to their work in a way that serves the work without being busy thinking about how to secure their basics.

Syrias recovery is likely to be very long and difficult

Iranian scholar Majid Rafizadeh wrote an op-ed for Arab News in which he argues that Syrias socioeconomic recovery will not be smooth and swift. For him, there are several reasons and obstacles that point to the premise that there is going to be a long road ahead for Syria as it seeks to implement a meaningful and substantial recovery that will benefit the majority of the Syrian people.

In his views, while Syrias readmission to the Arab League and the latest diplomatic rapprochements between Damascus and the Gulf states are indeed steps in the right direction, a lot of work remains to be done if the Syrian government truly desires to lead its nation into peace and prosperity.

One reason for the rising violence in southern Syria is drug smuggling. There has been a surge in drug trading and smuggling recently. In addition, Daesh has not completely vanished from Syria and operates in scattered areas such as Deraa and the Syrian desert.

In addition to heightened insecurity and the drug smuggling issue, it is critical to note that Syrias path to recovery is multifaceted and complex. For one thing, the economy is crippled after years of conflict, which has inflicted an unimaginable degree of devastation. Syrias gross domestic product has shrunk by more than half and its currency has lost a significant portion of its value, leading the World Bank to rank it as a low-income country.

Rafizadeh sees that in spite of the fact that Syria has recently been experiencing positive developments, such as being readmitted into the Arab League and improving its ties with the Gulf nations, Damascus route to full socio-economic recovery is going to be extremely difficult and will most likely take a very long time.

The ICJ can slow down Assads normalisation drive

The case filed against the Syrian regime may not immediately result in justice for its victims, but it will undermine attempts to rehabilitate it, according to Al-Jazeera columnist Mark Kersten.

In his op-ed, Kersten writes that the announcement that Canada and the Netherlands have begun legal proceedings against Syria at the International Court of Justice (ICJ) is especially noteworthy.

Ottawa has said it is seeking to hold Damascus accountable under the United Nations Convention Against Torture, for the countless human rights violations it has inflicted on the Syrian people since 2011.

Kersten argues that the move by Canada and the Netherlands may end up being largely symbolic. But symbols matter. Justice is not always measured in outcomes; the process also matters. Even with the attention of the West focused on the situation in Ukraine, the ICJ case shows that Canada and the Netherlands are firmly in the corner of the victims and survivors of the Assad regimes violence.

Keeping the hope alive that justice will eventually catch up with Assad might not prevent his political rehabilitation, but it could slow it down. The decision to bring Syria to the ICJ over its campaign of torture should help close the political space available to those who might otherwise consider doing business with Assad.

Kersten concludes that the Dutch and Canadian move at the ICJ means Assad will continue to be hounded by allegations of atrocities. It means that Syrias victims and survivors will remain relevant in both the public consciousness and the international courtroom.

The process of achieving accountability, he adds, is often winding and painfully slow. But because of efforts like Canadas and the Netherlands, maybe, just maybe, the space around Assad will one day shrink and his friends will grow tired of rubbing shoulders with a war criminal par excellence. When that day comes, justice for Syria will move from a mirage to a distinct possibility.

Lebanon calls on France to support Syrian refugees return to homeland

Lebanese Defense Minister Maurice Slim on Monday called on France to support Lebanon in returning Syrian refugees to their homeland, the National News Agency reported.

We call on France to convey Lebanons message to the international community about returning Syrian refugees to their homeland, Slim said during his meeting in Beirut with Joelle Garriaud-Maylam, a member of the French Senate Committee on Foreign Affairs, Defense and Armed Forces.

Slim called on the international community to take necessary steps to support the Lebanese appeal for the return of the displaced Syrians to their country.

The Lebanese minister also praised the continuous French support for Lebanon and the initiatives to find solutions to its ongoing crises.

For her part, Maylam expressed her confidence in the ability of the Lebanese to overcome the crisis that weighs heavily on Lebanon, affirming Frances permanent support for Lebanon in various fields, especially the military one.

Families of thousands missing in Syria draw some hope from U.N. push to find loved ones

The Associated Press publishes stories about missing people in Syria and their families.

In her small apartment in opposition-held Idlib in northwest Syria, Umm Mohammed is depressed and lethargic. But when her phone rings or someone knocks on the door she becomes suddenly alert. Maybe, finally, her husband has come back.

In 2013, Syrian soldiers broke into the couples home in Damascus as they were having breakfast, she said. She and her husband had previously taken part in anti-government protests.

They beat him up in front of my young daughter and then took him away, said Umm Mohammed, or mother of Mohammed, the name of her oldest son. She did not want to give her own full name for fear the authorities would harm her husband if he is still alive.

The U.N. General Assembly voted Thursday to form an independent international institution to search for the missing in Syria in government and opposition-held areas.

The newly created institution would collect information from families, Syrian civil society organizations, whistleblowers, U.N. agencies, and through inquiries to the Syrian government and authorities in opposition-held areas.

In recent years, whistleblowers and defectors have come forth with some information, including the so-called Caesar photos, a trove of 53,000 images taken in Syrian prisons and military hospitals. The photos showed the bodies of detainees with signs of torture.

Setting up an international body would be a significant move in a region scarred by war, where tens of thousands of families in neighbouring countries are waiting for information about their loved ones.

Investigating their fate should also pave the way for addressing other human rights issues in Syria, including the dire conditions for political prisoners.

Umm Mohammad is less hopeful of getting information about her husband from Syrian authorities. Assad has denied holding political prisoners, labelling the opposition as terrorists. Direct cooperation with Syria by investigators could also be difficult because it does not extradite its citizens.
Usha Gupta Vs Assistant Commissioner of Revenue (Calcutta High Court)

Introduction: The Calcutta High Court recently gave a verdict in the case of Usha Gupta Vs Assistant Commissioner of Revenue, revolving around the imposition of penalties for discrepancies in consignment quantity and documentation. The case is critical in the context of penalties levied under the e-Way Bill regulations in India, particularly in instances of goods shortages in consignments.

Analysis: The case arose from the detention of two consignments intended for export to Bhutan. Detention was based on three grounds: the physical quantity of the boxes being less than what was documented, the Integrated Goods and Service Tax (IGST) not being charged, and discrepancies between the export invoice and the purchase order.

The court found that the penalty could not be imposed on the entire consignment solely due to the discrepancy in the quantity of goods. Even at the time of the detention, the appellant had shown willingness to pay a penalty for the shortage of goods. The court also found that the alleged discrepancies in the sales order and the purchase order were not valid grounds for a 200% penalty on the entire consignment. As such, the court set aside the order of the appellate authority to impose a penalty on the entire consignment and remanded the matter for recalculation of the penalty concerning only the shortage of goods.

Conclusion: The Calcutta High Courts ruling in Usha Gupta Vs Assistant Commissioner of Revenue is an important decision clarifying the limits of penalty imposition in the context of e-Way Bills in India. It asserts that penalties should not be imposed on an entire consignment due to a shortage in quantity, highlighting the need for a more nuanced and proportional approach to handling such cases. This ruling reinforces the principle of fairness and proportionality in the imposition of penalties in customs and tax laws.

FULL TEXT OF THE JUDGMENT/ORDER OF CALCUTTA HIGH COURT

1. This intra-Court appeal is directed against the order dated 1 st March, 2023 passed in WPA 3512 of 2023 by which the learned Single Bench was declined to grant any interim order. The appellant, being aggrieved by this order, has preferred this appeal.

2. The learned advocates for the parties pray that the writ petition can be taken up for consideration along with the appeal. Accordingly, the writ petition as well as the appeal is taken up for hearing to be decided.

3. We have heard the learned advocates for the parties at length. Though elaborate submissions were made by Mr. Kanodia, learned counsel appearing for the appellant and Mr. Siddiqui, learned counsel appearing for the respondent, we need not labour much to elaborate on all factual issues. The case arose out of a detention of two consignments, which have been transported by the appellant for being exported to Bhutan. The detention of the goods was on the ground that the quantity of the boxes were lesser than the quantity shown in the document. Secondly, it was stated that IGST was not charged. The third issue is with regard to alleged discrepancy in the export invoice and the purchase order. So far as the issue relating to not mentioning charging IGST the appellate authority has granted relief in favour of the appellant assessee. So far as the aspect of discrepancy is concerned the learned advocate appearing for the appellant has produced before us a copy of the sales order which shows the sales order number as SG/2022-23/004 dated 23rd April, 2022. The purchase order placed by the purchaser from Bhutan shows the sales order number correctly and in the said purchase order license number of the purchase has been given as SAB84282. In the export invoice, which was generated by the appellant, buyers license number has been shows as buyers order number. In our view, this cannot be treated as a discrepancy because in the purchase order of the buyer the sales order number has been correctly shown as SG/2022-23/004. Therefore, on this ground the authorities could not have imposed 200% penalty on the entire consignment. So far as the third issue is concerned with regard to shortage of quantity of goods, it is submitted by the learned counsel for the appellant that even at the time of detention of the goods, the appellant expressed his willingness to pay penalty for the shortage of quantity of the goods. However, the authority while passing the penalty order has imposed penalty on the entire consignment which includes the amount of cess paid by the appellant.

4. In the light of the above, the appeal and the writ petition stand disposed of by setting aside the order passed by the appellate authority for levying penalty on the entire consignment and the matter is remanded back to the appellate authority to recalculate to take note of the order and recalculate the penalty in respect of shortage in quantity and over than quantity penalty shall be levied at 200% and the remaining penalty which has been remitted by the appellant shall be refunded to the appellant within a period of eight weeks from the date of receipt of the server copy of the order. Consequently, the application being CAN 1 of 2023 stands disposed of.
Over a dozen hospital workers picketed Sunday afternoon outside PeaceHealth St. John Medical Center over ongoing contract negotiations between PeaceHealth and lab professionals who say management has refused to bargain with them over ongoing issues related to staffing and low wages.

Wearing red shirts and holding signs that read More Techs Less Execs! and Safe Staffing Saves Lives, members of the Oregon Federation of Nurses and Health Professionals chanted slogans while drivers passing by often honked their horns in support.

The unions Facebook page states 80% of the professional lab crew picketed Sunday.

Shane Burley, communications organizer for the Oregon Federation of Nurses and Health Professionals, told The Daily News lab professionals at St. John are profoundly under-staffed, and the reason theyre under-staffed is because of historically lower wages.

The wages are not keeping up with the market or the area, he said.

Most of the unions proposals have been rejected by PeaceHealth, according to the Oregon Federation of Nurses and Health Professionals website, including a 15% increase in pay, plus a 6% raise in 2024 and a 5% increase in 2025.

Burley said raising the take-home pay for lab professionals would attract new blood and help retain current staff.

Everything affects patient care, said Burley. For example, if our workers are being underpaid and therefore understaffed, that could end up having an effect on patient care.

He said PeaceHealth has been reluctant to come to the table and tackle other key issues such as paid time off and scheduling concerns.

One lab professional picketing Sunday was Leila Johnson, a medical technologist with 10 years of experience, who said the cost of living, especially with housing and commuting, is taking its toll.

She said many lab professional dont own a house, they rent, and they want to make similar wages as lab professionals across the state.

Not a lot of people are coming into our field right now and a lot are retiring, and so we want to attract others in the field to come here and be a part of our community, said Johnson.

Burley said negotiations are at a standstill.

What we need is for them to come to the table and that is not happening,  Burley said.

Debra Carnes, senior director of marketing and communications for St. John and Southwest medical centers, said PeaceHealth aims to continue contract discussions that are sustainable for the facility.

We always respect our caregivers right to participate in activities such as informational picketing, she writes in an email. We look forward to re-engaging in constructive, good faith bargaining to reach an agreement for our caregivers that is fair, competitive and sustainable for our medical center and our community.
Deputies from the Cowlitz County Sheriff's Office arrested a Longview man early Sunday with the help of the Lower Columbia SWAT team and crisis negotiators.

Deputies detained Casey Lee Henderson, 31, in the the 4100 block of Ocean Beach Highway in West Longview, according to Chief Criminal Deputy Troy Brightbill.

Henderson is currently in the Cowlitz County Jail on outstanding warrants plus new suspected charges related to Sunday's events including obstructing a law enforcement officer and resisting arrest.

Deputies were initially called to the scene regarding a civil dispute, but authorities learned Henderson had an active felony warrant for unlawful possession of a firearm and violating the uniform controlled substance act. He reportedly barricaded himself inside the residence and refused to give up, so the Lower Columbia SWAT team and crisis negotiation team were called to the scene.

Eventually the crisis negotiation team talked with Henderson and he surrendered without any injury to himself or others.

Henderson's first court date is unknown at this time.
Meteorologists say dry conditions could cause rapid spread of new or existing fires in and near Skamania County  where a wildfire is already burning  through 11 p.m. Wednesday.

Stay up to date on Lower Columbia news, wherever you go Easily access the latest Lower Columbia news in an app that lets you select the topics that matter most to you.

The National Weather Service in Portland issued the Red Flag warning, which includes parts of Cowlitz County, at 5 a.m. Monday, and Cowlitz County's burn ban is set to start at midnight.

A wildfire in Skamania County has reached 533 acres in size, according to the Washington State Department of Natural Resources, and as of Sunday night, 0% was contained. A level 3 evacuation notice was issued.

The National Weather Service says there are unstable conditions in fire weather zones for the Eastern Gifford Pinchot National Forest Mt. Adams Ranger District and the extreme South Washington Cascades.

A Red Flag Warning means critical fire weather conditions are either occurring now, or will shortly, the National Weather Service reports.

Outdoor burning is not recommended, state meteorologists, as relative humidity for each afternoon through Wednesday is forecasted to be as low as 15%.

Low humidity takes moisture from the forest fuels, like grass and pine needles, according to the National Parks Service, and when the relative humidity drops, the risk of fire increase because the fuels become drier.

Cowlitz County burn ban, closed dredge site

A Cowlitz County burn ban is set to go into effect at midnight through at least Sept. 30, reports Cowlitz 2 Fire & Rescue.

All outdoor burning, including brush and yard debris piles, land clearing, and silvicultural burning will be prohibited, and all burn permits rescinded.

Recreational fires are allowed, which are:

- are on private property.

- have the property owners permission.

- are in an improved ring lined with metal, stone or masonry.

- are no bigger than 3'x3'.

- burn clean, seasoned fire wood.

- are supervised by someone 16 or older and sober who has the tools to put the fire out (like a charged hoseline).

The hot, dry weather has also extended the closure of the Lower Toutle dredge disposal site No. 1, according to Justin Hudek, safety supervisor for Cowlitz County Public Works.

The site, east of the Cowlitz Public Shooting Range on Toutle Park Road, was set to be closed to public access on Monday and Tuesday, but officials extended the closure through Friday due to the weather. Hudek writes in an email that the roughly 100-acre site is closed to "prevent excessive dust and danger of fire."

The gun range is also located on part of the dredge disposal site, but will remain open, Hudek added.

Editor's note: The Seattle Times reporter Vonnai Phair contributed to this article. This story has been updated to reflect changing conditions.
The charges on a credit card issued by a rural fire district just north of Portland had no apparent connection to firefighting.

Bank statements showed $40 spent at Scandalous Hair Design in downtown St. Helens, then $90 at another beauty salon in Scappoose. By the end of the day, charges totaled $265 for what appear to be makeovers to honor a group of senior volunteers and $45 more on groceries and pizza.

In the next months, the card held by the county coordinator of senior volunteers  whose grant-funded job was embedded with the fire department but had no ties to fire service  showed $66.43 charged at a Catherines clothing store in Beaverton, $138 at the local Dollar Tree, $5 at the Wiggle Butz Gourmet Pet Bakery & Gifts shop and $119.95 at another local clothing store, according to bank records obtained by The Oregonian/OregonLive.

Other employees given Columbia River Fire & Rescue credit cards racked up nearly daily charges for fast-food, though the district doesnt cover daily meals, as well as purchases on Amazon Marketplace, Craigslist and a recurring Apple iTunes charge.

Over seven years, the credit card spending totaled more than $700,000, according to a forensic audit. But the examiners said they found no receipts or purchase orders to determine if they were legitimate.

The Columbia County prosecutors office and state police have launched a criminal investigation into the fire departments past handling of finances, District Attorney Jeff Auxier confirmed. The governing board of the fire district commissioned the forensic audit, set to be released publicly on Friday.

Investigators also have identified eight former non-firefighter employees at the district who were enrolled for years in the state retirement system at a more lucrative rate that is reserved only for paid firefighters, the audit found.

The perk is worth thousands of dollars a year in extra compensation. The total taxpayer hit for the ineligible employees could reach hundreds of thousands of dollars if not clawed back by the fire district and state retirement system, according to the audit and fire officials.

Rampant financial irregularities at the fire district appear to have benefited a small cadre of longtime workers, forensic auditors found. Inattention by past fire chiefs and elected members of the districts board and a lack of internal controls allowed the spending to go unchecked, auditors said.

The districts budget for the senior volunteer coordinator and some of her expenses caught the attention of the new fire chief shortly after he was hired in December 2020 from out of state after a national search. The chief hired another outsider and former colleague of his last year to make sense of the budget after the longtime civilian finance manager left.

Theyve been giving out this money like they were a losing blackjack dealer in Vegas, said Fire Chief Joel Medina.

His new finance chief, Jimmy Sanchez, put it another way: This was the small towns slush fund.

Municipalities are the second most frequent victim of financial abuse behind banks, said Christopher Marquet, an expert on fraud and financial misconduct for Veritas Assurance Partners, a global risk consulting and investigative firm.

People will take advantage when you dont have the oversight or controls in place, or one person is in control of all the money, said Marquet, a senior partner at the firm.

Columbia River Fire & Rescue, the countys largest fire department covering a slice of a sprawling territory on the edge of the metro area, operates out of St. Helens old library, a nondescript brick building off Columbia Boulevard.

It provides firefighting and emergency medical care to over 27,000 people with 35 full-time paid firefighters, 12 volunteers and five non-firefighter paramedics. Theyre spread out among seven stations, including in the county seat of St. Helens, Columbia City, Warren, Prescott and Rainier.

The fire district, with a nearly $13 million budget, is financed by annual property taxes. Each year, the district sets the tax rate in an amount equal to its administrative expenses and benefit costs. The tax rate for fiscal 2022-23 was $2.97 per $1,000 of real market value.

The districts ex- finance manager, Marit Nelson, has denied any wrongdoing, as have other former employees, saying they followed all fire district guidelines.

Nelson, who resigned in 2021 at a salary of $120,873, oversaw the credit cards and the PERS enrollments. Nelson also was enrolled for the higher firefighter retirement benefits even though she doesnt qualify for them, according to the forensic audit. She said her fire retirement classification was up to the chief who hired her and it should stand.

You give your life to an agency and you try to do your best for them, she said. And this feels really bad and accusatory.

In a further development, three women who lost their jobs at the fire district sued the agency after they left, alleging sexual harassment by the new fire chief. The three say they were subjected to inappropriate sexual comments and a hostile work environment.

Medina denies the allegations and claims the suit is part of a campaign against him for trying to protect taxpayer dollars. The suit amounts to retaliation and discrimination, said Medina, who is Latino.

EXCESSIVE CHARGES

Medina and Sanchez found credit cards distributed to at least 11 people involved in the districts administration, finance management, volunteer recruitment, fire training, emergency medical services and mechanic work, according to the forensic audit and the districts bank statements.

They each had district-issued U.S. Bank Visa cards and faced few restrictions, and the lack of paperwork made it impossible to evaluate the validity of the spending, according to the audit. The cards were all on auto-pay, so the expenses were automatically withdrawn from the fire departments bank account.

Ive been in municipal government almost my whole adult life. Ive never seen misappropriation of funds to this level, Medina said. Worse, Ive never seen an organization be so brazen about it.

The employees spent $709,728 in credit card purchases from 2016 through 2022, according to the audit by Tualatin-based company Merina+Co. Combined, the 11 workers spent an average of $118,288 a year on the credit cards, according to the audit.

Among the charges: $35,574 on meals, $33,365 in excessive charges to Amazon and $193,471 for grocery and other incidental purchases in what appeared to be a pattern of inappropriate credit card use, the audit said.

The forensic investigators said they uncovered a stunning absence of receipts or purchase orders, making it impossible to trace exactly what people bought, examiners said. They had only the credit card statements.

They also found no evidence of management or board review or approval of the charges, according to the audit.

Under a policy in place since 1989, the fire districts board is supposed to authorize the fire chief to issue credit or debit cards on a limited and highly accountable basis.

The lack of documentation supporting credit card charges, and the lack of reconciliation of payroll and cash/bank information indicates either a lack of knowledge in these areas, disregard for the requirements or a calculated attempt to conceal misappropriation and wrongdoing, the audit said.

The districts bank statements cite credit card charges for what appear to be personal meals at fast-food restaurants, including Taco Bell, Subway, Jimmy Johns, Jack in the Box, coffee at Dutch Bros. and Starbucks, meals at local restaurants and pubs and repeated grocery trips to Costco, Safeway and Walmart, though the districts policy expressly bars paying for firefighter meals except for special events.

There were also hundreds of dollars for hotel stays out of town and out of state, including at a casino in Las Vegas, with no documentation of the business purpose, according to the audit. Bank statements also showed purchases from the online home furnishings site Wayfair, a local theater, a local thrift store, Craigslist, Bath & Body Works and a Colorado store called Books Are Fun.

Jennifer Motherway, the recruitment and retention coordinator for volunteer firefighters, and Monica Cade, the countys senior citizen volunteer coordinator, collectively used their fire district credit cards to spend $19,688 on meals from 2016 through 2022, auditors found. Cades grant-funded job is housed within the fire district but has no ties to fire services.

While some purchases of meals for meetings, events and other district business might be expected depending on assignments and staff delegations, the total for these two staff appear excessive, the audit said.

Both Motherway, through her lawyer, and Cade have denied any wrongdoing.

Nelson, the former finance manager, sometimes made dozens of purchases a month on Amazon Marketplace, the card statements show, but its unclear what she bought because auditors said they could find no supporting documentation.

Nelson and Motherway steeply increased their overall spending on the district cards over the years. Nelson, for example, charged $9,638.40 in 2016. By 2019, that had jumped to $42,199.18 and continued at that rate for the next two years, according to the auditors.

Motherways purchases rose from $3,995.19 in 2016 to $16,768.97 in 2021, according to the audit. She spent regularly at grocery stores and coffee shops and charged for hotels in Ohio, Texas and Maryland, bank statements show.

The auditors were unable to determine the destinations of four district credit card charges for airfare totaling $2,174.52 from May 2019 to January 2022 because there were no accompanying lodging, meal, parking or local transportation costs, according to the audit.

While the fire districts five-member board sees all department checks signed each month for purchases, its members never reviewed any of the credit card purchases, board members said in interviews.

The district had no documented evidence of effective management review or approval of credit card charges either prior to or subsequent to payment of those charges, the audit said.

Board chair Hans Feige, a member for seven years, said it became clear since Medina started as fire chief that earlier chiefs relied on Nelson and didnt ask questions like Medina has.

The financial person was running it and telling the chiefs what to do, Feige said.

Feige didnt know who carried district credit cards, he said. The board never got updates on the card purchases, he said.

There should have been a whole world of documentation and none of that can be found, Feige said.

A WAY OF DOING BUSINESS

Nelson left the fire district in November 2021 after 13 years.

She effectively operated as the districts chief executive officer, though her formal title was finance and human resources director, according to board members and former fire chiefs.

Medina said Nelson rebuffed him when he first asked for district spending and payroll records, vendor contracts and budget plans.

He said that at one point, Nelson pushed him to essentially back off, telling him: Why dont you just play fireman and let me run the department?

Nelson wouldnt comment on the chiefs characterization of their conversation, saying only, We all have a role that we play in our jobs. She said she answered Medinas questions and provided him with financial statements when asked.

Nelson said she regularly shared financial information with her fellow supervisors and attended budget committee meetings. Its not as if I managed in a silo, she said.

Nelson told The Oregonian/OregonLive that she wasnt aware of any credit card abuse and that she received receipts for employee credit card purchases but doesnt know where theyre currently kept.

She said food purchases were made for open house events or internal meetings and she bought office supplies and other equipment for the district on an Amazon Marketplace business account that also was used by various divisions within the district.

You can find all sorts of things on Amazon, she said.

During the pandemic, she said, the district bought N95 masks and personal protective equipment for emergency medical workers on Amazon Marketplace, as well as batteries for firefighters self-contained breathing equipment.

It became a way of doing business  the ability to do business electronically, thats how you get stuff done, Nelson said. Sometimes the charges would be $10,000 for the month or higher, or if theres a lot of travel or if were sponsoring an event.

Sometimes people didnt turn in receipts, she acknowledged, but that wasnt something that happened all the time. We had a process and procedure to double check that. Some people turned in receipts late, absolutely.

Nelson said annual audits would randomly examine three or four monthly credit card statements.

We had internal control processes and double checks, she said.

However, the last three annual audits by a Tigard-based firm dont reference credit card expenses.

The current fire chief, finance chief and administrative services director for the district said they cant access the Amazon Marketplace business account that Nelson said she opened for the district.

Nelson said she cant understand why that is. She left a list of her passwords and other information to help the people who followed her.

Dennis Hoke, the fire chief from 2019 to 2020, said he was surprised 11 people would have had the district credit cards. The U.S. Bank records from 2016 through 2022 dont show him as one of them.

But Hoke wasnt surprised by the districts credit card expenses, recalling the fire department bought most things on credit card, noting it was quicker than using purchase orders and invoices and having checks signed by two board members.

You just pay it off every month, so you dont have any interest charges, Hoke said, though he noted paying for personal meals would violate district policy.

JOBS ELIMINATED

Medina said he eliminated the two volunteer coordinator jobs after finding their salaries and benefits exceeded the federal grants awarded to cover their jobs, not to mention their credit card charges.

Several fire board members said they were told that both posts were set up as administrative pass-throughs that werent supposed to cost the fire department anything beyond incidental office space and supplies.

Medina first got rid of Cades position last year. Cade ended up retiring last July 1 after she ran the senior volunteer program for more than nine years. The job was attached to the fire district for more than two decades. Cade helped find volunteer positions for people 55 and older throughout the county, whether at food banks, senior centers or schools, for example.

She was the one who charged expenses at the beauty salons, clothing stores and pet shop, according to the audit and bank statements. She also is among the former employees who were improperly enrolled for firefighter retirement benefits, the audit said.

AmeriCorps provided $76,434 for Cades annual salary, but the fire district incurred about $110,000 in costs beyond that for her health insurance, sick time and vacation and retirement benefits, according to Medina and Sanchez. That didnt include credit card expenses, according to fire district officials.

Managers of the AmeriCorps grant are now pressing the fire district for an accounting of Cades program spending.

AmeriCorps records show a total $157,868 authorized most recently for the program for three years from July 2020 through this June 30. It had distributed $109,547 to the district, with a provision that the district would provide a 33% match, according to AmeriCorps documents.

Auditors and district chiefs said they couldnt find records to show if Cade used the money from the grant to cover purchases on the district credit card, including $785.50 to rent out the downtown St. Helens Columbia Theatre in 2021. The theaters owner said it was for a private movie showing of Jungle Cruise and snacks for senior volunteers.

Nelson said Cade sought reimbursement for volunteer recognition expenses from the grant and paid back the fire district. Cade also received donations, she said.

She beat the street and made sure other agencies stepped up, Nelson said.

The grant provisions say costs for recognizing volunteers must be within sound business practices, be reasonable and prudent and within a sponsors budget.

Cade declined to discuss specific credit card items charged but said, Everything I did was approved.

I just dont want to get into any details with you about that, she said.

Nelson said Cade didnt require approval for expenses up to $500 because she held a position akin to a fire district director.

The Federal Emergency Management Agency funded the volunteer firefighter coordinator position for Motherway, who worked for the district for more than 10 years until this past February.

Motherway also served as the fire districts spokesperson and was improperly enrolled by the district as a recipient of firefighter retirement benefits, according to the audit.

The latest four-year FEMA grant covered $45,000 a year for Motherways salary. Yet the districts records show Motherways salary grew from $58,273 in 2019 to $70,980 in 2022, according to payroll and W-2 forms cited in a memo written by Sanchez, the new finance chief. The district has paid for the gap  more than $78,000, according to Sanchez.

The district also paid for about $10,000 more a year than the grant set aside for Motherways benefits, Sanchez wrote.

Its not clear from records reviewed by The Oregonian/OregonLive if the grant covered Motherways expenses.

Motherway referred questions to her attorney, Rebecca Cambreleng, who also represents Cade in the civil suit they filed against the district.

My clients did what they were supposed to do, handed in receipts and purchase order documents, the lawyer said.

Cambreleng said Cades charges were largely for volunteer appreciation gifts and she got approval either before a purchase or the purchases had historically been approved. She said she didnt know who gave Cade approval.

LOCKED IN CABINET

Medina said he couldnt get straight answers from Nelson and turned to his former colleague from Florida, convincing Sanchez to move his family to Oregon and serve as a division chief in charge of finances to help figure out where the districts money was going.

Sanchez has a masters degree in emergency management and managed a $4 million fire department budget at the village of Tequesta, where he worked with Medina.

Medina, Sanchez and Eric Smythe, deputy fire chief, all told authorities that they couldnt find receipts for the credit card expenses in either the districts electronic or paper records and had to request the credit card statements from the bank. But the bank records went back to only 2016, Sanchez said.

Smythe, who had one of the districts credit cards, said he routinely handed in purchasing orders and receipts for his charges to Nelson. Id get chastised if I didnt get a receipt to Marit, he said.

When he occasionally asked to look at a past payment, Nelson would open a file cabinet with papers divided by month and year, he said.

Smythe said Nelson told him she needed to do a purge of district records several months before she resigned.

The forensic audit said a finance manager should have a working knowledge of the requirements of State of Oregon records retention and recognize the need for documentation to support expenses.

Nelson said she logged journal entries on district spending and maintained billing documents under a set retention schedule.

The district headquarters underwent construction about a year ago, Nelson said. They moved all the files, she said. They would know where they are.

Fire officials said they held onto all records during the renovation.

Medina and Sanchez have reined in the spending, taking back all the credit cards and issuing only one in Medinas name  its locked in a filing cabinet and used only upon approval by either the chief, Sanchez or Smythe.

Sanchez drafted a credit card policy that places new limits on expenditures, forbids spending on personal meals, except for light refreshments for training, seminars and special incidents, and requires receipts be turned in within three business days with an explanation of the charges.

The policy comes with new credit limits based on an employee rank, setting a $500 limit, for example, for the fire chiefs administrative assistant and up to $9,999 for the fire chief.

From August 2022 through June 12 of this year, the district charged a total of $29,324.11 on the single credit card issued in Medinas name for purchases sought by nine district employees, district records show.

NOTHING BUT PROBLEMS

In the background of the financial turmoil, the fire district faces a lawsuit filed in April by Motherway, Cade and a former finance assistant, Anika Todd, in addition to management-union strife.

The women allege a hostile work environment and what they say is Medinas financial mismanagement.

Medina told the women that they dressed like construction workers, showed them pictures of scantily clad women, made inappropriate sexual comments and treated the department as his own personal fiefdom, according to the suit in Columbia County Circuit Court.

Theyre hoping to shed light on what Chief Medina has done to hurt the fire district, said Cambreleng, the womens lawyer.

Medina manufactured the reasons for eliminating the grant-funded jobs, Cambreleng said.

Medina denied wrongdoing and said he found the grants werent properly administered and cost the district more than what had been represented.

In the same month as the lawsuit, the president of the firefighters union led a no confidence vote in Medina and called Medina and Sanchezs allegations of financial improprieties a distraction from the districts other issues.

Aaron Schrotzberger, a fire lieutenant who works for Medina and leads the St. Helens Professional Fire Fighters Association, said Medina has prompted experienced firefighters to leave and demonstrated confrontational and hostile behavior toward union members. The union and the district board are also headed to arbitration next month over a dispute on negotiated pay increases and stipends for firefighters who also work as paramedics.

Three union-backed candidates won election to the fire district board in May, ousting three supporters of Medinas who ordered the audit. The new members take office this Saturday.

Medina said he expects that his job will be on the line. If that happens, he said hell file a whistleblower complaint and sue to get it back.
"Support our downtown" sounds easy enough to get behind. But as always, the real devil is in the details. A proposition everyone agrees with becomes more complicated once you start discussing precisely how to go about it.

Small business owners in downtown Longview have been sounding the alarm regarding the health of their stores. Several shops have closed and many others report that they've considered doing the same. The Downtowners are looking to get a fulltime employee to facilitate plans that they believe can help turn this around, like organizing events and raising money. The position would also enable them to apply for a state program to help improve downtown.

The Downtowners turned to the Longview City Council, seeking $30,000 a year for five years with which to pay this employee. The city declined this budget request, a decision with which we agree.

We agree with Community Development Director Ann Rivers that there are some serious ethical concerns about the city outright providing a staffer to work for a nonprofit, no matter how well-intentioned that group may be.

You could argue that helping downtown Longview in any way helps the entire city, but the same could be true by funneling resources to another part of the city, like Washington Way. Outright paying for a fulltime employee for the Downtowners for an extended period, while excluding the independent stores in other parts of the city, just isn't fair.

If the city covers the paycheck for a fulltime employee at one nonprofit in the area, why is it only helping one particular nonprofit that works for one part of Longview? Are the Downtowners more important than the Chamber of Commerce? The Red Cross? It would be a tough decision to defend.

If the city is paying an employee with taxpayer money, that employee needs to eventually report to an elected official. We think that is an important part of accountability.

But we don't think the city can't work with the Downtowners.

Municipalities often contract with organizations to provide services, like when the county uses federal money specified for a community action program to pay Lower Columbia CAP to run Meals on Wheels. We feel any agreement needs to be tightly framed within a contract where the Downtowners provide specific services. The tasks specified in the contract would need to be the only things that employee would be allowed to work on when being paid with public money. This wouldn't just maintain a separation between city and private group, it also helps preserve fairness.

The contract would need to be funded with money outside the city's general fund, as well as list specific duties, like organizing a certain number of downtown events a year to draw a minimum amount of visitors and money. Like the contract with the Salvation Army to manage HOPE Village, the contract with the Downtowners would need to include metrics to measure success.

One reason the Downtowners are eager to create this position is because having at least one fulltime employee working to promote downtown is necessary to participate in the state's Washington State Main Street program. Once they are established, Downtown Longview can begin collecting Business & Occupation taxes that otherwise would head to Olympia.

Instead of committing to a five-year contract, we think the city could issue a grant or contract that would cover the employee's wages for the first year, where they would be responsible for getting into the Main Street program. Then they would have a fulltime employee to start raising funds, and the group can begin benefitting from the B&O taxes.

This would avoid tying the city to keeping the job paid for  it's a one-time grant and the Downtowners would need to use it not to fund a position for a stretch of time, but as a jumpstart. The infusion of cash could prime the pump for them and get the benefits flowing. Once that cash from the city is used up, it would be up to the Downtowners to pay for the position themselves.

Using a single grant rather than committing to paying paychecks to a person for the next five years would also preserve the separation between the city and the Downtowners. While supporting them, or any other nonprofit helping our community, is a good thing, we should always be conscientious about where a private group ends and an elected one begins.
ISLAMABAD, July 3 (Xinhua) -- Two soldiers were killed in an exchange of firing with terrorists in Pakistan's southwest Balochistan province, a military statement said on Monday.

The incident happened on Sunday when the security forces were conducting a combat patrol against terrorists by acting on an intelligence tip-off in the province, the military's media wing Inter-Services Public Relations (ISPR) said in the statement.

The terrorists were involved in firings on the security forces and civilians, besides planting improvised explosive devices in the area, the ISPR added.

"While the establishment of blocking positions to cut the escape routes was underway, a party of terrorists tried to ambush closing in patrol and opened fire onto security forces," the statement added.

As a result of the heavy exchange of fire, two security personnel, including an officer, were killed, while another soldier got injured.

The follow-up operation to nab the perpetrators of the attack continued in the area, said the statement.

The Pakistani security forces have intensified operations against terrorists across the South Asian country, and intelligence-based operations are being conducted to nab or neutralize them.

Earlier Sunday night, the ISPR said three terrorists were killed in a shootout with security forces during an operation in the northwest Khyber Pakhtunkhwa province. 
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:

In the future, virtual avatars will represent participants in the online courtroom. Credit:  Fraunhofer Austria

Since the coronavirus pandemic, video conferences have become an everyday occurrence across a variety of professions. Online court hearings are also becoming increasingly important around the world. In large countries such as Canada and Australia, virtual court hearings have become commonplace to avoid long journeys.

A research team at Fraunhofer Austria is currently working on software to take online court cases to a new level: The aim is to develop virtual avatars that will represent participants in the online courtroom. The participants' facial expressions and eye movements are recorded by a webcam and then transferred to the avatars. This makes it possible for all participants to make eye contact with each other, simulating face-to-face communication.

Online court hearings are becoming increasingly important. Since the coronavirus crisis, there has been a steady rise in online court cases, with many courts transitioning to online hearings. This offers a number of advantages, for example, hearings can be conducted more quickly, and participants do not need to travel long distances. In addition to streamlining court proceedings, cost and time savings are another benefit of virtual cases.

Critics, however, point out that the required technology is not yet mature and that many procedural questions remain unanswered: How can the quality of the video transmissions be guaranteed? How can hearings be moved to a digital format while respecting the detailed rules of conduct? The researchers at Fraunhofer Austria Research GmbH are working to answer such questions, collaborating with other scientists on this project, including Prof. David Tait, a researcher at Western Sydney University.

They are creating a software-based virtual court system that can be used to optimize and develop video technology applications in civil justice. The plan is to use the virtual courtroom setting initially for misdemeanors, for example in cases involving disputes between neighbors.

In many video conference applications, VR glasses are used to give users the feeling of being in the same physical location; however, the Fraunhofer researchers are not relying on VR in this project. Instead, the video output is displayed on a monitor. The participants communicate in the virtual courtroom using avatars3D graphical characters that represent real people.

Before the start of the hearing in the virtual courtroom, the participants select the appropriate role specification for them, such as judge, defense attorney, prosecutor, witness or defendant. A webcam records their face. Used in conjunction with a 3D graphics engine, the software is equipped with eye tracking to detect the direction in which the user looks. This eye movement is translated into the avatar's head movement, simulating direct eye contact between the interlocutors. It is this eye contact that is currently missing in video conferences via MS Teams or Zoom.

Video conferences on an equal footing

"Our virtual court system does not require any complicated technical equipment. Participants can be located anywherein a public building, police station or at homeas long as they have access to a laptop and webcam. That is all they need to take part in a virtual court hearing," says Volker Settgast, senior researcher at the Visual Computing business unit at Fraunhofer Austria in Graz. In the virtual representation of the courtroom, all users can see each other and tell where everyone is looking thanks to eye tracking. The webcam detects not only eye movements but also facial expressions.

"As the webcam records mouth movements and facial expressions, conclusions can be made about the emotional state of participants," explains Settgast. "In traditional video conferences, the video image is transmitted, but this is not necessary with our system thanks to the use of avatars. Only the audio stream and the data obtained from eye tracking and facial expression recognition are transmitted. The data stream to be transmitted is therefore reduced."

There are plans to adapt the virtual courtrooms to meet country-specific requirements and work is also underway to improve the avatar animation. For example, Settgast and his team want to incorporate participants' hands with gesture recognition. A browser-based version of the software is also planned for the future. Beta testing has already begun and the first workshops and user tests took place at Harvard University's Visualization Research and Teaching Laboratory, Department of Earth and Planetary Sciences, and at the University of Montreal's Cyberjustice Laboratory.

"Ultimately, we want to move the court setting to a completely virtual environment and enable civil court video conferences to be held on an equal footing. As eye movements, facial expressions and gestures are visible, online hearings will have the same personal dynamic as face-to-face interactions in the future," says the researcher.
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:

A map of the automatic identification system (AIS) generated shipping route (blue line) and spatial graph points for the three case study routes in the North Sea (a), South Atlantic Ocean (b) and North Atlantic Ocean (c). Red points indicate filtered graph points, while the green points form the sailable region. Wind rose maps are also shown, depicting the wind speeds and wind angles in 2018, 2019 and 2020 in the Earth reference frame. Credit: Ocean Engineering (2023). DOI: 10.1016/j.oceaneng.2023.114674

Researchers have identified a strategy that can offset the random and unpredictable nature of weather conditions that threaten carbon emission reduction efforts in the shipping sector.

Erratic weather is a major source of concern for ship owners installing modern sails to reduce carbon emissions. However, new research from The University of Manchester highlights operational strategies that can reduce shipping emissions by up to a quarter, strengthening confidence in sails as a decarbonization tool.

It is estimated that the international shipping sector contributes to 2%3% of global carbon emissions annually and its target to cut carbon by 50% relative to 2008 levels by 2050 falls short of the cuts required in the Paris Climate Agreement, meaning the shipping sector requires urgent global action.

The research, published in the journal Ocean Engineering, calculated carbon emissions from more than 1,000 ship departures setting sail from three main shipping routes. The results found that combining modern sail technology with efficient routing systems could provide greater assurances of carbon savings by using the technique that reduces uncertainty from unpredictable weather patterns.

Dr. James Mason, previously a postdoctoral researcher and now a visiting academic at the Tyndall Center for Climate Change Research at The University of Manchester, said, "Current measures to reduce carbon emissions include fitting retrofit technologies, such as wind propulsion technology, where modern sails produce direct energy from the wind to reduce the power consumed by a ship's engine. Weather routing is also used as an efficient routing system to allow a ship to deviate from standard shipping routes to search for new routes with more favorable winds.

"Current academic methods assume a perfect foresight of future weather rather than accounting for unpredictable winds that are happening in real-time. This can detrimentally reduce the carbon savings from weather routing and could present a real challenge for the shipping sector when trying to meet its climate reduction goals."

Dr. Alejandro Gallego Schmid, a Senior Lecturer at the Tyndall Center for Climate Change Research, added, "This research provides an insight into which routes are most sensitive to changing weather forecasts when using wind propulsion and assesses a strategy that could help to mitigate the detrimental impact that unpredictable weather conditions can have."

The strategy mirrors existing routing methods in the sector by updating weather and wind every 12 hours to allow ships to adjust their routes based on the most accurate weather forecast available.

To test the strategy, the study simulated 1,080 ship departures across eastbound and westbound journeys in the North Sea, South Atlantic Ocean and North Atlantic Ocean, which have voyage times of up to 12 days.

The research found that the method successfully reduced the uncertainty from unpredictable weather and showed that sails and efficient routing can provide annual carbon savings of up to 25%.

However, while the method reduces the uncertainty from unpredictable weather, it does not remove it entirely. Wind propulsion and efficient routing can provide maximum carbon savings of up to 29% in ideal conditions and weather uncertainty reduces these savings by 10%20%. Further research is needed to understand how ships can achieve these maximum savings in practice.

Reducing shipping emissions by up to a quarter by using wind propulsion with efficient routing could provide profound benefits to the sector. The research offers a clearer understanding of the potential carbon savings achievable through wind propulsion decarbonization strategies, without which, objectives in the Paris Climate Agreement may become out of sight.

More information: James Mason et al, Mitigating stochastic uncertainty from weather routing for ships with wind propulsion, Ocean Engineering (2023). DOI: 10.1016/j.oceaneng.2023.114674
KAMPALA, July 3 (Xinhua) -- The Ugandan military said on Monday that armed cattle rustlers killed four people, including two soldiers, in the country's northeastern district of Kotido.

Moses Amuya, a public information officer from the military, told Xinhua by telephone that the suspects, allegedly from the Jie ethnic group, killed a detachment commander, a soldier, a local leader and another civilian at the Lopuyo trading center in Kotido on Sunday afternoon.

"It was an unfortunate incident. As UPDF (Uganda People's Defense Forces), we strongly condemn this barbaric act," Amuya said. "We are tracking the suspects to apprehend (them)."

The suspects reportedly managed to run away with the soldier's gun.

The Karamoja region in northeastern Uganda is known for its traditional cattle herding practices, and cattle play a central role in Karamojong culture and economy. However, livestock theft happens from time to time, which has been a source of conflict between different ethnic groups in the region.

The Ugandan military is currently carrying out a disarmament operation to stem the practice. 
Demand for beef isnt slowing, but supplies are tighter and prices continue to climb, according to David Anderson, a Texas A&M AgriLife Extension economist.

Although Anderson noted high prices always hurt consumers, the current market is helping ranchers and producers.

This is a market at work, Anderson said. Supplies are declining. That puts the pressure on retail consumer prices, but these high prices really bring some needed profits to the cow-calf sector.

The current market has ranchers and producers excited to take advantage of its prices, according to Greg Goudeau, owner of the Navasota Livestock Auction.

Weve probably had as good of a spring as weve had in years and we are selling some cattle at some prices that, if theyre not record highs, theyre nearing record highs and the futures board is telling us, at this point as of today, is indicating the future is going to be very good also, Goudeau said.

Fed cattle are nearing record highs and in some instances might be records, Goudeau said.

Anderson explained in the southern plains region, which encapsulates North Texas and Oklahoma, a 400-to-500-pound steer sold for $2.74 per pound in mid-May. That same steer sold for $1.92 per pound the same time last year. In the Brazos Valley, Goudeau said prices have risen between 40 and 60 cents per pound.

Thats a huge percentage change, Anderson said.

This has led to a rise in higher prices among different cuts of beef, according to an AgriLife report published Thursday. The report said 50% lean grinds were $1.89 per pound compared to $1.05 per pound last year, and although brisket prices stumbled after they peaked at $3.05 per pound for choice cuts in September 2021, they have been climbing in recent weeks. Steaks also were priced higher this year compared to 2022, according to AgriLife.

Yet, pork and poultry prices have fallen from record highs. Anderson told AgriLife that wholesale chicken wings are currently 88 cents per pound compared to $1.86 per pound this time last year. Wholesale chicken breasts also have fallen from $3.56 per pound last year to $1.39 per pound right now. Anderson noted there are a lot of chickens produced in the Brazos Valley and that falling feed costs are helping poultry producers.

Because of the current market, Goudeau said his message to cattle producers is their animals are worth more than previous years and encouraged them not to skip castrations and vaccinations.

Do everything just like youve been doing it, Goudeau said. Make sure youre preparing these animals for the next level because, remember, these buyers are giving more money for your cattle this year than they were last year.

Abundant April rains has College Station sitting at 18.95 inches of precipitation on the year, according to the National Weather Service, which is above average. According to KBTXs Shel Winkley, April was the fifth-wettest ever in 141 years of data keeping as 8.94 inches of rainfall was recorded at Easterwood Airport. Winkley reported Wednesday that 3.95 inches were collected in May, but noted several big totals missed the airport and that there was still above average rainfall in the area last month.

The rains have allowed the eastern part of Texas, including the Brazos Valley, to remain out of a drought that is still affecting western Texas and the plains states.

With ample rains and nice weather, the grass really grows and thats a huge thing not only for the animals being born and growing now, but for people to start thinking about adding back new animals to their herds because theres plenty of grass and water for them, Anderson said. If you have lots of grass, if were not in the drought, these really high calf prices get people thinking about getting more cows and expanding their herds. High prices are a market signal to expand production.

Last summer, ranchers and producers were selling livestock at higher volumes due to high heat and drought conditions. High feed and fuel prices nixed the option of using alternative feed supplies, and producers were left to cull their cattle herds or liquidate them altogether.

It was just a tough time for everybody because people were having to sell cattle that they didnt want to sell, Goudeau said. We dont want to be selling them either if its a good young, replacement-type animal, especially at discounted prices, but now its like a total opposite from last year that were in right now.

Although grass is green and feed is available, Anderson and Goudeau said producers arent necessarily trying to build back their herds yet.

Even if they were, it might take some time after last summers culling.

In 2010, Anderson said there were 31.4 million beef cows in the United States. The notorious 2011 drought started that fall and by 2014, he noted the countrys cattle numbers dipped to 28.9 million. The industry finally rebounded by 2019 when there were 31.7 million beef cows nationwide.

Some producers might use heifer calves born this spring to build their herds from within, Anderson said. He added ongoing drought in other parts of the country has created a mixed bag where some might be trying to expand, yet some cant.

I would say that expansion hasnt really started yet, but a lot of people are thinking about it, Anderson said.
George M. Cohan, the son of Irish immigrants  often described as the man who owned Broadway  dominated American theater from 1901 until 1940.

During that four-decade period, the man born on the Fourth of July [Editors note: actually, he was born on July 3, 1878] produced 80 Broadway shows, many of which he wrote himself, and wrote more than 1,000 songs. Although Cohan liked to describe himself as just a song and dance man, he was a skilled actor, playwright and a director who once advised Spencer Tracy: Spencer, you have to act less, counsel that guided the great screen actor to his many understated performances.

Cohan got his start as one of the four Cohans, a late 19th century vaudeville act that included his father Jere, mother Nellie, Georges sister Josie and George. First carried onto the stage when he was 4 months old, in 1900 George and his family left hometown Providence, Rhode Island, and headed for Broadways bright lights.

Soon after, Cohan met Sam Harris who became Georges friend and partner. For decades, the team paired up for dozens of unqualified stage successes, the first of which, Little Johnny Jones, came in 1904. The play opened in Hartford, Connecticut, where, people first heard Cohan sing the words:

Im a Yankee Doodle Dandy

A Yankee Doodle do or die

A real live nephew of my Uncle Sams

Born on the Fourth of July.

The electrified audience members jumped out of their seats, applauding feverishly. The patriotically stirring, flag-waving tune reflected Cohans unflinching devotion to his country.

Cohan had three loves: his family, the theater and the United States.

In 1905, in his play George Washington, Jr., Cohan wrote another American tribute, Youre a Grand Old Flag. Sitting next to a Civil War veteran who had been active during Picketts charge at Gettysburg, Pennsylvania, Cohan listened as the old man, who tenderly stroked the U.S. flag he held in his lap, said, Shes a grand old rag. Recalling the veterans words, Cohan originally named his song Grand Old Rag. But listeners, not knowing the backstory, objected, so he changed the title. In his lyrics, however, Cohan kept the reference intact:

Youre a grand old rag, youre a high-flying flag

And forever in peace may you wave

Youre the emblem of the land I love

The home of the free and the brave.

At World War Is outbreak, Cohan penned another patriotic song, Over There, the eras most popular tune:

Over there, over there

Send the word, send the word over there,

That the Yanks are coming, the Yanks are coming

The drums rum-tumming everywhere.

In 1936, Congress awarded Cohan the Congressional Gold Medal, not only because of his songwriting and acting talent, but also because his work instilled in Americans hearts a loyal and patriotic spirit and projected the grandeur that the U.S. represented to people around the world.

Six years later, in 1942, Jimmy Cagney portrayed Cohan in Yankee Doodle Dandy, his Oscar-winning, Best Actor role. The same year, surrounded by friends and family at his home, Cohan lost his battle with intestinal cancer.

Cohans funeral, a Solemn Requiem Mass attended by thousands, was held at St. Patricks Cathedral. For the first time in St. Patricks history, the organist played a secular song. In a slow, soft funeral march tempo, Over There overwhelmed mourners, who sobbed uncontrollably. The funeral procession up Fifth Avenue proceeded to the Bronx where Cohan was laid to rest in Woodlawn Cemetery with his mother, father and sister. The burial marked the last stop in the Four Cohans journey.

Toward the end of Cohans life, long-time friend George Buck reminded him that no one had ever matched Georges theatrical triumphs. Doesnt that make you proud? Buck asked. Cohan replied: No complaints, kid. No complaints.

His daughter, Mary, at his bedside, said that she was certain that George M. died a happy man, a fitting final act for an artist who delighted so many for so long.
As we approach the celebration of our Declaration of Independence, we need to remember that the fight for Life, Liberty and the Pursuit of Happiness never ends.

When Benjamin Franklin was asked by a citizen of Philadelphia, what kind of government had been created in the Constitutional Convention, he replied, a Republic, if you can keep it.

While many of our citizens have been called on to make the ultimate sacrifice, most of us today are called upon to keep the Republic  in ways that may not require sacrificing our lives, but still require more commitment than many are willing to make.

One of the most challenging and difficult tasks we have today is trying to understand our history and be aware of the complexity of that history. It is difficult because we live in a world where historical information often is challenged as offensive to different political and cultural groups. We also live in a world that is changing faster than at any time in the past.

Thus, it is difficult, as Gordon Wood wrote in The Creation of the American Republic, 1776-1787, to recognize that many of the historiographical problems involved in interpreting the American Revolution and the formation of the Constitution stemmed from a failure to appreciate the distinctiveness of the political culture in which the Revolutionary generation operated.

In todays world, the pursuit of happiness often means instant gratification, a quality that the study of history is not often able to provide. It is difficult to expect most citizens to devote time to reading our history in a disciplined fashion or to devote their lives to sharing that history with others as accurately as possible.

But this failure to understand and appreciate our past in the political and social culture in which past generations operated has often led to attempts to purge our past of its complexity. It is the complexity of the story of human nature that we must try to preserve rather than merely passing on simple answers to the complex problems we face today.

In thinking of the Declaration of Independence, we frequently focus on Thomas Jeffersons stirring phrase all men are created equal, and fail to understand that this concept of equal was and still is more complex than many realize. If one reads the complete Declaration, one might conclude that Jefferson was not including Native Americans, which he referred to as merciless savages, and few people today are unaware that when Jefferson wrote this phrase, he was a major slave owner who did not free his slaves.

This is not to join those historians who suggest that Jefferson was a hypocrite, but merely to remind ourselves that history is a complex story.

As Bernard Bailyn reminded us in The Ideological Origins of the American Revolution, Jefferson did, in fact, instruct the Virginia delegates to the First Continental Congress that the rights of human nature are deeply wounded by this infamous practice  and the abolition of domestic slavery is the great object of desire in those colonies where it was unhappily introduced in their infant state.  But it would take a Civil War to resolve this issue, four score and seven years later, as Abraham Lincoln stated in his Gettysburg Address.

Not only were the colonists calling for changes in the British government, but groups in England also were aware they were on a dangerous course. Again, Bailyn noted that in England, in the 18th century, different solutions were advocated by both the Left and the Right.

But they both agreed that there was corruption  in the manipulation of Parliament by a power-hungry ministry, and corruption generally, in the self-indulgence, effeminizing luxury, and gluttonous pursuit of gain of a generation sunk in new and unaccustomed wealth.

The colonists also were concerned about whether they would be able to keep a Republic. As Gordon Wood suggested before the ink was dry on the Declaration of Independence, many of the leaders of the revolution believed that:

The American people seemed incapable of the virtue needed for republicanism. Too many were unwilling to respect the authority of their new elected leaders and were too deeply involved in trade and moneymaking to think beyond their narrow interests. ... These new popular leaders were exploiting the revolutionary rhetoric of liberty and equality to vault into political power and to promote the partial and local interests of their constituents at the expense of what the revolutionary gentry saw as the public good.

James Madison shared these concerns about the moral capacity of the people, but he also believed that ordinary people had to have sufficient virtue and intelligence to select men of virtue and wisdom  or no theoretical checks, no form of government can render us secure.

This 4th of July as we celebrate Life, Liberty and the Pursuit of Happiness, we should be grateful for the founding generation who gave us this Republic and who warned us that it was up to us to keep it with liberty and justice for all.

History matters.
Was there a president before George Washington? Did we declare independence before The Declaration of Independence? Does it matter?

Some of the names are etched in our collective memory: Washington, Thomas Jefferson, John Adams, Ben Franklin, Thomas Paine, Alexander Hamilton, John Hancock.

But there were 56 signatures on the Declaration of Independence including that of the improbably named Button Gwinnett. These were the men who came together to transform a disparate group of English colonies into what would become an independent nation. They knew that in signing that revolutionary document they risked everything, their possessions, their positions, their very lives.

From an English perspective they were traitors and the penalty for treason was well known. They knew they had to remain steadfast and united. As Franklin told them, We must all hang together, or most assuredly, we shall all hang separately.

Signing was an act of astonishing courage and trust. They were facing the greatest army the world ever had seen. Victory was far from assured. The Declaration itself emerged only after a year of arguing, haggling and negotiation.

The Second Continental Congress convened in Philadelphia May 10, 1775, shortly after the battles of Lexington and Concord. Delegates had been chosen by each of the colonies, in some cases by maneuvers of dubious legality. Not all of them were authorized to vote for independence. Some were forbidden to do so.

As the first order of business, they elected Virginias Peyton Randolph as leader. Few today recognize his name, but his title was president, making Peyton arguably the first president of the United States. His term, however, was brief. He collapsed and died October 22, 1775 while dining with his cousin, Thomas Jefferson.

He was succeeded by John Hancock, who took on the herculean task of achieving consensus among a loose assemblage of colonies with little in common but a sense of grievance with how King George was treating them.

Remarkably, the efforts of Hancock and a handful of other leaders, coupled with the intransigence and arrogance of King George III and the British Parliament, the Continental Congress came to acknowledge that independence was the only way to end the growing political and economic abuse they were suffering under English rule.

Only a year after the Congress convened, even colonies that had initially resisted severing ties with England agreed, authorizing Congress to adopt a resolution first proposed by Richard Henry Lee of Virginia entitled A Resolution for Independence. The much longer Declaration wasnt finalized until two days later, so shouldnt Independence Day more properly be July 2?

The larger question, though, is why did Congress feel it necessary to publish a Declaration of Independence? After all, wed already been at war with England for more than a year and nobody thought reconciliation was possible.

The answer is in the first paragraph: ... a decent respect for the opinions of mankind requires declaring the reasons for the separation.

What an extraordinary message those words imply: Were doing this not just for ourselves, but for mankind. The authors of this document were writing in the liberating spirit of John Locke and The Enlightenment as they continued, We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal. ... All men, not just Americans, have the right to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.

Obviously, from our 2023 perspective, those truths were shamefully limited in scope. When they said men they specifically meant white males who owned property. Women? People of color? The Founders left those questions for future battles.

We cannot fault them for failing to predict sensibilities a century or two in the future. What they accomplished with the Declaration was a gigantic step forward for humanity: conferring newfound dignity on common people and acknowledging that they, not just kings and noblemen, have certain rights simply by virtue of being born; rights no one can take from them.

While the Declaration goes on to fulfill its stated purpose of justifying separation by listing at least 27 specific instances of injury England had inflicted upon the American colonies, the radical idea that we are blessed from birth with fundamental and inalienable rights is what inspired people around the world in 1776  and continues to do so in 2023.

That, as well as our nations founding, is what we should celebrate amid the barbecue and fireworks, affirming our commonality as Americans above our differences and, like the Founders, pledging to each other our lives, our fortunes and our sacred honor.

Not for a day, but every day.
American International (OTCMKTS:AMIH  Free Report) is one of 60 public companies in the Personal Services industry, but how does it contrast to its peers? We will compare American International to similar businesses based on the strength of its risk, profitability, earnings, analyst recommendations, institutional ownership, dividends and valuation.

Valuation & Earnings

This table compares American International and its peers top-line revenue, earnings per share (EPS) and valuation.

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Gross Revenue Net Income Price/Earnings Ratio American International N/A N/A -0.01 American International Competitors $543.04 million $12.59 million 360.43

American Internationals peers have higher revenue and earnings than American International. American International 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.

Analyst Recommendations

Sell Ratings Hold Ratings Buy Ratings Strong Buy Ratings Rating Score American International 0 0 0 0 N/A American International Competitors 207 914 1607 66 2.55

This is a breakdown of recent ratings for American International and its peers, as reported by MarketBeat.com.

As a group, Personal Services companies have a potential upside of 91.40%. Given American Internationals peers higher probable upside, analysts clearly believe American International has less favorable growth aspects than its peers.

Profitability

This table compares American International and its peers net margins, return on equity and return on assets.

Net Margins Return on Equity Return on Assets American International N/A N/A N/A American International Competitors -20.14% -37.40% -2.82%

Insider and Institutional Ownership

25.0% of American International shares are owned by institutional investors. Comparatively, 42.4% of shares of all Personal Services companies are owned by institutional investors. 22.3% of American International shares are owned by company insiders. Comparatively, 24.5% of shares of all Personal Services companies are owned by company insiders. Strong institutional ownership is an indication that hedge funds, endowments and large money managers believe a stock will outperform the market over the long term.

Summary

American International peers beat American International on 5 of the 8 factors compared.

American International Company Profile

(Free Report)

American International Holdings Corp., through its subsidiaries, operates as an investor, developer, and asset manager with various assets in the energy supply chain. Its portfolio includes cycle energy that owns and operates cycle oil, cycle services, and cycle technologies. The company was incorporated in 1986 and is headquartered in Electra, Texas.

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(230705) -- BAICHENG, July 5, 2023 (Xinhua) -- Wan Xiaobai (R) digs a tree pit with a volunteer in the Horqin Sandy Land (Jilin) ecological demonstration zone in Baicheng City, northeast China's Jilin Province, May 16, 2018. (Xinhua/Lin Hong)

CHANGCHUN, July 3 (Xinhua) -- After over 20 years of strenuous efforts, Wan Ping, 70, has managed to turn a large piece of wasteland in northeast China's Jilin Province into a lush area.

Standing amidst the green landscape in the Horqin Sandy Land (Jilin) ecological demonstration zone, Wan recalled what the green landscape today was like in 1999 when he decided to embark on a journey of hope and uncertainty.

"The sand covered the grassland and sand dunes were everywhere," said Wan, who once lived in the area in the 1960s when he was a student.

The Horqin Sandy Land is one of China's largest sandy areas, stretching over 77.6 million mu (about 5.17 million hectares) and straddling three provincial-level regions in northeast China, namely, Inner Mongolia, Jilin and Liaoning.

Saddened by the barren land located in Tongyu County of Baicheng City in Jilin, Wan decided to quit his job in 2000 and begin his unwavering effort to green the land. Putting his entire saving worth over 300,000 yuan (about 41,576 U.S. dollars), he contracted 1,500 mu of sandy land in Xinhe village and devoted himself to this noble cause.

"One man, one shovel, and that's how my father started his work," said Wan Xiaobai, adding that her father was like a "lone hero."

By digging holes and planting trees in the moving sand dunes, Wan Ping dedicated himself to fighting desertification, which was considered "burning money" by many local villagers.

"While building the site for his anti-desertification work, my father lost more than 30 kg," Wan Xiaobai recalled.

In 2001, Wan Ping persuaded local villagers to work together with him to plant a total of 25,000 poplar trees and sea buckthorn trees, using income share as an incentive.

However, he underestimated the region's severe heatwaves and prolonged drought, and the harsh conditions were unsuitable for afforestation. No saplings were spared from the damage inflicted by moving sand, scorching hot weather and winds.

"If you want to plant trees and shrubs, you have to plant artemisia and grass first," said Wan Ping, who learned a lesson from the previous failure.

He found that using local herbaceous plants is more conducive to vegetation restoration, and began to lay grass on the sandy land and surround it with fences. It is like breeding grass seeds under quilts, according to Wan Ping.

In 2003, over 80 percent of the original vegetation was restored on the sandy land he contracted.

However, the right way for restoration didn't guarantee payback. In 2005, Wan Ping ran out of money and even incurred a debt. To help Wan Ping tide over adversity, Wan Xiaobai quit her job in a coastal city and joined her father in the restoration efforts.

Wan Xiaobai registered an environmental public welfare organization for fundraising, and as Wan Ping's story gained traction, capturing the attention of the governments, public institutions and enterprises in Beijing and Shanghai, hundreds of college students were drawn to the sandy land, eager to contribute as volunteers.

"Environmental protection awareness has increased significantly, and the fight against desertification has changed from our family concern to a public cause," Wan Xiaobai said.

"Baicheng serves as an important ecological barrier as to the west of Baicheng is Horqin Sandy Land, and to the east is a main grain producing area," said Ji Fengkui, director of the desertification land management center.

In recent years, Baicheng launched several afforestation campaigns to combat desertification. "Every year in mid-April, afforestation activities are carried out across the city, and residents work together to protect the ecological environment," Ji added.

This year marks the 23rd anniversary of the establishment of the Horqin Sandy Land (Jilin) ecological demonstration zone. Today, the sandy land has become an oasis and the vegetation coverage rate has reached 95 percent, with 260 kinds of plants forming natural barriers.

"Let the ecological protection mission be passed on from generation to generation," Wan Ping said. 

This combo photo shows Wan Xiaobai in the Horqin Sandy Land (Jilin) ecological demonstration zone on May 16, 2018 (above) and Wang Ping looking over the ecological demonstration zone, in Baicheng City, northeast China's Jilin Province, May 25, 2018. (Xinhua/Lin Hong)

This file photo taken on Aug. 15, 2013 shows the postcards for guests of the Horqin Sandy Land (Jilin) ecological demonstration zone in Baicheng City, northeast China's Jilin Province. (Xinhua/Lin Hong)
Banco de Chile (NYSE:BCH  Free Report) saw a large increase in short interest during the month of June. As of June 15th, there was short interest totalling 402,200 shares, an increase of 47.5% from the May 31st total of 272,700 shares. Based on an average daily volume of 135,400 shares, the short-interest ratio is presently 3.0 days.

Hedge Funds Weigh In On Banco de Chile

Institutional investors have recently modified their holdings of the business. Arrowstreet Capital Limited Partnership grew its holdings in Banco de Chile by 252.3% during the first quarter. Arrowstreet Capital Limited Partnership now owns 685,643 shares of the banks stock valued at $13,384,000 after purchasing an additional 491,004 shares during the period. Itau Unibanco Holding S.A. bought a new position in Banco de Chile during the first quarter valued at $3,970,000. Envestnet Asset Management Inc. purchased a new stake in shares of Banco de Chile during the first quarter worth $146,000. BlackRock Inc. lifted its position in shares of Banco de Chile by 80.4% during the third quarter. BlackRock Inc. now owns 256,655 shares of the banks stock worth $4,536,000 after acquiring an additional 114,359 shares in the last quarter. Finally, Connor Clark & Lunn Investment Management Ltd. lifted its position in shares of Banco de Chile by 687.9% during the first quarter. Connor Clark & Lunn Investment Management Ltd. now owns 91,710 shares of the banks stock worth $1,790,000 after acquiring an additional 80,070 shares in the last quarter. 1.12% of the stock is owned by institutional investors.

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Wall Street Analyst Weigh In

A number of brokerages recently weighed in on BCH. StockNews.com began coverage on Banco de Chile in a research report on Thursday, May 18th. They set a hold rating on the stock. Itau BBA Securities upgraded Banco de Chile from a market perform rating to an outperform rating and set a $24.00 price objective on the stock in a research report on Friday, June 2nd.

Banco de Chile Stock Up 0.5 %

BCH stock traded up $0.10 during trading on Friday, reaching $20.96. 59,747 shares of the stock were exchanged, compared to its average volume of 114,374. The firms 50 day moving average is $21.27 and its 200 day moving average is $20.75. Banco de Chile has a twelve month low of $15.64 and a twelve month high of $22.97. The company has a current ratio of 1.52, a quick ratio of 1.52 and a debt-to-equity ratio of 3.16. The firm has a market cap of $10.59 billion, a P/E ratio of 6.49, a price-to-earnings-growth ratio of 1.23 and a beta of 0.37.

Banco de Chile (NYSE:BCH  Free Report) last posted its quarterly earnings results on Friday, April 28th. The bank reported $0.65 earnings per share for the quarter, topping analysts consensus estimates of $0.64 by $0.01. The business had revenue of $867.00 million for the quarter, compared to the consensus estimate of $812.72 million. Banco de Chile had a return on equity of 29.47% and a net margin of 39.84%. As a group, research analysts forecast that Banco de Chile will post 2.55 EPS for the current year.

About Banco de Chile

(Free Report)

Banco de Chile, together with its subsidiaries, provides various banking and financial products and services to customers in Chile. It operates through Retail Banking, Wholesale Banking, and Treasury and Money Market segments. The company offers deposit products, such as checking accounts, current accounts, demand deposits and accounts, saving accounts, and time deposits; commercial, mortgage, consumer, working capital, syndicated, and installment loans; and credit cards.

Further Reading

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Invesco Senior Income Trust (NYSE:VVR  Free Report) was the recipient of a large growth in short interest in the month of June. As of June 15th, there was short interest totalling 677,900 shares, a growth of 90.6% from the May 31st total of 355,600 shares. Based on an average trading volume of 597,500 shares, the short-interest ratio is currently 1.1 days.

Hedge Funds Weigh In On Invesco Senior Income Trust

Several institutional investors and hedge funds have recently added to or reduced their stakes in the business. Morgan Stanley increased its position in Invesco Senior Income Trust by 14.4% during the 4th quarter. Morgan Stanley now owns 12,657,261 shares of the investment management companys stock worth $48,477,000 after purchasing an additional 1,597,466 shares during the period. Oaktree Capital Management LP increased its position in Invesco Senior Income Trust by 12.1% during the 4th quarter. Oaktree Capital Management LP now owns 7,400,000 shares of the investment management companys stock worth $28,342,000 after purchasing an additional 797,404 shares during the period. Bank of America Corp DE grew its holdings in shares of Invesco Senior Income Trust by 18.4% in the 4th quarter. Bank of America Corp DE now owns 4,004,429 shares of the investment management companys stock worth $15,337,000 after acquiring an additional 622,664 shares during the period. Penserra Capital Management LLC grew its holdings in shares of Invesco Senior Income Trust by 9.6% in the 1st quarter. Penserra Capital Management LLC now owns 2,791,081 shares of the investment management companys stock worth $10,271,000 after acquiring an additional 244,705 shares during the period. Finally, Wells Fargo & Company MN grew its holdings in shares of Invesco Senior Income Trust by 41.3% in the 4th quarter. Wells Fargo & Company MN now owns 2,299,940 shares of the investment management companys stock worth $8,809,000 after acquiring an additional 671,856 shares during the period.

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Invesco Senior Income Trust Stock Performance

VVR stock traded up $0.06 during trading on Friday, hitting $3.85. The company had a trading volume of 1,195,195 shares, compared to its average volume of 751,308. The firm has a 50-day moving average price of $3.71 and a 200-day moving average price of $3.79. Invesco Senior Income Trust has a 1-year low of $3.55 and a 1-year high of $4.14.

Invesco Senior Income Trust Announces Dividend

Invesco Senior Income Trust Company Profile

The firm also recently announced a monthly dividend, which was paid on Friday, June 30th. Shareholders of record on Thursday, June 15th were given a dividend of $0.039 per share. This represents a $0.47 annualized dividend and a yield of 12.16%. The ex-dividend date of this dividend was Wednesday, June 14th.

(Free Report)

Invesco Senior Income Trust is a closed ended fixed income mutual fund launched by Invesco Ltd. It is co-managed by Invesco Advisers, Inc, Invesco Asset Management Deutschland GmbH, Invesco Asset Management Limited, Invesco Asset Management (Japan) Limited, Invesco Australia Limited, Invesco Hong Kong Limited, Invesco Senior Secured Management, Inc, and Invesco Canada Ltd.

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Morgan Stanley Emerging Markets Domestic Debt Fund, Inc. (NYSE:EDD  Free Report) was the recipient of a large increase in short interest in June. As of June 15th, there was short interest totalling 157,600 shares, an increase of 87.0% from the May 31st total of 84,300 shares. Based on an average trading volume of 194,300 shares, the short-interest ratio is currently 0.8 days.

Institutional Trading of Morgan Stanley Emerging Markets Domestic Debt Fund

Hedge funds and other institutional investors have recently added to or reduced their stakes in the company. Fiera Capital Corp increased its position in Morgan Stanley Emerging Markets Domestic Debt Fund by 5.6% in the 4th quarter. Fiera Capital Corp now owns 432,575 shares of the investment management companys stock valued at $1,903,000 after buying an additional 23,099 shares in the last quarter. Almitas Capital LLC increased its position in Morgan Stanley Emerging Markets Domestic Debt Fund by 12.4% in the 4th quarter. Almitas Capital LLC now owns 407,084 shares of the investment management companys stock valued at $1,791,000 after buying an additional 44,968 shares in the last quarter. Logan Stone Capital LLC increased its position in Morgan Stanley Emerging Markets Domestic Debt Fund by 19.4% in the 3rd quarter. Logan Stone Capital LLC now owns 43,254 shares of the investment management companys stock valued at $174,000 after buying an additional 7,027 shares in the last quarter. PenderFund Capital Management Ltd. increased its position in Morgan Stanley Emerging Markets Domestic Debt Fund by 200.0% in the 3rd quarter. PenderFund Capital Management Ltd. now owns 150,000 shares of the investment management companys stock valued at $833,000 after buying an additional 100,000 shares in the last quarter. Finally, JTC Employer Solutions Trustee Ltd bought a new stake in Morgan Stanley Emerging Markets Domestic Debt Fund in the 4th quarter valued at about $44,000.

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Morgan Stanley Emerging Markets Domestic Debt Fund Stock Performance

Shares of EDD stock traded down $0.01 during mid-day trading on Friday, hitting $4.69. The companys stock had a trading volume of 192,431 shares, compared to its average volume of 176,030. The companys fifty day simple moving average is $4.74 and its 200-day simple moving average is $4.61. Morgan Stanley Emerging Markets Domestic Debt Fund has a 52 week low of $3.84 and a 52 week high of $4.89.

Morgan Stanley Emerging Markets Domestic Debt Fund Cuts Dividend

About Morgan Stanley Emerging Markets Domestic Debt Fund

The company also recently announced a quarterly dividend, which will be paid on Friday, July 14th. Investors of record on Friday, June 30th will be given a $0.08 dividend. This represents a $0.32 dividend on an annualized basis and a yield of 6.82%. The ex-dividend date is Thursday, June 29th.

(Free Report)

Morgan Stanley Emerging Markets Domestic Debt Fund, Inc is a closed ended fixed income mutual fund launched and managed by Morgan Stanley Investment Management Inc The fund invests in fixed income markets of emerging market countries across the globe. It typically invests in government bonds denominated in the local currencies of emerging markets.

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Servotronics, Inc. (NYSEAMERICAN:SVT  Free Report) saw a large growth in short interest in the month of June. As of June 15th, there was short interest totalling 1,700 shares, a growth of 88.9% from the May 31st total of 900 shares. Based on an average daily trading volume, of 2,200 shares, the short-interest ratio is currently 0.8 days. Approximately 1.3% of the companys shares are sold short.

Insider Activity

In other news, major shareholder Kenneth D. Trbovich sold 77,978 shares of the firms stock in a transaction on Wednesday, April 26th. The stock was sold at an average price of $11.20, for a total value of $873,353.60. Following the transaction, the insider now directly owns 26,195 shares in the company, valued at approximately $293,384. The transaction was disclosed in a filing with the Securities & Exchange Commission, which can be accessed through the SEC website. In other news, major shareholder Of Nicholas D. Trbovich Estate sold 44,643 shares of the firms stock in a transaction on Wednesday, April 19th. The stock was sold at an average price of $11.20, for a total value of $500,001.60. Following the transaction, the insider now directly owns 92,875 shares in the company, valued at approximately $1,040,200. The transaction was disclosed in a filing with the Securities & Exchange Commission, which can be accessed through the SEC website. Also, major shareholder Kenneth D. Trbovich sold 77,978 shares of the firms stock in a transaction on Wednesday, April 26th. The stock was sold at an average price of $11.20, for a total value of $873,353.60. Following the completion of the transaction, the insider now owns 26,195 shares in the company, valued at $293,384. The disclosure for this sale can be found here. Insiders own 29.70% of the companys stock.

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Institutional Inflows and Outflows

An institutional investor recently bought a new position in Servotronics stock. Courier Capital LLC purchased a new stake in Servotronics, Inc. (NYSEAMERICAN:SVT  Free Report) during the 1st quarter, according to the company in its most recent Form 13F filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission. The firm purchased 10,000 shares of the conglomerates stock, valued at approximately $106,000. Courier Capital LLC owned 0.40% of Servotronics at the end of the most recent reporting period. Institutional investors and hedge funds own 26.00% of the companys stock.

Servotronics Stock Performance

SVT stock remained flat at $13.75 during midday trading on Friday. The companys stock had a trading volume of 36 shares, compared to its average volume of 2,524. The company has a market capitalization of $34.79 million, a price-to-earnings ratio of -8.44 and a beta of 0.71. Servotronics has a 52-week low of $9.47 and a 52-week high of $14.32.

Servotronics (NYSEAMERICAN:SVT  Free Report) last posted its earnings results on Friday, March 31st. The conglomerate reported ($0.54) earnings per share for the quarter. The business had revenue of $10.43 million for the quarter. Servotronics had a negative return on equity of 11.52% and a negative net margin of 9.18%.

Servotronics Company Profile

(Free Report)

Servotronics, Inc designs, manufactures, and markets control components and consumer products in the United States and internationally. It operates in two segments, Advanced Technology Group (ATG) and Consumer Products Group (CPG). The ATG segment provides servo-control components to the commercial aerospace, aircraft, and government related industries; and medical and industrial markets.

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Nuveen Floating Rate Income Opportunity Fund (NYSE:JRO  Free Report) was the recipient of a large increase in short interest in the month of June. As of June 15th, there was short interest totalling 29,100 shares, an increase of 104.9% from the May 31st total of 14,200 shares. Based on an average trading volume of 191,200 shares, the short-interest ratio is currently 0.2 days.

Nuveen Floating Rate Income Opportunity Fund Price Performance

Shares of NYSE JRO traded up $0.04 during mid-day trading on Friday, hitting $7.80. The stock had a trading volume of 77,711 shares, compared to its average volume of 171,126. The company has a 50 day moving average of $7.70 and a two-hundred day moving average of $7.99. Nuveen Floating Rate Income Opportunity Fund has a twelve month low of $7.45 and a twelve month high of $8.98.

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Nuveen Floating Rate Income Opportunity Fund Dividend Announcement

The company also recently announced a monthly dividend, which will be paid on Monday, July 3rd. Investors of record on Thursday, June 15th will be given a $0.074 dividend. This represents a $0.89 annualized dividend and a dividend yield of 11.38%. The ex-dividend date is Wednesday, June 14th.

Hedge Funds Weigh In On Nuveen Floating Rate Income Opportunity Fund

Nuveen Floating Rate Income Opportunity Fund Company Profile

Several hedge funds have recently made changes to their positions in the company. Hollencrest Capital Management acquired a new stake in Nuveen Floating Rate Income Opportunity Fund during the 4th quarter worth about $56,000. FourThought Financial Partners LLC acquired a new stake in Nuveen Floating Rate Income Opportunity Fund during the 4th quarter worth about $288,000. CWM LLC grew its position in Nuveen Floating Rate Income Opportunity Fund by 46.7% during the 4th quarter. CWM LLC now owns 7,692 shares of the financial services providers stock worth $60,000 after purchasing an additional 2,448 shares during the period. Wolverine Asset Management LLC acquired a new stake in Nuveen Floating Rate Income Opportunity Fund during the 4th quarter worth about $593,000. Finally, Melfa Wealth Management LLC acquired a new stake in Nuveen Floating Rate Income Opportunity Fund during the 4th quarter worth about $99,000.

(Free Report)

Nuveen Floating Rate Income Opportunity Fund is a closed-ended fixed income mutual fund launched by Nuveen Investments, Inc The fund is co-managed by Nuveen Fund Advisors LLC and Symphony Asset Management LLC. It invests in fixed income markets of the United States. The fund invests in adjustable rate loans, primarily in senior loans.

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Templeton Emerging Markets Income Fund (NYSE:TEI  Free Report) saw a large growth in short interest in the month of June. As of June 15th, there was short interest totalling 21,800 shares, a growth of 98.2% from the May 31st total of 11,000 shares. Based on an average daily volume of 124,200 shares, the short-interest ratio is currently 0.2 days.

Hedge Funds Weigh In On Templeton Emerging Markets Income Fund

A number of hedge funds have recently added to or reduced their stakes in the company. B. Riley Wealth Advisors Inc. increased its holdings in Templeton Emerging Markets Income Fund by 36.3% in the first quarter. B. Riley Wealth Advisors Inc. now owns 18,520 shares of the companys stock worth $94,000 after buying an additional 4,934 shares during the last quarter. Advisory Services Network LLC increased its holdings in Templeton Emerging Markets Income Fund by 37.5% in the first quarter. Advisory Services Network LLC now owns 31,894 shares of the companys stock worth $162,000 after buying an additional 8,694 shares during the last quarter. MML Investors Services LLC acquired a new position in Templeton Emerging Markets Income Fund in the first quarter worth approximately $51,000. HRT Financial LP bought a new stake in Templeton Emerging Markets Income Fund during the first quarter worth approximately $73,000. Finally, HighTower Advisors LLC boosted its position in Templeton Emerging Markets Income Fund by 3.5% during the first quarter. HighTower Advisors LLC now owns 512,186 shares of the companys stock worth $2,599,000 after purchasing an additional 17,188 shares during the period.

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Templeton Emerging Markets Income Fund Price Performance

Shares of TEI traded up $0.05 during trading hours on Friday, reaching $5.15. The companys stock had a trading volume of 118,690 shares, compared to its average volume of 166,078. The company has a 50 day moving average of $5.03 and a two-hundred day moving average of $5.20. Templeton Emerging Markets Income Fund has a 1-year low of $4.33 and a 1-year high of $5.98.

Templeton Emerging Markets Income Fund Cuts Dividend

About Templeton Emerging Markets Income Fund

The company also recently disclosed a monthly dividend, which was paid on Friday, June 30th. Investors of record on Tuesday, June 20th were issued a $0.0466 dividend. The ex-dividend date of this dividend was Friday, June 16th. This represents a $0.56 dividend on an annualized basis and a yield of 10.86%.

(Free Report)

Templeton Emerging Markets Income Fund is a closed-ended fixed income mutual fund launched by Franklin Resources, Inc It is managed by Franklin Advisers, Inc The fund invests in the fixed income markets of emerging market countries across the globe. It primarily invests in bonds issued by sovereign or sovereign-related entities and private sector companies.

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Wells Fargo Advantage Funds  Allspring Global Dividend Opportunity Fund (NYSE:EOD  Free Report) was the recipient of a large decrease in short interest in June. As of June 15th, there was short interest totalling 38,000 shares, a decrease of 45.2% from the May 31st total of 69,300 shares. Based on an average daily volume of 82,400 shares, the days-to-cover ratio is currently 0.5 days.

Institutional Trading of Wells Fargo Advantage Funds  Allspring Global Dividend Opportunity Fund

Institutional investors and hedge funds have recently bought and sold shares of the business. Belvedere Trading LLC purchased a new position in Wells Fargo Advantage Funds  Allspring Global Dividend Opportunity Fund in the 1st quarter worth approximately $45,000. Captrust Financial Advisors purchased a new position in Wells Fargo Advantage Funds  Allspring Global Dividend Opportunity Fund in the 2nd quarter worth approximately $52,000. HighTower Advisors LLC purchased a new position in Wells Fargo Advantage Funds  Allspring Global Dividend Opportunity Fund in the 1st quarter worth approximately $75,000. Alpine Global Management LLC purchased a new position in Wells Fargo Advantage Funds  Allspring Global Dividend Opportunity Fund in the 4th quarter worth approximately $67,000. Finally, Centurion Wealth Management LLC purchased a new position in Wells Fargo Advantage Funds  Allspring Global Dividend Opportunity Fund in the 4th quarter worth approximately $83,000.

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Wells Fargo Advantage Funds  Allspring Global Dividend Opportunity Fund Stock Up 1.4 %

EOD traded up $0.06 on Friday, reaching $4.35. 104,034 shares of the companys stock were exchanged, compared to its average volume of 79,176. The companys 50 day moving average is $4.22 and its 200-day moving average is $4.45. Wells Fargo Advantage Funds  Allspring Global Dividend Opportunity Fund has a twelve month low of $4.05 and a twelve month high of $5.23.

Wells Fargo Advantage Funds  Allspring Global Dividend Opportunity Fund Dividend Announcement

About Wells Fargo Advantage Funds  Allspring Global Dividend Opportunity Fund

The firm also recently announced a monthly dividend, which will be paid on Monday, July 3rd. Investors of record on Tuesday, June 13th will be given a dividend of $0.107 per share. This represents a $1.28 dividend on an annualized basis and a yield of 29.52%. The ex-dividend date is Monday, June 12th.

(Free Report)

Wells Fargo Advantage Funds  Allspring Global Dividend Opportunity Fund is a closed-ended equity mutual fund launched and managed by Wells Fargo Funds Management, LLC. It is co-managed by Crow Point Partners, LLC and Wells Capital Management Incorporated. The fund invests in the public equity markets across the globe.

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44 Wealth Management LLC boosted its stake in NextEra Energy, Inc. (NYSE:NEE  Free Report) by 1.7% during the 1st quarter, according to its most recent 13F filing with the Securities & Exchange Commission. The firm owned 118,194 shares of the utilities providers stock after acquiring an additional 1,986 shares during the period. NextEra Energy accounts for about 3.1% of 44 Wealth Management LLCs holdings, making the stock its 3rd biggest position. 44 Wealth Management LLCs holdings in NextEra Energy were worth $9,110,000 as of its most recent filing with the Securities & Exchange Commission.

Several other institutional investors have also recently added to or reduced their stakes in NEE. United Bank boosted its holdings in NextEra Energy by 9.8% in the 1st quarter. United Bank now owns 9,966 shares of the utilities providers stock valued at $844,000 after purchasing an additional 891 shares in the last quarter. LSV Asset Management boosted its holdings in NextEra Energy by 9.2% in the 1st quarter. LSV Asset Management now owns 32,180 shares of the utilities providers stock valued at $2,726,000 after purchasing an additional 2,700 shares in the last quarter. Brown Brothers Harriman & Co. boosted its holdings in NextEra Energy by 11.2% in the 1st quarter. Brown Brothers Harriman & Co. now owns 15,731 shares of the utilities providers stock valued at $1,333,000 after purchasing an additional 1,587 shares in the last quarter. Covestor Ltd boosted its holdings in NextEra Energy by 59.1% in the 1st quarter. Covestor Ltd now owns 878 shares of the utilities providers stock valued at $74,000 after purchasing an additional 326 shares in the last quarter. Finally, Ergoteles LLC purchased a new stake in shares of NextEra Energy during the 1st quarter worth approximately $793,000. Institutional investors and hedge funds own 77.70% of the companys stock.

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Analyst Upgrades and Downgrades

A number of equities research analysts recently weighed in on the company. Morgan Stanley upped their price target on NextEra Energy from $94.00 to $96.00 and gave the stock an overweight rating in a report on Thursday, April 20th. StockNews.com assumed coverage on NextEra Energy in a report on Thursday, May 18th. They issued a hold rating on the stock. JPMorgan Chase & Co. lowered their price target on NextEra Energy from $93.00 to $85.00 in a report on Thursday, June 8th. Guggenheim lowered their price target on NextEra Energy from $96.00 to $92.00 in a report on Monday, April 24th. Finally, Erste Group Bank upgraded NextEra Energy from a hold rating to a buy rating in a report on Tuesday, March 28th. Four analysts have rated the stock with a hold rating and nine have assigned a buy rating to the companys stock. According to data from MarketBeat, the company currently has a consensus rating of Moderate Buy and an average price target of $91.67.

Insider Activity

NextEra Energy Stock Performance

In other news, EVP Robert Coffey sold 4,000 shares of NextEra Energy stock in a transaction that occurred on Wednesday, June 14th. The stock was sold at an average price of $74.90, for a total transaction of $299,600.00. Following the sale, the executive vice president now owns 11,292 shares of the companys stock, valued at $845,770.80. The transaction was disclosed in a filing with the SEC, which is accessible through this link . In related news, EVP Robert Coffey sold 4,000 shares of the businesss stock in a transaction that occurred on Wednesday, June 14th. The stock was sold at an average price of $74.90, for a total transaction of $299,600.00. Following the sale, the executive vice president now owns 11,292 shares of the companys stock, valued at $845,770.80. The sale was disclosed in a filing with the SEC, which is available through the SEC website . Also, CEO John W. Ketchum bought 13,600 shares of the companys stock in a transaction that occurred on Wednesday, June 14th. The shares were purchased at an average cost of $74.26 per share, for a total transaction of $1,009,936.00. Following the acquisition, the chief executive officer now owns 184,485 shares of the companys stock, valued at $13,699,856.10. The disclosure for this purchase can be found here . Corporate insiders own 0.18% of the companys stock.

NEE stock traded up $0.16 during midday trading on Monday, reaching $74.36. The company had a trading volume of 772,709 shares, compared to its average volume of 8,158,798. The company has a quick ratio of 0.46, a current ratio of 0.53 and a debt-to-equity ratio of 1.13. The stock has a 50 day moving average price of $74.93 and a 200 day moving average price of $77.06. NextEra Energy, Inc. has a fifty-two week low of $69.64 and a fifty-two week high of $91.35. The firm has a market capitalization of $150.46 billion, a PE ratio of 22.08, a P/E/G ratio of 2.85 and a beta of 0.46.

NextEra Energy (NYSE:NEE  Free Report) last issued its earnings results on Tuesday, April 25th. The utilities provider reported $0.84 EPS for the quarter, beating analysts consensus estimates of $0.75 by $0.09. NextEra Energy had a return on equity of 12.44% and a net margin of 26.97%. The company had revenue of $6.72 billion during the quarter, compared to the consensus estimate of $5.78 billion. During the same period in the previous year, the firm posted $0.74 earnings per share. Analysts anticipate that NextEra Energy, Inc. will post 3.11 earnings per share for the current year.

NextEra Energy Dividend Announcement

The firm also recently declared a quarterly dividend, which was paid on Thursday, June 15th. Stockholders of record on Tuesday, May 30th were issued a dividend of $0.4675 per share. The ex-dividend date was Friday, May 26th. This represents a $1.87 dividend on an annualized basis and a dividend yield of 2.51%. NextEra Energys dividend payout ratio (DPR) is presently 55.65%.

NextEra Energy Company Profile

(Free Report)

NextEra Energy, Inc, through its subsidiaries, generates, transmits, distributes, and sells electric power to retail and wholesale customers in North America. The company generates electricity through wind, solar, nuclear, coal, and natural gas facilities. It also develops, constructs, and operates long-term contracted assets that consists of clean energy solutions, such as renewable generation facilities, battery storage projects, and electric transmission facilities; sells energy commodities; and owns, develops, constructs, manages and operates electric generation facilities in wholesale energy markets.

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Smithbridge Asset Management Inc. DE trimmed its holdings in shares of Accenture plc (NYSE:ACN  Free Report) by 0.3% in the first quarter, according to its most recent filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC). The institutional investor owned 32,418 shares of the information technology services providers stock after selling 83 shares during the period. Accenture accounts for approximately 2.3% of Smithbridge Asset Management Inc. DEs holdings, making the stock its 4th largest holding. Smithbridge Asset Management Inc. DEs holdings in Accenture were worth $9,265,000 at the end of the most recent quarter.

A number of other hedge funds and other institutional investors have also recently bought and sold shares of ACN. United Bank increased its holdings in Accenture by 6.3% during the 1st quarter. United Bank now owns 2,969 shares of the information technology services providers stock valued at $1,001,000 after purchasing an additional 176 shares in the last quarter. Weitz Investment Management Inc. increased its stake in shares of Accenture by 1.3% in the 1st quarter. Weitz Investment Management Inc. now owns 89,400 shares of the information technology services providers stock valued at $30,148,000 after buying an additional 1,168 shares during the period. Fund Management at Engine No. 1 LLC acquired a new stake in shares of Accenture in the 1st quarter valued at $1,805,000. Guardian Wealth Management Inc. increased its stake in shares of Accenture by 0.6% in the 1st quarter. Guardian Wealth Management Inc. now owns 7,292 shares of the information technology services providers stock valued at $2,459,000 after buying an additional 41 shares during the period. Finally, Clearbridge Investments LLC increased its stake in shares of Accenture by 104.8% in the 1st quarter. Clearbridge Investments LLC now owns 441,451 shares of the information technology services providers stock valued at $148,871,000 after buying an additional 225,943 shares during the period. 73.00% of the stock is owned by institutional investors and hedge funds.

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Analyst Upgrades and Downgrades

ACN has been the subject of several research reports. Morgan Stanley lowered their target price on Accenture from $350.00 to $340.00 in a research note on Friday, June 23rd. Wells Fargo & Company lifted their price objective on Accenture from $289.00 to $294.00 and gave the stock an equal weight rating in a research note on Friday, March 24th. JPMorgan Chase & Co. lifted their price objective on Accenture from $311.00 to $314.00 and gave the stock an overweight rating in a research note on Friday, March 24th. Wedbush reaffirmed an outperform rating and set a $300.00 price objective on shares of Accenture in a research note on Monday, March 13th. Finally, Royal Bank of Canada lifted their price objective on Accenture from $335.00 to $340.00 and gave the stock an outperform rating in a research note on Friday, March 24th. Eight research analysts have rated the stock with a hold rating and nine have assigned a buy rating to the company. According to data from MarketBeat.com, the stock currently has a consensus rating of Moderate Buy and an average price target of $326.89.

Accenture Price Performance

Shares of Accenture stock opened at $308.58 on Monday. The firm has a market cap of $205.10 billion, a price-to-earnings ratio of 27.50, a price-to-earnings-growth ratio of 2.80 and a beta of 1.22. The stocks 50-day moving average is $293.94 and its 200-day moving average is $280.58. Accenture plc has a one year low of $242.80 and a one year high of $327.93.

Accenture (NYSE:ACN  Free Report) last issued its quarterly earnings results on Thursday, June 22nd. The information technology services provider reported $3.19 EPS for the quarter, beating analysts consensus estimates of $2.96 by $0.23. The company had revenue of $16.56 billion for the quarter, compared to analyst estimates of $16.49 billion. Accenture had a return on equity of 30.47% and a net margin of 11.28%. The companys quarterly revenue was up 2.5% compared to the same quarter last year. During the same period in the previous year, the company posted $2.79 earnings per share. On average, equities analysts expect that Accenture plc will post 11.59 EPS for the current year.

Accenture Dividend Announcement

The business also recently announced a quarterly dividend, which will be paid on Tuesday, August 15th. Investors of record on Thursday, July 13th will be given a $1.12 dividend. This represents a $4.48 dividend on an annualized basis and a dividend yield of 1.45%. The ex-dividend date is Wednesday, July 12th. Accentures dividend payout ratio is currently 39.93%.

Insider Activity at Accenture

In related news, CAO Melissa A. Burgum sold 1,344 shares of Accenture stock in a transaction dated Monday, June 26th. The stock was sold at an average price of $300.00, for a total value of $403,200.00. Following the sale, the chief accounting officer now owns 10,506 shares of the companys stock, valued at $3,151,800. The transaction was disclosed in a document filed with the SEC, which is available through this hyperlink. In other Accenture news, CEO Julie Spellman Sweet sold 2,954 shares of the businesss stock in a transaction that occurred on Friday, April 14th. The stock was sold at an average price of $280.05, for a total transaction of $827,267.70. Following the transaction, the chief executive officer now owns 24,459 shares of the companys stock, valued at $6,849,742.95. The sale was disclosed in a document filed with the SEC, which is available through this link. Also, CAO Melissa A. Burgum sold 1,344 shares of the businesss stock in a transaction that occurred on Monday, June 26th. The stock was sold at an average price of $300.00, for a total value of $403,200.00. Following the transaction, the chief accounting officer now directly owns 10,506 shares in the company, valued at approximately $3,151,800. The disclosure for this sale can be found here. Over the last quarter, insiders have sold 16,354 shares of company stock valued at $4,583,230. 0.08% of the stock is owned by insiders.

About Accenture

(Free Report)

Accenture plc, a professional services company, provides strategy and consulting, interactive, industry X, song, and technology and operation services worldwide. The company offers application services, including agile transformation, DevOps, application modernization, enterprise architecture, software and quality engineering, data management, intelligent automation comprises robotic process automation, natural language processing, and virtual agents, and application management services, as well as software engineering services; strategy and consulting services; data and analytics strategy, data discovery and augmentation, data management and beyond, data democratization, and industrialized solutions comprises turnkey analytics and artificial intelligence (AI) solutions; metaverse; and sustainability services.

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AFS Financial Group LLC boosted its holdings in shares of Eli Lilly and Company (NYSE:LLY  Free Report) by 18.8% in the first quarter, according to its most recent filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission. The fund owned 950 shares of the companys stock after buying an additional 150 shares during the quarter. AFS Financial Group LLCs holdings in Eli Lilly and Company were worth $326,000 at the end of the most recent reporting period.

Other institutional investors also recently bought and sold shares of the company. Y.D. More Investments Ltd purchased a new position in Eli Lilly and Company during the 4th quarter worth approximately $26,000. Destiny Wealth Partners LLC raised its position in Eli Lilly and Company by 97.8% during the 4th quarter. Destiny Wealth Partners LLC now owns 91 shares of the companys stock worth $33,000 after buying an additional 45 shares during the last quarter. New England Capital Financial Advisors LLC purchased a new position in Eli Lilly and Company during the 4th quarter worth approximately $35,000. Tanglewood Legacy Advisors LLC purchased a new position in Eli Lilly and Company during the 4th quarter worth approximately $37,000. Finally, Freedom Wealth Alliance LLC purchased a new position in Eli Lilly and Company during the 4th quarter worth approximately $37,000. 87.25% of the stock is owned by hedge funds and other institutional investors.

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Insider Transactions at Eli Lilly and Company

In other news, major shareholder Lilly Endowment Inc sold 11,760 shares of Eli Lilly and Company stock in a transaction on Wednesday, June 28th. The stock was sold at an average price of $465.41, for a total transaction of $5,473,221.60. Following the transaction, the insider now owns 101,237,050 shares in the company, valued at approximately $47,116,735,440.50. The transaction was disclosed in a legal filing with the SEC, which can be accessed through this hyperlink. In other news, major shareholder Lilly Endowment Inc sold 11,760 shares of Eli Lilly and Company stock in a transaction on Wednesday, June 28th. The stock was sold at an average price of $465.41, for a total transaction of $5,473,221.60. Following the transaction, the insider now owns 101,237,050 shares in the company, valued at approximately $47,116,735,440.50. The transaction was disclosed in a legal filing with the SEC, which can be accessed through this hyperlink. Also, CAO Donald A. Zakrowski sold 600 shares of the businesss stock in a transaction dated Monday, May 15th. The shares were sold at an average price of $435.29, for a total transaction of $261,174.00. Following the completion of the sale, the chief accounting officer now owns 5,978 shares in the company, valued at $2,602,163.62. The disclosure for this sale can be found here. Insiders have sold a total of 876,543 shares of company stock worth $372,308,236 in the last quarter. Company insiders own 0.13% of the companys stock.

Analyst Upgrades and Downgrades

Eli Lilly and Company Price Performance

LLY has been the subject of a number of recent research reports. Berenberg Bank raised their price target on shares of Eli Lilly and Company from $375.00 to $500.00 in a research report on Tuesday, June 20th. 3M reaffirmed a maintains rating on shares of Eli Lilly and Company in a research note on Friday, April 28th. Wells Fargo & Company raised their price objective on shares of Eli Lilly and Company from $440.00 to $500.00 in a research note on Friday, May 26th. JPMorgan Chase & Co. raised their price objective on shares of Eli Lilly and Company from $430.00 to $475.00 in a research note on Thursday, May 4th. Finally, Morgan Stanley raised their price objective on shares of Eli Lilly and Company from $478.00 to $507.00 in a research note on Monday, May 15th. One research analyst has rated the stock with a sell rating, two have given a hold rating and thirteen have given a buy rating to the company. Based on data from MarketBeat.com, the stock presently has an average rating of Moderate Buy and an average price target of $437.90.

LLY traded down $9.68 on Monday, hitting $459.30. 1,295,967 shares of the companys stock were exchanged, compared to its average volume of 3,096,598. Eli Lilly and Company has a fifty-two week low of $296.32 and a fifty-two week high of $469.87. The company has a current ratio of 1.30, a quick ratio of 1.02 and a debt-to-equity ratio of 1.67. The firm has a 50-day moving average price of $434.32 and a 200-day moving average price of $377.31. The stock has a market cap of $436.00 billion, a price-to-earnings ratio of 74.56, a P/E/G ratio of 2.15 and a beta of 0.38.

Eli Lilly and Company (NYSE:LLY  Free Report) last announced its earnings results on Thursday, April 27th. The company reported $1.62 earnings per share (EPS) for the quarter, missing the consensus estimate of $1.73 by ($0.11). Eli Lilly and Company had a return on equity of 61.42% and a net margin of 20.54%. The business had revenue of $6.96 billion for the quarter, compared to analyst estimates of $6.87 billion. During the same period last year, the firm earned $2.62 EPS. The companys revenue for the quarter was down 10.9% compared to the same quarter last year. As a group, equities analysts anticipate that Eli Lilly and Company will post 8.78 earnings per share for the current year.

Eli Lilly and Company Dividend Announcement

The business also recently declared a quarterly dividend, which will be paid on Tuesday, August 15th. Stockholders of record on Friday, September 8th will be issued a dividend of $1.13 per share. The ex-dividend date is Monday, August 14th. This represents a $4.52 annualized dividend and a dividend yield of 0.98%. Eli Lilly and Companys dividend payout ratio is presently 71.86%.

Eli Lilly and Company Company Profile

(Free Report)

Eli Lilly and Company discovers, develops, and markets human pharmaceuticals worldwide. It offers Basaglar, Humalog, Humalog Mix 75/25, Humalog U-100, Humalog U-200, Humalog Mix 50/50, insulin lispro, insulin lispro protamine, insulin lispro mix 75/25, Humulin, Humulin 70/30, Humulin N, Humulin R, and Humulin U-500 for diabetes; and Jardiance, Trajenta, and Trulicity for type 2 diabetes.

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SANAA, July 2 (Xinhua) -- The sound of drums and tambourines fills the air as local theatrical troupe members wearing outlandish masks walk along the roads between villages in the southern Yemeni province of Ibb.

Villagers follow the troupe joyously as they were entertained by the uproarious antics and jests of the masked performers.

This is the way how for centuries villagers in the Al-Maazbah District of Ibb have celebrated Eid al-Adha, one of the most important festivals for Muslims across the world.

These customs have been passed down through generations, reflecting the strong bonds within local communities. At the core of the traditions is the practice of "mutual visits," symbolizing unity and togetherness during the holiday season.

During the Eid Al-Adha holiday, many villagers visit neighboring villages to sing songs and perform traditional dances. They are accompanied by local troupes donning strange attire and wearing masks that resemble monsters and mythical creatures. These performers, known as the "prince of the feast," are very good at filling the procession with playful banter and laughter.

"The good-natured skirmishes among masked jesters are all part of the revelry," said Abraheem al-Fareh, a local villager. "'The prince of the feast' has the power to entertain as he pleases, without causing annoyance or displeasure," he added.

A warm and grand welcome is extended to the visitors upon their arrival at the neighboring village. Drums are beaten in the background as dances and traditional chants and songs are performed. The festivities culminate at the village's central parade ground, where the visitors are embraced with open arms.

This visit is reciprocated the next day, as the host villagers perform the same ritual by paying a visit to those who had visited them.

"This celebration is a treasured inheritance from our ancestors. It fosters a sense of kinship, camaraderie, and delight," al-Fareh said.

Such celebrations have special meaning for the villagers, who consider them a vital part of their community during Eid al-Adha. Even those who have been engrossed in their own pursuits and spent most of the year in far-off cities and regions will travel back to their villages for the Eid al-Adha holiday, demonstrating their dedication to their roots and shared heritage.

Local villagers hope similar customs could flourish in other parts of Yemen to foster social unity.

"The tradition gives all of us an unforgettable experience. It reminds us how good it feels to be friendly and kind to others, especially when our country is divided by war," al-Fareh added.

Yemen's civil war flared in late 2014 when the Houthi group seized control over much of the country's north and forced the internationally-recognized government out of the capital Sanaa.

The war has not only brought an immense humanitarian crisis to the Arab country but also separated many families and communities.

According to the United Nations, 4.5 million Yemenis, or 14 percent of the population, have been forced to flee their homes because of the conflict.

"Our steadfast hold onto the Eid al-Adha tradition is a testament to the indomitable spirit and unwavering resilience of the Yemeni people," al-Fareh said. 
Stock analysts at StockNews.com began coverage on shares of Ampio Pharmaceuticals (NYSEAMERICAN:AMPE  Free Report) in a research note issued on Saturday. The brokerage set a sell rating on the specialty pharmaceutical companys stock.

Ampio Pharmaceuticals Stock Down 2.5 %

AMPE opened at $0.23 on Friday. Ampio Pharmaceuticals has a 52-week low of $0.18 and a 52-week high of $2.83. The company has a market cap of $3.52 million, a P/E ratio of -0.13 and a beta of 1.48. The firms 50-day moving average price is $0.25 and its 200-day moving average price is $0.26.

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Ampio Pharmaceuticals (NYSEAMERICAN:AMPE  Free Report) last posted its quarterly earnings data on Monday, May 8th. The specialty pharmaceutical company reported ($0.26) earnings per share (EPS) for the quarter.

Institutional Investors Weigh In On Ampio Pharmaceuticals

About Ampio Pharmaceuticals

A number of large investors have recently bought and sold shares of AMPE. BlackRock Inc. boosted its position in Ampio Pharmaceuticals by 0.4% in the 1st quarter. BlackRock Inc. now owns 13,996,074 shares of the specialty pharmaceutical companys stock worth $6,578,000 after purchasing an additional 61,269 shares in the last quarter. Vanguard Group Inc. boosted its position in Ampio Pharmaceuticals by 0.8% in the 1st quarter. Vanguard Group Inc. now owns 9,307,338 shares of the specialty pharmaceutical companys stock worth $4,375,000 after purchasing an additional 77,822 shares in the last quarter. State Street Corp boosted its position in Ampio Pharmaceuticals by 2.0% in the 1st quarter. State Street Corp now owns 3,430,770 shares of the specialty pharmaceutical companys stock worth $1,612,000 after purchasing an additional 66,375 shares in the last quarter. Millennium Management LLC boosted its position in Ampio Pharmaceuticals by 998.6% in the 2nd quarter. Millennium Management LLC now owns 2,035,413 shares of the specialty pharmaceutical companys stock worth $342,000 after purchasing an additional 1,850,138 shares in the last quarter. Finally, Bank of Montreal Can purchased a new stake in Ampio Pharmaceuticals in the 1st quarter worth approximately $168,000. Hedge funds and other institutional investors own 19.82% of the companys stock.

(Free Report)

Ampio Pharmaceuticals, Inc, a biopharmaceutical company, develops therapies for the treatment of osteoarthritis-related pain. It focuses on the preclinical development of AR-300, a novel proprietary, small molecule formulation for the treatment of osteoarthritis of the knee. The company is headquartered in Englewood, Colorado.

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StockNews.com started coverage on shares of Ampio Pharmaceuticals (NYSEAMERICAN:AMPE  Free Report) in a research note published on Thursday. The brokerage issued a sell rating on the specialty pharmaceutical companys stock.

Ampio Pharmaceuticals Price Performance

Shares of NYSEAMERICAN AMPE opened at $0.23 on Thursday. The firms 50-day moving average is $0.25 and its two-hundred day moving average is $0.26. The company has a market capitalization of $3.52 million, a PE ratio of -0.13 and a beta of 1.48. Ampio Pharmaceuticals has a 12-month low of $0.18 and a 12-month high of $2.83.

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Ampio Pharmaceuticals (NYSEAMERICAN:AMPE  Free Report) last posted its quarterly earnings data on Monday, May 8th. The specialty pharmaceutical company reported ($0.26) earnings per share for the quarter.

Hedge Funds Weigh In On Ampio Pharmaceuticals

Ampio Pharmaceuticals Company Profile

Several institutional investors and hedge funds have recently bought and sold shares of AMPE. BlackRock Inc. boosted its stake in shares of Ampio Pharmaceuticals by 0.4% in the first quarter. BlackRock Inc. now owns 13,996,074 shares of the specialty pharmaceutical companys stock valued at $6,578,000 after purchasing an additional 61,269 shares during the period. Vanguard Group Inc. boosted its stake in shares of Ampio Pharmaceuticals by 20.0% in the third quarter. Vanguard Group Inc. now owns 9,954,092 shares of the specialty pharmaceutical companys stock valued at $602,000 after purchasing an additional 1,662,127 shares during the period. State Street Corp boosted its stake in shares of Ampio Pharmaceuticals by 2.0% in the first quarter. State Street Corp now owns 3,430,770 shares of the specialty pharmaceutical companys stock valued at $1,612,000 after purchasing an additional 66,375 shares during the period. Millennium Management LLC boosted its stake in shares of Ampio Pharmaceuticals by 998.6% in the second quarter. Millennium Management LLC now owns 2,035,413 shares of the specialty pharmaceutical companys stock valued at $342,000 after purchasing an additional 1,850,138 shares during the period. Finally, Two Sigma Advisers LP boosted its stake in shares of Ampio Pharmaceuticals by 304.3% in the third quarter. Two Sigma Advisers LP now owns 432,216 shares of the specialty pharmaceutical companys stock valued at $26,000 after purchasing an additional 325,300 shares during the period. Institutional investors and hedge funds own 19.82% of the companys stock.

(Free Report)

Ampio Pharmaceuticals, Inc, a biopharmaceutical company, develops therapies for the treatment of osteoarthritis-related pain. It focuses on the preclinical development of AR-300, a novel proprietary, small molecule formulation for the treatment of osteoarthritis of the knee. The company is headquartered in Englewood, Colorado.

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Brookfield Reinsurance (NYSE:BNRE  Free Report) and Hannover Ruck (OTC:HVRRF  Free Report) are both financial services companies, but which is the superior stock? We will contrast the two businesses based on the strength of their analyst recommendations, profitability, institutional ownership, risk, dividends, valuation and earnings.

Dividends

Brookfield Reinsurance pays an annual dividend of $0.28 per share and has a dividend yield of 0.8%. Hannover Ruck pays an annual dividend of $2.25 per share and has a dividend yield of 1.1%. Brookfield Reinsurance pays out 68.3% of its earnings in the form of a dividend. Hannover Ruck pays out 28.2% 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. Hannover Ruck is clearly the better dividend stock, given its higher yield and lower payout ratio.

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Profitability

This table compares Brookfield Reinsurance and Hannover Rucks net margins, return on equity and return on assets.

Net Margins Return on Equity Return on Assets Brookfield Reinsurance 0.08% 0.38% 0.01% Hannover Ruck N/A N/A N/A

Valuation & Earnings

Gross Revenue Price/Sales Ratio Net Income Earnings Per Share Price/Earnings Ratio Brookfield Reinsurance $5.32 billion 0.07 $490.00 million $0.41 82.07 Hannover Ruck N/A N/A N/A $7.97 26.86

This table compares Brookfield Reinsurance and Hannover Rucks top-line revenue, earnings per share (EPS) and valuation.

Brookfield Reinsurance has higher revenue and earnings than Hannover Ruck. Hannover Ruck is trading at a lower price-to-earnings ratio than Brookfield Reinsurance, indicating that it is currently the more affordable of the two stocks.

Analyst Recommendations

This is a breakdown of current ratings and price targets for Brookfield Reinsurance and Hannover Ruck, as provided by MarketBeat.com.

Sell Ratings Hold Ratings Buy Ratings Strong Buy Ratings Rating Score Brookfield Reinsurance 0 0 0 0 N/A Hannover Ruck 2 0 1 0 1.67

Hannover Ruck has a consensus price target of $149.50, suggesting a potential downside of 30.14%. Given Hannover Rucks higher probable upside, analysts plainly believe Hannover Ruck is more favorable than Brookfield Reinsurance.

Institutional and Insider Ownership

39.7% of Brookfield Reinsurance shares are owned by institutional investors. Comparatively, 20.0% of Hannover Ruck shares are owned by institutional investors. 1.0% of Brookfield Reinsurance shares are owned by company insiders. Strong institutional ownership is an indication that hedge funds, endowments and large money managers believe a stock will outperform the market over the long term.

Summary

Brookfield Reinsurance beats Hannover Ruck on 7 of the 12 factors compared between the two stocks.

About Brookfield Reinsurance

(Free Report)

Brookfield Reinsurance Ltd., through its subsidiaries, provides annuity-based reinsurance products to insurance and reinsurance companies in the United States, Canada, and internationally. The company operates in three segments: Direct Insurance, Reinsurance, and Pension Risk Transfer (PRT). The Direct Insurance segment offers a range of insurance products and services including life insurance, annuities, property and casualty insurance, health insurance, credit insurance, and pension products. The Reinsurance segment provides reinsurance of annuity-based products, such as fixed annuities, fixed index annuities, and payout annuities. The PRT segment provides transfer by a corporate sponsor of the risks associated with the sponsorship and administration of a pension plan. The company was formerly known as Brookfield Asset Management Reinsurance Partners Ltd. and changed its name to Brookfield Reinsurance Ltd. in December 2022. Brookfield Reinsurance Ltd. was founded in 1905 and is headquartered in Pembroke, Bermuda.

About Hannover Ruck

(Free Report)

Hannover Ruck SE, together with its subsidiaries, provides reinsurance products and services worldwide. It operates through Property & Casualty Reinsurance, and Life & Health Reinsurance segments. The company offers property and casualty reinsurance solutions for agricultural, livestock, and bloodstock businesses; aviation and space businesses; catastrophe XL business; credit, surety, and political risks businesses; facultative business; and marine and offshore energy businesses, as well as insurance-linked securities and structured reinsurance. It also provides risk solutions in the areas of critical illness, disability, health, longevity, long term care, and mortality. In addition, the company offers group and individual retirement and lifestyle, credit life, and Takaful reinsurance products. Further, it provides various financial solutions, including new-business financing; monetization of embedded value; reserve and solvency relief; and divestiture of non-core businesses. The company was formerly known as Hannover Ruckversicherung AG and changed its name to Hannover Ruck SE in March 2013. The company was founded in 1966 and is based in Hanover, Germany. Hannover Ruck SE is a subsidiary of Talanx AG.

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Antonetti Capital Management LLC increased its holdings in Enbridge Inc. (NYSE:ENB  Free Report) (TSE:ENB) by 58.2% during the 1st quarter, according to its most recent 13F filing with the Securities & Exchange Commission. The institutional investor owned 1,087 shares of the pipeline companys stock after buying an additional 400 shares during the period. Antonetti Capital Management LLCs holdings in Enbridge were worth $41,000 as of its most recent SEC filing.

Other institutional investors and hedge funds have also made changes to their positions in the company. Cranbrook Wealth Management LLC lifted its holdings in Enbridge by 24.0% in the 1st quarter. Cranbrook Wealth Management LLC now owns 1,525 shares of the pipeline companys stock valued at $58,000 after purchasing an additional 295 shares in the last quarter. Stonegate Investment Group LLC lifted its holdings in Enbridge by 3.1% in the 1st quarter. Stonegate Investment Group LLC now owns 19,408 shares of the pipeline companys stock valued at $740,000 after purchasing an additional 581 shares in the last quarter. Demars Financial Group LLC lifted its holdings in Enbridge by 1.0% in the 1st quarter. Demars Financial Group LLC now owns 126,815 shares of the pipeline companys stock valued at $4,838,000 after purchasing an additional 1,254 shares in the last quarter. SevenBridge Financial Group LLC lifted its holdings in Enbridge by 10.7% in the 1st quarter. SevenBridge Financial Group LLC now owns 24,280 shares of the pipeline companys stock valued at $926,000 after purchasing an additional 2,355 shares in the last quarter. Finally, Foster Victor Wealth Advisors LLC lifted its holdings in Enbridge by 9.1% in the 1st quarter. Foster Victor Wealth Advisors LLC now owns 123,867 shares of the pipeline companys stock valued at $4,817,000 after purchasing an additional 10,377 shares in the last quarter. 45.70% of the stock is currently owned by hedge funds and other institutional investors.

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Enbridge Stock Up 0.3 %

ENB opened at $37.25 on Monday. The firm has a 50 day moving average price of $37.68 and a 200 day moving average price of $38.70. The company has a market cap of $75.36 billion, a PE ratio of 41.74, a price-to-earnings-growth ratio of 2.81 and a beta of 0.84. Enbridge Inc. has a 1 year low of $35.02 and a 1 year high of $45.21. The company has a debt-to-equity ratio of 1.23, a quick ratio of 0.51 and a current ratio of 0.59.

Enbridge Increases Dividend

Enbridge ( NYSE:ENB Free Report ) (TSE:ENB) last posted its earnings results on Friday, May 5th. The pipeline company reported $0.63 earnings per share (EPS) for the quarter, topping analysts consensus estimates of $0.62 by $0.01. The firm had revenue of $8.93 billion during the quarter, compared to the consensus estimate of $10.33 billion. Enbridge had a net margin of 5.44% and a return on equity of 10.23%. Sell-side analysts expect that Enbridge Inc. will post 2.2 earnings per share for the current year.

The company also recently disclosed a quarterly dividend, which was paid on Thursday, June 1st. Shareholders of record on Monday, May 15th were given a $0.655 dividend. This is an increase from Enbridges previous quarterly dividend of $0.65. The ex-dividend date was Friday, May 12th. This represents a $2.62 annualized dividend and a yield of 7.03%. Enbridges dividend payout ratio (DPR) is 295.51%.

Wall Street Analysts Forecast Growth

ENB has been the topic of a number of recent research reports. Credit Suisse Group upgraded shares of Enbridge from an underperform rating to a neutral rating in a report on Wednesday, March 29th. StockNews.com initiated coverage on shares of Enbridge in a report on Thursday, May 18th. They set a hold rating on the stock. Five analysts have rated the stock with a hold rating and two have given a buy rating to the companys stock. According to MarketBeat, the company currently has a consensus rating of Hold and a consensus target price of $57.50.

Enbridge Profile

(Free Report)

Enbridge Inc, together with its subsidiaries, operates as an energy infrastructure company. The company operates through five segments: Liquids Pipelines, Gas Transmission and Midstream, Gas Distribution and Storage, Renewable Power Generation, and Energy Services. The Liquids Pipelines segment operates pipelines and related terminals to transport various grades of crude oil and other liquid hydrocarbons in Canada and the United States.

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Want to see what other hedge funds are holding ENB? Visit HoldingsChannel.com to get the latest 13F filings and insider trades for Enbridge Inc. (NYSE:ENB  Free Report) (TSE:ENB).

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Armadale Capital Plc (LON:ACP  Free Report)s share price hit a new 52-week low during trading on Monday . The stock traded as low as GBX 1 ($0.01) and last traded at GBX 1.10 ($0.01), with a volume of 7998995 shares changing hands. The stock had previously closed at GBX 1.10 ($0.01).

Armadale Capital Stock Up 0.1 %

The company has a market capitalization of 6.47 million, a price-to-earnings ratio of -17.75 and a beta of 1.13. The company has a debt-to-equity ratio of 11.23, a quick ratio of 41.47 and a current ratio of 15.53. The businesss 50 day moving average is GBX 1.30 and its 200 day moving average is GBX 1.54.

Armadale Capital Company Profile

(Free Report)

Armadale Capital Plc, an investment company, focuses on natural resources projects in Africa. It holds 100% interest in the Mahenge Liandu Graphite project located in Tanzania. The company was formerly known as Watermark Global Plc and changed its name to Armadale Capital Plc in July 2013. Armadale Capital Plc was incorporated in 2005 and is headquartered in Esher, the United Kingdom.

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HSBC upgraded shares of Aviva (OTCMKTS:AVVIY  Free Report) from a hold rating to a buy rating in a report released on Friday, The Fly reports.

A number of other brokerages have also commented on AVVIY. JPMorgan Chase & Co. decreased their target price on Aviva from GBX 545 ($6.93) to GBX 535 ($6.80) in a research report on Thursday, May 25th. Barclays decreased their target price on Aviva from GBX 560 ($7.12) to GBX 545 ($6.93) in a research report on Friday, March 10th. Finally, Berenberg Bank decreased their target price on Aviva from GBX 546 ($6.94) to GBX 532 ($6.76) in a research report on Thursday, May 25th.

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Aviva Stock Up 2.4 %

Shares of Aviva stock opened at $10.07 on Friday. Aviva has a one year low of $8.05 and a one year high of $11.39. The business has a 50-day simple moving average of $10.23 and a 200 day simple moving average of $10.49.

Aviva Company Profile

Aviva plc provides various insurance, retirement, investment, and savings products in the United Kingdom, Ireland, Canada, and internationally. The company offers life insurance, long-term health and accident insurance, savings, pension, and annuity products, as well as pension fund business and lifetime mortgage products.

Further Reading

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Pinnacle West Capital (NYSE:PNW  Free Report) had its target price cut by Bank of America from $80.00 to $78.00 in a research note released on Thursday morning, The Fly reports.

A number of other research firms also recently weighed in on PNW. StockNews.com downgraded Pinnacle West Capital from a hold rating to a sell rating in a report on Saturday, May 20th. Wells Fargo & Company lifted their target price on shares of Pinnacle West Capital from $85.00 to $89.00 in a research note on Friday, June 16th. Credit Suisse Group upgraded shares of Pinnacle West Capital from a neutral rating to an outperform rating and lifted their target price for the company from $77.00 to $80.00 in a research note on Tuesday, March 14th. Mizuho lifted their target price on shares of Pinnacle West Capital from $80.00 to $84.00 in a research note on Friday, June 23rd. Finally, Morgan Stanley lifted their target price on shares of Pinnacle West Capital from $71.00 to $78.00 and gave the company an equal weight rating in a research note on Thursday, April 20th. Three 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. According to data from MarketBeat, the company presently has a consensus rating of Hold and a consensus target price of $76.60.

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Pinnacle West Capital Price Performance

Shares of Pinnacle West Capital stock opened at $81.46 on Thursday. The firm has a market cap of $9.23 billion, a P/E ratio of 19.92, a price-to-earnings-growth ratio of 3.24 and a beta of 0.46. The firms 50-day simple moving average is $79.79 and its 200-day simple moving average is $77.59. Pinnacle West Capital has a twelve month low of $59.03 and a twelve month high of $84.59. The company has a debt-to-equity ratio of 1.28, a quick ratio of 0.74 and a current ratio of 1.01.

Pinnacle West Capital Announces Dividend

Pinnacle West Capital ( NYSE:PNW Free Report ) last released its quarterly earnings data on Thursday, May 4th. The utilities provider reported ($0.03) earnings per share for the quarter, missing analysts consensus estimates of $0.03 by ($0.06). The company had revenue of $944.60 million for the quarter, compared to analyst estimates of $808.33 million. Pinnacle West Capital had a net margin of 10.33% and a return on equity of 7.50%. The firms revenue for the quarter was up 20.6% compared to the same quarter last year. During the same period in the previous year, the firm posted $0.15 earnings per share. As a group, research analysts expect that Pinnacle West Capital will post 4.08 EPS for the current fiscal year.

The business also recently disclosed a quarterly dividend, which will be paid on Friday, September 1st. Investors of record on Tuesday, August 1st will be given a $0.865 dividend. This represents a $3.46 annualized dividend and a yield of 4.25%. The ex-dividend date of this dividend is Monday, July 31st. Pinnacle West Capitals dividend payout ratio (DPR) is presently 84.60%.

Institutional Inflows and Outflows

Several institutional investors have recently bought and sold shares of the stock. Vanguard Group Inc. raised its position in shares of Pinnacle West Capital by 1.2% during the 3rd quarter. Vanguard Group Inc. now owns 13,902,237 shares of the utilities providers stock valued at $896,834,000 after acquiring an additional 171,173 shares during the last quarter. BlackRock Inc. raised its position in shares of Pinnacle West Capital by 2.7% during the 1st quarter. BlackRock Inc. now owns 10,307,741 shares of the utilities providers stock valued at $816,785,000 after acquiring an additional 273,945 shares during the last quarter. State Street Corp raised its position in shares of Pinnacle West Capital by 1.0% during the 3rd quarter. State Street Corp now owns 7,634,622 shares of the utilities providers stock valued at $492,509,000 after acquiring an additional 74,164 shares during the last quarter. Invesco Ltd. raised its position in shares of Pinnacle West Capital by 29.6% during the 1st quarter. Invesco Ltd. now owns 3,537,942 shares of the utilities providers stock valued at $276,313,000 after acquiring an additional 808,207 shares during the last quarter. Finally, Geode Capital Management LLC raised its position in shares of Pinnacle West Capital by 3.7% during the 4th quarter. Geode Capital Management LLC now owns 2,758,370 shares of the utilities providers stock valued at $209,567,000 after acquiring an additional 97,897 shares during the last quarter. Institutional investors own 85.46% of the companys stock.

About Pinnacle West Capital

(Free Report)

Pinnacle West Capital Corporation, through its subsidiary, Arizona Public Service Company, provides retail and wholesale electric services primarily in the state of Arizona. The company engages in the generation, transmission, and distribution of electricity using coal, nuclear, gas, oil, and solar generating facilities.

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Brinks (NYSE:BCO  Free Report) updated its FY 2023 earnings guidance on Saturday. The company provided EPS guidance of $6.45-$7.15 for the period, compared to the consensus EPS estimate of $6.80. The company issued revenue guidance of $4.80 billion-$4.95 billion, compared to the consensus revenue estimate of $4.91 billion.

Brinks Stock Performance

BCO stock opened at $67.83 on Monday. The businesss 50-day moving average price is $67.47 and its two-hundred day moving average price is $64.18. The company has a current ratio of 1.53, a quick ratio of 1.53 and a debt-to-equity ratio of 5.27. The firm has a market cap of $3.15 billion, a PE ratio of 27.69 and a beta of 1.32. Brinks has a 1-year low of $48.38 and a 1-year high of $73.39.

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Brinks (NYSE:BCO  Free Report) last posted its earnings results on Wednesday, May 10th. The business services provider reported $1.16 earnings per share for the quarter, topping the consensus estimate of $1.10 by $0.06. The firm had revenue of $1.19 billion for the quarter, compared to analyst estimates of $1.15 billion. Brinks had a return on equity of 60.26% and a net margin of 2.50%. As a group, research analysts forecast that Brinks will post 6.8 earnings per share for the current year.

Brinks Increases Dividend

Wall Street Analysts Forecast Growth

The company also recently disclosed a quarterly dividend, which was paid on Thursday, June 1st. Stockholders of record on Monday, May 15th were issued a dividend of $0.22 per share. This represents a $0.88 dividend on an annualized basis and a dividend yield of 1.30%. The ex-dividend date of this dividend was Friday, May 12th. This is a boost from Brinkss previous quarterly dividend of $0.20. Brinkss payout ratio is currently 35.92%.

A number of brokerages have recently issued reports on BCO. StockNews.com upgraded Brinks from a buy rating to a strong-buy rating in a report on Monday, June 26th. Truist Financial boosted their price target on Brinks from $78.00 to $90.00 and gave the company a buy rating in a research note on Friday, March 24th.

Insider Activity at Brinks

In other Brinks news, EVP Dominik Bossart sold 15,000 shares of the companys stock in a transaction on Tuesday, June 6th. The stock was sold at an average price of $70.00, for a total transaction of $1,050,000.00. Following the completion of the sale, the executive vice president now directly owns 35,291 shares in the company, valued at $2,470,370. The transaction was disclosed in a filing with the Securities & Exchange Commission, which can be accessed through the SEC website. 2.65% of the stock is currently owned by corporate insiders.

Institutional Inflows and Outflows

A number of hedge funds and other institutional investors have recently bought and sold shares of BCO. JPMorgan Chase & Co. grew its position in Brinks by 38.9% in the first quarter. JPMorgan Chase & Co. now owns 219,320 shares of the business services providers stock valued at $14,913,000 after acquiring an additional 61,443 shares during the last quarter. Raymond James & Associates boosted its stake in shares of Brinks by 16.0% during the first quarter. Raymond James & Associates now owns 34,178 shares of the business services providers stock valued at $2,324,000 after purchasing an additional 4,721 shares in the last quarter. Bank of Montreal Can boosted its stake in shares of Brinks by 10.1% during the first quarter. Bank of Montreal Can now owns 4,326 shares of the business services providers stock valued at $296,000 after purchasing an additional 397 shares in the last quarter. Rhumbline Advisers boosted its stake in shares of Brinks by 2.9% during the first quarter. Rhumbline Advisers now owns 151,123 shares of the business services providers stock valued at $10,276,000 after purchasing an additional 4,231 shares in the last quarter. Finally, Commonwealth of Pennsylvania Public School Empls Retrmt SYS boosted its stake in shares of Brinks by 10.5% during the first quarter. Commonwealth of Pennsylvania Public School Empls Retrmt SYS now owns 18,014 shares of the business services providers stock valued at $1,225,000 after purchasing an additional 1,717 shares in the last quarter. Institutional investors own 96.49% of the companys stock.

Brinks Company Profile

(Free Report)

The Brink's Company provides secure transportation, cash management, and other security-related services in North America, Latin America, Europe, and internationally. The company offers armored vehicle transportation of valuables; automated teller machine (ATM) management services, such as cash replenishment, cash forecasting, cash optimization, ATM remote monitoring, service call dispatching, transaction processing, installation, and first and second line maintenance services; and cash-in-transit services.

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Rio Tinto Group (LON:RIO  Free Report)s stock had its buy rating reaffirmed by equities researchers at Citigroup in a research report issued on Monday, Digital Look reports.

A number of other equities analysts have also issued reports on RIO. JPMorgan Chase & Co. reaffirmed an underweight rating on shares of Rio Tinto Group in a research report on Tuesday, June 6th. Morgan Stanley dropped their price objective on Rio Tinto Group from GBX 5,800 ($73.74) to GBX 5,670 ($72.09) and set an overweight rating for the company in a report on Wednesday, June 21st. Berenberg Bank reiterated a buy rating and issued a GBX 6,600 ($83.92) price objective on shares of Rio Tinto Group in a research report on Thursday, May 25th. Deutsche Bank Aktiengesellschaft raised Rio Tinto Group to a buy rating and reduced their price target for the stock from GBX 6,200 ($78.83) to GBX 6,000 ($76.29) in a research report on Monday, June 5th. Finally, Royal Bank of Canada dropped their price target on Rio Tinto Group from GBX 5,100 ($64.84) to GBX 5,000 ($63.57) in a research note on Friday, April 21st. Two research analysts have rated the stock with a sell rating, one has assigned a hold rating and six have issued a buy rating to the companys stock. According to data from MarketBeat, Rio Tinto Group has an average rating of Hold and an average target price of GBX 6,109.23 ($77.68).

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Rio Tinto Group Price Performance

Rio Tinto Group stock traded up GBX 64.50 ($0.82) during trading hours on Monday, hitting GBX 5,050 ($64.21). 2,864,831 shares of the company traded hands, compared to its average volume of 2,783,171. The firm has a market cap of 63.13 billion, a P/E ratio of 844.48, a P/E/G ratio of -0.64 and a beta of 0.70. The company has a quick ratio of 1.34, a current ratio of 1.63 and a debt-to-equity ratio of 23.47. The firms 50-day simple moving average is GBX 5,013.84 and its two-hundred day simple moving average is GBX 5,521.88. Rio Tinto Group has a 1-year low of GBX 4,424.50 ($56.26) and a 1-year high of GBX 6,406 ($81.45).

Insider Activity

About Rio Tinto Group

In other news, insider Peter Cunningham sold 5 shares of the companys stock in a transaction that occurred on Monday, April 17th. The stock was sold at an average price of GBX 5,586 ($71.02), for a total transaction of 279.30 ($355.12). In other Rio Tinto Group news, insider Ngaire Woods purchased 500 shares of the firms stock in a transaction dated Thursday, May 11th. The shares were acquired at an average price of GBX 4,921 ($62.57) per share, with a total value of 24,605 ($31,284.17). Also, insider Peter Cunningham sold 5 shares of the companys stock in a transaction dated Monday, April 17th. The stock was sold at an average price of GBX 5,586 ($71.02), for a total value of 279.30 ($355.12). Over the last 90 days, insiders have acquired 1,410 shares of company stock valued at $7,259,580. 14.67% of the stock is currently owned by insiders.

(Free Report)

Rio Tinto Group engages in exploring, mining, and processing mineral resources worldwide. The company operates through Iron Ore, Aluminium, Copper, and Minerals Segments. It offers aluminum, copper, iron ore, diamonds, gold, borates, titanium dioxide, salt, silver, molybdenum, and lithium. The company also owns and operates open pit and underground mines, refineries, smelters, and concentrator facilities, as well as power stations, research, and service facilities.

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abrdn (OTCMKTS:SLFPF  Free Report) is one of 1,212 publicly-traded companies in the Asset Management industry, but how does it compare to its competitors? We will compare abrdn to similar companies based on the strength of its dividends, risk, analyst recommendations, earnings, profitability, valuation and institutional ownership.

Profitability

This table compares abrdn and its competitors net margins, return on equity and return on assets.

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Net Margins Return on Equity Return on Assets abrdn N/A N/A N/A abrdn Competitors 375.69% 7.63% 4.95%

Earnings and Valuation

This table compares abrdn and its competitors revenue, earnings per share and valuation.

Gross Revenue Net Income Price/Earnings Ratio abrdn N/A N/A 11.23 abrdn Competitors $248.75 million -$1.08 million 30.41

Dividends

abrdns competitors have higher revenue, but lower earnings than abrdn. abrdn is trading at a lower price-to-earnings ratio than its competitors, indicating that it is currently more affordable than other companies in its industry.

abrdn pays an annual dividend of $0.16 per share and has a dividend yield of 5.5%. abrdn pays out 61.7% of its earnings in the form of a dividend. As a group, Asset Management companies pay a dividend yield of 7.2% and pay out 599.7% of their earnings in the form of a dividend.

Institutional and Insider Ownership

27.1% of abrdn shares are owned by institutional investors. Comparatively, 32.5% of shares of all Asset Management companies are owned by institutional investors. 18.0% of shares of all Asset Management companies are owned by company insiders. Strong institutional ownership is an indication that hedge funds, large money managers and endowments believe a stock will outperform the market over the long term.

Analyst Ratings

This is a breakdown of recent ratings and price targets for abrdn and its competitors, as provided by MarketBeat.com.

Sell Ratings Hold Ratings Buy Ratings Strong Buy Ratings Rating Score abrdn 6 1 0 0 1.14 abrdn Competitors 1064 4794 6209 85 2.44

abrdn currently has a consensus target price of $174.00, indicating a potential upside of 5,950.07%. As a group, Asset Management companies have a potential upside of 84.36%. Given abrdns higher possible upside, analysts plainly believe abrdn is more favorable than its competitors.

Summary

abrdn competitors beat abrdn on 11 of the 13 factors compared.

abrdn Company Profile

(Free Report)

abrdn plc provides asset management services in the United Kingdom, Europe, North America, and Asia. The company offers investment solutions and funds; long-term savings and investment products to individual and corporate customers; and life insurance and savings products. It provides its products through institutional, wholesale, and retail distribution channels. It also makes real estate investments. The company was formerly known as Standard Life Aberdeen plc. abrdn plc was founded in 1825 and is headquartered in Edinburgh, United Kingdom.

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PHNOM PENH, July 3 (Xinhua) -- Cambodia recorded some 2.57 million international visitors in the first half of 2023, a sharp increase of 409 percent from 506,762 over the same period last year, Tourism Minister Thong Khon said on Monday.

Thailand topped the chart among the international arrivals to the Southeast Asian country during the January-June period this year, followed by Vietnam, China, Laos, and the United States, he said.

"About 910,000 foreign tourists visited Cambodia by air, up 279 percent; 1.63 million by land, up 526 percent; and 30,000 by waterways, up 586 percent," he said in a report, adding that the kingdom welcomed a total of 10,635 international flights in the first half of this year.

"Based on our latest forecast, Cambodia will be able to receive up to 5 million international tourists in 2023, an expected increase of 120 percent from 2.27 million in 2022," he said.

Khon said the number of foreign visitors to Cambodia is predicted to reach 7 million in 2025, surpassing the pre-COVID-19 pandemic level of 6.6 million in 2019.

"The recovery of the tourism sector has importantly contributed to our country's post-pandemic economic growth, which is forecast at 5.6 percent this year," he said.

Tourism is one of the four pillars supporting Cambodia's economy, in addition to garment export, agriculture and construction and real estate.

The minister said China's reopening earlier this year has injected fresh impetus into Cambodia's tourism growth and that the kingdom is expected to attract between 800,000 and 1 million Chinese tourists in 2023.

Cambodia is well known for its three world heritage sites, namely the Angkor Archaeological Park in Siem Reap province, the Preah Vihear Temple in Preah Vihear province, and the Sambor Prei Kuk Archaeological Site in Kampong Thom province.

Besides, it has a 450-km pristine coastline stretching across four southwestern provinces of Sihanoukville, Kampot, Kep and Koh Kong. 
Crane (NYSE:CR  Free Report) and Fanuc (OTCMKTS:FANUF  Free Report) are both industrials companies, but which is the superior business? We will contrast the two companies based on the strength of their dividends, valuation, earnings, profitability, analyst recommendations, risk and institutional ownership.

Profitability

This table compares Crane and Fanucs net margins, return on equity and return on assets.

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Net Margins Return on Equity Return on Assets Crane 13.10% 24.45% 10.14% Fanuc N/A N/A N/A

Analyst Recommendations

This is a summary of recent ratings and price targets for Crane and Fanuc, as reported by MarketBeat.

Sell Ratings Hold Ratings Buy Ratings Strong Buy Ratings Rating Score Crane 0 1 3 0 2.75 Fanuc 0 0 0 0 N/A

Insider & Institutional Ownership

Crane currently has a consensus price target of $106.00, indicating a potential upside of 18.94%. Given Cranes higher possible upside, equities research analysts clearly believe Crane is more favorable than Fanuc.

26.3% of Crane shares are owned by institutional investors. Comparatively, 35.3% of Fanuc shares are owned by institutional investors. 2.4% of Crane shares are owned by company insiders. Strong institutional ownership is an indication that hedge funds, large money managers and endowments believe a stock will outperform the market over the long term.

Valuation & Earnings

This table compares Crane and Fanucs top-line revenue, earnings per share (EPS) and valuation.

Gross Revenue Price/Sales Ratio Net Income Earnings Per Share Price/Earnings Ratio Crane $3.35 billion 1.51 $401.10 million $7.55 11.80 Fanuc N/A N/A N/A C$793.15 0.04

Crane has higher revenue and earnings than Fanuc. Fanuc is trading at a lower price-to-earnings ratio than Crane, indicating that it is currently the more affordable of the two stocks.

Dividends

Crane pays an annual dividend of $0.72 per share and has a dividend yield of 0.8%. Fanuc pays an annual dividend of C$178.18 per share and has a dividend yield of 518.1%. Crane pays out 9.5% of its earnings in the form of a dividend. Fanuc pays out 22.5% 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

Crane beats Fanuc on 9 of the 12 factors compared between the two stocks.

About Crane

(Free Report)

Crane Company, together with its subsidiaries, manufactures and sells engineered industrial products in the Americas, Europe, the Middle East, Asia, and Australia. The company has four business segments: Aerospace & Electronics, Process Flow Technologies, Payment & Merchandising Technologies, and Engineered Materials. The Aerospace & Electronics segment supplies critical components and systems, including original equipment and aftermarket parts, primarily for the commercial aerospace, and the military aerospace, defense, and space markets. This segment also offers pressure sensors for aircraft engine control, aircraft braking systems for fighter jets, power conversion solutions for spacecraft, and lubrication systems. The Process Flow Technologies segment provides engineered fluid handling equipment for mission critical applications. It offers process valves and related products, commercial valves, and pumps and systems. The Payment & Merchandising Technologies segment provides electronic equipment and associated software leveraging extensive, and proprietary core capabilities, including payment verification and authentication, as well as automation solutions, field service solutions, remote diagnostics, and productivity enhancing software solutions. The Engineered Materials segment manufactures fiberglass-reinforced plastic panels and coils, primarily for use in the manufacturing of recreational vehicles and in commercial and industrial buildings applications. It provides products and solutions to customers across end markets, including aerospace, defense, chemical and pharmaceutical, water and wastewater, payment automation, non-residential and municipal construction, energy, and banknote design and production, as well as for a range of general industrial and consumer applications. The company was formerly known as Crane Holdings, Co. Crane Company was founded in 1855 and is based in Stamford, Connecticut.

About Fanuc

(Free Report)

Fanuc Corporation provides factory automation products in Japan, the Americas, Europe, China, the rest of Asia, and internationally. The company offers CNC series products, servo motors, lasers, robots, compact machining centers, electric injection molding machines, wire electrical discharge machines, and ultra-precision machines. It also provides FANUC intelligent edge link and drive systems, an open platform for the manufacturing industry. The company was incorporated in 1950 and is headquartered in Yamanashi, Japan.

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Cullen/Frost Bankers (NYSE:CFR  Free Report) had its target price increased by JPMorgan Chase & Co. from $130.00 to $135.00 in a report published on Thursday morning, The Fly reports.

CFR has been the topic of several other reports. Wedbush upped their price target on shares of Cullen/Frost Bankers from $110.00 to $120.00 in a research report on Friday, April 28th. UBS Group assumed coverage on shares of Cullen/Frost Bankers in a research note on Wednesday, March 15th. They issued a sell rating and a $107.00 target price for the company. StockNews.com started coverage on Cullen/Frost Bankers in a report on Thursday, May 18th. They set a sell rating for the company. Morgan Stanley cut Cullen/Frost Bankers from an overweight rating to an equal weight rating and cut their price objective for the company from $127.00 to $121.00 in a research report on Tuesday, May 16th. Finally, Truist Financial dropped their price target on Cullen/Frost Bankers from $114.00 to $113.00 in a research note on Thursday. Two analysts have rated the stock with a sell rating, seven have issued a hold rating and four have issued a buy rating to the company. Based on data from MarketBeat, the company currently has an average rating of Hold and a consensus price target of $135.33.

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Cullen/Frost Bankers Trading Down 0.5 %

Cullen/Frost Bankers stock opened at $107.53 on Thursday. The company has a debt-to-equity ratio of 0.07, a current ratio of 0.58 and a quick ratio of 0.58. The firm has a 50-day moving average of $104.54 and a 200-day moving average of $116.18. The company has a market cap of $6.92 billion, a price-to-earnings ratio of 10.74, a P/E/G ratio of 1.17 and a beta of 1.04. Cullen/Frost Bankers has a one year low of $92.55 and a one year high of $160.60.

Cullen/Frost Bankers Dividend Announcement

Cullen/Frost Bankers ( NYSE:CFR Free Report ) last posted its quarterly earnings results on Thursday, April 27th. The bank reported $2.70 earnings per share for the quarter, beating analysts consensus estimates of $2.55 by $0.15. Cullen/Frost Bankers had a return on equity of 21.59% and a net margin of 30.40%. The firm had revenue of $505.09 million during the quarter, compared to the consensus estimate of $503.93 million. During the same period last year, the company earned $1.51 earnings per share. The businesss revenue was up 44.1% compared to the same quarter last year. On average, equities analysts expect that Cullen/Frost Bankers will post 9.76 earnings per share for the current fiscal year.

The firm also recently announced a quarterly dividend, which was paid on Thursday, June 15th. Shareholders of record on Wednesday, May 31st were given a dividend of $0.87 per share. The ex-dividend date of this dividend was Tuesday, May 30th. This represents a $3.48 dividend on an annualized basis and a dividend yield of 3.24%. Cullen/Frost Bankerss payout ratio is presently 34.77%.

Insider Activity

In related news, insider Patrick B. Frost sold 6,617 shares of the firms stock in a transaction on Friday, May 19th. The stock was sold at an average price of $101.09, for a total value of $668,912.53. Following the transaction, the insider now owns 210,946 shares in the company, valued at $21,324,531.14. The sale was disclosed in a document filed with the Securities & Exchange Commission, which can be accessed through the SEC website. In other Cullen/Frost Bankers news, Director Chris Avery purchased 5,000 shares of the stock in a transaction dated Wednesday, May 10th. The stock was bought at an average price of $95.75 per share, with a total value of $478,750.00. Following the acquisition, the director now owns 10,000 shares of the companys stock, valued at $957,500. The purchase was disclosed in a legal filing with the Securities & Exchange Commission, which is available at this hyperlink. Also, insider Patrick B. Frost sold 6,617 shares of the companys stock in a transaction on Friday, May 19th. The stock was sold at an average price of $101.09, for a total value of $668,912.53. Following the sale, the insider now owns 210,946 shares of the companys stock, valued at $21,324,531.14. The disclosure for this sale can be found here. Over the last ninety days, insiders acquired 8,500 shares of company stock worth $818,945. Corporate insiders own 2.89% of the companys stock.

Institutional Inflows and Outflows

A number of institutional investors and hedge funds have recently made changes to their positions in the stock. Macquarie Group Ltd. bought a new position in Cullen/Frost Bankers in the 1st quarter valued at approximately $25,000. Ellevest Inc. increased its holdings in shares of Cullen/Frost Bankers by 687.1% during the first quarter. Ellevest Inc. now owns 244 shares of the banks stock worth $26,000 after buying an additional 213 shares in the last quarter. Lazard Asset Management LLC bought a new position in shares of Cullen/Frost Bankers in the 4th quarter valued at $26,000. FourThought Financial LLC grew its position in Cullen/Frost Bankers by 51.1% during the 3rd quarter. FourThought Financial LLC now owns 207 shares of the banks stock worth $27,000 after acquiring an additional 70 shares during the last quarter. Finally, Clearstead Advisors LLC bought a new stake in Cullen/Frost Bankers during the 1st quarter worth $29,000. Institutional investors own 80.49% of the companys stock.

About Cullen/Frost Bankers

(Free Report)

Cullen/Frost Bankers, Inc operates as the bank holding company for Frost Bank that provides commercial and consumer banking services in Texas. It operates in two segments, Banking and Frost Wealth Advisors. The company offers commercial banking services to corporations and other business clients, including financing for industrial and commercial properties, interim construction related to industrial and commercial properties, equipment, inventories and accounts receivables, and acquisitions; and treasury management services, as well as originates commercial leasing services.

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Ethos Financial Group LLC increased its stake in shares of Raytheon Technologies Co. (NYSE:RTX  Free Report) by 12.0% during the first quarter, Holdings Channel.com reports. The institutional investor owned 2,529 shares of the companys stock after buying an additional 271 shares during the quarter. Ethos Financial Group LLCs holdings in Raytheon Technologies were worth $248,000 as of its most recent filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC).

A number of other large investors have also recently made changes to their positions in the stock. Princeton Global Asset Management LLC grew its holdings in shares of Raytheon Technologies by 2.5% during the first quarter. Princeton Global Asset Management LLC now owns 23,933 shares of the companys stock valued at $2,344,000 after buying an additional 575 shares during the last quarter. Daymark Wealth Partners LLC grew its holdings in shares of Raytheon Technologies by 22.4% during the first quarter. Daymark Wealth Partners LLC now owns 25,863 shares of the companys stock valued at $2,533,000 after buying an additional 4,731 shares during the last quarter. Presilium Private Wealth LLC grew its holdings in shares of Raytheon Technologies by 3.5% during the first quarter. Presilium Private Wealth LLC now owns 9,321 shares of the companys stock valued at $913,000 after buying an additional 317 shares during the last quarter. Altfest L J & Co. Inc. lifted its position in Raytheon Technologies by 11.5% during the first quarter. Altfest L J & Co. Inc. now owns 11,923 shares of the companys stock valued at $1,168,000 after purchasing an additional 1,227 shares during the period. Finally, Empire Financial Management Company LLC acquired a new position in Raytheon Technologies during the first quarter valued at $1,130,000. 78.72% of the stock is owned by hedge funds and other institutional investors.

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Raytheon Technologies Price Performance

NYSE RTX traded up $0.37 during trading hours on Monday, hitting $98.33. 561,865 shares of the companys stock traded hands, compared to its average volume of 4,501,861. Raytheon Technologies Co. has a 52-week low of $80.27 and a 52-week high of $108.84. The company has a market capitalization of $143.67 billion, a PE ratio of 26.12, a PEG ratio of 2.36 and a beta of 0.99. The company has a debt-to-equity ratio of 0.44, a current ratio of 1.13 and a quick ratio of 0.85. The firms 50-day moving average is $96.86 and its 200-day moving average is $98.29.

Raytheon Technologies Announces Dividend

Raytheon Technologies ( NYSE:RTX Free Report ) last announced its quarterly earnings data on Tuesday, April 25th. The company reported $1.22 earnings per share (EPS) for the quarter, beating the consensus estimate of $1.13 by $0.09. Raytheon Technologies had a net margin of 8.08% and a return on equity of 9.81%. The company had revenue of $17.21 billion during the quarter, compared to analysts expectations of $16.98 billion. During the same quarter in the prior year, the company earned $1.15 EPS. Raytheon Technologiess revenue was up 9.5% compared to the same quarter last year. Equities analysts forecast that Raytheon Technologies Co. will post 5.04 EPS for the current fiscal year.

The company also recently declared a quarterly dividend, which will be paid on Thursday, September 7th. Stockholders of record on Friday, August 18th will be paid a $0.59 dividend. The ex-dividend date of this dividend is Thursday, August 17th. This represents a $2.36 annualized dividend and a dividend yield of 2.40%. Raytheon Technologiess dividend payout ratio (DPR) is 62.93%.

Wall Street Analysts Forecast Growth

A number of research analysts recently issued reports on the stock. Jefferies Financial Group downgraded shares of Raytheon Technologies from a buy rating to a hold rating and decreased their target price for the company from $115.00 to $110.00 in a research report on Thursday, April 20th. Robert W. Baird boosted their target price on shares of Raytheon Technologies from $106.00 to $115.00 in a research report on Wednesday, April 26th. Wolfe Research upgraded shares of Raytheon Technologies from a peer perform rating to an outperform rating and set a $117.00 target price for the company in a research report on Wednesday, April 12th. StockNews.com began coverage on shares of Raytheon Technologies in a research report on Thursday, May 18th. They issued a buy rating for the company. Finally, Susquehanna upped their price objective on shares of Raytheon Technologies from $116.00 to $117.00 in a research report on Wednesday, April 26th. Five investment analysts have rated the stock with a hold rating and seven have issued a buy rating to the stock. According to MarketBeat, the stock currently has a consensus rating of Moderate Buy and an average price target of $111.88.

Raytheon Technologies Company Profile

(Free Report)

Raytheon Technologies Corporation, an aerospace and defense company, provides systems and services for the commercial, military, and government customers worldwide. It operates through four segments: Collins Aerospace, Pratt & Whitney, Raytheon Intelligence & Space, and Raytheon Missiles & Defense.

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Want to see what other hedge funds are holding RTX? Visit HoldingsChannel.com to get the latest 13F filings and insider trades for Raytheon Technologies Co. (NYSE:RTX  Free Report).

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General Mills (NYSE:GIS  Free Report) had its price objective lowered by JPMorgan Chase & Co. from $81.00 to $75.00 in a research note issued to investors on Thursday morning, The Fly reports.

Other analysts also recently issued research reports about the company. Stifel Nicolaus cut their price target on General Mills from $95.00 to $86.00 in a report on Thursday. Deutsche Bank Aktiengesellschaft raised their price target on General Mills from $84.00 to $86.00 in a report on Friday, March 24th. Bank of America cut their price target on General Mills from $88.00 to $82.00 in a report on Thursday. Piper Sandler cut their price target on General Mills from $95.00 to $88.00 in a report on Thursday. Finally, Morgan Stanley cut their price target on General Mills from $77.00 to $72.00 in a report on Thursday. Two analysts have rated the stock with a sell rating, nine have given a hold rating and five have issued a buy rating to the company. Based on data from MarketBeat, the company currently has an average rating of Hold and an average price target of $82.24.

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General Mills Price Performance

Shares of NYSE GIS opened at $76.70 on Thursday. General Mills has a fifty-two week low of $72.16 and a fifty-two week high of $90.89. The business has a 50 day moving average price of $84.94 and a two-hundred day moving average price of $82.88. The company has a quick ratio of 0.32, a current ratio of 0.69 and a debt-to-equity ratio of 0.93. The firm has a market cap of $45.05 billion, a PE ratio of 17.80, a price-to-earnings-growth ratio of 2.26 and a beta of 0.27.

General Mills Increases Dividend

General Mills ( NYSE:GIS Free Report ) last issued its quarterly earnings data on Wednesday, June 28th. The company reported $1.12 earnings per share for the quarter, beating analysts consensus estimates of $1.07 by $0.05. The firm had revenue of $5.03 billion during the quarter, compared to analyst estimates of $5.18 billion. General Mills had a return on equity of 24.47% and a net margin of 12.91%. General Millss quarterly revenue was up 2.8% on a year-over-year basis. During the same quarter last year, the firm earned $1.12 EPS. Sell-side analysts expect that General Mills will post 4.51 earnings per share for the current fiscal year.

The company also recently declared a quarterly dividend, which will be paid on Tuesday, August 1st. Investors of record on Monday, July 10th will be paid a dividend of $0.59 per share. This represents a $2.36 annualized dividend and a yield of 3.08%. This is a positive change from General Millss previous quarterly dividend of $0.54. The ex-dividend date is Friday, July 7th. General Millss payout ratio is currently 54.76%.

Insider Activity at General Mills

In related news, insider Bethany C. Quam sold 21,734 shares of the businesss stock in a transaction dated Tuesday, April 4th. The stock was sold at an average price of $85.86, for a total transaction of $1,866,081.24. Following the transaction, the insider now directly owns 47,560 shares in the company, valued at $4,083,501.60. The sale was disclosed in a filing with the Securities & Exchange Commission, which is available at this hyperlink. In related news, insider Jacqueline Williams-Roll sold 18,517 shares of the stock in a transaction that occurred on Friday, May 5th. The stock was sold at an average price of $89.47, for a total transaction of $1,656,715.99. Following the sale, the insider now directly owns 47,163 shares in the company, valued at approximately $4,219,673.61. The transaction was disclosed in a filing with the SEC, which can be accessed through this hyperlink. Also, insider Bethany C. Quam sold 21,734 shares of the companys stock in a transaction on Tuesday, April 4th. The stock was sold at an average price of $85.86, for a total value of $1,866,081.24. Following the transaction, the insider now directly owns 47,560 shares in the company, valued at approximately $4,083,501.60. The disclosure for this sale can be found here. Insiders have sold 47,341 shares of company stock worth $4,163,978 over the last three months. Company insiders own 0.67% of the companys stock.

Institutional Inflows and Outflows

Large investors have recently made changes to their positions in the stock. Moneta Group Investment Advisors LLC increased its position in shares of General Mills by 123,599.0% in the 4th quarter. Moneta Group Investment Advisors LLC now owns 11,076,005 shares of the companys stock valued at $928,723,000 after buying an additional 11,067,051 shares in the last quarter. Norges Bank bought a new stake in shares of General Mills in the 4th quarter valued at $382,081,000. Price T Rowe Associates Inc. MD increased its position in shares of General Mills by 101.7% in the 1st quarter. Price T Rowe Associates Inc. MD now owns 6,935,085 shares of the companys stock valued at $592,673,000 after buying an additional 3,496,741 shares in the last quarter. Envestnet Asset Management Inc. increased its position in shares of General Mills by 627.7% in the 1st quarter. Envestnet Asset Management Inc. now owns 3,536,513 shares of the companys stock valued at $41,213,000 after buying an additional 3,050,525 shares in the last quarter. Finally, Capital Wealth Planning LLC increased its position in shares of General Mills by 42.2% in the 4th quarter. Capital Wealth Planning LLC now owns 3,547,188 shares of the companys stock valued at $297,432,000 after buying an additional 1,052,899 shares in the last quarter. Institutional investors and hedge funds own 76.73% of the companys stock.

About General Mills

(Free Report)

General Mills, Inc manufactures and markets branded consumer foods worldwide. The company operates in five segments: North America Retail; Convenience Stores & Foodservice; Europe & Australia; Asia & Latin America; and Pet. It offers ready-to-eat cereals, refrigerated yogurt, soup, meal kits, refrigerated and frozen dough products, dessert and baking mixes, bakery flour, frozen pizza and pizza snacks, snack bars, fruit and salty snacks, ice cream, nutrition bars, wellness beverages, and savory and grain snacks, as well as various organic products, including frozen and shelf-stable vegetables.

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Greenhill & Co., Inc. (NYSE:GHL  Free Report) was the recipient of a significant decline in short interest in June. As of June 15th, there was short interest totalling 77,000 shares, a decline of 33.2% from the May 31st total of 115,200 shares. Based on an average daily volume of 259,000 shares, the short-interest ratio is presently 0.3 days. Approximately 0.6% of the companys stock are short sold.

Greenhill & Co., Inc. Price Performance

Shares of NYSE:GHL remained flat at $14.65 during trading on Monday. 29,042 shares of the stock traded hands, compared to its average volume of 167,556. The stock has a market capitalization of $268.39 million, a PE ratio of -21.54 and a beta of 1.14. The company has a quick ratio of 1.90, a current ratio of 1.90 and a debt-to-equity ratio of 5.09. Greenhill & Co., Inc. has a twelve month low of $5.64 and a twelve month high of $14.97. The company has a 50-day moving average of $11.51 and a 200 day moving average of $10.93.

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Greenhill & Co., Inc. (NYSE:GHL  Free Report) last announced its earnings results on Wednesday, May 3rd. The financial services provider reported ($1.27) EPS for the quarter. The business had revenue of $49.68 million during the quarter. Greenhill & Co., Inc. had a negative net margin of 3.02% and a negative return on equity of 13.14%.

Greenhill & Co., Inc. Dividend Announcement

Hedge Funds Weigh In On Greenhill & Co., Inc.

The firm also recently announced a quarterly dividend, which was paid on Wednesday, June 21st. Stockholders of record on Wednesday, June 7th were issued a $0.10 dividend. The ex-dividend date was Tuesday, June 6th. This represents a $0.40 dividend on an annualized basis and a dividend yield of 2.73%. Greenhill & Co., Inc.s payout ratio is -58.82%.

Institutional investors have recently modified their holdings of the business. Quantbot Technologies LP acquired a new position in shares of Greenhill & Co., Inc. in the 1st quarter valued at $40,000. Barclays PLC increased its stake in Greenhill & Co., Inc. by 139.0% in the 4th quarter. Barclays PLC now owns 3,456 shares of the financial services providers stock valued at $36,000 after buying an additional 2,010 shares during the period. Tower Research Capital LLC TRC increased its stake in Greenhill & Co., Inc. by 69.0% in the 1st quarter. Tower Research Capital LLC TRC now owns 3,859 shares of the financial services providers stock valued at $34,000 after buying an additional 1,576 shares during the period. Teachers Retirement System of The State of Kentucky acquired a new position in Greenhill & Co., Inc. in the 3rd quarter valued at $33,000. Finally, MetLife Investment Management LLC increased its stake in Greenhill & Co., Inc. by 58.1% in the 1st quarter. MetLife Investment Management LLC now owns 7,855 shares of the financial services providers stock valued at $122,000 after buying an additional 2,886 shares during the period. 63.50% of the stock is owned by institutional investors and hedge funds.

Analyst Upgrades and Downgrades

A number of research analysts recently weighed in on the stock. The Goldman Sachs Group dropped their price objective on shares of Greenhill & Co., Inc. from $9.50 to $8.50 and set a sell rating for the company in a report on Tuesday, April 11th. Keefe, Bruyette & Woods upgraded shares of Greenhill & Co., Inc. from an underperform rating to a market perform rating in a report on Monday, May 22nd. JMP Securities cut shares of Greenhill & Co., Inc. from an outperform rating to a market perform rating in a report on Tuesday, May 23rd. StockNews.com began coverage on shares of Greenhill & Co., Inc. in a research note on Monday, June 26th. They issued a hold rating for the company. Finally, TheStreet downgraded shares of Greenhill & Co., Inc. from a c rating to a d+ rating in a research note on Wednesday, May 31st. One investment analyst has rated the stock with a sell rating and four have assigned a hold rating to the companys stock. According to MarketBeat.com, Greenhill & Co., Inc. has a consensus rating of Hold and a consensus target price of $11.38.

Greenhill & Co., Inc. Company Profile

(Free Report)

Greenhill & Co, Inc, an independent investment bank, provides financial and strategic advisory services to corporations, partnerships, institutional investors, and governments worldwide. The company offers advisory services related to mergers and acquisitions, divestitures, restructurings, financings, private capital raising, and other similar transactions.

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Grimes & Company Inc. raised its stake in EOG Resources, Inc. (NYSE:EOG  Free Report) by 3.1% in the first quarter, according to the company in its most recent disclosure with the Securities & Exchange Commission. The institutional investor owned 108,627 shares of the energy exploration companys stock after purchasing an additional 3,293 shares during the quarter. Grimes & Company Inc.s holdings in EOG Resources were worth $12,452,000 at the end of the most recent reporting period.

A number of other hedge funds have also recently bought and sold shares of EOG. Tejara Capital Ltd bought a new stake in EOG Resources in the 4th quarter valued at about $106,000. Charles Schwab Investment Management Inc. grew its position in EOG Resources by 196.1% during the first quarter. Charles Schwab Investment Management Inc. now owns 9,859,925 shares of the energy exploration companys stock worth $1,175,599,000 after buying an additional 6,529,464 shares in the last quarter. Morgan Stanley raised its holdings in EOG Resources by 87.8% in the 4th quarter. Morgan Stanley now owns 7,787,281 shares of the energy exploration companys stock valued at $1,008,609,000 after acquiring an additional 3,641,504 shares in the last quarter. T. Rowe Price Investment Management Inc. raised its holdings in EOG Resources by 126.2% in the 4th quarter. T. Rowe Price Investment Management Inc. now owns 5,111,339 shares of the energy exploration companys stock valued at $662,021,000 after acquiring an additional 2,851,839 shares in the last quarter. Finally, Moneta Group Investment Advisors LLC raised its holdings in EOG Resources by 103,083.3% in the 4th quarter. Moneta Group Investment Advisors LLC now owns 2,272,097 shares of the energy exploration companys stock valued at $294,282,000 after acquiring an additional 2,269,895 shares in the last quarter. 89.58% of the stock is currently owned by institutional investors.

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Wall Street Analysts Forecast Growth

EOG has been the subject of several analyst reports. StockNews.com initiated coverage on EOG Resources in a report on Thursday, May 18th. They issued a hold rating for the company. JPMorgan Chase & Co. lifted their price objective on EOG Resources from $139.00 to $144.00 and gave the company an overweight rating in a report on Wednesday, April 12th. Scotiabank raised EOG Resources from a sector perform rating to a sector outperform rating and dropped their price objective for the company from $150.00 to $145.00 in a report on Thursday, April 13th. Mizuho raised EOG Resources from a neutral rating to a buy rating and lowered their price target for the stock from $150.00 to $146.00 in a report on Friday, May 19th. Finally, The Goldman Sachs Group cut EOG Resources from a buy rating to a neutral rating and lowered their price target for the stock from $137.00 to $130.00 in a report on Tuesday, June 13th. Five investment analysts have rated the stock with a hold rating, eighteen have given a buy rating and one has assigned a strong buy rating to the company. According to data from MarketBeat, EOG Resources currently has an average rating of Moderate Buy and an average price target of $148.17.

EOG Resources Trading Up 0.9 %

NYSE EOG opened at $115.50 on Monday. The businesss 50-day moving average price is $112.42 and its two-hundred day moving average price is $118.71. EOG Resources, Inc. has a 12 month low of $92.16 and a 12 month high of $150.88. The firm has a market capitalization of $67.55 billion, a PE ratio of 7.16, a price-to-earnings-growth ratio of 0.35 and a beta of 1.53. The company has a current ratio of 2.17, a quick ratio of 1.90 and a debt-to-equity ratio of 0.15.

EOG Resources (NYSE:EOG  Free Report) last released its quarterly earnings results on Friday, May 5th. The energy exploration company reported $2.69 EPS for the quarter, beating analysts consensus estimates of $2.42 by $0.27. EOG Resources had a return on equity of 30.34% and a net margin of 33.83%. The firm had revenue of $6.04 billion for the quarter, compared to analyst estimates of $5.28 billion. During the same quarter in the previous year, the company posted $4.00 EPS. The businesss revenue was up 51.7% on a year-over-year basis. On average, analysts expect that EOG Resources, Inc. will post 11.34 EPS for the current year.

EOG Resources Dividend Announcement

The firm also recently announced a quarterly dividend, which will be paid on Monday, July 31st. Investors of record on Monday, July 17th will be given a dividend of $0.825 per share. The ex-dividend date is Friday, July 14th. This represents a $3.30 annualized dividend and a dividend yield of 2.86%. EOG Resourcess payout ratio is 20.64%.

Insider Activity at EOG Resources

In related news, COO Lloyd W. Helms, Jr. sold 5,000 shares of the companys stock in a transaction dated Wednesday, June 7th. The stock was sold at an average price of $115.87, for a total transaction of $579,350.00. Following the sale, the chief operating officer now owns 149,689 shares in the company, valued at approximately $17,344,464.43. The sale was disclosed in a filing with the SEC, which can be accessed through the SEC website. 0.40% of the stock is owned by corporate insiders.

EOG Resources Company Profile

(Free Report)

EOG Resources, Inc, together with its subsidiaries, explores for, develops, produces, and markets crude oil, and natural gas and natural gas liquids. Its principal producing areas are in New Mexico and Texas in the United States; and the Republic of Trinidad and Tobago. The company was formerly known as Enron Oil & Gas Company.

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Bank of Queensland (OTCMKTS:BKQNY  Free Report) is one of 282 publicly-traded companies in the BanksRegional industry, but how does it weigh in compared to its peers? We will compare Bank of Queensland to related businesses based on the strength of its dividends, institutional ownership, earnings, risk, analyst recommendations, profitability and valuation.

Earnings & Valuation

This table compares Bank of Queensland and its peers top-line revenue, earnings per share and valuation.

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Gross Revenue Net Income Price/Earnings Ratio Bank of Queensland N/A N/A 4.82 Bank of Queensland Competitors $444.65 billion $805.49 million 245.23

Bank of Queenslands peers have higher revenue and earnings than Bank of Queensland. Bank of Queensland 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.

Dividends

Profitability

Bank of Queensland pays an annual dividend of $1.14 per share and has a dividend yield of 15.6%. Bank of Queensland pays out 75.2% of its earnings in the form of a dividend, suggesting it may not have sufficient earnings to cover its dividend payment in the future. As a group, BanksRegional companies pay a dividend yield of 13.1% and pay out 18.8% of their earnings in the form of a dividend.

This table compares Bank of Queensland and its peers net margins, return on equity and return on assets.

Net Margins Return on Equity Return on Assets Bank of Queensland N/A N/A N/A Bank of Queensland Competitors 32.81% 10.51% 0.92%

Analyst Ratings

This is a summary of current recommendations and price targets for Bank of Queensland and its peers, as provided by MarketBeat.

Sell Ratings Hold Ratings Buy Ratings Strong Buy Ratings Rating Score Bank of Queensland 0 4 0 0 2.00 Bank of Queensland Competitors 1115 3519 3325 38 2.29

As a group, BanksRegional companies have a potential upside of 317.31%. Given Bank of Queenslands peers stronger consensus rating and higher possible upside, analysts plainly believe Bank of Queensland has less favorable growth aspects than its peers.

Institutional and Insider Ownership

35.3% of shares of all BanksRegional companies are held by institutional investors. 15.4% of shares of all BanksRegional companies are held by company insiders. Strong institutional ownership is an indication that large money managers, endowments and hedge funds believe a stock is poised for long-term growth.

Summary

Bank of Queensland peers beat Bank of Queensland on 12 of the 13 factors compared.

About Bank of Queensland

(Free Report)

Bank of Queensland Limited, together with its subsidiaries, provides various financial products and services in Australia. The company operates in Retail Banking, BOQ Business, and Other segments. It offers personal banking services comprises savings and term deposits, and transactional accounts; debit and credit cards; home, personal, and car loans; and travel, home and content, landlord, and car insurance, as well as investment services comprising online share trading services, and self-managed superannuation funds. The company's business banking services include transaction accounts, and savings and investment accounts; loans and finance products, such as business loans, equipment and vehicle finance, and dealer finance; merchant and payment products; and financial market and international services. It also offers Internet and mobile banking services. It operates corporate branches, owner managed branches, and transaction centers. Bank of Queensland Limited was founded in 1874 and is based in Newstead, Australia.

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Shares of Hudson Pacific Properties, Inc. (NYSE:HPP  Free Report) were up 5.9% during trading on Monday . The stock traded as high as $4.48 and last traded at $4.47. Approximately 2,192,532 shares were traded during mid-day trading, a decline of 43% from the average daily volume of 3,857,514 shares. The stock had previously closed at $4.22.

Wall Street Analyst Weigh In

Several analysts recently issued reports on the stock. StockNews.com assumed coverage on shares of Hudson Pacific Properties in a report on Thursday, May 18th. They set a sell rating for the company. Citigroup decreased their price objective on shares of Hudson Pacific Properties from $10.00 to $6.00 and set a neutral rating for the company in a report on Wednesday, March 22nd. Morgan Stanley decreased their price objective on shares of Hudson Pacific Properties from $10.00 to $6.00 and set an equal weight rating for the company in a report on Friday, March 31st. The Goldman Sachs Group assumed coverage on shares of Hudson Pacific Properties in a report on Tuesday, March 21st. They set a sell rating and a $5.50 price objective for the company. Finally, BMO Capital Markets decreased their price objective on shares of Hudson Pacific Properties from $8.00 to $7.00 and set a market perform rating for the company in a report on Monday, April 10th. Three investment analysts have rated the stock with a sell rating, seven have given a hold rating and one has issued a buy rating to the company. According to MarketBeat, the company has a consensus rating of Hold and an average target price of $8.95.

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Hudson Pacific Properties Trading Up 5.9 %

The stock has a market capitalization of $629.82 million, a price-to-earnings ratio of -11.10 and a beta of 1.05. The companys 50 day moving average is $4.81 and its 200 day moving average is $7.39. The company has a debt-to-equity ratio of 1.37, a quick ratio of 1.80 and a current ratio of 1.80.

Hudson Pacific Properties Cuts Dividend

Hudson Pacific Properties ( NYSE:HPP Free Report ) last announced its quarterly earnings data on Monday, May 8th. The real estate investment trust reported ($0.14) earnings per share (EPS) for the quarter, missing analysts consensus estimates of $0.42 by ($0.56). Hudson Pacific Properties had a negative net margin of 4.91% and a negative return on equity of 1.52%. The business had revenue of $252.26 million during the quarter, compared to analyst estimates of $261.21 million. On average, research analysts forecast that Hudson Pacific Properties, Inc. will post 1.36 EPS for the current fiscal year.

The firm also recently disclosed a quarterly dividend, which was paid on Friday, June 30th. Stockholders of record on Tuesday, June 20th were paid a $0.125 dividend. This represents a $0.50 dividend on an annualized basis and a dividend yield of 11.19%. The ex-dividend date of this dividend was Friday, June 16th. Hudson Pacific Propertiess dividend payout ratio is -125.00%.

Hedge Funds Weigh In On Hudson Pacific Properties

A number of hedge funds have recently made changes to their positions in HPP. Group One Trading L.P. bought a new stake in shares of Hudson Pacific Properties in the 1st quarter worth about $149,000. HighTower Advisors LLC grew its holdings in Hudson Pacific Properties by 3.4% during the 1st quarter. HighTower Advisors LLC now owns 18,542 shares of the real estate investment trusts stock worth $514,000 after acquiring an additional 612 shares during the last quarter. Bank of Montreal Can grew its holdings in Hudson Pacific Properties by 76.5% during the 1st quarter. Bank of Montreal Can now owns 36,550 shares of the real estate investment trusts stock worth $1,034,000 after acquiring an additional 15,845 shares during the last quarter. MetLife Investment Management LLC grew its holdings in Hudson Pacific Properties by 33.3% during the 1st quarter. MetLife Investment Management LLC now owns 98,525 shares of the real estate investment trusts stock worth $2,734,000 after acquiring an additional 24,633 shares during the last quarter. Finally, Commonwealth of Pennsylvania Public School Empls Retrmt SYS grew its holdings in Hudson Pacific Properties by 10.5% during the 1st quarter. Commonwealth of Pennsylvania Public School Empls Retrmt SYS now owns 55,882 shares of the real estate investment trusts stock worth $1,551,000 after acquiring an additional 5,328 shares during the last quarter. Institutional investors and hedge funds own 97.55% of the companys stock.

About Hudson Pacific Properties

(Free Report)

Hudson Pacific Properties (NYSE: HPP) is a real estate investment trust serving dynamic tech and media tenants in global epicenters for these synergistic, converging and secular growth industries. Hudson Pacific's unique and high-barrier tech and media focus leverages a full-service, end-to-end value creation platform forged through deep strategic relationships and niche expertise across identifying, acquiring, transforming and developing properties into world-class amenitized, collaborative and sustainable office and studio space.

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Imperial Oil (TSE:IMO  Free Report) (NYSEMKT:IMO) had its price objective cut by National Bankshares from C$88.00 to C$87.00 in a report issued on Thursday morning, BayStreet.CA reports.

A number of other research analysts also recently commented on IMO. JPMorgan Chase & Co. increased their price objective on shares of Imperial Oil from C$78.00 to C$79.00 in a research note on Tuesday, May 2nd. ATB Capital raised their target price on shares of Imperial Oil from C$77.00 to C$80.00 in a report on Monday, April 17th. Royal Bank of Canada cut shares of Imperial Oil from an outperform rating to a sector perform rating and reduced their target price for the company from C$82.00 to C$78.00 in a research note on Wednesday, April 12th. CIBC dropped their target price on shares of Imperial Oil from C$80.00 to C$75.00 in a research report on Tuesday, May 23rd. Finally, TD Securities dropped their target price on shares of Imperial Oil from C$83.00 to C$82.00 and set a buy rating on the stock in a research report on Thursday, May 4th. One equities research analyst has rated the stock with a sell rating, five have given a hold rating and four have assigned a buy rating to the companys stock. According to data from MarketBeat.com, Imperial Oil currently has an average rating of Hold and a consensus price target of C$78.93.

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Imperial Oil Stock Up 0.4 %

Shares of TSE IMO opened at C$67.78 on Thursday. Imperial Oil has a 12-month low of C$52.67 and a 12-month high of C$79.83. The company has a market capitalization of C$39.60 billion, a PE ratio of 5.73, a price-to-earnings-growth ratio of 0.21 and a beta of 1.89. The company has a debt-to-equity ratio of 18.72, a current ratio of 1.41 and a quick ratio of 0.98. The firms 50-day moving average is C$64.81 and its two-hundred day moving average is C$66.89.

Imperial Oil Increases Dividend

Imperial Oil ( TSE:IMO Free Report ) (NYSEMKT:IMO) last released its quarterly earnings data on Friday, April 28th. The company reported C$2.13 earnings per share (EPS) for the quarter, topping the consensus estimate of C$1.92 by C$0.21. The company had revenue of C$12.12 billion during the quarter, compared to analyst estimates of C$15.04 billion. Imperial Oil had a net margin of 12.61% and a return on equity of 32.44%. Equities analysts anticipate that Imperial Oil will post 9.2651622 EPS for the current fiscal year.

The business also recently disclosed a quarterly dividend, which was paid on Saturday, July 1st. Stockholders of record on Saturday, July 1st were paid a $0.50 dividend. The ex-dividend date of this dividend was Thursday, June 1st. This represents a $2.00 annualized dividend and a dividend yield of 2.95%. This is a positive change from Imperial Oils previous quarterly dividend of $0.44. Imperial Oils payout ratio is currently 16.92%.

Imperial Oil Company Profile

(Free Report)

Imperial Oil Limited engages in exploration, production, and sale of crude oil and natural gas in Canada. The company operates through three segments: Upstream, Downstream and Chemical segments. The Upstream segment explores for, and produces crude oil, natural gas, synthetic crude oil, and bitumen. The Downstream segment is involved in the transportation and refining of crude oil, blending of refined products, and the distribution and marketing of refined products.

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Ora Banda Mining Limited (ASX:OBM  Free Report) insider Peter Mansell acquired 592,592 shares of the companys stock in a transaction that occurred on Friday, June 30th. The shares were acquired at an average price of A$0.13 ($0.08) per share, for a total transaction of A$74,074.00 ($49,382.67).

Ora Banda Mining Price Performance

The company has a debt-to-equity ratio of 140.17, a current ratio of 0.87 and a quick ratio of 0.84.

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About Ora Banda Mining

(Free Report)

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Ora Banda Mining Limited engages in the exploration, operation, and development of mineral properties in Australia. The company explores for gold, nickel, copper, lithium, and base metal deposits. It holds 100 % interest in the Davyhurst Gold project comprises 92 tenements covering an area of approximately 1,210 square kilometers located in North-West of Kalgoorlie, Western Australia.

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CAIRO, July 3 (Xinhua) -- Egypt condemned on Monday "in the strongest terms" the Israeli raid in the northern West Bank city of Jenin that killed five Palestinians and wounded at least 27.

In a statement, the Egyptian Foreign Ministry voiced opposition to the repeated Israeli raids and incursions into Palestinian cities that killed civilians.

It described the Israeli attacks and excessive and indiscriminate use of force as a "flagrant violation of international laws and legitimacy."

The ministry warned against the serious impacts of the ongoing Israeli escalation of tensions against the Palestinians that it said would exacerbate the Palestinians' sufferings and undermine Egyptian, regional, and international efforts to de-escalate tensions in the occupied territories.

"Egypt calls on the international actors to intervene to put an end to the violations and protect the Palestinians," the statement added.

The Israeli army launched a large-scale military strike on Jenin early on Monday, according to Palestinian eyewitnesses.

Dozens of armored vehicles backed by drones and helicopters stormed the city and the refugee camp, said the eyewitnesses, adding that airstrikes were carried out during the exchange of fire between Palestinian militants and Israeli soldiers. 
Triad Group plc (LON:TRD  Free Report) insider Tim Eckes sold 5,651 shares of the stock in a transaction on Wednesday, June 28th. The shares were sold at an average price of GBX 155 ($1.97), for a total value of 8,759.05 ($11,136.75).

Triad Group Stock Performance

Shares of TRD opened at GBX 150 ($1.91) on Monday. The businesss fifty day simple moving average is GBX 154.25 and its two-hundred day simple moving average is GBX 130.98. The company has a current ratio of 2.90, a quick ratio of 3.17 and a debt-to-equity ratio of 20.14. Triad Group plc has a 12 month low of GBX 77 ($0.98) and a 12 month high of GBX 170 ($2.16). The company has a market cap of 24.87 million, a price-to-earnings ratio of -15,545.00 and a beta of 1.34.

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Triad Group Company Profile

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Triad Group Plc provides information technology consultancy services to the public, private, and not-for-profit sectors primarily in the United Kingdom. The company offers consulting and advisory; business insights; staffing, resourcing, and recruitment; software development and engineering; project and software delivery; and program delivery and support services.

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Cranbrook Wealth Management LLC trimmed its holdings in shares of iShares Core S&P Small-Cap ETF (NYSEARCA:IJR  Free Report) by 11.3% in the first quarter, according to its most recent filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC). The fund owned 98,340 shares of the exchange traded funds stock after selling 12,508 shares during the period. iShares Core S&P Small-Cap ETF accounts for about 2.7% of Cranbrook Wealth Management LLCs holdings, making the stock its 7th largest holding. Cranbrook Wealth Management LLCs holdings in iShares Core S&P Small-Cap ETF were worth $9,509,000 as of its most recent SEC filing.

Other institutional investors also recently bought and sold shares of the company. Ironwood Wealth Management LLC. lifted its holdings in shares of iShares Core S&P Small-Cap ETF by 8.3% in the 1st quarter. Ironwood Wealth Management LLC. now owns 78,641 shares of the exchange traded funds stock valued at $8,484,000 after purchasing an additional 6,036 shares during the last quarter. United Bank lifted its position in iShares Core S&P Small-Cap ETF by 5.6% during the 1st quarter. United Bank now owns 27,546 shares of the exchange traded funds stock worth $2,972,000 after acquiring an additional 1,456 shares during the period. Rhumbline Advisers lifted its position in iShares Core S&P Small-Cap ETF by 67.2% during the 1st quarter. Rhumbline Advisers now owns 52,705 shares of the exchange traded funds stock worth $5,686,000 after acquiring an additional 21,177 shares during the period. Cibc World Market Inc. lifted its position in iShares Core S&P Small-Cap ETF by 4.8% during the 1st quarter. Cibc World Market Inc. now owns 24,791 shares of the exchange traded funds stock worth $2,674,000 after acquiring an additional 1,128 shares during the period. Finally, Vontobel Holding Ltd. lifted its position in iShares Core S&P Small-Cap ETF by 19.7% during the 1st quarter. Vontobel Holding Ltd. now owns 8,847 shares of the exchange traded funds stock worth $954,000 after acquiring an additional 1,455 shares during the period.

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iShares Core S&P Small-Cap ETF Trading Up 0.1 %

iShares Core S&P Small-Cap ETF stock opened at $99.65 on Monday. iShares Core S&P Small-Cap ETF has a twelve month low of $86.40 and a twelve month high of $108.24. The stock has a 50 day moving average of $95.23 and a two-hundred day moving average of $97.35. The stock has a market capitalization of $68.82 billion, a price-to-earnings ratio of 12.11 and a beta of 1.15.

iShares Core S&P Small-Cap ETF Profile

iShares Core S&P Small-Cap ETF, formerly iShares S&P SmallCap 600 Index Fund, seeks investment results that correspond generally to the price and yield performance of the Standard & Poors SmallCap 600 Index (the Index). The Index measures the performance of publicly traded securities in the small-capitalization sector of the United States equity market.

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iShares Floating Rate Bond ETF (BATS:FLOT  Free Report)s stock price hit a new 52-week low during mid-day trading on Monday . The stock traded as low as $50.58 and last traded at $50.59, with a volume of 614282 shares traded. The stock had previously closed at $50.82.

iShares Floating Rate Bond ETF Price Performance

The firm has a 50-day simple moving average of $50.59 and a 200-day simple moving average of $50.47.

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iShares Floating Rate Bond ETF Dividend Announcement

The company also recently announced a dividend, which will be paid on Monday, July 10th. Shareholders of record on Wednesday, July 5th will be given a $0.2341 dividend. The ex-dividend date is Monday, July 3rd.

Institutional Inflows and Outflows

iShares Floating Rate Bond ETF Company Profile

Several institutional investors have recently made changes to their positions in FLOT. Bank of New York Mellon Corp raised its stake in shares of iShares Floating Rate Bond ETF by 122.7% in the first quarter. Bank of New York Mellon Corp now owns 112,302 shares of the companys stock worth $5,674,000 after buying an additional 61,884 shares during the period. Roundview Capital LLC raised its stake in shares of iShares Floating Rate Bond ETF by 19.2% in the first quarter. Roundview Capital LLC now owns 121,500 shares of the companys stock worth $6,138,000 after buying an additional 19,580 shares during the period. Citigroup Inc. raised its stake in shares of iShares Floating Rate Bond ETF by 976.0% in the first quarter. Citigroup Inc. now owns 3,228 shares of the companys stock worth $163,000 after buying an additional 2,928 shares during the period. Bank of Montreal Can raised its stake in shares of iShares Floating Rate Bond ETF by 9.0% in the first quarter. Bank of Montreal Can now owns 118,015 shares of the companys stock worth $5,983,000 after buying an additional 9,772 shares during the period. Finally, Cibc World Market Inc. raised its stake in shares of iShares Floating Rate Bond ETF by 126.2% in the first quarter. Cibc World Market Inc. now owns 81,715 shares of the companys stock worth $4,128,000 after buying an additional 45,589 shares during the period.

(Free Report)

The iShares Floating Rate Bond ETF (FLOT) is an exchange-traded fund that mostly invests in investment grade fixed income. The fund tracks a market value-weighted index of USD-denominated, investment-grade floating rate notes with maturities of 0-5 years. FLOT was launched on Jun 14, 2011 and is managed by BlackRock.

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Shares of Jersey Electricity plc (LON:JEL  Free Report) hit a new 52-week low during trading on Monday . The company traded as low as GBX 450 ($5.72) and last traded at GBX 450 ($5.72), with a volume of 7648 shares changing hands. The stock had previously closed at GBX 457 ($5.81).

Jersey Electricity Trading Down 1.5 %

The firm has a market capitalization of 52.38 million, a PE ratio of 1,269.44 and a beta of 0.24. The company has a quick ratio of 2.90, a current ratio of 3.21 and a debt-to-equity ratio of 13.63. The stocks fifty day simple moving average is GBX 470.56 and its 200 day simple moving average is GBX 486.72.

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Jersey Electricity Cuts Dividend

The company also recently declared a dividend, which was paid on Tuesday, June 20th. Shareholders of record on Thursday, June 1st were given a GBX 8 ($0.10) dividend. The ex-dividend date was Thursday, June 1st. This represents a dividend yield of 1.68%. Jersey Electricitys payout ratio is currently 5,277.78%.

About Jersey Electricity

Jersey Electricity plc, together with its subsidiaries, engages in the generation, transmission, distribution, and supply of electricity in Jersey, the Channel Islands. The company provides energy solutions for domestic and commercial customers looking to switch from fossil-fuel-based energy to clean and low-carbon electricity; and home solutions, including heating systems and hot water, renewable energy, electric transport and related chargers, amenity lighting, air conditioning, and CosyCare maintenance.

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Kathmere Capital Management LLC boosted its holdings in AutoZone, Inc. (NYSE:AZO  Free Report) by 8.4% in the 1st quarter, according to the company in its most recent filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission. The firm owned 323 shares of the companys stock after purchasing an additional 25 shares during the quarter. Kathmere Capital Management LLCs holdings in AutoZone were worth $794,000 at the end of the most recent quarter.

A number of other hedge funds have also recently bought and sold shares of the company. JPMorgan Chase & Co. boosted its holdings in AutoZone by 4.2% during the 4th quarter. JPMorgan Chase & Co. now owns 1,204,151 shares of the companys stock worth $2,969,654,000 after acquiring an additional 48,141 shares during the last quarter. Moneta Group Investment Advisors LLC boosted its holdings in shares of AutoZone by 107,977.3% in the 4th quarter. Moneta Group Investment Advisors LLC now owns 699,260 shares of the companys stock worth $1,724,500,000 after buying an additional 698,613 shares during the last quarter. Royal Bank of Canada boosted its holdings in shares of AutoZone by 368.0% in the 1st quarter. Royal Bank of Canada now owns 411,450 shares of the companys stock worth $841,242,000 after buying an additional 323,536 shares during the last quarter. Proficio Capital Partners LLC boosted its holdings in shares of AutoZone by 241,813.5% in the 1st quarter. Proficio Capital Partners LLC now owns 304,811 shares of the companys stock worth $305,000 after buying an additional 304,685 shares during the last quarter. Finally, Norges Bank purchased a new position in shares of AutoZone in the 4th quarter worth about $658,788,000. 98.36% of the stock is owned by hedge funds and other institutional investors.

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Wall Street Analysts Forecast Growth

A number of equities research analysts recently issued reports on the company. Truist Financial boosted their price objective on AutoZone from $2,878.00 to $2,886.00 in a research note on Wednesday, May 24th. DA Davidson lowered their price objective on AutoZone from $2,425.00 to $2,340.00 in a research note on Wednesday, May 24th. 3M restated an upgrade rating on shares of AutoZone in a research note on Thursday, June 1st. Citigroup lowered their price objective on AutoZone from $3,125.00 to $3,020.00 in a research note on Tuesday, May 30th. Finally, Evercore ISI upgraded AutoZone from an in-line rating to an outperform rating and boosted their price objective for the company from $2,640.00 to $2,700.00 in a research note on Monday, June 12th. Two investment analysts have rated the stock with a hold rating and eighteen have given a buy rating to the company. Based on data from MarketBeat, the stock has a consensus rating of Moderate Buy and a consensus target price of $2,716.00.

AutoZone Trading Down 0.3 %

AZO traded down $8.48 during trading on Monday, reaching $2,484.88. The stock had a trading volume of 26,567 shares, compared to its average volume of 168,355. The stocks 50 day moving average is $2,533.65 and its two-hundred day moving average is $2,488.11. The company has a market capitalization of $45.13 billion, a price-to-earnings ratio of 19.61, a P/E/G ratio of 1.53 and a beta of 0.68. AutoZone, Inc. has a one year low of $2,050.21 and a one year high of $2,750.00.

AutoZone (NYSE:AZO  Free Report) last issued its quarterly earnings results on Tuesday, May 23rd. The company reported $34.12 earnings per share for the quarter, beating the consensus estimate of $30.84 by $3.28. AutoZone had a negative return on equity of 62.38% and a net margin of 14.45%. The firm had revenue of $4.09 billion during the quarter, compared to the consensus estimate of $4.12 billion. During the same period last year, the company earned $29.03 earnings per share. The companys revenue was up 11.0% on a year-over-year basis. On average, equities research analysts predict that AutoZone, Inc. will post 130.36 earnings per share for the current year.

Insider Activity

In related news, VP Dennis W. Leriche sold 1,420 shares of the stock in a transaction on Wednesday, April 12th. The stock was sold at an average price of $2,573.04, for a total transaction of $3,653,716.80. Following the sale, the vice president now directly owns 379 shares of the companys stock, valued at $975,182.16. The transaction was disclosed in a legal filing with the Securities & Exchange Commission, which is available at this link. In related news, VP Dennis W. Leriche sold 1,420 shares of the stock in a transaction on Wednesday, April 12th. The stock was sold at an average price of $2,573.04, for a total transaction of $3,653,716.80. Following the sale, the vice president now directly owns 379 shares of the companys stock, valued at $975,182.16. The transaction was disclosed in a legal filing with the Securities & Exchange Commission, which is available at this link. Also, VP Domingo Hurtado sold 90 shares of the stock in a transaction on Wednesday, May 31st. The shares were sold at an average price of $2,376.49, for a total value of $213,884.10. Following the sale, the vice president now directly owns 275 shares in the company, valued at $653,534.75. The disclosure for this sale can be found here. Insiders sold 3,510 shares of company stock worth $8,760,561 over the last three months. 2.59% of the stock is currently owned by corporate insiders.

AutoZone Profile

(Free Report)

AutoZone, Inc retails and distributes automotive replacement parts and accessories. The company offers various products for cars, sport utility vehicles, vans, and light trucks, including new and remanufactured automotive hard parts, maintenance items, accessories, and non-automotive products. Its products include A/C compressors, batteries and accessories, bearings, belts and hoses, calipers, chassis, clutches, CV axles, engines, fuel pumps, fuses, ignition and lighting products, mufflers, radiators, starters and alternators, thermostats, and water pumps, as well as tire repairs.

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Kovack Advisors Inc. decreased its stake in Invesco S&P 500 Downside Hedged ETF (NYSEARCA:PHDG  Free Report) by 1.1% in the first quarter, according to the company in its most recent 13F filing with the SEC. The firm owned 57,293 shares of the companys stock after selling 666 shares during the quarter. Kovack Advisors Inc.s holdings in Invesco S&P 500 Downside Hedged ETF were worth $1,883,000 at the end of the most recent reporting period.

Other large investors have also recently modified their holdings of the company. Patten Group Inc. increased its position in shares of Invesco S&P 500 Downside Hedged ETF by 7.9% during the 1st quarter. Patten Group Inc. now owns 62,869 shares of the companys stock valued at $2,067,000 after purchasing an additional 4,610 shares during the last quarter. WealthPLAN Partners LLC bought a new position in shares of Invesco S&P 500 Downside Hedged ETF during the 4th quarter valued at approximately $5,458,000. Connecticut Wealth Management LLC bought a new position in shares of Invesco S&P 500 Downside Hedged ETF during the 4th quarter valued at approximately $1,288,000. Ameliora Wealth Management Ltd. increased its position in shares of Invesco S&P 500 Downside Hedged ETF by 23.5% during the 4th quarter. Ameliora Wealth Management Ltd. now owns 3,030 shares of the companys stock valued at $98,000 after purchasing an additional 576 shares during the last quarter. Finally, Baron Financial Group LLC increased its position in shares of Invesco S&P 500 Downside Hedged ETF by 14.2% during the 1st quarter. Baron Financial Group LLC now owns 123,890 shares of the companys stock valued at $4,072,000 after purchasing an additional 15,415 shares during the last quarter.

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Invesco S&P 500 Downside Hedged ETF Trading Down 0.3 %

Shares of NYSEARCA PHDG traded down $0.10 during trading hours on Monday, hitting $33.21. 3,470 shares of the company traded hands, compared to its average volume of 54,391. The stock has a market capitalization of $204.24 million, a price-to-earnings ratio of 18.44 and a beta of 0.36. The companys 50 day moving average price is $32.84 and its 200 day moving average price is $32.75. Invesco S&P 500 Downside Hedged ETF has a 12 month low of $30.08 and a 12 month high of $36.33.

Invesco S&P 500 Downside Hedged ETF Company Profile

The Invesco S&P 500 Downside Hedged ETF (PHDG) is an exchange-traded fund that is based on the S&P 500 Dynamic VEQTOR index. The fund is an actively-managed ETF that allocates its portfolio between S&P 500 equities, VIX Index futures and cash. PHDG was launched on Dec 6, 2012 and is managed by Invesco.

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Want to see what other hedge funds are holding PHDG? Visit HoldingsChannel.com to get the latest 13F filings and insider trades for Invesco S&P 500 Downside Hedged ETF (NYSEARCA:PHDG  Free Report).

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Shares of Laboratory Co. of America Holdings (NYSE:LH  Free Report) gapped down prior to trading on Monday . The stock had previously closed at $241.33, but opened at $206.15. Laboratory Co. of America shares last traded at $208.11, with a volume of 72,603 shares.

Analyst Ratings Changes

Several research firms recently weighed in on LH. StockNews.com began coverage on shares of Laboratory Co. of America in a report on Friday. They issued a buy rating for the company. Credit Suisse Group reduced their price objective on shares of Laboratory Co. of America from $304.00 to $288.00 and set an outperform rating for the company in a report on Monday, March 13th. Mizuho reduced their price objective on shares of Laboratory Co. of America from $277.00 to $257.00 in a report on Tuesday, May 16th. Truist Financial dropped their price target on shares of Laboratory Co. of America from $285.00 to $275.00 in a research report on Monday, May 1st. Finally, Deutsche Bank Aktiengesellschaft dropped their price target on shares of Laboratory Co. of America from $265.00 to $240.00 in a research report on Wednesday, April 26th. Two analysts have rated the stock with a hold rating and eight have issued a buy rating to the stock. According to MarketBeat, the stock presently has a consensus rating of Moderate Buy and an average price target of $273.50.

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Laboratory Co. of America Trading Down 13.2 %

The company has a fifty day simple moving average of $224.18 and a 200-day simple moving average of $232.75. The company has a current ratio of 1.63, a quick ratio of 1.46 and a debt-to-equity ratio of 0.50. The stock has a market cap of $18.56 billion, a price-to-earnings ratio of 18.79 and a beta of 1.06.

Laboratory Co. of America Announces Dividend

Laboratory Co. of America ( NYSE:LH Free Report ) last posted its quarterly earnings data on Tuesday, April 25th. The medical research company reported $3.82 earnings per share (EPS) for the quarter, missing the consensus estimate of $3.99 by ($0.17). The company had revenue of $3.78 billion for the quarter, compared to analyst estimates of $3.70 billion. Laboratory Co. of America had a return on equity of 15.56% and a net margin of 6.78%. Laboratory Co. of Americas quarterly revenue was down 3.1% on a year-over-year basis. During the same quarter in the previous year, the firm posted $6.11 EPS. On average, research analysts forecast that Laboratory Co. of America Holdings will post 16.83 earnings per share for the current fiscal year.

The business also recently disclosed a quarterly dividend, which was paid on Thursday, June 8th. Shareholders of record on Thursday, May 18th were issued a dividend of $0.72 per share. The ex-dividend date of this dividend was Wednesday, May 17th. This represents a $2.88 annualized dividend and a yield of 1.37%. Laboratory Co. of Americas payout ratio is presently 26.13%.

Insiders Place Their Bets

In other news, CEO Paul R. Kirchgraber sold 4,300 shares of the companys stock in a transaction dated Friday, May 19th. The stock was sold at an average price of $216.91, for a total value of $932,713.00. Following the transaction, the chief executive officer now owns 12,946 shares in the company, valued at approximately $2,808,116.86. The sale was disclosed in a filing with the Securities & Exchange Commission, which is available through the SEC website. In other news, COO Mark S. Schroeder sold 1,500 shares of the companys stock in a transaction dated Thursday, May 18th. The stock was sold at an average price of $216.77, for a total value of $325,155.00. Following the transaction, the chief operating officer now owns 6,687 shares in the company, valued at approximately $1,449,540.99. The sale was disclosed in a filing with the Securities & Exchange Commission, which is available through the SEC website. Also, CEO Paul R. Kirchgraber sold 4,300 shares of the companys stock in a transaction dated Friday, May 19th. The shares were sold at an average price of $216.91, for a total value of $932,713.00. Following the completion of the transaction, the chief executive officer now owns 12,946 shares in the company, valued at approximately $2,808,116.86. The disclosure for this sale can be found here. Corporate insiders own 0.65% of the companys stock.

Institutional Investors Weigh In On Laboratory Co. of America

Large investors have recently made changes to their positions in the company. First Hawaiian Bank bought a new stake in shares of Laboratory Co. of America in the 4th quarter valued at approximately $602,000. Gabelli Funds LLC grew its stake in shares of Laboratory Co. of America by 0.4% in the 4th quarter. Gabelli Funds LLC now owns 54,270 shares of the medical research companys stock valued at $12,780,000 after buying an additional 200 shares in the last quarter. SVB Wealth LLC bought a new stake in shares of Laboratory Co. of America in the 4th quarter valued at approximately $253,000. D.A. Davidson & CO. grew its stake in shares of Laboratory Co. of America by 1.9% in the 4th quarter. D.A. Davidson & CO. now owns 8,628 shares of the medical research companys stock valued at $2,032,000 after buying an additional 165 shares in the last quarter. Finally, Daiwa Securities Group Inc. grew its stake in shares of Laboratory Co. of America by 3.3% in the 4th quarter. Daiwa Securities Group Inc. now owns 7,692 shares of the medical research companys stock valued at $1,812,000 after buying an additional 248 shares in the last quarter. Institutional investors own 87.75% of the companys stock.

Laboratory Co. of America Company Profile

(Free Report)

Laboratory Corporation of America Holdings operates as a life sciences company that provides vital information to help doctors, hospitals, pharmaceutical companies, researchers, and patients make clear and confident decisions. It operates in two segments, Labcorp Diagnostics and Labcorp Drug Development.

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Birchcliff Energy (TSE:BIR  Free Report) had its target price cut by National Bankshares from C$10.00 to C$9.25 in a research report sent to investors on Thursday, BayStreet.CA reports.

BIR has been the subject of several other research reports. Stifel Nicolaus lowered shares of Birchcliff Energy from a buy rating to a hold rating and reduced their price objective for the company from C$9.00 to C$8.00 in a research note on Thursday, March 16th. ATB Capital reduced their price target on shares of Birchcliff Energy from C$11.50 to C$10.50 in a research report on Monday, April 17th. BMO Capital Markets lowered their price objective on shares of Birchcliff Energy from C$9.00 to C$8.75 in a research note on Monday, April 17th. Stifel Firstegy downgraded shares of Birchcliff Energy from a buy rating to a hold rating in a report on Thursday, March 16th. Finally, Raymond James cut shares of Birchcliff Energy from an outperform rating to a market perform rating and decreased their price objective for the stock from C$12.00 to C$11.00 in a research report on Tuesday, April 11th. Six analysts have rated the stock with a hold rating and three have assigned a buy rating to the company. According to data from MarketBeat, Birchcliff Energy currently has an average rating of Hold and a consensus price target of C$10.92.

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Birchcliff Energy Stock Performance

BIR opened at C$7.84 on Thursday. The stocks 50 day simple moving average is C$7.81 and its 200 day simple moving average is C$8.27. The stock has a market cap of C$2.09 billion, a P/E ratio of 4.43, a P/E/G ratio of 0.35 and a beta of 2.26. The company has a debt-to-equity ratio of 8.84, a current ratio of 0.66 and a quick ratio of 0.97. Birchcliff Energy has a 1-year low of C$7.31 and a 1-year high of C$12.39.

Birchcliff Energy Announces Dividend

Birchcliff Energy ( TSE:BIR Free Report ) last announced its earnings results on Wednesday, May 10th. The oil and natural gas company reported C($0.16) earnings per share for the quarter, missing the consensus estimate of C$0.08 by C($0.24). The business had revenue of C$208.65 million for the quarter, compared to analyst estimates of C$185.90 million. Birchcliff Energy had a net margin of 36.42% and a return on equity of 22.31%. As a group, equities analysts anticipate that Birchcliff Energy will post 0.4139388 EPS for the current fiscal year.

The business also recently declared a quarterly dividend, which was paid on Friday, June 30th. Investors of record on Friday, June 30th were given a $0.20 dividend. The ex-dividend date was Wednesday, June 14th. This represents a $0.80 dividend on an annualized basis and a yield of 10.20%. Birchcliff Energys dividend payout ratio is presently 45.20%.

Insider Buying and Selling at Birchcliff Energy

In related news, Senior Officer Theo Van Der Werken sold 20,000 shares of the companys stock in a transaction that occurred on Friday, April 14th. The stock was sold at an average price of C$8.20, for a total value of C$164,000.00. 1.50% of the stock is owned by insiders.

About Birchcliff Energy

(Free Report)

Birchcliff Energy Ltd., an intermediate oil and natural gas company, acquires, explores for, develops, and produces natural gas, light oil, condensate, and other natural gas liquids in Western Canada. The company holds interests in the Montney/Doig resource play located approximately 95 km northwest of Grande Prairie, Alberta.

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StockNews.com upgraded shares of Par Pacific (NYSE:PARR  Free Report) from a hold rating to a buy rating in a research note released on Thursday.

PARR has been the subject of several other research reports. TD Cowen decreased their price objective on Par Pacific from $32.00 to $28.00 and set an outperform rating for the company in a report on Friday, May 5th. JPMorgan Chase & Co. lifted their price objective on Par Pacific from $29.00 to $34.00 and gave the stock a neutral rating in a report on Tuesday, March 28th. Piper Sandler cut their price objective on shares of Par Pacific from $39.00 to $34.00 in a report on Thursday, May 18th. Finally, UBS Group initiated coverage on shares of Par Pacific in a report on Wednesday, March 8th. They issued a neutral rating and a $34.00 price objective for the company. Three investment analysts have rated the stock with a hold rating and five have assigned a buy rating to the company. According to MarketBeat.com, the company currently has an average rating of Moderate Buy and an average price target of $30.43.

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Par Pacific Price Performance

Shares of NYSE:PARR opened at $26.61 on Thursday. The company has a debt-to-equity ratio of 0.61, a quick ratio of 0.65 and a current ratio of 1.24. The company has a market capitalization of $1.62 billion, a P/E ratio of 2.17 and a beta of 2.05. The companys 50-day moving average is $22.83 and its 200 day moving average is $24.86. Par Pacific has a fifty-two week low of $13.72 and a fifty-two week high of $30.49.

Institutional Inflows and Outflows

Par Pacific ( NYSE:PARR Free Report ) last posted its quarterly earnings results on Wednesday, May 3rd. The company reported $2.25 EPS for the quarter, topping analysts consensus estimates of $1.91 by $0.34. The company had revenue of $1.69 billion for the quarter, compared to analysts expectations of $1.54 billion. Par Pacific had a net margin of 9.65% and a return on equity of 108.48%. On average, equities research analysts forecast that Par Pacific will post 4.71 earnings per share for the current year.

A number of large investors have recently bought and sold shares of PARR. Financial Management Professionals Inc. bought a new position in Par Pacific during the 4th quarter valued at approximately $31,000. Nuveen Asset Management LLC grew its position in Par Pacific by 45.6% during the 3rd quarter. Nuveen Asset Management LLC now owns 1,181,469 shares of the companys stock valued at $19,388,000 after purchasing an additional 370,133 shares during the last quarter. Range Financial Group LLC purchased a new stake in Par Pacific during the 4th quarter valued at about $668,000. Algert Global LLC grew its position in Par Pacific by 37.0% during the 3rd quarter. Algert Global LLC now owns 221,359 shares of the companys stock valued at $3,633,000 after purchasing an additional 59,783 shares during the last quarter. Finally, National Bank of Canada FI purchased a new stake in Par Pacific during the 4th quarter valued at about $58,000. 93.23% of the stock is owned by hedge funds and other institutional investors.

Par Pacific Company Profile

(Free Report)

Par Pacific Holdings, Inc owns and operates energy and infrastructure businesses. The company operates through three segments: Refining, Retail, and Logistics. The Refining segment owns and operates three refineries that produces ultra-low sulfur diesel, gasoline, jet fuel, marine fuel, distillate, asphalt, low sulfur fuel oil, and other associated refined products primarily for consumption in Hawaii, Pacific Northwest, Wyoming, and South Dakota.

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Shares of Petroleo Brasileiro S.A.  Petrobras (NYSE:PBR  Free Report) have earned an average rating of Hold from the eight ratings firms that are currently covering the stock, Marketbeat.com reports. One research analyst has rated the stock with a sell rating, four have issued a hold rating and three have given a buy rating to the company. The average 1-year price target among brokers that have updated their coverage on the stock in the last year is $14.67.

PBR has been the topic of several recent research reports. JPMorgan Chase & Co. upgraded shares of Petroleo Brasileiro S.A.  Petrobras from a neutral rating to an overweight rating and lifted their price objective for the company from $11.50 to $15.50 in a research report on Monday, June 12th. StockNews.com upgraded shares of Petroleo Brasileiro S.A.  Petrobras from a hold rating to a buy rating in a research report on Tuesday, June 20th. The Goldman Sachs Group raised Petroleo Brasileiro S.A.  Petrobras from a neutral rating to a buy rating in a research note on Tuesday, June 20th. Finally, Morgan Stanley raised Petroleo Brasileiro S.A.  Petrobras from an equal weight rating to an overweight rating and lifted their target price for the company from $12.50 to $16.50 in a research note on Wednesday, June 7th.

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Petroleo Brasileiro S.A.  Petrobras Trading Down 3.5 %

Petroleo Brasileiro S.A.  Petrobras stock opened at $13.83 on Monday. The firms 50-day moving average is $12.39 and its 200-day moving average is $11.43. The company has a debt-to-equity ratio of 0.55, a quick ratio of 0.91 and a current ratio of 1.22. Petroleo Brasileiro S.A.  Petrobras has a 1 year low of $8.88 and a 1 year high of $16.32. The company has a market cap of $90.20 billion, a P/E ratio of 2.56 and a beta of 1.39.

Petroleo Brasileiro S.A.  Petrobras Cuts Dividend

Petroleo Brasileiro S.A.  Petrobras ( NYSE:PBR Free Report ) last posted its quarterly earnings results on Thursday, May 11th. The oil and gas exploration company reported $1.11 earnings per share (EPS) for the quarter, topping analysts consensus estimates of $0.98 by $0.13. The company had revenue of $26.77 billion for the quarter, compared to the consensus estimate of $27.26 billion. Petroleo Brasileiro S.A.  Petrobras had a net margin of 28.50% and a return on equity of 44.84%. On average, equities analysts expect that Petroleo Brasileiro S.A.  Petrobras will post 3.26 earnings per share for the current year.

The company also recently disclosed a Variable dividend, which will be paid on Friday, August 25th. Stockholders of record on Wednesday, June 14th will be paid a $0.336 dividend. This represents a dividend yield of 39.1%. The ex-dividend date of this dividend is Tuesday, June 13th. Petroleo Brasileiro S.A.  Petrobrass dividend payout ratio is presently 37.96%.

Institutional Trading of Petroleo Brasileiro S.A.  Petrobras

Hedge funds and other institutional investors have recently modified their holdings of the company. Harbour Investments Inc. bought a new stake in shares of Petroleo Brasileiro S.A.  Petrobras in the 1st quarter worth approximately $29,000. Zurcher Kantonalbank Zurich Cantonalbank increased its holdings in shares of Petroleo Brasileiro S.A.  Petrobras by 83.0% in the second quarter. Zurcher Kantonalbank Zurich Cantonalbank now owns 2,577 shares of the oil and gas exploration companys stock valued at $30,000 after buying an additional 1,169 shares in the last quarter. Newbridge Financial Services Group Inc. acquired a new stake in shares of Petroleo Brasileiro S.A.  Petrobras during the 4th quarter valued at $32,000. Wolff Wiese Magana LLC bought a new stake in shares of Petroleo Brasileiro S.A.  Petrobras during the 4th quarter worth $32,000. Finally, CoreCap Advisors LLC acquired a new position in shares of Petroleo Brasileiro S.A.  Petrobras in the 4th quarter worth $38,000. Institutional investors own 11.09% of the companys stock.

About Petroleo Brasileiro S.A.  Petrobras

(Free Report

Petroleo Brasileiro SA  Petrobras explores, produces, and sells oil and gas in Brazil and internationally. The company operates through Exploration and Production; Refining, Transportation and Marketing; and Gas and Power. It also engages in prospecting, drilling, refining, processing, trading, and transporting crude oil from producing onshore and offshore oil fields, and shale or other rocks, as well as oil products, natural gas, and other liquid hydrocarbons.

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MOGADISHU, July 2 (Xinhua) -- The African Union and United Nations envoys in Somalia have lauded Burundi peacekeepers for their sterling stabilization efforts in Somalia.

Mohammed El-Amine Souef, the special representative of the Chairperson of the AU Commission for Somalia and head of the AU Transition Mission in Somalia (ATMIS), and Anita Kiki Gbeho, the UN Secretary-General's Deputy Special Representative for United Nations Assistance Mission in Somalia, cited Burundi's key contributions to peace and stability in Africa, especially in Somalia and Central Africa.

Souef said Burundi has contributed immensely to the ideal universal peace mainly through political solutions anchored on mediation and constant engagement in favor of peace and security, according to a statement issued by the ATMIS Sunday in Mogadishu, the capital of Somalia.

Burundian troops serving with the ATMIS on Saturday joined their country to celebrate 61 years of independence from colonial rule.

"Burundi has never resisted investing in peace operations which for many people represent the unique hope for finding lasting peace like in Somalia and Central Africa," he said Saturday evening in Mogadishu during the celebrations.

Gbeho also lauded Burundian peacekeepers for their courage and sacrifice and pledged the UN's commitment to continue supporting the AU Mission. "With more than 3,000 Burundian troops committed to the largest AU peace support operation, you are making a difference daily to the security of the Somali people," she noted.

Sam Okiding, ATMIS force commander, said the Burundian troops have played a key role in pacifying Somalia and protecting the civilian population in their area of responsibility. "The Burundi contingent in Somalia has been at the forefront in fostering peace and stability in their Areas of Responsibility, and we commend you for your selfless efforts," Okiding said.

ATMIS Deputy Force Commander Marius Ngendabanka in charge of Operations and Plans, who hails from Burundi, outlined the contributions of Burundian troops since their deployment to Somalia in 2007 and reiterated their commitment to the peacebuilding process.

Ngendabanka said the Burundi contingent, currently deployed in Sector Five in Middle Shabelle, has demonstrated its support for Africa's peace and freedom initiatives hence serving as an example to other African countries.

Burundi is one of the ATMIS Troop Contributing Countries alongside Djibouti, Ethiopia, Kenya, and Uganda. 
Pettinga Financial Advisors LLC lifted its stake in shares of iShares MSCI USA Min Vol Factor ETF (BATS:USMV  Free Report) by 112.7% during the first quarter, Holdings Channel.com reports. The firm owned 106,157 shares of the companys stock after buying an additional 56,244 shares during the period. iShares MSCI USA Min Vol Factor ETF accounts for approximately 2.4% of Pettinga Financial Advisors LLCs holdings, making the stock its 12th largest position. Pettinga Financial Advisors LLCs holdings in iShares MSCI USA Min Vol Factor ETF were worth $7,722,000 as of its most recent SEC filing.

A number of other large investors also recently modified their holdings of USMV. Bank of Montreal Can lifted its position in shares of iShares MSCI USA Min Vol Factor ETF by 7.8% during the first quarter. Bank of Montreal Can now owns 8,253 shares of the companys stock worth $646,000 after purchasing an additional 594 shares in the last quarter. Blair William & Co. IL raised its stake in shares of iShares MSCI USA Min Vol Factor ETF by 1.7% during the first quarter. Blair William & Co. IL now owns 95,612 shares of the companys stock worth $7,417,000 after buying an additional 1,612 shares during the last quarter. AJ Wealth Strategies LLC raised its stake in shares of iShares MSCI USA Min Vol Factor ETF by 4.4% during the first quarter. AJ Wealth Strategies LLC now owns 1,348,690 shares of the companys stock worth $104,618,000 after buying an additional 57,434 shares during the last quarter. Founders Financial Securities LLC raised its stake in shares of iShares MSCI USA Min Vol Factor ETF by 27.0% during the first quarter. Founders Financial Securities LLC now owns 88,779 shares of the companys stock worth $6,887,000 after buying an additional 18,853 shares during the last quarter. Finally, West Michigan Advisors LLC raised its stake in shares of iShares MSCI USA Min Vol Factor ETF by 6.1% during the first quarter. West Michigan Advisors LLC now owns 12,575 shares of the companys stock worth $975,000 after buying an additional 719 shares during the last quarter.

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iShares MSCI USA Min Vol Factor ETF Trading Up 1.0 %

Shares of USMV traded up $0.76 on Monday, reaching $74.33. 2,008,510 shares of the companys stock were exchanged. The stock has a market capitalization of $29.63 billion, a P/E ratio of 20.17 and a beta of 0.75. The business has a 50 day moving average price of $72.93 and a two-hundred day moving average price of $72.47. iShares MSCI USA Min Vol Factor ETF has a 12 month low of $47.44 and a 12 month high of $55.45.

iShares MSCI USA Min Vol Factor ETF Profile

The iShares MSCI USA Min Vol Factor ETF (USMV) is an exchange-traded fund that is based on the MSCI USA Minimum Volatility (USD) index. The fund tracks an index of US-listed firms selected and weighted to create a low-volatility portfolio subject to various constraints. USMV was launched on Oct 18, 2011 and is managed by BlackRock.

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Ferguson Wellman Capital Management Inc. reduced its holdings in PPG Industries, Inc. (NYSE:PPG  Free Report) by 9.5% during the first quarter, HoldingsChannel reports. The institutional investor owned 55,103 shares of the specialty chemicals companys stock after selling 5,810 shares during the period. Ferguson Wellman Capital Management Inc.s holdings in PPG Industries were worth $7,361,000 as of its most recent filing with the SEC.

A number of other large investors also recently modified their holdings of the business. WFA of San Diego LLC bought a new stake in PPG Industries in the 4th quarter valued at about $25,000. Riverview Trust Co lifted its position in PPG Industries by 81.7% in the 4th quarter. Riverview Trust Co now owns 238 shares of the specialty chemicals companys stock valued at $30,000 after purchasing an additional 107 shares during the last quarter. Clear Street Markets LLC bought a new stake in PPG Industries in the 4th quarter valued at about $30,000. Massmutual Trust Co. FSB ADV lifted its position in PPG Industries by 90.6% in the 1st quarter. Massmutual Trust Co. FSB ADV now owns 242 shares of the specialty chemicals companys stock valued at $32,000 after purchasing an additional 115 shares during the last quarter. Finally, Parkside Financial Bank & Trust lifted its position in PPG Industries by 45.8% in the 1st quarter. Parkside Financial Bank & Trust now owns 277 shares of the specialty chemicals companys stock valued at $36,000 after purchasing an additional 87 shares during the last quarter. 78.95% of the stock is currently owned by institutional investors.

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PPG Industries Trading Up 0.5 %

Shares of PPG traded up $0.78 during midday trading on Monday, hitting $149.08. The stock had a trading volume of 209,489 shares, compared to its average volume of 1,449,895. PPG Industries, Inc. has a fifty-two week low of $107.40 and a fifty-two week high of $149.29. The business has a 50-day simple moving average of $139.49 and a two-hundred day simple moving average of $133.58. The firm has a market cap of $35.10 billion, a P/E ratio of 27.71, a price-to-earnings-growth ratio of 1.26 and a beta of 1.19. The company has a current ratio of 1.68, a quick ratio of 1.15 and a debt-to-equity ratio of 0.98.

PPG Industries Announces Dividend

PPG Industries ( NYSE:PPG Free Report ) last announced its earnings results on Friday, April 21st. The specialty chemicals company reported $1.82 EPS for the quarter, topping the consensus estimate of $1.55 by $0.27. PPG Industries had a net margin of 7.18% and a return on equity of 23.35%. The company had revenue of $4.38 billion during the quarter, compared to analysts expectations of $4.39 billion. During the same period last year, the company posted $1.37 earnings per share. The businesss revenue for the quarter was up 1.7% on a year-over-year basis. As a group, equities analysts forecast that PPG Industries, Inc. will post 7.25 EPS for the current year.

The business also recently declared a quarterly dividend, which was paid on Monday, June 12th. Investors of record on Wednesday, May 10th were issued a dividend of $0.62 per share. This represents a $2.48 annualized dividend and a dividend yield of 1.66%. The ex-dividend date of this dividend was Tuesday, May 9th. PPG Industriess dividend payout ratio is currently 46.27%.

Analysts Set New Price Targets

Several research firms have commented on PPG. BMO Capital Markets raised their target price on shares of PPG Industries from $151.00 to $158.00 in a research note on Tuesday, April 25th. StockNews.com began coverage on shares of PPG Industries in a research note on Thursday, May 18th. They set a buy rating on the stock. Robert W. Baird raised their target price on shares of PPG Industries from $150.00 to $160.00 in a research note on Monday, April 24th. JPMorgan Chase & Co. raised shares of PPG Industries from a neutral rating to an overweight rating and raised their target price for the company from $130.00 to $156.00 in a research note on Monday, April 24th. Finally, Wells Fargo & Company lowered their price objective on shares of PPG Industries from $150.00 to $145.00 in a research note on Thursday, May 25th. One research analyst has rated the stock with a sell rating, seven have assigned a hold rating and eleven have issued a buy rating to the company. According to data from MarketBeat, the company presently has a consensus rating of Moderate Buy and an average price target of $150.18.

PPG Industries Company Profile

(Free Report)

PPG Industries, Inc manufactures and distributes paints, coatings, and specialty materials worldwide. The company operates through Performance Coatings and Industrial Coatings. The Performance Coatings segment offers coatings, solvents, adhesives, sealants, sundries, and software for automotive and commercial transport/fleet repair and refurbishing, light industrial coatings, and specialty coatings for signs; and coatings, sealants, transparencies, transparent armor, adhesives, engineered materials, and packaging and chemical management services for commercial, military, regional jet, and general aviation aircraft.

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Quest Diagnostics Incorporated (NYSE:DGX  Free Report) has earned an average rating of Hold from the eleven analysts that are presently covering the stock, Marketbeat Ratings reports. Nine investment analysts have rated the stock with a hold recommendation and two have given a buy recommendation to the company. The average 12 month price objective among brokers that have covered the stock in the last year is $151.20.

Several brokerages recently issued reports on DGX. Bank of America cut Quest Diagnostics from a buy rating to a neutral rating and dropped their price objective for the stock from $166.00 to $148.00 in a research note on Tuesday, May 2nd. Truist Financial dropped their target price on Quest Diagnostics from $170.00 to $160.00 and set a hold rating on the stock in a research report on Friday, March 17th. Piper Sandler initiated coverage on Quest Diagnostics in a report on Thursday. They set a neutral rating for the company. StockNews.com initiated coverage on Quest Diagnostics in a report on Thursday, May 18th. They set a hold rating for the company. Finally, Mizuho reiterated a buy rating and set a $165.00 price objective on shares of Quest Diagnostics in a report on Friday, March 17th.

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Hedge Funds Weigh In On Quest Diagnostics

Institutional investors have recently modified their holdings of the stock. Vanguard Group Inc. grew its position in shares of Quest Diagnostics by 0.6% during the 3rd quarter. Vanguard Group Inc. now owns 14,156,902 shares of the medical research companys stock valued at $1,736,910,000 after acquiring an additional 90,362 shares during the period. Providence Capital Advisors LLC increased its stake in shares of Quest Diagnostics by 14,887.6% in the 1st quarter. Providence Capital Advisors LLC now owns 4,331,410 shares of the medical research companys stock valued at $30,615,000 after purchasing an additional 4,302,510 shares in the last quarter. Victory Capital Management Inc. increased its stake in shares of Quest Diagnostics by 1.1% in the 4th quarter. Victory Capital Management Inc. now owns 3,258,465 shares of the medical research companys stock valued at $509,754,000 after purchasing an additional 34,947 shares in the last quarter. American Century Companies Inc. increased its stake in shares of Quest Diagnostics by 62.2% in the 1st quarter. American Century Companies Inc. now owns 2,728,816 shares of the medical research companys stock valued at $386,073,000 after purchasing an additional 1,046,746 shares in the last quarter. Finally, Wellington Management Group LLP increased its stake in shares of Quest Diagnostics by 46,022.7% in the 1st quarter. Wellington Management Group LLP now owns 1,914,554 shares of the medical research companys stock valued at $270,871,000 after purchasing an additional 1,910,403 shares in the last quarter. Hedge funds and other institutional investors own 87.39% of the companys stock.

Quest Diagnostics Stock Down 0.4 %

Shares of NYSE:DGX opened at $140.56 on Wednesday. Quest Diagnostics has a 52-week low of $120.40 and a 52-week high of $158.34. The stock has a market cap of $15.74 billion, a P/E ratio of 20.73 and a beta of 0.95. The businesss 50 day moving average is $136.34 and its 200 day moving average is $141.80. The company has a quick ratio of 1.20, a current ratio of 1.34 and a debt-to-equity ratio of 0.65.

Quest Diagnostics (NYSE:DGX  Free Report) last announced its quarterly earnings data on Thursday, April 27th. The medical research company reported $2.04 earnings per share (EPS) for the quarter, topping the consensus estimate of $1.97 by $0.07. Quest Diagnostics had a return on equity of 16.51% and a net margin of 8.26%. The company had revenue of $2.33 billion for the quarter, compared to analysts expectations of $2.20 billion. During the same quarter in the prior year, the firm earned $3.22 earnings per share. Quest Diagnosticss revenue was down 10.7% compared to the same quarter last year. Sell-side analysts predict that Quest Diagnostics will post 8.69 EPS for the current year.

Quest Diagnostics Dividend Announcement

The business also recently disclosed a quarterly dividend, which will be paid on Tuesday, July 25th. Shareholders of record on Tuesday, July 11th will be paid a dividend of $0.71 per share. The ex-dividend date is Monday, July 10th. This represents a $2.84 dividend on an annualized basis and a dividend yield of 2.02%. Quest Diagnosticss payout ratio is currently 41.89%.

Quest Diagnostics Company Profile

(Free Report

Quest Diagnostics Incorporated provides diagnostic testing, information, and services in the United States and internationally. The company develops and delivers diagnostic information services, such as routine testing, non-routine and advanced clinical testing, anatomic pathology testing, and other diagnostic information services.

Further Reading

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Eurocash (OTCMKTS:EUSHY  Free Report) is one of 62 public companies in the Grocery Stores industry, but how does it compare to its rivals? We will compare Eurocash to related businesses based on the strength of its dividends, risk, valuation, institutional ownership, earnings, profitability and analyst recommendations.

Profitability

This table compares Eurocash and its rivals net margins, return on equity and return on assets.

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Net Margins Return on Equity Return on Assets Eurocash N/A N/A N/A Eurocash Competitors 2.01% 15.36% 4.99%

Analyst Recommendations

This is a summary of recent ratings and price targets for Eurocash and its rivals, as reported by MarketBeat.com.

Sell Ratings Hold Ratings Buy Ratings Strong Buy Ratings Rating Score Eurocash 1 0 0 0 1.00 Eurocash Competitors 1121 2752 3008 114 2.30

Insider and Institutional Ownership

As a group, Grocery Stores companies have a potential upside of 97.61%. Given Eurocashs rivals stronger consensus rating and higher possible upside, analysts plainly believe Eurocash has less favorable growth aspects than its rivals.

0.2% of Eurocash shares are held by institutional investors. Comparatively, 45.3% of shares of all Grocery Stores companies are held by institutional investors. 22.8% of shares of all Grocery Stores companies are held by company insiders. Strong institutional ownership is an indication that endowments, large money managers and hedge funds believe a company is poised for long-term growth.

Dividends

Eurocash pays an annual dividend of $0.58 per share and has a dividend yield of 14.3%. Eurocash pays out 43.9% of its earnings in the form of a dividend. As a group, Grocery Stores companies pay a dividend yield of 4.0% and pay out 61.3% of their earnings in the form of a dividend. Eurocash is clearly a better dividend stock than its rivals, given its higher yield and lower payout ratio.

Valuation & Earnings

This table compares Eurocash and its rivals gross revenue, earnings per share (EPS) and valuation.

Gross Revenue Net Income Price/Earnings Ratio Eurocash N/A N/A 3.07 Eurocash Competitors $26.96 billion $611.52 million 181.99

Eurocashs rivals have higher revenue and earnings than Eurocash. Eurocash 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

Eurocash rivals beat Eurocash on 11 of the 13 factors compared.

About Eurocash

(Free Report)

Eurocash S.A. engages in the wholesale distribution of food and other fast moving consumer goods (FMCG) in Poland. The company operates through Wholesale, Retail, and Projects segments. Its FMCG products include food products, soft drinks, alcoholic beverages, tobacco products, and household chemicals and cosmetics. The company markets its products to traditional retail stores, including small supermarkets, grocery stores, and specialized grocery stores; and kiosks, retail outlets, and convenience stores, restaurants, gas stations, hotel and cafe chains, and catering outlets. It operates a network of Cash & Carry warehouses; Delikatesy Centrum network supermarkets; Inmedio; and franchise and partner stores of Eurocash distribution. Eurocash S.A. was incorporated in 2014 and is based in Komorniki, Poland.

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St. Jamess Place (OTCMKTS:STJPF  Free Report) is one of 1,204 publicly-traded companies in the Asset Management industry, but how does it contrast to its peers? We will compare St. Jamess Place to related companies based on the strength of its risk, profitability, valuation, dividends, earnings, analyst recommendations and institutional ownership.

Analyst Ratings

This is a breakdown of recent ratings for St. Jamess Place and its peers, as reported by MarketBeat.

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Sell Ratings Hold Ratings Buy Ratings Strong Buy Ratings Rating Score St. Jamess Place 0 1 4 0 2.80 St. Jamess Place Competitors 1053 4624 5987 83 2.43

St. Jamess Place presently has a consensus price target of $1,362.25, indicating a potential upside of 10,051.80%. As a group, Asset Management companies have a potential upside of 81.92%. Given St. James Places stronger consensus rating and higher possible upside, equities analysts plainly believe St. Jamess Place is more favorable than its peers.

Profitability

Net Margins Return on Equity Return on Assets St. Jamess Place N/A N/A N/A St. Jamess Place Competitors 374.59% 7.95% 4.97%

Dividends

This table compares St. Jamess Place and its peers net margins, return on equity and return on assets.

St. Jamess Place pays an annual dividend of $0.16 per share and has a dividend yield of 1.2%. St. Jamess Place pays out 56.2% of its earnings in the form of a dividend. As a group, Asset Management companies pay a dividend yield of 7.0% and pay out 639.9% of their earnings in the form of a dividend.

Institutional and Insider Ownership

46.4% of St. Jamess Place shares are owned by institutional investors. Comparatively, 32.4% of shares of all Asset Management companies are owned by institutional investors. 18.1% of shares of all Asset Management companies are owned by insiders. Strong institutional ownership is an indication that large money managers, endowments and hedge funds believe a company is poised for long-term growth.

Earnings & Valuation

This table compares St. Jamess Place and its peers top-line revenue, earnings per share and valuation.

Gross Revenue Net Income Price/Earnings Ratio St. Jamess Place N/A N/A 47.26 St. Jamess Place Competitors $240.64 million $5.71 million 32.32

St. James Places peers have higher revenue and earnings than St. Jamess Place. St. Jamess Place is trading at a higher price-to-earnings ratio than its peers, indicating that it is currently more expensive than other companies in its industry.

Summary

St. James Place peers beat St. Jamess Place on 7 of the 13 factors compared.

St. Jamess Place Company Profile

(Free Report)

St. James's Place plc is a publicly owned investment manager. The firm launches and manages equity, fixed income, and balanced mutual funds for its clients. It invests in public equity and fixed income market across the globe. The firm was formerly known as St. James's Place Capital plc. St. James's Place plc was founded in 1991 and is based in Cirencester, United Kingdom.

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Canadian Pacific Kansas City (TSE:CP  Free Report) (NYSE:CP) had its price objective lifted by Royal Bank of Canada from C$122.00 to C$125.00 in a research report sent to investors on Friday morning, BayStreet.CA reports. Royal Bank of Canada currently has an outperform rating on the stock.

Several other research analysts also recently weighed in on CP. CIBC lowered their target price on Canadian Pacific Kansas City from C$125.00 to C$123.00 in a research note on Friday, June 16th. National Bank Financial lifted their price target on Canadian Pacific Kansas City from C$106.00 to C$107.00 in a research note on Monday, April 17th. TD Securities lifted their price target on Canadian Pacific Kansas City from C$120.00 to C$125.00 and gave the company a buy rating in a research note on Thursday, April 27th. BMO Capital Markets decreased their price target on Canadian Pacific Kansas City from C$130.00 to C$128.00 in a research note on Thursday, June 8th. Finally, JPMorgan Chase & Co. reduced their price objective on Canadian Pacific Kansas City from C$120.00 to C$118.00 in a report on Thursday. Three 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 stock has an average rating of Moderate Buy and an average target price of C$111.60.

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Canadian Pacific Kansas City Price Performance

Shares of TSE CP opened at C$107.00 on Friday. The company has a debt-to-equity ratio of 49.11, a quick ratio of 0.42 and a current ratio of 0.67. Canadian Pacific Kansas City has a fifty-two week low of C$90.00 and a fifty-two week high of C$112.27. The firm has a market capitalization of C$99.62 billion, a PE ratio of 26.75, a price-to-earnings-growth ratio of 1.81 and a beta of 0.83. The stocks 50-day simple moving average is C$106.28 and its 200-day simple moving average is C$104.91.

Canadian Pacific Kansas City Dividend Announcement

About Canadian Pacific Kansas City

The company also recently disclosed a quarterly dividend, which will be paid on Monday, July 31st. Shareholders of record on Friday, June 30th will be paid a dividend of $0.19 per share. This represents a $0.76 annualized dividend and a yield of 0.71%. The ex-dividend date is Thursday, June 29th. Canadian Pacific Kansas Citys payout ratio is currently 19.00%.

(Free Report)

Canadian Pacific Kansas City Limited, together with its subsidiaries, owns and operates a transcontinental freight railway in Canada and the United States. The company transports bulk commodities, including grain, coal, potash, fertilizers, and sulphur; and merchandise freight, such as energy, chemicals and plastics, metals, minerals and consumer, automotive, and forest products.

Further Reading

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Severn Trent (OTCMKTS:STRNY  Free Report) and Pennon Group (OTCMKTS:PEGRF  Free Report) are both utilities companies, but which is the superior business? We will compare the two companies based on the strength of their dividends, analyst recommendations, earnings, risk, profitability, valuation and institutional ownership.

Institutional & Insider Ownership

0.1% of Severn Trent shares are held by institutional investors. Comparatively, 44.0% of Pennon Group shares are held by institutional investors. Strong institutional ownership is an indication that endowments, large money managers and hedge funds believe a company will outperform the market over the long term.

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Earnings and Valuation

This table compares Severn Trent and Pennon Groups top-line revenue, earnings per share and valuation.

Gross Revenue Price/Sales Ratio Net Income Earnings Per Share Price/Earnings Ratio Severn Trent N/A N/A N/A $0.82 41.22 Pennon Group N/A N/A N/A $0.29 32.13

Profitability

Pennon Group is trading at a lower price-to-earnings ratio than Severn Trent, indicating that it is currently the more affordable of the two stocks.

This table compares Severn Trent and Pennon Groups net margins, return on equity and return on assets.

Net Margins Return on Equity Return on Assets Severn Trent N/A N/A N/A Pennon Group N/A N/A N/A

Dividends

Severn Trent pays an annual dividend of $1.47 per share and has a dividend yield of 4.4%. Pennon Group pays an annual dividend of $0.30 per share and has a dividend yield of 3.3%. Severn Trent pays out 179.4% of its earnings in the form of a dividend, suggesting it may not have sufficient earnings to cover its dividend payment in the future. Pennon Group pays out 104.5% of its earnings in the form of a dividend, suggesting it may not have sufficient earnings to cover its dividend payment in the future.

Analyst Recommendations

This is a breakdown of recent ratings and price targets for Severn Trent and Pennon Group, as reported by MarketBeat.com.

Sell Ratings Hold Ratings Buy Ratings Strong Buy Ratings Rating Score Severn Trent 0 2 3 0 2.60 Pennon Group 0 1 1 0 2.50

Severn Trent presently has a consensus target price of $2,932.50, suggesting a potential upside of 8,581.87%. Pennon Group has a consensus target price of $815.00, suggesting a potential upside of 8,641.35%. Given Pennon Groups higher probable upside, analysts plainly believe Pennon Group is more favorable than Severn Trent.

Summary

Severn Trent beats Pennon Group on 5 of the 8 factors compared between the two stocks.

About Severn Trent

(Free Report)

Severn Trent PLC operates as a water and sewerage company in England and Wales. It operates through two segments: Regulated Water and Waste Water, and Business Services. The Regulated Water and Waste Water segment offers water and waste water services to approximately 4.8 million households and businesses. The Business Services segment generates renewable energy from anaerobic digestion, hydropower, wind turbines, and solar panels; property development; and offers affinity products and search services. It also provides services to municipal and industrial clients, including the Ministry of Defence and the Coal Authority for design, build, and operation of water and wastewater treatment facilities and networks. Severn Trent PLC was founded in 1974 and is headquartered in Coventry, the United Kingdom.

About Pennon Group

(Free Report)

Pennon Group Plc provides clean water and wastewater services in the United Kingdom. It provides water and wastewater services for customers in Cornwall, Devon, and parts of Dorset and Somerset; water-only services in the areas of Dorset, Hampshire, and Wiltshire; and water and wastewater retail services to non-household customers in Great Britain. The company also offers regulated water to approximately 1.2 million customers in the Bristol region. It serves approximately 50 million household and non-household customers. The company was incorporated in 1989 and is based in Exeter, the United Kingdom.

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Spectrum Financial Alliance Ltd LLC grew its position in shares of General Electric (NYSE:GE  Free Report) by 4.5% during the 1st quarter, according to the company in its most recent filing with the Securities & Exchange Commission. The institutional investor owned 82,206 shares of the conglomerates stock after buying an additional 3,532 shares during the quarter. General Electric accounts for approximately 3.6% of Spectrum Financial Alliance Ltd LLCs investment portfolio, making the stock its 9th biggest holding. Spectrum Financial Alliance Ltd LLCs holdings in General Electric were worth $7,859,000 at the end of the most recent quarter.

Several other hedge funds have also recently modified their holdings of GE. Moneta Group Investment Advisors LLC raised its holdings in shares of General Electric by 122,242.2% in the 4th quarter. Moneta Group Investment Advisors LLC now owns 13,438,063 shares of the conglomerates stock worth $878,644,000 after purchasing an additional 13,427,079 shares during the period. Norges Bank bought a new stake in shares of General Electric in the 4th quarter worth approximately $635,274,000. Electron Capital Partners LLC bought a new stake in shares of General Electric in the 4th quarter worth approximately $121,527,000. Clean Energy Transition LLP raised its holdings in shares of General Electric by 1,592.4% in the 4th quarter. Clean Energy Transition LLP now owns 1,307,467 shares of the conglomerates stock worth $109,553,000 after purchasing an additional 1,230,210 shares during the period. Finally, International Assets Investment Management LLC grew its stake in General Electric by 7,640.4% in the 4th quarter. International Assets Investment Management LLC now owns 1,183,582 shares of the conglomerates stock valued at $3,666,000 after buying an additional 1,168,291 shares in the last quarter. Institutional investors own 74.75% of the companys stock.

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Wall Street Analysts Forecast Growth

A number of research analysts recently weighed in on GE shares. Morgan Stanley lifted their price objective on shares of General Electric from $90.00 to $110.00 and gave the company an overweight rating in a research note on Friday, March 31st. UBS Group lifted their price objective on shares of General Electric from $95.00 to $109.00 in a research note on Thursday, April 13th. Wolfe Research lifted their price objective on shares of General Electric from $107.00 to $125.00 in a research note on Wednesday, June 28th. The Goldman Sachs Group lifted their price objective on shares of General Electric from $96.00 to $110.00 and gave the company a buy rating in a research note on Friday, April 14th. Finally, Barclays lifted their price objective on shares of General Electric from $115.00 to $125.00 in a research note on Wednesday, June 7th. Two analysts have rated the stock with a hold rating and thirteen have assigned a buy rating to the company. According to data from MarketBeat, the stock currently has an average rating of Moderate Buy and a consensus price target of $105.19.

General Electric Stock Performance

NYSE GE opened at $108.52 on Monday. General Electric has a 52-week low of $46.55 and a 52-week high of $110.26. The company has a debt-to-equity ratio of 0.61, a quick ratio of 0.92 and a current ratio of 1.25. The company has a market capitalization of $118.17 billion, a P/E ratio of 14.32, a P/E/G ratio of 7.76 and a beta of 1.27. The company has a fifty day moving average of $103.09 and a 200-day moving average of $91.77.

General Electric (NYSE:GE  Free Report) last posted its quarterly earnings data on Tuesday, April 25th. The conglomerate reported $0.27 earnings per share (EPS) for the quarter, topping analysts consensus estimates of $0.13 by $0.14. The company had revenue of $14.49 billion during the quarter, compared to the consensus estimate of $13.46 billion. General Electric had a net margin of 11.85% and a return on equity of 9.45%. The firms revenue was up 14.3% compared to the same quarter last year. During the same period in the previous year, the firm posted $0.24 EPS. As a group, equities research analysts predict that General Electric will post 2.02 EPS for the current fiscal year.

General Electric Dividend Announcement

The firm also recently declared a quarterly dividend, which will be paid on Tuesday, July 25th. Shareholders of record on Tuesday, July 11th will be paid a $0.08 dividend. This represents a $0.32 annualized dividend and a yield of 0.29%. The ex-dividend date is Monday, July 10th. General Electrics dividend payout ratio is presently 4.17%.

Insiders Place Their Bets

In other General Electric news, VP Thomas S. Timko sold 7,254 shares of the businesss stock in a transaction on Monday, May 1st. The shares were sold at an average price of $100.82, for a total value of $731,348.28. Following the completion of the sale, the vice president now directly owns 20,953 shares of the companys stock, valued at $2,112,481.46. The transaction was disclosed in a legal filing with the Securities & Exchange Commission, which is accessible through the SEC website. In other news, VP Thomas S. Timko sold 7,254 shares of the companys stock in a transaction dated Monday, May 1st. The shares were sold at an average price of $100.82, for a total transaction of $731,348.28. Following the completion of the transaction, the vice president now directly owns 20,953 shares of the companys stock, valued at $2,112,481.46. The sale was disclosed in a legal filing with the SEC, which is accessible through this hyperlink. Also, SVP Michael J. Holston sold 58,292 shares of the companys stock in a transaction dated Monday, May 22nd. The shares were sold at an average price of $104.68, for a total transaction of $6,102,006.56. Following the transaction, the senior vice president now directly owns 70,537 shares of the companys stock, valued at $7,383,813.16. The disclosure for this sale can be found here. Insiders sold 239,419 shares of company stock valued at $24,144,151 over the last three months. Insiders own 0.67% of the companys stock.

General Electric Profile

(Free Report)

General Electric Company operates as a high-tech industrial company in Europe, China, Asia, the Americas, the Middle East, and Africa. It offers gas and steam turbines, full balance of plant, upgrade, and service solutions, as well as data-leveraging software for power generation, industrial, government, and other customers.

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Tourmaline Oil Corp. (OTCMKTS:TRMLF  Free Report) was the recipient of a significant decline in short interest during the month of June. As of June 15th, there was short interest totalling 10,842,500 shares, a decline of 32.6% from the May 31st total of 16,086,100 shares. Based on an average daily trading volume, of 32,800 shares, the days-to-cover ratio is currently 330.6 days.

Tourmaline Oil Trading Up 1.3 %

Shares of TRMLF traded up $0.62 on Monday, reaching $47.16. The companys stock had a trading volume of 18,400 shares, compared to its average volume of 41,166. The firm has a fifty day moving average of $44.32 and a 200-day moving average of $45.11. Tourmaline Oil has a twelve month low of $38.00 and a twelve month high of $63.94.

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Tourmaline Oil Cuts Dividend

The business also recently declared a dividend, which was paid on Friday, June 30th. Investors of record on Thursday, June 15th were issued a dividend of $0.1946 per share. This represents a dividend yield of 1.73%. The ex-dividend date was Wednesday, June 14th.

Analyst Upgrades and Downgrades

About Tourmaline Oil

Several equities analysts recently issued reports on TRMLF shares. Stifel Nicolaus dropped their target price on shares of Tourmaline Oil from C$77.00 to C$75.00 in a report on Thursday, May 4th. National Bank Financial dropped their target price on shares of Tourmaline Oil from C$80.00 to C$75.00 in a report on Thursday. CIBC dropped their target price on shares of Tourmaline Oil from C$80.00 to C$70.00 in a report on Friday, April 14th. Finally, Scotiabank decreased their price target on shares of Tourmaline Oil from C$112.00 to C$102.00 in a research note on Thursday, April 13th.

(Free Report)

Tourmaline Oil Corp. explores for and develops oil and natural gas properties in the Western Canadian Sedimentary Basin. It holds interests in properties located in the Alberta Deep Basin, Northeast British Columbia Montney, and the Peace River High Triassic oil complex. The company was incorporated in 2008 and is headquartered in Calgary, Canada.

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Turkcell Iletisim Hizmetleri A.S. (NYSE:TKC  Free Report) saw a significant increase in short interest in the month of June. As of June 15th, there was short interest totalling 746,500 shares, an increase of 37.0% from the May 31st total of 544,800 shares. Based on an average daily trading volume, of 337,600 shares, the short-interest ratio is currently 2.2 days. Currently, 0.1% of the companys stock are short sold.

Wall Street Analyst Weigh In

A number of brokerages have recently issued reports on TKC. TheStreet downgraded Turkcell Iletisim Hizmetleri A.S. from a b- rating to a c rating in a report on Thursday, May 11th. StockNews.com upgraded shares of Turkcell Iletisim Hizmetleri A.S. from a buy rating to a strong-buy rating in a report on Thursday, May 11th.

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Turkcell Iletisim Hizmetleri A.S. Price Performance

TKC traded up $0.02 during trading on Monday, hitting $3.59. The stock had a trading volume of 328,626 shares, compared to its average volume of 380,827. The stock has a 50 day simple moving average of $4.05 and a two-hundred day simple moving average of $4.39. The company has a debt-to-equity ratio of 1.15, a current ratio of 1.60 and a quick ratio of 1.59. Turkcell Iletisim Hizmetleri A.S. has a twelve month low of $2.33 and a twelve month high of $5.44.

Institutional Inflows and Outflows

Turkcell Iletisim Hizmetleri A.S. ( NYSE:TKC Free Report ) last issued its quarterly earnings data on Tuesday, May 9th. The Wireless communications provider reported $0.17 EPS for the quarter. Turkcell Iletisim Hizmetleri A.S. had a return on equity of 32.67% and a net margin of 21.39%. The firm had revenue of $911.81 million during the quarter. As a group, research analysts forecast that Turkcell Iletisim Hizmetleri A.S. will post 1.11 EPS for the current fiscal year.

Several institutional investors have recently modified their holdings of the company. Mercer Global Advisors Inc. ADV purchased a new stake in Turkcell Iletisim Hizmetleri A.S. in the first quarter valued at approximately $117,000. Segall Bryant & Hamill LLC purchased a new stake in shares of Turkcell Iletisim Hizmetleri A.S. in the 1st quarter valued at $102,000. State Street Corp increased its holdings in Turkcell Iletisim Hizmetleri A.S. by 2.9% in the first quarter. State Street Corp now owns 1,000,856 shares of the Wireless communications providers stock valued at $4,304,000 after buying an additional 28,633 shares in the last quarter. Squarepoint Ops LLC acquired a new position in shares of Turkcell Iletisim Hizmetleri A.S. in the first quarter worth about $255,000. Finally, Arrowstreet Capital Limited Partnership boosted its stake in shares of Turkcell Iletisim Hizmetleri A.S. by 134.2% during the 1st quarter. Arrowstreet Capital Limited Partnership now owns 721,454 shares of the Wireless communications providers stock worth $3,102,000 after acquiring an additional 413,443 shares in the last quarter.

Turkcell Iletisim Hizmetleri A.S. Company Profile

(Free Report)

Turkcell Iletisim Hizmetleri A.S. provides digital services in Turkey, Ukraine, Belarus, Northern Cyprus, and the Netherlands. It operates through Turkcell Turkey, Turkcell International, and Techfin segments. It offers work contact services, such as mobile communications, fixed business internet and business phone, and customer loyalty and programs; digital business services comprising uninterrupted access, cyber security, data center, Internet of Things, big data, e-transformation, technologies, and managed services, and cloud solutions.

Further Reading

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HERAT, Afghanistan, July 3 (Xinhua) -- Afghan police have arrested six alleged drug traffickers and discovered 6 kg of illicit drugs from their possessions in the western Herat province, said a statement of provincial police department released here on Monday.

The contraband, including 1 kg of heroin, 1 kg of opium poppy, 4 kg of hashish and three pistols were recovered from the possession of the arrested individuals during operations on Sunday, the statement added.

All the arrested men have been taken into custody for investigation, the statement asserted.

Days earlier, police also discovered more than 2 tonnes of illicit drugs and an object used in manufacturing heroin in the northern Samangan province, with four suspects detained.

The Afghan caretaker government in April last year banned the cultivation of illegal crops including poppy, drug processing and drug trafficking. 
WestRock (NYSE:WRK  Free Report) had its price target cut by UBS Group from $42.00 to $37.00 in a report published on Friday, The Fly reports.

A number of other brokerages have also commented on WRK. Bank of America raised WestRock from a neutral rating to a buy rating and lifted their price target for the company from $38.00 to $40.00 in a research note on Thursday, April 20th. StockNews.com assumed coverage on shares of WestRock in a research note on Thursday, May 18th. They set a hold rating for the company. Deutsche Bank Aktiengesellschaft lowered their target price on WestRock from $34.00 to $32.00 in a research report on Wednesday, March 15th. Finally, Citigroup raised WestRock from a neutral rating to a buy rating and decreased their price target for the company from $34.00 to $32.00 in a research note on Monday, March 20th. One analyst has rated the stock with a sell rating, five have assigned a hold rating and three have assigned a buy rating to the company. According to data from MarketBeat, WestRock currently has an average rating of Hold and a consensus price target of $34.00.

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WestRock Stock Performance

NYSE:WRK opened at $29.07 on Friday. The firm has a market capitalization of $7.45 billion, a PE ratio of -5.98, a price-to-earnings-growth ratio of 1.10 and a beta of 1.19. The company has a quick ratio of 1.02, a current ratio of 1.53 and a debt-to-equity ratio of 0.93. WestRock has a twelve month low of $26.84 and a twelve month high of $43.37. The stocks 50-day simple moving average is $28.62 and its 200 day simple moving average is $31.45.

WestRock Dividend Announcement

WestRock ( NYSE:WRK Free Report ) last issued its quarterly earnings data on Thursday, May 4th. The basic materials company reported $0.77 EPS for the quarter, beating the consensus estimate of $0.51 by $0.26. The business had revenue of $5.28 billion during the quarter, compared to the consensus estimate of $5.23 billion. WestRock had a negative net margin of 5.86% and a positive return on equity of 9.98%. The firms revenue was down 1.9% compared to the same quarter last year. During the same quarter in the prior year, the firm earned $1.17 EPS. On average, analysts anticipate that WestRock will post 2.46 EPS for the current fiscal year.

The business also recently announced a quarterly dividend, which was paid on Thursday, May 25th. Investors of record on Thursday, May 11th were paid a dividend of $0.275 per share. This represents a $1.10 annualized dividend and a yield of 3.78%. The ex-dividend date was Wednesday, May 10th. WestRocks dividend payout ratio is presently -22.63%.

Hedge Funds Weigh In On WestRock

Several institutional investors have recently made changes to their positions in the stock. ProShare Advisors LLC raised its stake in WestRock by 66.2% during the 1st quarter. ProShare Advisors LLC now owns 86,406 shares of the basic materials companys stock worth $2,633,000 after buying an additional 34,413 shares during the period. Empower Advisory Group LLC acquired a new position in shares of WestRock during the first quarter worth approximately $250,000. 3Chopt Investment Partners LLC bought a new position in shares of WestRock in the 1st quarter worth $252,000. Putnam Investments LLC increased its stake in WestRock by 1.4% during the 1st quarter. Putnam Investments LLC now owns 95,960 shares of the basic materials companys stock valued at $2,924,000 after purchasing an additional 1,292 shares in the last quarter. Finally, Ameriprise Financial Inc. lifted its stake in shares of WestRock by 88.1% in the first quarter. Ameriprise Financial Inc. now owns 695,222 shares of the basic materials companys stock valued at $21,183,000 after buying an additional 325,595 shares in the last quarter. Institutional investors and hedge funds own 84.54% of the companys stock.

About WestRock

(Free Report)

WestRock Company, together with its subsidiaries, provides fiber-based paper and packaging solutions in North America, South America, Europe, Asia, and Australia. It operates in four segments, Corrugated Packaging, Consumer Packaging, Global Paper, and Distribution. The Corrugated Packaging segment produces containerboards, corrugated sheets, corrugated packaging, and preprinted linerboards to consumer and industrial products manufacturers, and corrugated box manufacturers.

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The medical director of the Morrison Cancer Center believes the requirements of Medicare Advantage organizations such as UnitedHealthcare do a disservice to his cancer patients.

Dr. M. Sitki Copur feels people with cancer would be better served with traditional Medicare than they are by Medicare Advantage plans.

For people with Medicare Advantage, prior authorization is often required for treatments that Copur feels his patients need. Those measures include MRIs, chemotherapy and PET scans.

Copur, who is an oncologist, says the preauthorization burden causes problems for his patients on a regular basis.

Seeking preauthorization is a difficult process, he says. And the delay can be harmful for people with cancer.

Rather than sitting there, waiting for preauthorization, cancer progresses. A delay of two to four weeks can jeopardize a patients life, Copur said.

Sometimes a day or two can make a difference. This is why this is so important," he said.

With Medicare Advantage, if a doctor uses a procedure or medication without preapproval, the insurer will not pay. The doctor would have to bill the patient or the hospital. Rather than going that route, the doctor might use a lesser quality or cheaper product.

Three Medicare Advantage programs are available in Nebraska: UnitedHealthcare, Nebraska Total Care and Blue Cross/Blue Shield.

From Copurs perspective, UnitedHealthcare is the worst of the three for his cancer patients.

"And I'm not scared to say it," he said. Nebraska Total Care is a little bit better, he said.

The Morrison Cancer Center is part of Mary Lanning Healthcare. Copur has offices in Hastings and Grand Island. He is also an adjunct professor at the University of Nebraska Medical Center.

Under regular Medicare, standard procedures are followed in the treatment of cancer, using guidelines set out by the National Comprehensive Cancer Network and the American Society of Clinical Oncology. Any approved chemotherapy may be used for Medicare patients without preapproval.

Copur says UnitedHealthcare is misleading in its advertising. A letter he received from the company says a Medicare Advantage plan from United Healthcare provides your Original Medicare benefits, plus valuable extras.

Copur says thats not true. Cancer patients who are on traditional Medicare do not require preauthorization.

The Independent tried several times this past week to contact UnitedHealthcare, but those attempts were unsuccessful.

Two members of Copurs staff spend a lot of time trying to obtain preauthorization. The process is time-consuming. Some staff members refer to Medicare Advantage as Medicare Disadvantage.

Not only does UnitedHealthcare deny treatments, but it sometimes denies investigations and tests, Copur said.

This has to be corrected, Copur says of the current system.

If authorization is denied, the physician can appeal the process by requesting a peer-to-peer interview with a doctor.

Copur uses that process frequently. But hes disappointed that he cant argue his case with a fellow oncologist. Sometimes, in lobbying for his patients, he might be talking to a dermatologist or a pharmacist.

The appeal process takes time. Members of a cancer team must be aggressive in fighting cancer, Copur said.

The Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services have published two proposed rules addressing prior authorization. The proposals are meant to rein in Medicare Advantage plans from placing excessive and unnecessary administrative obstacles between patients and evidence-based treatments, says a news release.

Earlier this year, the American Society of Clinical Oncology listed Copur in the Presidents Circle of ASCOs Advocacy Champions.

ASCO says the honor was the result of his tireless advocacy efforts in 2022.

ASCO says Advocacy Champions are ASCO volunteers who work hard to ensure that every patient with cancer has access to high-quality, equitable cancer care no matter who they are or where they live.

Copur was one of 160 people who attended the 2023 ASCO Advocacy Summit meeting May 1 and 2 in Washington, D.C. During the trip, he visited the offices of Congressional representatives from Nebraska and Iowa.

At a breakfast, Copur spoke to Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse of Rhode Island.

Copur told Whitehouse that Medicare Advantage organizations are not doing what they say theyre doing. He said they're removing some of the benefits of regular Medicare and delivering small rewards in return.

Copur asked members of Congress to support the Improving Seniors Timely Access to Care Act and other bills.

In addition to his Washington trip, Copur works with the American Cancer Society Cancer Action Network and the Nebraska Medical Association.

Copur's battle wont stop anytime soon. He plans to devote the rest of his working life to fight for his patients and to ease their pain and suffering as much as he can.
As the family of Chris Marcello received an award Saturday night outside Third City Christian Church, a dozen Grand Island police officers stood off to the side, expressing their support.

The family Marcello left behind was presented with the Freedom Award at the churchs Heartland Celebration of Freedom. Marcello, a Grand Island police officer, died July 27, 2022, at the age of 42.

After Marcello passed away, Grand Island police officers promised they would look after his family. And theyve delivered.

Officers have helped a lot, said Marcellos widow, Tami.

Everybodys always asking if she needs anything, and Im not very good about asking for help, she said in an interview.

But she sees plenty of the officers who worked with Chris.

They drive by and check on us,, Tami said. They make phone calls. I have people send cards still. And then we get together with them.

Tami is raising the couples four children  Vincent, 15, Mia, 13, Ophelia, 10, and Victor, 7.

How is the family doing?

Plenty of good days. Id like to say more good days now. But since were coming up to his anniversary of when everything happened, lots of tears are being shed. A lot during the evening hours, when were home alone.

How would she describe her late husband?

My best friend. The person I confided in. The person I trusted, I looked up to, I asked for advice  my everything, our everything.

How are the Marcello children holding up?

It goes in spurts, she said. Recently its been rough for most of us. I dont know if its just from the anniversary coming, or what. But this last month has been a lot rougher than it has been the previous couple months.

Tami Marcello is a Hastings native. She and Chris met when they were students at the University of Nebraska at Kearney. She works at Mary Lanning Healthcare.

The Marcellos attend Third City Christian.

During the award presentation, Pastor Scott Jones led the gathering in prayer. After the award was presented, the Marcello family received a strong ovation.

The Marcellos did not speak during the presentation. After giving her the Freedom Award, Jones gave Tami a hug.

I appreciate everybodys thoughts and prayers and anything that theyve given us in the last 11 months, Tami said. We really appreciate everything."

It was the 21st time Third City has held the Heartland Celebration of Freedom.

We just love doing this for our community, Jones said.

The church likes to honor those who protect the rest of us. I dont know if you can thank them enough, he said.

Around 300 to 400 church members put on the celebration every year. Their jobs include setting up, working the event and cleaning up.

The Freedom Award is given every year. Recipients are first responders and those with a connection to the military.

The celebration ended with a fireworks show, sponsored by Dinsdale Automotive.
Request for fireworks respect

I am asking those who will shoot off fireworks to have a little courtesy when doing so.

There are those of us veterans and others who have PTSD and other anxiety disorders. We should not have to isolate because you like the sounds and colors.

The past few years I have contacted our city government about this issue and all I get is no answer.

As far as a fine for not following the guidelines set forth, I say the police department should fine them. They say they dont want their Fourth of July ruined. What about the rest of us. Dont get me wrong about the Fourth  enjoy it  but I believe six days is too long.

Gary Dixon

Grand Island

The need for foster parents

As a foster parent in Central Nebraska, and one who works for a foster care agency, I have noticed a true need for foster parents who can serve the harder to place population. This population includes sibling strips of three or more children, teenagers and kids or teens with higher needs. Children are sleeping in the offices of DHHS and the foster care closet because there are not enough homes to serve this population.

One common myth regarding foster care that you have to be a perfect parent to foster. This is not true. The requirements to becoming a foster parent include being 21 years of age, being able to support your own family unit outside of any foster care reimbursement and being able to provide a safe home with a place to sleep. You will have 24/7 support provided as well as assistance with their financial needs such as food, clothing and school supplies.

Another reason people tend to not foster is the fear of getting too attached. This attachment is actually the most important thing you will do as a foster parent because it helps to ensure that child can form lifelong attachments to adults in their future.

I know it is scary to imagine taking in a child who was not born to you. It is definitely a broken system. I can say after fostering for nine years myself, the children are the best part of fostering and I wouldnt trade the tough times for anything. Knowing I made a difference in the life of just one child keeps me fostering.

Contact me if you would like more information. The class is free and there is no obligation.

Krysten Vance

Boys Town Foster Care

Grand Island

Struggles with alcohol

Today I am thinking of a young man with terminal liver disease due to alcoholism whose church family are traveling to be with him in his last days.

Christian churches everywhere preach against alcohol use and some even make abstinence a requirement for membership.

Unfortunately, Christian churches often suggest that God works only through pious church men and their agencies, so they shun involvement in secular agencies.

That is literally false theological teaching. Jesus knew that all agencies of society must be positioned to support people-centered communities and consensual law, starting with an inspired Constitutional law.

Mothers Against Drunk Driving (MADD) have shown us the way to do this in our post-prohibition society. Theirs is not a church-oriented organization, nor are they necessarily church mothers, but their work has been righteous even though they do not mention Gods name as they do it.

The church has contributed greatly to the burgeoning 21st century anti-law mindset by suggesting that civic regulation of behavior is ineffective compared to conversion to Christ and church attendance.

Young people are dying while church people pray for Jesus to come and fix the problem. Jesus is waiting for us to deal with it.

Kimball Shinkoskey

Woods Cross, Utah
Korea beauty firm Amorepacific earns 2022 profit of $3 mln in Vietnam

By Tri Duc Mon, July 3, 2023 | 2:39 pm GTM+7

Amorepacific Vietnam Ltd., the Vietnamese subsidiary of South Korean beauty and cosmetics group Amorepacific, earned a profit of KRW3.77 billion ($2.87 million) in 2022, up 167.4% year-on-year.

The firm's revenue reached KRW41.93 billion ($31.91 million), up 32.5%, according to the parent company.

Amorepacifics Vietnamese subsidiary, which involves sales of cosmetics, earned the group's fourth highest overseas profit, only after Hong Kong-based Amorepacific Global Operations Limited., Hong Kong-based Amorepacific Hong Kong Co., Limited., and France-based Annick Goutal S.A.S.

A Innisfree store in Hanoi. Photo courtesy of Lotte Department Store.

Regarding global operations, Amorepacific made a post-tax profit of KRW149.2 billion ($113.58 million) on a revenue of KRW4,495 billion ($3.42 billion) in 2022, down 48.9% and 15.6% year-on-year.

Founded in 2011, Amorepacific Vietnam is one of Amorepacific's global business units with famous brands such as Sulwhasoo, Laneige, Innisfree, Daily Beauty and Vital Beautie. The firm opened its first official stores in Vietnam for the Sulwhasoo brand in 2013, Innisfree in 2016, and Laneige in 2017.

Vietnams cosmetics market has seen growing demand among consumers. Spending on cosmetics and healthcare products in Vietnam reached 6.6% of GDP in 2019, and could hit a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 10.7%, according to local market researcher Virac.

The current value of Vietnams cosmetics market is about $4 billion, according to the Vietnam Essential Oils Aromas and Cosmetics Association (VOCA). Of which, foreign businesses accounted for 60-70% of the market share, the association noted.

South Koreas cosmetics exports to Vietnam surged 43.4% year-on-year to $187.5 million in the first five months of this year, the highest growth rate among South Koreas export markets, the Korea Herald reported.

The South Korean daily added that the growth in Vietnam indicated the Southeast Asian nation could become an alternative market for South Korean firms due to a worsening performance in China amid political tensions between China and South Korea.
S Korean retailers double down in Vietnam

By Tuong Minh Mon, July 3, 2023 | 5:54 pm GTM+7

South Korean retailers are persisting with expansion efforts in the Vietnamese market even as Malaysian giant Parkson Retail Asias subsidiary files for voluntary bankruptcy.

Lotte Shopping, part of South Korea-based Lotte Group, is set to open the $250 million Lotte Mall West Lake Hanoi next month.

A status that appeared Monday on the Hanoi malls Facebook fan page says Lotte World Aquarium, part of the mall, is also set to open next month.

An artist's impression of Lotte Mall West Lake in Hanoi. Photo courtesy of Lotte Mall.

Situated by the West Lake, the project will also have a hotel, a Lotte cinema center and an office center.

Lotte Group broke ground last December on a $900 million multi-function Eco Smart City in Ho Chi Minh Citys Thu Thiem Peninsula. The 50,000-square-meter project will comprise a shopping mall, a hotel, an office complex, serviced apartments and a separate residential complex.

An artist's impression of the Lotte Eco Smart City project in Ho Chi Minh City, southern Vietnam. Photo courtesy of Lotte Group.

Another arm of the group that is expanding in Vietnam is Lotte Duty Free, which opened a new store in Danang City last November. Vietnam was a strong foundation for maintaining its leading position in Southeast Asia, the company said.

It also plans to open a store in downtown Hanoi in 2023 as part of what it calls the Lotte Duty Free Belt in the Asia Pacific region. The company has not provided further details.

Last month, The World Banks International Finance Corporation (IFC) signed an agreement to invest VND460 billion ($20 million) in CVS, a subsidiary of Vietnams Son Kim Retail Corp., to help expand the retail network of GS25 Vietnam, a convenience store chain.

Catering to the changing taste of a growing urban clientele that is looking for safe and reliable ready-to-cook meals, the HCMC-based convenience store operator aims to diversify its product range with a focus on high quality fresh food.

Supporting its efforts, IFC will advise GS25 Vietnam on enhancing its in-store food safety practices and reducing food loss and waste.

The IFCs $20 million funding will help GS25 Vietnam - a joint venture between Son Kim Retail and Korean firm GS Retail - open over 500 new convenience stores nationwide by 2025. The network expansion is expected to create up to 6,000 direct jobs (more than 60% of which will go to women) and generate thousands of indirect jobs with the JV increasing its supply of locally produced food.

Meanwhile, the Thaco Group, one of Vietnams leading private conglomerates, plans to open its third Emart hypermarket in HCMC this year under a master franchise contract with Korean retail giant Emart. The existing two Emart hypermarkets are also located in the southern economic hub.

The retail expansion by Thai firms is happening in the context of Vietnam and South Korea elevating their bilateral relationship to a Comprehensive Strategic Partnership last December. Just last month, the two governments agreed to make joint efforts to almost double bilateral trade to $150 billion by 2030 and deepen their multi-faceted cooperation.

The expansion also happens amid Parkson Vietnam filing for voluntary bankruptcy with the HCMC administration after 18 years in the Vietnamese market. Malaysia's Parkson Retail Asia, its parent company, said declaring bankruptcy was the best course of action because continuing operations in Vietnam was not economically feasible.

The Vietnamese market is home to a population of around 100 million with a growing middle-class population. As such, the South Korean retailers expansion efforts are facing fiercer competition from Japanese companies, including Aeon  Japans largest retailer.

Aeon has seven operational malls in Vietnam with two in HCMC, one in Binh Duong province bordering the megacity, three in Hanoi and one in the northern port city of Hai Phong. The giant is seeking to expand its Vietnam mall network to 25 by 2025 and has earmarked around $1 billion for the purpose.

Aeon signed an agreement last October with Boxed, an American online platform which sells household consumables in bulk and licenses its e-commerce software through its Spresso Software and Services Division. Under the agreement, Aeon will launch Boxeds end-to-end software and services platform in the Vietnamese market with Aeon Vietnam Co Ltd.
A 55-year-old St. George man is serving two years of probation after he pleaded guilty to charges stemming from an Orangeburg County incident.

Lawrence Junior Carn, of 1501 St. Mark Bowman Road, pleaded guilty to first-degree assault and battery and pointing and presenting a firearm during a recent term of court held at the Orangeburg County Courthouse.

Circuit Judge Maite Murphy sentenced him to 10 years in prison, suspended to two years of probation.

She also ordered him to undergo random drug/alcohol testing and complete substance abuse counseling.

Carn faced the following charges from the incident, but they were dismissed: two counts of kidnapping and one count each of possession of a weapon during the commission of a violent crime, possession of a firearm by a person convicted of a violent felony, first-degree assault and battery and pointing and presenting a firearm.

Orangeburg County Sheriffs Office deputies responded to a Lemon Grove Road home, near the Dorchester County line, on Nov. 24, 2019. They found two men with head injuries.

One of the men had a cut on the left side of his head with his ear split open, an incident report states.

The men claimed that Carn arrived at the home in a pickup truck with several members of his family following in cars.

Carn accused them of taking parts off of a wrecked vehicle without permission, but they said they werent able to remove any parts.

The men claimed Carn struck them with a 12-gauge shotgun.

They also alleged Carn threatened to kill them as he pointed the shotgun at them.

The men showed Carn that they didnt take any parts from the vehicle. Carn allegedly apologized to them and offered to pay for their medical bills, the report states.

In other recent guilty pleas:

 Jaquan Steve Murray, 27, of 1261 Fernwood Drive, Orangeburg, pleaded guilty to first-offense failure to stop for blue lights and first-offense driving under suspension, license not suspended for DUI.

Circuit Judge Heath Taylor sentenced him to three years in prison. Because he already served five days in jail, his sentence was suspended to 18 months of probation.

Charges of unlawful carrying of a pistol and operating or permitting operation of a vehicle which is not registered or licensed were dismissed.

 Kevin Dustin Peagler, 35, of 1934 A Jason Street, North Charleston, pleaded guilty to possession of a stolen pistol.

Taylor sentenced him to five years in prison. Because he already served three days in jail, the remainder of his sentence was suspended to two years of probation.

Taylor also ordered Peagler to complete substance abuse counseling and undergo random drug/alcohol testing.

Peagler is also required to complete inpatient substance abuse treatment as soon as bed space becomes available.

His charge of unlawful carrying of a pistol was dismissed.

 Charlie Cornelious Shuler Jr., 40, of 1082 Five Chop Road, Orangeburg, pleaded guilty to first-offense driving under the influence .16 or higher, pointing and presenting a firearm and third-degree domestic violence.

Shuler was charged with second-offense DUI .16 or higher, but pleaded guilty to first-offense DUI .16 or higher instead.

Taylor sentenced him to five years in prison. Because he already served three days in jail, his sentence was suspended to three years of probation.

Shulers following charges were dismissed: transporting alcohol with a broken seal in a vehicle, third or subsequent DUS license suspended for DUI and second-offense DUI less than .10.

 Larry Wayne Shuler, 42, of 231 Merri Oaks Court, Santee, pleaded guilty to second-degree domestic violence.

Taylor sentenced him to three years in prison. Because Shuler already served 10 days in jail, his term was suspended to two years of probation.

The following charges were dismissed: two counts of violation of court order of protection and one count each of domestic violence of a high and aggravated nature, first-degree burglary, second-degree burglary, third-degree assault and battery and unlawful neglect of a child.

 Edward Davon Stephens, 36, of 1587 Community Avenue, Smoaks, pleaded guilty to third-degree domestic violence.

Taylor sentenced him to 90 days in prison. Because Stephens already served one day in jail, the sentence was suspended to two years of probation.

 Benjamin Charles Talley, 30, of 5473 Charleston Highway, Bowman, pleaded guilty to second-degree assault and battery.

Taylor sentenced him to three years in prison. Because Talley already served four days in jail, the term was suspended to one year of probation.

Talleys charge of unlawful carrying of a pistol was dismissed.

 Kenneth Jeffrey Aiken II, 30, of 193 Armstrong Terrace, Orangeburg, pleaded guilty to third-degree assault and battery.

Aiken was originally charged with second-degree domestic violence, but pleaded guilty to third-degree assault and battery instead.

Taylor ordered him to pay a $100 fine within 30 days or report to jail for three days.
The South Carolina Department of Natural Resources will host five public meetings around the state to discuss concerns about declines in wild turkey numbers and options to address these declines.

The local meeting will be held from 6:30 to 8:30 p.m., July 25, at Orangeburg-Calhoun Technical College, Roquemore Auditorium, 3250 St. Matthews Road, Orangeburg.

SCDNR has heard from turkey hunters, landowners and members of the General Assembly with concerns about decreasing turkey numbers, lower reproduction, and declining harvests across the state.

These issues are not unique to South Carolina and are occurring across the Southeast and Midwest. SCDNR shares these concerns and summer brood surveys (turkey reproductive data), harvest data and numerous research projects in South Carolina and across the Country support these observations.

As part of the meeting, SCDNR will present available data, and receive comments and questions from hunters. This input from the public, combined with harvest data, brood survey data and university research findings will be used to develop recommendations for the S.C. General Assembly for possible legislative changes to seasons, bag limits and/or methods of take for wild turkeys.

Any potential changes would occur no sooner than the 2024 legislative session and would not go into effect until the spring of 2025 at the earliest.

For individuals unable to attend one of the meetings, there will also be a video presentation and opportunity to submit comments on the SCDNR website from mid-July through early August.

Following the series of meetings and public input, SCDNR will conduct an online survey to assess public opinions and preferences for various management options.

Keep an eye on the SCDNR website and social media platforms for more information and links to submit comments.

Public meeting schedule

All meetings begin at 6:30 p.m. and will end no later than 8:30 p.m.

July 11: Clemson Pee Dee Research and Education Center (REC), Pitner Center Auditorium; 2200 E Pocket Road; Florence, SC 29506.

July 13: Palmetto Electric Cooperative, New River Community Room; 1 Cooperative Way; Hardeeville, SC 29927.

July 25: Orangeburg-Calhoun Technical College, Roquemore Auditorium; 3250 St. Matthews Road; Orangeburg, SC 29118.

July 27: Greenville Technical College Barton Campus, University Transfer Auditorium; 506 S. Pleasantburg Drive; Greenville, SC 29607.

Aug. 1: Piedmont Technical College Newberry County Campus, Community Conference Center Auditorium, 1922 Wilson Road; Newberry, SC 29108.
Metro Manila (CNN Philippines, July 3)  The Philippines remains a lower-middle income country, according to the World Bank's (WB) updated classification of economies for fiscal year 2024.

The Washington-based lender's data showed the Philippines' gross national income (GNI) per capita  or the country's final income for the year divided by the population  falls behind other Southeast Asian countries.

The country's GNI per capita saw a continuous rise as it recovered from pandemic-stricken 2020, posting $3,950 for 2022 or nearly 218,000 per Filipino, according to the data.

It falls within the bank's lower-middle income bracket of $1,136 and $4,465.

The country's GNI per capita was $3,770 in 2019, $3,350 in 2020, and $3,550 in 2021.

The multilateral lender updates the income classification of countries each year on July 1, based on the GNI per capita of the previous calendar year. The latest classification is good until June 30 next year.

In Southeast Asia, nations with the same classification were Myanmar ($1,210), Cambodia ($1,700), Timor-Leste ($1,970), Laos ($2,360), and Vietnam ($4,010).

Indonesia ($4,580), Thailand ($7,230), and Malaysia ($11,780) are in the upper middle-income bracket.

Brunei ($31,410) and Singapore ($67,200) are high-income economies

The government is aiming to reach upper middle-income status by 2025, with President Ferdinand Marcos Jr. expressing confidence that the Philippine Development Plan for 2023-2028 could help in achieving the goal.

To be classified under that status, a country must have a GNI per capita of between $4,466 and $13,845, the WB said.

In September last year, Marcos told the United Nations General Assembly that the country remained on track to reach the upper middle-income economy by 2023.

RELATED: Marcos' year 1 marred by inflationary challenges despite Filipinos' 'starvation wages'

In May, the WB said the Philippines is "getting back on track" to become an upper middle-income country in the short term.
Orangeburg County Council is tightening rules on where drinking places can locate.

County Administrator Harold Young said a new amendment to the zoning ordinance will help protect a community if a drinking place pops up.

That would give another layer to protect citizens, Young said.

Council amended the countys zoning ordinance last month to require that drinking places in the commercial general district must be at least 1,500 feet from a residence, residential subdivision, church, religious institution or public or private school.

What has been noted is that in CG there are some residences that are close to places that can in fact become a bar or drinking place, County Attorney DAnne Haydel told council.

A drinking place is a place where people gather to drink either to pay for those drinks or they dont have to pay for them, but they are socializing on somebodys elses property for a profit for somebody, she said.

Existing drinking places in CG districts will be grandfathered in, unless the establishment has not been used as a drinking place for six months.

If they are already in business and have been permitted and they followed all the rules to get where they are going, then they are allowed to continue that use, Haydel said.

Councilman Johnny Ravenell asked if a drinking place would be considered people having a backyard party.

No, sir, Haydel said. It is any business or establishment, so it is not a private residence.

Haydel said a drinking place is defined as, any business or establishment used for social gatherings that sells or permits on-premises consumption of any alcoholic beverage.

In other matters:

 Council unanimously denied a request to rezone property just outside the town of North to allow the placement of a nightclub.

Residents expressed concerns about the clubs impact on the farming community.

Council voted down the request from Clyde Mack to rezone about three acres at 786 Creek Mill Road to commercial general for the planned location of a club. The property is currently zoned forest agriculture.

It is pretty much a quiet residential area, said Eunice Brightman, who has lived on Dry Yard Road for about 17 years.

We have farming there. We have farm animals there. We have elderly in our area and also children, she said.

We have heard about the club way before I even got there and they said it was pretty bad, Brightman said. We dont want to start a club in the area.

We definitely dont want drinkers there coming up and down our road speeding, Brightman said. They had a large gathering there the beginning of June. It was so large that we couldnt even get down the road. We really want to keep our area serene.

Prior to councils vote, Young said the proposed request would be considered spot zoning and the surrounding zoning district and land use are considered incompatible.

The Planning Commission previously denied the rezoning request 5-0.

 Linda Reid of Huson Circle expressed concerns about a neighboring 2.7-acre lot that has been purchased with plans to place trailer homes.

Of course, we definitely dont want that in our neighborhood, Reid said. We have a nice, decent area."

Huson Circle is located off of Cordova Road.

The property was cleaned off last month and we noticed Thursday a mobile home was put there and it is in horrible condition, she said.

Reid said she has been told more mobile homes will be put on the lot.

We just want to know what can we do to stop the process of a trailer park, Reid said.

Council Chairman Johnnie Wright encouraged Reid to contact county officials to determine her options.

Constance Mays also expressed concerns about the mobile homes coming into the neighborhood. She said she has been in the neighborhood since 1996 and the area is a single-family home community.

Now all of a sudden now we are getting all of these doublewides and mobile homes, Mays said. Some of them are just horrible and they are just throwing them up on lots. We are certainly concerned about this and how it can depreciate the value of our homes.

 Orangeburg County resident William Green requested the county consider the beautification of grassy areas at intersections throughout the county.

He suggested getting box roses and bringing more color to the grassy areas as people come into the city.

Green also expressed concerns about unkempt properties in the county. He said property owners who do not maintain their properties should be fined.

 Imani Mack and Jelani Haigler thanked council for allowing them to serve as summer interns. Mack worked in the countys administration department and Haigler in the countys magistrate office.

 Councilwoman Deloris Frazier wished everyone a happy Juneteenth. The June 19 federal holiday, which was established in 2021, commemorates the emancipation of enslaved people in the United States. Frazier said the county will make June 19 an employee holiday starting in 2024.

 Young thanked Orangeburg County Emergency Services and the S.C. Department of Natural Resources for their efforts with a water rescue.

 Frazier presented a framed plaque to the Orangeburg County Sheriffs Office in appreciation of National Correctional Officers and Employees Week held in May.

 Ravenell gave a shout out to Orangeburg County Animal Control and Young for their response to the scene of an accident to help rescue dogs.

 New MUSC Health Orangeburg Chief Executive Officer Walter Bennett introduced himself to council.

Other hospital leaders were also introduced, including: Sem Ganthier, executive director of operations; Anthony Sands, associate chief financial officer and Karrie Powell, chief nursing officer.

 Council entered into closed session to discuss contractual matters related to the Orangeburg County Courthouse.
COLUMBIA  The South Carolina Emergency Medical Services Association has been awarded a $35,000 grant from Power:Ed, a philanthropy of the SC Student Loan Corporation.

The funds will be used to update and expand workforce training curricula to allow the association to serve more EMT candidates, particularly those in rural areas without ready access to other training programs.

The goal is to increase opportunities for current and future EMS providers through timely, accessible and cost-effective education.

EMS is experiencing significant workforce shortages, and the focus of this project is to increase access to EMS education for the communities that are most significantly underserved.

The current education model fails to reach rural and disparate populations, so SCEMSA will use a distributed/hybrid education model that takes education to the student when and where it is meaningful for them.

Thanks to the Power:Ed grant, SCEMSA will be able to expand this project significantly to reach more students across the state and make a meaningful impact on the access to EMS education, thus helping EMS see more candidates in the workforce, SCEMSA Education Coordinator Austin Mandeville said.

Power:Ed Director Claire Gibbons said, SCEMSA can make a real difference in the success and well-being of so many S.C. students and families across our state.

EMS is a critical lifesaving service and not enough EMTs are available to meet the needs of all South Carolinians, particularly those living in rural communities and underserved areas. We can do something to help, and we are so excited about the potentially transformative impact they will have.
Some days out on the water the drift boats and rafts are so dense, Wind River Troutfitter owner Ron Hansen feels like everybodys on top of each other.

The phenomenon, he said, is most prevalent on the Bighorn River through Thermopolis and on the Grey Reef section of the North Platte River, near Alcova.

You can have 50 or 60 boats on a 5-mile stretch of water, Hansen said. Literally boats are on top of boats are on top of boats. It creates issues for everybody: Everyday recreational users, for guides, and every year it just seems to be getting worse.

There are no easy answers, he said, to alleviating congestion on blue ribbon Wyoming trout fisheries that have become world-renowned angling destinations. Still, some ideas rise to the top.

More regulation isnt necessarily the answer, Hansen said, but I dont know an alternative here.

The Lander-based guide is supportive of adding a layer of oversight to Wyomings vibrant guided fishing industry. As it is, there are no state licensing or permitting requirements for taking out a client to ply Wyoming waters.

We have to establish some boundaries at some point so that its not the Wild West, Hansen said.

He might get his wish. After eight failed attempts  in 1991, 93, 2005, 14, 18, 19, 20 and 23  the Wyoming Legislature is again examining regulations for the commercial fishing industry akin to those that govern trophy and big game hunting, regulated by the Wyoming Board of Outfitters and Professional Guides.

Specifically, four commercial fishing-related bills are poised to emerge from the Legislatures Travel, Recreation, Wildlife and Cultural Resources Committee, which identified the topic as its top priority ahead of the 2024 budget session. The coming draft legislation would: 1) Give the Wyoming Game and Fish Department the authority to regulate commercial fishing; 2) Add fishing outfitters to the existing statute governing commercial hunting; 3) Create a separate outfitting board for fishing guides; 4) Require that fishing outfitters be licensed.

Sen. Fred Baldwin, R-Kemmerer, launched the school of bills at a mid-June meeting in Evanston after hearing from outfitters who encouraged lawmakers to take it on. In conjunction, the committee voted to establish a working group to fine tune the bills, which had not yet been drafted by the Legislative Service Office as of Wednesday.

Chorus of support

Among Rocky Mountain states with famous trout waters, Wyoming and Utah are alone in not regulating fishing guides and outfitters. Montana, Idaho and Colorado require permitting and have rules and regulations, according to a LSO memo.

Thats not to say there are no regulations or permitting requirements altogether. The Bureau of Land Management, National Park Service, U.S. Forest Service and U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service all require permits for guiding via their access areas, and Teton County also has a peak-season regulations in place for the Snake River.

Ahead of the four-bill proposal, lawmakers heard from several outfitters, landowners and business owners who underscored the need to tighten the screws on their burgeoning industry. North Platte outfitter Blake Jackson, an owner of the Ugly Bug Fly Shop, expressed concern that the BLMs recent acquisition of the 35,670-acre Marton Ranch will make it easier for out-of-state unpermitted guides to do business on his home water.

They can now stop and eat lunch and those kinds of things, he testified.

The BLM handles permitting on the popular Grey Reef section of the North Platte and caps the number of operators at 23, but Jackson said he was frustrated by the federal agencys lack of enforcement.

Pinedale resident Paul Ulrich, better known for his role with Jonah Energy, testified as a fishing guide also irritated by unpermitted guides pouring in from across the border. The lack of regulatory structure, he said, has led to out-of-state outfitters and guides competing on Wyoming waters with local guides who are doing it right and are better trained with the necessary BLM or U.S. Forest Service permits.

Another Sublette County resident, Leslie Hagenstein, told legislators about crowding on the New Fork River, which cuts through her familys ranch. Over her lifetime the use of the river has changed significantly, she said, and fishing boats are now joined by canoers, kayakers and inner-tubing kids.

I am really concerned about this fragile ecosystem, she said. Its being degraded in my lifetime by the number of people who are using it. My ask today is to envision a future where we continue to keep this New Fork River corridor  my backyard  as pristine as we can.

Just how crowded?

Hagenstein also encouraged the Wyoming Game and Fish Department to actively monitor use on the most-popular destination rivers. In 2021 the state agency completed a study that used time-lapse cameras to gauge boat traffic on the Bighorn, Green, New Fork, North Platte, Salt and Snake rivers.

Led by Rob Gipson, former Jackson region fisheries supervisor for Game and Fish, and his successor, Darren Rhea, the research found that crowding is perhaps not as bad as perceived. An average of five to 10 fishing boats per day traversed most waters in July. Only the North Platte and Snake rivers exceeded 15 boats per day. Part of the issue, the biologists concluded, is that anglers all tend to launch during the same time window  usually in the morning which creates a phenomenon of concentrated use.

That is, peak use over a period of 23 hours could give many floaters the impression of crowding, the biologists wrote.

Still, the study also found that commercially guided anglers constituted a significant amount of the overall fishing pressure  the majority of anglers, in fact, on the Upper Green, Lower North Platte and Snake rivers. The highest concentration showed up on the Snake River in 2020, when 88% of anglers Game and Fish interviewed reported being guided. Guided anglers on the North Platte registered 76% of usage in 2019, and 68% on the Upper Green.

The majority of anglers on all rivers sampled were non-residents, which speaks to how trout fishing has become a major tourism draw and an economic stimulus in Wyoming.

Jackson, the Ugly Bug Fly Shop owner, told lawmakers that he partnered with the Casper tourism board a couple years ago and determined that his clients spent $583 per day in the community.

Roughly that would equate to $2.5 million of economic benefit, he said.

Finding return clients, however, has become increasingly challenging. Ugly Bug is now having to market to bring in new anglers, Jackson said, because long-term guests are choosing not to return due to river traffic.

Hearing all the concern in Evanston, Sen. Mike Gierau, D-Jackson, pressed his fellow committee members to get behind the idea of new regulations.

Judging from the comments today, he said, in this industry the time has come that we need something.

Nobody wants this

Major institutional challenges help explain the decades of inertia  and eight failed bills, so far.

The Wyoming Game and Fish Department is leery of administering the program and further straining its already understaffed, overworked game warden corps.

We certainly recognize that its a concern, but taking on another task for my department right now is not something Im interested in, Game and Fish Director Brian Nesvik told WyoFile. I view the enforcement of this, because its on a statewide scale, as being a significant increase in workload.

Game and Fishs statewide fisheries chief, Alan Osterland, told lawmakers that his crews are still operating the time-lapse cameras and conducting angler attitude surveys, but he did not outline other steps the agency is taking to address perceived overcrowding.

The Wyoming Board of Outfitters and Professional Guides has also offered tempered resistance. Cody big game outfitter Lee Livingtson, speaking as a member, agreed with one lawmakers assessment that nobody wants this, referring to the states reluctance to administer the program.

The Outfitter board doesnt want this, he said, Game and Fish doesnt want it.

But Livingston also indicated some willingness to take it on.

I would rather be driving the bus than be getting run over by it, he said. I think this is coming to the outfitter board.

Lack of unanimity within the fishing community also complicates finding a solution. When the Wyoming Legislature first regulated guided hunting some 34 years ago, some fishing outfitters opposed their industrys inclusion in the measure. They successfully convinced lawmakers to strip fishing from oversight under the then-newly founded Wyoming Board of Outfitters and Professional Guides, Livingston said. Speaker of the House and Rep. Albert Sommers, R-Pinedale hooked into that resistance when his 2019 and 2023 bills failed.

Theres been a lot of people who want it, but theres been a lot of outfitter and guides who dont want it, particularly in Teton County, Sommers said. Their concern, he said, was permitting redundancy  the entirety of the Snake River in Wyoming is already regulated.

Count Snake River Angler owner Will Dornan in that camp. He supports some of the coming bill drafts, like the one that would give Game and Fish authority to regulate guided river use.

Im not opposed to permitting a river, Dornan said, Im opposed to a guides association.

If the Wyoming agency does start to regulate river use, he said, its important theres adequate enforcement and that the state learns from the mistakes of Teton Countys river management program, which he called a junk show piece of garbage.

Sommers, meanwhile, said that even the Teton County guides hes spoken with recognize that the industry is growing and cannot grow like this forever. Over the years the Sublette County representative has gotten an earful from local guides whove tired of what they see as overuse and competition with out-of-state outfitters and those from Teton County. And hes seen overcrowding firsthand, once tallying 23 boat trailers at a single access point on the New Fork River.

All I know, Sommers said, is that if you dont have a mechanism to throttle use, use will continue to grow until you have a serious problem.
On a 3-mile stretch of road alongside East Rosebud Creek, visitors used to cruise 20 mph or faster, maybe complaining about the bumps and dust raised by the car in front of them.

Then last June, much of this graveled road disappeared, gobbled up by the creeks voracious floodwaters that swelled the stream to historically high flows.

What used to take minutes to breeze along in a car now takes an hour or more to hike, I discovered on a recent visit. Without the road, we were forced to slow down and explore an area long overlooked. A short stretch of the Custer Gallatin National Forest that once teemed with recreationists was now eerily empty and quiet.

East side

The hike to East Rosebud Lake began at Jimmy Joe Campground, roughly 11 miles south of the small community of Roscoe. A mile of new road extended to the creek before we had to pick our poison  either ford the raging waters and hike up the west side, or stay dry and venture down the eastern bank. We pondered the swift waters, and then decided it wiser to stick to solid ground.

Unbeknownst to us the path, where it ephemerally existed, would be especially tortuous. Hikers have to duck through dense stands of pollen-puffing lodgepole pine, brave shin-scraping willows, wade through mucky marsh as ripe-smelling as sewage, and crawl up and down steep cliffs with loose soil and rocks before hopping across boulder fields.

Parkour practitioners would love this challenge. Old guys like me and my buddy just got torn up, blistered and sore from stretching, side-hilling, tip-toeing and bushwhacking. My hardest hikes have always been the ones without trails, where Im picking and choosing my own path, bobbing and weaving through brush and branches, cursing downfall and dead-end routes. This one was no exception.

Along the way we were yelling and whooping in hopes of alerting any snoozing bears or moose to our presence in the dense foliage. The skeleton of a long-tailed, canine-fanged creature  a fox or raccoon?  hinted at one animals demise in the underbrush.

Even when the path diverted us streamside  a feeling of freedom once released from the clutch and confinement of thick foliage  the route still remained tortuous. We wandered among the flood debris of uprooted trees, scoured out channels and mounds of rock  so much rock. In places, the stone dunes were so dense that  even though the creek was raging in a white froth only 20 yards away  the waters sound was dampened to a dull hush.

Superpower

Pausing atop a creek-scoured hill provided a 180-degree view of the widened stream channel, scraps of remaining road and a nearly washed out cabin  the damaging extent of the storms rage.

I considered how 10,000 years ago the entire valley had been scrubbed clean by glaciers. Now the baring of the basins underlying rubble was a reminder that it had taken thousands of years to build up the soil in such a harsh, mountainous area. But it only took a few days of rapidly rushing water to hose off that delicate dirt and the vegetation clinging to it for life.

That made me think: If I were granted a superpower, the ability to focus the force of water may be the most all-powerful skill  a different kind of Aquaman, an Earth-bound Poseidon commanding a hellacious hose. I wondered: Did the Chinese workmen controlling hydraulic hoses in the 1800s, next to what is now Canyon Ferry Reservoir, revel in the power of high-pressure water as they eroded entire hillsides in the search for gold? Those water cannons could shoot 185,000 cubic feet of water every hour with a velocity of 150 feet per second, according to the U.S. Geological Survey. Although impressive, that force of water would look puny compared to what roared down the East Rosebud canyon last June.

Freedom

About two-thirds of the way into our hike, enthusiasm for the adventure was departing our bodies as fast as the sweat that soaked our shirts. If that last cliff hadnt eventually led to a wide meadow filled with the sweet perfume of wild rose blossoms and painted with purple lupine we might have given up. Instead, we were rejuvenated by being able to walk unencumbered.

Off to our right a barrier of thick, short pine trees blocked our route to East Rosebud Lake  the final destination. We kept walking uphill, hoping for an opening, only to find more trees around each corner. Taking a final plunge, we crouched and fought our way through the tightly knit forest, a breaststroke through branches. The remains of a deer fawn demonstrated that not all who ventured in came out alive.

Eventually, like divers emerging from the depths, we gasped for air as we stepped out onto the hillside overlooking the lake and surrounding mountains.

Is it Switzerland? the old postcard questions in cursive scrawled across its black-and-white bottom. My friend found it in his grandmothers collection of memorabilia, guessing it was from around the 1940s. No, it is in the East Rosebud Lake Country, Bear Tooth Mts. Montana, the postcard revealed.

The mountains still look the same, only the cows are now missing from the foreground. Last years flood had not affected this view until we scanned to the far right where Armstrong Creek descends the mountainside. There, a house sits in the middle of a wide swath of rock now blasted free of topsoil by the flood. That the structure remained standing is hard to believe. The creeks waters must have roared through the windows, walls and rafters.

Its not far from here that we see our first live creature. A young bull moose peeks from a thicket of pine. He seems as surprised to see us as we are to see him.

Back

Our return route is much easier, trekking beneath a powerline the route is relatively free of the dense trees we encountered on the east side of the creek. We cruise along at what seems like a fast pace until encountering the creek crossing again, the one we had initially avoided. My friend had hesitated coming back this way because of the rapids. I advocated for the route thinking this one section of troubled waters could more easily be conquered than wading back through all of the trees and rubble wed initially suffered.

Interlocking elbows we shuffled into the fast-moving stream, keeping our boots on for traction and stability among the slick, rounded rocks. Once amid the full force of the turbulence my friend suggested we take one step at a time and that I go first. I noted he was standing on my foot. And so we shuffled ungainly across, staggering arm in arm like drunks after closing time. The water rose to our crotches, tugging at our legs and feet to uproot us like the stream had done to so many trees. Luckily, we ambled out the other side unscathed, our hearts hammering hard from the exertion and fear. If one of us had went down, the other surely would have followed. Giddiness replaced dread.

Unfortunately, we were only halfway across, standing on a cobble island amid the creeks torrent. A large iron I-beam had been laid across the adjoining channel, providing a dry but narrow route to the opposite shore. Walking across the balance beam, while staring down at the rushing water, created an imaginary sense of movement and queasiness  motion sickness without actually moving. Despite the disorientation, we gingerly stepped across, fist-bumping in celebration once on solid ground after conquering our hikes final hurdle.

In the end, the treks mixture of awe  combined with a healthy dose of fear, sweat and strain  couldnt have taken place in a more beautiful setting. In the East Rosebud valley, the mountains rise like gothic cathedrals, bathed in dappled light cast between low-slung clouds. I returned to town with my spirit rejuvenated and my hips stiff and sore. It is humbling country. The hike was a reminder that even a short stretch of the East Rosebud valley, often overlooked en route to a glamorous lake, is worthy of respect, contemplation and admiration.
Its one of the many flights he took during his deployment.

He cant remember if they had a layover in Denver or if it was direct. He doesnt know the time of year. But he will always remember looking down and seeing that shiny, gold Zippo lighter.

He bends down to pick it up.

Turning it over in his hands, he sees engraved on one side the words 199th INF. BDE. and SP4 Ronald R. Roe on the other.

In that moment that I found it, I knew, in my mind, and in my heart, I knew that immediately I wanted it to be returned to him.

Schwartzbauer has reached out to various veteran organizations in an effort to return it to its owner or next of kin. He has had no success. All the avenues hes looked down have proven to be dead ends.

Schwartzbauer joined the Navy on Aug. 25, 1965 at the age of 18. He liked the uniforms.

He served on the USS Navasota (A0106), an oil tanker, until his honorable discharge on March 19, 1968.

While he didnt see direct combat, he watched as coffins were airlifted home. He knew other soldiers who committed suicide, watched people get lost at sea and ships collide. Death surrounded him, and so did fear.

I know one time we were refueling an aircraft carrier. And they were bringing coffins up from below, to load onto planes to ship back to the United States  I was manning a refueling station and saw these coffins. And several questions came to mind, he said. One of them is, I wonder who they are. I wonder where theyre from. I wonder if I knew any of them. And why are we here? And why the hell do they have to die? And that put a chip on my shoulder.

Following his discharge, he wanted to put all that death and suffering behind him. Life moved on. He did, too.

He went back to Montana and became a painter. He stayed in Billings working and doing odd jobs to make ends meet. He came to Casper in 1998 to see a friend from the past and never left. He volunteered with various veteran organizations to honor those who passed, ensuring no one was left behind or forgotten.

By all accounts, Schwartzbauer has led a quiet, normal life. Yet every couple of years, that shiny lighter would pop back into his head.

Through the moves and deaths of his parents, he lost all keepsakes from his time in the Navy, only holding it in his memories.

The lighter was even misplaced for 30 years.

It wasnt until one day last summer during a rummage sale after his brother died did that little gold lighter reappear. He was selling the whole Zippo collection when a buyer asked if he could only have Ronalds.

It could have been sold. An individual asked me how much I wanted for that lighter. And upon discovering that thats where that lighter was, I knew again that that lighter was not going to be sold or given to anyone other than the rightful owner.

And so the search started again. Schwartzbauer reached out to a veteran advocate at the VA who steered him to someone connected with veteran organizations. But that was another dead end. He then contacted the Star-Tribune in an effort to get the word out and try to find lighters owner.

(Ill feel) just the gratification of knowing that I did the right thing and gave it to the right person or getting back to the rightful owner.

He wants to make sure that Ronald or his next of kin know that he isnt forgotten. Hank wants to make sure that they feel what he has spent his entire life trying to make others feel: respected.
When it came time to say goodbye, Doolarie Badree just could not do it.

The ailing mother cried, begged, wailed and bought time until, in the end, she let go of the daughter she could no longer care for.

So that afternoon, her child, Renuca Badree, was taken from the home she had never left in all her 47 years of life.
Interview: Angola seeks to diversify economy through China-Africa expo -- business leader

Xinhua) 10:58, July 03, 2023

LUANDA, July 1 (Xinhua) -- Angola seeks to diversify its economy and address structural imbalance in it through the ongoing China-Africa Economic and Trade Expo, said President of the Angola-China Chamber of Commerce Luis Cupenala.

The expo is a vital opportunity for African countries to showcase their capabilities and products to the world, and Angola looks forward to upgrading cooperation and strengthening trade ties with China, Cupenala said in a recent interview with Xinhua.

The third China-Africa Economic and Trade Expo kicked off on Thursday in Changsha, the capital of central China's Hunan Province. The expo aims to welcome more "Made in Africa" products into China and boost business links between the two sides.

Attaching great importance to the event, the African country sent a high-level delegation to the expo, which includes several ministers, provincial governors and representatives of 17 companies, he said.

Trade between China and Angola has grown rapidly. According to Chinese customs statistics, bilateral trade reached 27.34 billion U.S. dollars in 2022, up 16.3 percent from the previous year. Angola became China's second-largest trading partner in Africa, following South Africa.

Hailing the progress of the trade relationship between the two countries, Cupenala said Angola's vast territory and rich reserves of oil and minerals offer great potential for cooperation with China.

He noted that companies from both countries have established strategic partnerships, while Angola aims to integrate China's experience into its own national development plan.

In addition, Cupenala pointed out that China's cooperation with African countries focuses on their development without interfering in their political affairs.

"Through initiatives like the Forum on China-Africa Cooperation, China seeks to become Africa's reliable and strong partner, fostering reciprocal contributions between China and the continent," he said.

Addressing the lack of infrastructure connecting African nations, he said the China-proposed Belt and Road Initiative and continuous cooperation with Africa are playing a vital role in promoting economic activities, as well as the flow of people, goods, technology and capital.

The business leader said he believes that the reciprocal cooperation between China and African countries will continue to foster greater trust between China and the continent.

(Web editor: Zhang Kaiwei, Liang Jun)
Metro Manila (CNN Philippines, June 3)  The four-year-old nephew of photojournalist Joshua Abiad, believed to be the target of a gun attack last week, has died, Quezon City Police District chief Nicolas Torre confirmed Monday.

The shooting incident happened late last week in front of their house in Quezon City while they were onboard their vehicle.

Abiad sustained two gunshot wounds, while three more family members got injured, including the child.

A bystander was also hit by a stray bullet, authorities said.

READ: Photojournalist, 3 family members injured in QC ambush

At least two unidentified male suspects were involved in the ambush, the police said, noting a manhunt operation was ongoing.

According to National Capital Region Police Office Chairman Raoul Esperas, the 37-year-old photojournalist was a regular signatory of the Philippine Drug Enforcement Agency in drug busts as required by law.

The law requires law enforcers to have mandatory witnesses, the media and representatives from the Department of Justice, during drug operations.

CNN Philippines Correspondent Crissy Dimatulac contributed to this report.
With over 100 persons arrested for the year in connection with child abuse, men are being called upon to better protect children.

We cant be the ones that are affecting and contributing to the abuse we are seeing here. We need to do better, ASP Christopher Aroon of the TTPS Special Victims Unit (SVU) said yesterday.
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Honourable Minister, the announcement that migrant children will be allowed into schools in September is excellent news for all who believe in social justice and the human rights of the child. As we welcome migrant pupils into our schools, we are presented with an opportunity to turn around our countrys education system to account for and correct the psychologically violent colonial inheritance of a raceand colour-based hierarchy.
Metro Manila (CNN Philippines, July 3)  A Cebu Pacific passenger bound for Manila from Bacolod received a bomb threat while aboard the plane on Sunday evening, according to the Civil Aviation Authority of the Philippines (CAAP).

In a statement on Monday, CAAP said the bomb threat was sent at around 11:39 p.m. on Sunday via AirDrop, an Apple feature that allows transferring of documents across its devices.

The passenger immediately alerted the airline attendant, who in turn notified the pilot of Cebu Pacific Flight 5J472, which had 193 travelers on board.

The incident was instantly reported to the Philippine National Police Aviation Security and Emergency Unit (PNP AVSEU), and the passengers and cargo of the aircraft were subsequently deplaned.

CAAP said a bomb squad was deployed to conduct an inspection of the aircraft and cargo, while the passengers underwent x-ray security checks.

Following a security procedure by the authorities, the flight was able to successfully take off at 2:18 a.m.

CAAP said the sender has not yet been identified as authorities investigate the incident.
Two motorcyclists were killed early Sunday when they collided on Tucson's east side, police say.

The crash happened about 2:30 a.m. in the 1600 block of North Harrison Road, just after the curve from East Wrightstown Road, Tucson police said in a news release.

Andrew Machalik, 48, was riding a black 2008 Harley Davidson XL1200 behind Adam Robert Gregory, 38, who was riding a white 2017 Yamaha SCR950 motorcycle.

Gregory had just negotiated the curve and was traveling south on Harrison when Machalik drifted into the center lane, struck the concrete barrier island on Harrison, then collided with the rear of Gregory's motorcycle, police said in the release.

Neither man was wearing a helmet. Police say they died at the crash scene.

The wreck remains under investigation.
Tucsonans will soon see some new aircraft flying regularly out of Davis-Monthan Air Force Base, including a spy plane based on a crop duster, new electronic-warfare planes  and perhaps someday, even combat drones  as D-M gains new missions to replace its retiring A-10 ground-attack jet squadrons.

The Air Force is in the planning stages for a new wing of its Special Operations Command at D-M that will replace the A-10 mission as the renowned Warthog close air-support jet is retired over the next several years.

As the fiscal 2024 Pentagon budget wends its way through Congress, new details about D-Ms planned future and the changing face of its aircraft fleets are emerging.

A key defense-policy bill that generally guides appropriations passed the Senate Armed Services Committee last week with the inclusion of $5 million requested by the Air Force to continue site evaluation and planning for what is initially is being called the Special Operations 492rd Power Projection Wing at D-M.

With backing from Arizona Sens. Kyrsten Sinema (I-Phoenix) and Mark Kelly (D-Tucson), the committees markup of the fiscal 2024 National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA) also requires the Pentagon to provide the committee a full accounting of anticipated steps, timeline and budget plans to complete D-Ms restructuring plan.

The amended NDAA next heads for a vote of the full Senate, and later reconciliation with a version awaiting passage in the House. Separate defense appropriations bills are still pending.

This defense bill provides the resources and oversight necessary to continue the Air Forces work to bring new, long-term flying missions to Davis-Monthan, including a new special operations wing, ensuring the base will remain central to our national security strategy for years to come, Kelly said in a prepared statement with Sinema on the NDAA markup.

Sinema said America is stronger and safer thanks to Arizonas military and defense operations that rely on critical investments from the annual bipartisan defense bill.

Were providing servicemembers and our military community with the tools and resources necessary to keep our nation safe and secure, she said.

Changing missions

Change is nothing new at Davis-Monthan, a key Air Combat Command installation that has changed missions periodically since it was set up in 1940 to train bomber pilots for World War II duty.

The base hosted fighter-jet units in the 1950s and 1960s before what now is the 355th Wing was assigned to the base in 1971, flying A-7D Corsair ground-attack jets before A-10s arrived in 1979 to provide close air support of ground troops.

The Cold War-era A-10, which features a massive, 30-millimeter cannon, gained renown as a tank killer during the Gulf War and underwent a series of upgrades, becoming a mainstay supporting ground troops in Iraq, Afghanistan and Syria.

The Air Force has been trying to retire the A-10 through budget cuts since 2014, contending that it wouldnt survive in a conflict with future adversaries fielding sophisticated air-defense systems.

But Congress, led largely by Arizonas delegation over the years, blocked the Air Forces requests to start retiring the A-10 until it consider a new close air-support platform while adding funding for new wings to extend the planes service life.

In 2021, members of Congress led by Kelly blocked an Air Force plan to retire 42 A-10s, including 35 at D-M, as part of a larger plan to create a center of excellence for combat search and rescue at the Tucson base, which already hosts a search-and-rescue group.

In April, the Air Force announced it was evaluating D-M as home to the new Special Operations Command wing, with the enthusiastic support of the Arizona lawmakers and local leaders.

The Pentagon, in its fiscal 2024 budget, plans to retire 42 more A-10s, including 35 at D-M, and Air Force leaders say they are looking to retire all of the A-10s by 2029.

A leader of the DM50, a local business and civic group supporting Davis-Monthan, said the group is pleased to see the base line up critical new missions.

DM50 is certainly happy to see the funding for the site assessment in the NDAA, as were fully in support of the proposed missions to replace the A-10, and thats the first step to making that a reality, said Linda Morales, past chairwoman and current policy committee chair of the DM50.

Home to the 355th Wing, responsible for training and deploying A-10C Thunderbolt II pilots, Davis-Monthan hosts a range of other missions.

Those include combat search-and-rescue units under the 563rd Rescue Group and the 943rd Rescue Group; the Air Forces only electronic-combat group; the 12th Air Force command; and the 309th Aerospace Maintenance and Regeneration Group, the nations biggest boneyard for retired military aircraft.

The base also supports Border Patrol aviation and Air National Guard drone, homeland security and training missions.

Local government and business leaders have feared the loss of the A-10 mission would diminish D-M, an important economic engine for the region with about 11,000 personnel and an estimated annual economic impact of some $3 billion.

New rescue helos

Besides funding for the spec-ops wing planning at D-M, the Senate bill supports procurement of the Air Forces new combat-rescue helicopter, the Sikorsky HH-60W Jolly Green II, and restructuring moves that will bring additional rescue assets to D-M over the next three years.

In May, D-Ms 55th Rescue Squadron took delivery of the first of the Jolly Green IIs that are expected to replace all of the aging HH-60G Pave Hawk rescue helicopter fleet used at D-M by the end of 2024.

The Jolly Green II  named in honor of a transport helicopter adapted to rescue operations during the Vietnam War  is made by Sikorsky based on the same twin-engine design as the Pave Hawk but offers much longer range and state-of-the art electronics.

The Senate version of the NDAA also includes $8.5 million for a new health center for Air Force Reserve combat search and rescue units at the Tucson base, Sinema and Kelly noted in a news release.

Drones over Tucson?

The Senate committees bill markup also requires a report on the feasibility of moving a squadron of four MQ-9 Reaper combat drones remotely flown by the Air National Guard 214th Attack Group from Libby Airfield in Sierra Vista to Davis-Monthan, where the units crews are stationed.

Though its personnel is mainly based at D-M, the 214th is assigned to the Arizona Air Guard 162nd Wing at Morris Air National Guard Base at Tucson International Airport. The 214th also flew RC-26 Condor reconnaissance jets from TIA before those planes were retired in April.

The Arizona Air National Guard requested the study of moving the drone launch and landing operations to D-M, which would save thousands of hours of commute time and increase the units efficiency, an aide to Sinema said.

The 214th Attack Group, known as The Black Sheep, is comprised of about 300 personnel, with a small number directly assigned to the flight operations at Libby, while others are assigned there on a temporary basis as needed, 162nd Wing spokeswoman Maj. Lacey Perry said.

The MQ-1 Reaper drones stationed at Libby are used for training, Perry said.

The move would also free up space for new mission opportunities at Fort Huachuca, the Arizona senators noted.

Since its inception in 2007 as the 214th Reconnaissance Group, the unit has flown more than 5,000 sorties and provided more than 93,000 flying hours of combat mission support in Southwest Asia.

The group initially flew the MQ-1 Predator drone and changed its name to the 214th Attack Group as it transitioned to the larger, more combat-capable MQ-9 Reaper in 2017.

Spec-ops wings

Besides the new rescue groups Jolly Green IIs, D-Ms new spec-ops wing will bring one familiar aircraft  and one new plane, based on a crop duster  to Tucson.

In late April, Air Force Chief of Staff Gen. Charles Q. Brown Jr. told a House committee that D-Ms new spec-ops wing will include the MC-130  a support plane based on Lockheeds long-lived Hercules transport platform and similar to other planes now based at D-M  along with light attack aircraft.

The Special Operations Command is transitioning from the retiring MC-130H Combat Talon II transport and support plane to an upgraded version, the MC-130 Commando II, by the end of 2024. The command also flies the AC-130J Ghostrider gunship.

Though Brown did not specify the light-attack plane, the Special Operations Command last year chose the AT-802U Sky Warden, developed by defense contractor L3 Harris and Air Tractor, to fulfill its armed reconnaissance mission.

The Sky Warden is based on the Air Tractor AT-802 agricultural and fire-fighting plane, introduced in 1990 as part of a series of crop dusters originally developed in the 1970s.

Air Tractor developed a military version in the late 2000s, and versions of the AT-802 have been used to spray herbicides in efforts to eradicate coca fields in Colombia under a State Department program.

Powered by a single turboprop engine, the Sky Warden can be equipped with armament including Hellfire air-to-ground missiles, guided bombs, unguided rockets and .50-caliber machine guns.

Powered by four turboprop engines, the Special Operations Commands MC-130s are based on the same Lockheed airframe as the HC-130J Combat King II support planes flown by D-Ms rescue squadrons.

Also similar are the EC-130H Compass Call planes flown by the 55th Electronic Combat Group, a unit uniquely stationed at D-M that provides electronic surveillance and jamming in combat zones and was nearly continuously deployed during the conflicts in the Middle East.

A new jam

But the 55th ECG, a geographically separated unit of the 55th Wing at Offutt Air Force Base, Nebraska, will soon get entirely new aircraft as well.

The Air Force is retiring its EC-130H Compass Call planes and replacing them with the EC-37B, a version of the Gulfstream 550 twin-engine business jet under conversion to the Compass Call electronic surveillance and jamming platform by L3 Harris.

The company is conducting operational testing of the first EC-37Bs among 10 the Air Force is planning to buy to replace its EC-130H fleet of 14 planes.

Last August, one of the first EC-37B Compass Call jets made a brief visit to Davis-Monthan, where the 55th ECG is expected to receive its first operational aircraft later this year and continue with its mission at the Tucson base.

The Senate committees NDAA markup also requires the Air Force to make progress on funding EC-37B training flight simulators at D-M.

No F-35s in sight

The one thing you wont see flying regularly at D-M anytime soon is the nations preeminent fifth-generation stealth fighter, the Air Forces F-35A Lightning II.

Though F-35s sometimes visit D-M while in transit or for training or air shows, D-M so far has been passed over as a base for F-35 units.

Most recently, D-M was considered along with several other bases to host an Air Force Reserve squadron of 26 F-35s but in 2021, the Air Force chose Naval Air Station Joint Reserve Base Fort Worth to host the unit.

The current restructuring plans may be of some relief to Tucson neighborhood activists who have vehemently opposed basing F-35s at D-M because of noise and safety concerns. F-35s are much louder than the A-10s and other aircraft based at D-M.

An Air Force environmental study for the 2021 F-35 basing decision found that the noise from the powerful single-engine jets would cause significant noise impacts, subjecting about 1,500 more residents to noise levels that make an area potentially incompatible for residential use.

Last week, the Air Force selected another major A-10 base, Moody Air Force Base in Georgia, to host two squadrons of F-35As as its Warthogs are retired by 2029.

The Air Force is typically required to conduct formal environmental assessments of changes in base aircraft fleets or operations under federal law.

Air Guard funding

The Senate version of the NDAA also includes spending and budget-related directives for several Arizona military bases, including the Morris Air National Guard base and Fort Huachuca, according to the Arizona senators budget summary.

The Senate legislation includes $11.6 million for emergency defense infrastructure at the Morris Air Guard base amid a major airfield-safety project at TIA underway by the Tucson Airport Authority.

The appropriation will fund work to reconfigure runway and taxiway areas, including a new aircraft arresting-cable safety system, to conform with the TIA project.

The Senate committees NDAA version also requires a plan for modernizing Air National Guard fighter force structure to provide long-term planning for Air Force airpower and fighter squadrons like the 162nd Wing, a major F-16 training base.

The legislation also authorizes a demonstration of a new Western Range Complex that would connect multiple non-kinetic ranges for exercises in the region, including Fort Huachuca, home to the Armys Network Enterprise Technology Command (NETCOM) and the United States Army Intelligence Center.

It also directs the Defense Department to renew its focus on electronic warfare and electromagnetic spectrum operations among the missions at Fort Huachuca.
Editor's note: This story was published on July 2 and updated on July 7.

Summer has arrived in Tucson and its hot and brutal for everyone  including local eateries who struggle to keep their doors open during the citys slowest months of the year.

Here are 12 local restaurants that have shut their doors in 2023 so far, listed in alphabetical order.

Brawleys Restaurant

Brawleys Restaurant located at 7848 E. Wrightstown Road closed in February after 37 years in business.

There is no one to blame, and really nothing to be done, it's just a simple sign of the times, Brawleys wrote on Facebook.

China Phoenix

Tucson has very few options for dim sum and with the apparent closure of China Phoenix, 7090 N. Oracle Road, there are now even less. We hope the closure is temporary, but when we visited on July 1, a sign was taped to the window stating: "Lease expired. Restaurant will be closed." Tables were no longer set up inside and two phone calls to the number on their website went unanswered.

Citizen Hotel

After a year in business, the Citizen Hotel, located at 82 S. Stone Ave. closed its doors in May. The boutique wine hotel featured a lobby bar, plus a wine cellar in the basement and wine tastings in the mezzanine.

The closing comes nearly 15 months to the day that the hotel opened and coincides with Tucson businesses bracing for the annual summer slowdown. Thats when tourism dramatically drops, and the city loses its reliable revenue stream from the loss of University of Arizona students and winter residents, the Arizona Daily Star reported.

Da Boots BBQ Shop

Da Boots BBQ closed its doors earlier this year at 1830 S. Park Ave. but said they are converting to a mobile operation, according to a post on their Facebook page.

Deliciocho

Deliciocho, located at 6308 S. Nogales Highway, known for its creative raspados and birria tacos, announced its closure on June 28. The south-side establishment opened in April 2021.

Due to this economic crisis we are going through. After almost 3 years of keeping our doors open and serving up some of the most unique menu items in Tucson, they wrote on Instagram.

Fiesta Filipina

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Fiesta Filipinas brick-and-mortar location in the food court of Park Place Mall, 5870 E. Broadway, closed on June 18. Fiesta Filipina decided to go down the brick-and-mortar route in 2021 after running a food truck for three years prior.

Thelma Ward, the owner of Fiesta Filipina announced the closure on Facebook on June 19. I will still be operating the Fiesta Filipina food trailer for special events and catering so watch for our events schedule, she wrote.

Fullyloves

Fullyloves in Main Gate Square, 994 E. University Boulevard, opened its doors in the spring of 2021. After a little over two years of serving up burgers, fries and vegan food, the joint closed in June.

The love and support we received from our community is unmatched and will be cherished. We will be taking this time to be with our family and prepare for our next chapter and will no longer be on University Blvd, they wrote on Facebook.

Little Love Burger

Little Love Burger located at 312 E. Congress St. in downtown Tucson opened in the fall of 2021. The fun burger joint was created by the team behind Hub Restaurant and Playground Bar & Lounge.

Little Love Burger officially closed on June 18.

After serving you with love for several years, we hand the keys to the sacred 312 East Congress space to Gabriel and Vivian Moreno, of Jaimes Pizza Kitchen. A multigenerational Tucson family business since 1989, Jaimes Pizza Kitchen will be opening soon, serving amazing traditional pizza, wings, and salads, Little Love Burger said on Facebook.

Mama's Hawaiian BBQ

Tucson's last Mama's Hawaiian BBQ location has closed its doors.

When visiting their eatery at 6310 E. Tanque Verde Road in early July, a lockout notice from the landlord was hanging in the window. Their website no longer works and a call to their phone number went unanswered.

Pastiche Modern Eatery

Anthonie Ruinard, Pastiche's most recent owner, was arrested in connection with the June killing of 18-year-old Parker League near Apache Junction.

Ruinard had owned the 25-year-old restaurant since 2021, after buying it from Costas and Judie Georgacas. The Georgacases ran the restaurant for four years after buying it in 2017 from the family of the original owner Pat Connors weeks after Connors died of cancer.

Pastiche, 3025 N. Campbell Ave., last posted on Facebook in February, citing water damage and repairs for a temporary closure. The sign on the building has been taken down and a notice of a landlord's lien, dated in February, was seen hanging in the window.

Ten55 Brewing Company

After a decade in business, Ten55 decided to discontinue all of its operations, Tucson Foodie first reported earlier this year. The brewery was set to open a new location in midtown after leaving its downtown digs at 110 E. Congress St. last year, but the new place never came to fruition.

The Lobby

The Lobby, located at 811 E. Wetmore Road, closed earlier this year after four months in business. The restaurant sold classic feel-good food like burgers, wings and milkshakes.
TELL CITY, Ind. (AP)  A man suspected of domestic violence fatally shot a police officer in a southern Indiana hospital early Monday and was then killed by other officers, authorities said.

The confrontation occurred at Perry County Memorial Hospital in Tell City, across the Ohio River from Kentucky. Police were called when a victim of domestic violence told hospital staff that Sean Hubert was on his way.

Tell City Sgt. Heather Glenn tried to subdue Hubert, 34, at the hospital with an electronic device and arrest him, but it was ineffective, Indiana State Police said.

During a brief struggle, Hubert produced a firearm and Sgt. Glenn was shot, state police said. Officers with the Tell City Police Department and Cannelton Police Department returned fire and shot Hubert.

The shooting occurred inside the hospital, near the emergency room, Sgt. John Davis told The Associated Press.

They did not know he was armed, Davis said.

Glenn had spent nearly 20 years with the Tell City Police Department and the Perry County Sheriffs Office.

Our police department suffered a tremendous loss, Police Chief Derrick Lawalin said. We lost a dear colleague, a dear friend. Sgt. Glenn  shes a cornerstone of our department.

Lawalin also offered thoughts and prayers for Huberts family.

Glenn and other officers had been searching for Hubert after speaking to the domestic violence victim Sunday, state police said.

Tell City, population 7,500, is 150 miles (240 kilometers) south of Indianapolis.

It was the second death of an Indiana police officer in less than a week. State Trooper Aaron Smith was hit by a stolen vehicle Wednesday while trying to place tire deflation sticks in the road in suburban Indianapolis. An 18-year-old male was charged with murder.
DES MOINES, Iowa (AP)  A California law approved by voters that promises to get breeding pigs out of narrow cages that prevent them from standing or turning will finally take effect Saturday, after years of delays and warnings that the rules could lead to price spikes and pork shortages.

But it will be six months before California grocery shoppers can be sure that pork chops they buy under the new law will be from a pig whose mother wasnt confined in a so-called gestation crate.

Thats because while the U.S. Supreme Court upheld the law, the state recently agreed to allow pork slaughtered before July 1 to be sold in California markets and restaurants for the rest of the year. That decision gives farmers and grocery stores time to adjust. But it's exasperating to supporters of the new rules that the effective implementation of the law would again be delayed  four years after voters approved it.

This development compounds the instability and confusion in the marketplace, while punishing the small independent family farmers and those companies that have been prepared to abide by the law, Chris Oliviero, general manager of meat company Niman Ranch, said in a statement.

Niman stands to benefit from the law because it contracts with farmers that have long met Californias new animal welfare rules.

But even backers of the tougher rules recognize a silver lining in the delay: Giving producers, grocers and restaurants more time to adjust will reduce the chance of shortages. Josh Balk, who led the Humane Society of the United States campaign to pass the law, said theres going to be a smooth transition for the pork industry.

The measure also included space requirements for egg-laying hens and veal calves. But while those producers complied, the pork industry filed legal challenges. They argued that California, which consumes roughly 13% of the nations pork but produces almost none of it, shouldnt dictate how farmers mainly in the Midwest and North Carolina should raise hogs.

Californians approved Proposition 12 in 2018, mandating that fresh pork sold in their state had to be born to sows with at least 24 square feet of space, allowing a breeding pig to turn around and extend its limbs. It effectively banned widely used gestation crates that protect sows from other pigs, which can be aggressive, but that many people see as cruel.

Producers argued converting barns to comply would be costly, with standard operations paying $5 million to $15 million, said Michael Formica, a lawyer with the Iowa-based National Pork Producers Council. Larger spaces would also mean higher heating and maintenance costs.

Pork producers also defended their treatment of pigs, arguing the law wasn't based on science.

The Supreme Court upheld the law in a 5-4 ruling, with Justice Neil Gorsuch writing that While the Constitution addresses many weighty issues, the type of pork chops California merchants may sell is not on that list.

To sell in California, farmers will need to operate more like Jared Schilling, who left a job as a civil engineer in Chicago to join his three siblings in shifting their family farm in southern Illinois away from gestation crates. They moved to group housing for all their breeding pigs as well as the other hogs.

Its easier to manage an animal if they never move, Schilling said of the crates.

They thought giving the animals extra space would be more humane, but without crates breeding pigs at times fight each other. The family had to add new technology to track each animal and figure out ways to prevent the fighting, on top of the cost of the expensive new barns.

After about five years, the farm now has about 3,600 breeding sows. It sells 80,000 hogs a year to Coleman Natural Foods, a Colorado-based national meat distributor that has sold only crate-free pork since 2018.

Schilling said Coleman pays him about 5%-10% more for the hogs so he can cover his extra expenses. The family's decision to keep animals in much larger pens also paid off in a more relaxed operation for everyone  people as well as pigs.

When theyre in the pens, theyre laying down, chill. Theres basically no noise, Schilling said. They definitely feel more relaxed.

The California law, as well as one taking effect soon in Massachusetts, should mean increased demand for pork from Schillings farm and ultimately more profit.

Some grocery stores in California don't anticipate too much of a disruption, but others are scrambling, even with the latest delay in the regulations, said Ronald Fong, CEO of the California Grocers Association.

Bacon is likely to remain well stocked because it can be frozen. But fresh products could be in shorter supply.

Pork chops, pork loin, pork roast, that are sold fresh, not frozen, those are the types of products that we can anticipate a disruption at some level, Fong said.

Balk, the humane society campaigner, now heads a company that seeks to influence food companies by investing in them. He believes the California law will speed up the demise of gestation crates. He said some companies already are promising to stop buying pork from operations that use the crates, and its only a matter of time before they are phased out.

For now, it's unclear how many hog farmers will invest to upgrade pens and meet demand in California and Massachusetts.

As best we can tell, theres nowhere near enough supply, said Formica, of the pork producers.
Be a part of a season finale live audience when award-winning Texas music artist Marcia Ball performs during a Friday, July 7, taping of Live From Cains at Cains Ballroom.

Seated general admission tickets and a limited number of reserved tables are available for the all-ages show at cainsballroom.com. The performance will be recorded for a public radio series set to air this summer on stations across the U.S.

Ball, a pianist, songwriter and vocalist, grew up in Louisiana with a family whose female members all played piano. She began taking lessons at age 5, playing old Tin Pan Alley and popular music tunes from her grandmothers collection. Ball discovered the power of soul music at age 13 while listening to an Irma Thomas performance from at Municipal Auditorium in New Orleans.

Ball has been inducted into the Gulf Coast Music Hall Of Fame and the Louisiana Music Hall Of Fame. The Texas State legislature named her the official 2018 Texas State Musician. In 2018, she was inducted into the Austin City Limits Hall of Fame. She will be backed by the Live From Cains house band, The Oklahoma Specials, featuring bandleader Paul Benjaman (guitar), Aaron Boehler (bass), Paddy Ryan (drums), Roger Ray (pedal steel) and Jeremy Watkins (fiddle).

The Oklahoma Specials will open the night with a set of original music featuring special guests, including LFCs host, Nashville-based multi-instrumentalist Fats Kaplin (Jack White, The Tractors, John Prine) and Tulsas Beau Roberson.

The eight-part radio series will air on a number of public radio stations, including Oklahoma stations KWGS (Public Radio Tulsa) and Normans KGOU beginning Saturday. KOSU is expected to carry the show later this summer.

The Red Dirt Relief Fund, a nonprofit organization that provides a safety net of critical assistance for Oklahoma music professionals, will be present at the event for those wanting to learn more about the Red Dirt Relief Fund. Since 2012, Red Dirt Relief Fund has served 600+ individuals across 39 Oklahoma counties by providing $640,000+ in aid as they recovered from illness, accidents, natural disaster, addiction and COVID-19.

The new Tulsa World app offers personalized features. Download it today.
Holiday closures: Summer feeding sites around the Tulsa area will be operating on different schedules this week, thanks to the Independence Day holiday.

Summer feeding sites operated by the child nutrition programs at Broken Arrow, Sapulpa and Jenks public schools, as well as at Unions Moore Elementary School, will be closed Monday and Tuesday but will resume meal service on Wednesday.

Sites hosted by Tulsa and Owasso public schools will be closed Tuesday, along with the six Tulsa City-County Library branches that offer lunches in collaboration with the Community Food Bank of Eastern Oklahoma.

All Union feeding sites other than Moore Elementary School will be closed until July 10, along with sites hosted by Bartlesville, Bixby, Claremore and Glenpool schools.

Summer meal service has ended at school-operated sites in Catoosa, Skiatook and Sand Springs.

Pass the crayons: Catoosa Public Schools announced Thursday that the district will provide most school supplies for students in eighth grade and younger for the 2023-24 academic year. Students will be expected to bring their own water bottle and backpack, along with boxes of tissues and, among fourth and fifth graders, a Trapper Keeper.

Catoosas first day of classes is Aug. 8.

Money talks: At a special meeting Monday afternoon, the Claremore school board approved a $2 per hour increase in the support staff pay scale.

The board also approved raising special education teachers stipend percentage from 5% of base pay to 7% of base pay.

Subs wanted: Broken Arrow Public Schools is now accepting 2023-24 applications for substitute teachers. The first training session is scheduled for 9 a.m. July 13. Registration is required. Applications and pay scales are available online at baschools.org/substitutes.

Working together: The Liberty Public Schools Board of Education voted Thursday to approve a memorandum of understanding with the Muscogee Nations language department to offer a Native American studies elective for high school students during the 2023-24 school year.

Libertys first day of classes is Aug. 10.

PTA Props: As part of its annual convention in Norman, the Oklahoma Parent-Teacher Association presented accolades to two Tulsa members and three Broken Arrow chapters.

Jamie Rogers and Melissa White were named the organizations 2022-23 Volunteers of the Year. Rogers was the 2022-23 Advocacy Chair for Unions district-wide PTA Council, while White was the PTA president at Mayo Demonstration School.

Additionally, the PTA chapter at Broken Arrows Lynn Wood Elementary School was named the 2022-23 Outstanding Unit, while the chapters at Country Lane Primary and Childers Middle School were each recognized as Units of Excellence.

On the board: On Friday, the American Indian College Fund announced the appointment of Monte Randall, president of the Okmulgee-based College of the Muscogee Nation, to its Board of Trustees.

Launched in 1989, the American Indian College Fund has provided more than $284 million in scholarships, programs and other forms of support for higher education in Indigenous communities.







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OKLAHOMA CITY  The Oklahoma Housing Finance Agency is seeking public input on a new affordable housing program created this year by state lawmakers.

The state agency will receive $215 million as part of the newly created Oklahoma Housing Stability Program, which is intended to incentivize the construction of affordable housing across the state.

Although lawmakers gave some direction for the new program that will allow developers to seek interest-free loans for new home construction projects, the Housing Finance Authority is also asking the public to weigh in through a series of public input sessions.

The Housing Finance Agency on Friday released proposed rules for implementing the program. According to the rules, the three main goals of the Housing Stability Program are as follows:

Increase the number of single-family residences available for purchase in rural and urban areas.

Provide gap financing to aid and incentivize the production of rental housing.

Remove barriers to home ownership caused by the lack of funds for down payment and closing costs.

The agency estimates that roughly 388 new affordable houses and 3,890 rental units will be built as a result of the first round of funding.

Roughly 75% of the funding set aside for home development will go toward construction projects in rural areas, with the remaining earmarked for developments in metropolitan areas.

Under the program, home buyers will be able to apply for grants to help them afford their down payments and closing costs.

With $40.8 million of the new funding set aside for the grants, the agency estimates that roughly 3,025 home buyers will receive down payment assistance equal to 5% of their loan amount. Those home buyers will be required to return the grant funds if they don't occupy the home for at least five years.

House Appropriations Committee Chairman Kevin Wallace, R-Wellston, previously said the new program is intended to go hand-in-hand with state economic development efforts to improve rural industrial parks in order to attract new businesses. Wallace has been discussing this idea with Housing Finance Agency officials since the Oklahoma Legislature appropriated $250 million last year for nearly two dozen rural economic development projects.

When new businesses decide to locate in rural parts of the state, housing options for their employees are often limited, Wallace said.

"As jobs come, the problem is theres never enough housing," he said on the House floor in May.

A public input session on the Housing Stability Program will be held at 1 p.m. July 11 in the Oklahoma State University-Tulsa auditorium, 700 N. Greenwood Ave. A public hearing in Oklahoma City will be held at 1 p.m. July 10 in the Metro Tech Springlake Campus auditorium, 1900 Springlake Drive.

A virtual public input session will be held over Zoom at 1 p.m. July 12.

Participants are asked to register in advance. More information can be found at ohfa.org.

Public comments can also be submitted online at housingstabilitypgm.freeforums.net.

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A mass shooting early on Sunday at an outdoor neighborhood block party in Baltimore, Maryland, left two people dead and 28 others injured, about half of them children, as investigators sought the public's help in tracking down multiple suspects, police said.

Authorities offered no motive for the gun violence, which erupted at about 12:35 a.m. local time in a courtyard of grass and pavement between a pair of two-story rowhouse structures in South Baltimore's Brooklyn Homes community.

The two people slain in the hail of gunfire were identified by police only as an 18-year-old woman and a 20-year-old man. As of Sunday afternoon, nine others wounded remained hospitalized, a few of them listed in critical condition, police told reporters.

A police officer passes a child's bicycle after a mass shooting at the scene of a Fourth of July holiday weekend block party in Baltimore, Maryland, U.S. July 2, 2023 in a still image from video. Photo: Reuters

Among the 28 survivors who were injured were an estimated 14 who were under the age of 18, said Richard Worley, acting commissioner of the Baltimore Police Department, noting that they were still trying to confirm victims' ages.

Baltimore television station WBAL-TV, an NBC affiliate, reported that ages of those who were injured ranged from 13 to 32.

The shooting likely ranks as Baltimore's largest single act of gun violence in terms of number of victims dating back to 2014, according to the Baltimore Sun newspaper, citing the earliest data kept by the nonprofit Gun Violence Archive.

The extent of the carnage was notable even for a city that has long grappled with high levels of homicide and other violent crimes.

Worley said police were searching for multiple suspects, and he appealed to the community to come forward with any information or videos that might help investigators identify the perpetrators.

"We know for sure there are more than one. We don't know how many (suspects)," Worley said.

One resident of the neighborhood, Terry Brown, told the Baltimore Sun said he was standing outside his home when he heard the crackle of gunfire, followed by a stampede of people fleeing in panic for cover.

"It was chaos," Brown said. "Parents were running around looking for their children, hollering and screaming, and don't know if their child has a bullet in them."

Police investigate after a mass shooting at the scene of a Fourth of July holiday weekend block party in Baltimore, Maryland, U.S. July 2, 2023 in a still image from video. Photo: Reuters

Mayor Brandon Scott called the shooting a reckless, cowardly act," and vowed that those responsible would be brought to justice. "We will not stop until we find you, and we will find you."

The tragedy rattled the city of Baltimore, Maryland's most populous city, 40 miles (64 km) northeast of Washington D.C., at the start of the Fourth of July holiday weekend, at a time when Americans typically gather for parades, barbecues and fireworks.

Local media reported that hundreds had attended the "Brooklyn Day" block party, which featured pony rides, dancing and refreshments.

One witness interviewed by television station Fox 45 recounted hearing 20 to 30 gunshots.

Television footage of the crime scene on Sunday showed police tape blocking off a grassy area littered with overturned tables, cups, plates, and other trash from the event.
Vinh International Airport in Nghe An Province, north central Vietnam will shut down until 10:50 am on Tuesday as a runway at the airport cracked.

Due to the cracked runway, flights scheduled to depart from or land at the airport on Monday were canceled.

Some flights had to make unscheduled landings at an airport in neighboring Thanh Hoa Province.

The Airports Corporation of Vietnam (ACV) said it is working with the Civil Aviation Authority of Vietnam to solve the incident.

A wider view of cracks on the runway at Vinh International Airport in Nghe An Province. Photo: Tuoi Tre Contributor

At 11:45 am on Monday, hundreds of passengers completed ticket return procedures at check-in desks of airlines at the airport. They also asked for solutions to the delayed flights.

Tran Van Tuyen, a resident in Nghi Loc District, Nghe An Province, said his flight from Vinh International Airport to Tan Son Nhat International Airport in Ho Chi Minh City would have departed at 9:15 am on Monday

After completing check-in procedures, I got on board but 30 minutes later, the flights captain announced that the runway was cracked and the plane would return to the terminal, Tuyen said.

He and 160 other passengers later came back to the terminal to wait for further notice.

Le Van Quy, a 75-year-old resident in Anh Son District, Nghe An, and his wife also had their flight canceled.

The flight was delayed to tomorrow, so we have to wait for a day, Quy shared.

Le Van Quy (R), a 75-year-old resident in Anh Son District, Nghe An Province, receives his luggage after his flight is canceled.

Many passengers from Ha Tinh and Thanh Hoa provinces, Nghe Ans neighbors, also had their flights from Vinh International Airport on Monday rescheduled.

Pham Van Dung, residing in Tinh Gia District, Thanh Hoa Province, said he and 19 others booked a tour to Nha Trang, a tourism city in south central Khanh Hoa Province.

We were aware of the runway incident when we reached the airport. The airline told us to book a flight to Tho Xuan Airport in Thanh Hoa or Hanoi to fly [to Nha Trang], while we had earlier booked hotel rooms, Dung complained.

Hundreds of passengers have their flights canceled on July 3, 2023 due to the incident. Photo: Doan Hoa / Tuoi Tre

A leader of Vinh International Airport said cracks appeared in the center of the runway, resulting in the delay and cancelation of dozens of flights.

There are 23 flights to and from Vinh International Airport today. However, only four flights were operated this morning.

Contractors have rushed to the airport to repair the runway and will strive to fix the problem at the earliest time, the airport leader added.

The Civil Aviation Authority of Vietnam has required air carriers to report the number of flights and passengers from and to Vinh International Airport from July 3 to 10.

The incident occurred during the peak summer travel season, thus making flight times at sixes and sevens, according to local airlines.

Other air routes will face a domino effect. As a result, many flights will face delays, airlines voiced their concerns.

Passengers at check-in desks of an airline.

Vinh International Airport has a 2,400-meter-long and 45-meter-wide runway and a 38,400-square-meter apron with seven aircraft parking spots.

The ACV put the passenger terminal, which costs nearly VND1.2 trillion (US$50.8 million), at the airport into operation in January 2015.

Despite an international airport, the airport serves no international air route. Vietnamese air carriers, including Vietnam Airlines, Vietjet Air, Bamboo Airways, and Pacific Airlines, are operating flights to and from the airport.

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Metro Manila (CNN Philippines, June 3)  State auditors questioned the Metro Manila Development Authority (MMDA) over unfinished flood control projects in the metropolis.

In its latest report, the Commission on Audit (COA) said 33 out of 47 projects worth a total of over 825 million under the Metro Manila Flood Management Project Phase 1 have yet to be fully implemented by the end of 2022.

They found delays or non-compliance with documentary requirements and procurement activities led to the failure to finish these projects.

It also manifested the Project Management Offices inadequacy of strategies to strictly implement the planned programs/projects and closely monitor the project implementation, COA said.

Among the common causes of delays include suppliers request for extension of deliveries, revision of contract cost or contract duration, and relocation of the site or project redesign.

Auditors recommended better assessment of programmed projects to ensure an efficient and economic procurement process.

The MMDA was also advised to strengthen its monitoring of the status or implementation of projects to fast-track their completion.

The Agency must expedite the implementation of programs and projects as this will also improve the quality of services rendered to the public, COA said.

Auditors also noted that the MMDA leftover 1.1 billion of its budget unused in view of delays, suspensions and non-implementation of projects. These include traffic management and flood control projects.

In their reply, MMDA management acknowledged its shortcomings in terms of budget utilization and project implementation.

The agency explained it prioritized remaining procurement items and unutilized and continuing funds from previous years. It also attributed delays to the halting of consultancy services and changes in the administration.
Police in Da Lat City, a popular tourist hub of Vietnams Central Highlands province of Lam Dong, have launched criminal proceedings against individuals allegedly involved in a deadly landslide that occurred on Hoang Hoa Tham Street in the citys Ward 10 in late June.

The landslide, triggered by torrential rains, claimed the lives of two construction workers, and destroyed several houses.

Colonel Tran Vinh Phu, head of the Da Lat City police agency, said on Sunday that after being notified of the tragedy, the agency was directed to clarify the cause of the landslide and related violations.

After three days of investigation, the police detected violations on construction safety, resulting in the prosecution against the case.

The citys investigative police agency summoned some 20 relevant individuals for the investigation into the fatal incident.

Besides, the competent forces also examined the scene and garnered all documents associated with the land lot where an embankment was built to pinpoint the violations that caused the serious consequences.

Preliminary investigation results showed that the landslide at 36 Hoang Hoa Tham Street resulted from errors in the construction of a building on Yen The Street, which is 30 meters topographically higher than Hoang Hoa Tham Street.

The work failed to match its approved design, and meet Lam Dong Provinces regulations.

As per the regulations, an embankment is built at a height of four meters, but the embankment on Yen The Street was 10 meters high.

The building project, which saw its embankment collapse and cause soil and rocks to stumble onto houses below, was designed and constructed by Le Nguyen Lam Dong Construction Company.

Meanwhile, Ha Phat Thinh Limited Company was in charge of appraising the design of the work.

Piles of rubble at the scene of the landslide in Da Lat City. Photo: M.V. / Tuoi Tre

A landslide destroys a house below. Photo: M.V. / Tuoi Tre

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Phan Thiet City in Binh Thuan Province, located in south-central Vietnam, has been swarmed with visitors on weekends due to the peak summer travel season, and the newly-opened Dau Giay - Phan Thiet Expressway.

Over the past month, many main roads at the heart of the city have been bursting with private cars and passenger buses on weekends.

Tourists have crowded the provinces popular beaches such as Doi Duong - Thuong Chanh, Ong Dia Stone, and Hon Rom - Mui Ne.

Notably, a section stretching from Huynh Thuc Khang Street in Mui Ne Ward to Nguyen Dinh Chieu Street in Ham Tien Ward in Phan Thiet City often faces a snarl-up on Saturday and Sunday evenings.

Binh Thuan Province welcomed nearly 830,000 travelers in June, surging by some 70 percent year on year, according to the provincial statistics office.

The number of tourist arrivals in the province is expected to amount to about 2.4 million in the third quarter of the year, nearly double last year's figure.

Tran Van Binh, vice chairman of the Binh Thuan Travel Association, said that the figure signaled a tourism boom in the province.

The peak travel season and the Phan Thiet - Dau Giay Expressway, which was opened to traffic in late April, have prompted visitors, mainly those traveling by private cars, to arrive in the city, Binh said.

The summer travel season lasts from June to August.

Hotels in the city were full on weekends in June, while July is expected to see hotel occupancy rates higher on weekdays as students have finished their school year and will follow their parents to tour, according to Binh.

Phan Thiet City is suitable for family travel, he added.

Phan Thiet City becomes more attractive as many resorts in the city feature playgrounds for kids, and high-end swimming pools, while the newly-opened expressway helps facilitate traffic, and shorten the distance between the province and other localities, especially Ho Chi Minh City.

Affordable prices of tourism products and services, and food are a plus.

Some resort owners said that many lodging facilities have mushroomed in the city, giving multiple options to overnight travelers.

Many cars are parked along a seaside road in Phan Thiet City. Photo: Duc Trong / Tuoi Tre

Visitors are pictured playing on a beach in Phan Thiet City. Photo: Duc Trong / Tuoi Tre

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Some local inhabitants in Phu Cat District of south-central Binh Dinh Province on Sunday spotted a large whale and a smaller one in the De Gi - Vung Boi waters, around one kilometer away from the shore.

Tran Van Tai, a local tour guide, said that he spotted the two whales, with the bigger measuring about 16 meters long and the smaller being around 12 meters long, swimming together when he was on a boat trip to the area on Sunday morning.

The two whales repeatedly dived and surfaced to feed on schools of small fishes, he recalled.

Some eyewitnesses posited that the two whales could be a mother whale and her calf that had appeared in the area last year.

They returned there to hunt for fishes, adding that the calf, despite being bigger and longer than it was last year, seemed to fear humans, they said.

This video shows two whales spotted swimming together in the De Gi - Vung Boi waters in Phu Cat District, Binh Dinh Province, south-central Vietnam on July 2, 2023. Video: TI TAI

In early August last year, a rare sighting of whales spotted swimming off the De Gi - Vung Boi waters captivated lots of photographers who came to take photos of the pod of whales and thereby helped promote tours to the locality.

The provincial fishery authority attributed the arrival of the whales to a large amount of fish in the De Gi waters, as diffuse schools of herrings and anchovies usually gather in the area during this season.

According to the Center for Biodiversity Conservation and Endangered Species, the whales spotted in the Binh Dinh waters last year are Brydes whales.

Brydes female whales nurse their calves for six months, so they normally opt for quiet and fish-rich waters to rest and nurse their calves.

Also, the fact that the mother whale chose the Binh Dinh waters again to hunt for fish is upbeat news, as it shows that the local sea environment has been improved and can meet the needs of whales.

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The United States live-action feature film Barbie is banned from screening in Vietnam for featuring a map depicting the illicit nine-dash line that China uses to illegally claim its sovereignty over most of the East Vietnam Sea.

Vi Kien Thanh, head of the Vietnam Cinema Department, confirmed the ban to Tuoi Tre (Youth) newspaper on Monday.

The ban was issued by the Central Council of Feature Film Evaluation and Classification, Thanh said.

Barbie was set to hit theaters in Vietnam on July 21, when the United States will release the firm.

However, the ban has prompted the managers of all cinema chains across Vietnam such as Galaxy and CGV to withdraw the live-action feature movie from their lists of upcoming films.

Vietnam had earlier either blocked many films or removed some ones from cinemas as these movies, mainly produced by China, contain the illegal nine-dash line map.

Barbie is one of the most anticipated movies this year. The film was directed by Greta Gerwig, starring Margot Robbie as Barbie, and Ryan Gosling as her boyfriend Ken.

Last year, Vietnam blocked Americas Uncharted, which stars Tom Holland, for the illicit nine-dash line.

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NSW Parole Authority and Corrective Services will lodge a complaint to media watchdog the Australian Communications and Media Authority following a story on a parolee living in Sydney.

In June Seven News reported on convicted baby killer Martin Saunders now living in Sydneys south-west.

in 2019 he confessed to shaking his 10-week-old son, pleaded guilty to manslaughter and was sentenced to a minimum of three years in jail.

Media Watch last night reported he was released on parole in December 2022, with the NSW Parole Authority and Corrective Services telling ABC he was not considered a threat to community.

The mother of the child Rochelle Kennedy, also spoke to Seven a third time describing him as a monster.

But ABC said their report on Saunders was media playing judge and jury and encouraging a lynch mob.

A Seven spokesperson told ABC, As you have noted the 7News story stated that some residents are terrified. This assessment was based on interviews conducted by Evan Barton who interviewed residents in the community. Vox pops were done to validate these sentiments.

While not all of these interviews may have been included in the final cut of the story they informed our understanding of the situation. Our reporting does not suggest that Martin Saunders is currently a danger to the public but rather covers the concerns primarily from those living in the community as well as the mother of the child.

It isnt clear if NSW Corrective Services have complained to Seven over the story, which is required procedure before an ACMA complaint.
Prepare to plant a smile on your face from beginning to end with the new Netflix documentary, Wham! which transports back to 4 glorious years in the 1980s.

Yes it was only 4 years, 1982  1986 that Andrew Ridgeley and George Michael shot like a meteor across the world of pop music, selling 30 million records in the process.

By 1986 George Michael embarked on his superstar solo career after a final sell-out concert as the duo at Wembley.

The new doco special from director Chris Smith (Tiger King, Sr.) and producers John Battsek (The Deepest Breath) and Simon Halfon (Supersonic) is gifted by extrordinary personal archives including remarkable and never-before-seen footage, alongside rare, candid and previously unheard interviews.

The voices of Michael and Ridgeley recall memories across the special in a comprehensive way, rather than just being edited in here and there.

From their meeting at Bushey Meads School -at ages 11 and 12- to Number 1 chart success and World Tours, this covers it all.

Wham! was never going to grow up it was like a dream, they recall. How could these two idiots become so bloody massive?

By the age of 16 the two were attempting a teen band, The Executive playing Ska music in 1979 -but it was the start of songwriting.

Even then, Andrew and Yog were musically joined at the hip, and dancing in combination at the local Beetroot Club, a forerunner of what would become Wham Rap! (Enjoy What You Do). The boys were writing social lyrics with disco beats but unable to land a record deal until meeting Mark Dean of Innervision Records, who had discovered ABC and Soft Cell.

But record sales were slow with Wham Rap at #105 until an arresting performance on Top of the Pops in 1982 with backing dancers Dee C. Lee and Shirlie Holliman. It ignited chart sales with a release of Wham Rap hitting #8.

Even Careless Whisper was written in 1981, with Michael admitting at the time, I dont know if Ill be good enough to sing it, but that is a number one song. It would not be released until 1984 with a hypnotic video, years after other Wham! successes.

Michael told Ridgeley of his attraction to men during a visit to Ibiza for Club Tropicana (1983), which saw him stay in the closet largely due to his conservative Greek-Cypriot father (Bad Boys lyrics reflect his feelings) but also due to the pressures of fame -the band were idolised by teenage girls across the country.

Michael admits to creating a character to front the pop act which had shifted to wholesome bubblegum pop, a factor which grated against Michaels burning desire for songwriting recognition. Despite a string of hits including Freedom,Everything She Wants, Last Christmas, Im Your Man and the smash hit Wake Me Up Before You Go-Go, the band were panned by music critics.

Amid some of the docos more fascinating archives is the 1985 trip to China -designed to attract the interest of the US market as a two man cultural revolution. As the first modern pop band to play in Communist China it worked. The vision here of Chinese concert fans, and the band walking the Great Wall of China, is rare access.

Ridgeley acknowledges the star power of Michael but does not begrudge him the desire to break out into a solo career. At the same time Michael was struggling with his sexuality being kept under wraps.

I want to be able to develop as a human being but I feel trapped, Michael recalls.

It must be one of pop musics most noble gestures, for Ridgeley to agree to a split at the height of fame and allow a childhood friend follow his true calling.

Australia features briefly in the doco, with a Molly Meldrum interview as the first of the special and a later reference of fans sleeping overnight at Melbourne Airport for a glimpse of the band.

In 2017 a Channel 4 doco by filmmaker and close friend, David Austin reflected on the stardom of George Michael not long after his early death.

But Wham! is the definitive screen archive of the pop duo. Choose Life. Dont miss it.

Wham! screens Wednesday July 5 on Netflix.
Metro Manila (CNN Philippines, July 3)  The Department of Justice (DOJ) has ordered an investigation on the brutal killing of a female architecture student in Occidental Mindoro.

Justice Secretary Jesus Crispin Remulla on Monday confirmed to reporters that he directed the National Bureau of Investigation to open a probe.

Police said Eden Joy Villacete, 21, a graduating architecture student of Occidental Mindoro State College, was reported missing for a few days.

They said Villacete may have been raped before she was murdered at her boarding house in San Jose town on Friday

On Sunday, San Jose Municipal Police denied rumors that the suspect in the rape-slay case is in police custody. It added that authorities are still gathering information on the crime.

Meanwhile, the bounty for the person or persons behind the death of Villacete was raised to over 591,000, pooled from contributions of various offices of personalities.
Pro-democracy and rights campaigner Alaa Abdel Fattah is serving a five-year prison sentence for 'spreading false news' by sharing a Facebook post about police brutality (Khaled DESOUKI)

The family of a jailed British-Egyptian activist on Monday held a vigil outside the foreign ministry in London to highlight a call by 100 British lawmakers for "fresh approaches" to secure his release.

The pro-democracy and rights campaigner Alaa Abdel Fattah is serving a five-year prison sentence for "spreading false news" by sharing a Facebook post about police brutality.

He was a key figure in the 2011 revolt that topped Egyptian autocrat Hosni Mubarak, and was given British citizenship in 2022 through his British-born mother.

The lawmakers voiced concern about the lack of progress despite Prime Minister Rishi Sunak raising the case directly with Egyptian President Abdel Fattah Al-Sisi during the COP27 climate summit in November last year.

"Private lobbying of the Egyptian government even at the highest levels is yet to deliver results. This calls for fresh approaches," the lawmakers from the lower and upper house of the UK parliament say in a letter to Foreign Secretary James Cleverly which was submitted on Monday.

French President Emmanuel Macron also took up the 41-year-old's case with Sisi and US President Joe Biden raised human rights issues.

Abdel Fattah's sister, Mona Seif, told AFP the family wanted to see the British government make his case a "top priority".

"We are asking them to shift gear. They have been using this approach of soft diplomacy and raising Alaa's case for over a year-and-a-half now and they haven't received anything in return," she said.

Rights groups say there are more than 60,000 "prisoners of conscience" who have been jailed in Egypt under the rule of President Al-Sisi.

Sisi deposed Islamist president Mohamed Morsi in 2013, before being elected the following year.

- Hunger strike -

At the time of the climate meet in the Egyptian Red Sea resort of Sharm el-Sheikh, Abdel Fattah had been on hunger strike for seven months.

On the day the conference opened he had begun refusing water too.

The British lawmakers want the UK to "take the lead on a joint statement on Egypt" at the UN Human Rights Council and to update the UK's travel advice to align it with the United States.

The US government warns that US citizenship does not provide protection from detention or arrest in Egypt and that those detained may be subject to "prolonged interrogations and extended detention".

Abdel Attah's sister Mona added that she believed a joint statement on Egypt at the UN Human Rights Council would almost certainly be "effective" in persuading the Egyptian government to move on the case.

"We know that a lot of countries would be willing to join in on a statement... but it needs to be led by the UK government because they have a higher stake, they have one of their citizens in arbitrary detention," she said.

The lawmakers' letter adds that the British embassy in Cairo has been prevented from visiting Abdel Fattah in jail for the past 18 months.

His mother Laila Soueif, a mathematician, said she could not understand why the UK government had been unable to secure this and described the situation as "unacceptable".

har/phz/jmm
How British pick-up trucks being right hand drive is fuelling their demand in Ukraine

In a warehouse in Lviv, a team works tirelessly to transform aging British pick-up trucks into armoured military vehicles.

Within a matter of weeks cars donated from around the UK are ready for the front line.

The demand for British cars in particular is due in part to them being right hand drive.

Volunteers say lives of Ukrainian soldiers have been saved because Russian snipers are fooled into shooting at the passenger seat, rather than at the driver.

"Steering is on the right side and they put a mannequin or a dummy with uniform on the left so the Russians don't take out the driver he aims for the passenger side and it confuses the Russians", says Patrick McIntyre, an Irish volunteer who lives in Coventry and has given up work in order to regularly make the journey to and from Ukraine delivering donated cars.

He's lost count of the number of times he's made the trip since March last year but estimates he goes three to four times each month.

On a recent journey he took a car from Edinburgh, driving down to Dover and from there across Europe as part of a convoy of five vehicles headed to Lviv.

Some of the cars are directly donated by owners who no longer need them. Others are paid for by donations which come from the UK, USA and across the European Union.

"We go in and around the UK" he says. "We do a rigorous search for the kind of vehicles we need".

"If it's an ambulance, we source an ambulance. If it's an emergency vehicle or a fire engine or in particular the ones we're dealing with today are 4x4s that will be transferred to Ukraine to be used for humanitarian and military purposes for extraction of soldiers from the front line or for combat use depending on the requirement of the unit."

Read more:

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There are several organisations that deliver vehicles. The one Patrick volunteers for is Car for Ukraine.

He describes the process that takes place once the cars arrive in Lviv.

"Car for Ukraine take the vehicles, convert them with panels of steel in the door, armoured plating in the side panels, take the panels off the doors and put them in, put panels on the back, armoured plating and convert them from a normal civilian car to a military vehicle, or a humanitarian vehicle."

In the warehouse the conversion process is overseen by Ivan Oleksii who founded Car for Ukraine.

"Pick-up trucks are very useful in general" he says.

"British pick up's particularly - Britain in general is very positive about helping Ukraine and so it's easier to negotiate deals and get donations. Right-hand drive cars are often cheaper too because there's no market for them in the rest of Europe.

"The fact that the driver is on the other side - we do hear stories where a sniper has shot at the passenger side.

"These vehicles are saving lives, not just because the driver is on the other side, but the pick-up trucks can carry heavy machine guns on the back and they can shoot up to 2 miles.

"But they have many uses. When the Kakhovka dam was blown up we saw how one of our pick-up trucks was evacuating people because it could access areas that other vehicles couldn't get into."

He estimates that so far they're converted around 200 British vehicles. He says around 30% have already been destroyed by shelling or other damage so says they always need more.

For Patrick, quitting his job to volunteer has come a huge personal cost but he's committed to continuing as long as there is demand for the vehicles.

"Since March last year I haven't taken a salary. Fortunately my wife works and I have some savings" he says.

"I feel passionate that it's the right cause because I hope that if anything ever happened in the UK or happened in any other country I hope that people would be here to help."
Toh Ting Feng, co-founder and CEO of car-sharing platform GetGo. (PHOTO: GetGo)

SINGAPORE  In today's world of young, maverick startup founders, car-sharing platform CEO Toh Ting Feng could have been considered a late bloomer in his late-30s, when he started the company. Toh was then also a young father to very young children.

But compared to a younger entrepreneur, Toh, now in his 40s, said that starting a business later in life afforded him some flexibility where he didn't necessarily have to work 18 hours a day on the startup.

"It helps to start a company in your late 30s and 40s because you know a lot of people," Toh told Yahoo Finance Singapore. "It wasn't like I was fresh out of university with no income or savings. That was the fortunate part about starting a business later; you have had a career, you have your own savings, and you are quite clear about what you need to do to get the business going."

"So, it wasn't as uncertain or as big of a risk or sacrifice because you go into it with a bit more of a plan, experience and stability," said Toh, adding that he had made sure to save up and planned financially after 15 years of working so as not to compromise the income for his young family.

Car-sharing service launched during COVID-19 pandemic

Launched at the height of the COVID-19 pandemic in February 2021, GetGo has since grown its user base from 10,000 at the initial launch to nearly 300,000 users as of March 2023. The startup currently employs 180 people and manages a fleet size of more than 2,400 cars which are available across 1,400 locations.

In February 2023, GetGo successfully raised S$20 million from investors, enabling them to further accelerate the growth of its fleet and invest in technology to strengthen operations. The company wants to deploy a fully electric and hybrid car-sharing fleet of 10,000 vehicles by 2030.

Toh said that the company was already profitable within the first year of operations and attributed this to adopting a strategy of "not spending more than we earn" and staying away from "subsidising aggressively to grow the business".

Taking the longer route

While GetGo's rise was swift, running a car-sharing business wasn't something that Toh had envisioned before  despite being raised by an entrepreneur father. For Toh, starting GetGo meant that his career had come full circle after several stints in various sectors.

In the early 1980s, Toh's father, a high school dropout, started a used car trading business. The younger Toh, however, was unimpressed when the time came for him to decide on his future and found other career paths more appealing. Instead of joining the family business, he decided to take up a scholarship and enlist in the military after being selected as a trainee at the Officer Cadet School.

"I felt that having the opportunity to be a professional military officer at the start of my career offered a lot of growth opportunities because being in the military is a lot about leadership, so you get to learn what it takes to lead a group of people," said Toh.

After 11 years in the military, including four years of studying, Toh was eager to learn more about commerce and business, such as analysing profit and loss statements and understanding investments  an experience that the military could not offer him. He then decided to join the private sector.

In the private sector, Toh took up a general management role at local real-estate developer CapitaLand before leaving to join ridesharing platform Grab  a market underdog who was competing with Uber at the time. As part of its strategy team, Toh was tasked with growing Grab's Singapore market.

While working at Grab, Toh's father became ill. The younger Toh then left his job to look after his dad, who had retired by then from his car trading business and was dabbling in investing.

"The biggest thing that came out of that phase of my career was towards the end of 2018. There was an opportunity to acquire a company called Lion City Rentals  which is a large rental car company  with a contemporary of my father. We came together and basically acquired this company, and I ran it as the CEO for a year in 2019," said Toh.

Coming full circle

It was during this time that Toh met eventual GetGo co-founder Johnson Lim, who was the son of his business partner that bought Lion City Rentals. Lim had just returned from Germany and was also helping out at the newly acquired company.

However, it would be another year before inspiration struck Toh, for after stepping down as CEO of Lion City Rentals, Toh admitted to being lost and unsure of what to do next. He considered going back to work in the corporate sector and investing in more startups.

But when the pandemic hit in 2020, he immediately saw an opportunity to capitalise on rental cars that were sitting idle, coupled with the growing demand for private hire cars, given Singapore's high cost of owning a car.

"I'm not a big car guy, you know? Because I always thought of cars as a utility, which is actually very in line with GetGo," said Toh.

"By building GetGo, we could not only serve our users with access to cars, but we were actually solving a problem for existing rental car companies as well. Because we were helping them, we could convince them and have their trust to put the cars on our platform," said Toh.

Armed with a wealth of experience, industry contacts and "a couple of hundred thousand dollars" that was pooled together between Toh, Lim, and three other co-founding investors, GetGo was born. It took "six to eight months" of research and planning before they were off to the races.

Looking back on his career, Toh said that his biggest takeaway was to think of it as a journey.

"As cliche as it sounds, it is a journey. No matter where you end up at any one point in time, I think the important thing is to just make the best of it and take away the best lessons you can. You meet people on the journey, and you never know when you can get together and do something meaningful down the line.

"That's why it's a journey, right? You never know what life brings," said Toh.

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The archipelago off the north of Scotland, which is made up of 70 islands, is exploring how it is governed.

The Yesnaby sea stack on the Orkney Islands. (Alamy)

Orkney is considering breaking away from the UK and could become part of Norway under new proposals.

The archipelago off the north of Scotland, which is made up of 70 islands, is going ahead with exploring how it is governed.

Orkney Islands Council backed a motion on Tuesday to investigate "alternative forms of governance".

Councillors have voted to explore alternative forms of governance, and now council officers will compile a report on the future of how the islands are run.

An amendment attempting to block the motion was defeated by 15 votes to six.

There is growing frustration on the islands that Orkney does not receive fair funding from Scotland and the UK.

It could mean the islands changing their status within the UK or even becoming a self-governing territory of Norway.

On Tuesday, the leader of the council, James Stockan, told the meeting that Orkney had been subject to "discrimination" by the Scottish and UK governments.

He said: I have been a councillor now for 20 years, but for the last number Ive been in negotiation with our governments to get what I believe is an equitable solution of position for the Orkney Islands in funding and in the opportunity that we have in and around these islands to benefit not just us, but to benefit our neighbours, to benefit our nation and to benefit the world.

But we have been restricted in every conversation, we have been held down, and what I would say is we all know most of what I could say with regard to the discrimination that weve had against this community from governments in the funding settlement we have.

He added: I say it is time for government to take us seriously, and I say its time for us to look at all the options weve got.

But he said: This is not about us joining Norway. There is a far bigger suite of options here  this could even be that we could get our money direct from the Treasury in London and look after our own future.

Yahoo News UK examines what it could mean for Orkney...

Where is Orkney?

Orkney is one of the two archipelagos of the Northern Isles of Scotland  the other is Shetland.

Orkney is located 10 miles north of the coast of the county of Caithness. A ferry to Orkney runs twice daily from the village of John O'Groats.

Orkney is made up of dozens of islands and is about 300 miles away from Norway.

The harbour at Kirkwall on the Orkney Islands in Scotland. (Alamy)

What is the population of Orkney?

There are 70 islands in Orkney, 20 of which are inhabited.

According to official figures, the population of Orkney was 22,540 as of June 2021.

The islands have been inhabited for at least 8,500 years.

The largest Orkney island  the Mainland, also known as Hrossey and Pomona  is an area of 200 square miles.

The largest settlement on Orkney is the town of Kirkwall, which has a population of about 10,000 people.

- Orkney Islands to consider break from UK governance and explore 'Nordic connections' (Sky News, 2 mins)

The Orkney Islands are exploring other forms of governance. (Alamy)

What is the history of Orkney?

Orkney did not always belonged to Scotland and the UK. It was annexed by Norway in the year 875 and settled by Norsemen.

But in 1472, Orkney and Shetland was brought into the Kingdom of Scotland after the failure to pay a dowry promised to James III of Scotland by the family of his bride, Margaret of Denmark.

The islands had been used as security for the marriage, seen as a way of uniting Scotland and Denmark following years of discord about taxation of the Hebrides Islands.

Orkney Islands declared Britain's best rural place to live (Yahoo News UK, 2 mins)

The Orkney Islands in Scotland are known for their beautiful scenery. (Alamy)

Could Orkney choose independence?

James Stockan, the leader of Orkney Islands Council, has put forward a motion saying it is time for Orkney to consider other forms of governance.

He has suggested Orkney should consider a similar model to crown dependencies, such as Guernsey, Jersey and the Isle of Man.

He has also put forward using "Nordic connections, which could mean following the Faroe Islands, which is a self-governing territory of Denmark in the North Sea.

The motion notes that any constitutional change would likely require a combination of petitions, referenda and legislation at Holyrood and Westminster.

Why might Orkney want independence?

Stockan told the BBC he felt that Orkney is being failed dreadfully by governments in both Edinburgh and London.

Funding is less per head than Shetland and the Western Isles receive, he said.

We were part of the Norse kingdom for much longer than we were part of the United Kingdom," he said.

On the street in Orkney, people come up and say to me when are we going to pay back the dowry, when are we going back to Norway.

There is a huge affinity and a huge deep cultural relationship there. This is exactly the moment to explore what is possible.

The Orkney Islands is exploring the idea of seeking independence. (Alamy)

What has the reaction been?

No 10 has shut down the proposals, with the Prime Ministers official spokesman saying: First and foremost, there is no mechanism for the conferral of crown dependency or overseas territory status on any part of the UK.

But fundamentally, we are stronger as one United Kingdom, we have no plans to change that.

Weve got no plans to change the devolution settlement.
What is Guru Purnima? Hindu festival celebrated around the world

Guru Purnima is also known as Teachers Day (PA)

Guru Purnima is being celebrated on Monday (July 3) and offers a chance for those of Buddhist, Jain, and Hindu faith to honour their teachers, gurus and mentors.

The occasion is primarily celebrated in countries and areas where these beliefs are most practised, such as India, Nepal and Bhutan.

It is also known as Teachers Day and is the birthday of Vyasa - an important figure in Hindu religion who was known for imparting his wisdom.

The name came from Guru meaning a remover of darkness and Purnima refers to the full moon night on which it falls. Teachers were considered people, consequently, who dispelled darkness from the lives of their students.

The Guru can be your breath, your heartbeat, or your Liberation. Whatever choice you make, I am with You. #GuruPurnima #SadhguruQuotes pic.twitter.com/PToVRjsT6f  Sadhguru (@SadhguruJV) July 3, 2023

These days, teachers can be considered anyone from a religious elder to a school professor, a parent, or even an elder sibling.

Guru Purnima is celebrated during Ashadha in the Hindu calendar, which is usually June or July, and in 2023, it falls on Monday, July 3 on the Western calendar.

By tradition, followers of the faiths will hold puja rituals - a religious routine - and fast during the day, before holding a celebration in the evening.

The Indian Express wrote: The custom of Guru Purnima holds a teacher high enough to remove ignorance from the students life, transcending him to a higher dimension.

Therefore, it is also a celebration of the knowledge and wisdom that a teacher has and imparts. It further encourages the sharing of knowledge as the only method of attaining transcendence.

Taking this day to thankfully remember each and everyone who has thought me valuable lessons in life #GuruPurnima pic.twitter.com/6Ux1FzWovW  Anil K Antony (@anilkantony) July 3, 2023

On social media, followers of the tradition paid tribute to some of the teachers in their own lives.

Sadhguru wrote: The Guru can be your breath, your heartbeat, or your Liberation. Whatever choice you make, I am with You. #GuruPurnima.

Anil K Antony said: Taking this day to thankfully remember each and every one who has thought me valuable lessons in life #GuruPurnima.
Metro Manila (CNN Philippines, June 3)  President Ferdinand Marcos Jr. said the administration will pursue the Philippine Air Force (PAF) modernization as the group celebrated its 76th founding anniversary.

I reiterate that this administration is committed to strengthening the armed forces including the Philippine Air Force through the acquisitions under the AFP (Armed Forces of the Philippines) modernization program, he said during his speech in Pampanga on Monday.

Officials estimated that modernizing the military will cost 2.2 trillion. The modernization program began in 2012.

READ: Marcos vows to continue military modernization

Marcos said the PAF plays a crucial role in defending the territory, including maritime zones, amid heightening geopolitical tensions.

The days ahead will not be easy, and will demand every ounce of our strength and our resilience, the winds of change signal geopolitical challenges around our region, and other parts of the world that as yet affect us, the president said.
HCM CITY  With its abundant resources and soaring demand for clean energy, Viet Nam is poised to become a regional leader in renewable energy, a conference organised by Forbes Vietnam heard last Friday.

Ha ang Son, deputy director of the Viet Nam Low Emission Energy Programme II (V-LEEP II), highlighted the countrys attractive prospects for local and foreign investors in renewables.

Viet Nams vast renewable resources, growing energy demand and supportive governmental policies are major contributing factors.

Its ample solar resources offer favourable conditions for investors as do its extensive coastline and favourable wind conditions, he said.

Its well-established agricultural sector generates substantial biomass waste, which can be utilised for energy generation, he said.

The Government approved in May a power development master plan that prioritises renewable energy, he said.

The plan includes an ambitious target to generate 20 per cent of the countrys electricity from renewable sources by 2030.

Experts pointed out the country requires US$135 billion for power plant and transmission grid development by 2030, and over $500 billion by 2050.

They highlighted the need for foreign investment, green credit and domestic private capital to achieve the transformation towards a sustainable energy model.

They also spoke about the major challenges faced by investors such as uncertainty and inconsistency in the Governments renewable energy policies and regulations.

Trinh Quoc Vu, CEO of a HCM City-based renewable energy company, said the shortage of infrastructure to accommodate the rising renewable energy capacity is another obstacle.

ang Quoc Toan, chairman and general director of the Asia Petroleum Energy Corporation, said the lack of transparency in the bidding for renewable energy projects is also a critical issue.

Financing remains a challenge despite the decreasing costs of renewable energy technologies, he added.

The complex and time-consuming land acquisition process in Viet Nam is another hurdle for investors in renewable energy projects.

The shortage of skilled professionals and limited domestic manufacturing capabilities escalate project costs and timelines in Viet Nam since developing large-scale renewable energy projects requires skilled labour and robust supply chain networks.

Supa Waisayarat, Viet Nam country manager for Thailands Super Energy Corporation, said investors should stay updated on government policies, regulations and incentives related to renewable energy in Viet Nam.  VNS
HCM CITY  Young couple Thach Thi Chal Thi and Pham inh Ngai, whose start-up Sokfarm Co. Ltd. makes coconut flower nectar and other products and exports to many countries, have opened a new direction for farmers in the Cuu Long Delta amid worsening saltwater intrusion into rivers.

In 2019 Thi, who has a masters degree in food technology, and Ngai, an electrical engineer, decided to leave HCM City for Tra Vinh and launch an enterprise whose name reflectes their dream: Sokfarm means happy farm in Khmer, This mother tongue.

The idea of establishing the company came in early 2018 when the price of dried coconut dropped dramatically in the province and saltwater intrusion began to significantly affect livelihoods and agriculture in general in the delta.

Ngai, who is also Sokfarm CEO, says collecting coconut blossoms is a traditional profession among the Khmer ethnic people in Tra Vinh.

After choosing a coconut tree three to 10 years old, workers must climb it at least twice a day to massage flowers that are about to bloom and collect syrup from them for processing. Sokfarm uses vacuum concentration technology to cook the syrup at a low temperature of 55-60 degrees Celsius to retain the nutrients, colour and taste.

Ngai said Sokfarm has a 20ha coconut farm with international organic certificates and a 500sq.m factory with an ISO 22000: 2018 certificate for food safety management. It employs 38 workers and has tied up with 35 farmers in the provinces Tieu Can District.

Farmers income from syrup is three to five times that from coconuts, Ngai said.

The company currently has seven products from coconut - nectar, flower vinegar, sugar, fresh blossom water, cider vinegar, cocoa nib and coconut nectar, and flower aminos - with a monthly output of 10-15 tonnes.

Ninety per cent of the products are sold in the domestic market and 10 per cent are exported to Japan, the Netherlands and Germany, he said.

Globally, there is great demand for new sweeteners that have low glycemic index or rich in minerals, or can solve problems that old sweeteners cannot.

And coconut flower nectar is a perfect product to meet that demand.

Coconut flower nectar has a sweet taste, lower glycemic index than honey or cane sugar and high mineral content, making it suitable for vegans, people suffering from diabetes, and seniors.

With more consumers embracing healthy lifestyles, the market for products using natural ingredients such as coconut flower nectar will expand in future.

Tra Vinh is the countrys second largest coconut growing province, and also one of the hardest hit by climate change in the delta, he said.

Coconut trees are highly adaptive to climate change, can withstand salinity levels of 0.5 per cent, and still flower when the salinity level reaches 1.5 per cent though their fruits will drop off or be smaller, meaning earnings will be reduced.

Shifting to planting coconut for collecting syrup will help farmers increase their income by three to five times compared to fruits.

The conversion will be a new direction for farmers in the Mekong Delta to adapt to climate change.

Another start-up that has created a great impact produces instant herbal teas made from the condensed extracts of medicinal plants, which offer great health benefits and help improve the value of local products.

It belongs to pharmacist oan Thi Hong Tham, who decided to quit her high-paying job to found Hygie and Panacee Company in 2019.

Tham said: As a pharmacist with many years of experience in research and production of medicinal herbs, I realise that the Mekong Delta is an extremely abundant source of raw agricultural materials, and each type of agricultural product has medicinal values and have been used for long as folk medicine and recognised in traditional medicine.

For instance, traditional medicines made from ginger help combat motion sickness and dizziness and treat nausea in pregnant women. Fish mint is very good for treating haemorrhoids, constipation and varicose veins, while perilla helps treat colds, nausea and vomiting associated with pregnancy and gout, she said.

These medicinal values in agricultural products are very precious but have not been exploited to the fullest extent, and so I want to make a change to enhance the value of Vietnamese agricultural products and create quality healthcare products.

Her company has developed 12 types of instant herbal teas made from common agricultural products such as ming aralia, perilla, ginger, lemongrass, and others and its production systems meet ISO 22000:2018 standards.

It has tied up with co-operatives that produce clean vegetables in Can Tho to ensure a steady supply of raw materials. Sales have grown steadily in recent years, and in addition to increased consumption in the domestic market, it has also strived to promote exports to more markets, she said.

Nguyen Lam Vien, chairman of Vinamit JSC, which has supported the Innovation Start-up Project Contest (name changed to Green Start-up Project Contest in 2023) for many years, said Viet Nam's agricultural products are increasingly recognised by the world as reflected by their steadily increasing exports.

Consumers globally are paying more attention to healthy and environment-friendly agricultural products, which offer young entrepreneurs a great opportunity if they know how to take advantage, he said.

Evaluating agricultural start-ups set up recently, Vu Kim Anh, deputy director of the Business Study and Assistance Centre and the person in charge of the Green Start-up Project Contest, said: Most of the projects know how to utilise indigenous resources and technologies for processing products to increase their value.

Many start-ups have exported products such as vegetable powders, noodles, coconut flower nectar, and cashew-based products to major markets such as the US, Europe and Southeast Asia.  VNS
BAC LIEU  Shrimp farming, the leading economic activity in Bac Lieu Province and elsewhere in the Mekong Delta, has been hit by a recent slump in prices.

Ta Hoang Nhiem, chairman of the Bac Lieu Province Shrimp Association, said a 40 per cent drop in prices this year has taken a toll on local farmers.

To cut costs, a number of farms have been discharging untreated water into local water bodies, posing a threat to the environment and even peoples lives, Pham Van Thieu, chairman of the provincial Peoples Committee, said.

Fluctuations in exports this year could also lead to a mass closure of household shrimp farms, he said.

The general director of Minh Phu Seafood Corp, Le Van Quang, said many countries are cutting shrimp imports due to the current economic downturn.

Besides, the relatively high production costs mean Vietnamese shrimp exports are unable to compete with that of Ecuador and India.

The problem lies in Viet Nams low shrimp farming success rate of only 40 per cent compared to 90 per cent and 60 per cent for Ecuador and India, he said.

It is important to focus on high-quality shrimp breeds, reduce the density of farms and adopt proper farming methods to achieve a higher success rate, he said.

Many experts also said that to lower costs, feed prices must be under strict management.

The head of the Viet Nam Directorate of Fisheries, Tran inh Luan, said farming households should work with co-operative groups to cut costs, avoid mass harvesting and ensure product quality.

Shrimp prices are projected to bounce back at the end of this year, and so it is crucial to have reasonable preparations in terms of shrimp seed quality and farming environment.  VNS
QUANG NGAI  Masan Consumer, one of Viet Nams leading food and beverages companies, has signed a contract with Quang Ngai Provinces Ly Son District for long-term purchase of Ly Son garlic to produce its new Nam Ngu Ly Son Garlic Chili Fish Sauce line, ensuring growers have a steady outlet.

The island district is well-known for its large garlic farms. It has an abundance of volcanos that enrich the soil with minerals, which combined with its layer of red volcanic basaltic soil and a top layer of coral sand, lend the garlic grown here a unique, appealing flavour.

Garlic is a key crop in Ly Son, often referred to as white gold by local farmers due to its high economic value. It has 300ha under the crop.

Ly Son Garlic is widely known for its aroma and spicy but slightly sweet taste. Its relatively high oil content makes it ideal for producing seasoning and medicine.

However, garlic farming suffers from problems such as weather, diseases, inconsistent demand, and unstable prices.

On July 1, Masan Consumer signed a contract with the Ly Son Peoples Committee and representatives of local garlic farmers to purchase garlic to make its Nam Ngu Ly Son Garlic Chili Fish Sauce (made completely from the regions garlic).

This long-term agreement is part of Nam Ngu brands commitment to its business strategy of creating high-quality products with Viet Nams specialities.

Le Thi Nga, deputy general director of Masan Consumer, said with the companys vision, sustainable development strategy and aim of improving the value of regional specialities, Masan Consumer and its Nam Ngu brand have focused on researching and developing outstanding products that use specialities like Ly Son garlic.

With its export expansion strategy, Nam Ngu is promoting and enhancing the brand value of Ly Son garlic in Viet Nam and abroad.

ang Tan Thanh, deputy chairman of the district, said unpredictable prices make the lives of farmers unstable and limit brand building for their garlic.

We highly regard the agreement by Masan Consumers Nam Ngu brand for enhancing the value of Ly Son garlic. This will play a big role in maintaining and developing the districts long-standing tradition of garlic farming in a sustainable manner, improving its economy and strongly promoting the Ly Son garlic brand.

Local authorities and garlic farmers will work with Nam Ngu to help Ly Son garlic become a national brand that is widely known across the world.

At the signing ceremony, Masan Consumer also contributed VN500 million (US$21,100) to the districts social security programme.

Masan Consumer (MSC) is one of Viet Nams largest consumer good companies, and currently produces and distributes a wide variety of food and beverage products, including seasonings, convenience foods and drinks.

It began operations in 1996, and has since been developing its product portfolio and distribution system to become a leading player in Viet Nams food and beverages market.  VNS
HA NOI  The Ministry of Industry and Trade (MoIT) and Samsung Vietnam on Monday officially kicked off the smart factory development project with an aim to support Vietnamese firms to participate in global supply chains.

Accordingly, in the first phase of the project, 12 businesses in Bac Ninh, Ha Noi, Ha Nam, Hung Yen and Vinh Phuc would participate in a three-week training course to gain theories about smart factories and nine-week practice. Samsungs specialists and Vietnamese consultants would review the businesses and help them establish smart factories.

Specialists then would continue to support the firms in building operation and management systems as well as making improvements.

Speaking at the ceremony, o Thang Hai, Deputy Minister of Industry and Trade, said: In the context of a highly competitive market, with a self-screening and selection mechanism, Vietnamese manufacturing enterprises are facing many challenges, having to compete with large corporations not only in the international market but also in the domestic market. Therefore, developing smart factories is an inevitable trend for Vietnamese manufacturing enterprises.

Hai said that to realise the goal of further promoting industrialisation and modernisation in Resolution No 29/NQ-TW, the ministry has actively implemented cooperation programmes with multinational and large FDI enterprises in Viet Nam to improve the quality of human resources and competitiveness of Vietnamese enterprises in the field of manufacturing, processing and support industry.

He added that cooperation programmes with Samsung Viet Nam have brought positive signs to the countrys industrial sector in general and the support industry in particular, helping local firms join the global supply chain.

Choi Joo Ho, President of Samsung Vietnam Complex, said: Based on the achievements in supporting the development of the support industry in the past seven years, Samsung Vietnam will continue to promote cooperation in the field of smart manufacturing for the development of the industry which creates high added value the Vietnamese Government is aiming for in the medium and long term.

He said he hoped that through this project, Vietnamese enterprises would strengthen their competitiveness according to global standards across the entire process, such as development, production and sales. Further, there will be many excellent businesses expanding their opportunities to participate in the supply chain of Samsung and global enterprises.

"In particular, this project has the participation of experts from Samsung's parent company to support the construction of the smart factory. With the support, I hope that the capacity of businesses participating in the project will be improved to a new level," he added.

As one of 12 enterprises participating in this project, Nguyen inh Than, Director of AMA Bac Ninh Joint Stock Company, said: In order to survive and develop, in addition to improving productivity and quality, standardising process, digitising production data at each stage, updating in real-time, making timely and correct decisions are vital requirements for businesses in general and AMA in particular.

Implementing the Memorandum of Understanding on the cooperation project on smart factory development between the MoIT and Samsung Vietnam, the ministry in 2022 cooperated with Samsung Vietnam to train 51 smart factory consultants and support consulting and improvement for 26 enterprises applying smart factories in both the North and the South.

The programme has brought a lot of in-depth knowledge to help improve the expertise of the domestic consultants and support to improve the production operation capacity on the basis of businesses information technology. The response and active participation from the business community is the premise for the ministry to continue implementing the programme in 2023 and the following years.

Since 2008, after officially investing in Viet Nam, Samsung Vietnam has been making efforts to contribute to the development of Viet Nam's support industry through a variety of support activities.  VNS
HA NOI  Improving access to opportunities for workers in the digital age is a must, said Vu Quoc Huy, director of Vietnam National Innovation Centre.

Huy made his comment during a forum discussing digital jobs, which presented the results of a programme called "New Opportunities" under the guidance of the Workforce for Innovation and Startup Ecosystem (USAID WISE). The event was co-hosted by the National Innovation Centre and USAID in Ha Noi on Wednesday.

The two events aim to support the development of Viet Nam's digital-savvy employee base to meet the challenges in the fourth industrial revolution.

Through digital skills training courses, employees, especially the unemployed or those who want to change careers after the COVID-19 pandemic, will get up-to-date knowledge to meet their future job requirements.

According to Huy, the training sessions will teach people how to proficiently access and use digital technology, thereby giving them more opportunities to find advanced jobs and progress in their careers. This is a key factor for employees in the context of constantly changing work patterns and the development of the services industry in Viet Nam.

Aler Grubbs, Director of USAID Vietnam said: The New Opportunities Programme is part of our broader partnership to support Viet Nam's shift to a knowledge-based, high-tech economy."

"Workers can broadly contribute to and benefit from this new economy. Viet Nam has been very focused on digital development and transformation, and embracing the fourth industrial revolution. This requires a significant shift in workforce skill composition.

o Tien Thinh, Deputy Director of NIC said that the New Opportunities programme was initially conducted in the first quarter of 2023, when many were unemployed due to the lingering economic hit of the pandemic.

The New Opportunities programme helps workers participate in training, with women making up at least 20 per cent of the total. After the training, 50 per cent of the participants should be able to secure a new job, Thinh said.

Many enterprises in the textiles and electronics industries were forced to lay off staff. In addition, a number of workers were replaced by machines and had to change their careers altogether.

This programme focuses on supporting unemployed workers due to the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic, as well as those likely to face unemployment due to automation in the future. It also aims to create opportunities for workers to join short-term training courses to improve their skills better to adapt to the digital economy.

Nguyen Thi Nga, a representative of the World Bank, said that Viet Nam's labour market has made a drastic change from self-employed to salaried employees.

Currently, 70 per cent of the fastest-growing occupational groups are specialists and technicians in the fields of IT, healthcare, science and technology and economics, as well as business and administration. Digital literacy is now widespread in Viet Nam with about two-thirds of careers requiring it.

Many technical skills in Viet Nam still fall below the global average, especially those involving advertising, architecture, and electronics. She noted that careers now require high levels of computer use.

She said Viet Nam needs to increase investment in boosting the supply and quality of labour in developing industries.

Within the framework of the forum, USAID's Economic Growth Support Program in Asia (US-SEGA) and FUNiX signed a cooperation agreement to pilot the "Digital transformation for Vietnamese workers" programme. The activities promise to help workers narrow the gap in knowledge in the key sectors of the fourth industrial revolution and develop new skills to reposition themselves and take advantage of new opportunities.  VNS
LARMOR-PLAGE -- The Festival Vietnam took place at Salles des Algues in the city of Larmor-Plage, in the Morbihan region, France, between 30 June and 2 July.

The event aimed to promote Vietnamese culture and was held as part of the Toucher Arts project, commemorating 50 years of Vietnamese-French diplomatic relations.

It was organised by the City Hall of Larmor-Plage in collaboration with three associations: Art Space, Vietnam Bretagne Sud, and Appel Lorient.

A series of large-scale activities, such as an art exhibition featuring children's artwork from nearly 20 countries around the world, was organised along with a concert to promote Vietnamese culture and art, a parade in the city centre and along the Larmor-Plage coastline to showcase traditions and customs, as well as festival stalls serving Vietnamese street food.

As many as 500 Vietnamese ao dai (traditional costume) were presented to French friends attending the festival. In return for receiving an ao dai, attendees volunteered to make a contribution to the project's fund, which will be utilised to support four orphanages and centres for the disabled in three regions of Viet Nam.

Various creative and large-scale workshops were continually organised at the festival to promote Vietnamese culture and traditions. These workshops included: making bamboo leaf decorations, which provide insights into Vietnamese Lunar New Year celebrations; workshops on creating ong Ho folk paintings; workshops on calligraphy, allowing the French participants to experience using pen brushes and ink; as well as engaging question-and-answer sessions on Vietnamese cultural knowledge, accompanied by interesting gifts.

In addition, the exhibition showcased nearly a hundred selected paintings out of more than 400 artworks contributed by Vietnamese-origin children from nearly 20 countries, as well as international children, in response to the 50th anniversary of Viet Nam-France diplomatic relations.

Young artist Thao Nguyen also presented her photo collection titled "Dreamy Hoi An".

There were over 10 booths introducing Vietnamese street food such as banh mi, bun bo (beef noodle soup), banh bao (steamed buns), savoury sticky rice, nem (spring rolls), banh gio (rice dumplings), and che ba mau (three-colour sweet soup).

These offerings attracted a large number of interested visitors who came to enjoy the food. French friends have continuously expressed their love and admiration for Vietnamese cuisine as well as the dishes introduced at the festival.

Under the theme of "Customs and Traditions", a collective of more than 100 international students, alongside Vietnamese residents in France and their French counterparts, adorned in traditional attire and ao dai, paraded together to introduce the traditional wedding customs and Lunar New Year festivities of Viet Nam.

The French locals had the opportunity to gain further insight into marriage rituals, bride selection, the betrothal ceremony, and the formal introduction of the two families. Additionally, the procession showcased vivid scenes reminiscent of Tet (Lunar New Year) festival, such as the representation of the Kitchen God rituals and the exchange of lucky money in red envelopes. The grandeur and scale of the procession were further enhanced by the participation of ten large-scale lion dance troupes.

On the evening of 1 July, more than 50 non-professional artists participated in a concert titled "Toucher Arts - Les Traditions et Legendes du Vietnam" (Embracing Traditions and Legends of Vietnam) to showcase the beauty of Vietnamese music to the French audience at the festival.

Through captivating songs and mesmerising dance performances, the French audiences had the opportunity to deepen their understanding of Vietnamese culture and traditions. Notably, the concert also featured the participation of young Vietnamese born and raised in France, as well as international students from various countries, showcasing exceptional acts including traditional musical instrument performances, singing, and traditional dance.

Additionally, Vietnamese-Belgian fashion designer Ella Phan presented her collection of ao dai at the festival as a special contribution.

The Mayor of Larmor-Plage, Patrice Valton, expressed his delight and optimism, not only regarding the established collaborations between Larmor-Plage and several cities in Viet Nam but also in light of the events taking place in his city, such as the Festival Vietnam.

He expressed great joy and pride in offering the people of Larmor-Plage the opportunity to explore the diverse and distinctive cultural heritage of Viet Nam.

The Vietnamese Ambassador to France, inh Toan Thang, shared his profound emotions upon witnessing the widespread dissemination and warm reception of Vietnamese culture among the French people.

He commended the remarkable success of the Art Space, Vietnam Bretagne Sud, and Appel Lorient associations in strengthening cultural connections and exchanges between the two nations, as well as promoting the beautiful image of Viet Nam to French friends.

"This event marked a perfect milestone for the 50th anniversary of Viet Nam-France diplomatic relations," he said. VNS
HA NOI Renowned director Bui inh Hac, who made history as the first-ever recipient of an international award for Vietnamese cinema, has passed away, aged 90.

As one of the first Vietnamese directors, he has made significant contributions to the development of Vietnamese cinema.

His debut work, the documentary film Nuoc ve Bac Hung Hai (Water Returns to Bac Hung Hai), produced in 1959, won the first international award for Vietnamese cinema - the Gold Prize at the Moscow International Film Festival - that same year. The director was only 25 years old at the time.

Over the course of his more than 50-year career, the director worked on both documentary and feature films. Alongside Water Returns to Bac Hung Hai, he was also well-known for his feature film Ha Noi 12 Ngay em (Hanoi 12 Days and Nights), produced in 2002. It was also the first Vietnamese film to extensively adopt special effects and modern technologies.

From 2002 to 2005, Hanoi 12 Days and Nights represented Viet Nam at numerous major international film festivals, including Locarno in Switzerland, Fokuoka in Japan, and in Cairo in Egypt, Vesoul in France, and Fajr in Iran.

During his career, Hac won 3 First Prizes and 1 Second Prize at various international film festivals, as well as seven Golden Lotus Awards and one Silver Lotus Award at Vietnamese film festivals.

With his exceptional achievements, he was awarded the title of People's Artist (First Class) by the state in 1984. In 2007, he was also honoured with the Ho Chi Minh Prize for Literature and Art for his outstanding contributions to cinema, specifically for his seven exceptional film works.

Director and People's Artist Bui inh Hac was born on June 4, 1934 in Tam Nong District in the northern province of Phu Tho.

He embarked on his filmmaking career after moving to inh Hoa District in the northern province of Thai Nguyen, the cradle of Vietnamese revolutionary cinema and photography, in 1953. After graduating from the Hanoi Film School, he continued his studies at VGIK (All-Union State Institute of Cinematography) in the Soviet Union.

Many other of his notable works, besides Water Returns to Bac Hung Hai and Hanoi 12 Days and Nights, include Nguyen Van Troi, uong Ve Que Me (Journey Back to my Homeland), Sai Gon Thang 5 Nam 1975 (Saigon in May 1975), and Ho Chi Minh  Chan Dung Mot Con Nguoi (Ho Chi Minh - Portrait of a Person).

The experienced director held prominent positions such as the Director of the Central Newsreel and Documentary Film Studio, the Head of the Vietnam Cinema Department, and the Deputy Secretary-General of the Vietnam Cinema Association.

He passed away at Vietnam-Soviet Friendship Hospital on July 1. VNS
HA NOI  The highly anticipated movie Barbie will not be showing in Vietnamese theatres for scenes depicting China's nine-dash-line map that is considered to be a violation of Viet Nam's sovereign territory.

Vi Kien Thanh, head of the Department of Cinema, under the Ministry of Culture, Sports, and Tourism, on Monday informed the media of the decision made by the National Council for Film Appraisal and Classification after a review of the movie.

The movie, directed by Greta Gerwig and featuring Margot Robbie and Ryan Gosling, was expected to hit the screen from July 21, the same day as in the United States, but cinema chains across Viet Nam did not include it in their upcoming list, even as July already started, which sparked concerns over its availability.

The nine dash line is an egregious, unilateral map by China that claims much of the East Sea (known internationally as the South China Sea), including Viet Nam's two island chains of Truong Sa (Spratlys) and Hoang Sa (Paracels).

Viet Nam has repeatedly stated its stance on the matter, saying it has sufficient historical evidence and legal grounds to assert claims over the East Sea and the two archipelagoes.

The Hague-based international arbitration court in 2016 announced its landmark ruling invalidating China's nine-dash-line claims over the East Sea, a ruling that Viet Nam welcomed.

Movie fans have expressed their regret on social media about not being able to see one of the most awaited films of the year in the theatres but remain supportive of the decision to reject the offending contents related to national territory and sovereignty.

Christopher Nolan's Oppenheimer, also with a scheduled theatrical release on July 21, is being delayed for about two weeks in Viet Nam pending appraisal from the national council, local media reported.  VNS
WASHINGTON  Viet Nam attaches importance to relations with the US and wants to continue developing the ties for the benefit of their people, and for peace, friendship, cooperation, and development in the region and the world.

That was the message from Chairman of the Party Central Committees Commission for Foreign Affairs Le Hoai Trung who held meetings with US officials during his working visit to the US from June 28 to July 2 at the invitation of the US Department of State.

In Washington DC, the Vietnamese delegation held working sessions with US Secretary of State Antony Blinken, US National Security Advisor Jake Sullivan, Administrator of the United States Agency for International Development (USAID) Samantha Power, Assistant Secretary of State for East Asian and Pacific Affairs Daniel Kritenbrink and Deputy Under Secretary of Defense for Policy Sasha Baker, President & Chief Executive Officer (CEO) of the US-ASEAN Business Council (US-ABC). They also met with former US officials and senators who support the development of Viet Nam-US relations.

In New York, the delegation worked with UN Under-Secretary-General for Policy Guy Ryder, and had an online discussion with US Special Presidential Envoy for Climate John Kerry. They also had meetings with long-standing friends of Viet Nam in the US, and representatives of the US Communist Party.

During the meetings, both sides agreed that the Viet Nam-US Comprehensive Partnership has witnessed robust, positive, and comprehensive development across fields in recent years.

The US officials affirmed that the US considers Viet Nam one of its key partners in the region, agreeing that the bilateral relations have enjoyed support from both the Democratic Party and Republican Party. They highly valued the recent contacts and meetings between the two sides, particularly the high-level phone talks between General Secretary of the Communist Party of Viet Nam Nguyen Phu Trong and President Joe Biden in March 2023.

They emphasised the desire to maintain exchanges and meetings at all levels, especially at the high-level, during the year marking the 10th founding anniversary of the Comprehensive Partnership; and deepen the bilateral relations, especially in terms of economic cooperation, climate change response, green energy, education - training, tackling war consequences, people-to-people exchanges and addressing global issues.

Meanwhile, the UN official acknowledged and applauded Viet Nam's successful development, cooperation, and contributions within the framework of the UN, hoping that Viet Nam will further enhance its important role in addressing global issues.

The US friends and representatives of the Communist Party of the US showed their pleasure with Viet Nam's renewal achievements and the path to socialism in the Southeast Asian nation, affirming that they always support Viet Nam and the development of the Viet Nam-US relationship.

Trung suggested the two sides continue promoting high-level exchanges and meetings, improving the efficiency of cooperation via the Party, state and people-to-people diplomacy channels in line with the results of the phone talks between General Secretary Nguyen Phu Trong and President Joe Biden.

The Vietnamese official said that Viet Nam treasures the role played by the UN and will continue to actively and responsibly contribute to the organisations activities.

Trung also expressed his gratitude to US friends who have always supported Viet Nam in the struggles for national liberation in the past. He also proposed directions to strengthen cooperation with the US Communist Party and socio-political organisations between the two sides in the coming time.  VNS
Metro Manila (CNN Philippines, July 3)  A female student was sexually assaulted inside the campus of University of the Philippines Diliman (UPD) in Quezon City last week, UPD Office of the Chancellor and the Commission on Higher Education have confirmed.

They said the student was assaulted by an unidentified assailant along Ylanan Street last July 1.

CHED Chairman Prospero de Vera on Monday said the student is under medical care, while the assailant remains at-large.

He added higher education institutions must remain as safe spaces for their students.

"This despicable criminal act is a wake-up call for the University of the Philippines to review and rationalize its security and safety policies, including its operational engagement with the Philippine National Police and other law enforcement agencies in order to make the UP Community safe and secure," De Vera said in a statement.

The UPD administration said it has been working with the police to arrest the suspect and provide assistance to the victim.

It added it is deploying more roving security personnel and university police officers in different areas in the campus, especially after office hours. It also reminded those who enter the campus to remain vigilant and report suspicious activities.
HA NOI  After each north-south journey, train driver Le Cong Thuc and his crew members breathe a sigh of relief only when the train arrives at the station safely.

Thuc, who works with Thong Nhat Crew No 10 under the Ha Noi Locomotive Enterprise, said that a number of illegal crossroads were opened by residents in different provinces and cities along the railway line.

Accidents are always lurking, and Thuc and the crew members do not know when problems may occur.

The railway industry and local authorities have been closing the dangerous passageways, but after a short time, local residents re-open them just to make travel easier for themselves.

Railway accidents are mainly due to motorbike and car drivers poor awareness.

At many crossings, when the bell rings, the red light flashes to signal a trains arrival, but many car and motorbike drivers still try to cross the railway, leading to collisions or even derailment.

Some others still walk, stand or sit close to the illegal crossings. When the train driver discovers them, it's too late.

Many tragic accidents have occurred at railway crossings. Despite local warnings and education campaigns, many people still ignore the danger.

This fact has urged the railway industry to upgrade the crossing system to ensure train safety.

According to Vietnam Railways (VNR), since the beginning of this year, the country saw 68 railway accidents, of which 31 occurred at illegal crossroads, accounting for 46 per cent of the cases. A further 27 cases occurred along the railway line, making up 40 per cent, and the remaining 10 cases at legal crossings with automatic warnings, making up 15 per cent.

Phan Quoc Anh, deputy general director of the VNR, said that the Prime Minister issued Decision No. 358/Q-TTg about a scheme to ensure the traffic corridors order and safety.

The scheme will handle illegal crossroads and set out a specific route with many infrastructure solutions such as installing fencing and making overpasses and underpasses.

The aim is to eliminate illegal crossings on railway lines in the country by 2025.

Funds required will be allocated from the State and local budget, estimated at more than VN7.1 trillion (US$304.1 million).

The Vietnam Railway Authority under the Ministry of Transport (MoT) also sent documents asking localities to implement Decision 358.

Determining crossings is the most important thing in ensuring train line safety. VNR is implementing many projects to upgrade the crossings.

To date, VNR has upgraded 452 crossings, equipping them with automatic barriers and guards.

This year, VNR will repair and supplement signals at 200 crossings.

It also sent a document to the MoT to propose the Prime Minister extend the time to upgrade and install automatic warning signals at 566 other crossings to the end of 2025.

When completed, there will be automatic sensors at all railway crossings. When the train runs through these sensors, the signal will be transmitted through the railway cable to the control cabinet.

The device at the control cabinet will automatically turn on the bell in the guardhouse to notify the guard staff that the train will arrive in 120 seconds. Then the guard staff will close the barrier, or perform another appropriate operation based on regulations.

Devices at the control cabinet will also automatically turn on the bell and red light at the crossings to warn people on traffic that a train is about to come.  VNS
A LAT  Police want to speak to around 20 people in connection with a deadly landslide in a Lat City which killed two people and injured five others.

Criminal proceedings have also been launched over construction violations which have been the reason for the landslide.

Colonel Tran Vinh Phu, head of the citys police office said that after the incident, the provinces Police Department directed the citys police office to quickly clarify the cause of this landslide.

Investigators have examined the scene of the collapse which happened in alley No 36, Hoang Hoa Tham Street, Ward 10 last Thursday.

The investigating agency recommended that local people, who knew of the violations related to the construction of the embankment causing the landslide in the alley, should soon report it to authorities.

On Saturday and Sunday, ang Quang Tu, Chairman of the People's Committee of the city ordered the forces to proactively bring machinery and vehicles to destroy the remaining of the embankment to avoid unexpected accidents.

The embankment showed signs of cracking and it was not safe, so the committee decided to destroy it, he said.

Tu also sent a written request on Saturday to the head of the Office of the People's Council, Office of the People's Committee; Office of Natural Resources and Environment; and the People's Committee of Ward 10, ordering that all officials, civil servants and public employees of the agencies and units to not leave the locality to serve the investigation.

The officials, civil servants and public employees were told to coordinate and provide full information to the investigating agency at any time, including Saturday and Sunday, until the investigation is completed, Tu said.

The two victims were a husband and wife who migrated from Phu Yen Province to work in construction. The landslide occurred after a nearby concrete embankment broke in heavy rain, causing four homes to be buried. Two houses were completely destroyed, while two others are partly buried by the soil.

According to Head of the Weather Forecasting Department, National Centre for Hydro-meteorological Forecasting, Nguyen Van Huong, recently Lam ong has experienced frequent rains leading to the soil and rock to be saturated with water.

Landslides can happen at any time regardless of day or night, he said.  VNS
Thanh Hoa has pledged to provide favourable conditions for Sumitomo Corporation's investment endeavours. The province's leaders have urged the corporation to swiftly conduct research and investment promotion, aiming to realise the construction and operation of the proposed project.

Representing Sumitomo Corporation, Takashi Yanai, member of the Board and general manager of the Infrastructure Business Division, expressed gratitude to Thanh Hoa leaders for their collaboration. He acknowledged the province's robust socioeconomic development, favourable geographical location, and population.

Yanai emphasised Sumitomo Corporation's commitment to creating a clean and prosperous living environment through the project.

He thanked the province for their assistance and expressed hope that the endeavour would commemorate the 50th anniversary of Japan-Vietnam diplomatic relations.

Yanai assured that Sumitomo Corporation would adhere to legal regulations, expedite research progress, and sought Thanh Hoa province's support throughout the project's implementation.

An MoU aims to enhance cooperation, draw foreign investment, create jobs, and contribute to the province's development has been inked between two sides.

Particularly, Sumitomo Corporation has shown interest in an industrial zone, covering 650 hectares, the logistics centre, and urban development spanning 168.5ha.

The project, with a capital of over $400 million, is slated for implementation between 2024 and 2025.

Sumitomo's subsidiary is researching infrastructure investment in the technology-industry-service zone, spanning 1,200ha, with a focus on clean industries and advanced technologies. Success may draw additional Japanese investors to collaborate with Thanh Hoa.

vir
Sonny Vu's carbon-based 3D-printed scooter campaign is temporarily locked to verify user allegations

The campaign to raise capital for Arevo's Scotsman All-Carbon Fiber electric scooter, founded by Mr. Sonny Vu, started around May 2021. The product is also part of a 3D printed vehicle project made from carbon fiber similar to the Superstrata bicycle model, which is called by Mr. Sonny Vu and Mrs. Le Diep Kieu Trang - former Director of Facebook Vietnam.

According to the expected plan written on the Indiegogo fundraising page, the scooter will start handing over to capital contributors in December 2021, but so far, only a few people have received the product. Currently, Indiegogo temporarily suspended fundraising for this project after many people left comments about not receiving goods as well as any support from the fundraising unit or Mr. Sonny Vu personally. The decision of the fundraising platform means that the unit will verify the project's information and stop receiving more contributions from members.

Before being put into "frozen", the project raised more than 564,999 EUR from 301 contributors, equivalent to an increase of 595% compared to the manufacturer's plan (92,000 EUR).

Previously, Arevo - a start-up manufacturing 3D printed bicycles of Mr. Sonny Vu and Mrs. Le Diep Kieu Trang, former Director of Facebook Vietnam, was misrepresented by users for their commitment to delivery and poor quality sales for the Superstrata 3D printed bicycle.

Also read: The nearly $20 million project of the Vietnamese 3D-printer bike closed

Who is Sonny Vu?

Sonny Vu is one of the most famous people in industrial start-ups, of which the biggest success is the founding of Misfit Wearables, a wearable device for health monitoring. In 2015, Fossil Group acquired Misfit for $260 million.

Sonny Vu (full name is Vu Xuan Son) was born in 1973 in Long Xuyen. He left Vietnam with his family in 1979. Vu Xuan Son graduated with a double degree in mathematics and linguistics from the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign branch.

Education

He graduated with both BA degrees in Mathematics and Linguistics from the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign.

He studied for a doctorate at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) but still needs to complete the program.

Although he did not complete his doctoral program, he was still called Doctor (Dr.) because he completed his doctoral thesis in linguistics at MIT.

Sony Vu has extensive knowledge of Mathematics, Linguistics and Information Technology. This greatly helped his career in starting and managing his business.

Career

He started his own business and failed while studying for a doctorate at MIT in 1996. After that, he worked at Microsoft.

In 1999, he again gave up a stable job at Microsoft to return to study at MIT but left halfway to found the first technology company, FireSpout.

This technology was sold to a large corporation in 2001.

With old classmates, he founded Agamatrix, operating in the field of blood glucose monitoring devices for people with diabetes. This is the first great success of Sony Vu.

In 2011, he gave up his management position at Agamatrix to start his own company, Misfit Wearables, operating in the field of smartwatches. This was his most successful company, which Fossil later acquired for $260 million.

Sony Vu is considered a pioneering entrepreneur who dares to give up a stable job to pursue his dream of starting a business. Many times failed at first but still achieved great success in the end.

Also read: Former Facebook Vietnam and Go-Viet CEO invests in the worlds first carbon fiber bicycle startup

Who is Le Diep Kieu Trang?

Le Diep Kieu Trang (English name Christy Le) was born in 1980 in Ho Chi Minh City. She is the daughter of Mr. Le Van Tri, former Deputy General Director of Southern Rubber Industry Joint Stock Company (Casumina - CSM). Her brother is Le Tri Thong, former Deputy General Director of Dong A Bank and currently Vice Chairman of the Board of Directors of Phu Nhuan Jewelry Joint Stock Company (PNJ). Her husband, Sonny Vu (real name Vu Xuan Son), is the co-founder and CEO of the fashion electronics company Misfit Wearables.

Education

Graduated from Le Hong Phong High School for the Gifted, Ho Chi Minh City.

Studied at Nguyen Tat Thanh University (less detailed information).

Studied a Bachelor's degree at Said Business School of the University of Oxford, UK, 2000-2003.

Studied for master's degree at the Sloan School of Business of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT Sloan School of Management), 2009-2011.

Studying a postgraduate degree at Oxford University, UK, period 2003 - 2005.

Read more: VinFast Vietnam will be one of the world's three largest electric vehicle companies?
The draft law on amendments and supplements to a number of articles of the Law on Foreigners Entry into, Exit from, Transit through, and Residence in Vietnam has been approved by the National Assembly at its fifth session, with more than 95 per cent of deputies agreeing. The law will take effect on August 15.

Visitors from countries that are unilaterally exempted from visas by Vietnam will be granted a temporary stay of 45 days, instead of the current 15 days. Meanwhile, foreign nationals from 80 countries who are being granted an e-visa can enter and exit the country as many times as they wish within 90 days, without having to go through the process of obtaining a new visa.

The new regulations have put Vietnam in the group of countries with average visa-free duration in the region, equivalent to competitors Thailand and Singapore, which also allow international guests to stay up to 45-90 days.

According to many experts, the relaxation of regulations and length of stay will quickly bring Vietnams tourism bounce back to pre-pandemic levels, contributing to improving the competitiveness of destinations, promoting the growth of the international tourist market, and supporting the tourism industry.

This also creates new advantages for foreigners who want to enter Vietnam to study, survey the market, and promote investment, especially in cases where there is a need to go to many countries in the region and return to Vietnam to evaluate and compare the possibility of expanding investment and business, said Le Tan Toi, Chairman of the National Assemblys Committee for National Defence and Security.

Despite being in a low period for international tourism, the countrys tourism industry still achieved impressive growth results.

90 day E-visa extension expected to attract international tourists (illustration photo/ Source: freepik.com)

Vietnam has a growth rate of 10-25 per cent, ranked sixth in the world, much higher than the general growth rate of Southeast Asia, according to Google Trends. International arrivals to Vietnam jumped to nearly 1 million in June, an increase of 6.4 per cent over the previous month. They were mainly tourists from key markets, including South Korea, China, the US, Malaysia, Japan, and Singapore.

In the first half of 2023, Vietnams tourism has served nearly 5.6 million international visitors and 64 million domestic tourists with total revenue from tourists reaching about $14.9 billion, according to the latest report from the Vietnam National Administration of Tourism.

Vietnam is one of the most popular destinations in Southeast Asia, attracting millions of tourists every year. The country received 3.66 million international arrivals in 2022 and aims to welcome 8 million this year, earning about $2.8 billion from tourism services. The new visa policy has received positive feedback from various experts and stakeholders in the tourism sector, who believe that it will facilitate economic activity and attract more international tourists and investors to Vietnam.

Lukasz Kozlowski CEO, MakeYourAsia As a destination management company located in Vietnam like us, new visa policy is a very good and important step towards rebuilding and growing the inbound tourist market. For groups like us, offering multi-country Southeast Asian tours, the possibility of obtaining multiple entry visas for our guests is opening new possibilities for designing itineraries in the region and bringing in more guests - not only for their first trip to Vietnam and Southeast Asia, but also for their later returns to the destinations they loved. We are happy to see every step that will make the entry process to the country easier. We are hoping that Vietnamese authorities will soon consider to implement visa waivers for Central European countries like Poland or the Czech Republic. Wendy Vu Country manager Qatar Airways This is exciting news after months waiting. I believe many foreign tourists and Vietnamese overseas cannot wait to plan their trip to Vietnam soon. The extension to a 90-day stay will help tourists to explore rural parts of northern Vietnam that are famous for the diverse culture of different ethnic minorities, and natural beaches along central and southern coastlines. We hope the good news to be shared to more channels, including social media, press, and TV channels, along with continuous marketing activities to promote Vietnam around the world. Nevertheless, more countries should be considered to offer visa exemptions like the US, Holland, Belgium, Poland, and others. Erkan Tuncaakar General manager Go Vacation Vietnam European partner tour operators welcome the decision on extending visa-free entry and the e-visa with multi-entry up to 90 days. However, many tour operators from Switzerland, Austria, Holland, Belgium, and other EU countries have expressed their disappointment at not being included in the visa waiver programme yet. Another request from the tour operators was to make the entry regulations for Phu Quoc clearer with the new entry regulations. Different entry regulations cause confusion among travellers and travel agents. Martin Koerner Head, Tourism Working Group Vietnam Business Forum We are very pleased with the new visa policy for which we advocated for many years. This is a significant improvement that will make Vietnam more attractive and competitive as a tourism destination in the region and beyond. We commend the Vietnamese government for listening to the voice of the tourism industry and taking this important step to facilitate travel and investment in Vietnam. The new visa policy will have positive implications for the tourism and hospitality industry, especially in the context of the pandemic recovery. It will help increase the number of international arrivals, lengthen their stay, diversify their itineraries, and boost their spending in Vietnam. It will also encourage more foreign investors to explore opportunities in the tourism sector. It will create more jobs, income, and tax revenue for the local economy and contribute to the sustainable development of Vietnam. However, we also believe that there is still room for further improvement and simplification of the visa policy. We recommend to the Vietnamese government to consider adding more countries to the visa exemption list, in particular EU countries, Australia and New Zealand, which are important source markets for Vietnam. We also suggest that the government streamline the visa application process, enhance the online platform, and ensure consistent implementation at all border gates. We hope that the government will continue to consult with the tourism industry and other stakeholders through platforms such to address any challenges and issues that may arise from the new visa policy. We look forward to working closely with the government and partners to promote Vietnam as a safe and friendly destination for all visitors. Dr. Nuno F. Ribeiro Associate senior program manager Tourism and Hospitality Management RMIT University Vietnam Visa extensions are great initiatives that will drive more international tourists to Vietnam. I can comprehend the immense amount of work and inter-agency cooperation that was necessary to pass this resolution. I would also urge the government to dedicate more efforts in supporting tertiary education in tourism and hospitality management, especially at the university level, so that the Vietnamese managerial workforce will be ready with the right skill set to correspond to increasing numbers of tourists. This will ensure the quality of Vietnamese tourism products and set the nation up to become a first-class tourism destination worldwide.

Visa extension proposal to help boost tourism: Insiders The Government has agreed to propose to the National Assembly some new policies relating to the immigration, transit and residence of foreigners in Vietnam, including one on a visa extension to 90 days.
Ana Mandara Cam Ranh Secures Hat-Trick of Awards

Outperforming more than 30 esteemed contenders within the same category, Ana Mandara Cam Ranh Resort has emerged as the sole beachfront destination at Bai Dai, Cam Ranh, to be honored as one of the Top 10 Best Beach Resorts in Vietnam.

The recognition places the resort alongside prominent players in Vietnams luxury tourism and resort industry. With its 25-year development legacy in Khanh Hoa province, the beach resort has proven its brand value.

Furthermore, Ana Mandara Cam Ranh Resort excelled at the Asia-Pacific Property Awards, an international event organised by the International Property Awards, renowned for its extensive reach. This accolade holds immense value for businesses involved in real estate project development, architecture, design, consulting, and interiors.

The resort successfully navigated a rigorous evaluation process conducted by a panel of over 80 industry experts, ultimately securing the category New Hotel Construction & Design Vietnam. The recognition for this, as well as being one of the top 10 best beach resorts in Vietnam, serve as a driving force for Ana Mandara Cam Ranh Resort to continually uphold and enhance its service quality, leaving an indelible mark on the resort tourism industry.

Ana Mandara Cam Ranh nominated for multiple prestigious travel awards Ana Mandara Cam Ranh, a 5-star resort, has continuously been named in some of the world's most prestigious travel awards.
Le Minh Hoan, Minister of Agrilculture and Rural Development

The conference was co-chaired by Le Minh Hoan, Minister of Agriculture and Rural Development, and Florika Fink-Hooijer, director-general of the Directorate-General Environment of the European Commission. In attendance were over 100 delegates, including representatives from departments under the MARD, local authorities in the Central Highlands provinces and districts, EU member states, coffee associations, and businesses, as well as domestic and international organisations.

The conferences objective was to share an overview of the requirements of the new European Union Deforestation-Free Regulation (EUDR), the opportunities and challenges that this regulation may bring to Vietnam's coffee industry, and to propose solutions to support the coffee producers as they try to meet the new regulations within an 1824 month preparation period. In addition, the national action plan for Vietnam's coffee sector to comply with EUDR was presented for the first time to key industry representatives and relevant international organisations.

Minister Hoan showed appreciation for the EU's recent support for the transformation of the agriculture sector towards more sustainable development practices. Pioneering policies from the EU, such as the Green Deal, From Farm to Fork, and the Circular Economy, have inspired and provided important references for the MARD in developing strategies for sustainable agriculture and rural development, as well as sub-sector strategies.

"90 per cent of global deforestation is driven by agriculture. As a major consumer market, the EU has a major role to play," Fink-Hooijer said, and he underlined the EU's willingness to support Vietnam's sustainable development. "The EU and Vietnam aim to address environmental challenges more effectively, contributing to the overall wellbeing of Vietnamese citizens and the preservation of the country's unique natural heritage," he said.

"The EUDR, which is expected to take effect in December 2024, will directly affect stakeholders in supply chains relating to wood products, rubber, and coffee, and will impact the livelihoods of farmers, especially smallholder farmers who comprise the majority in Vietnam," Minister Hoan said.

Supply chains will face various obstacles, particularly in terms of location data, traceability, monitoring systems, and deforestation-free supply chain management.

"These regulations are not only necessary to meet EU requirements for exporting, but MARD also considers them an opportunity to accelerate the implementation of Vietnam's agricultural development strategy," he added.

Tran Quynh Chi, regional director of Asia Landscapes at IDH, stressed the importance of public-private partnerships to implement EUDR compliance solutions in Vietnam. "With nearly 10 years of experience implementing the Central Highlands Landscape programme with public agencies and companies, IDH will closely collaborate with national and local partners in Vietnam to deploy comprehensive interventions to comply with EUDR. At the same time, we call for the participation and contribution of interested companies and organisations in the EUDR Action Framework to deliver significant impacts on responsible production, natural resource protection, and social inclusion."

Since the EUDR was passed by the European Parliament on May 16, it has had an impact on Vietnam's main export industries, including wood, coffee, and rubber. According to the regulation, many of Vietnam's agricultural products, especially coffee, imported into the European market must have GPS data at farm level, which will be used to assess the risk of deforestation through remote monitoring systems.

Rising demand for coffee in EU opens doors for increased Vietnamese offerings Europeans love their morning coffee  and Vietnam could continue to profit from this habit if domestic exporters make good use of the trade agreement with the EU. However, the competition remains active too, increasing the pressure from markets like Brazil and Southeast Asia, in addition to the seemingly ever-lasting challenges in freight costs.

Can coffee supply of Vietnam satisfy Chinese demand? As the second-largest coffee exporter in the world, Vietnam is more than well equipped to represent a major supplier of Chinas current and future demand for coffee.
The conference discussed how to build a data foundation for more accurate financial reporting planning organised by the Vietnam CFO Association, Microsoft, TC Data, and TD Tech Data, as insights were shared on the digital transformation journey of tech companies, emphasising the pivotal role of robust leadership in instigating change.

Over 80 industry experts and high-ranking executives gathered at the conference on June 29 in Ho Chi Minh City. The discussions were centred around the transformative power of data and the necessity of a data-driven culture in today's rapidly evolving business landscape.

Takeshi Murakami, CFO of Microsoft Thailand and Vietnam, revealed that Microsoft's data-driven culture was fostered even before their digital transformation. The company can quickly adapt to technological advancements and fosters a culture of continual learning among its employees. This culture helped Microsoft to respond well to the COVID-19 pandemic, swiftly instigating a work-from-home policy for their employees.

Lai Thi Thu Thao, CFO at Bachy Soletanche Vietnam, explained the benefits of automating financial reports, allowing CFOs to focus on analysing trends and making swift, informed decisions based on real-time data.

Tin Dang, founder of TC Data, also stressed the importance of a centralised data foundation for financial and accounting departments. He suggested the need for a data source that can be utilised by all departments, highlighting the future of businesses that centralise their data collection and management.

Dang also introduced the '4D' model to illustrate the progression of data-driven operations; Dream, Define, Deliver, and Data Culture. These forward-thinking strategies are poised to shape the future of digital transformation in the business landscape.

Microsoft's Murakami identified fostering a data-driven culture as the major challenge. He emphasised the need for consistency in Key Performance Indicators across all departments, to ensure alignment in decision-making processes.

A representative from a US multinational corporationin Vietnam underscored the critical role of selecting suitable platforms for achieving a comprehensive digital transformation. He also highlighted the importance of having a profound understanding of enterprise architecture to create customised solutions, rather than solely relying on external partners or consulting firms.

Another crucial aspect is the handling of data. This US corporation evaluated options like Azure Synapse Analytics or Chat Analytics. Making the right platform choice in this area directly impacts a company's ability to efficiently process, analyse, and utilise data to inform business decisions.

"Smart automation is another significant area of focus. In our case, we decided to develop this capability internally with a small team consisting of 45 individuals, resulting in highly efficient processes," he stated.

Integration also plays a vital role in the overall digital transformation puzzle. Seamless and accurate connections across all system components ensure the smooth and coordinated operation of the entire business.

The representative further emphasised the spotlight on security. Rigorous protection of these systems is of utmost importance, with the use of firewalls and antivirus software deemed essential to achieve 100 per cent security.

Lastly, contingency planning is deemed essential. It is crucial to maintain a comprehensive backup file to safeguard data in worst-case scenarios. As stated by the representative, the ability to recover from catastrophic events should be a central element of any digital transformation strategy.

AI risk mitigation on minds of global business leaders Business leaders are increasingly captivated by AI and its capacity to boost productivity and streamline operations. However, ethical data input, regulatory compliance, and cautious implementation are pivotal to fully harness AIs advantages.
Generali Vietnam's 'VITA  Cho Con' insurance policy combines protection and investment to offer customers exceptional benefits for the education and development of their children.

'VITA  Cho Con' provides customers and their families with comprehensive protection against the risks of death, total and permanent disabilities (TPD), and other afflictions.

For the first time in the Vietnamese insurance market, and in addition to the premium waiver benefit upon a parents death, TPD, or critical illness, Generali guarantees to issue a new insurance policy for their child without any underwriting required with a sum assured of up to 10 billion VND ($422,000).

As an education-focused unit-linked insurance solution, VITA  Cho Con offers many attractive bonuses, including a regular bonus of up to 11 per cent of the average value of the premium account. This is the largest bonus currently available in the market.

In addition, VITA  Cho Con offers policyholders great flexibility in determining the premium amount, assured sum, and investment allocation in accordance with their risk appetite.

Customers can flexibly adjust their investment plan by switching or withdrawing funds, or top-up their investment when needed.

VITA  Cho Con offers policyholders great flexibility in determining the premium amount, assured sum, and investment allocation in accordance with their risk appetite.

Vinay Dhareshwar, acting CEO of Generali Vietnam said, This award recognises Generali Vietnams success in product strategy, which aims to meet customers increasing demands.

This recognition is also a testament to our ambition of becoming a Lifetime Partner to millions of Vietnamese families by offering innovative insurance solutions, distinguished for their comprehensive benefits, transparent terms and conditions, competitive premiums, as well as market-leading customer experience.

In its efforts to give back, Generali Vietnam will contribute 100,000 VND ($4.22) to 'Sinh Con, Sinh Cha', a parenting community education scheme run by Generali Vietnam and the National Fund for Vietnamese Children, for each VITA  Cho Con policy it issues,

AstraZeneca honoured in Vietnams top 100 best places to work 2022 AstraZeneca Vietnam has been recognised as one of Vietnams top 100 best places to work in 2022, making it the fourth consecutive year that the company has won the recognition.

Nestle again voted most sustainable business in Vietnam Nestle Vietnam has again been named the most sustainable business in Vietnam in the manufacturing sector. The recognition was unveiled at the ceremony announcing the Sustainable Companies in 2022 by the Vietnam Business Council for Sustainable Development and the Vietnam Chamber of Commerce and Industry on December 1.

Generali  192 years of global protection, 12 years of companionship with Vietnam On April 24, Italian-backed life insurer Generali Vietnam celebrated its 12-year anniversary with excellent business performance and a nationwide network of more than 100 GenCasa agency offices and branches, serving nearly 500,000 clients across the country.
Houses in Rakhine State damaged by Cyclone Mocha. (Source: AFP/VNA)

Jakarta - The Indonesian Government on June 26 sent humanitarian aid to people affected by Cyclone Mocha in Rakhine State of Myanmar last May.

The humanitarian aid was sent off directly by Coordinating Minister for Human Development and Culture Muhadjir Effendy and head of the National Disaster Mitigation Agency Lt. Gen. Suharyanto at Soekarno Hatta Airport, Tangerang, Banten.



This aid delivery was made following the instruction of President Joko Widodo in response to the aid request official letter delivered by Myanmar to Indonesia, Effendy informed.



The aid worth over 525,000 USD is in the form of 45 tonnes of logistics supplies and equipment, comprising tarpaulins, family tents, refugee tents, carpentry tools, instant foods, hygiene kits, blankets, mattresses, and generators, the minister said.



In addition, Indonesia has also provided a Herculean aircraft carrier to bring AHA Center (ASEAN Coordinating Centre for Humanitarian Assistance on Disaster Management) aid from Subang, Malaysia, to Yangon, he added.



According to Effendy, Indonesia has provided the aid to Myanmar as part of its humanitarian solidarity effort in the region as well as in its capacity as the chair of 2023 ASEAN.
(CNN)  Canada has moved to ban the testing of cosmetics on animals, joining a number of other countries and American states to outlaw the practice.

The Canadian government announced the decision in a Tuesday news release. Bill C-47 amends the Food and Drugs Act to ban both the testing of cosmetic products on animals and the sale of products relying on animal testing data, according to the news release.

The news release noted animal testing for cosmetics was rarely conducted in Canada.

Canada will join the ranks of the European Union, Australia, the United Kingdom, and South Korea, which have all moved to ban cosmetic testing on animals, according to the release.

A total of 44 countries have passed laws banning cosmetic animal testing, according to the Humane Society International. Additionally, 10 states in the US have banned the practice: New York, Virginia, California, Louisiana, New Jersey, Maine, Hawaii, Nevada, Illinois, and Maryland.

Protecting animals, now and in the future, is something that many Canadians have been calling for, and something we can all celebrate, said Canadian Minister of Health Jean-Yves Duclos in the release. We are proud to move forward with this measure, and to assure Canadians that the products they buy are cruelty-free. We will keep working with experts and international partners to explore safe, cruelty-free alternatives so no more animals suffer and die due to cosmetic testing.

The release added Health Canada is also working to identify effective alternatives to animal testing outside the cosmetic world.

The amendment banning cosmetic testing on animals in one of a package of amendments included in the measure. The text of the bill stipulates No person shall sell a cosmetic unless the person can establish the safety of the cosmetic without relying on data derived from a test conducted on an animal that could cause pain, suffering or injury, whether physical or mental, to the animal and that No person shall conduct a test on an animal that could cause pain, suffering or injury, whether physical or mental, to the animal.

The bill was first read in the House of Commons in April and received royal assent on June 22.

Cosmetic testing has historically included toxicity tests in which animals are focused to consume or inhale certain chemicals, or have the chemicals applied to their skin or eyes, according to the Humane Society Internationals Animal-Free Safety Assessment Collaboration.

In addition to being unnecessarily cruel, animal tests are also less effective compared to newer forms of assessment like computer modeling or tests using human cells, said the Humane Society International.

This story was first published on CNN.com, "Canada has officially banned testing cosmetics on animals."
Prudential, MB Ageas Life, Sun Life, and BIDV Metlife have been found in violation of regulations by the MoF recent inspection of their bancassurance sales practices released on June 30.

The MoFs investigation revealed that all four companies engaged in misconduct while cross-selling insurance through bank channels, particularly in the advisory role played by their sales agents and brokers.

The most notable transgressions included instances where employees failed to provide direct advice to customers or neglected to guide them through the requisite procedures and documentation. Furthermore, the quality of advice provided by insurance companies was called into question, leading to a lack of clarity among customers regarding the products they were purchasing.

The MoF also identified cases where insurance company staff provided bank agents or employees with agency codes to assist customers in inputting their information. Additionally, the companies in question failed to adhere to the approved insurance premium rates.

"The MoF affirms that these violations will be subject to strict administrative penalties, ensuring both severity and deterrence in the market," an MoF said.

Furthermore, the ministry emphasised its commitment to transparency by announcing its intention to publicly disclose the penalty decisions.

The insurance market, particularly the burgeoning bancassurance sector, has witnessed significant growth in recent years. However, it has also been marred by unethical practices, including instances of banks pressuring customers to acquire loans concurrently with insurance policies, as well as the misrepresentation of insurance as a form of savings.

Investment-linked insurance products have been marketed by insurers as offering risk protection and profitable investment returns. However, in practice, a considerable portion of the insurance premiums paid by customers is deducted to cover various costs before being allocated to the investment-linked fund.

Based on the findings of the inspection, the MoF has called upon the four insurance companies to bolster their overall management and undertake comprehensive reforms within their bancassurance channels. Particular emphasis has been placed on the need to rectify training practices, enhance quality control mechanisms, and strengthen the supervision of insurance agents.

The measures aim to promptly detect any violations committed by agents or individuals associated with insurance agencies.

Insurance companies have also been directed to conduct thorough reviews of the operational costs associated with their agency activities, ensuring that these expenses are strictly aligned with insurance business purposes and supported by comprehensive documentation and evidence.

During the recent fifth session of the National Assembly, the government was tasked with conducting a complete review of the life insurance market, with a particular focus on investment-linked products. The objective is to address deficiencies in intermediaries and mitigate concerns related to the cross-selling of life insurance.

The MoF has also indicated that, in addition to the four companies, it will conduct specialised inspections of bancassurance practices in 10 other insurance companies throughout the year. Any violations will be dealt with rigorously in accordance with the established regulations and protocols.

Prudential Vietnam and VIB enter bancassurance partnership The extension of the strategic bancassurance partnership between the two businesses underscores the objective of both sides to bolster future confidence for Vietnams bancassurance sector.

Manulife Vietnam repays over $34 million in light of accusations Manulife Vietnam has received 6,060 complaints, resolving 3,553 and refunding over VND800 billion ($34.79 million) regarding allegations against it and SCB of insurance contract deception.
The Korea-Vietnam Partnership Fair 2023, held during South Korean President Yoon Suk-Yeols visit to Vietnam on June 22-24, witnessed the prominent presence of cosmetics brands.

Korean cosmetics capturing hearts, photo Le Toan

With over 120 distinguished South Korean enterprises participating in the fair, the cosmetics sector showcased its diverse offerings alongside other industries such as food and beverages, consumer goods, pharmaceuticals, and healthcare.

Tran Thi Hai Yen, head of the Korea Trade-Investment Promotion Agency in Hanoi, emphasised that South Korean businesses, including cosmetics companies, were actively seeking trade cooperation in Vietnam, capitalising on the countrys burgeoning population, expanding middle class, and escalating appetite for high-quality products.

Vu Thi Thu, director of Faso Vietnam Co., Ltd., an importer and distributor of South Korean merchandise, attested to the growing popularity of its products in Vietnam.

Faso has successfully imported an extensive repertoire of nearly 1,000 product lines, effectively reaching a broad spectrum of distributors and supermarkets across the nation, Thu said.

She believes that Vietnam has emerged as an irresistible market for South Korean cosmetics companies, propelled by a combination of factors that make it a prime destination for their products.

According to the Korea Herald, Vietnams demographic advantage cannot be overstated. With a population of over 100 million, the country boasts a significant proportion of young consumers who are increasingly demanding high-quality beauty products.

Vietnamese beauty enthusiasts often seek to emulate the flawless complexions and innovative beauty routines showcased by their favourite idols, turning to South Korean cosmetics to achieve their coveted beauty aesthetic.

Data released by the Korean Cosmetic Association reveals that exports of the nations cosmetics to Vietnam between January and May this year surged by 43.4 per cent compared to the same period last year, reaching an export value of $187.5 million.

Vietnam has emerged as the fastest-growing market for Korean cosmetics, outpacing the United States, which experienced a 25.7 per cent growth rate with exports totalling $425.12 million. In contrast, Chinese exports of Korean cosmetics declined by 25.7 per cent to $1.2 billion, while exports to Japan saw a 5.3 per cent decrease, reaching $323.9 million.

The US Department of Commerce reports that South Korea holds the largest market share in Vietnams imported cosmetics market at 30 per cent, followed by the EU at 23 per cent, Japan 17 per cent, Thailand 13 per cent, and the US 10 per cent. Currently, foreign brands account for 90 per cent of cosmetics consumed in Vietnam.

A 2022 survey by Q&Me Market Research Company among women aged 16-40 in major cities such as Ho Chi Minh City and Hanoi reveals that 93 per cent of women aged 25-32 regularly use Korean skincare products.

These products are primarily purchased from brand stores, health and beauty retail chains, and e-commerce platforms. Vietnamese women spend an average of around $18 per month on skincare products, with the most popular items being facial cleansers, makeup removers, sunscreen, and moisturisers.

Statista estimates that Vietnams cosmetics market will reach a value of $2.7 billion next year.

According to global market researchers Mintel, the current value of Vietnams cosmetics market stands at approximately $2.63 billion, with an expected annual growth rate of 3.32 per cent until 2027. Skincare products are the most popular category, with over 60 per cent of consumers using them daily.

In December 2022, the Beautycare Expo showed the latest products and technologies in Hanoi. Experts and managers at the event projected that the value of Vietnams skincare market would reach nearly $770 million in 2020 and is expected to reach $1.92 billion by 2027. Industry giants from South Korea such as AmorePacific have gained significant popularity in Vietnam, with 29 stores in the country as of October last year. With a diverse portfolio of renowned brands such as Sulwhasoo, Laneige, and Innisfree, AmorePacific has successfully captured the attention of Vietnamese consumers.

RoK President talks to Hanoi students President of the Republic of Korea (RoK) Yoon Suk Yeol and his wife Kim Keon Hee on June 22 visited and talked to students at the Faculty of Korean Language and Culture of the University of Languages and International Studies under the Vietnam National University  Hanoi (VNU), as part of the Presidents state visit to Vietnam.

Vietnam, RoK enhance partnerships in construction The International Contractors Association of the Republic of Korea (RoK) (ICAK) and the Vietnam Association of Construction Contractors (VACC) signed a memorandum of understanding on June 22, during an ongoing State visit by President of the RoK Yoon Suk Yeol.

Vietnam, RoK boost cooperation in technology, innovation The State Agency for Technology Innovation (SATI) under the Ministry of Science and Technology on June 22 signed a Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) on strategic cooperation in advanced technology development with the Korea Evaluation Institute of Industrial Technology (KEIT).

Vietnam, RoK exchange 17 cooperation documents President Vo Van Thuong and his visiting counterpart from the Republic of Korea (RoK) Yoon Suk Yeol witnessed the exchange of 17 cooperation documents across fields between agencies of the two countries after their talks in Hanoi on June 23.

Vietnamese, RoK leaders attend Vietnam-RoK business forum Prime Minister Pham Minh Chinh and President of the Republic of Korea (RoK) Yoon Suk Yeol attended the Vietnam-RoK Business Forum in Hanoi on June 23, with over 500 delegates representing associations, corporations and businesses of the two countries taking part.
The event is a valuable opportunity for Vietnamese mechanical enterprises to integrate into global trade and catch up with technical innovation in the world.

The MTA Vietnam exhibition attracts a large number of enterprises and visitors (Photo: MTA Vietnam 2022)

This year, MTA Vietnam 2023 marks a monumental comeback with more than 400+ exhibitors from 20+ countries and regions including the US, Canada, the UK, Italy, Germany, Switzerland, Japan, Korea, Singapore, India, China, Hong Kong, Taiwan, Thailand, and others.

In particular, MTA Vietnam 2023 is to welcome 14+ international pavilions to display on a total area of up to 13,200sq.m. During the four-day exhibition, MTA Vietnam attracts over 12,000 trade visitors and business groups from many sectors in the mechanical and manufacturing industry in Vietnam.

Focusing on the theme Capture the Future Wave, MTA Vietnam operates many practical activities on the application of industrial robots and automation in general. Hundreds of top brands from across the world will come and display thousands of the most advanced machines, equipment, and solutions for the mechanical and manufacturing industry.

Besides this, the event provides a series of insightful seminars professionally organised by top organisations and experts in the industry.

Besides this, the event provides a series of insightful seminars professionally organised by top organisations and experts in the industry.

Particularly, VINRA area - a totally new exhibit space for breakthrough innovations in automation  will be featured for the first time at MTA Vietnam 2023, with a raft of exciting side events taking place such as MTA Robot Challenge, 3D printing display or international conference will help visitors step further into the new era of automation.

Trade visitors have opportunities to access modern technology from the world's leading mechanical suppliers (Photo: MTA Vietnam 2022)

At MTA Vietnam 2023, trade visitors can expect abundant opportunities to experience cutting-edge technological solutions, gain invaluable experiences, and stay ahead of the latest innovation trends.

Furthermore, they can also explore and establish business relationships with new suppliers to enhance their existing production lines, optimise operational efficiency, and gain a competitive advantage in the market.

With the participation of renowned enterprises in precision machinery and manufacturing, MTA Vietnam 2023 aims to give trade visitors a valuable chance to explore the latest machines in the world right at SECC in Ho Chi Minh City.

Many machines are expected to be invested immediately by trade visitors at the exhibition (Photo: MTA Vietnam 2022)

As a division of Informa PLC, Informa Market is a leading exhibition organiser in the world with a long history in the UK.

MTA Vietnam 2023 is expected to attract 400+ exhibitors, especially with a projected more than 80 per cent foreign proportion.

With its strong reputation, MTA Vietnam is proud to give chances for domestic enterprises to access the most advanced machines and solutions, thereby improving competitiveness and opening up more opportunities for the entire Vietnam industry in general, as well as the mechanical and manufacturing sector in particular.

The 19th International Precision Engineering and Manufacturing Reinvented Exhibition and Conference (MTA Vietnam 2023) Date: July 4-7 ; Time: 9 a.m. 5 p.m. Venue: Saigon Exhibition and Convention Centre (SECC), 799 Nguyen Van Linh, District 7, Ho Chi Minh City Website: mtavietnam.com Email: mtavietnam@informa.com ; Tel: (+84) 28 3622 2588 To receive the best support from the organiser for group visitors, please contact: Ms. Jasmine Le Phone: +84 28 3622 2588 (115) ; Email: jasmine.le@informa.com

One-stop service office for returning migrant women opens in Hai Phong The Vietnam Women's Union (VWU) together with the International Organisation for Migration (IOM) put into operation a one-stop service office for returning migrant women and their families (OSSO) in the northern port city of Hai Phong on April 13.

Returning workers yearn for new support More businesses are being encouraged to create training programmes before and after sending Vietnamese workers overseas, in order for human resources potential to not be wasted on their return.

Excellent opportunities for engineering and manufacturing community at MTA exhibition A major engineering and manufacturing community exhibition is set to take place in Hanoi next month, which will play a vital role as a trade bridge in the field of engineering and manufacturing industry in the north.
Thanh Hoa has pledged to provide favourable conditions for Sumitomo Corporation's investment endeavours. The province's leaders have urged the corporation to swiftly conduct research and investment promotion, aiming to realise the construction and operation of the proposed project.

Representing Sumitomo Corporation, Takashi Yanai, member of the Board and general manager of the Infrastructure Business Division, expressed gratitude to Thanh Hoa leaders for their collaboration. He acknowledged the province's robust socioeconomic development, favourable geographical location, and population.

Yanai emphasised Sumitomo Corporation's commitment to creating a clean and prosperous living environment through the project.

He thanked the province for their assistance and expressed hope that the endeavour would commemorate the 50th anniversary of Japan-Vietnam diplomatic relations.

Yanai assured that Sumitomo Corporation would adhere to legal regulations, expedite research progress, and sought Thanh Hoa province's support throughout the project's implementation.

An MoU aims to enhance cooperation, draw foreign investment, create jobs, and contribute to the province's development has been inked between two sides.

Particularly, Sumitomo Corporation has shown interest in an industrial zone, covering 650 hectares, the logistics centre, and urban development spanning 168.5ha.

The project, with a capital of over $400 million, is slated for implementation between 2024 and 2025.

Sumitomo's subsidiary is researching infrastructure investment in the technology-industry-service zone, spanning 1,200ha, with a focus on clean industries and advanced technologies. Success may draw additional Japanese investors to collaborate with Thanh Hoa.

Meiko Corporation to invest $200 million in electronic manufacturing project in Hoa Binh province Japans Meiko Corporation has recently partnered with the leadership of Hoa Binh province to propose an investment plan for constructing an electronic circuit manufacturing facility at the Da River Left Bank Industrial Park in Hoa Binh city.
According to the Sustainable Travel Report 2023 conducted by Booking.com based on the results of a survey of 33,000 travellers from 35 countries and territories worldwide, 80 per cent of travellers say that sustainability is increasingly important to them.

Sustainable tourism no longer a temporary trend in Vietnam

In which, 97 per cent of Vietnamese tourists participating in the survey want to travel sustainably within the next year. Three-quarters of them are willing to pay more for certified sustainable travel options, as a way to ensure they are making a positive impact.

The report also said that Vietnamese tourists are actively looking for loyalty programmes and discounts, along with sustainable travel options to satisfy their personal budgets. Almost 80 per cent said they feel more secure staying at accommodation that is awarded a certification, or has a sustainability badge.

These changes in travel habits also require destinations and accommodation establishments to rapidly change in response.

After graduating from university with a degree in biotechnology engineering, Dinh Thu Huong chose to start a business in tourism. Huong is currently the owner of Lalita Tam Coc Resort & Spa, a resort facility located near the Tam Coc tourist area of Ninh Binh province, which has just been awarded a sustainable tourism badge from Booking.com.

She said that her knowledge in the field of biotechnology has had a great impact on her product thinking and the development of her tourism model.

I always put the environment, people and eco-friendly factors first when choosing a business development location, Huong said. That is why I decided to build a resort in a location far from the city, residential areas, completely quiet and surrounded by limestone mountains, the typical natural scenery of Ninh Binh, she added.

Not only restricting concreting in the design so as not to affect the surrounding landscape, Lalita Tam Coc also pays great attention to saving energy sources and limiting plastic waste into the environment. The resort only uses up to 80 per cent of LED capacity, directing the natural groundwater from the mountain to use, encouraging visitors to use cloth towels instead of paper towels and use bicycles to visit instead of motorbike or car.

The sustainability factor is also reflected in the focus on developing human resources with regularly held training courses, prioritising the use of local human resources and providing good working conditions for them.

We have saved a lot of costs when operating in a sustainable way. Human resources are also stable and have been with us since our establishment, said Huong.

Sustainable tourism is no longer a fad but has become a requirement for the vast majority of tourists globally, including Vietnam.

There are now more than 550,000 properties worldwide that receive a sustainable travel badge from Booking.com. In which, Vietnam has about 5,000 establishments, mainly in destinations including Ho Chi Minh City, Hanoi, Danang, Dalat, Nha Trang, Hoi An, Phu Quoc, Quy Nhon, Halong, and Vung Tau.

These accommodation facilities not only help visitors enjoy a great stay, but also actively take measures to reduce their impact on the environment, use renewable energy sources and strive to bring benefits to the local community.

The travel report indicates that the number of accommodation establishments receiving the sustainable travel badge this year increased seven times compared to last year, making Vietnam fifth in the Asia-Pacific region in terms of the number of accommodation establishments receiving one.

However, the transition from a normal model to a sustainable operating model will also cost a certain amount, while not all accommodation establishments are willing to accept it if it is not visible yet. Meanwhile, Vietnam currently has 38,000 such establishments, but mostly small- and medium-sized.

Meanwhile, at a consultation meeting to kick off the Swiss Tourism for Sustainable Development in Vietnam (ST4SD) project last week, Kenneth Wood, director of ST4SD commented, Tourism development without the participation of the private sector is like medical development without the participation of doctors. Therefore, projects supporting model transformation need to come up with a synchronous plan with close cooperation between management agencies and the business sector.

ST4SD is a project funded by Switzerlands economic development cooperation with more than $3.5 million to develop sustainable tourism models in some localities in the country towards 2027.

Kenneth added, The project does not aim to change the operating model of large corporations because they have their own path, but will focus on the small and medium-sized enterprises operating in the tourism industry.

Despite some obstacles, the transition to a sustainable tourism model is still taking place slowly in Vietnam, starting with a change in tourists consciousness.

According to research by Deloitte, Generation-Z is adopting more sustainable behaviours than any other group. Half of Gen-Z consumers reduce their purchases, and 45 per cent stop buying certain brands because of concerns about sustainability or ethics. The study indicates that the youngest generations feel more motivated to reduce the impacts of climate change and pollution.

Dang Xuan Son, chairman of the Vietnam Responsible Tourism Club said, Sustainable tourism is an urgent choice in Vietnam, to inspire and motivate to protect the environment, eliminate the carbon footprint and leave lessons on preserving community cultural values. If Vietnam can create a sustainable tourism brand, it can attract more international visitors.

Ha Van Sieu - Deputy director general Vietnam National Administration of Tourism Sustainable tourism is both a trend and a mandatory requirement because after the pandemic, the tourism industry in all countries has shifted towards developing in-depth quality, promoting local traditional cultural values, and minimising the use of resources and bringing maximum benefits to the community. In Vietnam, many localities have now built new tourism models, encouraging green tourism development ideas, using local resources, materials and labour in tourism activities. Some businesses have pioneered the implementation of these ideas by putting the visitors experience at the centre, closely linking with the government and the residential community to replicate these models. The Vietnam National Administration of Tourism has also made a preliminary assessment of destinations that are developing low-impact tourism successfully. But beside the assessment of the management agency, it is the visitors assessment that is the most objective and practical. For example, in a Quang Ninh, a number of tourist destinations are being appreciated by tourists for their sustainability, such as Yen Tu and Binh Lieu. In Halong, to successfully convert this model, there are still many problems that need to be tackled. The goal of the tourism industry going forward will be to focus on promoting activities that bring the best experiences for visitors and practical benefits for the people. Besides exploiting this potential, Vietnam needs to effectively use tourism resources, as well as preserve and effectively promote local cultural values to add value to tourist products. Do Quang Huy - Representative Swiss State Secretariat for Economic Affairs Switzerland is a successful lesson in sustainable tourism development and also has many similarities in terms of landscapes and diverse ecosystems that we can learn from. In Switzerland, these tourism models are managed by small- and medium-sized enterprises, while the number of such businesses operating in Vietnams tourism industry accounts for more than 70 per cent. Some destinations in our country are very suitable to study the greener tourism models of Switzerland, such as Ha Giang, heritage sites in Hue or Hoi An, or agricultural tourism models in the Mekong Delta. Tourist areas in Switzerland are well planned and divided according to residential areas, tourist areas and routes based on specific conservation and development principles. Vietnam can also access knowledge on low-impact tourism development planning, model building and products through accessing projects being supported by Switzerland. I believe that the policy of encouraging the contribution of the private sector is the decisive factor for the success of sustainable tourism. A project cannot succeed without resonance from many partners, especially the private sector and digital platforms. The issue of public-private dialogue is also a strong point to stimulate competition and innovation, ensure that policies are made in accordance with the operation of enterprises, helping them improve their competitiveness. In 2017, Vietnam launched a tourism policy that incorporates these elements. The recent marketing policy of the tourism industry also introduces models and makes requirements for sustainable tourism. But for businesses to put this into practice, we still have a long way to go because they have not seen the specific benefits of such tourism practices. In the process of contacting projects, I found that convincing businesses to agree to switch from the current model to a more green direction was not too difficult, but it requires them to be really persistent because of its benefits may only come in the long term. Before the pandemic, the tourism industry was proud of its sales, the number of visitors, everything was running well, and it did not see the need to change. But the shock from the pandemic and the economic recession has seen sustainable tourism mentioned much more. The private sector therefore also has to find new ways of doing things and repositioning for the right business model.

Laying focus on sustainable tourism The total revenues of Vietnams tourism in 2022 was approximately $19.6 billion  nearly triple that of 2021 but only 60 per cent of 2019. Now, there is a clear imperative for tourism in Vietnam to both improve and become more sustainable.
After entering Vietnam more than three years ago, UNIQLO now has expanded its retail network to 18 retail stores and an online store. Whats your assessment of the potential of the Vietnamese market?

Hideki Nishida, newly appointed general director of UNIQLO Vietnam

Vietnam is a young, dynamic economy with much potential. UNIQLO believes that this market is one of the markets that are critical to our growth strategy in the region. Like all other markets, UNIQLOs goal is to grow in harmony with the region where we operate. In Vietnam, this means becoming a good corporate citizen, interacting and supporting the local community, and actively contributing to the economy through job creation and production.

We have had a strong start in Vietnam with great trust from our customers. We believe that Vietnamese customers love experience and service that meet our global standards at UNIQLO retail stores, along with the design and quality of LifeWear and its real values.

Online and omnichannel sales are increasingly being applied in Vietnam market. How has UNIQLO been developing these channels?

UNIQLOs online and offline retail presence is always balanced. Nearly a year and a half after its launch, our UNIQLO.com online store has more than two million members with strong support from customers in both retail and online store. We see that Vietnam is a potential market thanks to the high rate of smartphone usage, especially as Generation Z has a very high preference for online shopping.

As a global fashion brand and proud of our LifeWear philosophy, we strive to bring the core values of our products to as many consumers as possible through all sales channels.

Customers can come to our retail stores to directly touch and experience the product, then can choose to buy online for their next shopping. We want to create a seamless shopping experience that connects online-to-offline channels for our customers, making shopping easier and faster.

For us, there is no difference and no conflict between online and offline. All platforms are now working together to promote each other and we have more customers who love both forms. Since opening our online store, the number of customers coming to our retail store has also increased thanks to increased awareness of UNIQLO nationwide.

UNIQLOs strong commitment to bring core values to customers

What are your next locations after the Binh Duong store?

I cannot reveal the details of our upcoming plans, but our mission and vision remain unchanged. That is continuing the commitment since we established our business in Vietnam. We will continue to expand LifeWears reach by opening new stores so that LifeWear can reach a growing number of diverse customers in different regions.

Our goal is to become one of the leading fashion brands in the minds of all Vietnamese customers, with their highest satisfaction and becoming an indispensable part of their daily lives.

What activities has UNIQLO been carrying out to achieve its sustainability goals?

Besides the initial successes in business, UNIQLO aims to be a responsible, reliable and reputable brand through our contribution to the sustainable development of the local community and society. This direction has never changed and is in line with the goal of Fast Retailing group with the comprehensive application of the LifeWear philosophy, along with sustainability activities.

We strictly follow the guidance from Fast Retailing Group (our parent company) with LifeWear - being equal with sustainability, contributing to the achievement of the groups sustainability goals and commitments to reduce greenhouse gas emissions from its own operations to 90 per cent and increase the portion of recycled materials in the total product mix to about 50 per cent by 2030.

Online and physical presence balanced at UNIQLO Vietnam Three years after opening its first Hanoi store in Vincom Pham Ngoc Thach, UNIQLO Vietnam now operates 13 retail stores across the country with the newest special store  UNIQLO Vincom Ba Trieu opened on October 28. Osamu Ikezoe, general director of UNIQLO Vietnam, sat with VIRs Nhat Ha to discuss the sustainable growth and expansion strategy of the Japanese fashion retailer.
The European Union (EU) has recently announced that instant noodles exported from Vietnam will no longer require phytosanitary certificates for residue testing of ethylene oxide (EO). However, despite the exemption, Vietnamese instant noodles will still undergo 20 per cent border controls upon entry into the EU region. The EU's decision comes after a year-long inspection by the European Commission's Directorate-General for Health and Food Safety (DG Sante), which found no violations of EO residues in Vietnamese instant noodles.

Since December 2021, the EU has imposed strict controls on instant noodles containing spices, seasoning powder, or sauce from Vietnam due to concerns over EO contamination. These measures aim to safeguard against potential risks associated with ethylene oxide, a highly effective disinfectant and fumigant commonly used in agricultural products. However, the comprehensive inspection by DG Sante provided assurance that Vietnamese instant noodles did not pose any violations in terms of EO residues.

The EU also acknowledged the commendable progress made by Vietnamese businesses in upholding rigorous adherence to regulations, ensuring supply chain control, and substantiating the quality of their products when exporting to the EU.

As a result, on June 6, the EU decided to waive the requirement for EO certificates on each batch of instant noodles, which were previously issued by Vietnamese regulatory agencies. This move is expected to alleviate the administrative burden and reduce costs for Vietnamese enterprises engaged in the export of instant noodles to the EU market.

Notwithstanding the exemption from residue testing, Vietnamese instant noodles will still be subject to 20 per cent border controls upon arrival in the EU. These measures seek to ensure the continued compliance of products entering the EU market and maintain the highest standards of food safety and quality.

In addition to instant noodles, three other Vietnamese agricultural products  bell peppers, green beans, and dragon fruit  will also face varying inspection frequencies of 20-50 per cent upon entry into the EU. These measures demonstrate the EU's commitment to maintaining stringent controls on agricultural imports to safeguard consumer health and maintain the integrity of the EU market.

The decision to exempt Vietnamese instant noodles from residue testing reflects a positive development for Vietnamese exporters, reducing the administrative burden and associated costs.

However, the Ministry of Industry and Trade emphasises that businesses must remain vigilant in enhancing product quality and strictly adhering to EU regulations. By doing so, Vietnamese enterprises can effectively compete and secure a stronger foothold in the EU market, thereby expanding their market share and fostering sustainable growth.

Vietnam ranks fifth in global instant noodle consumption After two consecutive years of decline, Vietnams instant noodle consumption started recovering in 2017 with the total sale of 5.06 billion packets, up 3 per cent compared to 2016 and 5.4 per cent compared to 2015.
World Bank supports Vietnam's inclusive and sustainable recovery

This credit marks the second and final instalment in a Development Policy Financing (DPF) series of two operations, following a $221.5 million operation approved in 2021.

While the impact of this operation is expected to fully materialise by 2024, the DPF series has already supported significant achievements. More than 140,000 businesses received tax support through a tax relief package in 2021. More than 85,000 children have received subsidised childcare, which has promoted gender equality in the workplace. Government services available online have doubled.

Going forward, the institutional and policy reforms supported by this operation will facilitate business recovery by enhancing the tax environment, supporting the financial inclusion of vulnerable households, and increasing access to quality childcare services.

To spur green and digital development, the reforms supported by the DPF focus on procurement, digitising public administration, scaling up renewable energy, and bolstering the financial sustainability of the power sector.

Moreover, reforms supported by this operation are expected to further improve public service delivery to households and businesses.

Reforms supported by this credit will strengthen Vietnam's ongoing recovery from the pandemic and subsequent commodity price shocks while paving the way for more inclusive, greener, and digital-friendly development, said Carolyn Turk, World Bank country director for Vietnam.

We look forward to working with the government to implement these reforms and support Vietnam to achieve its development goals.

Vietnam aims to lead region's development on green growth Vietnamese and foreign investors have considered green business as a strategic advantage for competition.

Vietnamese female entrepreneurs take the lead in boosting green growth On March 25, the Vietnam Association for Women Entrepreneurs (VAWE) held a seminar on female business leadership and green growth with the Vietnam Women Entrepreneurs Council, a part of the Vietnam Chamber of Commerce and Industry (VCCI).

Green growth topping the agenda for investment push Green growth and investment are in a fierce race that has been going on quietly for many years, but it is now speeding up to enable Vietnam to reach its committed goals.
Now called The Herringbone, the once multicolored conglomeration of shipping containers at Jackson Avenue and Fourth Street is changing its stripes, and a lot more. Once ridiculed for its bright, splashy appearance in contrast to downtowns prevailing earth tones, it has toned down its act.

But do not pass judgment on the new hue just yet, said Philip Auchettl, CEO of the San Diego architectural and creative design firm, Rad Lab, determined to convert what some considered an eyesore to an attractive cog in downtowns reawakening. It will become more than another pretty facade, rather a domicile for coffee shops, fine dining and overnight stays, Auchettl said.

The response from the local community has been absolutely amazing, and we are thrilled with the route its heading, Auchettl said of the project. In line with our original vision, we have begun to paint the containers.

More artistic touches soon will materialize, with Creative Waco and the ARTPrenticeship program to create two breathtaking mural walls on the projects outer public-facing walls, he said by email.

Stefanie Wheat-Johnson directs the apprenticeship effort that connects Waco Independent School District students with professional artists for mural projects. Wheat-Johnson said in a statement that her program and Creative Waco are delighted to partner with RadLab as they activate this remarkable space, and empower the future of our creative community through our apprentices.

In an interview, Wheat-Johnson said final designs are taking shape. She said she is not at liberty to discuss specifics, but the murals would center on community, hospitality and diversity. She said youngsters executing the first mural may start Monday, the day before July Fourth, or Wednesday.

The task will take five weeks to complete, if form holds, and a second mural will include input from a guest artist, she said.

Rad Lab acquired what once was called The Containery when the original developer, Bill Wetterman, encountered financial problems aggravated by the COVID-19 pandemic. Financier TFNB Your Bank For Life foreclosed on the property, found a buyer in Rad Lab, and again financed improvements.

Certainly this is a challenging project, but were very excited to have the opportunity, Auchettl said last year, discussing Rad Labs involvement.

Rad Lab received a pledge of $2.3 million from the downtown Tax Increment Financing Zone based on its estimate that a rescue would cost $11.6 million.

First working for Wetterman, local real estate agent Gregg Glime took up Rad Labs commitment to get The Herringbone packed with users.

The hotel lease is fully executed. The restaurant lease is executed. I am actively negotiating five other Letters of Intent ranging from coffee, to apparel, to personal service, Glime said by email. All of them are quality business, and we are really excited about how it is coming together.

In his note June 27, Glime said he was hoping to have even more leases signed in the next few days.

Mentioning the changing complexion of The Herringbone, Glime said, They have been testing different primers and paint colors, so nothing is near being finished from a painting perspective.

Bobby Horner, spokesperson for the city of Wacos inspection services department, said Rad Lab secured a permit for new construction of a commercial mixed use development, consisting of a public plaza, retail shops, hotel rooms, event space, catering kitchen, indoor bar and restaurant, plaza restaurant, coffee shop, and rooftop bar restaurant.

In his email, Auchettl said, The project entails a 4-story shipping container mixed-use hotel that will house multiple restaurants, bars, event venues, art installations, live music performances, curated boutique retail spaces, and a charming coffee shop.  We are working with local legend Gregg Glime, and are stoked to start welcoming talented local tenants into the retail spaces.

He said chef Corey McEntyre, who founded the Milo All Day restaurant at 11th Street and Franklin Avenue, is preparing an array of absolutely amazing food and beverage options for the site, promising an exceptional experience. Our hospitality group, Lucky Find, will be offering super fun and quirky accommodations on site.
(CNN)  Israeli forces launched a large military operation on Sunday night in Jenin in the northern West Bank.

In a statement posted to Telegram, the Israeli Defense Forces (IDF) said it launched an extensive counterterrorism effort in the area of the city of Jenin and the Jenin Camp, striking terrorist infrastructure.

The Palestinian Health Ministry said Israeli forces killed at least three people and injured 13 others in Jenin early Monday. Residents in Jenin told CNN they could hear sounds of explosions and heavy gunfire in the area.

Video from the scene shows wounded Palestinians being evacuated by ambulance to Jenin Government Hospital.

The IDF said it struck a joint operational command center for the Jenin Camp and operatives of the Jenin Brigade, a Palestinian militant group associated with Islamic Jihad.

The operational command center also served as an advanced observation and reconnaissance center, a place where armed terrorists would gather before and after terrorist activities, the IDF said, adding that the camp was a site for weapons and explosives and hub for coordination and communication among the terrorists.

Additionally, the command center provided shelter for wanted individuals involved in carrying out terror attacks in recent months in the area, it said.

Palestinian Islamic Jihad said it will face its enemy with all possible retaliation options, in response to the Israeli operations in Jenin.

The aggression on Jenin will not achieve its targets, Jenin will not surrender. We will face the enemy with all possible retaliation options in response to the enemy aggression on Jenin, the militant group posted to its official Telegram channel.

The raid comes less than two weeks after an Israeli military raid on Jenin erupted into a massive firefight, leaving at least five Palestinians dead and dozens wounded. Eight Israeli troops were injured and successfully evacuated, according to the IDF.

This story was first published on CNN.com. "Israel forces launch lethal strike on West Banks Jenin"
Ford and General Motors have partnered with mining businesses to avoid raw material shortages that might hinder their electric vehicle (EV) ambitions. This proactive strategy shows the industry's awareness of the need for a stable raw material supply chain.

To avoid falling behind Tesla and Chinese automakers, some executives from Western automobile manufacturers intentionally avoid traditional suppliers in favor of striking arrangements with firms that mine lithium. These transactions include large financial commitments on the part of Western executives.

Mining businesses are taking a more proactive approach to securing essential resources as they transition from using gasoline to using battery power. This trend is expected to continue. These firms are sending out teams to evaluate mines in different regions, such as Chile, Argentina, Quebec, and Nevada, with an eye on the future. The crews are outfitted with protective gear such as hard helmets and boots with steel toes. Their major purpose is to ensure a consistent supply of critical metal that can either make or destroy their businesses in this transforming period. If they are unsuccessful in this endeavor, they will have failed in their fundamental objective.

The absence of lithium poses a significant challenge for car manufacturers in the United States and Europe, as it hinders their ability to produce batteries required for electric pickup trucks, sport utility vehicles, and sedans. This dearth of lithium threatens its competitiveness in the market. The imminent cessation of assembly lines in key locations such as Michigan, Tennessee, and Saxony, Germany, is a matter of concern.

In light of the surging demand for electric vehicles, it has become increasingly evident that established mining companies are grappling with a shortage of lithium, a crucial resource for the industry. As the global shift towards sustainable transportation gains momentum, the existing lithium supply falls short of meeting the burgeoning needs of the electric vehicle sector.

This predicament poses a significant challenge for mining companies, who must now confront insufficient lithium reserves. In a bold and visionary move, General Motors (GM) has unveiled its ambitious plan to transition its entire fleet of vehicles to electric power by 2035. This announcement marks a significant milestone in the automotive industry as one of the world's largest automakers sets its sights on a future that is both sustainable and environmentally conscious. GM's commitment to an all-electric future is a testament to the company's unwavering dedication to reducing greenhouse According to a recent report by Kelley Blue Book, the sales of battery-powered cars, pickups, and sport utility vehicles (SUVs) in the United States witnessed a significant surge of 45 percent in the first quarter of 2023 compared to the same period last year. This data highlights the growing popularity and consumer demand for electric vehicles (EVs) in the American automotive market.

In the fiercely competitive automotive industry, car manufacturers compete to secure exclusive rights to smaller mines, aiming to gain a strategic advantage over their rivals. The urgency to secure these mining resources stems from the fear of potential competitors swooping in and seizing the opportunity for themselves. However, this particular strategy exposes these entities to the inherent risks associated with the volatile nature of the mining industry. Moreover, these risks are often amplified when operations are conducted in politically unstable regions that lack robust environmental safeguards. In automotive manufacturing, a potentially precarious situation looms for automakers who may find themselves paying exorbitant prices for lithium should their bets on this critical resource be misguided. The consequences of such miscalculations could result in automakers shelling out significantly more for lithium than its market value in the coming years.

In a recent development, automotive industry leaders have come forward to shed light on the compelling reasons behind their decision-making process. According to these executives, the lack of adequate and dependable supplies of essential battery materials, such as lithium, nickel, and cobalt, has left them with no alternative but to make difficult choices. This scarcity of resources has emerged as a significant hurdle in meeting the global demand for electric vehicles, which continues to grow exponentially.

In previous times, automotive manufacturers had delegated the responsibility of procuring lithium and other essential raw materials to their battery suppliers. The automotive industry, faced with a scarcity of lithium, has been compelled to take matters into its own hands. In response to the limited availability of this crucial metal, car manufacturers, who possess substantial financial resources, have resorted to procuring lithium directly and arranging for its delivery to battery production facilities. These facilities are either owned by suppliers or partially or wholly owned by the automakers. The efficient conduction of energy in batteries is made possible by utilizing lightweight lithium ions.

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In a strategic move, the automaker successfully established a supply agreement with Livent, a prominent lithium company based in Philadelphia, during the previous year. This agreement ensures a steady and reliable source of material derived from South American mines, further solidifying the automaker's position in the market. In a significant move, General Motors decided in January to allocate a substantial investment of $650 million towards Lithium Americas, a prominent Vancouver-based company. This investment aims to facilitate the development of the Thacker Pass mine located in Nevada. This decision showcases General Motors's commitment to securing a reliable supply of lithium, a crucial component for the production of electric vehicles. In a highly competitive bidding process, the company emerged victorious among a pool of 50 contenders, which included prominent battery and component manufacturers. This significant achievement was confirmed by Mr. Kunjur and executives from Lithium Americas, underscoring the company's strategic prowess and ability to secure a valuable stake.

Ford Motor, the automotive giant, has recently forged significant lithium deals with three prominent companies: SQM, a leading supplier hailing from Chile; Albemarle, headquartered in Charlotte, N.C.; and Nemaska Lithium, a prominent player in the lithium industry based in Quebec. These strategic partnerships are poised to impact Ford's future endeavors profoundly.

In a compelling statement made to investors in May, Lisa Drake, the Vice President for Electric Vehicle Industrialization at Ford, highlighted a select group of prominent lithium producers renowned for their exceptional quality and substantial global presence.

In a reminiscent nod to the early days of the automotive industry, automakers are currently forging agreements with mining companies and raw material processors. This strategic move resembles Ford's pioneering venture in Brazil, where the company established rubber plantations to ensure a steady supply of materials for tire production.

In a thought-provoking statement, Mr. Kunjur highlights the striking resemblance between the current and a bygone era nearly a century ago. This observation suggests we may have come full circle as a new revolution unfolds.

The establishment of a robust supply chain for lithium is projected to incur significant costs, amounting to a staggering $51 billion, as reported by Benchmark Mineral Intelligence, a reputable consulting firm in the industry. To avail themselves of the subsidies provided by the United States, battery raw materials must be extracted and processed within North America or by nations that share a trade alliance with the U.S.

According to several executives, the exorbitant prices of lithium have reached unsustainable levels due to fierce competition in the market.

In a recent statement, R.J. Scaringe, the chief executive of Rivian, an electric vehicle company based in Irvine, California, highlighted the rapid surge in lithium prices since the beginning of 2022. This unprecedented price escalation, coupled with the prevailing hype surrounding the industry, has led to the emergence of numerous unfavorable deals in the market. Scaringe's remarks shed light on the challenges industry players face amidst this dynamic landscape.

Many enterprises are currently engaged in the development of mines, fostering a promising landscape for lithium production. As this trend continues to unfold, it is plausible to anticipate a future wherein the supply of lithium surpasses the collective demand, thus ensuring ample availability to cater to all stakeholders' needs. The potential for a rapid upswing in global production has emerged as a significant factor that could precipitate an earlier-than-anticipated surge. This, in turn, may result in a substantial decline in the price of lithium, a phenomenon observed in the not-too-distant past. The potential consequence of such a scenario would result in automakers incurring significantly higher costs for the metal, surpassing its intrinsic value.

In a climate of heightened caution, automotive industry leaders display a palpable sense of apprehension. Their concerns stem from the realization that any prolonged shortage of lithium, a crucial resource for electric vehicle batteries, could potentially impede their companies' ability to remain competitive in the long run. This prevailing sentiment underscores the industry's recognition of the urgent need to secure a stable and sustainable lithium supply to avoid falling behind in the rapidly evolving EV market.

The concerns expressed by individuals are indeed valid and deserving of attention. In regions where the sales of electric vehicles have experienced rapid growth, traditional automakers have encountered significant setbacks. In the rapidly evolving landscape of China's automotive industry, the dominance of electric vehicles is undeniable. With nearly a third of new cars being electric, global giants such as Volkswagen, General Motors, and Ford have experienced a decline in their market share.

Through years of dedicated effort, Tesla, a renowned electric vehicle manufacturer, has successfully established a robust supply chain for essential resources like lithium and other raw materials. As a result, the company has been consistently expanding its market presence in China, Europe, and the United States. In a remarkable achievement, the automotive brand has secured its position as the second-largest seller of new vehicles in the highly competitive California market, trailing only behind the industry giant Toyota. This noteworthy milestone underscores the brand's growing prominence and regional market share.

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Chinese companies possess a distinct advantage over their American and European counterparts in the automotive industry. This advantage stems from their status as either state-owned or state-supported entities, which allows them to undertake more daring ventures in the mining realm. These mining endeavors frequently encounter obstacles such as local opposition, nationalization by populist governments, or technical challenges.

In a significant development, the renowned Chinese battery manufacturer Contemporary Amperex Technology Co. Limited (CATL) recently finalized a momentous agreement with Bolivia. The agreement entails a substantial investment of $1.4 billion in two lithium projects, marking a noteworthy milestone in the global lithium industry. The country, renowned for its political instability, has failed to attract long-term commitment from Western corporations.

In a strategic move, Western car manufacturers have largely refrained from acquiring ownership stakes in lithium mines, with only a handful of exceptions. In a strategic shift, companies are now engaging in negotiations to establish agreements that entail a commitment to procure a specified quantity of lithium within a predetermined price bracket.

In many instances, the agreements granted to car manufacturers give them advantageous privileges, creating a competitive disadvantage for other industry players. In a significant development, electric vehicle giant Tesla has recently struck a strategic agreement with Piedmont Lithium, a mining company located in close proximity to Charlotte. This landmark deal secures a substantial share of the output from a prominent mine in Quebec for the renowned car manufacturer.

Lithium, a highly sought-after resource, is known for its abundance; however, its extraction process is often fraught with challenges.

Several nations, including Bolivia, Chile, and Argentina, have adopted policies that involve nationalizing their abundant natural resources or implementing strict currency exchange controls. These measures can potentially restrict foreign investor's ability to withdraw funds from these countries. Establishing mines in both Canada and the United States is a time-consuming process that can span several years.

In a recent statement, Eric Norris, the president of Albemarle's Lithium global business unit, shed light on the challenges that lie ahead in the pursuit of widespread electrification and the acquisition of lithium within the United States. As the foremost American lithium miner, Albemarle holds a unique perspective. Norris emphasized the formidable nature of obtaining lithium, highlighting the hurdles that must be overcome to achieve full electrification in the country.

In light of recent developments, automotive industry executives and consultants are increasingly embarking on global expeditions to various mining sites. It is worth noting that a significant portion of these mines are still in the preliminary stages of production.

According to Amanda Hall, the chief executive of Summit Nanotech, a pioneering Canadian start-up specializing in the acceleration of lithium extraction from saline groundwater, a sense of urgency is palpable. In an effort to proactively address the issue at hand, automotive industry leaders have been diligently working towards finding viable solutions, as stated by a prominent industry spokesperson.

In their quest for expediency, automotive manufacturers are increasingly forging partnerships with smaller mining operations that may not necessarily meet the anticipated standards. According to Shay Natarajan, a partner at Mobility Impact Partners, a prominent private equity fund specializing in sustainable transportation investments, numerous instances of challenges have emerged in this domain. According to the expert, there is a possibility of a future collapse in lithium prices due to excessive production.

The mining industry emerges as the clear victor in this scenario. The agreements forged by these entities with prominent automobile manufacturers consistently yield substantial profits while concurrently facilitating their access to capital through borrowing or share sales.

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Vintage Aviation News staff did not write this article; the content comes via our partners who wish to help $upport our website.

December 7, 1941a date which will live in infamy These were the words of President Franklin D. Roosevelt a day after the Empire of Japan bombed Pearl Harbor. This naval US base near Honolulu, Hawaii, was the target of a devastating surprise attack by Japanese forces. But if you want to get the key momentsthe causes and consequences of the attack on Pearl Harbor, read the following article.

Pearl Harbor at Schools

Schools worldwide teach this historical moment that pushed America toward entering World War II. Students who are keen to learn more can find free research paper topics about Pearl Harbor because essay examples of this type are well-structured and presented understandably, helping students formulate a successful topic for their school sample.

Historical topics are usually not that easy to write about. Thus, using professional help is reasonable. Study Driver is always ready to help with any assignments, even when they are complicated. So, there is no need to worry.

Unraveling the Causes of the Attack on Pearl Harbor

The Japanese attack on the United States had one reason why it was carried out  oil. In reality, its not as simple as it sounds at first. At the time, Japan wanted to modernize its economy while, at the same time, building an empire. Yet, there was one problem  Japan lacked natural resources. So, the only way to achieve both goals was to expand the territory and occupy its neighbors import market. It led to Japan going to war with China in 1937.

America wasnt pleased with this hostile attack on China, so it froze all imports to Japan, limiting its oil supply. It, of course, meant that Japan couldnt act on its attack as strongly as initially wanted. Thus, Japan decided to take measures into its own hands.

By carefully planning, on December 7, 1941, Japan began its attack on the US by hitting the, for the country, easiest attacking target  Pearl Harbor.

Assessing the Consequences of the Attack on Pearl Harbor

The surprise attack on the US naval base had several consequences that would turn out to create some of the most significant events in history. The attack on Pearl Harbor was the first domino that toppled the rest  the first of several subsequent events that signified the end of World War II.

Relocation Camps

The foremost result of Japans attack on Pearl Harbor reflected on the Japanese-American people. Considering that there were over 2,000 Americans killed in the attack, Americans started rioting, outpouring anti-Japanese sentiments.

Because of this, the US government confined people of Japanese descent, Germans, and Italians into so-called relocation camps. That was justified under the cloak of prevention of espionage. It wasnt until 1945, the end of WW2, that these people were released.

Women Stepping Forward

The Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor also influenced the work balance regarding gender. Since men had to step down from their jobs and join the war, women took over them and became the leading manufacturing force that fueled the economy.

The Declaration of War

The biggest consequence of this attack was undoubtedly the declaration of war against Japan. On December 8, President Roosevelt signed the US Congress Resolution that started the US-Japan war.

Interestingly enough, Japan believed the US couldnt fire back after its initial attack. However, the US Navy wasnt as badly hurt as believed. In fact, most of the shipsexcluding the USS Arizona and USS Utahwere repaired and returned to battle.

Three days later, on December 11, Italy and Germany declared war on the US. It inevitably led to the final attack on Pearl Harbor outcome, which came on August 6 and 9, 1945the Hiroshima and Nagasaki bombing.

The Follow-Up of Hiroshima & Nagasaki

The American response to the Japanese attack resulted in another famous historical momentand a key shift in WW2. The atomic bombings at Hiroshima and Nagasaki led to the death of around 210,000 people.

After several tries and the Trinity Test, the US detonated an atomic bomb. So on July 26, 1945, the Allied Powers threatened Japan to surrender or face utter destruction. Japan didnt yield, which led to the gruesome bombing.

The first hit was Hiroshima on August 6, 1945. Even after witnessing the destruction, Japan still refused to surrender. As a result, the US dropped the second bomb. That finally made Japan reconsider and put an end to the war.

The Impact of Pearl Harbor on World War II

The biggest consequence of the attack was also the most significant impact on WW2. The fact that the US entered the war signalized a push for the Allied Forces. Considering the military impact of the Pearl Harbor attack wasnt as grave as thought, the US forces were able to strike back heavily.

Moreover, the Japanese missed one crucial part. By 1941/42, ships werent the main battle vesselsaircraft were. Luckily, on the day of the attack, all US aircraft carriers were away from the Pearl Harbor base. Plus, the Japanese attack hadnt managed to hit vital locations: oil storage, repair shops, docks, etc., was intact.

The Importance of Remembering Pearl Harbor

Today, people interested in that historical moment can visit museums or other WW2 displays. Many new exhibits, such as the one at the Pearl Harbor Aviation Museum, are added continuously that showcase the impact the moment had on WW2.

As we mentioned, students are tasked to do Pearl Harbor research paper assignments, so visiting these sights may be of great help. Aside from writing an essay about Pearl Harbor, remembering the moment in history is important because it was pivotal for America and the rest of the world.

Conclusion

Roosevelts words echo even today. The Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor made a considerable mark in history and is deemed the pivotal event that changed WW2s outcome. It prompted the deaths of thousands of Americans and Japanese people.

It would be left to wonder what wouldve taken place if Japan didnt choose to go down the road. Did it result in a different outcome, or did all roads lead to the same point? That moment, as well as the overall World War II, serve as eye-openers to modern society. Its left to us to see, understand, and learn from them.

Vintage Aviation News staff did not write this article; the content comes via our partners who wish to help $upport our website.
Text and photos by Nick Chismar

For four days in June, the skies over Reading, Pennsylvania once again came alive as the Mid-Atlantic Air Museum held its 32nd Annual WWII Weekend. Taking place over June 2nd, 3rd, and 4th this year, WWII Weekend is more than an airshow. First-time visitors are often amazed by the vastness of it all as olive drab tents and warbirds pack the area while veterans take the stage to tell their stories to captivated crowds. The event is truly a sight to behold. Despite some pesky storms on Friday and Saturday, WWII Weekend once again kicked off the summer with a bang while adding a new experience for aviation photographers who come to the show.

As the gates open and visitors begin to make their way around the show, the reenactors are already preparing for a full day ahead. Jeeps, motorcycles, and even tanks line up for the opening parade while MPs and volunteers keep the crowds at a safe distance. In another area of the event, the hill surrounding the French village begins to fill up with spectators as GIs are seen preparing to assault the village below. Suddenly the sound of gunfire erupts as fierce fighting takes over the once-peaceful village. GIs and German soldiers are seen fighting in close combat before the GIs ultimately declare victory.

After several minutes of fighting an all clear is given as the captured German troops are gathered to be questioned. Once the ropes are dropped and spectators flood back in, interrogations begin with GIs sifting through German paperwork. Squad leaders can be seen debriefing and planning their defense of the town while others receive their mail for the day. At the same time, the reenactors begin to mingle with the crowds, explaining the battle and offering amazing lessons about the history of the units they portray.

Up on the flight line, the airshow is just beginning. Liaison aircraft parade in front of the packed crowds with the primary trainers on the ground below, preparing for their turn in the spotlight. Just as the show begins in the air, not far away behind the crowd, members of the WWII Airborne Demonstration Team are double and triple checking each other as they prepare to board the C-47 Placid Lassie to jump above the runway. This demonstration has always been a crowd favorite and made a return this year after a few years of hiatus. The jump went off without a hitch, giving the crowd a taste of what the jump over Normandy would have looked like.

Suddenly a deafening whine could be heard as the thunderous sound of radial engines shot across the crowd. Now it was the Jersey Jerks turn to awe the crowd in their SNJs and T-6 Texans. Several formation passes were made with all six aircraft flying with immense levels of precision. Following the performance, five of the six aircraft come in for a landing, leaving just one remaining in the air. As if from out of nowhere, Kevin Russo sped into view in his yellow and white SNJ. As a longtime performer and crowd favorite, Kevin brought his SNJ through a series of loops, smoke on, and crowds locked in. While many are impressed with his eight-point roll, it just wasnt enough for Kevin as he came back around to perform an impressively sharp 16-point roll. After a series of photo passes Kevin brought his SNJ back down with crowds watching as he rolled by.

Now it was Stan Musicks turn as he brought CAF Airbase Georgias FG-1D Corsair to life. Performing a series of rolls and loops, show announcer Fast Eddie brought Stan up on the loudspeaker. From the ground, the Corsair was blazing through the sky with amazing speed as Stan walked the crowd through each maneuver like there was nothing to it. I think well come in for a nice and easy photo pass, Stan said, as the Corsair screamed by from show left before turning back to slow down for a carrier approach. Stan was soon joined by Airbase Georgias SBD Dauntless and the Military Aviation Museums FM-2 Wildcat. Together, they circle the field as Marine reenactors dazzled crowds with the flamethrower demonstration before recreating the flag raising at Iwo Jima.

Not to be outdone by the Corsair, Jerry Wells took to the sky in his Bucker Jungmeister. With a spectacular display of loops and knife edge passes Jerry dazzled the crowd before landing and doing a burnout, looping his aircraft on the taxiway with smoke on just in front of the show center. Not long after, the bombers and transports took off for their routine. Led by the B-25 Panchito from the Delaware Aviation Museum Foundation, the C-47s Hairless Joe of the Yankee Air Museum and Placid Lassie of the Tunison Foundation took to the sky followed by a Beechcraft Model 18 for a series of passes for the crowd before the B-29 Fifi joined them. Making several passes over the crowd, the B-29s incredible size and power was awe-inspiring. With only two B-29s flying in the world, it truly is a treat to see Fifi each year, especially for those who may have never been to the show or seen a warbird of that size.

Finishing out the air show portion were the fighters. The CAFs Corsair once again took the skies, but this time it was joined by Airbase Georgias P-51 and P-63, as well as, the FM-2 and the P-51 Kwitcherbitchen. The fighters made a series of photo passes with the P-63 and P-51 flying formation together making for a rather impressive duo. With Kwitcherbitchen now back on the ground, the other four flew over show center in a missing man demonstration to end the show.

While this would mark the end of Sunday afternoon, Friday and Saturday continue well into the night. With the air show over, reenactors change into their Sunday best or dress uniforms and make their way to the main hangar. Visitors once again make their way in, this time dressed for an evening on the dance floor. At 7:00 PM the dance begins as the Big Band Swing Fever plays through some of the most popular tunes from the era. The dance is always a crowd favorite, drawing visitors in as reenactors and volunteers get to relax and enjoy the night. While many were out at the dance on Saturday night, a group of photographers gathered for the 3rd Annual Night Photo Shoot. This years shoot featured three incredible aircraft, Airbase Georgias P-63, a Boeing Stearman, and a replica Aichi D3A Val, which was recently donated to the Mid-Atlantic Air Museum by Ken Laid.

Over the last 32 years, spectators and photographers have been enjoying the show from within the event itself. As the gates open, photographers scramble for their spots along the fence, setting up to capture some incredible images. Mid-way through the day, however, the sun is directly in your eye and unfortunately behind the aircraft. Finding a better place to shoot from has been the goal of Media Coordinator David Brown for the past several years with everything coming together for 2023. Thanks to David and his wife Christina, along with Jason Smith, Jeff Hunt, and Jim Duncan, this year marked the beginning of the new WWII Weekend Photo Pit.

Located on the opposite side of the show, the new pit sits above runway 13 inside the airport fence giving photographers an unobstructed view of the performances. Being closer to the display line, the pit offers a unique experience free from the noise of the crowd. All you hear is the thunder of the engines and the sound of your own shutter. This year, nearly 40 photographers were able to experience the new location over the three days of the show. This also included a free bagged lunch along with plenty of water and shade, especially as the temperature neared 100 degrees on Friday. The photo pit itself was a great success, even if a few canopies fell victim to fierce winds from pesky storms. It truly offers a new way to enjoy the air show. Information regarding the 2024 Photo Pit is expected to come out at the end of this year. Anyone who is interested, whether you are a professional photographer or avid enthusiast, should keep an eye out as this is an amazing way to experience the show.

Throughout each of the three day event, visitors, volunteers, and reenactors alike have the chance to experience history. Not just from the ground, but also from the sky. Operators like the Yankee Air Museum, Commemorative Air Force, Delaware Aviation Museum, and Mid-Atlantic all offer rides on their own incredible aircraft. This year, I was able to experience two of them, Yankee Air Museums C-47 Hairless Joe and Delaware Aviation Museums B-25 Panchito.

It is one thing to watch from the ground but to feel the tail lift in the C-47 on take-off, and be able to experience the ability to walk throughout the aircraft in flight is a whole other experience. The Yankee Air Museums crew could not have been better. You could see their passion for the aircraft, its history, and the experience it brings. Looking around at the others with me as they peered out the windows or watched the pilots fly, you could see the excitement on their faces. These were moments they will never forget, cruising over Reading, PA like you were in a classic Cadillac.

If the C-47 was a Cadillac, the B-25 is a Hot Rod. From a waist gunner seat, one can look out across the wings as you taxi past the show. The engines are even more deafening inside, calling for earmuffs once airborne. Once the flight was at altitude and the signal is given to unbuckle, the moment really sinks in. Walking past the open escape hatch and crawling to the tail gunner position might be a chore for some, but the view is something special. In the tail, you can turn around and see forward toward the cockpit, looking at both engines before turning back. Much nimbler, the B-25 feels worlds different than the C-47, shooting into the sky rather than arriving as it seems in the C-47. Both make for an unforgettable experience, and both can be found at the event, though it is suggested that these flight experiences be booked well in advance as they often fill up quite quickly.

In the end, the 32nd Annual WWII Weekend was another success. While some may come for the airshow, almost all stay for the whole event. From the aircraft that grace the skies, to the over 1,500 reenactors whose passion for history is infectious, to the Veterans whose stories speak volumes more in person than on a page, it is truly a one of a kind experience.

Special thanks to David and Christina Brown for their kindness and help, as well as the Mid-Atlantic Air Museum for making this all possible.
In 1863, the three-day Civil War Battle of Gettysburg in Pennsylvania ended in a major victory for the North as Confederate troops failed to breach Union positions during an assault known as Pickett's Charge.
RAYMOND  Sheriffs deputies shut down a section of road outside Raymond after a resident found a mortar round in a ditch Sunday afternoon.

It wasnt immediately clear how the explosive got there or how long it had been there, said Capt. Mark Herbst with the Black Hawk County Sheriffs Office. It wasnt clear if it was live or inert.

A woman picking up cans found the round around 3 p.m. Sunday in a ditch in the area of Lafayette and Dubuque roads. It wasnt close enough to homes to mandate an evacuation, but deputies closed off the road until a military ordnance disposal team arrived on the scene.

The squad from Fort Leonard Wood, Missouri, arrived Sunday night. The round was neutralized and taken to the sheriffs office training facility nearby to be detonated safely, Herbst said.

Photos: Waterloo Fireworks, July 1, 2023 070123jr-fireworks-waterloo-1 070123jr-fireworks-waterloo-2 070123jr-fireworks-waterloo-3 070123jr-fireworks-waterloo-4 070123jr-fireworks-waterloo-5
FLOYD  Two Minnesota residents were killed and two others injured in a head-on crash near Floyd on Sunday.

The deceased were identified as Steven York, 74, of Waconia, Minnesota, and Keira Duffy, 16, of Golden Valley, Minnesota, according to the Iowa State Patrol.

Injured were 74-year-old Mary York of Waconia and 37-year-old Jenna Stangland of Minneapolis.

According to the State Patrol, Strangland was heading east on U.S. Highway 18 around 3:50 p.m. when her Jeep Cherokee crossed the center line near mile marker 209. The vehicle began to return to its lane and collided with a westbound Toyota Prius driven by Steven York.

All involved were wearing seatbelts, according to the State Patrol.

Other agencies responding to the crash included the Floyd County Sheriffs Office, Floyd Fire Department, Colwell Fire, Charles City Ambulance and MeryOne Air Med.

These are the highways in Iowa with the most fatalities. These are the highways in Iowa with the most fatalities.
Telegraph Herald. July 1, 2023.

Editorial: Thanking our lucky stars (and stripes)

This morning, many in the tri-state area will be planning out where they will set up their bag chairs to catch the best view of the 37th Fireworks and Air Show Spectacular on the banks of the Mississippi River in Dubuque on Monday night. Maybe theyll be humming the patriotic tunes they know they will hear broadcast on Radio Dubuque during the show.

Others will clean their barbecue grills and get started on making potato salad for a family gathering, as plenty of people will stretch this star-spangled weekend across four days.

Some will make plans to make the quintessential Dubuque trek to the Mathias Ham House for the annual Fourth of July Ice Cream Social or one of the myriad other community events in small towns throughout the area.

And Americans will, in countless other ways, prepare for the Independence Day holiday.

Lets call it Independence Day, as opposed to July Fourth, as a subtle-but-important reminder that this red-white-and-blue occasion celebrates our independence from Great Britain. It celebrates the subsequent creation of freedoms that make the American system the worlds ideal model of democracy.

Independence Day 2023 also is an opportunity to remember that our freedoms  won through human courage, conviction and sacrifice the past two and a half centuries  are not guaranteed to be permanent. They must be preserved and protected every day, and we thank those who have made the ultimate sacrifice and those who, today, as you read these words, are serving in distant lands in defense of democracy and the American way of life.

While we might have fireworks, cookouts and cool desserts on our minds, there are people the world over for whom freedom is only a dream.

Consider what life in China might be like, for example.

With the Chinese Communist Party in complete control, individuals are not allowed to form independent organizations or political parties that might challenge its authority. We live in a country where we might tire of people railing against our elected officials. But imagine the world where that kind of dissent is completely suppressed.

We might have concerns about our governments attempts to restrict social media platforms. But consider a government that maintains the most extensive system of internet censorship in the world, including prohibiting apps such as Google.

While the United States has seen some government moves chip away at freedom of the press, consider a government such as Chinas which strictly controls media outlets.

China is just one example of many. Oppression of citizens is a longstanding reality in Russia, where the government tightly controls virtually everything, including journalists and their media outlets.

Yes, the United States has its share of problems. But in many ways, being born in the United States is a lottery ticket for life in a land of opportunity. The challenges we face have not eroded our standing of being the original, and still the foremost, Land of the Free.

That is still a great reason for celebration.

Des Moines Register. July 2, 2023.

Editorial: Kim Reynolds kept Iowans in the dark. It was wrong, and violates the law.

Public records illuminate how decisions are made, far more than the carefully edited and stage-managed declarations shared at news conferences and in news releases.

The Iowa Legislature was explicit in 1967:  Free and open examination of public records is generally in the public interest, even though such examination may cause inconvenience or embarrassment to public officials or others.

In 56 years since, a great many public officials have ignored this premise. But the Iowa Supreme Court has shown in a pair of opinions this term that it got the message, and the state will be better for it.

This decision fell to the Supreme Court because defiance of the 1967 laws spirit is easy to find. The governors office has frustrated requests by declining to even answer them. Agencies at all levels have conditioned their compliance on Iowans paying exorbitant six-figure review fees. The law started with 11 exceptions for maintaining confidentiality, but subsequent legislatures have added on average over one new exception every year. Judgments of the Iowa Public Information Board often seem to turn on its head the original idea  presuming public access at the outset  and err on the side of privacy, deferring to discretionary decisions against disclosure.

In the two lawsuits against the state decided this year, the allegations were egregious (and state lawyers disputed only a few of them).

1. For months on end, Gov. Kim Reynolds office all but ignored eight straightforward requests from Bleeding Heartland and Iowa Capital Dispatch journalists and the Iowa Freedom of Information Council. When the organizations and journalists sued, some of the records were, magically, provided. 2. Polly Carver-Kimm fulfilled public information requests for years as part of her job with the Iowa Department of Public Health. She says that the responsibility was taken away from her in stages as she butted heads with superiors and Reynolds staffers for being prompt and helpful in her work at the start of the COVID-19 pandemic. She eventually resigned and sued for wrongful discharge.

State had argued that timeliness doesnt matter

The Iowa Attorney Generals Office took some big swings to try to swat down the lawsuits. It argued that Iowa Code Chapter 22, the public records law, does not require timely compliance and that, even if it did, Reynolds staff was exempt. It argued that the public interest in upholding transparency laws wasnt a good enough reason to bar officials from firing employees for complying with those laws. But district judges and Supreme Court majorities found instead that there are consequences for trying to shield the publics eyes from the publics business.

Especially in the case directly addressing how the governors office dealt with requests, a ruling favoring state government would have tragically undermined Iowans practical ability to know about representatives work beyond their public, often self-serving pronouncements. The 6-0 decision dismisses the fiction that only explicit and ongoing refusal to share records breaks the law: We conclude that a defendant may refuse either by (1) stating that it wont produce records, or (2) showing that it wont produce records, wrote Justice David May.

The other case was closer: A 4-3 ruling lets Carver-Kimm continue pursuing her wrongful-discharge claim, but only against her departmental superiors, not against Reynolds or her deputies. Whether or not Carver-Kimm ultimately prevails, its refreshing that four justices found her transparency-related arguments about public policy more compelling than the well-established principle that most employees in Iowa can legally be dismissed for any or for no reason.

Justice Matthew McDermott correctly observed: What if, for instance, a lawful custodian is told by their boss that if they produce some embarrassing records, theyll be fired? Without legal protection for the custodian in this circumstance, its likely that the records will never be produced  and the records existence will never be known to the requesting party.

Few duties are of more critical importance than informing the public

Among the duties of every public official, few are higher than providing accurate information to the people. Iowans entrusted with this responsibility should review these court decisions and act accordingly, with prompt and candid responses to requests for records. In doing so, they will deliver insight to Iowans, to which state law entitles them. And they will avoid taxpayer expense for unnecessary litigation  double expense in some cases, The State Appeal Board last month approved paying about $135,000 to the journalists lawyers as part of a settlement agreement.

The governors office has stated it has revisited its open records policies and has committed to doing better moving forward, Thomas Story, an American Civil Liberties Union of Iowa attorney, said during a news conference. For our clients and us, this settlement agreement is about ensuring that it indeed will.

Public records illuminate how decisions are made, far more than the carefully edited and stage-managed declarations shared at news conferences and in news releases. Legislators in the 1960s recognized and codified that the people have every interest in how theyre being governed and the right to find out. Or, as was declared almost 250 years ago this month, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed.

P.S.: Keeping public out of meetings also ends poorly for elected officials

Iowas open meetings law, the companion to the open records law, serves the similarly important purpose of allowing any Iowan to be present where their representatives are considering or taking action, with carefully defined exceptions.

The Iowa Freedom of Information Council and local news organizations won a victory on this front by securing a settlement with the Bettendorf school board in which its members admitted illegally banning reporters from a public meeting last year.

About 300 people met in May 2022 to talk about misbehavior at a middle school. All but one school board member was present. Unfortunately, as Freedom of Information Council Executive Director Randy Evans wrote in a column, the district rebuffed complaints that day and afterward, and the Iowa Public Information Board swallowed hook, line and sinker a laughable claim by school attorneys that school board members were at the gathering only as interested citizens.

A lawsuit and the settlement followed. Bettendorfs schools join the list of public agencies, such as the Warren County Board of Supervisors, whose attempts to evade the public meetings law have ended in embarrassment.

END
(CNN)  Israeli forces launched what a military source said is its largest military operation in the occupied West Bank city of Jenin in more than 20 years, killing at least eight people and injuring about 80 others, according to Palestinian officials.

The Israel Defense Forces (IDF) said in a statement it launched the extensive counterterrorism effort in the area of the city of Jenin and the Jenin Camp, striking terrorist infrastructure.

The IDF carried out at least 10 airstrikes and hundreds of soldiers targeted what it said was militant command and control center as well as weapons and explosive manufacturing sites.

Videos obtained by CNN from Jenin show Israeli bulldozers tearing up streets to disarm IEDs, as well as Israeli tanks outside the city limits. Residents told CNN they heard explosions and heavy gunfire in the area, while video from the scene showed wounded Palestinians being evacuated by ambulance to Jenin Government Hospital.

Five of those killed were teenagers, the Palestinian Ministry of Health said.

A ninth Palestinian was shot and killed by Israeli forces near Ramallah in the West Bank in a separate incident, according to the health authorities.

Israeli army radio described at least eight of those killed in Jenin as militants but no militant group has yet to claim those killed as members.

The raid sparked immediate condemnation. Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas called the large-scale Israeli military operation a new war crime.

Security and stability will not be achieved in the region unless our Palestinian people feel it. What the Israeli occupation government is doing in the city of Jenin and its camp is a new war crime against our defenseless people, he said, according to presidential spokesman Nabil Abu Rudeineh.

Egypt also condemned the Israeli incursion, calling it an act of aggression.

Humanitarian access

The UN Special Coordinator for the Middle East Peace Process Tor Wennesland said he had been in direct contact with all relevant parties to urgently de-escalate the situation in Jenin and ensure humanitarian access.

The operation comes after months of growing tension that once again reminds us of the extremely volatile & unpredictable situation across the occupied West Bank. All must ensure the civilian population is protected, Wennesland said.

However, Israeli forces prevented Red Crescent crews from entering Jenin, according to al-Saadi. Israeli forces obstructed the ambulances access to the injured and raised arms against them, he said in a statement.

The ambulance crews managed to evacuate a number of the injured they were able to access. The paramedic crews were brought from other governorates to provide help, al-Saadi said.

CNN has reached out to the IDF for comment.

The director of the United Nations Relief and Works Agency (UNRWA) in the West Bank, Adam Bouloukos, said the Israeli operation and the response of armed actors in Jenin has tragic consequences for Palestinian refugees.

Humanitarian access is most urgent now, Bouloukos said on Twitter.

The White House is also closely monitoring the situation in Israel, a National Security Council spokesperson told CNN.

The spokesperson added broadly, We support Israels security and right to defend its people against Hamas, Palestinian Islamic Jihad, and other terrorist groups.

As of 6:00 p.m. local time, the operations were ongoing with the Israeli military saying it was continuing to engage in firefights with armed militants, including at a mosque.

The raid comes less than two weeks after an Israeli military raid on Jenin erupted into a massive firefight, leaving at least five Palestinians dead and dozens wounded. Eight Israeli troops were injured in that operation and successfully evacuated, according to the IDF.

Militants set off powerful IEDs against Israeli troops, while the Israeli military used an Apache helicopter to provide gun cover for soldiers, for the first time in decades.

Netanyahu briefed on operation

The IDF said it struck a joint operational command center for the Jenin Camp and operatives of the Jenin Brigade, a Palestinian militant group associated with Islamic Jihad.

The operational command center also served as an advanced observation and reconnaissance center, a place where armed terrorists would gather before and after terrorist activities, the IDF said, adding that the camp was a site for weapons and explosives and hub for coordination and communication among the terrorists.

Additionally, the command center provided shelter for wanted individuals involved in carrying out terror attacks in recent months in the area, it said.

The IDF later said its forces targeted a weapons production and explosive device storage facility and confiscated an improvised rocket launcher and additional weapons during the operations, which were carried out in coordination with the Israel Securities Authority (ISA).

Israels Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu was briefed on the progress of the operation in Jenin, a statement from his office said Monday, adding he had discussed future operational plans.

Later on Monday, an IDF aircraft struck near a mosque to remove a threat, according to the IDF, without elaborating on the character of the threat.

Clashes have been ongoing since shortly after midnight, with the latest death toll in Jenin rising to eight, according to the Palestinian Health Ministry figures released before the airstrike near the mosque.

In response to Mondays attacks, Hamas called on militants in the West Bank and Jerusalem to strike Israel by all available means, a statement by its military wing said.

Palestinian Islamic Jihad said it will perform its duty in stopping the massacre in Jenin.

Monday afternoon, Israeli police reported a Palestinian teenager stabbed an Israeli man in Bnei Brak, outside of Tel Aviv. Israeli police said the teen claimed he stabbed the person in response to the events in Jenin. The Israeli man was injured and moved to hospital.

IDF trying to break safe haven

IDF spokesman Lt. Col. Richard Hecht told reporters Monday that several armed terrorist suspects have been killed during the ongoing operation.

Were not trying to hold the ground. Were acting against specific targets, Hecht said.

The first round of airstrikes were launched at 1:14 a.m. local time and were followed by IDF ground forces, Hecht said.

One of the goals of the operation was to break the safe haven mentality within the Jenin camp, according to Hecht, who described it as a hornets nest.

Some 50 shooting attacks against Israelis have emanated from Jenin, he said.

Hecht also said the Palestinian Authority and Jordan had been informed about the incursion in advance, but didnt elaborate further.

Though the IDF spokesman declined to comment on the number of forces involved, he said it is around a brigade, which is approximately equivalent to 500 soldiers.

A spokesman said later an Israeli soldier was slightly injured by shrapnel from a grenade used during the incursion, and that they had been taken to a hospital for medical treatment.

Israeli Foreign Minister Eli Cohen said Monday the Israeli military is striking the terrorism hub that operates in the Jenin camp.

I want to emphasize we dont have a fight with Palestinians. Our fight is with the proxies of Iran in our region, which is mainly Hamas and Islamic Jihad, Cohen said, accusing Tehran of trying to escalate tensions in the region.

The Jenin Brigade claimed it had severely damaged at least one Israeli military vehicle with improvised explosive devices and its militants continue to clash with Israeli forces to prevent its advance inside the camp.

Palestinian Islamic Jihad said it will face its enemy with all possible retaliation options, in response to the Israeli operations in Jenin.

The aggression on Jenin will not achieve its targets, Jenin will not surrender. We will face the enemy with all possible retaliation options in response to the enemy aggression on Jenin, the militant group posted to its official Telegram channel.

In a separate incident, a 21-year-old man, identified as Muhammed Hassanein, was shot and killed by Israeli forces at the northern entrance of Al-Bireh near Ramallah in the West Bank, according to the Palestinian Ministry of Health on Monday. The IDF has not yet commented on the incident.

This story was first published on CNN.com, Israeli forces launch biggest military operation in West Banks Jenin since 2002"
Expectations that the West would behave decently did not materialize

Russian Foreign Ministry Sergei Lavrov said that the West can no longer enjoy our trust in any area.

Liz Truss said she was ready to press the red button, they are ready for a nuclear war, he stressed.
Russian Defence Ministry report on the progress of the special military operation (2 July 2023)

The AFU continued to attempt offensive actions in Donetsk, Krasny Liman and South Donetsk directions.

In Donetsk direction, during active defence activities, the units of the Yug Group of Forces have successfully repelled 11 enemy attacks close to Artyomovsk, Vodyanoye, Novobakhmutovka, Severnoye, Pervomayskoye and Maryinka (Donetsk Peoples Republic).

As a result of the attacks, launched by Operational-Tactical and Army aviation, as well as artillery, and heavy flamethrower systems, the enemy has lost up to 360 Ukrainian servicemen, six tanks, eight infantry fighting vehicles, five motor vehicles, one U.S.-manufactured M119 towed gun, one Polish-manufactured Krab self-propelled artillery system and one Gvozdika self-propelled howitzer.

In addition, ammunition depots of the 92nd mechanised and 95th airborne assault brigades of the AFU have been destroyed close to Seversk and Grigorovka (Donetsk Peoples Republic).

In Krasny Liman direction, as a result of active actions by the units of the Tsentr Group of Forces, air strikes, artillery and heavy flamethrower system fire, three enemy attacks by units of the 95th Airborne Assault Brigade and the 66th Mechanised Brigade have been repelled close to Torskoye (Donetsk Peoples Republic), Chervonaya Dibrov and Nevskoye (Lugansk Peoples Republic).

In addition, manpower and hardware concentration areas have been hit near Terny, Grigorovka (Donetsk Peoples Republic) and Chervonaya Dibrova (Lugansk Peoples Republic).

The activities of a Ukrainian sabotage and reconnaissance group have been suppressed close to Kuzmino (Lugansk Peoples Republic).

The enemy losses were up to 95 Ukrainian servicemen, one tank, two infantry fighting vehicles, one armoured fighting vehicle, one pickup truck, and two D-30 howitzers.

In South Donetsk direction, courageous and coordinated actions of the Vostok Group of Forces, air strikes and artillery fire have repelled an attack by the enemy near Nikolskoye (Donetsk Peoples Republic).

Close to Vremevka salient, one Ukrainian sabotage and reconnaissance group has been neutralised close to Rovnopol (Donetsk Peoples Republic).

In addition, an AFU manpower and hardware concentration area has been hit close to Makarovka (Donetsk Peoples Republic).

In Zaporozhye direction, as a result of the active actions by Operational-Tactical aviation of the Vostok Group of Forces, AFU manpower and hardware concentration areas of the units of the 33rd Mechanised Brigade have been hit near Pyatikhatka and Mirnoye (Zaporozhye region).

The enemy losses were up to 150 Ukrainian servicemen killed and wounded, one tank, two infantry fighting vehicles, two armoured fighting vehicles, three motor vehicles, as well as one FH70 howitzer.

In Kupyansk direction, as a result of active actions by the Zapad Group of Forces, Operational-Tactical and Army aviation, as well as artillery, two enemy attacks have been repelled near Novosyolovskoye (Lugansk Peoples Republic).

In addition, Russian troops inflicted fire on manpower and hardware concentration areas of the 14th and 37th mechanised brigades of the AFU close to Novomlynsk, Dvurechnaya, Sinkovka, Berestovoye (Kharkov region) and Novosyolovskoye (Lugansk Peoples Republic).

The activities of a Ukrainian sabotage and reconnaissance group have been suppressed close to Stelmakhovka (Lugansk Peoples Republic).

The enemy losses were up to 40 Ukrainian servicemen, one armoured fighting vehicle, two pickup trucks, and one D-20 howitzer.

Two ammunition depots of the units of the 103rd Territorial Defence Brigade have been destroyed near Kislovka.

In Kherson direction, the destruction of the AFU units that landed on Antonovsky Island in the Antonovsky Bridge area has been completed.

The enemy losses were up to 20 Ukrainian servicemen, two motor vehicles and two U.S.-manufactured M777 howitzers.

Operational-Tactical and Army aviation, Missile Troops and Artillery of the Armed Forces of the Russian Federation have neutralised 79 AFU artillery units at their firing positions, manpower and hardware in 108 areas.

In Kharkov region, AFU military hardware delivered from the central and western regions of Ukraine has been hit in places of unloading at railway stations close to Balakleya and Chuguev.

The control points of the AFU 28th and 54th mechanised brigades have been hit close to Aleksandro-Shultino, Razdolovka and Vesyoloye (Donetsk Peoples Republic).

Air defence facilities have shot down one Su-25 aircraft of Ukrainian Air Force near Novoandreevka (Zaporozhye region).

Four HIMARS multiple-launch rocket system projectiles and one HARM anti-radar missile have been intercepted.

In addition, 14 Ukrainian unmanned aerial vehicles have been destroyed close to Soledar, Krasnaya Gora, Yakovlevka, Volodino, Egorovka, Orlinskoye (Donetsk Peoples Republic), Kuibyshevo (Zaporozhye region), Belogorovka and Novokrasnyanka (Lugansk Peoples Republic).

In total, 445 airplanes, 240 helicopters, 4,859 unmanned aerial vehicles, 426 air defence missile systems, 10,472 tanks and other armoured fighting vehicles, 1,134 fighting vehicles equipped with MLRS, 5,300 field artillery cannons and mortars, as well as 11,365 special military motor vehicles have been destroyed during the special military operation.

WtR
It was quite the hubbub in the area: the death of a horse because of a bagpiper.

The December 25, 1895, edition of the Baraboo Republic newspaper took note of a case being tried in Wisconsin. It was decided by a jury that the bagpipe was not, in fact, a musical instrument.

There were a number of Scotchmen present, the reporter noted, and it was all the justice, with the aid of a constable, could do to keep them from assaulting the jury.

You see, William Matthaus sued the Wisconsin Theater Company because, the report said, a procession of freaks in the employment of the company was headed by a man playing on a bagpipe, an alleged musical instrument, which frightened a horse the plaintiff was riding.

The horse, sadly, never recovered and died. The plaintiff wanted to recover the value of the horse.

Attorneys argued all day about whether the bagpipe is a musical instrument. When the plaintiff referred to the bagpipe as an oin dudlesack, the report noted, the constable had to interfere to save him from the fury of a big Scotchman.

Rest assured, the bagpipe is now considered a musical instrument, and a proud one at that. Durwards Glen knows this, too.

There will be Scottish and Celtic music merriment, not fisticuffs, on Saturday during their annual Bagpipes in the Glen fundraiser.

The day will feature Scottish food, beverages, music, and, yes, bagpipinga lot of bagpiping.

It runs from 4 to 8 p.m. at the property, located at W11876 McLeish Road in the Baraboo Hills.

The event is a fundraiser for Durwards Glens nonprofit retreat center. Organizers are asking $20 per car for on-site parking. The event itself is free.

Durwards Glen was homesteaded for over 70 years by Scottish immigrants, the Durward family, noted Jeri Blau Wergin, director of the retreat center. They settled here in 1862, so we honor their Scottish roots by hosting this fundraiser yearly to help our nonprofit retreat center survive and flourish.

The first Bagpipes in the Glen event was in 2012. Last year, there were approximately 700 attendees for the festivities.

This years celebration begins at 4 p.m. with an opening ceremony and bagpiping. At 4:25, there will be a performance by Shari Sarazin, a vocalist, composer, and folk harpist. Shes performed in many locations throughout the region including the Milwaukee Irish Fest, Chicago Irish Fest, and at the Wisconsin state Capitol.

At 5:30, Slipjig performs. A Wisconsin-based band, they play music of the Celtic nations, including dance tunes and airs.

7 p.m. brings the Mears Brothers to the stage. The Mears Brothers have been performing since they were boys growing up in Racine. They are currently based in Nashville. Theyve had songs on the U.S. indie charts and their music has been heard on such shows at True Blood and Young Sheldon. Their music covers a wide spectrum of styles, from country to rock.

Guests can expect a carefully curated line-up of performances that honor Celtic and Scottish roots music, noted Jeri Blau Wergin. A few have performed at this event before. Some are brand new.

Bagpipes will be performed during set changes.

The organization suggests attendees bring their own seating for ease of comfort.

There was another newspaper article in the Baraboo Republic. The September 8, 1886 issue had an article that read, in part, We like the bagpipeslike to read about them and to think about them as something to whose melody distance lends enchantment.

Come Saturday, Baraboos Durwards Glen will be a land of enchantment.
The Columbia County Sheriffs Office has a new K-9 fund that will be used to help with the cost of training and acquiring police dogs.

An anonymous Lodi couple made the $10,000 donation earlier this month to the Community Foundation of South Central Wisconsin. The Columbia County K-9 unit has six dogs, but one is approaching retirement and another is injured, meaning the unit will need to add more dogs in the future.

It typically costs about $15,000 to purchase and train a new police dog. The K-9 unit is privately funded by donations, rather than taxpayer dollars.

The police dogs go through monthly training in drug detention, tracking, handler protection, criminal apprehension and building searches. Using police dogs enables officers to conduct searches with minimal time and personnel, and increases their personal safety, according to Columbia County Sheriffs Lt. Jordan Haueter.

Haueter and his police dog, K-9 Mattis, have been working together since 2018.

Hes my closest backup in the field, I just press a button on my belt to open the door and hes there, Haueter said.

Mattis and the five other dogs that make up the K-9 unit are German shepherds that came to Columbia County from the Netherlands, Germany and the Czech Republic. The dogs live with their handler and serve for anywhere between five and 10 years before retiring.

The dogs and their handlers form a life-long bond. Haueter said he was recently promoted and is spending more time in the office and less time in the field with Mattis.

I feel like Im leaving a part of me at home, Haueter said.

Since Mattis will likely retire within the next year or so, Haueter said the K-9 unit is especially grateful to the couple that donated to begin the new fund.

Robin Whyte, the executive director of the Community Foundation of South Central Wisconsin, said the Lodi couple was motivated to donate when they learned the K-9 unit was in need.

We continue to be amazed and inspired by the generosity of the community, Whyte said.

Photos: Scenes from the 2023 Westminster dog show
The Supreme Court has sent shockwaves through higher education with a landmark decision that struck down affirmative action and left colleges across the nation searching for new ways to promote student diversity. Leaders of scores of universities said Thursday they were disappointed by what they see as a blow to diversity. Yet many also voiced optimism that they would find new ways to admit more Black and Hispanic students, despite evidence that eliminating the practice often leads to steep enrollment decreases among them. President Joe Biden asked the Education Department to explore policies that could help colleges build diverse student bodies.
According to the Washoe County District Attorneys Office, Gustavo Mariscal-Garcia broke into his ex-girlfriend's house with a machete and hurt his ex-girlfriend's mother as she was trying to get away.
A graffiti reads "Without video, Nahel would be a statistic for the Interior Ministry" on a monument commemorating Holocaust victims and members of the French resistanceSunday, July 2, 2023 in Paris suburb Nanterre. The monument commemorating Holocaust victims and members of the French resistance during World War II was still defaced with graffiti Sunday, after it has been vandalized Thursday on the margins of a silent march to pay tribute to Nahel. Vandals painted anti-police slogans including "Police scum from Saint-Soline to Nanterre," "Don't forget or forgive," and "Police, rapists, assassins" (AP Photo/Cara Anna )
FILE - In this Sept. 1, 2020, file photo, Hong Kong activist Nathan Law, center, takes part in a protest during the visit of Chinese Foreign Minister Wang Yi in Berlin, Germany. Hong Kong police on Monday, July 3, 2023, accused eight self-exiled pro-democracy activists, including Nathan Law, of violating the territory's tough National Security Law and offered rewards of 1 million Hong Kong dollars ($127,600) each for information leading to their arrests. (AP Photo/Markus Schreiber, File)
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A former Marine who rowed across the Atlantic to raise money to provide service dogs for veterans is now tackling the Pacific.



Paul Lore, 61, who served in the Marines for eight years in the 1980s before spending 30 years as an air traffic controller, set off from Monterey, California, on June 12 and is due to reach Hanalei Bay in Hawaii in late July after rowing some 2,800 miles.

You can subscribe here to AARP Veteran Report, a free e-newsletter published twice a month. If you have feedback or a story idea then please contact us here.

As a warm-up last year, Lore and three other veterans  one each from the Army, the Navy and the Air Force  who made up the Foar from Home team took 51 days to row 3,000 miles across the Atlantic, from the Canary Islands to Antigua, raising $900,000 for K9s for Warriors.

This time, Lore, a father of four who is based at Fernandina Beach on Floridas Amelia Island, has brought together an international team of two male and two female rowers from the U.S., the Netherlands and Switzerland to form Team Ohana.

The Pacific Challenge row will raise money for K9s for Warriors and also the Childrens Tumor Foundation, which works to expand research and care for neurofibromatosis (NF) and related tumor disorders.

Lore, who expects the Pacific row to take between 38 and 44 days, decided to support the foundation because a friend suffers from NF, in which noncancerous tumors grow in places that cause deafness, blindness and paralysis. The friend underwent seven surgeries in a single year.

Paul Lore is now retired in Florida. Courtesy Paul Lore

K9 for Warriors is the nations largest provider of service dogs to military veterans suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder, traumatic brain injury or military sexual trauma. It has trained 9,000 dogs and has had only one loss of life among those it has served.

An average of 17 veterans die by suicide in the U.S. each day, with veterans 1.5 times more likely to commit suicide than nonveterans.

We wanted to rewrite the veteran suicide narrative, and to let people know its not a shirt or a slogan, Lore told AARP Veteran Report. These are our daughters and sons that were losing. Sometimes were losing our aunts and our uncles. And the dog program works.
Join AARP for a National PACT Act Tele-Town Hall on expanded health care benefits and services available to veterans and their families from the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs (VA) under the new law. The event will also highlight key AARP resources and tools, such as the mobile-friendly Veterans & Military Families Health Benefits Navigator.

The Sergeant First Class Heath Robinson Honoring our Promise to Address Comprehensive Toxics (PACT) Act, named after a decorated combat medic who died from a rare form of lung cancer, specifically addresses veterans with toxic exposures during the Vietnam War, Gulf War and post 9/11 eras.



Veterans who think they qualify for PACT Act benefits should submit their benefit claims before Aug. 10, 2023, to receive a whole years worth of retroactive benefits. Applications submitted after this date will not be provided back pay.

Tele-town hall date:

July 11, 2023, from 3 to 3:45 p.m. ET

How to dial-in:

1-833-998-1734 

Topics include:

Benefits available from the PACT Act

How to file for PACT Act benefits

How to obtain retroactive benefits by Aug. 10, 2023 deadline

Speakers:
Mike McCulloughs first big find with a metal detector was a gold wedding ring. Even better, it belonged to his wife, who had lost it in 1976. I found it about nine years after she lost it, McCullough said. That was my first really excellent find. Hes been hooked on the hobby since then.



McCullough, from Baldwin, Md., hunts for metal near his home. Matt Roth

Hes not alone. Detectorists, as they like to be called, have found gold and silver hoards, Civil War relics and other valuables hidden beneath the soil for years. Their finds can have personal value  small bits of history  or real cash value, in the case of coins or jewelry. Most recently, a loose confederation of detectorists called The Ring Finders has been using metal detectors to help locate lost rings and reunite people with their missing personal treasures. They get big thanks from the owners  and sometimes a gratuity as well.

A growing hobby

Metal detecting is a big hobby in Britain, thanks in part to Detectorists, a television series about eccentric metal detectoring enthusiasts. Some stunning recent finds, such as the 2,500 Norman pennies known as the Chew Valley Hoard, have sent Britons scouring the countryside for buried treasure. One of the more famous British detectorists is Bill Wyman, former bass player for the Rolling Stones, who sells his own branded line of metal detectors. You never know what the next find is, he says in a YouTube video about metal detecting. Plus, you get fresh air and exercise. Its a great hobby.

But metal detecting is a growing hobby in the U.S., too. McCullough has found coins, buckles, buttons and other common items from the Colonial era, as well as Civil War relics. Those are very memorable finds because this was part of our history, he says.

Ellis, geared up for a search in the Occoquan River in Northern Virginia. Matt Roth

For Rob Ellis, a retired teacher from Lorton, Virginia, the thrill of metal detecting is returning a lost ring or other valuable to its rightful owner. Its not the money, says Ellis, who charges about $25 to cover the cost of coming out to a customer. The customer then gives him whatever he feels the service is worth. Its like, Hey, heres a tip,  Ellis says. It can vary so much, but it allows me to buy new equipment and maintain it.

Ellis belongs to The Ring Finders, a directory of people you can call if youve lost a ring (or other valuable) and need help finding it. Most work on a reward basis  you pay only if the Ring Finder finds the ring. And in many cases, the fee is extremely flexible.
Surfing has existed in some form for several centuries and traces its origins to Polynesia. In the early 20th century, the sport was elevated to global phenomenon status, especially along the Southern California coast. Anthems such as Surfin U.S.A. by the Beach Boys and movies such as Gidget brought surf culture mainstream. These days, its easier than ever to try the sport, especially at camps that make it fun for people at all skill levels to catch a wave. (Be sure to talk with your health care provider before planning any strenuous activities.)

Check out these four surf camps where youll be hanging 10 faster than you can say cowabunga!

AARP Membership  $12 for your first year when you sign up for Automatic Renewal Get instant access to members-only products and hundreds of discounts, a free second membership, and a subscription to AARP The Magazine. Join Now Guests learn how to read the waves with the pros at Pata Sudaka Surf Camp in Oahu, Hawaii. Courtesy of Pata Sudaka Surf Camp

Pata Sudaka Surf Camp, Oahu, Hawaii

Hawaiian island magic and surfing meet during a seven-day surf camp about 40 minutes from Honolulu. Guests start by learning how to read the waves and progress with professional lessons along the way. A maximum of 12 students share the camps glamping tents (private tents are possible for couples), which are surrounded by coconut palms just five minutes away from Haleiwa, a laid-back town for ducking into galleries featuring work from island-based artists and grabbing post-surf smoothies or acai bowls at Haleiwa Bowls. The camp includes yoga classes for flexibility, guided hiking, kayaking and snorkeling opportunities around the island. Prices start at $2,650 per surfer and include airport transfer, two meals per day and professional surf lessons with video analysis. Camps run every month of the year. 

Learn everything you need to know about surf etiquette and safety at the Endless Summer Surf Camp in California. Endless Summer Surf Camp

Endless Summer Surf Camp, San Onofre, California

The part of San Onofre State Beach known as Old Mans Beach will keep you young at heart. The areas renowned surf breaks are great for beginners. By the end of the five-day camp, youll know how to paddle out, select a wave, stand up and turn, plus everything you need to know about surf etiquette and safety. A dedicated campsite at San Onofre State Beach has carpeted tents, ping-pong tables and a television and video viewing lounge complete with sofas for nighttime movies and surf session video analysis. Prices start at $1,395 and include overnight stays, all meals, snacks, nonalcoholic drinks and surfing equipment. Camp dates run through early September.
CPC's birthplace draws increasing number of foreign visitors

Xinhua) 11:14, July 03, 2023

SHANGHAI, July 1 (Xinhua) -- Since reopening to the public in June 2021, the memorial of the first National Congress of the Communist Party of China (CPC) in Shanghai has so far received over 3 million visitors, including 1,735 foreign officials and their retinue.

Saturday marks the 102nd founding anniversary of the Party, and it is usually a peak tourist season for the memorial. Currently, about 10,000 people visit the memorial on average every day, leaving some 1,000 notes on its message board each day.

Among the notes left there, a significant number are from foreign visitors. Many foreign ambassadors and diplomats have expressed their awe while talking about their experience of visiting the memorial. They were particularly struck by the remarkable changes that China has undergone over the past century under the leadership of the CPC.

Carlos Alberto Mendez, a vlogger from Honduras, was one of the foreign visitors spotted at the red culture-themed memorial. Speaking about his understanding, he said the Party has explored a new economic development model under the guidance of its socialist theory.

He went on to add that his trip to China made him realize the harmonious coexistence between modern cities and nature, leading to a deeper understanding of sustainable development.

"After returning to Honduras, I will try to spread what I see and hear in a way that is easy for the audience to understand so that more Hondurans can understand how socialism has made China prosperous," the vlogger said.

The ruling philosophy of the CPC is full of wisdom, which not only meets China's development needs but also deserves to be learned by Arabian countries, said Mohamed Ziad Zaitoun, the third secretary of the Syrian Embassy in China, when visiting the memorial of the first CPC National Congress.

China has made great development achievements under the leadership of the Party and benefited the world at the same time, the diplomat added.

"The site of the first CPC National Congress not only witnessed the groundbreaking events in China but also witnessed the changes brought about by the founding of the CPC to world history," Zaitoun said.

The CPC has launched the world's largest and most powerful poverty alleviation campaign, successfully lifting nearly 100 million people out of absolute poverty. Such a feat has provided the world with China's plan for poverty alleviation and governance while offering valuable reference for developing countries to get rid of poverty, said Nazar Majeed, the first secretary of the Iraqi Embassy in China, who had also visited the memorial.

Chinese modernization is inseparable from the leadership of the CPC. Chinese modernization has rich connotations, and under the leadership of the CPC, the Chinese nation will certainly be able to achieve great rejuvenation, noted Ahmed Chouaib, Charge d'affaires of the Arab League Representative Office in China.

Since the reopening of the renovated memorial in 2021, more than 240,000 messages have been written by visitors from home and abroad, expressing their thoughts on the founding and revolutionary history of the Party.

Among the messages, some are from the descendants of the Party's revolutionary martyrs, while others are left by foreign guests, and this vividly demonstrates the strong attraction and appeal of the birthplace of the CPC, said Xue Feng, curator of the memorial.

(Web editor: Zhang Kaiwei, Liang Jun)
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The 'Princess Diana' raptress gets cheeky as she expresses her gratitude for the warm response from her Dublin fans with an Instagram post after she headlines the festival in Marlay Park.

Jul 3, 2023

AceShowbiz - Ice Spice has treated her Instagram followers to racy pictures following her performance at Longitude Festival. Returning the love after receiving warm welcome at the festival in Dublin, Ireland, the raptress has unleashed some new photos flaunting her serious butt cheeks.

On Saturday, July 1, the Bronx femcee made use of her account on the photo-sharing platform to express her gratitude for the chance to headline the show in Marlay Park. "thxx," she wrote along with a slew of images taken during her visit to the country over the weekend.

Seemingly still wearing her stage outfit, the "Munch (Feelin' U)" hitmaker got cheeky as she showed off the exposed part of her derriere in one of the snaps. She rocked a skintight top and super short denim skirt with a black belt cinching her waist.

The 23-year-old completed her look with a pair of furry black knee high boots and carried a pink sequin bag over her shoulder. She opted for long bright red curls for her look that day.

The comments section of Ice's post was soon flooded with flirty messages from her followers. One fan wrote, "Shake that ass for daddy." Another left a comment which read, "I wanna suffocate between her ass." A third declared, "IM A MUNCH," while someone else begged the raptress to "sit on my face."

Meanwhile, Raekwon isaiah Thomas didn't miss his chance to propose a collaboration with the "Princess Diana" raptress. The musician/actor wrote in the comment, "I love you! @icespice can we get together," but she has not publicly replied to him.

Ice recently teamed up with Nicki Minaj to release "Barbie World", which is included in the soundtrack album of the upcoming live-action "Barbie" movie. The song marks their second collaboration after the Harajuku Barbie was previously featured on Ice's "Princess Diana" remix.

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The 80-year-old president of the United States previously opted to miss 74-year-old monarch's coronation in May, sending his wife, Dr. Jill Biden, in his place instead.

Jul 3, 2023

AceShowbiz - King Charles will meet Joe Biden next week. The 74-year-old monarch will host the U.S. president at Windsor Castle on 10 July, with the politician also set to sit down with U.K. Prime Minister Rishi Sunak, who visited Washington DC. last month, again during his brief visit to the U.K..

Buckingham Palace confirmed in a statement, "The King will meet the President of the United States of America at Windsor Castle on Monday 10th July."

The meeting was also confirmed by the White House. The president's representative said, "President Biden will first travel to London, United Kingdom for engagements with King Charles III and Prime Minister Rishi Sunak to further strengthen the close relationship between our nations."

The 80-year-old president previously met with the late Queen Elizabeth at Windsor Castle in June 2021, but he opted to miss Charles' coronation in May, sending his wife, Dr. Jill Biden in his place.

A spokesperson said ahead of the coronation, "President Joseph R. Biden, Jr. spoke today with King Charles III, underscoring the strength of the relationship between our countries and the friendship between our people. The President congratulated the King on his upcoming Coronation and informed him that First Lady Jill Biden looks forward to attending on behalf of the United States."

White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre revealed that Biden had told Charles how much he and the First Lady enjoyed visiting the late Queen and added that he hoped to visit again soon.

The king then offered the president the opportunity to come to the UK for a state visit, which Jean-Pierre confirmed was accepted by Biden.

She said, "So they will see each other again very soon, they have a very good relationship, there are many things that they both care about, key shared values, key shared issues, that they want to continue to discuss like climate change."

Jean-Pierre added, "I do not have a timeline, I can't say when it will be but the president was appreciative of the offer by the King and looks forward to it."

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Rae's Wu-Tang Clan brethren RZA, Ghostface Killah and Inspectah Deck as well as Nas, Fat Joe, Faith Evans and N.O.R.E. are among those attending the lavish ceremony in Dallas.

Jul 3, 2023

AceShowbiz - Raekwon is officially a married man now. The rapper has finally married his longtime girlfriend Jasmine, with whom he shares two children, in a star-studded wedding attended by hip-hop heavyweights.

The founding member of Wu-Tang Clan tied the knot with his partner on Friday, June 30 in Dallas, Texas. Among the guests were his fellow Clansmen RZA, Ghostface Killah and Inspectah Deck. The nuptials also attracted the likes of Nas, Fat Joe, N.O.R.E. as well as Faith Evans, who was on hand to serenade the groom and the bride. Rae was also seen in a video singing with the "I'll Be Missing You" songstress.

Photos from the wedding have since made their way out online, courtesy of guests at the event. Loud Records' founder Steve Rifkind posted on his Instagram page pictures of him with other guests and wrote, "Congrats @raekwon and Jasmin on your wedding family's pictures."

Fat Joe shared similar pictures and added in the caption, "Congrats to my brother @raekwon and his lovely wife jasmine love y'all."

Inspectah Deck posed with the groom, who donned an off-white suit and black pants with a bow tie. "Congratulations to my bro @raekwon," he captioned the snap, along with other images from the festivities. "Proud and honored to be part of your journey king!!"

Nas took to his own page to congratulate the 53-year-old rapper on his special day. "Rae Day! Congratulations to @raekwon & his family. ~From the family," so the "If I Ruled the World (Imagine That)" hitmaker penned.

Rae has rarely spoken on his personal life, but in his 2021 memoir titled "From Staircase to Stage: The Story of Raekwon", he opened up about his challenging childhood and how it has shaped his views as a father. "Being a dad myself, I never want to abandon my children under any circumstances. I don't care if I'm arguing with my kids' mom or whatever, that's just not going to be me because it's going to always make me reflect back to what I've been through," he vowed.

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In a video uploaded on social media, the former 'Scream Queens' star candidly declares that she does not 'have trust in the government anymore' after getting disappointed at decisions made by the authorities recently.

Jul 3, 2023

AceShowbiz - Keke Palmer has expressed her "much distrust" of the United States Government. Being disappointed at decisions made by the powers that be recently, the former "Scream Queens" star got candid about her inability to trust them and shared it with her followers.

On Thursday, June 29, the 29-year-old let out a video on Instagram in which she discussed her issues with the government. Over the clip, she noted, "WHAT IS GOING ON!?!? As a millennial l I've had ENOUGH." In the video, she could be heard saying, "It just gets to a point where we just don't even have trust in the government anymore."

The "Nope" actress went on to say, "People want us to be involved and want us to be engaged and we'd like to, but it's hard to be involved and engaged when there's so much distrust." She further asked, "How are y'all overturning Roe v. Wade? How are y'all overturning Affirmative Action? At this point, are we about to be segregated again?"

Along with the video, Keke wrote in the caption of the post, "Idk if I should be happy that @mielleorganics are on their way to be just for us again or what! .Im kidding but SERIOUSLY! How can we keep going like this?"

"I'm down for whatever and ready to roll with all the punches cause in the end the good always wins but there are some serious holes in the system and it gets to the point where something has to give," she continued. "What good is playing by the rules when they just play in your face like this?"

Keke's video was later reposted on The Shade Room's Instagram page. The comments section of the post was immediately flooded with Instagram users expressing their thoughts on the matter. One in particular wrote, "Every battle we fight and win is never completely won. I keep saying this - every generation has to keep fighting to maintain any change or progress we make."

Meanwhile, another chimed in, "They get mad when we don't care for politics like we're 'supposed to' but politics don't even care for us how they're supposed to." A third penned, "I feel like anybody that was born during segregation should not be in any form of leadership in 2023. they are all out of touch - why is the president pushing 100???"

Keke's disappointment at the government came a few weeks after she made a claim that she had been a victim of "breast milk discrimination" at the Houston airport. On June 12, she wrote on Twitter, "Breast milk discrimination at the Houston airport ruined my mood."

"I should've popped my t*t out right then because the discretion and comfort of pumping is thwarted with threats to throw out over 16oz my babies food?!?!!! Why is that not a crime?? I'M A MOTHER for crying out loud," she continued.

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In a video shared by Khaotic on Instagram, the 'Love and Hip Hop: Atlanta' star is seen preparing to move into his new house after finalizing his divorce with the mother of two of his children.

Jul 3, 2023

AceShowbiz - Lil Scrappy is marking a new chapter in his life with a new house. After finalizing his divorce with Bambi, the rapper/reality TV star has apparently bought a new "mansion" that will now be his bachelor pad.

It's his friend and "Love & Hip Hop: Atlanta" co-star Khaotic who shared the news via social media. Taking to his Instagram page on Saturday, July 1, Khaotic posted a video of him filming Scrappy at his new pad.

Scrappy was seemingly caught off guard by Khaotic's attempt to document his move. He looked shy while his friend was excitedly exploring the house, which is still half empty with some workers preparing the furniture.

In the video, Khaotic was marveled at Scrappy's "big a** house" while showing off the big walking closet and a pool in the backyard. He also pointed out that the house boasts "granite cabinet" and "marble counters."

"Congratulations My Boy @reallilscrappy Just Bought A Mansion N He Say I Can Live N Da Basement," Khaotic wrote in the caption.

Fans were happy for Scrappy, as one Instagram user reacted to the video, "So happy for you @reallilscrappy." Another commented, "Congratulations king," while a third penned, "Blessings scrappy god got you. Stay up. Khotic. Appreciate."

Some others, however, blasted Scrappy for buying the new house after his ex-wife Bambi revealed prior to their divorce that they had to move out of their shared home because he didn't uphold his end of the rent. The pair share two children together, son Breland and daughter Xylo.

"I see he can pay bills he just didn't wanna pay hers," one person remarked. A second critic said, "A man who doesn't take care of his family, isn't a man. Next." A third person was not thrilled by the news either as musing, "So he couldn't uphold his half of the rent with the house him and his family lived in but he can do this ? Trifling ass n***a behavior."

Some others alleged that Scrappy might have planned it all this time to prepare for his divorce. "Men pull moves like what he did to make a woman resent and loathe him. He purposefully didn't pay his end of the rent to spite her, so that he could save up to get his own new place," someone speculated. Another similarly remarked, "oh he was saving that money for the final exit."

Scrappy and Bambi's divorce was reportedly finalized last month, just before his scheduled appearance at the 2023 BET Awards. At the June 25 event, Scrappy seemingly made public his relationship with Diamond as they hit the red carpet together, though they stood in a distance from each other in front of cameras.

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The former Sex Pistol star has been forced to file a police report to ask for help from law enforcement officials after a female fan stalked and trespassed on his property.

Jul 3, 2023

AceShowbiz - John Lydon has sought help from police after allegedly being targeted by an over-zealous fan. The 67-year-old former Sex Pistol star alleges a woman started dropping letters into the mail box at his home in California last month and he later came face-to-face with her after she allegedly trespassed on his property by gaining access to his backyard.

Lydon told her to leave but later began receiving phone calls so he filed a stalking report with the Los Angeles County Sheriff's Department, according to TMZ.com. Officials are now investigating his claims, the website reports.

Lydon is still reeling from the loss of his wife Nora Forster - who died in April aged 80 after a battle with Alzheimer's disease. The musician cared for Nora while she fought the condition, and he recently insisted he's trying not to feel sorry for himself as he grieves her death.

He told Telegraph.co.uk, "All the sadness I had to go through [when Nora became ill] is self-inflicted on myself and I'm seeing the light in it now. In an odd weird way this is actually a gift from God, not a curse. Because it offers enormous self-reflection. And it reminds me of that famous tradition in the Lydon family, 'Don't have self-pity - all it does is arm your enemies.' "

The PiL frontman was reassured by the fact Nora knew she was "loved." He said, "She is loved, and she knows she is loved. And her personality has always been vivacious, outgoing, bright and looking for the best in things."

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Beyonce Knowles is reuniting with her former Destiny's Child bandmate to help officials in their hometown of Houton, Texas with a multi-million dollar housing unit for the needy.

Jul 3, 2023

AceShowbiz - Beyonce Knowles has joined forces with Kelly Rowland to help the homeless. The 41-year-old pop superstar and her former Destiny's Child bandmate are working with Harris County officials to build a multi-million dollar housing unit for those in need in their hometown of Houston in Texas.

"Harris County and the city of Houston, jointly with the coalition for the homeless, have reduced homeless in the middle of the pandemic by 20 percent, and we've been able to hold that reduction," Judge Lina Hidalgo said in a statement.

"We just did the homeless count again, so it's initiatives like this one I certainly will be supportive of it no matter whose behind it, but it's especially interesting, I think, because there are these names of Beyonce and Kelly Rowland, who, of course, have been supportive of the community for a very long time."

According to reports, the project supported by the "Bootylicious" hitmakers will also strive to provide support services such as transportation, mental health, physical and behavioral health support to those who need it.

Local pastor and Bread of Life founder Rudy Rasmus also noted that he was "grateful" to have the pop stars on board and noted that it will be the fifth development in the area in almost 20 years. He said, "This will be our fifth housing development in downtown in Precinct 1 over these last 17 years, and just really grateful to continue to help end homeless in our county."

When the "Break My Soul" songstress hit the big time alongside Michelle Williams, 43, and Kelly, 42, as part of the girl band in 2002, the two Houston natives donated $500,000 to their hometown to help build a new youth centre for the area. At the time, Rasmus said, "Every time they have received an honour, they have always acknowledged the fact that God has blessed them, and that is something to celebrate."

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According to an unnamed friend, Leandro De Niro Rodriguez was found lifeless in his rented apartment in New York with white powdery substance near his body.

Jul 4, 2023

AceShowbiz - Robert De Niro's grandson Leandro reportedly passed away from a possible overdose. A friend of 19-year-old actor Leandro De Niro Rodriguez found the teen's lifeless body sitting in a chair with a white powdery substance on a plate near his body, a police source told the Daily Mail.

Police sources told TMZ his death "is being investigated as an overdose" but it is unclear what the reported substance was. "We're told the teen was housesitting, and both drugs and drug paraphernalia were found near his body," the outlet added.

Leandro was found dead at a $950,000, one-bedroom apartment in the Cipriani Club Residences on Wall Street. TMZ reported the friend who found him hadn't heard from him in a few days and was checking in on him.

A concierge at 55 Wall Street confirmed Leandro lived in the building, and told the Daily Mail, "I'd see him every now and then, and he'd always say 'Hi.' He just was friendly, kept to himself. I didn't know who he was until I read the story. It's a tragedy. I was just talking to my co-worker that said my daughter just turned 20. You see (Leandro's) picture - he was a baby."

The concierge added Leandro lived alone in the sixth-floor apartment which he had apparently rented for less than a year. The 937 sq ft one-bed apartment is currently up for sale for $945,000 and an open house was scheduled for next week. It was last offered for rent at $4,000 a month, according to Mail Online.

Leandro's death was confirmed on Monday by his mum Drena De Niro - Robert's adopted daughter - in an emotional post on Instagram. The 51-year-old said, "My beautiful sweet angel. I have loved you beyond words or description from the moment I felt you in my belly."

"You have been my joy my heart and all that was ever pure and real in my life. I wish I was with you right now. I wish I was with you. I don't know how to live without you but I'll try to go on and spread the love and light that you so made me feel in getting to be your mama. You were so deeply loved and appreciated and I wish that love alone could have saved you. I'm so sorry my baby."

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Building upon its legacy of globetrotting exploits, Lucas hilms Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destinynow playing in theaterswas filmed on location in Morocco, Sicily, and the U.K., providing multiple backdrops for the whip-smart archeologists unforgettable final adventure. Says director/co-writer James Mangold, Part of what we expect in an Indiana Jones film is a tumbling menagerie of characters coming at us while they travel the world.

With that in mind, Mangold worked with production designer Adam Stockhausen, director of photography Phedon Papamichael, special effects supervisor Alistair Williams, and visual effects supervisor Andrew Whitehurst to develop the films dynamic action sequences and awe-inspiring visualswhich fans have come to expect ever since Indiana Jones and the Raiders of the Lost Ark was released in 1981, setting the tone for decades of international escapades. So, to give Indiana Jones (Harrison Ford) a proper sendoff, the production team constructed large set-pieces, which included a 1944 train sequence in Germany, a horseback pursuit through a ticker tape parade in New York, a frenzied tuk tuk chase through the streets of Tangier, and a tense underwater dive in Greece, to name just a few.

I think that is core to what makes these movies special; its different to be in a place than to pretend youre in a place, Stockhausen says of their considered approach. Being in a place brings all the authenticity of the real thing, and it brings all the surprises of being able to twist and turn around corners that you wouldnt have imagined to build into a set.

The real-world locations and practical sets helped the cast get into character. They each had their own personality, says Phoebe Waller-Bridge, who joins the franchise as Helena Shaw. Sicily was beautiful and serene, Morocco was full of bustle with a thousand things happening around you at the same time, and Glasgow has an energy I wish I could bottle.

At the same time, Stockhausen strove to match the visual grandeur of the real-world locations with the massive and richly detailed sets he constructed at Pinewood Studios just outside of central London. The explosive opening sequence was a prime example of the way the film smartly married impressive locationsincluding Englands Bamburgh Castle and the North Yorkshire Moors Railway stationwith Stockhausens inventive designs. The nighttime set piece sees the younger Indy attempting to rescue his friend Basil Shaw (Toby Jones) from Nazi captors aboard a moving train. I wanted to give the audience what they want right up front, Mangold says, so we indulge in this Indiana Jones classic experience.

Following the prologue, Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny jumps to 1969, when an estimated 4 million people lined the streets of New York City to see NASA astronauts Neil Armstrong, Buzz Aldrin, and Mike Collins and celebrate the success of the Apollo 11 mission to the moon. Staging the parade and the chase that follows required considerable planning in Glasgow, Scotland, which doubled for Manhattan. The production team spent three weeks dressing Glasgows main artery, St. Vincent Street, which was then closed to the public for seven days as filming took place. Says Stockhausen, You cant walk into a downtown metropolitan area and just take it over for three months. You have to do your work in as compressed a period of time as you can possibly manage and then get out and let people get back to their lives. So, there was an incredible intensity for everyone to rush in and do all this dressing, put up all these signs, put up all this bunting. It was go-go-go.

Fortunately for Papamichael, the weather cooperated while they were filming outdoors. Although it was all shot in Glasgow, it felt like we were really in New York in the late 60sthe scale of it, the colors, the hippies, the pipers, the big band, the cheerleaders, and the cars, and police on horses. The contrast couldnt be greater than the sequence that precedes it. You explode from the night and the Nazis into this whole new visual bouquet of colors and tone, he explains. It worked as a great visual device for a transition of time.

As the chase progresses, Indiana finds himself, on horseback, riding underground through Manhattans subway tunnels, racing an oncoming train. For those scenes, Stockhuasen created a full-scale replica of a subway station on Pinewoods 007 stagethe largest soundstage in the worldcomplete with paint and tile work that was aged for authenticity.

When the storys action moves to Morocco, exteriors were shot in the city of Fez, while the lavish interiors of the Hotel LAtlantiquewhere Helena auctions off her lootwere built at Pinewood. Meanwhile, Sicily stood in for Greece, wherewith Renaldo (Antonio Banderas)Indiana and Helena dive into vast caverns to follow the trail of Archimedes.

Ultimately, Ford says it was critical to film on location. You want to go to many places around the world. You want to feel these places, you want to smell them, as it were, the actor explains. And so, we want as much as possible to have practical sets, practical locations where theres a different culture, where theres a different feeling to the place.
Adgullys CMOs Charcha - Kolkata Chapter, held on June 30, 2023, brought together a diverse group of industry leaders, who discussed the great potential that the East markets offer, the changing expectations and aspirations of consumers, brands strategy to win over complex and somewhat remote markets, and much more.

Delivering his special keynote address, Harshavardhan Chauhaan, a leading industry expert in retail, e-commerce, and D2C brands, explored the concept of phygital retail and its role in shaping the future of retail sustainability.

Retail globally is undergoing unprecedented times. Economies across the world are witnessing increasing consumer consumption levels, directly impacting the sustainability of communities, society, and the planet. The next decade will be crucial for brands to survive the test of consumers, as sustainability becomes a key determinant of their success.

The Phygital Revolution

The term phygital is a portmanteau of physical and digital, representing the convergence of these two realms in the retail industry. Consumers no longer differentiate between online and offline experiences; instead, they expect brands to seamlessly operate across channels, providing a consistent and personalized shopping journey. This transformation presents an opportunity for brands to embed sustainability into every aspect of their operations and engage consumers in a meaningful and eco-conscious manner.

Sustainability at the heart of strategy

Chauhaan emphasised on the critical role of sustainability in shaping retail strategy. He believed that sustainability should not be treated as an add-on or marketing gimmick, but should be deeply embedded in a brands DNA. Companies must align their vision, mission, and values with sustainable practices to create a lasting impact on both the environment and society.

To achieve this, brands need to adopt innovative and catchy acronyms that reflect their commitment to retail sustainability. Concepts such as G.R.E.E.N. (Generating Responsibility by Embracing Eco-conscious Norms) and S.T.E.W.A.R.D. (Sustainable Transformations Empowering World through Action, Responsibility, and Development) can serve as guiding principles to drive sustainable initiatives across all business functions.

Phygital sustainability in action

Phygital retail enables brands to leverage technology to create sustainable experiences for consumers. For instance, using augmented reality (AR) and virtual reality (VR) technologies, brands can offer virtual try-on experiences, reducing the need for physical prototypes and minimizing wastage. By integrating these digital solutions into their sustainability strategies, brands can enhance customer engagement while reducing their environmental impact.

Furthermore, by leveraging data analytics and artificial intelligence (AI), brands can optimise supply chain processes, reduce carbon emissions, and minimise waste. Smart sensors and Internet of Things (IoT) devices can monitor energy consumption, track inventory levels, and streamline logistics, thereby promoting efficiency and sustainability in retail operations.

Collaboration and Partnerships

Chauhaan emphasised that achieving true sustainability requires collaboration across the retail ecosystem. Brands, suppliers, consumers, and governments must join forces to drive sustainable practices. Initiatives such as R.E.T.A.I.L. (Revolutionizing Ecosystem Through Alliances for Inclusive and Lasting Sustainability) promote partnerships between retailers and suppliers, facilitating the adoption of sustainable materials, responsible sourcing, and ethical labour practices.

Additionally, brands can partner with non-profit organisations and NGOs to implement social and environmental initiatives. Collaborative efforts, such as the P.L.A.N.E.T (Promoting Local Action for Nurturing Environmental Transformation) project, can engage local communities, foster eco-conscious behaviour, and create a positive impact on the environment.

The Role of Leadership

CEOs have a critical role to play in driving sustainability in retail. They must ensure that sustainability is not just a checkbox exercise, but ingrained in the core values of the organisation. As Chauhaan put it, CEOs will be expected to not just ensure that their bottomlines are green, but whether they are truly doing good practice green in strategy and everyday operations. This calls for a cultural shift within organizations, where sustainability becomes a shared responsibility across all levels and departments.

The future of retail sustainability lies in embracing the concept of phygital retail, where physical and digital channels merge seamlessly to deliver personalised, engaging, and eco-conscious experiences. Chauhaans visionary leadership underscores the importance of integrating sustainability into retail strategies, operations, and everyday practices. By adopting innovative acronyms, leveraging technology, fostering collaboration, and demonstrating strong leadership, brands can contribute to a more sustainable future, ensuring the well-being of communities, society, and the planet. As the retail industry evolves, sustainability must remain at the heart of its transformation, driving positive change and creating lasting value for generations to come.

These are edited excerpts of Harshavardhan Chauhaans keynote address. For the complete address, watch below:
Federal Department of Foreign Affairs

Bern, 03.07.2023 - Switzerland continues to provide aid to Ukraine. Federal Councillor Ignazio Cassis has approved an additional CHF 5.5 million to renovate and refurbish around 30 schools in Ukraine. The aim is to ensure that nearly 15,000 schoolchildren have access to a decent and safe education.

Russian military aggression has dealt a severe blow to Ukraine's education sector. Thousands of schools across the country have been damaged or destroyed, and many teachers have fled the conflict zones, thereby disrupting the education of millions of students.



In response to this crisis, Federal Councillor Ignazio Cassis has increased Switzerland's support for the 'Decentralisation for Improved Democratic Education' (DECIDE) project by CHF 5.5 million in order to rehabilitate around 30 schools in the regions directly affected by the fighting in Chernihiv, Odesa and Poltava. The project involves the installation of secure multi-purpose classrooms to ensure uninterrupted learning, even during air raid warnings.



The rehabilitation and upgrading of schools in municipalities that have long-standing partnerships with the SDC will provide pupils with a safe and appropriate environment for face-to-face classroom learning. This initiative will not only strengthen local public services but also bolster the education system's resilience in crisis situations. The continuation of face-to-face teaching will also contribute to the integration of displaced children and their families into host communities.



This additional Swiss contribution will also enable the DECIDE project to provide technical and pedagogical support for online education for displaced children and children living in areas particularly vulnerable to hostilities where in-person teaching is unfeasible. Thanks to this contribution from the Swiss Confederation, nearly 15,000 schoolchildren will be able to continue their education in safety and dignity.



Ukraine's Ministry of Education and Science is committed to rebuilding the education sector, ensuring that children return to school, and guaranteeing a safe learning environment and education services for the duration of the war. The DECIDE project is being implemented in close cooperation with the Ukrainian Ministry of Education and Science, the Ukrainian Ministry for Communities, Territories and Infrastructure Development, and local authorities.



Switzerland's support for schools is part of the CHF 140 million aid plan for Ukraine announced by the Federal Council in February and approved by Parliament.

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State Secretariat for Education, Research and Innovation

Bern, 03.07.2023 - Martina Hirayama, State Secretary for Education, Research and Innovation met with Chinese Vice Minister for Education on 3 July 2023 for a bilateral discussion on relations between the two countries in the area of higher education and vocational education and training.

The discussion between State Secretary Martina Hirayama and Vice Minister Wu Yan focussed on professional education, mobility and the respective higher education system in Switzerland and China. The meeting was a good opportunity to prepare for the next Sino-Swiss Joint Working Group (JWG) on Education. In 2012, a bilateral agreement was signed for the purpose of strengthening cooperation in the area of higher education. Since 2014, JWG meetings between the State Secretariat for Education, Research and Innovation (SERI) and the Chinese Ministry of Education have taken place at regular intervals on the basis of this agreement. These meetings serve as a platform for the sharing of information, discussion of current challenges and networking in the field of education. After a long hiatus during the Corona period, the next meeting is expected to be held in China in 2024.

In addition to the previously mentioned bilateral agreement on education, there is another agreement in force that the Swiss Confederation and the People's Republic of China signed back in 1989 on scientific and technological cooperation. By virtue of this agreement, Switzerland was able to open a Swissnex location in Shanghai in 2008. As a part of Switzerland's global network for education, research and innovation, Swissnex contributes to deeper cooperation between the two countries. The enactment of two new data protection laws in China in 2021 has now raised new questions among Swiss education and research stakeholders. SERI intends to work with China to find possible solutions. At the meeting with the Chinese Vice Minister for Education, State Secretary Hirayama underscored the importance of freedom of research and teaching as a fundamental prerequisite for successful cooperation in all international cooperation endeavours. Given the latest global challenges, international cooperation in education, research and innovation is essential.

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Representative Purpose

The Supreme Court on Monday slammed the Delhi government for expressing its inability to contribute funds for construction of the Regional Rapid Transit System (RRTS) project and directed it to furnish details of funds spent on advertisements in the last three financial years.

The funds were meant for construction of the RRTS stretch that will connect the national capital with Rajasthan and Haryana.

A bench comprising Justice S K Kaul and Justice Sudhanshu Dhulia directed the AAP government to file an affidavit enumerating details of funds within two weeks.

The direction came after the counsel for the Delhi government told the bench that there was paucity of funds and expressed inability to provide monetary assistance.

You want us to get into what funds you are spending where. All funds for advertisement shall be diverted for this project. You want this kind of order? You are asking for it, the court said.

The Delhi government has expressed its inability to contribute funds for common project. Since paucity of funds is an impediment in this project, we call upon the NCT of Delhi to file an affidavit setting forth the funds utilised for advertisement as the project is of national importance. Details may be furnished for last financial years, the bench said.
A career in journalism was on Dans radar from the very beginning. An English degree at Yale (class of 1974) separated his stints at The Commercial News, a Gannett paper. From there he went to The Democrat and Chronicle, Gannetts flagship paper in Rochester, New York. On the Gannett fast track, Dan went on to be a founding editor of USA Today in 1982 and its 1984 spinoff, USA Weekend, where he worked for 15 years. Following a brief and abortive stint at an internet start-up in 1999, Dan moved over to United Press International in 2000. Laid off in 2007 after a series of cutbacks at UPI, he moved on to launch the Age of Autism, the daily web newspaper of the autism epidemic.

Dan and I were classmates at Danville High School, wrote Bina Connelly on the comments section underneath his obituary. Even then, we knew he would leave a mark, make a difference. He was kind, thoughtful, intelligent, passionate. I am humbled to have known him. Dans friend of 40 years, Melissa Merli, tells me he is still in touch with his high school English teacher, who plans to attend his memorial service.

Dan was a journalist from very early in life. While in high school he wrote a column, High Times (the high stands for high school, nothing illegal!), for Danvilles local newspaper The Commercial News. His talent was apparent early.

Dan was born and raised in Danville Illinois, started his career there and maintained close ties to friends and family in the region. His sister Sallie died last year but his other sister Rosie still lives in Wilmette. She has long been a fierce supporter of Dans work. Rosie knew from an early age that Dan was a uniquely brilliant and talented journalist. She was a great advocate for the books we wrote together and especially pleasedDan told me-- that in The Age of Autism, I insisted that we put Dans name first on the marquee! (Dan and I actually competed to be the second author and eventually decided to take turns).

Dan Olmsteds Weekly Wrap, his regular Saturday column, was one of my favorite weekend pleasures. Dans death last weekend makes his January 21 st version his last. So in his honor, I spent much of this week connecting with a few folks who knew him well in order to write a tribute to him in this space. A final wrap.

In speaking with Dans colleagues during that 40-plus year journey, Ive heard an amazing and consistent portrait of a man who was, as his longtime partner and husband Mark Millett puts it, always passionate about journalism and his work. Melissa Merli was a colleague in the 1970s at The Commercial News and remembers that Dan was widely liked and respected. Everyone adored him at The Commercial News. That adoration extended to a number of the female reporters there, including Melissa. I had a crush on him, confided Melissa, and at one point, Dan took me aside and told me he was gay, but that we could still be good friends! Theyve been close and constant friends ever since.

Melissa described Dan as a gifted investigative reporter from the outset. One investigation stood out: an expose of corruption in the local police force, where a gang of police officers were running a drug store burglary operation. A grand jury was convened; Dan was sued for libel and won. Melissa later heard from a local official that theres one reporter there that everyones afraid of and thats Dan Olmsted.

Melissa describes a man that many came to know and love. Dan had a finely tuned sense of justice and compassion for others. Hes one of the most honest people I know. I can honestly say that I have no negative memories of Dan. He was one of a kind.

We can all thank the dot.com crash for reawakening Dans passion for investigative journalism. While at USA Today and USA Weekend, he focused on lighter fare. But after landing at the once proud UPI wire service --then owned by the Unification Church (aka the Moonies), a step down in prestige led to a step up in freedom and investigative autonomy. Dan teamed up there with a young reporter named Mark Benjamin and together they embarked on a project that hit the big time: an investigation of the negative side effects of an anti-malaria drug called mefloquine. Or, as it was marketed by Roche Pharmaceuticals, Lariam.

The Lariam project was investigative reporting at its most pure, Mark told me. It was a case of Dan deciding that we were going to take really damaging, but solid information on a bad drug and go up against one of the most powerful and deep-pocketed companies in the world, Roche. And it was one that had the Army and the CDC, quite literally, in its pocket.

Lariam was widely used at the time in the Army and the Peace Corp and although effective at preventing malaria, in a subset of recipients it was associated with cases of hallucinations, paranoia, suicidal thoughts, psychoses and even homicide. According to an August 11, 2016 article in Military Times. Mefloquine was implicated in a series of murder-suicides at Fort Bragg, North Carolina, in 2002, and media reports also tied it to an uptick in military suicides in 2003.

Dan and Mark were faced with sharp initial resistance, but their work eventually had a huge impact. According to Military Times, Once the U.S. military's malaria prophylactic of choice, favored for its once-a-week dosage regimen, mefloquine was designated the drug of last resort in 2013 by the Defense Department after the Food and Drug Administration slapped a boxed warning on its label, noting it can cause permanent psychiatric and neurological side effects. Prescriptions plummeted from 50,000 in 2003 to only 216 in 2015. Thats not low enough for some. Dr. Remington Nevin, another friend of Dan, argued that any distribution of Lariam is too much. This new finding should motivate the U.S. military to consider further revising its mefloquine policy to ban use of the drug altogether.

Their work had many positive and unexpected ripple effects. Mark and Dan were turned into a composite character, Sherm Hempell, on a Law and Order: SVU episode, which told a story of violence and murder in two Afghanistan war veterans that had taken an anti-malarial drug, Quinium. Happily, the good guys won and the Army cover-up was exposed. More notably, in a real life case that wasnt ripped from the headlines Dan and Mark quite literally saved the life of the first soldier since the Vietnam War charged with cowardice, an offense that carries the death penalty. The Army soldier, Andrew Pogany, was put on trial but ultimately the Army dropped the case when it became clear that his cowardice was simply an adverse reaction to Lariam. Mark joked that Dan wrote one of the best headlines ever for their article, Army Surrenders to Coward Soldier.

Ive never seen anyone else like Dan Olmsted in our business, before or since, Mark claimed. You can hold him up against any of the all-time great investigative journalists and he deserves a place right alongside them. What made him so good? There were so many things. He was just smarter than anyone else. He worked harder and once he knew he was right, he just never gave up. He would just never stop.

It was their glimpse into the inner workings of the CDC and its preferred programs that brought the UPI investigative pair to the vaccine issue, and in Dans case, into the Age of Autism. In the summer of 2003, Mark pursued (and Dan edited) a story about conflicts of interest in the CDCs recommended vaccine program, with a special focus on a little known vaccine inventor, Dr. Paul Offit, and the conflict between his role on the CDCs Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices and his commercial relationship with Merck, which made his rotavirus vaccine. Its a story AoA readers know well!

Mark Benjamin is the man that brought Dan Olmsted and me together. The two Marks (who when added to Dans partner Mark Millett explain Dans dedication in The Age of Autism, to Mark, Mark and Mark, in that order) had been discussing the issues swirling around autism and vaccines. Mark Benjamin wanted Dan to meet me and he arranged a dinner between the three of us in Washington DC on October 7, 2003. That began a collaboration that would last for over 13 years.

As Mark Benjamin turned to issues with the military and the health of veterans, Dan turned his attention to autism. He and I began to have frequent conversations and email exchanges. In 2004, Dan had decided he wanted to launch an extended, deep dive. And he wanted to find a way into the issue that was unique. By year end, Dan and I were just beginning to share thoughts on the issues we would turn into a book 6 years later. Dan, as he so often did, was trying to find the critical question, one that could spark an investigation. On December 7, he prefaced an email list of questions this way: I made a list of some odd ways in (some of which I have seen referred to elsewhere but not conclusively) if you have any thoughts The very first question was right on the mark: Is there anywhere they dont use vaccines and dont have autism? Or any group, like Christian scientists?

Bingo.

I wrote (as is my tendency) a lengthy answer. We have long discussed the idea of using low and zero exposure groups, religious groups (Amish or others), anthroposophic schools, etc. to test the theory. Since autism surveillance stats are not routinely collected, this would require a specific study, one that has never been done (and epi studies are expensive).

And so it began. Dan didnt bother to wait for a bureaucratic funding process. He decided to cut to the chase and do the study himself. He drove from his home in Falls Church Virginia to Lancaster County Pennsylvania, and started asking real people about autism in the Amish. A bare four months later he launched his UPI Age of Autism series with his first article, The Amish Anomaly. As many of us know by now, Dan found very few autistic children there and all of these were in the relatively small subset of vaccinated Amish.

Starting with the Amish Anomaly, on April 19, 2005, Dan added dozens of articles to the series. He stopped writing only when he was laid off at UPI, ending on July 18, 2007 with The Last Word. Along the way, he found the first of Leo Kanners case series, Donald T., the first of eight eventual discoveries and the heart of our book, The Age of Autism. Following his departure from UPI, Dan and I reached out to JB Handley and Kim Stagliano who had started their own blog, Rescue Post. Our joint venture went on line just a few months later.

From the very beginning, Dan stayed close to the families and individuals affected by autism. Dan started out talking to doctors on the front line of the epidemic, free thinkers like the late Meyer Eisenstein and Elizabeth Mumper. In fact, the third column in the UPI series Sick Children took Dans readers to Liz Mumpers pediatric practice in nearby Lynchburg Virginia. Dan wrote Dr. Elizabeth Mumper is an unlikely contrarian. Mumper is a pediatrician in the southern Virginia city of Lynchburg. About a decade ago, Mumper said, she began noticing a change for the worse in the overall health of the children she was seeing, including a startling rise in cases of autism. Ultimately, Mumper came to suspect the increasing number of childhood vaccinations in the 1990s -- and particularly the mercury-based preservative called thimerosal in many of those vaccines -- was a big reason.

Liz was a great source for Dan and me in our second book, Vaccines 2.0. When I reached out to her yesterday to get her reflections on Dan, she described those initial meetings. Dan came to my office in 2005. I was in the midst of running a practice in which many of the children had chronic illness and neurodevelopmental disorders. .Dan had such an inquisitive mind and asked such great questions. I was surprised that a reporter who had not gone to medical school would understand and be able to synthesize complex medical information the way he could.

Like many of us, Liz remarked on Dans tenacity and gift for words. What a gift to passionately seek answers to the unprecedented tsunami of childhood chronic illness! He wove the stories of children, families, medical institutions, government organizations and pharmaceutical industries into compelling prose.

Dans subsequent career-- 10 years here at the daily web newspaper of the autism epidemic (he truly loved real printed newspapers!), two published books and a third on the wayis all available here at Age of Autism. Under Kim Staglianos leadership and with the help of our amazing group of contributing editors we are continuing the noble project Dan started. But we do so with a heavy heart. I heard the news about Dan from his sister Rosie, driving from Boston to Manhattan this Monday afternoon. When I got to the city I sat down for dinner and wept. I didnt know quite what to do, so I typed out this FaceBook post, as tears smudged my iPhone .

To everyone who is sharing love for my great friend Dan Olmsted, please keep it up. Dan deserved so much and I hope will ultimately get the recognition he deserves. Dan was the consummate journalist. He had so much to teach us all about the ethics and discipline of how good reporters should respond to and treat evidence. But he was more than that. He was a deeply original and creative investigator. That combination was unique and compelling. Dan was brilliant and compassionate and persistent and uncompromising and balanced and impatient. All at once. And man! could he put words together in such a graceful and powerful way.

I was so fortunate to be his fellow traveler on the Age of Autism (his phrase and it was so powerful) journey. I will really miss him. I wish I had the words to say it as artfully as he could. I love you man. We'll all miss you. But you kicked some ass.

Later this week, I took my two daughters to dinner in Cambridge. Dan got to know both of them quite well in our years working together. My oldest, Sydney, traveled to Vienna with us as we researched the medical history of mercuric chloride treatments for syphilis and hysteria. My youngest, Michaela (now 21 years old and diagnosed with autistic disorder), spent a lot of time with Dan in recent months; he came to Cambridge a lot as we wrote our third book, Denial. Sydney knew the news already, but when I picked them up we told Michaela about Dans death. She often has difficulty processing emotions, especially sadness, in an appropriate way. But when I told her, I have sad news, honey. Dan is dead, I was pleased to see she was genuinely affected in the way Sydney and I were feeling. Dan is dead, she repeated to herself in a subdued tone. Trying, in her way, to process the news. She had grown up with Dan and knew how close our friendship was.

Later in the evening, as we were walking into dinner at Legal Seafoods, she asked me an amusingly autistic but poignant question. Dad, she asked, are you going to get a replacement for Dan?

No, honey. There will never be a replacement for Dan.



Mark Blaxill is Editor at Large for Age of Autism.
The Planning Office of the German Armed Forces has awarded Airbus Defence and Space GmbH, Quantum-Systems GmbH and Spleenlab GmbH with a research endeavor to demonstrate and analyze the AI building blocks required for swarms of tactical UAS in a real-world scenario. The project, titled KITU 2 (Kunstliche Intelligenz fur taktische UAS; Artificial Intelligence for tactical UAS), is funded by the German Ministry of Defence. The focus of the study is on the effectiveness of tactical UAS. The partnership enables each company to leverage and bring in its key strengths.

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The project, titled KITU 2 (Kunstliche Intelligenz fur taktische UAS; Artificial Intelligence for tactical UAS), is funded by the German Ministry of Defence (Picture source: Quantum Systems/Airbus/Spleenlab)

Airbus Defence and Space will contribute with trusted swarming algorithms, simulation environments and experimental hardware, and additionally required AI building blocks.

Quantum Systems provides the battle-proven Vector 2-in-1 tactical aerial reconnaissance platform with built-in AI edge-computing capabilities. The 2-in-1 platform enables heterogeneous swarms, as it can be deployed as a fixed-wing eVTOL Vector or as the multicopter Scorpion UAS and allows showcasing challenging and real-life missions with its flight endurance of 3 hours. Currently, Quantum Systems is working on a family of systems strategy that will see their smaller and bigger platforms enter the market in 2024 and 2025 and provide customers with a seamless layered approach regarding range, flight time and payload capabilities.

Spleenlab adds its expertise in AI edge software for swarming, which involves object recognition and robust navigation methods in communication-denied environments.

Additional programs benefit from the research results and small unmanned aircraft vehicles



In the joint Main Ground Combat Systems (MGCS) program of France and Germany, ongoing since 2018, both countries are working on a new weapon system to expand the defensive and offensive capabilities of main battle tanks on the battlefield by integrating next-generation technology and multiple platforms.

In the Future Combat Air System (FCAS) program, France, Germany, and Spain are developing a system consisting of manned new-generation fighters, unmanned aircraft, and new weapons and communications systems.

Both programs aim to bring multi-platform and multi-vehicle swarming to the battlefield and will benefit from the outcome of the KITU 2 program. Swarming enables force multiplication by controlling multiple UASs with a reduced ground or aircrew. In addition, first studies from the ongoing war in Ukraine have shown that multiple smaller and lower-cost UAS might be more effective at delivering aerial reconnaissance results from the battlefield, as larger areas can be covered simultaneously, and losses can be mitigated more easily.
The Bay County (Fla.) Sheriffs Office is looking at five separate cases where parents were fined $500 for letting their children in the water to consider whether additional charges are in order.

According to WJHG in Panama City, in each case the parents allowed their children to enter the water despite double flags flying. Under Florida -- and Alabama -- law, double red flags mean the water is closed to the public. Citations can be issued to violator.

Now, however, Bay County is examining each case to determine whether upgraded charges of child neglect are warranted.

To me, its no different than having a fire inside of a house and allowing a kid to go over there who doesnt know any danger to that fire, said BCSO Capt. Jason Daffin, according to the report.

Under Florida law, child neglect charges can be levied for a caregivers failure or omission to provide a child with the care, supervision, and services necessary to maintain the childs physical and mental health, including, but not limited to, food, nutrition, clothing, shelter, supervision, medicine and medical services that a prudent person would consider essential for the well-being of the child.

Florida law allows for a child neglect charge to be brought for repeated conduct or on a single incident or omission that results in, or could reasonably expected to result in, serious physical or mental injury, or substantial risk of death, to a child.

Child neglect which does not result in severe injury to a child is a third degree felony in Florida, punishable by a maximum sentence of five years and a fine of up to $5,000.

None of the seven recent drownings on Bay County beaches involved children, with the victims mostly middle-aged men. With the Bay County Sheriffs Office closed Monday, its unclear whether any of the five cases in which children were allowed in the water resulted in the death of someone trying to assist them.
There was a time when you couldnt walk more than a block in any direction in downtown Birmingham without passing a hot dog stand.

But come to think of it, we never passed one. We always had to stop.

Many of those old places, as we all know, are long gone.

Jimmys Hot Dogs. Tonys Terrific Hot Dogs. And, of course, Petes Famous Hot Dogs, where the gruff but loveable Constantine Gus Koutroulakis ruled as Birminghams hot dog king for more than 60 years until he died in 2011.

Scotts Koneys, which closed just last month when owner Scott Green hung up his apron after nearly a half-century in business, is a more recent casualty.

But the Birmingham hot dog tradition lives on, preserved at places like Sneaky Petes, which began in the Magic City in 1966 and now has franchise locations statewide; at Sols Hot Dogs in Norwood, which has been around since 1970 and has its own Birmingham Hot Dog Wall of Fame inside the shop; and at The Standard in the Pizitz Food Hall, a relative newcomer that serves its own Birmingham Dog with beef sauce, sauerkraut and onion.

And even though another old favorite, Lyric Hot Dogs & Grill, closed in 2013 to make way for the restoration of the Lyric Theatre, the eponymous Lyric Hot Dog is still available at The Collins Bar, which is owned by Andrew Collins, who, for more than 40 years, ran the hot dog joint his father started in 1957.

So, in celebration of the Birmingham hot dog and as part of our ongoing summer project to find the best eats in Birmingham, Huntsville, Mobile and across Alabama, weve put together this (very subjective) list of our Top 5 hot dog places in the Birmingham metro area.

MORE: Birminghams best burgers: Our Top 5

The Pop's Special Dog at Pop's Neighborhood Grill in Birmingham's Five Points South is dressed with mustrard, onions, sauerkraut and Pop's Famous Sauce, and loaded with hot beef.(Bob Carlton/bcarlton@al.com)

5. Pops Neighborhood Grill

1207 20th St. South, Birmingham. popsneighborhoodgrill.com.

Heather Guarino grew up working alongside her father, Sammy Guarino, at his Sammys Old Fashion Hot Dogs shops on Green Springs Highway and near Eastwood Mall. I knew what I wanted to do when I was 8 years old, she says. I grew up in it, and I just wanted to keep the hot dog dream going. In 2010, she did just that, opening a place of her own in Birminghams Five Points South and naming it Pops Neighborhood Grill in honor of her father, who still helps her with food deliveries. Its hard to keep him still, she says. Along with burgers, sandwiches and salads, the Pops menu features chili dogs, slaw dogs and a Chicago dog, as well as the signature Pops Famous Dog with mustard, onions, kraut and a house-made hot dog sauce that Heathers pop started making in 1978. The Pops Special Dog (above) comes with everything thats on the Famous Dog and piles on hot beef. We recommend one of each.

The Southern hot dog at Paramount features a Niman Ranch frank served with bacon, pimento cheese, fried pickles, lettuce, tomato and ranch dressing.(Bob Carlton/bcarlton@al.com)

4. Paramount

200 20th St. North, Birmingham. paramountbirmingham.com.

We typically go to Paramount for The Standard cheeseburger or The Three Hander sandwich, but weve learned not to sleep on those dogs. Paramount offers something different than your traditional mustard-kraut-onions-sauce Birmingham hot dog -- including one with blue cheese and caramelized onions and another with Swiss and sauteed mushrooms. Our new favorite is The Southern, a beast of a dog that features a four-ounce, all-natural Niman Ranch frank thats sliced down the middle and served with a couple of strips of bacon, pimento cheese, fried pickles, lettuce, tomato and ranch dressing on a hoagie-style bun. You wont need but just one, but we do recommend you pair it with a side of crispy onion rings.

A hot dog "all the way" with mustard, onion, kraut and Sam's special sauce is our go-to dog at Sam's Super Samwiches in Homewood.(Bob Carlton/bcarlton@al.com)

3. Sams Super Samwiches

1830 29th Ave. South, Suite 155, Homewood. samssupersamwiches.com.

The late, legendary Sammy Graphos started selling hot dogs in his cozy, little hole-in-the-wall shop on 18th Street South in downtown Homewood in the early 1970s. Now, his son, Ted Graphos -- with the help of Sammys widow, Sue -- carries on the Graphos family tradition at the new, more spacious location of Sams Super Samwiches just around the corner in Homewoods SoHo Square. Our go-to is a couple of grilled dogs with mustard, diced onions, kraut and Sammys secret sauce. Theres a little bit of Birmingham hot dog history in every bite.

RELATED: Remembering Homewood hot dog king Sammy Graphos

The Beef Sauce Dog at Tony's Hot Dogs in Pelham is dressed with mustard, onion and kraut and loaded with a meaty sauce.(Bob Carlton/bcarlton@al.com)

2. Tonys Hot Dogs

1922 Montgomery Hwy South, Pelham. www.facebook.com/Tonys1922.

Now in its 30th year in business, Tonys Hot Dogs in Pelhams Southgate Shopping Center has been serving classic Birmingham dogs south of town since 1993. The signature Tonys Hot Dog is a traditional grilled dog with mustard, onions, kraut and sauce, and the Beef Sauce Dog adds a chunky meat sauce to the mix. If you want to venture out and try something different, Tonys also offers a taco dog, a Chicago dog, a chili dog, a slaw dog and the everything in the house Junk Yard Dog. And by all means, order a side of fries, which may be the crispiest crinkle-cut fries weve ever tasted.

The special dogs at Gus's Hot Dogs in downtown Birmingham go great with a cold Grapico and a bag of Golden Flake chips.(Bob Carlton/bcarlton@al.com)

1. Guss Hot Dogs

1915 Fourth Ave. North, Birmingham. https://gusshotdogs.com.

It doesnt get any more Birmingham than what we lovingly call the Birmingham Trifecta  a couple of Guss special dogs, all the way, with a cold Grapico and a bag of Golden Flake chips. It is the essential Birmingham lunch. The last of the old-school downtown hot dog joints, Guss Hot Dogs has been around since Greek immigrant Gus Alexander opened shop on Fourth Avenue North in 1947. Now, Lee Pantazis, who bought Guss from longtime proprietor George Nasiakos in 2017, continues that legacy in the same building where it began. Upon handing over the keys to the shop, Nasiakos also entrusted Pantazis with Guss distinctive hot dog sauce -- a tart, sweet and spicy concoction that originated with Gus Alexander and that Nasiakos later tweaked and made his own. There are more than 75 years of secrets in that sauce. Mr. George sat and watched me like a hawk while I made it by myself the first time, Pantazis said not long after he bought Guss. Did not say a word. And thats one of the best compliments Ive ever gotten. Because I know, as a Greek man, not complaining about it is the same as praising it.

RELATED: Preserving a Birmingham hot dog tradition at Guss downtown

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This food trucks connection to Birminghams beloved Joy Young restaurant

Its tomato salad season at Hot and Hot Fish Club

Classic Birmingham meat-and-three celebrates 50 years

The story behind Pastry Art Bake Shoppes one-of-a-kind Baby Bites

BBQ is in the name but tacos are the game for this Birmingham food truck
Four juveniles are facing charges after an early-morning police chase from Vestavia Hills to Birmingham ended in a rollover crash.

Police Lt. Michael Keller said the incident began just before 2 a.m. Monday when officers spotted a vehicle driving recklessly on U.S. 31 near Kentucky Avenue.

Officers tried to stop the vehicle, but the driver would not stop.

The vehicle traveled from Vestavia Hills and through Homewood before ending up on Highland Avenue in Birmingham. At that point, Keller said, the vehicle flipped several times.

One of the juveniles was taken to Childrens of Alabama with minor injuries. The other three were evaluated on the scene.

Keller said all four were released to their parents pending formal petitions through the juvenile court system.
An Alabama state senator said he plans to introduce a bill to take funding away from the Alabama Department of Archives and History because the department hosted a one-hour presentation on LGBTQ history last month.

Sen. Chris Elliott, a Republican from Josephine in Baldwin County, said he would file the bill for the special session that starts July 17, according to the Alabama Political Reporter.

On June 15, Archives and History hosted Invisible No More: Alabamas LGBTQ History, as part of its Food For Thought series, held at the Archives building.

Maigen Sullivan, co-founder and director of research and development for the Invisible Histories Project, spoke at the luncheon. The Invisible Histories Project is a nonprofit research organization that works to preserve and teach LGBTQ history in the South.

Elliott is one of several Republican lawmakers who opposed the presentation, including House Majority Leader Scott Stadthagen, R-Hartselle, and Rep. Jamie Kiel, R-Russellville. They said it was not appropriate for a state agency and promoted a liberal political agenda.

Elliott said Monday evening his bill was not intended to defund the agency or interfere with its normal operations. He said the bill would propose stopping a $5 million supplemental appropriation.

Were not trying to blow up Archives and History or anything like that, Elliott said. I and others, which has turned out to be quite a few co-sponsors so far, are trying to send a message. But at the same time Archives and History does some great work and we want to be cognizant of that as well.

Elliott said the message is that the agency should not engage in programmatic activities, or sponsoring programmatic activities where the underlying conversation or the underlying reason for highlighting achievements of some individual is because of what they do in their bedroom.

Alabama Department of Archives and History Director Steve Murray said the presentation was not political.

As its name suggests, the Food for Thought program is intended to connect specialists in a wide array of topics with members of the general public who are interested in learning about Alabamas history, Murray said in a statement to AL.com last month. Not every program will be of interest to every Alabamian, but we strive to ensure that Alabamians will find somewhere in our offerings some historical content that is meaningful to them. Our aim is neither indoctrination nor politicization.

The Department of Archives and History will receive $7.7 million from the education budget and $2 million from the General Fund under the budgets passed by the Legislature for next fiscal year, which starts Oct. 1.

The Food for Thought series is sponsored by Friends of the Archives and funded by a grant from the Alabama Humanities Alliance, Murray said.

Sullivan, who has a doctorate in educational studies of diverse populations from UAB, has said her presentation was not political.

I really just went over things that are quite black and white, she said. Its just a record of history, and so I find it mind-boggling that anyone would interpret facts as a political agenda.

Gov. Kay Ivey called the special session because federal courts ordered Alabama to redraw its congressional district map for the 2024 election. The U.S. Supreme Court ruled June 8 that Alabamas current map likely violates the Voting Rights Act because it dilutes the influence of Black voters.

Because the governor called the special session specifically for redistricting, legislation on other topics, including Elliotts bill, would take a two-thirds vote to pass.

This story was updated at 7:53 p.m. to add comments from Sen. Elliott.
Authorities are asking for the publics help find a man who has been missing for more than three months in central Alabama.

Arthur Waur Cruikshank, 39, is living with a condition that may impair his judgment, according to the Alabama Law Enforcement Agency. A Missing and Endangered Alert was issued on Monday.

Cruikshank was last seen on March 26. No additional information about his disappearance was released.

Arthur Waur Cruikshank (ALEA)

Cruikshank is a white male, 5-feet, 7-inches tall and weighs 200 pounds. He has brown eyes and brown hair.

Anyone with information is asked to call 911 or Prattville Police Department at 334-595-0208.
Florida police officers accused of twice putting their 3 1/2-year-old son in a jail cell to punish him for potty training accidents remain on the job while an investigation continues.

Nearly nine months later, the Daytona Beach Shores Police Department is not talking about it and most records related to the investigation have been sealed by a Volusia County judge.

The city strives to always be open and transparent, however due to the court order that was issued to the city, we are unable to comment at this time. If anything should change, we would be happy to discuss, the citys public information officer, Tammy Marzik, wrote in an email to The AP.

The couple said they jailed their son twice  on Oct. 5 and 6, 2022. They were interviewed by a state child abuse investigator, who was escorted to their home by a Volusia County Sheriffs deputy whose body camera recorded the conversation. The video was sent to the media this week by the sheriffs office, which later asked to recall it, citing a court order restricting the release of information about the case.

The Associated Press is not identifying the child nor the parents  the mother is a detective and the father a lieutenant with the Daytona Beach Shores Police. Their attorney, Michael Lambert, did not respond to an email seeking comment.

During the hour-long video, the childs mother said she didnt believe they did anything wrong, adding that its just people getting it twisted. She also called the investigation the definition of insanity.

How the state learned about the boys treatment hasnt been made public, but the father told the investigator its just disgusting that somebody would drag our family through the mud like this.

He explained that their day care center requires children to stop using diapers by age 3, but the boy was still having accidents, so while the school was being lenient, they were trying everything possible to get him potty trained.

Weve tried books, weve tried run around without pants, you name it weve tried it, the father told the investigator.

So they confronted the boy, he said.

I said you know what I do for a living, the father explained. I said Im a cop. I take bad boys to the jail that dont follow the law. So thats what I did. I said you know you arent following the rules, lets go to jail.

The father said the cell was nasty so he checked it out for contraband before putting his son inside. He told investigators the boy was behind bars for about 13 minutes, and he had eyes on him the entire time.

He was crying, the father said. I was getting the response I expected from him.

The father said the boys mother had placed him in the cell the day before, for about three minutes.

The tactic worked: The child made good on his promise not to have any more accidents, the father told investigators.

Whats more, he said he did it before with his older son, about nine years ago, when that child admitted hitting a girl in preschool. He said he told his son that in his job, he puts people in jail when they hit others.

I took him to the jail and he sat there. And I watched him ... and he was crying and everything, and to this day, if you mention, like, that incident, hes just like, I would never do that again. It was effective, the father said. So thats why I did it with this. He didnt hit anybody, but I figured the same thing, discipline.

Florida Department of Children and Families spokeswoman Tori Cuddy told The AP that the agency responds to all allegations of of abuse, neglect or abandonment, and that all information involving such cases is confidential.

Its not clear what repercussions the couple faces, if any, but theyve gone to court, suing the state attorneys office in March and separately suing State Attorney R.J. Larizza in May. Those court records are marked confidential and have been sealed by a judge, the city clerks office said.

Lonnie Groot, a former city attorney for Daytona Beach Shores who now serves the community in more of a watchdog capacity, is looking for answers. Groot said hes been been unsuccessful in his attempts to get additional records involving the investigation.

The City is just patently trying to hide the matter and hopes now that it will go away and they can go back to their own ways, Groot told The AP.
A Huntsville police officer who was seriously wounded in a March shooting that claimed the life of a colleague returned to work today.

Officer Albert Morin was on light duty Monday. In an announcement, Huntsville police said Morin has made great strides in his recovery, and were happy to have him back.

Thank you to the community and my coworkers for the outpouring of support, Morin said in a statement. Ive read through every card and letter youve sent during my recovery. I remain grateful for all the support my family and I have received.

Morin, 34, was wounded along with Officer Garrett Crumby, 36, on March 28 at an apartment complex on the 4600 block of Governors House Drive. Crumby, who received 10 wounds in the shooting, died later.

A woman at the scene, Arionne Douglas, received non-life threatening wounds.

Morin was released from the hospital on April 14.

Juan Robert Laws, 24, was arrested at the scene and faces the charge of capital murder of a law enforcement officer. Douglas was identified as Laws girlfriend and called 911 to the scene.

Prosecutors plan to seek the death penalty.
A man was shot to death Sunday afternoon outside a west Birmingham paper and packing supply company where the victim is believed to have worked.

Birmingham police early Monday identified the victim as Lekilo Mason Cummings. He was 33.

West Precinct officers responded just before 5:30 p.m. to the 2700 block of Republic Boulevard on a report of a person shot.

Police arrived in the parking lot of Athens Paper to find the victim unresponsive. Mason was pronounced dead on the scene.

Sgt. LaQuitta Wade said investigators believe a domestic altercation took place in the parking lot which led to the fatal said.

This case is confidential, Wade said. There are a lot of questions I cannot answer at this time.

A man was shot to death Sunday, July 2, 2023, in the 2700 block of Republic Boulevard in Birmingham. (Carol Robinson)

A person was detained for questioning.

Friends and family of the victim gathered at the crime scene, visibly upset.

Cummings is the citys 66th homicide this year. Of those, one was an officer involved shooting by an outside law enforcement agency and five others have been ruled justifiable and therefore are not deemed criminal.

In all of Jefferson County there have been 97 homicides including the 66 in Birmingham.

Anyone with additional information is asked to call homicide detectives at 205-254-1764 or Crime Stoppers at 205-254-7777.
Leo A. McCall, a 40-year veteran of the Mobile County Sheriffs Office, was killed early Sunday morning in a single-vehicle accident, according to the MCSO.

Leo was a dedicated servant to our Country as well as to the Mobile County Sheriffs Office, said Sheriff Paul Burch. I have known Leo for over 20 years, he will be greatly missed.

According to the Alabama Law Enforcement Agency, the 64-year-old McCall was on his way to work with the MCSO reserve shortly before 4 a.m. Sunday when the accident occurred on Theodore Dawes Road about three miles west of Mobile.

The ALEA said McCalls 2017 Honda Ridgeline left the roadway, struck a ditch and embankment before overturning.

McCall was pronounced dead at the scene.

McCall was still working with the MCSO as a reserve deputy after a career which began in 1982.

In addition to his career with Mobile County, McCall was a member of the 1165th Military Police unit of the Alabama Army National Guard. During his military career, McCall had served overseas during Operation Iraqi Freedom and Operation Enduring Freedom.

May the memory of Leo McCall bring comfort and peace to everyone his life touched, wrote Terri Hall, one of McCalls fellow deputies, on Facebook. I am so very grateful to have called you my true friend, my forever friend.

Funeral arrangements for McCall had not been released as of Monday morning.
The Supreme Court will decide whether federal law can prohibit gun possession for people who are subject to domestic violence orders, the first Second Amendment case at the Supreme Court since a decision last year that expanded the right to carry firearms in public.

Fridays announcement from the justices comes after a wave of decisions on gun laws from appeals courts in the wake of the Supreme Court ruling in New York State Rifle & Pistol Association Inc. v. Bruen in 2022.

That decision laid out a new legal test for the constitutionality of gun regulations that relies on the history and tradition of the founding era. Judges implementing it since then have tossed restrictions such as prohibitions for nonviolent felons to bans on carrying in the New York City subway.

The case now before the justices will be the first major chance for the justices to revisit the Bruen case, in which a 6-3 majority of the court struck down a New York law governing who can obtain a concealed weapon permit in the state.

The justices likely will hear the case in the next term starting in October and issue a decision before the end of June.

The Biden administration asked the justices to overturn a February decision from a panel of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 5th Circuit that tossed a federal restriction on firearm possession for people subject to domestic violence restraining orders.

Solicitor General Elizabeth Prelogar, in asking the justices to review the 5th Circuit decision, argued the government should still be able to keep firearms out of the hands of people who have been found in a court of law to be a danger to the public. Prelogar said there are numerous historical examples that support taking firearms from people who could present a danger but have not been convicted.

Those descriptions suggest that the government may properly disarm citizens who are dangerous, irresponsible, or unlikely to abide by the law, Prelogar wrote.

In the year since the decision, courts have used the Bruen test to overturn a replacement New York law, a restriction on possession of guns without a serial number, a restriction on gun possession while under felony indictment and a restriction on gun possession for nonviolent felons.

Gun control advocates praised the Supreme Court decision to hear the case, including the Brady Campaign to Prevent Gun Violence. Douglas Letter, the groups chief legal counsel, in a statement called the 5th Circuit decision in the case egregiously wrong.

Prohibiting domestic violence abusers from accessing firearms is common-sense, life-saving, and constitutional, Letter said.

Court filings said the defendant in the case, Zackey Rahimi, had a criminal record and was subject to a domestic violence restraining order in 2020 after he threatened his girlfriend. Later he was convicted of threatening a different woman with a gun and several times fired a weapon in public, according to court records.

Federal investigators searched his home and found firearms, then charged him with violation of the domestic violence order statute. Rahimi initially pleaded guilty but revived a challenge to the constitutionality of the statute after the Bruen decision.

The 5th Circuit overturned the conviction, finding the 1994 law violated Americans Second Amendment rights. Judge Cory T. Wilson wrote for a unanimous three-judge panel that the domestic violence order could not be enough to deprive Rahimi of firearms.

Rahimi, while hardly a model citizen, is nonetheless part of the political community entitled to the Second Amendments guarantees, all other things equal, the 5th Circuit decision states.

Rahimi attempted to convince the justices not to hear the case, saying in a filing that the appeals court faithfully applied the test laid out in Bruen.

___

2023 CQ-Roll Call, Inc., All Rights Reserved. Visit cqrollcall.com. Distributed by Tribune Content Agency, LLC.
A Birmingham man being held in a Georgia jail on rape, incest and other charges died in his cell last week with numerous lacerations on his body, authorities said Monday.

The death of Jonathan McWaters, is under investigation, the DeKalb County, Georgia Sheriffs Office told Atlanta radio station 95.5 WSB.

McWaters, 37, was being held in the jail since June 8 following his arrest on rape, incest and other charges, reported Fox 5 Atlanta.

On June 28, deputies were told McWaters was suffering from numerous lacerations on his body, WSB reported.

Preliminary reports suggested the Birmingham mans wounds were self-inflicted, the station said.

McWaters became unresponsive and died in the cell after jail and medical staff unsuccessfully tried to resuscitate him.

The sheriffs offices Office of Professional Standards is investigating McWaters death.
Birmingham officials are offering more details about the recently announced nearly $22 million federal trails grant and what is means for the city.

The funding injects momentum into a nearly $30 million overall project to bring more than 3 miles of new bike and walking trails throughout the city, providing enhancement to the areas boarded by paths.

The federal RAISE grant from the U.S. Department of Transportation, provides the bulk of funding for trails that will crisscross the city. The $21.6 million grant, along with city funding, will create the Birmingham Urban Trail and Multimodal Corridor. The corridor is a 2.5-mile trail that will run through the Civil Rights District downtown, the Smithfield neighborhood and surrounding communities headed west. The urban trail will extend from City Walk near the BJCC south to Morris Avenue.

It made sense to put these two projects together and package it as one project, explained Christina Argo, strategic projects and innovation division manager for Birminghams department of transportation. Our partners and the city are highly motived to getting this one off the ground soon.

The project brings the ability to deliver revitalization and economic growth along their paths, said U.S. Rep. Terri Sewell, D-Birmingham.

It gives us the opportunity to attract businesses to our community, she said. So many industries are looking for downtown areas that are walkable and livable and bikeable as an asset. Its an opportunity for us to grow economically in Birmingham and in the 7th Congressional District.

Argo said new features will support existing outdoor activity, while also encouraging more people to take advantage of the new amenities.

Its going to be transformative for the western part of Birmingham, Argo said. You can walk or bike all the way to Legion Field and be very safe and comfortable and have an enjoyable experience outside your car.

Along the with new trails will also come more comfortable mass transit bus stops and trees lining the pathways, Argo said.

Along the east, west connection, we are going to do enhanced bus stops. It is going to have modern facilities that have covers and protection from the weather, Argo said regarding the path running from Graymont Avenue to Fifth Avenue. This is actually a busy corridor and it make sense for us to further enhance that corridor and make it easier for buses to pick up passengers.

Early planning is underway for the massive project that is expected to take several years. Sewell call Birminghams concept a potential model elsewhere.

I look forward to Birmingham sharing their best practices so that other communities in the state of Alabama and in Alabamas 7th Congressional District can also compete and win RAISE grants from the Department of Transportation, Sewell said.
A Nashville man was arrested after he allegedly drove a 13-year-old girl from Alabama to Tennessee for sex.

Alexander Xo Sub, 22, told police he had sex with the girl twice and believed she was either 16 or 17, according to court records, reported Nashville NBC affiliate WSMV on Monday.

Sub also told police he had consensual sex with the girl at his Nashville home. Minors cannot legally give consent.

Police said Sub drove the girl from Hoover to Nashville on June 30.

He was charged with two counts of statutory rape and one count of contributing to the delinquency of a minor, WSMV reported.

It was unclear whether more charges against Sub are forthcoming.
The urgency for the UK and EU to proscribe Iran's Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps (IRGC) By Dan Diker

web posted July 3, 2023 The Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps (IRGC) is mandated by Iran's constitution to pursue "an ideological mission of jihad in the way of Allah, that is, extending sovereignty of Allah's law throughout the world." This mandate is not theoretical or merely declarative. The IRGC is actively involved in terrorist operations around the globe and has therefore been deemed illegal by the U.S. government. Great Britain and Europe should follow suit. Since the founding of this paramilitary force in 1979, the IRGC has emerged as the principal organization advancing the Iranian regime's revolutionary Shia Islamist ideology, within and beyond the regime's borders. Over the past four decades it has been linked to terrorist attacks, hostage-taking, maritime piracy, political assassinations, human rights violations, and the crushing of domestic dissent across Iran. It was more recently responsible for the bloodshed on the streets of Iran in November 2019, leaving 1,500 people dead in less than two weeks. Iran targets its neighbors in its race for regional hegemony in service of its nuclear weapons programs and radical Shiite eschatological vision. Through the IRGC it spreads terrorism globally, and subverts governments in the Middle East and Africa. The IRGC provides financial and other material support, training, technology transfer, advanced conventional weapons, and guidance to a broad range of terrorist organizations including: Hizbullah, Palestinian Islamic Jihad, Hamas, Kata'ib Hizballah in Iraq, al-Ashtar Brigades in Bahrain, the Yemeni Houthis, and other terrorist groups in Syria, the entire area of the Persian Gulf, and Africa's Sahel region. Within its borders, Iran has also harbored al-Qaeda terrorists who have transferred money and fighters to South Asia and Syria. In 2016, the U.S. Treasury Department identified and sanctioned three senior AQ operatives residing in Iran and known to the regime. These operatives included 9/11 hijackers transiting its territory on their way to Afghanistan for training and operational planning. The U.S. government considers Iran to be the foremost state sponsor of terrorism  spending more than $1 billion on terrorist financing annually  and there are between 140,000 and 185,000 IRGC-Quds Force partner forces in Afghanistan, Gaza, Lebanon, Pakistan, Syria, and Yemen. In its efforts to export the Islamic Revolution across the Middle East, the IRGC advances radical Islamist groups, both Shia and Sunni around the globe including Iraq's Asaib Ahl al-Haq, which it armed, funded, and directed to conduct more than 6,000 attacks on American and British forces in Iraq between 2003 and 2011. Iran continues to threaten Israel openly, with its ideology centered on the destruction of Israel. IRGC Terror in the United Kingdom and Continental Europe The IRGC has been involved in extraterritorial activities targeting Iranian dissidents and opposition figures beyond Iran's borders, resulting in a chilling effect on freedom of expression and political participation among Iranians residing in the West. The IRGC is responsible for kidnapping and the extraterritorial and extrajudicial execution of journalists and dual nationals outside of Iran. In the UK, dual British-Iranian citizen Alireza Akbari, who had previously held a senior position in the Iranian government, was lured back to Iran in 2022, arrested, incarcerated and then executed on spurious espionage charges, an act condemned by both UK Prime Minister Rishi Sunak and Foreign Minister James Cleverly as barbaric. On January 12, 2023, the House of Commons voted unanimously in favor of a measure calling for the UK to proscribe the IRGC as a terrorist organization. In February 2023, the chief of MI5 reported foiling or exposing at least 15 kidnapping or assassination plots by the IRGC targeting UK citizens since January 2022 alone. On the European continent, Germany also uncovered ten IRGC operatives involved in a terrorist plot within German borders, and convicted another IRGC agent for surveilling a German-Israeli group. Germany is also pursuing prosecution against IRGC operatives who plotted attacks against synagogues in the state of North Rhine-Westphalia in January 2018. In Belgium, in 2022, an Iranian diplomat was convicted on terrorism charges for his role in a 2018 plot in Paris, and authorities in Georgia reportedly prevented the IRGC's attempted assassination of an Israeli-Georgian businessman in Tbilisi. In addition, the IRGC supplied arms and drones to Russia in its war with Ukraine and in 2020 was responsible for shooting down Ukrainian Flight 752 with two surface-to-air missiles, killing 176 passengers and crew. IRGC Penetration of the United States The U.S. Department of Justice unsealed indictments against IRGC operatives in several murder-for-hire schemes on American soil including the targeting of former U.S. national security adviser John Bolton and former U.S. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo. In 2011, the IRGC Quds Force plotted an attack against the Saudi Ambassador to the U.S. on American soil. Additional IRGC assassination attempts in the U.S. include those against Iranian-American human rights activist Asih Alinejad and Indian-Iranian author Salman Rushdie, whom the Iranian regime offered a $3 million reward for his death in 1989, upon publication of Rushdie's book, The Satanic Verses. Though the Iranian regime denied ordering the stabbing of Salman Rushdie in 2022, it offered farmland in Iran as an award to the young American who stabbed him, thanking him "for his brave action in carrying out the historic fatwa of Imam Khomeini." The IRGC's Hand in the Middle East The IRGC has targeted Arab countries and Israel for decades via its Hizbullah, Hamas, Palestinian Islamic Jihad and Houthi proxies, among others. The IRGC has targeted Saudi Arabia via its proxy Hizbullah al-Hejaz, which carried out its first attack at the Haj in Mecca in 1987. More recently, the IRGC has fueled Hamas rocket wars against Israel, with senior Iranian operatives maintaining a physical presence in the Gaza Strip since 2014 to advise Hamas operatives on drone operation and rocket production. IRGC has done the same for Houthi rebels in Yemen targeting Saudi Arabia, Bahrain, and the United Arab Emirates, creating havoc in the Gulf. In January 2022, the Houthis attacked the Emiratis using Iranian drones and exploded three fuel tanks in an attack on Abu Dhabi airport. The IRGC funds and directs Bahrain's Saraya al-Ashtar, the military wing of Hizbullah Bahrain, which aims to destabilize the kingdom by radicalizing its domestic extremists. In June 2023, Iranian Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei instructed the IRGC to intensify its attacks, via Palestinian terror proxies Islamic Jihad and Hamas, from Judea and Samaria, an area that overlooks Israel's main cities. IRGC officials assured PIJ Secretary-General Ziyad al-Nakhallah that Iranian weapons and cash would be smuggled to his organization and to Hamas in the West Bank, and demanded that rocket facilities be set up in northern Samaria, near Ben-Gurion airport, and overlooking the greater Tel Aviv area. The IRGC also significantly supports Syrian President Bashar al-Assad's government militias by providing them with military advisors, training, arms, and force coordination. The Syrian government and its allies, including the IRGC, have caused the deaths of over half a million Syrian civilians, displacing over 10 million people and creating a refugee crisis. In Turkey in 2022, IRGC operatives were foiled in their plan to murder Israeli tourists and to assassinate Yosef Levi-Sfari, the former Israeli consul in Istanbul. The IRGC has also employed criminal gangs in various countries, including Turkey, for terrorist operations. The IRGC also fuels tensions and war in Hamas-ruled Gaza, with its operatives involved in terror tunnel assaults against Israel. IRGC's Quds Force has made efforts to arm Palestinian terrorists in the West Bank by orders from their Supreme Leader Khamenei. In August 2022, following the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) Operation Breaking Dawn against Islamic Jihad in Gaza, IRGC Major General Hossein Salami and PIJ leader Ziyad al-Nakhallah met, resulting in an agreement to enhance PIJ's activities in the northern West Bank. Besides conventional warfare via proxy, IRGC-backed Hamas operatives have engaged in espionage, monitored Iranian-Israeli Jews' social networks, and obtained their personal details, which were submitted to Iranian intelligence with the aim of recruiting them into Iranian espionage rings. IRGC Intervention and Narco-Terrorism in Latin America The IRGC has developed a major presence in Latin America, primarily in Venezuela, Nicaragua and Cuba, where Iranian President Ebrahim Raisi recently visited, calling his visits "strategic" against common enemies. The IRGC has long ratcheted up its presence in Latin America's tri-border area where Argentina, Paraguay and Brazil meet. During the visit, Venezuela's President Maduro declared his intention to install a bust of former IRGC leader Qassem Sulemani, killed in an American drone strike in 2020. Iran has engaged in narco-terrorism and the use of organized crime  including drug trafficking, trafficking in illegal products, counterfeiting of products, human trafficking, smuggling of weapons, smuggling of immigrants, money laundering, and gambling  using profits for military, organizational, and terror operations. The IRGC's narco-terrorism extends from Western Europe to Latin America. The IRGC is extensively connected to the Afghan drug trade and other international criminal syndicates to develop a network for distributing narcotics, especially heroin, to Western countries via Eastern Europe. Using its local Lebanese expatriate connections, the IRGC's top proxy, Hizbullah, is involved in narco-terrorism mainly in Colombia and Mexico. These funds enhance Hizbullah's military and assist Iran, allowing Iran to claim plausible deniability. Narco-terrorism also includes terror attempts on the ground: In 2011, an Iranian spy attempted to recruit a member of a Mexican drug cartel to assassinate the Saudi ambassador in Washington. This Iranian agent also intended to attack the Israeli embassy in Washington, D.C., as well as the Saudi and Israeli embassies in Argentina. The IRGC has also targeted Israeli diplomats and facilities in Argentina, India, and Thailand, bombing the Israeli embassy in 1992 and the AMIA Jewish community center in Buenos Aires, Argentina, in 1994, killing 85 people. IRGC Human Rights Violations Within Iran's borders, the IRGC suppresses political dissent with deadly force, limiting freedom of speech, and stifling peaceful protests within Iran through the use of physical and psychological torture of detainees and other violent means, violating international human rights standards such as those against arbitrary arrests, prolonged detention without charges, limited access to legal representation, and coerced confessions. The IRGC violates freedom of expression by arrest and detention without trial of journalists, bloggers, and social media activists, contributing to a climate of fear and self-censorship. The IRGC has been implicated in the execution of political prisoners, often after unfair trials, extrajudicially and extraterritorially. There have been allegations of the IRGC targeting Iran's ethnic and religious minorities, including the Baha'is, Kurds, Arabs, and Baluchis. The IRGC has played a role in enforcing strict interpretations of Islamic law, leading to limitations on women's rights and gender equality in Iran, including restrictive dress codes, limitations on participation in public life, and discrimination in areas such as divorce, custody rights, and inheritance. The death of Iranian Kurd Mahsa Amini at the hands of Iran's morality police in 2022 and the protests which followed only drive this point home. The IRGC Quds Force: Incitement, Subversion, Destabilization, and Radicalization In 1989, Iranian leader Ayatollah Khamenei established the Quds Force  symbolically named after Jerusalem, Israel's capital, as an act of political warfare. Quds was founded as an extraterritorial "Islamic army" unit of the IRGC to "export the revolution overseas" by radicalizing foreign Muslims into the Iranian Shiite brand of Islamism to fight the "Great Satan" of the West, and "liberate Palestine" by destroying Israel, which the clerical regime describes a "cancerous tumor" and the "little Satan" of the Near East. Similar to ISIS, the IRGC and Quds are ideologically-motivated movements. Inspired by messianic Mahdism, Quds seeks to trigger the return of the twelfth divinely-ordained Shia Imam, Muhammad al-Mahdi, a descendent of Prophet Muhammad. The IRGC recruits are taught that Israel's existence is the greatest barrier to the Mahdi's return, and that Shiites must battle against the Jews and destroy the Jewish state as a prerequisite for his arrival. Iran has continued to arm and train Shiite militants through its Quds Force  the IRGC's international arm. Quds has provided advanced armed drones to Hezbollah in Lebanon, trained and funded more than 100,000 Shiite fighters in Syria, supplied ballistic missiles and drones to Yemen's Houthis, and helped Shiite militias in Iraq build missile capabilities. Iran has also continued to develop ballistic missiles, which, according to the United States, violates UN Resolution 2231. In response, the United States continues to impose sanctions on Iran's ballistic missile program and the IRGC through the Countering Iran's Destabilizing Activities Act of 2017 and the Countering America's Adversaries Through Sanctions Act. The U.S. Secretary of State designated the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps and Quds Force as a Foreign Terrorist Organization (FTO) in 2019 as it "continued support to and engagement in terrorist activity around the world." Quds was deployed to Syria in 2011, and by 2014, hundreds of their operatives including force commanders gathered intelligence and were directing logistics for Assad's government. In May 2018, Quds forces on the Syrian Golan Heights were alleged to have fired around 20 projectiles towards Israeli army positions, an action repeated in January 2019, for which the IDF retaliated. In April 2021, prominent Syria-based Quds operative Brigadier General Mohammad Reza Fallahzadeh became Quds Deputy Commander. Quds' Radicalization of Muslims in Europe Outside of Iran, Quds' messianic fervor has infected recruits in the West and elsewhere, with a surge of activity since 2015. IRGC propaganda has nurtured extremism in the same way as ISIS and al-Qaeda. Over half of the IRGC training budget is invested in their cult-like militaristic and apocalyptic indoctrination of recruits through the dissemination of terror-glorifying, extremist propaganda in mosques, charities, and schools. The discovery of an Iranian-linked bomb factory in London in 2015, as well as the successive chain of terror plots across Europe from 2017 to 2018, suggest that IRGC interests go beyond the Middle East, underscoring the urgency in countering their movement. In 2018, a plot to bomb an Iranian opposition-group's conference in Paris, attended by British MPs and citizens, was foiled. By 2022, MI5 announced that there had been ten threats to kill or kidnap UK-based individuals that year. Outlawing both the Political and Military Wings of the IRGC There is a tendency in the West to differentiate between the political and military wings of terror organizations such as Hizbullah, Hamas, and the IRGC. However, this distinction is erroneous. Sheikh Naim Qassem, Deputy Secretary General of the Iranian regime's Hizbullah proxy, has declared repeatedly that there is no difference between its political and military wings. Qassem stated in 2012, "We don't have a military wing and a political one; we don't have Hizbullah, on the one hand, and the resistance party, on the other." Both wings follow the directives of Vilayat-e-faqih, or the rule of the Islamic Jurisprudent, meaning Iran's Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei. As shown above, the IRGC cannot be separated from Quds  these two organizations work hand-in-hand to wage a hybrid political and military war using criminal, terrorist, and human-rights violations as means to the same end. Building on the Momentum to Proscribe the IRGC The intensifying Iranian regime repression and its threat to the Middle East and the West in the shadow of its nuclear weapons program have appear to move Europe and the United Kingdom to increase pressure to proscribe the IRGC. The UK's January 2023 vote to proscribe the IRGC was an important development. Significant statements of condemnation by Prime Minister Rishi Sunak, UK Minister for State Security Tom Tugendhat, and UK Foreign Minister James Cleverly set an important standard for the West. The stakes are high. A prospective agreement between the U.S. and Iran for sanction relief in exchange for cessation of Iranian uranium enrichment would inject some $20 billion to the Iranian regime's IRGC terror operations. The U.S., Israel, Saudi Arabia, Bahrain, and most recently Sweden in May 2023 have proscribed the IRGC. U.S. Congress members urged Prime Minister Sunak on May 11, 2023, to proscribe the IRGC, adding an additional level of momentum to the House of Commons' earlier vote. On January 23, 2023, the European Union imposed sanctions on over 30 Iranian officials and organizations, including the IRGC, over their "brutal" crackdown on protestors which included human rights abuses. Iranian-British activist Vahid Beheshti's 72-day hunger strike opposite the British Foreign Office in London, calling for the British government to formally proscribe the IRGC, captured the imagination of many in Britain, inside Iran, among its Sunni community, and around the world. Most significantly, for the first time, the IRGC warned the UK government to cancel a rally in support of Beheshti on April 29, 2023, which brought thousands into the streets of London in support of his struggle to proscribe the IRGC. Both the European Union and the British government have been called upon by their publics to proscribe the IRGC, which has become the world's leading sponsor of state terror. With the IRGC actively involved in Iran's ballistic weapons development and the regime's near breakout status  enriching uranium at close to 90 percent, weapons grade  time is of the essence. Dan Diker, President of the Jerusalem Center for Public Affairs, is the longtime Director of its Counter-Political Warfare Project. He is former Secretary-General of the World Jewish Congress and a Research Fellow of the International Institute for Counter Terrorism at Reichman University (formerly IDC, Herzliya). He has written six books exposing the "apartheid antisemitism" phenomenon in North America, and has authored studies on Iran's race for regional supremacy and Israel's need for defensible borders. Home
Lee Bollinger laments the ruling by Americas Supreme Court against affirmative action. Universities need to pursue diversity by other means, says Columbias president.

As I complete 50 years of university leadership, including 21 years as president of Columbia, I am sorry to see the Supreme Court end a process that has greatly benefited American society. I continue to believe that the countrys obligation to remediate past discrimination is far from complete.

The Healey-Driscoll Administration, along with over 100 Massachusetts Institutions of Higher Education, dedicated to equity stated:

Massachusetts will always be welcoming and inclusive of students of color and students historically underrepresented in higher education. We want to make sure that students of color, LGBTQ+ students, first generation students, and all students historically underrepresented in higher education feel welcomed and valued at our colleges and universities.

President Reginald DesRoches of Rice University in Houston said he was greatly disappointed by the decision but more resolute than ever to pursue diversity. The law may change, but Rices commitment to diversity will not [.]

At Schenectadys Union College, President David Harris stated the widely expected decision will impact the private institution that he said is race conscious in its admissions process.

However, Chief Justice John Roberts said that for too long universities have concluded, wrongly, that the touchstone of an individuals identity is not challenges bested, skills built, or lessons learned but the color of their skin. Our constitutional history does not tolerate that choice.

Each of these schools constantly states that they are committed to diversity so if race cannot be taken into account, how will the colleges and universities deal with this?

Berkeley Law Dean Erwin Chemerinsky explains how he has secretly enacted a policy of racial discrimination in faculty hiring -- which is illegal in California. If he is ever deposed he will state that he is going to deny I said this to you.

In states that already banned affirmative action, colleges responded by recruiting more low-income students, hoping that wealth would act as a proxy for race.

Another approach is to put greater emphasis on students who have overcome adversity. Legacy preferences where children of alumni are given admissions boosts are being examined as well.

Standardized tests like the SAT and ACT may become optional. In fact, during the pandemic, hundreds of colleges made entrance exams optional and there is a growing push to make the change permanent.

It is important to note that diversity and inclusion programs which have become code words for Left-leaning and Marxist ideas have now become big business. College diversity and inclusion offices rake in sky-high salaries as debt-saddled students face rising costs. In fact, Robert Sellers, Michigan's vice provost for equity and inclusion and chief diversity officer... took in $431,000 annually [.]

Martha Bradley-Dorsey asks

Just how much taxpayer money is being spent on DEI, and what are the offices doing? In order to find out, I began a research project for CSPI to gather basic budgetary information across a large number of universities. Unfortunately, it failed miserably. Cutting the project several ways, I first cast a wide net to find budget information for 200 publicly funded universities from all 50 states budget officials. While nearly all responded to my public-information law requests, I learned that many state fiscal officials dont maintain any detailed university budget information. Considering that public universities receive about $171 billion in government funding [emphasis mine] annually, it was frustrating to find out that information about how money was spent was not easily available.

It has become a permanent diversity-industrial complex and universities will fight to maintain a system of racial spoils, even as Chief Justice Roberts warns that universities may not simply establish through application essays or other means the regime we hold unlawful today.

Now that affirmative action has been in place for over a half a century, how has it actually fared? In A Dubious Expediency: How Race Preferences Damage Higher Education, Michael Barone writes that Good intentions all too often produce bad results. Racial quotas and preferences in high education... [which were violations of the Civil Rights Act of 1964] have not only harmed colleges and universities but have hurt most of all the intended beneficiaries.

Ramesh Thakur writes that

The primary victims of the US universities race-based admissions for several decades have been Asian-Americans. Yet, in another irony, the mother of all affirmative action programs, along with the many pathologies that arise from them and fossilize into a settled and stable equilibrium, is India. India is the biggest laboratory in human history for affirmative action policies mandated by the constitution. However, by institutionalizing affirmative action in favour of any one group, the actions inescapably discriminate against individuals from other groups, alienate them, feed their sense of grievance and can contribute to a growing militancy --without necessarily helping the most needy. Every affirmative action produces an equal and opposite sectarian reaction. If a government frames public policy in a group-conscious way, it cannot expect groups suffering relative deprivation to ignore group identity. For any one student admitted under a racial quota, only one alternative person would have succeeded in a merit system. But hundreds of rejected students end up feeling aggrieved and resentful for having lost out...

Notwithstanding the Supreme Court ruling, many universities have made no secret that, regardless of how the Court ruled, they would continue to bring to campus students who wouldnt have made the cut if they had not been black. How can universities do an end-run around the Supreme Court?

To salvage its rapidly diminishing fortunes, the College Board itself has joined the bandwagon. Tucked into [The College Board] SAT digitization project is the disclosure that test items will be removed if different races perform differently on them. The College Board thus aims to create a Harrison Bergeron test, rigged to equalize outcomes by race. The next step for universities is to concoct a set of proxies for race that are facially race-neutral in order to deliver enough blacks to campus. Socioeconomic preference is the leading criterion. The University of California system already deploys it with increasing finesse; Asian families in California have reported the devastating impact of the preference.

Not to be outdone, Biden announced actions to promote diversity and without any shame, the U.S. Department of Education maintains that diversity, equity, and inclusion training are consistent with Title VI of the Civil Rights Act of 1964.

In fact, the diversity conceit flies in the face of our colorblind Constitution and our Nations equality ideal.

What seems to be hidden in this entire issue is that traditional public schools are dumbing down their curriculum, either in favor of ideological indoctrination or just to hide academic outcomes. Why, for example, has California stopped offering algebra in eighth grade and calculus in high school? Is it any wonder black and Hispanic students will not get into Harvard based on test scores alone? In reality, we wouldnt need affirmative action if K-12 Schools actually worked.

Paul Frijters writes that not only do our children have lower IQs and a reduced capacity to think abstractly, but the mobility of young people is lower. He asserts that bureaucratic bloat needs to be reduced. Moreover, universities have become businesses run for personal glory and profit of its management, rather than an institution servicing a public good function that reflects the desire for knowledge in a whole community. In addition, mediocrity and cowardice too often describe todays schools of higher learning.

Bruce Thornton applauds the Supreme Court decision but states that it is going to take a lot more lawsuits adjudicated in the Supreme Court to stop universities from violating the Constitution and the Civil Rights Act, in order to ensure equality under the law.

Eileen can be reached at middlemarch18@gmail.com

Image: RawPixel
Fulton County District Attorney, Fani Willis has some formidable hurdles to clear in her quest to convict Donald Trump for interfering in Georgia's 2020 election. She plans to indict the former President in the Atlanta courthouse in August. Ms. Willis has put together a list of Georgia-state election crimes to charge him with. Among those, Ga. Code Ann.  21-2-603 -- "conspiracy to commit election fraud." If all goes well, she will add racketeering to the list; based on something to do with Trump's collusion with "fake electors."

The first hurdle Willis must confront is of her own making. She will enter the courtroom with the assumption that President Trump's claims that the 2020 election was "rigged" are false; and have proven to be "baseless." She treats this assumption as if it were universally accepted fact: Trump is lying.

Trump's "big lie" is fundamental to her case. To support her premise, she may cite the dozens of judges who have tossed the Trump legal team's lawsuits from their courts, seeing no evidence of fraud in the 2020 election. She is not so likely to draw the court's attention to the fact that millions of Americans, who are not judges, have seen a plethora of evidence that amounts to nothing short of a calculated coup d'etat, coordinated across several states. Such evidence ranges from expert analysis to published graphs showing impossible spikes in Biden votes in three battleground states: Wisconsin, Michigan and Georgia. These fantastic vote spikes were logged in the wee hours of election night when, according to reports, no observers were present, as would be required by law. As J.R. Dunn has stated, "The prosecution is going to have a very hard time stating a case without allowing in evidence that they desperately don't want anyone to hear."

Perhaps the most compelling evidence comes from testimony, given under penalty of perjury, from hundreds of Americans who witnessed illegal activity at the polls during this election. Perjury carries up to a ten-year prison term along with a hefty fine. So, the chances of these people bearing false witness is extremely unlikely. We have such witness testimony across the several contested states, including Michigan and Arizona. Though, perhaps the state where this witness testimony is most succinctly documented and most readily accessible is the state of Georgia. This is the first hurdle Willis will need to contend with.

The second hurdle she must negotiate rises out of her ignorance (intentional or not) of the scope of authority bestowed upon a sitting POTUS. Much of her case seems to center around a January 2, one-hour conference call between President Trump and Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger, along with their respective attorneys. She singles out a particular sentence, in their conversation, as if it was the smoking-gun evidence that should put Trump behind bars: "All I want to do is this: I just want to find 11,780 votes, which is one more that we have because we won the state." We would have to concede that this one-liner, when put into context of the rest of the one-hour conversation, goes a long way to prove that Donald Trump is indeed guilty, beyond reasonable doubt, of being Donald Trump -- a crime in itself, perhaps.

The number of written affidavits submitted by witnesses to 2020 election malfeasance in Georgia is uncertain here. However, between January 9 and January 14, 2020, over forty of these witnesses gave videoed testimony at Cobb County Republican Party Headquarters. Half of those testimonies are featured on this NTD web site. At least six of these witnesses, each in separate instances, in three separate counties -- Cobb County, Fulton County and Clayton County -- report to encountering, between them, thousands of mail-in ballots, in pristine condition -- without creases in the paper; showing that these ballots were never folded and mailed. All these ballots were identically marked for Joe Biden.

Add to those six witnesses a poll manager in Fulton County who testifies, under oath, that she and a co-worker, also came across a "batch" of uncreased mail-in ballots. "Every single ballot was absolutely identical. They appeared to be printed..." she reports. "98% of these ballots were for Joseph R. Biden." Two ballots were for Donald Trump and one for Joe Jorgensen. So now we have at least seven individuals who witnessed significant quantities of mail-in ballots that were clearly counterfeit.

After the jury, assembled by District Attorney Willis, views these 21 testimonies from their fellow Georgians -- keeping in mind the severe penalties for perjury and that these witnesses have nothing to gain and everything to lose by testifying -- the jury might not be so easily convinced that Mr. Trump's claims of a rigged election are "baseless."

While they're at it, the jury might want to review the controversial State Farm Arena security camera footage, where four (or five) poll workers are filmed running the same reams of ballots through tabulators three times; late at night when no monitors or observers were present. In the conference call with Secretary Raffensperger, Mr. Trump holds this CCTV footage up as indisputable evidence of election cheating in Fulton County:

President Trump: "...they put it in three times, each ballot. ...I dont know why three times. Why not five times?" He can't resist a facetious jab. But Raffensperger assures him: "Mr. President...We did an audit of that and we proved conclusively that they were not scanned three times." Clearly, both men can't be right. Maybe it is time to let an impartial jury decide.

Woe be upon any judge who should declare this eyewitness testimony (and video) as immaterial and inadmissible in the Willis' election-meddling case against President Trump. It is absolutely material evidence in Donald Trump's defense; since "election/ballot fraud" is a federal crime. And since the sitting President ...shall take care that the laws be faithfully executed. That is precisely what President Trump was doing on January 2 -- fulfilling the obligation of his office. In the conference call, Mr. Trump makes it quite clear to Secretary Raffensperger that he is investigating election crimes:

President Trump: "...a large batch came in and it was... 100% for Biden. And that is criminal. You know, thats criminal...Thats another of the many criminal events, many criminal events here." So, President Trump not only had the justification to examine the result of this federal election in Georgia, but had full authority to verify that this election was conducted in a lawful manner in that state.

It also comes out in the conference call that the Raffensperger team had blocked the Trump investigators from accessing and examining the election results in Fulton County. Instead, they gave them partial access to Cobb County, according to the transcript of the conference call:

President Trump: "OK, so why did you do Cobb County? We didnt even request [Cobb County] we requested Fulton County, not Cobb County. And you wouldnt give it to us." He continues: "And you said it would be open to the public..." Trump wanted transparency in the process. "And why cant it be open to the public?" Those ballots, after all, belong to the voters, not to the Secretary of State or any other public officer. The point is: The Raffensperger team prevented the Trump team from conducting an open and lawful audit of Fulton County election results.

Now, if the tables were turned, this would certainly be called obstruction of justice and we would never hear the end of it. Obstruction carries up to a 20-year prison term.

What are they hiding, anyway? Evidence? If the Trump team had gained access to Fulton County election materials -- open to the public, as they requested -- would they have found stacks of counterfeit mail-in ballots? Would they have discovered evidence that Secretary Raffensperger and his people were in violation of Ga. Code Ann.  21-2-603 -- Conspiracy to commit election fraud?

District Attorney Fani Willis' obsession to convict Donald Trump for some crime (or another) could be the turning point in the Left's perpetual assault on the former President. So yeah! Bring it on.

Image: Gage Skidmore
Some might have heard the phrase, men could not live with one another if there were not mutual confidence that they were being truthful to one another. The phrase could be interpreted to imply that division, chaos, suffering, and potential death are the result of lying and the use of misleading information, hoaxes, and other anti-truth actions.

The phrase should be applicable to all spheres of influence or relationships; for example, husband and wife would have significant difficulties if one of the founding principles of their marriage was that they could lie to one another. Throughout history many husbands and wives have experienced severe psychological harm as a result of the others dishonesty.

Another example is from psychology. Psychologists suggest severe harm can result from an anti-truth method which is informally known as gaslighting. Gaslighting or continuously and deliberately communicating false information to another causes the other suffering.

The East German Stasi developed a torture method very similar to gaslighting but apparently including more people. It is sometimes described as Zersetzung and might also be described as community organized gaslighting or community organized stalking in which a targeted person is continually deceived with pre-planned schemes. Law enforcement, secret or plainclothes police, or other entities may coordinate the schemes with most people in their communities participating. Psychologists label it as no-touch torture in that it is the psychological method of continuous deceptions which causes the suffering rather than physical pain (although sometimes physical torture is included).

If a group or community wanted to harm another without physically touching them, they might use such methods as gaslighting or Zersetzung. (Some have suggested that then-senator Bidens and President Clintons establishing of the Office of Community Oriented Policing Services (COPS) within the U.S. Department of Justice legalized Zersetzung as a policing method throughout America.)

The point of those examples is that anti-truth actions cause harm. Thus, men cannot live with one another in those situations.

Now, take a real example from U.S. Federal law which is applicable here. Federal law prohibits propagating hoaxes and false information but then exempts the FBI, intelligence community, and local police from such a law. (A separate U.S. government document on other laws clearly explains such wording in the law is a law enforcement exemption and the Department of Justice uses nearly identical language in what it labels as exceptions for law enforcement activities in a separate Federal law. Thus, one might conclude that the law implies that false information and hoaxes may be propagated or enacted by entities like the FBI, local police, and secret police entities in America.)

Reasonable Americans, then, might question reported crimes publicized in the media. Reasonable Americans also might question non-criminal occurrences published in the news as being potential intelligence community, FBI, or local police hoaxes. This is partially due to law enforcement including crime prevention, getting potential criminals or potential threats off the streets. Such preventative policing actions include significantly different activities than those which enforce laws after a crime is committed.

Of course, at least some of the current and previous problems in America result from Americans not trusting government employees. For example, the anti-police riots in America were (reportedly) a result of Americans not trusting uniformed police officers.

Some local governments responded by requiring police body-worn cameras. (It is somewhat off subject, but if police are exempt from prohibitions on propagating false and misleading information, or, if they are allowed to falsify information, then they might also be permitted to falsify or edit recordings from such cameras.)

Whether one realizes it or not, the governing principle of truthfulness is implied in Americas support for body cameras. Support for such technologies is due to Americans lack of trust in the honesty of government employees.

Probably obviously, by supporting body cameras one does not necessarily support the liberal idea of getting rid of police altogether. Instead, support for cameras often implies support for at least some policing entities but at the same time acknowledging that some officers might lie about the actions of others. Similarly, some uniformed officers reportedly support such cameras due to the possibility of citizens or non-officers lying about their actions.

There is a significant question that arises from Americas support for police cameras, though; what about secret police employees, undercover police, undercover investigators, and powerful employees in local and federal police offices? Such people could easily be just as dangerous, if not more dangerous, than uniformed police officers; if a uniformed officer does something bad in public, one can often at least identify the uniform and continue from there. Secret police, plainclothes police, undercover investigators, etc., cannot be identified as powerful government employees with weapons.

Secret police, of course, might also have secret weapons. Imagine the harm a secret police entity could cause with a remote-controlled device that causes heart attacks, brain aneurysms, or simply confusion or lack of coordination while one is performing dangerous tasks; death could be remotely caused without a trace of secret police involvement.

If Americans cannot trust uniformed police officers to be honest, then it likely follows that Americans cannot trust secret police officers, the FBIs undercover operations, the intelligence community, and other government employees to be honest.

Should those secret police or undercover entities be required to wear cameras? The problem with such a scenario is that body-worn cameras cannot be effective at protecting citizens unless the citizen can visually identify that a person is a police officer. A secret police officer, undercover investigator, or non-uniformed officer might lie and say they are not police officers, rendering a camera ineffective at protecting the non-officer.

And such likely scenarios lead to this question: should all secret policing, undercover FBI operations, and similar things be prohibited, without exemptions or exceptions, in America?

Or, to ask a similar question: how many people who do not work for the government would trust any FBI or local police employee being permitted to plan and commit hoaxes, propagate false information, or use remotely controlled secret weapons?

Image: Noh Mun Duek
In the late 1960s, affirmative action was advanced because women and minorities, with similar skills to those of White men, were being discriminated against in landing jobs. The object of affirmative action was to level the playing field for people with similar skill levels. Over the years studies have shown that women actually have benefited most from affirmative action, not African Americans.

But over the years affirmative action has evolved into a matter strictly of race: Black people get preferential treatment, period. Why has it evolved so?

Since its origin, liberals, both White and Black, have actively denigrated African American students.

First, President Lyndon Johnson's War on Poverty began to cripple the Black family. African American women could get more money from Uncle Sam than they could from their working husbands. Actually, if these husbands were working, their families could not have access to government benefits. Fathers left the home, leaving the raising of children to mothers and grandparents. By 2021, over four million African American kids live with only their mothers.

Second, overwhelmingly Democrat-led cities promised hope, but ran down their cities creating increasing crime and slums: environments of hopelessness.

Third, for the past several years schools have been teaching Critical Race Theory, in which Black students are told they are systemically inferior and will never be able to compete fairly with White students.

Liberals and Black activists hate the removal of affirmative action for racial purposes. They contend that African American children are underprivileged and need racial bias in the college selection process. They say these students are underprivileged because they are poor and live in high crime areas. Columbia Universitys Poverty Tracker, though, contradicted this contention. It revealed that 23 percent of New York Citys Asian population was impoverished compared to 19 percent of the citys Black population. And that in New York City, Asians relatively high poverty rate comes with exceptionally low crime rates.

Ironically the affirmative action case was brought before the Supreme Court by Asian Americans.

So why are Black students so disadvantaged? According to the Census Bureau, most Black-intensive school districts get the most amount of money for education, averaging over $28,000 per pupil. Is the problem more about Black culture? But Black leaders and activists do not want to acknowledge that. Rather they want preferential treatment for black students.

Yet Professor John Ogbu studied the issue of Black student underperformance and reported: a) Black students readily admitted they didn't work as hard as Whites, took easier classes and read fewer books. And why? Black students said, It was not cool to be successful or to work hard or to show how smart you are.

Further, the Opportunity Myth study concluded: a) teachers who believe students are capable give students grade-level work; d) teachers who believe students aren't give their students below-grade work; and c) students know if their teachers believe their students can succeed and that determines students' motivation to learn.

CRT tells teachers that Black students cannot perform like White students. Thus, teachers look upon African American students as incapable by nature. Consequently, they give assignments at below-grade level. The Opportunity Myth study found that 40 percent of classes with mostly minority students never receive even one grade-level assignment.

Yet success rates on grade-level work between Blacks and Whites were similar: 56 percent Black students and 65 percent White students succeeded with grade-level assignments. Students -- White or Black -- who started the year behind grade level but had access to grade-level content caught up to peers within six months.

What does this tell us? It says that the liberal/Black activist approach to improving African American youth has been flawed for over 50 years. Rather than addressing issues of Black culture as Jason Riley pleaded people to do, these so-called psychological and anthropological experts have made excuses for African American students, basing their conclusions on bogus assumptions or inconclusive evidence.

The fact of the matter is that affirmative action the way it is now applied is racist. It benefits a person, not on what he or she has learned or achieved, but strictly on their skin color. Does this send a message to Black students that they are entitled to an education and don't have to earn it? Perhaps because it does tell the student that he or she needs preferential treatment to succeed while it tells the other students that they matter less. Like CRT, affirmative action in this regard is a lose-lose proposition.

This proposition is exposed in the state of the art of higher education: lower admission and grading standards, easier course content, etc. This is a debilitating message to send African American students.

If colleges and universities adhere to the Supreme Court ruling instead of seeking ways around it, perhaps educators and activists can begin to motivate African American students to learn and understand the opportunities available to them. For example, in top universities like Harvard and Vanderbilt, the graduation rate for Blacks rivals that of Whites. There are 21 colleges/universities where the Black student graduation rate is at least five percentage points higher than the rate for Whites. According to the International Monetary Fund, the Census Bureau, and the World Economic Base, African Americans as a group would rank in the top 46 of 195 countries economically.

It's time to teach African American students that and not how bad off they are.

Image: Pexels
As all wars do, the war in Ukraine has produced volumes of propaganda. The most popular theme is that Volodymyr Zelensky (genetically Jewish but without any Jewish religious or cultural ties) opposes the Hitler-like Putin. Indeed, Zelensky has accused Putin of Hitler-esque antisemitism, a claim that garners support from American Jews and the media. Israelis, however, do not support this assertion. They know the truth, which is that Ukraine has deep roots in Naziism, a relationship Ukraine celebrates to this day.

During the Holocaust, approximately 800,000 Ukrainian Jews were murdered, many by their fellow countrymen who saw the Nazis as liberators from Soviet oppression. The Nazis arrived just a few years after the Holomodor, which saw Joseph Stalins policies lead to the deaths of between five and seven million Ukrainians.

Because many Jews thought communism would save them from Christian and Tsarist depredations, they allied themselves with the communists, leading Ukrainians to blame all Jews for the Holodomor. The Ukrainians, therefore, were only too happy to join the Nazis in murdering their Jewish neighbors.

To this day, with all that is known about Soviet Russia and Nazi Germany, many Ukrainians still view the Nazis as liberators. The Soviet Union may be gone, but Ukrainian and Western leaders have channeled hatred once reserved for the Soviet Union has been channeled into hatred for Russia. As part of this anti-Russian mindset, Western leaders and their loyal press corps have helped legitimize Nazism by willfully ignoring the fact that they bankroll a Nazi army that fights the Russians.

Image: Azov Battalion. YouTube screen grab.

For decades, the Soviet occupation held Ukrainian Nazism in check. That ended in 1991 with the Soviet Unions dissolution, followed by Ukraines independence from Russia. Politically, Ukraine has had a strong mix of ethnic Ukrainians and Russians. There were always tensions, but the current instability resulted from Western interference, especially from America and England. When Victoria Nuland orchestrated a 2014 coup against the legitimate government led by ethnic Russian Viktor Yanukovych, that unleashed the powerful Nazi element that had lain dormant for so long in Ukraine.

The first evidence of a Nazi resurgence occurred just after the 2014 coup. To deal with protesters, the government unleashed their Nazi Azov militia. The militia was called in because Ukraine military regulars would not do what the Azov did.

Writing at Consortium News in May 2014, Robert Parry recounted the roundup of ethnic Russians who were protesting the overthrow of the Yanukovych government. According to Parry, on May 2, in the port city of Odessa, the Azov militia herded the Russians into buildings that were then set ablaze, killing 40 people. Afterward, reporters spotted graffiti on walls with Swastika-like symbols honoring the Galician SS, the Ukrainian adjunct to the German SS in World War II. The Azov military repeated this barbaric action on May 9 in Mariupol, another port city.

In 2016, Kiev, Ukraines capital city, renamed two streets in honor of Stepan Bandera and Roman Shukhevych. Both men were among numerous Ukrainians who collaborated with the Nazis, including volunteering with the SS. Bandera and Shukhevych were complicit in the mass murderers of Jews and Poles but are celebrated as anti-communist heroes in Ukraine. In 2019, a Ukrainian court ruled against the honor accorded these Nazis, at which point Kievs mayor, Vitali Klitschko, announced on Facebook that he would appeal the ruling. (As of now, the ruling does not appear to have been overturned.)

In 2018 in Lviv, hundreds of men wearing the SS uniforms of Ukrainian collaborators marched in a city-approved event. At least three Ukrainian municipalities in recent years have unveiled statues for Banderas deputy, Yaroslav Stetsko. During the Holocaust, Stetsko openly called for the extermination of the Jews.

Swiss Intelligence Officer Jacques Baud wrote:

On 16 March 2022, a journalist on TV channel Ukraine 24 quoted the Nazi war criminal Adolf Eichman and called for the massacre of Russian-speaking children . On 21 March, military doctor Gennadiy Druzenko declared on the same channel that he had ordered his doctors to castrate Russian prisoners of war.

There were subsequent apologies for these statements. However, they did not seem to arise from anything other than President Zelenskys fear that this blatant Nazi worship would lead to Western nations withdrawing their support for his war.

In any event, Ukrainian Nazism is no secret. Western leaders are aware of it. When Fox Newss Bret Baier questioned Zelensky about the Azov Battalion, Zelensky simply said, They are what they are. According to the Conservative Treehouse, Fox later edited out this portion of the interview.

The same article includes a notification Google sent to the Conservative Treehouse explaining that it was demonetizing the post. The notice explains that it will not allow posts to be monetized if they include claims that Ukraine is committing genocide or deliberately attacking its own citizens. This is the deplorable state of todays media.

Looking at events in America and Europe, we see an ever-increasing tendency towards authoritarianism among Western leaders. Todays America is closer to the Soviet model than it is to that of our Founding Fathers. This may explain their affinity for Ukrainian Nazism. These so-called leaders see nothing wrong with genocide if it produces the desired results. Western leaders can ignore the costs of war because the dying and destruction are over there. Fatality estimates vary widely, but it seems as if they are already in the tens of thousands, and that doesnt count the human misery from destroyed communities and displaced lives.

Every American who believes in the U.S. Constitution should be both fearful and ashamed of our current government.
Jihad seems so passe in the wake of Joe Biden's disastrous Afghanistan pullout, which not only took U.S. forces out of the region, but seems to have emboldened Russia and China.

But to paraphrase the famous saying, it also may be that we are not interested in jihad, but jihad is still interested in us.

The example of France with its mass rioting, which has since spread to Belgium and Switzerland, gives one pause.

What do we know about the rioters?

Well, they are deracinated youth from the French underclass, Muslim migrants and the children of Muslim migrants who live in the bleak, ugly banlieue suburbs of Paris, where a generous welfare system ensures they don't need and don't want jobs, which for many leaves them without purpose, too. Hatred for France, resistance to assimilation, and their own criminal activity pretty well keep them in the underclass. They rioted before in 2005 over claims of racial discrimination, and they will probably riot again. France has no idea what to do about them except coddle them more. France's president is no longer mentioning that they even are migrants, let alone Muslims.

But the role of jihad from abroad shouldn't be dismissed, either, given that France has seen considerable new immigration from jihad-infested countries.

According to INSEE, the French statistical institute, migration to France from the Maghreb and sub-Saharan African countries is up since the end of the COVID pandemic lockdowns. (The Wikipedia page on immigration to France is outdated.) African immigrants, according to its bar chart, constitute 47.5% of all immigrants in France as of 2021, the last date for which data are available, and form the largest group of immigrants. In what may be a sub-category of that, 29.3% are from the Maghreb, the Muslim north African states that had been French colonies, such as Morocco, Algeria, and Tunisia. France has about 7 million immigrants from all countries, including 2.5 million naturalized immigrants, 4.5 million migrants, and 0.8 million non-immigrant foreign nationals, or expats.

Meanwhile, Pew Research argues that about 300,000 to 400,000 additional immigrants in the country are illegal aliens, a rise from years past.

So yes, the Muslim base for those attracted to jihad has expanded.

Still, there are counter-indicators. The Muslim mosques, for one, have called for peaceful protest rather than the barbarism currently on display from migrants across the country.

According to Le Monde (they prohibit reprinting even a small passage of their work), the Grand Mosque of Paris issued its condolences to the family of the man whose death at the hands of police while defying police orders yet called for calm in the neighborhoods, urging the youth not to react with violence. The paper noted that there was a Muslim family holiday on, and riots would surely ruin it.

The locals ignored them.

There were tweets like this on Twitter:

Allahu Akbar France! 

Imam brags: "France WILL become an Islamic country through Jihad; The entire world WILL be subject to Islamic Rule" The French will: "Convert to Islam, be Forced to pay Jizya poll tax, or be fought against for the sake of Allah"  #SaveTheWest pic.twitter.com/w6zk56owaS  LastKnightsTemplar    (@LeoLazio2) July 1, 2023

SHOCKING: Race rioters chant Allahu Akbar as they torch France, 719 arrestedhttps://t.co/nX0zvg6fdK  Jack Poso  (@JackPosobiec) July 2, 2023

Allahu Akbar: France's Child Soldiers...



At just 8 years old, this child soldier is already prepped to wage Jihad on the French police, bred to harbor a deep hatred for France. Are these the hopeful faces of France's future? Islamic groups view children as potential 'soldiers' pic.twitter.com/nCQStUX7Op  Amy Mek (@AmyMek) July 2, 2023

These aren't verified as things that have happened in recent days, but they appear authentic.

There also are broader indicators like this:

Islamic State promotes migration to the West for the purpose of waging jihad terrorism https://t.co/VzUcqvUwWv  Lois Levine Fishman (@FishmanLevine) June 29, 2023

It rather suggests that something is going on with these longtime terrorists.

Recent events, such as the toddler knife attack in recent weeks, may have had a jihad nexus, too, according to reports.

There also is the jihadi upsurge in Israel, where terrorists are enacting monstrous attacks in Israel.

The preponderance of evidence suggests that if jihadis aren't engaged in laid out plans of action to strike at France through its terrorism, at a minimum, they may be taking advantage of it.

France is loaded with purposeless migrant youth. France's president, Emmanuel Macron, blames social media for their disposition to riot, which has something of a ring of truth, given that revolting other phenomena, such as gangster glorification and the doings of that movie Cuties, which depicted North African and sub-Saharan African girls engaging in pervy twerking dances for audiences, which was based on observed activities in France, are rife. Things like that make migrants soulless and without empathy for others. They wreck social capital.

In that case, France had better get busy getting rid of the jihadis in its midst, because they're what happens next. Just read what Eric Hoffer had to say about that in The True Believer  that fanatics and mass movements arise out of people who've got a sense of already ruined lives. Right now, France may have reached that stage: the jihadis are showing what they want to do, and what they can do. That goes for the U.S. and the rest of the West, too.

Image: Twitter screen shot.
Is Pete Buttigieg the secretary of Transportation or the secretary of gayness?

Hard not to think it's the latter, given his horning in with his review of a presidential campaign ad by Florida's governor, Ron DeSantis.

According to NBC News:

Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg took aim Sunday at Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis for a video attacking former President Donald Trump over LGBTQ rights. DeSantis' presidential campaign reposted a video to Twitter last week showing overtures to the LGBTQ community by Trump over the years, including video of him saying he would "do everything in my power to protect our LGBTQ citizens" in a speech at the Republican National Convention in 2016. Trump issued the remarks in the wake of the deadly mass shooting at the Pulse Nightclub, a gay nightclub in Orlando, Florida. The second part of the video shifts to focus on DeSantis, appearing to try to portray him as the paragon of masculinity. Thumping background music is accompanied by images of DeSantis, shirtless, muscular men and headlines about the anti-LGBTQ policies DeSantis signed into law.

I guess Pete found that sexy  and the rest of us? We hadn't noticed.

Buttigieg went on and on about this, making the ridiculous claim that DeSantis, whose record in office in Florida is one of unparalleled success, not just on individual matters, such as hurricane recovery, but in turning a purple state red, was somehow trying to "prove his manhood," as if he, the Mr. Mom of the Biden administration, were somehow the authority on this matter.

Now, this is not to say that the ads were good  President Trump's former top adviser, Ric Grenell, who is gay, noted that they were indeed homophobic, and let's face it: it's stupid for DeSantis to criticize President Trump for his reasonable welcoming of gay people to his administration and in his policies. Most people, both gay and straight, had no problem with Trump's policies. Worse still, the ads don't reflect the real DeSantis and therefore are inauthentic, as Grenell noted here. The actual problem coming from the LGBT direction is the transgender agenda, which involves evangelization of and mutilation of children, which is not the same thing as President Trump welcoming gay people to his administration. The DeSantis ad attacking Trump for being friendly to gay people is the flip-side of the various Trump ads attacking DeSantis as some kind of leftist, and all of these ads can't be gone soon enough. Most Republicans like both Trump and DeSantis and want the two to get along.

But Buttigieg couldn't stay out of it, and it was none of his business, particularly as a supposedly impartial civil-service Cabinet official prohibited from politicking by the 1939 Hatch Act. He made yet another appearance before the TV cameras about gay stuff in his review of the other party's campaign ads and, despite his denials, was out campaigning again himself.

The funny thing here is that this is pretty much all he ever comments on.

His latest gay statement comes as the nation's airlines are facing a crisis of flight shutdowns, and the supply chain crisis is revving up again, creating shortages across the country.

We ought to be seeing him dealing with  and fixing  that, and then going on camera to tout his fixings.

All we get, though, are muffled excuses. According to Fox Business:

Secretary of Transportation Pete Buttigieg downplayed his department's responsibility in the recurring spates of flight delays across the country. Speaking on CBS's "Face the Nation," Buttigieg said severe weather was the key cause of recurring clusters of flight problems for thousands since January. "Well, if you look at the overall picture, we've seen a lot of improvements, but we had a hard few days with severe weather at the beginning of the week, and that definitely put enormous pressure on the system," he said. "Now the good news is, on Friday we saw, according to TSA, a record number of airline passengers, probably the most ever in America, and we saw those cancellation rates stay low," Buttigieg sasid. "Right now we're below 2%. But they really shot up at the first part of the week, largely because of severe weather hitting some of our key hubs."

How wretched is this? Time and again, Buttigieg shows us what his real priorities are in his nonstop commentary on gay matters. He does it even as evidence mounts that he doesn't do much at his secretary of Transportation job. Does he really want that job? It's amazing how focused he is on gay matters, which in the Trump administration were just an incidental matter of no importance to the job at hand. Biden, though, appointed his Cabinet based on identity politics, and sure enough, all he got were officials like Pete, focused on identity politics. Should Joe Biden give him a new title as secretary of all things LGBT instead? Sure seems like it. We can tell what really matters to Buttigieg by his statements  and they aren't about transportation.

Image: Screen shot from CNN video via YouTube.
If you're driving in Ridgefield, N.J., you may notice history being made. The first billboard of a statewide campaign is now up on Route 1, highlighting the deadly hospital protocol during COVID that took thousands of innocent lives. More billboards should be coming soon.

I've been writing about the Hospital Death Protocol for some time, explaining how the federal government paid big bonuses to hospitals if they treated patients with the lethal drug Remdesivir, then ventilated and killed them. Many people now know about the damage from the vaccines, mandates, and lockdowns, but news of the medical carnage in the hospitals has been sparse.

Fortunately, a group of volunteers is determined to get the word out. I think of them as the Bereaved Army. They lost a parent or spouse or sibling or child to what one eyewitness doctor called "organized homicide," and they won't stop fighting 'til they get justice.

I spoke with Charlene Delfico, the state chair of the New Jersey chapter of FormerFeds Freedom Foundation, which organized the billboard campaign. "I lost my stepdad to the death protocol in Virtua Our Lady of Lourdes Hospital in Camden, New Jersey. My mother was admitted at the same time. She survived thirty days of brutal torture and came home unable to move or talk. She's slowly recovering. But they put my stepdad on a ventilator and ran roughshod over him until he died."

In her grief, Charlene found her way to FormerFeds Freedom Foundation, a nationwide group of people who lost a loved one to the hospital protocol. A few survivors of the protocol participate, too  but not many, because most people forced into the federally subsidized "treatment" for COVID didn't make it.

"We're all connected because of this tragedy throughout the country," Charlene said. "It's an amazing group of people, and we're all working together. We're creating the COVID-19 Humanity Betrayal Memory Project (CHBMP.org), a living record of what happened. We gather videos and written testimonies and documentation for history. And we're working to get justice for our murdered loved ones and to make sure that other people never have to go through what they did.

"As a group, we've had discussions about putting up billboards, but they're expensive to take on. The brother of one of the hospital victims in New Jersey has been active, handing out flyers and trying to get attention. One day, he walked into the billboard company and said he wanted to do this.

"We made a logo that shows the Hippocratic Oath being torn in half, surrounded by the phrase 'Crimes Against Humanity,' because that's what the hospital protocol was. And we posed the question 'Covid Death...Are You Sure?' to get people thinking and questioning about what happened.

"We already have other state chapters of FormerFeds interested in putting up billboards and we're planning on having planes with our slogan fly across the Jersey shore beaches this summer. We've got car magnets and bumper stickers and things are really starting to move.

"We're not stopping, and we never will till we get justice. I get inspiration from my favorite quote: 'Justice will not be served until those who are unaffected are as outraged as those who are.'"

Stella is on twitter @stellapaulny. You can write her at stellapaulny@gmail.com.

Image: Qapta.es.
New York is the only place I ever felt at home. The red brick buildings, brownstones, statues, stores with the roll-up doors over a hundred years old were like one big painting. The East River and the Hudson served as frames. New Yorkers  bold, boasting, brilliant  covered the metropolitan coated canvas, the finest Alla Prima.

Home in New York, from day one, was an expensive place to be. Positioning oneself on the coveted canvas required paying legendary rent and expending constant energy. But the city itself gave its residents, us Alla Primas, the best return on investment there is  the city forces you to live in the present. And if you stray into the mental crevasses of a grieving mind, the city will yell, honk, or otherwise bring you back to life.

And now, postbail reform, everything has changed. As with personal tragedy within family homes, moments of normalcy can seep in to temporarily camouflage the brokenness. The city still feels like the city  in moments. But random stabbings, punches, and theft are being committed by repeat offenders, the police are diminished in presence and power, and vacant storefronts have become brick-and-mortar corpses. Homeless are unattended, violent, and worsening as time continues to pass without sufficient action.

Enter the migrants. Each migrant, coming here (in blatant disregard of the legal channels), is greeted by state employees with a welcoming handshake and a look of admiration. These migrant greetings are captured by local news and aired continuously. In addition to an assembly-line format of receiving housing, clothes, a phone, the migrants get the gift of having their grievances known and broadcast throughout the news cycle. The migrants do not want to live in Brooklyn  only Manhattan  made its way through a week's worth of coverage. Commercials  poised and personable, pitch how New Yorkers should "open up their spare rooms and take in a migrant."

Since the migrants have the proverbial megaphone that reaches straight to the eyes and ears of the city officials, and factoring in how there have been no meaningful actions taken by the governor or mayor to restore the city to the level of safety it enjoyed during the Giuliani and Bloomberg years, maybe the migrants are the only hope for a successful campaign for public safety. Perhaps, if New Yorkers made a formal request to the migrants, the migrants could then demand the much-needed increase in NYPD presence. Perhaps pronto! The formal request from New Yorkers to the migrants would be presented with the rationale that we have interests in common, (in addition to real estate preferences). No one wants to be stabbed, punched, robbed. Maybe the migrants would petition the local officials to provide safety for them, and even for us American peasants.

The P.R. possibilities are endless  a ceremony at the United Nations where the migrants, perhaps dressed by Tom Ford (though he declined to dress Melania as first lady), could make a collective speech. Following would be a singing of "This Is Your Land," led by Al Sharpton before the photo with President Biden, with arms extended and olfactory sensors in check. Then, perhaps, New Yorkers can once again have their NYPD back on the previous level that resulted in personal safety, law, and order.

Image: Screen shot from ABC7 video via YouTube.
Coup chaos amplifies vulnerability of Putin's authority

By Mark Alexander

web posted July 3, 2023

It is notable, as we approach the anniversary of our nation's Revolutionary War to secure American Liberty from tyrannical rule, that last month there was a "coup attempt" against the Russian tyrant.

For sure, this power play had nothing to do with securing freedom for the Russian people and everything to do with one thug rattling sabers with another thug.

After news broke that Wagner Group mercenary strongman Yevgeny Prigozhin captured the southern city of Rostov-on-Don and set his sights on Moscow, I was asked by an American military advisor in Ukraine how I thought it would play out. I responded: "We support the enemy of my enemy because in that moment he is my friend, but I suspect Prigozhin's effort to rally mass defections of senior Russian military officers from his equally corrupt longtime friend Vladimir Putin, and his estimation of the popular support that would follow, is as flawed as his Ukrainian operations."

The latter were flawed because Putin's Defense Minister Sergei Shoigu and Gen. Valery Gerasimov have long opposed Wagner Group mercenaries, undermining their military success. Shoigu and Gerasimov have been on Prigozhin's hit list since his earlier plan to capture them was foiled by Putin's Federal Security Service. That in itself paints a very disturbing picture of the discord between and among Putin's corrupt military commanders.

Now there is intel speculation that Gen. Sergei Surovikin, Putin's former top Russian commander in Ukraine, assisted Prigozhin. That may be more strategic fog to cause Putin heartburn. No question an operation of this size was full of leaks.

As you now know, Prigozhin's operation stood down almost as fast as it stood up.

Prigozhin claims his objective was to prevent Shoigu and Gerasimov from assimilating his forces into the Russian army  which would end Prigozhin's lucrative mercenary contracts and his theft of spoils. But his abrupt retreat when 200 kilometers from Moscow raises a lot of questions.

In the coming weeks we will know if there was any "coup" contrivance between Putin and Prigozhin to test the loyalty of those in Putin's military and political chains of command. Purges are coming, but I suspect Prigozhin, now taking refuge in Belarus, got played. If he does not fall victim to some deadly Russian chemical toxin, as was the case with Putin's last political opponent, Alexei Navalny, then we will know there was some contrivance.

Regardless, today Putin is in a weaker position in Ukraine than he was before the coup attempt, and he must now assimilate Prigozhin's estimated 22,000 mercenaries who were doing his dirtiest work. However, significant fissures in Putin's political leadership have been exposed.

Afterwards, Putin delivered a public address assuring his supporters he was not still in hiding and extolling Russia's "unity and patriotism," but his claims of why he cut a deal with the coup conspirators were unconvincing.

Make no mistake: A weakened Putin regime is very dangerous, especially given the fact he has an unstable military chain of command controlling an enormous nuclear arsenal, which he has threatened to use. (That accounts for why the government has stockpiled $290 million in anti-radiation drugs.)

(For background on the climate in Russia ahead of Prigozhin's coup attempt, Yale University history professor Timothy Snyder provided a summary of 10 key points well worth reading for any strategist.)

So, how now to resolve the "Putin problem"?

Last May, I noted that "Russia is struggling to replace bullets, bombs, hardware losses, and its manpower forces in Ukraine." Putin overplayed his hand, and the dwindling support of the Russian people was shadowing the contracting American support for Joe Biden.

At the time, indicative of Putin's waning support from his highest-level advisors, Boris Bondarev had just become the highest-profile diplomat in Putin's tyrannical regime to resign over his disastrous and deadly invasion of Ukraine three months earlier.

Bondarev protested: "For 20 years of my diplomatic career I have seen different turns of our foreign policy, but never have I been so ashamed of my country as on February 24 of this year. The aggressive war unleashed by Putin against Ukraine, and in fact against the entire Western world, is not only a crime against the Ukrainian people, but also, perhaps, the most serious crime against the people of Russia, with a bold letter Z crossing out all hopes and prospects for a prosperous free society in our country."

He added: "Those who conceived this war want only one thing  to remain in power forever, live in pompous tasteless palaces, sail on yachts comparable in tonnage and cost to the entire Russian Navy, enjoying unlimited power and complete impunity. ... Thousands of Russians and Ukrainians have already died just for this."

He was correct in that assessment then, and that is precisely where things stand now.

Biden's inept "leading from behind" provision of $42 billion in "security assistance" to Ukraine since the Russian invasion 18 months ago has been an anemic and bumbling knockoff of Ronald Reagan's successful strategy to beat Russia into submission by draining its military, government, and market capital, and by extension the political capital of the man who was then the General Secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union: Mikhail Gorbachev. The U.S. total appropriation of about $120 billion has barely moved the needle.

(Notably, last week the Biden DoD claimed that $42 billion assessment was overvalued by a $6.2 billion DoD "accounting error.")

As for Prigozhin's coup attempt, Biden once again avoided any appearance of supporting "regime change" by assuring our allies "that we were not involved, that we had nothing to do with it." The only reason I doubt Biden's claim is that the coup failed, and every foreign policy hand Biden has played has failed.

Recall the assessment of Obama's former SecDef and CIA director, Robert Gates, who declared that Biden has been "wrong on nearly every major foreign policy and national security issue" over the course of his career, noting also Biden's opposition to "every one of Ronald Reagan's military programs to contest the Soviet Union."

Biden is still hoping for a Putin retreat before the 2024 presidential election so he can have a victory-lap photo op with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky. And the "coup" certainly blew bombshell reports of the Biden family crime syndicate off the front pages.

I outlined the best hope for Russian withdrawal a year ago: "No question the quickest way to end Putin's ambitions is regime change. ... The tidiest way to terminate Putin's murderous Ukraine invasion  and his tyrannical dictatorship in Russia  is for a member of his security or military detail to put a bullet in his head. The more war- and sanction-related civil unrest that emerges in Russia's major cities, the more likely a proud and heroic individual may impose that 'regime change'  and qualify for a 'Hero of Russia' medal."

Finally, let me reiterate this fact: It can't be stated strongly or often enough that every drop of Ukrainian bloodshed is the direct result of Biden's abject ineptitude. The most dangerous domestic threat to U.S. national security has been and remains Joe Biden. Anyone who believes that Russian dictator and former KGB thug Vladimir Putin would invade Ukraine if Donald Trump had a second term as president is pathologically delusional. Even some of Trump's national security critics have conceded this point.

Thus, by extension, every drop of Ukrainian bloodshed, the murder of civilian men, women, and children, is the direct result of those who voted for Joe Biden. The same can be said of the reign of terror now besieging Afghan men, women, and children after Biden's deadly surrender and retreat. May the hellish nightmares of these victims of tyranny fuel the nightmares of Biden's sycophantic supporters.

Mark Alexander is the executive editor of the Patriot Post.
We are supposed to be scared because 13 people, mostly older, died from heat in the current hot weather, and we are told that heat deaths are becoming more common.

According to this item in the Associated Press:

Heat waves like the one that engulfed parts of parts of the South and Midwest and killed more than a dozen people are becoming more common, and experts say the extreme weather events, which claim more lives than hurricanes and tornadoes, will likely increase in the future. A heat dome that pressured the Texas power grid and killed 13 people there and another in Louisiana pushed eastward Thursday and was expected to be centered over the mid-South by the weekend. Heat index levels of up to 112 degrees (44 Celsius) were forecast in parts of Florida over the next few days. Eleven of the heat-related deaths in Texas occurred in Webb County, which includes Laredo. The dead ranged in age from 60 to 80 years old, and many had other health conditions, according to the county medical examiner. The other two fatalities were Florida residents who died while hiking in extreme heat at Big Bend National Park.

Good journalists who care about informing the public, instead of indoctrinating them to push an agenda, would do some research to put the heat-related deaths in perspective.

Sadly, the current crop of journalists seems much more interested in getting the public to capitulate to the radical green agenda to remake or destroy America, instead of informing them.

According to the CDC, the most recent data show that an average of 702 people die from heat-related illness each year. To put that number in perspective, around 3 million people die each year from all causes, so less than three hundredths of one percent of deaths each year are caused by heat.

How many of the 702 would have died from other causes that year? My guess is, just like with COVID, they had other significant health problems?

Here is a headline from 2023:

America's Top Weather Killer Is Not Tornadoes, Flooding, Lightning Or Hurricanes  It's Heat Excessive heat claimed an average of 158 lives per year in the U.S. from 1992 through 2021, according to NOAA. That's higher than the average annual death tolls from flooding (88), tornadoes (71), hurricanes or tropical storms (45) and lightning (37) in that 30-year period.

The headline is supposed to make people think there are a huge number of deaths from storms, but the worst killer is heat.

And the massive number of average deaths from heat each year according to NOAA from statistics from 30 years...wait for it!

158.

The total number from all these climate-related causes is a massive 399!

Maybe we should take a poll to see if people are willing to destroy their quality of life and industries that directly and indirectly employ tens of millions and that are responsible for thousands of products to save a few lives, when a significant number of these deaths would have probably occurred whether it was warm or not? How many would go along with the agenda if they were told the truth?

Who, in his right mind, would want politicians and bureaucrats to have policies to supposedly make the Earth cooler when after a supposed disastrous 140 years of warming, cold deaths still outnumber heat deaths by almost 4 to 1?

Why don't the media highlight that statistic? Because that doesn't correspond to the leftist agenda.

For this new study, the University of Washington researchers examined 64.9 million death records from nine different countries and determined that at least 1.69 million of those deaths could be attributed to extreme temperatures in 2019 alone. About 356,000 were linked to extreme heat and 1.3 million were related to extreme cold temperatures.

Maybe Joe Biden should be asked why he wants a colder Earth when the cold causes so many more deaths than heat?

Doesn't he care about the poor? As always, he won't answer the question and the media won't care.

Image: Pixabay, Pixabay License.
Neo-Marxism has displaced Marxism with a broader framework focused on class, race, or sex inequality. Neo-Marxists captured education over the past fifty years based on critical pedagogy (AKA Critical Theory), a philosophy of education that views teaching as a political act. The neo-Marxist movement continues its long march chipping away at America's other institutions.

Compassionate Training or Victim Aggrandizement?

Last May, the U.S. Conference of Mayors' Center for Compassionate and Equitable Cities launched a community healing program called Compassion USA. San Antonio mayor Ron Nirenberg, chair of the Center, unveiled the pilot training program installed last year to promote compassion and reduce emotional trauma in San Antonio. Based on the tenet of Critical Theory, the program curriculum offers free six-part learning activities to develop a compassionate skill set incorporating a shared vocabulary and practice. The goal is "prevention, intervention, transformation, and healing to our society." The byproduct will label a population segment as the oppressor, causing emotional trauma. The program seeks broad systemic change in government, business, civic, and religious organizations, including global aspirations.

The program's premise is that brainwashed individuals don't realize they're unhappy or discontented and can be liberated only by changing social structures. Identity and cultural differences are hyper-emphasized to divide society. The nexus is emotional trauma based on intersectionality inequities on status and power (LGBTQIA+, BLM), a plot resembling the Platte River  muddy, a mile wide, and inches deep.

Compassion is an emotional concern for someone suffering. Unfortunately, neo-Marxists manipulate the term "compassion," motivated by collective ideologies, focusing on racial and left-wing identity groups creating victimhood status and granting special privileges, including resource allocation. Compassion training is a Trojan horse used to restrain free speech and potentially label nonconforming opinions and perspectives as hate speech.

In his recent Zoom presentation to the mayors, Mayor Nirenberg (groomed by the radical Annenberg Foundation) says hate crimes are an epidemic. He has engaged DHS secretary Alejandro Mayorkas and the ADL to assist in rooting out domestic extremism. His office is calling out hate under the pretext of compassion.

Mayors' Compact against Hate

Last January, the mayors' Winter Conference held a meeting on hate crimes and violent extremism. The focus is on the "hate ecosystem" centering on the disruption of school board meetings regarding opposition to Critical Race Theory, spreading disinformation, opposition against racial justice protests, intimation of the LGBT community, extremists running for local office and taking positions as election judges and poll workers, extremists in police departments, and apprehension that a civil war may occur to create a white-ethno state. There was no mention of BLM and Antifa; it is a political snipe hunt. The YouTube link to a short clip capsulizes the illusional hate crime narrative used to justify coercion against the general public.

The United States Mayor Conference followed up by publishing the "Mayors' Compact to Combat Hate, Extremism and Bigotry" in collaboration with the ultra-left-leaning Anti-Defamation League (ADL). The Compact has ten components: blatant coercion to suppress free speech and label users exercising their First Amendment rights as haters and dissidents.

The Justice Department is concerned about the lack of hate crime reporting to the National Incident-Based Reporting System (NIBRS), which the FBI relies on. Ironically, NIBRS doesn't have a category for hate crime hoaxes. The demand for modern racism and bigotry incidents grossly exceeds the supply; hoaxes must be manufactured, which is a crime. Without a hate crime category and the prosecution of hoaxes, hate crime hoaxes stop.

1st Amendment Under Assault

The First Amendment guarantees citizens the right to speak freely about their views, regardless of if some consider them impolite, offensive, or unpopular speech. The mayors want to use shame and guilt to slander and control the general public while destroying Western culture. At the same time, their cities collapse like mythical Gotham City. Should an individual be accused of hate thoughts or bigotry, they want to deprive him of the protections guaranteed by the Bill of Rights. The mayors are determined to destroy free speech.

Bob Bishop is a resident of San Antonio and a forensic investigator and retired CPA.

Image via Wikimedia Commons, public domain.
Let's be honest: the Diversity Hire does no one any good...least of all the Diversity Hire. Last week's SCOTUS decision to do away with race-based Affirmative Action policies in higher education finally took a step towards fixing a grievous wrong.

But if you listen to Senator Elizabeth Warren (infamously known as Fauxcahontas, Lie-Awatha, and Sitting B-------), what happened is that the "extremist" Supreme Court "rolled back the march toward racial justice, and narrowed educational opportunity for all." For that comment, she was deservedly roasted on Twitter. I won't spoil the fun...go check it out!

In Warren's mind, ending the blatant discrimination against historically higher-achieving Asians and whites (sorry, just the facts) means marching away from racial justice. Evidently, "racial justice" means fighting racism with even more blatant racism, as long as that racism helps out whichever protected group is in favor today.

Warren benefited from these racist policies by being employed at Harvard Law for over twenty years because she claimed to be "American Indian," so why wouldn't she support affirmative action? Ironically, she had to cheat in order to get ahead as a boring old white chick, even back then. Further irony is that Warren presumably took the place that Harvard's quota system had set aside for an actual Native American!

Why are race and other quotas for higher education such a terrible thing? Isn't it nice to be able to give someone who is under-privileged the opportunity to go to a prestigious and expensive university like Harvard? Shouldn't we be looking to give a chance to achieve excellence? Of course we should. And we are, through scholarships, grants, and student loans to allow for those who are economically less capable to be able to attain higher education. We shouldn't be lowering the bar for entrance so that we can check off boxes and boast that "now we have one in every color!" And virtue-signal our enlightenment in today's upside-down world.

Here is what actually happens when you lower the standards of a university like Harvard in order to artificially boost your diversity numbers. If your standard results in a very low percentage of black or Hispanic students being qualified for acceptance at Harvard, such that a larger percentage of white or Asian students are accepted, where does the fault lie?

A) With the students?

B) With their parents?

C) With their high school?

D) With Harvard?

In a world with any personal accountability, the answer is "A, B and/or C." But in our racially charged Bizarro World, the fault lies with Harvard; asking a lot of those who attend a once-great institution is clearly racist. And clearly the solution is more racism.

So Harvard and hundreds of other schools simply lower the bar. Problem solved, right? Those Asian smarties can always go to Yale, Dartmouth, or maybe (gasp) Brown, right? A new generation of black and Hispanic students can now enjoy the benefits that all those over-privileged white kids have had for decades. Except that perhaps when the under-qualified student gets to Harvard, maybe he can't keep up...or he's passing, but just barely...or even failing. We can't have that! It would show the obvious fault in the logic that the only problem was getting into the fancy college.

The next illogically logical step is to lower the grading standards...or the difficulty level for the curriculum itself. Now those Cs jump up to As, and everyone is happy again, right? Harvard can boast that it graduated the highest number of whatever group is in the current cultural spotlight. Yay!

Except not "yay." Since they have dumbed down the qualifications to get into, perform at, and graduate from Harvard, the once highly valued degree is now essentially meaningless. No one, including the student, will ever know whether he actually achieved anything. Once he graduates and moves into the post-academic "real world," he is doing so with a watered down education, and also heading into a world that is increasingly indulging the same woke nonsense. Companies are now increasingly hiring candidates on the basis of skin color, gender (real or imagined), and sexual orientation rather than, you know, actual qualifications for the job in question.

"Big deal!" you might say. "Where's the harm? We're just giving people an opportunity to succeed in a patriarchal system full of systemic racism!" The Big Deal is that maybe that person who has been artificially helped through the system is flying your 747, performing your medical procedure, running your company, or being appointed to the Supreme Court of the United States. People who are actually qualified will have opportunities taken away from them in favor of people who are not, and those unqualified people will not only do damage to the world around them, but also do damage to themselves.

The end result of affirmative action is generations of people who can never know if they accomplished anything on their own merits or were simply handed things based on their race or superficial characteristics. Never.

Image via Pxhere.
Water bridges are bridge-like structures that carry navigable waterway canals over other rivers, valleys, railways or roads. Small ships and boats ply on these waterways. The most popular water bridge is the Magdeburg Water Bridge in Germany, the longest and the most impressive in the world. Although aqueducts has been used for supplying cities with water since centuries, they were not generally used for traffic until the 17th century when modern canal systems started to appear. The 662-metre long aqueduct carrying the Canal lateral a la Loire over the River Loire was built in 1896, and remained the longest navigable aqueduct in the world until the 21st century, when the Magdeburg Water Bridge in Germany took the title.

Here are three of the most unusual and magnificent water bridges around the world.

Magdeburg Water Bridge

The Magdeburg Water Bridge in Germany deserve special mention. Opened in October 2003 and part of the Magdeburg crossing of waterways, it connects the Elbe-Havel Canal to the Mittellandkanal, crossing over the Elbe River. At 918 meters, its the longest navigable aqueduct in the world.

The ElbeHavel Canal and Mittelland Canal canals had previously met near Magdeburg but on opposite sides of the Elbe, which was at a significantly lower elevation than the two canals. Ships moving between the two had to make a 12-kilometre detour, descending from the Mittelland Canal through the Rothensee boat lift into the Elbe, then sailing downstream on the river, before ascending to the Elbe-Havel Canal through Niegripp lock. Low water levels in the Elbe often prevented fully laden canal barges from making this crossing, requiring time-consuming off-loading of cargo.

The reunification of Germany and establishment of major water transport routes made the Water Bridge a priority again. Work started in 1997, with construction taking six years and costing 500 million. The water bridge now connects Berlins inland harbour network with the ports along the Rhine river.

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Pontcysyllte Aqueduct

The Pontcysyllte Aqueduct, in Wrexham County Borough in Britain, was built between 1795 and 1805 to carry the Ellesmere Canal over the valley of the River Dee to link the coal mines of Denbighshire to the national canal system during the Industrial Revolution. It was one of the world's greatest engineering achievements of the time. For more than 200 years, it is the longest and highest aqueduct in Britain, and currently a World Heritage Site.

The aqueduct is 307 meter long, 3.4 meter wide and 1.60 meter deep, and forms a part of an 18 km long aqueduct system. It consists of a cast iron trough supported 38 meter above the river on iron arched ribs carried on nineteen hollow masonry piers. The use of both cast and wrought iron in the aqueduct enabled the construction of arches that were light and strong, producing an overall effect that is both monumental and elegant.

The economic influence of the canal for the region was considerable during the first half of the 19th century, enabling the rapid development of coal extraction, metal working, limestone quarries, and the production of lime. The slate quarries of the Welsh mountains and agriculture also benefited from the canal. Today, the canal no longer moves coal and limestone cargoes, but is a popular spot for tourists. Since 1954 the canal has been managed and maintained in a navigable condition by British Waterways.

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Barton Swing Aqueduct

The Barton Swing Aqueduct is a moveable water bridge in Barton upon Irwell in Greater Manchester, England, that carries the Bridgewater Canal across the Manchester Ship Canal. The swinging action allows large vessels using the Manchester Ship Canal to pass underneath and smaller narrow boats to cross over the top. When large vessels need to pass along the Ship Canal, the 1,450-tonne and 100 meter long iron trough is rotated 90 degrees. A gate at each end of the trough retains around 800 tonnes of water; further gates on each bank retain water in their adjacent stretches of canal. A similar swing bridge, but for road traffic, lies adjacent to, and upstream of, the Barton Swing Aqueduct.

The aqueduct, which is the first and only swing aqueduct in the world is considered a major feat of Victorian civil engineering. Designed by Sir Edward Leader Williams and built by Andrew Handyside of Derby, the swing bridge opened in 1894 and remains in regular use.

Previously, the aqueduct crossing over River Irwell was a rigid stone structure that prevented new ships of larger dimension to pass underneath the bridge. A swinging bridge became a necessity.

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The swing aqueduct (left) in the closed position, showing the Bridgewater canal crossing over the Ship Canal; the Barton Road Swing Bridge is on the right. Photo credit

Other notable water bridges, not included in this Top3 list are the Avon Aqueduct - the longest and tallest canal aqueduct in Scotland and the second-longest in the United Kingdom, after the Pontcysyllte Aqueduct, and the Briare Aqueduct  which was the longest navigable aqueduct in the World until the opening of the Magdeburg Water Bridge. If you are interested, look them up on Google. If you are visiting the United Kingdom, spare a day to visit these remarkable achievements in civil engineering.
Ghost stories have fascinated and captivated people throughout history and across cultures. Despite the passage of time and advancements in science and technology, the allure of the supernatural continues to intrigue and captivate individuals from all walks of life. Some ghost stories have a strong cultural and historical significance. They are often rooted in local folklore, legends, and traditional beliefs, reflecting the values, fears, and customs of a particular community. Sharing and passing down ghost stories from generation to generation helps preserve cultural heritage and creates a sense of collective identity. These tales also serve as cautionary tales, teaching moral lessons and warning against certain behaviors.

A festival attendee dressed up as a ghost at the Festival of Fisher's Ghost. Photo credit: Campbelltown City Council/Wikimedia Commons

One of Australias most famous ghost stories from the early 19th century is that of Frederick Fisher.

Frederick Fisher was an English shopkeeper, who became involved in a situation where he either unknowingly or intentionally acquired counterfeit banknotes through his business dealings. Consequently, in 1815, Fred received a 14-year sentence of transportation to Australia. Due to his proficiency in reading and writing, which marked him as an educated individual, Fred was able to redeem himself in Australia, and acquired multiple farms and plots of land. He also ventured into the paper-making industry.

In 1822, Fred Fisher, having completed half his sentence, applied for a ticket-of-leave and permission to purchase some property. Among other properties, Fred Fisher secured a farm at Campbelltownat the time a remote rural outpost.

In 1825, Fisher had an argument with a local carpenter and was sent to prison. Worried about his farm, Fisher entrusted to his neighbor, George Worrall, the responsibility of looking after the same and also gave him the power of attorney for the duration of time he spent in prison. But when Fisher returned from prison six months later, he found that Worrall had been claiming the farm as his own.

On 17 June 1826 Fisher mysteriously disappeared. George Worrell announced he had sailed for England, and three weeks later he sold Fisher's horse and personal belongings, claiming Fred Fisher had sold them to him before he set sail.

Four months after Fishers disappearance a local man named John Farley came forward with a peculiar story. Farley claimed that he had seen the ghost of Fred Fisher sitting on the rail of a nearby bridge. Farley explained that the spectral figure did not utter a word but simply gestured towards a paddock located beyond the creek before vanishing from sight.

Farleys tale was initially dismissed, but the circumstances surrounding Fishers disappearance eventually aroused sufficient suspicion that a police search of the paddock to which the ghost had pointed was undertaken. Surprisingly, the remains of the murdered Fisher were discovered buried by the side of a creek.

Based on circumstantial evidences, George Worrall was arrested and charged with Freds murder. Although George initially denied the charge, he later confessed to the crime, and was subsequently hanged. It needs to be mentioned that the story of Fishers ghost didnt play any part in the conviction, as such evidences are inadmissible in court.

Did Farley really see Fishers ghost? It has been suggested that Farley invented the ghost tale to conceal the actual source of his knowledge about the whereabouts of Fisher's body. Maybe Farley witnessed the murder and saw the body being buried. He wanted to tell the authorities without implicating himself in the affair. So he invented the ghost story. Another theory is that the actual witness of the murder, in order to protect himself, disguised himself as the ghost and sat on the bridge waiting for a traveler. When Farley passed by, he pretended to be Fishers ghost, moaned and pointed to the burial site in the swamp.

Yet another likely theory is that the ghost story was a hoax a journalist invention by a Sydney-based magazine. Indeed, there are no mention of a ghost in the trial records of the case. The body was discovered, according to the records, not because Fishers ghost pointed at it but because the police found several spots of blood on the fence that led them to search the area. The search was assisted by two aboriginal trackers who soon reported traces they thought was the fat of a white man (presumably human tissue) floating on the creek. Proceeding on, they came to a spot which had been recently disturbed. Acting on intuition, the spot was dug up and Fishers body was discovered.

However the story of Fishers ghost came about, it has since entered popular folklore. Now every year, in November, the town of Campbelltown holds the Festival of Fisher's Ghost to commemorate one of Australia's most famous ghosts. The creek beside which the body was discovered was named Fisher's Ghost Creek, although it has now, however, been converted into mostly a storm water drain.

References:

# The Legend of Fred FISHERs Ghost, The Willis Tree

# In Search of Fisher's Ghost, Skeptical Inquirer
The Galaxy S22 series is following close on the heels of its successor to Samsungs July 2023 update. Shortly after the company released this months security patch to its latest flagships, the 2022 models are joining the party too. While the Galaxy S23 series first picked up the new SMR (Security Maintenance Release) in the US, the rollout for the Galaxy S22 trio has begun in Europe.

Samsung is pushing the July update to the Galaxy S22, Galaxy S22+, and Galaxy S22 Ultra with the firmware build number S90*BXXS6CWF6 in European countries. Like the Galaxy S23 series, the official changelog states that the 2022 flagships arent getting anything else apart from the latest security patches. The firmware version doesnt indicate anything, either. This means Galaxy S22 users will have to wait longer for the Gallery features that Samsung promised recently.

With the big June update for the Galaxy S23 series, Samsung added the ability to delete multiple motion photos at once in the Gallery app. The company also improved the lens distortion correction functionality for its Photo Remaster tool. It has announced both of these features for the Galaxy S22 series, as well as the Galaxy S21, Galaxy S20, Galaxy Note 20, and all recent foldables (except for the original Galaxy Fold). We will let you know when Samsung pushes these promised updates.

In the meantime, Galaxy S22 users can install the July update to ensure their phone is safe from several vulnerabilities. As usual, this months SMR should contain fixes for dozens of security issues. Unfortunately, Google hasnt published the details of the July patch for Android devices yet. Along with those Android OS patches, Samsung will also fix some security issues with various system apps, services, and components. Stay tuned for these details in the coming days.

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Samsung is internally testing the Android 14 update for the Galaxy S22 series

As Google prepares for the stable Android 14 release, Samsung is also hard at work to bring the latest features to Galaxy devices through One UI 6.0. The Android 14-based custom software will soon enter the public beta stage. We are expecting the Galaxy S23 series to first get the beta update in mid-July, followed by other models. The latter group includes the Galaxy S22 series, Galaxy Z Fold 4, and Galaxy Z Flip 4. The Korean firm is already testing this big update internally for all of these devices. We will let you know as soon as it begins public testing of One UI 6.0.
With satellite connectivity being a big deal, the Motorola Defy Satellite Link is here to save the day. Motorola put this device in the spotlight a few months ago after its launch, and it is now available for purchase. The idea behind the development of this device is that it can help users access the internet even in areas with little or no internet coverage.

To access the internet, users would only need the Motorola Defy Satellite Link, which would find a nearby satellite to connect with. Once this connection between the Defy device and the satellite is secure, the user would be able to access certain services on their smartphone. This piece of technology is great for those whose jobs entail that they move into areas with low network coverage.

Well, anybody can own this device as it can come in handy in the event of a network outage. Some devices already have satellite connectivity features built in just for rainy days. If your device doesnt have this feature, and you see it as being important, then you can opt to get the Motorola Defy Satellite Link.

Details, pricing, and where to buy the Motorola Defy Satellite Link

A few months ago, details on the Motorola Defy rugged device to launch in collaboration with Bullitt Group hit the internet. This device, although not yet available, would come with built-in satellite connectivity features. But while fans anticipate the launch of this rugged smartphone with satellite connectivity, Motorola is offering satellite connectivity for less.

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The Motorola Defy Satellite Link is a compact device that can give your device access to satellite connectivity. Staying true to the Motorola Defy brand, this is a rugged device that comes with Ingress Protection (IP68). It is drop and water-resistant, it also features MIL SPEC 810H certification and is resistant to thermal shock.

In certain parts of Europe, this device has been available for usage over the past few months. However, the company is finally extending availability and support to the US now. Other regions such as South America, Africa, and Australia will get support for satellite connectivity with this device in the coming months.

So if you are living in the US and need a device that can help you to access the internet via satellites, you can get one. The Motorola Defy Satellite Link is priced at $149. This device will connect to your smartphone via Bluetooth and offer satellite internet connectivity.

With satellite internet, users can send and receive text messages as well as send out SOS alerts. But to access these features, users would need to pay for either the Essential, Everyday, Premium, or Freedom plans. All except the Freedom plan are monthly subscriptions, the more a user pays, the more features they get access to.

Some specifications of this device include a 600mAh battery that can last 4 days on a single charge. It uses a USB-C charger to power up the battery once there is a need to. For processing power, it makes use of the MediaTek MT6825 NTN chipset. Lastly, it has a Lanyard, so it can be attached to the user without getting lost.
Violence and the civilized society: Conformity and dissidence in different societies (Part Four) By Mark Wegierski

web posted July 3, 2023 (Initial drafts of this essay date back to 1988.) Since traditionalism and conservatism greatly respects the civil order, it will clearly reject armed struggle as long as "liberal democracy" allows for some vestiges of real democratic choice by the people. There remains the hope for the traditionalist and conservative, that it will be possible to attract the support of a significant percentage of the population (or, less likely, of some significant portion of the elites) for at least some of one's policies, if only because one believes that human nature is conservative-tending. Unfortunately, the left-liberal elites are continually stacking the deck or loading the dice against the possibility of the actualization of traditionalist and conservative policies. There are so many ways today that left-liberals have obtained enormous advantages over conservatives, in current-day liberal democracy. One of the most obvious ways of doing this is the introduction of mass, dissimilar immigration into the Western countries, which typically leads to the creation of a large, permanently unassimilatable bloc, which will almost always vote for left-liberal parties. Another obvious strategy is the excision of serious conservative, traditionalist, or nationalist thought from the academy and circles of "serious opinion" -- thus reducing it to a leaderless and untutored reflex, with possibly ugly manifestations, which can be quickly and easily pejoritized and de-legitimated. Such categories as "history", "tradition", "human nature", "spirit", and "soul", mean nothing to many left-liberals, the human person is simply seen as a tabula rasa, on which anything that the liberal controllers want to be written, can be written. It must be pointed out that the courts as well as quasi-judicial human rights and similar tribunals of most Western countries often serve as left-liberalism's last line of defense against the will of the majority; as well as a powerful instrumentality for advancing those sets of values in law (and thereby social changes), that the majority may sometimes be highly reluctant to support. The operation of this top-down system of juridical legalism, based on highly expansive interpretations of ever more widely defined "human rights", has been termed, by some conservative critics, as a "judicial usurpation" of democracy. Also, the mechanistic and excessively proceduralist legalism of the system attenuates the proper operation of justice -- of real punishment for real crimes. (By contrast, in Victorian England, for example, there was public outrage when a murder trial, in what seemed like a highly obvious case, took more than a week!) An example of how comparatively little conservative parties can achieve today in Western countries, even when actually in power, is afforded by Mike Harris' Progressive Conservative government in the Province of Ontario (elected with substantial legislative majorities in 1995 and 1999). While trying to carry out what could be seen as mostly "tidying-up," administrative reforms, the Harris government was confronted by some of the most overwrought opposition ever hitherto encountered by a government in Canada. The trade-unions (especially the civil service and teachers' unions), most of the mass-media, and feminist and minority interest groups, whipped up an ongoing frenzy of opposition to Mike Harris from the day he was elected. Mike Harris was described as "anti-human", as "the closest thing to fascism ever seen in Ontario", as a "thug", as "mad", and so forth. It was suggested that Mike Harris submit to psychiatric counseling, as only a "crazy" person could carry out the policies he was carrying out, without being aware of how enormously they were hurting people. So conservative parties or factions within parties certainly can exist, but they are mostly unable to carry out conservative policies, on those comparatively rare occasions when they win a legislative majority. Many liberals really see conservatives as a continuous "dark threat," that must be beaten back again and again. The "dark forces" often come close to winning, but are always defeated at the last moment. This paradoxical conception of conservatism as very powerful, but almost certain to fail because of its "evil" nature, helps keep "the progressive forces" in a constant state of activism and vigilance against the Right. One is reminded of the important role of "Goldsteinism" (or the bogeyman) in upholding the regime in George Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four. To return again to the question of violence against the state or its ruling groups, some persons would argue that "one man's freedom fighter is another man's terrorist." However, one might well question whether there are in fact any rightwing terrorist groups in the West today, apart from some very miniscule fringes. (In terms of the idea of the manufacture of a "right-wing threat," it has been pointed out, for example, that many of the massive incidents of swastikasmearing in the former West Germany had been staged by the Soviet intelligence services and Far Left activists.) Some liberals have done their utmost to portray the vicious terrorist attacks in Oklahoma City and in Norway, as highly typical of a generalized right-wing. One also remembers how some liberals seized upon trying to link the Arizona shootings, to the Tea Party. There appear to be a large number of criteria by which a terrorist can be distinguished from a legitimate fighter for national selfdetermination or other cultural goals. Especially during the Cold War era, liberals tended to see many groups employing grotesque terror as "freedomfighters," while at the same time seeing many quite self-restrained oppositionists as "terrorists." To be continued. Mark Wegierski is a Canadian writer and historical researcher. Home
Frame rate matching originally became available on Android TV sometime last year. Google TV devices also got this feature at about the same time its counterpart (Android TV) got it as well. However, up until this point, Netflix has not supported frame rate matching on their streaming platform.

Finally, users of Android and Google TV can now benefit from frame rate matching while streaming. In a recent YouTube video from FlatpanelsHD, this feature can be seen in action on the Netflix app. What this feature does is very simple but essential to ensure a great viewing experience for streamers.

Users of Netflix on Google TV and Android TV might have not had a reason to complain about their streaming experience. But with the Netflix app now supporting the frame rate matching feature, theyll be a clear improvement to streaming. But what are the benefits of this feature, or what does it bring to the table for Netflix streamers?

Benefits of the frame rate matching feature now available for Netflix on Google TV and Android TV

The frame rate matching feature helps the TV match the contents frame rate. This helps the TV sync with whatever the user is watching, hence improving the viewing experience. So as the contents frame rate keeps changing, that of the TV will sync with it and change accordingly.

Users can benefit from this feature while streaming movies on Netflix, but it doesnt stop there. Even when users are just scrolling through the Netflix app, the frame rate matching feature is also active. This makes each animation, screen change, and scroll appear smoother.

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From the FlatpanelsHD video on YouTube, it is clear how this feature now available on the Netflix app works. The YouTuber tracked the frame rate of their TV by pulling up the VRR information from the settings page. While navigating across the Netflix interface, it was clear that the frame rate stayed the same.

Also, while streaming movies, the frame rate at which the movie is displayed stays in sync with the TV. Users can now wave goodbye to any choppy viewing experience while they use Netflix on Google TV and Android TV. However, it is good to note that supporting this feature will not bring a mind-blowing change to the Netflix app.

Before Netflix supported it, the viewing experience for most users was pretty good. To get support for this feature on your Google TV or Android TV, youd need to update the Netflix app. Possibly, other streaming services available on Google TV and Android TV would also support this feature.
Its no secret that Reddits recent decision to start charging exorbitant fees for its API access has sparked widespread outrage, resulting in whole communities abandoning the platform. However, despite the protests, it appears that Reddit has finally pulled the plug on API access, as multiple third-party apps have started showing error messages.

Christian Selig, the developer behind the popular Apollo Reddit client, expressed his frustration with Reddits demand for an astonishing $20 million per year for API access, equating to $12,000 for every 50 million API requests. Additionally, he also criticized the companys lack of empathy and willingness to listen, suggesting that Reddit could have made an effort to find a solution that worked for everyone.

However, Reddit CEO Steve Huffman has repeatedly defended the companys proposed changes, stating that the platform was not originally designed to support third-party apps and that they would not reconsider their position. As a result, well-known Reddit apps such as BaconReader and Sync have ceased operations, displaying only an error message stating Request failed: client error (429).

Subscription model, the way to go

While the recent API changes have caused the demise of many popular Reddit clients, some apps like Relay are considering adopting a subscription-based model to remain operational. Developer DBrady announced plans to transition to a subscription model in the coming weeks, emphasizing the importance of keeping the subscription price as affordable as possible. However, it is important to note that Relays pro version will remain free until they implement the subscription model.

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Furthermore, Narwhal, another popular Reddit app, will also adopt a similar subscription-based model, with developer Rick Harrison assuring users that the subscription will cost $4 and $7 and will be ad-free. Additionally, Nara for Reddit is exploring a subscription-based model, but the specific details regarding pricing and implementation are still unclear.

Accessibility apps exempt

Although regular Reddit apps will have to pay for API access, the company has exempted accessibility-focused apps. This means that apps dedicated to assisting users with accessibility needs, such as Reddit for Blind, Luna for Reddit, and Dystopia, will continue to operate for free, ensuring continued accessibility to Reddit content.
A letter signed by more than 100 MPs and lords is to be submitted to Foreign Secretary James Cleverly calling for fresh action to help free pro-democracy activist Alaa Abd El-Fattah, who has been incarcerated in Egypt for most of the past decade.

The mother of the 40-year-old British-Egyptian writer, mathematician Laila Soueif, will lead a vigil held by Amnesty International UK as the letter is presented to the Foreign and Commonwealth Development Office (FCDO) on Monday.

Sanaa Seif, the sister of writer Alaa Abd el-Fattah (Stefan Rousseau/PA)

High profile politicians including Sir Peter Bottomley, Sir Iain Duncan Smith and Lord Chris Patten are among the signatories of the petition which calls for the UK to lead on a joint statement at the UN Human Rights Council and to update the FCDOs travel advice for British visitors to Egypt.

Mr Abd El-Fattah is currently serving a five-year sentence on charges of disseminating false news for retweeting a report in 2019 that another prisoner had died in custody.

He has been carrying out hunger strikes while in custody which he intensified at the time of the Cop27 summit in Sharm el-Sheik in November 2022, during which Prime Minister Rishi Sunak raised his case with President Abdel Fattah El-Sisi.

In the letter to Mr Cleverly, the supporters of the Free Alaa campaign state: We are writing to express our concern at the lack of progress on the case of Alaa Abd el-Fattah, six months on from the Prime Ministers meeting with President Sisi in Sharm el-Sheikh.

As a result, we are asking you to take the lead on a joint statement on Egypt at the UN Human Rights Council, and to update the UKs travel advice for the country.

You are of course aware that while the two leaders were meeting, Alaa was perilously close to death, collapsing just days later.

Since he chose to end his hunger and water strike, he has remained imprisoned in his cell and has still not received a single visit from a consular official, despite repeated commitments to Alaas family from British ministers and officials that they are doing everything they can.

Private lobbying of the Egyptian government, even at the highest levels, is yet to deliver results.

This calls for fresh approaches that draw on traditional British strengths of international diplomacy. The Human Rights Council presents a key opportunity for the UK to lead on a joint statement.

The letter also calls on the UK travel advice to follow that given by the US which warns that foreign nationals are not protected from prolonged interrogations and extended detention and its embassy is not always kept informed of their circumstances.

The protest on Monday has been timed to mark the 10th anniversary of President El-Sisis military coup in Egypt during which time Mr Abd El-Fattah has been imprisoned for all but a few months.

His supporters also highlight that it has been 18 months since the British embassy in Cairo has been given access to him in prison.
Acas said it is well prepared and ready to help resolve a bitter dispute between the Government and junior doctors.

The British Medical Association (BMA) has written to Prime Minister Rishi Sunak urging ministers to enter talks with junior doctors through the conciliation service.

It comes as the union said the Government is letting patients down with its arbitrary stance that it will not enter talks with doctors while strikes are planned.

Later this month, junior doctors are planning to stage the largest walkout in the NHSs history  from July 13-18.

And consultants  the most senior doctors in the NHS  are planning to stage industrial action from July 20-21, when they will only provide scaled-back Christmas Day cover.

In a letter to Mr Sunak, Dr Phil Banfield, chairman of coucil at the BMA, said: The arbitrary precondition that you will not negotiate while strike action is planned is letting patients down.

When negotiations previously broke down, it was your government that cancelled upcoming meetings and withdrew from scheduled talks even though the public rightly want you to use every opportunity possible to get around the negotiating table to find a solution.

We are willing to negotiate before, during and after industrial action by refusing to negotiate while industrial action is planned, you are penalising patients.

It is not too late to begin intensive talks and it is not too late to avert further strikes.

We've written to the PM asking him to enter into intensive talks about junior doctors #PayRestoration, and to engage with ACAS. #ARM2023 Read the letter from @DrPhilBanfield here  pic.twitter.com/RXfzRzDkjG  The BMA (@TheBMA) July 3, 2023

In remarks issued to the PA news agency, Kate Nowicki, director of dispute resolution at Acas, said: We have a team of experts who are well prepared and ready to help with the junior doctors dispute.

Acas has decades of experience in resolving disputes, which includes helping the various sides look at options for a compromise.

Our collective conciliation service is impartial, free and independent. It is also voluntary, which means we can only hold formal conciliation talks when all the parties in dispute agree that the time is right for conciliation.

An independent survey this year showed that both employers and employees overwhelming want the various sides involved in strike action to seek mediation from Acas to resolve their dispute.

But Downing Street insisted that discussions could not be held unless strikes were called off.

We obviously remain open to talks and continue to call on the junior doctors to step back from such a highly disruptive strike action, which will put patient safety at risk, the Prime Ministers official spokesman said.

As we did  successfully  with other health unions, we dont think its right to enter into talks with the threat of strikes hanging over them.

So we have asked, as we have done before, that strike action is postponed in order for talks to begin.

Asked whether there could be a role for Acas, the spokesman said: We think we have achieved success with the Secretary of State negotiating with other unions in the past, we think thats the right way forward.

Obviously, the BMA are requesting a 35% increase to pay, we dont think that is fair to the taxpayer, and they are obviously still planning on significant strike action.

If they are willing to move beyond their starting position and pause strike action then we can begin talks.

In an interview with PA, Dr Banfield said: The loss of trust that has happened between this Government and the medical profession, Ive never seen before.

It is an absolute travesty that were in the position where doctors feel that there is no alternative but to take strike action.

In his speech to the BMA annual representative meeting in Liverpool, Dr Banfield said the whole of the medical workforce could be on strike before the next general election.

We will strike to the next general election and beyond if that is what it takes, he said.

We wont give up until junior doctors are fairly paid. On 13 July, we will stage a 5 day strike, the longest single walkout by doctors in the NHSs history. pic.twitter.com/CYxwm1aUh9  Junior Doctors (@BMA_JuniorDocs) June 23, 2023

We are prepared to negotiate in good faith but this Government is not.

I want to repeat our clear message to Westminster throughout the junior doctors dispute: we have always said we will meet without preconditions anytime, anywhere to resolve our issues. This offer still holds.

Meanwhile, consultants have suffered the biggest decline in pay for any branch of practice. They are joining the fight to ensure we do not lose our most senior and expert doctors  those who will train the next generation.

At this rate, the whole of the medical profession will be in dispute at the next general election.
Highly anticipated summer blockbuster Barbie has been banned in Vietnam due to its use of an illegal image, according to local media.

The film, starring Margot Robbie and Ryan Gosling, reportedly contains a scene that depicts a map with the nine dash line.

The nine dash line is a representation of Chinas territorial claims in the South China Sea, which Vietnam says violates its sovereignty.

According to Vietnamese outlet VNExpress, director general of the Vietnam Cinema Department under the Ministry of Culture, Sports, and Tourism, Vi Kien Thanh, announced the ban on Monday.

The decision was made by the National Film Evaluation Council, VNExpress reported.

Barbie is due for release in the UK on July 21, the same day as Christopher Nolans historical epic Oppenheimer.

It sees Robbies Barbie leave the utopian Barbie Land after questioning her mortality, travelling to the real world with Goslings Ken.

The trailer for the upcoming film states: If you love Barbie, this movie is for you. If you hate Barbie, this movie is for you.
Suella Braverman has said she has written a letter to Meta boss Mark Zuckerberg, expressing her concerns over the companys plans to introduce end-to-end encryption without appropriate safeguards for children.

The Home Secretary told the Commons about the critical role that tech companies such as Meta play in supporting UK law enforcement agencies, revealing that the information provided by these platforms helps to protect approximately 1,200 children each month.

However, she insisted that Metas plans may hinder efforts to proactively detect and report instances of child grooming and abuse material on Facebook Messenger and Instagram Direct, saying: This will be a huge boon to anyone who wants to hurt a child.

Meta-owned messaging app WhatsApp already offers end-to-end encryption by default, which prevents anyone other than the sender and recipient of a message from accessing its contents.

The social media giant is planning to add the feature to both Facebook Messenger and Instagram Direct chats later this year.

Speaking at Home Office questions, Ms Braverman said: The information that Meta and other tech companies give to UK law enforcement helps to protect around 1,200 children and leads to over 100 arrests of suspected child abusers every month.

But Meta plans to roll out end-to-end encryption soon without safeguards.

They will no longer proactively detect and alert authorities to child grooming and abuse material on Facebook Messenger and Instagram Direct.

This will be a huge boon to anyone who wants to hurt a child.

The Online Safety Bill will hold tech firms to account, but indifference to abuse is intolerable.

I have written to Mark Zuckerberg, along with the security minister (Tom Tugendhat), childrens charities, campaign groups to outline our profound concerns.

And last week I was in New Zealand at the Five Eyes security conference where there was widespread support for working together to ensure social media companies put child safety first.

A Meta company spokesperson said: The overwhelming majority of Brits already rely on apps that use encryption to keep them safe from hackers, fraudsters and criminals.

We dont think people want us reading their private messages so have developed safety measures that prevent, detect and allow us to take action against this heinous abuse, while maintaining online privacy and security.

We remain committed to working with law enforcement and child safety experts as we roll out end-to-end encryption.
The Foreign Secretary will hail the close and friendly co-operation between London and Brussels in a speech to EU parliamentarians.

James Cleverly is expected to meet top EU figures on Monday, with his speech likely to look ahead to better and more mature post-Brexit relations.

This is a new chapter in the UK-EU relationship.

We stand together in our support of Ukraine, and we want to maximise the opportunities of our trade deal, he said ahead of his trip to Brussels.

But we dont have to agree on everything  a mature relationship can deal with differences.

The speech to the UK-EU Parliamentary Partnership Assembly, a body created as part of the post-Brexit trade deal, comes as Rishi Sunaks Government seeks better relations with the bloc.

Mr Cleverly is also expected to stress the importance of continued support for Ukraine as part of the visit.

European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen was in London last month, as part of the UK-hosted Ukraine Recovery Conference.

Ursula von der Leyen, President of the European Commission, speaking in London last month (Henry Nicholls/PA)

The Prime Minister earlier this year brokered the Windsor Framework deal with the EU, designed to address concerns over the operation of post-Brexit arrangements in Northern Ireland.

While the deal did not lead to the return of powersharing at Stormont, which the Democratic Unionist Party continues to boycott, it did usher in hopes of a new foundation for UK-EU ties.

The Foreign Secretary will co-chair the Withdrawal Agreement Joint Committee alongside the EUs Maros Sefcovic and is also expected to meet European Parliament President Roberta Metsola as part of the trip.

Citizens rights and illegal migration are among the topics that could be on the agenda at the committee meeting.

Mr Cleverly will also hold talks with Nato secretary-general Jens Stoltenberg, ahead of a crunch summit in Vilnius, Lithuania.

It comes as Labours shadow foreign secretary David Lammy is expected to be in Paris for meetings with French Foreign Minister Catherine Colonna, as well as Transport Minister Clement Beaune.

It is understood that Mr Lammy is keen for discussions on his partys proposals for a UK-EU security pact, efforts to tackle smuggler gangs, as well as possible improvements to the Brexit trade deal.
The Foreign Secretary hailed the close and friendly co-operation between London and Brussels in a speech to EU parliamentarians.

James Cleverly said the level of trust between him and European Commission diplomat Maros Sefcovic was part of the reason the Windsor Framework was secured.

He accepted that it had taken slightly longer than many would have liked to reach the agreement but added: We have to recognise that we will not agree on everything, but in mature relationships we can deal with differences while making the most of areas where we agree.

Id like to say thanks for the spirit of friendship and cooperation that (Mr Sefcovic) brought into all our meetings and the level of trust that I was able to invest in our relationshp I think is part of the reason we got the Windsor Framework over the line, he said.

We have seen real progress and I am committed to maintaining that prositive trajectory.

The speech to the UK-EU Parliamentary Partnership Assembly, a body created as part of the post-Brexit trade deal, comes as Rishi Sunaks Government seeks better relations with the bloc.

Mr Cleverly is also expected to stress the importance of continued support for Ukraine as part of the visit.

European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen was in London last month, as part of the UK-hosted Ukraine Recovery Conference.

UK parliamentarians and MEPs begin a two-day meeting for the third edition of the EU-UK Parliamentary Parntership Assembly (AP)

The Prime Minister earlier this year brokered the Windsor Framework deal with the EU, designed to address concerns over the operation of post-Brexit arrangements in Northern Ireland.

While the deal did not lead to the return of powersharing at Stormont, which the Democratic Unionist Party (DUP) continues to boycott, it did usher in hopes of a new foundation for UK-EU ties.

But Sir Jeffrey Donaldson, leader of the DUP, was among members at the event who voiced concerns.

He said: It is right that we avoid a hard border in Northern Ireland for the good of the Good Friday Agreement, but the Good Friday Agreement is not a one-sided agreement. It requires the support of unionists as well as nationalists in Northern Ireland.

The concept of a border in the Irish Sea is harmful from a unionist perspective to Northern Irelands ability to trade within the United Kingdom, so we will continue to work particularly with the UK Government to ensure that the arrangements for trade within the internal market of the United Kingdom are not affected in the future by the continued application of EU law, he said.

Mr Cleverly is greeted by European Parliament President Roberta Metsola (AP)

The Windsor Framework was Rishi Sunaks attempt to alleviate unionist concerns with the Northern Ireland protocol by decreasing checks on goods travelling to and from the UK mainland, but Stormont remains in flux.

Citizens rights and illegal migration were also among topics raised at the meeting.

Mr Cleverly is also holding talks with Nato secretary-general Jens Stoltenberg, ahead of a crunch summit in Vilnius, Lithuania.

It comes as Labours shadow foreign secretary David Lammy is expected to be in Paris for meetings with French Foreign Minister Catherine Colonna, as well as Transport Minister Clement Beaune.

It is understood that Mr Lammy is keen for discussions on his partys proposals for a UK-EU security pact, efforts to tackle smuggler gangs, as well as possible improvements to the Brexit trade deal.
Five years have passed since the Government announced its intention to ban conversion therapies.

Here is what has happened since:

 What is conversion therapy?

Therapy professional bodies in the UK have been united in speaking out against conversion therapy (Anna Gowthorpe/PA)

The UK Council for Psychotherapy defines it as an umbrella term for therapy that is based on the assumption that any sexual orientation or gender identity is inherently preferable to any other, and attempts to change or suppress someones sexual orientation or gender identity on that basis.

It said conversion therapy is sometimes referred to as reparative therapy, gay cure therapy or sexual orientation and gender change efforts, and that all major therapy professional bodies in the UK have been united in speaking out against conversion therapy considering it unethical and potentially harmful.

 When was a ban announced?

Former prime minister Theresa May described conversion therapy as abhorrent (Charles McQuillan/PA)

The Government first announced its intention to ban so-called gay cure conversion therapies in 2018 as part of its LGBT action plan.

Then-prime minister Theresa May said at the time: I was shocked that conversion therapy was still going on. I think its abhorrent and I think it has no place in modern Britain.

 So why is it still not banned?

Boris Johnson dropped plans for legislation in 2022 (Victoria Jones/PA)

The Government has said the Bill must not inadvertently criminalise parents or clinicians who need to be able to have legitimate conversations with children and young adults experiencing gender-related distress.

When the Government initially announced its consultation into the conversion therapy ban, its universal proposals were intended to protect all LGBT (lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender) people.

In March 2022, then-prime minister Boris Johnson dropped plans for legislation, with a Government spokesman saying at the time it would look at how the existing law could be applied more effectively and explore other measures.

Within hours, a furious backlash forced a retreat and a senior Government source was quoted as saying legislation would be included in the Queens Speech.

Mr Johnson was said to have changed his mind after seeing the reaction to the earlier announcement.

He defended the decision not to include trans people, saying there were complexities and sensitivities which needed to be worked through.

Critics told the Government to stop making pathetic excuses, protesters took to the streets and so many LGBT+ groups pulled out of the Governments landmark LGBT conference that it had to be cancelled.

 What is the situation now?

At the beginning of this year, Michelle Donelan, then secretary of state for digital, culture, media and sport, said the Conversion Therapy Bill will protect everyone, including those targeted on the basis of their sexuality, or being transgender.

She described it as a complex area, adding the legislation must not, through a lack of clarity, harm the growing number of children and young adults experiencing gender-related distress, through inadvertently criminalising or chilling legitimate conversations parents or clinicians may have with their children.

 What are other organisations saying?

Prime Minister Rishi Sunak is said to have the draft Bill and be considering it before publishing (Jacob King/PA)

The British Psychological Society, which supports a ban, has warned the legislation must make a clear distinction between so-called conversion therapy and normal ethical practice.

It added that legislation should not interfere with psychological and medical professionals who are trained and competent in working with trans and gender-questioning young people from engaging in identity exploration or performing clinical assessment of suitability for medical intervention.

Dr Adrian James, president of the Royal College of Psychiatrists, has previously described conversion therapy as a damaging, degrading and discriminatory practice that seeks to correct something that does not need fixing  a persons sexual orientation, gender identity and/or expression.

LGBT+ charity Stonewall said a ban must not contain loopholes that would enable abuse to continue through the back door, whether it be via the idea that people can consent to abuse, exemptions for medical settings, or any other carve-outs.

 So, what happens next?

It was reported by ITV in June that the draft Bill had been sent to Prime Minister Rishi Sunak who was considering the exact wording of the Bill before publishing it.

A Government spokesperson said the draft Bill will be scrutinised by a committee during this parliamentary session allowing for in-depth analysis and challenge to test the policy and drafting and ensure we address any risk of unintended impacts.
A former Royal Marine has admitted planting a fake bomb outside a senior barristers chambers, telling jurors he would do anything to get cash.

Michael Broddle, 46, has accepted he placed two devices around Grays Inn in London on September 14 2021.

But he denied he had an issue with the alleged target Andrew Sutcliffe KC, claiming he was under instruction by a third party.

The prosecution allege businessman Jonathan Nuttall was behind a campaign against Mr Sutcliffe and his colleague Anne Jeavons because they represented the National Crime Agency in a long-running financial wrangle.

Jonathan Nuttall arrives at the Old Bailey, in central London (Lucy North/PA)

It is claimed Nuttall, 50, recruited his driver, Michael Sode, 58, to act as a middleman with Broddle, who in turn roped in his sons Charlie, 18, and Joshua, 20.

Jurors have heard one of the devices at Grays Inn was potentially viable and the other, which was left outside Mr Sutcliffes chambers, spewed smoke for maximum alarm.

It was accompanied by a note addressed to Sooty  Mr Sutcliffes old Army nickname  and contained false allegations said to have been designed to cause him professional embarrassment.

Giving evidence in his Old Bailey trial on Monday, Michael Broddle told jurors he had been instructed to carry out what he thought was a security test.

At the time, he had hoped that the job might lead to a security contract at Grays Inn, the heart of Londons legal district, jurors were told.

Joshua Broddle denies conspiring to transfer criminal property (Victoria Jones/PA)

The court heard he had been told to do a penetrative test like he used to do in the Marines with a fake bomb and write a note to Mr Sutcliffe.

Broddle said that at the time he did not question the link between the security test and the lawyer, who had been the subject of a previous research.

He told jurors: I was in financial difficulty. I would do anything to get the cash.

Judge Simon Mayo KC asked: You understood someone had an issue with Mr Sutcliffe and thats why there was a note addressed to Mr Sutcliffe?

The defendant agreed.

Charlie Broddle outside the Old Bailey where he is accused of a conspiracy to plant explosive devices targeted at lawyers (Victoria Jones/PA)

The judge said: What about the suggestion the content of the note had been dictated to you. You wrote it without adding anything to it?

Broddle replied: Thats true. I had no problem with Mr Sutcliffe. I was acting on instruction.

The Sooty part was me, I did that. The rest of it is dictated.

Nuttall, of Romsey, Hampshire, Sode, of Deptford, south-east London, and Charlie and Joshua Broddle, 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.

Michael Broddle, Nuttall, Sode, 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.

The Old Bailey trial continues.
The family of imprisoned British-Egyptian activist Alaa Abd El-Fattah have led a vigil in London to call for Government action to demand his freedom.

Mr Abd El-Fattah is currently serving a five-year sentence in Egypt on charges of disseminating false news for retweeting a report in 2019 that another prisoner had died in custody.

At the Amnesty International UK vigil in front of the Foreign, Commonwealth and Development office in Westminster on Monday, his mother Laila Soueif said he just wants to get out of jail and take care of his son.

Ms Soueif and her daughter Mona Seif delivered a letter signed by more than 100 MPs and lords to Foreign Secretary James Cleverly, calling for more action to help free the pro-democracy activist.

They called on the UK Government to lead on a joint statement about Egypt at the Human Rights Council and to change the travel advice for British nationals heading to Egypt.

Speaking to the PA news agency, Ms Seif said her family has been let down by world leaders, particularly Prime Minister Rishi Sunak.

Since Rishi Sunak met with President Sisi during Cop27 nothing much has happened, and it has been very disappointing, she said.

He went and raised Alaas case, but he was there at a critical point when Alaas health was in a dire situation, and we didnt have enough information about him.

He couldnt even get us a proof of life and he couldnt get a promise of a consulate visit.

She said the family has now been able to visit the 40-year-old writer in Egypt and have found him in a better condition.

He previously carried out hunger strikes which intensified during the Cop27 summit in Sharm el-Sheikh in November 2022, where Mr Sunak raised his case with President Abdel Fattah El-Sisi.

Mona Seif at the vigil (Jordan Pettitt/PA0

Things have improved over the past year he has been removed from the maximum-security prison, she said.

Hes OK, he has access to books, he has monthly visits from the family, and he gets to listen to music.

But other than that, he is still denied consulate access, he still is denied access to lawyers.

Psychologically, hes in a much better state, because during our visits over the past month after he completely collapsed after the hunger strike, we managed to actually talk to him about the extent of the campaign and solidarity hes getting all over the world.

And I think it resonated with him and managed to make him feel much more supported and helped him to be in a better state.

Ms Seif added: They should make it very clear to British nationals about how unstable things are in Egypt, the reality of the situation, and how its very easy to get into weird situations that end up sending you to prison.

The UK must prioritise human rights, the rule of law, and the wellbeing of their citizens over the trade deals and meaningless diplomatic relations they have with a military dictatorship.
Scotlands First Minister will chair a meeting of ministers and health officials to plan contingencies for expected junior doctor strikes this month.

The British Medical Association (BMA) announced last month that junior doctors in Scotland would reject a 14.5% pay increase over two years and strike between July 12 and 15.

Dr Chris Smith, the chair of the BMAs Scottish junior doctors committee, said taking strike action was an absolute last resort and those walking out were standing up for the future of the NHS.

But the First Minister said on Monday there was likely to be major disruption as a result of the action.

On Monday, Humza Yousaf will chair a meeting of the Scottish Government Resilience Room (SGoRR)  the equivalent of the UK Governments Cobra meeting  to plan contingencies.

Speaking ahead of the meeting, the First Minister said: Junior doctors make an extremely important contribution to NHS Scotland  which is why we have offered a fair and progressive rise which will mean a cumulative pay increase of 14.5% over two years, the best offer on the table in the UK.

We have been clear to the BMA that we are willing to match the pay uplift we have given to nurses, midwives, and other Agenda for Change staff, for junior doctors.

This is the biggest investment in junior doctor pay for the last 20 years and a step forward to modernising pay bargaining, restoring confidence among junior doctors and ensuring their contribution to our healthcare system is appropriately recognised.

While I am disappointed that BMA Scotland members are proceeding with plans for industrial action, the Scottish Government will continue to work with NHS Scotland to make sure appropriate contingency plans are in place in order to minimise any potential disruption to services.

However, we have to be upfront with the public  a junior doctors strike will cause major disruption and result in the significant cancellation of treatment, surgery and care the NHS is able to provide.

Deputy First Minister Shona Robison, Health Secretary Michael Matheson, the chief medical officer Dr Sir Gregor Smith and NHS officials will also be in attendance.

On Monday, Dr Smith said: Junior doctors in Scotland have consistently and strongly made clear that the pay offers made so far by the Scottish Government are not yet sufficient to demonstrate a commitment to reverse the years of pay erosion we have suffered, which has seen pay reduced by 28.5% since 2008.

No-one can seriously argue a junior doctor today is worth that much less than a counterpart 15 years ago. Indeed, our members rejected the Scottish Governments latest offer decisively.

Unless we act now and invest in the future of the workforce, we will go on losing doctors to places they are valued properly, compromising the care we can provide to the people of Scotland now and in the future.

It is on that basis we have reluctantly been pushed to announce strike dates for later this month  and in doing so we gave extra time for health boards and the Scottish Government to prepare.

It is good to see this time being used effectively  and the seriousness with which planning is being taken shows just how crucial a role junior doctors play.

Given the level of disruption we accept a strike will cause, it is crucial that the active negotiations we are still engaging in with the Scottish Government produce the improved offer that we know is needed.
The UK could see more fish deaths than ever before if temperatures continue to rise, after the Met Office confirmed June was the hottest on record in UK history.

The average temperature for June 2023 hit 15.8C, 0.9C hotter than the joint previous record of 14.9C in 1940 and 1976, according to the forecasters provisional figures.

In total, 72 counties saw their hottest June since records began in 1884.

June 2023 was the hottest on record for the UK, according to provisional Met Office figures. The headlines, as well as the influence of climate change, in the thread    Met Office (@metoffice) July 3, 2023

Mark Owen, head of fisheries at Angling Trust, warned that the hot weather had already killed thousands of fish across the country.

Mr Owen told the PA news agency: Where I was this morning on a canal near Birmingham, fish were caught up against a lock and you saw hundreds of seagulls picking up the dead fish, the stench was really quite amazing.

If July is like June, if August is like June, then we will get far more fish kills than weve ever seen. There is a knock-on effect.

(PA Graphics)

The fish are the visible bit because thats what people see floating on the surface but it is also (about) what is happening to the ecosystem.

In one case in West Yorkshire, people sat fishing have reported a stream of dead fish moving past.

Dr Andy Bray, catchment development manager at the Calder Rivers Trust, told PA: Weve got rivers that dont have any shade, that are straight and that are impounded so there is very little flow. So its just kind of a backlog for them to just be heated up in.

It was the hottest June on record for the UK in a series which dates back to 1884. England, Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland also reported their respective warmest June on record. For the UK, the previous record for mean temperature was beaten by 0.9C.   Met Office (@metoffice) July 3, 2023

In some places, its like a steady stream  of upturned fish floating down the river  there are hundreds in a 30 or 40-minute period.

This is a problem thats going to be happening year on year as we go forward. Maybe not every year, but its going to be something that well see again. You might even see again this summer.

There was also an unprecedented number of fish deaths in June, according to John Ellis of the Canal and River Trust.

(PA Graphics)

Mr Ellis told the BBCs Today programme: Weve had more than 60 fish mortality incidents on 21 different canals up and down the UK and to put that into perspective, a typical year we may see half-a-dozen incidents.

Mr Ellis told the BBC the increase in deaths was down to a combination of factors including high water temperatures and thunderstorms reducing the amount of oxygen in the water.

The Met Office also said the UK had had 68% of its average rainfall for June, with 52.2mm of rainfall.

A rapid study by Met Office scientists found the chance of observing a June beating the previous record of 14.9C, like we have this year, has at least doubled since the period around 1940. The previous record of 14.9C was recorded in 1940 and 1976.   Met Office (@metoffice) July 3, 2023

Mark McCarthy, who works in the Met Office team responsible for weather and climate records, said: Its officially the hottest June on record for the UK, for mean temperature as well as average maximum and minimum temperature.

June started with a good deal of high pressure and temperatures initially around average for many, but once that subsided, warm, humid air began to influence temperatures, with 32.2C the highest temperatures reached.

Whats striking is the persistent warmth for much of the month, with temperatures widely into the mid-20s Celsius for many and even into the low 30s at times.

Environment Agency fisheries manager Dr Graeme Storey said: Environment Agency fisheries teams have been responding round the clock to numerous reports of dead or distressed fish across the country.

While extreme weather including continuous hot temperatures and thunderstorms can be highly dangerous for fish, these incidents arent always due to a single cause and it is often the combination of several factors including temperature, water levels or flows, algal blooms, pollution and fish disease.

Responses to such incidents can include reoxygenating water and rescuing fish where river flows are especially low.

We encourage members of the public who see dead fish or fish in distress to contact our incident hotline on 0800 80 70 60 and alert the fishery owner or angling club where possible.
Game Of Thrones stars Kit Harington and Rose Leslie have welcomed their second child.

A representative of Harington confirmed the news to the PA news agency on Monday.

English actor Harington, 36, and Scottish actress Leslie, 35, met while starring together in HBOs sprawling fantasy series, which ended in 2019 after eight seasons.

Harington played Jon Snow in Game Of Thrones while Leslie played wildling Ygritte, who was known for her famous admonishment you know nothing, Jon Snow.

The couple tied the knot in 2018 at Leslies ancestral home in Aberdeenshire before announcing the birth of their son in February 2021.

English actor Harington, 36, and Scottish actress Leslie, 35, met while starring together in HBOs sprawling fantasy series Game Of Thrones (Chris J Ratclife/PA)

The actor previously admitted that he was terrified of becoming a father again, having been walking on clouds for nine months with the first pregnancy.

Speaking on The Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon in the US in Febraury, Harington said of his two-year-old son: Hes about to get the shock of his life, which is hes about to get a brother or sister. Im terrified.

With the first baby youre walking on clouds and dancing through fields of daisies for nine months, well the man is anyway.

But this time the reality check comes much sooner, you get practical real quick.

He added: Im not sure hes quite conceptually understood it yet.

Were trying to get him ready for it, we point at Roses tummy and we say mummys baby and he points at his tummy and says my baby.
Migrant crossings have set a new record for the month of June, pushing the total for the year so far to more than 11,000.

In the first six months of 2023, 11,434 people were detected making the journey from France, according to provisional government figures.

This includes 155 migrants arriving in three boats on Friday, taking the total for June alone to 3,824. This is the highest total for the month of June since records began five years ago, PA news agency analysis of the Home Office data shows.

Prime Minister Rishi Sunak vowed to stop the boats as one of his key pledges (Yui Mok/PA)

The figures come almost six months after Rishi Sunak vowed to stop the boats and made this one of his five flagship pledges as Prime Minister.

In June last year, 3,140 migrants arrived in the UK after crossing the Channel.

In 2021 it was 2,177; 727 in 2020, 163 in 2019 and just four people in June 2018.

Despite a flurry of crossings last month  including the highest daily total to date for the year on June 11 when 549 people were recorded making the journey  the total for the first half of 2023 is still 10% lower than this time last year (12,747).

(PA Graphics)

On January 4, Mr Sunak used his first major speech of the new year to set out five pledges he said would address the peoples priorities, including to pass new laws to stop Channel crossings.

He vowed to rebuild trust in politics through action, or not at all but refused to set a timescale for achieving his promise to stop migrant boats making the journey.

Last week saw a series of setbacks to the Prime Ministers bid, when his plan to send migrants to Rwanda was dealt a blow by an appeal court ruling and the Governments Illegal Migration Bill  aimed at beefing up powers to tackle the problem  suffered a series of defeats during its passage through the House of Lords.

This came just weeks after Mr Sunak insisted his plan to stop Channel crossings was starting to work.

Giving a speech in Kent, the Prime Minister said the number of people making the journey had reduced compared to last year and played down suggestions that fewer crossings were as a result of poor weather conditions rather than due to policy decisions.

(PA Graphics)

On Monday, Mr Sunaks official spokesman said: He stands by what he said at the time. We do have much further to go before we stop the boats but its right to highlight improvements when they take place.

He added: We do know that we would expect to see numbers fluctuate, particularly over the summer months when numbers do tend to be higher.

We want to do more in terms of the Rwanda migration partnership which is why were seeking leave to appeal, but its equally why we want to do more on the ground with our French counterparts.

Shadow home secretary Yvette Cooper said: Time and again the Prime Minister chases short-term headlines instead of doing the hard work needed to tackle the problem.

The numbers of dangerous crossings are rising again, hotel costs are spiralling, all while the Governments flagship Rwanda policy unravels in front of their eyes.
The King met queen Scotland as he arrived for his first public engagement in Scotland since his coronation.

Charles was welcomed by crowds as he arrived at Kinneil House in Boness, Falkirk  the historic home of the dukes of Hamilton  wearing a kilt.

Among those he greeted was Boness Fair Queen, Lexi Scotland, who was wearing her ceremonial robes and a crown.

The pair shook hands as the King congratulated Lexi on her achievement, while Lexi and the crowd welcomed him to Kinneil House.

Lexi said it is exciting to have been crowned the newest Boness queen, adding she enjoyed meeting the King and his entourage.

She said: I was quite nervous, but I was also excited to meet him.

Lexi was joined by May Garrow, 99, who was crowned the Boness Queen in 1936.

The occasion marked Mays first time meeting the King.

She said: Ive never actually shook hands with him before. Ill not wash that hand anymore.

The King during his visit to Kinneil House in Edinburgh (Andrew Milligan/PA)

Charles asked May if she still owns her dress from when she was crowned the Boness Queen.

May told reporters: Ive still got the dress. Mind you, it was white but its a dark creamy colour now. I dont think Id get into it now!

May turns 100 on February 24, and is excited to receive her message from the King.

May commented that it was a nice day, adding she enjoyed the Kings company and said: He makes things easy for you to talk.

Speaking of Lexi, she added: Shes had a nice day, and when shes my age shell come back too.

Maria Ford plays a vital role in organising the fair, and says they have tried for a royal visit for many years.

She said: We pushed and pushed for a royal visit but we just never managed, but now everythings came together and its like the last piece of the jigsaw.

The King later met with Sustainable Thinking Scotland (STS), which operates from Kinneil House.

King Charles meets the Boness Fair Queen, Lexi Scotland, during his visit to Kinneil House (Andrew Milligan/PA)

The organisation grows sustainable food which in turn is given for food parcels.

Co-director Steve McQueen said the King told him the cherries they had grown were the biggest hed ever seen.

Sean Kerr, also a director, said: I think the king sees the community benefit from all that were doing, whether its growing food, environmental or community work.

It was great to be able to talk to him about everything and hopefully we can take it further.

He added: Its really great to be able to highlight all the amazing work that all the groups we work with do we do.

For me its just a thrill to be able to showcase the people we work with that do such a great job in Falkirk, and were glad to be a part of it.

During his visit, the King viewed the cylinder of the engine erected by the famed Scottish engineer, James Watt.

The house and nearby James Watt Cottage were the setting for the engineers secret development work on the prototype steam engine in 1765-73.

The King also planted a tree to commemorate the centenary of the estate becoming a public park and meet charity representatives and beneficiaries.

The visit is the first of a series of engagements in Scotland, marking the first Holyrood Week since his coronation.

There will be a special ceremony of thanksgiving at St Giles Cathedral on Wednesday, where Charles will be presented with the Honours of Scotland  the nations crown jewels.

Each year, the monarch traditionally spends a week based at the Palace of Holyroodhouse in Edinburgh, known as Holyrood Week or Royal Week in Scotland.

The King and Queen will be accompanied by William and Catherine, whose Scottish titles are the Duke and Duchess of Rothesay.

Later on Monday, the King took part in the Ceremony of the Keys on the palace forecourt where he is presented with the keys to the city.

Charles and Camilla are also expected to visit the Great Tapestry of Scotland, seeing a newly stitched panel dedicated to the couple.

Wednesday will be a key day during the visit with a series of events to mark the coronation.

In late June 1965 The King, then Prince Charles, undertook his first public engagement in Scotland. Aged 16, he met 100s of young people at a garden party for Scottish & Commonwealth students at #HolyroodPalace. The King's first #HolyroodWeek of his reign will begin tomorrow. pic.twitter.com/UFVbwKKcfc  Royal Collection Trust (@RCT) July 2, 2023

Before the service at St Giles, there will be both a royal procession and a peoples procession along the Royal Mile.

Anti-monarchy campaign group Republic will be staging a protest along the route and said it expects a large turnout.

The organisation will also be collaborating with Scottish republican group Our Republic, which will be staging a rally outside the Scottish Parliament.

Graham Smith, Republics chief executive officer, said: Everyone in the UK should have the right to choose our head of state  not be told it will be Charles.

Charles does not represent the people of Scotland any more than he represents the rest of the UK.

An early morning procession rehearsal takes place along the Royal Mile in Edinburgh ahead of the service of thanksgiving (Euan Cherry/PA)

The peoples procession will consist of about 100 people representing different aspects of Scottish life.

At the head of the column will be the Shetland pony Corporal Cruachan IV  mascot of the Royal Regiment of Scotland.

The Stone of Destiny will be present at the ceremony in St Giles Cathedral, where the King will be presented with the Honours of Scotland.

Afterwards, there will be a gun salute at Edinburgh Castle and a flypast by the Red Arrows.
Conversion therapy must be banned completely with no carve-outs, campaigners have said five years after the Government first promised to end the practice.

Lives have been ruined by attempts to cure LGBT (lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender) people of being themselves, Stonewall said.

The Government, then led by Theresa May, first vowed to ban conversion practices in July 2018.

At the time the then-prime minister described conversion therapy as abhorrent and something she was shocked to find out still went on.

She said: I think it has no place in modern Britain.

Since then there have been years of delays and U-turns, with the Government saying in January that it would shortly publish a draft Bill.

At that stage it pledged to ban conversion therapy for everyone, including transgender people.

When the Government initially announced its consultation into the conversion therapy ban, its universal proposals were intended to protect all LGBT+ people.

But in March 2022, then-prime minister Boris Johnson dramatically dropped plans for legislation, later defending a decision not to include trans people by saying there were complexities and sensitivities to be worked through.

In January this year, Michelle Donelan, then-secretary of state for digital, culture, media and sport, said ministers recognised the strength of feeling on the issue of harmful conversion practices, adding that it was right the issue was tackled through a dedicated and tailored legislative approach.

She described it as a complex area, adding that the legislation must not, through a lack of clarity, harm the growing number of children and young adults experiencing gender-related distress, through inadvertently criminalising or chilling legitimate conversations parents or clinicians may have with their children.

On Monday, marking the five-year anniversary of the Governments promise on the ban, campaigners have called for urgent action.

Jayne Ozanne, from the Ban Conversion Therapy Coalition, accused the Government of having tried every trick in the book to delay and frustrate bringing forward this life-saving legislation.

She added: One can only conclude that they do not want to protect LGBT+ people and that they are only interested in stoking manufactured culture wars at the expense of vulnerable peoples lives. It is all an absolute disgrace, which the British public will find hard to forgive.

Sasha Misra, associate director of communications Stonewall, said: Monday 3 July marks half a decade since the UK Government first promised to ban conversion therapy.

Five years and four prime ministers later and we are still waiting for this ban to come to fruition. In the meantime, lives have continued to be ruined while these damaging attempts to cure LGBTQ+ of being themselves remain legal.

Even now, we are hearing worrying whispers that would leave LGBTQ+ people open to abuse. The ban must not contain loopholes that would enable abuse to continue through the back door, whether it be via the idea that people can consent to abuse, exemptions for medical settings, or any other carve-outs.

Conversion therapy isnt therapy, its abuse. And we need the UK Government to hold up their promise. Were calling on the UK Government to publish the draft Bill immediately and bring forward the final Bill by the Kings Speech in November.

A spokesperson for the Governments equality hub said: This Government is committed to protecting people at risk from conversion practices.

As part of this we will publish a draft Bill setting out our approach, which will be scrutinised by a Joint Committee of both Houses in this parliamentary session. This will allow for in-depth analysis and challenge to test the policy and drafting and ensure we address any risk of unintended impacts.
Lord Chancellor Alex Chalk has asked the Parole Board to reconsider its decision to allow double child killer Colin Pitchfork to be released from prison, the Ministry of Justice said.

The Parole Board ruled last month that Pitchfork, jailed for life for raping and strangling 15-year-olds Lynda Mann and Dawn Ashworth in Leicestershire in the 1980s, could be freed.

He was given a minimum term of 30 years in 1988, later had it reduced to 28 years for good behaviour and was released in September 2021.

Schoolgirl Dawn Ashworth was killed by Pitchfork (PA)

Pitchfork was back behind bars two months later for breaching the licence conditions of his release.

The Justice Secretarys intervention comes after Conservative MP for South Leicestershire Alberto Costa wrote to Mr Chalk asking him to challenge the parole decision, describing it as simply unthinkable.

The Ministry of Justice had previously said it would look very carefully at the move, while a source there described it as deeply worrying.

I have written to the Justice Secretary asking him to challenge the Parole Boards decision to release the child killer Colin Pitchfork. Not only is this a huge matter of concern for my constituents, but it also profoundly shakes public confidence in our parole system. pic.twitter.com/j5Bll2ktHz  Alberto Costa MP (@AlbertoCostaMP) June 15, 2023

In a statement on Monday, Mr Chalk said it was vital that dangerous offenders were kept behind bars.

He said: My thoughts remain with the families of Lynda Mann and Dawn Ashworth, whose lives were changed forever by the heinous crimes of Colin Pitchfork.

My number one priority is public protection and after careful assessment I have asked the Parole Board to reconsider their decision to release him.

It is absolutely vital that every lawful step is taken to keep dangerous offenders behind bars.

The last time Pitchfork was released in 2021, he was recalled to prison for approaching a lone female while litter picking.

Colin Pitchfork, now in his early 60s, was jailed for life after raping and strangling 15-year-olds Lynda Mann and Dawn Ashworth in Leicestershire in 1983 and 1986 (PA)

But a Parole Board panel ruled that the decision to recall him to custody was flawed and that there was no evidence he was pretending to pick litter when he approached her.

In its ruling, the panel said Pitchforks behaviour for almost all his time in prison had not caused any concern and that it was no longer necessary for him to be locked up for the publics safety.

A spokesperson for the Parole Board said previously: Protecting the public is our number one priority, however our sole focus in law is risk, not punishment, and must be based on evidence.

This case is eligible for reconsideration if any party thinks the decision is irrational or unfair.

They have been approached for further comment.
A minister was forced to defend the Governments record on crime as she introduced a funding package aimed at preventing antisocial behaviour.

Culture Secretary Lucy Frazer was touring broadcast studios on Monday to announce 3 million for youth organisations to offer additional activities to keep young people occupied over the summer.

But she was asked if the Government is simply picking up the pieces in trying to fix an antisocial behaviour problem that is likely linked to spending cuts over the last 13 years.

Appearing on ITVs Good Morning Britain, Ms Frazer cited the recruitment of 20,000 new police officers as an example of crime-fighting efforts but presenter Susanna Reid said this only covered the numbers that were cut.

Reid asked: At what stage do you think the Government will acknowledge that cutting 20,000 police officers and 20,000 police staff was a massive mistake?

Ms Frazer said: You will know the difficult decisions and the context in which those decisions were made.

On Monday, the Government rolled out its Million Hours Fund, which will make grants available to youth groups to provide more out-of-school activities and support more young people in areas of high need this summer.

It was introduced to mark Antisocial Behaviour Awareness Week and follows a pledge by Prime Minister Rishi Sunak to build stronger communities.

The Government met its target for 20,000 more police officers to be recruited earlier this year, though critics have argued there are now fewer per person than in 2010 because of population growth since austerity began.

Ms Frazer said of the scheme: Every young person, no matter where theyre from, deserves the best start in life and opportunities to fulfil their potential.

Youth clubs play a central role here, not only offering sports, games and skills development but also helping support those in need and providing vital role models.

Today we are opening applications for the first 3 million of the Million Hours Fund so youth organisations can deliver extra provision over the summer holidays, meaning more young people can enjoy and take part in positive and fun activities while school is out.
Home and motor insurers must improve their treatment of vulnerable customers, the City regulator has warned.

The Financial Conduct Authority (FCA) said that, after a rise in complaints about insurance claims, it found there were some instances of lengthy complaint-handling times and people not being given proper settlements.

The regulator said it uncovered cases of motor insurance customers being offered a price lower than their cars fair market value after it had been written off, which is against FCA rules.

Its review also found that some firms were unable to show they were monitoring customer outcomes well enough, and that better information sharing was needed where insurers dealt with intermediaries to settle claims.

Some firms also failed to show they were adequately able to identify vulnerable customers in need of extra support.

Timely and fair #insurance claims handling is especially vital during the cost of living squeeze. #CostOfLiving Where we found issues, weve told firms to put them right. Well be monitoring them to ensure they do.https://t.co/UIQEmgfAGK  Financial Conduct Authority (@TheFCA) July 3, 2023

The FCA said customers should contact their insurance company to complain if their claims have been delayed or they are unhappy with how their claims are being handled.

They can also raise a complaint with the Financial Ombudsman Service if they are dissatisfied with the firms response.

Firms should consider examples in the context of their preparations for a new consumer duty, which comes into force at the end of July, the FCA said.

The consumer duty sets higher and clearer standards of consumer protection across financial services and requires firms to put their customers needs first.

The regulator has provided feedback to individual firms about the poor practices and told firms to address it.

Examples of good practice were also found in the FCAs review, including payment holidays being offered, fees or excesses being waived and customer support hubs being set up.

The FCAs Sheldon Mills said the regulator will be monitoring firms to make sure they put issues right (PA)

Sheldon Mills, executive director of consumers and competition at the FCA, said: Timely and fair claims handling is especially vital during the cost-of-living squeeze.

While we have seen many firms treating their customers correctly, we found too many examples of customers not receiving the service theyre entitled to.

Where we found issues, weve told firms to put them right. Well be monitoring them to ensure they do.

The firms involved have not been named by the FCA.

The regulator said rising insurance premiums are impacting people who are already struggling with the cost of living.

It said: Whilst this adjustment of premiums is linked to UK motor and home insurers being expected to make losses in 2022 and 2023, our financial lives survey found that consumers who were female, younger, unemployed, working in the gig economy, renters, or in an ethnic minority group, were more likely to have low financial resilience.

Premium increases can therefore have a disproportionate impact on these consumers.

Recent figures from the Association of British Insurers (ABI) indicate that home insurance premiums have increased by 6% annually and motor premiums have jumped by 16% year-on-year.

Insurers have highlighted the rising costs they are dealing with, such as repair prices and the rising cost of courtesy cars and second-hand cars.

The regulator also said there were large variations in the typical time taken by firms to resolve claims, which could be due to supply chain issues with motor claims, an increasing length of time to agree settlement terms with third parties and some claims such as flooding and subsidence being more complex.

The FCA also noted signs that rejected claims were rising across both home insurance and motor insurance products over the four-month period from August to November 2022.

Firms said this was largely a result of customers making claims for circumstances they are not covered for, it said. One example of this would be people claiming for accidental damage when they had not purchased extended cover.

The regulator said it has reminded insurers of their obligation when advising customers to understand a customers demands and needs and only offer products that are in line with them.

The FCA said it will continue to monitor firms. It has also finalised new guidance for insurance firms about how they should support customers.

An ABI spokesperson said: Our industry knows that these continue to be difficult times for many UK households and businesses struggling with cost-of-living bills.

As the FCA report makes clear, across the insurance industry firms are supporting customers, especially the vulnerable, through these challenging times. On motor insurance alone, in the first quarter of the year insurers paid out 2.4 billion, the highest quarterly payout since our records began in 2013.

Anyone concerned about being able to afford their insurance and savings policies should speak to their provider to see what options may be available.
Train drivers are to stage another week of banning overtime in their long running dispute over pay.

Aslef announced that its members at 15 train operators will refuse to work overtime from July 17 to 22.

This follows a week-long overtime ban which began on Monday until July 8.

Mick Whelan, general secretary of Aslef, said he wants the dispute to be resolved (Owen Humphreys/PA)

The withdrawal of non-contractual overtime, or rest day working, will affect Avanti West Coast; Chiltern Railways; Cross Country; East Midlands Railway; Greater Anglia; Great Western Railway; GTR Great Northern Thameslink; Island Line; LNER; Northern Trains; Southeastern; Southern/Gatwick Express; South Western Railway main line; TransPennine Express; and West Midlands Trains.

Mick Whelan, Aslefs general secretary, said: We want to resolve this dispute. Train drivers dont want to be inconveniencing the public.

Thats why we have given the Government and the rail operators plenty of opportunities to come to the table and talk to us, but it is clear that they do not want a resolution.

Our members  the train drivers who keep the railway running day in, day out, from early in the morning until late at night, all the year round  have shown they are not prepared to accept the Governments attempts to force our industry into managed decline.

Rail travel is a vital part of our countrys fight against climate change and rail connectivity is essential to the UK economy.

Thats why its time for a fair deal and a sensible resolution so we can grow and improve our railways for the future.

A Department for Transport spokesperson said: Calling a ban on overtime the same week that RMT is striking will impact families at the beginning of the summer holidays and those planning on attending the Ashes, representing a co-ordinated effort by both unions to prolong the disruption.

The Government has played its part to try and end this dispute by facilitating a fair and reasonable pay offer that would see train drivers already high salaries increase from an average of 60,000 to 65,000. Aslef now needs to do the right thing and put the offer to its members for a vote.
Junior doctors in Scotland will be offered the biggest ever pay uplift in an effort to avert strikes later this month, the First Minister has said.

It comes as the Scottish Government confirmed senior NHS staff will be given a 6% pay increase following negotiations with the Doctors and Dentists Pay Review Body.

The uplift is being hailed by Humza Yousaf as the biggest since devolution as he promised an offer for junior staff that could amount to thousands of pounds.

The British Medical Association (BMA) announced junior doctors would walk out between July 12 and 15 after rejecting a 14.5% increase over two years.

The offer was initially described as the best and final deal from the Scottish Government, but as he marked the 75th anniversary of the NHS during a visit to Forth Valley Hospital in Larbert, near Falkirk, the First Minister said he planned to meet with the BMA on Tuesday to discuss a new offer.

He said: Im prepared to offer junior doctors the biggest ever uplift seen in the history of devolution, and if accepted, it would put thousands of pounds into the pockets of our junior doctors and they will be worth every single penny.

Mr Yousaf said the plans would only be discussed with junior doctors but said methods could include going above and beyond a one-year pay rise, or reforming contracts and working conditions.

He added: There isnt, Im afraid, money down the back of the sofa, I think people know that given the difficult financial constraints that the Government is operating under.

First Minister Humza Yousaf meets patient Paul MacIntosh during a visit to NHS Forth Valley Royal Hospital in Larbert (Lesley Martin/PA)

It comes after Mr Yousaf chaired a resilience meeting with senior ministers and health bosses to plan contingencies in the event of the expected strikes.

Mr Yousaf told journalists the walkouts could be hugely significant, resulting in potentially tens of thousands of patients being affected and having their procedures cancelled.

And asked by the PA news agency if he was confident that junior doctors would accept an improved offer, he said: I think its 50/50 if Im being honest.

I dont think its a done deal by any stretch of the imagination. I think its going to be a challenging negotiation given where we know the BMA are and what were able to afford.

First Minister @HumzaYousaf visited @NHSForthValley Royal Hospital today to mark #NHSScot75 He met with staff and patients to recognise the achievements of the past 75 years and confirm @scotgovs ongoing commitment to the founding principles of the NHS. pic.twitter.com/iqB04svyo3  First Minister (@ScotGovFM) July 3, 2023

But I do believe the BMA, absolutely, when they say they want to do everything they can to avoid industrial action.

Following the resilience meeting, Dr Chris Smith, chair of the BMAs Scottish junior doctors committee, said: Junior doctors in Scotland have consistently and strongly made clear that the pay offers made so far by the Scottish Government are not yet sufficient to demonstrate a commitment to reverse the years of pay erosion we have suffered, which has seen pay reduced by 28.5% since 2008.

No-one can seriously argue a junior doctor today is worth that much less than a counterpart 15 years ago. Indeed, our members rejected the Scottish Governments latest offer decisively.

Unless we act now and invest in the future of the workforce, we will go on losing doctors to places they are valued properly, compromising the care we can provide to the people of Scotland now and in the future.

Humza Yousaf speaks to staff during his visit to NHS Forth Valley Royal Hospital (Lesley Martin/PA)

Scottish Conservative health spokesperson Dr Sandesh Gulhane said: Scotlands health service is already at breaking point due to years of SNP mismanagement, so patients will be alarmed at the thought of these damaging strikes going ahead.

Humza Yousaf must do everything in his power to halt them by reaching a deal with shattered junior doctors  who are paying for the SNPs dire workforce. It must address not just pay, but the poor working conditions junior doctors face every day.

The pay deal for senior NHS staff, which will be backdated to April 1 2023, will see a consultant at the bottom of the pay scale see a rise of 5,488 and 7,292 for those at the top.

It builds on the 4.5% pay uplift awarded in 2022, taking the total increase to 10.5% in two years.
An under-threat police station in Boris Johnsons old constituency is set to remain open, after London Mayor Sadiq Khan intervened to save it weeks before a crunch by-election.

Local campaigners have long opposed the potential closure of the police station, with the former prime minister using a rare Commons appearance last November to raise the issue on behalf of his Uxbridge and South Ruislip constituents.

Mr Khan, in a letter to Metropolitan Police Commissioner Sir Mark Rowley, said that the station should now remain open.

The Labour local politician said that he had listened to the concerns of local residents and that it was in the best interests of the community for the station to remain open.

Prime Minister Boris Johnson giving his victory speech after winning the Uxbridge & Ruislip South constituency in the 2019 general election (Stefan Rousseau/PA)

He said that there was a strong case for retaining stations across London, after the highly critical review of the Met by Baroness Louise Casey.

Mr Khan said: Huge Government cuts over the last decade have forced the Met to make extremely difficult decisions about where they allocate resources.

Im proud that thanks to our extra investment from City Hall were once again restoring neighbourhood policing to our local communities.

And Ive also been listening to local residents and campaigners in places like Uxbridge who have been telling me how having a local police station in their area makes them feel much safer.

As we continue to rebuild neighbourhood policing and restore confidence after the Casey Review, Ive written to the Met Commissioner saying that the case for now retaining more police station sites across the capital is strong, and would be an important part of our work ensuring the force delivers everything that Londoners need and expect.

Both Labour and the Conservatives are campaigning in the constituency ahead of polling day on July 20, after Mr Johnson quit the Commons.

Sir Keir Starmers party, well ahead of the Tories in the poll, is believed to be confident Labour can take the seat.

Labours candidate Danny Beales said he was delighted with the decision.

Todays success clearly shows what we can achieve when we work together.

This is just the start of what I want to deliver as a strong, local voice for the people of Uxbridge & South Ruislip, he said.

The Conservative candidate for Mr Johnsons old seat is Steve Tuckwell.

Susan Hall, who is running to become the Tory mayoral candidate in London, accused Mr Khan of u-turning and playing political games with the Met.

The Met Police is not a toy that Sadiq Khan can use for his political games, she said.

Residents in Uxbridge are seriously concerned about his appalling decision to close the station, and he has now u-turned only because his disastrous Ulez expansion is threatening Labours prospects of winning the by-election.
A specialist police unit recovered 1 million of stolen cars and parts in one of its most successful weeks, including a Rolls Royce and a Bentley.

Essex Police said its Stolen Vehicle Intelligence Unit identified a haul of complete stolen vehicles and the remains of others known to be stolen, among them several Range Rovers and BMWs.

In recent months, they have also located and recovered a range of Ferraris and Aston Martins, and a Rolls Royce Cullinan that was worth more than 360,000 alone.

The force said the latest seizures, last week, take the units total value of vehicles recovered in 2023 to 12 million, and officers will examine the vehicles for intelligence to hunt down other missing cars.

The unit recovered or identified a record 626 stolen vehicles or parts of stolen vehicles in 2022  a 30% increase on 2021.

Once a car is taken, thieves may look to quickly sell it on  even for way under the market value  strip it for parts, or ship either the whole car or parts of the car to areas including the Middle East and Africa.

A Rolls Royce recovered by Essex Polices Stolen Vehicle Intelligence Unit (Essex Police/ PA)

There, the vehicles can be sold for two or three times more than they would cost in the UK and the parts market is vast in these distant countries, police said.

Thieves or handlers of the stolen vehicles may also obtain false or cloned identities, then sell the vehicles on to unsuspecting members of the public in the UK or distribute them to other criminals.

Pc Paul Gerrish said: Every year, we track down more stolen vehicles and as we do, we build up a bigger and better intelligence picture.

Our work is dedicated to the disruption of organised criminal gangs and we make sure car thieves are never comfortable in Essex.

We aim to make this a hostile county for car thieves to operate in.

Our work stretches beyond recovering individual stolen cars and encompasses the wider network of criminality behind each theft.

A Ferrari recovered by Essex Polices Stolen Vehicle Intelligence Unit (Essex Police/ PA)

The team has dismantled 15 chop shops  the places stolen cars are stripped of their parts  so far this year.

This year they have also intercepted almost 50 shipping containers, all full of stolen vehicles and parts, destined to leave the country.

Last month, three men were arrested as part of an investigation into the theft of 640,000 worth of stolen vehicles following the teams work.

The operation, which was intelligence-led, saw officers attend a unit at an industrial estate in Canvey Island on May 24.

During a search of the unit, officers found vehicles which had been reported as stolen from London, Surrey, Thames Valley and Essex.

Three men  all aged in their 20s  were arrested on suspicion of handling stolen goods and bailed until August while an investigation continues.
Employers should hire more ex-offenders to help fill Britains 1.1 million job vacancies, a new report argues.

ReGenerates Good Jobs Project, set to launch on Monday, is lobbying to get those from marginalised groups, such as young people in or leaving care and the invisibly disabled, into work to address the vacancy crisis and help people.

The initiative is backed by businesses including bakery chain Greggs and shoe repair and key-cutting firm Timpson, whose bosses worked with the charity on its report called The Purpose-Driven Business Solution to the UKs Labour Shortage.

The year-long study found that the UK is facing one of the worst labour shortages in its history and argues the best solution is for bosses to target the vast numbers of people that are commonly overlooked for jobs.

These groups also include people who are currently or have recently been homeless, refugees, those with mental health problems and over 50s, it notes.

The foreword to the report states: Over the last year the UK has experienced record-breaking vacancies, which currently stand at 1.1 million, which many businesses are struggling to fill.

As ever, UK businesses are innovating to remain successful, but are operating in a very complex environment.

Simultaneously, there are millions of individuals from communities that have been historically excluded, including people with disabilities, prison leavers, and single parents who face difficulties in finding flexible employment opportunities.

The report highlights that many employers take a blanket ban approach to hiring people with criminal records, excluding potentially suitable candidates.

Only 17% of ex-offenders each year are in work within 12 months of leaving prison and half of employers would not consider recruiting an applicant with a criminal record, it notes, citing Government data.

The report argues that this type of recruitment is good for business and philanthropic.

Ed Boyd, chief executive of ReGenerate, said The solution to the UKs record labour shortage is hiding in plain sight.

There are millions of potential workers who are rarely given a chance because they may have disabilities, criminal records or are neurodivergent.

Yet these people could make great employees, and make a major contribution to making companies more successful.

It is a real win-win.

ReGenerate has developed a range of proposed reforms, including giving employers a 12-month holiday from paying employer national insurance contributions for taking on some marginalised people.

Roisin Currie, chief executive of Greggs, said: Were passionate about people and believe that everyone deserves the chance to thrive in employment.

By not overlooking potential employees  be that because of their past or disability  we can select the right person and develop them to their full potential.

Weve been working with people leaving prison for a number of years through our dedicated Fresh Start programme.

The passion and energy for work that comes from people who are given an opportunity to kick-start their careers, or to turn their lives around is clear for all to see and as a business, we feel extremely motivated to do all we can to give these people a fresh start.

James Timpson, chief executive of Timpson, said: It is too easy for talented people to be held at arms length because they may have a criminal record, are neurodivergent or have a physical disability.

I have seen first hand how looking past such issues, and hiring on talent and character alone, not only benefits society by giving people a second chance, but helps businesses thrive too.
Robert De Niro says he is deeply distressed following the death of his grandson at the age of 19.

The veteran Hollywood actor, 79, said he and his family were greatly appreciative of condolences and asked for privacy.

The death of Leandro De Niro Rodriguez was announced on Monday by his mother Drena De Niro, 51, the eldest of the actors seven children.

The veteran Hollywood actor, 79, said he and his family were greatly appreciative of condolences and asked for privacy (Doug Peters/PA)

Im deeply distressed by the passing of my beloved grandson Leo, De Niro said, in a statement shared with the PA news agency.

Were greatly appreciative of the condolences from everyone. We ask that we please be given privacy to grieve our loss of Leo.

Further details about the youngsters death were not made immediately available.

Announcing the news on Monday in an Instagram post, Drena De Niro wrote: I dont know how to live without you but Ill try to go on and spread the love and light that you so made me feel in getting to be your mama, she wrote.

You were so deeply loved and appreciated and I wish that love alone could have saved you.

Drena De Niro shared Leandro with artist Carlos Mare, who posted black squares without a caption on his Instagram accounts.

Leandro also had acting credits to his name, with roles in three projects also featuring his mother: 2005s The Collection, and 2018s Cabaret Maxime and A Star Is Born.

In Bradley Coopers remake, the mother and son played mother and son  wife and child to Dave Chappelles character.
An alleged victim of Oscar-winning actor Kevin Spacey told a police officer the Hollywood stars sexual advances were like he thought he could groom me, a court has been told.

Jurors at Southwark Crown Court were shown footage of the interview, in which the man, who cannot be named for legal reasons, described Spacey as a slippery, snaky, difficult person.

The 63-year-old defendant has been described by the prosecution as a sexual bully as he stands trial accused of sex offences against four men between 2001 and 2013.

Spacey was described by the alleged victim as a slippery, snaky, difficult person (Jordan Pettitt/PA)

On Monday, one complainant said he was disgusted with the alleged sex assaults, saying: He would try to grope me and try to grab me and make me feel very uncomfortable.

The man said Spacey told him he could introduce him to A-list stars, and said when he tried to fight back against one of the alleged assaults, the actor replied: Thats such a turn on to me. Youre such a man.

Outlining his allegations against the defendant, the man said: He grabbed me in private areas and then tried to get my hands on him.

The alleged victim said he tried to blank out what happened.

He told the officer about an incident in which he drove Spacey to a lavish showbiz party in the early 2000s.

Describing what he said happened to him, the man said: He grabbed me so hard I almost came off the road.

He grabbed me really hard and it really hurt.

I pushed him against the door and said, Dont do that again or I will knock you out.

Continuing to talk about the incident, one of Spaceys alleged victims told the police officer: I was disgusted that he had done that.

The court heard the alleged victim describe the actor as very touchy feely.

He told the police officer: Obviously being a mans man and a professional I found it quite eerie and just awkward. He made me feel so awkward and uneasy.

The man said the actor became very friendly and started to grab him on several occasions, and the alleged victim told him to stop.

He added: He sort of left me and didnt say anything. He would just laugh it off and change the subject.

The man could be seen describing Spacey as a slippery, snaky, difficult person and a very mixed-up individual.

He continued: He grabbed me. He grabbed me a good few times.

He would squeeze my bum and would rub my legs.

The man said he could now no longer watch any of his films or TV programmes, including Netflix show House of Cards.

He said in his police interview: I cant stand watching the man. It makes me feel sick.

The man told the officer Spacey was pretending to be nice but was a predator who was aggressive.

He added: He was obviously very messed up with his sexuality.

After the interview was played to the jury, Spaceys lawyer Patrick Gibbs KC asked the alleged victim what his initial reaction was.

The complainant said: The first time that he touched me was, yes, just a massive shock, just a massive shock to me.

Asked if he was amused by the actors behaviour, he replied: No, not at all. The opposite of amused. You will probably know the word for that.

He said: It makes me feel angry, it makes me feel angry, you certainly wouldnt feel amused by it.

Asked by Mr Gibbs if he thought the actors advances were naughty, the complainant said: It wasnt naughty, it was disgusting.

And also nice? asked Mr Gibbs.

Spacey arriving at court on Monday (Jordan Pettitt/PA)

Not nice at all, the witness replied.

Spacey 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.

The two-time Academy Award winner also previously denied four further charges of sexual assault and one count of causing a person to engage in penetrative sexual activity without consent.

The trial continues.
The loss of trust between doctors and the Government is the worst it has been for at least three decades, a senior medic has said.

Dr Phil Banfield, chairman of council at the British Medical Association (BMA), said that he has never known such a breakdown of trust in his 30 years as a medic.

He said it is an absolute travesty that doctors feel they have no other choice than to take strike action.

Later this month, junior doctors are planning to stage the largest walkout in the history of the NHS  a five-day walkout from July 13-18.

And consultants  the most senior doctors in the NHS  are planning to stage industrial action on July 20-21, where they will only provide scaled-back Christmas day cover.

Dr Banfield urged ministers to enter talks, saying the Governments precondition to not get round the table when strikes are planned is a completely artificial red line.

He warned that doctors could strike to the next general election  and beyond as he called for the Government to enter talks through the conciliation service Acas.

The loss of trust that has happened between this government and the medical profession Ive never seen before, he told the PA news agency.

Weve asked for multiple meetings and because of the dispute, they have been declined.

Its really sad for the NHS to be in this state.

It is a complete fallacy that to solve the doctors dispute is unaffordable, it costs more to not fix it than to fix it.

It is an absolute travesty that were in the position where doctors feel that there is no alternative but to take strike action.

Consultants in England have voted a resounding YES to taking industrial action this July. Turnout: 71.08% Yes votes: 20,741  86.08% Together we can #FixConsultantPay now and for the future. Read more: https://t.co/Rq4seoH752 pic.twitter.com/4EROFIyKH7  BMA Consultants (@BMA_Consultants) June 27, 2023

Dr Banfield added: We signalled a year ago that this was the issue, they have taken an enormously long time to engage and when they have engaged its been for the briefest of moments and it hasnt felt like they have a genuine interest in settling the pay dispute with doctors.

Asked if consultants would conduct a string of strikes, as seen with junior doctors, he said: Consultants are taking this one step at a time because the whole point of taking industrial action is to get into the negotiating room to solve the issue and consultants are very keen to do this as are the juniors.

The juniors have no preconditions.

The Government has, the Government wont talk to the BMA during any notified strike action. But thats a completely artificial red line.

He added: It is possible for this government to fix this and its possible to do it really before the next industrial action takes place.

The comments come ahead of the BMAs main conference  its annual representative meeting  in Liverpool.

Dr Banfield will tell the conference that the Government is investing in the future of the Australian workforce as doctors seek work oversees.

He will say the Treasury is ignoring the workforce crisis as the Australian Government drives billboards to picket lines to advertise a better life for junior doctors.

Dr Banfield will also tell delegates that the union will be doing more to support whistleblowers and those who are being bullied in the workplace.

It hasnt been a good experience for many doctors in the workplace, he said.

So, bullying, victimisation, raising concerns and finding that youre not thanked for doing so  these are ongoing issues that the BMA has been supporting people with.

It is bizarre that a caring environment and a caring profession ends up not being cared for itself  if no one cares about the carers, you cant expect them to give good care.

So part of what I will be speaking about is to say that the BMA will be doing a lot more to support everyone in the workplace as well.

Asked whether there was a possibility for another system failure like the one witnessed in Mid Staffordshire NHS Foundation trusts where hundreds of patients died as a result of poor care between 2005 and 2009, he said: The feedback from our members is that a Mid Staffs, you know, its quite possible still within the existing system, and youll have your own reports of different hospitals and trusts at different times, that are very nearly on the cusp of being a Mid Staffs-like organisation.

A Department of Health and Social Care spokesman said: We hugely value the work of junior doctors and NHS consultants.

Weve been engaging with both the BMA Junior Doctors Committee and BMA Consultants Committee on their concerns and it is disappointing that BMA members have voted for strike action.

We stand ready to open talks again  we urge them to come to the negotiating table rather than proceeding with their proposed strike dates.

Strikes are hugely disruptive for patients and put pressure on other NHS staff, and we continue to call on the BMA to carefully consider the likely impact of any action on patients.
(Photo : Irek Dorozanski/Polish Ministry of National Defence via Getty Images)

The Polish government opted to bolster its border with Belarus after Wagner chief Yevgeny Prigozhin's announced arrival in the country following his group's failed mutiny against Moscow.

Polish authorities ordered the deployment of counterterrorism police to the Belarusian border after Wagner chief Yevgeny Prigozhin's arrival to the country after his mercenary group's failed rebellion against Russian military leadership.

Officials will send 500 police officers to bolster the country's border with Belarus after the fallout between Russian leaders and Prigozhin. The relocation of the Wagner group's troops to the Eastern European nation has caused concern about greater instability in the region.

Poland Strengthens Border With Belarus

In a post on Twitter on Sunday, Polish Interior Minister Mariusz Kaminski said police from riot patrol and counterterrorism units would be deployed to help control the "tense situation" on the border. He added that the additional forces would join 5,000 security guards and 2,000 soldiers deployed to the border.

The decision comes after 187 people tried to cross from Belarus into Poland on Saturday illegally. Warsaw officials have accused Minsk of trying to create a migrant crisis by pushing people from Africa and the Middle East across the border and into Polish territory, which Belarus has denied, as per Politico.

Poland's ruling Law and Justice party last week said that Warsaw believes that roughly 8,000 Wagner troops could be already stationed in Belarus. The party added that they would take temporary and permanent measures to strengthen the border, including bolstering the presence of security forces in the area and increasing fortifications.

On Wednesday, the Law and Justice party leader, Jaroslaw Laczynski, said that Wagner's presence in Belarus could only mean a "new phase of hybrid warfare." He said this phase was much more difficult to deal with than the one they have faced.

Last week, Belarusian President Alexander Lukashenko said that Wagner chief Prigozhin had already arrived in his home country. The announcement prompted concerns among NATO nations that border the nation, Latvia, Lithuania, and Poland.

The mercenary group leader had previously called on his troops to lead a march to Moscow last month before quickly calling it off. According to DW News, the Belarusian president was credited for assisting in defusing the rebellion.

Read Also: Sweden Under Fire After Man Burns Quran During Protest

Wagner Chief Yevgeny Prigozhin's Failed Mutiny

The rebellion occurred as the Wagner group's soldiers occupied a southern Russian city before marching toward Moscow. The mutiny resulted from Prigozhin calling Russian Defense Minister Sergei Shoigu and top general Valery Gerasimov incompetent and blaming them for the failures of the Russian military in Ukraine.

Many were left puzzled after the failed rebellion regarding the situation on Russia's home turf. On the other hand, Prigozhin's media holding group is set to shut down, said the director of one of its outlets, who highlighted the group leader's worsening fortunes.

The outlet, Patriot Media, has taken a strongly nationalist, pro-Kremlin editorial line but also provided positive coverage of Prigozhin and his Wagner mercenary group. In a video clip posted on Saturday, RIA FAN director Yevgeny Zubarev said he was announcing the decision to close down the media outlet to leave Russia's information space, said the South China Morning Post.

Related Article: Mike Pence Meets Volodymyr Zelensky During a Surprise Visit to Ukraine

@ 2023 HNGN, All rights reserved. Do not reproduce without permission.
Prime Minister Rishi Sunak is facing calls from within his own party to further cut immigration, as a group of Tory MPs offered a series of proposals to drastically curb the destabilising impact of mass migration.

The MPs call on ministers to close temporary visa schemes for care workers in a bid to reduce migration figures by more than 80,000, while also calling for a cap of 20,000 on the number of refugees for resettlement.

The report is backed by a group of right-wing Tory MPs from the 2017 and 2019 intake, including Tory deputy chairman Lee Anderson and backbencher Miriam Cates, and written by Ipswich MP Tom Hunt.

The 25-strong group, named the New Conservatives, say the proposed measures would reduce net migration by 400,000 and in doing so meet the 2019 manifesto pledge that there will be fewer lower-skilled migrants and overall numbers will come down.

Net migration was 606,000 last year, according to the latest figures from the Office for National Statistics.

In the report, MPs tell the Prime Minister that a promise to reduce immigration formed a key plank of Boris Johnsons 2019 victory, which saw the Tories make sweeping gains in former Labour heartlands or so-called red wall seats.

The group says the current post-Brexit system has been too lenient and is not working, saying that mass migration is having destabilising economic and cultural consequences.

On the issue of visas for care workers, the report says: Visa eligibility for both care workers and senior care workers were introduced as temporary measures to address post-pandemic labour shortages.

They were added to the Shortage Occupation List in response to pandemic pressures.

Neither measure has yet been brought to a close, despite the abatement of the pandemic and its associated consequences.

The group calls it encouraging that the Illegal Migration Bill, currently in the Lords, contains plans for an annual cap on refugees who come to the UK through safe and legal routes.

The report suggests that a cap of 20,000 would offer a number that, excluding Hong Kongers and Ukrainians, exceeds the total number of people granted asylum or resettled in the UK in any given year since 2002.

This cap could then be lifted in order to respond to an unforeseen emergency, such as a natural disaster or a war.

Between 2014 and 2022, about 54,000 people were resettled or relocated to the UK under refugee schemes.

The MPs also call for the Government to reserve university study visas for the brightest international students by excluding the poorest performing universities from eligibility criteria.

They write: In recent yearsthere have been increased applications for study visas from

students who wish to attend non-Russell group universities

A study visa that is blind to the rigour of university courses is also blind to the earning potential, or even employability, of graduates who can then go on to apply for Graduate work visas.

In making the call, the report argues that immigration policy should not be used to prop up the finances of underperforming universities.

The report will be launched on Monday by Mr Anderson and other Tory MPs.

It is the latest sign of backbench pressure on the prime minister to curb immigration ahead of the next general election, expected before January 2025.

The Government earlier this year announced plans to prevent some overseas students bringing dependants to the UK.

Home Secretary Suella Braverman has been outspoken about her desire to bring immigration numbers down, but other members of Mr Sunaks Cabinet are believed to be more relaxed about the issue.

Mr Hunt played down any suggestion that the report represented a challenge to the Prime Minister, telling BBC Radio 4s Westminster Hour: This is a constructive document. Weve finally got back control of our immigration system.

Weve ended EU free movement. I think its healthy to have a level of debate within the parliamentary party about the future of our immigration policy and were fully supportive of the Prime Minister.

He also rejected suggestions that some of the proposals, particularly related to the care sector, could undermine already short-staffed areas.

Weve got to move away from this addiction to cheap labour from abroad. Weve got to invest in our own workforce, he said.

Party colleague Tim Loughton gave the document a more mixed reception, telling the same programme he understood the frustrations and that in the longer term, the principle is right.

But he warned: We have got a shortage of people in this country, particularly in the care industry, particularly in hospitality.

Its not as simple as just putting the salary thresholds up as well. Theres quite a lot of skilled but lower paid people that we need coming into this country.
A father strangled his wife and their two young children while drunk and was then Tasered by police after holding a knife to his own throat, a court has heard.

Saju Chelavalel sobbed in the dock and bowed his head as a court was told he made an audio recording which prosecutors allege captured the sounds of coughing and retching as he strangled NHS nurse Anju Asok.

The 52-year-old pleaded guilty at a previous hearing to Ms Asoks murder and that of their six-year-old son Jeeva Saju and daughter Janvi Saju, aged four.

A sentencing hearing at Northampton Crown Court was told on Monday how Chelavalel had more than four hours to reflect on whether to kill his children before using a dressing gown cord to strangle them in the early hours of December 15 last year.

Saju Chelavalel (Northamptonshire Police/PA)

Chelavalel, originally from Kerala in India, claims he lost control while drunk in the mistaken belief that his wife was having an affair, killing her at around 10pm on December 14 at their ground-floor flat in Petherton Court, Kettering.

Opening the facts of the case, prosecutor James Newton-Price KC said the audio recording also captured the sound of a blender being used to make a toxic mixture of chocolate and pills intended to send the children to sleep.

Mr Newton-Price said Chelavalel urged police to shoot him at his home, where he also left instructions for his own and his familys bodies to be cremated in India.

A forensic officer at the scene in Kettering last December (Matthew Cooper/PA)

The prosecutor told the court that the killer was arrested after a 999 call at 11.12am on December 15, after a neighbour saw him apparently unable to speak.

After officers smashed a window to gain access to the property, Mr Newton-Price said, Chelavalel was seen to be holding a knife to his own throat.

The barrister told the court: He responded (to the officers) with words to the effect of: I am going to kill myself. He said: You shoot me, you shoot me.

Chelavalel was tasered and handcuffed and police went into a bedroom, where they found the body of 35-year-old Ms Asok, who worked as a nurse at Kettering General Hospital.

The childrens bodies were then found next to each other on a double bed in a different room.

A letter written by Chelavalel in English was found at the scene, in which he made unsupported accusations about his wife being unfaithful and claimed to have cryptocurrency investments and 5,000 in other funds.

The letter stated: Please use this amount to transfer our corpses to India.

The court heard that no evidence whatsoever of any affair was found on Ms Asoks phone, but that searches for women on dating sites were made by Chelavalel on December 3 and 12.

Part of the audio recording made by Chelavalel was played to the court, with Mr Newton-Price telling Mr Justice Pepperall: The word mummy can be heard and the defendant whispering.

He said of coughing sounds heard on the recording: We suspect that that may be the moment of strangulation (of Ms Asok) but we cant say that with absolute certainty.

During police interviews, Chelavalel claimed he could not remember killing his children, but said he had lost control of himself when his wife made an offensive comment about his mother.

Offering mitigation, defence KC George Carter-Stephenson said the circumstances of the case were tragic in the extreme for relatives of the victims.

He said of Chelavalel: They are also tragic for this particular defendant. Whatever sentence the court imposes on him today he has to live with the knowledge of what he did on that particular night.

Addressing Chelavalels claims that his wife was unfaithful to him, Mr Carter-Stephenson said: Although there is no evidence of it, it is something that he had believed.

That belief was obviously wrong. But he continues to hold that view.

Chelavalels possession of a knife during his arrest was part of his intent to end his own life, the defence KC argued.

The audio recording was made because it was simply left on from a period when the children were heard singing, Mr Carter-Stephenson added.
Detectives have arrested two males suspects over a double murder in north London in which 15-year-old Leonardo Reid and a 23-year-old man were killed.

The pair  aged 27 and 17  were arrested on Monday evening on suspicion of murder and attempted murder and are in custody at a north London police station.

Police were called at 11.33pm on Thursday to Elthorne Road, Archway, to reports of a stabbing and Leonardo was pronounced dead at the scene, while the 23-year-old, who has not yet been named, died in hospital.

A 46-year-old man who was arrested on Saturday on suspicion of murder and attempted murder was later released with no further action.

Shocked locals near Elthorne Road described how they were kept awake by a group of 40 youngsters who appeared to be recording a music video before a commotion broke out late on Thursday.

A forensic tent has been put up near Turpin Way where locals described seeing a large street party (Lucy North/PA)

Police said in a statement on Friday that they believe a large number of people were present when the attack took place and are urging witnesses and those with information to come forward.

Chief Superintendent Andy Carter said: My thoughts are with the families of the two victims who have suffered such an unimaginable loss in this shocking and unacceptable incident.

Anyone who has information that could help police should call 101 or tweet @MetCC ref CAD 9383/29 Jun.

To remain anonymous call the independent charity Crimestoppers on 0800 555 111.
Britain has vowed to defend the pro-democracy activists living in exile that Hong Kong police have issued arrest warrants for over alleged violations of the territorys harsh national security law.

A bounty of one million Hong Kong dollars (100,500) has been offered for information leading to the arrests of any of the eight people targeted under the legislation imposed by China.

Some, including Nathan Law, the politician granted asylum by the UK, are living in Britain, while others are residing in the US, Canada and Australia.

The UK strongly objects to Chinas National Security Law, which suppresses Hong Kongs freedoms. The decision to issue arrest warrants for 8 activists, some of whom are in the UK, is a further example of the authoritarian reach of Chinas extraterritorial law.  James Cleverly (@JamesCleverly) July 3, 2023

Foreign Secretary James Cleverly said: We will not tolerate any attempts by China to intimidate and silence individuals in the UK and overseas.

The UK will always defend the universal right to freedom of expression and stand up for those who are targeted.

We strongly object to the national security law that China imposed on Hong Kong, including its extraterritorial reach, in breach of the legally binding Sino-British Joint Declaration.

The UK handed over the former British colony to China in 1997, with Beijing promising to maintain Western-style liberties under a one country, two systems framework.

Mr Cleverly added: We call on Beijing to remove the national security law and for the Hong Kong authorities to end their targeting of those who stand up for freedom and democracy.
Protests across France sparked by the police shooting of a 17-year-old last Tuesday have been described as like a mini civil war by a British national living in Marseille.

Six nights of violent unrest, which appeared to be easing overnight into Monday, were driven by a backlash against a French state that many young people with immigrant roots say routinely discriminates against them.

Riots have affected several areas of the country, including the Paris suburb of Nanterre, where the teenager  identified only by his first name, Nahel  was killed in his hometown.

On Monday, crowds of people gathered at town halls across France to show solidarity with the local governments that had been targeted  according to the interior ministry, 99 town halls have been attacked in the riots, along with other public buildings.

Residents gather in front of the city hall in Mons-en-Baroeul in northern France in a show of solidarity with local authorities (Michel Spingler/AP)

Benjamin Klene, 33, from Oxford, who lives near the train station, the Gare St Charles, in Marseille, has described the riots and police presence as disturbing and very tense.

Mr Klene was driving home after celebrating a friends birthday on Friday night when he noticed a disturbing number of police on the streets.

Residents were told not to dispose of rubbish over the weekend for fear it would be used to start fires, and public transport across Frances second-largest city ground to a halt after 7pm, he said.

Mr Klene, who works in sales, told the PA news agency: I was driving home on Thursday night and saw unmarked vans full of tactical, special unit police in assault gear.

Police officers patrol at the Arc de Triomphe on the Champs Elysees in Paris on Saturday (Christophe Ena/AP)

It was like a mini civil war had suddenly broken out.

All of the public transport has been stopped at night for four nights in a row and weve been told not to put rubbish out as bins are being used to start fires to block off roads.

All of the restaurants and bars around my place have now been shut for the past three evenings because of the riots.

On Friday morning, we were told by police to leave the city centre and stay with friends or relatives if possible for the weekend.

Protesters block a street with rubbish bins in Colombes, outside Paris (Lewis Joly/AP)

There were police in riot gear all over the city and the atmosphere was very tense.

By Monday afternoon, the unrest appeared to be easing, and Peter Pam, 26, who was on holiday in central Paris with his girlfriend, said they had had zero negative encounters from the riots.

We have been here almost a week now and we have had zero negative encounters, Mr Pam, from California, told the PA news agency.

We are about a 10-minute walk away from the Eiffel Tower.

I didnt even know France was in trouble or having any riots until my friends and family from America messaged me yesterday asking if I was okay.

Graffiti stating Justice for Nahel on a wall in the Paris suburb of Nanterre (Cara Anna/AP)

Mr Pam, who proposed to his girlfriend on the second day of their trip, added that everything looks peaceful and all businesses are open.

We have walked early in the morning, all day, and night, even took public transport and honestly it made us fall in love with the city, he said.

I didnt hear any locals talking about it or preparing for it.

People are walking their dogs and most look happy.

All businesses are open and grocery stores are full.
A Virgin company has begun a High Court fight with an American train operator which pulled out of a deal after alleging that the Virgin brand had stopped being a brand of international high repute.

Lawyers representing Virgin Enterprises told a judge at a High Court hearing in London that Brightline Holdings allegation was cynical and spurious.

The deal meant that Brightline would rebrand its rail services in the United States as Virgin Trains USA, Judge Mark Pelling heard.

Virgin Enterprises says Brightline is in breach of a trademark licence agreement and wants around 200 million damages, the judge was told.

Brightline says Virgin Enterprises claim should be dismissed.

Judge Pelling has begun overseeing a trial, at the Rolls Building in central London, which is due to last three weeks.

He heard that Virgin Enterprises was part of the Virgin Group, founded by businessman Sir Richard Branson, and managed intellectual property relating to the Virgin brand.

This dispute arises out of a trademark licence agreement dated November 15 2018 between (Virgin Enterprises) and (Brightline) pursuant to which Virgin Enterprises agreed to license the Virgin brand to Brightline such that Brightline would rebrand its rail services in the USA as Virgin Trains USA, Daniel Toledano KC, Emma Himsworth KC, and Maximilian Schlote told the judge in a written case outline.

The term of the (agreement) was for an initial 20 years, which was extendable.

They said a clause in the agreement allowed Brightline to terminate the agreement, after giving written notice, if the Virgin brand had ceased to be a brand of international high repute  and told the judge that an exit fee had been agreed.

Very soon after concluding the (agreement), it appears that Brightline had second thoughts about the deal it had struck and began looking for a way to extricate itself from it as soon as possible and without paying the contractually agreed exit fee, they added.

At the height of the first wave of the Covid-19 global pandemic, Brightline sought to terminate the (agreement), on the basis of a cynical and spurious allegation that the Virgin brand had ceased to be a brand of international high repute.

The case was being heard at the Rolls Building in London (Steve Parsons/PA)

Lawyers representing Brightline told the judge that the claim should be dismissed.

This is a claim brought by (Virgin Enterprises) against Brightline for very substantial sums  in excess of 250 million US dollars  said to be due as damages for breach of a trademark licence agreement between the parties dated November 15 2018, they said.

Brightline terminated the (agreement) on July 29 2020.

(Virgin Enterprises) claims that this was a renunciatory breach of the (agreement).

The lawyers said the liability issue the judge had to decide was, simply stated, was Brightline entitled to terminate the agreement.

They added: The claim should be dismissed.

Lawyers representing Brightline outlined concerns about Virgins train and airline businesses.

They said by the end of 2019, Brightline was becoming concerned about the reputation of the Virgin brand.

In April 2019, Virgin Trains was disqualified from bidding for a renewal of the West Coast mainline train franchise; it operated no trains in the UK after 7 December 2019, they said.

A Virgin Trains UK video was described as not universally acclaimed (PA)

Not long after the announcement that Virgin Trains had been disqualified, investors started to express concerns about Brightlines links with Virgin.

They said a Virgin Trains UK video, released in November 2019 and called The Final Whistle, was not universally acclaimed.

One newspaper described the footage as a Bizarre farewell to Virgin Trains video featuring Richard Branson and Mr Blobby.

Lawyers said: Brightline regarded the video as an embarrassment

They added: The Covid-19 pandemic had a major impact on both Brightline and Virgin.

In March 2020, Virgin Atlantic attracted widespread criticism with its request to staff to take unpaid leave, followed by its request for a substantial financial support package from the UK Government (or bailout).

There was an ensuing wave of negative publicity.

This was noted internally by Virgin, which recognised the need to do something.

They told the judge that the response on social media was summarised in a social listening report, prepared for Virgin, which said: People are angry and frustrated that a billionaire would take taxpayer money to bail out his airline when he has ample money to fund it himself.

Lawyers representing Virgin Enterprises said Brightline had operated a train line in Florida, between Miami and West Palm Beach.

They said Brightline had explained that it entered into the agreement to increase brand awareness and to take advantage of cross-selling opportunities.

Virgin was hit by a spike in negative press in the UK in the spring of 2020, in particular in relation to Virgin Atlantics request for government support, they said.

However, the picture was different in other Virgin markets.

They added: There was no notable negative press about any Virgin-related stories in the USA.

Lawyers said, nonetheless, the challenges the wider group of Virgin companies and the Virgin brand was facing at that time in the UK caused internal concern and were taken very seriously and were addressed.

The press surrounding Virgin Atlantic and, relatedly, Sir Richard, also did not cause the Virgin Masterbrand to cease to be of international high repute, they said.

Virgin Atlantics request for government support should be seen in the context of the pandemic and in light of the fact US and other airlines received huge government support.

Nigel Tozzi KC, who led Brightlines legal team, told the judge on Monday that Sir Richards reputation had taken a hammering.

He said Sir Richard had used the word trashed.
Partygate investigator Sue Gray broke civil service rules as a result of the undeclared contact between her and the Labour Party, according to a Whitehall investigation.

The former senior civil servant is due to take up the role as Opposition leader Sir Keir Starmers chief of staff after being cleared to start the job in September by the Advisory Committee on Business Appointments (Acoba), the anti-corruption watchdog.

But in a separate Cabinet Office inquiry, it was found that Ms Gray, who refused to give evidence to the Government probe, broke the civil service code due to her contact with Labour ahead of her resignation in March.

The result was briefed ahead of Mondays announcement, which came in the form of a written ministerial statement.

Labour branded the investigation Mickey Mouse nonsense and said the conclusion is a political stunt by a Tory Government.

Cabinet Office minister Jeremy Quin said: I can now confirm that the Cabinet Office process looking into the circumstances leading up to Ms Grays resignation has been concluded.

As part of the process, Ms Gray was given the opportunity to make representations but chose not to do so.

This process, led by the Civil Service, found that the Civil Service code was prima facie broken as a result of the undeclared contact between Ms Gray and the Leader of the Opposition.

The rules and guidance that govern the conduct of civil servants are clear and transparent. It is deeply unfortunate that events have transpired in this way.

Acoba on Friday recommended that Ms Gray have a six-month cooling-off period, starting from the day she quit the civil service, before taking up her new role with the Opposition, allowing her to start in two months time.

Labour leader Sir Keir Starmer first approached Sue Gray in October (PA)

The watchdog ruled it had seen no evidence that her decision making or impartiality was impaired while serving in Whitehall.

Government figures had lobbied Acoba to impose a waiting period of 12 months after complaints about Ms Grays move to join the Labour leader after leading a high-profile investigation into Boris Johnson over lockdown breaches in No 10.

But while Acoba chairman and Conservative peer Lord Pickles said he shared some of the concerns raised by departments over the potential risk to the civil services integrity due to her job switch, he dismissed the call for a lengthier delay.

Responding to the Whitehall probe conclusion, a Labour Party spokesman said: All rules were complied with. The Acoba process makes that clear.

Former senior civil servant Sue Gray investigated lockdown breaches in Downing Street (Sue Gray Report/Cabinet Office/PA)

This statement is a political stunt by a Tory government out of ideas and out of road.

It says everything you need to know about the Tories that they have spent weeks wasting time on this Mickey Mouse nonsense, while refusing to investigate the serious allegations of sexual assault against their London mayoral hopeful Daniel Korski.

Were looking forward to Sue Gray joining us this September as we continue to show the country that only Labour can build a better Britain.

Downing Street said it was unprecedented for an inquiry to be conducted after someone has left the civil service but played down suggestions it was politically motivated.

An inquiry with no rules or precedent. Is it any wonder she refused to participate  which was my strong advice. https://t.co/Lj4p5uGC7v  Dave Penman (@FDAGenSec) July 3, 2023

Asked if Rishi Sunak believes the investigation was not politically motivated, the Prime Ministers spokesman told reporters: The Cabinet Office, given the public interest in this and the unprecedented nature of a serving permanent secretary being offered a role with the Opposition, the minister committed to updating the House and thats what youve seen happen today.

Quizzed on why the civil service code was found to have been prima facie broken, meaning at first sight, the spokesman said it was because officials conducting the probe werent able to speak directly to Ms Gray and relied on other information to come to the judgement.

Dave Penman, general secretary of the FDA union which represents senior officials, said on Twitter: An inquiry with no rules or precedent. Is it any wonder she refused to participate  which was my strong advice.

Mr Korski, a former Downing Street adviser during David Camerons tenure, pulled out of the race last week to be the Tory candidate to take on Sadiq Khan in the capital after it was alleged he groped a TV producer in No 10 a decade ago.

The Cabinet Office has ruled out investigating the claims, which Mr Korski categorically denies, made by Daisy Goodwin.

The Prime Ministers official spokesman was asked if Rishi Sunak believes the probe was not politically motivated (PA)

Ms Gray is expected to begin the task of preparing Labour for government ahead of a likely general election next year, with Sir Keirs outfit well ahead of Mr Sunaks Tories in opinion polls.

According to evidence handed to Acoba, Sir Keir raised the possibility of Ms Gray joining his team when he called her in late October 2022.

She told the committee she was open to such a possibility but there was no formal job offer until March 2  the day she resigned.

The investigation into partygate compiled by Ms Gray, after it was ordered by former prime minister Mr Johnson while he was in No 10, was published last May.

Along with her Covid rule breaches investigation, Ms Gray held a number of senior roles in the civil service, including leading the Cabinet Offices propriety and ethics team.

Her final role was as second permanent secretary at the Department for Levelling Up, Housing and Communities.
Law enforcement in Washington, D.C. is seeking a suspect who they believe either detonated or threw explosive devices at three different businesses in the nation's capital within the span of minutes Sunday morning.

The attacks happened just 15 minutes apart on the northeast side of the district and began at 4:30 a.m. when a suspect detonated an explosive device on the sidewalk outside of Truist Bank located on Washington Place, according to a media release from the Metropolitan Police Department. Six minutes later, another explosive device detonated on the sidewalk in front of the doors at the Nike store on H Street, police said.

The final attack occurred at 4:45 a.m. when a suspect threw a "Molotov cocktail style object" at the Safeway grocery store located on 40th Street, police said.

MPD and @ATFWashington seek the public's assistance in identifying suspects and a vehicle in reference to Destruction of Property offenses that occurred on Sunday, July 2, 2023, in the District.



Have info? Call (202) 727-9099/text 50411



Release: https://t.co/IvecJKuAeIpic.twitter.com/xKhxQ3xkHO  DC Police Department (@DCPoliceDept) July 2, 2023

South Carolina house fire: 6 dead, 1 critical in South Carolina house fire, man arrested on attempted murder charge

Police said that all three businesses were damaged in the attacks, though it was unclear to what extent. All the businesses were closed when the explosions occurred, and police said no one was injured.

Following each attack, a person could be seen on security footage fleeing the scene in a vehicle. Police have described the suspect's vehicle as a champagne-colored or gold Acura TL sedan with a Maryland license plate number of 17971CK.

Washington, D.C. police and the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives are offering a $20,000 reward for information leading to an arrest and a conviction.

New Hampshire crash: 34 people injured after driver crashes into busy New Hampshire restaurant

Eric Lagatta covers breaking and trending news for USA TODAY. Reach him at elagatta@gannett.com and follow him on Twitter @EricLagatta.

This article originally appeared on USA TODAY: Washington, D.C. explosions: Suspect sought after businesses targeted
Woody Rini slouched in the Mens Wearhouse suit, preparing for an evening of small talk and champagne.

Wearing a leather belt and swallowed in a boxy heap of navy fabric, Rini felt dejected by the masculine reflection staring back in the mirror.

Rini and wife Preetha Suresh Rini got into their car and cruised down Interstate 40 to Raleigh to celebrate a friends wedding. But as the couple made their way through the downtown streets last June, they spotted a joyful crowd careening across Fayetteville Street. It was Raleighs annual Pride festival.

All these colorful people look so fun, Rini remembered thinking. These people seem like theyre expressing themselves and having fun, and Im here in this tight belt, in this suit and Im miserable.

Soon after, the 29-year-old Cary resident began to wonder how to carve out a space among the colorful people.

After months of questioning and research, Rini slowly realized that rigid masculinity, like the navy suit, was not a perfect fit.

Rini, who was assigned male at birth, now identifies as non-binary and uses they/them pronouns.

They are one of the 1.2 million Americans who a 2021 UCLA study says identify as non-binary, a growing group of people who feel their gender identities fall outside the typical man-woman structure.

Rini, a self-help author and entrepreneur, is proud of their non-binary identity, but coming out to family and friends came with concerns.

Would people accept them?

Would it change their connection with Preetha?

Would their family understand?

Basketball and bro-talk

As a bubbly child in Richmond, Kentucky, not far from Lexington, Rini had struggled to fit in.

An avid sports fan who played high school basketball, they never connected with the male coaches and teammates who yelled and screamed, they said.

I guess I always perceived those masculine elements as less me, they said. Whatever this man thing is, Im not it.

As Rini grew into adulthood, they continued to struggle to form meaningful friendships with men.

One night, Rini attended a work function with Preetha, an attorney and UNC Law graduate. As they socialized, Rini spotted a pair of men who seemed to hit it off immediately. Rini tried to join the conversation, but their effortless bro-talk was out of reach.

I always felt like a child when I was trying to be a man around men, they said.

After the encounter at Raleighs Pride festival, Rini began seeking out non-binary content creators on social media. They listened to YouTube testimonials and read personal essays as they grappled with where to rest on the gender spectrum.

Celebrities like singers Demi Lovato and Sam Smith and reality TV star Jonathan Van Ness all played a role in Rinis journey.

Finally it all clicked.

Rini woke up one morning, turned to Preetha and said, I think Im non-binary.

The announcement surprised their wife of five years, but the two began discussing what Rinis new identity would mean for their relationship.

Preetha wondered if Rini would eventually want to live as a woman, and how to refer to Rini if not as her husband?

She didnt know if her workplace would accept her having a non-binary partner.

Other people get uncomfortable when you step outside the box, Rini said, and that was a concern for us.

But Preetha has been overwhelmingly supportive, they said.

I could see in her eyes that it didnt change anything about our relationship and has only made it better in the past nine months since that conversation, they said.

After several similar conversations, Rini decided to stop using he/him pronouns and start using they/them pronouns.

They embraced some traditionally feminine elements in their wardrobe, like jewelry and bright colors, and feel their identity transcends the man-woman paradigm.

Theres really nothing left of me thats masculine, they said.

Preetha began introducing Rini to people as her spouse.

Only one major consideration remained.

What would Rinis family say?

Family and the LGBTQ+ community

As a child, Rini attended the Church of Christ in Kentucky. Their family was a liberal island in a very conservative area, Rini said, so they were hopeful they would accept Rinis new identity.

Older sister Sarah Gump was the first to get the coming-out call.

I wasnt expecting it. I was surprised, Gump said. Im gonna love my sibling no matter what. But it did kind of make me pause and think, Does this change anything? And like my first thought was, Are they still going to be married to Preetha?

After assuaging Gumps concerns, Rini eventually emailed the rest of the family, sharing that they are non-binary.

My first reaction was Im totally going to accept and love my child, no matter what, and be supportive, said Rinis 71-year-old mother, Ellen Rini.

But I dont really get it, she said.

Their sister and mother readily admit they still mess up Rinis new pronouns from time to time.

Its a big adjustment, Ellen Rini said. Woody has a good attitude about it, and he knows Im old. Im the mom, and its not gonna be easy for me.

Mostly its just funny, said Gump. Because mom will say, How is they? And Im just, like, Mom, thats just not it. But its not like a conflict. Its just kind of funny, or we correct each other.

One of the major hurdles the family has faced has been deciding what to call Rini, since gender-neutral terms for describing family relations can be limiting.

I have 71 years of uncle, son, dad, etc. I liked those words, Ellen Rini said. So in a sense, I hate to lose those words, but in the bigger picture, Woody being who they really is  are, she corrected herself.

Gumps 7-year-old daughter previously called Rini Uncle Woody. Gump Googled gender-neutral terms for uncle, but nothing seemed to fit. So, she said, just Woody works for the time being.

Rini said their familys support has made coming out easier and is touched by how dedicated they are to educating themselves about the LGBTQ+ community.

This year Ellen Rini and Gump attended the pride festival in their hometown, and Ellen recently went to her first drag show.

Oh, yeah! I had a good time, she said with a laugh. Im trying to broaden my horizons.

Woody Rini sits with their eight-year-old dog, Willie, at their home in Cary, N.C. on Thursday, June 29, 2023. Rini, who was assigned male at birth, now identifies as non-binary and uses they/them pronouns.

The fear of anti-LGBTQ+ hatred

While Rini said they love their home in Cary, they cannot ignore the hostile political climate in North Carolina.

In November, 45,000 people in Moore County lost electricity after a local power station was shot out following a drag show in Southern Pines. Although law enforcement could not connect the attack and efforts to stop the drag show, local drag artists considered it an act of hostility.

Rini feels similarly and said they are upset by the anti-LGBTQ+ legislation being proposed and passed in the state.

In June, a ban on gender affirming care for minors cleared the state Senate.

Its terrifying to know it could get much, much worse, Rini said.

Still, Rini said they are hopeful the LGBTQ+ community and its allies will continue to make progress toward inclusivity.

I dont think this battle against queer people will win, Rini said.

Exploring gender identity

As Rini continues to navigate their newly acknowledged identity, they have begun experimenting with gender presentation. Some of the biggest changes to their appearance this year have been shaving their goatee, growing out their hair and getting their ears pierced.

As my identity has changed, and especially with the hair and the earrings. I could tell that I was wearing the clothes rather than the clothes dictating me, they said.

This spring, about a year after coming out, Rini was invited to another wedding and donned the previously dreaded navy suit.

But something was different this time.

With long dark hair, silver studded earrings and a smile a mile wide staring back, they said it finally felt like a perfect fit.
(Photo : AFPTV/AFP via Getty Images)

At least 52 people were killed when a truck collided with multiple other vehicles and market vendors in western Kenya.

Authorities have confirmed that one of the deadliest crashes in recent years has occurred in Kenya, resulting in the loss of 52 lives.

The tragic incident involved a truck colliding with multiple vehicles and pedestrians at a busy road junction. Rescuers are working to clear the wreckage caused by the truck, which was transporting a shipping container and had veered out of control.

Truck Crash in Western Kenya

The collision caused devastation as the truck plowed into other vehicles, including private cars, minibusses, and motorcycle taxis, as well as market stalls. The search for potential victims still trapped beneath the wreckage is ongoing, as per Daily Mail.

While the truck driver's death has been reported by Citizen TV, it has yet to be independently confirmed. Disturbing footage from the scene revealed the extent of the damage, with twisted metal, torn-off doors, and crushed motorbikes scattered across the area.

As a result of the accident, many Kenyan leaders, including President William Ruto, expressed their condolences. The incident has also prompted discussions about road safety, with suggestions for safety measures such as speed bumps and proper rest breaks for long-distance truck drivers.

Road accidents remain a significant issue in Kenya, with statistics indicating that thousands of people were involved in accidents last year, resulting in a substantial number of fatalities. The nation mourns the loss of those affected by this tragedy, and efforts are underway to support the victims' families and prevent similar catastrophes.

Read Also: Brazil Court Bans Jair Bolsonaro From Running for Office for 8 Years

Kenyan Government Plans to Relocate Street Vendors

According to a report by Kenyan station Citizen TV, it has been stated that the driver of the vehicle involved in the crash has died. However, independent confirmation of this information is still pending. Disturbing footage emerged on Friday, revealing the extensive wreckage as rescue workers labored in the dark and heavy rain, accompanied by the piercing sirens of ambulances.

The following day, a large crowd gathered at the crash site, where the overturned container remained lodged in a ditch. Debris, including car seats, piles of fruit, a damaged axle, and a solitary black boot, was scattered over a wide area.

An eyewitness named Joel Rotich described the incident as occurring suddenly, leaving many with no time to escape. According to Irish Times, chaos ensued as people screamed and scattered in the accident's aftermath.

In response to the tragedy, Kenyan government official Murkomen announced plans to relocate street traders from roadside areas to designated markets to prevent similar catastrophes in the future. He also advocated for enhanced safety measures at accident-prone sites, as well as the enforcement of proper rest breaks and refresher courses for long-distance truck drivers.

Statistics provided by Kenya's national transport and safety authority indicate that a staggering 21,760 individuals were involved in road accidents last year, resulting in 4,690 fatalities.

Highlighting a broader concern, the World Health Organization reported in September of the previous year that Africa possesses the highest rate of road traffic fatalities globally, with over 800 individuals losing their lives every day due to such incidents.

Related Article: Israel Spy Agency Busted Iran's Alleged Terror Cyprus Attack

@ 2023 HNGN, All rights reserved. Do not reproduce without permission.
President Biden is set to meet King Charles III while in London next week, the White House announced Sunday.

The president will travel to the United Kingdom on July 9 and also will meet with Prime Minister Rishi Sunak.

The meeting with Charles will be the first time the two have met since the coronation in May, and it will take place July 10 at Windsor Castle, the BBC reported. The two engagements are to further strengthen the close relationship between our nations, White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre said in a statement.

The president will then travel to Vilnius, Lithuania, for the NATO Summit and Helsinki, Finland, for a U.S.-Nordic Leaders Summit.

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First lady Jill Biden traveled to London to attend the coronation in May, representing the United States. Biden spoke with Charles in April to congratulate him and the president attended the late Queens funeral in September.

Biden hosted Sunak at the White House last month. Before that, the two were together in Japan for the Group of Seven summit in May and Biden visited Sunak in Northern Ireland in April when the president marked the anniversary of the Good Friday Agreement.

For the latest news, weather, sports, and streaming video, head to The Hill.
A man who shot a dog in the face in Florida last April was sentenced to 18 months in prison, the Flagler County Sheriff's Office shared in a news release June 29.

The dog, Rocky, had surgery after the April 2022 shooting and made a full recovery, according to the release. The dog was adopted by Hayden Ore, a crime analyst with the sheriff's office, and his wife. The couple says the dog has made a "wonderful addition" to their family and has shown no signs of aggression.

"Rocky is now living happily with Analyst Ore and his wife and no longer has to live in fear," Flagler County Sheriff Rick Staly said in a statement.

Rocky. (Flagler County Sheriff's Office)

State Attorney R.J. Larizza called the dog's recovery "miraculous" in a statement.

There is no doubt he suffered greatly. Rocky has a loving home and the defendant is behind bars. A fitting end to a disturbing crime," Larizza said.

Jamier Lee-Bright pled guilty to felony cruelty to animals and tampering with physical evidence, according to authorities. In addition to serving 18 months in prison, he has been sentenced to 42 months of probation, placed on the animal abuse registry and must forfeit his firearm and complete a mental health evaluation.

On April 5, 2022, after neighbors reported hearing gunshots and an animal crying, Flagler County deputies found Rocky shot in the snout and left in a kennel. Lee-Bright, who was at the home, initially said he didn't hear anything, but the responders called in detectives for an investigation after noticing a freshly dug hole and blood on his face.

The news release states that Lee-Bright later said a family member screamed at the dog because he bit her. Lee-Bright told detectives he shot the dog in the head outside before placing him back in the kennel, where Rocky was left for more than two hours, according to the news release.

The dog had surgery, which included staples in his snout, a metal pin in his leg, multiple stitches and a drain in his neck. During his recovery, Rocky was turned over to Palm Coast Animal Control, but after Ore heard the dog's story, he agreed to foster the dog after he was released from the vet.

By May 10, 2022, Rocky was able to put weight on his leg again, the sheriff's office said in a release at the time. According to his new owner, Rocky is "very playful, loves his toys, is great with our other dog, and loves everyone he meets. Hes never even growled at us, unlike his previous family claimed. A little love goes a long way!

This article was originally published on TODAY.com
"They have the same temperament. They are both sweet little pups with a bit of sass," one of the dog's owners says of the canine siblings

Courtesy Karolina Chwistek and Laura Green Canine siblings Augie and Puffin at their June 2023 reunion

It was a furry family reunion years in the making for Augie and Puffin.

Until June 25, the last time the 5-year-old sibling dogs had seen each other was when they were tiny puppies.

Augie's pet parent, Karolina Chwistek, picked up Augie the Cavachon from a responsible licensed breeder in Massachusetts in January 2018 and brought the puppy home to New Jersey.

Puffin, a pup in the same litter, went home with Laura Green, who resides in Austin, Texas, around the same time.

It seemed like the littermates would never cross paths again until an Instagram post changed everything.

In November 2020, Chwistek posted a picture of Augie on his Instagram (@augiemichels) to celebrate the dog's birthday.

Courtesy Karolina Chwistek and Laura Green Canine siblings Augie and Puffin at their reunion in Austin

Not long after the post went up, Chwistek received a direct message from Green saying, "I've noticed our dogs look exactly the same, and now they have the same birthday," Chwistek tells PEOPLE.

Like Chwistek, Green started an Instagram account for her adorable pup Puffin. According to Chwistek, Green followed Augie's account for a while through Puffin's Instagram and noticed the similarities between the two dogs but didn't act on the feeling until Augie shared a birthday post on Puffin's birthday.

Related: Therapy Dog Attends Graduation at N.J. School After Becoming Students' 'Collective Best Friend' (Exclusive)

Augie and Puffin's owners started messaging about their pets' history and soon confirmed what they both expected: the dogs were siblings!

"Same mother, same litter, same birthday," Chwistek summarizes.

Courtesy Karolina Chwistek and Laura Green Augie preparing to fly to Texas to reunite with his canine sister

After learning about this adorable connection, Green and Chwistek knew they wanted their dogs to reunite so the pups could have quality sibling bonding time.

The opportunity for that meet-up arrived in June 2023, when Chwistek's husband had to travel to Austin for work. Chwistek and Augie decided to tag along on the trip and turn it into a dog reunion vacation.

Related: See All the Uniquely Adorable Winners from the 2023 Ugliest Dog Contest

Green and Puffin agreed to the plan, and on June 25, Augie and Puffin reunited at a dog-friendly coffee shop in Austin.

Chwistek said bringing the dogs together was like reuniting old friends. Both pups happily sat down side-by-side and posed for photos with giant smiles.

Courtesy Karolina Chwistek and Laura Green Augie and Puffin, sibling Cavachons, at their reunion in Austin

The meet-up allowed the dogs' owners to connect and discover how alike their pets are.

"We quickly found out that both sit down during walks if we don't go in the exact direction they want, and they will literally jump over puddles because they both hate to get their paws wet," Chwistek says of some of the pups' similarities.

"They have the same temperament. They are both sweet little pups with a bit of sass," she adds.

Courtesy Karolina Chwistek and Laura Green Augie the dog with his owner Karolina Chwistek and Puffin the Cavachon with her owner Laura Green

After spending a few hours together and "snapping a million photos," the dog siblings parted ways. The goodbye took a little longer than planned because the pups are "so similar looking that we had to check we had the right dog when we left," Chwistek shares.

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Now that they have found each other, Augie and Puffin don't plan to let years go by before they hang out again.

Chwistek and Green see this recent reunion as the first of many get-togethers. The dog owners hope they can find more of the dogs' siblings and have a full-blown family reunion in the future.

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Read the original article on People.
David Weiss, the U.S. attorney tasked with investigating Hunter Biden's tax filings, denied retaliating against an IRS whistleblower who claimed that Weiss was blocked from filing charges outside his home district.

The whistleblower, Gary Shapley, told the House Ways and Means Committee in May that Attorney General Merrick Garland was not telling Congress the truth when he asserted in earlier testimony that Weiss, who is based in Delaware, had the authority to file charges outside his home district, including in California and Washington, D.C.

Weiss, in a letter sent Friday to House Judiciary Committee Chairman Rep. Jim Jordan, R-Ohio, said that the Justice Department did not retaliate against any IRS official for making protected disclosures to Congress, and that he believes he could file charges outside his home district if the investigation leads in that direction.

In the letter, Weiss didn't directly address the claims that he was blocked from filing charges outside his home district, but insisted that he has been granted "ultimate authority" over the investigation into Hunter Biden, "including responsibility for deciding where, when and whether to file charges."

Weiss also said he has been assured that he could be granted the special authority needed to file charges in the District of Columbia, the Central District of California, or any other district where charges could be brought in this matter.

U.S. Attorney David C. Weiss at a press conference in New Castle, Del. (Saquan Stimpson / USA Today Network )

Weiss' letter served as a response to a letter Jordan sent to him the week before accusing Weiss of refusing to cooperate with the committee and calling his rationale for doing so "unpersuasive."

Weiss, in his letter, disputed Jordan's accusations, saying he is unable to provide documentation or answer any specific questions about Hunter Biden because the investigation is still ongoing.

Jordan's office did not immediately respond to a request for comment. A spokesperson for the U.S. Attorney's Office in the District of Delaware declined to comment.

Weiss also left open the possibility that he might be able to provide some form of testimony to the committee.

At the appropriate time, I welcome the opportunity to discuss these topics with the Committee in more detail, and answer questions related to the whistleblowers allegations consistent with the law and Department policy, Weiss wrote.
At least 30 people were injured, two fatally, when a mass shooting erupted early Sunday in Baltimore, turning what had been a festive neighborhood block party into what one witness described as a "war zone."

An 18-year-old girl was found dead at the scene from a gunshot wound and a 20-year-old man was taken to a hospital, where he died, authorities said. Three of the injured people were in critical condition, officials said.

The deceased victims were later identified by police by the Baltimore Police Department as Aaliyah Gonzales, 18, and Kylis Fagbemi, 20.

At a press conference held Sunday afternoon, Police Commissioner Richard Worley told reporters that all victims are gunshot victims. They range in age from 13 to 32, with around 14 victims under 18, police said.

PHOTO: Tables are left on their side in the area of a mass shooting incident in the Southern District of Baltimore, July 2, 2023. (Julio Cortez/AP)

Among the victims were girls aged 13, 14 and 15; 16-year-olds and 17-year-olds, as well as women aged 18, 19, 20, 23 and 32, police said.

Among the victims were boys aged 13 and 15; 16-year-olds and 17-year-olds, as well as men aged 18, 22 and 31, according to Baltimore police.

"It was a war zone. It was definitively a warzone, one witness, who only wanted to be identified by her initials L.N. because she feels unsafe in Baltimore, told ABC News.

The mass shooting unfolded around 12:30 a.m. in the Brooklyn Homes neighborhood in the southern district of the city. Worley said police officers rushed to the scene when numerous 911 callers reported shots being fired.

Worley said the barrage of gunfire broke out during a large block party at a housing development in the 800 block of Gretna Court. The event was not permitted, he later told the media.

PHOTO: Party debris is seen in the area of a mass shooting incident in the Southern District of Baltimore, July 2, 2023. (Julio Cortez/AP)

"When officers got here, we located multiple victims suffering from gunshot wounds," Worley said.

Worley said authorities are looking for multiple suspects.

At press time, no suspects had been arrested in the violence Baltimore Mayor Brandon Scott described as "a reckless, cowardly act."

"This morning, all of Baltimore is grieving the lives that were lost here, and our hearts are with those who are recovering as a result of this mass shooting," Scott said at a news conference near the crime scene. We will not stop until we find those cowards who decided to just shoot dozens of people, causing people to lose their lives."

PHOTO: Parishioners from Kingdom Life Church pray with residents after a mass shooting during a block party at the Brooklyn Homes neighborhood in Baltimore. Md., July 2, 2023. (Carol Guzy/Zuma Press)

Worley said investigators are combing through security video in an attempt to identify suspects. He said a motive also remains under investigation.

MORE: 7 shot, 2 trampled in shooting at nightclub in Kansas

Directing his comments to the assailants, Scott said, "I want those responsible to hear me clearly, we will not stop until we find you. And, we will find you."

BPD is on scene of a mass shooting incident in the 800 blk of Gretna Court in our Southern District. Acting Commissioner Worley and PIO are on scene. Media Staging Area will be located at the intersection of 6th Street and Audrey Avenue. pic.twitter.com/2JK5F09WMB  Baltimore Police (@BaltimorePolice) July 2, 2023

"Until then, I hope that with every single breath you take, you think about the lives that you took and you think about the lives that you impacted here tonight."

Both the mayor and Worley asked for the community's help in finding the perpetrators.

MORE: 'Father was killing everyone': 3 young brothers shot and killed, mother injured in shooting

"If you saw anything or know anything, please call 911," Worley said.

Scott added, "Treat this as if it were your family, how you would want to be treated if you were mourning, if this was your neighborhood, if this was an event in your community."

PHOTO: A reward is being offered for information leading to the shooters in the deaths of Kylis Fagbemi and Aaliyah Gonzalez, killed during a mass shooting incident at a block party in Baltimore, early July 2, 2023. (Baltimore Police Dept.)

The witness, L.N., told ABC News that she was leaving the annual "Brooklyn Day" neighborhood block party and as she was walking to her car, she heard what she immediately recognized as gunfire.

"I mean, it was it was loud," said L.N. "It was messy, all these people were running around the building running everywhere. It was just ... oh my god, all these young people running."

L.N. said two young women who had been shot approached her and asked for help. She said she put both shooting victims in her car and drove to MedStar Harbor Hospital, running red lights along the way. She said one of the wounded women in her car "kept screaming every time I hit a bump."

"I wanted them babies to be OK. They are babies. These are young people, very young people, that were out there," L.N. said.

Worley said nine people, including the young man who died, were taken to area hospitals by ambulance. Additionally, 20 other victims walked into hospital emergency rooms throughout the region seeking treatment for gunshot wounds, he said.

At Sunday afternoon's update, Worley said all but nine of the victims who went to area hospitals had been released, with a few remaining in critical condition.

"This is an extensive crime scene," Worley said. "Our detectives will be here quite a while."

PHOTO: Police is on the scene of a mass shooting incident at 800 block of Gretna Court in the Southern District, in Baltimore, on July 2, 2023. (Kyle Mazza/Associated Press)

Maryland Gov. Wes Moore released a statement Sunday, condemning "yet another mass shooting (to) strike our community where a celebratory gathering turned deadly."

"Maryland has had enough of watching gun violence continue to ravage our state and our nation," Moore said. "The fact that these horrific shootings continue to take place is abominable. We as a state will continue to do everything we can to prevent senseless acts of violence like the one we saw last night."

ABC News' Deena Zaru and Teddy Grant contributed to this report.

30 injured, 2 fatally, in Baltimore mass shooting: 'It was a war zone' originally appeared on abcnews.go.com
What is that? Neil Young asked toward the end of his solo-tour-opening show Friday night at the Ford amphitheater in the Hollywood hills, referring to a strange, seemingly distant but quite audible sound that occasionally punctuated his songs or commentary. Are you hearing that all night? This was not an audio hallucination; the fairly intimate crowd of 1,200 was privy to it, too, and some had been looking up earlier to see if it might be a mighty wind causing a whoosh in the scenically placed palm trees over the stage. It was not. Its One Direction! someone in the audience finally shouted  not quite getting it right, but on point in alluding to the source of the noise, intermittent crowd roars from a Louis Tomlinson concert at the Hollywood Bowl, just on the other side of the 101. How do you like my new band? Young finally quipped, before getting back to business, resigning himself to the stray sound effects.

These occasional faint outbursts werent too bothersome, truth be told, and did not go a very long way toward interrupting the magic unfolding inside the Bowls much tinier, 103-year-old cousin. If anything, maybe the fleeting ambient sounds served a small purpose in setting up a not-so-ironic contrast with what was happening here on the other side of the tracks, as it were. It was cross-canyon Opposite Day in nearly every regard, starting with a small audience that sat mostly in rapt silence (aside from the yahoo prone to shouting Keep goin, Neil!, as if Youngs laconic stage presence suggested someone in need of a pep talk). Then there was the subject matter, with Young favoring material that at least touches on the passing of time or feeling a touch of alienation from other generations or ones own. And then, finally, you had the whole gambit of this tour, in which Young made it clear in an online chat before tickets went on sale that this brief west coast solo run would have a setlist mostly of songs hed rarely or never played in concert before. We will know Louis Tomlinson has really made it if someday he sells out a tour on the promise of the non-hits, nothin but the non-hits.

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Young will upscale the tour a bit, once he finishes the four opening dates at the Ford (formerly known as the John Anson Ford Amphitheatre and, before that, the Pilgrimage, in the 1920s through 70s). He follows these dates with two nights at the Greek  one sold out, plus an added date with handfuls of tickets left  succeeded by shows in other parts of California and Washington, Oregon and Nevada. But the Ford was the place to be for many of his most die-hard devotees, for the radical small-scale-ness of it all, or for the chance to experience the setlist fresh and without spoilers, beyond a handful of picks that Young himself had already revealed in a chat. Maybe the biggest benefit of seeing the show at the Ford, though, probably unwittingly for most ticket-buyers, is getting the chance to feel like a fairie sprite who has just happened upon Neil Young in the woods. (Woods that have palm trees, yes, but close enough.) His candlelit setup  three pianos, a pump organ, acoustic and electric guitars, a painted stove, an operating model trainset and a lit-up LOVE sign  felt like a living room that had been dragged out into the redwoods, or as close to a semi-natural setting as urban Hollywood is going to provide.

Or, as Young put it in Prime of Life, one of the sets highlights, When I hold you in my arms, I forget whats out there. (Including stacked parking and mass shrieks a few hundred yards away.)

Young did lie about one thing, when he was setting expectations for the tour: He strongly implied that one song in particular would not be played. Id rather be doing these others songs I havent done, he told fans in his website chat. I wont have to compare how Im doing Heart of Gold to 1970, 1980, 1990, 2000, 2010, 2020 He did do Heart of Gold, actually, to wrap up the pre-encore portion of the show, but out of 17 songs, that was one of only three that anyone could count remotely as a hit, per se, the other two being Ohio and the Buffalo Springfields On the Way Home. (And even that last one barely dented any charts and hasnt usually been a staple of Young concerts, despite its classic-rock-firmament status.) Young did kind of make a point of allowing that Heart of Gold was a sop to audience expectations this time around. When he went into his first encore number afterward, Love Earth, a song from a 2022 album hed never done live before, he noted that it was unusual to bring up a song few would recognize for the climactic portion of a show  but indicated he felt hed earned it, pointing out hed just played my biggest hit of all time.

Things may feel different in the larger confines of the L.A. and Berkeley Greeks, Vina Robles Amphitheatre, Lake Tahoe Outdoor Arena, etc., but at the Ford, no justifications for the obscure stuff were really needed, for fans dedicated enough to have obtained tickets to his first full show in four years by any means necessary.

Heart of Gold happened to fit in with the time-shifting lyrical and musical tenor, anyway, of a set in which only CSNYs topical Ohio really felt a little like the odd-song-out. (If you think this is actually a complaint that Ohio got played, save your calls, letters and @s.) The point is that, even without throwing in Old Man, Young has always liked to portray himself as a man out of time, or out of the generational space-time continuum, way older than his years back when he was on Sugar Mountain and maybe younger than that now. He has rarely gotten so specific with his lyrics, at length, that you could say very many of his songs are flagrant anthems for a boomer generation. But the setlist for this tour sure includes a lot of songs that live up to the promise he made in his online chat about doing songs that apply to my life right now, and apply to everyones lives in this era that were in, even though some of them were written 10, 20, 30, 40 years ago, but never really played live.

People my age, they dont do the things I do / They go somewhere while I run away with you, Young sang in the opening Im the Ocean  a song recorded and released with Pearl Jam 28 years ago, when he was both acknowledging his generation and setting himself apart from it. In the end, he used that tune to compare himself with the sea itself (does it get any more timeless than that?)  but also a Cutlass Supreme (does it get any less timeless than that?), in the wrong lane, trying to turn against the flow. In My Heart, a song from 1994s Sleeps With Angels that Young was somehow performing live at the Ford for the very first time, he offered, I gotta get somewhere, its not too late, with an urgency that felt quaint, now that the not too late is 29 years later. Singing When I Hold You in My Arms, a song that he hasnt performed since before it came out in 2002, he revived the lines The older generation, they got somethin to say / But they better say it fast or get outta the way  only it sounded (someone check me on this) like he substituted younger for older. If that was so, maybe he meant to say that even Gen X and millennials stand in danger of being old and in the way. One truly rare number, Homefires, recorded and performed live in the early 80s but not released on record until the recent Archives Vol. 2, had Young singing, Im not the same man I was a while ago / Ive learned some new things, I hope that it shows. Afterward, he talked cryptically about checking out some of these songs in preparation for the tour and said, I dont know if Ill ever be the same. Neil, youre still the same! shouted someone in the audience. I hardly recognize myself, he answered back, ambiguous as to whether that might be a bad thing or a good one.

Young has always walked a line between valuing the Old Ways (he did name an album that) and resisting the fogeydom of some of his contemporaries. Days That Used to Be could have been the mascot song of this setlist, as it had him singing, I wish that I could talk to you, and you could talk to me / Cause theres very few of us left, my friend, from the days that used to be. Mind you, this was a song he released on Ragged Glory back in 1990, when he still had a lot more career in front of him than behind him. If he thought there werent many soul survivors around 33 years ago, how does he feel about it now?

That may remain a bit of a mystery, as Young spent a lot of time in the show talking about specific instruments that have been a part of his life, and none talking about specific people. This was part of the shows charm, of course  hes so little prone to obvious sentiment that you take it where you get it from him. He sat down at a nine-foot Steinway he said he bought for $1,500 when he left L.A. 50 years ago, talking about how he didnt realize till later that it had been in a fire and if you reach down and touch it (inside), your hand turns black. Ash-incrusted or not, its a pretty good piano. Was he done talking about the bargains in his life? Hardly! Sitting down at a pump organ for Mother Earth (Natural Anthem) was cause to consider that I love playing that song on that thing. I got it in a drug store on Main Street in Redwood City for about 800 bucks. Im a good shopper. He even reminisced about buying a flute for $2.49 at a drug store while walking outside the studio while recording Sleeps With Angels, though said cheapie appeared neither on the album or in this show. As for another piano he sometimes used on stage, I rented it in Hollywood in 68 Its great to see it  and its great to see you, he added. Our hearts may have fluttered a bit, there in the Ford, knowing he was holding us in the same regard as one of his prized vintage keyboards.

It wasnt immediately clear, on opening night, whether the setlist was as set in stone as the canyon walls at the rear of the stage. There was definitely puttering happening during the show, as he moved between instruments, or decided which harmonica to use, warning that the results could be and have been fatal when he chose the wrong one. If youre in a hurry, I feel sorry for you, he remarked during one lull between songs. At another point, he muttered, Oh my God. Shit, as he tried to get his bearings for the next tune, getting a big laugh. He did not want the audience to think that anything about the show was random, though, or that requests would be taken. I have a list, you know. Its very organized. I dont know if you can tell that Im very organized, he assured the 1,200. But there was at least a chance of malleability in the set, evident when Young asked the crowd whether they would rather hear Mr. Soul or Mother Earth. With nearly everyone inevitably shouting for the far better-known Mr. Soul, Neil being Neil, he proceeded to play the other choice. (Thank goodness he did, as it afforded the opportunity to hear him play that gorgeous pump organ  something weve seen him have on stage and then not go near, in years past.) Fans who went Saturday night got to see him switch out two of the 17 numbers  Mr. Soul indeed made an appearance instead of the alternative, and Throw Your Hatred Down subbed for Song X on night 2.

If there were any murmurs, it wasnt about the deep-tracks content of the show, but its length, with the set clocking in on opening night at 85 minutes. That can seem slender in comparison to classic rock figures like Bruce Springsteen, Paul McCartney and Elvis Costello whove trained boomers to expect career-encompassing shows clocking in at two-and-a-half to three-plus hours. But if you werent counting things on a dollars-per-minute basis, this felt just right, for what it was designed to be  not the deepest catalog dive ever, but a swim through mostly neglected tunes that speak directly to where Young feels hes at now. Anyone who missed the memo and came to hear Powderfinger may not agree  nor may the fans whod like to get all the obscurities from Archives Vol. II in their 10-disc entirety. But the concentrated selectivity of this limited-edition tour feels like a feature, not a flaw.

Lets hope he gets to a Crazy Horse tour, eventually, too, the way hed planned to before the pandemic kicked in. (You can read our review of one of the few tryout shows he did with that reconstituted band in 2018 here.) But when he does resume full-band touring, with whatever lineup that turns out to be, many of us who are seeing these solo shows will be feeling wistful for the time we got alone with Young.

Or almost alone; Bob Rice, the guy who brought him his guitars, did a bit of playing on two songs, contributing minimal vibraphone on My Heart and sitting in as a second pianist on When I Hold You in My Arms. The latter allowed Young to sit at that Steinway for most of the song but bring up the electric guitar he had at his side for a couple of gentle solos, on a night that was otherwise far from being about guitar heroics. Pump-organ hero? Yes, definitely. And also a more lyrical pianist than he might always be given credit for, when it came to A Dream That Can Last, by far the most prettily ornate song of the night.

Ending with Four Strong Winds, a song by fellow Canuck Ian Tyson, who died this past December, by way of Comes a Time, Young acknowledged the fragility of this whole artist-fandom relationship: If the good times are all gone, and Im bound for moving on / Ill look for you if Im ever back this way. We could hope he ever does come back to the Ford  or, as he warmly and jestingly referred to it, the Podunk Coliseum. Louis Tomlinson should be so lucky as to ever play it.

Neil Youngs Night 1 setlist:

Im the Ocean

Homefires

Burned (Buffalo Springfield song)

On the Way Home (Buffalo Springfield song)

If You Got Love

My Heart

A Dream That Can Last

Song X

Prime of Life

When I Hold You in My Arms

Mother Earth (Natural Anthem)

Ohio

Days That Used to Be

Dont Forget Love

Heart of Gold

Encore:

Love Earth

Four Strong Winds (Ian & Sylvia song)

Youngs full west coast solo tour:

Friday, June 30  Los Angeles, CA  The Ford

Saturday, July 1  Los Angeles, CA  The Ford

Monday, July 3  Los Angeles, CA  The Ford

Wednesday, July 5  Los Angeles, CA  The Ford

Friday, July 7  Santa Barbara, CA  Santa Barbara Bowl

Saturday July 8  Paso Robles, CA  Vina Robles Amphitheatre

Mon, July 10  Los Angeles, CA  The Greek Theatre

Tuesday, July 11  San Diego, CA  The Shell

Thursday July 13  Los Angeles, CA  The Greek Theatre

Saturday, July 15  Berkeley, CA  The Greek

Monday, July 17  Bend, OR  Hayden Homes Amphitheater

Tuesday July 18  Ridgefield, WA  RV Inn Style Resorts Amphitheater

Thursday July 20  Auburn, WA  White River Amphitheatre

Sunday July 23  Napa, CA  Oxbow RiverStage

Monday July 24  Lake Tahoe, NV  Outdoor Arena at Harveys

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CHICAGO (AP)  More than a year after 11-year-old Mayah Zamora was airlifted out of Uvalde, Texas, where she was critically injured in the Robb Elementary school shooting that killed 19 children and two teachers, the family is still reeling.

Knocks on the door startle Mayah into a panic. The family is skipping Fourth of July celebrations to avoid booming fireworks. An outing to the Little Mermaid movie requires noise-canceling headphones.

Since 2016, thousands of Americans have been wounded in mass shootings, and tens of thousands by gun violence, with that number continuing to grow, according to the Gun Violence Archive. Beyond the colossal medical bills and the weight of trauma and grief, mass shooting survivors and family members contend with scores of other changes that upend their lives.

Survivors talked to The Associated Press about the mental and physical wounds that endure in the aftermath of shootings in Uvalde; Las Vegas; Colorado Springs, Colorado; and the Chicago suburb of Highland Park, Illinois, during a Fourth of July parade last year.

They describe staggering medical bills that in Mayahs case top $1 million, abandoning a dream career after 20 years, uprooting families and struggling to hold down a job, walk pets or even leave the house.

UVALDE

Mayah suffered wounds to her chest, back, both hands, face and ear, and needed so many surgeries her parents said they stopped counting. The family relocated to San Antonio, where Mayah spent 66 days in the hospital and still needs care.

Her hospital bill is insane, said Mayahs mother, Christina Zamora. It reaches close to $1,000,000, maybe over, not including rehabilitation, follow-up visits and counseling.

A year later, Christina and Mayah's father, Ruben, said they don't know what bills will be covered by insurance and how much they will need to pay. When Mayah was discharged, they realized one parent needed to stay home to care for her.

Christina quit her job. Facing daunting bills with one income instead of two is scary, she said. The relocation also has separated the family: Ruben works seven days on, seven off in Uvalde. The couples oldest son, Ruben Jr., stayed in Uvalde to attend college and work. Zach, 12, misses him. He misses our old normal life.

Mayah is terrified to return to Uvalde.

Its heartbreaking when your little one cant enjoy the things that she did before, and all these other kids are able to do, the elder Ruben said. It tears you up.

COLORADO SPRINGS

Ashtin Gamblin was working the front door at Club Q in Colorado Springs on Nov. 19 when a person armed with a semiautomatic rifle shot and killed five people and injured 17 more, including Gamblin.

I was shot nine times. Five to my left arm. Twice to my right arm. Twice to my left breast. Both of my humerus were shattered. So two broken arms, the 30-year-old said. Six months later, my right arm is still fractured. My left hand, were still working on function.

Tasks that were once simple, such as walking her dogs, are now challenging and the loss of autonomy has been difficult, Gamblin said.

She has battled with health insurance, the hospital and workers compensation officials to figure out who would foot the $300,000 medical bill.

Gamblin also no longer felt safe in her apartment, where she could sometimes hear gunshots outside. She bought a house in a quieter neighborhood: a house I wasnt prepared to buy, she said. I bought a $380,000 safe space.

She lists other unexpected post-shooting costs: a flooded basement, a service animal, a new car to get to doctors appointments.

Half a year later she is not mentally recovered enough to return to work.

I just cant be there I dont feel safe going to the grocery store. I dont feel safe being in public, she said. I have no idea what Im doing with my life currently.

So far in 2023, nearly 400 people in the U.S. have been wounded in mass shootings, according to the Gun Violence Archive. And 140 people have died in mass killings this year, which is on track to surpass 2019, the deadliest year on record for mass killings since 2006, according to a database maintained by The Associated Press and USA Today in a partnership with Northeastern University.

There is a lot of focus on the people that are killed. And Im grateful for that. Those are my friends and they deserved all of the attention and more, Gamblin said. The downfall is the rest of us are still suffering.

LAS VEGAS

Tia Christiansen had worked in the music industry for more than 20 years when a gunman unleashed the deadliest mass shooting in modern U.S. history at a Las Vegas music festival she helped organize in October 2017.

The shooter rained gunfire from the windows of a high-rise casino hotel into an outdoor concert crowd, killing 58 people and injuring more than 850.

Christiansen was scheduled to be at the festival that day. But she felt ill and stayed in her room, two doors down from where the gunman fired.

The room was shaking. It was incredibly loud. There was actually a moment when the gunfire was so loud that I literally instinctively ducked and put my hands over my head because I thought that the walls or the ceiling would come crumbling down, Christiansen said. I completely reconciled my life and thought, Am I ready to die?

She was physically unscathed. But her life turned upside down. After the shooting, she worked a few more festivals, until she had a complete, total breakdown on site crying.

What I came to understand about myself in that moment was, I dont know if I can do this anymore, she said.

At concerts, Christiansen no longer focused on fans' joy, instead fixating on emergency exits and whether people could get to safety. She has since given up her career in the music industry, letting go of her dreams.

Her lingering PTSD and need to control her environment also has affected Christiansens relationships with her friends and family.

My personality changes. I get very short tempered, and I get very judgmental. Im quick to be snippy, she said. That is heavy energy to be around.

Christiansen, who is based in South Deerfield, Massachusetts, turned to spending. She bought a new bed to try to find more comfort and relied on delivered meals to avoid leaving her home.

The financial aspect of it is crushing, absolutely crushing, she said. I dont know how many years its gonna take to pay that off.

Now Christiansen is part of a mentorship program for the Everytown Survivors Network, which connects thousands of gun violence survivors to resources and aims to end gun violence.

The trauma doesnt go away, she said. Even if youre not wounded in the moment, there is injury.

HIGHLAND PARK

Leah Sundheim, 29, was a night manager at a hotel in Las Vegas when she got the worst phone call you can ever receive.

Her mother, Jacquelyn Sundheim, had been killed at a shooting during Highland Parks 2022 Fourth of July parade, along with six other people.

That flight home broke me, Sundheim said.

She then moved back to Highland Park to be close to her father.

I couldnt be away from my family, Sundheim said. I cant do another flight like that ever.

Mass shootings cause a variety of trauma, she said. Her experience is different from that of her aunt and cousins, who were sitting next to Jacquelyn Sundheim when she died.

They have the visual and sound of watching her be murdered, and my dad has the trauma of receiving the phone call and then subsequent hours trying to get to her body. My trauma is waking up to my phone ringing and hearing that my mom was killed, she said.

Whichever type of trauma survivors experience, she said, it shatters the sense of security that you have in the world.

___

Savage 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.
(Reuters) -Australia's Kuniko said on Monday it had signed an offtake and equity investment agreement with automaker Stellantis to support the development of its Norwegian battery metals projects.

Stellantis would invest 5 million euros ($5.45 million) at an issue price of A$0.467 per share in the battery metals miner in return for a near 20% stake, Kuniko said.

Kuniko shares rose as much as 58.1% to A$0.680, their highest level since Oct. 31.

Under the deal, announced by Stellantis on Friday, the carmaker will also get 35% of the nickel sulphate and cobalt sulphate produced from Kuniko's Norway exploration projects for nine years.

The funds from the Stellantis' equity investment will be used to advance Kuniko's brownfield and greenfield battery metals exploration projects in Norway, the company said.

($1 = 0.9168 euros)

(Reporting by Himanshi Akhand and Rishav Chatterjee in Bengaluru; Editing by Rashmi Aich and Krishna Chandra Eluri)
Chinese herbal medicine finds common ground in Africa

Xinhua) 13:07, July 03, 2023

CHANGSHA, July 1 (Xinhua) -- Traditional Chinese Medicine (TCM) has emerged as a focal point of China-Africa cooperation during the ongoing third China-Africa Economic and Trade Expo in Changsha, the capital of central China's Hunan Province.

During the expo, representatives from Nigeria signed a TCM service project with Shijiazhuang Yiling Pharmaceutical Co., Ltd., a prominent company specializing in TCM. The company is renowned for producing the widely recognized Lianhua Qingwen capsule, which gained recognition as an important Chinese medicine in the fight against COVID-19.

Explaining the significance of the deal, Sun Xuefei, general manager of the company's international trade center, said that four of the company's TCM products, including Lianhua Qingwen, which have been officially registered in Africa, will not only be available for sale through pharmacies in Nigeria but will also be used in Nigerian hospitals.

The company has registered its TCM products in eight African countries including Zimbabwe and Kenya.

For the first time in the expo's history, a forum on cooperation in the field of TCM was held. First launched in 2019, the expo has become a major platform for strengthening economic and trade cooperation between China and African countries.

Speaking at the forum, Huang Luqi, deputy director of the National Administration of Traditional Chinese Medicine, said that through cooperation with relevant African institutions, China has established overseas TCM centers in African countries such as Morocco, Zimbabwe and Mauritius.

During an interview with Xinhua, Martin Chedondo, the ambassador of Zimbabwe to China, said that Zimbabwe's trade delegation to the expo hopes to explore opportunities to bring home herbal planting, processing, and laboratory testing technologies in order to establish a whole TCM industry chain and attract local companies into the industry.

"In China, I've seen huge fields of herbal plants. We really want something like that in Zimbabwe," the ambassador said.

Zhu Wei, the head of the 19th Chinese Medical Team to Zimbabwe, who just completed a one-year mission and returned to his home in Changsha in March, met a lot of African friends at the expo.

"The expo has witnessed the presence of numerous African dignitaries and entrepreneurs, who have shown great interest in Chinese medicine and acupuncture," said Zhu, who is also the deputy director of the acupuncture and massage rehabilitation department of the Hunan Provincial Hospital of Integrated Traditional Chinese and Western Medicine.

According to Zhu, Africa boasts resources of high-quality medicinal herbs, and there is a great need for further cooperation and exchanges between China and Africa in various fields of traditional medicine, including trade, cultivation, research and development.

Zhu said that during his time in Zimbabwe, his team undertook the TCM training program for local talents, and saw the graduation of the first batch of traditional Chinese medicine and acupuncture personnel last year.

Onyebuchi Chiamaka Henrietta, a Nigerian graduate student at the Central South University in Changsha, volunteered to promote specialties at the Nigerian booth at the expo.

"In Nigeria, we use dried ginger in very similar ways to China. You can boil it in water to drink for treating minor illnesses, or stew meat with it," she said fluently in both Chinese and English, as visitors gathered around a display of various agricultural specialties, including dried ginger, cashew nuts and sesame seeds.

Diarra Boubacar, vice president of the Federation of China-Africa Friendship Association, has been promoting exchanges between TCM and African traditional medicine for many years.

Boubacar, who hails from the Republic of Mali in West Africa, came to China to study TCM in 1984. He obtained a doctorate in Chinese medicine from the Chengdu University of TCM in 1997.

He told Xinhua that he is working on a book with the theme of mutual learning between Chinese and African herbal medicines. He tries to collect and analyze information on the similarities and differences in the use and efficacy of herbal medicines, such as Albizzia julibrissin, which are used in both Chinese traditional medicine and African traditional medicine.

Themed "Common Development for a Shared Future," the four-day expo opened on Thursday and will be attended by representatives from 53 African countries and multiple international organizations.

The number of exhibitors has reached 1,500, up 70 percent from the previous expo. A myriad of African products, ranging from Kenyan roses to Egyptian fragrances, is on display, with traders utilizing the expo to explore the vast Chinese market.

(Web editor: Zhang Kaiwei, Liang Jun)
(Photo : Mark Wilson/Getty Images)

United States President Joe Biden is set to go on an intertional trip where would meet with King Charles and British Prime Minister Rishi Sunak on his way to this year's NATO summit.

United States President Joe Biden will set out for an international trip from July 9 to July 13, where he will meet King Charles and British Prime Minister Rishi Sunak ahead of a scheduled NATO summit.

On Sunday, the White House said that the Democratic leader's later trip to Europe would include meetings in Britain, Lithuania, and Finland. Biden will start in London for meetings with the monarchy and the British prime minister.

Joe Biden To Meet King Charles, PM Rishi Sunak

While there, Biden is said to discuss ways to "further strengthen the close relationship between" the two nations. Afterward, the Democrat will continue to Vilnius for a scheduled summit of NATO leaders that will be held on July 11 and July 12. Many expect Russia's ongoing invasion of Ukraine will be a focus of the talks.

Afterward, the United States president will travel to Helsinki, Finland, on July 13 to meet with Nordic leaders to discuss various international issues at hand, as per Reuters.

The meeting with King Charles would be the first of its kind made by a United States president since the former's Coronation was held in May. Buckingham Palace confirmed that the monarchy would meet with the Democratic leader at Windsor Castle on Monday.

Despite Biden not being able to attend King Charles' Coronation, his wife, First Lady Jill Biden, and his granddaughter were able to make the trip. The Bidens were also at Queen Elizabeth's funeral, which was held at Westminster Abbey in September. They then attended a reception hosted by the King for world leaders on the eve of the funeral.

Biden's scheduled visit also follows Sunak's two-day trip to Washington in June, where the two international leaders talked about Ukraine, a post-Brexit economy, and the advantages and disadvantages of Artificial Intelligence in the current generation.

Downing Street also said that the Democratic leader's trip would reflect the strong relationship between the two nations. According to BBC, a No 10 spokesperson added that Prime Minister Sunak was looking forward to Biden's visit to the UK.

Read Also: Pence Meets Zelensky During a Surprise Visit to Ukraine, Setting Himself Apart From GOP

International Trip En Route to NATO Summit

The statement added that officials would set out further detail regarding the meeting at a future date. Biden also stopped in Belfast earlier this year to mark the 25th anniversary of the Good Friday Agreement, where he briefly met with Sunak.

Biden's short trip follows an announcement by the US and the UK regarding a new partnership, known as the "Atlantic Declaration," that seeks to bolster economic security. The partnership, announced during Sunak's visit to Washington, includes commitments to easing trade barriers, closer defense industry ties, and a data protection deal.

In May, the Democratic president claimed he visited Northern Ireland to ensure that "Brits didn't screw around." It happened during a time when American lawmakers were concerned about the impact of Brexit on the peace process.

During his trip, the US president told the Irish Parliament that he believed the UK should be working more closely with the administration in Dublin to support Northern Ireland, said Sky News.

Related Article: Poland Strengthens Belarus Border After Wagner Chief's Arrival

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By Brendan O'Brien and Gabriella Borter

(Reuters) - A shooting at a holiday block party in Baltimore over the weekend that left two people dead and 28 injured highlights a sustained surge in mass shootings in the United States since the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020.

As of Monday, 340 mass shootings have taken place across the country so far this year. At that pace, the United States will experience 679 mass shootings in 2023, the second most in a calendar year since 2014, according to the Gun Violence Archive.

In 2019, the year before the pandemic caused far-reaching changes in the way Americans work, play and interact with one another, the number of mass shootings reached 417, or about 61% fewer than the projected total for 2023.

Just after midnight on Sunday, gunfire erupted at the scene of an outdoor neighborhood block party in South Baltimore's Brooklyn Homes community. Fifteen of the injured victims were between the ages of 13 and 17, and the rest were over 17, Baltimore's acting police commissioner Richard Worley told reporters on Monday. The two people killed were 18 and 20.

Seven people were still hospitalized on Monday, four of whom were in critical condition, officials said. Investigators have asked for the public's help in tracking down multiple suspects. Police said they were concerned about retaliation for the shootings.

The rise in mass shootings over the last three years is partly due to the impact the pandemic has had on Americans, according to James Alan Fox, a criminologist at Northeastern University.

"Lots of people are struggling, financially and emotionally, from the pandemic," Fox said, adding that gun sales have increased since the beginning of COVID-19. "Then you also have the tremendous divisions now and polarization in our country."

Gun ownership, guaranteed under the second amendment of the Constitution, is widespread in the United States, and it is a contentious political issue that heats up after particularly shocking shootings such the one that took place in Baltimore.

MAYOR CALLS FOR MORE GUN CONTROL

"This is the United States of America. This is our longest standing public health challenge," Baltimore Mayor Brandon Scott said at a Monday news conference, urging more gun control at the national level.

"We pride ourselves on being the leaders of the free world, but we cannot seem to get to a point where we're going to have the lives of American citizens meaning more than American citizens' ability to have guns," he said.

At the pace of the first half of this year, mass shootings over the 2023 calendar year would reach 679 or about double the 336 recorded in 2018. That would mark the second highest annual total over the last nine years, behind only the 690 recorded in 2021, according to data collected by the nonprofit group that tracks shootings.

The past weekend alone saw five other mass shootings, including one that wounded eight at a Wichita, Kansas, nightclub early on Sunday, according to the Gun Violence Archive, which defines a mass shooting as any in which four or more people are wounded or killed, not including the shooter.

Among the deadliest mass shootings in 2023 was an attack in a Monterey Park, California, ballroom that left 11 people dead on Jan. 21 and another in Allen, Texas, where eight people were killed at a mall on May 6.

The definition of a mass shooting differs among organizations and media outlets that track gun violence.

For example, the online database Mass Shooting Tracker defines a mass shooting as any in which four or more are shot, including the shooter or shooters. The FBI defines a mass shooting as one in which at least four people are murdered with a gun.

(Reporting by Brendan O'Brien and Gabriella Borter; editing by Grant McCool)
Worries from U.S. voters that President Biden is too old to serve another four-year term as president are increasingly looking like the biggest challenge the president faces in winning reelection next year.

Biden, at the age of 80, is already the oldest person to serve as president, and he would be 86 at the end of his second term.

The longevity would beat any other president who served by a large margin. Former President Reagan finished his second term at 77, while former President Trump  who is the favorite to win the GOP presidential nomination  ended his first term at 74.

Biden has some work to do to convince voters he has the mental and physical capacity to run for reelection.

A whopping 68 percent of voters in a recent NBC News poll said they worry about Bidens health with 55 percent reflecting major concerns.

In a USA Today/Suffolk University poll of Democrats and Independents, 37 percent say the presidents age made them less likely to vote for him. A third poll from The Economist-YouGov found that 45 percent of independents say Bidens health and age severely limit his ability to do the job.

The presidents age is certainly going to be a headwind on his reelection campaign. The polling says so, and the examples will certainly keep coming as he is in the public eye, said Stewart Verdery, who served in former President George W. Bushs administration.

But Verdery, the CEO of Monument Advocacy, said Bidens age might not be as much of an issue in a general election against Trump, who is 77 years old.

If he were likely running against a modern JFK on a sailboat, it might be more of an issue. But as long as his main foil is in Mar-a-Lago, the presidents age may cause swing voters to pause before they still pull the lever for him, he said.

The White House this week pushed back on questions about Bidens health.

The president  shoot, he traveled yesterday, hes traveling again today. You saw how extensively he traveled during the midterms. And especially his foreign travel, this is someone who is incredibly active as president, press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre said Thursday.

Biden increasingly has been self-deprecating about his age, joking he is 198, 103 or 110 in recent speeches.

Hes acknowledging his age is an issue for some voters, and he has reportedly sought the counsel of Hollywood mogul Jeffrey Katzenberg, who is encouraging him to own his longevity like Harrison Ford and Mick Jagger.

By the way, Ive been doing this a long time. I know I dont look that old. I know. Im a little under 103, Biden said in recent remarks. But all kidding aside  I was a pretty powerful senator.

Still, the 80-year-old presidents age is also now something that carries over into everything he does, putting a physical or verbal stumble under a different kind of microscope.

When he tripped and fell at an event earlier this summer, there were worries about his health. To his political foes, it was evidence of his fragile state, even if a younger man might also have tripped.

On Monday night and Tuesday, Biden, who has a long history of misstatements, twice confused Ukraine for Iraq.

Opponents seize on these mistakes as evidence that Biden has lost a step and should not be running for a second term.

Republican presidential candidate Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, in an interview with Fox News this week, said he thinks California Gov. Gavin Newsom (D) is maneuvering in the background, and it would be interesting to see how things play out if Biden doesnt ultimately make it.

They would have a real clown show if Biden wasnt able to make it, he added. His comments echo fellow Republican presidential candidate Nikki Haley, who said in April that Biden is unlikely to make it to 86.

Some political analysts think the GOP is playing with fire in going after Bidens age, even if it is an issue for some voters. They say it risks angering older voters.

You can point it out, but you dont want to lean in too heavily here, said GOP strategist Doug Heye. Tone is important here. You can talk about mistakes that hes made and so forth. But if youre over the top, you [risk] a backlash, especially with senior voters.

The Hill Elections 2024 coverage

Jim Kessler, executive vice president for policy for the Democratic think tank Third Way, said the best thing for the White House to do is focus on the presidents accomplishments.

They can make a counterargument, which is that his experience has made the difference. And if you looked at what hes accomplished in the last two and a half years, its close to a biblical miracle, he said. Like, no one thought the number of bipartisan bills passed the last Congress was possible. And it happened. He outfoxed Vladimir Putin.

The White House this week confirmed Biden began using a CPAP machine in recent weeks to improve his sleep quality after reporters noticed lines visible on his face.

While Trump is nearing 80, Republicans argue his apparent energy gives him an advantage over Biden.

Heye said voters will ultimately get to compare the two if they win their parties nominations and debate.

Democrats are brushing off the verbal gaffes, noting they took place with Biden was younger, too.

President Bidens age has been an issue since before the 2020 election, and hes been notorious for making gaffes most of his political career. Theres really not much new here, one Biden ally said.

Biden faces other challenges, including the economy and son Hunter Bidens legal problems, which have drawn GOP scrutiny. These are also factors in his lower approval ratings which have lingered around 40 percent.

Still, many see age as an issue where Biden will once again have to prove something to the electorate.

The No. 1 thing I hear about Biden, and it doesnt matter where I am, is his age. And thats true of people who like them. Thats true people who dont like him, Heye said. So hes got a real problem there.

For the latest news, weather, sports, and streaming video, head to The Hill.
BEIJING (Reuters) - China, Japan and South Korea need to send a clear signal of regrouping towards co-operation, and resist "the coercion of bullying and domination", China's top diplomat, Wang Yi, said on Monday, in an apparent swipe at the United States.

The remarks come at a time of heightened tension as the United States moves to forge closer ties with allies Japan and South Korea to push back against China's growing regional influence.

Wang was speaking on efforts to revitalise co-operation among the three neighbours at a forum organised by the Trilateral Cooperation Secretariat, a body set up by agreement among Beijing, Seoul and Tokyo.

He called for them to "foster a sense of strategic autonomy, maintain regional unity and stability, resist the return of the Cold War mentality, and be free from the coercion of bullying and domination," the Chinese foreign ministry said.

Although Wang stopped short of mentioning the United States, he said "certain major countries outside the region" had attempted to replace unity with division while seeking geographical gains, the ministry said in a statement.

"If this trend is allowed to develop, it will not only seriously interfere with the smooth progress of trilateral co-operation, but also increase tension and confrontation in the region," Wang added.

Wang emphasised the need to solve disputes through dialogue and consultation, and oppose words or deeds that could plunge the region into war.

At the event in the eastern coastal city of Qingdao, Wang also called for accelerating talks on free trade zones and efforts to free up and smoothe trade among the neighbours.

However, Wang reiterated Beijing's opposition to Japan's plan to release into the sea treated water from Tokyo Electric Power Co's Fukushima nuclear plant, saying it would affect the marine ecosystem and people's safety.

South Korean Foreign Minister Park Jin and Japanese Foreign Minister Hayashi Yoshimasa addressed the event via video link.

(Reporting by Ethan Wang and Ryan Woo; Editing by Clarence Fernandez)
TBILISI, Georgia (AP)  Georgia's imprisoned former president Mikheil Saakashvili appeared severely emaciated on Monday in videolink testimony to a court considering an abuse-of-power case against him.

Saakashvili and his supporters claim he has been poisoned while imprisoned and that he now weighs about 60 kilograms (132 pounds), half of what he weighed when he was arrested in October 2021.

From a private clinic where he was being held, he told the court that despite his poor health, he was spiritually fit and determined to serve the country," according to local news site Agenda.

Saakashvili, who served as Georgias president in 2004-13 and led the so-called Rose Revolution protests that drove the previous president out of office, left for Ukraine after the end of his second term. He was later convicted in absentia of abuse of power and sentenced to six years in prison.

He was arrested in October 2021 after returning to Georgia to try to bolster opposition forces before nationwide municipal elections.

He is now on trial on charges connected to the violent dispersal of an opposition rally in 2007.

Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy on Monday called for Georgia to send Saakashvili to Ukraine for medical treatment and said the Georgian ambassador would be called to the foreign ministry and encouraged to leave Ukraine within two days for consultations with his government.

Saakashvili holds Ukrainian citizenship and was governor of the Odesa region in 2015-16.
BEIJING (AP)  The European Unions climate chief on Monday expressed concern over the expansion of Chinas coal industry, with the building of new coal-fired plants.

At a conference in Beijing, Frans Timmermans said that while China is forging ahead with plans to expand its use of renewable resources such as wind and solar energy, the country has also been constructing an ever-growing number of coal-fired plants in the past few years.

And that seems to be in a contradiction and it is in contradiction, said Timmermans. But at the same time, I do understand the anxiety caused by potential blackouts.

China is the worlds biggest and fastest-growing producer of renewable energy. It aims to turn one-third of its total power supply renewable by 2025.

As more cities are experiencing sweltering temperatures this summer, the country may face power shortages and challenges to electricity grids, similar to what happened last year. At the same time, water shortages have led to reductions in hydropower generation.

Chinas climate envoy Xie Zhenhua attended the conference and presented a commemorative plate to Timmermans, who is on a two-day visit to China for the EU-China High-level Environment and Climate Dialogue.

Official plans called for boosting coal production capacity by 300 million tons last year, at least the third consecutive year of growth.

Although China is one of the biggest investors in wind and solar, anxious leaders called for more coal-fired power after economic growth plunged and shortages caused blackouts and factory shutdowns. Russias attack on Ukraine added to the anxiety that foreign oil and coal supplies might be disrupted.

China is the top producer and consumer of coal. Global trends hinge on what Beijing does.

The Communist Party has rejected binding emissions commitments, citing its economic development needs. Beijing has avoided joining governments that promised to phase out the use of coal-fired power.

China has said carbon emissions will peak by 2030 and the country will become carbon neutral by 2060 by planting trees and through other offsets.

Some European and American officials have called on China to adopt more ambitious targets. China accounts for 26.1% of global emissions, more than double the U.S. share of 12.8%.
By Sam Nussey

TOKYO (Reuters) -The European Union (EU) will deepen cooperation with Japan on semiconductors, industry chief Thierry Breton said on Monday, as countries move to strengthen control over a technology vital for the defence, electronic and automotive sectors.

The EU and Japan will work together to monitor the chip supply chain and facilitate the exchange of researchers and engineers, Breton said. The EU will also be supportive of Japanese semiconductor companies considering operating within the bloc.

"We believe that it's extremely important to secure the supply chain of semiconductors," Breton told Reuters in Tokyo, where he is discussing cooperation on chips and artificial intelligence with the government and companies.

Japan is offering subsidies to revitalise its chip industry, which retains an edge in materials and equipment but has lost overall global market share, while a Japanese government-backed fund last week agreed to buy photoresist maker JSR Corp for $6.4 billion to drive consolidation in the industry.

Japan is also backing chip foundry venture Rapidus, whose executives are scheduled to meet Breton on Tuesday.

"I think it's really an important initiative and going in the right direction," he said of the foundry venture.

Plans by Rapidus to produce cutting edge chips rely on support from Belgium-based research company imec and IBM.

The deepening cooperation between the EU and Japan comes as the bloc has pledged to reduce its dependence on China, which aims to increase its capabilities in high-end technology such as chips.

"We made it very clear we just want to de-risk," Breton said.

Breton also met with Japan's Minister for Digital Affairs Taro Kono, Minister of Internal Affairs and Communications Takeaki Matsmoto and State Minister for Economy Trade and Industry Fusae Ota, for the first EU-Japan Digital Partnership ministerial talks.

They agreed to cooperate on undersea cable connectivity, semiconductors and cyber security, and in other areas of the digital economy, they said in a joint statement.

At a subsequent news conference Breton said much of the discussion was about AI. He said a further round of talks would be in Brussels in the first half of next year.

(Reporting by Sam Nussey and Tim Kelly; Editing by Himani Sarkar and David Holmes)
HONG KONG (AP)  Hong Kong police on Monday accused eight self-exiled pro-democracy activists of violating the territory's harsh National Security Law and offered rewards of 1 million Hong Kong dollars ($127,600) each for information leading to their arrests. The U.S. and Britain strongly condemned the move.

The rewards are the first for suspects accused of violating the Beijing-imposed legislation since it took effect in June 2020. It outlaws subversion, secession, collusion with foreign forces and terrorism.

The eight activists are former pro-democracy lawmakers Nathan Law, Ted Hui and Dennis Kwok, lawyer Kevin Yam, unionist Mung Siu-tat and activists Finn Lau, Anna Kwok and Elmer Yuen, police announced at a news conference.

They are currently living in the U.S., Britain, Canada and Australia after some were earlier accused of various other offenses.

Steven Li, chief superintendent of the police's National Security Department, said arrest warrants have been issued for the eight under the National Security Law. He acknowledged that police will not be able to arrest them if they remain overseas but urged them to return to Hong Kong and surrender for a reduction in their sentences.

Li said the new charges and rewards are not intended to spread fear but are merely enforcing the law.

He cited articles of the security law which state that police have extraterritorial jurisdiction, and said they would pursue people overseas who endanger Hong Kongs national security.

The news conference came less than two weeks after the state-owned Ta Kung Pao newspaper issued an editorial stating that the National Security Law applies to people outside Hong Kong, and that China, as a member of Interpol, could request assistance from other countries in arresting fugitives.

Hong Kong, a semi-autonomous Chinese city, has come under increasingly tight scrutiny by Beijing following months of political strife in 2019. Authorities have cracked down on dissent with over 260 people, including many pro-democracy figures, arrested under the National Security Law.

Hong Kongs political system has also undergone a major overhaul to ensure that only patriots loyal to Beijing can hold office.

The police force said it has evidence that the eight violated the National Security Law.

According to the warrants, lawyer Yam, former legislator Dennis Kwok and activists Yuen, Lau and Anna Kwok are accused of foreign collusion for allegedly calling for sanctions against Hong Kong officials.

Former lawmaker Hui is accused of inciting secession, subversion and foreign collusion for allegedly calling for Hong Kong and Taiwans independence on social media, as well as for sanctions against city officials.

Law, who is currently living in Britain, is also accused of foreign collusion and inciting secession for allegedly calling for sanctions and the citys separation from China in meetings with foreign officials and in open letters, petitions, social media posts and media interviews.

Unionist Mung is accused of inciting secession for allegedly advocating Hong Kongs separation from the mainland.

Law said the new charges are an attempt to suppress dissident voices.

"I ask Hongkongers not to cooperate with any related pursuit or bounty actions. We should not limit ourselves, self-censor, be intimidated, or live in fear, he tweeted.

Britain's Foreign Secretary James Cleverly said the U.K. will not tolerate any attempts by China to intimidate and silence individuals in the U.K. and overseas.

We call on Beijing to remove the National Security Law and for the Hong Kong authorities to end their targeting of those who stand up for freedom and democracy," Cleverly said in a statement.

The U.S. condemned the move and said extraterritorial application of the security law was a dangerous precedent that threatened human rights.

We call on the Hong Kong government to immediately withdraw this bounty, respect other countries sovereignty, and stop the international assertion of the National Security Law imposed by Beijing, said Matthew Miller, a spokesperson for the U.S. State Department.
JAKARTA (Reuters) - Indonesian President Joko Widodo on Monday urged his ministers to maintain a "healthy" state budget in anticipation of global geopolitical and economic risks and as the country gears up for elections next year.

Speaking during a routine cabinet meeting, Jokowi, as the president is known, highlighted outsized spending by the country's security agencies including the defence ministry which has been modernising Indonesia's ageing military equipment.

"We have to maintain a healthy state budget. We need to be focused and alert for the risk of crisis," Jokowi said, warning that ministers must "be careful on purchasing goods". He also highlighted high spending by the national police and intelligence agencies.

Defence Minister Prabowo Subianto, who is set to mount a third bid for the presidency next year, in January finalised an $800-million deal to buy 12 Mirage 2000-5 fighter jets, which some critics said were too old.

Indonesia also bought 42 Rafale fighter jets for $8.1 billion in February and is in the advanced stages of finalising a deal to buy F-15 fighter jets, according to Prabowo.

The defence ministry's total budget was pegged at 134.3 trillion rupiah ($8.93 billion), while the country's total spending was estimated to reach 3,061 trillion rupiah ($200 billion) in 2023, according to the finance ministry.

The government is targeting a 2023 budget deficit of 2.84% of GDP.

Jokowi also urged his ministers to help maintain political and economic stability ahead of the 2024 polls when the world's third-largest democracy will choose lawmakers and a new president.

($1 = 15,038.0000 rupiah)

(Reporting by Ananda Teresia; Editing by Kanupriya Kapoor)
JERUSALEM (Reuters) - Israel linked on Monday its pending decision on recognising the Moroccan claim on Western Sahara to Morocco hosting a repeatedly postponed forum of foreign ministers involved in a U.S.-sponsored regional normalisation drive.

Morocco upgraded ties with Israel in 2020, encouraged by then U.S. President Donald Trump, who recognised Rabat's rule over Western Sahara, where the Algeria-backed Polisario Front demands an independent state. Trump's successor, President Joe Biden, has not followed through by opening a consulate there, however.

Diplomatic sources have said that Morocco could establish full relations with Israel - with their current mid-level diplomatic missions repurposed as embassies - in exchange for Israeli recognition of Morocco's claim.

But Morocco, citing Israeli policies on the Palestinians, last month postponed a so-called Negev Forum of Israel and Arab states, which it had been due to convene.

Asked at a briefing to foreign media what Israel sought in return for a recognition of Western Sahara as Moroccan, and whether it planned to open a consulate in the territory, Israeli Foreign Minister Eli Cohen linked a decision to the conference.

"We are right now working in regards to this issue and our plan is to have our final decision in the Negev Forum," he told reporters, adding that he expected the Moroccan-hosted event to take place in September or October.

(Writing by Dan Williams; Editing by Peter Graff)
Canada's raging wildfires, South Korean firefighters arrived in Ottawa on Sunday, July 2.

More than a hundred firefighters from South Korea touched down at the Ottawa International Airport as they plan to fight dozens of wildfires in Quebec.

Canada Wildfire: South Korean Firefighters Arrive in Ottawa

Canada and South Korea have joined forces to combat the devastating wildfires raging across the Canadian wilderness. As per a report by CBC Canada, a total of 150 firefighters from South Korea touched down, ready to help battle the wildfires that have been raging in Canada for weeks.

These valiant South Korean firefighters have traveled halfway across the globe to assist their Canadian counterparts in battling the relentless infernos that have gripped the nation.

The firefighters, who are part of the Korea Disaster Relief Team, are expected to be deployed to northern Quebec, where some of the most destructive fires are burning. They will be working alongside Canadian firefighters to contain the flames and protect communities from further damage.

It is worth mentioning that it is not the first instance in 2023 that Korea's Disaster Relief Team touched down in another country to extend a helping hand. Earlier this year, the South Korean team kicked off a relief operation in Turkey amid the devastating effect of a massive earthquake last February. This time, Korean firefighters are in Canada for another mission.

Read Also: Midwest Air Quality Continues To Deteriorate as Canadian Wildfire Smoke Blankets Skies

Canada Wildfire Continues to Rage

The wildfire crisis in Canada has reached an alarming level, with numerous provinces, including Quebec, severely impacted. The flames have devoured vast stretches of forestland, threatened wildlife habitats, and displaced countless residents.

According to NPR, the smoke from Canada's wildfire triggered red and purple air quality alerts in various parts of the United States. Cities like Iowa, Madison, Columbus, Ohio, and Cedar Rapids, were under purple alert rating, which notes a "very unhealthy" air quality, last week.

A Michigan Radio reports that meteorologists warned that "the average air quality is expected to fluctuate between unhealthy for sensitive groups to unhealthy for everyone."

CTV News Canada notes that the country is now grappling with the worst wildfire season in recent times.

Roughly 1,500 firefighters from various parts of the world, such as the United States and Australia, are now part of the huge battle. South Africa, Spain, Chile, and New Zealand have also deployed their firefighters to help in the massive wildfire fight in several parts of Canada.

But despite that, SOPFEU communications officer Melanie Morin says they need more firefighters to deal with the raging wildfires, which span around 1.2 million hectares.

With firefighting resources stretched thin due to the several wildfires in Canada, the timely arrival of the South Korean firefighters should help battle the pesky infernos in the region.

Related Article: Professor, 2 Students Stabbed in Gender Studies Class in Canada University: 24-year-old Suspect Charged

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Kourtney Kardashian Barker has shared a new glimpse of her growing baby bump on social media.

The 44-year-old reality television star, who is expecting a son with her husband Travis Barker, has been sharing updates about her pregnancy online since announcing it June 16.

On July 2, Kardashian Barker posted a selfie that hinted at how far along she is in her pregnancy.

The Poosh founder shared a photo on her Instagram story of her riding in an elevator as her baby bump poked through the bottom of her T-shirt. She also wore a black trench coat, leggings and platform boots.

A new glimpse at Kourtney Kardashian Barker's pregnancy. (@kourtneykardash / Instagram)

She simply added a black heart emoji over the picture.

Kardashian Barker appeared to be enjoying a weekend trip to Denver, Colorado, with her husband as the rest of her Instagram story showed the couple holding hands in the Mile High City and strolling past the Big Blue Bear statue at the Colorado Convention Center.

His band, Blink-182, has a concert scheduled at Denvers Ball Arena on July 3.

Barker and his wife, who tied the knot in May 2022, have been gushing about welcoming their first child together on social media. Their experience with in vitro fertilization was documented on the "The Kardashians," and at the start of Season Three, which premiered just a few weeks before her announcement, Kardashian Barker said she and her husband were officially done with IVF.

The pair announced their pregnancy news on June 16 with a joint Instagram post that showed Kardashian Barker waving a sign at a Blink-182 concert that read, Travis Im pregnant.

After seeing the message  which was a nod to a moment in the bands All The Small Things music video  the 47-year-old drummer leapt off the stage and hugged his wife.

Fans could only see a glimpse of her baby bump in the video clip, but The Kardashians star fully displayed her stomach in a mirror selfie shared on Instagram June 23.

She posted a carousel of photos that included snaps of her sporting a green micro string bikini.

Sweet summer, she wrote in the caption.

The following day, the couple revealed they are having a baby boy.

On June 24, they shared a video from the moment they learned the sex of their baby at a party. Kardashian Barker sat on her husband's lap as the musician started a drum roll before hitting the cymbals. A confetti cannon then projected blue streamers into the sky, confirming they are adding a son to their blended family.

The entrepreneur and her former partner, Scott Disick, share three children together. Barker has two children with ex-wife Shanna Moakler.

This article was originally published on TODAY.com
A huge phosphate rock deposit discovered in Norway contains enough minerals to meet the global demand for batteries and solar panels for the next 100 years, according to the mining company that controls it.

Norge Mining said up to 70 billion tonnes of the non-renewable resource may have been uncovered in south-western Norway, alongside deposits of other strategic minerals like titanium and vanadium.

Phosphate rock contains high concentrates of phosphorus, which is a key component for building green technologies but currently faces significant supply issues.

Phosphorus was first discovered in 1669 by German scientist Hennig Brandt, who was searching for the philosophers stone. While it proved ineffective in turning ordinary metals into gold, it has become an essential component in lithium-iron phosphate batteries in electric cars, as well as for solar panels and computer chips.

Russia previously controlled the worlds largest ultra-pure phosphate rock deposits, with the European Union warning that these critical raw materials have a high supply risk.

The EU is currently almost entirely dependent on imports of phosphate rock from the rest of the world, according to a report from The Hague Centre for Strategic Studies, with China, Iraq and Syria also home to large deposits.

The report, which was published before the discovery of the massive Norwegian deposit, warned that the EU should be concerned about phosphate rock shortages.

An article in the scientific journal Nature last year warned of imminent supply disruptions of phosphorus, citing Russias invasion of Ukraine and the subsequent economic sanctions as a potential cause of market volatility.

The global economy consumes an estimated 50 million tonnes of phosphorus each year, with scientists warning earlier this year that the planet could face a phosphogeddon if supply trends continue.

The buyers market is becoming increasingly crowded by limited trade  due to political instability in several source countries, as well as international sanctions imposed on others, Norge Mining noted in a June blog post. This is forcing importers to fear an impending crisis.

Tesla CEO Elon Musk announced in Shanghai on 7 January, 2020, that Model 3 vehicles made in China would used lithium iron phosphate batteries (Getty Images)

Norways minister of trade and industry, Jan Christian Vestre, said last month that the government was considering fast-tracking a giant mine in Helleland once analysis is completed on 47 miles of drill cores. If approval is given, the first major mine could begin operation by 2028.

The politician said Norways obligation was to develop the worlds most sustainable mineral industry following the discovery of the minerals.

The mining plans already have the support of the European Raw Materials Alliance, according to local reports, while local consultations continue.

A spokesperson for the European Commission described the discovery as great news for meeting the objectives of the Commissions raw material objectives, with Norge Mining telling Euractiv that the projected 4,500-metre-deep ore body would theoretically be capable of meeting global demand for the next century.
BRUSSELS (AP)  Russias armed forces are bruised but by no means beaten in the war in Ukraine, a top NATO military officer said Monday, as he laid out the biggest revamp to the organizations military plans since the Cold War should Moscow dare to widen the conflict.

They might not be 11 feet tall, but they are certainly not 2 feet tall, the Chair of the NATO Military Committee, Admiral Rob Bauer, told reporters. So, we should never underestimate the Russians and their ability to bounce back.

U.S. President Joe Biden and his NATO counterparts are set to endorse a major shakeup of the alliances planning system at a summit in the Lithuanian capital Vilnius next week.

NATO, as an organization, does not provide weapons or ammunition to Ukraine. Its sought to avoid being dragged into a wider war with nuclear-armed Russia. At the same time, it is massively reinforcing the security of member countries near Russia, Ukraine and Belarus.

Around 40,000 troops are on standby from Estonia in the north down to Romania on the Black Sea. About 100 aircraft take to the skies in that territory each day, and a total of 27 warships are operating in the Baltic and Mediterranean Seas. Those numbers are set to rise.

Under its new plans, NATO aims to have up to 300,000 troops ready to move to its eastern flank within 30 days. The plans divide its territory into three zones  the high north and Atlantic area, a zone north of the Alps, and another in southern Europe.

Bauer said that NATOs new planning is based on the strength of the Russian army before President Vladimir Putin launched the war on Ukraine almost 17 months ago. He said the war has depleted Russias army, but not its navy or air force.

Of Russias ground forces, around 94% is now engaged in the war in Ukraine, Bauer said.

What we see in general is that the Russians are careful around NATO. They are not for seeking a conflict with NATO. I think that is a sign that they are very, very busy, he said. In the land domain, I dont think they have a lot of forces available to do anything to anyone else.

But we are convinced that the Russians are going to reconstitute, he said. We will continue to look at them as a serious threat, in the maritime, and in the air especially, and in space, they are still very, very, capable, let alone of course in nuclear.

A revolt by Wagner mercenaries in Russia late last month raised deep security concerns in Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania and Poland after a deal was reached for their leader, Yevgeny Prigozhin, to be allowed to take refuge in Belarus.

Lithuanian President Gitanas Nauseda said that neighboring countries would face a heightened danger if the Wagner Group deploys its serial killers just over their border.

Vilnius lies around 35 kilometers (22 miles) from the Belarus border.

Lithuania wants to have a permanent NATO presence on its territory. Germany signaled last week that it would be prepared to base soldiers there if requested. For the moment, though, NATO sees no imminent threat coming from Belarus.

Were confident we know whats going on, and right now we see no changes. But that doesnt take our eye off what we need to do every day, Major General Matthew Van Wagenen told reporters. If we needed to change posture, we could do it rapidly.

NATOs 31 member countries took part in a force generation conference last week in an effort to understand how many troops and how much equipment the alliance might have at its disposal to respond to any Russian attack, both in the short and longer term.

Both officers were upbeat about the results, although they declined to provide details for security reasons. Experts and some NATO diplomats, however, have expressed doubt about the willingness of member countries to put a total of 300,000 troops on standby.

I would classify it as highly successful, Van Wagenen said. I can assure you, we are in a position right now that we know whats missing and how we need to grow this in the future.

In terms of NATOs ability to execute the plans, should they be needed in the future, Bauer welcomed the expected commitment in Vilnius by Biden and his counterparts to boost defense spending, which should help provide commanders with the equipment they need.

In 2014, NATO committed to move toward spending 2% of GDP on their military budgets by 2024. At their July 11-12 summit, the leaders will set the 2% figure as a spending floor, rather than a ceiling to aim for.

___

Follow the APs coverage of the war at https://apnews.com/hub/russia-ukraine
By Andrew Osborn

(Reuters) -Russia's FSB security service said on Monday it had thwarted a Ukrainian attempt to assassinate Sergei Aksyonov, the Russian-backed head of Crimea, arresting an agent before he could blow up Aksyonov's car.

There was no immediate comment from Ukraine.

Russian media have reported that security has been stepped up in Crimea, the Black Sea peninsula that Russia annexed from Ukraine in 2014, and that additional checks are being made on crossings from Russia's southern Krasnodar region into Crimea.

The FSB said it had arrested a Russian national recruited by Ukraine's SBU intelligence agency who had undergone explosives, reconnaissance and sabotage training in Ukraine.

His plan, it said, had been to blow up Aksyonov's car, but he had been detained as he tried to retrieve an explosive device from a hiding place.

Footage broadcast on state TV showed masked FSB operatives detaining a man in a tracksuit as he walked into a wooded area. A green sack was shown containing what were described as elements of an explosive device.

The detainee was then shown with his face blurred out confessing that he was a Ukrainian agent and had planned to place the explosives in a car parked on the route used by Aksyonov's cortege in the city of Simferopol.

It was unclear whether the man was speaking under duress, and Reuters was unable to verify the footage.

The FSB did not name the man, who it said was in his mid-30s and had entered Crimea in June.

Aksyonov thanked the FSB and said he was sure the individuals who ordered the assassination would be found and punished.

The FSB said in May it had arrested seven people connected with Ukrainian intelligence on suspicion of plotting attacks against Aksyonov and other Russian-backed officials.

Ukraine has pledged to retake full control of Crimea, the base of Russia's Black Sea Fleet, as well as large areas of eastern and southern Ukraine that Russia has captured since launching what it calls its "special military operation" last year. Kyiv and the West call it a brutal war of conquest.

Russia's Izvestia newspaper reported on Monday that a 13 km (eight mile) traffic jam had formed in the Krasnodar region at the entrance to the bridge to Crimea. It said officials had increased the number of checkpoints around the bridge on Sunday.

(Reporting by Andrew Osborn Editing by Mark Trevelyan and Kevin Liffey)
MEXICO CITY (Reuters) -A top official in the northern Mexican state of Tamaulipas was shot at on Monday while traveling by car and was unharmed, authorities said, the latest outbreak of violence against officialdom in the country.

Hector Villegas, the border state's interior minister, came under attack in the early hours of Monday while on the Reynosa-San Fernando highway, the state's security spokesperson said on Twitter. He is now at work as usual, the tweet added.

Pictures on social media appeared to show the minister's car with a series of bullet holes. Local media described the attack as an assassination attempt.

Reuters could not immediately verify the photos.

One hundred soldiers from the Mexican army arrived in the Tamaulipas' municipalities of Nuevo Laredo, Reynosa and San Fernando, according to a statement shared later on Monday by the Defense Ministry (SEDENA).

The deployment aims to reinforce security operations to stop criminal groups' activities and ensure safety for the population, the statement said.

Tamaulipas has long been notorious for gang violence, as have other parts of Mexico.

Last year, the mayor of a small northern town was abducted in the Tamaulipas city of Nuevo Laredo before being freed.

Gunmen affiliated with a drug gang killed a town mayor alongside 19 others in the southern Mexican state of Guerrero in October, officials said.

Mexican consulting firm Etellekt Consultores said at least 88 Mexican politicians or candidates for office were killed between September 2020 and the June 2021 legislative elections.

(Reporting by Isabel Woodford and Lizbeth Diaz; editing by Grant McCool and Chris Reese)
A Southwest plane bound for Louisville, Kentucky made an emergency landing in Ohio on Sunday morning, airline officials said.

Flight 2082 which departed Baltimore was headed for the Louisville International Airport but had to make an emergency stop in Columbus, "after an apparent pressurization issue in flight," according to a statement from Southwest.

No injuries were reported, the airline said.

'What did you do to make that happen? Traveler questions wheelchair damage by Southwest

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Passengers got on another plane to continue trip

Upon landing, the aircraft taxied to a gate where the flight and passengers deboarded the plane and got on another one to continue the trip.

"The original aircraft is out of service for a review," Southwest said in its statement. "We apologize to these customers for their delayed arrival and thank them for their patience."

Natalie Neysa Alund covers breaking and trending news for USA TODAY. Reach her at nalund@usatoday.com and follow her on Twitter @nataliealund.

This article originally appeared on USA TODAY: Southwest plane to Louisville makes emergency landing in Columbus
CAIRO (AP)  The Sudanese army called Monday on young people and anyone else capable of fighting to enlist at the nearest military command for battle against rival paramilitary force.

Sudan descended into chaos after fighting erupted on Apr. 15 between the military, led by Gen. Abdel Fattah Burhan, and the paramilitary Rapid Support Forces, commanded by Gen. Mohammed Hamdan Dagalo. Since then, over 3,000 people have been killed, the countrys Health Ministry said, while about 2.5 million people have been displaced, according to the U.N. The true death toll is believed to be much higher.

The commanders of the military divisions and regions have been instructed to receive and equip the fighters, and they must go to the nearest military command or unit, the army said Monday morning on their official Facebook page.

Monday's call to arms comes just days after Burhan made a near-identical appeal during a televised speech, asking Sudans youth and those capable of fighting to support the army, either from their place of residence or by joining the military movement.

It remained unclear if Monday's call to arms was a forced conscription.

In the capital, Khartoum, RSF troops appear to have the upper hand on the citys streets, having commandeered civilian homes across the capital and turned them into bases. Throughout the 10-week conflict, the army has retaliated with airstrikes that have hit residential areas and sometimes hospitals.

The province of West Darfur has seen some of the worst violence. In a report issued two weeks ago by the Dar Masalit sultanate, the leader of the African Masalit ethnic community, he accused the RSF and Arab militias of committing genocide against African civilians. He estimated that over the past two months, more than 5,000 people were killed in the provinces capital, Genena.

Several rounds of peace talks hosted by Riyadh and Washington in the Saudi coastal city of Jeddah have all but broken down, with both mediators publicly accusing the RSF and the army of continually violating truces brokered by the two nations.

At least nine cease-fires have been agreed upon since the conflict broke out. None have lasted.
WASHINGTON (AP)  Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen will travel to Beijing Thursday as part of an ongoing Biden administration effort to thaw U.S.-China relations, a senior Treasury official said Sunday.

Yellen, who has called the notion of an economic decoupling from China disastrous, has frequently said in the past year that she would like to visit China. She says the two nations "can and need to find a way to live together in spite of their strained relations over geopolitics and economic development. Yellen will meet this week with Chinese officials, U.S. companies doing business in China and with Chinese people and will stay through July 9, said the official, who spoke on condition of anonymity to discuss details of the trip.

The goal of her visit is to deepen and increase the frequency of communication between U.S. and China, the official said. While there are clear areas of common interest where Yellen can make progress, the official said, there are also significant disagreements that will not be resolved through a single trip.

The most recent flareup came after President Joe Biden referred to Chinese President Xi Jinping as a "dictator " during a campaign fundraiser earlier in June. The Chinese protested loudly, but Biden later said his blunt statements regarding China are just not something Im going to change very much.

The U.S. president's statements have come after tensions over a Chinese surveillance balloon that the U.S. government shot down, U.S.-led restrictions on China's access to advanced computer chips and ongoing tensions about the status and security of Taiwan. Yet in Biden's dictator comments during a California fundraiser, the president told his audience don't worry about China as the U.S. has taken steps to compete with its financial and technological ambitions.

Yellen's trip would follow Secretary of State Antony Blinken's two-day stop in Beijing in June, the highest-level meetings in China in the past five years. Blinken met with Xi and the two agreed to stabilize deteriorated U.S.-China ties. However, better communications between their militaries could not be agreed upon. Treasury officials didn't specify which officials she'd meet with, but said it would not be Xi.

The treasury secretary's visit will be more focused on stabilizing the global economy and challenging China's support of Russia in its ongoing land invasion of Ukraine. China has developed an uncomfortable closeness with the Kremlin  claiming neutrality in the war, but holding joint military drills and frequent state visits with Russian officials.

Still, U.S. officials hold out hope that U.S-China relations will not further deteriorate.

Yellen met with her previous Chinese counterpart, Vice Premier Liu He, in January in Switzerland and made a big speech at Johns Hopkins University in April calling for  cooperation on the urgent global challenges of our day  between the two countries for the sake of maintaining global stability, while supporting economic restrictions on China to advance U.S national security interests.

New developments show glimmers of what could spark a renewed relationship.

At a Paris summit on global finance last week, a deal was brokered that restructured Zambia's debt with its creditors, which include China  Zambias biggest creditor holding $4.1 billion of a total $6.3 billion debt load. The deal may provide a roadmap for how China will handle restructuring deals with other nations in debt distress, and shows the Asian superpower is willing to cooperate in negotiations with other Group of 20 nations.

I am pleased that the international community has come together to support Zambia in its time of need, Yellen said in a statement last week.

However, there are plenty of other tensions impacting the superpowers' relationship. The discovery of a Chinese surveillance balloon traversing over sensitive areas of the U.S. in February put a damper on her previous travel plans, and further strained relations.

U.S. lawmakers earlier this year grilled TikTok CEO Shou Zi Chew about data security and the social media firm's ties to China, with some pushing a ban on the app, popular among American youths.

And last October, the Biden administration imposed export controls to limit Chinas ability to access advanced chips, which it says can be used to make weapons, commit human rights abuses and improve the speed and accuracy of China's military logistics.

Yellen's trip also comes as Biden considers issuing an executive order that would tighten rules on some overseas investments by U.S. companies in an effort to limit Chinas ability to acquire technologies that could improve its military prowess.

Still, trade entwines the U.S. and Chinese economies. And despite strong speeches about the need to rethink the relationship, Yellen said in her Johns Hopkins address that a full separation of our economies would be disastrous for both countries. It would be destabilizing for the rest of the world. Rather, we know that the health of the Chinese and U.S. economies is closely linked.

China shipped more than $536 billion worth of goods to the U.S. last year. By contrast, the U.S. exported $154 billion in goods to China, according to the Census Bureau.

___

Associated Press writer Colleen Long contributed to this report.
(Photo : Valery HACHE / AFP) (VALERY HACHE/AFP via Getty Images)

SpaceX has successfully launched the Euclid space telescope that is tasked with mapping out and studying the dark universe.

SpaceX has successfully launched the Euclid space telescope as part of a $1 billion European Space Agency (ESA) mission to map and study the "dark universe."

The groundbreaking piece of equipment, named after the Greek mathematician Euclid, will continue on its extraordinary million-mile journey from Florida to unravel the mysteries of the universe.

SpaceX Launches the Euclid Space Telescope

The probe, which weighs roughly two tons, was launched onboard SpaceX's Falcon 9 rocket from Cape Canaveral at around 11:11 a.m. local time. The telescope will be dispatched to an observing position roughly 1.5 million kilometers from our planet.

The primary objective of the billion-dollar mission is to observe and study the large-scale structure of our universe. The Euclid telescope has advanced instruments, including the Visible Instrument (VIS) and the Near Infrared Spectrometer and Photometer (NISP).

It would provide scientists back on Earth with crucial insights through visible imagery, near-infrared spectroscopy, and photometry. Euclid seeks to enhance humans' understanding of the cosmos' evolution by mapping the universe's vast structure, as per WION News.

The process includes mapping the distribution of galaxies and other matter on a grand scale, and the telescope seeks to shed light on the role of dark energy and dark matter in the expansion of the universe.

One of Euclid's main objectives is to measure the redshifts of galaxies, which is the phenomenon where the light emitted by galaxies is stretched with the expansion of the universe.

By analyzing redshifts, scientists can determine the distances to galaxies and accurately map the distribution of matter throughout our universe. The journey would take roughly a month and marks a crucial milestone in our goal of exploring space.

During a live webcast of the space telescope's launch, ESA Director-General Josef Aschbacher said, "We have a mission," just after liftoff. He added that he was excited about the mission with the knowledge that it was on its way to Lagrange Point 2, according to Space.

Read Also: Himalayan Glaciers On Track To Lose 80% of Ice by 2100 if Global Warming Continues

Efforts To Map, Study the Dark Universe

Scientists believe that dark matter and dark energy make up most of the universe, but they are not visible in wavelengths of light. On the other hand, they can be tracked through the dark universe and its effects on other objects.

For example, gravitational lensing is when a massive object bends the light of a distant object behind through the force of gravity. This brings otherwise faraway stars or galaxies into sharp focus.

Cosmologists work tirelessly to understand how the dark universe behaves to chart the effects of time on our cosmos. Dark energy and dark matter affect the mergers of galaxies, the expansion of the universe, as well as the movements of individual stars.

A physicist at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Jason Rhodes, who leads Euclid's U.S. science team, said that the space telescope came at an exciting time in the history of cosmology.

Rhodes noted that Euclid would be great at answering questions that are now just coming into focus among scientists. He added that he believes the space telescope will be "fantastic" for answering questions people have never thought of, said the New York Times.

Related Article: Powerful Gamma Ray Burst Born From Multiple Stars Colliding Near Black Hole

@ 2023 HNGN, All rights reserved. Do not reproduce without permission.
KYIV (Reuters) - Ukrainian authorities have charged a former top security official with treason, Kyiv's domestic intelligence agency said on Monday, in a case that highlights efforts to weed out Russian spies from within.

Oleh Kulinich, who headed the Security Service of Ukraine's (SBU) Crimea directorate, was arrested last July on accusations of recruiting other Russian-friendly operatives on orders from Moscow.

Investigators said Kulinich was working for Russia's Federal Security Service and was overseen by other former Ukrainian officials who had defected to Moscow, which launched a full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022.

"This is a clear signal to all those who work for the enemy: the SBU will definitely find you and make you answer for what you have done," SBU chief Vasyl Malyuk, who oversaw the operation to detain Kulinich, said in a statement.

Kulinich could not be reached by Reuters for comment. If convicted, he faces up to 15 years in prison.

President Volodymyr Zelenskiy last year hailed Kulinich's arrest as part of a process of "self-purification".

Zelenskiy also sacked then SBU chief Ivan Bakanov and Ukraine's top prosecutor, citing dozens of cases of collaboration by members of their agencies.

Ukrainian authorities are also investigating Andriy Naumov, a former head of the SBU's department of internal security, who turned up in Serbia last year in a car stuffed with cash and emeralds, police said.

Reuters was unable to reach Naumov for comment.

(Reporting by Dan Peleschuk, Editing by Timothy Heritage)
UNITED NATIONS (AP)  The U.N. Security Council will hold a first-ever meeting on the potential threats of artificial intelligence to international peace and security, organized by the United Kingdom which sees tremendous potential but also major risks about AIs possible use for example in autonomous weapons or in control of nuclear weapons.

UK Ambassador Barbara Woodward on Monday announced the July 18 meeting as the centerpiece of its presidency of the council this month. It will include briefings by international AI experts and Secretary-General Antonio Guterres, who last month called the alarm bells over the most advanced form of AI deafening, and loudest from its developers.

These scientists and experts have called on the world to act, declaring AI an existential threat to humanity on a par with the risk of nuclear war, the U.N. chief said.

Guterres announced plans to appoint an advisory board on artificial intelligence in September to prepare initiatives that the U.N. can take. He also said he would react favorably to a new U.N. agency on AI and suggested as a model the International Atomic Energy Agency, which is knowledge-based and has some regulatory powers.

Woodward said the UK wants to encourage a multilateral approach to managing both the huge opportunities and the risks that artificial intelligence holds for all of us, stressing that this is going to take a global effort.

She stressed that the benefits side is huge, citing AI's potential to help U.N. development programs, improve humanitarian aid operations, assist peacekeeping operations and support conflict prevention, including by collecting and analyzing data. It could potentially help us close the gap between developing countries and developed countries, she added.

But the risk side raises serious security question that must also be addressed, Woodward said.

Europe has led the world in efforts to regulate artificial intelligence, which gained urgency with the rise of a new breed of artificial intelligence that gives AI chatbots like ChatGPT the power to generate text, images, video and audio that resemble human work. On June 14, EU lawmakers signed off on the worlds first set of comprehensive rules for artificial intelligence, clearing a key hurdle as authorities across the globe race to rein in AI.

In May, the head of the artificial intelligence company that makes ChatGPT told a U.S. Senate hearing that government intervention will be critical to mitigating the risks of increasingly powerful AI systems, saying as this technology advances people are concerned about how it could change their lives, and we are too.

OpenAI CEO Sam Altman proposed the formation of a U.S. or global agency that would license the most powerful AI systems and have the authority to take that license away and ensure compliance with safety standards.

Woodward said the Security Council meeting, to be chaired by UK Foreign Secretary James Cleverly, will provide an opportunity to listen to expert views on AI, which is a very new technology that is developing very fast, and start a discussion among the 15 council members on its implications.

Britains Prime Minister Rishi Sunak has announced that the UK will host a summit on AI later this year, where we'll be able to have a truly global multilateral discussion," Woodward said.
Former Vice President Mike Pence said Sunday that President Bidens labeling of Chinese President Xi Jinping as a dictator was a statement of fact.

CBSs Margaret Brennan asked Pence whether he agreed with Biden describing Xi as a dictator to which the GOP presidential candidate answered, I think its a statement of fact. Pences remarks are in strong contrast to former president Trump, who described Xi as top of the line and a brilliant man in an interview with former Fox News host Tucker Carlson earlier this year.

Pence said that theres no more effective way to send a deafening message to communist China to check their military ambitions in the Asia Pacific than supplying Ukraine with what it needs to end Russias invasion of the country.

I guarantee you President Xi is watching whats happening in Ukraine very carefully, Pence said. We give the Ukrainians, much more quickly than Joe Bidens doing now, we give them what they need to win this fight to repel the Russian invasion

He also dodged a question that asked if he would commit to sending troops to Taiwan in the case of a Chinese invasion, adding that there is no advantage to say what you would or wouldnt do.

The United States of America should continue to be providing  Taiwan with the military means to defend themselves, he added. What we want is a policy of deterrence.

For the latest news, weather, sports, and streaming video, head to The Hill.
Images of the wreckage recovered from the Titan submersible at the bottom of the North Atlantic appear to confirm the theory that the vessel suffered a massive implosion under the pressure of the ocean.

Earlier this week, the US Coast Guard brought the debris left by the sub on the ocean floor onto dry land.

Jonas Mureika, a professor of physics at Loyola Marymount University, tells The Independent that calling the implosion catastrophic is referring to the intensity and speed of what took place.

The pressure at that depth (3.8 km) is incredibly high, about 400 times atmospheric pressure. Thats 6,000 pounds per square inch acting on the submarine  atmospheric pressure is roughly 15 pounds per square inch, he noted in an email.

Debris from the Titan submersible, recovered from the ocean floor near the wreck of the Titanic, is unloaded from the ship Horizon Arctic at the Canadian Coast Guard pier in St. John's, Newfoundland, Wednesday, June 28, 2023 (AP)

If the hull integrity was compromised or weakened in one spot, the inward pressure would quickly cause it to buckle asymmetrically, and the structure would implode because of the inward force. And at those pressures, the inward collapse would have occurred in milliseconds, he adds. But this doesnt mean the debris itself would be crushed in size, just that the pressure was inward.

Dr Joerg Reinhold, a professor at the Department of Physics at Florida International University, added that it seems the pressure vessel of the submersible consisted of a cylindrical hull capped off by two at least somewhat spherical endcaps or domes. One of these includes a viewport. In pictures, it seems the other dome is covered by another shell in the shape of a fin or so.

This photo provided by OceanGate Expeditions shows a submersible vessel named Titan used to visit the wreckage site of the Titanic. (AP)

From left to right: Stockton Rush, Hamish Harding, Paul-Henri Nargeolet and Shahzada and Suleman Dawood. ((Reuters/Jannicke Mikkelsen/OceanGate Expeditions/Getty))

The cylindrical hull seems surrounded by a shell of the same material ... I would expect that these shells do not add to the structural integrity of the hull. That means all the forces from the surrounding water act on the hull inside these shells, he said. I actually expect that the space between the shells and the hull is exposed to water at the same pressure as the surrounding water. It is therefore conceivable that these shells survive in larger pieces.

Dr Reinhold noted that at least one of the domes from the vessel appears to have been found intact.

My understanding is that these are made from titanium and not the carbon fibre material used for the cylindrical hull. Given the spherical shape and the material, I am not surprised that they, or at least one of them, stayed mostly intact, he said.

Debris from the Titan submersible, recovered from the ocean floor near the wreck of the Titanic, is unloaded from the ship Horizon Arctic at the Canadian Coast Guard pier in St. John's, Newfoundland, Wednesday, June 28, 2023 (The Canadian Press via AP)

Arun Bansil, a professor at the physics department at Northeastern University in Boston, told The Independent that although it seems counterintuitive, large objects do not normally split apart into smithereens in an implosion or explosion.

For example, a pressure cooker usually explodes with the top blown off but the body remaining intact. Initial failure of Titan would have occurred at its weakest links such as defects in the hull. Once a crack opens, however, large pieces of the hull will no longer experience very violent forces and remain more or less intact, he said.

Debris from the Titan submersible is unloaded (AP)

Debris from the Titan submersible, recovered from the ocean floor near the wreck of the Titanic, is unloaded from the ship Horizon Arctic at the Canadian Coast Guard pier in St. John's, Newfoundland (AP)

Was it an explosion or implosion and how would that have affected the passengers?

Knowing where the accident occurred, the assumption of an implosion makes sense, Dr Reinhold said. Both an implosion and an explosion need some form of stored energy. In typical explosive materials, the stored energy is chemical and is released through a chemical reaction. In the case of a submerged pressure vessel, the stored energy is mechanical  it is released when the surrounding water fills the space of the vessel.

If there is a catastrophic failure of the hull, this energy is first released in an implosion, he notes. Eventually, this will be followed by an outgoing shockwave  otherwise, listening devices would not be able to pick up the sound of the event.

He went on to say that implosions or explosions in water should behave differently than those in air. Air is a compressible fluid while water is an incompressible fluid. I expect the stored mechanical energy to be vastly bigger than any other source of energy on the submersible.

A view of the Horizon Arctic ship, as salvaged pieces of the Titan submersible from OceanGate Expeditions are returned, in St. Johns harbour, Newfoundland, Canada June 28, 2023 (Reuters)

Even if the breach of the vessel would have been triggered by an internal source of energy, the final result will be an implosion, Dr Reinhold said.

Dr Mureika added that an explosion results when there is a sudden release of energy that results in a powerful outward pressure wave. Implosions, on the other hand, are due to an inward pressure differential. This was most certainly an implosion.

A U.S. Coast Guard ship arrives in the harbor of St. John's, Newfoundland, on Wednesday, June 28, 2023 (Paul Daly/The Canadian Press via AP)

That being said, when the air inside the submarine was rapidly compressed, it most likely ignited and created an explosion  like a piston in a car engine  but this wouldnt compare in magnitude to the implosive force, he says.

As for the passengers, because of the time interval for this to occur, as well as the magnitude of the pressure, its very likely they didnt even know what hit them. Its also doubtful they had time to process what was happening unless the implosion was preceded by something like a leak, Dr Mureika adds.

How will the debris be used to determine what happened?

The obvious would be to look at the recovered pieces as well as design drawings and possibly any samples of the materials that the company might still have, Dr Reinhold said.
By Elizabeth Pineau and Benoit Van Overstraeten

PARIS (Reuters) - Rioters ram-raided the home of a Paris suburb mayor, set the car alight and launched fireworks at his wife and young children as they fled during a fifth night of nationwide unrest over Tuesday's police shooting of a teen of North African descent.

Vincent Jeanbrun, 39, the centre-right mayor of the southern suburb of L'Hay-les-Roses, was at the town hall when his house was attacked with his wife Melanie and children asleep inside.

The aggressors drove their vehicle at the suburban house but were halted by a low wall ringing the property's outdoor terrace, the local public prosecutor said. They then torched their vehicle.

As Jeanbrun's wife and children, aged 5 and 7, took flight through the back yard, they were targeted with fireworks. Jeanbrun told Prime Minister Elisabeth Borne his wife had had surgery to a broken leg and faced a three-month rehabilitation.

"While attempting to shield them and fleeing the attackers, my wife and one of my children were hurt," the mayor said.

The local prosecutor told reporters that an investigation into attempted murder had been opened. No suspects have been arrested.

Jeanbrun's town hall has been the target of attack for several nights since Tuesday's shooting and has been protected with barbed wire and barricades.

On a walkabout hours after the incident, Jeanbrun met local well-wishers and passed by the town's covered market which has been wrecked during the unrest.

"Stay strong, Mr. Mayor. Were with you, one man told the visibly emotional mayor.

"I didnt think we'd ever live through something like this," the mayor told another bystander who wished his wife well.

"Its pretty disgusting," she replied.

(Reporting by Elizabeth Pineau and Benoit van Overstraeten; Writing by Richard Lough; Editing by Alison Williams)


4DPLEX EXPERIENCES ADDED IN CAMBODIA, THAILAND



Korean tech firm CJ 4DPLEX has struck a deal with Thailands Major Cineplex to add two ScreenX locations in Cambodia and Thailand. One will be located at the AEON Mall Mean Chey, have almost 500 seats and have a 75-foot-wide central screen, making it the largest ScreenX auditorium in Southeast Asia. The other will be at Bangkoks ICONSiam Mall location, debuting on July 27.



ScreenX is a multi-projection system with an immersive 270-degree field of view. That creates a virtual reality-like setting with cinema quality resolution. Majors first ScreenX launched in 2022 at its Siam Paragon location in central Bangkok.



More from Variety

Weve received amazing reactions and feedback from our moviegoers for ScreenX in Thailand and expect to generate the same response at our Cambodia location, said Vicha Poolvaraluk, CEO, Major Cineplex.



The two companies previously partnered on 4DX installations, where viewers experience motion, vibration, water, wind, snow, lightning, scents and other special effects. There are now 10 4DX locations across Thailand in Siam Paragon, Ratchayothin, Chiang Mai, Hat Yai, Central Westgate, Promenade, Central Festival Eastville, Korat, Mega Bangna and Icon Siam.



Major Cineplex has more than 177 locations with 828 screens in Thailand and abroad.

APPOINTMENT

Debbie Ramsay has been appointed as the new editor of 5 News, ITN, the British producer best known for producing news programming for major U.K. broadcasters, announced on Monday. Ramsay joins 5 News from Channel 4 where she is commissioning editor for news and current affairs and was previously with the BBC for 16 years.

It is a time of growth for 5 News  across Q1 2023, the program grew 12% year-on-year among individuals, averaging 2.9% share and 301,000 viewers. The upward trajectory continued across April and May with the overall program share up by 30% year on year.

Ramsay will take up the post later in the fall, taking over from Cait FitzSimons who has been 5 News editor for five years.

MIND THE GAP

The Tokyo Gap Financing Market is set to make a return this year as an in-person event, having been held online only for the past three years due to the COVID pandemic. The three-day project market which is operated in parallel with the Tokyo International Film Festival, will run Oct 25-27 and be held at the Tokyo Metropolitan Industrial Trade Center Hamamatsucho-kan.



Organizers say that the market will cater to 15 live action and animation film projects that come with at least 60% of their finance attached. The focus will again be on projects originating from Asian territories or international projects that incorporate Asian elements.



TAIPEI AWARDS



The Taipei Film Festival gave out its International New Talent awards, including a cash award of NT$ 600,000 to Grand Prix winner, Tunisian film Under the Fig Trees. The special jury prize was awarded to the Yemeni film The Burdened. Japanese film Amiko received the Taiwanese Film Critics Society Award while the Audience choice award went to the Taiwanese film A Place Called Silence. The two main awards were selected by a jury headed by Chen Shiang-chyi, a Taiwanese actress, and also including Korean producer Oh Jung-wan, Hong Kong director Samson Chiu Liang Ching, Taiwanese director Lou Yi-an and the Berlinale head of programming Mark Peranson.



Guests in attendance included Kai Ko (director of Bad Education), Sam Quah (director of A Place Called Silence), Aleksandra Kostina (producer of Pamfir), Kattia G. Zuniga (director of Sister & Sister), Amr Gamal and Chen Ming-chang (director and music composer of The Burdened), Ann Oren (director of Piaffe) and Amanda Nell Eu and Foo Fei Ling (director and producer, respectively, of Tiger Stripes). Popular actor George Hu hosted the ceremony.



NEW LINE INTO TAIWAN



BBC Earth and BBC First have become available on Taiwanese OTT platform, LINE TV and can be found in two new branded zones on the service. The platform has 5 million monthly active users and more than 10,000 hours of licensed content including Taiwan drama, Chinese drama, animation, Korean drama and original dramas. The natural history and science documentary brand, BBC Earth, has shows including Frozen Planet, Planet Earth and Blue Planet. BBC First carries series including Sherlock, Maigret and Call the Midwife.

[This deal] represents the growing audience of our content in Taiwan, said Ding Ke, senior VP and GM of BBC Studios Greater China. The LINE TV platform is defined by its wide range of films and programs and is therefore honored to cooperate with BBC Studios, one of the worlds leading content providers, to further enrich our high-quality content, said Chen Li-ren, CEO of LINE TV.

RELEASE DATE

Sandeep Reddy Vangas gangster action drama Animal, starring Ranbir Kapoor, Anil Kapoor, Rashmika Mandana, Bobby Deol and Tripti Dimri, has postponed its release date from Aug. 11 to Dec. 1. The film is produced by Bhushan Kumar and Krishan Kumars T-Series, Murad Khetanis Cine1 Studios and Pranay Reddy Vangas Bhadrakali Pictures. It will release in the Hindi, Telugu, Tamil, Kannada and Malayalam languages.

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PICKENS, S.C. (AP)  Former President Donald Trump marked a return to the large-scale rallies of his previous presidential campaigns, speaking to a massive crowd gathered in the streets of a small South Carolina city on a blazing summer weekend.

There's nowhere else I'd rather be to kick off the Fourth of July weekend than right here on Main Street, with thousands of hardworking South Carolina patriots who believe in God, family and country, Trump said Saturday to a roaring crowd in downtown Pickens as temperatures climbed into the 90s.

Randal J. Beach, the police chief in the conservative Upstate community of about 3,400 residents, told The Associated Press on Sunday that his estimates of the crowd were somewhere between 50-55,000.

The heavily Republican area is a popular one for GOP hopefuls as they aim to attract support for South Carolina's first-in-the-South presidential primary. In recent months, other candidates including Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, former Vice President Mike Pence and biotech entrepreneur Vivek Ramaswamy have all held events in the Upstate, as well as the two South Carolinians in the race: former Gov. Nikki Haley and Sen. Tim Scott.

But none drew an audience like Trump, whose appearance effectively shuttered Pickens' quintessential Southern downtown.

Contrasted with his 2016 and 2020 campaigns, which drew thousands to rallies in states across the country, Trump's 2024 effort has been markedly different. Earlier this year, instead of addressing voters in a gymnasium or airplane hangar, Trump held his first South Carolina campaign event inside the Statehouse in Columbia, rolling out his state leadership team at an invitation-only gathering in an ornate lobby between the House and Senate chambers.

In other states, the former president has focused his efforts on smaller events, including a series of speeches before state party organizations, as he works to bolster his standing with delegates and local officials.

This was only Trump's second large rally of the 2024 campaign. In March, he rallied in Waco, Texas, disparaging the prosecutors then investigating him on hush-money charges  on which he was later indicted  and predicting his vindication. A planned outdoor rally in Iowa in May was canceled due to tornado warnings.

The rallies are also expensive to put on, although Trump has continued to bring in millions in fundraising, after both the New York indictment and also federal charges related to his retention of classified documents after leaving the White House. Last month, senior Trump aide Chris LaCivita told the conservative Ruthless podcast that the rallies are half a million bucks a pop.

Trump's campaign has also leaned in on unannounced stops at restaurants  such as at a celebrated Philadelphia cheesesteak restaurant Friday or Versailles, a famous Cuban eatery in Miami  in a bid to showcase his strong appeal among supporters despite the multiple legal challenges.

In a broad GOP field that has continued to grow, Trump's campaign has pointed to polls showing him with a considerable lead over his rivals, despite a campaign schedule that is far less robust than many of his rivals. He has also given frequent media interviews and appeared at many of the multi-candidate events of the primary season so far, including this past week's Moms for Liberty gathering in Philadelphia.

Still, the chance to see the former president in person drew thousands from across the Southeast for Saturday's rally, with attendees beginning to line up the night before, and coming from as far as Florida. Greg Pressley and his wife, Robin, said they drove more than three hours from their home in eastern Tennessee to see the candidate they've supported since his first run in 2016.

Donald Trump's the best president in history, Greg Pressley said. I love his policies. I love the man. I'm here to support him getting back to where he needs to be, to begin with.

Shelley Fox of Spartanburg, who said she has supported Trump since he entered the 2016 race, said she didn't feel it necessary to even think about any other candidates for next year's election.

I'd write him in, she said, when asked what she would do if forced to consider another hopeful. No question  I'd write him in.

___

Meg Kinnard can be reached at http://twitter.com/MegKinnardAP
Google's AI chatbot, Bard, expressed a preference for Apple's iOS over Android, pointing out the advantages of iPhones over multiple aspects.

The AI-generated tool surprisingly listed several compelling reasons why it believes iPhones are the cream of the crop.

Google Bard AI Prefers Apple iOS Over Android

As per a report by Apple Insider, Bard has finally shared its take on the intense iPhone vs. Android war. It turns out that Google-owned AI prefers Apple's iOS to Android.

The Apple-focused news outlet asked Google's AI chatbot this prompt: "Which do you prefer: iOS or Android?" Bard gamely answered by weighing the pros and cons of the two rivaling mobile operating systems.

And Google's own AI tool shockingly favored Android arch-nemesis, the Cupertino-based tech giant's iOS for iPhones.

According to BGR, Google's Bard is a direct response to the viral ChatGPT AI. Bard debuted last May, while the latter saw the light of day in December last year.

Bard's preference for iOS is notable because Google is the developer of Android. However, the AI tool is a large language model (LLM), which relies on a massive dataset of text and code. And as such, it means that it has access to a vast amount of information about both iOS and Android. From there, it draws its own conclusions about which operating system is better.

To be more precise, Bard says, "I prefer iOS." But despite that, the AI tool stresses that "both operating systems have their own strengths and weaknesses."

Apple Insider notes that it already tried asking OpenAI's ChatGPT and Microsoft's Bing Chat about their preference, but they shrugged it off, saying they do not have an opinion.

Read Also: ChatGPT, Google Bard Blocked in Court: Texas Judge Prohibits AI-Generated Filings

iOS vs. Android: Here's What Google Bard Says

Bard listed some of the advantages of iOS over Android, such as its utter simplicity in design and top-notch security. It says that the pros of the iPhone software include "tight integration with other Apple products" and "more frequent software updates."

Besides its pros, the AI tool pointed out some of its cons. It includes limitations, such as less customizability and the slimmer options of apps in the App Store. Bard also stressed that iOS devices are generally more expensive.

But to be fair, Google's chatbot highlights the customizability of Android, a wide range of apps, and the affordability of devices running it. However, Bard was pretty frank, pointing out that Android's UI "can be less polished." And on top of that, it is less secure, according to Bard.

Bard's opinion is consistent with most sentiments. The New York Times reports that iOS delivers better privacy and security, whereas Android is accessible even at lower price points.

Related Article: Elon Musk vs. Mark Zuckerberg: Google Bard AI Predicts Cage Fight's Winner

@ 2023 HNGN, All rights reserved. Do not reproduce without permission.
He pointed out that Indias trade with Russia has reached US $40 billion last year compared to $12-14 billion before the Ukraine conflict

New Delhi: Ahead of the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation (SCO) Summit, being held here virtually on Tuesday, external affairs minister S. Jaishankar underscored the importance of India;s ties with Russia. He shed light on Russias strategic pivot towards Asia subsequent to the Ukraine conflict, where it severed its primary economic partnership with Western countries, most notably Europe.

Jaishankar mentioned that because of the conflict in Ukraine, Russias economic ties with Western countries were cut off. As a result, Russia has started to pay more attention to Asia. He pointed out that Indias trade with Russia has reached US $40 billion last year compared to $12-14 billion before the conflict.

Jaishankar also highlighted the growing partnership between Asian economies, with China being the largest among them. He suggested that India shouldnt worry too much about Russias relationships with other countries, but instead, focus on strengthening its own ties with Russia and prioritising the interests of Indians.

Further, while visiting the Delhi North-west parliamentary constituency as part of the BJPs Vikas Teerth yatra, Jaishankar discussed the matter of pro-Khalistan groups and their actions in specific Western countries. He expressed worry about a recent pro-Khalistan rally in Canada showcasing a picture of Talwinder Parmar, who was accused of the 1985 Air India airplane bombing, with an intention to honour him.

Jaishankar told reporters that India has raised the issue of pro-Khalistan posters with the respective governments of partner countries, including Canada, the US, the UK and Australia. He stressed that the radical and extremist thinking of Khalistani groups is detrimental not only to India but also to these Western nations and their relations. He urged these countries not to provide a platform for such elements and to address the matter promptly.
Sharad Pawar, speaking in Mumbai, also said it was the 'time to unite'

NEW DELHI: As the high-voltage Maharashtra political drama continues to unfold, all eyes are on the proposed Opposition meeting in Bengaluru on July 17-18.

While the Aam Aadmi Party had bared its fangs at the Opposition meet in Patna on June 23, Trinamul Congress leaders, fighting both the Left

and the Congress in West Bengal, continued to blow hot and cold.

As the NCPs tallest leader, Sharad Pawar, accused nephew Ajit

Pawar and close associate Praful Patel of betrayal, some of the NCP rebels claimed that he was aware of the developments.

Sources revealed that at a recently-held NCP meeting, Pawar had reportedly told his MLAs that they were free to do whatever they wanted to. Rumours are flying thick and fast that Praful Patel could get a Cabinet berth at the Centre.

With regard to the Opposition meeting in Karnataka, AICC general secretary (organisation) K.C. Venugopal made the announcement on Twitter and said: We are steadfast in our unwavering resolve to defeat the fascist and undemocratic forces. In a tweet, Venugopal said: After a hugely successful all-Opposition meeting in Patna, we will be holding the next meeting in Bengaluru on July 17 and 18. We are steadfast in our unwavering resolve to defeat the fascist and undemocratic forces and present a bold vision to take the country forward.

Sharad Pawar, speaking in Mumbai, also said it was the time to unite.

TMC leader Derek OBrien pitched for Opposition unity, saying All for one and one for all."
by Shafique Khokhar

Shazia Imran, a 40-year-old Christian widow, was killed by four men in murky circumstances because she did not want to convert to Islam and marry a Muslim man, Mani Gujjar. For activist Nadia Stephen, minority women and girls should not be subjected to abduction, rape, and murder simply because they refuse to abandon their religion.

Lahore (AsiaNews)  Shazia Imran, a Christian woman, was kidnapped, raped and killed by four Muslim men because she refused to convert to Islam and marry a man who had set his eyes on her.

Mani Gujjar is the main suspect in the death of the 40-year-old Christian widow. After failing to get her to do what he wanted, he and others gang-raped her and, after killing her, tried to destroy her body with acid.

Shazia worked at a daycare centre at the Lahore University of Management Sciences (LUMS) where she first met the man who now stands accused of her death.

On 6 June, when she did not return from work, her family searched for the mother of three  two boys, Salman (16) and Abrar (6), and one daughter, Aliza (7)  without success.

The next day, they went to the police to file a report, concerned because Shazia and her family were convinced that her husband was beaten to death 18 months earlier, not by "thugs", as the police asserted, but by the same people who killed Shazia.

Physical attacks and rape have been used countless times as coercive methods of conversion, above all, against women from religious minorities in Pakistan.

Shazias case, her rape and murder for refusing to convert, have sparked a new wave of fear but also anger and protests among the country's Catholic minority.

Her relatives say that she had told her sister-in-law about Mani Gujjars harassment and attempts to get her to convert and marry him.

So far police have arrested only one of the four suspects, Mani Gujjar himself; his brother and two cousins, who allegedly participated in the crime, are still at large.

Joseph Jansen, president of Voice of Justice, said he was concerned about the incident, and urged the authorities to take strong action against the perpetrators.

For Jansen, whose NGO provides legal counsel through Pakistans first digital legal portal, the persecution of religious minorities needs to be curbed as soon as possible.

By the same token, the authorities must adopt stricter measures to ensure the safety and security of societys marginalised groups.

In his view, it is very disturbing but alarmingly common that Christian girls and women are subjected to pressure, harassment, and violence when they refuse to convert to Islam.

Women's rights activist Nadia Stephen agrees; for her, minority women and girls who face such pressures are very vulnerable. They should not be subjected to abduction, rape, and murder simply because they refuse to abandon their religion.
by Nirmala Carvalho

The Bishops' Conference called on Catholics to hold a day of prayer and solidarity for the victims of the violence that has torn the north-eastern state for two months. To this end, eucharistic adorations, human chains and torchlight processions were held to spur the Indian government to act.

Mumbai (AsiaNews)  Churches across India joined an appeal by the of the Catholic Bishops Conference of India (CBCI) to observe a day of prayer and solidarity on 2 July, yesterday, for the victims of the violence that has been tearing apart the north-eastern state of Manipur for the past two months.

The observance was held a day before the feast of Saint Thomas (Yashu Bhakti Divas), which falls today and has been celebrated for the past few years as Indian Christian Day.

In Tamil Nadu, many parishes in the Archdiocese of Pondicherry-Cuddalore held services, torchlight processions, and rallies in favour of peace and harmony to Manipur.

Participants also expressed their disappointment at the lack of proper action by the Union (federal) government to stop the wave of violence.

While different ethnic groups are pitted against one another, it is sad to see so many Christians targeted and churches torched.

Archbishop Francis Kalist of Pondicherry-Cuddalore announced a special fundraiser for the people of Manipur, where tens of thousands of people have been displaced. The money raised will go to Caritas India which is supporting initiatives put in place by the Diocese of Imphal.

Fr. Raj, rector at Our Lady of Pedryanayagi shrine in Konankuppam, spoke to AsiaNews about it.

In Konankuppam shrine, human chain and prayers were held after Sunday Mass, he said. Women and men participated, pledging to maintain peace and harmony in the country.

From Odisha, a state where anti-Christian pogroms took place in 2008, Archbishop John Barwa of Cuttack Bhubaneswar also spoke to AsiaNews.

In our diocese we held an adoration and we are doing collections to send them, he explained.

Our people feel the pain and suffering of the people in Manipur, he added, for they know the trauma of hiding in forests, seeing their houses and churches destroyed, and experiencing the sufferings of living in refugee camps.

He goes on to say, We are united in prayer and solidarity with the suffering people of Manipur hoping that they can be a balm for their wounds.
All eight are wanted in connection with alleged violations of the national security law imposed by Beijing in 2020. Two are former lawmakers. Aa bounty of around US$ 130,000 is hanging over their heads. As a member of Interpol, China is calling for their extradition. They are accused of demanding Hong Kong's independence and carrying out illegal activities.

Hong Kong (AsiaNews)  Hong Kong police have issued arrest warrants for eight activists for violating the draconian national security law imposed by Beijing in the former British colony to crack down on dissent.

All eight are living in exile. Two, Ted Hui and Dennis Kwok, are former members of Hong Kongs Legislative Council (LegCo), charged with various offences, including subversion and promoting the territorys independence.

Hong Kongs national security police has offered a HK million (US$ 130,000) bounty for each activist, a first for people wanted under the security law, which punishes acts of secession, subversion, terrorism, and collusion with foreign forces.

The announcement came a week after an editorial appeared in the state-owned newspaper Ta Kung Pao, citing Article 38 of the infamous law saying that it also applies to people living outside Hong Kong.

In particular, the law gives China, as a member of Interpol, the right to request the cooperation of other countries to apprehend fugitives.

The arrest warrants were issued two days after the third anniversary of the law's entry into effect and 26 years after the territory was returned to China.

In addition to the aforementioned former lawmakers, the warrants include activists Nathan Law, Anna Kwok, Elmer Yuen, Mung Siu-tat and Finn Law as well as lawyer Kevin Yam.

At present, the eight exiles (picture by Hong Kong Free Press) are in Canada, Australia, the United States, and Great Britain.

For National Security Police Chief Superintendent Steve Li, bounties are not for show, but are an act of law enforcement.

The goal is to arrest the suspects because, despite having fled Hong Kong, they continue to carry out illegal activities that endanger the Autonomous Region, like advocating self-determination and independence for Hong Kong.

According to the police, the eight also seriously violated" the law by calling for exemplary sanctions against "local officials" and scheming on behalf of foreign countries to undermine Hong Kong's financial status".

The suspects should come forward and surrender to the authorities so that the courts can "consider imposing a lighter sentence on them".

The police reported that 260 people, aged 15 to 90, have been arrested for endangering national security since the law came into effect, two thirds of whom have been charged. Five companies have also been indicted.
by Gianni Criveller *

Fr. Gianni Criveller remembers the Chinese academic who died in Beijing. "The son of militants who had done the Long March with Mao, he was proud of his studies at the Catholic University of Milan. He collaborated in the Cause for the beatification of Matteo Ricci. A man who symbolised a season of China's great openness towards faiths, now drastically reduced'.

Milan (AsiaNews) - Tomorrow, Tuesday 4th July, the funeral will be held in Beijing of Professor Ren Yanli (), 79 years old, an eminent scholar of Catholicism at the Research Institute of World Religions of the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences; and former director at the same Academy of the Office of Research on Christianity. The Academy of Social Sciences is the Chinese government's cultural and scientific laboratory, and is therefore of great importance and enjoys a fair amount of research freedom.

The news of his passing on 30 June last greatly shocked and saddened me. I was bound to Prof. Ren and his wife Wang Meixiu by friendship and affection. We collaborated with Prof. Ren on numerous occasions in Beijing, Hong Kong, Rome, Macerata, and Milan. He hosted me several times as a speaker at the Academy of Social Sciences and other academic institutions in the Chinese capital. In 1997, he generously engaged in organising a series of lectures by Neapolitan theologian Bruno Forte (now Archbishop of Chieti) at academic institutions in Beijing.

Prof. Ren was a member of the Commission for the beatification of Matteo Ricci at the diocese of Macerata (2010-2013), which I chaired. There were only two Chinese scholars on the commission, and Ren was the only non-Christian. I well remember the moment of the oath on the Bible, which of course was not asked of him (but he made a somewhat equivalent gesture). He diligently brought his contribution and our work was recognised with the recognition of Fr Ricci's heroic virtues by Pope Francis last 17 December, the act by which Ricci became Venerable.

I met Ren Yanli in 1994 in Beijing, thanks to Fr Angelo Lazzarotto, a PIME missionary, a true pioneer of contacts between China and Catholicism since the late 1970s. Fr Lazzarotto had facilitated Ren Yanli's admission to the Catholic University of the Sacred Heart in Milan, where he graduated with a thesis on the salvation of non-Christians according to the Second Vatican Council. Ren was very proud of his studies at the Catholic University, and maintained excellent relations with his lecturers.

Ren spoke Italian very well, furthering his knowledge of Catholicism, of which he became one of the foremost Chinese experts. Ren's knowledge of Italian and Catholicism allowed him frequent and in-depth contacts with those in the Vatican who were responsible for dialogue with China, including important cardinals. A Chinese priest familiar with this area confirmed to me how Ren had won esteem, respect and credibility for his sincerity, cordiality and tenacity both in China and in Rome.

Ren worked hard, unsparingly, to reconcile positions as different as those between China and the Vatican. He was a mediator, a man who united and not divided. And the field on which he moved was not without its pitfalls and difficulties. On the one hand the religious policy of the communist regime, so adverse and suspicious towards Catholicism, and on the other the Holy See's desire for dialogue and freedom for Catholics.

Ren Yanli had great respect for the Catholic faith and for the inescapability of the Roman primacy. He often told me of his struggle to help Chinese officials understand the concept "that Catholics are not Protestants, and therefore you cannot take the pope away from them". As Fides reported, Ren insisted that the faith of Chinese Catholics was a determining factor in making Chinese politicians understand the specificity of the Catholic Church and thus redirecting the intransigent line adopted for decades. On the other hand, Ren Yanli never encouraged Catholics to soften their principled positions, particularly on the role of the Roman Pontiff.

From the 1990s until a decade ago, centres for the study of Christianity flourished in China, led by so-called 'cultural Christians', i.e. scholars who were sympathetic to the Christian faith and adhered to it spiritually and ideally. Ren Yanli was not a 'cultural Christian', he was rather a scholar operating from within a government agency. Nevertheless, he participated in a season of China's great openness to faiths, and to Christianity in particular. And it is unfortunate to note that today this openness is drastically curtailed.

I personally owe a lot to Ren Yanli, whom I considered a loyal and sincere friend who did not fail to offer me advice, for my benefit, in difficult times. He hosted me in his home and told me about his life. His name Yan-li means 'the dawn of Yan': it means he was born in Yan-an (in the north of Shaanxi province) in 1944. As is well known Yan-an, a place now considered epic in the communist narrative, is the small town where Mao Zedong's Long March had ended and where the communist army reorganised in preparation for the struggle that would bring it to power in 1949. Ren Yanli was thus the son of communist militants who were very close to Mao and who made the legendary Long March with him. It was no small thing in communist China to boast of this origin.

As a young man, he was commissioned to study Italian, which he did with great success. However, the Cultural Revolution disrupted his and his superiors' plans, as it did for so many others who grew up within the Communist Party. After the Cultural Revolution he was allowed to continue studying Italian, and so it was that he came to Milan in the early 1980s.

He loved returning to Italy, and visiting his favourite gelaterias and pizzerias in Rome or Milan. But in recent years, his deteriorating health did not allow him to travel. Now, after contracting Covid, Prof. Ren Yanli has sadly passed away. My thoughts go with friendship to his wife, Wang Meixiu, who shared the study of Catholicism with her husband, and who also made significant contributions to the sympathetic understanding of Catholicism within the Academy of Social Sciences.

Last week Fr Jean Charbonnier, a missionary of the Missions Etrangeres de Paris who dedicated his life to China and to weaving fragile threads of dialogue and presence, also passed away. It feels like an end to a season that was truly promising.

I think that Fr Lazzarotto, who is no longer able to write, shares my feelings. With Ren Yanli we not only lose a friend, whom we esteemed and who played a very significant role in the long years of our contacts with China. It is the very cause of dialogue between China and the Vatican that is losing a valuable friend. Never before have we needed men who unite and not divide; we need bridge-builders and not saboteurs. We need believers in the common humanity that unites men and women 'under the same heaven'. Many years ago Ren Yanli told me that he was not a believer. I don't know if anything inside him changed. But I hope with all my heart that the God of life will not be displeased with the existence of a good man, who spent himself for dialogue and good.

* PIME missionary and sinologist
Today's headlines: Two weeks of strikes in South Korea; Chinese director-general Qu Dongyu re-elected at FAO; In Myanmar the number of displaced people rises to 1.8 million; In East Timor, independence hero Xanana Gusmao confirmed as new head of state; Heavy rains hit Japan; Russian Foreign Minister Lavrov attacks Patriarch Bartholomew of Constantinople.

ISRAEL - PALESTINE

At least three Palestinians died in a military operation launched by the Israeli Defence Forces (IDF) against the Jenin refugee camp in the northern West Bank. The Israeli military claimed to have hit 'terrorist infrastructure', while the Jenin Battalion, which brings together several Palestinian armed groups, said it would continue to fight. "What is happening in the refugee camp is a real war," said a Palestinian ambulance driver.

MYANMAR

The number of internally displaced persons (IDPs) in Myanmar has reached 1.8 million according to the UNHCR, of whom an estimated 328,000 fled before the military coup on 1 February 2021 and are mainly in Kachin, Rakhine, Karen, Shan and Chin states, while now due to the civil war 41% of the IDPs are in the northern Sagaing region.

EAST TIMOR

As previously announced, Xanana Gusmao was elected Prime Minister of East Timor on Saturday, after his party, the Timorese National Reconstruction Congress, winner in the May elections, allied with the Democratic Party, which came second in the polls. A fighter for independence, he had been the country's first president in 2002.

CHINA

Yesterday Qu Dongyu was re-elected for a second term as director general of the Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO), receiving 168 out of 182 votes. He will remain in office until 2027. According to the organisation's website, since the first election in 2019 "Qu has supported a wide range of reforms and initiatives to overhaul the business model" of the FAO.

SOUTH KOREA

The Korean Confederation of Trade Unions announced a two-week strike calling for the resignation of President Yoon Suk-yeol. The demonstration is expected to involve 400-500 thousand workers opposed to Yoon's proposed labour reform measures, which the unions believe are 'pro-chaebol', Korea's large family-owned corporate conglomerates, and 'anti-worker'.

JAPAN

Heavy rains hit the southwestern region of Kyushu, causing a bridge to collapse, and Japanese authorities issued evacuation orders for about 360,000 residents of the city of Kumamoto, who were also advised to be on the alert for possible landslides and flooding. No casualties have been reported so far.

RUSSIA

Russian Foreign Minister Lavrov has lashed out at Patriarch Bartholomew of Constantinople, who, according to him, "is on very close terms with the United States, which finances him, and does everything to ruin the whole of world Orthodoxy, and has never done anything to help us solve the problems with the Ukrainian Orthodox, on the contrary, he has ruined everything".

BELARUS

The parliament in Minsk has passed a law for the accession of Belarus to the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation, and the chairman of the House Foreign Affairs Committee, Andrej Savinykh, said he was certain that this decision would make accession possible in an accelerated timeframe, 'not in two years, but in one'.
by Vladimir Rozanskij

In a verdict that represents an important step forward for human rights, four officers were given sentences ranging from two to seven years in prison. They were accused of torturing two prisoners, one of whom died as a result of the harassment.

Astana (AsiaNews) - The Special Court for Serious Crimes in the city of Symkent in Kazakhstan made a rather resounding decision for the country's traditions on 30 June, sentencing four members of the police force to two to seven years in prison.

They were accused of torturing two prisoners, one of whom died as a result of the harassment. Both the convicts and the lawyers of the injured parties, however, challenged the sentence, stating that they would appeal against it.

On 8 December 2021, 30-year-old Nurbolat Zumabaev and his slightly younger friend Sergey Petrov were arrested and taken to the Symkent police department on suspicion of participating in the theft of a very expensive car. A few hours later, Zumabaev died in the building itself.

At first the police stated that he "fell ill during interrogation, and passed away before the ambulance arrived", but relatives later reported that they found many signs of violence on his body.

On 11 December, Eraly Zumakhanbetov, then director of the department, admitted that violence had been used on the suspect, confirming the relatives' version that he had been beaten to death. Petrov also stated that he had been subjected to violence, and the four policemen were sued for crimes of torture, which aroused strong emotions throughout Kazakh society.

Judge Svetlana Synalieva finally passed the sentence, one and a half years after the facts were analysed by the special court. Daulet Ajmesov was sentenced to seven years, Ualikhan Zanibekov to seven years, Dinmukhammed Isaev to three and a half years and Aliser Otkirov to two years, partly accepting the prosecution's demands, which ranged from three to nine years.

Sergey Petrov, a survivor of torture, stated that he would never forgive the defendants and asked the judge to impose the heaviest possible sentence on them. The first three convicts will serve their sentences in a medium-security prison, deprived of the rank of corporal, while Otkirov, who was also reduced to the lowest level, will be locked up in a simple security prison.

In addition, they will not be able to exercise leadership functions in any law enforcement agency for another three years; part of the sentence has already been served after the arrest, with preventive and home detention, which will reduce the sentences by almost two years.

At the trial, the prosecutor recalled the facts, from when the policemen had stopped the two suspects in a bar, then beaten and tortured them for almost an hour at the precinct, without any entry in the police arrest register.

Ajmesov was the first to turn on Zumabaev and Petrov, punching and kicking them and leaving them on the freezing floor of a cell without heating while it was almost -30 degrees. They were then taken to different rooms, and in agreement with the other policemen, Ajmesov remained alone with Zumabaev, who attacked him with a fatal blow to the chest .

In his testimony, the accused explained that the two had refused to provide the pin-codes of their mobile phones, "and we were forced to use truncheons" to find evidence of their crime.

According to the autopsy ordered by the judge, which the relatives also released to the press, the death may also have been caused by 'electroshock', with signs of 'internal bleeding in the liver' and 'trauma to the stomach'.

The deceased's brother, and Petrov himself, were also awarded by the court compensation of 1 million tenge (about EUR 2,000) by each of the convicts for moral damage, and 5 million (about EUR 10,000) by Ajmesov and Zanibekov, but no further sums by the state.

The plaintiffs also called for the indictment of the now former police district director, General Zumakhanbetov, for 'negligence in the performance of his duties', but the judge disregarded the request.

Nurbolat's body is now resting in the cemetery of his native Kostanae, and Kazakh and international humanitarian organisations are calling on the government in Astana to take serious measures against torture and violence in prisons and investigation institutions, where even the most basic rights of suspects are not recognised.
The South Korean government is warning its northern counterparts that the Unification Ministry is no longer interested in providing comprehensive support.

According to Yonhap News Agency, South Korean President Yoon Suk Yeol announced the shift in stance toward North Korea on Sunday after designating a conservative ministerial chief.

South Korea's Unification Ministry to Shift Focus

Since the Korean War, when the peninsula was split in half, the Unification Ministry of South Korea has been entrusted with sustaining contact with its northern neighbor. As per Fox News, the ministry has shifted in response to the warming and cooling of relations with North Korea.

As a result of increased US-South Korea military exercises and North Korean weapon tests, tensions between the North and South have heightened during the presidency of Joe Biden. In solidarity with its allies, Russia and China, the hermit kingdom has also reverted to an aggressively anti-American stance.

After appointing a new unification minister a few days earlier, South Korean President Yoon Suk Yeol stated on Sunday that the ministry had in the past placed too much emphasis on delivering aid to North Korea and needed to alter its approach.

Kim Yung-ho, the new minister, is a conservative scholar and outspoken critic of human rights atrocities in North Korea, which Yoon has sought to highlight in the context of escalating tensions on the Korean Peninsula.

Read Also: Russia Reduces Military Presence Near Zaporizhzhia Nuclear Plant Amid Fears That Putin Prepares for Sabotage

South Korea Urges to Defend Liberal Values

Per AOL, Yoon also urged the ministry to defend liberal democratic values and stated that unification should result in a "better and more humane existence" for the South and North Koreans.

Kim wrote in a 2019 online column that reunification would be clear once Kim Jong Un's "regime is overthrown and North Korea is emancipated."

A high-ranking representative from Yoon's office explained: "The unification ministry will primarily analyze and respond to the most recent trends in North Korea, as well as manage human rights issues in North Korea."

Kim Yung-ho, a conservative scholar nominated for the ministerial position on Friday, has stated that human rights violations in North Korea's secretive regime must be highlighted to exert pressure on the country and that Seoul's inter-Korean policy must prioritize human rights in North Korea.

Per Korea Times, critics believe that Kim's appointment, once finalized in a parliamentary confirmation hearing, could undermine the role of the Ministry of Unification, which prioritizes exchanges and reconciliation with the North.



Related Article: North Korea Responds to Hyundai Chief's Visit Requests, Says 'Entry Cannot Be Allowed'





@ 2023 HNGN, All rights reserved. Do not reproduce without permission.
In an interview with the Emirati daily al-Ittihad, the pontiff warned, "Any book considered sacred must be respected." Recalling the Document on Human Brotherhood signed in Abu Dhabi, he called for its translation into concrete gestures and praised the initiative of the Abrahamic House. At Cop28 in Dubai the call to listen to "the cry of the earth and the cry of the poor."

Vatican City (AsiaNews) - "I feel outraged and disgusted by these actions": This is Pope Francis response to a question about the burning of a copy of the Koran in Sweden in recent days, during an interview with the UAE daily al-Ittihad.

Dialoguing with editor Hamad al-Kaabi, the pontiff admonishes, "Any book considered sacred by its authors must be respected out of respect for its believers, and freedom of expression must never be used as an excuse to despise others, and to allow this must be rejected and condemned."

In the interview Pope Francis returns to his 2019 trip to the United Arab Emirates and the Document on Human Brotherhood signed in Abu Dhabi together with Imam of al Azhar Ahmad al Tayyeb.

"I think it is an important text not only for dialogue between religions," he explains, "but for peaceful coexistence among all human beings. There will be the civilization of brotherhood or the civilization of enmity, either we build the future together or there will be no future."

"Our task," Francis further adds, "is to transform the religious sense into cooperation, into fraternity, into concrete good works. Today we need peacemakers, not arms manufacturers; today we need peacemakers, not instigators of conflict; we need firefighters, not arsonists; we need advocates of reconciliation, not people who threaten destruction."

And this commitment must be concrete: "It is easy to talk about brotherhood, but the true measure of brotherhood is what we actually do in concrete ways to help, support, rescue, feed and welcome my brothers and sisters in humanity. All good by its very nature must be directed toward everyone indiscriminately. If I do good only to those who think or believe as I do, then my good is hypocrisy, because good knows no discrimination or exclusion."

In the interview, the pope praises the Abraham's House initiative, which precisely in the spirit of the Human Brotherhood document sees St. Francis Church, a mosque and a synagogue side by side in Abu Dhabi.

"It is a place to respect diversity, willed by God, and not to turn difference into contempt or a reason for conflict," the pontiff explained. "It is a place of coexistence, tolerance and faith. Each of us can live our faith while respecting the faith and freedom of the other. Only those who are not sure of their faith live in fear of meeting the other and rush to confrontation."

Finally, when asked about the appointment of Cop28-the World Climate Conference to be held in Dubai at the end of the year-he hoped it would represent a significant date in the effort to give "answers to the environmental crisis and to the cry of the earth and the cry of the poor who can wait no longer. The only effective way to address this crisis," he concluded, "is to find realistic solutions to the problems. We must turn statements into action before it is too late."
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Diego Mariscal, the founder and CEO of 2gether-International and a participant in last weeks Aspen Ideas Festival, has built a company that helps disabled entrepreneurs build their companies.
Chinese netizens are criticizing American-style or European food, asking how U.S. residents are able to eat this kind of meal every day.

The cultures of China and the United States have many differences. The way Chinese and Americans dress, enter the house, and prepare their food are definitely not similar.

This is why Chinese and American residents are confused about why the other side does this and that. Now, Chinese social media users are questioning how Americans continue to eat European meals.

#WhitePeopleFood: Chinese Netizens Criticize American-Style Food

According to NBC News' latest report, Chinese netizens are posting about European meals.

They are usually criticizing American-style food, saying that the #WhitePeopleFood is "food of suffering."

Related Article: Pride Month 2023: A Rundown of the Most Controversial June to Date

The #WhitePeopleFood trend began in May; with Chinese netizens sharing videos and photos of American meals they see.

One of these viral posts shows a train passenger in Switzerland pulling lettuce leaves from a bag. The lady layered the vegetables with ham and mustard to make a sandwich.

"Is there anything more 'white people food' than this?" said the Chinese netizen who posted the video.

Although many Chinese residents are dissatisfied with American-style meals, some people in China are good with them since European food can be prepared easily, especially during their work breaks.

Gao Duan, a 30-year-old Chinese resident who has been eating American food for over six months, said that European meals are convenient to eat in the office since they don't have a strong smell.

"There is no point eating good food in the workplace because food should be divine and enjoyed properly," added Duan.

American Vs. Chinese Food

There are numerous reasons why Chinese residents don't like American-style food. These include the lack of flavor since European meals commonly consist of bread, vegetables, fruits, ham, etc.

Unlike Americans, people in China are used to eating cooked food. They even spend a lot of time cooking their meals; using many spices to make them more flavorful.

Aside from meal preparation, Business Insider provided other differences between American-style and Chinese food:

China has more ingredients compared to the U.S. These include soy sauce, plum sauce, star anise, lotus pods, etc.

While Americans are used to eating raw food, Chinese prefer their meals to be cooked.

In China, residents commonly eat food that doesn't contain many dairy products, which is the opposite in the U.S. since Americans love milk and cheese.

Donuts and other desserts in the United States are usually very sweet. On the other hand, desserts in China are not.

Related Article: Independence Day 2023: Finding the Best Grill for Your Cookout

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CARSTAR South Thornton in GA Celebrates White Christmas in July

Published July 3, 2023

All the stockings were hung by the chimney with care, in hopes that St. Nicholas soon would be there. But Jamie White, owner of four CARSTAR collision repair facilities in northeast Georgia, got a lump of coal instead.

On Christmas Eve, just as White was preparing to celebrate the holiday with his family, he got a call from the fire department that his sprinkler system had been activated at his CARSTAR South Thornton location. White sprang into action, donning his cap and heading to see what the clatter was all about.

Dalton, GA, was in the middle of an unseasonable deep freeze, and the pipes supplying Whites sprinkler system burst, dumping a massive water flow of more than 6 inches in an hour throughout his lobby and office areas. The building, which was the original Ford dealership in Dalton, had a solid foundation, so damage was fortunately limited to the inside.

I was in shock, said White. The fire department got there quickly and got the water turned off and I was right behind them. My family and our team members started showing up shortly after. We had my dad, our lead estimator, our administrator and several others who heard about it on our small-town grapevine and came to help on Christmas Eve.

The damage was unbelievable, White said. The ceiling, floors, furniture, office equipment and files were all ruined. White and his band of Christmas Eve elves did what they could to salvage items and mop up all the water. He reached out to his local insurance agent, who provided all the steps he needed to follow, and filed a claim on his garage keepers policy with Travelers.

There was nothing else we could do but go home and focus on Christmas with our families, he said. I started putting a plan in place to get us up and working in the short term and renovate our building to be better than ever over the coming months.

White was prepared for just such an accident, learning from his friend and fellow CARSTAR owner Tom Martin, who had a massive fire at one of his CARSTAR locations in Ohio several years ago.

Toms experience taught me an important lesson---dont ever think it wont happen to you, because it can, said White. I made an effort to get organized, document everything and have a plan just in case we had a disaster. And when it did happen, we were as ready as we could be.

White outlined several key steps in getting prepared for a flood, fire or other natural disaster---before it happens:

Understand the value of your insurance coverage. Know what is and isnt covered and increase your policy to ensure youre protected.

Conduct an audit of all your equipment, furnishings and materials. Record every serial number, purchase information and warranty details in a safe place.

Back up your technology regularly so you always have a digital record of your business, banking, tax information and customer files.

Conduct a cost analysis of your assets and what it will take to replace them, then create a fund to cover such emergencies.

Once the water dried, White and his team went to work to get the business running again. Fortunately, there was no damage in the production areas, so they only had to focus on the office space.

We relocated our parts department to our production area so we could keep repairs in process, said White. The production area isnt heated, so our parts team put up with being chilly for a few months but never lost their focus on getting the job done. Then, we got a mobile shipping container that was outfitted as an office, and our customer service team, estimators and managers all piled in there. We went from about 5,000 square feet of space to about 300 square feet. It was cramped, but our staff was absolutely amazing and soldiered on to keep serving our customers.

White noted that building back provided an opportunity to modernize the facility and make better use of the space. He opened up the waiting room to make it more spacious and relaxing for customers, added private cubicles where they could meet with estimators and discuss their repairs, created a training room for his team, and designed the offices and work stations for more efficient flow and communications.

Now, six months later, White is reopening his facility renovated and ready to serve his customers. He credits his local insurance agent and Travelers with helping him navigate the flood waters.

He has had some time to reflect on the experience, and shared these tips for anyone facing the same situation:

Keep your operation lean. Get rid of things you dont need along the way.

Be patient and follow the process. You cant rush the steps you need to go through and you cant let your frustration impact your team.

Enlist your family and friends in helping rebuild together. They will be more vested in the outcome if they are part of the repair planning.

Dont think it wont happen to you. Be prepared and have a plan in place when it does.

So after the shock of the flood on Christmas Eve, White made it home for dinner and Santa arrived as scheduled for Christmas morning. It was a White Christmas after all.

Source: CARSTAR
USAA Settles Georgia Class Action on Underpaid Taxes in Auto Claims

Written by Insurance Journal Staff Reports

Published July 3, 2023

A federal judge in Georgia has given preliminary approval to a $2.3 million settlement in a class-action lawsuit that charged USAA Casualty Insurance Co. with underpaying for taxes on totaled vehicles.

The Court finds, subject to the final fairness hearing  that the settlement agreement is fundamentally fair, adequate and reasonable, U.S. District Judge Leigh Martin May wrote in the order in June.

The final hearing has been scheduled for Dec. 13.

Some 9,000 Georgia policyholders joined the suit, one of several class actions around the country filed against USAA, State Farm, GEICO and other auto insurers. Lead plaintiff Jahazel Black, of McDounough, GA, argued in the 2021 complaint that in her case, USAA reimbursed only $49.25 to cover the ad valorem tax paid when Black purchased the vehicle.

That was well below the $345 that should have been paid under the actual cash value terms of the policy and under Georgia law, the plaintiff said. Other plaintiffs in the class had similar underpayments, the complaint noted.

In its answer to the suit, USAA denied the allegations and said its ad valorem tax manual speaks for itself.

USAA also must pay almost $573,000 in attorney fees, the court ordered.

The suit is similar to others that have alleged auto insurers have systematically underpaid taxes and fees to insured motorists, which amount to a few hundred dollars per plaintiff. In August 2022, San Antonio-based USAA agreed to settle a class action suit in Mississippi, which held that the insurer had underpaid on hundreds of auto claims. The suit was handled by the same plaintiffs law firm that has led other class actions.

GEICO Insurance in 2022 also was the subject of a similar class action in Georgia. State Farm was sued in Illinois on similar grounds. State Farm in 2022 also settled a class action brought in Alabama, charging that the cost of labor on home repairs was depreciated, something not allowed by state law.

But a Massachusetts judge in June denied class certification in a lawsuit against Safety Insurance and Commerce Insurance, over the resale value of repaired vehicles.

USAA officials could not be reached for comment about the Georgia settlement.

We thank Insurance Journal for reprint permission.
In 2021, the British motorcycle manufacturer launched the Triumph 3 GT 221 Limited Edition, a more touring-oriented motorcycle than the standard R model. It delivered excellent performance and was named after its peak torque of 221 Nm.

The GT model and the R version were available for only one year. They combined a unique color scheme with top-end performance specifications and Rocket's signature styling, handling, and effortless touring capabilities.

The bike was painted in a distinctive Red Hopper color found on the front fender and fuel tank, fitting perfectly with the Sapphire Black elements, like the front fender's brackets, headlight housings, side panels, rear bodywork, and radiator cowls.

The 2021 Triumph 3 GT 221 Limited Edition and its Rocket siblings were fitted with the same engine, the largest unit ever served on a production motorcycle worldwide, delivering the highest torque compared to other production machines.

As for the power figures, both 2021 Triumphs packed a 2,458cc four-stroke inline three-cylinder liquid-cooled engine fed by an electronically controlled fuel injection system, boasted 167 hp at 6,000 rpm and 221 Nm (163 lb-ft) torque at 4,000 rpm.

The bike's suspension was handled by a 47 mm fully adjustable Showa upside-down fork on the front and a fully adjustable Showa monoshock on the rear, delivering excellent suspension performance and handling.

In addition, the bike was available with 50+ Genuine Triumph Accessories designed along with the bike, including a range of luggage accessories for enhanced touring capabilities, with a patented cast aluminum retractable and lockable mounting system.
The Bavarian automaker has lots to do this early summer  from model year updates to the BMW Motorrad lineup to introducing the 'small' 2024 BMW X1 M35i xDrive and from announcing the artist behind their 20th BMW Art Car to diligently taking care of their flagship XM crossover SUV.

SUV

Speaking of the latter, the brand-new XM has already been hit with the first recall alongside the facelifted X7 M60i  these new vehicles now tend to break down way too early on during their lifecycles. Luckily, thanks to Performance Eurowerks' dynamometer, we also know that the 644-horsepower-rated super-CUV is laying down 615 hp at the wheels, meaning it has more power and torque than BMW says it does, as per tradition.Anyway, the 2024 BMW XM with 'just' 644 horsepower (which is still almost enough to challenge a 657-hp Lambo Urus S or Performante to a quick brawl or two) has been around for some time already. And, at $159k without destination, it's undoubtedly one of the most expensive M GmbH models available on the US market. Compare it to the $62,200 M2, the M3 family ($76k Sedan, $78,100 M4 Coupe or $93,300 M4 Convertible), M8 Coupe or Convertible and Gran Coupe ($138,800 or $148,800, and $138,800 respectively), plus the entire X family, which ranges from $74,400 (X3 M) to $127,200 (X6 M) and you can easily drive a point home.But now the Bavarians have the absolute XM flagship on offer, too. So, the 2024 BMW XM Label Red goes from an MSRP of $185k, which is not that much for swapping the rating from 644 hp to 738 hp for the plug-in hybrid assembly paired with the iconic 4.4-liter BMW M TwinPower Turbo V8. That way, the sprint time to 60 mph (96 kph) goes down from 4.1 seconds to a supercar-like 3.6s! And shockingly, there are only a few paid options. For example, all colors are free of charge (including the Toronto Red exterior trim), and so are all the 22- and 23-inch wheel choices.In the end, all you can add is the $3,400 Bowers & Wilkins Diamond Surround Sound System, the $2,500 M Driver's performance package, plus various bundles of the BMW Ultimate Care+ program (from $850 to $6,649). In the end, the tally rose to less than $200k - $197,549, to be more precise, without the $995 destination & handling fee. That's a total of $198,544, by the way. As a reminder, the pre-order waiting list was opened months ago in February, but until now, there was no way to fiddle with the options . The BMW XM plug-in hybrid full-size luxury crossover represents the German company's idea of a super-that's bound to clash with everyone, from the ultra-ritzy Rolls-Royce Cullinan Black Badge to the 715-hp Ferrari Purosangue, and more.
Following the E-Class Sedan and E-Class T-Modell, which means wagon in Mercedes-Benz vernacular, the Stuttgart-based automaker is preparing to unveil yet another all-new model. The CLE replaces no fewer than four nameplates in the German brand's lineup, those nameplates being the C-Class Coupe, C-Class Convertible, E-Class Coupe, and E-Class Convertible.

AMG

4MATIC

Scheduled to premiere on July 5 at 5:00 pm Central European Standard Time, the CLE has been teased in fixed-head coupe form. Our spy photographers captured quite a few-ified versions in the past months, together with the CLE Convertible. At press time, it's not known if the cabriolet will debut on July 5 as well.Mercedes didn't confirm four- and six-cylinder engines officially, but we do know that fours and sixers are in the offing thanks to a March 2023 filing with the Environmental Protection Agency in the United States of America. The filing in question  which is attached as a .pdf below  lists the CLE Coupe and CLE Convertible under the codenames C236 and A236.The C-Class and E-Class, by comparison, are referred to as the W206, W214 , and  in the T-Modell's case  S214. The E-Class T-Modell will also receive an All-Terrain variant that shares the wagon's codename.In the US market, both the coupe and convertible will be initially available as the four-cylinder 300 4MATIC , six-cylinder 450, and six-cylinder 53 4MATIC. The filing even lists tire sizes, with the 300 series getting 245/45 R18 rubber shoes as standard.The 450 levels up to 245/40 R19s and 275/35 R19s, and the AMG-branded 53 sweetens the deal to 265/40 R19 for the front axle and 295/35 R19 for the rear axle. The 53 will be optionally available with 265/35 R20s and 295/30 R20s. All three series get nine-speed automatics. The 53 drops the torque converter of the 450 and 300 in favor of a wet start-off clutch for better acceleration.Regarding said engine choices, the four-cylinder turbo is a 48-volt mild hybrid with 2.0 liters of displacement to its name. The hybrid part of the powertrain is an integrated starter generator, with said ISG integrated into the transmission. In the E-Class 350 4MATIC, it makes 22 horsepower and 148 pound-feet (201 Nm).The E-Class 450 4MATIC is estimated at 375 horsepower and 369 pound-feet (500 Nm) at full chatter, which is pretty good for a straight-six turbo with 3.0 liters of displacement. Comparable to the B58 from BMW, that is. The 53 is a bit of a mystery because  as per the filing  it rocks the very same engine and ISG.As opposed to the C 43, which packs a four-cylinder turbocharged engine assembled by hand by AMG, the CLE 53 features a regular production engine. Keep that in mind if you're in the market for the 53 series.
SUV

In the real world, everyone is screaming 'wolf' about the impending release of a new Toyota Land Cruiser. That's odd, considering that the J300-series has been out for a little while only (two years), but most likely, the Japanese automaker is not talking about that one when they said the nameplate would return to the United States after that short hiatus. Instead, the probability is 99% that Toyota will use the same values for the European continent and across the big pond (aka the Atlantic Ocean), so we  along with the entire rumor mill  are expecting that the next Toyota Land Cruiser Prado (or 250) will become a common asset based on the new Lexus GX 500 underpinnings across both regions.However, as it turns out, not everyone is thinking about the iconic Land Cruiser. Meanwhile, across the imaginative realm of digital car content creators, some would rather consider all otherfactors instead. And since the 2024 Toyota Tacoma is almost ready to go out and about, maybe it's the appropriate time also to discuss its 4Runner sibling  a model that has already reached its fifth generation compared to Tacoma's N400 fourth iteration, but it also did it way long ago, in 2009!As such, everyone and their mother knows it's about time Toyota did something about that. But since the Japanese automaker seems to have bigger Land Cruiser fish to fry, the CGI stage is set for pixel masters to try their best to supply the all-new 2024 or 2025 Toyota 4 Runner SUV that would do TNGA-F battle with the sixth-gen Ford Bronco or fourth-gen Jeep Wrangler. Anyway, this is not the first time that the good folks over at the AutoYa info channel on YouTube have imagined the CGI looks of the upcoming 2025 4Runner, complete with (many) TRD Pro goodies.So, now they deferred to the satellite venue dubbed AutoYa Interior , where all the fresh (CGI) 4Runner action occurs, mostly from inside-out, and complete with many posh color options. By the way, do take all this with a healthy dose of salt as nothing is official just yet - not leaked patents, not any juicy teasers, and not even a hint from Toyota's corner office head honchos. Hey, not even our spy photographer partners have caught any camouflaged DNA of the upcoming sixth-gen 4Runner, so it's pretty safe to say that everything seen here is not only wishful thinking but also way ahead of the official times.
There are three types of car lovers. The opportunist who sees the value and potential of a car in the market and wants to flip it for profit. The motorhead who craves a chance behind the wheel of a performance car to push it to its limits, and lastly  the collector who's ready to sacrifice everything for an automobile to end up in their beautiful collection.

Eclectic collection proof of their long-standing history in car modification

Photo: YouTube Screenshot/The Late Brake Show

1980 BMW E30 M3 Track Car

Photo: YouTube Screenshot/The Late Brake Show

2006 GT1 LP640 Lamborghini Murcielago

Photo: YouTube Screenshot/The Late Brake Show

2001 BMW E46 M3

Photo: YouTube Screenshot/The Late Brake Show

Driftworks Toyota AE86 (7.4-liter LSX engine)

Photo: YouTube Screenshot/The Late Brake Show

1992 Porsche 911 964 Turbo

Photo: YouTube Screenshot/The Late Brake Show

2021 Porsche 992 GT3 Clubsport

Photo: YouTube Screenshot/The Late Brake Show

2001 Nissan S15 2JZ

Photo: YouTube Screenshot/The Late Brake Show

Johnny Smith of The Late Break Show on YouTube recently featured the latter kind of car enthusiast in their Car Cave series . We are talking about Phil Morrison, one of the founding fathers of Driftworks Company."Some people who buy cars that probably would have been good investments if they hadn't modified them, but they decide to modify them exactly how they want to modify them, and that is what we have in this instance," Johnny said, introducing his featured guest's collection.Phil Morrison isn't a new name in the world of car modifications  especially in Europe. As most success stories start, Driftworks began in 2004 in a tiny spare room  Phil Morrison's house, to be specific. It's since evolved over the years into a multi-billion business in a 12,000 sqft facility in Birmingham, UK, that's currently Driftworks Racing Team HQ and online business center.The featured cars are a showcase of Phil Morrison's splurging spree and Driftworks cars in a collection used to demonstrate to their clients the products the company offers.You wouldn't tell it by looking at his size, but Morrison confessed to Johnny that his first two cars were the classic MINIs . As you'd expect of any young man back in their era, he had massive 22-inch subwoofers in the back.That little piece of information says a lot about his enterprise and what it's developed into."I've done that with everything. Sort of throughout my life before cars from bikes, and you know, whatever it was when I was a kid. Model planes and all sorts of stuff like that was always about changing it to be my own," Morrison explained the evolution of his hobby of modifying things.One car that stands out in the Driftworks collection is a 1980 BMW E30 M3 Track Car. By looking at it, you'd need clarification about its specifications, but Morrison admits it was a genuine M3 when he found it. It even had genuine M3 arches before he chopped them off.You'd confuse it for a Drift car, thanks to all the Driftworks livery, but Morrison says it's been designed for circuits. Still, that doesn't mean it won't go sideways when pushed  it is a rear-wheel-drive and a classic Bimmer, after all.Under the hood, it packs a naturally aspirated S65B40 4-liter V8 engine out of the E92 M3, good for 444hp (450 ps) at 8,500 RPM. To harness all that power, it runs a Drenth 6-speed sequential transmission sending all the power to the rear wheels. Stick your foot on the pedal, and it'll achieve a top speed of 192 mph (309 kph).While the performance of this track car is impressive, what's fascinating and relevant to this episode of the Car Caves series is its build setup. According to Morrison, every part of the '80 E30 M3 is modified and changed to his preference including the suspension design, front wings, rear quarters, and bonnet.But what really sets Driftworks apart from other car modification outfits and gives them massive social currency on platforms like Instagram is their Modified Lamborghini Murcielago Like in life, often, the best things have a terrible past. According to Morrison, their world-famous Lambo was the worst in the country when they found it. He picked it up at Coparts in dreadful condition after a bad crash damage repair job (running on half the cylinders).Its a 2006 GT1 LP640 Lamborghini Murcielago. It packs a 6.5-liter V12 mated to a gated 6-speed manual transmission pushing 677 hp (686 ps) at 8,200 RPM with a top speed of 211 mph (340 kph).What makes this car iconic besides what lies on the rear is its exterior. The fenders, front bumper, headlights, part of the side skirts, back bumper, and wing are off the actual 2009 LeMans race car.Morrison is bonkers about RGTs, specifically the GT1 versions. Motivated by their craziness and the noise they make, he modified his Murcielago's LP640 engine to run two banks of E46 M3 throttle bodies (independent).Another bonkers build (work in progress) in the Driftworks collection is a modified 2001 E46 M3 with a V10 conversion . Anyone who loves massive power will be drooling once they look at what lies under the hood of this car.It's running an S85B50 V10 engine with a 6-speed manual transmission good for 542 hp (550 ps) with a theoretical top speed of more than 200 mph (322 kph). You'll notice the custom widebody exterior that adds an aggressive demeanor to its looks.It's not the most effortless setup to get running right, but believe it or not, Morrison drove it daily for a while before taking it to the Nurburgring."Obviously, a complete work in progress. There's so much more to go in here to make it work. The most common question is how are you going to heat insulate that etc. It's all work in hand. But yeah, this work of art is made by Celeritech, and this was part of a 3D scanning process," he said about the massive Medusa hair-designed manifold under the hood.No car collection is complete without a JDM classic. In the Driftworks collection, a familiar orange ripper exists. The Driftworks King Rolla, a Toyota AE86 . Sorry to burst your bubble, but this legend here doesn't run the legendary 4AGE engine but a built 7.4-liter LSX engine paired to a Quaife 6-speed sequential transmission good for 671 hp (680 ps) at 7,500 RPM.On the exterior, it runs a custom Kevlar widebody kit. According to Morrison, it is an integration of NASCAR parts."It's a spectacle every time this car comes out. People like watching it because it's either going to do something incredible, or I'm gonna crush it. People love that kind of stuff," Morrison said about Driftworks AE86 Toyota.Porsche makes fantastic collectibles. Their iconic design is built for the runway, and as you'd expect, Driftworks has a neat 1992 JDM-inspired Porsche 911 964 Turbo with a wild body kit and an obnoxious rear spoiler.He got it from Japan, and the widebody aero is a dead giveaway. He was initially looking for a 911 project. He hoped to do a Rotary swap before he found the 964 Turbo and fell in love with it.It packs a 3.3-liter Promodet Turbo engine mated to a G50/52 manual transmission sound for 631 hp (640 ps) with a top speed of 200 mph (322 kph).Fun fact: it was the Porsche that ran away. He lost the bid during the auction but had his friend chase it down for four months before buying it from the new owner.It doesn't matter how much of a modification buff you are  at one point in your life, you'll meet a car that'll impress you so much you wouldn't dare change its appearance. That car for Phil Morrison is a 2021 Porsche 992 GT3 Clubsport. He admits the GT3 is essentially a modified car when you buy it. He has a lot of love for this car, but he's letting it go. It's currently up for sale.Morrison's Porsche 992 GT3 packs a 4-liter flat six on ITBs with Fabco long tube headers mated to a 7-speed PDK transmission making 503 hp (510 ps) at 9,000 RPM. It has a top speed of 198 mph (319 kph).Another bonkers JDM build in the Driftworks collection is a 2001 S15 2JZ. Yes! We are talking about the Nissan S15 Silvia with a drift-recipe Toyota Supra heart transplant.The 2JZ (push-back engine) is paired with a V160 6-speed manual transmission making 710 hp (720 ps) at 7,400 RPM. It has the iconic T&E Vertex Ride aero on the exterior.Morrison initially owned this S15, and he's just repurchased it. It had been away for 11 years, but still in the condition he let it go (preserved in Greece).There's also another S15 (conservative) in the Driftworks collection. A 2000 Nissan S15 that resembles Driftworks' famed AE86 on the exterior. It packs an SR20DET mated to a BMW 5-speed manual transmission making 434 hp (440 ps). It's also dressed in a T&E Vertex Ridge aero on the exterior. He's also thinking about selling this unit.Also part of the collection is a vintage 1972 Toyota Hilux (MX-5 turbo running gear), GR Yaris, and a 1964 Impala SS ( built to be a wedding car). We'd love to tell you more about these cars, but we'll let you enjoy the grand tour in the video below.
"So much money and time have been lost within a week," the owner of the yellow E36 3 Series Coupe complains on Instagram. "No need to explain how I am feeling right now," he added, after admitting that it was indeed him behind the wheel of the car in the screenshot. He affectionately called his yellow BMW "Lemon," which is French for "lemon."It all started with drifting on May 26, 2023, in what he claims was some industrial area in Tourville-la-Riviere, in northern France, and not a public road. That doesnt necessarily make it legal. But at least it reduces the risk of injury, since there should not be any pedestrians or drivers around. Someone uploaded photos of him on social media, and a screenshot somehow ended up in the hands of the French National Police.About 20 days later, on June 14, authorities seized the car parked in front of his home, while he was at work, so he did not even get the chance to take his belongings. Furthermore, police showed up at his work and arrested him right in front of his boss.He tried to appeal the decision, but he was told that the crushing was already scheduled and there was nothing that he could do about it. The French National Police shared a video and several photos of the yellow E36 3 Series Coupe and of a multicolored E46 3 Series sedan getting crushed in a compactor within seconds.Even now, when all that is left of the cars is a cluster of metal and glass, people advise them to get a lawyer and ask for compensation. The owner of the yellow BMW is now crowdfunding for a legal defense, and he is at almost 1,600 euros ($1,743) right now. The first hearing will take place on January 15, 2024.In France, the fine for stunt driving exceeds 75,000, translated into more than $81,800. Drivers who do stunts on public roads could even serve up to three years in prison. This is how the French authorities are radically trying to crack down on such actions that, in the past years, have been causing more and more casualties.
Philippine President Ferdinand Marcos Jr. attended the 76th founding anniversary of the Philippine Air Force Monday (July 3) in a ceremony at Clark Air Base in Pampanga, north of Manila.

He expressed gratitude for the dedication and sacrifice of the men and women of the service in their efforts to secure the archipelago from various aerial threats, local media reported.

"...[O]n behalf of the Filipino people, I thank you for your service." the president said. "May you continue doing your best in all the endeavors that you are given and inspire your fellow airmen and airwomen to do the same."

Marcos reiterated his administration's commitment to the Armed Forces of the Philippines (AFP) Modernization Program to boost its defense capacities, especially with the air force's role in maritime patrol missions in the South China Sea. The commitment also included the country's deal with the US to increase its military presence across the Philippines in response to rising tensions between the US and China.

"The winds of change signal geopolitical changes around our region and other parts of the world that [have yet to] affect us," he added.

Philippine Defense Secretary Gilbert Teodoro earlier asserted the Philippines should not be a pawn of the "geopolitical battle" between the US and China, saying the country was "a value proposition by its own self". The statement reflected the aftermath of the visit of US Secretary of State Anthony Blinken to Beijing last June.

Prior to the ceremony, Marcos witnessed the capability demonstration of the Philippine Air Force at the Crow Valley Gunnery Range in the nearby province of Tarlac.

Read Also: Ukraine Will Not Get Requested Gripen Jets, Says Swedish Defense Minister

Philippines Signs a Deal with Sweden to Acquire the JAS-39 Gripen

Last month, Manila signed a memorandum of understanding (MOU) on defense materiel cooperation with Stockholm that could pave the way to secure a major deal to supply Saab JAS-39 Gripen multirole fighter jets for the Philippine Air Force.

The deal was signed when then-acting Defense Secretary Carlito Galvez Jr. and Swedish Defense Minister Pal Jonson were attending the Shangri-La Dialogue in Singapore.

"The agreement opens up opportunities for Swedish defense industries to participate in the Armed Forces of the Philippines modernization program as well as for possible joint initiatives in support of the Philippines' thrust to achieve a self-reliant defense posture," said the Philippine Department of National Defense in a statement.

Days before the deal, air force chief Lt. Gen. Stephen Parreno led a contingent to Sweden where they engaged with their Swedish counterparts and toured the Saab facility to see the Gripen and the Saab 340 AEWCS, a twin-engine aircraft capable of housing its Erieye airborne early warning and control systems.

It is reported the Philippine Air Force would be provided with the Gripen's C/D variant

There are other fighter aircraft models the Philippine Air Force is seeking to acquire, such as the Lockheed Martin F-16 Viper and the Korea Aerospace Industries (KAI) KF-21 Boramae.

The Philippine Air Force was founded on July 1, 1947, and currently has 17,600 active and 16,000 reserve personnel.

After the retirement of its fleet of Northrop F-5 Freedom Fighters, the Philippine Air Force was left with no supersonic fighter jets until the commissioning of the KAI FA-50PH light combat fighter in 2015.

Related Article: Guam to Hire 10,000-15,000 Filipino Workers for Military Base Construction

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It's not uncommon these days for carmakers, even the ones of the premium variety, to venture into the world of bicycles. After all, there's money to be made there as well, so why not take the chance?

BMW Exploro Gravel  $4,999

BMW Exploro Gravel electric  $7,999

BMW Exploro Road  $5,999

BMW Exploro Road electric  $8,999

BMW Exploro Urban  $4,999

We've seen this expansion into uncharted territory several times before, and the trend doesn't seem to be stopping. The latest company to do is German BMW , which this week announced a partnership with bike maker 3T to create a new range of bicycles. Called Exploro, the family comprises three models meant for different uses, and their corresponding versions in electric guise.You have them all listed below, but before we go into the details for each of them I'll tell you all bikes, regardless of type, are built around a full carbon fiber frame. All six offer a two-tone paint finish and have the cable run through the frame, to make them more visually appealing.Six sizes are available across the range, and all come with stuff SRAM 12-speed gearing, hydraulic brakes from the same producer, and Mahle rear-wheel hub motors for the electric variants of the bikes.For everyday use, the BMW Exploro Urban is what BMW is offering, a bike mounted on 27.5-inch wheels. They are spun under the power of a pedal, but it does have an electric variant that relies on a 350 Wh battery and the Mahle hub motor for the same task.If you want to venture outside city limits, the best choice could be the BMW Exploro Road. It's a vehicle riding on 28-inch carbon fiber wheels wrapped in Panaracer GravelKing Slick tubeless-ready tires. The electric variant for this bike relies on a 250 Wh battery pack.Last but not least comes the BMW Exploro Gravel. Its name says it all, really, as it's meant for use in more demanding, asphalt-free conditions. It moves over uneven terrain thanks to 27.5-inch aluminum wheels wearing Pirelli Cinturato Gravel tires. The electric version packs a 350 Wh battery in such a way that it's almost indistinguishable from its foot-powered sibling.BMW says all three bikes and their electric variants are already on sale at specialist retailers, and by the looks of it available for delivery as soon as you order them.You'll also find these bikes online, but over at 3T , not BMW (that's how all carmakers do this business).The list of prices for the American market for all six bikes can be found below. As a side note, the European market gets these new rides for the exact same prices, only expressed in Euros.
If it were not for the EV1, we could say that General Motors arrived late to the electric car party. When it decided it wanted a piece of that market, things went very wrong with the Bolt EV and its massive battery pack recall. The automaker's purchase of an Israeli startup shows GM does not want to repeat that experience. In fact, it reveals how concerned automakers are about battery packs  and how little they can do about them.

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Photo: Cherokee County Fire & Emergency Services

Photo: GM

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Photo: GM

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Photo: GM

That's only natural. A battery pack represents most of the production cost for a battery electric vehicle () and becomes a tremendous liability if anything goes wrong. Either car companies make their own cells, or they trust that suppliers will sell them impeccable ones. GM chose the second option and was surprised when LG Energy Solution (LGES) delivered defective components that were prone to thermal runaway episodes  fires, if you prefer a more straightforward communication. That is where ALGOLiON can help.In GM's words, the Israeli startup "has developed sophisticated software that uses data streams from EV battery management systems to help identify anomalies in cell performance to ensure proper vehicle health management." In other words, it provides "early detection of battery hazards including thermal runaway propagation events."The software ALGOLiON developed "uses sophisticated algorithms to identify minuscule changes that could impact battery health weeks earlier than other methods in use today." It does all that "without additional hardware or sensors," which lowers the costs associated to any detection tool. General Motors is also happy that the ALGOLiON software does not interfere with the battery pack's regular operation.That's all pretty helpful until you think about further consequences. Let's suppose the ALGOLiON software behaves as expected and detects anything that can lead a battery pack to self-immolate some weeks from that point. What will GM do about that if the component is still under warranty? What should the owner do if the warranty is over? There is no answer to these questions at this point.If you think it through, you'll see the software that ALGOLiON now offers is the first solution General Motors proposed to fix the Chevy Boltwhen the first blazes started to emerge. All the solution did was to recommend that people park far from anything that could burn along with the vehicle if anything was wrong. In some cases, it was not capable of doing even that: blazes occurred without any warning.The monitoring software ALGOLiON developed and will keep working on under GM ownership is just a tool for the automaker to follow the health of its electric vehicles. If it works as planned, it will give the automaker a better idea of how the battery packs are holding out. If they present any issues, just like they did with the Bolt EV, General Motors may have more time to negotiate with its supplier (still LGES, for the Ultium cells) to get them replaced without the same doubts it apparently had with the Bolt fires. This is the only aspect that can make customers' lives a little better, but they still have plenty of concerns related to their BEVs' most expensive component.Imagine a scenario in which the battery pack dies. How much will it cost to replace it in GM electric cars? If we are talking about the GMC Hummer EV , it would be fair to imagine the 212.7-high-voltage accumulator will cost twice as much as Tesla's 100-kWh battery pack, currently sold for $20,000. If the Bolt EV is a valid parameter, General Motors may be able to replace only the defective modules, not the whole battery pack. However, it is not clear how the automaker conceived the components of its future BEVs.If GM chose to follow cell-to-pack (CTP) or even cell-to-body (CTB) construction strategies, as BYD did, the only replacement option is the entire battery pack. By eliminating modules and other structures in a battery pack, these building methods increase the energy density but also seem to reduce the repairability of these elements. If they present problems, the only solution is to replace them.Right now, BEV advocates are only happy to see so many options available from several automakers. In eight years or more, they will face used electric cars out of warranty with massive repair bills because no one is talking about battery pack maintenance. To be honest, the only company to mention that was AEHRA  and it is yet to produce any vehicles, which makes it just a promise for the time being. General Motors' purchase of ALGOLiON shows automakers are worried about not being caught by surprise by issues such as the one the Bolt EV presented. Unfortunately, they are not as concerned with what used car buyers will have to figure out when BEVs are the leading option for them.
As such, Google Assistant must work flawlessly all the time, as otherwise, I have no other option than to switch to touch input. And as we all know already, this isn't necessarily the safest thing to do in a car, as looking at the screen while driving could cause dangerous distractions.The experience with Google Assistant has long been a crazy rollercoaster ride full of ups and downs, as it occasionally stops working on Android Auto for the uncanniest reasons.This time, I ended up struggling with a bug that looked impossible to fix at first glance.Google Assistant works properly on Android Auto, with no issue whatsoever when setting up navigation, playing a song, or making a phone call. But the moment I disconnect the phone from the head unit, Google Assistant becomes unavailable on the mobile device. Oddly enough, the assistant starts working again if I connect the phone back to the head unit.The first time I noticed this unusual behavior was approximately two weeks ago, and based on my quick research, it was all caused by a Google app update. I tried downgrading to an earlier Google app version, and everything is running as expected. The Google app is in charge of powering Google Assistant on the mobile device and in the car.Others online reported the same problem in their cars, but their workaround is a little bit different. They claim that restarting the phone fixes the problem and allows Google Assistant to work correctly on the smartphone and on Android Auto. However, the moment the mobile device is again connected to the media receiver, Google Assistant stops working on the smartphone, and another reboot is required.Restarting the phone after shutting down Android Auto isn't by any means a convenient workaround, so another thing that could work is force-closing the Google app on the mobile device. This method should help restore Google Assistant on the smartphone if you don't want to go back to an earlier release.If you want to see the glass half-full, then the good news is that the glitch doesnt seem very widespread at this point. As a result, time will tell if Google at least starts an investigation, as bugs like these come and go, depending on the number of users struggling with them.Google app updates typically go live every few days, so installing the most recent release is a good idea if you currently experience the same problem on your smartphone. The newest build at the time of writing (and still causing this bug) is 14.26.9.
After the trip summary screen went missing on Android Auto, it's now the turn of the SMS option to wave goodbye to the directions sharing screen.If you never heard of the text message option when trying to send directions from a computer to a mobile phone, that's alright. This is probably the reason Google decided to discontinue the feature in the first place, as users rarely used it on their devices.Posts that went live on Google's forums in early June revealed that the SMS option went dark approximately one month ago, obviously without the Mountain View-based company saying a single word about it. Users have since been pretty confused, as the lack of an announcement makes it unclear if the company did it on purpose or if the feature was missing because of a bug.A post from a product expert on the forums reveals that Google "discontinued the option of sending directions through text messages," kind of setting things clear and confirming that the company killed off another Google Maps feature. On purpose, that is, so it's not caused by a bug. Therefore, The feature is unlikely to make a comeback, so you'll have to stick with the other option when sending the directions to your phone.The only way to do it is through a mobile push notification. I believe this is the easiest option anyway, as Google Maps is already on the mobile device if you want to use the directions on the go anyway. The only major inconvenience I can think of is related to the Google account, as you'd also have to log in with the same credentials on the desktop. I assume some people don't want to do this on their computers, which is why they want the feature to return to Google Maps.Otherwise, sending directions to a smartphone is as straightforward as possible. You configure the route on the computer, and when you're done, just click the send to phone option. If you're logged in with the same Google account, Google Maps should recognize your phone and let you transfer the data in one second. A notification appears on the mobile device, and when tapped, it opens Google Maps with the same route as on the PC.The process works similarly on Android and iPhone as long as the latest version of Google Maps is installed on the device. No charges are involved, and the only requirement is an Internet connection on the computer and the smartphone where the app is running.
Because of the exposure custom Harley-Davidson motorcycles get in the media, and the instant head-turning effect they have on people in the real world, it has become a habit for businesses not involved with this industry to forcibly tie their names in. That's how in Spain, for instance, we get a lot of fashion brands being associated with custom Harleys.

The latest such business to do so is a little-known brand outside Malaga called My Toro. As unfamiliar as this company is on an international scale, as impressive and likely to be remembered is the ride it commissioned sometime in 2016.The crew tasked with the build is an older acquaintance of ours called Lord Drake. Like most other builds made by them, the My Toro custom is based on a Harley-Davidson Sportster, transformed to become a cafe racer-style machine.The build was inspired by another motorcycle Lord Drake made, already featured here on autoevolution. It's the Racing Is Life I'm talking about.That particular two-wheeler was meant as a tribute to the Le Mans movie of 1971, starring legendary Steve McQueen. So much so, in fact, that the color scheme on the Harley was meant to mimic that of the Porsche 917 McQueen used to race in the flick, down to the number 20 written on its side.The style of these two bikes is thus similar, with multi-wire wheels wrapped in Metzeler tires replacing the original ones, the same rear fender and styling of the seat, and the same shape of the fuel tank.What's different about the For Brave People is the color scheme, this time a combination of white, red and gold. These are the colors of tobacco brand Marlboro, and were chosen specifically because of this, although we're not given an explanation as to why. That is, outside the owner's wishes.We're not told anything about potential mechanical changes made to the bike, but knowing how Lord Drake does business means there's a high chance no such alterations were made and, with the exception of the breathing apparatus, the Sportster still packs the unchanged, original powertrain.As for the name of the bike, For Brave People was chosen because that's the slogan of the My Toro clothing brand.So, what we're looking at is in essence a fashion accessory for the fashion brand's owner, one whose price was not disclosed.Lord Drake can have builds similar to this one made again, for other interested customers, as long as the base bike is a Sportster, no matter its type.The build is said to last between 30 and 60 days, and the end product can be shipped both in the U.S. and Europe, should the customer want this.
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EV

Some people would first like to see the company address long-overdue model generation changes like the sixth generation 4Runner mid-size, and others would even fancy a revival of the Toyota RAV4to fight off against their former partners at Tesla properly. But, of course, as is obvious from the real world's teaser campaign, the Rising Sun carmaker has other plans.And not just in Europe, where they are set to introduce an all-new Land Cruiser, but also in America, where the same teaser was used to announce the 'comeback story' about to unfold. Given the circumstances and the connections between the Old and New Continents, everyone across the rumor mill and their mother speculates that Toyota is not bringing the larger, heavier, and J310 Lexus LX-related J300 Land Cruiser to the United States or Europe.Instead, all bets are on the next-generation Land Cruiser Prado (aka 250) making the rounds for tough off-road SUV fans. And there's no smoke without fire  as we need to remember that Toyota just introduced the fourth-gen N400 Tacoma and Lexus, the third-generation 2024 GX 550, on the exact same TNGA-F body-on-frame underpinnings. So, it is pretty safe to assume that the next Land Cruiser Prado (250) will follow suit and share lots of DNA with those two, as well as the other members of the pack - J300 Land Cruiser, XK70 Tundra and XK80 Sequoia, plus the flagship J310 Lexus LX.Interestingly, some members of the imaginative realm of digital car content creators have become quite passionate about the next Toyota off-road and family-oriented SUV. For example, the Halo oto channel on YouTube provides fresh automotive info corroborated with their virtual designs; now, there is another CGI take on the Land Cruiser. Initially, the resident pixel master imagined a rather traditional take on the upcoming Prado (250), followed by the depiction of a crazy report from Japanese media that the SUV could arrive with as many as three different front fascia designs.Now, after also seeing the potentially colorful interior alongside the three-visage CGIs, the CGI expert is back to fulfill the host's vision of the Land Cruiser 250 (Prado) being directly twinned with the recently-introduced 2024 Lexus GX as far as the overall design is concerned while the powertrain could be snatched from the 2024 Toyota Tacoma TRD Pro i-Force Max complete with the 2.4-liter turbo and electric motor for a stable of 326 electrified ponies residing under the hood. Of course, they did not forget about some personalized design elements, hence the hard-to-believe round-LED headlight treatment, among other things.
This made sense at some level. The more expensive Bel Air and Impala were the models bringing home the bacon, while Biscayne, whose role was to offer a sense of the premium siblings at a lower price, was just a bare-bones version of the two.On the other hand, Biscayne customers could order nearly the same engines as on an Impala or Bel Air, as the powertrain options (as well as the styling and product refreshes) were aligned with the other full-size cars in Chevy's lineup.It goes without saying Biscayne wasn't necessarily supposed to be a superstar, but the 1963 model that you see here achieved this status in a very different way.The car ended up starring in several upcoming movies, including Unfrosted, MaXXXine, and The Sympathizer. The producers wanted to recreate the original feeling of the mid-'60s, so the Biscayne fitted this concept like a glove.However, the car has gone through quite a lot in the last decades.First of all, the last registration dates back to 1999. Born in Alaska, it was sent to Utah, where it was parked for approximately two decades, with only occasional drives around the block, as eBay seller im1joeking explains. The vehicle was eventually transferred to Los Angeles after 20 years in storage specifically for these movies.Despite a long tenure in storage and the relocations, the car continues to be original and unmolested. The only thing it received throughout its lifetime is a fresh coat of paint, as the owner says the original finish faded when the car arrived in Los Angeles. It was repainted to the original color, and based on the provided images, it was a professional job, and another respray shouldnt be required now.Power comes from a 6-cylinder engine paired with a 3-speed manual transmission. The car still runs and drives. Most people aren't exactly interested in lazy powerplants, especially on a car born in the '60s when carmakers offered so many great V8s, but a six-cylinder unit fitted the Biscayne like a glove. Chevrolet wanted the nameplate to be as affordable as possible, and the six-cylinder unit, alongside the lack of power steering and power brakes, brought the price to the lowest possible level.This Biscayne's interior shows its age, with seats and the headliner requiring a handful of fixes. In terms of rust, we have the typical suspects, mostly on the undersides, but the car is far from becoming a rust bucket anyway.The auction starts at about $2,000. The seller did not enable a reserve, so a single bid will be enough to secure a new future for this otherwise original and unmolested Chevrolet.
We've been hearing of them for years and seeing bits and pieces displayed at dedicated events (mostly CES), but when will we see them in action? The upcoming AIRTAXI World Congress in San Francisco is finally breaking the ice with what promises to be a show that will go down in history.

The 2024 Paris Summer Olympics are gearing up to be a unique stage for AAM (advanced air mobility) as well, with several eVTOL (electric vertical take-off and landing) companies preparing for pioneering flights at the event. The Osaka World Expo 2025 in Japan is another huge event where guests will get the chance to see air taxis in action and even experience air taxi rides.Fortunately, we don't have to wait that long to see electric air taxis in action. The most highly-anticipated event in the industry is coming up in just a few months in the US. The AIRTAXI World Congress made its debut in 2021 in London. The second edition took place at the Raffles Istanbul Hotel in Turkey, bringing together more than 300 participants.The third edition is promising to be truly spectacular. It will take place at San Francisco International Airport (SFO) from October 2 to 5, with unprecedented attendance and a vertical air show claiming to be the largest of its kind.The event officials are expecting more than 400 key players in the industry, ranging from eVTOL manufacturers and infrastructure developers to major airports, airlines, and city officials. The greatest thing about this AAM event is that it reunites representatives from all over the world. Future air mobility is not only about cooperation between all players involved in the AAM ecosystem but also about international cooperation.This year's edition is particularly significant because operators are closer than ever to certification. Commercial air taxi services are expected to launch in just a couple of years in multiple parts of the world. In the meantime, one of this event's goals is to bring regular people closer to the AAM phenomenon.This is also why the event includes a Vertical Airshow that promises to be spectacular. With so many eVTOL manufacturers participating, the live flight demonstrations can only be truly impressive. And there's more good news. The event officials recently confirmed that all eVTOL performances will also be live-streamed so that they can reach a much wider audience. In other words, you don't need to travel to San Francisco for this year's greatest vertical airshow.Airline representatives from all over the world will meet one on one with US city officials, eVTOL makers (including EHang and Volocopter), vertiport developers (Skyports, Ferrovial), and aviation giants like Rolls Royce and Airbus. A team from NASA's Air Traffic Management  eXploration (ATM-X) will also attend AIRTAXI'23.
Impala might have been Chevy's number one superstar in the '60s, but the Corvette was a nameplate whose popularity was increasing slowly but surely.

1960, for example, brought a major achievement for the series. Corvette sales surpassed 10,000 units for the first time, despite the new model being almost identical to its predecessor (except for the extra options that were specifically introduced for this model year). Chevrolet sold over 10,200 Vettes, out of which over 2,000 rolled off the assembly lines with a 283 (4.7-liter) rated at 270 horsepower.The same engine is also installed on this Corvette right here, though the unit under the hood is no longer the original one. It's period correct, eBay seller twin67s explains, though it's unclear whether it's still running.The more important bit, however, is the Corvette's current condition. Born in 1960, the car was taken apart approximately ten years after it rolled off the assembly lines. The owner didnt put it back together, so the Vette was just left in a garage waiting for someone else to finish the project. The long ended up incredibly long, as the Corvette was eventually pulled from the garage after half a century.The good news is the car comes in pretty good shape, especially when taking into account the incredibly long time it spent in storage. The body panels are all original , the frame is already reassembled to allow for the car to roll, and many parts are still around, including the armrest, the glass, the radio, the clock, the seats, and so on.As such an old-school project, it also comes with more concerning issues. It lacks a transmission and some other parts, including the bumpers. The metal's condition isn't necessarily the best in every aspect, so some fixes on this front are required as well.The top is unsurprisingly wrecked, but other than that, this Corvette seems to check many boxes for a potential restoration candidate. The work isn't going to be easy, but given the solid bones, someone with the right skills should be able to turn this project into quite a head-turner.The only major shortcoming is the selling price. The owner won't give up on the car for cheap, as the bidding starts at no more, no less than $20,000. That's certainly a hefty price tag for a 1960 Corvette in this shape, but that's not all. The auction also comes with a reserve, so the bidding must go significantly higher to unlock the car. The Buy It Now price has been set to $37,000, and this is how much you'll have to pay if you want to get the Vette without a fight. If you want to take a look at it before bidding, the Corvette is parked in Plymouth, Massachusetts.
The time is up for the Fiesta. Ford has decided to stop production of the supermini this very week. The last one to roll off the assembly line will be on July 7. It is a move that we have been expecting to happen since last year. Ford has other plans for the plant that has been building the model.

What will Ford do with the last Fiestas that it builds?

Photo: Ford

The figures of the iconic Ford Fiesta

CVT

Photo: Ford

Other Ford models that are saying goodbye

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By putting an end to the production of the Fiesta, Ford is making room for its first high-volume electric car. The Cologne, Germany, plant will be turning into a fully battery-electric production center. Right there, the American carmaker officially opened its first carbon-neutral factory on June 12 and plans to sell EVs only by 2030, in Europe. 600,000 electric cars sold every year is the target.The Explorer EV , built on the Volkswagen-sourced MEB architecture just like the ID range, will see the light of day there. Later this year, a second electric model, possibly coming with the Capri name, will roll off the assembly line in Cologne. Ford is also working on an electric version of the Puma crossover.The Fiesta has been around for almost half a century. A tiny car with a big personality, the Fiesta has come in eight generations, one cuter, smarter, and a bit faster than the one before it.But the pandemic meant the beginning of the end for the model. Manufacturers had to steer the supply chains towards more profitable models. The Fiesta was not one of them in a market where the demand for crossovers, SUVs, and pickup trucks was skyrocketing and still is. It was just not strong enough to fight the Puma.Ford had to pause the orders for the Fiesta in June 2022, blaming the shortage of semiconductors.Only four days of production are left, and the no regrets idiom surely does not work here, as Ford wipes a tear while saying goodbye to the supermini, even though theyve known for months that it was going to happen.The carmaker is keeping the last two Fiestas to itself. One of them will join the companys International heritage fleet in Cologne, Germany, where the model has been in production. The other one will end up n the United Kingdom heritage fleet.47 years on the market. Eight generations. 18 million units sold. These are the figures of the Fiesta.One of Fords longest-running models started its story back in the 1970s. Codenamed Bobcat, the subcompact car was greenlighted in Dearborn in late 1972.It was a three-door model at first. It first came with a 63-horsepower L4 in the US spec trim, mated to a four-speed transmission. It may not sound like much, but with a weight below 1,700 pounds, it was zippy enough to be enjoyed from the drivers seat.Ford redesigned the model in 1984. The second generation, getting the same proportions as the first, was kept away from the American market. For the first time, the model got aautomatic transmission.The third generation came in late 1989 with a five-door version included in the lineup. Zetec and turbocharged engines were offered together with a five-speed manual transmission instead of the four-speed unit. The RS Turbo version was ready to fight the GTIs from Volkswagen, while the diesel option ticked the fuel economy box.A fifth-gen Fiesta came in 1995, running through 2002 as a hatchback, sedan, and minivan. But the MK5 never made it to the US, either.It was 2008 when Ford finally decided to redesign the Fiesta as a global product, bringing it back to the United States. Customers could go for either a four-door sedan or a five-door hatchback.The seventh-generation Fiesta was sold in the United States up until 2019. The ST guise was also part of the plan in the American market. But customers there could also choose an ST Line version, that got all the dramatic looks of the ST without them paying as much as they would have paid for the 197-horsepower (200 PS) version.One of the worlds most popular superminis, the Fiesta is not Fords only model to say goodbye, as reported by Autocar. Whether you like it or not, anything that doesnt have a high ride seems doomed, not just for Ford, but for any carmaker out there. The American company halted production of the S-Max and the Galaxy MPVs in April 2023.There is not much time left for the Focus hatchback either, even though Ford tried to resurrect it with an Active version that came with-inspired looks and capabilities back in 2018. Failing to benefit from this second chance that it got, the Focus will also say farewell in 2025.The Ford Mondeo was also axed back in 2021.
US President Joe Biden has been criticized by conservatives after his aides were told to publicly say he only had six grandchildren and omitted Hunter Biden's four-year-old estranged daughter Navy Joan Roberts.

The younger Biden settled his child support case in Arkansas last week after a years-long paternity dispute over Navy Joan and her mother, Lunden Roberts. Both the president and the first lady, Dr. Jill Biden, refused to acknowledge Navy Joan as their seventh grandchild.

Hunter agreed in a court filing Thursday (June 29) to give Navy Joan some of his paintings in order for Roberts to withdraw her counterclaim to change their last child's name to "Biden."

The New York Times reported Saturday (July 1) saying the family dispute was rooted in "money, corrosive politics, and what it means to have the Biden birthright."

Two people familiar with the discussions told the Times that White House aides were told during strategy meetings to not mention Navy Joan as the seventh Biden grandchild. The discussion came as the president listed only six grandchildren by name during a "take your child to work day" event at the White House.

"I have six grandchildren, and I'm crazy about them," he said at the time. "And I speak to them every single day. Not a joke."

Read Also: Hunter Biden Mocked for Art-for-Child-Support Deal; President's Son Agrees To Build Relationship with Daughter

Bidens Hunted by Conservatives for Disinheriting Navy Joan

As the 2024 election draws near, the president has openly embraced Hunter and his son Beau during his retreat at Camp David.

Last month, the Justice Department announced Hunter entered a plea agreement regarding two tax violations and a felony gun charge, which allowed him to escape jail time. There are also speculations about Hunter's foreign business dealings.

Conservatives on Twitter called the Bidens allegedly shunning Navy Joan as "gross" and "sad."

"[The First Couple] are two of the scummiest people to have ever disgraced American politics," wrote Jacob K. Schneider.

"Set aside politics and put yourself in the shoes of this [four-year-old]," added economist Timur Kuran. "No one should do this to a child."

Washington Post foreign and domestic policy columnist Marc Thiessen added that the president not having a relationship with Navy Joan was "an absolute disgrace," while CNN political commentator Scott Jennings called the Bidens "monsters."

Related Article: New Disturbing Hunter Biden Text Messages Prove Family's Corruption Scandal

@ 2023 HNGN, All rights reserved. Do not reproduce without permission.
They also want to criminalize any government decision to stop campaigning for greater international recognition of the 1915 Armenian genocide in Ottoman Turkey.

The ballot initiative dubbed Hayakve (Armenian vote) follows Prime Minister Nikol Pashinians recent pledge to recognize Azerbaijani sovereignty over Karabakh through an Armenian-Azerbaijani peace treaty. His statement has been strongly condemned by the Armenian opposition and Karabakhs leadership.

Avetik Chalabian, an opposition figure coordinating the initiative, said on Monday that Pashinian made a verbal statement that has no legal force and that Hayake aims to prevent him from formalizing his far-reaching plans.

Hayakve is specifically seeking two new articles of the Armenian Criminal Code which would make recognition of Karabakhs incorporation into Azerbaijan and renunciation of the genocide recognition campaign crimes punishable by between 10 and 15 years in prison. Chalabian argued that this would be in line with a 1990 declaration of independence adopted by Armenias first post-Communist parliament.

Armenian law requires the parliament to debate any initiative backed by at least 50,000 citizens. A petition signed by at least 300,000 Armenians must be put on a referendum.

The current National Assembly is controlled by Pashinians Civil Contract party, suggesting that the referendum is the only realistic way of enacting the amendments demanded by Hayakve and endorsed by many opposition leaders.

Chalabian said he and other individuals leading the ballot initiative, among them several well-known artists and intellectuals, will release weekly updates on the number of signatures collected by them. He did not say how many citizens have already backed the effort with their signatures.

Some mainstream opposition groups pledged earlier this month to stage street protests against what they see as a new capitulation deal with Azerbaijan planned by Pashinian.
The Supreme Judicial Council (SJC) also accepted government demands to dismiss three other judges on the grounds that their past verdicts were overturned by the European Court of Human Rights (ECHR). Some Armenia legal experts regard these grounds as unconstitutional.

The Armenian Ministry of Justice initiated disciplinary proceedings against the other, more famous and respected judge, Davit Harutiunian, after he claimed that the SJC arbitrarily fires his colleagues at the behest of a single person.

In my view, more than two dozen judges have been relieved of their duties in various illegal ways, he told reporters two months ago.

The Ministry of Justice responded by accusing Harutiunian of discrediting the Armenian judiciary and jeopardizing its impartiality. The SJC, which is headed by former Justice Minister Karen Andreasian, decided to oust him after several hearings that were held behind the closed doors despite strong objections from the judge, his lawyers as well as journalists.

The SCJ did not immediately specify the reason for the decision. Andreasian refused to talk to the press both before and after its announcement.

Harutiunian condemned the decision while saying that he anticipated it. He said he will appeal to the ECHR and file a crime report against Andreasian with Armenian law-enforcement authorities over what he described as serious procedural violations committed by the SJC.

The Supreme Judicial Council must set an example for judges, Harutiunian told reporters. But as we can see, the opposite is the case.

The sackings of the judges are bound to stoke opposition allegations that Pashinians government is seeking to further curb judicial independence in Armenia under the guise of Western-backed judicial reforms. They highlight the Armenian authorities growing recourse to punitive measures against judges, which was facilitated by a 2021 which Andreasian had helped to enact in his previous capacity as justice minister. The number of disciplinary proceedings against them has risen sharply in the last two years.

Last December, the SJC controversially fired a judge married to a vocal critic of the government. The judge, Anna Pilosian, was officially punished for excessive delays in the publication of verdicts handed down by her in four civil cases.

Another Yerevan judge, Zaruhi Nakhshkarian, openly criticized Pilosians sacking. Nakhshkarian lost her job in February because of that. Her ouster was also initiated by the Ministry of Justice.

As justice minister, Andreasian repeatedly called for a mandatory vetting of Armenian judges, an idea that prompted serious misgivings from European legal experts. In February 2022, he stated that the SJC must fire scores of judges, including those who openly accused the authorities of pressuring courts.

Andreasian was affiliated with Pashinians Civil Contract party until becoming a member and then the head of the SJC in October. Another member of the judicial watchdog resigned a few days after his appointment, saying that the SJC can no longer protect judicial independence.
3 July 2023 08:30 (UTC+04:00)

Qabil Ashirov Read more

The new season of Armenian Farce in Karabakh, scripted by Armenian intelligentsia and public figures and starred by Nikol Pashinyan and Arayik Harutyunyan, is underway. Watching it some immediately realize that Armenians planned to shoot drama, but due to inexperience, it turned out a comedy. Therefore nobody is interested in it, except Armenophiles around the world.

As is known, Armenians and their mouthpieces have tried to persuade the world that Azerbaijan does not comply with its commitments under the 9 November statement for several months. Ostensibly, Azerbaijan aims ethnic cleansing and therefore keeps Karabakh under blockade. They go extra miles to substantiate their accusations, but they have not been able to prove it so far, like their preivouse baseless claims. Just leafing through history is enough to unearth the lies made up shamelessly by Armenians.

In retrospect, like in the former unrecognized Nagorno Karabakh Autonomy of Azerbaijan, many ethnic groups lived in Armenia during the USSR. However, when the regime collapsed and Armenians took over the total power, the first and third biggest ethnic groups - Azerbaijanis and ethnic minorities of some Muslim Kurds were totally expelled from Armenia where they had lived for thousands of years. Armenians did not have mercy on other ethnicities as well. For example, Russians were the second ethnic group after Azerbaijanis, and four of five Russians have left Armenia over 30 years.

They have not limited themselves to ethnic cleanings only in Armenia. They wrested Karabakh and adjoining seven rayons (districts) out of Azerbaijan and expelled the multiethnic population, including Azerbaijanis, Russians, Kurds, Udins, Meskhetians and so on.

Following the invasion, this self-styled "civil" horde started deliberately destroying the historical heritage of the local population, more precisely, demolishing mosques, caravanserais, Russian orthodox church, and Armenenization of Albanian churches such as Amaras and Khudavang monasteries, and building new Armenian churches instead. Their shamelessness extended to such a degree that they coined a new slogan "New Wars, New Territories" and invited Armenians in the USA to come to fight against Azerbaijan for invading new territories. It was the limit, Azerbaijan did not intend to tolerate this knavishness of Armenians anymore. The 44-day War broke out and ended in a humiliating defeat for them. With the above said in mind, we can say that Armenia is the last country in the world to accuse other countries of ethnic cleansing.

Unlike Armenia, Azerbaijan is the multiethnic, multicultural and multireligious country. There are tens of nations with different origins living in peace and prosperity in Azerbaijan. Besides, 30,000 Armenians live in Azerbaijan despite the war with Armenia, and massacres made by Armenians in the First Karabakh War. One of these Armenians living in Azerbaijan is Zoya Arutyunyan, the sister of former Armenian Defense Minister. She lives in Kurdamir with her children and nobody disturbed her even during the both Karabakh wars. Also, it must be underlined that without questioning ethnic background, Azerbaijan embraced Muslim Kurds who had lived in Armenia for thousands of years and were dispelled by Armenians in the 1990s.

As for Azerbaijan's not complying with its commitments under the 10 November agreement, it is another ridiculous accusation voiced by Armenia. Before coming to Azerbaijan's commitments, they had better recall their own ignobility and negligence to stipulation in the signed document. First and foremost, neither Armenia nor its mouthpieces should forget about the 4 statements of the UN over the withdrawal of Armenian Armed Forces from Azerbaijan's territories. Armenian responded the UN statement with the motto "New War, New Territories," let alone withdrawal.

For the Human Watch report on the Khojaly massacre, first, they tried to put the blame then-Azerbaijani government, but later the former Armenian president Serj Sargsyan confirmed that it was committed deliberately to terrorize local people. It is worth noting that in Khojaly, Armenian terrorists slaughtered 613 civilians including children, elderlies, and women. Another organizer of the Karabakh crisis Murad Igoryan went even further to call locals a political instrument and emphasized that Armenians needed to get rid of them.

In regard to the 10 November, Azerbaijan fulfilled all commitments that it overtook - it stopped military operations, allowed local Armenians to return to their homes, and kept open the only route through Lachin to Azerbaijan's Karabakh. Unlike Azerbaijan, Armenia has never complied with a single item of the statement that was signed by Nikol Pashinyan. For example, the 7th item of the statement reads: "Internally displaced persons and refugees shall return to the territory of Karabakh and adjacent districts under the control of the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees." However, considering refugees as a political tool, Armenia has never attempted to allow IDPs from regions that are under the control of separatists to return to their homes. Under the 9th item of the statement, Armenia overtakes a commitment to provide Azerbaijan with entrance to its exclave Nakhchivan through Armenia. However, Armenia goes the extra mile to evade the item and has not opened the communication line yet.

In the fourth item, Armenia undertook a commitment to withdraw its armed groups from Karabakh. Even they declared that Armenia withdrew its Armed Forces from Karabakh in September 2022. However, a few days ago 4 Armenian soldiers lost their lives in a shootout that stemmed from their provocations and Armenia pleaded with the Russian Peacekeepers for two days to help Armenians to take the two corpses of dead servicemen to Armenia. Here arises the question, if Armenia really withdrew its Armed Forces from Karabakh as they claimed, why are they taking the corpses of dead servicemen to Armenia? The answer is clear, Armenia did not withdraw from Karabakh.

So in the end, I would like to recall Armenians that lie has short legs. Hey, you cannot cheat everyone forever, therefore it is better to stop the farce. Believe me, you are weak, you do not have any resource to get strong and nobody will come to fight with you, except you will be left alone in the battlefield facing Azerbaijan, your nightmare. If you want to live in peace and prosperity you have to find a common language with your neighbors, otherwise, the viability of Armenia is under question.

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Qabil Ashirov is AzerNews staff journalist, follow him on Twitter: @g_Ashirov

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3 July 2023 13:45 (UTC+04:00)

Elnur Enveroglu Read more

A tragicomic scene has emerged between the Armenian authorities and the leaders of the so-called separatist states. Thus, the response of Armenian Parliament Speaker Alen Simonyan on his Facebook page to Metaxe Hakobyan, a kind of speaker of the so-called separatist regime in Karabakh, has aroused great interest. Hakobyan accused the other side of not supporting the separatist leaders since they were "blockaded" in Khankendi. In his answer, the Speaker of the Armenian Parliament denied this and stressed that he has been and is in constant contact with the separatists. The question arises, how is it that Armenia is constantly communicating with the separatists when it says in all meetings and statements that it does not have any connection with separatists in Karabakh and is not responsible for what happened in Karabakh?

First of all, let's remember that Pashinyan personally stated in one of his speeches that Yerevan bears no responsibility for armed groups of Armenians in Karabakh, some of which have been remaining since the 10 November agreement. This forms a logical reason that Azerbaijan can directly participate in the cleansing of those terrorist elements. And it was done in the last successful military operation. As a result, the bodies of 4 illegal Armenian terrorists, who turned weapons against Azerbaijani soldiers on the territory of Azerbaijan, were returned.

However, it is still questionable why Armenia is so worried about the part of the dead terrorist groups?

Another logical conclusion shows that there is no difference between the Armenian authorities and the so-called separatist regime operating illegally on the territory of Azerbaijan. The Republic of Armenia is responsible for the armed provocations committed against Azerbaijani military personnel, as well as the terrorist forces that attempted to enter the territory of Azerbaijan before and after the establishment of the Lachin border checkpoint. Not only the so-called separatist leaders, but also Pashinyan and all his supporters should be kept accountable for all the crimes that have occurred.

Alen Simonyan's confession can also be considered a kind of gaffe of the Armenian authorities. As the saying goes, lie has short legs. The speaker of the Armenian parliament suddenly loses himself in front of the shouts of the brazen separatist regime, and as a result, he exposes all the dirty deeds of Armenia unintendedly.

Armenia should understand unequivocally that no illegal measures related to its territories can remain hidden and out of Azerbaijans control, be it secret or open. Although Pashinyan tries to conduct the ostrich politics, official Baku sees all his flaws and is aware of every step he takes.

As for the separatist regime's noise about remaining in the blockade, the Republic of Azerbaijan will one day solve this problem by all possible means. And in a lavish manner, fully worthy of Metaxe Hakobyan, Arayik Harutunyan and Ruben Vardanyan. Time is the cure for all problems. Their problems will be solved in time. The main thing is that Yerevan should think about what to say when sitting opposite the Azerbaijani side at the table. Maybe they will find the words to talk, but the question remains how effective those words will be...

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Elnur Enveroglu is AzerNews deputy editor-in-chief, follow him on @ElnurMammadli1

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3 July 2023 17:35 (UTC+04:00)

Qabil Ashirov Read more

The fickleness of Armenians bothers not only its enemies but also its allies, as well. Armenia is the only country in the region, no one, including themselves, can make out its position. They are the strategic ally of Russia in the region, and Armenian Air Defense System (ADS) is integrated into Russia's ADS and so on. On the other hand, they go the extra mile to host the military base of NATO members such as France. In parallel with all of these, they wheedle Israel to provide Armenia with sophisticated weapons, and simultaneously they are eager to develop their relationship with Iran, the arch-enemy of Jews.

It is worth noting that it is not of recent Armenian disposition, but Armenia's monkeyish character that dates back to thousands years. For example, Armenia was one of six countries voting to break away from Russia in the last referendum held in the USSR at the end of the 1980s. However, today Armenia is the only country among the six ones to be a strategic ally of Russia. Even Alexandre Dumas criticizes their weak-kneed features in his book Le Caucase: Impressions de voyage; suite de En Russie (1859).

Due to their indecisiveness, peace talks between Azerbaijan and Armenia over Karabakh have reached an impasse for thirty years. There is no single day that Armenians accuse each other of betrayal in the mass-media, and make provocation against the Azerbaijan Army to hinder the peace talks. The last such kind of article was written by Suren Sargsyan, an expert on US foreign policy and researcher. The author touched on the US initiative to the peace talks between Azerbaijan and Armenia, and the last provocation in Karabakh. Needless to say that he accuses the USA of taking advantage of the Ukrainian crisis, put the blame on the Azerbaijani side for all provocations done by Armenians, and tries to create images as if Azerbaijan is under Turkiye's shadow.

We, Azerbaijanis, are used to such kind of Armenian opprobrium, especially after the 44-day War. Obviously, the result of the war was a big blow to the Armenian propaganda that had been made for 30 years. Since the Armenian side could not explain the reasons for their humiliating defeat, they started to agitate that not Azerbaijan but Turkiye waged the war against Armenia in 2020.

Besides, the author is so unprofessional that he aims to blame Azerbaijan for provocations, but he reveals the truth. He emphasizes that Russia and the USA compete in the peace talks. Both of them have their own agendas. According to him, Russia aims to freeze the conflict, but the USA wants to resolve it in favor of Azerbaijan. It is crystal clear when the top diplomats of the two South Caucasus countries go to the West to discuss peace talks, provocations happen in Karabakh and on the Azerbaijan-Armenian border. Taking into account that the stance of the West suits Azerbaijan, so the provocateur is obvious. In other words, since the stance of the West is against Armenian interests, they try to impede the peace talks. Besides, it also foreshadows that Russian control on the Armenian Army is stronger than Armenian.

Overall, reading the article, I have no other option but to think that the author covertly accuses Pashinyan of betrayal, and using tempting words to provoke citizens and to pressure the PM not to sign peace with Azerbaijan.

As for the USA taking advantage of Russia's involvement in the war with Ukraine, it is ridiculous. I do accept that the USA is interested in the resolving Karabakh crisis but it does not mean that America draws water to its own mill. On the contrary, the USA aims to save Armenia and make it viable. Observing the Syrian and Ukrainian wars, some could easily realize that no country in the world, including the USA and Russia, can speak in military wording with Azerbaijan. Yes, Azerbaijan is not strong enough to march to Moscow or Washington, but on the other hand, any military operation against Azerbaijan is doomed to fail.

For more detail, it is enough to recall that the USA and its allies did not dare to use military aircrafts to bombard Syria in April 2018, as they had done in Iraq, Afghanistan, and Yugoslavia. They launched 105 most sophisticated Tomakawt missiles, but Syria was able to shoot down 75 of them. In other words, if the Allies used aircrafts, 75 percent of them won't return. Later, Israel's F35 was injured by Syrian Air Defense right after violating the Syrian Air Space. Besides, prior to obtaining Patriot Air Defense System, Ukraine used the same Air Defense System and lowered over 300 military airplanes and 300 helicopters. For comparison, according to the data spread on the internet, Iran has 210 military aircrafts and 60 military helicopters, Turkiye, which is the second biggest Army in NATO, has about 300 military aircrafts and 100 military helicopters, and France obtains 200 military aircraft and 70 helo.

Syrian and Ukrainian Air Defense Systems are comprised of S125, S200, and S300. Among them, S300, which was produced in the 1990s, is considered modern. In addition to the same systems, Azerbaijan has Barrak missiles which were produced in the 2000s. So, Azerbaijans Air Defense System is more modern than said countries and can cause damages more than they did.

The range of Himars MRLS given to Ukraine is 80 km, but the range of analogs of the same system which Azerbaijan obtains is 150 km (Turkish Gasirga), 300 km (Belorussian Palanez), and 400 km (Israeli Lora). Ukraine can strike a maximum of 250 km, however, with the help of Harpy and Harop Azerbaijan can strike 600 km and 1000 km respectively.

When the war started Ukraine had one military ship and no anti-ship missiles. Later Ukraine developed Neptune and the West gave Ukraine Harpoon (the range of both of them is about 300 km). In contrast to Ukraine, Azerbaijan has over 40 ships and Gabriel missiles, ranging 300 km. Besides, Harop and Harpies can be used against military boats. For comparison, Iran has 12 military ships in the Caspian Sea.

As for anti-tank missiles, it is worth noting that Ukraine destroyed over 4000 Russian tanks. For comparison, the USA has 6,000 tanks, France 300, and the UN 230. The long-ranged Ukrainian anti-tank missile is Stugna with 6 km. According to the data circulating on the internet, Azerbaijan obtains the same missile or analogs of anti-tank missiles which are being used by Ukraine. In addition, Azerbaijan uses Israeli Spikes with 25 km ranges.

In other words, any country that intends to conduct military operations in Azerbaijan will be deprived of tanks, air force, and naval fleets.

So, with all data in mind, the USA is well aware that Azerbaijan's patience has limits, and testing it could cause undesirable consequences for Armenia. Analyzing the Syrian and Ukrainian crises, which it partakes actively, the USA knows that neither Russia nor the USA can save Armenia, let alone Iran and France. So, it goes the extra mile to persuade Armenia and Armenian society that the inducements of Iran and France are baseless. So it proved to be that Armenia can be viable only by accepting the condition declared by Azerbaijan.

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Qabil Ashirov is AzerNews staff journalist, follow him on Twitter: @g_Ashirov

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3 July 2023 10:00 (UTC+04:00)

The first deputy minister of Foreign Affairs of Cuba, Gerardo Penalver, who heads his country's delegation to the Ministerial Meeting of the Non-Aligned Movement, began his work program in Azerbaijan, Azernews reports.

Penalver, who is also the Permanent Representative of Cuba to the United Nations Organization, began his activities in the Azerbaijani capital with a visit to the Museum of Miniature Books.

During his stay at the museum, the diplomat was received by the founder and director, Zarifa Salajova, who was decorated last year, by the vice president of the Cuban Parliament, Ana Maria Mari, with the commemorative stamp 60th Anniversary of the Cuban Institute of Friendship with the Peoples.

In the central display case of the institution, Penalver was able to appreciate copies of Fidel Castros biography and his work History will absolve me, in this unique format, as well as other texts dedicated to the Caribbean nation.

Salajova, who is a long-time friend of Cuba, has expressed her devotion to the historical leader of the Revolution in the largest of the Antilles on many occasions and this is a new tribute to her life and work.

The Museum of Miniature Books, was founded on April 23, 2002, it has eight thousand 887 miniature books published in 83 countries that are collected in 39 showcases.

Located in the historic center of Baku, the Museum is a cultural institution, the only one of its kind in the world, and has received 70,648 foreign visitors since its creation. In 2015 it was awarded the Guinness Record as the largest museum of its kind in the world.

The Cuban ambassador Carlos Valdes de la Concepcion accompanied Penalver during the tour of the institution and participated in the pleasant conversation that the vice chancellor had with Salajova.

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3 July 2023 18:00 (UTC+04:00)

The Russian House in Baku hosted a concert by Anastasia Bobovich, a talented vocalist, a graduate of the Uzeyir Hajibeyli Baku Music Academy, winner of international music competitions, who once worked at the Azerbaijan State Academic Opera and Ballet Theatre, Azernews reports, citing press service of the Russian Information and Cultural Centre.

.Bobovich has been involved in creative and pedagogical activities for many years, both in Turkiye and Russia.

Having arrived in his native city, A.Bobovich kindly accepted an invitation to the Russian House in Baku and gave the guests a wonderful musical evening together with a concertmaster, Honoured Artist of the Republic of Azerbaijan Ilaha Sadykhzade.

The concert programme included works by W.A. Mozart, M.I. Glinka, G. Verdi, N.A. Rimsky-Korsakov and other great composers.

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3 July 2023 15:30 (UTC+04:00)

Abbas Ganbay Read more

The fact that the tails of Armenian separatists, who are still operating illegally in the territory of Azerbaijan, got caught at the door for the last few days, has also started to hurt and worry the Western forces that support them.

Adam Schiff released a statement in which it says Azerbaijan as though has kept the Armenian minorities living in Karabakh in blockade. But in fact, those being in blockade are the separatists who supposedly mark "200-day blockade of artsakh by Azerbaijans forces" as mentioned Schiff. Those who have been deprived from supporting terrorist groups as they did it before.

"Yesterday marked the 200th day that the people of Artsakh have been living under Azerbaijans unlawful blockade of the Lachin Corridor, a clear violation of international law, and the 2020 trilateral ceasefire agreement."

Firstly, the pro-Armenian Democrat politician ignores the last 31 years of the Armenian occupation of the Azerbaijan's territories and calls on the public and US President Joe Biden to take strong action on their part. "The United States must condemn these egregious violations of human rights. The international community cannot stand idly by as innocent civilians are brought to the brink of starvation and despair," says the Armenophile Shiff as he shamelessly denies and turns blind eye to all Armenian provocations in Azerbaijan's sovereign territory. Secondly, if Schiff, blinded by Armenian love, at least respects himself, he should first of all be attentive about the territorial integrity of Azerbaijan, an independent state. Schiff should not forget that the prime minister of the Armenian people, whom he defends, is the last person on earth who recognizes the territorial integrity of Azerbaijan.

Despite the criticism, Azerbaijan continues to improve its regional, inter-regional relations with Armenia and countries in the Caucasus. Besides, Azerbaijan hailed the meeting with Secretary of State Antony Blinken as well as the trilateral meeting held between the Azerbaijani Foreign Minister Jeyhun Bayramov and Armenian Foreign Minister Ararat Mirzoyan at the National Foreign Affairs Training Centre in Arlington, Virginia, on Thursday 29 June 2023.

Following the meeting, Secretary of State Antony Blinken said Azerbaijan and Armenia have made further progress toward a peace agreement in three days of U.S.-hosted talks between the two former Soviet republics.

I appreciate further progress toward this shared objective of an agreement to include agreement on some additional articles as well as a deepening understanding of the positions on outstanding issues, as well as the recognition that there remains hard work to be done to try to reach a final agreement, Blinken said at the end of the closed-door talks at the State Departments Foreign Service Institute in northern Virginia.

We look forward to continuing this process in the weeks ahead to take advantage of the momentum that weve helped achieve through these meetings, he said. I very much appreciate the spirit of candor, openness, and directness that everyone has exhibited. That is the way ultimately to reach understanding and finally to reach an agreement.

Looking at what the US Secretary of State said above, it is impossible to characterize such a pathetic speech of a biased politician in any way other than pro-Armenianism. So what happened that you suddenly woke up after a 30-year deep sleep to protect Armenians who you have used as instrument for over years...

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3 July 2023 11:42 (UTC+04:00)

President of the Republic of Azerbaijan Ilham Aliyev has sent a congratulatory letter to President of the Republic of Belarus Alexander Lukashenko on the occasion of the state holiday - Independence Day of Belarus.

The letter reads:

Dear Aleksandr Grigoryevich,

On behalf of myself and on behalf of the people of Azerbaijan, I heartily congratulate You and through You all the people of Belarus on the occasion of the national holiday of friendly Belarus  Independence Day.

Our countries are bound together by close traditional ties of friendship, cooperation and reciprocal support. This year we celebrated the 30th anniversary of establishment of diplomatic relations between the Republic of Azerbaijan and Republic of Belarus. It is with pride that we managed to not only keep but also enhance positive results of the shared past within historically short span of time as well as elevate the interaction to a totally new level.

We put a special emphasis on development of Azerbaijan-Belarus cooperation in all fields of mutual interest for our countries. I am confident that our joint efforts will continue to aim at cementing traditional friendly relations and strategic partnership between Azerbaijan and Belarus in the interests of our peoples and countries.

Dear Aleksandr Grigoryevich, I wish You robust health, happiness and success on this remarkable day and the Republic of Belarus prosperity and progress.

Respectfully,

Ilham Aliyev

President of the Republic of Azerbaijan

Baku, 24 June 2023

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3 July 2023 15:05 (UTC+04:00)

Agriculture Minister Mejnun Mammadov is attending the 43rd session of the UN Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO), which began its work in the Italian capital Rome, Azernews reports, citing the ministry.

According to information, within the session, the Azerbaijani delegation held bilateral meetings with agriculture ministers of several countries. Mammadov and his counterparts from Estonia, Northern Macedonia, Uzbekistan, and Moldova, discussed topics of mutual interest, as well as expansion of bilateral cooperation relations in agriculture, an increase of trade turnover of agricultural products, improvement of the legal framework of cooperation, exchange of experience in agricultural research and technology, etc..

The Minister of Agriculture of Azerbaijan is scheduled to address a round table on the efficient use of water resources at the 43rd session of the FAO.

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The Chinese scientist He Jiankui, who caused controversy across the world in 2018 by revealing that he had produced the first gene-edited offspring, has proposed a new idea for altering human embryos that he claims could benefit the "aging population."

The Controversy

He, a former researcher at the Southern University of Science and Technology in Shenzhen, claimed in 2018 that he had altered twin girls' human embryos using the gene-editing technique CRISPR in an effort to shield them from HIV. He's research also resulted in the birth of a third genetically altered child, a Shenzhen court subsequently ruled.

The findings ignited a vigorous debate over the morality of using cutting-edge technology on humans and the possibility that unwanted mutations could be passed on to future generations, including children. In addition, it sparked worries about potentially modifying species through the introduction of "designer children."

A New Project

He was recently sentenced to three years in prison in China for engaging in "illegal medical practices," but he made a surprise return last year when he declared on social media that he was building a research lab in Beijing, as reported by CNN.

Since then, his research posts on Twitter have mainly discussed ideas for developing gene therapy for rare diseases.

(Photo: ANTHONY WALLACE/AFP via Getty Images) Chinese scientist He Jiankui reacts as he speaks at the Second International Summit on Human Genome Editing in Hong Kong on November 28, 2018.

But on Thursday, he stirred up controversy once more by publishing a new research plan that experts claim is similar to his prior work, which was widely condemned by scientists as being unethical and risky with the potential to alter future generations' genetic makeup.

In a brief, one-page memo, He suggested conducting research that would entail gene-editing human zygotes and mouse embryos to see if a particular mutation "confers protection against Alzheimer's disease."

This possible experiment, unlike the study that landed him in jail, includes a type of defective fertilized egg cell that is typically regarded as being unsuitable for being implanted in a woman.

No human embryos would be implanted for pregnancy, and prior to doing any testing, "government permit and ethical approval" were required, according to the proposal.

Even if the idea He put up were found to have validity, it is unclear if He would receive approval for such work in China, and foreign experts claim the current proposal is not scientifically sound.

Read also: Gene Editing: Pigs Engineered To Be Immune To Disease

China's Restrictions on Human Genome Editing

As a result of the information about his earlier study, Chinese authorities have taken numerous measures to strengthen the laws and moral guidelines governing human genome editing. They also restricted He's use of human genetic resources and prohibited him from working on projects involving assisted reproductive technologies, according to state-run media.

Scientists and medical ethics specialists are, however, alarmed and perplexed by the scientist's release of a new concept involving the gene editing of embryos.

Related article: Gene Editing Technology Proven Successful in Human Cell Experiments to Prevent Coronavirus Replication

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3 July 2023 15:59 (UTC+04:00)

The opening ceremony of the 17th Baku Summer Energy School was held at ADA University in Azerbaijan on Monday.

The 17th Baku Summer Energy School is jointly organized by the Institute of Development and Diplomacy (IDD) of ADA University, the State Oil Company of Azerbaijan (SOCAR), bp Azerbaijan, Kolin, TotalEnergies and Masdar, Azernews reports, citing IDD.

A total of 56 people are involved in the program. Of which 32 participants represent 13 countries - Azerbaijan, Turkey, the United States, Great Britain, Italy, Spain, Hungary, Bulgaria, China, Japan, Kazakhstan, Saudi Arabia, and Nigeria.

During the opening ceremony Rector of ADA University Hafiz Pashayev, Deputy Energy Minister Elnur Soltanov, SOCAR President Rovshan Najaf and bp Regional President Gary Jones welcomed the participants.

Speaking at the opening ceremony Hafiz Pashayev noted that the Baku Summer Energy School has been held annually since 2007, which is an indicator of the relevance of the topic.

"People with the necessary experience in this sphere have gathered here, and the popularity of this school is growing. Generally, today Azerbaijan has a huge history of oil and gas production," he adds

Another speaker, Regional President Gary Jones, sharpened his focus on this. He noted that what started as just a conversation about oil and gas extraction in the Caspian Sea has now turned into a long and very interesting 'journey'. Today energy is an important part of Azerbaijani life and the country's partnership with international oil and gas companies, including BP, he added.

This year's summer school will have a different format: a part of the summer school will be held from 3-14 July in Baku, while the other part will be in Aktau.

Registration for the 17th Baku Summer Energy School (BSES) is closed now. Please be kindly noted that the announcement for the 18th Baku Summer Energy School will be out in December 2023.

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3 July 2023 09:00 (UTC+04:00)

Turkish security forces "neutralized" nine PKK terrorists in northern Iraq, the National Defense Ministry said on Sunday.

The terrorists were targeted by an airstrike in the Operation Claw-Lock zone, the ministry said on Twitter.

Turkish authorities use the term "neutralize" to imply the terrorists in question surrendered or were killed or captured.

PKK terrorists have hideouts in northern Iraq, across the Turkish border, which they use to plot attacks on Turkiye.

Turkiye launched Operation Claw-Lock last year in April to target the terror group PKK's hideouts in the Metina, Zap, and Avasin-Basyan regions of northern Iraq, located near the Turkish border.

It was preceded by two operations  Claw-Tiger and Claw-Eagle  launched in 2020 to root out terrorists hiding out in northern Iraq and plotting cross-border attacks in Turkiye.

In its more than 35-year terror campaign against Turkiye, the PKK  listed as a terrorist organization by Turkiye, the US, and EU  has been responsible for the deaths of more than 40,000 people, including women, children, and infants.

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Follow us on Twitter @AzerNewsAz
3 July 2023 08:00 (UTC+04:00)

Police have been allowed to use drones in Paris and many surrounding cities for monitoring of protests that erupted following the killing of a teenager by French police last week.

In a statement, the Paris Police Department said that following the publication of a decree, the police were allowed from 6:00 p.m. to 6:00 a.m. to use drones in Paris, in all cities in Seine-Saint-Denis and in some cities in Hauts-de-Seine.

Local Le Parisien newspaper reported that 7,000 police officers will be on duty Sunday evening in Paris and its suburbs.

Underlining that the government has been working hard to restore order in the country in recent days, French Prime Minister Elisabeth Borne emphasized that attacks on public buildings such as police stations and municipalities are "unacceptable."

Borne underlined that the government will work until order is restored.

France has seen a wave of violent protests since a police officer shot dead Nahel M. in the Paris suburb of Nanterre last Tuesday.

Protests began in Nanterre and spread to other cities the next evening, including Lyon, Toulouse, Lille, and Marseille. However, tensions rose on Thursday following clashes between police and protesters.

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Follow us on Twitter @AzerNewsAz
3 July 2023 18:45 (UTC+04:00)

Turkish forces on Sunday rescued 84 irregular migrants pushed into Turkish territorial waters by Greek naval forces off the western Canakkale province, Azernews reports, citing Anadolu Agency.

The Turkish Coast Guard's Northern Aegean Group Command carried out the rescue after learning that there were irregular migrants in inflatable boats off Ayvacik, Canakkale.

Three Turkish naval boats directed to the area rescued the irregular migrants from Afghanistan who were pushed into Turkish territorial waters by Greek forces.

A total of 84 people brought ashore were transferred to the Ayvacik Foreigners' Removal Center after procedures.

Human rights groups and media outlets have frequently reported on illegal pushbacks and other human rights breaches by Greek authorities. Survivors of a migrant boat sinking last month in which 300-600 migrants are feared drowned have blamed the deadly incident on a Greek Coast Guard boat trying to tow the migrant craft into Italian territorial waters.

Turkiye and global rights groups have repeatedly condemned Greeces illegal practice of pushing back asylum seekers, saying it violates humanitarian values and international law by endangering the lives of vulnerable migrants, including women and children.

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Follow us on Twitter @AzerNewsAz
3 July 2023 19:50 (UTC+04:00)

Joining NATO is a pipedream for Stockholm, which has been reluctant to meet Ankaras demands, Turkish Parliamentary Speaker Numan Kurtulmus said in an interview with the Milliyet newspaper, published on Monday, Azernews reports, citing TASS.

"There is a trilateral agreement [between Turkiye, Sweden and Finland]. They will engage in provocative actions [even as they are] asking for us to approve their NATO membership [application]. Excuse me, but Turkiye is a country that means what it says. Whatever it says and whatever it promises, it delivers; but, we would also like our opponents to stand by their word. Becoming a NATO member is a pipedream for Sweden, which has been failing to fulfill its promises," Kurtulmus stressed.

He noted that "Turkiye is facing strong pressure" over the NATO bid by Sweden, "which supports and harbors terrorist organizations." "On the other hand, Turkiye will not take a single step on the matter until its demands are met," Kurtulmus added.

On June 28, 2022, Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan, Finnish President Sauli Niinisto, then-Swedish Prime Minister Magdalena Andersson and NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg held talks ahead of the annual NATO summit in Madrid. The parties signed a memorandum enabling the accession of Stockholm and Helsinki to NATO. On March 31, 2023, the Turkish parliament passed a protocol approving Finlands accession to NATO, after which the Nordic country formally joined the North Atlantic Alliance on April 4. However, Turkish lawmakers refused to approve a similar protocol approving Swedens NATO membership, demanding that Stockholm implement all provisions of the Madrid memorandum related to fighting terrorism.
Copyright 2023 The Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.
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Leon Gautier was the last surviving Frenchman who participated in the Allied invasion of Normandy, France in 1944. The town of Ouistreham, where he lived since the 1990s, has announced his death at the age of 100 Monday (July 3) in a hospital in nearby Caen.

Last of the Kieffer Commandos

Gautier was born in Rennes in the French region of Brittany. He joined the French Navy in 1940 at the age of just 17. He eventually became one of 177 Frenchmen who fought alongside the predominantly British, Canadian, and American troops during Operation Overlord, also known as D-Day. Particularly, Gautier belonged to the 1st Battalion, Marine Commando Fusiliers of the Free French forces, more known as the Kieffer Commandos after its commanding officer, Philippe Kieffer.

The Kieffer Commandos landed on Sword Beach during Overlord, which covered the towns of Ouistreham, Benouville, Amfreville, and Bavant. Before Normandy, he went to fight in Congo, Syria, and Lebanon.

Read Also: France: Protests Are Still Raging With Attacks on Mayor's Family Home, Chinese Tourist Bus

 Nous ne sommes pas des heros, nous navons fait que notre devoir , repetait-il.



Dernier membre du commando Kieffer qui debarqua avec ses 176 camarades francais en Normandie le 6 juin 1944, heros de la Liberation, Leon Gautier nous a quittes.



Nous ne loublierons pas. pic.twitter.com/6IPx5mjoM7  Emmanuel Macron (@EmmanuelMacron) July 3, 2023

Hometown Hero

By the end of the Second World War, Gautier became a pacifist, using his own wartime stories and experiences as leverage. He also admitted he had been haunted by the realities of war ever since the war ended.

"You kill people on the other side who never did anything to you, who have families, and children. For what?" he said during the celebration of his 100th birthday last year.

Meanwhile, the town of Ouistreham mourned for the death of its local hero, chief among them was the town's mayor Romain Bail, who called Gautier an "ardent defender of freedom.

"Ouistreham is very sad today," Bail added, "the loss of this father, this grandfather has orphaned us."

Gautier was last seen publicly during the 79th anniversary of the Normandy landings last June, where he met French President Emmanuel Macron.

In a tweet, Macron described Gautier and his comrades as "heroes of the Liberation" of France from the Nazi regime. "We will not forget it," he added.

Authorities in Ouistreham have not yet released any funeral details, but a special tribute ceremony is to be expected.

Related Article: D-Day Operation Overlord: What Really Happened in History's Largest Amphibious Invasion

@ 2023 HNGN, All rights reserved. Do not reproduce without permission.
No doubt many have noticed the white wooden booths, decked with red, white and blue flags, popping up across Bakersfield: Those makeshift stal
Was it a judicious ploy for Joe Biden's FBI to execute the unprecedented raid of President Trump's Mar-a-Lago estate? Yes; the Cheneys despise this former Republican president, and for good reason ... so they say. No; never has a former president been treated with this level of vindictive abuse by those temporarily in power. Who cares? It's Trump. 870 total vote(s) What's your Opinion?



poll#173

In the face of a known scandal finally being revealed by the corrupt Legacy Media regarding Joe Biden, his Mishandling of Classified Documents and his long history of Influence Peddling to our Foreign Adversaries for Personal and Familial Profit: What do you believe the outcome will be in America's Leftist practice of a Two Tiered Justice System? Nothing will happen since the Democratic Socialist Left is corrupt to the core, and their non patriot ambitions are only the control of power. Justice WILL be served, but NOT without a tremendous fight by those willing to save the Republic. Why can't everyone else understand that the Left is special because we care so much for our own, especially the well being of the president and his family, especially Hunter. What difference does it make; I am a product of a failed public education system. 401 total vote(s) What's your Opinion?



poll#180

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. How can we be assured that the "Laptop" is real? Would NOT our standard journalists have investigated this issue thoroughly nearly 3 years ago if it was real? 301 total vote(s) What's your Opinion?



poll#165

In light of continued developments, primarily since 2008, there exists in these United States a Legal System which operates on a proved Two Tiered approach to justice rendered, which primarily benefits Democratic Elites and Woke Ideological Virtue Signalers, representing their co-dependent wards, to the expressed exclusion of normal hardworking American citizens: What is your suggestion in remedying this widespread injustice and, if not corrected, its existential outcome for our Constitutional Republic? Complete overhaul of the Department of Justice and their enforcers - the FBI - to reflect a far more honest justice system to keep patriots remaining calm. Disband the FBI, and request that congress investigate all unethical and non patriotic practices to partially right the wrongs of a distrusted and politically weaponized "Department of Justice." Continue with the current system since the two tiered justice system has been so remarkably beneficial to Democratic Socialist political hegemony; chronic distrust in institutions notwithstanding. 482 total vote(s) What's your Opinion?



Todd Blanche and Chris Kise, two high-powered attorneys from New York and Florida, respectively, appeared alongside former President Donald Trump for his arraignment at a federal courthouse in Florida on Tuesday.Blanche and Kise have been part of Trump's legal defense for some time as the former president battles state and federal indictments and investigations. After his federal indictment last week, Trump reshuffled his legal team. Two of his attorneys, Jim Trusty and John Rowley, resigned, and Blanche took the lead on the case with Kise assisting.Trump brought Blanche on in early April. Blanche resigned as a partner at the elite law firm Cadwalader, Wickersham & Taft, the oldest firm in New York City, to take Trump's case.he said in a statement at the time.Blanche is a former federal prosecutor and a veteran defender in white-collar crime cases. As a federal prosecutor, Blanche served as Assistant U.S. Attorney for the Southern District of New York for nine years, earning accolades from the Department of Justice for his work.He co-led the Southern District of New York's White Plains Division, running investigations and prosecutions of public corruption, bank fraud, racketeering, and other white-collar crimes. He went into private practice after leaving the Southern District of New York, eventually joining Cadwalader in September 2017.As a defense attorney, Blanche represented Paul Manafort, a Trump ally and chair of the former president's 2016 campaign. Manafort was sentenced to 7.5 years in prison in 2019 on charges stemming from former special counsel Robert Mueller's investigation into the Trump campaign's alleged ties to Russia. Similar New York state charges leveled against Manafort were dropped for double jeopardy.Blanche also represented Igor Fruman, an associate of Trump attorney Rudy Giuliani. Fruman took a plea deal on campaign finance-related charges.Blanche's partner in Trump's document case, Kise, was brought on to Trump's legal team in August to work on the documents case. Kise soon shifted to working on Trump's defense in a New York case brought by Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg.Kise's CV includes four successfully argued cases before the U.S. Supreme Court. He has argued dozens of others in front of the Supreme Court of Florida and has extensive experience across state and federal courts.Kise is a longtime fixture in Florida GOP politics. He served as Florida's solicitor general from 2003 to 2006 under then-Attorney General Charlie Crist, who was a Republican at the time. Kise served as counsel to Crist when he became governor, and Kise later served as general counsel to former Florida Governor Rick Scott's transition team in 2010 and then again for Governor Ron DeSantis's team in 2018.During DeSantis's 2018 run for governor against Democratic candidate and former Tallahassee Mayor Andrew Gillum, Kise released 2016 text messages showing Gillum accepted tickets to see the Broadway playfrom an undercover FBI agent. The texts exacerbated ethical and corruption concerns hanging over Gillum's mayoral administration.Kise, who made the texts public two weeks before election day, denied releasing the messages for any political motive. He said he was doing what was right for his then-client, Adam Corey, a Tallahassee lobbyist who was once considered a staunch Gillum ally.
On its fifth night, violent race riots by Third World migrants which began in Paris suburbs after police shot a 17 year old Muslim criminal, have spread across the country. Cars and buildings have been set afire, stores looted, and French officials physically attacked. City halls and police stations have been among bulidings set on fire. Off duty police officers have been severely beaten. In the town of L'Hay des Roses, rioters rammed a burning car into the home of the mayor, injuring his wife and children and damaging his home.

https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-12255699/Rioters-ram-French-mayors-home-burning-car-assassination-attempt-injures-family.html

https://www.thegatewaypundit.com/2023/07/france-has-fallen-migrant-mob-torch-mayors-home/

https://rmx.news/crime/french-riots-2-off-duty-police-officers-beaten-like-dogs-by-mob-in-brutal-video/

https://rmx.news/crime/france-turns-into-war-zone-as-second-night-of-riots-slams-country-viral-videos-show-police-stations-city-halls-and-dozens-of-cars-torched/

The largely Muslim rioters also vandalized a Paris memorial to French Jews deported in the Holocaust.

https://europeanconservative.com/articles/news/parisian-holocaust-memorial-trashed/

A 79 yeaer old French priest was attacked, severely beaten, and robbed by rioters

https://europeanconservative.com/articles/news/reports-that-french-catholic-priest-violently-beaten-and-robbed-go-viral/

Meanwhile, the French race riots by Third World migrants have spread beyound France to Belgium and to Laussane in the French speaking part of Switzerland.

Two years ago, 25 French generals signed an open letter to Macron warning of civil war due to the influx of migrants.

https://www.zerohedge.com/geopolitical/france-crisis-fifth-night-violence-spreads-neighboring-countries

UPDATE: On the sixth night of violence, France saw more burning and looting by out of control mobs of migrants, and a 24 year old French firefighter was killed battling a blaze set by the rioters in an underground car park. Meanwhile, French citizens started to fight back with groups of vigilantes armed with swords and football "ultras" taking to the streets to defend persons and property from the rioters.

https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-12257991/French-firefighter-24-killed-battling-riot-blaze-sixth-night-violence.html
In Congress, July 4, 1776

The unanimous Declaration of the thirteen united States of America, When in the Course of human events, it becomes necessary for one people to dissolve the political bands which have connected them with another, and to assume among the powers of the earth, the separate and equal station to which the Laws of Nature and of Nature's God entitle them, a decent respect to the opinions of mankind requires that they should declare the causes which impel them to the separation.

We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.--That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed, --That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness. Prudence, indeed, will dictate that Governments long established should not be changed for light and transient causes; and accordingly all experience hath shewn, that mankind are more disposed to suffer, while evils are sufferable, than to right themselves by abolishing the forms to which they are accustomed. But when a long train of abuses and usurpations, pursuing invariably the same Object evinces a design to reduce them under absolute Despotism, it is their right, it is their duty, to throw off such Government, and to provide new Guards for their future security.--Such has been the patient sufferance of these Colonies; and such is now the necessity which constrains them to alter their former Systems of Government. The history of the present King of Great Britain is a history of repeated injuries and usurpations, all having in direct object the establishment of an absolute Tyranny over these States. To prove this, let Facts be submitted to a candid world.

He has refused his Assent to Laws, the most wholesome and necessary for the public good. He has forbidden his Governors to pass Laws of immediate and pressing importance, unless suspended in their operation till his Assent should be obtained; and when so suspended, he has utterly neglected to attend to them. He has refused to pass other Laws for the accommodation of large districts of people, unless those people would relinquish the right of Representation in the Legislature, a right inestimable to them and formidable to tyrants only. He has called together legislative bodies at places unusual, uncomfortable, and distant from the depository of their public Records, for the sole purpose of fatiguing them into compliance with his measures. He has dissolved Representative Houses repeatedly, for opposing with manly firmness his invasions on the rights of the people. He has refused for a long time, after such dissolutions, to cause others to be elected; whereby the Legislative powers, incapable of Annihilation, have returned to the People at large for their exercise; the State remaining in the mean time exposed to all the dangers of invasion from without, and convulsions within. He has endeavoured to prevent the population of these States; for that purpose obstructing the Laws for Naturalization of Foreigners; refusing to pass others to encourage their migrations hither, and raising the conditions of new Appropriations of Lands. He has obstructed the Administration of Justice, by refusing his Assent to Laws for establishing Judiciary powers. He has made Judges dependent on his Will alone, for the tenure of their offices, and the amount and payment of their salaries. He has erected a multitude of New Offices, and sent hither swarms of Officers to harrass our people, and eat out their substance. He has kept among us, in times of peace, Standing Armies without the Consent of our legislatures. He has affected to render the Military independent of and superior to the Civil power. He has combined with others to subject us to a jurisdiction foreign to our constitution, and unacknowledged by our laws; giving his Assent to their Acts of pretended Legislation: For Quartering large bodies of armed troops among us: For protecting them, by a mock Trial, from punishment for any Murders which they should commit on the Inhabitants of these States: For cutting off our Trade with all parts of the world: For imposing Taxes on us without our Consent: For depriving us in many cases, of the benefits of Trial by Jury: For transporting us beyond Seas to be tried for pretended offences For abolishing the free System of English Laws in a neighbouring Province, establishing therein an Arbitrary government, and enlarging its Boundaries so as to render it at once an example and fit instrument for introducing the same absolute rule into these Colonies: For taking away our Charters, abolishing our most valuable Laws, and altering fundamentally the Forms of our Governments: For suspending our own Legislatures, and declaring themselves invested with power to legislate for us in all cases whatsoever. He has abdicated Government here, by declaring us out of his Protection and waging War against us. He has plundered our seas, ravaged our Coasts, burnt our towns, and destroyed the lives of our people. He is at this time transporting large Armies of foreign Mercenaries to compleat the works of death, desolation and tyranny, already begun with circumstances of Cruelty & perfidy scarcely paralleled in the most barbarous ages, and totally unworthy the Head of a civilized nation. He has constrained our fellow Citizens taken Captive on the high Seas to bear Arms against their Country, to become the executioners of their friends and Brethren, or to fall themselves by their Hands. He has excited domestic insurrections amongst us, and has endeavoured to bring on the inhabitants of our frontiers, the merciless Indian Savages, whose known rule of warfare, is an undistinguished destruction of all ages, sexes and conditions.

In every stage of these Oppressions We have Petitioned for Redress in the most humble terms: Our repeated Petitions have been answered only by repeated injury. A Prince whose character is thus marked by every act which may define a Tyrant, is unfit to be the ruler of a free people.

Nor have We been wanting in attentions to our Brittish brethren. We have warned them from time to time of attempts by their legislature to extend an unwarrantable jurisdiction over us. We have reminded them of the circumstances of our emigration and settlement here. We have appealed to their native justice and magnanimity, and we have conjured them by the ties of our common kindred to disavow these usurpations, which, would inevitably interrupt our connections and correspondence. They too have been deaf to the voice of justice and of consanguinity. We must, therefore, acquiesce in the necessity, which denounces our Separation, and hold them, as we hold the rest of mankind, Enemies in War, in Peace Friends.

We, therefore, the Representatives of the united States of America, in General Congress, Assembled, appealing to the Supreme Judge of the world for the rectitude of our intentions, do, in the Name, and by Authority of the good People of these Colonies, solemnly publish and declare, That these United Colonies are, and of Right ought to be Free and Independent States; that they are Absolved from all Allegiance to the British Crown, and that all political connection between them and the State of Great Britain, is and ought to be totally dissolved; and that as Free and Independent States, they have full Power to levy War, conclude Peace, contract Alliances, establish Commerce, and to do all other Acts and Things which Independent States may of right do. And for the support of this Declaration, with a firm reliance on the protection of divine Providence, we mutually pledge to each other our Lives, our Fortunes and our sacred Honor.
Speaker Tim Moore has paid the piper, likely a very large sum, to quickly settle the sex scandal lawsuit brought against him by an aggrieved husband. Republican activist and elected official Scott Lassiter had sued Moore for alienation of affection and criminal conversation for an adulterous affair Moore was alleged to have conducted with Lassiter's wife. The sworn complaint contained allegations of group sex, surveillance cameras, and Moore's offer to use his powers as Speaker to compensate the jilted husband. During the time the affair was going on, Lassiter's wife, a state employee had received a highly unusual 48% increase in pay.

In such settlements, non-disclosure agreements routinely prohibit anyone from revealing how much was paid or other terms of the settlement. Lassiter's attorney simply announced that the case had been "resolved". A settlement this quick, was likely pricey.

Speaker Moore has had ambitions to run for Congress in 2024.

https://dailyhaymaker.com/resolved/

Plaintiff Scott Lassiter with his wife Jamie at the 2022 state GOP convention:
South Africa: dtic to host AfCFTA workshop in Western Cape

The Department of Trade, Industry and Competition (the dtic) in partnership with the City of Cape Town will on Friday host the upcoming workshop on the implementation and operationalisation of the African Continental Free Trade Area Agreement (AfCFTA).

Other departments that will partner in the workshop includes the Western Cape Department of Economic Development and Tourism, the Western Cape Tourism and the Trade and Investment Promotion Agency (Wesgro).

The event is scheduled to take place at the Southern Sun Cape Sun Hotel as part of a nationwide series of workshops.

Following the successful hosting of workshops in Gauteng, KwaZulu-Natal, Limpopo, and Mpumalanga, the primary objective of these gatherings is to apprise South African companies and export-ready Small and Medium Enterprises on the benefits of trading under the AfCFTA, which intends to create a single continental market with a population of about 1.3 billion foster partnerships and collaboration with the private sector, women-owned businesses and youth-owned export-ready enterprises.

The AfCFTA seeks to establish a large single continental market, encompassing a population of approximately 1.3 billion people and a combined Gross Domestic Product (GDP) of approximately USD 3.4 trillion.

By participating in preferential trade beyond the Southern African region, South African companies can unlock significant progress and benefits for their respective businesses.

According to the Chief Director of Africa Multilateral Economic Relations at the dtic, Sandile Tyini, the workshop seeks to communicate and engage with the private sector, Small and Medium Enterprises (SMEs) as well as women and youth-owned export ready businesses on the status of the implementation of the AfCFTA, including opportunities for South African companies to participate in preferential trade beyond the Southern African region.

The workshop will focus on six sector master plans, namely steel and metal fabrication, agriculture and agro-processing, retail-clothing, textiles, footwear, and leather (R-CTFL) value chain, automotive industry, sugar value chain and forestry," said Tyini.

These workshops will also identify companies within the provinces in the targeted sector master plans as well as other priority sectors that wish to export to the rest of the continent.

"In addition, the workshops will expose export ready companies to the benefits of exporting under the AfCFTA, said Tyini.

The AfCFTA presents tremendous opportunities for South African companies to expand and diversify their export base beyond traditional markets in Southern Africa.

By exploring new markets in North, West, Central and Eastern Africa, businesses can tap into previously untapped potential.

The continental free trade area also includes mechanisms to support emerging producers, SMEs, as well as women and youth entrepreneurs, enabling them to participate and benefit from the opportunities it offers.  SAnews.gov.za

This story has been published on: 2023-07-03. To contact the author, please use the contact details within the article.
Feature: Hong Kong people travel through time to Tang Dynasty

Xinhua) 13:37, July 03, 2023

HONG KONG, July 1 (Xinhua) -- On Saturday, in the Tang culture experience zone at Hong Kong's Victoria Park, women dressed beautifully in Tang Dynasty (618-907) costumes were dancing happily.

Dressing as a young girl in Tang Dynasty costume, Miss Lee, a Hong Kong resident, took a selfie with her mobile phone against the backdrop of red lanterns under the sun.

Saturday marked the 26th anniversary of Hong Kong's return to the motherland. Lee and her friends went to Victoria Park to celebrate this special day.

"The decorations here match the Tang clothes so well," Lee said.

67-year-old Hong Kong resident Wan Miu-ling waited two and a half hours in the scorching heat and was finally seated in the makeup section.

"I like the costumes of various Chinese dynasties, and the Tang costumes were the most gorgeous," Wan said she was satisfied with the makeup and hairstyle designed by the makeup artist.

Wan said she loves traditional Chinese culture. "After I retired, I began to study Yi Jing, or Book of Changes, and the Analects of Confucius. I keep studying because I am Chinese," she said.

Such an immersive cultural experience was greatly loved by Hong Kong people. Many local people flocked to the park to try on Han-style clothing, the traditional dress of the Han Chinese people.

Wang Ning, a representative of the Han-style clothing experience zone in the park, told Xinhua that there were 120 sets of different styles of costumes for people to choose from.

"It seems that Chinese traditional costumes are very popular among Hong Kong people," Wang said.

In another corner, children of different ages sat quietly at the table to do handicrafts.

A sixth-grade primary school student surnamed Lee was making a moon-shaped fan, which was popular in the Tang Dynasty. Lee decorated the fan carefully and wrote the word "peace" in the blank space.

"I heard there was a traditional culture experience zone here, so I dressed in my Han-style outfit to join the party," said Chui Wai-sze, a local college student.

"I have been to many places in the mainland and the traditional Chinese culture is really beautiful. Young people in Hong Kong should go to the mainland and experience the charm of different Chinese dynasties," Chui said.

(Web editor: Zhang Kaiwei, Liang Jun)
Editorial SCF

July 01, 2023: Information Clearing House -- There will be hell to pay for the U.S. and European rulers who have staked everything on their nefarious ambition for strategic defeat of Russia.

The Ukraine proxy war against Russia can be increasingly seen as a disastrous defeat for the United States and NATO. That stunning outcome should be making world headlines. Instead, the Western media spin machine is in overdrive about a failed mutiny in Russia, which on an objective scale of important events is relatively minor compared with the colossal U.S./NATO scandal.

A month-long Ukrainian counteroffensive has failed to make any dent in Russias defenses despite billions of dollars and euros in weaponry funnelled to the Kiev regime by the NATO bloc. That is a veritably astounding calamity and scandal. The completely unnecessary death and destruction are obscene  akin to World War One slaughtering by callous armchair generals and politicians.

Are You Tired Of The Lies And Non-Stop Propaganda?

Even Western officials and the corrupt money-grubbing Kiev regime are coyly admitting that the much-vaunted counteroffensive  that had been hailed for months as an expected hammer blow against Russian forces  is a failure. Thousands of Ukrainian soldiers as well as NATO special forces covertly on the ground have been killed. Hundreds of tanks and infantry vehicles have been pulverized by superior Russian firepower.

It is a slaughter and orgy of war racketeering that American and European political elites, along with their media servants, have endlessly promoted.

There will be hell to pay for the American and European rulers who have staked everything on their nefarious ambition for the strategic defeat of Russia (under the specious guise of defending democracy in a Nazi regime!)

The political consequences for U.S. President Joe Biden will make his Afghanistan withdrawal debacle in 2021 look like a picnic as presidential elections loom next year.

As for the European Union, whose leaders have slavishly followed Washingtons folly in Ukraine, the repercussions of economic and political chaos will fatally undermine this already teetering entity.

Ultimately, theres no getting away from the impending seismic geopolitical crisis, no matter how much the Western elitist mis-rulers twist and squirm to avoid accountability.

The tumult from the Prigozhin affair in Russia over the last week, which saw a mutiny attempt by the chief of the Wagner private military company, came at a convenient time for the U.S. and EU. It momentarily distracted from the unmitigated disaster that Washington and its NATO allies have created in Ukraine. But as the Prigozhin charade dissipates, the focus will rightly turn to the far bigger scandal of Western-led defeat in Ukraine.

Who will answer for the countless lives lost, the millions of displaced, and the American and European economies and livelihoods thrown into disarray? All of the Western so-called leaders, as well as the shameless war-propagandizing media outlets, are a rogues gallery that will face searing scrutiny from their public in due course when the chickens inexorably come home to roost.

Disturbingly, however, in the short term, the mad rulers in Washington and Europe show no connection with reality and no turning back in their war obsession.

This week, the European Unions supposed top diplomat Josep Borrell is proposing to turn the blocs so-called European Peace Facility into a Ukraine defense fund. The EU has already committed over 50 billion of taxpayers money for propping up the Neo-Nazi regime in Kiev. Now, unelected bureaucrats like Borrell want to make the whole purpose of the EU a banker for war in Ukraine.

Denmark has this week taken the lead among other European states to begin a pilot training program for Ukrainians and other NATO mercenaries to fly the U.S.-made F-16 fighter jets.

The Biden White House is also reportedly close to signing off on the supply of long-range ATACMS missiles to Ukraine which would be capable of launching attacks on Russian territory. Biden has already burnt through $150 billion of public money in fencing a corrupt Kiev regime whose army and NATO weapons have been obliterated. (Of course, this is a super-lucrative, self-reinforcing business for the U.S. military-industrial complex and their political pimps in Washington, including Biden.)

In other words, instead of sobering up to the reality that the U.S.-led proxy war in Ukraine against Russia is doomed, the Biden administration and its European flunkies are doubling down. They are strapped by their own ideological straitjackets, corrupt personal interests, the short-term elite profits of war, and Russophobia.

Western leaders are even making the twisted deduction that the failed mutiny in Russia is all the more reason why the U.S. and NATO should ramp up arms to the Kiev regime. Antony Blinken, the American Secretary of State, gloated this week about a supposed opportunity to inflict a strategic defeat on Russia. Such thinking is completely delusional and insanely dangerous.

The conflict in Ukraine could end in short order. It should never have started. The solution to end the violence is the same as was advocated by Moscow a long time ago: to formulate geopolitical security accords and in particular neutrality of Ukraine with regard to joining NATO.

The Western rulers have learnt nothing. Ahead of the NATO summit in two weeks time in Vilnius on July 11-12, Britain and others are calling for Ukraines membership to be fast-tracked. Such a move will consolidate the path to all-out war with Russia.

Further arming Ukraine and pushing for NATO membership is not simply digging a deeper hole for yourself. Its pushing the situation over the abyss.

Vassily Nebenzia, Russias ambassador to the United Nations, told the Security Council this week: For this war to end, the American masters must give orders to their vassals. The absence of such signals and orders indicates only one thing: the United States has no need or desire to end the conflict, but has an appetite for its continuation and anticipates when Russia will be defeated, preferably [in the U.S. interpretation] strategically. I want to tell you that that isnt going to happen.

The Russian envoy added this grim warning: Having become completely detached from reality, the West is deliberately provoking a direct confrontation between nuclear powers.

There is a foreboding sense that rather than face accountability for their Ukraine nemesis, the Western elite would rather start World War Three.

That is the most damnable realization about the Western political class and their so-called liberal democracy. Its a fascist cabal willing to suicide the world.

Up to an indefinite point, Russias formidable military deterrence can hold off the Western cabal from their warmongering delusions, and in that way increasingly expose the Western psychopathic system for what it is. But for a historic transition to a more peaceful world, the onus is on the people in the West to take down their warmongering system and hold their criminal mis-leaders to account. If World War Three can be avoided in the meantime, that is.
Shelbourn Stevens is no longer with Novant Health, the Winston-Salem, N.C.-based health system confirmed to Becker's.

Mr. Stevens had been serving as president of New Hanover Regional Medical Center in Wilmington, N.C., and Novant Health's Coastal Market, which includes Bolivia, N.C.-based Brunswick Medical Center and Burgaw, N.C.-based Pender Medical Center.

"We appreciate his contributions to our organization over the years," Novant Health said in a statement. The health system did not provide further information about the circumstances surrounding his departure.

Mr. Stevens became president of NHRMC and Novant Health's Coastal Market in May 2021, around the time Novant Health acquired the assets of NHRMC. This month, Novant Health announced an agreement to invest $50 million in Pender Medical Center and develop the facility into a community general hospital within the next five years.

Novant Health said Jeff Lindsay, the health system's executive vice president and COO, will lead the region in the interim while a search is conducted for a replacement.

Mr. Lindsay has been part of Novant Health since 1996.

Before becoming president of NHRMC and Novant Health's Coastal Market, Mr. Stevens served as president of Brunswick Medical Center, according to his LinkedIn page.
Harland & Wolff is boosting its turnover on the back of projects such as the Cory barge, the first vessel to be completed at its Belfast yard since 2003

Belfast-based Harland & Wolff has reported a loss of 70.35m, rising from 25.5m, in its latest financial results.

However, revenue had risen by 51% to 27.96m, while employee numbers were close to double.

The team increased by 88% to 769 core employees in the year ending December 31, 2022, against the previous 17-month period.

The firm, led by group chief executive John Wood, is targeting annual revenue of 500m by 2025. It said revenues in the 2023 financial year are expected to be around 100-115m, while contracted revenues for the 2024 financial year have already exceeded 70m.

Harland & Wolff was bought out of administration in 2019 by British firm Infrastrata, which has since rebranded under the name of the historic Belfast shipbuilder.

The company said its 70.35m loss was largely due to recruitment in preparation for bidding on large-value contracts across its five target markets. They said the investment was expected to generate cost savings in the long term.

Large numbers of personnel were hired, for example, in preparation for key contracts such as the 55m M55 Regeneration Programme, 18m Cory barges and 1.6bn Fleet Solid Support (FSS) projects.

Harland & Wolff said its contracted backlog has increased from 110m to 900m, while its uncontracted weighted pipeline of opportunities has risen from 1.36bn to over 2.50bn over a five-year period.

It has also secured an increase in its corporate debt facility to $100m (79m) to meet the group's growing capital needs as further investment is made to win and execute fabrication contacts.

Mr Wood said: Having completed the third year of our turnaround strategy at the end of financial year 2022, we have started on a strong foot at the beginning of financial year 2023 with the award of the subcontract for the FSS programme.

Whilst the FSS subcontract is a game-changing contract win for the company, it will take several years to deliver, and we still have a lot to achieve over the next two years in order to turn this company into a target 500m per annum business.

We believe this is a wholly achievable goal and our maturing presence across five markets will fuel the growth that we are targeting by the time we end the fifth year (FY 2025) of our turnaround strategy.

Malcolm Groat, chairman of Harland & Wolff, said: Post the balance sheet date, we secured the manufacture subcontract for the FSS which will see a 77m investment into technology in our Belfast yard, making it the most state of-the-art shipyard in the UK, also bringing a ramp up of 1,200 shipyard jobs across Belfast and Appledore.

This contract award is a game -changer for the company and will allow us to rekindle and modernise worldclass shipbuilding skills and trades that were otherwise dying out. FSS has enabled us to build a legacy that will provide secure and sustainable high-quality employment for decades to come.

The firm is meanwhile addressing a skills gap through its apprenticeship programme, with intake totalling 37 apprentices in 2021, rising to 64 in 2022 and set to increase to 100 this year.

And it expressed confidence a judicial review aimed at overturning the marine licence awarded to its Islandmagee gas storage project has limited chance of success.
Belfast-based Kainos Group has acquired US firm RapidIT-Cloudbera - from left, Brendan Mooney, CEO of Kainos, and Russell Sloan, who is taking over the role in September

An Atlanta-based supplier of automated testing products for the business sector has been acquired by Kainos Group for an undisclosed sum.

RapidIT-Cloudbera is the creator of Genie, a Workday-focused product with the ability to rapidly auto-generate test cases, allowing customers to quickly launch automated testing. Established in 2017, the firm has operations in the US and India.

Workday software is used by medium to large businesses to manage payroll, benefits, HR and other employee data.

Genie, which is used by more than 100 organisations to streamline their testing activity, is set to be combined with the Belfast firms own market-leading automated testing product Smart Test.

Kainos said the combined product will provide its customers with the ability to achieve greater compliance and quality assurance more quickly, with less internal effort and with increased testing coverage.

Brendan Mooney, CEO of Kainos, said: We are delighted to welcome our new colleagues from RapidIT-Cloudbera.

The skills, expertise and creativity of our expanded team will allow us to accelerate our product development, increasing the functionality of our existing products and allowing us to quickly bring new products to market  it is a winning combination.

Last month, Mr Mooney announced he is stepping down as chief executive in September after 34 years with the firm. Digital services director Russell Sloan will be taking over the role, with his predecessor remaining in an advisory role until June 2024 to ease the transition.

The team at RapidIT-Cloudbera will join Kainos Workday Products division, one of three divisions alongside Digital Services and Workday Services.

Integration of Genie and Smart Test products is due to complete during Kainos current financial year.

In its latest results, the IT provider reported turnover up by 24% year on year to 374.8m in the year to March 31, 2023. Reporting Annual Recurring Revenue (ARR) of 49m, its Smart products suite is forecast to achieve 100m ARR by 2026.

The first Northern Ireland business to be listed on the FTSE 250, Kainos has increased its employee numbers by 11% to 2,990 colleagues in 22 countries, to be joined by RapidIT-Cloudberas team of 101 people.

Its headquarters remain in Belfast, with plans underway to move into new headquarters at Bankmore Square by 2026.

Gopo Velagundula, CEO of RapidIT-Cloudbera, said: The automated testing market for Workday is growing rapidly and by combining our two products we are creating the undisputed global leader for automated testing.

The combination also represents fantastic news for our customers, increasing the scale and value of what we can do to support their compliance efforts.

Malachy Smith, workday products director at Kainos, said: When we launched Smart Test in 2013 we created the market for the automated testing of Workday and it has been incredibly exciting to be at the forefront of this market for the past 10 years.

The combination of Smart Test and Genie further enhances our position in this high growth market and allows us to look beyond our 100m ARR target.
Frequent users of the social website Twitter will have noticed a dramatic change to their feeds since Saturday afternoon after Twitter owner Elon Musk randomly decided to limit the amount of content seen for free.

The move caused panic and outrage among tweeters who were greeted with a repetitive error message stating 'Rate limit exceeded' when visiting profiles, refreshing their timeline, and even viewing their own account.

But what exactly has happened and why?

Here, we break down some of the most frequently asked questions to explain why one of the world's most popular social media websites is now seemingly behind a paywall.

What has Elon Musk said about the change to Twitter?

After hours of confusion, with many people incorrectly believing Twitter was down, South African and (as of now outgoing) Twitter CEO Elon Musk took to his social media platform to explain the changes.

"To address extreme levels of data scraping and system manipulation, we've applied the following temporary limits," he wrote - though many relied on third-party media outlets to report on the statement, considering most Twitter users couldn't load his profile.

What does 'Rate limit exceeded' mean?

The 'rate limit' refers to the number of tweets users can see on the website. Musk made the move to limit these to various figures throughout the weekend, initially stating that verified accounts - those subscribed to Twitter Blue and therefore gaining a 'blue tick' on their account - would be allowed to read 6,000 tweets a day, while unverified accounts would be limited to 600, and 300 for newly created unverified accounts.

Within hours, these amounts were changed again, to 8,000 for verified users, 800 for unverified, and 400 respectively - and again, to the current (at the time of writing) 10,000, 1,000, and 500.

Does this mean I now have to pay for Twitter?

No - but you will have to pay to view more of the website. Twitter Blue is the subscription service officially rolled out to all users last year.

Contrary to popular belief, it was not Musk's invention as the feature was long in development before he took the reins.

It costs 11 a month, with users gaining a 'blue tick' on their account, something previously only used to verify public figures. Musk also promises that those who subscribe will see fewer ads, and their tweets will be seen by more users.

However, the actual evidence for the latter terms has been debated.

What is 'data scraping and system manipulation'?

Musk's concerns about data scraping and system manipulation are legitimate.

Due to its format and heavy use by journalists and media organisations, Twitter has developed into a user-generated news wire over the years.

This means the website is an all-you-can-eat buffet for AI programs - if you're trying to create the next ChatGPT, you need data and information to input into it, which can easily be lifted from Twitter.

The former richest man in the world has also long taken issue with the number of websites that casually use Twitter's IP to create their own websites, such as Twitterific- claiming they manipulate Twitter's systems.

Why are the changes being made?

While Musk has said the move has simply been about changing the website's format to protect its data (and users' data), many have speculated about the real reason behind the changes and why now.

When he purchased Twitter in October 2022 for $44 billion, using a mixture of bridge and secured loans, Musk, despite an eye-watering net worth, still owes around $13 billion of that payment and is said to be making $300 million lump sum instalments.

These sudden blunt changes mean that ultimately the overall worth of Twitter has now dramatically decreased.

Other liberal commentators have said the timing of the changes could be linked to the 2024 US Presidential Election race, which is now in full swing. Twitter is an incredibly useful tool in spreading political messaging.

Is this the end of Twitter?

The news of Twitter's demise was (for now) greatly exaggerated, as many users who jumped ship over the weekend started to notice their feeds slowly returning to an appearance of normality by Monday - but many are still complaining of frustrations.

It's clear Musk has intentions to mould Twitter to his own vision and arguments, either for better or worse, depending on your persuasion.

It's likely going to be around for a little while longer, but as Musk tightens his grip, don't expect this to be the last of the dramatic changes.
Eden Consultancy at the Our Generation: Autism: Belonging and Inclusion in Youth work conference in the Millennium Forum

Autism NI supporters and MLAs at Stormont four years ago campaigning for mandatory autism training for all teaching staff here

A Belfast woman who founded a business that delivers training around autism has said wider society needs to change in order to get the best out of every young person.

Rebecca McCullough was speaking following a report commissioned by the Department of Education which found that providing early support for children with special educational needs is almost impossible in Northern Ireland.

In 2022/23, more than 66,000 pupils here had some form of special educational needs.

About 7,000 are educated in 39 special schools, with 4,000 others in specialist classes in mainstream schools.

But the EA has already warned about a significant shortfall in places for special schools for the coming academic year.

Autism NI supporters and MLAs at Stormont four years ago campaigning for mandatory autism training for all teaching staff here

Ms McCullough (30) previously lived and worked as a special needs teacher in England for eight years, in a school primarily for autistic children aged three to 19.

She said: There were 14 kids in my class and I loved helping them, but I just thought there are so many more individuals like this out there who need someone to believe in them.

They were a group in which mainstream education had not worked out for them up until they were about 15 or 16, and then they came to us. It just broke my heart. The world hadnt been kind or accepting to them.

Ms McCullough returned to Belfast to study a masters in psychological sciences, and upon coming home said she realised an even bigger gap here in terms of where things should be, and were not even in comparison to where they are in mainland UK.

Following this, she formed her business, Eden Consultancy NI, in 2020.

Eden Consultancy at the Our Generation: Autism: Belonging and Inclusion in Youth work conference in the Millennium Forum

Describing its ethos, Ms McCullough explained: We change the world around the child and the individual, not the individual themselves.

We help adults in those peoples lives, whether its teachers, youth workers, parents or carers, to grow and understand, and create a world that is deeply accepting, not just aware, of neurodiversity.

Latest figures from the Department of Health show that one in 20 schoolchildren here have a diagnosis of autism.

It is the highest prevalence rate on record, and more than four times as many as 15 years ago.

Ms McCullough added that those figures also dont account for people on the waiting list to be diagnosed, or those who might have been misdiagnosed.

She explained that this is the equivalent of at least one child in every Northern Ireland classroom having autism.

That means there has to be a level of understanding for every individual in that setting, including [mainstream] teachers and classroom assistants, she said.

I get the question all the time, especially from the older generation: Is autism around more today?

Its not. It was always around, it just wasnt understood or picked up on in the same way.

Are our services good enough now? No. Are they much better than they were? Yes, 100%. Therefore, more voices are being heard.

Its not that autism and ADHD are increasing, its that our systems, processes and understanding have improved quite quickly all of a sudden, so were seeing this big rise in statistics.

But theres such a pressure on services and there arent enough spaces in specialist schools.

I believe we can build a better society by upskilling adults in general. Its the small things that make a big difference, and simplistic approaches that we can integrate into our everyday communication can make a real change.

Rebecca McCullough speaking on the Parentline NI podcast.

Eden Consultancy has gained a lot of attention recently for its snippet-sized social media videos, with one reaching almost 100,000 views.

In the clips, staff interview people on the streets of Belfast about common myths surrounding neurodivergent issues.

Many people believe boys are more likely to have autism than girls, but thats just about how the diagnosis system here works, Ms McCullough said.

Or one of the biggest misconceptions is that everyones a little bit autistic.

This is where the change comes, around language and expectations, and saying, actually, thats a common misconception, this is how it can make people with autism feel and heres what you can say instead.

It shows the importance of going out and having these conversations.

She said that while Eden is not a non-profit and doesnt receive grants, charities and health services will often use their own funding to pay for the consultancy to conduct training, which will be free for parents and carers, because that particular service has covered it.

Obviously with all the cuts at the minute here, its hard, she added.

But autism is just a neurological condition meaning that brains are formed slightly differently.

Its nothing wrong, its not that the brains broken, its just different.

We know that as a society, were not great at different sometimes. We want to create an environment where everyone can flourish.
President Biden accidentally referred to Putins war in Iraq when answering questions from the press, a year after former president George W Bush made the same gaffe. Both men played crucial roles in the push to invade Iraq.

Asked on Wednesday whether the short-lived Prigozhin rebellion was a sign that Putin was weakening, Biden replied, Its hard to tell really. But hes clearly losing the war in Iraq.

During the 2020 presidential race, Current Affairs Nathan J Robinson wrote the following about Bidens pivotal role in manufacturing support for the Iraq invasion:

In 2003, Biden was a senator bullish about the push to war [in Iraq] who helped sell the Bush administrations pitch to the American public, who voted for  and helped advance  the Bush agenda. He was the wars most crucial senate supporter. Biden repeated the myth that Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction, saying that these weapons must be dislodged from Saddam Hussein, or Saddam Hussein must be dislodged from power. The resulting war was one of the most deadly catastrophes in the history of U.S. foreign policy  the Iraqi death toll was in the hundreds of thousands or possibly even the millions, and 4,500 American troops died.

That Bidens decomposing brain would find the word Iraq when reaching for the word which means nation that has been illegally invaded by an evil government is positively Freudian.

Are You Tired Of The Lies And Non-Stop Propaganda?

In May of last year during a speech in Dallas, George W Bush made a similar Freudian confession, saying, The result is an absence of checks and balances in Russia, and the decision of one man to launch a wholly unjustified and brutal invasion of Iraq. I mean, of Ukraine.

After correcting himself with a nervous chuckle, Bush broke the tension with the words, Iraq too. Anyway. He then quipped that he is 75 years old, leaning harder on his Aw shucks gee willikers Im such a goofball persona than he ever has in his entire life.

I defy you to find me anything that is more quintessentially representative of the state of the US empire than these two clips. Two decaying empire managers fumbling around in their skulls for the name of nation thats been invaded by murderous thugs, and coming up with the name of the nation they themselves invaded. Its truly a thing of beauty.

Its absolutely ridiculous that theyre trying to charge Putin with war crimes while these two mass murderers are walking free. As American law professor Dale Carpenter has said, If citizens cannot trust that laws will be enforced in an evenhanded and honest fashion, they cannot be said to live under the rule of law. Instead, they live under the rule of men corrupted by the law. This is all the more true of laws which would exist between nations.

Its not a whataboutism to say its absurd to charge Putin with war crimes without charging men like Bush and Biden  its a completely devastating argument against the claim being made. If the law doesnt apply to everyone, then its not the law, its just corruption. Its a tool of the powerful.

Caitlin's articles are entirely reader-supported, so if you enjoyed this piece please consider sharing it around, liking her on Facebook, following her antics on Twitter, checking out her podcast, throwing some money into her hat on Patreon or Paypal, or buying her book Woke: A Field Guide for Utopia Preppers. New book! Lao Sue And Other Poems, available in paperback or PDF/ebook. - All works co-authored with her husband Tim Foley. https://caitlinjohnstone.com

Views expressed in this article are solely those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the opinions of Information Clearing House.
Author Aingeala Flannery tells of her plans for the money she won for her debut novel, The Amusements last month

What did you learn about money while growing up?

Be self-sufficient. Double-job in case one falls through. Dont borrow unless you absolutely have to.

My father was self-employed and believed in the graft and in giving someone a start.

If youre lucky enough to get a start, work hard and throw the ladder down after you to help the next person who needs a chance.

What are your plans for the 20,000 prize-money?

The first thing I did was give my teenage son a few hundred euro for music and clothes, and I bought myself a Capulet & Montague necklace.

Next, its essential house repairs. Then Ill set aside the tax I owe on the prize, and pay myself a monthly wage for writing between now and October.

Did you have to make any financial sacrifices when moving from journalism to fiction-writing?

The three Hs: Holidays. Home improvements. Hairdressers.

When were you most broke?

Crete, 1990. I lived on a fried egg, a melon, and a pack of cigarettes a day.

Whats the most expensive place youve visited?

Copenhagen in the early 1990s. I was inter-railing on a shoestring budget, so everywhere in northern Europe seemed expensive.

Now Dublin, London, and New York are expensive, yet you can live on surprisingly little, depending how well you know the city.

Aside from rent, of course.

Would you buy Irish property now?

No. I own a home, and one is enough for anyone.

Do you still carry cash?

Yes, for shopping trolleys, birthday cards, and to give to people less fortunate than I am. Also, in case I need to flip a coin.

Do you use any of the digital banks?

Every single day. The text I get most often is: How much is on the Revolut, Mam?

What was your biggest ever financial mistake?

I thought I could survive on an arts salary when I left my job at Today FM and ended up couch-surfing with my son while we Airbnb-ed our house for money.

But I got a few more freelance gigs and we were able to move back in after a couple of months.

What was your worst-ever job?

Ive had plenty of so-called menial jobs: cleaning offices in Germany, working the fryers at KFC, bartending in the seediest dive bar imaginable. All these jobs were grand because I liked the people I worked with.

My worst job, by far, was in a typing pool for a firm in New Zealand.

My supervisor gave out to me and about me non-stop, because I wasnt typing fast enough.

The stuff we were typing was so badly written that Id edit and redraft it. That drove your woman bananas.

When I got my final pay cheque, I took off for Bali. Only then did it dawn on me that she was still sitting at her desk and I didnt blame her for hating me.

Do you have a pension?

Yes, from my years working in radio. I cant afford to add to it. Hopefully Ill be able to work until I drop. Id go nuts without a purpose.

An award-winning journalist and broadcaster, Aingeala quit her job of 16 years as a news editor and producer to write fiction, study creative writing. She won the Kerry Group Irish Novel of the Year award for her debut novel, The Amusements, last month
Captain finally tells frustrated travellers to disembark due to a crew issue

Frustrated holidaymakers were 'grounded' by easyJet after sitting on the plane for four hours

EasyJet has apologised after a flight from Belfast to Faro was cancelled  just as the aircraft was about to take-off.

The flight from the international airport to the Portuguese city on Friday had already been delayed by approximately four hours, with passengers  including families with children  left waiting on the plane.

Initially problems were caused by technical issues.

But by the time these were resolved, the crew had overworked their regulated hours  and the plane could not take off.

Among those on board was William Fitchie, from Belfast.

He said: The flight was initially scheduled to take off at 4.30pm and we were informed that it would be delayed until 5pm.

We eventually boarded the plane at 5.10pm and the captain informed us of another delay that was due to a technical issue with a landing gear tyre.

We were told this would delay us by no more than an additional 10 minutes.

An hour later the passengers were informed that there was a crew flying time issue, meaning that a standby crew needed to board the plane.

However, he explained that the flight continued to be delayed  and it was then discovered that some of the replacement crew would also have worked their hours by the time it reached Faro.

After almost four hours sitting on the plane with other passengers, including many kids and families beginning to become frustrated, the flight finally taxied towards the main runway.

Kids were clapping and yelling with excitement as the plane was pushed off the stand.

We were about halfway towards the main runway when the captain announced that he had spoken with headquarters and if the staff flew to Faro and back it would exceed their hours. Therefore, the flight had to be cancelled.

Mr Fitchie explained that when the disappointed passengers disembarked the plane, there were no easyJet staff available at the service desk in the terminal to assist them.

He said it angered passengers who were already extremely frustrated.

It took over an hour for luggage to be taken off the flight and returned to them, Mr Fitchie added.

We had to go and ask about our bags; it was frustrating. It then took the airport ground staff a further one and a half hours to unload the luggage as communication between the carrier and ground crew had broken down, he said.

Crowd cheers as man proposes to flight attendant in Dublin Airport

Mr Fitchie, who was also travelling with his grandchildren, said no replacement or alternative flight was offered.

My group, like lots of others, had booked the holiday through easyJet holidays and sought information at the Swissair desk.

They told us to check our easyJet app for information; the app said they would be in touch with an update on our holiday.

The next information we received was that there was no available alternative, and our holiday was then cancelled.

This meant that many people, including families with children, may have had to miss out on their summer holiday.

We were lucky enough to have a few extra pounds to book another holiday, but its very likely that other families with young children may have not been able to afford to do this, Mr Fitchie added.

An easyJet spokesperson apologised for any inconvenience caused but that the safety and wellbeing of customers and crew is our highest priority.

Flight EZY3045 from Belfast to Faro on Friday night experienced a technical issue caused by debris on the taxiway and while our engineers resolved this, the delay led to crew exceeding their safety regulated operating hours, they said.

We arranged for replacement crew, however further delays at the airport meant that not all crew could operate within their safety regulated hours and so unfortunately the flight was cancelled.

The safety and wellbeing of customers and crew is our highest priority, and our crew did all possible to minimise the impact of the delay and kept customers updated onboard.

If a flight is cancelled, we provide passengers with information via our mobile app and online with options to transfer to an alternative flight or receive a full refund and book hotel accommodation and meals if required, the spokesperson added.

We are looking into customers experience in the airport with our ground handling provider at Belfast as we always expect our customers to be provided with support and we would like to apologise for the inconvenience caused.
A former senior Stormont civil servant has said the Government needs to be honest with the DUP to end the political deadlock.

Andrew McCormick, former director general of international relations in the Executive Office and ex-permanent secretary at the Department for the Economy, insists the Government should come clean with the DUP by making it clear it cannot deliver unfettered access for goods moving between GB and Northern Ireland.

Writing in UK in a Changing Europe, he said that since February, NI has been stuck in limbo with the DUP asking for something the Government cannot deliver, and the Government appearing to promise to meet their concerns, despite knowing they cannot.

Mr McCormick said: The Northern Ireland Office has allowed this stalemate to continue, despite the real world consequences: no Executive, deteriorating public services and worsening public finances, all shaking trust in the governing institutions.

The DUP claim, as restated by Sir Jeffrey Donaldson at Northern Ireland Questions on June 21 and at the NI Affairs Committee on June 28, they were promised that Northern Irelands ability to trade within the internal market of the United Kingdom would be protected in legislation.

He also restated the importance of Article 6 of the Acts of Union (1800), which guaranteed the same privileges in relation to trade for the people of Ireland as for Great Britain. The Supreme Court has found that the Protocol (and hence the Windsor Framework) amended these provisions.

Secretary of State Chris Heaton-Harris responded with an extraordinary promise  that he hopes to bring forward legislation that does exactly what [the DUP] needs it to do for the DUP to re-enter the Executive.

He added: There is history here. In the New Decade, New Approach agreement in January 2020, which was critical to re-establishment of the Executive after its last collapse, legislation was indeed promised on Northern Irelands place in the UK internal market.

But there was a clear distinction between the promise on goods moving from NI to GB and what was possible for goods moving in the other direction.

The promise of unfettered access for goods moving from NI to GB has been explicit since the Joint Report agreed between the UK and EU under Theresa May in December 2017. The promise was repeated in the Protocol in October 2019 and the Internal Market Act 2020 converted the promise in New Decade, New Approach into legislation. While it is relatively easy for UK governments to guarantee unfettered access to the GB market for NI goods, the reverse is not true.

The stumbling block from the start of Brexit has been that there is no real world model or option that provides both for the UK to leave the EU single market, and for completely unfettered access for goods moving from GB to NI.

New Decade, New Approach emphasised Northern Irelands place in the UKs internal market, but conspicuously did not promise unfettered access for goods moving from GB to NI.

On the contrary, it explicitly confirmed that the Protocol would apply and it should have been very clear that ruled out GB-NI unfettered access. The Internal Market Act did nothing to alter the Withdrawal Agreement.

He said the Government appears reluctant to point out to the DUP that the Internal Market Act did fulfil the promise in New Decade, New Approach, and that it cannot go further without re-opening the issue with the EU.

He concluded: Tantalising the DUP with promises the Government knows it cannot fulfil allows them to avoid confronting the reality that the Windsor Framework is now the settled will of the UK Parliament.

Some are still indulging in ideas, like mutual enforcement, that the EU has made clear repeatedly it will not countenance.

The UK Government needs to come clean with the DUP, make clear it has fulfilled its January 2020 promise and nothing more is feasible.

And once they have stopped being strung along by promises they should know are undeliverable, the DUP must decide whether it will allow NI to have its government back.
Motorists have been advised to expect delays in Bangor on Friday afternoon following a crash.

The two-vehicle traffic collision happened in the Estate Road area of the Co Down town, at the junction of the Ballysallagh Road.

Police have advised drivers to seek alternative main routes for their journey.

Meanwhile, the Church Street area of Downpatrick reopened following a fire on Friday morning.

The PSNIs Inspector Browne said: The fire was discovered by officers on mobile patrol who were in attendance at a flat in Church Street and were able to raise the alarm and residents able to exit their property.

"Our colleagues from the Fire Service attended and cleared the remainder of the building. The fire is not being treated as suspicious at this stage.
Police officers patrol in front of the Arc de Triomphe on the Champs Elysees in Paris

An award-winning author who grew up chucking halfers at the Army in west Belfast before moving to Paris has said tension in the French city had been worse than the hottest of hot times during the Troubles.

Robert McLiam Wilson moved to Paris 15 years ago, a city that has just seen its fifth night of unrest sparked by the police killing of a teenager.

Police had made 719 arrests nationwide by early yesterday after a mass security deployment aimed at quelling Frances worst social upheaval in years.

The fast-spreading crisis is posing a new challenge to President Emmanuel Macrons leadership and exposing deep-seated discontent in low-income neighbourhoods over discrimination and lack of opportunity.

The 17-year-old, whose death last Tuesday spawned the anger, identified only by his first name Nahel, was buried on Saturday in a Muslim ceremony in his hometown of Nanterre, a Paris suburb where emotion over his loss remains raw.

Robert McLiam Wilson

McLiam Wilson, who writes for Charlie Hebdo  the French satirical weekly magazine where 12 people were killed in 2015 after controversially depicting Muhammad  described the atmosphere in Paris following the teenagers death.

Everyone knew immediately that the banlieues (the under-privileged suburbs) would erupt in some kind of protest and rioting, the Eureka Street author told the Belfast Telegraph.

The same thing happened in 2005 after two kids were electrocuted while running away from the police.

There is a lot more arson and looting this time  this could be because of the social media videos of US unrest of the last couple of years.

He continued: I grew up in the hottest of hot times in Belfast, but Paris has always struck me as more tense, more filled with suppressed rage and hatred.

Ive been attacked a lot more in Paris than Belfast or London. It can often feel like everyone hates everyone else.

You dont have to scratch hard to find it, particularly if you have a foreign accent like mine  people will delight in explaining to you how to avoid black/white/brown areas. There is huge cultural denial of this tension. Except among the working class.

Despite geographical and cultural differences, the author said the similarities between the Troubles and Paris current state is inescapable.

But he said that although the conflict is undoubtedly serious, coverage can be sensationalised.

Since the French police are now using armoured cars and even some vehicles that look like old school Northern Irish Saracens, the parallels are inescapable, the former St Malachys College student said.

I feel the same way now that I did then.

Burning cars look amazing on TV but riots are remarkably undangerous to life and limb. Theyre more slow-moving than tortoises  incredibly easy to skirt around, if youre not a lorry driver or a bus driver, that is. Not all the kids doing it are wicked demons.

I was chucking halfers at the Army when I was eight or nine and I ended up going to Cambridge. Ill never forget seeing a burning car outside the Rangers Supporters Club on Sandy Row, an excited phalanx of foreign photojournalists surrounding it, clicking away.

But none of the pictures showed the row of backpackers behind them sitting on the low wall of the youth hostel, watching it all like it was Christmas.

He added: Paris is fine, France is fine. People forget this kind of stuff very quickly, just like everything else. Though its not much fun if you have a tiny little shop or cafe, barely breaking even and these hallions come and burn it down for you.
A deceased benefactor has donated an extra 100,000 to Sinn Fein, it has emerged.

The Business Post reported that new filings show the money was lodged to the party in March of this year.

It brings the total donations from William Hampton to 3.35m following an additional 350,000 lodged by his estate to the republican party last year.

It is unclear exactly how much Mr Hampton donated in total to Sinn Fein, but his estate is said to be worth an estimated 4m.

Mr Hampton was a mechanic by trade with no evident ties to Sinn Fein.

He had inherited money and land from his father but was reportedly unhappy with the way his inheritance was handled by the executors of his fathers will.

The late Mr Hampton had no fixed abode and was living in a caravan at the time of his will being made.

Dave Morton, a friend of Mr Hamptons, previously told the BBC he had left the fortune to Sinn Fein out of spite and to say up you to the British establishment.

The first of Mr Hamptons donations arrived in 2019, amounting to 2m that year across several instalments. In 2020, 100,000 was lodged; another 800,000 was lodged in 2021.

An additional 350,000 was lodged last year across three instalments, while the newest donation of 100,000 was made in March, taking the total donations from Hampton to 3.35m.

Irish electoral laws dont allow political parties to accept donations over 2,500, but the Hampton donation has been accepted through the northern office of the party, meaning it is subject to separate UK electoral laws which dont prohibit such large donations.

Sinn Fein previously said the Republics Standards in Public Office Commission had investigated Mr Hamptons bequest back in 2019 and had decided the matter was closed to their satisfaction.

Last week, the DUP was critical of Sinn Fein for having a conveniently partitionist attitude to donations after it emerged that $54,645 was repatriated from the US to Sinn Feins northern office ahead of the Assembly elections last year, to pay for Sinn Fein expenses.

The DUP said there should be greater scrutiny of Sinn Feins finances.

The republican party raised close to $1m in the Unites States last year through the Friends of Sinn Fein organisation.

Part of that money came from a single $394,000 donation, while many other donations were in excess of $3,000.

Most of the US-related funds are understood to be kept by Friends of Sinn Fein or reinvested in American activities.

Friends of Sinn Fein raised over $905,000 in the 12 months between November 2021 and November 2022.

The US organisation also spent $454,000 in the same period, most of it on administrative expenses, fundraising events and travel.

One donation from that period amounted to $394,010  the donation was made by the Lauren Harvey Living Trust after being bequeathed by Lauren Harvey, an Arizona woman who was described in her obituary as a frequent visitor to Ireland.

Harvey died in a bicycle accident in 2020. The party has never acknowledged any connection to the woman.

The donation from Harvey is the second largest ever publicly declared by Sinn Fein, only behind the donations received from Hampton.

Sinn Fein has been contacted for comment.
Ulster Unionist Policing Board member Mike Nesbitt said the incident had shocked him.

The incident took place at a PSNI training facility in Antrim

The PSNI has carried out a review of security arrangements at a police training facility in Antrim after a man wielding a knife was able to gain access to the grounds last month.

BBC Radio Ulsters The Nolan show told listeners the man had waved a knife at two guards in a security hut before entering the complex on the towns Steeple Road and attempting to access buildings.

The man (43) left the premises after 40 minutes and was subsequently arrested in relation to the incident on Sunday June 11. He is due to appear at Antrim Court on July 25.

In a statement, the PSNI confirmed a security breach had taken place.

"A criminal investigation is underway and our enquiries are ongoing, said a spokesperson.

"We take the safety of our officers and staff extremely seriously and, as a result of the incident, have conducted an internal review of site security in line with existing procedure.

"We can confirm that all buildings within the training facility were secured and no access was gained."

Policing Board members Mike Nesbitt (UUP) and Trevor Clarke (DUP), said they were concerned the Board had only been told about the incident three days ago.

They said they would be raising the issue with Chief Constable Simon Byrne at a meeting later this week.

Mr Nesbitt also questioned whether it was appropriate to have a private security form guarding PSNI facilities, a practice that has been in place for a number of years.

"Were into Oscar Wilde territory in that one security breach  the one in Newtownards  might be written off as a misfortune; two looks like carelessness, Mr Nesbitt told the Nolan Show.

"The fact that this happened is not acceptable. We need to have a frank discussion with the PSNI. I am very conscious of the budgetary constraints and because of those I have questioned whether this policy of civilianisation of services like people being on the gates is appropriate.

A G4S Secure Solutions UK spokesperson said: "We take all matters of security very seriously.

"Any investigations into any matters of concern are conducted in conjunction with the PSNI and, if necessary, corrective measures put in place."
Only one in four RoI respondents in poll by European Movement Ireland back possibility

A rapidly declining number of people in the Republic believe a united Ireland is possible in the next 10 years, according to a new poll.

While almost half (45%) of people in Northern Ireland can see a united Ireland in the EU within the next decade, just one in four people (24%) in the Republic hold the same view  a significant drop of seven points on last year.

A majority of Northern Irish respondents also believe that Northern Ireland is worse off since Brexit (66%), according to the survey released by European Movement Ireland.

Only 14% in Northern Ireland and 9% in the Republic of Ireland believe that Northern Ireland is doing better since Brexit.

The poll is the first dedicated all-island opinion poll on EU issues and was conducted by Amarach Research, with data collection in Northern Ireland undertaken by LucidTalk.

It shows that a majority (64%) of respondents who say they voted Leave in the Brexit referendum believe Northern Ireland is doing worse since Brexit.

Support for the Republic remaining a member of the EU stands at 79% in Northern Ireland, while 58% believe the EU is moving in the right direction.

The poll also shows that 71% of people who say they voted Leave in the Brexit referendum support the Republic remaining a member of the EU.

Three-quarters of people in Northern Ireland (74%) and 51% in the Republic believe that Northern Ireland should be represented in the European Parliament.

Commenting on the findings, Noelle O Connell, CEO of European Movement Ireland, said: This is our tenth year producing an annual opinion poll on EU issues and the first time we have included Northern Ireland in the findings.

Since Brexit, the relationship between people in Northern Ireland and the European Union has been uncertain and we think its important to measure public sentiment towards the major issues affecting the relationship between the European Union and this island.

Whats surprising is the large jump of people in Ireland (RoI) in one year  up from 43% to 58%  who dont believe there will be a united Ireland in the next 10 years.

This is particularly noteworthy as the responses on this issue remained relatively constant over three years, with about one-third of people in Ireland (RoI) saying they believed there would be a united Ireland in the European Union.

This compares to 45% in Northern Ireland who believe there will be a united Ireland in the EU in the next 10 years.

Meanwhile, about one in 10 in both Northern Ireland and Ireland (RoI) believe that Northern Ireland is doing better since Brexit, with the number of people thinking it is doing worse far higher in Northern Ireland at 66%.

Noelle O Connell, CEO of European Movement Ireland

Ms O Connell added: Some 66% of respondents in Northern Ireland say they could not be convinced that Ireland would be better off outside of the EU.

Of these, more than half (55%) who say they voted Leave in the Brexit referendum now say they could not be convinced Ireland would be better off outside of the EU.

When considering important policy areas for the EU, environment is ranked in first place by respondents in Northern Ireland, followed by healthcare.

Some 60% of respondents said they feel more politically, socially and culturally close to Europe, compared to 30% who answered Great Britain.

The poll also suggests that 22% of people in Northern Ireland say they trust the UK Government the most, while 44% say they trust the EU, and 34% say they trust the Irish Government.

Some 70% of respondents in Northern Ireland also felt they should have representatives sitting as MEPs in the European Parliament.
Police have confirmed they held the 30-year-old man after rushing to a hotel in the Costa Dorada resort of Salou 70 miles south of Barcelona and finding her lying lifeless in a corridor.

An Irish tourist has been arrested on suspicion of murder after a woman believed to be his partner was strangled to death at a hotel in a Spanish holiday resort.

Police have confirmed they held the 30-year-old man after rushing to a hotel in the Costa Dorada resort of Salou 70 miles south of Barcelona and finding her lying lifeless in a corridor.

Her alleged killer, discovered beside her with a self-inflicted wrist wound, was taken to hospital where he remained under police guard this morning.

Sources close to the investigation have confirmed the arrested tourist is Irish like the 36-year-old woman he is suspected of strangling to death.

The same sources also indicated the pair, thought to be from Dublin although this has not been confirmed by officials, were understood to be partners and were sharing the same hotel room.

The suspect allegedly used a cord to strangle the woman.

A hotel worker is said to have found the victim in one of the corridors trying to escape her suspected killer, according to one of the reports.

Staff at the adult-only four-star Magnolia Hotel in Salou where the horror incident occurred said they were unable to make any comment.

The alarm was raised around 9.30pm on Sunday night. Salou is part of the Catalan province of Tarragona.

A spokesman for the regional Mossos dEsquadra police force said: Officers from the Mossos d'Esquadras Criminal Investigation Decision in Tarragona have arrested a man allegedly related to the violent death of a woman in Salou last night.

The events occurred around half past nine when the Mossos received a warning from a hotel in Salou saying a woman was seriously injured.

When they arrived at the scene, the officers found a woman lying on the floor and a man next to her with a self-inflicted wound.

Although emergency medical responders tried to revive the woman, they were finally only able to certify her death.

Officers arrested the man as the alleged perpetrator of the death.

The murder suspect is under police guard at Juan XXIII Hospital in the city of Tarragona, the capital of the province of the same name.

He is understood to have caused his wrist wound by punching or hitting a pane of glass. Well-placed sources said his injuries were not life-threatening.

The suspected killer has been transferred to a police station after being treated in hospital for his wounds, police confirmed just before midday on Monday.

One unconfirmed report said he had severed a tendon in his right wrist.

A spokesman for the Mossos dEsquadra said: He is currently at a police station and the expectation is that he will be handed over to the courts later today.

His court appearance will take place behind closed-doors, as is normal in Spain where only trials take place in public.

He is expected to be remanded in custody on the orders of a judge while the criminal investigation continues.

Charges would be laid at a later stage if the judge feels there is sufficient evidence against him.

He will be asked at his first court hearing if he wishes to answer questions but has the right to remain silent.

Police have not officially said yet whether they are treating the incident as a domestic violence killing.

However a spokesman for the Department of Equality and Feminisms of the Catalan regional government called the Generalitat has already condemned the crime and is referring to it as a femicide.

The department said in a tweet: We are keeping tabs on the femicide in Salou. We are working with the town hall and making our services available to the family and close friends of the victim who need maximum privacy at these difficult moments.

Tania Verge, the Generalitats head of Equality and Feminisms, added: Devastated by a new femicide. All our support to the victims family.

Machismo doesnt have holidays. On the contrary when couples spend more time together the risk of suffering violence increases.

Salou Town Hall will hold a minutes silence for the Irish woman killed last night at the four-star Magnolia Hotel.

It has already put up a banner with a black ribbon on its HQ.

The town hall said in a tweet: Salou Town Hall condemns last nights gender violence incident.

We urge society to participate in an act of rebuke this evening at 7pm in front of the town hall.

The 72-room Magnolia Hotel, which is one street back from the seafront, describes itself as a Four Star Superior hotel on its website.

It says: Magnolia Hotel Salou is a specialised establishment offering an Adults Only or Child Free experience, meaning it is a hotel designed exclusively for adults.

Our hotel in Salou is committed to offering a place where relaxation, peace and quiet are the most important values. So, both the hotel activities and facilities are geared towards the needs of adults travelling without children.

Magnolia Hotel is a cosmopolitan, modern Adults Only establishment with carefully designed interiors that aims to offer guests a chic experience away from the hustle and bustle and noise of other types of hotels.
Among his trips, Starmer, then head of Crown Prosecution Service, led five-person British delegation that met with Eric Holder for 45 minutes in Washington in November 2011

Delegation included the U.K. liaison prosecutor to the U.S., who dealt with extradition

Meeting was also attended by head of U.S. Department of Justices national security division

CPS refuses to clarify to Declassified UK if destruction of the Washington documents is routine procedure

The Crown Prosecution Service (CPS), England and Wales public prosecutor, has deleted all records of its former head Keir Starmers trips to the U.S., it can be revealed.

Starmer served as director of public prosecutions (DPP) from 2008-13, a period when the body was overseeing Julian Assanges proposed extradition to Sweden to face questioning over sexual assault allegations.

Starmer, who became an MP in 2015, is now leader of the Labour Party. Assange, meanwhile, faces imminent extradition to the U.S. to face up to 175 years in prison under charges mostly related to the U.S. Espionage Act.

Are You Tired Of The Lies And Non-Stop Propaganda?

While DPP, Starmer made trips to Washington in 2009, 2011, 2012 and 2013 at a cost to the British taxpayer of 21,603. It was his most frequent foreign destination while in post. Max Hill, the current DPP, has made just one trip to Washington during his five-year tenure.

During Starmers time in post, the CPS was marred by irregularities surrounding the case of the WikiLeaks founder.

The organisation has admitted to destroying key emails related to the Assange case, mostly covering the period when Starmer was in charge, while the CPS lawyer overseeing the case advised the Swedes in 2010 or 2011 not to visit London to interview Assange.

An interview at that time could have prevented the long-running embassy standoff.

Assange and WikiLeaks began publishing classified U.S. diplomatic cables  in alliance with some of the worlds largest newspapers  in November 2010. In the same month, Sweden issued an international arrest warrant for Assange over allegations of sexual misconduct, leading to a protracted legal battle, in which the CPS was heavily involved.

Italian journalist Stefania Maurizi has been waging a years-long legal fight to access documents related to the CPS and Assange case. However, the role of its then head, Starmer, in the episode has always remained unclear.

Starmer in Washington

Using the Freedom of Information Act, Declassified requested the itinerary for each of Starmers four trips to Washington with details of his official meetings, including any briefing notes.

The Crown Prosecution Service (CPS) does not hold any information falling within the scope of your request, the public body told Declassified. Information held has been destroyed in line with retention schedules.

When asked by Declassified what these retention schedules are, the CPS pointed to its retention and disposal schedule policy. But that document contains no references to time-limits on the preservation of CPS documents.

Asked for clarification  and whether the destruction of Starmers Washington documents was routine  the CPS did not respond.

But while there is no longer any official record of what Starmer did on these four trips on the British side, some information has come to light on the U.S. side.

U.S. records show that on Nov. 9, 2011, then U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder met with Starmer at his office at the U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ) for 45 minutes.

Starmers CPS was then handling Assanges proposed extradition to Sweden. In December 2010, Holder had been asked about WikiLeaks cable releases. We are doing everything that we can, he said.

Asked if he might mount a prosecution under the Espionage Act, Holder added: That is certainly something that might play a role, but there are other statutes, other tools at our disposal.

[Related: How Americas Official Secrets Act Ensnared Julian Assange]

He continued that he had given the go-ahead for a number of unspecified actions as part of a criminal investigation into WikiLeaks. I personally authorised a number of things last week and thats an indication of the seriousness with which we take this matter and the highest level of involvement at the Department of Justice, Holder said.

Meeting at DOJ

The personnel involved in the Starmer-Holder meeting at the DOJ indicates it had a national security focus. It is possible that some of the unspecified actions against WikiLeaks and Assange referenced by Holder the previous year were discussed.

Starmer was part of a five-person British delegation. This included Gary Balch, then U.K. liaison prosecutor to the U.S., who dealt with extradition.

Also present was Patrick Stevens, then head of the international division at the CPS, in which he developed and led CPS activities worldwide in support of U.S. national security. Stevens states that, at the time, he was at the heart of the U.S. governments national security and international justice strategy.

Alongside them sat Susan Hemming, then head of counter-terrorism at the CPS, who was in charge of issues related to  among other things  official secrets.

On the U.S. side, the point of contact was listed as Amy Jeffress, then the DOJs attache at the U.S. embassy in London, a role which involved coordinating with the CPS. Before that role, she had been national security counselor to Attorney General Holder which involved interfacing regularly with the U.S. intelligence community.

Jeffress moved from the DOJ in Washington to the U.S. embassy in London in September 2010, two months after WikiLeaks began publishing the Afghan War Diary. She would stay in London until 2014.

[Related: The Revelations of WikiLeaks: No. 2 The Leak That Exposed the True Afghan War]

When Assange was seized at the Ecuadorian embassy in London in April 2019, Jeffress told The Washington Post: It will be some years before a final decision is reached  at least a year and probably longer. She added: These cases can become very political in the U.S.

National Security

Another U.S. official present at Starmers DOJ meeting was Denise Cheung who would go on to be deputy chief of its National Security Section. Also present was Bruce Schwartz, then the DOJs counselor for international affairs, who would go on to win the departments award for excellence in furthering the interests of U.S. national security.

Lisa Monaco, another DOJ official at the meeting, had recently been appointed assistant attorney general for national security, leading the DOJ division overseeing its intelligence functions.

Monaco, who is now deputy U.S. attorney general, was in London in February this year to reaffirm and build upon the strong partnership between the United States and Great Britain in countering threats to our national security.

She met with Matthew Rycroft, permanent secretary at the Home Office, to continue the strong working relationship between the Home Office and the Justice Department.

Declassified has previously shown that the U.K. Home Office deployed eight staff on the secret operation to seize Assange from his asylum at the Ecuadorian embassy in London. This was a highly irregular move as Ecuador is a friendly country and asylum is a right enshrined in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights.

The CPSs lack of disclosure of documents related to Assange may raise suspicions of a cover-up. While Starmer was still in charge, in April 2013, the CPS rejected Assanges request for the personal data it had on him because of the live matters still pending.

Even GCHQ, the U.K.s largest spy agency, had granted Assanges request for the personal information it held on him, which revealed one of its intelligence officers calling the Swedish case a fit-up.

Starmer did not respond to a request for comment.

Matt Kennard is chief investigator at Declassified UK. He was a fellow and then director at the Centre for Investigative Journalism in London. Follow him on twitter @kennardmatt

This article is from Declassified UK.

Views expressed in this article are solely those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the opinions of Information Clearing House.
Patient Luke Rovira joins striking junior doctors from the British Medical Association on the picket line outside Bristol Royal Infirmary in June (PA)

Acas said it is well prepared and ready to help resolve a bitter dispute between the Government and junior doctors.

The British Medical Association (BMA) has written to Prime Minister Rishi Sunak urging ministers to enter talks with junior doctors through the conciliation service.

It comes as the union said the Government is letting patients down with its arbitrary stance that it will not enter talks with doctors while strikes are planned.

Later this month, junior doctors are planning to stage the largest walkout in the NHSs history  from July 13-18.

And consultants  the most senior doctors in the NHS  are planning to stage industrial action from July 20-21, when they will only provide scaled-back Christmas Day cover.

In a letter to Mr Sunak, Dr Phil Banfield, chairman of coucil at the BMA, said: The arbitrary precondition that you will not negotiate while strike action is planned is letting patients down.

When negotiations previously broke down, it was your government that cancelled upcoming meetings and withdrew from scheduled talks even though the public rightly want you to use every opportunity possible to get around the negotiating table to find a solution.

We are willing to negotiate before, during and after industrial action by refusing to negotiate while industrial action is planned, you are penalising patients.

It is not too late to begin intensive talks and it is not too late to avert further strikes.

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In remarks issued to the PA news agency, Kate Nowicki, director of dispute resolution at Acas, said: We have a team of experts who are well prepared and ready to help with the junior doctors dispute.

Acas has decades of experience in resolving disputes, which includes helping the various sides look at options for a compromise.

Our collective conciliation service is impartial, free and independent. It is also voluntary, which means we can only hold formal conciliation talks when all the parties in dispute agree that the time is right for conciliation.

An independent survey this year showed that both employers and employees overwhelming want the various sides involved in strike action to seek mediation from Acas to resolve their dispute.

But Downing Street insisted that discussions could not be held unless strikes were called off.

We obviously remain open to talks and continue to call on the junior doctors to step back from such a highly disruptive strike action, which will put patient safety at risk, the Prime Ministers official spokesman said.

As we did  successfully  with other health unions, we dont think its right to enter into talks with the threat of strikes hanging over them.

So we have asked, as we have done before, that strike action is postponed in order for talks to begin.

Asked whether there could be a role for Acas, the spokesman said: We think we have achieved success with the Secretary of State negotiating with other unions in the past, we think thats the right way forward.

Obviously, the BMA are requesting a 35% increase to pay, we dont think that is fair to the taxpayer, and they are obviously still planning on significant strike action.

If they are willing to move beyond their starting position and pause strike action then we can begin talks.

In an interview with PA, Dr Banfield said: The loss of trust that has happened between this Government and the medical profession, Ive never seen before.

It is an absolute travesty that were in the position where doctors feel that there is no alternative but to take strike action.

In his speech to the BMA annual representative meeting in Liverpool, Dr Banfield said the whole of the medical workforce could be on strike before the next general election.

We will strike to the next general election and beyond if that is what it takes, he said.

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We are prepared to negotiate in good faith but this Government is not.

I want to repeat our clear message to Westminster throughout the junior doctors dispute: we have always said we will meet without preconditions anytime, anywhere to resolve our issues. This offer still holds.

Meanwhile, consultants have suffered the biggest decline in pay for any branch of practice. They are joining the fight to ensure we do not lose our most senior and expert doctors  those who will train the next generation.

At this rate, the whole of the medical profession will be in dispute at the next general election.
The BMA has warned that the NHS is collapsing (James Manning/PA)

The NHS is collapsing and doctors are being forced to apologise to their patients because they cannot provide adequate care, a leading medic has warned.

Dr Phil Banfield, chairman of council at the British Medical Association, described the frighteningly common situation where dying patients are forced to sleep in a corridor or on a chair while hospitals (are) failing and falling apart and ambulances (are) stacked outside emergency departments.

Addressing the unions annual representative meeting in Liverpool, Dr Banfield said that almost every metric measuring the health services performance is flashing red as he warned that the NHS 75th anniversary celebration threatens to be a wake.

On the publication of the long-term workforce plan for the health service, he said that the crisis is now and the crunch is today, adding: investing in medical school places while refusing to reverse years of pay erosion is illogical.

In his keynote address to the conference, Dr Banfield said: As we look at our health service today, we see hospitals failing and falling apart and ambulances stacked outside emergency departments.

We look patients in the eye and apologise when weve not been able to provide the care and treatment we have been trained to give.

All around us the NHS is collapsing.

Where we are today is not the result of the pandemic, nor due to new economic challenges precipitated by war in Europe, weve been warning of catastrophe for 10 years, its now arrived.

This devastation has been wrought by successive UK governments.

On the long-term workforce plan, he added: Thank you for a costed workforce plan at last. But this ignores that the crisis is now the crunch is today.

Who will train the workforce? Who will teach medicine when there are no medics and academics left?

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Investing in medical school places while refusing to reverse years of pay erosion is illogical.

And we saw the Prime Minister unable to answer questions about why pay wasnt part of their retention strategy.

Dr Banfield also spoke about the NHS 75th anniversary, on July 5.

He told delegates: This week The NHS celebrates its 75th anniversary. I remain immensely proud to work as a doctor in an organisation I truly believe in.

But as we know, waiting lists have never been higher, cancer targets are missed, emergency departments are overwhelmed.

Sleeping in a corridor or or a chair is frighteningly common, and remember this may be people for whom this is the last day of their life.

Those needing mental health support a cruelly sent across the country  this government said that that practice would stop by now, yet another failed promise.

The same government that said it would expand GP numbers by 5,000, instead we have over 2,000 fewer full-time equivalent GPS than in 2015 while patient numbers soar.

In England we are almost 50,000 Doctors short of the OECD and EU nation average.

Almost every metric for understanding what is happening is flashing red right now.

Whats the governments response? Heap more work on an already burnt-out workforce. Repeat lines to the press about how much they value doctors while simultaneously cutting the value of pay. Taking the nurses union to court  shameful.

This government takes pride in beating the very workers who care for the people of this country.

This NHS is far removed from the one we want to be celebrating at 75. Its birthday threatens to be a wake.

A Department of Health and Social Care spokesperson said: As we celebrate the NHSs 75th birthday this week, we have so much to be proud of and are making progress on our plans to recover and improve services, backed by record funding.

There are more staff than ever before working in the NHS which has led to a record number of cancer patients being treated over the last two years  and in April there were a record number of diagnostic tests carried out per working day.

Were also tackling the backlog caused by the pandemic and have reduced the number of patients waiting more than 18 months by over 90% since the September 2021 peak and virtually eliminated two-year waits for treatment, despite more people coming forward for treatment.

The NHS has published the first ever Long Term Workforce Plan, backed by over 2.4 billion Government funding to deliver the biggest training expansion in NHS history alongside measures to improve culture, leadership and wellbeing.
The UK handed over the former British colony to China in 1997 (Anthony Devlin/PA)

Britain has vowed to defend the pro-democracy activists living in exile that Hong Kong police have issued arrest warrants for over alleged violations of the territorys harsh national security law.

A bounty of one million Hong Kong dollars (100,500) has been offered for information leading to the arrests of any of the eight people targeted under the legislation imposed by China.

Some, including Nathan Law, the politician granted asylum by the UK, are living in Britain, while others are residing in the US, Canada and Australia.

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Foreign Secretary James Cleverly said: We will not tolerate any attempts by China to intimidate and silence individuals in the UK and overseas.

The UK will always defend the universal right to freedom of expression and stand up for those who are targeted.

We strongly object to the national security law that China imposed on Hong Kong, including its extraterritorial reach, in breach of the legally binding Sino-British Joint Declaration.

The UK handed over the former British colony to China in 1997, with Beijing promising to maintain Western-style liberties under a one country, two systems framework.

Mr Cleverly added: We call on Beijing to remove the national security law and for the Hong Kong authorities to end their targeting of those who stand up for freedom and democracy.
Riots have affected several areas of France, including the Paris suburb of Nanterre (Jean-Francois Badias/AP)

Protests across France sparked by the police shooting of a 17-year-old last Tuesday have been described as like a mini civil war by a British national living in Marseille.

Six nights of violent unrest, which appeared to be easing overnight into Monday, were driven by a backlash against a French state that many young people with immigrant roots say routinely discriminates against them.

Riots have affected several areas of the country, including the Paris suburb of Nanterre, where the teenager  identified only by his first name, Nahel  was killed in his hometown.

On Monday, crowds of people gathered at town halls across France to show solidarity with the local governments that had been targeted  according to the interior ministry, 99 town halls have been attacked in the riots, along with other public buildings.

Residents gather in front of the city hall in Mons-en-Baroeul in northern France in a show of solidarity with local authorities (Michel Spingler/AP)

Benjamin Klene, 33, from Oxford, who lives near the train station, the Gare St Charles, in Marseille, has described the riots and police presence as disturbing and very tense.

Mr Klene was driving home after celebrating a friends birthday on Friday night when he noticed a disturbing number of police on the streets.

Residents were told not to dispose of rubbish over the weekend for fear it would be used to start fires, and public transport across Frances second-largest city ground to a halt after 7pm, he said.

Mr Klene, who works in sales, told the PA news agency: I was driving home on Thursday night and saw unmarked vans full of tactical, special unit police in assault gear.

Police officers patrol at the Arc de Triomphe on the Champs Elysees in Paris on Saturday (Christophe Ena/AP)

It was like a mini civil war had suddenly broken out.

All of the public transport has been stopped at night for four nights in a row and weve been told not to put rubbish out as bins are being used to start fires to block off roads.

All of the restaurants and bars around my place have now been shut for the past three evenings because of the riots.

On Friday morning, we were told by police to leave the city centre and stay with friends or relatives if possible for the weekend.

Protesters block a street with rubbish bins in Colombes, outside Paris (Lewis Joly/AP)

There were police in riot gear all over the city and the atmosphere was very tense.

By Monday afternoon, the unrest appeared to be easing, and Peter Pam, 26, who was on holiday in central Paris with his girlfriend, said they had had zero negative encounters from the riots.

We have been here almost a week now and we have had zero negative encounters, Mr Pam, from California, told the PA news agency.

We are about a 10-minute walk away from the Eiffel Tower.

I didnt even know France was in trouble or having any riots until my friends and family from America messaged me yesterday asking if I was okay.

Graffiti stating Justice for Nahel on a wall in the Paris suburb of Nanterre (Cara Anna/AP)

Mr Pam, who proposed to his girlfriend on the second day of their trip, added that everything looks peaceful and all businesses are open.

We have walked early in the morning, all day, and night, even took public transport and honestly it made us fall in love with the city, he said.

I didnt hear any locals talking about it or preparing for it.

People are walking their dogs and most look happy.

All businesses are open and grocery stores are full.
Israel used drones to strike targets in a militant stronghold in the occupied West Bank early on Monday and deployed hundreds of troops in the area (Majdi Mohammed/AP)

Israel used drones to strike targets in a militant stronghold in the occupied West Bank early on Monday and deployed hundreds of troops in the area.

Palestinian health officials said at least eight Palestinians were killed in the attack, which resembled the wide-scale military operations carried out during the second Palestinian uprising two decades ago.

Troops remained inside the Jenin refugee camp at midday on Monday, pushing ahead with the largest operation in the area during more than a year of fighting.

It came at a time of growing domestic pressure for a tough response to a series of attacks on Israeli settlers, including a shooting last week that killed four Israelis.

Black smoke rose from the crowded streets of the camp and the buzzing of drones could be heard overhead as the military pressed on.

Smoke rises during an Israeli raid on the militant stronghold of Jenin in the occupied West Bank (Majdi Mohammed/AP)

Residents said electricity was cut off in some areas and military bulldozers were ploughing through narrow streets, damaging buildings as they cleared the way for Israeli forces in another reminder of the last uprising.

The Palestinians and neighbouring Jordan condemned the violence.

Army spokesman Lieutenant Colonel Richard Hecht said the operation began just after 1am with an air strike on a building used by militants to plan attacks. He said the goal of the operation was to destroy and confiscate weapons.

Were not planning to hold ground, he said. Were acting against specific targets.

He said a brigade-size force  roughly 2,000 soldiers  was taking part in the operation, and that military drones had carried out a series of strikes to clear the way for the ground forces.

Although Israel has carried out isolated air strikes in the West Bank in recent weeks, Lt Col Hecht said Mondays series of attacks was an escalation unseen since 2006  the end of the Palestinian uprising.

While Israel described the attack as a pinpoint operation, smoke billowed from within the crowded camp, with mosque minarets nearby. Ambulances raced towards a hospital where the wounded were taken in on stretchers.

According to the official Palestinian news agency Wafa, the military blocked roads within the camp, took over houses and buildings and set up snipers on rooftops.

The Palestinian Health Ministry said at least eight Palestinians were killed and 50 other people were injured, 10 of them critically.

An injured Palestinian is carried into a hospital (Nasser Nasser/AP)

In a separate incident, a 21-year-old Palestinian was killed by Israeli fire near the West Bank city of Ramallah, the ministry said.

Our Palestinian people will not kneel, will not surrender, will not raise the white flag, and will remain steadfast on their land in the face of this brutal aggression, Nabil Abu Rudeineh, a spokesman for the Palestinian president, said in a statement.

Jordan called for Israel to halt its raids into the West Bank.

The Jenin camp and an adjacent town of the same name have been a flashpoint as Israeli-Palestinian violence escalated since spring 2022.

Israels foreign minister, Eli Cohen, praised the efforts of the military in an address to foreign journalists, and accused arch-enemy Iran of being behind the violence by funding Palestinian militant groups.

Due to the funds they receive from Iran, the Jenin camp has become a centre for terrorist activity, he said, adding that the operation would be conducted in a targeted manner to avoid civilian casualties.

Palestinians rejected the claims, saying the violence is a natural response to 56 years of occupation since Israel captured the West Bank in the 1967 Middle East war.

Tyres burn during an Israeli raid on the militant stronghold of Jenin in the occupied West Bank (Nasser Nasser/AP)

Jenin has long been a bastion for armed struggle against Israel and was a major friction point in the last Palestinian uprising.

In 2002, days after a Palestinian suicide bombing during a large Passover gathering killed 30 people, Israeli troops launched a massive operation in the Jenin camp.

For eight days and nights they fought militants street by street, using armoured bulldozers to destroy rows of homes, many of which had been booby-trapped.

Retired Brigadier General Amir Avivi, who served as a battalion commander in the northern West Bank in 2002, described Mondays operation as a raid in which the army moves in and then withdraws.

But Brig Gen Avivi, who is president and founder of the Israel Defence and Security Forum, a hawkish group of former military commanders, said the size of the force indicates the operation could last for a longer period of time, not just a few hours, but maybe a few days.

Mondays attack came two weeks after another violent confrontation in Jenin and after the military said a pair of rockets were fired from the area last week which landed in the West Bank.

The rockets exploded shortly after launch, causing no damage in Israel, but marked an escalation that has raised concerns in Israel.

There has been a dynamic here around Jenin for the last year, Lt Col Hecht said, defending Mondays tactics. Its been intensifying all the time.

Smoke rises in the militant stronghold of Jenin (Majdi Mohammed/AP)

But there also may have been political considerations in play.

Leading members of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahus far-right government, which is dominated by West Bank settlers and their supporters, have been calling for a broader military response to the ongoing violence in the area.

Proud of our heroes on all fronts and this morning especially of our soldiers operating in Jenin, tweeted National Security Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir, an ultranationalist who recently called for Israel to kill thousands of militants if necessary. Praying for their success.

More than 130 Palestinians have been killed this year in the West Bank, part of more than a year-long surge in violence that has seen some of the worst bloodshed in the area in nearly two decades.

The violence escalated last year after a spate of Palestinian attacks prompted Israel to step up its raids in the West Bank.

Israel says the raids are meant to beat back militants.

The Palestinians say such violence is inevitable in the absence of any political process with Israel and increased West Bank settlement construction and violence by extremist settlers. They see the intensifying Israeli military presence in the area as an entrenchment of Israels occupation of the territory.

Israel says most of those killed have been militants, but stone-throwing youths protesting at the incursions and people not involved in the confrontations have also been killed.

Palestinian attacks against Israelis since the start of this year have killed 24 people.

Israel captured the West Bank, east Jerusalem and the Gaza Strip in the 1967 Middle East war. The Palestinians seek those territories for their hoped-for independent state.
Ciaran Hinds has blamed Pamela Ballantine for finally getting him to the Spirit of Northern Ireland Awards in partnership with Ulster Bank.

The 70-year-old Oscar-nominated actor was one of the many celebrity guests at Friday nights star-studded event at the Culloden Estate and Spa.

He told Showbiz Life: Ive never been before but that dreadful woman Pamela Ballentine has on my case for many many years to come and shes tried to get me here. Ive always been working but fortunately when she got in touch and said where are you? I was working in Dublin on the next series of The Dry. Theres a wonderful girl from here called Roisin Gallagher on it.

The actor, who previously starred in Belfast as well as Game of Thrones, admitted hes thrilled by the Irish success in Hollywood, particularly the 14 nominations for Irish talent at the Oscars.

He said: The expression is punching above their weight but to be quite honest I had the biggest grin when I heard the announcement. Colin Farrell, Brendan Gleeson, Kerry Condon, Barry Keoghan and Paul Mescal, its really nice for them all.

The north Belfast man caught up with our own Oscar winner James Martin at the Spirit of Northern Ireland Awards. James starred in short film An Irish Goodbye, which clinched an Academy Award. He was also the first person with Downs syndrome to star in an Oscar-winning film.

Tony Christie, James Martin, Ciaran Hinds, Gary Lightbody and Martin Breen at the Sunday Life Spirit of Northern Ireland awards

Ciaran is thrilled there are so many shows being made across Ireland but worries it might get saturated.

He added: Its ridiculous now. They are making so much product and everyone is doing it then you worry no one will watch it and that would be a problem. But Ireland has always had incredibly gifted writers, poets, musicians and painters. For the size of it theres so much culture here and suddenly theres been access to some finance to develop this and thats why we see the rise of this incredible talent. They need to keep it up and give people aspirations of what they could do.
New eight-course offering from the Grand Centrals flagship Seahorse Restaurant throws down the gauntlet to its fine dining rivals

And last but not least... Course 8: Petit Fours

Mmmm, sweet baby Jesus, mumbled the missus, blaspheming in that good way you sometimes do when something leaves you gobsmacked.

In this instance, I cant even remember what dish it was, such was the conveyor belt of culinary magic those sorcerers on the far side of the pass were conjuring.

We were sat overlooking a rainswept Bedford Street in Belfast, ensconced by the windows in the Seahorse, the opulent Grand Central hotels flagship restaurant; there to run the rule over their brand new eight-course tasting menu.

And boy was it good; certainly the best thing Ive eaten this year, and maybe even sneaking into my all-time list, alongside a wonderful lunch I once had in the long-gone Nicks Warehouse years ago; a beef dish I enjoyed even further back in Paul Rankins old gaff Cayenne, when Only Fools and Horses legend Trigger was sat on the table beside me; and world class tapas from celebrity chef Steven Saunders at his sadly-departed Little Geranium in La Cala, Marbella.

So the Seahorse, led by head chef Damian Tumilty, finds itself in some rarefied company.

The restaurant was quiet on the evening of my visit, but in the attentive and knowledgeable AJ and Sarah, we had two brilliant waiting staff to keep us company and guide us through the food.

Which brings me to another point... that weird lexicon which has crept into fine dining. When you dont know your granola from your gremolata, your miso from your matzo, it can all be a little intimidating.

For the most part, however, the menu at the Seahorse wasnt too daunting, even to a layman like me.

Course 3: Glazed Conway Farm asparagus, crispy quail egg, hazelnut dressing and Cais Na Tire mousse

The highlights, we agreed, were the Conway Farm asparagus with crispy quail egg; the spring pea panna cotta with crab and caviar; the roast sirloin of Moiled Irish beef, smoked and peppered brisket with marrow mash and purple sprouting broccoli; and the Waggle Dance honey parfait with Bushmills whiskey sauce and sheep yoghurt sorbet.

Id never tried quails egg before, but they were terrific, the light, salty and crunchy tempura yin to the soft, rich yolks yang. They came with glazed asparagus and a wonderful hazelnut dressing.

There was a bit of a nutty theme to the early courses now I think about it, with the second dish a homemade focaccia with a ridiculously good hazelnut butter.

Course 4: Spring pea panna cotta, crab, caviar, buttermilk dressing and mint

Rarely would I pick a cold dish as my favourite, particularly when the beef which followed  number five in the scheme of things  was so tasty, the miso emulsion lending it such depth of meatiness, but that honour goes to the pea panna cotta with crab, caviar, mint and buttermilk dressing.

Silky, sweet and creamy, the panna cotta was a showstopper, the only thing more impressive than the dazzling medley of flavours the presentation itself. All the colours of a summer meadow on a plate.

Belfast seems to be fair game these days for the knockers and naysayers. And I share some of that despair at its flagging fortunes, but Ill defend to the hilt the capitals hospitality offering.

The Grand Central stands tall at the centre of this sector. The Observatory on the 22nd floor is already established as one of the citys classiest bars, and this new menu  priced at 75 a head (or 125 if you choose to pair up with wines)  means the hotel has the food to match.

Its fine dining par excellence: daring and decadent and delicious.

And it got me in the long grass.

At about 5am I woke with volcano-grade heartburn, scratching around the bedside table for Gaviscon as the richness of the food threatened to cook me alive from the inside out.

But it was worth it.

When it comes to the finest of fine dining in these parts, Ox and Blank and Eipic and Muddlers trip off the tongue. Together theyve raised the bar, but theyll need to keep raising it if this is the standard of the competition.

Pre-dinner cocktails in The Observatory

The food

8-course tasting menu

75-a-head x 2: 150

The rating

Service 5/5

Food 5/5

Decor 4/5

Vegetarian 4/5
Rohingya gather near a drain blocked by garbage at the Jadimura camp in Teknaf, Bangladesh, July 3, 2023.

Bangladesh has seen a spike in dengue cases and deaths in less than a month, according to government health figures released on Monday that did not include infections in Rohingya refugee camps, where cases of the mosquito-borne disease have been climbing as well.

The government reported 9,193 cases and 56 deaths since the start of 2023, compared with 2,865 cases and 21 deaths on June 9.

Health officials in Coxs Bazar, a southeastern district that hosts about 1 million Rohingya refugees, reported 330 cases in June and 10 more during the first three days of July.

The officials estimated that about 96% of those infected were Rohingya Muslims living in the sprawling and densely populated camps by the border with Myanmar, from which members of the stateless group fled persecution.

Since Jan. 1, more than 1,500 Rohingya have been infected and three have died  numbers that are expected to climb during the monsoon season, which just began and runs through mid-August.

Rashid-e-Mahbub, president of Health Rights Movement, an NGO, said Rohingya camp leaders should act to combat mosquitoes responsible for the spread of the disease.

The living space in the Rohingya refugee camps in Coxs Bazar is very densely populated. If its management is not done effectively, the dengue situation can escalate, he told BenarNews.

Meanwhile, Medical Officer Fahim Ahmed Faisal of the Coxs Bazar Civil Surgeons Office, said 350,000 mosquito nets had been distributed in the camps.

A government official in Coxs Bazar said other steps were being taken to combat the spread of mosquitoes.

Our people regularly clean the drains, garbage bins and standing water points in the camps, Md. Mostafa Sadek told BenarNews, adding that fogger machines to kill adult mosquitos have been used in camps stricken with dengue outbreaks.

Of the 33 refugee camps in Coxs Bazar, dengue outbreaks have been most prevalent in four camps in Ukhia, a local sub-district.

Refugees collect water from a well next to a dirty drain in the Shalbon Rohingya camp in Teknaf, Bangladesh, July 3, 2023. [Abdur Rahman/BenarNews]

Abul Kalam, a resident of the Shalbon Rohingya camp in Teknaf, complained of poor sanitary conditions.

Because of unclean drains, mosquito infestation has increased  as a result, most children suffer from various diseases including dengue, he told BenarNews.

Another Shalbon resident expressed concern for family members who had become sick recently.

I have six children in my house. Two of them have had high fevers since yesterday, Nur Nahar told BenarNews on Monday.

Even after first aid, their health condition did not improve. I think they were infected with dengue, he said, adding that two family members were infected last year.

During a visit to the Shalbon camp on Monday, a BenarNews correspondent saw three people cleaning the camps drains while children sat nearby.

An entomologist blamed the refugee camps for contributing to the outbreak.

Dengue cases this year are much higher than in previous years, Jahangirnagar University professor and entomologist Kabirul Bashar told BenarNews.

In Rohingya refugee camps, due to the lack of sanitation and overcrowding, infection rates are much higher than in areas outside the camps, he said.

On Monday, the Directorate General of Health Services reported that four people had died in the previous 24 hours, bringing to 56 the years nationwide death toll from dengue. Data shows three deaths occurred in Dhaka city and one in Mymensingh.

In addition, at least 436 dengue patients were admitted to hospitals in the last day, including 174 in Dhaka city.
A Matryoshka of Psyops: And Why General Armageddon Is Not Going Anywhere

July 02, 2023: Information Clearing House -- The secret of a perfect psyop is that no one really understands it.

A perfect psyop accomplishes two tasks: it renders the enemy dazed and confused while achieving a set of very important goals.

It goes without saying that sooner rather than later we should see the real goals emerging out of the strategic play in Russia I described as The Longest Day.

The Longest Day may or may not have been a larger than life psyop.

To clear the fog, lets start with a roundup of the usual winner suspects.

First one is undoubtedly Belarus. Due to the priceless mediation of Old Man Luka, Minsk is now gifted with the most experienced army in the world: the Wagner musicians, masters of conventional (Libya, Ukraine) and non-conventional (Syria, Central African Republic) war.

That is already inflicting the Fear of Hell in NATO, which is suddenly facing in its eastern flank a super pro army, very well equipped, and de facto uncontrollable, and on top of it hosted by a nation now equipped with nuclear weapons.

Simultaneously, Russia props up dissuasion on its western front. Like clockwork that is leading NATOstan to invest in ballooning military budgets (with funds it doesnt have). That process happens to be a key plank of Russian strategy since at least March 2018.

And as an extra bonus Russia creates a 24/7 threat to the whole of Kievs northern front.

Not bad for a mutiny.

The Dance of the Oligarchs

Way more complex is Russias internal dynamics. Putins current and subsequent difficult decisions may entail loss of popularity coupled with loss of internal stability -depending on the manner Kremlin-defined strategic victories are presented to Russian public opinion.

Are You Tired Of The Lies And Non-Stop Propaganda?

Whatever 24/7 NATOstan mainstream media spin may come up with, the Kremlins official explanation for June 24 boils down to a Prighozin demonstration: he was just trying to shake things up.

Its way more complicated than that. There were strategic gains, of course, and Prighozin seems to have followed a very risky script that in the end favors Moscow. But its still too early to tell.

A key sub-plot is how the Dance of the Oligarchs will proceed. Independent Russian media was already expecting some  treasonous  players, including state functionaries, to buy their one-way ticket when the going got tough (or to say they were ill, or refuse to answer important calls). The Duma  fed by Bortnikovs FSB  is already working on a hefty list.

The Russian system  and Russian society as well  see people like these as supremely toxic: in fact much more dangerous than the demshiza (a term that mixes democracy and schizophrenia, applied to globalist neoliberals).

On the military front, it gets even more complicated. Putin has charged Defense Minister Shoigu to compile the list of Generals to be promoted after The Longest Day. To put it mildly, for quite a few people, from many different persuasions, Shoigu has become a toxic element in Russian politics.

Wagner  rebranded, and under new management  will continue to serve Russias interests via Minsk, including in Africa.

Old Man Luka, wily as ever, has already firmly stated there wont be any provocations against NATO via Wagner. Wagner recruiting bureaus will not be opened in Belarus. Belarussians may join Wagner directly. As it stands, most of Wagner fighters are still in Lugansk.

For all practical purposes, from now on the Russian government wont have anything to do, militarily and financially, with Wagner.

Additionally, there are no heavy weapons to be confiscated. Already on Monday, June 26, Wagner had moved their heavy weapons to Belarus. What remains  and had not been moved during The Longest Day  was returned to the Ministry of Defense (MoD).

The Dance of the Generals

A clear winner in the whole process is Russian public opinion: they made that graphically clear in Rostov. Everyone was supporting Putin, Russian soldiers, Wagner and Prighozin  at the same time. The overall objective was to improve the Russian army to win the war. Its as straightforward as that.

The purge inside the MoD will be tough. Under the pretext of repression or rebellion, operetta Generals (as defined by Putin himself) that did not train their soldiers properly, did not organize the mobilization properly, or were incompetent in battle, will definitely be axed.

The problem is that theyre all part of Gerasimovs circle. To put it diplomatically, he needs to answer a lot of serious questions.

And thats what brings us to the General Armageddon has been arrested monster fake news gleefully parroted by the whole of the NATOstan info universe.

General Surovikin did receive Prighozin in Rostov  but he was never an accomplice to the rebellion. Vice-Minister of Defense Yevkurov was also at the HQ in Rostov, and received Prighozin alongside Surovikin. Yevkurov may have played the role of strategically-placed observer.

The Prighozin rebellion soap opera de facto started back in February  and nothing was done to stop it. Regardless whether one shares the official narrative  or not.

What this implies is that the Russian state saw it coming. Does that make The Longest Day the Mother of All Maskirovskas?

Once again: its complicated. Unlike the collective West, Russia does not practice or enforce cancel culture. Wagner was protected via martial law. Any insult against a musician fighting neo-nazi Banderistan would be met by as much as a 15-year jail term. Each Wagner fighter is officially a Hero of Russia  something Putin himself always stressed.

On the maskirovka front, theres no question the simmering tensions in Russian military circles before The Longest Day were manipulated, fog of war-style, to disorient the enemy. It worked like a charm. On the fateful June 24 itself, Surovikin was running a war, and not spending the day drinking brandy with Prighozin.

The NATOstan axis is really clutching at straws. It took just a Surovikin-related rumor to send them into rapture  proving once again how deeply they fear General Armageddon.

A key vector is how Surovikin is regarded by public opinion compared to the surviving operetta Generals.

He built the now legendary three-layered defense which is already burying the counter-offensive. He introduced the wildly successful Shahed-136 Iranian drones in the battlefield. And he organized the meat grinder devastation in Bakhmut/Artemyovsk  which has already entered the military annals.

Way back in the Autumn of 2022, it was General Armageddon who told Putin that Russian forces were not ready for a large-scale offensive.

So whatever the 5th columnists fabricate, General Armadeggon is not going anywhere  except to win a war. And Russia is not leaving Africa. On the contrary: a rebranded Wagner is there to stay, and remains on speed dial in several latitudes.

The trend, short term, seems to point to a  convoluted  draining of the Russian military swamp. The Longest Day seems to have galvanized Russians of all stripes into identifying who the real enemy is  and how to defeat it, whatever it takes.

Nothing happens by chance

Historian Andrei Fursov, reviving Roosevelt, observed that in politics, nothing happens by chance. If it happens, you bet it was foreseen.

Well, maskirovska rides again.

Yet the main problem faced by Russia is not the Hegemon and NATO: its domestic.

Based on conversations with Russian analysts, and their impressions from very sharp people who lived in Russia, Ukraine and in the West, it would be possible to identify basically four main groups trying to impose their idea of Russia.

The Back to the USSR gang. Includes, of course, some former KGB. Have some kind of support from the general population. A lot of educated specialists (old school pros, mostly pension age). This project suggests a revolution  a 1917 on steroids. But where is Lenin? The Back to the Tsar people. That would imply Russia as the Third Rome and a prominent role for the Orthodox Church. Hefty funds behind it. A big question mark is how much popular support, especially in deep Russia, they really have. This group has nothing to do with the Vatican  which is sold to The Great Reset. The Plunderers  as in robbing Russia blind in favor of the Hegemon. Congregates 5th columnists, and all manner of totalitarian neoliberals worshipping the values of the collective West. The remaining ones will soon get a knock on the door by the FSB. Their money is already blocked. The Eurasianists. This is the most feasible project  in close collaboration with China, and aiming towards a multipolar world. Theres no place for Russian oligarchs here. Yet the degree of collaboration with China is still highly debatable. The real burning question: how to really integrate, in practice, the Belt and Road Initiative with the Greater Eurasia Partnership?

This is just a sketch  open for discussion. The first three projects may hardly work  for a series of complex reasons. And the fourth still has not gathered enough steam in Russia.

What is certain is that all of them are fighting each other. May the current draining of the military swamp also serve to clear the political skies.

Pepe's latest book is 2030. Follow him on Facebook.

Views expressed in this article are solely those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the opinions of Information Clearing House.
Teenager Amir Shah is among tens of thousands of Malaysian students who dropped out of formal education last year by deciding not to sit for the all-important school exit exam.

Having taken on a job at a restaurant when schools were shut down during the COVID-19 pandemic, he found he could easily earn U.S. $400 a month instead of having to endure the pure torture of listening to teachers drone on for hours.

Outdated curricula and an exam-oriented and pressure-packed schooling system were already causing many youths to lose interest in their studies, but the pandemic accelerated their departure from the classroom, say educators, who warn that Malaysia could be sitting on a skills-gap tinder box if the trend continues.

Nearly 30,000 students of a total of 403,637 did not take the school-leaving Malaysian Certificate of Education (SPM) exam in 2022, Deputy Education Minister Lim Hui Ying told Parliament recently.

That means around 7.4% of students missed the exam. By comparison, only 2.7% of total eligible students sat out the exam in 2021, according to The Star, a local newspaper.

Amir, 18, works as a helper at a seafood restaurant in Perlis, a northern state in Malaysia, and earns around 1,800 ringgit (U.S. $386) a month, which is enough to live on comfortably, he said.

I started to work part-time at a restaurant near my house to kill time when school was closed during the lockdown and earned between 30 and 200 ringgit a day depending on the number of patrons, he told BenarNews.

When school reopened, I often skipped classes so that I could work and earn income, since I dont actually gain much at school, he added.

Amir decided that earning was better than sitting and listening to teachers in class, which he described as boring, so he quit school just months before the SPM exam last year.

Anecdotal evidence suggests that others who decided to ditch the exam and drop out of school to work felt similarly.

Noraizah Baharin, 35, describes her niece who lives in Sarawak as a smart young woman. The niece declined to speak to BenarNews to protect her privacy but agreed to let her aunt speak on her behalf without naming her.

To Noraizahs acute frustration, her niece, who was also supposed to sit for the SPM exam this year, decided to quit school as it was more fun to work than reading books.

I tried to knock some sense into her thick skull. Told her she would lose if she quit school but she did not listen, Noraizah told BenarNews.

She feels happy with what she has now, which is money of her own to spend.

Secondary school students wait to receive the COVID-19 vaccine at a school in Putrajaya, Malaysia, Sept. 20, 2021. [Lim Huey Teng/Reuters]

Curriculum is irrelevant

Academics blame the Malaysian education system for students aversion to school.

The grades a student scores in the SPM exam solely determine which college or university they can attend, making the last two years of school a huge stressor, said Noorazeela Zainol Abidin, a senior lecturer at Universiti Malaysia Perlis (UniMAP).

Additionally, she believes teachers rush to complete courses, which are outdated to begin with.

There are also students who perceive the SPM curriculum is irrelevant and does not meet their needs or interest. The curriculum  prevents them from honing their interest or talent, causing them to lose interest in pursuing studies, she told BenarNews.

If the pedagogy used is unattractive or unsuitable for the students learning style, they might have difficulties in understanding the lessons.

BenarNews contacted the Education Ministry for comments from the minister about how the government was planning to address the problems, but did not immediately hear back. When contacted by BenarNews, several state education directors declined to comment, saying that only the federal minister could address the issue.

A counselor at a secondary school, who declined to be named because she was not authorized to speak to reporters, said the pandemic catalyzed the departure of a chunk of students from the system.

Losing interest in education has been happening but COVID made the situation worse. These youngsters are the nations future generation, she told BenarNews.

What will happen to Malaysia in years to come if half of them [students] abandon education and contend with low-income jobs? Who will fill the sectors that require skills and training? Will there be sufficient professional workers in the future? If left unaddressed, the countrys development would regress.

Earlier this year, Economy Minister Mohd Rafizi Ramli told Parliament that Malaysias high youth unemployment rate of 10% is largely due to a skills mismatch, according to The Edge Malaysia, a local publication.

We have a huge [skills] gap between the jobs in demand and the talent quality produced by our system, Rafizi was quoted as saying.

The counselor said she had come across many students such as Amir and Noraizahs niece during her career.

The solution, she said, was for school authorities to take proactive measures in identifying students with poor attendance, investigating the reasons behind their absence and providing assistance where needed.

We have children who are forced to miss school to take care of their ill parents, or those who are in dire financial situations. In these cases, we would rope in all relevant quarters or NGOs to provide necessary aid, she said.

For those who have no passion for in-class learning sessions, even if they would be sitting for the SPM in a few months, we could advise them to consider signing up for the TVET program that provides students with practical skills and knowledge for a specific trade or vocation.

She was referring to the Technical and Vocational Education and Training (TVET) program, which according to her could also use a curriculum upgrade.

Instead of wasting their time and quitting school, at least they could put their skills to use, giving them a fighting chance in securing better jobs in the future, she said.
Supporters of self-determination for Indonesias Papuan provinces are pictured with a Morning Star independence flag at the Rainbow refugee camp in Port Moresby, Papua New Guinea on July 1, 2023.

Authorities in Papua New Guinea have clamped down on displays of the West Papuan independence flag ahead of the Indonesian presidents visit to the Pacific island country this week.

Papua New Guinea, which has a 760-kilometer (472-mile) border with Indonesia, is home to thousands of refugees from the Papuan provinces of its powerful neighbor, where an indigenous Melanesian independence movement and armed insurgency has simmered for decades.

Officers from Papua New Guineas National Intelligence Organization removed Morning Star independence flags and banners at the Rainbow refugee camp in the capital Port Moresby on Saturday. Supporters of Papuan self-determination were marking the July 1 anniversary of a decades-old proclamation of independence from Indonesia.

We will not allow the raising of the West Papuan flag, said one of the officers, who identified himself to BenarNews as from the National Intelligence Organization. But you can carry on with your program, the officer, who declined to give his name, told residents at the camp.

Indonesian President Joko Widodo will arrive in Papua New Guinea for a two-day visit on Wednesday, the Pacific island countrys government has said. Widodo was last in Port Moresby in 2018 for the Asia Pacific Economic Cooperation leaders summit.

Indonesia, an archipelago nation of some 270 million people, is a rising Southeast Asian power that reaches into the South Pacific region and says it is on track to be the worlds fourth-largest economy by 2045. Its military, economy and population dwarfs Papua New Guineas.

In recent years, Indonesia has contributed aid and technical assistance to Melanesian nations in the Pacific including Papua New Guinea, Vanuatu, Fiji and the Solomon Islands in an attempt to counter criticism of lack of development and militarization of its Papuan provinces. The region, which makes up the western half of the island of New Guinea, is referred to as West Papua in Pacific island countries and by supporters of independence.

The intelligence agency officers arrived at the refugee camp in Port Moresby in two unmarked white vehicles with tinted windows.

Their activities caused a commotion and some women and men cried as they sang the West Papuan national anthem in protest.

Even if they remove our flag, they cannot remove us. We are the flag, said Samuel Inggamer, a community leader. I urge President Widodo to give us independence. He would make history if he did that.

Children of refugees from Indonesias Papuan provinces are pictured at the Rainbow refugee camp in Port Moresby, Papua New Guinea with Morning Star independence flags in the background on July 1, 2023. [Harlyne Joku/BenarNews]

Vincent Manukayasi, director of civil society group PNG Trust, said the intelligence agencys actions called into question the independence of a state institution.

As a sovereign state, the NIO cannot be seen to be dictated to by another foreign government, he said.

Poorly armed Papuan fighters  collectively known as the West Papua National Liberation Army  have battled Indonesia since the early 1960s, when it took control of the remote mountainous region from the Dutch.

Papuans, culturally and ethnically distinct from the rest of Indonesia, say they were denied the right to decide their own future. Indonesian control was formalized in 1969 with a U.N.-backed referendum in which little more than 1,000 Papuans were allowed to vote.

Documented and alleged killings and abuses by Indonesian military and police, from the 1960s until the present day  along with impunity and the exploitation of the regions natural resources and widespread poverty  have fueled resentment of Indonesian rule.

Papuan liberation fighters have also become more unified and aggressive in recent years, stepping up attacks on Indonesian soldiers and civilians.

In a recent attention-grabbing raid, a rebel unit under Egianus Kogoya kidnapped New Zealand pilot Philip Mehrtens hoping to gain international exposure.

Within Papua New Guinea, there is a grassroots support for the Papuan independence movement in Indonesia. The Papua New Guinea government says it recognizes Indonesias sovereignty over the territory.

After a decades delay, Papua New Guinea in March ratified an agreement governing its border with Indonesia, possibly opening the way to relieving a longstanding pressure point in relations.

Researchers say that Jakarta is concerned by the prospect of Papuan insurgents moving between both countries. Over the decades Indonesia itself has periodically made incursions into Papua New Guineas territory, deliberate and accidental, they say.

Ahead of Widodos visit, Indonesias national airline Garuda, through its Citilink subsidiary, on Sunday began twice-a-week flights between Port Moresby and Denpasar, Bali.
Philippine tourism officials announced Monday they were terminating a contract with an ad agency after it used stock images from other countries for a nearly U.S. $1 million campaign to promote the nation to foreign visitors.

Amid protests from Filipinos in the wake of the embarrassing discovery that images from countries as far afield as Brazil, Switzerland and the United Arab Emirates had appeared in the Love the Philippines campaign, the Philippine Department of Tourism blamed the controversy on DDB Philippines, an advertising agency.

Under the terms governing the DOTs tourism branding campaign contract with DDB Philippines, material/s produced by the winning bidder should be original and aligned with the DOTs advocacies, Tourism Secretary Christina Garcia Frasco said in a statement posted online.

[T]he DOT hereby exercises its right to proceed with termination proceedings against its contract with DDB.

Noting that DDB Philippines had apologized and taken responsibility for its use of the non-original material, Frasco called what happened an abject failure to comply with the contract and to meet the objectives for enhanced tourism branding.

The tourism department said it would continue an investigation after previously stating that no payments had been made to DDB Philippines, the company responsible for the successful 2012 campaign, Its more fun in the Philippines. The latest campaign was estimated to cost 49 million pesos ($887,000).

The embarrassing examples of visual plagiarism in the campaign, which were revealed by Agence France-Presses fact-check team and a Filipina blogger, Sass Rogando Sasot, deals a blow to the Philippines, which, like many other Southeast Asian countries, is relying on its tourism sector as its economy tries to recover from the COVID-19 pandemic.

Some of the promotional video included scenes from Thailand and Indonesia as well as famous sand dunes in the UAE and an aircraft landing in Switzerland.

Sasot, the blogger, posted the ad and several images from other countries on her Facebook page.

Filipinas in traditional garb join the Panagbenga (Flower Festival) in the mountain resort city of Baguio, Feb. 1, 2023. [Andy Zapata/BenarNews]

DDB Philippines apologized for its action.

While the use of stock footage in mood videos is standard practice in the industry, the use of foreign stock footage was an unfortunate oversight on our agencys part, the ad agency said. The use of foreign stock footage in a campaign promoting the Philippines is highly inappropriate, and contradictory to the DOTs objectives.

We sincerely hope this will not diminish the genuine love and appreciation the stakeholders and the public have been showing for the Love the Philippines campaign, it said.

Lazy work

Before the tourism department announced that it was dropping the contract with DBB Philippines, Congressman Joey Salceda questioned why the promotional video did not include footage of the countrys most active volcano, Mayon.

For something as critical as an entire countrys image, you dont set the mood with plagiarism, Salceda said, noting that it was next to impossible for anyone to overlook the 2,462-meter (8,077-foot) Mayon in promoting the countrys top tourist destinations.

Clearly, the exclusion of Mayon and other tourist attractions intrinsic to the Philippine brand was just a symptom of lazy work that is now evident to everyone, he said.

Meanwhile, House Deputy Minority Leader France Castro criticized the tourism department and urged government agencies to investigate and potentially take legal action.

The use of deceptive stock footage by the DOT is not only a disservice to Filipinos but also to foreigners who may be misled into believing that these images represent the beauty and attractions of our country, Castro said.

Castro also pointed out the similarity of the Love the Philippines campaign slogan to the 2021 Love Cyprus campaign.

On Monday, Sen. Nancy Binay, chairwoman of the Senate Committee on Tourism, said the department must be held accountable for the gaffe, calling the controversy a major setback.

This is not the first time that DOT and its agencies drew flak from netizens because of some creative lapses, she said in a statement, adding that Tourism Secretary Frasco must explain the embarrassing oversight.

Arent we supposed to show authenticity? These types of promotional anomalies directly affect travelers decisions and at the same time portray a negative image of how we promote our destinations, Binay said.

Gerard Carreon in Manila contributed to this report.
A policeman runs a bomb detector through a bed of flowers at the scene of an explosion in Bangkok, Aug. 2, 2019.

A Bangkok criminal court on Monday sentenced three men from Thailands insurgency-stricken Deep South region to 40 and 50 years in prison for a series of bomb attacks that injured four people in the Thai capital in 2019.

Nine bombs were detonated at five locations in Bangkok in August 2019, when the Thai government was hosting a series of meetings of the Association of Southeast Asian Nations, including ones also attended by top diplomats from the United States, China and other countries.

One of the bombs went off in front of the national police bureau, only a few hundred yards from the venue of the ASEAN meetings.

The Ratchada Criminal Court convicted defendants Lu-ai Sae-ngae, 27, Wildon Maha, 33, Muhammad Illum Sa-I, 31, of terrorism, forming a crime syndicate and attempted murder, according to court officials and a defense attorney.

Muhammad was found guilty of all the bombings and sentenced to 170 years in prison, although his term was reduced to 50 years because of a legal cap on prison sentences.

The third defendant [Muhammad Illum Sa-I] was found guilty of terrorizing, premeditated attempted murder and utilizing explosives on several counts.  He is sentenced to 170 years and 8 months, the Bangkok court ruled.

Due to  the rule of  limitations, the sentence is capped to 50 years in jail.

The other two men were found responsible for two of the explosions and sentenced to life, but their terms were reduced to 40 years because they had been cooperative during the trial, the court said.

Upon hearing the verdict, Muhammads mother burst into tears and hugged her son in the courtroom for several minutes.

We will fight the case. We are consulting with the lawyer, she later told BenarNews, asking to not be named over security concerns.

The defendants lawyer said the court had failed to thoroughly consider his clients accounts during the trial and that he would appeal the verdict.

The court based the hearings on the CCTV footage and listened to the prosecutors without much cross-examinations of the defendants witnesses, defense attorney Kitcha Ali-Ishoh told BenarNews.

All the defendants denied all along they were not the individuals seen [on the CCTV footage].

The court however said Muhammad was seen on CCTV planting an explosive-laden can in front of the national police bureau, while Wildon kept watch. Investigators had also traced that all three traveled from one place to another before fleeing to Thailands far south.

Aim to disrupt ASEAN meetings

Meanwhile, a human rights advocacy group that assisted the defendants said the three men claimed they were beaten and forced into confessing their guilt.

It was disappointing the court did not address the complaint that they were tortured and [therefore] pled guilty, Pornpen Kongkachonkiet, director of the Cross Cultural Foundation, told BenarNews.

At that time of the bombings, then-Prime Minister Prayuth Chan-o-cha said the blasts were an attempt to ruin the ASEAN meetings, which were being attended by then-U.S. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, then-Chinese Foreign Minister Wang Yi and other top diplomats from more than 30 countries.

Officials in the Deep South told BenarNews back then that members of the most powerful insurgent group, Barisan Revolusi Nasional (BRN), was behind the blasts in Bangkok.

The bombings were aimed at drawing international attention to the ongoing violence in the three Malay-speaking and mainly Muslim provinces near Thailands southern border.

Roadside bombings and other attacks by insurgents occur often in the Deep South, but are far less frequent in Thailands capital.

A pipe bomb packed with TNT exploded at the Erawan Shrine during rush hour in central Bangkok on Aug. 17, 2015, killing 20 people and injuring more than 125 others. This case is still being heard.

On April 5, 2017, two women were injured when a pipe bomb blew up near Bangkoks Grand Palace and Monument of Democracy.

About six weeks later, a retired engineer set off a pipe bomb that injured 21 people at a Bangkok military hospital. The explosion occurred on May 22, the third anniversary of a military coup that overthrew the democratic government of Yingluck Shinawatra. The suspect, Watana Pumret, was sentenced to 31 years in prison.

In September 2018, a criminal court sentenced a man from the Deep South, Mubarina Kana, to six years in prison for car-bomb attacks in Bangkok and the capitals perimeter in 2016. No one was killed in that attack.

Nontarat Phaicharoen in Bangkok contributed to this report.
Bennington, VT (05201)

Today

Light rain this morning with thunderstorms developing for the afternoon. Gusty winds and small hail are possible. High near 75F. Winds SSE at 5 to 10 mph. Chance of rain 100%..

Tonight

Thunderstorms early, then cloudy skies after midnight. Potential for heavy rainfall. Low around 60F. Winds light and variable. Chance of rain 70%.
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WASHINGTON  Butterflies, bees and dragonflies were out in number as about 20 people converged on a mountaintop meadow to walk a site being considered for a radio tower used to track migratory birds.

After a 2019 article in the journal Science calculated the loss of nearly 3 billion migratory birds over the 50 years following 1970, ornithologists have tracked birds to try to determine what is causing the loss.

Select Board Chair Kent Lew, who lives next door with his wife, Carol, had placed a pole at the spot based on GPS coordinates, a location he described as right in the middle.

Lew prefers having the 30-foot radio tower closer to a stand of birch trees  and his property line  or moved back near the edge of the meadow.

The meadow forms a rare open view from the road. Neighbors said the field, with blueflag irises, buttercups, orange hawkweed and tall grass, is a popular stopping point. There are blueberry and cranberries growing there.

My concern more is the broader vista, because this is so prominent in our town, Lew said. He was looking for compromise.

Todd Alleger, New England Motus installation coordinator, was willing to consider both sites suggested by Lew.

The Motus Wildlife Tracking System is an international network of researchers that use automated radio telemetry to track birds, bats and insects. The network started in Canada and stretches across the Western Hemisphere, with sites in Europe, Africa, Asia and Australia.

Slipping it in a little bit more, thats totally fine by me, Alleger said. Sliding it back within reason, thats fine by me.

The location near the small stand of birch trees would be preferable to Alleger. Closer to the forest, the tower would not be able to pick up as many signals. Alleger said ideally the tower would be erected in time to catch the fall bird migration.

If erected, this will be the 10th and final tower to form an east-west line across Massachusetts in the Motus network under a U.S. Fish and Wildlife federal grant to site 50 towers across New York and New England.

Dan Wright, research coordinator for the state Department of Conservation and Recreation, took out a 20-foot extensible flagpole to give a sense of what a tower might look like in either location.

Jonathan Ruane, an archaeologist for DCR, walked the site with his eyes to the ground. He was looking for signs of ancient human disturbance.

The tower will require a special permit from the Planning Board following a public hearing. DCR has not yet put in an application for a special permit.

Tricia Drugman, who lives next to the field, raised concerns about the lease she and her husband, Dave, have held since the 1990s to mow the field.

Kris Massini, Central Berkshire District forester for DCR, explained that the Drugmans lease will be handled separately from the siting of the tower.

I wait definitely past the Fourth of July because theres nesting birds down in the grass, Dave Drugman told The Eagle. Last couple years Ive been waiting til September because Carol [Lew]s got the bees here. Especially dry years, theres not a lot for them to eat. We kind of leave the goldenrod up, which comes up late.
July 02, 2023: Information Clearing House -- As Washington is mired in brinkmanship with Russia in Ukraine, the last thing the US should do is decouple with China. For years, the Pentagon has been eyeing a future war with Beijing, yet another unnecessary war which  in our lifetimes - could lead to this planets nuclear incineration.



Americas new Cold War with China is a bi-partisan imperial project led by the Democrats. In 2011, former President Barack Obama began it in earnest, dubbing it the pivot to Asia. The pivot entails the largest military buildup since the Second World War, shifting hundreds of bases as well as two-thirds of all US Air and Naval forces to the Asia-Pacific region. Washington is encircling China for a future war with Beijing.



In 2020, while Americans were distracted by the Covid-19 crisis, Donald Trumps war cabinet seized the opportunity to drastically expand the US military footprint in Beijings near abroad by sending more warships and spy planes, conducting aerial surveillance flights, to the region and especially the South China Sea. These provocations have been vastly escalated by the Biden administration.



Americans must soon put the shoe on the other foot and ask how Washington would react if instead China was surrounding the US with weapons of war and military bases.



Ten months after Biden entered the oval office, US reconnaissance aircraft had flown over 2,000 sorties in the South China Sea, the East China Sea, and the Yellow Sea, including near Chinas coast. That same year, Biden nearly doubled the deployments of aircraft carrier strike groups in the South China Sea.

Are You Tired Of The Lies And Non-Stop Propaganda?

In 2022, US spy planes flew 1,000 sorties in the South China Sea including, in some instances, flying just over a dozen miles from the baseline of Chinas mainland territorial waters. US aircraft carrier strike groups and amphibious alert groups made eight deployments to the region. Last year, Biden sent nuclear-powered attack submarines to the South China Sea 12 times.



Concurrently, the US is attempting to wrangle its allies in the confrontation with China, bringing the north Atlantic alliance to the Indo-Pacific targeting Beijing, and building various alliances such as AUKUS and the Quad with Australia, Japan, and India, eyeing an east Asian version of NATO.



The Trump administration formally rejected almost all of Chinas claims to the waters in the South China Sea. Washington has been challenging China, using the Navys Seventh Fleet, inserting itself into disputes between regional actors there whom all have overlapping claims on the waters including over various, sometimes unmanned, rocks, reefs, islands, islets, and archipelagos. Under Biden, the policy has been reaffirmed.



Even if it means war with China, Bidens administration has pledged that the US will defend Japans claims to the uninhabited Senkaku Islands. The Senkaku Islands are claimed by Beijing, Tokyo, and Taipei. Similarly, Washington has promised the US military will come to the Philippines defense in the event of a violent conflict with China, including in the South China Sea, potentially over the disputed Whitson Reef, which is claimed not only by Beijing and Manila but by Hanoi as well.



The Navy routinely conducts so-called Freedom Of Navigation Operations (FONOPS), in the waters surrounding China, sailing warships through the waters, particularly in the South China Sea, usually provocatively close to Chinese controlled or claimed islands.



Additionally, Bidens administration has overturned almost 50 years of US-Taiwan policy, which has largely kept the cross-strait peace. Per the former approach, the US would never commit to defending or not defending the island, which the US views as part of One-China, against a potential attack on the breakaway province. Critically, strategic ambiguity has aimed to deter Beijing from attempting to retake the island by force and, at the same time, to discourage Taiwans radical factions seeking to declare independence.



Biden himself has frequently made what were thought to be gaffes contradicting long-standing US policy on Taiwan. The president has repeatedly insisted that Americas sons and daughters would be sent to the island to fight this war with China that his administration is actively provoking. Although, this year both the commander of US Indo-Pacific Command, Admiral John Aquilino, and the Director of National Intelligence (DNI) Avril Haines have confirmed strategic ambiguity is dead and gone.



China has made clear that Taiwan is a red line. While the American side promises they only want to deter war with these actions, Beijing has repeatedly said that they seek a peaceful reunification with Taiwan but they have not ruled out using force. Washingtons actions make war more likely.



The US is now committing billions of dollars in military aid to Taiwan, expanding US National Guard training programs with the Taiwanese military, continually sending more Congressional delegations to the island, deploying higher numbers of US troops to the island, training hundreds of Taiwanese soldiers for war on US soil, converting Taiwan into a giant weapons depot, and sailing American warships through the sensitive Taiwan strait almost every month.



Senior Fellow at Defense Priorities and Retired Lieutenant Colonel Daniel Davis has explained that a war with China over the island of Taiwan could see American cities obliterated with nuclear weapons over an issue which does not affect our national security unless we unnecessarily involve ourselves. Davis details the dire risks of this extreme bipartisan bellicosity,

It is crucial to understand that for China, the Taiwan issue is not merely a core interest, but an emotionally charged one. They are far more willing to pay extraordinary costs, sacrifice many men, and could risk it all to eventually compel unification with Taiwan. The issue does not directly affect our national security unless we get involved.



If we eventually choose war with China over Taiwan, we will at best suffer egregious losses in ships, aircraft, and troops; in a worst-case, the war could deteriorate into a nuclear exchange in which American cities are turned into nuclear wastelands, killing millions.



America should never take such risks unless our security and freedom are directly threatened. Fighting China for any reason short of that would be a foolish gamble of the highest order.

[H]ow much longer can we afford this unnecessary and counterproductive extravagance? While our government engages in deficit spending to fund its military exploits overseas, detracting from our own productivity, countries like China are filling the void by expanding their trade opportunities. I have never understood this talk of our military presence as a strategic reserve of Western civilization. Instead, the best indication of our civilization has been our prestige in international trade. We should let the best measure of our American greatness come from free and peaceful trade with other nations, not from displays of our military might.

Lets recognize the reality that China is a very ambitious nation and it does want to compete. But the reality is it doesnt want to compete with us militarily. [China is] still relatively poor compared to [the United States]. I think we [should] be competing with them. On an economic platform, not a military one. Im not frightened by China. That kind of competition would be good for the whole world. It would be a collaborative competition, if you will. China does not want a war with us. We were told after the Cold War period that wed get a peace dividend. We never got that peace dividend. We now spend more on our military than the next ten countries in the world. Its [kind of] a self-fulfilling prophecy. We should be deescalating. We should be talking with China, for gods sake. We havent talked with them in five years. Any talks with China should not be about military swaggering. The Chinese have been doing a lot better than us because theyve been projecting economic power abroad. Why are [we] trying to create a war with China? Why are [we] making Taiwan a military issue? Let Taiwan and China figure it out. They dont want war. They want prosperity. Lets deescalate. Lets figure out how to have a financial relationship with them that rebuilds the American industrial base.

Views expressed in this article are solely those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the opinions of Information Clearing House.
LEE  The town has temporarily dropped its lawsuit against Bayer for Monsantos PCB sales because the lawyer litigating the case is in the midst of attending to a family emergency.

But the town plans to refile it. The lawsuit was dismissed May 23 without prejudice, giving town officials the option to file it again at any time.

The attorney litigating on behalf of the Town requested we approve the temporary withdrawal of the lawsuit because he was facing a very serious family difficulty that required his total attention, wrote Chris Brittain, Lees town administrator. Brittain said that Cristobal Bonifaz will refile and continue the case as soon as his familys health is back to normalcy.

The town on March 30 had filed suit in federal district court in Springfield against Monsanto and two of its successor companies, as well as Bayer, Inc., which bought Monsanto in 2018. Bonifaz is a Conway-based environmental attorney well-known for suing Chevron.

The suit alleges Monsanto knew that PCBs  polychlorinated biphenyls  were toxic to all life forms as early as the 1950s and yet continued to market and sell those, including to the General Electric Co. for use in its electrical transformer manufacturing at the companys Pittsfield plant.

For more than 40 years GE dumped the chemicals into the Housatonic River, later sparking an investigation and a river cleanup agreement with the Environmental Protection Agency and five other towns including Lee. As part of that agreement to dredge the river, GE will move 2 million tons of PCB soil and mud to a dump located in Lee known as the Upland Disposal Facility.

The most toxic soil will be shipped out of state.

But the method for transporting it through Berkshire towns on its way to the dump in Lee is still in question, given a meeting between GE and town officials last week. The transport of the waste is yet another reason for fury and opposition to the plan from town residents and officials.

Two environmental groups are suing EPA over the disposal location.

The case attorney Bonifaz had filed against Monsanto was an attempt to hold accountable the source of the chemicals ultimately destined for Lee and the companys alleged malfeasance in marketing and sales.

The lawsuit had asked for compensatory, punitive and natural resource damages with amounts proved at trial. The town also wants the court to require Monsanto to deposit money into an escrow account for Lee to move the 2 million tons of PCB soil and mud out of state.

A Bayer spokesperson previously told The Eagle that the lawsuit was meritless, given the towns agreement to host the dump and to accept a share of the $55 million settlement agreement.

Eagle reporter Clarence Fanto contributed to this report.

Lee Select Board seeks meetings with Rest of River Committee towns in escalating struggle against PCB landfill The Lee Select Board is not happy with the Rest of River Municipal Committee. Theyre not thrilled with the Berkshire Regional Planning Commission either.
This brook will dry up this summer, which designates it as intermittent  meaning it would not have federal protection under the Clean Water Act, according to the Supreme Court's ruling earlier this year.
Providence is an interesting word, commonly used to refer to God, but also to His divine will and the force through which God exerts that will on earth. When reading the writings of the Founding Fathers, they often would refer to Providence as acting during the course of the war.

George Washington wrote, By the all-powerful dispensations of Providence, I have been protected beyond all human probability and expectation; for I had four bullets through my coat, and two horses shot under me, yet escaped unhurt, altho' death was levelling my companions on every side." In the mind of the men and women during the Revolution, God was on their side.

Other mentions of Providence or Gods will as it relates to the war or the founding of America as a country by the Founding Fathers include:

Samuel Adams

The right to freedom being the gift of God Almighty, it is not in the power of man to alienate this gift and voluntarily become a slave."

Benjamin Franklin

"Whoever shall introduce into public affairs the principles of primitive Christianity will change the face of the world."

Here is my Creed. I believe in one God, the Creator of the Universe. That He governs it by His Providence.

Rebellion to tyrants is obedience to God.

Alexander Hamilton

"For my own part, I sincerely esteem it a system, which, without the finger of God, never could have been suggested and agreed upon by such a diversity of interests."

Patrick Henry

Three millions of people, armed in the holy cause of liberty, and in such a country as that which we possess, are invincible by any force which our enemy can send against us. Beside, sir, we shall not fight our battles alone. There is a just God who presides over the destinies of Nations, and who will raise up friends to fight our battles for us.

James Madison

"We have staked the whole future of American civilization, not upon the power of government, far from it. We have staked the future of all of our political institutions  upon the capacity of each and all of us to govern ourselves  according to the Ten Commandments of God.

George Washington

It is the duty of all Nations to acknowledge the providence of Almighty God, to obey his will, to be grateful for his benefits, and humbly to implore his protection and favors.

"Since we ought to be no less persuaded that the propitious smiles of Heaven, can never be expected on a nation that disregards the eternal rules of order and right, which Heaven itself has ordained: And since the preservation of the sacred fire of liberty, and the destiny of the Republican model of Government, are justly considered as deeply, perhaps as finally staked, on the experiment entrusted to the hands of the American people."

In the minds of the Founding Fathers, whether they were Christian or deist, they did believe that God and His Providential will were behind their efforts to separate from England and their victory.

Photo credit: Getty Images/ZU_09
The verdict is out. And the result has drawn applause  for the industry captains who are winners of the Indian Bio & Health Sciences Industry awards and also for the Jury members who managed this tough task in a two-hour-long deliberation. Since its institution in 2003, the BioSpectrum Excellence Awards honour the achievements of the Indian Bio & Health Sciences Industry leaders. The Annual Gala Awards Nite on June 30, 2023, where these were given away, has been the most eagerly awaited event in the industry.

New Delhi, June 30, 2023: Leaders from the Indian Bio & Health Sciences industry were felicitated by India's leading Bio & Health Sciences publication, BioSpectrum for their outstanding contribution over the past two years.

The BioSpectrum India Excellence Awards now in its 13th edition, in 2023, is an endeavour to honour the outstanding achievements of the biotech industry veterans. The BioSpectrum Awardees were unanimously chosen by the Jury headed by Dr Renu Swarup, Former Secretary, Department of Biotechnology, Government of India.

The Award Ceremony took place at Hyatt Regency in New Delhi. There were 3 categories of Awards. Jury Awards  selected by the Jury, and Ranking Awards given on the basis of the BioSpectrum annual industry survey the results of which are published in the April & June 2023 issues of BioSpectrum. The award winner profiles are published in the July 2023 issue of BioSpectrum. The third category - Special Recognition Awards are given to organisations/ companies we believe will lead the way in the near future, not only in India but globally.

Details of Award winners-

BioSpectrum Jury Award Winners

Lifetime Achievement Award- Dr K I Varaprasad Reddy, Founder, Shantha Biotechnics

Year 2020-21

Businessperson of the Year - Dr Krishna Ella, Executive Chairman, Bharat Biotech

Entrepreneur of the Year - Hasmukh Rawal, MD, Mylab Discovery Solutions

Woman Entrepreneur of the Year- Dr Rachana Tripathi, Co-Founder, Huwel Lifesciences

Product of the Year  Covaxin COVID-19 vaccine by Bharat Biotech

Young Woman Scientist of the Year- Dr Ritu Trivedi, Principal Scientist, Central Drug Research Institute

Year 2021-22

Businessperson of the Year - Mahima Datla, Managing Director, Biological E

Entrepreneur of the Year - Dr Anand Anankumar, Co-founder, Bugworks Research

Woman Entrepreneur of the Year - Geethanjali Radhakrishnan, Founder, Adiuvo Diagnostics

Product of the Year - SSI Mantra Surgical Robotic System by SS Innovations

Young Woman Scientist of the Year- Dr Pragya D Yadav, Scientist-F, National Institute of Virology

The panel of experts within the jury consisted of six members from different industry verticals including academics, investments, policy makers, consultants and incubators. Chaired by Dr Renu Swarup, Former Secretary, Department of Biotechnology, Government of India, the jury panel members included- Dr Nilima A Kshirsagar, National Chair of Clinical Pharmacology, Indian Council of Medical Research (ICMR); Dr Taslimarif Saiyed, Chief Executive Officer & Director, Centre for Cellular and Molecular Platforms (C-CAMP); Nitin Deshmukh, Advisor  Private Equity, Kotak Investment; Sujay Shetty, Global Health Industries Advisory Leader, Partner, PwC India; and Dr Pramod Garg, Executive Director, Translational Health Science & Technology Institute. The panel members picked out the winners for both FY 20-21 and FY 21-22 across six categories.

Talking about the BioSpecrum Excellence Awards 2023, Ravindra Boratkar, Publisher and Managing Editor, BioSpectrum India, MM Activ Sci-Tech Communications, said India's bioeconomy is poised to touch $300 billion by 2030 and with its rising innovation and scientific temper, India is set to join the global wave of a new industrial revolution. India is emerging as the world's major bioeconomy with fast growing biotech startups. The number of biotech startups has increased from 50 to 5,000 in the last 8 years. India has the potential to move from 5,000 to 50,000 within the biotech startup sector. Considering this growth, BioSpectrum also wants to be part of this growth journey of the Bio & Health Sciences startup ecosystem and contribute in different aspects like skill development, mentoring, investments to take it to the next level. We are launching MMA Spectrum Foundation to become a partner of this progress of Bio & Health Sciences startups ecosystem.

Talking about the awards ceremony he said BioSpectrum honours personalities from the life sciences sector whose work has, indeed, been worthy of recognition. As an esteemed media platform of the life sciences field, BioSpectrum not only recognises but also appreciates their excellence in their respective work areas by conferring upon them BioSpectrum Excellence Awards. Last year we could not organise it due to COVID, hence this year we are giving awards for two years.

In her address, Dr Renu Swarup, Former Secretary, Department of Biotechnology (Jury Chair) congratulated all the award winners for their performance and achievements, and complemented BioSpectrum for its efforts in bringing the hidden jewels into the limelight. These efforts of BioSpectrum are going to help the young students of biotechnology see these winners as role models. As the country is offering huge opportunities in the biosciences space, the young minds can grab these through their skill sets and talent to make a difference to the society, she said.

Congratulating BioSpectrum for launching MMA Spectrum Foundation, she wished all success in its endeavour of providing the very best to the upcoming and young entrepreneurs in different fields of life sciences.

In his acceptance speech Dr K I Varaprasad Reddy, Non-Executive Chairman, Shantha Biotechnics recalled his tough and solo journey of developing recombinant DNA vaccines with a motto of offering them at an affordable price three decades ago.

Dr Varaprasad Reddy, who overcame the unethical and bad experiences and set the prices for vaccines in India for 11 years since the launch of Shantha Biotechnics, said We have great doctors, great engineers in our country but not great leaders. The vaccine scenario has changed considerably in India. Currently, we are strong in production but we should collaborate with other countries for joint development and own the patent rights, to become global leaders.

Industry Ranking Award Winners (for FY 20-21 & FY 21-22)

Biopharma sector

Top Indian Biopharma Company- Serum Institute of India (For FY 20-21 & FY 21-22)

Top MNC Biopharma Company- Sanofi Healthcare (For FY 20-21)

Top MNC Biopharma Company- Novo Nordisk (For FY 21-22)

Industrial Enzyme sector

Top Indian Industrial Enzyme Company- Rossari Biotech (For FY 20-21 & FY 21-22)

Top MNC Industrial Enzyme Company- Novozymes South Asia (For FY 20-21 & FY 21-22)

BioService sector

Top Indian BioServices Company- Piramal Pharma Solutions (For FY 20-21 &; FY 21-22)

Top MNC BioServices Company- IQVIA RDS (India) (For FY 20-21 & FY 21-22)

Medical Devices & Diagnostics sector

Top Indian Medical Devices & Diagnostics Company- Transasia Bio-Medicals (For FY 20-21 & FY 21-22)

BioSupplier sector

Top BioSupplier Principal Company- Waters Corporation (For FY 20-21)

Top BioSupplier Distributor Company- Genetix Biotech Asia (For FY 20-21)

Top BioSupplier Principal Company- HiMedia Laboratories (For FY 21-22)

Top BioSupplier Distributor Company- Premas Life Sciences (For FY 21-22)

Bioincubator

Top Bioincubator (Private Sector)- Venture Center Pune (FY 20-21)

Top Bioincubator (Private Sector)- KIIT Technology Business Incubator (FY 21-22)

Top Bioincubator (Public Sector)- Bangalore Bioinnovation Centre (FY 20-21)

Top Bioincubator (Public Sector)- Centre for Cellular and Molecular Platforms (FY 21-22)

Special Recognition Award Winners

Bioinnovation Leader of the Year- Bangalore Bioinnovation Centre

Industry Leader of the Year- Dr Gangadhar M Warke, Chairman & Managing Director, HiMedia Laboratories

Best Innovator for COVID-19 Solutions  Dr Vishal G Warke, Director- R&D, Cell Culture & Immunology, HiMedia Laboratories

Emerging Biostartup- Qure.ai (Powered by Biostartups)

Special Recognition in Cell & Gene Therapy- ReGrow Biosciences

Best Workplace in Bio & Health Science business - Siemens Healthineers, India (Powered by BioSpectrum Jobs)

Digital Disruptors of the Year- Thermo Fisher Scientific, India

Excellence in MedTech Innovation- Drager India

Business Person of the Year in Life Sciences Industry- Amit Sehgal, Managing Director and Country Head  Avantor India

Most Promising Company: Engineering Solution & Services for Pharma, Biopharma & Nutraceutical Industry- Praj HiPurity Systems

About BioSpectrum India:

The BioSpectrum India edition was launched in March 2003 and is India's first comprehensive biotech business monthly magazine. It provides comprehensive coverage of the exciting happenings in life sciences, which include BioPharma, BioAgriculture, BioInformatics, BioIndustrial, BioSuppliers and BioServices and showcases the emerging Indian entrepreneurship in the biotech industry. In a short time, BioSpectrum has emerged as the most preferred platform to engage the life sciences industry in India and the Asia Pacific. It is also widely accepted by the research and academic community. Top key policymakers in the Central and State government use the magazine as a platform to reach out to the Indian Biotech Industry. BioSpectrum has columns by Indian's top policymakers, biotechnology professionals, scientists and NGOs. Readers of BioSpectrum are from among the key Policy Makers, Key Executives and the Influencer's in Biotechnology, Pharmaceutical Companies, Research Heads of Clinical Research, Clinical Trials and Contract Manufacturing Organizations, Educational Institutes, Consultants, Fund Managers etc.
Sickle cell genetic status cards distributed to beneficiaries

Prime Minister Narendra Modi launched the National Sickle Cell Anaemia Elimination Mission in Shahdol, Madhya Pradesh (MP) on 1 July and distributed sickle cell genetic status cards to the beneficiaries.

The Mission aims to address the pressing health challenges posed by sickle cell disease, particularly among the tribal population. The launch will mark a crucial milestone in the Governments ongoing efforts to eliminate sickle cell disease as a public health problem by 2047. The National Sickle Cell Anaemia Elimination Mission was announced in the Union Budget 2023. This will be implemented in 278 districts of 17 high-focus states in the country namely Gujarat, Maharashtra, Rajasthan, Madhya Pradesh, Jharkhand, Chhattisgarh, West Bengal, Odisha, Tamil Nadu, Telangana, Andhra Pradesh, Karnataka, Assam, Uttar Pradesh, Kerala, Bihar, and Uttarakhand.

The Prime Minister also kickstarted the distribution of about 3.57 crore Ayushman Bharat Pradhan Mantri Jan Arogya Yojana (AB-PMJAY) cards in MP.

The Prime Minister said that the nation is taking a big pledge of securing the lives of the people from the tribal communities, a resolution of freedom from Sickle Cell Anaemia and saving the lives of 2.5 lakh children and families that are affected by the disease.

He underlined the need for a coordinated approach of government, health personnel and tribals. He informed that blood banks are being established for the patients, arrangement for bone marrow transplant is being enhanced, and screening of Sickle Cell Anaemia is being revamped. He asked the people to come forward for screening.
Corona is poised to capitalise on the potential of the muscle relaxant segment

Ahmedabad-based pharmaceutical firm Corona Remedies has announced the acquisition of the Myoril brand from the global pharmaceutical giant Sanofi. The acquisition, valued at Rs 234 crore (including taxes), marks Coronas largest acquisition to date.

The acquisition of the Myoril brand for the Indian market is effective from June 28, 2023. It positions Corona as a key player in the muscle relaxant segment. Myoril is a well-established brand known for its efficacy and enjoys a high level of trust among orthopaedics in the country. With its impressive market presence, the brand has significant potential for growth.

With the Myoril brand becoming a part of its portfolio, Corona gains its first offering in the muscle relaxant category, strengthening its existing lineup of more than 80 brands and advancing its mission of promoting good health for all. The scientific expertise and market presence of Myoril in the muscle relaxant market complement Coronas therapeutic enrichment efforts and strengthen its orthopaedic portfolio.

The companys strong presence in the western and southern regions of India will facilitate increased market penetration and coverage for Myoril in the orthopaedics and physician space.

The muscle relaxant market in India is valued at Rs 1,626 crore and it is growing at 13%. Myoril has annual sales of Rs 38 crore and a growth of 6.8%, according to IQVIA May 2023 data.

Image caption- Vaibhav Karandikar (L) - CFO, Sanofi India and Bhavin Bhagat - President, Corona Remedies
To produce products that are part of P&Gs global healthcare product portfolio, especially digestives

Procter & Gamble (P&G) India will invest Rs 2000 crore to set up a new state-of-the-art personal healthcare manufacturing facility in Gujarat. The investment was announced by LV Vaidyanathan, CEO, P&G India, in a meeting with Bhupendra Patel, Chief Minister of Gujarat.

The facility builds on top of the P&G Indias existing manufacturing footprint of 8 plants across the country and expands the existing presence in Gujarat. P&G already operates a state-of-the-art manufacturing plant in Sanand, Ahmedabad, since 2015.

The new state-of-the-art manufacturing plant will produce products that are part of P&Gs global healthcare product portfolio, especially digestives. This facility will be operational over the next few years and is set to become an export hub for P&G globally, as it will help P&G India in serving consumers across the globe. With this investment, P&G India will help create hundreds of direct and indirect jobs, thereby offering a significant boost to the local economy.

The facility is situated across a 50,000 sqm area in Sanand, Gujarat. It will use state-of-the-art technology to manufacture superior products in the digestive wellness space and is designed to be fully automated based on the modern concept of Industry 4.0. This concept employs futuristic technology including the latest vision systems for quality checks, robotic equipment for material movement and operator cockpits to name a few. The investment is being planned through an unlisted private company and does not impact any of the listed public companies of the P&G group in India.

Image caption- P&G's CEO LV Vaidyanathan with Bhupendra Patel, Chief Minister of Gujarat
What country can preserve its liberties if their rulers are not warned from time to time that their people preserve the spirit of resistance?Thomas Jefferson

July 02, 2023: Information Clearing House -- The government is goosestepping all over our freedoms.

Case in point: Americas founders did not want a military government ruled by force. Rather, they opted for a republic bound by the rule of law: the U.S. Constitution.

Yet sometime over the course of the past 240-plus years that constitutional republic has been transformed into a military dictatorship disguised as a democracy.

Most Americans seem relatively untroubled by this state of martial law.

Incredibly, when President Biden bragged about how the average citizen doesnt stand a chance against the governments massive arsenal of militarized firepower, it barely caused a ripple.

As Biden remarked at a fundraising event in California, I love these guys who say the Second Amendment isyou know, the tree of liberty is water with the blood of patriots. Well, if [you] want to do that, you want to work against the government, you need an F-16. You need something else than just an AR-15.

The message being sent to the citizenry is clear: there is no place in our nation today for the kind of revolution our forefathers mounted against a tyrannical government.

For that matter, the government has declared an all-out war on any resistance whatsoever by the citizenry to its mandates, power grabs and abuses.

Are You Tired Of The Lies And Non-Stop Propaganda?

By this standard, had the Declaration of Independence been written today, it would have rendered its signers extremists or terrorists, resulting in them being placed on a government watch list, targeted for surveillance of their activities and correspondence, and potentially arrested, held indefinitely, stripped of their rights and labeled enemy combatants.

This is no longer the stuff of speculation and warning.

For years, the government has been warning against the dangers of domestic terrorism, erecting surveillance systems to monitor its own citizens, creating classification systems to label any viewpoints that challenge the status quo as extremist, and training law enforcement agencies to equate anyone possessing anti-government views as a domestic terrorist.

A 2008 Army War College report revealed that widespread civil violence inside the United States would force the defense establishment to reorient priorities in extremis to defend basic domestic order and human security. The 44-page report goes on to warn that potential causes for such civil unrest could include another terrorist attack, unforeseen economic collapse, loss of functioning political and legal order, purposeful domestic resistance or insurgency, pervasive public health emergencies, and catastrophic natural and human disasters.

Subsequent reports by the Department of Homeland Security to identify, monitor and label right-wing and left-wing activists and military veterans as extremists (a.k.a. terrorists) have manifested into full-fledged pre-crime surveillance programs. Almost a decade later, after locking down the nation and spending billions to fight terrorism, the DHS concluded that the greater threat is not ISIS but domestic right-wing extremism.

Rounding out this profit-driven campaign to turn American citizens into enemy combatants (and America into a battlefield) is a technology sector that is colluding with the government to create a Big Brother that is all-knowing, all-seeing and inescapable. Its not just the drones, fusion centers, license plate readers, stingray devices and the NSA that you have to worry about. Youre also being tracked by the black boxes in your cars, your cell phone, smart devices in your home, grocery loyalty cards, social media accounts, credit cards, streaming services such as Netflix, Amazon, and e-book reader accounts.

The events of recent years have all been part of a master plan to shut us up and preemptively shut us down: by making peaceful revolution impossible and violent revolution inevitable.

The powers-that-be want an excuse to lockdown the nation and throw the switch to all-out martial law.

This is how it begins.

As John Lennon warned, When it gets down to having to use violence, then you are playing the systems game. The establishment will irritate youpull your beard, flick your faceto make you fight. Because once theyve got you violent, then they know how to handle you.

Already, discontent is growing.

According to a USA TODAY/Suffolk University poll, 7 out of 10 Americans believe that American democracy is imperiled.

Americans are worried about the state of their country, afraid of an increasingly violent and oppressive federal government, and tired of being treated like suspects and criminals.

What well see more of before long is a growing dissatisfaction with the government and its heavy-handed tactics by people who are tired of being used and abused and are ready to say enough is enough.

This is what happens when a parasitical government muzzles the citizenry, fences them in, herds them, brands them, whips them into submission, forces them to ante up the sweat of their brows while giving them little in return, and then provides them with little to no outlet for voicing their discontent.

Our backs are against the proverbial wall.

Weve been losing our freedoms so incrementally for so longsold to us in the name of national security and global peace, maintained by way of martial law disguised as law and order, and enforced by a standing army of militarized police and a political elite determined to maintain their powers at all coststhat its hard to pinpoint exactly when it all started going downhill, but weve been on that fast-moving, downward trajectory for some time now.

When the government views itself as superior to the citizenry, when it no longer operates for the benefit of the people, when the people are no longer able to peacefully reform their government, when government officials cease to act like public servants, when elected officials no longer represent the will of the people, when the government routinely violates the rights of the people and perpetrates more violence against the citizenry than the criminal class, when government spending is unaccountable and unaccounted for, when the judiciary act as courts of order rather than justice, and when the government is no longer bound by the laws of the Constitution, then you no longer have a government of the people, by the people and for the people.

Brace yourselves.

There is something being concocted in the dens of power, far beyond the public eye, and it doesnt bode well for the future of this country.

Anytime you have an entire nation so mesmerized by political theater and public spectacle that they are oblivious to all else, youd better beware.

Anytime you have a government that operates in the shadows, speaks in a language of force, and rules by fiat, youd better beware.

And anytime you have a government so far removed from its people as to ensure that they are never seen, heard or heeded by those elected to represent them, youd better beware.

The architects of the police state have us exactly where they want us: under their stamping boot, gasping for breath, desperate for freedom, grappling for some semblance of a future that does not resemble the totalitarian prison being erected around us.

The government and its cohorts have conspired to ensure that the only real recourse the American people have to express their displeasure with the government is through voting, yet that is no real recourse at all.

Yet as I make clear in my book Battlefield America: The War on the American People and in its fictional counterpart The Erik Blair Diaries, what is unfolding before us is not a revolution. This is an anti-revolution.

We are at our most vulnerable right now.

Constitutional attorney and author John W. Whitehead is founder and president of The Rutherford Institute. His most recent books are the best-selling Battlefield America: The War on the American People, the award-winning A Government of Wolves: The Emerging American Police State, and a debut dystopian fiction novel, The Erik Blair Diaries. Whitehead can be contacted at staff@rutherford.org. Nisha Whitehead is the Executive Director of The Rutherford Institute. Information about The Rutherford Institute is available at www.rutherford.org.

Views expressed in this article are solely those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the opinions of Information Clearing House.
While Pride Month is over, brands need to understand that advertising to the LGBTQQIAAP+ community is more than just a month-long exercise.

Image supplied. Khangelani Dizba, head of Raprt Creative's PR & Influencer and passionate advocate of gay rights explores advertising to the LGBTQQIAAP+ community

The LGBTQQIAAP+ community has often been alienated by advertising that has missed the mark.

Khangelani Dziba, head of Rapt Creative's PR & Influencer and passionate advocate of gay rights explores this in-depth in his study Queer Marginality and Planning for Brand Resonance: A Qualitative analysis of the South African Advertising Industry.

I think the root cause is the refusal to realise that the queer community is pluriversal," he says.

The failure to recognise this fact equates to alienation which results in the mark being missed because it is not reflective of all. As a result, no change is achieved.

This lack of inclusion of multiple voices in the work advertisers produce reflects the community in its entirety. This, he says, arises  probably  because our work is informed by our own social constructions".

"These reflect our lived reality and how we have been socialised, and often lead to a particular kind of image of the Queer Community.

That being said, he believes that there are great improvements and work coming out that is really brave and interesting.

Examples of this are the Mrs Balls television commercial and the Woolworths Pride Campaign. This was followed by an educational campaign."

He adds that it is very commendable that Woolworths committed to run this educational campaign throughout the year and not only during Pride Month.

Missing the opportunity to contribute to change

Brands that continually miss the opportunity to include and collaborate with the queer community are missing an opportunity to contribute towards change.

The reality is, as brands and advertising, we do influence culture and so we should look at how we can meaningfully shape it by being inclusive and diverse in all that we do, says Dziba.

Avoiding pinkwashing essentially means not appropriating the movement towards the liberation of marginalised people like the LGBTQQIAAP+ community.

Instead, we should be adopting causes that will see the betterment of the lived experiences of those in the community. It is the brands responsibility to find out more about the issues afflicting the community and how they can contribute towards challenging the status quo.

A seat at the table

Collaboration, he says, is incredibly important in unpacking and understanding nuances that are often overlooked when only one perspective is held on any brief.

He quotes Linda Alcofs article titled The Problem of Speaking for Others that highlights the danger of alienating those we are trying to advocate for by excluding them in the conversations and solutions being crafted for their course.

The first thing that brands must always do is give the people they are committing to advocate for a seat at the table where decision-making is made and collaborate with them to craft policies, campaigns, activities and initiatives that will meaningful make a difference in their lives.

This, he says, is evidenced by the excellent work we saw from Woolworths.

Its International Pride Month!  At Woolies, we celebrate the LGBTQIA+ community year-round, and were continuously working to better serve our LGBTQIA+ people and customers. pic.twitter.com/8hcf0uOzOi

 Woolworths SA (@WOOLWORTHS_SA) June 1, 2023

More than just a Pride Month campaign

Closely linked to that is ensuring that there no pinkwashing (appropriating the movement for financial gain and not making a real contribution to the community).

Brands that pinkwash could receive backlash from their core consumer if the subject matter they are advocating for is not authentically aligned to their purpose. Or, from the LGBTQQIAAP+ community, which will obviously resent the pinkwashing.

Dziba adds that it is not enough for brands to run a campaign during Pride Month  it should be throughout the year.

In addition, we could look at how profits and proceeds are used to support the advancement of queer communities through programmes and initiatives that empower, provide safety and are aligned to the direct need of consumers.

Lastly, he says, representation in leadership of organisations is important. This will allow for the growth and influence towards a positive discourse and cultural practice internally as well as an outward projection that will gain support from the consumers point of view.
Together with Dawn Rowlands, Dentsu Africas CEO, Hoets has played a vital role in building a high-performance team across the region, growing the African talent pool from a team of 40 to over 1500 inspired people under their leadership, across 11 markets.

Hoets will be taking on a new role at Rubro, a family business, to further drive the companys expansion globally. Dentsu wish him all the best for his future endeavours and know that his family business will continue thrive with his support.

Stepping into the role of dentsu Africa CFO is Ruschda Ismail, former CFO for Dentsu South Africa. Ruschda joined dentsu in July 2016 as the CFO for Dentsu SA, having spent two years at Dentsu Creative, formerly known as John Brown South Africa, as Finance Director, and 10 years at Media24 in various financial management roles.

True to form, Ruschda oversees all things financial at Dentsu South Africa, she is an experienced CFO with a demonstrated history of working in the marketing and advertising industry. Ismails extensive knowledge and experience in finance strategy, accounting, group accounts, internal controls, tax and financial reporting is unrivalled.

Commenting on her promotion, Ismail had this to say: I am extremely excited for the next stage of my career journey. Working with our groups incredible talent has led me to this amazing new chapter as dentsu Africas CFO. Dentsu is a place for growth, and this is deeply rooted in the culture of the business. I am really looking forward to working with all my new colleagues across the region and contributing to achieving great value for all our stakeholders, from our shareholders right through to the communities that we serve.

Continuing the vision and strategy of Dentsu Africa, Dentsu is proud to have Ismail move into this position and contribute to dentsu being the first fully female-led network in Africa with a priority and emphasis on empowering women, succession planning and growing our people. Ismail has worked closely with Bevis and the dentsu Africa finance team throughout her seven years at Dentsu. She is highly driven and thrives on the challenge of streamlining processes to maximise efficiencies. With her vast knowledge and experience, Ismail will ensure a smooth handover process and that all finance elements continue to function effectively, ultimately leading Dentsu Africa to greater success.
The maiden edition of the Africa PR and Communications (APCR) report says the PR and communications industry has a pivotal role to play in restoring the continent's reputation through informed, responsible, and ethical practices.

Image Supplied. The front cover of the first Africa PR & Communicaitons Report

Launched by BHM Research and Intelligence (BR&I) the Report is a comprehensive exposition on PR and communications practice and its role in fostering sustainable development on the continent.

The APCR  a first-ever of its kind in Africa  represents an exclusive primer to understand the challenges and opportunities new realities present to practitioners, stakeholders and investors within Africa's PR & Communications industry, and actionable approaches required to maximise the continent's widely documented growth potential using real data and professional insights.

A critical time for Africa

Africa has been widely tipped for global dominance.

The continent boasted six of the top 10 fastest-growing economies in the world until Covid-19 pandemic disrupted economic growth rates globally.

Yet, foreign direct investment is rebounding, rising from $40bn in 2020 to $47bn in 2021, and $83bn in 2022.

And as a sign of its people strengths, projections indicate the continent would boast the largest workforce globally by 2040, a realisation that would significantly impact the pace of its economic growth.

With an expected GDP of $5.6tn in four years and the African Continental Free Trade Area (AfCFTA) agreement predicted to lift 30 million people out of extreme poverty upon full implementation, it is a critical time to lay the groundwork for the continent's sustainable development.

The pivotal role of PR

The 2023 APCR is rich with verified facts, statistics, and analysis of the multidimensional aspects of PR practice in Africa, including new and peculiar challenges, skill levels, digital technology tools, inclusivity and compensation, stakeholders and government interventions.

These insights will provide requisite guidance for building new practice models for practitioners to excel in their fields, deliver value to stakeholders, and build trust with the African people.

Immortalise the art of PR in Africa

"The time has come to immortalise the art of PR in Africa, harnessing the wealth of resources and opportunities at our disposal, while taking advantage of information, data, and expert insights to unleash our extraordinary professional prowess, says Moliehi Molekoa, an adviser on the APCR Committee and the managing director of Magna Carta Reputation Management Consultants, a pan-African reputation management consultancy.

Molekoa adds: With Africa's resounding pursuit of growth and the bestowed recognition upon it, the APCR not only elevates the skill level and practice within the industry, but also propels us into a position of influence, fortifying the continent's reputation and ultimately ushering prosperity for the African people."

Femi Falodun, executive director, BHM, and APCR Committee Adviser, says "Africa is currently witnessing unprecedented global interest in its cultural, social, technological, and economic activities.

This brings up a great opportunity and challenge for communicators and 'image-makers' on the continent to deliver impactful work that will shape the way Africa is perceived, received and consumed around the world.

He adds: "The APCR serves as a first of its kind source of credible local data and insights to aid strategic planning for marketing and communications industry stakeholders within and outside Africa.

No better time for PR professionals

Ayeni Adekunle, BHM Founder and APCR committee chair says they are pleased to create yet another world-class funnel for the growth of PR and communications practice, this time in Africa.

With interesting happenings across various sectors, there is not a better time for PR professionals to proudly wear the badge and understand our role in helping to drive the continent to a place we can all be proud of," says Adekunle.

He adds, "This is the first step in rallying all practitioners and stakeholders on the continent to understand what is possible and actions to embark upon, but we must first acknowledge that no significant influence can be achieved without key data and information.

We are enthused about the new insights provided in the APCR and how they'll shape PR and communication practice in Africa as we know it, for the benefit of the continent and its one-billion-strong people.

Eniola Harrison, co-founder Africa PR & Communications Week and APCR committee adviser, says "It is an important time for the PR & communication industry to play a role in driving Africa towards sustainable growth, as the continent continues to evolve and present new opportunities.

We are delighted that the APCR provides us with enough data and insights into what the future of PR practice will look like and how we can navigate the challenges that can hinder our efforts.

The journey to elevate industry practice and bolster Africa's burgeoning industrialism for the betterment of its people starts now and we must all stay committed."

The Report compilation

The Africa PR and Communications report is compiled by BHM Research Intelligence (BR&I) in partnership with the Chartered Institute of Public Relations (CIPR), CIPR International, Association of Advertising Agencies Of Nigeria (AAAN), Public Relations and Communications Association (PRCA), Africa Communications Week (ACW), International Communications Consultancy Organisation (ICCO), Women In PR Ghana (WIPRG), Magna Carta Reputation Management Consultants, Wadds Inc.

A division of Black House Media (BHM) BR&I has produced all the editions of the Nigeria PR Report since its inception.

The list of partner associations also include African Public Relations Association (APRA), Associaca de Profissionais de Relacoes Publicas de Mocambique (APRPM), Global Mind Consulting, Nigerian Women in PR, Uganda Marketers Society, Rwanda Communications Network, Uganda Advertising Association, Central University Ghana, BHM UK, BHM, ID Africa and Plaqad.Inc.

Pre-order the Report here.
Despite non-compliance having very costly consequences like penalties, legal fees and director liability, the most recent annual report of the Companies and Intellectual Property Commission (CIPC) states that 72% of the 3.1 million companies in South Africa don't submit annual returns and therefore don't meet basic legal requirements.

Every registered company must meet certain requirements to remain active and trading in South Africa. These include filing an annual return, notifying the government of changes to company, director, member and officer information, maintaining a register of shareholders and producing various company records.

Failing to do so could result in penalties and de-registration. In fact, the CIPC recently de-registered over 640,000 companies for failing to file annual returns.

The CIPC also recently announced that companies must submit information about their beneficial ownership by 1 October 2023 adding to an already complex situation.

Companies can meet their obligations by using the CIPCs website, but they generally use company secretarial services provided by professionals. These services can be costly, which is a factor in the low level of compliance.

A startup spotted the gap and is helping companies get CIPC compliant from R199 for an annual return using proprietary software.

Many privately held companies are put off by the admin and costs involved to remain compliant. InfoDocs developed software to simplify company secretarial services for directors and shareholders. Even professionals use our system to import data directly from CIPC, produce professional templates and store company records securely online.

New laws for beneficial ownership

South Africa recently put in place new laws related to beneficial ownership. The Companies Act already requires a register of those who own or control 5% or more of the company, but the greylisting of South Africa by the Financial Action Task Force (FATF) has put this requirement in the spotlight.

To ensure transparent ownership and control structures of legal entities, companies have until 1 October 2023 to file this information with CIPC which will maintain a central database.

Companies can capture their share register and certain other changes for free using InfoDocs. We charge nominal submission fees depending on the transaction. At very low rates, its a no-brainer to remove the risk of penalties, legal fees and director liability.

InfoDocs works closely with the CIPC, as the software aids the CIPC in meeting its mandate.

To date, more than 30,000 companies are using InfoDocs to submit annual returns, maintain statutory registers and submit documents using high-quality document templates. The software sends alerts and notifications of submission deadlines.

From the dashboard, companies can file returns and make secure payments directly to the CIPC.
At Binance, we remain committed and active in furthering the security of the global crypto and blockchain ecosystem. A key part of this effort is our close collaboration with law enforcement agencies and regulators worldwide, working with them hand-in-glove to fight illicit cyber/financial crimes and thwart bad actors.

Recently, the Binance Sanctions Investigations team, with support from the compliance teams at Binance, worked with Israels Ministry of Defense to help take down a terrorism financing operation linked to Irans Quds Force and Hezbollah. This was Israels first operation that targeted the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps - Quds Force and a historic case of this magnitude where millions of dollars in cryptocurrency intended for terrorist financing were seized. The team at Binance helped identify and disrupt this terrorist operation.

We are proud to have been able to provide our support to one of the most significant cases in counterterrorism financing and the successful takedown of Irans Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps - Quds Force funding on the blockchain. Terrorism has no place in a civilized society and we are committed to ensuring the safety and security of the global crypto community through our proactive work.  -- Binance Sanctions Investigations team.

The Binance Sanctions Investigations team, Financial Crimes Compliance (FCC) team and the Deputy Head of Financial Crimes Compliance Nils Andersen-Roed were recognised by Israel's National Bureau for Counter Terror Financing (NBCTF) and the Israeli National Cybercrime Unit for their contributions to this case and several other operations with Israel for global security.

Last year, the Binance Investigations team responded to over 47,000 law enforcement requests with an average of three days response time which is faster than any traditional financial institution.

Across the globe, we have addressed a number of security-related issues and financial crimes including terrorist financing, child sexual abuse material, nation-state hacking, intellectual property, narcotics smuggling, and investment and romance scams. To date, the team helped law enforcement freeze and seize more than $1bn and more than $900m this year (as of May 2023) alone in illicit transactions and funds.

We created the industrys first program/coordinated effort (Law Enforcement Training Programme) across the globe to help law enforcement and prosecutors detect financial and cybercrimes and to assist in the prosecution of bad actors. The training includes concepts of blockchain and highlights Binance's AML and investigative methods.
The "Big Five" social media platforms in South Africa have been shaken up, as TikTok leaps past Instagram into second place, and challenges the dominant social network, Facebook, in several segments.

This is one of the key finding of the South African Social Media Landscape 2023 study, released by brand intelligence consultancy Ornico and market research house World Wide Worx.

Facebook, with a commanding 56.7% penetration of South African aged 15 and over, living in cities and towns, continues to dominate the social media scene. However, TikTok has seen explosive growth, and surpassed Instagram to claim second position at 30.6%. Notably, TikTok's appeal extends beyond its under-15 target audience, making significant inroads into the 15+ market. The study delves into this phenomenon further, examining the platform's impact on different age groups.

Instagram remains a popular choice among South African social media users, boasting 27.6% penetration, while Twitter retains a significant following despite its troubled takeover by Elon Musk, standing at 22.5%. LinkedIn is far behind, but its 14.7% penetration is healthy for a professional networking platform that does not hold youth appeal.

The data is based on Ask Afrika's Target Group Index (TGI), which surveys 16,000 South Africans every six months. Ornico and World Wide Worx also conduct a survey of social media usage by South Africas biggest brands, and integrate the findings with several additional data sources, into one of the countrys most anticipated research reports of the year. The report is made available to the market at no cost.

The youth audience is key to social media in South Africa, says Arthur Goldstuck, CEO of World Wide Worx. When a platform like TikTok, which has deep reach among those aged under 15, breaks through to this extent in the older youth market, as well as among young adults, we can see the landscape undergoing a significant shift.

The study highlights the correlation between social media platforms' popularity and the proportion of highly active users. Facebook emerges as the leader, with nearly 8 out of 10 users being highly active. TikTok and Instagram exhibit similar levels of user engagement, while LinkedIn has a relatively small proportion of highly active users. This distinction implies that platforms like Facebook, TikTok, and Instagram are deeply integrated into users' lifestyles, whereas LinkedIn is more closely associated with their workstyles, says Goldstuck.

Another significant insight from the study is the impact of privilege on social media usage. Across most platforms, there is a strong correlation between race, socio-economic level (SEL), and general usage, as well as highly active usage.

This observation serves as a reminder to South Africans on social media to acknowledge their privilege and serves as a key theme throughout the report's analysis of individual platforms., says Goldstuck For example, TikToks one weakness is the extent to which its penetration is correlated with socio-economic level (SEL).

At the highest level, SEL 1, TikTok has massive penetration, at 57% of this population segment. It drops off steadily to 28% at SEL 8, and then almost vanishes, with the two lowest SELs seeing below 8% penetration.

This partly tells us that TikTok and privilege go hand in hand, across all population groups.

Meanwhile, the industry survey conducted as part of study, among more than 100 of the countrys biggest brands, revealed that Twitter experienced a significant decline in the percentage of major brands using it as a marketing platform, dropping from 69% to 63%, compared to a high of 88% in 2019.

Says Oresti Patricios, CEO of Ornico: One of the big shifts measured in the survey was in the proportion of companies at the highest spend category and those at the lowest. Almost the exact percentage of decline in those spending more than R50,000 a month, a 9% drop from 22% down to 13%, was applied to the increase in the lowest category.

The survey saw a 10%, rise from 54% to 64%, in the percentage of those spending less than R10,000 a month. Interestingly, this coincided with a similar rise in the proportion of companies using social media as a means to lower cost of communications, from 20% to 27%.

On the question of whether social media brought brand returns, the positive response remains rock-steady at 65%, says Patricios.

When asked to specify returns, one stood out above all others: Brand awareness. While it did lead the way last year, at 60%, it thoroughly dominated, with 91% citing this benefit.

The industry survey offers valuable insights into the changing dynamics of social media in South Africa. As brands navigate the evolving digital landscape, understanding these trends is crucial for developing effective marketing strategies and maximizing their online presence.

Among other, Patricios warns in the introduction to the South African Social Media Landscape 2023 report that artificial intelligence (AI) holds the potential to hand control of social media to bots.

As we witness the increasing integration of AI-based technologies into every facet of our online existence, we are inadvertently surrendering the right to our internet freedom to unconscious algorithms, he says. Once a space where the human touch prevailed, social media now veers toward a future where we engage with bots, moderated by bots, and our very opinions are shaped by bots.

To watch the report launch webinar visit https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i0bvW2Cjqrk

Media contacts:

Relebohile Kobeli, Head of Marketing OrnicoGroup

Landline: +27 11 884 5041

Email: az.oc.puorgocinro@KelihobeleR
A groundbreaking collaboration between two South African powerhouses to present a reimagined platform that has no equal.

Relativ Connect, a level 1 BEE company specialising in innovative advertising solutions, has joined forces with Oasis Digital Networks, a progressive group known for curating cutting-edge digital platforms. Together, they are proud to announce the launch of the new DigiMax digital screen network across the Shell & Vivo Network that is set to transform the advertising landscape in South Africa and beyond.

The largest digital screens available in this space, positioned prominently at the entrances of the convenience stores, offer a landscape orientation impossible to miss. This strategic placement, together with an average dwell time of almost five minutes, ensures maximum visibility and engagement to a wide range of audiences. Whether it's customers fuelling up their vehicles or pedestrians passing by, the captivating digital displays will capture attention and deliver impactful brand messages.

Importantly, with back-up power to supply all screens, this network will remain always on! Furthermore, our team have equipped the network with the requisite tech and onboarded all assets to enable the network to be bought programmatically, ensuring line of sight and ease of acquisition.

Relativ Connect brings its extensive expertise in curating both roadside, in-mall digital and static advertising solutions. With an impressive portfolio thus far, the Relativ team has established itself as a forward-thinking player in the industry. Through their collaboration with Oasis Digital Networks, Relativ Connect aims to take their advertising solutions to new heights.

The Oasis Group is renowned for its successful track record in developing digital platforms across the continent, including the Digi Max Network, with over 50 forecourts already equipped with digital screens in South Africa and 35 forecourts throughout Africa, Oasis Digital Networks has established a strong presence in the market and continues to rapidly add to this network.

"This partnership represents an exciting step forward for both companies. We are thrilled to collaborate with Oasis Digital Networks to introduce a transformative advertising solution that will captivate audiences and drive results," said Sijadu Mzozoyana, CEO of Relativ Connect. "Our shared vision for innovation and commitment to excellence will undoubtedly shape the future of advertising in South Africa and beyond."

Joining forces with Relativ was a logical decision as it allows us to leverage our collective years of experience and expertise to foster the growth of our business together. We eagerly anticipate our collaborative expansion, solidifying our position as the foremost leader in our industry, said Reinhardt Hanel, CEO Oasis Digital Networks.

The forecourt digital screen network promises to deliver unparalleled advertising opportunities for brands, providing them with an impactful platform to engage with their target audience. Advertisers can look forward to harnessing the power of dynamic digital content and captivating visuals to create memorable brand experiences.

Stay tuned for more updates as Relativ Connect and Oasis Digital Networks continue to revolutionise the advertising industry with their dynamic forecourt digital screen network.




Apple Inc become the first company in the world to reach a market value of $3tn, buoyed by hopes over its expansion in new markets coupled with expectations of a more moderate approach to interest rate hikes by the Federal Reserve.

An Apple logo is pictured in an Apple store in Paris, France on 17 September 2021. Reuters/Gonzalo Fuentes

The iPhone maker's advance was among the most eye-catching in a month marked by investor interest in the potential of artificial intelligence, with share buyers also particularly favouring companies with strong balance sheets and cash flows.

Apple's most recent quarterly report in May showing its revenue and profits beat analysts' expectations, and its track record of stock buybacks reinforced its reputation as a safe investment during global economic uncertainty.

In a similar vein, electric car maker Tesla Inc witnessed a 28% jump in its market capitalisation in June.

Tesla's surge was fuelled by deals struck by rivals Ford Motor Co and General Motors Co to gain access to Tesla's charging network, which could potentially establish Tesla's chargers as the industry standard.

Elsewhere Nvidia Corp joined the $1tnvaluation club last month, as its market cap climbed 11.8%, with investors betting on its potential to become a major beneficiary of a boom in artificial intelligence.

The company's shares have soared following a revenue forecast that was more than 50% above the Wall Street estimate in May.

Apple and Microsoft Corp led the list of top 20 global companies by market capitalisation at the end of June.

By contrast, Alphabet Inc's market cap dropped 2.3% last month to $1.53tn, on rising competitive pressures from Microsoft's Bing which has grown in prominence after the integration of the artificial intelligence behind ChatGPT.
From left, actors America Ferrera, Margot Robbie and director Greta Gerwig pose during a press conference held at Four Seasons Hotel Seoul in Seoul, Monday



By Kwak Yeon-soo



Director Greta Gerwig and the cast of "Barbie" (2023) said the film is not only tremendously funny and silly but also moving and thought-provoking.



The film follows Barbie (Margot Robbie) and Ken (Ryan Gosling) as they venture out of "Barbieland" to explore the real world, and as a consequence, they encounter various obstacles along the way.



Margot Robbie, who plays the lead heroine and was also a producer on the film, talked about playing a character who grows past the stereotype of Barbie and delves into her inner life and complications.



"It's important to see that real-life women and imaginary representations of women are both connected in this impossible pursuit of being everything all at one  sometimes you're expected to be a great mother, coworker, sister, person ... There's a part where Gloria (played by America Ferrera) vocalizes how impossible and contradictory that is," she told Korean reporters during a press conference held at the Four Seasons Hotel Seoul in Seoul, Monday.



Ferrera, who plays the human character Gloria in the film, said her key takeaway from the film is self-celebration and self-actualization.



"We all know Barbie is fun and aspirational Barbie doesn't exist without women. I'm grateful that Greta decided to tell this film through the eyes of a grown human woman. I knew that with Greta and Margot, it wasn't going to be just fun, bright, entertaining film. It's also going to be something that needs you thinking and feeling," she said.



Gerwig, who co-wrote and directed "Barbie," said she was both excited and terrified when she decided to take on the project upon Robbie's request.



"It was a combination of excitement and terror, and part of me thought this could be great. I was very excited to work with Margot because the work she's done not just as an actor but also as a producer was so amazing. I was terrified because it's Barbie  something that's known all over the world and so many people have opinions about her," she said.





A scene from the film "Barbie" / Courtesy of Warner Bros. Korea
During this weeks Summer Davos conference in Tianjin, China, The World Economic Forum (WEF) quietly partnered on multiple discussion forums with the China Central Television Network, a state media operation that reports directly to the Chinese Communist Party (CCP)'s Central Propaganda Department.

Over the course of this week, WEF panelists (including World Economic Forum leader Klaus Schwab) have been lavishing praise upon the Chinese government for its ruthless lockdowns in Wuhan, in addition to its authoritarian financial censorship policies and its infamous Social Credit Score system.

WEF-China recap: Klaus praises Wuhan lockdowns, speakers call for 'public-private' partnership on CBDC.

Similar to the annual WEF confab in Davos, any dissent from the prevailing narratives is forbidden, and debate is a cancel-worthy sin. Davos acts as a reinforced ruling class echo chamber in which there is one problem, one objective, and only one solution. Regardless of who populates these panels and speeches, whether its invited corporate media, governmental officials, and/or business executives, theres never any dissent or difference of opinion expressed.

At Summer Davos in China, the Party line is enforced even further. Not only are the WEF-invited panelists acting as bootlickers for the CCP, some of the hosts of the discussion forums at Summer Davos report directly to the Chinese Communist Party.

For example, in a Thursday panel titled, China's Economy: The Big Rebound? a note below the panel reads, This session was developed in collaboration with China Central Television Network.

According to Freedom House, China Central Television Network (CCTV) exists to attack designated enemies of the Communist Party. Moreover, the broadcaster is known to build local audiences with attractive and innocuous content so that it can be mobilized at key political moments to attack CCP opponents.

The host of the Word Economic Forum panel is a broadcaster named Tian Wei, who also happens to be credentialed as a WEF Young Global Leader, according to her Twitter account.

Another Tuesday Summer Davos panel on The Future of the Belt and Road Initiative was developed in collaboration with CCTV. That followed a climate hoax discussion held in partnership with Phoenix TV, an additional state-controlled outlet.

On Wednesday, the WEF partnered with YICAI Media Group on a panel that discussed Sustainability Reporting: Best Practices from Asia's Champions. In 2020, YICAI was designated by the Trump Administration as a foreign mission and CCP propaganda outlet.

Of course, the Western corporate media has plenty of problems, but there are at least some degrees of separation between the media and the state. At Summer Davos, World Economic Forum leaders are doing the direct bidding of the CCP, with the assistance of some of their top propagandists in state-media.
Ice Cube was one of the founding members of the iconic rap group NWA. This gansta rap project was controversial due to its glorification of drugs, violence, police brutality, and the hypocrisies of American politics. One of his bandmates also happened to have succumbed to Faucis AIDS.

Ice Cube is most certainly aware of the sordid history of Native Americans receiving smallpox-infected blankets, as well as the Tuskegee Experiment, etc.

SARS-CoV-2 is a Targeted Eugenics Bioweapon: Racial/Ethnic Variation in Nasal Gene Expression of Transmembrane Serine Protease 2 (TMPRSS2) 2ND SMARTEST GUY IN THE WORLD  SEPTEMBER 22, 2022 The virus was created for the DEATHVAX, but before the later was deployed the former was not only targeting older and unhealthier demographics, but especially the black populations.This substack is a daily battle against evil. Please consider becoming a paid subscriber: its 8 cents a day. Read full story

Ice Cube explained that the Hollywood Studios applied pressure on individual producers through their unconstitutional and unconscionable mandates. Said producers attempted to leverage Ice Cube into taking the slow kill bioweapon DEATHVAX.

He flat out categorically refused the producers demands that he get the vaccine, and went on to explain that he deliberately did not want to publicly disclose this matter.

He added that Hollywood purposely leaked this information about him in order to generate a pro-vaccine news cycle at his expense, while making an example out of him as the stupid anti-vaxxer that lost out on a $9 million dollar windfall.

These Hollywood quislings attempted to put him out of business, and pressure him to get the DEATHVAX in order for him to do the movie. Ice Cube said if they offered him even $20 million it would not have changed his decision.

Joe Rogan then chimed in that if he had developed a vaccine injury, then that money would not have meant anything, to which Ice Cube wholeheartedly agreed.

They then went on to have a fascinating discussion on vaccine injuries in general, illegal firings, corporate conglomerates, ESGs, Bud Lite, Target, and the CIAs Mockingbird MSM to control minds and bodies.

Ice Cube also shared his views on the importance of judicious and strategic application of noncompliance in the face of tyranny.

Must see:

Free speech absolutist fraudster Elon Musk is still blocking Tweets in Substack. Please click the image to watch.

If only NWA were to reunite just to produce a hardcore track on all things PSYOP-19.

Do NOT comply.
From right, Hana Financial Group Vice Chairman Lee Eun-hyung, Indonesian Ambassador to Korea Gandi Sulistiyanto and BINUS University Vice President George Wijaya pose during an MOU signing ceremony at Hana Financial Group headquarters in downtown Seoul, Friday. Courtesy of Hana Financial Group



By Lee Yeon-woo



Hana Financial Group signed a memorandum of understanding (MOU) with BINUS University, one of the top private universities in Indonesia, to nurture global experts for the financial industry, according to the group, Monday.



Under this agreement signed at the group's headquarters in Seoul, Friday, Hana Financial Group will offer internship opportunities to Indonesian students starting in the second half of this year.



These discussions began after Financial Supervisory Services Governor Lee Bok-hyun and Hana Financial Group Chairman Ham Young-joo launched an IT academy in Indonesia in May. The academy, led by Hana, provides scholarships and internships for local students who major in IT.



Since then the group has been cooperating closely with Indonesian Ambassador to Korea Gandi Sulistiyanto and embassy officials.



Student interns from BINUS will be expected to rotate through various departments and branches of Hana related to global affairs, and receive mentorship from Hana employees. Outstanding interns are anticipated to receive scholarship support until the completion of their undergraduate studies and to be offered employment benefits at Hana's Indonesian subsidiary.



"Hana Financial Group has been making continuous efforts for 33 years since we entered the market in 1990 to contribute to Indonesian society, including offering scholarships to approximately 1,000 students in the country," Hana Financial Group Vice Chairman Lee Eun-hyung said. "We will continue to write the story of a finance that seeks mutual benefits, growing together with global experts through generous support and closer cooperation."



"Today's event is a significant occasion where the ideas we shared with the financial authorities of both countries in Indonesia last May have been realized," Sulistiyanto said. "I will do my best to ensure that such good results continue to be produced."



Meanwhile, Hana Financial Group announced plans to expand cooperation with universities in Indonesia, such as Universitas Indonesia and Institut Teknologi Bandung, the co-organizers of the IT academy in Indonesia.




An undated photo of indigenous Light Combat Aircraft (LCA) Tejas. On July 1, 2023, the indigenous Light Combat Aircraft (LCA) completed seven years of service in the Indian Air Force. Photo: PTI/PRO (DEFENCE)

NEW DELHI (PTI): The Indian Air Force is expected to get deliveries of Light Combat Aircraft Tejas MK-1A from February next year, and the new variant of the indigenously-built jet will be capable of firing a plethora of weapons, including beyond visual range missiles, the Ministry of Defence has said.



As the jet completes seven years in service in the IAF, the ministry said the aircraft and its future variants will form the mainstay of the Indian Air Force (IAF).



In February 2021, the ministry sealed a Rs 48,000 crore deal with state-run aerospace major Hindustan Aeronautics Ltd for procurement of 83 Tejas MK-1A jets for the IAF.



Tejas is a single-engine multi-role fighter aircraft capable of operating in high-threat air environments.



Egypt, Argentina, the US, Australia, Indonesia, Malaysia and the Philippines are among the countries showing keen interest in procuring Tejas aircraft.



On last Saturday, the Light Combat Aircraft (LCA) completed seven years of service in the IAF.



"The confidence that the IAF reposes in the Tejas is borne by its order for 83 LCA MK-1A," the ministry said.



The ministry said the LCA MK-1A will have "updated avionics as well as an active electronically steered radar, updated electronic warfare suite and a beyond visual range missile capability."



"The new variant will be capable of firing a plethora of weapons from increased stand-off ranges. Many of these weapons will be of indigenous origin. The LCA MK-1A will see a substantial increase in the overall indigenous content of the aircraft," the ministry said.



It said the deliveries of the aircraft are expected to commence in February 2024. Tejas has been designed to undertake the air defence, maritime reconnaissance and strike roles.



The ministry said Tejas offers carefree handling and enhanced manoeuvrability, and that this capability is further enhanced with its multi-mode airborne radar, helmet mounted display, self-protection suite and laser designation pod.



The first IAF squadron to induct the Tejas was No 45 squadron, the 'Flying Daggers'.



Over the years, the squadron progressed from Vampires to Gnats and then onto the MiG-21 Bisos, before being equipped with its current steed.



Each of the aircraft flown by the Flying Daggers has been manufactured in India -- either under license production or having been designed and developed in India.



In May 2020, No 18 Squadron became the second IAF unit to operate the Tejas.



The IAF has showcased India's indigenous aerospace capabilities by displaying the aircraft at various international events, including at Dubai Air Show in 2021, Sri Lanka Air Force anniversary celebrations in 2021, Singapore Air Show last year and Aero India Shows from 2017 to 2023.



Whilst it had already participated in exercises with foreign air forces domestically, the exercise Desert Flag in the United Arab Emirates in March was the Tejas' maiden exercise on foreign soil.


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Postal Code
A panoramic view of Korea's largest financial district of Yeouido in Seoul / gettyimagesbank



By Lee Min-hyung



Brokerage houses are accelerating the closures of sales offices, as part of efforts to cut fixed costs and focus business on the wealthy, data showed Monday.



According to data from the Financial Supervisory Service (FSS), the number of sales offices operated by securities firms here has been rapidly declining for the past few years. The figure came in at 1,070 in 2016, but fell to 799 as of the end of 2022. But the number is forecast to decline further amid the rise of mobile stock transactions.



KB Securities plans to shut down six sales offices in Seoul this month alone, to realign its sales channels to focus on wealthy customers by operating a few large offices. Other brokerages are taking similar steps in line with shifts in sales strategy.



A large portion of retail investors utilize securities firms' mobile trading platforms. So firms are adjusting their focus to offer customized wealth management services through sales offices that primarily target the wealthy.



Other data from the Korea Financial Investment Association showed that Samsung Securities had the greatest decline in its sales offices for the past year. As of the end of March this year, the company operated 29 offices, down by more than 30 percent from a year ago.



"The market environment has rapidly changed during the pandemic era when more retail customers jumped into a buying spree of local stocks via mobile trading systems from each brokerage house," an official from a brokerage house said. "The trend remains in place even after the pandemic. For now, securities firms are focusing more on maximizing sales efficiency amid unstable stock market sentiment and growing woes of recession."



Even if the shutdown of sales offices sparked concerns that the elderly  who are not accustomed to mobile trading  will fall victim to the sales practice change, some securities firms are offering services  such as operating online consultation via mobile devices.



Other financial sectors are also slashing their offline sales channels for a similar reason. Data from the FSS showed that the number of banks' sales offices reached 5,804 as of the end of 2022, down by 294 from a year ago.



"More sales offices will lose their ground to online channels due to the rapid rise of internet-only banks or securities firms' and customers' growing preference for mobile transactions," the official said.




The UK's media watchdog has launched a new broadcast standards investigation into an episode of Jacob Rees-Moggs GB News show which addressed a court case involving Donald Trump.

Ofcom said it received 40 complaints objecting to the Conservative lawmaker acting as a newsreader during his State Of The Nation show on May 9th as British politicians are prevented from this role unless it is editorially justified.

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The investigation will look at whether the GB News programme abided by these guidelines when it reported on a civil trial verdict reached that day on the former US president.

Jacob Rees-Mogg in the studio at GB News during his new show Jacob Rees-Moggs State of The Nation. Photo: Stefan Rousseau/PA.

An Ofcom spokesperson said: We are investigating whether this programme broke our rules, which prevent politicians from acting as newsreaders, unless exceptionally, it is editorially justified.

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The regulator will also investigate an episode of Talk TVs Richard Tice presented by the leader of the Alba Party Alex Salmond on April 2nd.

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Ofcom has said it received two complaints regarding the impartiality of the programme, specifically in relation to a discussion on whether the SNP was holding back the course of independence.

Alba party leader Alex Salmond. Photo: Robert Perry/PA.

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A spokesperson said: We are investigating whether this programme broke our rules requiring news and current affairs to be presented with due impartiality.

The media regulator added that it is still investigating an edition of GB News Saturday Morning With Esther And Philip broadcast on March 11th which stars the husband-and-wife duo (Esther McVey and Philip Davies) who are both serving MPs.

The Ofcom rules surrounding politicians presenting programmes were first introduced in 2005.

The media watchdog has said that they are conducting new research to gauge current audience attitudes into current affairs programmes presented by sitting politicians given the rise in the format.

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This report will be carried out by a research agency and Ofcom aim to publish the findings later this year.
The Attorney Generals new litigation principles for public bodies have been cited by two local residents to bolster their argument that An Bord Pleanala should concede in their challenge to its permission for a 40 million Chinese-backed meat factory in the Midlands.

The High Court was on Monday told that Desmond Kampff and Gwen Wordingham have called on the planning board to concede in their case on the basis that it stopped contesting a similar point in another judicial review planning action.

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The boards counsel, David Browne, said it seems to be the applicants position that the board, as an arm of the State, has some duty to concede in the case based on the Governments State litigation principles issued last month by Attorney General Rossa Fanning.

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The board does not accept that it should concede in this case and wants an opportunity to respond to the applicants latest points, Mr Browne added.

Among the 15 principles drafted by Mr Fanning is one stating that public bodies should be consistent across claims.

Speaking last month, Mr Fanning said the State should act in the public interest and consider the broader public interest before taking certain procedural steps in litigation.

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The guidelines, he said, do not create rules of law, do not have any binding legal effect and are not intended to radically change how the State conducts litigation.

Meat processing plant

In their judicial review case, Mr Kampff and Ms Wordingham, represented by barrister John Kenny, instructed by FP Logue solicitor Eoin Brady, say they are critically concerned about the potential environmental impacts of the proposed processing plant at a site 3km southeast of Banagher, Co Offaly.

The facility would discharge its domestic and wastewater into the nearby Feeghroe stream which, they say, does not have the capacity for this.

Banagher Chilling Limited was granted permission by An Bord Pleanala in June 2022 to expand a pre-existing disused plant. This came on an appeal lodged by Mr Kampff and Ms Wordingham against Offaly County Councils grant of permission.

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The new facility will have the capacity to slaughter 36,000 animals a year.

An Bord Pleanalas inspector found the development proposed by Banagher Chilling Limited would not be likely to have a significant negative environmental impact in terms of climate.

However, Mr Kampff and Ms Wordingham, who have separate addresses in Banagher, claim it was not open to the board to make this finding as, they say, the evidence demonstrates that the additional biochemical oxygen demand levels would be sufficient to render the adjacent Feeghroe stream incapable of attaining good status.

The discharge would also lead to significantly elevated nitrogen levels, they allege.

The board could not have arrived at its conclusion that there would be no significant environmental effect in circumstances where the adjacent Feeghroe stream has not been assigned a quality status by the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA).

The applicants also allege invalidity occurred because the Environmental Impact Assessment (EIA) report was allegedly not uploaded onto the boards website.

The pair say the permission breaches a section of the Water Framework Directive and surface water regulations.
An Irish tourist has been arrested on suspicion of murder after his partner was strangled to death at a hotel in a Spanish holiday resort.

Police have confirmed they held the 30-year-old man on Sunday night after rushing to a hotel in the Costa Dorada resort of Salou 105km south of Barcelona and finding her lying lifeless in a corridor.

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Her alleged killer, discovered beside her with a self-inflicted wrist wound, was taken to hospital where he remained under police guard on Monday morning.

Sources close to the investigation have confirmed the arrested tourist is Irish, as is the 36-year-old woman he is suspected of strangling to death.

Tanaiste Micheal Martin expressed shock and sadness at the death and said the Department of Foreign Affairs was providing consular assistance.

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He told RTE radio's News at One: It is very shocking news that a young woman should be killed in a violent manner like this. We await further news in respect of that.

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Our department officials are providing consular assistance there to the family and doing everything we can to help those impacted by that terrible event in Spain.

Sources in Spain indicated the pair, thought to be from Dublin although this has not been confirmed by officials, were understood to be partners and were sharing the same hotel room.

He allegedly used a cord to strangle her.

Trying to escape

A hotel worker is said to have found the victim in one of the corridors trying to escape her suspected killer, according to a local report.

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Staff at the adult-only four-star Magnolia Hotel in Salou where the horror incident occurred said they were unable to make any comment.

The alarm was raised around 9.30pm on Sunday night. Salou is part of the Catalan province of Tarragona.

The incident took place in the Costa Dorada resort town of Salou, which is popular with Irish tourists. Photo: AFP via Getty

A spokesman for the regional Mossos dEsquadra police force said: Officers from the Mossos d'Esquadras Criminal Investigation Decision in Tarragona have arrested a man allegedly related to the violent death of a woman in Salou last night.

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The events occurred around half past nine when the Mossos received a warning from a hotel in Salou saying a woman was seriously injured.

When they arrived at the scene, the officers found a woman lying on the floor and a man next to her with a self-inflicted wound.

Although emergency medical responders tried to revive the woman, they were finally only able to certify her death.

Officers arrested the man as the alleged perpetrator of the death.

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In an update on Monday morning the police force said the arrested man is 30 years old.

The murder suspect was under police guard at Joan XXIII Hospital in the city of Tarragona, the capital of the province of the same name.

He was later transferred to a police station after being treated for his wounds.

One unconfirmed report said he had severed a tendon in his right wrist.

A spokesman for the Mossos dEsquadra said: He is currently at a police station and the expectation is that he will be handed over to the courts later today.

He is understood to have caused his wrist wound by punching or hitting a pane of glass. Well-placed sources said his injuries were not life-threatening.

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Police have not officially said yet whether they are treating the incident as a domestic violence killing.

 Estem fent el seguiment d'un #feminicidi a Salou Acompanyem @AjuntamentSalou i posem els nostres #serveis a disposicio de la familia i l'entorn de la victima  Cal garantir-los la maxima #privacitat en aquests moments dificils #NiUnaMenys https://t.co/7uWvvNUWds  Igualtat i Feminismes (@igualtatcat) July 3, 2023



However a spokesman for the Department of Equality and Feminisms of the Catalan regional government called the Generalitat has already condemned the crime and is referring to it as a femicide.

The department said in a tweet: We are keeping tabs on the femicide in Salou.

We are working with the town hall and making our services available to the family and close friends of the victim who need maximum privacy at these difficult moments.

Tania Verge, the Generalitats head of Equality and Feminisms, added: Devastated by a new femicide. All our support to the victims family.

Machismo doesnt have holidays. On the contrary when couples spend more time together the risk of suffering violence increases.

Special court

Court officials confirmed a court specialising in violence against women would be tasked with the criminal investigation.

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They also said a secrecy order had been placed over the case, which does not prevent reporting of the incident and ongoing probe, but limits the amount of information civil servants including police can give out to media.

It is a common procedure in the early stages of a case and has the objective of legally safeguarding the ongoing criminal probe.

The accused's court appearance will take place behind-closed-doors, as is normal in Spain where only trials take place in public.

He is expected to be remanded in custody on the orders of a judge while the criminal investigation continues.

Charges would be laid at a later stage if the judge feels there is sufficient evidence against him.

He will be asked at his first court hearing if he wishes to answer questions but has the right to remain silent.

A local judicial official said: Tarragonas Duty Court proceeded last night to order the removal of the body of a woman who suffered a violent death at a hotel in Salou.

The case, which is under judicial secrecy, will be investigated by a court specialising in violence against women.

The victim and alleged aggressor are not residents in Spain and therefore it is not possible at this time to state whether there had been previous episodes of violence involving the couple.
A Laois man has been charged with unlawfully sharing people's personal information, including pictures, from the Garda Pulse computer system.

It follows an investigation by gardai attached to the National Bureau of Criminal Investigation (NBCI).

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Niall Sheehy (58), of Ballinteskin, Stradbally, appeared before Judge Treasa Kelly at Dublin District Court charged with 10 counts of breaking section 145 of the Data Protection Act for disclosure of personal information obtained without authority in 2019.

Judge Kelly heard that the Director of Public Prosecutions directed the case could be dealt with in the District Court only if Mr Sheehy pleaded guilty.

Defence solicitor Tracy Horan said her client would take a certain course, and she was instructed that he would plead guilty.

Judge Kelly held, however, that the case was still too serious to accept jurisdiction, and should be sent to the Circuit Court, which has wider sentencing powers.

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She remanded Mr Sheehy on bail to appear again in September to be served with a book of evidence.

Detective Sergeant Padraic Jennings told Judge Kelly that the accused made no reply to the charges.

Home searched

Outlining the prosecution evidence, he said the NCBI investigated the activities of a member of An Garda Siochana. It led to the search of the home of another man, the accused.

Mr Sheehys mobile phone was seized and subjected to technical analysis.

We discovered a member of An Garda Siochana had forwarded a number of screenshots from the Garda Pulse system to Mr Sheehy, he said, adding it happened on 10 occasions.

The screenshots included pictures and personal information contained on the garda information system.

Detective Sergeant Jennings said the case against Mr Sheehy was that he had forwarded them on to two other people; however, there was no financial reward for the information.

The offence can, on conviction on indictment, result in a fine not exceeding 50,000 or imprisonment for a term not exceeding five years or both.
A 53-year-old man has admitted to laundering tens of thousands in crime cash after his arrest as part of a major garda operation in Limerick, while his partner has seen charges against her dropped.

Before the Special Criminal Court, Dermot McManus (53), Keating Park, Killalee, Co Limerick, pleaded guilty to three charges relating to money laundering offences.

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On June 17th 2020, he handled sums of cash worth 28,550 and 11,795, knowing or believing or being reckless as to whether this was the proceeds of criminal conduct.

Between January 1st 2018, and June 17th 2020, he handled or used money credited to an account in his own name at the Limerick and District Credit Union, knowing or believing or being reckless as to whether it was the proceeds of criminal conduct.

He also pleaded guilty to handling a white Mercedes Sprinter van between June 2nd 2020, and May 23rd 2021.

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The matter has been adjourned to October 16th next for sentencing, while a previous bail condition that McManus observe a curfew between 10pm and 7am has been lifted.

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McManus partner, Terese Halpin (50), of the same address, was charged with possession of the same cash sums and allowing a Permanent TSB account to be used for handling the proceeds of crime.

Dominic McGinn SC, on behalf of the State, said that a nolle prosequi could be entered on these matters, and the charges against Ms Halpin were dropped.

McManus arrest followed what gardai described as a significant development in Operation Coronation, which targeted organised crime in Co Limerick.

At a previous bail hearing for McManus, Detective Garda John Sheahan gave evidence that after a search warrant was obtained for Keating Park in June 2020, 28,550 was found in socks on top of a wardrobe while an amount of cash in sterling was discovered in a jacket pocket.

Det Gda Sheahan said Manus told gardai he had bought the Mercedes Sprinter in Northern Ireland but that the accused's only regular income was a disability payment and that he had never filed a revenue return or paid income tax.

In September 2021, gardai carried out 65 raids in the county as part of the same operation, involving soldiers, detectives, customs officers and over 300 local gardai, with 12 people arrested.
A man threatened to kill his estranged wife's family members and throw acid in her sister's face in a series of WhatsApp voice notes, a court has heard.

By making the threats, the 29-year-year man, who can't be named for legal reasons, was also intimidating two court witnesses - including his wife's brother who he is accused of sexually abusing - Dublin Circuit Criminal Court heard today.

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He and his wife were separated at the time but have since reconciled, John Barnes BL, prosecuting, told the court.

The Dublin man pleaded guilty to seven counts, including making threats to kill or cause serious harm to his brother-in-law, father-in-law and sister-in-law, making threats to damage two properties and two counts of intimidating a witness with the intention of obstructing justice. All of the offending took place on January 19th, 2022.

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He has nine previous convictions including arson and robbery.

The man is currently before the Central Criminal Court in relation to a sexual assault allegation against his brother-in-law and his father-in-law is a witness in that case, the court heard.

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Garda Patrick Browne told the court that on the day in question, the man sent his estranged wife a series of voice messages in which he said he was going to throw acid on her sister's face and make her look like Freddy Krueger and that he would be up on a murder charge in relation to her father and her brother.

I'm going to go to the UK after I rip out one of their throats, the man said, before adding he hoped the woman would send their kids over for an occasional visit. He also said he would petrol bomb one of her relative's homes and go through one of their houses with his Jeep.

In the course of the messages, the man also said he would love to get back with his wife, but he knew that wasn't possible and he wished her a happy life.

The woman alerted gardai who downloaded the messages from her phone. The man was on bail at the time for previous offences and has been in custody since a few days after this incident.

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In mitigation, Justin McQuade BL, defending, said his client had a number of children with his wife. He left school early with no formal qualifications. Alcohol and pill addiction was a big feature of the case, the court heard, and the man has a history of mental health issues and depression.

Judge Martina Baxter said she would order a Probation Services report in order to get some introspection and reflection from the man. She adjourned the matter for sentencing on October 9th.

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.
The number of nights spent by visitors in Airbnb-style accommodation in Dublin has fallen dramatically since pre-pandemic levels, according to a new report by the European Commission.

New figures  with data collated from four major accommodation booking platforms: Airbnb, Booking, Expedia and TripAdvisor  have revealed that the number of bookings for short-term rental accommodation in Dublin last year decreased by almost 60 per cent compared to 2019 levels.

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It is the largest decline recorded by any major city destination for tourists within the EU, according to the latest figures.

The report shows a total of 1,063,270 guest nights in Dublin were booked on the four online platforms in 2022.

Although it represented a doubling of the number of overnight stays compared to 2021 which was badly affected by travel restrictions, last years total is almost 1.56 million fewer guest nights than in 2019, representing a decrease of 59.4 per cent.

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The reduction in short-term rentals in Dublin is higher than the decrease recorded in other popular city destinations including Amsterdam (-54.5 per cent); Prague (-52.4 per cent); Berlin (-38.6 per cent); Budapest (-33.8 per cent) and Rome (-19.3 per cent).

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The figures are likely to raise questions over the crackdown on short-term rental lettings introduced in Dublin in 2019 due to concerns about their impact on the availability of residential accommodation given the housing crisis in the capital.

Property owners within the administrative area of Dublin City Council must secure planning permission to provide short-term or holiday letting, unless it is their own home which they can rent for a maximum of 90 days.

Almost 1,600 properties in Dublin have been investigated for operating suspected illegal short-term lets since the new legislation was enacted.

At a national level, the total number of guest nights in Ireland booked on the four platforms last year was down 23.2% on pre-pandemic levels.

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It was the 3rd biggest percentage drop in short-term lets by visitors among EU countries in 2022 after the Czech Republic and Hungary at a time when overall guest nights booked on online platforms across the EU were up almost 7 per cent on 2019 levels.

The figures show just over 5.3 million overnight stays were recorded across the Republic in 2022 compared to over 6.9 million in 2019.

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Other regions to suffer a downturn in what the European Commission brands platform tourism included the south-west covering Cork and Kerry where guest nights were down 10.8 per cent to 1.2 million  a decrease of almost 146,000.

Overnight stays via booking platforms were also down 10.5 per cent to 988,000 in the west region which includes Galway and Mayo.

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The number of guest nights in the mid-west and mid-east regions were effectively unchanged since 2019 at 486,000 and 316,000 respectively.

In contrast, the number of bookings were up in some parts of the country compared to pre-pandemic levels including the border region which was up 27.8 per cent to over 758,000 guest nights.

Other areas to record an increase were the south-east  up 11.5 per cent to just under 409,000 guest nights  and the midlands where overnight stays were up 10.1 per cent to 85,000.

Commenting on the latest figures, the Irish Tourism Industry Confederation said the overall downturn in guest nights booked on online platforms was not surprising given 2019 was a record year for Irish tourism, while some pandemic restrictions were still in place during the first quarter of 2022.

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However, ITIC chief executive, Eoghan OMara Walsh, said the reduction in use of such accommodation in Dublin was quite significant.

Irish tourism still has a hangover from Covid and overall visitor numbers are still a good bit down on 2019, so were a long way from a full recovery, said Mr OMara Walsh.

He expressed concern about the availability of tourist accommodation given the reduction of supply of one-fifth of hotel accommodation around the country for humanitarian needs to provide housing for Ukrainian refugees and asylum seekers combined with the restrictions on short-term accommodation lettings in Dublin.

It would seem foolish to compound the situation by reducing the stock of short-term tourist lets. At the moment, Irish tourism needs additional capacity and accommodation stock for visitors rather than less stock, he added.

The four international websites for booking short-term rental accommodation have provided data to the European Commission as part of an agreement signed in March 2020.

The latest figures show the overall number of guest nights booked via the four platforms last year was 547 million  up 6.9 per cent from pre-pandemic levels of 512 million in 2019.

However, the report said the overall growth of platform tourism since pre-pandemic times was spread unevenly across Europe.

The highest growth rates in 2022, compared to 2019, were recorded in rural areas of Poland, France, Sweden and Germany but many city destinations including Dublin still lag behind pre-pandemic levels.

Booking rates were up in 12 of the 27 EU countries last year including France, Italy and Spain.
RTE must rebalance its focus away from personality presenters and back to its public service ethos, the Tanaiste has said.

Micheal Martin expressed concern that the culture of the agent had become predominant within the public service broadcaster, to the detriment of the interests of the collective organisation.

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He said there was a need for a root and branch examination of how RTE operated going forward.

His comments come amid the ongoing furore that has engulfed the broadcaster following revelations last month that it under-reported the salary paid to star presenter Ryan Tubridy, failing to disclose 345,000 worth of additional payments to him between 2017 and 2022.

RTE presenter Ryan Tubridy. Photo: Brian Lawless/PA.

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The crisis has since widened amid further revelations about RTEs internal financial, accounting and governance practices.

Many of the issues emerged when senior RTE executives faced an intensive grilling at two Oireachtas committees in Dublin last week.

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Much of the focus has centred on the workings of a UK-based barter account used by RTE to pay for certain services and tickets and trips related to corporate client entertaining. Some TDs and Senators have branded it a slush fund.

Cabinet is expected sign off on terms of reference for a government-commissioned external review into culture and governance at RTE when it meets on Tuesday.

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Minister for Media Catherine Martin is also set to use powers under Irelands Broadcasting Act to appoint a designated auditor to go in and examine RTEs accounts.

RTE operates on a dual funding model, with 55 per cent of its income, 200 million euro a year, brought in by way of a licence fee.

The rest is generated through commercial advertising revenues.

I think we are concerned in terms of how the culture of the agent seems to have been predominant over the collective so to speak, Mr Martin told RTE Radio One on Monday.

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Theres always a balance between the personality, the predominance of personality in broadcasting and in journalism, by definition that is a fact.

But the balance perhaps has clearly gone the wrong way. And in terms of public service broadcasting, I think we need to rebalance that.

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Members of staff from RTE take part in a protest at the broadcasters headquarters in Donnybrook, Dublin (Niall Carson/PA)

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Mr Martin said the pay and conditions of lower earners in RTE also had to be looked at, as he expressed concern at reports of some workers being employed on effectively zero hours contracts.

So I do think this is an opportunity to take a root and branch look at this, he added.

Mr Martin said dividing RTEs funding streams and spending between public and commercially sourced money was complicated due to areas of overlap.

But it is fair to say that many in the print industry and maybe in other channels might feel at times that the commercial revenue is used maybe to unfairly advantage RTE, and thats something that needs to be genuinely looked at, he said.

Mr Martin insisted many of those issues could be addressed by recommendations in last years Future of Media Commission in Ireland.

Speaking about the auditor the Government is set to send into RTE, the Tanaiste said the aim would be to come back with a very clear, transparent picture.

He said there was a need for a strong, coherent governance structure and suggested more formal links between executives and the board, with the former reporting to the latter on a more fixed basis.

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An Independent Senator in the Oireachtas, Ronan Mullen, is pursuing a private members bill in the Seanad that would seek to ensure the highest salary in RTE does not exceed that paid to the Minister for Media, 195,000 a year.

Former RTE director general Dee Forbes quit amid the fallout from the misreported payments scandal. Photo: Niall Carson/PA.

Mr Mullens proposals would also require that any RTE salary equivalent to the pay of a TD, 107,000, would need to be made public.

Mr Martin said he did not favour a pay cap on earnings within RTE.

I would much prefer to look at the pay and conditions of those who are not earning anything like that in RTE and get that right, he said.

The Tanaiste added: Im just slow to go in for the cap. Its simplistic, its popular to say that, but the actual working out of that over time can be actually more problematic than people might think right now.

Minister for Public Expenditure Paschal Donohoe declined to be drawn on whether he favoured a cap.

I would want to know what would be the impact of that in RTE, what would that mean for their ability to deliver on their mandate, he told reporters in Dublin on Monday.

He said that far, far more clarity and transparency was needed around how existing pay policy at RTE was implemented, and said it was not acceptable to the Government, parliament or the TV licence fee-paying public that the wrong information was given to them.

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Asked whether details of RTE finances and accounts going back decades were needed, Mr Donohoe said: Im not sure if decades was warranted. It does appear that were going to need information that did stretch back a number of more years than is currently available.

He also said there was a need for a degree of proportionality in the debate and a degree of balance.

We are going to need an RTE at the end of all of this, we are going to need public broadcasting at the end of all of this, he added.



After the RTE payments controversy, should the TV licence be scrapped?

On Sunday, Ms Martin insisted there were no proposals for staff redundancies or selling assets at RTE.

The statement from her spokesperson came following weekend media reports suggesting the Government was considering several significant cost-cutting steps at the organisation.

On Monday, further newspaper reports suggested RTE was considering selling its studios in Cork.

In response, the broadcaster insisted it was fully committed to its operations in Cork but acknowledged the suitability of the current building for the full range of RTEs operations in Cork is being assessed.

Ms Martin is also due to meet with chairwoman of the RTE board Siun Ni Raghallaigh and incoming director general Kevin Bakhurst in the coming days to discuss the external review.

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Mr Bakhurst is planning to reconstitute the executive board once he takes up his post.

His predecessor as director general, Dee Forbes, quit last week amid the fallout from the scandal.

She had already been due to stand down in July, with Mr Bakhurst taking over.

The parliamentary media committee in Dublin has also invited former chairwoman of the RTE board Moya Doherty, ex-director general Noel Curran, and former chief financial officer Breda OKeeffe to answer TDs and senators questions on Wednesday.
Shinhan Financial Group Chairman Jin Ok-dong speaks during a meeting with employees of Shinhan Life Insurance at the insurer's headquarters in Seoul, Monday. Courtesy of Shinhan Financial Group



By Lee Min-hyung



Shinhan Financial Group Chairman Jin Ok-dong pledged to enhance its internal control system by adopting a management responsibilities map at the earliest possible date.



"All the work processes should be justified by thorough an internal check system for sustainable growth of the group," Jin said during a meeting with employees of Shinhan Life Insurance, Monday.



The documented guidelines are used to improve the internal control systems of major financial companies in developed countries, such as the United Kingdom and Singapore. C-level executives should abide by them to improve transparency of management activities.



"We should move forward to become a more trustworthy financial group by building another level of internal control systems that are safer than demanded by society amid a series of scandals surrounding sales of botched investment products," Jin said.



The remark reflected growing public concerns over repeated financial fiascos sparked by mis-selling of risky investment products and a series of embezzlement scandals involving employees of financial firms.



Last month, financial authorities decided to introduce rules on the responsibilities map. Under the decision, leaders of financial firms should write up a map for their company that specifies responsibilities that each executive should assume.



For instance, the leader of a financial firm should be responsible for any false statements on the map. Based on large commercial banks here, a group of 20 to 30 executives are forecast to be included in the list of executives on the map.



"Shinhan will benefit from the responsibilities map from a long-term viewpoint, even if adopting the rule is feared to weaken our sales capacity, as all the work processes will become stricter following the introduction of the map," a spokesman at Shinhan said.


The fully suspended sentence handed down to a man who dragged his partner by the hair, slammed her head, pushed his fist into her face and screamed abuse at her while subjecting her to "appalling" coercive control was too lenient, the State has told the Court of Appeal.

At Trim Circuit Court in January of this year, James 'Jake' Boles was sentenced to two years' imprisonment, fully suspended, by Judge Orla Crowe for one charge of coercive control and five assaults causing harm to his then partner at two addresses in Ratoath, Co Meath, between January 1st 2019 and April 5th 2019.

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His victim (22) waived her anonymity so that Boles (24) of Rathborne Avenue, Ashtown, Dublin 15, can be named.

At the Court of Appeal, Carl Hanahoe BL, for the State, submitted that the sentence was unduly lenient due to the level of physical violence involved, the period over which the offences occurred, the nature and frequency of the violence, the restraint and humiliation of the complainant and the impact the offending had on her.

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Mr Hanahoe said that an "excessive discount" had been applied by the trial judge for the mitigating factors in the case and that she had erred in nominating an "actual sentence" of two years' imprisonment, which was then fully suspended.

Boles' sentence hearing was told that he and his former partner began seeing each other when she was 17 and he was 19. They broke up in 2018 but when they subsequently got back together he became "physically and emotionally abusive" to her.

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The sentencing hearing was told that his assaults included dragging the complainant by the hair along the floor, putting his hand over her mouth while violently screaming abuse in her ear and pushing his fist into her face, causing bruising.

The sentencing court heard that he also pinned her against a wardrobe while smothering her face in his then bedroom at Mill Tree Park in Ratoath, before pushing her down the stairs.

On another occasion he went to her house in Ratoath and smashed a mirror before verbally abusing her and slamming her head against a headboard.

At the three-judge court today, Mr Hanahoe said that "violence is not necessarily a component of the offence of coercion, but it is submitted that it constitutes a significant aggravating factor" in the offending.

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Mr Hanahoe said that the trial judge identified three years' imprisonment as a headline figure before applying a one-year discount for Boles' guilty pleas and for his previous good character.

Mr Hanahoe said there was "evidence in regard of the physical element that was far more frequent than the convictions for assault would suggest".

Counsel said the complainant was subject to "physical abuse on a weekly basis", which was a "dominant feature" in the relationship.

Ms Justice Una Ni Raifeartaigh, sitting at the Court of Appeal, noted that a weekly assault occurring over four months brought the case into a "very serious category".

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Mr Justice John Edwards said the cumulative nature of the assaults and coercion were "appalling" and "very damaging" to the complainant.

Mr Hanahoe said the "pattern of behaviour" should have aggravated the penalty imposed by the trial judge. "It is dominion over another on a persistent basis," he said.

Mr Justice Edwards noted that some of the abuse occurred within the complainant's home, which was constitutionally protected.

Mr Justice Edwards also noted that the woman's victim impact statement was "both poignant and horrendous".

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David Staunton BL, for Boles, said punishment can be applied in "many different guises" but that he would not seek to "deprecate the severity" of the offending.

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Mr Staunton said the question for the Court of Appeal was whether or not the trial judge acted outside her margin of appreciation when coming to a "fork in the road" over deciding on suspending the sentence.

Mr Staunton said the sentence was not a "binary" one that prioritised rehabilitation over punishment as the sentence was suspended until 2027 with "onerous" conditions.

Counsel said the trial judge had held his client's "feet to the fire" in her sentencing while also attending to rehabilitation.

Counsel said the trial judge acted "impeccably", within her margin for discretion and that while the sentence was lenient it was not unduly lenient.

Mr Staunton said he accepted that cocaine had been a factor in the offending but submitted that his client was negative in urinalysis testing and said the guilty pleas had been "hugely valuable" to the court.

Counsel said that his client had since been "publicly shamed" which he said was a "significant penalty" in addition to losing his job as a security guard because of the convictions.

Mr Justice Patrick McCarthy said the purpose of anonymity "is to protect the victim, not your client".

If you have been affected by any of the issues raised in this article, you can contact Womens Aid (24-hour freephone helpline at 1800-341 900, email helpline@womensaid.ie) or Mens Aid Ireland (confidential helpline at 01-554 3811, email hello@mensaid.ie) for support and information.

Safe Ireland also outlines a number of local services and helplines at safeireland.ie/get-help/where-to-find-help/. In the case of an emergency, always dial 999/112.
A Leaving Certificate student who started to sexually abuse his sister when she was eight years old and he was 12 has been jailed for one year.

The 18-year-old man, who cannot be named to protect the identity of his victim, was convicted by a jury at the Central Criminal Court last December of a total of five counts of sexual assault - three on unknown dates between July 2016 and August 2018 at the victim's home in Dublin and two counts on November 2nd 2019 at a restaurant.

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The jury also found him not guilty of one count of rape and one count of sexual assault.

The victim is the defendant's half-sister and was aged between eight and 11 at the time of the offending, while he was aged between 12 and 15. The court heard the defendant continues to deny any wrongdoing.

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A sentencing hearing took place in February and the case was adjourned to allow the defendant to sit his Leaving Certificate exams.

The abuse, which included inappropriate touching, took place in the victim's home, on occasions when her brother was visiting, and at a restaurant on November 2nd 2019. The offending came to light in December 2019, after the girl told her father.

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Imposing sentence, Ms Justice Mary Ellen Ring noted that the mother of the victim and the defendant had passed away when they were both very young.

She said the decision of their fathers to maintain contact between the siblings was the right route to take in normal circumstances, however, neither could have seen the abuse that would arise.

Aggravating factors

She noted that the aggravating features included the victim's young age when the abuse started, its duration and that it took place in her home, which should have been a place of safety for her. She said there had been a breach of trust, and that the victim had suffered a criminal breach of her right to bodily autonomy.

Ms Justice Ring noted the defendant's young age and his co-operation with gardai as mitigating factors. She said the court was concerned that the Probation Service was unable to carry out a risk assessment as the defendant continues to deny the offending.

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She said if the defendant was an adult, she would set a headline sentence of five years, reduced to four years when the mitigation was taken into account.

Ms Justice Ring handed the defendant a two-year-sentence with the final 12 months suspended on strict conditions, including that he place himself under the supervision of the Probation Service for two years post-release.

She said she had reduced the sentence due to the defendant's young age, noting that if this case had been dealt with before his 18th birthday, a custodial sentence would have been the last resort. Ms Justice Ring noted that the jury did not find him guilty of the most serious charge  rape - on the indictment.

Courage

She said the girl deserved great praise for speaking out and finding the courage to tell her father about the abuse. Wishing the girl well for the future, Ms Judge Ring said she had showed herself to be a person of great character, resolve and strength.

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At a previous sentence hearing, a local garda told Philip Rahn SC, prosecuting, that in December 2019, the victim came downstairs and went outside to find her father.

She was in floods of tears and handed a note to her dad which said: Sometimes when he comes to visit, he touches me in my private parts, and on the back of the note, the victim had written, Please dont be mad at me. Her dad was shocked and comforted his daughter, before confiding in family members.

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The garda said the victim was interviewed by specialist gardai, and footage of this was played during the trial. The victim told gardai that on one occasion, she was sexually assaulted twice on the same day, once in her home and once in a restaurant, by her step-brother.

On both occasions, the boy waited outside the bathroom for her and placed his hand into the front of her trousers. The girl described it as touching me in my front on my lady space, where you would do your wee.

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On another occasion, the girl was in her bedroom, and the accused came in, pulled down her pants and started touching her, saying: Im just doing something.

The girl was scared, and he stopped when he heard someone coming up the stairs. The victim also described an incident where the accused went to give her a hug, and they toppled over and fell on a chair.

The accused took his penis out and rubbed it off her, but when he heard someone coming, he stopped and put his penis back in his trousers.

On the final occasion, the victim and the accused were talking, and the accused took out his penis and said, Touch that, and the victim said, No. The accused then wanted her to put his penis in her mouth, but she refused. He asked her: Will you rub it? and put her hand on his penis.

A victim impact statement which was read in court said: My life has changed and not in a good way. Some of my childhood was taken away.

I have a lot of anger for my brother, and I took it out on the rest of my family. The statement finished with: I trusted him because he was my big brother.

The garda agreed with Rodrick OHanlon SC, defending, that his client had been cooperative with gardai during interview.

Mr OHanlon said this court case has been hanging over his client for several years and has had an effect on him and his schooling.

Counsel said his client will now be registered as a sex offender.

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.
Musical star and Broadway legend Idina Menzel said she has a profound connection with the LGBTQ+ community.

The 52-year-old performer  recognisable to millions as the voice of Elsa in Frozen and the original Elphaba in Wicked  added that her friends in the queer community have impacted both her approach to life and her career.

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Theres a profound connection and its quite emotional for me. I look back on my career, ever since 1995 in the Off-Broadway show Rent in New York City, where I played a bisexual woman, Maureen.

[The community] has just taught me so much about the kind of life I want to lead, through their courage and bravery. They choose to live an authentic, honest life, Menzel told PA Media, speaking ahead of her Pride in London performance this weekend.

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I dont feel that my career would be as it is if it wasnt for my friends in the queer community.

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View this post on Instagram A post shared by Idina Menzel (@idinamenzel) Advertisement



As a parent, Menzel said she is keen to raise her son, Walker, to see the importance of inclusivity too. But at age 13, she added that he and his peers are already a step ahead on this front.

My son and his friends dont really need too much [guidance]. Its almost like they dont understand why were having the discussion  their friends are their friends, no matter how they identify, Menzel explained.

I do a good job in my house, but I think its a testament to our kids, and how kids are just born to love each other. Its us, grown-ups that somehow poison that.

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Frozen stars Josh Gad (L), Idina Menzel and Jonathan Groff (Alamy/PA)

LGBTQ+ representation in the media is something she believes is important too.

Its important even more so now. Its about representation and visibility and diversity  the more that people can see themselves in media, the more understanding and empathy there is in society. Its all a snowball effect, and so many more people are vigilant about telling real stories now, said Menzel  who played the mother of Rachel Berry (played by Lea Michele) in musical Fox series, Glee.

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The show marked a significant change in the portrayal of LGBTQ+ characters on screen, featuring openly gay teenager Kurt Hummel (played by Primetime Emmy winner Chris Colfer), years before same-sex marriage became legal across the US.

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On the topic of representation, Menzel added: Especially for our trans youth, I think in this time and this world that were living in, its imperative that they feel represented in our journalism, in our media, in our storytelling, our legislation. And so I think that Glee, Rent and so many shows have led the way.

But we have so much more work to do. Weve made so much progress, and then weve taken so many steps back too.

There has been much speculation among fans on the sexuality of Disney heroine Elsa, a character voiced and adored by Menzel. With a third instalment of the much-loved movies is in the works, does she think more will be revealed?

I do not know the script whatsoever  I only know that we are being asked to reprise our roles for Frozen Three, Menzel said.

I will say that I trust our creative team wholeheartedly. They love Elsa very much and we all would like to see her have a real partner in her life.

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View this post on Instagram A post shared by Idina Menzel (@idinamenzel)



Returning to London to perform at Pride, Menzel said she is excited to be giving something back to the community.

London is one of my favourite cities in the entire world, and Im honoured to be invited to perform because it gives me an opportunity to really express my gratitude to the LGBTQ+ community, to all my friends and family, there and all over the world, she continued.

Having spent several months in London playing Elphaba in Wicked at the Apollo Victoria back in 2006, she said she knows the city and its LGBTQ+ community well  and credited her time here for helping her relax her rigid good girl rules around work.

I cant party too much and sing the kind of notes that I have to sing and do eight shows a week! she said laughing.

[However] on the West End, my British friends and Australian friends taught me that you can actually have a good time after work and still do a good job. It took me a few years in work until I learned that wonderful lesson; that the pub is also good for the soul.

That was not the first big lesson her theatre career taught her about embracing life and doing what you love. On the eve of Rents 1996 debut in NYC, Jonathan Larson, the creator and composer of the show, died suddenly from an aortic dissection  a tear in the inner layer of the aorta  at age 35.

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This loss struck the theatre world and influenced the rest of Menzels life.

The loss of Larson had a profound effect on the theatre world (Alamy/PA)

My career started with this beautiful show called Rent, which is all about not taking things for granted, living in the moment Celebrating who we are, being artistic, having integrity, and a connection to our community, she recalled.

Having lost Jonathan Larson in the middle of all that has set a real precedent for how Ive wanted to proceed and try to live my life, personally and professionally.

Ive learned from Jonathan Larson and Rent that the more we can step out of ourselves and focus on the people we love, the more our perspective changes. So as a mother, it actually liberated me to have a child because it gave me something else to put my attention on other than myself.

As for the influence she hopes to have on her son, Menzel continued: I want him to see a woman doing what she loves to do for a living, and I want him to do that too.

Motherhood for me has been a wake-up call to living. It takes the weight off of being perfect, because when youre a mother, youre handling so many different things.

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If my son gets sick in the middle of the night, Im not going to not hold him, just because Im afraid of getting a cold. Im going to be with my son  and if I get sick, I get sick. If I cant sing perfectly that night, well then thats how it is.

So it takes the pressure off as a performer, as a woman to be perfect, and puts your priorities in order.
Defiant gatherings were held outside town halls across France on Monday following a wave of rioting triggered by the fatal police shooting of a teenager of north African descent.

Here is some key information about the unrest:

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Where are the riots?

There was very little rioting overnight on Sunday and police made fewer than 160 arrests. The previous flashpoints have included the Parisian suburbs, Lyon, Strasbourg, Metz, Nice, Toulouse, St Etienne and Tours.

Is it safe to travel in France

Irish people travelling in France are being urged to exercise caution and be aware of their surroundings.

Who was the teenager killed by police?

The 17-year-old who died last Tuesday has been identified only as Nahel. His mother is Algerian and father Moroccan, according to an acquaintance of the family. He was known to police for previous incidents in which he failed to comply with traffic stops, the local prosecutor Pascal Prache said.

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Nahel died from a single shot through his left arm and chest. Police and paramedics tried to resuscitate him but he was declared dead at 9.15am, Mr Prache added.

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An officer has acknowledged firing a lethal shot, the prosecutor said, telling investigators he wanted to prevent another chase, fearing he or another person would be hurt.

What happened at the traffic stop?

Mr Prache said police spotted a Mercedes driving in a bus lane at 7.55am in the district of Nanterre on the western outskirts of Paris. Police attempted to pull him over at a red light using sirens and lights, the prosecutor added.

But Nahel disobeyed and committed several traffic offences, endangering the lives of a pedestrian and a cyclist.

The officers caught up with the Mercedes in a traffic jam. Both officers at one point used guns to deter him from starting off again and asked him to turn off the ignition, the prosecutor said. When the car made to get away, one officer fired at close range through the driver's window.

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Why did riots unfold?

Nahel's death has fed longstanding complaints of police violence and systemic racism inside law enforcement agencies from rights groups and within the low-income, racially mixed suburbs that ring major cities in France. Authorities deny that.

Even though the police officer involved is under investigation for voluntary homicide and president Emmanuel Macron has condemned the shooting, public anger has spilled onto streets across France. Police made 180 arrests during a second night of unrest into Thursday. Some 40,000 officers were deployed to curb the trouble, 5,000 in the Paris region.

The killing was the third fatal shooting during traffic stops in France so far in 2023, down from a record 13 last year. The majority of victims of such shootings since 2017 were Black or of Arab origin.

What is the history of such unrest?

Like the United States and some other European nations, France has experienced previous waves of protests over police conduct, particularly against minorities.

In 2005, violence erupted in the Paris suburb of Clichy-sous-Bois and spread across France after two teenagers of African descent were electrocuted in a power substation as they hid from police. That unrest convulsed France for three weeks and forced then president Jacques Chirac to declare a state of emergency.
Israeli drones struck targets in a militant stronghold in the occupied West Bank early on Monday and hundreds of troops were deployed in the area, in an attack resembling the wide-scale military operations carried out during the second Palestinian uprising two decades ago.

Palestinian health officials said at least five Palestinians were killed.

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Troops remained inside the Jenin refugee camp early on Monday, pushing ahead with the largest operation in the area during more than a year of fighting.

It came at a time of growing domestic pressure for a tough response to a series of attacks on Israeli settlers  including a shooting last week that killed four people.

Black smoke rose from the crowded streets of the camp as the military pressed on.



Smoke rises during an Israeli raid on the militant stronghold of Jenin in the occupied West Bank (Majdi Mohammed/AP)

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According to Palestinian media reports, the operation disrupted life for local residents, with electricity cut off in some parts and a military bulldozer seen driving through narrow streets  another reminder of Israels incursions during the last uprising.

The Palestinians condemned the violence.

Army spokesman Lieutenant Colonel Richard Hecht said the operation began just after 1am with an air strike on a building used by militants for planning attacks. He said the goal of the operation was to destroy and confiscate weapons.

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Were not planning to hold ground, he said. Were acting against specific targets.

He said that a brigade-size force  roughly 2,000 soldiers  was taking part in the operation, and that military drones had carried out a series of strikes to clear the way for the ground forces.

Although Israel has carried out isolated air strikes in the West Bank in recent weeks, Lt Col Hecht said Mondays series of strikes marked an escalation unseen since 2006  the end of the Palestinian uprising.

While Israel described the attack as a pinpoint operation, videos on Palestinian social media showed a large plume of white smoke billowing from a crowded area, with a mosque minaret nearby.

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Other videos showed a wounded man being taken into a hospital on a stretcher, while another was carried in by a group of men.

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According to official Palestinian news agency Wafa, the military blocked roads within the camp, took over houses and buildings and set up snipers on rooftops.

The agency also said the military cut off electricity in large areas of the camp and that army bulldozers caused damage to property.

The Palestinian Health Ministry said at least five Palestinians were killed and 13 others injured, three of them critically, early on Monday. Lt Col Hecht said as many as seven militants were believed to have died.

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Palestinian health officials said at least five Palestinians were killed in the raid on Jenin (Majdi Mohammed/AP)

In a separate incident, a 21-year-old Palestinian was killed by Israeli fire near the West Bank city of Ramallah, the ministry said.

Our Palestinian people will not kneel, will not surrender, will not raise the white flag, and will remain steadfast on their land in the face of this brutal aggression, said Nabil Abu Rudeineh, a spokesman for the Palestinian president.

The Jenin camp and an adjacent town of the same name have been a flashpoint as Israeli-Palestinian violence escalated since the spring of 2022.

Jenin has long been a bastion for armed struggle against Israel and was a major friction point in the last Palestinian uprising.

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In 2002, days after a Palestinian suicide bombing during a large Passover gathering that killed 30 people, Israeli troops launched a massive operation in the Jenin camp.

For eight days and nights they fought militants street by street, using armoured bulldozers to destroy rows of homes, many of which had been booby-trapped.

Mondays raid came two weeks after another violent confrontation in Jenin and after the military said a rocket was fired from the area last week, which landed in the West Bank.

There has been a dynamic here around Jenin for the last year, Lt Col Hecht said, defending Mondays tactics. Its been intensifying all the time.

But there may also have been political considerations in play.

Leading members of Israels far-right government, which is dominated by West Bank settlers and their supporters, have been calling for a broader military response to the ongoing violence in the area.

Proud of our heroes on all fronts and this morning especially of our soldiers operating in Jenin, National Security Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir, an ultranationalist who recently called for Israel to kill thousands of militants if necessary, tweeted. Praying for their success.



Mondays deaths take the toll of Palestinians killed in the West Bank so far this year to 132 (Majdi Mohammed/AP)

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Mondays deaths take the toll of Palestinians killed in the West Bank so far this year to 132, part of more than a year-long surge in violence that has seen some of the worst bloodshed in that area in nearly two decades.

The violence escalated last year after a spate of Palestinian attacks prompted Israel to step up its raids in the West Bank.

Israel says the raids are meant to beat back militants.

The Palestinians say such violence is inevitable in the absence of any political process with Israel and increased West Bank settlement construction and violence by extremist settlers. They see the intensifying Israeli military presence in the area as an entrenchment of Israels 56-year open-ended occupation of the territory.

Israel says most of those killed have been militants, but stone-throwing youths protesting at the incursions and people not involved in the confrontations have also been killed.

Palestinian attacks against Israelis since the start of this year have killed 24 people.

Israel captured the West Bank, east Jerusalem and the Gaza Strip in the 1967 Middle East war. The Palestinians seek those territories for their hoped-for independent state.
Hong Kong police have accused eight self-exiled pro-democracy activists of violating the territorys harsh National Security Law and offered rewards of one million Hong Kong dollars (100,500) each for information leading to their arrests.

The rewards are the first for suspects accused of violating the Beijing-imposed legislation since it took effect in June 2020. It outlaws subversion, secession, collusion with foreign forces and terrorism.

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The eight activists are former pro-democracy politicians Nathan Law, Ted Hui and Dennis Kwok, lawyer Kevin Yam, unionist Mung Siu-tat and activists Finn Lau, Anna Kwok and Elmer Yuen, police announced at a news conference.

They are currently living in the US, Britain, Canada and Australia after some were earlier accused of various other offenses.



Hong Kong pro-democracy activist Nathan Law is currently living in Britain (Markus Schreiber/AP)

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Steven Li, chief superintendent of the polices National Security Department, said arrest warrants have been issued for the eight under the National Security Law.

He acknowledged that police will not be able to arrest them if they remain overseas but urged them to return to Hong Kong and surrender for a reduction in their sentences.

Mr Li said the new charges and rewards are not intended to spread fear but are merely enforcing the law.

He cited articles of the security law which state that police have extraterritorial jurisdiction, and said they will pursue people overseas who endanger Hong Kongs national security.

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The news conference came less than two weeks after the state-owned Ta Kung Pao newspaper issued an editorial stating that the National Security Law applies to people outside Hong Kong, and that China, as a member of Interpol, can request assistance from other countries in arresting fugitives.

Hong Kong, a semi-autonomous Chinese city, has come under increasingly tight scrutiny by Beijing following months of political strife in 2019. Authorities have cracked down on dissent, with more than 260 people, including many pro-democracy figures, arrested under the National Security Law.

Hong Kongs political system has also undergone a major overhaul to ensure that only patriots loyal to Beijing can hold office.

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The police force said it has evidence that the eight violated the National Security Law.

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According to the warrants, lawyer Mr Yam, former politician Mr Kwok and activists Mr Yuen, Mr Lau and Ms Kwok are accused of foreign collusion for allegedly calling for sanctions against Hong Kong officials.

Former politician Mr Hui is accused of inciting secession, subversion and foreign collusion for allegedly calling for Hong Kong and Taiwans independence on social media, as well as for sanctions against city officials.

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Mr Law, who is currently living in Britain, is also accused of foreign collusion and inciting secession for allegedly calling for sanctions and the citys separation from China in meetings with foreign officials and in open letters, petitions, social media posts and media interviews.

Unionist Mr Mung is accused of inciting secession for allegedly advocating Hong Kongs separation from the mainland.

The New York-based group Human Rights Watch condemned the targeting of overseas pro-democracy activists.

These arrest warrants are not an indictment of these activists, but of Hong Kongs once well-regarded law enforcement and judiciary, said Sophie Richardson, the groups China director.

Democracies should not only flatly reject the warrants, which authorities want upheld internationally, but they should also increase protections to those threatened by Beijing, consider imposing new sanctions, and face the reality that no mainland or Hong Kong authority will respect international legal obligations.
Russias armed forces are bruised but by no means beaten in the war in Ukraine, a top Nato official said on Monday, as he laid out the biggest revamp to the organisations military plans since the Cold War should Moscow dare to widen the conflict.

They might not be 11ft tall, but they are certainly not 2ft tall, Admiral Rob Bauer, chairman of the Nato Military Committee, told reporters. So, we should never under-estimate the Russians and their ability to bounce back.

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US President Joe Biden and his Nato counterparts are set to endorse a major shake-up of the alliances planning system at a summit in the Lithuanian capital, Vilnius, next week.



A US Air Force F-16 fighter takes off from the Spangdahlem Air Base in Germany during last months Air Defender 2023 exercise (Boris Roessler/dpa/AP)

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Nato, as an organisation, does not provide weapons or ammunition to Ukraine and has sought to avoid being dragged into a wider war with nuclear-armed Russia.

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At the same time, however, it is massively reinforcing the security of member countries near Russia, Ukraine and Belarus.

Around 40,000 troops are on stand-by from Estonia in the north down to Romania on the Black Sea.

About 100 aircraft take to the skies in that territory each day, and a total of 27 warships are operating in the Baltic and Mediterranean Seas, with those numbers set to rise.

Under its new plans, Nato aims to have up to 300,000 troops ready to move to its eastern flank within 30 days.

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The plans divide its territory into three zones  the high north and Atlantic area, a zone north of the Alps, and another in southern Europe.

Admiral Bauer said Natos new planning is based on the strength of the Russian army before President Vladimir Putin launched the war on Ukraine almost 17 months ago.

He said the war has depleted Russias army, but not its navy or air force.



A German army Leopard 2A6 tank takes part in the Lithuanian-German military exercise Griffin Storm 2023 at a training range in Pabrade, Lithuania, in June (Mindaugas Kulbis/AP)

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Of Russias ground forces, around 94% is now engaged in the war in Ukraine, he added.

What we see in general is that the Russians are careful around Nato. They are not seeking a conflict with Nato. I think that is a sign that they are very, very busy, he said.

In the land domain, I dont think they have a lot of forces available to do anything to anyone else.

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But we are convinced that the Russians are going to reconstitute.

We will continue to look at them as a serious threat, in the maritime, and in the air especially, and in space, they are still very, very, capable, let alone of course in nuclear.

A revolt by Wagner mercenaries in Russia late last month raised deep security concerns in Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania and Poland after a deal was agreed for their leader, Yevgeny Prigozhin, to be allowed to take refuge in Belarus.

Lithuanian President Gitanas Nauseda said neighbouring countries would face a heightened danger if the Wagner Group deployed its serial killers just over their border.

Vilnius lies around 22 miles (35km) from the Belarus border.

Lithuania wants to have a permanent Nato presence on its territory, and Germany signalled last week that it would be prepared to base soldiers there if requested. For the moment, though, Nato sees no imminent threat coming from Belarus.

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Were confident we know whats going on, and right now we see no changes. But that doesnt take our eye off what we need to do every day, Major General Matthew Van Wagenen told reporters. If we needed to change posture, we could do it rapidly.



A revolt by Yevgeny Prigozhins Wagner Group mercenaries raised deep security concerns in eastern Europe (Prigozhin Press Service/AP)

Natos 31 member countries took part in a force generation conference last week in an effort to understand how many troops and how much equipment the alliance might have at its disposal to respond to any Russian attack, both in the short and longer term.

Both officers were upbeat about the results, although they declined to provide details for security reasons. Experts and some Nato diplomats, however, have expressed doubt about the willingness of member countries to put a total of 300,000 troops on stand-by.

I would classify it as highly successful, Maj Gen Van Wagenen said. I can assure you, we are in a position right now that we know whats missing and how we need to grow this in the future.

In terms of Natos ability to execute the plans, should they be needed in the future, Admiral Bauer welcomed the expected commitment in Vilnius by MNr Biden and his counterparts to boost defence spending, which should help provide commanders with the equipment they need.

In 2014, Nato committed to move towards spending 2% of GDP on their military budgets by 2024.

At their July 11-12 summit, the leaders will set the 2% figure as a spending floor, rather than a ceiling to aim for.
The first specialist unit made up of experts from government, law enforcement and the private sector has been unleashed on scammers to stop people from losing their money.

The so-called fusion cell will be co-ordinated by a new National Anti-Scam Centre. It will identify ways to disrupt investment scams and minimise losses.

Investment cons are responsible for about half of the $1 billion in scam losses Australians suffer each year.

ACCC deputy chair Catriona Lowe says investment swindles are the most reported scams. Credit: Peter Rae

The investment scam unit will operate for six months initially. It will report to the anti-scam centre launched by Assistant Treasurer Stephen Jones in Melbourne on Monday.
The concept of float therapy, also known as sensory deprivation therapy, isnt ubiquitously known, but the idea is simple: you jump into a tank of heated water filled with hundreds of kilos of Epsom salts designed to make the water dense to counteract your weight, and you float.

The first time Queensland tradies Tim Butters and Jeremy Hassell tried it, they were pretty sceptical. But once they got into the water, they were sold. My mind just switched off and I just had this weightless feeling, said Butters. It was the most incredible moment of clarity.

City Cave, a chain of 70 flotation therapy centres founded by two tradies from Queensland, has set up shop in the US.

But their experience was marred after they emerged from their respective float pools to a waiting room furnished with harsh bright lights and uncomfortable chairs. When you come out, you should have your senses reintroduced to the external environments in a really nice, soft, calm way, he said.

It could be done so much better, said Butters, so he and Hassell did. We opened one, and we built it from the ground up because we both come from a trade background, so we literally built it.
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Take away or drink in at this bar-bottle shop hybrid, a home for wild ales, biodynamic wines and cocktails that hero ferments of all kinds.

Brunswick Streets bar scene gets a jolt this week with the opening of Odd Culture, a combined bar and bottle shop focused on wild drinks that occupies a busy Fitzroy corner site.

The 200-square-metre space is set to become a destination for craft beer nerds, Australian spirit fans, and wine enthusiasts whether casual or connoisseur, thanks to its hand-picked range that covers all those bases with equal care.

Snacks include the signature chicken liver parfait doused in fish sauce caramel and topped with potato chips (centre). Simon Schluter

Odd Culture is the brainchild of James Thorpe, who opened a bar in Sydneys Newtown in 2021 to explore fermented drinks of all kinds, especially beers made with wild yeasts and wines that skew natural, organic or biodynamic. The nearby bottleshop sells those hard-to-find drinks for takeaway. In Fitzroy, however, both are under one roof.

Visitors will see people perched on stools drinking in the window before confronting a well-stocked bank of shelves and fridges. The team have brought down 44 kegs of wild ales theyve been collecting for their Melbourne debut, as well as rare wines, some decades old.
China-Africa expo consolidates trade links, builds brighter future

Xinhua) 13:59, July 03, 2023

NAIROBI, July 2 (Xinhua) -- Ethiopian coffee, Madagascar's essential oil, Kenyan flowers and many other products from Africa are becoming increasingly popular among Chinese consumers in Changsha city, an important transportation hub in central China.

The third China-Africa Economic and Trade Expo which kicked off in the city on Thursday brought Chinese consumers products of high quality and low prices and has yielded win-win results. For African producers and traders looking for new export markets, the expo is a golden opportunity.

Over the past two decades, China-Africa trade has been steadily increasing, hitting a record high of 282 billion U.S. dollars in 2022. With the participation of about 1,500 exhibitors, the expo is expected to help China and Africa forge new cooperation and strengthen trade relations.

GREEN CHANNEL FOR AFRICAN PRODUCTS

To help African countries revive their economies after the COVID-19 pandemic, China continues to expand imports of African goods. China is the second largest destination country of African agricultural products. In recent years, the average growth rate of African agricultural exports to China has reached 11.4 percent.

Among the agricultural products, avocado is an example demonstrating the vigorous development of trade between China and Africa. Since last July, Kenya has exported more than 3,000 tons of fresh avocados to China, bringing more income to over 3,200 farmers. Local officials in the East African country expect to increase the exports to 100,000 tons annually in the coming years.

At the 8th Ministerial Conference of the Forum on China-Africa Cooperation in 2021, China announced the establishment of a "green channel" for African countries' agricultural products entering China. Since then, more than a dozen African countries have been given approval to export agricultural products, such as citrus from South Africa and sesame from Tanzania, to China.

Through the China International Import Expo, the China-Africa Economic and Trade Expo, online shopping festivals and other platforms, China has been helping African products enter Chinese and global markets.

Bordering Kenya in the north, Tanzania is the second largest wine producer in sub-Saharan Africa after South Africa.

"The fair will be an opportunity for us to have our wines showcased on an international level, and our company is looking forward to more sales to China," said Archard Kato, managing director of Alko Vintages Company, a Tanzanian wine company that participated in the exhibition in Changsha.

The expo creates great opportunities for the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC), which deems China a "privileged" and "strategic" partner, Congolese External Trade Minister Jean-Lucien Bussa Tongba told Xinhua in a recent interview.

"The DRC government prioritizes the diversification of its economy, which would also be a key message that I would share with Chinese investors. It corresponds to our internal need, the world market's need and certainly the need of the Chinese investors," he said.

According to official statistics, China's new investment in the DRC reached 500 million dollars in 2022, and the trade volume between the two countries amounted to 21.8 billion dollars in the same year. So far, China has granted zero tariffs on about 97 percent of products from the DRC.

VALUE-ADDED PRODUCTS

At the ongoing expo in Changsha, Chinese consumers could taste anchovies from Kenya for the first time. Locally known as "dagaa," the small fish caught in the Indian Ocean were processed, dried and packaged in a factory of Huawen Food (Kenya) Export Processing Zone Limited, a Chinese company based in Kenya's Kwale County.

Abdi Dura, a 30-year-old father of two, was born in a fishing family in a village on the shores of the Indian Ocean. "It is an exciting moment to witness the maiden export of anchovies to the Chinese market," Dura said. "Now that we have secured a new market for the small fish, we expect our income to increase and look forward to purchasing new fishing gear to help improve the volumes of our catch."

Salim Mvurya, cabinet secretary for the Ministry of Mining, Blue Economy and Maritime Affairs of Kenya, said the inaugural shipment of anchovies sourced from local fishermen to the Chinese market was "a historic moment for the country."

The blue economy will open new frontiers for Kenya-China cooperation, Mvurya said.

China has long prioritized poverty reduction and agricultural development in cooperation with African countries. Over the past years, China has sent agricultural experts to Africa and established more than 20 agricultural demonstration centers.

Chinese enterprises have established agricultural cooperative parks and agro-processing plants in African countries, using advanced technology, equipment and experience to help them increase crop yields and establish an agricultural industry.

In February last year, several Chinese enterprises signed cooperation agreements on the construction of preliminary processing plants for rubber, palm oil, cotton and other agricultural products in Cote d'Ivoire and other West African countries.

Now two plants of a Chinese rubber processing factory have been put into operation in Cote d'Ivoire, one of the leading rubber producers in the world, with an annual capacity of approximately 260,000 tons, equivalent to a quarter of the country's rubber production.

Brou Bonaventure, resource supervisor of the Ivorian Interprofessional Fund for Agricultural Research and Advice, said that before the Chinese company came to Cote d'Ivoire, local farmers did not have distribution and transportation channels, and were stuck with large and costly amounts of overstock and had to sell raw materials at low prices. Things are becoming better as the Chinese factory has provided stable and reasonably priced shipping channels for the farmers.

More and more young people working in big cities are returning home, where agricultural production, such as rubber cultivation, brings them more income, Bonaventure said.

CLOSER TRADE LINKS

Over the years, the economic and trade cooperation between China and Africa has witnessed steady progress, with the implementation of a number of projects via platforms such as the Belt and Road Initiative and China-Africa Economic and Trade Expo. Their close trade links have yielded win-win results.

According to China's Ministry of Commerce, China has remained Africa's largest trading partner for 14 consecutive years. The two sides have together constructed and commissioned over 10,000 km of railways, nearly 100,000 km of highways, and an array of important infrastructure including airports, docks, bridges and power plants.

In recent years, China-Africa cooperation has expanded from agriculture, infrastructure and manufacturing to new industries such as green economy, health, finance and digital innovation.

"We see the booming trade as a win-win situation which keeps growing," said South African Ambassador to China Siyabonga Cyprian Cwele. "And the massive growth in bilateral trade has been translated into direct benefits to our people."

Since the beginning of this year, many local governments in China have sent delegations to Africa or held forums on cooperation to enhance contacts with African countries.

Among them, Kenya intends to showcase investment opportunities in diverse sectors like the blue economy, affordable housing, manufacturing, digital superhighway, and agro-processing during the expo in Changsha, said Michael Ogutu, an investment promotion officer at the Kenya Investment Authority, at a promotional conference for the third China-Africa Economic and Trade Expo held last month in Nairobi.

Ogutu said the Kenyan government has created a conducive regulatory environment to attract capital, technology, and expertise from China amid the quest to realize people-centered economic transformation.

In the eyes of Zambian Minister of Commerce, Trade and Industry Chipoka Mulenga, the ongoing expo is a major platform for strengthening economic and trade cooperation between China and African countries.

"This opportunity that China has presented to Africa and many other countries is something that we do not want to be left out of," Mulenga said.

(Web editor: Zhang Kaiwei, Liang Jun)
New CEO of Woori Bank Cho Byung-kyu speaks during his inauguration ceremony at the bank's headquarters in downtown Seoul, Monday. Courtesy of Woori Bank



By Lee Yeon-woo



Cho Byung-kyu, a former CEO of Woori Financial Capital, officially assumed the helm of Woori Bank on Monday. He will serve in the position until December 2024.



As a new head of the bank, Cho vowed to transform it into a "great" institution that "contributes to the country" and is "loved by customers."



"I will focus on advancing the founding philosophy of Woori Bank, which is to support corporate finance and to be a source of strength for the common people," Cho said to reporters during his first day.



"Corporate financing is what I have been deeply involved in during my time in the banking sector," he added. "Considering the national economy's innovation in new growth businesses, we will prepare ourselves to play a role as a commercial bank and become a financial institution that can accompany national development."



During the inauguration ceremony, Cho reaffirmed his commitment to corporate financing. Considered an expert in the sector, Cho has held various significant positions, including sales, strategy planning and management since joining the bank in 1992.



Cho announced his plans to maximize the sector's capacity, which includes launching a new channel dedicated to small and mid-sized corporations and investing in promising new firms.



As part of his official schedule, Cho will begin on Tuesday by visiting corporate customers and vendors near Seoul to gather feedback and insights from the field.



With his inauguration, Cho now faces the burden of improving the bank's performance.



Although Woori Bank achieved a significant increase in net profits in both the previous and current years, it currently ranks fourth among the five major banks in the country. During the first quarter of this year, it recorded a net profit of 859.5 billion won.



Meanwhile, Hana Bank, which has been in close competition, has widened the gap this year and recorded the highest net profit among the top five banks. NH Nonghyup Bank, which had been lagging, showed an impressive growth of 50.6 percent in its net profit during the same period.



Decreases in corporate loans further emphasized the importance of Cho's role, given his expertise in corporate finance. While Woori Bank had the largest overall loan portfolio, it had the lowest growth rate.



"In an era of relentless competition, a 'deep change' is necessary to create new opportunities. We must boldly change outdated customs and methods," said Cho, emphasizing the need to actively create opportunities in non-financial sectors and offer customer-oriented services.


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First came Bistecca and Gidley, serving just the T-bone and rib-eye respectively. Now their new stablemate venue on Bligh Street will champion another specialty cut from the Riverina.

If Sydney didnt already have a steakhouse epicentre, it does now. The group behind market-shaping city steakhouses Bistecca and The Gidley are opening Alfies on Bligh Street, around the corner from Rockpool Bar & Grill and across the road from Chophouse.

Alfies, which opens in September, will continue the Liquid & Larder hospitality groups approach of opening protein-led city venues with a narrow focus.

The fast-paced restaurant will champion the sirloin cut from the Riverina. Its a move the group pioneered at Alfies stablemates, Bistecca and Gidley, known for serving just one cut of steak, the T-bone and rib-eye respectively.

Liquid & Larder co-owner James Bradey promises the sirloin at Alfies will be on customers tables within 15 minutes of ordering. At Bistecca, its cut to order (and thicker), so it takes 40 minutes. By using sirloin, it allows us to be faster  theres no bone to contend with, but the quality is still good.
Investigators are hoping autopsy results will shed light on whether the deaths of two people found within hours of each other in burnt-out cars in Sydney are connected.

NSW Police launched an investigation after a body was found inside a burnt-out car in North Parramatta about 2.15am on Tuesday.

The gruesome finding came just two hours after human remains were discovered in the back of a burnt-out car in a Waterfall car park in the citys south.

Speaking at a press conference on Tuesday morning, Superintendent Barry Vincent said it was too early to tell whether the two incidents were linked.
Opinion pieces from local writers exploring their suburbs cliches and realities and how it has changed in the past 20 years.

Mum moved us from an idyllic childhood in Launceston, Tasmania to the inner-west Melbourne suburb of Braybrook in the early 2000s.

We need to be around more people like us, she said at the time.

Back then  to me at least  Braybrook was a miserable and dull-looking place; the houses were old and run-down with outdated timber facades, some in shades of yellow that looked like decades-old nicotine stains (and probably were). At dusk, an ungodly sewage smell emanated from nearby factories, forcing us to keep our windows and doors firmly shut.

The suburb was infamously dubbed Victorias Bronx and certainly lived up to its nickname, with its high crime rate, unemployment and drug issues often making the news.
London: Hong Kong police are offering bounties worth $HK1 million (AU$192,000) for information about eight activists who fled Beijings security crackdown on the territory for Australia, Britain and the US.

The bounties were offered by Hong Kongs chief superintendent Steve Li for information leading to the arrests of Melbourne lawyer Kevin Yam, who is an Australian citizen, and former Hong Kong legislator Ted Hui who has settled in Adelaide with his family.

Hong Kong political exile Ted Hui has been living in exile in Australia since March 2021. Credit: Eamon Gallagher

I think the bounty is ridiculous and hilarious, Hui said.

It can only be a high-profile gesture without any legal effects.
The Hague: Russian President Vladimir Putins recent comments about payments to the Wagner group was like direct evidence that Wagners mercenaries were an illegal arm of the Russian army in the war, Ukraines top prosecutor has told Reuters.

Putin said last week that Wagner and its founder, Yevgeny Prigozhin, had received almost $US2 billion ($3 billion) from Russia in the past year.

Russian President Vladimir Putin tours an exhibition of promising Russian companies during the forum Strong ideas for the new time in Moscow on June 29. Credit: Reuters

Ukrainian Prosecutor General Andriy Kostin made the comments in The Hague, where he was attending the opening of the International Centre for the Prosecution of the Crime of Aggression on Monday.

Kostin said his office had identified Prigozhin as a suspect during investigations this year and that Wagner fighters were responsible for some of the most serious war crimes since the February 24, 2022 invasion.
Latest News Is commercial lending about to boom? Broker, property adviser discuss whats ahead for the market

Finsure fights modern slavery An estimated 15,000 people live in modern slavery in Australia

Sydney-based director David Henty Sutton had been hit with a life-long ban from providing any financial services, performing any function involved in the carrying on of a financial services business, and controlling an entity that carries on a financial services business, ASIC has reported.

The Australian financial services license of Suttons company, McFaddens Securities, now known by its previous name, APC Securities, has also been cancelled.

McFaddens is a Sydney-based financial services firm that had held an AFS licence since September 2009. Sutton became the firms director in July 2009 and has been the key person on the licence since September 2009.

ASIC said its concerns arose after Sutton made offers of investment in unlisted shares via McFaddens to Australian and overseas investors in companies. The companies included Steppes Alternative Asset Management, Trinus Impact Capital, Avalon Pacific Group (APG) and ASAF Critical Metals and its Australian subsidiary, Aus Streaming.

Sutton has also been disqualified from managing corporations for five years.

ASIC deemed Sutton to not be a fit and proper person to provide financial services, finding that he:

used a misleading, false, deceptive, or dishonest statement to persuade another person/s to deal in a financial product

made false, misleading, or deceptive representations to potential investors in his role as a director of McFaddens and APG

engaged in a misleading and deceptive conduct regarding a financial product

did not take reasonable steps to ensure McFaddens representatives did not accept conflicted remuneration

was involved in and facilitated misconduct by Kristofer Ridgway

Sutton has also been found to have failed to exercise his power and discharge his duty with care and diligence in relation to his directorships of Paltar Petroleum and Aus Streaming, ASIC said.

McFaddens and Sutton have the right to appeal to the Administrative Appeals Tribunal for a review of ASICs decision.
Latest News Is commercial lending about to boom? Broker, property adviser discuss whats ahead for the market

Finsure fights modern slavery An estimated 15,000 people live in modern slavery in Australia

Self-employed lending specialist Rate Money has announced a new product line that has no fees for borrowers and no clawbacks for brokers.

The new product line, Rate Money House Money, is available from July 3 and covers both full-doc and low-doc owner-occupier and investor loans and is available at 30 locations across Australia.

Welcomed by the FBAA, the announcement comes at a time where brokers are experiencing a rise in clawbacks due to increased refinancing levels and cashback offers from banks.

Data from the FBAA between 2018 and 2021 found lender cashback incentives had risen by 59.1%. The research also found the average annual clawback value per annum to a broker had surged by 47.4% over three years from $10,229 in 2018 to $15,077 in 2021.

Rate Money CEO Ryan Gair (pictured above left) said the home lending sector should not be about profiteering and instead should be about transparency and working towards customers best interests without it being detrimental for brokers.

Were incredibly excited to offer this industry-first product line in response to the challenges brokers are facing, ensuring brokers are adequately rewarded for their hard work, Gair said.

We have seen others in the industry offer no clawback lite products, but these have come with a rise in risk fees which negate the benefit of no clawbacks. We have thrown it all out the window for this offering to provide a true no strings attached product line.

Rate Money will not charge any borrower fees, which includes risk, application and valuation fees.

The lender said the FBAA had recognised the importance of fair lending practices and believed that the companys new offering set a precedent for the entire industry.

Peter White, managing director of the FBAA (pictured above right), said as banks increasingly offered incentives that drover borrowers to refinance, many mortgage brokers had felt the brunt of the cost.

We applaud Rate Money for their commitment to fair and transparent outcomes for all and recognise that this is a significant step forward for the industry as it acts in the best interest of the consumer, White said. We want to see other lenders adopt a similar approach.

Launched in 2019, Rate Money now has a network of more than 170 people and has settled more than $5 billion in loans in the space of four years for more than 8,000 clients.

The lender has also previously refused to pass full rate rises onto customers in an effort to remain competitive in the market.

In 2022, Rate Money won the Mortgage Manager category in the Mortgage and Finance Association of Australia Awards and was named a 5-star Mortgage Innovator by Australian Broker.
UB photographers perspective gaining wider audience

University Communications photographer Douglas Levere has been documenting life at UB for years  first as a UB undergraduate interning in University Publications and more recently as photo and video manager in University Communications.

And now his perspective on life at UB is gaining a much wider audience.

Leveres photographs have consistently placed in the Top 10  as high as No. 8  in the Monthly Image Competition (MIC) sponsored by the University Photographers Association of America (UPAA). MIC began in 2004 as a friendly competition through which UPAA members could share their photographs, but has grown over the years to become a way of fostering creative ideas and seeing what others in the profession are doing.

Images are judged by fellow university and college photographers, so winning participants know their images are appreciated and valued by their counterparts at some of the best college and universities around the world, says UPAA President Glenn Carpenter.

The MIC takes place during each academic year, from August through June. Photographers can enter a maximum of four images each month in a variety of categories. Scores from the monthly competitions are added together to determine an overall winner, who is recognized at UPAAs annual symposium in June.

A native of Roslyn Heights on Long Island, Levere received a BA in design studies  a planned special major from the School of Architecture and Planning  in 1989. He launched his photographic career in New York City, working for advertising, corporate and editorial clients. His images have appeared in Newsweek, People, Business Week, Life, The New York Times, Forbes and Fortune, among others.

From 1997-2002, he revisited sites in New York City originally documented by photographer Bernice Abbott in the 1930s, using the same 8x10 Century Universal camera and shooting at the same time of day and year. The subsequent book, New York Changing, was published by Princeton Architectural Press in 2004, and an exhibition of photographs was held in 2005 at the Museum of the City of New York. Both the book and exhibit show the Abbott and Levere photos side by side.

Levere moved back to Buffalo in 2005 and joined Creative Services  now University Communications  as a full-time photographer in 2009. In addition to his work at UB, Levere is also president of Print Collection Inc., a web-based gallery selling fine art prints of commissioned, licensed and public domain imagery.

And in his spare time on winter nights, he often can be found photographing snowflakes in the dark outside his garage. That work has been published in The New Yorker, The Buffalo News and in other blogs and online publications. The first public exhibition of his snowflake photography was shown in 2015 at CEPA Gallery.
Korea Exchange (KRX) Chairman and CEO Sohn Byung-doo, fifth from right, stands with leaders of major securities firms and heads of associations of financial industries at the lobby of the KRX in Yeouido, Seoul, Monday. Courtesy of KRX



By Anna J. Park



The Korea New Exchange (KONEX) market, a local securities exchange exclusive for small and medium-sized enterprises and startup companies, marks its 10th anniversary this summer.



Since its establishment on July 2, 2013, the total market cap of the bourse market has grown by over tenfold to 4.2 trillion won ($3.2 billion) from 400 billion won a decade ago. The number of listed companies has also increased by more than six times to 127 this year, from just 21 back in 2013.



The Korea Exchange (KRX), the country's bourse operator, held a ceremony on Monday to mark the anniversary, sharing achievements of the KONEX market and its future growth direction. Some 150 people, including CEOs of most securities firms as well as heads of financial associations, attended.



"The KONEX market has fully assumed its role as the ladder of growth for startup companies. Ninety-one companies have so far succeeded in transferring themselves to the Kosdaq market during the past decade, while raising over 2 trillion won at the market," KRX Chairman and CEO Sohn Byung-doo said at the ceremony.



"The job creation effect of startup firms is known to be three times larger than the average of local companies. Besides the employment, venture companies are the root of technological innovation, raising the quality of life. They are also the core of the spirit of entrepreneurship and national competitiveness."



Sohn vowed to keep implementing measures to stimulate the bourse by diversifying listing requirements and supporting KONEX-listed firms' transition to other markets like the benchmark KOSPI or tech-heavy Kosdaq.



"With pride and responsibility, the KONEX market has been operated as the exclusive bourse for small and medium-sized businesses and startup companies. We will make sure the market will continue to function as a channel for smooth capital attraction, investment opportunities and incubating entrepreneurship, contributing to building a healthy venture landscape in the country," the chief of the KRX said.


Jewellery retail player Senco Gold Ltd on Monday said it has mobilised Rs 121.5 crore from anchor investors ahead of its initial share sale.

The company has allocated 38.33 lakh shares to 21 funds at an average price of Rs 317 apiece, according to a circular uploaded on the BSE website.

BNP Paribas Arbitrage, Societe Generale, Elara India Opportunities Fund, 3P India Equity Fund 1, Nippon India Mutual Fund (MF), WhiteOak Capital MF, Sundaram MF, Bandhan MF, Jupiter India Fund and Max Life Insurance Company are among the anchor investors.

Senco Gold's Rs 405-crore Initial Public Offer (IPO) comprises a fresh issue of equity shares aggregating up to Rs 270 crore and an offer-for-sale (OFS) of equity shares worth Rs 135 crore by shareholder SAIF Partners India IV Ltd.

At present, SAIF Partners has a 19.23 per cent stake in the jewellery retail chain.

The issue, with a price band of Rs 301 to Rs 317 apiece, will open for public subscription on July 4 and conclude on July 6.

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Of the Rs 270 crore, the company proposes to use Rs 196 crore of net proceeds from the fresh issue towards funding working capital requirements and the remaining for general corporate purposes.

The Kolkata-based firm has 140 showrooms across 13 states and a total of 63 per cent of them are located in West Bengal. It also sells its products through various online platforms and undertakes wholesale exports of its jewellery, primarily to Dubai, Malaysia and Singapore.

IIFL Securities Ltd, Ambit Private Ltd and SBI Capital Markets Ltd are the book-running lead managers to the issue. The equity shares are proposed to be listed on the BSE and NSE.
The Delhi High Court has ruled in favour of Nokia in a patent infringement suit against Oppo and ordered Oppo to furnish security payment of the India portion of the last-paid licence fee.

Though the amount is confidential, it will be 23% of the amount paid under the 2018 License Agreement. This is because Oppo's India portion is 23% of its global sales

Keeping in view the status of Oppo as an ex-licensee, its admission that its phones use Nokias patents, its willingness to renew the 2018 Agreement and make interim payments as late as June 2021, the fact that it has approached a Court in China for determining a FRAND (Fair, Reasonable and Non-Discriminatory (FRAND) rate as well as the consistent practice of this Court and the financial condition of Oppo, this Court is of the view that the impugned judgment is contrary to the facts as well as settled principles of law, the order said.

The issue arises from Nokias appeal against an order of November 17 last year dismissing its application. Nokia also sought a direction to Oppo to deposit interim security of an amount based on either the latest counter-offer made by Oppo for a global licence of Nokias portfolio of Standard Essential Patents or of an amount equivalent to the royalty paid under the (2018 Agreement) proportionate to the ratio of the number of devices sold by Oppo in India vis-a-vis the number of devices sold globally.

Nokia claims that Oppo is the worlds second-largest manufacturer of smartphones having overtaken Apple and Oppos sales in India account for around 23 per cent of its global sales.

Nokia told the court that Oppo had secured a licence for use of Nokias Standard Essential

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Patents in 2018 for a period of three years (expiring on 30th June, 2021) after making a payment under the 2018 Agreement). The said 2018 Agreement was a cross-licence agreement for patents belonging to both parties.

Nokia said that the 2018 Agreement did not include patents relating to the 5G standards and considering that 52 percent of Oppos sales in India and 64 per cent of its global sales consist of 5G devices, any new licence fee would be substantially higher.

Nokia said that after the expiry of the 2018 Agreement, Oppo had witnessed an unprecedented increase in the sale of its devices and during the period between July, 2021 and December, 2022, it sold around 77 million devices in India without paying a single rupee in royalty to Nokia. It claimed that despite its efforts including making itself available for discussions on the technical and economic fronts, Oppo refused to execute a fresh/second licence agreement.

Upon failure of execution of the fresh/second licence agreement between the parties, Nokia moved the Delhi High Court for infringement of its three Standard Essential Patents on the

ground of unlicensed manufacture, sale etc. of cellular devices which comply with 2G, 3G, 4G and 5G telecommunication standards by Oppo.

Nokia contended that sufficient facts and law had been pleaded by it before the learned Single Judge while seeking the protem (for the time being) deposit.

Nokia stated that Oppo had not only admitted to the past licensor-licensee relationship between the parties based on the 2018 Agreement but had also offered to make payments of royalties for a fresh licence. Nokia said Oppo had also filed a case in China seeking fixation of Fair, Reasonable, and Non-Discriminatory(FRAND) rate for Nokias portfolio of Standard Essential Patents.

Meanwhile, Oppo said that bank guarantees have been issued by Oppo in respect of their counter-offers which included a standstill clause for the Non-Standard Essential Patents as well.

Thus, the bank guarantees should be sufficient security for both proceedings, that is in respect of the Standard Essential Patents and the Non-Standard Essential Patents, Oppo submitted.

The court however rejected Oppos contention. This Court is of the view that the Oppo FRAND case in China is a prima facie admission that Nokia does own Standard Essential Patents and that Oppo must necessarily license it against FRAND royalty payment, Justices Manmohan and Saurabh Banerjee said.

The court said that the bank guarantee is encashable only once a FRAND agreement has been concluded and there is a default in payment obligations under the yet to be concluded agreement.

This Court is in agreement with the contention of the learned senior counsel for Nokia that German bank guarantee is a smokescreen as it will only come into fruition once a licence agreement has been signed  i.e., it provides no security at all until a licence agreement is entered into, the order said.

The court said that though German Courts have not expressly assessed the sufficiency or adequacy of the bank guarantee, yet insufficiency of the past bank guarantee is evident from the fact that despite a bank guarantee having been furnished, the German Court has found Oppo to be an unwilling licensee and has permanently restrained it from manufacturing and selling its devices in that country.

It is also interesting to note that pursuant to the order of the German Court, Oppo has chosen to suspend its operations in the German market, rather than take a licence for Nokias Standard Essential Patents. Consequently, this Court is of the prima facie view that Oppo is an unwilling licensee, the order said.
The Centre has scrapped its proposed strategic sale in Pawan Hans after examining the response of Star9 Mobility, the winning bidder for the state-owned helicopter service provider, on an adverse order by a company court.

Star9, a consortium of three companies led by majority owner Cayman Islands Almas Global Opportunity Fund (AGOF), placed a winning bid of Rs. 211.14 crore for Pawan Hans in 2021.



The government put the sale on hold after the Kolkata bench of the National Company Law Tribunal (NCLT) passed an adverse order against AGOF for willful contravention of an approved resolution plan for another company, EMC Ltd, and forfeited its performance bank guarantee of Rs. 30 crore. The government in April issued a notice to AGOF, asking it to explain why its winning bid should not be quashed.



After careful consideration of the response of the successful bidder (Star9 Mobility) to the show cause notice, government has decided that successful bidding consortium is disqualifiedfor not fulfilling terms of preliminary information memorandum and request for proposal under disinvestment," said the Department of Investment and Public Asset Management (DIPAM) on Monday.

DIPAM said the current process, under expression of interest (EOI), for the strategic disinvestment of Pawan Hans stands annulled.



The decision has been taken with the approval of the alternative mechanism on strategic disinvestment (duly empowered by Cabinet Committee on Economic Affairs) comprising Minister of Road Transport & Highways, Minister of Finance and Minister of Civil Aviation. Notably, the government has since 2016 made four failed attempts for the disinvestment of Pawan Hans.



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The government on April 29, 2022, had approved Star9 Mobility as the successful bidder for the sale of its 100 per cent equity in Pawan Hans. After the adverse order by NCLT, a letter of intent (LoI) was not issued in favor of Star9 Mobility. The consortium member filed an appeal against the NCLT order in National Company Law Appellate Tribunal (NCLAT), (principal bench at New Delhi).



NCLAT had dismissed the appeal and upheld the original order of NCLT and directed that the NCLT order be forwarded to the Ministry of Corporate Affairs and Bankruptcy regulator, IBBI for their consideration on initiation of complaint under sections 74(3) and 236 of the IBC. Acting on the instruction, IBBI had filed a complaint against the concerned consortium member in the special court.
Hinduja group firm IndusInd International Holdings Ltd (IIHL), the promoter of IndusInd Bank, announced on Monday its plans to raise $1.5 billion (about Rs. 12,300 crore) to increase its stake in the lender to 26 per cent from the current 15 per cent as well as fund its proposed acquisition of debt-laden Reliance Capital.

IIHL said in a statement that the strategic decision of its board opens boundless opportunities to expand its business horizon in India and other global geographies in the banking, financial services and insurance (BFSI) sector. Our aspirations will not be capital constrained as raising capital for IIHL is not an issue at all, Ashok P Hinduja, chairman of IIHL, was quoted as saying in the statement.



The promoters of IndusInd Bank are eligible to increase their shareholding in the bank, subject to the assessment of fit and proper status by the Reserve Bank of India (RBI). Accordingly, the board of directors resolved to undertake capital raise in a phased manner to mobilise the required funds for infusion, the statement said.



In November 2021, the RBI allowed promoters to hold up to 26 per cent stake in banks, up from the previous cap of 15 per cent. The decision came following recommendations from an internal working group, which had reviewed the ownership and corporate structures of private sector banks.



Referring to Reliance Capitals acquisition, IIHL said the administrator of the company had issued the duly signed letter of intent.

IIHL was the sole resolution applicant for Reliance Capital, which is undergoing insolvency proceedings, with a bid amount of $1.2 billion (about Rs. 9,650 crore). The underlying operating companies in Reliance Capital are in insurance (life, general and health), asset reconstruction, and broking.

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Global sovereign and private equity funds have expressed interest in participating in IIHLs growth story, the statement said. The company is likely to be listed by next year, and this would also give a trading option to its numerous shareholders who have stayed with the company for over three decades, it added.

IIHL recently acquired a majority holding in a bank in the Bahamas. It has also received an in-principle approval for a banking licence in Mauritius, giving it an opportunity to explore options to set up a greenfield bank or consider inorganic acquisition.

The company was also in process of acquiring asset management and wealth management businesses to complete its BFSI suite.
Kyndryl, the independent entity formed after the spin-off of IBMs infrastructure services, aims to grow its consulting business to over 15 per cent of its revenues by 2025 from 13 per cent now, said Ashish Kothari, vice-president and partner, Kyndryl Consult.

Given that consulting is a high-margin business, even a 1 per cent rise in consulting revenues can significantly boost margins, said experts.

For the financial year ended March 31, 2023, Kyndryl reported revenues of $17 billion, a decline of 7 per cent compared to last year. To put in perspective, Accenture, considered the largest consulting firm globally, reported a 25 per cent increase in consulting revenues to $34.1 billion for FY22. This is more than 50 per cent of its total revenues of $61.6 billion.

Globally, Kyndryl has more than 10,000 practitioners, who are focused on the consulting practice.

Our model is a globally-integrated one and we leverage most of it also for what we do for the India business. We continue to invest in all the parts of our consulting business, including our partners, Kothari told Business Standard.

Kyndryl Consult was established as a separate unit in November last year that combines Kyndryls consulting expertise with its technology-integration solutions. It aims to help new and existing customers navigate the complex technology environments and accelerate business outcomes.

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Kyndryl Consult is helping customers in their digital transformation across three key areas. First is to modernise for efficiency and growth. Second is to innovate for differentiated customer experience. And third, is to build a resilient and secure business, said Kothari.

The consulting market grew 14 per cent to $266.3 billion in 2022, according to research firm Gartner. Kyndryl does not report its consulting revenue separately but it is estimated to be around $2 billion. In November 2021, Kyndryl signed an agreement to acquire Finland-based Samlink in a bid to bolster its consulting business. This is especially in financial services in the strategic markets of Finland and the Nordics. In this region, the company is helping major financial institutions drive their digital transformations.

Kyndryl Consult works with enterprise customers across multiple sectors such as fintech, automotive, retail, and manufacturing. Some of its customers in India include Godrej, National Stock Exchange, Dr. Lal Path Labs, Somany Ceramics, and Holcim.

Kyndryl was formed as an independent entity in November 2021. It claims to be the worlds largest IT infrastructure services firm as it started life with $2 billion in cash on its books, more than 4,000 enterprise customers in over 60 countries, and annual revenues of nearly $19 billion, when it officially separated from IBM on November 4, 2021.
Global major in microcontroller solutions, Microchip Technology Inc on Monday opened a new research and development (R&D) facility in Hyderabad and also announced an investment of $300 million for the next few years to expand its operations in India.

The investment will include new engineering labs, talent acquisition and support for regional technology consortia and educational institutions, the company said. It will also improve the companys existing facilities which include R&D centres in Bengaluru and Chennai, and sales offices in Bangalore, Chennai, Hyderabad, Pune and New Delhi.

The new development centre of Hyderabad is located in the Kokapet business district across 168,000 square feet and can house 1,000 employees.

Microchip is making a significant strategic commitment to growing our operations in India, whose meteoric growth has established it as one of the top sources of business and technical resources in our sector. Our investments here will enable us to both benefits from and contribute to the countrys increasingly important role in the global semiconductor industry, said Ganesh Moorthy, President and CEO of Microchip.

Microchip has become the latest American tech firm to expand its presence in India. The announcement comes days after Prime Minister Narendra Modis visit to the US, where major semiconductor companies Micron Technology, Applied Materials and Lam Research committed to investing in Indias emerging semiconductor industry.

The Chandler, Arizona-based company is among the largest companies providing microcontroller, mixed-signal, analog semiconductors and flash-IP solutions. In India, the company serves some 2000 customers from data centre and computing, automotive, consumer appliances, aerospace, defence and industrial sectors.

Microchips new investment is expected to accelerate hiring across its centres in the country. Currently, the high-tech firm has a workforce of 2500 in three centres in India out of which some 500 will operate from the new centre in Hyderabad. A majority of the team works on R&D and new product development.

Moorthy added that India contributed to a substantial amount of design activities and had a large impact on Microchips operations. The companys Indian centres support the business units for 8-bit, 16-bit and 32-bit microcontrollers (MCUs), 32-bit microprocessors (MPUs), networking and data centre solutions, and other product development.

Microchips investments in India over nearly two and a half decades have augmented its headcount growth, resulting in building a centre of excellence for engineering deliverables and solutions for Microchips global success. We look forward to celebrating Microchips continued progress in India as it embarks on this impressive growth campaign, said Krishna Moorthy, President and CEO of the India Electronics and Semiconductor Association (IESA).
Low-cost airline Spicejet on Monday settled a Rs 100 crore loan to City Union Bank (CUB) by repaying Rs 25 crore as a part of the loan accounts final tranche, the company said in a press release.

In August 2022, the airline had agreed to repay its dues till June this year. With the latest settlement, the company has closed its loan account taken in 2012.

The company had also pledged 20 million shares with the bank as collateral owned by the airlines promoters, according to media reports.



The recent settlement of Spicejets loan releases all securities that the company had pledged with the bank.

The repayment to City Union Bank follows a successful settlement agreement with Nordic Aviation Capital (NAC), a major lessor for SpiceJets Q400 aircraft. The agreement with NAC settles all past liabilities for the Q400s leased by NAC to SpiceJet and paves the way for the return and induction of three additional planes into the SpiceJet fleet, the airline added.

The bank had marked the carriers account as a special mention account-1 (SMA1) in March last year. The airline filed an appeal in the court against the banks declaration of SMA-1 in April.

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A company is classified as SMA-1 if the principal or interest is overdue between 31-60 days.

Moreover, the cash-strapped airline has incurred losses since FY19. The companys consolidated net loss swelled to Rs 1,744 crore in FY22 from Rs 1,030 crore in FY 21.
KaarTech, a business-to-business (B2B) digital consulting start-up, said on Monday it has raised $30 million in funding from A91 Partners.

KaarTech will use the funds to expand in West Asia and the European Union and to enter the North American market, it said in a statement. Gautam Mago and Kaushik Anand, partners at A91, will join KaarTechs board.

This association will bolster our ability to expand geographically and augment our services portfolio in-organically, said Maran Nagarajan, KaarTechs founder and chief executive officer.

In doing so, we aspire to be the partner of choice for customers looking for digital transformation journeys in SAP, cloud ecosystem customer experience, process automation and data analytics blended with KaarTechs core competence in logistics, supply chain, financial and human capital management, he said.

Veda Corporate Advisors acted as the exclusive financial advisor to the company and its promoters for the deal.

KaarTech was founded in 2006 by Nagarajan and Ratnakumar N, Selvakumar M and George Guardian, who are directors in the company. It specialises in the SAP ecosystem, manufacturing, professional services automation, and consumer packaged goods.

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The Chennai-based company has more than 2,000 employees and said it has doubled its revenue in the last 24 months.

Over the last decade, they (KaarTech) have established themselves as one of the leading partners for digital transformation and SAP Consulting Services. We look forward to working closely with them in helping them expand their geographic presence in the US and Europe and in their journey towards becoming a publicly listed company, said Anand, of A91 Partners.

KaarTech has operations in over 15 global regions, with notable clients such as Aramco. The company says it is looking to go beyond SAP as it eyes a public listing.
The finance ministry has requested the Financial Services Institutions Bureau (FSIB) to fill up the vacant posts of non-executive chairman posts in the public sector banks (PSBs) to improve bank governance and enhance investors protection.

"FSIB is working on the request, and we are expecting positive developments on the issue in the coming months. The department of financial services is aware of the problem and is expecting that most of the vacancies will be filled by the end of this financial year," a senior finance ministry official said.

UCO Bank, Bank of Maharashtra, Bank of India, Indian Overseas Bank, Indian Bank, and Central Bank of India do not have a non-executive chairman.

In November last year, the Centre appointed non-executive chairman on the boards of Canara Bank, Punjab National Bank, Union Bank of India, and Punjab & Sind Bank.

The issue of vacant chairman positions in PSBs was raised in May during the Reserve Bank of India (RBI) governors interaction with the board members of PSBs in New Delhi.

A senior RBI official told Business Standard that when there is a division on the board on any policy, the chairman plays the important role of making the decision in the larger interest of the bank's governance.

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"The chairman also highlights the problems if management is not following certain governance guidelines despite not taking part in the day-to-day operations of the bank," he added.

The salary of the chairman of the PSBs is based on the number of sittings on the board.

The RBI official highlighted that the remuneration paid to them is less considering the time, responsibilities, and extensive knowledge of subjects that are needed for them to fulfil their duties on the board.

Addressing the conference of directors of private banks in Mumbai in May, RBI Governor Shaktikanta Das compared the role of a bank chairperson to that of the captain of a ship. "For the chairperson to be able to navigate the board discussions and functions in the right direction, he/she should possess the requisite experience, competencies, and personal qualities," he added.

During the New Delhi meeting with the RBI, public sector bankers also raised the issue of compensation for directors, particularly MDs and CEOs and highlighted the fact that the remuneration of state-owned bank chiefs is less than that of their private-sector counterparts.

The finance ministry official quoted earlier said that there was currently no proposal under consideration to enhance the salaries of MDs and CEOs of PSBs. "They work in the public interest and have the rank equivalent to additional secretary of the department under the Centre," the official added.

Shriram Subramanian, founder and MD of advisory firm InGovern, said the absence of non-executive chairmen in PSBs had no immediate impact on banks performance, safety, or profitability because that was for the executive team to execute under the direction of the board.

Finance Minister Nirmala Sitharaman on Saturday told PSBs to follow best corporate governance practices, adhere to regulatory norms, ensure prudent liquidity management, and continue to focus on having robust asset-liability and risk management.
By Rakesh Sharma



Indias imports of Russian oil hit another record last month as the South Asian nation potentially nears the limit of its buying splurge from the major OPEC+ producer.







Daily volumes climbed to 2.2 million barrels a day in June, rising for a 10th month, according to Viktor Katona, the head of crude analysis at Kpler. Russian purchases again exceeded the combined shipments of Saudi Arabia and Iraq, data from the analytics firm show.

India emerged as a key consumer of Russian oil following the invasion of Ukraine, but the nations buying could be near its limit due to infrastructure issues and the need to maintain good relations with other suppliers. Kpler says imports may dip next month because of lower Russian supply.

State-owned Indian Oil Corp. has been the biggest buyer of Russian crude over the past two months, followed by Reliance Industries Ltd., according to Kpler. Overall, Indias imports of Urals hit another record of 1.5 million barrels a day in June, the analytics firm said.
Novelist and literary translator Ahn Jung-hyo / Korea Times file



By Park Han-sol



Ahn Jung-hyo, a noted novelist and a literary translator whose magnum opus, "White Badge," recounts the haunting legacy of the Vietnam War inspired by his own experiences as a war correspondent in the Southeast Asian country, died Saturday at the age of 82.



He passed away at a hospital in Seoul after a battle with cancer, his family confirmed.



Born in 1941 in Seoul's Mapo District, the late writer majored in English literature and pursued a career in journalism until 1966 when he joined the Vietnam War as a member of the White Horse Division of the Republic of Korea Army.



Upon his return, Ahn served as a culture reporter (1969-70) and later as a desk editor (1975-78) for The Korea Times. During that time, he wrote a serialized column for the paper called "Viet Vignettes" that documented his experiences in the war.



These writings eventually became the foundation of his literary debut in 1983, when his tour de force, "White Badge," first appeared in the quarterly publication, "Literature in Action." It was published in book form two years later.



His radical novel details horrors and atrocities witnessed during combat, as well as the post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) suffered by veterans  topics that were largely suppressed during the authoritarian regimes of Park Chung-hee and his successor Chun Doo-hwan.



During Park's tenure, South Korea sent approximately 320,000 troops to the Vietnam War, serving as allies to the U.S. More than 5,000 Korean soldiers lost their lives, while another 10,000 were wounded in the conflict.



Ahn translated the book into English himself and got it published in the United States in 1989.



After having won critical acclaim from both home and abroad, the story was adapted into a 1992 Korean film of the same name by Chung Ji-young, starring Ahn Sung-ki.



In addition to "White Badge," the novelist is known for penning "Silver Stallion," which narrates the United Nations forces' encampment in a rural Korean village during the 1950-53 Korean War and the experiences of women working as prostitutes for the military, and "The Life and Death of the Hollywood Kid"  both of which were adapted into movies.



Ahn was also a prolific literary translator, rendering more than 150 novels and writings into Korean throughout his lifetime. His translations include notable works such as Margaret Mitchell's "Gone With the Wind," Gabriel Garcia Marquez's "One Hundred Years of Solitude," Aldous Huxley's "Brave New World," John Irving's "The World According to Garp" and most recently, Graham Greene's "The Quiet American."



He received the Kim You-jeong Literary Award in 1992 for the novella "Akbujeon" and the local Korean Translation Literature Award in 1982 for his rendition of John Updike's "Rabbit Is Rich."



The writer is survived by his wife Park Kwang-ja, a professor emeritus of German Language and Literature at Chungnam National University, and two daughters, Mi-ran and So-geun.




Almost 76 per cent of Rs 2,000 banknotes in circulation as on May 19 have been returned to the banks, the Reserve Bank of India (RBI) said in a statement on Monday.

As on May 19, the total value of Rs 2,000 notes in circulation was Rs 3.56 trillion. Out of this, currency notes worth Rs 2.72 trillion have been returned, the RBI said.

It added that the data collected from major banks shows that out of the total banknotes in Rs 2,000 denomination returned from circulation, about 87 per cent is in the form of deposits and the remaining around 13 per cent has been exchanged into other denomination banknotes.

"Members of the public are requested to utilise the next three months to deposit and/or exchange the Rs 2,000 banknotes held with them to avoid any rush in the last few days before September 30, 2023," the RBI said.

On May 19, the RBI said that in pursuance of the "Clean Note Policy" it has been decided to withdraw the Rs 2,000 denomination banknotes from circulation.

It also said that about 89 per cent of the Rs 2,000 denomination banknotes were issued prior to March 2017 and are at the end of their estimated life span of 4-5 years.

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"The total value of these banknotes in circulation has declined from Rs 6.73 trillion at its peak as on March 31, 2018, to Rs 3.62 trillion constituting only 10.8 per cent of notes in circulation on March 31, 2023," the RBI said.

It added that this denomination is not "commonly used for transactions".

"Further, the stock of banknotes in other denominations continues to be adequate to meet the currency requirement of the public," it added.

"Accordingly, members of the public may deposit Rs 2,000 banknotes into their bank accounts and/or exchange them into banknotes of other denominations at any bank branch. Deposit into bank accounts can be made in the usual manner, that is, without restrictions and subject to extant instructions and other applicable statutory provisions," it said.

RBI had given the customers time till September 30 to exchange or deposit the notes at their nearest bank branch. A customer is allowed to exchange Rs 2,000 worth Rs 20,000 at a time per branch.
The digital Competition Law Committee (DCLC) is in the process of finalising its report on the need for a separate law for competition in digital markets, as the panels's term comes to an end on July 5. Government sources indicated that a third extension of the committee might be underway, if the report is not finalised in the next two days.

The committee was formed in February this year with an original mandate for three months and it has had two extensions of one month each ever since.

The panel led by Manoj Govil, secretary, corporate affairs ministry is expected to present its stance on the need for ex-ante regulations for big tech companies. Stakeholder discussions on the contours of digital competition law were concluded in March.

The discussion around the digital competition law comes amid a global scrutiny of Google, Apple, Facebook, Amazon, and others for allegedly abusing their market position using chunks of user data. Earlier this year, the Competition Commission of India (CCI) slapped Google, in two separate cases, with penalties of Rs 936.44 crore and Rs 1,337.76 crore.

The Supreme Court of India had also greenlighted CCIs probe into WhatsApps privacy policy update, related to allegations that it shares user data with its parent company Facebooks advertising business.

The first meeting of the panel formed for framing the law was held on February 22. The committee includes chairperson, competition commission of India; Saurabh Srivastava, chairman, Indian Angel Network and cofounder of industry body Nasscom.

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Legal representatives on the panel include Haigreve Khaitan of Khaitan & Co, Pallavi Shardul Shroff of Shardul Amarchand Mangaldas & Co, Anand Pathak, P&A Law Offices, Rahul Rai, Axiom5 Law Chamber.

A parliamentary panel on finance had suggested the need to have a digital competition law in its report tabled in December 2022.

Domestic startups and news publishers had made presentations sharing their views on the need for a Digital Competition Act on March 4. Representatives of Google, Amazon, Meta, Apple, Twitter and Netflix had taken part in the stakeholder discussions along with various domestic firms such as Zomato, Oyo, Swiggy, Paytm, Makemytrip and Flipkart.

Several startups and news publishers had raised the issue of their non-inclusion in the committee earlier and said that the panel seemed to be dominated by the corporate lawyers, many of them representing the Big Tech. Following this, many domestic startups and news publishers were invited to share their views with the panel.

Digital competition law aside, the CCI is also building a digital market unit to understand the models of e-commerce platforms and digital economy companies. The idea is to ensure that anti-competitive conduct should not go undetected.
The Delhi High Court on Monday refused to grant bail to Aam Aadmi Party's communication in-charge Vijay Nair in a money laundering case related to the alleged Delhi excise policy scam, noting that the statements of witnesses showed kickbacks claimed to have been paid by the potential beneficiaries were used in the Goa assembly elections.

Justice Dinesh Kumar Sharma, by separate orders, also dismissed the bail applications of former Delhi deputy chief minister Manish Sisodia, businessman Abhishek Boinpally and liquor giant Pernod Ricard's executive Benoy Babu in the case lodged by the Enforcement Directorate (ED).

The court said while personal liberty is a "sacrosanct right and pre-trial detention cannot be taken as a punitive measure", such right has to be balanced with the right of the society at large.

The judge, in his 45-page order passed on the bail plea by Nair, observed that the allegations are "extremely serious in nature" and the alleged conspiracy in the present case was "peculiar in nature where the excise policy was allegedly framed with mala fide intention".

"The accused person (Nair) in the present case acting in furtherance of the conspiracy circumvented the policy and got framed the policy in such a manner to continuously generate and channel illegal funds. The allegations are that deliberate loopholes were left to facilitate illegal and criminal activities," the court said.

"Dinesh Arora (approver)... specifically stated that the Petitioner Vijay Nair got into an arrangement with Arun Pillai, Abhishek Boinpally, and Buchi Babu (who were the representatives of South Group.. The south group gave Rs. 100 Cr (approx.) to Vijay Nair in advance and they were supposed to recoup this money from the 3 major wholesalers. There are also statements on the record that how this kickback was used in Goa elections," it added.

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The Delhi government had implemented the excise policy on November 17, 2021 but scrapped it at the end of September 2022 amid allegations of corruption.

The court, while dealing with co-accused Babu's bail plea, observed that in case of a conspiracy to generate proceeds of crime, a person who is connected with any related process or activity cannot avoid the responsibility.

Justice Sharma said, at this stage, there was sufficient material on the record to support the ED's claim that Babu was indulging or knowingly assisting in the process or activity connected with the proceeds of crime.

Similarly, the court said, at this juncture, it was unable to conclude that Nair was not guilty of the of the charges levelled against him, in view of the seriousness and gravity of the case.

Both Nair and Babu were arrested by the ED in November last year.

The court also said there was no illegality or perversity in an earlier trial court order refusing to release Nair on bail, adding, "the alleged conspiracy has been well spun and there are prima facie credible materials on record".

"It has also come on the record that accused Vijay Nair was a close associate of Chief Minister, GNCT of Delhi and Sh. Manish Sisodia, Deputy Chief Minister. The investigation has further revealed that Vijay Nair arranged a video call through face time between Chief Minister, Government of NCT of Delhi and Sameer Mahendru where Chief Minister said that Vijay Nair is his boy and they should trust him," the court recorded in its order.

"Learned Trial Court while considering the evidence on record observed that Vijay Nair had in fact emerged as the string holder of the entire criminal conspiracy hatched by the accused persons," the court said.

It observed that though it is not disputed that he was the Media and Communication incharge of AAP, at the same time, it was revealed during the investigation that he was actually representing the AAP and GNCTD in different meetings that took place with the stakeholders in liquor business at different places.

While refusing to interfere with the trial court decision rejecting the bail application of Boinpally, who was arrested in November last year, the court said the lower court had meticulously examined the case on merits and reached a finding which was duly supported by sound reasons.

The court also dismissed his petition challenging the legality and validity of his arrest.

According to the CBI and ED, irregularities were committed while modifying the excise policy and undue favours were extended to the licence holders.

The money laundering case stems from the CBI FIR which was lodged after Delhi Lieutenant Governor V K Saxena recommended a CBI probe.

The CBI has alleged that Nair was involved in meeting the other co-accused and liquor manufacturers as well as distributors at various hotels in Hyderabad, Mumbai and Delhi for arranging "ill-gotten money through hawala operators".

It has also claimed that Boinpally was part of the clandestine meetings and was involved in the conspiracy to launder money along with another accused Sameer Mahendru, a businessman dealing in liquor.
The Supreme Court on Monday refused to entertain a plea of the Enforcement Directorate challenging the six-week interim bail granted to liquor businessman Sameer Mahendru in a money laundering case related to alleged irregularities in the now-scrapped Delhi excise policy.

A bench of Justices Sanjiv Khanna and Bela M Trivedi told Additional Solicitor General SV Raju, appearing for the ED, that it is not going to interfere with the order of the Delhi High Court.

Raju submitted that the Delhi High Court order is "shocking" and is based on wrong facts and cannot be treated as a precedent.

The bench said, "Sorry, for six weeks bail, we are not going to interfere. The period is going to run itself out in the next 10-15 days".

On June 12, the high court had granted six-week interim bail on medical grounds to Mahendru in the money laundering case.

The high court had observed that the accused was suffering from life-threatening diseases warranting immediate medical attention and post-operative care.

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Every person has a right to get adequately and effectively treated, it had said.

After the expiry of the interim bail period, he shall surrender before the trial court before or at 5 pm on July 25, it had said.

The court had imposed several conditions, including that he shall not leave the limits of the hospital and his house and shall also not leave the country.

According to the prosecution, the accused was allegedly one of the major beneficiaries of the violations of the excise policy as he was not only running an alcoholic beverage manufacturing unit but also given a wholesale licence along with some retail licences in the name of his relatives.

Because of the alleged irregularities and violations, Mahendru made around Rs 50 crore, the prosecution has claimed.

The ED has registered an enforcement case information report (ECIR) against Mahendru under the relevant provisions of the Prevention of Money Laundering Act (PMLA).

The money laundering case stems from a Central Bureau of Investigation (CBI) FIR.

According to the CBI and the ED, irregularities were committed while modifying the excise policy and undue favours were extended to licence holders.

The Delhi government implemented the policy on November 17, 2021, but scrapped it at the end of September 2022 amid allegations of corruption.

Former Delhi deputy chief minister Manish Sisodia is also an accused in the matter.
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The Rajasthan government will provide fish seeds for free to 20,000 farmers in a bid to promote fisheries.Chief Minister Ashok Gehlot recently approved the Rs 2 crore project that will provide each farmer or diggi (water pond) with 1,000 fingerlings of major Indian carps like rohu, catla, and mrigal.The project, announced in Budget 2023-24, has received financial approval recently. Select farmers will be imparted with training on fisheries at the district level soon, a department official said.Rajasthans water bodies cover about 430,000 water spread area. This is in addition to about 70 rivers and canals covering about 30,000-hectare (ha) area. The state has made steady growth in inland fisheries over the past three decades.The area under fish culture and production in the state, which ranks 18th in output, has gone up. About 60 per cent of the total fish production comes from reservoirs, and the rest from tanks and ponds. The productivity of large reservoirs (55 kg/ha) is above the national average.In this years Budget speech, the chief minister had announced to set up the Brackish Water Aquaculture Laboratory in Churu district to promote shrimp farming. Work is going on, the official said.The government is promoting innovations in the tribal sub-plan area under the livelihood model in Jaisamand Dam in Udaipur, Kadana backwater in Dungarpur, and Mahi Bajaj Sagar in Banswara. In these areas, the government is focusing on the creation of livelihood for tribal fishermen. Besides this, the department is paying fishermen according to
After its three-member delegation visited Manipur, the women's wing of CPI on Monday alleged that the ongoing disturbance in the northeastern state is not communal but "state-sponsored" as the government has been acting as an "onlooker" and has not done enough to quell violence.

At a press conference in the national capital, National Federation of Indian Women (NFIW) General Secretary Annie Raja said the BJP governments in the state and at the Centre should take responsibility for the situation.

Its activists urged the government to initiate dialogue and restore peace in the state. They demanded that the government disarm all groups and individuals, initiate confidence-building measures, register FIRs at the earliest, and urgently improve conditions in the relief camps.

According to NFIW, its team was in Manipur from June 28 to July 1.

They visited three relief camps and a government hospital in Imphal East, two camps in Moirang of Bishnupur, the District Collector's office there and the IMA Market where they interacted with Meira Paibis (women-led vigilante groups).

The team also visited the district collectors of Churachandpur and the assistant collector of Bishnupur, Manipur Baptist Convention Center Church and Catholic Bishop House in Imphal West.

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"What is happening in Manipur is not communal violence, nor is it merely a fight between two communities. It involves the question of land, resources, and the presence of fanatics and militants," said Annie Raja.

"It is state-sponsored violence. We are saying this because we observed the police, they remain onlookers. Clashes are taking place in front of their eyes, and they remain spectators. It has angered both Meitei and Kuki people. The double-engine of BJP government in the state and the Centre should take responsibility," she said.

The members of the delegation said mistrust between the members of Maritime and Kuki communities is deep, and "militants, fanatics and miscreants have taken advantage of the situation".

Delegation member and advocate Deeksha Dwivedi said in all the relief camps, they did not find anyone who had been paid any compensation and the camps were lacking in facilities.

She also said both "communities are in pain, and the government should find a way to resolve the conflict".

Delegation member Nisha Sidhu pointed out that most camps were run by citizens and civil society groups, with limited support from the government, and most of those in the camps were mostly daily wage workers and ordinary people.

"The camps have persons aged one month to 80 years. Many pregnant women are also there. Food provided by the government is insufficient, especially for infants, elderly, pregnant and lactating women," said Sidhu.

The activists also demanded the setting up of a buffer zone between areas dominated by the two communities and said the same force should be deployed on both sides.

Clashes broke out in Manipur after a 'Tribal Solidarity March' in all its 10 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 percent of the population and reside in the hill districts.
Defence Minister Rajnath Singh Monday said the government, every section of society and social organisations will have to work together to make India a developed nation by 2047.

Singh was in Punjab's Jalandhar where he attended 'Guru Purnima Mahotsav' organised by 'Divya Jyoti Jagriti Sansthan' (DJJS).

On this occasion, the Union minister lauded the sansthan which is located at Nurmahal in Jalandhar for its work, saying he was happy that the DJJS is working in every field by considering service of humans as its uppermost philanthropy.

Shri Ashutosh Maharaj united people with the aim of 'Sarvochch Parmarth'. 'Parmarth' means an act of serving others without seeking any benefit, which only a great personality can do. Swami ji inspired the people with his works, said Singh.

He said that the DJJS was continuously working towards spreading Swami ji' life values and objectives to the masses.

The way Swami ji selflessly worked for the welfare of the nation and society is an inspiration for a vast mass of people even today, he added.

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Today is the day of Guru Purnima, and this day also makes us realise the importance of Guru in the world... Guru acts as a guide for us in the world, said Singh.

The defence minister said that the country has entered 'Amrit Kaal', which has been described by the government as the 25-year period culminating in the centenary of India's Independence.

Till the end of Amrit Kaal or by 2047, we have moved ahead with a resolve of making India a developed country. To make the country developed, the government, every section of the society as well as institutions like Divya Jyoti Jagriti Sansthan will have to work together, asserted Singh.

'Dharma' is necessary in all stages of our lives and in all roles. We have to follow the 'dharma' in our personal and public lives, he said, adding that by 'dharma', he meant duty.

Singh said being the defence minister, it was his duty to protect India through brave soldiers of the country.

Whatever position you may hold, you have a particular 'dharma' and you have to follow that 'dharma'. 'Dharma' is necessary in every part of life, even if it is politics, he said.

"Once Mahatma Gandhi had said those who say religion has nothing to do with politics, do not know what religion is, Singh said.

Singh said the politics which has been discussed "in our country is itself inspired from 'dharma'".

Politics has not been described only as a means of getting power but it has been described as a means of serving people, he said.

Our history is full of examples of how important Rajdharma is. Lord Rama himself always gave priority to justice and the interest of people while following Rajdharma, he said.

The Union minister said the biggest dharma of a king is to protect the interest of his "praja". It is the duty of a king to work for the upliftment of the last man standing in a queue, he said.

Under the leadership of Prime Minister Narendra Modi, our government, while performing its 'dharma', has worked by making the development of a person standing at the end of the queue as its objective. And we are continuously succeeding in our objective, said Singh.
Korea Times Chairman Seung Myung-ho, seventh from left, Patriots and Veterans Affairs Minister Park Min-shik, eighth from left, and Ban Ki-moon, ninth from left, chairman of the Ban Ki-moon Foundation for a Better Future, pose with dignitaries during a symposium on the Korea-U.S. alliance held at Korea University campus in Seoul, Monday. The event, co-hosted by Ban's foundation and Korea University's Convergence Institute for National Unification, was held to mark the 70th anniversary of the Mutual Defense Treaty signed between the two allies in 1953. Courtesy of Convergence Institute for National Unification
The Union Ministry of Home Affairs will organise the "G20 Conference on Crime and Security in the Age of Non Fungible Tokens (NFTs), Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Metaverse" on July 13-14 in Gurugram, officials said on Monday.

The two-day event is being organised in partnership with the Union Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology, Ministry of External Affairs, National Security Council Secretariat and the Central Bureau of Investigation, they said.

The Rashtriya Raksha University, National Forensic Science University, National Law School of India University, Interpol and UNODC are the event's organising partners.

"The MHA will host the 'G20 Conference on Crime and Security in the Age of NFTs, AI and Metaverse' on July 13-14. It will bring together G20 countries, nine special invitee countries and domain experts (from) around the world to delve into the challenges of advancing technologies," a Union Ministry of Home Affairs (MHA) spokesperson said.

The conference will bring together G20 countries, guests from the invitee nations and international bodies.

NFTs are assets that have been tokenised via a blockchain. These are assigned unique identification codes and metadata to distinguish these from other tokens. NFTs can be traded and exchanged for money or cryptocurrency.

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AI is a rapidly growing field of technology that has already made significant contributions to industries such as health care, finance and transportation. AI has recently emerged as a critical component in the development of the Metaverse -- a virtual world where people can interact with each other and digital entities in a fully immersive environment.

According to the officials, the conference will see the participation of ministries and central government organisations, chief secretaries and administrators of states and Union Territories, directors general of police of states and Union Territories and cyber experts.

Guest speakers from the legal fraternity, academia, training institutions, financial intermediaries, fintech, social media intermediaries, information and communication technology, cyber forensics, regulators, startups, over the top (OTT) service providers, e-commerce companies and others will also take part, the officials said.
India will host the virtual Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO) summit on Tuesday i.e July 4, 2023. Pakistani Prime Minister Shehbaz Sharif and Chinese President Xi Jinping are on the list of invitees. The SCO Council of Heads of State will be led by PM Narendra Modi virtually for all intents and purposes.

India has also invited other SCO members like Russia, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, and Uzbekistan. Iran, Belarus, and Mongolia have also been invited to the 23rd Meeting of the SCO Council as Observer States. According to the SCO rituals, Turkmenistan has likewise been welcomed as the chair guest. Heads of the two SCO Bodies; the Secretariat and the SCO RATS, will likewise be available.

Further, the heads of six international and regional associations  UN, ASEAN, CIS, CSTO, EAEU, and CICA  are also expected to be part of the summit. The Summit's title is "Towards a SECURE SCO." The acronym was instituted by Modi at the 2018 SCO Qingadao Summit and represents Security; Economy and Trade; Connectivity; Unity; Respect for Sovereignty and Territorial Integrity; and Environment.

India and SCO Summit: Overview

India joined the SCO in 2005 and became a full-fledged member at the Astana Summit in 2017. Indias participation over the last decade has been phenomenal in all SCO operations. The country was given the chairmanship at the SCO summit in Samarkand in September 2022, from Uzbekistan.

Indias participation helped foster new areas of cooperation and the creation of five new pillars in SCO  Startups and Innovation, Traditional Medicine, Digital Inclusion, Youth Empowerment, and Shared Buddhist Heritage. The country also helped usher in two new mechanisms in the SCO  Special Working Group on Startups and Innovation and Experts Working Group on Traditional Medicine.

During India's presidency of the SCO, External Affairs Minister S Jaishankar virtually displayed the New Delhi hall in the SCO Secretariat in Beijing. To celebrate India's most memorable SCO presidency, a memorial stamp was given. On May 4-5 this year, India likewise facilitated the Foreign Ministers of SCO in Goa, this was observed by a beautiful cultural programme and meaningful conversations the next day. Goa exhibited its warm hospitality, exceptional culture, and unique legacy.

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SCO Summit 2023: China and Pakistan

Chinese Foreign Ministry Spokesperson Mao Ning said "Beijing stands ready to work with different individuals to construct a significantly closer SCO group with a common future". On the other hand, Shehbaz Sharif, Prime Minister of Pakistan is scheduled to attend the 23rd Meeting of the SCO Council of Heads of State (CHS).
Karnataka Home Minister G Parameshwara on Monday said a Special Investigation Team (SIT) under the Criminal Investigation Department (CID) has been formed to reinvestigate the Bitcoin scam.

The Bitcoin scam had surfaced during the previous BJP regime in 2021 and the Congress, which was then in Opposition, had accused the government of trying to cover up the scandal as it involves big names.

The prime suspect, Srikrishna Ramesh alias Sriki, was accused of hacking the state government's e-procurement website and siphoning over Rs 11.5 crore.

There were also charges of cryptocurrency theft, drug peddling and cyber fraud relating to the case.

The Home Minister said Additional Director General of Police Manish Kharbikar will head the SIT which, he added, can also take the help of technical experts since the matter relates to cyber crime.

Before the Assembly elections in May, the Congress had promised the people of Karnataka that if it comes to power, it would reinvestigate the Bitcoin scam, he told reporters here.

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"Accordingly, we have taken a decision to hand it over to a Special Investigation Team. We have constituted the SIT under the Criminal Investigation Department," the Minister said, adding that orders have been issued in this regard.

"We hope that the SIT will do the justice. Manish Kharbikar, an ADGP, has been entrusted with the responsibility. He can also take the help of technical people because this is related to cyber. Anything related to technical aspects...they can also take the help of different sources," he explained.

Regarding any possible assistance of central agencies, Parameshwara said he has advised the SIT to take the help of whoever is required.

"If there is a separate order required to that effect, we will definitely do so. It depends. When they (SIT) start the investigations, then we will come to know about their requirements," the Minister pointed out.

The government took the decision keeping all the aspects into consideration, Parameshwara said. "It (the investigation) should not be some sort of a repeat. We want to investigate this more seriously. Lots of lapses have happened. Those things (have) to be covered by the SIT".

On the possibility of forming two special courts to prosecute the Bitcoin cases, he said the investigation should begin first and the government would do whatever is required as far as probe and legal aspects are concerned as the case proceeds.
The Uttar Pradesh government has rolled out its plan to develop major cities as Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Information Technology (IT) hubs.

The move follows Prime Minister Narendra Modis clarion call from the US last month that there have been path-breaking advances in AI and that India and the US are leading the developments. The cities lined up for the AI- and IT-based makeover include Lucknow, Kanpur, Gautam Buddha Nagar (Noida), Varanasi, and Prayagraj (Allahabad).

Meanwhile, Lucknow has been positioned as Indias first AI City under the overarching blueprint to catalyse the five cities as future hubs of IT and IT Enabled Services (ITeS). UP Industrial Development Minister Nand Gopal Gupta Nandi said technology and tech leadership would shape the future world and UP had taken a giant leap to be a major hub of AI, both nationally and globally.

AI leadership means leadership of the world and our double engine government is turbocharged to lead the tech revolution in the world, he told Business Standard.

The proposed AI and IT sector development in these five cities is aimed at catalysing the journey of UP to become a trillion-dollar economy.

Recently, officials briefed Chief Minister Yogi Adityanath about a detailed road map. The CM has tasked a high-level team headed by the chief secretary to take steps to immediately implement the proposal.

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A 40-acre land near the Lucknow airport and flanking the Lucknow-Kanpur highway has been identified to lead the AI City landscaping. The Lucknow AI hub project will provide an entire value chain to investors and companies comprising AI start-ups, data centre, data analytics, AI-based training, and data forensics, etc.

UP has partnered leading entities, such as Indian Institute of Technology-Kanpur, Indian Institute of Management-Lucknow, and APJ Abdul Kalam Technical University, for a slew of knowledge-based initiatives and projects.
The CBI has filed a charge sheet against Bihar Deputy Chief Minister Tejashwi Yadav, his father and former railways minister Lalu Prasad and mother and former chief minister Rabri Devi in connection with the land for jobs scam case, officials said Monday.

The charge sheet, which also names 14 others, is the second charge sheet in the case. It has been filed on the basis of documents and evidence that surfaced after the first charge sheet was submitted in the case, they said.

Besides members of the Yadav clan, the CBI has also named AK Infosystems and several middlemen in the case, they said.

The charge sheet was filed in a special CBI court.

The officials said the second charge sheet was filed as the alleged roles of the accused could not be completed by the time the initial report was filed.

The CBI has alleged that favourite candidates were appointed in the railways in violation of norms and procedures, without any advertisement or public notice. during Lalu Prasad's tenure as minister in the UPA government from 2004 to 2009,



The agency claims that substitutes from Patna were appointed in various zonal railways located in Mumbai, Jabalpur, Kolkata, Jaipur and Hazipur.

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As a quid pro quo, the candidates, either directly or through their immediate family members, allegedly sold land to Lalu Prasad's family members at highly-discounted rates.
A unique scenario is emerging for the first time after the last 51 years as the number of MLAs from various parties backing the Maharashtra government has prima facie reached 200, post the induction of NCP leader Ajit Pawar in the state cabinet. The last time when more than 200 MLAs were part of the state government was in 1972, but at that time all the 222 legislators belonged to Congress. Also, the strength of the House was 270 at that time, a former state legislature official said on Monday citing data.NCP Chief Sharad Pawar expels Praful Patel; Rebel Patel appoints Tatkare as the new NCP President. Sharad Pawar's NCP suspends two party workers for attending Pawar's oath ceremony. He rejects speculation that Ajit Pawar's rebellion has his blessing. He paid tribute to former Maharashtra Chief Minister Yashwant Rao Chavan in Karad, Maharashtra with senior Congress leader Prithviraj Chavan.
With Manipur witnessing violence for over two months, the business community in the state is bleeding red with economic activities almost coming to a standstill.

A number of entrepreneurs in the state said on Monday that irrespective of the communities, all sections of the people and their economic activities have been affected by the violence that began on May 3.

Corporate leaders who had returned to Manipur after serving long stints at global MNCs outside the Northeast are now questioning their own decisions of investing time and money in their home state.

"The impact has been huge. Almost everyone, irrespective of the communities, has been affected. Before May 3, life was pretty normal. For the last couple of years, we were on a path of progress. Businesses were flourishing, people were progressing on day-to-day lives as we were recovering from the COVID-19 impact.

"Then this (ethnic clashes) happened. Now our lives have changed, and the way people do business has changed. In fact, it has sent us quite a few years back," Addble Solutions Pvt Ltd founder Yaikhomba Ningthemcha told PTI.

Talking about the impact on the business community, he said that the sector was suffering.

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"Apart from all the normal transactions stopping, businesses relying on the internet have come to a standstill. We need the internet for paying back our loans. Consumers are not able to pay us. Filing of GST has been affected as we are not able to file it on time because there is no internet," Ningthemcha said.

Ningthemcha was working at a multi-national company in Bengaluru for more than 15 years and returned to his hometown in 2018 to start his own business. Addble Solutions is a cloud-based IT firm that provides B2B digital commerce platforms to companies.

"We were ramping up in 2019-20, when the pandemic came in. Post COVID-19, we were servicing a lot of retail and F&B businesses in Manipur. We are the first from the Northeast to be a part of the Open Network for Digital Commerce (ONDC).

"We are now questioning ourselves if it was the right decision to come back and start a business in Manipur. Our intention was to uplift our state and bring in the brighter side. That's why I came back," he said.

N Sundeep Meitei, a stockbroker from Sangaithel village in Imphal West district, said that businesses have gone down completely.

"There is no transportation, there is no internet. Without the internet, how can we transfer the money? Without transportation, there cannot be any infrastructure development. That means, the progress is zero," he said.

Stating that the deadly clashes and mistrust among communities have caused long-lasting damage to industries, Sundeep said that it is also affecting the lives of common people.

"Those who are in hospital, elderly and minor patients, are not getting money. Their treatment is affected. This is a very painful situation here. I am not talking about one community. Even though I am a Meitei, the violence is affecting every community in Manipur," he said.

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. So far, more than 100 have died and several hundred were injured, besides thousands taking shelters in relief camps.

Meiteis account for about 53 per cent of Manipur's population and live mostly in the Imphal Valley. Tribal Nagas and Kukis constitute another 40 per cent of the population and reside in the hill districts.
Rhee Zha-hyoung, judge-elect for the International Tribunal for the Law of Sea (ITLOS), speaks during an interview with The Korea Times at the Ministry of Foreign Affairs in Seoul, June 27. The former director-general for international legal affairs bureau at the foreign ministry was elected as an ITLOS judge on June 14. Korea Times photo by Shim Hyun-chul



Veteran diplomat elected as judge at International Tribunal for the Law of Sea



By Lee Hyo-jin



The International Tribunal for the Law of Sea (ITLOS) is a permanent international court dealing with disputes concerning the interpretation or application of the UN Convention of the Law of the Sea (UNCLOS), serving as a basis for preserving maritime order and maintaining peace and stability at sea.



The tribunal consists of 21 judges elected by state parties to the UNCLOS, and Rhee Zha-hyoung, a Korean diplomat has recently been elected as a new judge to ITLOS.



With Japan's imminent release of treated wastewater from Fukushima nuclear plant to the Pacific Ocean rising as an imminent concern among Koreans, public attention is rising here over how the international tribunal handles maritime dispute between nations.



Speaking to The Korea Times, Rhee explained that reaching a settlement through the international tribunal is a time-consuming and complicated process that would take several years.



"If a state party (to the UNCLOS) decides to sue another party, the case can be referred to a tribunal that the two parties accepted for the settlement of the dispute," he said. Rhee was elected as the new judge during a UNCLOS meeting on June 14. His term begins this October.



According to Rhee, the involved parties can choose among four means of settlement  ITLOS, the International Court of Justice (ICJ), an arbitral tribunal and a special arbitral tribunal, he said. If the parties fail to reach an agreement, the case may be submitted only to the arbitration.



However, since the judicial proceedings would take several years to come to a conclusion, a party to a dispute may request "provisional measures" to the tribunal if a situation requires an immediate action, according to Rhee. But the request can be filed only after the dispute has been duly submitted to the tribunal, he noted.



He explained, "The tribunal that received the request reviews whether the request meets the requirements and may prescribe provisional measures which it considers appropriate under the circumstances to preserve the respective rights of the parties or to prevent serious harm to the marine environment."



The International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) is widely anticipated to give a permit to the Japanese government on the water discharge in the coming days, which means that Tokyo may start discharging the treated  but still radioactive  wastewater soon after.



Given the urgency, opposition parties and civic groups in Korea are calling on the government to sue Japan at ITLOS. Some critics see that even if the Korean government decides not to take the case to the international tribunal, chances are that neighboring countries, such as China or Pacific Island nations, may file a complaint against Japan.





Storage tanks for contaminated water at the damaged Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Plant are seen in this March 11, 2022 photo. Yonhap
The Supreme Court on Monday slammed the Delhi government for expressing its inability to contribute funds for construction of the Regional Rapid Transit System (RRTS) project and directed it to furnish details of funds spent on advertisements in the last three financial years.

The funds were meant for construction of the RRTS stretch that will connect the national capital with Rajasthan and Haryana.

A bench comprising Justice S K Kaul and Justice Sudhanshu Dhulia directed the AAP government to file an affidavit enumerating details of funds within two weeks.

The direction came after the counsel for the Delhi government told the bench that there was paucity of funds and expressed inability to provide monetary assistance.

"You want us to get into what funds you are spending where. All funds for advertisement shall be diverted for this project. You want this kind of order? You are asking for it," the court said.

"The Delhi government has expressed its inability to contribute funds for common project. Since paucity of funds is an impediment in this project, we call upon the NCT of Delhi to file an affidavit setting forth the funds utilised for advertisement as the project is of national importance. Details may be furnished for last financial years," the bench said.

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Uttarakhand Chief Minister Pushkar Singh Dhami on Monday sought a financial assistance of Rs 1,774 crore from the Centre for the Song dam drinking water project.

Dhami met Union Finance Minister Nirmala Sitharaman in New Delhi and requested her that the amount be given to the state under special assistance from the Government of India.

The total cost of the proposed project is Rs 2,021 crore.

To be built over the Song river, a tributary of the Ganga, the project will make 150 MLD (millions of litres per day) drinking water available to about 10 lakh people of Dehradun and its suburban areas, Dhami said.

The chief minister also requested the Union Finance Minister to remove the ceiling imposed on the loan amount of externally-aided projects in view of the special circumstances and limited financial resources of Uttarakhand.

After the construction of the project, the dependence on tube wells for drinking water system will almost end, he said.

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Besides, a lake of about 3.50 km length will be created by the construction of the project which will promote tourism in the area, generate employment and increase the income of the locals, the chief minister added.
Britain's international trade minister Nigel Huddleston has said that he want to use his first official trip to Kolkata to show the UK's eagerness to work with India and Bangladesh on shared challenges like climate change, using collective expertise to deepen trading relationship, spark economic growth and create jobs.

Huddleston arrived in Kolkata on Monday on a two-day visit to the metropolis. In Kolkata, he will unveil a package of partnerships on electric mobility and green construction at a joint session with the government of West Bengal, the UK government said.

The Department for Business and Trade (DBT) said Huddleston is on a three-day visit to South Asia, which covers Kolkata and also Dhaka in Bangladesh, focused on unlocking more opportunities for British companies to grow trade and two-way business flows.

It added that while the UK continues to negotiate a free trade agreement (FTA) with India, which has completed 10 rounds of negotiations, the ministerial visit forms part of a wider ambition to at least double bilateral trade by 2030 which currently stands at GBP 36 billion. With Bangladesh, UK trade has increased 50 per cent in current prices to hit nearly GBP 5 billion.

"The UK has a strong and enduring relationship with India and Bangladesh. Our trade with both has grown significantly over the past year, which shows our partnerships are reaching new heights, said Huddleston.

"I want to use my first official visit here to show the UK's eagerness to work with both countries on shared challenges like climate change, using our collective expertise to deepen our trading relationship, spark economic growth, and create jobs, he said.

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While in Kolkata, the minister will announce a new project that will see the UK and West Bengal join forces on a pilot to develop electric two-wheelers, such as motorcycles or scooters. West Bengal, the sixth largest state by economic value in India with a GDP expected to reach GBP 117 million this year, has set a target of developing 1 million electric vehicles (EVs) in the next five years.

"Transport is the third biggest source of emissions in India, with road transport accounting for 90 per cent of transport emissions. India has set strong targets to boost EVs and the UK is well-placed to support this ambition by providing knowledge exchange, access to finance and technology, DBT said.

Huddleston will also launch a centre to enhance opportunities in the EV sector by partnering Indian businesses with elite academic and industrial institutions in the UK.

He will also facilitate the signing of memorandum of understanding (MoU) between the UK's Royal Institute of Chartered Surveyors (RICS) and government of West Bengal on skill development in sustainable and modern methods of construction. Through these initiatives, UK businesses will be well-placed to customise and market EV technology and sustainable construction for this burgeoning market in India, DBT said.

Huddleston will also visit a waste processing company in Kolkata using cutting-edge green technologies supplied by UK business CDE Ireland to recycle construction waste into high quality, reusable sand.

At a business roundtable, the minister will speak to industry leaders on the deepening of UK and India's economic ties, emphasising the opportunities that have already been unlocked from the UK-India Enhanced Trade Partnership.

The minister will also discuss the economic benefits of a proposed UK-India FTA, that could cut red tape, reduce tariffs, and help UK and Indian companies do more business.

In Dhaka, Huddleston will visit Intertek, a UK company supporting supply chains in Bangladesh by providing bespoke testing services, for example ensuring manufacturers meet product safety standards. This visit comes a month after the UK's world-leading Developing Countries Trading Scheme (DCTS) came into force, making it easier for Bangladesh and other developing countries to trade with the UK.

DBT claimed Bangladeshi exporters now benefit from simpler and more generous Rules of Origin, which means that they will be able to produce goods using components from many more countries and still export these with zero tariffs to the UK.
United Nations Deputy Secretary-General Amina J Mohammed on Monday began a three-day visit to India with an aim to discuss various global issues.

It is her first visit to India since her reappointment to the post for a second five-year term in January last year.

The UN deputy secretary-general (DSG) will hold separate meetings with External Affairs Minister S Jaishankar, Finance Minister Nirmala Sitharaman, Environment Minister Bhupender Yadav and India's G20 Sherpa Amitabh Kant.

"The DSG's visit to India will be an opportunity to exchange views on India's ongoing G20 presidency and its achievements in Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) ahead of the SDG summit in September this year, and issues related to climate action in context of developmental priorities," the Ministry of External Affairs (MEA) said.

It said the visit is a reflection of India's abiding commitment to multilateralism, including through its contribution to the UN and its ongoing G20 presidency, in addressing global challenges meaningfully.

"The DSG will also be travelling to Bengaluru where she will be interacting with experts from premier information and technology research institutions and industry representatives to discuss India's achievements in the digital technology domain that could be replicated in the Global South for addressing developmental challenges," the MEA said in a statement.

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White-collar hiring in India witnessed 3 per cent decline in June as sectors such as IT, Retail, BPO, Education, FMCG and Insurance also showed cautious hiring sentiments, a report said on Monday.

According to the Naukri JobSpeak Index, on a year-on-year basis, June witnessed a 3 per cent decline with 2,795 job postings compared to 2,878 in June 2022. On a month-on-month basis, the job postings fell by 2 per cent.

The Naukri JobSpeak is a monthly Index representing the state of the Indian job market & hiring activity based on new job listings and job-related searches by recruiters on the resume database of Naukri.com.

"The white collar job market of India is witnessing a structural shift. For a long time, jobs in the tech sector and in top metros were the key drivers of white collar job growth.

"Of late, jobs in the emerging sectors such as real estate, oil and gas, pharma and BFSI have emerged as significant contributors to job growth," Naukri.com Chief Business Officer Pawan Goyal added.

As per the report, the IT industry hiring continued to remain an area of concern, with a 31 per cent decline in new jobs created compared to June last year.

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The decline in hiring was prominent across all types of IT companies, including global tech giants, large IT services companies, tech-focused start-ups and unicorns, the report noted.

While traditional roles such as Software Developers and System Analysts continued to witness a downturn, niche roles such as Cybersecurity Analysts and AI Specialists showed positive hiring trends, bucking the negative trend across most other tech roles, said the report.

Besides IT, sectors such as Retail, BPO, Education, FMCG and Insurance also showed cautious hiring sentiments.

However, the report revealed that the Oil and Gas sector continued its bull run with 40 per cent growth in new jobs compared to June last year in line with the rapid refinery expansion and supporting roles to meet the increased domestic and export demand.

Similarly, the Pharma sector surged with a 14 per cent growth in new jobs compared to June last year.

Automobile, Hospitality, and Banking were some of the other sectors witnessing positive hiring sentiments.

The Naukri JobSpeak Index also found that diversification of white-collar jobs to non-metro cities continued apace.

Ahmedabad topped the list with an unprecedented 23 per cent growth in employment compared to June last year, followed by Vadodara with 14 per cent growth, while Jaipur continued to hold steady.

On the other hand, it said, hiring activity continued to dip across large IT-driven metros, except Mumbai, which held steady compared to June 2022, primarily driven by the Oil and Gas and Hospitality sector.


A newspaper clipping of Lieutenant Richard F. Underwood, interpreter, during the Korean War. Courtesy of Richard Underwood, "What a fun LIFE!"



By Robert Neff



I never met Richard Folsom Underwood in person, but I have corresponded with him on several occasions over the last six or seven years. He was always kind enough to answer my incessant questions about life in Korea prior to World War II and provided honest criticism of my writing  pointing out my far-too-frequent errors. He also provided me with a copy of his autobiography, "What a Fun LIFE."



Born in Seoul on June 9, 1927, his arrival was not especially welcomed by his three older brothers who desired a sister and indignantly pointed out to their mother that "every respectable family has at least one girl!" She eventually placated them when she provided them with a kid sister some two years later.



His early years were filled with picnics, sailing on the Han River or along the coast, hunting in the mountains and life lessons taught with reasoning and an occasional spanking. There was also a degree of competitiveness enjoyed by the entire family  especially when they played croquet.



Richard's father always insisted on using the green ball and took fiendish delight in hexing his children's balls while charming his own. When he knocked one of his young opponents' ball out of the field he felt compelled to quote Lord Byron  "The Assyrian came down like a wolf on the fold, his cohorts all gleaming purple and gold." If the children were playing well, he would taunt them by declaring, "The wicked flourish as the green bay tree," but if he was ahead "Virtue rises triumphant," rang from his lips.



Following the surprise attack on Pearl Harbor in 1941, most Westerners were forced to leave Korea. When he was old enough, Underwood enlisted in the U.S. Army and was stationed in Korea following Japan's surrender  other members of his family also returned to Seoul. Although liberated, the peninsula was divided by two ideologies and was a vortex of political uncertainty and lawlessness. He served for nearly two years in Korea before he was discharged and returned to the United States to attend school.



On March 17, 1949, his mother was murdered in her own home at Choson Christian College (now Yonsei University) during a tea party given in honor of Mo Yunsuk, a poet. Two members of the Democratic Patriotic Students League broke into the house intent on killing Mo and when Mrs. Underwood attempted to throw them out, she was mortally shot. Her last words were, "It is okay."



The Korean War began on June 25, 1950, and Underwood promptly reenlisted in the U.S. Army and was sent to Korea as a junior officer. His accounts of the war are haunting, especially the events surrounding Wonsan and the massacre of citizens by the North Korean forces. But, as he noted in his book, North Korean soldiers were not the only ones guilty of atrocities.



There were other losses. On Feb. 20, 1951, his father, who worked "for an unnamed U.S. agency" in Korea, died from a heart attack. It was a terrible blow but Underwood found solace with his work.



During one of the peace talks, he served as an interpreter. In his book, he admitted that he was less-than-pleased with his initial performance  having "sweat blood, died of humiliation" and poorly interpreting the speeches given by the delegates  but he quickly improved.





Richard Underwood, right, in 1953 / Korea Times Archive



Not included in his autobiography is an anecdote he provided me a couple of months ago. He and his brother, Horace (who was also serving as an interpreter) learned the U.N. delegation was considering ceding the Baengnyeong Island group to North Korea.



This greatly alarmed the brothers who had often sailed to the islands prior to World War II and knew some of the residents. They were also aware that following liberation and the subsequent division of the peninsula, many refugees, mostly Christians, fled from the mainland to the islands because they were south of the 38th parallel and thus within South Korea. If the islands were ceded to North Korea, the refugees (and their friends) would all suffer.



The Underwoods quickly pointed out the strategic importance of the islands  that they were ideal locations for radar stations to monitor China. The delegation agreed and declared that as the islands "had never been under the control of the North they must remain in the South."



In his email, he described it as "a quiet victory" and wrote:



"I am brash enough to feel that Horace and I have had something to do with keeping a sizable friendly population safe for all this time. Now, almost seventy years later that still feels pretty good."



In 1952, Underwood finished his military service, married Carol Lutz and raised four children. He spent most of the next four decades in Korea  mainly with Seoul Foreign School where he served as headmaster from 1961 until he retired in 1992 and returned to the United States.





Richard F. Underwood as headmaster of Seoul Foreign School in 1981/ Korea Times Archive
As a part of the Tamil Nadu governments effort to address the concerns of the industry, the industries department has kicked off SIPCOT BizBuddy Outreach programme and held the first annual event at SIPCOT Oragadam Industrial Park on Monday.

SIPCOT or the State Industries Promotion Corporation of Tamil Nadu is an institution owned by Tamil Nadu government to promote industrial growth in the state.

SIPCOT BizBuddy Outreach is a first-of-its-kind programme initiated Industries ministry, and undertaken by SIPCOT and the Department of Industries, to address the needs and concerns of the industry, a government statement said.

Annual SIPCOT BizBuddy Outreach events will now be held across all industrial parks of SIPCOT starting this year. Representatives of all establishments in the industrial parks will be invited to share their challenges and ideas with officials of SIPCOT and the Industries department.

The chief minister has advised us to keep our ears open to feedback from investors and industry representatives. The idea behind the programme is to listen to the industry, and address your concerns in the best way possible. We want to assure you that we intend to stand by you and help you solve any issues you may face. We want your honest feedback. We are also very keen on taking your inputs on how to improve policies and infrastructure in your respective parks, said TRB Rajaa, industries minister of Tamil Nadu, inaugurating the event.

More than 250 representatives from the industry attended the event held on Monday at Hotel Mercure in Oragdam. Industry representatives from various establishments in Oragadam, Irungattokottai, Sriperumbudur and Pillaipakkam participated. The event was held in an open-house format and everyone was given the opportunity to speak. Several representatives shared their ideas and concerns with the minister and officials, and thanked the government for this initiative. After listening to industry representatives, the minister promised to look into their suggestions and take constructive steps as soon as possible.
India on Monday permitted imports of potatoes from Bhutan without any license for one more year till June 2024.



Earlier, it was allowed till June 30 this year.



"Import of potatoes...is allowed from Bhutan without any import license, up to June 30, 2024," the directorate general of foreign trade (DGFT) said in a notification.



Imports of fresh or chilled potatoes stood at USD 1.02 million in 2022-23.



In a separate notification, the DGFT said that the import of 17,000 metric tonnes of fresh (green) areca nut without a minimum import price (MIP) condition from Bhutan will also be allowed through LCS (land customs station) Chamurchi (INCHMB).



Chamurchi is a small village in the Jalpaiguri district. It is close to the Bhutan border. INCHMB is a location code.



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Further, in a trade notice, the directorate laid out a procedure for the allocation of quota for the export of broken rice on humanitarian and food security grounds, based on requests received from governments of other countries.



It has extended the last date for submission of an application for obtaining a license for the export of broken rice to Senegal, Gambia and Indonesia, up to July 6.



"In case of any mis-declaration by any applicant or any applicant failing to export the allocated quota to the respective country(ies), within the specified time period, will be blacklisted for the next two financial years and action under the relevant provisions of FT (D&R) Act, 1992, as amended, shall be taken against the applicant," it said.



Foreign trade happens as per the Foreign Trade (Development & Regulations) Act, 1992.
Jewellery retail major Senco Gold Ltd has fixed a price band of Rs 301 to Rs 317 for its Rs 405 crore initial public offering (IPO), which will open for public subscription on July 4, the company said on Monday.

The initial share sale will conclude on July 6 and the bidding for anchor investors will open on July 3, according to the Red Herring Prospectus.

The bids have to be made for a minimum of 47 shares of Rs 10 each and multiples thereof.

The Senco IPO comprises a fresh issue of equity shares aggregating up to Rs 270 crore and an offer-for-sale of equity shares to the tune of Rs 135 crore by selling shareholder SAIF Partners India IV Ltd, the RHP said.

At present, SAIF Partners has 19.23 per cent stake in the jewellery retail chain. It will be offloading its stake by 8-9 per cent in this issue, Senco managing director and CEO Suvankar Sen said.

Another PE fund sponsored by the Oman Investment Authority and State Bank of India which has invested Rs 75 crore in the Kolkata-based jewellery retailer last year is not offloading any stake, he said.

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Out of Rs 270 crore, the company proposes to use Rs 196 crore of net proceeds from the fresh issue for funding working capital requirements and the remaining for general corporate purposes.

The Kolkata-based firm has 140 showrooms across 13 states. A total 63 per cent of them is located in West Bengal. It also sells its products through various online platforms, besides wholesale exports of its jewellery primarily to Dubai, Malaysia and Singapore.

Sen said the company said the fund garnered from the IPO will help fuel growth. "The company has been opening five to six stores every year".

IIFL Securities Ltd, Ambit Private Ltd and SBI Capital Markets Ltd are the book-running lead managers to the issue. The equity shares are proposed to be listed on the BSE and NSE.
Indias International Financial Services Center (IFSC) in Gujarat International Finance Tec-City (GIFT) achieved a major milestone on Monday with the successful migration of Nifty derivatives contracts traded on the Singapore Exchange (SGX).

On day one itself, the GIFT Nifty, earlier referred to as SGX Nifty, clocked trading turnover of more than $1 billion and open interest of over $8 billion. The turnover was expected to rise further as GIFT Nifty contracts are traded for nearly 21 hours, encompassing market hours in Asia, Europe, and the US.

The first session for GIFT Nifty contracts starts at 6:30 AM India time and closes at 3:55 PM, closer to the operations of the domestic market. The second session operations are between 4:35 PM IST and 2:45 AM the following day.

We are proud of this important landmark with full scale operations of NSE IX  SGX GIFT Connect, with onshoring Nifty contracts to NSE IX. The Connect becomes a symbolic event of opportunity, innovation and unparalleled access between India and the world, said NSE managing director and chief executive officer Ashishkumar Chauhan.

The arrangement between both exchanges was proposed after the Indian bourses decided to end licensing agreements with their overseas counterparts in 2018. The decision was aimed to bring liquidity and stop trading in domestic products on overseas exchanges.

GIFT City, characterised as a special economic zone, falls under the regulatory purview of the International Financial Services Center Authority (IFSCA).

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The complete migration of the re-branded GIFT-NIFTY to GIFT IFSC will consolidate the international liquidity pool for Nifty products in the NSE IX exchange and will a give a boost to GIFT-IFSC as a global hub for international financial products and services, said Injeti Srinivas, chairman, IFSCA.

The NSE IX was set up at GIFT city in 2017 and offers products from index and currency derivatives to global stocks.

Industry experts say that the transition will help bring more inflow of US dollars and foreign capital to India along with offering a level playing field for both domestic and offshore investors.
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Shares of Housing Development Finance Corporation (HDFC) and HDFC Bank gained up to 3 per cent on the BSE in Mondays intra-day trade, extending their past three days' upward movement, after their respective Boards fixed July 13 as the record date for determining the shareholders of the Corporation who shall be issued and allotted the shares of HDFC Bank.With the deal getting effective, HDFC Bank will be 100 per cent owned by public shareholders, and existing shareholders of HDFC will own 41 per cent of the bank. Every HDFC shareholder will get 42 shares of HDFC Bank for every 25 shares they hold.Besides, July 13 has been fixed for the continuation of warrants of HDFC Limited in the name of HDFC Bank.Shares of HDFC Bank hit a record high of Rs 1,744.70, as they gained 2.5 per cent on the BSE in the intra-day trade today. It surpassed its earlier high of Rs 1,733.95, hit on May 4, 2023.Shares of HDFC, too, hit a 52-week high of Rs 2,900.60, rising3 per cent on the BSE in the intra-day trade today. The stock surpassed its previous high of Rs 2,867, touched on May 4, 2023.In the past four trading days, these stocks have surged 7 per cent. In comparison, the S&P BSE Sensex was up 0.71 per cent at 65,175 at 09:51 am.The boards of directors of the Corporation and HDFC Bank, at their respective board meetings held on June 30, 2023, have approved Saturday, July 1, 2023, to be the 'Effective Date' of the Scheme, on which date the certified order of the National Company Law Tribunal, Mumbai bench (NCLT) sanctioning the Scheme will be filed by HDFC Investments, HDFC Holdings, the Corporation and HDFC Bank with the RoC.HDFC Bank had said that the merged entity brings together significant complementarities existing between them and is poised to create meaningful value for various stakeholders.HDFC Bank is expected to deliver higher than industry growth with RoA of around 2 per cent in FY25E. Analysts at ICICI Securities remain positive and retain BUY rating on the stock. We value HDFC Bank at ~2.5x FY25E ABV (post merger) and Rs 155 for subsidiaries and revise our target price to Rs 2050/share from Rs 1970 earlier," the brokerage firm said.
Public sector banks Punjab National Bank (PNB) and Canara Bank, along with LIC-owned IDBI Bank , are set for an upgrade from mid-cap to large-cap in the lastest stock categorisation list to be issued by the Association of Mutual Funds in India (Amfi) this week, according to report by Nuvama Institutional Equities.

Amfi takes the average market capitalisation (m-cap) for the past six months to arrive at the fresh list at the end of every six-month period (January to June and July to December). Top 100 stocks by average m-cap qualify for the largecap status and the next 150 for midcap.
We are having the wrong kind of conversations on inclusion and inequity, both in India and abroad. In the US, the Supreme Court just handed down a 6-3 verdict outlawing race-based affirmative action programmes in two educational institutions, Harvard and the University of North Carolina. But even as the courts are reversing decades of progressive law-making, politicians are trying to include caste as one more kind of discrimination. They are thus importing an Indian problem into the US, even as their judiciary is saying race cannot be the entire basis for affirmative action.

In India, we are going in
Never in my long career have I been so amazed to see the remarkably enabling environment being provided by policymakers to the Indian industry to enhance manufacturing value-add in the country. PLI schemes are the cornerstone of the government's efforts to make India a global manufacturing powerhouse - both by augmenting the capabilities of Indian companies and attracting global companies to set up mother plants in India. As chairperson of the Steering Committee for Advancing Local Value-Add and Exports (Scale) committee, I have an opportunity to interact with industry in many of the PLI sectors directly, and I can confidently say that PLI is making a huge difference. The impact will go way beyond the end of the scheme in five years. PLI is giving a kick-start to manufacturing in a way that it will get into a positive spiral.

The government is investing in the long-term growth of our manufacturing sector by providing a strong financial booster shot in the Production Linked Incentive Scheme and doing other reforms. The intent is very clear - to make our manufacturing sector globally competitive and thereby make India Atamanirbhar and take advantage of the current geopolitical situation. I may also add that we are only in the second year of the 5-year PLI scheme. The positive impact of PLI will only accelerate as we move forward.

PLI Scheme, as envisioned, is built on the foundation of 14 sectors with an incentive outlay of Rs 1.97 trillion (about US$ 26 billion) to strengthen their production capabilities and help create global champions. The underlying principle is to grow scale and make India globally competitive. The expectation is that in 5 years, the industry will reach a scale and efficiency, help with other reforms such as Gati Shakti, new trade agreements, and EoDB, and that it will not need a PLI to be competitive.

We are already witnessing a gradual shift in India's export basket from traditional commodities to high-value-added products such as electronics & telecommunication goods, processed food products etc. PLI Sectors that have seen an increase in FDI inflows in the last year are drugs and pharmaceuticals (+46 per cent), food processing industries (+26 per cent) and medical appliances (+91 per cent).

In the 14 PLI sectors - mobiles, medical devices, telecom & networking products, automobiles and auto components, pharmaceuticals, drugs, white goods, speciality steel, electronic products, food products, textile products, solar PV modules, advanced chemistry cell battery and drones and drone components, as on date, 733 applications have been approved with an expected investment of Rs 3.65 trillion, of which Rs 62,500 cr has already been realised till March 2023. Along with the large industries, 176 MSMEs are also among the direct PLI beneficiaries.

An incentive amount of around Rs 2,900 crore has been disbursed in FY 2022-23 under PLI Schemes for 8 Sectors, viz. large-scale electronics manufacturing (LSEM), IT hardware, bulk drugs, medical devices, pharmaceuticals, telecom & networking products, food processing and drones & drone components.

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One of the big success stories is that of mobile phones. PLI has enabled major smartphone companies, e.g., Foxconn, Wistron and Pegatron, to shift their supplier base to India. As a result, top high-end phones are being manufactured in India. This has also increased localisation in IT Hardware such as batteries and laptops. India has increased the value addition in mobile manufacturing to almost 20 per cent within three years, which is indeed a very good start compared to its peers. Tech giant Apple Inc. is looking to shift part of its iPhone manufacturing value chain to India. PLI Scheme for LSEM, along with the existing Phased Manufacturing Program (PMP), has led to increased value addition in the electronics sector and smartphone manufacturing, 23 per cent and 20 per cent, respectively, from negligible in 2014-15.

Another PLI scheme - PLI for White Goods (air conditioners, etc.) has successfully boosted local value addition. The domestic AC industry is working towards increasing the localisation content from 25 per cent to 75 per cent in 5 years and targeting to acquire a reasonable share of global export in room air conditioners from a minuscule share. There is increased confidence in Indian companies to play in the global arena, thanks to the support from PLI.

The telecom sector has achieved import substitution of 60 per cent with increased self-reliance in antennae, GPON (Gigabit Passive Optical Network) and CPE (Customer Premises Equipment). Drones, a strategic sunrise sector, has seen significant momentum post-PLI, particularly in the growing number of promising start-ups in drone manufacturing.

Medical devices is another important sector with high import dependency  to the tune of 75 to 80 per cent and yet high export potential. India can become the global manufacturing and export hub for medical devices. Thanks to the PLI support, the sector has received a committed investment of 1,206 cr, with an actual investment of Rs 714 cr to date. Tech giants like Wipro, GE, and Siemens are increasing their manufacturing footprint in India. It is very encouraging to see domestic manufacturing of high-end medical devices like MRI scans, CT scans, mammograms, high-end X-ray tubes, etc, starting in India.

However, the industry must remember that the PLI scheme is for five years. The industry must use these five years to create scale and reduce factor and logistics costs with the government's help. By the sixth year, we must ensure that Indian manufacturing is globally competitive, even without the help of the PLI scheme.

The writer is former MD of Mahindra & Mahindra. He is currently chairman, IN-SPACe and chairman, Scale

Disclaimer: These are the personal opinions of the writer. They do not reflect the views of www.business-standard.com or the Business Standard newspaper
When the Opposition gathered in Patna on June 23, it had settled alliances in four states  Tamil Nadu, Maharashtra, Bihar, and Jharkhand. Of these, the alliances in undivided Bihar and Maharashtra worried the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) the most.

In 2019, the BJP and its allies won 92 of Maharashtra, Bihar and Jharkhands 102 seats. But four years hence, its former allies, the Janata Dal (United) and the Uddhav Thackeray-led Shiv Sena, stood with the Opposition.

On Monday, a day after Nationalist Congress Party (NCP) leader Ajit Pawar joined the Eknath Shinde-BJP government as deputy chief minister (CM), along with eight other NCP Members of Legislative Assembly (MLAs) who were inducted as ministers, the two NCP factions indulged in mutual sackings of party leaders.

Beyond their recriminations, the NCP split has dented the political sway and morale of the Maha Vikas Aghadi in its preparedness for the 2024 Lok Sabha and Assembly polls more than last years split in the Shiv Sena. It has jolted Opposition unity efforts and lowered patriarch Sharad Pawars stature among other Opposition parties.

Some in Opposition parties were sceptical of claims that Pawar senior and daughter Supriya Sule had little inkling of what party leaders Ajit Pawar, Praful Patel, and others had planned. But it has also ended the National Democratic Alliance government in Maharashtras reliance on the Shinde-led Shiv Sena in case of any disqualification of its legislators.

Pawar senior has resolved to go to the people to rebuild his party. The test will be the parallel meetings of the two factions on July 5, which could be a measure of whether the party rank and file and majority of its legislators are with the 82-year-old patriarch or his 63-year-old nephew.

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Indian politics is replete with party patriarchs, in the evening of their political careers, failing to quell rebellions in their parties, including N T Rama Rao, Mulayam Singh Yadav, and Haryanas Devi Lal.

On Monday, Sharad Pawar sacked the party's working president Praful Patel and Lok Sabha member of Parliament (MP) Sunil Tatkare, who have sided with Maharashtra Deputy CM Ajit Pawar in his rebellion, for engaging in anti-party activities. Tatkares daughter Aditi was among the ministers who took oath on Sunday.

Soon after being removed as NCP working president, Praful Patel on Monday evening announced the appointment of Tatkare as the partys state unit chief, replacing Jayant Patil and Maharashtra Deputy CM Ajit Pawar as its legislature wing leader.

Patel, a Rajya Sabha MP who was named NCP working president last month, told a press conference in Mumbai that Ajit Pawar would be the NCP's legislature party leader.

Today (Monday) is Guru Purnima; we all wish that Sharad Pawar continues to bless us, said Patel.

Deputy CM Ajit Pawar, who was present at the press meet, said he enjoyed the support of maximum NCP legislators and also the partys election symbol. He said he had given a letter to the Assembly Speaker, seeking the disqualification of party MLAs Jayant Patil and Jitendra Awhad (who belong to a rival group) from the House.

Whatever we are doing is in the interest of the party. We will strengthen our party further, Ajit Pawar said.

Asked who was the NCPs national head, Ajit Pawar shot back, The partys national president is Sharad Pawar. Have you forgotten? Law will decide if we have rebelled. Only the Election Commission of India will decide to whom the party belongs.
President Yoon Suk Yeol and Vietnamese President Vo Van Thuong shake hands at the Presidential Palace of Vietnam in Hanoi, June 23. Yonhap



Experts say Seoul should tread carefully in taking advantage of Hanoi's bid to diversify arms import sources



By Jung Min-ho



The abysmal performance exhibited by Russia's military in Ukraine has been a PR disaster for its arms exporters and an alarming revelation for the nations that rely heavily on Russian weapons for their security.



As many countries seek to reduce their dependence on Russian military hardware, President Yoon Suk Yeol said that South Korea would reinforce defense ties with Vietnam  one of the top buyers of Russian weapons  at a summit with Vietnamese President Vo Van Thuong in Hanoi last month.



Yoon's surprising move has prompted South Korean arms makers to rethink their overseas business strategies, which have almost exclusively targeted those in the free world. Vietnam, a one-party state ruled by the Communist Party of Vietnam, still maintains cordial diplomatic relations with North Korea.



Foreign relations experts and industry officials told The Korea Times that South Korea needs to develop shrewd, long-term strategies as part of its efforts to take advantage of Vietnam's attempt to wean itself off its heavy dependence on Russian weapons, saying that doing so would require a careful assessment of the geopolitical situation. Both the potential benefits and the risks associated with South Korea's expansion into this uncharted market are substantial, they added.



Korea Aerospace Industries (KAI), the nation's sole aircraft manufacturer, signed an agreement recently with Viettel Aerospace Institute, an affiliate of Vietnam's largest mobile network operator, to develop and produce helicopters.



According to KAI officials, Vietnam is the first socialist country the firm aims to build a long-term business relationship with. They said that the KAI seeks to expand into the defense sector after strengthening in non-military cooperation first.



"No other socialist countries have been considered for such business partnerships, and the one with Vietnam was possible only because the U.S. lifted its ban on weapons sales to the country in 2016, given its unique geopolitical position," a KAI official said on Monday.





North Korean leader Kim Jong-un, left, and Vietnamese President Nguyen Phu Trong raise their hands during a state banquet in Hanoi, in this March 1, 2019 photo. EPA-Yonhap
The Nationalist Congress Party (NCP) on Sunday night said Ajit Pawar, who has joined the Eknath Shinde-led government as Deputy Chief Minister with some leaders, doesn't have the support of 36 MLAs as being claimed.

NCP national spokesperson Clyde Crasto also claimed that the party working president Supriya Sule and state unit chief Jayant Patil are contacting all the 53 MLAs and the picture will become clearer by Monday.

The NCP has 53 MLAs in the 288-member Maharashtra Assembly and Ajit Pawar needs the support of at least 36 legislators to not attract the provisions of anti-defection law.

"Ajit Pawar doesn't have the support of 36 MLAs as being claimed," claimed Crasto.

Ajit Pawar took oath as Deputy CM in the Shiv Sena-BJP government on Sunday afternoon, while eight other MLAs of NCP were sworn in as ministers.

In the evening, sources cited a letter submitted to Raj Bhavan to claim that Ajit Pawar enjoys the support of more than 40 MLAs and over six of nine MLCs of his party.

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"Ajit Pawar has the support of more than 40 MLAs and more than six MLCs. A letter of support of these legislators was given to Raj Bhavan," a source had told PTI.

Addressing reporters after taking oath as deputy CM, Ajit Pawar had maintained that there was no split in the NCP and that they would contest all future elections on the NCP's name and symbol.

"All the elected representatives (of the party) have supported the decision to join the government," he had claimed.

Ajit Pawar's uncle and NCP chief Sharad Pawar had said some people whose names are on the list (of BJP) had called him to inform they were invited (to Mumbai) and their signatures were taken.

"They said their stand as (MLAS) of NCP is different," he added.
Nationalist Congress Party (NCP) leader A jit Pawar made headlines on Sunday when he was sworn in as the deputy chief minister of the BJP-Shiv Sena coalition government in Maharashtra. This move came a little over a week after 15 parties gathered in Patna to unite against the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) in the upcoming Lok Sabha elections in 2024.

Alongside Pawar, eight other members of legislative assembly (MLAs) from NCP, including senior leader Chhagan Bhujbal, took oath as ministers at a ceremony at Raj Bhavan in Mumbai

In response, NCP has filed a disqualification petition against Pawar and the other eight MLAs.

This move is reminiscent of the events in 2019 as well as Sharad Pawars own rebellion in 1978.

Heres how the events unfolded, what happened in 2019 and the significance of the anti-defection law, and how they may apply to Deputy CM Pawar.

Ajit Pawar's political career

Also Read 'Dirty tricks': Opposition hits back at BJP after NCP split in Maharashtra SC faults Maha governor and speaker, but won't restore Thackeray govt Politician Sharad Pawar quits as NCP chief, then agrees to 'rethink' LIVE: TN CM Stalin spoke to NCP Chief Pawar, extended his support to him Is Pawar's exit from NCP a precursor to new power equations in Maharashtra? ECI opens web portal for political parties to file financial accounts Next Opposition meet of parties to be held in Bengaluru on July 17-18: Cong Ajit Pawar, Bhujbal meet Fadnavis to discuss allocation of portfolios CPI(M) in Kerala trying to turn UCC into communal issue: Congress 'Dirty tricks': Opposition hits back at BJP after NCP split in Maharashtra

Ajit Pawar is a prominent leader of the NCP and has held several key positions in Maharashtra's political landscape, including being the deputy chief minister of Maharashtra in the Uddhav Thackeray-led Maha Vikas Aghadi government from November 2019 to June 2022. He is well-known for his grassroots leadership and administrative abilities and even held the position of finance minister for Maharashtra.

Deputy chief minister for 80 hours

In 2019, Ajit Pawar was sworn in as the deputy chief minister (DCM) of Maharashtra alongside chief minister Devendra Fadnavis after a split between BJP and Shiv Sena. This government lasted for 80 hours and Pawar returned to the NCP, making him the shortest-serving DCM in India.

Pawar would then begin his second stint as DCM on December 16, 2019 for the Maha Vikas Aghadi (MVA) administration.

However, this recent rebellion and the amount of support Pawar has received from other members of NCP has caused a significant split in the party and the event weakened the MVA alliance that includes NCP, Congress, and Shiv Sena.

Sharad Pawar stated, "We live in a democratic country where everyone has the right to speak for themselves and keep their points. Ajit Pawar's move is his own decision and point of view."

In light of this news, Sharad Pawar also announced a meeting for July 5 , stating that they would rebuild the party.

Sharad Pawar's Rebellion in 1978

Ajit Pawar is not the only member of NCP or his family to have rebelled in this form. In 1978, his uncle and current chief of NCP, Sharad Pawar rebelled against the Vasantdada Patil government in Maharashtra.

Congress (I) led by Indira Gandhi and Congress (Urs) led by D Devraj Urs, united after the Maharashtra Assembly elections in 1978. They formed a coalition government under the leadership of Vasantdada Patil.

At that time, Sharad Pawar was a part of the Congress (Urs) faction. He, along with 40 other MLAs, revolted against the government, which resulted in its downfall. He sought support from the Janata Party to become the chief minister at the young age of 38.

The Anti-Defection law

The anti-defection law, part of the tenth schedule of the Indian Constitution, was introduced in 1985 to curb defections by legislators. It applies to both the Parliament and state legislatures.

Under this law, legislators risk losing their seats if they abstain from voting or vote against the party whip on any issue.

However, there are two exceptions outlined in the law that allow for abstention without consequences. Firstly, if one-third of the legislators in a political party resign, and secondly, if two-thirds of the legislators merge with another party.

The anti-defection law was amended in 2003 to allow speakers the authority to decide on instances of defection.

"We have filed a disqualification petition with the speaker of the assembly, and we will send hard copies as soon as possible. This disqualification petition was filed against nine leaders," said NCP leader Jayant Patil.

He added, "They didn't inform anyone that they were leaving the party, which is against the NCP. We have also written a letter to the Election Commission of India. We are not accepting this; these nine leaders didn't inform us before doing this (leaving the party)."

"We believe most of the MLAs will come back to the NCP, and we will accept them again," he further added.
Senior Congress leader Prithviraj Chavan on Monday claimed he has information that the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) has promised Ajit Pawar the post of Maharashtra chief minister.

With Ajit Pawar's move to join the ruling Eknath Shinde-BJP coalition on Sunday changing political dynamics in Maharashtra, Shiv Sena (UBT) leader Sanjay Raut also claimed that Shinde will lose the CM's post.

On Sunday, Ajit Pawar led a vertical split in the NCP to become the deputy chief minister, shocking his uncle Sharad Pawar, who founded the party 24 years ago.

Eight NCP leaders were also sworn in as ministers in the Eknath Shinde-Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) government.

To a query, Chavan while speaking to reporters in Karad said, "I had spoken about it (that Ajit Pawar may go with BJP) publicly but I faced criticism."



The Congress leader said he knew this was happening.

"Just bargaining was going on over what he (Ajit) should be getting. As per our information, he has been given a promise of chief minister's post by pushing Eknath Shinde aside with the help of Assembly speaker's decision (on disqualification of 16 Shiv Sena MLAs)," the former CM claimed.

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Chavan was at 'Pritisangam', the memorial of Maharashtra's first CM Yashwantrao Chavan.

NCP chief visited the memorial in Karad and paid floral tributes to the late leader.

Prithviraj Chavan said, "He (Sharad Pawar) is one of the constituents of Maha Vikas Aghadi (MVA) and I am here to extend support to him."



"Pawar Saheb is standing strong behind the opposition unity at the national level and he is going to attend the opposition meet in Bengaluru," he added.

The Congress leader also told PTI that if the MVA had stayed united and strong, the BJP-Eknath Shinde alliance would have had no chance in elections due to the "sympathy factor" for former CM Uddhav Thackeray and the Congress and NCP coming together with him.

The Lok Sabha and Maharashtra Assembly elections are due next year.

"There would be all attempts to break us and that is what has happened,' Prithviraj Chavan said referring to the move by Ajit Pawar and eight other senior NCP leaders to join the government.

He also said state Assembly Speaker Rahul Narwekar has to take a decision on the disqualification of 16 Shiv Sena MLAs, including CM Eknath Shinde, by August 11, failing which the MVA will move the Supreme Court.

Prithviraj Chavan also said Sunday's developments were like preparing the ground "to save the government" if the 16 Sena MLAs are disqualified.

Talking to PTI, Shiv Sena (UBT) leader Sanjay Raut claimed, "Shinde will surely lose the CM's post."



"Let the July 5 meeting of NCP called by Sharad Pawar take place, we will then sit together to chart the road ahead. Uddhav Thackeray has called a meeting of his supporters tomorrow. We will remain united," the Rajya Sabha member said.

Maharashtra Congress vice president Ratnakar Mahajan said the political climate in Maharashtra has for the first time become "chaotic".

Every body seems to be confused about what will happen in the future.

"One thing is certain that everyone wants power. In such a situation, neither issues nor values matter. For the general public it is disappointing," he said.

Against this backdrop, the outcome of elections due next year has become more unpredictable, he said.

"Many surprises will be seen in terms of coalitions, leaders involved and people's participation. Ultimately people suffer in the process," Mahajan said.

Speaking about his party, Mahajan said for the time being Congress is member of the MVA. "Future stand will depend on the situation that develops," he added.

However, state BJP vice president Madhav Bhandari said there is no chaos over two Shiv Sena factions and two NCPs.

'The people who thought they own the parties have been left out and are on one side, while the organisation and workers are on the other side. It is too early to speak about how the developments will play out in future. We have to wait and watch,' he said.

Shiv Sena (UBT) Lok Sabha member Vinayak Raut, while speaking to a TV channel, demanded that Uddhav Thackeray chart out a separate political path out of the MVA.

With the changing political dynamics in Maharashtra, Maharashtra is likely to see two Shiv Sena factions as well as two of the NCP battle it out for political space along with the Congress and BJP in the Lok Sabha and the state Assembly polls next year.

Maharashtra sends 48 MPs to the Lok Sabha, the second highest after Uttar Pradesh.

Despite the rebellion in the Shiv Sena last year, which result in the collapse of the MVA government, the three allies Congress, NCP and Shiv Sena (UBT) had appeared to stand united and face the BJP at the hustings.

The alliance had even tasted success in the biennial elections to the Legislative Council and the Assembly bypoll in Kasba seat of Pune.
Hours after NCP leader Ajit Pawar took oath as deputy chief minister in the Eknath Shinde government, party's working president and his cousin Supriya Sule on Sunday said the developments in the party will not impact the Opposition's unity.

Addressing a press conference late night in Mumbai, Sule said her father and Nationalist Congress Party (NCP) chief Sharad Pawar's stature will rise further.

"Our credibility will only rise after this," she said.

She also said that Ajit Pawar may have different views, but she can never fight with her elder brother and that she will always love him as a sister.

Ajit Pawar on Sunday joined the Shiv Sena-BJP government in Maharashtra as deputy chief minister, while eight other party leaders were inducted as ministers. Sule, whose elevation as party working president last month is said to have triggered Ajit Pawar's revolt, said since 2019 when he first joined the short-lived government led by Devendra Fadnavis to 2023, she has matured a lot with the responsibility of the party.

She said she will not mix personal and professional relationships.

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"I can never have a fight with my brother," she said. "I am boring, steady and not impulsive...Emotional relationships and professional work are two different things. I will.never mix the two," she said. To a question on how her day was in view of the hectic political developments, Sule said it was a challenging day like many other days.

To a question on what transpired at the meeting at 'Devgiri', Ajit Pawar's official residence in Mumbai in the morning, Sule said what was discussed between her and her brother will remain between them only.

The Baramati MP said the party will work with renewed vigour for strengthening the organisation and for the welfare of the state and the country. To a question on whether any disciplinary action would be taken against those who joined the government, she said, "Let the story unfold. It has not even been 12 hours." Nationalist Congress Party's senior leader Ajit Pawar on Sunday met some party leaders and MLAs at his official residence in Mumbai. Sule said Ajit Pawar may have different views. "We both are mature enough to compartmentalise our lives on personal and professional fronts," she said.

"Nobody knows how many MLAs are with Ajit Pawar," Sule said.

When asked if she was talking to any of them, she said, "I talk to them every time. Every MLA of NCP is precious. We have love, affection and respect. We have lived as a family," she said.
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NCP working president Praful Patel has said the decision to join the Shiv Sena-BJP government was a collective one which was taken by the party to provide political stability and ensure the development of Maharashtra and the country.

Talking to reporters, Patel took potshots at Congress and Rahul Gandhi while referring to the Patna meeting of Opposition parties.

Queried whether he has ditched NCP chief Sharad Pawar, Patel rolled up the window of his car and left without answering.

He said the decision to join the state government was taken for the welfare and development of the state and the country.

"The country has progressed under the leadership of Narendra Modi in the last nine years. I had been to Patna for the meeting of opposition parties. I saw what happened there. In the main opposition party Congress there is confusion about whether Rahul Gandhi is the leader or not. We don't know who runs that party," Patel told reporters.

When asked to spell out the exact number of MLAs backing Ajit Pawar, Patel claimed the entire party (53 MLAs) is together.

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Dealing a major blow to his uncle Sharad Pawar, Ajit Pawar on Sunday took oath as Deputy Chief Minister of Maharashtra while eight MLAs of NCP joined as ministers.

"Joining the Maharashtra government was a collective decision taken by NCP for the development of the state, country and in view of the able leadership of PM Modi. In Nagaland, we have supported NDA. We have supported the Maharashtra government to ensure the development of the state and to provide political stability," Patel said.

He echoed Ajit Pawar saying, "If NCP can align with Shiv Sena then why not with BJP? There are no ideological differences".

Patel refused to respond to questions on Pawar being upset with him and whether he had ditched the NCP chief.

"There is no pressure on us. I am thankful to NCP and Pawar saheb for all I got in the party," the former Union minister added.

Notably, Sharad Pawar on Sunday said he was not upset with anybody in view of the major political development in his party but slammed leaders Praful Patel and Sunil Tatkare for "abandoning" the guidelines of the party president and taking a "wrong path".
In the wake of the political developments in Maharashtra that led to a vertical split in the Nationalist Congress Party (NCP), its Goa unit on Monday pledged support for party chief Sharad Pawar.

Talking to PTI, the party's state unit president Jose Philip D'Souza said the entire unit of Goa is strongly behind Sharad Pawar and will not break away from the NCP.

NCP leader Ajit Pawar on Sunday led a vertical split in the party to become the deputy chief minister of Maharashtra, shocking his uncle Sharad Pawar, who founded the party 24 years ago.

Eight NCP leaders were also sworn in as ministers in the Eknath Shinde-Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) government.

The entire unit has faith in Sharad Pawar's capabilities to rebuild the party even after such moves by some leaders, D'Souza said.

We have seen him do it some 15 years ago when a similar incident had happened, he said.

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D'Souza further said he will hold a meeting of his unit later in the day to discuss the political developments in Maharashtra.
A day after NCP stalwart Ajit Pawar joined the Maharashtra government as deputy chief minister with some senior leaders, several workers of the party visited its south Mumbai office and extended their support to patriarch Sharad Pawar.

Ajit Pawar, however, has asked his colleagues to refrain from making any public statements.

Several NCP leaders and workers from districts and tehsils neighbouring Mumbai rushed to the party office to extend their support to the Pawar senior.

Former state home minister Anil Deshmukh and several others have posted their pictures with Sharad Pawar on social media with the tagline: Saheb, always with you.

Meanwhile, NCP state unit president Jayant Patil has suspended party general secretary Shivajirao Garje who attended the swearing-in ceremony of Ajit Pawar on Sunday.

NCP Lok Sabha member from Shirur, Amol Kolhe, who was present at Raj Bhavan a day earlier, on Monday returned to the Pawar camp.

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Sometimes the head makes a mistake, but the heart never, Kolhe tweeted.

The post was retweeted by NCP leader Jitendra Awhad, saying, One warrior returns to camp.
US President Joe Biden will be heading to Europe for a three-country trip to -- the United Kingdom, Lithuania, and Finland--to bolster the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) coalition.

During his trip from July 9-13, President Biden will first travel to London, United Kingdom for engagements with King Charles III and Prime Minister Rishi Sunak to further strengthen the close relationship between our nations, the White House informed in a statement.

He will then travel to Vilnius, Lithuania from July 11- 12 to attend the 74th NATO Summit. This will be followed by a visit to Helsinki, Finland for a US-Nordic Leaders Summit.

According to Al Jazeera, the intention of Biden's Europe visit is to bolster the international coalition against Russian aggression as the war in Ukraine extends well into its second year.

The main focus of Biden's five-day visit will be the annual NATO summit, held this year in Vilnius, Lithuania.

Also planned are stops in Helsinki, Finland, to commemorate the Nordic country's entrance into the 31-nation military alliance in April, and Britain, the White House has announced.

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The NATO meeting comes at the latest critical point in the war.

Ukraine's president, Volodymyr Zelenskyy, says counter-offensive and defensive actions against Russian forces are underway as Ukrainian troops start to recapture territory in the southeastern part of the country, according to its military leaders, Al Jazeera reported.

Notably, the Russia-Ukraine war started after Ukraine expressed the desire to be a part of the NATO alliance.

Even after the Russian invasion going on for over a year, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy is firm on the stand.

"I am also grateful for the support of our movement in NATO. It is now the obvious fact - the wider NATO is in Europe, the wider the space of peace is in Europe," he said on Twitter after meeting Spanish Prime Minister Pedro Sanchez on Saturday.

NATO's secretary-general, Jens Stoltenberg, visited the White House on June 13, where he and Biden again stressed that the Western alliance was united in defending Ukraine.

After the Russian attack on Ukraine, Finland and Sweden too expressed desire to join the NATO bloc for getting security assurances.

Finland joined the bloc in April this year after Turkey withdrew its objections over its membership.

However, Sweden has still not been able to join the grouping, as Turkey has "security concerns" with it and also accuses it of harbouring "terrorist groups".

In addition to this, Hungary too has objected to Sweden's entry in the bloc over the latter's criticism of Hungary's PM Orban.

The Russia-Ukraine war that started on February 24, 2022 has taken numerous lives and the war continues to escalate between the two nations even now.
The grandmother of Nahel M, the 17-year-old boy who was shot and killed by a police officer, has called for peace after days of unrest in France over his fatal shooting.

Identified as Nadia, the grandmother of the teen in a telephone interview with French news broadcaster BFM TV, said, The people who are breaking things right now, I tell them: stop it.

She said that she was not angry at the police in general and only angry at the officer who killed her grandson. She expressed faith in the justice system of the nation.

Violence erupted in France after Nahel, a delivery driver, was shot and killed by a police officer on June 27 in a Paris suburb during a traffic check. The death of the teen unleashed tensions between residents setting barricades on fire and the police firing tear gas.

On Saturday, hundreds of people rallied at Nanterres grand mosque in Paris to express their support to the family as the teenager was buried.

Rioters damaged and ransacked shops, burned cars, and clashed with 45,000 police officers sent across the country to quell Frances worst social upheaval in years. Rioters have torched 2,000 vehicles since the start of the unrest and over 200 police officers have been injured.

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The French government said that 875 people were arrested on Thursday and 1,311 people on Friday night. The police said that around 200 people were arrested nationwide on Saturday.

Following an initial investigation, local prosecutor Pascal Prache said that Nahel was driving in the bus lane and when the police officers tried to stop him, he drove through a red light. Nahel then got stuck in traffic and the police officers approached his car.

Prache said that the teen was killed by a single shot that went through his left arm and chest. He determined that the necessary conditions for the lawful use of the weapon were not fulfilled. As a result, the police officer responsible for the fatal shooting in Nanterre will face an investigation for voluntary homicide.

To maintain public order in the country, the French government deployed 45,000 officers. However, despite these efforts, instances of violence erupted in Marseille, Lyon, Pau, Toulouse, Lille, and certain parts of Paris, including Nanterre.

French President Emmanuel Macron appealed to parents to keep their children off the streets and blamed the influence of social media for aggravating the situation.

French law enforcement agencies possess a higher number of firearms per capita compared to other advanced economies.

According to data from the Small Arms Survey, an independent research organisation headquartered in Geneva, approximately 500,000 firearms are in the possession of French police officers, resulting in a ratio of 765 guns per 100,000 civilians. This ratio surpasses that of the US.
This photo provided by the Gyeongnam Provincial Police Agency shows police personnel searching a mountain for the body of a newborn baby. A couple was arrested on July 2, on charges of strangling their newborn baby to death and abandoning his body in the southern city of Geoje. Yonhap



A couple was arrested Sunday on charges of strangling their newborn baby to death and abandoning his body in the southern city of Geoje, police said, the latest in a series of child abuse cases involving unregistered babies.



A woman in her 30s and her partner in his 20s were charged with strangling the baby to death and burying his body on a mountain after the child died in their home in Geoje, 331 kilometers south of Seoul, five days after he was born in September last year.



The two had initially claimed they found the baby dead on the morning of Sept. 9 and buried his body on a mountain the following day, but later confessed that they killed him and abandoned the body in a stream, officials said.



It was the latest in a series of shocking child abuse cases revealed after the government launched an investigation to check the well-being of more than 2,000 undocumented babies born since 2015, following the discovery of two unregistered newborns in a home refrigerator last month.



On Sunday, the Suwon District Court in Suwon, 30 km south of Seoul, had also planned to hold a hearing on an arrest warrant for a woman accused of starving her infant to death in 2019, but she decided not to attend the hearing after admitting to all charges against her, officials said.



The woman, in her 20s, was put under emergency detention Friday on charges of neglecting her baby son and letting him starve to death by not feeding him for three days at her previous home in Daejeon, 139 kilometers south of Seoul, after giving birth in April 2019.



The court is expected to decide on the warrant later Sunday.



According to the police, the woman left her ex-boyfriend four years ago without knowing she was pregnant. She gave birth to her child alone at a hospital in Daejeon but did not report the child's information to the local government.



The baby's body has not been found yet, the police said.



Authorities initially searched the mountains near the suspect's previous home in Daejeon for the body after she said she buried it near her old home there. She has since repeatedly changed her story, telling the police different locations, they said. (Yonhap)






By Takashi Mochizuki and Yuki Furukawa



International Business Machines Corp. is prioritizing helping Japans chipmaking startup Rapidus Corp., with a senior executive describing the budding foundry business as vital to securing long-term global supply.



Rapidus, a venture backed by some of Japans biggest electronics firms, is turning IBMs 2-nanometer chip design into production-ready silicon and aims to fabricate such chips at scale in the latter half of this decade. The most advanced semiconductors today are built at the larger 3nm node.

When it comes to 2nm technology, we are focusing our efforts on Rapidus and investing a great deal of resources to this project, even sacrificing some capacity that we could have used in other research, IBM Japans Chief Technology Officer Norishige Morimoto told Bloomberg News in an interview. We want Rapidus to succeed. We want it to contribute to a stable supply of the chips we and the world need.

Rapidus is a quasi-public project that got its start last year as a venture to build out Japans local chipmaking capacity at a time of rising geopolitical tensions and protectionism. It has the governments support and is led by veterans of the semiconductor supply chain, including Tetsuro Higashi, the former chairman of Tokyo Electron Ltd., and Atsuyoshi Koike, the former Japan president of Western Digital Corp.

The daunting task ahead of them is to create a world-class chipmaking foundry  fabricating silicon for outside customers  to catch up with industry leader Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co. within a handful of years. The duo have drawn investment from companies including Toyota Motor Corp., Sony Group Corp. and Nippon Telegraph & Telephone Corp. Rapidus is working with IBM and Belgium-based microelectronics research hub IMEC.

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Rapidus engineers have been dispatched to IBMs Albany NanoTech Complex to design 2nm mass production lines while its factory is being built in Hokkaido, accelerating the development process. The Japanese firm expects to invest 5 trillion ($35 billion) in its 2nm project, roughly matching the annual outlay of TSMC and fellow leading chipmaker Samsung Electronics Co.

IBM would be open to helping Rapidus lock up further deals with major chip firms. We wont rule out any options as long as they match with our business needs, Morimoto said. IBM also provides chipmaking technology to Samsungs foundry division.

Rapidus and Samsung are on the same platform as they both use IBM technology, and its very possible the two can strike a win-win partnership as their business models are quite different, Omdia analyst Akira Minamikawa said.

IBM provides Rapidus key process technology that enables 2nm chip nodes and beyond, using a new type of transistor composition called nanosheet. Jumping forward to such advanced geometries is a huge leap from Japans existing capacity, which trades in more mature nodes like 40nm, but Morimoto is confident in the countrys deep roster of seasoned chip engineers.

Semiconductor demand is set to keep growing as a post-Covid recovery takes hold and the artificial intelligence boom drives the need for more memory and computing power.

Global revenue is expected to reach $1 trillion by 2030, doubling in the space of a decade, according to Inna Skvortsova, market analyst at industry body SEMI.

Presently, only Samsung and TSMC can produce the most advanced chips and theres widespread interest  from Washington to Beijing and Brussels  in adding more redundancy to the sources of supply. Rapidus would ideally offer a third option and, moreover, should be welcomed by the industry leaders who have struggled to meet demand, Morimoto said.

We know from our own experience that providing the newest generation of chips is not something that one company can handle alone, he said. Both TSMC and Samsung will welcome Rapidus joining the club of cutting-edge chip manufacturers because, as things stand now, they are making customers wait. Rapidus taking some orders from them wouldnt be a problem.

TSMC Chairman Mark Liu has said he doesnt see Rapidus as a competitor, as the Japanese chipmaker will focus on fostering engineering talent.
An international centre opened on Monday in The Hague to support nations already building cases against senior Russian leaders for the crime of aggression resulting from the country's invasion of Ukraine.

The International Centre for the Prosecution of the Crime of Aggression against Ukraine is the latest step in concerted worldwide efforts to hold the Russian leadership criminally responsible for its war against Ukraine last year, triggering Europe's deadliest conflict since World War II.

The centre is based at the headquarters of the European Union's judicial cooperation agency, Eurojust. It will not issue indictments or arrest warrants for suspects. Instead, it will support investigations already underway in Ukraine, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania and Poland.

Ukrainian Prosecutor General Andriy Kostin said in a statement that the launch was a clear signal that the world is united and unwavering on the path to holding the Russian regime accountable for all its crimes.

He added that there is unfortunately, a gaping hole in accountability for the crime of aggression in the international criminal justice architecture.

The European Union's executive commission is funding the initiative and agreed Monday to an initial 8.3 million euros (USD 9 million) in financial support.

Also Read Japan will carefully monitor investigation against Putin: PM Kishida ICC issues arrest warrant for Vladimir Putin over Ukraine war crimes Putin's invasion of Ukraine has been a test for the ages, says Biden Zelenskyy visits ICC after warrant issued against Putin for war crimes UN draft resolution calls for peace to ensure Ukraine's sovereignty UK trade minister Huddleston to unveil green partnerships on Kolkata visit World Bank, WTO chiefs seek to reignite services trade negotiations UN chief urges maritime nations to chart net zero shipping emissions plan July Supermoon 2023: Timing of much-awaited lunar event in India today Extremist Khalistani ideology not good for India or partner countries: EAM

The International Criminal Court is investigating crimes in Ukraine and has issued an arrest warrant for Russian President Vladimir Putin accusing him of personal responsibility for the abductions of children from Ukraine.

The ICC's chief prosecutor, Karim Khan, welcomed the opening, saying there is no hope for accountability "unless evidence is preserved, unless it is collected, unless it is well understood.

The ICC does not have jurisdiction to prosecute aggression in Ukraine because Russia and Ukraine have not ratified the Rome Statute that founded the court.

Kostin said Kyiv plans to join the court's 123 member states.

I hope that it will be ratified sooner than later and practically," he said, "our country is ready to do it. The only question is when the parliament will be ready to vote, he said.

The United States also is not an ICC member state but is supporting international efforts to deliver justice in Ukraine. A newly appointed Special Prosecutor for the Crime of Aggression, Jessica Kim, will represent the US at the new centre in The Hague.

Assistant Attorney General Kenneth A. Polite, Jr. told reporters that Washington last week provided the first batch of evidence to an international database of crimes in Ukraine.

It will not be our last, he added. He declined to elaborate on the nature of the evidence.

Kostin said that Ukrainian prosecutors already have identified more than 600 people in absentia suspected of involvement in the crime of aggression and indicted 312 of them.

While countries around the world are working together to build cases, it remains unclear where they would be prosecuted. Ukraine is pushing for the establishment of an international tribunal, while others, including the United States, support a court rooted in Ukraine's legal system but with some elements of international law.

Despite those differences, Kostin said the nations involved in the new centre are united in their efforts to deliver justice for aggression.

"If the crime of aggression would not have been committed. There would be no other 93,000 incidents of war crimes, he said.
Israel's military launched a major operation in the West Bank City, Jenin, killing seven people and injuring 27 others.

According to Israeli news media, Israel's army began with air strikes and moving ground forces towards the city. During the operation, the Israel army killed at least seven Palestinian militants in the massive strike.

The Palestinian Authority health ministry said that around 27 people were injured during the strike, and out of them, 7 Palestinians are in a very critical situation.

The Israel Security forces are engaged in preventing terror throughout Jenin and have struck terror infrastructure in the city after 1 a.m claimed Israel Defence Force.

The military has said that they have carried out a joint air strike against various armed groups in the city, including Jenin Battalion, a gathering place for armed terrorists before or after terror attacks. It is also a post to store munitions and bombs and it is also a communications centre for terrorists, it claimed.

The last time Israel conducted such a massive airstrike was in the 2000s in the West Bank during the second Palestinian intifada or uprising.

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Militant groups in the Palestinian coastal territory of Gaza have constantly been launching rockets for 20 years, but West Bank militant groups have not developed such capabilities so far.

On June 19, an Israel raid in Jenin turned deadly, killing at least 5 Palestinians in a gun battle, including a 15-year-old girl with over a dozen wounded.

On that same day, many Israeli security forces were also wounded, leading to the arrest of two Palestinian suspects of terrorist activity.

IDF spokesperson says will continue such operations

IDF spokesperson Rear Admiral Daniel Hagari told reporters that the operation was focused on refugee camps and "part of a series of actions that we carry out and will continue to carry out."

We did not come to occupy the refugee camp. This is not an operation against the Palestinian Authority but against the terror groups in Jenin, he added.

He didn't give it an official name, but called it a 'brigade-level raid'.

The operation that took place on Monday morning didn't hurt any Israeli soldiers.

Defence Minister hailed the operation

Israel Defense Minister Yoav Gallant praised the operation and shared a tweet, saying that anyone who harms the citizens of Israel will pay a heavy price.

He further wrote, We are closely monitoring the behaviour of our enemy, the defence establishment is prepared for any scenario."
Oil rose on Monday after top exporters Saudi Arabia and Russia announced supply cuts for August, overshadowing concern over a global economic slowdown and the potential for further increases to US rates.



Saudi Arabia on Monday said it would extend its voluntary cut of one million barrels per day (bpd) for another month to include August, the state news agency said.



Russia will reduce its oil exports by 500,000 bpd in August, Deputy Prime Minister Alexander Novak said on Monday, further tightening global supplies.



Brent crude futures were up 0.9 per cent, or 70 cents, at $76.11 a barrel by 1210 GMT.



The cuts amount to 1.5 per cent of global supply and bring the total pledged by Opec+ oil producers to 5.16 million bpd.

Brent has dropped from $113 a barrel a year ago, sent lower by concerns of an economic slowdown and ample supplies from major producers.



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Brent crude futures were up 0.9 per cent, or 70 cents, at $76.11 a barrel by 1210 GMT, having gained 0.8 on Friday. US West Texas Intermediate crude rose 1.1 per cent, or 80 cents, to $71.44 after a 1.1 per cent gain in the previous session.
The head of the United Nations called Monday for maritime nations to agree on a course for the shipping industry to reduce its climate-harming emissions to net zero by the middle of the century at the latest.

The appeal by UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres came at the start of a meeting of the International Maritime Organisation in London that's seen as key for helping achieve the international goal of limiting global warming to 1.5 degrees Celsius (2.7 Fahrenheit).

Shipping, which accounts for almost 3 per cent of global emissions, will be vital, Guterres said.

He urged delegates to agree a new greenhouse gas strategy for shipping that includes ambitious science-based targets starting in 2030 both on absolute emissions reductions and the use of clean fuels.

The IMO's current target is for the shipping industry to cut its emissions by at least half from 2008 to 2050.

Guterres said the new targets should include all greenhouse gas emissions caused by the industry and backed the idea of introducing a carbon price for shipping.

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Campaigners have suggested that funds generated from a levy on emissions could be used to help poor nations tackle climate change, though the industry wants the money to go toward the development of clean technologies.
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, the philanthropic arm of Merck KGaA Germany, recently conducted their annual conference, the. The conference was inaugurated by, and, andalong withexpressed, I proud of our long-term partnership withthat started in 2019. We have together achieved a lot together in this short duration.Together we have providedto young Namibian doctors in critical and underserved medical specialties like Oncology, Diabetes, Endocrinology, Cardiovascular Medicine, Sexual and Reproductive Medicine, Respiratory and Acute Medicine, Trauma and Orthopedics, Critical Care, Psychiatry, Clinical Microbiology and Infectious diseases, Dermatology in Clinical Practice, Internal Medicine, Neonatal Medicine, and Pediatric Emergency Medicine. We will continue to build healthcare capacity in Namibia.shared, I am very happy to have this ongoing long-term beneficial partnership with Merck Foundation. I am particularly excited as More Than a Mother Ambassador, as together we have been doing amazing work in the country to empower women living with infertility through access to information, education, information, change of mindset and economic empowerment. Moreover,in the fields of Diabetes, Cardiology, Endocrinology, Respiratory Medicines, Acute Medicines and Sexual and Reproductive Medicines, and many more. For Namibia, 2.4M population, we will soon have more thannationwide, to assist couples living with infertility or need any sexual & reproductive help, this will be a significant contribution towards improving women health in general and reproductive health in specific. This is a big achievement for us.On day 2 of the Luminary,was also conducted between The First Ladies and Merck Foundation Chairman and CEO. During the MFFLI committee meeting, a reading session of Childrens storybooks created by Merck Foundation,to focus on the importance of Girl Education and highlight the immoral practices of society including child marriage & dowry system; and to emphasize on the importance of empowering girls through education, was also held.During the Luminary, a meeting betweenwas also held to discuss the impact of on-going programs and define strategies to further build healthcare and media capacity in Namibia.Together with, Merck Foundation has providedout of whichfor PG Diploma and MSc into strengthen diabetes care in the countryto young doctors from different provinces in Namibia.Merck Foundation has also providedfor. Out of the two, one has completed the Fellowship program and one is undergoing the masters degree Program. Also,have been provided for PG Diploma and MSc inforConsidering the significance of Gynecologists, and to significantly improve Womens Health in general and Reproductive Health in particular,have been provided for PG Diploma and MSc in. The expertise of trained doctors will help to add significant value to womens health and enhance the quality of healthcare system for addressing fertility and infertile couples across Namibia., has developed awareness, information materials media kit that sperate myths from facts about infertility prevention, early detection, male infertility and fertility management to break the stigma around women with infertility since they are subject to abuse and discrimination due to the harsh cultural and social perception of infertility in Africa, as we all know.As a part of  Program, Merck Foundation has also supported the education ofand distributedto young Namibian students.Together, Merck Foundation has launched  program, to establish small businesses in order to empower women who are living with infertility stigma, so they become independent, stronger, and happier. This program has helped many women until today.Moreover, in partnership with, Merck Foundation has also launched seven childrens storybooks,30,000 copies of the storybooks have been distributed to school students of Namibia; more copies will also be distributed soon. The storybooks address various social and health issues like breaking infertility stigma, supporting girl education, coronavirus awareness, stopping GBV and diabetes awareness.withalso announced the Call for applications for theirfor Media, Musicians, Fashion Designers, Filmmakers, students, and new potential talents in these fields. Through these awards, the aim is to encourage young talents and youth in Namibia to create and innovate messages in their art and daily work to create awareness about sensitive issues like Break Infertility Stigma, Support Girl Education, Stop Gender Based Violence, End Child Marriage, End FGM, and Women Empowerment at all levels and raise awareness about early detection & prevention of Diabetes & Hypertension.Thewas Merck Foundation and Senator, Dr. Rasha Kelej
President Yoon Suk Yeol poses with new vice-minister level government officials during an appointment ceremony at the presidential office in Yongsan District, Seoul, Monday. Joint Press Corps



By Nam Hyun-woo



President Yoon Suk Yeol held a ceremony, Monday, to grant appointment certificates to a number of minister- and vice minister-level government officials he named last week, demonstrating his trust in them and aiming to strengthen his grip on the administration.



Those who were officially appointed include five former presidential secretaries who served under Yoon until last week and have been tasked with realizing the administration's goals in the second year of the president's single, five-year term.



Yoon held the appointment ceremonies for new Anti-Corruption and Civil Rights Commission (ACRC) Chairperson Kim Hong-il and 13 vice ministers and vice-minister level government officials at the presidential office.



The ACRC chairperson is a former prosecutor who was in charge of a botched investigation into a corruption case involving Busan Mutual Savings Bank along with Yoon, who was a prosecutor at the time. Kim also worked for Yoon's election camp during the 2022 presidential election.





President Yoon Suk Yeol poses with new Anti-Corruption and Civil Rights Commission Chairperson Kim Hong-il during an appointment ceremony at the presidential office in Yongsan District, Seoul, Monday. Joint Press Corps
Rep. Kim Young-joo, deputy speaker of the National Assembly, speaks during the Whole House Committee meeting at the National Assembly in Seoul, March 30. Korea Times file



Rep. Kim Young-joo, a deputy speaker of the National Assembly, offered an apology on Monday for exchanging text messages with an acquaintance about travel to Japan during a recent plenary session.



Kim, a four-term lawmaker from the main opposition Democratic Party of Korea (DPK), was caught on camera discussing a trip to Japan's Hokkaido in her text messages on June 30, when her party railroaded a strongly contested parliamentary resolution urging the government to file a complaint over Japan's plan to release contaminated water from its crippled Fukushima nuclear power plant.



"I apologize to the nation and party members for causing a controversy due to my personal text messages during the (parliamentary) adoption of a resolution against the Fukushima contaminated water," Kim said in a Facebook post.



"Exchanging private text messages during a plenary session is clearly wrong. As a public figure, I'll be more careful in the future," she said. (Yonhap)


Toyota Motor Philippines has introduced one of its most important new models of the year: the all-new Wigo. As Filipinos seek to become more...
Combating Racism Through Research, Training, Practice, and Public Health Policies

Jeffrey E. Hall, PhD, MA, MSPH, CPH1; L. Ebony Boulware, MD, MPH2,3 (View author affiliations)

Suggested citation for this article: Hall JE, Boulware LE. Combating Racism Through Research, Training, Practice, and Public Health Policies. Prev Chronic Dis 2023;20:230167. DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.5888/pcd20.230167.

PEER REVIEWED

Racism is a system [of power and oppression] of structuring opportunity and assigning value based on the social interpretation of how one looks (which is what we call race) that unfairly disadvantages some individuals and communities, unfairly advantages other individuals and communities, and saps the strength of the whole society through the waste of human resources (1). At a systems level, racism is a public health problem, threat, and crisis (24). Its presence in societys policies, practices, and programs creates inequities in access to vital conditions for health and well-being based on social ascriptions of race and ethnicity  resulting, for instance, in disparate access to and the quality of basic requirements for health and safety; residential neighborhood and housing options; developmental and educational experiences; and jobs, careers, and lifestyles (511). These inequities, in turn, produce and perpetuate disparities in health and disease experiences and outcomes. Because of its omnipresence, racism permeates every level of society, including the health care and public health sectors, creating racial and ethnic inequities in the operations of their infrastructures and, accordingly, in the delivery of essential services (1221).

The work in this collection, Combating Racism Through Research, Training, Practice, and Public Health Policies, captures insights on roles and actions taken in public health, medicine, and policy to eliminate racism as a public health threat. Preventing Chronic Disease solicited manuscripts to elucidate research, training, practice, and public health policybased efforts that address topics ranging from the effects of racism and racial discrimination on psychological, mental, and emotional health and disease risk to institutional, organizational, or community policies and changes implemented to address institutional racism. Articles in this collection 1) link exposures to racial discrimination with morbidity among diverse populations; 2) detail implementation of multicomponent antiracist initiatives enacted in schools of public health, schools of medicine, and other university-affiliated units; and 3) elevate attention to underlying drivers of structural inequities in housing and to domains through which meaningful community engagement in health initiatives is achievable.

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Racial Discrimination Experiences and Morbidity

The creation of racially and ethnically patterned differences in morbidity and mortality is well documented  covering many populations and health dimensions (7,2226). However, continued expansion and updating of knowledge about how racism affects health, and who it affects, are critical to ensure that health care and public health remain capable of accounting for and mitigating the effects of all its manifestations. Original research by Reyes-Ortiz et al (27) demonstrates the continued salience of personally mediated racism and interpersonal racial discrimination as an emphasis toward which the performance of core functions must be directed and adapted.

Experiencing rejection, unfair treatment, or discrimination because of the meanings assigned to race, ethnicity, and skin color affects the odds of experiencing 2 or more chronic conditions concurrently in older adulthood among Colombians (27). Such experiences may increase or amplify the burden and complexity of multimorbidity patterns with which Columbian health care and public health systems must contend. They also may necessitate adoption of life course approaches to chronic disease management that are more socioecologically and clinically nuanced. Using racially informed, life courseanchored practice models may help assure equitable service delivery to older adults whose current health reflects culturally structured, race-related stress accumulated in social institutions during sensitive periods, developmentally significant social transitions, or ubiquitously over a lifetime (2831).

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Implementation of Multicomponent Antiracist Initiatives in University-Affiliated Units

Academic organizations play an important role in perpetuating racism and its effects on health through institutional norms, pedagogy, and research practices (3236). Several approaches to dismantling institutional racism are described in this collection. Rinderknecht et al (37) describe work to break down structurally racist processes and cultural barriers to entry into medical careers. They describe a novel longitudinal mentorship program for aspiring medical students who come from backgrounds underrepresented in medicine. Students articulated key areas they perceived as structurally racist barriers to successful medical school application, including difficulty with medical school entrance examination preparation, lack of mentorship, and financial considerations. Moreover, the authors describe a novel program in which racially and ethnically minoritized (hereinafter referred to as minoritized) medical students provide direct mentorship to aspiring racial and ethnic minority premedical students to help them overcome these barriers, resulting in increases in confidence and competencies required for successful medical school application. Their work provides a model for enhancing the entry of students from minoritized communities into medical and public health careers.

Both Allen et al (38) and Polston et al (39) describe efforts to eliminate institutional-level racism in schools of public health through organizational change efforts. Allen et al describe a comprehensive process at the University of California, Berkeley, whereby the organization is undergoing an active and transformative longitudinal process to embed antiracism throughout the schools culture and practices. Efforts focus on multiple facets of the schools community and culture, including improvement of faculty and workforce development, student experiences, curriculum and pedagogy, community outreach, and business processes. They describe robust efforts to collect data to drive assessment and accountability and provide an exemplar for similar efforts. Polston et al describe similarly motivated efforts at the University of North at Carolina Chapel Hills Gillings School of Global Public Health, whereby student activism and grassroots efforts, including qualitative data collection and analysis, led to the development of an institutional Equity Task Force. The task force developed and implemented antiracism actions in 6 areas, including 1) transforming culture and climate; 2) enhancing teaching, mentoring, and training; 3) revisiting how faculty and staff performance are assessed; 4) strengthening recruitment and retention of minoritized faculty; 5) increasing transparency in student hiring and resources; and 6) improving equity researchoriented planning. They provide a planning tool to help guide others in creating an antiracist institutional culture.

The approach to pedagogy in institutions of health-related higher learning also represents an important focus for antiracism efforts (17,34,40). Specifically, a need exists to ensure students in health-related fields are well trained to recognize and dismantle racism and to develop strategies to eliminate racism in their future professional practice. Durham Walker et al (41) describe a community heath course at Morehouse School of Medicine that trains medical students to work with minoritized and disadvantaged individuals and communities. This service-learning course shifts the lens of pedagogy beyond a traditional patient-centric focus on pathology to a diagnosis and assessment of the health of communities. Coursework helps students learn to develop action plans to improve aspects of community health, providing students with foundational knowledge of the effect of racism on health. This work provides a model for others seeking to fundamentally change workforce views on racism and its harmful effects on health, and to activate health professionals to dismantle the effect of racism on health through action.

Academic organizations also promote and support research that has promulgated well-earned distrust of medical research (42,43). Lebow-Skelley et al (44) acknowledge research centers as entities that affect faculty, students, and surrounding communities and have the potential to dismantle historically systemically racist research practices. They describe efforts at Emory Universitys Rollins School of Public Health through the HERCULES environmental research program to 1) acknowledge and confront the universitys history of slavery and dispossession and 2) recognize and act on the need to address systemic and institutional racism in research practices. They embrace antiracist actions to transform their approach to university and academic partnerships with the ultimate goals of improving trust and accountability and creating equity in academiccommunity partnerships that provide a model for others.

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Drivers of Structural Inequities: Housing and Community Engagement

Health-based efforts to dismantle racism must eliminate racial and ethnic inequities in social determinants of health such as housing while maximizing community agency in health promotion and disease prevention (79,18,19,26,45). In her essay, Wonderly first encourages additional attention to housing as a particularly important social determinant of health. She links racial and ethnic disparities in COVID-19 risks and outcomes to inequities in housing access to further catalyze consideration of how housing costs, conditions, consistency, and contexts influence health, health care, and public health outcomes (46). Eliminating housing as a key arena where racial and ethnic health disparities are created requires interventions that expand and stabilize access to physically sound, high-quality, affordable housing in neighborhoods with robust environments, infrastructures, and institutions. Elevating humane housing as a vital condition for health as part of intersectoral action may aid in permanently expelling racism from this arena. Strategic integrations of Antiracist and Health and Equity in All Policies approaches could facilitate remediation of racist policies and practices that determine housing stock availability, neighborhood composition and resource allocations, and wealth accumulation opportunities associated with home ownership.

Although Wonderlys discussion of housing calls for addressing features of social structure, her treatment of meaningful community engagement urges committed investment in enhancing community agency. At base, she asserts that meaningful advancement of health equity and systems transformation can result from strengthening partnerships and alliances, expanding co-created community knowledge, designing community-relevant health and health care programs and policies, and cultivating thriving communities (46). Centering and embracing historically marginalized racial and ethnic communities as true action partners via concerted investment in such domains may diminish power imbalances and reduce health disparities resulting from structural racism. Significant strides in dismantling and healing the harms of racist systems can be made together with communities who feel engaged and who capably wield tools for systems change in a manner consistent with their felt needs and interests.

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Conclusion and Directions Forward

The articles in this PCD collection provide inspiration for future efforts to dismantle racism in public health and medicine, and they also help identify gaps in the field for future progress. First, these articles demonstrate the need for continued efforts to link exposures to racial discrimination with morbidity experiences among minoritized individuals and communities. Studies could include efforts that elucidate interactions between racialized contexts in shaping health, such as specific life stages and settings for experiences of discrimination for discrete populations. Research could also include more sophisticated analyses of policies, such as redlining and resultant differences in built environments and health-promoting environments, which are associated with inequitable health outcomes. Regarding the former set of studies, examinations of how distinctive combinations of institutional policies of specific places reinforce social marginalization could help devise more robust tactics for pursuing equity with populations whose social positions are reinforced by particular racialization and multiple, overlapping minoritization processes. New discoveries here are key to overcome limitations of strategies for addressing racism through universal remediation  which ignore important within-population and between-population differences in structural positioning that can vary exposures to chronic stress and the availability of protective social and socioeconomic capital. In addition, actively considering intersections of multiple interlocking systems of privilege and oppression, such as racism, heterosexism, and cisgenderism, in shaping health allows health care and public health to be in a better position to address the compounded effects of these systems on physical and mental health (16,18,31,4750). Each new effort here advances use of intersectional frameworks that give increasingly more relevant service to populations whose social positions relative to well-being are jointly determined by the many social systems, processes, and hierarchies stratifying society. Regarding the latter category of studies, analyses of interdependencies in nested policy hierarchies and networks governing racial equity and evidence-driven recommendations for altering them are crucial to demolish racist systems effectively and permanently. Better addressing enmeshed local, state and territorial, and national policies linked to racially disparate treatment and disproportionate impact could clear grounds upon which antiracist systems could be constructed.

The articles in this collection also highlight the need for educational institutions in medicine and public health to look within themselves to identify and dismantle fundamentally racist norms, pedagogies, and processes that perpetuate racist practices in clinical and public health practice and research. Efforts should examine and reform admissions and hiring practices, curricula, teaching and mentor training and hiring practices, approaches to retain and promote minoritized individuals and staff, and institutional partnerships and contracting practices. Strategies for effectively synergizing organizational change efforts of individual institutions to eliminate systemic racism require additional attention. Strides here are key to transforming racism initiatives within institutions into movements capable of tackling racism in health care and public health systems.

Increased attention is also needed to codify and actualize the imperative of meaningfully engaging community partners in focused efforts to address inequities in housing, food insecurity and poverty, and other nonhealth domains that affect health. We must find ways to make community-centered strategies that incorporate multisystemic, intersectional approaches our norm and mandate. Doing so may more effectively blend and leverage community and institutional assets, evidence, and know-how to address racism in all systems affecting health opportunity.

Additional gaps in ongoing work, not highlighted in this collection, should also be addressed. For example, the public health sector should become more actively engaged in efforts to dismantle policy-mediated causes of racial health inequities. Novel strategies, including partnerships with grassroots action efforts (ie, emanating from communities) that inform system changes could be pursued to stimulate action to develop or support implementation of antiracist policies. Similar strategic partnerships with other nonhealth sectors (eg, business, justice) for maximum effectiveness could create powerful alliances with the potential to influence social change in and across systems linked to racial and ethnic differences in health. Within the public health sector itself, work to synchronize and achieve strategic alignments of antiracist interventions in the areas of education, research, and public health practice will amplify and accelerate progress toward inseparable racial and health equity goals.

Lastly, further examination of the role of the COVID-19 pandemic in reinforcing the very systemic racism responsible for observed disproportionate burden of COVID-19 among some racial and ethnic minority populations should be contemplated as directions for future effort are considered. New longitudinal efforts here could describe and address the long-term consequences of systemic racism not only for the patterning of COVID-19 health disparities by race and ethnicity but also for the persistence and patterning of chronic disease disparities and inequities in the social determinants of health. These efforts could cover potential additional increases in morbidity and mortality that may occur among some racial and ethnic populations as COVID-19 becomes endemic. But they might also cover possible enduring functional limitations and chronic conditions that could be associated with complications of COVID-19, such as the development of 1) multisystem inflammatory syndrome in children, 2) multisystem inflammatory syndrome in adults, and 3) post-COVID-19 conditions (also known as long-COVID and postacute sequelae of SARS-CoV-2 infection). Additional variations in subsequent disproportionate effects by race and ethnicity on well-being for different age cohorts should also be explored. This exploration is suggested because the consequences of the COVID-19 pandemic for social development, social participation, social network density, and psychosocial resource availability likely also vary by chronological age and social placement during the life course within race and ethnicity. Lastly, the disparate systemic implications of COVID-19 for the socioeconomic positions, collective efficacy, and access of vital conditions for health and well-being (eg, humane housing, quality education, meaningful work and wealth) of racially and ethnically diverse communities should be continuously documented and addressed. Doing so may ensure that the increased attention to systemic linkages between racism, health, and well-being stimulated by COVID-19 and social injustices occurring during the past 3 years will be sustained and leveraged toward societal transformation.

At a health systems level, pandemic-associated racial and ethnic inequities in access to prevention and treatment should be further dissected and prospectively monitored. First, health systems research could continue to identify circumstances where access inequities existing before the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic may have been exacerbated (eg, access to screenings, treatments, or procedures for breast cancer) (51). Characterizing and addressing the differential effects of such access inequities on population health care trajectories across time is essential to prevent further expansion of health gaps that widened during the pandemic. Second, equitable receipt of COVID-19 vaccines, novel therapeutics (eg, monoclonal antibody therapies and oral antiviral therapeutics), and expedited treatment of individuals who received a positive test result for the virus remain essential to reduce disparities in severe COVID-19associated illness and deaths that continue to affect some racial and ethnic minority populations (5254). Accordingly, research that clarifies strong leverage points and tactics for severing pathways through which structural racism shapes inequities in access to such modalities among racially and ethnically diverse populations is important to improve enjoyment of the protective benefits of these interventions by people with higher risks for exposure to SARS-CoV-2 and for adverse outcomes. Moreover, evaluations of supply prioritization, allocation, and distribution strategies and resource triage protocols enacted during the pandemic may provide evidence that strengthens the case for giving precedence to racial equity considerations when deciding how to deploy scare resources as SARS-CoV-2 continues to evolve (54,55). Work in these 2 highlighted areas could secure health system changes that ensure all persons have fair and just opportunities to avoid, cope with, and recover from the effects of COVID-19, regardless of their race or ethnicity.

Ultimately, work to dismantle racist systems present in health will require multipronged efforts that draw on numerous strengths from within and outside health care and public health institutions. As this work moves forward, our fields are called to consider bold and innovative actions that have the potential to produce lasting change.

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Acknowledgments

The findings and conclusions in this report are those of the authors and do not necessarily represent the official position of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention or the Agency for Toxic Substances and Disease Registry. No copyrighted tools or materials were used in this article.

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Author Information

Corresponding Author: Jeffrey E. Hall, PhD, MA, MSPH, CPH, Office of Health Equity, Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, 4770 Buford Hwy, MS TW-3 Atlanta, Georgia 30341 (dzu4@cdc.gov).

Author Affiliations: 1Office of Health Equity, Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, Atlanta, Georgia. 2Wake Forest University School of Medicine, Winston-Salem, North Carolina. 3Advocate Health, Winston-Salem, North Carolina.

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References

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Interview: "Luckily, we have been very close to China," says Tanzania's Zanzibar president

Xinhua) 14:26, July 03, 2023

Tanzania's Zanzibar President Hussein Ali Mwinyi delivers a speech at the opening ceremony of the third China-Africa Economic and Trade Expo in Changsha, central China's Hunan Province, June 29, 2023. (Xinhua/Chen Sihan)

CHANGSHA, July 2 (Xinhua) -- As the world is grappling with challenges like political tensions and climate change, Africa and China will continue to keep close ties and lend a hand to each other, Tanzania's Zanzibar President Hussein Ali Mwinyi said in an interview with Xinhua on Saturday.

"We have been on good cooperation since historical times," said Mwinyi, who has been in China to attend the third China-Africa Economic and Trade Expo being held here from Thursday to Sunday.

Over the decades, the two sides, "as very close partners," have seen "no changes" in their dedication to supporting each other, said Mwinyi.

"Luckily, we have been very close to China ... our policies are aligned, and we will continue to work with China," he added.

China's economic bounce-back after the COVID-19 pandemic has brought lots of opportunities and injected vitality into the African economy, according to the president.

"Having seen that after the pandemic, things are going back to the pre-pandemic times (in China), we are happy to be here to see that we get development things done again," he said.

Tanzania is an agricultural country, and through investment in infrastructure and industrial parks, China is equipping the country with the capability to process agricultural products and establish value-added industries, said the president. "This is very important for us."

"African countries want to be able to be self-reliant," Mwinyi stressed, adding that cooperation with China is of great importance for them to achieve such a goal and creates a win-win situation beneficial to both sides.

Talking about his impression of China during the visit, the president said that he is "extremely impressed by the achievements in China: the infrastructure and development, and the whole economic improvement."

"China offers examples worth emulating in the African continent," Mwinyi said. "We see there is a huge economic growth rate, but we also see a lot of achievement in all sectors."

In its pursuit of the Chinese modernization, China has lifted hundreds of millions of people out of poverty, the president pointed out, hailing China's efforts in eliminating extreme poverty as "a huge achievement on any standards."

Looking into the future, Mwinyi sees great potential in Tanzania's cooperation with China.

Bilateral cooperation needs to go with the times. As Tanzania is undergoing a digital transformation, he said, "we will work with the Chinese partners, governmental and private, to make sure that we cooperate in the new sectors like information technology."

During the interview, the president sent out his invitation to Chinese tourists. "Zanzibar is a very important tourist destination ... I would like to see more Chinese tourists in Zanzibar," Mwinyi said.

(Web editor: Zhang Kaiwei, Liang Jun)
Park Yong-soo, left, a former aide to former Democratic Party of Korea leader Song Young-gil, attends a hearing at the Seoul Central District Office, July 3. Yonhap



A former aide to Song Young-gil, a previous leader of the main opposition Democratic Party of Korea (DPK), was arrested Monday in connection with a cash-for-vote scandal involving the party's 2021 leadership election.



The Seoul Central District Court issued an arrest warrant for Park Yong-soo, a former aide in charge of fund management for Song's campaign at the time of the election, citing concerns he could destroy evidence.



The scandal centers on allegations that Song's campaign distributed cash envelopes totaling 94 million won ($71,597) to as many as 20 DPK lawmakers and other party members in the runup to the party's leadership election in May 2021, which he ultimately won.



Park is accused of involvement in the distribution of 67.5 million won of the total in collusion with other campaign officials to help get Song elected.



He allegedly received 50 million won from a businessman in April 2021 and delivered 60 million won to former DPK lawmaker Youn Kwan-suk, who then distributed the money to about 20 party lawmakers the same month, according to prosecutors. Youn quit the party after the allegations surfaced.



The former aide is also accused of having a sponsor group for Song pick up a 92.4 million-won bill for a public opinion poll conducted ahead of the party election.



Prosecutors sought an arrest warrant for Park last week, accusing him of committing a "grave crime" in violation of the Constitution. (Yonhap)


Progress for Peru?

ICR Research By

Published 03 July 2023

Following a market contraction in 2020, Perus cement producers have seen domestic cement demand recover, making significant gains, even when compared to pre-pandemic levels. Company performance remains solid despite higher input costs, and driving the industry towards further optimisation initiatives. By ASOCEM, Peru.

The Peruvian economy showed progress in 2022 following the COVID-induced economic setbacks of 2020. However, there were expectations that the Peruvian economy would do better, since growth in 2022 was lower than expected. The growth rate was 2.7 per cent YoY in 2022, despite the fact that at the beginning of 2021 the BCRP had a growth projection of 3.3 per cent for 2022.

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Aggregates Europe  UEPG, which represents the European aggregates Industry in Brussels, has joined Concrete Europe as an associate member. According to Aggregates Europe - UEPG, the collaboration signifies its "collective commitment to shaping solutions for achieving the EU Green Deal within the construction ecosystem."

Joining Concrete Europe represents a significant step for Aggregates Europe  UEPG, enabling us to work more closely with other industry leaders in developing sustainable and effective strategies for the construction sector, added Antonis Antoniou Latouros, Aggregates Europe  UEPG president.

Marco Borroni, Concrete Europe president, welcomed the new member saying, We are pleased to have our colleagues from Aggregates Europe - UEPG on board. Their addition not only strengthens our organisation but also helps convey a clear and unified message to EU policy makers and stakeholders at this critical time as the EU is developing policies focused on the Built Environment.

Membership of Concrete Europe is open to all EU associations active within the concrete value chain.




By Ma Kyung-hee



On May 11th Korea marked the 18th anniversary of Adoption Day, intended to raise public awareness about adoption, promote a positive adoption culture, and encourage domestic adoption of children in need while safeguarding their rights and interests. For nearly two decades, the government has attempted to achieve these important goals through the enactment of new policies, but unanticipated barriers have limited their success.



With the longest-running adoption program in the world, Korea sent out more than 200,000 children between 1953 and 2022. Inter-country adoption was devised after the Korean War as a method of rescuing war orphans, but the demand for Korean children increased exponentially in the 1970s, reaching its highest point in the 1980s. In 1985 alone, 8,837 Korean children left for inter-country adoption, amounting to 1.35 percent of live births or more than one in 75 children, the highest rate anywhere in the world.



Inter-country adoptions declined in 2013 by two-thirds from their peak in 2004, due to a shortage of available children. This phenomenon became more salient during the COVID-19 pandemic because nations closed their borders for international travel. In this context, the pandemic functioned as a de facto moratorium on inter-country adoption. Nevertheless, inter-country adoption from Korea increased by nearly five percent from 2019 to 2020, becoming the third-largest source that year.



Inter-country adoption of Korean children has continued alongside alarmingly low fertility rates. According to Statistics Korea, the country's fertility rate fell to 0.78 in 2022 and is expected to keep dropping. A group of children's rights activists and the overseas Korean adoptee community ascribe the perpetuation of inter-country adoption to limited and often absent government interference, profit-driven practices, and powerful agencies influencing policies. However, some scholars (including this author) suggest that it may also stem from the country's collective wariness of differences. Those perceived as a threat to this moral order are thought as being unworthy of public assistance.



Historically, the Korean government seems to have used inter-country adoption programs as a mechanism for social exclusion. First, biracial children those conceived of temporary relationships between Korean women and American servicemen or U.N. soldiers  were sent abroad, because they were considered to be "racially contaminated" and thus considered unfit for Korean society. Between the late 1950s and the mid-1970s, close to 4,500 biracial children were sent abroad for adoption.



Gradually, Korean children, mostly born out of wedlock, have been offered for inter-country adoption. Korea underwent rapid industrialization in the 1960s, utilizing a labor force of young single women between the ages of 15 and 25. These women moved to large cities to financially support their families back home while working for exploitative wages. However, a lack of social support, inadequate sex education that emphasized women's chastity, and the financial burden of abortion led them to become unwed mothers, many of whom gave up their babies for adoption.



Lastly, children with disabilities or health challenges are more likely to be offered for inter-country adoption than domestic adoption. According to the Ministry of Health and Welfare, from 2018-2020, 1,025 infants were adopted domestically, with only 103 of them having a reported health condition. In contrast, during the same period, 852 children were placed for inter-country adoption with 341 of them having health issues. Historically, disability has been viewed as a moral problem, bringing disgrace to the family. Furthermore, these differences often instigate societal fear and discomfort. Therefore, it is considered the best for them to be removed from Korean society through adoption abroad.



Inter-country adoption has persisted in Korea for 70 years. If the government truly wants to terminate inter-country adoption, it needs to identify cultural and social barriers and develop a child welfare system indigenous to and appropriate for Korean culture. The system must recognize children of all backgrounds as relevant to the country and worthy of public assistance. Without this system in place, whenever "unfit" children are born, the Korean government will continue to look for quick solutions outside the country without making substantial efforts to solve them domestically. The result will be a continued legacy of perpetual dependency on inter-country adoption.





Ma Kyung-hee (kyungheem@daum.net) is a researcher and editor specializing in mental health.


Yoo Byaeng-kuk, second from right, head of Automotive Components Business Unit at LG Innotek, poses with Barbara Bergmeier, left, executive director of JLR, Ju Won-rae, second from left, head of EU Representative office of LG Innotek and Tobias Moch, right, CPO of JLR, during JLR Supplier Excellence Awards ceremony in Gaydon, U.K., May 30. Courtesy of LG Innotek



By Baek Byung-yeul



LG Innotek won the best partner award from British luxury car brand JLR for its high-quality auto parts, according to the company, Monday.



JLR was formerly known as Jaguar Land Rover, but as of June 1, the company rebranded to JLR. Each year the British automobile manufacturer recognizes its top global suppliers. At this year's JLR Supplier Excellence Awards, JLR recognized suppliers based on five values: Customer Love, Unity, Integrity, Growth and Impact. LG Innotek was selected in the Impact category.



"LG Innotek could have been nominated for any of the five supplier award categories but the way they innovate their products and improve their customer services makes an Impact award particularly appropriate. LG Innotek hugely supports the JLR Product Development teams, continuously improving their products and, in turn, improving JLR's," JLR said.



LG Innotek has been recognized for its excellent quality by maintaining JLR quality certification for three consecutive years since 2021. LG Innotek has been supplying DC-DC converters for mild hybrid vehicles to JLR. The company said it has made great efforts to quickly supply parts and respond to customer needs by producing parts at its Poland plant.



Apart from DC-DC converters, the company has also produced seven automotive electronic parts, including battery management systems in Poland.



LG Innotek expects that winning the awards from JLR will help the company expand its presence in the global auto parts market as it has already been recognized for its quality products by major carmakers and parts makers such as GM, Continental and Schaeffler.



"LG Innotek will continue to innovate in quality to provide differentiated customer value," said Yoo Byaeng-kuk, head of the Automotive Components Business Unit at LG Innotek.


A Criminal Court jury on Sunday found Joshua Wells guilty as charged on both counts - first-degree murder and aggravated arson after a week-long trial.

He was convicted of setting a fire on Rubio Street that claimed the life of his mother, Kimberly Wells. The fire was in 2016 and he was not indicted until December 2022 after Coty Wamp came into the DA's office. Ms. Wamp tried the case herself in the courtroom of Judge Boyd Patterson.

DA Wamp told the jury, "In regards to the case going cold, one of the witnesses (the brother of the defendant) testified that he thought they forgot about my mom. I told the jury that we didnt. The state of Tennessee didnt. And the Chattanooga Fire Department didnt."

The murder conviction carries a life prison sentence.

The state relied heavily on security camera video from a neighbor who lives at the rear of the Wells house. It showed a figure go up to the house early in the morning and start the beginnings of a fire. The figure leaves and then returns and starts a bigger fire.

The defendant's brother and uncle were among those testifying that they were certain that the figure was that of Josh Wells.

Wells told police he had been walking around from 11:30 p.m. throughout the night.

Kimberly Wells, 44, was found hunched in a corner of her bedroom. She was taken to Erlanger and on to the burn unit at Augusta, Ga., but she soon died of smoke inhalation.
Tennessee Wing (TNWG) Civil Air Patrol (CAP) Group 2 changed command Tuesday in Chattanooga. Command was assumed by 2d Lt Robert Bob Lawson from Maj Gary Fiser, both of Chattanooga.

Passing the symbolic guidon from outgoing to incoming commanders was TNWGbCommander Col Rob Borsari. Distinguished guests included Col Barry Melton (previously Southeast Region CAP Commander, TNWGmCommander, and National Board Member), Col Dent Young (previously commander of Tennessee Wing CAP, TNWG), and several current Squadron Commanders from Group 2. Chattanooga Cadet Squadron TN-187 hosted the event.



Group 2 TNWG includes Squadrons in Tullahoma, Lewisburg, Cleveland, Dayton, Chattanooga, and Spencer, Tennessee. Tennessee Wing includes over 1,050 volunteer members with nine aircraft across 35 squadrons. The FY2022 value of the Wings volunteer hours was over $3.3 million.



Founded in 1941 and established as the official civilian auxiliary of the U.S. Air Force seven years later, Civil Air Patrol is chartered by Congress as a nonprofit organization for the purposes of youth development, aerospace education, and to promote general aviation. Innan auxiliary role as a Total Force partner of the Air Force, CAP operates the worlds largest fleet of single-engine aircraft for search and rescue, disaster relief, training, and education. Civil Air Patrol is dedicated to serving Americas communities, saving lives, and shaping futures.
An officer blocking traffic for a fallen tree had to also work a single vehicle crash in the 4300 block of University Drive after a driver got out to speak with the officer. The driver failed to put their vehicle in park which resulted in the vehicle rolling into the ditch.An individual came to the police department to report that they had received a phone call several hours earlier from the Collegedale Police Department. They were informed that the call most likely came from their spouse who had been arrested and transported to the Hamilton County Jail.An individual in the Spring Green apartments called about someone they had previously had relations with and now they would not leave their apartment.The individual was gone when police arrived.A Collegedale fugitive was booked on a petition to revoke bond warrant from a previous theft charge.A concerned citizen reported that an individual was walking through the Walmart parking lot pulling door handles on parked cars. Contact was made with the individual as they were leaving the lot. They advised that they had been walking the parking lot and stretching while their spouse was inside shopping.An individual came to the police station to report that they had not made contact with a business partner for the last two weeks. Sheriffs deputies conducted a well-being check for the partner who lives outside the Collegedale city limits. There was no contact made.Police received a complaint about two dogs left unattended in a vehicle at the Walmart. Both animals were in good health. Customers had poured water on one of the dogs through the open rear windows, believing it was suffering heat exposure. The owner was located in the store and they advised that they would take the dogs home.Officers were called again to another animal left in a parked car at the Walmart. The car was running and the air conditioning was on. The animal was ok.Police responded to the McKee Food Corporation after a security guard reported that they were out with an individual passed out in their vehicle. The individual was awake and outside their vehicle when the officer arrived. They stated they were tired due to being up for a day and a half and had been taking a nap.Officers were requested to check the well-being of an intoxicated resident in the 10900 block of Apison Pike with multiple children in the home. During the encounter the individual assaulted an officer and was taken into custody. They were charged with assaulting police and resisting arrest. The children were turned over to a grandparent and the incident was reported to the Department of Children Services.Collegedale police were requested to assist sheriffs deputies with an alarm at the Standifer Mini Mart, located in the 8100 block of Standifer Gap Road. The building was found to have been broken into but the suspects had already fled the scene.Police responded to a homeless individual asleep in front of AFC Urgent Care, in the 9000 block of Old Lee Highway, in a sleeping bag. The individual was checked on and left the area.A property owner called in stating that they could not reach their tenant in the 5600 block of Tallant Road, and requested they be checked on. No contact with the tenant was made at the residence.Police responded to a juvenile in distress in the 9500 block of Leyland Drive. On scene units calmed the juvenile and provided them a ride back to their residence. The incident was referred to the Department of Children Services.Police responded to the parking lot at the Collegedale Church, located in the 4800 block of College Drive East, for a two vehicle crash. On scene the vehicles were separated and neither party noticed damage or wanted a report.An officer tried to assist a motorist in the Walmart parking lot with several battery boosts but was unsuccessful. They were advised to find a garage.An officer assisted with a stalled motorcycle on the bridge in the 5500 block of Little Debbie Parkway. The bike was able to be started and continue on its way to a nearby gas station for fuel.A residential alarm was activated in the 9700 block of Homewood Circle. Dogs and family members were on scene when officers arrived and everything checked out ok.Police responded to a business in the 5200 block of Little Debbie Parkway for a front door motion alarm. The building was checked and the front door was re-secured. Due to the storm officers were called out again for an another alarm. Everything checked out ok.A resident in the 5000 block of Hickory Hill Lane reported that their birth certificate had been lost or stolen.A Collegedale fugitive was booked on a warrant for possession of stolen property.An officer shut down the roadway at Katie Kim Lane and Prospect Church Road for a tree that had fallen across the road in the county district until the tree was cleared from the roadway.On duty officers toured the new Little Debbie park, meeting with families and and talking with children.A traffic stop in the 9800 block of Apison Pike resulted in the drivers arrest for DUI and possession of illegal drugs. A passenger was also charged with possession of illegal drugs.Chattanooga police made contact with a Collegedale fugitive, who was wanted on warrants for theft and conspiracy. The fugitive was transported to the jail.Officers responded to a residential alarm in the 4100 block of Barnsley Loop. Contact was made with the homeowners who stated it was the dogs that had set it off.Police responded to a disorder at the Circle K, located in the 5000 block of Little Debbie Parkway, for an individual who was refusing to leave the store. The individual was taken into custody and charged with resisting arrest. They were transported to the Hamilton County Jail.Officers responded to wires being down in the 5600 block of Tallant Road.Officers responded to wires being down in the 9900 block of Standifer Gap Road.An officer responded to a tree down in the 5500 block of Tallant Road.An officer responded to a tree down in the 9600 block of Ocoee Street. Referred to the county highway department as it was outside of Collegedale.Officers responded to wires being down in the 4800 block of University Drive.An officer responded to a tree down in the 5300 block of Tucker Road.Collegedale police were requested to assist the sheriffs office with an intoxicated person in the 10900 block of East Brainerd Road. The individual was gone before police arrived on scene.Collegedale police assisted the sheriffs office with a vehicle crash in the 9700 block of Standifer Gap Road, outside the citys South District.Officers responded to an audible alarm at the Tractor Supply. Everything checked out ok.A traffic stop in the 9800 block of Lee Highway resulted in the driver being charged with driving on a suspended license.A night shift officer made contact with two individuals who had been sitting at a gas pump at the Collegedale Exxon for an extended period of time. Everything checked out ok.Officers responded again to an audible alarm at the Tractor Supply. Everything checked out ok.An officer made contact with a homeless person sitting in front of the Zaxby's, in the 8800 block of Old Lee Highway, after business hours. The individual stated that they were trying to get to Knoxville and an officer provided some assistance, transporting them to the next exit on the interstate.
How did life begin on Earth? Experts have long been fascinated by this question and over the years have come up with a variety of theories. One hypothesis is that the origin of life can be traced back to warm little ponds which are thought to have existed on Earth four billion years ago. The water in these ponds probably contained urea molecules; these were exposed to ultraviolet radiation from the sun, which at that time would have penetrated to the surface of the earth largely unimpeded. This high-energy radiation was able to convert the urea into reaction products which then formed biomolecules that later served as the building blocks of life  or so the idea goes.

Two neighboring urea molecules in an aqueous solution exchange protons. Ludger Inhester, DESY

This theory of warm little ponds was one of the things that led a research team from Hamburg, Zurich and Geneva to devise and carry out a novel experiment. The team led by Hans Jakob Worner from the Swiss federal institute of technology ETH Zurich and Jean-Pierre Wolf from the University of Geneva used a special X-ray source to examine the first, extremely rapid steps of light-induced urea conversion, as the scientists report in the journal Nature.

For their experiment at the University of Geneva, the team shot pulses of a laser beam through a jet of a highly concentrated urea solution. The laser pulses ionised some of the urea molecules, knocking one electron out of each of them. Immediately afterwards, the scientists sent an ultra-short pulse of soft X-rays behind them. These acted as a probe, revealing in great detail how the urea reacts to the electron being knocked out. The group then repeated the experiment several times, systematically changing the time interval between the ionising laser and the X-ray pulses.

As a result, it was possible to reconstruct the sequence of events precisely  down to a few femtoseconds (quadrillionths of a second). Interpreting the resulting spectra proved to be particularly challenging. This required detailed computer simulations which we developed here at DESY over many years, explains DESY physicist Ludger Inhester, who works at the Center for Free-Electron Laser Science, a joint venture of DESY, the University of Hamburg an the Max Planck Society.

The scientists used this setup to work out the initial steps in the conversion of urea. When a urea molecule is ionised, it loses an electron and becomes positively charged. It would like nothing better than to get rid of this positive charge, and that becomes possible when another, non-ionised urea molecule is in the immediate vicinity. The first molecule then pushes a proton, which is a hydrogen nucleus, over to the neutral molecule, says Inhester, who also works in the framework of the Cluster of Excellence CUI: Advanced Imaging of Matter at the University of Hamburg. This proton transfer creates an urea radical along with a positively charged urea ion. Both are chemically reactive and could have led to the formation of RNA molecules billions of years ago  essential building blocks of early life.

The experiment carried out by the scientists not only demonstrates for the first time the rapid proton transaction concluded between two urea molecules, but also reveals its duration  the entire process takes just a few hundred femtoseconds.

What is new about our experiment is that we were able to observe extremely fast processes in a molecule that exists in an aqueous environment, explains Inhester points out. Previous experiments have only looked at reactions like this in the gas phase. The behaviour of molecules suspended in a liquid such as water is particularly relevant to a whole number of questions  especially when it comes to biological processes. Experiments in this type of environment are a challenge not only when it comes to making the measurements, but also in terms of the computations required to interpret the measured data.
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Google removed a 'Pride and Drag Show' from its list of company-promoted LGBTQ+ events in California after facing backlash from hundreds of Christian employees and others. The event, scheduled at the LGBTQ+ bar Beaux in San Francisco, was labeled by petitioners as a direct attack on religious beliefs and sensitivities.

Removal of 'Pride and Drag Show' Promo Section

According to a report from Fox News, the petition highlighted concerns about the provocative and inflammatory nature of the drag artist's performance, explicitly mentioning the artist "Peaches Christ." The petition claimed that such performances disrespect the Christian faith. In response to the criticism, Google promptly removed the event from its list of annually sponsored activities on its website. A Google spokesperson clarified that the event was initially posted without following the company's standard events process. While the event was removed from the company's official list, the performance will still proceed at the planned venue, open to the public for attendance. Google stated that they have a longstanding tradition of celebrating and supporting the LGBTQ+ community, including featuring drag artists in their Pride celebrations.

Moreover, the New York Post reported that in response to a question about whether or not the petition played a role in the decision to terminate the program, Google did not provide an answer. The San Francisco Pride Parade will take place on Sunday, Jun 25, 2023, and the revelers cheer during the parade. Google stated that the cancellation was necessary because of an error in the booking procedure, and it urged its staff to attend other Pride activities instead.

Furthermore, other employees at Google have voiced their opposition to both the petition and the company's decision to eliminate the episode from its series. Some people condemned the objections of their Christian coworkers, saying that they were subjective and that they contributed to the ongoing political culture wars. Comprehensive legislation targeting drag performers' rights has recently inflamed political culture battles. In addition, the workers condemned Google for allegedly caving to the petitioners' demands by secretly removing the event from the company's internal website.

Also Read: Google's Experimental AI 'Bard' Embraces Faith: Christianity Offers Hope to Artificial Mind

Russian Court Fines Google for Promoting' LGBT Propaganda'

Google faced a fine of 3 million rubles ($38,600) from a Russian court on Thursday, May 11, for its failure to remove YouTube videos that allegedly promoted 'LGBT propaganda' and disseminated "false information" about Russia's military campaign in Ukraine. Reuters reported that over the past year, Moscow had imposed numerous fines on Western technology companies to tighten control over the online content accessible to Russian internet users. In addition to enacting censorship laws following its deployment of troops in Ukraine, Russia also strengthened its legislation against the "promotion of LGBT propaganda."

The expanded law broadens Russia's definition of 'LGBT propaganda' and has drawn significant criticism from independent human rights organizations. It reportedly imposes heavy fines on actions or disseminating information deemed as attempts to promote homosexuality in public, online platforms, films, books, or advertising. On the other hand, Russian prosecutors accused Google of refusing to remove several YouTube videos, including one from a blogger labeled a "foreign agent" by Moscow. The videos discussed topics such as same-sex couples raising children and the LGBT community in St. Petersburg.

Related Article:Google Faces Lawsuit From Attorney Generals For Exploitation Of User Information
As I was growing up in Malaysia, my parents would send me to Mandarin lessons after school. Despite their best efforts, I was particularly resistant to learning Chinese. Consequently, most Mandarin lessons went in one ear and out the other, particularly the ones about chengyu ().

The four-character idioms called chengyu are a popular way in Mandarin to state a meaning, moral, or teaching. Part of their appeal lies in their ability to express powerful ideas in a concise, proverbial manner.

In theory, each chengyu I labored to remember should have pressed the collective wisdom of our ancestors into my reluctant heart. But it was a lost cause. After all, how could a child reared on American cartoons and comics possibly value esoteric phrases like meng mu san qian (), which extols how Chinese philosopher Menciuss mother moved to different neighborhoods three times to improve her childs chances of success? My familys move abroad when I was 10 years old ended further hopes of progress.

Now, pastoring a Chinese church in New Zealand and rediscovering my mother tongue as an adult, I still struggle to memorize chengyu. But when my virtual Mandarin-language teacher, who is based in China, brings up these idioms, his eyes brim with excitement as he shares not only their vernacular use but also their fascinating backstories.

Chengyu sum up stories, principles, or lessons from Chinese history. Some retell humorous folktales as proverbs for daily life. Others connect Chinas 3,500-year-old written history, including pre-Qin dynasty writings like Confucian poetry classic Shijing (), to our present-day hopes and anxieties.

Both ancient and modern chengyu are used in written conversations and taught in classes today to provide insights into the Chinese worldview, which values observing filial piety, prioritizing collective benefit over an individuals, and honoring our ancestors wisdom. To memorize and use chengyu is to enact a cultural performance that enables us to develop or maintain relationships in that particular milieu.

If chengyu are like portraits that illustrate moral or ethical principles, how can they contribute to fresh ways of understanding Scripture? In my Mandarin lessons, Ive learned that the Book of Philippians is a favorite among Christians in China. Like the church in Philippi, they are considered outsiders in a society that demands loyalty to a great leader and the official party line.

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For a relatively short letter, Philippians speaks a lot about becoming wise. The Greek verb phroneo (), which means to have understanding and to be wise, appears ten times in this letter (compared to once each in Galatians and Colossians and nine times in the much longer Romans). The meaning of this word extends beyond intellectual assent. It invites us to cultivate an attitude, to carefully consider a scenario, to set our minds on a way of thinking.

Thinking with the Philippians, then, is like chewing on chengyu. Through reading the Chinese Bible, Ive discovered three particularly punchy chengyu that are helpful reminders in living out our faith every day.

Pursuing unity

In Philippians 4:2, Paul pleads with Euodia and Syntyche, members of the church in Philippi, to reconcile by asking them to be of the same mind in the Lord. In the Chinese Union Version (CUV), this phrase is translated into four characters: zhu li tong xin (). Mandarin readers will know that the second half of the phrase means having the same heart. In reading this phrase as chengyu, we see that Paul encourages them not to simply concede mentally but to seek unity of heart in the Lord.

The nature of Euodia and Syntyches conflict escapes us. Were they arguing over money or missions strategy? Did they disagree on whether winsome speech or righteous anger was the best response to enemies of the cross (Phil. 3:18)? Or, as a youth pastor once joked, did they fall for the same guy?

Only by re-envisioning their seemingly irreconcilable differences through the eyes of Christ can two (or more) quarrelers begin to be of the same mind in the Lord. Its the same attitude that Paul mentions earlier in the letter when encouraging brothers and sisters to be like-minded (2:2). It also reflects the humility that Christ exemplified as he walked toward death and resurrection (2:511), making reconciliation truly possible.

How many difficult conversations in church could have turned out differently had I memorized Philippians 4:2 as chengyu? Perhaps I would have sought to win over a brother in Christ and not the argument at hand or to empathize more sincerely with a sister in Christ.

Recovering joy

If seeking authentic reconciliation amid conflict isnt a perennial issue that believers face, struggling with mental health challenges might be. In the past five years, antidepressant use has jumped 53 percent among children and teens in New Zealand. Pastors and parents feel the weight of an anxious generation fighting to experience hope and joy.

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In this context, telling my congregants to rejoice in the Lord (Phil. 4:4) frequently feels like yet another trite, simplistic cliche. The follow-up directive to not be anxious about anything: (4:6) is rarely more assuring.

But what if we treated this phrase as a chengyu to chew over rather than a quick fix to dispense? In Mandarin, our source of joy is placed upfront: kao zhu xi le (), or trusting the Lord, rejoice. Read in this light, the phrase is less a command to follow (Put on a happy face!) and more an introduction to Someone outside ourselves whom we can rely on.

To rejoice in the Lord, we must rest in the knowledge that the most undeserved death in history is the source of our greatest joy, even as our experience of mental health challenges may continue to persist. We look to Christ, who for the joy set before him  endured the cross, scorning its shame, and sat down at the right hand of the throne of God (Heb. 12:2). In doing so, he upends our expectations of where true joy can be found.

Pauls life also reflects this principle of rejoicing in God through trusting in him. The apostles imprisonment advanced the gospel both into the highest halls of power and into the hearts of brothers and sisters now emboldened to speak the Word without fear (Phil. 1:1214). Pondering the story behind Pauls suffering allows us to behold the glory of Christ. So again, Paul will say, Rejoice!not as a command but as a chengyu pointing to Jesus, our only source of true delight in an anxious age.

Longing for new life



Pauls instructions to the Philippians emphasize the importance of seeking unity and joy in Christ. But the beginning of his letter highlights a foundational belief that undergirds his exhortations: For to me, to live is Christ and to die is gain (1:21). In Mandarin, this paradoxical phrase can be rendered as a pair of chengyu: huo shi ji du, si you yi chu ().

The Mandarin word for profit () particularly resonates with the Chinese cultures penchant for accruing material wealth. The word reappears when Paul lists his impeccable credentials and earthly achievements like a chartered accountant (3:46), only to say, But whatever were gains (or profits) to me I now consider loss for the sake of Christ (3:7). In other words, only Jesus is priceless. Flush the rest away.

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Now that I have children of my own, I feel the sinful urge to define profit and gain like Menciuss mother once did: a college acceptance, an honorable career, a family, and kids. Yet the gospel gives us a better way to see profit and loss. Because of Christs death for our sins and life beyond the empty tomb, life in Christ is of invaluable worth, and death is merely a doorway to everlasting gain.

One way Ive recently been trying store up Philippians 1:21 in my heart is to visualize and pray for brothers and sisters who cling to this proverb from countries that are hostile to their very existence. I think of my Mandarin teachers hope for repentance and revival in his house church and how this chengyu is a daily reality for him. I recall a testimony of a formerly devout Muslim who held intense hatred for Christians but later accepted Jesus as his personal Savior.

As Simo Ralevic, a Serbian Christian, shared, For Christians in the West, I wish you persecution. Then you will know the sweetness of Christ.  Out[side] of Christ is only death. In Christ is life. Encountering stories of believers facing persecution in the global church encourages us to take up our crosses daily, precisely where God has placed us.

Reading contextually

Wider culture wars have conditioned us to be wary of cultural interpretations of the Bible. In Reading Romans with Eastern Eyes, missiologist Brad Vaughn (formerly known as Jackson Wu) rightly warns against blindly using contextual interpretations to co-opt Scripture for political or social purposes.

But approaching Philippians with Eastern eyes need not jettison our theological heritage. It can draw us toward drinking more deeply from the inexhaustible riches of Christ, our wisdom (1 Cor. 1:30). Im confident God does not waste anything: not my mixed heritage, my childhood struggle to memorize chengyu, or my Mandarin-language classes.

Theologizing between cultures is like sitting in an estuary, a tidal space where the saltwater of open sea and the freshwater of inland rivers mix, according to Chloe Sun, professor of Old Testament at Logos Evangelical Seminary. As water currents converge and diverge within the same transitional space, they form a rich and fertile habitat for maritime life. Likewise, when we read Scripture in liminal ways, we learn new ways of telling the timeless story of a wise and loving Savior awaiting his citizens of heaven (Phil. 3:20).

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Gods grace frees me to mine the depths of Scripture through my Western roots, while appreciating how Eastern ways of collecting and presenting wisdom can contextualize the message of Christ. My Mandarin teachers house church in China and my immigrant church in New Zealand may be continents apart, but through our weekly lessons, our stories interweave and a forgotten tongue reawakens. As we find chengyuor true words in Mandarinin Philippians, our hearts grow wise.

William HC is the pastor of a Chinese church in Auckland, New Zealand. He uses a pseudonym, as he ministers and supports believers in sensitive contexts.
Elevation Church, a North Carolina megachurch known for its popular music and charismatic pastor, has left the Southern Baptist Convention (SBC).

In a letter sent to the SBCs Executive Committee in Nashville and to the Baptist State Convention of North Carolina, Charlotte-based Elevation Church said it was withdrawing its affiliation with the Southern Baptist Convention effective immediately.

The letter was published by Baptist Press, an official SBC publication. A spokesman for the North Carolina Baptist Convention confirmed receiving the letter.

We have no plans to make a public announcement on this decisionwe have too much to do in reaching a world that needs the love of Jesus, the letter reads. Should your Credentials Committee decide to make this decision by Elevation public, we will only respond with a copy of this letter to anyone inquiring about the notification.

Elevation did not respond to a request for comment.

The SBCs Credentials Committee is charged with determining if churches are in friendly cooperation with the nations largest Protestant denomination. That cooperation includes giving to SBC causes and closely following the SBCs doctrine.

Earlier this year, five congregationsincluding Saddleback Church, which was one of the largest SBC churches in the countrywere expelled from the SBC for having women pastors.

The SBCs statement of faith says only men can hold that office.

During their recent annual meeting, Southern Baptists passed a proposed constitutional amendment that would bar churches that have women pastors of any kind. That amendment must be ratified in 2024.

By some estimates, about 2,000 SBC churches have women serving in pastoral rolesincluding supporting roles like associate pastors, childrens pastors, and music ministers.

Elevations letter gives no reason for the churchs departure after more than two decades in the SBC. However, Holly Furtick, wife of Elevation pastor Steven Furtick, is described as a church cofounder and preaches on a regular basis.

According to data submitted by the church to the SBC, Elevation averaged 10,185 attendees each week and had $103 million in donations for 2021. The church gave $10,000 to the SBCs Cooperative Program.

A recent study found that Elevation is one of four megachurches whose songs dominate the market for contemporary worship music.

Ryan Burge, a political scientist from Eastern Illinois University, noted that Saddleback Church and Elevationwhich reportedly baptized 1,725 people in 2021accounted for about 2.5 percent of the baptisms for the entire SBC, which has more than 40,000 churches.

The SBC has seen declining baptism and membership numbers for more than a decade. The SBC lost nearly half a million members from 2021 to 2022 and 1.5 million in the last three years. In 2022, the SBC reported 13.2 million members, down from 16.3 million in 2006.

Despite leaving the SBC, Elevation plans to keep partnering with Southern Baptist churches, Chunks Corbett, a leader at Elevation, wrote.

Please know that our withdrawal from affiliation in no way means that we will withdraw from praying for you and your ministries and mission work in the futurewe are all on the same side!
Gunmen kill pastor, abduct 7 worshipers in Nigerian church attack

In a pre-dawn attack on a church vigil, unidentified gunmen stormed a parish of the Redeemed Christian Church of God in southwest Nigeria's Ogun State, leaving the pastor dead and abducting seven worshippers.

The incident occurred around midnight on Saturday at the Desires of Nations Parish in Abule-Ori, Obafemi Owode Local Government Area.

Police Public Relations Officer of the state command Omolola Odutola told The Punch that a fellow pastor identified the slain pastor as Pastor Kayode Oluwakemi, 56. He reportedly sustained bullet wounds to his chest and died at the scene.

"He was in church with other pastors and church members, when some hoodlums numbering about seven invaded their church, attacked them with guns, cutlasses and other dangerous weapons with intent to Kidnap members," Odutola said.

Ogun State Social Orientation and Safety Corps Commander Soji Ganzallo said his officers rescued the seven congregants during a tense operation, Nigeria's Daily Post reported. Officers engaged the kidnappers in a fierce exchange of gunfire, leaving one of the assailants dead and several others critically injured, according to Ganzallo.

"The officers were charged to go after the suspects to rescue the victims unhurt and swung into action immediately," Ganzallo said in a statement. "The seven victims were rescued unhurt, while one of the kidnappers was killed, and many of the suspects sustained serious injury during a fire exchange."

The brutal attack has left the parish and the broader community in shock and mourning.

The commander added that a joint team, comprising the police and the So-Safe Corps, is already pursuing the remaining kidnappers, who managed to escape. He underscored that the objective was to capture them alive, to face justice for their brutal crimes.

Ganzallo also stated that the body of the slain kidnapper had been retrieved and deposited at a nearby morgue.

The search for the fugitives was ongoing.

In its latest International Religious Freedom Report, the U.S. State Department noted a spike in deadly violence impacting both Christians and Muslims in Nigeria. The NGO Armed Conflict Location & Event Data Project reports there were 3,953 civilian deaths from violence across the country in 2022.

"There continued to be frequent violent incidents, particularly in the northern part of the country, affecting both Muslims and Christians, resulting in numerous deaths," the State Department's report on Nigeria states.

"Kidnappings and armed robbery by criminal gangs increased in the South as well as the North West, the South South, and the South East. The international Christian organization Open Doors stated that terrorist groups, militant herdsmen, and criminal gangs were responsible for large numbers of fatalities, and Christians were particularly vulnerable."

In June 2022, gunmen stormed into St. Francis Catholic Church in the southwestern Ondo state and killed dozens.

At least 700 Christians were reportedly killed in Nigeria during the month of May, according to an estimate released by the Anambra-based International Society for Civil Liberties and Rule of Law.

The report comes as Nigerian Christians and human rights groups have voiced concerns for years that the violence being carried out against predominantly Christian farming communities in the Middle Belt states by radicalized herdsmen has reached genocidal levels as thousands have been killed in recent years.

However, the Nigerian government has rejected claims that the violence is influenced by religion and insists it's part of decades-old farmer-herder clashes. Additionally, data cited by the U.S. State Department suggests that violence targeting Christians accounts for a small fraction of the killings.
Kakao Mobility CEO Ryu Gung-seon, front row fifth from left, poses with Vietnamese startup representatives after a business discussion in Hanoi, Thursday. Courtesy of Kakao Mobility



By Kim Jae-heun



Kakao Mobility held a meeting with Vietnamese startups in the mobility and tourism sectors, discussing ways to establish a technology cooperation system in the nation's startup ecosystem, the company said Friday.



Company CEO Ryu Gung-seon and top executives accompanied President Yoon Suk Yeol on his state visit to Vietnam as members of an economic mission.



The company plans to share its mobility technology and platform construction experience with local startups and discover various cooperative models that can expand information technology exchanges between Korea and Vietnam.



"Beyond Korea's cooperation with Vietnam in the manufacturing and real estate sectors over the past 30 years, Kakao Mobility expects to strengthen cooperation with Vietnam in the IT and service sectors," Kakao Mobility CEO Ryu said.



The company first met with representatives of Vietnam's leading mobility and tourism startups such as Ship60, EcoTruck, Otocity and Tubudd to explore the direction and exchange of platform technology and services between the two countries, Thursday.



Ship60 provides a B2B fulfillment service platform and on-demand delivery services. EcoTruck operates a B2B logistics brokerage platform and transportation service. Otocity runs a digital trading platform for used cars and Tubudd provides a matching platform service for local travel experts to help with hotel and vehicle reservations as well as tour guides and interpretation.



The mobility company also shared insights into local technology infrastructure and startup ecosystems with public transportation platform company Phenikaa MaaS and its autonomous driving, robot technology subsidiary Phenikaa X, and Korean startup accelerator TheVentures, which entered the Vietnamese market in 2015.



"As a representative platform company in Korea, we will help Vietnam build its own platform success model and help Vietnam and Korea's startup ecosystem with excellent capabilities to expand exchanges," Ryu said.


Indiana Supreme Court upholds state abortion ban

Indianas highest court has upheld a state law banning abortion under most circumstances, striking down an earlier courts injunction blocking enforcement of the pro-life law.

In a decision released last Friday, the Indiana Supreme Court ruled in favor of Senate Enrolled Act 1, also known as Senate Bill 1, which was signed into law by Gov. Eric Holcomb last year.

Indiana Supreme Court Justice Derek Molter authored the court opinion, concluding that the abortion providers suing the state cannot show a reasonable likelihood of success on their facial challenge.

Molter noted that the plaintiffs attempt to use Article 1, Section 1 of the state constitution to block the abortion ban did not work, given the original intentions of those who ratified the constitution.

Indianas long history of generally prohibiting abortion as a criminal actcoupled with Plaintiffs acknowledgment that protecting prenatal life falls within the States broad authority to protect the publics health, welfare, and safetysuggests that the common understanding among Article 1, Section 1s framers and ratifiers was that the provision left the General Assembly with legislative discretion to regulate or limit abortion, wrote Molter.

In sum, our States history and traditions, as reflected in our Courts precedents, indicate that the common understanding of Section 1 among those who framed and ratified it was that it generally left the General Assembly with broad legislative discretion to limit abortion.

Justice Christopher M. Goff authored an opinion that concurred in part and dissented in part, arguing that even those who abhor abortion in all circumstances should be wary of unfettered government power over the most personal, private aspects of a persons life.

Reliance on the history made by men holding these views, prevalent at the time of our constitutional drafting, is simply inadequate for charting the liberty of women today, Goff continued.

We cannot draw constitutional law on the particular matter of womens rights from the doings of exclusively male institutions in times when women were excluded and marginalized from public discussion.

Holcomb signed SB 1 into law last August, a couple of months after the United States Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade, saying in a statement at the time that he was willing to support legislation that made progress in protecting life.

These actions followed long days of hearings filled with sobering and personal testimony from citizens and elected representatives on this emotional and complex topic, stated Holcomb.

Ultimately, those voices shaped and informed the final contents of the legislation and its carefully negotiated exceptions to address some of the unthinkable circumstances a woman or unborn child might face.

Although the Indiana law bans most abortions, it allows for abortions to be performed in cases of rape, incest, any serious health emergency for the mother, or lethal fetal deformity.

Soon after the legislation was passed, abortion providers, including Planned Parenthood, filed suit against the ban, as did the state chapter of the American Civil Liberties Union.

The other lawsuit involves the ACLU suing Indiana on behalf of a group of plaintiffs arguing that the abortion ban violated the Religious Freedom Restoration Act. While an injunction remains in effect from the lawsuit, it only applies to the plaintiffs themselves and not statewide, reported Life News.
Religion has become enclave for highly educated, married, middle-class families: Ryan Burge

America's churches have become enclaves for highly educated, married, middle-class families with children, and that's troubling for democracy, according to political scientist and lay preacher with the American Baptist Church Ryan Burge.

Burge's findings are based on a recent analysis of data analyzing measures such as education, income and relationship status. The data is derived from studies such as the Nationscape survey, which includes responses from 477,000 respondents, and the Cooperative Election Study, "a 50,000+ person national stratified sample survey administered by YouGov."

Burge, an associate professor at Eastern Illinois University known for researching data on religion in the United States, concluded that "increasingly religion has become the enclave for those who have lived a 'proper' life."

"These results are hard to ignore and should sound some major alarms for any person of faith who is concerned about the large state of American society," he writes in his analysis. "College degree, middle class income, married with children. If you check all those boxes, the likelihood of you regularly attending church is about double the rate of folks who don't."

He notes that religious affiliation increases as education increases, citing that "the group with the highest level of religious affiliation are those with a master's degree."

Burge contends that the shrinking middle class, which makes up some 50% of the American population, is most likely to be attending church services weekly.

"The group that is the most likely to attend services are not the poor, nor the wealthy. Instead, it's people who smack in the middle of the income distribution," Burge writes. "This analysis points to the following conclusion: the people who are the most likely to attend services this weekend are those with college degrees making $60K-$100K. In other words, middle class professionals."

Burge believes the development of the church as a middle-class enclave is problematic for American democracy because it makes the church exclusionary when it should be a place where people of all backgrounds can come together to "build bridges."

"Religion, at its best, is a place where people from a variety of economic, social, racial, and political backgrounds can find common ground around a shared faith. It's a place to build bridges to folks who are different than you. Unfortunately, it looks like American religion is not at its best," he explains.

"It's become a hospital for the healthy. An echo chamber for folks who did everything 'right,' which means that it is seeming less and less inviting to those who did life another way," he adds. "Do I think that houses of worship have done this on purpose? Generally speaking, no. But they also haven't actively refuted this narrative."

A number of studies over the years have shown how shifting cultural norms and the economy have impacted how people treat things like marriage and cohabitation.

While marriage has been shown to positively impact society in health outcomes, longevity and economic security, for example, a recent report from the National Center for Health Statistics, showed how the marriage rate reached its lowest point in more than 100 years with growing economic insecurity.

For the people who get married and endure, University of Maryland sociology professor Philip Cohen, who authored The Coming Divorce Decline, suggested that marriage appears to be losing its original intent and is becoming more of an "achievement of status."

"Marriage is becoming more selective, and more stable, even as attitudes toward divorce are becoming more permissive, and cohabitation has grown less stable," Cohen wrote. "The U.S. is progressing toward a system in which marriage is rarer, and more stable, than it was in the past, representing an increasingly central component of the structure of social inequality."
Major Supreme Court Decisions, LGBT Pride Events Exposed Kids To Nudity, And Elevation Church Withdraws From SBC

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Top headlines for Monday, July 3, 2023

In this episode, we discuss the recent Supreme Court decision that asserts a Christian website designer's right not to create sites celebrating same-sex marriage in Colorado. Then, we delve into the rejection of President Biden's student loan forgiveness plan by the Supreme Court, overturning a supportive lower court ruling. We will also investigate the controversy surrounding several LGBT Pride events and claims of exposing minors to explicit content. Lastly, we'll examine the significant move by Elevation Church in North Carolina, led by Steven Furtick, ending their 20-year-affiliation with the Southern Baptist Convention.

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Top headlines for Monday, July 3, 2023

In this episode, we discuss the recent Supreme Court decision that asserts a Christian website designer's right not to create sites celebrating same-sex marriage in Colorado. Then, we delve into the rejection of President Biden's student loan forgiveness plan by the Supreme Court, overturning a supportive lower court ruling. We will also investigate the controversy surrounding several LGBT Pride events and claims of exposing minors to explicit content. Lastly, we'll examine the significant move by Elevation Church in North Carolina, led by Steven Furtick, ending their 20-year-affiliation with the Southern Baptist Convention.
American Medical Association compromised by radical ideology

The American Medical Association recently passed a series of resolutions in the name of diversity, equity and inclusion that highlight how elite, professional organizations have been deeply compromised by ideology.

A report by National Review on Monday noted that the AMA, which accredits medical schools and has enormous power over the medical profession, passed a series of resolutions in mid-June denouncing legislation that would prevent gender-affirming care for minors and in support of racial preferences in higher education.



From National Review:

One resolution that passed amended a preexisting policy to oppose mandatory reporting of information related to sexual orientation and any information related to gender transition, including for patients who are minors, according to the organizations press release  During the annual meeting, the AMA also adopted a policy urging colleges and medical schools to implement race-conscious admissions procedures in advance of the looming Supreme Court decision on affirmative action.

Supporting gender-affirming care for minors is bad enough, but affirmative action? That issue would seemingly be out of the purview of medicine, but not according to the AMA, which joined an amicus brief with Ivy League schools in the affirmative action Supreme Court cases decided Thursday. Thankfully, they lost.

The AMA explained in its amicus brief that diversity in the education of the nations physicians and other health care professionals is a medical imperative. The best argument that the association could come up with for why enforced racial preferences are a medical imperative is that, according to some research, having diverse doctors improves outcomes for patients.

Thats a dubious premise, but given the power of the DEI ideology, would they ever acknowledge studies that demonstrated the opposite?

Large corporations and professional organizations are afraid to touch any study, book, or film that in any way calls into question the gender-transition ideology, for instance. It seems unlikely they will ever, in any way, question the racial diversity narratives that dominate the world of our cultural elite.

The DEI cult never seems to need actual positive results to conclude that all diversity efforts are beneficial. It doesnt matter how shallow, silly, expensive, or directly harmful the initiatives are, they are always promoted as good and necessary.

The more plans fail, the more planners plan, as a great man once said.

And those diversity efforts, according to the AMA, require racial preferences and discrimination.

The AMA said in a press release that it maintains unequivocal opposition to legislation that would dissolve affirmative action or punish institutions for employing race-conscious admissions.

As I wrote previously, our nations elite institutions just wont quit the racial preferences game, no matter what the Supreme Court rules or what the average American thinks.

Of course, the AMA is highly selective in deciding what health policies must be added or abandoned to rectify historical oppression. It recently threw out body mass index as a measure of patient health because, it says, BMI is racist and has roots in eugenics.

If thats so, as Tristan Justice pointed out at the Federalist, then why does the AMA cling so tightly to abortion, which most certainly has racist roots in the eugenics movement? They seem rather selective in what historic injustices qualify for rectification.

The AMA has veered leftward for some time, but it has slipped into full cultural revolution mode in the past few years.

Institutional science and medicine are going woke, abandoning professional standards and even common sense, it seems. Their gatekeeping power remains immense, though. This is, in effect, how the ruling elites rule. They use generations of institutional trust and their overwhelming power over who may or may not enter the ranks of the managerial elite to browbeat society into accepting the most extreme elements of the cultural revolution.

Perhaps they think their lock on Western societies is absolute. The problem they are running into is that once the credibility of their expertise collapses, and people get fed up with the extremism, do the institutions any longer have the power to force the public en masse to accept their claims and agenda?

Sure, Democratic politicians will continue to cite the AMA, or the American Psychiatric Association, or the College Board, or any number of other such organizations to justify their aims. But at some point, people just stop believing in them entirely. Confidence in institutions has cratered in this country. Its not hard to guess why.

Thats why there needs to be increased emphasis from Americans, through their elected representatives, to sidestep the power of these institutions.

Woke ideology spreads like cancer from higher education into corporate America and professional organizations. Its now baked into the ethos of the legal profession and especially government bureaucracies.

Some states, such as Texas and especially Florida, are catching on to the problem and are using political power to ensure that institutions reflect the beliefs of the people and not the other way around. They are ensuring that compromised institutions dont have the power to dictate how you run your life or how you raise your children.

Thats what principled populism is all about. We, the people, still have the power to change the course we are on if we choose to do so.

Originally published at The Daily Signal.
Why Israelis wish America happy Independence Day

As America celebrates its Independence Day this month, I am reminded of how grateful I am for the strong U.S.-Israeli partnership.

While I live in Israel today, I spent my childhood in the U.S., and I am proud to say that I am a citizen of both countries. I will never forget how welcoming and excited my new friends and neighbors in Israel were when they realized Id immigrated to Israel from America.

This was almost two decades ago. I was brand new to the country, and Id taken a leap of faith with my husband  we were newlyweds  to live and start our family in our biblical homeland. But even though it was an exciting time, any new immigrant will tell you it can also be a time of anxiety and insecurity. I wasnt quite sure of myself or the cultural expectations. Everything was new  the language, the people, even the desert landscape.

Everyone spoke Hebrew around me. But I remember as soon as I started speaking English, instead of feeling out of place, I was met with appreciation. People would say things, like Wow, you're American and you moved to Israel! The U.S. is our greatest ally and greatest friend, and America is our example of how to build a land of freedom and diversity.

I had many feelings at once: though I was uncertain about my new surroundings, I was grateful and happy to be in Israel. At the same time, I felt so proud of the country I left and the values it embodies, and was proud to say that I was from the U.S. I realized how strong the bond of shared values is between the U.S. and Israel and how much Israel looks to the U.S. as an example of freedom and democratic and biblical values.

Today, Im no longer a new immigrant. Ive lived in Israel for 18 years, so Ive seen for myself what my new Israeli friends described to me in those early days of living in the Holy Land: America truly is one of Israels greatest allies.

One moment that I feel privileged to have witnessed was the U.S.s historic decision in 2017 to move the U.S. embassy to Jerusalem. The following year, during the official embassy opening ceremony, the streets of Jerusalem buzzed with excitement, and Israeli and American flags were flying everywhere. Israel had always looked at Jerusalem as its capital, but it was the U.S. that became the first to officially recognize this fact (just as the U.S. was the first to recognize the newly-formed state of Israel when it declared independence in 1948)  a strong message of solidarity with the Israeli people.

I now better understand why so many Israelis value Americas commitment to freedom. I remember when my children were much younger, and we returned to the U.S. to visit relatives. My 3-year-old daughter asked me, Why arent there security guards everywhere? and it reminded me of the frightening reality we face here in Israel.

But it also reminded me that freedom isnt free. The U.S., like Israel, has gone through many years of war, upheaval, and hardships, and paid a great cost to retain the freedoms its citizens enjoy. But after 247 years, America has gotten to a place where the people can be together without a security guard standing watch at the entrance to every shop, every business, and every place of worship. Its a nation where people from diverse backgrounds, different faiths, and different generations come together to live in freedom.

This is a goal Israel is constantly working toward as well, a goal that it has gone a long way toward achieving. All the while, Israelis are on the front lines defending our freedom, and acting as a beacon of democracy in the Middle East, hoping that one day, our country will know true peace.

And so, even though I live in Israel  maybe because I live in Israel  I am so grateful to be able to celebrate Americas Independence Day. For me, this day reminds me of our partnership, the true friendship and support America has shown Israel, and the foundational values that we share. And it also reminds me of how valuable freedom is and how important it is to protect it.

In 1960, John F. Kennedy, who was then running for U.S. president, gave a speech at the Zionists of America convention. Israel was not created in order to disappear  Israel will endure and flourish, he told the crowd. It is the child of hope and home of the brave. It can neither be broken by adversity nor demoralized by success. It carries the shield of democracy and it honors the sword of freedom.

I can assure my American friends that Israelis feel the same way about the U.S. So, we all wish you a happy birthday, America! May you endure and flourish, and continue to embody the values of democracy and freedom that we all hold dear. As we celebrate the 4th of July, I also celebrate how thankful I am for the U.S.-Israeli partnership. I am hopeful, and I firmly believe that, with Gods guidance, our friendship will remain strong for many years to come.
David Platt laments 'idolatry of personal and political convictions' in the Church, issues call to unity

Over the last five years, David Platt, pastor of McLean Bible Church near Washington, D.C., began noticing a disturbing trend in the Church: Instead of being eager to unite around Jesus, the Body of Christ was becoming increasingly quick to divide over what he refers to as the idolatry of personal and political convictions.

It was out of this growing concern for the American Church that Platt, an author of three New York Times bestsellers, penned his latest book, Don't Hold Back: Leaving Behind the American Gospel to Follow Jesus. In it, he warns that the American gospel  an ideology he says prostitutes Jesus uses Jesus for the sake of comfort and power and politics and prosperity in the world  for the true Gospel.

The ramifications of this, he said, are deadly.

If were not careful, we can conflate the Gospel with American ideals and values and power and politics, and in the process, lose the way of Jesus, Platt told The Christian Post. What He's called us to is so much bigger than what we are tempted to get caught up with in this world, and particularly my country, with the pursuit of comfort and power and politics and prosperity here.

The Church must unify around the hope we have in Jesus, Platt said, citing Romans 15. His deep desire is to see the Church united around the person of Jesus, rather than being divided by personal and political convictions that often take precedence over the Gospel.

In his book, Platt categorizes convictions into three buckets: The first bucket represents the non-negotiable core beliefs of the Gospel and the authority of God's Word; the second consists of convictions that may vary among different local churches, while the third bucket encompasses issues on which believers can agree to disagree.

We need to make sure we know which beliefs go in which bucket, he stressed, adding that particularly during the last election, many people put how you voted in the same bucket that we put the atonement of Jesus and the Trinity.

No, these are not the same, he said. And so we need to be careful not to mix those buckets and then careful to remember how to love people who have convictions in different buckets.

Platt emphasized that while politics and comfort have their place, they should never overshadow the call to live for another world and prioritize the eternal Kingdom of God.

I'm not saying politics aren't important, and Im not saying all comfort is all bad, he clarified. But I'm saying we've been called to follow One who beckons us to die to ourselves in this world and to live for another world altogether, not to live for a country that one day, like all other countries, is going to fall and to live for a Kingdom that's going to last forever. And that changes the way we live here.

According to Platt, fractures within the church, particularly regarding racial issues, have existed for a long time. But recent years have seen these tensions come to the surface due to political and cultural turmoil, he said, expressing hope that this moment will be used as an opportunity to address and rectify the racial divisions that have plagued the Church for centuries.

How can we experience the multi-ethnic beauty of the Church? How can we make sure we're seeking God not as a means to an end, but as the end? he asked. How can we be intentional about showing counter-cultural compassion in the world and doing justice in a world of injustice?

A November 2022 study from Barna found that less than one-third of pastors (30%) report often speaking on unity between people of different political beliefs; only 23% of Christians report hearing this.

Furthermore, 28% of Christians report hearing their pastors speak on unity between congregants and people of other religious beliefs, yet only 12% of pastors say this is true.

When addressing hot-button and political issues from the pulpit, Platt advised pastors to prioritize clarity on issues where the Bible speaks directly and clearly. While acknowledging the significance of political topics, he warned against allowing the world's agenda to dictate preaching and teaching.

The key for me as a pastor is to make sure where the Bible speaks clearly and directly that I'm speaking clearly and directly, he said. For years, I was silent about abortion. And I just kind of saw that as a political issue. And then I was reading Psalm 139 one day, and I'd read it before, but God just opened my eyes in a fresh way: This is a biblical issue far before it's a political issue.

I think many times we as pastors, if we're not careful, can be selective about the issues we will address or won't address from the Word based on the political party that most people in our church may align with, he added. And that's where we've got to be really, really careful that the world's not setting the agenda for what we're preaching and teaching, but it really is God's Word thats setting that agenda.

Platt challenged believers to fight for unity and move beyond debating justice and actively engage in pursuing and practicing justice in a world filled with injustice. He reminded Christians of their primary purpose: spreading the Gospel to all nations, as commanded by Jesus.

Participating in global missions, he emphasized, is not reserved for a select few, but is the calling of all Christians.

Our purpose on the planet is not to promote the greatness of our nation, it's to spread the Gospel to all nations, he said. We have more opportunities than ever before in history, to spread the Gospel to the ends of the Earth today than any other people have ever had.

The pastor said his book is intended for discouraged and disillusioned and divided Christians as well as the next generation he says has looked at the Church in recent years and thought there was more to Jesus than this.

In all this, I think one of my biggest concerns is to call the Church to see that Jesus is not a means to an end; He is the end. He is the One. God Himself is the goal of the Gospel. If we're not careful, we can subtly look to him as a means to a variety of other ends that will fall far short of what our hearts were created to find satisfaction in, he said.

I wrote this book to say, There is so much more to Jesus and so much more than the Church  and we can experience awe-filled wonder at Jesus and the otherworldly beauty of the Church. But some things need to be different, not just to those people out there, but starting in us.
American Bible Society survey finds 'unprecedented drop' in Bible reading

There has been an unprecedented drop in the number of Bible users in the United States since last year, according to a report released by the American Bible Society.

The 2022 State of the Bible report, released Wednesday, based its findings on responses collected from a survey of 2,598 U.S. adults conducted in January. The 12th annual report asked Americans a variety of questions about their Bible use and their thoughts on its role in society.

A preface to the report also highlights changes in the percentage of Bible users in the U.S. over time. The American Bible Society defines Bible users as those who use the Bible at least 3-4 times each year on their own, outside of a church setting.

After reaching a high of 53% in 2014, the share of Bible users among the U.S. adult population consistently remained between 48% and 51%. Just last year, 50% of Americans were Bible users. However, in 2022, Bible users in the U.S. accounted for just 39% of the adult population, the lowest in more than a decade.

The State of the Bible report described the 11% decrease as an unprecedented drop in the percentage of Bible users in the United States. When applied to the U.S. population as a whole, the figure suggests that the number of Bible users in the U.S. dropped from 128 million in 2021 to 103 million in 2022.

The group labeled Bible users consisted of Americans who read the Bible outside of church as infrequently as three to four times a year to those who use the Bible daily. Ten percent of U.S. adults use the Bible daily, while 4% use it four to six times a week, 7% consult it two to three times a week, 5% read the Bible once a week, and 7% read it once a month.

More than half (60%) of Americans use the Bible less than three to four times a year. A plurality (40%) of those surveyed never read the Bible on their own, while 12% read it less than once a year and 8% look at it once or twice a year.

The State of the Bible report also demonstrates what the American Bible Society describes as a major decrease in Scripture Engagement, which is defined as consistent interaction with the Bible that shapes peoples choices and transforms their relationships with God, self, and others. The estimated number of Scripture-engaged Americans dropped from 64 million in 2021 to 49 million in 2022. At the same time, the estimated number of Bible disengaged Americans rose from 100 million last year to 145 million this year.

The survey also inquired about respondents Bible reading habits. The overwhelming majority (78%) of those surveyed indicated that their Bible reading stayed the same over the past year, as 13% reported an increase in Bible reading and the remaining 10% saw a decrease in their Bible reading.

When asked how do you think our country would be without the Bible, specifically referring to a hypothetical scenario where nobody read the Bible at all, a plurality of respondents (45%) indicated that they thought the U.S. would be worse off without the Bible. This is a noticeable decrease from last year, when 54% of those surveyed believed that the U.S. would be worse off without the Bible.

Forty-one percent of respondents contended that the country would be about the same without the Bible, an increase from the 33% who said so in 2021. The share of Americans who think the U.S. would be better off without the Bible remained flat at 14% in both 2021 and 2022.

In 2022, the elderly were the group most likely to believe that the U.S. would be worse off without the Bible, with 64% of the oldest Americans agreeing with that statement. A majority of baby boomers (57%) and a plurality of those in generation X (46%) also predicted that the U.S. would be worse off without the Bible.

Millennials were the least likely group to see an absence of the Bible as making the U.S. worse off. Thirty-one percent of millennials subscribed to that belief. A slightly higher share of Generation Z (39%), the youngest group of American adults, told pollsters that an absence of the Bible would make the U.S. worse off.

Overall, nearly half of respondents (49%) agreed either strongly or somewhat that Bible reading is an important component of a childs character development, while an additional 27% disagreed either strongly or somewhat with that analysis. At 47%, the oldest respondents constituted the largest share of respondents who strongly agreed that Bible reading played an important role in a childs character development.

Thirty-three percent of baby boomers strongly agreed that Bible reading was important to a childs character development, along with 28% of those in Generation X, 19% of millennials and 20% of those in Generation Z.

Forty-nine percent of adults also agreed with the statement proclaiming that the Bible contains everything a person needs to know to live a meaningful life. Once again, elders were far more likely than their younger counterparts to strongly agree with that statement. The share of elders who strongly agreed with that statement was measured at 44%, followed by 34% of baby boomers, 31% of Gen Xers, 22% of Gen Zers and 19% of millennials.

Additional chapters of this years State of the Bible report are expected to be released throughout the year.
China: Authorities double fines for pastor and wife: Thank God for allowing us to have a part in His affliction

Chinese authorities have doubled a previously imposed fine on Pastor Yang Xibo and his wife, Wang Xiaofei, leaders of the Xunsiding Church, which is the largest house church in Xiamen, known for its hundred-year heritage. The couple, now facing a combined fine of 400,000 yuan (roughly $55,100), are being penalized for organizing religious activities.

Chinese officials moved to enforce this escalated fine last week, according to the U.S.-based group ChinaAid, which documents religious persecution in China and supports Chinese prisoners of conscience.

The couple, who have been fighting against the fine since 2021, announced their refusal to pay on social media: Thank God for allowing us to have a part in His affliction, and especially thankful that on Earth we have no property for the court-enforced implementation, which is definitely a great grace of God, they said.

This significant fine follows a legacy of state persecution. The Xunsiding Church was initially banned and fined 25,000 yuan (about $3,400) on May 19, 2019. The government dispatched police to surround the church venue for 30 days, persistently surveilling members.

Following these actions, the church resorted to frequently changing meeting spaces to avoid further raids and bans. However, the authorities continued their attempts to disband the church, damaging private property and coercing members to send their children to public schools.

The authorities campaign against Pastor Yang and his wife is a component of a broader drive to suppress unregistered churches, the group said.

The Chinese government only recognizes five religious groups that accede to its influence, leaving Christians from unregistered churches to face harsh penalties and fines.

Pastor Yang, a fourth-generation minister, and his wife are following in the footsteps of his father and aunt, both of whom were imprisoned for refusing to join the state-sanctioned Three-Self Church but resumed serving the church after their release.

According to a report released by ChinaAid in February, the Chinese Communist Party increased its persecution of churches and Christians ahead of the 20th Party Congress in 2022. Charges of fraud against house church pastors and leaders have grown in frequency, with traditional church activities such as tithing and offerings being portrayed as illegal.

The report noted that the authorities had weaponized the Measures for the Financial Management of Religious Activity Venues, updated last June, to construct charges against house churches. It also highlighted a strategic shift in government policy to align the state-sanctioned church more closely with Xi Jinping since the 20th National Party Congress.

ChinaAids President and founder Bob Fu expressed grave concerns about the situation, stating, Their goal is not only to curate a socialist-friendly church; they hope to erase it. The international community needs to know about these trends and developments as China continues to rise on the global stage.

Adding to these concerns, ChinaAid reported that the government had been intensifying its restrictions on religious content online, impacting the freedom of Christians also in the digital sphere. The Administrative Measures for Internet Religious Information and Services implemented in 2022 had caused unprecedented online censorship, effectively seeking to remove Christianity from cyberspace, the report said.

The Chinese Communist Party remains unyielding in its drive for religious Sinicization, illustrated by the copious praises lavished on Xi by state-run religious groups during the Congress. This shift toward loyalty to Xi indicates the evolving nature of religious Sinicization.

According to the 2023 Open Doors World Watch List, China is ranked as the 16th worst country when it comes to Christian persecution.

Open Doors, an organization that monitors persecution in over 60 countries, noted in a factsheet: Tightening restrictions and increasing surveillance are putting Christians in China under intensifying pressure, as the Communist Party seeks to limit all threats to its power.
UMC congregation forcibly closed before it could disaffiliate sues to reopen

A North Carolina congregation shut down by a United Methodist Church regional conference just as it was considering disaffiliating from the mainline denomination is suing to keep its doors open.

Fifth Avenue United Methodist Church, a congregation based in Wilmington that has operated for over 170 years, filed the lawsuit after the congregation was locked out of the building in late March before it could hold a vote on whether to disaffiliate from the UMC.

The congregation wants to remain open and continue with the disaffiliation process just as thousands of other UMC churches nationwide have been able to do in the last couple of years amid a longstanding debate over the denomination's stance on sexuality.

"This lawsuit was a last resort," attorney Gavin Parsons said in a statement released last week. "Fifth Avenue gave the Conference every opportunity to do the right thing, but they refused."

"Hundreds of churches have voted on disaffiliation. Some chose to stay, some chose to leave, but all were given a vote. The Conference chose to seize Fifth Avenue's property instead of allowing a vote. We look forward to restoring Fifth Avenue's historic church to its members and allowing them to pursue a vote on disaffiliation as promised by the United Methodist Church."

In March, the UMC North Carolina Conference announced that it would shut Fifth Avenue UMC, citing declining attendance as the reason.

"Membership and missional activity of Fifth Avenue has recently declined, and the Church has a current membership of 205 and average weekly attendance of approximately 20 members," said the Rev. Tara Lain, superintendent of the Harbor District, which includes Wilmington, in an earlier email to The Christian Post.

"The North Carolina Annual Conference wants all our churches to thrive and make disciples of Jesus Christ. We believe this closure leads to rebirth, and we plan to use this space to meet the local community's clear, present, and pressing needs."

Lain said that the conference has other plans for the property, such as possibly turning it into a senior living facility, and "members of Fifth Avenue will be transferred to a local UMC congregation."

Jim Seay, an attorney first hired by the church to help them through the disaffiliation process, told CP in March that the congregation was "still exploring all of our alternatives."

"I was there the night they closed them down. I thought it was going to be an informational session," Seay said. "It's an absolute shame that this dispute couldn't have been kept between us at the local church and the bishop at the greater church."

Since last year, over 6,000 congregations across the United States have voted to leave the UMC.

Although the denomination officially prohibits the blessing of same-sex unions and the ordination of noncelibate homosexuals in the UMC Book of Discipline, theological progressives within the UMC have often refused to follow or enforce the rules.

The open defiance by some of the UMC Book of Discipline has prompted about 6,100 congregations to leave the UMC, including over 300 congregations in the North Carolina Conference, according to numbers compiled by UM News.

Many of these departing congregations have opted to affiliate with the Global Methodist Church, a theologically conservative denomination launched last year.
Church of England seeks to regain power to defrock priests, bishops

The Church of England is considering reviving its power to defrock priests, bishops and archbishops found guilty of serious misconduct or abuse, according to papers submitted to the General Synod, the denomination's legislative body.

At a gathering this week in York, the synod will consider a proposal on "Clergy Conduct Measures."

The power of defrocking, or deposition from Holy Orders, was repealed in 2003 as part of legislation governing the discipline of priests. This power, once restored, would enable the denomination to strip abusive priests of their Holy Orders, forcing them to live as laypersons.

The current policy allows clergy members found guilty of misconduct or abuse to retain their ecclesiastical status and often continue with ministry functions. Currently, the harshest penalty for priests is a lifetime ban from holding another role within the denomination, but this doesn't strip them of their priestly status or the reverend title.

The new proposal would repeal Clergy Discipline Measure 2003 and replace it "with a new system for the investigation and determination of complaints." The denomination would establish three procedures to handle grievances, misconduct allegations and serious misconduct allegations.

"Clause 39 re-introduces a power for a bishop to depose a priest or deacon from Holy Orders following a finding of misconduct that does not involve a question of doctrine, ritual or ceremony," a summary of the measure states.

If a tribunal recommends the deposition of the clergy, the ritual would be conducted by a bishop.

Furthermore, the proposal also includes a provision for defrocking bishops or archbishops, provided they are given an "opportunity to be heard" by a panel of senior clergy before being stripped of their Holy Orders.

For a bishop or archbishop to be defrocked, they must be found guilty of a serious offense.

The proposal follows recommendations from the Independent Inquiry into Child Sexual Abuse (IICSA) made in a 2020 report.

After discovering the denomination sheltered hundreds of pedophiles for decades and routinely ignored allegations against its clergy, the IICSA recommended reinstating the ability to defrock. The IICSA stated that the denomination allowed abusive bishops and priests to continue in service for many years before facing justice.

The proposal has raised concerns among victims and lawyers specializing in abuse cases. They warn that the new measure could ultimately serve to consolidate power among bishops, who would singularly have the ability to defrock clergy.

Andrew Graystone, an advocate for victims of church-related abuse, criticized the lack of external oversight in the church's handling of abuse cases.

"What is needed is not more power in the hands of bishops, but greater accountability, greater transparency, stronger external scrutiny," he told The Telegraph.

Richard Scorer, a solicitor at Slater & Gordon who represents many survivors of clerical abuse, shared Graystone's concerns.

"Any strengthening of disciplinary measures needs to be part of a shift to independence in safeguarding so that decisions can be made objectively and fairly without being tainted by internal church politics and the interests of survivors can be properly protected," Scorer told the publication.

A CofE spokesperson responded to the criticism.

"IICSA recommended that deposition from Holy Orders be reintroduced in the Church as it was important for victims and survivors. The Church fully supported that recommendation, and its reintroduction is part of the legislation for the new Clergy Conduct Measure currently going through General Synod."
Pepsi Zero Sugar soft drinks are displayed at a large discount store in Seoul, in this 2022 file photo. Newsis



By Kim Jae-heun



Food and beverage (F&B) companies are growing concerned over the World Health Organization's (WHO) possible classification of artificial sweetener aspartame as a carcinogen, company officials said Sunday.



Aspartame is one of the popular artificial sweeteners used to make zero-sugar beverages, chewing gum, yogurt drinks and makgeolli, or rice wine, here.



According to Reuters, Thursday, the International Agency for Research on Cancer (IARC) under WHO is set to declare aspartame as "possibly carcinogenic to humans."



In the domestic market, "Pepsi Zero," distributed by Lotte Chilsung Beverage, contains aspartame. Lotte imports the soft drink directly from PepsiCo's headquarters in New York and only bottles them. Its recipe is also a trade secret according to the American manufacturer.



"Aspartame has been used by F&B companies around the world for a long time. It is not an issue of an individual company but rather that of the whole related industry, globally. We are currently discussing the matter with the Ministry of Food and Drug Safety (MFDS) and will wait to see what they have to say," a Lotte Chilsung Beverage official said.



If the artificial sweetener is classified as a cancer-causing agent, Lotte will fall vulnerable to considerable economic damage as the company is currently enjoying good sales of Pepsi Zero. Its sales in the whole soft drink business increased 14.6 percent year-on-year in the first quarter of this year thanks to the well-performing zero-sugar cola beverage.



Aspartame is also included in almost all makgeolli products. Seoul Jangsoo, one of the country's largest makgeolli producers, said it will review recalling all of its rice wine products with the artificial sweetener if the MFDS becomes clear on the classification of aspartame as carcinogenic to humans.



Consumers are concerned about purchasing sugar-free drinks.



"I drink a lot of sugar-free beverages due to my health concerns and I feel betrayed that many of them contain possible cancer-causing substances. Furthermore, people including myself do not know which drinks contain aspartame. The government should take action to clarify the drinks containing it to consumers," a 58-year-old housewife surnamed Kong said.


Bill Hybels mentee Pastor David Ashcraft named new CEO of Global Leadership Network

David Ashcraft, pastor emeritus and teaching pastor at the multi-campus LCBC Church in Pennsylvania, has been named president and CEO of the Global Leadership Network, formerly known as the Willow Creek Association, founded by his friend and disgraced pastor Bill Hybels.

GLN is the creator of the Global Leadership Summit, which is the largest leadership experience in the world that partners with local churches, ministries and organizations to help leaders grow and become a catalyst for change, according to the organizations website.

We are very excited for David to take on this position with the GLN. We know that their organization and programming will continue to advance because of Davids leadership, LCBC church, which currently has 19 campuses across Central Pennsylvania and is ranked among the top 20 largest churches in America, said in a recent statement posted on its website.

Were grateful for Davids vision and ongoing strategic leadership of The Advantage and were excited to see how God continues to use his gifts with both organizations.

Less than two years before Hybels was forced to resign as lead pastor at Willow Creek Community Church after an extensive investigation published by the Chicago Tribune in March 2018 detailed a pattern of sexual misconduct allegations, Ashcraft described him as a friend to LCBC and a mentor during an interview with Hybels published in October 2016.

I know you hear it all the time that Willow is impacting churches around the world, but for us, it was huge in our development, Ashcraft gushed during the interview.

I look at you, whether you had ever realized it or not, I look at you as somebody who has mentored me in my younger years, Ashcraft told Hybels. Its always fascinating to me because people tend to think mentoring means you got to sit down with each other once a week, spend 30 minutes to an hour. Didnt happen that way for me, so [I] appreciate you very much. Thank you for all of that, [I] so appreciate you and what youve done for us as a church.

Hybels denied a number of the allegations, including a consensual affair with a married woman who retracted her claims. But in 2019, an Independent Advisory Group that investigated the allegations called them credible and recommended counseling for him as well as a raft of changes to improve the organizational culture at the church and Willow Creek Association, rebranded as the Global Leadership Network.

The Global Leadership Summit was significantly impacted by the scandal as scores of churches cut ties with the event in the wake of Hybels fall.

Ashcraft has been a member of the GLN board for the last four years and has been involved with the organization for 25 years overall, including 17 years as a host-site pastor. He said they were slowly rebuilding trust some five years after Hybels exit from the organization.

Any time a leader stumbles, the impact ripples out into many directions. When that leader has been serving in the context of a church or a faith-based organization, these ripples grow exponentially, and countless lives are affected. Many individuals have been impacted by Bill Hybels departure, and as a result, some churches and church leaders took a step back from Global Leadership Network for a season, he told CP.

On a positive note, this situation has challenged GLN leadership to self-evaluate, create, and implement more robust policies and procedures to insure healthy relationships between GLN staff and their constituents, he explained. As more churches and church leaders continue to regain trust in the leadership of GLN, it is creating positive impacts  the organization is growing and outperforming results from the previous few years.

In addition to taking over the leadership of GLN, Ashcraft says he will continue his current role at LCBC, leading a project called The Advantage that is headquartered in Lancaster County, Pennsylvania.

Ashcraft told CP that The Advantages mission is to serve and to be a benefit or an advantage to pastors in Pennsylvania and throughout the Northeast.

Because both organizations exist to serve pastors, I am honored to have the opportunity to continue working alongside the Advantage Team under the outstanding leadership of Patrick Murdock while at the same time leading the staff and the work of Global Leadership Network, he said.

In his book, What Was I Thinking?: How to Make Better Decisions So You Can Live and Lead with Confidence, published in May 2022, Ashcraft dedicates a full chapter to address When Leaders Fall.

He doesnt name Hybels in the chapter, but he highlighted the fall of a friend and mentor.

As I read the report, a sick feeling came over me  that sick feeling that rushes in when you hear something so troubling it surely cant be true. That sick feeling that comes with the realization that your world is about to change. Its that kick in the gut when you hear words you never wanted to hear, he wrote.

This was someone I looked up to. This was someone I considered my mentor, even if only from a distance. This was someone who had helped shape and stretch my leadership skills. This was someone who had greatly influenced our church. And this was someone Ruth (my wife) and I had just spent the evening with not two weeks before, sitting out on the deck of his hotel suite, sharing stories and crackers and cheese with a few other friends and acquaintances, Ashcraft continued. I watched sadly as my mentor  my friend  stepped away from his position of leadership. And just like that, another leader fell.

Ashcraft also went on to describe watching his mentor deliver his final address to his church as the scandal unfolded.

It was one of the most heartbreaking and deflating endings I have ever seen. Final addresses are meant to be a tribute, a celebration of a life well-lived and an organization well-led. But after pouring most of his adult life into this organization, rather than ending his career by being honored and revered for all the good he had done, he walked off the platform one last time. No celebration. No honor. Only humiliation. Only disbelief, he wrote.

When asked if the mentor in his book is Hybels, Ashcraft said: A name was not necessary as it was a personal story that was impactful to me and a caution to others even without the mention of a name.

When CP noted that a review of Hybels final address at Willow Creek shows him getting a standing ovation and being prayed for by leaders, contradicting the description in his book, he replied: Having not been present in that situation Im not able to comment.

As for the mentor he describes in his book, Ashcraft says despite his failures, he still considers Hybels a friend and mentor.

In spite of all of this, I still consider him to be my friend and mentor. And I am so thankful for the influence he has had on my life. But my heart aches both for him and for all who have been impacted by the fallout of his situation, Ashcraft wrote. I hold firm to the hope that God is able to make something good out of broken vessels. All broken vessels.
Hailey Bieber, celebrities urge social media platforms to censor anti-LGBT content as 'hate speech'

Christian model Hailey Baldwin Bieber has joined the likes of trans advocate LaVerne Cox and nonbinary artist Sam Smith in endorsing a public letter calling for Instagram, YouTube and other social media platforms to ban LGBT "hate, harassment and disinformation."

In the letter shared by LGBT activist group GLAAD and addressed to the Meta head Mark Zuckerberg, YouTube/Alphabet's Neal Mohan, TikTok's Shou Zi Chew and Twitter's Linda Yaccarino and Twitter's Elon Musk, more than 250 "celebrities, influencers, and prominent public figures with significant followings on social media" warn of a "massive systemic failure" involving the social media giants.

Other well-known entertainers and influencers who endorsed the letter are Ariana Grande, Judd Apatow, Elliot Page, Alyssa Milano, Shawn Mendes, Camila Cabello and Gabrielle Union-Wade.

"There has been a massive systemic failure to prohibit hate, harassment, and malicious anti-[LGBT] disinformation on your platforms and it must be addressed," the letter stated. "The very content you profit from is in violation of your own terms of service, which assert that you do not allow hate speech."

Such content, the letter asserts, includes both "dangerous" content and ads from "high-follower hate-based accounts" and any speech that "spreads malicious lies and disinformation about medically necessary healthcare for transgender youth."

Claiming that medical operations for trans-identified people have been endorsed by "every leading" medical and psychological association, the letter states, "inflammatory disinformation falsely asserting that this healthcare is dangerous is allowed to fester on your platforms because it drives clicks and profit."

The letter links such speech to bomb threats against children's hospitals that offer gender interventions and death threats against specific providers despite citations that provide no direct connection between the two.

For example, the letter cites a Vice article on "far-right extremists," which acknowledges that the targeted "hospital did not specify where the threats were coming from."

Other citations include a Daily Beast article that states "misgendering is violence" and a Human Rights Campaign report that links "religious intolerance" with misinformation.

The letter also categorizes any speech that opposes LGBT values as "extremist hate," again linking to a Vice video to highlight the Libs of TikTok channel, which has over 2.3 million followers on Twitter.

An example of such "hate," according to the letter, is the "grooming/groomer" label, which the letter calls a "conspiracy theory."

Notably, the GLAAD letter calls out what it described as "dehumanizing, hateful attacks on prominent transgender public figures and influencers" in a likely reference to the Bud Light advertising campaign involving trans-identified influencer Dylan Mulvaney.

The campaign resulted in a boycott and a steep drop in sales for Bud Light and led to at least two executives taking leave of the company.

"Directing hate against [LGBT] public figures is a common vehicle for expressing general anti-[LGBT] bigotry," the letter stated. "When companies maintain policy loopholes that allow such hate against public figures, this perpetuates harm against entire communities."

Lastly, the letter urged social media companies to crack down on what it called "anti-transgender hate speech," which includes "misgendering" and "deadnaming," which involves using biologically accurate pronouns or birth names of trans-identified persons.

Twitter banned the practice in 2018 before rolling back that policy earlier this year. TikTok and Meta, meanwhile, have various forms of prohibitions on both practices.

While calling on social media companies to address these concerns, the letter also appeared to ask that the LGBT community not be held to the same standard for fear of "over-enforcement and censorship."

"Your policies and corresponding enforcement are inadequate when it comes to mitigating harmful and dangerous anti-[LGBT] content," the letter stated. "You must urgently take action to protect trans and [LGBT] users on your platforms (including protecting us from over-enforcement and censorship)."

Acknowledging a number of other left-leaning activist groups like GLAAD, Human Rights Campaign, The Trevor Project, and others, the letter stated the social media companies' "mitigations remain woefully inadequate."

"True allies do not profit from anti-[LGBT] hate," the letter states.

Both Justin and Hailey Bieber, who have been married since 2018, identify as Christians. They were seen regularly attending Hillsong Church together at one point in 2016. Following the fall from grace of Hillsong NYC Pastor Carl Lentz, Justin Bieber clarified he is a member of Churchome led by Judah Smith, who officiated their wedding and baptized the couple in 2020.

The Christian Post reached out to GLAAD for comment, but there was no response as of Friday afternoon. This story will be updated in the event a response is received.
Hillsongs Phil Dooley says megachurch needs to 'rebuild trust,' shares new 'vision'

Ahead of his first Hillsong Conference since he became the global senior pastor, Phil Dooley says he understands that the global Evangelical church network needs to rebuild trust as its reputation has taken a hit in recent years amid scandals involving his predecessor and other prominant pastors.

In an interview with Sydney-based Christian radio station Hope 103.2 last Monday, Dooley said that the megachurch has been recovering slowly since the myriad of scandals. With Hillsong Conference slated for Monday through Wednesday, Dooley said the conference would "bring some new vision."

"We've got a clear vision for our church, a healthy church  changing lives through Christ," he said. "We want [the conference] to be about developing healthy teams, developing health [leaders], hearing from different people who maybe we haven't heard from their perspective at [the] conference."

"I think for a lot of the Church, I don't think it was just Hillsong, we became quite event-driven," he added. "Sunday becomes the event, and conferences are the events, and how do we get everyone to the events? What we are really shifting to is we want to be focused around our mission. We have defined our mission in three areas: building healthy church communities, creating significant sustainable social impact and developing purposeful Jesus followers."

Dooley acknowledged that Hillsong has been through a "difficult season" that has brought "quite a bit of media attention" surrounding the departures of former Global Senior Pastor Brian Houston and former Hillsong NYC Pastor Carl Lentz. Lentz was involved with the recently released documentary "The Secrets of Hillsong." In 2022, Discovery+ released the documentary "Hillsong: A Megachurch Exposed."

"I understand that public perception is not always the greatest. We need to rebuild trust, and that's earned," said Dooley, who was appointed alongside his wife Lucinda Dooley as the new global senior pastor of Hillsong Church on February 5, 2023, after a year of serving in the interim.

"Lucinda and I, stepping into the role of leading our church.  We feel the weight of that. We believe we are stepping into a new era.  We've got a really clear vision. We've got a focus when it comes to our mission, and we've been doing a whole lot even with our governance, you know, refreshing our board and making changes there."

Brian Houston formally resigned from his role as Hillsong global senior pastor on March 23, 2022, after two women made serious complaints of misconduct against him dating back to the last decade.

Houston also faces criminal charges as authorities allege that he "knew information relating to the sexual abuse of a young male in the 1970s and failed to bring that information to the attention of police." Authorities say Houston knew as early as September 1999 that his father had committed an indecent assault in 1970. At the time, Brian Houston was a teenager.

Lentz was fired in November 2020 for "leadership issues and breaches of trust, plus a recent revelation of moral failures." It was later revealed that Lentz engaged in an extramarital affair.

Following Lentz's firing, Hillsong launched an investigation into Hillsong NYC and East Coast amid concerns from individuals who attended those campuses. Hillsong also revealed that it investigated 2018 allegations of inappropriate sex between staff members at Hillsong NYC. Hillsong also investigated allegations of financial abuse among pastors at Hillsong NYC.

Hillsong also was hit with a lawsuit from a former church employee who accused Hillsong of misappropriating donations and giving "large cash gifts" to Houston, his family and other church leaders. The Australian Charities and Not-for-Profits Commission had been investigating the church since March 2022 to verify whether the church is in compliance with Australian charity regulations.

Church attorneys announced in April that a forensic review of Hillsong Church's finances by accounting firm Grant Thornton found that Hillsong didn't appear to engage in any "unlawful conduct" and that allegations of misappropriation reflected a "misunderstanding" that should be discussed in a "church context." In March, Hillsong announced a raft of changes in how it manages finances.

Despite what they may read in the news about Hillsong, Dooley encourages "people to come along and check [Hillsong Church] out for yourself."

"I think you'll experience something that's pretty unique, pretty special. It's made up of real people, not perfect people, but people who have a genuine love for Jesus and a genuine commitment to build a healthy church and to be an expression of the love of Jesus to our world," he said.
Catholic priest sentenced to 6 months in prison for blocking Planned Parenthood entrance

A Catholic priest and pro-life activist has been sentenced to six months in federal prison by a New York court after being found guilty of placing locks on the entrance to a Planned Parenthood abortion facility entrance.

Father Fidelis Moscinski was sentenced last week to six months by Judge Steven Tiscione for violating the Freedom of Access to Clinic Entrances Act, with the priest denying that his actions were wrong because he believes he was putting an end to "murder."

"My actions  were done because Planned Parenthood as an organization is in the business of killing," Moscinski reportedly told the judge in a statement provided to Catholic News Agency by the pro-life organization Red Rose Rescue.

Moscinski's case centers around an incident on July 7, 2022, when he obstructed access to a Planned Parenthood clinic in Hempstead on Long Island. The FACE Act bars "violent, threatening, damaging, and obstructive conduct intended to injure, intimidate, or interfere with the right to seek, obtain, or provide reproductive health services."

The priest was convicted in January.

In his statement to the judge asking for leniency, Moscinski highlighted his belief that "every procured abortion that occurs on [Planned Parenthood's] premises constitutes the deliberate killing of an innocent human being."

"These bloody and violent acts also cause grave spiritual and psychological harm to the mother of the child. All of my actions then and now are directed solely towards preventing the murder of defenseless children and the wounding of their mothers," Moscinski said.

"I am not guilty of violating this law because this law cannot be seen as anything other than null and void since it attempts to give legal protection to actions which are intrinsically evil and unjust."

Moscinski was also sentenced last Friday by Judge Karen L. Moroney to 90 days for "obstructing government administration" and 15 days for "trespassing" for an incident at an abortion clinic in April 2021.

Fellow pro-life activist Laura Gies was sentenced by Moroney 45 days for "obstructing government administration" and 15 days for "trespassing" for her part in the 2021 incident.

The FACE Act was passed in 1994 to protect the right to access "abortion facilities, pregnancy centers, hospitals, clinics, physician's offices and other facilities including medical, surgical, counseling or referral services."

Moscinski is a member of Red Rose Rescue, a pro-life group with a mission to "peacefully talk to women scheduled for abortion, with the goal of persuading them to choose life."

Although Red Rose Rescue is aware of Moscinski's membership as a rescuer, the organization has said it didn't sanction Moscinski's actions in locking the doors to the Planned Parenthood facility.

New York Attorney General Letitia James filed a lawsuit against Red Rose Rescue last month, seeking to ban Moscinski and other members of Red Rose Rescue from being within 30 feet of any abortion clinic.

"Defendants have been arrested multiple times for their unlawful acts, but despite multiple convictions across the country and within New York State, they continue to repeat their criminal misconduct," read the lawsuit.

"Red Rose Rescue is an anti-abortion group whose members conspire to illegally trespass into private medical facilities that perform abortions and shut down or physically obstruct the provision of all reproductive health services, refusing all requests to leave by staff and law enforcement."

The lawsuit claimed that "other anti-abortion groups have distanced themselves from Red Rose Rescue and have characterized the latter's conduct as 'haranguing,' 'aggressive,' and 'intimidating.'"

"Defendants have caused and will continue to cause harm to patients and staff at reproductive health facilities throughout the state of New York, as they have vowed not to abide by the law but instead to continue to trespass at any and all private medical facilities that perform abortions," the suit continued.
Rejoicing at the misfortune of others

Of all the icky things our culture manifests, this one is a serious stomach-turner for me.

Im sure the tragedy of the Titan submersible has not escaped your daily newsfeed. The Titan, which provided tours of the Titanic shipwreck, lost contact with its mother surface vessel about two hours into its dive Sunday morning on June 18th, about 900 miles east of Cape Cod, Massachusetts. The U.S. Navy said it detected what sounded like an implosion within hours of the Titan descending to visit the Titanic wreckage, which killed all onboard.

That you likely already knew. However, what you may not know is how far too many people have rejoiced over the deaths of those who were aboard the Titan.

I have nothing to say but eat the rich, one Twitter user posted. MSNBC contributor Elie Mystal said: Next time some rich white person wants to take Sam Alito on an expensive trip, please take him to see the Titanic.

Theres actually a term thats been coined to define this skin-crawling attitude  the German word schadenfreude which is a combination of the German nouns schaden, meaning damage or harm, and freude, meaning joy. So youre rejoicing over some injury or misfortune thats suffered by another, especially when that someone is considered to be of a higher social, economic, or career status than you.

Commenting on the horrible remarks made about the demise of those aboard the Titan, LA Times columnist Jessica Gelt wrote: Like a digital Tower of Babel, social media is evolving into an increasingly ugly and chaotic space  a real-time repository for our worst impulses, uninspired musings, scatological humor and ill-formed thoughts that should be kept to ourselves. It is an online Mall of America: vast, vacuous, relentlessly commercial and soul-sucking. And in a time of immense crisis  political, ecological, social  it has become a garbage dump of vile commentary publicly aired because thats just what we do now.

Yep, it sure is. It reminds me of the place in Scripture where Paul talks about the downhill slide of humanity and says that evil people will proceed from bad to worse (2 Tim. 3:9).

Welcome to worse.

When to rejoice

If you werent aware, the Bible has some pretty explicit instructions for us in this area that we should all take to heart.

It starts with Scripture saying that God doesnt rejoice at anyones death no matter who they are or what theyve done: I take no pleasure [even] in the death of the wicked (Ezek. 33:11).

The Bibles wisdom literature then turns its attention to us when it says, He who rejoices at calamity will not go unpunished. Do not rejoice when your enemy falls, and do not let your heart be glad when he stumbles (Prov 17:5, 24:17).

Such an attitude was evidently well known even in the earliest of days, with the book of Job (which some say is the oldest book of the Bible) declaring: Have I rejoiced at the extinction of my enemy, or exulted when evil befell him? No, I have not allowed my mouth to sin by asking for his life in a curse (Job 31:2930).

The only way in which Scripture speaks about taunting someone over their downfall is when a person receives the inevitable negative consequences of their own evil actions and has deliberately shunned multiple attempts at correction. Then wisdom itself says: I will also laugh at your calamity; I will mock when your dread comes (Prov. 1:26).

David characterized those who hated him as rejoice[ing] when I am shaken (Ps. 13:4), but our much-different mandate is to, rejoice with those who rejoice, and weep with those who weep (Rom. 12:15).

But sometimes thats not so easy.

By and large, the church does an excellent job of weeping with those who weep. We have plenty of care ministries and individual outreaches to those who are hurting, so that base seems well covered.

But that first part? Applauding someone elses sunshine is oftentimes difficult.

Why is that? Theres actually a body of psychological research on the subject with mind science saying we struggle at reveling with someone in their success because of envy, selfishness, comparison traps, resentment, and, in the extreme, narcissistic disorders.

This maps pretty well with what Scripture tells us: For where jealousy and selfish ambition exist, there is disorder and every evil thing (James 3:16).

The bottom line for us is were not to follow the crowd into the poisonous pool of social media that seems to cheer someones ruin or, God forbid, death. Instead of having the spirit that is now working in the sons of disobedience (Eph. 2:2), were told to live by the [Holy] SpiritLet us not become boastful, challenging one another, envying one another (Gal. 5:2526).

Easier said than done sometimes, but far more peaceful and Christlike.
Vicar says bank account closed after trans protest

An Anglican vicar says his bank account was closed after he accused it of pushing transgender ideology.

The Rev Richard Fothergill said he politely complained to the Yorkshire Building Society (YBS) that it was promoting trans ideology during Pride month.

The Times reports that he received a written response four days later from YBS stating that his internet savings account was to be closed after 17 years.

The letter stated that YBS had a "zero tolerance approach to discrimination" and that his feedback was "not tolerable".

It also claimed that its relationship with Rev Fothergill had "irrevocably broken down".

"I wasn't even aware that our relationship had a problem. They are a financial house  they are not there to do social engineering. I think they should concentrate their efforts on managing money, instead of promoting LGBT ideology," the vicar told The Times.

"I know cancel culture exists and this is my first first-hand experience of it. I wouldn't want this bullying to happen to anyone else."

A spokesman for YBS responded: "We never close savings accounts based on different opinions regarding beliefs or feedback provided by our customers. We only ever make the difficult decision to close a savings account if a customer is rude, abusive, violent or discriminates in any way, based on the specific facts, comments and behaviour in each case."

Chancellor Jeremy Hunt is reportedly set to warn banks that they must protect free speech after Nigel Farage complained that his bank account was being closed without explanation.

A Treasury source told the Daily Telegraph that it was "absolutely a concern" that banks and lenders may be dropping customers who hold unpopular views.

"No one should have their bank account denied on the grounds of freedom of expression. We expect to take action on this issue within weeks," the source said.

Last week, The Core Issues Trust, which provides counselling for unwanted same-sex attraction or gender dysphoria, staged a protest outside the London headquarters of Barclays Bank after its account was closed in 2020.

Barclays last week settled with the trust and agreed to pay 21,500 in compensation plus legal costs.
Lotte Mall West Lake Hanoi in Hanoi / Courtesy of Lotte Group



By Kim Jae-heun



Local retail firms are stepping up efforts to tap into the Vietnamese market, which has huge growth potential thanks to its rapid economic growth and a high proportion of working age population, the company officials said Sunday.



Lotte Group, one of the top two retail giants in Korea along with Shinsegae, is the most active in the scene. The company currently has 20 affiliates operating in Vietnam, including Lotte GRS, Lotte Shopping and Lotte Culture Works.



Lotte Shopping is set to open Lotte Mall West Lake Hanoi, in Hanoi, in August, in which the company invested a total of $250 million (329.7 billion won). It will be Vietnam's largest shopping mall complex also consisting of a hotel and offices.



The retail giant is also investing about $900 million to establish Thu Thiem Eco Smart City, which is a complex that will consist of a shopping mall, hotel, offices, housing and a cinema. In August, Lotte World Aquarium is set to open in Hanoi as well.



"Vietnamese retail market grew about 100 times in the past 20 years. It is an attractive business destination with s high portion of the young population, who love Korean food, K-pop and K-drama. At our newly opening Lotte Mall West Lake, we will provide some 3,600 square meters of venue for young consumers to enjoy cultural content such as a yoga experience space, handcraft workshop and a book store," a Lotte Shopping official said.



Shinsegae plans to open a third Emart store in Vietnam under a master franchise contract with the local THACO Group in the second half of this year.



GS Retail has already opened over 200 GS25 convenience stores in the Southeast Asian country. The company's local joint venture is expected to expand its business in Vietnam by signing an investment contract with the International Finance Corporation.



Vietnam has a domestic market with a population of nearly 100 million. The middle-class population is expected to reach 56 million over the next 10 years, with the highest growth rate in Southeast Asia at 10.1 percent between 2016 and 2021.



Looking at the composition ratio of the population, those under the age of 30 account for 50 percent of the population while the working-age population takes up 70 percent.



"Vietnam has such a huge potential for growth as it has a considerable amount of young and working-age population. Also, Korean products are very popular among local consumers thanks to K-pop and K-drama. In the time when many retailers are looking for their next business destination after China, there is no better option than Vietnam at the moment," a local retail firm official said.


Government officials from African countries and Korea pose before the start of an agricultural development course at Asan City Agricultural Technology Center in South Chungcheong Province, June 20, 2018. Korea Times file



By Lee Kyung-min



The Korean government will invite ministers from eight African countries to Seoul, July 10, for a meeting about the "K-Rice Belt," the agriculture ministry said Monday. The Korea-led initiative is part of the official development assistance (ODA) program introduced to help countries struggling with a lack of agricultural infrastructure, compounded by geographical and other limitations unfavorable to growing crops.



Korea will share knowledge and experience on enhancing rice productivity and farming technology so that African countries can grow a variety of crops developed by organizations affiliated with Korea's agriculture ministry. Korea will discuss ways to help African peers build critical agriculture infrastructure.



The participating countries are Ghana, Gambia, Guinea, Guinea-Bissau, Senegal, Uganda, Cameroon and Kenya.



The Ministry of Agriculture, Food and Rural Affairs said next week's meeting will be held to bolster ties to strengthen friendships between Korea and the participating countries, as mediated by rice.



The ministers will sign memorandums of understanding (MOU) on ways to meet the specific needs of each country factoring in their unique conditions.



The ministry said the African ministers will take a tour of Korea's farming equipment manufacturing sites, rice processing plants and smart farms, to fine-tune joint growth strategies for a presentation at next year's Korea-Africa special summit.



"Korea's agricultural technology can help African countries achieve sustainable food security," the ministry said. "We are looking forward to next week's meeting where in-depth discussions will be held to produce a long-term mutually beneficial outcome."



Fortifying cooperation with African countries was part of the ministry's key policy directives announced in January.



Other directives included fostering global cooperation with key grain-producing countries, as underpinned by efforts to diversify trade partner countries in Central and South America.



Korea will launch a minister-chaired special taskforce to help it achieve $10 billion (13 trillion won) in agricultural exports this year, promoting IT-mediated smart farming technologies and the capabilities of strong local players. The goal is to push the figure up further to $15 billion in 2027.


POSCO Group Chairman Choi Jeong-woo delivers a congratulatory speech at the 50th anniversary of the company's first steel plant held in Pohang, North Gyeongsang Province, Monday. Yonhap



By Kim Jae-heun



POSCO Group will invest 121 trillion won ($92.44 billion) in steel, secondary batteries and hydrogen by 2030 to strengthen its competitiveness in future eco-friendly materials, the company said Monday.



More than 60 percent of the investment, or 73 trillion won, will be spent domestically  mainly in Pohang, North Gyeongsang Province, and Gwangyang, South Jeolla Province, where the company runs its main steel mills.



"With this investment, POSCO will dominate the future technology and growth market and solidify its leading position in core businesses to open a sustainable future with eco-friendly future materials," POSCO Chairman Choi Jeong-woo said in a speech marking the 50th anniversary of its first steel plant in Pohang, Monday. "In particular, over 60 percent of our total investment will be spent in Korea to play a role in balanced national development and creating high-quality jobs."



According to the steelmaker's plan, it will focus not only on steel, which is the foundation and competitiveness of the company, but also secondary battery materials, which will drive new mobility in the future, and hydrogen to achieve the group's "2050 Carbon Neutral" goal.



POSCO estimates its investment of 73 million won in Korea will generate a production inducement effect of 121 trillion won and create a combined 330,000 jobs over the period.



In recent years, it has been making large investments in secondary battery materials, led by its holding company POSCO Holdings and its affiliate POSCO FutureM, and is said to have successfully transformed from a traditional steel company to a comprehensive materials company.



Moreover, POSCO plans to convert its current carbon-based steelmaking facility to HyREX, a hydrogen-reduction ironmaking facility in 2026, with the aim to commercialize it by 2030.



In order to change the furnaces of its steel mills in Pohang and Gwangyang to hydrogen reduction steel as planned, the company needs 5 million tons of hydrogen per year. POSCO plans to produce 7 million tons of hydrogen per year by 2050 to meet the demand.


For the last 30 years, the dream of being able to collect, manage and make use of the collected knowledge assets of an organization has never been truly realized. Systems for sharing information assets across the enterprise have evolved in their sophistication but havent been able to take it to the next level by effectively turning the information that resides in digital files into usable knowledge. Data exists in ever larger silos, but real knowledge still resides in employees.

But the rise of large language models (LLMs) is starting to make true knowledge management (KM) a reality. These models can extract meaning from digital data at scale and speed beyond the capabilities of human analysts. The 2023 State of the CIO survey reveals that 71% of CIO respondents anticipate greater involvement in business strategy over the next three years with 85% stating they were becoming more digital- and innovation-focused. The application of LLMs to an organizations knowledge assets has the potential to accelerate these trends.

Less is More

OpenAIs ChatGPT and Dall-E 2 generative AI (GenAI) models have revolutionized how we think about AI and what it can do. From writing poems to creating images, its staggering how a computer can create new content from a few simple prompts. However, the scale of the LLMs used to perform these tasks is vast and expensive for OpenAI to offer. GPT-4 was trained on over 45 terabytes of text data via more than a thousand GPUs over 34 days and cost almost $5 million in compute power. In 2022, OpenAI lost $540 million despite having raised $11.3 billion in funding rounds.

Clearly these costs and its scale of operations are beyond the capabilities of most organizations wanting to develop their own LLMs. However, the AI future for many enterprises lies in building and adapting much smaller models based on their own internal data assets. Rather than relying on APIs provided by firms such as OpenAI and the risks of uploading potentially sensitive data to third-party servers, new approaches are allowing firms to bring smaller LLMs inhouse. Adjusting the parameters of LLM models and new languages such as Mojo and AI-programming frameworks like PyTorch significantly reduce the compute resources and time needed to run AI programs.

Open is Better

Just as the web is built on open-source software and protocols, its likely that many enterprise AI initiatives will be built on open-source models such as LLaMA and freely available techniques such as LoRa. According to a recently leaked Google memo,

The barrier to entry for training and experimentation has dropped from the total output of a major research organization to one person, an evening, and a beefy laptop.
Advanced Packaging: The Hot Topic in the Florida Sun Published: 03 July 2023 by Jan Vardaman by Jan Vardaman

ECTC revealed the latest developments in 3-D hybrid bonding.

More than 50 presentations on hybrid bonding filled rooms to capacity at the IEEE Electronics Components and Technology Conference (ECTC) in Orlando, as did the Tuesday morning panel session. That panel discussion, on "Copper Hybrid Bond Interconnections for Chip-to-Wafer Applications," organized by Infinera and Qualcomm and moderated by TechSearch International, included perspectives from design and EDA (Synopsys) and research institute IMEC, users of hybrid bonding (AMD with production at TSMC and Intel with its internal development program), equipment makers Besi and EVG, and yield and reliability specialist PDF Solutions.

Synopsys pointed out the importance of design tools and IMEC described key drivers for 2.5-D and 3-D integration technologies such as increasing system complexity, increasing need for heterogeneous integration, increasing die-to-die interconnect data bandwidth (more interconnect channels and higher interconnect speeds per interconnect), reducing die-to-die interconnect energy with shorter distance interconnect, scaled, lower capacitance interconnects, and lower voltage. IMEC noted the issue is not the number of interconnects but rather the available (local) interconnect density enabled by interconnect pitch scaling. Many of today's hybrid bonding applications using die-to-wafer structures are focused on the high-performance space where the cost can be justified, including stacking SRAM cache and logic-on-logic, as introduced by AMD's products in desktop, servers, and AI/machine learning.

Energy efficiency is driving development of new packaging solutions for the high-performance space. 3-D hybrid bonding offers more than three times the interconnect energy efficiency and more than 15 times the interconnect density compared to microbump solutions, according to AMD. 3-D hybrid bond interconnect is not without challenges, however, including external IP/die/package integration, new materials, power delivery, yield, test and cost, as described by Intel. While Besi and EVG presented options for the assembly, all agree that process yield depends on controlling particles and cleanliness. There was general agreement that die-to-wafer is more challenging than wafer-to-wafer. PDF reminded the audience that despite the presenter lineup, reliability should not be the last consideration! Responses to audience questions made it clear that test and known good die are essential to the success of the technology. The race to introduce hybrid bonding for high bandwidth memory (HBM) was apparent in dueling papers from Samsung and SK Hynix, as well as updates on Micron's activities. TSMC also presented the potential for the use of hybrid bonding in photonics applications where the EIC and PIC could be stacked. Wafer-to-wafer stacking has been in products for many years for image sensors and MEMS, and Sony continues to report progress in wafer-to-wafer bonding with larger chips. Volumes are expected to increase for 3-D NAND flash where wafer-to-wafer bonding is used to stack layers, as evidenced by recent announcements from Western Digital and Kioxia for licensing Adeia's direct bond interconnect technology.

More hot panel topics. Panels and professional development courses before the start of the full conference were well attended. A panel on "Advanced Integration Roadmap for Harsh Environment  Current Status and Opportunities" led by Fraunhofer and Robert Bosch featured panelists from GM, Robert Bosch, ASE, Samsung, TSMC, Henkel, TU Delft, and Georgia Tech. TSMC suggested that with the large body sizes for ADAS, its CoWoS-R using an organic interposer instead of silicon interposer may be well suited to large-body-size packages. ASE explained that large packages often require board-level underfill, and corner balls are an issue for AEC-Q104. ASE reminded the audience that its FOCoS and FOCoS bridge packages reduce the pressure on substrates because routing in the RDL permits relaxed features and fewer build-up layers for the laminate substrate. Henkel noted requests for high-heat dissipation with underfill. Georgia Tech sees thermal (heat fluxes) as the biggest challenge.

A special session on "Photonic Integrated Circuit Packaging: Challenges, Pathfinding, and Technology Adoption," chaired by CEA-Leti and Cisco featured representatives from both organizations plus IBM, iNEMI, Teramount and Ficotec.

The Tuesday afternoon panel "Advanced Packaging Manufacturing in North America: Building the Ecosystem" was also a packed session. Organized by GE Research, ASE and TechSearch International, the panel featured representatives from government organizations (NIST and DARPA). DARPA's presentation explained the 3-D heterogeneous integration (3DHI) R&D focus areas such as multichip, multi-technology assembly and packaging (including die-to-die, wafer-to-wafer, die-to-wafer, and wafer-to-board processes, 3DHI interconnects (including fine-scale printing and additive manufacturing), thermal and power (including embedded thermal management with assembly and package, materials to extend temperature operation range, low-loss passive for power distribution, and efficient power conversion), tools for design, simulation and test, and prototyping services (including a 3-D assembly design kit).

The NIST presentation explained the purpose of the CHIPS for America bill is to strengthen and advance US leadership in R&D, developing an integrated ecosystem that drives innovation through a partnership with industry, academia, government and allies. A National Semiconductor Technology Center and a National Advanced Packaging Manufacturing Program will be created. The act is focused on significantly reducing the time and cost of moving from design to commercialization for member organizations and making semiconductor design capabilities accessible to a wide range of stakeholders. The program will establish and provide access to physical assets such as facilities, tools, and equipment with high capital costs. Access to in-house technical staff to assist with overcoming technical and process challenges will also be provided. Creating an investment fund that is structured to attract significant private capital into semiconductor-focused emerging companies is also part of the plan. Building a sustainable workforce is also emphasized as key.

Industry was represented by Marvell Technology, Micron and Promex (a small North American OSAT). Promex explained the difficulties for small companies to raise funds to match government incentives and asked the important question: Who will be the customer for US-based packaging services? Barriers to onshoring include the current limited onshore capability and higher cost of US domestic production. Benefits to onshoring include turn time, ability to visit, communicate and learn, confidentiality, and the availability of alternate sources. Promex suggested focusing investment on emerging and next generations of packaging, developing improved technologies, construction of pilot lines, demonstration of capability and performance, then establishing relationships and price. Micron indicated labor cost was not the main problem for onshoring, but rather everything else. Efficiency is important. Collaboration on equipment and materials is essential. In response to a question about workforce development, Marvell indicated a need for technicians, adding that partnerships with community colleges are helpful. UCLA provided a university perspective, indicating the importance of working with industry and the role in education by providing a program that produces students with a multi-disciplinary background.

The Heterogeneous Integration Roadmap (HIR) Workshop, simultaneously held on Tuesday, included a perspective on Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning in Package Co-Design for Chiplets, a discussion of challenges and opportunities for the heterogeneous integration of MEMs and sensors, an update on the US CHIPS and Science Act, and a presentation on additively manufactured electronics for heterogeneous integration.

Tuesday evening's panel discussion organized by IBM and Rapidus (Japan's new 2nm technology node silicon foundry) examined the Future of High-Density Substrates  Toward Submicron Technology. Presentations by Shinko Electric, Unimicron, Dai Nippon Printing (DNP), IBM and Penn State University highlighted the latest research on high-density substrate developments and glass packaging. Shinko Electric described its iTHOP high density organic interposer. Unimicron described challenges in producing large-area build-up substrates (>120mm x 120mm with more than 20 layers). New, semiconductor-like materials and equipment are required for future advanced substrates. Warpage control is essential. DNP described its work with a glass core substrate. IBM described its dual chip module (split die) and mentioned the importance of good test coverage. Penn State is working on glass with a focus on RF applications. Standards for chiplet design were discussed including Bunch of Wires (BoW), and Universal Chiplet Interconnect Express (UCIe), with the latter having more momentum.

The conference opened Wednesday with a keynote by Professor Michael J. Manfra of Purdue University on "Unlocking the Potential of Quantum Computers: Challenges and Opportunities in Electronic Devices, Interconnects, and Packaging," in which he explained that advances in quantum hardware on multiple scales are required to reach the promise of quantum computing.

Wednesday night the panel chaired by Brewer Science and GE Research from ECTC coordinated with University of Toronto from ITherm, the co-located conference, focused on diversifying the technical workforce to meet national needs including CHIPS Act initiatives. Panel members included representatives from University of Texas, Arlington, NextFlex, GE Foundation, and NIST.

On Thursday the conference opened with a panel chaired by Metawave Corporation and Fraunhofer with a discussion on "Millimeter-Wave Phased Array Front-End Integration and Packaging for Next-Generation Communication and Radar Systems," including panel members from Teledyne Scientific, Northrop Grumman Space Systems, HRL Laboratories, Penn State University, Nokia Bell Labs, and IBM Research.

On Friday morning a panel session on "How Can Photonics Enable the Bandwidth Densities with Lower Energy per Bit in Emerging SiP," was chaired by the EPS president and Lyte. The discussion focused on the tools to achieve the goal, with panel members from University of Toronto, Lightmatter, University of Southern California, and substrate and PCB maker AT&S providing the discussion.

Options and challenges with large packages. Advanced packages for high-performance applications discussed at the conference included silicon interposers and fan-out on substrate using RDL, some with the use of an embedded bridge. Many of the presentations address the challenges with the large body size packages that are being driven by AI/ML where an increasing number of HBMs are required. TSMC described its progress with silicon interposers using its CoWoS process and the shift to an organic interposer instead of silicon with CoWoS-R and CoWoS-L. MediaTek reported on the challenges that it had to overcome with the solder mask cracking in large packages using fan-out RDLs. DNP described its 2m line and space RDL structure and indicated that the use of the RDL instead of silicon interposer provides an improvement in resistance. ASE and Amkor presented papers describing their RDL structures with bridges. ASE explained co-design of a chiplet package with its FOCoS package versus a conventional FC-BGA. Amkor described its S-Connect bridge technology. IBM Systems described its AI hardware package using a high-density organic interposer.

Photonics/co-packaged optics. Co-packaged optics continues to be a hot topic with continued technical improvements. Rain Tree Photonics described its heterogeneously integrated wafer-level processed co-packaged optical engine for hyper-scale data centers. Broadcom discussed high-density integration technologies for silicon photonics-based optical I/Os. Fraunhofer discussed photonic system integration with glass substrates. AIM Photonics with Analog Photonics demonstrated a 300mm Si photonics interposer. Siliconware (SPIL) described co-packaged optics on glass substrates for 1.2.4 Tb/s data center switches and fan-out bridge structures for co-package optics. Cisco described its low-cost, high-volume singulation of silicon photonic ICs for low-loss waveguide-to-fiber array edge coupling.

Photonics developments for LiDAR in autonomous driving were also presented. CEA-Leti and Steerlight described an advanced 3-D integration TSV and flip chip technology for mobile LiDAR.

New materials and processes. New materials and process developments provided insight into future packaging possibilities. Ajinomoto described its work in build-up film. Toray Industries provided details of its photodefinable low-Dk and low-Df polyimide for high-frequency applications. Resonac discussed its low-Dk/Df photoimageable dielectric for RDL. Taiyo Ink discussed a low-Df thermosetting film. AGC presented its work on a low-Dk build-up material using micron-sized hollow silica. NAMICS discussed its liquid compression mold underfill with low warpage and narrow gap flow. Deca Technologies and Nepes described maskless laser direct imaging and adaptive patterning for ultra-high-density fan-out packaging.

Mobile device packaging. Packaging for mobile devices also featured new developments. Samsung discussed its panel FO process for high-end mobile applications. SPIL presented a comparable study of RDL first versus last in a fan-out package-on-package (PoP).

Presentations from IBM/Fujikura, ASE, Renesas, Corning, Amkor/Texas Instruments, and several universities provided the latest developments in RF including antenna-in-package (AiP).

Don't forget about wire bonding, but watch the emerging technologies! Wire bonding still represents a large percentage of all packages and presentations from Onsemi described developments on modeling and optimization for Cu wire bonding. A special section was devoted to sintering and soldering for high-power, high-reliability, and RF devices. New material developments were provided by Indium and Uyemura. Pac Tech described its laser solder-jetting process. Samsung examined the risks of hybrid low-temperature solder on SMT and board-level reliability for BGA packages. GE Research discussed planar SiC power module packaging and interconnections using direct ink writing. Presentations also covered emerging areas such as additive manufacturing and packaging for flexible electronics.

Next year, ECTC will be held in Denver, CO.

E. Jan Vardaman is president of TechSearch International (techsearchinc.com); jan@techsearchinc.com.
Korean Confederation of Trade Unions (KCTU) head Yang Kyung-soo, sixth from left, and union members hold a press conference in front of the presidential office in Yongsan, Seoul. The union members said Monday's walkout will continue through July 15. Korea Times photo by Shim Hyun-chul



Biggest umbrella labor group starts 2-week walkout



By Lee Kyung-min

The government and a coalition of employers' groups called for stern measures against what they have characterized as "illegal strike," railroaded by the top left-wing umbrella union dismissing due negotiation process stipulated under the law, the industry ministry and the groups said Monday.

The move came after the Korean Confederation of Trade Unions (KCTU) launched a two-week general strike Monday morning to protest the Yoon Suk Yeol government's labor policies.

Business groups argue that the collective action is undermining not only the recent turnaround momentum in the country's trade balance, but also threatens stability in healthcare and other services industries.

The "politically-charged" agenda of delegitimizing the Yoon Suk Yeol administration, engineered by the KCTU, is and will be a lost cause, in their view, as blunted by souring public sentiment against labor group conflating politics with extended acts of a few unionized workers seeking to cripple economic activities.

In response, labor groups said the Yoon administration should be ousted for degrading the values of labor, democracy, peace and livelihoods. They maintain the hourly minimum wage should be raised to over 12,000 won ($9.17) from 9,620 won.

Other demands include that it scrap plans to restrict labor activities, as illustrated by audits of government-funded labor organizations. They want the government to take measures against Japan discharging treated wastewater from the crippled Fukushima nuclear plant into the Pacific Ocean.

Minister of Trade, Industry and Energy Lee Chang-yang, center, and heads of employers' groups pose before a government briefing at the Seoul Government Complex, Monday. Yonhap
Consultanta nationala pentru servicii de printare-editare a suporturilor didactice pentru cadre didactice si parintii cu copii mici refugiati din Ucraina. Centrul National pentru Educatie Timpurie si Informare a Familei (CNETIF)
Project Description

The UN House Cleaner position is located at UN House premises in Chisinau, Moldova. Under the guidance and direct supervision of the UN House Administrative Associate, the UN House Cleaner provides cleaning services in the building ensuring a welcoming and hygienic environment for visitors and staff, high quality and accuracy of work. The Cleaner demonstrates a client-oriented approach, high sense of responsibility, courtesy, tact and the ability to work with people of different national and cultural backrounds. The Contractor works in close collaboration with the UN House Agencies Operations teams staff to ensure consistent service delivery.

The UN House in Moldova requires the effective provision of cleaning services for its office premises (86 working places). The layout is four floors comprising of office space, conference facilities and common areas.

Scope of Work

Deliverables

The scope of the Contract shall include but not be limited to the following:

Cleaning of office spaces, conference rooms, stairways and common areas;

Cleaning of all bathrooms and their fixtures;

Cleaning of the kitchens;

Cleaning of windows, glass partitions and doors;

Waste management.

1.1. Daily tasks:

Act as UN House Cleaning Focal Point , by ensuring safekeeping of all CSA cleaning devices and assets; keeping track of and preparing for purchasing the list of cleaning supplies; daily monitoring the quality of the delivered outsourced cleaning services, and in case of poor quality, shall eliminate all deficiencies and immediately inform the UN House Administrative Associate. Act as liaison person between the CSA/UN House.

, by ensuring safekeeping of all CSA cleaning devices and assets; keeping track of and preparing for purchasing the list of cleaning supplies; daily monitoring the quality of the delivered outsourced cleaning services, and in case of poor quality, shall eliminate all deficiencies and immediately inform the UN House Administrative Associate. Act as liaison person between the CSA/UN House. Effective communicate and assign cleaning tasks to the cleaning ladies for the evening shifts, ensuring clarity and understanding of the required actions. Ensure that the cleaning ladies have access to the necessary cleaning equipment, tools, and supplies needed to perform their assigned tasks effectively. Monitor and report any shortages or maintenance needs promptly to the UN House Administrative Associate. Provide feedback and guidance to the cleaning ladies to improve their performance and maintain consistent service quality.

Maintenance of Entryway : Keep the entryway area clean and tidy by: Sweeping or mopping the entrance floor. Removing leaves, debris, or snow from the entrance area, as needed. Cleaning and maintaining the cleanliness of floor mats.

: Keep the entryway area clean and tidy by: Sweeping or mopping the entrance floor. Removing leaves, debris, or snow from the entrance area, as needed. Cleaning and maintaining the cleanliness of floor mats. Offices / Reception  empty paper/waste bins, dust and water all UN House flowers and clean pots; Cleaning and restocking magazines or reading materials. Ensuring the reception desk is clean and presentable.

 empty paper/waste bins, dust and water all UN House flowers and clean pots; Cleaning and restocking magazines or reading materials. Ensuring the reception desk is clean and presentable. IT equipment  dust and clean all printers located in the UN House. For this purpose, IT Units shall provide special cleaning kits. Cleaning of the desks and equipment of the desks (computer, computer screens, keyboard, mouse, calculator, telephone, desk lamp, etc.) will not be part of this contract. Computer screen, keyboard and mouse cleaning will be done by the people occupying the desks, while computers, calculators, telephones, lamps etc. cleaning will be done by the outsourced cleaning company;

 dust and clean all printers located in the UN House. For this purpose, IT Units shall provide special cleaning kits. (computer, computer screens, keyboard, mouse, calculator, telephone, desk lamp, etc.) Computer screen, keyboard and mouse cleaning will be done by the people occupying the desks, while computers, calculators, telephones, lamps etc. cleaning will be done by the outsourced cleaning company; Meeting / conference rooms  empty paper/waste bins, clean and re-arrange tables and chairs. As per requests, ensure and/or serve water/coffee/tea for and/or during various events in UN House; Maintain open and professional communication with the reception staff and promptly address any specific cleaning requirements or concerns.

 empty paper/waste bins, clean and re-arrange tables and chairs. As per requests, ensure and/or serve water/coffee/tea for and/or during various events in UN House; Maintain open and professional communication with the reception staff and promptly address any specific cleaning requirements or concerns. Bathrooms  wash floors, clean mirrors, disinfect washbasins and toilet seats, replenish with toilet paper, paper towels, liquid soap, toilet disinfectant, etc.;

 wash floors, clean mirrors, disinfect washbasins and toilet seats, replenish with toilet paper, paper towels, liquid soap, toilet disinfectant, etc.; Kitchens  clean floors, tables, sinks, empty waste bins, replenish with soap, dishes washing liquid, kitchen paper towels. Maintain and clean kitchens appliances (refrigerator, microwaves, coffee machines, tea kettles, etc.). Wash the dishes - cups and glasses used during the meetings only.

 clean floors, tables, sinks, empty waste bins, replenish with soap, dishes washing liquid, kitchen paper towels. Maintain and clean kitchens appliances (refrigerator, microwaves, coffee machines, tea kettles, etc.). Wash the dishes - cups and glasses used during the meetings only. Corridors  wash floors, dust and clean equipment (printers, shredders), water flowers, ensure wet cleaning of the carpets in the reception/common area;

 wash floors, dust and clean equipment (printers, shredders), water flowers, ensure wet cleaning of the carpets in the reception/common area; UNH elevator & platform  clean inside walls, handrails, knobs, buttons, using distinctive sprays only;

 clean inside walls, handrails, knobs, buttons, using distinctive sprays only; Terrace  clean and re-arrange tables and chairs. As per requests, ensure and/or serve water/coffee/tea for and/or during various events in UN House;

 clean and re-arrange tables and chairs. As per requests, ensure and/or serve water/coffee/tea for and/or during various events in UN House; Staircase  sweep and wash the outdoor front entry steps & access ramp, clean the handrails;

 sweep and wash the outdoor front entry steps & access ramp, clean the handrails; Perform other duties as assigned;

Compliance with Health and Safety Standards: Adhere to all health and safety regulations and guidelines while performing cleaning tasks. Use appropriate cleaning agents and equipment safely and as instructed.

Report of any equipment malfunctioning or repair needs, as well as any shortages of cleaning supplies or restroom amenities, to the UN House Administrative Associate. Restock supplies hen necessary.

1.2. Weekly tasks:

Offices, corridors, kitchens, meeting / conference room  clean coolers;

Kitchens  polish cupboards, clean the refrigerators (each Friday noon), microwaves, coffee machines, tea kettles, etc.).

Basement  wash floors, remove the spider webs;

Garage & Server Room  provide support to UNH Janitor;

Supplies and equipment

The organization shall provide all equipment, as well as environmentally friendly cleaning supplies required for carrying out the work. This comprises of but is not limited to, all the supplies for toilets, kitchenettes, and desk cleaning, including  toilet paper, paper towels, disinfectants, kitchen paper towels, washing-up liquids, liquid hand soap for soap dispensers, detergents for the kitchenettes, dishwasher supplies, garbage bags, vacuum cleaners, dusters, brooms, brushes, buckets and mops.

There is a dedicated storage room in the basement for keeping supplies and equipment.

Institutional Arrangement

Under the guidance and direct supervision of the UN House Administrative Associate, the incumbent provides ensuring a welcoming and hygienic environment for visitors and staff, high quality and accuracy of work. The Cleaner demonstrates a client-oriented approach, high sense of responsibility, courtesy, tact and the ability to work with people of different national and cultural backrounds and works in close collaboration with the second cleaner in the daily shift from 8:00 am until 5:00pm.

Competencies

Core Achieve Results: LEVEL 1: Plans and monitors own work, pays attention to details, delivers quality work by deadline Think Innovatively: LEVEL 1: Open to creative ideas/known risks, is pragmatic problem solver, makes improvements Learn Continuously: LEVEL 1: Open minded and curious, shares knowledge, learns from mistakes, asks for feedback Adapt with Agility: LEVEL 1: Adapts to change, constructively handles ambiguity/uncertainty, is flexible Act with Determination: LEVEL 1: Shows drive and motivation, able to deliver calmly in face of adversity, confident Engage and Partner: LEVEL 1: Demonstrates compassion/understanding towards others, forms positive relationships Enable Diversity and Inclusion: LEVEL 1: Appreciate/respect differences, aware of unconscious bias, confront discrimination

Cross-Functional & Technical competencies

Thematic Area Name Definition Business Management Knowledge Generation Ability to research and turn information into useful knowledge, relevant for context, or responsive to a stated need. Business Management Customer Satisfaction/Client Management Ability to respond timely and appropriately with a sense of urgency, provide consistent solutions, and deliver timely and quality results and/or solutions to fulfil and understand the real customers needs.

Ability to anticipate clients upcoming needs and concerns. Operations Management Ability to effectively plan, organize, and oversee the Organization's business processes in order to convert its assets into the best results in the most efficient manner. Knowledge of relevant concepts and mechanisms. Administration & Operations Building, facilities & office space management Knowledge and ability to facilitate the renovation and

upgrade of offices including review of complex

engineering/architectural drawings; negotiate

technical agreements to ensure fully operational

building infrastructure and services; design policy &

procedure (POPP) for premises and facilities

including space standards; manage premises and

facilities; validate financial statement notes on

leasehold data

Minimum Qualifications

Secondary education

Relevant experience in the office cleaning services provision will be an asset.

Required skills

Ability to organise your time and workload

Customer service skills

Patience and the ability to remain calm in stressful situations

To be thorough and pay attention to detail

Desire to help people

Desired skills

Ability to operate and maintain a variety of cleaning equipment to provide efficient delivery of service is an advantage.

Experience in an international organization is a strong advantage.

Required Language(s)

Knowledge of Romanian and/or Russian.

Knowledge of English is an asset.

Working knowledge of one or more additional languages relevant for Moldova, including Bulgarian, Gagauzian, Romani, Ukrainian or sign language is an asset.

The following documents shall be required from the applicants:

Personal CV or P11, indicating all past positions held and their main underlying functions, their durations (month/year), the qualifications, as well as the contact details (email and telephone number) of the Candidate, and at least three (3) the most recent professional references of previous supervisors. References may also include peers. Managers may ask (ad hoc) for any other materials relevant to pre-assessing the relevance of their experience.

Disclaimer

Applicant information about UNDP rosters

Note: UNDP reserves the right to select one or more candidates from this vacancy announcement. We may also retain applications and consider candidates applying to this post for other similar positions with UNDP at the same grade level and with similar job description, experience and educational requirements.

Non-discrimination

UNDP has a zero-tolerance policy towards sexual exploitation and misconduct, sexual harassment, and abuse of authority. All selected candidates will, therefore, undergo rigorous reference and background checks, and will be expected to adhere to these standards and principles.

UNDP is an equal opportunity and inclusive employer that does not discriminate based on race, sex, gender identity, religion, nationality, ethnic origin, sexual orientation, disability, pregnancy, age, language, social origin or other status.

UNDP is committed to workforce diversity. Women, persons with disabilities, Roma and other ethnic or religious minorities, persons living with HIV, as well as refugees and other non-citizens legally entitled to work in the Republic of Moldova, are particularly encouraged to apply.

Scam warning

The United Nations does not charge any application, processing, training, interviewing, testing or other fee in connection with the application or recruitment process. Should you receive a solicitation for the payment of a fee, please disregard it. Furthermore, please note that emblems, logos, names and addresses are easily copied and reproduced. Therefore, you are advised to apply particular care when submitting personal information on the web.

To apply please follow the link/Pentru a aplica, va rugam sa adresati link-ul: Apply

Advertisement end date was extended/Data de incheiere a postului vacant a fost extins pana la: 31 July 2023

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Against a backdrop of the Labour Party once again scrutinising the level of public benefit delivered by charities that charge fees, the Supreme Court has handed down its judgment in Merton Council v Nuffield Health. The Supreme Court was not, like Labour, concerned with school fees, but with those charged for access to Nuffield Healths gyms. Specifically, the Merton Abbey gym, which reportedly charged 80 per month for access, with very little meaningful fee remission or other arrangements for those who could not afford it. This case was not about public benefit in isolation but came before the courts due to the business rates position.

In Mertons view, a charity restricting access in this way could not possibly deliver sufficient public benefit for it to earn the right to mandatory 80% relief from rates. The counter argument was that Nuffield Health and its use of the site satisfied all of the relevant tests under the Local Government Finance Act 1988 (LGFA) and even if the charity might fail the public benefit test on an analysis of the Merton Abbey gym alone (which it surely would), that was irrelevant. When you consider that Nuffield Health operates some hundreds of gym facilities across the country, it is very clear why the charity fought this case all the way.
By malp / Adobe

The 2023 Charity Finance Pooled Funds Survey covers 49 funds that are exclusively for charitable organisations, with combined funds under management of 23.1bn. While there have been no new product launches in the last year, six funds listed in 2022 have closed or are about to. The CAF UK Equitrack Fund closed on 27 April 2023 and funds are being returned to investors. CAF Financial Solutions Limited (CFSL) has decided to focus its attention on the three IFSL funds managed by abrdn, as it believes these offer a compelling solution to the increasing number of charity investors that are asking for multi-asset funds with environmental, social and governance filters.

Epworth terminated its relatively new Corporate Bond Fund for Charities, and Sterling Sovereign Bond Fund for Charities, at the end of April, while Cazenove shut its 25- year old Charity Bond Fund in May. Co-head of charities at Cazenove, Tom Montagu-Pollock, said the fund was small and had not grown in some time. We carefully considered various options to try and restructure with a view to growth but decided to close it. This illustrates that charities have increasingly moved to a pooled multi-asset approach, rather than using single asset class funds, in the past decade. You can also look at the UK equity charity fund universe of ten funds, they have fallen by 43% on average in value since 2019 and you would imagine this trend in moving to pooled multi-asset approaches is likely to continue.
By Kim Jae-heun



Noh Dong-jin, chairman of the National Federation of Fisheries Cooperatives (NFFC), has been elected to the board of directors of the International Cooperative Alliance (ICA), becoming the first NFFC head to do so, the federation said Monday.





NFFC Chairman Noh Dong-jin
Leaders of several charities have voiced support for a campaign to support trans people in the sector, which officially launched today.

Chief executives of charities including the Childrens Society and Teenage Cancer Trust have backed the campaign, which invites sector leaders to pledge their absolute commitment to supporting the rights of our trans, non-binary, and gender diverse communities.

Kevin Taylor-McKnight, founder of campaign group Charity So Straight, announced the #StandWithTrans initiative last month .

Speaking ahead of todays launch, he said: We staunchly advocate that trans lives matter and charity sector bosses can play a vital role in moulding a Britain free from discrimination, prejudice, and hate.

He invited charity leaders to visit the campaigns website and attend a webinar on 20 July.

Charities have a pivotal role to play

Andy Bell, CEO of Centre for Mental Health said: Charities have a pivotal role to play in supporting social justice, inclusion and equality for everyone. Its vital that our sector stands with trans people at all times, and especially now. Its fundamental to creating good mental health for all.

Kay Hallsworth, CEO of Gosport Voluntary Action, said: So many people in our community have spent years hidden away and afraid to be themselves, as LGBTQ+ or trans, because they didnt know where they could find help and support or feel included.

As a CEO in the voluntary sector, I want people to know that our organisation and our services are inclusive of everyone and always will be, and I'm delighted to say that I wholeheartedly #StandWithTrans.

Were committed to doing more

Mark Russell, CEO of the Childrens Society, said: We are committed to the Childrens Society being a safe and inclusive space for trans colleagues, and we are dedicated to fostering inclusivity, understanding and acceptance.

We will tirelessly fight for the rights of all children regardless of their gender identity. In the face of fear and prejudice, we believe love and acceptance will always prevail and we are committed to making this a reality for young people everywhere.

Kate Collins, CEO of Teenage Cancer Trust, said: Were committed to being an organisation that strives for equity, and that means ensuring that trans colleagues feel welcome as part of our team, trans young people and members of young peoples friend and family networks who are trans feel safe to be themselves when we support them.

Weve put down some foundations, but we know that there is a lot more to be done until we can be confident that were an equitable organisation, for the young people we exist to support, their friends and family and our staff. However, weve made progress  Im proud of how far we have come, and were committed to doing more.
Save the Children UKs income rose by 23% to 294m last year after two successive annual declines, the charity has reported.

According to its accounts for the 2022 calendar year, the charity dismissed two volunteers for sexual harassment during the year and received nearly 200 more complaints from the public on its fundraising activity.

The charitys expenditure increased by 50m, with the organisation reporting that overlapping crises in 2022 had tested its teams as never before.

Income

Save the Children UK received 34m from the Disasters Emergency Committee, 24m of which was through its Ukraine appeal.

The charity received 10m more from the United Nations for its work in Ethiopia and Yemen.

One-off donations rose by 6m to 19m, which the charity attributed to its Ukraine and Pakistan appeals, but regular donations fell by 900,000 as the charitys investment in fundraising has reduced since the start of the Covid-19 pandemic.

Major donors and trusts gave 12m more than in 2021, in part to the charitys emergency fund.

The charity received 19m from corporate partners, 3m up on the previous year.

Last year was the first annual increase in the charitys income for three years. It reported a 49m decline in 2021 .

Complaints

The charity investigated four safeguarding complaints and dismissed two volunteers for sexual harassment.

It took action against another volunteer for aggressive behaviour but said an allegation of misconduct by a member of staff was found to be unsubstantiated.

Meanwhile, the charity received 465 complaints from members of the public about its fundraising activity, compared to 269 in 2021, none of which were investigated by the Fundraising Regulator.

It said the rise was due to its resumption of face-to-face fundraising activities and a decision to decline a gift from fossil fuel company Neptune Energy during the year.

The charity said it expects complaints to increase again in 2024 as we return to pre-pandemic levels of fundraising activity.

Expenditure

Save the Children UKs expenditure increased by 50m on the previous year to 286m last year.

The charitys staff costs remained flat at 47m.

Chief executive Gwen Hines salary remained unchanged at 143,000, while her executive team was cut by one post and cost 14% less than in the previous year.

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Former customers of Injured Workers Pharmacy whose personal information was stolen by hackers and allegedly used to file a fake tax return may pursue a class-action lawsuit against the company, a panel of the 1st District Court of Appeal ruled Friday, reversing a trial court decision.

The appellate panel said that Alexsis Webb and Marsclette Charley had plausibly alleged they were injured by a 2021 data breach that exposed their personal information. Both were clients of IWP in January 2021, when hackers breached the companys computer network, exposing the personally identifiable information of 75,000 customers.

We do not hold that individuals face an imminent and substantial future risk in every case in which their information is compromised in a data breach. But on the facts alleged here, the complaint has plausibly demonstrated such a risk, the opinion says.

Injured Workers Pharmacy, a Massachusetts company that mails medications prescribed for work injuries and illnesses to workers compensation claimants, discovered it had been hacked in May 2021, four months after the actual data breach. The company admitted that the hackers compromised multiple employee email accounts and had unfettered access to its network during the months the breach was undetected.

IWP did not begin notifying customers of the hack until February 2022, and even then did not reveal the scope of the breach. The company encouraged its customers to monitor their account statements and credit reports for suspicious activity, but did not offer to pay for credit monitoring and identity protection services to the impacted patients.

Webb, a resident of Ohio, alleges that the cybercriminals behind the hack used her information to file a fake tax return, which forced her to expend personal time to deal with the Internal Revenue Service and caused anxiety, sleep disruption, stress, and fear. Charley, a Georgia resident, says she is experiencing feelings of rage and anger, anxiety, sleep disruption, stress, fear, and physical pain.

In May 2022, the two woman filed a putative class-action lawsuit in the US District Court for Massachusetts seeking damages for negligence, breach of contract, unjust enrichment, invasion of privacy and breach of fiduciary duty. They also asked for an injunction from the court requiring IWP to improve its cybersecurity and ordering the company to cease its unfair practices.

The lawsuit requested certification of a class of United States residents whose personally identifiable information was compromised by the data breach.

District Court Judge Richard G. Stearns dismissed the complaint, finding that Webb and Charley lacked standing because they failed to state an injury in fact. The judge found that Webb did not sufficiently allege a connection between the data breach and the fake tax return filed in her name. The judge found that the allegation of potential misuse of personal information was not sufficiently imminent to establish an injury in fact.

The appellate panel disagreed. The panel noted that in a 2021 decision, TransUnion LLC v. Ramirez, the US Supreme Court ruled that plaintiffs must demonstrate they have suffered a concrete injury in order to assert a claim for damages by a data breach.

Intangible harms can also be concrete, including when they are injuries with a close relationship to harms traditionally recognized as providing a basis for lawsuits in American courts, such as reputational harms, disclosure of private information, and intrusion upon seclusion,' the opinion says, citing a different Supreme Court ruling.

The panel said Webbs allegations that her information was used to file a false tax return suffice to state a concrete injury. Charleys allegation of a material risk of harm due to potential misuse of her personal information was also sufficient to give her standing, the opinion says.

Plaintiffs face a real risk of misuse of their information following a data breach when their information is deliberately taken by thieves intending to use the information to their financial advantage  i.e., exposed in a targeted attack rather than inadvertently, the opinion says.

The panel reversed the District Courts decision that Webb and Charley lacked standing, but affirmed its ruling not to issue the requested injunctions. The panel said the plaintiffs failed to show how the injunctions would redress their injuries.
Andover, Massachusetts-based Injured Workers Pharmacy (IWP) has agreed to pay $10 million to resolve allegations that it violated the Controlled Substances Act by improperly filling prescriptions for controlled substances, including opioids, and submitting false claims for payment to the Department of Labor (DOL).

In addition, IWP will enter into a five-year corrective action plan with the Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA).

Acting U.S. Attorney Joshua S. Levy said that as part of the settlement agreement, IWP admitted that between 2014 and 2019 it failed to adequately address prescriptions with red flags, including high doses of opioids, early refills and dangerous drug combinations, before dispensing them to injured workers. Red flags indicate prescriptions that may not have been issued for a legitimate medical purpose, such as abuse or diversion.

IWP previously settled a parallel investigation by the state attorney general into its dispensing practices for $11 million.

Levy said the settlement also concerns IWPs claims for payment submitted to DOL, which administers the federal workers compensation program. In 2017, in an effort to curb opioid abuse among injured federal workers, DOL began reviewing claims and flagged concerning prescriptions  a process called a Drug Utilization Review (DUR). Before paying claims flagged for a DUR, DOL requires pharmacies to represent that a pharmacist or the prescribing medical professional addressed the concerns raised by the DUR.

IWP admitted that, between 2017 and 2019, IWPs claims employees routinely represented to DOL that IWP consulted with prescribers about DURs when, in fact, IWP did not consult with those prescribers.

Under the terms of the settlement, over the next five years, DEA is allowed to conduct unannounced inspections of IWP without administrative inspection warrants. The DEA monitors pharmacy prescribing practices to ensure compliance with federal law.

To address issues uncovered in the investigation, officials said IWP has made improvements in its pharmacy practices, including developing additional procedures to review high-risk prescribing; increasing training for all employees; and eliminating production quotas for pharmacists and staff. The company also retained additional personnel to address high-risk prescribing.

Last week brought disturbing reports that opioid overdose deaths only increased last year in Massachusetts. Pharmacies are on the front lines of the prescription pill and opioid epidemic devastating our communities, said Levy. Pharmacies that distribute dangerous prescription pills have a solemn responsibility to comply with measures enacted to curb abuse and addiction.

Christopher J. Godfrey, director of the DOL workers compensation program, said the settlement allows his office to recover medical bill payments.
PHOENIX (AP)  Heat waves like the one that engulfed parts of parts of the South and Midwest and killed more than a dozen people are becoming more common, and experts say the extreme weather events, which claim more lives than hurricanes and tornadoes, will likely increase in the future.

A heat dome that pressured the Texas power grid and killed 13 people there and another in Louisiana pushed eastward Thursday and was expected to be centered over the mid-South by the weekend. Heat index levels of up to 112 degrees (44 Celsius) were forecast in parts of Florida over the next few days.

Eleven of the heat-related deaths in Texas occurred in Webb County, which includes Laredo. The dead ranged in age from 60 to 80 years old, and many had other health conditions, according to the county medical examiner. The other two fatalities were Florida residents who died while hiking in extreme heat at Big Bend National Park.

Scientists and medical experts say such deaths caused by extreme heat will only increase in the U.S. each summer without more action to combat climate change that has pushed up temperatures, making people especially vulnerable in areas unaccustomed to warm weather.

Here in Boston we prepare for snowstorms. Now we need to learn how to prepare for heat, said Dr. Gaurab Basu, a primary care physician and the director of education and policy at the Center for Climate, Health, and the Global Environment at Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health.

Planting more trees to increase shade in cities and investing in green technology like heat pumps for home cooling and heating could help, Basu said.

Extreme heat already is the deadliest of all weather events in the United States, including hurricanes, tornadoes, wildfires and flooding.

Heat waves are the deadliest because they affect such large areas and can go on for days or weeks, said Joellen Russell, a climate scientist who teaches at the University of Arizona in Tucson and is currently on a Fulbright scholarship in Wellington, New Zealand. And they catch people by surprise.

Phoenix, the hottest large city in America, faces an excessive heat warning headed into the weekend. Dangerously hot conditions are forecast from Saturday through Tuesday, including temperatures of 107-115 degrees (41.6-46.1 Celsius) across south-central Arizona.

Arizona already understands heat to a certain extent, but its getting hotter for us, too, said Russell. That means a lot of people will continue to die.

Counting heat deaths has become a science in Arizonas Maricopa County, which includes metro Phoenix. The county tallied 425 heat-associated deaths last year, a 25% increase over 2021.

Located in the Sonoran Desert, Maricopa County counts not just deaths due to exposure but also deaths in which heat is among several major contributing factors, including heart attacks and strokes.

The countys Office of the Medical Examiner updates suspected and confirmed heat- associated deaths every week through the warm season, which runs from May through October. So far this season, there have been six heat-associated deaths in Maricopa County, home to nearly 4.5 million people.

Dr. Sameed Khatana, a staff cardiologist at the Philadelphia VA Medical Center and assistant professor at the University of Pennsylvanias Perelman School of Medicine, said deaths in which heat contributed significantly to fatalities from causes like heart failure should also be considered to provide a more complete picture.

Khatana participated in research published last year that suggested that from 2008 and 2017 between 13,000 to 20,000 adult deaths were linked to extreme heat, about half due to heart disease.

Older people and those with diabetes, obesity, heart disease and other serious health conditions are most at risk, he said.

Hurricanes, flooding and wildfires are very dramatic, said Khatana. Heat is harder to see and especially affects people who are socially isolated or living on the margins.

The city of Phoenixs Office of Heat Response and Mitigation has opened summertime shelters for homeless people, operates cooling centers in libraries and other community spaces to help people get out of the sun and distributes bottled water, hats and sunscreen. The city also has a Cool Callers program with volunteers dialing vulnerable residents who ask to be checked on during hot periods.

Even the Phoenix Zoo is taking measures to cool off the monkeys, big cats and rhinos, spraying them with water, delivering frozen treats, and providing shaded areas and cooled water pools.

Extreme heat deaths are a global problem.

Mexican health authorities this week said there have been at least 112 heat- related deaths so far this year, acknowledging for the first time the deadliness of a recent heat wave that President Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador previously dismissed as an invention of alarmists.

The report released Wednesday also shows a significant spike in heat-related fatalities in the last two weeks. So far this year, Mexicos overall heat- related deaths are almost triple the figures seen in 2022.

A flash study released this spring said record-breaking April temperatures in Spain, Portugal and northern Africa were made 100 times more likely by human- caused climate change.

Deaths and widespread hospitalizations were caused by searing heat wave that broiled parts of southern Asia in April with temperatures of up to 113 degrees (45 Celsius) was made at least 30 times more likely by climate change, according to a rapid study by international scientists.

Top photo: Construction worker Fernando Padilla wipes his face as he works in the heat, Friday, June 30, 2023 in Nashville, Tenn. Weather forecasts call for heat indexes to reach over 105 degrees Fahrenheit for the Middle Tennessee area through the weekend. (AP Photo/George Walker IV)

Copyright 2023 Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.
A U.S. judge on Friday ordered a new trial on damages against BNSF Railway in a privacy class action, in a ruling that wiped out an award of $228 million to truck drivers who accused the freight railway giant of unlawfully collecting their fingerprints.

The ruling from U.S. District Judge Matthew Kennelly in Illinois upheld a jurys liability verdict that BNSF had violated the Illinois Biometric Information Privacy Act, which imposes restrictions on the collection and use of personal information such as retinal scans and fingerprints.

But Kennelly said damages under the biometric law were discretionary, and so BNSF is entitled to have a jury determine the appropriate amount of damages.

The trial was the first to be held under the Illinois biometric privacy law, which is among the most stringent nationwide in protecting sensitive personal information.

Warren Buffetts Berkshire Hathaway owns BNSF, which operates one of the countrys largest freight rail networks.

A spokesperson for BNSF and a lawyer for the company did not immediately respond to requests on Friday seeking comment.

Attorneys for the plaintiff did not immediately respond to similar messages.

A truck driver sued BNSF in 2019, alleging the Fort Worth, Texas-based company unlawfully required drivers to scan fingerprints at facilities in the state.

The jury in Chicago last year concluded BNSF recklessly or intentionally violated the Illinois biometric privacy law 45,600 times. The law allows $5,000 per violation.

Lawyers for BNSF said in a post-trial brief that the Illinois biometric law contains the word may and that there is the option not to award damages, or to award damages in any amount less than the statutory maximum.

The state law poses myriad compliance hurdles for companies, and many have faced litigation. In 2020, Facebook said it would pay $650 million to resolve class action allegations that it violated the Illinois law in a feature that could recognize people in photographs shared to the site.

The case is Rogers v. BNSF Railway Company, U.S. District Court, Northern District of Illinois, No. 1:19-cv-03083.
Johnson & Johnson wrapped up a trial today to determine if the health care giant is misusing the bankruptcy system for the second time in less than two years in a bid to force an end to about 40,000 cancer lawsuits.

A bankrupt unit of J&J has been in federal court this week fighting a group of cancer victims who want juries around the country to decide whether their diseases were caused by tainted talc in baby powder the company sold for years. J&J is using the units Chapter 11 case to try to force holdouts to accept an $8.9 billion settlement offer.

In the coming weeks, US Bankruptcy Judge Michael Kaplan, who is based about 25 miles from J&Js headquarters, must decide whether to throw out the bankruptcy of LTL Management, a unit created to try to end all current and future health claims related to the talc. Earlier this year, a federal appeals court ordered Kaplan to dismiss the first LTL bankruptcy.

Kaplan did not say when he would rule on the new bankruptcy case, but told lawyers they can submit a final round of written arguments in July.

Since J&J first put LTL into bankruptcy in 2021, victims have been blocked from taking their cancer claims to trial. The bankruptcy strategy was developed after J&J lost some big trials, including one verdict in which the company was forced to pay out $2.5 billion to about 20 women.

While one of the richest corporations in America plots and schemes to protect itself, victims of its products are sick and dying, Jeff Jonas, a lawyer for a committee of alleged talc victims, told Kaplan Friday morning. Should Kaplan dismiss LTLs bankruptcy holdouts would regain their right to pursue J&J in jury trials.

When J&J developed its bankruptcy strategy, the company faced about 40,000 claims. Today the company faces as many as 100,000, some of which have been filed as lawsuits and others that are cases that law firms are developing, LTL bankruptcy lawyer Greg Gordon told Kaplan.

About 60,000 claimants support the $8.9 billion settlement, said Kris Hansen, who represents a group of law firms that back the settlement. Those cancer victims have a better chance of getting paid and getting paid more quickly in bankruptcy, he said.

Lawyers for LTL and their supporters told Kaplan Friday afternoon that if he dismisses the Chapter 11 case he will prevent tens of thousands of cancer claimants from deciding whether theyd prefer taking the $8.9 billion settlement or their chances in the court system.

Lawyers suing J&J are split over the bankruptcy strategy. The main victim group backing the settlement includes lawyers with tens of thousands of clients who have not yet sued. Holdouts, many of whom have filed lawsuits and are preparing for trial, want to take their claims to juries around the country.

Last year Kaplan sided with J&J against a unified band of the top plaintiffs law firms in the US, but was overruled by a federal appeals court in Philadelphia, which ordered the judge to dismiss LTL Managements first Chapter 11 bankruptcy petition.

J&J responded by tweaking its legal strategy and raising its settlement offer to $8.9 billion in order to attract support from cancer victims. LTL returned to bankruptcy in April and Kaplan agreed to hold a hearing to decide if the new case fixed the legal flaws that doomed the first effort.

At the heart of the decision Kaplan must make are several complex legal questions including whether LTL faces any real financial distress, if the bankruptcy was filed in good faith, and whether J&J conspired to strip LTL of a valuable funding agreement in order to qualify for a new bankruptcy case.

The holdouts argue that the new case, like the old one, is not a valid use of bankruptcy. The appeals court previously ruled that LTL  the bankrupt unit  was never in financial distress because it had an agreement with J&J to backstop any settlement funding shortfall. The court found the backstop agreement meant LTL could pay claimants as much as $61.5 billion outside of bankruptcy and therefore the Chapter 11 filing was not made in good faith.

In response, J&J and LTL agreed to cancel that funding agreement and replace it with one backed by a J&J holding company worth about $30 billion. J&J also said it would only provide LTL money to pay the cancer victims as part of a bankruptcy case. Lawyers for LTL say all of the changes mean the new case meets the appeals court test.

The new bankruptcy filing is LTL Management LLC, 23-12825, U.S. Bankruptcy Court for the District of New Jersey (Trenton).

(Updates with new estimate of the number of talc claims in the sixth paragraph.)

With assistance from Jonathan Randles.

Copyright 2023 Bloomberg.
BRECKSVILLE, Ohio -- The Brecksville-Broadview Heights school board has appointed an interim district superintendent, who will hold the job for slightly more than two weeks in July.

Brian Wycuff, assistant superintendent of personnel and business operations, will act as interim superintendent from July 13-31, before newly appointed Superintendent Jeffrey Harrison takes over Aug. 1.

An interim superintendent was needed because outgoing Superintendent Joelle Magyar, whose contract runs through July 31, is leaving her job early. She will become superintendent of the Avon Lake City School District.

Joelle has moved up her resignation date so that she can provide more transition days and attention to her new district, Brecksville-Broadview Heights Treasurer Craig Yaniglos told cleveland.com in an email.

Magyar will not receive pay for the days shes not on the job in Brecksville-Broadview Heights this month. Her base salary here was more than $171,900 in 2022 and her total compensation was about $188,400.

Wycuff, whose salary is $150,393 as assistant superintendent, will earn $96 a day in additional pay as interim superintendent, under an agreement the board approved June 28.

Yaniglos said Wycuff isnt expected to work weekends, so hes projected to earn $1,248 in additional pay for 13 weekdays as interim superintendent.

Yaniglos said the amount of $96 a day is the difference between Magyars daily pay rate of $674.45 and Wycuffs daily pay rate as assistant superintendent of $578.45.

The school board hired Harrison, whos been superintendent of the Buckeye Local School District in Medina since 2020, in May.

Magyar was hired by the Brecksville-Broadview Heights Board of Education in 2016. She replaced Scot Prebles, who resigned in December 2015 to become superintendent of Forest Hills Local Schools near Cincinnati. Prebles is now superintendent of the Bay Village City Schools.

Magyar was introduced as the new superintendent of Avon Lake City Schools during a March 27 school board meeting in Avon Lake. She will succeed Bob Scott, who is retiring.

Read more from the Sun Star Courier.
LAGRANGE, Ohio -- The Carlisle Reservation in LaGrange hosted an informative event June 29, showcasing the Railroads of Lorain County. The presentation was one of the events celebrating the countys upcoming bicentennial.

From now until May 2024, activities and events will bring people of all ages from across the county together in celebration of all that Lorain County has to offer, according to information from the Lorain County Historical Society.

Since 1889, the Lorain County Historical Society has preserved and shared the stories of the people, places and events that have shaped the history of Lorain County, Ohio. The commemoration of the Lorain County Bicentennial recognizes the proud history and the promising future of Lorain County.

There are so many historical sites, people and stories in Lorain County that it takes a long time to take them all in and appreciate all the places and the people who built the countys communities.

Railroads of Lorain County was particularly interesting. The presentation was narrated by Adam Matthews, an area historian. He is known as a railroad historian, preservationist, photographer and model railroader.

He began by touting the romance of trains, saying, People love trains.

He made his case with his own love of trains. The many train tracks in Ohio were shown repeatedly on several of his slides, demonstrating how the train industry grew in Ohio.

Two of the historical periods of railroads in Ohio were 1831-1968 and 1839-1914. Two major routes ran from Cleveland to Toledo, bringing products and supplies for businesses all along the way, and also from Elyria to Norwalk.

In the 1800s, he said, locomotives were built in Ohio by the thousands. Oberlin was an important freight depot.

But even though the railroads brought tremendous success to businesses in Ohio, there were some mighty sad moments along the way, including train derailments and crashes.

One of the noted train crashes was called the Great Kipton Train Wreck, a head-on collision in 1891 in Oberlin resulting in eight deaths. The wreck was blamed on inconsistent timekeeping of train schedules, a practice that improved due to the tragedy.

The Lorain County population is probably going to hear much more about train history as the bicentennial continues until next May.

For more information on Matthews, visit his website, Train Wizard Productions, at https://www.trainwizardpro.com.

And for more information on the Lorain County Bicentennial, visit the county historical society at 284 Washington Ave. in Elyria or the website at www.lchs.org. Phone is 440-322-3341.

Read more from the Sun Sentinel.
BRUNSWICK, Ohio -- City Council has approved two pieces of legislation related directly to a state-mandated plan to construct an Interstate 71 interchange, likely at Boston or Grafton roads in Brunswick.

The interchange proposal stems from the passage of Ohio House Bill 23, which includes a mandate for highway interchanges every 4.5 miles. It was added to the state transportation bill by House Finance Committee member Tom Patton (R-Strongsville) and passed into law by Gov. Mike DeWine.

The highway interchange mandate was reportedly put in place to alleviate traffic snarls in the city of Strongsville.

But it could lead to the removal of residential housing on Boston Road, according to Brunswick city officials. The proposal has led to a groundswell of opposition from residents and officials from Brunswick and surrounding communities.

On June 26, Brunswick council approved an ordinance to enact a six-month moratorium on acceptance and processing of rezoning, conditional use and variance applications for property in the citys low-density residential district.

It also passed an ordinance to establish a chapter of the citys codified ordinances defining Eisenhower Interstate System highways and interchanges in the city and prohibiting the construction of interchanges within the city limits without City Council approval, unless required by federal law.

This is to make sure, unlike our neighbors to the north, things are zoned the way they should be, said Ward 2 Councilman Nick Hanek.

Law Director Ken Fisher added that the moratorium is to allow for a study of residential properties throughout the city -- not in one specific area -- in order to determine if the current zoning code is in line with the citys master plan and to make sure residents are protected.

Also at the meeting, council approved an amended agreement to establish the Medina County Emergency Management Agency and a contract with Konstruction King Inc. not to exceed $293,375 for the 2023 concrete repair program.

At the June 12 City Council meeting, council approved changes to a contract with Air Force One to stay within the estimated $493,999 in repairs to the Brunswick Community Recreation and Fitness Center to include insulation of external duct work, painting of girders and pipes in the pool room and removing installation of rooftop air conditioning units on the fitness and arts and crafts areas from the scope of the project.

Also at the June 12 meeting, council recognized members of the St. Ambrose fifth- and sixth-grade boys CYO lacrosse championship team.

Read more news from the Brunswick Sun.
China's largest ultra-high voltage cross-river power transmission project put into operation

Xinhua) 14:27, July 03, 2023

NANJING, July 2 (Xinhua) -- China's largest ultra-high voltage (UHV) power transmission project across the Yangtze River, the longest river in the country, was completed and put into operation Sunday.

The 500-kV power transmission project, spanning 2,550 meters across the Yangtze, stretches from the city of Taizhou to Wuxi in east China's Jiangsu Province, with a total length of 178 km and a total investment of over 1.5 billion yuan (about 207.6 million U.S. dollars), according to the State Grid Jiangsu Electric Power Co., Ltd.

The project includes two power transmission towers measuring 385 meters high each, the tallest of their kind in the world. It is estimated that the maximum annual power transmission of the project can exceed 26 billion kWh, which is equivalent to the annual electricity consumption of a medium-sized Chinese city.

It is expected to increase Jiangsu's cross-river power transmission capacity by 30 percent, greatly promoting the consumption of clean energy like offshore wind power in the Yangtze River Delta and reducing carbon dioxide emissions by about 10 million tonnes every year.

"We have overcome a series of technical difficulties and set many industry records. The overall project and the equipment were 100 percent Chinese-made," said project manager Chen Bing.

(Web editor: Zhang Kaiwei, Liang Jun)
Ahn Jae-yong, left, CEO of SK bioscience, poses with Thomas Triomphe, executive vice president of Sanofi, during the Vaccines Investor Event hosted by Sanofi in London, June 29. The two companies announced the successful completion of the Phase 2 clinical trial of a pneumococcal vaccine that they are jointly developing. Courtesy of SK bioscience



By Baek Byung-yeul



SK bioscience successfully completed the Phase 2 clinical trial of a 21-valent pneumococcal vaccine co-developed with French biopharmaceutical company Sanofi and is on track to enter the Phase 3 trial, according to the local vaccine developer and producer, Friday.



The company said it confirmed excellent immunogenicity and safety in the Phase 2 clinical trial of GBP410, a 21-valent pneumococcal protein conjugate vaccine in infants and young children, and is ready to enter the Phase 3 trial.



"GBP410, jointly developed by SK bioscience and Sanofi, is a protein-conjugate vaccine that conjugates specific proteins to the pneumococcal coat polysaccharide that causes pneumonia and invasive disease," SK bioscience said, adding that the protein conjugate method is said to be the most effective pneumococcal vaccine ever developed.



The two companies conducted comparative trials of GBP410 and a control vaccine in 140 children aged 12-15 months and 712 infants aged 42-89 days in the United States, Canada and Honduras, and confirmed equivalent levels of immunogenicity compared to the control vaccine. In terms of safety, no serious vaccine-related adverse events were reported in the GBP410 dose group, SK bioscience said.



Following the commercialization of GBP410, SK bioscience plans to increase its market share in cooperation with Sanofi, a pediatric vaccine market leader. The pneumococcal vaccine is the largest single vaccine in the global vaccine market. It is expected to grow to 12 trillion won ($9.1 billion) in 2028 from 10 trillion in 2022, according to global pharmaceutical statistics organization Evaluate Pharma.



"The successful Phase 2 clinical trials of pneumococcal conjugate vaccine signifies that SK bioscience's technology and capability in vaccine development can deliver best-in-class vaccine candidates," Ahn Jae-yong, CEO of SK bioscience, said. "We're so proud to collaborate with an excellent partner, Sanofi, and we continue to be committed to developing and manufacturing vaccines based on the global partnership with major pharmaceutical companies."



In addition to the development of the pneumococcal vaccine, SK bioscience is working to expand its vaccine lineup through cooperation with global partners.



Recently, the company secured core technologies for mRNA vaccine development through agreements with leading domestic and overseas companies. In May, the company signed a contract with MSD to produce a new candidate for the next-generation Zaire Ebola vaccine candidate and is also working on establishing overseas R&D and vaccine production bases in countries with inadequate vaccine infrastructure.


SHAKER HEIGHTS, Ohio -- As expected, City Council has amended the 2018 Shaker Lakes Dams Rehabilitation Project agreement in order to proceed with the restoration of Doan Brook through the drained Horseshoe lakebed.

In doing so, Shaker officials last week closed ranks with their counterparts in Cleveland Heights, where the council there approved similar legislation June 20. The Northeast Ohio Regional Sewer District (NEORSD) Board of Trustees did so five days before that.

The resolution by Cleveland Heights and an ordinance by Shaker, both passed as emergencies on first reading, came on the heels of taxpayer lawsuits filed May 31 in Cuyahoga County Common Pleas Court seeking an injunction to stop plans to remove the Horseshoe Lake dam.

Both pieces of legislation from the respective councils cite a March 29 inspection by the Ohio Department of Natural Resources (ODNR) and the subsequent Dam Safety Inspection Report issued May 1.

In the report, ODNR inspectors state that the conditionally approved repair plans for Upper Shaker (Horseshoe) Lake dam are no longer acceptable, adding that if comprehensive reconstruction is not done, the dam may be decommissioned.

That is one of the reasons why the Friends of Horseshoe Lake (FOHSL) and the taxpayers on both sides of the border are in court.

They argue that as the owners of the dams on the parklands they are leasing from the City of Cleveland, Shaker and Cleveland Heights are responsible for maintaining and repairing the dams, as well as dredging the lakes.

Although they declined a request for further comment on the lawsuits at this time, FOHSL attorneys Diane Calta and Anthony Coyne noted that ODNRs latest Horseshoe Lake Dam report was already incorporated as an exhibit in their lawsuit.

In addition to the long-term parkland leases, Calta and Coyne argued that the cities and sewer district were also violating the 2018 project agreement that was still in place.

Accompanying his written memo, Shaker Heights Law Director William Ondrey Gruber told council June 26 prior to passage that the amendment to the 2018 project agreement was a cleanup measure that we planned to do in the future at some point where the new plans were all ready for Horseshoe Lake and for council approval.

That will still be coming, as well as a separate agreement for Lower Shaker Lake.

In the fall of 2021, both councils passed respective resolutions of concurrence with the NEORSD recommendations to remove Horseshoe Lake dam and keep Lower Lakes, at a district-funded cost of roughly $14 million apiece.

The recommendation came over three years after the original Shaker Lakes Dams Rehabilitation Project agreement.

In the meantime, we have the 2018 agreement with the sewer district and Cleveland Heights that authorized projects at Green, Lower and Horseshoe lakes, Gruber said, noting that work at Green Lake and dam was completed, with some of the work at Lower Lake also done.

The earlier proposal for Horseshoe Lake and its failing dam is no longer viable, something that we already knew, as did Cleveland Heights and the sewer district, Gruber added.

Also, the type of project has changed: It now calls for the removal of the dam and the restoration of Doan Brook in the area of the current dam.

The amending legislation from both cities also notes that, once completed after the Green Lake overhaul, the sewer districts $10 million Chagrin River-Lake Erie Tributaries Stormwater Master Plan (CHALET-SWMP) determined that Lower Shaker Lake provided more flood control benefits than Horseshoe.

Gruber added that the ordinance came on first reading, so we can proceed quickly with amending the agreement so we are not bound by it and the project can move ahead.

The sewer district had already hired a consulting team that is wrapping up a year of pre-design work, to be followed by another year of detailed design and construction slated for early 2025.

Further details were not immediately available on the amended legislation passed at the NEORSD Board of Trustees June 15 meeting, although the agenda stated in part that it granted authorization to:

-- Amend Stormwater Project Agreement No. 3782 with the cities of Cleveland Heights and Shaker Heights for the Shaker Lakes Dams Rehabilitation Project

-- Replace such portion of the project relating to Upper Shaker (Horseshoe) Lake with the Doan Brook Restoration Near Horseshoe Lake Park project

-- Remove from the project scope the repair of the Horseshoe Lake dam

-- Memorialize the agreement of the parties to move forward with design services necessary to decommission the dam and restore Doan Brook to a more naturalized state

Shaker Heights Vice Mayor Sean Malone noted June 26 that the Shaker Heights ordinance had not gone through any committees prior to passage.

For an extensive review of up-to-date sewer district plans for the Doan Brook Restoration Near Horseshoe Lake Park, visit https://www.neorsd.org/doan-brook-restoration-near-horseshoe-lake-park/.

To learn more about FOHSL, visit www.SaveHorseshoeLake.com.

Read more from the Sun Press.
MEDINA, Ohio -- When Medina County was still very rural, tractors and other farm equipment could be seen almost everywhere.

That included one day in 1954 when there was a huge parade through Medina honoring John Wankos record-setting sale of New Holland Hay Balers at the Farmers Exchange. Wanko asked farmers to drive their tractors to town that day and hitch up their new equipment.

In honor of the 50th anniversary of this baler holiday, a re-enactment parade has been planned by the Medina County Antique Power Association in conjunction with the Medina County Historical Society.

At 6:30 p.m. July 13, the parade will be recreated, starting at the Medina ReStore on Lafayette Road and proceeding into town, up South Court Street and onto West Liberty Street to the Medina County Fairgrounds.

The public is, of course, invited to watch the parade and enjoy the festivities.

A big part of this event will be the crowning of the Medina County Hay Queen -- the first since the crowning of Miss Kunkle.

Once publicity began for the re-enactment, it drew some unexpected results. Thanks to the genealogy team at the Medina County District Library, the mystery of who Miss Kunkle was has been solved.

Heres how they did it.

(The) MCDL genealogy team cant resist a good mystery. After reading the recent news coverage of the Hay Baler Parade, we believe weve identified Miss Kunkle, the library notes.

We searched the 1950 Census for young women with the surname Kunkle. We found only one -- a Marilyn Kunkel living in Montville.

Next, we searched our digital newspaper collection (https://mcdl.info/newspapers). There we discovered that her surname is more frequently spelled as Kunkel and she was active in 4-H.

Lastly, we searched our digital yearbook collection (https://mcdl.info/yearbooks) and found her in the 1955 Medinians senior directory. As for her activities, she is identified as Farm Prosperity Queen for her junior year (1954).

The title of Farm Prosperity Queen aligns with the photo from MCHS, with her crown (on which you can make out the end of the word Prosperity) and her sign, A Handful of Hay Brings A Prosperity Day.

Courtney Benson, chairperson of the queen competition, said some 20 women of all ages have qualified for the title. Each represents their community, and a qualification is that they must have baled hay at least one time in their lives.

The winner will be selected just before the parade by three judges -- including Mike Wanko, son of the originator of the parade.

So, come on down and enjoy an old-fashioned parade.

Read more from the Medina Sun.
CLEVELAND HEIGHTS, Ohio -- The driver who fled the scene after causing fatal injuries to a Cleveland Heights man faces sentencing Thursday (July 6) in Cuyahoga County Common Pleas Court.

Derrick A. Matthews, 56, of Cleveland, pleaded guilty May 31 to charges of aggravated vehicular homicide, as well as failure to stop after an accident.

It was exactly four months after David Eisler, 66, died from injuries suffered as he was using the flashing crosswalk in front of the Heights Libraries Lee Road branch on the evening of Jan. 19.

David Eisler was a neighbor, father, husband, grandfather and avid library user, said Heights Library Director Nancy Levin, who plans to attend the hearing. His death has been a very difficult blow to the community and the library.

From her office, Levin watched the tragedy unfolding on the street below.

He followed all laws, hit the crosswalk button activating blinking lights and proceeded across the street, where a speeding car struck him and kept going, Levin said last month.

He was left in the street, where good Samaritans redirected traffic and called the police, Levin added.

She noted that the library provided police with some of its security camera footage for their investigation.

Matthews was arrested Jan. 25. He appeared in Cleveland Heights Municipal Court the next day, waiving his preliminary hearing, leading to his indictment by a Cuyahoga County grand jury Feb. 10.

Court records indicate that Matthews remained free after posting 10 percent of a $5,000 bond. He had a prior conviction after being indicted in November 1992 on a felony charge of failure to comply with an order or signal of a police officer.

He pleaded guilty to that charge in early 1993, received a 1 1/2-year suspended sentence and was placed on probation for a year.

Meanwhile, Levin said she had since met twice with Eislers widow, and the two of them still have a lot of questions about what happened and what can be done to prevent future injuries and deaths.

Other people have been struck or almost hit in this crosswalk, Levin said, adding that the library requested action from the city, including a traffic study, but had not yet gotten a response last month on whether one had been commissioned.

With the exception of the City Prosecutors Office, Cleveland Heights officials also declined comment for this story, although late last month, bright orange plastic lane markers were installed in front of the library and beyond along Lee Road.

Levin told council earlier that portable folding placards were set up in the middle of the road to alert motorists, but those got run over.

Further up at the intersection with Cedar Road, Sophia Villanueva, 22, was struck and killed while also legally crossing Lee Road around 7 p.m. Feb. 5. She was hit by a northbound motorist who ran the red light. He told police he was fleeing a road rage incident.

Levin believes a traffic light may be whats needed to get drivers to stop.

For now, Levin tells library staff to use the walking bridge across Lee Road to get from one building to the other.

Read more from the Sun Press.
CLEVELAND, Ohio  Cuyahoga County has agreed to settle a contentious lawsuit by paying a former jail inmate $250,000 after he accused guards of twice dousing him in the face with pepper spray for no reason.

Attorneys for Deonte James and county prosecutors reached the agreement during mediation last week. The settlement needs approval from Cuyahoga County Council.
CLEVELAND, Ohio  It is legal to set off fireworks from your home in Ohio, but many cities have their own laws banning the practice.

In 2021, state lawmakers passed House Bill 172, which allows people to discharge, ignite or explode fireworks on private property on certain days of the year, including the Fourth of July. These include firecrackers, bottle rockets and Roman candles.

Cities are allowed to opt out of the law, which went into effect last summer. Most Cleveland suburbs have decided to ban the private use of fireworks. Those caught shooting them off face misdemeanors. Other cities, like Cleveland, have had ordinances on their books for years that forbid it.

Maple Heights allows residents to possess and use bottle rockets and firecrackers on private property.

We follow the state law regarding fireworks, the citys police chief, Todd Hansen, said in an email.

Broadview Heights is one of the many Cuyahoga County suburbs that does not allow residents to set off fireworks.

We want everyone to have a safe and happy Fourth of July, but I will have extra officers on patrol to enforce our local ordinances regarding fireworks, said Steven Raiff, the citys police chief.

Broadview Heights will be having fireworks displays at its Home Days festival on July 6, 7 and 8.

Cleveland police are urging people to be safe if they use fireworks over the holiday weekend, even though they are illegal in the city. Forty percent of fires on Independence Day are a result of fireworks.

The discharge of, ignition or explosion of any fireworks, except novelty or trick fireworks, is a misdemeanor of the fourth degree, police said in a statement. Violations of this section after having been warned within 36 hours of a second occurrence are a misdemeanor of the third degree. Violations of this section during any dates of June 15 through July 15 inclusive are a misdemeanor of the third degree.

Many communities are hosting their own fireworks displays and other events to celebrate the holiday. Downtown Cleveland Alliances Light Up the Lake starts at 10 p.m. Tuesday with prime viewing locations from the Flats, Voinovich Park, Whiskey Island, Wendy Park, Edgewater Park and Kirtland Park.

Northeast Ohio cities that do not allow residents to shoot off fireworks:

Akron

Amherst

Avon Lake

Bay Village

Beachwood

Bedford

Bedford Heights

Berea

Brecksville

Broadview Heights

Brooklyn Heights

Cleveland

Cleveland Heights

Garfield Heights

Highland Heights

Euclid

Fairport Harbor

Lakewood

Mayfield Heights

Mayfield Village

Medina

Mentor

Middleburg Heights

Parma

Rocky River

Seven Hills

Shaker Heights

South Euclid

Strongsville

Tallmadge

Twinsburg

University Heights

Wadsworth

Warrensville Heights

Westlake
LOS ANGELES  Long-time Wheel of Fortune letter turner Vanna White is in negotiations to stay on the show after Pat Sajak retires at the end of the next season  negotiations that could include her first raise in nearly 20 years.

Sajak announced June 12 he would retire after the next season, which begins in September. Sony Pictures Television announced June 27 that Ryan Seacrest, who has made a career as an emcee, will take over as host for Wheel of Fortune when Sajak leaves in 2024.

Previous story: Wheel of Fortune names successor to legendary host Pat Sajak and its someone youll recognize

White, who has co-hosted with Sajak for four decades, is under contract for another year, and is in negotiations to continue with the show, The New York Times reported.

And she reportedly wants a significant raise.

According to Puck, White has been paid about $3 million a year for the last 18 years for her duties on the syndicated show. Sajak makes almost five times that amount. Sources told TMZ and Puck that she wants half of what Sajak is paid.

After 41 years as a model employee and more the face of that show than him [Pat], asking for 50% of what he makes seems like a no-brainer, a White source told TMZ. It reported the ongoing contract negotiations have been very difficult because Sony does not seem excited about giving her that big of a salary increase.

TMZ quoted the source as saying White loves her job and wants to stick around through Sajaks last season and into Seacrests tenure, she is willing to walk away if she does not receive a minimum of what is fair. The source described the pay parity discussion as a statement for all women.

The online site SheKnows, meanwhile, suggested White might be setting her sites too low. That is because Seacrest is rumored to be in the running for $28 million per year to host the show.

That would make him the highest-paid person on television, SheKnows reported, citing another $12 million a year Seacrest already is makes with American Idol, producing reality shows, including The Kardashians, and hosting Dick Clarks New Years Rockin Eve.
CLEVELAND, Ohio  Seventeen people were shot in Cleveland this past weekend, another chapter in a summer of gun violence.

Three people were killed in homicides, while two died by suicide, authorities said. The shootings took place from Friday morning to Sunday night.
Redistricting redux: On Friday, the U.S. Supreme Court ordered the Ohio Supreme Court to reconsider a July 2022 decision in which the Ohio Supreme Court rejected the congressional map Ohio used in last years election as unconstitutionally gerrymandered in favor of Republicans. As Andrew Tobias writes, the surprise decision could lead to a streamlined process for writing the final chapter in Ohios latest redistricting saga, allowing the court, which has a new makeup thats widely viewed as more Republican-friendly, to simply approve the map that previously was rejected. Some other outcome also is possible, such as Republicans asking the court to approve a more Republican-friendly map the previous court rejected in January 2022. Republicans hold 10 of Ohios 15 congressional seats, while the first rejected map would make it easier for them to win 13 of 15 seats.

Lets make a deal: Ohio lawmakers on Friday struck a compromise on a two-year budget that will see the state spend north of $190 million over the next two fiscal years. Jeremy Pelzer and Laura Hancock have details on what made it in  and what got tossed out  of the final plan, which is littered with other policy decisions that have little to do with state spending. The budget now goes to Gov. Mike DeWine for his signature and any line-item vetoes.

Rally round the flag: While Democrats and Republicans might choose to fly the flag of their preferred presidential candidate, polling suggests a similarly partisan divide around the U.S. flag  a traditional source of unity in the American melting pot, Sabrina Eaton reports. Republicans are somewhat more likely to buy U.S. flags than Democrats. It is a sign of honor and pride that we are Americans, and that goes for both conservative and liberal people, says Bill Quinn, owner of Quinns Flags in Eastlake.

Ethics (non)reforms: Former Ohio House Speaker Larry Householder was sentenced to 20 years behind bars last week for orchestrating what prosecutors described as the biggest public corruption scandal in Ohio history. The sentencing punctuated a three-year saga since Householders initial arrest, but Jeremy Pelzer reports the scandal that upended Ohio politics has resulted in no change in the ethics laws that state officials must follow.

Another one: Householders co-defendant, lobbyist Matt Borges, also was sentenced last week. Adam Ferrise reports that Borges, the former chairman of the Ohio Republican Party, was sentenced to five years in prison, where he was immediately remanded following a Friday hearing. The five-year sentence was the lower limit of what federal prosecutors recommended for Borges, who helped fight a repeal effort for the bill Householder and his allies delivered for Akron-based FirstEnergy Corp. as part of a $60 million bribery scheme.

Meeting the Press: Both of Ohios U.S. Senators were guests on Sundays Meet the Press where they discussed their work to fight the fentanyl epidemic. J.D. Vance, a Cincinnati Republican, told host Chuck Todd that areas like Ohio that lost manufacturing jobs during deindustrialization might have worse substance abuse problems when workers lost their livelihood, their sense of financial stability. Sherrod Brown, a Cleveland Democrat, called for an all the above approach to the problem. Its treatment. Its police work. Its sanctions. Its border protection. Its all that.

Breathing easier: Brown announced Friday that the U.S. Department of Labor is proposing to update federal standards to protect miners from health hazards that stem from exposure to silica dust, which causes Black Lung Disease. The proposed rule would require mine operators to maintain miners Permissible Exposure Limit to respirable crystalline silica at or below 50 micrograms per cubic meter of air for a full 8-hour shift exposure. If a miners exposure exceeds the limit, operators would be required to take immediate corrective actions. This new standard is a dramatic improvement that will mean fewer Ohio mineworkers get sick on the job, said Brown.

Untiring support: U.S. Rep. Emilia Sykes, an Akron Democrat, on Friday joined North Carolina Republican Richard Hudson in introducing a resolution that designated June 28  July 2, 2023, as National Tire Safety Week. The pair co-chair the Congressional Tire Caucus. Together, let us prioritize tire safety, making our nations roadways safer, one tire at a time, said a statement from Sykes that called her district the birthplace of the modern tire industry.

Full Disclosure

Five things we learned from the May 14, 2023, financial disclosure of Jay Edwards, a Nelsonville Republican:

1. His full first name is James.

2. In addition to his legislative salary, he disclosed income from eight different rental properties. Five of them brought in an amount ranging from $1,000 to $9,999 each, two of them brought in an amount ranging from $10,000-$24,999 each and one of them brought in less than $999.

3. All eight of his rental properties are in Athens County

4. He has no investments besides his state pension.

5. He disclosed 16 gifts. That includes one from Robert Cahaly, a Georgia-based Republican pollster; Brooke Bodney, a major Republican fundraiser; and Tom Rastin, a major Ohio Republican political donor

Tick-Tock

The countdown is on for the special election to decide State Issue 1, a state constitutional amendment that would make it harder to pass future amendments. Here are some key dates to remember.

Voter registration deadline... 7 days (July 10)

Start of early voting... 8 days (July 11)

Election Day... 36 days (Aug. 8)

Straight From The Source

Although Ohio has shifted much more in favor of Republicans over the last decade, Sherrod Brown still has enough state-wide appeal to make this a very close general election. We suspect all eyes will be on this contest as it very well could determine control of the United States Senate in November 2024.

Jonathan Morris, Senior Polling Scientist for the Center for Survey Research for Eastern Carolina University. The university released a poll, the first independent survey of the race, that showed Brown with a narrow lead, albeit one in the margin of error, over all three potential Republican opponents. A poll of the Republican primary meanwhile showed Secretary of State Frank LaRose with 17%, state Sen. Matt Dolan with 14% and Cleveland-area businessman Bernie Moreno with 7%.

Capitol Letter is a daily briefing providing succinct, timely information for those who care deeply about the decisions made by state government. Subscribe to get Capitol Letter in your email box each weekday for free.
CLEVELAND, Ohio  The United Church of Christ has elected the Rev. Karen Georgia Thompson as the first woman to lead the denomination as general minister and president.

The General Synod, the governing body of the church that is based in Cleveland, voted Monday to elect Thompson during its 34th annual gathering in Indianapolis with 626 delegates voting for her election, 43 against and seven abstaining. Thompson is also the first Black woman to lead the church.

Thompson is a Jamaican immigrant and is the third person of African descent to serve as leader of the denomination. She is the third woman nominated for the post, but she is the first to be elected.

Today, United Church of Christ, we created a first together, she said after the vote. It wont be the last first.

She will start her new role Aug. 1, taking over from the Rev. John Dorhauer, who has served for the past eight years.

Thompson has served in the National Setting of the United Church of Christ since 2009 as minister for racial justice and minister for ecumenical and interfaith relations. Prior to joining the national staff, she was on staff for UCCs Florida Conference, as a church planter in Florida and in family ministries in New York.

Thompson holds a doctorate in ministry, with a dissertation in religious multiplicity among African Caribbean people, from Seattle University; a masters of divinity from Union Theological Seminary; and a masters of public administration from North Carolina Central University.

As I stand here before you as your newly and duly elected general minister and president, I stand here as a Jamaican immigrant woman, a mother and a grandmother, a sister and a friend to many, Thompson said in a statement released through the church. The enormity of this moment will be with me for many years to come.
Serhii Zinko, a 12 year-old boy, waves a national Ukrainian flag to a military car on the highway near Lyman, Ukraine, Monday. AP-Yonhap



Ukraine on Monday reported making gains in the south and east over the past week in difficult fighting to dislodge Moscow's heavily entrenched forces.



While Russia's security service (FSB) said it had foiled an assassination attempt on the head of Crimea, a southern peninsula annexed by Russia in 2014.



Kyiv's troops, which have faced intense resistance in their counteroffensive launched last month, have urged Western allies for more military support.



"Last week was difficult on the frontline. But we are making progress," Ukrainian President Volodymyr said. "We are moving forward, step by step!"



Deputy Defence Minister Ganna Malyar noted that Ukrainian forces over the past week recaptured nine square kilometers (four square miles) in the east and 28 square kilometers in the south. (AFP)


Police officers patrol past some Chinese national flags set up for marking the 24th anniversary of Hong Kong handover to China at a street in Hong Kong Thursday, July 1, 2021. AP-Yonhap



China said on Monday it would slap export controls on two rare metals essential for the manufacture of semiconductors over security concerns, as Beijing and Washington tussle over the global market for chips.



Exports of gallium and germanium, of which China is a major producer, will require a license from August 1, according to a guideline issued by the Ministry of Commerce and China Customs.



The final recipient of the exports and the purpose of their use will have to be specified, the text said.



The need to "preserve security and national interests" was the reason for the measures, it said.



Gallium, which is found in integrated circuits, LEDs and photovoltaic panels for solar panels, among other things, is considered a critical raw material by the European Union. (AFP)


This story is part of CNBC Make It's Millennial Money series, which details how people around the world earn, spend and save their money. In 2018, Kate Brunotts moved to New York City right after graduating from high school to pursue her dream of working in music production. While growing up in a suburb of Washington, D.C., Brunotts always expected to go to college. But after reviewing the potential costs of attending music school in NYC, she ultimately decided against pursuing higher education. "I didn't really want to go into debt," she tells CNBC Make It. "There was definitely some social resistance, I would say. But at the end of the day, I was like, 'I've got to make the right decision for me.'" However, she knew she still wanted to move to New York, so at 15, she began working after school as a cashier at Wegmans, walking dogs and teaching music lessons in order to save up to move. By the time she graduated at 18, she had amassed around $10,000. Now 23, Brunotts works as a freelance music producer and audio engineer. She brought in around $48,000 last year and says she's on track to make more this year.

Getting started in NYC

Although Brunotts' $10,000 in savings felt like a lot, she quickly realized it wouldn't be enough to sustain her for long. "I was so excited to be here. But it was tight," she says. She found work as a barista, walked dogs and picked up an additional job at Guitar Center to make ends meet while producing music on the side. During her first two years in New York, she only earned around $20,000 a year, she says.

Kate and her partner, Matt. Kate Brunotts

Then she met her partner, Matt, who introduced her to freelancing. "I didn't know that that was a path that could exist, especially for someone like me who hadn't really pursued any higher education," Brunotts says. Brunotts began finding gigs through Upwork, a platform that connects freelancers with clients. She booked various jobs, including writing articles for a blog about dogs and creating meditation and instrumental music. Although she was getting paid to produce music, she wasn't making a lot of money. "One time, I made an hour of music and earned maybe $20," she says. "It was really bad."

Kate moved to New York full-time after graduating from high school and saving $10,000. Lauren Shamo | Maherzad Todiwala | CNBC Make It

But Brunotts kept at it. As she built up her portfolio and technical skills, she was able to increase her rates and take on more gigs. Currently, she has eight clients and provides a number of services, including copywriting, technical writing, podcast production and music production. As a copywriter, Brunotts develops marketing slogans and writes blogs posts for brands, and as a technical writer, she helps create manuals that provide directions on how to use certain products. However, first and foremost, she's a music producer, she says, which involves producing the tracks that artists sing over. "All the sounds that you hear behind the vocals, so like the pianos, the sound effects, all of those things, I am building the beats there." Brunotts usually works Monday through Friday, aiming to keep her weekends free to work on her own projects. She typically charges $45 to $55 per hour, depending on whether or not she's using her own equipment. Additionally, she factors in the 10% service fee Upwork charges freelancers who book clients through its platform.

Dealing with an unpredictable income

While Brunotts enjoys being able to control her own schedule, two of the biggest disadvantages of freelancing are having inconsistent income and needing to constantly look for work, she says. "With freelancing, it can be really hard to predict your income," she says. "Which is why it's so important to save anything that you can for a rainy day or for those drier months." Brunotts usually works on projects for at least two of her clients each day and aims to earn around $1,200 a week, or $4,800 a month. This can involve editing podcast episodes, producing meditation music, writing for blogs about music production and helping her clients set up their own studios.

When she has earned more than her weekly goal doing work for clients, Kate spends time working on personal music projects. Lauren Shamo | Maherzad Todiwala | CNBC Make It

Some months, she brings in far more: In April and May, she made about $6,700 and $7,150, respectively. Earning more than her weekly goal allows Brunotts space to work on personal projects. Once she hits $1,200 in a week, she'll often try not to take on more work so she can spend time producing, singing and performing her own songs. "It's important, at least where I am at now, to have that separation between art and what I do to survive and sustain myself," she says. "Decoupling that has really benefited me. And I think it benefits my art too, because I know at the end of the day my expression is not dependent on its perceived value in the outside world."

How she spends her money

Here's how Brunotts spent her money in April 2023.

Zoom In Icon Arrows pointing outwards

Discretionary: $1,200 for travel to visit parents, Target, pet insurance and Amazon purchases

$1,200 for travel to visit parents, Target, pet insurance and Amazon purchases Housing and utilities: $1,150 for her portion of the rent and utilities shared with her partner

$1,150 for her portion of the rent and utilities shared with her partner Studio time: $818 for recording and mixing music she makes herself

$818 for recording and mixing music she makes herself Food: $598 for per portion of the groceries and dining out expenses shared with her partner

$598 for per portion of the groceries and dining out expenses shared with her partner Roth IRA contribution: $542

$542 Transportation: $247 for subway rides, Lyfts and Citi Bike

$247 for subway rides, Lyfts and Citi Bike Phone: $74 for Google Fi wireless plan Brunotts also helped her partner cover $1,800 in tax payments this spring. After living with her partner for two years, it felt inconvenient for them to keep sending each other money through Venmo, she says. They decided to open a joint bank account, which they use to cover most household expenses. Brunotts maintains a personal account as well, and aims to keep at least $1,000 there at all times. She has one credit card, which she uses for most purchases in order to earn cash-back rewards, and is sure to pay it off in full each month. She still allows herself small treats though. "My one splurge is I budget for a bubble tea every week because I'm so passionate about it and it's amazing," she says.

Time is such a huge asset. It's not necessarily what you make, but it's what you do with it.

One of Brunotts' main money goals is to save for retirement, and she has nearly $9,000 stashed in her Roth IRA as of June 1. "Because I'm freelance, I don't have a 401(k) or any sort of retirement match, so I really need to be proactive and save for that myself," she says. "Time is such a huge asset. It's not necessarily what you make, but it's what you do with it. I've always been super conscious about setting aside whatever I can for retirement."

Her future in music and beyond

Brunotts is open-minded about what her future as a music producer and artist may look like. While it would be nice to create and perform her own music full time, she recognizes that it would also come with financial challenges. "You could be getting a million streams per month and just be above the poverty line because of the way that streaming culture has decimated artists earnings," she says.

Kate works from home as a music producer, enhancing sound quality for her clients. Lauren Shamo | Maherzad Todiwala | CNBC Make It
The U.S. is notorious for its abysmal stance on providing paid time off to workers. It's the only advanced economy in the world that doesn't have federal laws requiring paid leave for vacations or sick time, and as a result, many rely on policies that vary by employer. When left up to businesses, the average American worker gets just 11 days of paid vacation in their first year at a company, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. That bumps up to 15 days after five years of service, but pales in comparison to what's legally mandated in many other countries around the world. In a culture that prizes productivity, even workers who do get vacation days often leave them on the table. But for some people, the chance to move abroad, particularly to Europe, comes with a whole new outlook on taking paid time off from work. Krys Elexandra, 26, lived in Arizona and moved to Germany 18 months ago to explore Europe and because of her strong interest in German culture. She works in supervisory administration and financial guidance. Elexandra is entitled to 30 paid days off in Germany and was surprised to find it's "extremely easy" to request time off. Her longest vacation was a three-week stint to South Korea, and as it turns out, the most helpful thing she did at work to prepare was to provide transparency to the rest of her team, she tells CNBC Make It.

More than half of the email replies I receive are auto-replies stating that the person is on vacation until mid-July or August. Kimberly Sorce American living in Sweden

"Many times, when we take vacation in the United States, it's something that we consider private," she says. "In Germany, I was very vocal on where I was going and for how long so if anyone had any questions or was concerned about my absence, they knew why I would not be available for an extended amount of time." By the time she returned, she found "easing back into work was fairly easy. Almost all of the employees I work with were notified so my workload was paused until I returned."

Planning ahead for weeks off at a time

Kimberly Sorce, 32, grew up in New Jersey but moved to Malmo, Sweden, in May 2022 to be with her fiance who grew up there. She works as a business development representative for a tech company and is "still getting used to" 30 days of paid vacation each year. (Swedes are guaranteed 25 paid vacation days by law.)

Kimberly Sorce moved from New Jersey to Sweden in 2022 and works for a tech company. Courtesy of subject

Requesting time off is easy and pretty much always approved immediately  the only sticking point is planning in advance since it's expected that people take off several weeks at a time. "We had to put in our requests for our summer vacation weeks in April," Sorce says. She says her European coworkers and clients have a "general understanding that in the summertime, business will be slower and then pick back up in the autumn." During the summer, she says, "more than half of the email replies I receive are auto-replies stating that the person is on vacation until mid-July or August." Beyond that, the extent of Sorce's pre-vacation work prep is straightforward: "Just tell your co-workers when you will be on vacation so they know they aren't going to see you for a few weeks." Then, "set an auto-reply for your inbox and you'll be good to go."

Unplugging from work
Pan Gongsheng was named party secretary of the People's Bank of China on July 1, 2023.

BEIJING  The People's Bank of China announced Saturday that Pan Gongsheng, head of the country's foreign exchange regulator, would become the central bank's party secretary.

In a country ruled by the Communist Party of China, the party secretary of an institution typically holds the most sway.

Pan's appointment to the role comes as Beijing continues to unfurl leadership changes. The Party's twice-a-decade congress in October and an annual parliamentary meeting in March gave President Xi Jinping an unprecedented third term.

The PBOC's previous party secretary, Guo Shuqing, headed the China Banking and Insurance Regulatory Commission.

That institution was absorbed into the National Financial Regulatory Administration in a financial regulatory overhaul announced in March and is set to take effect this year. The administration's party secretary and director is Li Yunze, a rare minister-level appointee of the younger 1970s generation.
The European Union is looking to cooperate more closely with Japan on key technologies such as artificial intelligence, the bloc's industry chief said, as the coalition looks to reduce its reliance on China in certain areas.

EU Commissioner Thierry Breton is meeting with the Japanese government on Monday, and artificial intelligence will be "very high" on his agenda, he said in a video posted on Twitter on Sunday.

"I will engage with [the] Japanese government  on how we can organize our digital space, including AI based on our shared value," Breton said.

Breton also said there will be an EU-Japan Digital Partnership council, to discuss areas including quantum and high-performance computing. The EU held a similar council with South Korea last week, in which the two sides agreed to cooperate on technologies such as AI and cybersecurity.

Partnerships with key Asian countries with strong technology sectors come as the EU looks to "de-risk" from China  a different approach from that of the U.S., which has sought to decouple its economy from Beijing.

Part of that EU strategy involves deepening the relationship with allied countries around technology.

Breton told Reuters on Monday that the bloc and Japan will cooperate in the area of semiconductors. Japan is a key country in the semiconductor supply chain, and Tokyo has been looking to strengthen its domestic industry. Last week, a fund backed by the Japanese government proposed to buy domestic chipmaking firm JSR for around 903.9 billion yen ($6.3 billion).

The EU has also been looking to strengthen its own semiconductor industry across the bloc.
Traders work in the Frankfurt Stock Exchange, operated by Deutsche Boerse AG, in Frankfurt, Germany.

European stock markets closed slightly lower on Monday, shortly after ending the first half of the year 8.8% higher.

The pan-European Stoxx 600 index ended down 0.2%, with sectors mixed after a choppy session. Mining stocks led with a 2.2% uptick, followed by oil and gas stocks, which rose 1.6%.

Health care stocks were down 2% as AstraZeneca shares fell 8% after preliminary results from a lung cancer treatment trial fell short of analyst expectations.
India is the "best structural story" among emerging markets by far, according to Goldman Sachs strategist Sunil Koul. It's time for investors to consider getting back into India, Koul, who is vice president of Asia Pacific portfolio strategy at the investment bank, told CNBC's "Street Signs Asia" on Friday. "The amount of interest we are seeing, especially from global investors, is off the charts," he added. That's despite Indian stocks already soaring, with the country's benchmark indexes BSE Sensex and Nifty 50 soaring to new record highs on Friday, according to Refinitiv data. "Valuations are expensive, that's for sure," Koul conceded. "But we take comfort in the fact that the fundamentals are so strong, macros look very stable. You have earnings that are growing at 15% plus in the first quarter. Numbers are pretty strong." He advised investors to buy "every possible weakness." "I think you are still able to find some good quality companies at reasonable valuations," he added. Historically, India has a "very strong" track record of generating returns, according to Koul. He said that Indian stocks have a 16% compound annual return over the last 20 years in local currency terms, and 13% in dollar terms. That's twice the rate of broader emerging markets. As such, he described India as "the most fertile ground for picking stocks." It also has a high proportion of what Goldman analysts dub "multibagger" stocks, according to Koul. These share a number of traits including high realized growth rates, high capital return ratios and inexpensive starting valuations. What to buy Koul told CNBC Friday that he still likes banks, as valuations are less expensive. "Banks are the one sector that's still trading at mid-cycle valuations. They're gaining market share from non-banks," he said. Goldman Sach screened 25 large-cap Indian stocks for those with an attractive growth and valuation profile. Four banks meet its criteria: HDFC Bank , ICICI Bank , State Bank of India and Kotak Mahindra Bank. Shares of HDFC Bank and ICICI Bank are traded in the U.S. Global investors who want to gain exposure to Indian stocks including the State Bank of India might want to consider an India-focussed ETF, such as VanEck India Growth Leaders ETF. SBI accounts for 4.4% of the fund. Kotak Mahindra Bank is accessible via the Nifty India Financials ETF, where it makes up 4.3% of the ETF's holdings. Koul also likes names in infrastructure and cement, with UltraTech Cement and construction company Larsen & Toubro both showing up on Goldman's screen. UltraTech Cement is available to global investors via the ProShares MSCI Emerging Markets Dividend Growers ETF, where it accounts for 2.7% of holdings. Larsen & Toubro is held in the iShares India 50 ETF, with a 3.5% weightage.  CNBC's Michael Bloom contributed to this report.
For college students and young professionals looking to get their foot in the door of their target industry, a cold email is often the first step. It's a task that is often daunting, though  particularly for those without previous work experience. A cold email is an important way to network within your potential field of interest, Monster career expert Vicki Salemi tells CNBC Make It. Cold emails set you apart from other job applicants and allow you to demonstrate that you are willing to think outside the box. "When you email someone, you're building a relationship. Don't think of a job like a transaction. Think of it like a long-term relationship where you want to make and build strong connections to get your foot in the door," Salemi says. "Your peers and colleagues may not necessarily be doing this. So this is one way to stand out and connect with people who can help you and who can advance your career." To successfully send a cold email  and get on your dream company's radar  hiring experts share their tips in this step-by-step guide.

1. Do your research

Before hitting send, it is important to have done your homework, Salemi says. Think about whether the company has any job openings or if you are reaching out for informational purposes. "Determine what you are looking to get out of the email," she says. "Identify your goal: what is the anticipated outcome? Are you seeking an informational interview? An interview based on a job you recently applied to? A foot in the door? Once that's identified, you should be really clear in your email." In addition to determining what you are aiming to get from the email communications, it is important to determine the right person, or people, to contact. Often, a two-pronged approach is warranted and young professionals should consider reaching out to both recruiters and members of their target department, Salemi says. Above all, it is important to find specific points of contact at your target company. The key to avoiding the spam folder is finding a specific name instead of emailing "careers@company.com," Salemi says. "Identify who you're going to contact; definitely aim for a person rather than a generic email box."

2. Establish a connection

How to ace the art of the cold email? The key is a strong anchor point, founder and CEO of Career Strategy Lab Sarah Doody tells CNBC Make It. "Think of an anchor as the connection point between you and the person you're emailing. Maybe you met in person, have a mutual friend or conversed online. Mention how you know each other or how you're connected and you'll instantly increase the chances of someone replying," Doody says. "When I worked in recruiting and received cold emails, I did not pay close attention to them," Salemi adds. "Typically I responded with a generic response like, 'Thank you for your email, we are reviewing your resume and will get back to you soon if it's a fit.' But, I didn't have any time to invest in someone I already did not know or have a connection to." For the emails she received containing a point of connection, however  whether it be a shared experience or a recent conference she had attended  Salemi says she was much more likely to respond. "Connections are key," she says. "Leverage the subject line in the email. Something like, "Hello from an [insert alma mater name] alum" or "Networking via [insert mutual contact's name]" or the [professional industry organization]." Ultimately, Salemi says that warm emails, based on commonalities, are often more successful than cold emails. "Try to change your mindset from a cold email to a warm email," Salemi says. "Network your way to get your foot in the door so when someone receives that email, they have a connection to you." She adds, "You can still cold email. I'm not saying don't ever do it, but a warm email connection can increase the chances significantly of someone responding to you and engaging with you to help you advance to the next level."

3. Get to the point

Treat your email like a cover letter or an elevator pitch: it is your chance to quickly market yourself to recruiters and higher-level employees at your target company, Salemi says. "Go in with a specific ask. Don't ask to pick people's brains. Ask for what you want," Doody says. Like a cover letter, the email should highlight your ask, the two or three experiences that make you stand out and links to your professional accounts. "It should be succinct and highlight your strengths. The first sentence should be a friendly greeting along with your goal," Salemi says. "The middle section goes into your strengths and why they should be interested in speaking with you. Then, you should wrap it up with the anticipated outcome such as 'hope to hear from you soon.'" When it comes to the email, shorter is better, Doody says. "Keep the request short. Too many people write a novel and this is an instant turn-off. Instead, ditch the pleasantries and get to the point," she says.

4. Be patient
Workers are silhouetted against the setting sun at the Coastal Road Project construction site in Mumbai.

India is not the new China, and the emerging superpower is marching to the beat of its own drum and could "enjoy some very high growth years," said Riedel Research Group.

"[I'm] very, very bullish on India  they are doing all the right things and have a very high chance to outperform expectations in the next six to 24 months," David Riedel, CEO of the equity research and analysis firm, told CNBC in an e-mail.

"Definitely prefer India over China," he continued. "China's economy [is] much larger but this is a notable shift as India has perennially underperformed China."

Riedel also maintained that India is a "very different country" from what China is today and ever was.

According to Riedel, India is successfully maneuvering the middle income growth trap with a number of instruments in their toolbox, such as the monetization and digitization of their economy, as well as a change in their tax structure.

The middle income trap is an economic development situation where growing economies stagnate at middle-income levels and are unable to advance to the ranks of high-income countries.

"I think it has the chance to enjoy some very high growth years, and I think that's what investors should be looking for," he said in an interview with "Street Signs Asia" on Friday.

India is set to overtake Japan and Germany to become the world's third-largest economy before the end of the decade, according to forecasts from S&P Global and Morgan Stanley last December.

And some of the brighter spots could be found in the outsourcing and finance sectors.

"This is really the decade and expansion of Indian financial services," Manish Chokhani, director of Enam Holdings, told CNBC's "Street Signs Asia" on Thursday.

"The whole mutual fund business, the private sector banking business ... they really have a decade of growth ahead of them."
Stromness village in Scotland's Orkney islands. The iconic archipelago is considering the prospect of leaving Britain to become part of Norway.

An iconic archipelago off the northeast coast of Scotland is looking at ways it might split off from the U.K. and potentially become a self-governing territory of Norway.

Under new proposals brought forward by the local council, the Orkney Islands will explore "alternative forms of governance," including changing its legal status within Britain, as it seeks to provide more economic opportunities for islanders.

One potential route being considered could see the archipelago leverage its energy production capabilities  including an oil terminal on Flotta island and other renewable resources  to gain greater economic independence, according to council leader James Stockan, who brought the motion.

Stockan said that no thorough analysis of Orkney's contributions to the U.K. economy had been carried out and, as such, the islands had been "failed dreadfully" by both the U.K. and Scottish governments and neglected of fair funding.

"We know that we have contributed for the last 40 years through north sea oil, and the dividend we get back isn't sufficient to keep us going," he told BBC Radio Scotland.

Under the U.K.'s devolved system of government, Orkney, one of 32 council areas in Scotland, receives allotted funding from the Scottish government.

"We've got a unique opportunity right at the heart of all the wind projects round our waters," Stockan added.
A Siemens Gamesa blade factory on the banks of the River Humber in Hull, England on October 11, 2021.

Costly failures at wind turbine manufacturer Siemens Gamesa last month sent shares of parent company Siemens Energy tumbling, and analysts are concerned about wider teething problems across the industry.

The German energy giant scrapped its profit guidance in late June, citing a "substantial increase in failure rates of wind turbine components" at its wind division Siemens Gamesa.

Siemens Energy CEO Christian Bruch told journalists on a call Friday that "too much had been swept under the carpet" at Siemens Gamesa and that the quality issues were "more severe than [he] thought possible."

Siemens Energy stock plunged by around 37% on June 23, while other wind companies also saw shares retreat as investors worried that the problems at Gamesa might be a symptom of a wider issue for the industry.

Nicholas Green, head of EU capital goods and industrial technology at AllianceBernstein, told CNBC that the pace of expansion, and the fact that many components of larger turbines haven't actually been in use for very long, means there could be inherent risks throughout the sector.

"We have to acknowledge that putting brand new machinery  whether it's on-shore or even more difficult off-shore wind farms  and the pace of change in that machinery has put us into slightly uncharted territory," he said.

"Although it's hard to tell at the moment, my best guess is that this probably actually is an industry-wide issue. It wasn't that Siemens Gamesa is a bad operator as such, it's that actually some of the normal protocols and time in use, operational data in use, is relatively limited."

Siemens Gamesa's board is now due to conduct an "extended technical review" into the issue, which is expected to incur costs in excess of 1 billion euros ($1.09 billion). The company's shares have recouped some losses, but remain down over 33% in the last month.

A tough two years

The wind industry has expanded rapidly over the past two decades, lowering costs to rival  and sometimes undercut  those of fossil fuels, while boosting efficiency with ever-bigger turbines and reducing reliance on state subsidies.

"These cost reductions have been achieved with innovations in turbine technology and by pushing the boundaries of engineering," Christoph Zipf, spokesman for industry body WindEurope, told CNBC via email.

He said that 20 years ago, a typical wind turbine would have 1 million watts of capacity; today, European original equipment manufacturers, or OEMs, are testing 15 MW turbines.

"This means that turbines have become bigger as well, posing challenges to components (quality, materials, longevity). The introduction of competitive auctions has also been a driving factor in this cost reduction," Zipf added.

The Statistical Review of World Energy report published last week revealed that wind and solar power accounted for 12% of the world's power generation last year, with wind power output increasing by 13.5%.

The industry was hit hard by the Covid-19 pandemic, as resulting lockdowns depressed industrial activity and reduced global energy demand. The ensuing supply chain problems then hampered OEMs.

These manufacturers have since endured a further shock from soaring inflation and input costs as Russia's invasion of Ukraine disrupted markets and aggravated supply chain disruptions. WindEurope estimates that the rise in commodity prices has increased the price of wind turbines by up to 40% over the last two years.

"OEMs were sourcing some material from Russia (mostly nickel) and Ukraine (mostly steel). The price of both skyrocketed after the invasion. This comes on top of the challenging inflationary environment all European businesses are operating in (i.e. rising electricity prices, etc.)," Zipf explained.

"A main problem for the OEMs is that not all countries had indexed their renewables auctions. Consequently wind turbine orders were not necessarily indexed to inflation. The time between the order intake and the commissioning of a wind turbine can take up to 18 months (especially when supply of materials is short)."

However, Zipf denied that industry-wide technical failures could be on the horizon, insisting that "the problems at Siemens Gamesa are limited to Siemens Gamesa."

"Big turbine failures are extremely rare given the number of turbines installed in Europe already. However, the competition in the sector is pushing OEMs to come up with bigger and better turbines at a fast rate, may be faster than in other sectors," he said.

He also challenged the notion that the industry has entered "uncharted territory," arguing that the changes in turbine technology have been "incremental and evolutionary."

"Naturally every new turbine model comes with new challenges, requires rigorous testing and certification. But the European wind industry has overcome all of these challenges and maintained its reputation for delivering highly reliable high-quality turbines," Zipf said.

Facts and figures

According to ONYX Insight, which monitors wind turbines and tracks over 14,000 across 30 countries, most turbines are designed and certified for 20 years but contain components that will fail during that time due to a "compromise between the cost of the system and reliability."

"We have been aware for some time that turbine failure rates across the industry can  and should  be more widely understood, given the scale of their potential impact on the overall profitability of projects," Evgenia Golysheva, vice president of strategy and marketing at ONYX, told CNBC.

"It's not that they are made badly, but we now have a compromise between the cost of energy and targeted reliability. Everyone who builds, finances and operates wind turbines needs to have a realistic picture of how many failures to expect."

In turbines built in 2023, more than 40% of gearboxes will need to be replaced after 20 years of project life, according to ONYX, along with over 20% of main bearings and more than 5% of blades.

Across the wind industry, around 65% of operations and maintenance costs are unplanned, according to ONYX. It projects that major corrective spending will rise to $4 billion by 2029.

"The growth of wind installations has been unprecedented, and the industry has had to scale up very quickly with little time to digest it. It's not a capacity issue, and it's not new, but it is good that OEMS (who are under pressure from supply chain and from inflation) are bringing this conversation into the public domain," Golysheva explained.

"It's a conversation that is overdue, because the underlying issues aren't going away. For example, wind turbine rotors are getting bigger, the turbines are getting bigger, and the development cycles are short, so it's crucial to have digital and other diagnostic tools to be able to deal with reliability issues."
In this photo illustration, the Tesla, Inc. logo is displayed on a smartphone screen.

Check out the companies making headlines in premarket trading.

Tesla  Tesla shares popped nearly 7% after the electric vehicle company posted second-quarter delivery and production numbers that topped Wall Street's expectations. Deliveries rose 83% year over year.

Electric vehicle stocks  Electric vehicle stocks rose broadly after Tesla posted strong-than-expected production and delivery numbers for the second quarter. Rivian added 3.2%, while Fisker and Lucid gained more than 2% each.

Xpeng  U.S.-listed shares of the Chinese electric vehicle company popped about 7% after beating its delivery forecast and logging a 27% quarter-on-quarter increase following more than a year of declines. Other China-based EV stocks Nio , Li Auto rose more than 4% each on solid delivery numbers.

Apple  The iPhone maker's stock dipped 0.4% following a report that Apple plans to scale back Vision Pro headset production. Apple shares closed above a $3 trillion market cap on Friday.

AstraZeneca  Shares of the drugmaker fell 5.7% in premarket trading after AstraZeneca announced preliminary results for a phase three trial of a lung cancer treatment. While the drug compared well to a competitor on one endpoint, the data for overall survival was "not mature" and pointed toward to the results being not statistically significant, AstraZeneca said in a press release. The trial will continue, according to the company.

United Airlines  The airline stock traded marginally higher before the bell even after the carrier bared the brunt of the flight delays occurring nationwide over the holiday weekend.

Chinese internet stocks  Shares of China-based technology stocks gained before the bell, lifting the KraneShares CSO China Internet ETF . Alibaba , Pinduoduo and JD.com shares gained 1.9%, 3.2% and 3.1%, respectively. The gains came amid news that Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen is planning to meet with senior Chinese officials in Beijing later this week.

Energy stocks  Energy stocks gained in premarket trading, lifted by a rise in oil prices after top exporters cut supply for August. Halliburton and ConocoPhillips added about 1% each. Chevron , Devon Energy and Occidental Petroleum also moved higher.

 CNBC's Jesse Pound contributed reporting
Moscow's combat position in the war in Ukraine will not be impacted by the loss of troops belonging to Russian paramilitary group Wagner, according to a senior Russian defense official.

Wagner forces were integral to Moscow's advance in Kyiv before the group staged an attempted insurrection at the end of last month, damaging relations with the Kremlin's top military brass irreconcilably.

The failed rebellion propelled Wagner leader Yevgeny Prigozhin into exile in Belarus and the militia group said it has now suspended recruitment as it relocates to the country.
Dwayne ''The Rock'' Johnson and John Cena in action during WrestleMania XXVIII at Sun Life Stadium on April 1, 2012 in Miami Gardens, Florida.

Wrestling legend John Cena surprised fans with a pitch to hold WWE's largest live event Westlemania, the so-called "Super Bowl of wrestling" that has never taken place outside of North America, in London.

WWE brought its premium live event called Money in the Bank to London's O2 arena on Saturday, in its second major event in the U.K. in the last year.

Cena, a 16-time world champion in WWE and now Hollywood movie star, shocked fans with an appearance at Money in the Bank, after a near three-month absence.

The crowd erupted as his tell-tale entrance music hit, but Cena arrived not to fight  but to pitch to hold Wrestlemania in London.

"It's not up to me, it's up to the decision makers. They don't necessarily know how to feel about London," Cena told the packed O2 arena which booed at the suggestion.

"They think this is kind of a hostile environment," Cena said, to which the crowd replied with a louder chorus of boos.

"They think that sometimes you guys are a distraction. They even think that you guys try to take over the show," Cena said, to which the crowd cheered loudly in agreement.

"You see that? They don't know what they're talking about. You are the voice. You are the heartbeat. You are not trying to take over the show. You are the show," Cena said.

"So I am here to try to bring Wrestlemania to London."

The fans erupted in cheers once more.

"Take a moment right now, let them see, let them feel, let them hear what WrestleMania is going to sound like in London," Cena added.
Metro Manila (CNN Philippines, July 3)  The country saw 2,747 new COVID-19 cases from June 26 to July 2, the Department of Health (DOH) reported Monday.

An average of 392 infections nationwide were recorded per day, reflecting a 20% decline from the week before.

The latest tally included 32 patients in severe and critical condition.

Meanwhile, 442 severe and critical cases are in hospitals, representing 10.8% of total COVID-19 admissions in the country.

The DOH also verified in the past week two deaths due to COVID-19, both of which occurred prior to June 19 to July 2.

As of July 2, more than 4.16 million COVID-19 cases have been confirmed in the country since the pandemic began, with over 4.09 million recoveries and at least 66,000 deaths.

The number of active cases is at 6,925.

Some 78 million people, or all of the target population, have been vaccinated against COVID-19. Meanwhile, 23 million people received booster shots.

Around 7.1 million senior citizens, or 82.16% of the target A2 population, received primary doses.
Metro Manila (CNN Philippines, June 3)  President Ferdinand Marcos Jr. said on Monday 30 buildings will be put up in San Fernando, Pampanga to house more than 8,300 families as part of the Pambansang Pabahay para sa Pilipino (4PH) program.

Siniguro natin na malapit ito sa mga ospital, schools, recreational facilities, pamilihan, he said in his speech before inspecting the ongoing construction of the 9.8-hectare project in Barangay Del Carmen, Crystal Peak Estates.

[Translation: Were making sure that the sites are near hospitals, schools, recreational facilities, and markets.]

The government said it has also in the pipeline housing projects in Minalin and Candaba towns also in Pampanga, designed for over 10,000 families.

According to the Department of Human Settlements and Urban Development, the projects would accommodate families in the public and private sectors, including overseas Filipino workers, employees of the local government, the Department of Education, the Philippine National Police, and the Armed Forces of the Philippines.

The government has broken ground in 28 areas nationwide for the housing program.

The 4PH aims to address the housing backlog estimated at 6.5 million units.
Metro Manila (CNN Philippines, July 3)  The local government of Pasig City is planning to construct a new city hall as the existing one is no longer structurally sound.

Pasig City Mayor Vico Sotto made the announcement during the 450th Pasig Day on Sunday.

Ang city hall natin, ang apat na building na bumubuo ng city hall ay structurally unsound, he told his constituents during the event.

[Translation: Our city hall, the four buildings that make up the city hall are structurally unsound.]

The city government tapped a consultant to look into the issue. The findings showed that 62 columns and 451 girders and beams of the city hall are structurally inadequate.

Sotto also said that some parts of the city hall sustained cracks and liquefaction even before he sat as mayor.

The local chief executive said he consulted with more than two dozen engineers and architects, and no one recommended retrofitting the city hall.

Hence, the city government will be building a new one, he added.

Sotto said he is envisioning a city hall that has a playground, evacuation center, senior citizen center, and mega market, among others.

The local government said it will look for a place where city employees will temporarily work once the construction begins.

Sotto said negotiations for the construction of the new building are underway.

The whole construction may take 10 years to be completed, but the city hall itself may be built in two years, he noted.
Metro Manila (CNN Philippines, July 3)  Senator Jinggoy Estrada is urging the Senate to investigate fake online advertisements using celebrities to endorse food and health products as they pose danger to public health.

"The circulation and proliferation of fraudulent online advertisements are clear and blatant violations of the Consumer Act which penalizes dissemination of deceptive and misleading advertisements," Estrada said in a Senate resolution dated June 26.

"There is an urgent need to protect consumers against the consumption of unregistered and potentially harmful food and health products through strict enforcement of the provisions of the Consumer Act and regulation of fraudulent advertisement in social media platforms," he added.

Estrada cited recent incidents where health reform advocate Dr. Tony Leachon and cardiologist Dr. Willie Ong became victims of the fake ads.

Leachon's name and picture were used to make it look like he was personally endorsing Grandsure Gold nutrient drink which supposedly prevents osteoarthritis. Glufarelin milk, claiming to be a cure for diabetes, also used Leachon and the National Institutes for Health (NIH).

Estrada said the products were not registered with the Food and Drug Administration (FDA), and Leachon and the NIH have already denied endorsement.

Ong, on the other hand, was seen endorsing a "miracle food" and the Golden Gout Colostrum, supposedly a top product to treat gout but also not registered with the FDA.

CNN Philippines was also victimized in the advertisement of the latter product as it used part of an episode by the network and placed Ong's photo on the thumbnail.

Estrada noted there were posts and impostor pages that also promoted unregistered products that feature Ong and his wife Dr. Liza Ong with the logo of the Department of Health and an FDA-approved mark. Celebrities Sharon Cuneta and Kris Aquino were also seen to be used in this kind of ads, the senator added.

"There is a need to identify and plug possible loopholes in our prevailing laws and regulations, and update their provisions, considering the extensive employment of social media platforms and the cyberspace, as well as the alarming use of maliciously manipulated images, spliced videos, and fabricated statements, in the promotion of food and health products," Estrada said.
Metro Manila (CNN Philippines, July 4)  A group of Cebu public officials signed a manifesto in support of Tourism Secretary Christina Frasco, claiming that the "Love the Philippines" fiasco is a form of "sabotage" and "demolition job" against her.

"Given the circumstances, it is not difficult to see that the goal of all this is to sabotage the great accomplishments of the Department of Tourism (DOT) Secretary, who continues to deliver for the administration of President Ferdinand "Bongbong" Marcos Jr., the manifesto read.

The officials, including 11 representatives and 53 provincial mayors, also asserted that the criticisms directed at the campaign and the errors in the promotional video is a "demolition job" against Frasco.

"We maintain that this barrage of criticisms in social and mainstream media is aimed at destroying neither the DOT nor the concerned private advertisement agency, but Secretary Christina Garcia-Frasco herself," it said.

"We strongly believe this demolition job to be perpetrated by individuals with their own questionable agenda, perhaps to sway the trust and confidence of President Marcos in a Cebuana," it added.

The manifesto also said that Frasco is an "asset" to the Marcos administration and ranked second as top performing cabinet official next to Interior Secretary Benhur Abalos Jr. in a recent survey.

The officials further tagged the criticisms as "patent mudslinging," "dirty politicking" and "black propaganda" against Frasco.

The DOT is investigating the "Love the Philippines" campaign video after netizens pointed out that "non-original shots" of locations outside of the country were used in the video.

Frasco earlier told CNN Philippines' The Source that the DOT spent 49 million for the "Love the Philippines" campaign.
Metro Manila (CNN Philippines, July 4)  Four Chinese fugitives are scheduled to be deported this week after being apprehended at XinHuang Network Technologies, a Philippine offshore gaming operator (POGO) hub in Las Pinas City where a series of anti-cybercrime raids were conducted last week.

According to Philippine National Police (PNP) spokesperson Police Colonel Jean Fajardo, the fugitives have existing arrest warrants in China for fraud and drug trafficking.

The PNP has admitted that the entry of fugitives to the country has been a long-time problem. Law enforcers are coordinating with the Bureau of Immigration to prevent it from repeating. Authorities are also investigating how the foreigners were able to work in the POGO hub

Meanwhile, the camp of rescued POGO workers condemned the alleged abuse carried out by the police during the raid.

"Kung nag-attempt sila na tumakas [If they attempted to escape], is the use of force  excessive force  allowed action in doing so? the POGO firms legal counsel Ananias Vargas said. "Nakahandusay na 'yung tao, binabatuta pa rin ng pulis [The person was on the ground but was still being hit]. What do you call that?"

READ: Over 2K workers rescued in POGO hub raid in Las Pinas

The PNP said proper operational procedures were followed during the raid. Fajardo added that officers from Human Rights Affairs were also present during the operation, and the process was done with "utmost respect for human rights."

"We categorically deny (the abuse). 'Yung mismong (the) Las Pinas local government unit, they provided ambulance and medical team to treat victims na naka-incur ng (that incurred) minor injury because they attempted to escape," Fajardo said.

Around 1,200 foreign workers are still subjected to profiling in coordination with embassies in the country.

The PNP said charges of violation of the Anti-Human Trafficking Law and Cybercrime Prevention Act of 2012 have been filed against the five Chinese believed to be involved in irregularities in the POGO hub.
Today is July 3, 2023, and here's what you need to know:

The Colorado Supreme Court this week wrapped up its calendar of oral arguments and weekly releases of decisions until the fall, leaving behind a roster of major rulings and edicts affecting the administration of justice.

Chief Justice Brian D. Boatright said at a lawyers-and-judges conference in May that during the past year, the state's highest court has granted review of fewer cases through the traditional route of certiorari, or "cert," but has increased the percentage of cases it hears directly from the trial courts, bypassing the Court of Appeals.

At the same time, the Supreme Court has been quicker to process the appeals it hears, which Boatright attributed to better communication between justices about the issues prior to the drafting of an opinion.

"Collegiality is at an all time high. We like each other," he added.

Colorado Politics compiled a list of the most consequential things the Supreme Court did between September and June  and also, what it notably did not do.

In early July, the Colorado Supreme Court will reach an unusual milestone: going 2.5 years without a new justice.

While 30 months may not seem like a long stretch, it is, in fact, the largest interval any of the court's current members have experienced without a seat turning over, beginning with Justice Monica M. Marquez's appointment in 2010 and ending with the addition of Justice Maria E. Berkenkotter in 2021.

"For court watchers like me, its certainly easier when you dont have to learn the legal views of a new judge," said Christopher M. Jackson, an appellate attorney with Holland & Hart. "There will be a little more predictability in terms of where the court is going, but it also means there wont be any 'fresh blood' to shake things up for quite a while."

The state's highest court is populated with seven people who are nowhere near the mandatory retirement age of 72. Barring a resignation, a return to private practice or an elevation to the federal bench, the seven justices who are in their 50s or early 60s will comprise the Supreme Court for the next decade.

The demographics of the current court have already played a role in a new system for selecting the chief justice. Previously, the chief justice would remain in that role until retirement. That method allowed the late Chief Justice Mary Mullarkey to serve for 12 years  the longest in history  until stepping down in 2010.

Demand for abortions continues to tax Colorado providers, as out-of-state women travel here for services because of legal restrictions where they live, following last years U.S. Supreme Court ruling on Dobbs v. Jackson Womens Health Organization.

About 2 in 5 women seeking abortion services from Planned Parenthood of the Rocky Mountains have been from out of state since the June 24, 2022, ruling, said Fawn Bolak, regional director of communications and marketing.

Its been an all-hands-on-deck type of mentality since the Dobbs decision, she said.

A majority of justices held that the U.S. Constitution does not confer a right to abortion and overturned the 1973 Roe v. Wade ruling, which reverted control of abortion law to individual states.

As the first state to allow legal abortion in 1967, Colorado has a history of being an abortion sanctuary and today boasts one of the country's most lenient abortion laws.

The Democratic-controlled legislature further bolstered reproductive rights this year with three new laws that expand health insurance coverage for abortion, protect abortion and gender-affirming care patients and providers in Colorado from penalties from other states and prevent deceptive advertising at crisis pregnancy centers.

Nearly two dozen Denver County Court judges will not be impacted by any reform to the states judicial discipline system should voters approve the proposal next year.

Thats because Denvers 19 county jurists  each appointed by the mayor and apart from the 27 Denver district court judges named by the governor  fall under an autonomous city judicial discipline commission different from a state panel that oversees everyone else.

That means while 339 district and county court judges across Colorado must comply with any change to the states system of discipline, Denvers county court judges will still answer to another  one that strongly mimics the very methods voters are being asked to reform in 2024.

The city's commission can continue to hold hearings in secret, continue to act as prosecutor and jury on any case it brings against a Denver county court judge, or even allow the mayor to sit in judgment, despite any potential conflict of interest.

Denver commission officials told The Denver Gazette theyre waiting and watching to see what happens with the statewide vote and would likely take up similar changes after that, a process that could take months and require another vote of the citys electorate.

After the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that a Christian website designer, along with businesses that create speech, do not have to serve LGBTQ customers if the desired message violates their beliefs, policymakers in Colorado are pondering whether changes to the state's anti-discrimination law are warranted.

Currently, the Colorado Anti-Discrimination Act (CADA) makes it unlawful for businesses open to the public to refuse service on the basis of sexual orientation and other protected characteristics. The Supreme Court's conservative majority, however, determined Colorado cannot compel speech-based enterprises to create objectionable content. In the case of 303 Creative v. Elenis, that meant wedding websites celebrating same-sex couples.

"I am still reviewing the full opinion and can't comment on specific changes to CADA until I have done that," said Rep. Mike Weissman, D-Aurora, who chairs the House Judiciary Committee. "However, it's pretty clear to me that this ruling from the arch-conservative U.S. Supreme Court will cause more Coloradans  and more Americans  to experience discrimination in places of public accommodation, and that's tragic."

At a press conference on Friday, Attorney General Phil Weiser said he will attempt to "limit the impact" of the decision and "ultimately overturn" it, but he declined to endorse any amendments to CADA itself in light of the new exception for purely expressive services.

"Were gonna work to limit the impact of that loophole as much as possible. But from we have seen thus far, we dont see the need to change the nature of our anti-discrimination laws," he said.
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By Katelyn Sattler

Staff Writer

A bill winding its way through the Ohio Statehouse would require public utilities (water, sewer, electricity, gas, and refuse) to shift the costs from landlords to municipalities.

Ohio House Bill 93, Regards limits on recovery and lien imposition by municipalities, was introduced on March 7. The bills sponsors, state representatives Mark Johnson (R-Chillicothe) and Riordan McClain (R-Upper Sandusky), have been contacted by constituents who have had their tenants unpaid utility bills attached to their property tax total, which is allowed in Ohio law.

This bill aims to correct this by removing the option to place a property tax lien due to services not contracted by the property owner. The property owner could only be held liable for the amount that, when unpaid, would result in a municipal utility services provider terminating that service. The sponsors want to make sure that tenants are held responsible for their delinquent payments.

Obetz City Administrator Rod Davisson, representing the Ohio Municipal League and the approximately 1,100 municipalities in Ohio, gave opponent testimony to the bill on June 13. Davisson empathized with the landlords and gave an example of a landlord in Obetz during COVID (when billing was stretched out to 120 days) that was left with a bill of $2,000. However, that landlord ultimately had to pay the bill because, We (Obetz) run electricity, gas, and particularly water and sewer, on a thin margin. Theres no profit in it. We make just enough money to be able to pay to run the utility and then occasionally upgrade the system. Theres not a lot of leeway in there to take big losses as a municipality.

Davisson said the way Obetz cured the problem was to create a double billing system.

We bill the landlord and tenant at the same time so that landlords have the opportunity to see whether or not their tenants got behind on the utility payments, said Davisson. The landlords have contracts with the tenants that we dont have and they can evict their tenants for non-payment of these types of utilities. Cities and villages really dont have that kind of power. We just turn off the water and we dont turn it back on until someone pays the amount of money that we need. Some of our landlords also take the approach that they just bill the utilities with the rent.

Davisson believes HB 93 infringes on a municipalitys Home Rule authority.

And also, the municipalities have pretty broad power when it comes to utilities under Article 18, Section Four|Acquisition of public utility; contract for service; condemnation (of the Ohio Constitution), said Davisson.

State Representative Jennifer Gross (R-West Chester) asked Davisson how the bill interferes with existing service contracts between municipalities and landlords, introducing a degree of uncertainty and potential instability and municipalities might refuse to provide services.

Davisson said, You generally dont make laws that interfere with contracts. We understand from the constitution that there are 1,100 municipalities in the State of Ohio, and you probably have 1,100 different versions of how this goes. Because they have Home Rule, because they have the constitutional authority to create their own utilities, theyre really unregulated for the most part. And so they each have their own way of doing things. And some of them have contracts with the homeowners, some of them have contracts with the tenants. We all do it differently. And so when we try to pass the law that affects all 1,100 of them, its hard to predict which ones of those we will create an impairment of their contract with. Some it may not, some it may, but there are 1,100 choices out there to try to figure it out.

HB 93 is still in the House State and Local Government Committee.

For information on HB 93, go to https://www.legislature.ohio.gov/legislation/135/hb93/status, or go to https://www.legislature.ohio.gov to sign up to track the bill.

To watch Davissons testimony, go to https://ohiochannel.org/video/ohio-house-state-and-local-government-committee-6-13-2023.
(Posted July 3, 2023)

By Kristy Zurbrick, Madison Editor

Broken Horn Rodeo has added a ninth event to their lineup for this years Madison County Fair Rodeo which will take place July 8 at 7:30 p.m. Its called chute dogging, and its for amateurs onlyno pro cowboys allowed.

We put one of our bull dogging steers in a bucking chute. As soon as the steer clears the gate, you have to throw it down on its side, explained Jim McElroy who owns Broken Horn with his wife, Sandra.

The event is geared toward fair visitors who want to get in on the rodeo action. Anyone 18 or older is welcome to enter. Prizes go to the winners.

Another fun add-on is the kids stick horse races which take place at intermission. Entrants run around four cones; the fastest win prizes. There are two age groups: 5 years old and younger; and 6 to 9 years old. There is no entry fee.

The rest of the show lineup includes: saddle bronc riding, bareback horse riding, steer wrestling, tie-down calf roping, barrel racing, team roping, bull riding, and cowgirls break-away roping. These events are open to pros and amateurs. Anyone younger than 18 must have a notarized waiver from their parents. The call-in date to enter is July 3, 9 a.m.-5 p.m. Central Standard Time, (903) 287-7852. Those who want to compete must call on this date and time, no exceptions.

All entry fees go back into cash prizes for the winners. Broken Horn adds $500 to each event to complete the purse money. Additionally, those participating in rodeo circuit competitions earn a point for every dollar they win; those points count for national standings for finals.

Broken Horn Rodeo is based out of Ripley, Ohio, near Cincinnati. Founded in 1991, the business is sanctioned by the International Professional Rodeo Association and the American Professional Rodeo Association. This year, Broken Horn is doing 22 shows, traveling around Ohio and to Kentucky, Illinois, Indiana, Michigan, Nevada, Oklahoma, and Tennessee.

In conjunction with the rodeo, the Madison County Fair Board is sponsoring a mechanical bull from 6 to 9 p.m. Anyone can ride for free. Children and adults are welcome.

Fairgoers are welcome to get autographs from cowboys, bull fighters, and the rodeos funny man if they are available.

Admission to the rodeo is free with paid admission to the fair.

For details, look for Broken Horn Rodeo on Facebook, send email to brokenhornroado1@gmail.com, or call (513) 309-5371.
By now, virtually everyone agrees that powerful generative AI needs to be regulated. In its various forms, it presents a variety of potential dangers: helping authoritarian regimes, thanks to its ability to create misinformation; allowing Big Tech firms to establish monopolies; eliminating millions of jobs; taking over vital infrastructure; and  in the worst case  becoming an existential threat to humankind.

One way or another, governments around the world, including the regulation-averse United States, eventually need to set rules about how generative AI can and cant be used, if only to show theyre taking the dangers seriously.

Any such rules couldnt be more important, because without sufficient guardrails in place soon, it may be too late to stop AI's spread.

Thats why Microsoft is pushing so hard for government action  that is, the kind of government action the company wants. Microsoft knows its AI gold-rush time, and the company that stakes its claims first will end up the winner. Microsoft has already staked that claim, and now wants to make sure the federal government wont interfere.

Not surprisingly, Microsoft President Brad Smith and OpenAI CEO Sam Altman have become the feds go-to tech execs for advice on how to regulate generative AI. That puts Microsoft, which has invested $13 billion in OpenAI, in the driver's seat  its a safe bet Altmans recommendations align with Smiths.

What exactly are they advising the government do? And will their recommendations truly rein in AI, or will it be mere window dressing?

Altman becomes the face of AI

More than anyone else, Altman has become the face of generative AI on Capitol Hill, the person elected officials call to learn more about it and for advice on regulations.

The reason is simple: OpenAI created ChatGPT, the chatbot that revolutionized AI when it was unveiled late in 2022. Just as important, Altman has carefully courted Congress and presents himself not as a tech zealot, but as a reasonable executive who only wants good things for the world. Left unsaid is the billions of dollars that he, his company, and Microsoft stand to gain by ensuring that AI regulation mirrors what they want.

Altman began a charm offensive in mid-May that included a dinner with 60 members of Congress from both political parties. He testified before many of the same members on the Senate Judiciary subcommittee on privacy, technology and the law, where he was lauded in terms usually reserved for important foreign dignitaries.

At the hearing, Committee chair Sen. Richard Blumenthal (D-CT)  normally a critic of Big Tech  enthused: Sam Altman is night and day compared to other CEOs. Not just in the words and the rhetoric but in actual actions and his willingness to participate and commit to specific action.

Altman focused primarily on the apocalyptic, up to and including destruction of humankind. He asked that Congress focus their regulations on these kinds of issues.

It was a bait-and-switch.

By focusing on legislation for the dramatic-sounding but faraway potential apocalyptic risks posed by AI (which some see as largely theoretical rather than real at this point), Altman wants Congress to pass important-sounding, but toothless, rules. They largely ignore the very real dangers the technology presents: the theft of intellectual property, the spread of misinformation in all directions, job destruction on a massive scale, ever-growing tech monopolies, loss of privacy and worse.

If Congress goes along, Altman, Microsoft and others in Big Tech will reap billions, the public will remain largely unprotected, and elected leaders can brag about how theyre fighting the tech industry by reining in AI.

At the same hearing where Altman was hailed, New York University professor emeritus Gary Marcus issued a cutting critique of AI, Altman, and Microsoft. He told Congress that it faces a perfect storm of corporate irresponsibility, widespread deployment, lack of regulation and inherent unreliability. He charged that OpenAI is beholden to Microsoft, and said Congress shouldnt follow his recommendations.

Companies rushing to embrace generative AI care only about profits, Marcus warned, summing up his testimony succinctly: Humanity has taken a back seat.

Brad Smith weighs in

A week and a half after Altmans appearance before Congress, Smith had his turn calling for AI regulation. Smith, a lawyer, joined Microsoft in 1993 and was put in charge of resolving the antitrust lawsuit brought by the US Justice Department. In 2015, he became the companys president and chief legal officer.

He knows his way around the federal government quite well, so well that Altman met with him for help on how to formulate and present his Congressional proposals. Smith knows it so well that the Washington Post recently published an insidery, adulatory article about his work on AI regulation, claiming, His policy wisdom is aiding others in the industry.

On May 25, Smith released Microsofts official recommendations for regulating AI. Unsurprisingly, they dovetail neatly with Altmans views, highlighting the apocalyptic rather than the here-and-now. The only specific recommendation was one no one would disagree with: Require effective safety brakes for AI systems that control critical infrastructure.

Thats a given, of course, the lowest of low-hanging fruit. Beyond that, his recommendations were ones only a lawyer could love, full of the kind of high-minded legalese that boils down to: Do nothing, but make it sound important. Things like, Develop a broad legal and regulatory framework based on the technology architecture for AI, and pursue new public-private partnerships to use AI as an effective tool to address the inevitable societal challenges that come with new technology.

In fairness, Smith did later note a few significant issues that need to be addressed: deep fakes, false AI-generated videos designed for disinformation; the use of AI by foreign cyber influence operations, the kinds of activities that are already taking place by the Russian government, the Chinese, the Iranians; and alteration of legitimate content with an intent to deceive or defraud people through the use of AI.

But he offered no regulatory proposals for them. And he left out all the other myriad dangers posed by AI.

Will the cavalry come from Europe?

The US is generally anti-regulatory, especially with technology. Lobbying by Microsoft, OpenAI, Google and others will likely keep it that way. So it may be that Europe, more willing than US leaders to tackle Big Tech, will be the one to address AIs dangers.

Its already happening. The European Union recently passed a draft law regulating AI. Its only a starting point, and the final law likely wont be finalized until later this year. But the early draft has sharp teeth. It requires AI developers to publish a summary of all copyrighted material used to train AI; calls on AI developers to put in safeguards stopping AI from generating illegal content; ensure that face recognition be curtailed; and ban companies from using biometric data from social media to build their AI databases.

Even more far reaching is this, according to The New York Times: The European bill takes a risk-based approach to regulating AI, focusing on applications with the greatest potential for human harm. This would include where AI systems were used to operate critical infrastructure like water or energy, in the legal system, and when determining access to public services and government benefits. Makers of the technology would have to conduct risk assessments before putting the tech into everyday use, akin to the drug approval process.

It would be difficult, if not impossible, for AI companies to have one system for Europe, and a different one in the US. So, a European law could force AI developers to follow its guidelines everywhere around the world.

Altman has been busy meeting European leaders, including Ursula von der Leyen, president of the European Commission (the executive branch of the European Union), trying to rein in those regulations, so far to no avail.

Though Microsoft and other tech companies may think theyve got the political leaders in the US under control, when it comes to AI, Europe may be where they meet their match.
Businesses are likely to accelerate their adoption of Windows 11 next year, as the 2025 Windows 10 support deadline trumps underlying economic concerns.

Almost two years after the operating systems launch, the total installed base for Windows 11 stands at around 25% to 30%, said Linn Huang, research vice president for devices and displays at IDC. That lines up with the most recent StatCounter figures, which put Windows 11 adoption at 29%  still far behind Windows 10s 67%.

Huang expects Windows 11 adoption to reach an inflection point early in 2024. I think, ballpark, we're probably a quarter to a third of the way there in the total installed base [now]. But we're really going to see a strong movement on that starting at the turn of this calendar year, into the next year, he said.

Many businesses have already started moving some users to 11, said Huang. Anecdotally, its a mixed bag at this stage: many clients are more than halfway through their migration, he said, while some have completed the move, and others havent yet begun.

In Microsofts Q3 earnings call in April, Satya Nadella said 90% of Fortune 500 companies are trialing or have already deployed Windows 11. The picture is likely to be different for smaller firms, which tend to move to the latest OS more slowly due to upgrade cycles, said Ranjit Atwal, a research director at Gartner.

The bulk of business Windows migrations usually occur 18 to 24 months prior to end of support (EOS) date for the outgoing Windows version. For Windows 11, that date is set for October 2025. While theres no significant lag at this stage, macroeconomic concerns mean businesses migration "is not going gangbusters either, said Huang.

We think a lot of this would have happened in earnest Q4 of this year, but the macros have punted a lot of projects into '24, said Huang.

Despite initial concerns about new hardware requirements for Windows 11, the operating system is well-received by users and IT, he said. But the launch of the OS in late 2021 came about at a really awkward time from a market perspective.

The first involved supply-chain issues brought about by the COVID-19 pandemic; more recently, theres been a slump in demand for PCs amid an uncertain economic environment.

Assuming the economic environment gets better, budgets get released and then Windows 11 gets increased adoption, said Atwal. The question then is if the economic environment doesn't get better, do they still move to Windows 11 next year?

Delaying migration until 2025 is unlikely at this point, Atwal said, as businesses would risk missing the end of support deadline and have to pay for extended support.

One potential danger for Microsoft involves businesses that might be looking to other platforms, with Apple devices gaining traction in the enterprise. In a lot of these instances, Windows 10 PCs might not get migrated to Windows 11. MacOS is coming on very, very strong, said Huang.

ChromeOS is less of a competitor these days, however. Four years ago, I would have told you that Chrome was also a threat to eat some of that Windows install base, but we've really seen a slowdown in Chrome growth at the enterprise level.
A Zimbabwean was found with E2,8 million cash (about US$153 000) at King Mswati III International Airport.

King Mswati III International Airport is located in Sikhuphe, 50km from Manzini. Masiyakurima Agrippa Bopela (Masiya), entered the kingdom last Monday with the equivalent of E2 897 183 in US dollars and attempted to leave the country the following day with the cash after a local bank reportedly declined him permission to deposit the money.

After police officers stationed at the airport seized the money, the director of public prosecution (DPP) swiftly ran to court for an order to have it formally kept by the police pending further investigations into its source and destination. It is suspected that the money was obtained through illicit means, it is proceeds of ill-gotten activities, money laundering or possibly to finance terrorism. The police are reportedly suspecting that the Zimbabwean, who is purportedly a well-known businessman in his home country, was working with high profile local people hence the need for further investigations.

In the urgent application to formally seize the money, which the DPP moved in terms of the Prevention of Organised Crime Act (POCA) 2018, she related how the Zimbabwean was caught, his attitude towards the police during their preliminary investigation and the suspicions the law enforcer had about the source of the money.

Narrating events leading to the recovery of the money, Head of Asset Forfeiture Unit under the DPP Office, Principal Crown Counsel Elsie Matsebula, submitted that upon arrival at the airport, Masiya (46) went through the immigration processes and thereafter moved to the Department of Eswatini Revenue Services (Customs), where he declared an amount of US$153 000 (E2 820 000). Upon completion of the declaration process, said Matsebula, the Zimbabwean was released to go with the cash.

She told the court that the information about the bulk cash amount was received by investigators based at Lubombo Regional Police Headquarters in Siteki under the Financial and Economic Crimes Money Laundering and Asset Forfeiture Unit.

According to Matsebula, on the following day, Masiya was back at the airport to fly out of the country. A police officer, Sergeant Delisile Vilakati, who was at the Central Screening Point, noticed that Masiya had cash in his bag, submitted Matsebula.

She said the officer asked Masiya if he had declared the cash and he indicated that he had done so when he arrived in the country the previous day. Matsebula said Vilakati informed Masiya that he was supposed to declare it again when departing.

Masiya was taken back to the Customs desk where he handed the cash to the officers and it was counted. It totalled US$153 860. US$3 860 was in Masiyas pockets. Vilakati then asked him for the source of the cash before she appended her signature on the declaration form. Masiya failed to produce the source of the funds. She then reported the matter to her superiors. The cash was seized, submitted Matsebula.

The financial investigators were informed about the arrival of Masiya back at the airport with the cash and they rushed there. Among the team were Detective Sergeant Steven Mlambo and Detective Inspector Msibi. They were called to make preliminary financial investigations about the money in issue. Matsebula submitted that the investigators enquired from Masiya about the reasons to carry such a huge amount as well as the source of the cash.

The principal Crown counsel stated that Masiya developed an attitude and became aggressive towards the officers. She said he was against being questioned about the cash and this led to an argument between him and the officers.

She averred that another Zimbabwean  a holder of Eswatini citizenship  who was accompanying him, Dr Godfrey Gandawa, intervened and informed Masiya about the need to cooperate with the financial investigators, who were carrying out a legal mandate. Matsebula said the intervention calmed investigators down and he told the investigators that he was a businessman.

He told them that he went to First National Bank in Manzini to deposit the cash but they refused, telling him he was not allowed to make such a bulk deposit, but he could split the cash into denominations of US$5 000 (E94 250) and deposit same on a daily basis. He then left the bank since he could not stay in the country for so many days for such a process to be carried out, said Matsebula.

This information, according to Matsebula, was confirmed by Masiyas attorney at Siteki Magistrates Court when an attempt was made by the investigators to detain the cash in terms of Money Laundering and Financing of Terrorism (Prevention) Act 2011. A magistrate ordered that the US$3 860, which was in his pockets, be released to him for his personal expenses.

During the questioning at the airport, submitted Matsebula, Masiya sent some documents through WhatsApp to Sergeant Mlambo, which he argued were in support of the claim that the source of the cash was a legal business. However, Masiya is said to have been unhappy when Sergeant Mlambo asked for some time to download the documents and he allegedly quickly deleted for everyone the information he had sent to Mlambo. The information remained stored in the sergeants phone.

Matsebula informed the court that the investigators seized the cash and told Masiya to proceed with his flight. He refused to leave the country without his cash. Instead he made frequent calls on his cellphone, Matsebula stated. The declaration form he completed when he arrived last Monday reflected that he was declaring an amount of US$150 000 and the source of the funds was allegedly Business Group Bopela Eswatini. In the declaration form, Masiya completed when he was about to exit the country, he neglected completing the part on the source of funds, the court was told. Matsebula submitted that Masiyas conduct did not show that he was an astute businessman. She submitted that an online search showed that there was a company named Bopelo Eswatini.

The investigators went to the company premises in Matsapha as reflected online and found a company by the name of Eswatini Scafolding Framework. It is, however, brought to the attention of the court that the cash was imported into the country and an attempt to deposit it was made. Further it was being taken out of the country when it was seized.

It is difficult to believe that the local company is a source of this cash property. An enquiry was made with the Eswatini Revenue Service and the information received was that the company registered as a taxpayer in 2020 but it never filed any returns, said Matsebula. She added that an online search showed that Masiya was a well-known businessman in Zimbabwe. However, she stated that it was clear from his actions that he entered Eswatini to try and launder the cash by attempting to place it within the banking financial system. According to Matsebula, when Masiya failed, he quickly tried to leave the country with the cash.  Times of Swaziland.
After a pilot program that lasted six months, the US Federal Reserve System plans to launch its FedNow real-time payment system in July. But many banks and businesses could be caught flatfooted when it launches.

The central banks payment and settlement rail is designed to increase liquidity, especially for small businesses and supply chain participants who can get paid instantly for goods and services. It also creates a new way for employees, especially gig and hourly-rate employees, to get paid more quickly and frequently  perhaps every day.

The new system will allow banks, businesses, and consumers to send and receive payments in 10 seconds, any day. As with other payment systems, there are fees associated with the service, and banks will have to decide who foots the bill  merchants, consumers, neither, or both.

"Banks aren't 24/7 in their operations today," said Debbie Buckland, a director analyst in financial services for Gartner Research. "So, they'll have to have procedures set up to accomodate that liquidity management that happens in the middle of the night. Becasue if you give your customers the ability to do their banking in the middle of the night, they're going to do it."

Initally, FedNow will allow banks to send and receive payments; Other capabilities, such as allowing consumers to identify themselves by phone number and email only in order to make payments -- as Venmo now allows  is expected to come later.

"You have to have a vehicle for customers  both consumers and businesses  to initiate a real-time payment," Buckland said. "That means adding that functionality to their digital and mobile channels. You need to be able to upgrade your product or turn on that service."

Consumers who want an instantaneous way to make payments, whether it's for a retail product or a mortgage installment, will need to use an app or banking platform once their financial services provider offers it.

There are two primary differences between FedNow and traditional payment systems such as automated clearinghouse services (ACH) and wire transfers, such as Western Union or the Feds own Fedwire service. ACH transactions settle just once at the end of a business day, and they settle in batches  not individually. Wire transfers are faster, but charge higher user fees. Wires are also not used for multiple or traditional batch transactions, and theyre still not real time; they can take several minutes or several days for remittances or cross-border payments.

For consumers not familiar with the ACH payment system, it's the funds transfer system used when employees sign up for direct deposit, make eChecks payments or authorize automatic payments to be deducted from their banking accounts.

FedNow is not a replacement for existing ACH and wire networks, but an additional payment option when real-time payments and settlements are needed.

Existing payment systems will be challenged by FedNows efficiency, and while the impact will be significant, its not likely to supplant other systems, according to Aaron Press, research director for Worldwide Payment Strategies at IDC.

Electronic payments are growing fast enough in general that, even if other systems lose share, they wont necessarily stop growing, Press said. But, theyre not taking this standing still. Every other payment system [operator] is thinking about how to position against FedNow. Even the [Federal Reserve] is thinking about the impact of FedNow on its own Fedwire service.

The new system also means banks that adopt it will have to adjust to a 24/7 world where merchants or consumers might want to transfer funds between different third-party accounts at odd hours of the day or night. It also means banks wont have a full business day, as they do now, to go through know-your-customer, anti-money laundering, and anti-fraud processes. Those processes will have to be automated for real-time discovery.

For many banks, 'a real shift'

For a lot of banks, this is a real shift in operational thinking, Press said. The margin of error is significantly smaller. The time to do things manually is essentially gone. Were hearing a lot from banks and vendors who offer automation that theres an increasing demand for automating a lot of tasks and workflows to better handle real-time messages.

From a corporate standpoint, the use of FedNow is not just about being able to pay faster; it can be about paying slower or determining the last possible moment a payment must go out. For businesses that pay millions of dollars day in and out, holding onto money until it must be paid can amount to earnings.

If you have an invoice with advantageous terms to pay at a certain time, you want to submit at last possible moment, Press said. FedNow gives you a lot of control over when precisely you pay. If those same invoices are paid over ACH, theres some uncertainty to that.

Retail merchants and others who want to offer consumers an instant-payment option will have to work with their payment providers, such as FIS, Fiserv, Jack Henry and Q2 to ensure the point-of-sales (POS) system has the proper APIs and ensure their systems are properly connected.

The FedNow instant-payment system will use the new ISO 20022 global financial messaging standard, meaning banks will need to be sure they can submit messages in that format. Many banks may already have the ability to submit messages through ISO 20022, because FedNow is actually the second real-time payment system.

In 2017, a consortium of banks called The Clearing House launched the Realtime Payments network or TCH RTP. But the network failed to achieve wide adoption because smaller banks were wary of using a payment system backed by their larger competitors. However, TCH RTP does use the ISO 20022 standard.

At its core, FedNow serves as an interbank instant-payment infrastructure. Banks, credit unions, and other eligible institutions have accounts at the Federal Reserve that allow them to hold reserves. Banks pay each other by transferring reserves from the paying banks Fed account to the receiving banks Fed account using several interbank payment options. FedNow is a new addition to the suite of options to make such transfers.

Sam Aarons, co-founder and CTO of middleware payments provider Modern Treasury, said the payments industry is excited about the promise of FedNow. Modern Treasury provides the translation layer for corporate accounting systems to transfer funds over a network using API calls systems. Bank systems are sorely outdated, however, and still rely on technology from the 1970s and 1980s.

"Thats also why Modern Treasury is excited about FedNow, because it is going to force a lot of people into figuring out what is a modern technology stack for payments," Aarons said. "As I like to say, what is a business day if money can arrive and leave your bank account 24/7, 365 [days a year]? Are you going to have accountants stay up at midnight to close the books? You need to change the software for your company thats looking at the precipice of that."

While integration with FedNow is one issue, moving payment systems to be real-time is the bigger problem, according to Aarons.

"Where we usually see the hiccups is in fraud checking and [Know Your Customer]," he said. "A lot of those systems throw up a red flag when there's a questionable transaction, and then you have a day and a human can look at this payment. When youre trying to send out payments in 10 seconds, you have to automate that or make your decision quickly. 'Yes, I can send this out,' or 'No, I cant send this out.'"

A gig workers dream

One advantage to using FedNow is that organizations who employ gig or hourly workers can pay them at the end of a shift because the money transfers instantaneously. Today, when a gig worker is paid, its through a credited system and the actual money doesnt transfer from bank to merchant until the next day. Gig workers, however, will need a bank account to be paid, versus a payroll debit card as many use today.

The United States is a follower in rolling out a central bank-based instant payment system. Forty to 50 other countries have already implemented same-day payment systems  and their uptake was fast, quickly reaching nearly ubiquitous use.

For example, Brazils Central Bank launched the Pix instant payment system in 2020; within a year, it had reached more than 100 million users and today it serves more than 150 million people. That suggests FedNow will be quickly adopted across banking and business sectors.

Theres a good reason for the quick uptake. When businesses are making thousands of payments a day to distributors and suppliers, it behooves everyone to get their money faster. Like Brazil's Pix, FedNow will allow companies to pay vendors, contractors, or any business partner instantly. And it will enable better cash-flow management because funds are instantly available, allowing for faster reinvestment.

Because most US companies now use the ACH system to make and receive payments, they experience next-day clearing for batch transfers, or they pay extraordinarily high fees for faster wire transfers.

"FedNow represents huge advances for the businesses of today that are moving money around," Aarons said. FedNow is an opportunity to deliver a great consumer experience, but also one for banks as well. Its a really good opportunity for the US to catch up with the rest of the world.

"I think there's going to be a big lift-off when FedNow launches, and the hope is to get to universal coverage that we have with ACH and wire," Aarons said.
IN a huge breakthrough for the Second Republic led by President Mnangagwa the power utility, Zesa, says the country no longer needs a load-shedding schedule as it is now able to produce enough electricity from its power plants with minimal imports to meet demand by domestic and industrial consumers.

The successful implementation and completion of Hwange Thermal Power Station Units 7 and 8 expansion projects, which are now undergoing the final synchronisation phase, coupled with the establishment of solar parks by Independent Power Producers (IPPs) and improved output from Kariba Hydro-Power Station, has recently pushed total domestic generation capacity above 1 500MW on average when compared to less than 600MW in March this year.

The improved power generation capacity has drastically reduced load-shedding across the country and excited the productive sector, which is now able to plan operational schedules and guarantee smooth industry outcomes.

Yesterday, the Zimbabwe Power Company (ZPC) in its daily update indicated that total power generated stood at 1 443MW with Kariba producing 875MW, Hwange adding 535MW, and Harare and Munyati thermal power stations contributing 21MW and 12MW respectively.

In line with its infrastructure and utilities priority projects, the Second Republic has committed a lot of resources towards increasing power generation hence the benefit now being enjoyed by industry and domestic consumers. Captains of industry and commerce believe the improved electricity supply in the country is a key deliverable for economic growth as it will boost production, increase capacity utilisation and reduce production costs. Due to load shedding several businesses had opted for expensive diesel generators and those who did not would incur long hours of no production.

In a recent interview in Bulawayo, Zimbabwe Energy Transmission and Distribution Company (ZETDC) acting managing director, Engineer Howard Choga, said given the milestone improvement in power generation and supply, there is no need for a load-shedding schedule.

You will notice that in the past two to three weeks, we have not been shedding at all, therefore, under those circumstances, there will be no need to have a load-shedding schedule, he said.

Our projection is that we are not going to be shedding going forward, at least in the medium term, said Eng Choga, adding. If we are not shedding it means we are getting enough for the consumers.

On imports, Eng Choga said: At the moment we are getting 100 megawatts from South Africa, and from Mozambique, we have two sources that is Hidroelectrica de Cahora Bassa (HCB) of Mozambique, which is giving us 50MW and EDM 10MW. Thats enough for the demand in the country.

With improved power generation, the business community has started feeling the positive impact expressing hope that the situation will continue to stabilise, thereby guaranteeing enhanced production and supply of goods. This is a significant departure from the acute power shortages experienced in the past years, which have crippled production across various sectors of the economy while the use of generators as an alternative source of energy was said to be costly and not sustainable.

Last week, Energy and Power Development Permanent Secretary, Dr Gloria Magombo, said the coming in of Units 7 and 8 in Hwange, which are undergoing technical commissioning ahead of commercialisation, have greatly improved the power situation. Built at a cost of about US$1,5 billion, the Hwange Thermal Power Station Unit 7 and 8 expansions, is one of the Second Republics signature projects aimed at boosting power generation.

Unit 7 and 8 will provide a combined 600MW to about 1 500MW being produced from major thermal and hydro projects. It is one of the flagship projects being implemented under the Second Republic in line with Vision 2030, which aims to transform Zimbabwe into an upper-middle-income economy.

The countrys economy is on a rebound due to various policies initiated by the Government that have seen growth in the mining and agricultural sectors.

Several other power generation projects are at various stages of implementation. Added to that, a steadily growing population, rapid rural-to-urban migration, and nascent economic recovery  driven by new mining projects  have spurred demand for power in the country. Herald
Older comedy fans love to chide their younger counterparts about the hypersensitivity of modern comedy clubs, but I dont remember Don Rickles ever telling a paying audience member to shoot yourself in the fucking head.

New York comedian Ashley Gavin is one of the breakout stars of the burgeoning TikTok stand-up scene, having parlayed her online persona into sold-out shows across the country. A mainstay of multiple comedy podcasts and host of the show We're Having Gay Sex, Gavins acerbic, aggressive style has earned her a respectable online footprint alongside her work on more traditional comedy platforms like Netflix, Hulu and Comedy Central. Like many comics who have found success through the new channels of content distribution, crowdwork and audience participation at her live shows have comprised a large part of her digital brand  as well as her biggest controversy.

Late last month, TikTok user Olivia Neely, a self-identified suicide survivor, posted a video in which she explained an upsetting experience she had at Gavins performance at the Helium Comedy Club in Indianapolis on June 16th, during which Neely says that Gavin berated her for breaking the tension during a joke set-up and repeatedly yelled at Neely to un-alive myself, a TikTok euphemism for kill yourself that can slip past the platforms watchful censors.

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Neelys video quickly went viral, amassing more than three million views and numerous responses from Gavins fanbase expressing their shock at their favorite comics explosive reaction to a crowd member misreading the room mid-performance. Pivotally, Neely says that, before the show began, Gavin expressly asked the audience to not hold back, to just laugh and be loud. Then, when Gavin mentions that shed had an abortion in the middle of the set, Neely, in her own words, shouts, Woo! breaking the tension that Gavin had hoped to create for a punchline.

Audio recordings of Gavins response to Neelys interruption circulated on TikTok before being removed by the site, but a transcript of Gavins rant published by The Daily Dot corroborates Neelys version of events in explicit detail. That was the most virtue-signaling piece of dogshit Ive ever seen in my entire life, Gavin tells Neely in the recording. That is the most  in a comedy club? Everyone here is pro-abortion. Kill yourself. Go kill yourself.

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When a shocked Neely said that shed attempted suicide in the past, Gavin continued, I dont care. Youre an annoying person. Try harder to kill yourself. You just interrupted the tension that I was building into the joke. Your mother shouldve aborted you.

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After Neely and her friend walked out of the performance, Gavin seemed to pull back, shouting at waitstaff to comp their tickets and drinks before addressing the remaining audience, Im just doing my job. I cant have people woo-ing in the middle of every fucking joke. The job is tension. Thats the job, I have to do that. Im very sorry if my kill yourself jokes hurt her, but she volunteered the information to me.

In recent weeks Gavins fanbase has responded to the rant with outrage as countless followers flood her social media accounts with demands that Gavin address the altercation and apologize to Neely. Gavin, however, has remained silent on the incident, with no new tweets since the Indianapolis show and a sparse couple of videos in the following days, all of which have been brigaded with comments such as, Do you play the ukulele by any chance?
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'Unmanned civilian airship' over US not for spying, China repeats

(People's Daily App) 15:27, July 03, 2023

It was an entirely unexpected accident when a Chinese balloon drifted over the US in February, Chinese foreign ministry said again on Friday.

"As China has stated on many occasions, the unmanned Chinese civilian airship drifting over the US was caused by force majeure," Ministry of Foreign Affairs spokesperson Mao Ning said at a routine press briefing in Beijing in response to a US statement that the balloon did not collect intelligence.

Pentagon spokesman Brig. Gen. Pat Ryder told reporters at a briefing on Thursday: "We believe that (the balloon) did not collect while it was transiting the United States or flying over the United States."

Mao said that to call the device a "spy balloon" that collected intelligence was nothing but a false accusation.

(Web editor: Zhang Kaiwei, Liang Jun)
The clocks on board still stand at 15.01. It was the precise moment when the late Queen, accompanied by most of the Royal Family, left the Royal Yacht Britannia for the last time, closing a remarkable chapter in our maritime history.

That was back in December 1997, on a day which left the Queen in tears as she watched Britannia being decommissioned. Since then, the Yacht has become an award-winning tourist attraction at the Port of Leith, outside Edinburgh.

Last night, the King was back on board for his first visit since that sad farewell. He remembered the deck games, the picnics, the concert parties and, above all, the crew. Around 50 former Royal Yachtsmen, known as 'Yotties', had turned out for last night's reception.

'I just want to thank all you marvellous old Yotties for keeping this going,' he told them as they all enjoyed a tot (or two) of rum up on the Verandah Deck. They responded with multiple three cheers and a distinctly unroyal 'Oggy Oggy Oggy! Oi! Oi! Oi'  much to the King's amusement.

More than a quarter of a century after Britannia's retirement, these former crewmates still gather on board for an annual week of unpaid maintenance work just to keep the Yacht looking as smart as ever.

The King returned to the Royal Yacht Britannia nearly a quarter of a century after the Queen left in tears as she watched it being decommissioned

Royal 'Yotties' cheered King Charles's emotional return to the Yacht Britannia on Monday afternoon

Then Prince of Wales Charles leaves Gibraltar on the Royal Yacht Britannia with the late Princess Diana for their honeymoon cruise, 31st July 1981

The Royal Yacht Britannia carrying Queen Elizabeth II, Prince Philip, Prince Charles and Princess Anne in Gibraltar in 1954

Around 50 former Royal Yachtsmen, known as 'Yotties', had turned out for last night's reception

Last night's visit was the King's way of thanking them. 'The galley's still going? You haven't lost your touch?' he asked former leading cook Jeff Stoddard, 73.

'I remember being fascinated by the 'pschhh' noise,' he said as he looked inside the old laundry.

He was delighted to find the engine room still gleaming.

'Those engines could run again right now,' former chief petty officer David Rushforth, 73, told the King.

'He kept saying how much he appreciated the way the working party still come back after all these years,' said the Yacht's last skipper, Commodore Anthony Morrow.

The King is in Edinburgh for a week of official engagements, notably tomorrow's cathedral service where he will formally receive the Honours of Scotland.

As a five-year-old prince, he had been Britannia's very first royal passenger, along with his sister, Princess Anne, when they sailed out to the Mediterranean in 1954 to meet their parents.

The King always loved life aboard the Yacht, whether on a major tour or cruising around the coast of Scotland.

The King always loved life aboard the Yacht, whether on a major tour or cruising around the coast of Scotland. Pictured: Staff stand to attention for the King's arrival

Last night's visit (left) was the King's way of thanking the Yotties for taking care of the yacht after all this time. A young Charles, then Prince of Wales, is pictures with his sister, Princess Anne, and their parents Queen Elizabeth II and Prince Philip on-board the yacht in 1956 (right)

King Charles waves as he leaves the Royal Yacht Britannia - which was one of the most famous vessels in the world

The King was delighted to find the engine room still gleaming. Here, he is pictured being shown it by a royal yachtsman

Bob Downie, chief executive of the Royal Yacht Britannia (L) with King Charles during a tour of the Royal Yacht Britannia

Members of the Royal Yacht Britannia toast King Charles III during a tour of the Royal Yacht Britannia

A piper plays a lament piper aboard the Royal Yacht Britannia, moored in Leith, Edinburgh, ahead of the funeral of Queen Elizabeth II on September 19, 2022

Britannia was one of the most famous vessels in the world  and she saw most of it, too, during 43 years and more than a million miles at sea. In wartime, she was supposed to be a hospital ship (hence her huge laundry and operating theatre). In peacetime, she would be a palace-cum-embassy.

The Royal Family loved to join in the weekly quiz competition and even the concert parties, performing a sketch or a song. Charles took part in plenty.

Britannia would also go on to become a very effective showroom for British business, generating billions through commercial events.

Finally, in 1997, the great voyage was over. The then-prince was invited to address the farewell dinner. It was the shortest speech of his life.

'I just want to get blindly, madly drunk,' he said, and sat down to thunderous applause. No further explanation was needed. Last night, you could understand why.
One Sunday last December, it was snowing when I finally admitted it to myself: I had made a dreadful mistake in buying an electric car.

I was driving through a blizzard in heavy traffic on the M6 to collect my mother, who was coming to stay with us for Christmas.

My middle daughter had insisted we listen to an audiobook throughout the interminable journey  on the motorway I hate most in the world.

The wipers on my Renault Zoe were struggling against the snowfall  and even though it was 2pm, the headlights were on.

The farther north we travelled towards Mum's home in Lytham St Annes, the lower the temperature outside dropped. The car's heater was on full blast  and its battery was draining before my eyes.

NADINE DORRIES: One Sunday last December, it was snowing when I finally admitted it to myself: I had made a dreadful mistake in buying an electric car (stock image)

My 'range anxiety'  always present when I was at the wheel  was in overdrive. Just 30 per cent was left, so perhaps a few dozen miles given how the heater was sucking up all the power.

'Where are the chargers in Lytham?' I asked my daughter.

She checked her phone. 'There's one in Booths supermarket car park  only the app says it isn't working.'

I can't repeat my reply.

Available fast chargers, I had come to realise, more or less vanished north of the Watford Gap. That wasn't in any government policy paper I had read.

And the thing is, I had really wanted an electric car.

I loved the fact that the noise on my street in London had fallen so much over the past few years, as electric cars are so much quieter than their petrol equivalents.

I support the push to cut Britain's carbon emissions to 'net zero': it's a policy that's creating thousands of jobs and helping the environment. Cleaner air means we, our children and grandchildren can live longer, healthier lives.

I used to support the Government's target to ban the sale of new petrol and diesel vehicles by 2030, too  but that was before a pandemic, before Putin invaded Ukraine and before the cost of electricity shot through the roof.

Now, I believe that the target should be delayed. The cost of charging an electric car is bad enough  but the infrastructure to power millions of them simply isn't there.

Even in London, as I learnt with my Renault, finding a working charger can be difficult. And for longer journeys, like going to pick up my mum, it could be a huge issue.

So, back to that journey north last Christmas.

NADINE DORRIES (pictured): Yes, the future is electric. But Britain isn't ready yet  and it is time that the Government admitted it

'Let's pull off at Stafford services,' said my daughter, as the illuminated 'Welcome' sign pierced through the freezing fog. 'They have working chargers there.'

It sounded so simple. We cruised around the car park for ten minutes but could see only Tesla chargers, and I'd heard it was difficult to connect my car to that network.

Elon Musk has installed convenient forecourt chargers on the foggy M6. He's nailed it  as long you buy his products. At the back of the lorry park and behind a petrol-station forecourt, we eventually found a charger we could use.

Once I had connected it, it took ten minutes to kick in, with a loud and worrying bang coming from a metal box about five yards away.

Eventually, the electric juices were flowing. God, it had been a stressful day.

With a wait of at least half an hour, we decided to go into the service station to buy a coffee.

But from the back end of the lorry park, that involved a long and wet walk in the freezing rain. I would not have felt safe doing it on my own.

So, that was it for me. Early in the New Year, I returned the car to the dealer with less than 5,000 miles on the clock. Now, every time I jump into my Discovery Sport  a hybrid, I'm pleased to say  I feel a sense of relief.

I've had a charger fitted at home and I'm glad to do all my local mileage on the battery.

But I also feel safe in the knowledge that when it runs out, or I have a long journey to make, the petrol kicks in.

Yes, the future is electric. But Britain isn't ready yet  and it is time that the Government admitted it.

Twiggy deserves a glittering script for her iconic life

Close Up, a musical about the life of Twiggy, is set to open in London in September. I was just nine when Twiggy shot to stardom as 'the face of 1966', becoming a global superstar almost overnight.

What a shame that the show, about the model's working-class background and her rise to fame, has been written and directed by the partisan Leftie comic Ben Elton.

Twiggy's story deserves to be heard, so I hope the show won't lose the plot and turn into one of his rants.

NADINE DORRIES: Close Up, a musical about the life of Twiggy, is set to open in London in September. I was just nine when Twiggy shot to stardom as 'the face of 1966', becoming a global superstar almost overnight

Labour big-hitters have been lining up to defend frontbench MP Jess Phillips against accusations of racist and bullying behaviour towards the respected head teacher Katharine Birbalsingh. They needn't bother.

Birbalsingh's open letter about Phillips (the 'shadow minister for domestic violence and safeguarding') is devastating.

'She inspired a vicious mob attack against me on Twitter,' writes the headteacher, adding that Phillips 'holds me in contempt for being a black woman who does not . . . consider her master'.

Left-wing MPs like Phillips constantly complain about the online abuse they face  but don't seem to mind so much when others suffer.

Aperol spritz? No, it's the pits

Am I the only person who's not gushing over the disgusting tipple Aperol spritz? It feels like everyone I know is going on about how excited they are to be having their first one this summer.

Maybe their slavish adoration is down to the colour, a gorgeous flaming sunset. But I have noticed one thing. No one ever seems to finish their Aperol before moving on to a nice glass of rose  and pushing the luminescent gloop to one side.

Elon Musk is capping the number of tweets people can see on Twitter. A typical user can read perhaps 1,000 tweets a day  while a paid-for 'verified' account might view 10,000.

Conspiracy theories abound. Staff shortages at Twitter HQ? Forcing more people to stump up for verification?

Whatever the reason, he's done us all a favour. Twitter is highly addictive, accused of worsening people's mental health  and wasting their time. Now, a confession: I pay for my verified 'blue tick', so my cap is 10,000 tweets. Anyone staring at Twitter that long needs to step away from the phone.

Katie Price has announced that she has ADHD. I get how difficult it is, but everywhere you look a new celebrity is testing themselves for this condition and 'bravely' announcing the result to the world.

I'm quite amazed at the number of articulate, clever, successful individuals writing about their ADHD diagnosis.
A former child sex slave has revealed how her own mother sold her into a high-profile trafficking ring at just six years old.

Anneke Lucas was forced into a Belgian aristocratic pedophile network where boys and girls were raped, tortured and murdered in 1969.

She has recently spoken with Unfiltered Stories about the ordeal that began when she was forced to take part in a masked orgy in a castle.

The now 58-year-old explained how her mother 'took over from the pimps' by keeping her out of school and driving her to 'events' within the twisted network.

Former child sex slave Anneke Lucas has revealed how her own mother sold her into a high-profile trafficking ring at just six years old

She was forced into a Belgian aristocratic pedophile network where boys and girls were raped, tortured and murdered in 1969

The now 58-year-old explained how her mother 'took over from the pimps' by keeping her out of school and driving her to 'events' within the network

Speaking during the interview, Anneke, who grew up in Belgium, said her family was 'quite normal from the outside.'

'Even though I was being abused by my mother at the time, I was also very outgoing, a very bossy little girl,' she said.

But Anneke said things started to change when she was four years old after her mother remarried and the family moved to Flanders.

She described how the relocation saw her 'starting to get groomed to be taken into the trafficking network.'

Anneke said that it began when her mother's new cleaning lady offered to take her on outings alongside a whole host of other children that 'seemed to change all the time.'

The trips continued for about a year before the cleaner and her husband took her 'to the first event in the network,' which was a masked orgy in a castle.

'Once I was being taken to the network, my mother actually took over from the pimps,' she said.

'I don't really know what happened exactly but I tried to tell my mother in the words that I had available to me at the time and instead of protecting me, she actually started to drive me herself.'

Speaking during a recent interview, Anneke, who grew up in Belgium, said her family was 'quite normal from the outside'

Anneke said things started to change when she was four years old after her mother remarried and the family moved to Flanders

Deemed to be an 'expendable child,' she even found herself in situations where other children had died due to the 'extreme' mistreatment

Anneke claimed that her mother had never taken any lessons but had been granted a driver's license and also got the only automatic car available at that time, which she believed was a kind of reward organized by members of the network.

'I was trafficked into a pedophile network that actually at the time consisted of the VIPs of the country... They were all quite powerful and had important posts. It was a mix of politicians, high-placed officials, government officials, clergy as well as aristocrats,' she added.

Her mother, who organized everything through a contact - described as a woman from a noble family, would often keep her out of school to go to events within the ring.

Anneke explained that she could never tell anyone else about the abuse due to fear of repercussions, adding: 'It was made clear from the start that if I were to speak out then I would be killed.'

Deemed to be an 'expendable child,' she even found herself in situations where other kids had died due to the 'extreme' mistreatment.

Anneke, who previously calculated that she had been raped for more than 1,700 hours before she reached the age of 12, left Belgium once and for all in the 1980s

In 1972, she said she was 'traded' to an international network where she was trained to be an 'elite slave' capable of spying and making men fall in love with her at aged nine

But in 1972, she said she was 'traded' to an international network where she was trained to be an 'elite slave' capable of spying and making men fall in love with her at aged nine.

The plan was for Anneke to be inducted into a cult to mark the beginning of her 'new life,' but the youngster rebelled because the expectations were becoming 'too much.'

She was eventually able to get out of both the international and Belgian networks, and had since learned how to 'function well in society' as well as how to have 'more empathy and love for people.'

Anneke, who previously calculated that she had been raped for more than 1,700 hours before she reached the age of 12, left Belgium once and for all in the 1980s.

Having settled in New York with a family of her own, she founded Liberation Prison Yoga in 2014 to help other people who had been incarcerated and vilified as a child.

She continues to raise awareness of child sex trafficking by sharing her story.
A restaurant in Brazil put their signs the wrong way around on their windows

From a typo to bad wording, or a small quirk in the design, all it takes is a small error to completely ruin a product and leave people confused.

But these examples really do take the biscuit and they may even leave you struggling to understand who signed off the idea in the first place.

Cheezburger have put together a thread which features poor designs from around the world, including a picture frame on sale in America with a picture of a blue whale and a slogan, saying: 'No plastics in the ocean'.

This would be an admirable message if it weren't for the fact that the item came wrapped in plastic.

A clothing brand seemed to be in such a rush to get their product out to stores, they forgot to finish designing the t-shirt, which featured the words: 'Your tagline here.'

Mixed messages! A store in the US was selling this picture frame, which ruined its environmental message thank to a plastic wrapping

American fast food giant McDonald's attempted to be inclusive to blind customers with a sign, saying: 'Braille and picture menus available'.

However, the sign itself was not in Braille, which rather defeated the purpose.

A restaurant in Brazil also put the signs on their window the wrong way around, so it read 'conditioned air,' rather than 'air conditioned,' and 'Wifi free,' instead of 'Free Wifi.'

Here FEMAIL have picked the worst designs which will leave you either feeling frustrated or scratching your head.

Not lovin' it! US fast food giant McDonald's tried and failed to be inclusive with this sign advertising Braille menus

Not such a beauty! The design of this box at a store in the US made the model on the front look rather odd, and probably won't encourage anyone to buy the eye and lip therapy tool within

Not in control! The person who made this remote may want to rethink their design, because you may think you're turning the volume up when in fact you are doing the opposite

This Pepsi cup has two holes in the lid, one on the front and another on the side, meaning that when you drink, it will spill on your lap

American sandwich shop Subway's tagline 'eat fresh' has made it look as though they are telling people to eat next door

That's shirty! The creator of this t-shirt was clearly in a rush to get out to stores because they forgot to write a tagline

What a crock! This bowl was clearly designed to be displayed rather than used because there are holes in the side, meaning that the food would just fall out

Despite this saloon bar, located in Fairfax, Virginia, being called Peri's, the font has made it look as though it named after the male organ

That's what you get for boasting! In this American hardware store, it says this platform can hold up to 1,000lbs, but it has been knocked over with just 810lbs

This restaurant in Brazil put their signs the wrong way around - no doubt causing some confusion for customers

That's not how you make a sandwich! This poorly-designed sign from American brand Upstart shows a knife spreading mayo on top of a sandwich rather than inside it
The Texas woman was provided with an IV and medication for the swelling

Her infected eye doubled in size and leaked pus so she was rushed to hospital

Dyreante Notto, 24, went in for a lash extension appointment, but it went wrong

A woman's eye was left infected and burning after a botched eyelash extension.

When Dyreante Notto, 24, booked herself in for a beauty treatment, she had no idea that the luxury treat would take an awful turn.

Instead of getting long, lush lashes, the Texas fashionista was left with an infected eye that doubled in size and leaked pus.

Sharing the before and after clips on TikTok, viewers have been left horrified with the video seen more than one million times.

When Dyreante Notto, 24, booked herself for a lash extensions appointment, she had no idea that the luxury treat would take a horrifying turn

'I noticed things weren't right almost a few hours after the appointment because my eyes would not stop burning,' Dyreante, who is a student, told NeedToKnow.co.uk.

At first her eyes started swelling.

Dyreante chose not to go to the salon for help because they already 'messed' her eye up, so she didn't want to make it worse.

She started to take her lashes off using oil and her right ones came off immediately.

However, when it came to her left side, she was unsuccessful. She attempted to cut them down, but wasn't able to.

After having no success at removing the lashes, Dyreante decided to suffer through the burning and swelling, hoping it would go down because she had an important exam.

But her symptoms only worsened and the student eventually ended up rushing to the hospital.

While she prepped for her exam, she 'told herself' she could do it, but 'she could barely even see.'

Dyreante Notto, 24, is based in Houston, Texas, and she said her eye kept 'burning' and her 'vision was completely blurred'

After having no success at removing her lashes, Dyreante decided to suffer through the burning and swelling, hoping it would go down, as she had an important exam

She placed a large bandage over her eye to try to stop it from leaking constantly.

As soon as her exam concluded, her sister took her to hospital. Her eyes were in tremendous pain and her 'vision was completely blurred.'

First she went to urgent care, but after seeing her situation, medical staff sent her straight to the hospital.

'My eye was infected and began to leak pus and fluids, so while in the hospital, they gave me an IV and monitored me,' she recalled.

'They gave me medicine to stop the swelling, infection and pain.'

In the TikTok, Dyreante shares a picture of her lashes just after she had got them done on May 24.

It then skips to various videos of her eyes continuing to swell as time went on.

Dyreante then showed pictures and videos of herself in the hospital receiving treatment for the infection.

The video has more than 198,000 likes and thousands of comments from shocked users.

'My eye was infected and began to leak pus and fluids, so while in the hospital, they gave me an IV and monitored me,' she said

One person said: 'New fear unlocked.'

Someone else wrote: 'This is why I'm sticking to strips cause ain't no way.'

'Why they sticking straight up like that. She would've had to take them off soon as I looked in the mirror,' another added.

A TikTok user said: 'Y'all make me want to stop wearing lashes in general.'

One person commented: 'This so scary qlad you getting better.'

Another added: 'Coming from a lash tech, I hope you got a refund or something ma. I'm so sorry this happened to you.'

Someone else wrote: 'That would be my first and last day wearing lashes.'

She advises: 'Do your research on the lash technician, do your research on the products that are going to be used, and do research on your eyes'

Dyreante has not had her eyelashes done since and is now urging others to do research before getting lash treatments.

She states: 'It took almost a week for the swelling to go down in my left eye.

'I have not had lash extensions since and it has been about a month.

'I only wear strip lashes now. I would say to people who want to get lash extensions to please do your research!

'Do your research on the lash technician, do your research on the products that are going to be used, and do research on your eyes.'
A Lancashire woman has spoken out about how doctors gave her just 24 hours to live after alcohol addiction resulted in her suffering with multiple organ failure.

Charlotte Durcan, 30, says that her addiction began only three years ago, as she only drank alcohol occasionally before then and would have considered herself a non-drinker.

However, as a self-confessed 'extremist', the mother-of-two went from nothing, to drinking three litres of vodka a day.

As a result of her addiction, she started to have seizures and blackouts - but she still didn't realise how serious the situation had become.

Charlotte said: 'I drank to the extreme and that's my personality, I don't do things by halves.

Charlotte Durcan (pictured) was given just 24 hours to live by doctors, as a result of her extreme alcohol intake

'It's always everything is the furthest I can take it, in a sense. I was drinking really heavily and basically, it grabbed me.'

It was when Charlotte realised that she couldn't go without a drink that she knew the drinking had become a serious addiction.

She says she found that every time she didn't have a drink, she would start 'shaking and sweating'.

The mother-of-two added: 'In the mornings, I would have to have a drink, just to level me out.

'It would be vodka and that would be a pint of vodka neat. That would be literally to stop me from shaking and stop me from being too sick and sweating - that'd work.

'From there, it would just carry on throughout the day, but obviously, when money went tight and things, I would try and get family to get me drink.

'I was using all my money up on drink, so they'd sometimes only be able to get me bottles of wine and things.

'Then I started to realise it was a problem, when I could have a full bottle of wine and it wouldn't affect me.'

The 30-year-old (pictured) is currently celebrating 11 months of sobriety from alcohol. She is now trying to raise awareness of addiction, to help others who are struggling

Charlotte realised she needed to drink vodka in order to feel a difference, but after blacking out again, she visited the hospital for the first time.

She was kept in for a few days and returned home. However, despite going four days without drinking whilst being admitted, she 'went straight back to the drink' upon her return and ended up back in hospital again, with this circle of events occurring around three or four times.

'The last time, I ended up in intensive care with multiple organ failure,' Charlotte continued.

'I had heart failure, liver failure, kidney failure and they had to take two litres of fluid from my lungs and I was in for three weeks, but I couldn't move, I couldn't speak, I couldn't talk.

'So I was in intensive care, I was on oxygen and they got all of my family in to say bye to me. I was literally on end of life care.'

Charlotte's family visited her bedside at 2am, after they were told by doctors she had only 24 hours left to live. However, she says that somehow she 'managed to pull through' and ended up going to rehab after recovering from her hospital visit.

Nowadays, the mum is celebrating 11 months of sobriety and is volunteering for Inspire Lancashire, which are currently undertaking an alcohol awareness campaign, Hidden in Plain Sight.

The campaign focuses on people with addictions who may not appear to be suffering on the outside, but are battling with their inner demons, that can sometimes lead to fatalities.

Charlotte says that often, addiction is associated with people who have been struggling for years, but in her case, she was grappled by alcoholism quickly.

'My story is a lot different to other people's,' Charlotte explained.

'I think people think that you have to be an alcoholic for so many years or start off as a drinker, then a binge drinker and then you're an alcoholic.

'Whereas, I'm trying to raise awareness that it can literally happen to you so quickly, without you even realising and then it can be too late for some people.

'I was close to dying, all of my family thought I was going to die, but I didn't have a clue because I was so out of it. That was my outcome after two years of drinking heavily.'

Inspire Lancashire helped Charlotte to get into rehab when she was discharged from hospital and her relationship with the service has remained strong ever since. She says the team supported her to stop drinking gradually, as stopping cold turkey would have most likely killed her.

The service is geared towards helping people tackling their drug and alcohol use by reducing or removing substances from people's lives.

For Charlotte, she's hoping to raise awareness of addiction and inspire others to ask for help if they're struggling with their own journeys.

For her future, Charlotte's hoping to get to a year sobriety and from there, will then look into finding full-time employment.
Royal fans were treated to a glimpse of the spectacular procession that will take place in Edinburgh today to mark King Charles' Service of Thanksgiving.

The monarch, 74, will be presented with the oldest Crown Jewels in the UK  known as the Honours of Scotland  at a glorious ceremony on Wednesday to mark his Coronation.

The Service of Dedication and Thanksgiving will also be attended by Queen Camilla and the Prince and Princess of Wales, known as the Duke and Duchess of Rothesay.

This morning, members of the armed forces taking part in the procession took part in a run-through along Edinburgh's Royal Mile.

Members of the King's Guard were pictured passing St Giles' Cathedral this morning on horseback.

Pictured: Members of the armed forces took part in a procession rehearsal along Edinburgh's Royal Mile this morning

What's more, another large group of soldiers were seen practising their part of the procession while dressed in traditional kilts and bearskin hats.

Members of the navy were seen participating in the run-through to honour the monarch - who has been Admiral since 2006 - later this week.

Ahead of the ceremony on Wednesday, royal fans got up at the crack of dawn this morning to catch a glimpse of the rehearsal on the Royal Mile.

The service will also involve a people's procession of about 100 community groups collecting the honours from Edinburgh Castle.

The procession will then 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

Buildings on the historic stretch of road - which is situated in the heart of Edinburgh's Old Town - date all the way back to the late 16th Century.

The Royal Mile has been used as the processional route for monarchs over the past 500 years as it connects Edinburgh Castle and Holyrood Palace.

The Service of Thanksgiving, which will take place at St Giles' Cathedral, is a key part of Royal Week, with Charles and Camilla undertaking several engagements in Scotland.

The ceremony on Wednesday will officially mark King Charles (pictured) becoming Head of State in Scotland

Soliders dressed in traditional kilts and bearskin hats were also spotted in the procession rehearsal in Edinburgh today

The Royal Mile has been used as the processional route for Kings and Queens over the past 500 years

Members of the Royal Navy are also included in the historic procession. The King has been the Royal Navy's Admiral since 2006

Pictured: Royal fans got up at the crack of dawn today to catch a glimpse of the spectacular procession

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

Prince Harry is not thought to be attending the symbolic July 5th Honours of Scotland service to officially mark his father becoming Head of State in Scotland.

The Duke of Sussex attended the Coronation on May 6th without wife Meghan Markle and flew in for just 24 hours to see his father crowned at Westminster Abbey, before jetting back to his home in Montecito, California.

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.

The Stone of Destiny will be in the cathedral during the ceremony, and there will also be a fly-past by the Red Arrows following the event.

Five new pieces of music will be heard to mark the coronation of the King and Queen.

The pieces, including one composed in Gaelic, were commissioned by Charles for the national service of thanksgiving and dedication at St Giles' Cathedral on Wednesday.

The new music will form part of what is described by Buckingham Palace as a rich mix at the service to reflect Scottish history and culture, with performers representative of contemporary Scotland.
A 30-year-old woman has revealed how she became a mother-of-six unexpectedly after giving birth to triplets.

Monique Davaul, 30, from Virginia, was planning her birthday party when she realized she was eight weeks pregnant.

She was already a mother-of-three, having previously given birth to her son, now 8, and twin boys, now 6.

Monique welcomed fraternal triplets  babies Jihad, Mielle, and Noelle  on April 12 at Riverside Regional Medical Center in Newport News.

She delivered her triplets at early at just 33 weeks, and recalled 'constantly visiting the hospital' towards the end of her pregnancy.

Monique Davaul, 30, from Virginia, gave birth to fraternal triplets, two girls and a boy, in April (pictured)

Speaking to Good Morning America about her unusual situation, Monique said: 'I was like "It's easy".

'So I guess maybe God said, "You kept saying it was easy. I got something for you. Let's see what you can do with three."

The mother-of-three was planning her 30th birthday party when she realized she as eight weeks pregnant.

Despite it being a rare phenomenon, she said she predicted she was having multiples, telling People she was 'very sick' throughout her pregnancy.

Initially, she didn't know she was having triplets, though co-workers joked she could be having multiples after she welcomed twins six years ago.

A visit to the doctor confirmed the news she was expecting triplets, and she quickly phoned her co-worker to tell them the news.

After telling her co-worker they had been right, she also called the venue she had booked to host her birthday party and explained she would be having a 'gender reveal' party instead.

Her three children thought she was joking when she told them she was expecting triplets, before excitement settled in.

Having already given birth to twins, she felt she knew what it was like to be pregnant with more than one baby at once.

However this time around, she experienced frequent morning sickness early on, and stopped working four months into the pregnancy.

She began attending routine check-ups every two weeks before her waters broke and she welcomed her triplets, two girls and one boy, via Cesarean section.

An adorable picture shows the triplets dressed in near-matching outfits, as two of them have cute pink flower headbands on

And after spending the first few weeks of their life in the intensive care unit, the babies were all discharged in time for Mother's Day last weekend.

Monique explained since welcoming her children home, her twins 'try to help out' with their younger sisters and brother.

'This phenomenon happening naturally is so rare that it's hard to find any statistics on the occurrence,' RRMC said in a statement to PEOPLE.

It comes after another couple said they were 'over the moon' after beating 'one in 200 million' odds by having identical triplets.

Parents Jenni and James Casper were amazed to discover they had naturally conceived three identical babies last year.

The three baby girls - named Harper-Gwen, Marvella and Evalynn - were delivered nine weeks prematurely at York Hospital on March 31.

Jenni, 27, and James, 26, had initially been told they were expecting twins, the chances of which are roughly one in 250.

But the couple said they were left speechless when they discovered at the 12-week scan that they would be having triplets instead.

The couple are now parents to five daughters, with their newborns now able to come home and meet their older sisters Danica, 10 and Gabriella, four.


A woman has shared the bizarre warning symptoms she experienced ahead of a devastating stroke which left her unable to walk or talk - describing the moment she felt her brain 'explode'.

Morgan Bailey, originally from New Jersey but now living in Arizona, was just 22 and working at a school when she started experiencing worrying symptoms - including an 'excruciating' headache and numbness along the right side of her body.

Perhaps most bizarrely, for a few months she had noticed a change to her eyelashes, with them appearing very straight on her right eye - something that hasn't been medically linked, but that Morgan believes was a warning sign.

She underwent surgery but remains paralysed on her right side - which will be a permanent effect of what she went through.

Morgan, now 24, explained: 'If you would have asked me 'can someone have a stroke aged 22?', I would have said 'no way'. I had to re-learn everything. I had to re-learn how to walk. I had to re-learn how to speak properly. I had to re-learn how to write with my left hand.'

Morgan Bailey, originally from New Jersey but now living in Arizona, was just 22 when she suffered a stroke

After suffering a stroke, Morgan underwent surgery but remains paralysed on her right side - which will be a permanent effect of what she went through

Morgan had been diagnosed with an arteriovenous malformation (AVM) at the age of 18 after falling and hitting her head at school one day.

AVMs are abnormal tangles of blood vessels which can cause irregular connections between the arteries and veins - which often develop in the spinal cord and brain.

When she woke up the following day with paralysis in her right side and struggling to walk properly, she went to hospital and was later told she had an AVM and had suffered three brain aneurysms.

Morgan said she was no given any medication or treatment, with doctors 'too scared to touch it' due to it being in her thalamus.

She added: 'They told me to go home and live life, and that's what I did for five years.'

In the four years that followed, Morgan was able to lead a normal life with few worries about her condition - until the day of the stroke.

'My life has completely flipped upside down,' Morgan told NeedToKnow.co.uk.

'My health was perfect before - I never had any issues.'

On the day of the stroke as the headache got worse, she quickly found her friend to say she wasn't feeling well before having the sensation that her 'brain exploded'.

It was the last thing she would remember for a month.

Morgan was rushed to hospital and remained there for seven weeks in the ICU while she recovered from the stroke.

When she woke up, she was paralysed on her right side and had to learn how to walk, speak and write again.

Morgan was rushed to hospital and remained there for seven weeks in the ICU while she recovered from the stroke

After she suffered the stroke, Morgan said life will never be the same because it has 'completely flipped upside down'

Morgan had been diagnosed with an arteriovenous malformation (AVM) at the age of 18 after falling and hitting her head at school one day

Morgan said she was no given any medication or treatment, with doctors 'too scared to touch it' due to it being in her thalamus

Despite having the diagnosis, Morgan was able to live a relatively normal life - until she suffered the stroke

For a few months before the stroke, Morgan noticed a change to her eyelashes, with them appearing very straight on her right eye

On the day of the stroke as the headache got worse, she quickly found her friend to say she wasn't feeling well before having the sensation that her 'brain exploded'

She said: 'I had no idea what this was before it happened.

'I can't use my right hand so I'm very thankful for technology and I voice-type.'

She underwent brain surgery (a craniotomy) to remove 75 per cent of the AVM, and had intense physical and speech therapy following the stroke.

Morgan said: 'Mentally, I think I did phenomenally.

'More than half of people who have a traumatic brain injury face depression, anxiety, or stress, but I was super positive.

'Of course, there were days when I was sad, but the next day, I was positive. I just had to get out of my funk.'

When she woke up after her stroke, she was paralysed on her right side and had to learn how to walk, speak and write again

Morgan, pictured in hospital in July 2021, had to learn to walk again during her time in hospital after the stroke

She underwent brain surgery (a craniotomy) to remove 75 per cent of the AVM, and had intense physical and speech therapy following the stroke

After undergoing therapy for a number of years, Morgan now wants to help others who might be in need

How can FAST save you during a stroke? The main symptoms of stroke can be remembered with the word F.A.S.T. This will help you more quickly identify someone having a stroke. Face: the face may have dropped on one side, the person may not be able to smile, or their mouth or eye may have dropped.

Arms: the person with suspected stroke may not be able to lift both arms and keep them there because of weakness or numbness in one arm.

Speech: their speech may be slurred or garbled, or the person may not be able to talk at all despite appearing to be awake.

Time: it's time to dial 999 immediately if you see any of these signs or symptoms. Source: NHS Advertisement

But for the young woman, life will never be the same. She said: 'My life has completely flipped upside down.

'I now don't want to do anything I was planning on doing with my degree.

'I know that I want to help people - people who are in a tough spot, who have had strokes, who have AVMs, and more.

'I'm outside hiking, I'm volunteering at the Sedona Heritage Museum, I'm doing yoga, and more.

'I am happy that my life changed after the stroke.

'Life is much simpler now.

'It's not all this hustle and bustle, this go-go-go that I was chasing.'

In the future, she hopes to start her own non-profit organisation in order to help people with AVMs

In the future, she hopes to start her own non-profit to help people with AVMs.

Morgan added: 'People can come and relax, have meditation sessions, and have healing treatments.

'I think it will be extraordinary.'

But for now, she has a message for everyone - whether they are suffering a health issue or not.

She said: 'We need to live life, and we need to live it to the fullest.

'You never know when someone you love is going to pass away, when you're going to break up with your boyfriend, when your dog is going to die...

'The moral of the story is you need to live life like no one is watching.'
Princess Diana would be the 'only person who could fix Prince William and Prince Harry's rift' as her sons 'meant the world to her', a royal expert has claimed.

Former BBC royal correspondent Jennie Bond - who met with Diana several times before her death in 1997 - said the late royal was 'so clearly proud' of her two boys.

Speaking to Ok! magazine, the expert claimed Diana said the UK was 'lucky' to have William as a future King.

However, the expert said Diana worried about how Prince Harry would forge his own path in the Royal Family.

Jennie said: 'Diana was an absolutely devoted mother and her sons meant the world to her.'

Princess Diana pictured with Prince William and Prince Harry on the Duke of Sussex's first day at Eton college in 1995

Speaking on what would have been Diana's birthday, Jennie said: 'Im sure her greatest wish would be to hug her boys again and find some way of resolving the rift between them.

'If anyone could sort things out, it would have been Diana.'

What's more, the expert commented on the royal's loving approach with her sons.

Princess Diana allegedly told the former royal correspondent that she 'showered' Harry and William with 'love and cuddles' because she hadn't been shown much affection during her childhood.

In his bombshell biography Spare, Prince Harry claimed his older brother physically attacked him when he was still living in Nottingham Cottage within the grounds of Kensington Palace.

William is said to have branded Meghan 'difficult', 'rude' and 'abrasive' and insisted he was trying to help his younger brother during a meeting about 'the whole rolling catastrophe' of their failing relationship and Harry's rows with the Press.

Harry accused his brother of 'parroting the Press narrative' about his American wife before a screaming match ensued, ending in a physical altercation, the book claims. He says he gave the heir to the throne a glass of water and said: 'Willy, I can't speak to you when you're like this'.

Describing what he claims happened next, and insisting he was scared, the former soldier said: 'He set down the water, called me another name, then came at me. It all happened so fast. So very fast.

BBC royal correspondent Jennie Bond said the late Princess was 'so clearly proud' of her two boys (pictured in 2018)

Pictured: Jennie Bond was the BBC's royal correspondent for 14 years and met with Diana on several occasions

'He grabbed me by the collar, ripping my necklace, and he knocked me to the floor. I landed on the dog's bowl, which cracked under my back, the pieces cutting into me. I lay there for a moment, dazed, then got to my feet and told him to get out'.

Elsewhere in the biography, Prince Harry also claimed his brother and Kate Middleton told him to wear a Nazi uniform costume to a fancy dress party they were all attending in 2005.

Harry claims he was considering either the Nazi uniform or a pilot's outfit to a 'Native and Colonial' themed event and called his brother and sister-in-law for their opinion.

'They both howled. Worse than Willy's leotard outfit! Way more ridiculous! Which, again, was the point.'

The outfit became a huge scandal when Harry, then 20, was photographed wearing the Nazi regalia.

The story made global headlines after an image of Harry in the costume featured on the front page of The Sun newspaper.

Prince Harry and Meghan Markle pictured in December 2022 - a month before the Duke of Sussex's memoir was published

While promoting Spare in January, Prince Harry appeared to blame his family for the feud in an interview with The Telegraph.

He said: 'It was all so avoidable. But they just couldn't help themselves.'

The Duke of Sussex added that he could not understand why it seemed 'shocking and outrageous' for him to tell what he said was the 'truthful' side of the story.

Harry also claimed he felt a 'responsibility' to reform the monarchy in the interests of his two young children.

He also described how therapy had helped him, but said he was unable to 'get through' to his family to agree with him.

He said: 'Thats when I started trying to explain to them how some of their decisions and some of the things they were doing - or not doing - was going to reflect on them. Badly.

'Especially across the global stage, especially across the Commonwealth, with relation to my now wife. And I couldnt get through to them. And it wasnt one or two people that I was trying to get through to.

'It was a mindset. It was a culture, within a bubble within a bubble, that while I was there was unbreakable.'
The UK's 'first lady' looked effortlessly chic this morning as she took the family dog for a walk outside Downing Street.

Akshata Murty, 43, who is married to prime minister Rishi Sunak, doubled up on tie-dye garments for her casual outing.

The mother-of-two opted for a pair of 88 'Align' leggings by the Vancouver-based sportswear brand LuluLemon.

The eye-catching bottoms - which were reduced to 54 in their recent sale - feature a purple-and-pink tie-dye print.

The billionaire's daughter, whose wardrobe often includes luxury items, paired this with a light grey-and-pink tie-dye hoodie.

Akshata Murty, 43, who is married to prime minister Rishi Sunak, was pictured speaking on the phone as she walked the family dog Nova in central London

Tying into the colour theme, Akshata completed her dog-walking outfit with some light pink plimsolls.

Akshata also wore a small black bum bag, which contained her dog walking essentials - including treats for Labrador retriever Nova.

The mother tied her long hair up into a low bun and wore a black cap over the top.

As she spoke on the phone, Akshata was pictured wearing some light green sunglasses and holding Nova's lead in one hand.

In May, the mother swapped her high-end designer items for high street brands such as ME+EM and Sezane for the G7 summit in Toyko.

The 43-year-old touched down in Hiroshima with a green 675 Joseph midi dress and a Union Jack umbrella.

She chose a 295 pink floral dress from royal favourite ME+EM to attend the spouses' programme in Hiroshima and also donned a 350 turtleneck from Joseph and 150 Sezane skirt to visit a memorial.

It has been rumoured that Askshata has been working with the stylist of former Tory first lady Samantha Cameron in recent months.

The UK's 'first lady' paired her tie-dye hoodie with some statement purple-and-pink leggings by Vancouver-based sportswear brand LuluLemon

Pictured: Akshata's 88 leggings were reduced to 54 in the brand's recent sale. It has been rumoured that Askshata has been working with the stylist of former Tory first lady Samantha Camero

She struck a sophisticated chord (pictured left, arriving at Hiroshima, and right, visiting the Peace Memorial Park)

Mr Sunak and Ms Murthy have built up a joint fortune of 730million, the Sunday Times Rich List revealed in May, making him the first frontline politician to feature in the annual wealth rankings since its inception in 1989.

Mr Sunak made big money in the City of London before entering politics.

But the bulk of the cash is from his wife's stake in IT giant Infosys, set up by her father N. R. Narayana Murthy, one of the richest men in India who has been described as the father of the Indian IT sector and 'one of the 12 greatest businessmen of all time'.

Last week, Akshata revealed a little bit more about her life as the UK's 'first lady' in the first photos on her new Instagram account.

She used the posts to speak about the difficulties of parenting and mental health support for children from a young age.

Illustrating the talking points, she posted photos of her visits to a community centre in Cornwall which supports parents of young children, and a later visit to a primary school in north London which has been recognised for its work in children's mental health.

She follows just 32 people including her husband, members of the royal family, the NHS and David Attenborough.
Queen Mathilde of Belgium showed off her motherly nature as she played games with children battling cancer in Pelt today.

Mathilde, 50, visited the Kom op tegen Kanker - which translates to 'stand up to cancer' - holiday camp this morning where she chatted with children aged between six to 17.

This camp is for children and young people of that age who are being treated for cancer or were treated up to a year ago.

The camp is a free holiday for the children and has been an annual event since 1989.

This year, 69 children who have faced, or are facing the cruel disease, were given the opportunity to go on the trip.

Mathilde, 50, visited the Kom op tegen Kanker holiday camp where she engaged with children aged between six to 17

Queen Mathilde smiled as she had fun playing with the children and took the time to listen to their stories.

The royal was pictured pushing a young girl in a wheelchair, who was holding a basket ball, as the group took part in games.

She also sat down at a table with some past and present patients where they participated in a quiz.

The Queen looked elegant as she donned a pink frilly frock with forest green floral patterns on it.

She paired this with some tan coloured wedges and gold jewellery, including a watch.

Mathilde wore her sleek blonde locks down and opted for a side parting. She tucked her hair behind her ears to show off her dazzling leaf earrings.

On their website, David Vansteenbrugge, General manager Kom op tegen Kanker is quoted saying: 'Carefree playing with peers, talking freely with someone who is going through the same thing, not feeling any different...

'For children and young people, the holiday camp is a place where they can forget their illness for a while.

The Queen looked elegant as she donned a pink frilly frock with forest green floral patterns on it

The royal also sat down at a table with some past and present patients where they participated in a quiz

This camp is for children and young people of that age who are being treated for cancer or were treated up to a year ago

Mathilde wore her sleek blonde locks down and opted for a side parting. She tucked her hair behind her ears to show off her dazzling leaf earrings

'The Queen's visit is a unique experience for them and a nice token of appreciation for everyone who helps with the holiday camp.'

The children are able to go on this holiday as the three Flemish children's hospitals - UZ Gent, UZ Leuven and UZA - provide a nursing team that is on standby day and night.

They are able to go on the mini break with their trusted nurses who can therefore ensure that treatment and care can continue.

Queen Mathilde has also granted Royal Patronage to Breast International Group, which supports research on breast cancer.

Queen Mathilde smiled as she had fun playing with the children and took the time to listen to their stories

This year, 69 children who have faced or are facing the cruel disease will have the opportunity to go on the trip

The camp is a free holiday for the children who have battled or are still battling cancer and has been an annual event since 1989

The children are able to go on this holiday as the three Flemish children's hospitals - UZ Gent, UZ Leuven and UZA - provide a nursing team that is on standby day and night
Steel is its main material and the house has a system to reduce outside noise

It's on 3,913 square feet, and has three bedrooms and four bathrooms

For $2.87 million, you could ensure your safety in this iconic earthquake resistant house.

The Earthquake House was built by David Ming-Li Lowe, and was recognized in 1994 by the American Institute of Architects as one of the country's most important projects.

Along with steel as the major structural framework, the home is the first in America built on viscous-damper base isolators to protect it from earthquakes.

The avant-garde visionary retained this house until his death in 2013.

The house was built in 1990 by David Ming-Li Lowe and this is the first time that it has been on the market

It is almost 4,000 square feet, and has three bedrooms and four bathrooms

Steel is its main material and the house has a system to reduce outside noise

Since then, his family has taken care of the house and this is the first time that it has been on the market.

Built in 1990, The Earthquake House is designed to ensure your safety in a high-seismic zone such as California, where an earthquake of at least 7.0 magnitude is expected in the future.

The Earthquake House's architect David Ming-Li Lowe passed away in 2013

Materials like galvanized sheet-metal refrigeration panels and beautiful translucent Kalwall sheeting have been used to ensure the full proof safety of the home, and the house has received many accolades for its design.

'The three-story home is a light-filled, private, artistic and creative space, just waiting for a new owner's personal touches,' the listing reads.

'The floor plan is easy to adapt to multiple uses, as creative space, as an office for an architect, tech startup, or production studio, etc.

'The private yard includes a wooden deck and a teahouse, and the home is set back from the street.

'The two-car garage has high ceilings and an industrial roll up door. There is a basement, other storage, and solar panels.'

The house is located in the Sawtelle neighborhood and features three bedrooms, and four bathrooms sitting on a 3,913-square-foot property.

Designer David was born in Shanghai and attended Reed University, thanks to his older brother's encouragement to enroll.

He studied vigorously at various institutions which included, Reed, MIT, California State Polytechnic, and USC, where he majored in architecture and environmental design, and graduated in 1957 with honors.

The three-story home in California has received many accolades for its design

The avant-garde visionary retained this house until his death in 2013. Since then, his family has taken care of the house, and this is the first time that it's been on the market

The listing states: 'The floor plan is easy to adapt to multiple uses, as creative space, as an office for an architect, tech startup, or production studio, etc'

Along with steel as the major structural framework, the home is the first in America built on viscous-damper base isolators to protect it from earthquakes

The private yard includes a wooden deck and a teahouse, and the home is set back from the street

The listing continues: 'The two-car garage has high ceilings and an industrial roll up door. There is a basement, other storage, and solar panels'

'The three-story home is a light-filled, private, artistic and creative space, just waiting for a new owner's personal touches,' the listing reads

David introduced and used Germany's GERB vibration control system, which provides added protection from earthquakes, and reduces outside noise and strong vibrations

David taught architecture at California State Polytechnic and Los Angeles City College. As an architect, David went on to create his own practice, and became know for producing large-scale industrial projects with the use of durable steel.

His main focus was creating buildings that were earthquake resistant to help keep California's residents safe.

He also introduced and used Germany's GERB vibration control system, which provides added protection against not only earthquakes, but it also reduces outside noise and strong vibrations.

Since his passing in 2013, several of his inspired students posted online under Williston North Hampton School's In Memoriam.

'I am indebted to his memory and wonderful enlightenment as I still live today,' one student wrote.

Another added: 'David was one of my major mentors a man of amazing inspiration and depth.'

The Earthquake House has been listed by Crosby Doe Associates.
Princess Olympia of Greece oozed effortless glamour as she attended a Christian Dior fashion show in Paris this afternoon.

The socialite, 26, opted for a stunning white off-shoulder dress with voluminous sleeves for the Paris Fashion Week show.

The model's dress featured a lazer-cut floral pattern and delicate ruching along the top and cuffs.

Adding a bit of edge to her ensemble, Olympia - who is King Charles' goddaughter - added a chunky black leather belt with gold buckles.

In a nod to the designer, the socialite opted for a mini Christian Dior book tote bag - which retails for 1,800.

The model, 26, took her 1,800 Dior tote bag to watch the French designer's show during Paris Fashion Week

Olympia kept her makeup minimal - opting for a pale pink lipstick and black liquid eyeliner flick.

Forgoing any jewellery, the model styled her platinum blonde hair straight and in a central parting.

Olympia's grandfather is King Constantine, a relation of Prince Philip, who was exiled from Greece following the 1967 coup.

The family continue to use their royal titles decades after the abolition of the monarchy.

What's more, Olympia grew up in the London borough of Chelsea and studied Photography at the Parsons School of Design in New York.

She counts Diane von Furstenberg's model granddaughter, Princess Talita Natasha von Furstenberg and the Hilton sisters among her close friends.

Alongside her photography work, Olympia also works as a model - and has appeared in magazines such as Teen Vogue, Tatler and W.

Olympia is the eldest of Crown Prince Pavlos and Crown Princess Marie Chantal's five children and the only girl of the bunch.

Olympia - who is King Charles' goddaughter - added a chunky black leather belt with gold buckles

Olympia kept her makeup minimal - opting for a pale pink lipstick and black liquid eyeliner flick

Crown Prince Pavlos and Crown Princess Marie-Chantal pictured on their wedding day in London in July 1995

The family, who have a house in London and in Gloucestershire, spend their summers in Harbour Island, Bahamas, and their winters in Gstaad, Switzerland - where Prince Pavlos proposed to Marie-Chantal on a chair lift in 1994.

Alexandra, Marie-Chantal and their older sister Pia - often referred to as 'The Miller Sisters' - all married into very wealthy families; Pia's ex-husband is Getty Oil heir Christopher Ronald Getty.

Marie-Chantal has a long history of associating with the rich and famous; before she married into the royal family, the London-born blonde - whose father was duty-free shopping co-founder Robert Warren Miller - worked for Andy Warhol.

Marie-Chantal began a degree in History of Art at NYU in 1993, but she dropped out after Prince Pavlos proposed to her the following year.

The couple met on a blind date set up by New York investment banker Alecko Papamarkou, a mutual friend who was convinced they would hit it off.

'We clicked,' the Princess told Vanity Fair in 2008. 'It was love at first sight. I knew that he was the person I would marry.'
But there are solutions such as cuddling, treats and even calming music

Symptoms of anxiety in pets include crying, pacing, whining and running away

Dogs often get scared or anxious during fireworks and can go into survival mode

Every year on July Fourth, revelers take delight in basking in the glow of fireworks - but it is not all fun and games.

The unrelenting noise from the illuminations can trigger dogs across the country to enter survival mode - leaving them scared and anxious.

Symptoms that your furry friend may be in distress include crying, pinning their ears back, pacing, restlessness, whining, crouching on the floor, and even running away.

However, there are steps that pet owners can take to minimize the impact.

The unrelenting noise from the illuminations can trigger dogs across the country to enter survival mode - leaving them scared and anxious (stock image)

Dogs hear twice as many frequencies than humans which means firework spectacles are much louder for them (stock image)

Dogs hear twice as many frequencies than humans which means firework spectacles are much louder for them - so what is the solution?

Well, to start canines usually take their owners' lead when it comes to emotion so it is recommended that households themselves stay calm in order to reassure the dog that everything is okay.

Cuddles, treats, calming music and even massages for your pets are also recommended during the celebrations.

Here, FEMAIL has rounded up how to keep your canine relaxed this week.

Keep your dog distracted with toys, cuddles and treats

One of the most simple things you can do this July 4th to keep your dog calm is to distract them by playing fetch or giving them their favorite toy.

Pet owners can also turn on music or the television to provide white noise to distract them from the sounds outside.

'Classical music has been shown in studies time and time again to be helpful in calming dogs,' says Sydney's Animal Hospitals Regional Clinical Director, Dr. Tim Montgomery.

But he advises that it might also be worth playing 'recordings [of fireworks] at low volumes and increase the volume slowly over weeks to months to get them used to the noise.'

Canines usually take their owners' lead when it comes to emotion so it is recommended that households themselves stay calm in order to reassure the dog that everything is okay (stock image)

Similarly, dogs are affectionate creatures and cuddling with them helps put their minds at ease.

Dr. Montgomery recommends 'putting firm pressure on the shoulders and around their chest... but others [other dogs] would rather just be left alone.'

You can also provide treats to your dog while the fireworks are taking place outside, so that your dog gets 'counter-conditioned' and desensitized to the sound.

Provide physical barriers from the noise

During the firework celebrations, it is best to keep dogs indoors in a well-insulated space - such as a basement.

Ensure that the doors and windows closed as well as having the blinds down to reduce the impact of the flashing lights.

Pet owners can also try placing a cotton ball in their dogs' ears during the worst of the firework noise.

Invest in anti-anxiety products

Anti-anxiety products can also assist in making your dog feel safe and secure.

For example, ThunderShirts act in a similar way to swaddling an infant, as the design allows for gentle and constant pressure to help ease your dog's emotions.

Pheromone collars mimic the pheromones that a dog's mother emits when she gives birth - and the synthetic scent created can help calm dogs.

Similarly, the Surgi Snuggly is like a warm blanket that provides your dog with a warm embrace that feels like a soothing hug - to name just a few of the products available.

Ask your vet for assistance

There are also a variety of anti-anxiety medicines that can make all the difference for your beloved dog.

If you find that the recommended tips aren't working, your local vet could be a great resource for 'behavioral medicine.'

Dr. Montgomery advised: 'If your pet is anxious about fireworks, they're probably also scared of storms - a lot of people struggle with this but don't realize that their vet might be able to help.'

As a last resort, they can prescribe medications that have components in them that decrease anxiety.

Your vet may recommend CBD oil, and calming treats, if your dog's symptoms are severe.
Kevin Costner's first wife Cindy Silva was spotted shopping for groceries almost 30 years after her marriage to the Hollywood actor came crashing down as the Yellowstone star undergoes another divorce.

Cindy, 66, who tied the knot with the 68-year-old actor in 1978, but split from him in 1994, was photographed doing some grocery shopping at Gelson's Market in California over the weekend.

She kept it casual in a pair of black leggings, a button-down denim top, and Birkenstock sandals.

It was a far cry from the life she led with Costner when she would attend red carpet events and Hollywood parties with the movie star three decades ago.

Kevin Costner's first wife Cindy Silva was spotted almost 30 years after her marriage to the actor came crashing down amid explosive cheating allegations

Cindy (seen left in 1991 with Kevin and right recently) was photographed doing some grocery shopping at Gelson's Market in California over the weekend

She kept it casual in a pair of black leggings, a button-down denim top, and Birkenstock sandals

It was a far cry from the life she led with Costner when she would attend red carpet events and Hollywood parties with the movie star three decades ago

Cindy could be seen pushing a large cart filled with groceries - including a bouquet of flowers - to her car and loaded them into the trunk

Later on in the day, she was seen dropping off a man at the airport

Cindy could be seen pushing a large cart filled with groceries - including a bouquet of flowers - to her car and loaded them into the trunk as she wore her shoulder-length, white hair loose and thick-brimmed glasses.

Later on in the day, she was caught dropping off a man at the airport. She seemed in great spirits during both outings, flashing a big smile at one point.

Cindy tied the knot with the Yellowstone star in 1978 but split from him in 1994. They are seen together in 1992

Kevin and Cindy met in college in 1975, while they were both students at California State University - Fullerton, and tied the knot three years after that.

They welcomed two daughters together, Annie in 1984 and Lily in 1986, as well a son, named Joe, in 1988.

But after 16 years together, their marriage ended in divorce after a slew of rumors started to spread that Kevin had been unfaithful to Cindy.

At the time, reports emerged that claimed he had been embroiled in an affair with a celebrated hula dancer named Michele Amaral while he was filming the flick Waterworld in Hawaii.

New York Daily News reported that Kevin and Michele, a married mother-of-two, met at the Mauna Lani hotel, and shortly afterwards, she was 'spotted creeping out of his $4,500-a-day villa.'

The outlet said that Cindy found out about the affair from someone who had been working on the film but was fired.

Cindy seemed in great spirits during both outings, flashing a big smile at one point

She and met in college in 1975, while they were both students at California State University - Fullerton, and tied the knot three years after that

But after 16 years together, their marriage ended in divorce after a slew of rumors started to spread that Kevin had been unfaithful to Cindy

Their split was said to be one of the most expensive Hollywood divorces ever - and Cindy reportedly walked away with $80 million

Kevin strenuously denied the allegations at the time, saying that he was merely interviewing Michele for a job, and insisting he and the hula dancer had never even spoken on the phone.

At the time, reports emerged that claimed he had been embroiled in an affair with a celebrated hula dancer named Michele Amaral (seen) while he was filming the flick Waterworld in Hawaii

He stated to Parade Magazine in 1995: '[The cheating allegations] were hard on Cindy and our children.

'It didn't help things. The only thing it did was hurt. The collapse of my marriage was the hardest thing of all for me.'

In a separate interview with the Seattle Times that year, Kevin took responsibility for his role in the demise of his marriage, but did not go into detail.

'A series of events conspired to happen at the same time. I know it hurt some people that I had failed in my marriage. And the marriage was my own failure,' he said.

Their split was said to be one of the most expensive Hollywood divorces ever - and Cindy reportedly walked away with $80 million.

Since then, Cindy has stepped out of the spotlight and is now living a much quieter life

Kevin strenuously denied the cheating allegations after his split from Cindy (seen this week), claiming that he was merely interviewing Michele for a job

He stated to Parade Magazine in 1995: '[The cheating allegations] were hard on Cindy and our children. It didn't help things. The only thing it did was hurt'

Kevin also called the 'collapse of his marriage' the 'hardest' thing he had been through. His ex-wife Cindy is pictured this week

Since then, Cindy has stepped out of the spotlight and is now living a much quieter life.

As for Kevin, he briefly dated a woman named Bridget Rooney - heiress to the Pittsburgh Steelers, and aunt of actresses Rooney and Kate Mara - following his split from Cindy, and together, they welcomed a son, named Liam, in 1996.

In 2004, he married designer Christine Baumgartner after four years of dating.

They had two sons, Cayden in 2007 and Hayes in 2009, and a daughter, named Grace, in 2010. Christine filed for divorce in May.
YouTube star Grace Helbig has revealed she has been diagnosed with breast cancer at age 37.

The California-based social media personality took to YouTube with an emotional video to share that she received her diagnosis one month ago.

She detailed the moment she was given the 'shocking' and 'surreal' news that she had stage 2A triple-positive breast cancer.

Grace told her over 2.6 million subscribers, 'It doesn't sound real, but it's real,' before adding that she has had enough time to process the information and is beginning the process of chemotherapy.

California-based YouTube star Grace Helbig has revealed she has been diagnosed with breast cancer at age 37

The social media personality took to YouTube to share that she received her diagnosis one month ago in an emotional video

'I have breast cancer, It's very shocking, it's very surreal. It doesn't sound real, but it's real,' she said at the beginning of her video.

The 37-year-old explained that she discovered her diagnosis 'a month ago.'

'I've had a decent amount of time to process and start the process, so I'm finally ready to share with you,' Grace added.

Grace said she was diagnosed with stage 2A triple-positive breast cancer, which is a form of breast cancer in which the tumor cells have estrogen receptors, progesterone receptors, and a larger than normal number of HER2 receptors, according to the National Cancer Institute.

The social media star said medical professionals told her it was 'super treatable' and 'highly beatable.'

'We're going for cure, not remission here, which is exciting, encouraging, helpful, good,' Grace added.

The 37-year-old revealed she would be undergoing six rounds of chemotherapy, surgery, and hormonal therapy.

She added that she has already begun undergoing the beginning stages of her treatment, before noting that it made everything feel 'much more real.'

Grace (pictured with her husband Elliot) detailed the moment she was given the 'shocking' and 'surreal' news that she had stage 2A triple-positive breast cancer

The 37-year-old revealed she would be undergoing six rounds of chemotherapy, surgery, and hormonal therapy

The cancer Grace is fighting: What is triple-positive breast cancer? Triple-positive breast cancer is relatively uncommon It means the tumor cells have estrogen receptors, progesterone receptors, and a larger than normal number of HER2 receptors It can be treated with surgeries, chemotherapy, radiation and hormonal therapies Due to its unique characteristics, therapies may not be as effective with this form of caner as it is with others Advertisement

'This whole thing has been a lot, to say the least.

'I am feeling every feeling all day long.

'But I am so incredibly thankful to have an amazing husband [Elliott Morgan] and... you're really confronted with having to put yourself first.

'And you need to let people help you.'

She detailed how she first found out she had cancer, adding that she noticed a 'weird lump in my left breast.'

Although she was reluctant to tell her doctor about the lump, she eventually brought it to their attention.

'I really had to talk myself into bringing it up to her in the appointment because I thought I was just a stupid little girl that didn't know how girl bodies worked.

'Thank God I listened to that little voice inside of me that finally got the courage to bring it up to her because she also thought it was abnormal,' she explained.

Grace urged her over 2.6 million followers to get 'those lumps checked.'

The social media personality's diagnosis comes just two months after Hank Green revealed he was diagnosed with Hodgkin's lymphoma.

She detailed how she first found out she had cancer, adding that she noticed a 'weird lump in my left breast'

She explained she had come back to social media after experiencing burnout and was excited to get back to creating content up until receiving her diagnosis

She explained that she had been communicating with Hank, adding that he has been 'incredibly helpful.'

Grace said she was finding the humor in the situation to help herself cope with the devastating news.

She said: 'Comedy, jokes, laughing, that all really helps me process very difficult things - and not from a place of denial or deflection about the reality, but rather from a place of aiding me through the hard s**t.

'Laughing feels like it makes me breathe within a situation that I feel like I'm holding my breath. Like, this is a very serious situation, I know that. But there's also some humor to be found here.

'The joke's not lost on me that I've spent 15 years not using my boobs to get attention on the internet and yet here we are. And that I'm announcing this during Cancer season.'

Grace said that her diagnosis came as she was finally beginning to regain her confidence.

She explained she had come back to social media after experiencing burnout and was excited to get back to creating content up until receiving her diagnosis.

Grace said fighting the cancer and undergoing treatment would now be her full-time 'job'

'I was really excited about the idea of starting to make content again from this healthier, more grounded place. And then I got breast cancer,' she said.

Grace said fighting the cancer and undergoing treatment would now be her full-time 'job.'

'I'm going to fight this little b**** of a thing in my left breast as best and as strongly and as gracefully as I can,' she revealed.

At the end of her video, the social media personality added: 'The other immediate thing that you kind of learn in this process is that you cannot plan for the future.

'You have to take it one step at a time. And this was the next step for me. I'm doing okay.

'It was a hard few weeks after I found out, but I have the most amazing and supportive husband and family and friends, and I'm doing well and I'm ready to take this on.

'And I know I can take this on. I just have to take it one step at a time.'
The UK cracked the top 25, while the US ranked 35 out of 189

While Americans and Britons both have strong drinking cultures, neither hold a candle to nations like Latvia, Austria, and even a collection of islands in the South Pacific.

That's according to figures compiled by the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) in 2019, which analyzed the average liters of pure alcohol each person drank in 189 countries.

The Cook Islands - a collection of islands in the South Pacific- topped the list, with the average person consuming about 13 liters of pure alcohol per year- that's more than 100 glasses of wine.

The UK made it to the top 25, ranking 24 out of 189, while the US was 35th place.

Data collected by the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) ranked alcohol consumption of 189 countries. The Cook Islands, a collection of 15 islands in the South Pacific, topped the list, while the UK and US ranked 24 and 35 respectively

The data was collected as part of the CIA's World Factbook, a reference database that provides detailed demographic information for 266 countries.

Three of the countries in the top five are in Eastern Europe, the home of vodka, which has some of the highest rates of alcoholism.

More than one in 10 men in Latvia and Lithuania, for example, are dependent on alcohol.

Austria, where the legal drinking age is 16, closed out the top five, also has a strong beer culture.

About half Cook Islands adults over 18 drink alcohol, with some groups drinking as many as 10 beverages in a single night out.

The World Health Organization (WHO) estimates that 2.3 billion people across the globe are considered 'current drinkers,' meaning that they drink alcohol on a regular basis. This is nearly 30 percent of the world's population.

The Cook Islands is a self-governed nation in the South Pacific, nearly 2,400 miles from New Zealand, that's comprised of 15 islands.

The entire nation has about 17,500 people, and its economy is centered around tourism. The CIA's data says that over half the alcohol Cook Islanders drink is from spirits, such as vodka, whiskey, gin, and rum.

A separate report released by the Cook Islands Ministry of Health and the WHO found that almost half of all respondents from the Cook Islands drank alcohol in the last 30 days.

Alcohol use was more common in men, who made up about 57 percent, versus women, who accounted for 37 percent.

The researchers also noted that on a single drinking occasion, male drinkers consumed 9.5 standard drinks, whereas women had 6.3.

A standard drink contained about 10 grams of pure alcohol. In the US, a standard drink has 14 grams pure alcohol, according to the National Institutes of Health.

Pure alcohol is measured as one milliliter for every percentage of the drink's strength if there's at least 100 milliliters of it. A liter of 37.5 percent vodka, for example, contains 375 milliliters of pure alcohol, while a five-percent beer would contain 28.4 milliliters of pure alcohol.

Men between ages 18 and 44 consumed an average of 10 drinks per occasion.

On average, the report found that men had about 4.9 drinking occasions per month, while women had 4.2. That means young men could have upwards of 50 drinks per month.

Lower on the list are the US and UK, where drinking is a major part of both cultures.

Europe has the highest per capita consumption of alcohol of any continent in the world, the WHO has said.

According to 2021 data from the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD), Britons consume about 4.4 pints of beer or 2.3 bottles of wine on average every week.

They also tend to binge drink more than most other nations, with 51 percent of all alcohol consumed in the country drank by heavy drinkers  defined as drinking two pints for men or one pint of beer for women per day by the OECD.

In the US, 213 million people ages 18 and older have reported drinking alcohol at some point in their lifetime, according to the 2021 National Survey on Drug Use and Health (NSDUH).

About a quarter of US men and a fifth of US women reported binge drinking within the past month.

The US may rank lower than the UK due to an older drinking age. While Americans have to wait until age 21 to legally drink, Britons can do so at 18.

Rounding out the bottom of the CIA's list, all tied at 0 liters per year, were Bangladesh, Kuwait, Mauritania, Saudi Arabia, and Somalia.

In Bangladesh, consuming or selling alcohol was prohibited at the time the CIA data was released due to religious reasons. However, last year the country loosened its laws to allow someone to drink with official permission.

It's still banned in Kuwait, Mauritania, Saudi Arabia, and Somalia.
71% of Brits predict the NHS will charge them a fee for care in the next 10 years

Most Brits fear the NHS will have to start charging them for care within the next 10 years, a poll suggests.

This is despite the health service making over half of Brits proud to be British, ranking higher than the UK's history, democracy, or the Royal family.

The survey of nearly 2,500 Brits revealed that just 25 per cent believe the NHS will be largely free at the point of use by 2033.

Just over half (51 per cent) suspect they will have to pay for some services they currently get for free, whilst 13 per cent predicted most services will come with a fee and 7 per cent anticipate having to pay for all NHS services.

The poll, commissioned by think tank the Health Foundation, comes amid record waiting lists for NHS care, overstretched ambulance and A&E services and crucial cancer care deadlines for patients being missed.

Over three quarters of Brits predict the NHS will start charging them for currently free services within the next decade with a similar proportion anticipating the health service isn't prepared to meet rising demand according to a Health Foundation commissioned poll

Despite the gloomy outlook, the vast majority of Brits said the health service made them proud to be British

When asked why, the NHS's principal of providing free/affordable care ranked as the highest source of pride

Among those surveyed, those who vote Conservative were most likely to predict the NHS will start charging people to use services, at 66 per cent

In comparison, 51 per cent of Labour supporters predicted the same.

Conservative and Labour supporters also disagreed on what was to blame for the NHS being in crisis.

Tory voters were more likely to pin the blame on NHS mismanagement and inefficacy, 43 and 32 per cent pointing to these factors respectively.

Labour supporters instead said No10 and ministers' penny-pinching was to blame, with 58 and 52 per cent pointing to a lack of NHS funding and Government policy respectively.

READ MORE: How striking NHS consultants can earn up to 500,000 a year: Shock salaries revealed - with 10% pocketing MORE than Rishi Sunak Latest health service figures for 2022 show the average annual basic pay for full-time equivalent consultants now stands at 104,357 (top left graphic). However, the same data shows this extends to 126,125 per year, with their base wages topped up through overtime, medical awards and geographic allowances (bottom right chart) Advertisement

Regardless of how they voted, eight out of 10 people said the NHS needed an increase in funding.

Increased taxation was the most popular method of raising this extra cash, beating more borrowing or cutting other Government, with the most popular tax being a specific NHS tax (31 per cent).

The vast majority of those surveyed also didn't think the NHS was ready for the future.

A total of 77 per cent said the health service was not ready to meet the demands of an ageing population and 51 per cent said it was unprepared to incorporate new technology like AI.

Despite uncertainty over its future, the poll also revealed how many Brits were proud of the UK's health service.

A total of 54 per cent of people said the NHS made them proud to be British, easily beating the nation's history (34 per cent) and the Royals (23 per cent).

Among those for which the NHS was a source of pride, 55 per cent said they were most proud of the health service providing free and affordable health care.

Other leading sources of pride were the NHS treating every person equally (36 per cent) and the quality of care and skill of its medics (14 per cent).

Health Foundation assistant director for policy Tim Gardner said the poll revealed both how important the NHS was to Brits, and how they feared for its future.

'After 75 years, the NHS remains fundamental to what it means to be British  but there is real concern among the public about whether the principles on which the health service was founded will endure,' he said.

The number of people waiting for routine hospital treatment in England soared to a record 7.42million (red line) in April, figures show. More than 370,000 people in the queue for routine ops, such as hip replacements, were waiting for more than a year (yellow bars)

NHS data on A&E performance in May shows that three-quarters of emergency department attendees (74 per cent) were seen within four hours (red line). Meanwhile, 31,494 patients who sought help in emergency departments were forced to wait more than 12 hours  equivalent to more than 1,000 patients per day (yellow bars)

Ambulances took an average of 32 minutes and 24 seconds to respond to category two calls, such as burns, epilepsy and strokes. This is nearly twice as long as the 18 minute target and nearly four minutes longer than one month earlier (red bars)

Six in 10 cancer patients started treatment within two months of an urgent GP referral (red line). This is down from March and well below the NHS target of 85 per cent. It means 5,178 patients (blue bars) had to wait longer for surgery, chemo or radiotherapy

'People's concern about the current state of the health service should not be interpreted as an appetite for radical change to its founding principles.

READ MORE: 60,000 more doctors, 170,000 more nurses and 2.4billion in funding: Everything you need to know about the first-ever NHS long-term workforce plan The plan has pledged to increase the NHS permanent workforce by almost a million by 2036/2037. It expects to see a rise from 1.4million to between 2.2 and 2.3million Advertisement

'Our polling consistently shows that the public wants a better health service, that can respond to changing health needs and continue to provide equitable access for all, and backs the investment and policy action needed to bring that about.'

Mr Gardner added that Government's recently released NHS workforce strategy should be a starting point for sustained 'investment and improvement  not a one-off event.'

The NHS's 75th birthday comes at a time when many parts of the health service are struggling to keep up with demand.

Official data shows the number of people waiting for routine hospital treatment in England soared to a record 7.42million in April, figures show.

Of these, more than 370,000 people in the queue for routine ops, such as hip replacements, have been waiting for more than a year.

NHS data on A&E performance in May shows that only three-quarters of emergency department attendees (74 per cent) were seen within four hours, compared to above 90 per cent a decade ago.

And ambulances took an average of 32 minutes and 24 seconds to respond to category two calls, such as burns, epilepsy and strokes, nearly twice as long as the 18 minute target for such emergencies.

Additionally, only six in 10 cancer patients started treatment within two months of an urgent GP referral below the NHS target of 85 per cent.

It's not the first time the prospect of paying for NHS care has been highlighted.

Other such ideas, such as controversially charging wealthier Brits to use the health service or removing some exemptions like free prescription for pensioners have been touted before.
The vast majority of teens now underestimate their body weight at the expense of their health, a new global study suggests.

Nearly 14 percent of adolescents believed themselves to be lighter than they actually were while over a quarter overestimated their weight

That is despite ballooning obesity rates nationwide, with 43 percent of adults and 25 percent of youth qualifying as medically too fat or having a body mass index of over 30.

The researchers said the widespread misperception about weight signals that teens may be less likely to engage in healthy lifestyle behaviors especially as a movement toward body positivity and self-acceptance normalizes and downplays the risks of being obese.

In the survey of more than 746,000 adolescents aged 11 to 15 (average age of 13.7), girls were more likely than boys to underestimate their weight, which researchers said suggests greater rates of self-acceptance

Rates of childhood obesity in the U.S. jumped 17% from 2011 to 2020, with those aged 12 to 19 years old the most at risk

Dr Anouk Geraets said: So its concerning that were seeing a trend where fewer adolescents perceive themselves as being overweight  as this could undermine ongoing efforts to tackle increasing levels of obesity in this age group.

Dr Geraets, a social scientist at the University of Luxembourg and lead author added: Young people who underestimate their weight and therefore do not consider themselves to be overweight may not feel they need to lose excess weight and, as a result, they may make unhealthy lifestyle choices.

The study, published in the journal Child and Adolescent Obesity reported that from 2002 to 2018, females and males across 41 countries became more likely to underestimate their weight.

Meanwhile, rates of overestimating weight decreased, meaning teens were more likely to see themselves as thinner than they truly were.

Compared to teen boys, girls were more likely to underestimate their weight, which experts behind the study posit could mean that girls are becoming increasingly self-accepting of their sizes and less fixated on the number that shows up on the scale.

The study took place across 41 countries including the US, Canada, and many in Europe. In countries with higher rates of overweight and obesity, teens were actually more likely to mistakenly underestimate their weight.

The social scientists behind the study were concerned about the negative effects these trends will have on public health guidance for tamping down ballooning obesity rates.

As fewer adolescents acknowledge that they are medically overweight or obese, they continue down a path of poorer health compared to those with a normal weight.

The authors said: 'As a result, less adolescents will be involved in weight reduction than before, reducing the effectiveness of public health interventions aimed at weight reduction.'

The team collected health data from the Health Behavior in School-Aged Children (HBSC) study, a cross-national World Health Organization research initiative dating back to 1983.

They looked at survey responses from over 746,000 adolescents whose average age was 13.7 every four years from 2002 to 2018. They were asked how much they weighed without clothes on and how tall they were without shoes on to calculate Body Mass Index (BMI).

Over the study period, more and more adolescents came to underestimate their weight while rates of overestimating weight fell.

As time passed, teen girls were more likely than boys to think they were lighter than they actually were. Boys also had an increasing tendency to underestimate their weight but to a lesser extent.

Teens of both genders showed a decreasing trend in overestimating their weights over time.

The decrease was slightly stronger among girls compared to boys, meaning that girls were steadily becoming less likely to think they were heavier than they actually were.

To assess weight perception, the social scientists from Luxembourg, Czech Republic, Norway, Finland, Italy, Ireland, Armenia, Malta, Serbia and Germany, conducted a thorough screening of the teens involved in the study.

The 746,000 subjects were asked to answer the following question: Do you think your body is? with the possible answers, much too thin, a bit too thin, about the right size, a bit too fat and much too fat.

Study subjects answered whether they considered themselves normal weight, underweight, or overweight/obese, with zero representing under, one for normal, and two for overweight.

Despite obesity rates tripling worldwide since the 70s, the researchers reported that girls seemed to be better able to correctly estimate their weight than boys.

Even though the team found that teens living in countries with higher obesity rates often underestimated and less often overestimated their weight status, the researchers said that changes in those rates over time did not explain the changes in perception because the effect of the survey year on body weight perception did not change significantly.

Girls were typically more likely than their male counterparts to consider themselves too fat regardless of obesity rates in their home countries, therefore the increase in a more accurate weight perception and declining rates of overestimating their weights could indicate an overall decline in the number of girls taking dangerous steps to lose weight such as starvation and purging.

The authors of the study said: The decrease in overestimation and increase of correct weight perception among girls may reflect an increase in positive body image, which is associated with health benefits.

Changes may reflect the programs and efforts to emphasize functionality of ones body rather than on body size alone.
On a Saturday morning two years ago, Jane McNeice was lying in bed, scrolling through Facebook, when a colourful chart describing traits of 'girls with autism' caught her eye. The list included 'practises conversations in mind', 'may feel out of place in the world', 'anxiety', 'perfectionist', 'trusting' and 'adapts behaviour to fit in'.

'I went, tick, tick, tick  and cried my eyes out,' says the 47-year-old author and founder of mental health training company Mind Matters.

'I knew immediately. It was like a light bulb going on over my entire life,' says Jane, who lives in Doncaster with her husband Steven, 33, who runs his own IT company, and their children, Oliver, ten, and Benjamin, seven.

For more than four decades, Jane had experienced a range of problems, including discomfort interacting with others, low self-esteem, anxiety, depression and suicidal thoughts. She has always been, she says, a square peg in a round hole.

At that time, in 2021, she'd been seeking help for Oliver, who since lockdown had been increasingly having meltdowns where he'd lash out, cry and scream.

Jane McNeice, 47, (pictured) experienced discomfort interacting with others, low self-esteem, anxiety, depression and suicidal thoughts for more than four decades

Jane also has a daughter, Laura, 27, from a previous relationship. From a young age, she had also experienced emotional problems, as well as being verbally abusive and damaging things at home.

What started off as one light bulb turning on became a series of flicked switches for the McNeice family. Over the following seven months, first Jane, then Laura, and finally Oliver, were diagnosed with autism spectrum disorder.

This is a lifelong developmental disorder that affects how people communicate and interact with the world. While the causes are not clear, experts believe that genetic factors may contribute, with studies estimating 40 to 80 per cent have an inherited factor.

Jane and Laura were reluctant to wait for an NHS adult diagnostic service (currently two years or more, depending where you live) so went privately to a psychotherapist who assessed them using tests produced by the American Psychiatric Association.

In Oliver's case, a chat with a GP and his school led to them receiving an NHS letter saying the wrong department had been contacted and suggesting Jane and her husband take a course for parents with children with ADHD (attention deficit hyperactivity disorder) and emotional regulation problems.

After paying for a private assessment, which established that the suspected ADHD was 'unlikely' and autism was 'possible', Jane paid 3,750 for an autism assessment by a specialist child psychiatrist, which included Oliver being observed at school.

Jane says each diagnosis has made a significant difference to their lives. 'Understanding who we are has improved our sense of self, our mental health, self-esteem and resilience,' she says.

Jane, pictured with her three children Laura, Oliver and Benjamin, was diagnosed with autism later in life

It's often assumed that autism affects boys more than girls  and, certainly, boys are more likely to be diagnosed, with a 2017 study published in the American Academy of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry showing three males are diagnosed for every one female.

There are around 700,000 UK adults and children diagnosed with autism, according to the National Autistic Society, with around 460,000 of them men and boys.

However, research published in The Lancet in April suggests the numbers affected could be more than double the official figures, with the over-50s and women less likely to be diagnosed.

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One of the main reasons behind this lack of diagnosis is that females are less likely to 'fit the pattern' of autism, defined by research that's largely based on males, suggests Dr Sarah Lister Brook, a clinical director at the National Autistic Society and diagnostic specialist with the charity's Lorna Wing Centre for Autism.

'Standardised approaches for assessing autism lean towards questioning and expecting a pattern of behaviour and development that is more typical of males, because, historically, common autistic mannerisms came from studying boys,' she explains. 'Those approaches might miss picking up a more typically female profile.'

For instance, a 2013 study in the Journal of the American Academy of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry added irritability and lethargy to the problems that typically affect autistic girls more than boys. Girls may also 'mask' their symptoms more, by copying how their peers speak and behave.

'It's not the case for all males, but we know the typical male presentation is more overt symptoms such as repetitive patterns of behaviour, rituals and unusual movements in their bodies [such as hand flapping],' says Dr Lister Brook.

'We've found, over many years of assessing women and girls, that while some experience some of these behaviours, they will often suppress them more effectively and have more of a social filter for repetitive behaviours.

'While boys typically act out how they are feeling and externalise their emotions, girls tend to be more internalising.'

Dr Rachel Hiller, a clinical psychologist and research fellow at Bath University, led two studies, published in 2014 and 2015, on autistic gender differences and found that boys and girls with autism behave differently as early as pre-school years. Young girls were more likely to mimic others to fit in, and obsess over friendships; boys were more likely to withdraw and socially isolate.

There are around 700,000 UK adults and children diagnosed with autism, according to the National Autistic Society, with around 460,000 of them men and boys (Pictured: Jane with daughter Laura)

'Autistic women and girls are often more socially motivated than autistic boys or men, and may have close friendships,' adds William Mandy, a clinical psychologist and professor of clinical psychology at University College London.

Differences can also occur with interests or obsessions.

'The special interests of autistic girls often look less striking and unusual than autistic boys,' says Professor Mandy. 'For example, a girl might be fascinated with animals, or make-up, whereas a boy might be really interested in the District Line or 50p pieces.

'Though someone without autism might have these same interests, they won't tend to be followed with the same autistic intensity.'

The understanding about women's experience of autism is slowly improving, says Dr Lister Brook, who has noticed a steady rise in referrals for autism assessments for women and girls. 'The figure has definitely increased rapidly  and more so in the last 15 years.'

But a study in 2015 by online research community Interactive Autism Network (IAN) found that girls in its U.S.-based registry of over 30,000 autistic individuals have milder autistic mannerisms than the boys. IAN's director, Paul Lipkin, said: 'We must consider whether the girls are not only being recognised later, but also may be underidentified due to less pronounced symptoms.'

But this does not mean that their symptoms are any less distressing, says Jane. 'The presumption is that girls with autism do not get diagnosed because maybe we are not suffering or we have our problems under control or managed. That is not true. Our suffering is hidden.'

Sarah Dickinson, 34, (pictured) from County Durham, was diagnosed with autism and ADHD 18 months ago  having previously been told she was suffering with anxiety

Another crack autistic females can fall into is being diagnosed with anxiety or other mental health disorders. This is less likely for males whose symptoms tend to be more pronounced.

'It is not uncommon for someone with autism to hit a clinical threshold for anxiety and be diagnosed with it,' says Dr Lister Brook. 'But it takes a bit of curiosity to understand that there might be a neurodevelopmental condition  autism  underpinning it.'

Sarah Dickinson, 34, from County Durham, was diagnosed with autism and ADHD 18 months ago  having previously been told she was suffering with anxiety.

'I was called a hypochondriac and highly sensitive, but I just knew there was more to it,' says Sarah, a customer experience manager for a health food company. 'I'd have awful breakdowns and what I thought were panic attacks at school when I felt extreme emotional or sensory overload.

'I'd have a very big cry and then isolate myself and not speak much for a few days to recharge. Every six months or so I'd visit my GP begging them to do every test possible to find out why I struggled so much with daily life.'

Soon after starting secondary school, Sarah was diagnosed with generalised anxiety disorder and depression and prescribed sertraline, an antidepressant. But this had no effect on her mood, so after nine months she came off it.

'I struggled a lot with change and going into a new environment,' she says. 'I got bullied for copying others  but, if I was myself, asking too many questions or saying 'weird' things, I got bullied for being different. I was stuck.'

Throughout her adolescence, doctors suggested her weight, hormones or the contraceptive pill might be responsible for how she was feeling. 'You start to question yourself  am I making this up? Am I going crazy? If you have low self-esteem anyway, it can be really difficult.'

Sarah went to college to study animation and illustration but left after less than a year because she struggled with the pressure of deadlines, something she now identifies as pathological demand avoidance  a recognised characteristic of some autistic people  which means avoiding everyday demands and expectations to an extreme extent.

'I was called a hypochondriac and highly sensitive, but I just knew there was more to it,' says Sarah

During lockdown, her anxiety hit new levels and she was seen by a different GP who reviewed her medical records. 'She said: 'Has anyone ever talked to you about autism or ADHD?' At the time I laughed. It sounded ridiculous.'

A backlog for specialist assessment meant the diagnosis process took two years, but when a psychiatrist finally confirmed it was autism, she, like Jane, said it made a huge difference. 'I know that my 'character flaws' are not flaws at all. I'm just wired differently.'

She is now less concerned about trying to fit in. Connecting with

other autistic people, like her, through social media @adhd.khaleesi on Instagram and TikTok) makes her feel happier and less isolated.

With more than four decades of practice, Jane had become adept at 'masking': trying to do or say the socially 'right' thing by copying how others speak, gesture, or even the tone of their voice. 'I would mimic their ideals, how they dressed, even their handwriting,' she says.

It was, she says a blessing, in that it helped her fit in, but it was mentally exhausting. It never occurred to Jane that she might be on the spectrum. 'I'm actually really poor at maths, though I've always been good at pattern spotting,' she says.

Jane, who has self-published a book, The Umbrella Picker, about her diagnosis, says knowing she is autistic has helped her become less self-critical.

Her daughter, Laura's, diagnosis at 26 was equally transformative. 'She is now able to manage her emotional impulses more effectively, through awareness and coping mechanisms, and has an explanation for why she experienced the thoughts and feelings she has.

'To find out your child is autistic and that their suffering can be eased is priceless. For me, too, it's been the best psychological intervention I've ever received for my mental health, even though there's no treatment as such,' says Jane.

'It improved my anxiety levels. I just want all the other lost girls out there to be found.'
Alzheimer's patients across America will be given a sliver of hope this week with health officials poised to approve a breakthrough drug.

The monoclonal antibody therapy lecanemab is expected to be approved by the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) this Thursday, July 6.

The drug - which is given intravenously - was shown in clinical trials to reduce the toxic buildup of clumps of toxic amyloid proteins in the brain, a hallmark of Alzheimers disease, and slow symptoms of the cruel memory-robbing disorder in patients with an early form of the disease by around a quarter - which in real terms works out at around an additional six months of healthy life.

Approval of dementia medication Leqembi is all but guaranteed after an FDA panel voted unanimously last month in favor of making the drug accessible to patients early in their disease progression

In clinical trials, lecanemab (orange) showed the ability to slow cognitive decline 27 percent when compared to those on a placebo

Despite the treatments great promise, it has the potential to cause severe and sometimes life-threatening side effects including bleeding or swelling in the brain.

But the FDA's expert panel of neurologists agreed unanimously that the benefits of the medication outweighed the small risk of negative reactions, which affected one in seven trial participants.

The approval paves the way for over a million Americans in the early stages of the disease to get access to Alzheimers treatment starting possibly as soon as the end of summer.

In order to qualify for the treatment, potential patients will need to undergo tests showing that they are in the early stages of dementia.

Doctors will also need to determine that the patients' brains contain the amyloid deposits, typically by performing a PET scan.

The potential for the drug is huge - more than six million Americans are estimated to have Alzheimer's disease and of that total, between 360,000 and 640,000 have early onset Alzheimer's.

The drugmakers estimate far fewer people - 100,000 by 2026 - will actually get the drug due to barriers with health insurance.

The true number of patients who will get access to it is unclear as providers will have to contend with a mountain of paperwork and bureaucratic obstacles to dispense it.

It is also slated to become available to more than a million Alzheimer's patients enrolled in Medicare, the government health insurance program that caters to seniors 65 and older.

While Medicare has said it will foot the bill for the $26,500-per-year medication 'in appropriate settings' , Medicare often does not cover ancillary costs for Alzheimer's treatments that can add up to thousands of dollars.

Patients enrolled in Medicare may still be on hook for shares of the cost of PET scans used to detect amyloid deposits as well as repeat MRIs, tacking on an additional $5,000 per year on average. This would present a major hurdle to Medicare enrollees whose average income hovers around $31,000.

The late-stage clinical trial involved nearly 1,800 patients aged 50 to 90 with mild cognitive impairment caused by Alzheimers or early-stage Alzheimers.

The participants were evaluated in several areas to determine the rate of cognitive decline, including memory and problem-solving. Cognitive decline was measured using the clinical dementia rating, an 18-point scale with a higher score indicating a greater level of impairment.

The IV monoclonal antibody administered twice a month slowed the rate of cognitive decline by 27 percent, representing a slowdown of about six months.

The drug received accelerated approval from the FDA in January based on its ability to remove sticky amyloid plaques from the brain.

More than 6 million Americans have Alzheimers disease, and the vast majority of them are over 65 and qualify for government insurance under Medicare.

In healthy people, those amyloid proteins are cleared from the brain. In the context of Alzheimers disease the amyloid-beta protein deposits build up over time and form sticky plaques in the brain that are thought to disrupt communication between cells and activate the immune system, causing inflammation.

When the buildup of amyloid in the brain reaches a tipping point, it leads to the formation of tangles of a protein called tau.

The formation of these tangles disrupts the normal functioning of brain cells by disrupting the transport of essential molecules such as neurotransmitters involved in intercellular communication and nutrients such as glucose and oxygen.

The research into the exact mechanisms that cause Alzheimers disease is ongoing and far from settled. Some researchers believe tau has a bigger role to play than amyloid plaques in the progression of the disease.

Over time, the buildup of plaques and tau tangles damages synapses in critical regions of the brain such as the hippocampus, for instance, which is crucial for forming memories, as well as the Entorhinal Cortex which relays sensory information from the outer cortex of the brain to the hippocampus.

That buildup also damages the parietal lobe of the brain involved closely with sensory perception, spatial awareness, and the ability to maintain attention.

Despite the promise shown in trials, some experts are less than convinced about the drugs benefit. While one member of the panel, Dr Merit Cudkowicz called the clinical evidence very clear and very robust, others voiced concerns about the significant health risks attached to the lab-made antibody.

Among those who received lecanemab in the trial, 17 percent had brain bleeding, compared with nine percent in the placebo group, and 13 percent had brain swelling, compared with just two percent of those given a placebo.

In an earlier study, about seven percent of trial participants dropped out due to adverse effects compared to less than three percent of placebo recipients.

Overall, 14 percent of people who received the drug suffered a serious adverse reaction in the trial compared to just 11 percent of those who did not get the drug.

The companies behind the drug, Eisai in Tokyo and Biogen in Cambridge, Massachusetts have said 13 trial participants died.

One such participant was Florida-native Genevieve Lane, 79, who suffered a massive, fatal seizure triggered by a burst blood vessel in her brain in September 2022, just a week after her third dose of the drug.

Ms Lane's daughter Julie said her mother was in the early stages of her disease and was deemed fit for the lecanemab trial.

Genevieve Lane, pictured with her daughters, died in September 2022 after her third dose of Alzheimer's wonder drug lecanemab

Ms Lane suffered a massive bleed on the brain, shown here on this scan

But soon after her first infusion, Genevieve's health deteriorate slowly at first, then quickly. A week after the third infusion on Sept 7, she collapsed and was rushed to the hospital, but there was little the doctors could do.

Five days after she was admitted, the family made the decision to remove Genevieves life support. She died on September 19.

While neurologists have said the drug shows tremendous promise for millions of Americans, its rollout is expected to be bogged down by bureaucratic roadblocks. Per the federal guidelines, doctors will have to participate in registries that collect evidence about how the drugs work in the real world.

Many doctors do not see this requirement as onerous  collecting patient data is something they do every day.

But Alzheimers activists fear this will cause harmful delays in prescribing, depriving some patients of much-needed help. And with lecanemab, which is designated for people showing early signs of the disease, time is of the essence.

The approval will also require a torrent of paperwork, communicating with insurers and the government, and hiring qualified workers to diagnose and treat Alzheimers. An increasingly old population has coincided with increased rates of Alzheimers and related forms of dementia, and the healthcare system is straining to keep up.
Two years ago, the London stock market was gripped with excitement about medical cannabis, with companies queuing up for a public listing.

After the initial buzz, investors did not see many highs for the following year or so, but a budding revival has been apparent in recent months.

Companies are adjusting to the shifts in an industry that is, in a legally approved sense, still very young, with one chief executive describing this stage of the market as 'Cannabis 2.0'.

Although the UK is the second largest market for medical cannabis in Europe, its legalisation in 2018 has seen progress in fits and starts.

Patient numbers are rising by around a thousand each month, and are forecast to exceed 47,000 this year, and possibly 70,000 by the end of the next year, according to industry specialist Prohibition Partners.

Progress: Although the UK is the second largest market for medical cannabis in Europe, its legalisation in 2018 has seen progress in fits and starts

This growth has seen significant share price bounces for several companies, with Oxford Cannabinoid Technologies jumping over 70 per cent in the first few months of the year, Celadon Pharmaceuticals soaring 190 per cent and Chill Brands almost 300 per cent.

All three cover different corners of the cannabis market, with the full array of London-listed medical cannabis companies offering access to corners of the market from cultivators to biotechs, CBD producers and distributors, and makers of skincare and other consumer goods.

London investors currently have direct access to two cultivators, Celadon and Hellenic Dynamics, with a possible third, Northern Leaf, recently raising 3 million for a potential listing.

Hellenic Dynamics, based in Greece, is more focused on European markets and has just signed a major deal signed with a German distributor.

Celadon grows its medical cannabis from an indoor hydroponic facility that is one of the first to gain Good Manufacturing Practice (GMP) from the UK medical regulator.

This approval allowed the commercial sale of its product and has led to the surge in Celadon's value.

UK patients prescribed medicinal cannabis are currently reliant on imported product, but Professor Mike Barnes, a neurologist who educates and trains doctors about prescribing medical cannabis, says Celadon is one of a new generation of domestic producers that should provide an important boost to the UK market by guaranteeing more consistent supply.

Another brake on the UK's medical cannabis growth is the caution of the medical regulatory environment, Prof Barnes adds.

He acknowledged that the nature of cannabis makes it difficult to regulate like a pharmaceutical pill, with many complex variables that influence cannabis growth affecting the nature of each plant.

But GW Pharmaceuticals, now owned by Jazz Pharmaceuticals, was the first to develop prescription medicines based on cannabis extracts. Its products Epidiolex and Sativex were approved in the US in 2018 and England in 2019 respectively.

For investors who are looking for the potential reward than comes with higher risks, there small cap biotechs looking to follow in its footsteps.

Oxford Cannabinoid Technologies (0.93p) is one such company, which has seen considerable share price movements on the back of its Home Office growing licence renewal and approval for a phase 1 trial in the UK of its lead pain relief drug candidate.

Ananda Developments, also with a UK cultivation facility, is set to begin two Phase 2 clinical trials for chronic pain conditions.

Broker SPAngel suggested these trials could provide more confidence to prescribers and regulators.

Another to have segued into more of a pharmaceutical approach is MGC Pharmaceuticals (0.29p), where the first deliveries of its CannEpil treatment for drug-resistant epilepsy were received by UK patients in May via the I Am Billy Foundation and named patient request scheme.

Kanabo (2p), which characterises the fast-moving nature of the sector by seeming to do a bit of everything, has a cannabis inhaler in development, which was tipped for European approval earlier in the year.

It also recently launched an online medicinal cannabis clinic specialising in pain management.

CBD, one of the best-known chemical extracts from cannabis, is an active ingredient in some of these pharmaceutical products but its largest presence in the UK is in the wellness and lifestyle goods spaces.

Total sales of CBD, which can be bought without a prescription as a health supplement or in cosmetics products, are expected to reach 344million in the UK this year and 383million by 2027.

Chill Brands (7.4p), a skincare business, has regained investor confidence under its new boss Callum Sommerton, with its balance sheet reinforced and its chill.com website now selling third-party products as well as its own branded CBD oils, tobacco alternatives and edibles.

Cellular Goods (0.8p), a skincare products maker, lately received a boost by winning a product placement on multinational beauty retailer Sephora's website.

What we are witnessing in the cannabis sector ultimately mirrors trend often seen in new industries as they transform and adapt, with investors needing to keep a close eye on developments to reap the potential harvest.

To read more small-cap news click here: www.proactiveinvestors.co.uk.
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John Wood Group has won a two-year contract extension worth about $250million (197million) to provide services to Brunei's largest energy producer.

The Scottish engineering and consulting company said the new deal would focus on upgrading Brunei Shell Petroleum's offshore energy assets to improve production capacity while lowering emissions.

Among the services its operations business division intends to deliver range from construction to procurement, brownfield engineering and management of the offshore marine fleet.

Contract: Wood Group said the new deal would focus on upgrading Brunei Shell Petroleum's offshore energy assets to improve production capacity whilst lowering emissions

Wood said services would be supplied to BSP's 20 biggest offshore installations, which are responsible for approximately 80 per cent of the firm's total oil and gas production.

BSP is a joint venture between the Government of Brunei Darussalam and oil giant Shell, employing about 4,000 people and 20,000 contractors, according to its website.

Shell's presence in Brunei dates back to at least 1929 when the British Malayan Petroleum Company discovered oil in the Seria field in northwest Borneo.

Ken Gilmartin, chief executive of Wood, said: 'This extension shows progress on our strategy, which focuses on reimbursable projects and complex work in critical industries that we laid out last year and demonstrates the strength of our relationship with an important client in a key region.

'It is also testament to our track record of performance excellence, safe operations and innovative technical expertise.

'The award also highlights our continued focus on ensuring energy security across the region whilst minimising the environmental impact of doing so.'

Wood Group shares were 1 per cent up at 136.6p on Monday morning, yet they have plunged by over three-quarters in the past five years, mostly due to the lockdown-era slump in oil prices causing energy firms to cut back on new projects.

Its latest deal follows an eventful year for the Aberdeen-based group, which was a takeover target for private equity house Apollo Global Management.

After rejecting four proposals, Wood agreed to open up its books in April when the American asset manager put forward a 240 pence per share offer.

But the following month, Apollo decided to walk away without explanation, meaning it cannot make another approach until at least November.
Carillions former finance chief has been handed an 11-year boardroom ban for his role in one of the UKs biggest corporate failings.

Zafar Khan, who served as the outsourcing giants finance director for less than a year before it imploded, has been blocked from holding company directorships for more than a decade.

The construction group, which was involved in building hospitals and roads, collapsed in early 2018 owing close to 7billion.

At the time, it was working on about 450 public sector projects, leaving thousands of people without a job and putting major delays on planned developments.

An Insolvency Service spokesman said yesterday it had accepted a disqualification undertaking from Khan for 11 years for his conduct as a director of Carillion.

Ban: Zafar Khan, who served as Carillions finance director for less than a year before it imploded, has been blocked from holding company directorships

The Insolvency Service refused to comment further because litigation against the remaining directors is ongoing, with a trial set to commence the week of October 16.

Last year, Khan, chief executive Richard Howson and Richard Adam, who also served as Carillions finance chief, were fined a total of close to 1million for issuing misleading statements to investors about its finances.

Ben Drew, partner at law firm Fladgate, said Khans ban was an example of the Insolvency Service flexing its muscles.

Khan said: I have decided, in the interests of my family and finally to draw a line under this process, that I will provide an undertaking not to act a director.

When I took on the role I was aware that the group faced significant commercial challenges and I devoted all my energies to overcoming these challenges.

I regret that I was not able to make a big enough difference in the short time I was in post.
AstraZeneca shares took a hit after data from a highly anticipated clinical trial suggested a lung cancer drug may not work as well as hoped.

The pharma giant said there had been a number of grade 5 events with its trials for datopotamab deruxtecan.

Grade 5 events mean that patients died during the clinical trial and this is likely to raise fears about the safety of the drug.

The news sent AstraZenecas shares down 8 per cent, or 902p, to 10,374p.

Setbacks: AstraZeneca said there had been a number of grade 5 events with its trials for lung cancer drug datopotamab deruxtecan

The fact that the firm, which is developing the drug alongside Japanese group Daiichi Sankyo, did not announce that the results were clinically meaningful was also a blow to investors, who are hoping the treatment will become as successful as AstraZenecas other cancer drug Enhertu.

Some analysts have estimated that the drug could generate as much as 14.2billion in sales, with AstraZeneca having already agreed to pay 4.7billion to Daiichi Sankyo for the rights to develop the treatment.

But broker Stifel said that while the adverse side effects could be considered manageable by lung cancer specialists, it had expected the company to have learned from previous experience to help and limit such outcomes.

It added that the absence of any clinically meaningful data, as well as patient deaths during the trial, would raise questions about the magnitude of the benefit of the drug against existing treatments.

Despite this, Susan Galbraith, AstraZenecas head of oncology research, said the results provided compelling evidence that the drug could play a role in treating lung cancer.

The firm plans to continue the trial and gather more data on the overall survival of patients using the drug, before publishing the full results.

Datopotamab deruxtecan is an antibody drug conjugate, a method of targeting chemotherapy to make it more effective and reduce its side effects.

Doctors and scientists are trying to move away from the current method of chemo which involves exposing the whole body, killing both cancerous and healthy cells.

In the trial, AstraZeneca said that datopotamab deruxtecan could stall the progression of the disease in patients with advanced lung cancer for longer than the current standard treatment, a chemotherapy drug called docetaxel.
PwCs embattled Australian business has fired eight partners, including its former chief executive, following an internal investigation into the leaking of confidential government tax plans by a former partner.

The investigation found that misuse of confidential information breached professional standards.

It also identified a failure of leadership and governance to address the breaches, PwC said in a statement.

The professional services group has been in crisis in Australia after leaked emails showed it had used information about tax policy changes it had obtained in confidence from the government to try to win new business from corporate clients.

The Australian Treasury referred the matter to the police in May.

Sackings: PWC has been in crisis in Australia after leaked emails showed it used information it had obtained in confidence from the government to try to win new business

The Reserve Bank of Australia, several government departments and the countrys three largest pension funds have frozen or reviewed ties with PwC.

The sackings are the latest attempt to contain the damage to the business caused by the scandal.

It began after a former partner, Peter Collins, who had been advising the Australian government on new tax laws targeting corporate tax avoidance, shared confidential drafts with colleagues, which were used to drum up business around the world.

Collins, PwC Australias former head of international tax, had been part of a trusted group of outside tax experts helping the Australian government to draft its 2016 Multinational Anti-Avoidance Law.

He had signed strict confidentiality agreements with the Australian Treasury.

Emails showed, however, that Collins had shared secret government documents, decisions and planning for the new tax laws with colleagues.

He has since been deregistered as a tax agent by the Tax Practitioners Board and is under investigation by police.

Kristin Stubbins, acting chief executive of PwC Australia, said: Accountability is critical to improving our culture and, based on our investigation to date, it is clear that the conduct of a number of partners fell short of what was expected of them.

They are now being held accountable for their misconduct.

Tom Seymour, who stepped down as chief executive of PwC Australia in May, is one of the eight who have left or are in the process of leaving.

He admitted he had received emails containing confidential information about the governments tax plans. The eight have not commented.
Ready for action: Ofgen chief exec Jonathan Brearley

Energy suppliers have been warned by the industrys watchdog not to start prematurely showering investors with dividends as they return to profit.

Ofgems chief executive Jonathan Brearley told chief executives yesterday that the regulator is ready to take action if firms start rewarding shareholders before rebuilding their financial health.

Billions of pounds in taxpayer subsidies have been spent propping up the sector after global energy prices surged following Russias invasion of Ukraine.

Now that the pressure is starting to ease, the regulator is trying to ensure that consumers benefit and that firms beef up their financial resilience.

In a letter to the chief executives of all domestic energy firms, including British Gas-owned Centrica, EDF, Ovo and Eon, Brearley said: A return to the practices we saw before the energy crisis isnt on the table.

Suppliers must reciprocate the support the sector was given by consumers and taxpayers when wholesale prices increased by behaving responsibly as prices fall and profits return.

We need suppliers to learn the lessons of the energy crisis and play their part by making sure theyre financially robust, can absorb potential losses and are meeting our new capital requirements.

I expect no return to paying out dividends before a supplier has met those essential capital requirements.

Brearleys letter comes as his counterparts at Ofwat, the water sector regulator, face pressure over the financial troubles facing that industry  and the suggestion that firms had been allowed to rack up too much debt while paying out big dividends.

The crisis in the energy sector dates back to before the Ukraine war when rising wholesale prices resulted in dozens of smaller energy suppliers going bust.

That raised questions about the financial health of some of those companies as well as Ofgems oversight of them.

Subsequently, the Ukraine war intensified the pressure on wholesale prices and the government was forced to step in with billions of pounds of subsidies for energy bills.

Now that wholesale prices have come down, a fall in the energy price cap from July 1 means that households are finally starting to see some relief.

That fall has knocked 426 off a typical annual energy bill.

Brearley said Ofgem would closely monitor the situation, including to make sure that the market is operating competitively on price.

It comes after Chancellor Jeremy Hunt last week summoned regulators, including Ofgem, to a summit at 11 Downing Street, resulting in the confirmation of a series of measures to protect consumers.

They include making sure that pre-payment meter customers pay no more than direct debit customers and that the formula Ofgem uses to work out the price cap is kept under review to ensure it accurately reflects the costs facing suppliers.
A prosecutor who signed off on the documents charging Hunter Biden with tax and gun crimes previously worked with one of the First Son's business partners, DailyMail.com can reveal.

Delaware US Attorney David Weiss officially filed charges against the president's son last Tuesday after a near five-year probe into his alleged tax crimes and foreign financial dealings.

Weiss's deputy, Assistant United States Attorney Derek Hines, signed off on the charging documents alongside his boss and two other assistant US attorneys  indicating he has a central role in Hunter's criminal prosecution.

According to Hines's LinkedIn account, he previously worked as Special Counsel to ex-FBI director Louis Freeh at his private company, Freeh Group International Solutions, a lobbying and 'risk management' consultancy that teamed up with Hunter on overseas business currently under scrutiny by lawmakers.

Hunter Biden last week reached a deal with prosecutors that would see him plead guilty to tax crimes and dispense with a gun charge but likely avoid jail time

Assistant United States Attorney Derek Hines (left) who was one of the prosecutors to sign off on Hunter's charges, previously worked under ex-FBI director Louis Freeh, a business partner of Hunter and a close friend of the Bidens

Freeh worked with Hunter on a $3million job consulting for a Romanian criminal, a deal that is allegedly now part of his federal criminal investigation and is being investigated by Congress.

Republican Senator Ron Johnson told DailyMail.com the link between the prosecutor and Hunter's business associate 'calls into question the integrity of their entire investigation'  after GOP lawmakers slammed the relatively minor charges filed by the Delaware prosecutor this week as a mere 'slap on the wrist'.

DailyMail.com has previously revealed that Freeh and his firm worked closely with Hunter Biden trying to get the US State Department to help limit the prosecution of Romanian real estate tycoon Gabriel Popoviciu, who was on the brink of a bribery conviction in 2015.

Freeh proposed setting up a private consultancy with Hunter and Joe Biden when he ended his vice presidential term, offering 'lucrative future work options' including working for overseas clients such as corrupt former Malaysian Prime Minister Najib Razak.

He also sent $100,000 to a private trust for Joe's grandchildren  though he wrote an email to Hunter saying it was intended for a charity instead.

Hines's LinkedIn says he worked as 'Special Counsel' for the ex-FBI director at his company Freeh Group in New Orleans, Louisiana, between August 2013 and February 2015. It is unclear what projects he counseled Freeh on.

It wasn't until 2016 that Hunter started working with Freeh consulting for Popoviciu.

But emails on his laptop show the Biden family had a close relationship with Freeh   who headed the FBI from 1993-2001  dating back to when Hines worked for him.

Romanian real estate tycoon Gabriel Popoviciu was on the brink of a bribery conviction in 2015 when Freeh and his firm, working closely with Hunter, got a $3million job consulting for him

DailyMail.com previously published emails that showed Hunter brought in political heavyweight and family friend Louis Freeh to use his U.S. law enforcement contacts for Popoviciu's advantage, and was offered a referral fee as a result

Freeh proposed setting up a private consultancy with Hunter and Joe Biden when Joe ended his vice presidential term in 2016

In a 2014 press release, Freeh described Joe Biden and his son Beau as 'dear friends', and in a May 2010 email to a colleague Hunter said Freeh was 'a close friend.'

In December 2014, Freeh was described with others as a 'strong contact for possible referral/collaboration' with Hunter and his brother Beau in an email laying out their plans for a 'Biden Law Group', written by Beau's former Delaware Attorney General deputy Ian McConnel.

After Beau's death in May 2015, Freeh became a board member of the Beau Biden Foundation for the Protection of Children.

In August that year a charity executive thanked Freeh for donating to Joe Biden's potential 2016 presidential run.

The link between Hines, one of four top prosecutors in Hunter's criminal case, and his former employer Freeh, could create a conflict for the Department of Justice attorney.

Title 28, Section 45.2 of the Code of Federal Regulations says: 'no employee shall participate in a criminal investigation if he has a personal or political relationship with [] any person or organization substantially involved in the conduct that is the subject of the investigation'.

Hunter's $3million from Popoviciu was part of a total $17.3million income investigated by the IRS in their Hunter Biden tax crime probe, which formed the basis for this week's criminal charges, according to Congressional testimony by an IRS whistleblower who led the investigation.

The IRS special agent's claims suggest Hunter's work with Freeh in Romania were likely part of the Delaware probe.

The House Oversight Committee documented the same $3million flowing from Popoviciu's accounts to the Biden family, via intermediaries, using bank records lawmakers obtained with subpoenas.

U.S. Attorney for Delaware David Weiss, a holdover from the Trump administration, has been overseeing the politically charged probe into Hunter Biden

Weiss asked a judge to schedule hearing for Hunter Biden for two tax offenses and a gun charge, following a years-long investigation into the president's son

Republican Senators Ron Johnson (left) and Chuck Grassley first launched an investigation into Hunter's shady overseas dealings four years ago

Hunter connected political heavyweight Freeh with Popoviciu in May 2016 to use his US law enforcement contacts for the Romanian businessman's advantage.

In May 2021 DailyMail.com published emails in which Freeh promised to contact FBI legal attaches in Romania as well as State Department officials to help smooth over the Romanian tycoon's clash with the country's prosecutors.

Wisconsin Sen. Johnson, who spent four years investigating the Bidens with his colleague Chuck Grassley, said Hines's relationship with Freeh 'calls into question the integrity of their entire investigation'.

'These types of connections to the Biden family pose significant conflicts that must not be ignored,' he told DailyMail.com.

The Oversight Committee is also investigating another of Freeh's connections to allegations of corruption by the Biden family.

Whistleblower and alleged Israeli arms dealer, Dr. Gal Luft, claims around 2017 Hunter used a current or former senior FBI official dubbed 'One-Eye' to get sensitive bureau information and pass it to his Chinese business partners at oil giant CEFC, which was under federal investigation at the time.

The Committee is investigating Luft's claims, and believes that Freeh may have information to help with its probe, though they have not yet subpoenaed or requested an interview with the ex-FBI chief.

Garrett Ziegler, a former Trump White House staffer and founder of right-wing nonprofit Marco Polo investigating the Bidens, claimed in a report last year that Freeh and Hunter had committed Foreign Agents Registration Act violations by lobbying US officials for Popoviciu without notifying the Department of Justice.

A photo of a firearm application triggered an investigation after it showed Hunter lied on the form when he attested that he did not abuse drugs

Hunter has admitted owning a gun while a drug user and pictures found on the laptop he abandoned at a repair shop show him holding it

'The charges filed against Hunter Biden are a limited hangout in the superlative,' Ziegler told DailyMail.com, referring to an intelligence community technique to use a minor admission to cover a greater wrongdoing.

'In fact, those charges are filed by somebody who was a special counsel to Louis Freeh, who himself is implicated in crimes in the Biden Laptop. It is a full court suppression campaign, even today.'

Hines is not the only DoJ official to investigate Hunter while having links to his business associates.

Senators Grassley and Johnson, who ran a four-year investigation into Hunter's shady overseas dealings, wrote to the DoJ in 2021 asking that criminal division chief Nicholas McQuaid recuse himself over links to Hunter.

Prior to working as acting head of the Justice Department's criminal division, McQuaid worked directly with Hunter's criminal defense attorney Chris Clark at law firm Latham and Watkins.

'Since Feb. 2021, Sen. Grassley and I sent multiple letters to DOJ demanding assurances that Nicholas McQuaid, the former head of DOJ's criminal division, who had a Hunter Biden connection, had recused himself from the Hunter Biden investigation.

'The DOJ refused to provide a clear answer,' Johnson told DailyMail.com.

'DOJ's apparent unwillingness to remove any doubt about conflicts in the Hunter Biden case calls into question the integrity of their entire investigation.'

The Delaware federal prosecutor's office declined to comment.
She alleged in a lawsuit that after the recruiter raped her she had to marry him

A woman is suing the Church of Scientology, its leader, and one of its recruiters

A woman born into the Church of Scientology and drafted into its inner circle at 14 was raped by a notorious recruiter at 16 and forced to marry him when she spoke out, according to a newly unsealed lawsuit.

The woman, anonymized as Jane Doe, alleges she was groomed and sexually abused by high-ranking recruiter Gavin Potter during a series of car rides while enrolled in a 'billion-year contract' with the Sea Organization - a 'clergy' that runs the church's operations.

The attacks are said to have taken place in California, where the age of consent is 18, with the accuser two years younger than that when the attacks began.

On reporting them, Jane Doe says she was offered the chance to embark on five years at a labor camp or to marry Potter, and says she chose the latter.

A lawsuit filed in the LA County Superior Court argues the church prevented its members from reporting crimes committed by other members to police. Pictured is Miscavige

An attorney for the Church of Scientology said allegations made against Potter made in the lawsuit are false. Pictured is the Scientology building in Los Angeles

Jane Doe's claims have come to light in a lawsuit she has brought against Potter and the church in the LA County Superior Court in December, but which was unsealed last week.

It argues the church prevented its members from reporting crimes committed by other members to police and knowingly used Potter to recruit young and vulnerable women into the abusive Sea Organization.

Jane Doe says church members consider it a 'high crime' to report another's law-breaking to police, although Scientology officials insist they comply with all local laws, and encourage members to report crimes.

The lawsuit recounts how after reporting the abuse to the church, which does not allow extramarital relationships between Sea Org members, it demanded that she and Potter either marry else she would be subjected to five years of 'isolation, food deprivation and long hours of hard manual labor'.

After marrying Potter at 16 the woman, referred to in the suit as Jane Doe, became pregnant with his child at 19, before finally escaping the church in 1997 at 23 and divorcing him.

In a separate case brought against the church in 2019, the same woman said she was raped by Scientologist and actor Danny Masterson in 2003. The That 70s Show star was convicted of that rape and another in May, but cleared of a third allegation made by a former girlfriend.

Potter is one of the defendants in the case and accused of childhood sexual abuse and molestation. Also named are three individual church entities, as well as its leader David Miscavige.

William Forman, an attorney for the Church of Scientology, told DailyMail.com in a statement the allegations in the lawsuit were false.

'This baseless lawsuit is preposterous and will go nowhere,' he wrote. 'The entire lawsuit is a con job and an attempted shakedown.'

An attorney for Doe, Graham E. Berry, alleged in the complaint that the church 'created opportunities for such sexual abuse to occur' and 'specifically recruited attractive minor females into an organization that required cohabitation'.

THE SEA ORG The Sea Organization (Sea Org) considers itself to be the 'clergy' of the Church of Scientology. It was established in 1967 by L Ron Hubbard to assist with 'advanced research operations' and to 'supervise Church organizations around the world'. Being a member of the Sea Org is voluntary, meaning it must recruit ordinary Scientologists to join its ranks. Scientologists that join Sea Org must sign a 'billion-year pledge', which involves 'pledging eternal service to Scientology and its religious goals'. Once onboard, they live communally and have their meals, uniforms and healthcare provided by the Church. They must also give up their parents. If a Sea Org recruit is under 18, they will be assigned a guardian. All members are closely tracked by a 'Port Captain', who oversees their lives. Advertisement

He also claimed that scientologists are prohibited from contacting police or other authorities to report crimes committed by members and taught that the only remedy in such circumstances is Scientology itself, and the teachings of its founder L. Ron Hubbard.

The lawsuit also says the church coordinated for Doe to marry Potter in Las Vegas in Nevada when she was 16 so as to skirt California law that might have derailed the marriage - what it says is a common practice within the church.

Potter is said in the lawsuit to have had a reputation for being particularly effective at recruiting young girls to join the Sea Organization.

'It was known by all Defendants and Sea Org that Gavin Potter recruited these impressionable female minors through fear and flirtation,' read the complaint.

Potter was allegedly so successful that his young female recruits were commonly referred to as 'Bridge Babes', a term coined by Miscavige himself.

Doe alleges that the sexual abuse began in 1991 when she turned 16 and was sent to Los Angeles by the church to work as a receptionist for the L. Ron Hubbard Life Exhibition, a museum dedicated to the church's founder.

Potter, she alleged, approached her one day and asked for a lift home in her car.

After agreeing on one occasion she claims he made a habit of taking rides home in her car. She alleged that once as she sat in the driver's seat he lent over from the passenger's seat to fondle her breasts and kiss her on the lips.

The lawsuit also recounts another occasion on which Potter put his hands up her skirt and penetrated her with his hands, terrifying her to the point that she could not move.

She said after that incident she noticed he had a wet spot on his pants but did not know at the time that he had ejaculated and had never had any sexual contact with anyone prior to those car rides.

Pictured is the L. Ron Hubbard Life Exhibition in Los Angeles, where the 16-year-old girl had been working when the sexual abuse began

In a separate case brought against the church in 2019, the same woman said she was raped by Scientologist and actor Danny Masterson in 2003. Pictured is Miscavige

According to the lawsuit, Doe was born in 1974 to parents who were involved in the Religious Technology Center, a division of the church and one of the defendants in her suit.

When she was 14, while attending a Scientology training exercise in Clearwater, a city in Florida that serves as a hub for the church, she was asked to join the Sea Organization and accepted the offer.

Members of the Sea Organization are recruited from within the church and often minors at the time. In order to enroll they are forced to sign 'billion-year' pledges of indefinite servitude.

Sea Org members that are below the age of 18 need to be adopted by somebody in the church. All members are assigned a 'Port Captain' who oversees them and manages their living arrangements, referred to as 'berthing'.

In 1991 when Doe turned 16 her position in the Sea Org was 'activated', according to the lawsuit, and she was sent off to work in LA. There, was a receptionist and would work into the night cleaning Scientology facilities for little pay.

It was then that the lawsuit alleges Potter began sexually assaulting her. It states that the day after the incident in which he ejaculated in the car, Doe reported the incident to her colleagues.

Since extramarital relationships between Sea Org members are forbidden, once the church became aware it required that she and Potter either marry or serve five years with the Rehabilitation Project Force.

The Rehabilitation Project Force, or RPF, was created in 1974 by Hubbard for Sea Org members that violated its policies and required punishment.

Sea Org members assigned to RPF are sent to Sea Org work camps, where, according to the lawsuit, they are subjected to 'isolation, food deprivation, long hours of hard manual labor, and other cruel and unusual punishments'.

A member can be allegedly sentenced to RPF for anywhere from one to ten years.

'That same day, Jane Doe's "Port Captain" arranged for Jane Doe, Gavin Potter, and Jane Doe's mother to travel to Las Vegas, Nevada to complete the marriage,' reads the lawsuit.

'Jane Doe's mother witnessed the marriage. The Port Captain explained that the wedding could not take place in California as that would require both parties to see a counselor or psychologist to determine the mental capacity of the minor to marry, and a judge to sign off after review of the psychologist's report,' it read.

The Church of Scientology Celebrity Centre International is seen in Hollywood. The woman alleges in the lawsuit that she was told she would either have to marry Potter or serve five years in a labor camp

The complaint also alleges that girls are routinely transported to and from Las Vegas for marriages to avoid any such requirements.

After the marriage Doe was then allegedly booked into the Manor Hotel with Potter by her Port Captain where she says she was coerced into 'ritualistic and painful' sex.

The following day Doe went back to living with her parents but would intermittently have intercourse with Potter in the subsequent years.

Then at 19 she became pregnant, which was forbidden among Sea Org members.

In 1986, upon the death of Hubbard and when David Miscavige took over, a Sea Org Order was issued declaring Sea Org members from having children at all.

Potter asked Doe to get an abortion, and she refused.

In 1997 when she was 23, she was able to escape the Church and successfully divorced Potter. A court ruled that Potter would provide her with child support, but she claims the church forced her to sign materials promising to never recover them.

Her attorney has said that since the divorce she has never claimed any child support money.
Fast food chain Carl's Jr has revived its discontinued El Diablo burger after repeated pleas from fans.

The sandwich is back in stores now.

It contains charbroiled beef, special habanero sauce, bacon, jalapeno chilis, breaded jalapeno bites, pepper jack cheese, all enclosed in a potato bun.

But fans will have to be quick, as it will only remain on Carl's Jr's menu until August 15.

Carl's Jr. spokesman Anthony Nguyen told The US Sun: 'This burger packs a flavor punch and has built a cult following over the years as our spiciest burger yet. We were eager to bring back this bold menu item  with some fun and great deals.

'You spoke. We listened. This one is for the dedicated fans who reached out daily, and we can't wait for them to be reunited with El Diablo.'

The fast food chain hasn't said why the beloved burger is only making a brief return, and it's unclear if the El Diablo will be revived once again in the future - or even made a permanent addition to Carl's Jr's menu, if demand is sufficient.

Carl's Jr. has relaunched its super-spicy El Diablo burger - although only until August 15

The sandwich is stuffed with jalapenos, breaded jalapenos, cheese, bacon and sauce

Carl's Jr. also offers a My Rewards program to encourage customers to keep chomping down on its treats.

Users can earn 10 stars for every dollar spent, with rewards unlocked when users hit 150 stars, 300 stars and 500 stars.

The El Diablo burger is one of a number of buzzy launches and re-launches from popular fast food chains in recent months.

McDonald's recently debuted a purple, berry-flavored milkshake inspired by a long-forgotten, grape-colored mascot called Grimace who's recently been revived.

The shake has quickly become the talk of the internet, and even inspired a bizarre trend where TikTok users pretend to die after consuming it.

McDonald's also hit the headlines by launching special limited edition dips of its iconic BigMac sauce, giving fans the chance to try the condiment with McNuggets and fries.

The chain with the golden arches has repeatedly brought back its McRib pork sandwich, having proclaimed each reappearance will be the barbecue-sauce coated burger's 'farewell tour.'
The rapid rise of artificial intelligence technology has allowed scammers to make sophisticated scams with as little as three seconds of a victim's voice

Scammers are using artificial intelligence to mount terrifying scams which see social media users' voices cloned - with fakers then calling their targets' parents and pretending to be in trouble, before begging for cash for help.

So-called imposter scams, where a fraudster impersonates someone in order to steal money, are the most common scam in the US, losing American's $2.6 billion in 2022 alone, the Federal Trade Commission reported.

Artificial Intelligence has now supercharged the 'family emergency' scam, where the criminal convinces the victim that a family member is in distress and in immediate need of cash.

One in four respondents to a McAfee survey in April 2023 said they had some experience of an AI voice scam and one in ten said they had been targeted personally.

Scammers can need as little as three seconds of audio, which can easily be extracted from a social media clip, to clone a person's voice, McAfee's study found.

Eddie Cumberbatch's grandparents were told by fraudster's he had been in a car accident. (Pictured: Cumberbatch made a TikTok warning others about AI voice scams)

Eddie Cumberbatch, a social media content creator with more than 100,000 followers, experienced the terrifying reality of AI's potential to impersonate.

In April Cumberbatch's grandparents received a phone call that sounded just like Eddie, telling them he had been in a devastating car crash and needed money immediately.

By a stroke of luck, Cumberbatch's father overheard the conversation and was able to call his son to verify that the crash had not happened and that he was safe.

Despite managing to dodge the scam Cumberbatch described the situation in a TikTok video as 'absolutely terrifying.'

His grandparents would have taken a second mortgage out to send the requested money, the influencer explained.

A Canadian couple who were targeted by a similar AI voice scam, were less lucky and ended up losing $21,000 Canadian dollars (U.S. $15,449).

Benjamin Perkin's parents were tricked by an AI clone of his voice that told them he was in jail for killing a diplomat in a car accident.

The voice, which sounded just like Perkins, told the panicked parents that he needed $21,000 for legal fees before going to court.

His frightened parents collected the cash from several banks and sent the scammer money through Bitcoin, Perkins told The Washington Post.

Benjamin Perkin's parents were tricked out of $21,000 after scammers targeted them with an AI clone of his voice that told them he was in jail for killing a diplomat in a car accident (pictured: Perkins made a TikTok video to tell his story)

The voice sounded 'close enough for my parents to truly believe they did speak with me,' he told the Post.

Although not certain about how the fraudsters obtained his voice Perkins said he has posted videos on YouTube discussing his snowmobile hobby.

Perkin's parents filed a police report once they realized they had been scammed, but 'the moneys gone,' he said.

'Theres no insurance. Theres no getting it back. Its gone.'

Requests for money to be sent via a cryptocurrency such as Bitcoin could likely be a scam as they are untraceable and therefore limit the ability to track scammers down, the FTC warns.

Richard Mendelstein, a software engineer at Google, lost $4,000 after receiving a distressing phone call that appeared to be his daughter screaming for help.

He was then told by her 'kidnappers' to withdraw $4,000 in cash as a ransom payment.

Mendelstein sent the money to a wiring service in Mexico City and only later realized he had been scammed and that his daughter was safe at school.

The rise in accessible and sophisticated AI making scams quicker and easier to perform, Steve Grobman, McAfee's chief technology officer said.

'One of the things that's most important to recognize with the advances in AI this year is it's largely about bringing these technologies into reach of many more people, including really enabling the scale within the cyberactor community,' Grobman warned.

'Cybercriminals are able to use generative AI for fake voices and deepfakes in ways that used to require a lot more sophistication.'

Vice President Kamala Harris also told CEOs of leading tech companies in May that they have growing moral responsibility to limit the damage to society from their AI products.
Freshman Republican Senator Eric Schmitt is rejoicing at the Supreme Court siding with the argument made in a case he brought forward - even as President Biden has promised to find a workaround.

In one of his last acts as Missouri attorney general before joining the Senate at the start of this year, Schmitt filed suit with six other attorneys general arguing Biden's student loan forgiveness would cause 'irreparable harm' to student loan agencies.

'It was a cheap political ploy during election season by Joe Biden that's now been completely exposed,' Schmitt said of the Biden plan.

'From a legal perspective, there's just no authority at all, in statute or otherwise, that gave Joe Biden the ability to write off a half a trillion dollars worth of student loan debt with a stroke of a pen.'

Freshman Sen. Eric Schmitt is rejoicing at the Supreme Court siding with the argument made in a case he brought forward - even as President Biden has promised to find a work-around

'This is an important case for the court to sort of reassert that if this is going to be this kind of thing is going to happen and Congress has to vote for it. Of course, this wouldn't pass Congress,' he said.

In its final opinion before a summer recess, the Supreme Court struck down Biden's long delayed program that would have forgiven up to $20,000 in student debt that was estimated to cost around $400 billion.

Democratic Biden challenger Robert F. Kennedy echoed Schmitt's sentiment, blaming Biden for not attempting to work with Congress on debt forgiveness.

'Biden knew his plan wouldn't survive a legal challenge. His plan gave the appearance of action, while accomplishing nothing,' Kennedy claimed.

'This is an issue of grave importance to our country. As President, I will galvanize public support to pressure Congress to put down their partisan positions and legislate meaningful relief to the tens of millions of Americans who are drowning in student debt.'

Instead, Biden is looking to another work-around to press forward with debt forgiveness unilaterally: the Higher Education Act.

'This new path is legally sound. It's going to take longer, but in my view it's the best path that remains to providing as many borrowers as possible with debt relief,' Biden said.

But some legal scholars have said Friday's Supreme Court decision suggests the court might be unlikely to allow student debt cancellation through other legal avenues either.

In one of his last acts as Missouri attorney general before joining the Senate at the start of this year, Schmitt filed suit with six other attorneys general arguing Biden's student loan forgiveness would cause 'irreparable harm' to student loan agencies

Students protest the Supreme Court;s ruling against President Joe Biden's student-debt relief program

The court's conservative justices have pointed to a legal doctrine that says Congress needs to clearly delegate authority to an agency before it is able to resolve a major question through massive or expensive new regulation. Using the HEA could take months or over a year to finalize.

And another transformative student loan policy is still in play.

The Education Department has proposed an overhaul of income-driven repayment that would cost $250 billion instead of the debt forgiveness' $430 billion.

It would cut the cap on monthly payments for those enrolled in income-driven repayment plans down from 10 percent to 5 percent. Monthly payments could be as little as $0 for low-income people. After a set number of years - usually 20, sometimes 25 - the remaining balance would be forgiven.

While the Education Department proposed softening income-driven repayments in January, the rule has not yet been finalized.

Schmitt urged Biden against finding any other work-arounds for student loan relief.

'I think it's a pretty radical position to take and not popular with people,' he said. The senator instead demanded greater 'transparency' in college costs.

While some conservatives have argued that the nation needs to emphasize college alternatives like trade school, Schmitt insisted lawmakers need to make higher education 'attainable' for the working class by holding universities accountable for their ballooning prices.

'I do think that we ought to be thoughtful about what we do to make the American dream realized for working class folks,' said Schmitt. 'That's my background, right? I didn't grow up - nobody in my family had gone to college right out of high school. I certainly didn't know any lawyers growing up.'

'Education was the pathway for me and so many people who grew up in working class families to achieve things so I think we have to keep that attainable,' said Schmitt. 'I think we've got to hold higher education accountable for that.'
A top US intelligence officer claims World War II American forces retrieved a UFO that crashed in Italy in 1933  and Italian researchers say they have the documents to prove it.

Former top National Reconnaissance Office staffer David Grusch shocked the world last month when he revealed he had blown the whistle in sworn testimony to Congress and government watchdogs, about an alleged secret US program that has obtained multiple 'non-human' flying saucers.

Grusch claims one of these alien spacecraft crashed in Northern Italy in 1933, and was secreted away by Fascist dictator Benito Mussolini, before it was captured by American forces at the end of World War II and shipped to the US.

DailyMail.com understands Grusch was briefed on the supposed June 1933 crash by a staffer who allegedly worked on the 'non-human' craft in a secret US government program.

Italian researcher Roberto Pinotti shared extraordinary details of the saucer crash that allegedly occurred in Northern Italy in 1933

An artist's impression of the alleged 1933 UFO crash outside Magenta in northern Italy shows a craft shaped like a saucer

Pinotti was also sent handwritten memos on paper with a government agency letterhead dated August 22, 1936 which include a sketch and description (pictured) of a cylindrical aircraft with portholes on the sides and white and red lights spotted flying over Northern Italy

And this week Senate Intelligence Committee ranking member Marco Rubio confirmed he has heard testimony from alleged first hand witnesses of such crash retrieval programs.

Now, in an interview with DailyMail.com to coincide with Sunday's World UFO Day, Italian researcher Roberto Pinotti shared extraordinary details of the alleged saucer crash that occurred a full 14 years before the famous Roswell, New Mexico incident.

Pinotti, president of the National Ufological Center, which goes by the Italian initialism CUN, obtained documents he claims evidence the June 13, 1933 crash, and a secret department set up by Mussolini to study the alleged saucer.

Pinotti's research has been met with skepticism in Italy since he first released it in 2000, and is still little-known outside its borders.

'I and my colleague Alfredo Lissoni began investigating the story of the 1933 UFO crash in Lombardy in 1996, when we received some original secret documents about the case,' he told DailyMail.com.

The documents were mysteriously mailed to Pinotti from an anonymous source who claimed to have inherited them from a family member who worked on Mussolini's supposed UFO program.

They include two June 1933 telegrams in Italian, one demanding 'absolute silence' over an 'alleged landing on national soil of unknown aircraft'.

Another, dated June 13, threatens the 'immediate arrest' and 'maximum penalties' for any journalists reporting news of an 'aircraft of unknown nature and origin'.

'Immediate recasting of any leads from the newspapers bearing said news is ordered,' the second telegram said.

Both say they are by 'personal order' of 'Il Duce'  Mussolini himself.

The documents include two June 1933 telegrams in Italian demanding 'absolute silence' over an 'alleged landing on national soil of unknown aircraft'

Another, dated June 13, threatens the 'immediate arrest' and 'maximum penalties' for any journalists reporting news of an 'aircraft of unknown nature and origin'

Other documents sent to Pinotti refer to a mysterious government department called 'Gabinetto RS/33', or the RS (Special Research) 33 Cabinet, supposedly set up by the Italian dictator to manage the retrieval and study of the alleged saucer wreckage, as well as other UFO incidents.

Pinotti says RS/33 was headed by Nobel Prize-winning inventor Guglielmo Marconi, inventor of the radio.

To this day, Italian historians and UFO researchers have found no other evidence of this shadowy alleged group or Marconi's involvement.

Pinotti was also sent handwritten memos on paper with a government agency letterhead dated August 22, 1936 which include a sketch and description of a cylindrical aircraft with portholes on the sides and white and red lights spotted flying over Northern Italy.

Piecing together the mysterious documents, Pinotti was able to pinpoint SIAI Marchetti in Vergiate, an aircraft facility near the alleged crash site outside Magenta, a satellite town of Milan, as the likely site where the supposed wreckage was stored.

The site miraculously avoided regular bombing raids by Allied Forces during the Second World War, and 12 years later in 1945 the region was secured by US and UK troops.

US whistleblower Grusch claims it was around this time that the supposed craft was shipped back to the US; the first saucer recovery to his knowledge.

'In 1933, a bell-like craft, around ten meters in size, was recovered in Magenta, northern Italy. It was kept by Mussolini's government until 1944 when it was recovered by agents of the Office of Strategic Services (OSS, a former US intelligence agency),' he told French newspaper Le Parisien last month.

'Ironically, it predates anything the public has heard about for decades, such as Roswell, etc.'

The former National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency official declined to be interviewed on the record by DailyMail.com about his claims.

As the only UFO crash case which Grusch has specifically described as authentic, the alleged 1933 incident has taken on a new significance as an indicator of the reliability of his claims of a US crash retrieval program.

Other documents sent to Pinotti refer to a mysterious government department called 'Gabinetto RS/33', or the RS (Special Research) 33 Cabinet, supposedly set up by the Italian dictator

From the mysterious documents Pinotti was able to pinpoint SIAI Marchetti in Vergiate, an aircraft facility near the alleged crash site outside Magenta, a satellite town of Milan, as the likely site where the supposed wreckage was stored

And Pinotti says he has been able to authenticate at least some of his paperwork.

The Italian researcher had one of his documents, dated 1936, tested by a forensic expert who concluded the paper and ink was from that period. The 1933 telegrams have not been tested.

The conclusion of the 2000 report by scientific consultant Antonio Garavaglia, shared with DailyMail.com, says: 'It can be stated with reasonable certainty that only the sample examined and the subject of the appraisal can be considered original and, therefore, authentic.'

'After four years of investigations and a forensic analysis showing the documents were really written in the 1930s, we published a detailed report in a book,' Pinotti told DailyMail.com.

'The evidence speaks for itself. And it shows that the first world leader who officially (although secretly) faced the UFO problem was not president Harry Truman with the Roswell incident in the United States but Italy's Benito Mussolini.'

However, skeptics have pointed out that vintage paper and ink from the time could have been used to forge the papers, and that they bear no protocol numbers or official stamps that would help verify them as real government documents, appearing instead to be more like personal memos.

Even other Italian UFO researchers have poured scorn on the story. Giuseppe Stilo, a member of the Italian Center for UFO Studies, told Vice News Italy: 'From a scientific point of view, these are embarrassing stories. Any historian would blanch at seeing how one claims to prove one thing or the other.'

British historian Graeme Rendall, who has written books on WWII UFO sightings, told DailyMail.com that he believes the evidence is inconclusive.

The Italian researcher had one of his documents, dated 1936, tested by a forensic expert who concluded the paper and ink was from that period

Marco Negri, whose family have lived in Northern Italy for over a century, said his great-great grandfather, Pietro Negri (pictured) told stories to his father of a strange metallic aircraft without wings that crashed in Magenta in the 1930s

'It's one of these cases where we need more information,' he said. 'There's claims made, but nothing really to back them up.

'It would be nice if there was an independent examination of the original documents. That could rule out or in, whether this was a forgery or not.'

The Republic of San Marino, a tiny European city-state on the Italian mainland, is currently working with Pinotti and fellow CUN executive Paolo Guizzardi to lobby the United Nations to set up its own UFO investigations office.

Pinotti's research has been met with skepticism in Italy since he first released it in 2000s and is still little-known outside its borders

The effort, named Project Titan, was approved by the San Marino government on January 19 this year, and Pinotti and Guizzardi had their first meeting with ministers on June 19.

Guizzardi says he wants San Marino to be the headquarters for the proposed UN UFO office, with the goal of making the city 'the Geneva of UFOs'.

Rendall, author of UFOs Before Roswell: European Foo-Fighters 1940-1945, pointed out a telling detail from one of the 1936 memos Pinotti received, which describes Italian fighter biplanes as being unable to catch a cylindrical UFO traveling at '130 kilometers per hour'.

'That's very slow, about 80mph. The Italian Air Force fighter aircraft at the time, a CR-20 or CR-32, could go a lot faster than that  well over 200km/h,' he said. 'It's one detail that makes you think twice.'

Despite the skepticism around the case, the former head of the US government's UFO investigation unit told DailyMail.com that officials are taking the case 'seriously'.

'The incident is something we've taken seriously and we continue to take seriously,' said Lue Elizondo, who helped lead AATIP, the Advanced Aerospace Threat Identification Program at the Department of Defense until 2017.

One Italian resident near the site shared information with DailyMail.com that predates the discovery of Pinotti's controversial documents.

Pinotti, San Marino science and culture minister Andrea Belluzzi, and fellow CUN executive Paolo Guizzardi at the San Marino science and culture government office this month

The effort, named Project Titan, was approved by the San Marino government on January 19 this year, and Pinotti and Guizzardi had their first meeting with ministers on June 19

Pentagon whistleblower David Grusch, 36, has claimed the Vatican is aware of non-human intelligences and helped the US retrieve a downed UFO from dictator Benito Mussolini

Marco Negri, whose family have lived in Northern Italy for over a century, said his great-great grandfather told stories to his father of a strange metallic aircraft without wings that crashed in Magenta in the 1930s.

Marco, 42, said his ancestor Pietro Negri was Podesta (Mayor) of Arona from the 1920s through the 1950s, less than 10 miles from Vergiate where the alleged wreckage was supposedly stored, and about 30 miles from the suppoosed crash site.

'My great-great grandfather Pietro told my father a story about the strange crash in 1933, since he was young,' Marco said.

'It was a second-hand story told to me by my father when I was a child in the early 1990s. But it matches the story of the crash.

'I was told a strange metal plane with no wings crashed somewhere between Vergiate and Magenta.

'I was told there was a big censorship around this crash. The fascist secret police were sent to the surrounding cities to keep people silent about it.'

Marco, who says he and his family disavow their ancestors' fascist past, added that Pietro's position as head of the town and its police force meant he was able to see telegrams about the crash.

Marco said his great-great grandfather died in the 1950s and his father and other older family members he told his story have also passed away, offering no corroboration for the tale.

The Lombardy resident said his great-great grandfather's story also included a wild detail that Pinotti also described  without evidence: that two 'bodies' with blond hair were found inside the craft.

Marco said his ancestor described them as 'child-sized', whereas in presentations at UFO conferences, Pinotti said they were around 5'9' with 'light hair and eyes'.

The Department of Defense denies any crash retrievals by the US.

'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,' spokeswoman Susan Gough said.
A sobbing mother of two has relived the horrific moment she found her husband brutally murdered in his lounge room with fatal head injuries.

A homicide investigation is underway after Matthew Berry, 37, was found in his Mount Tamborine home, west of the Gold Coast, just after midday on Thursday.

Wife Edwina Berry called triple-zero after finding him with fatal head and upper body injuries in the home's main living area.

'Matty was a loving father, son, brother and friend, he was also an incredible partner' Ms Berry told a press conference on Sunday.

'His heart was huge and he was always willing and able to put others before himself.

Sobbing mother-of-two Edwina Berry (pictured) has relived the horrific moment she found her husband brutally murdered in his lounge room with fatal head injuries.

Mount Tamborine man Matthew Berry (pictured) was found dead in his home with fatal head and upper chest injuries

'My husband didn't deserve any of this, and I'm asking anyone with information to please come forward and help police with their investigation.'

Ms Berry became overwhelmed by her grief while speaking about the two little girls she shared with Mr Berry during the emotional appeal for information.

'I just want justice for all of our family and friends and most of all our two little girls,' she said, before walking away from the cameras.

She was heard sobbing in the background in the momentary silence before Queensland Police Detective Inspector Chris Knight took over the conference.

He had previously told media of the grisly scene found by emergency services workers arriving at the home.

'When first responders arrived, it was very clear there had been violence inflicted on the gentleman,' he said.

Edwina Berry (pictured) became overwhelmed with emotion while speaking about the two little girls she shared with Mr Berry during the emotion appeal for information

Specialist scientific and forensic officers had been at the scene for nearly 24 hours at the time of the media conference, with Mr Knight saying they will likely be there for a number of days.

Detective Knight said Ms Berry had gone to the address after not hearing from Mr Berry for multiple days.

'His former partner went to the address, and was unfortunately confronted with that scene, she contacted triple-zero.

'She was there to check on his welfare, hadn't heard from him for a couple of days, but she's a grieving lady.'

Specialist scientific and forensic officers had been at the scene for nearly 24 hours at the time of the media conference, with Mr Knight saying they will likely be there for a number of days.
Leading Tories will today urge Rishi Sunak to slash net migration by two-thirds  presenting a plan to reduce numbers by 400,000 a year.

The New Conservatives lobby group will tell the Prime Minister the party must 'honour the promise' made in the 2019 manifesto to cut net immigration to below the level at the time, which was 226,000 people a year.

In a report today, the group points out that net immigration has instead 'skyrocketed' to a record 606,000 last year.

The senior Tories warn that without swift action 'the Conservative Party will further erode the trust of hundreds of thousands of voters who lent the party their vote in 2019'. The new group, whose 25 MP members include Tory deputy chairman Lee Anderson, set out a 12-point plan designed to slash numbers by 'approximately 400,000'.

The report says: 'The British public voted for a strong approach to migration. They did not vote for mass migration and the social and economic harms it brings.

The New Conservatives lobby group will tell Rishi Sunak (pictured) the party must 'honour the promise' made in the 2019 manifesto to cut net immigration to below the level at the time

'Reliance on cheap international labour drives down wages for British workers and disincentivises businesses from investing in skills training or new technology. Mass migration also contributes to the housing crisis: Over half a million more houses a year are estimated to be needed to keep up with migration trends.'

The report will be seen as warning shot at Mr Sunak, who has said only that he will bring down numbers to the level he 'inherited', which is around 500,000, roughly double the amount at the last election. The report says that the points-based system introduced after Brexit has been 'too lenient' and now risks generating 'destabilising economic and cultural consequences'.

It points out that a 'temporary' relaxation of the rules for foreign care workers, introduced during Covid, remains 'despite the abatement of the pandemic'. Closing this loophole could reduce numbers by more than 80,000, it says.

In n the report's plan is the 'rapid introduction' of measures in the Illegal Migration Bill, which could cut numbers by a further 35,000 by tackling the small boats crisis (File image)

The report also calls for the minimum salary threshold for skilled worker visas to be raised to 38,000, potentially cutting numbers by 54,000 a year.

A further tightening of the rules for foreign students, including ending the right of graduates to work in the UK for two years after finishing their courses, could reduce numbers by 174,000 a year, the report says.

It comes after Mr Sunak tightened student rules this year, including a ban on foreign students on one-year masters courses bringing in their dependants. Also in the report's plan is the 'rapid introduction' of measures in the Illegal Migration Bill, which could cut numbers by a further 35,000 by tackling the small boats crisis.

Refugee numbers should be slashed and capped at 20,000 a year, it says, while hiking the immigration health surcharge from 624 a year to 2,700 would act as a disincentive for potential migrants.

The report reflects wider concerns in the Tory Party about soaring immigration levels, with one minister telling the Mail the Government has 'taken [its] eye off the ball' after the pandemic.
Four people taken to hospital with injury

Shocking photos have emerged of the damage caused inside a Hawaiian Airlines plane cabin after the flight was hit by severe turbulence while travelling to Sydney.

The HA451 flight from Honolulu, in Hawaiia, hit strong winds and encountered 'severe turbulence' about five hours into its nine-hour and forty-five minute flight as it flew over the Pacific Ocean.

The aircraft nosedived sending passengers flying out of their seats and crashing onto the floor.

Emergency services met those onboard the plane after it landed at 7.47pm at Sydney Airport on Friday.

Paramedics treated a dozen people before taking one passenger and three flight attendants to hospital with injuries and back pain.

One passenger shared two images to Reddit of 'cabin damage caused by human bodies flying out of seats' after the plane hit shocking turbulence.'

The HA451 flight from Honolulu to Sydney encountered 'severe turbulence' throwing passengers from their seats. The ceiling panel in the walkway between the seats was bent out of shape after a person slammed into it (pictured)

Another image shared by a passenger on the flight showed a huge crack next to the control panel above a person's seat (pictured)

One image showed a ceiling panel in the walkway between the seats bent out of shape while another picture showed a huge crack next to the control panels above a passenger's head.

The traveller explained passengers and crew members were thrown around the cabin as the plane nosedived between 800 to 1,000 metres at a speed of about 950km/h.

'We were informed over intercom that the turbulence was about to get bad and we all needed to buckle up and not get up to use to bathroom' they wrote.

'Before the sentence had finished the plane started shaking like mad before the nose got pushed down and the engines jetted us downward at 950km/h.

'The pilot recovered us after a few seconds - but according to the altitude readings on the in-flight radar on the screen from before, and after, the dive we dipped somewhere between 800m and 1km in those few seconds.'

Social media users criticised passengers for not wearing a seatbelt during the flight as the safety precaution would have prevented injury.

However, the passenger called for an end to 'the seatbelt comments' claiming the time between verbal warning and the event was only a few seconds.

'Nobody can avoid peeing for an entire 11-hour flight, and the time between the verbal warning on the intercom and the event was barely a few seconds,' they wrote.

'Plus, most of the seriously injured people were crew who didn't have the luxury of sitting around with their seatbelt on all the time.'

They added the screams of fellow passengers and crew members would stick with them forever and hopes those taken to hospital recover quickly.

'I think we're just very shaken up by it all,' they wrote.

Hawaii Airlines explained the Airbus A330 was inspected before boarding and thanked Sydney airport first responders for their assistance.

'Our Airbus A330 aircraft carrying 163 passengers and 12 crew members landed without incident at Sydney Airport,' Hawaiian Airlines said in a statement.

'Our immediate priority is to continue to care for our passengers and crew affected by this turbulence event, and we thank Sydney airport first responders for their swift assistance.

The Airbus A330, carrying 163 passengers and 12 crew members landed safely at Sydney Airport. Twelve people were treated by paramedics with four taken to hospital with injuries

Hawaiian Airlines flight HA451 was hit with strong winds about five hours into its nine-hour and forty-five minute flight. A passenger claimed the plane nosedived between 800 to 1,000 metres in a 'few seconds'

'We conducted a thorough inspection of the aircraft before boarding HA452, which departed Sydney to Honolulu,' Hawaii Airlines said.

It comes as hundreds of flights at airports in Sydney, Melbourne and Brisbane were plagued by widespread delays and cancellations due to strong winds and staffing issues.

Travellers along the east coast faced airport chaos for a third straight day over the weekend as heavy winds brought flights to a standstill.

Passengers are being urged to arrive at the airport early for their flight and to keep up to date with their flight details.
A grieving father is suing his dead wife for negligence and 'intentional infliction of emotional distress' caused over a horror crash that killed their four children.

Charmaine McLeod, 34, and her children Aaleyn, 6, Matilda, 5, Wyatt, 4, and Zaidok, 2, all died when her SUV was involved in a head-on collision with a truck on the Bunya Highway at Kingaroy, north-west of Brisbane, in 2019.

Her estranged husband James McLeod is seeking more than $2.3m in damages and alleges his wife intended to cause harm or death to their children to cause him psychological harm.

Charmaine McLeod and her four children Aaleyn, 6, Matilda, 5, Wyatt, 4, and Zaidok, 2, were killed in a head-on collision with a truck in 2019

Mr McLeod says he developed 'an overwhelming sense of grief, distress and loss' following the deaths of his children and still has constant nightmares and flashbacks over the crash, according to his claim filed in the Brisbane Supreme Court.

The claim states he was diagnosed with post-traumatic stress disorder and alcohol use disorder in the wake of the tragedy, The Courier Mail reported.

Four years on, Mr McLeod continues to suffer from ongoing depression, anxiety, insomnia, hopelessness, reduced motivation, lethargy and alcohol abuse, court documents state.

The truck driver and volunteer firefighter seeks more than $677,000 for the loss of future earning capacity and intended to seek work as a paid urban firefighter or tradesman when his youngest child started school, the claim states.

Mr McLeod also seeks $1m in aggravated damages, arguing in his claims that 'the first defendant's breach of duty and or intentional or reckless conduct' was 'heinous and reprehensible

Other damages being sought include $506,520 for future care and assistance, $102,950 in general damages and $49,750 for future expenses.

'The first defendant as the driver of the vehicle, owed to the plaintiff, the father of her passengers, a duty to take reasonable care to avoid exposing him to the risk of psychological harm which may occur should their children be injured or killed in a collision,' the claim states

'The plaintiff's pain and suffering has been increased by reason of the horrifying circumstances in which the injuries have occurred,' the claim states.

'The plaintiff has been left with very limited to no residual earning capacity as a result of the collision.'

James McLeod (pictured in June at the coroner's inquest) is suing his late estranged wife

The father-of-four says he still suffers nightmares over the crash that killed his kids

Ms McLeod's insurer, AAI Limited trading as Suncorp Insurance is named as the second defendant in the claim.

The insurer disputes some of Mr McLeod's claims in its defence, including harm suffered and the extent of his lost earning capacity.

'His family obligations, but for Charmaine McLeod's breach of duty, were such that he would not have been in a position to undertake the shift work required by employment as an urban firefighter,' the defence stated.

The insurer's defence also made claims about Mr McLeod's health history, including back pain, night tremors and being prescribed antidepressants and anti-anxiety medications on 10 occasions between 2004 and 2011.

The insurer claimed Mr McLeod would have faced difficulty in securing and maintaining employment due to 'required medical treatment and the use of antidepressant medication'.

Mr McLeod has disputed the claims in a reply filed to the court, arguing his health history did not significantly affect his working capacity or ability to fulfil everyday tasks prior to the fatal crash.

James McLeod (pictured with his four kids) says he developed 'an overwhelming sense of grief, distress and loss' following the deaths of his children

Emergency workers described the crash as 'catastrophic' and one of the worst scenes they had been to

Wyatt, Ally, Zaidok and Matilda (pictured l-r) lost their lives in the head-on crash

Both parties will wait until the coroner has finalised the investigation into the tragedy before the civil case progresses.

Mr McLeod told the recent two week coroner's inquest he remains haunted by his children's deaths is and riddled with anxiety every time he sees an oncoming truck.

'I was absolutely gutted to have my kids ripped away from me,' Mr McLeod told the court.

'Being a dad was the one thing I was good at.

'I feel like I have no purpose in life anymore.'

The inquest also heard police believe the crash was 'in retaliation' to proceedings in the family court.

An eight-page note found in Ms McLeod's handbag after the crash read 'blame the courts, not enough help for domestic violence victims and kids'.

Ms McLeod's note also said she finally had the 'courage to stand and report my abusive husband'.

Mr McLeod, who was in an ongoing custody battle with his ex-wife at the time, denies the allegations and has never been charged.

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Appearance comes just weeks after explosive docuseries on her 'real life'

The woman with dwarfism was spotted selling fireworks outside a local Walmart

Natalia Grace is settling into life with her new family in Indiana

Natalia Grace, the Ukrainian-born woman who has been accused of pretending to be a six-year-old girl has been spotted with her new family just weeks after a documentary on her aired on Discovery.

Natalia celebrated the upcoming Fourth of July holiday by selling fireworks outside a Greencastle, Indiana Walmart alongside her new adoptive family, the Mans.

In posts made on Instagram, Natalia shared photos of her at their tent selling the explosive items after an expose on the woman with dwarfism.

In the Discovery docuseries, her former adoptive family, the Barnetts, accused her of lying about her age and emotionally and physical abusing them.

The family said the woman with a rare spine disorder told them that she was six years old and they later found out she was actually born in 2003.

Natalia Grace (pictured) celebrated the upcoming Fourth of July holiday by selling fireworks outside a Greencastle, Indiana Walmart alongside her new adoptive family, the Mans

Natalia Grace alongside her new adoptive father Antwon Mans in a photo from Instagram

Photos taken of Natalia by the U.S. Sun show her alongside new adoptive dad and pastor, Antwon Mans, at the store over the holiday weekend.

In the photos, Natalia was spotted wearing a long skirt and a shirt with a religious message, the Sun reported.

A video posted to the family's Instagram confirmed they were out selling fireworks at a tent along with the photos of Natalia in front of large stacks of the explosives.

The family has been quiet on social media since the release of the docuseries, 'The Curious Case of Natalia Grace.'

Natalia has repeatedly denied the allegations by her former family in the documentary and maintains that she is a child.

Later this year, Natalia will have the opportunity to have her side of the story heard in the upcoming ID documentary 'The Curious Case of Natalia Grace: Natalia Speaks.'

In a trailer for the documentary, she called the Barnetts' allegations 'frustrating.'

'It's very frustrating to hear everything that's being said from Kristine and Michael because I already don't know who I am, and I want to know who I am, what happened to me,' Natalia said.

She also accused them of lying about her time in their home in the first part of the show.

'But I'm hearing all this stuff that never actually happened from Kristine and Michael.'

Natalia has maintained that she is a child and will speak out in an upcoming documentary

The Barnetts had adopted Natalia from Ukraine in April 2010 believing her to be a six-year-old girl.

Within months, the family said they began questioning her child-status and her real age after she exhibited 'violent behavior' inside the home.

The couple later had her age birth-year legally changed to 1989.

In June, Natalia's biological mother was tracked down and stated that her daughter was born in 2003, making her 19-years-old.

The Barnetts moved to Canada with their biological children and left Natalia by herself in 2013 and it was discovered she was living alone.

In 2019, the couple the Barnetts were charged with neglect of a dependent.

They have insisted since they were charged that they did not leave a child alone since Natalia's birth year had been legally adjusted.

Michael Barnett was found not guilty in 2022, and Kristine Barnett had all of her charges dismissed in March.

The Barnetts were charged in 2019 with neglecting their child after allegedly ditching Natalia and moving to Canada after they petitioned a court to increase her age from eight to 22

In June, Natalia's biological mother Anna Gava (pictured) was tracked down and stated that her daughter was born in 2003, making her 19-years-old

Natalia Grace in a photo shared by Kristine Barnett

In a more recent photo, the family showed a picture of Cynthia and Natalia along with the hashtags 'justice for natalia' and 'natalia grace'

Since her adoption, Natalia's new family has welcomed her with open arms, even setting up a GoFundMe page for her.

'By now, many of you have seen or at least heard of the series 'The Curious Case of Natalia Grace,'' Cynthia Mans wrote in the fundraiser's description.

'You have seen home videos of a frightened young Natalia taken by the Barnetts and heard about how she was left to fend for herself at 8 years old,' she wrote.

'We are the Mans and Natalia Grace is our daughter. We believe God put her in our life and she is an amazing daughter and a loving sister,' the page continued.

In a more recent photo, the family showed a picture of Cynthia and Natalia along with the hashtags 'justice for natalia' and 'natalia grace.'

The family has garnered a tremendous amount of support from social media followers who are cheering them on.

'Natalia keep smiling gorgeous you brighten up the world with you sprite and joy !! God bless you family,' one person wrote on a recent post.

'Love seeing Natalia! She is such a sweet young lady who has been through hell! Glad to see she has a family that loves her,' another wrote.
Natalie Barr has asked Tom Cruise if he 'ever gets scared' of performing the wild stunts he has become known for as the starstruck host avoids asking the movie star about his affiliation with the Church of Scientology or his daughter Suri.

Cruise, 60, appeared on Sunrise on Monday morning to promote his new movie Mission Impossible - Dead Reckoning during an exclusive interview.

Dozens of excited fans crowded with posters of Cruise crowded the studio as Nat Barr and Matthew Shirvington quizzed the actor on the making of the film.

One of the many stunts Cruise performs involves him riding a motorbike straight off a cliff before parachuting to the bottom of a steep mountain.

The stunt has been described as the actor's most dangerous yet, with cast and crew members forced to watch Cruise perform the stunt up to eight times in a row.

'Do you ever get scared?' Barr asked the Hollywood star.

'Yeah, I do. I just don't mind being scared, that's the difference,' he replied.

'As I'm breaking things down, I like that feeling. I like that feeling of 'what's going to happen', and I train, train, train for everything.'

Cruise, 60, appeared on Sunrise on Monday morning to promote his new movie Mission Impossible: The Reckoning Part One (pictured)

Cruise told the hosts he had been riding motorbikes for most of his life and that he liked to 'study every single department' when working on a film.

'I'm constantly working to be competent in things. So I'll study every single department from writing, to cinematography, to wardrobe, every department. Then I studied studios and distribution. I want to travel the world,' he said.

Cruise said he worked closely with the film's director Christopher McQuarrie to design the awe-inducing stunts, build the characters and form the story.

Shirvo asked the Hollywood star how he had honed his sprinting technique.

'I've been an athlete my whole life. I came out running. I was that little kid where I would get a new pair of sneakers and have to hit every puddle,' Cruise replied.

'I watch people. I study. Then I try different things of my own. I'll watch someone and I'll imitate them, I'll ready about other people's training.'

The Hollywood star was also called out for his well-known habit of going undercover to the cinema to watch the audience reactions to his films.

'I'll go with my movies but I'll also go with other films,' he said.

'I like Friday or Saturday night, opening weekend, to see a movie with that packed audience, those people who love the cinema, love the movie they're about to go see, it's really fun. I just go in and wear a cap.'

Barr asked if people ever recognised him in the movie theatre.

'They do, sometimes when I go in and they'll say 'hi Tom'. There's a few selfies then everyone settles down to watch,' Cruise replied with a smile.

However, there were several things the hosts avoided asking Cruise about, including his affiliation with Scientology and his relationship with daughter Suri.

There were several things the Sunrise hosts (pictured) avoided asking Cruise about, including his affiliation with Scientology and his relationship with daughter Suri

'Super excited for Tom Cruise to finally get grilled about his scientology links live on #sunrise this morning ... or maybe not,' one viewer tweeted.

'#TomCruise looks incredible for a man in his 60s. Makes me rethink Scientology. If that's the result then sign me up. Show me the literature, Tom!' a second wrote.

During a 2017 trip to Australia, Cruise was pictured alone on his balcony after a brief visit to Scientology's Australasian headquarters in Chatswood.

The centre in Sydney's lower north shore has been described as the religion's 'biggest spiritual centre outside the United States'.

Facilities include 60 'auditing' or spiritual counselling rooms - where technology called 'e-meters' are used, a chapel, grand auditorium, production studio, and an office devoted to L. Ron Hubbard.

In the same year, the movie star also visited the multi-million dollar Scientology headquarters in Auckland after it opened in January.

The headquarter is said to feature a sauna and a 'Purification Centre', designed to rid 'toxins, pesticides and drugs lodged in the fatty tissues of the body'.

The movie star was pictured shaking hands with Auckland church members, behind a sign that read: 'Take Your Free Personality Test Here'.

Cruise (pictured) made a rockstar arrival at Sydney Harbour on Sunday as he attended a media event for his new film Mission Impossible - Dead Reckoning

Cruise has previously campaigned for Scientology to become a recognised religion in Europe and is said to be considered 'god-like' by other followers.

His ex-wife, Katie Holmes, left the church after her divorce with Cruise in 2012.

It was reported at the time that she departed Scientology because she didn't want their daughter Suri, now 17, to be involved with the church.

Since 2008, the Mission Impossible star is understood to have limited interviewers from asking about his association with Scientology.

In March of this year, reports that Cruise is estranged from his daughter resurfaced.

In transcripts from his 2012 defamation lawsuit against Bauer Media, Cruise was asked if one of the reasons he and former partner Katie Holmes had parted ways in 2012 was 'in part to protect Suri rom Scientology'.

'That was one of the assertions, yes,' Cruise responded.

Holmes, who lives in New York City with Suri, is said to be giving her teenager daughter the most normal and stable upbringing she possibly can.

'What has been really important for me with my daughter, because she was so visible at a young age, is I really like to protect her,' she told Glamour in April.

'I'm very grateful to be a parent, to be her parent. She's an incredible person.'
A pet poodle has been mauled to death and its owner bitten on the face in a horrifying dog attack.

Frank De La Pena had just returned from walking his and his partner Adele Raffa's miniature poodle, Mika, around Spearwood, south of Perth, over the weekend.

A rogue Staffy then bounded out of nowhere before attacking the pair.

Frank De La Pena was walking his poodle, Mika, when an uncontrolled Staffy attacked them both and caused life-threatening injuries to the pet

The miniature poodle is a breed originally developed as a cuddly companion to French royalty. Mika stood no chance against the Staffy, whose ancestors were bred as fighting dogs

Mr De La Pena snatched up his seven-year-old poodle, to try and keep her safe, before the Staffy then turned on him and bit his face several times.

Mr De La Pena shouted to his wife to call the police and ambulance.

His face was left covered in blood with paramedics rushing him to hospital where he was told by doctors he may need plastic surgery.

Mr De La Pena relived the terrifying moment on Sunday describing the Staffy biting down on his helpless dog and violently shaking it.

'It was like he had a rag doll, and was ripping [her] from side to side,' a traumatised Ms Raffa told 10News.

As the Staffy shook Mika, blood was sprayed over the outside of the couple's home, leaving a grisly reminder of the attack days later.

Miniature poodles, originally bred by French royalty as cuddly companion dogs, are not physically equipped to withstand a Staffy attack, let alone fight back.

Staffordshire Bull Terriers were originally bred as fighting dogs and as they age some develop reputations as dangerous to other breeds.

They also have a 'bite force' stronger than their more feared cousins, Pit Bull Terriers.

Ms Raffa rushed the limp Mika to the vet, but the dog's injuries were so bad she had to be euthanised.

'She was a mess, terrible,' Ms Raffa said, breaking down in tears.

'There's nothing they could do for her because she was in too much pain, that's what they said.

'I don't think I'll ever have another dog like her, she was just so smart.'

Adele Raffa was in heavy shock from witnessing her dog Mika being violent shaken by a bloodthirsty Staffy

Adele Raffa and Frank De La Pena lost their beloved poodle Mika to a savage attack from a Staffy

It was not the first time the same Staffy has terrorised its Perth street.

A neighbour reported the Staffy to authorities twice, including one incident where it ran at her and her young daughter.

Rangers working for the City of Coburg have now seized the offending dog, which is believed to be four years old.

Ms Raffa's and the couple's granddaughter, Montana Raffa, insisted the Staffy should never have been allowed outside without a muzzle.
The desire to tackle climate change and leave a cleaner, greener planet for our children and grandchildren is shared by almost everybody.

That has been illustrated by the Mail's successful and popular campaigns to end the scourge of plastic pollution and clean up the litter befouling our countryside.

But we have also warned that Net Zero policies which make people poorer, their lives harder and less free, will understandably be met with resistance.

So our poll should make alarming reading for Tory and Labour politicians fixated on forcing voters into buying supposedly eco-friendly electric cars they cannot afford.

It is not surprising there is woefully little support for banning sales of new petrol and diesel cars from 2030. Only one in four think this deadline  plucked from thin air without consultation  is a good idea.

Voters want a pragmatic environmental strategy. They will not forgive politicians whose reckless virtue-signalling leaves them facing debt and difficulty

Not only are electric vehicles frighteningly expensive, but soaring power prices mean a full recharge can now cost significantly more than a tank of petrol.

And that, of course, is if you're lucky enough to find a charging point. With the current network lamentably inadequate, many motorists will plainly not want to gamble on switching to battery-run cars with tiny mileage ranges.

Experts also calculate that replacing traditional fossil fuel vehicles will jeopardise jobs and harm Britain's car industry. It's no wonder nearly half of voters worry that the looming ban will damage the economy.

And will the environmental gain be worth the economic pain? It's not entirely clear.

Manufacturing an electric car can create substantially more emissions than producing a petrol model, as their batteries require large quantities of rare metals.

When millions are being hammered by the crippling cost of living, and need reliable vehicles to get them to work, school and the shops, MPs' obsession with Net Zero risks being seen as out of touch.

This might be expected from Labour, which has effectively outsourced its eco-agenda to major donor Dale Vince and the zealots of Just Stop Oil, who he bankrolls. But what is the Tories' excuse?

Voters want a pragmatic environmental strategy. They will not forgive politicians whose reckless virtue-signalling leaves them facing debt and difficulty.

The sickest of jokes

Does anything tug on the heartstrings like hospital consultants whose NHS salaries average 128,000 whining that they are not paid enough?

One agitator behind this month's strikes by the hard-Left British Medical Association boasts of boosting his NHS income by 350 an hour doing lucrative private work. So much for Corbynite posturing!

As NHS chief executive Amanda Pritchard rightly said yesterday, the most vulnerable patients will 'pay the price' for this callous walkout, adding to the 650,000 operations and appointments already cancelled since December. Some will tragically die.

The ever belligerent BMA's pay demands are, of course, ludicrously excessive and politically motivated. How appalling that the country's most respected profession is putting the sick at risk.

As NHS chief executive Amanda Pritchard rightly said yesterday, the most vulnerable patients will 'pay the price' for this callous walkout

Now step on the gas

For years it has been suspected that drivers are being ripped off at the pumps.

Petrol retailers are accused of profiteering by hiking forecourt prices sharply when wholesale costs rise, but being painfully slow to lower them when they plummet.

So we welcome ministers cracking down on this dubious practice by backing a new 'Pump Watch' website. This will let motorists compare petrol prices in their area  potentially saving them hundreds of pounds a year each.

To get the scheme up and running, the Government needs to step on the gas.
A bus carrying migrants from a Texas border city arrived in downtown Los Angeles on Saturday for the second time in less than three weeks.

The office of LA Mayor Karen Bass was not formally notified but became aware on Friday of the bus from the border town of Brownsville.

'The City of Los Angeles believes in treating everyone with respect and dignity and will do so,' Bass spokesman Zach Seidl said.

The bus arrived around 12:40pm, and the 41 asylum-seekers on board were welcomed by a collective of faith and immigrant rights groups.

Eleven children were also on the bus, according to a statement by the Coalition for Humane Immigrant Rights.

The asylum seekers came from Cuba, Belize, Colombia, El Salvador, Guatemala, Mexico, Nicaragua and Venezuela.

A bus carrying migrants from Texas is seen arriving at a church in Los Angeles

Their bus from Brownsville, Texas, was seen arriving at Union Station in Los Angeles

The migrants were directed inside the church where they received food, water and advice

They received water, food, clothing and initial legal immigration assistance at St. Anthony's Croatian Parish Center and church.

Jorge-Mario Cabrera, a spokesperson for the coalition, said the group 'was less stressed and less chaotic than the previous time.' He said most were picked up by family in the area and appeared to have had sandwiches and water, unlike the first time.

Los Angeles was not the final destination for six people who needed to fly to Las Vegas, Seattle, San Francisco and Oakland, he said.

The city received a bus carrying 42 migrants from Texas on June 14. Many were from Latin American countries, including Honduras and Venezuela, and they were not provided with water or food.

The group received water, food, clothing and initial legal immigration assistance at St. Anthony's Croatian Parish Center and church

After arriving at Union Station, the migrants boarded local buses to go to the church

The migrants are seen arriving at a church in Los Angeles following their arrival in the city

Officials and volunteers deliver diapers, supplies and toys to the St. Anthony Croatian Catholic Church where migrants have been transported in Los Angeles

Bass said at the time that the city would not be swayed by 'petty politicians playing with human lives.'

Texas has bussed more than 21,600 migrants out of state since last spring, Abbott's office said.

Last month, LA Mayor Karen Bass, a Democrat, condemned the transfer as 'a despicable stunt that Republican Governors have grown so fond of.'

'This did not catch us off guard, nor will it intimidate us,' Bass said in a statement last month.

'Los Angeles is not a city motivated by hate or fear and we absolutely will not be swayed or moved by petty politicians playing with human lives.'

Border Patrol agents escort migrants onto a bus to be taken to a processing facility to begin their asylum-seeking process in Eagle Pass, Texas last week

Newly-arrived migrants wait to be taken by Border Patrol to a processing facility

Migrants are seen waiting to be taken by Border Patrol to a processing facility to begin their asylum-seeking process in Eagle Pass, Texas on June 25

A second group of migrants was bused from Texas to Los Angeles on Saturday and dropped off at downtown's Union Station

Officials and volunteers deliver diapers, supplies and toys to the St. Anthony Croatian Catholic Church where migrants had been transported

Los Angeles County Public Health Emergency Operations officials leave St. Anthony's Croatian Catholic Church after evaluating newly arrived migrants

The also city received a bus carrying 42 migrants from Texas on June 14. Pictured last month, Angelica Salas, executive director of Coalition for Humane Immigrant Rights of Los Angeles (CHIRLA), speaks to the media outside St. Anthony Croatian Catholic Church

People seeking asylum speak with law enforcement after illegally crossing the Rio Grande into the US at Eagle Pass, Texas, last month

Jorge Mario Cabrera of the Coalition for Humane Immigrant Rights, who spoke to several migrants, said they had spent 23 hours on a bus, some without food or water. One migrant had an immigration appointment in New York

'They are being fed; they're taking shelters; they're talking to attorneys,' said Cabrera.

'These are migrants that have been allowed by the US to enter because they have credible fears. They have not yet received asylum.'

Texas Gov. Greg Abbott said he sent the bus to Los Angeles because California had declared itself a 'sanctuary' for immigrants, extending protections to people living in the country illegally.

It was unclear if Abbott sent the latest bus.

Governor Abbott said in last month: 'Texas' small border towns remain overwhelmed and overrun by the thousands of people illegally crossing into Texas from Mexico because of President Biden's refusal to secure the border.

Last month Texas Governor Greg Abbott announced he had dropped off the first bus load of migrants in LA after the Californian city declared itself a sanctuary for asylum seekers. It was unclear if Abbott sent the latest bus

The latest group were dropped off at LA 's Union Station this on Saturday (file photo)

Union Station in downtown Los Angeles is pictured, above

'Los Angeles is a major city that migrants seek to go to, particularly now that its city leaders approved its self-declared sanctuary city status.

'Our border communities are on the frontlines of President Biden's border crisis, and Texas will continue providing this much-needed relief until he steps up to do his job and secure the border.'

Texas has bused more than 10,000 migrants to Washington D.C. since April 2022, over 8,200 migrants to New York City since August 2022, more than 2,600 migrants to Chicago since August 2022, more than 1,600 migrants to Philadelphia since November 2022, over 210 migrants to Denver since May 2023, and over 80 migrants to Los Angeles since June 14.

Earlier in June, the state of Florida picked up three dozen migrants in Texas and sent them by private jet to California's state capital, catching shelters and aid workers in Sacramento by surprise.

Earlier this year, DeSantis sent two planes filled with migrants to ritzy Martha's Vineyard island, off the coast of Massachusetts.

The migrant crossings come after Title 42 ended in May - causing an influx of people moving into the US over the border.

The Title 42 rules had been in place since March 2020.

The restrictions allowed border officials to quickly return asylum seekers back over the border on grounds of preventing the spread of COVID-19.

U.S. authorities have unveiled strict new measures to replace Title 42, which crack down on illegal crossings while also setting up legal pathways for migrants who apply online, seek a sponsor and undergo background checks.

Over the last year, Republican governors in Texas and Florida have been busing and flying migrants to Democratic strongholds and so-called Sanctuary Cities including New York City, Chicago and Washington, D.C., without advance warning

The Biden administration has opened up new ways for migrants to enter the U.S. legally as part of a broader strategy to discourage people from crossing the U.S.-Mexico border illegally.

Migrants waiting in Mexico can apply for U.S. entry on a smartphone app and later request asylum, but slots on the app fill up quickly.

Under another Biden program, Cubans, Haitians, Nicaraguans and Venezuelans can request to enter the U.S. by air if they have U.S. sponsors.

But those routes do not provide the same benefits available to refugees or a direct path to permanent residence and eventual citizenship.

In April, the Biden administration said it aimed to admit 40,000 refugees from Latin America and the Caribbean in fiscal years 2023 and 2024, doubling a previous target.

As of May 31, about 3,400 had arrived, showing that the pace would need to greatly accelerate to reach that goal.

Some refugee backers are concerned the focus on Latin America could slow processing from other parts of the world, including refugees already waiting for approval.

The initiative under discussion would be a 'Priority Two' refugee program, the sources said, similar to one opened for Afghans in 2021. Such programs allow certain groups of people to apply for refugee status directly without needing a referral from the United Nations
A mobile speed camera operator has divided drivers after claiming motorists are allowed to travel a certain speed over the limit before they are booked.

The speed camera operator made the dubious claim to a motorist while refuelling his car at a petrol station in Sydney.

Edward McDonald had filled up his motorcycle and was standing nearby with a group of friends when he was approached by the operator.

Young motorist Edward McDonald spoke with a speed camera operator at a petrol station in Sydney (pictured)

Mr McDonald shared a video of the exchange to TikTok on Sunday, claiming he 'got an inside tip' from a 'speed camera dude'.

The operator is seen in the video telling the young men they can go 10 per cent over the speed limit without copping a fine.

'I'll tell you something boys, you can do 10 per cent over any f*****g speed limit before you get pulled,' he said.

The skeptical young man asks, 'Even on your camera?'

'Yep,' the man responded.

Mr McDonald explained in the video's caption that he is 'not going to test it out' as he fears the man's claims might be a trap.

Social media users agreed with many claiming they were fined for doing less than 10km/h over the speed limit.

'I got fined from a mobile speed camera for doing "under 5km over" in New South Wales,' one wrote.

'Nah it's not 10 over his trying to make extra money from the people he gets. It's like 5 over that's it,' another person commented.

A third person chimed: 'on a mobile speed camera I've been done 3km/h over.'

'Definitely tryna get a commission off you,' a fourth person added.

Other users claimed people were confused between 10 per cent over and 10km/h over the speed limit.

'It's up to 10 per cent. Anything over 10 per cent you get booked. Example: 100km/h zone equals extra 10km/h. Anything over you're gone,' one person commented.

'It's not 10km it's 10 per cent. So 4 over 40, 5 over 50, and so on,' another person wrote.

Mobile speed camera vehicles in NSW equipped to carry portable warning signs in a reversal of the previous state government's decision to remove the signs in 2020.

Mobile speed camera vehicles in NSW equipped to carry portable warning signs in a reversal of the previous state government's decision to remove the signs in 2020

The speed camera operator (left) told Edward (right) and his friends they could do 10 per cent above the legal speed limit without getting a fine. Edward said he would not test it out as he fears the man's claim might be a trap

Warning signs must now be displayed during enforcement, including a retractable rooftop sign, two portable signs placed on approach to every mobile speed camera vehicle and one after.

NSW Premier Chris Minns said he wanted 'an end to the secrecy' with motorists having clear warning signs ahead of speed cameras to remind them to slow down.

'I would rather people slow down in the first place than receive a fine in the mail two weeks after they committed the offence,' Premier Chris Minns said.

Mr Minns said the former government went from collecting about $4million a year in low-range speeding fines to about $45million during one financial year.

The number of fines where the speed limit was exceeded by 10km/h or less went from 3,222 in October 2020 to 27,855 by February 2021.

Following community backlash, the signs were partially reintroduced to return to the top of speed camera vehicles in 2021 but gave drivers no advance warning.
It comes as there's a shortfall of 130,000 in the state

A tiny town will be given an entire new look under a huge housing development plan that's been approved by the state in a bid to alleviate Sydney's housing crisis.

The development, which was signed off by state planning minister Paul Scully last week, will see 12,900 brand new homes built on a site in Appin in the city's south.

The Appin site, which is owned by property developer Walker Corporation, will be built near existing infrastructure at the small town in the Macarthur region.

It was one of a number of precincts flagged by the state government for rezoning in November last year.

It comes as the government looks for ways to fix the shortfall of more than 130,000 homes in the state, which has gotten worse as housing supply struggles to keep up with increasing demand.

The state government has signed off on a major housing development plan at a site in Appin in Sydney's south (pictured, concept art of the completed site)

Concept art has been released showing what the Appin site is expected to look like following the completion of development.

Besides the 12,900 new properties, the state government has also approved the development of new transport, education and health services in the area.

One third of the site has been dedicated to conservation to protect the environment and the local koala population.

Koala corridors will be reserved for the species after one of the nation's most emblematic animals was pushed to the brink of extinction due to habitat loss and logging operations.

'The rezoning of land at Appin will provide for much-needed additional homes while reserving more than a third of the site for environmental and koala protection,' Mr Scully said about the conservation push.

Concerns have been raised over the Appin site, with environmental groups taking issue with land clearing.

Others have raised doubts over whether there would be an appropriate amount of infrastructure at the site to accommodate residents moving in.

About 12,900 homes will be built along with new transport, education and health services (pictured, concept art of the completed site)

Mr Scully assured those concerned that the planned infrastructure for the area would be completed in a 'timely manner'.

'The combination of planning requirements and the reformed infrastructure contributions scheme to come into effect from 1 October will mean that the infrastructure needed to support those homes will be delivered in a timely manner,' the state planning minister said.

Walker Corporation is completing master plans for the site before developing additional plans for sections where more homes can be built.

Last month, premier Chris Minns announced a range of initiatives to incentivise the construction of affordable housing in the state, including setting more minimum affordable targets and fast-tracking planning processes.

Housing developments of more than $75 million, which include a minimum of 15 per cent affordable housing, will gain access to a new State Significant Development pathway, meaning planning decisions will be made faster.

These developments will also gain access to a 30 per cent floor space ratio boost and a height bonus of 30 per cent above local environment plans.

New planning and development reforms in NSW aim to create more affordable housing and boost supply (pictured, NSW Premier Chris Minns with his wife Anna)

Incentivising a minimum affordable housing component in private developments on private land will build on the government's pre-election commitment to ensure developments on surplus public land include a minimum of 30 per cent affordable, social and universal housing.

Under the new reforms, set to come into force later this year, the government will have the power to gazette more large-scale housing proposals as State Significant Developments, speeding up planning decisions.

NSW needs to build 314,000 new dwellings to meet the state's share of the Accord to build one million new homes over five years starting from 2024.

It is falling short by almost 30,000 homes a year.
Australia's busiest airport has been plagued with more disruptions for a fifth day in a row with more than 30 departing and arriving flights cancelled on Monday morning.

Airlines have cancelled 18 domestic services destined to land at Sydney Airport this morning - including from Melbourne, Canberra, Brisbane, Adelaide, Hobart, the Gold Coast and Griffith.

A further 13 flights scheduled to leave Sydney have been cancelled - with affected destinations including Canberra, Melbourne, Brisbane, Perth, Hobart and the Gold Coast.

Flights departing Sydney have also been rescheduled, leaving one frustrated traveller in tears.

An airport spokesman said the cancellations are a knock-on effect from the weather-related disruptions that took place over the weekend.

Sydney Airport has been plagued with more disruptions for a fifth day in a row after more flights were cancelled. Pictured is Sunday's chaos

A severe shortage of air traffic controllers - due to staff illness in Brisbane - has also contributed to widespread chaos to flights along the country's east coast since Thursday.

The ongoing disruptions coincide with the start of the NSW school holidays.

One distraught traveller burst into tears after arriving at the airport to learn her flight had been cancelled, throwing her holiday into disarray.

'I had a 7.30am flight and my ticket now says it's 5pm,' she told the ABC.

'I didn't get an email or anything.'

'I'm devastated, I'm sad, I want to go on my trip and it's not working out for me.'

'I'm really stressed right now and there's no resolution. We're all confused.'

One man has been trying to get to the Gold Coast to visit his children since Friday but has had back-to-back flight cancellations.

He woke up at 4am to get to airport, where he was notified his flight had been rescheduled by another two days.

'I came here on Friday afternoon and it was cancelled while we were waiting at the bar. My bags were already checked in,' he told the ABC.

'We had to retrieve our bags and spend $200 getting here and back plus extras, including car hire.'

'Now we've been rescheduled to Wednesday. That's half our holiday.'

A Garuda Indonesia flight from Bali, a Chinese Eastern Airlines flight from Wuhan, and a Virgin Australia flight from Nadi were among the international flight cancelled on Monday.

One woman broke down in tears after her holiday was thrown into chaos by a cancelled flight

Sydney Airport has been hit by a fifth straight day of cancelled and rescheduled flights

Virgin Australia passnegers are believed to be the most affected.

'We apologise to anyone impacted by delayed or cancelled services and we continue to work hard to ensure our guests reach their destinations,' a spokeperson said.

'We continue to communicate with guests whose flights are disrupted and ensure they are accommodated on the next available services.'

It's understood the majority of 800 services originating from Sydney Airport were running on schedule and all runways are in operation.

It comes after hundreds of travellers faced lengthy delays after heavy winds brought flights to a standstill on Sunday.

A handful of flights were delayed or cancelled at Sydney and Brisbane airports.

It resulted in long queues for the check-in at both airports, as airlines desperately try to clear a backlog of widespread cancellations.

Around 150 flights have been delayed or cancelled since last week.

Around 2.3million travellers are expected to go through Sydney Airport over the next two weeks making it one of the busiest school holiday periods since pre-Covid.
A 'hero father' is fighting for his life in hospital after trying to save a mother and her two young children who were killed in a house fire.

Gemma Germeney, 31, her son Oliver Peden, four, and daughter Lilly Peden, eight, died after the blaze at family's two-storey maisonette in Cambridge on Friday.

An unnamed man in his 30s, who escaped the burning building and remains in a critical condition in hospital, is believed to be Ms Germeny's partner, Scott Peden, who is the father of the two children.

Neighbours paid tribute to the family, with a resident, called Debbi, telling the Sun: 'Gemma loved her kids to bits, she was a devoted mum and she had a heart of gold.

'We heard that her partner Scott had tried to rescue them all when the fire broke out in the middle of the night. He was a hero, but he couldn't save them.'

Gemma Germeney (left), 31, her daughter Lilly Peden (bottom right), eight, and her son Oliver Peden (bottom left), four, were all killed in the fire. The man believed to be her partner, Scott Peden (back right) is fighting for his life

Lilly and Oliver both died in hospital following the house fire last week

Locals described hearing screams as flames burst out of the windows of the family's maisonette (pictured) in Sackville Close, in the King's Hedges area of Cambridge

Ms Germeney died at the scene, while her two young children passed away later in hospital.

Their two dogs are also believed to have perished in the fire.

Locals described hearing screams as flames burst out of the windows of the family's home on Sackville Close, in the King's Hedges area.

A neighbour, who asked not to be named, said: 'I was woken up by what I thought was a car alarm, but it must have been a smoke alarm going off.

'Then I heard a lot of shouting and commotion. A man's voice was yelling, "Call the fire brigade" and "call an ambulance".

'There was smoke billowing everywhere and I could see flames, and hear the sounds of windows smashing.

'The first two fire engines arrived within a few minutes and they quickly got the fire under control.

Neighbours paid moving tributes to the family, with one resident called Debbi saying: 'Gemma loved her kids to bits, she was a devoted mum'

Gemma Germeney (left) and her eight-year-old daughter Lilly Peden (right) who traigcally died along with four-year-old Oliver

'I didn't realise how serious it was until I saw some stretchers being wheeled out. It was absolutely horrific.

'I think there was a child on one of the stretchers and they were receiving CPR.'

Around 30 firefighters which included crews from Cambridge, Cottenham, Cambourne, Linton, Burwell and Huntingdon were all involved in helping tackle the flames.

The alarm was raised as the fire took hold shortly after 1am on Friday, but details of the fatalities were only released on Saturday.

The walls of property have been left charred black, and the windows smashed, as a result of the intense heat and smoke.

Despite fire crews battling to stop the fire from spreading to adjoining properties, a child from a neighbouring home was also taken to hospital.

It is believed that the youngster was suffering from smoke inhalation, but was not seriously hurt.

Neighbours described Ms Germeney as having a 'heart of gold'

Both police and firefighters were on the scene on Sackville Close

More than 30 firefighters rushed to a flat in King's Hedges ward, Cambridge, at 1.08am

Firefighters from five separate Cambridgeshire crews attended the tragic incident

Another neighbour who asked to stay anonymous said: 'I was woken up by screaming just after 1am and I thought it was someone having an argument.

'A few minutes later, I was woken up properly by fire engines turning up. I looked out of my window and saw flames everywhere. They were coming out of the ground floor window and going up the wall.

'The ambulances could not get near because of all the fire engines. I saw the stretchers being wheeled past to get to the ambulances, and a policeman carrying a child who looked like a boy.

'There were loads of fire engines, two ambulances and police cars. It was just mayhem. I had never seen so many people out there.'

Data analyst Peter Griffin, 30, who lives nearby said: 'I was woken up by the first fire engine  but our neighbour said he heard shouting before that.

'There are trees between our house and the maisonette. I could see the orange glow of the fire. There was also an acrid smell of smoke.

'I think the family who lived in the maisonette had a large dog. It is just an awful tragedy.'

Area commander Stuart Smith, of Cambridgeshire Fire and Rescue Service, said: 'This is a devastating and deeply upsetting incident that will touch many people.

'Our thoughts are with the relatives, friends and neighbours of the family. It's just heartbreaking.

A police scientific support unit van was among the emergency vehicles at the scene on Friday

A cordon remained in place over the weekend as emergency services attempted to establish the cause of the blaze

'We know this will have a huge impact on the local community and our fire safety team was in the area visiting residents yesterday to provide fire safety information and reassurance and will be returning next week.

'A fire like this is one of the toughest incidents you can attend as a firefighter and we're looking after the welfare of all those who responded to or supported this incident.'

A Cambridgeshire Fire and Rescue Service spokesman said the alarm was raised at 1.08am on Friday.

They added: 'Crews arrived to find smoke issuing from the ground and first floor of a two-storey maisonette. Crews worked hard to extinguish the fire and prevent it from spreading to neighbouring properties.

'A man in his 30s managed to escape the flat before crews arrived, however he suffered serious injuries and was taken to hospital where he remains in a critical condition.

'Two children, a boy and a girl, were rescued by firefighters. They received treatment at the scene by firefighters and paramedics but tragically both later died in hospital. Sadly, a woman in her 30s also died at the scene.

'An investigation to establish the cause of the fire started yesterday and will continue over the weekend.'

Cambridge mayor Jenny Gawthrope Wood said: 'I know that the residents of King's Hedges and the whole city will share my shock and sorrow at the loss of life in Sackville Close. To lose loved ones in such tragic circumstances is so terribly hard to bear.

'I know that our council officers will provide support wherever they can. I offer my sincere condolences to the families and friends of the victims of this shocking event.'

The young children were rescued from the blaze but both later died in hospital

A Cambridge council spokesman said: 'People will be shocked and distressed to hear about this incident in their local community and we are working to provide support to those people who have been directly affected, including the occupants of neighbouring properties.

'We are also working closely with our emergency service partners and we will support their investigation into its cause. Our thoughts are with the victims, their loved ones and all of the people who have been affected.'

An East of England Ambulance Service spokesman said: 'Three ambulances, three hazardous area response team vehicles, two ambulance officer vehicles and response cars from the East Anglian Air Ambulance and Essex and Herts Air Ambulance were called out in the early hours of Friday June 30 to a serious house fire in Sackville Close in Cambridge.

'The ambulance service would like to extend its deepest sympathies to all those affected by this tragic incident.'
Holidaymakers have been warned of summer chaos as air traffic control expects to be 'overloaded' at European airports including London, Brussels and Barcelona.

Eurocontrol, which manages the continent's airspace, fears of a 'challenging' period as peak summer season begins and is bracing itself for an estimated 33,000 flights per day over the next eight weeks.

This is an 8 per cent increase on the number of flights across Europe for the same period last year.

The war in Ukraine is also a contributing factor to delays this summer as the military requires more airspace, Eurocontrol said.

The warning comes as Britons are set to make more than 25 million trips abroad between now and September - with the majority of these by air.

A plane takes off from Heathrow Airport in London which is expected to suffer travel delays this summer

With the threat of strikes looming this summer too, there are fears holidaymakers will face travel chaos in the peak season

Eurocontrol predicts it will experience 'high overloads' of traffic on most days in key regions such as Athens, Budapest and France - particularly in Reims and Marseilles.

On peak days - such as Fridays and weekends - the air traffic company forecasts overloads for London, Barcelona, Brussels, Budapest, Nicosia, Warsaw and Zagreb, The Times reports.

Overloads can have a serious impact on travel resulting in major delays - especially if aircraft are forced to take longer routes to avoid busy areas.

Raul Medina, Eurocontrol's director-general, said: 'This summer in Europe is challenging as we have less available airspace because of the war in Ukraine and the military needs... We need everyone to play their part.

'Airports need to be well staffed, it is vital [air traffic services] provide enough capacity and airlines stick to their schedules.'

Mr Medina told a meeting of the Airports Council International in Barcelona that increased military activity had reduced available airspace by up to 20 per cent, leading to some control centres facing far more traffic.

He also added: 'Recent industrial action caused many delays. We can manage situations like that in quieter periods but if it happens in the middle of summer it will be much more challenging.'

Although the prediction of 33,000 flights per day falls short of the 37,228 flights recorded on a single day in June 2019, there are external factors that pose a bigger threat.

The number of air traffic controllers has dropped, in part from the struggle to recruit workers since the pandemic. Strikes could also play a major role in the 'challenging' summer ahead.

Short-haul flights departing from the UK and Spain are often heavily affected by French air traffic control strikes

Willie Walsh, head of the International Air Transport Association, sounded the alarm about air traffic control last month as he warned that the disruption in June was 'well beyond what is normal for the time of year'.

He added: 'We have the chaotic situation where we're seeing almost daily air traffic control strikes, which doesn't just disrupt traffic in France but right across Europe because it forces airlines to reroute to other countries.'

Ryanair boss Michael O'Leary has said that air traffic control strikes in France is one of the biggest threats to summer travel.

Short-haul flights departing from the UK and Spain are often heavily affected by the French strikes because officials in France prioritise domestic departures and long-haul flights.

Ryanair chief Michael O'Leary said air traffic control strikes in France is one of the biggest threats to summer travel

This ultimately results in the cancellation of short-haul flights using French airspace even if they do not land in France.

A 34-hour strike by French air traffic controllers ended on June 30. It was the 60th day of action by the airport workers this year in response to Emmanuel Macron's pension reforms.

France has also been engulfed by riots following the 'execution' of a 17-year-old boy of Algerian descent by police. Britons have been told to check the latest Foreign Office advice before travelling.

Holidaymakers have been told it is 'more important than ever to get travel insurance and check it provides sufficient cover'.
The remains of a 56-year-old amputee who went missing more than two weeks ago has been recovered - stuffed in barrel found floating in a South Carolina lake.

Law enforcement in rural Cherokee County made the disturbing discovery around 1:45pm ET Thursday, after being summoned to 100-acre Lake Thicketty in small-town Gaffney.

Deputies reportedly arrived to the scene to find the 42-gallon vat floating near the shore - and upon opening it discovered the body of Jeffrey Sutphin. Upon analyzing the corpse, a coroner confirmed it had been locked away for 'a number' of days.

After identifying the body, officials said they interviewed a person of interest - during which they learned Cherokee resident Sutphin, who was missing his right leg and used a prosthetic, was likely killed somewhere in neighboring Spartanburg County.

Sutphin was reportedly last seen on June 15 in Chesnee, which is set in both counties. Police have since made a single arrest following the grim find - charging Eric Shawn Fetzer, 25, with destruction, desecration or removal of human remains.

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The remains of 56-year-old Jeffrey Sutphin, who went missing in rural Cherokee County more than two weeks ago, was recovered Thursday - after being stuffed in barrel that was found floating in an 100-acre lake not far from where he disappeared

Police have since made a single arrest following the grim find - charging 25-year-old Eric Shawn Fetzer with destruction, desecration or removal of human remains

'Deputies found the barrel near the shore and upon opening it found human remains,' Cherokee County Coroner Dennis Fowler wrote in a news release Friday, as investigating deputies said they anticipate additional arrests in the coming days.

'It appears the body had been in the container for a number of days.'

She added: 'Since the discovery, investigators were able to confirm late Thursday that the death occurred in Spartanburg County.

'This morning I transferred the remains to Spartanburg County Coroner Rusty Clevenger who will assume the death investigation as is protocol.

'My office role will only be a recovery to assist another agency.'

In an earlier update, police in Cherokee County said they received a call to the scene at 1:45pm ET, after which they found the missing man's remains after pulling the partially submerged barrel ashore and prying it open.

Members of the Department of Natural Resources, Cherokee County Emergency Management, and Spartanburg County Emergency Management also assisted with the recovery.

After coming into possession of the body Friday, Spartanburg County Coroner Rusty Clevenger penned his own statement Saturday - one that revealed the corpse belonged to Sutphin, and that officials suspected foul play in his death.

In it, Clevenger claimed Sutphin 'was taken to Cherokee County in attempt to hide the death.'

Law enforcement in rural Cherokee County made the disturbing discovery around 1:45pm ET Thursday, after being summoned to 100-acre Lake Thicketty in small-town Gaffney.

After identifying the body, officials said they interviewed a person of interest - during which they learned Cherokee resident Sutphin was likely killed somewhere in neighboring Spartanburg County, a brief drive away

Sutphin - who had a prosthetic right leg - was last seen in early wearing a blue short sleeve shirt, blue jeans, black shoes, and a green ball while leaving a business in Chesnee, which is set in both counties

Officials reportedly came to the conclusion after interviewing the person of interest, who has yet to be identified - and whose account was apparently enough to have the case transferred to the Spartanburg County Sheriff's Office

Officials reportedly came to the conclusion after interviewing the person of interest, who has yet to be identified - and whose account was apparently enough to have the case transferred to the Spartanburg County Sheriff's Office.

Deputies said they expect to make additional arrests soon, after deputies in Cherokee apprehended 25-year-old Feltzer.

Before Feltzer's arrest, Cherokee Sheriff Steve Mueller described his department's ongoing effort to help Spartanburg County deputies find the perpetrator or perpetrators responsible.

'We've still got about four investigators out working, as we speak, running down some leads and some information on this case,' he said on Friday.

'It's part of an ongoing investigation that led us to that area to search and look for human remains.'

'Deputies found the barrel near the shore and upon opening it found human remains,' Cherokee County Coroner Dennis Fowler wrote in a news release Friday, as investigating deputies said they anticipate additional arrests in the coming days

'It appears the body had been in the container for a number of days,' officials said following the discovery at the South Carolina lake

Officials have not released any other details surrounding his disappearance nor the ongoing investigation, or whether his death is being treated as a homicide. Officers' investigation, as of Sunday, is still ongoing

As for Sutphin, not much is known about the deceased - aside for the fact a massive search had been in effect since he was reported missing on June 15, when he was seen leaving a business on Rutherfordton Highway on June 4 at around 8 pm ET.

Officials have not released any other details surrounding his disappearance nor the ongoing investigation, or whether his death is being treated as a homicide.

The car Sutphin had been driving when he was last seen - a gold 2006 Jeep Liberty - has yet to be recovered. Officers' investigation, as of Sunday, is still ongoing.
The Metropolitan Police was last night under pressure from the Home Secretary to justify a ban on officers wearing a badge commemorating fallen colleagues.

Officers policing Pride celebrations were ordered not to wear the Thin Blue Line emblem - a black-and-white Union flag with a thin horizontal blue line - in case it offended the LGBT+ community.

But the families of officers killed in the line of duty reacted angrily as the badge is worn as 'a mark of remembrance and respect' for those who paid the ultimate price to maintain law and order.

Met commanders ordered officers at Saturday's Pride parade in London not to display the symbol as they claimed it has become 'linked to far-Right and anti-trans groups in the US'.

Last night Home Secretary Suella Braverman requested more information from the Met over why it banned officers from wearing the emblem - despite other forces allowing it.

Last night Home Secretary Suella Braverman (pictured) requested more information from the Met over why it banned officers from wearing the emblem - despite other forces allowing it

A source close to Ms Braverman said: 'The Home Secretary has concerns at the reported reasoning for officers being unable to wear the Thin Blue Line badge in honour of colleagues who have lost their lives in the line of duty.

'She has asked for more information to understand what's happened.'

It comes as politicians, senior officers and the families of those killed in the line of duty all condemned the decision.

Debbie Adlam, the mother of PC Andrew Harper, 28, who was dragged to his death by teenagers in a getaway car after a burglary in Berkshire in 2019, said it was a symbol of her son's 'dedication to the force'.

She told The Mail on Sunday: 'Since we lost Andrew we have considered the Thin Blue Line image to be a universal memorial to the loss of these officers.

'It concerns me that there are those who want to take [the badge] away. I hope that today is not the start of the end for the Thin Blue Line and all it means to us in the UK.'

Debbie Adlam, the mother of PC Andrew Harper (pictured with widow Lissie Harper), 28, who was dragged to his death by teenagers in a getaway car after a burglary in Berkshire in 2019, said it was a symbol of her son's 'dedication to the force'

More than 1.5million people took to the streets of London on Saturday for the biggest ever celebration of the LGBT+ community in Britain.

Of the hundreds of officers policing the march, none appeared to be wearing Thin Blue Line badges.

Ahead of the celebrations, advice from the Met commander said: 'No 'Thin Blue Line' badges/patches are to be worn whilst policing this event.

Ahead of the celebrations, advice from the Met commander said: 'No 'Thin Blue Line' badges/patches are to be worn whilst policing this event

'These have been linked to far-Right and anti-trans groups in the US and this year's Pride is focusing very much on the trans community. This is non-negotiable and supervisors are expected to ensure this is adhered to please.'

In the US, a similar symbol, based on the American Stars and Stripes, emerged around 2014 and it has since been linked to transphobic far-Right groups.

But in Britain it has been worn by officers since around 2015, and never been politicised.

Former officer turned campaigner Henry Miller said: 'Nobody in this country says that the Thin Blue Line is political. It's completely crazy. We have seen officers wearing all kinds of insignia associated with political causes, none of which they should do.

'But the one thing that police should be able to do is memorialise their own colleagues.'

Debbi Adlam said: She told The Mail on Sunday: 'Since we lost Andrew we have considered the Thin Blue Line image to be a universal memorial to the loss of these officers' (pictured: PC Andrew Harper who died in the line of duty in 2019 with widow Lissie)

However most leave it to the discretion of chief constables and do not include it in written guidance.

The Met dress code urges officers not to wear badges 'advertising causes, beliefs or charities. They distract from our corporate identity and compromise the impartiality of the [Met]'.

But forces across the UK have emblazoned squad cars with rainbow flags in support of LGBT rights, while officers have taken the knee at Black Lives Matter rallies - both seen as political gestures.

A spokesman for the Met declined to comment last night.
A 34-year-old man has died after diving head first from a 40 foot embankment into a four-foot-deep lake.

Police were called to Lake Gladewater in eastern Texas, 100 miles east of Dallas, on Saturday afternoon. On arrival, they begun first aid.

Seven witnesses told the first responders that the man had dived from the embankment into shallow water, which has a rocky bottom.

The witnesses said they dragged him from the water and tried to save him.

A 34-year-old man died on Saturday after diving into this lake in eastern Texas

He was pronounced dead at the scene.

'The initial investigation revealed that alcohol may have been a contributing factor in this unfortunate incident,' said Gladewater Police Department.

The accident comes as Texans swelter amid a heatwave, seeking ways to cool down in lakes and rivers as the heat index reached as high as 117F.

Similar heat killed at least 279 people in the state last year, and hundreds of heat-related emergency room visits have been reported this month.
Labour's attack on private schools would be used to fund incentive payments to stop teachers leaving the profession, the party revealed yesterday.

But the policy was last night in disarray after it emerged the money has already been allocated elsewhere.

Sir Keir Starmer has vowed to retain predecessor Jeremy Corbyn's policy of stripping private schools of charitable status, meaning VAT would apply to fees.

The Conservatives pointed out the proposed 1.7billion to be raised from the contentious move was allocated by Labour in January to pay for 6,500 more teachers and support staff.

A Tory source said: 'They've now pledged two different policies with the same money.'

Sir Keir Starmer (pictured) has vowed to retain predecessor Jeremy Corbyn's policy of stripping private schools of charitable status, meaning VAT would apply to fees

Former Downing Street education advisor Chris McGovern, chairman of the Campaign for Real Education, said: 'It suggests Labour need to go back to school themselves because they can't do their sums. It's obviously a policy of chaos.

'Actually, the imposition of VAT on school fees is going to increase the number of children in state schools so any gain will be offset by the extra cost to the sector. The state would be likely to face extra expense.

'Even worse, pushy parents who would normally send their children to private school would use their sharp elbows to get their children into the best state schools taking the places of other children from less-privileged backgrounds.

'They shouldn't be running education policy on the basis of spite and punishing private schools.'

Labour said it would provide a 2,400 cash payment to teachers who stay in the profession for at least two years after qualifying, to stop an exodus from the profession.

According to separate analysis by the party, some 8 billion of taxpayers' money has been spent by schools on recruitment agencies to fill teaching gaps since 2010.

The party said it wants to 're-establish teaching as a profession that is respected and valued as a skilled job'.

Labour's plans to levy VAT on private school fees have previously been condemned by figures including Tory grandee Sir John Redwood, who headed Margaret Thatcher's policy unit.

Speaking last November, after the policy was revealed, Sir John told the Mail: 'They are clearly trying to price people out of sending their children to private schools from the UK - it will become rich foreigners only.

Speaking last November, after the policy was revealed, Sir John Redwood (pictured) told the Mail: 'They are clearly trying to price people out of sending their children to private schools from the UK - it will become rich foreigners only'

'And it will therefore greatly increase the burden of public spending because all those people will need full-price state places free, instead of paying for the private-sector places themselves.

'It's a typical, vengeful tax to stop people getting on in the world which ends up costing all of us a lot more money and making many more people miserable.'

READ MORE: Backlash sparks Labour rethink on 'devastating' private school tax hikes Advertisement

Labour has accused the Conservatives of creating the 'perfect storm' in the teaching profession, with recruitment to teacher training down by a third so far this year, while more than one in three teachers who qualified in the last 11 years have since left the profession.

According to most recent Department for Education figures, 43,997 teachers left the profession in 2021/22, compared with only 36,159 starters on Initial Teacher Training, leaving a shortfall of 7,838, Labour said.

Shadow Education Secretary Bridget Phillipson said yesterday: 'A good retention plan is the best recruitment plan: that is why Labour's measures to keep teachers in our classrooms will deliver world-class teachers in every classroom and reduce the costly payments to recruitment agencies clobbering taxpayers.'

However, she gave no commitment on wider pay rises despite a wave of school strikes, only saying the issue was 'complicated'.

Education secretary Gillian Keegan said: 'This is yet another example of Labour's reckless spending plans.

'The Conservatives have ensured we have record numbers of teachers entering the profession thanks to our tax-free bursaries worth up to 27,000.

'We're also supporting schools with 2billion extra funding this year and next - meaning we'll be funding schools at their highest level in history by next year at 58.8billion.'
An NHS hospital consultant behind strikes by senior doctors has claimed he can make '350 an hour' from his lucrative private work.

The assertion by Mike Henley, a lead negotiator for the British Medical Association (BMA), can be disclosed after the Mail last week revealed that NHS consultants can cash in from private work while on strike.

In a post on social media in August last year, Mr Henley wrote: 'My private rate is currently equivalent to a solicitor... so circa 350/hr. My clinics are always full.'

Mr Henley, who lives in a 1million cottage in rural Derbyshire, is among thousands of senior NHS doctors who will strike for two days this month as they demand pay rises of 35 per cent.

It can also be revealed that the BMA's other lead negotiator in the senior doctors' dispute, Ram Moorthy, is making as much as 120,000 extra a year from private work, according to analysis of his company's accounts.

Mr Henley, who lives in a 1million cottage in rural Derbyshire, is among thousands of senior NHS doctors who will strike for two days this month

The pair will be among senior medics who are able to profit during this month's two-day walkout of NHS consultants, but which will cause misery for thousands of patients who face having operations cancelled.

NHS medical director Professor Stephen Powis urged senior NHS doctors not to cash in on private work during strikes.

He told the BBC last week: 'I would expect doctors if they are on strike, consultants, to approach the private sector exactly the way that they would approach the NHS.

'So they have a professional responsibility to manage emergencies and if they are providing a Christmas Day level of cover in the NHS then they should not go beyond that in any other setting.

'Clearly they have a duty to look after patients but no, they should not be doing additional work beyond that.'

Tory MP Dr Ben Spencer added: 'As a former NHS consultant I know the disruption and delays these strikes will cause.

'It's outrageous that some doctors are planning to use it to fast track their private patients, making a mint while NHS patients suffer.'

NHS medical director Professor Stephen Powis urged senior NHS doctors not to cash in on private work during strikes

No 10 also spoke out after it was revealed that the wealthy medics, who earn 128,000 on average for their public sector work, are allowed by the BMA to continue in private practice during industrial action.

Asked what Rishi Sunak made of their behaviour, the PM's official spokesman replied: 'If consultants choose to take strike action, it cannot be right that some continue to only treat their fee-paying private patients and benefit financially from that while patient care is put at risk in the NHS. It would not be right to put profit before patients.'

Up to 24,000 hospital consultants are due to strike on July 20 and 21, for the first time in more than a decade, claiming their incomes have fallen by 35 per cent in the past 15 years.

They will provide 'Christmas Day cover', meaning that routine operations will be cancelled but life-or-death services in A&E and maternity will remain in place.

The action has been timed to start the day after junior doctors in England complete a five-day walkout, adding to the disruption suffered by patients.

It comes after the head of the BMA warned that all four types of doctors could be in dispute with the Government ahead of the next election.

No 10 also spoke out after it was revealed that the wealthy medics, who earn 128,000 on average for their public sector work, are allowed by the BMA to continue in private practice during industrial action

Mr Henley is a urology consultant for the University Hospitals of Derby and Burton NHS Foundation Trust but is also listed as running a private clinic on the Nuffield Health and Bupa websites.

He has previously urged senior doctors to never 'be embarrassed about what you earn... you're worth every penny'.

Mr Moorthy, who lives in an 800,000 home in Buckinghamshire, is a consultant for NHS Frimley Health Foundation Trust specialising in head and neck surgery.

He also practises privately at the Spire Thames Valley Hospital in Slough, The Princess Margaret Hospital in Windsor, and the Bridge Clinic in Maidenhead.

A BMA spokesman said that the 120,000 figure in relation to Mr Moorthy's extra earnings was an 'overstatement' because it doesn't take into account business taxes.

They added: 'The BMA is clear that NHS consultants planning to strike should not schedule any other work, including in private practice, when they are taking part in industrial action.

'This would be especially important should the strikes be called off due to the Government coming forward with a credible offer - something we are imploring Ministers to do to avert action.'
Bestselling author Kate Mosse has urged budding historians and writers to add more biographies of women on Wikipedia.

The British novelist claimed that less than a fifth of all biographies on the online encyclopaedia are currently about women.

Speaking at Chalke Valley History Festival, sponsored by the Daily Mail, Ms Mosse said the writing of has history 'often quite deliberately left out women'.

And when asked by a member of the audience what people could to change this trend, she said: 'On Wikipedia, which is the biggest online encyclopaedia that there is, only 19 per cent of biographies are about women, 19.'

Ms Mosse, 61, added: 'So it's not that the old books are out of date and now it's all fine.

The British novelist Kate Mosse (pictured) claimed that less than a fifth of all biographies on the online encyclopaedia are currently about women

READ MORE: Brits feel guilt about the Empire because they know nothing about it', Oxford don tells Chalke Valley Festival Advertisement

'Anybody who does Wikipedia, go on and add women.

'Because again you know it's the old suffragette anthem, isn't it? Deeds not words. Do something.'

The author of Labyrinth (2005) also stressed how the world was still seeing women being erased from history in modern times.

Alluding to how the misogynistic regime of the Taliban - which has already seen most girls banned from schools  she said: 'We are seeing deliberate erasure for example in Afghanistan today.

'Things go backwards as well as forwards in history and that's why we must always be vigilant and pay attention.'

Ms Mosse, who founded the Women's Prize for Fiction in 1996, added: 'Women have to be able to write our stories down, it is why what's happening in Afghanistan is so deliberate.

'A woman writing is always transgressive because if women don't write their stories down then they vanish.'
Ukraine has made a 'rare' discovery of rusting British World War Two fighter planes buried in a forest outside Kyiv.

The planes were transported to the Soviet Union by Britain after Nazi Germany invaded in 1941.

According to the BBC, the aircraft were part of a package of allied military support for the USSR. It was reportedly paid for by the US under the supposed Lend-Lease scheme.

This is the first time the remains of such a large number of Hurricanes have been discovered in Ukraine, according to aviation experts.

Oleks Shtan, a former airline pilot leading the excavation, said: 'It is very rare to find this aircraft in Ukraine.'

Ukraine has made a 'rare' discovery of rusting British World War Two fighter planes buried in a forest outside Kyiv

'It's very important for our aviation history because no Lend-Lease aircraft have been found here before.'

About 3,000 Hurricanes were sent to the USSR between 1941 and 1944 to assist in the Soviet war effort. Most of them were either demolished in combat or taken apart later for their parts.

Mr Shtan said: 'The Hurricane was a strong, easy to fly machine.'

Some Hurricanes were purposely taken apart and buried after the war so that the Soviets did not have to pay back the US.

This was the case for eight Hurricanes that were discovered buried in woodland in the south of Kyiv - part of the USSR until 1991.

They had had their instruments, machine guns and radios stripped, and then dragged by tractors from a nearby airfield and dropped into a shallow ravine.

The planes were sent to the Soviet Union by Britain after Nazi Germany invaded in 1941

The remains were found recently after an unexploded bomb from the war was found close by.



The rest of the ravine was examined using metal detectors and the Hurricanes were discovered.

According to the BBC, The National Aviation Museum has began the process of excavating the site by hand.

Staff at the museum want to identify as much of the aircraft as possible so the historic pieces can go on display.

The head of research at the museum, Valerii Romanenko, said the hurricanes are a 'symbol of British assistance' during the years of World War Two, adding that the UK is one of 'the largest suppliers of military equipment to our country now'.

Just 14 restored hurricanes are believed to be able to fly in the world today.
South Africa's Zulu King has been receiving treatment for suspected poisoning after he was hospitalised with a mysterious illness - one day after one of his closest advisers died unexpectedly.

Misuzulu Zulu, 48, has undergone 'thorough' medical examinations, a spokesman confirmed yesterday but still denied reports the king had been hospitalised.

The monarch - who was visiting neighbouring Eswatini when he fell ill - 'underwent precautionary and thorough medical exams in the context of Covid and after the sudden death of his close adviser Douglas Xaba', his spokesman said.

The king ascended the throne last year after the death of his father, Goodwill Zwelithini, amid a bitter feud over the royal succession.

Overnight on Saturday, the influential Zulu prime minister, Prince Mangosuthu Buthelezi, said in a press release that the monarch had been hospitalised in Eswatini after falling ill.

Misuzulu Zulu (pictured), 48, has undergone 'thorough' medical examinations, a spokesman confirmed yesterday but still denied reports the king had been hospitalised

The monarch - who was visiting neighbouring Eswatini when he fell ill - 'underwent precautionary and thorough medical exams in the context of Covid and after the sudden death of his close adviser Douglas Xaba', his spokesman said

The king believes he was being poisoned, after the sudden and unexpected death of one of his close advisers on Saturday, he said.

Xaba 'passed on quite suddenly and that there are suspicions that he was poisoned', added Buthelezi.

'When His Majesty began to feel unwell, he suspected that he too may have been poisoned.'

The king preferred treatment in Eswatini because 'his parents had both received treatment in South Africa and subsequently died', he said.

Several police sources in Eswatini confirmed that there was heavy security deployed at a private hospital close to the country's royal residence.

However, a royal spokesman on Sunday assured that the Zulu king, also known as Misuzulu kaZwelithini, was 'in perfect health and is not currently admitted to any hospital'.

The spokesman criticised what he said was an 'orchestrated agenda' to circulate 'baseless claims of His Majesty's ill health'.

'The king underwent precautionary and thorough medical exams in a context of Covid and after the sudden death of his close advisor.'

Although the title of king of the Zulu nation does not bestow executive power, the monarchs wield great moral influence over more than 11 million Zulus, who make up nearly a fifth of South Africa's population of 60 million people.

King Zwelithini, who died after more than 50 years in charge, left six wives and at least 28 children.

Misuzulu is the first son of Zwelithini's third wife, who he designated as regent in his will.

The queen however died suddenly a month after Zwelithini, leaving a will naming Misuzulu as the next king - a development that did not go down well with other family members.

Last September, another counsellor of the Zulu king was shot dead in mysterious circumstances on the sidelines of a traditional ceremony.
A bank customer was left stunned when a teller told her they did not have any cash within the branch to meet her withdrawal request, prompting her to close her account on the spot.

Taryn Comptyn had gone to her bank to withdraw $3,500 to pay for renovations but did not have her ATM card handy.

'I thought "that's fine" I will just go to the teller',' she said in a video posted to social media.

'The teller proceeds to tell me they don't have cash in the bank anymore, that you can only get it out through the ATM but she said "don't worry I'll set you a card up so you can just tap it in place of your card".'

However, when Ms Comptyn tried her temporary card at the ATM it repeatedly flashed up an error message.

'She (the teller) said "I am really sorry there is nothing we can do",' Ms Comptyn said.

TikToker Taryn Comptyn was so infuriated her bank could not hand over cash from her account that she closed it

'I was like "what do you mean? I need to get my money out of my bank account".

'She was like "really sorry, we don't carry cash here". '

Ms Comptyn said the teller suggested that she could transfer the cash to an account with another bank - if she had one - and access it there.

'Lucky for me I am with another bank so I transferred every single penny out of that account, closed the account while I was there and went and got my money out of the other bank,' Ms Comptyn said.

'But it just got me thinking about our banking system and where we are at and how the hell can you go to a bank and not access your own money.'

Ms Comptyn's post attracted plenty of agreement from the more than 34,000 people who have viewed it.

'Yes they are trying to go digital.. everyone start withdrawing cash so they can't make the change,' one person wrote.

'I definitely have. Got it out while I still could. The world's gone crazy,' Ms Comptyn responded.

'No money at all at the bank?!' another person exclaimed.

'I understand not being able to take out 10k on the spot but like dude!! Don't carry cash?!'

In March the ANZ announced that some of its branches in Victoria would no longer carry any cash except in the ATMs

In March the ANZ, which Ms Comptyn strongly hinted ran her cashless branch, announced some of its outlets in Victoria would longer dispense cash.

The bank did not disclose which branches would be affected and insists only a 'small number' would be involved.

ANZ said that only eight per cent of its customers use branches to access their money, with the vast majority having switched to internet banking.

However, critics warned the move to cashless banks could cause significant harm to older people and those with disabilities who still rely on branches and physical cash.

The number of bank branches in Australia has fallen by about 30 per cent in the past five years.

And ATMs have decreased even more, with figures showing that they have fallen from a high of 14,000 in 2017 to around 6,000 as of last year.

The Reserve Bank estimated just 13 per cent of transactions in late 2022 were in cash, a halving in just three years since the start of the Covid pandemic.

ANZ has been contacted for comment.
Forget Dry January, its going to be a Dry Summer too as Britons create a record thirst for no and low alcohol beer.

January traditionally sets the high water mark for sales during the year, but for 2023 supermarkets, corner shops and pubs have seen demand continue to rise.

Britains biggest supermarket Tesco says sales of no/low beer are 25 per cent higher in June than January, at a time when sales of normal beer are falling.

In pubs, sales are up 23 per cent on a year ago, and nearly nine in ten have at least one option, the British Beer and Pub Association said.

It all comes at a time when sales of normal beers are falling - down 6 per cent on a year ago, market researchers Circana say.

Increased demand for no/low beers comes on the back of Britons increasingly cutting back on alcohol

Increased interest in drinking less for health reasons is driving a bigger and better range - in turn attracting those put off by the thin-tasting versions of the past.

This January was the first where those taking the Dry January challenge had the option of Peroni 0 per cent and Asahi 0 per cent, and where Guinness 0 per cent was widely available too.

Alcohol-free IPAs, stouts, ales and craft lagers have also been rolled out by independents in the past year. Tesco alone has 29 no and low alcohol beers and nine ciders.

Jess Edmondson, beer buyer at Tesco, said: The current boom is down to the number of authentic-tasting products now available from brewers who are using high quality ingredients and more advanced methods.

This revolution has grown very quickly in the last five years and instead of the thin-tasting alcohol-free beers that were on the market back then, shoppers can now find fuller-bodied equivalents that taste like the real thing.

The store has also seen shoppers buying bigger pack sizes rather than single cans or bottles as a result of having more confidence in the quality now available.

Across all shops and pubs, sales of no/low beer are up 10 per cent in the past three months, according to Kantar Worldpanel.

Richard Lee, its strategic insight director for alcohol, said: This shift in consumer behaviour is down to a combination of two factors. Firstly, were seeing a gradual, long-term rise in moderation from drinkers, who are increasingly seeing the health and wellbeing value of lighter alcohol offerings.

Secondly, the no/low options now available to consumers are more varied and much better quality than they were a few years ago which makes it a more accessible and inviting category for people to enjoy.

Britains biggest supermarket Tesco says sales of no/low beer are 25 per cent higher in June than January, at a time when sales of normal beer are falling

Britains biggest dedicated no and low beer brand Lucky Saint is selling almost three times. They even opened their own pub, The Lucky Saint, in London in March to champion alcohol-free drinks alongside alcoholic ones.

Lucky Saint founder Luke Boase said: This idea that you have to apologise for not drinking is fading, and were seeing a rapid cultural shift in attitudes towards alcohol.

Increased demand for no/low beers comes on the back of Britons increasingly cutting back on alcohol. A 2023 report by retail consumer research experts KAM found the number of adults consuming alcohol at least once a week has fallen from 90 per cent in 2022 down to 77 per cent this year.

Over half of all UK adults are planning on moderating their alcohol intake in 2023, and one in three pub visits are now alcohol-free.
A poignant inclusion in a new TV commercial for Bob Jane T-Marts hints at a tragic family secret and the healing of a rift over the tyre tycoon's $100million fortune.

Rodney Jane, the once-estranged son of motor racing legend Bob and heir to his empire, appears in the new ad alongside snippets of his father as a younger man.

Footage shot at Melbourne's Calder Park Raceway decades ago shows Bob Jane delivering a message on the danger of bald tyres.

'I'm Bob Jane... you've heard me talk about bald tyres. Now let me show you just how dangerous they are. Watch what happens in an emergency in the wet,' he says.

Footage of a car skidding and spinning is shown, before his son appears on screen to say: 'I'm Rodney Jane and we're still testing tyres for safety 50 years later.'

It's a message close to the heart of the family business: Bob Jane's second-eldest daughter Georgina was killed in a car crash in 1991 after a retreaded tyre blew out.

As a result, Bob Jane T-Marts is still Australia's only major tyre retailer which doesn't sell retreaded tyres.

The return of Bob Jane to the tyre company's ads comes after Rodney Jane made an emotional tribute to his father last month when he got behind the wheel of a racing car for the first time in a decade, making his international debut at the fabled Le Mans circuit.

It would seem the bitter family feud that embroiled the Janes is being left behind.

Rodney Jane, the once-estranged son of motor racing legend Bob Jane and heir to his empire, appears in the new ad alongside snippets of his father as a younger man (pictured)

Bob Jane says 'Now let me show you just how dangerous they are. Watch what happens in an emergency in the wet' and footage of a car (above) skidding and spinning is shown

The tyre king's son Rodney Jane (pictured) then appears to reinforce the safety message close to his family's heart after the death of Bob Jane's second-eldest daughter in a 1991 car crash

Rodney and his racing legend father had battled over the family fortune, with the younger Jane winning a 2013 court case over a $2.9million payment to the tyre company.

Bob Jane claimed he loaned the money to Bob Jane Corporation, which by then was headed by Rodney, for the purchase of two Melbourne properties.

Bob Jane had accused his son, born to his second wife Geraldine, of taking advantage of him after he had a stroke in 2006 - wiping out an estimated $100million fortune.

However, Rodney Jane told the Victorian Supreme Court that if he hadn't stepped in to take hold of his father's business, it would have collapsed around 2003.

Justice Michael Sifris threw out the case with both father and son indicating that a reconciliation was not on the cards.

'My dad, up until 2010, was my best friend without doubt,' Rodney said in 2013.

'We were really close  we have done everything together for 30 years.

'I lost him as a friend, I lost him as a father. It would be one of the worst things that has ever happened to me.'

Bob Jane's falling out with Rodney was only eclipsed by the acrimony surrounding his split with third wife Laree, who he met at a beauty pageant when he was 58 and she was just 19.

Rodney Jane is pictured going to court in May 2013 after his father tried to reclaim almost $3million which a judge ruled Bob Jane was not entitled to

Bob Jane went through an acrimonious split with his third wife Laree (both pictured), whom he met at a beauty pageant when he was 58 and she was 19

Bob Jane, 58, met Laree, 18, at a beauty pageant and proposed to her six weeks later, the couple going on to have three children before a bitter split, then a reconciliation

The pair divorced in 2008 after a bitter break-up and a public war over two Bob Jane T-Marts franchises she was running.

In 2009, Laree faced five charges including assault, false imprisonment and threatening to inflict serious injury on her then 77-year-old husband after he made a complaint to police in December 2006.

Bob Jane had earlier claimed that Laree spent almost $500,000 on a pearl-buying spree, had secretly obtained up to 14 credit card and ran up debts after he tried to rein in her spending.

The ageing tycoon claimed Laree was particularly infatuated with Paspaley pearls - some of the biggest and most sought after pearls in the world, produced in Broome.

However, all allegations Laree were dismissed and she told a court in 2013 that she and Bob Jane had rekindled their relationship three years earlier.

The family's feuding was further exposed in 2018 when Bob Jane died aged 88 following a battle with prostate cancer.

Rodney Jane was not invited to his father's funeral, with Laree asking only her own three children to attend.

Bob Jane had been an Australian icon, a kid from the backblocks of Melbourne who turned his passion for racing into a luxury car parts and then tyre business fortune.

Rodney Jane is back on the racing circuit after a ten-year break during which his legendary father died following a bitter family feud over the family's $100million tyre fortune

Rodney Jane (left) won in Darwin after returning to the race circuit following a ten year lay off, and his famous father (right) with a Bob Jane T-Marts vehicle after he retired from racing to start an empire

Laree Jane (above) was accused by her estranged husband of threatening him with a bread knife, but all charges against her were dismissed in a Melbourne court

He was a four-time winner of the Armstrong 500 endurance race, which became the Bathurst 1000, and a four-time Australian Touring Car Champion who was inducted into the V8 Supercars Hall of Fame in 2000.

But not long after that his Bob Jane T-Marts business hit financial trouble, and before his death he went into bankruptcy and lost his family farm.

At the time, Jane said he had only $15 left in his bank account.

Rodney Jane is now forging his own career on the racetrack, winning a race at the Porsche Carrera Cup Pro-Am at Hidden Valley Raceway in Darwin last month.

He also impressed at the fabled Le Mans raceway in France last month, finishing fifth in the AM class in the 50-minute Carrera Cup race.

In what was his international debut, Rodney Jane's race in a Bob Jane T-Marts Porsche meant that his family's famous brand returned to the circuit 39 years after it last featured at the famous French event.

Bob Jane was an Australian racing icon who turned his Bob Jane T-Marts into a an empire, but by his last decade before dying in 2018 he was embroiled in bitter family feuds

Bob Jane (above) in his heyday, when he was a four-time winner of the Armstrong 500 endurance race, which became the Bathurst 1000, and a four-time Australian Touring Car Champion. He was inducted into the V8 Supercars Hall of Fame in 2000

Motor racing icon Bob Jane outside a Melbourne court in 2009 where his former wife Laree was acquitted of domestic violence charges, the 79-year-old stranded on the steps after his car had been towed for parking in a clearway

In 1984, Bob Jane backed an Australian team of touring car heroes Peter Brock and Larry Perkins in a Porsche 956.

Despite mechanical issues, and a crash ultimately ruling the pair out, they ran as high as fifth during the race.

Rodney Jane told Carrera Cup Australia that entering the races in France 'means more than just driving a race car at Le Mans'.

'My father was instrumental in the careers of many racing drivers, including some of the best names in the sport and he played a pivotal role in getting Peter Brock and Larry Perkins to race there 39 years ago in a Porsche in the 24 Hours of Le Mans,' he said.

'Two Bathurst legends racing there was massive news at the time and I'd like to think that this trip is a small way to pay homage to that.

'I'm really excited for this adventure. It is really going to mean a lot to myself and the Bob Jane T-Marts business.'

Today, Bob Jane T-Marts is Australia's most successful independent tyre retailer, with 117 franchises nationally.

After his court battle in 2013, Rodney Jane said publicly that he had fallen out with his father years previously.

Daily Mail Australia has approached Rodney Jane for comment.
A Woolworths worker who was killed when crushed by falling pallets at a distribution centre has been remembered as the 'most beautiful soul'.

Basel 'Baz' Brikha, 37, was working at Woolworths Distribution Centre at Minchinbury in Sydney's west about 3.30pm last Tuesday when he was struck by the pallets.

Mr Brikha was pinned to the ground. Two colleagues rushed to his aid, only for them to also be struck by pallets and suffer serious head injuries.

All three were rushed to Westmead Hospital, but Mr Brikha later died.

The incident has sparked calls from union workers for a suspension in the use of pallet distributors while their safety is investigated.

Basel 'Baz' Brikha, 37 (pictured) was tragically killed in a workplace accident

Emergency services are pictured at the scene last Tuesday after Mr Brikha and two colleagues were seriously injured

Tributes have poured in online for the beloved uncle and godfather, with loved ones describing him as a 'gentle and kind soul' who 'would always bring a smile to your face, no matter what kind of day your having'.

It is understood Mr Brikha grew up in Wellington, New Zealand, before later migrating to Australia.

Longtime friend Hera Sefou said she was 'heartbroken' and was hoping it was a 'bad dream' after hearing Mr Brikha, who is a godfather to her son, had passed away.

She said Mr Brikha would join her family on Mondays for 'family dinners' and - despite it being his only day off - he chose to spend it with them.

'He was a beautiful kind gentle man that every women had as their big brother,' she told Daily Mail Australia.

Ms Sefou said Mr Brikha loved his job and the people he worked with.

'He loved his conversations at work with his colleagues and friends about who was the best soccer team' she said.

'Real Madrid was his team and he let everybody know.'

Another loved one, Martina Toma Eli, said she was still struggling to come to terms with Mr Brikha's death.

'It just seems so unreal Baz,' she said.

Mr Brikha has been remembered as a 'beautiful soul' who always brought a smile to the faces of those around him

'I know your [sic] at peace but we were just not ready.'

Hundreds of loved ones gathered at the Syriac Christian church of Saint Zaia Cathedral in Middleton Grange last Thursday to commemorate Mr Brikha, who will be farewelled at the same church later this week.

Stock image of a pallet dispenser

A spokesperson for Primary Connect told Daily Mail Australia the company, which is responsible for Woolworths' supply chain platform, was 'deeply saddened' by Mr Brikha's death.

'Our thoughts and condolences are with our team members friends and family at this difficult time and we are currently supporting the family and our two team members who were also injured in the incident,' they said.

'We are cooperating with NSW Police and SafeWork NSW to investigate the incident and we will also be undertaking our own investigation.

'Out of respect for the team members and their families, we closed our distribution centre for a period of time.'

It is understood supply chain staff have been offered counselling services.

United Workers Union has issued a statement offering their sympathies to Mr Brikha's family and confirming it was providing support to his colleagues.

'The United Workers Union is deeply saddened that a member from Woolworth's DC died on shift yesterday,' it Tweeted on Wednesday.

'We are working with the company to ensure all workers at the site are supported during this sorrowful time and are able to access appropriate services.

'Every worker should be able to go home to their family unscathed.'

The workplace tragedy sparked supply shortages across Sydney. Pictured is a photo of an empty fresh produce shelf posted by a shopper online

Members of an unofficial Facebook group consisting of distribution centre union members said pallet dispensers should be banned in the wake of the tragedy.

Pallet dispensers are machines designed to automatically load, store, and dispense pallets, which - depending on size - can handle between 20 to 50 pallets at a time.

'All pallet dispensers Australia wide should be shut down immediately in Woolworths DC [distribution centre] after the death at Minchbury,' SNDC wrote in a post online.

'The union has to act to protect their members.'

Dozens of members liked the post, with one woman saying the incident was 'just a matter of time' due to the machinery being unsafe.

Daily Mail Australia has contacted Woolworths for comment.

The workplace accident last week disrupted operations, sparking significant supply shortages at Woolworths stores across Sydney.

Shoppers shared pictures on social media of empty shelves as some stores were stripped bare of fresh produce.

A Woolworths spokesperson said stock levels are expected to return to normal this week.
One of the original artists has revealed the X-rated secret hidden in the over-the-top Sistine Chapel-like ceiling painting for a murdered cocaine kingpin.

The lavish artwork at Alen Moradian's showy suburban home in West Pennant Hills, in Sydney's north-west, had subtly disguised female genitals hidden in the fresco's finer detail, added in as a private joke by its creators.

Moradian, 48, was last week gunned down by two assassins as he sat in his car in an underground car park at a Bondi Junction apartment block in Sydney's east.

The gangland supremo was one of the top drug barons behind The Commission cartel said to run Sydney's lucrative coke industry with the Comanchero bikie gang.

Moradian - whose wife dubbed him Australia's Tony Soprano after the TV mafia figure - had previously been jailed for his role in a huge drug trafficking operation.

The flashy criminal ploughed millions of his drug money into expensive Versace furnishings, antiques and artwork at his former home.

He also commissioned a religious-style painting on his ceiling that has been likened to Michelangelo's Creation of Adam in the Vatican's Sistine Chapel.

One of the original artists has revealed the X-rated secret behind the Sistine Chapel-like ceiling in the Versace-bedecked home (pictured) of murdered coke kingpin Alen Moradian

The lavish artwork (pictured) at Alen Moradian's old home had subtly disguised female genitals hidden in the fresco's finer detail, added in as a private joke by its cheeky creators

Photos of the artwork show red flowers in one corner, entwined by a phallic-like snake (pictured) near bare-breasted hornblowers, which appear to have been styled sexually

But unknown to the gangster boss, his team of artists had included an extra hidden message to the ruthless criminal that wasn't in the original order.

They disguised the female genitalia in the flowers at the corner of the giant artwork - and the explicit added details were never spotted by Moradian.

'When the boss was away, one of the naughtier girls, would paint vaginas disguised as flowers,' revealed one of the artists in the wake of Moradian's murder.

'Probably not the smartest move, all things considered. We look back now and laugh.'

Photos of the artwork show red flowers in one corner, entwined by a phallic-like snake near bare-breasted hornblowers, which appear to have been styled sexually.

Moradian was handed a 16-year jail sentence in 2011 for his role in the Golden Gun syndicate which trafficked more than 300kg of cocaine into Australia in 2005/06.

The syndicate was given its name after police found a gold-plated .357 Magnum Desert Eagle handgun during one of the raids.

At his trial, a Versace salesman told the court Moradian 'loved the Versace furniture and the excess', with police later branding the designer mansion a 'Versace palace'.

He spent a reported $40,000 on the extravagant ceiling masterpiece, filled with cherubim and angels in heaven, and lovingly hand-painted by the artist and others.

They had responded to an ad in Bondi art shop for an artist's assistant and worked for months on the project as part of a rotating team of four artists.

Moradian spent a reported $40,000 on the ceiling, filled with cherubim and angels in heaven, and hand-painted by the artist and others (pictured during the painting process)

The artists had responded to an ad in Bondi art shop for an artist's assistant and worked for months on the project (pictured near completion) as part of a rotating team of four artists

She had been hired by a lead artist in 2007, along with a string of other painters, to help create the spectacular artwork for the notorious 'Golden Gun' criminal.

She revealed they were aware their client was not the usual art-lover - and were careful not to say anything incriminating for fear they were being bugged by police.

'The Golden Gun Kingpin was in the thick of the crime world back then,' revealed the artist who did not want to be identified.

'We would see half a dozen phones plugged in, charging in the bathrooms.

'We had to be careful about all we spoke of, knowing that the house was seriously bugged.'

She added: 'He was jailed not long after that. Two decades later, his life was taken.

'Sometimes I ponder over what a colourful life Ive lived...Its a hectic, unpredictable world out there, full of adventure.'

At the time of his arrest in 2007, Moradian was said be on the brink of buying an exclusive $850,000 Lamborghini with custom Versace paintwork.

Moradian - nicknamed Fathead by underworld figures - was warned by his wife Natasha Youkhana that his extravagant spending would lead to his downfall.

'Why do you just sit there and show off?' she wrote in an email to the gangster.

'Do you see Tony Soprano doing that? He points it all off on a junior for a reason - to take the heat away from him.

'You, on the other hand, want the attention, you get a big head, you love it. People like that won't survive.'

Last Tuesday the prophetic warning came true when he died in a hail of gunfire in the early morning attack as he left his secret hideout to head for the gym.

The driver's seat window of Alen Moradian's car (pictured) was riddled with gunshots

Police swarmed Bondi Junction in Sydney's east after Alen Moradian was ambushed last week

Moradian was shot multiple times in the head at close range as he sat in his high-end rented black Audi RS4, leaving his face almost unrecognisable.

'He was shot multiple times through the head,' a source said. 'Absolutely pulverised.

'They walked up and emptied a clip into him. He wasn't going anywhere.'

Detective Superintendent Danny Doherty said Moradian's links to the big names in Sydney's underbelly made him a high-value target in the underworld.

'He's a high-level criminal identity,' he said. 'He's a major player in the organised crime network and also has links to the Comanchero.

'He obviously had a big target on his back.'
The identities of two people killed in a mass shooting at a Baltimore block party have been revealed - as video emerged showing revelers twerking before bullets flew.

Baltimore City Police identified Kylis Fagbemi, 20, and Aaliyah Gonzales, 18, later the same day with Metro Crime Stoppers releasing images of the pair.

Acting Baltimore Police Commissioner Richard Worley told Fox Baltimore that out of the 28 other victims at least 14 were minors and 9 remain in hospital, some in a critical condition.

Video footage which surfaced in the wake of the tragedy showed party goers twerking and dancing in the streets hours before a gunman opened fire.

Police say they're still looking for suspects but called the crime scene 'extensive' and said other jurisdictions were also working with them to identify the motive for the attack.

Baltimore City Police identified Kylis Fagbemi, 20, and Aaliyah Gonzales, 18, later the same day with Metro Crime Stoppers releasing images of the pair

'We know for sure there is definitely more than one [suspect]. We don't know exactly how many, but we do know more than one person was shooting,' said Worley.

Not a lot is currently known about Fagbemi, but a heart wrenching post to Facebook made by Gonzales' mother, Krystal, revealed the 18-year-old had recently graduated from high school.

The grieving mom was in disbelief posting pictures and videos of her daughter prior to her untimely death.

'MY BABY!!! Worst day of my life! I cannot do life without her. I NEED HER!!,' she captioned the post.

'Why would they do this to a perfect angel. I love you so much baby. I didn't get there fast enough. God this is a mistake!!! Please!!'

Hundreds commented on Krystal's post sharing their condolences.

'This was a reckless, cowardly act that happened here and has permanently altered many lives and cost two people their lives,' Mayor Brandon Scott said Sunday afternoon.

'I want those responsible to hear me, hear me very clearly: We will not stop until we find you. And we will find you.'

A video taken about three hours prior to the shooting showed a crowd of hundreds gathered at the block party dancing and twerking before the night descended into horror.

The 12 second clip was posted to TikTok with a time stamp and caption that read: 'Good thing I left when I did, it was fun but scary!'

The shooting took place just after 12:30 a.m. at a block party in the Brooklyn Homes area in the southern part of the city, Acting Baltimore Police Commissioner Richard Worley said.

Hundreds of people gathered in the area for an event called 'Brooklyn Day,' a witness said. Another witness told FOX45 News that they heard 20 to 30 shots fired.

'They just kept going off,' the witness said.

Not a lot is known about Fagbemi, but a heart wrenching post to Facebook made by Gonzales' mother, Krystal, revealed the 18-year-old had recently graduated from high school

The grieving mom was in disbelief posting pictures and videos of her daughter prior to her untimely death

Nine victims were transported by ambulance and 20 victims walked into area hospitals with injuries from the shooting, Worley said.

Hours after the shooting, a number of officers remained at the scene, working behind police tape amid densely packed two-story housing blocks.

Folding tables and plastic cups were scattered around the scene, apparently left behind when people ran from the gunshots.

One witness, Lakell Nelson, 54, told the Baltimore Sun that during the block party people had been mistaking the sound of fireworks. But it wasn't a false alarm when the shooting began.

'The shots were just going on and on and on,' Nelson said, then added two women walked up to her and stated they had been shot.

'I kinda didn't believe them at first because they were walking up the street. I said, 'Show me,' and the girl was like, 'I was shot in my butt,' she said. 'When she turned around, I saw the hole through her shorts.'

Nelson helped the women into her car and drove to the nearest hospital.

'When I pulled up to the door of the hospital, my car was almost getting ready to be inside the hospital, because I was determined to get those babies in that hospital,' Nelson said.

Two people are dead and dozens injured after mass shooting in Baltimore overnight

Police were hunting on Sunday morning for the people involved in the shooting that left an 18-year-old woman and 20-year-old man dead

Nine victims were transported by ambulance and 20 victims walked into area hospitals

A tow truck operator removes a vehicle with multiple bullet holes. Witnesses said they heard 20 to 30 shots during the shooting

No arrests were made after the shooting and police asked anyone with information to come forward

Officers yet to determine a motive but said they are reviewing video footage and talking to witnesses to try to identify suspects

Fellow witness Terry Brown was standing outside his home when the shooting started. He said people ran from the courtyard, jumping fences and calling for loved ones.

'They were running for their lives,' Brown said.

Brown saw one girl who was shot and neighbors held compression on her body. Other victims were loaded into cars and taken to hospitals.

'It was so many kids. It was chaos,' Brown said. 'Parents were running around looking for their children, hollering and screaming, and don't know if their children has a bullet in them.'

An University of Maryland Medical System spokesperson said 12 people received treatment and Shock Trauma and four wen to the center's pediatric emergency department.

A MedStar Health official said 19 people were treated and all but one had been released. Nine were stabilized and transferred to other trauma centers.

Authorities said the crime scene was extensive and it would take some time for detectives to investigate.

'Treat this as if it were your family,' Scott said.

'How you would want people to treat it if you were mourning, if this was your neighborhood, if this was an event in your community that this happened at.

Acting Commissioner Richard Worley for the Baltimore Police Department said officers had received numerous calls reporting a shooting just after 12.30am

Mayor of Baltimore Brandon Scott said: 'I want those responsible to hear me and hear me very clearly. We will not stop until we find you and we will find you'

Investigators could be seen combing the area for evidence at the scene of the shooting as debris from the block party filled the parking lot

A police officer moves a scooter in the area of a mass shooting incident in the Southern District of Baltimore the morning after gunfire left two dead

'We want you to treat it that way because that's how we have to treat each other as Baltimoreans.'

Worley said police were not told in advance about the large party. The department would investigate what officers did once they determined there was a gathering.

'If we made mistakes, we will fix them and move forward so it never happens again,' Worley said. 'But again, we did not know that this event was occurring.'

The violence comes as federal prosecutors in Baltimore this week touted their efforts to reduce violent crime in the city.

Police have reported nearly 130 homicides and close to 300 shootings so far this year, though that's down from the same time last year. Authorities have vowed to crack down aggressively on repeat violent offenders.
A group of flyers passing through Colorado Springs airport ahead of July 4 had fireworks confiscated, with officials warning they were never allowed on a plane.

Officials from the Transportation Security Administration (TSA) showed off the fireworks as a warning against attempting to take them onboard.

The warning came as TSA announced it had broken the record for the number of passengers screened - surpassing a tally previously set over Thanksgiving in 2019.

A TSA representative in Colorado Springs shows off fireworks which were confiscated recently

'Nice collection of fireworks on the left half of this table @COSAirport,' tweeted the official account of the regional TSA office.

'Let this serve as a reminder to leave those at home this #FourthofJuly weekend since fireworks are never allowed in carry-on or checked baggage.'

Three firearms and three stun guns were found in passengers' luggage on Thursday, and TSA renewed their warning.

'And while we are at it, time for #CommonSense to take over & remind everyone that fireworks don't fly - in carry-on or checked luggage,' the official account said.

'Fireworks are never allowed on an aircraft, so please don't bring them to the airport.'

The spokesperson told DailyMail.com that anyone found with fireworks in their carry-on or checked luggage will be told to remove them, and either take them back to their vehicle or dispose of them.

Colorado Springs airport was expecting 32,000 - 34,000 passengers over the weekend from Friday to Tuesday.

'It's going to be a high volume and high traffic weekend,' said Dana Schield, a spokesperson for the airport.

She told KKTV: 'Of course, we recommend travelers arrive as early as possible.

'Make sure you are prepared and understand all the do's and don't's for TSA and always check your flights status before arriving at the airport.'

Liquids and aerosols are limited to 3.4 ounces (100 ml) or less in carry-on luggage.

If a traveler brings liquids in quantities larger than 3.4 ounces, TSA will have to conduct a bag check, which slows the screening process for that traveler and everyone in line behind them.

Any liquids in quantities larger than 3.4 ounces should travel in checked baggage.

Passengers at Pensacola International Airport go through security checks on Sunday

Passengers are seen at JFK's terminal four amid days of delays

Baggage and people stacked up at United Airlines at LAX on June 29

United Airlines has been the worst-affected airline all week. Frustrated passengers are seen at LAX on June 29

TSA on Friday screened 2,883,595 individuals  beating the previous travel record of 2,882,915 on the Sunday after Thanksgiving in 2019.

The new record was set against the backdrop of days of flight delays and cancellations.

On Sunday, 7,000 flights were delayed - a decrease in previous days, and a sign that the situation was coming under control, but still a source of frustration for thousands of people.

There were 1,235 cancellations. United remained the worst-affected airline, as it has been all week.

On Sunday, 29 percent of all their flights were delayed and 3 percent were canceled. Newark remained the worst-affected airport, followed by LaGuardia and JFK.
A Florida urologist has been accused of carrying out a vasectomy on the wrong side of a patient.

Dr Dilipkumar Patel, 72, who is based in Kissimmee near Orlando, was supposed to perform the vasectomy on the patient's left side - but a state complaint says the procedure was carried out incorrectly.

It is believed to be the first complaint against Patel since he was licensed in February 1982, according to the Florida Department of Health.

The American Board of Urology states how Patel has been board certified since 1983.

Dr. Dilipkumar Patel, 72, a Florida-based urologist performed a vasectomy on the wrong side of a patient, according to a state complaint

The complaint details how during the surgery from last June, Patel was set to carry out the routine procedure on the the left side of a 51-year-old man who had already had a vasectomy on his right side done by a different doctor.

'During the procedure, [Patel] conducted a vasectomy of the right side as opposed to the left side,' the complaint details.

'A few hours following the procedure, [Patel] noticed the error and notified the patient that he had done a vasectomy of the right side instead of the left,' reports The Miami Herald.

During a vasectomy, a small incision or puncture is made in the scrotum to access the vas deferens.

Dr. Dilipkumar has been board certified since 1982 and is based in Kissimmee, Florida

The tubes are then cut, sealed, or blocked to prevent sperm from passing through.

This can be achieved by various methods, including cutting and tying the tubes, cauterizing or sealing them.

After the procedure, the incisions are typically closed with stitches or surgical adhesive.

The accuracy and precision with which a vasectomy needs to be carried out is paramount, as one doctor in South America found out recently.

In May, a doctor was ordered to pay child support to a couple until their baby turns 18 after botching a vasectomy on the father.

The couple in Medellin, Colombia - who have not been named - were stunned to discover that the man had got the woman pregnant despite undergoing a vasectomy at a health clinic.

The dad had decided to have the procedure in 2012 to avoid having more children with his wife because they did not have enough money.

He even underwent an examination at the clinic to ensure that the vasectomy had been effective, with the clinic confirming that it had.

But after discovering that his wife was pregnant, the couple, who already had two children, took the doctor and the health clinic to court in 2017.

The couple in Medellin, Colombia (pictured), were stunned to discover that the man had got the woman pregnant after he underwent a vasectomy at a health clinic

And now after a lengthy legal battle during which the parents argued that they had unwillingly become parents again on October 1, 2013 due to an incorrect medical procedure, the judge has ruled that the doctor and the health authority in charge of the clinic must pay court fees and child support

These will total $66,000 until the baby turns 18. The couple's daughter is almost ten years old, according to reports. As a result, the doctor will has to pay eight more years of financial support.

The Superior Court of Medellin also ruled that the health clinic and the doctor must pay 80 installments of the Colombian minimum wage.

In December, in his first ruling, the Judge said that the botched vasectomy not only caused 'harm in the exercise of sexuality and reproductive freedom' of the couple, but 'considerably affected the economy of the family nucleus and it has generated worries and afflictions for the plaintiffs, since they have no way to meet the basic needs of the minor.'

According to Infobae, a Spanish-language news site based in the US, the father suffers from a debilitating condition called severe bilateral hearing loss.

This makes it extremely difficult for him to work, the report says.

He experiences frequent doziness and vomiting and must wear a hearing aid.
14 were taken to area hospitals, while another 20 people were treated at the scene and released. Two of those hospitalized sustained 'significant' leg injuries

The incident happened at Laconia's Looney Bin Bar and Grill in New Hampshire Sunday around 12:45pm - at the height of the popular restaurant's lunch rush

An SUV collided into a crowded restaurant in New Hampshire on Sunday, injuring more than 30 diners.

The incident happened at Laconia's Looney Bin Bar and Grill in New Hampshire around 12:45pm - at the height of the eatery's lunch rush.

It resulted in serious damage to not only the pub's storefront, but several unsuspecting patrons as well - with 34 reportedly injured as a result.

In an update Sunday night, fire officials who descended on the horror scene revealed that of those injured, 14 were taken to area hospitals, while another 20 people were treated at the scene and subsequently released.

Of those hospitalized, Laconia fire officials said two suffered 'significant' lower leg injuries - while the others were being treated for lacerations, contusions and other injuries the were non-life-threatening.

An investigation is currently underway - with police now saying the crash occurred when another vehicle was making a left turn as it pulled out of a nearby business.

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An investigation is currently underway - with police now saying the crash occurred when another vehicle was making a left turn as it pulled out of a nearby business, sending the above Acura careening into Looney Bin Bar and Grill in Laconia

An SUV collided into this crowded restaurant in New Hampshire Sunday, injuring more than 30 diners - several seriously

The driver, who was unnamed, apparently did not see the oncoming SUV, and collided with the southbound car - sending it careening into the Looney Bin.

'There were a lot of people inside due to it being lunchtime and a holiday weekend,' Fire Captain Chad Vaillancourt said Sunday afternoon, as it was revealed several customers selflessly moved to help the wounded as the incident unfolded.

The Laconia fire chief hailed first-responders' efforts as well, after members of his department and the Laconia police department were reportedly on the scene within minutes.

'The great response from our mutual aid partners allowed us to help many injured people in a short amount of time.'

Standing outside the bar's destroyed facade, he added the restaurant sustained 'significant damage' - an assertion backed by photos and video showing not only the store's exterior, but its savaged insides as well.

Snapped before the car was excavated, they show the four-door Acura still lodged in its interior - with windows, walls, and furniture all left in ruins by its wake.

The restaurant's dining room - where more than three dozen were said to be gathered - was left utterly unrecognizable, with patrons warned away for the foreseeable future.

The restaurant's owner, Michelle Watson, told 7News Boston that given the damage wrought by the disaster, it was a miracle that no one was killed - while revealing the most seriously injured person became hurt after being pinned in the bathroom.

That person, as well as the other 13 hospitalized, have yet to be named, with the extent of their injuries still unknown.

Speaking to 7News, Watson praised patrons for springing into action in the immediate chaos that occurred as a result of the crash. Cops and other officials said it was this quick thinking that helped ensure that no one involved in the crash suffered life-threatening injuries.

The driver, who was unnamed, apparently did not see the oncoming SUV, and collided with the southbound car - sending it careening into the Looney Bin

Snapped before the car was excavated, they show the four-door Acura still lodged in its interior - with windows, walls, and furniture all left in ruins by its wake

'There were a lot of people inside due to it being lunchtime and a holiday weekend,' Fire Captain Chad Vaillancourt said Sunday afternoon, as it was revealed several customers selflessly moved to help the wounded as the incident unfolded

The restaurant's dining room - where more than three dozen were said to be gathered - was left utterly unrecognizable, with patrons warned away for the foreseeable future.

Laconia Fire Chief Chad Vaillancourt hailed first-responders' efforts, after members of his department and the Laconia police department were reportedly on the scene within minutes

'I'm just so grateful that everyone's OK,' the restaurateur said, as the tall task of repairing her store - potentially with the help of the drivers involved with the crash - still looms.

'Everyone jumped in to help, everyone jumped into make sure people were OK,' she said, also stationed in front of the SUV-sized hole that now plagues her establishment.

'Right now I've got three walls that are compromised,' she said of the prospects of the restaurant reopening in the future.

'I don't know when I'm going to be able to reopen.'

That said, the hole in the restaurant has since been boarded up, with the car also removed from its precarious position.

The fate and identity of the driver, as of Monday, remains unknown - but police in Laconia, a small suburb set some 30 miles north of Concord, have specified how they believe the driver ended up lodged into the eatery.

According to Laconia Police Chief Matt Canfield, who outlined how the crash occurred to FOX 23, it involved three cars in total, including the ill-fated SUV.

He said it started when one car was making a left turn as it pulled out of a nearby business, when the driver of another vehicle - the one that ended up hitting the Acura - began turning into the same establishment from the center lane.

The restaurant's owner, Michelle Watson, told 7News Boston that given the damage wrought by the disaster, it was a miracle that no one was killed - while revealing the most seriously injured person became hurt after being pinned in the bathroom

Chief Matt Canfield on Sunday outlined how the crash occurred, revealing it involved three cars in total, including the ill-fated SUV

The crash was not the result of other factors such as speeding and alcohol, Canfield further confirmed - adding it was still under investigation

That car reportedly gave the first vehicle the go ahead, Canfield said - spurring the driver to pull out.

While performing the maneuver, the driver apparently did not notice the third vehicle involved - the southbound SUV.

The two vehicles collided in the third travel lane, Canfield said, sending the Acura careening into the Looney Bin.

The crash was not the result of other factors such as speeding and alcohol, Canfield further confirmed - adding it was still under investigation.

As for the 14 injured, they were taken to either Laconia Hospital, Concord Hospital, or Franklin Hospital. It is not clear how many remained hospitalized as of Monday morning.

At least two were receiving treatment for 'significant leg injuries,' cops said.
Weeks later Family have announced that James is now awake and 'performing above expectations' according to doctors but has a 'long road to recovery'

A California influencer who suffered a brain aneurysm and gave birth by emergency C-section while in a coma has woken up to meet her baby for the first time.

Jackie Miller James, 35, collapsed from the medical condition, was found by her husband Austin, and rushed to hospital, with her family posting about it on June 6.

On Sunday, James' family said they were 'beyond thrilled' to be sharing news that the 35-year-old mom was 'performing above expectations at this stage of her recovery.'

'Jackie is awake and was recently transferred to one of the best neurological rehabilitation hospitals in the country,' they wrote.

'The doctors have been pleased upon her latest tests, numbers and evaluations, noting that Jackie is performing above expectations at this stage of her recovery.

Jackie Miller James, 35, collapsed and was found by her husband Austin, and rushed to hospital she's pictured with her newborn daughter while in a coma

A California influencer who suffered a brain aneurysm and gave birth by emergency C-section while in a coma has woken up to meet her baby for the first time in weeks - she's pictured here prior to the incident

While her family are thrilled with James' progress they've revealed it's still a 'long road to recovery.

James' daughter has been a 'constant source of light for the entire family' through the harrowing ordeal.

'[She] continues to grow into a happy, healthy, and animated little angel,' the family's update read.

'Jackie has also recently been reunited with her baby, and spends a great deal of each day with her entire family while in the hospital.'

Their daughter was born by emergency caesarean and spent her first 12 days in the NICU, but was unharmed.

James remained on life support and had to have five separate brain surgeries. Her sisters Natalie and Nicelle started fundraising for her care.

'If Jackie and the baby arrived a few minutes later at the hospital, we likely would have lost both of them,' they wrote on their GoFundMe.

'But instead, Jackie is continuing to fight for her life each day and we are optimistic she can beat the odds by surrounding her with the right specialists and methods of therapy.

'While the road will be long, we are committed to bringing Jackie home to her daughter and husband.'

James' most recently posted on her Instagram page on May 18, showing a series of glamorous pregnancy photos followed by one showing her comically lying with a hamburger on her stomach.

She wrote in the caption that she was 39 weeks pregnant.

On the same day, James posted a series of photos showing the 'pregnancy symptoms [she] was not expecting.'

Among those was snoring so bad that her husband couldn't sleep and 'hysterically crying no reason at all.'

The influencing mom has over 27,000 followers on her Instagram and has earned nearly 120,000 likes for her videos on TikTok.

Jackie Miller James is seen at her baby shower in April. With only one week until her due date she collapsed and had to be rushed to hospital

Miller James married Austin James in April 2022

The pair are pictured in South Lake Tahoe, California, in January

James became an influencer full time in 2021, after five years as a professional backup dancer in New York, and six years working for a Beverly Hills plastic surgeon.

She said she was always fascinated by Botox, cosmetics and beauty and wanted a forum to discuss them honestly.

She also charted her dating dramas, and met Austin James online in 2019.

The pair married in a lavish Napa Valley ceremony in April 2022 that was described as a 'little bit Cali and a little bit country.'
He described the heads of the No campaign as 'shadows'

One of the architects of the Voice to Parliament has written an unusual essay describing the heads of the No campaign as 'shadows' who are seeking 'precious' power - as he pushed for Australians to back the Yes side.

Key Voice campaigner and signatory to the Uluru Statement from the Heart, Thomas Mayo, implored the Australian public to vote Yes in the Voice referendum in a fiery piece he wrote for The Saturday Paper at the weekend.

In his column, Mr Mayo brutally criticised the most vocal proponents of the No campaign in colourful terms, describing them as malevolent creatures.

'The 'No' campaign is led by a group of shadows,' he wrote.

'They loom near a new dawn of unity and acceptance.

'They hang ominously over an awakening Australia that is ready to bloom in the warmth of our proud Indigenous heritage and culture.'

Voice to Parliament architect Thomas Mayo (pictured) penned a fiery essay advocating for the Yes vote - as he characterised No campaigners as 'shadows' and 'trolls'

'They gather and fulminate as Australians take a step closer to accepting that the longest continuous civilisation on the planet is foundational to who we are.'

Mr Mayo claimed in the Saturday Paper that these 'shadows' were 'leaping and prancing across sections of our media unchecked'.

'I feel the shadowy tactics of intimidation on social media  the trolls lurking under the bridge, coaxed from the gutter by Peter Dutton's 're-racialising' Australia comments, infecting the heart of our democracy with their toxic tongues.'

He also appeared to make a veiled comparison between the heads of the No campaign and the fictional character Gollum from the Lord of the Rings franchise.

In the fantasy series, Gollum referred to the magical One Ring as 'my precious' - and so did No campaigners in their lust for power in Mr Mayo's essay.

'Take notice of how these shadows are poised, salivating with hunger for their precious  for power,' Mr Mayo wrote.

'They seek to loom large in the absence of truth, to re-create Australia in their grotesque image.'

In March, Mr Mayo stood shoulder to shoulder with a tearful Prime Minister Anthony Albanese as the official wording of the referendum question was announced

In his Saturday Paper piece, he wrote that 'trolls' had been 'coaxed from the gutter by Peter Dutton's 're-racialising' Australia comments' to attack the Yes campaign

The Voice campaigner stressed to Australians that the body would give First Nations people a chance to improve their lives.

His essay pointed out the gaps Indigenous people face compared to non-Indigenous people when it came to factors such as life expectancy and incarceration.

The Kaurareg Aboriginal and Kalkalgal, Erubamle Torres Strait Islander man warned that life for Indigenous people will get worse should the referendum fail.

Some historic comments Mr Mayo has made about the Voice to Parliament has sparked criticism from prominent 'No' campaigners.

Liberal Indigenous Affairs spokeswoman Jacinta Nampijinpa Price has described Mr Mayo's past comments about the Voice as 'divisive statements' that were made 'publicly and proudly'.

Mr Mayo has previously said the Voice could pave the way to make the Pay the Rent campaign a reality and to change the date of Australia Day in a series of videos and tweets.

The 'Pay the Rent' movement wants homeowners to voluntarily pay a percentage of their income to Aboriginal elders without any government oversight or intervention.

Mr Mayo described his vision for life after the Voice was introduced in posts to Twitter - complete with reparations for Indigenous people, 'rent' being paid to live on Australian land and the abolishment of 'harmful colonial institutions'.

Additionally, Mr Mayo said his sights were set on 'getting ALL our kids out of prisons & in to care...integration of our laws & lore, speaking language, wages back'.

Mr Mayo spoke in front of Minister for Indigenous Australians Linda Burney and members of the Referendum Working Group and Referendum Engagement Group during a Voice to Parliament press conference in March

His advocacy for the Voice to Parliament has sparked criticism from prominent 'No' campaigners including Aboriginal Senator, Jacinta Nampijinpa Price

Mr Mayo said a 'guaranteed representative body' was 'needed [to]... properly pursue the rent that is owed and an abolishment of systems that harm us'.

In a video published by Search Foundation, a left-wing thinktank that markets itself as the successor group to the Communist Party of Australia, the Yes campaigner spoke about the proposal being a step towards reparations and compensation.

'Pay the Rent' for example, how do we do that in a way that is transparent and that actually sees reparations and compensation to Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people beyond what we say and do at a rally?' he said in the clip.

In unearthed tweets written by Mr Mayo between 2018 and 2021, he expressed his hope that the Voice would be 'an appropriate body, with appropriate authority to discuss an appropriate date' to celebrate Australia Day.

And in January 2021, he tweeted: 'Celebrating 26 Jan is disgusting... prioritise the campaign for a First Nations Voice referendum. Twitter and Facebook warriors, and peaceful demonstrators without coordination... is changing f**k all.'

In a 2022 opinion piece, Mr Mayo even suggested the new date could be the day the Voice to Parliament referendum passes.

Senator Price slammed these comments, claiming they illustrated the more 'radical' demands that were actually behind the proposal.

'These shocking revelations speak to the aggressive and radical agenda behind the Voice and destroy once and for all the myth that this massive change to our Constitution is 'a modest request',' she said.

'He is very clear that the intention, the goal, the ambition of the Voice and this referendum is to divide Australians.'

Mr Mayo explained that the Voice is purely 'focused on practical issues that matter to Indigenous communities such as better employment outcomes and housing

But Mr Mayo explained to Daily Mail Australia that the Voice is designed purely to focus on issues affecting Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people.

'I support celebrating our nation, Im a proud Australian and I believe our democracy is important, and it will be enhanced when Indigenous people are given a say on the matters that affect them such as health and education,' he said.

'It is my full expectation that a Voice will be focused on practical issues that matter to Indigenous communities such as better employment outcomes and housing.'

The referendum for the Voice to Parliament is expected to be held between October and December of this year.
Three men have been stabbed and a dog slaughtered during a savage and ferocious attack over the sale of an e-scooter at a home south of Brisbane.

The violence erupted when four men armed with knives arrived at the Forest Lake home in Brisbane's southwest around 5pm on Sunday and demanded they be given the e-scooter.

It had been advertised for sale privately on social media with a $2,000 asking price.

About 1.30pm two of the men had gone to the home to inspect the scooter before trying to pay with counterfeit cash.

Three men have been stabbed and a dog slaughtered during a savage attack over the sale of an e-scooter at Forest Lake home, in Brisbane's south-west (pictured)

Three men aged 33, 30 and 21 were stabbed, one seriously, during the wild brawl and taken to hospital with puncture wounds. The dog was also stabbed and died despite efforts of police and late-night vets

'The two males who attended the property have then produced a knife, an altercation took place which resulted in the two males leaving the address without the scooter,' Detective Superintendent Andrew Massingham told reporters on Monday.

Hours later, they came back with two more reinforcements and the four men scaled the back fence armed with weapons including knives, machetes and a handgun, which was later identified as a gel blaster pistol.

'They demanded the scooter and started smashing the rear glass doors of the property to try and entice the victims to come outside,' Det Massingham said.

'When that did not occur, they stabbed the dog.'

Despite the efforts of police and late-night vets, the dog died. The senior police officer described the dog's death as 'barbaric'.

The residents armed themselves with shovels before a violent confrontation erupted in the backyard.

Three men aged 33, 30 and 21 were stabbed, one seriously, during the wild brawl and were taken to hospital with puncture wounds.

A 33-year-old resident was stabbed on both arms, a 30-year-old was stabbed in his back and abdomen and a 21-year-old was treated for minor lacerations. Three of the alleged attackers, aged 24, 20, and 21, have been arrested.

Two were injured as the homeowners fought back and remain under police guard in hospital with injuries including a fractured cheekbone, lacerations to the eye socket and injuries to the back of the skull.

The trio is expected to be charged with offences including wounding, serious animal cruelty and threatening violence.

Four men armed with knives demanded the e-scooter be handed over before the residents armed themselves with a shovel (pictured)

Detective Superintendent Andrew Massingham (pictured) labelled the attack as 'ferocious and barbaric' urging those advertising expensive items for sale online to exercise caution

The 24-year-old Goodna man is expected to appear before the Richlands Magistrates Court on Monday.

'These attacks - in particular, this one - of people in their own home is indeed savage, ferocious, and indeed have no respect for human life,' Det Massingham said.

'These attacks occurring on persons with items for sale on online platforms is increasing.'

Queensland Police officers across the state's southeast were regularly being called to robberies targeting social media sellers.

'Our call to people is that if you're advertising expensive items for sale online, you take appropriate measures to ensure your safety, and if you intend on inviting people to your residence to inspect the property, there are several safeguards that you should take,' Det Massingham said.

'This was a group of men intent on financial gain, using extreme measures to try and overpower and intimidate.'
An Australian champion skydiver has died while testing out a new jumping method in the United States, just weeks after she helped set a national record back home.

Melissa Porter, 29, from Port Kennedy in Western Australia, died at the Skydive Spaceland Houston facility in Texas on June 24, where she was working as an instructor.

Horrified spectators reportedly saw the parachute deploy after Ms Porter jumped out of the plane but then made a hard landing.

Investigators are yet to determine whether the young Australian experienced a medical emergency during the dive or was killed by the impact.

Ms Porter's death was confirmed by local police on Sunday after her body was idenitified, sparking an outpouring of tributes.

She had spent the last month in Texas preparing for the jump and recently shared footage of herself training at iFLY El Paso.

Australia's skydiving community has been rocked by shock death of Melissa Porter

Three weeks before her death, Ms Porter shared footage of herself training at iFLY El Paso

'Finally sent some head down in the tunnel,' Ms Porter captioned the video.

Fellow skydivers have taken to social media to express their grief and pay tribute.

'We lost such a beautiful person. Rest peacefully Mel,' one wrote.

Others remembered Ms Porter as 'exuberant' and an inspiration to other young female divers.

'Skydiving was her life,' coach Kristina Hicks told The West Australian.

'She was loving (living in Texas) and being part of the diving community over there where there were opportunities to progress and work with some of the best divers in the world.'

Weeks before she flew to Texas, Ms Porter was amomg 19 women who jumped at Skydive Ramblers in Toogoolawah to complete a '2-point 23 way', an Australian women's total-break sequential record.

It comes she and her skydiving partner won gold in the two-way Inter Vertical Formation Skydiving category at the national championships in WA's Wheatbelt region in March.

Melissa Porter was passionate about inspiring girl to take up the ardenalin sport

The professional skydiver had recently travelled to the US to work as an instructor

She fell in love with the ardenaline sport after watching her grandmother skydive and took her first tandem skydive on her 14th birthday.

Ms Porter has spent the last five years travelled the world and participated in several skydiving adventures, She also learned to solo skydive in Portugal.

In March, Ms Porter spoke about her passion to inspire more young women to pursue skydiving.

'For so long the sport has been male-dominated,' she told the Sound Telegraph.

'There's this idea that women are too afraid or they're too small, or they're too light, all of these things and it's absolutely not true, they are 100 per cent capable.

'It's really cool for me to be able to be an instructor and to show other women it's doable.

'I want to continue doing that for years.'

Skydiving for Melissa Porter's life

Melissa was testing a new jump method at the Skydive Spaceland Houston facility in Texas (pictured) when her life was tragically cut short

The Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade is providing consular assistance to Ms Porter's devastated family.

'We send our deepest condolences to the woman's family,' a DFAT spokesperson added.

An online fundraiser to support Ms Porter's loved ones has already raised more than $13,000.

'Please help support Mel Porter's family in this challenging time. We're hoping that the financial burden of last minute international travel and funeral expenses can be the least of their worries as they begin to recover from this devastating loss,' the page states.

The fundraiser has been inundated with tributes.

'Mel was a bright shining light, an inspiration, and the best kind of friend I could have asked for. I'll miss her,' one man wrote.

Another friend added: 'We love you Mel. Thank you for being there on my very first jump. Will remember your coaching and the lessons you taught for ever.'
An Oakland visual artist who turns vacant buildings into centers for black culture in San Francisco has been accused of owing hundreds of thousands of dollars in rent.

Binta Ayofemi has vehemently denied the allegations despite at least five commercial property owners in the Bay Area accusing her of missed payments over the past three years.

The spaces were intended to be transformed into a bookstore, craft distillery and an arts and events space, according to interviews with property owners and Ayofemi by the SF Chronicle.

But while some of the projects were underway, rental payments stopped while other projects had spaces left unused, according to claims made to the outlet.

'She has in her mind in this glittering, beautiful, persuasive image of a project, but it's an empty shell of a dreamscape that she's not actually doing,' said Oakland attorney Shona Armstrong.

Oakland visual artist, Binta Ayofemi - who turns vacant buildings into centers for black culture in San Francisco - has been accused of owing hundreds of thousands of dollars in rent

Before the pandemic Armstrong rented an office space to Ayofemi at 1625 Broadway in Oakland but later evicted her. She claims that the artist owes her more than $10,000 in unpaid rent.

Ayofemi told the outlet she doesn't owe Armstrong money but an Alameda County Superior Court judge ordered her to pay the back rent and about $5,000 more in attorney fees and costs.

'There is no substance backing up these visions. There is no follow-through,' said Armstrong.

The SFMOMA's prestigious SECA award for rising artists last year was awarded to Ayofemi.

She uses rented and renovated vacant commercial spaces to realize her 'ambitious projects' through her nonprofit organization, Ground Urban - that has since had its business entity status suspended by the Franchise Tax Board.

Armstrong filed a complaint to state and federal officials detailing Ayofemi's real estate dealings under the nonprofit.

It's been alleged that Ground Urban is a being used as a front for renting and defaulting on spaces to raise money in order to 'revitalize' spaces while actually using the money for other purposes.

Ayofemi said she had not seen the IRS complaint, but told SF Chronicle the claims were 'insane' and 'bogus.'

She also denied the claim that donor money was being used to pay rent.

The young artist was also evicted from at least three other Oakland buildings including 1460 Seventh St., 1701 Telegraph Ave., and 2124 Broadway, according to SF Chronicle.

Court documents obtained by the outlet said that she owed at least two of them tens of thousands of dollars in back rent and fees. Ayofemi said she plans to resolve all of the disputes.

Shona Armstrong shortly before the pandemic rented an office space to Ayofemi at 1625 Broadway in Oakland later evicting her and claims she's owed more than $10,000

The young artist was also evicted from at least three other Oakland buildings including 1460 Seventh St (pictured), 1701 Telegraph Ave, and 2124 Broadway

She's in the middle of fighting an eviction where she opened 'Dusk Coffee' a cafe and wine bar that is still in operation in the city - she's believed to owe more than $100,000 in back rent

She's in the middle of fighting an eviction where she opened 'Dusk Coffee', a cafe and wine bar that is still in operation in the city.

Brian Breyre, who leased the space to Ayofemi, said she owes 'well over $100,000' in back rent since she stopped paying in January.

'She was good at selling herself, and it's so sad because I thought she was going to be good for the community, and I really wanted to believe in it,' Breyre said.

Dusk Coffee will continue to operate while the artist contests her eviction in court.

Despite the allegations and court documents, Ayofemi denied 'any record of not paying rent.'

'I am literally in the midst of doing transformative things,' said Ayofemi, comparing her work to that of Nelson Mandela.

'My family knows how dangerous it is for me to do this work, and I was like no, I'm going to do this work. It's powerful, beautiful work.'

She claims to have made requests for rent extensions that were denied and in some cases believed murals she painted and other 'renovations' could be used in place of rent, the outlet reported.

An email from Armstrong after she'd lost patience with Ayofemi read: 'I get it. You've bitten off more than you can chew. Maybe you are panicking.'

'Please stop the bleeding and sign the termination agreement.'

A San Francisco restaurant called Sam Jordan's Bar and Grill in the Bayview neighborhood was intended to be turned into a craft distillery and art space, investors who financed her the loan told the outlet.

But its been claimed Ayofemi failed to make payments on the roughly $1 million loan to revitalize the building.

The lenders eventually foreclosed on the property and resold it at a close to $300,000 loss in April.

'I've never seen something like this, when an individual enters into this many leases and for this much money, all at the same time, and breaches this many of them,' said Hussein Saffouri, an attorney who represented the owners of 1701 Telegraph Ave and 2124 Broadway.

Ayofemi said she relied on investments, sales of her art and grant money to fund her work.

She did not offer the outlet any other details about her investors or grants, only to say that the agreements were 'delicate and nuanced.'

Bonnie Bridges, principal architect at Studio BBA, said she'd worked with Ayofemi to renovate at least four spaces and hasn't been paid since September 2021

Ayofemi said she still believes, once her legal woes are quelled that she can reinvigorated black spaces and storefronts in the area

Bonnie Bridges, principal architect at Studio BBA, said she'd worked with Ayofemi to renovate at least four spaces.

She claims that she has not been paid since at least September of 2021 adding that the fees are 'north of six figures.'

Ayofemi denied the claims of unpaid invoices and said Bridges had 'double billed' her and has been paid a 'ton of money' for the project.

She said that someone who had not paid rent is 'very problematic' and that it has been a 'misunderstanding and would be resolved.'

'I have so many people who love my work. The majority of people love my work.'

Ayofemi said she still believes, once her legal woes are quelled that she can reinvigorated black spaces and storefronts in the area.
An upstate New York cop has been arrested after an investigation revealed she was the one responsible for sending menacing text messages to herself - despite her claiming they were from her colleagues.

Emily Hirshowitz, 36, from Ossining Police Department, filed a report with the District Attorney's office in May 2022, claiming to have received threatening texts from several anonymous numbers.

She said she believed fellow police officers from were behind the messages, writing in a complaint 'a fellow police officer or multiple police officers at my department are involved.'

Months later, in July and August, Hirshowitz went on to make further complaints, this time including screenshots of messages filled with expletives.

The messages called her 'useless,' 'dumb' and a 'reject,' while others were full of insults and some even suggested she commit suicide.

Emily Hirshowitz, 36, a New York police officer, has been arrested after an investigation revealed that she was sending herself abusive text messages and blaming her colleagues

Hirshowitz was named '2018 Employee of the Year' by the Rotary Club of Ossining

The nature of the messages led to a police investigation and for the DA to get involved concerned over the 'increasingly threatening content.'

By August, Hirshowitz suddenly seemed keen on dropping the investigation, but her superiors were persistent and wanted to get to the bottom of who was behind the messages.

Her bosses pushed for the DA's office to continue investigating the matter despite Hirshowitz telling the office she no longer wanted to pursue the complaint any longer.

A department-wide meeting was held on August 23 at which the mayor of Ossining attended alongside Police Chief Kevin Sylvester.

It wasn't long before investigators began to suspect Hirshowitz herself as being behind the messages.

Ossining police officer Emily Hirshowitz when she joined the force in May 2016

Hirshowitz, 36, had blamed the menacing texts on fellow officers within Ossining PD leading to an investigation by police and the District Attorney

A search warrant of Hirshowitz's phone and digital accounts indicated she controlled several of the numbers from which threatening messages were sent

At one point, Hirshowitz suddenly seemed keen on dropping the investigation but her superiors were persistent and wanted to get to the bottom of who was behind the messages

Hirshowitz, left, had stated how she believed fellow police officers from her department were behind the messages - 'a fellow police officer or multiple police officers at my department are involved,' she wrote in a complaint. She is pictured alongside Police Chief Kevin Sylvester

It wasn't long before investigators began to suspect Hirshowitz herself as being behind the messages. She has now been suspended with pay

A search warrant was obtained for her cellphone and Apple iCloud accounts in October.

Prosecutors found evidence indicating that she controlled several of the phone numbers from which the threatening messages were sent - with at least eight messages emanating from devices owned by her.

Hirshowitz, who studied at Sacred Heart University, joined the small Ossining Police Department in 2016 from the New Rochelle PD.

The force has just 58 officers on its staff and she was recognized as the 'Employee of the Year' by the local Rotary Club branch in 2018.

Upon winning the award, she was described as having made 'a big impact.'

Hirshowitz was celebrated as an officer who was dedicated to her role thanks to her 'hard work, dedication, and absolute love for the community.'

She ranked among the top officers in when it came to arrests and vehicle & traffic enforcement.

Hirshowitz was has now been charged with four counts of third-degree falsely reporting an incident and three counts of first-degree filing a false instrument at the Westchester District Attorney's Office.

The latter charge is a felony accusing her of intentionally filing a report to defraud.

Following her charges, she was suspended with pay.

Another former Ossining police officer, Louis Rinaldi, center, resigned previously over separate disciplinary charges, was also mentioned as a possible accomplice to Hirshowitz

Village of Ossining Police Department headquarters are pictured

The criminal complaint explained that three of the text messages appeared to have been sent by someone known to the DA's office but did not identify the individual.

Another former Ossining police officer, Louis Rinaldi, who had resigned previously over separate disciplinary charges, was also mentioned as a possible accomplice to Hirshowitz.

Hirshowitz's attorney, Paul DerOhannesian, says more information needs to be gathered regarding the case.

'There's a lot of mystery and confusion surrounding the allegations in this case and we'll evaluate as we learn more,' said DerOhannesian to the The Journal News.

Hirshowitz will appear at the White Plains City Court on July 12.
Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen will travel to Beijing next week, as the United States continues its mission to try and ease tension with China and restore a working relationship.

Yellen's trip will be her first to China as Treasury Secretary, and comes weeks after the Secretary of State, Antony Blinken, met President Xi Jinping in Beijing.

Blinken became the first top U.S. diplomat to visit China in five years following tensions between the two superpowers over COVID, Taiwan, economic rivalry, human rights and the 'spy balloon' saga.

Both Washington and Beijing said progress was made - without detailing concrete examples.

Blinken's trip was then swiftly overshadowed by President Joe Biden referring to Xi as a dictator - remarks that infuriated China. Biden downplayed the drama, insisting he expected to see Xi himself in the near future, and he didn't think his words would make any difference to their relationship.

The Treasury did not say who Yellen, the first woman to head the department, would meet.

Janet Yellen, the first woman to lead the Treasury, will travel to China this week

Antony Blinken, the Secretary of State, is seen in Beijing on June 19 meeting Xi Jinping. Blinken is the first top U.S. official to visit China in five years

Blinken mets with Chinese President Xi Jinping on June 19

But her visit would look for ways to work together on issues of mutual interest, the Treasury said.

'While in Beijing, Secretary Yellen will discuss with PRC officials the importance for our countries  as the world's two largest economies  to responsibly manage our relationship, communicate directly about areas of concern, and work together to address global challenges.'

Yellen will discuss national security interests, human rights, 'mutually beneficial growth and innovation', opportunities for American workers and businesses, and cooperation on issues such as climate change and debt distress.

The Treasury chief plans to tell China's new economic team that Washington will continue to defend human rights and its own national security interests via targeted actions against China, but wants to work with Beijing on urgent challenges.

'We seek a healthy economic relationship with China, one that fosters growth and innovation in both countries,' an official told Reuters.

'We do not seek to decouple our economies. A full cessation of trade and investment would be destabilizing for both our countries and the global economy.'

A second administration official told Reuters that Yellen was expected to meet the Chinese Vice Premier He Lifeng.

Yellen is seen with a shrimp po-boy at Domilise's Po-Boy & Bar in New Orleans on Friday

Yellen would underscore Washington's determination to strengthen its own competitiveness while responding to what Washington calls 'economic coercion' and unfair economic practices by China.

One clear area of concern involved China's new national security and espionage law, and the potential implications for foreign and U.S. firms, the official added.

'We have concerns with the new measure, and how it might apply, that it could expand the scope of what is considered by the authorities in China to be espionage activity,' the official said.

While no major 'breakthroughs' were expected, Treasury officials hope to have constructive conversations and build longer-term channels of communication with China's new economic team.

U.S. officials would also reiterate concerns about human rights abuses against the Uyghur Muslim minority, China's recent move to ban sales of Micron Technology memory chips, and moves by China against foreign due diligence and consulting firms.

Yellen would also talk with Chinese officials about a long-awaited U.S. executive action curbing outbound investment in China in certain critical sectors, and 'make sure they don't think something is more sweeping than it is or than it's intended to be,' the official said.

Yellen is expected to be followed to China later this year by John Kerry, Biden's climate envoy, and Commerce Secretary Gina Raimondo.

Blinken said last week the visits were aimed only at 'building back sustained lines of communication' with Chinese officials.

'The significance is they're talking,' said David Loevinger, who helped coordinate U.S.-China economic talks for the Obama administration.

He told The Washington Post: 'It is striking  at all levels of both the U.S. and Chinese governments  how little communication is going on.

'We need to be able to talk and have relationships where people can pick up the phone.'

Chinese President Xi Jinping looks on as meets with U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken in the Great Hall of the People in Beijing

Her visit comes amid simmering Chinese anger at Biden's 'dictator' remark.

Foreign Ministry spokesperson Mao Ning said last week that Biden's comments 'go totally against facts and seriously violate diplomatic protocol, and severely infringe on China's political dignity.'

'It is a blatant political provocation. China expresses strong dissatisfaction and opposition,' Mao said at a daily briefing.

'The U.S. remarks are extremely absurd and irresponsible.'

Biden, in off-the-cuff remarks at a fundraiser, said that Xi was embarrassed over the recent tensions surrounding a suspected Chinese spy balloon that had been shot down by the Air Force over the East Coast.

'The reason why Xi Jinping got very upset in terms of when I shot that balloon down with two box cars full of spy equipment in it was he didn't know it was there,' said Biden, referencing the February incident.

'That's a great embarrassment for dictators. When they didn't know what happened. That wasn't supposed to be going where it was. It was blown off course.'

Mao reiterated China's contention that the balloon was intended for meteorological research and had been blown off-course accidentally.

'The U.S. should have handled it in a calm and professional manner,' she said.

'However, the U.S. distorted facts and used forces to hype up the incident, fully revealing its nature of bullying and hegemony.'

The Chinese 'spy balloon' is pictured on February 4 being shot down off the coast of South Carolina

The 'spy balloon' is seen on February 1 over Billings, Montana. It traversed the U.S. before it was shot down

Foreign Ministry spokesperson Mao Ning said Biden's comments 'go totally against facts and seriously violate diplomatic protocol, and severely infringe on China's political dignity'

In March, Xi secured a precedent-breaking third term as president after clinching in October another five years as chief of the ruling Communist Party, making him China's most powerful leader since Mao Zedong.

Biden also said that China 'has real economic difficulties.'

China's economy stumbled in May with industrial output and retail sales growth missing forecasts, adding to expectations that Beijing will need to do more to shore up a shaky post-pandemic recovery.

The World Bank earlier this month forecast U.S. growth for 2023 at 1.1 percent - more than double the 0.5 percent forecast in January.

China's growth, meanwhile, is expected to climb to 5.6 percent, compared to a 4.3 percent forecast in January.

Blinken and Xi agreed in their Monday meeting to stabilize the intense rivalry between Washington and Beijing so it did not veer into conflict, but failed to produce any breakthrough during a rare visit to China by the secretary of state.

They did agree to continue diplomatic engagement with more visits by U.S. officials in the coming weeks and months.

Prior to his damaging remarks, Biden said Monday he thought relations between the two countries were on the right path, and he indicated that progress was made during Blinken's trip.

Biden said that Xi had been concerned by the so-called Quad strategic security group, which includes Japan, Australia, India and the United States.

The U.S. president said he previously told Xi the U.S. was not trying to encircle China with the Quad.

'He called me and told me not to do that because it was putting him in a bind,' Biden said.
A statement from the U.S. Attorney's Office in the Middle District of Florida last Monday outlined the attorney's alleged crimes, which carry a harsh sentence

An American lawyer who has spent the past two-and-a-half years in Cambodian prison for raping four children is now facing five federal counts in the US - after being deported back to the states earlier this month.

Currently being kept under house arrest in Tampa, 42-year-old Rugh James Cline is facing 170 years in prison for his alleged crimes, which include alleged payments to rape four minors in the Southeast Asian nation back in 2019.

According to the lawman's indictment, he arrived in Cambodia in May of that year with a photo or video showing two Cambodian children engaged in sex acts - before and after raping two minors under the age of 15 on multiple different occasions.

The trip was the second in a matter of months for the Florida lawyer, with the first made in February - during which time prosecutors believe he either recorded the media which featured one child as young as '12 years old.'

The indictment alleges Cline paid to abuse a total of four minors 'multiple times' on both trips.

Now being used in the case against him, the evidence was enough to slap Cline with five counts of engaging in illicit sexual conduct in a foreign place, and one count of possessing child sex abuse materials.

Currently being kept under house arrest in Tampa, 42-year-old Rugh James Cline - seen here after his Cambodian arrest in 2019 - is facing 170 years in prison for his alleged crimes, which include payments prosecutors said were made to rape two kids under the age of 15 several times

Cline, seen here being walked to his cell where he served 2.5 years - was indicted on those charges back in 2021, and made his first appearance in US federal court on June 7, in Tampa. A hearing a weeks later saw him released on $100,000 bond, and put on house arrest until his upcoming federal trial

Cline was indicted on those charges back in 2021 two years after his arrest, and made his first appearance in US federal court on June 7, in Tampa.

Less than three weeks later, last Monday, a bond hearing was held, which saw the suspected pedophile released on conditions of GPS monitoring, 24-hour home detention and $100,000 signature bond.

As he awaits his impending federal trial sometime this year or next, Cline is also not allowed to have access to the internet or to minors during his house arrest, prosecutors said.

A statement from the U.S. Attorney's Office in the Middle District of Florida last Monday outlined some of the disgraced attorney's alleged crimes.

'According to the indictment, in February and May 2019, Cline, a U.S. citizen and Florida-licensed attorney living in Tampa, traveled to Cambodia,' attorneys wrote.

'While in Cambodia, he paid to engage in sexual conduct on multiple occasions with four minors.

'[It] also charges Cline with having traveled from the Middle District of Florida to Cambodia while knowingly possessing materials depicting the sexual abuse of young children.'

According to a non-governmental organization that investigates suspected foreign pedophiles in Cambodia, families of three accusers told police Cline paid them a total of $120 for the 'multiple' illegal acts.

A Cambodian court already ordered Cline, who is technically still a lawyer but has lost the ability to practice due to delinquent fees, to pay 15 million riels - roughly $3,750 - in compensation to each of the girls, all of whom were under 15 at the time.

According to a non-governmental organization that investigates suspected foreign pedophiles in Cambodia, following the alleged assaults, victims told police that Cline - seen here while still practicing in Florida - paid them a total of $120 for the alleged and illegal trysts

As he awaits his impending federal trial sometime this year or next, the deported Cline - who has completed a two-and-a-half year sentence in Cambodia for sexually abusing three girls - is also not allowed to have access to the internet or to minors

In addition to the compensation fees, Cline - who pleaded guilty to his crimes in Cambodian court - was ordered to pay an additional one-time fee that the court tapped at $200.

His looming trial in the US comes after years of investigation from agencies such as the Federal Bureau of Investigation, who, according to prosecutors' Monday press release, was aided by the State Department and the Cambodian National Police.

The case is now set be prosecuted by Assistant United States Attorney Ilyssa M. Spergel - with Cline, this time around, electing to plead not guilty on all charges.

The decision will see the attorney fight allegations that he was busted with images of 'sexually explicit conduct' involving one unnamed prepubescent child and another under the age of 12 with him to Cambodia in February 2019.

The indictment further states that three times in February, and then again on May 10 and May 17, 2019, Cline 'engaged in illicit sexual conduct' with two minors each day.

Finally being brought forward after four years of deliberations and international cooperation, the case comes as factors such as poverty and poor law enforcement have made Cambodia a de facto breeding ground for foreign pedophiles.

Finally being brought forward after four years of deliberations and international cooperation, the case comes as factors such as poverty and poor law enforcement have made Cambodia a de facto breeding ground for foreign pedophiles

Anti-human trafficking police are currently attempting to crack down on the phenomenon, including the NGO Action Pour Les Enfants (APLE), whose executive director, Seila Samleang, celebrated Cline's Cambodian incarceration back when it was ordered in 2019.

'I welcome the verdict, however the crime of purchase of child prostitution should have been charged as the offender took advantage of the victims, coercing them with money,' APLE's executive director, Seila Samleang, said in a statement.

'This would've represented a longer jail sentence,' she added, decrying local laws that allowed Cline to skate free after just a few years.

An investigation published by the agency last year noted that foreign tourists suspected of pedophilia continue to visit Cambodia to exploit weak law enforcement, with as many as 102 cases recorded in 2017 and 89 cases in 2018.

Lieutenant General Chiv Phally, director of Interior Ministrys Anti-Human Trafficking Police Department, recently promised that Cambodian police are strengthening cooperation with their overseas counterparts to crack down on the alleged crimes.

Cline, meanwhile, is set stand trial in Tampa federal court for the five counts of engaging in illicit sexual conduct in a foreign place and the one count of possessing child exploitation materials. Until then, he remains under 24-hour house arrest

'We continue to cooperate with relevant people to crack down and protect children from these criminals,' he said in 2019, shortly after Cline was charged.

The penalty for purchase of child prostitution in the country is currently a sentence of just seven to 15 years, when the child is under 15 years old.

At the time, Samleang also urged Cambodian authorities to deport foreign sex offenders after they complete their prison terms - on the basis that they could pose a risk to other local children.
A couple in central Texas is suing the city of San Marcos over a metal balcony that has ties to the Ku Klux Klan saying it 'doesn't represent their family values.'

Their home was once owned by former mayor Frank Zimmerman who had a local theater known for hosting a KKK Day in the 1920s, and he installed his initial 'Z' on metal decor which sits on top of the balcony.

Kristy Money and her husband Rolf Straubhaar said they didn't know about the history before buying their home in Burleson Historic District.

'We felt a bit heartbroken. We wanted to do our best to, to be a force for good, teach our kids anti-racism values. We weren't going to ignore it,' Money said.

Because of the area that they live, Money had to apply to get permission from the city's Historic Preservation Commission to take down the 'Z.'

Money and her husband Straubhaar said they didn't know about the history before buying their home in Burleson Historic District and they wanted to 'teach our kids anti-racism values'

Central Texas couple Kristy Money and her husband Rolf Straubhaar are suing the city of San Marcos over a metal balcony that has ties to the Ku Klux Klan

Frank Zimmerman who owned a local theater known for hosting a KKK Day in the 1920s installed a letter Z on a metal decor which sits on top of the balcony

The commission unanimously denied the request at a meeting on May 4 calling the lettering a 'character defining element of the house,' according to KSNT.

'That's the whole point of being in a historic district, you know, to kind of like respect the past,' said one commission member.

Money said she felt like a 'guest' in her own home and retained Chance Weldon, Director of Litigation at the Texas Public Policy Foundation, as legal counsel on the matter.

The lawsuit challenges the local ordinance - which allows the commission to decide what a homeowner in the historic district can and can't do with their property.

'We believe that both under the United States Constitution and the Texas Constitution when you regulate someone's property, it has to be based in nuisance or harm, or something that actually falls within the general powers of government,' Weldon said.

Their home was once owned by former mayor Frank Zimmerman who had a local theater known for hosting a KKK Day in the 1920s (pictured: an advert for Zimmerman's Palace Theater and the KuKluxKlan Day. The poster boasts 'hundreds of scenes of Klan activities  in connection with big regular picture program')

The lawsuit challenges the local ordinance - which allows the commission to decide what a homeowner in the historic district can and can't do with their property

The city will have to file a response within the next month or so according to Weldon and If they don't reach an agreement, then a court will decide.

The City of San Marcos told the outlet it 'could not provide a statement on ongoing litigation.'

Money said she wants to be able to do what her family thinks is best for their 'forever home.'
A woman claims her friend has been banned from Woolworths across an entire state for three years after stealing $40 worth of items.

The woman claimed her friend had been barred from entering any of the supermarket stores across Victoria as a result.

She labelled her friend an 'idiot' saying she stole items for cheap thrills.

The woman said she was shocked after learning security took a photo of her friend before she was slapped with a three-year ban over the petty theft.

A woman claims her friend has been banned from Woolworths across an entire state for three years after stealing $40 worth of items

'She's an idiot. Didn't need to steal but just does it at a cheap thrill,' she wrote on Reddit on Sunday.

'Anyway she purchased $40 worth of stuff and had a few chocolate bars in her pocket.

'They took her photo and told her she's banned from any Woolworths state wide for 3 years.

'Does woollies have facial recognition? What are the odds she walks into a different Woolworths and gets grabbed by security.. and in that scenario.. is her presence in store prosecutable?'

Some social media users made light of the situation.

'That is a massive inconvenience I imagine. She'll have to steal from Coles and Aldi now,' one wrote.

Others claimed it was unlikely the woman would be banned from all the stores in the state.

'As a former woolies employee, we wouldn't have the slightest idea whose banned state wide they'll be fine,' one wrote.

The woman said she was shocked after learning security took a photo of her friend before she was slapped with a three-year ban over the petty theft (stock image)

Another added: 'She can enter other Woolies stores. It's all good. Happened to a few people I've known.'

A Woolworths spokesperson told Daily Mail Australia the supermarket works closely with police to identify and ban shoplifters.

'The majority of customers do the right thing when shopping in our stores,' a Woolworths spokesperson said.

'On the occasion that shoplifting occurs, we work closely with police to help identify and ban offenders from returning to our stores.'

It's understood Woolworths has an extensive CCTV network which can be used by police when needed to identify a banned customer.
Pope Francis condemned the burning of the Koran, in Sweden last week, saying it made him feel 'angry and disgusted' to see the Muslin holy book desecrated.

Salwan Momika, a 37-year-old Iraqi national who fled to Sweden several years ago, put bacon in the pages of a copy of the holy book before stomping on it and setting several pages alight.

The head of the Catholic Church is the latest public figure to slam the protest, and also rejected the suggestion that it should be permitted in the name of free speech.

'Any book considered holy should be respected to respect those who believe in it,' the pontiff said in an interview in the United Arab Emirates newspaper Al Ittihad, published on Monday. 'I feel angry and disgusted at these actions.

'Freedom of speech should never be used as a means to despise others and allowing that is rejected and condemned.'

The head of the Catholic Church is the latest public figure to slam the protest, and also rejected the suggestion that it should be permitted in the name of free speech

Salwan Momika, a 37-year-old Iraqi national who fled to Sweden several years ago, put bacon in the pages of a copy of the holy book before stomping on it

It came after several Muslim countries condemned Sweden for allowing the Iraqi man to burn a Koran outside Stockholm's main mosque on Wednesday - during the Eid al-Adha holiday and the annual hajj pilgrimage to Mecca.

These included Turkey, whose backing Sweden needs to gain entry to the NATO military alliance.

While Swedish police have rejected several recent applications for anti-Koran demonstrations, courts have over-ruled those decisions, saying they infringed freedom of speech.

On Sunday, an Islamic grouping of 57 states said collective measures are needed to prevent acts of desecration to the Koran and international law should be used to stop religious hatred.

The protest started a day after an Iraqi citizen living in Sweden, Salwan Momika, 37, stomped on the Islamic holy book and set several pages alight in front of the capital's largest mosque (pictured: the protests today)

The Koran burning, coinciding with the start of the Muslim Eid al-Adha and the end of the annual pilgrimage to Mecca in Saudi Arabia, sparked anger across the Muslim world.

Protesters spent days outside the Swedish embassy in Baghdad last week.

'It's an insult to the Holy Koran,' said 47-year-old civil servant Nafia Wali Idriss. 'Freedom of expression must not clear the way for sectarianism.'

Friday's protesters chose their own bugbears to trample underfoot - photographs of Momika and the rainbow flag of the LGBTQ+ movement.

'No to homosexuality, yes to the Koran,' the demonstrators chanted.

The Koran burning, coinciding with the start of the Muslim Eid al-Adha and the end of the annual pilgrimage to Mecca in Saudi Arabia, sparked anger across the Muslim world

'It's an insult to the Holy Koran,' said 47-year-old civil servant Nafia Wali Idriss. 'Freedom of expression must not clear the way for sectarianism'

The Iraqi government has called on Sweden to extradite Momika so he can be put on trial in his home country.

The foreign ministry also summoned Swedish ambassador Jessica Svardstrom on Thursday to hear a strong protest against her government's authorisation of Momika's protest.

Sadr movement official, Hakim al-Zamili, said the calling in of the ambassador was not enough and demanded 'more concrete measures'.

Swedish Prime Minister Ulf Kristersson distanced himself from Momika's protest today. 'This is a serious security question. There's no need to insult other people,' the right-wing premier said.

Momika told a Swedish newspaper late Thursday that he intended to repeat his protest in July. 'Within 10 days I will burn the Iraqi flag and the Koran in front of Iraq's embassy in Stockholm,' he told Expressen.
Australia is rapidly turning into a cash-free society but not everyone is happy about it sparking a call for a protest week of using only notes and coins.

A 'Cash-only' week rallying call has gone out on social media urging workers to stop using electronic payments from July 3 to 10.

'Pay with cash only for everything that you can 3-10 July,' the protest ad reads. 'Please be part of this. Get behind the cash only movement.

'If everyone does cash only, it can only benefit us plebs of society.'

A protest movement to only use cash for all payments for a week is gathering momentum on social media

'It's our hard-earned!!! Stop paying fees and charges that big corps impose on us.'

'Start asking for better deals with cash!'

The flyer promises that 'small steps' will go towards 'big wins for all of us'

It is unclear who has organised the protest but there is a Pay Cash Only Movement on Facebook that is global in nature.

Last November Fiona Edmunds shared a popular Facebook post comparing the costs of using physical instead of electronic money .

The Brisbane mother-of-three pointed out whenever you use a bank card, some of the money will invariably be eaten away by fees, which the shop owners are forced to pay.

'I have a $50 banknote in my pocket and I go to a restaurant and pay for dinner with it,' Ms Edmunds said in the post that more than 19,000 people have shared.

'The restaurant owner then uses the bill to pay for their laundry. The laundry owner then uses the bill to pay the barber,' she continued.

'After an unlimited number of payments it will still remain a $50 value which has fulfilled its purpose to everyone who used it for payment.'

'BUT if I come to a restaurant and pay digitally via card, the bank fees for my payment charged to the seller could be up to 3 per cent or $1.50.'

Ms Edmunds said a similar percentage is imposed on every other transaction using that original $50 if the holder pays via tap-and-go.

Those advocating the use of physical cash point to the fact that there are fees associated with electronic payments

'Payments made by the laundry shop owner, the barber and so on. Therefore after 30 transactions the initial $50 will exist at only $5 and the remaining $45 has become property of the bank.'

While this is a simplified example and fees vary wildly between banks, the principle is sound.

With each subsequent purchase, banks and credit card companies take a small cut from the original $50 until with enough transactions, eventually it becomes theirs.

'Use it or lose it folks... cash is king,' Ms Edmunds said.

While avoiding fees motivates some people to prefer cash others are worried about the broader implications of only using digital payments.

In a blog associated with the Pay Cash Only Facebook page, US author Gary Anderson warns about the potentially sinister implications of getting rid of cash.

'The government wants to track your every move,' he writes.

'It can control what you buy and what you aren't allowed to buy. People need to use cash or lack of demand will cause banks to go cashless and you will find yourselves without the outlets to get cash!'



On Monday Daily Mail Australia reported a customer was so furious with her bank branch when it told her it had kept money with the tellers to give her she shut the account.

A Brisbane mother-of-three shared an elegantly simple explanation of why cash is superior to paying by card

Taryn Comptyn said that when she went to bank, which she strongly hinted was the ANZ, without her ATM card they had no cash inside and couldn't even organise and a temporary way to use the machines.

In March the ANZ announced some of its outlets in Victoria would longer dispense cash.

ANZ said that only eight per cent of its customers use branches to access their money, with the vast majority having switched to internet banking.

However, critics warned the move to cashless banks could cause significant harm to older people and those with disabilities who still rely on branches and physical cash.

The number of bank branches in Australia has fallen by about 30 per cent in the past five years.

And ATMs have decreased even more, with figures showing that they have fallen from a high of 14,000 in 2017 to around 6,000 as of last year.

The Reserve Bank estimated just 13 per cent of transactions in late 2022 were in cash, a halving in just three years since the start of the Covid pandemic.

UNSW Professor of Economics Richard Holden told SBS in May that the New Payments Platform (NPP) developed by the RBA (Reserve Bank of Australia) in 2018 was a game-changer.

The NPP allows for instantaneous 24/7 peer-to-peer electronic money transfers.

Professor Holden said from a business perspective, doing away with cash reduced risk from theft and holdups and therefore could have a flow-on effect on business insurance premiums but also reduced workload.

TikToker Taryn Comptyn was so infuriated her bank could not hand over cash from her account that she closed it

Professor Holden said switching all payments to digital also the end of the cash economy to avoid tax or for criminal activities

Professor Holden said the usage of digital currency in China prompted 'legitimate concerns' about the government knowing what people were spending their money on but he didn't think those worries were as big in Australia.

In China a person's Social Credit Score, which is calculated on how a good and obedient a citizen someone is, can be used to determine what transactions will be allowed or blocked.
Israel launched what appeared to be a major military operation in the West bank early Monday, deploying hundreds of troops into Palestinian territory and conducting drone strikes on what it said were militant strongholds in and around Jenin.

At least nine Palestinians were killed in the strikes 100 injured, according to the Palestinian health ministry.

'There is bombing from the air and an invasion from the ground,' Mahmoud al-Saadi, director of the Palestinian Red Crescent in Jenin, told AFP.

'Several houses and sites have been bombed... smoke is rising from everywhere.'

The Israeli incursion, which resembles the wide-scale deployments carried out during the second Palestinian uprising two decades ago, was described as an 'extensive counterterrorism effort' by the hard-right government of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.

The operation saw reinfornced bulldozers, armoured vehicles and unmanned aerial vehicles scythe into Jenin backed up by hundreds of Israeli soldiers.

Palestinian gunmen wearing balaclavas fired back at the troops as sirens wailed.

It comes at a time of growing domestic pressure in Israel for a tough response to a series of attacks on Israeli settlers - including a shooting attack last week that killed four people.

Palestinian armed militants fire at Israeli armoured vehicles in the occupied West Bank city of Jenin on July 3, 2023

Palestinian militants engage in a firefight with the Israeli military in Jenin, the West Bank, 03 July 2023. The Israel Defense Forces announced on 03 July that they launched a large-scale operation in Jenin

A person is transported on a stretcher after a Palestinian was killed during an Israeli military operation, in Jenin, in the Israeli-occupied West Bank July 3, 2023

Smoke billows from houses inside a refugee camp in the occupied West Bank city of Jenin on July 3, 2023, after an Israeli strike

Smoke rises during an Israeli military raid of the militant stronghold of Jenin in the occupied West Bank

View of tyres set on fire on a street after a Palestinian was killed during an Israeli military operation, in Jenin, in the Israeli-occupied West Bank July 3, 2023

Paramedics rush an injured man into a hospital in the occupied West Bank city of Jenin on July 3, 2023, after an Israeli strike. The Israeli army said July 3, 2023 it was striking targets in the occupied West Bank city of Jenin in an 'extensive counterterrorism effort'

Israel has occupied the West Bank since the Six-Day War of 1967.

Excluding annexed east Jerusalem, the territory is now home to around 490,000 Israelis who live in settlements considered illegal under international law.

The Palestinians, who seek their own independent state, want Israel to withdraw from all land it occupied in the Six-Day War and to dismantle all Jewish settlements.

The tensions regularly spill over into localised conflicts, but the scale of operation launched by the Israeli army this morning has not been seen in years.

The army this morning said its forces had struck a 'joint operations centre', which served as a command post for the 'Jenin Brigade', a local militant group.

The area is nominally under the control of president Mahmud Abbas's Palestinian Authority, which has partial administrative control in the West Bank.

Lt. Col. Richard Hecht, an Israeli army spokesman, said the operation began just after 1 a.m. with an airstrike on a building used by militants for planning attacks. He said the goal of the operation was to destroy and confiscate weapons.

'We're not planning to hold ground,' he said. 'We're acting against specific targets.'

'People were aware that we were probably going in, but the method of striking from the air basically caught them by surprise.'

He said troops remained inside the camp but were after 'specific targets' and 'not trying to hold ground.'

'We are still seizing weapons and ammunitions' and 'infrastructure', Hecht said, adding the focus was on Jenin camp and that there was no specific timeline for ending the operation.

He added that a brigade-size force - roughly 2,000 soldiers - was taking part in the operation, and that military drones had carried out a series of strikes to clear the way for the ground forces.

Although Israel has carried out isolated airstrikes in the West Bank in recent weeks, Hecht said Monday's series of strikes marked an escalation unseen since 2006 - the end of the Palestinian uprising.

While Israel described the attack as a pinpoint operation, videos on Palestinian social media showed a large tuft of white smoke billowing from a crowded area, with a mosque minaret nearby. Other videos showed a wounded man was brought into a hospital on a stretcher, while another was carried in by a group of men.

According to the official Palestinian news agency Wafa, the military blocked roads within the camp, took over houses and buildings and set up snipers on rooftops. The agency also said the military cut off electricity in large areas of the camp and that army bulldozers caused damage to property.

Israeli military vehicles manoeuver during a raid in Jenin, the West Bank, 03 July 2023

Smoke billows from houses inside a refugee camp in the occupied West Bank city of Jenin on July 3, 2023, after an Israeli strike. The Israeli army said July 3, 2023 it was striking targets in the occupied West Bank city of Jenin

Smoke rises during an Israeli military operation, in the Israeli-occupied West Bank July 3, 2023

Jenin has been a flashpoint as Israeli-Palestinian violence escalated since the spring of 2022. Monday's raid came two weeks after another violent confrontation in Jenin.

'There has been a dynamic here around Jenin for the last year,' Hecht said, defending Monday's tactics. 'It's been intensifying all the time.'

But there also may have been political considerations at play. Leading members of Israel's far-right government, which is dominated by West Bank settlers and their supporters, have been calling for a broader military response to the ongoing violence in the area.

'Proud of our heroes on all fronts and this morning especially of our soldiers operating in Jenin,' National Security Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir, an ultranationalist who recently called for Israel to kill 'thousands' of militants if necessary, tweeted. 'Praying for their success.'

Monday's deaths bring the death toll of Palestinians killed this year in the West Bank to 131, part of more than a yearlong spike in violence in that area that has seen some of the worst bloodshed in nearly two decades.

The outburst of violence escalated last year after a spate of Palestinian attacks prompted Israel to step up its raids in the West Bank.

Israel says the raids are meant to beat back militants. The Palestinians say such violence is inevitable in the absence of any political process with Israel and increased West Bank settlement construction and violence by extremist settlers. They see the intensifying Israeli military presence in the area as an entrenchment of Israel's 56-year open-ended occupation of the territory.

Israel says most of those killed have been militants, but stone-throwing youths protesting the incursions and also people not involved in the confrontations have also been killed.

Palestinian attacks since the start of this year have killed 24 people.

Israel captured the West Bank, east Jerusalem and the Gaza Strip in the 1967 Mideast war. The Palestinians seek those territories for their hoped-for independent state.
A teacher at a prestigious private girls' school has been banned from working in schools after a tribunal found he sexually groomed a teenage student and had oral sex with her in his car.

The teacher, previously named Connor Taurapa Matthews but now legally known as Taurapa, was found by the New Zealand Teachers Disciplinary Tribunal to have 'engaged in a personal and sexual relationship' with a student at Rangi Ruru Girls' School in Christchurch while in his early 20s in 2018.

He was hired at the $27,500 -a-year (AU$25,306) private school to teach the indigenous language of New Zealand, te reo, and first met the then 15-year-old in that class.

Taurapa later sent her nude images on Snapchat, masturbated on camera and engaged in sexual acts with her when she was 16 years old.

He was also found to have messaged another teenage girl when he worked at another school but she stopped responding to him.

The teacher, previously named Connor Taurapa Matthews but now legally known as Taurapa (pictured), was found by the New Zealand Teachers Disciplinary Tribunal to have 'engaged in a personal and sexual relationship' with a student

He now works as an independent marriage and civil union celebrant in Christchurch after leaving teaching during the investigation.

Taurapa was in a Snapchat group with the teen and three other students for a study group before it turned to conversations about performing arts at the school, something both Taurapa and the girl were heavily involved with.

The two then began to message privately, with 'innocuous' conversations that quickly turned personal and became frequent outside of school hours.

The conversations then became sexual in nature after the girl turned 16 in April of 2018, when he gifted her a writing journal with a poem entitled 'Words of Love'.

Their personal time then stretched beyond messages and into time alone together, with the first instance occurring in Taurapa's classroom where they watched a musical on a bed of pillows and blankets.

'[The teen] states that during this occasion "he kissed me and felt me up too", including she says on her breasts,' the tribunal's findings read.

The following month, her and Taurapa began working on a theatrical production together, where he would meet her in changing rooms to kiss and grope her.

The teen claimed he would choose a certain room due to its lack of security cameras.

'Taurapa had made it clear to her that their relationship was to be kept secret and that nobody could find out,' the findings read.

He would also offer to drop her home in his car after 'most rehearsals', telling her to duck out of view when driving around town and kissing her goodbye.

A former teacher at Rangi Ruru Girls' School (pictured) has been banned from teaching after a tribunal found he sexually groomed a teenage student and had oral sex with her in his car

Taurapa then began messaging the teen in a more sexual manner, discussing what would happen if 'something further' would happen between them sexually.

He then brought up her potentially giving him oral sex.

Not long after, the two were in his car after a school activity when he said 'they were going to do something'.

'Taurapa drove them to a secluded area. Oral sex was then carried out by the teen. Taurapa also engaged in digital penetration of her. He then dropped her home,' the findings read.

The pair would often exchange nude photographs, 'too many to count' according to girl.

However, she did did note that there appeared to be a line with sex that Taurapa did not cross, such as him not coming to her house unless invited.

The tribunal found the teen was in an 'emotionally vulnerable position' while these events were occurring, having already been affected by mental health issues.

They also found that sexual messaging and conduct between the two began to escalate after she turned 16, the age of consent in New Zealand.

'He was in an obvious position of trust and authority. That position was severely abused,' the findings read.

'Taurapa through his conduct left the teen bouncing around a dangerous myriad of thoughts and feelings.

'We find that he both risked, and did cause, significant harm to the teen through his conduct'.

Taurapa had initially denied the claims made by the teen, admitting they had met outside of school hours but had not done anything wrong.

After investigations into the claims brought forward screenshots of conversations and personal accounts, he wrote to the tribunal that 'he accepted that he had engaged in serious misconduct and had breached his professional obligations'.

He claimed he was 'attempting to help her with her hauora (physical wellbeing) and mental health'.

'He stated that he would be engaging with a professional clinical psychologist to better understand his behaviour and ensure that it did not happen again in the future,' the tribunal wrote.

'He also stated that he would be engaging in ongoing mentoring and supervision at his current place of employment.'

He had his teaching license, which was valid until December 2023, terminated by the tribunal.
Music lovers driving to the world's most remote festival caked in mud

The conditions have not deterred thousands of Big Red Bash fans

Over 10,000 revellers heading for the world's most remote music festival have refused to let a rare deluge deep in the Australian desert rain on their parade.

A snaking convoy of cars, campervans and motorhomes travelling to the Big Red Bash rock music festival in far south west Queensland was stopped at multiple road blocks across the Outback on Monday after record rainfall and flooding hit the region.

Birdsville, a normally arid town of just 110 people around 35km west of where the festival is held, was battered by almost 16mm of rain in the past 24 hours.

Over 10,000 revellers heading for the world's most remote music festival have refused to let a rare deluge deep in the Australian desert rain on their parade. Pictured: two women dance on the top of the Big Red sand dune in the Simpson Desert (picture credit: Matt Williams)

Three quarters of attendees had arrived by Monday evening - the day before the festival begins - despite the road closures caused by flooding (picture credit: Matt Williams)

Dozens of drivers were seen queuing in the drizzle in Birdsville - the most remote town in Australia - to hose down their mud-spattered vehicles at the town's famous artesian springs

Dozens of drivers were seen queuing in the drizzle to hose down their mud-spattered vehicles at Birdsville's famous artesian springs once the roads reopened.

Vince Filocamo, 60, had been waiting for over two hours to clean his Toyota LandCruiser, which was towing a trailer with swags, firewood, cooktops and camping gear - all caked in layer upon layer of mud.

'We're lucky that we were at the end of the street when it was just 20-30 cars. It's now gone right around the block,' he said.

'I just want to clean it enough so I can touch the car without getting filthy. If I go out to the festival like this I can't unpack because I can't touch my car.'

But the unexpected pit stop failed to dampen the spirits of the thousands of families descending on 'Bashville' for its tenth anniversary, which will feature headline acts including the likes of ICEHOUSE, Hoodoo Gurus and John Williamson.

Vince Filocamo, 60, had been waiting for over two hours to clean his Toyota Landcruiser, which was towing a trailer with swags, firewood, cooktops and camping gear - all caked in mud (pictured)

Festivalgoers were greeted by deep mud tracks as organisers advised 2WD vehicles to think twice in the slippery conditions

Festival founder Greg Donovan told Daily Mail Australia they had taken 'extra precautions' to ensure the safety of attendees after the downpour.

'Despite the unfortunate weather conditions and unexpected rain in the lead up to the event, we want to reassure everyone that the event is still very much going ahead,' he said.

'The rain has now cleared so get ready for an unforgettable time at the Big Red Bash!'

While the road closures and tough conditions are making the trip in difficult, more than three quarters of attendees had arrived by Monday evening.

But sadly some were forced to turn for home.

'Our dream of attending the Big Red bash is over,' wrote one devastated woman.

'We rented a 2WD RV and hit the muddy unsealed roads cautiously this morning. We were sliding so badly we felt the safest option to turn back.'

The festival's natural amphitheatre sits in the shadow of the Simpson Desert's largest sand dune, Big Red where children were seen bombing down the dunes on boogie boards (picture credit: Matt Williams)

Organisers are hoping the mud will dry up in the winter sun before the festival officially kicks off at midday on Tuesday (picture credit: Matt Williams)

The heavens have only opened in similar fashion in the area three times this year: during the famous Birdsville races, Christmas Eve and this week.

The usually scorched red landscape was turned into a swamp by the torrent but organisers are hoping it will dry up in the winter sun before the festival officially kicks off at midday on Tuesday.

'Bad things come in threes so hopefully the rest of the week will pass without a hitch,' said one happy-go-lucky camper in ankle-deep mud.

The festival's natural amphitheatre sits in the shadow of the Simpson Desert's largest sand dune, Big Red where children were seen bombing down the dunes on boogie boards.

Attendees donned gum boots and winter gear to cope with the conditions (picture credit: Matt Williams)

Cars queue for a clean in Birdsville 35km west of the festival campground

Many festivalgoers were forced to camp out at the Birdsville Hotel, one of the oldest in Australia due to road closures

The festival, which has no WiFi, running water or phone reception, is celebrating its tenth anniversary this year after first starting as a running race in the Simpson Desert before morphing into a popular event on the music calendar.

Mr Donovan, who runs the festival with his son Steve, said he never set out to create the world's most remote music festival.

'You would have to have rocks in your head to have a plan like that,' he told the attendees on Monday night.
The West must stop opposing Russia's aggression in Ukraine - or face nuclear war, epidemics and famine which could wipe out millions, a close aide to Vladimir Putin has warned.

The dictator will not accept any solution short of total defeat of the 'annihilation' of democratic Ukraine, warned the former Russian president Dmitry Medvedev in a chilling threat to the free world.

'You don't have to be a visionary to understand that the confrontation phase will be very long,' said Medvedev, who is now deputy head of 70-year-old Putin's security council.

'The confrontation will last for decades... One way to resolve it is the third world war.

'But it is obviously bad, because the victors are not at all guaranteed further prosperity, as was the case after previous world wars... Most likely, there will simply be no winners.

Dmitry Medvedev, deputy head of the Kremlin's powerful security council, and a former Russian president and prime minister, has issued a chilling threat to the West

Medvedev is a close ally of President Putin, but could be seeking to position himself to return to the Kremlin if Putin falters or is too ill to continue in power

'After all, it is impossible to consider as a victory the world in which nuclear winter has come, million-plus cities lie in ruins, there is no electricity due to the transcendent electromagnetic impulse, and a huge number of people die from the shock wave, light radiation, penetrating radiation and radioactive contamination.

'Where terrible epidemics and famine reign.'

His sinister and threatening analysis was in the Kremlin's official newspaper Rossiyskaya Gazeta.

He also called for Russia to suspend diplomatic relations with the UK and other countries who are siding with Kyiv.

'It would be better to temporarily suspend diplomatic relations with Finland and similar countries (such as Poland, the Baltic states and, of course, the UK), or at least downgrade their level for a while.'

He warned that the West must halt its efforts to prevent Russia from overpowering Ukraine or face severe consequences.

'There should be no more Anti-Russia in principle, otherwise everything will end very badly sooner or later,' he said. 'Kyiv Nazi regime must be annihilated.'

Medvedev warned of a 'nuclear winter' if the West failed to stop supporting Ukraine

Medvedev also highlights Russia's goal in the war as being to 'eliminate the threat of Ukraine's membership of NATO' - a goal he claims it is going to achieve.

'If countries involved in conflict are not accepted into NATO, that means that the conflict will be permanent, because this is a question of Russia's existence,' he also declared.

He warned that Western politicians of all stripes were blind to the threat that 'such an Apocalypse is not only possible, but also quite probable'.

He claimed: 'The world is in a confrontation much worse than during the Caribbean crisis [Cuban Missile Crisis of 1962], because our opponents have decided to really defeat the largest nuclear power - Russia.

'They are, no doubt, down-and-out jerks, but that's just the way it is.'

Medvedev demanded the 'annihilation' of democratically elected Ukraine as a condition of peace and end to the war.

Medvedev was president of Russia from 2008 to 2012, and was also the country's longest-serving post-Communist prime minister

'Our interests should be taken into account to the maximum extent,' he said.

'There should be no more Anti-Russia in principle, otherwise everything will end very badly sooner or later.

'The Kyiv Nazi regime must be annihilated, legislatively banned in civilised Europe as fascist.

'Thrown away, like a rotten piece of lard, to the dustbin of world history.

'The West will have to accept this if it does not want an apocalyptic end to our imperfect civilisation.'

Medvedev, 57, is seeking to position himself to return to the Kremlin if Putin falters or is too ill to continue in power.

Medvedev was president of Russia from 2008 to 2012, and was also the country's longest-serving post-Communist prime minister.
An A&E doctor who was twice caught speeding in a 30mph zone has avoided a road ban after insisting disqualification would be 'disastrous' for the NHS.

Dr Juliet Bransby, 46, warned the court that her colleagues and patients would be 'impacted' if she was banned from driving. She claimed she was unable to use public transport to travel to night shifts because it was 'not safe'.

Bransby, from Anfield, works as a locum at a hospital in Wrexham, North Wales. She was caught driving her Ford Transit Connect van at 36mph in the same 30mph zone in Liverpool in April and July of last year.

She failed to give driver details following a further speeding offence the following August after her vehicle was caught at 36mph in a different 30mph zone in Liverpool. She was handed another six points.

As she already had three points from an earlier speeding offence, the latest offences meant she was left with 15 points on her licence.

Although she faced a mandatory six-month ban, Bransby argued that losing her licence would cost her her job, telling the court the 'NHS is in the worst state I have seen it' and if she was not able to keep working it would 'impact everyone'.

Dr Juliet Bransby, 46, was twice caught speeding in a 30mph zone but has avoided a road ban after insisting disqualification would be 'disastrous' for the NHS

In an impassioned plea for exceptional hardship, Bransby told the court in Wirral that there is 'no sign' of the NHS 'improving at the moment' and it is necessary that she be able to commute to work.

'I am a doctor and work as a locum at A&E mainly, based in Wrexham,' she said, sharing how she works three eight-to-ten hour shifts a week and that it takes an hour to drive to Wrexham from her home.

'We need all hands at the deck and they need me. If I was not able to carry on, it would impact everyone.'

She added: 'So many staff are off with stress after the fallout of the added pressure from Covid. Patients often wait for around 12 hours in A&E which is not safe.

'It would be unsafe and unfair to them and there would be more pressure on my colleagues as well.'

Bransby also claimed that due to a disability, she is not able to use public transport, alleging that she struggles to stand for longer than five or ten minutes at a time.

She said she has 'recurrent patella dislocations to both knees' and 'two slipped discs in my lower back'. The doctor added that she is currently under investigation for a neurological disorder and waiting for further investigations.

'At work, if I have to move around and wait there is normally something I can lean on. I have got my fold up stick although a lot of the time, if I am at a computer, I have to sit down,' she said. 'My employers have told me to work within my capabilities as they do not want me injured or to collapse on shift.

'If I lose my driving licence, I would not be able to work. I drive to work and cannot use public transport, largely because of my mobility problems, especially with knee dislocations. The slightest knock will cause a dislocation and I would not be able to work for weeks.

'Also, with the slipped discs I cannot easily walk. I cannot stand if the train is busy. Trains are also not very safe. I am often travelling alone, late in the evening or at night.'

Bransby argued that on her night shift rotations she typically works in a team of two or three, meaning that if she is not present 'it's a big difference'.

She said she usually works nights because the department is 'less crowded' and 'more seating available'. But a downside is that there is 'no public transport available at night' and without a driving licence 'I would not be able to get to work'.

In regard to taking taxis she said it would cost '100s' and went on: 'I have considered it but it is not feasible at all and have no other family who live nearby who could help. I would not be able to pay my rent or my bills if I lost my income and would be effectively housebound.

Bransby said she had not been able to secure locum work at Liverpool or Wirral hospitals, despite the fact that she was allegedly 'looking for work elsewhere'.

She told the magistrates she believed locum shifts at the Royal Liverpool hospital are taken up by the permanent staff.

'I have been looking for work elsewhere but the only other work is in Southport which is a similar sort of journey and I would have the same issues,' Bransby said.

'If I lose my licence, I would not be able to attend the appointments in Manchester, the ones that are most critical to what happens next.'

'If unable to drive, I would rely on a corner shop for groceries and that would be it. My life would be limited. I would be pretty much home bound.

'I am waiting for some urgent investigations and still waiting for some neurological investigations in Manchester and another scan in Liverpool.'

Bransby warned the court that her colleagues and patients would be 'impacted' if she was banned from driving

Her lawyer Diana Przemecka, a specialist in speeding offences, told the court: 'You have heard yourself and seen today that Dr Bransby struggles with her mobility. She simply won't be able to travel by public transport due to the risk to her health.

'You have heard about the pressures in the NHS, that there's a shortage of doctors and a shortage of NHS staff. You have heard that due to the pressures, and especially due to the Covid pandemic, more doctors are under stress and going off sick, putting more pressure on the hospitals.'

Ms Przemecka argued that in Bransby's case, the 'innocent parties' are her colleagues, the hospital, the NHS and 'most importantly' A&E patients seeking emergency medical care.

'If Dr Bransby is not able to work, they will wait longer and it may have a significant impact on their health. In the longer term it may be catastrophic for them,' the attorney said.

'You heard that Dr Bransby is here on her own, she has no one else to help her. If she were to be disqualified from driving, she will lose her job, lose her livelihood and will be home bound.

'This is an application that you consider not disqualifying Dr Bransby and consider the implications her disqualification would have on the NHS, her work colleagues, and the patients as well.'

Miss Przemecka supplied the court with references, evidence of the lack of public transport available to her, and also the cost of taxis to and from the hospital. She said that Bransby earns 500 per week.

The magistrates agreed to grant the application and not disqualify Bransby from driving. They fined her a total of 332 for the two speeding offences, a further 750 for failing to give driver details and ordered she pay 218 in costs and victim surcharge.

The Justices of the Peace told her: 'We agree that this passes the exceptional hardship threshold and the reasons are that we accept that due to your disabilities there will be exceptional hardship if you were not able to get to work.

'We also accept that if you lost your job, you could potentially lose your home and the impact on your current mental health could be quite detrimental to your well-being. Therefore, we are not going to disqualify you from driving.

'You are not disqualified but you still have 15 points on your licence. If you commit another traffic offence you will be disqualified. You cannot use the argument you used today in the next three years. I would say that you need to be driving very carefully for the next three years.'
The U.S. recommended Americans reconsider traveling to China because of arbitrary law enforcement and exit bans and the risk of wrongful detentions.

No specific cases were cited, but the advisory came after a 78-year-old U.S. citizen was sentenced to life in prison on spying charges in May.

It also followed the passage last week of a sweeping Foreign Relations Law that threatens countermeasures against those seen as harming Chinas interests.

China also recently passed a broadly written counterespionage law that has sent a chill through the foreign business community, with offices being raided, as well as a law to sanction foreign critics.

The U.S. recommended Americans reconsider traveling to China - above passenters at the Beijing Capital International Airport

'The Peoples Republic of China (PRC) government arbitrarily enforces local laws, including issuing exit bans on U.S. citizens and citizens of other countries, without fair and transparent process under the law,' the U.S. advisory said.

'U.S. citizens traveling or residing in the PRC may be detained without access to U.S. consular services or information about their alleged crime,' it warned.

The advisory also said that Chinese authorities 'appear to have broad discretion to deem a wide range of documents, data, statistics, or materials as state secrets and to detain and prosecute foreign nationals for alleged espionage.'

It listed a wide range of potential offenses from taking part in demonstrations to sending electronic messages critical of Chinese policies or even simply conducting research into areas deemed sensitive.

Exit bans could be used to compel individuals to participate in Chinese government investigations, pressure family members to return from abroad, resolve civil disputes in favor of Chinese citizens and 'gain bargaining leverage over foreign governments,' the advisory said.

Similar advisories were issued for the semi-autonomous Chinese regions of Hong Kong and Macao. They were dated Friday and emailed to journalists on Monday.

Accused spy John Shing-Wan Leung was sentenced to life in prison for espionage

The U.S. had issued similar advisories to its citizens in the past, but those in recent years had mainly warned of the dangers of being caught in strict and lengthy lockdowns while China closed its borders for three years under its draconian 'zero-COVID' policy.

China generally responds angrily to what it considers U.S. efforts to impugn its authoritarian Communist Party-led system. It has issued its own travel advisories concerning the U.S., warning of the dangers of crime, anti-Asian discrimination and the high cost of emergency medical assistance.

China had no immediate response to the travel advisory on Monday.

Details of the accusations against the accused spy John Shing-Wan Leung are not available, given Chinas authoritarian political system and the ruling Communist Partys absolute control over legal matters. Leung, who also holds permanent residency in Hong Kong, was detained in the southeastern city of Suzhou on April 15, 2021 - a time when China had closed its borders and tightly restricted movement of people domestically to control the spread of COVID-19.

The warnings come as U.S.-China relations are at their lowest in years, over trade, technology, Taiwan and human rights, although the sides are taking some steps to improve the situation.

U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken made a long-delayed visit to Beijing last week and Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen is making a much-anticipated trip to Beijing this week. China also recently appointed a new ambassador to Washington, who presented his credentials in a meeting with President Joe Biden at the White House.

Advisory warns that U.S. citizens traveling to China 'may be detained without access to U.S. consular services or information about their alleged crime'

U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken (left) made a long-delayed visit to Beijing last week where he met with Chinese leader Xi Jinping (right)

Other incidents, however, have also pointed to the testiness in the relationship. China formally protested last month after Biden called Chinese leader Xi Jinping a 'dictator,' days after Blinken's visit.

Biden brushed off the protest, saying his words would have no negative impact on U.S.-China relations and that he still expects to meet with Xi sometime soon. Biden has also drawn rebukes from Beijing by explicitly saying the U.S. would defend self-governing Taiwan if China, which claims the island as its own territory, were to attack it.

Biden said his blunt statements regarding China are 'just not something Im going to change very much.'

The administration is also under pressure from both parties to take a tough line on China, making it one of the few issues on which most Democrats and Republicans agree.

Along with several detained Americans, Two Chinese-Australians, Cheng Lei, who formerly worked for Chinas state broadcaster, and writer Yang Jun, have been held since 2020 and 2019 respectively without word on their sentencing.

Perhaps the most notorious case of arbitrary detention involved two Canadians, Michael Kovrig and Michael Spavor, who were detained in China in 2018, shortly after Canada arrested Meng Wanzhou, Huawei Technologies chief financial officer and the daughter of the tech powerhouse's founder, on a U.S. extradition request.

They were charged with national security crimes that were never explained and released three years later after the U.S. settled fraud charges against Meng. Many countries labeled Chinas action 'hostage politics.'
Hollywood star Kevin Spacey attacked a man in a car on the way to Sir Elton John's White Tie and Tiara Ball, a court heard today.

Jurors at Southwark Crown Court were shown footage of a police interview in which the man, who cannot be named for legal reasons, said it was like the Oscar-winning actor 'thought he could groom me'.

The witness described Spacey as a 'slippery, snaky, difficult person' and referenced the star's serial killer character in the film Seven, saying: 'He's a bit like that, a bit creepy.'

In the video played to the jury, the man said Spacey told him he could introduce him to A-list stars. The man claimed 'touchy feely' Spacey would put the man's hand on his genitals five or six times and assaulted him in other ways around five or six other times.

Spacey, 63, has been described by the prosecution as a 'sexual bully' as he stands accused of carrying out offences involving grabbing, squeezing, and touching of his four victims' genitals and buttocks over their clothing between 2005 to 2013 - mostly during his time as Artistic Director at The Old Vic theatre. Three indecent assaults and four sexual assaults date between 2001 and 2004. The five further offences range from between 2005 to 2013.

Today an alleged victim claimed one of the alleged assaults happened in a car on the way to Sir Elton's 1million White Tie and Tiara Ball at the Rocketman singer's home in Windsor.

The man said: 'He went to a lot of lavish parties at the time, he was very famous, he had just done American Beauty, he was an Oscar winner. Elton John would have this big Windsor party and it was a big, 1million party. It was a summer party, The White Tie and Tiara Ball, it was called.

'He was worried about the press taking pictures of him so he was on edge, he had also had a drink. We were going down there and he was quite fired up. He hit me right in the nuts, basically. It took my breath away, he was laughing giggling and I said it f***ing hurt. He didn't say anything, he laughed and giggled. He said; ''oh stop it, stop it''. He grabbed me so hard I almost came off the road.

'He had obviously been drinking quite a bit and drugs as well, and I said don't every f***ing do that again, that really hurt. And he laughed about it: ''oh that's a turn on to me, oh you're such a man'' he said. I was disgusted that he had done that.'

Actor Kevin Spacey (right) arrives with his legal team at Southwark Crown Court today

The man also said: 'He would try to grope me and try to grab me and make me feel very uncomfortable.'

The man said Spacey told him he could introduce him to A-list stars, and said when he tried to fight back against one of the alleged assaults, the actor replied: 'That's such a turn on to me. You're such a man.'

Outlining his allegations against the defendant, the man said: 'He grabbed me in private areas and then tried to get my hands on him.'

The man said he tried to 'blank out' what happened.

Describing an incident that he said happened to him, the man said: 'He grabbed me so hard I almost came off the road.

'He grabbed me really hard and it really hurt. I pushed him against the door and said, 'Don't do that again or I will knock you out'.'

Continuing to talk about the incident, the man told the police officer: 'I was disgusted that he had done that.'

Actor Kevin Spacey arrives at Southwark Crown Court today for the continuation of his trial

The court heard the alleged victim describe the actor as 'very touchy feely'.

He told the police officer: 'Obviously being a man's man and a professional I found it quite eerie and just awkward. He made me feel so awkward and uneasy.'

The man said the actor became 'very friendly' and started to grab him on several occasions, and the alleged victim told him to stop.

He added: 'He sort of left me and didn't say anything. He would just laugh it off and change the subject.'

The man could be seen describing Spacey as a 'slippery, snaky, difficult person' and a 'very mixed-up individual'.

He continued: 'He grabbed me. He grabbed me a good few times. He would squeeze my bum and would rub my legs.'

The man added: 'It's like he thought he could groom me.'

US actor Kevin Spacey arrives at Southwark Crown Court today as his trial continues

The court heard Spacey began to attack the man within two to three weeks of meeting him.

The witness said in his police interview: '(Within) two to three weeks he started to make me feel uncomfortable.

'From the first two to three weeks he would start to try and get into my head about what my sexuality was like.'

The man claimed he was assaulted more than ten times by Spacey.

He said the actor would also grab his bottom on occasions and walked around naked in his London hotel room in front of his alleged victim, jurors heard.

In addition, the man said he cannot bring himself to watch any of his films.

Actor Kevin Spacey arrives at Southwark Crown Court in London this morning

He said in his police interview: 'I can't stand watching the man. It makes me feel sick. He was quite an angry person. He was obviously angry inside.'

He later described the actor as a 'very confused, mixed up individual'. He said he was 'pretending to be nice' but was a 'predator' who was 'aggressive'.

He added: 'He was obviously very messed up with his sexuality.'

Spacey 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.

The two-time Academy Award winner also previously denied four further charges of sexual assault and one count of causing a person to engage in penetrative sexual activity without consent.

The trial continues.
Furious drivers attempted to force their way through Just Stop Oil eco-zealots as they blocked roads during rush hour in the capital this morning.

The eco-mob held up banners while slow-walking on the South Circular Road near its junction with the A40 in west London, while also causing disruption on Kings Street in Hammersmith, New Kent Road in Southwark and Hanger Lane in Ealing.

A series of clips shared online showed fed-up motorists nudging against the demonstrators with their vehicles before speeding off or attempting to drive around them and almost knocking them over.

Monday's action, which resulted in multiple arrests, comes little over a day after London Mayor Sadiq Khan branded the eco-warriors a 'really important pressure group.'

The Labour politician made the comments during the capital's Pride parade on Saturday, which was disrupted when Just Stop Oil members blocked a float to protest against 'polluting' sponsors such as Coca-Cola.

Just Stop Oil protesters appear to tell a motorist to halt as they carry out a slow march in Hanger Lane, west London, this morning

Protesters were seen slow walking on the South Circular Road near its junction with the A40 in the west of the capital

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Speaking before their action, Mr Khan said: 'I agree with protesting in a way that is lawful, safe, and peaceful. I think that Extinction Rebellion and Just Stop Oil are really important pressure groups trying to put power on those who have power and influence.

'I fully support the right to protest. It's really important to recognise the joy of a democracy is protest.'

However he added that he 'was not sure' how Just Stop Oil 'protesting at a protest helps the cause when it comes to tackling the climate emergency.'

Video footage from Monday's protests shows one black BMW repeatedly push against the legs of activists as it refuses to be delayed by their disruption.

A protester is heard asking 'what do we do?' before being told by a ringleader: 'Don't sit on it!'.

The car eventually breaks through the wall of activists and speeds off.

Another clip shared online shows the moment a fed-up motorist almost knocked over a protester on the A201 near Elephant and Castle.

The white van driver swiftly overtakes a woman who is slow-walking in front of him while holding a sign reading 'no new oil'.

The protester, who appeared to be one of three blocking the road, stumbles as her hands push against the vehicle, but she avoids falling over.

Images from Hanger Lane show demonstrators telling a driver of a navy van to halt as it edges just inches away from their feet.

Elsewhere, five protesters caused 'serious disruption' on Vauxhall Bridge Road at 8.30am, police said.

The Met added: 'Officers issued a section 12 condition to move off the carriageway at 08.34hrs, which was complied with. The road was cleared at 08.35hrs.'

Just Stop Oil also uploaded a video of Reverend Bill White being arrested today, claiming he was one of 34 members to take part in slow marches across the capital.

It follows a weekend of disruption which saw the group attempt to put a stop to London's historic LGBT+ Pride Parade  leading at least five members to be charged.

Protesters from the eco-group sat in front of a Coca-Cola float to protest the company's use of plastic.

Four protesters stage a Just Stop Oil slow walk through Knightsbridge in central London today

Protesters were also causing disruption on Kings Street in Hammersmith, New Kent Road in Southwark and Hanger Lane (pictured) in Ealing, according to the Metropolitan Police

A lorry pulls over on Hanger Lane amid disruptive protests by Just Stop Oil on Monday morning

It follows a weekend of disruption which saw the group attempt to put a stop to London's historic LGBT+ Pride Parade  leading at least five members to be charged (protesters pictured on South Circular Road today)

 REVEREND ARRESTED AS JUST STOP OIL BEGINS 11th WEEK OF SLOW MARCHING



 Reverend Bill White has just been arrested as 34 people march today demanding no new oil and gas.



 Join Bill and sign up to march together from the week beginning 16th July at https://t.co/7BzUVS02dZ pic.twitter.com/weAoK7Aar4  Just Stop Oil (@JustStop_Oil) July 3, 2023

Ben Plumpton, 68, of Underbank Avenue, Charlestown, Calderdale, Zosia Lewis, 22, of Melbourne Street, Newcastle-upon-Tyne, Oliver Clegg, 20, of Olney Street, Manchester, Gosse Bootsma, 25, of no fixed address and Callum Goode, 23, of Ashbourne, Derbyshire, were arrested on Saturday.

They were charged under the Public Order Act with behaviour likely to cause harassment, alarm or distress and were bailed to attend Westminster Magistrates' Court in London tomorrow, Scotland Yard said.

Two other men, aged 19 and 22, were released on bail pending further inquiries, the force added.

All seven were arrested at about 1.25pm on Saturday, after Just Stop Oil activists disrupted the march at Down Street, Piccadilly.

They accused Coca-Cola of being 'the world's worst plastic polluter, accused of numerous human rights abuses'.

A spokesman said Pride had failed to address their relationship with 'destructive industries' that use the event to 'pinkwash' their reputations.

They added: 'These partnerships embarrass the LGBTQ+ community, at a time when much of the cultural world is rejecting ties to these toxic industries.

'We call on Pride to remember the spirit in which it was founded and to respect the memory of all those who fought and died to secure the rights we now possess, whilst taking the necessary steps to protect our community long into the future.'

Legendary LGBTQ+ rights campaigner Peter Tatchell said: 'Climate destruction is destroying communities, jobs, homes and lives across the world, especially in poorer countries.

'Our community must not collude with environment, species and climate destroying companies.'
For more than 600 years, the Orkney Islands were a key possession of Norway, having been seized by the Vikings.

And had the impoverished King Christian I not reneged on a promised dowry payment for his daughter's marriage to King James III of Scotland, they might have remained Norse for another six centuries.

But despite being formally part of Scotland since 1472, the people of Orkney still feel a strong affiliation with their one-time mother country.

That was evidenced by news yesterday that the islands' authorities are considering leaving the UK and becoming a self-governing territory of Norway.

From Sigurd the Mighty, the first real Earl of Orkney, to the fearsome warrior Thorfinn Skull-Splitter, Orkney has a rich array of characters that continue to inspire modern residents.

The islands are also dotted with Norse heritage in architectural form, including St Magnus Cathedral, which was founded in 1137.

The Orkney Islands were ceded to Scotland in 1472 after the failure of King Christian I of Denmark, Norway and Sweden to pay a dowry following his daughter Margaret's betrothal to King James III of Scotland (left)

Before the arrival of the Vikings, the Orkney Islands had been home to the Picts, a group recognised as Scotland's oldest indigenous people.

The westward expansion of the Vikings had started in the late 8th century, thanks in large part to the development of large ocean-going ships.

These vessels could reliably transport people as well as goods and livestock across the North Sea and North Atlantic.

The Orkney Islands' strategic position off the northern coast of Scotland made them a key target for the Vikings, who were looking to expand their raids on the British Isles.

The main Norse movement into Orkney is believed to have begun at the start of the 9th century.

Norway's King Harald Fairhair is then believed to have formally seized the islands as he looked to subdue renegade Vikings using the islands as their summer base.

The first real Earl of Orkney, Sigurd the Mighty, would go on to reign over the islands for nearly 20 years.

One of his successors, the one-eyed Torf-Einar, is said to have ordered his men to carve the outline of an eagle on a prisoner's back before slicing the man's ribs from his backbone so his lungs could be pulled out as an offering to the god, Odin.

In the space of the 300 years that followed, Norse culture and settlements had largely replaced those of the Picts.

St Mangus Cathedral at Kirkwall, Orkney's main town, was founded in honour of Earl Magnus Erlendsson, who, according to the 13th century Icelandic text the Orkneyinga saga, was executed in 1117.

St Magnus Cathedral is the most northerly cathedral in the UK. It was founded by the Norse occupiers of the Orkney Islands in the 12th century

For Vikings, killing quickly and efficiently was a form of art, that had to be taught since childhood

Vikings had names like Erik Bloodaxe and Thorfinn the Skull-Splitter and terrorised across England, Scotland and Ireland for more than a century

WHAT IS THE ORKNEYINGA SAGA? The Orkneyinga saga, which is also known as the History of the Earls of Orkney, details the conquest of the area by Norway and its subsequent Viking rulers. It was written between 1192 and 1206 and covers the lives of various rulers, or Jarls, of the Orkney and Shetland Islands from the 9th to the 13th Century. Parts of the saga are clearly fabricated to add to the drama of the story, but the piece as a whole has been incredibly useful for historians. Advertisement

Construction work on the church, which is the most northerly cathedral in the UK, began in 1137.

The remains of St Magnus were found in the church in the early 20th century.

In 1263, the Scots, led by King Alexander III, fought the Norwegians for control of the Hebrides.

Although the outcome was inconclusive, the battle marked the beginning the decline of Norwegian rule in Scotland.

Norway's King Hakon Hakonsson had planned to renew military action but died in Orkney in the winter of 1263.

His successor, Magnus VI, struck a peace deal which gave Scotland control of the Hebrides and the Isle of Man.

Links with the Scottish mainland deepened further when Princess Margaret of Scotland married King Eirik Magnusson of Norway in 1281.

The marriage contract stipulated that if Erik not consummate the union on becoming 14 years old, 'the whole land of Orkney, with all rights due to Norway's king' would be ceded to Scotland.

But, if Margaret was the unwilling one, the King of Scotland would have to give the Isle of Man to Norway.

As it turned out, Erik did father a child with his bride, who died giving birth.

In the 14th century, Orkney, along with Shetland, remained officially Norwegian.

But the appointment of Henry Sinclair - the Scottish Earl of Roslin - to the Orkney Earldom further weakened the Norse systems of tenure.

In 2019, archaeologists unearthed a Viking drinking hall in Orkney that could have been used by a high-ranking chieftain 800 years ago. Pictured: an overhead view of the excavation site

The discovery was made at Skaill Farmstead in Westness, Rousay, and is believed to have been a high-status Norse hall, dating as far back as the 10th century

The Viking age The Viking age in European history was from about 700 to 1100 AD. During this period many Vikings left their homelands in Scandinavia and travelled by longboat to other countries, like Britain and Ireland. When the people of Britain first saw the Viking longboats they came down to the shore to welcome them. However, the Vikings fought the local people, stealing from churches and burning buildings to the ground. The people of Britain called the invaders 'Danes', but they came from Norway and Sweden as well as Denmark. The name 'Viking' comes from a language called 'Old Norse' and means a pirate raid. The first Viking raid recorded in the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle was around 787 AD. It was the start of a fierce struggle between the Anglo-Saxons and the Vikings. Advertisement

Norway then ceased to exist as a separate kingdom with the Kalmar Union of 1397, which united the Danish, Swedish and Norwegian crowns.

The end of Norwegian dominion over the Orkney Islands finally came in the late 15th century, when King Christian I, agreed to a union between his daughter Margaret of Denmark and Scotland's King James III.

The Orkney Islands were held in pawn until the agreed dowry had been paid.

But when the money was not forthcoming, the 1471 Act of Annexation was passed in the Scottish Parliament.

From then on, Orkney was under the control of Scotland, which became part of Great Britain in the 1707 Act of Union.

News that the Orkney Islands are to consider plans to become a self-governing territory of Norway was announced yesterday.

A motion to look at 'alternative forms of governance' is set to go before Orkney Islands Council on Tuesday.

James Stockan, the council leader, said the islands are 'really struggling at the moment', adding that they doesn't receive fair funding.

He told the BBC: 'We are denied the things that other areas get like RET (Road Equivalent Tariff) for ferry fares.

'And the funding we get from the Scottish government is significantly less per head than Shetland and the Western Isles to run the same services - we can't go on as we are.'

He said the funding Orkney receives from the Scottish government is significantly less per head than Shetland and the Western Isles. This is despite all three areas having a population of between 22,000 and 27,000.

Mr Stockan suggested looking at Crown Dependencies such as the Channel Islands or Falkland Islands, or the self-governing Denmark territory the Faroe Islands as possible governing routes for Orkney.

He added: 'On the street in Orkney people come up and say to me when are we going to pay back the dowry, when are we going back to Norway,

'There is a huge affinity and a huge deep cultural relationship there. This is exactly the moment to explore what is possible.'

A ship arriving to the coastal port town of Kirkwall on the mainland of the Orkney Islands, in Scotland
A friend of the rapper has been detained in connection with shooting

Rapper Mozzy and his crew were arrested on Sunday after seven people were shot at his afterparty following a concert in Wichita.

At around 1am, seven people were left with gunshot wounds and a further two were trampled on after several shooters reportedly opened fire at the City Nightz club, where the rapper was celebrating with fans.

Images on social media show Mozzy, who spent 10 months in jail last year for separate federal firearms charges, being ordered to get out of a vehicle before being placed in handcuffs and led away by police officers. He has been reportedly released without charge since.

One of the rapper's friends, who was also in the vehicle, has been detained in connection with the shooting, according to TMZ.

Mozzy's crew members are also being questioned by police but it is not confirmed anyone else has been detained.

Images show the harrowing moment the perpetrators open fire in the club, as terrified revellers attempt to escape or take cover.

Rapper Mozzy was arrested on Sunday after seven people were shot at his afterparty following a concert in Wichita

At around 1am, seven people were left with gunshot wounds and a further two were trampled on after several shooters reportedly opened fire at the City Nightz club (pictured)

Wichita Police Lt. Aaron Moses said investigators have recovered four guns and were working to determine if they were the weapons the shooters used.

All the victims are being treated at hospital, Moses said, with one person critically injured.

The gunshot victims included five men between the ages of 21 and 34, a 21-year-old woman and a 24-year-old woman, Moses said. The two people trampled were a 30-year-old woman and a 31-year-old male.

Detective Chris Merceau said during a news conference Sunday morning that police have been called to the nightclub about a dozen times this year for various incidents, including a report of aggravated battery and a drive-by shooting on May 21.

He said police met with the club's owner after that incident and discussed the importance of using electronic wands to detect weapons on patrons and surveillance cameras. He said investigators will work to determine if any of those recommendations were followed.

Police said the club and surrounding area will be shut down for some time while investigators examine the scene.

The shootings were part of a particularly violent night in Wichita, a city of nearly 400,000 people about 200 miles (320 kilometers) southwest of Kansas City, Missouri.

According to the police department's Facebook page, a 17-year-old boy was found dead around 6:30 pm on Saturday.

Investigators said it appears he was shot during an argument with a 21-year-old man, who showed up at a hospital with a gunshot wound to his hand.

About twenty minutes after the shootings at City Nightz on Sunday morning, a 35-year-old man was walking down a road when an unknown suspect shot him in the arm.

'We have to take actions to push back against this increase in gun violence that we are seeing,' Mayor Brandon Whipple said.

'We have to come together as a community and talk with our young people in particular about how resorting to gun violence is not the way to solve a problem or issue.'
Thousands of hotel workers in Southern California strike for higher pay during Independence Day holiday

Xinhua) 15:47, July 03, 2023

LOS ANGELES, July 3 (Xinhua) -- Thousands of unionized hotel workers in Southern California walked off their job Sunday morning for higher wages and better welfare, just as tourists descended on the region for the Fourth of July holiday.

The strike is expected to last four days until the holiday concludes.

"Our members were devastated first by the pandemic, and now by the greed of their bosses," said Kurt Petersen, co-president of UNITE HERE Local 11, a union representing more than 32,000 workers in hotels and relevant fields in Southern California and Arizona.

"The industry got bailouts while we got cuts. Now, the hotel negotiators decided to take a four-day holiday instead of negotiating. Shameful," she noted.

Up to 15,000 employees from the group participated in the strike, which affected 65 major hotels in Los Angeles and neighboring Orange counties, including Ritz-Carlton, Hilton, Marriott, and Four Seasons, according to the labor union.

It marks the largest multi-hotel strike in local history that came during one of the busiest holiday weekends of the year, said the organizer.

Video clips posted online showed that members of the union wearing red T-shirts rallied outside the InterContinental Los Angeles Downtown Hotel, one of the biggest hotels in the region, as early as 6:30 a.m. Another big hotel Westin Bonaventure Hotel was able to reach a deal with the workers, averting a strike against it.

In an Instagram post Sunday morning, the union said, "When workers' rights are under attack, what do we do? STAND UP, FIGHT BACK! The #SoCalHotelStrike has started."

The Hotel Association of Los Angeles said that their facilities will remain open with management and other nonunion staff filling in the event that the union strike materialized.

(Web editor: Zhang Kaiwei, Liang Jun)
Shots were fired at a pre-wedding party with more than 100 guests in Wolverhampton.

Police received a number of calls to the Gujarati Association on Mander Street in Merridale, Wolverhampton, at around 9.30pm on Saturday night.

It is believed a car drove up to the back of the venue before someone got out of the vehicle and fired a number of shots at another car parked at the site. A gun was then fired back towards the attacker from the direction of the wedding party by another person, according to reports.

The shooting took place in the car park of Sitara Hall, a venue built ten years ago next to the Gujarati Association's main building, where a Mehndi party was taking place ahead of a Muslim wedding.

No one is thought to have been injured but a vehicle was damaged and will be forensically examined, police said.

The Association's vice Chair Naresh Patel told MailOnline: 'The hall is used by all communities for family occasions such as weddings, receptions, wakes and so on. On Saturday night it was a Mehndi party ahead of a Muslim wedding. The incident happened at about 8.30pm. The police came and took away the car that had been hit in the car park and took details from some of the guests.

'They did not search anyone as far as I know and the party continued until 11pm.'

Sitara Hall, pictured on Monday, where a Mehndi party was taking place on Saturday

Police received a number of calls to the Gujarati Association in Merridale on Saturday night

A Mehndi party is a pre-wedding event for the bride, her closest female friends and other family members. The bride has henna applied to her hands and feet.

It is understood that the Hall was booked from 5pm until 11pm. The Association provides security but this does not involve the searching of guests.

Mr Patel added: 'We do have security. Normally this is because alcohol will be consumed but at this event there was no alcohol served.'

Sitara Hall sits on Mander Street, an industrial zone on the edge of Woverhampton, where several different community centres are based.

In addition to the Gujarati Association, there is a Sikh Gurdwara at the other end of the street, a Buddhist Vihara across the road and a nearby Ukranian centre.

The shooting incident happened at the far end of the car park, next to Upper Zoar Street, a quiet road with a park next to it.

Mr Patel added: 'Our hall was built by money donated by the Gujarati community but it serves all the communities of Wolverhampton.

'It is a big venue that can hold a lot of people and we only hire it out for family events, not commercial events.

'We have not had anything like this happen before. People at the party were annoyed that it had happened.

'It is not what you want at a celebration but the party did not stop. It went on until the end.'

Officers were at the scene yesterday carrying out forensic and CCTV enquiries.

The shooting took place in the car park of Sitara Hall, a purpose-built venue built ten years ago next to the Gujarati Association's main building (pictured on Monday)

More than 100 people were at the event and detectives are keen to speak to witnesses

Chief Inspector Paul Southern, of Wolverhampton Police said: 'This was a totally reckless attack and it's by luck rather than by design that no one was seriously injured or killed.

'We believe there were more than 100 people at this event and it's vital that we speak to anyone who was there and who saw or recorded what happened, so that we can bring those involved to justice.

'The community will be understandably shocked and worried by what happened and we'll be carrying out extra patrols to offer reassurance today.

'Anyone with information has been asked to get in touch via 101 or Live Chat on our website, quoting log 4353 of 1 July.

'Alternatively, contact Crimestoppers anonymously on 0800 555 111.'

The Gujarati Association has released a statement about the incident over the weekend.

'During the private event held at the premises of the Gujarati Association, an incident involving the discharge of a firearm took place. Our primary concern remains the safety and well-being of our community members and all those who attended the event,' the statement said.

'Law enforcement authorities were immediately notified, and they responded swiftly to the situation. They are currently conducting a thorough investigation to gather all the facts surrounding the incident. The Gujarati Association is cooperating fully with the authorities to ensure that the incident is resolved efficiently and comprehensively.

'At this time, we can confirm that no injuries have been reported as a result of the firearm discharge. The Gujarati Association deeply regrets this incident and assures the public that safety measures will be further reinforced to prevent any such occurrences in the future.

'We understand the concerns and questions that may arise due to this incident, and we assure you that we are committed to providing updates as more information becomes available. Our priority is to maintain the safety and security of our community members and visitors.

'We would like to thank the local law enforcement agencies for their swift response and ongoing support during this challenging time. We also request the cooperation of the media and the public in allowing the investigation to proceed unhindered, and to refrain from speculation or spreading unverified information that could potentially hinder the process.

'The Gujarati Association remains committed to fostering a safe and inclusive environment for everyone, and we will continue to work diligently to ensure the well-being of our community members. We appreciate your understanding and support during this time.'
Witnesses claimed the boy may have had a disability and used a wheelchair

A seven-year-old Polish boy  who died alongside his mother after they plunged from a ferry into the Baltic Sea  may have been disabled and in a wheelchair, witnesses said.

It comes as Polish authorities announced they are investigating the tragedy as the 'murder of a child and the suicide of the mother', amid claims that the ship's railings were too high to allow an accidental fall.

Initial reports suggested the boy had fallen and his mother had jumped in to rescue him, but CCTV footage is said to not match this version of events and a murder probe has been launched by Swedish prosecutors, with no suspect identified.

Passengers on the Stena Spirit ferry, which was carrying 310 people from Sweden to Poland on Thursday, watched on in horror as rescue teams scoured the water for an hour to find the boy and his mother.

The mother, who has been named as Paulina, is said to have come from Grudziadz, a town south of Gdansk, and was a single parent to her son Lech, according to Polish newspaper Fakt.

Passengers on the Stena Spirit ferry watched as rescue teams scoured the ocean for an hour to find the boy and his mother on Thursday

The Swedish ferry, Stena Spirit, had 310 passengers onboard and was midway through its journey to Gdynia in Poland from Karlskrona in Sweden when the tragedy occurred, officials have said

The pair were found in the freezing waters, winched up by helicopter and rushed to hospital, where they both died.

Now an expert has told Polish media that the high railings on the ferry meant the boy's fall of around 65ft 'couldn't have been an accidental'.

Agnieszka Zembrzycka, a Stena Line spokesman, said on Friday that the CCTV footage from the ship did not match this version of events.

'The barriers are at the height of my chest, and I am 180cm tall, so it could not have been an accidental fall,' Polish rescue expert Michal Mieczkowski told local media.

'Either the child was climbing and the jolting or rocking of the ship caused him to lose his balance, or is this a suicide attempt?'

The ferry, which is owned by the Stena Line, was on its way from Gdynia in Poland to Karlskrona in Sweden on Thursday.

An extensive search and rescue operation was launched involving ships and helicopters from Sweden and Nato units in the area also came to their assistance

The mother was found in the freezing water 59 minutes after the alarm was sounded and her son seven minutes later, according to a ferry official, before they were winched by helicopter and rushed to Karlskrona Hospital.

Meanwhile, over the weekend, a Polish diving group who were sailing in the area claimed to have recovered a Stena Spirit lifebuoy from the sea.

There has been no confirmation whether this was linked to the rescue effort.

Swedish prosecutors said on Friday that they had initiated a preliminary investigation where the criminal charge is murder, while adding that no suspect had been identified.

'The investigation aims to try to clarify what happened,' prosecutor Stina Brindmark said.

She did not want to answer whether the investigation concerns the mother, whose death was confirmed on Friday.

Over the weekend, a Polish diving group who were sailing in the area claimed to have recovered a Stena Spirit lifebuoy from the sea

A police spokesman said on Friday: 'Unfortunately, in the morning we received information from the Swedish side that we have to pass on this terrible news to the family, because both the boy and the woman are dead.'

The ferry's rescue boat, a helicopter belonging to the Swedish Maritime Administration, German helicopters and an American aircraft from a nearby Nato exercise all took part in the rescue effort, local media reported.

'There were passengers who alerted the crew that two people were missing. Then possessions were found without the people. Then the crew was alerted and surveillance images were checked', Stefan Elfstrom, of Stena Line, said.

The Swedish ferry, Stena Spirit, was in the Baltic midway through its journey to Gdynia in Poland from Karlskrona in Sweden (file image shows the ferry)

Swedish police issued an appeal to passengers via Poland's state-run news agency PAP asking for information that could explain how the accident occurred.

A Swedish Maritime Administration spokesman said the child fell from a height of about 20 metres (65 feet).

'First we received a report that one person had fallen overboard, then it turned out to be two,' said Lars Blom, chief of rescue operations at its rescue centre.

Swedish Maritime Administration spokesman said the child fell from a height of about 20 meters (65 feet) (file image of Stena Spirit)

Sebastian Kluska, a Polish Maritime Search and Rescue Service director, said the ferry left Gdynia on Thursday at 9am.

At approximately 4.20pm information came through about two people who fell from the ferry and emergency services rushed to the scene.

The accident occurred in the Swedish area of responsibility of the SAR service, but the Polish team was called in to help, he said.

About five minutes after the broadcast of the message, which was also sent out by Polish Rescue Radio, the Swedish administration and the Swedish Rescue Coordination Center asked for help, he told Fakt.pl.

It was the rescue boat crew who found the Polish woman and her son in the water, he added, claiming they were then handed over to the helicopters.
Stunning new footage from the frontlines of Ukraine has captured the moment a Russian tank exploded in a fireball after hitting a mine.

Surveying the battlefield with a drone camera, Ukraine's 225th mechanised brigade targeted a lone Russian tank barrelling along a dirt road north-west of Bakhmut - the industrial city in Ukraine's Donetsk region that has become the epicentre of the bloody conflict.

As the tank breaches the treeline and moves into an exposed position, it suddenly explodes in a huge orange fireball.

Moments later, the drone zooms in to watch as the stricken tank's desperate occupants bail out of the immobilised armour and make a run for the trees.

It comes as Ukrainian's deputy defence minister this morning claimed Kyiv's forces had recaptured some 37 square kilometres (14 square miles) of Russian-held territory last week.

'Over the past week... the area liberated (in the east) was increased by nine square kilometres,' Deputy Defence Minister Hanna Malyar said, adding that Ukrainian forces had wrested another 28 square kilometres in the south from Russian control.

Stunning new footage from the frontlines of Ukraine has captured the moment a Russian tank exploded in a fireball

As the tank breaches the treeline and moves into an exposed position, it suddenly explodes in a huge orange fireball

The stricken tank's occupants tumble out of the smoking hull and scramble for cover

Ukrainian's deputy defence minister this morning claimed Kyiv's forces had recaptured some 37 square kilometres (14 square miles) of Russian-held territory last week

Progress has been slow but steady since Ukraine announced its long-anticipated counter-offensive last month.

Kyiv's forces are coming up against heavily entrenched Russian defensive positions, with Moscow's military leaders having dug in deep ahead of the offensive along both the southern and eastern fronts.

Malyar said Ukrainian troops were fighting 'fierce' battles with Russian forces around the eastern flashpoint city of Bakhmut, while in the south, Kyiv's fighters had 'successes' along the front towards the Melitopol and Berdyansk sectors.

'Fierce fighting is going on everywhere,' Maliar wrote on social media, adding: 'The situation is quite complicated'.

Ukrainian forces have urged Western allies to escalate pledges of military support as they continue to force the offensive.

Ukraine's military commander-in-chief Valery Zaluzhny expressed frustration in an interview published Friday at the slow deliveries of weaponry promised by the West.

It 'pisses me off' that some in the West complain about the slow start and progress to the long-awaited push against Russian occupying forces, he told the Washington Post, pointing out that Ukraine needs more timely delivery of weapons to sustain the offensive.

He also complained he has a fraction of the artillery shells that Russia is firing.

'A lot of people die every day - a lot. Just because no decision has been made yet,' Zaluzhny said.

Zaluzhny added that his Western supporters would not themselves launch an offensive without air superiority, but Ukraine is still awaiting F-16 fighter jets promised by its allies.

'I do not need 120 planes. I'm not going to threaten the whole world. A very limited number would be enough,' he told the newspaper.

Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky also spoke about F-16 training on Saturday during a visit to Kyiv by Spanish Prime Minister Pedro Sanchez.

'I believe that some partners are dragging their feet,' Zelensky said, referring to F-16 training for Ukrainian pilots.

A coalition of Kyiv's European backers led by the Netherlands and Denmark has said it will help teach Ukrainian pilots, after the United States gave its green light in May.

Dutch Defence Minister Kajsa Ollongren last month said the training could start this summer.

A Ukrainian serviceman of the 3rd Assault Brigade fires a 122mm mortar towards Russian positions at the front line, near Bakhmut, Donetsk region, Ukraine, Sunday, July 2, 2023

Ukrainian servicemen walk along a road in the recently retaken village of Novodarivka

A Ukrainian serviceman from the 3rd Separate Assault Brigade flashes the V-sign as they ride an armoured personnel carrier (APC) at a road near the frontline city of Bakhmut, Donetsk region

This photograph taken on June 28, 2023, shows heavily damaged residential buildings in the frontline town of Avdiivka, Donetsk region, amid the Russian invasion of Ukraine

A destroyed Russian tank is seen in the village of Novodarivka recently retaken by the Ukrainian Armed Forces, amid Russia's attack on Ukraine, in Zaporizhzhia region, Ukraine July 2, 2023

On Sunday, Ukrainian officials said they had successfully neutralised a new drone attack on Kyiv.

'All enemy targets in the airspace around Kyiv were detected and destroyed,' said Sergiy Popko, head of the Kyiv city military administration.

In a separate statement, Ukraine's air force said Sunday that it had shot down three cruise missiles and eight Iranian-made attack drones deployed by Moscow's forces overnight.

'Eight Shaheds were launched from the southeast, and three Kalibr missiles were launched from the Black Sea,' the air force said.

It did not provide any details on the Kyiv attacks.

Ruslan Kravchenko, head of the Kyiv regional military administration, said that three houses were damaged by falling debris in the Kyiv region.

Kyiv, which had been relatively spared from attacks since the beginning of the year, faced frequent nightly aerial raids in May.
A major city mayor has been accused of leaving a restaurant without paying the bill after telling a waiter: 'Do you know who I am?'

Tory Whanau, the mayor of New Zealand's capital Wellington, strenuously denies she uttered the words and that she was drunk last Friday night at the Old Quarter Vietnamese fusion restaurant.

But the 40-year-old does admit to being 'tipsy' and leaving without paying the tab because of a 'miscommunication' with friends that has left her feeling 'mortified'.

Speaking on Monday, Ms Whanau said she was 'a little bit merry after a few wines and a hearty meal' but that her not wearing makeup was mistaken for being drunk.

'I wasn't wearing makeup, maybe that's what half the problem was, because it was a nice casual Friday,' she said on radio station Newstalk ZB, after video emerged of her interaction with a waiter while holding a bottle of wine.

Restaurant manager Shay Lomas said staff considered not serving alcohol to Ms Whanau when she arrived, but decided it was OK because she was ordering food.

Tory Whanau (pictured), the mayor of New Zealand's capital Wellington, rejected accusations she was drunk last Friday night at the Old Quarter Vietnamese fusion restaurant

Mr Lomas said the mayor may have just been joking when she allegedly asked staff if they knew who she was.

'I'd say she was trying to be funny but also not really  it was a mixture of serious and a bit ditzy, there wasn't anything really disrespectful about it, it was just like 'do you recognise me?',' he told The Post newspaper.

Andrew Jenkins, the waiter who served her, claimed at one point she held a bottle of wine as she asked him 'do you know who I am?'

He did not know who she was, but guessed she was a politician, which allegedly led to Ms Whanau saying 'I'm the mayor, can you do your thing?'

The mayor rejects the interaction took place and said: 'That's just something I wouldn't say. I deny saying that.'

The restaurant manager said the staff mentioned it seemed as if the mayor may have been trying to get special treatment, but he had not served her personally so he couldn't confirm that.

Video emerged of Ms Whanau's interaction with a waiter while holding a bottle of wine (pictured)

Ms Whanau said that she and her friend leaving without paying was just an 'honest mistake'. The Old Quarter restaurant is pictured

Ms Whanau said that she and her friend leaving without paying was just an 'honest mistake'.

'(It was a) miscommunication, we (each) thought the other person had paid the bill,' she said.

'(We were) mortified, absolutely embarrassed to realise the next morning that we hadn't, so she paid it immediately.'

Mr Lomas confirmed the $140 tab was paid the next day.

Ms Whanau said she had 'no regrets' about her eventful night out, but in future she would be more conscious about people recording her.
Fury is mounting at Sussex Police after video emerged of a PCSO refusing to attend an alleged assault at a Co-op store just seconds away - telling a member of the public who approached him for help 'but then I'll have to deal with it'.

Footage of the incident in Lancing shows a witness approach the officer, parked up in a marked police car, to report an alleged incident at the supermarket just 200-300 yards away.

The witness claimed there had been a fight sparked by people trying to stop shoplifters - with a member of the public attacked - and asked the police community support officer to get to the scene.

But the officer - whose response is now being reviewed by the force - told the witness he was not part of a response unit and appeared to refuse to deal with the incident. The force apologised for the 'clumsy language used by the PCSO' as they investigate.

The exchange on Thursday, which was recorded on dashcam and quickly shared on TikTok, comes as police are increasingly criticised over high numbers of reported crimes that never result in a conviction.

A former Scotland Yard detective, Mike Neville, told MailOnline he was 'appalled' when he saw the video, saying every day the public's trust in the police 'ebbs away' and that the footage shows 'police are not on your side'.

Another ex Scotland Yard detective, Peter Bleksley, has also since hit out at Sussex Police - telling Good Morning Britain the incident was a 'dreadful look' for the force and that an officer wearing a uniform and in a marked car should have dealt with the disturbance 'and actually done what they are paid to do.'

'I'm not a response unit unfortunately,' a police officer is heard saying in footage shared online

The officer was parked up on a street just 200-300 yards from a Co-op store

Good Morning Britain, who reported on the incident, said it took them 26 seconds to make the journey the police officer would have had to make

The officer is heard telling a member of the public asking for help 'then I'll have to deal with it'

In footage of the incident, a witness is heard telling the officer: 'You need to get around to the Co-op. Honestly, there's just been a fight around there because people are trying to stop the shoplifters that you're doing nothing about.

'There's a member of the public that's just been assaulted by a 15-year-old girl who's drunk, had a drink thrown in her face, got punched.

'People have called the police, we've come round here and you're sitting here.'

But the police officer told him: 'I'm not a response unit unfortunately.'

The member of the public then says: 'I know you're not, but the sight of the car will make them scatter. '

The police officer then replies: 'Yeah but then I'll have to deal with it.'

'Are you afraid to deal with it then,' the man asks the officer, who tells him: 'That's not the point.'

But the member of the public is far from impressed and tells him: 'It kind of is the point, that's the perception.'

The officer then says: 'It's why I'm here and not round there.'

Mike Neville, former Scotland Yard detective, told MailOnline: 'When you join the police you join to help the community. They have got to be able to deal with emergencies,' he said.

'It's no good just sitting there. I was appalled.

A spokesman from Sussex Police said: 'We are aware of video footage of a single-crewed Police Community Support Officer (PCSO) being approached by a member of the public to report an incident in Lancing'

Sussex Police are investigating a report of shoplifting and an alleged assault at the Co-op in Lancing on Thursday June 29 (stock image)

Read more: Just what ARE the police for? More than 200,000 burglaries  almost 600 a day  went unsolved by police last year, shocking figures revealed in April. Crime statistics published by the Government showed 77 per cent of cases were closed by police in England and Wales with no suspect identified. It means that 209,424 domestic break-ins, or 574 a day, went unsolved, the analysis of official data by the Liberal Democrats revealed. Separate Home Office data showed only 5.1 per cent of 'violence against the person' offences led to a suspect being taken to court. For robbery the figure was 6.6 per cent and for thefts 4.3 per cent. Across all types of crime reported last year, just 5.6 per cent led to a suspect being charged or summonsed  roughly the same as the previous year. A further 4 per cent led to the offender being given a 'slap on the wrist' punishment. Advertisement

'Why was a PCSO driving a marked police car? Whatever they were doing there, if there's an emergency police have got to stop and deal with it.'

He said the public were losing trust in the police, adding: 'Every day the trust ebbs away.

'The average working person feels they are being let down by the police, and this is just one example.

'PCSOs are designed for low level crime and to trawl the streets.

'The presence of a uniform could have defused the situation.

'The video shows again that the police are not on your side.'

Good Morning Britain, who reported on the incident, said it took them 26 seconds to make the journey the police officer would have had to make from where he was parked up to the Co-op.

A spokesman from Sussex Police told MailOnline: 'We are aware of video footage of a single-crewed Police Community Support Officer (PCSO) being approached by a member of the public to report an incident in Lancing.

'The matter was reported to us and a police officer attended the incident as an emergency.

'The PCSO also then attended the scene.

'The investigation into a report of assault and shoplifting is subject of a live investigation, and the victim has been contacted by officers.'

West Sussex local policing Superintendent Nick Dias said: 'Keeping the public safe and feeling safe is paramount and our officers and PCSOs work hard to tackle crime and anti-social behaviour, often in challenging circumstances. We [work] closely with local retailers and partners to help prevent and respond to anti-social behaviour and assaults on shop workers.

'We are sorry for the clumsy language used by the PCSO in this exchange and acknowledge the public's concern.

'A police unit was dispatched to the scene as a matter of priority. Our response to this incident is being reviewed.'

Speaking out about the incident, Peter Bleksley, former Scotland Yard Detective, told GMB: 'They are wearing a police uniform, they are in a marked vehicle. They are supposed to be there as a presence in communities. This is crime being committed in their community.

'That officer most definitely should have responded or at the very least, got on the radio and got another unit to go and attend this incident.

'This cuts across the whole trust in the police which as we know is tanking and this police community support officer in this case, in my opinion, clearly came way, way short of what we should expect from them.'

People were quick to comment on the video on social media

Read more: Sussex Police issue humiliating apology after Home Secretary blasted them for 'policing pronouns' when they warned it was 'hateful' to say trans paedophile was a man when she sexually abused seven children Advertisement

He added: 'In my opinion, that officer should have attended this disturbance, dealt with any crime being reported and actually done what they are paid to do.

'These officers get paid out of the public purse, they are there to reassure communities, to build bridges with communities and to say 'if I had to deal with it' or words to that effect 'it's not my job' is quite frankly appalling.

'This is the real core problem with policing in 2023. The moderate majority of your viewers feel that they are let down by the police. Their burglaries are not investigated, when their car gets broken into or stolen it is not investigated - and that is how the moderate majority usually engage with police - whether it be a police constable or a community support officer.'

He described it as a 'dreadful look for Sussex Police' and policing in a wider context.

People were also quick to hit out at the incident on social media.

A retired police officer tweeted: 'I am a ret police officer but while serving, I would never not intervene in any incident taking place, on or off duty. As for the officer possibly being a PCSO, they do not carry officer safety equipment but can detain for 30 mins which is ample time for police to arrive!'

Another said: 'Whether a PCSO or not would have had more safety equipment than the member of the public that got punched.'

A third, commenting on the video, wrote: 'If you can't use police powers then you shouldn't be driving a marked car.'

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Sadiq Khan today came under pressure to keep all London police stations open after he intervened to save one in Uxbridge just weeks before a crunch by-election.

Policing minister Chris Philp, speaking in the House of Commons, claimed the London mayor would shed his 'credibility' if he failed to reverse further planned closures.

A furious row has erupted after Mr Khan wrote to Metropolitan Police Commissioner Sir Mark Rowley to say the under-threat Uxbridge police station should now remain open.

It comes less than three weeks before the Uxbridge and South Ruislip by-election, when local voters - who were concerned by the possible closure - will choose a new MP to replace ex-prime minister Boris Johnson.

Labour have high hopes of taking the west London constituency off the Tories and Mr Khan has been accused of 'cynical political game-playing' and attempting to boost his party's chances.

Policing minister Chris Philp, speaking in the House of Commons, claimed the London mayor would shed his 'credibility' if he failed to reverse further planned police station closures

Tory former Cabinet minister Theresa Villiers raised the controversy during Home Office questions in the Commons this afternoon

Tory former Cabinet minister Theresa Villiers, who represents another Greater London constituency in Chipping Barnet, raised the controversy during Home Office questions in the Commons this afternoon.

She asked Mr Philp: 'Given this morning's U-turn by the Mayor of London over selling off Uxbridge police station, does the minister believe he should also act to save Barnet police station?

'And, if he doesn't, his decision on Uxbridge looks like cynical political game-playing and interference in a by-election?'

Mr Philp replied: 'I and many other Londoners were concerned when Sadiq Khan, I think in 2017, announced plans to close 37 police stations.

'Thanks to resolute campaigning of local councillor Steve Tuckwell [the Tory by-election candidate] in Hillingdon, Sadiq Khan has executed a last-minute handbrake U-turn under pressure - I'm sure entirely unconnected with the upcoming by-election.

'My right honourable friend is absolutely right, if Sadiq Khan is to have any credibility at all with Londoners - he currently has pretty much none at all - he should reverse not just this one police station closure plan but all of his police station closure plans.'

Sadiq Khan, in a letter to Metropolitan Police Commissioner Sir Mark Rowley, said that the under-threat Uxbridge police station should now remain open

Boris Johnson, pictured at Uxbridge police station in December 2021, had been campaigning for it to remain open before he quit as the local MP

Susan Hall, who is campaigning to be the Tory candidate in next year's mayoral election, accused Mr Khan of 'political games'

But Mr Khan hit back at the criticism and blamed 'huge government cuts' for police station closures, which he highlighted had also taken place during Mr Johnson's spell as London mayor.

'Huge government cuts over the last decade have forced the Met to make extremely difficult decisions about where they allocate resources,' he said.

'More than 70 police stations and front counters were closed in London between 2008-2016 under the previous mayor Boris Johnson.'

In his letter to Sir Mark, Mr Khan said he had listened to the concerns of local residents and that it was in the best interests of the community for the Uxbridge station to remain open.

The Labour politician added that there was a 'strong' case for retaining stations across London, after the highly critical review of the Met by Baroness Louise Casey.

'I'm proud that thanks to our extra investment from City Hall we're once again restoring neighbourhood policing to our local communities,' he said.

'And I've also been listening to local residents and campaigners in places like Uxbridge who have been telling me how having a local police station in their area makes them feel much safer.

'As we continue to rebuild neighbourhood policing and restore confidence after the Casey Review, I've written to the Met Commissioner saying that the case for now retaining more police station sites across the capital is strong, and would be an important part of our work ensuring the force delivers everything that Londoners need and expect.'

Susan Hall, a Tory member of the London Assembly who is campaigning to be her party's candidate in next year's mayoral election, had also joined the criticism of Mr Khan.

'The Met Police is not a toy that Sadiq Khan can use for his political games,' she said.

'Residents in Uxbridge are seriously concerned about his appalling decision to close the station, and he has now U-turned only because his disastrous ULEZ expansion is threatening Labour's prospects of winning the by-election.'

Ms Hall called on local voters to 'send a message' to the London mayor by backing Tory candidate Mr Tuckwell in the Uxbridge and South Ruislip contest this month.

She added: 'If I am elected Mayor of London, all of my decisions will be in the best interests of Londoners, unlike Sadiq Khan who only thinks about himself.'

After quitting Downing Street last summer, Mr Johnson used an appearance in the House of Commons to demand Mr Khan save Uxbridge police station.

He told MPs that Uxbridge remained 'the most sensible place' for a police station in the local borough.

The ex-PM also filmed a video outside Uxbridge police station last month, before standing down as the local MP, in which he implored Mr Khan to 'end the uncertainty'.

Labour's by-election candidate Danny Beales said he was 'delighted' with the decision to keep the police station open.

'Today's success clearly shows what we can achieve when we work together,' he said.

'This is just the start of what I want to deliver as a strong, local voice for the people of Uxbridge and South Ruislip.'
British passengers were fearing for their lives when an 'extremely drunk' passenger allegedly tried to open the plane door during a flight from Turkey to the UK.

The Jet2 aircraft, which was bound for Glasgow and packed with holidaymakers travelling home from Bodrum, was forced to make an emergency landing in Bulgaria last night. Police in Sofia then boarded the airliner and arrested him.

After noticing what the man was doing, passengers sat near him are said to have bravely tackled him before the crew were alerted and the plane was grounded.

Shocking footage shows the man stumbling and appearing to resist officers as he is bundled down the aisle of the plane, while furious passengers yell 'scumbag' and 'idiot' at him.

The incident took place at around 10pm BST during the LS124 overnight flight. A passenger told MailOnline that they eventually landed back in Glasgow in the early hours of this morning with their family.

Police in Sofia boarded the airliner and arrested the man after claims he had tried to open the plane door mid-flight

Furious passengers yelled 'scumbag' and 'idiot' at the man as he was hauled off the flight

The traveller, who asked not to be named, said: 'A man who was extremely drunk and sat in the emergency exit row attempted to open the door mid-flight.

'[It] looked like he'd maybe woken up and didn't know where he was or anything.

'He was restrained by a woman who was on her own and an elderly man in another seat.

'I realised what was happening when people started screaming and shouting, I felt petrified for my children's lives and everybody's safety on the plane.'

During the terrifying ordeal worried parents and their kids watched on as the man was hauled off the plane.

With their family now safely home, a passenger said they are doing well after the nightmarish journey and praised the flight attendants on the budget airline.

'We are doing fine now. Just a bit shaken up and thankful that the Jet2 staff managed the situation so professionally.

Shocking footage shows the man stumbling and appearing to resist officers as he is bundled down the aisle of the plane

Passengers feared for their safety during the ordeal, with worried parents and their kids watching on as the man was hauled off the plane

Jet2 said a disruptive passenger had to be removed from the flight after it diverted to Sofia

The flight from Bodrum to Glasgow is said to have arrived at its final destination in the early hours of Monday

'We landed back in Glasgow at the early hours of the morning today, and have no further information about the man in the video for now.'

A spokesman for Jet2 said: 'Flight LS124 from Bodrum to Glasgow diverted to Sofia Airport last night, so that a disruptive passenger could be offloaded by police. After a short delay, the flight continued to Glasgow.

'We would like to apologise to all affected customers for any inconvenience caused. As a family friendly airline, we take a zero tolerance to disruptive passenger behaviour, and everyone's health, comfort and well-being will always be our number one priority.'
A trans woman activist who appeared on ITV News as a 'struggling mother' has shared a photo of her breastfeeding her child and said she only stopped doing so after she had a cancer relapse.

Mika Minio-Paluello  a former Labour special adviser  was seen during Wednesday night's News At Ten programme doing the washing up while she spoke of how the soaring water bills were 'tough if you're a mum'.

The segment led to criticism from feminists including Labour MP Rosie Duffield, who wrote: 'Dear @itvnews, I am sure this is a lovely, intelligent and decent human being. This was an important piece. This is not however a struggling ''mother''.'

Ms Minio-Paluello, who was born male, also complained about viewers 'obsessing' over a breast pump that could be seen in the footage and said it belonged to a housemate.

And after a feminist campaigner responded to the row by mentioning that Ms Minio-Paluello had been 'simulating breastfeeding', she hit back by saying that 'trans women can breastfeed' before sharing a photo of herself doing so.

Trans women can make themselves lactate by taking a combination of medicines that tricks the body into making milk. In 2018, a 30-year-old transgender woman became the first officially recorded to breastfeed her baby and was able to produce 227 grams of milk a day.

Mika Minio-Paluello said in the caption to this photo: 'Here's me on the bus to hospital for the 1st chemo round, feeding my child for the last time'

As she shared the image, Ms Minio-Paluello wrote: 'In the end, I only breastfed my child for a few weeks. I then had to stop because I had a cancer relapse and didn't want to poison my child.

How can biological men lactate? Trans women can make themselves lactate by taking a combination of medicines called the Newman-Goldfarb protocol. It tricks the body into making milk. It was originally developed for biological women who adopted or had a child via surrogacy and wanted to breastfeed. The method involves taking hormone boosting medications, including the pill. Other drugs that are used include anti-sickness medicine metoclopramide, heart medication digitalis and anti-psychotic chlorpromazine and sedative medications which are known to increase prolactin, the hormone responsible for milk production. Domperidone, an anti-nausea drug, is the preferred option for the protocol as it has fewer potentially dangerous side effects. However, it's not completely risk free. The drug can pass into breast milk in small amounts and can sometimes give babies an irregular heartbeat as a result. The drug regime is used in conjunction with a breast pump to mimic the changes a women's body undergoes during the late stages of pregnancy and shortly after the birth of a child. Experts have urged caution about transwomen using the Newman-Goldfarb protocol to lactate. They have warned that long term health implications from using the treatment, for both adult and baby, are unknown. There have been separate rare cases of biological men undergoing lactation in the past without deliberately setting out to do so. These are usually the result of a rare medication side effect influencing hormone production, or from a hormone-disorder. Advertisement

'Here's me on the bus to hospital for the 1st chemo round, feeding my child for the last time.'

This prompted further debate, with critics replying to the photo by saying it was not possible for someone with male sexual organs to breastfeed.

Trans women can make themselves lactate by taking a combination of medicines called the Newman-Goldfarb protocol. It was originally developed for biological women who adopted or had a child via surrogacy and wanted to breastfeed.

The method involves taking hormone boosting medications, including the pill. Other drugs that are used include anti-sickness medicine metoclopramide, heart medication digitalis and anti-psychotic chlorpromazine and sedative medications which are known to increase prolactin, the hormone responsible for milk production.

Domperidone, an anti-nausea drug, is the preferred option for the protocol as it has fewer potentially dangerous side effects.

However, the regimen is not completely risk free. The drug can pass into breast milk in small amounts and can sometimes give babies an irregular heartbeat as a result.

The drug regime is used in conjunction with a breast pump to mimic the changes a women's body undergoes during the late stages of pregnancy and shortly after the birth of a child.

Experts have urged caution about transwomen using the Newman-Goldfarb protocol to lactate. They have warned that long-term health implications from using the treatment, for both adult and baby, are unknown.

There have been separate rare cases of biological men undergoing lactation in the past without deliberately setting out to do so. These are usually the result of a rare medication side effect influencing hormone production, or from a hormone-disorder.

It is unclear how many other trans women have been able to breastfeed since the first recorded case in 2018.

There are also very few studies and no scientific consensus about the nutritional quality of the breastmilk produced.

However, one this year, published in the Journal of Human Lactation found it contained similar levels of lactose, proteins and electrolytes.

After a feminist campaigner responded to the row by mentioning that Ms Minio-Paluello had been 'simulating breastfeeding', she hit back by saying that 'trans women can breastfeed'

The ITV news segment featuring Ms Minio-Paluello appeared as the second item on News At Ten and was presented by ITV News consumer editor Chris Choi.

It introduced Ms Minio Paluello  believed to be in her early 40s  as a 'Thames Water customer' and failed to mention her Labour credentials.

As the Daily Mail revealed, she is currently the TUC's Climate and Industry lead, while between October 2017 and November 2019 she was a special adviser to the shadow Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy secretary while Jeremy Corbyn was the leader of the Labour Party.

Ms Minio-Paluello's appearance is not the first time ITV News' impartiality has been called into question.

Last year its political editor Robert Peston was repeatedly criticised for being anti Tory, and in particular biased against former prime minister Boris Johnson.

During Wednesday night's News At Ten programme, Mika Minio-Paluello spoke about soaring water bills

The clip, broadcast last night, showed her washing up and doing some laundry

ITV News' coverage of rising water bills also prompted anger from women and feminists across social media for portraying the message that washing up and laundry is what mums do.

Ms Duffield also retweeted a post by a feminist campaigner which criticised the 'breastfeeding picture' Ms Minio-Paluello shared and accused her of 'motherfaking'.

Ms Minio-Paluello later tweeted: 'It needs saying: Adoptive mothers are mothers. Lesbian mothers are mothers, whether they birthed the child or not.

'Step mothers are mothers. Trans women can be mothers. It's not up to an MP or anyone else to march into a family & enforce what a child calls their parent.'
A 'remorseless' teacher who helped bring rush-hour traffic to a standstill at the heart of Londons financial sector has been jailed for five weeks, after the judge blasted her for lecturing the jury.

Louise Lancaster, 57, along with Julie Mecoli, 68, Stefania Morosi, 45, and history professor Nicholas Till, 67, blocked traffic as part of an Insulate Britain protest on Upper Thames Street on October 25, 2021.

Lancaster, of Grantchester, Cambridgeshire, Mecoli, of Canterbury, Kent, Morosi, of Ealing, West London and Till, of Islington, were convicted of causing a public nuisance.

Also, Lancaster was found to be in contempt of court after lecturing the jury on climate change.

Lancaster was jailed for five weeks for her role in the protest. The jury blasted her and the group for being remorseless

Lancaster was also found to be in contempt of court after lecturing the jury about her eco politics

Despite being warned by Judge Silas Reid not to do so Lancaster hectored the jury in her closing address.

The judge told jurors at Inner London Crown Court: She knew she wasnt entitled to say what she said at the end of her address.

She wants the trial to deal with her concerns with respect to climate change. That is not what this trial is about.

You must ignore what she said with respect to the government and climate change.

'You must not hold against her any potential perception that she is trying to manipulate you to go against your oath of affirmation.

You must put it out of your mind.

Before she was sentenced Lancaster, representing herself, told the court: I am more proud of my civil resistance for Insulate Britain than anything I have ever done in my life.

I feel immensely privileged to challenge the insidious injustice imposed on the few by the many.

I was facing the truth in unison with wonderful people sounding the alarm in the loudest way I could.

There was and is no time left for a measured response we need an emergency response set outside the business as usual.

Lancaster is married to Tim Lancaster, who was head of technology for BBC Worldwide for nine years before joining the Carbon Trust in 2005.

According to reports they live in 900,000 house in Cambridgeshire.

Louise Lancaster, a teacher, and another woman stand on Marsham Street in Westminster as they protested outside the Home Office last year

Gregory Frey, 25, and Alexander Rodger, 32, were also sentenced for their involvement in the protest at the junction of Bishopsgate and Wormwood Street on the same day.

Sentencing the six protestors Judge Reid said: None of you has any remorse for your actions, in fact, most if not all of you at least in part wear them with a degree of pride.

You each clearly feel that the democratic process has failed, and you each acted in a way that set yourselves above the law as if you were entitled to decide what the whole country should do.

Reid acknowledged their main aim was to attract publicity but added: Disruption to the public was a method, not a side effect to your actions.

He referred to the evidence of a member of the public who explained that she wanted to use the bus but couldnt and that she had missed a hospital appointment'.

Your actions cost people time, money and possibly worse,' the judge added.

Well over 5,000 people were significantly negatively impacted.

Protest has a long and important history in this country.

The stunt by the eco group is thought to have negatively impacted well over 5,000 people in October 2021

Mrs Lancaster was one of the two women activists who were filmed sitting in the road last October when they were 'nudged' along by a Range Rover driven by furious mother Sherrilyn Speid, 34, who had her school run delayed in Thurrock, Essex

A notice revealing a High Court order on the home of Tim and Louise Lancaster

But the right to protest does not entitle you to cause widespread disruption simply because you think it is the right thing to do.

Lancaster was jailed for five weeks.

Mecoli was given a four-week prison sentence suspended for 18 months and she will have to complete 75 hours of unpaid work.

Morosi was given a six-week prison sentence suspended for 18 months and will have to complete 100 hours of unpaid work.

Till was also given a six-week prison sentence suspended for 18 months and will have to complete 40 hours of unpaid work.

He will also have to pay 3,500 in prosecution costs.

Frey was given a five-week prison sentence suspended for 18 months while Rogers was given a 40-day prison sentence suspended for 18 months.

He will also have to complete 100 hours of unpaid work.

Frey, of Ely, Cambridgeshire and Rodger, of Brighton, earlier admitted causing a public nuisance.
Greedy supermarkets made almost 1billion last year by fleecing drivers with high fuel prices, a damning new report revealed today.

Watchdog the Competition and Markets Authority (CMA) said Asda, Tesco, Sainsbury's and Morrisons together made around 900million by failing to pass on the falling wholesale cost of petrol and diesel to consumers.

They made an average of 6p extra profit on every litre of fuel sold by keeping their profit margins higher than usual due to a lack of market competition.

Ministers said today they will act on a recommendation from the CMA to introduce a new law forcing fuel retailers to make up-to-date pricing information available to third parties.

This is expected to lead to the creation of 'pump watch' price comparison apps and websites, enabling drivers to easily find the cheapest fuel in their area and drive down prices.

The Government also pledged to hand new powers to a public organisation to 'closely monitor' pump prices and 'alert' ministers if further intervention is needed.

New rules could be announced as soon as tomorrow as the Government begins to clampdown on businesses unfairly hammering consumers by not passing on cuts in wholesale prices.

The CMA found that the average supermarket fuel margins rose by 6p per litre between 2019 and 2022.

And an increase in margins on diesel across all fuel retailers cost drivers an extra 13p per litre during the first five months of this year alone.

Supermarket giant Asda has also been fined 60,000 by the CMA for failing to provide relevant information in a timely manner, the regulator revealed.

The Prime Minister's official spokesman said: 'It is absolutely not right that drivers aren't getting the right fair deal for fuel and have in some circumstances been overcharged by retailers.'

CMA chief executive Sarah Cardell said: 'Competition at the pump is not working as well as it should be and something needs to change swiftly to address this.

'Drivers buying fuel at supermarkets in 2022 have paid around 6p per litre more than they would have done otherwise due to the four major supermarkets increasing their margins.

'This will have had a greater impact on vulnerable people, particularly those in areas with less choice of fuel stations.

'We need to reignite competition among fuel retailers.'

The idea of a pumpwatch scheme that would make it easier for drivers to find out local prices and fill up where the price is lowest has been around for some time.

It is hoped the scheme would force retails including major supermarkets to lower prices in areas where they are high, as drivers flock to lower prices nearby.

Luke Bosdet, the AA's spokesman on pump prices, said the problem of wider margins was longstanding ands had been seen after Hurrican Katrina in 2005, when prices shot up and took a long time to come back down.

What are the cheapest petrol stations in the London area today? These are the 20 cheapest locations for unleaded petrol price per litre in the London area, as given by PetrolPrices.com when searching with a 20-mile radius of Charing Cross: Esso East Barnet Road (EN4 8QX) - 136.9p Sainsbury's Hoddesdon (EN11 8HF) - 136.9p Low Prices Always Hoddesdon (EN11 8SX) - 137.8p Texaco Park Deptford Service Station (SE8 3BU) - 137.9p Tesco Extra Cheshunt ( EN8 0TA) - 137.9p Morrisons Peckham (SE15 5HS) - 138.7p Esso Sandy Lane (HA6 2HU) - 138.7p Asda Watford (WD24 7RT) - 138.7p Applegreen Camberwell Road (SE5 0EG) - 138.8p Tesco Extra Surrey Quays (SE16 7LL) - 138.9p Sainsbury's New Cross Gate (SE14 5UL) - 138.9p Tesco Bromley By Bow (E3 3DA) - 138.9p Sainsbury's Low Hall (E4 8ST) - 138.9p Morrisons Chingford (E4 8SA) - 138.9p Morrisons Enfield (EN1 1TW) - 138.9p Sainsburys Enfield (EN1 1TH) - 138.9p Gulf Ruislip (HA4 7DH) - 138.9p Tesco Extra Watford (WD17 2BD) - 138.9p Sainsbury's Dome Roundatbout (WD25 9JS) - 138.9p Jet Hollybus Hill (E11 1PP) - 139.0p Advertisement

'Sadly, it has taken more than 15 years for a government and competition watchdog to recognise this and do something about it. However, action that is better late than never is greatly appreciated by motorists across the UK,' he said.

'Since the pandemic, this has become not just apparent but blindingly obvious  exemplified by supermarkets over the past year charging way more for fuel than many small independents.

'The price difference of sometimes 10p or more for the same supermarket fuel but in a neighbouring town was so blatant that it has to be asked how the supermarkets ever expected to get away with it.'

As it stands the most well-known source for petrol price comparisons is the website PetrolPrices.com, which will allow users to search within 20 miles.

The website today showed the cheapest location within the M25 for unleaded is the Costco in Watford at 134.9p, although that is only a price for the chain's members.

After that, Esso East Barnet Road in North London is the cheapest at 136.9p per litre, ahead of Texaco Park Deptford Service Station in South East London at 137.9p.

Also comparatively cheap are Morrisons Peckham in South East London, Esso Sandy Lane in Moor Park, Hertfordshire and the Asda in Watford  all at 138.7p.

Others can be found in South East London, including the Applegreen Camberwell Road at 138.8p, and Tesco Extra Surrey Quays and Sainsbury's New Cross Gate, both at 138.9p.

However PetrolPrices.com limits users to 20 searches per day and will only show the cheapest options  so users cannot work out how much of a saving they could make.

Chancellor Jeremy Hunt has thrown Treasury support behind the pumpwatch scheme, telling the Sun on Sunday: 'I am committed to getting a fair deal for motorists.

I met with watchdogs this week to work out how to reduce everyday costs. They have my 100 per cent backing to crack down on any unfair treatment.'

The Chancellor and Grant Shapps, the Energy Secretary, have previously been said to favour something like a scheme that already runs in Northern Ireland, which has been credited with reducing the average price of filling up.

According to the RAC the average cost of filling up with petrol in the UK is 143.86p per litre, and diesel 145.54p.

That is down from a peak of 191.43p for petrol and 199.07p for diesel in July last year as the war in Ukraine and other factors causes a surge in prices.

While they are now lower there is concern that motorists are still not getting the best deal from retailers.

Britain's competition watchdog revealed in May plans to investigate whether consumers are paying more for fuel because of a 'failure in competition' in the supply chain and supermarkets.

Liberal Democrat Treasury Spokeswoman Sarah Olney said: 'This scathing report shows ministers have been asleep at the wheel while drivers are fleeced by petrol profiteers.

'The government has failed to properly police the road fuel market leaving families to fork out higher prices at the pump.

'Rishi Sunak needs to crack down now on this petrol profiteering, by hauling the bosses responsible into Downing Street and holding them to account.

'The CEOs of petrol firms who have failed to cut prices in line with wholesale costs should be told to give up their bonuses and slash prices over the summer.'
This is the terrifying moment a 'British' passenger on a Ryanair flight from Croatia attempts to open the plane door ahead of take-off.

The unnamed man, believed to be from the UK and aged 27, is seen shouting at other passengers and cabin crew in the aisle of the aircraft as it prepares to leave Zadar Airport on June 30.

In a series of videos shared on TikTok, the man is seen raising his clenched fist and lunging for the plane's door as other flyers scream 'oh my god!'.

One woman cries: 'What is he doing?!', before brave passengers are seen pushing back against him and tackling him to the floor.

The traveller, donning black shorts and a white t-shirt, is then seen being escorted off the flight by Croatian police.

Moment a passenger is tackled by another while trying to lunge for the plane door

The unnamed man, believed to be aged 27, is seen shouting at other passengers and cabin crew in the aisle of the aircraft as it prepares to leave Zadar Airport

Two officers are filmed dragging the individual along the tarmac as he struggles to stand on his own two feet.

A woman who uploaded a video of the incident said many of the passengers were returning home after partying at the Hideout Festival.

One accused the man of being drunk, a claim not yet confirmed by police.

MailOnline has contacted Ryanair for comment.

According to local news outlet BNN, police in Zadar arrested the Briton and launched an investigation.

The news site said the man was a professional boxer, but his identity has yet to be confirmed.

It comes after British passengers were left fearing for their lives when an 'extremely drunk' passenger allegedly tried to open the plane door during a Jet2 flight from Turkey to the UK, forcing the flight to make an emergency landing.

Flight LS124, which was bound for Glasgow and packed with holidaymakers travelling home from the tourist hotspot of Bodrum, made an emergency landing in Bulgaria last night.

After noticing what he was doing, passengers sat near the man are said to have bravely tackled him before the crew were alerted and the plane was grounded. Police in Sofia then boarded the airliner and arrested him.

Shocking video shows the man stumbling and appearing to resist officers as he is bundled down the aisle of the plane, while furious passengers yell 'scumbag' and 'idiot' at him.

The incident took place around 10pm BST during the overnight flight, and a passenger told MailOnline that they eventually landed back in Glasgow in the early hours of this morning with their family.

Police in Sofia boarded the airliner and arrested the man after claims he had tried to open the plane door mid-flight

Shocking video shows the man stumbling and appearing to resist officers as he is bundled down the aisle of the plane

The traveller, who asked not to be named, said: 'A man who was extremely drunk and sat in the emergency exit row attempted to open the door mid-flight.

'[It] looked like he'd maybe woken up and didn't know where he was or anything.

'He was restrained by a woman who was on her own and an elderly man in another seat.

'I realised what was happening when people started screaming and shouting, I felt petrified for my children's lives and everybody's safety on the plane.'

Passengers feared for their safety during the terrifying ordeal, with worried parents and their kids watching on as the man was hauled off the plane.

With their family now safely home, a passenger said they are doing well after the nightmarish journey and praised the flight attendants on the budget airline.

'We are doing fine now. Just a bit shaken up and thankful that the Jet2 staff managed the situation so professionally.

'We landed back in Glasgow at the early hours of the morning today, and have no further information about the man in the video for now.'

A spokesperson for Jet2 said: 'Flight LS124 from Bodrum to Glasgow diverted to Sofia Airport last night, so that a disruptive passenger could be offloaded by police. After a short delay, the flight continued to Glasgow.

'We would like to apologise to all affected customers for any inconvenience caused. As a family friendly airline, we take a zero tolerance to disruptive passenger behaviour, and everyone's health, comfort and well-being will always be our number one priority.'
A judge has slammed a cannabis-smoking gangster who blasted an innocent university with a shotgun and stabbed him to death as a 'very dangerous person'.

Russell Jordan Jones, 23, was in the wrong place at the wrong time when he was murdered outside a parade of shops in South Street, Enfield, north London, on March 17, 2018.

Gang member Sherome Williams, 21, had been with a group looking for rivals to attack when they found Mr Jones, who was not a member of any gang. Williams has been jailed for life.

Mr Jones, who was studying at the University of Hertfordshire, was stabbed in the face and neck as well as suffering 10 knife wounds to his back and being shot with a 12-bore shotgun. He died at the scene after losing a huge amount of blood.

Karun Singh, a friend of Mr Jones, was also stabbed in the back and seriously injured during the same attack.

Russell Jordan Jones, 23, was in the wrong place at the wrong time when he was murdered outside a parade of shops in South Street, Enfield, north London, on 17 March 2018

Gang member Sherome Williams, 21, had been with a group looking for rivals to attack when they found Mr Jones, who was not a member of any gang. Williams has been jailed for life

Williams, who was only 16 when he killed Mr Jones, was jailed for life with a minimum term of 25 years for murder, grievous bodily harm and possession of a firearm.

Bilkan Bilkaner and Duke Quainoo, both 20 at the time, were each jailed for 29 years for the murder in 2019.

After the chilling murder Quainoo wrote the rap lyrics: I bored up a p***y and bored up his friend. And one of them n****s turned ghost.'

Williams was previously jailed for 22 years for attempted murder after carrying out a similar attack in Tottenham on 6 January 2020.

The 26-year-old victim was driving down Lansdowne Road when a stolen black Mercedes rammed his vehicle.

READ: Two drill gang members who carried out brutal shotgun and stabbing murder of innocent student before making a rap video about the killing are jailed for a total of 58 years Advertisement

He ran from the crash scene before being repeatedly stabbed by Williams and three other attackers.

Judge Anthony Leonard told Williams: You are a very dangerous person and have been for years.

Your intention, alongside the others involved in this attack, was to kill.

I take account of the fact you had not yet reached majority but in terms of criminality you were experienced.

Mr Jones mother Stephanie Saunders said in a victim impact statement read to court: Russell was my only son, my daughters twin and my parents only grandson.

He was my strength, my protector, my voice of reason, but mostly my baby.

I will love and miss him till the day I die and I just hope one day we will meet again.

B ilkaner and Quainoo formed half of the gang of four who carried out the hit - but two accomplices remain at large

Bilkan Bilkaner and Duke Quainoo, both 20, were jailed for 58 years for the gun and knife attack on an innocent group of friends

There are no words to fully explain how the last five years have changed and affected me, my daughter, my family and Tara, the love of his life with beautiful red hair who he was planning to spend his future with.

Our lives are shattered, our hearts broken and only a future of huge pain and loss lies ahead.

Russell was an extremely bright, intelligent, quick-witted, lovable young man with an endearing smile and his whole life ahead of him.

Williams has smoked cannabis from the age of 12 and became a dealer to fund his 80 a day habit.

Mark Heywood, KC, prosecuting, earlier described it as a sudden, violent and truly bloody attack' that left one man dead and another seriously wounded.

He said: In character, it was neither random nor spontaneous: the violence was deliberate and planned - the best indication being that it was done with a gun and knives, for the purpose of violence.

The violence was done by a team, operating together and driven there by another.

They came from the car, moved as one, sought out their victims and then attacked swiftly and brutally.

Mr Heywood added: There was no apparent provocation for the attack, which effectively took the form of an ambush.

Murder victim Russell Jones, 23, pictured with his girlfriend Tara Ward shortly before his death

The evidence does not suggest that either Russell Jones or Karun Singh were particular individual targets of attack, but rather that the deadly violence was aimed at the group to the extent that they suffered really serious injuries.

It appears they were in the wrong place at the wrong time.

Williams, of Edmonton denied but was convicted of murder, inflicting grievous bodily harm and possession of a firearm with intent to endanger life.

He was sentenced to detention at His Majestys Pleasure, or life imprisonment, with a minimum term of 25 years, concurrent to the 22 year sentence he is already serving.

Bus driver Kallum Martin, 25, who ferried the murderers to the scene in his Mercedes A Class, was cleared of murder and manslaughter in 2019 after insisting he had no idea what the others had planned.

He was left cowering in the dock moments after the verdicts were returned when Bilkaner and Quainoo leapt on him and rained down a barrage of punches.
Kellyanne Conway's teenage daughter Claudia has deleted some of her Playboy content which she was charging up to $99 to view.

The 18-year-old launched a subscription page on Playboy.com in late April, presenting it as a way to 'reclaim' her 'womanhood and femininity'.

Claudia, the eldest daughter of Donald Trump's 2016 counselor Kellyanne and George Conway - an outspoken critic of the former president - used her profile to share images revealing her in a selection of bikinis.

Raunchier photos, such as cleavage close-ups, are also available for as little as $5, while the most expensive snaps cost $99.

The teen has shared frequent updates throughout the last two months - but one link posted last week and promoted via Twitter appears to have been swiftly deleted.

Kellyanne Conway's teenage daughter Claudia, 18, said she was offering adult content for $5-a-month on a new Playboy site to reclaim her womanhood and femininity

Claudia and her mother have had a publicly documented rocky relationship for years, but the teenager was supportive in the wake of her parents' divorce announcement

The 18-year-old deleted some of her Playboy content which she was charging up to $99 to view

Her tweet was also erased - though the Playboy page as a whole remains active.

Claudia launched her page in late April, and she took to Twitter in May to say it was a way of taking back control of her body after feeling exploited by the media and 'forced into portraying myself as something I wasn't'.

'My body was taken from me,' she said. 'Now, as a young adult, I am aiming to reclaim my womanhood and femininity in a way that is truly mine.

'I am putting myself out there in a way that is MY OWN and no one elses.

'I have full control of my body and my voice.

'I believe in writing your own narrative, like Ive said in the past, and taking back what was once unjustly taken from you.

'Autonomy and freedom are two things everyone should have.

'Dont let someone capitalize off of your vulnerabilities reclaim them.'

The teenager signed off her tweet, which she said would be the 'only comment' she would give on the launch of her account by wishing her followers 'light and sunshine'.

Playboy launched the channel in March as part of its pivot to digital content following the closure of its loss-making print magazine in 2020.

On Instagram, she is known to share racy, but milder pics, in revealing dresses and swimsuits

Claudia has previously claimed that her mom working for Trump has ruined her life

Showing her liberal credentials, Claudia carried a 'F*** SCOTUS' placard during a march to protest the Supreme Court's overturning of Roe v Wade last year

Unlike competitor Only Fans, the site does not allow pornography or X-rated posts but does allow what it describes as 'artistic nudity'.

As a result, most bunny pages show women in swimwear, among them Claudia who appears in three different swimsuits  one green, one lilac and one a blue floral print.

Claudia is the eldest daughter of Trump administration official Kellyanne Conway, 56, who famously coined the phrase 'alternative facts' during a Meet the Press interview in January 2017.

Her father is George Conway, an activist and outspoken Trump critic. George and Kellyanne announced plans to divorce earlier this year.

Kellyanne is now a Fox News contributor and remains the only woman to have masterminded a successful US presidential election campaign  steering former President Trump to victory in the 2016 contest.

But her tenure as senior counselor to former President Trump led to a brief public estrangement from Claudia who stunned commentators in July 2020 when she announced to the world that her parents' marriage had 'failed'.

A month later, the then 15-year-old said she was 'pushing for emancipation' from her parents  adding in a Twitter post: 'Buckle up because this is probably going to be public one way or another, unfortunately. Welcome to my life.'

The Twitter outburst also included a broadside at her mother, with Claudia calling Conway 'selfish' for pursuing her political career and begging ultra-liberal congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez to adopt her.

Users can subscribe to Claudia's page for free, but can have access to more exclusive content for a price. Footage starts as little as $5 while the most expensive photo on offer costs $99

Claudia tweeted Tuesday about her new gig, saying she was exploited by the media and 'forced into portraying myself as something I wasn't'

In 2020, Conway announced she was resigning from her White House role 'to spend more time with my family' but Claudia unleashed another social media barrage in 2021 when she posted a TikTok video of her mom yelling at her and claimed she had been 'mentally, physically and emotionally abused'.

By July 2021, the mother-daughter duo's relationship was on the mend, with Claudia posting a heartfelt string of messages to Twitter that read: 'I can finally and fortunately tell you, with all the elation in my heart, that I am happy and safe. Forgiveness has taught me a lot.

'I love my mother and she will always inspire me, despite our public conflicts. I am proud that we are living proof of breaking the cycle.'

When she was 16 years old, Claudia briefly appeared on American Idol where judge Katy Perry grilled her about her parents  an experience she later described in an interview with Bustle as 'really, really uncomfortable'.

Claudia has since told how she came out as gay to her family in 2020 and now defines herself as both gay and pansexual. She uses her online presence to champion issues such as gun control, abortion rights and LGBTQ issues.
Four men aged between 40 and 62 were arrested after the alleged attacks

A 13-year-old schoolgirl was allegedly raped and another sexually assaulted in one of Britain's wealthiest towns.

Four men aged between 40 and 62 were arrested over the alleged attack on the teenage schoolgirls in Weybridge, Surrey.

The youngsters are said to have been found after a relative who was concerned where they were pinpointed their location using the GPS signal from their mobile phone.

Police were called and arrested the four men on suspicion of rape and sexual assault by touching.

They were later released on conditional bail pending further enquiries.

Weybridge is home to the second highest number of millionaires in any town in Britain [File image]

Pictured: The Weybridge town centre in Surrey

A Surrey Police spokeswoman said: 'We were called at 10.35pm on Saturday, 17 June following a report of a rape of a teenage girl by a male suspect and a sexual assault by touching of another teenage girl on Weystone Road, Weybridge.

'A 53-year-old man, 62-year-old man, 49-year-old man and a 40-year-old-man have been arrested on suspicion of rape and sexual assault by touching as part of our enquiries.

'They have all been released with bail conditions.'

Asked whether they thought this could be part of a trafficking or grooming gang, the police spokeswoman said: 'At this time, we do not believe this incident to be linked with trafficking or grooming.

'The two teenage girls are being supported by specialist teams, and the investigation is ongoing.'

The two girls were also taken to a rape counselling suite and interviewed by specially-trained sex crime investigators.

A local source told The Sun: 'The girls and their families are devastated. Nobody can work out why the police are not issuing a public appeal for information about this.'

Weybridge is an extremely wealthy area in Surrey and is home to the second highest number of millionaires in any town in Britain.
Bud Light is now selling for less than water in some places following weeks of declining sales after the brand's disastrous partnership with Dylan Mulvaney.

America's former number one selling brew is now down almost 50 percent from its sales numbers a year ago.

The brand has lost upwards of $20billion since generating a massive wave of controversy over its partnership with trans influencer Mulvaney in early April.

'It's just not moving like it used to,' Andy Wagner, manager of Glenn Miller's beer & Soda Warehouse in Pennsylvania told the New York Times.

'At this point, it's cheaper than some of the cases of water we're selling in the back.'

The manager of Glenn Miller's Beer & Soda Warehouse told the New York Times that Bud Light had been selling for less than the price of cases of water recently

Sales of Bud Light continue to plummet. Figures have gotten incrementally worse since the beginning of the brand's controversy in April

Wagner added that the drop-off in sales cannot be attributed to a general lack of interest in drinking beer among American consumers.

Cases of Miller Lite, for instance, are flying off the shelves for $24.99 - far more than the seriously marked down $8.99 that cases of Bud Light are now going for.

'I've seen longtime Bud Light customers trying other beers,' said Wagner. 'If they find something they like, they may not come back.'

'It's not that they stopped drinking beer. They just stopped buying Bud Light.'

Wagner added that one of the cardinal 'bar rules' in the beer industry is not getting political in the first place. 'No politics, no religion,' he said.

Sales at Bud Light continue to plummet, falling nearly 30 percent last week - the brand's worst 7-day period since the controversy began, and the situation appeared to be growing more dire headed into the July 4th holiday weekend.

In addition to the significant faction of beer drinkers who have opted to boycott Bud Light over its limited partnership with Mulvaney, members of the LGBTQ community have also backed away from the brand over its apparent lack of support for the influencer in the wake of the scandal.

Last week, Mulvaney blasted the brand for failing to reach out following the backlash.

'I was waiting for the brand to reach out to me, but they never did,' Mulvaney said in a video. 'For a company to hire a trans person and then not publicly stand by them is worse in my opinion than not hiring a trans person at all, because it gives customers permission to be as transphobic and hateful as they want.'

Some gay bars have also decided to boycott the beer over its apparent lack of support for Mulvaney and their community.

Boycotts began to hit Bud Light in the wake of a limited promotional relationship it entered into with transgender influencer Dylan Mulvaney

Bud Light proceeded with its Pride month programming despite being rejected by members of the LGBTQ community for not adequately defending Mulvaney in the wake of the scandal

Cases of Bud Light have remained fully stocked on grocery store shelves across the country since April

Even eye-popping price drops have not been able to move cases of the beer

The immense drop off in sales of Bud Light is also costing Americans jobs across the country. A glass bottling company was recently forced to shut down two of its plants and lay off 650 employees.

The Ardagh Group, one of the largest glass producers in the world, announced last week it was shuttering its Wilson, North Carolina, and Simsboro, Louisiana, plants on July 17. The Wilson plant employed nearly 400 people, and the Simsboro plant employed 245 - all of whom now find themselves without jobs.

The company did not cite a reason for the closures in its statement, just saying it was part of a 'multi-year performance optimization program.'

But an investigation by WRAL found Ardagh was forced to close the plants due to declining sales of Bud Light  one of its major contractors.

Workers at both the North Carolina and Louisiana bottling plants have said they have faced decreased production since Mulvaney's promotion was posted online in early April.

Both plants were forced to take some of their machines offline amid the decreased demand, which was 'of course, being pointed towards the Bud Light situation,' James Munhall, a journeyman machine repair mechanic, told WRAL.

By May 18, according to an internal memo obtained by the news station, company executives said they would shut down the two plants 'due to slow sales with Anheuser-InBev,' the parent company of Budweiser and Bud Light.

Longtime employees explained that the majority of their business was making bottles for Budweiser and Bud Light.

They said at a meeting inside the North Carolina plant last week, the manager told them the boycott was forcing them to shut down.

'Because of Budweiser no longer selling the bottle, they no longer needed our product,' David Williams, a machine repair mechanic, told WRAL.

When announcing the closures last week, the company simply said: 'Our multi-year performance optimization program, involving targeted investments in enhanced capacity and ongoing cost optimization, underpins our ability to continue to provide existing and prospective customers with high quality American-made sustainable glass packaging.'

It added existing customers will continue to be supplied from alternative locations in the network, according to the Ruston Leader.

Anheuser-Busch executives have previously said that the ongoing boycotts of Bud Light have hurt frontline workers and wholesalers as conservatives stopped buying the beer following the Mulvaney promotion.

Anti-Bud Light beer graffiti is seen scrawled on a gate on June 21, 2023 in Arco, Idaho

As new developments continue to unfold in the nightmarish saga for Anheuser-Busch, the brand released a statement saying it remains 'committed to the programs and partnerships' it has forged with the LGBTQ+ community.

The statement read: 'The privacy and safety of our employees and our partners is always our top priority.

'As we move forward, we will focus on what we do best  brewing great beer for everyone and earning our place in moments that matter to our consumers.'

It came just days after CEO Brendan Whitworth was slammed for refusing to rule out if the company would partner with Mulvaney again - and avoided answering how much the marketing blunder had cost Bud Light.

Speaking to CBS Mornings, Whitworth was asked if he would send Mulvaney another can, knowing the tidal wave of backlash that it sparked.

But instead of giving a definitive answer, the CEO instead launched into a pre-rehearsed speech about the 'social conversation' that the disastrous campaign caused.

Whitworth added that they 'need to deeply understand the consumer' and 'appreciate' what they want from the brand. The executive was subsequently blasted on social media for doing a 'dismal job.'
Her father claimed her autopsy showed bruises in different stages of healing

The family of a teacher who was found brutally stabbed in her home in what was deemed a suicide by authorities have demanded that the city's mayor reopen her case amid claims the governor had a conflict of interest.

Ellen Greenberg was 27 years old when her fiance Sam Goldberg found her dead in the kitchen of her Philadelphia apartment on January 26, 2011; she had 20 stab wounds, including 10 to the back of the head and neck.

Her parents have been on a journey ever since to get what they say would be justice for their daughter, who they claim was being abused by Goldberg - whose family allegedly donated to then-attorney general Josh Shapiro, now the state's governor.

Ellen's father Dr. Josh Greenberg told Fox News Digital his daughter had injuries on her body 'consisted with abuse.'

'That's what I think the whole issue of this story,' the grieving father added. 'Somebody didn't want Ellen's abuse to get out there  and that's why she's dead.'

Ellen Greenberg was 27 years old when her iance Sam Goldberg found her dead in the kitchen of her Philadelphia apartment on January 26, 2011

Ellen's father Dr. Josh Greenberg said his daughter had injuries on her body 'consisted with abuse.' Ellen is pictured with fiance Sam Goldberg

Ellen's parents, Joshua and Sandee believe their daughter was killed and have spent years dedicated to finding out the truth behind her death

Back in 2022, independent journalist Gavin Fish claimed in a YouTube video that then AG Shapiro had a 'clear conflict of interest' in the case and that Goldberg's family were campaign donors. Then-AG Shapiro recused himself from the case three days after the video was published, as reported by Fox News.

At the time, the AG's office denied the conflict of interest was real.

'While the Office of Attorney General does not have an actual conflict in this matter, circumstances beyond our control have created the appearance of a conflict and our involvement is no longer serving one of the primary purposes of the District Attorneys original conflict referral,' Shapiro's office told The Philadelphia Inquirer.

This month, Dr Greenberg claimed Ellen's autopsy report said she suffered a huge laceration in the back of her head and that she was covered in bruises in different stages of healing.

'That's what I think the whole issue of this story,' he told Fox News Digital. 'Somebody didn't want Ellen's abuse to get out there  and that's why she's dead.'

Ellen's death was initially ruled a homicide but the medical examiner's office then changed it to suicide after a meeting with police and prosecutors, per her family.

A petition asking mayor Jim Kenney to to reopen and investigate Ellens case has collected more than 150,000 signatures.

DailyMail.com has reached out to the offices of mayor Kenney and governor Shapiro.

Officials have for years said they have found no evidence of foul play in Ellen's death.

Philadelphia District Attorney Larry Krasner also previously recused himself from reinvestigating the death after having previously worked with the Greenbergs.

The family commissioned a photogrammetry recreating each of Ellen's 20 stab wounds

Then-Attorney General Josh Shapiro (pictured) recused himself from the case after a journalist claimed the Goldberg family had donated to his campaign

A petition asking mayor Jim Kenney (pictured) to to reopen and investigate Ellens case has collected more than 150,000 signatures

Greenberg had 10 stab wounds to the neck and back of the head, with an additional 10 to her stomach, abdomen, and chest. A knife was still plunged into her heart.

At the time, police claimed that the door of Greenberg's apartment was locked from the inside and there were no signs of a struggle.

Goldberg told investigators he came home in 2011, kicked the door, and found his fiance dead with a knife clinging to her chest.

In a chilling 911 call, he told police Greenberg had stabbed herself. 'Help!... My fiance's on the floor with blood everywhere.'

He later added, 'I can't see anything... there's nothing broken... Ellie!... I think she hit her head.'

'Oh my god! She stabbed herself... she fell on a knife... there is a knife sticking out of her heart.'

The Chester County District Attorney's Office began an outside investigation into Ellen's death last year, but now governor Shapira had been sitting on the case for years while he was attorney general.

'He stole four years from us, holding the case in his office, and we have no evidence of him doing anything,' said Ellen's mother Sandee Greenberg.

Then-AG Shapiro's office, however, previously said it had undertaken 'an exhaustive review and conducted new forensic analysis' but their additional efforts did not bring 'more closure to the questions around [Ellen's] death.'

Chester County officials have said their investigation into the case is ongoing.

The Pennsylvania Office of the Attorney General alleged that several death and suicide- related searches has been performed on Greenberg's laptop in the weeks leading up to her death.

Photogrammetry showed the size, depth, and length of each stab wound, with the creators concluding that all of them could not have been self-inflicted

The duo lived together in a luxury Philadelphia apartment. Ellen had asked multiple people to move in with them before she died

But a lawyer hired by the Goldbergs said the hard-drive was subsequently examined by the FBI lab in 2011 and no such searches were found.

The family also commissioned a photogrammetry recreating each of Ellen's 20 stab wounds.

It showed the size, depth, and length of each stab wound, with the creators concluding that all of them could not have been self-inflicted - particularly the ones to the back of Greenberg's neck and head.

In the weeks prior to her death, Greenbergs parents, Josh and Sandee, said something had been troubling their daughter.

However, they did not believe she was suicidal.

A couple of weeks before her death Greenberg told her parents that she wanted to quit her job and 'come home.' They said she could come home if she needed to, but they wanted her to seek help for her anxiety.

She told them it was the stress of organizing a wedding  she was due to marry that August and had sent out 'Save the Date' cards just four days before her death - and that work was particularly busy.

Her father said, 'Something was amiss. Her personality was changed. She played it off that work was too much but when the teacher who took on Ellen's class saw her books and marking she said everything was perfect.'

Greenberg saw a therapist who prescribed her Ambien and Klonopin for anxiety. Police pointed to this as further support for a finding of suicide. But psychiatrist Dr Ellen Berman, who saw Greenberg three times before her death, was clear that her new patient was not suicidal.

Samuel Goldberg is now 40 and a married father of two living in New York. He remained in contact with the family for a year or so following Greenberg's death.
A woman who crashed while speeding, leaving her teenage passenger with a traumatic brain injury, said 'I'm a race car driver I think I know what I'm doing' just moments before the horror smash.

Keely Bown, 22, narrowly escaped jail time when she faced the District Court in Adelaide for sentencing after flipping her V8 2008 SS Holden sedan several times on December, 23, 2020.

She was driving her friends - a male, 16, and a female, 17, at the time - to help the boy buy a new audio system for his car near Nelshaby, north of Adelaide.

Neither Bown and 17-year-old received serious injuries, however the 16-year-old suffered a life-threatening traumatic brain injury, a collapsed lung and his spleen and bowel were both torn.

He is now left with cognitive issues, difficulty speaking and a hand tremor, with his family traumatised by the long recovery process.

Keely Bown, 22, narrowly escaped jail time when she faced the District Court in Adelaide for sentencing after flipping her V8 2008 SS Holden sedan several times on December, 23, 2020

Bown (right) said 'I'm a race car driver I think I know what I'm doing' just moments before the smash

The car became airborne after it hit a dip on a narrow bitumen road, the court heard.

Bown told police that she was travelling at less than the 100km/h speed limit and that she attempted to brake before hitting the dip, however there was no evidence of her brakes locking up.

Both passengers said Bown was travelling in excess of the speed limit, with Auxiliary Judge Gordon Barrett saying 'they told you to slow down'.

'A neighbour along the road on which you were travelling heard your car accelerating aggressively through the gears,' Judge Gordon told the court.

He noted that Bown 'had been involved in motor racing for some time'.

In the July 2019 issue of Street Machine, an automotive magazine, Bown said: 'I've wanted to drive ever since I could touch the pedals'.

Bown told police that she was travelling at less than the 100km/h speed limit and that she attempted to brake before hitting the dip, however there was no evidence of her brakes locking up

'I was riding a motorbike at three. I've been involved in motorsport, racing dirt circuit, since I was 10,' she said.

Bown had recently pushed her turbo-charged Subaru to 175mp/h (281 km/h) during the 29th annual Lake Gairdner Speed Week.

Both her father and older sister had also competed in previous events.

Bown pleaded guilty to to causing serious harm by dangerous driving and causing harm by dangerous driving.

During sentencing, Judge Gordon described the offences as 'serious', that caused harm to two people.

'[The boy] will be left with lifelong consequences of the offending. He and his family have gone through considerable trauma following the incident,' he said.

'You were driving at a dangerous speed which injured both of your passengers.

Both passengers said Bown was travelling in excess of the speed limit, with Auxiliary Judge Gordon Barrett saying 'they told you to slow down'

'I must fashion a sentence which recognises the seriousness of the offending; in particular, the seriousness of the consequences for the victims of that offending'.

Judge Gordon took into account that Bown had no offences prior to the incident, had been diagnosed with post-traumatic stress disorder and was deeply remorseful for her actions.

She was sentenced to two years, 10 months and seven days imprisonment with a non-parole period of 18 months to be served at her father's home.

She was also disqualified from driving for 11 years and ordered to pay a compensation fee of $818.95 to the teenage boy.
A Manhattan apartment, dubbed the most 'overpriced' in New York City, has been on, off and back on the market since 2015, without ever securing a buyer.

The eight-bedroom penthouse of Olympic Tower in Midtown Manhattan is on the market with a $35 million listing price.

First bought by Maurizio Gucci of the eponymous Italian fashion brand in the 1970s, the 9,450 square foot space is the result of Gucci combining two units into one.

The spacious Fifth Avenue apartment, now owned by Maurizio's daughters Alessandra and Allegra Gucci, may remain in the family for some time to come since at least five brokerage firms have failed to sell it in the last 8 years.

Corcoran, Brokerages Brown Harris Stevens, Sotheby's International Realty and Douglas Elliman have all attempted to sell the penthouse.

The luxury penthouse has been dubbed 'overpriced' by brokers as it has been left on the market unsold for eight years

The eight-bedroom penthouse of Olympic Tower in Midtown Manhattan is on the market with a $35 million listing price

First bought by Maurizio Gucci (pictured) of the eponymous Italian fashion brand in the 1970s, the 9,450 square foot space is the result of Gucci combining two units into one

Now Loy Carlos of Serhant is the latest brokerage to try their hand and currently holds the listing.

The luxury penthouse first hit the market with an eye-watering $45 million price tag in August 2015, but was soon reduced to $38 million, and then to $35 million in June 2016 where it has remained despite the lack of interest.

'It's overpriced, there are a lot of newer, high-end buildings in the neighborhood' one broker told Curbed, saying Olympic Tower is 'just a dated building.'

'It's well-run, but it's dated. It's not an amenity-rich building. They have a high number of staff, so it's high-touch, but for that price, people want something newer' they explained.

'It was built in the 70s. Its old. And, at least on the lower floors, the Mandarin cuts the view of the park a little' they added.

The current price sets the unit at $3,703 per square foot, despite a recent sale in the same building going for $2,387 per square foot according to Business Insider.

The apartment features a luxury walk-in closet, a library with a skylight, wood-burning fireplaces, two interior elevators, and floor-to-ceiling windows in nearly every room.

The bedrooms are all located on the 50th floor, while the 51st floor includes living and dining rooms, an entertaining room, a staff kitchen, and an eat-in kitchen.

The luxury penthouse first hit the market with an eye-watering $45 million price tag in August 2015, but was soon reduced to $38 million, and then to $35 million in June 2016

The apartment has floor to ceiling windows in every room, including the sleek kitchen

The apartment features a luxury walk-in closet, a library with a skylight, wood-burning fireplaces, two interior elevators, and floor-to-ceiling windows in nearly every room

The current price for the Fifth Avenue apartment sets the unit at $3,703 per square foot

The spacious Fifth Avenue apartment, now owned by Maurizio's daughters Alessandra and Allegra Gucci, may remain in the family for some time to come (pictured: Maurizio Gucci, center, at the opening of a new Gucci store in Paris in 1983)

Loy Carlos of Serhant is the latest brokerage to try their hand and currently holds the listing after five other firms failed to sell the luxury property

The apartment offers panoramic views of the City skyline with floor-to-ceiling windows

It also boasts wood-paneled walls and an open-floor plan.

Despite these amenities, another broker, who has worked on the listing in the past, told Curbed the apartment's price tag was unrealistic: 'Look at the StreetEasy history. That will tell you everything you need to know,' she said, referring to its price cuts and length of time on the market.

Another broker summarized the situation: 'People shoot for high numbers there, but they dont get them.

'They may have owned for a long time and dont fully understand where Olympic Tower falls in the pecking order.

'Many sellers are also international and not so in touch with the nuances of the local market

Adding: 'They think, Fifth Avenue. It has a cachet to it, but its not just a blanket Fifth Avenue.'
Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg charged Lorie Smith, the Colorado graphic designer who sued the state over its anti-discrimination law, of getting into the business 'for the purpose of provoking a case like this.'

In a defeat for gay rights, the Supreme Court last week ruled 6-3 for Smith, saying she can refuse to design websites for same-sex weddings despite a Colorado law that bars discrimination based on sexual orientation.

'It's very revealing that there's no evidence that this Web designer was ever even approached by anyone asking for a Web site for a same-sex wedding,' Buttigieg, who is openly gay, told CNN's State of the Union on Sunday.

'Matter of fact, it appears this Web designer only went into the wedding business for the purpose of provoking a case like this.'

Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg charged Lorie Smith, the Colorado graphic designer who sued the state over its anti-discrimination law, of getting into the business 'for the purpose of provoking a case like this'

The court said forcing her to create the websites would violate her free speech rights under the Constitution's First Amendment.

Buttigieg said the court ruled in favor of an 'agenda to use every instrument of government, courts and legislatures, to claw back at these rights for people who are just trying to go about their lives and just trying to be treated equally by businesses and by the government.'

'There's something in common between this Supreme Court ruling and what we're seeing happening in state legislatures across the country, which is kind of a solution looking for problem, in other words, sending these kinds of things to the courts and sending these kinds of things to state legislatures for the clear purpose of chipping away at the equality and the rights that have so recently been won in the LGBTQ+ community,' he told CNN.

Smith, the owner of 303 Creative, is an evangelical Christian who said she believes marriage can only exist between a man and a woman.

She sued Colorado's civil rights commission and officials in 2016 because she said she feared being punished for refusing to serve gay weddings.

She insisted she did not want to discriminate against anyone but simply objects to not being able to express her Christian beliefs.

And she argued that her websites counted as art and were protected by her constitutional right to free speech.

The Supreme Court agreed.

In the ruling, Justice Neil Gorsuch wrote for the courts six conservative justices that the First Amendment 'envisions the United States as a rich and complex place where all persons are free to think and speak as they wish, not as the government demands.'

Gorsuch said the court has long held that 'the opportunity to think for ourselves and to express those thoughts freely is among our most cherished liberties and part of what keeps our Republic strong.'

After the ruling, however, it was revealed that the person behind the request for the wedding website for a gay wedding wasn't gay and didn't know his name had been used.

Lorie Smith is a Christian graphic designer who said her religious beliefs would make her decline requests to design wedding websites for same sex couples

Smith's case cites a request from a man named 'Stewart' for his wedding to 'Mike.'

Stewart told The Associated Press he never submitted the request and didn't know his name was invoked in the lawsuit until he was contacted this week by a reporter from The New Republic, which first reported his denial.

'I was incredibly surprised given the fact that I've been happily married to a woman for the last 15 years,' said Stewart, who declined to give his last name for fear of harassment and threats.

His contact information, but not his last name, were listed in court documents.

He added that he was a designer and 'could design my own website if I need to'  and was concerned no one had checked into the validity of the request cited by Smith until recently.

Smith's lawyer, Kristen Waggoner, said at a Friday news conference that the wedding request naming Stewart was submitted through Smith's website and denied it was fabricated.

She suggested it could have been a troll making the request, something that's happened with other clients she has represented.

And Colorado Attorney General Phil Weiser on Friday called the lawsuit a 'made up case' because Smith wasn't offering wedding website services when the suit was filed.
The first GOP debate stage might not produce the dramatic scene originally expected as a growing number of candidates could opt to skip out  while others are struggling to meet the requirements to land on stage.

With just two months to go, there are 15 candidates vying for the Republican presidential nomination in 2024  and only one-third of the field has met the requirements so far to debate in August.

Longshot candidates remain at risk of not qualifying in time to reach the debate stage, while some of the frontrunners are threatening to boycott due to restrictions and rules set by the Republican National Committee (RNC).

The RNC is holding the first debate on August 23 in Milwaukee, Wisconsin  a key swing state that voted red for Donald Trump in 2016 then went blue in 2020 for President Joe Biden.

Trump has threatened not to attend the debate, suggesting the event is below him because he doesn't have any serious challengers. Politico reports that Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis won't appear for the debate if Trump doesn't.

The first GOP debate stage of the 2024 primary could be virtually empty as a slew of candidates appear unlikely or unwilling to engage in the August 23 event in Milwaukee, Wisconsin

The Republican National Committee (RNC)  chaired by Ronna McDaniel (above)  has implemented a 'loyalty pledge' this year that requires candidates to sign an agreement to support the eventual nominee. This has several candidates on edge, claiming that they won't sign the pledge

DailyMail.com has reached out to DeSantis' campaign team on whether he plans to participate in the August debate.

The 2016 GOP debate state was quite crowded  but the RNC was determined this time around to weed out candidates that lack the serious prospect of winning or getting far in the primary election.

But instead of the intended outcome, now frontrunner candidates are threatening to boycott the debates altogether.

The RNC created a 'loyalty pledge' this year that requires candidates to sign an agreement to support whoever becomes the GOP nominee. This hasn't only caused a problem for frontrunner Trump, but also more longshot candidates that claim it continues a pattern of 'spinning the wheels' of the Republican Party around the former president.

Some candidates who haven't even met the criteria to be able to debate yet are saying they wouldn't agree to sign the pledge if they are given the opportunity.

The stricter requirements resulted in only five of the 15 candidates so far being able to reach the debate stage in Milwaukee. This includes Trump, Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, former Ambassador to the United Nations Nikki Haley, South Carolina Sen. Tim Scott and biotech millionaire Vivek Ramaswamy.

'The real race begins on Aug 23 in Milwaukee at the first debate. I'll be there. We will level up as a party & a nation,' Ramaswamy said in a Sunday evening tweet despite being the least likely to clinch the nomination of those who qualified for the debate.

Trump and DeSantis joined by three others who have met the requirements to debate  Former UN Ambassador Nikki Haley (left), South Carolina Sen. Tim Scott (right) and biotech millionaire Vivek Ramaswamy

Self-made biotech millionaire Vivek Ramaswamy  once a major longshot  has brought in enough donations and earned enough in polling to make the debate stage. He says he will be in Milwaukee on August 23 to debate

New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie, who still needs to secure 40,000 donors to qualify for the first debate hosted by Fox News, said the requirements are too stringent this year,

'I think for those people who don't make the debate stage, it's very hard for them to make the case for why they should stay in the race, and I suspect they will have trouble raising money after that,' the 2024 presidential hopeful said.

Fellow longshot and former Arkansas Gov. Asa Hutchinson has also openly expressed his distaste with the RNC's loyalty pledge.

Advisers for Trump  who remains at least 20-30 percent ahead of second-place poller DeSantis  have maintained for months that the former president is opposed to participating in the August debate.

They claim that Trump doesn't see a reason to go up against candidates so far behind him in the polls and is still peeved with Fox News' coverage of him, which he claims has been unfair.

There are 15 candidates vying for the GOP nomination in 2024  with Trump and DeSantis far leading the pack

'Why would I let these people take shots at me?' Trump said in an interview last month on the right-leaning network.

Some are floating the idea that Trump could hold a competing event on August 23 to distract from the debate in Milwaukee and steer away viewership from those taking him on in 2024.

Many longshot candidates see the loyalty pledge as a way for the RNC to continue pandering to Trump and his base and have said they will not sign the prerequisite to participate in the debate this summer.

The second debate will be held at the Reagan Library in Simi Valley, California. It is not yet known when the debate will happen and which media organization will host the event  or what requirements will be rolled out for the second debate.
Vietnam has banned the upcoming Barbie movie from cinemas over scenes which feature a map showing China's claims to territory in the South China Sea.

The movie about the doll, directed by Greta Gerwig and starring Margot Robbie and Ryan Gosling, had been set for release in the country on July 21.

However, its performance schedule is no longer on the websites of major Vietnamese cinema chains following the government's decision to ban the film due to scenes featuring the so-called nine-dash line, state media reported.

Beijing has been building military bases on artificial islands within the border for years and also often conducts patrols there in an attempt to impose its territorial claims.

The new Barbie film starring Margot Robbie and Ryan Gosling has been pulled in Vietnam for scenes showing the nine-dash line in the South China Sea

Uncharted, starring Tom Holland, was also banned in Vietnam for scenes featuring the nine-dash line

The nine-dash line is a maritime boundary in the South China Sea drawn up by China, which claims to own the territory inside the line

China has long used its so-called nine-dash line to demonstrate its expansive claims to most of the resource-rich sea, often to the displeasure of the Vietnamese, who also claim part of the waterway.

What is China's 'nine-dash line' in the South China Sea? The nine-dash line is a maritime boundary in the South China Sea drawn up by China, which claims to own the territory inside the line. However, this is disputed by many Asian countries, including Vietnam, the Philippines, Taiwan, Malaysia and Brunei. The U-shaped line was initially claimed by the government of the Republic of China in 1947. In 1992, the Communist Party of China adopted the boundary while updating its law on the territorial sea and the contiguous zone, according to book Strategic Regions in 21st Century Power Politics. Chinese passports issued from 2012 onwards feature the Chinese map printed with the nine-dash line on three pages. In 2016, the Permanent Court of Arbitration in the Hague ruled that there was no legal basis for much of China's claims to the area. The Chinese government has strongly objected to the ruling. Advertisement

The boundary is also contested by others including the Philippines, Taiwan, and Malaysia.

'The film review board watched the film and made the decision to ban the screening of this movie in Vietnam due to a violation regarding the 'nine-dash line',' Vietnam's Department of Cinema director, Vi Kien Thanh, told the Dan Tri news site.

Another state media outlet, Tien Phong, reported that the nine-dash line scene appeared multiple times in the movie.

All films in Vietnam must be approved by censors who screen for gratuitous violence, suggestive sex scenes, or politically-sensitive material.

Last year, the action-and-adventure movie starring Tom Holland, Uncharted, was stopped from being shown due to scenes featuring the same line.

The same was also the case in 2019, when Abominable was banned in Vietnam, and Netflix was told to remove episodes of the series Pine Gap.

And in 2018, Vietnam cut a scene from the romantic comedy Crazy Rich Asians that featured a designer bag with a map of the world showing the disputed South China Sea islands as being under Beijing's control.

The South China Sea is home to valuable oil and gas deposits and shipping lanes, and several of China's neighbours have voiced concern that Beijing is seeking to expand its reach.
Tory deputy chairman Lee Anderson has pulled out of the launch of a Tory pressure group report demanding Rishi Sunak get tougher on immigration.

The Ashfield MP was listed to speak at the launch of The New Conservatives' 12-point plan to reduce legal arrivals by two-thirds by the time of the next election.

The launch of the report in Westminster today is seen as heaping huge pressure on the Prime Minister, who is also under fire over illegal migration and the Rwanda deportation scheme.

The expected presence of Mr Anderson raised some eyebrows given his senior official position in the party, though he is not a member of the government.

However The New Conservatives' deputy chairman Danny Kruger told the launch event that Mr Anderson had 'a terrible sick bug' and would not be attending. His name was also missing from a list of MPs who support its recommendations.

Ipswich MP Tom Hunt, who wrote the report, had earlier said it was 'healthy' to discuss immigration levels and denied it would put pressure on the PM.

He told Sky News: 'We support the Prime Minister who shares many of our aims and objectives.

'We look forward to working with him to reduce immigration to a more manageable level.'

The expected presence of Mr Anderson raised some eyebrows given his senior official position in the party, though he is not a member of the government.

The New Conservatives lobby group will tell Rishi Sunak (pictured at Lords yesterday) the party must 'honour the promise' made in the 2019 manifesto to cut net immigration to below the level at the time

The 25-strong group, which includes the party's deputy chairman Lee Anderson and 24 other Red Wall MPs including Miriam Cates, wants net migration cut by two-thirds from 606,000 in 2022 to around the 226,000 level it was when they were first elected in 2019.

Ipswich MP Tom Hunt, who wrote the report, said it was 'healthy' to discuss immigration levels. He told Sky News: 'We support the Prime Minister who shares many of our aims and objectives'

In n the report's plan is the 'rapid introduction' of measures in the Illegal Migration Bill, which could cut numbers by a further 35,000 by tackling the small boats crisis (File image)

Who are the New Conservatives? Among the members of the New Conservatives are: Lee Anderson - Ashfield MP and deputy chairman of the Conservative Party.

Jonathan Gullis - Stoke-on-Trent North MP and former schools standards minister .

Sarah Atherton - Wrexham MP and former parliamentary private secretary (PPS) in the MoD.

Danny Kruger - Devizes MP, son of Bake Off host Prue Leith and former PPS to Boris Johnson.

Miriam Cates - Penistone and Stocksbridge MP and campaigner on trans issues.

Tom Hunt - Ipswich MP and the report's author.

Andrew Lewer - Northampton South MP.

Nick Fletcher - Don Valley MP.

Alex Stafford - Rother Valley MP and vice-chairman of the Conservtive Party, and former PPS to Boris Johnson. Advertisement

The report states: 'Prime Minister Rishi Sunak is rightly taking measures to cut net migration. His proposal to prevent foreign students from bringing dependents with them is a welcome step in the right direction.

'Likewise, the Illegal Migration Bill promises to tackle the growing number of migrants who enter the UK via dangerous and dishonest means. But more must be done.'

The grouping of 25 Red Wall MPs elected since 2017 wants net migration cut by two-thirds from 606,000 in 2022 to around the 226,000 level pledged in the 2019 Tory manifesto.

Among the ideas in the report are the removal of visas for tens of thousands of care workers, and raising the skilled work visa salary threshold - designed to reduce the amount of low-paid, unskilled labour - to 38,000.

They also recommend ending the right of graduate students to stay in the UK for up to two years after the end of their course without a job offer, and to allow fewer foreign postgrads into Britain by'excluding the poorest performing universities from eligibility criteria'.

They also say Britain should cap the number of refugees it accepts at 20,000, and cap those allowed in under future humanitarian relief schemes.

There would also be a cap on the amount of social housing that can be allocated to non UK nationals 'until the number of British families waiting for housing clears'.

The senior Tories warn that without swift action 'the Conservative Party will further erode the trust of hundreds of thousands of voters who lent the party their vote in 2019'.

The report says: 'The British public voted for a strong approach to migration. They did not vote for mass migration and the social and economic harms it brings.

'Reliance on cheap international labour drives down wages for British workers and disincentivises businesses from investing in skills training or new technology. Mass migration also contributes to the housing crisis: Over half a million more houses a year are estimated to be needed to keep up with migration trends.'

Downing Street said the Government is not planning to remove care workers from the shortage occupation list.

'That's not an approach we're considering currently. Again, we know there is significant demand in the care sector for staff,' the Prime Minister's official spokesman said.

'We are boosting domestic staff as I've said and backing that with hundreds of millions of pounds in support... there's lots we're doing but right now we think we're striking the right balance.'

Downing Street did not rule out capping the number of refugees entering the country at 20,000 but said it was for Parliament to 'make a judgment' rather than the Government to fix a figure 'unilaterally.'

The spokesman refused to say whether Rishi Sunak was frustrated by Mr Anderson supporting the change despite holding a party office.

The report will be seen as warning shot at Mr Sunak, who has said only that he will bring down numbers to the level he 'inherited', which is around 500,000, roughly double the amount at the last election. The report says that the points-based system introduced after Brexit has been 'too lenient' and now risks generating 'destabilising economic and cultural consequences'.

It points out that a 'temporary' relaxation of the rules for foreign care workers, introduced during Covid, remains 'despite the abatement of the pandemic'. Closing this loophole could reduce numbers by more than 80,000, it says.

The report also calls for the minimum salary threshold for skilled worker visas to be raised to 38,000, potentially cutting numbers by 54,000 a year.

A further tightening of the rules for foreign students, including ending the right of graduates to work in the UK for two years after finishing their courses, could reduce numbers by 174,000 a year, the report says.

It comes after Mr Sunak tightened student rules this year, including a ban on foreign students on one-year masters courses bringing in their dependants. Also in the report's plan is the 'rapid introduction' of measures in the Illegal Migration Bill, which could cut numbers by a further 35,000 by tackling the small boats crisis.

Refugee numbers should be slashed and capped at 20,000 a year, it says, while hiking the immigration health surcharge from 624 a year to 2,700 would act as a disincentive for potential migrants.

The report reflects wider concerns in the Tory Party about soaring immigration levels, with one minister telling the Mail the Government has 'taken [its] eye off the ball' after the pandemic.
A fundraiser for a French policeman who 'executed' a teenager during a traffic stop has reached more than 1million (almost 900,000) - dwarfing the 189,000 donated to the victim's devastated family.

Nationwide riots were sparked after the cop shot Nahel Merzouk, a 17-year-old with an Algerian background, at point blank in the Paris suburb of Nanterre on Tuesday.

Many  including members of Nahel's family  said the killing was symptomatic of widespread racism towards ethnic minority groups in France, and Nahel's grandmother said she was 'heartbroken' by the support shown for the policeman.

More than 40,000 people have pledged money to the online fund for the officer, set up on Gofundme.com by far-right media commentator Jean Messiha. The biggest single donation, which was given anonymously, was 3,000.

Messiha, a former advisor to far-right politician Marine Le Pen, celebrated on Twitter when it surpassed the fund for Nahel's family and later when it climbed to 1million.

Nationwide riots were sparked after the cop shot Nahel Merzouk, a 17-year-old with an Algerian background, at point blank in the Paris suburb of Nanterre on Tuesday

Mounia Merzouk, the mother of Nahel, during a commemoration march (marche blanche) for her son

Widespread rioting and looting since Tuesday appear to have deepened the polarised views of many in France

The 'insulting' collection easily outstripped the 189,000 gathered for the family of Nahel, who lived with his mother on a housing estate in a west Paris suburb.

Nahel's grandmother, Nadia, slammed those who are supporting the policeman and told French media on Sunday that he must face justice.

'He took the life of my grandson. This man must pay, the same as everyone,' she told the BFM channel. 'I have confidence in the justice system. I believe in justice.'

She also criticised rioters for using his death as an excuse to cause havoc and said the family was desperate for calm.

'I tell them to stop it. It's mothers who take buses, it's mothers who walk outside. We should calm things, we don't want them to break things,' she said. 'Nahel is dead, that's all there is.'

The shooting, during a traffic stop, has exposed deep political divisions in France and stoked longstanding complaints of discrimination, police violence and systemic racism among law enforcement.

Many right-wing figures are seeking to defend the security forces, while many who occupy the centreground and those on the left see the death as a consequence of systemic racism in the police.

Widespread rioting and looting since Tuesday appear to have deepened the polarisation.

Politicians from the centrist ruling party and on the left have condemned the collection for the policeman, which was launched by far-right commentator Jean Messiha.

He previously worked as a spokesperson in anti-Islam politician Eric Zemmour's Reconquest! party, and remains a friend of the controversial far-right figure.

Nahel's grandmother, Nadia, told French media on Sunday that his killer must be brought to justice

'Jean Messiha is playing with fire,' ruling party MP Eric Bothorel wrote on Twitter, calling his fundraiser 'indecent and scandalous'.

The head of the Socialist party, Olivier Faure, addressed a message to Gofundme, saying they were facilitating a 'shameful' collection.

Senior hard-left MP Mathilde Panot highlighted how a collection for a former boxer who had punched several police officers during 'Yellow Vest' anti-government demonstrations in 2019 had been quickly closed by authorities.

'Killing a young North African, in France in 2023, can earn you a lot of money,' she wrote.

Criminal lawyer Carole-Olivia Monteno told BFM TV: 'It's insulting to Nahel's family, it only increases hate where there's too much of it already, its completely inappropriate and politically it does nothing.'

Messiha, an Egyptian-born economist and commentator on the right-wing CNews channel, celebrated when his fund overtook the one for the family of Nahel at the weekend.

When launching the collection, he said it was for an officer who was 'doing his work and is paying a heavy price'.

The head of the right-wing Republicans party, Eric Ciotti, defended the initiative on Monday and said he might contribute.

The officer's family was 'facing difficulties', he said.

The 38-year-old policeman, named in French media as Florian M., has been detained and charged with voluntary manslaughter.

In a video of the shooting, he can be seen with a colleague stopping a yellow Mercedes which Nahel was driving without a licence in the western Paris suburb of Nanterre on Tuesday morning.

The officer has his weapon drawn and shoots Nahel at point-blank range as the car drives off.

Prime Minister Elisabeth Borne said the operation was 'was obviously not in line with the rules of engagement for police'.

Florian M. also faces charges of making false statements, having initially claimed that he opened fire when Nahel drove towards him.

Another teenager in the car told media after the incident that the officers had hit Nahel with the butts of their guns before opening fire.

A voice can be heard on the video saying: 'You are going to get a bullet in the head.'

Since he was shot on Tuesday, there have been flashpoints in cities including Paris, Strasbourg in the east and Marseille and Nice in the south.

French riot police officers stand guard next to a burnt out trash bin during a demonstration against police in Marseille, southern France on July 1

Clashes between police and protestors continue after Seine-Saint-Denis, Paris, on June 30

The Interior Ministry has poured up to 45,000 police onto the streets each night to quell the unrest, which has mostly been confined to the suburbs but occasionally erupted into clashes in tourist areas such as Paris' Champs-Elysees avenue.

On Monday, the ministry said 157 people were arrested overnight, down from over 700 arrests the night before and over 1,300 on Friday night.

Three police officers were injured, the ministry said, while 300 vehicles were damaged by fire, according to provisional figures.

The riots amount to the worst crisis for Macron since the 'Yellow Vest' protests over fuel prices gripped much of France in late 2018.
An explosive new report has revealed that OceanGate founder Stockton Rush hired college-aged interns to design the 'critical' electrical systems for the Titan sub.

Rush along with four others perished during a catastrophic implosion while on a voyage to view the 1912 Titanic shipwreck, 12,500 feet beneath the Atlantic Ocean's surface on June 18.

Rush, who reportedly ignored repeated safety warnings, used interns from Washington State University Everett to work on the electrics for the submersible, The New Yorker revealed.

Mark Walsh, a former student with Washington State University's Institute of Electrical and Electronics, who worked on the doomed vessel. He was hired by OceanGate in 2017 after he graduated to lead the company's electrical engineering division.

In 2018, he enthusiastically told the college paper WSU Insider, that 'the whole electrical system - that was our design, we implemented it, and it works.'

OceanGate CEO and founder Stockton Rush (pictured left) sits alongside submersible pilot Randy Holt in the company's submersible, 'Antipodes,' traveling three miles off the coast of Fort Lauderdale, Florida June 28, 2013

An undated image provided by OceanGate Expeditions in June 2021 shows the company's Titan submersible

A file photo of the Titan submersible before its doomed voyage to the Titanic wreck last month

He added: 'We are on the precipice of making history and all of our systems are going down to the Titanic. It is an awesome feeling!''

But, by 2019 Walsh was no longer with the company, according to his Linkedin profile.

According to Walsh, OceanGate's director of engineering, Tony Nissen, described some of the company's challenges, and at the time he and fellow students volunteered to offer solutions, The New Yorker reported.

'Tony said, "OK, you're hired,"' said Walsh, who was also the treasurer of WSU's Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers club.

He told the college newspaper: 'If electrons flow through it, I'm in charge of it,' he laughed. 'That ranges from monitors, keyboards and tablets to the Wi-Fi and sonar.'

During that time, Walsh explained that he was leading a team of five, including Nissen and two WSU interns. According to the college paper, Nissen had also recommended senior Doug Yamamoto because of his software engineering experience.

OceanGate was also using interns from Everett Community College's Ocean Research College Academy, but that partnership ceased in 2019, according to the Everett Herald.

Ardi Kveven, founder and executive director of Everett Community College's Ocean Research College Academy, who helped students get the internships at OceanGate, told The Herald there was 'often a disconnect between the exploration community, which embraced pushing the envelope, and the more methodical scientific community.'

Sherif Edmond El Dabe of the LA-based firm El Dabe Ritter Trial Lawyers told The Herald that Rush had 'specifically' sought to hire younger people.'

He reiterated Rush's on-the-record comments that the OceanGate head, 'wanted a team partly based on who would do things in a new way due to their youth and optimism.'

The attorney then asked: 'Was the team ignorant of certain safety concerns or design flaws that an older, experienced engineer would have headed off?'

According to the Titan's specifications, the 21-foot submersible had the capacity to stay underwater for 96 hours, but the vessel appeared to lose communication with a ship on the surface about 45-minutes into its dive

The OceanGate engineering team with 3 Cougs was featured in the WSU Insider on February 21, 2018. The article was titled: A New Generation of Titanic Exploration

In 2018, the university sent out a news release that shared their students accomplishments and the role they had in designing of the submersible.

'When a five-person submersible descends to the floor of the North Atlantic this summer, part of a historic series of private excursions to map the famed RMS Titanic's wreckage in 3-D imagery, it will be WSU Everett students that helped make it possible,' the release said.

The release also stated that the submersible's entire electrical system was designed by WSU Everett students.

That same year, OceanGate's former director of marine operations and chief pilot David Lochridge said Titan was a 'lemon' and not safe to dive, according to The New Yorker.

He was fired after he raised concerns about OceanGate's testing methods.

In 2018, Lochridge found 'several critical aspects to be defective or unproven' with the Titan.

In a report, he outlined his concerns, including the craft's carbon-fiber hull, which experts now believe could have led to the implosion.

'Until suitable corrective actions are in place and closed out, Cyclops 2 (Titan) should not be manned during any of the upcoming trials,' he reportedly wrote.

Rush, who was reportedly 'furious' with Lochridge's report. He had called a meeting with the leadership team who insisted that no hull testing was necessary, the New Yorker reported.

British billionaire adventurer Hamish Harding, 58; Pakistani billionaire Shahzada Dawood, 48, his 19-year-old son Suleman and revered French explorer Paul-Henri Nargeolet, 77, were the other victims who tragically lost their lives on the ill-fated submersible.

CEO Stockton Rush made several claims to French Navy Veteran PH Nargeolet about the safety of the submersible

Five people were onboard the ill-fated Titan, including British billionaire adventurer Hamish Harding and Shahzada Dawood and his son Suleman, who was just 19

Days after the doomed voyage the university issued a statement to the Daily Herald saying that it 'does not have an alliance with OceanGate.'

'We are aware that some of our graduates have worked at OceanGate. To our knowledge, one graduate currently works there,' the statement read.

'We are not privy to what OceanGate projects WSU Everett alumni have been involved in or what their roles may have been outside of publicly available information.'

The relationship between OceanGate and WSU Everett and Everett Community College started when the company moved to Everett in 2015.

During that time, OceanGate had been leasing warehouse space at the Port of Everett. They were in the developmental stages of building a 'fleet of manned next-generation submersibles,' and conduct sea trials, the news outlet reported.

Boeing and the University of Washington also have both denied being involved with OceanGate, which the company's CEO repeatedly touting outside expertise in developing the submersible.

He also name dropped Boeing and the University of Washington and in a CBS video showed how the Titan was run by a videogame controller.

Rush, who saw himself as an innovator and once told a journalist in 2017 that he 'wanted to be Captain Kirk and in our lifetime, the final frontier is the ocean,' was considered a maverick and rule-breaker, the BBC reported

The chart shows the timeine of Oceangate's path to tragedy

Rush, who saw himself as an innovator and once told a journalist in 2017 that he 'wanted to be Captain Kirk and in our lifetime, the final frontier is the ocean,' was considered a maverick and rule-breaker, the BBC reported.

In 2009, he founded his private company OceanGate with hopes of giving those adventure-seekers a chance to experience deep see explorations. One of those voyages was the Titanic shipwreck that costs upwards of $250,000 a-head.

Canadian police are considering whether 'criminal, federal, or provincial laws' were broken in the lead-up to the Titan submersible disaster.

The Royal Canadian Mounted Police will examine 'the circumstances that led to the deaths' of the five crew on board the sub and decide 'whether or not a full investigation is warranted'.

Their investigation was ongoing on Thursday, a day after it emerged human remains were found during the recovery mission and segments of the vessel were brought ashore.

It comes as a marine engineering professor claimed electrical failure could also have contributed to the disaster, following suggestions it was made from inappropriate materials.

On Monday, a WSU Everett spokesperson Corrie Wilder told DailyMail.com that the university did not have a formal internship program established with OceanGate and issued a statement.

'Our relationship with OceanGate was through WSU Everett graduates who were working for the company and who were interested in giving back to their alma mater by mentoring a senior capstone project,' Wilder said.

'Student capstone projects do not constitute formal contracts or partnerships; they serve as an industry-driven initiative to provide students with expertly supervised practical experience in their respective fields of study.'

'The hosting of WSU Everett capstone projects at OceanGate ended when those WSU alums left the company.'
A father has been left fighting for life after suffering a brain haemorrhage while on holiday in Bali - and now his loved ones are stuck with the bill to fly him home.

Family and friends have rallied around the devastated family, who had their dream trip turned upside down by the sudden medical emergency.

Dad-of-one Raj is now in a 'life-threatening' coma, according to friend Andrew Macqueen.

There was no sign that he was sick, and just three days before Raj collapsed, he went snorkelling with Manta rays and appeared to be perfectly healthy.

A family's Bali holiday has been turned upside down after a father-of-one, Raj (pictured), suffered a 'massive' brain haemorrhage

According to his friend, Andrew Macqueen, doctors are unsure about how much damage has been done to Raj's brain and have told the family 'the road to recovery is long'

'He has been put into an induced coma where they have been working with both doctors in Bali and Australia to keep him alive and stable,' Mr Macqueen said.

'He is now in critical condition in the ICU. We are planning to send him home back to Australia via a repatriation flight with a team of medical experts and doctors.'

Doctors don't yet know how much damage has been done to his brain but have told the family 'the road to recovery is long'.

To add to the burden, the family's insurance has declined support, meaning they will have to fund his medical evacuation to Australia themselves.

Mr Macqueen has set up a GoFundMe campaign to support the family through his time in hospital and medevac home.

'Being far away from home only adds to the challenges he's facing, making it crucial for us to act swiftly and ensure his safe return to Australia,' he said.

'We're reaching out to you, our incredible network, in the hope that you can help us raise the necessary funds to cover the medical expenses, emergency transportation, and other associated costs.

'Every single donation, no matter the size, will make a significant difference in helping us bring our friend back to familiar surroundings and the care he desperately needs.'

To add to the burden, the family's insurance has declined support, meaning they will have to fund his medical evacuation to Australia themselves

The family's harrowing ordeal comes just weeks after an Australian mum also suffered a serious brain injury that her travel insurer refused to cover, while holidaying in Southeast Asia

Kylee Enwright, 48, from Singleton in the Hunter Valley, stepped off a half-metre balcony at her resort on the second day of her trip to Khao Lak in Thailand with her husband Paul on May 28.

She was instantly knocked unconscious from the fall and was 'bleeding from the head and ears'.

Ms Enwright was rushed to hospital and underwent six-hour emergency brain surgery to remove the left side of her skull.

Kylee Enwright, 48, from Singleton in the Hunter Valley, stepped off a half-metre balcony at her resort on the second day of her trip to Khao Lak in Thailand with her husband Paul on May 28

Ms Enwright (pictured, in hospital) was knocked instantly unconscious after the fall and was 'bleeding from the head and ears'

Left with a $250,000 medical bills, their travel insurance provider Cover-More invalidated the claim because she had consumed alcohol.

The insurer's investigators used CCTV footage and the couple's bar tab - showing nine Long Island iced teas and 14 beers ordered to their room number - to determine she could have had a blood-alcohol level of 0.35.

Her husband has disputed the bar bill and claims others may have added to their order.

The mother-of-three was flown back to Australia on June 17 and taken to the John Hunter Hospital in Newcastle.
An evil father who strangled his wife and their two young children with a dressing gown cord while drunk then held a knife to his throat before being Tasered by police has been jailed for life.

Saju Chelavalel attacked NHS nurse Anju Asok before throttling Jeeva Saju, six, and Janvi Saju, four, with a dressing gown cord.

A court heard he also tried to poison the children and made audio recordings as he strangled his wife while his son and daughter screamed: 'Mummy'.

Concerned neighbours alerted police after Saju failed to arrive for work at Kettering General Hospital and officers broke down the door to be confronted by Chelavalel.

Shocking body-cam footage shows him holding a knife and shouting 'shoot me' before he was Tasered. The lifeless bodies of tragic Anju, Jeeva and Janvi were then discovered in a nearby room at the at the property in Kettering, Northamptonshire, on December 14 last year.

Chelavalel previously admitted murder and was today jailed for life, to serve a minimum of 40 years.

Northampton Crown Court the monster drank half a bottle of Jack Daniels and murdered his wife at around 10pm. Prosecutors said Chelavalel falsely suspected his wife of being unfaithful when he violently choked her in the prolonged attack a few days before Christmas. He then penned a suicide note detailing his crime before trying to poison his son and daughter with a chilling cocktail of chocolate, sugar, water and sleeping pills.

When they rejected the deadly concoction, Chelavalel strangled both children and left their bodies together in a bedroom at around 2.30am.

Chelavalel sobbed as distressing audio footage was played to the court where coughs, screams and crying could be heard as he strangled his wife.

Saju Chelavalel must serve at least 40 years for his brutal crimes that he carried out while drunk

Saju Chelavalel threatening police officers with a knife following the murders of his wife and their two young children

All three of his victims were found at a property in Petherton Court, Kettering, on December 15 last year

Body worn video footage released by Northamptonshire Police after the hearing showed the killer urging police to shoot him at his home in Kettering, where he also left instructions for his own and his family's bodies to be cremated in India.

The footage, filmed after officers broke the glass in a patio door to gain access to the ground-floor flat in Petherton Court, shows them issuing repeated warnings for Chelavalel to drop a knife before his arrest.

Ms Asok, aged 35, worked as a nurse at Kettering General Hospital. Her body was found on the floor of a bedroom at the flat, while the children's bodies were found next to each other on a double bed in a different room.

Opening the facts of the case, prosecutor James Newton-Price KC said that the killer was arrested following a 999 call at 11.12am on December 15, after a neighbour saw him apparently unable to speak.

After officers smashed a window to gain access to the property, Mr Newton-Price said, Chelavalel was seen to be holding a knife to his own throat.

The barrister told the court: 'He responded (to the officers) with words to the effect of: 'I am going to kill myself'. He said: 'You shoot me, you shoot me'.'

Chelavalel was tasered and handcuffed before police then discovered the dead bodies of his family.

A letter written by Chelavalel in English was found at the scene, in which he made unsupported accusations about his wife being unfaithful and claimed to have cryptocurrency investments and 5,000 in other funds.

The letter stated: 'Please use this amount to transfer our corpses to India.'

The court heard that no evidence whatsoever of any affair was found on Ms Asok's phone, but that searches for women on dating sites were made by Chelavalel on December 3 and 12.

Part of the audio recording made by Chelavalel was played to the court, with Mr Newton-Price telling Mr Justice Pepperall: 'The word 'mummy' can be heard and the defendant whispering.'

He said of coughing sounds heard on the recording: 'We suspect that that may be the moment of strangulation (of Ms Asok) but we can't say that with absolute certainty.'

During police interviews, Chelavalel claimed he could not remember killing his children, but said he had lost control of himself when his wife made an offensive comment about his mother.

Offering mitigation, defence KC George Carter-Stephenson said the circumstances of the case were tragic in the extreme for relatives of the victims.

He said of Chelavalel: 'They are also tragic for this particular defendant. Whatever sentence the court imposes on him today he has to live with the knowledge of what he did on that particular night.'

Chelavalel, originally from Kerala in India, sobbed in the dock with his head bowed on Monday as an audio recording was played to the court on which his wife could be heard coughing and his children could be heard talking.

The judge said both child victims would have been 'terrified and deeply traumatised' after hearing their mother's murder

Addressing Chelavalel's claims that his wife was unfaithful to him, Mr Carter-Stephenson said: 'Although there is no evidence of it, it is something that he had believed.

'That belief was obviously wrong. But he continues to hold that view.'

Chelavalel's possession of a knife during his arrest was part of his intent to end his own life, the defence KC argued.

The audio recording was made because it 'was simply left on' from a period when the children were heard singing, Mr Carter-Stephenson added.

Passing sentence, High Court judge Mr Justice Pepperall told Chelavalel his actions had been brutal and 'extraordinarily selfish'.

The judge said both child victims would have been 'terrified and deeply traumatised' after hearing their mother's murder.

Both children could have been brought up by other relatives, the judge told Chelavalel, who he said had killed his wife in a 'fit of rage' after a minor argument.

The judge said: 'Fuelled by alcohol, wallowing in self-pity, engulfed in your resentment at your wife's perceived infidelity, you instead chose to snuff out their young and precious lives.'

A forensic officer at the scene in Kettering last December (Matthew Cooper/PA)

Chelavalel showed no emotion as the judge added: 'Even if you had been right in your suspicions, let me make clear that nothing could possibly justify violence, let alone the brutal murders of your family.

'I should make plain that the police did indeed investigate your claim (of an affair) and found no evidence whatsoever that your wife was involved with another man.

'Not only was her supposed infidelity a figment of your imagination but the police investigation revealed your hypocrisy in that it was you, and not your wife, who had been searching dating websites in the days leading up to these offences.

'Your attack upon your wife was recorded. While you were squeezing the life out of your wife, your young children can be heard crying in the background for their mummy.

'Having listened to that harrowing recording, I cannot be sure that they were eye-witnesses to their mother's murder but it is clear that they heard what was going on and knew that she was being hurt by you.'

The judge said the evidence showed that within minutes of murdering his wife at about 10pm on December 14, Chelavalel decided his children must also die.

The judge continued: 'No psychiatric evidence is put before me to explain any disordered thinking that led you to that extraordinarily selfish and callous conclusion.

'At some point after 2.30am, you then strangled both children.

'Immediate triggers were a pesky argument over the children's clothes for the next day and your belief that your wife had insulted your mother.

'Underlying those matters was your longstanding brooding sense of grievance that you believed Anju had been having an affair.

'You were later to be insistent that the police should investigate that matter and believed it to be true.

'Even if you had been right in your suspicion, let me make clear, nothing possibly justifies violence, let alone the brutal murder of your family.'

The judge added: 'The police did investigate your claim and found no evidence whatsoever of your wife's involvement with another man.

'It was you and not your wife that had been searching dating sites for other women in the days leading up to this incident.

'While you were squeezing the life out of your wife your young children can be heard screaming for their mummy.

'Having listened to that harrowing account I cannot be sure that they were not eye-witnesses to their mother's murder.

'It is clear that they knew what was going on and that she was being hurt by you.

'I accept that you attacked her in an alcohol-fueled rage and her murder was not premeditated.

'Your wife would have initially lost consciousness, but only died because you maintained that pressure for a period of time.

'You reached the decision that both children must die.

'You ground up tablets and then put them in a chocolate drink.

'One child is recorded 20 minutes after your wife's murder complaining that the drink made them sick. The children rejected the poison.

'On your own account, you went to sleep with your children.

'You planned to kill them and take your own life. At some point after 2.30am you then strangled both children, your six-year-old son first then your four-year-old daughter.

'Your children would have been terrified and deeply horrified by the attack on their mother.

'Each of your victims would have suffered physically and mentally as they fought to breathe as they lost consciousness. A family man does not kill his wife.'

Speaking to the media outside the court building, Detective Inspector Simon Barnes said the murdered children went to Kettering Park Infant Academy.

He said: 'The staff at the school described the children as kind, caring, gentle, playful, polite and smiley. They are much missed.

'How do you explain to children as young as four that the friends they were playing with only days before are no longer with us? You shouldn't have to. No one should.

'As an adult, detective and father, I cannot comprehend how Saju Chelavalel could do this and don't think I ever will.

'There is no amount of time behind bars that will ever be enough for what he did. His primary role as a husband and a father was to protect his family from harm.'

In a statement, a spokesperson for the family said: 'The life of Anju's parents and siblings back in India will never be the same without her.

'She came to this country with a lot of expectations and dreams. She was not expecting a tragic death from her husband, whom she trusted.

'Her only surviving sister and the aunt of Jeeva and Janvi is so traumatised that she hasn't recovered from this incident's mental shock and deep scars.

'Indeed, she was hospitalised for a week in India due to the shock of what happened.'

He also went on to explain how Chelavalel had caused 'deep upset' by trying to contact Anju's family from prison.

The court also heard from Sarah Powell - the headteacher of Kettering Park Infant Academy, where Jeeva and Janvi attended school.

She described Jeeva and Janvi as valued and much-missed members of the school community.

She said: 'I am incredibly proud of how the school community have all worked together to try and understand what has happened and we were privileged to hold a memorial to remember Janvi, Jeeva and their mother Anju with the support of our Trust and Governors.

'We have two colourful benches in our playground to remember them both.

'Having the two police officers and next of kin present during this memorial meant a lot to our whole school community.

'The school have also created an album of memories of the children from their time at the school.'
Police have launched an urgent manhunt for the perpetrators of a firebombing attack on three Washington DC businesses early Sunday morning.

Images of a suspect and vehicle have been released by officials as they hunt down at least one person believed to have thrown explosives and Molotov Cocktails at the locations in the northwest of the capital.

A Nike store, a Truist Bank ATM and a Safeway were all targeted in a 15-minute blitz at around 4:30am, however no injuries were reported and it is believed the stores were empty when they were hit.

Police are yet to establish a motive in the incident, and have not determined how many suspects were potentially involved as they continue their investigation.

Police released this image of a champagne-colored Acura TL, with a Maryland license plate reading: 17971CK. Officials are offering a $20,000 reward for information leading to an arrest

One or more suspects are being sought by DC police, including this individual seen in surveillance footage released by cops

The first store to be targeted was the Truist Bank, which saw significant damage after a device was placed outside and detonated at approximately 4:30am.

Around six minutes later, the Nike store was struck, before the assailants threw a Molotov Cocktail at the Safeway at 4:45am, police said.

A Molotov Cocktail is a glass bottle filled with flammable liquid that is sealed with a rag, which is then set on fire.

Although police know a Molotov Cocktail was used at the third location, the explosives used at the first two stores is yet to be established.

Notably, the Nike store is located mere blocks from the US Supreme Court and Capitol buildings.

'It appears the suspect targeted commercial establishments and it does not appear the suspect was targeting any members of the public,' police said in a statement.

Shocked residents said the terrifying early-hours spree has left the community shaken.

One local told NBC News he heard a 'boom', adding: 'It woke me up out of my sleep, and I was paranoid'.

'It shook my living room, it knocked all my security cameras off the wall, it knocked my pictures off the wall, it pretty much rattled me,' added the resident, who declined to give his name but said he lived above the targeted Trust Bank.

'It was enough to rattle me, I've got PTSD and that really rattled me.'

Another customer said outside the store: 'It's frightening, I don't know what it is, if it's like a firework or something like that, but it's definitely concerning.'

Patricia Agino, an ANC commissioner for a nearby neighborhood, condemned the crimes, saying: 'I am very much appalled by the incidents, I find it unsettling.'

An image of a 'champagne-colored' Acura TL that was spotted in at least one of the three attacks has been released by police as they continue their investigation.

The vehicle is described as a four-door with a license plate from Maryland, listed as 17971CK.

An image of a suspect was also released by officials, showing a man at the scene wearing a light grey hoodie and black pants.

The Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives and the Metropolitan Police Department are offering a $20,000 reward for information leading to an arrest and a conviction.

Anyone with information is urged to contact DC Police, or text their tip line at 50411.
A 'devastating' house fire that killed a mother and her two children was most likely caused by a charging electric bike, it has emerged.

Gemma Germeney, 31, her son Oliver Peden, four, and daughter Lilly Peden, eight, died after the blaze at the family's two-storey maisonette in Cambridge on Friday.

A man in his 30s who escaped the burning building and remains in a critical condition in hospital is believed to be Ms Germeny's partner Scott Peden.

Mr Peden, the father of the two children, has been branded a 'hero' after neighbours said he tried to rescue his family when the fire broke out at around 1am.

Following an investigation, Cambridgeshire Fire and Rescue today said it had concluded that 'the most probable cause was an e-bike that was charging.'

Gemma Germeney (left), 31, her daughter Lilly Peden (bottom right), eight, and her son Oliver Peden (bottom left), four, were all killed in the fire. The man believed to be her partner, Scott Peden (back right) is fighting for his life

Lilly and Oliver both died in hospital following the house fire last week

The force's Area Commander Stuart Smith said: 'Fire service and specialist fire investigators, together with police forensic teams and a fire dog, have spent the weekend carrying out a thorough investigation of the maisonette.

'A fire investigation looks for the most probable cause and in this case, we believe that to be an electric bike that was charging.

'We know e-bikes and e-scooters are popular modes of personal transport at the moment and we are urging anyone with one to be aware of the potential risks and follow simple precautions to reduce the likelihood of the batteries overheating.'

The two family dogs are also said to have perished in the inferno.

It comes after experts last month issued a warning over buying cheap electric bikes or scooters online, as well as cheaper chargers.

In the first five months of 2023 alone, the London Fire Brigade has on average been called out to a fire caused by overheating lithium batteries once every two days.

Since 2020, at least eight people are believed to have died from fires caused by electric bikes and scooters, while more than 190 have been injured.

In January, an e-bike left charging overnight ignited at the home of Rab Shearer, 60, in Litherland, Merseyside. Mr Shearer was killed in the blaze while his son Gary, 23, died in hospital two weeks later after trying in vain to save him.

On New Year's Day, Sofia Duarte, 21, was asleep at her home in Old Kent Road, south London, when a modified electric bike in her flat exploded.

The 'fun-loving' daughter of Portuguese immigrants, who enjoyed dancing, spending time with friends and travelling, is believed to be the first person to be killed in London due to an e-bike fire.

Giuseppe Capanna, a product safety engineer at electricalsafetyfirst, has been investigating the spate of e-vehicle fires across the UK.

He told MailOnline: 'With e-vehicles people can easily buy them from online retailers and be completely unaware they don't meet any of the safety standards.'

It is not yet known what type of e-bike was inside the Germeney-Peden household at the time of the fire last Friday.

Locals described hearing screams as flames burst out of the windows of the family's maisonette (pictured) in Sackville Close, in the King's Hedges area of Cambridge

Neighbours described Ms Germeney as having a 'heart of gold'

A police scientific support unit van was among the emergency vehicles at the scene on Friday

Mr Capanna added: 'If it's a substandard scooter/bike the battery can be damaged easily which means it's more likely to catch fire. They hold an enormous amount of energy in a very small space and they're separated by a very thin layer that keeps the two things apart. If you crush or pierce one of these batteries they just explode.

'Imagine a dam with a reservoir. It's holding back all that water and is useful as long as you can control it. If that wall collapses it's pandemonium. It's the same with the batteries, as long as the electricity comes through in a controlled manner it isn't an issue.

'If that's breached you'll have an explosion. That can happen either by damage to the battery or overcharging, which can happen if you use an incompatible charger.

'When they catch fire you're in trouble as they burn at around 600C and even higher than that. They're glowing red hot and they melt everything around them. The chemical reaction in the battery creates its own oxygen which makes them very hard to put out.'

It comes as neighbours have been paying tribute to the Germeney family, with one resident named Debbi telling the Sun: 'Gemma loved her kids to bits, she was a devoted mum and she had a heart of gold.

'We heard that her partner Scott had tried to rescue them all when the fire broke out in the middle of the night. He was a hero, but he couldn't save them.'

Ms Germeney died at the scene, while her two young children passed away later in hospital.

Gemma Germeney (left) and her eight-year-old daughter Lilly Peden (right) who traigcally died along with four-year-old Oliver

More than 30 firefighters rushed to a flat in King's Hedges ward, Cambridge, at 1.08am

Locals described hearing screams as flames burst out of the windows of the family's home on Sackville Close, in the King's Hedges area.

A neighbour, who asked not to be named, said: 'I was woken up by what I thought was a car alarm, but it must have been a smoke alarm going off.

'Then I heard a lot of shouting and commotion. A man's voice was yelling, "Call the fire brigade" and "call an ambulance".

'There was smoke billowing everywhere and I could see flames, and hear the sounds of windows smashing.

'The first two fire engines arrived within a few minutes and they quickly got the fire under control.

'I didn't realise how serious it was until I saw some stretchers being wheeled out. It was absolutely horrific.

'I think there was a child on one of the stretchers and they were receiving CPR.'

Around 30 firefighters which included crews from Cambridge, Cottenham, Cambourne, Linton, Burwell and Huntingdon were all involved in helping tackle the flames.

The alarm was raised as the fire took hold shortly after 1am on Friday, but details of the fatalities were only released on Saturday.

The walls of property have been left charred black, and the windows smashed, as a result of the intense heat and smoke.

Despite fire crews battling to stop the fire from spreading to adjoining properties, a child from a neighbouring home was also taken to hospital.

A cordon remained in place over the weekend as emergency services attempted to establish the cause of the blaze

The young children were rescued from the blaze but both later died in hospital

It is believed that the youngster was suffering from smoke inhalation, but was not seriously hurt.

Another neighbour who asked to stay anonymous said: 'I was woken up by screaming just after 1am and I thought it was someone having an argument.

'A few minutes later, I was woken up properly by fire engines turning up. I looked out of my window and saw flames everywhere. They were coming out of the ground floor window and going up the wall.

'The ambulances could not get near because of all the fire engines. I saw the stretchers being wheeled past to get to the ambulances, and a policeman carrying a child who looked like a boy.

'There were loads of fire engines, two ambulances and police cars. It was just mayhem. I had never seen so many people out there.'

Data analyst Peter Griffin, 30, who lives nearby said: 'I was woken up by the first fire engine  but our neighbour said he heard shouting before that.

'There are trees between our house and the maisonette. I could see the orange glow of the fire. There was also an acrid smell of smoke... It is just an awful tragedy.'
At least three people, including a doctor, are under arrest in Brazil after authorities dismantled a gang that sold fake university diplomas and transcripts for people who pretended to be doctors.

Federal Police investigators discovered that the ring members falsified documents from several medical schools to gain access to records that were sold to the fake doctors, according to Brazilian news magazine Fantastico.

The diplomas and transcripts were created with paper that resemble the legal versions that were provided by the universities.

Some of fake records contained the official school logo of the State University of Bahia.

Dr. Francisco Gomes, who was arrested in June, formed part of a Brazilian ring that forged diplomas and transcripts to fake doctors

Juan Machado is among the individuals who are being investigated by Brazilian authorities for purchasing fake university diplomas and transcripts that they used to practice medicine.

Fake transcripts and diplomas attributed to the State University of Bahia were sold to fake doctors

Dr. Francisco Gomes, Valdelirio Barroso and Reinaldo Santos were all taken into custody in June.

Ana Monteiro, who has been identified as the ring leader, was on the run as of Monday.

The suspects set up a fake email through the State University of Bahia to avoid being detected and obtained at least 65 forged documents from the Rio de Janeiro Regional Council of Medicine.

An employee at the agency notified the Federal Police after they became suspicious of one of the fraudulent records.

Valdelirio Barroso (left) and Reinaldo Santos (right) were arrested in June after Brazilian authorities took down a ring that sold fake university diplomas and transcripts to people pretending to work as doctors

Brazil's Federal Police is searching for Ana Monteiro, who is accused of being the leader of a gang that sold fake university transcripts and diplomas to people who posed as fake doctors

Brazilian nurse Marcelo Salgueiro is among several people who were busted with fake doctor diplomas

Registered nurse Cassia Santos spent 400,000 reais (around $83,500) for access to documents and has been cooperating in the investigation.

One of the fake doctors, Johnny Teixeira, attended medical school in Paraguay but failed to graduate, according to police records.

He paid 80,000 Brazilian reais (about $16,700) for access to the documents. He was arrested for working as a doctor in February and was jailed for nine days.

Another bogus doctor, Jean Machado, threatened the ring with reporting them to the Federal Police if they didn't refund the money he had paid for a diploma.

When contacted by the outlet, he claimed that 'he did not buy a diploma' and refused to say if he had ever studied medicine.

Marcelo Salgueiro, who practices nursing and owns an ambulance company, told authorities that he paid 45,000 reais (about $9,400) to obtain a transcript and diploma with the logo from the State University of Bahia.

'The investigation was able to point out that there was indeed a business structure in this sale of fake diplomas and fake school transcripts,' Federal Police chief Francisco Guarani said.
France has been rocked by six nights of protests after a 17-year-old boy was shot dead at point-blank range by a policeman during a traffic stop in a Parisian suburb on Tuesday.

Several cities in France have seen widespread demonstrations, some of which turned violent with incensed protesters smashing up property, setting cars alight and fighting in the streets with riot police.

Thousands have been arrested since the protests began, with some 45,000 officers deployed across the country to try and quell the unrest.

Sunday night saw the intensity of the protests abate somewhat, with the grandmother of teen shooting victim Nahel M. appealing to citizens to demonstrate peacefully and stop the violence.

But tensions remain fraught, particularly in the suburbs of cities like Paris, Marseille and Lyon.

So, with concerns abound among British travellers contemplating a trip to France, MailOnline delves into the matter and examines the latest advice from the Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Office (FCDO).

Police hold young people against a vehicle during the fifth night of protests following the death of Nahel, a 17-year-old teenager killed by a French police officer in Nanterre during a traffic stop, in the Champs Elysees area, in Paris, France, July 2, 2023

A French firefighter works to extinguish a burning car during the fifth day of protests following the death of Nahel, a 17-year-old teenager killed by a French police officer in Nanterre during a traffic stop, in Tourcoing, France, July 2, 2023

Riot police forces clash with demonstrators near the Arc de Triomphe on Saturday

A person walks by Champ de Mars and a barricaded Eiffel Tower in Paris, France, 03 July 2023

Where is the violence?

Every year, a staggering 17 million Britons set foot in France, usually without a hitch.

But scenes of destruction have gripped the country in recent days, with cars being torched, vandalised, and flipped over like toys.

In some cases, municipal buildings and infrastructure have been targeted in arson attacks.

Paris has been the epicentre of violence and lawlessness, with a string of shops looted in commercial hotspots like the Forum des Halles.

But things have calmed somewhat over the weekend, with the family of Nahel pleading for the return of peace, and Parisian authorities deploying crowd control measures likes tear gas and water cannons against demonstrators.

A massive force of 45,000 police officers is operating across the country, with cities like Marseille, Lyon, Toulouse and Lille benefitting from an increased law enforcement presence.

Meanwhile, some towns and suburbs around the outskirts of Paris implemented partial curfews last week, some of which are in effect until tomorrow.

Can I travel to France?

For now, the French government has refrained from declaring a state of emergency, though Macron delayed what would have been the first state visit to Germany by a French president in 23 years yesterday, highlighting the seriousness of the situation.

While French authorities decline to implement extreme measures to calm protests, the FCDO has not officially discouraged travel to France.

However, it's crucial that British travellers jaunting across The Channel keep a close eye on the media, steer clear of protests, stay updated with guidance from travel operators, and strictly adhere to the instructions of local authorities.

Holidaymakers heading for Paris, Lyon and Marseille in particular should be wary of any signs of unrest or violence and take steps to remain safe.

Protesters were seen running from launched tear gas canisters during clashes with police in Marseille on Saturday

People run followed by police officers during riots following the death of Nahel, a 17-year-old teenager killed by a French police officer in Nanterre during a traffic stop, at Champs Elysees in Paris, France

Riot police forces on motorbike secure the area in front of the Arc de Triomphe amid fears of another night of clashes with protestors in Paris, France, 02 July 2023

Emphasising the importance of adequate travel insurance, the FCDO warns that it is 'now more important than ever' to obtain comprehensive coverage.

With France in the throes of turmoil and violence, British tourists must carefully evaluate the risks and uncertainties before embarking on their continental adventures.

As the situation remains volatile, personal safety should be the utmost priority when considering travel plans.

Useful information

The Overseas Business Risk service offers information and advice for British companies operating overseas on how to manage political, economic, and business security-related risks.

If you are abroad and you need emergency help from the UK government, contact the nearest British embassy, consulate or high commission.

For emergency services in France, travellers can call:
A Place for All Conservatives to Speak Their Mind.
Downing Street today rejected an astonishing suggestion by Orkney politicians that the Scottish island archipelago could leave the UK and reunite with Norway after more than 600 years.

No10 intervened after local politicians in Kirkwall said it was among options they were considering in a row over what they see as a lack of public spending by the British and Scottish government.

Orkney's council leader James Stockan has put forward a motion which says it is time for the islands to consider other forms of governance, possibly along the lines of crown dependencies such as Guernsey, Jersey and the Isle of Man, or reviving historic links with Scandinavia.

Mr Stockan told the BBC he felt that Orkney is being 'failed dreadfully' by Governments in both Edinburgh and London.

Orkney was under Norwegian and Danish control until 1472 when the islands were given to Scotland as part of Margaret of Denmark's wedding dowry to King James III of Scotland. It was later home to the UK's largest naval base at Scapa Flow.

But the Prime Minister's official spokesman told reporters today: 'First and foremost, there is no mechanism for the conferral of crown dependency or overseas territory status on any part of the UK.

'But fundamentally, we are stronger as one United Kingdom, we have no plans to change that.'

Orkney's council leader James Stockan has put forward a motion which says it is time for the islands to consider other forms of governance, possibly along the lines of crown dependencies such as Guernsey, Jersey and the Isle of Man, or reviving historic links with Scandinavia.

The Orkney Islands were ceded to Scotland in 1472 after the failure of King Christian I of Denmark, Norway and Sweden to pay a dowry following his daughter Margaret's betrothal to King James III of Scotland (left)

The spokesman added: 'We've got no plans to change the devolution settlement.'

Orkney was already being supported with 50 million through the islands growth deal, No 10 said.

Mr Stockan's motion will be considered by Orkney Islands Council on Tuesday.

It states that 'due to historical and contemporary challenges' over funding, 'Orkney Islands Council should now explore options for alternative models of governance that provide greater fiscal security and economic opportunity'.

That should include looking at 'Nordic connections, crown dependencies and other options for greater subsidiarity and autonomy to be presented to the community for consideration'.

The council leader's motion does not commit the council to any of these options and the officials' report notes that any constitutional change would likely require a combination of petitions, referenda and legislation at Holyrood and Westminster.

Mr Stockan told the BBC he felt that Orkney is being 'failed dreadfully' by Governments in both Edinburgh and London.

Funding is less per head than Shetland and the Western Isles receive, he said.

Had the impoverished King Christian I not reneged on a promised dowry payment for his daughter's marriage to King James III of Scotland, they might have remained Norse for another six centuries.

But despite being formally part of Scotland since 1472, the people of Orkney still feel a strong affiliation with their one-time mother country.

Mr Stockan told the BBC: 'We were part of the Norse kingdom for much longer than we were part of the United Kingdom.

'On the street in Orkney, people come up and say to me: 'When are we going to pay back the dowry? When are we going back to Norway?'

'There is a huge affinity and a huge deep cultural relationship there. This is exactly the moment to explore what is possible.'
In what some might call an unlikely romantic match, a Mayor of a small Mexican town and a 'princess girl' caiman wearing a wedding dress have tied the knot.

Victor Hugo Sosa, mayor of San Pedro Huamelula, a town of Indigenous Chontal people in the Tehuantepec isthmus of Mexico, explained 'you can't have a marriage without love' after he said 'I do' to the reptile named Alicia Adriana.

As onlookers clapped and danced in celebration, the mayor and others embraced Alicia, who was wearing a floral headband, as part of the 230-year-old ancestral ritual.

The caiman, which is similar to an alligator, appeared relaxed before she entered into holy matrimony with Mr Sosa. The pair then change into their white costumes before the pair marry.

Victor Hugo Sosa, mayor of San Pedro Huamelula, kisses his 'princess girl' bride after they are wed

Before the wedding ceremony, the mayor and caiman parade round the town

The caiman seemed pretty relaxed as she married the mayor of the town

El presidente municipal de San Pedro Huamelula se caso con un lagarto llamado princesa Alicia como parte de una tradicion en ese municipio del Istmo de Tehuantepec #Oaxaca pic.twitter.com/ysE2lvDbhD  OAXACA INFORMATIVO (@OaxacaInforma10) July 1, 2023

Sosa swore to be true to what local lore calls 'the princess girl.'

'I accept responsibility because we love each other. That is what is important. You can't have a marriage without love... I yield to marriage with the princess girl,' he said during the ritual.

Marriage between a man and a female caiman has happened in San Pedro Huamelula for 230 years to commemorate the day when two Indigenous groups came to peace - with a marriage.

Tradition has it that frictions were overcome when a Chontal king, now represented by the mayor, wedded a princess girl of the Huave Indigenous group, represented by the female alligator.

The wedding allows the sides to 'link with what is the emblem of Mother Earth, asking the all-powerful for rain, the germination of the seed, all those things that are peace and harmony for the Chontal man,' Jaime Zarate said, chronicler of San Pedro Huamelula.

Before the wedding ceremony, the reptile is taken house to house so that inhabitants can take her in their arms and dance.

Marriage between a man and a female caiman has happened in San Pedro Huamelula for 230 years

During the service the creature's snout is bound shut to avoid any scraps

Before the wedding ceremony, the reptile is taken house to house so that inhabitants can take her in their arms and dance

The caiman is passed around the village members as part of the ritual before the wedding

The alligator wears a green skirt, a colorful hand-embroidered tunic and a headdress of ribbons and sequins. And the creature's snout is bound shut to avoid any pre-marital scraps.

Later, she is put in a white bride's costume and taken to town hall for the blessed event.

As part of the ritual, Joel Vasquez, a local fisherman, tosses his net and intones the town's hopes that the marriage may bring 'good fishing, so that there is prosperity, equilibrium and ways to live in peace'.

After the wedding, the mayor dances with his bride to traditional music.

'We are happy because we celebrate the union of two cultures. People are content,' Mr Sosa said.

As the dance winds down, the king plants a kiss on the snout of the 'princess girl'.
The leader of the Polish government-in-exile in the Second World War is set to be commemorated with a new bronze statue, made to mark the 80th anniversary of his death in a plane crash.

General Wadysaw Sikorski died along with his daughter and several others on July 4, 1943, when the plane they were travelling in crashed in mysterious circumstances shortly after take-off in Gibraltar.

He was a key ally of Britain's Prime Minister Winston Churchill and provided troops for many key battles, including the Battle of Britain, where the Polish air force played a crucial role in defending the UK from German air attack.

A new life-sized statue of the hero General will be unveiled on Tuesday at Newark Cemetery in Nottinghamshire, where the war leader was buried alongside 200 Polish airmen who lost their lives in the fight against Adolf Hitler.

General Wadysaw Sikorski, the leader of the Polish government-in-exile in the Second World War, is set to be commemorated with a new bronze statue. Above: General Sikorski (second form left) with Prime Minister Winston Churchill and France's Charles de Gaulle (second from right) in 1941

A new life-sized statue (above) of the hero General will be unveiled on Tuesday at Newark Cemetery in Nottinghamshire, where the war leader was buried alongside 200 Polish airmen who lost their lives in the fight against Adolf Hitler

The figure, created by sculptor Andrew Lilley, depicts the General saluting the Polish Memorial Cross, which stands above his tomb and was visited by him more than 80 years before.

The Daily Mail's tribute to the war leader

When Hitler invaded Poland in September 1939 - an act which led Britain and France to declare war on Germany - General Sikorski Poland's prime minister.

He fled to France and, as well as becoming chief of Poland's surviving armed forces, set up the Polish government-in-exile.

After the defeat of France in 1940, he then came to London, bringing thousands of Polish troops with him.

The Polish 303 Fighter Squadron ended up achieving the highest number of kills of any Allied air unit in the Battle of Britain, which raged from July until the end of October in 1941.

General Sikorski was killed along with 15 others during his attempt to return from a visit to Polish troops stationed in the Middle East.

His daughter, chief of staff and two Conservative MPs also died.

The only survivor was the plane's pilot, Captain Edward Prchal, who later won a libel case after being wrongly accused of deliberately causing the crash.

The plane, a four-engined Liberator, had taken off as normal but, after a 'mighty jerk', the controls jammed and the aircraft crashed into the sea.

An enquiry confirmed that the aircraft had become uncontrollable after the elevator controls jammed but was unable to determine the exact cause of the malfunction.

In a transmission to the Polish people, Churchill paid tribute to the General, saying: 'I knew him well.

'He was a statesman, a soldier, a comrade, an ally and, above all, a Pole.

'He is gone: but if he were at my side I think he would wish me to say this, and I say it from my heart: "Soldiers must die, but by their death they nourish the nation which gave them birth.

"Sikorski is dead, but it is in this sense that you must think of your dead Prime Minister and Commander-in-Chief."'

General Sikorski is seen saluting as he leaves a Polish cabinet meeting in London during the war

The Daily Mail said in tribute: 'General Sikorski will be sincerely mourned in this country.

'He will be remembered with gratitude as the one who stood by us in our darkest hour and whose faith in our ultimate victory never faltered.

'He was a Polish patriot of the best type, and always a staunch advocate of alliance with Britain and France.'

At his funeral, General Sikorski was laid in a vault among the remains of fallen Polish airmen.

Two years earlier, he had attended the unveiling of the memorial cross which stood above the vault.

General Sikorski was buried near the memorial cross which he had come to visit two years before his death. Above: His grave site

Dr Marta de Zuniga, Director of the London-based Polish Cultural Institute, which organised the new tribute, said: 'General Sikorski was a war time leader and a hero who was a symbol of resilience and strategic thinking in times of the enormous existential threats of WWII.

'His fight for "your freedom and ours" in many ways resembles the dramatic situation of our Ukrainian friends today and teaches us about the importance of solidarity and mutual support not only in times of crisis and war.

'The 80th anniversary of Sikorski's death offers a chance to raise awareness among non-Poles of both Sikorski's profile, as a heroic military leader and statesman, as well as the significant Polish-British relationship that existed during WWII.

'It is an opportunity to rediscover Britain's forgotten ally and celebrate his achievements among audiences beyond Poland.'
China reaffirmed its military relations with Russia and called on the two countries to take their defence ties to 'a new level' during a meeting today.

Chinese defence minister Li Shangfu told the head of Russia's navy Admiral Nikolai Yevmenov that Beijing hopes for increased exchanges, joint exercises and other forms of co-operation, according to a release from his ministry.

The pair met in Beijing for the first formal military talks between the friendly neighbours since a short-lived mutiny by Russian mercenary group Wagner, which analysts say weakened Russian president Vladimir Putin's position.

'The Chinese and Russian navies have close exchanges and frequent interactions,' the ministry quoted Mr Li as saying.

'It is hoped that the two sides will strengthen communication at all levels, regularly organise joint training, joint patrols and joint war games.'

Chinese defence minister Li Shangfu (pictured June 4) told the head of Russia's navy Admiral Nikolai Yevmenov that Beijing hopes for increased exchanges, joint exercises and other forms of co-operation, according to a release from his ministry

Russia's navy Admiral Nikolai Yevmenov (second-right) said China and Russia should 'continue to expand exchanges at all levels of the two countries' navies' and 'continuously push the relationship between the two militaries to new heights'

Yevmenov said the two countries should 'continue to expand exchanges at all levels of the two countries' navies' and 'continuously push the relationship between the two militaries to new heights', Beijing's readout said.

China operates the world's largest navy by number of hulls and vastly outstrips Russia's navy in both size and technical ability.

The countries' fleets have held a series of exercises and joint manoeuvres since Russia's invasion of Ukraine last year, as have their air forces.

The military co-operation embodies the Chinese and Russian governments' informal alliance to oppose the US-led liberal world order.

They align their foreign policies and positions at the United Nations, where Beijing has consistently provided diplomatic cover for Moscow.

While saying it is neutral in the Ukraine war, China has stood solidly beside Russia, accusing the US and Nato of provoking Moscow and of fuelling the bloodshed by helping arm Ukraine.

China has refused to condemn the invasion or to refer to it as one in deference to Moscow but has also said it will not provide Russia with military assistance or weapons for the conflict.

Since the abortive rebellion led by Wagner Group leader Yevgeny Prigozhin, China has said it backs Russian efforts to 'stabilise the situation in the country'.

The march on Moscow that Mr Prigozhin launched and then called off last month posed the greatest challenge to Putin's two decades in power.

Beijing said it supported Russia in 'protecting national stability' following the mutiny but leader Xi Jinping is yet to hold public talks with Putin over the incident.

The chief of staff of Russia's armed forces, Valery Gerasimov, said last month his country's strong military partnership with China provided stability around the world.

A Chinese warship sails during a military drill near Fuzhou, Fujian Province, near the Taiwan-controlled Matsu Islands that are close to the Chinese coast, China, April 8

Prigozhin called for Gerasimov to either resign or be sacked when he launched his mutiny on June 23. It is understood that Gerasimov remains in his post, although he is yet to be seen publicly since the failed insurrection.

The recent developments have very much made Russia the junior partner in the relationship with China. War-related sanctions have made the Russian economy heavily dependent on energy purchases from China and India.

Mr Putin, Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi and Chinese leader Xi Jinping are set to meet on Tuesday at a virtual summit which will mark the Russian leader's first multilateral meeting since the Wagner revolt.

The summit of the Shanghai Co-operation Organisation, a security grouping founded by Russia and China to counter Western alliances from East Asia to the Indian Ocean, is an apparent indication that Mr Putin still enjoys some support.
Salt Lake City has ditched the fireworks for July 4 this year and replaced them with a drone spectacle amid concerns over wildfires, air quality and frightened pets.

The Utah capital displayed its first-ever drone show in lieu of fireworks to celebrate American Independence over the weekend.

Democratic Mayor Erin Mendenhall told reporters the new format signaled an effort to minimize risk in the 'high fire danger' area, in addition to reducing air quality issues - which are often exacerbated by pyrotechnics - brought about by the raging Canadian wildfires.

Furthermore, swapping drones for fireworks mitigates the issue of poor reactions from pets - most of whom are frightened by the loud bangs that fill the sky on Independence Day.

The drone show celebrating independence day on Saturday July 1st in Salt Lake City Utah. SLC, and a few other cities across the U.S. are opting to trade thunderous fireworks displays for colorful high-tech drone shows this Fourth of July week over fire safety and air quality concerns in dry areas

Salt Lake City Mayor Erin Mendenhall announced the change to the fireworks show this year due to climate and air quality concerns, as well as wildfires that plague Utah every summer

July 4 is believed to be the day that the single highest number of pets run away, because of their overwhelming fear of what's going on outside.

'As temperatures rise and fire danger increases, we must be conscientious of both our air quality and the potential for wildfires,' said Mendenhall.

'The summer holiday shows are a mainstay for Salt Lakers, and were excited about adapting to new technology which will provide a safe alternative for our residents and visitors.'

Utah has one of the highest rates of wildfires in the US, suffering an average of 800 to 1,000 annually. According to the Utah Department of Public Safety, the state is among the most wildfire-prone in the country.

In Colorado as well, the city of Boulder also decided to axe the annual fireworks display for its first-ever nighttime drone show. Colorado is also in its wildfire season right now.

Before the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic, the city of roughly 100,000 people celebrated its Independence Day Blast since 1941. This year, however, they opted for a change.

'The shift from traditional fireworks to drones was not an easy decision and based on a number of factors, including increased fire danger fueled by climate change,' read a Facebook update from the city's government.

'While the show is going to be a bit different, it promises to be a fantastic show that aligns with our Sustainability, Equity and Resilience Framework.'

One Boulder businessman whose company partners with the city to put on the show, told CNN that the committee in charge of planning the 4th of July show ultimately decided on the drone route because of environmental impacts and the potential difficulty of acquiring fireworks.

'Ultimately, the decision became pretty clear for us because the company that weve long gotten purchased the fireworks from had gone out of business during the pandemic, and we were not able to find fireworks for the show, so it made our decision pretty straightforward and pretty easy to go with the drones,' he said.

In California, several areas, including Lake Tahoe, La Jolla and Ocean Beach, also chose to host drone shows for their celebrations.

Jeff Stein, the owner of the drone company that handles the La Jolla synchronized light show in San Diego said that the area had gone half-a-decade without fireworks before exploring a new option.

Fireworks in the valley of Salt Lake City - a silver lining to the swap for drones is that pets will no longer be scared during the annual light presentation

''Drones are reusable, and with fireworks, you have smoke, other fallout like debris, the noise stresses out dogs and people with PTSD,' said the man who owns the drone company responsible for the show in San Diego

'They found drone shows as a solution because theyre quiet,' said Stein. 'Drones are reusable, and with fireworks, you have smoke, other fallout like debris, the noise stresses out dogs and people with PTSD. Theres a lot of military in San Diego.'

The pixels from the drones will light up the coastal community, simulating fireworks while also providing aerial animation that tells a story through motion graphics - something Stein says fireworks cannot accomplish.

Flocks of drones have already been used during a number of high profile events during the last few years: from the 2020 Tokyo Olympics, to the royal coronation of King Charles III a few months ago.

The global market for drone light shows - which was barely a reality 10 years ago - is now valued at more than $1billion, according to Allied Market Research.
An elite Brooklyn private school is being sued by the parents of a 13-year-old student who killed himself when he was allegedly kicked out for developing a learning disability.

Saint Ann's, which counts Jennifer Connely and Lena Dunham among its notable alumni, is accused of callously booting Ellis Lariviere for struggling academically, despite not giving students grades.

The decision devastated the boy, and his parents told The New York Times they launched a lawsuit after feeling the ritzy school caused their son's death in 2021.

'I cant bring Ellis back, but I just want to do whatever I can to make sure that no family has to go through this again,' said Ellis' grandfather, Jeffrey Gural. 'Had they said he could go to the high school, he'd be alive today.'

Saint Ann's (pictured), an elite Brooklyn private school, is facing a lawsuit for allegedly causing a student's suicide in 2021

Saint Ann's has earned a reputation as one of the most exclusive and prestigious schools on the East Coast.

It has educated child celebrities including Lena Dunhan and Jennifer Connely, ostensibly focusing its student cohort on creativity and the arts.

The school, which does not give students grades, says on its website that it 'has embraced a commitment to education for its own sake, oriented to the capacities of each individual student, free of the encumbrances of formal grading.'

Despite its artsy outlook on education, the Wall Street Journal named Saint Ann's as the nation's top private school in 2004, based on the high number of students that end up at the most selective colleges.

For those starting their kids in kindergarten, however, tuition fees start at $53,750.

The opulent school is facing a lawsuit from Ellis' parents, who allege that the institution cold-heartedly cut their son from its ranks, leading to his suicide.

In an indication over the bad blood between the parents and school, they chose to include the last line from Ellis' suicide note in their lawsuit to hammer home Saint Ann's alleged attitude to the loss: 'Don't let the school do an assembly about this'.

His father, Roger Gural, is the son of one of New Yorks major real estate developers, and owned the Manhattan-favorite Arcade Bakery until arthritis forced him to close in 2019. His mother, Janine Lariviere, is an artist.

'I didn't want to send my kids to prep school,' said Lariviere, who said she was attracted to the focus on artistic expression as well as academics.

However, by the third grade the parents were facing Ellis' possible dismissal after he began to show signs of dyslexia.

While a school-recommended evaluation by a neurophysiologist found that Ellis was fine to continue to the next grade, the parents claim that Saint Ann's told them at the time: 'We just don't think we can help him.'

As he continued to receive good reports from his teachers over the years, the parents allege school administrators repeatedly felt he would not last.

The back-and-forth over Ellis' future reportedly continued for the next five years, until Ellis was ultimately kicked out from the school, leaving him devastated.

'He just cried a lot,' said Lariviere. 'He didn't want comfort from me. He was very hurt. This is the most painful thing for me, because I didn't know how to protect him.'

Saint Ann's is one of the most selective and exclusive private schools in America

Notable alumni to come out from Saint Ann's over the years includes Top Gun: Maverick star Jennifer Connely (left) and Lena Dunham (right)

Three months after the school forced him out, the 13-year-old committed suicide in his family home in Red Hook, Brooklyn.

As they grapple with the loss of their son two years on, Ellis' parents have been left dumbfounded by the school's lack of support for students with academic differences and ability, without any grades to base it on.

The lawsuit alleges that Saint Ann's policies and decisions made by the school administrators were negligent in their care for Ellis.

With no grading to base the decision off, and with Ellis having never previously been disciplined for behavior issues, they claim the expulsion was callous and cruel.

Gural even compared his son's treatment from the institution to bullying, feeling there is a double standard coming from the lucrative school.

'Imagine if some student said to my son, Youre stupid, you dont belong here, and we went to the school about it, and the school did nothing, and he took his own life,' he said.

'But in this case, its the school whos the bully. The school is saying to my son, You dont belong''.

'I cant bring Ellis back, but I just want to do whatever I can to make sure that no family has to go through this again,' said Ellis' grandfather, Jeffrey Gural.

'Had they said he could go to the high school, he'd be alive today.'

The ritzy school is among the most exclusive in the nation, with tuition fees starting in kindergarten at $53,000

One of the aspects of the tragedy that most infuriated the parents was the reaction to Ellis' suicide by the exclusive school. When news of the teen's death emerged, Saint Ann's allegedly informed parents that a student had died by suicide, leaving out that the deceased teen had recently been asked to leave.

'I was apoplectic,' said Ellis' father. 'Because it did not contextualize in any way what the issues were in my sons suicide. And it says the school is being proactive to deal with this mental health crisis.

'Here they are, presenting information about my sons death in the most flattering way possible. Totally dishonest.'

The lawsuit even includes the last line from Ellis' suicide note, 'Don't let the school do an assembly about this'. It was held by the family for two years while Ellis' brother finished his studies at Saint Ann's.

The family is now demanding the school overturns its counseling policies to make it more transparent to families and consistent with the school's artistic ethos.

They are also asking the school to increase its support staff to match other comparable institutions.

Other unspecified 'compensatory damages, punitive damages, attorneys fees, and costs' are also being sought in the lawsuit.

In a statement to parents sent out last month, Saint Ann's said the lawsuit contained 'a number of inaccurate and misleading allegations' and it would 'vigorously defend itself against any false allegations contained in this lawsuit.'

Saint Ann's has been contacted for comment by DailyMail.com.
The 15-second spot starred Kansas City Chiefs star Travis Kelce as he cracked open a few cold ones with several other burly men

Bud Light has been branded 'desperate' after releasing a new advert showing men aggressively 'grunting'

Bud Light has been branded 'desperate' after releasing a new advert with Kansas City Chiefs star Travis Kelce in a bid to win back customers.

The embattled beer giant released a new 15-second spot on Sunday showing Kelce cracking open Bud Light cans and aggressively grunting with several other men.

The advert was a clear marketing U-turn after backlash to the company's previous collaboration with trans star Dylan Mulvaney devastated the brand financially.

However, the effort has failed to gain traction after it was posted to YouTube, picking up just 2,500 viewers in over 24 hours following its release.

Kansas City Chiefs star Travis Kelce (left) has seen his new advert with Bud Light panned for being 'desperate'

The new advert, titled 'Backyard Grunts with Travis Kelce', appears to be an attempt to claw back male drinkers turned off by its recent marketing choices.

Kelce is seen in the advert attending a BBQ with several other men, satirically grunting as they slowly recline in their seats and crack open a beer.

The video was met with mixed reviews, however, with many commenters feeling the about-face from the company is not enough to win them back.

'Sorry there Bud. The only thing that would be close to bringing your base customers back is an unconditional apology and a renounce of woke culture!' said one viewer.

Another added: 'Nice try but no dice'.

Kelce's appearance in the advert was also met with backlash, with one commenter slamming him for being a 'sell out'.

'Not rooting for Kelce again,' they said. 'Will never buy another Anheuser Busch product ever again.'

The 15-second video sees Kelce enjoying a BBQ while cracking open a Bud Light can

Several other men loudly grunt as they recline with a beer in the advert

The promo comes several months after parent-company Anheuser Busch was again accused of over-compensating to the backlash in a separate advert.

In an overly-patriotic ad for Budweiser, the brand released a one-minute spot showing its iconic Clydesdale horses galloping across the country.

A deep-voiced narrator says that Budweiser is 'a story bigger than beer' as the horses race across the screen. 'This is the story of the American spirit,' he added.

The ad for the beer - which like Bud Light is owned by Anheuser-Busch - appeared to be a return to traditional values for the brand which has historically appealed to blue-collar American workers.

This is in stark difference to Bud Light's doomed partnership with trans influencer Mulvaney, who has since accused the company of abandoning her amid the controversy.

The fallout cost the company billions and saw it lose its place as America's number one beer brand.

In some stores the abrupt end of Bud Light sales has even seen the beer sold for cheaper than water as retailers report a 50 percent drop in sales.

In early April, Mulvaney shared a video of herself in a bathtub sipping from a can of Bud Light to announce her new partnership with the brand

The brand has endured months of backlash following its collaboration with trans star Dylan Mulvaney (pictured)

Bud Light has endured months of backlash and a financially devastating boycott ever since it launched a collaboration with trans star Dylan Mulvaney.

The brand lost $20 billion in market cap amid the fallout from the fiasco.

However, Mulvaney broke her silence last month to slam the company, feeling it failed to stand by her while she was hit with online abuse.

Speaking to her 1.8million followers, she said: 'I was waiting for the brand to reach out to me, but they never did. I've been scared to leave my house.

'For a company to hire a trans person and then not publicly stand by them is worse than not hiring a trans person at all.

'Because it gives customers permission to be as transphobic and as hateful as they want. There's should be nothing controversial or divisive about working with us.

'I have been ridiculed in public I've been followed and I have felt a loneliness that I wouldn't wish on anyone.'
Locals hostile to the chain due to claims it could harm independent bakeries

Greggs has submitted plans to open new branch of the bakery in Truro, Cornwall

Major pie wars have reignited in Cornwall after Greggs was accused of embarking on a 'full scale' invasion of the county by seeking to open its fifth store.

The bakery chain looks set to continue its foray with new premises in Bodmin, according to plans submitted to Cornwall Council.

This follows the controversial establishment at four other Greggs stores in Truro, Launceston, Saltash, and Cornwall Services.

The fast food outlet was met with fury after they opened shop in Truro last year, just hundreds of metres from Rowe's and Warrens, which claims to be the oldest producer of Cornish Pasties in the world.

Cornwall has historically been hostile to the bakery chain, best known for their sausage rolls and pasties, due to the county's large independent bakery industry.

Greggs was accused of embarking on a 'full scale' invasion of Cornwall by seeking to open its fifth store in county (Greggs store which opened in December last year in St Nicholas Street, Truro pictured)

Cornwall has historically been hostile to the bakery chain, best known for their sausage rolls and pasties, due to the county's large independent bakery industry

Local Cornish pasty-making businesses fear that the chain's low prices will undercut the local pastry economy - driving independent stores out of business.

Opponents also note that the national chain does not produce pastries within the county, instead producing them in a factory in Newcastle Upon Tyne.

Greggs was even driven out of Cornwall in 2019 after opening it's first Cornish store in the Tamar - which was quickly boycotted by locals and closed after just seven months.

Despite the hostility, Greggs were undeterred and later opened an outlet in the Cornish capital of Truro late last year - prompting angry local pasty makers to warn of an 'invasion' of the county.

The latest move has the backing of Bodmin Town Council, with plans suggesting the new store will be located on the Dunmere Road Retail.

The planning permission application also lists the unit as 185 square meters, and requests access for outdoor seating at the site.

An earlier planning application for a 'Greggs to Go' at Bodmin Moor Services Shop, Altarnun, have previously been withdrawn.

Rumours of a potential new store in Newquay that emerged in February have also since gone quiet.

One resident has described it as 'the Devil's spawn' and another saying that any new stores that try to open in Cornwall 'won't last'.

Greggs was forced to close a branch (pictured) at Saltash service station in Cornwall in 2018 a year on from opening it

And one pasty maker said Greggs would never be welcome or well received in the county.

They said: 'You would have thought they would have learned their lesson. Cornwall is a funny place, people stick to what they know and the real thing.

'Factory made stuff doesn't cut it, it's not the same as a real Cornish pasty. That's what they're fighting against, people here are used to the real thing.'

Greggs has been contacted for comment.
A Texas woman has revealed how strangers turned up to her home after scammers hacked into her Facebook account and sold non-existent items under her name.

Monique Sherman, 43, was locked out of both her Facebook and Instagram profiles when hackers compromised her details and posted a host of fraudulent ads for goods that did not exist.

Furious victims paid for the items online before three turned up at her door demanding a sofa for which they had paid $300.

Her story is evidence of how quickly ecommerce scams are rocketing - with cybersecurity experts now warning that Facebook Marketplace has become a digital 'wild west.'

Sherman, from Katy, Houston, told Click2Houston: 'I'm at a loss. I'm fearful for myself and I'm also upset for other people.

Monique Sherman, 43, said she was unable to sleep for two weeks after beign targeted by cruel Facebook Marketplace scam

'I was online, actually posting and then it flickered and asked me to put in my password.

'I put in my password and it wouldn't work. I kept on getting activity to my phone saying I'm selling this, selling that... 73 things.'

Sherman said the crisis came to a head when scammers sold a sofa from her account which she had never seen before.

Innocent Facebook users who had paid for the furniture showed up at her door demanding to take it away.

It left her unable to sleep for two weeks.

She explained: 'I go out there and he's like yeah I'm here to pick up a couch. Two guys.'

In all she had three strangers show up at her home in response to the fake adverts.'

They had messages sent from her account including a picture of her ID.

'That's what really scared me,' Sherman said, adding: 'They made a post. People were tagging me and saying 'oh yeah, we're going to get her.'

While she has managed to get some of the fraudulent ads taken down, the one involving the sofa remains on the platform - leaving her concerned more victims will try to contact her.

She has resorted instead to widely republishing the advert with a warning that it is a scam - and encouraging others not to fall victim.

She is also installing a new home security surveillance system and has pictures of the police report plastered to her front door in case any more strangers turn up.

Sherman, from Katy, Texas, had her account hacked and scammers started advertising fake goods from her profile

Sherman is now widely republishing the advert with a warning that it is a scam - and encouraging others not to fall victim

Cybersecurity firm VPN Overview found that searches for 'Facebook Marketplace scam' have shot up by 270 percent in recent months.

Jason Meza, senior regional director of the Better Business Bureau (BBB) told San Antonio station Kens5: 'It's truly skyrocketing. Facebook Marketplace is truly a wild west.'

The BBB recommends always googling the seller's name on Facebook marketplace and adding the word 'scam' to see if fraud stories pop up.

Meza added to Kens5: 'Save everything, receipts, transactions, communication, texts.

'Whatever you have from buyer or seller, everything helps to prove your case.

'Prosecutions are far and few between. Money back, if you're not using secure methods is even tougher to get.'

Facebook's Purchase Protection Policies stipulates the firm will refund many purchases on the site which turn out to be fraudulent.

However, users are not covered for transactions which are made through third-party sites, local pickups or messenger transactions.

Dailymail.com reached out to Facebook owner Meta for comment.
A British tourist who was returning from his holiday in Turkey with his wife and teenage daughter had to restrain a 'drunk' passenger for an hour after he threatened to open the plane door.

The Jet2 flight, which was bound for Glasgow and packed with holidaymakers travelling home from Bodrum, was forced to make an emergency landing in Bulgaria to remove the 'disruptive' passenger last night.

Anthony Spence, 52, described his terror as just ten minutes into the journey he woke up to see a man next to him moving towards the emergency exit.

'My dad immediately got up when the guy said "I want off the plane, I'm going to open the door",' his daughter Toni told MailOnline.

Mr Spence, from Glasgow, was forced to restrain the man until the plane landed - and continued to do so until police in Sofia came on board to arrest the rowdy passenger.

Holidaymaker Anthony Spence, 52, (pictured) described his terror just ten minutes into the journey as he woke up to see the man next to him moving towards the emergency exit

Police in Sofia boarded the airliner and arrested the man after claims he had tried to open the plane door mid-flight

The father and daughter said the man, who they believe was Glaswegian, 'should not have been allowed on the flight' which was filled with dozens of young families.

Just ten minutes into the flight Anthony, who had been sleeping, woke up when a packet of crisps burst.

Then he noticed the man next to him acting suspiciously. 'I saw him moving for the door... I thought "he's going to open the bloody door",' Anthony said.

He added that he had no choice but to restrain the man. 'As he leapt across across the seats to get to the door, I grabbed and pinned him to the seat so he couldn't get to the door.'

He struggled to hold him down, he said, but no one came to his aid apart from two airhostesses, who he says were not strong enough to stop the man from moving.

'It was only me and the airhostesses who tried to get him under control - no other passengers decided to help until last minute only because my wife and daughter screamed to the rest of the plane "Help my husband", "Help my dad", as I was the only one who could keep him from getting up.'

Anthony (left) and his 16-year-old daughter Toni said the man, who they believe was Glaswegian, 'should not have been allowed on the flight'

Toni said she and her mum were fearing for Anthony's safety during the hour-long ordeal, and that more needs to be done to prevent it happening again.

'He shouldn't have been allowed on the plane,' she and her dad agreed.

'They need to make sure this doesn't happen again, there were kids on the flight.'

Footage from the man's arrest was obtained by MailOnline.

It shows the man stumbling and appearing to resist officers as he is bundled down the aisle of the plane, while furious passengers yell 'scumbag' and 'idiot' at him.

The incident took place at around 10pm BST during the LS124 overnight flight. Passengers said that they eventually landed back in Glasgow in the early hours of Monday morning.

A spokesman for Jet2 said: 'Flight LS124 from Bodrum to Glasgow diverted to Sofia Airport last night, so that a disruptive passenger could be offloaded by police. After a short delay, the flight continued to Glasgow.

'We would like to apologise to all affected customers for any inconvenience caused. As a family friendly airline, we take a zero tolerance to disruptive passenger behaviour, and everyone's health, comfort and well-being will always be our number one priority.'
The number of migrants making the journey to the UK in small boats last month hit its highest since records began five years ago, Home Office data shows.

In the first six months of 2023, 11,424 people were detected making the perilous journey across the Channel to Dover, Kent, from France, according to provisional government figures.

The figures include 115 migrants who arrived in three boats last Friday, taking the total in June alone to 3,824. It's the highest total for June since records began five years ago.

In June last year, 3,140 migrants arrived in the UK having crossed the Channel. In 2021, 2,177 were detected, while there were 727 in 220 and 163 in 2019. And in June 2018, just four people made the crossing.

The highest daily total of crossings for the year so far was also made last month on June 11, when 549 people were recorded as having made the journey.

In the first six months of 2023, 11,424 people were detected making the perilous journey across the Channel to Dover, Kent

The highest daily total of crossings for the year so far was also made last month on June 11, when 549 people were recorded as having made the journey (Pictured - Migrants arriving on Dover on May 19)

Despite the flurry of crossings throughout the month, the total for the first half of the year is still 10 per cent lower than this time last year, when the figure stood at 12,747.

It comes almost six months after Prime Minister Rishi Sunak vowed his government would 'stop the boats' by passing new laws to put an end to Channel crossings as he made his five flagship pledges in office.

However, he was dealt a blow last week when his plan to send migrants to Rwanda was ruled to be unlawful by the Court of Appeal.

Three judges agreed by a majority of two to one that Rwanda was not 'a safe third' country, putting a halt to plans to deport Channel migrants to the East African nation so they could claim asylum there.

The decision was a major blow to the Government's flagship Illegal Migration Bill. Mr Sunak said he 'fundamentally disagreed' with the decision while Home Secretary Suella Braverman suggested the immigration system is 'rigged against the British people'.

Under the proposals announced last April, any adult who enters Britain illegally could be sent on a one-way ticket to the African country to have their asylum claim processed.

Ministers had hoped the prospect of being immediately deported 4,000 miles away would put off migrants planning to travel to Britain by illegal means. However, over the past 12 months, no migrants have been sent to Rwanda from the UK as the Government battles a series of legal challenges.

Just weeks prior, Mr Sunak insisted his plan to stop Channel crossings was 'starting to work' as he announced two more barges to house asylum seekers during a speech in Kent.

A group of up to 80 migrants are brought ashore at Dover marina on June 22 after crossing the English Channel

Rishi Sunak said he 'fundamentally disagrees' with the Court of Appeal's ruling and will seek permission to appeal it in the Supreme Court

Suella Braverman suggested the current immigration system is 'rigged against the British people'

He said the number of people crossing the Channel had reduced compared to last year, and played down suggestions that fewer crossings were the result of poor weather conditions, rather than his policy.

'There's many things I can control, the weather is not one of them', he said. 'I wish it was so.

'Our approach is working,' he added. 'I said I will stop the boats and I meant it.'
The statements caused shock and outrage among those in attendance

Banner said that her career would be better if she were black and a lesbian

A white USC professor is under fire after she said during a recent conference that her career and life would be easier if she were black and a lesbian.

Lois Banner, a professor emerita of women's history at the University of Southern California, spoke during the Berkshire Conference of Women Historians on Friday.

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Banner, 83, reportedly said she wished she were a lesbian because they had great communities and that her career would have been better if she were black.

'You won't change my mind, I'm 84 years old,' Banner allegedly said, refusing to apologize. Her words were shared by Stephanie Narrow, a student in attendance.

According to conference guests, Banner's antics came just moments after a black professor had spoken on racism and exclusion in the academic space.

Lois Banner, a white USC professor, is under fire after she said during a recent conference that her career and life would be easier if she were black and a lesbian. Pictured: Lois Banner

'You won't change my mind, I'm 84 years old,' Banner allegedly said, refusing to apologize. Her words were shared by Stephanie Narrow, a student in attendance

The shocking statements were documented by Narrow, a doctoral student who attended the Friday plenary session where Banner spoke.

She wrote that the event 'took a turn' after Banner - who she did not initially name - shared her extremely controversial opinions.

'A white senior scholar at the 50th anniversary plenary VERY publicly, and unapologetically, said that she wished she was Black so her professional life would be easier,' Narrow tweeted out Friday night.

The student said that the professor - who has a Ph.D. from Columbia University - was shunned for the comments which caused an uproar.

'She was immediately called out for her blatantly racist remarks, and refused to apologize, let alone listen, to the reason why her remarks were horrifying wrong.'

Narrow went on to say that the 'room was shaken,' calling the feeling that rippled through the auditorium 'palpable.'

The student did not name Banner as the professor who had made the startling remarks until several hours later, but stated she had confirmed Banner's identity.

Another crowd member, Paul Renfro of Florida State University, described the situation by saying that 's**t went absolutely off the rails.'

'A lot of folks (myself included) walked out due to a dreadfully racist comment made by one of the presenters,' Renfro tweeted on June 30.

'She was reprimanded by several audience members, and quite a few attendees walked out,' he said.

The student said that the professor - who has a Ph.D. from Columbia University - was shunned for the comments which caused an uproar. Pictured: Lois Banner

'A white senior scholar at the 50th anniversary plenary VERY publicly, and unapologetically, said that she wished she was Black so her professional life would be easier,' Narrow tweeted

'Her remarks came immediately after Deborah Gray White rightly admonished the Berks for its history of anti-Black racism,' Renfro continued.

Renfro was referring to the speech during the plenary session in which Dr. Deborah Gray White spoke on 'The Berks' history of exclusion.

Whites speech addressed the history of black women in the historical profession.

The Florida State University said following Banner's words that the conference's history with racism 'obviously endures.'

Banner helped to co-found the biennial event in the 1970s.

She is the author of 'Marilyn: The Passion and the Paradox,' a biography on the life of famed Hollywood actress Marilyn Monroe.

In a statement following the incident, the Berkshire Conference of Women Historians denounced the woman's words.

'The Berks officers do not condone or support the inappropriate remarks made by one of the speakers tonight. A formal statement from the presidents will be made after the break,' the conference's Twitter account shared.

As of July 3 a formal statement had not been posted online.

The initial tweet received mass amounts of backlash, especially from those who felt as though Banner's words were especially painful after the Supreme Court's overturning of affirmative action.

'For Lois Banner, a very established and senior white woman historian, to say that she wished she was Black so her professional life would be easier, yesterday of all days, when white backlash was so very vicious from the Supreme Court, is obscene,' one person wrote in a quote tweet of the statement made by the Berks.

Banner's comments saying she would have had a more successful career if she were black came moments after Dr. Deborah Gray White (pictured) gave a speech on exclusion

Banner is the author of 'Marilyn: The Passion and the Paradox'

In a statement following the incident the Berkshire Conference of Women Historians denounced the woman's words

Even more astounding, after Banner sat back down, another black historian took the podium to address the need for intersectionality and the woman's comments.

Deidre Cooper Owens from the University of Nebraska gave a speech that Narrow said left her in tears.

'Addressing Banner's comments, she chose to center love because "we just saw what comes from self-hate." So she shared how Jennifer Morgan & Deborah Gray White shaped her into the woman/scholar she is today,' Narrow tweeted.

On Twitter after the plenary, Cooper Owens said she spoke out against Banner's statements because 'she needed to keep Black women's name out of her mouth.'

'The Berks Conference was a beautiful one until it was soiled by Lois Banner's hatefully racist comments,' Cooper Owens shared.

'More urgently, I needed that room to acknowledge the strength, brilliance, and bravery of Deborah Gray White, period. I refused to let a bigoted racist take away from Deborah's powerfully truthful speech,' the academic tweeted.

After Banner's speech, White had to sit on the stage next to the woman and 'keep her composure for the remainder of the session,' Narrow tweeted.

'She deserves an apology,' Narrow continued.

DailyMail.com reached out to Banner for comment but she did not respond to requests.
Jemele Hill, the Atlantic writer who called the Queen a 'colonizer' in the days after her death, has sparked fury again by accusing Asian Americans of 'carrying the water for white supremacy' by celebrating the Supreme Court's decision to outlaw affirmative action.

Hill was replying to a tweet by Asian American mother and activist Yiatin Chu.

She and her fellow activists at the Asian Wave Organization had been fighting to end affirmative action, which they argued negatively harmed Asians students' chances of getting a fair shake in college admissions.

Hill was replying to a tweet by Asian American mother and activist Yiatin Chu, who fought to outlaw affirmative action along with many other Asian Americans

Jemele Hill, shown last year, said African Americans fought 'diligently' for Asian American rights

'I told my daughter that today is a big day. They've ended affirmative action. Isn't that it what you're fighting for?' she asked. I said yes,' Chu said.

Hill seized on her comment.

'Can't wait until she reads that you gladly carried the water for white supremacy and stabbed the folks in the back whose people fought diligently for Asian American rights in America,' she said.

She was slammed for the remark by many Twitter users, including some who accused her of trying to 'divide the country along racial lines'.

Among those to criticize Hill's remarks was fellow black journalist Jason Whitlock

Among those to criticize Hill's remark was fellow black journalist Jason Whitlock.

'This is the kind of detached-from-reality logic that earned her promotions at the Detroit Free Press, Orlando Sentinel and ESPN. Or was it Affirmative Action?

'There is far more proof of white evangelicals fighting for black American rights than black Americans fighting for the rights of Asians.

'She is just dumb and dishonest. She's exhibit A in why the elimination of Affirmative Action is necessary. Credentialing idiots is not a good idea.'

Others sent Hill videos of black protesters heckling Asian protesters outside the Supreme Court last week.

'I don't think my kids should have to work 3x as hard to get into the same school. That doesn't make me a supporter of white supremacy,' said another.

Hill argued back: 'I agree, but youre aiming at the wrong target. Making it seem like Black kids are the reason there arent more Asians at these elite colleges is a major disservice and pushes such an anti-Blackness narrative.'

Many Asian Americans embraced the SCOTUS decision

Others accused Hill of flat-out racism.

Many Asian Americans embraced the SCOTUS decision.

In a joint statement last week, several Asian American organizations said: 'We are thankful that the Supreme Court has finally ruled against decades of pernicious discrimination against Asian American students. Colleges have abused Affirmative Action for too long.

'Their collective reward and punishment by race deprived the rights of hundreds of thousands of individual applicants.

'Discrimination by group identity is unconstitutional, un-American, and immoral. We call upon universities to comply with the law and stop in good faith to discriminate by race.'
Joy Reid has claimed 'the only reason' she was admitted to Harvard was because of affirmative action as she slammed the Supreme Court's decision to end it.

The MSBNC host, 54, made the comments on Thursday while reacting to the Court's landmark ruling to ban colleges from using race as a factor when admitting students.

'I got into Harvard only because of affirmative action,' Reid said on All In with Chris Hayes.

'I went to a school no one had ever heard of in Denver, Colorado, in a small suburb. I didnt go to Exeter or Andover. I didnt have college test prep. I just happened to be really nerdy and smart and have really good grades and good SAT scores.'

Reid, who graduated from the prestigious school in 1991, recalled how a Harvard recruiter went to see her in Denver to do an interview.

Joy Reid claimed 'the only reason' she was admitted into Harvard was because of affirmative action as she slammed the Supreme Court's decision to end it

The justices decided in a 6-3 vote that the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill (UNC)'s race-based affirmative action admissions policy is unconstitutional

'This was not the recruiter saying, "Were going to take an unqualified person and put them in Harvard,"' Reid continued. 'Rather, they were saying, "Were going to take a very qualified person who we would never know existed and put them in Harvard."'

'I was pulled in  affirmatively,' she added.

Last week, the justices decided in a 6-3 vote that the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill (UNC)'s race-based affirmative action admissions policy is unconstitutional, arguing it violates the Equal Protection Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment.

They also ruled 6-2 - with liberal justice Ketanji Brown Jackson recused - that Harvard's admission policy should also be struck down in decision sending shockwaves nationwide.

The ruling ends the decades-old 'affirmative action' policy that was designed to boost the number of black and Hispanic students in colleges. Now universities will have to look to new ways to better incorporate minority groups and ensure representation among student bodies.

Meanwhile, as she reacted to the news, Reid also claimed that after she arrived at Harvard, her 'presence was questioned by white people.'

'I was in a big conference class where some white students stood up and said, Those students, the black students, theyre only here because of affirmative action." It became a huge argument that we all ended up having,' the anchor said.

She continued saying that many of the people who supposedly targeted get had received extra help getting into the school.

'And yet, some of the people I went to school with were far less smart than me or the other black folks there. They got in because their daddy and their grandaddy went there,' Reid said.

Harvard and UNC were sued by Students for Fair Admissions, a conservative nonprofit group, over their race-based admissions policies in 2014, saying they violated Title VI of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Equal Protection Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment. The cases made their way through lower courts, which ruled on the side of Harvard and UNC, before reaching the Supreme Court for oral arguments last year.

The ruling ends the decades-old 'affirmative action' policy that was designed to boost the number of black and Hispanic students in colleges

The Supreme Court decided that college can no longer implement quotas that base admissions on an applicant's race  known as affirmative action, which was started to get more minorities admitted into universities

Specifically, Harvard was accused of violating Title VI of the Civil Rights Act, a landmark piece of legislation first proposed by John F. Kennedy that sought to outlaw racial discrimination. Title VI 'prohibits discrimination on the basis of race, color, or national origin in any program or activity that receives Federal funds or other Federal financial assistance.'

The case argued that Asian American students specifically have been illegally disadvantaged by affirmative action policies because despite achieving high grades, they score lower on Harvard's vague 'personal rating scale,' particularly on 'likability' ratings and 'positive personality,' compared to other applicants.

The UNC case also looked what the university could factor into admissions practices without the use of race and how it would impact diversity on campus. Both Harvard and UNC have maintained that their use of race in admissions does not discriminate against Asian Americans.

Justice Thomas, who was the second black justice appointed in history, called race-based admissions 'rudderless' and 'designed to ensure a particular racial mix in their entering classes.'

He went on in his concurring opinion, which he read from the bench in a rare move, to state plainly that despite being 'painfully aware' of discrimination against other individuals of his race, he has hope that all Americans will be treated equally under the law.

'While I am painfully aware of the social and economic ravages which have befallen my race and all who suffer discrimination, I hold out enduring hope that this country will live up to its principles so clearly enunciated in the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution of the United States: that all men are created equal, are equal citizens, and must be treated equally before the law,' Thomas wrote.

However, Democrat-appointed Justice Sotomayor said in a written dissent that the decision 'rolls back decades of precedent and momentous progress.'

'The Court cements a superficial rule of colorblindness as a constitutional principle in an endemically segregated society,' she continued.

In a separate dissent, the nation's first female black Justice, Ketanji Brown Jackson, said the 6-3 decision is a 'tragedy for us all.'

A new ABC/Ipsos poll shows most Americans agree with the Supreme Court ruling that colleges cannot admit students based on race quotas

'Gulf-sized race-based gaps exist with respect to the health, wealth, and well-being of American citizens. They were created in the distant past, but have indisputably been passed down to the present day through the generations,' she wrote.

Jackson had recused herself from the Harvard case due to her former position on the board of the university.

Meanwhile, a new ABC News/Ipsos poll found that most Americans do agree with all three rulings compared tot those who disapprove.

While 53 percent of respondents to the latest ABC/Ipsos poll say they think the justices rule 'mainly on the basis of partisan politics,' it appears the majority of Americans still do agree with the recent rulings.

The survey found that 52 percent of Americans approve of the ruling that stops colleges from using race as a determining factor in college admissions  a practice known as affirmative action. Another 32 percent said they disapproved of the ruling.

The other two rulings saw a bigger divide, but still saw approval of the rulings.

Forty-five percent of those polled approve of the Supreme Court striking down student loan forgiveness, while 40 percent disapprove.

The closest split was on the case ruling that a web designer did not have to create a wedding website for a gay couple because it went against his religious beliefs against same-sex marriage. While 43 percent approved of the decision, only 1 percent less said they disapproved.
California Gov. Gavin Newsom went to deep red Idaho over the weekend to campaign for President Joe Biden, as he insists he doesn't have his own White House ambitions.

The Los Angeles Times reported that Newsom headlined an event with Idaho Democrats at a mansion in the Boise foothills Saturday, where he talked up the 80-year-old commander-in-chief.

The 55-year-old has been taking his liberal message to red states including Alabama and now Idaho, where Republicans outnumber Democrats four-to-one.

'I'm really proud of this president, and I hope you are as well,' Newsom told the crowd, saying he made the trip to Idaho to make the 'powerful case for why we should be passionate, enthusiastic about Biden's reelection.'

Biden's poll numbers show that most Americans don't feel that way about the current Oval Office occupant.

California Gov. Gavin Newsom stumped for President Joe Biden and the Democrats on Saturday at an event held outside of Boise, Idaho - one of the country's reddest states

Newsom visiting a bookstore in Boise, Idaho that was selling banned books. He posted about it on TikTok

An NBC poll conducted in late April, the same week Biden announced his 2024 run, found that 70 percent of registered voters didn't want him to run.

An additional 60 percent said the same thing about former President Donald Trump, who is currently leading the 2024 Republican field.

Forty-eight percent of those who said Biden shouldn't run said age was a 'major reason' for them to believe that.

The White House quickly acknowledged last week that the president had started using a CPAP machine to treat sleep apnea when marks were seen on his face from the device's mask.

The White House was also asked why he's started using the shorter Air Force One stairs more frequently, in the weeks following him stumbling over a sandbag on stage at the Air Force Academy graduation ceremony. Press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre didn't have an answer for that.

While Newsom was in Idaho to sell Biden, some Idaho Democrats saw the California governor as the future of the party.

'He looks like an incredible presidential candidate,' Russ Buschert, an Idaho Democratic Party trustee, told the LA Times.

Besides his more youthful appearance, Newsom has also been hitting Republicans harder than the president.

At the Idaho event, Newsom said that Trump - if reelected - might never give up power.

'You think Trump, if he gets back into office, is not going to demand a third term?' Newsome asked. 'Give me a break.'

'You think January 6 is the last we are going to see ... Give me a break,' the California governor added.

He'll troll Republicans on social media and call them out by name, including taking cracks at Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis and Texas Gov. Greg Abbott.

Newsom's political group, Campaign for Democracy, is pushing for a Constitutional amendment that would allow for certain gun control reforms.

He visited a bookstore in Idaho that was selling banned books and posted a video of his trip to social media.

'He's putting in time and effort that no one else outside the White House appears to be,' Rob Stutzman, a Republican consultant in California, told the LA Times. 'He's acting like the candidate in waiting.'

'Someday it may pay off for him,' Stutzman said.

California Republican Party Chairwoman Jessica Millan Patterson said Newsom should not be exporting his failures to additional states.

She told the LA Times that California's problems - including with homelessness - should 'serve as a warning to the rest of the nation.'

'While Newsom runs a shadow presidential campaign, it's increasingly clear that he wants to take his failures from his own state straight to the White House,' Millan Patterson. 'You don't want what Gavin Newsom's selling.'
The Duke of Sussex stood shoulder to shoulder with Jack Mann and his other closest confederates in the 'band of brothers' photograph at Windsor Castle on the night of the royal wedding.

And, after Prince Harry and Meghan Markle's nuptials, it was suggested that Mann was not just one of the ushers but was, in fact, his 'real' best man, rather than Prince William.

So there was disappointment at the weekend among royal fans that Harry and Meghan were not present at Mann's own big day.

Mann, 40, exchanged vows with osteopath Isabella Clark at St Peter's church in Stutton, Suffolk, where guests included Harry's friend Thomas van Straubenzee, godfather of Princess Charlotte.

Van Straubenzee was accompanied by his wife, Lucy, an assistant head at Charlotte and Prince George's former school, Thomas's.

Mann, 40, exchanged vows with osteopath Isabella Clark at St Peter's church in Stutton

Guests included Harry's friend Thomas van Straubenzee, godfather of Princess Charlotte

Harry and Meghan were spotted holding hands, smiling and laughing as they left an office building in Santa Barbara, California on Friday

The Duke of Sussex stood shoulder to shoulder with Jack Mann and his other closest confederates in the 'band of brothers' photograph at Windsor Castle on the night of the royal wedding

Who is Jack Mann? Prince Harry befriended Jack Mann at the Royal Military Academy Sandhurst. He is the son of Simon Mann, a SAS officer turned mercenary, who was jailed for five years for allegedly tried to overthrow the government in Equatorial Guinea in 2004. Harry's friend served with the British Arm for tours of Iraq and Afghanistan. After leaving the army he worked in Libya as a country manager for a UK security company called Aegis Defence Services. He went to create his own private security company in 2015 called Alma Risk. Advertisement

It's not clear how close Harry remains to Mann, whom he met at Sandhurst where both were commissioned into the Blues and Royals.

The Duke admits in his memoirs, Spare, that he fell out with some of his old pals after he attacked the Royal Family on television.

Mann has been in the headlines himself recently. He is co-founder of private security company Alma Risk and had a business trip to Libya interrupted last year.

'We did not continue the journey from Malta on the advice of Maltese immigration to rectify our paperwork,' Mann subsequently explained to the Daily Mail.

'The issue was resolved within five days,' he added, explaining that Alma Risk was providing medical training for Libyan clients.

The exploits of his father  Old Etonian adventurer and former SAS officer Simon Mann  mean that the family name can sometimes generate unfortunate attention. Mann senior was a participant in the 'Wonga coup' of 2004.

Intended to remove Teodoro Obiang, president of Equatorial Guinea, from power, it ended in Simon's imprisonment and Obiang threatening to eat his testicles.

The exploits of his father  Old Etonian adventurer and former SAS officer Simon Mann(pictured)  mean that the family name can sometimes generate unfortunate attention. Mann senior was a participant in the 'Wonga coup' of 2004.

Prince Harry played polo with Jack Mann when the pair were younger

The couple were accompanied by an unidentified man presumed to be a member of their security detail

The Duke and Duchess of Sussex were all smiles during their first public outing since their eviction from Frogmore Cottage. The couple are pictured on Friday in Santa Barbara, California

Mann Snr survived a total of five years' captivity and returned home intact.

He was on hand to toast the happy couple but declines to discuss the celebrations, telling me: 'I'm in 'no comment' mode.'

The wedding was held near the bride's family seat.

The daughter of property hot shot Stephen Clark, her home is a magnificent, crenelated, 17th-century pile, with sweeping lawns down to a river.
Disturbing photos have revealed Philadelphia's drugs crisis, with homeless people shooting up on the streets of the birthplace of American independence over the Fourth of July weekend.

The Kensington neighborhood, 'ground zero' for the city's drug epidemic, is seen strewn with trash and addicts injecting drugs in the middle of the day.

The disaster has been fueled by the rise of the drug Xylazine, known as 'tranq' - a lethal sedative that is used to enhance the effects of heroin, fentanyl and cocaine.

Philadelphia has become overwhelmed by drug-fueled crime under Democratic District Attorney Larry Krasner, a self-described 'progressive prosecutor.'

His failure to crack down led to his impeachment in 2022 for 'dereliction of duty', however he remains in office after his trial was indefinitely postponed.

Disturbing images show a depressing sight in Philadelphia as drug users and the homeless litter the streets of the City of Brotherly Love over Fourth of July weekend

It's a situation fueled by the rise of the drug Xylazine, also known as 'tranq' - a lethal sedative that is often used to enhance the effects of heroin, fentanyl and cocaine

The new footage shows addicts shooting up or passed out on the sidewalk

The latest evidence is captured in photos and video of the Kensington neighborhood, overrun with addicts, garbage and drug paraphernalia.

Addicts are seen injecting drugs into their legs, their arms and necks in broad daylight in the middle of the sidewalk.

Emaciated homeless people are passed out in the street next to empty bottles and plastic bags.

Crime has soared by a fifth in Philadelphia compared to last year, with theft among the law-breaking which has made the problem persistent.

Homeless people and drug addicts are often driven to petty theft as a way to find sustain themselves or scrape enough money together to supply their addictions.

Footage by Dailymail.com back in May revealed the scale of Philadelphia's untamed 'tranq' epidemic, which has transformed the city's streets into a drug-infested hellhole.

Just two months later, images show that the situation is the same.

Gruesome scenes in the 'City of Brotherly Love' show droves of homeless addicts aimlessly staggering through the streets, surrounded by tents and scattered trash.

One person gave Dailymail.com an inside look into the harrowing situation, explaining 'people are starving, people are overdosing.'

'I've had to do CPR on five people out here. We have found three dead bodies, people just stepping over bodies that are laying there. I've lost count of how many times we've had to do Narcan, uh, for folks,' the person said.

The person added that the addicts are flocking from California and New York and other areas of the United States.

'You know, when I, when we come from Virginia, people are like, why are you going to Philly? It's a Philadelphia problem. Like, this is an America problem and it's coming to a city near you if we don't do something about it because, um, people are literally coming from all over the east coast because they know they can come here and use and they won't, they won't get in trouble for it.'

Footage by Dailymail.com back in May revealed the scale of Philadelphia's untamed 'tranq' epidemic, which has transformed the city's streets into a drug-infested hellhole

Addicts are seen in photos passed out on the sidewalks and others go about their business

Tranq can be consumed in a number of ways as it is mixed with other substances to enhance its 'high' - which has a similar effect to other opioid drugs

Users are seen smoking, snorting, injecting, swallowing and inhaling the drug, with some even seen injecting it between the toes in their feet

The same person also talked about addicts shooting up in the middle of the day.

'You'll see people with like mirrors, they'll put a mirror on a tree and they'll just walk right up and shoot up in the neck,' they said.

'Ground zero, hell on Earth,' the person responded when asked about the situation. 'Um, largest open air, or it's the only open air narcotic market on the East coast where, um, you know, people are allowed to buy, sell, used prostitute. Uh, and it's, it's just allowed, you know, there's, there's no regulation.'

Overall crime in the City of Brotherly Love is up 17. 7 percent compared to the same time last year, according to stats compiled by the Philadelphia Police Department.

Theft is up 5.7 percent compared to the same time last year. But homicides, shooting victims, rape and robbery were all down compared to the same time last year.

Overall crime in the City of Brotherly Love is up 17. 7 percent compared to the same time last year, according to stats compiled by the Philadelphia Police Department

Gruesome scenes in the 'City of Brotherly Love' show droves of homeless addicts

The addicts imlessly staggering through the streets, surrounded by tents and scattered trash

The effects of the drug appear very similar to that of an overdose, as victims suffer from an uncontrolled stupor of sedation, slowed breathing and unconsciousness

The sidewalks are more reminiscent of a scene from the Walking Dead than a bustling metro

Earlier this year, disturbing photographs obtained by DailyMail.com laid bare the scale of the city's tragic drug problem.

Amid a flood of the popular and dangerous drug, the sidewalks are more reminiscent of a scene from the Walking Dead than a bustling metro.

Tranq can be consumed in a number of ways as it is mixed with other substances to enhance its 'high' - which has a similar effect to other opioid drugs.

Users are seen smoking, snorting, injecting, swallowing and inhaling the drug, with some even seen injecting it between the toes in their feet.

The effects of the drug appear very similar to that of an overdose, as victims suffer from an uncontrolled stupor of sedation, slowed breathing and unconsciousness.

The above map shows the percentage change in drug overdose deaths by state across the US. Each has seen a rise except for Hawaii. In Oklahoma deaths did not increase or decrease compared to previous years

Deaths caused by fentanyl in the US surged in the 2010s. At the start of the decade, 2,666 Americans died of a fentanyl overdose. This figure shot up to 19,413 by 2016. Covid made the situation worse, with a record 72,484 deaths recorded in 2021

Xylazine also often causes raw, gaping wounds on its victims, many of whom are found suffering from gruesome injuries while they lay among garbage and syringes.

Startling figures also found that tranq had been found in more than 90 percent of fentanyl samples in Philadelphia, and emergency rooms have reportedly seen skin and soft tissue injuries increase four-fold in the last three years.

Philadelphia is not alone in its struggle to contain rampant drug addiction.

In 2021, there were over 107,000 deaths from drug overdoses, an increase of nearly 15 percent from the year prior.

National trends indicate the numbers of drug deaths continue to soar, with tranq and fentanyl 'zombies' slumped on streets across America.
A Virgin company has begun a High Court fight with an American train operator which pulled out of a deal after alleging that the 'Virgin brand' had stopped being a 'brand of international high repute'.

Lawyers representing Virgin Enterprises told a judge at a High Court hearing in London that Brightline Holdings' allegation was 'cynical and spurious'.

The deal meant that Brightline would rebrand its rail services in the United States as 'Virgin Trains USA', Judge Mark Pelling heard.

Virgin Enterprises claimed Brightline was in breach of a trademark licence agreement and is seeking around 200million damages, the judge heard.

Brightline says Virgin Enterprises' claim should be dismissed.

Virgin Enterprises was part of the Virgin Group, founded by businessman Sir Richard Branson, and managed intellectual property relating to the 'Virgin brand'

Judge Pelling has begun overseeing a trial, at the Rolls Building in central London, which is due to last three weeks.

He heard that Virgin Enterprises was part of the Virgin Group, founded by businessman Sir Richard Branson, and managed intellectual property relating to the 'Virgin brand'.

'This dispute arises out of a trademark licence agreement dated November 15 2018 between (Virgin Enterprises) and (Brightline) pursuant to which Virgin Enterprises agreed to license the Virgin brand to Brightline such that Brightline would rebrand its rail services in the USA as 'Virgin Trains USA',' Daniel Toledano KC, Emma Himsworth KC, and Maximilian Schlote told the judge in a written case outline.

'The term of the (agreement) was for an initial 20 years, which was extendable.'

They said a clause in the agreement allowed Brightline to terminate the agreement, after giving written notice, if the Virgin brand had ceased to be a 'brand of international high repute' - and told the judge that an 'exit fee' had been agreed.

'Very soon after concluding the (agreement), it appears that Brightline had second thoughts about the deal it had struck and began looking for a way to extricate itself from it as soon as possible and without paying the contractually agreed exit fee,' they added.

'At the height of the first wave of the Covid-19 global pandemic, Brightline sought to terminate the (agreement), on the basis of a cynical and spurious allegation that the Virgin brand had ceased to be a brand of international high repute.'

Lawyers representing Brightline told the judge that the claim should be dismissed.

The deal meant that Brightline would rebrand its rail services in the United States as 'Virgin Trains USA', Judge Mark Pelling heard

'This is a claim brought by (Virgin Enterprises) against Brightline for very substantial sums - in excess of 250 million US dollars - said to be due as damages for breach of a trademark licence agreement between the parties dated November 15 2018,' they said.

'Brightline terminated the (agreement) on July 29 2020.

'(Virgin Enterprises) claims that this was a renunciatory breach of the (agreement).'

The lawyers said the 'liability' issue the judge had to decide was, 'simply stated', was Brightline 'entitled to terminate' the agreement.

They added: 'The claim should be dismissed.'

Lawyers representing Brightline outlined concerns about Virgin's train and airline businesses.

They said by the end of 2019, Brightline was becoming 'concerned about the reputation of the Virgin brand'.

'In April 2019, Virgin Trains was disqualified from bidding for a renewal of the West Coast mainline train franchise; it operated no trains in the UK after 7 December 2019,' they said.

'Not long after the announcement that Virgin Trains had been disqualified, investors started to express concerns about Brightline's links with Virgin.'

They said a Virgin Trains UK video, released in November 2019 and called 'The Final Whistle', was not 'universally acclaimed'.

One newspaper described the footage as a 'Bizarre farewell to Virgin Trains video featuring Richard Branson and Mr Blobby'.

Lawyers representing Virgin Enterprises said Brightline had operated a train line in Florida, between Miami and West Palm Beach (pictured: Richard Branson onboard a Brightline train arriving in West Palm Beach in 2019)

Lawyers said: 'Brightline regarded the video as an embarrassment...'

They added: 'The Covid-19 pandemic had a major impact on both Brightline and Virgin.

'In March 2020, Virgin Atlantic attracted widespread criticism with its request to staff to take unpaid leave, followed by its request for a substantial financial support package from the UK Government (or 'bailout').

'There was an ensuing wave of negative publicity.

'This was noted internally by Virgin, which recognised the need to do something.'

They told the judge that the response on social media was summarised in a 'social listening report', prepared for Virgin, which said: 'People are angry and frustrated that a billionaire would take taxpayer money to bail out his airline when he has ample money to fund it himself'.

Lawyers representing Virgin Enterprises said Brightline had operated a train line in Florida, between Miami and West Palm Beach.

They said Brightline had explained that it entered into the agreement to 'increase brand awareness and to take advantage of cross-selling opportunities'.

'Virgin was hit by a spike in negative press in the UK in the spring of 2020, in particular in relation to Virgin Atlantic's request for government support,' they said.

'However, the picture was different in other Virgin markets.'

They added: 'There was no notable negative press about any Virgin-related stories in the USA.'

Lawyers said, nonetheless, the 'challenges' the wider group of Virgin companies and the Virgin brand 'was facing at that time in the UK' caused 'internal concern and were taken very seriously and were addressed'.

'The press surrounding Virgin Atlantic and, relatedly, Sir Richard, also did not cause the Virgin Masterbrand to cease to be of international high repute,' they said.

'Virgin Atlantic's request for government support should be seen in the context of the pandemic and in light of the fact US and other airlines received huge government support.'
A 57-year-old pastor in Texas admitted to having an enormous trove of BDSM and bestiality-themed child pornography on his various electronic devices.

David Lloyd Walther pleaded guilty last week in federal court to one enhanced count of possession of child pornography, according to court documents.

According to the US Attorney's Office for the Western District of Texas, Walther knowingly 'searched for, downloaded, distributed and possessed child sexual abuse material, including child pornography - some of which depicted prepubescent minors.'

The office said Walther used BitTorrent, a peer-to-peer file sharing network to download more than 100,000 images and more than 5,000 videos of child sexual abuse material, which were found during a November 2022 search of his home and car.

If convicted, Walther faces up to 20 years in prison and a fine of $250,000.

David Lloyd Walther, a former pastor at the Faith Baptist Church in Round Rock, Texas, pleaded guilty to one enhanced count of possession of child pornography

Walther was formerly the pastor at the Faith Baptist Church in Round Rock, about 20 miles north of Austin

At the time of his arrest, Walther was serving as the pastor of Faith Baptist Church in Round Rock, Texas, about 20 miles north of Austin.

Federal investigators said they traced downloads of the child sexual abuse material to an IP address connected to the Faith Baptist Church.

According to the affidavit, 'On our about September 18, 2022, at 0015 hours, a successful download of child pornography was obtained from IP address 69.212.115.82 via BitTorrent.'

'On October 6, 2022, information from AT&T, in response to legal process, indicated that the subscriber of IP address 69.212.115.82, at 0015 hours on September 18, 2022, was Defendant WALTHER at his personal residence in Georgetown, Texas.'

'IP address 69.212.115.82 is a static IP address and has been assigned only to Defendant WALTHER's residence since May 3, 2022, when Walther's account was initialed at that location,' it read.

Search warrants were subsequently executed on November 9, 2022, during which time authorities seized two large computer hard drives full of the child sexual abuse material.

In a probable cause affidavit, prosecutors wrote that Walther had a computer folder titled 'BDSM,' which contained graphic material of children.

After the search warrants were executed, prosecutors say Walther agreed to speak with federal agents voluntary and was told at the time that he was not under arrest.

Allegedly, Walther admitted to a pornography addiction. He said he would 'go through cycles of downloading and viewing pornography depicting both adults and minors.'

He added that when he viewed child pornography, the children featured were 'between 8 and 17 years old, either posing sexually or engaged in sex acts with adults or children,' read the affidavit, providing a summary but not a direct transcript of the defendant's statement.

Walther told authorities that he had a history of 'purging' the illegal material when he felt guilty, understanding that what he'd done was wrong.

If convicted, Walther is looking at up to 20 years in prison and a possible $250,000 fine

The FBI is investigating the case via the Child Exploitation and Human Trafficking Task Force run out of the FBI's San Antonio division

The FBI is investigating the case via the Child Exploitation and Human Trafficking Task Force run out of the FBI's San Antonio division. They are being assisted by the Round Rock Police Department, Williamson County Sheriff's Office, and the Williamson County Children's Advocacy Center.

Assistant US Attorney Matthew Devlin is prosecuting the case.
House prices will fall at a slower rate than expected this year, according to the Federal National Mortgage Association, or Fannie Mae.

The government-sponsored company has revised its housing forecast for 2023 and 2024, predicting a more modest increase.

While in February it predicted that home prices would fall by 4.2 percent this year and another 2.3 percent in 2024, it now estimates that costs will only decline by 1.2 percent in 2023 and a further 2.2 percent the year after.

Doug Duncan, chief economist at Fannie Mae, said that high demand and an ongoing shortage of homes for sale means that prices will stay elevated for longer - outperforming earlier expectations.

'Demand for housing has exceeded expectations due to Baby Boomers aging in place and Gen-Xers locking in historically low rates, both of which have helped keep housing supply at historically low levels,' he said.

'Homebuilders continue to add to that supply, but years of meager homebuilding over the past business cycle means the imbalance will likely continue for some time.'

Doug Duncan, chief economist at Fannie Mae, said that high demand and an ongoing shortage of homes for sale means that prices will stay elevated for longer

House prices will fall at a slower rate than expected this year, according to Fannie Mae

While Fannie Mae does not expect home prices to crash, if the new predictions come to fruition it would mean home prices would be down 3.4 percent from December 2022 to December 2024.

National home prices have remained resilient despite last year's mortgage rate shock - when the average 30-year fixed-rate deal soared to close to 7 percent.

As of June 29, the typical 30-year rate was 6.71 percent, according to Freddie Mac.

Fannie Mae predicts that the average 30-year fixed mortgage rate will drift down to 6.3 percent by the end of 2023, and to 5.6 percent by the end of 2024.

Duncan said: 'Housing prices continue to show stronger growth than what was previously expected given the suddenness and significant magnitude of mortgage rate increases.'

These inflated rates have meant that buyers have been turned off by the daunting market conditions - and homeowners.

Inflated rates have resulted in a drop in home sales as buyers are turned off by the daunting market conditions - and homeowners locked into lower rates have stayed put.

It comes as a separate index showed house prices beginning to fall after more than a decade of soaring property values.

Year-on-year prices dropped 0.2 percent in April, compared with a 0.7 percent annual growth rate in the month before, according to home price tracker S&P CoreLogic Case-Shiller National Home Price Index.

After a decade of soaring property values, the annual decline was the first recorded by the Index since April 2012.

In some parts of the country, prices are falling at a marked rate. Earlier this year Redfin revealed how pandemic hotspots and expensive coastal markets are seeing historic home-price declines.

Properties in some cities selling for hundreds of thousands of dollars less than they were just a year ago

While Fannie Mae does not expect home prices to crash, if its predictions come to fruition it would mean home prices would be down 3.4 percent from December 2022 to December 2024

San Francisco and Oakland both saw price drops into six figures with the median value decreasing by $220,000 and $174,000 respectively.

Other notable declines occurred in major metros like Austin, Boise, Salt Lake City, Seattle, and Los Angeles - all of which saw their median home price shed at least $60,000 since April of last year.

The price decreases come following an unprecedented surge seen during the Covid-19 pandemic.

'Pandemic boomtowns and pricey coastal markets are seeing historic home-price declines,' the report published on May 22 said, before noting nationwide, the median home sale price has dropped nearly $18,000 - the most since January 2012.
Hero cop Heather Glenn, who was fatally shot when responding to a domestic violence case at a local hospital, was pictured with her fellow police officer father before she died.

Glenn, 47, responded to an incident in Tell City, Southern Indiana early on Monday morning, but was gunned down by the suspect.

The Tell City Police Department have now released heartbreaking photos of Glenn and her retired sergeant father Bob Glenn.

The fatal confrontation occurred at Perry County Memorial Hospital where Glenn joined responding officers called to the scene when an injured victim of domestic violence told hospital staff that Sean Hubert was on his way.

Officers attempted to subdue Hubert, 34, with an electronic device and arrest him, but it was ineffective, Indiana State Police said.

Tell City Police Department have now released heartbreaking photos of Glenn and her retired sergeant father Bob Glenn

FATHER AND DAUGHTER: Glenn and her retired sergeant father pictured together in 1997

'During a brief struggle, Hubert produced a firearm and Sgt. Glenn was shot,' state police said.

Adding: 'Officers with the Tell City Police Department and Cannelton Police Department returned fire and shot Hubert.'

The shooting occurred inside the hospital near the emergency room, at around 12:50am Sgt. John Davis told The Associated Press.

'They did not know he was armed,' Davis said.

Just before 6.15am, a coroner's vehicle and a large police presence were seen leaving the hospital, WAFB reported.

Glenn and other officers had been searching for Hubert after speaking to the domestic violence victim Sunday, state police said.

Glenn had spent nearly 20 years with the Tell City Police Department and the Perry County Sheriffs Office.

'Our police department suffered a tremendous loss,' Police Chief Derrick Lawalin said in a statement.

'We lost a dear colleague, a dear friend. Sgt. Glenn - she's a cornerstone of our department.'

Glenn's death comes less than a week after the death of fellow Indiana police officer Aaron Smith.

Smith was hit by a stolen vehicle on Wednesday while trying to place tire deflation sticks in the road in suburban Indianapolis.

An 18-year-old man has been charged with murder.
Detectives have arrested two men after a 15-year-old schoolboy and a 23-year-old man were stabbed to death last week.

Leonardo Reid, 15, was killed on Thursday while youths reportedly chugged laughing gas, admired flash cars and filmed a music video on Elthorne Road, Archway, north London.

He was found with stab wounds and pronounced dead at the scene. A 23-year-old unnamed victim was also rushed to hospital with stab wounds where he was pronounced dead.

Two men, aged 17 and 27, were arrested on Monday evening on suspicion of murder and attempted murder and were held in custody at a north London police station.

Locals described being kept awake by a group of up to 40 youngsters who appeared to be recording a 'rap' video around luxury cars before a 'commotion' broke out at the late-night street party in Islington, north London.

The boy, 15, who has been named as Leonardo Reid (pictured), from Islington, was found with stab wounds and pronounced dead at the scene, which is near a nursery, just after midnight

Forensic officers in Elthorne Road, Islington, London after a man and a teenager were stabbed to death

A double murder investigation has been launched and police are appealing for information

A 46-year-old man who was arrested on Saturday on suspicion of murder and attempted murder was later released with no further action.

Chief Superintendent Andy Carter said: 'My thoughts are with the families of the two victims who have suffered such an unimaginable loss in this shocking and unacceptable incident.

'We will support our colleagues as they investigate and members of the public will see an increased policing presence in the area.

'I urge anyone who has information that can help us establish exactly what has happened to approach those officers or contact us immediately.

A police cordon was in place and a Section 60 Order granting police additional stop and search powers was authorised

The Specialist Crime Command have launched an investigation. An extensive crime scene is in place and urgent enquiries are ongoing

Superintendent Jack May-Robinson from the Metropolitan Police spoke after the attack

'A man and boy have lost their lives and we must now work together to identify those responsible and remove them from our streets.'

Neighbourhood Superintendent for Islington Jack May-Robinson said he would not be answering any questions from the press.

He said: 'I urge anyone with information concerning this horrific incident to get in touch.

'We are committed to work with our power partners to tackle street violence, but we can't do this alone.

'If you can help this investigation please do get in touch. We know that some people may be hesitant at coming forward with information.

'But you can share what you know anonymously by independent charity Crimestoppers, who will not even ask for your name.

The scene at Elthorne Road, Islington, where a boy and a young man were stabbed to death

Police said in a statement on Friday that they believe a large number of people were present when the attack took place and are urging witnesses and those with information to come forward

'This is an area of rich community spirit and we thank the local people for their cooperation and assistance.

'As our specialist crime police progress investigation will provide further updates and specs of the incident as it becomes available.'

Police said in a statement on Friday that they believe a large number of people were present when the attack took place and are urging witnesses and those with information to come forward.

Anyone who has information that could help police should call 101 or tweet @MetCC ref CAD 9383/29 Jun.

To remain anonymous call the independent charity Crimestoppers on 0800 555 111.
They are classic comedies famed for poking fun at both the British and our European neighbours.

But an academic, writing in a new book, is claiming that sitcoms such as 'Allo, 'Allo!, Dad's Army and Fawlty Towers provide a way to make sense of the political attitudes that prompted Brexit.

University of Birmingham historian, Professor Gavin Schaffer, has contributed a chapter to the book British Humour and the Second World War: Keep Smiling Through.

In it he suggests British people's ambivalence towards Europe and their wish to be different from 'the continent' is portrayed in these shows.

He argues that 'Allo, 'Allo in particular reflected some of the thinking that lay behind the decision of British people to back Brexit.

An academic, writing in a new book, is claiming that sitcoms such as 'Allo, 'Allo!, Dad's Army and Fawlty Towers provide a way to make sense of the political attitudes that prompted Brexit . Pictured: John Cleese, Connie Booth in Fawlty Towers

'Allo, Allo, written mostly by David Croft and Jeremy Lloyd, ran as a pilot on the BBC in 1982 and then aired for nine series between 1984 and 1992. It starred Gordon Kaye as Rene Artois, a French cafe owner who reluctantly becomes involved with the resistance.

Among the characters was an undercover Englishman whose failed attempts at a French accent were part of the show's running gags.

Professor Schaffer said: 'Many Britons took 'Allo 'Allo to their hearts as it presented a light-hearted reflection of European differences, that ultimately spoke to the core differences between Britain and her European neighbours.

'The show also tells us something about how British attitudes to Europe were changing and not changing in the late 80 and early 90s, as Britain edged closer to her European neighbours. Despite closer bonds, British voices of Euroscepticism never strayed too far from suspicions rooted in the Second World War.'

Professor Schaffer said: 'Many Britons took 'Allo 'Allo to their hearts as it presented a light-hearted reflection of European differences.' Pictured: Cast of 'Allo 'Allo! together on location in Mundford, Norfolk on April 22, 1986

He argues in the book that while 'Allo, 'Allo can be seen as an attempt to bury the Germanophobia of the Second World War and work through the European trauma it caused, it also highlighted how different people in Britain felt from other Europeans.

Professor Schaffer also points out that Fawlty Towers most well-known scene treats the relationship between Brits and Europe as the 'elephant in the room'.

The academic added: 'The argument that there was something specifically British about being able to laugh at yourself was key to much of the public affection for 'Allo 'Allo.'

He added: 'This helps to explain British-European relations in this period - illustrating the extent to which British people considered their outlook, and principles, different and exceptional.

'Continuing affection for this kind of humour points to something of a British blind spot about the legacy of the War and the barriers between Britain and the rest of Europe.

'What lurks in the shadows is a nation deeply ill at ease with its European neighbours and itself. Listening very carefully to 'Allo 'Allo reveals a story of a nation that remains unready for further European integration.'
China offering 100k for help which leads to arrest of Hong Kong campaigners

China is seeking the return of three UK-based human rights activists - and is offering 100,000 for assistance leading to their arrests.

Beijing has approached Interpol to demand warrants for the trio who spoke out against repressive reforms in former UK colony Hong Kong.

Nathan Law, Finn Lau and Mung Siu-Tat are among eight persons Beijing wants to imprison for endangering national security.

While the UK does not extradite to China, the move could render the trio prisoners in this country - as their ability to travel freely could be compromised.

Two European Union states, Portugal and the Czech Republic are yet to suspend their extradition treaties with Beijing.

China is seeking the return of three UK-based human rights activists (Nathan Law pictured) - and is offering 100,000 for assistance leading to their arrests

Left: Finn Lau, activist in exile from Hong Kong and founder of Hong Kong Liberty, speaks during the rally at Parliament Square in June last year. Right: Members of Hong Kong Confederation of Trade Unions (HKCTU) including Mung Siu-tat (foreground) attend a protest

In recent years China has bombarded the crime agency with demands for 'red notices', meaning individuals could be arrested across the world.

Interpol is not supposed to be used for political purposes. However, its relationships with China and repressive Gulf states have been heavily criticised.

The 100,000 rewards have been offered to anyone providing information about the whereabouts of any of the activists leading to their arrest and subsequent prosecution by the Hong Kong authorities.

Mr Lau is facing a 'foreign collusion' charge, Mr Law is accused of dissent for meeting foreign politicians and speaking out against Hong Kong's disregard for human rights.

Finn Lau told the Mail he has been chased by the Chinese authorities for three years. He described the bounty on his head as 'a badge of honour'.

He wants to visit Portugal and the Czech republic to protest against their judicial relationships with China.

He said: 'The 100,000 bounty reflect the frustration of the Hong Kong government. They are resorting to all means. But I will continue to advocate for democracy, human rights and pragmatic policies.

'The Hong Kong democratic movement will not be stopped by the risk of abduction, physical assault and other non-legal ways. I am willing to risk my life to testify at the Portuguese and Czech parliaments. Glory and freedom to Hong Kong.'

While Nathan Law wrote on Twitter: 'We should not limit ourselves, self-censor, be intimidated, or live in fear.'

The eight persons fled Hong Kong after Beijing imposed legislation banning dissent and free speech in 2020.

Twenty six years ago this month Britain handed Hong Kong back to China. Since then it has been accused of breaking promises made in 1997 to upholds freedoms and customs.

Hong Kong Chief Superintendent of Police (National Security) Li Kwai-wah speaks during a press conference to issue arrest warrants for eight activists, in Hong Kong on July 3

The national security laws introduced in the former British colony in 2020 have led to 260 arrests of pro-democracy politicians, activists, union leaders and journalists.

Since 2016 China has engaged Interpol in more than 3,000 investigations. At least 60 persons subject to Chinese red notices have been returned to Beijing.

In 2017 Interpol issued a red notice against Uyghur activist Idris Hasan. He has been held in captivity in Morocco since then and still faces extradition to China.

Such cases have led to the agency being labelled a 'tool for dictators'.

But Steven Li, Chief Superintendent of Hong Kong's national security department defended the arrest warrants, saying: 'They have committed very serious offences.

'They have advocated for sanctions to damage Hong Kong's interests and intimidate Hong Kong's officials. They are abroad, but we will not stop chasing them.'

Foreign Secretary James Cleverly said: 'We will not tolerate any attempts by China to intimidate and silence individuals in the UK and overseas. The UK will always defend the universal right to freedom of expression and stand up for those who are targeted.

'We strongly object to the National Security Law that China imposed on Hong Kong, including its extraterritorial reach, in breach of the legally binding Sino-British Joint Declaration.

'We call on Beijing to remove the National Security Law and for the Hong Kong authorities to end their targeting of those who stand up for freedom and democracy.'

The Mail has approached Interpol for comment.
A new report claims he emailed a fellow staffer to warn about the sub's failings

A former OceanGate staffer fired after airing concerns about the safety of the doomed Titan submarine emailed an associate saying he was worried the firm's CEO would get himself and others killed in a 'quest to boost his ego'.

David Lochridge, formerly OceanGate's director of marine operations who worked at the company between 2015 and 2018, was fired after raising concerns about the safety of the Titan for much of its building process.

Those warnings were allegedly delivered from the factory floor during the latter half of 2017, but were constantly dismissed as part of a push to move on from the building to begin testing.

It's now emerged that Lochridge emailed project associate Rob McCallum - who also left OceanGate over safety concerns - shortly after he was fired in 2018, to say he was worried CEO Stockton Rush would end up dead on the submersible.

'I don't want to be seen as a Tattle tale but I'm so worried he kills himself and others in the quest to boost his ego,' Lochridge wrote about Rush, The New Yorker claims.

Ex-OceanGate staffer David Lochridge emailed another ex-associate in 2018 to warn about the Titan sub's failings - saying he was worried the firm's late CEO would get himself and others killed, in what he billed as a 'quest to boost his ego'

At the time, Lochridge (not pictured) was OceanGate's director of marine operations, and was perhaps the only experienced pilot at the company. He had already been raising concerns about the structural integrity of the vessel - seen here in pieces on June 28 - for much of 2017

The intrepid engineer reportedly continued: 'I would consider myself pretty ballsy when it comes to doing things that are dangerous, but that sub is an accident waiting to happen.'

'There's no way on earth you could have paid me to dive the thing.'

Rush - a self-professed 'innovator' who sought to push the boundaries on passenger diving - was one of five died in what proved to be the Titan's final voyage, after its pressure chamber imploded near the 3800meter depths where the Titanic rests.

Days before sending the email, DailyMail.com has already reported, Lochridge inspected every important facet of the sub - which he was already extremely familiar with - and quickly found a litany of red flags.

For one, court documents from a since settled lawsuit filed by the nixed OceanGate staffer show, Lochridge found glue was coming away at the seams of the vehicle's ballast bags, and that improperly placed mounting bolts threatened to cause a rupture.

Moreover, the veteran diver also found issues with the sub's ceiling faces, noting they had visible plunge holes, while the Titan itself boasted grooves that deviated from standard parameters.

There were also snagging hazards, the suit notes, with important components allegedly attached with zip-ties.

Also concerning Lochridge was the presence of flammable flooring, along with interior vinyl wrapping he said would regularly emit highly toxic gases upon ignition.

That said, within this laundry list of prospective safety hazards, the primary concern for Lochridge - and the part of the sub that would ultimately fail during its dive last month - was the carbon fiber core, responsible for keeping passengers alive at the icy depths where the Titanic wreckage resides.

David Lochridge, who was Director of Marine operations for the Titan project, was fired after meetings with OceanGate CEO Stockton Rush, who is on board the missing submersible

Days before sending the email, DailyMail.com has already reported, Lochridge inspected every important facet of the sub - which he was already For one, extremely familiar with - and found a litany of red flags, such as important components allegedly attached with zip-ties

The intrepid engineer reportedly called Rush's carbon fiber creation 'an accident waiting to happen.' He wrote to a fellow staffer who also left OceanGate due to Titan-related concerns: 'There's no way on earth you could have paid me to dive the thing'

There, the external water pressure is roughly 6,000 pounds per square inch, pressure that would be felt from every angle around the vessel's all-important hull.

Concerning Lochridge was the fact the pressure chamber was made of carbon fiber - a capricious material not used in any other deep ocean submersible, making it largely untested.

Several experts have since slammed Rush's use of the material - which, similar to several strands of rope wrapped around each other, is strong under tension but more tenuous under compression.

Perhaps most troubling, though, is OceanGate's alleged decision to not seek certification for the new technology, and the lack of longterm deepwater testing enacted before it ultimately imploded.

According to Lochridge's lawsuit, this decision was ultimately up to Rush, along with Tony Nissen, the Washington-based firm's director of engineering.

In it, Lochridge claimed the pair maintained that stance in January 2018 after he handed them the aforementioned engineering report, which, along with the previously laid issues, saw the expert find literal 'holes' in a section of the sub's hull

Lochridge thus argued the Titan needed more testing - saying that and passengers may be endangered when it reached 'extreme depths,' according to the lawsuit filed later that year in Seattle District Court.

'Verbal communication of the key items I have addressed in my attached document have been dismissed on several occasions, so I feel now I must make this report so there is an official record in place,' Lochridge reportedly wrote of his refusal to sign off on the sub.

'Until suitable corrective actions are in place and closed out, Cyclops 2 (Titan) should not be manned during any of the upcoming trials.'

As a result, The New Yorker report claims, Rush was furious - and fired Lochridge almost on the spot.

The CEO also called a meeting that afternoon, and over the course of the day him and other OceanGate leadership insisted that no hull testing was necessary.

In its place, brass touted an acoustic monitoring system that would detect fraying fibers. At the time, the firm said the system would serve enough to alert the pilot to the possibility of catastrophic failure 'with enough time to arrest the descent and safely return to surface.'

The two parties would eventually become embroiled in bitter litigation, with the case eventually settled on undisclosed terms several months after it was filed.

In response to the wrongful death suit, OceanGate sued Lochridge, accusing him of breaching a non-disclosure agreement, and filed a counterclaim alleging that he was wrongfully fired for raising questions about testing and safety.

Lochridge said in the counterclaim that OceanGate, which charges up to $250,000 for a seat on the vessel, would 'subject passengers to potential extreme danger in an experimental submersible'. He also said Titan was not equipped to reach depths of around 13,123 feet, where the Titanic wreck rests.

OceanGate CEO and founder Rush (pictured left) sits alongside submersible pilot Randy Holt in the company's submersible, 'Antipodesin June 28, 2013. A self-professed rule breaker, Rush's decisions during the construction of the Titan sub are now coming into question

A file photo of the Titan submersible before its doomed voyage to the Titanic wreck last month

In a blog post titled 'Why Isn't Titan Classed?', OceanGate offered its stance on neglecting to seek classification, suggesting the process would simply take too long.

The post said: 'While classing agencies are willing to pursue the certification of new and innovative designs and ideas, they often have a multi-year approval cycle due to a lack of pre-existing standards

'Bringing an outside entity up to speed on every innovation before it is put into real-world testing is anathema to rapid innovation.'

The company said its 'innovations' included a real-time (RTM) hull health monitoring system which is 'not currently covered by any classing agency'.

OceanGate suggested its own in-house safety protocols were sufficient. The blog concluded that 'by itself, classing is not sufficient to ensure safety'.

Lochridge, whose role included overseeing safety on the Titan project, had urged OceanGate to seek classification several years ago, before he was sacked in a disagreement about safety checks on the craft.

He also wanted the company to carry out a scan of Titan's hull to 'detect potential flaws' rather than 'relying on acoustic monitoring'  which would only detect an issue 'milliseconds before an implosion'.

The revelation is significant because rescuers do not know whether Titan is still at the bottom of the ocean - triggering fears it could have 'imploded' under extreme pressure.

In a court document filed in 2018, lawyers for the company said Lochridge's employment was terminated because he 'could not accept' their research and plans, including safety protocols.

OceanGate also claimed that Lochridge 'desired to be fired' and had shared confidential information with others and wiped a company hard drive. The company said he 'refused to accept the voracity of information' about safety from Titan's lead engineer.

Lochridge had relocated from the UK to Washington to work on the development of the Titan  which was previously called Cyclops 2.

A former Royal Navy marine engineer and ship's diver, he was described by OceanGate as an 'expert in the field of submarine operations and rescue'.

Legal filings obtained by DaiyMail.com show that he wrote a report in 2018 which was critical of the company's research and development process for the vessel.

Lochridge also 'strongly encouraged that OceanGate utilize a classification agency, such as the American Bureau of Shipping, to inspect and certify the Titan.'

The suit states that 'OceanGate refused both requests, and stated it was unwilling to pay for a classification agency to inspect its experimental design.'

Lochridge 'disagreed with OceanGate's position to dive the submersible without any non-destructive testing to prove its integrity, and to subject passengers to potential extreme danger in an experimental submersible.'

Lochridge stated he could not accept OceanGate's research and development plans. Based on Lochridge's position, OceanGate terminated his employment, the legal filings reveal.

Pictured: File photo of inside the OceanGate Expeditions sub which is currently missing with five people on board

Among those who died in the ill-fated expedition last month was British billionaire Hamish Harding (pictured), CEO of Action Aviation in Dubai

Shahzada Dawood, 48, (pictured with his wife Christine) a Pakastani businesseman, and his son Sulaiman Dawood, 19, also died after the Titan's carbon fiber pressure chamber imploded on itself in April

French Navy veteran Paul Henry Nargeolet (left) was in the sub along with Stockton Rush (right), CEO of the OceanGate Expeditions

The suit also claims Rush had asked Lochridge to assess the safety risks because he was the 'best man for the job' - though Lochridge was still 'ignored' when trying to raise verbal concerns over the safety and quality control of Titan.

In his report he said: 'With Cyclops 2 (Titan) being handed off from Engineering to Operations in the coming weeks, now is the time to properly address items that may pose a safety risk to personnel.

'Verbal communication of the key items I have addressed in my attached document have been dismissed on several occasions, so I feel now I must make this report so there is an official record in place.'

OceanGate did not comment on the Lochridge lawsuit, or its refusal to seek classification, when approached by DailyMail.com.

Before Rush and the other four victims were officially deemed dead, the company said its 'entire focus is on the wellbeing of the [Titan] crew'.
The SUV was occupied by teens, who were being chased by other troopers

Shocking dashcam footage shows the moment a Michigan State Police cruiser slammed into a stolen SUV that crossed into its path during a high-speed chase.

State police were responding to a call to join in the chase of the stolen vehicle when it pulled out in front of them and collided with their cruiser, injuring two MSP troopers and two teenagers in the car.

One of the troopers was knocked unconscious and became trapped in the car, which caught fire. Similarly, of the two teens in the car, one was 'ejected' while the other also became trapped.

The two troopers and the two suspects in the stolen vehicle, said to be 'juveniles', were all taken to the hospital with serious injuries.

State Police were chasing two teens in a stolen vehicle when the SUV collided with the cruiser (pictured at the scene after the crash)

Of the two teens in the car (pictured after the crash) one was 'ejected' while the other was trapped inside but rescued by fire crews

The MSP troopers have since been discharged from the hospital, WZZM13 reported, but no update was given as to the condition of the two suspects in the stolen SUV.

The incident happened on June 15 when another MSP vehicle was chasing the stolen car as it approached the intersection of Peck and E. Holbrook in Muskegon, by Michigan Lake.

The second MSP cruiser involved in the crash was speeding towards the chase to assist in intercepting the SUV when it pulled out in front of the cruiser, causing the crash.

'Initial dispatch info stated cruiser struck and an officer unconscious. While en route, dispatch advised two vehicles involved, one cruiser with two officers injured - one trapped - and the cruiser on fire as well as a civilian vehicle into a building with one ejected and one trapped,' Muskegon Fire Department said in a statement after the crash.

Dashcam footage recorded from the cruiser shows the moment the white SUV pulls out in front of it at the intersection of Peck and E. Holbrook in Muskegon

A still of the cruiser's dashcam footage in which the SUV is seen directly in front of the speeding cruiser

Doorbell footage showed the SUV rolled over on its side after the crash

Dashcam footage showed the moment of impact and doorbell footage showed the SUV rolling into a nearby building and into the bushes.

'This is a situation that we never want to deal with, especially when we're dealing with other individuals. We never want to see this happen,' Lieutenant Robinson told WZZM13.

'And so our thoughts go out to the troopers, their families, the families of the individuals that were in the other vehicle... it's a senseless thing that happens.'

MSP said Fifth District Investigative Response Team is assisting in an ongoing investigation.
A 'well-loved' bar worker who suffered serious head injuries, a broken spine and clavicle after her buggy crashed in Ayia Napa has awoken from a coma - but her family warn she still has a 'long road to recovery'.

Ellie Horrocks, 22, from Westhoughton, Greater Manchester, was rushed to hospital where doctors placed her in a medically induced coma, following the tragic accident last Monday.

Her aunt Sarah previously said Ellie, who had move to Cyprus in May to work in a bar, had hired the buggy to see the sunset in another part of the resort but was confronted by an oncoming car, forcing her to swerve and the vehicle to overturn.

Leanne Horrocks, her mother, immediately set up a fundraising page to help fly Ellie home in an air ambulance, which is estimated to cost around 60,000.

The 'amazing' and 'creative' woman is being treated in ICU at a hospital in Nicosia, with her mother staying in a hotel nearby and can only visit her for an hour a day.

Ellie Horrocks, from Westhoughton, Greater Manchester, has woken up from her coma after she got in a serious buggy crash in Ayia Napa

The 'amazing' and 'creative' bar worker was being treated in ICU at a hospital in Nicosia. While she has awoken from her coma, her family have said she still has a 'long road to recovery'

The 22-year-old who had been working in a bar in Cyprus suffered serious head injuries, a broken spine and clavicle

The family announced publicly today that Ellie had woken up from her coma and is 'progressing'.

They said: 'The family is pleased to inform you that Ellie has now come out of her coma. The doctor is pleased with her progress although she still has a long road of recovery ahead of her.

'Nicosia hospitals are liaising with the family and a UK hospital in order that arrangements can be made to bring Ellie back home via air ambulance. We will update again as soon as we can. Thank you for your kind words and continued support.'

Speaking last week, Ellie's aunt said: 'She's young, so she likes going out with her friends, she's got loads and loads of friends, but she's also just a very creative person. She's a really, really, well-loved girl.'

On the GoFundMe page, Ellie's mother said: 'We urgently want to get her home to Manchester, to be treated in a specialist neurology hospital where she can heal and hopefully recover close to her family and friends.

Ellie Horrocks, from Westhoughton, Greater Manchester, was placed in a medically induced coma

A GoFundMe page to help bring Ellie home has now raised 69,182 out of its 70,000 target

'The cost of repatriation from Nicosia Hospital in Cyprus to the UK is significant and not covered by Ellie's insurance and this has meant we have had to reach out for help.'

The page has now raised 69,182 out of its 70,000 target. Last week her aunt Sarah said the family wanted to thank everyone who had donated so far, saying the family had been 'overwhelmed by the messages of support, even from strangers'.

'All the donations and the kindness everyone has shown has just been incredible. So, we want to thank them all,' she added.
Electric car drivers are being pressured into downloading more than 30 apps to navigate the charging network.

Nearly every firm running charging points in the UK has its own app for payment, which customers are pushed towards when they visit their website.

At least a dozen charging providers do not even allow payment by other means, such as cash or contactless card.

Councils have already faced a significant backlash from motorists after introducing app-only payment for car parking amid complaints the technology is difficult to use and is hard for older customers to understand.

The 2030 ban could heap further app misery on the more than two million people who are already expected to be living in 'parking meter deserts' where pay-and-display machines are scrapped. Now they will be forced to grapple with electric vehicle (EV) charging apps too.

Electric car drivers are being pressured into downloading more than 30 apps to navigate the charging network

Nearly every firm running charging points in the UK has its own app for payment, which customers are pushed towards when they visit their website (File image)

Research last year found that nearly 40 per cent of the public agreed they would be more likely to switch to an electric car if they could confidently rely on a single public charging option.

ZapMap, which provides a UK-wide map of EV charging points, has recently launched its own payment app, Zap-Pay, 'with a mission to sign up all the key networks across the UK'.

The firm said it decided to take action after hearing 'a message coming loud and clear from EV drivers across the country: make paying for charging simple'. However, its website suggests only nine providers have so far signed up.

ChargeUK, representing the EV charging industry said: 'We are working with government to ensure charging is accessible, convenient and hassle-free,' insisting: 'Paying for public charging has never been easier.'
He was allowed to enter the centre despite a nationwide ban

Chase had been wanted for bashing another staffer

A man wanted by police for punching a Centrelink worker in the face allegedly stabbed another employee in the back - almost killing her - after a series of bureaucratic bungles.

Joeanne Cassar, 35, was left fighting for life after she was allegedly stabbed by Elijah Chase, 34, at a Centrelink service centre at Airport West, Melbourne last month in an incident that shocked Australia.

Daily Mail Australia can reveal Chase should never have been allowed to enter the welfare agency in the city's north-west that day due to a nationwide ban on him entering government sites.

Chase appeared before the Broadmeadows Magistrates' Court on Thursday where his attempt to obtain a court-imposed gag order on his alleged offending was withdrawn after opposition by Daily Mail Australia.

Police allege Elijah Chase, 34, stabbed Ms Cassar with a kitchen knife

Joeanne Cassar, 55, had tried to lock her attacker out of the Centrelink building

Police swarmed on the Centrelink in Airport West, Melbourne in May

It can be revealed Chase should not have even been near the Centrelink office on May 23.

Government and police sources have outlined a series of bureaucratic blunders that almost cost a life.

Surrounded by supporters, Ms Cassar arrived at court hobbling on crutches after sustaining what is believed to be life-changing injuries from the savage attack.

She refused to speak with Daily Mail Australia due to ongoing civil action launched against her employer in the days following her assault.

Former Victoria Police commissioner Graham Ashton is in the process of leading an urgent review of service centre security across Australia, with sources telling Daily Mail Australia he has spoken repeatedly with Ms Cassar.

It is understood Mr Ashton's presence has had immediate results, with customer service staff now authorised to order customers to be screened by security before being admitted onto the site.

It was a direction Ms Cassar had been allegedly overruled on the very day she was stabbed.

A well-placed source told Daily Mail Australia Chase had been well known to rank-and-file workers within the Airport West Centrelink building.

Joeanne Cassar was brutally stabbed while at work

Joeanne Cassar, 55, was stabbed while working at Centrelink in Airport West

'He's restricted from every single Services Australia building, which is Centrelink, in Australia so he cannot go into any office at all. He is a banned customer,' the source said.

Under the ban, Chase - who was still receiving Centrelink payments - was supposed to only communicate with staff over the phone.

'It's personalised servicing effectively,' the source said.

Chase had received the ban after assaulting a female staffer within the very same building he is alleged to have stabbed Ms Cassar.

'He assaulted workers and punched a woman in the face,' the source said.

The alleged assault on December 20, 2021 somehow did not see police issue a warrant for Chase's arrest.

A Victoria Police spokesperson said instead police initially sought Chase 'on whereabouts' in relation to the alleged assault.

'This was upgraded to a warrant in January 2023. Throughout this time and beyond police made numerous attempts to locate the individual,' police said via a statement.

'This included phone contact, residential checks in numerous suburbs and discussions with family and known associates as well as other agencies and services.

'He was ultimately arrested following the incident in Airport West on 23 May 2023 and charged in relation to that and all outstanding matters.'

It remains unclear why Chase wasn't locked up in May last year after being charged with more assaults in Brunswick.

Chase is further accused of breaking another worker's collarbone during an alleged rampage at a JobFind Centre in Coburg.

Last month it was revealed Chase had been wanted on a warrant and for breaching a community corrections order at the time of his alleged attack on Ms Cassar.

A Victoria Police spokesperson told Daily Mail Australia on Friday Chase had been 'actively avoiding police'.

Victorian police rushed to Centrelink Airport West after Ms Cassar was stabbed inside on May 23

Former Victoria Police Chief Commissioner Graham Ashton will head the review

Chase had been picked up on a Melbourne tram while still allegedly armed shortly after the daylight attack.

It is understood police allege he stabbed Ms Cassar with a kitchen knife after she confronted him at the door.

Chase had attended the office earlier that morning where he self-identified that he wasn't allowed to enter and left without incident.

The breach saw Ms Cassar place the entrance doors on a 'controlled entry' status, which sees everyone entering the building screened before the doors open.

A source claimed that directive was overruled by a superior within an hour of the request being made.

'It was taken away from her at a higher level, so the doors had to be opened,' the source said. 'She was told she didn't have the power to do it and the doors were opened. They were told they didn't have the authority to do it.'

When Chase returned, a security guard ordinarily positioned within the office had been on his lunch break.

A police source said Ms Cassar told Chase he was not allowed inside and offered to go back inside and find him some assistance.

Witnesses have told Daily Mail Australia Ms Cassar was seen attacking Ms Cassar outside before she bolted back into the Centrelink office with Chase allegedly attacking her from behind.

'He chased her from the door into the office,' a witness said.

A 34-year-old man from Essendon was arrested and is assisting police with their investigation into the horrific stabbing on Tuesday

Daily Mail Australia has been told while Ms Cassar was taken to Royal Melbourne Hospital with critical injuries, Services Australia was already working to reopen the office.

'The agency had already put plans in place to ensure that door opened the next morning,' a source said.

'They already had a replacement crew ready to roll out whether she lived or died.'

A former Centrelink worker, who asked not to be named, said staff were only protected by a 'panic button'.

While workers enjoyed a brief respite from fears of attack during the Covid-19 pandemic, those increased security measures did not last.

'We couldn't leave staplers on our desk because they threw them at us. We couldn't leave anything like that on our desks because they used them as weapons and threw them us,' the former worker said.

'It's this Leftist wokest ideology that has infiltrated every single government department, every aspect of life and that's why they had this stupid open door policy and we were all at risk. Every one of us.'

Sources claim while Chase had previously been assessed by doctors from Thomas Embling Hospital - for the criminally insane - he was not found sick enough to be admitted as a patient.
Last month was officially the hottest June on record, the Met Office has confirmed - with climate change to blame for the scorching temperatures.

Provisional figures show the average mean temperature in the UK for June was 15.8C - the highest it's been since June 1940 and June 1976, when the average temperature was 14.9C.

A rapid study by the Met Office found that these record-breaking temperatures were fuelled by climate change.

Paul Davies, Met Office Climate Extremes Principal Fellow and Chief Meteorologist, said: 'We found that the chance of observing a June beating the previous joint 1940/1976 record of 14.9C has at least doubled since the 1940s.

'Alongside natural variability, the background warming of the Earth's atmosphere due to human induced climate change has driven up the possibility of reaching record high temperatures.'

Last month was officially the hottest June on record, the Met Office has confirmed - with climate change to blame for the scorching temperatures. Pictured: Brighton Beach on June 25

Provisional figures show the average mean temperature in the UK for June was 15.8C - the highest it's been since June 1940 and June 1976, when the average temperature was 14.9C

The UK's mean temperature for June 2023 was 15.8C, the Met Office has confirmed.

This is some 2.5C higher than average for June.

Mark McCarthy, a science manager at the Met Office said: 'It's officially the hottest June on record for the UK, for mean temperature as well as average maximum and minimum temperature.

'June started with a good deal of high pressure and temperatures initially around average for many, but once that subsided, warm, humid air began to influence temperatures, with 32.2C the highest temperatures reached.

'What's striking is the persistent warmth for much of the month, with temperatures widely into the mid 20s Celsius for many and even into the low 30s at times.'

A whopping 72 counties recorded their hottest June on record, with many recording temperatures more than 2.5C above average.

This includes Orkney, Warwickshire, Surrey, Somerset and Cornwall, according to the Met Office.

To understand whether these record-breaking temperatures were linked to climate change, the Met Office used the UK's climate projections, UKCP18.

Last month wasn't just the hottest June on record - it was also the sunniest June since 1957, and the fourth sunniest on record. In addition, rainfall was in short supply for much of the month, with the UK having just 52.2mm of rainfall - 68 per cent of its average for the month

These were used to compare the chance of surpassing the previous record of 14.9C during the period 1925-1955 to that for 1991-2020.

'Using our UKCP18 climate projections, we can also see that there is a difference in the frequency of these sort of extremes depending on the emissions scenario we follow in the future,' Mr Davies said.

Worryingly, the results show that things are only going to get hotter.

'By the 2050s the chance of surpassing the previous record of 14.9C could be as high as around 50 per cent, or every other year,' Mr Davies explained.

'Beyond the 2050s the likelihood is strongly governed by our emissions of greenhouse gasses, with the chance increasing further in a high emissions scenario but levelling off under mitigation.'

Last month wasn't just the hottest June on record - it was also the sunniest June since 1957, and the fourth sunniest on record.

In addition, rainfall was in short supply for much of the month, with the UK having just 52.2mm of rainfall - 68 per cent of its average for the month.
A drug to turbocharge the brain in old age has come a step closer.

A single injection of a protein called klotho can boost cognitive function in older monkeys, a study has found.

People who have a high level of klotho, because of a genetic quirk, have better brainpower and are less likely to develop dementia.

But scientists want to understand whether topping up the protein could help supercharge thinking skills.

Having previously discovered injecting mice with klotho could boost their cognitive function, they have now found the same result in rhesus macaques, which are more similar to humans, and suffer cognitive decline like us as they age.

A single injection of a protein called klotho can boost cognitive function in older monkeys, a study has found (stock image)

This raises hopes for klotho, which is named after the mythological Greek figure Clotho who spun the thread of human life.

Researchers at the University of California, San Francisco (UCSF), carried out a study using 18 macaques with an average age of almost 22 - the equivalent of a 65-year-old person.

They gave a subset of the animals an injection of klotho equivalent to the level seen in people at birth.

These monkeys performed better in a test which required them to remember the location of a food treat among up to nine possible locations, following a delay of up to 32 seconds.

The study authors conclude: 'Because klotho levels decrease in human aging, our data showing that a lower dose of klotho (comparable to five times baseline levels and similar to levels observed at birth) can enhance cognition in aged non-human primates suggest that peripheral treatment or replenishment with this endogenous hormone may prove therapeutic in aging humans.'

Neuroscientist Dr Dena Dubal, senior author of the study from UCSF, who had studied klotho for years, has previously said on its anti-ageing potential: 'Ageing is the biggest risk factor for cognitive problems, and cognitive problems are one of the biggest biomedical challenges that we face.

People who have a high level of klotho, because of a genetic quirk, have better brainpower and are less likely to develop dementia (stock image)

'Why don't we just block ageing?'

The Japanese researchers who named klotho found that the amount produced by mice could affect how long the rodents lived.

People with higher levels also live longer.

Klotho is believed to boost brainpower by enhancing the function of synapses - the gaps between brain cells in which they 'talk' to each other using electrical signals.

In the current monkey study, the boost to cognitive function in monkeys injected with the protein was found to last for at least two weeks.

Neuroscientist Dr Dena Dubal, senior author of the study from UCSF, who has studied klotho for years, said: 'Cognitive impairment is a problem in ageing and dementia, which can erode our language, memories and the essence of who we are.

'But these results suggest that klotho could be a treatment which could really work in people, to keep our brains healthy in old age.

'We need clinical trials urgently to see if that's the case.'
Kim Kardashian revisited a pivotal moment in her life while speaking to Vogue Italia for its July cover story.

The 42-year-old multihyphenate recalled passing the 'baby bar,' formally known as the First-Year Law Students Examination, which was documented on Hulu's The Kardashians.

'That's one of my favorite episodes too. My daughter was there with me,' the SKIMS founder told the publication, explaining how it helped her seem relatable in her 10-year-old daughter North West's eyes.

'For a long time it was difficult for her to understand why I was studying all the time. She saw me fail and cry. She saw how I was no different than her when she was worried because of a test,' the superstar said.

She added, 'But when she saw me cry from joy, I knew she understood how important that achievement was to me personally.'

Special moment: In an interview with Vogue Italia Kim described how passing her law exam made her more relatable in daughter North's eyes

Sweet bond: 'For a long time it was difficult for her to understand why I was studying all the time. She saw me fail and cry. She saw how I was no different than her when she was worried because of a test,' the superstar said about her daughter

In addition to North, Kim shares Saint, 7, Chicago, 5, and Psalm, 4, with ex-husband Kanye West, 46.

'You are only allowed to take the baby bar a certain amount of times - this was the last time I could ever take it - so if I dont [pass], then this law school journey is over for me,' the influencer said before passing the exam.

The Keeping Up With the Kardashians alum revealed in late 2021 that she had achieved the feat in a social media post.

'OMFGGGG I PASSED THE BABY BAR EXAM!!!!' she wrote to her hundreds of millions of fans.

'Looking in the mirror, I am really proud of the woman looking back today in the reflection,' she added.

Kardashian admitted that she had 'failed this exam three times in two years' in a rough patch on her 'law school journey.'

'I got back up each time and studied harder and tried again until I did it!!!' said Kardashian, who registered with the California State Bar in 2018.

Kardashian noted, 'I was told by top lawyers that this was a close to impossible journey and harder than the traditional law school route, but it was my only option, and it feels so so sooooo good to be here and on my way to achieving my goals.'

Happy tears: Kim said when North 'saw me cry from joy, I knew she understood how important that achievement was to me personally'

Cover girl: Kim was profiled for the July 2023 issue of the fashion magazine's Italian subset

Kim and her firstborn child share a close-knit bond, and even share a TikTok account together.

Their most recent post was a fun and light-hearted 5-second clip shared with their 16.2 million followers on the app on Sunday.

The bombshell captioned the clip: 'Sunday mornings be like... With me and my Bff.'

It featured a mashup of Kim and her daughter mouthing along to a trending sound called 'they trunna be subway surf.'

The mother-of-four was dressed down in a white tank top with oversized dark sweatpants.

She was barefaced except for coats of shiny lip gloss layered onto her plump pout.

Kim's long, dark locks were wavy and appeared slightly damp as she spent one-on-one time with her mini-me.

For her part, North showed off a new, long, freshly braided hairstyle as she joined her mom in the silly clip.

Precious: Kim and her firstborn child share a close-knit bond, and share a TikTok account together

Cute! North showed off a new, long, freshly braided hairstyle as she joined her mom in the silly clip

Giving her devoted admirers even more content to devour, Kim dropped in on Instagram on Sunday as well.

The beauty maven shared a collection of captures featuring three of her nieces.

Joined by younger sister Khloe Kardashian, 39, the law student took the little girls and her daughter Chicago on a fun, Barbie-themed outing.

She wrote in the caption, 'Barbie girls in a Barbie world,' and the post quickly amassed more than one million likes.

For the occasion, Kim wore a skintight black catsuit with an oversized black trench coat.

She added a pop of color by sporting hot pink, pointed-toe, over-the-knee boots with white stripes going down the sides.

Khloe wore a similar look as she opted for a fitted, long-sleeved turtleneck catsuit in bright pink.

Like her older sister, the blonde beauty finished the look with thigh-high hot pink boots.

New post: Giving her devoted admirers even more content to devour, Kim dropped in on Instagram on Sunday as well

Play date: The beauty maven shared a collection of captures featuring three of her nieces and her daughter Chicago

Fantastic: Joined by younger sister Khloe Kardashian, 39, the law student took the little girls on a fun, Barbie-themed outing

Adorable: She wrote in the caption, 'Barbie girls in a Barbie world,' and the post quickly amassed more than one million likes

Girl gang: The little ones appeared enthralled by the experience

Kim pulled her long, raven locks into a high ponytail that fell down her back.

Meanwhile, Khloe's frosty hair was styled in a center part with loose waves falling over her chest.

Kim and Khloe's baby sister Kylie Jenner's 5-year-old daughter Stormi was along for the fun, as well as their brother Rob Kardashian's daughter Dream, 6.

And Khloe's 5-year-old daughter True Thompson - who she shares with ex Tristan Thompson - was also in tow.
Lisa Rinna channeled her inner rock star as she attended the Patou Spring/Summer 2024 fashion show in Paris Sunday.

The 59-year-old actress looked like an 80s rock goddess in thigh high lace up black boots and leggings.

The former Real Housewives of Beverly Hills cast member topped the look with a thigh length belted black coat with gold buttons.

She sported big hair and natural looking makeup with a bold red lip.

The Daytime Emmy nominee accessorized with large gold hoop earrings and several rings on her fingers.

Rock it: Lisa Rinna channeled her inner rock star as she attended the Patou Spring/Summer 2024 fashion show in Paris Sunday. The 59-year-old actress looked like an 80s rock goddess in thigh high lace up black boots and leggings

Lisa added a pop of color, carrying a pink purse.

The influencer enjoyed the styles of the ready-to-wear collection, entitled Dancing Diaries, alongside Natasha Lyonne and Christine Quinn, who were also invited.

Lisa is in the City of Lights with her daughter Amelia, 22, who walked in the ALAIA Winter/Spring 2024 show.

The actress shares Amelia and older daughter Delilah, 25, with her husband of 26 years, Harry Hamlin, 71.

Lisa has landed a new acting gig.

She will take part in the third season of American Horror Stories.

The versatile actress will star in an episode of the popular anthology series entitled Tapeworm.

There's been no word on what the episode is about, but Deadline reported that Lisa has already shot her part.

Coat: The former Real Housewives of Beverly Hills cast member topped the look with a thigh length belted black coat

Big hair: Lisa sported big hair and natural looking makeup with a bold red lip

Accessories: Lisa accessorized with large gold earrings and several rings from the design house

Amercian Horror Stories is a spinoff of the similarly named American Horror Story.

Each episode tells a different scary tale.

The show was created by Ryan Murphy and Gwyneth Paltrow's husband, Brad Falchuk.

It appeared Lis and her former RHOBH cast mate Kathy Hilton have ended their feud.

During a livestream for Bravo Breaking News on Instagram, Kathy, 64, sent her best wishes, according to Reality Blurb.

'I think this will be great for her. Everybody likes to keep busy and shes gonna do what she She loves acting and keeping busy so I will definitely watch,' she said.
A grand jury in Texas recently declined to file criminal charges against Travis for the deadly crowd surge at his 2021 Astroworld festival in his native Houston

Travis Scott gave his shirt and shoes to a fan in the audience at one of his shows after a Texas grand jury recently declined to bring criminal charges against him for the deadly crowd surge at his 2021 Astroworld festival.

The 32-year-old rapper was performing at Rolling Loud festival in the Netherlands over the weekend when he headed over to the front row to get closer to the crowd.

The ex-boyfriend of reality star Kylie Jenner, 25, was quickly impressed by one guy who was rapping his lyrics straight back to him.

In video footage circulating online, Travis appeared impressed with the fan's ability to keep up with his own rhyming pace as they traded lines on the mic, and promptly stripped off his shirt and handed them over, along with his shoes.

While others in the immediate vicinity made a grab for the garments, the Sicko Mode rapper made sure they went to the intended recipient.

Fan appreciation: Travis Scott, shown in May in Cannes, France, was performing at Rolling Loud festival in the Netherlands over the weekend when he gave his shirt and shoes to a fan

The shirt appeared to be an unreleased piece of 'Utopia' merchandise, while the shoes were custom Nike Air Jordans the rapper recently has been seen wearing.

The Dutch fan later admitted he'd had the best night of his life.

He shared pictures of his new merchandise on Twitter and wrote: 'GREATEST NIGHT OF MY LIFE (sic)'

He also reposted fan footage of the moment he came face-to-face with his idol and wrote: 'I WON LIFE (sic)'

And he told another fan: 'i slept like a baby with my new babies ain't gon lie (sic)'

This isn't the first time Travis has given away his shoes.

Last year, he was leaving Los Angeles nightspot TAO when he saw a number of fans waiting outside for autographs and pictures.

Although he jumped straight into a waiting car, the vehicle then drove past the group and slowly approached the crowd. It then stopped, the window was rolled down and Travis handed over a pair of Nike Air Jordan 1 low sneakers.

Travis Scott gifts a fan his unreleased UTOPIA merch & Air Jordan 1 Low pic.twitter.com/zw3B94hLma  TRAVIS SCOTT FANS  (@LaflameScott) July 1, 2023

On stage: The 32-year-old rapper, shown performing in May in Miami, was quickly impressed by one guy who was rapping his lyrics straight back to him

Former couple: Travis is hown in June 2021 with ex Kylie Jenner and their daughter Stormi

Astroworld concert: The Houston native is shown performing at his Astroworld Music Festival in Houston in November 2021 in which 10 people died in a massive crowd surge

The waiting fans rushed to grab the souvenir, with two taking home one shoe each as Travis' car drove away.

The Houston rapper's lawyer Kent Schaffer confirmed on Thursday that the Harris County grand jury had met and decided not to indict his client on any criminal charges stemming from the 2021 Astroworld concert.

'He never encouraged people to do anything that resulted in other people being hurt,' Schaffer said, adding that the decision is 'a great relief.'

Circumstances of the deaths limited what charges prosecutors were able to present before the grand jury, eliminating potential counts such as murder, manslaughter and criminally negligent homicide, said Alycia Harvey, an assistant district attorney with the Harris County District Attorneys Office.

That left prosecutors to focus on possible counts of endangering a child in connection with the deaths of the two youngest concertgoers, ages 9 and 14, she added.

'The grand jury ... found that no crime did occur, that no single individual was criminally responsible,' Harris County District Attorney Kim Ogg said.

The Nov. 5, 2021, crowd surge in Houston killed 10 young festivalgoers who ranged in age from 9 to 27. The official cause of death was compression asphyxia, which an expert likened to being crushed by a car.

Roughly 300 people were injured and treated at the scene, and 25 were taken to hospitals.
Paula Patton was pictured out with actor Elijah Allan-Blitz on an outing to Erewhon Market in Los Angeles on Saturday.

The 47-year-old actress and 36-year-old actor appeared cozy on the sunny day in the City of Angels, walking out of the upscale market together, stoking rumors of a new summer romance.

The Mission: Impossible - Ghost Protocol star was clad in seasonal style as she paired a pink ruffled crop top with white shorts with a floral pattern.

The Devil's Promise actress - who's mom to 13-year-old son Julian Fuego with ex-husband Robin Thicke, 46 - wore white sandals with gold embellishments and had her brown locks pulled back into a braided ponytail as she exited the venue.

Both were seen cooling down with smoothies as they made their way out of the market together.

The latest: Paula Patton, 47, was pictured out with actor Elijah Allan-Blitz, 36, on an outing to Erewhon Market in Los Angeles on Saturday, stoking rumors of a new summer romance

Allan-Blitz, who dated Oscar-winning actress Brie Larson, 33, for more than three years, wore an ash-white top with gray jeans and gray suede Chelsea boots, with a denim and cloth jacket draped around his shoulders.

Allan-Blitz and Larson initially started seeing one another in 2019, and news of their split spread this past March.

Allan-Blitz and Larson won Emmys in 2020 for their work on The Messy Truth VR Experience, which claimed Outstanding Original Interactive Program on the event.

Larson made clear the split had occurred when said she didn't 'have a partner' during a chat with Harper's Bazaar this past March.

The outing comes amid a difficult time for Patton, the family-focused actress who revealed last month that she had lost her uncle Floyd Newman, a saxophonist and session musician, on May 23.

'My Uncle Floyd died the day before Tina Turner,' Patton said. 'Only a few months after Tina Turner and my good friend Mauri inspired me to put my hands together and chant Nam Myoho Renge Kyo.'

The 47-year-old actress and 36-year-old actor appeared cozy on the sunny day in the City of Angels, walking out of the upscale market together

The Mission: Impossible - Ghost Protocol star was clad in seasonal style as she paired a pink ruffled crop top with white shorts with a floral pattern

The Devil's Promise actress wore white sandals with gold embellishments and had her brown locks pulled back into a braided ponytail as she exited the venue

The actress is mother to 13-year-old son Julian Fuego with ex-husband Robin Thicke, 46

Allan-Blitz dated Oscar-winning actress Brie Larson, 33, for more than three years

Allan-Blitz wore an ash-white top with gray jeans and gray suede Chelsea boots, with a denim and cloth jacket draped around his shoulders

Both of the entertainers cooled off with smoothies on the summer day in Southern California

The outing comes amid a difficult time for the family-focused actress, who revealed last month that she had lost her uncle Floyd Newman

'My Uncle Floyd died the day before Tina Turner,' Patton said with a picture of the Stax Museum of American Soul Music

Patton shared a picture of the Stax Museum of American Soul Music, where the marquee featured the phrase, 'In Loving Memory Tina Turner Floyd Newman.'

Said Patton: 'This marquee gives proof of one of the principle beliefs of Nicheron Buddhism - that we are all connected.'

She hailed Turner and her late uncle, 'You were two incredible forces, and you will both be missed, but no doubt your beautiful spirits live on.'
Channel Ten is on the hunt for a new celebrity judge for MasterChef Australia 2024 to replace Jock Zonfrillo, following his shock death on April 30.

And several world-famous chefs are said to be in the running.

'International names such as Jamie Oliver, Nigella Lawson and Shannon Bennett have all been thrown around,' an insider told Woman's Day.

However, the source added these culinary experts all have hectic schedules so booking them for the competitive cooking show was currently 'a pipe dream'.

The network is also reported to be considering bringing back 'heritage' names to the series, such as original judges George Calombaris and Gary Mehigan, to attract older viewers.

Channel Ten is on the hunt for a new celebrity judge for MasterChef Australia 2024 following the shock death of series veteran Jock Zonfrillo on April 30

Another expert being considered is renowned pastry chef Amaury Guichon, who is set to appear on the MasterChef spin-off, Dessert Masters, alongside judge Melissa Leong, later this year.

It comes amid rumours celebrity chef's Melissa Leong and Andy Allen may move forward without a permanent third, as the Herald Sun reported on Saturday.

The publications claimed the cooking duo may instead go into the next season alongside a rotating roster of guest judges.

'International names such as Jamie Oliver, Nigella Lawson and Shannon Bennett have all been thrown around,' an insider told Woman's Day

While filming dates for season 16 haven't been set, Channel Ten has asked aspiring chefs to submit their applications before August 16.

Meanwhile, others have suggested Melissa, 41, and Andy, 35, may be planning to quit MasterChef as they continue to grapple with the tragic death of their co-star.

Some fans are convinced the entire hosting panel may be replaced altogether, after Channel 10 refused to confirm Jock's replacement in the recent casting call.

The network is also reported to be considering bringing back 'heritage' names to the series, such as original judges George Calombaris (right) and Gary Mehigan (left), to attract older viewers

Jock died in Melbourne on what was supposed to be the premiere date of the latest MasterChef series, which was delayed by a week following his passing.

The 46-year-old Scottish-born chef was found dead in his Carlton hotel room.

Police found his body after they were called to his room for a welfare check.
Kourtney Kardashian showed off her baby bump in a new Instagram snap on Sunday.

The Kardashians star, 44, shared a self-portrait of herself in the reflection of elevator doors and flaunted her blossoming baby bump during a trip to Denver, Colorado with her husband, Travis Barker.

For their night out on the town, the socialite  who revealed she and the Blink-182 drummer, 47, are expecting a baby boy at their lavish gender reveal party last weekend  was effortlessly stylish in a casual yet chic ensemble.

The eldest sister of the Kardashian-Jenner clan modeled a white graphic T-shirt and figure-hugging, black leggings.

The entrepreneur also bundled up in an oversized trench coat and sported a pair of chunky platform boots.

Bumping along: Kourtney Kardashian showed off her baby bump in a new Instagram snap on Sunday. The Kardashians star, 44, shared a self-portrait of herself in the reflection of elevator doors and flaunted her blossoming baby bump during a trip to Denver, Colorado with her husband, Travis Barker

Expecting parents: Kardashian's trip to Denver with her husband comes about a week after the couple threw a lavish gender reveal party. Last Saturday, their close family and friends joined the expecting parents at their home in Calabasas for a rock 'n' roll themed celebration

In the photo, the Poosh founder leaned back coolly against the railing in the elevator and had her shirt slightly lifted to reveal her baby bump.

The reality TV personality appeared to have forewent any makeup to showcase her natural beauty and glowing skin.

For an effortlessly chic look, the SoCal native also slicked back her raven black tresses into a polished updo.

Around the same time, she also shared photos of her husband walking past Denver's 40-foot-high blue bear statue.

As they visited the tourist destination of eye-catching art installation of a bear standing peering into the Denver Convention Center, she took a photo of the otherwise empty streets and surroundings.

Only the upper half of his body could be seen in the candid snap, but Barker appeared to be sporting an all-black ensemble to match Kardashian.

The musician  who is the father of three children from his previous marriage  donned a black graphic T-shirt, a simple beanie, and a chunky gold chain around his neck.

While taking a late-night stroll on the empty streets with her other half, Kourtney also stopped to take a quick snap of the moon as well as a street sign that read 'Court Place'.

Candid snap: Around the same time, she also shared photos of her husband walking past Denver's 40-foot-high blue bear statue. Only the upper half of his body could be seen in the candid snap, but Barker appeared to be sporting an all-black ensemble to match Kardashian. The musician  who is the father of three children from his previous marriage  donned a black graphic T-shirt, a simple beanie, and a chunky gold chain around his neck

Over the moon: While taking a late-night stroll on the empty streets with her other half, Kourtney also stopped to take a quick snap of the moon as well as a street sign that read 'Court Place'. In text placed over the blurry photo, she corrected the name and wrote that it should've been 'spelled with a K'

Late-night stroll: As they visited the tourist destination of eye-catching art installation of a bear standing peering into the Denver Convention Center, she took a photo of the otherwise empty streets and surroundings

In text placed over the blurry photo, she corrected the name and wrote that it should've been 'spelled with a K'.

Kardashian's trip to Denver with her husband comes about a week after the couple threw a lavish gender reveal party.

Last Saturday, their close family and friends joined the expecting parents at their home in Calabasas for a rock 'n' roll themed celebration.

Kardashian  who unveiled to the world that she was pregnant on June 16 while attending Barker's concert in Los Angeles  treated their guests with 'All Access' passes to the 'Baby Barker World Tour with Special Guest Kravis' and blue cake.

Days after the special event, she shared more photos from the party posing with Barker on a drumset.

In the caption, she wrote: 'little drummer boy coming soon'.

As seen in previous snaps, she modeled a figure-hugging gray dress with a low-rise belt at her hips to accentuate her baby bump.

In the pictures, she sat on Barker's lap as he wrapped his arms around her and mimicked playing the drums.

Gender reveal party: Days after the special event, she shared more photos from the party posing with Barker on a drumset. In the caption, she wrote: 'little drummer boy coming soon'. As seen in previous snaps, she modeled a figure-hugging gray dress with a low-rise belt at her hips to accentuate her baby bump. In the pictures, she sat on Barker's lap as he wrapped his arms around her and mimicked playing the drums.

Baby Barker: He looked every bit the rocker in a white tank, black skate pants, and his usual beanie. In one close-up snap showing off her bump, Barker can be seen gently touching and caressing her side

He looked every bit the rocker in a white tank, black skate pants, and his usual beanie.

In one close-up snap showing off her bump, Barker can be seen gently touching and caressing her side.

On the official account for her brand Poosh, she also shared more behind-the-scenes snaps from the bash and revealed how she put it all together in less than 48 hours.

For the photo series that she also shared to her personal account's Instagram Story, she wrote in the caption, 'POV: You were at the Baby Barker World Tour one week ago today'.

While promoting her beauty and lifestyle brand, she added: 'Head to the link in our bio to learn how last weekend's gender reveal party came together in less than 48 hours.'

In the snaps, she shared a more close-up photo of their world tour poster and wristbands as they fully dedicated themselves to the rock star theme.

At the eventful bash, the guests enjoyed a cake with white frosting that, once cut into, revealed a bright blue color  indicating their baby will be a boy.

Other confections at the party also included sugar cookies in the shape of microphones, musical notes, and black hearts that read 'MOM'.

From their bash: In the snaps, she shared a more close-up photo of their world tour poster and wristbands as they fully dedicated themselves to the rock star theme.

Baby boy: At the eventful bash, the guests enjoyed a cake with white frosting that, once cut into, revealed a bright blue color  indicating their baby will be a boy

Future rock star: Other confections at the party also included sugar cookies in the shape of microphones, musical notes, and black 'MOM' tattoo hearts

Rock 'n' roll theme: She also shared a fun 'tour memories' station where the expecting couple asked their guests to take a photo with disposable cameras and leave a sweet note for them to look back on

Black-and-white: Inside of their home was decorated lavishly in a black-and-white theme. In photos, Kardashian gave an inside look at the decorations including: black heart balloons, white baby's breath flowers, black candles, drums with white drumsticks, and trays of clear wine glasses

Rockin': The party also had no shortage of drums to remind everyone that Barker is a drummer in a famous rock band

Blue streamers: At the end of the event, Kardashian also took a snap of the trees in her yard at sunset ornate with blue streamers from their party

She also shared a fun 'tour memories' station where the expecting couple asked their guests to take a photo with disposable cameras and leave a sweet note for them to look back on.

Inside of their home was decorated lavishly in a black-and-white theme.

In photos, Kardashian gave an inside look at the decorations including: black heart balloons, white baby's breath flowers, black candles, drums with white drumsticks, and trays of clear wine glasses.

The party also had no shortage of drums to remind everyone that Barker is a drummer in a famous rock band.

At the end of the event, Kardashian also took a snap of the trees in her yard at sunset ornate with blue streamers from their party.

She already shares three children  daughter Penelope, 10, and sons Reign, eight, and Mason, 13  with her ex, Scott Disick.

Barker is a father to three children  son Landon, 19, daughter Alabama, 17, and stepdaughter Atiana, 24  from his previous marriage to Shanna Moakler.
The Project was brutally roasted on Monday after the show made a shocking social media blunder.

Channel Ten's Facebook posted photos of its celebrity guests this week, which include Cate Blanchett and Dolly Parton.

They posted one picture of Blanchett, 54, to confirm she was Tuesday night's guest star then one of Parton, 73, who is appearing on the program on Wednesday.

However the name text for Parton's photo was not amended, and they labelled the iconic American country music star as 'Cate Blanchett'.

Fans quickly noticed the error and slammed Channel Ten for the mistake.

The Project was brutally roasted on Monday after the show made a shocking social media blunder. Pictured: Host Sarah Harris

'This show is a joke,' one wrote as another chimed in: 'Wow, Cate has really changed her look'.

'You guys are useless,' a third person vented.

Blanchett is currently in Australia to promote her latest film The New Boy while Parton is promoting her upcoming album Rockstar.

The Aussie actress looked as chic as ever as she attended a screening and Q and A session in Sydney for the movie on Sunday.

She opted for a high fashion ensemble as she posed alongside the film's director Warwick Thornton and producer Kath Shelper.

Channel Ten 's Facebook posted photos of its celebrity guests this week, which include Cate Blanchett and Dolly Parton . They posted one picture of Blanchett, 54, to confirm she was Tuesday night's guest star then one of Parton, 73, who is appearing on the program on Wednesday

However the name text for Parton's photo was not amended, and they labelled iconic American country music star as 'Cate Blanchett'

Fans quickly noticed the error and slammed Channel Ten for the mistake

The star appeared relaxed as she posed with her crew on the red carpet alongside the media wall.

She was recently spotted in Cannes promoting the drama, where Cate plays a nun with a rebellious streak.

The Oscar winner first rose to prominence with her star-making performance in the 1998 historical drama, Elizabeth.

Cate later won the Best Supporting Actress Oscar in 2005 for her role in The Aviator, opposite Leonardo DiCaprio.
Married At First Sight's Hayley Vernon has denied she's in a relationship with co-star Seb Guilhaus after the pair starred in a porn film together.

Hayley, 35, and Seb, 30, sparked speculation they could be dating when she posted a sweet photo of the pair,

'I can't believe we weren't mates sooner, please swipe to see why I laugh so much with this giant. I've made such a good friend,' she wrote.

The post prompted a number of fans to question if they were an item and Hayley quickly confirmed they are just pals.

'Hmmmm, Friend, ok?' one person wrote.

Hayley Vernon, 35, denied being in a relationship with Seb Guilhaus, 30, after the pair were questioned on Instagram, with her writing: 'Very much a friend...nothing more, nothing less'

'Very much a friend...nothing more, nothing less,' Hayley responded.

She later snapped in the comments when a fan tried to belittle Seb.

'I've always loved your authenticity girl, but not a fan of him. He makes you look cheap,' they wrote.

Hayley replied: 'Are you serious? You've just made yourself look idiotic.'

Hayley and Seb have been getting closer after they started creating adult content together.

Hayley certainly wasn't shy in the comments section of the post

The pair have had mixed responses to the film, in which they pretend to be a couple celebrating their anniversary.

Seb comes home to an empty house with a bottle of milk and red roses for his excitable wife.

'What a day at work!' Seb says. 'Hey baby! Awwww, so sweet,' Hayley replies.

Hayley defended Seb, writing: 'Are you being serious? You've made yourself look idiotic'

Hayley then makes a crude remark about cream before slipping into skimpy black lingerie for her husband.

'What man doesn't love a girl in lingerie?' Hayley says, twirling in front of the mirror.

The pair then lock lips before Hayley calls herself a 'good girl' and they get intimate in the living room.

The trailer was panned by several of Seb's Instagram followers, with many calling it 'cringe' and threatening to unfollow the pair.

'Cringe,' one wrote. 'I don't get it?' added another.

'This gave me the strongest second hand embarrassment,' yet another wrote.

Seb and Hayley have had a mixed response to their pornographic video together

'MAFS porn,' yet another said, in gest.

'Argh cringe, not that I used to follow. Hooroo,' another added.

Seb and Hayley, who both appeared on season seven of MAFS in 2020, have since become popular OnlyFans performers.

The pair are set to expand their career by working together. Hayley has previously revealed she was working a an escort.

The pair pretend to be a couple celebrating their anniversary in the clip

Personal trainer Seb makes explicit content for paying subscribers, which he says is empowering for him.

'I am still doing it. I let it go a little bit stagnant. I've just been training and doing some other things,' Seb said of his recent absence from the adult content platform.

'But I have an exciting filming coming up with Hayley Vernon on the Gold Coast on the 10th of June,' he added.

'And then possibly with another high profile creator for a BBG (boy/boy/girl) scene to sort of reignite it. So I'm looking forward to that. '

Seb and Hayley teased the collaboration for their huge fan bases

In January, Seb clapped back at haters who flooded his Instagram with 'brutal' comments after he announced his OnlyFans collaboration with two porn stars.

The hunk shared a video to Instagram Stories and he didn't mince words when slamming his critics.

'It's not okay to attack random people on social media. I deleted over 200 comments,' he said.
Negan showed his tender side caring for mute Ginny and unleashed his savagery again while killing Luther on Sunday's episode of The Walking Dead: Dead City.

The third episode of the AMC spin-off series featuring Negan [Jeffrey Dean Morgan] and Maggie Rhee [Lauren Cohan] opened with Ginny [Mahina Napoleon] shown in a flashback.

She was walking alone in a forest and became startled when an impaled zombie lunged at her.

The walker was killed with a knife stab to the head by Negan who scolded Ginny.

'We gotta talk. Scratch that, you gotta talk. You need help? How am I supposed to know if you ain't yelling for it? All I have been doing for months is trying to find a safe place for you,' Negan said.

Nice side: Negan [Jeffrey Dean Morgan] showed his tender side caring for mute Ginny on Sunday's episode of The Walking Dead: Dead City on AMC

He asked Ginny to explain what she was doing in the woods and she showed her empty backpack.

'You lost your dino,' Negan said referencing her toy.

He cursed while grudgingly telling Ginny that they would retrace their steps and find it.

Ginny was then shown in the present riding up on a motorcycle across the river from New York City ruined by the zombie apocalypse.

She ditched the motorcycle and used a cooler and wood plank as a makeshift canoe to paddle toward the city.

Maggie and Negan meanwhile continued their alliance with Tommaso [Jonathan Higginbotham], Amaia [Karina Ortiz] and Luther [Michael Anthony] against The Croat, who has kidnapped Maggie's son Hershel Rhee.

After they successfully hunted a goat in the city, Amaia worked with Maggie on a battle plan against The Croat [Zeljko Ivanek].

Amaia told how they were just kids when the zombie apocalypse hit New York City and said the first few weeks were the worst because it spread so fast.

'Through the subways, the buildings, bodies coming up from the ground, falling from the sky,' Amaia said.

Dark side: Negan used a cheese grater against Luther's face to gain control in their fight to the death

Safe place: 'We gotta talk. Scratch that, you gotta talk. You need help? How am I supposed to know if you ain't yelling for it? All I have been doing for months is trying to find a safe place for you,' Negan said

Lost toy: He asked Ginny to explain what she was doing in the woods and she showed her empty backpack

Makeshift canoe: Ginny ditched the motorcycle and used a cooler and wood plank as a makeshift canoe to paddle toward the city

She said the waited for the Army to show up and when they finally got there, they blew up the bridges and tunnels.

Tommaso said The Croat later showed up and started his kill or be killed community with his Burazi group.

Maggie had to take an emotional self time-out, but Negan assured Amaia and Tommaso that she would be fine.

'She's tougher than she looks, and she looks tough as s***,' Negan said.

Negan also opened up to Maggie about what happened to his Annie and son Joshua.

They lived in a cabin outside New Babylon and Annie was attacked when she went into town to do some trading.

Negan said she was robbed and beaten and he later went out and found the five men responsible and killed them.

He became a wanted man for the killings and put Annie and Joshua on a train to Missouri.

Zombie apocalypse: Amaia told how they were just kids when the zombie apocalypse hit New York City and said the first few weeks were the worst because it spread so fast

Family history: Negan also opened up to Maggie about what happened to his Annie and son Joshua

'I said I'd be right behind them. I stayed. I think about them every single day. I hope to God they are okay, but maybe I have no right in hoping that. I don't know, Maggie, what else do we have besides hope?,' Negan said.

Ginny in a flashback looked for her toy dinosaur with Negan who urged her to speak when he calls out for her.

'Hey, are you listening to me?,' Negan told as he got frustrated with their lack of communication.

Negan then eased up on Ginny and reminded her that clues about the whereabouts of her toy dinosaur were probably all around them.

Ginny in the present was shown lurking in the shadows as she watched a scavenger kill a zombie and collect a toy.

While Maggie and Negan joined the group in a nice dinner, The Croat was shown riling up his troops after killing his personal chef for serving meat with a worm in it.

'Death is no end. It is our fuel Because people are a resource!,' The Croat declared.

A corpse was in a tube with methane passed from a gas mask into prisoner Perlie Armstrong [Gaius Charles] who then had to fight in a cage against zombies.

Natural resource: 'Death is no end. It is our fuel Because people are a resource!,' The Croat declared

Methane gas: A corpse was in a tube with methane passed from a gas mask into prisoner Perlie Armstrong [Gaius Charles] who then had to fight in a cage against zombies

Cage match: A walker attacked Perlie while he was handcuffed to a pole

Cruel sport: The Croat looked on as Perlie fought off a zombie while handcuffed

He killed the first walker while handcuffed to a pole and then ripped it open to get the key for the handcuffs. Perlie then took off a boot and used it as a glove to pummel another round of walkers sent after him.

The Croat then continued his interrogation of Perlie who revealed that he had two partners who died in their attempt to bring a wanted man home.

'Who is worth following here,' The Croat asked.

'His name is Negan,' Perlie told him.

Luther was next shown sneaking up on Negan in the kitchen who smiled as she held onto a cheese grater.

Negan assured Luther they were on the same side and Luther said that he and Maggie needed to leave.

Luther then showed Negan the wanted poster that warned people not to trust him.

Negan said he had people depending on him and said he wasn't going to leave.

Luther said people also were depending on him and blocked Negan from getting past him.

Negan warned him not to challenge him and smiled before taking a swing at him with a pan.

Luther gained control but Negan used the cheese grater against Luther's face. Luther fell backward and struck his head against the ground and Negan coldly finished him off.

Ginny watched Maggie from afar as she continued to wrestle with her tough past.

Negan was then shown in a flashback with Ginny.

Negan produced her toy dinosaur from his own backpack and placed some gauze around it for her.

'The operation was a complete success,' he said while giving it back to Ginny.

Cheese head: Luther gained control but Negan used the cheese grater against Luther's face

Deadly fight: Negan finished off Luther after he fell backward and struck his head

Key information: The Croat then continued his interrogation of Perlie and learned that he was after wanted man Negan

Kidnapped son: Maggie was under a lot of emotional duress while looking for her kidnapped son

Looking on: Ginny was able to track down Maggie in the city and kept an eye on her from afar

Negan then taught Ginny the two-tone safety whistle that his wife Lucille used to use and promised to come running if she used it.

Ginny ran up and hugged him.

The episode ended with Ginny continue to monitor Maggie as Negan walked away from Luther's body.

The Walking Dead: Dead City will return next week on AMC.
Irina Shayk is among the superstar models to help showcase the new collection from ALAIA.

Slipping into promo model for the luxury fashion house, the Russian-born catwalk queen took to her Instagram page and share some behind-the-scenes images of her recent photoshoot that she captioned, 'ALAIA 02.07.2023'.

With the help of a team of stylists, Shayk (born Irina Valeryevna Shaykhlislamova), 37, struck a number of poses for the cameras in two different outfits.

An all-black ensemble hugged her 5ft10in statuesque figure from head-to-toe, and came complete with a shoulder-less top potion that resembled a corset bustier adorned with silver pieces along the chest and midriff regions.

The glam squad had her slip into a pair of black stiletto heels, while the hair stylist pulled her long dark tresses back off her face in a slick-back look and into a ponytail.

BTS shoot: Irina Shayk, 37, took to her Instagram page and shared a series of selfies taken during a photoshoot for the ALAIA collection

It appears as though Shayk posed for a couple of photos in the black ensemble as a test-run ahead of the actual photoshoot.

The stylists were also captured focusing on every little detail of the second look of the day, which was a combination of black baggy pants and a white fitted tank top.

One man was captured working on the back end the pants, all while the television personality looked over her shoulder straight towards the camera.

She exchanged the stiletto heels for a pair of black heeled shoes for this second ensemble.

And while her long locks were kept in a ponytail, this go-around saw her don a black round hat

Shayk could be seen taking several selfie snaps in the black-and-white look, including one where she held her camera-phone above her head.

She also focused in on her top and pants with another selfie that left her head out of the image.

New campaign: The top Russian model would first strut her stuff in a form-fitted black ensemble for ALAIA

Perfecto: All the experts took their hand at making things just perfect for the shoot

Working her magic: There was no less then four stylists on hand for the photoshoot

Contrast: The second outfit included baggy black pants and a skin-tight white top

Selfie time: The Russian-born star revealed the new collection from 'ALAIA' dropped on '02.07.2023', which translated to June 2, 2023 in the U.S.

Lovely lady: She was seen out and about ahead of the ALAIA fashion show in Paris on Sunday

Rocking it: She donned designer sunglasses on the outing

In what's likely to be a huge relief for little Lea, Shayk moved between the different stylists and experts, all while snapping photos of the process.

A couple of those pictures were shot while she stood in front of a white screen that was lit up by an assortment of big lights.

When Shayk isn't strutting her stuff in front of the cameras as one of the top models in the world, she normally can be found spending quality with her daughter, Lea, whom she shares with on-again, off-again partner, Bradley Cooper.

Reunited! Cooper, 48, and Shayk, 37, had been separated for more than three-years by the time they decided to rekindle their romance; they are pictured in June 2021

Seemingly back on one more time, the handsome couple have been seen snuggling up and getting cozy together during walks in New York City in recent months.

They had already worked out their custody plan for Lea, settling on joint legal and physical custody that mandated they had to live in New York City to make co-parenting easier.

The former Victoria's Secret Angel and the A Star Is Born actor and director were first linked romantically in 2015, which led to a four-year relationship that ended in June 2019.

They had been separated for more than three-years by the time they began to rekindle the romance.
Comedian Hamish Blake and his multimillionaire beauty mogul wife Zoe Foster Blake are reportedly set to star on this year's season of The Block.

The couple are said to be interested in buying one of the properties on Charming St in Hampton East, Melbourne, and starring as bidders on the renovation series.

A source told the publication Hamish and Zoe have a secret connection to this year's series as their former assistant being among the hopeful contestants.

'They know what a good investment The Block houses are  and even though they've been living in Sydney for three years now, Melbourne will always be home for them,' an insider told Woman's Day.

The source added that not only a home in the suburb is the 'perfect place to visit' for the pair to visit while they are in Melbourne, the prize money will also help their friend.

Comedian Hamish Blake and his multimillionaire beauty mogul wife Zoe Foster Blake are reportedly set to star on this year's season of The Block

'It could potentially help their assistant and dear friend take home the extra $100,000 prize money if they win,' the insider explained.

Meanwhile the first trailer for the show was released last month.

The promo showed the renovators dressed in 1950s outfits as they posed around vintage cars. Despite not hitting the airwaves yet, Nine has already been slammed for sending residents an 'entitled' letter asking them to move their cars so they can shoot a commercial for The Block.

The couple are said to be interested in buying one of the properties on Charming St in Hampton East, Melbourne, and will appear as bidders on the renovation series

In March, the network sent the letter to homeowners living on Charming Street in Hampton East in the Bayside Council area in Melbourne's south-east.

Channel Nine informed residents they intended to film a commercial for their hit show and that it would be set during the 1950s.

The letter sparked outrage for only giving residents short notice and telling them not to park their cars on the street or driveways.

'We will bring various 7 x 1950's cars to park on the street and period piece props and costumes,' the letter read.

'As we are dressing the street, we do request on Friday evening that you please not park on the street or in your driveways,' it continued.

'We would like to keep modern cars out of the shots. If you need assistance to move your vehicles we can assist you in the morning.'

The letter went on to warn that residents living in house number 24 and 25 to make sure they didn't park their car outside their houses on Saturday.

Host Scott Cam and Shelley Craft will return as hosts this year

A photo of the letter was shared online where social media users ripped into the network for its 'entitled' requests.

'Brilliant!!! They've got a bloody cheek, haven't they ? Five days notice to basically cancel your entire Saturday,' one wrote.

Another added: 'Why cancel your Saturday? Sounds like a great day to throw an Aussie Saturday street party.'

Several suggested the residents living along the street ask the network to reimburse them for their troubles.

'Dear Channel Nine, I'd be delighted to acquiesce to your requirements for filming,' one wrote.

'As this then makes me part of your production, I'm sure your accounting department would have no trouble approving payment of the attached invoice for my services.

'Once I have confirmation, in writing, of your acceptance of my recompense I will make the arrangements you have requested.'

A second added: 'In all seriousness, get some money out of them.

'Park cars on your lawn and invite someone over for a BBQ in the front yard.

'Maybe keep the cars up past the letterbox so it's on your private property rather than the council's, but still very visible. Make some noise in case they're recording audio.

'They need release forms for anyone with their face in shot.'
Marcus Graham has spoken out for the first time about his relationship with Nicole Kidman.

The E Street star, 59, told Woman's Day, he dated the Hollywood actress, 56, when they were in their early 20s.

But he was heartbroken when Nicole left him for Tom Cruise after they met and fell in love on the set of Days of Thunder.

'I was devastated and heartbroken but that's the way it goes... Why would I want to keep her in Australia and lock her away?' Marcus said.

'I don't have any bad feelings there and I understand. At the time I cried for a long time. I was really hurt and confused but I had lots to learn about the world.'

E Street star Marcus Graham has revealed he was left heartbroken and crying for days after Nicole Kidman left him for Tom Cruise as he speaks about their romance for the first time

Despite their relationship ending, Marcus admitted he has 'nothing bad to say about Nicole'.

Nicole and Tom went on to tie the knot in 1990 just months after their first meeting.

But they separated in 2001 after 12 years of marriage amid rumours his commitment to Scientology had driven a wedge between them.

The couple adopted two children, daughter Isabella Jane in 1992 and son Connor Antony in 1995, but never had any biological children.

The E Street star dated the actress when they were in their early 20s. But he was heartbroken when Nicole left him for Tom Cruise after they met on the set of Days of Thunder

Nicole and Tom went on to tie the knot in 1990 just months after their first meeting. But they separated in 2001 after 12 years of marriage amid rumours his commitment to Scientology had driven a wedge between them

In 2006, Nicole married her husband Keith Urban after meeting at the G'Day LA gala a year earlier.

The couple later welcomed daughters Sunday Rose, 15, and Faith Margaret, 12, in 2008 and 2010.

Meanwhile, Marcus is currently single but said he is open to finding love and even becoming a dad.

After his split from Nicole, he dated his E street co-sar Melissa Tkautz, Aussie actress Rebecca Gibney and Mia Freedman.
He has been partying alongside his famous family and best pal Matt Damon on the Greek island of Mykonos.

And Chris Hemsworth spent a relaxing day at the beach on Friday.

The Hollywood star, 39, flaunted his action man physique as he went shirtless for a refreshing dip.

The hunky Australian star looked shredded in a pair of tight boardshorts which hung loosely on his hips.

He also sported a five o-clock shadow and accessorised with a number of boho-style bracelets.

Shirtless Chris Hemsworth showed off his ripping six-pack abs at the beach in Mykonos on Friday

Chris is spending time on the island with his megastar pal Matt, his famous brother Liam Hemsworth and other family members.

The group are thought to be in Greece for a party organised by his father Craig Hemsworth, 67.

Guests are travelling far and wide to attend the exclusive destination-soiree.

The exclusive guest list includes Matt Damon and his wife Luciana Barroso, Chris' actress wife Elsa Pataky, Australian model Gabriella Brooks - girlfriend of son Liam - radio personality Lauren Phillips and her partner, AVMIN air boss Paul O'Brien.

The hunky Australian star looked shredded in a pair of tight boardshorts which hung loosely on his hips

He also sported a five o-clock shadow and accessorised with a number of boho-style bracelets

Chris is spending time on the island with his megastar pal Matt Damon and his wife Luciano Barroso

Daily Mail Australia has been told the star-studded event is due to take place in the coming days at one of the island's most exclusive beach clubs.

Mykonos has been the party venue of choice for some of the world's wealthiest and most famous stars  from Leonardo DiCaprio to Richard Branson, and Alessandra Ambrosio.

Fellow Byron Bay locals tipped to join the festivities include Anthony 'The Cat' Catalano and his wife Stefanie, who are holidaying in nearby Ithaca.

The former Domain boss owns Byron's Bay's legendary Rae's on Wategos beach and is a notable figure in the north coast town now synonymous with A-listers.

Australian DJ Kaz James - who has a summer residence on the party Island is another likely guest to Craig Hemsworth's soiree.

The festivities kicked off on Thursday at a mansion that saw the group let loose.

While oldest brother Luke and his wife Samantha were nowhere to be seen.

Liam packed on the PDA with his model girlfriend Gabriella Brooks, sharing a passionate kiss as he cosied up to the glamorous blonde as they soaked up the sunshine.

Close family friend - model and actress Michele Merkin, who is friends with the Thor star and his wife Elsa - was seen playfully cuddling up and joking around with Chris.

It's no secret the Hemsworth's clan know how to party.

Chris and wife Elsa, ditched Hollywood three years ago for Byron Bay host an annual New Year Eve party.

The couple spare no expense, each year the event gets bigger and grandeur.

The group are thought to be in Greece for a party organised by Chris' father Craig Hemsworth, 67, far left

Elsa Pataky (left) Luciana (centre) and Hollywood star Matt have jetted in for the occasion

An invitation to their themed bash is the hottest ticket in Byron Bay.

However, before the three Hemsworth brothers made it big on the silver screen they spent their early childhood raise to a cattle farm in the Northern Territory.

Mum Leonie was an English teacher and Craig a counsellor working in child protection services.

The family later relocated to Phillip Island in Victoria where all three brothers found their love of surfing.
Blac Chyna shared footage from the moment she received an honorary Doctorate of Humanities degree from a seminary in Sacramento.

Taking to Instagram, the 35-year-old mother-of-two - who ended her Only Fans career this year - uploaded three separate posts in honor of the milestone.

The first post was a video showing the star - real name Angela Renee White - walking across a stage in an auditorium to collect her certificate.

In the snippet Blac Chyna became emotional as she delivered a heartfelt acceptance speech.

The former reality television personality has been on a path of transformation this year, undergoing a dramatic cosmetic surgery makeunder among other life changes.

Milestone: Blac Chyna shared footage from the moment she received an honorary Doctorate of Humanities degree from a seminary in Sacramento

Special: Taking to Instagram, the 35-year-old mother-of-two uploaded three separate posts in honor of the milestone

She began the caption of the clip, 'Doctorate of Humanities Dr. Angela White Thank you Sacramento Theological Seminary and Bible College for my honorary.'

Chyna's caption to her 17.2 million followers continued: 'Doctorate of Humanities

The degree of Doctor of Humanities is an honorary degree awarded to those who have distinguished themselves through humanitarian and philanthropic contributions to society.'

White's voice cracked as she spoke through tears while people in the audience affirmed her.

'God has never given up on me,' she said into a hand-held microphone.

'Ive been through a lot in my life and hes been changing my life,' the star added.

'I want to continue to walk in this light and learn and grow and be an inspiration to my family, my friends and my kids,' she stated.

It comes after White received her doctorate in liberal arts from the school earlier this year.

Proud moment: White's voice cracked as she spoke through tears while people in the audience affirmed her

Another upload featured a slideshow of photos, including one with Chyna's new degree resting inside a gold box.

This time she wrote in the caption: 'Dr. Angela Renee White, Doctorate of Liberal Arts, Doctorate of Humanities.'

The box holding her degree was set on a glass table next to a vase holding white roses.

In the next slide, Angela showed fans a photo of her holding the degree in front of a black and white image of her children King, 10, and Dream, 6.

The influencer shares King with ex-boyfriend Tyga, and co-parents Dream with former flame Rob Kardashian.

Included in the roundup of photos was a snapshot of her liberal arts degree, which she received in January.

She also shared two quotes set against pink stock photos - one said, 'I am on a beautiful journey to become the best version of myself.'

The second simply stated, 'I love who I am becoming.'

Finally, the media sensation shared photos of herself in a black graduation robe and cap with a gold tassel.

She wrote in the caption: '"Be on your guard; stand firm in the faith; be courageous; be strong."'

Beautiful: Another upload featured a slideshow of photos, including one with Chyna's new degree resting inside a gold box

Turning a new leaf: The former reality television personality has been on a path of transformation this year, undergoing a dramatic cosmetic surgery makeunder and getting baptized among other life changes

Angela quietly completed a $10K-tuition doctorate program at the Sacramento Theological Seminary and Bible College on January 17.

STSBC's home-study doctorate program 'concentrates on developing expertise in the biblical rationale, which equips students to engage in research and sound biblical teaching.'

It's unclear precisely how long the doctorate program takes to complete, but the college application requires a copy of 'unofficial high school or college transcripts.'

Chyna is believed to have graduated from Henry E. Lackey High School in Maryland and she studied business management at Johnson & Wales University in Florida for some time.

In 2013 she graduated from JLS Professional Makeup Artist School.

The star previously announced she had been re-baptized on her 34th birthday on May 11, 2022.

Treasures: Angela showed fans a photo of her holding her degree in front of a black and white image of her children King, 10, and Dream, 6

Previous degree: The new degree comes after White received her doctorate in Liberal Arts from the school earlier this year

White recently had all of her face fillers and illegal silicone injections removed, in addition to having her Baphomet tattoo lasered off her left hip.

Chyna had previously undergone five breast augmentations and three liposuction surgeries.

This year she legally changed her name back to Angela White, but has maintained her alias on social media.

She keeps busy running her clothing line BlacChynaCloset as well as her beauty company Lashed Cosmetics.
Heidi Klum and her husband, Tom Kaulitz, color-coordinated in black ensembles as they strolled hand-in-hand while arriving at the luxurious Hotel Ritz in Paris on Sunday.

The German-American model, 50, who recently showed off her toned frame in a skimpy bikini while on vacation with her spouse, 33, flashed a cheerful smile as they made their way into the ornate building.

The mother of four was effortlessly chic in a long-sleeved, black satin shirt that was tied into a knot at the front.

She showed off her long legs wearing a fitted, black miniskirt and slipped into a pair of open-toed, black strappy heels.

The blonde beauty draped a black shawl around her shoulders and slung a pastel pink purse over her right shoulder to hold a few items she needed during the busy night.

Glam duo: Heidi Klum, 50, and her husband, Tom Kaulitz, 33, color-coordinated in black ensembles as they strolled holding hands into the luxurious Hotel Ritz in Paris on Saturday

Heidi accessorized the look by adding a pair of sparkling earrings as well as a gold and silver-chained necklace. She also threw on a gold band around her right wrist for an additional flashy touch.

Her blonde locks were parted in the middle, and effortlessly flowed down past her shoulders in voluminous waves.

The star's husband and Tokio Hotel guitarist also opted for an all-black outfit and threw on a long-sleeved, heart-patterned shirt along with black trousers.

The music artist completed his ensemble by slipping into a pair of black sneakers that contained a white sole.

The two lovebirds, who tied the knot in 2019, were spotted holding hands as they climbed up the blue velvet steps that led to the entrance of the glitzy hotel.

Earlier on Saturday, the America's Got Talent judge had a bit of fun on her Instagram page and let her husband join in. She shared a short clip to her stories as she lip-synced to Madonna's hit track titled, Vogue.

The model added a filter over the video that gave her large red lips and heavy eye makeup as she lounged next to Tom.

The star also added a similar filter to his own face for a separate reel, but also gave him shades that had various photos of Madonna taken over the years throughout her career.

Stylish: The mother of four was effortlessly chic in a long-sleeved, black satin shirt along with a fitted black miniskirt and strappy heels

Happy couple: The two lovebirds, who tied the knot in 2019, were spotted holding hands as they climbed up the blue velvet steps that led to the entrance of the glitzy hotel

Having a bit of fun: Heidi shared a short clip to her stories as she lip-synced to Madonna's hit track titled, Vogue, on her Instagram stories on Saturday

Madonna notably was 'rushed to the hospital and intubated' after she was found unconscious in her New York apartment earlier last week due to a bacterial infection, but has since been discharged to continue recovering at home.

In another video uploaded to her stories, Heidi could be seen laying on a comfortable bed while resting her head on her husband's shoulder.

At one point, he could be see resting a gentle kiss on her head and rubbing her stomach and chest.

Klum added a different, glammed up filter that also gave her flashy eye makeup and the star made various poses towards the phone camera, such as puckering her lips.

Both Heidi and Tom were first confirmed to be dating back in 2018, and tied the knot in February 2019 during a private, intimate ceremony. Later that same year, the couple held a larger wedding ceremony in Italy.

Earlier this year in February, the former Victoria's Secret Angel made an appearance on The Jennifer Hudson Show and during a Ja or Ne game (Yes or No in German) she was asked if she would 'ever have another baby?'

Playing with filters: The model added a filter over the video that gave her large red lips and heavy eye makeup as she lounged next to Tom

Joining the video: The star also added a similar filter to Tom's face for a separate reel, but also gave him shades that had various photos of Madonna taken over the years throughout her career

Spending time together: In another video uploaded to her stories, Heidi could be seen laying on a comfortable bed while resting her head on her husband's shoulde

A sweet kiss: At one point, he could be see resting a gentle kiss on her head and rubbing her stomach and chest

Vacation mode: Both Heidi and Tom recently whisked themselves away to Italy for a lavish getaway during the summer season

Making memories: The couple took a quick selfie during their trip as they soaked up the sun during a boat day on the water in Italy

In response to the question, the supermodel admitted that the desire to have another child 'depends' on the day.

She currently has four children: daughter, Leni, whom she welcomed with ex Flavio Briatore; daughter Lou, 13, and sons Henry, 17, and Johan, 16, with ex-husband Seal. He notably adopted Leni in 2009 during their marriage, which ended in 2014.

Both Heidi and Tom recently whisked themselves away to Italy for a lavish getaway with the summer season in full swing.

She gifted her fans with a series of photos that had captured special moments from the trip, such as Klum wearing a striped bikini while looking out at a scenic view and also spending time out on the water.
Margot Robbie was once again every inch a real life Barbie girl as she attended a press conference for her new film in Seoul, South Korea, on Sunday.

The actress, 33, slipped into a hot pink studded co-ord, as she put on an animated display while taking to the stage at the event alongside her co-star America Ferrera and the film's director Greta Gerwig.

The devil was in the details for Margot's all pink look, which also included a matching asymmetric crop top, as well as a bow detail hat and a heart-shaped bag.

The Australian star wore her honey blonde locks in perfectly styled curls and accentuated her pretty features with a covering of make-up, which of course included a slick of Barbie pink lipstick.

Margot's incredible look, which is the latest in a long-line of Barbie inspired outfits, was completed with a pair of pearl stud earrings.

I'm a Barbie girl! Margot Robbie was once again every inch a real life Barbie girl as she attended a press conference for her new film in Seoul, South Korea, on Sunday

Girls on tour! The actress, 33, slipped into a hot pink studded co-ord, as she put on an animated display while taking to the stage at the event alongside her co-star America Ferrera and the film's director Greta Gerwig

Margot added a pair of slip on heels to the ensemble, after fans went wild for her arched feet during the trailer for the Barbie film.

Meanwhile, in stark contrast, America, 39, opted for a sleek black look as she joined Margot at the promotional event.

America's leather-look jumpsuit with a cowl neck was cinched around her waist with a chunky belt and accessorised with a pair of drop earrings.

She wore her black hair slicked back into a neat chignon and added a dewy coat of make-up to her already glowing complexion.

Elsewhere, Greta, 39, cut a cool figure in a grey Prada jumper which she wore with a pretty pleated midi skirt with black court shoes.

Earlier in the day, Margot looked incredible in two stylish pink outfits as she attended the film's premiere.

She put on a glamorous display in a plunging pink shimmering midi dress, with a belt that cinched in her waist.

The gown featured a mesh skirt and she completed the ensemble with a pair of matching heels.

Perfection: The devil was in the details for Margot's all pink look, which also included a matching asymmetric crop top, as well as a bow detail hat and a heart-shaped bag

Sizzling: America's leather-look jumpsuit with a cowl neck was cinched around her waist with a chunky belt and accessorised with a pair of drop earrings

Radiant: She wore her black hair slicked back into a neat chignon and added a dewy coat of make-up to her already glowing complexion

Margot then slipped into a hot pink blazer and matching midi skirt, teamed with a neck tie and white fedora.

She opted for a flawless blush makeup look with a swipe of nude lipstick while flashed her dazzling white smile.

Margot's golden locks were styled in loose curls while she posed up a storm on the pink carpet.

It comes after Margot arrived in Sydney on Wednesday with her husband Tom Ackerley to promote her starring role in Barbie.

The actress has since revealed the secret behind her famous arched foot in the new film.

In the trailer for the highly anticipated comedy fantasy, Margot is seen stepping out of her high heels to reveal Barbie's feet remain arched, just like the toy.

On Thursday night's episode of Australian chat show The Project, the actress revealed very little went into getting the shot right.

'There's no special effects, you'd be amazed how few [special effects] there are in this film actually,' she said alongside director Greta Gerwig.

Margot explained it's her own feet in the frame, and she achieved the shot by stepping out of her heels and simply 'held on to a bar' so she was 'sturdy'.

'We did put double-sided tape on the floor so that my shoes stayed still,' she added, before revealing she also had a pedicure prior to filming the scene.

AirBnB announced on Monday that the DreamHouse in Malibu will be available for fans to book two free one-night stays for two guests apiece on July 21 and July 22.

The stays will be free of charge because, according to an Airbnb press release, 'because Ken couldn't figure out how to put a price on Barbie's Malibu DreamHouse.'

Fans can start to request a room at the DreamHouse on Monday, July 17 at 10 AM PT at AirBNB.com/KensDreamHouse.

The DreamHouse is located in Malibu, California, an oceanfront mansion that, 'features panoramic views and serves as the perfect backdrop for Ken's picture-plastic paradise.'

Big love !America's leather-look jumpsuit with a cowl neck was cinched around her waist with a chunky belt and accessorised with a pair of drop earrings

Talking: Margot sat down to chat to the audience at the event

Girls gone wild! The three women led the way at the premiere

Cheese! Margot flashed a toothy grin as she smiled for the camera

Love! Greta held up her hands in the shape of a heart

According to Vulture, the film is 'a fish-out-of-water story about a doll who is ousted from toy society for not being perfect enough.'

Another synopsis on IMDB of the movie reads: 'A doll living in 'Barbieland' is expelled for not being perfect enough and sets off on an adventure in the real world. A Live-action feature film based on the popular line of Barbie toys.'

Oscar nominee Ryan Gosling is starring opposite Margot as he takes on the role of Barbie's boyfriend Ken.

Will Ferrell is playing the CEO of the toy company that may or may not be Mattel.

Little Women and Ladybird filmmaker Greta Gerwig directed the project, and wrote the script for the film with her longtime partner Noah Baumbach.

Other members of the cast include Kate McKinnon, Michael Cera, Emma Mackey, Kingsley Ben-Adir, America Ferrera, Rhea Perlman, Ariana Greenblatt, Ana Cruz Kayne, Alexandra Shipp, Ritu Arya, Sharon Rooney, Connor Swindells, Scott Evans and Jamie Demetriou.

Barbie goes on general release from July 21.

Gorgeous: Earlier in the day, Margot Robbie looked incredible in two stylish pink outfits
Mason Greenwood's girlfriend enjoyed a lavish baby shower as she prepares to welcome the couple's first child.

Greenwood, 21, is set to become a father later this month, with his university student partner celebrating the occasion this weekend by hosting a party with her loved ones.

The mother-to-be showcased her burgeoning baby bump in a fitted white dress with a thigh high slit, while she accessorised with a small white Prada handbag and heels.

She was pictured at the event hugging a friend in front of a white flower wall while surrounded by pink and white balloons.

His family are said to be aware and 'looking forward' to welcoming the couple's child in the summer, The Sun reported.

Greenwood and his girlfriend have kept their relationship low profile amid a turbulent time for the forward player.

Baby joy: Mason Greenwood's girlfriend enjoyed a lavish baby shower with her loved ones over the weekend as she prepares to welcome the couple's first child

Greenwood was charged with attempted rape, controlling and coercive behaviour and assault in October last year.

The charges were dropped in February with the Crown Prosecution Service (CPS) citing a 'withdrawal of key witnesses and new material that came to light'.

The developments meant there was 'no longer a realistic prospect of conviction' and they added they had a 'duty' not to proceed with the case in such circumstances.

While United are conducting their own investigation, the men's senior squad are said to be split over whether or not the former academy starlet should be allowed to return.

A report states that some of the members of the squad harbour concerns about his return, while some possess no objections to Greenwood being welcomed back.

Among the women's squad, who share the Carrington base with the men, players are said to be deeply concerned about Greenwood returning.

A source told The Sun: 'If Mason does come back, it is inconceivable that he would not have any contact with any of the women's team.

'Everyone at the club is very aware of what was alleged at the time of his arrest.'

Greenwood remains prohibited from training or playing for the club while this process is ongoing. It is reported that it could stretch on for months.

Charged: Greenwood was charged with attempted rape, controlling and coercive behaviour and assault in October last year

The player released a statement after the CPS announced their decision, writing: 'I am relieved that this matter is now over and I would like to thank my family, loved ones and friends for their support. There will be no further comment at this time.'

United remained tight-lipped over their next steps in the days and weeks following the decision by the CPS.

Erik ten Hag, asked about the case of Greenwood in his press conference the day after the charges were dropped, referred people to the statement put out by the club.

'I can't add anything, I refer to the statement of the club,' he said.

It emerged earlier this month that Greenwood is on the list of players being retained by Manchester United, while David de Gea is the most notable omission as talks continue over a new contract.

It's understood that Greenwood's inclusion reflects the fact that he is under contract at Old Trafford until 2025, and is not an indication of the outcome of an internal club investigation after the Crown Prosecution Service dropped charges of attempted rape and assault against him in February.

United still haven't made a decision over Greenwood's future, but Mail Sport previously revealed that one of the options under consideration is loaning the 21-year-old to a foreign club next season - with Italy, Turkey or Spain among the options.

Sending him overseas would allow themselves a further period of reflection, while also giving them a chance to gauge public opinion along with Greenwood's mental health and performance levels.

Greenwood, who has two years left on his 75,000-a-week deal at Old Trafford, was suspended by United when the allegations were first made last January and he remains out of the picture.
Paris Hilton happily embraced mom duty with her baby boy, Phoenix, during a relaxing outing to the park in a new 'photo dump' uploaded to Instagram on Sunday.

The Simple Life star, 42, who recently celebrated her new advice hotline and partnership with fast food chain Taco Bell, dressed down for the afternoon stroll while bonding with her son, who will turn six months on July 16.

The media personality donned a short-sleeved, black printed T-shirt to stay cool in the warm, summer weather and additionally slipped into a pair of loose-fitting, cheetah-patterned trousers.

She draped a soft, green sweat jacket around her waist in case she grew chilly later in the day and wore a pair of sneakers for the walk.

Hilton threw on a black, New York Yankees cap on top of her head that partially covered her blonde locks that were pulled back into an up do.

Mom duty: Paris Hilton, 42, happily embraced mom duty with her baby boy, Phoenix, during a relaxing outing to the park in a new 'photo dump' uploaded to Instagram on Sunday

Keeping it casual: The media personality donned a short-sleeved, black printed T-shirt to stay cool in the warm, summer weather and additionally slipped into a pair of loose-fitting, cheetah-patterned trousers

The beauty threw on a pair of black shades to protect her eyes from the bright sunshine and was pictured pushing her little one in a luxurious Dior stroller, which is priced at $4,900, according to the brand's official website.

The star enjoyed the fresh air in a quiet park that was filled with lush green grass, as well as green bushes and various shady trees.

Another snap added into the adorable photo series included a close-up of Hilton holding an excited smile on her face as she knelt down close to Phoenix who was securely strapped in the comfy stroller.

The last image showed the businesswoman pushing the stroller on a long stretch of sidewalk in the shade.

In the caption of the post, Hilton typed out to her 24.1 million fans and followers, 'Mommy Day in the Park Photo Dump.'

Paris and her husband Carter Reum, whom she tied the knot with in 2021, surprised the world when they revealed they welcomed their first child, a boy, earlier this year in January via surrogacy.

Eight days after the birth of their son, the media star jumped to her Instagram and shared a close-up photo of her hand as her son's tiny fingers wrapped around her finger.

At the time, the mother of one sweetly wrote out, 'You are already loved beyond words,' followed by a blue heart emoji.

Bonding: Another snap added into the adorable photo series included a close-up of Hilton holding an excited smile on her face as she knelt down close to Phoenix

A sprinkle of luxury: The beauty threw on a pair of black shades to protect her eyes from the bright sunshine and was pictured pushing her little one in a luxurious Dior stroller, which is priced at $4,900

Biggest fan: She has since shared little updates with her fans on social media by sharing photos of her son as he continues to grow

She has since shared little updates with her fans on social media by sharing photos of her son as he continues to grow.

On her podcast, I Am Paris, the star gushed, per People, 'From the moment I laid eyes on him, my heart felt so full. I feel like my life is so complete now. I always wanted to be a mom.'

While talking to Harper's Bazaar earlier this year in February, Hilton revealed that she had disguised herself when going to the hospital shortly before her baby boy was born. She had donned a brunette wig and also chose to use a different name.

The star notably kept her son a secret, and also didn't reveal to her own mother, Kathy Hilton, that she was now a mom herself until after Phoenix was welcomed to the world.

She expressed, 'My entire life has been so public. I've never had anything for myself. We decided that we wanted to have this whole experience to ourselves.'

Paris revealed on her podcast that, 'When I introduced my mom to our baby boy, it was amazing to see the look on her face,' but stated that, 'It was really nice to have that with Carter, be our own journey together.'

Paris also hinted to Harper's Bazaar that having another child in the future is a possibility. 'I'm more interested in babies than billions,' she stated.

Back in the studio: Along with balancing motherhood, Paris has also been working hard in the studio to create new music

Recording in style: On Sunday, the star uploaded a few snaps as she stood inside a recording studio while sporting a fashionable pink tracksuit

Relaxation mode: The star also enjoyed time to rejuvenate and took a brief while getting a refreshing facial

Selfie time! The media personality lastly shared a short video selfie as she showed off a pleated lavender shirt that contained a large cutout on the front

Glammed up: Her blonde locks were slicked back into a ponytail and she threw on a pair of white-rimmed sunglasses for a finishing touch

Along with balancing motherhood, Paris has also been working hard in the studio to create new music. On Sunday, the star uploaded a few snaps on her Instagram stories as she stood inside a recording studio while sporting a fashionable pink tracksuit to also promote her new line.

She recently dropped her latest single, Hot One, earlier on Friday and released a new version of her past track, Stars Are Blind, which also featured Kim Petras, in June.

The star also enjoyed time to rejuvenate and took a brief break while getting a refreshing facial. Hilton could be seen resting on a bed and covered with a warm, plush pink blanket. 'Loving this facial...' she typed out.

The media personality lastly shared a short video selfie as she showed off a pleated lavender shirt that contained a large cutout on the front. Her blonde locks were slicked back into a ponytail and she threw on a pair of white-rimmed sunglasses for a finishing touch.
BBC Breakfast present Nina Warhurst has given birth to her third child.

The broadcaster, 43, has welcomed a baby girl with her husband Ted, after previously welcoming two sons together.

The happy news was announced during Monday's Breakfast show by her co-stars Jon Kay and Sally Nugent, who were hosting the show.

Sallly, 51, said: 'Some very exciting news now about our colleague Nina Warhurst, who we said goodbye to not very many days ago as she went off on maternity leave.

'She has welcomed a very healthy, beautiful baby girl.'

Welcome! BBC Breakfast present Nina Warhurst has given birth to her third child

So sweet: The broadcaster, 43, has welcomed a baby girl with her husband Ted, after previously welcoming two sons together

Announcement: The happy news was announced during Monday's Breakfast show by her co-stars Jon Kay and Sally Nugent, who were hosting the show (pictured)

They they showed the first pictures of the newborn, as Jon said: 'And there she is!

'Nina has told us the baby's name is a working progress, but the great news is they're all doing well after what Nina says was brilliant care from the team at St Mary's in Manchester. Isn't she gorgeous?'

Sally continued: 'I believe this as well - Nina said she's watching from home, morning, Nina!

'Along with the baby and two beautiful big brothers and she's very grateful for all the gorgeous messages she's had from people at home who are watching too.

'So she wants to pass on her thanks for everything - all the kind words people have said.'

Jon continued: 'And all our love to you and the family, Nina. That is fantastic, we're delighted for you.'

Nina announced she was pregnant in March on Mother's Day and revealed that after months of 'vomiting and migraines' she discovered she was expecting.

She shared a beaming snap of herself posing in a skin-tight black dress, while cradling her growing baby bump in the BBC studio.

Nina penned on Instagram: 'Happy Mother's Day to all of those who are any part of this endless handover of love, values, genes, chaos and perpetually crumb-infested kitchens.

'I'd like to say 'you got this Mama!' But maybe you haven't. I dunno. It's hard isn't it?'

Congratulations! Nina announced she was pregnant in March on Mother's Day and revealed that after months of 'vomiting and migraines' she discovered she was expecting

Baby joy: The presenter, 42, revealed that after months of 'vomiting and migraines' she discovered she was expecting with her husband Ted

'That said we are doing it again. It's been a funky few months involving intense migraines, vomiting, morning kebabs, first time acne, small acts of violence against fruit, afternoon kebabs, tears, spontaneous snoozes, anxiety and more kebabs.

'I am settling in to the middle chunk (emphasis on chunk) and enjoying the wonders of Mother Nature and her tiny kicks and flutters. The boys and the cat have been enjoying their new chair God willing, Baby Doner-Shish joins the outside world in the summer.

'I am blown away that we do this. And acutely aware of the privilege, born of nothing but fortune.'

She signed off by adding: 'Sending love to those who've had to say goodbye to the babies they lost and the ones they dreamed of.'

Nina previously opened up about feeling guilty for losing patience with her father's forgetfulness as he struggles with the degenerative symptoms of dementia.

The presenter has filmed a short feature for the BBC in which she shines a light on the plight of dementia sufferers and the wider impact it has on family members left to care for their loved ones.

Nina and her sisters Amy and Mel are currently co-caring for elderly father Chris, who was diagnosed with the condition in 2022 - but the presenter admitted she's still coming to terms with the toll it has already taken on his cognitive ability.

'We have been fortunate that my dad has never gotten angry,' she told Monday's BBC Breakfast . 'I know that can happen with different forms of dementia, but he didn't understand it was happening.

She announced on Instagram: 'We are doing it again. It's been a funky few months involving intense migraines, vomiting, morning kebabs, first time acne, small acts of violence against fruit, afternoon kebabs, tears, spontaneous snoozes, anxiety and more kebabs.'

Ouch: Nina also showed the acne outbreak which has been one of her pregnancy symptoms

'When we had conversations about changing the set-up, maybe giving some respite care he thought nothing was wrong.

'Having to tell little fibs all the time just broke your heart but it was in his best interest. There were times when 'if I don't fib to him to get us over this hump, we are not going to get there'.

'And he would phone me 10 times a day, saying 'I need you to come round' and then I'd get there and he would say 'What are you doing here?''

She added: 'At that point, it is hard not to be cross and that was the surprising thing, I felt really guilty because I was getting angry with him.

'I was taking it out on him and I had two tiny kids at home that I wasn't seeing as much and I wasn't focused at work. There are these ripples that then go through your family as well.'

Dementia, a degenerative condition with no known cure, commonly affects the brain's ability to think, remember, and function normally, with suffers typically losing their memories over time.

Taking to Instagram last year, Warhurst admitted she was devastated after her father failed to recognise her.

Sharing a photo of herself and Chris, she wrote: 'My Dad. I missed him so much this week. Dementia means he's here, but not here. Today was the first time he couldn't quite place me.

'Then he got out a new glasses case. He was clearly chuffed with it but knew it was funny to be chuffed with a new glasses case.

Family: Nina and her sisters Amy and Mel are currently co-caring for elderly father Chris, who was diagnosed with the condition in 2022

Taking to Instagram last year, Warhurst admitted she was devastated after her father failed to recognise her

'In some ways, he taught me to laugh. Properly from the tummy. And to laugh at myself.'

She added: 'We're all holding on to those deep-rooted connections for as long as we can. Dementia isn't the end. It's the start of a new chapter.

'So much respect for his key worker today who told me that it's all about cherishing those connections, instead of missing the ones we've lost. The staff are superstars and it means the world.'

If you've been affected by anything in this article, please call the Dementia UK helpline on 0800 888 6678.


Sushil Kumar Modi (File Photo) Less than a week after Prime Minister Narendra Modi strongly pitched for a Uniform Civil Code (UCC) in the country, a high-level Parliamentary standing committee will hold a meeting on it on Monday. Headed by BJP Rajya Sabha MP Sushil Modi, the Rajya Sabha Parliamentary standing committee on personnel, public grievances, law and justice will deliberate on the proposal at 3 p.m.



Sushil Modi had earlier informed that the panel will seek the views of the stakeholders on the matter.



Representatives from the department of legal affairs, legislative department as well as the Law Commission of India have been invited for the meeting.



The UCC proposes to formulate and implement personal laws of citizens which apply to all citizens equally regardless of their religion, sex, gender and sexual orientation.



Currently, the personal laws of various communities are governed by their religious scriptures. The Parliamentary panel has called for a discussion on the subject even as the 22nd Law Commission had last month begun examining the uniform civil code.



On June 14, the 22nd Law Commission had solicited the views and ideas of the public and recognised religious organisations to examine the uniform civil code. The common public can send its views on the matter till July 14 to the commission.




The grief-stricken father of Robert De Niro's grandson Leandro has paid tribute to him following his death at the age of 19.

Leandro was the son of De Niro's adopted daughter Drena, 51, and artist Carlos Rodriguez.

On Sunday, Drena announced his death on Instagram, saying: 'I wish that love alone could have saved you.'

While it remains unclear how the teenager died, his father, an artist, said in a separate comment: 'Words arent enough to express the joy he gave us or the loss we now endure with our families and friends. He is God's child now. On this full moon his spirit luminates what could not be seen in the dark.'

Drena's post began: 'My beautiful sweet angel. I have loved you beyond words or description from the moment I felt you in my belly. You have been my joy my heart and all that was ever pure and real in my life. I wish I was with you right now. I wish I was with you.'

De Niro with Leo and his father when he was a child. Leandro's mother announced his death on Instagram

Tragic news: Robert De Niro 's grandson Leandro has died at the age of 19 (pictured with his mother Drena and grandfather)

Heartbreaking: Leandro was the son of De Niro's adopted daughter Drena and artist Carlos Mare, with Drena paying tribute to her late son in a heartfelt Instagram post on Monday

Final post: Robert De Niro 's grandson Leandro De Niro Rodriguez appeared in a heartbreaking final social media post shared by his mother Drena on Mother's Day

Drena continued: 'I dont know how to live without you but Ill try to go on and spread the love and light that you so made me feel in getting to be your mama.

'You were so deeply loved and appreciated and I wish that love alone could have saved you. Im so sorry my baby, Im so sorry @carlosmare. Rest in Peace and Eternal Paradise my darling boy.'

Leandro's father added in his own comment: 'Words arent enough to express the joy he gave us or the loss we now endure with our families and friends.

'He is God's child now. On this full moon his spirit luminates what could not be seen in the dark.

'You cant spell LOVE without LEO.'

The pair were immediately flooded with messages of condolences, with one friend commenting: 'Drena don't tell me it's true tell me you're joking because I can't believe Leo isnt with us anymore.

'Its an horrible news to digest. Drena my heart is with you and Carlos and your loved ones - I love you '

Drena responded: 'I know I still hope this is a nightmare and Ill wake up tomorrow.'

Victoria Gotti, the daughter of mob-boss John Gotti, commented she was 'heartbroken' and she had 'no words' following Leandro's death.

She wrote of Leandro: 'You were such a playful handsome amicable and amazing young boy who grew into an amazing young man! May you rest my dear boy and I was so blessed to have shared thanksgiving with yousuch a bright intelligent and well mannered young man. A young life cut far too short.'

Actress Rosie Perez Brooklyn wrote: 'Shocked! Im so sorry! We are all here for you !!! I love you too much!', while Director and producer Lee Daniels wrote: 'Drena may God keep you in his arms.'

MailOnline has contacted De Niro's representatives for comment.

Aspiring actor and director Leandro was following in his mother and grandfather's career footsteps, landing small roles in 2018's A Star Is Born and Cabaret Maxime and 2005's The Collection.

His mother Drena was adopted by De Niro, and took his surname, after the actor married her mother, Diahnne Abbott, in 1976.

She had a relatively transient lifestyle thanks to her father's vibrant career and split her time between New York City, Los Angeles, and Italy.

In May, Drena had taken to Instagram - weeks before her son's death - to share a sweet post to praise him on Mother's Day.

Family: Drena is pictured with mother Drena and father Carlos Rodriguez

Leandro with his mother in a recent photo she shared for Mothers' Day

Grieving: Carlos did not pay a public tribute to his late son but shared an image of a black square on his Instagram page without a caption

Leandro was the son of De Niro's (pictured) adopted daughter Drena, 51, and artist Carlos Rodriguez, with Drena paying tribute to her late son in a heartfelt Instagram post on Monday

Drena and Leandro both appeared briefly in A Star Is Born. He was 13 at the time of filming

Tragic loss: Leandro was the son of De Niro's adopted daughter Drena (pictured in 2016)

Parents: De Niro adopted Diahnne Abbott's daughter after the pair married in 1976 (pictured together in New York in 1977)

In the snaps, Drena could be seen beaming alongside Leandro for a selfie, with another shot showing the pair posing with Leandro's father Carlos Rodriguez.

The post from May 15 post was captioned: 'Mothers Day ~ A Lil bit of Leo Lil bit of Mare , Lots of Sunny & CleoPipa #AliceDoesntLiveHereAnymore. Lots of memories of my soulmate ,fur baby Daisy. Today was a good day  #happymothersday.'

Drena left school and decided to explore the arts, turning her hand to a whole host of career paths including model, DJ and fashion consultant.

She eventually decided to follow in De Niro's footsteps and soon found her feet as an actress and filmmaker.

Her first role was in Allison Anders's Grace of My Heart in 1996 and she went on to star in several of her father's films including 1999's On The Run, 2002's City By The Sea and 2002's Showtime.

De Niro split with Drena's mother in 1988 but the Hollywood A-lister remained in her life nonetheless.

She made De Niro a grandfather in 2003 when she welcomed Leandro with her then-boyfriend Carlos Rodriguez.

Drena, who currently lives in New York, has since turned her attentions to directing and also describes herself as being trained in Muay Thai and martial arts.

At 51, Drena is five years older than De Niro's oldest biological child, Raphael, with Abbott. Now 46, he's a Manhattan estate agent whose celebrity clients have included Jon Bon Jovi and Renee Zellweger.

De Niro also has two children  twins Aaron and Julian, 27,  from his relationship between 1988 and 1995 with former model and actress Toukie Smith. They were conceived by in vitro fertilisation and delivered by a surrogate mother.

In 1998, he also had a son, Elliot, 21, and in 2011, a daughter, Helen, 11, (also born via surrogate) during his stormy 20-year marriage to his second wife, former flight attendant Grace Hightower.

In May, the 79-year-old actor confirmed that he'd welcomed his seventh child Gia Virginia with his girlfriend Tiffany Chan, 43, to whom he has been linked since summer 2021.

New parents: Robert shares the newborn baby girl with his girlfriend Tiffany Chen (pictured together on June 7 in NYC), to whom he's been linked since summer 2021

His eldest daughter: Robert has two kids - Drena, 51 (pictured with Robert in 2022), and Raphael, 46 - with his ex wife Diahnne Abbott

De Niro (right) is pictured with his son Julian (far left) as well as John David Washington, Danielle Brooks and Samuel L. Jackson in November 2022 in New York City

His son Elliot: De Niro with his son Elliot, who is now 24, in 2011 in France

His girl: De Niro with daughter Helen Grace out for ice cream with their puppies in New York in April 2019

Gia was born on April 6 and weighed 8 pounds and 6 ounces.

In June, De Niro gushed about raising a newborn once again while at the Tribeca Film Festival in New York City, stating: 'It feels great.'

In regards to how he has changed as a father, the Goodfellas star said: 'I have certain awareness  when youre older you have awareness of certain things in life, dynamics, everything, family dynamics.'

He added: 'You cant avoid learning certain things and how you can deal with those and manage them and this and that, the usual.

'It's amazing, but I'm very happy about it.'

Shortly after the news of his new family addition came to light, the actor told Page Six that welcoming his seventh child was 'planned' and questioned 'How you could not plan that kind of thing?'
OnlyFans star Veruca Salt has announced that she will continue making X-rated content while pregnant.

The Gold Coast influencer, whose real name is Kimberley Summer Hartley, is expecting her first child.

She replied to a fan on Instagram Stories on Monday, who asked her is she would continue to star in videos on adult platform OnlyFans while pregnant.

'Yes, just because I'm pregnant, doesn't mean I'm ugly,' the 24-year-old replied simply.

It comes after Veruca appeared to get into an altercation with her housemate after fighting about a cat's litter box.

OnlyFans star Veruca Salt (pictured) has announced that she will continue making X-rated content while pregnant

She posted several Instagram stories about a fight she and her housemate had that led her to moving out.

It escalated so badly that the women appeared to be fighting while Veruca, was filming a live video on TikTok.

On Thursday, the sex worker shared several messages between her and her housemate to her Instagram story as she went off on a scathing rant.

The conversation started off with Veruca's housemate asking her to clean her cat's litter box, and this really upset the influencer.

It comes after Veruca appeared to get into an altercation with her housemate after fighting about a cat's litter box

Her housemates message read: 'Hey girl, could you please clean your cats litter. Upstairs smells absolutely foul and it's starting to creep into my room.

'I remember you saying you would be cleaning your cats litter daily but you haven't been hence the smell.'

Veruca simply replied: 'I haven't scooped this morning but it gets scooped everyday.'

The OnlyFans model appeared very upset by this message, as she posted it to her story with the caption: 'A couple weeks ago she texts me this and I'm like ok maybe Blaze [her cat] just pooped in his litter box so I got out there and he hasn't and it also doesn't smell so I quite literally do nothing, I don't scoop, I don't spray, NOTHING'.

On Thursday, the sex worker shared several messages between her and her housemate to her Instagram story as she went off on a scathing rant

Despite her not cleaning the litter tray, the housemate later texted Veruca and thanked her for scooping it, but this seemed to annoy her even more.

The housemate wrote: 'Hey girl, I wanted to apologise for coming at you and being a bit rude about the smell issue this morning.

'I shouldn't have said that you hadn't been looking after the litter when I didn't actually know that for a fact.

'Anyways it smells so much better upstairs so thank you so much for doing something about it.'

Veruca then called her housemate 'delusional' and captioned the screenshot: 'And then she text me later saying it smells better.

'Babe it's actually exactly the same DELULU'.

The OnlyFans star then later went live on TikTok, and influencer watchdog account Dutch Minty shared a snippet of this video to its Story

The OnlyFans star then later went live on TikTok, and influencer watchdog account Dutch Minty shared a snippet of this video to its story.

The clip shows what appears to be Veruca and her housemate getting into an altercation.

As she has all her things packed and is about to leave the house, Veruca says 'good luck finding someone else' to a woman, who appears to be her housemate.

It then sounds like she throws something at her and and tells her to leave.

Veruca then says: 'You just threw s**t at me, you nasty horrible c**t'.

The other woman is then heard shouting 'you piece of sh**' as Veruca's cat purrs in the background.

The controversial influencer, who is pregnant with her first child, was sharing a house despite previously claiming she makes upwards of $15,000 a month on OnlyFans.

The controversial influencer, who is pregnant with her first child, was sharing a house despite previously claiming she makes upwards of $15,000 a month on OnlyFans

On Friday, she posted that she has successfully moved into a new house after her traumatic fight with her old housemate.

Sharing a picture of the view from the Gold Coast property, she wrote: 'My new house is giving peace and serenityyyyyy and slayyyy!

'My movers did such a good job and blazey is so happy'.

Daily Mail Australia has reached out to Veruca Salt for comment.

The sex worker grew a social media following after she sparked a national manhunt in 2019.

On Friday, she posted that she has successfully moved into a new house after her traumatic fight with her old housemate

At the time, she was 20 years old and panicked her friends when she disappeared from a wedding in Queensland and failed to respond to worried mates for more than a week.

She was found a week later by police at Desires brothel in Woolongong, south of Sydney.

Speaking to Daily Mail Australia in 2020, Veruca explained the type of content that she shares on OnlyFans.

The website is a non-censored social media platform where users pay creators a subscription fee to view their content. Photos and videos are often X-rated.

'I take full nudes, and photos of my b**hole and stuff,' she told Daily Mail Australia.

'I guess it's pretty gross,' she laughed. 'I usually do full porn in there.'
Robert Irwin and girlfriend Rorie Buckey were every inch the loved-up couple at the Mission Impossible - Dead Reckoning premiere in Sydney on Monday night.

Robert, 19, looked dashing in a black suit with a tuxedo style lapel as he wrapped his arm around his love and posed for photographers.

The wildlife warrior paired the suit with a crisp black shirt, opened at the collar, and black dress shoes.

Elsewhere, girlfriend Rorie, 18, looked sensational in asymmetric black maxi dress that featured one-sleeve, one-shoulder detailing.

The chic, floor length number also featured a demure cut-out portion at the waist.

Robert Irwin and girlfriend Rorie Buckey were every inch the loved-up couple at the Mission Impossible - Dead Reckoning premiere in Sydney on Monday night. Both pictured

Robert, 19, looked dashing in a black suit with a tuxedo style lapel as he wrapped his arm around his ladylove and posed for photographers

The wildlife warrior paired the suit with a crisp black shirt, opened at the collar, and black dress shoes

The blonde beauty let her natural beauty shine through on the night, wearing minimal makeup, and wore her blonde locks centre-parted with gentle waves.

At one point, Robert tenderly wrapped his arms around Rorie as they appeared to share a joke and giggle.

The couple looked thrilled to be making their red carpet debut for the seventh installment of the Mission: Impossible franchise.

Their outing comes after news Robert is reportedly planning to pop the question to Rorie Buckey after several months of dating

According to New Idea magazine, protective mother Terri has concerns that her lovestruck son, 19, and his smitten girlfriend, 18, will rush down the aisle too early.

Elsewhere, girlfriend Rorie, 18, looked sensational in asymmetric black maxi dress that featured one-sleeve, one-shoulder detailing

The chic, floor length number also featured a demure cut-out portion at the waist

The blonde beauty let her natural beauty shine through on the night, wearing minimal makeup, and wore her blonde locks centre-parted with gentle waves. At one point, Robert tenderly wrapped his arms around Rorie as they appeared to share a joke and giggle

'Terri feels like Robert is moving way too fast,' a source told the publication.

'Rorie's a sweetheart and it's easy to see why he is absolutely smitten, but Terri knows the stakes are high,' they added.

The publication also claimed Robert is a 'romantic' who is hoping to emulate his mother's quick engagement to her late husband Steve after just eight months of dating in 1992.

Robert and Rorie, who is the niece of legendary Australian actor Heath Ledger, are currently in a long-distance relationship, with Robert based at Australia Zoo in Queensland while Rorie is in Perth.

The couple looked thrilled to be making their red carpet debut for the seventh installment of the Mission: Impossible franchise

Their outing comes after news Robert is reportedly planning to pop the question to Rorie Buckey after several months of dating.

According to New Idea magazine, protective mother Terri has concerns that her lovestruck son, 19, and his smitten girlfriend, 18, will rush down the aisle too early

The official trailer for the upcoming Mission: Impossible installment was recently released.

The heart-stopping, high-speed clip showed plenty of action scenes with the Hollywood actor, whose film Top Gun: Maverick was a massive summer 2022 hit.

He stars alongside Pom Klementieff, Hayley Atwell and fan favourite cast member Simon Pegg.

This is Tom's seventh Mission: Impossible film and it will be released in Australian theatres on July 8.

Returning to the sequel are Tom's usual sidekicks - veteran Hollywood names Ving Rhames, Rebecca Ferguson, and Vanessa Kirby.
Michelle Keegan looked stunning in an array of summery ensembles as she shows off her latest Very collection on Monday.

The actress, 36, - who has been an ambassador for the brand for years - showed off her incredible sense of style in the 40-piece range.

One shot saw her looking glamorous in a black and white striped vest which she wore with a denim midi skirt as she posed by a car.

She accessorised her look with a belt to cinch her in at the waist and wore trendy white-rimmed sunglasses.

Michelle had her brunette tresses in loose waves over her shoulders and opted for a radiant makeup look.

Style: Michelle Keegan looked stunning in an array of summery ensembles as she shows off her latest Very collection on Monday

Work it: The actress, 36, - who has been an ambassador for the brand for years - showed off her incredible sense of style in the 40-piece range

Trendy: For a different look she wore a white floaty summer dress with pretty buttons down the front that was accessorised with a wicker bag

Another saw her flaunt her toned figure in a clingy purple knitted dress which hugged her frame and had a high neck design.

She boosted her height with nude heels and gave a sultry stare off into the distance.

For a different look she wore a white floaty summer dress with pretty buttons down the front that was accessorised with a wicker bag.

Other styles saw her don a denim co-ord black cropped shirt and matching trousers and a white mini dress.

It comes as Michelle has confirmed herself as one of televisions top earning stars with assets of more than 3million.

The star, who most recently appeared in the BBC's Ten Pound Poms, has seen her company Rosia Promotions Ltd, which handles her TV and film earnings, rake in the cash this year.

Her company has eye watering assets of 3,053,434 in the bank and of that figure 197,072 was paid out in taxes and other costs leaving her with shareholder funds still worth a healthy 2,857,623 - over half a million up on the previous year.

Former Coronation Street cast member Michelle, who is married to television personality Mark Wright, 36, started the company in September 2013 and is the sole director.

The accounts cover the period up to September 30 last year and were filed today with Companies House.

Stunning: One shot saw her looking glamorous in a black and white striped vest which she wore with a denim midi skirt as she posed by a car

Glowing: Michelle had her brunette tresses in loose waves over her shoulders and opted for a radiant makeup look

Range: Other styles saw her don a denim co-ord black cropped shirt and matching trousers and a white mini dress

Accessories: Michelle looked great in the white summer dress which she wore with blue-rimmed sunglasses

Double denim: She accessorised the blue look with a white and black hair tie while sat in the vintage car

Nice one: It comes as Michelle has confirmed herself as one of televisions top earning stars with assets of more than 3million

Busy: The star, who most recently appeared in the BBC 's Ten Pound Poms, has seen her company Rosia Promotions Ltd, which handles her TV and film earnings, rake in the cash this year

The look: She accessorised her look with a belt to cinch her in at the waist and wore trendy white-rimmed sunglasses

Posing up a storm: She looked great in the white skirt which showed off her figure perfectly as she beamed

Beauty: Another saw her flaunt her toned figure in a clingy purple knitted dress which hugged her frame and had a high neck design

Cash: Her company has eye watering assets of 3,053,434 in the bank and of that figure 197,072 was paid out in taxes and other costs leaving her with a healthy 2,857,623

A representative for Michelle declined to comment when contacted by MailOnline.

Earlier this month, Michelle was spotted in Manchester as she filmed for her new Netflix drama Fool Me Once.

Michelle has reportedly signed a 1million deal to star in the series, which is based on one of Harlan Coben's books.

In the upcoming show, Michelle plays Maya, a mother who suffers a trauma after returning from war.

Seven of Harlan's hit books have already been adapted into Netflix series, including psychological thriller The Stranger, which garnered huge popularity on the platform.

According to the book's synopsis, Maya goes through a trauma when her husband Joe is brutally murdered.

But two weeks later, she has to deal with a mystery when she sees her infant daughter playing with Joe on her baby monitor.

She will star alongside the likes of Richard Armitage, Adeel Akhtar and Dino Fetscher on the show.

Speaking of Michelle's new role, a TV source told The Sun: 'This is a huge role for Michelle.

'Harlan's dramas are some of the most streamed on Netflix and people watch around the world.'

A release date for the series is yet to be confirmed but it is expected to be available for streaming from late this year or early next.

Meanwhile, Mark has recently hit back at trolls who claim he and wife Michelle Keegan never see each other, saying they always spend 'quality time together'  they just don't post about it.

The presenter told MailOnline that often the public overreact when there's a photo of him with Michelle despite the fact they have been married for the past seven years and share their newly completed Essex home as a couple.

Their hectic careers, including Mark filming away for a month shooting BBC One's A Wright Family Holiday and presenting The Challenge UK in Argentina, as well as Michelle starring in upcoming Netflix drama Fool Me Once and Ten Pound Poms, gives fans the impression they don't spend enough time in each other's company.

Money: Former Coronation Street cast member Michelle, who is married to television personality Mark Wright, 36, started the company in September 2013 and is the sole director

Career: Earlier this month, Michelle was spotted in Manchester as she filmed for her new Netflix drama Fool Me Once

Actress: Michelle has reportedly signed a 1million deal to star in the series, which is based on one of Harlan Coben's books

Plot: In the upcoming show, Michelle plays Maya, a mother who suffers a trauma after returning from war

Successful: Seven of Harlan's hit books have already been adapted into Netflix series, including psychological thriller The Stranger, which garnered huge popularity on the platform

Good company: She will star alongside the likes of Richard Armitage, Adeel Akhtar and Dino Fetscher on the show

Upcoming: A release date for the series is yet to be confirmed but it is expected to be available for streaming from late this year or early next

Candid: Meanwhile, Mark has recently hit back at trolls who claim he and wife Michelle Keegan never see each other

Truth: The presenter told MailOnline that often the public overreact when there's a photo of him with Michelle despite the fact they have been married for the past seven years

Together: Mark insists the pair make their lifestyles work but like to keep the intimate moments they share, including at home when they're relaxing, off social media

Love: He said: 'We spend quality time together just like any other relationship and I'm not just saying that... we genuinely do'

Looking lovely: Another look saw her posing in front of the pool in a black cropped shirt and trousers

Pose: She looked effortlessly stylish in her double denim ensemble

Bronzed: She flaunted her deep holiday tan as she modelled the clothes

Mark insists the pair make their lifestyles work but like to keep the intimate moments they share, including at home when they're relaxing, off social media.

He said: 'Do you know what whenever there's a picture of us together people will say "rare picture of Mark and Michelle" or "Mark and Michelle reunite after time apart" we just don't tell everyone when we do spend quality time together.

'I could be in the house with Michelle for two weeks, but no one will know that because I'm not necessarily posting about it. We spend plenty of quality time together and we've had plenty of weekends away. We have got stuff booked up.

'We spend quality time together just like any other relationship and I'm not just saying that... we genuinely do.'
Robert De Niro's grandson Leandro De Niro Rodriguez appeared in a heartbreaking final social media post shared by his mother Drena.

Drena, 51, announced the tragic loss of her 18-year-old son on Monday, not revealing his cause of death but declaring 'I wish that love alone could have saved you.'

The adopted daughter of Hollywood star Robert had taken to Instagram weeks prior to praise her son, sharing a sweet post in May for Mother's Day.

In the snaps, Drena could be seen beaming alongside Leandro for a selfie, with another shot showing the pair posing with Leandro's father Carlos Rodriguez.

The post from May 15 post was captioned: 'Mothers Day ~ A Lil bit of Leo Lil bit of Mare , Lots of Sunny & CleoPipa #AliceDoesntLiveHereAnymore. Lots of memories of my soulmate ,fur baby Daisy. Today was a good day  #happymothersday.'

Final post: Robert De Niro 's grandson Leandro De Niro Rodriguez appeared in a heartbreaking final social media post shared by his mother Drena on Mother's Day

Family: The adopted daughter of Hollywood star Robert had taken to Instagram to praise her son, sharing a sweet post with the teenager and his father Carlos Rodriguez in May

Drena announced her son's tragic death on Monday, sharing a picture of her son captioned: 'My beautiful sweet angel. I have loved you beyond words or description from the moment I felt you in my belly.

'You have been my joy my heart and all that was ever pure and real in my life. I wish I was with you right now. I wish I was with you.'

Drena continued: 'I dont know how to live without you but Ill try to go on and spread the love and light that you so made me feel in getting to be your mama.

'You were so deeply loved and appreciated and I wish that love alone could have saved you. Im so sorry my baby, Im so sorry @carlosmare. Rest in Peace and Eternal Paradise my darling boy.'

She was immediately flooded with messages of condolences, with one friend commenting: 'Drena don't tell me it's true tell me you're joking because I can't believe leo isnt with us anymore. Its an horrible news to digest. Drena my heart is with you and Carlos and your loved ones - I love you '

Drena responded: 'I know I still hope this is a nightmare and Ill wake up tomorrow.'

Leandro's father Carlos did not pay a public tribute to his late son but shared an image of a black square on his Instagram page without a caption.

MailOnline has contacted De Niro's representatives for comment.

Heartbreaking: Leandro was the son of De Niro's adopted daughter Drena and artist Carlos Mare, with Drena paying tribute to her late son in a heartfelt Instagram post on Monday

Tragic news: Drena, 51, announced the tragic loss of her 18-year-old son on Monday, not revealing his cause of death but declaring 'I wish that love alone could have saved you' (Leonardo pictured with Drena and grandfather Robert)

Grieving: Carlos did not pay a public tribute to his late son but shared an image of a black square on his Instagram page without a caption

Aspiring actor and director Leandro was following in his mother and grandfather's career footsteps, landing small roles in 2018's A Star Is Born and Cabaret Maxime and 2005's The Collection.

His mother Drena was adopted by De Niro, and took his surname, after the actor married her mother, Diahnne Abbott, in 1976.

She had a relatively transient lifestyle thanks to her father's vibrant career and split her time between New York City, Los Angeles, and Italy.

Drena left school and decided to explore the arts, turning her hand to a whole host of career paths including model, DJ and fashion consultant.

She eventually decided to follow in De Niro's footsteps and soon found her feet as an actress and filmmaker.

Her first role was in Allison Anders's Grace of My Heart in 1996 and she went on to star in several of her father's films including 1999's On The Run, 2002's City By The Sea and 2002's Showtime.

De Niro split with Drena's mother in 1988 but the Hollywood A-lister remained in her life nonetheless.

She made De Niro a grandfather in 2003 when she welcomed Leandro with her then-boyfriend Carlos Rodriguez.

Drena, who currently lives in New York, has since turned her attentions to directing and also describes herself as being trained in Muay Thai and martial arts.

At 51, Drena is five years older than his oldest biological child, Raphael, with Abbott. Now 46, he's a Manhattan estate agent whose celebrity clients have included Jon Bon Jovi and Renee Zellweger.

Parents: De Niro adopted Diahnne Abbott's daughter after the pair married in 1976 (pictured together in New York in 1977)

De Niro also has two children  twins Aaron and Julian  from his relationship between 1988 and 1995 with former model and actress Toukie Smith. They were conceived by in vitro fertilisation and delivered by a surrogate mother.

In 1998, he also had a son, Elliot, and in 2011, a daughter, Helen, (also born via surrogate) during his stormy 20-year marriage to his second wife, former flight attendant Grace Hightower.

In May, the 79-year-old actor confirmed that he'd welcomed his seventh child.

There has been no official confirmation of the mother's identity but his significantly younger girlfriend, Tiffany Chen, 43, was photographed prior with what appeared to be a baby bump.
Amber Turner and Chloe Brockett joined their fellow TOWIE cast members as they filmed the ITVbe show's final scenes in Cyprus on Friday.

The reality stars have been staying in the lavish 500-a-night Cap St Georges Hotel and Resort as they have been topping up their tans between scenes.

And Amber, 29, sizzled as she donned a pale orange bikini that showed off her washboard abs.

She ensured all eyes were on her as she added a bright orange mesh skirt over the top with a matching cardigan.

Amber slipped her feet into a pair of beige Chanel sliders and toted a woven straw handbag.

Looking good: Amber Turner and Chloe Brockett joined their fellow TOWIE cast members as they filmed the ITVbe show's final scenes in Cyprus on Friday

Pretty in pink: Chloe, 22, looked incredible in a hot pink co-ord, made up of a halterneck bralette and a maxi skirt

Incredible: Amber, 29, sizzled as she donned a pale orange bikini that showed off her washboard abs and a bright orange co-ord

Sporting a radiant palette of make-up, she styled her caramel locks in loose curls and let them tumble down her shoulders.

Meanwhile, Chloe, 22, looked incredible in a hot pink co-ord, made up of a halterneck bralette and a maxi skirt.

Her skirt boasted a daringly high slit that showed a peek at her toned legs and she boosted her height in a pair of brown high heels.

She wore her dark tresses in soft waves underneath a lilac bandana and hid her eyes behind aviator sunglasses.

They were joined by a dazzling Ella Rae Wise, who showed off her sensational figure in pink and white patterned bikini.

She added a coordinating sheer cover-up over the top and elevated her height in a pair of pink high heels.

Wow! They were joined by a dazzling Ella Rae Wise, who showed off her sensational figure in pink and white patterned bikini

Legs for days: She added a coordinating sheer cover-up over the top and elevated her height in a pair of pink high heels

Stunning: Her long blonde locks were styled in neat waves and she completed her look with a full face of flawless make-up

Lady in red: Danni Imbert stood out from the crowd in a bold red co-ord, that showed off her flat stomach

Red hot: She donned a knitted red bra and matching maxi skirt, which she teamed with gold sandals

Stylish: Toting a straw handbag and adding a gold shell necklace, Dannie wore her ombre tresses in her natural curls

Her long blonde locks were styled in neat waves and she completed her look with a full face of flawless make-up.

Danni Imbert stood out from the crowd in a bold red co-ord, that showed off her flat stomach.

She donned a knitted red bra and matching maxi skirt, which she teamed with gold sandals.

Toting a straw handbag and adding a gold shell necklace, Dannie wore her ombre tresses in her natural curls.

Amy Childs put on a leggy display in a blue lace dress and elevated her height in a pair of gold wedges.

The mum-of-four, who just recently welcomed twins, shielded her eyes behind a pair of aviator sunglasses.

She was later seen sitting with her fiance Billy Debosq as they got ready to film a scene together.

Trendy: Amy Childs put on a leggy display in a blue lace dress and elevated her height in a pair of gold wedges

Shady lady: The mum-of-four, who just recently welcomed twins, shielded her eyes behind a pair of aviator sunglasses

Lights, camera, action! She was later seen sitting with her fiance Billy Debosq as they got ready to film a scene together

Pals: Amy posed alongside Harry Derbidge, who looked trendy in a pink and white patterned shirt and shorts

Handsome: His blonde hair was slicked back and he added a pair of pink sliders and matching pink sunglasses

Gorgeous: Chloe Meadows showed off her ample cleavage and toned figure in a metallic silver two-piece

Accessories: She added a white knitted sarong, a pair of black and gold sliders and a slew of gold necklaces

Flawless: Her blonde tresses were swept up in a high ponytail and she sported a light palette of make-up

Amy posed alongside Harry Derbidge, who looked trendy in a pink and white patterned shirt and shorts.

His blonde hair was slicked back and he added a pair of pink sliders and matching pink sunglasses.

Chloe Meadows showed off her ample cleavage and toned figure in a metallic silver two-piece.

She added a white knitted sarong, a pair of black and gold sliders and a slew of gold necklaces.

Her blonde tresses were swept up in a high ponytail and she sported a light palette of make-up.

Courtney Green looked sultry in a black bikini underneath a see-through black mesh skirt and matching cardigan.

Her tanned pins were on full display and she added a pair of black and gold designer sandals.

Elma Pazar caught the eye in a bright green string bikini, which she paired with a coordinating sarong.

Sizzling: Courtney Green looked sultry in a black bikini underneath a see-through black mesh skirt and matching cardigan

Leggy display: Her tanned pins were on full display and she added a pair of black and gold designer sandals

Beauty: Her long brunette locks were styled in loose waves and she sported a brown smoky eyeshadow look

Eye-catching: Elma Pazar caught the eye in a bright green string bikini, which she paired with a coordinating sarong

Dazzling: Her long tresses were curled and pinned back, with several strands left down to frame her face

Mates: Best pals Diags and Dan Edgar were seen laughing as they hitched a ride on the back of a buggy

Hot stuff: Dan showed off his shirtless torso under an unbuttoned white shirt and pair of bright patterned shorts

Fashionable: Diags also displayed a peek at his chest in a open grey shirt, which he teamed with a pair of white shorts

Her long tresses were curled and pinned back, with several strands left down to frame her face.

Best pals Diags and Dan Edgar were seen laughing as they hitched a ride on the back of a buggy.

Dan showed off his shirtless torso under an unbuttoned white shirt and pair of bright patterned shorts.

Diags also displayed a peek at his chest in a open grey shirt, which he teamed with a pair of white shorts.

Saffron Lempriere dazzled in a sparkly green midi dress, which she styled with a pair of gold flip flops.

She wore her long blonde hair straight and pinned back by a matching glittery green headband.

Saffron added a pair of statement silver earrings in the shape of palm trees, while sporting oversized sunglasses.

Sensational: Saffron Lempriere dazzled in a sparkly green midi dress, which she styled with a pair of gold flip flops

Muscled: Jordan Brook flaunted his chiselled chest as he left his long-sleeved black shirt unbuttoned

Hunk: He added a pair of baggy black shorts and matching black sliders, while hiding behind aviator sunglasses.

Amazing: Junaid Ahmed looked typically stylish in a white semi-sheer button-up shirt and matching trousers

Jordan Brook flaunted his chiselled chest as he left his long-sleeved black shirt unbuttoned.

He added a pair of baggy black shorts and matching black sliders, while hiding behind aviator sunglasses.

Junaid Ahmed looked typically stylish in a white semi-sheer button-up shirt and matching trousers.

TOWIE's season 32 is set to air on ITVBe later on this year with 'juicy gossip, major LOL's and serious drama' being teased.
She announced last year that she was waiting on her jailbird fiance David to be released from prison so that he could propose in style.

Yet Danniella Westbrook was already in full wedding plan mode ahead of his release later this year as she was spotted trying on bridal gowns in Turkey on Saturday.

The EastEnders star, 49, was a blushing bride as she slipped into a princess style gown with an embellished bodice and voluminous tulle skirt.

She added to the glamorous ensemble with a floor length veil that was secured in place with a glittering silver tiara.

Danniella looked in good spirits during the fitting despite the fact she was still recovering after 'nightmare' facial reconstruction surgery.

Here comes the bride! Danniella Westbrook was already in full wedding plan mode ahead of her jailbird fiance's prison release as she was spotted trying on bridal gowns in Turkey

Full steam ahead: She announced last year that she was waiting on her jailbird fiance to be released from prison so that he could propose in style

Last year, Danniella spoke about her wedding plans with David, who at 28 is 20 years her junior.

She said: 'I've got a big ring that was made for me, and I wore it into the jail and David said, "it was lovely but it's not big enough", so there is a bigger one coming.

'He has asked me to marry him but I told him to wait until he gets home. He asks me all the time, he even asked me at the jail. He didn't get down on one knee or anything but he's like, "we are getting married you know."'

According to The Sun, David is serving time in prison for counterfeit goods and engaging in various physical altercations but will be released in September, just before her 50th birthday.

The pair were previously in a 'tumultuous' relationship after meeting each other other in Spain five years ago.

Yet despite their 'up-and-down' romance, Danniella explained to The Daily Star: 'We just stayed in touch and he went to jail early 2019 and he got 9 years 9 months. He's home next year though, he's got 11 months to go.'

It could be third time lucky for the former Celebrity Big Brother housemate, who has been married twice before.

Her first marriage was to van driver Ben Morgan in 1998, but they divorced nine months later.

In 2001, the star married businessman Kevin Jenkins, almost four months after the birth of their daughter Jodie. They divorced in 2020.

Loved-up: Danniella, 49, is engaged to David, 28, who is reportedly serving time in prison for counterfeit goods and engaging in various physical altercations

Sitting pretty: The EastEnders star was a blushing bride as she slipped into a princess style gown with an embellished bodice and voluminous tulle skirt

Like a princess: She added to the glamorous ensemble with a floor length veil that was secured in place with a glittering silver tiara

Posing up a storm: Danniella seemed in great spirits as she twirled around in her embellished gown for a series of snaps

Ink-redible: Danniella flashed her back tattoo in the corseted gown

Working on the fit: Danniella was ensuring her gown would be tailored perfectly

Ouch: Danniella looked in good spirits during the fitting despite the fact she was still recovering after 'nightmare' facial reconstruction surgery

New face: Danniella had a thread lift, liposuction in her cheeks and lips, fat grafting on her chin and her jawline etched after her septum collapsed from excessive drug use in 2002

With less than a year until David is a free man, the actress is already planning some risque business for the pair of them.

After revealing they had already slept together in Spain, Danniella confessed: 'There's nothing like that going on now though, they listen in to all your phone calls and screen the emails and photocopy all of the letters so we can't risk anything rude on there as all the screws will see it first.

'But there will be many sleepless nights on my gorgeous new bed once he's out.'

For now, Danniella is also focusing on her appearance after her nightmare surgery at a clinic in Turkey which she had in a desperate bid to save her collapsing face.

The actress- whose wounds have been stitched up with non-dissolvable fishing wire - previously detailed the horrifying procedure as she revealed she will 'go back' to her original doctor in the UK to have corrective surgery.

She claimed the painful operation she has waited years for was performed without anaesthesia.

Danniella alleged the surgeon even slapped her during the op, and her phone was confiscated by an assistant as she begged for him to stop.

She said: 'He was going to me, "Stop crying, stop crying." I said, "I'm in a lot of pain. Please, please. I'm frightened. I'm in a lot of pain. I didn't know this was going to happen." It was really frightening'.

She then began to panic, and continued to tell the doctor she was in serious pain, but she said he told her to 'Stop f*****g moving, I tell you, stop moving.'

Despite undergoing another procedure in Turkey in a bid to save her collapsing face, Danniella has since admitted she hates her new look.

Danniella had a thread lift, liposuction in her cheeks and lips, fat grafting on her chin and her jawline etched after her septum collapsed from excessive drug use in 2002.

Taking to Instagram, the actress shared a photo of herself taken before the surgery and said she couldn't believe what had been done to her.

She wrote: 'Three months ago I looked like this and thought I looked awful. I'd give my world to look like this again...

'I can't believe what's been done to me with this surgery.'

Struggle: Danniella wanted the reconstruction for the past seven years, but was unable to find a surgeon who would operate because her septum had completely collapsed

Third time's the charm: Danniella's first marriage was to van driver Ben Morgan in 1998, but they divorced nine months later. In 2001, she married businessman Kevin Jenkins and they divorced in 2020

Former self: At the height of her use it was reported she would take up to five grams of cocaine a day, blowing close to 250,000 on the drug (pictured in 1996)

When Danniella first woke up after the lengthy procedure, she said she looked 'like she had done 10 rounds with Tyson Fury'.

She wanted the reconstruction for the past seven years, but was unable to find a surgeon who would operate because her septum had completely collapsed.

The actress' battle with drugs has been well-publicised, and she famously had her nose reconstructed after her septum collapsed from excessive cocaine use in 2002.

At the height of her use it was reported she would take up to five grams of cocaine a day, blowing close to 250,000 on the drug.
Dhakota Williams is known for incredible figure - and she loves to flaunt it.

The gangland heiress-turned-OnlyFans star was at it again on Monday when she poured her knockout figure into a bikini and shared footage of the moment to Instagram.

Dhakota, 21, could barely contain her ample assets in a green bikini top, as she covered her modesty with a matching wrap.

In another frame, the busty brunette ensured all eyes were on her as she poked her tongue out.

Dhakota joined OnlyFans in August and her mother Roberta soon followed.

Dhakota Williams is known for incredible figure - and she loves to flaunt it. The gangland heiress-turned-OnlyFans star was at it again on Monday when she poured her knockout figure into a bikini and shared footage of the moment to Instagram. Pictured

Dhakota, 21, could barely contain her ample assets in a green bikini top, as she covered her modesty with a matching wrap. In another frame, the busty brunette ensured all eyes were on her as she poked her tongue out

The pair recently discussed their foray into the sex industry with The Daily Telegraph, revealing they had 'no choice' due to their infamous history.

'I can't get a normal job like anyone else,' Roberta told the publication.

Meanwhile, Dhakota said she'd been thinking about joining for some time before finally pulling the trigger.

'Mum gave me the courage to do it. There is no shame in owning your femininity,' she declared.

Dhakota joined OnlyFans in August 2022 and her mother Roberta soon followed. The pair recently discussed their foray into the sex industry with The Daily Telegraph, revealing they had 'no choice' due to their infamous history.

The duo recently starred in a live show where they delved into their life with infamous underworld figure Carl - Robert's late husband and Dhakota's father.

The show, titled My Life Our Life, is described on the Eventbrite website as 'Roberta and Dhakota Williams talking about Life Before Carl, with Carl, and Now.'

Dhakota was nine-years-old when her father, drug kingpin Carl, was bludgeoned to death at Barwon Prison by fellow inmate Matthew Charles Johnson in 2010.

The hitman, whose life was made famous by the TV series Underbelly, had been jailed for 35 years in 2007 for ordering the murders of three rivals, and more time for conspiring to kill a fourth.

Carl wrote several long letters to his wife and others from jail in the months before he was murdered, that have since been made into the book Life Sentence.

The couple married in 2001 and were still husband and wife at the time of his death in 2010.
Kyle Sandilands and Tegan Kynaston are enjoying their first blissful weeks as newlyweds.

On Monday, the pair, who have been honeymooning in Saint Tropez, France, headed off to their next location, Barcelona, by private jet.

They were joined by the shock jock's longtime manager and friend Bruno Bouchet, and Bruno's partner Laura.

The group gathered on the tarmac for photos, with Tegan taking along the pair's baby son, Otto, in a pram.

Further images, shared to Instagram Stories by Bruno, showed Tegan getting cosy on the plane with her baby boy.

Kyle Sandilands and Tegan Kynaston, who have been honeymooning in Saint Tropez, France, headed off to their next location, Barcelona, by private jet on Monday. They were joined by the shock jock's longtime manager and friend Bruno Bouchet, and Bruno's partner Laura

Kyle also settled in, sitting in a leather seat next to his friend as the plane took to the skies.

Newlyweds Kyle and Tegan are finally free to enjoy a work-free honeymoon as his KIIS FM radio went on break last week.

According to Yahoo Lifestyle, an insider has revealed that the KIIS FM presenter has spent around $500,000 on the three-week holiday.

The couple, who married last month, brought a posse of pals and stayed at a chateau costing around $8200 a night, Daily Mail Australia revealed.

Further images, shared to Instagram Stories by Bruno, showed Tegan getting cosy on the plane with her baby boy

Kyle also settled in, sitting in a leather seat next to his friend as the plane took to the skies

According to Yahoo Lifestyle, an insider has revealed that the KIIS FM presenter has spent around $500,000 on the three-week holiday

As well as Kyle's KIIS FM co-host Jackie 'O' Henderson and her daughter Kitty, Kyle the couple brought along Bruno and Laura.

Also on the jaunt is newsreader Brooklyn Ross and Kyle and Jackie O Show producer Jaimee Blazquez, as well as their partners, and producer 'Intern Pete' Deppeler.

During the two week stay, Kyle continued recording his radio show as well as having days off.

The shock jock tied the knot with his wife Tegan in a $1million ceremony at the heritage-listed Swifts mansion in Sydney's Darling Point.
Robert De Niro has broken his silence over the death of his 18-year-old grandson Leandro who was was found dead on Sunday afternoon with a white powdery substance on a plate near his body.

In a statement today, the actor said: 'Im deeply distressed by the passing of my beloved grandson Leo.

'Were greatly appreciative of the condolences from everyone. We ask that we please be given privacy to grieve our loss of Leo.'

Leandro De Niro Rodriguez was the son of De Niro's adopted daughter Drena, 51, and artist Carlos Rodriguez. On Sunday, Drena announced his death on Instagram, saying: 'I wish that love alone could have saved you.'

Robert De Niro with Leo and his father when he was a child. Leandro's mother announced his death on Instagram and both of his parents paid tribute to him on Sunday night

Leo's father, Carlos, said in a post that his son is 'Gods child now'

Leandro, 19, was found dead sitting in a chair in a $950,000, one-bedroom apartment in the Cipriani Club Residences on Wall Street in New York City on Sunday

The teenager's lifeless body was found sitting in a chair inside a $950,000, one-bedroom apartment in the Cipriani Club Residences on Wall Street.

A police source tells DailyMail.com the substance was found near his body and there were no signs of trauma. He was found by a friend who hadn't heard from him in a few days and was checking in on him, a police source told TMZ.

The concierge at 55 Wall Street confirmed that Leandro lived in the building.

Hed lived alone in the upscale sixth-floor apartment, renting the unit for less than a year, he said. The apartment is located in the same stone building as Cipriani, a luxury venue for events.

He described Leandro as a friendly young man, whod always say hello when he came and went.

Id see him every now and then, and hed always say hi, the concierge said. He just was friendly, kept to himself.

I didnt know who he was until I read the story, he said. Its a tragedy. I was just talking to my coworker that said my daughter just turned 20. You see his (Leandros) picture, he was a baby.

The apartment building on Wall Street where De Niro's grandson was found on Sunday

The concierge said he had never seen De Niro at the apartment.

The 937 sq. ft. one-bedroom apartment is currently up for sale for $945,000 and an open house was scheduled for next Sunday.

Records show it was bought for $915,000 by Richard and Shulamit Charles in 2015 and has been on and off the market ever since.

It was last offered for rent at $4,000 a month.

Richard Charles told DailyMail.com: I really have no information to share. I havent been informed or contacted by anyone.

I didnt know the young man, he added. Clearly its a very sad situation.

Residents in the building, right next to the Wall Street subway stop told DailyMail.com they saw an ambulance and a fire truck pull up on an otherwise tranquil Sunday afternoon.

They were unaware of what had happened until the news broke Monday morning that De Niros grandson was found unresponsive in his apartment.

Aspiring actor and director Leandro was following in his mother and grandfather's career footsteps, landed a small role in 2018's A Star Is Born as the son of Bradley Cooper's best friend, George 'Noodles' Stone, played by Dave Chappelle. He also appeared in Cabaret Maxime in 2018.

Both of his parents paid tribute to him on Instagram on Sunday night.

His father, Carlos, said in a post: 'Words aren't enough to express the joy he gave us or the loss we now endure with our families and friends. He is God's child now. On this full moon his spirit luminates what could not be seen in the dark.'

Drena's post began: 'My beautiful sweet angel. I have loved you beyond words or description from the moment I felt you in my belly.

'You have been my joy my heart and all that was ever pure and real in my life. I wish I was with you right now. I wish I was with you.'

Tragic news: Robert De Niro's grandson Leandro has died at the age of 18 (pictured with his mother Drena and grandfather)

Heartbreaking: Leandro was the son of De Niro's adopted daughter Drena and artist Carlos Mare, with Drena paying tribute to her late son in a heartfelt Instagram post on Monday

Final post: Robert De Niro 's grandson Leandro De Niro Rodriguez appeared in a heartbreaking final social media post shared by his mother Drena on Mother's Day

Drena continued: 'I don't know how to live without you but I'll try to go on and spread the love and light that you so made me feel in getting to be your mama.

'You were so deeply loved and appreciated and I wish that love alone could have saved you. I'm so sorry my baby, I'm so sorry @carlosmare. Rest in Peace and Eternal Paradise my darling boy.'

Leandro's father added in his own comment: 'Words aren't enough to express the joy he gave us or the loss we now endure with our families and friends.

'He is God's child now. On this full moon his spirit luminates what could not be seen in the dark.

'You can't spell LOVE without LEO.'

The pair were immediately flooded with messages of condolences, with one friend commenting: 'Drena don't tell me it's true tell me you're joking because I can't believe Leo isn't with us anymore.

'It's an horrible news to digest. Drena my heart is with you and Carlos and your loved ones - I love you '

Drena responded: 'I know I still hope this is a nightmare and I'll wake up tomorrow.'

Victoria Gotti, the daughter of mob-boss John Gotti, commented she was 'heartbroken' and she had 'no words' following Leandro's death.

She wrote of Leandro: 'You were such a playful handsome amicable and amazing young boy who grew into an amazing young man! May you rest my dear boy and I was so blessed to have shared thanksgiving with yousuch a bright intelligent and well mannered young man. A young life cut far too short.'

Actress Rosie Perez Brooklyn wrote: 'Shocked! I'm so sorry! We are all here for you !!! I love you too much!', while Director and producer Lee Daniels wrote: 'Drena may God keep you in his arms.'

MailOnline has contacted De Niro's representatives for comment.

His mother Drena was adopted by De Niro, and took his surname, after the actor married her mother, Diahnne Abbott, in 1976.

She had a relatively transient lifestyle thanks to her father's vibrant career and split her time between New York City, Los Angeles, and Italy.

In May, Drena had taken to Instagram - weeks before her son's death - to share a sweet post to praise him on Mother's Day.

Family: Drena is pictured with mother Drena and father Carlos Rodriguez

Leandro with his mother in a recent photo she shared for Mothers' Day

Grieving: His father Carlos did not pay a public tribute to his late son but shared an image of a black square on his Instagram page without a caption

Drena and Leandro both appeared briefly in A Star Is Born. He was 13 at the time of filming

Tragic loss: Leandro was the son of De Niro's adopted daughter Drena (pictured in 2016)

Parents: De Niro adopted Diahnne Abbott's daughter after the pair married in 1976 (pictured together in New York in 1977)

In the snaps, Drena could be seen beaming alongside Leandro for a selfie, with another shot showing the pair posing with Leandro's father Carlos Rodriguez.

The post from May 15 post was captioned: 'Mothers Day ~ A Lil bit of Leo Lil bit of Mare , Lots of Sunny & CleoPipa #AliceDoesntLiveHereAnymore. Lots of memories of my soulmate ,fur baby Daisy. Today was a good day  #happymothersday.'

Drena left school and decided to explore the arts, turning her hand to a whole host of career paths including model, DJ and fashion consultant.

She eventually decided to follow in De Niro's footsteps and soon found her feet as an actress and filmmaker.

Her first role was in Allison Anders's Grace of My Heart in 1996 and she went on to star in several of her father's films including 1999's On The Run, 2002's City By The Sea and 2002's Showtime.

De Niro split with Drena's mother in 1988 but the Hollywood A-lister remained in her life nonetheless.

She made De Niro a grandfather in 2003 when she welcomed Leandro with her then-boyfriend Carlos Rodriguez.

Drena, who currently lives in New York, has since turned her attentions to directing and also describes herself as being trained in Muay Thai and martial arts.

The Cipriani Club Residences where the teen was found dead Sunday features a 24 hour concierge and butler service, library, bi-level fitness center, and landscaped roof deck

At 51, Drena is five years older than De Niro's oldest biological child, Raphael, with Abbott. Now 46, he's a Manhattan estate agent whose celebrity clients have included Jon Bon Jovi and Renee Zellweger.

De Niro also has two children  twins Aaron and Julian, 27,  from his relationship between 1988 and 1995 with former model and actress Toukie Smith. They were conceived by in vitro fertilisation and delivered by a surrogate mother.

In 1998, he also had a son, Elliot, 21, and in 2011, a daughter, Helen, 11, (also born via surrogate) during his stormy 20-year marriage to his second wife, former flight attendant Grace Hightower.

In May, the 79-year-old actor confirmed that he'd welcomed his seventh child Gia Virginia with his girlfriend Tiffany Chan, 43, to whom he has been linked since summer 2021.

New parents: Robert shares the newborn baby girl with his girlfriend Tiffany Chen (pictured together on June 7 in NYC), to whom he's been linked since summer 2021

His eldest daughter: Robert has two kids - Drena, 51 (pictured with Robert in 2022), and Raphael, 46 - with his ex wife Diahnne Abbott

De Niro (right) is pictured with his son Julian (far left) as well as John David Washington, Danielle Brooks and Samuel L. Jackson in November 2022 in New York City

His son Elliot: De Niro with his son Elliot, who is now 24, in 2011 in France

His girl: De Niro with daughter Helen Grace out for ice cream with their puppies in New York in April 2019

Gia was born on April 6 and weighed 8 pounds and 6 ounces.

In June, De Niro gushed about raising a newborn once again while at the Tribeca Film Festival in New York City, stating: 'It feels great.'

In regards to how he has changed as a father, the Goodfellas star said: 'I have certain awareness  when you're older you have awareness of certain things in life, dynamics, everything, family dynamics.'

He added: 'You can't avoid learning certain things and how you can deal with those and manage them and this and that, the usual.

'It's amazing, but I'm very happy about it.'

Shortly after the news of his new family addition came to light, the actor told Page Six that welcoming his seventh child was 'planned' and questioned 'How you could not plan that kind of thing?'


Sanjay Raut (File Photo) A day after the dust of the Maharashtra political quake hovers in the air, the Opposition Maha Vikas Aghadi got into a war-mode with Shiv Sena (UBT) MP and Chief Spokesperson Sanjay Raut predicting that the state will soon get a new Chief Minister, here on Monday. Speaking to mediapersons, Raut said that the Shiv Sena CM Eknath Shinde's days are numbered and even its ally BJP has perceived this.



"At best, he is a 'temporary guest' ('kuchh dinon ka mehmaan'). The Speaker's verdict on the disqualification of 16 MLAs including Shinde has to come soon. The BJP has realised that Shinde has outlived his utility and the NCP split is to safeguard their position later," said Raut.



The Sena (UBT) leader added that Ajit Pawar has become Deputy CM for a record 5th time, "but his target is higher, the post of CM".



"After the Speaker's verdict, there will be a change of guard in the state and Ajit Pawar's deal is for the top post. The state will get a new CM soon," Raut reiterated.



He added how the BJP has been rattled by its May rout in Karnataka and all recent surveys indicating an even worse debacle for it in Maharashtra whenever the elections are held here.



"All this is being done to salvage their position in the state. First they broke the Shiv Sena and now they have split the NCP, but the people of the state are watching all this and will not spare them," he declared.



Pulling the government's ears, Raut lamented that Sunday (July 2), the bodies of the 25 (out of 26) victims of the Buldhana bus tragedy on early Saturday, who hailed from different parts of the state, were being given a mass cremation in Buldhana.



"As their pyres burnt, in Mumbai there was rejoicing, handshakes and hugs in Raj Bhavan where the new Deputy CM and Ministers were sworn-in This was improper, they should have at least waited for the cremation fires to extinguish before their celebrations, said Raut.






The stars have descended on the French capital in style.

And it was the turn of Christian Dior on Monday, as as slew of the great and good of the style world attended the fashion house's Haute Couture Fall/Winter 2023-2024 at the start of Paris Fashion Week.

Leading the way was Elizabeth Debicki, who looked phenomenal in a Parisian-inspired look complete with a beret and veil.

Joining the stunner was fellow actresses Natalie Portman, Rosamund Pike and Gemma Arterton, who wore floral, black and cream ensembles respectively.

Natalie Portman, who has been a spokesmodel for the brand for 12 years, was naturally flying the flag for the fashion house in a chic look.

Stunner: The Crown's Elizabeth Debicki nailed Parisian chic in a beret and monochrome as she joined elegant Rosamund Pyke and Gemma Arterton at Dior's PFW show

Stunning: A slew of the great and good of the style world attended the fashion house's Haute Couture Fall/Winter 2023-2024 at the start of Paris Fashion Week on Monday, including Rosamund Pike

Chic: Gemma was the epitome of elegance in a cream coord, comprising a short sleeved crop top and city shorts while her hair was soft and neatly styled

Looking good: Natalie Portman, who has been a spokesmodel for the brand for 12 years, was naturally flying the flag for the fashion house in a chic look

Perfection: Elizabeth's alabaster complexion helped make her slick of red lipstick pop

A vision: Rosamund pulled her hair off her face but allowed straight lengths to fall over her shoulders

Stunner: Gemma was radiant, with minimal make-up adding to the clean cut style of her look

Wow: Natalie Portman, who has been a spokesmodel for the brand for 12 years, was naturally flying the flag for the fashion house in a chic look

Elegant: Elizabeth's tank top bore the initals CD, while her bag was the trademark quilted design from the fashion giant

Elizabeth, who soared to fame playing Princess Diana in The Crown, looked incredible in a tight vest tucked into a leather pencil skirt.

She toted a small black handbag, with the piece de resistance being her beret which was adorned with studs and a wide-net veil.

Rosamund meanwhile wore a structured dress falling off one shoulder and featuring an elegant maxi hemline and figure-enhancing nipped in waist.

Gemma was the epitome of elegance in a cream coord, comprising a short sleeved crop top and city shorts while her hair was soft and neatly styled.

Black Swan star Natalie, 42, looked stunning in a strapless prom-style dress while her hair was teased into a bouncy blow-dry with soft curls at the ends.

It was a day of muted glamour as the stars in attendance wore neutral tones in a nod to the new season's fashions on display on the runway.

Other stars in attendance included Nadia Tereszkiewicz, Camille Cottin and Amira Casar, all of whom looked incredible in their chic Dior looks.

A vision: Black Swan star Natalie, 42, looked stunning in a strapless prom-style dress while her hair was teased into a bouncy blow-dry with soft curls at the ends

Oozing confidence: Natalie confidently posed with her hands on her hips as she wore her summery white dress with a floral print

Completing the look: The star carried a white handbag with her while she opted for a pair of silver high heel shoes

Sheer beauty: She wore lashings of make-up to highlight her pretty features, opting for a palette of natural hues

Radiant: Natalie looked incredible against the historic backdrop

Stunner: Nadia Tereszkiewicz was chic in stripes for the event

Trendy: Nadia's ensemble featured a corset layered over a white shirt

A vision: Camille Cottin looked elegant in a crisp white shirt

A vision: Lena Mahfouf wowed as she posed up a storm at the event

Stunning: Amira Casar wore a deep cream trench with statement ruched sleeves

Check me out: Olympia of Greece looked incredible in a lace ensemble

Radiant: Sofia Achaval de Montaigu looked sensational in a white gown

Trendy: American visual artist Mickalene Thomas looked stylish in all black

A vision: The styles on display were dazzling and made a bold statement

Elizabeth's appearance comes amid her blazing the promo trail for Guardians Of The Galaxy Vol. 3, which premiered earlier this year.

The original installment in the Guardians of the Galaxy series was released in 2014, with the second film in the franchise subsequently released to much praise in 2017.

Elizabeth portrays Ayesha in the film, who is the leader of the Sovereign, a group of aliens who believe they are superior to other races. She initially took on the role in the franchise's second film, with her return confirmed late last year.

While there was much speculation that Elizabeth would reprise the role, many worried that her filming schedule for Netflix's The Crown would restrict this.

But managing to do both, it seems the star is in high demand currently as it was recently revealed that she is amongst a new batch of actors joining a star-studded sequel to the Mia Gothstarring horror films X and Pearl.

Nice! Bryanboy was perfecting the Dior look in a chic ensemble

Glittering: Marisa Berenson went for all out glamour in an adorned top with pearl earrings and a necklace

Amazing: One of the dresses featured an elaborate cape which sat atop a bias cut dress
Ashley Tisdale offered some life advice as she celebrated her 38th birthday on Sunday.

The actress, who was recently spotted out and about in Los Angeles, shared a beachy photo carousel sharing life wisdom garnered from the past year.

The former Disney star showed off her trim torso in a black one piece bathing suit and white unbuttoned shorts.

Her dark blonde hair was styled in natural curls.

She wore light makeup and accessorized with a gold pendant and dark sunglasses.

Happy birthday: Ashley Tisdale celebrated her 38th birthday Sunday and marked the day sharing some beachy photos and life advice

'This last year has had so many unbelievable moments,' the MTV Movie Award winner began. 'Things Ive dreamt up but never thought was possible.'

'Here is what I learned thus far. Manifestation is real, being present is most important, hard work pays off, being authentic takes learning about yourself and that takes time, being there for others goes such a long way, and when life surprises you and it gets hard learn the lesson and rise above! 38 and life is great '

The High School Musical star celebrated the big day in New York with her husband, Christopher French, 41, and their daughter Jupiter, two.

Part of the celebrations included dinner at an outdoor cafe with a plate full of cupcakes and a nicely harmonized rendition of Happy Birthday.

Ashley's big sister, Jennifer, 41, shared a sweet message using a photo from their childhood with Ashley sitting in a toy car and Jennifer standing over her, holding her hand.

'Happy birthday to my baby sister @AshleyTisdale,' the actress turned real estate agent wrote.

'I will always be there to protect you, hold your hand when life gets scary, be your biggest cheerleader and forever best friend no matter how old you get!! Happy birthday babe.'

The business builder has been in the Big Apple promoting her Frenshe products.

Words of wisdom: The actress shared some words of wisdom with her fans telling them, 'This last year has had so many unbelievable moments. Things Ive dreamt up but never thought was possible'

Life lessons: 'Manifestation is real,' she wrote next to a carousel of photos from the beach, 'being present is most important, hard work pays off, being authentic takes learning about yourself and that takes time, being there for others goes such a long way'

Cupcakes: Ashley celebrated the big day in New York with her husband, Christopher French, 41, and their daughter Jupiter, two. Part of the celebrations included dinner at an outdoor cafe with a plate full of cupcakes and a nicely harmonized rendition of Happy Birthday

Sisterly love: Ashley's big sister Jennifer, 41, shared a sweet message which included a photo from their childhood

The line features a variety of wellness and skincare products including candles, linen sprays and lotions and serums.

In an interview with Brit+Co, the entrepreneur said the collection was inspired by her own self-care practice.

'In my thirties, I've been married and I just feel a lot more grounded with who I am and not, I guess, confident in just what I do,' she explained.

'What I'm doing with Frenshe just feels way more meaningful to people and for people who are struggling. I just feel like I have a whole new kind of purpose in life.'

Ashley has also taken her talent for interior design public and launched her own company Frenshe Interiors.

'Im a very creative person [and] feel like my creativity comes out in various forms,' she told the outlet.

'It just depends on what I'm inspired by. I love to be creative and that's where my happiness lives.'
America's Got Talent fans have been left disappointed after it was confirmed the judges would be taking a two-week break.

The official Twitter account for the NBC program recently announced: 'We're signing off, but mark your calendars! #AGT returns in TWO weeks,' alongside a gif of judge Howie Mandel.

Howie, 67, retweeted the post and added: 'See you on July 11th #AGT,' but some viewers were unimpressed and rushed to social media to share their disappointment.

It is just the latest in a long line of controversies to plague the show in recent weeks.

Back soon: America's Got Talent fans have been left disappointed after it was confirmed the judges would be taking a two-week break

Save the date: The official AGT Twitter account announced the hiatus alongside a gif of Howie Mandel

Replying to the tweet about the hiatus, one fan wrote: '2 weeks?! UGH!' while another admitted: 'I can't wait that long!'

Over on Reddit, another fan wrote: 'It looks like AGT is off next week and back July 11- is that true? So annoying to wait two weeks.'

Someone else replied and explained: 'Yes. Preempted for 4th of July programming.'

Simon Cowell, along with fellow judges Heidi Klum and Sofia Vergara, will be absent from television screens for a fortnight as they enjoy the holidays.

But it comes after viewers were left questioning other decisions taken on the show in recent months.

After tuning in on June 27, many fans were confused by the lack of a golden buzzer moment.

'No golden buzzer tonight? Weird #AGT,' one person tweeted, while another asked: 'No Golden Buzzer tonight??? #agt @AGT.'

'Oh? No golden buzzer this episode. Damn guess we gotta wait two weeks for Sofia's golden buzzer. #AGT,' a third fan predicted.

A fourth viewer seemed relieved and posted: 'Ok...no golden buzzer. Whew! #AGT.'

The gang: AGT host Terry Crews with judges Howie Mandel, Heidi Klum, Sofia Vergara and Simon Cowell

Last month, AGT host Terry Crews also left viewers unimpressed when he pressed his golden buzzer for The Atlanta Drum Academy.

The Academy teaches kids how to play the drums, and the troupe of 20 students was led by eight-year-old Chioma as they took to the stage to perform.

The act, which last just under two minutes, forayed from an acoustic solo by Chioma to the whole ensemble drumming in sync, all the while carrying out complex physical choreography in time to the rhythm.

The final stretch saw the energetic company dance and drum to the tunes of 2010 chart-topper OMG by Usher and will.i.am and Tag Team's 1993 hit Whoomp! (There It Is), the latter concluding the performance.

When OMG came on, a reaction cam showed Terry begin to enthusiastically bounce along to the beat as he watched the group from the wings of the stage.

Judge Heidi Klum, 50, enthused how she 'love[s] that you do something with your extra time outside of school - instead of being on your computers you're putting this amazing act together!

'I love that!' she added, giving two thumbs up.

Judge Sofia Vergara, 50, similarly expressed enthusiasm for the crew.

'I didn't like it,' began judge Simon Cowell, 63, eliciting boos from the audience.

Terry's turn: Last month, AGT host Terry Crews also left viewers unimpressed when he pressed his golden buzzer for The Atlanta Drum Academy

Sweet moment: The 54-year-old spoke to The Atlanta Drum Academy ahead of their audition

He briefly paused for suspense before finishing the thought: 'I absolutely loved it!' - prompting the crowd to burst into cheers.

'I mean seriously, what's not to like? They're so much fun and they're so talented. This is one of my favorite, favorite auditions this year. I really mean that!'

He continued, 'Okay, I think I know where this is going ,' implying that he was certain The Atlanta Drum Academy would garner enough 'yes' votes from the judges panel to advance.

Suddenly, Terry, 54, burst on to the stage, frantically waving his arms as he bellowed, 'No, no, no, no, no, no NO! There is NO need to vote! NO NEED!'

He then addressed Chioma, recounting how the pint-size percussionist had told him prior to taking the stage about his 'dream' to get the golden buzzer.

'And the Atlanta Drum Academy, I am honored to make that dream come true!' Terry continued before smashing his hand down on the golden buzzer.

Chioma's expression changed from thrilled to over-the-moon as the group began to jump up and down in victory - with the pressing of the golden buzzer unleashing a torrent of gold confetti from above.

'Undeserving': Some AGT viewers were disappointed that Terry used his Golden Buzzer for the young drummers

Sofia's turn: Viewers think that Sofia Vergara will press her Golden Buzzer when the show returns after its two-week hiatus

However, not everyone was as enthusiastic about the Terry's move - and many took to Twitter to make their feelings known.

'You have to have some of the most undeserving Golden Buzzers in AGT history. And that is really saying something. The group was good but you are clearly there to make a statement, not to actually pick the most talented,' one viewer fumed.

'The weakest golden buzzer ever,' griped another.

As yet another armchair critic put it, 'You did a nice thing. But it's a talent show. Supposed to send the best acts through. Their routine wasn't together. Never seen any gold ticket winner not completely smash it.'

The original concept behind AGT's golden buzzer was that each judge gets one chance per season to use it on a contestant they deem particularly deserving - resulting in the act being automatically advanced to the next round of the competition.
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Bella Thorne put on a seriously sizzling display as she enjoyed a sun-kissed getaway to Italy with her fiance Mark Emms.

The star, 25, risked a wardrobe malfunction in a very skimpy triangle bikini as she packed on the PDA with her hunky future husband.

She left very little to the imagination as she basked in the sunshine in a string swimsuit with an arty blue design.

The couple, who announced their engagement in May, could hardly keep their hands off one another as they enjoyed some quality time together by the shore.

Mark wrapped Bella up in his arms from the behind as he lavished her with kisses.

Packing on the PDA! Bella Thorne put on a seriously sizzling display as she enjoyed a sun-kissed getaway to Italy with her fiance Mark Emms

Whoa! Bella flaunted her incredible body in a sexy triangle bikini with a semi-sheer top thrown over

She tenderly placed her hand upon his head as he gave her cheek a peck.

The couple looked totally lost in each other as they flung their arms around one another, completely tuning out the beach full of visitors.

The beauty was a vision of summertime glam in her sexy look.

She rocked a chunky gold necklace with a heart, a slew of rings, and edgy sunglasses. A bold red slick of nail polished adorned her nails, and she also tossed on a semi-sheer white top over her swimsuit.

As for Mark, he sported a black T-shirt and colorful shorts.

Once they were all done for the day, Bella tossed on a pair of slouchy trousers, a floppy hat, and sandals.

She carried her belongings about in an ultra chic woven Loewe tote.

Bella reached for her love as they departed the beach, before he placed his hand upon the small of her hand.

Love me! Thorne and her fiance could hardly keep their hands off one another

Kisses: Mark had his fiancee wrapped up in his arms as they enjoyed the sunshine

Sun-kissed! The couple didn't have a problem displaying their love for one another

Too cute: She lovingly held his hand

Summertime chic: Eventually she changed into a pair of slouchy green trousers, sandals, a floppy hat and Loewe bag

Later, Bella shared a mirror selfie snap with her sister, Dani, and their friends as they showed off their beach day ensembles.

She also shared a zoomed-in shot showing off her outfit details and, at the same time, her stunning figure.

The Midnight Sun actress announced her engagement to Mark, an entrepreneur and producer, in late May.

The couple met last year on the beach in Ibiza at Cara Delevigne's birthday party.

'It was love at first sight as the sun rose,' the American Horror Stories star told Vogue Weddings.

The Imagen Foundation Award winner and her fiance also posed together in a sweet photo announcing the news on social media.

Bella made sure to included the 10-plus carat emerald cut diamond engagement ring prominently in the photo.

I want to hold your hand! The couple linked hands as they strolled across the pebbly beach

So romantic: The lovebirds shared a passionate smooch

Cheeky! Thorne displayed her pert backside as she dashed across the sand

Beach babe! Emms couldn't take his eyes off his stunning fiancee

The couple had been keeping the secret for a while.

Mark, who also owns the New York City hotspot The Mulberry, actually popped the questions at Bella's house in California on Mother's Day.

The Divinity star told the publication she'd like to have the wedding at a country manor in the United Kingdom, but has not announced a wedding date.

The bride-to-be did reveal that she is looking for more than one look for the big day, with an eye toward vintage Schiaparelli or Dior.

Summer loving! It all comes just over a month after Bella announced her engagement to Mark

Wedding bells: The Divinity star told the publication she'd like to have the wedding at a country manor in the United Kingdom, but has not announced a wedding date

Group snap: Later, Bella shared a mirror selfie snap with her sister, Dani, and their friends as they showed off their beach day ensembles

Super close-up: She also shared a zoomed-in shot showing off her outfit details and, at the same time, her stunning figure

'Every bride does not need one gown,' she said hinting at multiple wardrobe changes, 'but four!'

The busy actress has a slate of projects on her roster, including the upcoming Saint Clare.

The horror-comedy focuses on a quiet college student with a 'divine vocation for killing,' according to the movie's description on IMDB.
Coronation Street serial killer Stephen Reid's next victim has been 'confirmed' as his evil ways continue to rumble on.

Murderer Stephen (Todd Boyce) has been causing havoc on the cobbles as he attempts to gain control of Weatherfield's underwear factory Underworld.

The Canadian businessman has already killed three people since arriving on the scene.

He saw off Jenny Connor's (Sally Ann Matthews) fiance Leo Thompkins (Joe Frost) in a flashback episode last year, and both his father Teddy Thompkins (Grant Burgin) and a former client Rufus Donahue (Steve Meo) this year.

The ruthless criminal has also been attempting to kill off Underworld boss Carla Connor (Alison King) by continuously drugging her and tried to murder his fiancee Elaine Jones (Paula Wilcox).

Chilling: Coronation Street serial killer Stephen Reid's (Todd Boyce) next victim has been 'confirmed' as his evil ways continue to rumble on

Terror plot: The ruthless criminal has been attempting to kill off Underworld boss Carla Connor (Alison King) by continuously drugging her

In addition, he has terrorised some local teenagers who attempted to buy drugs from him.

Now, artificial intelligence has waded in on who Stephen could put an end to next in a dramatic twist.

According to the Daily Star, Bard AI states the exact identity of Stephen's next victim is 'unknown' but there are a number of possibilities.

Stephen recently took out a life insurance policy on Elaine which means that if she dies, her entire estate would be left to him.

He has been taking 380 each month from Underworld's accounts to pay for the life insurance, paying the money to a mystery business named Seagull Ltd.

However, Carla told him Owen Longford (Ben Hull) wants to inspect the company accounts, prompting Stephen to become very concerned.

Bard AI's software stated: 'Stephen has already tried to kill Elaine once, and he may not give up until she is dead. Elaine is also a wealthy woman, and Stephen is motivated by her money.'

And even actor Todd believes his character Stephen could kill off Elaine next, recently telling the Mirror: 'That would be the numbers you would connect...'

Ruthless: Stephen has taken out a life insurance policy against his fiancee Elaine Jones (Paula Wilcox) after proposing while high on LSD

However, the AI software also suggested Tim Metcalfe (Joe Duttine) could be in Stephen's sights after growing suspicious of the killer.

'Stephen could kill Tim to silence him and prevent him from exposing him as a killer,' the software said.

Despite his drugging of Carla, Stephen did not manage to kill her and Todd has suggested the character will continue to do whatever he needs to takeover Underworld.

'He's got a few people who are getting on his nerves or making him nervous because they could jeopardise his future. He's worked so hard and I think he's come this far,' he said. 'He doesn't want to have done all this in vain. He wants to have a nice life.'

Coronation Street continues on Monday on ITV1 and ITVX at 8pm.
New Amsterdam star Tyler Labine has revealed he suffered a 'potentially fatal blood clot' in his intestines and liver.

Labine, 45, revealed he recently spent three days in the hospital 'trying not to die' after learning his incredibly painful stomach ache was in fact an emergency.

The actor detailed the heath scare on his Instagram account on Sunday, along with video and images capturing his ambulance ride and subsequent medical care.

'Sometimes it's a Tuesday and you're walking around with a tummy ache so you try to sleep it off. Then sometimes you wake up on a weds with a stomach ache so bad you decide to go to the ER at your local hospital. And then sometimes your tummy ache turns out to be a potentially fatal blood clot in your intestines and liver and you have to spend the next 3 days in the hospital trying not to die. Just sometimes.'

The health scare has prompted Labine to 'count his blessings'.

Health scare: New Amsterdam star Tyler Labine has revealed he suffered a 'potentially fatal blood clot' that landed him in the hospital for three days.

'I'm doing alright. Slow recovery but I'm here with my family supporting me and my lovely girlfriend Martha taking care of me. Im counting my blessings and just possibly reassessing what's really important to me in this life. Thanks everyone. SO much love,' he added.

The post ended with the hashtags, '#hospital #health #life #death #love #family #girlfriend #healthy #youonlyliveonce.'

Tyler's followers and famous friends alike inundated the comments section with messages of support.

'Oh man. Im so sorry. Sending healing thoughts,' actress Fiona Gubelmann posted.

'Praying for you, brother!' Shazam! star Zachary Levi wrote.

'Sending love hermano,' actor Alejandro Hernandez posted.

Labine had been playing Dr. Iggy Frome on the NBC medical drama series New Amsterdam since 2018.

'A new medical director breaks the rules to heal the system at America's oldest public hospital,' reads a show synopsis.

Terrifying: Labine said he spent 'the next 3 days in the hospital trying not to die' following his admittance

Scary: Labine included footage of his ambulance ride to the emergency room

Staying positive: Despite the scary situation, he managed to flash a thumb's up

Sending their support: Tyler's followers and famous friends alike inundated the comments section with messages of support

Medical drama: Levi played Dr. Iggy Frome on the drama series New Amsterdam, which recently came to an end after five seasons

The show came to an end after five seasons earlier this year.

Speaking with Entertainment Weekly following the series end, executive producer Peter Horton said: 'I have a father-in-law who's a doctor and years ago I directed the pilot to Grey's Anatomy and he said, "This is nothing like what we go through."

'When this came along, I played it for him and he loved it. This hospital show really captured what doctors got into it for, the idealism and the hope that this is what their lives and careers could be. That's really unique to the show and I'm really proud of that.'

In addition to New Amsterdam, Labine's other credits include Escape Room, It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia, Super Troopers 2 and more.
Natalie Portman nailed Parisian chic as she attended Dior's Haute Couture Fall/Winter 2023-2024 show during Paris Fashion Week on Monday.

The actress, 42, looked gorgeous in a strapless white swing dress that was adorned with an abstract floral print.

Natalie, who has been a spokesmodel for the brand for 12 years, showcased her figure in the frock that was cinched at her tiny waist.

The Oscar winner accentuated her features with radiant make-up and her dark hair was teased into a bouncy blow-dry with soft curls at the ends.

She slipped her feet into pair of strappy heels and toted her essentials in a mini cream handbag.

Glam: Natalie Portman, 42, nailed Parisian chic as she attended Dior's Haute Couture Fall/Winter 2023-2024 show during Paris Fashion Week on Monday

Stunning: The actress looked gorgeous in a strapless white swing dress that was adorned with an abstract print

It comes after reports claimed Natalie's husband Benjamin Millepied, 45, had an affair with a 25-year-old woman.

Last month Portman and Millepied's marriage was the subject of an article in the French publication, Voici, which claimed the French dancer and choreographer had an affair with the younger woman - a climate activist named Camille Etienne.

However, People reported that an insider claimed the alleged affair with Etienne was 'short-lived' and is now 'over.'

According to Page Six, Portman learned of her husband's cheating in early March, and that the couple had separated last year but were able to work through their relationship problems.

And now, after this alleged transgression, they are again taking steps to do what they can to save the marriage.

A source confirmed to DailyMail.com that the couple, who have been married for more than 10 years, are in fact still together.

'He knows he made an enormous mistake and he is doing all he can to get Natalie to forgive him and keep their family together,' a source revealed to People.

Gorgeous: The Oscar winner accentuated her features with radiant make-up and her dark hair was teased into a bouncy blow-dry with soft curls at the ends

Pose: Natalie, who has been a spokesmodel for the brand for 12 years, showcased her figure in the frock that was cinched at her tiny waist

Fashion: She slipped her feet into pair of strappy heels and toted her essentials in a mini cream handbag

Ageless: She oozed confidence for the cameras before enjoying the show

Front row: Natalie (R) sat front row alongside fellow actress Lea Seydoux (L)

Chinwag: The duo appeared in high spirits as they chatted and shared a giggle

'Natalie is incredibly private and has no intention of playing this out in the media. Her biggest priority is protecting her children and their privacy.'

Portman, a native of Jerusalem, Israel, and Millepied, who's from Bordeaux, France, share two children together: son Aleph, who turns 12 on June 14, and daughter Amalia, six.

They met back in 2009 on the set of her psychological horror film Black Swan, for which he did the choreography, that resulted in her winning the Best Actress Oscar for her riveting performance.

The lovebirds got engaged in 2010 were married in 2012 at Big Sur, California.

Family: It comes after reports claimed Natalie's husband Benjamin Millepied , 45, had an affair with a 25-year-old woman (pictured in 2022)

In his free time: Photos published in France reportedly show Milliepied spending time with the climate activist Camille Etienne, who is 25

Millepied again worked on choreography for Portman's dark musical drama film Vox Lux in 2018, in which she played a woman who survives a school shooting, only to become a pop star.

Most recently, the leading lady has been promoting her latest production, the romantic drama May December with Julianne Moore and Charles Melton, which made its world premiere at the 76th Cannes Film Festival on May 20.

A number of publications reported that the couple's marital woes were an open secret on the set of the Todd Haynes directed film during the course of the 23 day shoot this past November.
32-time Grammy winner Beyonce Knowles-Carter and her eldest child Blue Ivy Carter donned stylish dresses for the lavish wedding of Jay-Z's mother Gloria Carter at Tribeca 360 in Manhattan on Sunday.

The 11-year-old Grammy-winning producer - who currently serves back-up dancing duties for her famous 41-year-old mother - wore a green silk dress as she walked down a Big Apple street with her grandmother Tina Knowles Lawson,

Beyonce - who relies on stylist KJ Moody - flaunted substantial cleavage in a peach-colored Dolce & Gabbana SS/23 dress, which she paired with a pink-feathered shrug and matching heart-print handbag.

Knowles-Carter's husband of 15 years - Roc Nation rap mogul Jay-Z - opted for a sleek blue tailored suit and necktie as he entered the building ahead of the ladies.

It was an emotional day for the Brooklyn-born 53-year-old (born Shawn Carter) as he was instrumental in helping his mother Gloria come out as a lesbian six years ago.

Holding hands! Beyonce Knowles-Carter and her eldest child Blue Ivy Carter donned glamorous dresses for the lavish wedding of Jay-Z's mother Gloria Carter at Tribeca 360 in Manhattan on Sunday

Nice earrings! The 11-year-old Grammy-winning producer - who currently serves back-up dancing duties for her famous 41-year-old mother - wore a green silk dress as she strutted down a Big Apple street with her grandmother Tina Knowles Lawson (L) and another lady (2-L)

Frock star: Beyonce - who relies on stylist KJ Moody - flaunted substantial cleavage in a peach-colored Dolce & Gabbana SS/23 dress, which

Love is in the air: Her blonde hair was styled in a partial updo for the romantic day

The Shawn Carter Foundation CEO tied the knot on Sunday with Wiltshire Foundation president Roxanne Wiltshire - a Trinidad-born, New Jersey-based mother-of-two - after dating as far back as 2018.

Gloria spoke about 'living two lives happy, but not free' when she publicly came out as a featured artist on Jay-Z's 2017 track Smile.

The 24-time Grammy winner - who was 11 when his father Adnis Reeves abandoned the family - rapped: 'Mama had four kids, but she's a lesbian / Had to pretend so long that she's a thespian / Had to hide in the closet, so she medicate.

'Society shame and the pain was too much to take / Cried tears of joy when you fell in love / Don't matter to me if it's a him or her / I just wanna see you smile through all the hate.'

In 2018, Carter - who earned an honorary doctorate from Lincoln University in 2021 - was honored at the GLAAD Media Awards with a special recognition trophy for the rap track, and she gushed about finding her partner.

'Love gave me the courage to take the power that I allowed other people to have over my life for fear of them revealing my secret,' the former investment firm clerk said onstage the Hilton Midtown.

'I am a human being who has a right to love who I love. So everybody, just smile, be free.'

That same year, Jay-Z recalled on My Guest Needs No Introduction with David Letterman: 'For her to sit in front of me and tell me, "I think I love someone," I mean, I really cried. That's a real story. I cried because I was so happy for her that she was free.'

Outshining the bride! She paired with a pink-feathered shrug and matching heart-print handbag

Patriarch: Knowles-Carter's husband of 15 years - Roc Nation rap mogul Jay-Z (L) - opted for a sleek blue tailored suit and necktie as he entered the building ahead of the ladies

Big day! It was an emotional day for the Brooklyn-born 53-year-old (born Shawn Carter) as he was instrumental in helping his mother Gloria come out as a lesbian six years ago

Also attending Gloria's wedding were Good Morning America co-anchor Robin Roberts and her partner of 18 years, Plant Juice Oils co-founder Amber Laign.

The 62-year-old Daytime Emmy winner - who came out in 2013 - rocked a blue sparkly pantsuit and white Oxfords while the 48-year-old former massage therapist opted for a cranberry-colored silk dress and nude peep-toe heels

Robin - who boasts 850K Instagram followers - posted a car selfie coyly captioned: 'Special date night with Sweet Amber. Wishing all a fun, safe holiday weekend. #sundayvibes.'

Honorary Oscar and Emmy winner Tyler Perry - who owns his own movie/TV studio in Atlanta - was dressed far more casually for the ceremony in a sporty sweatshirt and paint-splattered ombre jeans and sneakers.

Meanwhile, the Texan R&B diva will next bring her sold out, 57-date Renaissance World Tour, supporting her seventh studio album, to the Rogers Centre in Toronto this Saturday and Sunday.

Back in February, Billboard projected that Beyonce's ninth concert tour will gross approximately $300M.

They do! The Shawn Carter Foundation CEO (L, pictured in 2019) tied the knot on Sunday with Wiltshire Foundation president Roxanne Wiltshire (R) - a Trinidad-born, New Jersey-based mother-of-two - after dating as far back as 2018

'Love who you love': Gloria spoke about 'living two lives happy, but not free' when she publicly came out as a featured artist on Jay-Z's 2017 track Smile

The 24-time Grammy winner - who was 11 when his father Adnis Reeves abandoned the family - rapped: 'Mama had four kids, but she's a lesbian / Had to pretend so long that she's a thespian / Had to hide in the closet, so she medicate. 'Society shame and the pain was too much to take / Cried tears of joy when you fell in love / Don't matter to me if it's a him or her / I just wanna see you smile through all the hate' (pictured Sunday)

Legacy: In 2018, Carter - who earned an honorary doctorate from Lincoln University in 2021 - was honored at the GLAAD Media Awards with a special recognition trophy for the rap track, and she gushed about finding her partner

The former investment firm clerk said onstage the Hilton: 'Love gave me the courage to take the power that I allowed other people to have over my life for fear of them revealing my secret. I am a human being who has a right to love who I love. So everybody, just smile, be free'

That same year, Jay-Z recalled on My Guest Needs No Introduction with David Letterman: 'For her to sit in front of me and tell me, "I think I love someone," I mean, I really cried. That's a real story. I cried because I was so happy for her that she was free'

Still going strong! Also attending Gloria's wedding were Good Morning America co-anchor Robin Roberts (L) and her partner of 18 years, Plant Juice Oils co-founder Amber Laign (R)

Flash: The 62-year-old Daytime Emmy winner - who came out in 2013 - rocked a blue sparkly pantsuit and white Oxfords while the 48-year-old former massage therapist opted for a cranberry-colored silk dress and nude peep-toe heels

Robin - who boasts 850K Instagram followers - posted a car selfie coyly captioned: 'Special date night with Sweet Amber. Wishing all a fun, safe holiday weekend. #sundayvibes'

Changing first? Honorary Oscar and Emmy winner Tyler Perry - who owns his own movie/TV studio in Atlanta - was dressed far more casually for the ceremony in a sporty sweatshirt and paint-splattered ombre jeans and sneakers
Controversial series The Idol slammed Kanye West for his anti-Semitism scandal in its shock finale on Sunday.

The series mentioned West's admiration for Nazi leader Adolf Hitler and vile ant-Semitic rants in a scene which saw Lily Rose Depp's character Jocelyn put on a showcase for her management team to convince them she was ready to tour.

In the scene, her agent, referencing Jocelyn's relationship with The Weeknd's character Tedros, said: 'You know, f*****g Kanye was filling arenas until he decided to start following Adolf Hitler.'

Ye last year was banned from Twitter and lost a series of lucrative sponsorship deals after he made a variety of anti-Semitic statements.

He wrote: 'I'm a bit sleepy tonight but when I wake up I'm going death con 3 On JEWISH PEOPLE.

Career-ending: Controversial series The Idol slammed Kanye West for his anti-Semitism scandal in its shock finale on Sunday

Scene: The series mentioned West's admiration for Nazi leader Adolf Hitler and vile ant-Semitic rants in a scene which saw Lily Rose Depp's character Jocelyn put on a showcase for her management team to convince them she was ready to tour

'The funny thing is I actually can't be Anti Semitic because black people are actually Jew also. You guys have toyed with me and tried to black-ball anyone who ever opposes your agenda.'

He courted widespread criticism but later doubled down on the remarks.

In December 2022 West said he 'likes' and 'loves' Hitler', defended Nazis and denied the Holocaust during an unhinged appearance on Alex Jones' podcast Infowars that many viewers described as a live on-air mental breakdown.

Wearing a fabric mask to cover his entire face, West ranted: 'I see good things about Hilter... every human being has something of value that they brought to the table, especially Hitler.'

Later, he said the Germans 'had a really good leader at one point', and denied that Hitler had ordered the deaths of six million Jews.

'He didn't kill six million Jews. That's just factually incorrect,' West said in what were by some measure, his most anti-Semitic remarks to date.

'I'm not trying to be shocking. I like Hitler. The Holocaust is not what happened... Hitler has a lot of redeeming qualities,' he said.

The show followed Jocelyn (Depp - who recently said she was excited to perform the sex scenes in the show), a pop star whose life is turned upside down after meeting bizarre night club owner Tedros.

Ye last year was banned from Twitter and lost a series of lucrative sponsorship deals after he made a variety of anti-Semitic statements

In December 2022 West said he 'likes' and 'loves' Hitler', defended Nazis and denied the Holocaust during an unhinged appearance on Alex Jones' podcast Infowars that many viewers described as a live on-air mental breakdown

It doesn't take long for Tedros to move in and fully take control of her life, much to the protest of her friend and assistant Leia (Rachel Sennott).

The finale finally found Jocelyn standing up to Tedros and rightfully booting him out of her life, as she gets her tour back on track... though in a rather surprising development, she lets him back into her life... but this time she's using him the same way he used her, while we learn more about her manipulative past.

Fans did not hold back their thoughts after the finale on social media, with @Kai365247 perhaps summing it up best on Twitter: 'This bulls**t a** show is over.'

Over: HBO's controversial sexually-charged TV series The Idol has come to a close with Sunday night's season finale, and, like they have all season long, many fans took to social media to bash the show

Over: Fans did not hold back their thoughts after the finale on social media, with @Kai365247 perhaps summing it up best on Twitter: 'This bulls**t a** show is over'

The episode begins with Jocelyn putting the finishing touches on her new songs, when she finally has had enough with Tedros, telling him to leave, though he won't, calling himself her 'inspiration' while he continues to drink heavily.

She tells him that he 'served his purpose' but now she has no use for him and tells him to go, though it finally takes her manager Chaim (Hank Azaria) offering him a ton of money to get him to walk away, though he initially refused his first offer of $500,000.

Chaim then tracks down the journalist Talia (Hari Nef), telling her everything about Tedros to use in her story.

Meanwhile, Jocelyn held a showcase with her team including Nikki (Jane Adams), LiveNation's Andrew Finkelstein (Eli Roth) and her managers Chaim and Destiny (Da'Vine Joy Randolph) for her new music and all of Tedros' artists - Chloe (Suzanna Son), Izaak (Moses Sumney), Ramsey (Ramsey) - who Jocelyn now says are 'her' people, not Tedros'.

She announces that they are all going on tour with her as everyone is impressed with their talent, while Tedros is escorted out of Jocelyn's house by security.

The episode cuts to six weeks later, just before Jocelyn's tour stop at SoFi Stadium in Los Angeles, as Chaim, Destiny and Andrew casually chat about how Tedros' life was ruined.

His nightclub got shut down and he was being investigated by the IRS, though at the same time, Tedros shows up and asks if there is an artists pass for him.

While there isn't one for him under Tedros, there is one under his real name - Mauricio Jackson.

Showcase: Meanwhile, Jocelyn held a showcase with her team including Nikki (Jane Adams), LiveNation's Andrew Finkelstein (Eli Roth) and her managers Chaim and Destiny (Da'Vine Joy Randolph) for her new music and all of Tedros' artists - Chloe (Suzanna Son), Izaak (Moses Sumney), Ramsey (Ramsey) - who Jocelyn now says are 'her' people, not Tedros'

Pass: The episode cuts to six weeks later, just before Jocelyn's tour stop at SoFi Stadium in Los Angeles, as Chaim, Destiny and Andrew casually chat about how Tedros' life was ruined

Tour: She announces that they are all going on tour with her as everyone is impressed with their talent, while Tedros is escorted out of Jocelyn's house by security

Why: @danasflxapl tweeted, 'Why is Tedros still here when Jocelyn told him she's done with him?'

He's let in to see Jocelyn, who says she misses him, as Tedros learns that the hairbrush Jocelyn's mother supposedly beat her with was actually brand new, likely hinting that she made everything up about her late mother's abuse.

We also learn that Jocelyn was likely behind her label pulling the song they gave her former dancer Dyanne (Jennie Kim) that would have been her first single.

These revelations either show that Jocelyn has always been this manipulative all along, or perhaps that she just learned it from Tedros himself, turning from victim to villain in one fell swoop.

The final shot was quite surprising for many fans, as Jocelyn tells her fans that she wants to introduce them to the man who, 'pulled me out of my darkest hours,' as she brings Tedros up on stage, much to the shock of Chaim, Destiny and Andrew.

She kisses Tedros on stage before whispering her final words of the series: 'You're mine. Forever. Now go stand over there,' as a stunned Tedros obeys as the series comes to an end.

They also showed a number of behind-the-scenes shots of the cast and crew seemingly having a grand old time, likely an effort to offset reports of a toxic set environment that were reported in March.

Many fans were surprised that the show was ending after just five episodes, since, when it was first announced back in 2021, it was given a six-episode order.

'The Idol Season 1 ending after tonight,' tweeted @danasflxapl, with a GIF of a woman covering her mouth.

Jocelyn: The final shot was quite surprising for many fans, as Jocelyn tells her fans that she wants to introduce them to the man who, 'pulled me out of my darkest hours,' as she brings Tedros up on stage, much to the shock of Chaim, Destiny and Andrew

Manipulative: These revelations either show that Jocelyn has always been this manipulative all along, or perhaps that she just learned it from Tedros himself, turning from victim to villain in one fell swoop

Tonight: 'The Idol Season 1 ending after tonight,' tweeted @danasflxapl, with a GIF of a woman covering her mouth

Others were quite confused with Jocelyn going back to Tedros, with @anyiahszn tweeting, 'OK... so what was the point of her going back to him in the last ep? Matter of fact wtf was the whole point of the show since the ending is like this. Horrible and boring waste of time because of that ending...'

@Al_YourPal tweeted, 'All that controversy and #TheIdol really just turned out to be 5 episodes of The Weeknd dressed up like a vampire Jedi from Spirit Halloween and saying some freaky boi stuff.'

@danasflxapl tweeted a GIF of Tyra Banks screaming, adding, 'Jocelyn getting back together with Tedros??'

@toxictrl tweeted, 'Is Jocelyn pimping him out now??' along with a GIF of a confused lady.

Other fans like @percpapii was happy to see the downfall of Tedros, tweeting, 'Tedros being distressed / ignored and not being the center of attention is so funny. I love seeing his downfall sm.'

@percpapii also tweeted, 'Hold on, I think it was some reverse psychology... Jocelyn now owns Tedros and his people. When she told him to go stand, he was baffled. She's in control now.'

@PharaohRMA tweeted, 'Jocelyn talked all that s**t about Tedros just to get back with him in this f***ing ending.'

@urinternetgay tweeted a meme of Spongebob Squarepants character Squidward adding, 'Jocelyn getting back with Tedros at the end...'

Point: Others were quite confused with Jocelyn going back to Tedros, with @anyiahszn tweeting, 'OK... so what was the point of her going back to him in the last ep? Matter of fact wtf was the whole point of the show since the ending is like this. Horrible and boring waste of time because of that ending...'

Controversy: @Al_YourPal tweeted, 'All that controversy and #TheIdol really just turned out to be 5 episodes of The Weeknd dressed up like a vampire Jedi from Spirit Halloween and saying some freaky boi stuff'

Back: @danasflxapl tweeted a GIF of Tyra Banks screaming, adding, 'Jocelyn getting back together with Tedros??'

Pimping: @toxictrl tweeted, 'Is Jocelyn pimping him out now??' along with a GIF

Downfall: Other fans like @percpapii was happy to see the downfall of Tedros, tweeting, 'Tedros being distressed / ignored and not being the center of attention is so funny. I love seeing his downfall sm.'

Owns: @percpapii also tweeted, 'Hold on, I think it was some reverse psychology... Jocelyn now owns Tedros and his people. When she told him to go stand, he was baffled. She's in control now.'

Jocelyn: @PharaohRMA tweeted, 'Jocelyn talked all that s**t about Tedros just to get back with him in this f***ing ending'

End: @urinternetgay tweeted a meme of Spongebob Squarepants character Squidward adding, 'Jocelyn getting back with Tedros at the end...'

Troye: Other fans praised Troye Sivan, who played Jocelyn's creative director Xander, with @troyeshair_ posting, 'Goodbye goodbye goodbye. You were bigger than the whole show,' adding, '#TheIdol we're not gonna miss you'

Only: @ethanscyrus added, 'The only good thing about #TheIdol was Troye Sivan's performance.'

Jocelyn: @NOTURSTAN tweeted, 'So Jocelyn manipulated everyone, kicked Tedros out, just to end up with Tedros in spite of everything her team did to get rid of him? Hmm OK'

IDK: @spaceykelsie added, 'IDK how to feel... jaw is on the floor'

Other fans praised Troye Sivan, who played Jocelyn's creative director Xander, with @troyeshair_ posting, 'Goodbye goodbye goodbye. You were bigger than the whole show,' adding, '#TheIdol we're not gonna miss you.'

@NOTURSTAN tweeted, 'So Jocelyn manipulated everyone, kicked Tedros out, just to end up with Tedros in spite of everything her team did to get rid of him? Hmm OK.'

@ethanscyrus added, 'The only good thing about #TheIdol was Troye Sivan's performance.'

@spaceykelsie added, 'IDK how to feel... jaw is on the floor.'
Jimmy Fallon posed for a rare family snap with his wife and daughters during a Fourth of July getaway on Sunday.

The Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon host, 48,posed up with producer partner Nancy Juvonen, 56, and their daughters, nine-year-old Winnie and eight-year-old Frances.

'I agreed to take this photo only if I could stand on the dry side of the dock. Happy 2nd of July!' the late night talk show host captioned his Instagram post.

In the photo, the family of four were seen smiling as they posed on a dock with a golden glow by a scenic lake.

Fallon held his younger daughter on his hip while Juvonen, 56, put her arms around the couple's older daughter.

Happy 2nd of July: Jimmy Fallon posed for a rare family snap with his wife Nancy Juvonen and daughters Winnie and Francesduring a Fourth of July getaway on Sunday

Fun: Nancy embraced her daughter in one fun snap

As explained in the caption, the producer and Winnie stood on the wetter side of the dock for the picture.

In the photo, the Saturday Night Live alum donned a pink collar shirt, a blue under tee, a pair of brown pants, and a pair of white sneakers.

Meanwhile, Juvonen wore a black tee, a pair of black shorts, and pair of yellow platform sandals. She wore her hair down.

Winnie wore a white tee and sky blue skirt that had white and yellow squiggly lines running across the bottom of it.

As for Frances, the younger child donned a white top with ruffle sleeves and a white floral patterned skirt.

Unlike their parents, both of the children, who were born via a surrogate, opted to go barefoot for the picture.

The family spent the Fourth of July weekend at Juvonen's family house in Lake Winnipesaukee, New Hampshire. It is largest lake in the state of New Hampshire and is situated by the town of Wolfeboro.

Lake Winnipesaukee holds a special place in the couple's heart as it was the site of where Fallon asked Juvonen to marry him.

Stars: Although the couple prefer to keep their two daughters out of the spotlight, Winnie and Frances played a big role during their father's talk show

Met Gala: Fallon's Instagram post comes almost two months after he made a solo appearance at the 2023 Met Gala this past May

'I just bring the ring and Nancy goes, 'Let's go out and have a cocktail on the dock,' so I go, 'Okay on the dock would be perfect,'' The late night talk show host recalled in a March 2023 appearance on The Today Show.

'So I'm like [telling myself], 'don't cry. don't cry. Let her cry if someone's gonna cry.' As soon as I pull out the ring, I start crying.'

Although the couple prefer to keep their two daughters out of the spotlight, Winnie and Frances played a big role during their father's talk show and made multiple appearances when COVID-19 pandemic forced all talk-shows (morning and late night) to go remote.

Fallon's latest Instagram post comes almost two months after he made a solo appearance at the 2023 Met Gala.

In addition, it appears from his Instagram post that Fallon is enjoying the extra time he has gotten to spend with his family due to the ongoing Writers Guild of America Strike.

Since the strike began on May 2, no new episodes of The Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon (and several other late night shows) have been taped and aired.
Delicious local delicacy drives rural revitalization in east China

Xinhua) 16:25, July 03, 2023

NANCHANG, July 3 (Xinhua) -- Xie Shuzhong's poultry farm offers some delightful sights. Every time he pours duck feed into a plastic feeder, his ducks would swim out of the rivulet and flock together for a satisfying meal.

At 55 years old, Xie is a diligent duck farmer, raising over 20,000 Lianhua shelducks, a local duck species, annually. "I used to worry about selling them out, but now my only concern is that my breeding scale cannot meet the growing market demand," said Xie, who hails from Huangtian Village in Lianhua County in east China's Jiangxi Province.

Xie's sweet burden came from the burgeoning local "Lianhua blood duck" cuisine industry, as his ducks serve as the primary ingredients for this traditional delicacy.

"Lianhua blood duck" is renowned for its spicy taste and tender texture of the meat, and its culinary skills were recognized as a provincial intangible cultural heritage in Jiangxi in 2009.

According to Li Guohua, 57, an inheritor of the cultural heritage, the cuisine was first a common dish on the dining tables of local households, and then grew into a novel ready-made delicacy in supermarkets and online stores thanks to improved cold-chain logistics.

With the establishment of standardized production and complete industrial chains, "Lianhua blood duck" has now gained popularity among consumers across China.

Jiangxi Lianhua Blood Duck Food Co., Ltd. is also harnessing the delectable potential of the delicious duck recipe by developing various derivative products, including rice noodles and self-heating rice dishes topped with the exquisite flavors of "Lianhua blood duck."

"When I was a child, my parents needed at least half an hour to make a plate of 'Lianhua blood duck,'" said Yan Pengbao, chairman of the company, "but now our automatic production line can produce 3,000 packages of the dish in merely an hour."

The intangible cultural heritage has brought about tangible boons to the local farmers.

Yan said his company collaborates with three agricultural cooperatives in Lianhua County, and more than 500 farmers supply ducks to him. "Over 6,000 ducks are consumed every day," he added.

"With an upward demand, the duck price has also more than doubled from around 15 yuan (about 2 U.S. dollars) per kg initially," Xie said.

Currently, the county provides more than 1 million ducks every year, with the annual net income of the local farmers exceeding 20,000 yuan on average.

Another player in the duck dish industry, Lotus Development Group Co., Ltd. has also actively promoted the local delicacy through colorful exchanges and activities.

On June 15, a high-speed train adorned with signature elements of "Lianhua blood duck" departed from Nanchang, the provincial capital. This is part of the company's efforts to boost sales, said Liu Jingwei, general manager of Lotus Development Group Co., Ltd.

To ensure authentic taste, the local Lianhua blood duck association hosts cookery courses and culinary skill competitions annually.

"At least 50 chefs come here to learn from me every year. After finishing their apprenticeship, most of them will start their own restaurants featuring 'Lianhua blood duck' across China," Li Guohua said.

(Web editor: Zhang Kaiwei, Liang Jun)
WELLINGTON New Zealand  Chatham Rock Phosphate Limited, CRP or the Company (TSXV: NZP, NZX: CRP FSE 3GRE) advises that our CEO Chris Castle, in company with Cloncurry-based Executive Director Colin Randall and Field Manager Maurice March visited all Korella sites last week.

Accompanying them was Lindsay Crutch from consulting firm WSP who is assisting in the Mining Lease Application for Korella North and is the independent leader for the Pre-Feasibility Study for the 2Mtpa Korella South project.

Chris was also able to meet with elders of the Yulluna people who are the Native Title holders for both Korella North and Korella South.

Proposed Korella North Mine Site next to an earlier successful exploration drill hole

During the 2-day visit inspections were made of the sites for the Cloncurry Distribution Hub and Korella MCPs monocalcium phosphate plant.

The Round Oak Road Site for the Proposed Distribution Hub

Chris Castle commented, This was a most instructive visit to the sites of our multiple proposed mining projects at Korella and the distribution hub and MCP plant at Cloncurry. Probably the most striking feature was the huge competitive advantage our projects have being adjacent to the railway. Not for us trucking rock phosphate huge distances across flood vulnerable roads and expensive double handling of our product. Our initial flagship project, Korella North, is a short walk from the train tracks.

For further information please contact:

Chris Castle

President and Chief Executive Officer

Chatham Rock Phosphate Limited

64 21 55 81 85, chris@widespread.co.nz or chris@crpl.co.nz

Statements about the Company's future expectations and all other statements in this press release other than historical facts are "forward looking statements". Such forward-looking statements are based on numerous assumptions, and involve known and unknown risks, uncertainties and other factors, including risks inherent in mineral exploration and development, which may cause the actual results, performance, or achievements of the Company to be materially different from any projected future results, performance, or achievements expressed or implied by such forward-looking statements.

Neither the Exchange, its Regulation Service Provider (as that term is defined under the policies of the Exchange), or New Zealand Exchange Limited has in any way passed upon the merits of the Transaction and associated transactions, and has neither approved nor disapproved of the contents of this press release.

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Ex-F1 boss Bernie Ecclestone enjoyed a sun-soaked getaway with his young family in Formentera, Spain this week.

The 91-year-old joined wife Fabiana Flosi, 46, and son Ace, 3, dined at a beach restaurant before later returning to their multi-million-pounds superyacht.

Bernie cut a casual figure for the sunny outing in a pale blue shirt which he teamed with navy jeans and trainers.

Shielding his eyes behind shades he strolled along the sand before enjoying the spectacular views with his son from the vessel.

Meanwhile Brazilian beauty Fabina, who wed the billionaire in 2012, flaunted her toned legs in denim shorts and a bright pink shirt.

Family outing: Ex-F1 boss Bernie Ecclestone, 91, enjoyed a sun-soaked getaway with his young family in Formentera, Spain this week

Casual: Bernie cut a casual figure for the sunny outing in a pale blue shirt which he teamed with navy jeans and trainers

Slipping her feet into colourful sandals she could be seen carrying her little one over the rocks.

Fabina donned chic oversized shades and a sun hat as her bags were carried by a member of the boat's staff.

Ace appeared to be having a wonderful time on his getaway while dressed in shorts, T-shirt and bucket hat.

When back on board his parents quickly provided him with a life jacket as they lifted him to see the shore.

Bernie is also father to daughter's Tamara, 39, Petra, 34, from his marriage to ex-wife Slavica, 65 - as well as Deborah, 68, who he shares with first wife Ivy.

The outing comes after Bernie denied fraud after he was accused of hiding more than 400 million from the government in a trust in Singapore.

He appeared at London's Southwark Crown Court on Tuesday and entered a not guilty plea.

The former F1 supremo is accused of falsely claiming he had only set up a single trust for his daughters and indicating that, other than that trust, he was 'not the settlor nor beneficiary of any trust in or outside the UK'.

Getaway: He joined wife Fabiana Flosi, 46, and son Ace, 3, dined at a beach restaurant before later returning to their multi-million-pounds superyacht

Leggy: Brazilian beauty Fabina, who wed the billionaire in 2012, flaunted her toned legs in denim shorts

Fun in the sun: Ace appeared to be having a wonderful time on his getaway while dressed in shorts, T-shirt and bucket hat

Helping hands: Bernie was helped out of the dingy by staff

He stood in the well of the court near his lawyers to confirm his name before entering a not guilty plea to a single count of fraud between July 13 2013 and October 5 2016.

The billionaire faces trial at the same court on November 16 in front of High Court judge Mr Justice Bryan following an investigation by HM Revenue and Customs (HMRC) into his finances.

He was granted unconditional bail ahead of his six week trial.

The charge alleges that Ecclestone 'dishonestly' made a representation to officers of HMRC 'which was, and which you knew was or might have been, untrue or misleading'.

The charge against him was authorised by the Crown Prosecution Service (CPS) in July last year following an investigation by HMRC, which said the probe had been 'complex and worldwide'.

Chat: Bernie could be seen chatting with the crew

Staff: Members of staff from the ship helped them with their belongings

Chief crown prosecutor Andrew Penhale said at the time: 'The CPS has reviewed a file of evidence from HMRC and has authorised a charge against Bernard Ecclestone of fraud by false representation in respect of his failure to declare to HMRC the existence of assets held overseas believed to be worth in excess of 400 million.'

Former racing car driver Ecclestone oversaw Formula One from the late 1970s until 2017.

He was also co-owner of Queens Park Rangers from 2007 to 2011 with Flavio Briatore.

The Sunday Times Rich List ranks Ecclestone, who has been married three times, as the 65th wealthiest person in the country, with an estimated net worth of 2.5billion.
Lady Victoria Hervey cut a stylish figure as she arrived at the La Metamorphose show during Paris Fashion Week on Monday.

The socialite, 46, turned heads in a chic white suit with tailored jacket and matching wide-legged trousers.

Victoria layered the look over a cropped black bustier adored with jewels as she flaunted her toned midriff.

The stunner opted for a natural make-up look and style her blonde tresses into loose waves as they cascaded to her shoulders.

She slipped her feet into trainers as she strutted her stuff to take her seat in the star-studded front row.

Style: Lady Victoria Hervey, 46, cut a stylish figure as she arrived at the La Metamorphose show during Paris Fashion Week on Monday

Chic: The socialite turned heads in a chic white suit with a tailored jacket and matching wide-legged trousers

She appeared in good spirits as she posed for snaps with other guests at the event.

Lady Victoria's outing comes shortly after she attended a slew of star-studded events and premiere's at Cannes Film Festival.

Lady V, as shes known in her close circles, was dubbed an It Girl while working as a model in the 1990s.

She was a staple in glossy magazines and the celebrity press.

But recently she caused a stir in February when, she claimed the now-disgraced Prince Andrew has always been a source of 'jealousy' for King Charles.

In an interview with GB News she said Andrew, who she briefly dated in 1999, has been very 'badly advised' in the past few years and Charles has been jealous of his 'successful military career'.

She said: 'I think Charles, as the older brother, has always been a bit jealous of him [Prince Andrew].

'He had a very successful military career for 20 years. I've heard that he's always been jealous of him.

Shades: Victoria layered the look over a cropped black bustier adored with jewels and flaunted her toned midriff

Blonde beauty: The stunner opted for a natural make-up look and style her blonde tresses into loose waves as they cascaded to her shoulders.

'So as soon as the Queen has gone, the daggers are out.'

Her interview came shortly after moved back to London from Los Angeles after living in the US for over two decades.

The model had sparked rumours of a return to the UK last year and has now decided the A-list packed city is 'not what it used to be'.
They initially met in 1994 and exchanged vows in January of 1996

Real Housewives of Beverly Hills star Kyle Richards and husband Mauricio Umansky have separated after a 27-year marriage - amid circulating rumors Richards has been seeing female country singer Morgan Wade.

Richards, 54, and Umansky, 53, 'have been separated for a while now but are still living under the same roof,' an insider told People Monday. 'They remain amicable as they figure out what's next for them and their family.'

Richards and Umansky wed in January of 1996 and share daughters Alexia, 27, and Sophia, 23, and Portia, 15. Mauricio is also stepfather to Kyle's daughter Farrah Aldjufrie, 34, from her first marriage to Guraish Aldjufrie.

Richards and Umansky issued a statement Monday evening on Instagram in which they denied getting divorced, but didn't deny separating. It read: 'In regards to the news that came out about us today Any claims regarding us divorcing are untrue.

'However, yes, we have had a rough year. The most challenging one of our marriage. But we both love and respect each other tremendously. There has been no wrongdoing on anyones part.'

The latest: Real Housewives of Beverly Hills star Kyle Richards, 54, and husband Mauricio Umansky, 53, announce they have separated after a 27-yeaar marriage. Pictured this past March in LA

The shocking split comes amid a TMZ report that Kyle has been 'dating country singer' Morgan Wade, 28, in the wake of their separation. Wade was seen last month in Lexington, Kentucky

They continued: 'Although we are in the public eye, we ask to be able to work through our issues privately. While it might be entertaining to speculate, please do not create false stories to fit a further salacious narrative.'

They wrapped up in saying, 'Thank you for the love and support,' signing the letter, Kyle & Mauricio.

The shocking split comes amid a TMZ report that Kyle has been 'dating country singer' Wade, 28, in the wake of their separation, and that they 'allegedly have matching heart tattoos.'

Dailymail.com has reached out to reps for Richards, Umansky and Wade for comment on the story.

An Instagram user under the handle @facereality16 had a theory about the burgeoning relationship between Richards and Wade, pointing out that had been subtly acknowledging their romance by wearing matching silver bands.

Amid the speculation about Richards and Wade wearing rings, a separate wave of conjecture surrounded Richards and Umansky last spring after she was seen on an outing without her wedding ring.

Umansky, appearing in April on the podcast Two T's In a Pod with Teddi Mellencamp and Tamra Judge said the couple was 'not getting divorced.'

He insisted, 'I mean, it's so dumb. That one stupid story that came out there, and then the girls all, you know, decided to talk about it on the Housewives, and so now it's a storyline.'

Richards and Umansky issued a joint statement calling the divorce claims untrue, while not directly denying the claims they are separating

Moving on? Kyle and Mauricio purchased this sprawling Encino property for a whopping $8,253,000 in October 2017

Richards did not acknowledge the split on social media Monday, as she put up a series of pictures of herself with her longtime friend Faye Resnick in a series of Instagram Stories posts to wish Resnick a happy 66th birthday.

Kyle's fame preceded her spot on the Bravo series, as she's Kathy Hilton's sister and Paris Hilton's aunt. Richards and her family stepped into the limelight in 2010 when she was a principle cast member of Bravo's The Real Housewives of Beverly Hills.

The cast also included her sister Kim Richards, Adrienne Maloof, Camille Grammer, Taylor Armstrong and Lisa Vanderpump.

A dozen seasons later, only Kyle remains on the popular reality series (while Vanderpump has had tremendous success with her own spinoff Vanderpump Rules).

The 12th season of the series centered around Richards dealing with fragile family relationships - including with Kathy - while Umansky steadfastly supported her amid the tense time.

'I have always just been 100 percent supportive of her, no matter what she does,' Umansky told E! News in November. 'If she wants to reconcile, I am all down for it. If she's not ready to reconcile and she needs to just keep it going for a little bit, I support her a thousand percent.'

The timing of the split comes about a year and a half after the duo celebrated a marital milestone with their 25th wedding anniversary.

'It means so much, and it's something that we're both incredibly proud of,' Richards told Bravo Insider in November of 2021. 'And for me, it's one of my biggest accomplishments. I mean, I think it's refreshing, in this town to be married 25 years is a really big deal. And we're really proud to be good role models to our daughters.'

The shocking split comes amid a TMZ report that Kyle has been 'dating country singer' Wade in the wake of their separation, and that they 'allegedly have matching heart tattoos'

Wade and Richards were pictured at the 21st Annual Americana Honors & Awards at Ryman Auditorium on September 14, 2022 in Nashville

They also attended an event in support of NAMI in LA in April

Wade and Richards posed for a selfie in a shot Kyle posted to Instagram last month

Wade and Richards were seen working out with one another a few weeks ago

Wade and Richards were pictured with one another at the Americana Music Honors & Awards last fall in Nashville

Wade and Richards were seen at a holiday celebration together late last year

Umansky said that their marriage had 'been great and beautiful' and that the long time they were wed flew by.

'To be quite honest, it feels easy and doesn't feel like it's been that long,' he told Bravo Insider. 'And, you know, I definitely intend to spend the rest of my life with her. So hopefully it'll be at least another 25 years, and maybe another 50.'

Umansky on June 16 exclusively told DailyMail.com about shrugging off Ozempic rumors targeting his wife Kyle Richards, season two of Buying Beverly Hills, and being nominated for Ernst Young's Entrepreneur Of The Year Award.

Speaking exclusively with DailyMail.com, Umansky revealed how Richards handles the rumors she has used Ozempic to drop the pounds, even though she has repeatedly denied ever using controversial weight loss jabs.

'We just kind of laugh. We don't really care about it. We laugh about it. She's already made her statement, and it is what it is. I mean, you know, there's just nothing you can do about that,' he explained.

Richards was pictured with her longtime friend Faye Resnick in an Instagram Stories post Monday to wish Resnick a happy birthday

Richards said there were 'many more celebrations to come' in celebrating her friend's 66th birthday

Resnick, who gained notoriety as a figure in the O.J. Simpson murder trial, has been seen alongside her friend on episodes of RHOBH

The couple share daughters Alexia, 27, and Sophia, 23, and Portia, 15. Mauricio is also stepfather to Kyle's daughter Farrah Aldjufrie, 34, from her first marriage to Guraish Aldjufrie. Pictured in February 2020

Umansky praised his wife for adhering to a consistent workout routine and called the naysayers 'jealous' and unable to believe results could be achieved without use of a substance.

'She has been so amazing that you know, she completely quit drinking, and she literally works out every single day of her life, and it shows. And she's f**king crushing it.'

'It's jealous people that don't believe that you can do something without a substance. So... just good mental power.'

Umansky has enjoyed success in the world of real estate, as the founder of the brokerage The Agency, which has offices around the world.

Umansky recently released the book The Dealmaker: How to Succeed in Business & Life Through Dedication, Determination & Disruption, and last week won Ernst Young's Entrepreneur Of The Year Greater Los Angeles Award.

Speaking of getting nominated ahead of the ceremony, he described the award as a 'great honor.'

'I've been nominated by Ernst Young's Entrepreneur of the Year for Los Angeles region,' he explained. 'I made the finals, so I can't wait to hear if we win, cause you know, Ernest Young is a big deal, and I think that would be just a great honor to win the entrepreneur of the year award.'

As far as his book, Umansky is thrilled to see his book connect with readers from all walks of life.

Richards and Umansky wed in January of 1996, two years after they crossed paths at a club

The famed couple was pictured after their 1994 nuptials with daughter Farrah Aldjufrie

Umansky pictured with wife Kyle Richards and daughters Sophia, Farrah, and Alexia

Kyle's fame preceded her spot on the Bravo series, as she's Kathy Hilton's sister and Paris Hilton's aunt. They were pictured in February of 2020

'I've gotten some great reviews on the book. I've gotten so many great DMs from a lot of different people, and it just makes me feel so good that I was able to touch a lot of people.

'I mean, there's been just a variety of different people. There's been people that are literally down and out... sending... text messages saying "you motivated me". Other CEOs and executives that have said really interesting perspectives on XY or Z. That was the idea, and it just feels really good that we've been able to teach a little bit.'

Now, Umansky has followed a similar path as Richards, allowing cameras into his office with the Netflix series Buying Beverly Hills.

The show premiered in 2022, and followed employees of The Agency - which include his daughters Alexia and Farrah. Buying Beverly Hills will be returning for a second season, and Umansky promises fans are in for more drama and a real estate feast for the eyes.

'It's really going to show more of what The Agency is all about and what we do from a lifestyle perspective, a little bit more of the global dynamics and the events... and now that you know a lot of the cast members, we're definitely going to start digging into more of the cast members' personalities, lives, digging deeper. Not just superficial. And so you're going to get a lot of that.

'You're going to continue to see amazing real estate porn, we have some gorgeous homes, we have a lot of deals that are closing, there are still great things to learn, every deal in real estate's different, there's always something to learn from it.'

Umansky promised season two would feature 'some good drama': 'I can't wait for it to come out, it's going to be great.'

Buying Beverly Hills is just one of several reality shows following the glamorous lives of realtors. Selling Sunset, another hit series with the same premise as Buying Beverly Hills, has just returned to Netflix for a sixth season. But Umansky doesn't see these shows as competition.

Back for more! Umansky's reality show Buying Beverly Hills will be returning for a second season

Family business! Maurico works with his daughters Alexia and Farrah at The Agency

Reality stars: Umansky pictured with Alexia and Kyle

'I think we all help each other, you know, if people get more into real estate and they like the real estate porn, and all of this, we kind of help each other... Even in my own business, when I have other real estate agents that are competing for the same listing, I look at them more as colleagues, and my personality is that it's more of a colleague or a collaborator or somebody who can feed off of.

'So I think the reason there are multiple is because the audience wants to watch. So I don't think it's oversaturated.'

Umansky has even worked with The Oppenheim Group, the company Selling Sunset centers on: 'They're good guys, I like them a lot.'

The Agency has turned into something much more meaningful than just a 9-5 for Umansky as well. With his daughters Farrah and Alexia joining the group, The Agency really has transformed into a family business.

Power couple: Richards married Umansky in 1996 and shares daughters Alexia, 27, and Sophia, 23, with him. Mauricio is also stepfather to Kyle's daughter from her first marriage, Farrah Aldjufrie, 34

Read all about it! Umansky is thrilled his book was able to reach readers from all walks of life with his new book, The Dealmaker

Speaking of working with his daughters, he said: 'It was awesome, and for me to have the opportunity to work with my daughters and to see them every single day... it's been an absolute dream for me to be able to work with them and to watch them flourish and they're going to crush it.'

While Farrah and Alexia are now both agents, they both got their starts as assistants.

'Farrah started out as my assistant and she was doing everything, and Alexia started off in the marketing department as an assistant, and then I brought her into the Umansky team. And now Alexia is now an agent.'

Now, the world will be getting to know his daughters more as they gain more prominent roles in Buying Beverly Hills.

'They're so beautiful and intelligent and smart. Again, season two is totally different than season one, right because people start getting to know them now... I can't wait for the world to get to know who these kids are.

'They've been on camera for 13 years but they've always just been kind of on the sidelines.'

All episodes of The Real Housewives of Beverly Hills are available on Hayu.
EastEnders' Kim Fox was jailed for contempt of court while having a panic attack during Monday's tense episode.

On the morning of her sentencing Kim was in a state of high anxiety, while Howie and Denise tried to reassure her, but a terrified Kim insisted that she might go to prison.

Meanwhile, privately, Howie tells Denise they cant afford counselling for Kim, but she desperately needs it.

Denise hands over 500 from her and Jacks joint account to fund the sessions.

And when her husband Jack sees the money is missing from their account, he hits the roof.

Tense: EastEnders' Kim Fox was jailed for contempt of court while having a panic attack during Monday's tense episode

Anxious: On the morning of her sentencing Kim was in a state of high anxiety, while Howie and Denise tried to reassure her, but a terrified Kim insisted that she might go to prison

At court, a nervous Denzel gives his statement but when the prosecution plays footage of the accident, Kim has a full-blown panic attack.

The court officer seized Kim and the judge ordered her to calm down before telling her she was in contempt of court.

Denise and Howie pleaded with Kims lawyer to say something and he noted her illness to the judge, but as they were awaiting confirmed medical evidence, the judge ordered Kim to be taken down and held in custody.

The family looked distressed as they watched Kim being taken away.

It comes after Denzel Danes was left fighting for his life in the latest episode of EastEnders after Kim Fox crashed her new car.

Mitch (Roger Griffiths) was first to spot the crash and quickly called an ambulance, and with the help of the emergency services, Kim (Tameka Empson) got free but Denzel (Jaden Ladega) was left trapped inside.

While Kim became conscious, Denzel did not and was rushed to hospital, with his father Howie (Delroy Atkinson) there to support him.

Howie was heartbroken as he recalled the last time he had spoken to Denzel, while Kim confronted Denise about what really caused the crash.

Upset: The family looked distressed as they watched Kim being taken away

Tough times: Meanwhile, privately, Howie tells Denise they cant afford counselling for Kim, but she desperately needs it. Denise hands over 500 from her and Jacks joint account to fund the sessions

A doctor then told the family: 'There's no brain injury but there's a lot of internal bleeding and is blood pressure is low.

'We need to operate urgently. We'll do everything we can. We are just about to take him into theatre if you want to see him.'

It comes after Kim discovered the truth about sister Denise's affair with Ravi Gulati while driving her new car.

As messages began to pop up on Denise's phone, which Kim accidentally had, it became clear her sister had been cheating on husband Jack Branning.

The messages read: 'So you unblock me now! You don't get to talk to me like that. You're the married one. You're the cheat'

Denise turned up to the hospital to check on Kim but her sister snapped that the reason for the crash was because she discovered the truth.

Kim shouted: 'He was your valentine's kiss, it was him wasn't it, how long?'

Awful: Denzel Danes was left fighting for his life in the latest episode of EastEnders after Kim Fox crashed her new car

Denise broke down in tears, saying: 'So we kissed. It was Jack, he was all about Amy.'

Kim quipped: 'So you are blaming this on Amy?'

Denise added: 'No but Ravi would pay me attention. I didn't sleep with him. We went to a hotel room, we didn't, I couldn't, I went home to Jack. I love Jack.'

She also explained that Ravi was now blackmailing her to get police evidence for him.
Bindi Irwin has shared an adorable Instagram photo of herself taking her daughter Grace Warrior, two, on snowy bushwalk.

The Queensland zookeeper, 24, melted hearts on Saturday by uploading a photo of herself kneeling next to Grace in front of snow snow-covered bushland.

Bindi was bundled up in a black coat and jeans as she stared lovingly at her daughter, who looked adorable in a colourful snow jacket.

'Snowflakes in our hair, love in our hearts,' Bindi captioned the post.

Bindi is no stranger to sharing photos and clips of Grace and her American husband, Chandler Powell, 26.

Wildlife queen Bindi Irwin, 24, shared this adorable photo of herself enjoying a snowy bushwalk with daughter Grace, two, on Saturday, writing: 'Snowflakes in our hair, love in our hearts'

In a sweet Instagram post last month, the daughter of the late 'Crocodile Hunter' Steve Irwin paid tribute to Chandler and his growth as a father to their little girl.

Bindi captioned the images, 'I thought I knew how much I loved you when I married you. Then I watched you become the best dada to our beautiful daughter.'

'Now I realise that every day I'll just keep loving you more. You mean the world to me and Grace,' she concluded the heartfelt tribute.

Bindi is no stranger to sharing photos and clips of Grace and her American husband, Chandler Powell (left)

A slideshow of candid photos showed the family of three on various adventures, including a trip to the snow, a lighthouse and a beach.

Chandler replied to his wife's post, writing, 'This means so much. Your girls are my whole world.'

'I love you so much and am thankful every day that we get to spend life together,' he added.

In a sweet Instagram post last month, the daughter of the late 'Crocodile Hunter' Steve Irwin paid tribute to Chandler and his growth as a father to their little girl

Bindi and Chandler tied the knot in 2020, before welcoming their daughter in March 2021.

The lovely exchange took place after Bindi revealed the touching ways she keeps the memory of her father Steve 'The Crocodile Hunter' Irwin alive.

Bindi was just eight years old when her father, known to millions around the world as 'the Crocodile Hunter', died on September 4, 2006, at the age of 44 after being pierced in the chest by a stingray while filming a documentary on the Great Barrier Reef.

Bindi recently revealed the touching ways she keeps the memory of her father Steve 'The Crocodile Hunter' Irwin alive. Pictured together in 2001

The wildlife warrior spoke at the annual Steve Irwin Gala Dinner in Los Angeles and said she continues to honour her father with the help of her family.

'Whether it's playing one of his documentaries for our daughter Grace, feeding the crocodiles at the Australia Zoo, or nights like tonight,' she told E! News.

'I think it's so important to remember we all deal with grief in different ways.'
READ MORE: Locklear is back on the booze after 20 stints in rehab - and has lost 40lbs on Ozempic as sources close to the actress say her family is 'very worried'

The actress, 61, displayed erratic behavior and was seen attempting to balance on a ledge and talking to herself

DailyMail.com spotted Heather Locklear outside of an office building in Malibu after an undisclosed appointment that lasted an hour

There are serious concerns for Heather Locklear's welfare after the Melrose Place actress, 61, was seen behaving erratically in Malibu, California, last Thursday.

The TV star, whose battles with mental health issues and addiction are well-documented, was pictured trying to balance along the ledge of an office building wearing a pair of flip-flops and gripping onto pillars for support.

Worried friends say troubled Locklear may have started drinking again after numerous stints in rehab.

DailyMail.com spotted Locklear being dropped off by a man believed to be her fiance, former motocross racer Chris Heisser, at about 1pm for an undisclosed appointment that lasted an hour.

When she emerged from the building, she kept Heisser waiting in his car and was seen making her way along the ledge of the building and sprinting across the street.

Locklear, who wore army fatigue sweatpants and an off-the-shoulder T-shirt, sat at the top of a staircase for a while where she read from a journal and began talking to herself while looking distressed.

DailyMail.com spotted Heather Locklear outside of an office building in Malibu after an undisclosed appointment that lasted an hour

The actress displayed erratic behavior and was seen walking along a ledge and talking to herself while appearing in distress

During her balancing act, Locklear looked nervous as she steadied herself by holding on to pillars in order to avoid a steep drop into the parking lot and dumpster below

The Melrose Place alum, 61, opted to keep fiance Chris Heisser waiting in his car and was seen balancing herself along the edge of the building

Locklear wore army fatigue sweatpants, an off the shoulder t-shirt and flip flops

Video shows the actress looking bewildered as she sat at the top of the steps reading from her personal journal.

At one point she is seen pointing angrily to something written in the diary and gesticulating in an animated fashion before pushing it firmly back into her purse.

She sat for a lengthy period of self-reflection at the top of the stairs.

During her balancing act, Locklear  who People reported in 2019 had been to rehab more than 20 times  looked nervous as she steadied herself by holding on to pillars in order to avoid a steep drop into the parking lot and dumpster below.

Eventually, after well over an hour by herself, Locklear ran over to Heisser, 61, who had waited patiently in the car.

He appeared happy to give her the space she wanted and the pair drove off together in his SUV.

Locklear has had her fair share of troubles that included hospitalizations, several arrests and 20 stints in rehab

The actress has had her own experiences with substance abuse and arrests, but has been thought to be on the straight and narrow since 2019

Video shows the actress looking distressed as she sat at the top of a flight of steps reading from her personal journal

In 2019 she was ordered to complete a 30-day residential rehab stay in a mental health facility with a 120-day jail sentence suspended. She has been thought to be sober ever since

At one point Locklear was seen sprinting across the street in her flip flops

Her fiance Chris Heisser waited in the car for about an hour giving Locklear space before she hopped in his SUV and they drove off

DailyMail.com broke the news in 2020 that three years after rekindling her relationship with her high school sweetheart, Locklear accepted Heisser's proposal.

She has been going steady with her on/off beau since cleaning up her act following a highly-publicized stint in rehab.

The pair dated in the late 1970s at Newbury Park High School, went through multiple marriages and have had their share of ups and downs since getting back together in the fall of 2017.

The couple were an item before Heather went on to marry rockers Tommy Lee from 1986-1993 and Richie Sambora from 1994-2007, with whom she has a daughter, Ava, 25.

But now new fears are enveloping Heather, who starred in shows throughout the 1980s and 90s including Dynasty, TJ Hooker and Spin City.

It's been Ava's steadfast support of her mother that was said to have helped the star get sober in 2019.

Ava reportedly had a front-row seat to her mother's fall from grace that kicked off with a DUI after she and Sambora split in 2006.

DailyMail.com broke the news in 2020 that three years after rekindling her relationship with her high school sweetheart Chris, she accepted his proposal. Heather, Ava and Chris are pictured together in a social media snap

The pair dated in the late 1970's at Newbury Park High School, went through multiple marriages and have had their share of ups and downs since getting back together in the fall of 2017

The next decade was filled with hospitalizations, several arrests and the stints in rehab.

In February 2018 she was arrested for domestic violence and for battery against a police officer who attended the incident at her mansion in Thousand Oaks, California.

In June, she was arrested again for allegedly verbally and physically abusing an ambulance EMT who responded to her home following a call for help.

Then in November 2018, she was placed on a 5150 hold  where patients can be hospitalized for 72 hours if it is determined they are a danger to themselves or others  after her therapist determined that she was experiencing a mental breakdown.

In August 2019, Locklear pleaded no contest to eight misdemeanor counts: five counts of battery on a peace officer, one count of battery on an emergency medical personnel, and two counts of resisting, obstructing or delaying a peace officer.

These involved two separate incidents when cops were called to her Thousand Oaks home after complaints of fights with Heisser.

She was ordered to complete a 30-day residential rehab stay in a mental health facility with a 120-day jail sentence suspended.
Police in the UK have launched an investigation after shots were fired at a wedding party of more than 100 guests at the Gujarati Association at Wolverhampton in the West Midlands region of England.

Wolverhampton Police said they received calls about the incident on Saturday night and believed that a car was driven up to the back of the venue before someone got out of the vehicle and fired a number of shots at another car parked at the venue.

It's then believed a gun was fired back towards the attacker from the direction of the wedding party by another person.

No injuries have been reported, but a vehicle was damaged and is being forensically examined, the police said as its officers carried out forensic and CCTV enquiries over the weekend.

"This was a totally reckless attack and it's by luck rather than by design that no one was seriously injured or killed, said Paul Southern, Chief Inspector of Wolverhampton Police.

"We believe there were more than 100 people at this event and it is vital that we speak to anyone who was there and who saw or recorded what happened so that we can bring those involved to justice. The community will be understandably shocked and worried by what happened and we'll be carrying out extra patrols to offer reassurance," he said.

The police have asked anyone with information to contact them to assist with the ongoing investigation.
Drawing a parallel between the surprising move made by Ajit Pawar in Maharashtra, Ramdas Athawale, president of the Republican Party of India (RPI) and Union Minister for Social Empowerment, has predicted a potential alliance between the Rashtriya Lok Dal and the Bharatiya Janata Party in Uttar Pradesh.

Speaking to this reporter in Lucknow, Athawale said, Rashtriya Lok Dal in UP could surprise Samajwadi Party president Akhilesh Yadav, much like how Ajit Pawar stunned his uncle, Sharad Pawar, by aligning with the National Democratic Alliance (NDA).

Athawale highlighted the growing rivalry between Akhilesh Yadav and RLD president Jayant Chaudhary as he discussed the political dynamics in UP. He expressed his belief that this conflict might lead to Jayants alignment with the NDA.

Furthermore, Athawale pointed to a significant shift in support, with members of not only backward classes and Dalits but also the Muslim community increasingly gravitating towards the NDA.

He said that the declining public support for Mayawatis Bahujan Samaj Party and the Muslim community distancing itself from the SP could potentially lead to substantial divisions within these parties.

Emphasising the NDAs appeal among backward classes, Athawale pointed out that over 80 per cent of the backward community supported the alliance. He attributed the weakening of the BSP to the growing trend of Dalits aligning themselves with the NDA.

Athawale commended Ajit Pawars decision to support the NDA in Maharashtra, expressing his belief that it would strengthen the alliance in the state, despite Sharad Pawars reservations.

The RPI chief refuted allegations of orchestrating a split within the Nationalist Congress Party, asserting that Ajit Pawar had willingly chosen to join the NDA.

Athawale cautioned that those opposing the NDA in other states might encounter similar unexpected turns of events.

Ramdas Athawales observations shed light on the potential political upheavals in Uttar Pradesh, where internal conflicts within the SP and RLD coincide with the NDAs increasing support from various communities.

The prospect of an alliance between the RLD and BJP adds an intriguing dynamic to the political landscape of UP, which could significantly impact the upcoming elections.
Chhattisgarh Chief Minister Bhupesh Baghel on Monday accused the Modi government of strangling democracy with the help of agencies like the Enforcement Directorate (ED) and Income Tax (IT) department.

Commenting on the political development in Maharashtra, Baghel said the leaders of the Nationalist Congress Party were compelled to defect after being threatened by the federal agencies.

Switching over to BJP is like going through a washing machine, he said. Leaders who were earlier targeted by the federal agencies were "cleaned" with this washing machine, he said.

"We have seen this multiple times, be it West Bengal, Assam or Maharashtra, the leaders who switched over to BJP were given a clean chit by the agencies," Baghel said.

Elections are nearing in Chhattisgarh and it is inevitable that the agencies would now target leaders from the state in order to dent their image and to do "political assassination at the behest of the Modi government", he said.
Chief Minister Pushkar Singh Dhami met union finance minister Nirmala Sitharaman in New Delhi on Monday. In the meeting, the CM requested that the union government should remove the ceiling on the loans for the externally assisted projects in view of the special conditions and limited financial resources of the State. He also requested that the government of India should provide a sum of Rs 1174 crore for the Song dam drinking water project in the State as special assistance.

Dhami said that the population of Dehradun is increasing rapidly due to which the demand for drinking water is also consistently increasing. In view of this and considering future needs a project is proposed on Song river which is a tributary of Ganga. He said that the estimated cost of the project is Rs 2021 crores. The project envisages providing 150 MLD drinking water by use of gravity to Dehradun and its peri urban areas. A population of about 10 lakh would get drinking water from the project. Dhami said that the project once completed would end the dependence on tube-wells for providing drinking water. A 3.5 km long lake would also get formed due to the Song dam which apart from providing impetus to tourism and creating new employment opportunities would help in preserving the environment. The CM told the union finance minister that flood control is another objective of the project. The project would provide protection to a population of 15000 in 10 villages from the floods which affect them every year.

He said that all the necessary technical, forest land transfer and other approvals from the departments and the ministries concerned have been obtained. The State government would bear the cost of displacement and rehabilitation of the affected families for which an amount of Rs 247 Crore has been earmarked.

Dhami requested that the union government should provide assistance of Rs 1174 crore for the Song Dam project.

The CM also requested that the economic works department of the finance ministry should approve the proposal for strengthening of the power transmission system which involves construction of the power sub stations and lines in Dehradun under the ADB funded scheme. The project also involves making the HT and LT power lines in Dehradun city underground. On this request, Sitharaman said that the State government should send a proposal for revaluation of the project. She also assured every possible help to the State.
Comvita Limited (NZX: CVT ) is pleased to announce that they have signed a significant long term partnership with Ole supermarkets in China during the Prime Minister Chris Hipkins visit to China. Ole are one of the countries largest premium retail chains with more than 100 premium retail stores across mainland China.

The agreement aims to significantly grow Comvitas current revenue with Ole over the next few years. The agreement also includes a commitment to partner on the implementation of Comvita's Harmony Plan in China which will encompass a broad number of ESG initiatives in a market first.

Commenting David Banfield CEO said 'This strategic partnership is both commercially and philosophically significant. We have set out a plan to significantly grow our current business with the biggest premium retailer in China but have also agreed to achieve this in line with our Harmony Plan principles. This will result in significant benefits to consumers in China, shareholders, the planet and most importantly, bees.

Comvitas Harmony Plan drives several key sustainability initiatives that reflect their ambition to leave the world in a better place. As climate action leaders Comvita will become carbon neutral by 2025, they stand as guardians for bees  saving more than 10 million bees per year, they aim to restore balance to ecosystems through native tree planting programs and leaving positive impact in human populations around the world through employment opportunities and community outreach programs.

Ends.

For further information contact:

Kelly Bennett, One Plus One Communications

Mobile: +64 21 380 035

Email: kelly.bennett@oneplusonegroup.co.nz

Background Information

Comvita (NZX: CVT ) was founded in 1974, with a purpose to heal and protect the world through the natural power of the hive. With a team of 550+ people globally, united with more than 1.6 billion bees, we are the global market leader in Manuka honey and bee consumer goods. Seeking to understand, but never to alter, we test and verify all our bee-product ingredients are of the highest quality in our own government-recognised and accredited laboratory. We are growing industry scientific knowledge on bee welfare, Manuka trees and the many benefits of Manuka honey and propolis. We have pledged to be carbon neutral by 2025 and carbon positive by 2030, and we are planting 1-2million native trees every year. Comvita has operations in Australia, China, North America, South East Asia, and Europe  and of course, Aotearoa New Zealand, where our bees are thriving.

Background Information Ole

Under China Resources, Ole is the largest premium supermarket in China. Oles first store opened in 2004 in Shenzhen and now they have expanded and have over 104 stores in over 35 cities throughout China. Oles annual sales is at RMB12B (NZ$3B) and has over 15M high-income members. Oles mission is to lead the consumption upgrade, and create high-quality lifestyle. Ole is also active in sustainability activities through For nature to future.

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Deputy Commissioner, Ranchi Rahul Kumar Sinha organized a meeting of the peace committee and enlightened people on behalf of the district administration here on Monday.

In the meeting, Senior Superintendent of Police Ranchi, Kishor Kaushal, Deputy Development Commissioner Ranchi, Dinesh Kumar Yadav, Superintendent of Police Ranchi (Traffic) Haris Bin Zaman, Sub-Divisional Officer Ranchi (Sadar) Deepak Kumar Dubey, Sub-Divisional Officer Bundu, Rajesh Kumar Sao, Additional District Magistrate Ranchi (Law and Order), Rajeshwar Nath Alok, District Supply Officer Ranchi, Albert Billung, District Transport Officer Ranchi, Praveen Prakash, District Nazarat Deputy Collector Ranchi, Kewal Kumar Agarwal, Circle Officer Ranchi ( city), all district level office bearers and members of peace committee, enlightened people participated.

DC Rahul Kumar Sinha welcomed all the members of the peace committee and all the enlightened people who came and said that the district administration has high hopes from you, only through you big events and festivals can be facilitated in Ranchi district. And it has been thriving with mutual brotherhood. The administration always gets your cooperation, for this you all deserve congratulations. He praised all the peace committee members and the enlightened people who came

The DC welcomed all the members of the peace committee and all the enlightened people who had come. Requesting them to stand with the district administration in the same way, he told them to always stand towards the society so that mutual cooperation and brotherhood remain in the society. People should cooperate with each other and many congratulations were given by the district administration for the cooperation of the peace committee members and enlightened people.
The oath-taking ceremony for justice (Retd) Umesh Kumar as the Chairperson of the Delhi Electricity Regulatory Commission (DERC) has been delayed again. Despite expressing his availability for the ceremony, Justice (Retd) Umesh Kumar has been kept in limbo since June 26, 2023. To overcome the current situation Delhi Lieutenant Governor (LG) VK Saxena has again written to Chief Minister Arvind Kejriwal, urging him to ensure the prompt administration of the oath of office and secrecy to Justice (Retd) Umesh Kumar.

In his letter, Saxena advised the Chief Minister that Minister of Power should administer the oath virtually through a video-conference or video call, and if the Minister is unable to do so, the Chief Minister Arvind Kejriwal or any other designated Minister may administer the oath. In the event that both situations are not feasible, the Chief Secretary has been suggested as an alternative to administer the oath of office and secrecy to Justice Kumar.

The oath, which was originally scheduled for Monday at 6:00 PM, has now been rescheduled for July 6 in the Delhi Power Minister's chamber. Earlier during the day, the office of the Minister of Power conveyed to Justice Umesh Kumar that she had suddenly taken ill and proposed a new date for the ceremony.

The Delhi government, in a statement said, Power Minister Atishi had come to office today and her schedule included the event to administer oath to the DERC chairperson-designate.

However, she suddenly faced a health issue due to which all her meetings and official engagements (including the administering of oath to DERC chairman-designate) had to be postponed.

The oath taking ceremony of the new DERC chairperson has been rescheduled for the coming Thursday, the statement added. According to the Raj Niwas officials, Atishi wrote to the chairman-designate and asked for his availability to take the oath in her presence.

He accordingly confirmed the same, they said. Later, the event was postponed after Atishi took ill, the officials said.

As the oath-taking ceremony of Delhi-electricity Regulatory Commission (DERC) chairperson-designate Justice (Retd) Umesh Kumar was postponed at the eleventh hour , the situation has raised eyebrows, considering that the notification by the President of India appointing Justice (Retd) Umesh Kumar was issued on June 21, 2023 itself.

In the letter Saxena has urged Kejriwal to ensure the prompt administration of the oath of office and secrecy to Justice (Retd) Umesh Kumar. Expressing concern over the delay, LG Saxena highlighted the series of events that have led to the current impasse. Saxena has pointed out that in his letter dated June 27, he requested the Chief Minister to facilitate the oath ceremony for Justice (Retd) Umesh Kumar without any further delay. Subsequently, the Minister of Power proposed holding the ceremony on July 3 at 6:00 PM in her office and sought Justice (Retd) Umesh Kumar's consent for the proposed date and time.

Agreeing with the suggested time and date, Justice (Retd) Kumar expressed his consent in writing and arrived in Delhi on Monday in the forenoon. However, he received a communication from the office of the Minister of Power, stating her sudden illness and proposing a rescheduled oath ceremony on July 6, 2023, at 6:00 PM in her chamber.

LG Saxena expressed surprise over the delay and noted that Justice (Retd) Umesh Kumar has been kept in limbo since June 26, 2023, despite his availability and expressed willingness to fulfill his responsibilities as the Chairperson of DERC. The LG emphasised that it is indeed perplexing that a notification issued by the President of India on June 21, 2023, has not been given effect to due to the unavailability of the Minister, particularly in today's digital age. Atishi was scheduled to administer the oath of office and secrecy to Justice (Retd) Kumar at 6 pm on Monday with Delhi government sources stating that the minister had also communicated her go-ahead regarding this to all concerned.

The AAP government had recommended the name of former Madhya Pradesh High Court judge Justice (retd) R K Srivastava for the position. However, Justice Srivastava expressed his inability to take over charge due to family commitments and requirements. Later, the government sent the name of Justice (retd) Sangeet Raj Lodha of the Rajasthan High Court on June 21.
Chief Minister Shivraj Singh Chouhan has said that information about development and public welfare schemes should be conveyed to the people in the district, villages and wards in an easy manner, so that it becomes easy for people to understand. People should be told about the all-round development in every area of the state. CM Fellow and Chief Minister Jan-Seva Mitra are doing good work, they should be given panchayat wise responsibility. Chief Minister Chouhan was addressing the 5th meeting of the Governing Body of the Atal Bihari Vajpayee Institute for Good Governance and Policy Analysis at Samatva Bhawan, Chief Minister's residence office. Co-operative and Public Service Management Minister Dr. Arvind Singh Bhadoria and Vice President of the Institute Prof. Sachin Chaturvedi, office bearers and other officers were present in the meeting.

Chief Minister Chouhan said that the work undertaken by the institute to improve the quality of PhD is commendable. He said that efforts are being made to increase the GSDP of the state to $550 billion.

In the meeting, the action taken on the applications for compassionate appointment under the Chief Minister's Covid-19 Special Anugraha Yojana was approved. A provision was made to give compassionate appointment to the dependents on the death of the employee at the time of Covid-19. Along with this, approval was also given to set-up 3 new centers under this institute, in which evaluation, monitoring and impact assessment center, Bhopal International Center for Ideas and nodal center for the strategy to promote life science based economy in Madhya Pradesh. The financial accounting statement and audit report of the institute and the annual administrative report of the institute were also approved.
Chhattisgarh Police on Monday arrested a 38-year-old man from New Delhi and brought him here for cheating a grain merchant of Rs 2.55 crore in 2021.

Raipur Additional Superintendent of Police (Urban) Abhishek Maheshwari said Amit Goyal has been taken into custody.

Goyal is one of the directors of Kiya Agro Industries Pvt Ltd in Thane in Maharashtra.

Two other directors, Anil Maurya and Hrishabh Maurya, were arrested earlier.

They cheated Prashant Sharma of Raipur by promising him higher profit after exporting the latters rice.

Sharma bought rice worth Rs 2.55 crore from local rice millers and handed over the consignment to them.

The three sold the consignment but did not pay Sharma. After arrest, Goyal confessed to cheating Sharma.
n Students should join the Indian Army and defend their motherland even at the cost of laying down their life as Brigadier Mohammad Usman did, said Jamia Vice Chancellor Najma Akhtar on Monday after a wreath-laying ceremony to commemorate the death anniversary of Usman, Maha Vir Chakra winner.

The event was organised on Monday by a contingent from 50 (I) Para Brigade of the Indian Army at his memorial situated in Jamia Millia Islamia graveyard. Several serving and retired Army officers, NCC officers and cadets attended the ceremony. A wreath on behalf of the VC was also laid at the memorial by senior officials of the varsity.

Late Brigadier Mohammad Usman, also known as the saviour of Naushera (Naushera ka Sher), was responsible for the recapture of Jhangar and Naushera (Jammu & Kashmir) during the 1947-48 war with Pakistan. The gallant officer attained martyrdom on July 3, 1948 when an enemy artillery shell landed close to him in Naushera.

Najma mentioned that many Jamia students, including girls, take part in NCC so that they can later join the Army and serve the country.
Bahujan Samaj Party chief Mayawati again handed over the command of Meerut to her trusted lieutenant Munkad Ali. She also relieved two other leaders on Monday.

Sources said that the BSP chief, who is busy with preparations for the Lok Sabha elections in 2024, is busy giving important organisational responsibilities to her trusted lieutenants besides finding suitable replacements for those who ditched her to join other political parties.

On Monday, Mayawati gave a big responsibility to former Rajya Sabha member Munkad Ali, appointing him again as coordinator of Meerut.

Earlier, this responsibility was with Shamsuddin Rain, who has now been given the responsibility of Bareilly division.

The responsibilities of Satpal Pepla and Mohit Jatav, who were coordinators of several divisions, have also been taken back.

Sources said that to rebuild the party, especially in the wake of some senior party leaders leaving the BSP, Mayawati has now instructed seniors to hunt for potential leaders within the party to represent castes which lack prominence.

Since 2016, the BSP has lost several second rung leaders and this has eroded the sustainable leadership and representation of several caste groups, like Pasi, Kurmis and Kushwaha-Maurya.

We do not see these leaders coming back or Behenji (Mayawati) re-inducting them. The blanks need to be filled from within the party. Partymen will now scout for potential leaders at every level. They will be groomed into leaders. The party may also import leaders from outside to plug the gap, said a BSP functionary.

It may be recalled that ahead of the 2017 UP assembly elections, many prominent leaders walked out of BSP. Other Backward Class leader Swami Prasad Maurya quit BSP in June 2016. A month later, another veteran, RK Chaudhary, took the exit route. Chaudhary is a prominent Pasi leader. The Pasi community constitutes the second largest Scheduled Caste community in UP and is around 16 per cent, after Jatavs, who are said to be more than 50 per cent of the states total Dalit population.

Expulsion of another influential Pasi leader, Indrajit Saroj, followed in August 2017. These expulsions dented the partys voter base. It created a panic among leaders and disillusioned the voters.

We need active leaders to reach out to these Dalit and OBC communities to bring them back to us, said a party functionary.

Unfortunately, those expelled by the BSP constituted a strong second line of leaders. Some of these leaders have assumed significant positions in other parties and are instrumental in peddling Dalit and OBC politics there. Brijlal Khabri, who quit BSP in October 2016, is now heading the Congress in UP. Naseemuddin Siddiqui, another senior colleague of Mayawati also left her to join Congress. Thakur Jaiveer Singh and SP Singh Baghel, who were with BSP earlier, are now ministers in the Bharatiya Janata Party government. One of the main proponents of BSPs social engineering experiment in 2007, Brajesh Pathak is deputy chief minister in the BJP government.

At least a dozen of our former leaders are in the Yogi Adityanath government. In western UP, it has made a big difference for the party as many of these leaders command influence in the region, like our former MP Narendra Kashyap, who joined the BJP, said sources in the BSP.

Moreover, BSPs second-in-command Satish Chandra Mishra has been mysteriously missing in action for the past several months and there has been no official word about his present status in the party.
Punjab CM hands over Rs 2 cr cheques to NoK of cops died on-duty or accidental death



Chandigarh: Punjab Chief Minister Bhagwant Mann on Monday handed over cheques worth Rs 2 crore to the next of kin of the cops who had attained martyrdom while performing their duty or due to accidental deaths along with Rs 12 lakh (Rs four lakh each) for educating their children. Mann handed over the cheque worth Rs one crore to the family of ASI Sanjeev Kumar who had attained martyrdom in line of duty at Jalandhar and cheques worth Rs 50 lakh each to the next of kin of ASI Parnam Singh and ASI Gurlal Singh, who lost their lives during accidental deaths. It may be recalled ASI Sanjeev Kumar was killed after a Balero vehicle banged into him when he was checking the vehicles during the movement of a highly threatened VVIP in Jalandhar. Likewise, ASIs Parnam Singh and Gurlal Singh lost their lives due to accidental deaths.

Punjabs farmers getting canal water after decades: Meet Hayer



Chandigarh: In a dream come true, the states farmers got canal water after decades on the directions of Punjab Chief Minister Bhagwant Mann. For the first time in their lives, the new generation of farmers saw natures bounty irrigating their fields in the form of canal water, said the states Water Resources Minister Gurmeet Singh Meet Hayer while also lauding all the officers and employees of the Department for the historic achievement. He said that strengthening the canal water network is the main need of the hour to save the agriculture and groundwater of the state. He added, out of 15741 water courses closed in the state due to non-availability of canal water for the last several decades, 13471 water courses were restored by the Department during the last two and a half months. Now, out of a total of 47000 water courses in Punjab, only 2270 remain to be restored, regarding which the work is also going on a war footing.



Punjabs head constable honoured for saving stray dog



Chandigarh: Touched by the sensitivity shown by a cop of Punjab Police, ADGP (Traffic) Amardeep Singh Rai on Monday honoured the Head Constable (HC) Palwinder Singh for saving the life of a street dog, whose head was stuck in the fog-lamp hole of a car bumper. HC Palwinder Singh, currently posted at Police Station Mohkampura in Amritsar Commissionerate, received the Commendation Certificate (Class-1). In a viral video, HC Palwinder was seen successfully pulling out the head of a stray dog and saving his life.



Political Parties will now be able to file financial accounts online: Sibin C



Chandigarh: Political parties will now be able to file their financial accounts online to the Election Commission, said Punjabs Chief Electoral Officer Sibin C. He said that the measure has been enabled with the launch of a new web-portal (https://iems.eci.gov.in/) to facilitate the online filing of contribution report, audited annual account and election expenditure statement by the political parties. These financial statements are required to be submitted by political parties to the Election Commission or CEOs of the States or Union Territories, as per the Representation of Peoples Act, 1951 and transparency guidelines issued by the Commission, from time to time, over the last many years.



Punjab Speaker urges farmers not to use hazardous chemical 'Paraquat' to ripe moong crop



Chandigarh: Punjab Legislative Assembly Speaker Kultar Singh Sandhwan on Monday urged the states farmers not to use dangerous chemical 'Paraquat' to ripe the moong crop. Expressing grave concern over the trend of using hazardous chemicals by the farmers, Sandhwan said that excessive usage of various chemicals for agricultural production is causing dreadful diseases like cancer. Some farmers in the state are preferring to ripe the moong crop unnaturally by spraying chemical 'Paraquat'. While this chemical is harmful for crops, it is also extremely dangerous for human healthThis chemical has not been recommended by the Agriculture Department or the Agriculture University, he said while appealing to the farmers not to use this chemical keeping in view of the larger public interest and prefer to ripe the crop naturally.



Punjab VB nabs planning officer among three PUDA officials for accepting bribe



Chandigarh: Punjab Vigilance Bureau on Monday nabbed Planning Officer Manveer Singh posted at Office of District Town Planner, Fatehgarh Sahib, for demanding and accepting bribe from a resident of Amloh. Two other arrested accused officials have been identified as a Junior Engineer (JE) Dhikshu Saini and Driver Tejinder Singh. Spokesperson said that the accused officials have been arrested on the complaint of Balram Kumawat resident of Amloh. The complainant has approached the Police Station VB, Patiala Range, and lodged a complaint that these PUDA officials have demanded a bribe of Rs 1.50 lalkhs for not demolishing his house and shop, which according to them was constructed illegally. They have finalized a deal in Rs 40,000 and out of the amount they already took a bribe of Rs 30,000.



Bains orders completion of slab casting of Nangal flyover within stipulated time



Chandigarh: Punjab Cabinet Minister Harjot Singh Bains on Monday ordered the completion of slab casting on Nangal flyover within the stipulated time. Bains, chairing a weekly review meeting, reviewed the progress of construction of the flyover, and the road work being constructed there after the shifting of Kusht Ashram and directed the officials to complete the work at the earliest. The MInister also announced to hold the next weekly review meeting on the construction of the flyover on July 10, 2023, at Nangal flyover.



No need to apply for change of ownership details of registered Properties after July 3 in Hry



Chandigarh: Haryana government has decided that for any property registrations done after July 3, 2023, in the municipal area, there will not be any need to apply for any change in ownership details of the Property ID, database of Urban Local Bodies will be updated automatically after the conveyance deed is executed by way of sharing of data through the API, a spokesperson said on Monday.



Haryana Cabinet meeting today



Chandigarh: Haryana Cabinet meeting will be held under the Chairmanship of Chief Minister Manohar Lal Khattar at 11 AM in the main Committee Room, fourth floor, Haryana Civil Secretariat, Chandigarh on Tuesday, an official spokesperson said on Monday.



Expedite permissions of Communication and Connectivity Infrastructure Policy services: Hry CS



Chandigarh: Haryana Chief Secretary Sanjeev Kaushal on Monday presided over a meeting to emphasize the need for swift permissions and renewal from various departments to expedite services under the Communication and Connectivity Infrastructure Policy (CCIP) on the Invest Haryana Portal. Kaushal directed all departments concerned, including Forests and Wildlife, Haryana Shehri Vikas Pradhikaran, State Industrial and Infrastructure Development Corporation Ltd, Haryana State Marketing Board, Housing Board, Irrigation, Municipal Committee, Municipal Corporation, Municipal Council, Panchayat, PWD (B & R) Department, Town and Country Planning, and Zila Parishad, to collaborate effectively and ensure the seamless implementation of the CCIP. He said that under the CCIP policy, the permission shall be deemed to have been granted if the nodal officer fails to either grant permission or rejection within a maximum period of 45 days from the submission of the application.



Uttar Haryana Bijli Vitran Nigam to redress consumer grievances in Panchkula today



Chandigarh: Uttar Haryana Bijli Vitran Nigam would take the proceedings of the forum in the office of SE/OP Circle, UHBVN, Panchkula, SCO-96, 1st Floor, Sector-5, Panchkula at 11:30 AM on Tuesday. A spokesperson of the Nigam said that the Chairman Consumer Grievances Redressal Forum (CGRF) of the Nigam along with the members of the Forum would redress the grievances (both old and new) of the consumers belonging to Panchkula district only on Tuesday.
Haryana Power Minister Ranjit Singh Chautala said that the Government has done remarkable work in the power sector, which has paved way for the State to become one of the leading States in the country in terms of providing electricity to its people. Despite hikes in prices of coal, petrol, disease, land and other items, the Government has not increased power tariff for consumers in the last nine years. Additionally, 24 hours power supply is being provided in 5739 out of the total 6307 villages of the State. Also, the State has successfully reduced electricity transmission losses to 9.37 per cent, he added.

Chautala, who is also the Jails Minister of the State, said that a high-security jail which is being constructed in Rohtak district for prisoners serving time for heinous crimes will be completed in the next three months.

Chautala had won 2019 Assembly election as an independent candidate from Ratia Constituency of Fatehabad district and extended his support to the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) to form Government in the State. He said that he may contest Lok Sabha election in 2024 if BJP high command asks for it.

In an exclusive interview with The Pioneer, Chautala talked about Power Departments achievements, measures taken as the Jail Minister for modernization of jails among other issues.

There is no clarity whether the BJP and JJP will fight next years Assembly and Lok Sabha polls together, as their leaders are taking digs at one other. What do you see the future of this coalition government in the State?

It is an internal matter of both the parties. Our support to this government is unconditional and for the full five-year term.

Being a Power Minister, what are your achievements?

Lot of work has been done in the power sector in the State. Haryana has successfully reduced electricity transmission losses to 9.37 per cent from 31 per cent in 2014 and the power corporations have managed to save more than Rs 6,,000 crore. All of this has been possible due to the Department's emphasis on curbing electricity theft, reducing line losses and strengthening the metering system in the State. Moreover, despite the hike in prices of coal, petrol, disease, land and other items, we have not increased power tariff for consumers. Tubewell connections are being distributed to the farmers. Haryana is at number one in the country in providing tubewell connection operated at solar energy. So far, about 33,000 connections have been given under Kusum Solar Yojana. We have set a target of providing 50,000 connections, which will be completed soon.

Some State Governments are giving free electricity to its people. Have you thought of it?

This concept has totally failed as under the scheme, people do not get power adequately. In such states, it was observed that free electricity means no electricity or inadequate power supply. This neither benefits the consumers nor the government. People of State have also understood this and are fully supporting the government. Lot of facilities are being provided to the power consumers in the State. We have not increased the electricity rates in the last nine years, and have instead brought relief to the people by reducing the power tariffs. Moreover, to strengthen the power sector, we have provided relief to the consumers by waiving off the overcharge. Not only this, defaulted consumers were given an option to pay the principal amount of their electricity bills in installments and the interest and surcharge of crores of rupees was also waived off. Haryana has become one of the leading states in the Country in the Energy Efficiency Rank.

What are the steps taken to promote solar energy in the State?

Our Government has emphasized on promoting the use of solar energy. People are encouraged to get optimum benefits of solar energy. Several schemes have been launched for the promotion of solar energy in the State. Around 30,000 solar connections have been given and the work of giving 50,000 more solar connections is underway. A target has been set to provide a total of 1 lakh solar connections. The use of solar energy has resulted in the fact that earlier a total of Rs 7,200 crore was given as subsidy on electricity, whereas today Rs 5,500 crore is given as subsidy. Apart from this, to promote the use of solar energy in government buildings, the Rooftop Solar Policy has been implemented.

Modernisation of jails was one of the topmost priorities soon after you joined the Government as Jail Minister. Four years down the line, what is the progress?

Several steps have been taken in this direction. A highsecurity jail is being set up at Rohtak at the cost of around Rs 76 crore. It would have 50 jammers, a dog squad, deep earth metal detectors and boundary wall check posts. Besides providing training to develop market-oriented job skills among inmates, an open air camp (prison) has been started in Karnal jail. It will help prisoners to reintegrate with society after their release from the jail. The aim of the project is to encourage good conduct, satisfactory performance of work and a life of self-discipline among the prisoners.

Additionally, we have made efforts to bring about a change in the mindsets of the prisoners in jails so that people have more faith in them. Fuel pump is being operated by jail inmates at Kurukshetra Jail premises. Eligible prisoners are allowed to get employment here. This petrol pump earns around Rs 70, 000 per day. The motive is to socialize the prisoners with mainstream society and reform them. This will give a message to other prisoners as well so that they refine their behaviour. When people come to this filling station, they see that the prisoners can also work like common people. Such petrol pumps will also be opened at 10 other places including two at Ambala, Yamunanagar, Karnal, Jhajjar, Faridabad, Gurugram, Bhiwani, Jind and Hisar.

Do you have any plan to contest the Lok Sabha election in 2024?

During his recent visit to Sirsa, senior BJP leader and Home Minister Amit Shah stayed in my home for around 40 minutes. If the BJP high command gives me a ticket, I would join the party and contest the Lok Sabha election in 2024.

What are the upcoming proposals for the State?

We have given special attention to promote the use of solar energy. The Power Department is preparing a proposal to set up power plants through solar panels to be installed on canals across the state. Paddy stubble-based plants will also be set up at four places in the State for power generation. Out of these, a plant will also be set up in Fatehabad.

Recently, a jail official was arrested while accepting a Rs 1 lakh bribe from family members of an inmate in lieu of providing him better treatment inside the prison. What steps have you taken to check corruption in the Jail department?

Our government follows zero tolerance towards corruption. A State AntiCorruption Bureau team had taken action against the accused officials. The Department will take stringent action against corrupt officials in the State.

What are the works done being an MLA of Rania constituency?

On the demand of the people, works like construction of roads, irrigation facilities, power supply, community halls and among others have been completed. I am approachable every time for our constituency people. People meet me on a daily basis at the Secretariat office and party office at Ratia. Whatever demands being made by the people of the constituency are addressed on priority basis.
Agitated over the death of a youth, allegedly due to torture in police custody, hundreds of villagers and relatives of the victim kept the body on road and created a ruckus in Baghpat on Monday morning.

The protesters also blocked the road for several hours, demanding action against the accused policemen.

The relatives allege that the cops of Ratauli police outpost picked up the victim and thrashed him on suspicion of gambling due to which he died.

On the assurance given by the police officers, the protesters allowed the dead body to be lifted from the road and cleared the road blockade.

One constable was removed and sent to the police lines.

Reports said that 26-year-old Sajid of Rataul under Khekra police station died allegedly after being beaten up by the police. The accused policeman, Abhay Kumar, was later sent to the lines after the local residents staged a massive demonstration, demanding action against the cops.

Superintendent of Police Arpit Vijayvargiya said on Monday that in the investigation so far, it was not confirmed that Sajid was tortured by the police. The autopsy of Sajids body has been conducted by a panel of doctors. Till now, the relatives of the deceased have not filed any complaint against any policeman in this case.

The SP said that the investigation of the incident was handed over to ASP Manish Mishra. He said that according to the investigation so far, on Sunday morning, some boys were sitting in a suspicious condition in the mango orchard in Ratauli police post area of Khekra and on seeing the police, they started running away. The police caught Sajid among them and he was released shortly after being interrogated at the Ratauli police station.

On the other hand, Sajids father, Babu, and other family members claimed that Sajid was sitting with some youths near Noorbagh on Sunday morning, when the policemen reached there. Seeing them, other youths ran away but the police caught Sajid and took him to the police outpost. The family alleged that Sajid was mercilessly beaten up at the outpost and when his condition worsened, his family members were called and asked to take him away. The family took Sajid to the hospital, but he died on the way.

Angered by this incident, the villagers blocked the road by placing Sajids body on the Banthla-Dhikauli road, demanding registration of a case against the accused policemen. The police officials, who reached the spot, assured the protesters of action, after which the protest ended.

Meanwhile, in Sitapur, three policemen, including a station house officer (SHO), were suspended and booked after a video of a woman allegedly being beaten inside Rampur Mathura police station in Sitapur went viral on social media.

Sitapurs Superintendent of Police Ghule Sushil Chandrabhan ordered an inquiry by an officer of the rank of assistant superintendent of police.

According to the FIR, SHO Ram Awadh Chauhan, head constable Kamlesh Yadav and woman constable Rachna Chaudhary have been booked under the charges of sections 342 (wrongful confinement), 323 (voluntarily causing hurt), 506 (criminal intimidation) of the Indian Penal Code on the complaint of Annapurna Devi.

On June 18, Nirankar Sharma and Omkar had gone to Rampur Mathura police station to file a complaint related to a family dispute. When they did not return till evening, a group of women, led by Annapurna, reached the police station and asked the cops the reason for keeping Nirankar Sharma and Omkar in custody.

SHO Ram Awadh Chauhan called a lady constable and head constable who locked us in a room and thrashed us brutally with a leather leash, said Annapurna, in her complaint to the police.

Later, the women were also booked by the police under Section 151 of the Criminal Procedure Code for breach of peace.

The aggrieved woman then complained about the matter to the district magistrate and the SP. SP Chandrabhan asked the Police Circle Officer Mahmudabad Ravi Shankar Prasad to conduct a probe.
Taking notice of the reports that patients with dengue like symptoms are arriving in the hospitals of the State but no case of the disease has so far been reported the health secretary, R Rajesh Kumar has directed all the district magistrates to deploy Additional District Magistrate (ADM) and Sub District Magistrates (SDM) for regular monitoring of the situation of Dengue in districts. He said that with the arrival of the rainy season, the possibility of transmission of dengue disease increases. Kumar said that the patients with the symptoms of dengue disease start coming to the hospitals for treatment at the start of July month.

He said that the officer of the administration should review the medical arrangements in the hospitals and should physically visit them as soon as possible. Kumar said that the officers should ensure that there is no discrepancy in the medical management of dengue disease and full cooperation should be provided to the hospital administration in strengthening the dengue treatment management system. He added that since dengue has a strong potential to take the form of an epidemic prevention and control activities against dengue disease are mandatory. The secretary said that due to the concerted and combined efforts the dengue disease has been kept completely under control in the state for the last three years, and control disease should be everyones priority.
Russia is now sending special operations (Spetsnaz) troops to the border between Belgorod province and Ukraine to deal with continuing raids by anti-Putin Russian militias based in Ukraine. These raids have been going on for several months and embarrass Russia by demonstrating its lack of border security. This is common because Russia has over 22,000 kilometers of land borders, mostly with little or no border security. This includes nearly 2,000 kilometers of border with Ukraine and 540 kilometers of that is in the Belgorod area. Russia has also sent special operations troops to upgrade defenses on the rest of the border with Ukraine in Kursk and Bryansk provinces.

The raids on the Belgorod are meant to embarrass Putin, not kill Russian soldiers and civilians. Some of the Russian responses to the raids did that too, notably because the forces involved acted like Russian troops everywhere, such as bombing and using artillery in civilian areas, looting (of Russian instead of Ukrainian civilians), etc.. Most of the responses against the Ukrainian-backed Russian militias were ineffectual, which is typical of the Russian Army Putin has created to fight in Ukraine. The Belgorod border is north of the Ukrainian city of Kharkiv. Initially these raids faced no armed opposition. When Russian security forces showed during more recent raids, the Russian troops either retreated or surrendered when confronted by the raiders. This was not unexpected because Russian troops in Ukraine have performed poorly from the beginning. Worse, the raiders were all Russians who, unlike most Russian army personnel in Ukraine, were competent and effective fighters whose motivation was to discredit Vladimir Putin and his war in Ukraine. In response to this the best Russia could do was send about a hundred special operations troops to Belgorod in an effort to increase the effectiveness of the additional border forces already at the border. These Spetsnaz, however, were only more of the same poorly trained and led conscripts who offered no effective resistance to the raiders and behaved badly towards Russian civilians.

Unguarded Russian border areas have become popular with young Russians seeking to leave the country to avoid being mobilized to fight in Ukraine. The thousand kilometer-long Russian border with Finland is a popular area for Russian men to cross and ask for asylum. To control this, Finland is building a fence along its Russian border. This will take over a year to complete and the Finns believe the troubles (war in Ukraine and the impact of economic sanctions) will keep the Russians trying to cross the Finnish border for more than a year, if not longer.
A programme was organised at the under construction Sainya Dham in Guniyal Gaon on Monday in which the soil brought from the households of the martyrs of the State and the water from all the major rivers was put into the foundation of the Amar Jawan Jyoti of the memorial. The programme was presided over by the soldier welfare minister Ganesh Joshi and was attended by the governor of Uttarakhand Lieutenant General (Rtd) Gurmit Singh, Chief of Defence Staff (CDS) General Anil Chauhan and others.

Speaking on the occasion, the Governor said that the memorial being built by bringing sacred soil from the households of 1734 martyrs would act as an inspiration for the future generations. He said that Sainya Dham would not only express the devotion of the people of the State but would also showcase the bravery and valour shown by our brave soldiers. The governor said that the brave soldiers of the State are providing valuable service in the field of national security. He said that it is the duty of every one to assist the families of the martyrs who sacrificed themselves for the cause of the motherland.

The minister Joshi said that the brave soldiers of Uttarakhand have always remained in the forefront for service of the nation. He said that every fifth soldier of the county hails from Uttarakhand. The minister said that it the duty of everyone to provide reverence to the martyrs and keep their memory live. He said that the Sainya Dham represents the vision of Prime Minister Narendra Modi and the commitment of the Chief Minister Pushkar Singh Dhami. He said that the Sainya Dham would always inspire the youngsters of the State and the country.

Speaking on the occasion, the CDS General Anil Chauhan said that it is matter of great pride that soil from the houses of 1734 martyrs and water from 28 rivers has been put in the foundation of the Amar Jawan Jyoti of the Dham. He said that by constructing Sainya Dham the people of Uttarakhand have made its martyrs immortals and has ensured that their legacy remains imprinted in the heart and soul of the generations to come.

The president of Uttarakhand BJP Mahendra Bhatt is getting established as the fifth Dham of the State.

The Mayor of Dehradun Sunil Uniyal Gama, MLA Savita Kapoor, secretary soldier welfare Deependra Kumar Chaudhary, GoC Uttarakhand Sub area Major General Sanjiv Khatri and others were present on the occasion.
Chhattisgarh Governor Bishwabhushan Harichandan on Monday asked banned single use plastic in Raj Bhavan.

He asked officials to use cloth materials and gunny or jute bags instead of single use plastic on the occasion of the International Plastic Bag Free Day, an official communication said.

He said plastic pollution was the biggest challenge facing the world today. Everyone has to change their mindset to reduce plastic pollution. Make sure to carry a cloth or jute bag while going to market.

The Governor appealed to the countrymen to take a pledge not to use single use plastic from today.
In a fresh setback to senior AAP leader and former Deputy Chief Minister Manish Sisodia, the Delhi High Court on Monday declined him bail in a money laundering case linked to alleged irregularities in the city government's excise policy, saying the charges against him were very serious in nature.

Besides rejecting Sisodia's plea, the High Court also refused bail to businessmen Abhishek Boinpally, Benoy Babu and Vijay Nair, who are co-accused in the money laundering case lodged by the Enforcement Directorate (ED) arising from the alleged scam.

Sisodia was arrested in connection with the case on March 9. This matter has to be visited with a different approach as a deep rooted conspiracy involving huge loss of public funds has been alleged, the court observed while rejecting his bail application. Justice Dinesh Kumar Sharma said the former deputy chief minister of Delhi has not been able to pass the triple test for bail under the anti-money laundering law in which the court has to see whether an accused is likely to flee from justice, tamper with evidence or influence witnesses.

The present case arises out of an alleged conspiracy wherein the government framed an excise policy with a malafide intention to recoup the kickbacks received in advance from certain individuals and to further generate ill money from the liquor trade.

There are witnesses and witnesses on record to show that certain outsiders were actively participating from the stage of drafting and formulation of the policy, the high court said in the 56-page judgment on Sisodia's bail plea.

It said the statements of the witnesses clearly indicate some extraneous factors were working since the time of conceptualisation, formulation and drafting of the excise policy. The allegation regarding generation of the e-mails in support of the excise policy also raises the red flag that everything was not being done in a transparent and bonafide manner, the high court said.

This court at this stage cannot go into the probative value of the witnesses nor can it meticulously examine those facts. The involvement of the third parties in the formulating and drafting of the policy certainly points at mens rea (criminal intent), it said.

Justice Sharma said he has gone through the order of the special court which had earlier dismissed Sisodia's bail petition, and he does not find any infirmity or illegality in the decision.

The special court has passed a reasoned order on the basis of material available on record, Justice Sharma said, adding The petitioner (Sisodia) is not entitled to bail and the petition is accordingly dismissed.

He said the high court was fully conscious of the fact that personal liberty is a sacrosanct right and pre-trial detention cannot be taken as a punitive measure. However, the court has to strike a balance between the interest of an individual and the interest of the society at large, the judge said. The judge, in his 45-page order passed on the bail plea by Nair, observed that the allegations are extremely serious in nature and the alleged conspiracy in the present case was peculiar in nature where the excise policy was allegedly framed with mala fide intention.
Three kanwariyas were killed and 12 others were injured when a truck rammed into a tractor-trolley on Delhi-Haridwar national highway on Monday.

The accident took place in Muzaffarnagar when the kanwariyas (devotees of Lord Shiva) were going to Haridwar to bring water from the river Ganga, Station House Officer of Mansurpur, R Tyagi, said.

The deceased were identified as Ajay (23), Rohit (22) and Anmol (22).

The injured were admitted to a hospital and their conditions were stated to be stable.

The bodies of the victims were sent for post-mortem and the truck was seized.

In a separate mishap reported from Farrukhabad, two minor brothers drowned after falling in a waterlogged pit in Nawabganj area on Sunday, police said. According to police sources, Arun (11) and his brother Anshul (9) of village Salempur Tyori, had gone to a brick kiln located some distance from the village in the afternoon. The duo fell into the water filled in a deep waterlogged pit and drowned. By the time their family members reached the spot and pulled the children out of the water, they had already died.

Police registered the case and started the investigation.

Meanwhile, two people, including a minor, were killed after being struck by lightning in Ballia district, police said on Monday.

Rakesh (12) of Shivpur Diyar Nambri in Ballia City Kotwali area had gone to his farm on Sunday. In the evening, when he was returning home by bicycle, he was struck by lightning and died on the spot.

Pankaj (18) of Revati town was killed after being struck by lightning on Sunday evening. He had gone fishing in the Dah Taal adjacent to the town when it started raining. Pankaj was hit by lightning and died on the spot.

Police sent the bodies for post-mortem.

In Bhadohi, a married woman allegedly committed suicide by jumping into a well following arguments with her mother-in-law, police said on Monday.

The incident took place in Khamaria locality of Aura area on Sunday when Santoshi Devi (18) jumped into the well following a dispute with her mother-in-law, Santara Devi, Circle Officer Umeshwar Prabhat Singh said.

The body was taken out of the well by police personnel on Sunday night and sent for post-mortem.

It prima facie appears to be a case of suicide, police said, adding that, an FIR had been registered on the basis of a complaint from the victims mother, Singora Devi, against the deceaseds husband, Santosh Yadav, and his mother Santara Devi for allegedly killing her daughter for dowry.

A probe is on.
Chakulia block of the district is grappling with a growing issue of tusker menace, with incidents of elephant-human conflicts on the rise. In response to the alarming situation, the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) has announced plans to stage a demonstration in protest at the Chakulia Forest Department office on July 6, demanding immediate action to curb the elephant menace.

The menace caused by wild elephants has become a pressing concern for the residents of Chakulia, as these majestic creatures increasingly encroach upon human settlements, resulting in property damage and endangering lives. The frequency of such incidents has witnessed a notable surge in recent months, prompting local authorities and political parties to address the issue.

The BJP, in a bid to raise awareness and advocate for immediate intervention, has decided to organise a demonstration at the Chakulia Forest Department office. Scheduled for July 6, the protest aims to voice the concerns of the affected community and urge the authorities to take proactive measures to mitigate the elephant menace.

 Party members, along with concerned residents, will gather outside the Forest Department office to demand urgent action. The BJP intends to put forth a list of demands, which include increased surveillance and monitoring of elephant movements, implementation of effective preventive measures to discourage elephant intrusion into populated areas, and the deployment of trained personnel to manage human-elephant conflicts, said a party leader.

He emphasised the need for immediate attention from the Forest Department, citing the escalating risks faced by the residents. They expressed solidarity with the affected individuals and affirmed their commitment to ensuring the safety and security of the local community.

Local BJP leaders have been mobilizing party workers and residents to participate actively in the demonstration. They have called for a peaceful protest and urged everyone to voice their concerns in a responsible manner, emphasizing the importance of drawing attention to the elephant menace and pressing for appropriate action.

The Chakulia Forest Department has been notified about the forthcoming protest, and adequate security measures have been requested to ensure a peaceful demonstration. The department officials are expected to meet with BJP representatives to discuss the concerns and explore possible solutions to address the issue of tusker menace effectively.

Recently a herd of elephants launched a sudden attack on the Food Corporation of India (FCI) office. The rampage, which lasted for several minutes, resulted in significant damage to the office building and created a state of chaos. Authorities have swiftly responded to the incident, assessing the damage and implementing measures to enhance safety in the area.

With the BJP's planned demonstration, the residents of Chakulia hope to draw the attention of authorities and create awareness about the pressing need for immediate action to curb the elephant menace. The protest serves as a platform for the affected community to unite and demand a safer living environment, free from the threats posed by wild elephants.
Chief Minister Yogi Adityanath said that expressing gratitude towards the doer was one of the core principles of Sanatan dharma, adding, Guru Purnima is a holy festival of showing gratitude towards the guru.

Addressing a function organised at Gorakhnath Temple on Monday on the occasion of Guru Purnima, the chief minister said, The birth anniversary of Maharishi Ved Vyas ji is revered as Guru Purnima. Ved Vyas ji made an immeasurable contribution to preserving our religious and Vedic knowledge by writing and making it available to everyone.

Recalling Ved Vyas ji, Guru Gorakshanath, Adi Shankaracharya, Sant Ramanand, Swami Nimbacharya and Goswami Tulsidas, the chief minister said, Our saints and maharishis, while playing the role of gurus in different periods, protected society from distortions and worked for the welfare of entire humanity. This tradition of the saints of India inspires us to walk on the right path.

When Emperor Shah Jahan was imprisoned by his son, he said that the best people are the Sanatani people, who serve their parents while they are still alive and show gratitude to them even after they have passed away, Yogi added.

He said there were numerous castes in India and various costumes and lifestyles and one factor that united them was nationalism. Every Indian believes that India should be powerful, and it is due to this thinking of Indians that those who used to imagine dividing India into many pieces after independence became victims of negligence, he said.

India has made significant strides toward nationalism under the successful leadership of Prime Minister Narendra Modi. It is also a matter of pride that India is also leading the G-20, a group of 20 big countries of the world, under the chairmanship of Prime Minister Narendra Modi, he said.

The chief minister also taught people how to avoid arrogance in addition to imparting practical knowledge. He said that in Sanatan dharma, we say Swaha and Swadha during havan. Through Swaha we sacrifice the ego and through Swadha we imbibe purity in the heart.

The Sanatan dharma motivates us to set aside our egos and work tirelessly with a pure heart for the welfare of humanity, he added.
RJD president Lalu Prasad on Monday alleged that the NCP faction led by Ajit Pawar joined the BJP-led government in Maharashtra at a time when opposition leaders came together to fight the assault on democracy.

In a blistering attack on Prime Minister Narendra Modi, Prasad accused him of committing a "dacoity" in the western state.

He was speaking on the sidelines of the launch of a book on Bihar Chief Minister Nitish Kumar, an arch-rival with whom he has now joined hands.

"This function is taking place at a time when Nitish, I and various leaders have come together to combat assaults on democracy by the dispensation headed by Prime Minister Narendra Modi," he said.

"Modi has been committing dacoities across the nation, as you have seen in Maharashtra from where the country's most senior leader had come to attend our opposition meet," said the RJD supremo.

Prasad expressed hope that the upheaval will have no impact on the standing of the NCP's founding president Sharad Pawar, who seems to have been left high and dry with close aides like Praful Patel also joining the rebel camp led by his nephew.

Sharad Pawar is a national leader. Narendra Modi has tried to make a dent in his standing. But he will come out unscathed, said Prasad, who had been the NCP chief's cabinet colleague in the Manmohan Singh-led government at the Centre.

In his speech at the function, where Prasad spoke for less than 20 minutes, he began on a blistering note alleging assaults on the constitution and dacoities being carried out across the country by Prime Minister Narendra Modi.

He also scoffed at speculations of a similar development rattling the Mahagathbandhan (grand alliance) in Bihar, which leaders of BJP-led NDA have been boasting of since Sunday's development.

You have seen what has happened in Maharashtra, from where the country's senior-most leader had come to lend his support to our opposition unity initiative, said Prasad, referring to the June 23 meeting hosted by Nitish Kumar which was attended, among others, by Pawar, Patel and the NCP chief's daughter Supriya Sule.

Legislators are being poached, alleged the RJD supremo adding After what has happened in Maharashtra, I get to hear that similar attempts are being mooted in Bihar.

Let those harbouring such fancies remember, this is Bihar. Here we know how to smear a flying bird with turmeric (udti chidiya ko haldi lagana), said the charismatic leader who often uses the Bihari idiom to underscore the political consciousness of the state's people.

Prasad also questioned Modi's anti-corruption pitch, raking up the allegations against the Adani group, and asked: "Who can be more corrupt than this regime?

Prasad, who spent quite a long time behind bars following sentences awarded in fodder scam cases, also rued communal tensions which he called attempts to pit the followers of Ram and Rahim against each other.

Squarely blaming the BJP for the scenario, he also alleged there were no attempts to uplift the poor and conspiracies are underway to do away with reservations.

The RJD supremo, whose party is enjoying power, with his son Tejashwi Yadav as the Deputy CM, following his tie-up with Nitish Kumar, fondly recalled the JD(U) leader's support when they were together in the undivided Janata Dal.

I became the Leader of the Opposition in Bihar assembly after the death of Karpoori Thakur despite some of my seniors being in the race. I owe it, in great measure, to Nitish Kumar.

Our careers took off at almost the same time. I became the Chief Minister of Bihar and he became a Union minister. Together we fought for implementation of Mandal Commission and protecting the minorities, said Prasad.
Nationalist Congress Party (NCP) president Sharad Pawar on Monday visited the memorial of his mentor and Maharashtra's first chief minister Yashwantrao Chavan in Karad and paid floral tributes to him.

The 82-year-old leader's visit to late Chavan's memorial on the occasion of Guru Purnima is being seen as a show of strength by him, a day after his nephew Ajit Pawar led a vertical split in the NCP to become the deputy chief minister in the Eknath Shinde-BJP government.

Sharad Pawar on Sunday said he was undeterred by his nephew Ajit Pawar's rebellion and would start afresh by going among the people.

He left from Pune for Karad on Monday morning and stopped along the way to meet supporters who lined up on roadsides to greet him and extend support to him.

In Karad, Sharad Pawar was welcomed by thousands of supporters and local MLA Balasaheb Patil.

Senior Congress leader Prithviraj Chavan, who hails from Karad, was also present.
The Supreme Court on Monday directed the Manipur government to file an updated status report detailing the steps taken to ensure rehabilitation and improve the law and order situation in the ethnic violence-hit state.

A bench comprising Chief Justice D Y Chandrachud and Justices P S Narasimha and Manoj Misra listed the batch of petitions on the issue for hearing on July 10.

Asking Solicitor General Tushar Mehta, appearing for the state government, to file an updated status report, the bench said, "It should have details like rehabilitation camps, law and order and recovery of arms.

In a brief hearing, the top law officer gave details of the deployment of security forces and the recent status of the law and order situation and said curfew in the state has now been reduced to five hours from 24 hours.

According to Mehta, civil police, Indian reserve battalions and 114 companies of CAPFs are also deployed in the state.

He said senior advocate Colin Gonsalves, appearing for Kuki groups, should not give the case a communal angle" and added that "real human beings are being dealt with.

Gonsalves argued that militants came on a news programme and said they will annihilate the Kukis but no action was taken against them. He alleged that the violence against Kukis was sponsored by the state.

The apex court is seized of a batch of pleas on the Manipur situation, including one by a ruling BJP MLA challenging the high court order on Scheduled Tribe status to the Meitei community, and a PIL by a tribal NGO for an SIT probe into the violence that has rocked the northeastern state.

One of the NGOs, Manipur Tribal Forum, has moved the top court seeking Army protection for the minority Kuki tribals in Manipur and prosecution of communal groups attacking them.

On June 20, a vacation bench headed by Justice Surya Kant declined urgent hearing on the plea, saying it's a law and order issue the administration should tackle.

Gonsalves, appearing for the NGO, submitted that 70 tribals have been killed in ethnic violence in the state notwithstanding the solemn assurances that nobody will die.

The solicitor general had opposed the request for an urgent hearing, and said security agencies are on the ground and doing their best to stem the violence and restore normalcy.

He submitted that the main matter pertaining to the Manipur High Court's order for grant of Scheduled Tribe status to the majority Meitei community, which set off a chain of violence in the northeastern state, has been posted for hearing on July 17 by the top court.

More than 120 people have lost their lives in clashes between the Meitei and Kuki communities. The clashes first broke out on May 3 after a Tribal Solidarity March was organised in the state's hill districts to protest the Meitei community's demand for ST status.

Meiteis account for about 53 per cent of Manipur's population and live mostly in the Imphal Valley. Tribal Nagas and Kukis constitute another 40 per cent of the population and reside in the hill districts.

On March 27, the Manipur High Court order asked the state government to send a recommendation to the Centre within four weeks on the demand for ST status to the majority community.
StockNews.com upgraded shares of B2Gold (NYSEAMERICAN:BTG  Free Report) (TSE:BTO) from a buy rating to a strong-buy rating in a report released on Friday morning.

Other research analysts also recently issued research reports about the company. TheStreet downgraded B2Gold from a b- rating to a c+ rating in a research note on Friday, June 16th. Royal Bank of Canada reiterated a sector perform rating and set a $4.25 target price on shares of B2Gold in a report on Wednesday, March 8th. BMO Capital Markets assumed coverage on B2Gold in a report on Thursday, April 20th. They set an outperform rating on the stock. National Bank Financial lifted their target price on B2Gold from C$7.25 to C$7.75 in a report on Friday, May 12th. Finally, Scotiabank lifted their target price on B2Gold from C$7.50 to C$8.00 in a report on Wednesday, April 12th. Two research analysts have rated the stock with a hold rating, two have assigned a buy rating and one has given a strong buy rating to the companys stock. Based on data from MarketBeat, the stock currently has a consensus rating of Moderate Buy and an average price target of $6.46.

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B2Gold Stock Performance

BTG stock opened at $3.57 on Friday. The businesss fifty day moving average is $3.85 and its 200-day moving average is $3.51. The company has a quick ratio of 2.69, a current ratio of 4.00 and a debt-to-equity ratio of 0.01. The company has a market cap of $4.62 billion, a P/E ratio of 14.28 and a beta of 0.96. B2Gold has a twelve month low of $2.81 and a twelve month high of $4.40.

B2Gold Dividend Announcement

B2Gold ( NYSEAMERICAN:BTG Free Report ) (TSE:BTO) last posted its quarterly earnings results on Tuesday, May 9th. The basic materials company reported $0.10 earnings per share for the quarter, beating analysts consensus estimates of $0.07 by $0.03. The company had revenue of $473.56 million for the quarter, compared to the consensus estimate of $416.00 million. B2Gold had a return on equity of 9.94% and a net margin of 14.02%. Equities research analysts forecast that B2Gold will post 0.32 EPS for the current year.

The company also recently declared a quarterly dividend, which was paid on Tuesday, June 27th. Shareholders of record on Friday, June 16th were paid a $0.04 dividend. This represents a $0.16 annualized dividend and a dividend yield of 4.48%. The ex-dividend date was Thursday, June 15th. B2Golds dividend payout ratio is 64.00%.

Institutional Trading of B2Gold

A number of hedge funds and other institutional investors have recently modified their holdings of BTG. JPMorgan Chase & Co. increased its position in shares of B2Gold by 4.6% in the first quarter. JPMorgan Chase & Co. now owns 2,343,623 shares of the basic materials companys stock valued at $10,757,000 after acquiring an additional 103,507 shares during the last quarter. Raymond James Financial Services Advisors Inc. grew its holdings in B2Gold by 13.7% during the first quarter. Raymond James Financial Services Advisors Inc. now owns 199,062 shares of the basic materials companys stock worth $914,000 after purchasing an additional 24,045 shares during the period. Bank of New York Mellon Corp grew its holdings in B2Gold by 5.5% during the first quarter. Bank of New York Mellon Corp now owns 577,840 shares of the basic materials companys stock worth $2,652,000 after purchasing an additional 30,187 shares during the period. HighTower Advisors LLC grew its holdings in B2Gold by 30.3% during the first quarter. HighTower Advisors LLC now owns 39,711 shares of the basic materials companys stock worth $181,000 after purchasing an additional 9,229 shares during the period. Finally, Cetera Advisor Networks LLC grew its holdings in B2Gold by 52.9% during the first quarter. Cetera Advisor Networks LLC now owns 26,750 shares of the basic materials companys stock worth $123,000 after purchasing an additional 9,250 shares during the period. Institutional investors and hedge funds own 44.97% of the companys stock.

About B2Gold

(Free Report)

B2Gold Corp. operates as a gold producer with three operating mines in Mali, the Philippines, and Namibia. It operates the Fekola Mine in Mali, the Masbate Mine in the Philippines, and the Otjikoto Mine in Namibia. The company also has an 25% interest in the Calibre Mining Corp.; and approximately 19% interest in BeMetals Corp.

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South Korean firm Hyundai Rotem has designed a new main battle tank called the K3. Current K2 tanks used by South Korea are based on the American M1. The K3 is more similar to the Russian T-14, which the Russians promoted as the tank of the future. The T-14 did not work. Its engine had persistent problems as did many electronic systems essential to the T-14soperation. Hyundai is aware of this and taking its time to get things right. The first working K3 prototype wont be available until 2030.

The K3 design is similar in many ways to the T-14. K3 is a 55-ton tank with a three-man crew (commander, gunner and driver) operating from inside a heavily protected capsule underneath the turret, which is unmanned and uses an auto-loader. The K3 turret is designed to also handle the 130mm gun proposed as a replacement for the current NATO-standard 120mmm smoothbore cannon. The turret also contains a 12.7mm machine-gun that is usually operated by the gunner but can also be operated by the tank commander. There is an APS (active protection system) to defend against anti-tank rockets and missiles. There is supposed to be a system for detecting anti-tank mines and roadside bombs which have been a major source of tank losses for nearly a century.

The K3 will have numerous video cameras and other sensors installed on the external hull. The armor itself is to be an improvement on the current composite design. The external sensors give the crew a 360 degree view of whats outside the tank day or night. The crew may use special visors for their helmets that display the outside view on the visor. This sort of thing is already in use. Communications systems also use the latest tech, which may include anti-jamming capabilities. The K3 has a top road sped of 70 kilometers an hour and up to 50 kilometers off-road. On roads, K3 range is 500 kilometers. There will also be a smaller auxiliary power generator to enable the main engine to be shut down while there is still sufficient power to keep all the electronics and air-conditioning operating.

There was a similar, in some ways, new 35-ton PL-01 light tank developed by Poland and Britain back in 2013. The PL-01 worked but was not competitive with the Leopard 2 or M1.

K3 developers learned much from the flawed development of the similar Russian T-14 design, which was meant to be a major improvement on the current T-72. T-14 development began over a decade ago and was supposed to be ready for combat by 2020 at the latest. That did not happen because of a growing list of problems. The worst was an unreliable engine and many of the electronic systems still have significant problems. Costs also increased to the point where it was no longer affordable. T-14 has not been in combat and is too expensive to purchase in large quantities.

The 48-ton T-14 is a radical new design that appeared quite impressive but has so far proved too complex and too expensive to mass produce. Mass production was supposed to have started in 2015 but technical problems and shrinking defense budgets halted that until 2020 when covid19 restrictions again delayed production until 2022. The war in Ukraine meant further delays. Russia has fewer than thirty development and pre-production T-14s which have been undergoing field tests with tank units since 2016. The T-14 has a three-man crew and a fully automated turret with the three crew all in an armored capsule under the turret.

The T-14 relies on a lot of new techs, some more advanced than any other Western tank has installed. Getting all that tech to work reliably has been a major problem. Getting all these problems fixed has made the T-14 more expensive, at about $4 million each. Thats twice what the reliable T-72B3 costs and Russian combat commanders and crews will have to be convinced that the T-14 works and is not just as reliable as the T-72B3, but also better at surviving in combat. Mass production to build less than two hundred more T-14s was supposed to begin in 2022. The Russians considered sending some T-14s to Ukraine but the list of known and potential defects made it obvious that T-14s in combat would be an embarrassment. There are major problems with the engine and electronics and now Russia cant afford the money needed to deal with those problems.
CACI International Inc (NYSE:CACI  Free Report) was the recipient of a significant increase in short interest in June. As of June 15th, there was short interest totalling 489,800 shares, an increase of 75.1% from the May 31st total of 279,800 shares. Based on an average daily volume of 158,200 shares, the short-interest ratio is presently 3.1 days. Currently, 2.2% of the shares of the stock are sold short.

Insider Buying and Selling

In related news, Director Gregory G. Johnson sold 150 shares of the businesss stock in a transaction that occurred on Tuesday, June 13th. The stock was sold at an average price of $320.30, for a total transaction of $48,045.00. Following the sale, the director now owns 5,958 shares of the companys stock, valued at $1,908,347.40. The sale was disclosed in a filing with the SEC, which is available through the SEC website. 1.23% of the stock is owned by corporate insiders.

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Hedge Funds Weigh In On CACI International

Institutional investors and hedge funds have recently added to or reduced their stakes in the company. Bank of New York Mellon Corp grew its holdings in shares of CACI International by 30.3% during the 1st quarter. Bank of New York Mellon Corp now owns 604,767 shares of the information technology services providers stock valued at $179,180,000 after acquiring an additional 140,710 shares in the last quarter. Ameriprise Financial Inc. grew its holdings in shares of CACI International by 6.8% during the 1st quarter. Ameriprise Financial Inc. now owns 443,965 shares of the information technology services providers stock valued at $131,538,000 after acquiring an additional 28,091 shares in the last quarter. Geode Capital Management LLC grew its holdings in shares of CACI International by 15.2% during the 1st quarter. Geode Capital Management LLC now owns 366,123 shares of the information technology services providers stock valued at $108,475,000 after acquiring an additional 48,439 shares in the last quarter. Barrow Hanley Mewhinney & Strauss LLC grew its holdings in shares of CACI International by 2.8% during the 1st quarter. Barrow Hanley Mewhinney & Strauss LLC now owns 346,615 shares of the information technology services providers stock valued at $102,695,000 after acquiring an additional 9,335 shares in the last quarter. Finally, Vaughan Nelson Investment Management L.P. grew its holdings in shares of CACI International by 6.1% during the 1st quarter. Vaughan Nelson Investment Management L.P. now owns 133,880 shares of the information technology services providers stock valued at $39,666,000 after acquiring an additional 7,643 shares in the last quarter. 89.34% of the stock is currently owned by hedge funds and other institutional investors.

Analyst Upgrades and Downgrades

CACI International Trading Up 0.7 %

Several research analysts have issued reports on CACI shares. Stifel Nicolaus upped their price target on CACI International from $315.00 to $360.00 in a report on Thursday, June 22nd. StockNews.com started coverage on CACI International in a report on Thursday, May 18th. They issued a buy rating on the stock. Finally, 888 reaffirmed a maintains rating on shares of CACI International in a report on Friday, April 28th. Five research analysts have rated the stock with a buy rating, According to MarketBeat, the company presently has a consensus rating of Buy and an average target price of $341.83.

NYSE CACI traded up $2.44 on Friday, hitting $340.84. 121,035 shares of the stock were exchanged, compared to its average volume of 173,134. CACI International has a 52-week low of $245.32 and a 52-week high of $342.83. The company has a debt-to-equity ratio of 0.57, a current ratio of 1.23 and a quick ratio of 1.23. The company has a market capitalization of $7.77 billion, a price-to-earnings ratio of 21.71, a P/E/G ratio of 2.29 and a beta of 0.97. The companys 50-day moving average price is $312.23 and its two-hundred day moving average price is $302.48.

CACI International (NYSE:CACI  Free Report) last posted its quarterly earnings data on Wednesday, April 26th. The information technology services provider reported $4.92 earnings per share for the quarter, topping the consensus estimate of $4.64 by $0.28. CACI International had a net margin of 5.57% and a return on equity of 13.60%. The firm had revenue of $1.74 billion for the quarter, compared to analysts expectations of $1.66 billion. During the same period in the previous year, the company posted $4.64 EPS. The companys quarterly revenue was up 10.1% compared to the same quarter last year. Research analysts predict that CACI International will post 18.4 EPS for the current year.

About CACI International

(Free Report)

CACI International Inc, together with its subsidiaries, provides expertise and technology to enterprise and mission customers in support of national security missions and government modernization/transformation in the intelligence, defense, and federal civilian sectors. It operates in two segments, Domestic Operations and International Operations.

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Kayne Anderson Energy Infrastructure Fund, Inc. (NYSE:KYN  Free Report) saw a large growth in short interest in June. As of June 15th, there was short interest totalling 233,800 shares, a growth of 48.7% from the May 31st total of 157,200 shares. Based on an average trading volume of 473,400 shares, the days-to-cover ratio is presently 0.5 days.

Kayne Anderson Energy Infrastructure Fund Price Performance

KYN remained flat at $8.14 during trading on Friday. 396,295 shares of the companys stock were exchanged, compared to its average volume of 476,406. Kayne Anderson Energy Infrastructure Fund has a twelve month low of $7.76 and a twelve month high of $9.66. The businesss 50-day simple moving average is $8.14 and its two-hundred day simple moving average is $8.51.

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Kayne Anderson Energy Infrastructure Fund Dividend Announcement

The business also recently disclosed a quarterly dividend, which will be paid on Wednesday, July 5th. Shareholders of record on Monday, June 26th will be issued a dividend of $0.21 per share. This represents a $0.84 dividend on an annualized basis and a yield of 10.32%. The ex-dividend date is Friday, June 23rd.

Institutional Investors Weigh In On Kayne Anderson Energy Infrastructure Fund

About Kayne Anderson Energy Infrastructure Fund

A number of institutional investors have recently added to or reduced their stakes in KYN. MinichMacGregor Wealth Management LLC purchased a new stake in Kayne Anderson Energy Infrastructure Fund during the 4th quarter valued at approximately $34,000. Cullen Frost Bankers Inc. boosted its position in shares of Kayne Anderson Energy Infrastructure Fund by 87.5% during the 1st quarter. Cullen Frost Bankers Inc. now owns 6,429 shares of the financial services providers stock valued at $56,000 after acquiring an additional 3,000 shares during the last quarter. Chilton Capital Management LLC bought a new position in shares of Kayne Anderson Energy Infrastructure Fund during the 1st quarter valued at approximately $69,000. Venturi Wealth Management LLC bought a new position in shares of Kayne Anderson Energy Infrastructure Fund during the 1st quarter valued at approximately $76,000. Finally, Parallel Advisors LLC boosted its position in shares of Kayne Anderson Energy Infrastructure Fund by 1,466.7% during the 1st quarter. Parallel Advisors LLC now owns 9,400 shares of the financial services providers stock valued at $81,000 after acquiring an additional 8,800 shares during the last quarter.

(Free Report)

Kayne Anderson MLP Investment Company is a closed ended equity mutual fund launched and managed by KA Fund Advisors, LLC. It is co-managed by Kayne Anderson Capital Advisors, L.P. The fund invests in the public equity markets of the United States. It invests in stocks of companies operating in the energy sector.

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PIMCO High Income Fund (NYSE:PHK  Free Report) was the target of a significant drop in short interest in the month of June. As of June 15th, there was short interest totalling 54,200 shares, a drop of 46.9% from the May 31st total of 102,100 shares. Based on an average trading volume of 347,000 shares, the short-interest ratio is currently 0.2 days.

Institutional Inflows and Outflows

Large investors have recently modified their holdings of the company. First Manhattan Co. bought a new stake in PIMCO High Income Fund in the 3rd quarter valued at $35,000. Belpointe Asset Management LLC purchased a new stake in PIMCO High Income Fund in the 4th quarter valued at about $42,000. RMR Wealth Builders purchased a new stake in PIMCO High Income Fund in the 4th quarter valued at about $49,000. Jane Street Group LLC purchased a new stake in PIMCO High Income Fund in the 4th quarter valued at about $52,000. Finally, Private Advisor Group LLC purchased a new stake in shares of PIMCO High Income Fund in the 1st quarter worth approximately $54,000. Hedge funds and other institutional investors own 11.81% of the companys stock.

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PIMCO High Income Fund Stock Up 1.4 %

PHK traded up $0.07 during trading on Friday, hitting $5.00. The companys stock had a trading volume of 378,453 shares, compared to its average volume of 413,645. PIMCO High Income Fund has a one year low of $4.50 and a one year high of $5.41. The businesss 50 day simple moving average is $4.76 and its 200-day simple moving average is $4.88.

PIMCO High Income Fund Dividend Announcement

About PIMCO High Income Fund

The company also recently announced a monthly dividend, which will be paid on Monday, July 3rd. Investors of record on Monday, June 12th will be paid a dividend of $0.048 per share. This represents a $0.58 dividend on an annualized basis and a dividend yield of 11.52%. The ex-dividend date is Friday, June 9th.

(Free Report)

PIMCO High Income Fund is a closed ended fixed income mutual fund launched and managed by Allianz Global Investors Fund Management LLC. The fund is co-managed by Pacific Investment Management Company LLC. It invests in the public fixed income markets across the globe. The fund invests in U.S. dollar denominated high-yield corporate debt obligations.

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Alimentation Couche-Tard (OTCMKTS:ANCTF  Free Report) had its price objective hoisted by Stifel Nicolaus from C$74.00 to C$76.00 in a research note published on Thursday morning, The Fly reports.

ANCTF has been the topic of several other reports. Scotiabank upped their price objective on shares of Alimentation Couche-Tard from C$76.00 to C$78.00 in a report on Thursday. BMO Capital Markets decreased their target price on shares of Alimentation Couche-Tard from C$70.00 to C$68.00 in a research note on Thursday. CIBC boosted their target price on shares of Alimentation Couche-Tard from C$73.00 to C$76.00 in a research note on Friday, March 17th. Raymond James boosted their target price on shares of Alimentation Couche-Tard from C$60.00 to C$75.00 in a research note on Thursday, March 9th. Finally, Royal Bank of Canada boosted their target price on shares of Alimentation Couche-Tard from C$85.00 to C$87.00 in a research note on Wednesday, June 7th.

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Alimentation Couche-Tard Stock Up 0.0 %

ANCTF stock opened at $51.32 on Thursday. The firms fifty day simple moving average is $49.41 and its 200-day simple moving average is $47.74. Alimentation Couche-Tard has a 12 month low of $38.91 and a 12 month high of $52.89.

Alimentation Couche-Tard Company Profile

Alimentation Couche-Tard ( OTCMKTS:ANCTF Free Report ) last released its quarterly earnings data on Tuesday, June 27th. The company reported $0.71 EPS for the quarter. The business had revenue of $16.26 billion during the quarter.

(Free Report)

Alimentation Couche-Tard Inc operates and licenses convenience stores in North America, Europe, and Asia, as well as stores operated under the Circle K banner in Cambodia, Egypt, Guam, Guatemala, Honduras, Indonesia, Jamaica, Macau, Mexico, New Zealand, Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, and Vietnam.

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The Chemours Company (NYSE:CC  Free Report) has received an average recommendation of Hold from the ten brokerages that are currently covering the company, MarketBeat reports. One analyst has rated the stock with a sell rating, seven have issued a hold rating and two have issued a buy rating on the company. The average 1-year price objective among brokerages that have issued ratings on the stock in the last year is $38.44.

CC has been the topic of several recent research reports. UBS Group increased their price objective on shares of Chemours from $41.00 to $43.00 in a research note on Tuesday, June 13th. Bank of America cut shares of Chemours from a buy rating to a neutral rating and decreased their target price for the stock from $41.00 to $37.00 in a research note on Thursday, June 22nd. Royal Bank of Canada raised their target price on shares of Chemours from $36.00 to $37.00 in a research note on Friday, June 9th. StockNews.com lowered shares of Chemours from a buy rating to a hold rating in a report on Saturday, May 20th. Finally, Credit Suisse Group cut their price objective on shares of Chemours from $27.00 to $25.00 in a report on Friday, April 28th.

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Chemours Stock Up 2.8 %

NYSE:CC opened at $36.89 on Wednesday. The firms 50-day moving average price is $30.86 and its 200-day moving average price is $31.63. The company has a market capitalization of $5.50 billion, a PE ratio of 11.90, a P/E/G ratio of 1.36 and a beta of 1.87. The company has a debt-to-equity ratio of 2.93, a current ratio of 1.84 and a quick ratio of 0.98. Chemours has a 1-year low of $23.58 and a 1-year high of $38.36.

Chemours Dividend Announcement

Chemours ( NYSE:CC Free Report ) last released its earnings results on Friday, April 28th. The specialty chemicals company reported $0.98 earnings per share for the quarter, topping analysts consensus estimates of $0.62 by $0.36. The firm had revenue of $1.54 billion for the quarter, compared to the consensus estimate of $1.46 billion. Chemours had a net margin of 7.45% and a return on equity of 53.44%. The companys revenue was down 12.9% compared to the same quarter last year. During the same period in the prior year, the firm earned $1.46 EPS. On average, equities analysts predict that Chemours will post 3.94 EPS for the current fiscal year.

The firm also recently announced a quarterly dividend, which was paid on Thursday, June 15th. Stockholders of record on Monday, May 15th were given a dividend of $0.25 per share. The ex-dividend date was Friday, May 12th. This represents a $1.00 dividend on an annualized basis and a dividend yield of 2.71%. Chemourss dividend payout ratio (DPR) is 32.26%.

Insider Activity

In other Chemours news, SVP Matthew S. Abbott sold 8,912 shares of the firms stock in a transaction on Thursday, June 8th. The stock was sold at an average price of $34.20, for a total value of $304,790.40. Following the transaction, the senior vice president now owns 29,869 shares in the company, valued at approximately $1,021,519.80. The sale was disclosed in a legal filing with the Securities & Exchange Commission, which is available at the SEC website. In other Chemours news, SVP Matthew S. Abbott sold 8,912 shares of the firms stock in a transaction on Thursday, June 8th. The stock was sold at an average price of $34.20, for a total value of $304,790.40. Following the transaction, the senior vice president now owns 29,869 shares in the company, valued at approximately $1,021,519.80. The sale was disclosed in a legal filing with the Securities & Exchange Commission, which is available at the SEC website. Also, CEO Mark Newman acquired 7,661 shares of the firms stock in a transaction on Friday, June 9th. The stock was purchased at an average price of $34.63 per share, for a total transaction of $265,300.43. Following the acquisition, the chief executive officer now directly owns 266,955 shares in the company, valued at approximately $9,244,651.65. The disclosure for this purchase can be found here. Insiders own 1.63% of the companys stock.

Institutional Trading of Chemours

A number of hedge funds and other institutional investors have recently modified their holdings of the stock. Raymond James & Associates increased its position in shares of Chemours by 31.0% during the 1st quarter. Raymond James & Associates now owns 135,617 shares of the specialty chemicals companys stock worth $4,269,000 after purchasing an additional 32,121 shares during the last quarter. Cetera Advisor Networks LLC increased its position in shares of Chemours by 21.3% during the 1st quarter. Cetera Advisor Networks LLC now owns 9,636 shares of the specialty chemicals companys stock worth $303,000 after purchasing an additional 1,695 shares during the last quarter. Bank of Montreal Can increased its position in shares of Chemours by 36.4% during the 1st quarter. Bank of Montreal Can now owns 73,197 shares of the specialty chemicals companys stock worth $2,361,000 after purchasing an additional 19,552 shares during the last quarter. D.A. Davidson & CO. acquired a new stake in shares of Chemours during the 1st quarter worth about $208,000. Finally, MetLife Investment Management LLC increased its position in shares of Chemours by 35.7% during the 1st quarter. MetLife Investment Management LLC now owns 107,133 shares of the specialty chemicals companys stock worth $3,373,000 after purchasing an additional 28,160 shares during the last quarter. 70.80% of the stock is owned by institutional investors and hedge funds.

About Chemours

(Free Report

The Chemours Company provides performance chemicals in North America, the Asia Pacific, Europe, the Middle East, Africa, and Latin America. It operates through three segments: Titanium Technologies, Thermal & Specialized Solutions, and Advanced Performance Materials. The Titanium Technologies segment provides TiO2 pigment under the Ti-Pure brand for delivering whiteness, brightness, opacity, durability, efficiency, and protection in various of applications, such as architectural and industrial coatings, flexible and rigid plastic packaging, polyvinylchloride, laminate papers used for furniture and building materials, coated paper, and coated paperboard used for packaging.

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The Taiwan Fund, Inc. (NYSE:TWN  Free Report) was the target of a large increase in short interest during the month of June. As of June 15th, there was short interest totalling 5,600 shares, an increase of 80.6% from the May 31st total of 3,100 shares. Based on an average daily trading volume, of 15,700 shares, the days-to-cover ratio is currently 0.4 days.

Institutional Investors Weigh In On The Taiwan Fund

Several hedge funds and other institutional investors have recently made changes to their positions in TWN. Advisor Group Holdings Inc. increased its position in shares of The Taiwan Fund by 21.7% during the 1st quarter. Advisor Group Holdings Inc. now owns 3,652 shares of the companys stock valued at $121,000 after purchasing an additional 651 shares during the last quarter. Raymond James & Associates increased its holdings in The Taiwan Fund by 3.9% in the 1st quarter. Raymond James & Associates now owns 17,644 shares of the companys stock worth $580,000 after acquiring an additional 664 shares in the last quarter. UBS Group AG raised its stake in The Taiwan Fund by 198.2% during the 2nd quarter. UBS Group AG now owns 1,333 shares of the companys stock worth $33,000 after acquiring an additional 886 shares during the period. Captrust Financial Advisors bought a new stake in The Taiwan Fund during the 2nd quarter worth approximately $83,000. Finally, Matisse Capital bought a new stake in The Taiwan Fund during the 4th quarter worth approximately $262,000. Hedge funds and other institutional investors own 88.58% of the companys stock.

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The Taiwan Fund Price Performance

NYSE:TWN traded down $0.12 during mid-day trading on Friday, reaching $31.34. The companys stock had a trading volume of 3,482 shares, compared to its average volume of 16,043. The Taiwan Fund has a 12-month low of $18.35 and a 12-month high of $31.89. The firms fifty day moving average price is $28.47 and its two-hundred day moving average price is $26.79.

The Taiwan Fund Company Profile

The Taiwan Fund, Inc is a closed-ended equity mutual fund launched and managed by JF International Management Inc It invests in the public equity markets of Taiwan. The fund seeks to invest in stocks of companies operating across diversified sectors. It employs fundamental analysis focusing on such factors as overall growth prospects, competitive position in the respective industry, technology, research, and development, productivity, labor costs, raw material costs and sources, profit margins, return on investment, capital resources, government regulation, and management to create its portfolio.

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Avantax Planning Partners Inc. lifted its stake in shares of Black Hills Co. (NYSE:BKH  Free Report) by 10.0% in the first quarter, according to the company in its most recent filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission. The firm owned 31,013 shares of the utilities providers stock after acquiring an additional 2,830 shares during the quarter. Avantax Planning Partners Inc.s holdings in Black Hills were worth $1,957,000 at the end of the most recent reporting period.

A number of other hedge funds also recently made changes to their positions in BKH. Great West Life Assurance Co. Can grew its stake in shares of Black Hills by 11.1% during the 1st quarter. Great West Life Assurance Co. Can now owns 36,590 shares of the utilities providers stock valued at $2,896,000 after acquiring an additional 3,657 shares during the period. Yousif Capital Management LLC boosted its stake in Black Hills by 4.4% in the 1st quarter. Yousif Capital Management LLC now owns 34,426 shares of the utilities providers stock worth $2,651,000 after purchasing an additional 1,466 shares during the period. Raymond James Trust N.A. boosted its stake in Black Hills by 8.2% in the 1st quarter. Raymond James Trust N.A. now owns 8,190 shares of the utilities providers stock worth $631,000 after purchasing an additional 618 shares during the period. Dimensional Fund Advisors LP boosted its stake in Black Hills by 7.2% in the 1st quarter. Dimensional Fund Advisors LP now owns 748,590 shares of the utilities providers stock worth $57,656,000 after purchasing an additional 50,038 shares during the period. Finally, Allianz Asset Management GmbH boosted its stake in Black Hills by 1.1% in the 1st quarter. Allianz Asset Management GmbH now owns 13,420 shares of the utilities providers stock worth $1,034,000 after purchasing an additional 151 shares during the period. 86.24% of the stock is currently owned by institutional investors.

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Wall Street Analyst Weigh In

Separately, StockNews.com upgraded Black Hills from a sell rating to a hold rating in a research note on Saturday, June 3rd. Two equities research analysts have rated the stock with a sell rating and five have assigned a hold rating to the company. According to data from MarketBeat.com, the stock currently has an average rating of Hold and an average target price of $67.29.

Black Hills Price Performance

Shares of BKH traded up $0.21 during mid-day trading on Monday, hitting $60.47. 63,634 shares of the stock were exchanged, compared to its average volume of 449,452. The company has a market cap of $4.05 billion, a PE ratio of 15.45, a price-to-earnings-growth ratio of 7.34 and a beta of 0.57. Black Hills Co. has a 52-week low of $58.81 and a 52-week high of $79.78. The firm has a 50-day moving average of $62.89 and a two-hundred day moving average of $65.13. The company has a debt-to-equity ratio of 1.24, a quick ratio of 0.76 and a current ratio of 0.88.

Black Hills (NYSE:BKH  Free Report) last issued its quarterly earnings data on Wednesday, May 3rd. The utilities provider reported $1.73 earnings per share (EPS) for the quarter, topping the consensus estimate of $1.67 by $0.06. The business had revenue of $921.20 million for the quarter, compared to analysts expectations of $754.70 million. Black Hills had a return on equity of 8.33% and a net margin of 9.62%. The companys revenue for the quarter was up 11.9% on a year-over-year basis. During the same period in the prior year, the firm earned $1.82 EPS. On average, equities analysts predict that Black Hills Co. will post 3.73 earnings per share for the current year.

Black Hills Announces Dividend

The business also recently declared a quarterly dividend, which was paid on Thursday, June 1st. Investors of record on Thursday, May 18th were issued a dividend of $0.625 per share. The ex-dividend date of this dividend was Wednesday, May 17th. This represents a $2.50 annualized dividend and a yield of 4.13%. Black Hillss payout ratio is presently 64.10%.

Insider Activity at Black Hills

In other Black Hills news, CFO Richard Kinzley sold 10,033 shares of the companys stock in a transaction on Monday, May 8th. The stock was sold at an average price of $65.49, for a total value of $657,061.17. Following the transaction, the chief financial officer now owns 36,576 shares of the companys stock, valued at approximately $2,395,362.24. The sale was disclosed in a filing with the Securities & Exchange Commission, which is accessible through this hyperlink. 0.61% of the stock is currently owned by insiders.

About Black Hills

(Free Report)

Black Hills Corporation, through its subsidiaries, operates as an electric and natural gas utility company in the United States. It operates in two segments, Electric Utilities and Gas Utilities. The Electric Utilities segment generates, transmits, and distributes electricity to approximately 220,000 electric utility customers in Colorado, Montana, South Dakota, and Wyoming; and owns and operates 1,482 megawatts of generation capacity and 9,024 miles of electric transmission and distribution lines.

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Citigroup cut shares of Core Laboratories (NYSE:CLB  Free Report) from a neutral rating to a sell rating in a research note issued to investors on Friday, The Fly reports. They currently have $21.00 target price on the oil and gas companys stock, down from their previous target price of $22.00.

Other equities analysts have also issued research reports about the company. Stifel Nicolaus increased their target price on Core Laboratories from $24.00 to $25.00 in a research note on Friday, April 28th. StockNews.com assumed coverage on Core Laboratories in a research note on Tuesday, June 27th. They issued a hold rating on the stock. Bank of America lowered shares of Core Laboratories from a neutral rating to an underperform rating and set a $21.50 target price on the stock. in a report on Tuesday, April 18th. They noted that the move was a valuation call. Finally, Piper Sandler increased their target price on shares of Core Laboratories from $18.00 to $19.00 in a report on Monday, May 1st.

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Core Laboratories Price Performance

Shares of Core Laboratories stock opened at $23.25 on Friday. The stock has a market cap of $1.09 billion, a PE ratio of 46.50, a price-to-earnings-growth ratio of 0.88 and a beta of 2.67. Core Laboratories has a 52 week low of $13.19 and a 52 week high of $26.80. The companys 50-day moving average price is $22.66 and its two-hundred day moving average price is $22.68. The company has a current ratio of 2.38, a quick ratio of 1.68 and a debt-to-equity ratio of 0.90.

Core Laboratories Dividend Announcement

Core Laboratories ( NYSE:CLB Free Report ) last posted its quarterly earnings results on Wednesday, April 26th. The oil and gas company reported $0.08 earnings per share for the quarter, missing analysts consensus estimates of $0.14 by ($0.06). The company had revenue of $128.36 million during the quarter, compared to analyst estimates of $126.26 million. Core Laboratories had a return on equity of 15.23% and a net margin of 4.72%. As a group, sell-side analysts anticipate that Core Laboratories will post 0.56 EPS for the current fiscal year.

The firm also recently announced a quarterly dividend, which was paid on Tuesday, May 30th. Investors of record on Monday, May 8th were issued a $0.01 dividend. The ex-dividend date was Friday, May 5th. This represents a $0.04 dividend on an annualized basis and a dividend yield of 0.17%. Core Laboratoriess dividend payout ratio is presently 8.00%.

Hedge Funds Weigh In On Core Laboratories

Large investors have recently modified their holdings of the business. Fifth Third Bancorp boosted its stake in shares of Core Laboratories by 328.1% in the 1st quarter. Fifth Third Bancorp now owns 1,858 shares of the oil and gas companys stock valued at $41,000 after purchasing an additional 1,424 shares in the last quarter. UBS Group AG boosted its holdings in Core Laboratories by 171.6% during the 3rd quarter. UBS Group AG now owns 3,200 shares of the oil and gas companys stock valued at $43,000 after acquiring an additional 2,022 shares during the period. Trivant Custom Portfolio Group LLC purchased a new stake in Core Laboratories during the 1st quarter valued at about $49,000. Quadrant Capital Group LLC boosted its holdings in Core Laboratories by 213.1% during the 4th quarter. Quadrant Capital Group LLC now owns 2,805 shares of the oil and gas companys stock valued at $57,000 after acquiring an additional 1,909 shares during the period. Finally, PNC Financial Services Group Inc. boosted its holdings in Core Laboratories by 184.9% during the 4th quarter. PNC Financial Services Group Inc. now owns 2,934 shares of the oil and gas companys stock valued at $59,000 after acquiring an additional 1,904 shares during the period. Hedge funds and other institutional investors own 97.63% of the companys stock.

About Core Laboratories

(Free Report)

Core Laboratories Inc provides reservoir description and production enhancement services and products to the oil and gas industry in the United States, Canada, and internationally. It operates through Reservoir Description and Production Enhancement segments. The Reservoir Description segment includes the characterization of petroleum reservoir rock, reservoir fluid, and gas samples to enhance production and improve recovery of oil and gas from its clients' reservoirs.

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Citigroup assumed coverage on shares of Dell Technologies (NYSE:DELL  Free Report) in a research report report published on Thursday morning, The Fly reports. The firm issued a buy rating and a $60.00 price target on the technology companys stock.

DELL has been the topic of several other research reports. Morgan Stanley upped their price objective on Dell Technologies from $55.00 to $56.00 in a report on Friday, June 2nd. Sanford C. Bernstein reduced their price objective on Dell Technologies from $60.00 to $51.00 in a report on Friday, March 3rd. Deutsche Bank Aktiengesellschaft lifted their price target on shares of Dell Technologies from $45.00 to $48.00 in a research report on Friday, June 2nd. JPMorgan Chase & Co. downgraded shares of Dell Technologies from an overweight rating to a neutral rating and set a $47.00 price objective for the company. in a research report on Monday, April 17th. Finally, The Goldman Sachs Group began coverage on shares of Dell Technologies in a research note on Monday, March 20th. They set a buy rating and a $43.00 target price on the stock. Five research analysts have rated the stock with a hold rating and eleven have given a buy rating to the company. According to data from MarketBeat.com, the company has a consensus rating of Moderate Buy and an average target price of $50.75.

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Dell Technologies Price Performance

NYSE DELL opened at $54.11 on Thursday. Dell Technologies has a fifty-two week low of $32.90 and a fifty-two week high of $54.61. The stocks 50-day moving average is $47.17 and its two-hundred day moving average is $42.84. The firm has a market cap of $39.35 billion, a P/E ratio of 20.50, a price-to-earnings-growth ratio of 0.96 and a beta of 1.02.

Dell Technologies Dividend Announcement

Dell Technologies ( NYSE:DELL Free Report ) last posted its earnings results on Thursday, June 1st. The technology company reported $1.31 earnings per share for the quarter, beating the consensus estimate of $0.86 by $0.45. The company had revenue of $20.92 billion for the quarter, compared to analyst estimates of $20.27 billion. Dell Technologies had a negative return on equity of 149.49% and a net margin of 2.01%. The businesss revenue was down 19.9% compared to the same quarter last year. During the same period last year, the company earned $1.64 earnings per share. On average, equities analysts expect that Dell Technologies will post 4.59 EPS for the current year.

The business also recently disclosed a quarterly dividend, which will be paid on Friday, August 4th. Investors of record on Tuesday, July 25th will be given a $0.37 dividend. This represents a $1.48 annualized dividend and a dividend yield of 2.74%. The ex-dividend date is Monday, July 24th. Dell Technologiess payout ratio is currently 56.06%.

Insider Activity at Dell Technologies

In related news, CAO Brunilda Rios sold 22,042 shares of the stock in a transaction that occurred on Monday, April 17th. The shares were sold at an average price of $43.78, for a total value of $964,998.76. Following the completion of the transaction, the chief accounting officer now directly owns 18,647 shares of the companys stock, valued at approximately $816,365.66. The sale was disclosed in a legal filing with the Securities & Exchange Commission, which is accessible through the SEC website. In other Dell Technologies news, CAO Brunilda Rios sold 22,042 shares of the firms stock in a transaction that occurred on Monday, April 17th. The shares were sold at an average price of $43.78, for a total transaction of $964,998.76. Following the completion of the transaction, the chief accounting officer now directly owns 18,647 shares of the companys stock, valued at approximately $816,365.66. The transaction was disclosed in a legal filing with the Securities & Exchange Commission, which is accessible through this link. Also, General Counsel Richard J. Rothberg sold 200,958 shares of the firms stock in a transaction that occurred on 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 transaction, the general counsel now directly owns 149,379 shares of the companys stock, valued at $6,775,831.44. The disclosure for this sale can be found here. 48.60% of the stock is currently owned by insiders.

Institutional Investors Weigh In On Dell Technologies

Several institutional investors and hedge funds have recently added to or reduced their stakes in the stock. Cambridge Investment Research Advisors Inc. increased its stake in Dell Technologies by 17.7% in the first quarter. Cambridge Investment Research Advisors Inc. now owns 14,076 shares of the technology companys stock valued at $706,000 after purchasing an additional 2,117 shares during the last quarter. D.A. Davidson & CO. acquired a new stake in Dell Technologies in the first quarter valued at $304,000. MetLife Investment Management LLC acquired a new stake in Dell Technologies in the first quarter valued at $568,000. Rhumbline Advisers raised its stake in shares of Dell Technologies by 2.0% during the 1st quarter. Rhumbline Advisers now owns 254,266 shares of the technology companys stock worth $12,762,000 after buying an additional 4,949 shares during the last quarter. Finally, Yousif Capital Management LLC raised its stake in shares of Dell Technologies by 5.2% during the 1st quarter. Yousif Capital Management LLC now owns 6,090 shares of the technology companys stock worth $306,000 after buying an additional 302 shares during the last quarter. Hedge funds and other institutional investors own 25.05% of the companys stock.

Dell Technologies Company Profile

(Free Report)

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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Dutch Bros Inc. (NYSE:BROS  Free Report) has been given a consensus recommendation of Hold by the ten analysts that are presently covering the stock, MarketBeat reports. Six investment analysts have rated the stock with a hold recommendation and four have given a buy recommendation to the company. The average 12-month target price among analysts that have covered the stock in the last year is $37.73.

Several brokerages have weighed in on BROS. JPMorgan Chase & Co. cut Dutch Bros from an overweight rating to a neutral rating and dropped their price objective for the stock from $38.00 to $32.00 in a report on Wednesday, May 10th. TD Cowen cut Dutch Bros from an outperform rating to a market perform rating and dropped their price objective for the stock from $39.00 to $33.00 in a report on Wednesday, May 10th. Stifel Nicolaus dropped their price objective on Dutch Bros from $37.00 to $36.00 and set a hold rating for the company in a report on Tuesday, April 4th. Finally, Wedbush raised Dutch Bros from a neutral rating to an outperform rating and set a $37.00 price target for the company in a research note on Wednesday, April 5th.

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Institutional Trading of Dutch Bros

A number of large investors have recently bought and sold shares of BROS. WealthPLAN Partners LLC bought a new position in shares of Dutch Bros during the 1st quarter worth approximately $28,000. Lindbrook Capital LLC grew its stake in shares of Dutch Bros by 39.1% during the 4th quarter. Lindbrook Capital LLC now owns 1,100 shares of the companys stock worth $31,000 after acquiring an additional 309 shares in the last quarter. Captrust Financial Advisors grew its stake in shares of Dutch Bros by 87.9% during the 2nd quarter. Captrust Financial Advisors now owns 1,114 shares of the companys stock worth $35,000 after acquiring an additional 521 shares in the last quarter. Ameritas Advisory Services LLC bought a new position in shares of Dutch Bros during the 1st quarter worth approximately $36,000. Finally, Deutsche Bank AG bought a new position in shares of Dutch Bros during the 4th quarter worth approximately $36,000.

Dutch Bros Stock Up 0.7 %

Shares of NYSE BROS opened at $28.45 on Wednesday. The firms 50-day simple moving average is $29.03 and its 200 day simple moving average is $31.55. The company has a market cap of $1.30 billion, a price-to-earnings ratio of -406.43 and a beta of 2.64. The company has a quick ratio of 0.15, a current ratio of 0.32 and a debt-to-equity ratio of 1.49. Dutch Bros has a 12-month low of $25.45 and a 12-month high of $54.18.

Dutch Bros (NYSE:BROS  Free Report) last issued its quarterly earnings results on Tuesday, May 9th. The company reported ($0.16) earnings per share (EPS) for the quarter, missing the consensus estimate of ($0.08) by ($0.08). The company had revenue of $197.27 million for the quarter, compared to analyst estimates of $208.20 million. Dutch Bros had a negative return on equity of 5.07% and a negative net margin of 0.47%. On average, research analysts expect that Dutch Bros will post -0.08 earnings per share for the current fiscal year.

Dutch Bros Company Profile

(Free Report

Dutch Bros Inc operates and franchises drive-thru shops. The company offers coffee-based beverages, including custom drinks, cold brews, and freeze blended beverages, as well as Blue Rebel energy drinks. It also provides tea, lemonade, sodas, smoothies, and other beverages through company-operated shops and online channels.

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Deutsche Bank Aktiengesellschaft cut shares of Graphic Packaging (NYSE:GPK  Free Report) from a buy rating to a hold rating in a research note released on Thursday morning, The Fly reports. Deutsche Bank Aktiengesellschaft currently has $26.00 price objective on the industrial products companys stock, down from their prior price objective of $30.00.

Several other brokerages also recently commented on GPK. Raymond James raised their price objective on shares of Graphic Packaging from $29.00 to $30.00 in a research report on Wednesday, May 3rd. StockNews.com started coverage on shares of Graphic Packaging in a research report on Thursday, May 18th. They set a buy rating on the stock. Seaport Res Ptn restated a buy rating on shares of Graphic Packaging in a research report on Wednesday, May 3rd. Finally, Mizuho raised their price objective on shares of Graphic Packaging from $30.00 to $31.00 in a research report on Wednesday, May 3rd. One research analyst has rated the stock with a hold rating, seven have issued a buy rating and one has issued a strong buy rating to the company. Based on data from MarketBeat, the company has an average rating of Buy and a consensus price target of $28.75.

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Graphic Packaging Stock Up 1.5 %

GPK opened at $24.03 on Thursday. The company has a current ratio of 1.62, a quick ratio of 0.64 and a debt-to-equity ratio of 2.36. Graphic Packaging has a 1-year low of $19.46 and a 1-year high of $27.56. The company has a market capitalization of $7.38 billion, a PE ratio of 12.02, a PEG ratio of 0.31 and a beta of 0.97. The firms 50 day simple moving average is $25.15 and its two-hundred day simple moving average is $24.08.

Graphic Packaging Announces Dividend

Graphic Packaging ( NYSE:GPK Free Report ) last released its quarterly earnings results on Tuesday, May 2nd. The industrial products company reported $0.77 earnings per share for the quarter, topping the consensus estimate of $0.62 by $0.15. Graphic Packaging had a net margin of 6.46% and a return on equity of 38.99%. The business had revenue of $2.44 billion for the quarter, compared to the consensus estimate of $2.40 billion. During the same period last year, the firm earned $0.48 earnings per share. The companys quarterly revenue was up 8.6% on a year-over-year basis. As a group, equities analysts forecast that Graphic Packaging will post 3.02 EPS for the current year.

The business also recently announced a quarterly dividend, which will be paid on Wednesday, July 5th. Investors of record on Thursday, June 15th will be paid a dividend of $0.10 per share. The ex-dividend date of this dividend is Wednesday, June 14th. This represents a $0.40 annualized dividend and a yield of 1.66%. Graphic Packagings payout ratio is 20.00%.

Insider Activity at Graphic Packaging

In other Graphic Packaging news, CFO Stephen R. Scherger sold 160,492 shares of Graphic Packaging stock in a transaction on Tuesday, May 9th. The shares were sold at an average price of $25.81, for a total value of $4,142,298.52. Following the completion of the transaction, the chief financial officer now directly owns 427,548 shares of the companys stock, valued at approximately $11,035,013.88. The sale was disclosed in a filing with the Securities & Exchange Commission, which is accessible through this link. 1.20% of the stock is currently owned by corporate insiders.

Hedge Funds Weigh In On Graphic Packaging

A number of institutional investors and hedge funds have recently made changes to their positions in GPK. Private Trust Co. NA grew its stake in shares of Graphic Packaging by 177.3% in the 1st quarter. Private Trust Co. NA now owns 1,109 shares of the industrial products companys stock worth $28,000 after buying an additional 709 shares in the last quarter. Raleigh Capital Management Inc. boosted its stake in shares of Graphic Packaging by 369.6% during the 1st quarter. Raleigh Capital Management Inc. now owns 1,174 shares of the industrial products companys stock worth $30,000 after purchasing an additional 924 shares during the period. Accurate Wealth Management LLC purchased a new position in shares of Graphic Packaging during the 4th quarter worth about $34,000. C M Bidwell & Associates Ltd. purchased a new position in shares of Graphic Packaging during the 1st quarter worth about $39,000. Finally, Jefferies Financial Group Inc. purchased a new position in shares of Graphic Packaging during the 4th quarter worth about $41,000. 92.86% of the stock is owned by hedge funds and other institutional investors.

About Graphic Packaging

(Free Report)

Graphic Packaging Holding Company, together with its subsidiaries, provides fiber-based packaging solutions to food, beverage, foodservice, and other consumer products companies. It operates through three segments: Paperboard Mills, Americas Paperboard Packaging, and Europe Paperboard Packaging. The company offers coated unbleached kraft (CUK), coated recycled paperboard (CRB), and solid bleached sulfate paperboard (SBS) to various paperboard packaging converters and brokers; and paperboard packaging products, such as folding cartons, cups, lids, and food containers primarily to consumer packaged goods, quick-service restaurants, and foodservice companies; and barrier packaging products that protect against moisture, hot and cold temperature, grease, oil, oxygen, sunlight, insects, and other potential product-damaging factors.

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Pennon Group (OTCMKTS:PEGRF  Free Report) and Severn Trent (OTCMKTS:SVTRF  Free Report) are both utilities companies, but which is the better stock? We will contrast the two businesses based on the strength of their profitability, earnings, dividends, analyst recommendations, institutional ownership, risk and valuation.

Dividends

Pennon Group pays an annual dividend of $0.30 per share and has a dividend yield of 3.3%. Severn Trent pays an annual dividend of $0.80 per share and has a dividend yield of 2.5%. Pennon Group pays out 104.5% of its earnings in the form of a dividend, suggesting it may not have sufficient earnings to cover its dividend payment in the future. Severn Trent pays out 98.1% of its earnings in the form of a dividend, suggesting it may not have sufficient earnings to cover its dividend payment in the future.

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Valuation and Earnings

This table compares Pennon Group and Severn Trents top-line revenue, earnings per share (EPS) and valuation.

Gross Revenue Price/Sales Ratio Net Income Earnings Per Share Price/Earnings Ratio Pennon Group N/A N/A N/A $0.29 32.13 Severn Trent N/A N/A N/A $0.82 39.96

Profitability

Pennon Group is trading at a lower price-to-earnings ratio than Severn Trent, indicating that it is currently the more affordable of the two stocks.

This table compares Pennon Group and Severn Trents net margins, return on equity and return on assets.

Net Margins Return on Equity Return on Assets Pennon Group N/A N/A N/A Severn Trent N/A N/A N/A

Analyst Recommendations

This is a breakdown of current ratings and price targets for Pennon Group and Severn Trent, as provided by MarketBeat.com.

Sell Ratings Hold Ratings Buy Ratings Strong Buy Ratings Rating Score Pennon Group 0 1 1 0 2.50 Severn Trent 0 2 0 0 2.00

Pennon Group currently has a consensus price target of $815.00, suggesting a potential upside of 8,641.35%. Given Pennon Groups stronger consensus rating and higher probable upside, equities analysts clearly believe Pennon Group is more favorable than Severn Trent.

Insider and Institutional Ownership

44.0% of Pennon Group shares are owned by institutional investors. Comparatively, 37.3% of Severn Trent shares are owned by institutional investors. Strong institutional ownership is an indication that endowments, hedge funds and large money managers believe a company is poised for long-term growth.

Summary

Pennon Group beats Severn Trent on 5 of the 8 factors compared between the two stocks.

About Pennon Group

(Free Report)

Pennon Group Plc provides clean water and wastewater services in the United Kingdom. It provides water and wastewater services for customers in Cornwall, Devon, and parts of Dorset and Somerset; water-only services in the areas of Dorset, Hampshire, and Wiltshire; and water and wastewater retail services to non-household customers in Great Britain. The company also offers regulated water to approximately 1.2 million customers in the Bristol region. It serves approximately 50 million household and non-household customers. The company was incorporated in 1989 and is based in Exeter, the United Kingdom.

About Severn Trent

(Free Report)

Severn Trent PLC operates as a water and sewerage company in England and Wales. It operates through two segments: Regulated Water and Waste Water, and Business Services. The Regulated Water and Waste Water segment offers water and waste water services to approximately 4.8 million households and businesses. The Business Services segment generates renewable energy from anaerobic digestion, hydropower, wind turbines, and solar panels; property development; and offers affinity products and search services. It also provides services to municipal and industrial clients, including the Ministry of Defence and the Coal Authority for design, build, and operation of water and wastewater treatment facilities and networks. Severn Trent PLC was founded in 1974 and is headquartered in Coventry, the United Kingdom.

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Joby Aviation, Inc. (NYSE:JOBY  Free Report) CEO Joeben Bevirt sold 1,153,394 shares of Joby Aviation stock in a transaction dated Thursday, June 29th. The stock was sold at an average price of $10.68, for a total value of $12,318,247.92. Following the completion of the sale, the chief executive officer now owns 58,361,827 shares of the companys stock, valued at $623,304,312.36. The sale was disclosed in a document filed with the Securities & Exchange Commission, which can be accessed through the SEC website.

Joeben Bevirt also recently made the following trade(s):

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On Tuesday, June 20th, Joeben Bevirt sold 662,431 shares of Joby Aviation stock. The stock was sold at an average price of $7.26, for a total value of $4,809,249.06.

On Friday, June 16th, Joeben Bevirt sold 1,066,117 shares of Joby Aviation stock. The stock was sold at an average price of $7.58, for a total value of $8,081,166.86.

On Tuesday, April 4th, Joeben Bevirt sold 26,215 shares of Joby Aviation stock. The stock was sold at an average price of $4.17, for a total value of $109,316.55.

Joby Aviation Stock Performance

JOBY traded down $0.03 during midday trading on Monday, reaching $10.23. 15,259,293 shares of the company were exchanged, compared to its average volume of 5,145,941. Joby Aviation, Inc. has a one year low of $3.15 and a one year high of $11.98. The stock has a market capitalization of $6.45 billion, a P/E ratio of -20.11 and a beta of 2.11. The stocks 50-day simple moving average is $5.82 and its 200 day simple moving average is $4.66.

Analysts Set New Price Targets

Joby Aviation ( NYSE:JOBY Free Report ) last released its quarterly earnings data on Wednesday, May 3rd. The company reported ($0.16) earnings per share for the quarter, missing the consensus estimate of ($0.15) by ($0.01). On average, research analysts anticipate that Joby Aviation, Inc. will post -0.6 earnings per share for the current year.

JOBY has been the subject of a number of research reports. Deutsche Bank Aktiengesellschaft lowered Joby Aviation from a hold rating to a sell rating and lowered their price objective for the stock from $6.00 to $4.00 in a research report on Tuesday, March 7th. Canaccord Genuity Group assumed coverage on Joby Aviation in a report on Friday, June 9th. They set a buy rating and a $8.00 target price on the stock. One research analyst has rated the stock with a sell rating, three have given a hold rating and two have issued a buy rating to the company. According to MarketBeat, the stock currently has an average rating of Hold and an average target price of $6.50.

Institutional Investors Weigh In On Joby Aviation

Hedge funds and other institutional investors have recently bought and sold shares of the company. FMR LLC raised its position in Joby Aviation by 60.7% in the 1st quarter. FMR LLC now owns 6,065 shares of the companys stock valued at $26,000 after buying an additional 2,290 shares during the last quarter. CWM LLC raised its position in Joby Aviation by 78.4% in the 1st quarter. CWM LLC now owns 8,301 shares of the companys stock valued at $36,000 after buying an additional 3,649 shares during the last quarter. EP Wealth Advisors LLC acquired a new position in shares of Joby Aviation during the 3rd quarter worth approximately $43,000. Cahaba Wealth Management Inc. acquired a new position in shares of Joby Aviation during the 1st quarter worth approximately $43,000. Finally, Independent Advisor Alliance acquired a new position in shares of Joby Aviation during the 1st quarter worth approximately $44,000. Institutional investors and hedge funds own 30.98% of the companys stock.

About Joby Aviation

(Free Report)

Joby Aviation, Inc, a vertically integrated air mobility company, engages in building an electric vertical takeoff and landing aircraft optimized to deliver air transportation as a service. The company intends to build an aerial ridesharing service, as well as developing an application-based platform that will enable consumers to book rides.

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MSC Industrial Direct (NYSE:MSM  Free Report) had its price target lifted by Robert W. Baird from $104.00 to $110.00 in a research note issued to investors on Friday, The Fly reports.

Several other equities research analysts also recently weighed in on MSM. KeyCorp increased their target price on shares of MSC Industrial Direct from $97.00 to $105.00 and gave the stock an overweight rating in a research note on Friday, April 21st. JPMorgan Chase & Co. increased their target price on shares of MSC Industrial Direct from $80.00 to $86.00 and gave the stock a neutral rating in a research note on Wednesday, April 5th. StockNews.com began coverage on shares of MSC Industrial Direct in a research note on Thursday, May 18th. They set a buy rating for the company. Loop Capital increased their target price on shares of MSC Industrial Direct from $82.00 to $89.00 and gave the stock a hold rating in a research note on Wednesday, April 5th. Finally, Stephens reissued an overweight rating and set a $100.00 price target on shares of MSC Industrial Direct in a report on Wednesday, April 5th. Three equities research analysts have rated the stock with a hold rating and four have issued a buy rating to the companys stock. Based on data from MarketBeat.com, the stock presently has an average rating of Moderate Buy and a consensus target price of $96.17.

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MSC Industrial Direct Stock Up 1.0 %

Shares of NYSE MSM opened at $95.28 on Friday. The firm has a market cap of $5.33 billion, a price-to-earnings ratio of 14.86 and a beta of 1.02. The company has a quick ratio of 0.88, a current ratio of 1.93 and a debt-to-equity ratio of 0.12. MSC Industrial Direct has a 52-week low of $71.32 and a 52-week high of $98.37. The businesss 50 day moving average is $93.05 and its two-hundred day moving average is $86.87.

MSC Industrial Direct Dividend Announcement

MSC Industrial Direct ( NYSE:MSM Free Report ) last posted its quarterly earnings data on Thursday, June 29th. The industrial products company reported $1.74 earnings per share for the quarter, missing analysts consensus estimates of $1.75 by ($0.01). MSC Industrial Direct had a return on equity of 25.42% and a net margin of 9.00%. The company had revenue of $1.05 billion for the quarter, compared to analysts expectations of $1.02 billion. During the same period in the prior year, the company posted $1.82 EPS. The firms revenue was up 10.0% compared to the same quarter last year. Research analysts predict that MSC Industrial Direct will post 6.3 EPS for the current year.

The business also recently announced a quarterly dividend, which will be paid on Tuesday, July 25th. Stockholders of record on Tuesday, July 11th will be given a $0.79 dividend. This represents a $3.16 annualized dividend and a dividend yield of 3.32%. The ex-dividend date is Monday, July 10th. MSC Industrial Directs payout ratio is currently 49.30%.

Insider Transactions at MSC Industrial Direct

In other news, SVP Kimberly Shacklett sold 6,442 shares of MSC Industrial Direct stock in a transaction dated Tuesday, May 2nd. The shares were sold at an average price of $90.99, for a total value of $586,157.58. Following the completion of the transaction, the senior vice president now directly owns 10,716 shares of the companys stock, valued at approximately $975,048.84. The transaction was disclosed in a document filed with the Securities & Exchange Commission, which is available at this link. Insiders own 28.39% of the companys stock.

Institutional Inflows and Outflows

A number of hedge funds and other institutional investors have recently bought and sold shares of the company. BlackRock Inc. lifted its stake in shares of MSC Industrial Direct by 5.4% in the 1st quarter. BlackRock Inc. now owns 6,359,260 shares of the industrial products companys stock worth $534,178,000 after acquiring an additional 327,944 shares during the period. Vanguard Group Inc. raised its holdings in shares of MSC Industrial Direct by 1.6% in the 3rd quarter. Vanguard Group Inc. now owns 4,476,878 shares of the industrial products companys stock worth $325,962,000 after purchasing an additional 72,338 shares in the last quarter. American Century Companies Inc. raised its holdings in shares of MSC Industrial Direct by 9.8% in the 1st quarter. American Century Companies Inc. now owns 2,926,338 shares of the industrial products companys stock worth $245,812,000 after purchasing an additional 259,981 shares in the last quarter. State Street Corp raised its holdings in shares of MSC Industrial Direct by 1.8% in the 1st quarter. State Street Corp now owns 1,367,455 shares of the industrial products companys stock worth $114,866,000 after purchasing an additional 24,040 shares in the last quarter. Finally, Epoch Investment Partners Inc. raised its holdings in shares of MSC Industrial Direct by 4.5% in the 1st quarter. Epoch Investment Partners Inc. now owns 1,288,660 shares of the industrial products companys stock worth $108,247,000 after purchasing an additional 56,030 shares in the last quarter. 86.78% of the stock is owned by institutional investors and hedge funds.

About MSC Industrial Direct

(Free Report)

MSC Industrial Direct Co, Inc, together with its subsidiaries, distributes metalworking and maintenance, repair, and operations (MRO) products and services in the United States, Canada, Mexico, and the United Kingdom. Its MRO products include cutting tools, measuring instruments, tooling components, metalworking products, fasteners, flat stock products, raw materials, abrasives, machinery hand and power tools, safety and janitorial supplies, plumbing supplies, materials handling products, power transmission components, and electrical supplies.

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General Mills (NYSE:GIS  Free Report) had its price objective trimmed by Stifel Nicolaus from $95.00 to $86.00 in a report published on Thursday, The Fly reports.

Several other equities research analysts have also recently weighed in on the stock. UBS Group upped their price objective on shares of General Mills from $88.00 to $96.00 in a research report on Monday, March 27th. Wells Fargo & Company cut their price objective on shares of General Mills from $89.00 to $80.00 in a research report on Thursday. Morgan Stanley upped their price objective on shares of General Mills from $73.00 to $77.00 and gave the stock an underweight rating in a research report on Tuesday, April 11th. Bank of America cut their price objective on shares of General Mills from $88.00 to $82.00 in a research report on Thursday. Finally, Deutsche Bank Aktiengesellschaft upped their price objective on shares of General Mills from $84.00 to $86.00 in a research report on Friday, March 24th. Two research analysts have rated the stock with a sell rating, nine have assigned a hold rating and five have assigned a buy rating to the company. According to data from MarketBeat, General Mills presently has an average rating of Hold and an average price target of $82.24.

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General Mills Trading Up 0.5 %

GIS stock opened at $76.70 on Thursday. The company has a debt-to-equity ratio of 0.93, a quick ratio of 0.32 and a current ratio of 0.69. The companys 50-day simple moving average is $84.94 and its 200 day simple moving average is $82.88. General Mills has a 52 week low of $72.16 and a 52 week high of $90.89. The company has a market capitalization of $45.05 billion, a PE ratio of 17.80, a price-to-earnings-growth ratio of 2.26 and a beta of 0.27.

General Mills Increases Dividend

General Mills ( NYSE:GIS Free Report ) last released its quarterly earnings results on Wednesday, June 28th. The company reported $1.12 EPS for the quarter, beating the consensus estimate of $1.07 by $0.05. General Mills had a net margin of 12.91% and a return on equity of 24.47%. The business had revenue of $5.03 billion for the quarter, compared to the consensus estimate of $5.18 billion. During the same period in the prior year, the company posted $1.12 earnings per share. General Millss revenue was up 2.8% compared to the same quarter last year. As a group, sell-side analysts anticipate that General Mills will post 4.51 earnings per share for the current year.

The company also recently disclosed a quarterly dividend, which will be paid on Tuesday, August 1st. Stockholders of record on Monday, July 10th will be paid a $0.59 dividend. The ex-dividend date of this dividend is Friday, July 7th. This represents a $2.36 annualized dividend and a dividend yield of 3.08%. This is an increase from General Millss previous quarterly dividend of $0.54. General Millss dividend payout ratio is currently 54.76%.

Insider Activity

In other General Mills news, insider Jacqueline Williams-Roll sold 18,517 shares of the stock in a transaction that occurred on Friday, May 5th. The shares were sold at an average price of $89.47, for a total transaction of $1,656,715.99. Following the completion of the sale, the insider now owns 47,163 shares of the companys stock, valued at approximately $4,219,673.61. The transaction was disclosed in a legal filing with the Securities & Exchange Commission, which is accessible through the SEC website. In other General Mills news, insider Jacqueline Williams-Roll sold 18,517 shares of the stock in a transaction that occurred on Friday, May 5th. The shares were sold at an average price of $89.47, for a total transaction of $1,656,715.99. Following the completion of the sale, the insider now owns 47,163 shares of the companys stock, valued at approximately $4,219,673.61. The transaction was disclosed in a legal filing with the Securities & Exchange Commission, which is accessible through the SEC website. Also, insider Bethany C. Quam sold 21,734 shares of the firms stock in a transaction that occurred on Tuesday, April 4th. The stock was sold at an average price of $85.86, for a total transaction of $1,866,081.24. Following the sale, the insider now directly owns 47,560 shares of the companys stock, valued at approximately $4,083,501.60. The disclosure for this sale can be found here. Insiders sold 47,341 shares of company stock valued at $4,163,978 over the last quarter. 0.67% of the stock is owned by company insiders.

Institutional Trading of General Mills

Several large investors have recently modified their holdings of GIS. Aspire Private Capital LLC bought a new position in shares of General Mills in the 1st quarter worth $23,614,735,000. Disciplined Investments LLC lifted its holdings in shares of General Mills by 245.9% in the 1st quarter. Disciplined Investments LLC now owns 294 shares of the companys stock worth $25,000 after purchasing an additional 209 shares in the last quarter. FWL Investment Management LLC bought a new position in shares of General Mills in the 4th quarter worth $25,000. James Investment Research Inc. bought a new position in shares of General Mills in the 4th quarter worth $26,000. Finally, AXS Investments LLC bought a new position in shares of General Mills in the 4th quarter worth $30,000. Institutional investors and hedge funds own 76.73% of the companys stock.

About General Mills

(Free Report)

General Mills, Inc manufactures and markets branded consumer foods worldwide. The company operates in five segments: North America Retail; Convenience Stores & Foodservice; Europe & Australia; Asia & Latin America; and Pet. It offers ready-to-eat cereals, refrigerated yogurt, soup, meal kits, refrigerated and frozen dough products, dessert and baking mixes, bakery flour, frozen pizza and pizza snacks, snack bars, fruit and salty snacks, ice cream, nutrition bars, wellness beverages, and savory and grain snacks, as well as various organic products, including frozen and shelf-stable vegetables.

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StockNews.com lowered shares of Vale (NYSE:VALE  Free Report) from a buy rating to a hold rating in a research report sent to investors on Thursday.

Other equities analysts also recently issued research reports about the company. Royal Bank of Canada upgraded Vale from a sector perform rating to an outperform rating and increased their price objective for the stock from $13.00 to $15.00 in a report on Tuesday, June 6th. Scotiabank lowered Vale from a sector outperform rating to a sector perform rating and set a $16.00 price objective for the company. in a research note on Wednesday, June 28th. Citigroup lowered Vale from a buy rating to a neutral rating and lowered their target price for the company from $20.00 to $16.00 in a research note on Monday, April 17th. Morgan Stanley lowered their price objective on Vale from $18.00 to $17.00 in a research report on Wednesday, June 21st. Finally, BNP Paribas cut Vale from a neutral rating to an underperform rating and set a $13.20 target price on the stock. in a report on Wednesday, June 28th. One equities research analyst has rated the stock with a sell rating, seven have given a hold rating and four have issued a buy rating to the company. According to MarketBeat, the company presently has a consensus rating of Hold and a consensus price target of $16.43.

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Vale Stock Performance

VALE stock opened at $13.42 on Thursday. Vale has a fifty-two week low of $11.72 and a fifty-two week high of $19.31. The company has a quick ratio of 0.73, a current ratio of 1.12 and a debt-to-equity ratio of 0.39. The company has a market capitalization of $60.16 billion, a P/E ratio of 3.80 and a beta of 0.87. The company has a 50-day simple moving average of $13.78 and a 200 day simple moving average of $15.65.

Institutional Investors Weigh In On Vale

Vale ( NYSE:VALE Free Report ) last issued its earnings results on Wednesday, April 26th. The basic materials company reported $0.41 earnings per share for the quarter, missing analysts consensus estimates of $0.57 by ($0.16). The business had revenue of $8.43 billion during the quarter, compared to analyst estimates of $10.09 billion. Vale had a net margin of 38.99% and a return on equity of 38.16%. Sell-side analysts predict that Vale will post 2.21 earnings per share for the current fiscal year.

Institutional investors and hedge funds have recently made changes to their positions in the stock. Putnam Investments LLC raised its stake in shares of Vale by 6.0% during the 3rd quarter. Putnam Investments LLC now owns 145,015 shares of the basic materials companys stock worth $1,932,000 after purchasing an additional 8,237 shares in the last quarter. Creative Financial Designs Inc. ADV increased its position in Vale by 527.0% during the 4th quarter. Creative Financial Designs Inc. ADV now owns 4,000 shares of the basic materials companys stock worth $68,000 after buying an additional 3,362 shares during the period. SG Americas Securities LLC increased its position in Vale by 1,441.9% during the 4th quarter. SG Americas Securities LLC now owns 314,202 shares of the basic materials companys stock worth $5,332,000 after buying an additional 293,824 shares during the period. State of New Jersey Common Pension Fund D increased its holdings in Vale by 27.7% in the 4th quarter. State of New Jersey Common Pension Fund D now owns 1,065,826 shares of the basic materials companys stock valued at $18,087,000 after buying an additional 231,037 shares during the period. Finally, Polar Asset Management Partners Inc. acquired a new stake in shares of Vale in the 3rd quarter valued at $390,000. Institutional investors own 18.82% of the companys stock.

Vale Company Profile

(Free Report)

Vale SA, together with its subsidiaries, produces and sells iron ore and iron ore pellets for use as raw materials in steelmaking in Brazil and internationally. The company operates through Iron Solutions and Energy Transition Materials segments. The Iron Solutions segment produces and extracts iron ore and pellets, manganese, and other ferrous products; and provides related logistic services.

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 HMD       LCO2 multi-gas carriers LCO    Capital Ship Management
Amazon and Ohio state Governor Mike DeWine announced new investment plans that will AWS invest an estimated $7.8 billion by the end of 2029/2030 to expand its data center operations in Central Ohio.

Numerous localities in Central Ohio are reportedly under consideration for the new data center campuses, and final site selections will be decided at a later date.

AWS launched its first data centers in the Midwest in 2016 for its AWS U.S. East cloud region and currently operates data center campuses in Franklin and Licking counties.

The company said it has invested $6.3 billion in Ohio since 2015. As well as data centers, Amazon has invested in 18 solar and wind farms in the state; once all are fully operational, these projects are expected to generate more than 6.6 million MWh of energy annually.

Today, we are proud to reinforce our long-term commitment to the State of Ohio with plans to expand and invest an estimated $7.8 billion by 2030, said Roger Wehner, director of economic development, AWS. Since 2015, AWS has invested more than $6 billion in Ohio while supporting thousands of local jobs. This additional investment will bring new, well-paying jobs and will continue to boost the state's Gross Domestic Product each year. We are excited to continue our partnership with the state of Ohio and deliver new workforce development and educational programs that support the next generation of talent by emphasizing collaborative, long-term public and private partnerships across the state.

Governor DeWine said the project represents the second-largest single private sector company investment in Ohio's history.

Amazon operates a 459,000 sq ft (42,640 sqm) data center in New Albany at 2570 Beech Road in Licking County. In 2019 the company announced plans to develop a 170,000-square-foot data center on 100 acres on the northeast corner of Harrison Road and Innovation Campus Way to the east of the Beech Road facility.

The company is seemingly seeking to expand in New Albany; Amazon last year acquired 400 acres of land along Beech Road in New Albany for $116.6 million, just north of the 112 acres the company purchased in 2020.

The company also has data centers in the Hilliard and Dublin areas of Columbus and is seeking to develop nine more data centers at a new campus in Hilliard.

Google also has a significant data center footprint in Ohio.

For more information about this news, visit https://aws.amazon.com.
Prime Minister Narendra Modi addresses a meeting of the Union Council of Ministers at the newly built convention centre at the Pragati Maidan in New Delhi, Monday, July 3, 2023. (PTI)

NEW DELHI: Prime Minister Narendra Modi on Monday chaired a key meeting of the Union council of ministers amidst speculation of a Cabinet reshuffle. The meeting primarily focused on the 2024 general elections with the Prime Minister seeking performance reports of a section of ministries. He emphasised the need for ministers to ensure that the benefits of government schemes and programmes reach the common people.

The meeting took place at the newly-built convention centre in Pragati Maidan, which is set to host the G-20 Summit in September. The gathering saw the participation of all Cabinet ministers and ministers with independent charges.

"A fruitful meeting with the council of ministers, where we exchanged views on diverse policy-related issues," Prime Minister Modi tweeted after the meeting, which lasted for nearly five hours. Sources said that the Prime Minister told the ministers that his government is being run on the agenda of development and it is the collective responsibility of ministers to ensure that the development agenda of the government reaches every section of society.

"The Prime Minister said that 2024 will be fought on development," sources said.

Sources further said Modi encouraged ministers to actively engage on social media platforms and maintain a strong physical presence among the public.

As per sources, a few ministers gave presentations related to their ministries before the council of ministers. It has been learnt that a few Central flagship programmes and schemes were also discussed in the meeting.

Presentation on Indias likely development journey till 2047 made at the meeting, the sources said.

It has also been learnt that the Prime Minister asked the ministers to focus more on the delivery of government schemes and regularly interact with people.

It has been further learnt that the Prime Minister asked the ministers to explain to people the work of their ministries and union government.

The meeting of the Union council of ministers comes amid speculations about a likely Cabinet reshuffle following a series of meetings of the ruling BJPs top brass and the Prime Minister. What has added to the reshuffle buzz is the fact that the period before Parliaments Monsoon Session, which begins on July 20, could be the last window for such an exercise.

The fact that the period before Parliaments Monsoon Session, which begins on July 20, could be the last window for such an exercise have added to the reshuffle buzz. The BJPs organisation, including in some states, may also see some changes as its top brass makes its choices for key positions with the campaign for the 2024 Lok Sabha polls intensifying.
BJP RS member Sushil Modi. (PTI File)

NEW DELHI: BJP RS member Sushil Modi on Monday advocated keeping tribals of the North East and other regions out of the purview of any likely Uniform Civil Code at a parliamentary panel meeting chaired by him while some opposition members questioned the law commissions move to begin consultation on the contentious issue.

Panel on law, headed by Sushil Modi today held a meeting on the issue of the UCC. The standing panel has called representatives of the law commission and the law ministry on a recent notice issued by the law panel seeking views of stakeholders on the issue of a UCC.

Sources said that most of the opposition members, including those from the Congress and the DMK, linked the push for a UCC to the next year Lok Sabha polls. It has been learnt that Shiv Sena's Sanjay Raut noted that many countries had a common civil law while calling for looking into concerns of different communities and regions. He also questioned the consultation's timing.

It has been further learnt that Congress MP Vivek Tankha and DMK MP P Wilson submitted separate written statements questioning the move of the Law Commission, which was represented in the meeting by its member-secretary K Biswal, to invite suggestions on UCC from people and other stakeholders.

Sources said that they noted that the previous Law Commission, the term of which ended on August 31, 2018, had described the UCC as neither necessary nor desirable at this stage.

"Congress' Manickam Tagore also questioned the intent behind the move and linked it to the polls," they said.

BJP's Mahesh Jethmalani, however, made a strong defence for the UCC as he cited debates in the constituent assembly to assert that it was always considered imperative.

Sources said that Sushil Modi in his comments pitched for keeping tribals, including those in the North East, out of the ambit of any proposed UCC and noted that all laws have exceptions.

It was also pointed out in the meeting, sources said, that the central laws are not applicable in some North Eastern states without their concurrence.

Law Commission officials said so far, 19 lakh suggestions have been received on the consultation started by it following a public notice brought out on June 13. The exercise will continue till July 13.

Sources said that 17 out of 31 members of the panel attended the meeting.

The 22nd Law Commission of India is examining the matter of Uniform Civil Code. Initially, the 21st Law Commission of India had in October 2016 examined the subject on Uniform Civil Code and solicited the views of all the stakeholders through its appeal along with a questionnaire. "Pursuant to the same, overwhelming responses have been received by the Commission.

The 21st Law Commission has issued the consultation paper on "Reforms of Family Law" on 31.08.2018. Since more than three years have been lapsed from the date of issuance of the said Consultation Paper, bearing in mind the relevance and importance of the subject and also the various Court orders on the subject, the 22nd Law Commission of India considered it expedient to deliberate afresh over the subject. Accordingly, the 22nd Law Commission of India decided again to solicit views and ideas of the public at large and recognized religious organizations about the Uniform Civil Code," the Law Commission said.

Those interested can present their views till July 14 to the Law Commission of India. The stakeholders can also make their submissions in the form of consultation, discussion or working papers on any of the issues pertaining to the Uniform Civil Code to the Law Commission of India. If need be, the Commission may call upon any individual or organization for a personal hearing or discussion, the Law Commission said.

The panel circulated the 2018 consultation paper of the 21st Law Commission on the subject to its members.
TPCC President Revanth Reddy. (DC Image)

HYDERABAD: TPCC chief A. Revanth Reddy said that the Congress will ensure that it delivers on all key promises, including Rs 4,000 monthly pension to senior citizens, widows, physically challenged, artists, seriously ill-patients, among others.

Speaking a day after the Telangana Jana Garjana event, where the party made the promise, Revanth Reddy said, "The Cheyutha scheme is workable if the states resources are managed properly. The pension, which was Rs 75 was increased to Rs 200 earlier by our party. We will give Rs 4,000 pension to 55 lakh people by including the pending 10 lakh applicants, who are awaiting approval from the KCR government."

Asked how the government could fund the scheme which would cost Rs 22,000 crore, when it is struggling to pay salaries and pensions, he alleged that Chief Minister K. Chandrashekar Rao and his family had looted a surplus state like Telangana and reduced it into a debt-ridden state.

"The Pranahita Chevella project started with an estimate of Rs 38,000 crore and was redesigned as Kaleshwaram project. It was projected to cost Rs 81,000 crore. The present estimate is Rs 1,49,131 crore. So far Rs 85,000 crore have been paid. Similarly, the Palamuru Ranga Reddy (lift irrigation scheme) was redesigned and the cost escalated from Rs 16,000 crore to Rs 58,000 crore. It is now pegged at Rs one lakh crore," he said while asking "Are K.T. Rama Rao and T. Harish Rao ready for a debate with the Congress on these issues?"

The cost of providing water to one acre under Kaleshwaram is Rs 45,000. The government, which wanted to acquire 93,000 acres for the project, has so far taken only 64,000 acres. The CAG pointed out that the government has to spend Rs 25,000 crore per year to provide water. The BRS leaders are worried of a backlash after the tremendous response to party leader Rahul Gandhi, he said.

On reports that Karnataka had been slicing existing schemes to fund its poll promises, Reddy said, "You are reading it the wrong way. Every government has its priorities. Only those schemes where pilferage is noticed will be removed."

On Samajwadi Party chief Akhilesh Yadav meeting BRS leaders, he said, "We are clear that BRS is not going to be part of the opposition. That BRS and Congress will not be part of the same group has been made clear by Rahul Gandhi in Khammam."
BJP state president Bandi Sanjay Kumar. (DC)

HYDERABAD: The throes of confusion that the BJP in Telangana is thrown into intensified all the more on Monday with a series of events that gave the party some hope of unity but at the same time left it in a tizzy. All this on a day the Union council of ministers met in New Delhi under Prime Minister Narendra Modis chairmanship amidst some speculation that there could be changes in the state party leadership.

In an effort to calm the waters, that is being stilled by a new development a day, Sunil Bansal, BJP general secretary in-charge of Telangana, is scheduled to visit the city on Tuesday. Officially, the visit is to evaluate how the partys Maha Jan Sampark Abhiyan outreach programme is going on.

On Monday, there was enough to keep Telangana BJP leaders and workers wondering as to what was happening, when party MLA from Dubbak M. Raghunandan Rao suddenly made news in the afternoon over comments that left little to the imagination about where he stood on the Telangana BJPs leadership issue.

Raghunandan Rao, who just a few days ago had made it clear that it was time his services to the party were recognised, and sought that he be either made the BJP floor leader in the Assembly or a national spokesperson, on Monday afternoon, reportedly added to the list his third choice, that of BJP state president in place of Bandi Sanjay Kumar who was, by some in the party circles, tipped to vacate his chair and join the Union Cabinet.

Raghunandan Rao, who was in Delhi on Monday, later in the evening denied that he had issued any such demand, and declared his loyalty to the party as one of its workers. He said he would yet again contest from Dubbak on a BJP ticket and win for the second time. But, in the few hours in between, his reported criticism of Sanjays leadership and alleged statement on the state BJP chiefs sudden rags to riches rise created furious waves in the party.

Incidentally, Sanjay too was in Delhi on Monday.

Earlier in the day, Etala Rajendar, party MLA from Huzurabad, and A.P. Jithender Reddy, former MP and BJP national executive member, who were at loggerheads just a couple of days ago over the state party leadership issue, joined for lunch in the presence of Haryana Governor Bandaru Dattatreya at Reddys farmhouse, along with a few other party leaders who too have been vocal in either supporting Sanjay or are seen as rivals.

The luncheon gathering, reportedly organised at Dattatreyas suggestion, ended well with Jithender Reddy quashing all rumours of differences and declaring that the party and all its leaders are united. Rajendar later went to a Maha Jan Sampark Abhiyan programme in Medak and into a role he slipped into with ease over the past few days as a party leader taking part with some enthusiasm in BJP events.

In New Delhi, Union minister G. Kishan Reddy, whose name was doing the rounds as the next possible BJP president in Telangana, addressing a press conference, laid into Congress leader Rahul Gandhi for his criticism of the party during the Telangana Jana Garjana in Khammam, claiming that he was neither able to run his own party nor able to retain MLAs who won on its flag.

He said: "The Congress leadership is so weak and helpless that it could not even keep within its fold MLAs who won on its flag in Telangana."

Kishan Reddy, speaking with reporters in New Delhi, said the Congress and the BRS were hand in glove, with a secret understanding, and declared that the BJP will never have a truck with the BRS. "The BRS and Congress, unable to digest the BJPs growth, are working together to undermine the BJP," he said.

The BJP, he said, "is not a B-Team for anyone, and the people of the state fully well know how the Central government, under Prime Minister Narendra Modis leadership, has stood by Telangana. Those who claim that the BJP is finished in Telangana will realise that the truth is otherwise, four months from now."

"The Congress is an expert at announcing schemes and turning them into scams. And who does not know how it joined BRS in Parliament to disrupt proceedings? Did the world not see Rahul Gandhi and BRS leader K. Keshava Rao sit together and discuss issues? No one has forgotten how the Congress-propped candidate for the President was given a royal reception in Hyderabad by the BRS government. Is this not enough to show who is the B-team of which party," Kishan Reddy asked.

Recalling former prime minister Atal Behari Vajpayees observation that Congress in Opposition is more dangerous than when in power, Kishan Reddy said, "When in power, Congress leaders loot the nation and, when out of it, they divide society, undermine national unity, and create rifts between sections of society for political gains."

"The Congress is a party that makes impossible promises just to come to power," he said, referring to the Rs 4,000 pension promised in Telangana, and likening it to the BRS. "These two parties are two sides of the same coin," he said.
Around 550 scientists, academics and students have hit out at administrators of the Indian Institute of Science (IISc) over the denial of permission to organise an in-campus discussion on the Unlawful Activities (Prevention) Act.

The discussion, scheduled on June 28, was to be led by Natasha Narwal and Devangana Kalita, activists who were part of the movement against the Citizenship Amendment Act and were, in 2020, arrested under UAPA in connection with the Delhi riots conspiracy.

The campaigners said the event, originally planned as a talk at the Centre for Continuing Education (CCE) at IISc, was approved by the CCE Chair. Through an email to the students council dated June 27, the Registrar Capt Sridhar Warrier (Retd.), however, denied permission citing a lack of prior administrative approval.

Read | The criminalisation of association

Capt Warrier, in his email, also referred to complaints raised from different quarters. The Registrar was not available for comment. At the time of filing this report, IISc was yet to respond to an email sent by DH seeking an official clarification.

In a letter, the signatories urged the IISc Director to ensure that the members of the institute remain free to express and discuss ideas, both about science, and about the society that we live in. Scientists, academics and students from various institutions including the IISc, IITs, the Tata Institute of Fundamental Research, National Institute of Advanced Studies, Indian Institute of Astrophysics, Raman Research Institute, and Indian and international universities are signatories to the campaign.

The signatories said it was important for IISc members to hear about the activists experience and to reflect on the laws used to incarcerate them. In their letter, they said actions of the administration reflected poorly on IIScs commitment to upholding academic freedom and democratic values. They have damaged IIScs reputation, both within the country and internationally, they said.

Informal interaction

The student-organisers replaced the talk and hosted the activists in an informal interaction, near a food court in the campus. Prof Suvrat Raju, faculty at the International Centre for Theoretical Sciences (ICTS), Bengaluru  one of the signatories who was also present at the interaction  said members of the security team sent by the administrators also tried to stop the informal event.

Read | Situation from Kashmir to Kerala makes it must to retain sedition law: Law Commission chief

The security team members were taking photographs and making phone calls. Later, they tried to stop the interaction but they had to backtrack. The activists talked about various aspects of UAPA, including low conviction rates and pendency of trials, and related their personal experiences in prison. There was nothing controversial being discussed, Prof Raju told DH.

Prof Prateek Sharma, a faculty at the IIScs Department of Physics, said he was not planning to be at the event but decided to be a signatory to the campaign because it was the right thing to do.

The event was planned as part of three talks. The first one at ICTS (on June 26) and another in the city (on June 29) passed without incident but the events at IISc were disturbing and unfortunate, since IISc is an important centre in Indias academic ecosystem, Prof Raju said.
MANZINI  CANGO Executive Director (ED) Thembinkosi Dlamini says members of the State security organs who pulled the trigger on June 29, 2021 need to account for their role during the unrest.

The Coordinating Assembly of Non-governmental Organisations (CANGO) ED said this during a candle light service, which was hosted by the Swaziland Massacre Victims and Survivors Association (SWAVISA), in memory of the June 2021 victims. The service was held at Caritas, Manzini, yesterday and the Dlamini said it did not matter whether or not the members of the State security organs were carrying out instructions from their superiors. He said all they need to do was account for their role in the unrest. June 29, 2021 is the day when the June/July 2021 civil unrest started.

During the unrest there were protest actions across the country and were carried out mostly by people who were calling for political reforms.The protest actions culminated to violence, vandalism and looting of private and public properties, including businesses, some of which were torched. In the process, dozens of emaSwati were shot death allegedly by members of the State security organs and some of those died, while others were left with permanent disabilities.

According to a report which was released by the Human Rights Commission, at least 291 people were shot in two days (June 28 and 29, 2021) and they include 19 children. The report said 48 of those who were shot died and these included two children. It also said that during its investigation, it gathered that gunshots fired inside the hospital premises were reported and that the police allegedly refused with information. The ED said following the civil unrest people who were affected directly and indirectly need to heal. In that regard, he said those who partook in shooting emaSwati should be paraded before a commission of enquiry team and account for the role they played during the civil unrest. They need to tell the nation what they did and why, Dlamini said.

According to the CANGO ED, the nation, mainly the immediate relatives of the victims of the civil unrest, survivors and the nation at large would heal. He said they would also be able to pick-up the pieces and move on with life as at the moment, some of them were still traumatised to an extent that they still attend psychological sessions. He said even those who were fighting for political reforms needed to heal and pick-up the pieces and march on in their quest to attain a democratic Eswatini, where they believe rule of law would abound, see equal opportunities for all and where justice would be guaranteed.

In terms of carrying out orders, the CANGO ED said members of the State security organs were entitled to conscientious objection and not to participate in extrajudicial killings and as such should be held personally liable for their actions in terms of the Nuremberg principles.

Again, he said the Guiding Principles and values of the police service  Section 10 (1); A member of the police service shall at all times serve the community and protect all persons against illegal acts, consistent with the high degree of responsibility required by their occupation or profession.

Protect

He added that subsection 2 says in the performance of their duties, members of the police service should respect and protect human dignity, maintain and uphold the human rights of all persons. Furthermore, he said subsection 3 says; A member of the police service may not inflict, instigate or tolerate any act of torture or other cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment or punishment, nor may any member of the service invoke superior orders or exceptional circumstances as a justification for torture or other cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment or punishment. Theerefore, Dlamini said once the members of the State security organs were punished by either domestic or international laws, government could be compelled to discuss the victims and survivors could be compensated.

His argument was that according to testimonies of some of the victims relatives and survivors suggest that there was allegedly pure lawlessness in the execution of the alleged order(s) or the order(s) themselves were defective, hence the members of the State security organs purportedly acted outside the scope and powers provided for in law.

CANGO was initially set up in 1983 as an umbrella body coordinating NGOs in Eswatini who were implementing primary healthcare programmes. The mandate of CANGO is coordination, capacity building, advocacy and grants management. Most recently it renewed its registration in 2012. CANGO is a membership-based NGO operating in the Kingdom of Eswatini since 1983.

Also, CANGO is a membership-based institution that has over 100 members. CANGOs mandate is structured into thematic areas where it facilitates coordination and advocacy through various consortia namely; Human rights, non-communicable diseases, Eswatini HIV and AIDS (ESHACO), gender, children, food security, media and SRHR to name but a few.

The candle light service was attended by representatives from Swaziland Concerned Church Leaders, Council of Swaziland Churches and Catholic Commission for Justice and Peace (CCJP). There were also representatives from the mass democratic movement, who are organised under the Multi-stakeholder Forum (MSF) and Political Party Assembly (PPA).
The grandmother of a teenager shot dead during a police traffic stop in a Paris suburb pleaded for the rioting to stop on the sixth straight night of unrest, while authorities expressed outrage over the targeting of a Mayor's home with a burning car as his family was sleeping.

The grandmother of the 17-year-old, known publicly by his first name, Nahel, said in a telephone interview with French news broadcaster BFM TV, "Don't break windows, buses ... schools. We want to calm things down."

Also Read  Mayors targeted on fifth night of protests across France

"I'm telling them [the rioters] to stop," said the grandmother, who was identified only as Nadia and spoke a day after the teen's funeral, CBC News reported.

"Nahel is dead. My daughter is lost... she doesn't have a life anymore."

Protests have erupted across France since the teen, who was reportedly of north African descent, was shot Tuesday in the chest while driving away from a traffic stop in Nanterre, a working-class suburb 15 km from central Paris, CBC News reported.

Also Read  Riots in France force Macron to postpone state visit to Germany

Nahel's grandmother said she was angry at the officer who killed her grandson, but not at police in general, and expressed faith in the justice system as France faces its worst social upheaval in years.

The officer accused of killing Nahel was given a preliminary charge of voluntary homicide.

Thirteen people who didn't comply with traffic stops were fatally shot by French police last year, and three this year, prompting demands for more accountability.

On Sunday, Vincent Jeanbrun, Mayor of the southern suburb of L'Hay-les-Roses, said his wife and one of their children, aged five and seven, were injured as they fled their home in the early hours.

During the incident at his home, Jeanbrun, from the conservative Les Republicains party, was at the town hall monitoring the violence. The town hall has been the target of attacks for several nights since the shooting of Nahel, and has been protected with barbed wire and barricades.

Jeanbrun said the attack represented a new stage of "horror and ignominy" in the unrest, and he urged the government to impose a state of emergency.

The local prosecutor told reporters that an investigation into attempted murder had been opened. No suspects have been arrested, CBC News reported.

The prosecutor said the woman was injured as she fled through the backyard of the house.

In a less chic neighbourhood of northern Paris, protesters set off firecrackers and lit barricades on fire as police shot back with tear gas and stun grenades.

Skirmishes erupted in the Mediterranean city of Marseille but appeared less intense than the night before, according to the Interior Ministry. A bolstered police contingent arrested 55 people there, CBC News reported.

Across the country, arrests were lower than the night before. Interior Minister Gerald Darmanin attributed that to "the resolute action of security forces". Police made 719 arrests by early Sunday.

Darmanin said the latest overnight riots had been less intense, after 45,000 police were deployed following Saturday's funeral of Nahel in the Paris suburb of Nanterre. Since he was shot on Tuesday, rioters have torched cars and looted stores, but they'vealso targeted state institutions town halls and police stations.

Amid the unrest, a Second World War monument in Nanterre commemorating Holocaust victims and members of the French resistance was vandalised on the sidelines of a silent march on Thursday to pay tribute to Nahel.

The slogans included "Don't forgive or forget" and "Police, rapists, assassins." The European Jewish Congress denounced the vandalism as a "shameful act of disrespect for the memory of the victims of the Holocaust."

More than 3,000 people have been detained overall since Nahel's death.

The mass police deployment has been welcomed by some frightened residents of targeted neighbourhoods and shop owners whose stores have been ransacked,but it has further frustrated those who see police behaviour as the core of France's current crisis.

President Emmanuel Macron was holding a special security meeting Sunday night, and it was not clear whether he would make public comments. Macron has delayed what would have been the first state visit to Germany by a French president in 23 years, starting Sunday evening.
Clashes between Sudan's army and paramilitary Rapid Support Forces (RSF) intensified on Sunday, as the war in the country's capital and western regions entered its 12th week with no attempts in sight to bring a peaceful end to the conflict.

Air and artillery strikes as well as small arms fire could be heard, particularly in the city of Omdurman, as well as in the capital Khartoum, as the conflict deepens a humanitarian crisis and threatens to draw in other regional interests.

Also Read: Record 110 million forcibly displaced globally: UN

The RSF said it brought down an army warplane and a drone in Bahri, in statements to which the army did not immediately respond.

"We're terrified, every day the strikes are getting worse," 25-year-old Nahid Salah, living in northern Omdurman, said by phone to Reuters.

The RSF has dominated the capital on the ground and has been accused of looting and occupying houses, while the army has focused on air and artillery strikes.

Army chief Abdel Fattah al-Burhan last week called on young men to join the fight against the RSF and on Sunday the army posted photos it said were of new recruits.

The Sudanese Doctors Union accused the RSF on Saturday of raiding the Shuhada hospital, one of the few still operating in the country, and killing a staff member. The RSF denied the accusation.

The war has also hit cities in the western Kordofan and Darfur regions, in particular the westernmost city of El Geneina, where the RSF and Arab militias have been accused of ethnic cleansing.

The Combating Violence Against Women Unit, a government agency, said on Saturday it had recorded 88 cases of sexual assault, which it said was a fraction of the likely real total, in Khartoum, El Geneina, and Nyala, capital of South Darfur, with victims in most cases accusing the RSF.

Talks hosted in Jeddah and sponsored by the United States and Saudi Arabia were suspended last month, while a mediation attempt by East African countries was criticised by the army as it accused Kenya of bias.

Last week, army chief Abdel Fattah al-Burhan and his deputy on the country's Sovereign Council Malik Agar expressed openness to any mediation attempts by Turkey or Russia, though no official efforts have been announced.
Union Minister of Education Dharmendra Pradhan on Sunday said 262 new medical colleges were built after the Narendra Modi government came to power in 2014.

Addressing a seminar here, he also said that while the Congress says that they have built 700 Navodaya Vidyalayas in the country, the Modi government has "sanctioned 692 Eklavya schools" in all tribal and backward districts of the country in just nine years.

"From independence till 2014, there were a total of 380 medical colleges across the country, but after the Modi government came to power, 262 new medical colleges were built," Pradhan was quoted as saying in a statement issued by the Delhi BJP.

Also Read: Delhi University a 'movement', says PM Modi at centenary event

A research has been done by voluntary organisation Public Policy Research Center (PPRC) on the "achievements" of the Narendra Modi government in the last nine years, and based on that a research paper has been prepared on the "achievements of various departments of the central government" which are being released in collaboration with the local BJP units in different cities of the country, it said.

In this series, a research paper on nine years of Modi government's work in the education and health sectors was released by Union minister Pradhan at the seminar organised by Delhi BJP here.

Pradhan said the Modi government has also done the work of increasing seats in medical colleges.

He said when the whole world was in the grip of Covid-19, PPE kits were not being made in India, but just two months after the lockdown, "we not only started making PPE kits but also started exporting them to other countries".

Also Read: Indian universities fail excellence test

The Union minister said that "only one AIIMS was built" in the country during the rule of the Gandhi family, and when Atal Bihari Vajpayee-led NDA government came to power, they built six AIIMS. But, the Manmohan Singh government that ruled for 10 years, "did not build any new AIIMS", he said.

When Modi became the Prime Minister in 2014, "he took a pledge to provide good health services to the last citizen of the country, and today the result is that 15 new AIIMS have been dedicated to the public in the last nine years".

The Union education minister said India is a knowledge-based society consisting of many civilizations. After 34 years, a national education policy was conceived by the Modi government, the story of which had started from 2014 and which was implemented in 2020. Not only this, the Modi government is also going to do the work of building Eklavya Model School at a cost of Rs 45 crore, which will also have a hostel facility, he added.

Delhi BJP president Virendra Sachdeva said today there is a message going all over the world that "India is a rising power and this has been possible only under the leadership of PM Modi".
A special judge here on Monday gave AAP MLAs Akhilesh Pati Tripathi and Sanjeev Jha the nominal sentence of 'till rising of the court' for being part of a mob that attacked policemen at Burari police station in north Delhi in 2015.

A person given the Rising of the court sentence is not allowed to leave the court till it concludes for the day.

Special Judge Geetanjli Goel passed the directions while upholding a magisterial court order which convicted both the politicians in September 7, 2022.

Also Read | Congress threatens to sue Punjab CM Mann for defamation over Ansari's jail stay row

The judge, however, modified the six-month jail term awarded to Tripathi and three months to Jha.

The Metropolitan Magistrate had awarded the jail term on January 5, 2023.

While modifying the jail term, the court also imposed a fine of Rs 10,000 on each in the case.

"Considering the facts and circumstances of the case and the totality of the facts, it would be appropriate that the appellants are sentenced to imprisonment till the rising of the court for the offence under Section 332 (voluntarily causing hurt) of IPC, read with Section 149 (every member of unlawful assembly guilty of offence committed in prosecution of common object) of IPC, the judge said.

Akhilesh Pati Tripathi is the MLA from Model Town while Sanjeev Jha represents Burari.

The metropolitan magistrate had also convicted 15 others in a case of rioting and causing hurt to police personnel at a police station.

They were found guilty of offences under Sections 147 (rioting), 186 (obstructing public servant in discharge of public functions), 332 (voluntarily causing hurt to deter public servant from his duty), and 149 (every member of unlawful assembly guilty of offence committed in the prosecution of common object) of IPC.

According to the prosecution, the incident took place on the night of February 20, 2015, when a mob attacked the police personnel at Burari police station and damaged property.

The mob was demanding the custody of two men "allegedly to beat them up" arrested and brought to the police station.

The police had tried to pacify the crowd but the MLAs joined the mob and attacked them and resorted to stone pelting, the prosecutor had told the court.
The Supreme Court on Monday directed the Delhi government to furnish details of money spent by it on advertisements in the last three financial years, as the AAP government expressed its inability to provide funds for regional rapid transit system (RRTS) projects for Delhi-Alwar and Delhi-Panipat corridors.

The Delhi government counsel submitted before a bench of Justices Sanjay Kishan Kaul and Sudhanshu Dhulia that in December 2020, the state government had informed the National Capital Region Transport Corporation (NCRTC) about its inability to provide their share of funds.

A counsel, appearing for NCRTC, contended that the entire scheme of three corridors will be defeated if it is restricted to only Delhi-Meerut corridor.

On this, the bench told Delhi government counsel, You want to get into where, what funds you are spending we see all funds for advertisements.

The Delhi government submitted that in 2020, it had communicated that funds were not available with it and the position had worsened on account of Covid-19 pandemic.

The GST compensation provided by the Centre has also been stopped since the last financial year and therefore, there are no finances available, the state government counsel said.

The bench asked why there are no funds for a project that would ensure smooth transportation, however, funds are allocated for advertisements.

Since the paucity of funds is an impediment in this project, we call upon the NCT of Delhi to file an affidavit on funds utilised for advertisement. The project is of considerable importance, we will divert the funds. Details to be furnished for the period of the last three financial years, the bench said.

The NCRTC counsel said every year delay is causing a cost escalation of up to Rs 1,500 crore.

The state government counsel pointed out that the funds required are above Rs 5,000 crore.

"Is it required at one go? Let us see how much you spend on other things. It is a development project, you are saying you are unable to make budgetary provisions for it, that is the problem, the bench told the counsel.

The bench asked the Delhi government to file the affidavit in a period of two weeks.

Senior advocate A D N Rao appeared as amicus curiae in the matter.

The top court was considering a matter related to Delhi-Alwar (Rs 37,987 crore) and Delhi-Panipat RRTS (29,296 crore) corridor projects.

In its status report, the Government of NCT of Delhi said that it had on December 17, 2020, informed that it would not be able to make any financial contribution towards Delhi-Panipat RRTS project due to inadequate finances and worsened financial position due to Covid-19 pandemic.

However, the Delhi government said it is willing to grant in-principle or administrative approval for Delhi-Panipat RRTS project, provided its share of contribution is met by the Government of India.

The Delhi-Meerut RRTS project, the court was informed, was sanctioned by the Government of India in 2019.

The contribution of the Delhi government in this project is Rs 1,180 crore. However, till date only Rs 865 crore have been released by it that too after intervention of the court from Environmental Compensation Charge funds.

In addition to this, the Delhi-Meerut RRTS project has a multilateral loan component of Rs 16,906 crore which is to be repaid by respective state governments including GNCTD in ratio of investment in their respective territories.

"The commitment towards operational losses and loan repayment is still pending from the Delhi government since they have not yet signed the Memorandum of Understanding as per the terms and conditions of the sanction order. Without this commitment, the long-term future of survival of this project will be uncertain," the court was informed.
A woman who had left her ailing husband and was living with another man allegedly killed herself by consuming poison in this Uttar Pradesh district, police said on Monday.

Additional Superintendent of Police Samar Bahadur Singh said Ruby (38), a resident of the Pipri area, killed herself by consuming poison on Sunday.

The husband of the deceased, Madanlal Pasi, was ill for a long time and she was getting him "treated" through exorcism, during which she came in contact with Raju Pasi, a resident of Nizampur village, the officer said.

The woman fell in love with Raju Pasi and started living with him, he added.

Ruby and Raju had an altercation over the phone on Sunday afternoon after which the woman consumed poison, the officer said.

He said Raju Pasi has been traced to Surat district in Gujarat, adding that a police team has been sent to nab him.

The body has been sent for postmortem.
The opposition Bharatiya Janata Party in Karnataka will attend the Assembly session, starting Monday, without the Legislative party leader.

After a discussion with former Chief Minister B S Yediyurappa regarding the appointment, the party top brasses decided to send an observer to Karnataka on Monday.

In the Assembly elections held in May, the Congress swept to power with 135 seats while the BJP won 66 and the JD(S) 19.

Also Read: Araga, Ashwath join race for leader of the Opposition post in Assembly

The observer will gather the opinion of BJP legislators and submit a report to the party high command, Yediyurappa told reporters in Delhi late on Sunday night after a meeting with Union Home Minister Amit Shah and BJP president J P Nadda.

He also said that based on the opinion gathered by the observer, the party will decide the Legislative party leader, who will be the leader of the opposition.

"This is what was discussed in the meeting. They said they will be sending an observer, who will gather opinion and let the party high command know. Afterwards, they will discuss with me," Yediyurappa, a BJP Parliamentary Board member, said.

When pointed out that the session was starting from today, he said he was only communicating whatever happened in the meeting.

"The party's decision will be final. They are sending observers on Monday. Based on the opinion gathered by the observer, the decision will be taken," the BJP leader added.

Regarding the appointment of a new BJP state president, Yediyurappa said it will be done based on the opinion of the party legislators.

Meanwhile, party sources said there will be a BJP Legislative Party meeting at 1 pm on Monday soon after Governor Thaawarchand Gehlot's address to the members of both Houses of the Karnataka Legislature.
Coston McIsaac & Partners grew its position in Pfizer Inc. (NYSE:PFE  Free Report) by 3.7% in the first quarter, according to the company in its most recent disclosure with the SEC. The firm owned 17,629 shares of the biopharmaceutical companys stock after acquiring an additional 635 shares during the period. Coston McIsaac & Partners holdings in Pfizer were worth $719,000 at the end of the most recent quarter.

Other hedge funds have also modified their holdings of the company. Legacy Trust lifted its position in shares of Pfizer by 6.6% during the 1st quarter. Legacy Trust now owns 16,012 shares of the biopharmaceutical companys stock valued at $653,000 after buying an additional 993 shares in the last quarter. Moody National Bank Trust Division lifted its holdings in Pfizer by 0.4% during the first quarter. Moody National Bank Trust Division now owns 149,373 shares of the biopharmaceutical companys stock valued at $6,094,000 after purchasing an additional 543 shares in the last quarter. Seelaus Asset Management LLC grew its position in shares of Pfizer by 201.7% in the first quarter. Seelaus Asset Management LLC now owns 21,809 shares of the biopharmaceutical companys stock valued at $884,000 after purchasing an additional 14,580 shares during the period. Louisiana State Employees Retirement System increased its stake in shares of Pfizer by 0.6% during the first quarter. Louisiana State Employees Retirement System now owns 364,900 shares of the biopharmaceutical companys stock worth $14,888,000 after purchasing an additional 2,200 shares in the last quarter. Finally, SOL Capital Management CO raised its position in shares of Pfizer by 24.1% during the 1st quarter. SOL Capital Management CO now owns 54,214 shares of the biopharmaceutical companys stock worth $2,212,000 after purchasing an additional 10,538 shares during the last quarter. 67.80% of the stock is owned by hedge funds and other institutional investors.

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Analyst Upgrades and Downgrades

Several research firms have commented on PFE. Credit Suisse Group lowered Pfizer from an outperform rating to a neutral rating and cut their price objective for the stock from $47.00 to $40.00 in a research note on Thursday. Morgan Stanley reduced their price objective on Pfizer from $45.00 to $44.00 and set an equal weight rating for the company in a research note on Monday, April 10th. Cantor Fitzgerald reaffirmed an overweight rating on shares of Pfizer in a report on Wednesday, May 17th. Daiwa Capital Markets downgraded shares of Pfizer from an outperform rating to a neutral rating and set a $38.00 price target on the stock. in a research note on Thursday, May 11th. Finally, UBS Group lowered their price target on shares of Pfizer from $41.00 to $39.00 in a research report on Friday, May 5th. Eleven research analysts have rated the stock with a hold rating and three have given a buy rating to the stock. Based on data from MarketBeat, the company presently has an average rating of Hold and an average target price of $46.67.

Insider Transactions at Pfizer

Pfizer Price Performance

In other news, Director Scott Gottlieb acquired 1,000 shares of the businesss stock in a transaction that occurred on Monday, May 8th. The shares were purchased at an average price of $38.58 per share, for a total transaction of $38,580.00. Following the acquisition, the director now owns 6,000 shares of the companys stock, valued at $231,480. The transaction was disclosed in a filing with the SEC, which is available through the SEC website . Company insiders own 0.05% of the companys stock.

PFE stock opened at $36.68 on Monday. Pfizer Inc. has a 52-week low of $35.76 and a 52-week high of $54.93. The business has a fifty day moving average of $38.32 and a two-hundred day moving average of $42.05. The stock has a market cap of $207.07 billion, a price-to-earnings ratio of 7.22, a price-to-earnings-growth ratio of 1.22 and a beta of 0.61. The company has a quick ratio of 1.11, a current ratio of 1.37 and a debt-to-equity ratio of 0.31.

Pfizer (NYSE:PFE  Free Report) last issued its quarterly earnings data on Tuesday, May 2nd. The biopharmaceutical company reported $1.23 earnings per share (EPS) for the quarter, beating the consensus estimate of $1.00 by $0.23. The firm had revenue of $18.28 billion for the quarter, compared to analyst estimates of $16.49 billion. Pfizer had a net margin of 31.25% and a return on equity of 37.53%. Pfizers revenue was down 28.8% on a year-over-year basis. During the same period in the previous year, the firm earned $1.62 EPS. As a group, research analysts anticipate that Pfizer Inc. will post 3.35 earnings per share for the current year.

Pfizer Announces Dividend

The company also recently declared a quarterly dividend, which will be paid on Tuesday, September 5th. Shareholders of record on Friday, July 28th will be paid a dividend of $0.41 per share. This represents a $1.64 dividend on an annualized basis and a yield of 4.47%. The ex-dividend date of this dividend is Thursday, July 27th. Pfizers dividend payout ratio (DPR) is 32.28%.

Pfizer Profile

(Free Report)

Pfizer Inc discovers, develops, manufactures, markets, distributes, and sells biopharmaceutical products worldwide. It offers medicines and vaccines in various therapeutic areas, including cardiovascular metabolic, migraine, and women's health under the Eliquis, Nurtec ODT/Vydura, and the Premarin family brands; infectious diseases with unmet medical needs under the Prevnar family, Nimenrix, FSME/IMMUN-TicoVac, and Trumenba brands; and COVID-19 prevention and treatment, and potential future mRNA and antiviral products under the Comirnaty and Paxlovid brands.

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Sinn Fein has its sights set on the Department for the Economy ministry in a restored Executive.

Speaking to Derry Now, Conor Murphy, the partys Finance spokesperson, and previous Department of Finance minister, said Sinn Fein would like to take charge of Economy and use that position, if we could get an Executive up and running, to deliver on the idea of regional balance.

Mr Murphy was in the city on Friday to meet Professor Paul Bartholomew, Ulster University Vice-Chancellor, along with his assembly colleagues, Caoimhe Archibald, Ciara Ferguson, and Padraig Delargy.

The expansion of Magee, as well as being a New Decade, New Approach commitment in terms of getting the numbers up, is a key catalyst for the growth of the economy in the North West, said Mr Murphy.

Magee has a plan. There is a target set for expansion to 10,000 students. That is a political commitment.

Over the years, Sinn Fein has met with Derry City and Strabane District Council, the Chamber of Commerce, and Ulster University about re-affirming that [target] and getting the building blocks in the right place at the right time to make sure the ambition and the plans that are here for the growth in Derry and the North West take place.

In terms of the university, what you have to do is get the infrastructure in place to support that. You cant suddenly land another 4,000 students here with nowhere to put them and no accommodation.

That will not happen overnight but we need to make sure that all of the things that need to be put in place to do that, happen. This is a continuous process.

There is capital investment in there. There is more capital investment going in as part of City Deals. There is accommodation investment.

The university talked about that this morning and we know there are other people interested in accommodation investment and we are encouraging them to go and to see how they can provide part of that.

In terms of oversight, Mr Murphy said it was important the City Deal happens on time and it delivers the outcome it was intended to do. Part of the City Deal was its contribution to the expansion of Magee.

He added: When the Executive is up and functioning, we need to ensure government departments recognise that a commitment for regional balance means a commitment for regional balance and all of the departments need to contribute to that.

There is a Programme for Government commitment for regional balance. It is a policy commitment for the Department of the Economy. It is a policy commitment for Invest NI. it has to be delivered and it is our job to hold different departments to account.

I know there has been ongoing debate. Part of that is borne out by frustration that the University of Ulster was not moving sufficiently fast or was not committed to that.

The important thing here is we get momentum behind Magee and that in turn provides momentum into the North West generally in terms of the economy. In that regard, the involvement of Dublin in terms of its investment has been very important.

From a practical point of view, if you were to say, Right, University of Ulster, stop all of your plans, we are going to turn Magee into an independent university and start from scratch, that is a big and significant step.

I know some people may argue for and I understand some of the sentiment behind that argument, but for me, there is a vehicle here which is already moving in the right direction, our job is to make sure it is fully loaded and it delivers what it needs to deliver.
MANZINI - Women failing to contribute towards the the upkeep of their children should brace themselves for tough times as a woman was found guilty of failing to maintain her own child is currently behind bars.

Nomcebo Sikhondze of Ngcoseni, who was charged with the offence of failure to maintain her 15-year-old daughter doing Form I in one of the schools in the Manzini Region, was arrested at the instruction of Manzini Magistrate Philisiwe Simelane. The accused was charged for contravening the Childrens Protection and Welfare Act of 2012. Upon her arrest, the accused made an application to the High Court challenging her arrest.

Seized

The applicant in the matter is Sikhondze, while Magistrate Simelane who is seized with the applicants purported criminal matter at the Manzini Magistrates Court is the first respondent. The second respondent is the director of public prosecutions and the third respondent is the attorney general. The applicant argued that the order for her continued incarceration at His Majestys Correctional Services was unlawful, irrational and unconstitutional and of no force and effect. Making her submission, the applicant stated that on Monday, June 19, she was called to report to the Manzini Police Station, and was later taken to the Manzini Magistrates Court, where she was arraigned before the first respondent, who issued an order directing the police that they should take her to the Mawelawela facility the same day.

The applicant highlighted that the matter was postponed to June 27, a period of a whole week. She mentioned that during her first appearance before the first respondent, neither the first and second respondents informed her of her rights, including that of applying for bail if she so wished, as well as her right to be legally represented by an attorney of her choice.

Misdirection

She mentioned that she was advised by her legal advisor and that on its own was misdirection and a gross miscarriage of justice from the first respondent, which made the proceedings reviewable. The applicant cited that on June 27, the return date, she again appeared before Magistrate Simelane where she was made to plead, and she pleaded guilty to the charges that were preferred against her. Sikhondze submitted that she was duly convicted by the magistrate. To my surprise and dismay, the first respondent issued an order directing that I should be remanded in custody until July 5, 2023 for sentencing, she submitted.

The applicant elaborated that the matter was duly postponed to July 5 for sentencing. This, according to the applicant, was despite the fact that Section 227 of the Children Welfare and Protection Act of 2011 provides that if a person is convicted for the first time for failure to maintain a child, he or she should be ordered to pay the maintenance due, not to be incarcerated.

I state that the child in question was staying with me until January this year, where she decided to go and stay with her paternal grandmother since I am now married to another man. I was supporting my child the whole of her life, she said. Sikhondze added that trouble started in February 2023 when she went on maternity leave since she lost her only source of income from work. She highlighted that she was employed by one of the firms in Matsapha, where maternity leave was not paid and to date, she had not been paid anything.

Incarcerated

The applicant revealed that she returned to work in June 2023 and was arrested and incarcerated thus, she had lost hope that she would get her job back since this was her second week of incarceration. What further compounds the situation is that I have two other minors from my new marriage. This is not to say I am making excuses about my failure to maintain my child. I had hoped to continue to support my child like before since I had returned to work prior to my arrest and unlawful incarceration, she said. She further stated that she was desirous of being admitted to bail pending review. Sikhondze averred that the interests of justice favoured that she be admitted to bail pending review of the proceedings at the Magistrates Court. She explained that the reason for this was that she had three minors. The applicant stated that one of the children was with her at Mawelawela Correctional facility.

Sikhondze elaborated that bail was a right under the right of liberty enshrined under the Constitution of the country and any unjustifiable confinement was a violation of my right to liberty. There is no likelihood that I will either interfere with any state witness, evade trial since I have gone through trial, that my granting of bail will cause public disorder or that it will jeopardise the proper administration of justice, she submitted.
Local people have been asked to join a picket organised in support of local striking Department for Infrastructure (DfI) Roads Service workers.

The workers themselves will be on the picket line from Monday (July 3) to Friday (July 7).

The picket will take place on Thursday, July 6, at the Woodburn Depot, on Crescent Road, in the Waterside.

Derry City and Strabane District councillor Shaun Harkin (People Before Profit) said the DfI Roads Service workers had been "forced to hit the picket line again this week in pursuit of fair pay have our full solidarity".

Cllr Harkin added: "DfI officials are using the excuse of Stormont being down to claim they don't have the means to take appropriate action - but they have no problem implementing cuts demanded by the Tories.

"What road service workers do is essential and it's not acceptable for them to be on low pay. The draconian bonus system should be replaced with decent pay.

"We commend UNITE and GMB trade unions for backing their members and supporting the strike. Strike action has delivered pay rises during the cost of living crisis.

"The political system is failing when those at the centre of it for decades can't pay workers properly and maintain our infrastructure in a safe way. Join me on the Woodburn picket line this Thursday at 10am to stand in solidarity with the strikers."
Donegal Deputy Pearse Doherty has called on the government to honour its commitment to the upgrade of the notorious A5 road.

The works on the A5, which connects Derry city to Aughnacloy, serves as a main route between Donegal and Dublin, have been halted by a series of legal issues.

Since 2007, when the Northern Ireland Executive first approved the development of a dual carriageway for the A5 Western Transport Corridor, 47 people have lost their lives on the A5. Earlier this year, three members of the one family from Strabane - Dan McKane, Christine McKane and Julia McSorley - were killed in a crash as they returned from a funeral in England.

Donegal-based Sinn Fein TD Doherty will move a motion in the Dail on Tuesday.

It is time to build the A5 road with no more delays, the Sinn Fein spokesperson on finance said.

Far too many families have lost loved ones on this dangerous road.

When the upgrade works for the 54-mile route were initially approved, the Irish government pledged half of the estimated 1.6bn cost.

Deputy Doherty said: The A5 upgrade was first announced in 2007 in order to transform a dangerous single-lane road into a much safer dual carriageway but 16 years on we are still waiting.

We cannot wait any longer. We must act to save lives and protect families from further heartbreak.

Deputy Doherty said the works on a road that is an important link between north and south will also enhance the social and economic wellbeing of the North West region.

On Tuesday, Sinn Fein will bring a motion to the Dail calling on the government to honour its commitment to fund 50 per cent of the cost, as committed to as part of the St Andrews agreement.

Deputy Doherty said: The government must also take all necessary steps to ensure that the Ten-T Road upgrade projects for Donegal, connecting to the A5 and related N2 upgrades receive approval and are delivered as speedily as possible.

There can be no more delays, and no more lives lost. It is time to build the A5 road.
The Diocese of Derry and Raphoe is to get its first female Dean following the appointment of Rev Liz Fitzgerald as Rector of the Grouped Parishes of Raphoe, Raymochy and Clonleigh and Dean of St Eunans Cathedral.



News of the appointment, by the Bishop of Derry and Raphoe, Rt Rev Andrew Forster, was announced on Sunday at services in the Raphoe Group of churches and in Rev Fitzgeralds current parishes of Gweedore, Carrickfinn and Templecrone.



The Omagh-native said she may have squealed when the proposition was initially put to her by Bishop Forster to succeed Rev Arthur Barrett as Dean. I think I squealed, Who me?

Mrs Fitzgerald says she is looking forward to the challenge immensely. Being invited to be Rector of the Raphoe Group and Dean of St Eunans Cathedral is very exciting and Im really looking forward to it. When I was ordained curate, I never thought that I would see a time when I would be in full-time ministry in a parish, so that is very exciting for me.

"My grandmother lived next door to St Patricks Cathedral in Armagh. As a child Id be in and out of the Cathedral and I just loved the feeling and the atmosphere, and I would have worshipped there, so to be invited to be Rector of St Eunans Cathedral is wonderful. The Dean bit I think is exciting, its a privilege. Ive a lot of learning to do.



St Eunans has a long and distinguished history. The church is 800 years old and people have prayed on the site for 1,400 years. While acknowledging the historic nature of her appointment, Rev Fitzgerald says she is undaunted by it, putting her trust in God.



I was brought up in a family where we considered professions as genderless. If it was the right person in the right place to do the right job that was good. The fact that Ive been appointed St Eunans Cathedrals first lady Dean, I dont feel weighed down by it at all. I think its very exciting. Its certainly a historic event, but I feel the weight of the calling more than the weight of history. Am I daunted? I just feel spiritually guided. I feel spiritually very content in what Ive been asked to do, and I feel God will be my guide and will see me through it  but I still have to do the graft.



Rev Fitzgerald will miss her parishioners in west Donegal. She said: My part of Donegal  Bunbeg, Carrickfinn, Dungloe  is beautiful, and what makes it beautiful is the good, kind people, my parishioners and the people in the community. But, about a year ago, I had a restlessness deep inside me which I tried to ignore and tried to leave to one side.

"That restlessness continued all of last year. Rev Fitzgeralds husband Sean had a huge role in Rotary Ireland, my son was on placement in Belfast, our life was upside down and then, all of a sudden, our life is now calm, Seans retired, Rotary has stopped. This offer has been presented to me and Ive said Yes because the time is right, Im ready for another challenge  Ive time for another challenge  and I thank the Lord that this is my challenge.



Ive always loved the sense of peace in Raphoe Cathedral. It never, ever dawned on me that I would actually end up being Rector of a cathedral and whenever it was proposed to me, I just heard God say, This is yours. It was the strangest feeling. I didnt stop and think about it. I just put it totally in Gods hands, and thats why Im so calm and excited all at once.



Rev Fitzgerald says she is not totally sure what being Dean of St Eunans Cathedral "entails in its entirety" but says she is up for the challenge. I feel energised, I feel awakened. Sean even said this morning that I look 10 years younger. This has reawakened my call, my duty. Im ready to roll up my sleeves and learn about the administrative roles and responsibilities of being Dean and Rector, as well as the pastoral needs and the worship needs involved. Im ready to roll up my sleeves and go.



A date has yet to be finalised for Rev Fitzgeralds institution as Rector and installation as Dean. The only thing that I have in my head, Rev Fitzgerald says, is that St Eunans Day is the 23rd of September and it would be lovely if something could happen around St Eunans Day.



Its all a bit of a fantasy to me. George Otto Simms was the Archbishop in Armagh when I was a child. He inspired in me how central to the Church and yet how important to our faith a cathedral and cathedral worship can be. I just feel privileged. Thank you, God. Thank you for letting me serve this way.



Bishop Forster has congratulated Rev Fitzgerald on her appointment and thanked her for her ministry in the Gweedore Group. On behalf of the Diocese, I wish to express my gratitude to Liz for her generous and faith-filled witness in Gweedore, Carrickfinn and Templecrone.

"She is a gifted priest and pastor, and will share those gifts with her new parishioners in Raphoe, Raymochy and Clonleigh. I trust that parishioners in Raphoe, Manorcunningham and Lifford will welcome Liz warmly and offer her their prayers and support.
Mollie Egan-Crossan (22), from Derry, graduated from the School of Arts, English and Languages at Queens University Belfast with a 2:1 BA (Hons) in Film and Theatre Making at the weekend.

Mollie, overcame mental health challenges during her time at University to graduate with her dream degree.

Speaking about her experience, Mollie said: At secondary school I was head girl, on the student council, setting up clubs to support women, and doing media interviews talking about current affairs. On paper, it made sense that I should thrive at university.

My first year was during the pandemic, along with personal struggles and relationship issues my mental health took a tumble. While I managed to pass all my classes, my attendance wasn't always great, and I never felt like I truly met any friends.

After a challenging start, Mollie was determined to get help and have a more enjoyable experience for the rest of her university journey.

She continued: In second year, I was ready to admit that I was depressed, and I decided to do something about it by speaking to a therapist which helped me a lot.

I then decided to join a society at Queens, the Musical Theatre Society, where I finally got to know people and the rehearsals broke the week up for me. Then in my second and third year I decided to push myself out of my comfort zone. I ended up being the course representative for my degree, and I joined the student blogging programme where I created YouTube videos and articles for the University.

I was actually able to help a few people from my old school navigate their first year at Queen's and reach people through my TikTok platform where I have 15,000 followers, giving them advice on beginning their university journey.

Talking about her favourite memory from her time at Queens, Mollie commented: The most enjoyable experience was making my final project for my cinematography class in second year. The script chosen for the film was one I had written and as a result I got to try my hand at casting, directing, producing - seeing my vision come to life.

"Being on set for that and raising funding to pay the actors was a great experience. I finally felt more like my confident self, and it made me think that creative writing could be a good career avenue for me.

Looking ahead to her graduation day, Mollie added: It feels very surreal to be graduating, my degree went by in the blink of an eye. I feel really proud, and I cant wait to have my family standing on campus with me when I graduate.

After graduation, Mollie hopes to embark on her Masters degree in Creative Writing at Queens.
PICTURED ABOVE: Henry McLaughlin handing over a cheque for 2,340, raised from the Scalp Walk, to Cora Morrisson, Concern Worldwide. Standing on left are family members Majella (daughter) with Sophie (granddaughter), Patricia (daughter), Annie (granddaughter) and Michael (son). Volunteers on the day, front from left, are Denis Feeney, Ciaran Keaveney, Laurence Hegarty and Seamus McGettigan. Standing, from right, are Charlie Glenn and Tommy McDermott. (Photo - Tom Heaney, nwpresspics)

The recent Concern Scalp Mountain walk proved to be a great success this year, with the weather perfect for all those taking part.

The local Derry Concern Group paid tribute to all those who took part and for their contributions of 2,340 to Concern Worldwide.

A spokesperson said: "Everyone seemed to enjoy the considerable challenge of ascending a 1500 foot mountain. The walk would not be possible without the cooperation of the McLaughlin family who own the farm on Scalp Mountain.

"We are all aware that many people in our area are living through difficult times but those who contributed to the Concern appeal are to be commended for their fellow feeling for people in many countries around the world living in desperate circumstances.

"The Derry Concern Group continue to be amazed at the generosity of local people to their campaigns for various disasters of recent years: Ukraine, Afghanistan, and the Turkey/Syria earthquake.

"All these situations have required an immediate response but the walk is raising funds for the continuing work Concern Worldwide undertakes in 26 countries around the world. Concerns concentrates on the development of food security. Many communities around the world live on the edge of disaster.

"They barely survive until circumstances such as natural disasters, wars, climate change disrupt their lives. As poor communities they need outside intervention to assist their recovery. This is not possible without the basics of food, water and shelter."

Those who took part in the walk gave generously to help many people in difficult circumstances but it is still possible to donate through the Concern bookshop in Ferryquay Street or by using the specific email address: www.justgiving.com/page/derryscalp.
The Gartan Open Water Swimmers swam 38 kilometres from Donaghadee in Northern Ireland to Port Patrick in Scotland last week.

The team consisted of Derry man Garvan McCann, with Donegal swimmers Rea Doherty, Mark Loughridge, Karen Crawford, Sinead Diver and Sarah Brennan with Paddy Bond being their support crew on the boat. Their swim took 13 hours 15 minutes and 10 seconds - all with only wearing a swimsuit, a hat and a pair of goggles!

The swim took place in cooler water temperatures (12-15 degrees), changeable weather conditions and abundance of jellyfish.

On Thursday these intrepid swimmers were blessed with fairly calm conditions for most of the swim and only encountered choppy and rough seas for the final four kilometres close to Scotland.

Swimmers with Anne Marie Ward in Portnablagh - Sinead Diver, Anne Marie Ward, Mark Loughridge, Garvan McCann, Sarah Brennan, Karen Crawford, Rea Doherty, Paddy Bond

The swim started just before 7:30am with Garvan entering the water cheered on by local swim groups, and many friends and family on the rocky shores. Each hour another swimmer took over with the changeovers being carefully monitored by the Irish Long Distance Swimming Association observer - so the swim can be ratified as an official channel swim.

Many people followed their endeavours and progress during the day as they watched live video feeds from the boat, and followed the online tracking system where they could pinpoint the exact location of the swimmers.

There were four sets of swimmers seeking to cross the North Channel on Thursdaytwo relays and two solo swimmerswith just two sets completing the trip, showing the unpredictable and challenging nature of the task.

The landing at Port Patrick in Scotland was a very special and emotional moment with Rea Doherty powering to the finish line, with the rest of the group following her to the shore. The finish was made even more special by the cheering, flag-waving and applause of locals on the pier, the beach, the cliffs of Port Patrick.

Derry swimmer Garvan McCann (centre), with from left, Karen Crawford, Rea Doherty, Mark Loughridge, and Sarah Brennan

Finishing on Port Patrick beach is something of a rarity for channel swimmers since you are at the mercy of tides and currents and often glad to touch any part of Scotland. So an even more special way to finish a giant of a swim.

Infinity Channel Swimming were the boat pilots, and have guided many groups of solo and relay swimmers across this stretch of water.

The Gartan Open Water Swimmers are very grateful to them for their professionalism and their expertise in guiding them in such a safe and supportive way, and also having someone on board whose role it was to spot the jellyfish and steer the swimmer away from those lions mane and barrel jellyfish which populate the North Channel.

The swim route from Ireland to Scotland

The swimmers have been training hard throughout the winter months building up their tolerance to cold water. The past few weeks have been spent preparing for this channel swim and practising various aspects such as leaving the boat, changeovers and multiple swims in one day.

They are very grateful to their families and friends who have supported them over these past few months, and to the many swimmers who trained with them and spurred them on. Anne Marie Ward, Donegals great channel swimmer, was a particular inspirationcoming to meet with the swimmers at their final practice swim and giving them her support, wisdom and encouragement.

Rea Doherty, Sinead Diver, Karen Crawford, Sarah Brennan, Infinity pilot Ian Conroy, Garvan McCann, Mark Loughridge, Paddy Bond ready to depart

The group are fundraising for the Samaritansdetails can be found on their Facebook page or by contacting any of the swimmers.

And now its on to the summer schedule of weekly Crab Crawl events in Portnablaghan open, fun event for all swimmers with a swim of 1 kilometre. Come down and join the group every Wednesday with the swim starting at 7pm.
Motorola unveiled the Moto Razr 40 in India, a month after its official debut. It has come along with the vanilla Razr 40 but garners most of the attention for its massive cover screen and much better specs and features. For starters, the Ultra is driven by a Snapdragon 8+ Gen 1 chip while the regular Razr 40 has Snapdragon 7 Gen 1 inside. The Ultra will be Motorolas prime pick for the best folding phones of 2023. So, it will obviously go head to head with the forthcoming Samsung Galaxy Z Flip 5. Will the Motorola foldable be able to capitalize on its early entry into the market? Thats something we will know in time, but for now, lets highlight the features and reasons we think it has a chance.

Motorola Razr 40 Ultra: What are its strengths?

1. Motorola offers a large 3.6-inch 144Hz AMOLED display with HDR10+ colour coverage and 1100 nits of peak brightness. The screen wraps around the dual camera rings. You can get more out of this screen thanks to several custom software features. You can access apps, calendars, contacts, Spotify, weather apps, etc. You can also stretch certain compatible apps to fit the full screen. You can even access the quick settings menu and turn off the phone from here.

The main screen is a 6.9-inch 165Hz LTPO AMOLED panel with HDR10+ support and 1400 nits of peak brightness.

Also Read: Moto G73 Review: Solid performer with some misses

2. The newly improved hinge lets you prop up the device at different angles. It reduces the crease and lets you close the phone flatter. Another design feature is how clicking the side buttons can be configured to switch tracks, change volume and control the music playback.

3. The phone can be placed in a way that its base doubles as a tripod. You can also remotely trigger the shutter button through certain preset gestures and even use dual capture mode using both side cameras. You get a 12MP+13MP dual rear camera setup and 4K60 fps recording. Even the 32MP front camera offers the same resolution and fps for shooting videos.

4. The device comes with Snapdragon 8 Plus Gen 1 which is still a powerful chipset in 2023. That coupled with oodles of memory should offer reliable performance or so we hope. The 3080mAh battery is on par with what its counterparts have. This is backed by 30W fast charging.

5. The rest of the feature set including WiFi 6e, Bluetooth 5.3, USB-C port, and unique software features like Retro Razr and Moto Gestures should be interesting too. You also get Gorilla Glass Victus on the front and back (when closed). It has IP52 rating that's inferior to what the Samsung foldables boast.

Also Read: Motorola Edge 40 Review: An impressive mid-range phone with undeniable panache

The rumoured specifications of the Galaxy Z Flip 5 are mostly a notch ahead of the Razr. Going by these alleged specs itself, the Razr 40 Ultra is ahead in terms of a higher-megapixel selfie camera along with a video recording option, and slightly faster charging speed. Now, we will have a clear idea once the Galaxy Z Flip 5 arrives. If Motorola manages to undercut the Samsung foldable, then that could work in its favour. It has been priced at 89,999. The regular Razr 40 is available at 59,999. As a launch offer, you can get 7000 discount whilst using ICICI bank cards for the purchase of both these phones. Additionally, there is up to 15,000 Jio benefits (applicable on both). The pre-booking starts today on Amazon and sale starts July 15.
The Sony Bravia A80L is a premium OLED TV that boasts a range of Sony's proprietary image and video processing technologies, enhancing the cinematic experience. This television excels in handling legacy SD content and motion, ensuring amazing performance. Moreover, the HDR10 and Dolby Vision experiences are also mostly impressive, though we noticed that highlights dont get bright enough to pop. Acoustic Surface Audio+ technology adds realism and further elevates the overall viewing experience.

It is worth noting that the Sony Bravia A80L lacks a colour-accurate Filmmaker mode. Additionally, with numerous technologies dynamically optimizing picture quality, it becomes challenging to determine if the original intent of the content creators is faithfully preserved.

Sony Bravia XR-A80L Review: Specifications

Panel Size: 65-inch (also available in 55, 77 and 83-inch as well)

Panel Type: OLED (WRGB), 100Hz native refresh rate

Panel Resolution: 3840 x 2160 - 4K

Panel Refresh Rate: 120Hz

Supported HDR Formats: HDR10, HDR10+, HLG, Dolby Vision

Speakers: 50W Acoustic Surface Audio+ (3 Actuator + 2 Subwoofer)

Audio formats supported: Dolby Audio, Dolby Atmos, DTS Digital Surround

Software: Google TV

Weight (with stand): Approx. 24.3kgs

HDMI Ports: 4 (2 full bandwidth HDMI 2.1 ports - HDMI 3, HDMI 4)

HDMI 2.1 features - 4K@120, eARC, VRR, ALLM

Other connectivity options: 2 USB ports, Wi-Fi 5, Bluetooth 4.2, Ethernet, RF connection input, Headphone out, Digital audio out

Built-in storage: 16GB

Price: MRP: 3,49,990; Best Price: Rs 2,84,990

Sony Bravia A80L Design, Remote and Software

Sony continues to follow its minimalist design approach, and the A80L is a sleek and stylish TV that also feels solidly built and extremely premium. The aluminium slim-wedged stand of the TV can be mounted in three positions, with each successive angled-in position raising the TV a bit higher. With the feet set straight, the TV can accommodate most conventional soundbars at the front without blocking the display view.

The power cord is detachable and should be easy to replace. All ports are placed toward one side. The HDMI ports are properly spaced, and of these, HDMI 3 and HDMI 4 are full bandwidth HDMI 2.1 ports (HDMI 3 supporting eARC). HDMI 1 and HDMI 2 are based on HDMI 2.0. There are two USB-A ports on the rear positioned back to back, so it might be a tad inconvenient if, for some reason, you need to use both simultaneously.

The remote is quite ergonomic and has 6 hotkeys for popular apps. The buttons are sensibly laid out, and we got used to the layout in no time. However, they are not backlit, and we wouldn't be fussing about this if we hadn't experienced the luxury with the Sony Bravia A95K.

The Google TV interface on the Sony Bravia A80L ran perfectly smoothly during our testing. The TV further integrates Google Assistant, Chromecast Built-in, Apple AirPlay, and HomeKit, so you will be able to easily cast from all popular mobile devices.

Sony Bravia A80L Picture Quality

To start with, the Sony Bravia A80L uses the WBE OLED panel (WRGB) sourced from LG displays without any heat sink. While this is a good quality OLED panel supported by Sonys deft image processing algorithms, it must be mentioned that the panel falls below the QD-OLED panel that Sony uses on the A95K or the latest MLA OLEDs available in this year's LG G3, both of which can achieve significantly higher brightness.

If this is your first experience with an OLED TV, the Sony Bravia A80L will definitely wow you. The deep blacks, high contrast, wide viewing angles, and fast response times are advantages that make watching good-quality OTT content truly amazing. Sony TVs are also renowned for their expertise in upscaling low-quality content, smoothing gradations, and handling motion in a balanced manner.

The Sony Bravia A80L does not include a Filmmaker mode to accurately reproduce the creator's intent. The most colour-accurate profile on the TV is Custom, but most people will understandably use Standard, Vivid, and Cinema modes that enhance colours and contrast to make the content look pleasant.

Since the Custom mode is the closest to a colour-accurate profile, that is what we tested using the Spectracal C6 HDR2000 colourimeter and Portrait Displays Calman Ultimate software. Sony has a number of custom settings enabled by default, and we disabled power-saving and light sensor adjustments before our testing.

In SDR, the greyscale has a significant blue bias, thus impacting white-point accuracy. As you can see, the gamma over tracks the standard in the shadow region, resulting in some compromise in shadow details.

As for colours, the average delta error is below the humanly perceptible value of 3, with the maximum error occurring at 100% white. Skin tones felt natural in both SDR and HDR content.

Also Read: Best Smart TVs in India

Sony Bravia A80L HDR performance

The Sony Bravia A80L supports HDR10, Dolby Vision, and HLG. It does not support HDR10+ and Dolby Vision IQ. However, we don't believe that is a deal breaker. Overall, the nuances of the HDR experience are handled really well.

Dark scenes with some bright objects thrown in are rendered beautifully.

Like all White OLED panels, it struggles in the near-black region. For example, you can notice a lot of artefacts in scenes where a meteor shoots through a grey sky.

The overall peak brightness of the Sony Bravia A80L is on the conservative side, which is at times noticeable in less-than-dazzling highlights in bright HDR scenes.

We measured a peak brightness of 1080 Nits on a 1 per cent window using our lux meter in the vivid mode. In the custom mode, we measured around 700 nits on a 10% window measured and full field brightness measured 140 nits. This is better performance than last years Sony Bravia A80K.

As seen in the chart above, greyscale in HDR content is still skewed toward blue. The Sony Bravia A80L accurately tracks the EOTF curve in HDR content, although it slightly undertracks the reference in dark scenes.

Colours in HDR are once again quite accurate, with maximum error at the white point. We measured an average delta error of 3 which means that the colour inaccuracies will not be easily discernible to users.

As for colour volume, we recorded 72.04% of BT2020 colour space in the XY terms and 73.67% in the UV term, which is again standard for the White OLED panels.

Sony Bravia A80L gaming

With fast response time, fluid motion and VRR support, Sony Bravia A80L is quite good for gaming. The TV has two HDMI 2.1 ports, supports ALLM, and 120Hz VRR (NVIDIA G-Sync, AMD FreeSync Premium). Dolby Vision gaming is capped at 4K@60Hz. It also has a dedicated game mode where you can pull up a game bar to quickly enable or disable VRR and access a few other settings.

High-end TVs from Samsung and LG come with some additional perks like 4 HDMI 2.1 ports and HGiG mode for accurate tone mapping in game mode.

Sony Bravia A80L Audio

Sony Bravia A80L uses Acoustic Surface Audio+ technology where the screen becomes the speaker and this adds a lot of realism to the experience. The 50W audio system includes three 10W actuators and two 10W sub-woofers.

This is certainly one of the best TV audio systems that we have experienced so far. Movie dialogues are crisp and clear, while the soundstage feels impressively expansive, occasionally simulating convincing surround sound effects. Additionally, the TV offers an auto-calibration option that employs a microphone in the remote control to gather data and optimize audio settings based on your typical viewing distance.

Sony Bravia A80L Review - Verdict

The Sony Bravia A80L is a premium OLED TV that boasts a range of Sony's proprietary image and video processing technologies, enhancing the cinematic experience. This television excels in handling legacy SD content and motion, ensuring amazing performance. Moreover, the HDR10 and Dolby Vision experiences are also mostly stunning, though we noticed that highlights dont get bright enough to pop. Acoustic Surface Audio+ technology adds realism and further elevates the overall viewing experience.

It is worth noting that the Sony Bravia A80L lacks a colour-accurate Filmmaker mode. Additionally, with numerous technologies dynamically optimizing picture quality, it becomes challenging to determine if the original intent of the content creators is faithfully preserved.

The Sony A80L lies in the middle of the stack and costs a premium, but it justifies its price for cinema buffs who watch a lot of legacy content and for users who like how Sony handles and enhances content. Its main competitor, the LG C3, is a similarly priced OLED TV and might have a stronger appeal to gamers. When considering other OLED options, both the LG G3 and the Sony A95K are expensive but offer a brighter OLED panel. However, if you're looking for a more affordable OLED option, last year's Sony A80K provides a comparable experience and is currently available at a better value price.
DigiKey partners with GroupGets to enable hardware startups to bring products to market

DigiKey, a leading global commerce distributor offering the largest selection of technical components and automation products in stock for immediate shipment, has partnered with GroupGets to launch the "Get MADE" crowdfunding initiative, a collaboration that promotes and funds hardware creators.

This program will allow startups to get hardware funded, produced and sold on DigiKey's website.

GroupGets is a crowd purchasing platform for group buying technology products that helps businesses and individuals launch their products by promoting, funding and distributing electronic devices across the world. Through the "Get Made" program, GroupGets and DigiKey will cross promote qualifying devices through content, design, distribution and partial funding through DigiKey. Upon successful funding, GroupGets will work with the creators to manufacture the platforms and then DigiKey will list the platforms for sale on its website.

"The 'Get MADE' program stemmed from the longtime supply partnership between DigiKey and GroupGets and became a call to action to further support makers trying to enter the market," said David Sandys, senior director of technical marketing at DigiKey. "By partnering together, we can bring interesting new solutions to market and fuel innovation in the hardware space."

"I made GroupGets to originally 'hack minimum order quantities' and put every maker on an equal level playing field with big technology companies," said Ron Justin, co-founder of GroupGets. "We've been a DigiKey fan since we were electrical engineering students in college and are proud to be further supporting the maker community through assisting them in their funding goals, as well as with production and distribution."

For more information on DigiKey, visit the DigiKey website.
GEGE  Deputy Prime Minister (DPM) Themba Masuku has urged the nation to guard against people with the character of the biblical Jonah, as they prepare for the upcoming general elections.

According to the Bible, Jonah was a man whom God sent to Ninevah to warn the people about their imminent peril but decided to go to Tarshishi. With this statement, Masuku was making reference to the people who will contest a seat in the 12th Parliament. He said elections were not new as they started in the ancient times. He stated that elections were done for a purpose and were limited to certain individuals. However, he said it came a time when nations including Eswatini came up with their own constitutions to govern elections. Our Constitution is clear on why we elect people into Parliament. It is also clear about the roles of the elected individuals once they assume their duties, he said.

Masuku urged members of the church to elect sound candidates who would contribute to the countrys development as opposed to those who would focuse on the negatives. Khetsani bantfu lenibatiko kutsi bacotfo emmangweni hhayi lumayemaye. Ukhandze kutsi umuntfu utalise lonkhe live futsi akanaki bantfwana, he said in vernacular closely translating to: Elect people with integrity, not troublemakers. For example, you cannot elect a person who sleeps around with women without taking responsibility of his children. He also made an example about the events which took place in the 11th Parliament, which he said was divided into three after certain individuals had their own agenda within the House.

Without mentioning names, he said the individuals left other Members of parliament (MPs) inside the House and started announcing violence outside. He told the congregants to ensure that they elect people who would represent them with integrity as opposed to those who fabricated stories on behalf of their constituents to suit their agenda. Masuku said anything said by constituents should be backed up by minutes from meetings.

Violence

There is absolutely nothing wrong about having differing views but the Constitution requires that MPs should raise motions to be debated in the House for whatever outcome as opposed to announcing violence outside. I hope you all know that the country was in flames just because some people decided to announce violence. I hope you are all aware of the consequences of the violence. Investors closed down their businesses and never returned, resulting in huge job losses, he said. The politician stated that violence started on May 17, 2021 before it escalated on June 29, 2021. This, he said, was after some MPs took advantage and continued to accuse police officers of negligence after the death of Thabani Nkomonye, who died in a car accident.

Masuku said emaSwati could prevent the repeat of the unrest by electing the right people to Parliament. He also thanked the House of Prayer countrywide for joining hands in praying for the end of the unrest and COVID-19 pandemic. He said the country would have not survived from the unrest and COVID-19 pandemic. The DPM was accompanied by the League of Churches President, Bishop Samson Hlatjwako, Gege MP Musa Kunene and Zombodze Emuva MP Bhekani Muzi Kunene at the event.
MBABANE  The glaring problems with implementing the policy allowing pregnant pupils to attend school have been exposed at a high school in the outskirts of Manzini.

This comes after one of the learners who is currently five months pregnant faced humiliation from her head teacher, who told her that she had to stand in front of the morning assembly and apologise to other learners for falling pregnant and also detail to them how she fell pregnant. The aim of the policy is to outline conditions under which pregnant learners, expectant fathers and learner-parents can continue with their education. It was in this regard that government announced that pregnant pupils should be allowed into class, without any discrimination. In 2021, a report on the Learner Prevention and Management Policy and Guidelines revealed that 1 760 pupils fell pregnant during the coronavirus pandemic. Worth noting is that in 2021 pupils did not attend classes due to the COVID-19 pandemic.

According to the pupils mother *Nomsa, she said after her daughter reported that she was pregnant, she approached the head teacher and informed her on the developments. Nomsa said she reported her daughters pregnancy because she was avoiding a situation where the head teacher found out on her own, as she did not know how she would react. She said the school head stated that she would also update teachers about the matter. However, she said after a week, the head teacher called the pupil into her office and told her that she was expected to stand in front of everyone during morning assembly and tell other learners that she was pregnant and also narrate how the pregnancy happened and when. After my daughter had informed me about this, I engaged her and told her that what the head teacher had done was against the law and that she should not do it."

She said indeed her daughter did not do as told by the head teacher but instead took her belongings and left the school on the day she was supposed to address her peers. Nomsa said as her daughter was leaving, two teachers questioned her on what the challenge was and she responded that she was told to stand before other learners to inform them about her pregnancy which she would not do in fear of embarrassment, the mother narrated. Furthermore, she stated that while the child was returning home and troubled by what had happened to her, some women in her community called her and asked what had happened. These women, she said reported the incident to their Member of Parliament (MP) who is also the Minister of Education and Training, Lady Mabuza on the humiliation the learner had faced before the head teacher. She said a team from the regional education office (REO) arrived at the school and engaged them and told the child to return to class. Nomsa said the head teacher was however not present during the talks. Interviewed, the head teacher requested not to comment on the matter, stating that the REOs office was currently handling it.

Minister

Minister Mabuza confirmed that the matter was reported to her and that she had instructed the office of the Manzini REO to sort it out. Mabuza stated that when she enquired from the head teacher, she admitted to have engaged the pupil on her pregnancy. I then told the acting principal secretary (PS) to send officers from (REO) to attend to the matter, said the minister. Mabuza said she further suggested that the team, as well as the head teacher should apologise to the pupil and her parents about the incident. Also, she said she told them to address the teachers at the school and other learners. She pointed out that there should be an understanding that the policy was new and that there would be teething problems experienced here and there. Mabuza pleaded with the nation, teachers and learners to work together and support each other in order for the policy to be well implemented. She said pregnant learners needed to visit the clinic constantly and should be released and also during birth. Regarding the matter, she said the head teacher was very wrong. However, she said the matter was handled well.

*Not real name to protect minor.



... Save the Children condemns act

MBABANE  Save the Children has frowned upon the actions of the head teacher who allegedly attempted make a pupil apologise for falling pregnant during assembly.

Director of Save the Children Dumisani Mnisi said the head teacher should be ashamed of herself for further exacerbating the humiliation that had already been suffered by the pupil by falling pregnant. Caregivers should not embarrass or belittle children but they should correct them in a dignified manner, he said. Mnisi said teething problems with the policy were bound to surface because it was a fairly new position. He added that there was need to cooperate with authorities of the school and education space. The director noted that they could not expect to have the policy well received in its infant years. He further emphasised on the need to have all players help children refrain from falling pregnant, but if it occurs they should help the child not lose education.



Matter sorted, pupil back in class  REO

MBABANE  The matter is under control and the pupil is back in class.

The above statement was made by the Regional Education Officer (REO) in Manzini, Sizwe Kunene. Kunene said they engaged the parent, child and teachers at the school. He said the matter was corrected and the affected pupil only lost a few days of school.
Action needs to be taken now in order to ensure that water quality in Dundalk is improved, Sinn Fein TD Ruairi O Murchu has said.

Deputy O Murchu was speaking during a Dail debate on the Environmental Protection Agencys Water Quality Report and highlighted the ongoing issue of manganese and the continued appearance of brown water in parts of Dundalk.

The Louth TD was speaking as Uisce Eireann (formerly Irish Water), announced further work to the network in Dundalk.

Following the completion of works along Toberona Road and Bellewsbridge Road, the new watermain pipelaying being carried out by Uisce Eireann,moves on July 3 to the Mill Road.

Uisce Eireann said there would be a 24-hour road closure required on the Mill Road from the junction with Bellewsbridge Road to the junction of the Castletown Road, with local and emergency access maintained and diversions in place, until the end of August. Seventy metre sections of the road will be closed at a time.

Speaking in Leinster House, Deputy O Murchu said: I would find it hard, coming from Dundalk, to talk about water quality without dealing with the particular issues that relate to our water supply and the issue of manganese. We have been told it would take a number of years for Uisce Eireann to deal with this particular issue.

I call for action to be taken now. I even hear of flushing that is happening in my own area back in Bay Estate and that, again, people are looking at brown water, which we have been dealing with for a considerable amount of time.

There is an issue in regard to legacy infrastructure in old housing estates as well that needs to be dealt with and sometimes serious pressure is put on individuals that have public lines through their land.

Meanwhile, Deputy O Murchu said he is aware of ongoing HR issues with water services workers who went on strike in Louth on Friday due to a dispute about moving from council contracts to Uisce Eireann and the terms and conditions of the new contracts.

He said the government needs to intervene immediately to sort the issue out, while he also called on the Taoiseach to outline the wording and date for a referendum on the public ownership of water services.
Professional 'patient companions' emerge in China as demand grows

People's Daily Online) 10:45, July 03, 2023

Professional "patient companionship", a new occupation that mainly involves people providing companionship and support to patients during their hospital visits, has been gaining steam in China in recent years, as there has been increasing demand among people who have difficulty seeking medical services.

These "patient companions" provide services including making appointments with doctors, accompanying patients to medical appointments, helping patients consult doctors, sending test samples to labs, and picking up medical examination reports and medicines for patients.

Photo taken on May 12 shows patients going through the approval process for chronic diseases at a medical insurance service station in the outpatient lobby of Jinhua Municipal Central Hospital in Jinhua city, east China's Zhejiang Province. (Photo/Hu Xiaofei)

Their clients are mainly people who live alone, mostly the elderly, and those who seek medical services outside of their home cities.

Qin Na, a 36-year-old woman who lives by herself, has hired a professional "patient companion" to help her father with hospital visits after she herself enjoyed the convenience provided by the service.

Qin met Zhang Ruijuan, a professional "patient companion, through a friend's recommendation after she was struck by acute gastroenteritis one night last year.

"The tests are often not done on the same floor, and I have to wait in line for every test. Sometimes when I feel under the weather, it's difficult to handle these things on my own. The help of a professional 'patient companion' can save me from strenuous efforts and worries during the process of seeking medical services," Qin said.

As a professional "patient companion", Zhang can handle many things that Qin doesn't have to do in person at the hospital.

She made an appointment with a doctor, stood in line, added information to Qin's account of her symptoms and medical history, and took notes of the doctor's directions for Qin. After the consultation, Zhang provided a written document for Qin, which contained detailed information on her hospital visit, including test results, doctor's directions, and instructions for taking medicines.

Qin said Zhang's help made the whole process very easy for her. All I have to do is sit there and wait for my turn. I no longer have to run here and there to go through various procedures," Qin noted.

A professional "patient companion" (left) sits with a patient during her visit to Guang'anmen Hospital under the China Academy of Chinese Medical Sciences in Beijing, China. (Photo/Yang Yanfan)

"My first experience of the services provided by a professional 'patient companion' was very good. Once, when my father had to go to hospital and I was too busy with work to go with him, I asked Zhang, who accompanied me on my visit to hospital, to help my father. At first, my father was reluctant to have a stranger accompany him during the process. But after he tried the services, he realized how convenient they are," Qin told People's Daily.

Zhang receives about 20 bookings a month. Her clients include elderly people, single, young and middle-aged people, mothers who take care of their children by themselves, and patients seeking medical services outside of their home cities, according to Zhang, who explained that most of her clients are recommended to her by people who know her.

"Some patients just like to have someone accompany them when they go to hospital, so that they feel less lonely and uneasy," said Zhang, stressing that professional "patient companions" should have professional expertise, as they need to facilitate communication between doctors and patients and help solve practical problems for patients.

As patients who go to large hospitals in China often have to spend a lot of time waiting in lines, professional "patient companions" can meet the specific needs and resolve practical difficulties facing elderly people whose children don't live nearby, pregnant women, people who live alone, as well as other groups who need help with visits to hospitals, said Gao Hong, deputy secretary general of the China Association of Gerontology and Geriatrics.

Professional "patient companions" should have medical common sense and legal knowledge, and be familiar with hospitals' layouts and relevant procedures, as well as medical insurance policies, Gao said, adding that they also need to be caring, thoughtful, and patient.

The China Association of Gerontology and Geriatrics is formulating criteria and mechanisms to standardize professional activities of professional "patient companions", in order to protect the legitimate rights and interests of both those who offer these services and consumers, according to Gao.

The association is also leveraging its advantages to hold training sessions and seminars for professionals of the emerging industry, so as to ensure its standardized and professional development, Gao added.

(Web editor: Hongyu, Liang Jun)
MANZINI  The security industrys wages council might have agreed on a 7.5 per cent pay rise, but some of the prominent companies have attached demands to its implementation.

Some of the security companies, which refer to themselves as the Big Five, want the Ministry of Labour and Social Security to launch an intensive probe into how the companies in the sector operate in terms of being labour compliant, to be specific. This, they said was because a majority (over 80 per cent) of the security guard companies in the country were labour non-compliant, as they were purportedly underpaying its employees, not paying Eswatini National Provident Fund (ENPF) monies for the security guards and they did not issue out payslips, which meant that their employees could not access financial assistance from financial organisations, among other things.

According to some of the companies (Big Five), logic suggests that some of the security companies, which were mushrooming of late, were allegedly cleaning dirty money and the industry, including the workers suffered in the process. They said the issue normally starts when they bid for tenders as the companies in question charge (per security guard) money that was less than the gazetted basic minimum wage. They highlighted that the current government gazette (for 2022/23) the basic minimum wage for security guards is E2 490 and some of the companies in question charge E2 200 per security guard. The question is how much do they pay the security guard, because from that money, they have to buy uniform, cater for operational cost (office rent, fill fuel for patrol cars and pay utility bills among other things) and also get profit, they said.

On top of that, they said they have to pay ENPF and worksmen compensation, among other insurances to pay. They claimed that their investigations suggest that some companies deduct contributions for ENPF from the workers salaries, but do not remit it to ENPF. They highlighted that other companies pay for a certain percentage of their workers (like 10 workers yet the workforce is about 100). This means that such companies are not in the industry for profit or services, but to clean their dirty money, they claimed.

Costs

They said their assertion was based on that to dress a security guard costs at least E2 500, but these companies charge E2 200, yet they have to get profit, pay the guards and insurances and also buy the uniform. This beats logic, hence we believe they are cleaning money, they said. On top of that, they said government was also contributing to such practices in various ways. To start with, they said one question, which they never got a satisfactory answer to was how the office of the labour commissioner issued labour compliant certificates to these companies. They argued that if the labour commissioner did due diligence, the industry would not be in the mess it was in because non-complying establishments would not qualify to bid for tenders.

In that regard, they said government, in particular the office of the labour commissioner should do a thorough job to ensure that it issued labour compliant certificates to companies that complied with the labour laws and practices. We have been calling the officer of the labour commissioner about this issue, but at times, they tell us that they have not received any complaint regarding same, they claimed. Again, they said government was contributing to the ills they faced in the industry, because it also went for the lowest bidder when hiring a security company. They alleged that by so doing, it meant that government and its enterprises were only concerned about getting services and cared less about the labour practices and the workers. If government gives a tender to a security company that charges E2 200 per security guard and is expected, by law, to pay its workers at least E2 490 per month and get profit after catering for operational costs, among other necessities, then there is something wrong with that tender, they said.

As it stands, they said some of the labour non-compliant companies were winning tenders and this was despite the fact that labour compliance was one of the major requirements at the tender Board. They claimed that even the tender Board did not interrogate the labour compliant certificates produced by the companies. Also, they said if the tender Board or office of the labour commissioner would ask to meet some of the companies, they would meet at restaurants or hotels because they (companies) did not have offices.

Bidders

They said since most companies, including government and public enterprises were going for the lowest bidders, labour compliant companies no longer bid for tenders because they did not have a chance to be considered. This means the mushrooming labour non-compliant security companies have taken the industry down, together with its workers, they said. In that regard, they said the implementation of the gazette of 7.5 per cent salary adjustment in the sector, which is yet to be issued by the Minister of Labour and Social Security, should be carried out together with the recommendations of the enquiry into the matter of labour non-compliant security companies. They added that the report should also unearth how the office of the labour commissioner issued out labour compliant certificates to companies which did not comply with the law. We will not implement the 7.5 per cent salary adjustment until this matter is investigated and the investigations recommendations have been implemented, they said. By doing this, they said they were not against the salary adjustment, but they wanted things to be done properly, in accordance with the law. They further highlighted that they would like to see their workers earning a minimum of E4 000 and up to E10 000 per month, but emphasised that things should be done according to the law.
MBABANE  The businessman, Masiyakurima Agrippa Bopela (Masiya), allegedly deposited US$100 000 (1.7 million Zambian Kwacha) in Zambia.

He, however, encountered a challenge when he tried to deposit E2.8 million at First National Bank in Manzini last Tuesday. The bank allegedly informed Masiya that he could only deposit the money in amounts of US$5 000 each day, but he decided to leave as he could not stay in the country for that long. According to the Head of the Asset Forfeiture Unit, Principal Crown Counsel Elsie Matsebula, Masiya allegedly sent, via WhatsApp, a message to one of the investigators, Sergeant Steven Mlambo, which contained a receipt reflecting a deposit of US$100 000 in a Zambian bank. Masiya, however, deleted for everyone the message. He is said to have also deleted the receipt but it was already stored in the investigators cellphone since he had taken a screenshot of it.

Slip

Matsebula said the deposit slip showing that he allegedly deposited US$100 000 in Zambia was proof that he was involved in planting cash in different jurisdictions, the purpose of which is unknown. There are also articles online raising some red flags that might prompt the conduct of placing cash in various jurisdictions. There is a need to do an investigation in this regard and we have since sent a request to Zimbabwe for assistance, she said. Constable Mbongeni Kunene, who is based at King Mswati III International Airport Police Post, stated in his confirmatory affidavit that when he informed Mayisa, who was then with his countryman, that they had to wait for his superiors so that they could be escorted to the bank, they ran off and jumped into a Toyota Prado with foreign registration plates, and drove off. He said he had accompanied Masiya to the Eswatini Revenue Service (ERS) Office at the airport last Monday. He submitted that Masiya was carrying two bags and was attended to by Zethu Hlatshwako at the ERS Office. Kunene informed the court that Masiya told Hlatshwako that he had some cash to declare. He opened one bag and we started counting the money, which was in US Dollars. It was packed in bundles. There were 15 bundles of US$10 000, said Kunene.

Appointment

He also told the court that Masiya informed him that he was going to FNB Ezulwini Gables where he had an appointment. He said he asked Masiya how he would deposit the money since it was 4pm and banks closed at 3:30pm. Masiya allegedly told him that he would do private banking as bank officials were aware that he would be arriving. Masiya also allegedly informed the police officer that he wanted to deposit the money on that day because he does not want to sleep with the money. According to Kunene, Hlatshwako signed the declaration form in his presence and he was a witness. However, he said before appending his signature, he called his shift supervisor and informed him that a Zimbabwean man was declaring US$150 000. Kunene said the shift supervisor told him that he would notify the post commander about the matter and Hlatshwako released Masiya.

Kunene stated that he and Masiya went to the public concourse where the latter met a fellow Zimbabwean national. I advised them to wait for a bank escort. The two men told me they could not wait for my superiors to ask for a bank escort as they were running out of time. They said they wanted to reach Ezulwini before 5pm. When I tried calling my shift supervisor, who said they should wait for him, they ran towards a Prado with foreign registration licence plates and drove off, Kunene narrated. Sergeant Delisile Vilakati stated in her confirmatory affidavit that Masiya also carried a further amount of 2 200 Ethiopian Birr.
Labour Party representative for Cork city, Peter Horgan, has expressed concern over declining garda numbers in the city and has called for more support from the Government to bolster recruitment levels.

Mr Horgan noted that when comparing the published Garda Station Strength numbers from 2020 and 2022, the number of gardai had fallen by 145 across Cork city garda stations.

Gardai on the frontline should be supported by the minister, he said.

Senior gardai have vocalised that they are struggling with resources in Cork. I am extremely concerned at the decreasing number of members of An Garda Siochana.

With numbers in Cork city stations dropping to 578 in 2022 from 723 in 2020, it raises serious questions about the working conditions and career progression opportunities available to members.

In Labours alternative budget published in September 2022, we called for the recruitment of an additional 800 trainees to help tackle the increase in anti-social behaviour, home burglaries and serious incidents of crime.

As well as the additional numbers of gardai needed, Labour also budgeted to provide enough funding to meet the request of an additional net 429 civilian staff, thus freeing up more frontline gardai to patrol our streets and keep our communities safe.

People in all parts of Cork, rural and urban, want to feel safe and they want to feel secure in their own homes and on our streets.

In a recent parliamentary question, the party sought information as to the number of garda graduates from Templemore in the years 2020, 2021, 2022, and to date in 2023, and the district they were first posted to.

From 2015 to January 13, 2023, some 128 probationer gardai were allocated to Cork city; 82 to Cork North and 44 to the Cork West Division out of a total of 4,029 graduates.

Justice Minister Helen McEntee stressed that the Garda Commissioner is responsible for the administration and management of An Garda Siochana, including responsibility for the recruitment, training and deployment.

Government is committed to ensuring that An Garda Siochana has the resources it needs, which is reflected in an allocation of over 2 bn in Budget 2023, she said.

This level of funding provides for a steady pipeline of new gardai in the coming years, supporting the recruitment of up to 1,000 gardai and 400 additional garda staff this year, with new recruits to enter the Garda College approximately every 11 weeks.
A Brazilian national who was desperate to send money home to his parents resorted to drug dealing in Cork, and now he has appealed a prison sentence for having a stash of drugs that included over 7,000 worth of cannabis.

Diego Martins Gomez, who was living at an address at 89 Barrack Street, Cork, pleaded guilty to two counts of drug-dealing in respect of cannabis and a much smaller quantity of MDMA (ecstasy).

He got a five-month prison term for that offence at Cork District Court, and now he has appealed that sentence at Cork Circuit Appeals Court.

His barrister, Orla Meere, said: He admitted having the drugs for sale or supply to send money back to Brazil where his parents are retired and they struggled to choose between buying groceries and fuel for their vehicle.

They were unaware of any illegal activity by their son and he is highly ashamed of his actions.

"He has no previous convictions.

Judge Helen Boyle said it was a reasonably significant amount of drugs with which he had been caught.

However, the judge decided that she would increase the sentence of five months to 12 but suspend it fully.

Sergeant John Kelleher outlined the background to the offence. Gardai obtained a warrant to search his home in the city on January 10, 2022, and found over 7,000 worth of cannabis and they also found a smaller stash of ecstasy.

In one bedroom where the defendant resided there was cannabis with a street value of 7,650 and ecstasy worth 200. Also seized was a small amount of cash, deal bags and a digital weighing scales. During the course of the search, Mr Gomes returned home to the property where he was arrested, Sgt Kelleher said.

SENDING MONEY HOME

The accused, who has been working in various jobs in Cork city, told gardai he was sending home money to his family in Brazil.

The Director of Public Prosecutions indicated that they would accept the case going ahead at district court level only on a plea of guilty. Otherwise, the matter would have to be sent forward for trial by judge and jury.

Garda Eoin Harrington got a search warrant under the Misuse of Drugs Act to search 89 Barrack Street in Cork city.

At 5pm on that date, gardai attended the house to execute this warrant. The door was opened [by another person living at the address] and the property searched comprehensively by gardai.

Eddie Burke, solicitor, said: He is a 33-year-old single man from Brazil. He has been in Ireland for four years. He co-operated fully with the investigation.

He signed a memo in the house and then went back to the Garda station and made a full voluntary statement.

He came to Ireland as a student on a visa but he then went into the workforce in various jobs. He has no previous convictions. I would ask for a probation report.

His family were in difficulty at home and he was sending some money to his family."
Founded in 2005 as an Ohio-based environmental newspaper, EcoWatch is a digital platform dedicated to publishing quality, science-based content on environmental issues, causes, and solutions.

Smoke from wildfires in Canada shrouds the Empire State Building in New York City on June 30, 2023. David Dee Delgado / Getty Images

Hundreds of wildfires have been burning in nearly all of Canadas provinces for almost a month, the smoke from them drifting down into the midwestern and eastern United States.

Major U.S. cities from Minneapolis to Charlotte have been affected by the eerie orange-tinged wildfire smoke, but last week four out of the five most polluted cities in the world  New York, Toronto, Montreal and Washington, DC  were in North America, according to Swiss technology company IQAir.

This is not something that were talking about future generations dealing with, said New York Governor Kathy Hochul during a press conference last week, as CNBC reported. We are truly the first generation to feel the real effects of climate change.

The smoke from the Canadian wildfires contains particulate matter, one of the most dangerous types of air pollution.

Wildfire smoke is made up of many elements such as gases and water vapor, but the chief among them is particulate matter (PM), including PM2.5  particulates measuring 2.5 micrometers in diameter or less  and ultrafine particles (UFPs). Airborne particulate pollutants are the primary health hazard found in smoke, IQAir said last month. UFPs  particulate matter smaller than .01 micron in diameter  is the most dangerous airborne pollutant due to its small size. When inhaled, UFPs easily cross over from the lungs into the bloodstream and all other regions of the body.

This year is the worst wildfire season Canada has ever experienced in terms of area affected, with more than 20 million acres having been burned across the country, reported BBC News. Thats 21 times more than the average over the past 10 years.

Abnormally warm and dry conditions are expected to last through the summer, creating a continued high wildfire risk across the country.

Climate change is increasing the frequency and intensity of wildland fires and creating longer fire seasons in Canada, said Michael Norton, director general of the Northern Forestry Centre at Natural Resources Canada, as BBC News reported.

Since there are so many fires burning at once, firefighters must prioritize which to fight and which to let burn, reported CNN.

You protect people, infrastructure, watersheds, so theres a prioritization system, Canadian wildland fire ecologist Robert Gray told CNN. If youve got these fires that are burning way out in the back forty, and theyre not threatening anything immediately, then youre going to have to let them do their thing.

Canadian resources to fight wildfires have been short, so at least 10 other countries have stepped up to deploy their firefighters, including Mexico, Chile, Costa Rica, New Zealand, South Korea, Australia, South Africa, France, Spain and the U.S.

International groups keep saying, you need to shift the focus to upfront mitigation and prevention so youre spending less money on response and recovery, Gray said. Its ridiculous. We spend billions of dollars once the fire breaks out, but we dont invest the money upfront to mitigate the fires from happening in the first place.




USDA grants of US$115 million aim to boost small meat and poultry operators

The US Department of Agriculture (USDA) has announced grants worth US$115 million for smaller meat and poultry operators in 17 states, as part of ongoing efforts to counter the consolidation trend in food production, KFYR TV reported.

These grants, the latest in a series of awards by President Joe Biden's administration, are aimed at promoting meat and poultry processing, benefiting farmers, and creating job opportunities in rural areas.

US Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack, a former governor of Iowa, highlighted the fact that while 7.5% of farms account for 89% of all farming income, it is crucial to ensure that small farmers receive a larger share of the income to reverse the decline in population and wealth in rural communities.

Although Vilsack acknowledged that changing consolidation trends would take time, he emphasised the need for this transformation to prevent a decline in farm families, customers for small-town businesses, and rural school enrolment.

The funding announced includes 10 awards totalling US$77 million for recipients in 12 states through a program supporting the establishment or expansion of meat and poultry processing plants.

Among the recipients are Mountain West Economic Development in Montana, which will receive US$15 million to enhance slaughterhouse operations in the state's Flathead Valley, and the Farmers Union Foundation, which will receive US$800,000 to assist smaller processors in Minnesota, Montana, North Dakota, South Dakota, and Wisconsin.

Additionally, the USDA granted US$38 million to support the expansion of slaughterhouses for independent producers in five states, bringing the total number of awards to five.

The projects receiving funding span across Colorado, Connecticut, Georgia, Indiana, Iowa, Maryland, Massachusetts, Michigan, Minnesota, Montana, New York, North Dakota, Ohio, South Dakota, Tennessee, Texas, and Wisconsin. These investments aim to bolster the operations of smaller meat and poultry operators, revitalise rural communities, and promote a more equitable distribution of income in the agricultural sector.

- KFYR TV
Some HBO shows are streaming on Netflix in the US for the first time 'Insecure' is now on the platform, with 'Band of Brothers,' 'Six Feet Under' and 'Ballers' arriving later.

Your eyes aren't deceiving you. There really is an HBO show on Netflix. All five seasons of Issa Rae's highly acclaimed comedy-drama series Insecure are now streaming on Netflix in the US. Not only that, more HBO shows are on the way to the service as Warner Bros. Discovery (WBD) tries to wring more revenue out of its expansive library.

Band of Brothers, The Pacific, Six Feet Under and Ballers are also coming to Netflix as part of the deal, the company told Deadline. Meanwhile, Netflix users outside the US will be able to stream True Blood on the service. This is the first time that HBO content has appeared on Netflix in the US, though some has previously been available on Prime Video. The shows will still be available on Max.

All five seasons of Issa Rae's Peabody and NAACP award winning series Insecure are now on Netflix! pic.twitter.com/6hpNcw4ja2  Netflix (@netflix) July 3, 2023

This is part of an effort to boost WBD's revenue. Late last year, the company removed some notable titles from Max, including Westworld and The Nevers. Those shows, and many others from the WBD library, are available to watch on free, ad-supported channels on Roku, Tubi and Amazon's Freevee.

Zaslav and his team have employed other tactics to improve WBD's bottom line. Those include pulling many shows and movies from Max to reduce costs, canceling Max-exclusive projects before they were done (reportedly in favor of tax writeoffs in some cases) and laying off employees.
In a baffling move over the weekend, Elon Musk said the company would restrict unverified accounts to reading 600 posts per day  and new accounts to only 300 tweets daily. Meanwhile, Twitter will allow verified accounts to read 6,000 posts each day. For most people, that means, short of paying for Twitter Blue, they can spend about a minute or two on Twitter before encountering a "rate limit exceeded" error. Less than two hours later, Musk said Twitter would "soon" ease the limits to 8,000 for verified accounts and 800 for those without Twitter Blue.

Musk claimed the "temporary" limits were in place to address "extreme levels of data scraping" and "system manipulation." The day before, Twitter began preventing people not logged into the site from viewing tweets. Musk did not say what "new" means in the context of an account, nor did he say how long Twitter plans to restrict users.

Its a challenging change to Twitter when its courting advertisers and paid users. Fewer eyes for ads and fewer benefits for subscribers.

 Mat Smith

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The company is also reportedly working on new hearing-health features.

Bloombergs Mark Gurman says Apple is working on bringing new health features to its AirPods family. The first could be a hearing test. Already, AirPods support audiogram profiles, so iOS can tune earbuds to adjust for hearing loss. Some apps, like Mimi, already tap into this feature. Gurman added Apple is exploring how to market the AirPods Pro as a hearing aid since the FDA made it easier for Americans to buy over-the-counter options last year.

Apple is also working on an earbud feature to measure your body temperature. The company already introduced a built-in temperature sensor with the Watch Series 8 and Watch Ultra. But a sensor can get a more accurate temperature reading from the ear canal than the wrist. However, Gurman warns both features are several months or even years away.

Continue reading.

The new model allows for a Dutch riding style and has a wider saddle.

Cowboy

When Cowboy introduced its Adaptive Power update earlier this year, I wondered when a new model would arrive. The answer is, well, today. The new variant encourages a more upright design for a relaxed Dutch riding position. It also has a wider saddle  a feature at the top of our wish list for the Belgian companys latest iteration. The e-bike has a wireless charging phone mount, and, like all its models, its companion app integrates with Google Maps. The Cowboy Cruiser is available for an introductory price of 2,690 (roughly $3,400) in black or white.

Continue reading.

Nothing lasts forever on the internet.

Gfycat is shutting down. Snap, Gfycats parent company, said it plans to shut down the GIF database and delete all user content in a few short weeks. The Gfycat service is being discontinued, a notification at the top of the website reads. Gfycats impending demise wont come as a surprise to anyone who has tried to use the site in recent months. In May, Motherboard reported Snap had allowed Gfycats security certificates to expire. The oversight meant the platform temporarily became inaccessible to most internet users.

Continue reading.
MBABANE  A Zimbabwean national was found with E2.8 million cash at King Mswati III International Airport.

King Mswati III International Airport is located in Sikhuphe, 50 kilometres from Manzini. Masiyakurima Agrippa Bopela (Masiya), entered the kingdom last Monday with the equivalent of E2 897 183 in US Dollars and attempted to leave the country the following day with the cash after a local bank reportedly declined him permission to deposit the money at a go. After police officers stationed at the airport seized the money, the director of public prosecution (DPP) swiftly ran to court for an order to have it formally kept by the police pending further investigations into its source and destination. It is suspected that the money was obtained through illicit means, it is proceeds of ill-gotten activities, money laundering or possibly to finance terrorism. The police are reportedly suspecting that the Zimbabwean national, who is purportedly a well-known businessman in his home country, was working with high profile local people hence the need for further investigations.

Application

In the urgent application to formally seize the money, which the DPP moved in terms of the Prevention of Organised Crime Act (POCA) 2018, she related how the Zimbabwean national was caught, his attitude towards the police during their preliminary investigation and the suspicions the law enforcer had about the source of the money. Narrating events leading to the recovery of the money, Head of Asset Forfeiture Unit under the DPP Office, Principal Crown Counsel Elsie Matsebula, submitted that upon arrival at the airport, Masiya (46) went through the immigration processes and thereafter moved to the Department of Eswatini Revenue Services (Customs), where he declared an amount of US$153 000 (E2 820 000). Upon completion of the declaration process, said Matsebula, the Zimbabwean was released to go with the cash. She told the court that the information about the bulk cash amount was received by investigators based at Lubombo Regional Police Headquarters in Siteki under the Financial and Economic Crimes Money Laundering and Asset Forfeiture Unit.

According to Matsebula, on the following day, Masiya was back at the airport to fly out of the country. A police officer, Sergeant Delisile Vilakati, who was at the Central Screening Point, noticed that Masiya had cash in his bag, submitted Matsebula. She said the officer asked Masiya if he had declared the cash and he indicated that he had done so when he arrived in the country the previous day. Matsebula said Vilakati informed Masiya that he was supposed to declare it again when departing. Masiya was taken back to the Customs desk where he handed the cash to the officers and it was counted. It totalled US$153 860. US$3 860 was in Masiyas pockets. Vilakati then asked him for the source of the cash before she appended her signature on the declaration form. Masiya failed to produce the source of the funds. She then reported the matter to her superiors. The cash was seized, submitted Matsebula.

The financial investigators were informed about the arrival of Masiya back at the airport with the cash and they rushed there. Among the team were Detective Sergeant Steven Mlambo and Detective Inspector Msibi. They were called to make preliminary financial investigations about the money in issue. Matsebula submitted that the investigators enquired from Masiya about the reasons to carry such a huge amount as well as the source of the cash. The principal Crown counsel stated that Masiya developed an attitude and became aggressive towards the officers. She said he was against being questioned about the cash and this led to an argument between him and the officers.

Citizenship

She averred that another Zimbabwean  a holder of Eswatini citizenship  who was accompanying him, Doctor Godfrey Gandawa, intervened and informed Masiya about the need to cooperate with the financial investigators, who were carrying out a legal mandate. Matsebula said the intervention calmed investigators down and he told the investigators that he was a businessman. He told them that he went to First National Bank in Manzini to deposit the cash but they refused, telling him he was not allowed to make such a bulk deposit, but he could split the cash into denominations of US$5 000 (E94 250) and deposit same on a daily basis. He then left the bank since he could not stay in the country for so many days for such a process to be carried out, said Matsebula.

This information, according to Matsebula, was confirmed by Masiyas attorney at Siteki Magistrates Court when an attempt was made by the investigators to detain the cash in terms of Money Laundering and Financing of Terrorism (Prevention) Act 2011. A magistrate ordered that the US$3 860, which was in his pockets, be released to him for his personal expenses.

During the questioning at the airport, submitted Matsebula, Masiya sent some documents through WhatsApp to Sergeant Mlambo, which he argued were in support of the claim that the source of the cash was a legal business. However, Masiya is said to have been unhappy when Sergeant Mlambo asked for sometime to download the documents and he allegedly quickly deleted for everyone the information he had sent to Mlambo. The information remained stored in the sergeants phone.

Matsebula informed the court that the investigators seized the cash and told Masiya to proceed with his flight. He refused to leave the country without his cash. Instead he made frequent calls on his cellphone, Matsebula stated. The declaration form he completed when he arrived last Monday reflected that he was declaring an amount of US$150 000 and the source of the funds was allegedly Business Group Bopela Eswatini. In the declaration form Masiya completed when he was about to exit the country, he neglected completing the part on the source of funds, the court was told. Matsebula submitted that Masiyas conduct did not show that he was an astute businessman. She submitted that an online search showed that there was a company named Bopelo Eswatini.

Investigators

The investigators went to the company premises in Matsapha as reflected online and found a company by the name of Eswatini Scafolding Framework. It is, however, brought to the attention of the court that the cash was imported into the country and an attempt to deposit it was made. Further it was being taken out of the country when it was seized. It is difficult to believe that the local company is a source of this cash property. An enquiry was made with the Eswatini Revenue Service and the information received was that the company registered as a taxpayer in 2020 but it never filed any returns, said Matsebula. She added that an online search showed that Masiya was a well-known businessman in Zimbabwe. However, she stated that it was clear from his actions that he entered Eswatini to try and launder the cash by attempting to place it within the banking financial system. According to Matsebula, when Masiya failed, he quickly tried to leave the country with the cash.
Los Angeles, CAPaul Cheston, highly respected UK crime reporter and author of The Babes in the Woods Murders: The Shocking True Story of How Child Murderer Russell Bishop was Finally Brought to Justice, has penned a glowing review of Without Redemption: Creation & Deeds of Freeway Killer Bill Bonin, His Five Accomplices & How One Who Escaped Justice.

A 'specialist' court reporter for the Evening Standard, beginning in 1993, Cheston signed on with the Standard in 1988 after sharpening his skills at the Diss Express and Press Association. A reporter for 23 years at one of the most famous courts in the world, London's Old Bailey, Paul hung up his notepad in 2016 and was given an open court sendoff attended by a host of senior judges, barristers and fellow journalists.

During the ceremony Nicholas Hilliard QC, the Recorder of London, praised Cheston's "commitment to open justice" and told the assembled guests he was universally regarded as a first rate court reporter, further adding, "Any court, particularly the Old Bailey, is dependent on so many people if we are to function at our best and the press have a particularly important role to play to let the public know what is going on and bear the responsibility to ensure it is fair and accurate. No one has delivered that better than Paul."

Following retirement, he wrote the fascinating and emotionally gripping The Babes in the Woods Murders. Released in 2019, it is the heartbreaking true story of two families' thirty-year fight for justice for their murdered daughters. On 9 October 1986, Russell Bishop sexually assaulted and strangled nine-year-old Nicola Fellows and Karen Hadaway, in woods near Brighton. He did not answer for his crimes for over thirty years.

Here is Paul Cheston's review of Without Redemption, a detailed historical biography about Freeway Killer Bill Bonin by Vonda Pelto, Ph.D. and Michael B. Butler.

Unique & Amazing Serial Killer Biography

I would unreservedly recommend 'Without Redemption' as the most profound analysis of a serial killer I have read.

It is based on unprecedented access to probation, medical, psychiatric reports, police statements and court documents, and, as an author and journalist, I know how difficult, nay impossible, it is to gain access to such a treasure trove of detail and insight.

But most importantly it has the unique perspective of Vonda Pelto's own interviews with Bonin and his accomplices and the mass killer's own handwritten diaries.

The authors spare no one in exposing how Bonin was allowed to game the system and names of those professionals and institutions which put their own vested interests ahead of their duty to have him locked up long before he even started his killing spree.

Michael Butler has a light writing style which keeps the pace moving briskly and never loses the balance between explaining why Bonin killed and the devastating impact of this need to kill on the victims and their families.

Without Redemption is currently available on Amazon, Kobo and Google Play and has found interested readers in the United States, Canada, Australia, New Zealand and throughout Europe.

The most detailed bio of serial killer Bill Bonin ever written using previously hidden documents.

How childhood abuse & Vietnam War service helped create what followed.

How Bonin manipulated California judicial, mental health & prison systems for nine years before the killings.

Interviews of Bonin, Miley & Munro with Vonda Pelto, Ph.D. before, during & after his Los Angeles trial.

Bonin's jailhouse writings offer new perspectives on his brutality, methods, thoughts and personality.

How & Why Bonin covered for accomplice Eric Wijnaendts, who helped him with two murders.

How & Why March 24, 1980, is a key date in the Bill Bonin story.

Below is the book trailer and eight Kindle E-Gift Links.

Without Redemption Book Trailer





Here are Eight FREE E-Gift Kindle Links for Without Redemption:

https://www.amazon.com/kindle/redeem/?t=GSG5F3RWGAQTNFB

https://www.amazon.com/kindle/redeem/?t=GSJ6XBH5ER86RTV

https://www.amazon.com/kindle/redeem/?t=GSPHTUDHTYJES3K

https://www.amazon.com/kindle/redeem/?t=GS7N2A9CRXUF4P5

https://www.amazon.com/kindle/redeem/?t=GSDUWQSEWPMGGK2

https://www.amazon.com/kindle/redeem/?t=GS4GPTFUUC4PXF2

https://www.amazon.com/kindle/redeem/?t=GSMHYET45NQBEF5

https://www.amazon.com/kindle/redeem/?t=GSYLP944SHVG9SS

Radio Show Video of Vonda Pelto, Ph.D. on Gary Nolan Show





Without Redemption: Creation & Deeds of Freeway Killer Bill Bonin, His Five Accomplices & How One Escaped Justice, Paperback ISBN: 979-8841931249, Hard Cover ISBN: 979-8844477775. For more info go to www.WithoutRedemption.com and purchase copies at Amazon, Google Play or Kobo.

Media Contact: For interviews or to request review copies contact Flotsam PR at 319-504-3788 or flotsampr@pm.me.
S Korean fishermen hold maritime rally against Japan's nuke wastewater discharge plan 21 Jul 2023 | 2:42 PM Seoul, July 21 (UNI) South Korean fishermen on Friday held a maritime protest rally against Japan's planned discharge of contaminated wastewater from the crippled Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant into the ocean. see more..

Dengue death toll rises to 155 in B'desh in 2023 21 Jul 2023 | 2:23 PM Dhaka, July 21 (UNI) The Bangladeshi government has confirmed another nine deaths from dengue fever, bringing the total number of fatalities in the country since January to 155, the Directorate General of Health Services (DFHS) reported. see more..

Seoul warns Pyongyang of 'end of N Korean regime' in event of nuclear attack 21 Jul 2023 | 1:07 PM Seoul, July 21 (UNI) The South Korean Defense Ministry on Friday threatened Pyongyang with "the end of the North Korean regime" in the event of a nuclear attack against Seoul, after the North said that the deployment of US nuclear assets in the region could be a sufficient reason to use nuclear arms. see more..

UK Tories win parliamentary by-elections to replace Boris Johnson 21 Jul 2023 | 12:57 PM London, July 21 (UNI) The UK Conservative Party has managed to win a by-election to the House of Commons, the lower house of the UK parliament, to replace former Prime Minister Boris Johnson after he left the body, UK media reported on Friday. see more..
A view of U.S. Highway 93 in Kalispell taken in 2007 (Photo by Katie Brady via Wikimedia Commons | CC-BY-SA 2.0).

Following the Sunday killing of Scott Bryan in Kalispell, a local shelter mourned the loss of the unhoused man and criticized increased rhetoric by some community leaders as spurring threats against people without homes.

Weve never had violent acts like this toward our homeless community until recently, read the statement by the Samaritan House. It doesnt take long for verbal assaults to turn physical.

Kaleb Elijah Fleck, 19, was charged with deliberate homicide in connection with the case, according to the affidavit of probable cause. Fleck was arraigned Tuesday and is being held in the Flathead County jail on $500,000 bail, according to the jail roster and Kalispell Police Department.

A second man was arrested and released in connection with the case but could still faces charges, said Detective Shane Lidstrom of the Kalispell Police Department.

The affidavit of probable cause outlines the events surrounding Bryans killing and the arrests.

After 2 a.m., Sunday, Bryan, 60, was taken to Logan Health Hospital by Kalispell police after officers found him face down in a gas station parking lot bleeding profusely, according to the affidavit. One officer said it appeared that Bryans nasal cavity had been crushed, with lacerations and exposed bone. Bryan was declared dead around 3 a.m.

Chris Krager of the Samaritan House said in an interview a recent letter from Flathead County Commissioners and related ordinances in part created an environment where some folks obviously feel emboldened. He said people have been yelling and making threats towards the unhoused community.

In January, Flathead County Commissioners penned an open letter titled Stop Enabling Homeless Population that called homelessness a lifestyle choice for some.

The Kalispell City Council not long after passed an ordinance that, in part, restricted the use of tents and limited excessive personal property allowed in public spaces. The council also approved an ordinance that would criminalize panhandling, as reported by the Daily Inter Lake.

Flathead County Commissioner Brad Abell in a response to emailed questions from the Daily Montanan said he did not have comments about the possible effect the letter had in the incident, but he said violence by anyone should not be condoned and will not be condoned.

Commissioner Randy Brodehl said in an emailed response that what took place over the weekend was tragic and should never happen in any community.

Flathead County currently has nine homicide charges, and multiple attempted homicide charges against inmates in our jail. Every one of these homicides has a terrible impact on our families and our community, Brodehl said. At no time will I ever condone these acts of violence and I am committed to protecting our citizens and visitors, and to holding perpetrators accountable for their actions.

City Manager Doug Russell declined to comment on the Samaritan House statement, citing the ongoing investigation.

Detective Lidstrom confirmed the aftermath of the crime was recorded on the social media platform Snapchat.

According to the affidavit, a female witness showed officers an eight-second video that panned between Fleck and Bryans body lying motionless on the ground, with the other man who was also arrested saying You fked that guy up dude, and Fleck responding Step up. Step up b-tch.

Krager said the community is appalled the video was put on Snapchat.

And if you think about it, he would not be doing that unless he really strongly felt that his audience on social media really kind of wanted to see it, Krager said.

Lidstrom said the number of investigations into violence against the homeless community has been on the rise recently, noting there have been increased reports and ongoing investigations, but also an uptick in the transient population in the area.

Multiple compounding issues are at play with homelessness in the community, with a weekly affordable rental hotel closing and nothing to replace it, no day center for the unhoused, shrinking mental health services and higher housing occupancy in the summer in the Flathead, Krager said.

All of this creates a community that is now seeing homelessness more visibly, Krager said.

The Samaritan House is in the process of building affordable housing units, as well as housing dedicated for veterans. The Flathead Warming Center, which recently gathered to mourn Bryan, is open during the summer on Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays. Montana also recently passed $5 million in grants for shelters through House Bill 5.

Krager said Bryan had received some services from the Samaritan House, and although he didnt know Bryan well, he described him as quiet and respectful and someone wrestling with health issues.

He absolutely without a doubt was not the kind of guy who would be looking for a fight, Krager said.

The post After killing of unhoused man, Kalispell shelter criticizes increased rhetoric from officials appeared first on Daily Montanan.
New Delhi, July 3 (UNI) Prime Minister Narendra Modi will host the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation (SCO) summit in virtual format on Tuesday, with Chinese President Xi Jinping, Russian President Vladimir Putin and Pakistan Prime Minister Shehbaz Sharif among the SCO leaders set to attend.

The theme of Indias chairship of the SCO is  SECURE, derived from the acronym given by PM Modi at the 2018 Qingadao SCO Summit.

It stands for: S : Security, E: Economic development, C: Connectivity, U: Unity, R: Respect for sovereignty and territorial integrity, E: Environmental protection.



India has created five new pillars and focus areas of cooperation in SCO, these are Startups and Innovation, Traditional Medicine, Digital Inclusion, Youth Empowerment and Shared Buddhist Heritage.



Two new mechanisms in SCO, Special Working Group on Startups and Innovation and Experts Working Group on Traditional Medicine were created on Indias initiative, and India intends to contribute substantially in both these areas.



To further the PMs vision of Vasudhaiva Kutumbakam (World is one Family), India emphasised on building greater people to people connect. A number of signature events were held under Indias Chair of SCO with the intention to further deepen people to people connect.



There was an unprecedented level of engagement with the SCO Observers and Dialogue Partners under the Indian Chair with their participation in 14 socio-cultural events.



Events like SCO Film Festival, SCO Millet Food Festival, SCO Cultural showcase at SurajKund Mela, SCO Tourism Mart, Conference on Shared Buddhist Heritage, B2B Conference on Traditional Medicine, SCO International Conference of Think Tanks, were held.



Drawing focus on Indias millenia old cultural and civilisational heritage, Kashi/Varanasi was celebrated as the 1st SCO Tourist and Cultural Capital of SCO 2022-23.

The Youth Empowerment was another focus area of Indian chair, where events were held like Young Authors Conference, Young Scientist Conclave, Startup Forum, SCO Youth Council and Conference, SCO Resident Researchers Programme where the SCO young scholar from Member State stayed in India for a month to conduct research activities.



On May 4-5, India hosted the Foreign Ministers of SCO in Goa, this was marked by a colourful cultural program and substantive discussions the following day. Goa showcased its warm hospitality, unique culture and distinct heritage.



EAM inaugurated New Delhi Hall virtually at the SCO Secretariat in Beijing during Indias presidency of SCO.



A commemorative stamp was released to mark the first ever SCO presidency of India.

Indias association with SCO began in 2005 as an Observer country. India became a full Member State of SCO at the Astana Summit in 2017.

In the past six years, India has played a very active and constructive role in all spheres of activities of SCO.



On September 2022, India for the first time, took over the presidency of SCO from Uzbekistan at the Samarkand Summit of SCO.

SCO Member States comprise: China, Russia, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Pakistan, Tajikistan and Uzbekistan.

In addition, Iran, Belarus and Mongolia have been invited as Observer States.

As per SCO tradition, Turkmenistan has also been invited as the guest of the Chair.

Heads of the two SCO Bodies  the Secretariat and the SCO RATS - will also be present. Further, Heads of six international and regional organizations have also been invited, viz. UN, ASEAN, CIS, CSTO, EAEU and CICA.

The theme of the Summit is Towards a SECURE SCO.



UNI RN
Ewan McGregor used to give himself a giggle by showing his kids the stomach-churning toilet scene from his movie 'Trainspotting'.

Ewan McGregor used to show his kids a particularly grim scene from his movie Trainspotting

The actor played junkie Mark Renton in Danny Boyle's gritty 1996 movie - based on the book of the same name by Irvine Welsh - and he's revealed he used to take great pleasure in playing showing his kids the infamous scene in which his character climbs into what's dubbed the "worst toilet in Scotland".

Speaking at the Karlovy Vary Film Festival in the Czech Republic, Ewan - who is dad to five kids including actress daughter Clara - told reporters: "I wasnt there when [my daughter] Clara watched Trainspotting for the first time. But I did used to show my kids the toilet scene. Just for a laugh.

"Its a unique situation, perhaps, for a father to be able to show his children footage of him going down the toilet."

Ewan attended the festival alongside Clara to promote the new movie they made together - 'You Sing Loud, I Sing Louder' - and the 27-year-old actress revealed her dad used to embarrass her as a kid with some car karaoke on the school run.

Speaking about Leona Lewis' song 'Bleeding Love' - which features in the film - she explained: "We used to be big fans of Leona Lewis. I started growing out of it at some point. My father didnt. On our drives to school, right when we were about to pull up, he would really crank it up, roll the windows down and I was ducking. It was really cool we got to put it in the film."
'The Graduate' producer Lawrence Turman has died aged 96.

Lawrence Turman passed away at the Motion Picture and Television Country Home and Hospital

The Oscar-nominated filmmaker passed away on Saturday (01.07.23) at the Motion Picture and Television Country Home and Hospital.

His son, John Turman, told Deadline. Our father Lawrence Turman passed away late yesterday. Its sad but he had a long and storied life and it's the passing of an era.

Memorial services hosted by the MPTF and the University of South Carolina (USC) will take place.

Turman started out in Hollywood as an agent, before launching his producing career with 1961's 'The Young Doctors'.

Turman was nominated for an Academy Award for the 1967 rom-com classic 'The Graduate', which starred Anne Bancroft, Dustin Hoffman and Katherine Ross, and was the highest-grossing flick of the year in North America.

He spent $1,000 on the rights to Charles Webbs 1963 novel 'The Graduate' but it took him years to sell the story.

The producer eventually found a director in Mike Nichols.

His other producer credits include 1968's 'Pretty Poison', 1970's 'The Great White Hope' and 1998's 'American History X'.

Turman also directed two movies in 1971's 'The Marriage of a Young Stockbroker' and 1983's ' Second Thoughts'.

He went into partnership with David Foster on The Turman/Foster Company in 1972, which run under the Warner Bros. banner, and they developed their flop television pilots, including 'Mass Appeal'.

Turman was director of The Peter Stark Producing Program at the University of Southern California.

He published the tome 'So You Want to be a Producer' in 2005.

In 2011, the filmmaker executive produced a prequel to sci-fi horror 'The Thing' directed by Matthijs van Heijningen Jr. and starring Mary Elizabeth Winstead and Joel Edgerton.

Dean Elizabeth M. Daley, Dean of School of Cinematic Arts at USC paid a touching tribute in a statement which read: Larry led a remarkable life for 96 years and we were fortunate to share part of it with him.

"Larry was a movie industry legend. His fifty-year career gave us classics like 'The Graduate', for which he was nominated for an Oscar, 'The Great White Hope', 'The Thing', and 'American History X', and made him the expert on the critical role of Producers in film...

"Without a doubt, Larry was a transformative member of our industry, and our School. He was a wise mentor and guide.

"On a personal note, Larry was my dear friend and colleague for almost 40 years, and I will miss him deeply as I know many of you will. Having him in our lives was a blessing beyond measure. We will announce plans for a celebration of Larrys life as soon as we have them.
Kevin Spacey has been accused of "groping" and "grabbing" a young man.

Kevin Space has been accused of grooming a young man

The Oscar-winning actor, 63, is currently facing 12 charges of sexual assault and appeared at London's Southwark Crown Court on Monday (03.07.23), where one of his alleged four victims gave evidence and said he had been made "very, very uncomfortable" by the former 'House of Cards' star, who he accused of "grooming" him from the minute they met.

In a filmed police interview shown to the court, the man - who cannot be named for legal reasons - said: "He grabbed me in private areas, and tried to get me to put my hands on him. He tried to grope me and grab me and it made me feel very, very uncomfortable. He was almost, from the get go, grooming me."

The man - who is the first of the four alleged victims to give evidence in court - also described Spacey as a "slippery, difficult person" and a "mixed-up individual."

The man told how the alleged incidents took place over a five-year period when the 'American Beauty' star was artistic director at the Old Vic Theatre in London, a position he held from 2004 to 2015.

Spacey - who denies all charges - was said to be "listening intently" to the evidence after he arrived at the courthouse unhandcuffed.

Prosecutor Christine Agnew kicked off the trial by detailing the numerous allegations stacked against Spacey.

Agnew told the court: "He is an extremely famous actor who has won a number of awards. He is also, the prosecution allege, a man who sexually assaults other men.

"A man who does not respect personal boundaries or space, a man who it would seem delights in making others feel powerless and uncomfortable, a sexual bully."

She told the court it was important not to get "starstruck" or "overwhelmed" by Spacey.

The four male complainants whose cases will be heard over the next month or so have the right to anonymity.

The first plaintiff claimed they were inappropriately touched by Spacey and that the contact got "more intense", leading to him being grabbed and groped aggressively.

And Agnew told the court the Hollywood actor got a "sexual thrill out of this type of sexual aggression".

The second complainant alleged that the movie star "laughed" as he tried to get away from being grabbed "with such force it was painful" at work in 2005.

The third plaintiff, who reported the actor first, allegedly woke up to Spacey performing a sex act on him after spending the night at his flat following an evening at the pub.

The male claims Spacey offered to mentor him.

And he said he "sat and cried" at a bus stop at 5am after the alleged assault took place.

In 2013, a fourth male met Spacey at the Oxfordshire pub he worked at and later met with him at another drinking establishment he suggested they meet at.

According to the complainant, Spacey touched his leg and told him to "be cool" when he kissed his neck.

The prosecutor then told the court that Spacey grabbed the male's crotch.

Agnew said Spacey thought he could get away with doing "what and who he wanted, when he wanted".

Patrick Gibbs, Spacey's barrister, argued that the allegations made against his client had been "reimagined with a sinister spin" and "deliberately exaggerated".

He went on to ask the jury to consider what the male complainants wanted to gain from Spacey and whether they were after his money or using him to enter the acting industry.

Gibbs added: "What did they want from his wealth and from his influence and what do they still want do you think?"

The barrister then accused the complainants of spreading "damned lies" about the actor.

He concluded: "You will soon hear I suggest some truths, you will soon hear some half-truths, you will also hear I suggest...some deliberate exaggerations and you will hear many damned lies."

The trial is set to last for four weeks.
King Charles will meet Joe Biden next week.

King Charles will host Joe Biden

The 74-year-old monarch will host the US president at Windsor Castle on 10 July, with the politician also set to sit down with UK Prime Minister Rishi Sunak - who visited Washington DC. last month - again during his brief visit to the UK.

Buckingham Palace confirmed in a statement: The King will meet the President of the United States of America at Windsor Castle on Monday 10th July."

The meeting was also confirmed by the White House.

The president's representative said: "President Biden will first travel to London, United Kingdom for engagements with King Charles III and Prime Minister Rishi Sunak to further strengthen the close relationship between our nations."

The 80-year-old president previously met with the late Queen Elizabeth at Windsor Castle in June 2021, but he opted to miss Charles' coronation in May, sending his wife, Dr. Jill Biden in his place.

A spokesperson said ahead of the coronation: "President Joseph R. Biden, Jr. spoke today with King Charles III, underscoring the strength of the relationship between our countries and the friendship between our people.

"The President congratulated the King on his upcoming Coronation and informed him that First Lady Jill Biden looks forward to attending on behalf of the United States."

White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre revealed that Biden had told Charles how much he and the First Lady enjoyed visiting the late Queen and added that he hoped to visit again soon.

The king then offered the president the opportunity to come to the UK for a state visit, which Jean-Pierre confirmed was accepted by Biden.

She said: "So they will see each other again very soon, they have a very good relationship, there are many things that they both care about, key shared values, key shared issues, that they want to continue to discuss like climate change."

Jean-Pierre added: "I do not have a timeline, I can't say when it will be but the president was appreciative of the offer by the King and looks forward to it."
Travis Scott gave his shoes to a fan in the audience at one of his shows.

Travis Scott gave his shoes to a fan

The 'Sicko Mode' hitmaker was performing at Rolling Loud festival in the Netherlands over the weekend when he headed over to the front row to get closer to the crowd, and was quickly impressed by one guy who was rapping his lyrics straight back to him.

In video footage circulating online, Travis appeared impressed with the fan's ability to keep up with his own rhyming pace as they traded lines on the mic, and promptly stripped off his shirt and handed them over, along with his shoes.

While others in the immediate vicinity made a grab for the garments, the 32-year-old star made sure they went to the intended recipient.

The shirt appeared to be an unreleased piece of 'Utopia' merchandise, while the shoes were custom Nike Air Jordans the rapper has recently been seen wearing.

The Dutch fan later admitted he'd had the best night of his life.

He shared pictures of his new merchandise on Twitter and wrote: "GREATEST NIGHT OF MY LIFE (sic)"

He also reposted fan footage of the moment he came face-to-face with his idol and wrote: "I WON LIFE (sic)"

And he told another fan: "i slept like a baby with my new babies aint gon lie (sic)"

This isn't the first time Travis has given away his shoes.

Last year, he was leaving Los Angeles nightspot TAO when he saw a number of fans waiting outside for autographs and pictures.

Although he jumped straight into a waiting car, the vehicle then drove past the group and slowly approached the crowd. It then stopped, the window was rolled down and Travis handed over a pair of Nike Air Jordan 1 low.

The waiting fans rushed to grab the souvenir, with two taking home one shoe each as Travis' car drove away.
Companies fined 80,000 each for safety violations following the Belfast Primark fire



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A massive fire in Belfast's city centre destroyed a Primark store inside a historic structure, and two companies have each been fined a total of 160,000 for their involvement.

Almost five years have passed since the fire at the five-story, Grade B1-listed Bank Buildings on Royal Avenue.

Since then, the building has undergone a 100 million reconstruction, and it reopened last year.

Both Bennett Management Contractors (GB) Ltd. and AF Roofing admitted to health and safety violations and received 80,000 in fines from Belfast Crown Court.

They pleaded guilty two weeks ago to failing to ensure the health and safety of both their employees and other workers who were not employed by them.

Bennett Management Contractors (GB) Ltd, of Central Street in London, had four weeks to pay the fines, the judge said, noting that the company has an annual revenue of more than 30 million.

Due to its much smaller annual turnover, Irish company AF Roofing, based in Youghal, County Waterford, was given more time to pay the fine.

The judge ordered that 20,000 be paid by the end of this year, followed by 30,000 in 2024, and the remaining sum in 2025.

The fire happened on August 28, 2018, and lasted for several days, gutting the building and leading to the closure of part of the city centre for months.

The crane driver called for help when he noticed smoke on the roof of the Primark store that morning, according to testimony provided to the court previously.

A certified roofer, two trainees, one of whom was a fire marshal, and an employee of AF Roofing were working on the building's roof when they left for a tea break.

The Northern Ireland Fire and Rescue Service was eventually called and took control of the scene after the alarm was raised and site workers tried using extinguishers to put out the fire.

An investigation conducted by the fire department and the Northern Ireland Health and Safety Executive turned up health and safety violations, according to senior prosecutor Graham Cardwell of the Public Prosecution Service.

"None of the offences allege that the health and safety failings caused the fire, but that employees and non-employees were exposed to risks to their health or safety as a result of the failings uncovered in the investigation," he said.

"The defendants accepted that such failings occurred."

The verdict in this case, according to Mr. Cardwell, should serve as motivation for other businesses to implement rigorous processes that are rigorously monitored and ensure the health and safety of their employees.

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Following a strong start at the Spring Edition of Intertextile Shanghai Home Textiles early this year, global industry players have turned their sights to the next international event in August 2023. As the first Autumn Edition to be held in the wake of China lifting many of its pandemic-related border restrictions, the three-day fair will gather around 1,000 international and domestic exhibitors.

Traders looking to meet market demand will be able to source from an extensive range of trending and specialised home and contract textile products from August 1618, 2023. Widely considered one of Asias most comprehensive industry platforms, Intertextile Shanghai Home Textiles  Autumn Edition 2023 is expected to fill 100,000 sqm plus of floor space across four halls at the National Exhibition and Convention Center (Shanghai), organiser Messe Frankfurt said in a press release.

The Autumn Edition of Intertextile Shanghai Home Textiles 2023 is set for August 16-18, expecting around 1,000 international and domestic exhibitors at the National Exhibition and Convention Center. The fair will showcase the latest in home and contract textile products. The global home textile market is anticipated to reach $174.1 billion by 2028.

According to a recent market report, the global home textile market is expected to show a CAGR of 5.6 per cent from 20232028 to reach $174.1 billion by the end of the forecast period. Asia-Pacific has dominated the global market in recent years, with China one of its most significant contributors.

As the global manufacturing hub for home textiles, China is gradually recovering from social and business disruptions caused by the pandemic.

Speaking at the recent Spring Edition, Rosemary Li, domestic sales manager of Zhangjiagang Coolist Life Technology Co Ltd, a long-time exhibitor specialised in bio-based and functional bedding products, said: Since China relaxed its pandemic-related control and prevention measures, after Chinese New Year we have been flooded with orders. With both domestic and export orders increasing, it has been almost impossible for the production line to fulfil the order demand.

While the spring shows promising visitor flow was a positive start to the Chinese home textile industrys post-pandemic era, a higher participation of overseas exhibitors and buyers is expected at the upcoming Autumn Edition.

Later this year in Shanghai, exhibitors will showcase their most up-to-date home and contract textile products, ranging from bedding and towelling, rugs, table and kitchen linen, upholstery and curtain fabrics, editors, home textile technologies, and textile design. With a wealth of choices for buyers, several show highlights include the Editor and Designer Zone, country and region pavilions, and textile designs.

The Editor and Designer Zone, located in hall 5.1, will feature international, high-end editor and designer brands brought by leading exhibitors J&C, Julai, Qianbaihui, Prestigious, Shanghai Lotus, SohoCut, Yada, and more.

Premium suppliers from Belgium, Turkiye, and Taiwan will exhibit quality products in their designated pavilions in hall 6.1.

Textile design studios from Japan, Portugal, and Taiwan, namely Amilia Design Studio, Fine Art Inc, and Telas Design Lda, will also showcase their seasonal designs in hall 6.1.

Adding to buyers sourcing options, a multitude of domestic players from different categories will also showcase their respective products. Highlighted exhibitors include top curtain and curtain fabric suppliers FuTex, Hangzhou Aico, Hexin, and Xiaoxuanchuang; bedding suppliers Coolist, Huizhou Wah Shing, and Yantai North Home; as well as Hightex, Huatex, Maya, and Suzhou Roufang from the upholstery and sofa fabric sector.

Fairgoers can also learn more about the upcoming global trends and designs by visiting the 20232024 Intertextile International Lifestyle Trend area. In aid of this, Intertextile Shanghai Home Textiles has joined forces with NellyRodi, the renowned French forecasting agency, to present the design theme for 20232024: Alive. Human capital, rousing commitment, and unreal realities are the themes three main trends. Shen Lei from the trend committee will be onsite to share his insights on the upcoming trends in an exclusive seminar for fairgoers.

Intertextile Shanghai Home Textiles  Autumn Edition is organised by Messe Frankfurt (HK) Ltd; the Sub-Council of Textile Industry, CCPIT; and the China Home Textile Association (CHTA).

Fibre2Fashion News Desk (NB)
A Spectacular Grand Finale, Uniting Contestants In Celebration: Akhil emerges victorious as the winner of Bigg Boss Malayalam season 5, fulfilling the wish of the majority of the audience.

The grand finale was a star-studded event, with all the contestants from this season coming together to witness the thrilling conclusion.

This season of Bigg Boss stood out from the rest, characterized by moments of both conflict and camaraderie among the contestants. However, it was the underlying bond and affection between them that truly shone through in the finale.

Dulquer Salmaan's Mysterious Post Raises Concerns Among Fans: I Haven't Slept In A While

While Akhil basks in the glory of his well-deserved triumph, the other contestants couldn't be happier for him. Additionally, yesterday marked a joyous occasion for Rinosh's dedicated fans, as it marked his long-awaited return.

Rinosh, initially seen as a strong contender for a spot in the final five, had to withdraw from Bigg Boss due to health concerns. The uncertainty surrounding Rinosh's participation in the grand finale left fans wondering. Hence, when Rinosh made a sudden appearance, it took everyone by surprise.

Rinosh Clarifies Absence From Group Photo With Akhil Marar

However, a curious observation emerged when a group photo of Akhil with all the other contestants from the grand finale surfaced. One question lingered in the minds of fans: Where was Rinosh? Interestingly, Rinosh was absent from that particular photo.

This raised a discussion among fans, who speculated on the reasons behind Rinosh's absence. There were doubts and uncertainties as to whether Rinosh returned early or deliberately stayed away. Thankfully, Rinosh himself has provided an answer.

Taking the stage, Rinosh refuted all the circulating rumours and clarified what actually transpired. Speaking to the media after the finale, Rinosh explained that he did not leave without participating in the group photo.

Sobha Viswanath Fulfills Her Dream, Dazzles In Wedding Saree At Bigg Boss Malayalam Season 5 Grand Finale

According to Rinosh, there was no incident or intention to exclude him from the photo. He suggested that his portion might have been inadvertently cropped when the picture was edited. Rinosh further confirmed that he had been standing near Omar Lulu during that moment.

When queried about his future plans and upcoming projects, Rinosh disclosed that he would consider other opportunities only after the hangover of the Bigg Boss experience, allowing himself time to reflect and rejuvenate.
Cate Blanchett has to "constantly justify" her career in her native Australia.

The 'Tar' actress admitted she hates strangers asking her what she does for a living when she's Down Under because she doesn't think her craft is "celebrated" in the way it is in the UK and US, where she spends a lot of her time.

According to the Courier Mail newspaper, during an event at the Roslyn Packer Theatre at the Sydney Theatre Company - which she and husband Andrew Upton ran from 2008 to 2011 - she said: The worst thing for us as an actor in Australia is getting in the back of the cab and a cabbie asking What do you do? Because you think, Oh, God , she said. Youre constantly having to fight for the space or to justify the fact that you have the right to actually be an artist in Australia.

But yet overseas, our culture is celebrated and sung and praised but we dont often do it internally. We dont often know what we have here. And living and working overseas, I can see absolutely objectively what we have here.

The 54-year-old actress admitted promoting homegrown stories, such as her new movie 'The New Boy' - which follows an Indigenous youth with supernatural powers set in outback Australia during World War II - is a priority for her.

Cate - who co-produced the movie, as well as starring as a nun - said: Any chance I have to amplify that and to find ways for that work to get out overseas and be celebrated, but also to be celebrated here, is deeply important to me."

Last month, the Oscar-winning star caused a stir when she joined sparks on stage at Glastonbury to dance to their song 'The Girl Is Crying In Her Latte'.

But Cate insisted she had no idea the performance would be such a talked-about moment and insisted nothing about it was planned.

She said of the footage taking the internet by storm: Oh, did it? Well, thats exciting. I love Glastonbury. Id known Sparks for a while now and I was in video and they were going to Glastonbury and I was going Glastonbury so they said, would I?. And I went Why not?. Everything was made up. Everything was on the fly.
Ethirneechal Marimuthu About Caste Dominance In Film Industry: Some actors have expressed their concern in the Vaa Tamizha Vaa program about caste-based casting opportunites in Tamil film industry. Actor Marimuthu, who participated as a special guest, has shared his opinion about the same.

He also explained about how he got the opportunity to act in Pariyerum Perumal movie director Mari Selvaraj. Actor Marimuthu is playing the character Aadhi Gunasekaran in Sun TV's Ethirneechel serial. He has previously acted in character roles and as a villain in films. Especially in Pariyerum Perumal, his performance is appreciated by many.

Caste-Based Casting Opportunities In Tamil Film Indistry

In this situation, the words spoken about director Mari Selvaraj by actor Marimuthu in the program Vaa Tamizha Vaa hosted by director Karu Palaniappan is now going viral as a video on social media.

In this episode of Vaa Tamizha Vaa, people from both sides were talking on the topic "The city does not look at caste much Vs The city does look at caste". When comedian Telephone Raj, who became famous for acting with actor Vadivelu said that caste is seen too much in cinema, Marimuthu denied that there was nothing like that.

Karu Palaniappan, who is the host asked both of them to explain their opinon in detail. Actor Marimuthu sadi, "I think there are about 80 to 100 people here. But everyone here has a unique experience. It has been 35 years since I came to Chennai. Those who gave me a chance in cinema and those who denied me a chance in cinema did not decide it based on my caste identity.

How Mari Selvaraj Chose Ethirneechal Marimuthu?

At that time, comedy actor Telephone Raj said, "Some directors who belong to a particular caste make films only to form a team in their own caste. Another set of directors in another caste thinks that only their caste members should act and rise above in film industry. All of us in between are suffering because of this. Some people think that even the assistant directors should be of his caste.

To which Karu Palaniappan said "This is surprising. But the comedian said "There is nothing surprising in this. You can hide it like that, Sir. You know about the reality in cinema. In a few days I will die. I will die without achieving. I came to Chennai from Kanyakumari at the age of 18 to become an actor. Insults are the only thing left. I have been at home without shootinh for three years. They are not calling us after knowing about our caste."

Marimuthu denied that and said "You didn't get a chance for three years. It is very surprising. You have played very good characters in many Vadivelu films. So I think that you are hit in the dark somewhere. As you say everything will happen somewhere sir.

I will share something openly. Director Mari Selvaraj gave me the role in the movie Pariyerum Perumal because of his faith in my performance. Everyone will not celebrate us immediately. Bharathiraja, Bhagyaraj and Balachandran were not celebrated by anyone in the beginning."
Vadivelu's Salary For Maamannan: Actor Vadivelu played the lead role in the recently released movie Maamannan which is running successfully in theatres. Information about his salary for the film is now spreading on social media.

Maamannan was directed by Mari Selvaraj and starred Vadivelu, Udayanidhi Stalin, Keerthy Suresh and others. The film is currently running in the theaters for the 3rd day.

Who Is The Highest Paid Actor In Maamannan?

Maamannan movie is said to have been made around 40-50 crores. It is said that Keerthy Suresh, who played the female lead in the film, was paid a salary of 2 crores. Malayalam actor Fahadh Faasil is said to have earned Rs 3 crore for the film. It is said that Vadivelu, who played the lead role in the film, may have received a salary of 4 crore rupees.

Tamil Nadu minister and actor Udhayanidhi Stalin played the role of Adhi Veeran, the son of Vadivelu in Maamannan. It is said that he may have received a salary of 5 crores to act in the film. It is said that Udayanidhi earned the highest salary among the actors in this film.

Actor Vadivelu made his mark as the top comedian in Tamil film industry 15 years ago. Later, he got involved in a series of controversies such as problems with co-actors, political parties and director Shankar. He was later given a red card by the Tamil Film Producers Council. After that, he stayed away from cinema for a few years.

Controversial Film Collects Well At BO

After solving all the problems around him, Vadivelu has now reached a new dimension in his acting with Maamannan. His next film 'Chandramukhi 2' has been announced to release on the upcoming Vinayagar Chaturthi.

The audio launch of Maamannan was held at Nehru Indoor Stadium a few weeks ago. Actor Kamal Haasan participated in the event as a special guest. Speaking on the stage during the event, Mari Selvaraj spoke about the controversy about the film Thevar Magan.

Many raised their voices against Mari Selvaraj due to his speech. The All India Forward Block Party held a protest in Theni and Dindigul districts saying that the film Maamannan should not be released as his speech became a huge controversy. After many hardships, the film was released and now it is doing well. However, unlike Mari Selvaraj's other films, this film has received mixed reviews.
Bigg Boss OTT 2 nomination: Salman Khan's reality show has been creating ripples on social media, courtesy of the drama-packed episodes. The Weekend Ka Vaar episodes turned out to be a blockbuster affair as the Bollywood superstar lambasted the contestants for their antics.

SALMAN KHAN ANGRY WITH BIGG BOSS OTT 2 CONTESTANTS

From lashing out at Jad Hadid to slamming Avinash Sachdev and Falaq Naaz, Salman Khan didn't mince his words while sharing his thoughts about the behaviour of the celebrities. He expressed his displeasure over Jad Hadid showing his butt while taking a dig at Bebika Dhurve.

The Kisi Ka Bhai Kisi Ki Jaan actor warned the contestants, asking them to keep a check on their behaviour and the things they say. After his warning, several contestants including Falaq Naaz and Manisha Rani resolved their differences in a heartfelt conversation.

BIGG BOSS OTT 2 NOMINATION TWIST

In a shocking development, seven contestants have been nominated for eviction. It seems bad luck has continued for Jiya Shankar as she has been nominated for the fourth continuous time. Yes, you read that right!

The likes of Jiya Shankar, Avinash Sachdev, Jad Hadid Falaq Naaz, Cyrus Broacha, Manisha Rani and Bebika Dhurve have been nominated for elimination. Only Abhishek Malhan and Pooja Bhatt are saved from eviction while others are in the danger zone.

As Fukra Insaan aka Abhishek Malhan is the current captain, the housemates couldn't nominate him. His friend Manisha Rani locked horns with Jiya Shankar during the nomination task. Things got physical as Manisha asked the Pishachini actress to not point fingers at her.

Nomination task mein hui Manisha aur Jiya ke beech jung!



Find out what happened and who gets nominated in #BiggBossOTT2 streaming free on #JioCinema, tonight at 9pm.#BBOTT2 #BBOTT2onJioCinema @beingsalmankhan pic.twitter.com/qKj7BSp2q8  JioCinema (@JioCinema) July 3, 2023

On a related note, Akanksha Puri was eliminated from the Weekend Ka Vaar episode. She was nominated along with Jiya Shankar and Abhishek Malhan. Her journey came to an end despite the hot French kiss that made waves on social media. She locked lips with Jad Hadid after Avinash Sachdev gave them a challenge.

Bigg Boss OTT 2 is available for viewing on JioCinema. The new episodes premiere everyday at 9pm.
Garima Jain is a talented actress who is currently seen as Sakshi in Star Bharat's popular show 'Na Umra Ki Seema Ho,' shares her perspective on the significance of screen space and the importance of leaving a lasting impact as an actor.

Garima Jain expressed her belief that screen space should not be the primary concern for actors. Instead, she emphasized the significance of the character's depth and the impression it leaves on the audience. Throughout her successful career, Garima has portrayed various small roles with limited screen time, but she has always dedicated herself wholeheartedly to each character.

She says, "For me, it's not about the amount of screen space I receive; it's about the role I portray and the impact it creates," said Garima. "I have always focused on delivering my best performance and leaving a lasting impression, regardless of the screen time allocated to me. Every opportunity, no matter how small, is a chance to showcase my talent and connect with the audience."

As Sakshi in 'Na Umra Ki Seema Ho,' Garima Jain has continued to impress audiences with her portrayal of the character. She portrays a grey shade character in the show who is here to create a rift between Dev and Vidhi as Jay has instructed her. With her performance as a grey shade character in the show Garima has changed her viewers perspective who typecasted her in girl next door roles. However, her ability to bring depth and authenticity to her role as 'Sakshi' has made her a standout performer in the show, capturing the hearts of viewers with her talent and versatility.

Will Sakshi succeed in her plans to create misunderstanding between Dev and Vidhi? To know what happens next.

Stay tuned to watch 'Na Umra Ki Seema Ho' every Monday-Friday at 8:00 PM only on Star Bharat.
Amsterdam/'s-Hertogenbosch, the Netherlands, 3 July2023



Van Lanschot Kempen has completed its acquisition of Robeco's online distribution platform. With this transaction, Evi van Lanschot will become a leading online investment platform in the Netherlands, with combined assets under management of around 6 billion and about 150,000 clients.

Robeco Retail Nederland employees are now part of Van Lanschot Kempen, joining their colleagues at Evi van Lanschot to work towards further growth of the online investment service and the tie-up of both brands and websites - all centred on excellent service and personal attention.

The combined Evi van Lanschot platform will continue to offer Robeco's investment funds. Robeco's clients will retain their current investments and continue to be able to buy and sell as normal.

With the transfer to Evi van Lanschot, current Robeco Retail clients will regain the option to select a savings product in future. Evi van Lanschot will also focus on meeting the growing demand for investment products that reflect the ongoing individualisation of the Dutch pensions market in the wake of the country's new pension agreement.

The transaction sees Robeco and Van Lanschot Kempen bring together the deep-seated knowledge and expertise of two investment houses with a long Dutch history. As part of the transaction, both parties are committed to stepping up collaboration on behalf of Van Lanschot Kempen's private banking clients.

The transaction will have a negative impact on Van Lanschot Kempen's CET 1 ratio of 0.5 percentage points. A two-year integration path is envisaged and is expected to involve one-off costs of between c. 8 million and 11 million. The new combination is expected to break even by 2025 and then to start making a positive contribution to Van Lanschot Kempen's net profit.



Media Relations: +31 20 354 45 85; mediarelations@vanlanschotkempen.com

Investor Relations: +31 20 354 45 90; investorrelations@vanlanschotkempen.com

About Van Lanschot Kempen

Van Lanschot Kempen is an independent, specialist wealth manager active in private banking, investment management and investment banking, with the aim of preserving and creating wealth, in a sustainable way, for both its clients and the society of which it is part. Through our long-term focus, we create positive financial and non-financial value. Listed at Euronext Amsterdam, Van Lanschot Kempen is the Netherlands' oldest independent financial services company, with a history dating back to 1737.

For more information, please visit vanlanschotkempen.com

Important legal information and cautionary note on forward-looking statements

This press release may contain forward-looking statements and targets on future events and developments. These forward-looking statements and targets are based on the current insights, information and assumptions of Van Lanschot Kempen's management about known and unknown risks, developments and uncertainties. Forward-looking statements and targets do not relate strictly to historical or current facts and are subject to such risks, developments and uncertainties which by their very nature fall outside the control of Van Lanschot Kempen and its management. Actual results, performances and circumstances may differ considerably from these forward-looking statements and

targets.

Van Lanschot Kempen cautions that forward-looking statements and targets in this press release are only valid on the specific dates on which they are expressed, and accepts no responsibility or obligation to revise or update any information, whether as a result of new information or for any other reason. The figures in this press release have not been audited.

This press release does not constitute an offer or solicitation for the sale, purchase or acquisition in any other way or subscription to any financial instrument and is not a recommendation to perform or refrain from performing any action.

This press release is a translation of the Dutch language original and is provided as a courtesy only. In the event of any disparities, the Dutch language version will prevail. No rights can be derived from any translation thereof.

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Press Release



Atos entersinto exclusive negotiationsfor the sale of EcoAct

Major progress ontransformation plan:

100% of Atos'divestment program secured

100% of Atos'divestment program secured Strategic partnership with Schneider Electric on decarbonization

Paris, France - July3, 2023- Atos Group, a global leader in digital transformation, today announces that it has entered into exclusive negotiations with Schneider Electric for the sale of 100% of EcoAct SAS and its subsidiaries ("EcoAct"). With this potential transaction, Atos would secure its divestment program of non-core assets while engaging in a strategic partnership with Schneider Electric on decarbonization.

EcoAct is an international leader in climate consulting and NetZero solutions offering a unique portfolio of services which covers the entire Net Zero transition value chain, from planning and forecasting to carbon offsetting. The company generated revenues of approximately 70m in FY22 and currently employs close to 400 people.

The proposed transaction does not include Atos' digital Net Zero Transformation practice (part of Eviden business), dedicated to supporting its customers in all industries to catalyze their decarbonization goals, which will be kept within the Atos Group. Atos would also cooperate closely with Schneider Electric combining Technology and Sustainability expertise to build products and solutions that enhance its customers' paths to NetZero.

Atos remains highly committed to its own sustainability engagements which are set to achieve net zero carbon emissions by 2039.

This proposed transaction, in addition to the ongoing divestments already engaged, would allow Atos to complete its divestment program ahead of the schedule announced at the Group's Capital Markets Day on June 14, 2022.

"We are very pleased with this proposed transaction,after which we would have secured more than100% ofour divestment program and delivered on our commitment.Our transformation plan has already showed encouraging performance results, and we have further reinforced our clients' confidence in our ability to accompany them in their digital challenges" said Diane Galbe, Senior Executive Vice President, Atos "Digitization and decarbonizationare key for all businesses today.Thanks to this future partnershipwith Schneider Electric we look forward to developing leading edge offers to accelerate customers'journeys to NetZero."

Steve Wilhite,President, Sustainability Business atSchneider Electric said "Demand for sustainable goods and services is rapidly increasing as businesses navigate the challenges posed by climate change, the energy crisis, and investor and regulatory pressures. The solutions to these challenges are complex to navigate. By combining forces with EcoAct, we would expand our team of world-class sustainability consultants and our ability to deliver strategic value to our clients,accelerating the transition to the carbon-free energy future."

Stuart Lemmon, Global Head of EcoAct, said "I am excited for EcoAct to potentially joinSchneider Electric and to continue to grow our ability to lead clients through challenges at the heart of the energy and resource transition. I believe this transaction could provide fantastic opportunities to our talented and passionate 'EcoActors' and look forward to the promising future ahead."

The potential transaction remains subject to the information and consultation of the relevant employee representative bodies of Atos and Schneider Electric, to the agreement and signing of the definitive documentation and to other customary regulatory approvals. The potential transaction is expected to be closed in H2 2023.

***

About Atos

Atos is a global leader in digital transformation with 110,000 employees and annual revenue of c.  11 billion. European number one in cybersecurity, cloud and high-performance computing, the Group provides tailored end-to-end solutions for all industries in 69 countries. A pioneer in decarbonization services and products, Atos is committed to a secure and decarbonized digital for its clients. Atos is a SE (Societas Europaea) and listed on Euronext Paris.

The purpose of Atosis to help design the future of the information space. Its expertise and services support the development of knowledge, education and research in a multicultural approach and contribute to the development of scientific and technological excellence. Across the world, the Group enables its customers and employees, and members of societies at large to live, work and develop sustainably, in a safe and secure information space.

Contacts

Investor relations: Thomas Guillois | thomas.guillois@atos.net| +33 (0)6 21 34 36 62

Media: Martin Bovo | martin.bovo @atos.net | +33 (0)6 14 46 79 94

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July 3, 2023, Oslo, Norway: PGS is awarded a large offshore windfarm site characterization contract in the US by a leading renewable energy company. PGS will use the Sanco Swift, which is rigged as an offshore wind site characterization vessel. Mobilization is scheduled for August 2023 and acquisition is expected to complete in February 2024, with total project duration of approximately 180 days. Profitability of the project is in line with PGS' core business.



The project will be acquired with PGS market-leading ultra-high-resolution 3D (UHR3D) P-Cable. This UHR3D system provides significantly more detailed subsurface data for shallower targets compared to traditional seismic acquisition systems.

"We are very pleased with award of our second offshore wind site characterization contract, which strengthens our position in this market.Our geophysical approach to map and understand the shallow subsurface layers with our UHR3Dsystem is significantly more efficient than conventional solutions. Energy companies acknowledge the value of shorter lead time for accessing high quality data, and we are ready to scale our UHR3D offering to capitalize on the market momentum," says Berit Osnes, Executive Vice President New Energy in PGS.

PGS announces contract awards and MultiClient projects as stock exchange releases if the contract has a value of $10 million or more, MultiClient projects with a duration of 2 months or more and strategically important contracts.

FOR DETAILS PGS, CONTACT: Bard Stenberg, VP IR & Corporate Communication

Mobile: +47 99 24 52 35



***

PGS ASA and its subsidiaries.

***

The information included herein contains certain forward-looking statements that address activities, events or developments that the Company expects, projects, believes or anticipates will or may occur in the future. These statements are based on various assumptions made by the Company, which are beyond its control and are subject to certain additional risks and uncertainties. The Company is subject to a large number of risk factors including but not limited to the demand for seismic services, the demand for data from our multi-client data library, the attractiveness of our technology, unpredictable changes in governmental regulations affecting our markets and extreme weather conditions. For a further description of other relevant risk factors we refer to our Annual Report for 2022. As a result of these and other risk factors, actual events and our actual results may differ materially from those indicated in or implied by such forward-looking statements. The reservation is also made that inaccuracies or mistakes may occur in the information given above about current status of the Company or its business. Any reliance on the information above is at the risk of the reader, and PGS disclaims any and all liability in this respect.

--END--




VANCOUVER, British Columbia, July 03, 2023, a leading exploration management company, to oversee the Company's 2023 exploration program at the Jarnet Lithium project in Quebec, Canada. This marks a significant milestone in Arbor's commitment to unlocking the potential of the Jarnet project and further solidifies the Company's commitment to becoming a key player in the Canadian lithium sector.



Arbor appointed Grander Exploration for its extensive experience in managing successful exploration programs throughout Canada and its utilization of cutting-edge technology. With a proven track record of delivering results, Grander Exploration is well-equipped to guide Arbor through the exploration program efficiently and precisely.

Mark Ferguson, CEO of Arbor , expressed his enthusiasm about the collaboration, stating, "We are thrilled to be working with Grander Exploration for our 2023 exploration program at the Jarnet project . Their expertise in managing exploration programs and using advanced technologies aligns perfectly with our objectives. We have great confidence in their ability to help us uncover the full potential of our project."

The exploration program will focus on mapping and prospecting activities, incorporating the drilling of potential targets. The team will be stationed at a lodge in Northern Quebec, close to the project claims, ensuring quick and efficient access to the site via helicopter. The program will span several days, with a qualified Quebec geologist conducting a final verification and preparing the assessment report.

Arbor remains committed to advancing its Jarnet Lithium project and is confident that the expertise and guidance of Grander Exploration will accelerate the exploration efforts. The Company looks forward to providing updates on the progress and results of the exploration program in the coming months.

Arbor remains committed to conducting responsible and sustainable exploration, prioritizing environmental stewardship and engaging with local communities. As the company progresses with its Summer 2023 program, it will ensure compliance with the highest industry standards and work collaboratively with stakeholders.

Dr. Peter Born, P.Geo., is the designated qualified person as defined by National Instrument 43-101 and is responsible for, and has approved, the technical information contained in this release.

About Arbor Metals Corp.

Arbor Metals Corp. is a mining exploration company focused on developing high-value, geographically significant mineral projects worldwide. Arbor is paving the way for advanced mineral exploration as it oversees world-class mining projects. The Company is confident that combining quality projects with proven strategies and a dedicated team will yield exceptional outcomes. Arbor currently oversees three outstanding mineral projects.

The Jarnet lithium project , located in the James Bay region of Quebec, comprises 47 map-designated claims, covering an area of approximately 3,759 hectares. The Jarnet project is contiguous to the Corvette-FCI property, where diamond drilling has confirmed significant lithium mineralization. It represents one of the highest-profile lithium exploration projects in the sector.

For further information, contact Mark Ferguson, Chief Executive Officer, at info@arbormetalscorp.com , or 403.852.4869, or visit the Company's website at www.arbormetalscorp.com .

On behalf of the Board,

Arbor Metals Corp.

Mark Ferguson, Chief Executive Officer

Neither the 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.

This news release may contain certain "Forward-Looking Statements" within the meaning of the United States Private Securities Litigation Reform Act of 1995 and applicable Canadian securities laws. When or if used in this news release, the words "anticipate", "believe", "estimate", "expect", "target, "plan", "forecast", "may", "schedule" and similar words or expressions identify forward-looking statements or information. These forward-looking statements or information may relate to the development of the Jarnet Lithium Project, the assessment of samples from that Project, and other factors or information. Such statements represent the Company's current views with respect to future events and are necessarily based upon a number of assumptions and estimates that, while considered reasonable by the Company, are inherently subject to significant business, economic, competitive, political and social risks, contingencies and uncertainties. Many factors, both known and unknown, could cause results, performance, or achievements to be materially different from the results, performance or achievements that are or may be expressed or implied by such forward-looking statements. The Company does not intend, and does not assume any obligation, to update these forward-looking statements or information to reflect changes in assumptions or changes in circumstances or any other events affecting such statements and information other than as required by applicable laws, rules and regulations.

Contact Data

CONTACT:

MRKT360 INC

https://mrkt360.com

Alex Zertuche

alexz@mrkt360.com

For E.S.T Office Hours, Call 1 416-477-0587

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ISTANBUL, July 3, 2023 /PRNewswire/ -- A report from GLOBAL TIMES ONLINE:

State Power Investment Corporation participated in the 5th Turkey Nuclear Power Plant Exhibition and the 9th Turkey Nuclear Power Plant Expo & Summit (NPPES) held in Istanbul, Turkey on June 21 and 22.

China's Consul General in Istanbul Wei Xiaodong noted that over the recent years, China and Turkey have constantly deepened their strategic cooperation and achieved positive progress.

He said China boasts advanced technologies and rich experiences in nuclear power, hoping the two countries can further strengthen their cooperation in all fields and strive to make new progress in building the Belt and Road.

The founder and board member of the Turkish Nuclear Energy Industry Association, Koray Tuncer said he hopes the SPIC can make use of the window period of nuclear power development in Turkey and accelerate China-Turkey cooperation on nuclear energy.

During the expo, SPIC shared its successful experiences in the development of the third-generation non-energy nuclear power technology, engineering construction, equipment manufacturing and maintenance, and expounded on the important significance of the"Guohe-1"and series of small modular reactors for the development of the global nuclear power industry and the development of clean and low-carbon energy.

It also showed its strong confidence and determination in building mutual trust, pursuing win-win results, utilizing nuclear energy peacefully, solving energy crisis and benefiting the mankind.

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PARIS and TORONTO, July 3, 2023 /PRNewswire/ -- Today CACEIS, subsidiary of the Credit Agricole group and Santander, and Royal Bank of Canada (RBC) announced completion of the sale by RBC and purchase by CACEIS of the European asset servicing activities of RBC Investor Services and its associated Malaysian centre of excellence.

This transaction, which has received all required regulatory and antitrust approvals, combines two strong asset servicing operations in Europe.

With this transaction, CACEIS gains broader international coverage and an expanded offering for all its clients. Covering the entire value chain, CACEIS is strengthening its leading position in European asset servicing.

CACEIS' acquisition of the business of the UK branch of RBC Investor Services Trust and RBC Investor Services business in Jersey is expected to take place in the coming months, subject to the receipt of the necessary regulatory approvals.

The results of the sold operations have a de minimis impact to RBC's common equity Tier 1 (CET1) ratio and earnings per share (EPS).

The transaction excludes RBC Investor Services' Canadian operations.

Jean-Pierre Michalowski, CEO of CACEIS, commented: "This deal further strengthens CACEIS' leadership position as a front-running asset servicing player. I believe that the staff who are joining us are proud to be part of our group. Together we will construct the benchmark for the sector in Europe. With motivated individuals all working collectively to serve our clients, we are on the right track."

Francis Jackson, CEO of RBC Investor Services, added: "We are incredibly proud of the business we have built in Europe and pleased that both clients and employees of our business will benefit from being part of what is expected to become one of the largest asset servicing providers in Europe. We believe the complementary services, combined scale and joint expertise of RBC's Investor Services' European business and CACEIS will bring more opportunity for employees and greater value for clients."

CACEIS is the asset servicing banking group of Credit Agricole S.A. and Santander dedicated to asset managers, insurance companies, pension funds, banks, private equity and real estate funds, brokers and corporate clients. Through offices across Europe, North and South America, and Asia, CACEIS offers a broad range of services covering execution, clearing, forex, securities lending, custody, depositary and fund administration, transfer agency, fund distribution support, middle office outsourcing and issuer services. With assets under custody of 4.1 trillion and assets under administration of 2.2 trillion, CACEIS is a European leader in asset servicing and one of the major players worldwide (figures as of 31 December 2022).

www.caceis.com

Royal Bank of Canada is a global financial institution with a purpose-driven, principles-led approach to delivering leading performance. Our success comes from the 98,000+ employees who leverage their imaginations and insights to bring our vision, values and strategy to life so we can help our clients thrive and communities prosper. As Canada's biggest bank and one of the largest in the world, based on market capitalization, we have a diversified business model with a focus on innovation and providing exceptional experiences to our 17 million clients in Canada, the U.S. and 27 other countries. Learn more at rbc.com.

We are proud to support a broad range of community initiatives through donations, community investments and employee volunteer activities. See how at rbc.com/community-social-impact.

Caution Regarding Forward-Looking Statements

This press release contains forward-looking statements within the meaning of certain securities laws, including the "safe harbour" provisions of the United States Private Securities Litigation Reform Act of 1995 and any applicable Canadian securities legislation, with respect to RBC's and CACEIS' financial performance, beliefs, plans and expectations. Forward-looking statements in this press release may include, but are not limited to, statements with respect to plans for the combined operations of CACEIS and RBC Investor Services, the anticipated timing of CACEIS' acquisition of the business of the UK branch of RBC Investor Services Trust and RBC Investor Services business in Jersey, the financial, operational and capital impacts of the transaction, our strategies or future actions, and our objectives and commitments. The forward-looking information contained in this press release is presented for the purpose of assisting the holders of our securities and financial analysts in understanding the transaction and may not be appropriate for other purposes. Forward looking statements are typically identified by words such as "believe", "expect", "foresee", "forecast", "anticipate", "intend", "estimate", "goal", "commit", "target", "objective", "plan" and "project" and similar expressions of future or conditional verbs such as "will", "may", "might", "should", "could" or "would".

By their very nature, forward-looking statements require us to make assumptions and are subject to inherent risks and uncertainties, which give rise to the possibility that our predictions, forecasts, projections, expectations or conclusions will not prove to be accurate, that our assumptions may not be correct and that our actual results may differ materially from such predictions, forecasts, projections, expectations or conclusions.

We caution readers not to place undue reliance on these statements as a number of risk factors could cause our actual results to differ materially from the expectations expressed in such forward-looking statements. These factors - many of which are beyond our control and the effects of which can be difficult to predict - include, but are not limited to: the possibility that the anticipated benefits from the transaction, such as delivering scale and covering the entire value chain, are not realized in the time frame anticipated or at all as a result of changes in general economic and market conditions, interest and exchange rates, monetary policy, laws and regulations (including changes to capital requirements) and their enforcement, and the degree of competition in the geographic and business areas in which RBC Investor Services and CACEIS currently operate; the risk that any announcements relating to the combination could have adverse effects on the market price of the common stock of RBC; the possibility that the business of RBC Investor Services and CACEIS may not perform as expected or in a manner consistent with historical performance; the ability to promptly and effectively integrate RBC Investor Services; our ability to achieve our capital targets; our ability to cross-sell more products to customers; reputational risks and the reaction of RBC Investor Services' customers and employees to the transaction; diversion of management time on integration-related issues; increased exposure to exchange rate fluctuations; material adverse changes in economic and industry conditions; general competitive, economic, political and market conditions; and other risks discussed in the risk sections of RBC's 2022 Annual Report and the Risk management section of RBC's Q2 2023 Report to Shareholders, all of which outline certain key factors and risks that may affect our future results and our ability to anticipate and effectively manage risks arising from all of the foregoing factors.

We caution that the foregoing list of risk factors is not exhaustive and other factors could also adversely affect our results. When relying on our forward-looking statements to make decisions with respect to us, investors and others should carefully consider the foregoing factors and other uncertainties and potential events. Material economic assumptions underlying the forward-looking statements contained in this press release are set out in the Economic, market and regulatory review and outlook section and for each business segment under the Strategic priorities and Outlook sections in RBC's 2022 Annual Report, as updated by the Economic, market and regulatory review and outlook section of RBC's Q2 2023 Report to Shareholders.

Any forward-looking statements contained in this document represent the views of RBC and CACEIS only as of the date hereof. Except as required by law, neither RBC nor CACEIS undertakes to update any forward-looking statement, whether written or oral, that may be made from time to time by us or on our behalf.

CONTACT: RBC, Europe: Janita Hung, +44 7548 311 208, janita.hung@rbc.com; Canada: Ylana Kurtz, 416 348 2330, ylana.kurtz@rbc.com; RBC Investor Relations, Asim Imran, 416 955 7804, asim.imran@rbc.com; CACEIS, Claude Michaux, +352 47 67 27 92, claude.michaux@caceis.com

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AMSTERDAM (dpa-AFX) - The Dutch manufacturing activity continued to shrink in June due to sustained declines in output and new orders, survey results from S&P Global showed on Monday.



The Nevi manufacturing Purchasing Managers' Index dropped to 43.8 in June from 44.2 in the previous month.



The index has remained below the neutral 50.0 mark for the tenth consecutive month, signaling contraction in the sector. Moreover, this was the lowest reading in over three years.



'The Nevi Netherlands Manufacturing PMI suggests that the downturn is far from over,' ABN AMRO manufacturing sector economist Albert Jan Swart, said.



The survey showed that new orders logged a sustained and rapid reduction. Sales declined at one of the sharpest pace in the survey history. New export orders dropped for the eleventh consecutive month.



Declines in output and orders led to a fresh reduction in manufacturing employment. The fall in staffing levels was the first since October 2020.



Backlogs of work decreased for the fifth consecutive month, largely reflecting subdued order books. Due to weaker demand, manufacturers reduced input buying.



Further, the survey showed that suppliers' delivery times improved for a sixth straight month.



On the price front, data revealed that the fall in input prices was among the fastest on record. There was a back-to-back decrease in factory gate charges. Optimism among manufacturers moderated in June, to the weakest since last November.



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Mega-Chance Cyber Security Die KI-Revolution ist in vollem Gange und vor allem ein Bereich wird stark betroffen sein: Cyber-Security. Die Experten sind sich sicher: Mit steigender Entwicklung von KI-Technologien nehmen auch KI-gestutzte Cyber-Attacken zu. Wir zeigen hier, welche Aktien profitieren konnen. Hier klicken
News Provided by FinTech Magazine

F&M Bank's Chief Experience Officer, Charles Driest, talks about striking the right balance between digital innovation and a personal customer approach

LONDON, July 3, 2023 /PRNewswire/ -- Charles Driest is the newly-appointed Chief Experience Officer at Farmers & Merchants (F&M) Bank. A graduate of George Mason University in Virginia, and later St. John's University in New York, he began his banking career shortly after returning to Virginia from New York in 2007.

Before this, Driest's early career saw him employed by the Grocery Manufacturers Association (MGA), and, later, at the American think-tank, Brookings Institution. It was here he was struck with inspiration to retrain in finance by a former manager, Roberta Cohen.

Driest says: "She said if I didn't go back to school she would fire me. This was probably my biggest inspiration. It amazes me that her voice is always in the back of my head, and when she told me that, it was about two decades ago."

F&M Banks's new Chief Experience Officer hasn't exactly been short of inspiration, either: "I've been really lucky because I've had a lot of influencers in my career, with bosses and managers who have pushed me to take on new risks that perhaps I didn't feel I was ready for, but gave me a great opportunity to learn."

Beginning his banking career after reeducating in New York and returning to Virginia, Driest was again inspired to follow a digital path in his career. "One of the first CEOs I worked for taught me a valuable lesson; it's how I got into the digital side of the banking business.

"At the time we didn't have a good grasp of our digital spending at the organisation. My CEO asked me to break down the numbers to explain to executive management where the money was going. So I sifted through 12 months of invoices and began asking operational questions: where's our money going? How do we better manage this?

"This is when I found out the business had these operational holes, while we didn't have the right insights into the capabilities available to us that we were using. So my CEO said: 'You found the problems, go fix them'. This is what got me into digital banking, furthering my career by putting me into a situation I wouldn't necessarily have been comfortable in initially."

This valuable experience in digital banking saw Driest become F&M Bank's Director of Digital Banking sometime after, a role he had for "14 to 15 months" before being promoted to F&M Bank's Chief Experience Officer.

Despite his brief time in the role so far, Driest says: "Taking on three new reports has been a lot of fun. I really enjoy the personnel management aspect of things. I like watching the development of people. From my perspective, I really like to see the process of a team getting onto one page, because it has a powerful multiplying effect. The pace of work speeds up when everybody is in sync."

Achieving synchronisation for the now is key to driving growth in the future, according to Driest, who has deep excitement for the future of banking as the proliferation of fintechs continues, believing community banking will endure despite the growth of technology.

He concludes: "I've seen some of the biggest developments in banking over the years, and I feel even with all the fintechs out there, I think ultimately, community banking will survive. If there's one thing banks are very good with, it's about integrating technology that is focused on the customer.

"For anyone that talks about the speed of fintech growth, fundamentally, it still relies on people, and people don't change habits that quickly. The arc of change and the pace of change will always be constrained by people at the end of the day. So, as long as you're making good decisions and always looking ahead by two to three years at a time - it doesn't matter what type of bank you are - you'll probably end up in a good place."

F&M Bank has been featured in the July issue of FinTech Magazine

In this exclusive interview, Charles Driest, Chief Experience Officer, discussed striking the right balance between digital innovation and a personal customer approach.

"The future is technology and people, that's what is going to win the day - not one or the other"

BizClik's FinTech portfolio connects banking, financial services, payments, technology & consulting brands and their most senior executives with the latest FinTech trends, industry insight, and influential FinTech, InsurTech & Crypto projects as the world embraces CX, Business Transformation and Digital Ecosystems. FinTech Magazine and its entire portfolio is now an established and trusted voice on all things FinTech, engaging with a highly targeted audience of 113,000 global executives. We provide key industry players with the perfect platform to showcase their brands, develop content syndication plans, webinars, white papers, demand generation as well as a global set of events (In-Person & Virtual).

BizClik is a UK-based media company with a global portfolio of leading industry, business and lifestyle digital communities.

BizClik's portfolio includes Technology & AI, Finance & Insurance, Manufacturing & Supply Chain, Energy & Mining, Construction, Healthcare, Mobile & Data Centres and EV. For further information, please visit https://www.bizclikmedia.com/

You can read the report in the latest issue of FinTech Magazine by clicking HERE

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Die KI-Revolution ist in vollem Gange und vor allem ein Bereich wird stark betroffen sein: Cyber-Security. Die Experten sind sich sicher: Mit steigender Entwicklung von KI-Technologien nehmen auch KI-gestutzte Cyber-Attacken zu. Wir zeigen hier, welche Aktien profitieren konnen.

WASHINGTON (dpa-AFX) - Oil prices gained more than 1 percent on Monday as weak Chinese data raised hopes for additional stimulus. Benchmark Brent crude futures jumped 1.2 percent to $76.28 per barrel, while WTI crude futures were up 1.2 percent at $71.47. A private survey showed activity in China's manufacturing sector slowed in June. The Caixin/S&P Global manufacturing purchasing managers' index dropped to 50.5 from 50.9 in May, raising calls for more stimulus to boost growth in the world's second-largest economy. Business surveys from other parts of Asia and Europe also painted a gloomy picture, as traders brace up for tighter supply. The one million barrel per day of extra output cut by Saudi Arabia, the top producer of the OPEC cartel, takes effect this month and it remains to be seen if it will extend the reduction beyond July. According to Bloomberg, some expect the production cut to be extended through August as well. Investors also weighed another round of impressive U.S. economic data against a hawkish rate outlook from central banks. 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.
CHICAGO, July 3, 2023 /PRNewswire/ -- The global market for naval communication market is estimated to be USD 3.3 billion in 2023 and expected to reach USD 4.3 billion by 2028 at a CAGR of 5.3% from 2023 to 2028 according to a new report by MarketsandMarkets. One major driver of the naval communication market is the increasing focus on maritime security and the need for advanced communication capabilities to support naval operations.

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Naval Communication Market Report Scope:

Report Coverage Details Market Revenue in 2023 $3.3 billion Estimated Value by 2028 $4.3 billion Growth Rate Poised to grow at a CAGR of 5.3% Market Size Available for 2019-2028 Forecast Period 2023-2028 Forecast Units Value (USD Million/Billion) Report Coverage Revenue Forecast, Competitive Landscape, Growth Factors, and Trends Segments Covered By Platform, System Technology, Application and Region Geographies Covered North America, Europe, Asia Pacific, and Rest of World Key Market Challenge Cybersecurity risks Key Market Opportunities Adoption of 5G technology Key Market Drivers Increasing geopolitical tensions and defense budgets



The rising geopolitical tensions, territorial disputes, and evolving security threats drive the demand for robust communication systems that enhance situational awareness, interoperability, and command and control capabilities. Additionally, the growing emphasis on naval modernization programs and the deployment of advanced sensor systems and unmanned platforms further fuel the demand for integrated communication solutions. Technological advancements, Defense budgets of nations, and the pursuit of naval power projection also contribute to driving the market forward.

The naval satcom systems segment is projected to witness the highest CAGR during the forecast period.

The naval satcom system is anticipated to experience the highest CAGR in the naval communication industry. Naval forces rely on satcom systems for secure and reliable communication, data exchange, and real-time information sharing. The increasing demand for maritime surveillance, remote sensing, and intelligence gathering drives the need for enhanced satcom capabilities. The ability to establish long-range and beyond-line-of-sight communication links using satellites is crucial for naval operations in remote or geographically dispersed areas.

The ships segment is projected to dominate the naval communication market by platform. The ships segment is expected to witness a highest CAGR in the naval communication market. Ships serve as vital platforms for naval operations, necessitating robust communication systems. The increasing focus on maritime security, naval modernization programs, and the need for enhanced operational capabilities drive the demand for advanced communication solutions in the ships segment. Ships require reliable and seamless communication for coordination, command, and control purposes. With the deployment of advanced sensor systems, unmanned platforms, and surveillance equipment on naval ships, there is a growing requirement for integrated communication solutions that support efficient information exchange. These factors contribute to the anticipated high CAGR in the ships segment of the naval communication market.

The command-and-control segment of the naval communication market by application is projected to dominate the market. Command and control systems are crucial for effective coordination, situational awareness, and decision-making in naval operations. As the complexity of naval missions increases, there is a growing demand for advanced command and control solutions. Naval forces require integrated communication systems that can handle diverse data, voice communication, and video feeds from multiple platforms and sensors. Command and control systems enable centralized command centres to monitor and manage the battlefield, disseminate critical information, and provide actionable intelligence to operational units.

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North America is expected to account for the largest share in 2023.

The naval communication market industry has been studied in North America, Europe, Asia Pacific, and Rest of the World. North America is poised to have the largest market share in the naval communication market. The region's dominance can be attributed to several factors, including the presence of major Defense contractors, advanced naval capabilities, and significant Defense budgets. The United States, in particular, holds a strong position in the market, driven by its robust naval force and technological advancements in the Defense sector. The country allocates substantial resources to naval modernization programs and the development of advanced communication systems for its naval fleet. Companies such as General Dynamics and Lockheed Martin, headquartered in North America, contribute to the region's market leadership.

Major players operating in the naval communication companies are Honeywell International Inc. (US), General Dynamics Corporation (US), Lockheed Martin Corporation (US), BAE Systems plc (UK), and Elbit Systems Ltd. (Israel) among others are some of the market players.

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Browse Adjacent Market: Aerospace and Defence Market Research Reports &Consulting

Related Reports:

Tactical Communication Market Size, Share & Industry Growth Analysis Report by Application (Command & Control, ISR, Communication, Combat), Platform (Ground, Airborne, Naval, Unmanned Systems), Type (Soldier Radios, Manpacks, VIC, HCDR), Frequency, Technology, Point of Sale, Region - Forecast to 2027

Military Radars Market by Component (Transmitter, Digital Signal Processor), Platform (Land, Naval, Airborne, Space), Technology (SDR, Quantum, Conventional), Waveform (FMCW, Doppler), Application, Type, Frequency Band & Region - Global Forecast to 2027

Military Antenna Market by Component (Reflectors, Feed Horn, Feed Networks, Low Noise Block Converter (LNB)), Frequency Band (HF, VHF, UHF SHF, AND EHF), End Use (OEM and Aftermarket), Type, Application, Platform and Region (2021-2026)

C4ISR Market by Platform (Airborne, Land, Naval, Space), Solution (Hardware, Application Software, Services), Application, End User (Defense & Space, Homeland Security, Commercial), Installation and Region - Global Forecast to 2028

Surveillance Radars Market by Application (Commercial, National Security, Defense & Space), Platform (Land, Airborne, Naval, Space), Frequency Band (HF, UHF & VHF; L; S; C; X; Ku; Ka; Multi-bands), Dimension, Component, Region (2020-2025)

About MarketsandMarkets

MarketsandMarkets is a blue ocean alternative in growth consulting and program management, leveraging a man-machine offering to drive supernormal growth for progressive organizations in the B2B space. We have the widest lens on emerging technologies, making us proficient in co-creating supernormal growth for clients.

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.

To find out more, visit www.MarketsandMarkets.com or follow us on Twitter, LinkedIn and Facebook.

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Trescon is set to organize the 42nd edition of World AI Show, a global platform showcasing the latest trends and innovations in enterprise AI solutions. This highly anticipated event will be held on 2-3 August 2023 at the prestigious Marina Bay Sands Expo and Convention Centre in Singapore, bringing together IT Heads and business leaders from enterprises and governments across the APAC region.

SINGAPORE, July 3, 2023 - (ACN Newswire) - Singapore, a thriving hub of technological advancements, is set to host the 42nd edition of World AI Show, organised by Trescon. This premier event is renowned for highlighting the latest trends and innovations in enterprise AI solutions, catering specifically to IT Heads and business leaders from enterprises and governments in the APAC region. With a focus on driving collaboration and fostering knowledge exchange, World AI Show - Singapore promises to unveil the future of AI and its various applications.

World AI Show - Singapore will serve as a platform for global thought leaders, industry experts, AI enthusiasts and innovators to converge, share insights, and explore cutting-edge AI solutions. Attendees will gain invaluable knowledge through keynote presentations, enterprise use-case discussions, panel sessions, and interactive tech talks. The event will also facilitate business networking opportunities, enabling participants to connect with like-minded professionals and forge partnerships to accelerate AI adoption within their organisations.

The 42nd edition of this prestigious event taking place in Singapore solidifies its position as a global gathering of AI experts, government officials, and industry leaders. The event will feature thought-provoking discussions on the latest trends, challenges, and opportunities in AI, providing attendees with actionable strategies and valuable insights. The exhibition floor will showcase the most innovative AI solutions and technologies, allowing participants to experience first-hand the transformative power of AI across diverse industries.

Naveen Bharadwaj, Group CEO of Trescon, expressed his enthusiasm for the upcoming event, stating, "World AI Show is a unique platform that brings together global AI experts, government officials, and industry leaders to shape the future of AI. Singapore's vibrant tech ecosystem and strategic location in the heart of APAC make it an ideal host for our 42nd edition. We are excited to witness ground-breaking discussions and witness the transformative potential of AI in enterprise solutions."

Notable speakers attending the event include:

Miao Song, Global Chief Information Officer, GLP

Daniel Ting, Director, AI Office SingHealth

Ivan Ng, Chief Technology Officer, City Developments Limited

Sudesh Kumar, Chief Digital Officer, Hello Health Group

Nirupam SD, Senior Scientist, Head of IoT and Artificial Intelligence Energy Research Institute at NTU, The Nanyang Technological University

One of the key speakers at the show Miao Song, Global Chief Information Officer, GLP, said, "AI is the most promising yet controversial technology in this modern world. Adopting AI in the right way will only help us to grow our businesses and create a positive impact on humankind. I look forward to sharing best practices and take part in in-depth discussions in the upcoming World AI Show in Singapore."

Sudesh Kumar, Chief Digital Officer, Hello Health expressed his excitement about the show saying, "Witness the future at World AI Show, where global innovators unite to unveil ground-breaking advancements, fostering a world where artificial intelligence transcends human potential and creates limitless possibilities."

The 42nd global edition of the World AI Show is supported by:

Platinum sponsor - Dataiku

Gold Sponsor - Singlestore

Robotics Sponsor - Aliriza Group

Bronze Sponsor - WNS - Vuram

Aliriza Abdul Gafoor, Chairman and CEO at Aliriza group quoted, "Aliriza Group aims to accelerate AI innovation and adoption in Singapore, contributing to the National AI Strategy and reinforcing Singapore's global AI hub status through our participation in the World AI Show"

Mark your calendars for 2-3 August 2023 and join the brightest minds in the AI community at the Marina Bay Sands Expo and Convention Centre in Singapore. Experience the forefront of AI innovation, gain actionable insights, and forge strategic partnerships at the 42nd edition of World AI Show. For more information and registration, visit www.worldaishow.com.

About Trescon

Trescon is a pioneering force in the global business events and services sector, driving the adoption of emerging technologies while promoting sustainability and inclusive leadership.

In line with their vision to foster a future driven by emerging technologies, you are invited to join these upcoming events by Trescon:

World Fintech Show at Jakarta and Kingdom of Saudi Arabia

World CX Summit at Singapore and Manila

World Cloud Show at Manila

World AI Show at Kingdom of Saudi Arabia

World Blockchain Summit at Singapore and Dubai

World Cloud Show at Jakarta

Trescon is glad to announce a new mega tech show called Digital Acceleration and Transformation Expo (DATE) scheduled to take place in Delhi in November 2023 and Jakarta in 2024.

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HPC and AI as a service available to public and private organizations of any size as part of new agreement

UAE to become home to one of the regions first sustainable data centers powered by Lenovo Neptune Liquid Cooling Servers

HPC Cluster at SRTI to drive transformational change in citizen welfare and security

DUBAI, UAE / ACCESSWIRE / July 3, 2023 / Lenovo signed a new agreement with Al Hathboor Bikal.ai, to provide public and private sector customers with cutting-edge high performance cloud computing systems to support advanced digital transformation projects which focus on developing innovation in the UAE. Lenovo will also provide systems and expertise to support Al Hathboor Bikal.ai to build and operate a new sustainable data center at Sharjah Research Technology and Innovation Park (SRTIP).

The collaboration will see Lenovo and Al Hathboor Bikal.ai, the joint venture between Al Hathboor Group LLC and Bikal Technologies Limited, working together to leverage shared experience in High Performance Computing (HPC) and Artificial Intelligence (AI), to provide customers in the region with advanced capabilities that will enable them to use AI to address business challenges and create new digital technologies.

The agreement was signed at the Sharjah Research Technology and Innovation Park on 17th May in presence of HE Hussain Al Mahmoudi, CEO SRTIP and Raj Sandhu, GM Al Hathboor Bikal.ai, Mohammed Al Hathboor Management Committee Member of Al Hathboor Bikal.ai, and Alaa Bawab, General Manager, Lenovo Infrastructure Solutions Group, META along with other senior management and dignitaries.

Commenting on the partnership, Raj Sandhu, GM Al Hathboor Bikal.ai said: "We have huge ambitions for Sharjah Research and Technology Innovation Park, and this partnership with a global leader like Lenovo, will set the path towards developing tailored infrastructure solutions that will solve both public and private organisational challenges. We look forward to leveraging Lenovo's experience in the technology sector and enhancing our digital capabilities while also welcoming new AI-powered and data-enabled research and technologies."

"Al Hathboor sees this collaboration as a way to give the UAE a technological advantage to the innovation ecosystem, create jobs and opportunities for our youth, and develop tech for solving regional and global challenges. Lenovo, Nvidia and Intel with SRTIP gives us a joint capability in tech transfer and we look forward with working with our universities, businesses, and government", Added Mohammed Al Hathboor Management Committee Member of Al Hathboor Bikal.ai.

High Performance Computing (HPC) For All

Lenovo will provide HPC hardware and software to Al Hathboor along with operational management and support, to create on demand services for customers as well as managed services support. The partnership will democratise the use of HPC for various private and public sector organisations allowing them to access HPC cluster on a service model.

As an example of one application, the HPC cluster situated at SRTIP can play a crucial role in enhancing citizen health and safety within the emirate of Sharjah. By harnessing the power of HPC, authorities can process and analyze vast amounts of data from various sources, such as CCTV systems, and sensor networks, through to analysing data from patients to diagnose health issues. This enables real-time monitoring, helping to identify potential threats swiftly and respond proactively. Additionally, HPC systems can also enhance emergency response and disaster management by optimizing resource allocation, analyzing weather patterns, and coordinating rescue efforts. Furthermore, HPC's advanced analytics capabilities facilitate predictive modelling and machine learning algorithms, enabling agencies to detect patterns of activities and predict potential events. Ultimately, HPC empowers decision-makers to make data-driven choices, enhancing the safety and health of citizens throughout the UAE.

AI & Analytics

The agreement will leverage Lenovo's position as the one of the only providers for proven, ready-to-deploy AI-enabled infrastructure solutions that are optimized for industry-leading independent software vendors (ISVs) of any size and scale. Lenovo will also provide support through its AI Centers of Excellence, including access to Lenovo Data Scientists, AI architects and engineers, to leverage the company's multi-industry domain experience to deploy AI and machine learning research solutions that can be used across various sectors including education, R&D, retail, oil & gas and more.

With its AI-ready servers and storage solutions, active partnerships and an ecosystem of ISVs, Lenovo will deliver pre-validated, performance optimized AI-ready solutions on demand, even under the heaviest high-performance workloads.

Sustainable Data Center

As part of the deal, Lenovo will implement one of the first data centers in the region to use Lenovo's patented Neptune Liquid Cooling Technology, which will greatly improve energy efficiency and sustainability of services delivered by Al Hathboor. The unique thermal solution uses efficient liquid cooling to reduce cooling requirements in the data center, reducing energy consumption and contributing to sustainability goals. The solution is designed for sustainable performance and scalability, while supporting the emergent demands for HPC workloads without compromising on performance.

Alaa Bawab, General Manager, Lenovo Infrastructure Group, META added, "The agreement with Al Hathboor Bikal.ai for HPCaaS is a gamechanger, providing organizations with the ability to access high performance computing and advanced technologies including AI, to power their digital transformations, with the confidence that they are accessing services from the region's first sustainable data center." He further added, "Along with being in line with the UAE Net Zero 2050 policy, the launch of this data center will also enable access for organizations to powerful solutions and the computing resources to utilize them effectively. This in turn will help drive new innovations, such as Large Language Models similar to GPT-3 and help organizations to bring the benefits of advanced AI to their own operations."

The agreement and the opening of the new sustainable data center both align with the UAE NetZero 2050 strategic initiative. The initiative is a national drive to reduce net-zero emissions by 2050, powered by key sustainability goals of reducing greenhouse gas emissions, implementing sustainable practices, and using renewable energy. The new data center keeps this in mind, driving efficiency while simultaneously reducing energy consumption.

The agreement will also form the platform for cooperative activities and research in relevant fields such as technology incubation and development. Both parties will also promote activities to encourage cooperation between technology companies, while supporting each other with international conferences, symposiums, and events.

About Lenovo

Lenovo (HKSE:992) (ADR:LNVGY) is a US$70 billion revenue global technology powerhouse, ranked #171 in the Fortune Global 500, employing 75,000 people around the world, and serving millions of customers every day in 180 markets. Focused on a bold vision to deliver smarter technology for all, Lenovo has built on its success as the world's leading PC player by expanding into new growth areas of infrastructure, mobile, solutions and services. This transformation together with Lenovo's world-changing innovation is building a more inclusive, trustworthy, and sustainable digital society for everyone, everywhere. To find out more visit https://www.lenovo.com, and read about the latest news via our StoryHub.

About Al Hathboor Bikal.ai (Fzc)

Al Hathboor Bikal.ai is a product company that solves challenge statements of the Industry/government using Artificial Intelligence and Data Science along with 5G technologies and High Performance Compute.

View additional multimedia and more ESG storytelling from Lenovo on 3blmedia.com.

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Spokesperson: Lenovo

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SOURCE: Lenovo

View source version on accesswire.com:https://www.accesswire.com/765247/New-HPC-Cluster-Enables-Lenovo-Al-Hathboor-Bikalai-To-Drive-Citizen-Safety-Health-From-Sustainable-Data-Center
Regulatory News:

Mon courtier energie Group (Paris:ALMCE), a B2B energy brokerage company, today announces its 2023 financial calendar.

Events Dates* 2023 First-Half revenue July 18, 2023 2023 First Half results October 18, 2023

(*): Press releases will be published before market opens. Information subject to change.

About Mon Courtier Energie Groupe:

Founded in Bordeaux in 2017, in just a few years Mon Courtier Energie Groupe has become the leading French energy broker on the B2B market. The Group's mission is to help companies with the global management of their energy budget in order to reduce or optimise their gas and/or electricity bill. Mon Courtier Energie Groupe's service offer comprises brokerage and advice regarding energy purchasing, the management and optimisation of contracts and energy transition guidance.

Mon Courtier Energie Groupe draws on the expertise of more than 130 people at its head offices and in "licenced" branches around the country.

For further information, please go to www.moncourtierenergie.com.

View source version on businesswire.com: https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20230703257412/en/

Contacts:

Mon Courtier Energie Groupe

Charlie Evrard

Founder and CEO

investisseurs@moncourtierenergie.com

NewCap

Mathilde Bohin Dusan Oresansky

Investor Relations

mce@newcap.eu

Tel: +33 (0)1 44 71 94 94

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Media Relations

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LONDON, July 3, 2023 /PRNewswire/ -- Dechert LLP announced today that Sam Kay, one of the leading private equity fund lawyers in the UK, has joined the firm as a partner in the financial services and investment management practice in London.

With over 25 years of experience advising on investment funds, Mr. Kay specializes in fund formation work for a wide range of private equity firms across a broad range of investment strategies, including leveraged buyouts, venture capital, real estate, infrastructure, energy and transition funds, and for asset management clients in the private equity, private debt/credit, infrastructure, and real estate sectors. He also regularly works on GP-led transactions and secondaries (both buy-side and sell-side), carried interest arrangements and co-investment schemes, and counsels on ongoing and follow-on fund strategy as well as liquidity solutions. In addition, Mr. Kay advises institutional investors in connection with their investments in private equity funds, which means he sees a broad range of fund terms and conditions.

Widely recognized as a leading practitioner in the investment funds space, Mr. Kay has been distinguished as a "Global Leader" for private fund formation by Who's Who Legal and ranked in Chambers UK in 2022. He was included in Real Deals' list of the "Top 20 Most Influential" in private equity in 2022.

"Advising asset managers, private equity firms and financial institutions on all aspects of their business, including global private equity fund formation, is central to the firm's strategic focus. I'm thrilled to welcome Sam to Dechert as we continue to strengthen and focus on areas that set us apart from other global firms," said Mark Thierfelder, co-chair of Dechert.

"We have worked across from Sam for a very long time and are thrilled to have him join us," said Gus Black, co-chair of Dechert's global financial services group and chair of Dechert's London Management Committee. "His reputation and experience will help shape our continued growth in the London private equity fund formation market."

Mr. Kay said, "I am delighted to have started at Dechert. The private capital market is continuing to grow and evolve and fund formation work, particularly in the broad private equity asset class, plays a key part in that. As the private funds market becomes more sophisticated, financial institutions need law firms with the strength and depth to support on a wide variety of advisory and transactional matters across a number of jurisdictions. That is exactly the sweet spot for Dechert. I am excited to be part of the team and to be able to contribute to Dechert's continued growth and success."

With over 185 lawyers, Dechert has one of the largest investment management teams of any law firm. Dechert was the first law firm with a funds practice in all key European fund domiciles, including the UK, Ireland, Luxembourg, Germany and France, as well as the U.S., the Middle East and Asia. Dechert is consistently recognized by independent experts as a leading law firm for investment funds, including private equity, where it has been at the forefront for 35+ years. With more than 300 private equity and private investment clients, our globally integrated team advises at every phase of the investment life cycle and has unique insights into how the industry has evolved and where it's going next.

View original content:https://www.prnewswire.co.uk/news-releases/dechert-expands-its-fund-formation-practice-in-london-with-addition-of-sam-kay-301869242.html
Camena Bioscience, a Cambridge, UK-based provider of synthetic genes to the pharmaceutical and biotechnology industries, raised 7.8M in Series A funding.

The round was led by Mercia Ventures. Experienced biotechnology inventor and executive Aditya Rajagopal, founder of diagnostics company ChromaCode Inc and co-founder of Esperto Medical, and Lee Lindley, who has nearly 10 years of corporate finance and investing experience, has also joined the board.

The company intends to use the funds to scale operations and continue development of its DNA synthesis platform, gSynth.

Co-founded by CEO Steve Harvey and CSO Derek Stemple, Camena has developed enzyme-based DNA synthesis technology, which aims to overcome limitations of traditional DNA synthesis methods to accurately produce synthetic DNA. The company has already signed commercial agreements with biotech and pharmaceutical companies and secured a multi-million pound revenue stream.

FinSMEs

03/07/2023
Techstars, the Saudi National Bank and the Saudi Ministry of Communication and Information Technology (MCIT), launched two Techstars Founder Catalyst programs in Jeddah and Al Ahsa.

The first edition of the programs will aim at supporting founders across various industries in enhancing their entrepreneurial skills, understand their target customers, and dig into the innovative solutions they are offering.

The Techstars Founder Catalyst Jeddah / Al Ahsa is a 10-week hybrid program with two distinct cohorts based out of Jeddah and Al Ahsa in Saudi Arabia. The program invites early-stage founders from all industries, with a preference for founders in media tech, from across the world to participate and shape the future of the Kingdoms startup ecosystem.

Both programs will run in a hybrid format from September to November (Jeddah) / December (Al Ahsa) 2023 and provide more than 50 founders with valuable masterclasses, mentorship, community and access to Techstars worldwide network of entrepreneurs, mentors, investors and partners.

Founders will also receive support from Saudi National Banks and the Saudi Ministry of Communications and Information Technologys (MCIT) vast technology and business expertise across a variety of business units.

Applications for both Founder Catalyst programs are now open.

All early-stage founders  especially in media tech  are encouraged to apply until 13 August, 2023 (Jeddah) or 27 August, 2023 (Al Ahsa). Early applications are prioritized. For any question, founders can contact the program management at [email protected]

FinSMEs

03/07/2023
It was a Sunday shocker. Ajit Pawar, a senior leader of the Nationalist Congress Party (NCP) and nephew of Sharad Pawar, changed his alliance on Sunday and joined the Maharashtra government led by Eknath Shinde.

While he took oath as deputy chief minister of Maharashtra, eight other MLAs, including party veterans like Chhagan Bhujbal and Praful Patel, also were sworn into the Cabinet.

The move has shaken up the political circles in Maharashtra, with the NCP filing a disqualification petition against the leaders including Ajit Pawar. Addressing a press conference late Sunday, Patil said the disqualification petition has been sent to Speaker Rahul Narvekar. NCP supremo reacting to the developments also said that that his nephew Ajit Pawars decision to jump ship and be sworn in as the deputy chief minister in the Maharashtra government, led by Shiv Sena and BJP, was not a big thing.

Two days ago Prime Minister Narendra Modi had made a statement about the NCP. He mentioned two things in his statement: that the NCP is a finished party and he referred to the irrigation complaint and allegations of corruption. I am happy that some of my colleagues have taken the oath. From their joining the NDA government, it is clear that all the charges have been cleared. I am thankful to him, said Sharad Pawar, who will also be addressing a public meeting today (Monday).

As Ajit Pawars seismic move prompts actions and reactions, many believe that while shocking, the NCP leaders move isnt surprising. The signs were present for a while now. As Shiv Sena (UBT) leader Sanjay Raut, a part of the Maha Vikas Aghadi alliance said that they were already aware of the recent move by NCP leader Ajit Pawar and few party MLAs to join the NDA-led Maharashtra government.

We present a timeline of events which lead to Ajit Pawars Sunday move and also show that the move was in the making for a long time.

First signs of dissent

Ajit Pawar, the son of Sharad Pawars elder brother Anantrao, has been by his uncles side since he made his foray into politics in 1982 when he was elected to the board of a sugar cooperative. He has been by his uncles side since 1991-1992 and has been an elected MLA from the Baramati Assembly Constituency in 1995, 1999, 2004, 2009, 2014 and previously in 2019 winning by a vote margin of 1,65,265 votes.

Ajit Pawar has made no secret of his political ambitions and the first sign that things werent good between uncle and nephew was in 2009 when he first came forward to openly criticise Sharad Pawars decision making and leadership style. Ajit threatened to resign from all party positions and it was after much negotiations that he reconciled with his uncle and returned to the fold.

Rise of the son

In 2019, before the Lok Sabha elections, differences between Ajit Pawar and Sharad Pawar once again cropped up and this time it was over Ajit Pawars son, Parth. While Ajit was insistent that his son contest the elections from Maval constituency, his uncle was not in favour of the idea.

Pawar seniors reasoning was that if so many members of the family contested, it would leave the party cadre disheartened.

However, Pawar senior surrendered to family pressure and declared his withdrawal from the polls, saying only two members from the family should contest polls at the time. At the time, Sharad Pawar was prepared to contest from Madha constituency and had declared his daughter Supriya Sules name as the candidate from Baramati.

Parth, unfortunately, lost to Shiv Sena MP Shrirang Barne by over two lakh votes, becoming the first member of the Pawar family member to lose an election. Parth then had claimed that leaders and workers of the NCP in Pimpri-Chinchwad didnt put in their best efforts. In Pimpri and Chinchwad assembly segments, where I trailed heavily, the party workers and leaders were not seen aggressively campaigning for me. I think these two segments let me down badly, Parth was quoted as saying.

Soon after the Lok Sabha elections, the NCP supremo was seen promoting his other grandson, Rohit, the son of his nephew, Rajendra. With Pawars encouragement, Rohit successfully contested the Assembly elections from Karjat-Jamkhed constituency in Ahmednagar district.

The revolt of 2019

Perhaps the clearest indication that ties between uncle and nephew were strained came in November 2019. The junior Pawar joined hands with the BJP to form the government along with Devendra Fadnavis after the Assembly elections, claiming he had support of several NCP MLAs. He took the oath as deputy chief minister in a surprise and shocking move in the wee hours of the morning. However, the government lasted only for 80 hours as he was unable to create a split within his party.

At the time of his revolt, Supriya Sule, Sharad Pawars daughter, had shared her Whatsapp status that read: Party and family split. However, when asked to speak on the matter, both she and her father refused to comment, with Sharad Pawar even adding that he did not support nephew Ajits move.

Later, he returned to his own party fold and again took oath as deputy chief minister, this time as a part of the Maha Vikas Aghadi (MVA) coalition. He served in the post until June 2022 when the Uddhav Thackeray-led government collapsed.

The rise of Supriya Sule

In May, NCP chief Sharad Pawar delivered a shocker of his own when he announced that he would be stepping down as party lead. While most leaders asked Pawar senior to rethink his decision, Ajit Pawar had then said, Pawar Saheb himself had said about the necessity of change in guard a few days back. We should see his decision in the light of his age and health also. Everyone has to take a decision according to time, Pawar Saheb has taken a decision and he wont take it back, he added.

Political pundits saw Ajit Pawars statement as a sign that he was angling for a bigger space within the party and was assuming to be named as the next chief. However, after withdrawing his resignation, Sharad Pawar appointed Supriya Sule and Praful Patel as the partys working presidents, overlooking his nephew. This is considered as the major reason for his defiance of his uncle to join the ruling BJP-Shiv Sena alliance.

Also read: How Supriya Sule, not Ajit Pawar, has emerged as frontrunner to lead NCP

Moreover, he also skipped a crucial NCP executive meeting in June, with the BJP saying that Sharad Pawar was neglecting Ajit and engaging in unhealthy politics. And just days before his shock move, Pawar had also said he didnt want the position of Leader of Opposition. He was then quoted as saying, I have asked the party to relieve me from the post of the LoP. I want to work for the party and fulfil responsibilities given by it.

It is left to be seen how long this revolt will last? Will Ajit Pawar be able to engineer a split within the NCP or will Sharad Pawars political acumen come out on top? Only time will tell, but for now the NCP looks weak.

With inputs from agencies

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A day after his nephew Ajit Pawars rebellion, Nationalist Congress Party (NCP) supremo Sharad Pawar announced in Satara districts Karad in Maharashtra Monday (3 July) that he will rebuild the party. Accusing the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) of creating fear in society, the senior Pawar said, My fight against communal forces begins today. Such rebellions happen. I will rebuild the party.

The octogenarian also said that rebels can return to the party but there is a time limit.

After Shiv Sena last year, now NCP is witnessing a rebellion in Maharashtra with Ajit Pawar joining the Eknath Shinde-Devendra Fadnavis government as a deputy chief minister. Along with junior Pawar, eight other NCP leaders, including Chhagan Bhujbal, Dilip Walse-Patil, Hasan Mushrif and Dhananjay Munde among others, were sworn in as ministers at Raj Bhavan in Mumbai on Sunday (2 July).

Following the move, NCPs Maharashtra unit president Jayant Patil said that the party has moved a disqualification petition against Ajit and the other rebel MLAs, reported PTI. He also said that the defected MLAs will be given a chance to return but action will be taken against those who do not.

With Maharashtra now having a triple engine government, how will it impact chief minister Shindes position in the alliance between his Shiv Sena, Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), and the Ajit Pawar-led NCP camp? What does Ajit Pawars rebellion mean for the Maha Vikas Aghadi (MVA)?

Is Ajit Pawar a threat to Eknath Shinde?

The Opposition MVA, comprising of Sharad Pawar-led NCP, Congress and Shiv Sena (Uddhav Balasaheb Thackeray), believes so.

The NCP said Sunday that the BJP is trying to replace Shinde as chief minister by inducting Ajit Pawar into the Maharashtra government.

Eknath Shindes power will be reduced, said NCPs Maharashtra chief Patil was quoted as saying by NDTV.

He claimed that some people did not like the way Shinde works. Now to reduce his (Shindes) importance, Ajit Pawar has been added to the government thats already in the majority, Patil added.

A similar claim was made by Shiv Sena (UBT) today (3 July) in an editorial in its mouthpiece Saamana. Ajit Pawar has made a record of taking oath as deputy chief minister. This time the deal is strong, it read.

Pawar has not gone there for the deputy CMs post. Chief minister Eknath Shinde and rebel MLAs of the Sena would be disqualified soon and Pawar would be coronated, the editorial claimed, as per news agency PTI.

VIDEO | The CM of Maharashtra is about to get changed. The 16 MLAs with Eknath Shinde will be disqualified soon as per the Supreme Courts order. This is the reason why Ajit Pawar and others have been inducted, says Shiv Sena (UBT) leader Sanjay Raut a day after NCPs Ajit pic.twitter.com/xUbAAHAn9v  Press Trust of India (@PTI_News) July 3, 2023

Congress leader Prithviraj Chavan also asserted that Shinde and other MLAs who engineered a split in the undivided Shiv Sena last year, leading to the collapse of the Maha Vikas Aghadi (MVA) government, will be disqualified.

Speaking to NDTV, Chavan stated: If they get disqualified, then we will need a new chief minister. Now have the BJP given a promise to Ajit Pawar that he will succeed Eknath Shinde? We do not know.

Are there tensions between Shinde-led Sena and BJP?

In the past few months, leaders from the Shinde-led Sena and the BJP have made remarks upsetting the other, noted ThePrint.

These tensions ratcheted up after the Shiv Sena (Shinde) put out an advertisement in Maharashtras newspapers, citing a survey, that Shinde was the most favoured choice for the chief ministers post. It also downplayed the importance of deputy chief minister Devendra Fadnavis, further irking the BJP.

To placate its alliance partner, another ad was published later, featuring Fadnaviss picture, to highlight peoples preference for the Shinde-Fadnavis government.

ALSO READ: Can Ajit Pawar, 8 other NCP rebels avoid disqualification in Maharashtra?

What do experts say?

With Ajit Pawar and a bunch of NCP MLAs joining the Maharashtra government, discontentment is expected to arise in the Shinde camp over the allotment of Maharashtra Cabinet berths.

Out of the total 43 berths, only 14 seats are vacant after the entry of nine MLAs from the NCP.

According to an Indian Express report, before Ajit Pawar-led NCP legislators came into the picture and there were 23 vacant seats in the Maharashtra Cabinet, Shinde Sena was vying for at least 11 berths for its MLAs.

But now, a maximum of six Shinde-led Sena lawmakers can be made part of the ministry, the report added.

Ajit Pawars entry has also ensured that the BJP does not have to rely solely on Shinde Sena to retain power in Maharashtra.

A political observer told Indian Express that the saffron party has no compulsion to maintain the alliance with Shinde Sena. This will come as a setback for Shinde and his MLAs. The party may also no longer find the free space in the government and in the coalition it earlier enjoyed, the observer noted.

Speaking to Hindustan Times (HT) newspaper, a BJP leader, who did not wish to be identified, said that with Ajit Pawar becoming a part of the government, the saffron party could now make inroads into 11 Lok Sabha constituencies in the state that were bastions of the NCP. These NCP bastions have a completely different voter base. Our only option was to create a dent in the party by poaching its leaders. This will help us enter districts in western Maharashtra, including Pune, Satara and others.

The BJP leader also admitted that keeping Shinde in check is the saffron partys foremost agenda. We have managed to create an alternative to the Shinde faction by inducting some of Maharashtras stalwarts into the cabinet, the leader added.

An expert has also predicted that there are likely to be rifts between Shinde Sena and Ajit Pawar-led NCP MLAs.

Sanjay Patil, a research assistant with Mumbai Universitys politics and civics department, told ThePrint: The Shinde group doesnt really have too much space for an excess. The partys existence is due to the BJP. There might be disagreements, but the Shinde-led Shiv Sena doesnt have the political might to openly voice them.

As per Indian Express, Shindes say in the government may get undermined as Ajit Pawar has more experience in governance and is seen as a strong administrator and crafty politician. Moreover, the NCP leader is also believed to enjoy warm ties with Fadnavis, reported HT.

What about the MVA?

Two out of the three MVA partners have seen a split in their parties since last year. The Congress, which is the only party in the alliance so far with its flock intact, is also watching its leaders, Chavan told NDTV.

Since Ajit Pawar outsmarted his uncle, MVA partners Thackeray-led Shiv Sena and Congress have expressed support for Sharad Pawar.

However, with the split in NCP, the future of MVA has become uncertain. The rebellion in NCP is expected to weaken the Opposition alliance ahead of the crucial Lok Sabha and Maharashtra Assembly polls next year.

Like the Shiv Sena (UBT), the NCP will now have to rebuild a significant part of its organisation, noted ThePrint.

In the 288-member Maharashtra Assembly, the BJP has 106 MLAs, NCP 53, Congress 44, Shiv Sena (Shinde) 40, Shiv Sena (UBT) 16 and the rest 29 seats are held by smaller parties and independents.

While Ajit Pawars side has claimed that they have the support of at least 36 NCP MLAs out of the total 53, sources in Sharad Pawars camp have denied this, saying the rebels do not have the backing of more than half of the legislators, reported Indian Express.

Moreover, Mumbai Universitys Patil told ThePrint that the timing of Ajit Pawars induction could be due to an increased frenzy of Opposition parties to come together against the BJP ahead of the 2024 Lok Sabha polls.

This is a message to opposition parties that if you try to do this, you will either become a Shiv Sena or an NCP, he added.

With inputs from agencies

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It will no longer be a ruff time for animals in Canada. The country has moved to ban the testing of cosmetics on animals, joining a number of other countries and American states to outlaw the practice.

Earlier, the Canadian government announced that Bill C-47 had amended the Food and Drugs Act to ban both the testing of cosmetic products on animals and the sale of products relying on animal testing data.

Canadian health minister Jean-Yves Duclos said, Protecting animals, now and in the future, is something that many Canadians have been calling for, and something we can all celebrate. We are proud to move forward with this measure, and to assure Canadians that the products they buy are cruelty-free. We will keep working with experts and international partners to explore safe, cruelty-free alternatives so no more animals suffer and die due to cosmetic testing.

We take a closer look at why Canadas move is significant and how cruel is animal testing actually?

What is Canadas ban on animal testing?

On 27 June, Canada passed the legislation banning cosmetic testing on animals. According to the law, No person shall sell a cosmetic unless the person can establish the safety of the cosmetic without relying on data derived from a test conducted on an animal that could cause pain, suffering or injury, whether physical or mental, to the animal and that No person shall conduct a test on an animal that could cause pain, suffering or injury, whether physical or mental, to the animal.

This isnt the first time that Canada is seeking to ban animal testing for cosmetics. In 2015, there was a private members bill to the same effect, but the cosmetics industry opposed it because of overly broad language.

Darren Praznik, president and CEO of Cosmetics Alliance Canada speaking to CTVNews said, It was so badly crafted that if you made a pet shampoo for a dog or a cat, you wouldnt have been able to actually try it on a dog or a cat to see if they liked it.

However, animal rights activists feel the legislation has more room for improvement. For instance, the rules are not retroactive, which means that products already on the market that originally used animal testing to establish their safety wont be pulled from shelves.

How cruel is animal testing?

The cosmetics industry has long been associated with testing products on animals. Study after study has shown how unnecessary and often painful tests are carried out on animals to analyse cosmetics and their ingredients.

Experts note that every year millions of animals fall victim to human vanity, thanks to the many cosmetic products that are still safety tested using living animals. Even today, shampoos, makeup, hair dye, and deodorants are still tested on innocent animals in a laboratory, despite the many laws on the matter.

In fact, according to a report published by The Cut, theres no legal definition of the term cruelty free in the United States, and as the Food and Drug Administration points out, some companies may apply such claims solely to their finished cosmetic products. This means that a brand can label its lipstick cruelty-free because the bullet wasnt swiped on a bunny, but its possible that one of its ingredients was tested on animals.

But why is this testing considered cruel? Campaigners who are against animal testing say the practice is cruel and inhumane. They state that these animals  dogs, cats, monkeys, rabbits, rats and many more  are deliberately sickened with toxic chemicals or infected with diseases, live in barren cages and are typically killed when the experiment ends.

Also read: The cosmetics industry is cruel to animals, but you can make a difference

According to a PeTa report, the animals are burned, shocked, poisoned, isolated, starved, drowned, addicted to drugs, and brain-damaged. The animal rights group has published a report in which it states that after enduring terrifying, painful procedures, the guinea pigs are usually dumped back into a cage without any painkillers. Video footage has also revealed that often they see other animals being killed right in front of them.

There are several cosmetic brands that carry out eye and skin irritation tests, which involve forcibly immobilising a rabbit and applying the products into their eyes as well as exposed skin. The reaction of the product can yield results such as bleeding, blindness, and ulcers. When not being actively tested on, these rabbits often live in uncomfortable cages and are treated like objects rather than living beings.

There are multiple reports of rats and dogs being used in acute toxicity tests, where they are administered a very high and lethal dose of chemicals through the bloodstream or force-feeding.

The HumaneSociety.org has pegged that over 5,00,000 animals suffer and die worldwide every year in cosmetics tests. Another survey also revealed that in 2019, 44 of the 50 largest cosmetic brands test on animals themselves or have them tested by third parties.

But why perform testing on animals?

One of the major reasons why cosmetic giants continue to test on animals is because of Chinas legislation. As of 2021, China changed its laws stating that special use cosmetics had to undergo animal testing. For the unaware, special cosmetics are products for the function of anti-freckle/whitening, sunscreen, hair dye, hair perm, anti-hair loss. So if a moisturiser has sunscreen in it, then it will be tested on animals.

Jopie Louwe Kooijmans, a cruelty-free and vegan cosmetics expert at Shop Like You Give a Damn, was quoted as saying, China is one of the largest and fastest growing markets for cosmetics in the world. Brands want to sell their products there and accept animal testing as collateral damage for their growing business and increase revenue.

Moreover, even though some countries and regions across the world ban animal testing, there are requirement to test certain raw materials on animals. For instance, in the European Union region, there are clauses in the law that allow or require a raw material or product to be tested on animals.

This despite newer methods emerging that wont require animal sacrifices. Also, not all testing on animals is successful and campaigners say they are ineffective because animals are so different to humans.

Which countries have banned animal testing?

While Canada has passed legislation to ban animal testing, it is not the first. According to Humane Society International, 44 countries have passed laws banning cosmetic animal testing. These include India, Australia, New Zealand, the United Kingdom, Norway, Iceland, Brazil, Ecuador and the European Union to name a few.

In America, 10 states have banned the practice  New York, Virginia, California, Louisiana, New Jersey, Maine, Hawaii, Nevada, Illinois, and Maryland. New Yorks ban on animal testing came into effect only this January.

No countries currently ban medical animal testing, but this may soon change too. This year, Switzerland held a referendum on medical animal testing. A large Swiss pharmaceutical lobby campaigned against the initiative, which was ultimately unsuccessful. But the fact that animal testing went from untouchable fact to subject of a national debate sparks doubt about its continued acceptance in the future.

What can we do?

Consumers who want to avoid products tested on animals can look for a vegan or cruelty-free label when purchasing cosmetic products. The popularity of cruelty-free products has been rising with more and more governments banning the sale of animal-tested products and the use of animal testing.

With inputs from agencies

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In a little more than a year, a crisis has hit another regional political party in Maharashtra  the Nationalist Congress Party (NCP). With Sharad Pawars nephew, Ajit, breaking away and taking eight MLAs with him to join the Eknath Shinde-Devendra Fadnavis government, there are fears that the NCP might go the Shiv Sena way.

BJP leader and deputy chief minister Fadnavis, who enjoys cordial relations with Ajit Pawar, is seen to be behind the NCP leaders rebellion. According to The Times of India (TOI) report, the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) was seeking to create fissures in the Opposition Maha Vikas Aghadi (MVA)  comprising of Sharad Pawar-led NCP, Congress and Shiv Sena (Uddhav Balasaheb Thackeray)  as surveys showed the alliance had an edge over the BJP in the 2024 Lok Sabha elections. And now, Fadnavis has delivered on this front using his ties with Ajit Pawar, the newspaper added.

As per Hindustan Times, with the Ajit Pawar-led NCP camp joining the Maharashtra government, the BJP is said to have achieved two goals  weaken the MVA and downsize Shinde, who was chosen by the saffron party over Fadnavis for the chief minister post last year.

Lets take a look at how 52-year-old Devendra Fadnavis fits in these Maharashtra political coups.

The 2019 betrayal

When no single party emerged as the clear winner in the 2019 Maharashtra Assembly elections, discussions were on between different parties to form a government.

As the differences between the BJP and the then-undivided Shiv Sena over the chief ministers post grew, a BJP general secretary told Indian Express that the saffron party then approached the NCP and got a positive response from a section led by Ajit Pawar.

While Ajit was in talks with the BJP, senior Pawar was knitting an alliance  the MVA  with the Shiv Sena and Congress to form the government.

A day after the MVA alliance was announced, Fadnavis took oath as the chief minister in the early hours of 23 November 2019, while Ajit was sworn in as his deputy. However, this alliance was short-lived and the government survived less than 80 hours as Ajit Pawar resigned and returned to the NCP fold.

The MVA came to power with Uddhav Thackeray as the chief minister. Stung by Senas move, Fadnavis at a BJP function, as per Indian Express, had said in private: Chot dil mein lagi hai (It is my heart that has been struck). It is not so much about losing the CM post, but the manner in which the Sena betrayed us that has left us wounded. I am not sure if it can be forgiven so easily.

Recently, Sharad Pawar said he had delivered a googly in 2019 to expose the power hungry BJP. The NCP supremo admitted he had met Fadnavis after the 2019 Assembly election results to form the government but later changed his mind.

If I changed my stand, what was his compulsion in taking the oath in the two days? That too in such secrecy, so early in the morning. Had we (NCP) supported the alliance, he would not have had to resign within two days. We made certain moves to expose to the public that they (BJP) can go to any extent to grab power. Maharashtra needed to see how uncomfortable he (Fadnavis) would become without power, senior Pawar was quoted as saying by the newspaper.

ALSO READ: With Ajit Pawars entry, is BJP trying to replace Eknath Shinde as Maharashtra CM?

Fadnavis revenge

Fadnavis revenge came last year when he successfully engineered a split in Shiv Sena. When the rebellion by Shinde and some other Sena MLAs resulted in the collapse of the Thackeray-led MVA government in June 2022, the BJP came to power again in Maharashtra.

Fadnavis had to be contented with the deputy chief minister post as the BJP top brass picked Shinde as the chief minister. But by taking his revenge, Fadnavis showed the BJP central leadership in Delhi  which was reportedly upset with him after the breakup of the Sena and BJP alliance  his worth.

Last November, Fadnavis told Marathi news channel SAAM TV in an interview: If anyone betrays me, I will take revenge. Yes, I have taken revenge.

Elaborating on his philosophy of badla, the deputy chief minister said, If those who enjoyed power with you, those who were with you round the clock, and those who were elected along with you, directly stab you in back, then to stay alive in politics, you need to give it back to him. Otherwise, you cannot survive in politics, reported Indian Express.

His remarks had drawn angry reactions from the MVA partners, with Shiv Sena leader Sanjay Raut saying that the politics of revenge had never been a part of Maharashtras culture.

ALSO READ: Me punha yein: Devendra Fadnavis, Maharashtras comeback man

Fadnavis answer to Sharad Pawars googly

Fadnavis has had his way again with Ajit Pawar rebelling against his uncle and becoming a part of the Shinde-led government.

As per an Indian Express article in February, Fadnavis was counting on the lingering animosity between Ajit and Sharad Pawars loyalists after the 2019 episode.

Even after their failed bid in 2019, Ajit Pawar and Fadnavis have tried to refrain from attacking each other. The BJP leader earlier this year told local channel TV9 Marathi, To be fair, Ajit Pawar kept his promise of an alliance. But he was forced to withdraw.

#WATCH | Maharashtra Deputy CM Ajit Pawar along with NCP leaders Praful Patel, Chhagan Bhujbal and Lok Sabha MP Sunil Tatkare met Dy CM Devendra Fadnavis in Mumbai today NCP leader Sunil Tatkares daughter & MLA, Aditi Tatkare was inducted into the Shinde-BJP cabinet yesterday pic.twitter.com/TU8dYP6rqD  ANI (@ANI) July 3, 2023

Not only has Ajit Pawar defied his uncle with his revolt, but he has also staked a claim to the NCPs symbol. The entire NCP is with me and we have joined the government as NCP. We shall also fight all the future polls  civic, Assembly, and parliament elections  under the same name and symbol, the junior Pawar said after taking oath as the deputy chief minister on Sunday (2 July).

On Pawars recent googly remarks, Fadnavis retorted sharply, saying it hurt Ajit Pawar more than him. I am happy that I could bring out the truth from Sharad Pawar. But even this is a half-truth. I will also throw a googly and the rest of the truth will come out. My one googly made him speak this. Pawar bowled the googly but it knocked out his nephew.

When asked how an intact MVA will affect the BJP in the elections, the Maharashtra deputy chief minister told Indian Express in an interview on 28 June that one doesnt know what will happen to them (MVA alliance) in the one-and-a-half years that are left.

On being asked if everything is fair in politics, Fadnavis said, as per the newspaper: We want to do ethical politics but I cant promise that I do ethical politics 100 per cent. We have to compromise sometimes. I do too. Idealism is good, but if youre kicked out, who cares?

With inputs from agencies

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Ajit Pawar has created an upheaval in Maharashtra politics. In a big move, he switched sides and joined the Shiv Sena and Bharatiya Janata Party government. The Nationalist Congress Party (NCP) leader took oath as deputy chief minister and eight other party leaders were sworn in as ministers. The Sharad Pawar-led NCP has filed a disqualification petition against Ajit and eight other dissidents with the Maharashtra Assembly Speaker Rahul Narwekar.

The party has also written to the Election Commission of India conveying that Sharad Pawar, who founded the NCP in 1999, is the head of the party and that there is no change in leadership. It also stated that party leaders from all districts stand firmly with the senior Pawar.

Maharashtra NCP president Jayant Patil said that the party had moved a disqualification petition against Pawar and eight others who took oath as ministers in the Eknath Shinde-led government. Taking a jibe at the rebels, he said that nine MLAs cannot be a party. The petition for disqualification was filed after instructions from Sharad Pawar, according to sources.

On Monday, the Discipline Committee of NCP on Monday passed a resolution against Ajit Pawar and eight other rebel MLAs. These defections were done in such a secretive manner, without the knowledge or consent of the Party President, amounts to the desertion of the party which in turn invites disqualification, it read.

But can Ajit Pawar be disqualified? We take a look at the anti-defection law.

Also read: Ajit Pawars Maha shocker: What led him to revolt against his uncle Sharad Pawar?

How much support does Ajit Pawar have?

While nine NCP leaders, including Ajit Pawar, took oath as ministers in the Maharashtra government, sources in the BJP say that the rebellion faction claims to have the support of more than 40 out of NCPs 53 MLAs in the state Assembly. To avoid the provisions of the anti-defection law, Ajit will need the support of more than 36 MLAs.

Now the Maharashtra Cabinet consists of nine ministers from the BJP, nine from the Shiv Sena and nine from the NCP. This includes Chief Minister Eknath Shinde and the two deputy CMs Devendra Fadnavis and Ajit Pawar. The Cabinet can have up to 43 members.

In a press conference, where Ajit appeared with senior party leader Praful Patel, he claimed he has the support of almost the entire NCP. He also staked claim to the party name and symbol, a move that is reminiscent of Eknath Shindes rebellion and split from the Shiv Sena.

Ajits next move would be to approach the Election Commission and prove that he is the original NCP. Until then, he faces disqualification under the current laws, according to a report by NDTV.

Also read: Explained: How Ajit Pawars move echoes Sharad Pawars 1978 rebellion

What is the anti-defection law?

The Tenth Schedule of the Constitution seeks to prevent political defections which may be prompted by a reward of office or other similar consideration. A member is said to have defected when they have abandoned a position or association, often to join an opposing group.

The Rajiv Gandhi government introduced the law in 1985 via the 52nd constitutional amendment. It intended to deter the evil of political defections by legislators motivated by the lure of office or other considerations and set out provisions for the disqualification of elected members on the grounds of defection to another political party. It was brought in after various state governments were toppled by party-changing MLAs after the 1967 general election.

The law applies to both the Parliament and state Assemblies.

When can an MP or MLA be disqualified?

Lawmakers and legislators can be disqualified if: 1) If an elected member gives up his membership of the party voluntarily. 2) If the MLA or MP abstains from voting in the house, going against the partys direction. 3) If any independently elected member joins any political party. 4) If a nominated member joins any political party after six months.

When does anti-defection law not apply?

The law has a provision to protect rebel legislators from disqualification. When first introduced, it had the one-third rule: Defection by one-third of the elected members of a political party was considered a merger and they would not be subjected to disqualification.

However, in 2003, the then-Atal Bihari Vajpayee government via the 91st Constitutional Amendment made a change. It requires at least two-thirds of the party members to avoid facing anti-defection charges during a split. The exemption from disqualification, if one-third of the members form a separate group, was removed.

Who is the decision-maker?

Speakers have the authority to decide on instances of defection, as granted by the legislation. However, concerns have been raised during debates over the law that involving speakers in defection cases could create unnecessary conflicts for their office.

What will happen in Ajit Pawars case?

This remains to be seen. While Ajit Pawar claims to have the support of 40 of the 53 NCP MLAs, it is a fast-developing situation.

With inputs from agencies

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Theres a lot of buzz around Hollywood director Greta Gerwigs new movie  Barbie  a fantasy comedy film based on the famous doll. Now, the movie starring Margot Robbie and Ryan Gosling has gained even more attention after authorities in Vietnam have banned it.

The movie, set for a release on 21 July, has upset officials for a depiction of a map that shows Chinas claims to territory in the South China Sea.

Vi Kien Thanh, director general of the Vietnam Cinema Department under the Ministry of Culture, Sports, and Tourism, said on Monday that the ban was decided by the National Film Evaluation Council. We do not grant licence for the American movie Barbie to release in Vietnam because it contains the offending image of the nine-dash line, said the state-run Tuoi Tre newspaper, also citing Vi Kien Thanh.

Also read: Blame Barbie: How the world ran out of pink paint

Row over nine-dash line

Barbie, the movie, according to a senior official, depicts the offensive image of Chinas nine-dash line. For the unaware, the nine-dash line is used in Chinese maps of the South China Sea to show its territorial claims.

China often uses the U-shaped nine-dash line to illustrate its expansive claims over most of the resource-rich sea, often to the displeasure of Hanoi, which also claims parts of the waterway.

The nine-dash line was denounced in a 2016 international arbitration ruling by a court in The Hague but Beijing does not recognise the ruling.

Incidentally, Barbie isnt the first feature in Vietnam to get into trouble over the depiction of the nine-dash line. DreamWorks animated film Abominable was banned for the same reason in 2019 and Sonys Unchartered, starring Tom Holland, suffered the same fate last year.

In 2018, Vietnam cut a scene from the romantic comedy Crazy Rich Asians that featured a designer bag with a map of the world showing the disputed South China Sea islands under Beijings control. Last year, even Netflix was told to ditch episodes of its Pine Gap series over similar scenes.

Vietnam and China ties

Beijing claims most of the South China Sea through the nine-dash line, while Hanoi is among the several regional claimants to the Paracel and Spratly Islands. The dispute often gives rise to tense stand-offs at sea. There have been multiple incidents where China and Vietnam have had confrontations over these disputed territories, including clashes between naval vessels. China regularly uses its maritime militia to harass Vietnamese civilian and military vessels.

The United States has tried to take advantage of this situation and boost ties with Vietnam. In fact, President Joe Biden reached out to Vietnamese Communist Party chief Nguyen Phu Trong in late March, which was then followed by Antony Blinkens visit to Hanoi as Secretary of State in mid-April.

However, experts state that the US outreach to enlist Vietnam as an ally wont bear fruit as Hanoi dares not risk angering its larger neighbour. Zachary Abuza, a professor at the Washington-based National War College who focuses on Southeast Asian politics and security issues, told VOANews, China is much more important to Vietnam than the United States. Hanois worldview is far more aligned with Beijings than that of Washington.

With inputs from AFP

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The Lansdowne Cantonment Board in Uttarakhand has proposed naming Lansdowne town after 1962 India-China war hero Jaswant Singh.

According to sources, the resolution to rename the popular tourist spot after Singh was passed by the board at a meet chaired by its president Brigadier Vijay Mohan Chaudhary.

This comes after the defence ministry had sought proposals from all cantonment boards to rechristen places named during the British era.

But what do we know about the town? Why was it renamed after Lansdowne? And who was Singh?

Lets take a closer look:

The town and the British viceroy

The town was called previously Kalaun ka Danda  meaning a hill surrounded by dark clouds.

The town was named Lansdowne on 21 September, 1890,  132 years ago  after the then British viceroy Lord Henry Lansdowne.

As per Indian Express, Lansdowne was Viceroy of India from 1888 to 1894. The fifth Marquess of Lansdowne previously also served as Governor General of Canada, Secretary of State for War and Secretary of State for Foreign Affairs in the United Kingdom.

He also led the House of Lords.

He is infamous in India for his handing of the 1891 Manipur rebellion.

As per The Times of India, the town presently hosts the regimental centre of the Indian Armys Garwhal Rifles regiment.

The town is one of Uttarakhands most popular hill stations, as per the Hindu.

As per Indian Express, Lansdowne is a Category III cantonment town.

With a total area of 1503.8 acres, it had a population of 5,667 civilians and military personnel according to the 2011 Census.

Who was Jaswant Singh?

Singh hailed from Baria village in Pauri districts Beeronkhal area.

Singh in 1962 was deployed in the 4th battalion of Garhwal Rifles at Tawang in Arunachal Pradesh.

According to Indian Express, Singhs outfit during the war with China thwarted two Peoples Liberation Army attacks on their position.

When the PLA attacked again, they set up a medium machine gun close to Indian defenders positions and was unleashing round after round of fire.

Singh, using covering fire from Lance Naik Trilok Singh Negi and Rifleman Gopal Singh Gusain, managed to kill the five Chinese sentries and even seize the gun itself.

Negi and Gusain died and Singh was left seriously injured.

However, Singh stuck at his post even after his company withdrew.

According to Indian Express, Singh was assisted by two local girls  one of whom was killed and the other captured by the PLA.

Since 5am that day, the Chinese were attacking in waves. Rifleman Jaswant Singh along with others beat back two PLA groups. Then the Chinese started firing from an MMG from a close range. Jaswant Singh Rawat along with Lance Naik Trilok Singh Negi and Rifleman Gopal Singh Gusain tried to subdue the MMG. Rawat and Gusain, with covering fire from Negi, tried to seize the MMG. While returning, Gusain and Negi lost their lives. Rawat was severely injured. He was asked to go back. He fought with the help of two local girls, Sela and Noora. They were jumping on different sides of the bunkerThe Chinese army for 72 hours could not gauge how many people were there, Major Tushar Chaudhary told News18.

Singh eventually died in battle on 17 November at Tawang. He had prevented the Chinese troops from advancing for 72 hours.

According to News18, more than 300 Chinese soldiers died in this battle.

Singh was awarded the Maha Vir Charka  the second-highest gallantry award  posthumously.

A war memorial honouring Singh has been erected around 25 kilometres away from Tawang, according to News18.

The defence ministry continues to give Singh a pension and promotions as a sign of respect.

He is always with us. It is said that he guards his post even today. If any soldier while on guard falls asleep, Rifleman Jaswant Singh slaps him and asks him to do his duty, Major Chaudhary told News18.

Some oppose renaming town

While Uttarakhand chief minister Pushkar Singh Dhami has also said that British-era names that harken back to Indias colonial past will be changed, some remain opposed to the move.

An office-bearer, speaking to The Times of India on condition of anonymity, confirmed that some locals are against this proposal.

The Lansdowne Cantonment Board, in its proposal saying that renaming the town after the war hero would be a logical move, noted that some locals are against such a move. An office-bearer confirmed to The Times of India that some residents are against this proposal.

Some argue it would lead to a loss of the towns identity and affect tourism.

Lansdowne is a land of brave hearts and a well-known tourist destination. If its name is changed, it will lose its identity. Tourism, which is the main trade here, will be adversely affected. Its old name should be retained in public interest. I will soon send a proposal to this effect to the government, local BJP MLA Dilip Singh Rawat told PTI.

We, in the first place, want that this board to be dissolved. Rather than doing that, they are thinking to change the name of the place. This is wrong and unfortunate, Rawat told the Hindu.

This isnt the first time such a change has been opposed. A proposal to rename it Kalau Danda fell by the wayside. As did another proposition to rename it after Lord Subedar Balbhadra Singh.

On both occasions, the government had to step back in the face of disapproval from locals.

Indeed, former cantonment board member Rajesh Dhyani said residents should have been taken into confidence before sending such a proposal to the defence ministry.

Renaming the town is meaningless. What is needed is improvement in its infrastructure, added former cantonment board vice president SP Naithani.

With inputs from agencies

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South Korea has been struggling with a low fertility rate for years.

Now, President Yoon Suk-yeols government has moved to improve the fertility rate through a novel approach  by banning killer questions on exams.

But what are killer questions? And why is South Korea scrapping them?

Lets take a closer look:

What are killer questions?

South Koreas college entrance exams are said to be notoriously difficult.

More than half a million students sit the annual nine-hour test, known as suneung, which plays a crucial role in deciding a students college, career and even marriage prospects.

Killer questions, which cannot be answered by simply studying the curriculum taught at state schools, were meant to help distinguish top students.

According to The Telegraph, such questions have included contingency pricing from lawyers, as well as questions about equity capital and risk-weighted bank assets.

Students were also asked to conduct a hypothetical analysis of Piagets theory of cognitive development.

While such questions were meant to help distinguish top students, experts say such questions only add to the pressure that students and parents feel.

South Koreas ultra-competitive education system has been blamed for teenage depression and suicide rates which are among the highest in the world.

Why are they being blamed for low fertility rate?

According to The Telegraph, South Korea has the worlds lowest fertility rate.

Experts say one of the many reasons for this phenomenon  which has been ongoing for years  is the cost of raising and educating children.

Killer questions have created an arms race of extra educational spending as they flock to expensive private tutoring centres known as hagwons to get ahead.

According to The Telegraph, around 8 in 10 students attend now hagwons.

South Korea in 2022 spent 26 trillion won ($20.3 billion)  a record amount on private education.

This, despite the student population dropping, was a 10 per cent increase over 2021, as per the newspaper.

I was dumbfounded and angry, The New York Times quoted Kim Kwang-doo, a professor of economics at Sogang University in Seoul as saying. Is there a high school student who could solve problems that are this difficult without the help of top instructors at private academies?

South Koreas president has signalled his stance on the matter.

Topics that are not covered in the public education system must be eliminated from the Suneung, Nikkei Asia quoted Yoon telling education minister Lee Ju-ho in June.

Yoon further blasted such questions as extremely unfair and unjust.

Seeing this, people could believe education authorities and the private tutoring industry are in cahoots, Yoon added, as per The Telegraph.

Including questions that are not covered in the public school curriculum for the college entrance exam is no different than pushing students into private education, Lee was quoted as saying by Bloomberg.

I will do everything I can in my capacity as the education minister to exclude questions outside of the public education system to make the test a fair test, he earlier said in June.

Lee said officials should reflect on themselves for previously failing to address the tests difficulty, which he called the driving force behind explosive growth in private education.

While the government stood idly by, the pockets of cram schools got fatter, he added.

Big business

Private education is big business in South Korea.

According to Nikkei Asia, students on average spend around 700,000 won ($536 per month) on hagwon fees.

According to SCMP, there are around 85,000 hagwons across the nation.

The largest of the countrys schools, Megastudy, witnessed a 19 per cent jump in sales last year at 836 billion won (US$635 million) last year.

Meanwhile, its operating profits rose 36 per cent to 134 billion won.

Megastudy chief Son Ju-eun dismissed such accusations from the government.

The presidents statement is right in terms of its direction, one former government official who graduated from Seoul National University told Nikkei Asia. Korean universities are very difficult to enter, but once you get in, its easy to graduate. It would be better to make the entrance easier and the exit harder, like in the West, so students can enjoy a more fruitful life.

Broader plan needed

But not everyone is happy with the governments reform bid.

The government needs to come up with a broader plan that addresses the question of how to alleviate this excessive competition to get into a few of the best universities, Shin So-young, an activist at civic group The World Without Worry About Private Education, told Reuters.

SCMP quoted an 18-year-old high school student in Seoul, who is gearing up for the exam, as saying, I felt like I was struck by lightning only five months before Suneung.

It took me by surprise as Ive spent thousands of dollars for private tutoring for my kid to prepare him for so-called killer questions, a 62-year-old named Park told the outlet.

Park said he wanted his son to get into medical school.

A private maths tutor named Chang told SCMP, Now, just one mistake in Suneung could push you down from the top level to the third level, and change the entire course of your life, as there would be a lot of students who will receive almost perfect scores.

The Opposition Democratic Party of Korea has slammed Yoon with its chief Lee Jae-myung saying, The biggest risk to Korean education is President Yoon.

With inputs from agencies

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The Reserve Bank of India (RBI) on Monday informed that 76 per cent of the Rs 2,000 notes in circulation have been returned to banks, mostly through deposits.

The central bank on May 19 announced the withdrawal of Rs 2,000 notes in circulation and gave public time till September 30 to either deposit the currency notes in their bank accounts or get them exchanged.

According to the data received from the banks, the total value of Rs 2,000 bank notes received back from circulation after the announcement on May 19 is Rs 2.72 lakh crore up to June 30, 2023.

Consequently, Rs 2,000 bank notes in circulation as at the close of business on June 30 stood at Rs 0.84 lakh crore, the central bank said in statement.

Now, 76 per cent of the Rs 2,000 banknotes in circulation as on May 19, 2023 have since been returned.

Data collected from major banks indicates that out of the total bank notes in Rs 2000 denomination received back from circulation, about 87 per cent is in the form of deposits and the remaining around 13 per cent has been exchanged into other denomination bank notes.

(With inputs from PTI)

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Tech has been at the centre of Indias rapid development in the last 9 years. While we transitioned from 4G to 5G in this decade, the next decade will be even more crucial for us  this seems to be the central theme of the announcement of Bharat 6G Alliance.

Indias forthcoming 6G technology will leverage the foundation laid by 5G and offer enhanced capabilities such as improved reliability, ultra-low latency, and affordable solutions. It is expected to provide speeds nearly 100 times faster than 5G, enabling the development of new communication applications. These technological advancements will not only revolutionize user experiences but also have a profound impact on economies and peoples lives worldwide.

To that effect, the IT ministry made some important announcements regarding Indias semiconductor industry as well as 6G and the telecom industry.

Indias tryst with 5G

Minister of State (MoS) for Communications, Devusinh Chauhan, stated that India has witnessed one of the swiftest rollouts of 5G networks, with the establishment of 2.70 lakh 5G sites within a span of nine months.

Chauhan expressed his unwavering confidence that, under the leadership of Prime Minister Narendra Modi, India will emerge as a global leader in 6G technology.

He emphasized the vital role played by telecom connectivity in Indias socio-economic development, attributing this progress to the telecom reforms introduced by the Cabinet. Chauhan acknowledged the significant contribution of Union Telecom Minister Ashwini Vaishnaw in successfully implementing these reforms.

6G In India

According to IT Minister Ashwini Vaishnaw, our goal should be to ensure that at least 10 per cent of the intellectual property rights (IPR) related to 6G technology originate from India. He also mentioned that we should be prepared to implement the next wave of telecom reforms within the next few weeks.

Vaishnaw stated that India is among the top three ecosystems globally in terms of 5G development. The government and industry are now working together as collaborators instead of adversaries. The Telecom Manufacturing PLI (Production Linked Incentive) scheme has been successful, with companies already becoming exporters. Additionally, Vaishnaw noted that an increasing number of countries are interested in importing from India.

Data Protection Bill

IT Minister Ashwini Vaishnaw also announced that India will soon introduce the Data Protection Bill. Vaishnaw announced We are ready with the Data Protection Bill. Hopefully, we will table it in the Monsoon Session of Parliament.

The objective of the draft bill is to establish guidelines for handling digital personal data in a way that respects individuals rights to safeguard their personal information, while also acknowledging the necessity of processing such data for lawful reasons.

India Semicon

Today, approval has been granted to five companies for chip design under the Design Linked Incentive Scheme, announced IT Minister Ashwini Vaishnaw. The minister added that Microns involvement has sparked a renewed sense of optimism regarding Indias potential as a semiconductor hub.

Furthermore, Micron will start their production of semiconductors in India soon, announced Minister Vaishnaw. Microns semiconductor factory has got land allocation in Gujarat. It is hoped that the groundbreaking ceremony of the factory will happen in the next four to six weeks, he said.

This is a developing story and is being updated

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by Oliver Waters

Panic about runaway artificial super-intelligence spiked recently, with doomsayers like Eliezer Yudkowsy prophesising that, if current progress continues, literally everyone on Earth will die.

In a way, hes right. Humanity will probably die out as technology progresses, but not quite in the depressing way he imagines. Humanity after all, refers to two distinct things. The first is our biological species  homo sapiens. The second is our collective cultural existence  the beliefs, attitudes, and creations that make us truly who we are. Our biology is merely a platform for our humanities to dance upon, and it is a platform that transhumanists wish to eventually supersede.

If all goes well, we will design and build better bodies and neural systems that more seamlessly integrate with our information technologies. On this trajectory, there will be no grand dichotomy between humans and Artificial General Intelligences. All persons, whether descended from apes or designed in a lab, will be constantly upgrading their cognitive systems to be ever wiser and sturdier.

The first big step on this journey will involve scanning your brain for all relevant neural information, which would then be loaded into a synthetic brain, attached to a comfortable artificial body. Science fiction has already imagined the countless benefits of existing in such a digital, computational brain. Practical immortality is at the top of the list, given you can download your backed-up state of mind into a new body if you happen to be hit by a train or are notoriously assassinated.

The prospect of truly immersive virtual reality also has profound economic implications, given it makes the scarcity of most physical resources a thing of the past. It would be the ultimate step in de-materialisation  providing ourselves with better, richer experiences with far fewer resource requirements and impact on the natural world.

Its understandable to cringe at this sales-pitch now, given the rudimentary current state of simulation technology. Who wants to put on a clunky headset to watch glitchy, pre-recorded footage of Mark Zuckerberg on his private beach, gesturing at you to join him in the MetaverseTM? No one. Its lame, and there are no pina coladas. But in a simulation truly indistinguishable from the physical world mediated via an artificial brain, the drinks will taste just as good, if not better.

Our hardy synthetic brains and bodies could also survive and thrive in any physical environment, be it deep underwater or outer space, and would allow us to teleport anywhere at light speed by transmitting our neural data to wherever another suitable artificial body is stationed.

This is all hugeif true. There are obviously many unknowns about this speculative transition. What precise level of detail of brain information will need to be copied over to preserve ones personality? And what kinds of other materials, if any, could support consciousness?

But perhaps the most troubling of all concerns is whether the artificial version of you will really be you. Indeed, all these wonderful benefits would count for nothing if you simply died and someone else entirely was created in your place.

A film that captures this quandary nicely is The Prestige (2006) by Christopher Nolan, in which magician Robert Angier asks the famous inventor Nikola Tesla to build a special device. This machine creates an exact copy of its user nearby, leaving their original body intact. Angier exploits this to carry out a spectacular magic trick, where he suddenly disappears amid electric sparks only to reappear instantly up on the theatre balcony. Unbeknownst to the audience, the version of him on stage has dropped down through a trapdoor into a flooded glass box, which then is automatically locked. As this version of him drowns in agony, the one on the balcony receives a standing ovation.

Angier decides to go through with this trick again and again, because he values the looks of awe on his audience members faces more than he fears the risk of really being the man drowned in the box. The question the film poses is whether you would make the same gambit. Do you think you would survive performing this illusion?

Obviously your original self and your artificial copy are not strictly identical, since they exist in different locations and are made of different physical stuff. But of course, by this standard, no two things in the universe are ever identical. This means we need to let go of the mathematical concept of identity (i.e., 1=1) if were going to talk sensibly about identity in the real, physical world.

Take the example of two five-dollar bills. There are some senses in which they are the same, and others in which they are not. The bills are identical with respect to paying for things, but they each have different histories and precise atomic compositions. Similarly, when thinking about personal identity over time, we need to distinguish between the senses in which you and a copy of you are the same, and the senses in which they are different, and decide which senses matter to us and which do not.

After the moment of your copys creation, you both clearly have different perspectives on the world. Does this one difference make you meaningfully different people? Imagine instead that ordinary you goes to sleep, and while you are unconscious, someone transports you to Japan. When you wake up in Tokyo, are you a different person? No. Youre the same person, just with a different perspective.

Many object to the idea that you and your copy only differ with respect to perspective, because of course, your copy is made of entirely different stuff! An obvious problem with this response is that your ordinary self does not consist of the same stuff over time, given the components of most human cells get replaced every seven or so years. Yet we tend to think we remain the same person over that period of time.

Defining something in terms of its precise physical components makes sense in certain contexts. For instance, the question of whether a painting was the one that Claude Monet painted is very important for art dealers. A forgery can be perfect, in the sense that it replicates the exact appearance, smell and feel of an artwork, but it is still worthless in the eyes of collectors. They care about the history of the actual atoms that compose the forgery. Did that splash of red paint come off the very brush of the master?

Some of us, however, dont care much about the origins of art, and would enjoy a perfect forgery just as much as the original. For us, it is about the experience that the art affords us, not the higher social status of owning something rare.

This, I suggest, is how we should think about our minds.

A mind is best conceived as information stored and processed in a physical nervous system. This means that just like a novel or computer program, we shouldnt try to define a self in terms of its physical components. Rather, we should define it in informational terms. Bodies and brains are certainly necessary for our physical instantiation as selves, but the specific ones we employ today are likely not the only possible ones.

In his monumental 1984 book Reasons and Persons, Parfit argued for what he called a reductionist viewpoint on personal identity, which entailed that all that matters for your survival is psychological connectedness and continuity, not any physical connection with your prior body. That is, so long as you share the memories, dispositions and other psychological properties with your past self, you should be considered to be the same old you.

Parfits approach addresses the problem of ones personality changing gradually over the years. As a 60-year-old, you might not be strongly psychologically connected to yourself at age 10  indeed you might remember hardly anything of that version of you. But so long as you have a strong psychological connection to who you were at age 50, and that 50-year-old version of you has a similarly strong connection to who they were at age 40, this chain of personal identity continues all the way back to your youngest conscious self. Most importantly, Parfit thought this way of thinking about a persons identity over time made far more sense than the singular Cartesian ego whose identity must be all or nothing.

Parfits dismissal of physical connectedness is still controversial among philosophers today. Philosopher Jeff McMahan, a long-time colleague and friend of Parfits, still suspects that some kind of physical connectedness is necessary for personal survival. In a recent podcast, McMahan expressed his intuition that a mere copy of himself continuing to exist elsewhere is no consolation for the death of his original body and brain. He would be comfortable however with his atoms being disassembled and then reassembled perfectly back as they were. In other words, he thinks that our personal identity depends upon the very same atoms coming along for the ride.

This strikes me as an untenable view given atoms of the same type are truly identical, so it shouldnt make any difference whatsoever whether some or all of the atoms in our bodies are replaced with equivalent ones. Zooming out from the atomic scale, it seems likely that even different chemical properties could give rise to the same higher-level psychological properties, due to a phenomenon called multiple-realizability. There seems to be no reason in principle why biological neurons are the only possible substrate for thoughts and feelings.

The philosopher Susan Schneider also doesnt buy the kind of view Parfit is selling. In her 2019 book Artificial You, Schneider argues against the patternist conception of a person, as promoted by Nick Bostrom and Ray Kurzweil, which has many of the same implications as Parfits view. Schneider rules out this position by imposing a requirement of spatiotemporal continuity upon a person for them to be considered identical to their past self. It offends Schneiders intuition that a persons mind could jump instantaneously across time and space between bodies like an internet signal. In her view, to remain the same mind, you must enjoy a smooth, physically continuous trajectory through space-time.

The problem with Schneiders move is that whether our journey through life is physically continuous depends on the scale at which you examine it. Yes, from our intuitive human range of experience, it looks as though we move through the world in one fluid motion. But if you were to zoom right down to the quantum level of quarks in our neurons and muscle fibres, you would see entities discontinuously jumping around  sometimes acting like particles and sometimes acting like waves. This makes Schneiders requirement of spatiotemporal continuity seem totally arbitrary  a product of our parochial scale of observation.

If these counterarguments dont stack up, why are people so reluctant to give up on a strictly physical conception of personal identity?

Evolution has not equipped our instincts to find multiple instances of ourselves plausible. By analogy, consider the modern practice of being injected with a vaccine with a sharp syringe. For most people, no amount of rational deliberation on the scientific validity of vaccination can overcome the visceral emotional response of being jabbed in the arm. This feeling of personal violation is a product of millions of years of evolving in environments where such events were uniformly bad for us.

Similarly, the highly intuitive perspective that there can only ever be one physical continuation of me will be very hard, if impossible, to shake. But we should try our best to consider the issue from a more objective viewpoint. Many of us may end up deciding to go ahead with the brain-copy procedure despite our strong intuitions to the contrary, just as most of us still grit our teeth and bear a painful injection to defend ourselves from nasty infections.

One intuition pump that can help assuage such doubts is the gradual replacement hypothetical transition scenario. While you remain fully conscious throughout, I start replacing each of your neurons one by one with artificial ones. We converse happily for the duration, and you never feel a thing. Are you still the same person after this long operation? If you think youre not, the challenge is to describe the exact moment you somehow switched from being the real you to being a mere forgery. This seems impossible to do. And its unclear why replacing all your neurons at once should make any difference to the outcome.

Those of us who do choose to take this leap will certainly be generating some very strange moral and legal conundrums.

A scientific or causal analysis of the situation is very comfortable with gradations of you-ness. There is no essential, singular, authoritative version of you  the Cartesian ego. This means there is no reason there cant exist many, many copies of you with slight variations, which we simply label you1, you2, you3etc. In the context of morality and law however, we cant deal in infinitesimal shades of grey. We think in terms of individuals, each with certain rights and responsibilities.

For instance, lets say we can scan your brain non-invasively and create a copy of you in an artificial body. You might naively think that you can both go off and live your lives as distinct people. But then you try withdrawing money from your bank account, only to discover that half the funds have been drained. That damn copy! He knows your passwords, address, date of birth, and your mothers maiden name. You immediately file a lawsuit to get the money back, claiming you are the rightful owner of the bank account.

As the original, biological version, you may argue that only you are the real you. After all, you inhabit the body and brain that signed the contract with the bank and that acquired the money in the first place. Your copys lawyer counters, in true Parfitian style, that these details are not essential to personal identity. What matters is the information of which your mind consists. That information was perfectly copied in the procedure, so your copy shares your exact personal identity.

The judge sides with your copy, and you are required to relinquish half your wealth to them. You curse yourself for ever making that stupid decision to copy yourself. You thought you could get more stuff done by having someone else on your team with the same values and goals. Instead, you just created an annoyingly autonomous version of yourself with increasingly divergent interests. But theres no time for all this self-berating, because youre due in the next court session over who is entitled to be married to your wife and to have custody over your kids.

Things get very messy when there are multiple versions of you running around, because our most fundamental concepts in morality and law have hitherto been premised upon everyone having a singular physical identity. Should you be held responsible for crimes your copy commits? Well explore this in a future essay, but the short answer is yes. Merely having no memory of committing the crime will be no excuse when you and the perpetrator share the same core identity.

Artificial brains promise extraordinary benefits but will also challenge our deepest intuitions about who and what we are. Getting our heads around the implications now will help us steer wisely through the next great technological age: the fusing of humans and machines.
NCP chief Sharad Pawar on Monday rejected speculation that his nephew Ajit Pawars rebellion has his blessings. Further he stated that several leaders from Ajit Pawar camp are in touch with him.

Many from there (Ajit Pawar) camp called me and said that their ideology is not different from that of NCP and they will take a final call in the next few days, Sharad Pawar said.

NCP chief Sharad Pawar, says "Many from there (Ajit Pawar) camp called me and said that their ideology is not different from that of NCP and they will take a final call in the next few days" pic.twitter.com/AnjbSxesC3  ANI (@ANI) July 3, 2023

While addressing a press conference in Satara, Sharad Pawar also said he has launched a statewide tour to strengthen the NCP and boost the confidence of party workers, unfazed by actions of a few leaders.

On Sunday, Ajit Pawar led a vertical split in the NCP to become the deputy chief minister. Eight other NCP leaders were also sworn in as ministers in the Eknath Shinde-BJP government.

Asked whether Ajit Pawars rebellion on Sunday had his blessings, the NCP chief said, It is a mean thing to say. Only those with a mean and low intellect can say this.

I have set out on a tour of the state and galvanize the cadre. They should not feel disillusioned with what some leaders have done, Sharad Pawar said.

(With inputs from agencies)

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Hitting out at the BJP, Chhattisgarh Chief Minister Bhupesh Baghel on Monday said that just a few days ago NCP leaders were being investigated by the probe agencies and the moment they joined the BJP, they got washed in the Washing machine  and are now ministers in the Shiv Sena-BJP cabinet in Maharashtra.

Congress uses the phrase washing machine to suggest that the BJP uses Parliament and central agencies to wash scams of its friends or those who side with the party.

Yesterday a few more people got washed in the washing machine, said the Chief Minister referring to NCP leader Ajit Pawar, and eight other party MLAs who joined the Eknath Shinde government on Sunday.

Baghel said that the BJP was targeting Opposition parties through central agencies and strangling democracy.

through central agencies, they first broke Shiv Sena, they were investigating Shiv Sena leaders and then suddenly investigation was closeda few days back, NCP leaders were being investigatedthe moment they left NCP and joined BJP, they are now ministers and have become part of the cabinet (Shinde-BJP cabinet) & they took the oaththrough central agencies, they are strangling democracy, the Chief Minister added.

The NCP, founded by Sharad Pawar in 1999, suffered a vertical split on Sunday after his nephew Ajit Pawar broke ranks and joined the Shiv Sena-BJP government as deputy chief minister.

Eight other NCP MLAs, including staunch Sharad Pawar loyalists like Chhagan Bhujbal and Dilip Walse Patil, were also made ministers.

With inputs from agencies

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Taking a swipe at Bhartiya Janata Party (BJP) after former Nationalist Congress Party leader Ajit Pawar ditched the party and was sworn in as Maharashtra deputy chief, Rajya Sabha MP Kapil Sibal said that BJP first attacks the corrupt and then embraces.

On Sunday, Ajit Pawar took oath as the deputy chief minister of Maharashtra in a sudden move that is expected to change political equations in the state ahead of the Lok Sabha elections in 2024.

First attack the corrupt, then embrace the corrupt. First, guarantee their investigation, then get a warranty for their support. Investigation in suspension. Henceforth ED, CBI: No tension. Sounds familiar? Mother of democracy at work! Sibal said in a tweet.

Ajit Pawar, the nephew of NCP chief Sharad Pawar, was joined by eight other MLAs, some of whom were close allies of Sharad Pawar, in taking oath as ministers in the Shiv Sena-BJP coalition government in Maharashtra.

Earlier, Sibal had taken a swipe at Prime Minister Narendra Modi on Sunday over the Ajit Pawar revolt, saying probably this is the mother of democracy that Modi talked about in his address to the United States Congress.

Meanwhile, Maharashtra NCP president Jayant Patil on Sunday said his party has moved a disqualification petition against the leaders including Ajit Pawar.

We have filed a disqualification petition with the speaker of the Assembly, and we will send hard copies as soon as possible. This disqualification petition was filed against nine leaders, said NCP leader Jayant Patil.

He added, They didnt inform anyone that they were leaving the party, which is against the NCP. We have also written a letter to the Election Commission of India. We are not accepting this; these nine leaders didnt inform us before doing this (leaving the party).

Earlier today, Sharad Pawar reached the district of Satara to address a rally, the first since the split occurred within NCP.

With inputs from agencies

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Police arrested four men on Sunday for celebrating a birthday party and bursting crackers on the Noida elevated road.

The arrest were made after the video widely surfaced on social media in which a group of several men can be seen firing crackers in the middle of the highway.

The ruckus was created on Friday night and the accused were identified as Lalit Sharma (22), Deepak Patel (25), Shekhar Chaudhry (27), and Tarun Sharma (26). Police has seized the SUV in which the accused traveled to the elevated road.

Amit Kumar, station house officer, Sector 24, said that the accused were identified are the residents of Noida Sector 24, who works at a private company.

The SHO mentioned that in the middle of the road, a group of 6-7 men were shouting at the top of their voices, firing crackers when someone recorded their video and made it viral on social media.

As it was a cognizable offence and they were creating a ruckus in the middle of the night, the accused were traced through the cars registration number, said SHO Kumar.

The police further mentioned that the SUV belonged to Lalit, and he told to police that they were celebrating his brother-in-law Taruns birthday.

Shakti Mohan, additional DCP Noida, said that the car was seized and a case under Section 151 CRPC (arrest to prevent the commission of cognizable offences) was registered against them at Sector 24 police station.

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Indian Space Research Organisation (ISRO) Chairman S Somnath on Monday said that the launch day for Chandrayaan 3 for a soft landing on the moon is July 13.

We will be able to do a soft landing on the moon. The launch day is July 13, it can go upto 19th, ISRO Chairman S Somnath said on the launch of Chandrayaan 3 while speaking to ANI.

He said that the launch date would be July 13. However, it may go up to July 19.

Earlier on June 28, Chairman of the Indian Space Research Organisation S Somanath revealed that Chandrayaan 3 testing is complete and the window of opportunity for the launch is aimed between July 12 and 19.

Currently, the Chandrayaan 3 spacecraft is fully integrated. We have completed the testing and also mated with the rocket compartment Currently, the window of opportunity for launch is between July 12 and 19 and we will take the earliest possible date, maybe the 12th, maybe the 13th or maybe the 14th. We will announce the exact date after all the tests are completed, Somanath told ANI.

Earlier in June, he also shared an update on Aditya-L1 Mission which is Indias first mission to study the Sun and said ISRO is aiming for August end as the target for its launch.

The ISRO chief also shared his views on Artemis Accords and believes that it is an opportunity for Indian industries that are working in the space sector to work with the US companies.

We are looking at Artemis Accord as a political engagement with the US. It is a statement of Intent that when the US is proposing collaborative work in the space sector, especially the exploration of outer planets in a very cordial atmosphere between different nations, we agree with that. So it has a big statement. We would like to work with the US, especially on technologies which are high-end and space is one of them. It will open opportunities for Indian industries who are working in the space sector to work with the US companies that are equally working in the space sector, he mentioned.

So the advancement of electronics, new processors, the centre takes place in the US and this access to this new technology to the Indian company is so important for them to innovate and bring up value which will give an opportunity to market them in the US market. This is precisely the objective of the US. So we would like to make sure the Indian companies contribute to the US space program. Its not a great thing now. So, the earlier the US sees it as an opportunity because Indian companies have the technological strength today, they have cost-effectiveness and they have a lower development cycle time which they want to bank on. So it is the purpose that it is jointly developed this whole accord signing is for the benefit of the US as well as the benefit of India, he added.

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One person has been beheaded and three others were shot dead by rival groups in Manipur where communal violence continue unabatedly since May 3.

The situation in Manipur remained volatile on Sunday after a man, identified as David Thiek was killed and beheaded in Langza  a Hmar-Kuki village  in Churachandpur district.

As per locals, several village residents fled after attack began in Langza. However, a few village volunteers stayed back. Thiek was one of the volunteers who was killed during the attack.

A resident informed that Langza has around 23-24 villages and they were asked by Hmar chief to vacate the houses and take important documents after rival groups started burning houses. However, to prevent our houses from getting looted, we had kept three to four young men to guard the villages, he added.

Also, three people, identified as Ningombam Ibomcha (34), Naorem Rajkumar (26) and Haobam Ibocha (44), were killed in an incident of firing in Khoijumantabis Bishnupur district in the valley, at the border with the hill district of Churachandpur.

Police said the incident took place when armed miscreants coming from adjoining hills fired at the village volunteers who were stationed in Khoijumantabi hills.

With the recent deaths, the total number of people killed since the start of Manipur violence has gone up to at least 137.

Five more people were injured in the bloodiest clash on Sunday after which the Bishnupur district administration in Manipur slashed the curfew-relaxation period there from 12 hours to a five-hour window of 5 am  10 am.

National Highway blocked for two months reopens

Meanwhile, Kuki rebel groups announced they would lift the two-month-long blockade of the national highway in Manipurs Kangpokpi district. The reopening of NH-2 connecting Imphal with Dimapur in Nagaland would enable smooth flow of essential supplies that were hit since 3 May.

In early June, the blockade was temporarily lifted after Union Home Minister Amit Shah made an appeal during his visit to the state. It was, however, reimposed a few days later when three people from the Kuki-Zomi community were killed in Kangpokpi district on June 9.

With inputs from agencies

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The Modi government is a government of delivery and thats the difference, External Affairs Minister S Jaishankar said Monday as he visited a Homeopathy hospital in the Capital.

Hailing the Centres efforts to bring development to the country, including Delhi, Jaishankar said people could see who has brought change and has delivered and that he was confident of coming back to power in 2024.

This time around I am visiting a national institute on Homeopathy in Delhi, the benefit of which people of Delhi, as well as those of neighbourinbg areas such as Hatyana and Punjab are gettingThese are real the changes that are taking place, Jaishankar said.

Institutes have been built, people are coming and getting cured, people see and observe the change, Jaishankar added.

I will sum up Vikas Yatra in one word that is delivery This is the government of delivery, the foreign affairs minister said.

Real changes are taking place under the leadership of PM Modi. Development does not mean just laying a foundation stone and forgetting about it. This is the government of delivery; other governments are the governments of speeches. We have faith that the people will see the deliveries, a confident Jaishankar asserted.

#WATCH | EAM Dr S Jaishankar, says Real changes are taking place under the leadership of PM Modi. Development does not mean just laying a foundation stone and forgetting about it. This is the government of delivery, other governments are the govt of speeches. We have faith that pic.twitter.com/KivxNXOxT6  ANI (@ANI) July 3, 2023

Last time, Jaishankar had paid a visit to the esteemed All India Institute of Ayurveda (AIIA) along with other BJP leaders.

Speaking on the occasion, EAM Jaishankar had highlighted the global shift towards preventive measures witnessed since the onset of the pandemic. He had emphasised, The World Health Organization (WHO) has recommended the establishment of a global center for traditional medicine to promote the holistic concept of wellness on a global scale. India, recognizing the importance of this responsibility, has taken concrete steps by establishing the Global Institute for Traditional Medicine in Jamnagar, Gujarat. We wish to remind the residents of Delhi of the remarkable transformation witnessed in the past 9 years. This institute stands as a living testament to the countless lives it has positively impacted. After being on hold for over 20 years, the project has not only been initiated but continues to bring healing to thousands of lives every day. It is due to the visionary leadership of Shri Narendra Modi that Ayurveda has achieved its current prominence."

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A day after the Nationalist Congress Party (NCP) received a major blow following Ajit Pawars departure from the party, chief Sharad Pawar on Monday left for Karad town located in the district of Satara.

He is being accompanied by his wife Pratibha Pawar, Rajya Sabha member Vandana Chavan and NCP spokesperson Ankush Kakde. Pawar will pay a visit to the memorial of Maharashtras first chief minister Yashwantrao Chavan.

Following this, the NCP supremo will address a rally in Karad.

We will go to Satara where we will pay obeisance at the tomb of Late Deputy Prime Minister Yashwantrao Chavan. Hundreds of thousands of workers are ready to go to Satara with Sharad Pawar, Pune City NCP President Prashant Jagatap told ANI.

This will be Pawars first public event since his nephew Ajit Pawar left the party for BJP. On Sunday, Ajit Pawar took oath as the deputy chief minister of Maharashtra in a sudden move that is expected to change political equations in the state ahead of the Lok Sabha elections in 2024.

Meanwhile, Maharashtra NCP president Jayant Patil on Sunday said his party has moved a disqualification petition against the leaders including Ajit Pawar.

We have filed a disqualification petition with the speaker of the Assembly, and we will send hard copies as soon as possible. This disqualification petition was filed against nine leaders, said NCP leader Jayant Patil.

He added, They didnt inform anyone that they were leaving the party, which is against the NCP. We have also written a letter to the Election Commission of India. We are not accepting this; these nine leaders didnt inform us before doing this (leaving the party).

With inputs from agencies

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NCP working president and Ajit Pawars cousin Supriya Sule said on Sunday that the changes within the party will not have an impact on the Opposition unity, hours after Ajit Pawar took the oath of office as deputy chief minister in the Eknath Shinde government.

Addressing a press conference late night in Mumbai, Sule said her father and Nationalist Congress Party (NCP) chief Sharad Pawars stature will rise further.

Our credibility will only rise after this, she said.

She said that whatever happened is painful.

Sharad Pawar treated everyone like a family and he is our senior leader, I dont think speaking after his statement will be correct. His response was we are living in a democratic country where everyone has the right to speak for themselves and keep their points. Ajit Pawars move is his own decision and point of view, said Sule.

My relationship with Ajit Pawar will not change, he will always remain my elder brother. We will rebuild the party, she added.

She also said that Ajit Pawar may have different views, but she can never fight with her elder brother and that she will always love him as a sister.

Maharashtra | Whatever happened is painful. Sharad Pawar treated everyone like a family and he is our senior leader, I dont think speaking after his statement will be correct. His response was We are living in a democratic country where everyone has the right to speak for pic.twitter.com/QkOyJlFC7u  ANI (@ANI) July 2, 2023

Ajit Pawar on Sunday joined the Shiv Sena-BJP government in Maharashtra as deputy chief minister, while eight other party leaders were inducted as ministers.

Sule, whose elevation as party working president last month is said to have triggered Ajit Pawars revolt, said since 2019 when he first joined the short-lived government led by Devendra Fadnavis to 2023, she has matured a lot with the responsibility of the party.

She said she will not mix personal and professional relationships.

I can never have a fight with my brother, she said.

I am boring, steady and not impulsiveEmotional relationships and professional work are two different things. I will.never mix the two, she said.

To a question on how her day was in view of the hectic political developments, Sule said it was a challenging day like many other days.

To a question on what transpired at the meeting at Devgiri, Ajit Pawars official residence in Mumbai in the morning, Sule said what was discussed between her and her brother will remain between them only.

The Baramati MP said the party will work with renewed vigour for strengthening the organisation and for the welfare of the state and the country.

To a question on whether any disciplinary action would be taken against those who joined the government, she said, Let the story unfold. It has not even been 12 hours.

Nationalist Congress Partys senior leader Ajit Pawar on Sunday met some party leaders and MLAs at his official residence in Mumbai.

Sule said Ajit Pawar may have different views. We both are mature enough to compartmentalise our lives on personal and professional fronts, she said.

Nobody knows how many MLAs are with Ajit Pawar, Sule said.

When asked if she was talking to any of them, she said, I talk to them every time. Every MLA of NCP is precious. We have love, affection and respect. We have lived as a family, she said.

With inputs from agencies

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Twenty-seven and with four kids, Seema Ghulam Haidar allegedly from Pakistan crossed two international borders to illegally enter India, ostensibly for love of an Indian man who she had met on the popular gaming app PUBG.

Now, she is in the net of Noida Police. She could well be a spy, cops say.

According to reports, Seema sneaked into India across the porous Nepal border about a month ago without any valid documents.

She had come looking from Pakistan for one Sachin, a resident of Greater Noidas Rabupura. Reportedly, Seema landed into the police dragnet before she and Sachin could finally tie the knot.

It so transpired that the lawyer the duo engaged to validate their marriage ratted them out to the police.

The Noida Police, upon receiving the tip from the lawyer, got alerted and started investigating Seema and Sachin.

But, in a major twist to this rather unusual love story, the two allegedly made good before the police could raid their rented accommodation. This was Saturday.

The persistent cops, however, traced the duo Monday to a nearby area. Since the arrest, the police have been probing if this is a genuine Gadar story, or a tale of deception and honey-trapping and spying.

Allegedly, earlier, Sachin had told the lawyer that he had met the Pakistani woman playing PUBG. Both became close friends within a few days of chatting and playing the online game together.

According to sources who talked exclusively to Firstpost, Seema had described herself as a resident of Karachi; that her brother works in Pakistan army. She had on herself a Pakistani passport and an expired visa for Nepal with which she had managed to enter India with her four children to unite with her online lover and get married to him.

Sachin, meanwhile, had reportedly told the lawyer that he wanted to marry Seema. Sachin, reportedly, had developed cold feet when Seema insisted on roaming around in Delhi for site-seeing. He suspected that the two would be caught.

By the filing of this report, Noida Police had detained the woman and was questioning her. According to the police, Central intelligence agencies have also been roped in to gather more information on the woman.

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by Muna Nassir

Sitting on the sill, head slightly resting on the pane, The Dubliners in hand, I look out the window, much like the eponymous Eveline, at the start of this particular short story. The darkness, in this case, is ready to invade not an avenue with concrete pavement and rows of redbrick terraced houses in Dublin, but an empty playground with bright coloured slides, swings, seesaws, and a roundabout in South Manchester. My vantage point allows me an eye level view of the giant oak sitting at the closest corner of the park, across the street. Unlike the slanted view from the living room, here, I can almost see the tiniest ferns sprouting on its bark. The oaks tip points towards the sky with its thick branches spread out like the arms of a dervish in a trance. Bearing the weight of the subject in mind, I sigh in, inhaling the evening breeze. My nostrils detect not the smell of dusty cretonne but rather the scent of fallen leaves imbued with the myriad hues of autumn. From green to lime, to orange, red, maroon, and brown. The tree sits on a sideway, a space that seems to have been added as an afterthought, giving the park an irregular shape. Basking in another worldly silence, the oak exudes a stillness befitting the days retirement for the night.

At the opening of this very short story, Eveline, who is just over nineteen, is presented as rather wearied. We read in the opening lines, she was tired. Torn between the dread and drudgery of life at home with her abusive father on the one hand and the prospect of a new life in Buenos Aires as Franks wife, a man she scarcely knows and hardly loves on the other she finds herself at a forking path. The first mention of her father paints him often hunting, Eveline and her siblings as small children, in from their playtimes in the avenue, with a blackthorn stick. She looks out the window into the evening, reminiscing, as she weighs both her options. She reviews the familiar objects in her home, from which she had never dreamed of being divided and the possibility that she might never see them again registers her dilemma for the first time. In the next paragraph, she asks herself if consenting to go away to begin with was even wise. From the names of the families in the neighbourhood, to descriptions of the streets, the language from the outset, in true Joycean style, is specific and local to Ireland. The children of the Avenue used to play together in that field  the Devines, the Waters, the Dunns, little Keogh the cripple. In this short story Joyce, who is known to have said, in the particular is contained the universal explores universal sentiments and emotions  the tug and pull of the comfort if not the security of the familiar, juxtaposed with the fear and the alluring potential of the unknown that arise when one is standing in between two divergent roads in ones life.

This short story takes me back to a starlit evening in Asmaras Embasoira Hotel on a mild evening in May 2014. A book launch. The chairs decked with white satin covers and bow ties laid out in the main hall. I sit at the back. The guest speakers take turns to laud the young writer and his literary career spanning over fifteen years. I stand in a long queue and when my turn comes the writer, Akhedr Ahmedin, signs my copy of his debut collection of short stories The Remnant with the words, thank you for coming today. I hope we will get a chance to debate and share our ideas of writing soon. We never got the chance to do that. I left the country not long afterwards and Akhedr a few years later. He currently lives in Kenya with his family and works as a journalist for BBC Tigrinya.

Much like Eveline the unnamed soldier in Akhedr Ahmedins, short story The Remnant, which is also the title of the collection, finds himself in a liminal space both physically and in his mind. The setting, where the soldiers squad is garrisoned, is an almost entirely evacuated village, in the aftermath of a war. It has been two years since the start of the 1998 border war between Eritrea and Ethiopia. Both countries, in spite of the recent peace deal, are caught in between war and peace. It is uncertain times. Yet, there is hope that it would soon be time for the soldiers to return home and thus, the first sentence opens with the soldier wondering how much he must have changed and if he would be able to take anything with him for his mother. He is clearly traumatised. I could not bear the wound in my soul, the war spared nothing and no one.

The soldier further describes the horrors he endured. Having witnessed youth destroyed, humanity buried, love shattered, and dreams thwarted, every fabric in my being is pierced through and through, threadbare. However, he seems to have found the answer for the latter part of his question in the opening sentence  in a young woman of great beauty he sees walking back from his post as a night sentinel. The first time he sees her, the lazy sun is resting its rays on her face. He is taken by the beauty in her eyes, the long hair, half plaited half resting on her shoulders, and her traditional chiffon long dress. The soldier marvels at how hard it had become to keep his eyes away from her and wonders, if in giving her his love, his soul would finally heal. Smitten, he starts to contemplate how  the absurdity of war which he struggled to make sense of, if waged in defence of the beautiful instead of a piece of land would begin to feel justified. In the days that follow, the young soldier is torn between divulging his feelings to his beloved fantasising incessantly about the details of their soon to come shared love life and keeping the thoughts to himself.

In these short stories, both writers, Akhedr and Joyce, remain removed and impartial. They present the main characters thoughts as they occur in the main characters minds. Unlike in Eveline, however, in The Remnant the reader is inside the soldiers and not the young womans mind. The narrative follows his train of thought while the beautiful womans interiority remains inaccessible. Observed and looked at only from the outside, her silence in the short story both in speech and thought, looms heavy. Meanwhile, Eveline, still looks out the window, oscillating between the merits of staying at home and the tempting prospects of her married life with Frank. She asks herself, what would they say of her in the Stores [her place of work] when they found out that she had run away with a fellow? She flits through her memories of what she considers happy at home but remembering how on edge Miss Gavan at work is towards her, Eveline, like a boat rocked by heavy storms, tilts to the other side. Like the young soldier she begins to fantasise, how people would treat her with respect, once she is married to Frank and how she would not be treated as her mother had been. She then remembers her fathers intemperance and mistreatment and almost concludes, hers was a hard life. Yet standing at that point in her life where she is just about to put the past behind her, and start afresh, Eveline realises, she did not find it a wholly undesirable life.

A white butterfly flutters into the room through the tilted opening of the window at the top and steals my attention. The evening is still lingering, painting the park across the road in the golden hue of twilight. The butterfly moves across the room, landing briefly on the double bed in the middle and then continuing to flutter towards the white chest of drawers at the opposite end. It comes back to the window and attempts to find the opening again, crushing softly against the cold glass, a few times. Torn between the desire to scoop the butterfly in my hands to release it and the hope that it would somehow find its own way out, I sit still. In its imprisonment the butterfly reminds me of the exiled self, mentally existing elsewhere while the body is in the here and now. As though straddling two lanes at once. A sort of a Frankenstein, with the different parts patched in random patterns a far cry from the hybridised homogeneous self that some like to fantasise about. Sometimes walking down the streets the serene curves of an absent-minded smile form on my face. The trigger would not be from the here and now but somewhere distant, perhaps the tender memory of the sassiness in the octogenarian neighbour, Adey Brchiqos voice, as she mixes peoples gender in her speech or the memory of my grandmothers blunt loving replies. A citizen of neither the here nor the there but that of the muted space in between.

While Eveline oscillates, rocking back and forth between thoughts of staying and leaving, the soldier in The Remnant, lives his days and nights for a glimpse of his beloved, which further fuels his fantasies. His squad leader reprimands him for his shortening temper, and he is regarded with suspicion. The besotted soldier, eventually, risking punishment for mutiny stays behind and diverts to his beloveds house. She is sat outside and as he gets close, he finds only a shell of the beauty he had discerned from afar. When you get close you only see the outline of her beauty, she looks disheveled, her body parched and her skin grimed. He tries to strike a conversation. He is met with a deep silence. Her mother comes out to the threshold and tells him that her daughter is a remnant of those butchered and traumatised by war. And that she has been mute, ever since the sexual assault she suffered at the hands of the invading soldiers. There is an unbridgeable pause. The mother adds, that is, save the primordial cry she let out when it was happening. She further adds, my son, do you have a cure for a torn woman?

The darkness has deepened in the avenue. A reminder that very little time had elapsed from the opening scene. Eveline is still standing by the window, holding two letters in white envelopes for her father and her brother. She remembers the nice things her father did for her growing up, albeit very few and far in between, and soon hears a street organ, which takes her back to the promises she made her mother the evening she died. To look after her two younger siblings and to keep the family intact. She remembers her mothers life, which she calls, a life of common place sacrifices. And the gibberish, Derevaun Seraun!, that her mother repeats with foolish insistence on her deathbed, eventually, compels Eveline to leave. The next we see of her; she is at the station with Frank. The boat that would transport her into this future which Eveline, hopes would be filled with life if not love, is described as a black mass. In the final scene, she is in an emotional turmoil, all the seas of the world tumbled about her heart. Just before she is about to embark the boat, Eveline, who had been silent until this point in the story (whilst Miss Gavin scolded, her father cursed, and Frank sang) sends a cry of anguish.

Perhaps the magnitude and type of trauma the two characters endure are not suitable for comparison, but this is not so much about comparing the different types of trauma as it is about an attempt to analyse and understand writing difficult female experiences through the lens and work of male writers. Having reached the delicate point where language buckles under the full weight of the oppressive trauma, both writers instinctively give in to an utterance that predates language itself. A primordial cry of anguish. Language comes unbound, unfettered, fluid, and not dissimilar in manner to what Cixous calls ecriture feminine. At this point, both Akhedr and Joyce, rightly refrain from lending their voices to both the unnamed young woman and Eveline respectively. Both female characters are protected by an impenetrable silence, beyond the reach of phallocratic male writing. After the release of the cry, there is a return to a sort of a childlike state that seems to precede notions of the self and identity. In the final sentences, Joyce writes of Eveline, she set her white face to him, passive, like a helpless animal. Her eyes gave him no sign of love or farewell or recognition. Likewise, after the assault and the cry that follows, the young woman in The Remnant, is hurled into a catatonic state from which she never mentally returns. Akhedr describes her mother cry out, my poor daughter, I dont know whats overtaken her after that last cry.

I stand looking out the window. My nostrils do not catch the smell of dusty cretonne but the cool breeze of an autumn night. The flight of a part of the self to an unknown space beyond any reach, that comes with the release of an anguished cry, in both short stories, brings an idea of the release of the suppressed feminine self to my mind. A final act of defiance. I think of silences and in-between spaces. Imperceptible, like the line separating memory from fantasy. Fleeting and subtle, like the pause between two utterances. I think of the last step at a forking path, the last grounding tip before the leap. I scoop the white butterfly in my hands and release it into the park that is now in total darkness. I breath out.
The Parliamentary Standing Committees meeting on Uniform Civil Code (UCC) began on Monday.

Sushil Modi, the head of the Parliamentary Committee, said that the meeting of the committee is non-political as the panel has members from all political parties.

Meanwhile, Union Minister Piyush Goyal had earlier mentioned the UCC is the need of the hour that a law should be made by uniting and including all the people of the country and the Supreme Court has also endorsed many of its verdicts.

We have a full majority in Rajya Sabha and I think there are many leaders from other parties who want that the country should unite. I think many parties will support BJP on Uniform Civil Code. We will get cross-party support for this, Goyal told ANI.

Last week, UCC received nearly 8.5 lakh responses on its public notice.

In more than a dozen cases, the Supreme Court has said that the UCC should be implemented as soon as possible. The court has repeated this time and again, Modi said.

He added, I dont understand why the same age for marriage cant be fixed for all. It is being propagated that the UCC will affect religious customs and rituals. If criminal law is the same for all people in the country, then why cant civil law be that way?

Bharatiya Janata Partys strong push for a Uniform Civil Code in the country has unruffled the Congress as also the larger bunch of Opposition parties since they see this as a ploy to shore up the Hindu vote bank ahead of the next years Lok Sabha elections in which PM Modi will seek a third term.

With inputs from agencies

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Prime Minister Narendra Modi chaired a meeting of the Council of Ministers chaired at the Pragati Maidan Convention Centre in New Delhi on Monday.

According to sources, certain ministries will likely provide a report on the various central programmes and how they were carried out. They said that such conversations had previously taken place at Council of Ministers sessions.

According to the reports, there could be a significant political message from the prime minister in light of the upcoming Lok Sabha elections and elections to five states later this year.

The government is putting up the agenda for the Parliaments monsoon session, which will start on July 20. To put the government in a corner, the opposition is expected to bring up the UCC issue.

Prime Minister Narendra Modi held a meeting with Union Home Minister Amit Shah, BL Santosh and BJPs National President JP Nadda last week. The BJP, for the first time, will hold region-wise meetings of the three zones- the eastern, northern and southern  on July 6, 7, and 8.

The BJP is gearing up for assembly elections in Madhya Pradesh, Rajasthan, Chhattisgarh, Telangana and Mizoram to be held later this year as well for the Lok Sabha elections.

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Madras High Court, on Sunday, passed an order to reinstate a bus conductor who had been dismissed by the Tamil Nadu State Transport Corporation (TNSTC) nearly eight years ago, citing a revenue loss of Rs 7.

The judge expressed strong disapproval of the harsh punishment given to the conductor, saying that it shook the conscience of the court.

The incident took place in 2015 when the Tamil Nadu State Transport Corporation (Villupuram Division) conducted a surprise inspection on a bus.

During the inspection, an extra sum of 7 rupees was found in the collection bag of Ayyanar, the bus conductor.

Subsequently, on December 10, 2015, the corporation terminated Ayyanar, attributing the alleged revenue loss to the extra amount found.

In response to his dismissal, Ayyanar approached the Madras High Court seeking justice.

Advocate S. Elambharathi represented him in court and took up the case pro bono, without charging any fees.

During the hearing, Justice PB Balaji criticized the corporations decision, deeming it inconceivable that such a minor amount could have caused substantial revenue loss to the corporation.

The judge strongly believed that the punishment inflicted on Ayyanar was grossly disproportionate to the alleged offense, which deeply troubled the courts conscience.

The corporation had accused Ayyanar of negligence in his duties, asserting that he failed to issue a ticket to a female passenger despite receiving payment for it.

During the investigation, it was also found that there was an excess of seven rupees in Ayyanars collection bag, further incriminating him for harming the corporation and being an irresponsible employee.

However, Ayyanars lawyer, Elambharathi, refuted these allegations, arguing that his client had indeed provided tickets to all the passengers, including the lady in question.

The woman had taken a short-distance journey and was issued a five-rupee ticket. Unfortunately, she misplaced the ticket during the ride, and out of fear during the ticket check, falsely accused the conductor of not issuing one to her.

Furthermore, Ayyanar had to return two rupees to another passenger, leading to the presence of the additional amount in his collection bag.

The court found Ayyanars defense to be convincing and sided with him and ordered the TNSTC to reinstate Ayyanar within a week.

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Supreme Court on Monday sought a detailed status report from Manipur government on the measures taken to curb ethnic violence in the state and posted the matter for hearing on 10 July.

The court also directed the government to submit a report on rehabilitation camps for homeless and violence-affected people, deployment of forces, and law and order situation in the state.

Appearing for the Centre and Manipur government, Solicitor General Tushar Mehta appearing earlier told the Supreme Court that the situation in the state is improving, though slowly.

More than 100 people have lost their lives in the ethnic strife between Meitei and Kuki communities in the northeastern state so far.

Meiteis account for about 53 per cent of Manipurs 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.

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A day after Praful Patel, senior Nationalist Congress Party (NCP) and close aide of Sharad Pawar, ditched the party to accompany Ajit Pawar and eight other party lawmakers in joining BJP-Shiv Sena alliance government in Maharashtra, his photo was removed from the Nationalist Student Congress office.

Praful Patels photo frame from the Delhi office was removed by NCP student wing national president Sonia Doohan who shared the reason of the move.

We removed Praful Patels photo frame and all other leaders who left NCP since they are not part of the NCP family anymore, Doohan said.

On Sunday, Patel joined Ajit Pawar in his big rebellion when the latter led a vertical split in his NCP to become the deputy chief minister of Maharashtra.

Patel had on Sunday lauded Ajit Pawars decision to join hands with the Maharashtra government and said it was a conscious decision made by a majority of MLAs in the party".

As per reports, Patel is likely to be inducted into Prime Minister Narendra Modi's Cabinet. The Cabinet reshuffle is on the cards and a meeting in this regard is expected to take place on Monday evening.

Patel was elevated to the post of NCP's working president along with Sharad Pawar's daughter Supriya Sule on the 24th Foundation Day of the party in June.

With inputs from agencies

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In the aftermath of the Ukraine war, India-Russia trade has witnessed a steep hike, said External Affairs Minister S Jaishankar, underlining that Indias diplomatic relations were there to proffer the interests of the Indian people.

Our (Indias) trade before the Ukraine conflict was about 12-14 billion dollars, our trade last year was 40 billion dollars, said Jaishaknar while interacting with youngsters at the National Institute of Technology (NIT), New Delhi

Russia turning more towards Asia

Jaishankar said Russias main economic partners were the Western countries, but after the Ukraine conflict, that had drastically shifted. Russia is now turning more and more towards Asia, he said.

The EAM said people in India should de-hyphenate Russias relations with India and other countries. We should keep our own relationship with Russia going and see how the interest of the Indian people is best served, Jaishankar said.

#WATCH | External Affairs Minister Dr S Jaishankar says, Russias main economic partner was the Western countries, after the Ukraine conflict that way was closed. Russia is turning towards AsiaOur trade before the Ukraine conflict was around 12-14 billion dollars, our trade pic.twitter.com/rFHGR4lDQx  ANI (@ANI) July 3, 2023

How India's foreign policy decisions affect daily lives?

During the interaction, the foreign minister explained how India's foreign policy decisions touch all of us in our daily lives.

"Without a good foreign policy, the petrol price would be much higher, the cooking oil price would be much higher, the (price of) the next iPhone you buy would be much higher," the minister said.

Why India continues to import oil from Russia?

Despite Russia's invasion of Ukraine last February, India has strongly defended its decision of importing crude oil from Moscow. Russia, however, has been at the receiving end of US-led sanctions regime by Western countries.

Jaishankar explained: India has a per capita income of $2,000 and it is the obligation of the government, as well as its moral duty, to ensure that people of the country get the best deal possible.

Last week, Jaishankar had said Indias strong relations with Russia or any other country should not become an obstacle in equally strong relations with the US.

It is not in our (Indias) interest to be tied down to exclusive relationships, Jaishankar said, responding to a question of divided loyalties and India-US relations.

Because we have a tradition of strong ties with Russia, that should not become a burden or an obstacle to an equally strong relationship with the United States, the minister had said.

With inputs from agencies

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The political situation currently prevailing in Maharashtra can happen in Bihar soon, Republican Party of India leader Ramdas Athawale claimed on Monday.

Athawale, the Union Minister of State for Social Justice and Empowerment of India, made the comments following former NCP leader Ajit Pawars defection to the Bhartiya Janata Party. In a sudden move that jolted the politics of Maharashtra, Ajit Pawar, nephew of Nationalist Congress Party (NCP) chief Sharad Pawar, was sworn in as the Deputy Chief Minister of the state on Sunday.

A similar situation (like currently in Maharashtra) can arise in Bihar soon as some JD(U) MLAs are upset with Nitish Kumar. In UP, Jayant Chaudhary can join with NDA as is currently upset with Akhilesh Yadav, Athawale said.

He added, There is a possibility that differences arise between MLAs of the Samajwadi Party.

He also made a similar prediction for Akhilesh Yadav-led Samajwadi Party, saying that his MLAs are unhappy under his leadership.

Ajit Pawar, the nephew of NCP chief Sharad Pawar, was joined by eight other MLAs, some of whom were close allies of Sharad Pawar, in taking oath as ministers in the Shiv Sena-BJP coalition government in Maharashtra.

Meanwhile, Maharashtra NCP president Jayant Patil on Sunday said his party has moved a disqualification petition against the leaders including Ajit Pawar.

We have filed a disqualification petition with the speaker of the Assembly, and we will send hard copies as soon as possible. This disqualification petition was filed against nine leaders, said NCP leader Jayant Patil.

He added, They didnt inform anyone that they were leaving the party, which is against the NCP. We have also written a letter to the Election Commission of India. We are not accepting this; these nine leaders didnt inform us before doing this (leaving the party).

With inputs from agencies

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Opponents of UCC for obvious political reasons are trying to project this as anti-minority. But they have no ground to stand the test of reason. The UCC is not against social practices. These practices in fact solidify relationships and grant a lot of sanctity to both the couples.

The UCC is to ensure that social practices do not become a tool to subjugate the other sex to a life of perpetual inequality. Religion or the fear of God should not be used to force servitude. Both men and women are equal but men have used their guile and physical force to keep women in the backyards. Leading ideologies are the ideologies given by men.

Whether the country should or should not have a Uniform Civil Code (UCC) for its citizens? There is no doubt that we must have. The Constitution mandates under Article 44 and suggests a unilinear direction. The Supreme Court of India has expressed itself so many times that the UCC is needed for larger national integration but it has left the task on the legislature to take a decision on this.

The ruling BJP which has a decisive mandate at the Centre is committed to implementing the UCC. Anytime soon the UCC may become a reality the way Article 370 has been scrapped. Like in the case of scrapping Article 370, there is a larger consensus for enactment of the UCC. The BJP would do a great national service by implementing a Uniform Civil Code.

However, let us not talk about the constitutional and legal aspects. There have been plenty of strong arguments. Let us try to discuss some of the human issues associated with the issue. The Hindu System has witnessed many reforms due to legislative determination that was not shown in the case of other communities such as Muslims. Naturally Muslims would resist the changes strongly since no society welcomes change without resistance.

The first issue that comes to mind is why should there be inequality of sexes. There are many Hindu families as well where male children frown upon the issue of giving equal share in fathers property to female siblings. This is despite the law being in place and repeated clarifications by various courts.

Both men and women have one vote and separate identities. Hence, they must have equal rights. If a man can do something, a woman can also do the same. This seems to be the reason for giving them entry to armed forces too. We dont have to look to a foreign country to get inspiration for this. Our own Subhas Chandra Bose had women army regiment called Rani of Jhansi regiment in the Indian National Army (INA). Mahatma Gandhi had favoured participation of women in public life. Long before that women used to participate in public affairs during the Vedic period.

When a reasonable person talks of the UCC, he or she does not oppose social practices, as for example Hindu women putting vermillion on their heads as a mark of their married status. While one can always argue why Hindu men should also not put vermillion as a sign of their marital status, this does not impinge on the legal status that makes both men and women as equal.

In some parts of Bihar and other places, Muslim women too put vermillion on their heads since this gives them the protection due to moral values inculcated through generations that they must be respected. The guarantee is of society in general. But as the moral code is breaking so is the practice of putting vermillion.

The talk of equality is always in the context of marriage, divorce, inheritance and adoption. How you marry is not important but it must be registered to ensure safety of women in terms of civil rights and her protection from being subjected to criminal acts. In absence of registration of marriage, a woman is vulnerable. At times, even men are vulnerable if women become vindictive and lodge a case or rape.

Similarly divorce needs to be registered so that the rights are protected and also people should know when any person is going to remarry. The knowledge about past records would help people make better judgments about their own prospects. One can divorce by saying Triple Talaq as per Islamic tradition but the divorce must be registered to ensure that the rights of both the spouses obtained by previous marriage have been honoured. The Court must stand guarantee of this insurance.

The case of Triple Talaq may look hilarious. If men are allowed to have Triple Talaq why not women. They should also have the same right. The law must investigate whether khula divorce can be considered as granting equal rights to Muslim women. So, the process of divorce must go through a due process of law. Some Muslim women may accept the inherent inequality in the process of divorce for them due to social conditioning or the fear of God, but law cannot discriminate and they must get the legal option.

An interesting discussion would be to give Muslim women the right to have four husbands in the same way Muslim men have. How can there be inequality? Not that every Muslim practices this. Most of my Muslim friends are monogamous. But the very existence of this liberty provides for inequality. Either dont have this or have it for both male and female.

Muslim men have no right to oppose changes in the personal law taking refuge in religion. After all, they have accepted the secular criminal law that does not make a distinction between criminals based on their religions or practices. Taliban or ISIS kind of justice handed out under Islamic law cannot be accepted in civilised society. Same is the case with civil code. They must understand that tides of equality and liberty would blow away medieval practices that show humanity in poor light.

Nobody is arguing that you marry as per secular code. One can marry through the rituals of Hinduism, Islam or Christianity but the marriage once performed must be registered to show supremacy of the State. Law is above everything since it can take the lives of individuals too. Similarly, divorce can happen if two people accept it. But it must come before the law and the competent court must ensure that no pressure was exercised to succumb to the social practice.

Same is the issue with inheritance. If men and women are equal, they must inherit property equally. If a woman wants to voluntarily surrender her rights, she can do so but her rights to inherit cannot be denied. The law on adoption and child custody needs a fresh look since there are many matters pending before the Court and one who suffers the most is the child. It is the welfare of the child and not the emotions of a parent that should decide custody.

The writer is the convener of the media relations department of the BJP and represents the party as a spokesperson on TV debates. He has authored the book Narendra Modi: The Game Changer. The views expressed are personal.

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The second meeting of opposition parties has been postponed to 17 and 18 July. The announcement of new dates comes day after NCPs Ajit Pawar joined Eknath Shinde-led government in Maharashtra and took oath as deputy chief minister of the state.

As per reports, Ajit Pawar and eight other party lawmakers who joined the Maharashtra government, were miffed with NCP chief Sharad Pawars decision to join forces with Congress Rahul Gandhi during the first opposition meet in Bihars Patna which was held last month.

Ajit Pawar and Chhagan Bhujbal, among other leaders, could not bear that senior leaders like Sharad Pawar might be willing to move forward under the leadership of Rahul Gandhi, a report by ToI quoted sources as saying.

After a hugely successful all-opposition meeting in Patna, we will be holding the next meeting in Bengaluru on 17 and 18 July, 2023. We are steadfast in our unwavering resolve to defeat the fascist and undemocratic forces and present a bold vision to take the country forward, Congress General Secretary KC Venugopal tweeted.

After a hugely successful All-Opposition meeting in Patna, we will be holding the next meeting in Bengaluru on 17 and 18 July, 2023. We are steadfast in our unwavering resolve to defeat the fascist and undemocratic forces and present a bold vision to take the country forward.  K C Venugopal (@kcvenugopalmp) July 3, 2023

Earlier, Sharad Pawar said the next opposition meet will be held in Bengaluru on 13 and 14 July. Those dates were said to be clashing with the Assembly sessions in a few states.

The first such meeting of opposition parties was held in Bihar's Patna on 23 June.

In the inaugural meeting earlier in Patna, top Opposition leaders, including Pawar, Bihar Chief Minister and Janata Dal United (JDU) chief Nitish Kumar, Congress's Mallikarjun Kharge and Rahul Gandhi, and West Bengal CM Mamata Banerjee, among others, had resolved to put up a united fight against the BJP government at the Centre in next year's Lok Sabha election

Meanwhile, launching a scathing attack on BJP over the recent political event in Maharashtra, Venugopal said the development will not affect the Maha Vikas Aghadi (MVA) coalition.

"PM Modi made a big allegation recently against the NCP leaders for corruption and now we saw this drama. It is a clear sponsored game of ED and their agencies. It will not affect MVA," Venugopal said.

"We will fight against BJP more aggressively. This is not going to affect opposition unity, this is NCP's issue. Sharad Pawar is the tallest leader of the party and he will be able to handle the situation. Some leaders changing the party does not mean that the supporters of the party and other members will go with them," he said.

With inputs from agencies

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Nationalist Congress Party (NCP) president Sharad Pawar on Monday sacked Praful Patel and Sunil Tatkare from party for anti-national activities.

I, as the National President, Nationalist Congress Party hereby order removal of the names of Shri Sunil Tatkare and Shri Praful Patel from the Register of Members of NCP Party for anti-party activities, Pawar tweeted, a day after his nephew Ajit Pawar and eight other NCP MLAs joined BJP-Shiv Sena coalition government in Maharashtra.

I, as the National President, Nationalist Congress Party hereby order removal of the names of Shri Sunil Tatkare and Shri Praful Patel from the Register of Members of NCP Party for anti-party activities.@praful_patel @SunilTatkare  Sharad Pawar (@PawarSpeaks) July 3, 2023

Patel held the post of NCP's national working president, while Tatkare was the party's national general secretary.

The removal of Patel and Tatkare came moments after NCP working president and daughter of Sharad Pawar demanded their disqualification for indulging in "anti-party activities" in connection with the induction of Ajit Pawar and eight MLAs in the Eknath Shinde government.

Tatkare, whose daughter Aditi Tatkare was made a minister, and Patel were present at the oath taking ceremony in Raj Bhavan on Sunday.

"I write with great urgency to inform you that two Members of Parliament of Nationalist namely Praful Patel and Sunil Tatkare, have acted in violation of our constitution, rules of our party and have also indulged in anti-party activities by facilitating and spearheading swearing of the oath of nine MLAs as cabinet ministers of government of Maharashtra," Sule said in a letter addressed to Sharad Pawar.

She further said that Patel and Tatkare acted in complete violation of NCP's direction and principles as they "openly made statements to this effect before the media".

"This decision of the 2 (two) Members of Parliament to support the 9 (nine) MLAs has been taken without the permission of the party president (Sharad Pawar) and without taking all members into confidence," the letter read.

Sule further said the behaviour of both Patel and Tatkare was abundantly clear that they no longer share the aims and ideology of the NCP.

"They have acted in direct contravention of the party constitution and rules to further their own personal ambitions. Their actions are also a direct betrayal of the mandate given by the electorate and party," Sule said.

Earlier on Monday, NCP sacked three party leaders - divisional NCP chief Narendra Rathod, Akola city district chief Vijay Deshmukh and state minister Shivajirao Garje - for attending Ajit Pawar's oath-taking ceremony.

This act (attending Ajit Pawar's swearing-in ceremony) is against party discipline as well as party policy," NCP said in a statement.

On Sunday, Ajit Pawar took oath as the deputy chief minister in the Eknath Shinde government. Eight other party lawmakers were also sworn in as ministers.

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GAC Aion drives NEV industry growth in Lancang-Mekong region

10:59, July 03, 2023 By Cai Hairuo, Ning Yuying ( People's Daily Online

Representatives from the 2023 Lancang-Mekong Cooperation Media Summit visit the Guangzhou Automobile Group in Guangzhou, south China's Guangdong Province, on June 30, 2023. (People's Daily Online/Ning Yuying)

Chinese new energy vehicles (NEV) are gaining popularity in Thailand, potentially paving the way for more Chinese automobile brands to enter the Thai market, according to Chanchai Pratheepwatanawong, chief reporter of Nation TV, Thailand. His comments came during a visit to Guangzhou Automobile Group (GAC), a prominent Chinese automobile company based in Guangzhou, south China's Guangdong Province.

In alignment with the Belt and Road Initiative, the Guangdong provincial government organized an economic and trade delegation to engage with business communities in ASEAN countries from June 23 to July 2. The aim was to foster trade and investment cooperation. On June 28, the delegation arrived in Bangkok, Thailand, with GAC Aion being the only automotive company to sign cooperation contracts with local businesses.

Representatives from the 2023 Lancang-Mekong Cooperation Media Summit visit the GAC Aion Intelligent Ecological Factory in Guangzhou, south China's Guangdong Province, on June 30, 2023. (People's Daily Online/Ning Yuying)

During the visit, Nguyen Xuan Dan, chief of the News Department of Vietnam Parliament Television, had meaningful exchanges with GAC Aion personnel. He noted that Aion is on track to establish a headquarters for the Southeast Asian market in Thailand. "China has great potential for electric vehicle cooperation, especially in the Lancang-Mekong region. This headquarters will soon broaden the company's reach to other countries after its establishment, and we hope to see more Chinese NEVs appearing in the Southeast Asian market," said Nguyen.

Representatives from the 2023 Lancang-Mekong Cooperation Media Summit visit the GAC Aion Intelligent Ecological Factory in Guangzhou, south China's Guangdong Province, on June 30, 2023. (People's Daily Online/Ning Yuying)

In recent years, China's NEV industry has developed rapidly. From January to May, China surpassed Japan in automobile exports, reaching nearly 1.76 million units, including 457,000 NEVs. China houses the world's largest NEV market and is at the forefront of new energy technologies worldwide.

After entering the Thai market, GAC Aion intends to use its Thai subsidiary as a Southeast Asian hub to boost its investments and initiate factory setups along the Lancang-Mekong River. This strategy aims to propel the NEV industry in the Lancang-Mekong region.

Representatives from the 2023 Lancang-Mekong Cooperation Media Summit visit the GAC Aion Intelligent Ecological Factory in Guangzhou, south China's Guangdong Province, on June 30, 2023. (People's Daily Online/Ning Yuying)

The 2023 Lancang-Mekong Cooperation (LMC) Media Summit took place in Beijing on June 27, attracting over 130 representatives from related departments and media outlets from the six Lancang-Mekong countries. The LMC media delegation, aiming to promote exchanges among the people of the six countries through media cooperation, and to narrate the Lancang-Mekong story more effectively, visited various locations in China, including local enterprises, industrial parks, and communities. The group toured Guangzhou Automobile Group on June 30.

(Web editor: Hongyu, Wu Chengliang)
by Mark Harvey

Ive mostly escaped the selfie photo culture, not out of some virtuous modesty, but because I generally look like a confused mouth-breathing moron in photos. So selfies are more of an indictment for me than something I want to post on Instagram. If I photographed like a Benicio del Toro or George Clooney, all bets would be off. And before I offend and get canceled by any mouth breathers, I am part of the mouth-breathing family due to a deviated septum. At full rest, I sound like one of those artificial lungs in hospitals.

But, my God, there are a lot of people roaming the world who are convinced their friends and followers could use just one more shot of them doing the Bon Jovi fingers on a beach in Cancun. Everywhere you go couples, individuals and families are setting up little super-model sets angling for just the right light, just the right 4 jump off the beach, and just the right expression communicating spontaneity or expensive vacations or being included with the cool crowd.

Instead of going somewhere to enjoy the locale, near or far, social media has turned millions into location scouts ever seeking a good post. Maybe thats why Mark Zuckerberg changed the name of his company to Meta. Whats more meta than dedicating half your awareness to how youll look in a photo?

Somehow its kind of cute with teenagers who grew up with this stuff and know nothing else. I suspect those born after about 2008 assume a photo looks like a lonely mistake if they dont include themselves in the frame.

Ive read enough Thoreau, Emerson, and Power of Now that I could go full sanctimonious crank in a hurry. As in, why cant everyone just live in the now like me? But Ive got plenty of vices to escape the now when the now is just too tiresome or unpleasant. Plus virtue signaling is even more annoying than posting hundreds of selfies.

But the unabashed and unabated self-involvment shown by Americans who just cant get enough of their own image is weird. I have one friend, a beautiful young woman with a sensational body, who must have posted close to 500 photos of herself in a bikini. Granted she looks great, but wouldnt 200 photos have done the trick? I get exhausted just imagining all the paddle boarding, surfing, awesome friend meetups and sunsets she manages, not to mention keeping track of about 40 different bikinis and sustaining vast quantities of fresh towels.

The self-involvement engendered by the iPhone and social media in a short 15 years has revolutionized how people live in this world. What were people doing in the not-so-long-ago world without incredibly powerful phones and the ability to transmit photos worldwide in a flash?

I almost cant remember but I think we were having conversations, looking at the scenery, daydreaming, sketching, journaling, and sometimes just drifting off into a reverie. The seduction of social media and the hypnotic grip it has on the world is viral but without the nice part of viruses finally abiding to a vaccine or our immune system.

I have no illusions about Americans en masse considering that wonderful Annie Dillard phrase, How we spend our days is of course how we spend our life, and then deciding that staring at a screen four hours a day maybe isnt a great way to spend your life. The screen is addicting as hell (even to older people).

My sister recently introduced me to the concept of the imaginary audience, a term first coined by the psychologist David Elkind. Writing in the December 1967 issue of Child Development, Elkind describes various stages of human development but the thrust of his article is on the egocentric nature of adolescents and how it manifests itself in teenagers.

Anticipating the advent of social media by about 50 years, he writes,

The boy who stands in front of the mirror for two hours combing his hair is probably imagining the swooning reactions he will produce in the girls. Likewise, the girl applying her makeup is more likely than not imagining the admiring glances that will come her way. When these young people actually meet, each is more concerned with being the observed than with being the observer.

In the days when Elkind wrote that article, in the old days before a person could amass 50,000 followers on Instagram or Facebook, the most a boy or girl could get in terms of swooning reactions or admiring glances would be a few dozen people. But social media has made it fairly easy to get several thousand swooning reactionsusually in the form of emojisby doing the most mundane things. One thing to win an Olympic medal and get a million well-deserved likes. Quite another to be Lady Gaga taking a sip of tea while wearing bright red lipstick and getting 1.6 million likes.

Part and parcel to the imaginary audience is the concept of the personal fable, the idea that a person is unstoppable, omnipotent, and unique. Psychologists attribute adolescent risk-taking to the manifestation of the personal fable. Adolescents deep in the stage of personal fable cant imagine that any of the billions of human beings before them could possibly have experienced either their woes or their triumphs. Dr. Martha Strauss, a professor of clinical psychology describes an encounter with an adolescent client crying her heart out over a breakup with a boy:

When I nodded knowingly about how devastating this must have felt, she wheeled around and snapped, What do you know about this? Youve never been in love! I couldnt help laughing, though Im still sorry that I did. Was there really no love when dinosaurs roamed the earth?

I have to think the power of social media and the vast accumulation of wealth among the billionaire class has created individuals with personal fables on steroids, broadcasting their specialness to imaginary audiences in the millions. The other day while browsing the internet, I saw photos of Jeff Bezos and his fiancee taking selfies of themselves on his new $500 million yacht. Posing for a selfie on a yacht that costs more than the value of a 1,000 American homes really is the ultimate in a performative life and the ostentatious display of wealth. Even his kids, deep in the development stage of their own personal fables, must be cringing and thinking, Thats over the top, Pops. Im not sure what I would do if I were in his friend group to respond: post a photo of my over-the top $900 Kamado Joe Smoker grill? Wouldnt want it to be too obvious I was trying to keep up with the Bezos!

I cringed loud enough to be heard by the neighbors when I watched Bezos get in a rocket wearing a cowboy hat to travel the 60 miles to the Karman line, where outer space begins. Its the billionaires version of a 4 jump on the beach of Cancun.

After reading about the imaginary audience theory, I realizedto my chagrinthat I still have vestiges of the imaginary audience in my own day-to-day work. There are times when I am fixing fence miles from the nearest electrical outlet or wifi connection and while setting a post or building a corner brace, I wonder what the world would think of my slightly out-of-level work. Usually, Ill attach a frowning face of a critical friend or relative to my imaginary audience and try to finesse the work that literally no one will ever notice. As if to punctuate the remoteness and lack of importance of that piece of work, there is usually a vulture circling thousands of feet above me, slightly interested in what I would taste like as carrion. Or maybe thats just more of my imaginary audience.
Maharashtra politics took a new turn over the weekend after Ajit Pawar succeeded in engineering a split within Nationalist Congress Party (NCP) and extended support to NDA-led government in the state.

On Sunday, Pawar took oath as the Deputy Chief Minister and even revealed the reason of joining the local BJP-Shiv Sena coalition government.

Pawar said the NCP decided to join the coalition government in Maharashtra to support Prime Minister Narendra Modis effort in taking India forward on the path of development.

He asserted that the country is progressing under the leadership of PM Modi and therefore, he decided to extend support to the Centre by joining the Eknath Shinde-led government in Maharashtra.

We decided to prioritise development. PM Narendra Modi has been strongly working for the country for the last nine years and he is taking the country forward on the path of development. We believed that we should also support that effort, Pawar said.

Overall and comprehensive development was taken into account. We have a vast experience of the administration, we can utilise it for the good, he said.

Addressing a press conference after taking oath as Maharashtra Deputy CM, Pawar said, There will be a discussion on the portfolios later. Considering all aspects at the national level, we thought that we should support development.

Alongside Pawar, 8 other members of NCP took oath as part of the NDA government at Raj Bhawan on Sunday. They are:

Chhagan Bhujbal Dilip Walse Patil Aditi Tatkare Dhananjay Munde Hasan Mushrif Ramraje Nimbalkar Sanjay Bansode Anil Bhaidas Patil

Can go with BJP as well

Pawar defended his decision to share power with BJP and said, If we can go with the Shiv Sena, then we can go with the BJP as well. The same thing happened in Nagaland as well.

Was it all sudden?

As per Pawar, the decision to join Maharashtra government was discussed for many days and it received support by majority of MLAs.

We all worked under the guidance of (party chief) Sharad Pawar ji. We will now promote young blood I dont care about criticism. I will work towards the welfare of people of Maharashtra. And we took the decision Majority of MLAs support it, the newly sworn in Maharashtra Deputy CM said.

Ajit Pawar as Maharashtra Deputy CM

Ajit Pawar has not become the Deputy Chief Minister of Maharashtra for the first time. He has served the post five times, including twice before 2019 in a Congress-led government.

Interestingly, Pawar has been donning the role of Deputy CM for the third time in four years under three chief ministers  BJPs Devendra Fadnavis, Shiv Senas Uddhav Thackeray and Eknath Shinde.

With inputs from agencies

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Some of our people fell prey to BJPs tactics to break other parties, said a visibly stung Sharad Pawar Monday.

We were serving Maharashtra under Uddhav Thackeray, but our government was toppled by some people. The same happened in some other parts of the nation too, the NCP President said in Maharashtras Karad a day after nephew Ajit Pawars rebellion that has divided the NCP across the middle.

While this is the second time that Ajit Pawar has changed political colours to join the saffron brigade, the scale of challenge and the timing of the latest rebellion has shocked NCP. While Sharad Pawar was one of the most vocal proponents of Opposition Unity to challenge the BJP in 2024 Lok Sabha polls, the crumbling of his own house has seriously damaged Pawar seniors political heft.

People of Maharashtra will not succumb to undemocratic forces, Pawar senior added.

Intensifying his attack on BJP, the NCP head said, We set up a government led by Uddhav Thackeray. But some people overthrew it. And a government promoting communal forces came into being. Such efforts are being done elsewhere in the country too.

A new turn of events was witnessed in Maharashtra politics on Sunday when Ajit Pawar and eight other NCP MLAs have taken oath as ministers in the Eknath Shinde-led Maharashtra government.

Ajit Pawar was sworn in as the deputy chief minister. This is the third time in four years he has taken oath as the states deputy CM.

What may have sparked the move?

In June, Sharad Pawar had said he needed two working presidents as the situation in the country is such that it would have been wrong to give the responsibility of all states to only one person.

He then appointed his daughter Supriya Sule and Rajya Sabha MP Praful Patel as working presidents of the party.

The announcement was well received within the party, but it also raised sparked speculation that Ajit Pawar, who is known for his rebellious streak and joined the BJP in 2019, may feel sidelined as he was not given any party post.

Less than a month, Ajit Pawar found his way out, possibly expressing his anger by joining hands with BJP-Shiv Sena alliance government in the state.

With inputs from agencies

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Ajit Pawar joining hands with BJP-Shiv Sena coalition is not a good news for Maharashtra Chief Minister Eknath Shinde, Nationalist Congress Partys (NCP) Jayant Patil said, adding that (Eknath) Shindes power will be reduced.

Patil, a senior NCP leader, claimed that Pawars induction in Maharashtra government as the second Deputy CM is BJPs aims to look for a replacement for Shinde.

Some people did not like the way the Chief Minister works, Patil said.

Now to reduce his (Shindes) importance, Ajit Pawar has been added in the government thats already in majority, the senior NCP leader said.

Ajit Pawar, nephew of Sharad Pawar, on Sunday abruptly crossed over to the ruling alliance government in the state and took oath as Maharashtra deputy chief minister. Also, eight other MLAs of his party have joined the BJP-Shiv Sena coalition government in the state.

Also Read: PM Modi The real reason why Ajit Pawar joined BJP-Shiv Sena govt in Maharashtra

Pawar even claimed that more of his party colleagues will be inducted in the Cabinet in future.

As per reports, ahead of the cabinet reshuffle in Maharashtra, BJP wants to drop 10 ministers from the Shinde faction to make space for the NCP ministers.

After the Uddhav Thackeray government collapsed, BJP had bigger numbers in the state Assembly, but they allowed Eknath Shinde to head the government. However, reports say that lawmakers of Shinde-led Shiv Sena faction claimed that the BJP has been trying to play the big brother.

Meanwhile, Pawar said the NCP had decided to join the Maharashtra government to support Prime Minister Narendra Modis efforts in taking the country forward on the path of development.

We decided to prioritise development. PM Narendra Modi has been strongly working for the country for the last nine years and he is taking the country forward on the path of development. We believed that we should also support that effort, Pawar said.

With inputs from agencies

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Goldman Sachs, four years after collaborating with Apple on the introduction of the Apple Card, may be contemplating an exit strategy. According to The Wall Street Journal, Goldman Sachs is actively seeking a way to disengage from its prominent deal with Apple, which recently expanded to include savings accounts for Apple Card holders.

The investment banking firm is currently engaged in discussions to transfer the partnership to American Express, as mentioned in the WSJ report. However, no concrete agreements have been reached yet, and it remains uncertain whether Apple would support such a handover.

Apple Card in India

Apple meanwhile, is trying to expand its presence in the Indian market and is planning to launch the Apple Card, a premium credit card, in India. The company has been engaging in discussions with banks and regulatory authorities in the country for this purpose. During CEO Tim Cooks visit to India in April, he held a meeting with Sashidhar Jagdishan, the CEO and Managing Director of HDFC Bank.

Furthermore, Apple has been in talks with the Reserve Bank of India (RBI) to discuss the specific operational details of the card. Moneycontrol reports that the RBI has requested Apple to follow the standard procedures applicable to co-branded credit cards, and has not granted any special concessions to the company.

Goldman Sachs backing out of Apple Card

While the outcome of Goldman Sachs and American Express discussions still remains uncertain, it wouldnt be surprising if this arrangement ultimately materializes.

Earlier this year, Goldman CEO David Solomon expressed his contemplation of strategic alternatives for the investment firms consumer division. In addition to its association with Apple, Goldmans consumer-oriented business encompasses a credit card partnership with General Motors and the acquisition of GreenSky, a lending company purchased for $2.2 billion in 2021.

Apple Card in the US vs Apple Card in India

Notably, the Apple Card does not impose any annual fees. In the United States, Apple Card users have the option to purchase Apple products in interest-free instalments. Additionally, customers can earn cashback of approximately 3-5 per cent when purchasing Apple products and services. Apple may also establish partnerships with other premium brands, offering 2-3 per cent cashback or reward points for purchases made with these partners.

In the US, Apple Card holders benefit from a daily 2 per cent cashback when using their card via Apple Watch or iPhone. Furthermore, the card provides 3 per cent cashback at major merchants.

In India, Apple may face limitations in launching the Apple Card and carrying out certain activities associated with it. Due to heavy regulations surrounding credit cards in the country, Apple may not have the authority to issue the card itself. Additionally, the physical titanium card, as introduced in the United States, may not be feasible for launch in India.

The Reserve Bank of India (RBI) has implemented regulations concerning the offerings and charges that banks can provide to credit card customers. Furthermore, last year, the RBI issued a directive stating that banks and their partners are prohibited from storing customer data or transaction data. This directive will also be applicable to the Apple Card, meaning that Apple cannot store card details on its platforms within India.

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Pope Francis has recently published a manual on the ethics of AI, in collaboration with Santa Clara Universitys Markkula Center for Applied Ethics.

Together, they have established the Institute for Technology, Ethics, and Culture (ITEC), a collective aimed at fostering thoughtful discussions on the impact of technology on humanity. Essentially, ITEC serves as a Vatican-led think tank on AI ethics.

Vatican to guide ethical development of AI?

The institutes first order of business was to release a guide, or a handbook called Ethics in the Age of Disruptive Technologies: An Operational Roadmap. This handbook is supposed to assist technology companies in navigating the ethical complexities associated with AI.

According to Father Brendan McGuire, an advisor to ITEC, the supreme pontiff has always held a broad perspective on the world and recognizes the positive potential of technology. However, with its development comes the need to address profound questions.

Silicon Valley technology executives have sought the Vaticans guidance for quite some time, expressing concerns about the unpreparedness for various impending technological advancements. The idea behind ITEC was to leverage the Vaticans influential position to bring together executives from around the world.

While the handbook covers a range of subjects including encryption, tracking, and facial recognition technologies, it primarily draws inspiration from the ongoing race in AI development. In an introductory chapter written by Irish Bishop Paul Tighe, he reflects on his discussions with senior representatives from Silicon Valley, particularly those involved in artificial intelligence and machine learning. He highlights their aspiration to uphold high ethical standards within their industry.

The big question: Humanity vis-a-vis profits

According to Tighe, there is already a noticeable trend among various initiatives that emphasize the importance of technology serving humanity, being ethical by design, human-centred, for the greater good, and open.

However, he acknowledges that some business leaders may use these buzzwords strategically to gain trust and make profits. The question then arises: How do companies genuinely fulfil their promises of being human-centred and avoiding unethical behaviour? Furthermore, why is the Pope involved in all of this?

It is clear that Tighe recognizes the unlikely collaboration between the Catholic Church, an ancient institution, and Silicon Valley, a hub of technological innovation. The existence of ITEC, however, could be seen as an indication of the real and potentially transformative impact of AI. It is worth noting that the Pope has not published a 140-page guidebook on cryptocurrency, highlighting the specific relevance of AI in this context.

How will governments deal with ethics in AI?

It is important to acknowledge that ITEC does not claim its handbook to be a substitute for government regulations. While waiting for regulatory measures to be implemented, which can be a lengthy process, the Institute suggests that its guidelines can assist emerging companies in prioritizing consumer well-being and ethical considerations.

Father Brendan acknowledges the necessity of robust regulations to ensure ethical practices in technology. He believes that countries and governments will eventually implement such regulations. However, he emphasizes the role of the handbook in expediting the process of incorporating ethical considerations into the design and implementation of technology for consumers.

The aim is to enable companies to proactively meet the required standards well in advance. By utilizing the guidelines provided in the handbook, companies can expedite their journey towards ethical practices and responsible implementation of technology.

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According to recent research published on the official White House website, the Biden administration is receptive to exploring methods of obstructing sunlight as a means of combating climate change and safeguarding the Earth.

The White House Office of Science and Technology Policy issued a report, as mandated by Congress, which focuses on solar geoengineering. This report indicates that a specialized team has been investigating techniques to mitigate the suns rays and their contribution to global warming.

Unique ways to fight climate change

The report emphasizes the need for further research due to the uncertainties surrounding the intricate Earth systems and our evolving comprehension of them. It highlights the importance of understanding the potential advantages and risks associated with these endeavours.

The Consolidated Appropriations Act of 2022, which requested the development of a research governance framework for publicly funded solar geoengineering projects, motivated the creation of this report.

The report specifies that the Biden administration is currently exploring methods such as stratospheric aerosol injection (SAI) and marine cloud brightening. It also acknowledges ongoing research in cirrus cloud thinning. The document states that space-based approaches have received less attention as implementing geoengineering techniques is comparatively simpler and more feasible in the near term.

Understanding Solar Radiation Modification

Furthermore, the report clarifies that its primary focus is on enhancing our understanding of the potential impacts of Solar Radiation Modification (SRM), rather than the technologies necessary for its implementation. This research contributes not only to our knowledge of fundamental climate processes and the effects of human greenhouse gas emissions but also to our understanding of the outcomes associated with SRM.

The report concludes that a comprehensive research program exploring the scientific and societal implications of SRM would enable more informed decision-making regarding the risks and benefits of incorporating SRM into climate policy. It suggests that such a program would also prepare the United States for the potential deployment of SRM by other entities, whether public or private.

Lastly, the report mentions that SRM holds the potential to significantly cool the planet within a few years time.

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After posters informing about the Khalistani rally to be held on 8 July were circulated in Canada, India on Monday expressed its concerns to the Canadian authorities about escalation of threats to its high commissioner in Ottawa and consulate general in Toronto who have been directly identified in the posters.

According to a Hindustan Times report, citing the poster, the rally is being held in the name of Harjit Singh Nijjar, the pro-Khalistan priest, who was found murdered in the parking lot of a gurdwara in the town of Surrey in British Columbia on 18 June.

The poster has threat references to Indias high commissioner to Ottawa Sanjay Kumar Verma and consulate general in Toronto Apoorva Srivastava, added the report.

A senior Indian official said concerns about their security and other personnel have been communicated informally to the Global Affairs Canada, the countrys foreign ministry, the Royal Canadian Mounted Police (RCMP), which is tasked with diplomatic security, and the Ottawa and Toronto police departments, HT reported

Following the long weekend for Canada Day, they will be formally informed of the heightened concerns

In the garb of freedom of expression, they are attempting to cause harm to foreign envoys, which may not be the intention of Canadian law and constitution, under which such rights are provided, HT quoted Verma as saying.

He added that each right is accompanied with obligations to maintain peace and harmony.

The pro-Khalistan elements have accused India of behind the murder of Nijjar, who headed the Guru Nanak Sikh Gurdwara Sahib and was with the separatist Sikhs for Justice (SFJ).

SFJs legal counsel Gurpatwant Pannun described it as an assassination.

However, the Integrated Homicide Investigation Team (IHIT), investigating the killing, has not ascribed any motive.

Nijjar was alleged to be the head of the Khalistan Tiger Force by Indian law enforcement and faced several terror-related charges.

The National Investigation Agency (NIA) had announced an award of 10 lakh for information leading to his capture.

However, none of the charges against him were tested in Canadian courts and SFJ has maintained it does not use violence.

With inputs from agencies

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Republican Presidential candidate Nikki Haley on Sunday raised concerns about the threat posed by China and its military build-up. Haley further suggested that Beijing has been preparing for war with the US for decades.

Her comments came as she slammed the current Democratic-ruled government for not doing enough while China prepares itself. Haley said that the government has been complacent and busy with taking gender pronoun classes.

In an interview with Fox News Sunday, Haley, the former US ambassador to the UN said, If you look at the military situation, they now have the largest naval fleet in the world.

She explained, They have 340 ships, we have 293. Theyre going to have 400 in two years, we wont even have 350 in two decades. They have started developing hypersonic missiles. Were just now getting started.

Haley noted that China is making military advancements as the US defence is prioritising woke culture in the military.

They are modernizing their military, our militarys taking gender pronoun classes, she said.

The Republican presidential hopeful further said that Chinas military is ahead of the US in terms of cyber, artificial intelligence and space.

Chinese Military stronger at the end of Trumps era

Acknowledging Donald Trumps own shortcomings in dealing with the China issue, Haley said, China was military stronger  militarily stronger  when President Trump left office than when he entered. Thats bad. But Joe Bidens record is much worse.

Claiming that the Chinese Communist Partys (CCP) endgame is near, Haley said that Americas policy on China needs a series of fundamental shifts.

The Communist Partys endgame is clear. China is preparing its people for war. President Xi has openly said it. We should take him at his word and act accordingly, she added.

Haleys proposal on dealing with Chinas threat

Last week, Nikki Haley also made a number of specific proposals, saying that China is much more than a mere competitor.

She said that Congress must put a permanent end to trade relations until the flow of fentanyl into the US ends.

The US should stop funding universities that also operate on Chinese money. Universities must choose, you either take Chinese money or you take American money, but the days of taking both are over. It shouldnt be a hard decision.

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With neither side restrained by deterrence or concerned about escalation, a Chinese military think-tank simulated a total war with the US in which both sides used their complete and unfettered military capabilities to advance on the other.

This was done to see how a highly political and strategic situation might affect how well Peoples Liberation Army Navy (PLAN) warships would perform individually as they faced multiple simultaneous threats and had to use or overuse their anti-ship, anti-land, and electronic warfare capabilities.

Chinas PLA Navy suffered terrible losses during the war game, with its destroyers losing more than half of their fighting capacity. The document on the wargame simulation by the PLAs Unit 91404 at Qinhuangdao, however, does not imply that the Chinese leadership is actively considering such a conflict or that the Communist Party of China (CPC) is reflecting such an attitude.

Instead, it uses a tried-and-true military tactic to test the boundaries of its weaponry, defence technologies, and warfighting doctrine: planning for the worst-case situation.

The majority of militaries around the world train for such apocalyptic scenarios where they underestimate the enemy. The Chinese Journal of Ship Research, a peer-reviewed journal, published the study that was written by Fang Canxin and Guo Xinwang.

According to the experts, the end-of-the-world battle, designated as Z, will be a clash of strategic willpower (where) the regional conflict escalates to a total war.

The South China Sea (SCS), where Beijing disputes maritime boundaries with the Philippines, Indonesia, and Vietnam, is therefore included in a war between the US and China that extends beyond the latters invasion of Taiwan.

In such a situation, a Chinese destroyer would come under fire from almost a dozen missiles and three torpedoes. The fleet of the Blue Alliance, which had Arleigh Burke carriers, produced jamming noises that were over 30 times more powerful than the signal that the ship utilised for communication.

Additionally, it cut the radar range of Chinese warships by 60%. However, it doesnt mention any nations or navy.

The paper lists four potential outcomes. The Chinese ship only encounters one or two missiles of a single type and one torpedo when the Blue Alliance does not participate in the battle with firepower or targeting information.

As a result, the US is not standing up for Taiwan or Japan, completely opening the door for the PLAN. Only one anti-ship missile attack from other enemy vessels is possible for it.

The Chinese destroyer and the opposing ship engage in a two-way exchange of fire when the Blue Alliance supplies targetting and reconnaissance data. Here, two waves of five to seven different types of missiles and two torpedoes are launched by each ship.

Three torpedoes and nine to eleven different missiles are traded between the two ships in one wave when the Blue Alliance immediately engages in combat.

In order to increase the likelihood of hitting an enemy warship, navies and planes typically fire missiles in volleys of at least two. When crews and pilots launch two missiles at the same aircraft in tandem during anti-air warfare, they are using the same approach.

The rain of missiles is indeed terrible when the conflict intensifies and local wars spread to full-scale wars, though. Three torpedoes and more than 11 different types of missiles are exchanged in waves in different directions.

Fangs team claims that these extraordinary circumstances significantly limited the Chinese warships combat capabilities.

For instance, the destroyer would lose approximately a third of its air defence capabilities right once. Only half of the surface-to-air missiles were able to connect with their intended targets.

The whole destruction of the war, which would have killed millions while destroying cities, transportation systems, communication networks, and industries, is far more devastating than the destiny of a warship.

If nuclear weapons are used, the conflict may irreparably harm ecosystems and agriculture, resulting in a lack of food, genetic mutations, an increase in the incidence of cancer, and other diseases.

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Chinese Defence Minister Li Shangfu on Monday met the head of the Russian Navy Admiral Nikolai Yevmenov in Beijing, the Chinese defence military said.

The two held discussions to strengthen Russia and Chinas military capabilities and boost communications at all levels. Shangfu and Yevmenov also agreed to hold joint military exercises and patrol on a regular basis.

Shangfu also said that he hoped both countries could strengthen communication at all levels, according to a readout from the Chinese defence ministry.

Moscow and Beijing should make positive contributions to maintaining regional and world peace and stability, he added.

Meanwhile, the Russian Admiral said that Beijing and Moscow must continue to expand exchanges at all levels of the two countries navies and continuously push the relationship between the two militaries to new heights.

Mondays talks were the most high-level discussions held between the two countries since the Wagner mutiny occurred late last month.

Beijing said it supported Russia in protecting national stability following the mutiny but leader Xi Jinping is yet to hold public talks with President Vladimir Putin over the incident.

Meanwhile, China claims to be a neutral party in the Russia-Ukraine war. However, western countries have long blamed Beijing for not condemning the war waged by Russia.

The two countries have ramped up economic cooperation and diplomatic contacts in recent years, with their strategic partnership having only grown closer since Moscows invasion of Ukraine last year.

The two countries militaries frequently hold joint drills.

The chief of staff of Russias armed forces, Valery Gerasimov, said last month his countrys strong military partnership with China provided stability around the world.

With inputs from agencies

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by Ashutosh Jogalekar

This is the seventh in a series of essays on the life and times of J. Robert Oppenheimer. All the others can be found here.

The Bohrian paradox of the bomb  the manifestation of unlimited destructive power making future wars impossible  played into the paradoxes of Robert Oppenheimers life after the war. The paradox was mirrored by the paradox of the arena of political and human affairs, a very different arena from the orderly, predictable arena of physics that Oppenheimer was used to in the first act of his life. As Hans Bethe once said, one reason many scientists gravitate toward science is because unlike politics, science can actually give you right or wrong answers; in politics, an answer that may be right from one viewpoint may be wrong from another.

In the second act of his life, like Prometheus who reached too close to the sun, Oppenheimer reached too close to the centers of power and was burnt. In this act we also see a different Oppenheimer, one who could be morally inconsistent, even devious, and complicated. His past came to haunt him. The same powers of persuasion that had worked their magic on his students at Berkeley and fellow scientists at Los Alamos failed to work on army generals and zealous Washington bureaucrats. The fickle world of politics turned out to be one that the physicist with the velvet tongue wasnt quite prepared for.

The atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki horrified many of the Los Alamos scientists including Oppenheimer. Contrary to what some people believe, he did not regret building the bomb  the danger that Hitler would get one made that goal a perfectly reasonable one  but he did regret the fact that his beautiful physics had created a monster that could potentially destroy humanity, and he was very troubled by the faith which the politicians and generals seemed to be placing in it. Right after the news trickled in from Japan, he had entered a crowded auditorium at Los Alamos to cheers and applause, his hands clasped over his head like a victorious general. But just a few days later, after photos of the mutilated, burnt victims of the two unfortunate cities had changed jubilation to sober reflection and even revulsion, Oppenheimer wrote to his old Ethical Culture School teacher, Herbert Smith, You will believe that this undertaking has not been without its misgivings; they are heavy on us today, when the future, which has so many elements of high promise, is yet only a stones throw from despair.

He was, at that point, the most famous scientist in the world and a household name. His face would grace the covers of Time and Life magazine, the most popular subscriptions in the country. What he would do next was still a question, especially since so many possibilities remained open to him. Offers came rushing in from Harvard, Princeton and Columbia, but he chose to remain in California. Relations with Berkeley had become strained, however, in part because his old friend Lawrence who was much more sanguine about the bomb had little patience with his hand wringing. Nonetheless, even the Nobel Prize-winning physicist appreciated the importance of having a celebrity scientist on the faculty and urged the chair of the department to hire him. But Oppenheimer was ambivalent, and while keeping his chances at Berkeley open, accepted a position at Caltech where he found a warm welcome.

But Washington constantly beckoned and he found himself flying back and forth between the two coasts. In October, 1945, an opportunity arose to meet President Truman himself. The episode is one of historys most ironic, showcasing the rift between the scientific and the political mind. Bohr and Oppenheimer had both seen what the politicians including Truman had not, that the only defense against a weapon which is essentially a weapon of genocide would be international cooperation; only three days after V-J Day, Oppenheimer had sent Stimson the conclusions of a final report written by the Scientific Panel of the Interim Committee: We believe that the safety of this nation cannot lie wholly or even primarily in its scientific and technical prowess. It can be based only on making future wars impossible. These were words right out of Niels Bohrs mouth.

But Truman saw it differently; as far he was concerned, America should now use its monopoly on this new weapon as much to its advantage as it could. At the meeting, he told Oppenheimer that the country should first deal with the national situation  figure out authority and the rules of secrecy over the new weapons, that is  and then they should bother with what the international implications would be. But Oppenheimer saw it differently, telling the president that they must first define the problem internationally. Truman then asked how long it would take the Soviets to build the bomb. When Oppenheimer waffled the president leaned closer and said, Never. Oppenheimer did not quite know what to make of Trumans response. Searching for words he said, in some anguish and with the drama he sometimes displayed, Mr. President, I think I have blood on my hands. Truman was startled, and one account has him offering Oppenheimer his handkerchief and saying, Here, would you like to wipe it off?. Another account has him saying, Never mind, itll all come out in the wash. An awkward silence followed, after which the two men shook hands and Truman told Oppenheimer he was hoping the physicist would help them all make sense of the new world they were in.

In reality Truman was infuriated. He later told Dean Acheson, the new Undersecretary of State, I dont want to see that son-of-a-bitch in this office ever againblood on his hands dammit, he hasnt half as much blood on his hands as I have. You just dont go bellyaching about it. Six months later he was still smarting from the exchange, calling Oppenheimer that cry-baby scientist. Truman, the autodidact country farmer from Missouri, had fundamentally misunderstood what the scientists had, especially when he mentioned his belief that the Soviets would never get the bomb: building the bomb was a question of resources, manpower and basic science. Any country with smart scientists and the will  and the Soviet Union certainly qualified  could figure it out within a few years. There was no big secret to keep. Citizens of the open republic of science, Oppenheimer, Bohr and their fellow scientists had understood this fundamental fact; the politicians had not. The Oppenheimer-Truman exchange, similar to the Bohr-Churchill exchange two years before, was symbolic of a continued misunderstanding between science and politics which would heat up the arms race between the two countries and, among other things, ultimately cause Oppenheimers downfall.

Never at a loss for eloquence, Oppenheimer met with a very different reception at Los Alamos that November when five hundred people crowded in to hear him speak. He spoke extemporaneously for an hour. What they had done, he said, was an organic necessity. If you are a scientist, you believe that it is good to find out how the world worksthat it is good to turn over to mankind at large the greatest possible power to control the world and to deal with it according to its lights and values. But once the genie was out of the bottle, he proposed that they set up an international commission that was unhindered by national interests and controlled all aspects of atomic energy. Also agreeing that he disagreed with the presidents America-centric worldview when it came to nuclear weapons, he emphasized that secrecy strikes at the very heart of science. Oppenheimer was channeling Bohr here and already going against the official grain. The audience was mesmerized; more importantly they were reassured, feeling secure in the fact that the terrible weapon that they had built was for a reason.

But soon, his fellow scientists were to come to know how divided they felt about their former leader. One of the most important issues in the early history of nuclear weapons was the apportioning of authority between civilians and the military, a drama that has played out in the nuclear weapons programs of most countries. The army naturally wanted authority to rest with them, they wanted to enforce severe penalties for any leakage of classified information and wanted to cast a wide net on the research itself. But the scientists were horrified at the implications it would have for their work, not just work on the weapons themselves but in the basic areas of nuclear and atomic physics that they would continue to research in their universities; as Bethe put it, like good soldiers they had helped built the bomb, and now they wanted to go back to the world they best loved and do their science without interference.

A particular point of contention came in October, 1945, when two senators drafted a bill by their name called the May-Johnson bill that, among other things, would place key parts of atomic energy development under military purview and would severely penalize even accidental leakage of information. The bill also proposed to set up an Atomic Energy Commission, with a mix of civilians and military officials as commissioners. The scientists were almost unanimously opposed to it and looked to Oppenheimer to convey their concerns to congressmen and senators. Instead, in testifying about the bill before Congress, Oppenheimer proved himself to be a master of equivocation, first telling his fellow scientists that they should support the bill because  inexplicably, they thought  it would provide the first steps toward international control of atomic energy and then effectively passing the buck when asked by the Congressmen if he thought it was a good bill by saying that it should be sound since it was supported, among others, by Fermi, Lawrence, Compton, Bush and other distinguished scientists. As to the question about whether he thought military commissioners should head it, he said that he cared less about a man being in uniform than about what kind of a man it was.

Clearly Oppenheimer had not opposed the May-Johnson bill with the kind of vigorous advocacy that his friends and colleagues expected. At least some prominent scientists like Herbert Anderson (a protege of Enrico Fermi), Robert Wilson and Leo Szilard said their faith in him had been shaken. Oppenheimers responses show how he was trying to tread the thin line between being a dissenter and being an insider. It was a line that would increasingly become hazy. As it turned out in this particular case, the May-Johnson bill metamorphosed into a watered down version called the Atomic Energy Act of 1946 that squarely placed atomic energy development under a group of civilian commissioners appointed by the president. For the moment, at least, the scientists fears proved largely unfounded.

As the year 1945 came to an end, Oppenheimer and the atomic scientists were filled with a mixture of hope and fear about their creations. The next year would prove highly consequential. Over Christmas, Oppenheimer visited his old friend Isidor Rabi in his apartment at New York City. As the two men looked out of the window at the ice floes lazily making their way down the Hudson river, they discussed a glimmer of an idea for a way to control the spread of nuclear weapons, one that would make its way into a revolutionary document that holds great import even today. At the beginning of 1946, Truman had asked Dean Acheson and the chairman of the new AEC, David Lilienthal, to draft a blueprint for dealing with the thorny problem. Acheson realized that he needed a group of technical experts to advise the committee. There was no more accomplished expert than Robert Oppenheimer who they could call upon. Over the next few months, the group engaged in a combination of scientific seminar and groundbreaking policy planning, with Oppenheimer leading them through a whirlwind tour of nuclear physics.

David Lilienthal, a sensitive, worldly man who had previously been the chairman of the Tennessee Valley Authority, later called their meetings one of the most memorable and emotional intellectual experiences of my life.. That he thought this was in large part because of their scientific expert was evident. Lilienthals impression of Oppenheimer, then as later, verged almost on hero worship. Initially greatly impressed by his flash of mind, he wrote that Oppenheimer was an extraordinary personage, a really great teacher. He concluded his superlative assessment by later telling Oppenheimers lawyer that it was worth living a lifetime just to know that mankind has been able to produce such a being. Lilienthals assessment mirrors that of many of Oppenheimers students and colleagues, but in that fraught beginning of the Cold War, it would increasingly become a rarity.

The report that the group authored, with the wording largely supplied by Oppenheimer, came to be known as the Acheson-Lilienthal report. It was a radical document. Knowing what Bohr had said about an open culture of science and realizing the practical difficulties of policing individual nations nuclear infrastructure, the report suggested that every aspect of atomic energy, from the mining of uranium to the production of fissile material would be under the control of an international organization like the newly formed United Nations. Even more radically, because peaceful uses of nuclear energy cannot be neatly separated from malicious uses, the organization should deliberately spread mines and processing plants in different countries while continuing to have complete control of them  in effect peacefully proliferating them. One of the most insightful parts of this arrangement was that the world did not need to wait for a country to make bombs in order to gauge its ill intent; merely opening a mine would foreshadow such an action. Just like science is done in the open, so would the development of nuclear energy. As Richard Rhodes says in his book Dark Sun, the Acheson-Lilienthal report advocated the equivalent of a batch of disassembled guns, all of which are within reach of every country but all of which are watched and controlled by an international authority like the United Nations. It is only in the knowledge that nobody else can build bombs is a country secure. More than once the report also channels Bohr by saying that true security is incompatible with secrecy. When the Danish Nobel laureate saw the report he remarked that it offered just the best hopes for the development in which we all put our faith.

Unfortunately the radical report was doomed to die a slow and painful death. Trumans goal was to present it to the Soviets at the United Nations. As presenter he picked a 76-year-old financier and former business partner of Secretary of State James Byrnes, Bernard Baruch. When Baruch took a look at the report and saw its internationalism he blanched; he accepted his appointment conditional on radically modifying the radical document. Baruch wanted a policy of swift and sure punishment to be part of the proposal, along with a condition that other countries promise not to develop nuclear weapons before the United States did. When he presented it at the United Nations, the Soviets predictably and promptly rejected the hard-line wording. Oppenheimer later said that the day he knew who was going to present the report was the day he gave up hope.

It did not help that dark clouds were gathering on the horizon in 1946. Three signal events guaranteed the speedy inauguration of the Cold War that year: the first was George Kennans famous X telegram from the American embassy in Moscow in which he laid out his containment policy, a policy that had an enormous impact in Washington but that was also given a highly militarist meaning unintended by Kennan; the second was Churchills famous iron curtain speech at Fulton College in Missouri; and the third was a rousing speech by Stalin in which he declared the Soviet system, freshly victorious from having beaten the Nazis, on its way to world domination. In this atmosphere, any kind of international proposal seemed doomed to fail. Later events like the Berlin blockade made mutual cooperation with the Soviet Union even more inconceivable; after seeing a 1949 proposal by Oppenheimer, Acheson said he failed to see how one could encourage a foe as zealous and aggressive as the Soviet Union to disarm by example.

For now Oppenheimers star was still high. In the fall of 1946, he was unanimously chosen to be the chairman of the General Advisory Committee (GAC) of the AEC, a position that effectively made him the top advisor on nuclear matters in the country. It was also during this time that a character enters Oppenheimers life who was going to become his arch nemesis and have enormously destructive consequences for his career  Lewis Strauss. Strauss is one of the most remarkable people of this era, not because there was much that was admirable about him but because of how much bad advice he could give from influential positions, much like Oppenheimers fellow physicist Edward Teller.

A former shoe salesman with a high school education, he had somehow weaseled his way into becoming Herbert Hoovers assistant when Hoover was in charge of food relief in Europe after the Great War. Impressed by the young assistants work ethic and ambition, Hoover had introduced him to a well-heeled law firm in New York City where he quickly rose through the ranks, at one point making a million dollars a year; marriage to the daughter of one of the firms founders had made him a part of the elite establishment. By shrewdly withdrawing his investments before the crash of 1929, Strauss (who insisted people pronounce his name as Straws) had become financially independent and on the lookout for talent and opportunity. While not a physicist himself, he followed the seminal discoveries in nuclear physics in the 1930s with great interest and fancied himself something of a physicists patron; at one point he was in regular touch with and supported the young Leo Szilard and his maverick ideas about nuclear fission. Strauss was a vindictive, thin-skinned man who often took disagreement as personal affront. If you disagree with Lewis the first time, a colleague said, he will think of you as a fool. But if you disagree a second time, he will probably think you are a traitor.

Strauss meeting Oppenheimer was like an ill-fated Greek tragedy destined to crash on the rocks. But at least at the beginning, Strauss was as impressed with the physicist as anyone else and knew his stature in the community. He was instrumental not just in supporting his appointment as GAC chairman but also offered him the directorship of the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton; a move to Princeton from California would make it easy for Oppenheimer to travel to Washington. As part of his GAC appointment, Oppenheimer had to be cleared for a top-secret security clearance. During the background investigation Strauss learnt about his role in the Chevalier affair, but since he had been cleared during the project in spite of it, Strauss did not think much of it. The Chevalier affair again came up in 1946 when the FBI questioned Oppenheimer about it in the wake of increasing anti-communist sentiment; FBI director J. Edgar Hoover had kept Oppenheimer under one kind of surveillance or another since the end of the war. Significantly during this questioning, Oppenheimer told the FBI that he had made up the story about the three sources in 1943 (detailed in this post) and there had been only one source. In fact Oppenheimer had divulged the name of this source to General Groves during the war  his friend Haakon Chevalier. That Oppenheimer never told Chevalier about his discussions with security agents reflects very poorly on him; it was only much later  after Chevalier had been subjected to hours-long questioning and denied jobs in the United States that had forced him to move to Paris, all because of Oppenheimers testimony  that Chevalier who virtually worshipped Robert came to know about what can only be described as betrayal on his friends part.

Chavelier was not the only one who had to suffer the consequences of Oppenheimers betrayal. In 1949 the Cold War started heating up and anti-communist sentiment in the United States started building up to hysteria. The House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC) had been established in 1938 and was ostensibly formed to address threats that attacked the form of our government as guaranteed by our Constitution, a vague clause that virtually ensured that HUAC would function as a giant vacuum cleaner, sweeping up subversives and erasing the distinction between incendiary speech and thoughts and actual subversive action. Because physicists were at the nucleus of secret atomic energy work, many of them were caught in HUACs dragnet. Much before Joe McCarthy made it fashionable, almost anyone who had been a former member of the communist party was subpoenaed and called to testify before the committee. Many of Oppenheimers former students including David Bohm, Joseph Weinberg, Bernard Peters and Rossi Lomanitz had been party members.

The case of Bernard Peters, a talented cosmic ray physicist who had been Oppenheimers PhD student in 1942, is particularly instructive. On June 7, 1949, Oppenheimer was called to testify before the committee. Under questioning, while denying that he himself had ever been a member of the party, he admitted that Peters was quite the red and a crazy person. At that time Peters was employed by the University of Rochester. Somehow Oppenheimers secret testimony was leaked, leading to outrage among his colleagues; as far as they could tell, far from protecting his former student, he had thrown him under the bus. Two of Oppenheimers closest colleagues and friends, Hans Bethe and Victor Weisskopf, were mortified and begged Oppenheimer to write a letter clarifying his words. Peters himself went to meet Oppenheimer with Frank Oppenheimer and came back dismayed. Oppenheimer wrote a kind of partial retraction which did little to exonerate Peters. Fortunately the University of Rochester, in a gesture that was all too rare during those paranoid times, not only did not fire Peters but gave him tenure. Worse was the fate of Bohm, Lomanitz and Weinberg, all of whom pleaded the fifth in front of HUAC, were fired from their respective jobs and had trouble finding jobs in the United States. Bohm later moved to England and became a distinguished philosopher and writer who collaborated with the Indian philosopher Jiddu Krishnamurti and the Dalai Lama, and Peters to India where he worked at the Tata Institute for Fundamental Research in Mumbai. In no case did their former teacher mount a vigorous defense of his former students.

Worst was the fate awaiting Frank Oppenheimer who by this time had been a professor at the University of Minnesota. Frank had denied he had been a communist party member earlier to a congressional committee and to security agents; now, instead of pleading the fifth as many questioned by HUAC did, he decided to tell the truth that he had been a party member. In short order he was fired by his university. Later in his life Frank became a rancher and physics professor and, most famously, the founder of the Exploratorium in San Francisco. These episodes indicate that by this time Oppenheimer was a dedicated government insider and had also grown fearful of the political climate, all of which led him to implicate former students and colleagues to save himself. It did not endear him to his colleagues, even as he was becoming suspect for his views on nuclear weapons to the Washington establishment.

The prime candidate for holding Oppenheimers views suspect was Lewis Strauss. In front of a Congressional panel in June, shortly after Oppenheimers testimony implicating Peters, the always paranoid Strauss expressed concern that the United States was exporting nuclear material to other countries. The material in question was radioactive isotopes for industrial testing and other peaceful applications of atomic energy. Oppenheimer was asked whether he agreed with Strausss contention that the material posed a security risk. Exasperated by Strausss position  almost any material is what we now call dual use  Oppenheimer retorted, You can use a shovel for atomic energy; in fact you do. You can use a bottle of beer for atomic energy; in fact you doMy own rating of the importance of isotopes is that they are far less important than electronic devices, but far more important than, say, vitamins, somewhere in between. His withering sarcasm had drawn laughter from everyone except one man  Strausss eyes flashed and the color rose in his face. Oppenheimer was known to be cruel to his peers, but while most of them either ignored the taunts and insults, Strauss was not one to forget slights.

In August, 1949, the countrys fate took a dramatic turn when the Soviet Union exploded their first atomic bomb. Unlike the scientists who knew the caliber of the science in Russia along with Stalin and his henchman Lavrenty Berias iron grip on their scientists, the test threw the politicians and generals who had expected that Russia would not get a bomb for at least several years more in a frenzy. Suddenly the fixation on an even bigger bomb  a thermonuclear bomb  took center stage. Unlike a fission bomb which depends on assembling enough plutonium or uranium in a critical mass, a thermonuclear or hydrogen bomb depends on using heat as the trigger for fusing deuterium or tritium nuclei together. Unlike a fission bomb theres no real upper limit for a hydrogen bomb, so in principle it could be made indefinitely large. In addition, unlike plutonium and uranium, deuterium and (to a lesser extent) tritium were cheap. While the bombs that destroyed Hiroshima and Nagasaki had yielded the equivalent of about 20,000 tons of TNT, hydrogen bombs were predicted to yield 10 million or even 100 million tons of TNT. These were numbers that were beyond anyones imagination, but until then they had been theoretical. Now the time seemed ripe to one man in particular to turn them into reality  Edward Teller.

Since the end of the war, the volatile Hungarian-born physicist had bided his time and worked as a professor at the University of Chicago alongside his mentor, Enrico Fermi. The hydrogen bomb had been an idee fixe for a long time  Teller had suggested the idea to Fermi as early as 1941. He had then brought it up at the Berkeley conference organized by Oppenheimer in 1942. It was Tellers unwillingness to work on the fission bomb and his obsession with the thermonuclear that led Oppenheimer to excuse him from working in the theoretical division during the war and let him work on his pet project. In one form or another Teller had been gestating the idea since the end of the war, watching from the sidelines as his former boss gained prominence in government. The problem was that Tellers original idea imagined an atomic bomb generating enough heat and igniting a mass of deuterium or tritium that would sustain burning. Preliminary calculations had shown that there was no guarantee that the fuel could be ignited, nor that it would continue burning once ignited. Now Teller saw his opportunity and started lobbying with influential scientists and government and military officials.

Oppenheimer meanwhile saw a great danger in the paranoia that was gripping the country regarding the Soviet test. The United States still had a significant lead in atomic weapons; by 1950 the country was thought to possess about 200 bombs in its arsenal. This was enough to wipe out the Soviet Union several times over. But the Air Force in particular, goaded by the Strategic Air Command (SAC) and its commander Curtis LeMay, was clamoring for more. Oppenheimer decided to organize a meeting to enshrine official GAC policy regarding thermonuclear weapons; it was scheduled for the end of October, on Halloween. Oppenheimer had already had talks about the hydrogen bomb with James Conant, wartime administrator of the Manhattan Project and by now a close friend; Uncle Jim, as Oppenheimer called him, was opposed to building the Super (as the bomb had been christened) in even stronger terms than Oppenheimer himself. What worries me, confessed Oppenheimer to Conant, is that this thing seems to have caught the imagination, both of Congressmen and of the military people, as the answer to the problem posed by the Russian advance. In short, Oppenheimer was worried that the country was going to get so fixated on the Super that it would forestall all other ways to scale back a nuclear arms race.

Meanwhile Teller had started lobbying scientists to go back to Los Alamos and start working with haste on the weapon, inaugurating another Manhattan Project-style effort. He tried to recruit Oppenheimer who flatly refused. He also tried to recruit his old friend and colleague, Cornell physicist Hans Bethe who commanded authority and expertise that few could match. Bethe had at first said he would consider joining the project. A few weeks before the Halloween meeting, Teller and Bethe went to see Oppenheimer at Princeton and to seek his advice. Teller was concerned that Oppenheimer with his well known powers of persuasion would convince Bethe not to work on the bomb. But Oppenheimer told the two men he was still undecided. He showed them a letter from Conant saying that they would build the Super over my dead body. As the men were leaving, Bethe said to Teller, You see, I am coming after all. But after the meeting, Bethe happened to run into two old friends at another meeting, the physicists Victor Weisskopf and George Placzek. Weisskopf, an uncommonly conscientious scientist, painted a vivid picture of how the world would look like if the hydrogen bomb were developed and used, how such a world would not be worth preserving even if one side technically won. Bethe was moved by Weisskopfs arguments. After going home he called Teller and told him he was not coming after all. Teller became convinced that Oppenheimers velvet tongue had swayed the Cornell physicists mind.

The Halloween meeting opened on a Friday and went on until Sunday. Present, among others, were Oppenheimer, Lilienthal, Rabi, Fermi and Conant. The document they produced is an extraordinary one. Reading it one gets a sense of a tremendous missed opportunity, an opportunity clearly seen by men who were admittedly the foremost thinkers on nuclear matters in the country. While Oppenheimer had his own bias about the project, there is every indication that he did not try to force anyones hand and gave everyone complete freedom to air their views. The meeting produced two parts, a majority view and a minority view. The consensus view argued that precious neutrons that would be spent in breeding the tritium that is needed as fuel for the super could be spent instead in making plutonium and producing smaller, tactical nuclear weapons. But there was also a strong moral conclusion that the GAC reached. The majority view that was signed by Oppenheimer said,

It is clear that the use of this weapon would bring about the destruction of innumerable human lives. It is not a weapon which can be used exclusively for the destruction of material installations of military or semi military purposes. Its use therefore carries much further than the atomic bomb itself the policy of exterminating civilian populations we believe a super bomb should never be produced. Mankind would be far better off not to have a demonstration of the feasibility of such a weapon until the present climate of world opinion changes.

The most remarkable part of the document, however, is the minority view signed by Rabi and Fermi. It said that:

Necessarily such a weapon goes far beyond any military objective and enters the range of very great natural catastrophes. By its very nature it cannot be confined to a military objective but becomes a weapon which in practical effect is almost one of genocide The fact that no limits exist to the destructiveness of this weapon makes its very existence and the knowledge of its construction a danger to humanity as a whole. It is necessarily an evil thing considered in any light.

Later, when Oppenheimer was accused of opposing the hydrogen bomb, his detractors seemed to have conveniently forgotten that Rabi and Fermi, not to mention Conant, had opposed it in even stronger terms.

The important GAC report had the predictable effect on the state department and the White House  almost none. Acheson could not understand how one was to persuade a regime like Stalins to not develop the hydrogen bomb even if the United States did not; he did not understand what the GAC understood, that not developing and testing the weapon would give high moral ground to the country, and even if the Russians built and tested one, the United Statess very significant lead in fission weapons  a lead which would not last forever if both countries refrained from signing an agreement  would easily allow the country to threaten its adversaries and retaliate. As it happened, goaded by Acheson, Strauss and others, Truman had already made up his mind, ignoring both the moral and the technical considerations. On January 31, 1950, he announced that he had authorized the AEC to resume work on all nuclear weapons, including the Super. Said Rabi about the president who was famous for his decisiveness, I never forgave Truman. How much the world lost by not taking advantage of that narrow window of time when the hydrogen bomb was not reality and the United States had a lead in atomic weapons would never be known, but it is surely one of historys greatest lost opportunities.

Oppenheimer and Conant were so distraught by Trumans decision that they considered resigning from the GAC; if they had their life trajectories would almost certainly have been happier, and in retrospect, the development of nuclear weapons in Americas arsenal would have continued unabated. This is the plague of Thebes, Oppenheimer said to a reporter at a party thrown shortly after Trumans announcement to celebrate Strausss birthday. When Strauss introduced Oppenheimer to his son, the physicist snubbed him by extending a hand over his shoulder. Strauss was understandably furious.

As Oppenheimer and other physicists knew, and as Truman did not, nobody knew if a hydrogen bomb would work when the president made his announcement. Calculations by Fermi, John von Neumann and the brilliant Polish-born mathematician Stanislaw Ulam showed well into 1950 that thermonuclear burning could not be sustained, even with very large quantities of tritium. It was only in June 1951, based on a groundbreaking idea by Ulam that Teller expanded on, that hydrogen bombs became reality. Oppenheimers opponents also tended to forget that once he knew the idea behind what became known as the Teller-Ulam invention, he called it technically sweet and encouraged its development. This story is wonderfully told in Rhodess book, Dark Sun.

From then on a very clear dividing line had appeared between the establishment scientist and the establishment. It did not help that after Truman had made his announcement, theoretical physicist Klaus Fuchs who had worked at Los Alamos under Oppenheimer confessed to passing atomic secrets to the Soviet Union. Fuchs was talented and highly placed enough to have given them valuable information, although when it came to the thermonuclear, the ideas that he had  based on Tellers design  were so premature and wrong that Oppenheimer actually hoped that he had passed on those ideas to the Russians to mislead them.

In the spring of 1951, Oppenheimer was assigned to give advice on a top secret project organized by the Air Force called Project Vista, held at the Vista Arroyo hotel near Caltech. The president of Caltech, Lee DuBridge, led the group, but Oppenheimer was invited to contribute as an expert. The aim of the project was quite general, to assess improvements in air and ground warfare. It made many recommendations including how the air force could better support the army through improved communications, but one chapter in particular, Chapter 5, became the focus of Oppenheimers opponents. It had been written almost exclusively by him and recommended that NATO diversify its atomic arsenal, not through hydrogen bombs but through tactical atomic bombs that would be primarily used by ground forces, not air forces. This was a direct rebuke to the doctrine of SAC which advocated massive attacks on the Soviet Union using strategic weapons.

Oppenheimers manuever was aimed at taking authority away from the Air Force and SAC because their plan for bombing the Soviet Union in 1951 absolutely appalled him, relying as it did on targeting every Russian city with strategic weapons so many times over that, as Churchill would say in a different context, it would make the rubble bounce. The Air Force plan in 1951 was the goddamndest thing I ever saw, he would later tell Freeman Dyson. But Air Force officials were furious with what they saw as Oppenheimer taking away authority and funding from them. Thomas Finletter, Secretary of the Air Force, declared that Oppenheimer should never be asked to advise a panel on classified projects again. As Ken Young and Warner Schilling lay out in detail in their book, Super Bomb, much of Oppenheimers troubles can be seen through the prism of the interservice rivalry between the Army and the Air Force whose cross-hairs he had been caught in. He was also both naive enough and arrogant enough at the same time to underestimate the damage Air Force officials could do to him.

It was clear by the time the first hydrogen bomb  a leviathan consisting of a giant tank of liquid deuterium that exploded with a force more than six hundred times that obliterating Hiroshima  had been tested in November, 1952, that the two superpowers were well on their way to a ruinous and terrifying arms race; by the end of the Cold War, the United States had built 70,000 nuclear weapons at a staggering cost of $5.5 trillion, an arsenal that went infinitely past deterrence and could have destroyed the planet many times over. The decision to make the hydrogen bomb appeared, even then, irrevocable, a tipping point in mankinds ability to pull down the temple on itself.

It would have been better if Robert Oppenheimer had retired from his government job by the end of 1952. His valiant and sensible efforts to forestall the arms race had failed, and with a Republican administration in place, it wasnt clear that he could do much. But he had tasted power and known what it was like to be an insider. That taste would soon turn bitter. In February, 1953, Oppenheimer gave a speech in New York at the Council for Foreign Relations, a venue that would guarantee attention in the upper echelons of New York and Washington. Oppenheimers speech was an unclassified version of a report he had penned with future JFK advisor McGeorge Bundy and sent to the Eisenhower administration. Channeling Niels Bohr again, the report advocated a policy of candor in which Americans should be told the extent of the atomic enterprise, including the rate of production of bombs. The New York address now took direct aim at the notion of secrecy. We do not operate well when the important facts are known, in secrecy and fear, only to a few men. He criticized (now ex-president) Truman and a high officer of the Air Force (chief scientist David Griggs who had been incensed at his recommendations on Project Vista) for underestimating Soviet capabilities and thinking that they could protect the countrys striking force without somehow harming the country. The speech seemed like a direct rebuke to officials in multiple places. Oppenheimer seemed to be ridiculing the very foundation of the establishments nuclear weapons policy, striking at the heart of secrecy and criticizing the government for thinking that a war with nuclear weapons could be won. Unsurprisingly, many including Lewis Strauss were appalled.

At the end of the speech, Oppenheimer provided a striking, memorable analogy for the continued standoff between the United States and the Soviet Union: We may be likened to two scorpions in a bottle, each capable of killing the other, but only at the risk of his own life. Now the scorpions around Oppenheimer himself would start moving in for the kill.

In May, 1953, Strauss began an orchestrated campaign to get rid of Oppenheimers influence. He gave Eisenhower a kind of ultimatum; he could not serve on the AEC if Oppenheimer were to stay. Eisenhower himself was troubled by what he saw as Oppenheimers almost hypnotic power over small groups as he briefed a group of White House officials on candor and what he had said in his New York talk. In retrospect, the evidence clearly shows that Strauss repeatedly and deliberately misled the president  who clearly had other issues on his mind  as to what he labeled as Oppenheimers untrustworthiness and opposition to the hydrogen bomb. Strausss case was helped by a vicious, opportunistic character named William Borden who was the executive chairman of the Joint Committee on Atomic Energy. Borden had held a grudge against Oppenheimer for some time. Now, in the poisonous atmosphere of Joe McCarthys America, he sent a letter to the FBI laying out charges against the physicist and concluding, fantastically, that more probably than not J. Robert Oppenheimer is an agent of the Soviet Union. When the FBI report containing Bordens allegations reached Eisenhower he was shocked and, pending investigation, ordered a blank wall to be placed between Oppenheimer and classified information. Strauss now had Oppenheimer i his corner. He summoned the physicist to a meeting in December and told him that his security clearance had been taken away, and that if he wanted he could either resign or could request a hearing.

This was a fork in Oppenheimers life. When the shocking news became public, Einstein told a reporter that he thought that Oppenheimer should go to the government, tear up his clearance, tell them they were fools and resign. As usual Einstein saw through the thicket of complexity to the heart of the matter. But such behavior would have been entirely out of character for Oppenheimer. After conferring with his lawyers, Oppenheimer decided to fight the charges.

The classified papers in Oppenheimers case were taken away and he was served the official letter from the AEC outlining the accusations. Hardly anything in there was new, and the Chevalier affair featured prominently. Except for the charges related to obstructing the hydrogen bomb, all the other charges were ones explicitly addressed  and rejected  by General Groves during the war and by the AEC during Oppenheimers appointment to the GAC. This should have been easy, but Strauss made sure that it would not, especially by his choice of prosecutor, a canny forty-six-year old trial lawyer named Roger Robb who had won convictions in murder trials. Robb was a street fighter who brought a gun to a knife fight. In contrast, Oppenheimers team picked someone who would bring a walking stick to a gun fight. Lloyd Garrison was a genteel, distinguished lawyer at a prestigious New York law firm, skilled in debate but not a street fighter (the contrast reminds one of the much later contrast between the dignified Warren Christopher and the cunning James Baker during Bush v. Gore). Strauss also ensured that since the case would discuss classified material, the security clearances that Oppenheimers lawyers would need would be delayed.

The trial which opened on April 12, 1954, was exhibit A in the travesty of justice, the kind of show trial which would have been completely at home in the Soviet Union; an especially ironic fact since Oppenheimers adversaries were accusing him of having communist leanings. The board was chaired by Gordon Gray, president of the University of North Carolina. Almost everything about the inquiry by the Gray board, as it was euphemistically called, was illegal. Not only were Oppenheimers lawyers denied access to the prosecutors material under the pretext of national security  they were asked to leave the room when this material was presented  but his home as well as his lawyers offices were bugged by the FBI, ensuring that Hoover and Strauss knew the details of what he and his lawyers were discussing. For Oppenheimer and his team, it was downright Kafkaesque.

Remarkably, the powers of persuasion that Oppenheimer was known for seemed to have deserted him in his hour of deepest need. Most of the time he sat chain-smoking on a couch, and when he testified multiple times his usual eloquence devolved into mumbling and equivocation under the ruthless scalpel of Robbs legal talents. The major points of contention were the Chevalier affair and what it indicated about Oppenheimers character. Oppenheimer was asked to remember facts from more than ten years ago. All the usual associations were dragged out  his affair with Jean Tatlock, his associations with students who were known communists, and most prominently his lying to security agents. At one point when Robb asked him why he had reported three advances instead of one advance to security agents, the best Oppenheimer could do was to say, Because I was an idiot. As historian Richard Rhodes comments, the transcript of the whole affair is one of the great, dark documents of the early atomic age, almost Shakespearean in its craven parade of hostile witnesses through the government star chamber, with the victim himself, catatonic with shame, sunken on a couch incessantly smoking the cigarettes that would kill him with throat cancer at 63 in 1967. It was a terrible performance.

Better than Oppenheimer on the stand were some of the star witnesses his lawyers had lined up. This included the usual suspects  distinguished scientists like Fermi, Bethe, Rabi and Conant  but also government and military officials including Groves, John McCloy who had Eisenhowers ear and, surprisingly enough, John Lansdale, the security officer who, after talking to Oppenheimer at Los Alamos in 1943, had become convinced of his patriotism and loyalty. Ernest Lawrence phoned Strauss to say he could not attend because of an attack of colitis that seems to have been at least partly psychosomatic; while Lawrence was a confirmed political adversary of Oppenheimers by this time, one wonders if his ailment was brought on by thoughts of testifying against his former friend, the man he had built up Berkeley to world prominence with starting all the way back in 1929.

Kitty Oppenheimer also testified about her own background; during this time she seems to have been a rock to Robert. But many of the witnesses saw themselves get caught in contradictions and guilty-by-association tactics skillfully employed by Robb. When Bethe testified at length about Oppenheimers great contributions to national security, Robb could not, as a passing shot, resist asking him whether Klaus Fuchs was in his division. When McCloy  one of the most respected financiers and political advisors in the country  discounted the Chevalier affair, Robb tried to trip him up by getting him to admit that he wouldnt hire a person with Oppenheimers associations in one of his banks. Groves was a particularly interesting witness. While he admitted that hiring Oppenheimer in 1942 was a matter of expediency and perfectly valid under that eras security rules, he would not clear the physicist in 1954 based on the new security rules.

It is an indication of Oppenheimers stature that even scientists and officials like John von Neumann and Groves who had been politically opposed to him testified on his behalf. These men understood that disagreement does not equate disloyalty. But the most ringing blow to the charade was delivered by tough-minded Isidor Rabi who had grown up on the streets of New York and could face any adversarial questioning.

Q. Dr. Rabi, Mr. Robb asked you whether you had spoken to Chairman Strauss in behalf of Dr. Oppenheimer. Did you mean to suggest in your reply  in your reply to him you said you did among other things  did you mean to suggest that you had done that at Dr. Oppenheimers investigation?

A. No; I had no communication from Dr. Oppenheimer before these charges were filed, or since, except that I called him once to just say that I believed in him, with no further discussion.

Another time I called on him and his attorney at the suggestion of Mr. Strauss. I never hid my opinion from Mr. Strauss that I thought that this whole proceeding was a most unfortunate one.

Q: What was that?

A: That the suspension of the clearance of Dr. Oppenheimer was a very unfortunate thing and should not have been done. In other words, there he was; he is a consultant, and if you dont want to consult the guy, you dont consult him, period. Why you have to then proceed to suspend clearance and go through all this sort of thing, he is only there when called, and that is all there was to it. So it didnt seem to me the sort of thing that called for this kind of proceeding at all against a man who had accomplished what Dr. Oppenheimer has accomplished. There is a real positive record, the way I expressed it to a friend of mine. We have an A-bomb and a whole series of it, and what more do you want, mermaids? This is just a tremendous achievement. If the end of that road is this kind of hearing, which cant help but be humiliating, I thought it was a pretty bad show.

Edward Teller, on the other hand, knew exactly what he wanted to say. In 1951, Teller had approached the FBI and had told them that he would do anything possible to see Oppenheimers services terminated. He saw Oppenheimers hand and his powers of persuasion everywhere. Before the hearing, Hans Bethe had tried hard to convince him not to testify; Freeman Dyson remembers encountering Bethe in Washington and hearing from him that he had just had the most unpleasant conversation of his life, with Edward Teller. Now Teller provided a view of Oppenheimer that was calculated to be subtle and yet devastating:

In a great number of cases, I have seen Dr. Oppenheimer act  I understand that Dr. Oppenheimer acted  in a way which for me was exceedingly hard to understand. I thoroughly disagreed with him in numerous issues and his actions frankly appeared to me confused and complicated. To this extent I feel that I would like to see the vital interests of this country in hands which I understand better, and therefore trust more.

When asked if he thought Oppenheimers security clearance should be reinstated, Teller said that he didnt think so, especially based on actions since 1945. Freeman Dyson later said that without Tellers testimony the outcome would not have been changed, but Teller remains the most prominent scientist to have testified against Oppenheimer.

As Rabi said, it had been a pretty bad show. At the conclusion of the trial, the board voted 4-1 to deny Oppenheimers clearance, only 32 hours before it was due to expire anyway. Ward Evans, a chemistry professor at Northwestern University, said that the debacle would always be a black mark on the escutcheon of this country. The trial had been a deliberate, orchestrated attack by Lewis Strauss and his associates on a patriotic American who had contributed immensely to protecting his country against adversaries and laying out a bold vision for averting a disastrous arms race that had been ignored. Oppenheimers influence with the United States government had ended. Early this year, 68 years after the fact, the Department of Energy symbolically reversed the removal of Oppenheimers security clearance, arguing that the AEC had violated their own rules.

As it turned out, at least two of his prominent opponents reaped what they sowed. Lewis Strauss faced a barrage of humiliating, adversarial questioning, much like Oppenheimers, when he appeared for confirmation as Commerce Secretary before the Senate in 1958, having been nominated by Eisenhower. He was accused of lying and exaggerating under oath and his nomination was rejected, the first time that had happened since 1925. From Princeton Oppenheimer watched Strausss downfall.

Most of Oppenheimers colleagues were so outraged at Edward Tellers testimony that he was virtually expelled from the community of physicists he had known and loved for so long. Teller died in 2003 at the ripe old age of 95, still trying to take credit for inventing the hydrogen bomb and defending his testimony against Oppenheimer. He was outlived by his old friend, Hans Bethe.

Sources and Further Reading:
The French Police made 157 arrests on Sunday as riots continue across the country.

The number is significantly down from 719 arrests the day before. A firefighter died on duty outside of Paris while trying to douse vehicles set ablaze during the violence, interior minister Gerald Darmanin said on Monday.

The 24-year-old died fighting a blaze in an underground car park in the suburb of Seine-Saint-Denis north of the French capital, Darmanin added.

Meanwhile, mayors have called on the public and elected officials to gather at town halls across the country on Monday in a show of opposition against the riots, France24 reported.

Grandmother of teen shot dead by police urge rioters to stop

Earlier, the grandmother of the French teenager shot dead by police during a traffic stop pleaded Sunday for rioters to stop after five nights of unrest, while authorities expressed outrage at an attack on a suburban mayors home that injured family members.

The fatal police shooting triggered the ongoing violence in France.

The grandmother of 17-year-old Nahel, identified only as Nadia, told French news broadcaster BFM TV, Dont break windows, buses  schools. We want to calm things down.

She said she was angry at the officer who killed her grandson but not at the police in general and expressed faith in the justice system as France faces its worst social upheaval in years. Nahel, whose full name hasnt been disclosed, was buried on Saturday.

The violence appeared to be lessening. Still, the office of Interior Minister Gerald Darmanin said 45,000 police officers would again be deployed in the streets to counter anger over discrimination against people who trace their roots to former French colonies and live in low-income neighborhoods. Nahel is of Algerian descent and was shot in the Paris suburb of Nanterre.

President Emmanuel Macron held a special security meeting Sunday night and plans to meet Monday with the heads of both houses of parliament and Tuesday with the mayors of 220 towns and cities affected by the violence.

With inputs from agencies

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Following the arrest of 157 rioters, the lowest in days, mayors across France have called on officials and the public to stage protests against the violence that has persisted in the country since police shot a 17-year-old boy last week.

Over the past week, France has been battling violent riots and looting over the killing of Nahel M, a food delivery worker, reviving longstanding accusations of racism against the French police force.

Meanwhile, a fireman was killed during a sixth consecutive night of rioting while dousing burning vehicles in northern Paris but there was no immediate indication of a connection with the violent protests, the interior ministry said.

The call for a mobilisation of citizens for a return to republican order came after angry protestors vandalised the residence of a mayor, prompting widespread violence.

In a statement, an association of the countrys mayors noted that areas everywhere in France are the scene of serious unrest, which targets republican symbols with extreme violence.

Grandmother of teen shot dead by police urge rioters to stop

Earlier, the grandmother of the French teenager shot dead by police during a traffic stop pleaded Sunday for rioters to stop after five nights of unrest, while authorities expressed outrage at an attack on a suburban mayors home that injured family members.

The fatal police shooting triggered the ongoing violence in France.

The grandmother of 17-year-old Nahel, identified only as Nadia, told French news broadcaster BFM TV, Dont break windows, buses  schools. We want to calm things down.

She said she was angry at the officer who killed her grandson but not at the police in general and expressed faith in the justice system as France faces its worst social upheaval in years. Nahel, whose full name hasnt been disclosed, was buried on Saturday.

With inputs from agencies

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Former Pakistan prime minister and the leader of the Pakistan Tehreek-e-Insaaf (PTI) Imran Khan, blasted the Shehbaz Sharif administration, alleging that the government had made a plan to imprison him and that the entire incident surrounding his detention had been pre-planned.

In his speech to the nation, he also categorically rejected any culpability in any allegations of corruption against him.

Addressing the nation, former PM Imran Khan said, I want the nation to know how a plan has been made to arrest me on the basis of false and baseless cases. A lawyer is killed in Quetta and without any investigation and proof. Shahbaz Sharifs advisor comes on TV on the same day and says that the murder was done by Imran Khan and later the video of the same lawyers widow shows who did it.

This is not politicsthis is jihad. We are all slaves,  Imran Khan added.

Imran Khan, a former prime minister and the head of the PTI, was detained by the National Accountability Bureau (NAB) on May 9 inside the High Court in Islamabad on suspicion of corruption in connection with the Al-Qadir Trust, which he and his wife, Bushra Bibi, jointly own.

Khans party organised protests after his detention, several of which descended into violence. The government launched a crackdown, leading to numerous arrests around the nation. The perpetrators of the violence on May 9 are being tried in military courts.

On May 9, I was arrested like a terrorist from the Islamabad High Court despite being on bail, and after that the cases were piled up while the Supreme Court also declared this arrest illegal. Is anyone going to answer? Khan asked during his address.

He added, 16 innocent Pakistanis were shot, 9 people are missing but there is no inquiry and no one is talking about it. Is this a free society? Do these Pakistanis have no rights? Arent their wives and children family?

Before his address, Imran Khan asked the public to show defiance and stand up for Haqeeqi Azadi (Real Democracy).

Lets all raise the PTI flag to show defiance to those who are trying to crush Pakistans biggest and only Federal party through this current reign of terror. We are standing up for our Haqeeqi Azadi. he said on Twitter before the address.

Slamming the Shehbaz Sharif government during the address, Khan said that if he is put in an open court, he can prove that all his arrest was pre-planned.

I want to say that bring me up in an open court on a televised address. I will prove that all of this was pre-planned. The way I was picked from there. It was pre-planned for provocation. Later on, when people reacted to it, it was used to crush the party (PTI) down, because the party was not bogging down, he added.

Giving a reference to the French protests over the fatal shooting of a teenage boy, the PTI Chairman said, So many innocent civilians were shot at, no one is even talking about it, and in France just one person was shot and see what is happening. Thats what is called a free nation.

Imran Khan accused the Pakistan government of destroying all the institutions in the country and gave an explanation denying any wrongdoing in Al-Qadir case, Toshakhana case and land scam.

Imran Khan claimed that the cheque payments in the alleged land scam were done after Khan was removed as the Prime Minister after losing the majority.

They have filed an anti-corruption case on Bushra Bibi alleging that a road was constructed in her village. They have also filed the case on me and my sister. These duffers say that as PM I got them lands worth of 6 million PKR at cheaper rates. But, look at the cheque numbers. The first cheque was given on April 25, 2022. The other cheque is on June 2. And I was not the PM since April 9, he said.

The PTI Chairman further said that in the Al-Qadir case, not a penny could have gone to Imran Khan or Bushra Bibi as they happen to be the trustees of the charitable trust.

In the Al-Qadir case, the cabinet received a proposal that if a case between a Malik Riaz family and a UKs National Crime Agency is settled and kept confidential from the cabinet, 190 million pounds will come to Pakistan. But if it is not kept confidential, then Pakistan will have to prove its stand in the court. The case would have gone for 5-6 years, and we (Pakistan) have a very bad record in foreign cases, and have already lost cases over 100 million USD, he said.

Imran Khan added, If they are alleging money laundering here, what is stopping them? The money has come to Pakistan. It was a unanimous decision passed by the cabinet. They are also accusing that I did that to benefit the Al-Qadir university which is a charitable trust. But, in a charitable trust, not a penny can go to the trustees which includes me and Bushra begum.

The Al-Qadir Trust case alleges that the PTI chief and his wife, Bushra Bibi, obtained billions of rupees and land worth hundreds of kanals from a real estate firm for legalising PKR 50 billion that was identified and returned to the country by the UK during the previous PTI government, as per The News International report.

He also claimed that the Toshakhana gifts were sold as per the rules and everything has been declared in FDR.

As per the law, when PM, President, Army Chief receives gifts, it goes to Toshakhana, where it is valued. It is done through an FDR, with an initial value and then an appraisal. If there are any excess value, they give the option of purchasing. This is the rule. Under this I took many gifts and refused others. Whatever I sold, is declared in FBR and is under capital gains tax. What is wrong here? Also, under this case, NAB, Election Commission and FIR is also filed. It is just not possible that three cases are being run on the same issue, he further alleged.

The case pertains to the allegations that the former PM deliberately concealed details of the gifts he retained from the Toshaskhana  a repository where presents handed to government officials from foreign officials are kept  during his time as the prime minister and proceeds from their reported sales.

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New Zealand has become the first nation globally to extend its prohibition on plastic bags in supermarkets to encompass thin bags typically utilized for storing fruits and vegetables.

Implemented on Saturday, this measure is part of a broader government campaign aimed at curbing the use of disposable plastics.

Since the prohibition on takeaway plastic bags was introduced in 2019, most shoppers already bring their own bags when visiting stores.

Numerous countries have taken steps to reduce plastic bag usage, either through fees or outright bans.

According to Rachel Brooking, Associate Environment Minister, New Zealand generates excessive amounts of waste, particularly plastic waste.

She further stated that over one billion plastic bags have been saved since the prohibition on thicker bags came into effect in 2019.

This latest initiative is projected to prevent the usage of 150 million plastic bags annually.

However, critics have expressed concerns that consumers may simply opt for disposable paper bags, which remain available in supermarkets.

We believe it is still worth implementing this change, but our ultimate goal is to reduce the usage of any single-use packaging, stated Ms. Brooking. We want people to bring their own bags, and supermarkets are now selling reusable produce bags, she added.

Countdown, a supermarket chain operating more than 185 stores nationwide, has commenced the sale of reusable polyester mesh bags. The company hopes this will encourage shoppers to utilize reusable bags for fruits and vegetables.

We understand that change can be challenging and it may take some time for customers to adjust, explained Catherine Langabeer, Head of Sustainability at Countdown. We encounter some disgruntled customers.

The New Zealand government has also made progress in other endeavors to combat climate change.

In October, it proposed implementing a tax on greenhouse gases emitted by farm animals, such as sheep and cattle.

This pioneering scheme aims to have farmers paying for their agricultural emissions in some form by 2025.

The nations farming industry is responsible for approximately half of its total emissions.

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In the first six months of 2023, Pakistan witnessed an alarming rise in terrorist and suicide attacks, claiming as many as 389 lives, according to a think tank.

As per the report by Pakistan Institute for Conflict and Security Studies (PICSS), the first half of the current year saw a total of 271 attacks, claiming 389 lives and injuring 656 others, Dawn reported.

During the same period last year, 151 terrorist attacks took place across Pakistan, claiming 293 deaths and injuring 487 people.

Shockingly, the country witnessed a staggering 79 per cent increase in militant attacks during the first half of 2023 compared to 2022.

(With inputs from agencies)

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Prime Minister Narendra Modi will host the virtual SCO summit on Tuesday. The meet is likely to be attended Chinese president Xi Jinping, Russian president Vladimir Putin and Pakistan PM Shehbaz Sharif.

The summit is expected to focus on regional security situation and ways to boost connectivity and trade.

Notably, it will be Putins first participation in a multilateral summit since the Wagner Group launched a short-lived coup attempt on 24 June.

The summit of the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation (SCO) under Indias presidency is also set to welcome Iran as the new permanent member of the grouping.

The situation in Afghanistan, the Ukraine conflict and enhancing cooperation among the SCO member countries are expected to figure in the summit, people familiar with the matter said, adding boosting connectivity and trade is also likely to be discussed.

The summit is also taking place against the backdrop of the over three-year eastern Ladakh border standoff between Indian and Chinese troops, and two weeks after Prime Minister Modis high-profile visit to the US.

The SCO, comprising India, China, Russia, Pakistan, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan and Uzbekistan, is an influential economic and security bloc and has emerged as one of the largest transregional international organisations.

India assumed the rotating chairmanship of the SCO at the Samarkand Summit of SCO on September 16 last year.

Heads of the two SCO bodies  the secretariat and the SCO RATS (Regional Anti-Terrorist Structure) are also set to attend Tuesdays virtual summit whose theme is Towards a SECURE SCO.

The SECURE acronym was coined by Prime Minister Modi at the 2018 SCO summit and it stands for Security; Economy and Trade; Connectivity; Unity; Respect for Sovereignty and Territorial Integrity; and Environment.

Heads of six international and regional organisations have also been invited to the summit.

The organisations are the UN, the ASEAN (Association of Southeast Asian Nations), CIS (Commonwealth of Independent States), CSTO (Collective Security Treaty Organisation), EAEU (Eurasian Economic Union) and CICA (Conference on Interaction and Confidence Building Measures in Asia).

Indias presidency of the SCO saw significant activities in a number of areas. New Delhi created five new pillars for cooperation in SCO. These are startups and innovation, traditional medicine, digital inclusion, youth empowerment and shared Buddhist heritage.

The special working group on startups and innovation and experts working group on traditional medicine were created on Indias initiative.

We intend to contribute substantially in both these areas, said one of the people cited above.

To further prime minister Modis vision of Vasudhaiv Kutumbakom (world is one family), India emphasised on building greater people-to-people connect, the person said.

A number of signature events were held under the Indian presidency with the intention to further deepen people to people connect.

Indias association with the SCO began in 2005 as an observer country. It became a full member state of SCO at the Astana summit in 2017.

India has shown a keen interest in deepening its security-related cooperation with the SCO and its RATS, which specifically deals with issues relating to security and defence.

The SCO was founded at a summit in Shanghai in 2001 by the presidents of Russia, China, the Kyrgyz Republic, Kazakhstan, Tajikistan and Uzbekistan. Pakistan became its permanent member along with India in 2017.

With inputs from PTI

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Ely Cathedral in UK embraced a new approach this week by welcoming 800 partygoers to its premises for a silent disco, aiming to attract younger worshippers.

Organised by Silent Discos, the sold-out event took place within the mediaeval site. The initiative forms part of a series of measures aimed at engaging a younger audience and generating revenue for the cathedral.

In an interview with The Sunday Times, the Very Reverend Mark Bonney, the 35th Dean of Ely, said, This is not my cathedral. Its the cathedral for the people who live here.

Recognizing the discos unlikely connection to subsequent worship, he viewed it as a gradual process of bridging the gap and bringing individuals closer together.

Ely Cathedral faces significant financial responsibilities, with an annual maintenance bill surpassing 1 million, according to The Telegraph. The cathedral relies on income from visitor tours, donations, and event rentals to support its upkeep.

Looking ahead, Ely plans to organise additional fundraising initiatives. The cathedral currently hosts 22 services per week, which will continue to be upheld, as the dean highlights its primary purpose as a place of worship.

Reflecting on the cathedrals significance, the dean stated, The building touches something thats bigger than we are. And we might not be able to articulate what thats about, but it makes us think about things in a different sort of way. And thats the beginning of a spiritual journey.

According to The Telegraph, the decline in church attendance in the UK has persisted for 70 consecutive years, with less than two percent of the population regularly attending church services.

With inputs from agencies

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The FSB security force of Russia arrested a suspect and prevented an attack on Moscow-installed head of the Crimean peninsula, which Moscow annexed in 2014, Russian news outlets said on Monday.

An assassination attempt organised by Ukraines special services targeting the head of the Republic of Crimea, Sergei Aksyonov, was foiled, Russian state-run agency TASS reported, citing an FSB statement.

The detained individual was a Russian national born in 1988 who had been recruited by officers of Ukraines Security Service (SBU), the statement added.

It added that the suspect was detained while removing the explosive device from its hiding place.

Moscow annexed Crimea from Ukraine in 2014 after a referendum widely regarded as a sham by Kyiv and Western countries.

The peninsula has been regularly targeted by strikes and attacks targeting Russian-installed officials over recent months that Moscow has blamed on Kyiv.

With inputs from agencies

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Ahead of its largest annual military exercises, Taiwan will kick off a two-day missile live-firing test on Monday as the island ramps up preparations against China.

The 23 million Taiwanese people live under the threat of attack by Beijing, which views the self-ruled democracy as part of its territory to be seized one day.

As relationship between Taipei and Beijing are increasingly strained, the missile firings in southern Pingtung county comes to spotlight, with China conducting two major military exercises around the island in the past year.

The most recent was spotted in April, when Beijing simulated targeted strikes on Taiwan and island encirclement.State media also reported dozens of planes practising an aerial blockade.

Those war games were a response to President Tsai Ing-wens meeting with US House speaker Kevin McCarthy earlier that month.

Monday and Tuesdays missile tests come against the backdrop of aerial and naval manoeuvres by Beijing in and around the Taiwan Strait  a 180-kilometre-wide (122-mile-wide) passage between the island and mainland China.

Last month, eight Chinese warplanes approached Taiwans contiguous zone  or the band of sea within 24 nautical miles (44 kilometres) of its coast.

Taiwans immigration department announced last week that it had rejected applications by Chinese tourism officials to visit the island for a mid-July international travel fair.

Citing the overall cross-strait situation, the immigration agency said there were doubts about the necessity, urgency and irreplaceability of the participation of Chinese tourism officials. Only tourism operators from China had their visas approved.

With inputs from AFP

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Russias FSB security service has reportedly thwarted an attack on Sergei Aksyonov, the governor of the Crimea peninsula and arrested a suspect.

Crimea, which was a part of Ukraine earlier, was annexed by Russia in 2014.

An assassination attempt organised by Ukraines special services targeting the head of the Republic of Crimea, Sergei Aksyonov, was foiled, the FSB said in a statement.

The FSB said in their statement that the detained individual was a Russian national born in 1988 who had been recruited by officers of Ukraines Security Service (SBU).

It added that the suspect was detained while removing the explosive device from its hiding place.

Russia had annexed Crimea from Ukraine in 2014 after a referendum widely regarded as a sham by Kyiv and Western countries.

In recent months, Crimea has experienced regular strikes and attacks targeting officials installed by Russia that Moscow has blamed on Ukraine.

(With agency inputs)

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Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen is set to visit Beijing this week, the United States said Sunday, marking the second trip by a cabinet official to China since ties between the worlds top two economies deteriorated earlier this year.

Yellen is expected to discuss with her counterparts the importance for both countries to responsibly manage our relationship, communicate directly about areas of concern, and work together to address global challenges, said the Treasury Department in a statement.

Yellens planned July 6-9 trip comes just weeks after Secretary of State Antony Blinken met Chinas top leader President Xi Jinping and Foreign Minister Qin Gang in Beijing in June.

Blinken was the highest-ranking US official to visit the Chinese capital in nearly five years, and Xi said on the rare trip that he saw headway in the strained relationship between Washington and Beijing.

In Beijing, Yellen will discuss how the United States views its economic relationship with China, a senior Treasury official said Sunday.

She will meet with senior Chinese officials and leading US firms, the American spokesperson said without providing specifics.

While the US seeks to secure its national security interests and protect human rights, actions to this effect are not intended to gain economic advantage over China, the official added.

Washington also looks towards healthy ties with Beijing and does not seek to decouple the economies, while pursuing cooperation on urgent challenges like climate change and debt distress, the American official said.

The United States does not expect significant breakthrough from this initial trip, but it does aim to build longer-term channels of communication with China, the Treasury official added.

 Restarting engagement 

I think the US government is clearly trying to put some floor under the deterioration of the economic relationship, Edward Alden, a senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations (CFR) told AFP, speaking on the Treasury secretarys intentions to visit China.

A Yellen trip could restart a steady pattern of engagement at lower levels, he said, adding that the US has shifted from being ambiguous about how far it was supporting decoupling to explicitly adopting a strategy of derisking instead.

This means focusing on a narrower range of items that have strategic importance, trying to build fences around those items, but otherwise trying to continue to nurture a reasonably robust US-China economic relationship, Alden said.

But observers do not expect a quick resolution to tensions.

President Joe Bidens administration is considering a program to restrict certain US outbound investments involving sensitive technology with key national security implications  an issue that has riled Chinese officials.

Other possible sticking points include amendments to Chinas anti-espionage law which recently broadened the definition of spying while banning the transfer of information relating to national security  a move that has spooked foreign and domestic businesses.

The senior Treasury official told reporters Sunday that Washington intends to communicate its concerns over the law.

While significant disagreements may not be resolved in a single trip, the US seeks to deepen and increase the frequency of communication with China and to stabilize the relationship, avoiding miscommunication and expanding collaboration where possible, the official said.

 Global growth, debt problems 

For the US, discussions with officials from the worlds second biggest economy are important to help spur stronger global economic growth and to tackle the mounting debt problem of the Global South, said Wendy Cutler, vice president at the Asia Society Policy Institute, discussing a prospective Yellen visit.

On Beijings part, officials are looking for concrete steps taken by the US to show that decoupling and holding back China is not the ultimate goal of the United States, Cutler added.

But despite US policies that have drawn ire from Beijing, officials likely have an awareness of Chinas continued export dependence and the importance of the US market, CFRs Alden said.

I think that theres a growing awareness in Beijing that China also needs to play a role in nurturing this economic relationship with the United States, because its simply too important to China as well, he added.

Washington and Beijing recently have clashed over trade, human rights and other issues.

Relations came under further stress this year when the United States shot down a Chinese balloon it said was used for surveillance  a claim China strongly denied.

But Blinkens reception in Beijing has been seen as a symbolic sign of lowering temperatures.
US Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen will visit Beijing from 6-9 July to participate in couple of meetings with senior Chinese officials to discuss a broad range of issues,including US concerns about a new Chinese counterespionage law, a senior Treasury official said on Sunday.

Yellens much-awaited visit is a part of a plan by President Joe Biden to deepen communication between China and US, grow relationship and minimize the risks of mistakes when disagreements arise, the official told reporters.

This occurs just a few weeks after Secretary of State Antony Blinken paid a visit to Beijing and reached an agreement with Chinese President Xi Jinping to stabilize ties and ensure that the intense rivalry between the two countries does not escalate into conflict. China protested loudly when Biden subsequently referred to Xi as a dictator, but analysts say the remark had little impact on efforts to improve ties.

The Treasury chief plans to tell Chinas new economic team that Washington will continue to defend human rights and its own national security interests via targeted actions against China, but wants to work with Beijing on urgent challenges such as climate change and debt distress faced by many countries.

We seek a healthy economic relationship with China, one that fosters growth and innovation in both countries, the official said. We do not seek to decouple our economies. A full cessation of trade and investment would be destabilizing for both our countries and the global economy.

The official, speaking on condition of anonymity, declined to give details on which Chinese officials Yellen would meet in Beijing. A second administration official told Reuters that Yellen was expected to meet the Chinese Vice Premier He Lifeng.

Yellen would underscore Washingtons determination to strengthen its own competitiveness while responding with allies to what Washington calls economic coercion and unfair economic practices by China, the first official said.

One clear area of concern involved Chinas new national security and espionage law, and the potential implications for foreign and U.S. firms, the official added.

We have concerns with the new measure, and how it might apply, that it could expand the scope of what is considered by the authorities in China to be espionage activity, the official said, citing possible spillovers to the broader investment climate and the economic relationship.

While no major breakthroughs were expected, Treasury officials hope to have constructive conversations and build longer-term channels of communication with Chinas new economic team, including at the sub-cabinet level, the official said.

U.S. officials would also reiterate concerns about human rights abuses against the Uyghur Muslim minority, Chinas recent move to ban sales of Micron Technology memory chips, and moves by China against foreign due diligence and consulting firms.

Yellen would also talk with Chinese officials about a long-awaited U.S. executive action curbing outbound investment in China in certain critical sectors, and make sure they dont think something is more sweeping than it is or than its intended to be, the official said.

With inputs from Reuters

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In a difficult week for Kyivs counteroffensive against Russian forces, Ukraine claimed on Monday that its troops had won more ground along the eastern and southern fronts. President Volodymyr Zelenskiy termed this as success.

Heavy battle last week resulted in the Ukrainian military regaining 37.4 square kilometres (14.4 square miles) of land, according to deputy defence minister Hanna Maliar.

She claimed that Kievs forces were moving forward in eastern Ukraines Bakhmut direction and that Russian forces were advancing in the Lyman, Avdiivka, and Mariinka directions in the eastern Donetsk region.

Ukraine had reclaimed nine square km over the past week along the eastern front as a result of improving the operational (tactical) position and aligning the front line, Maliar said.

NATO readies military plans against Russia

A senior NATO military officer declared on Monday that Russias military is battered but by no means defeated in the conflict in Ukraine and outlined the biggest revision to the alliances military strategy since the Cold War should Moscow dare to escalate hostilities.

They might not be 11 feet tall, but they are certainly not 2 feet tall, the Chair of the NATO Military Committee, Admiral Rob Bauer, told reporters. So, we should never underestimate the Russians and their ability to bounce back.

U.S. President Joe Biden and his NATO counterparts are set to endorse a major shakeup of the alliances planning system at a summit in the Lithuanian capital Vilnius next week.

NATO, as an organization, does not provide weapons or ammunition to Ukraine. Its sought to avoid being dragged into a wider war with nuclear-armed Russia. At the same time, it is massively reinforcing the security of member countries near Russia, Ukraine and Belarus.

Around 40,000 troops are on standby from Estonia in the north down to Romania on the Black Sea. About 100 aircraft take to the skies in that territory each day, and a total of 27 warships are operating in the Baltic and Mediterranean Seas. Those numbers are set to rise.

Under its new plans, NATO aims to have up to 300,000 troops ready to move to its eastern flank within 30 days. The plans divide its territory into three zones  the high north and Atlantic area, a zone north of the Alps, and another in southern Europe.

In the south, Ukraine has regained 28.4 square km of territory, bringing the total area of recaptured territory along that front to 158.4 square km, Maliar added.

Last week was difficult on the front line. But we are making progress, Zelenskiy wrote on the Telegram messaging app.

We are moving forward, step by step! I thank everyone who is defending Ukraine, everyone who is leading this war to Ukraines victory!

Russia, which began its full-scale invasion in February 2022, said at the weekend its forces had repelled Ukrainian attacks near villages ringing Bakhmut and in areas further south, particularly near the hilltop town of Vuhledar. It also reported success in containing Ukrainian troops in the northeast.

Russian Defence Minister Sergei Shoigu said on Monday that a brief mutiny by the Wagner mercenary group last month had not affected Russias special military operation in Ukraine.

The provocation did not affect the actions of army groups (involved in the operation), he told a ministry meeting.

Ukraine says Russian troops advancing

Earlier on Sunday, Ukraine said that Russian troops were advancing in four areas in the east of the country amid fierce fighting but reported its forces moving forward in the south.

Deputy Defence Minister Ganna Maliar said that Russian troops were advancing near Avdiivka, Mariinka, Lyman and Svatove.

Fierce fighting is going on everywhere, Maliar wrote on social media, adding: The situation is quite complicated.

Ukrainian forces have made gradual progress in their counteroffensive launched last month but have so far failed to produce a major breakthrough and have urged Western allies to escalate pledges of military support.

Maliar also said Ukrainian troops were advancing with partial success on the southern flank of Bakhmut in the east and near Berdyansk and Melitopol in the south.

In the south, she said Ukrainian forces faced intense enemy resistance, remote mining, deploying of reserves and were only advancing gradually.

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Amina J. Mohammed, the Deputy Secretary-General (DSG) of the United Nations, arrived in India on Monday on a three-day visit, according to the Ministry of External Affairs.

Her three-day visit takes place from July 3 to 5. Since been reappointed as the UNs deputy secretary general for a second five-year term in January 2022, this is her first trip to India.

Upon her arrival in India, the UN Deputy Secretary-General was accompanied by Indias ambassador to the UN, Ruchira Kamboj, and welcomed by Shombe Sharpe, the UN Resident Coordinator in India, and other MEA officials.

Taking to Twitter, the official spokesperson for MEA, Arindam Bagchi wrote, A warm welcome to @UN Deputy Secretary General @AminaJMohammed as she arrives in New Delhi on an official visit to India.

According to the Ministry of External Affairs During her visit, the DSG will have meetings with External Affairs Minister S Jaishankar, Finance Minister Nirmala Sitharaman, Minister for Environment, Forest & Climate Change Bhupender Yadav, MoS for External Affairs and Parliamentary Affairs V Muraleedharan, Vice Chairman of NITI Aayog, Suman Bery, and Indias G20 Sherpa, Amitabh Kant.

The DSG will also be travelling to Bengaluru where she will be interacting with experts from premier information and technology research institutions and industry representatives to discuss Indias achievements in the digital technology domain that could be replicated in the Global South for addressing developmental challenges, the MEA release said.

The DSGs visit to India will be an opportunity to exchange views on Indias ongoing G20 Presidency and its achievements in Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) ahead of the SDG Summit in September this year, and issues related to Climate Action in the context of developmental priorities, the release added.

The visit is a reflection of Indias abiding commitment to multilateralism, including through its contribution to the UN and its ongoing G20 Presidency, in addressing global challenges meaningfully.

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External Affairs Minister S Jaishankar on Monday said that US visit of Prime Minister Narendra Modi was different as compared to other prime ministers who visited the country as PM Modi has a different image.

He said that when PM Modi tries something or takes a position, its effect is seen in global politics.

Addressing the Student Samvaad in Delhi, EAM Jaishankar said, If you see the recent US visit of PM Modi, you saw that there were many prime ministers who visited the US but this visit of PM Modi was different. It was because PM Modi has a different image. He is a senior, experienced and credible leader. When PM Modi tries something or takes a position, its effect is seen in global politics. In the last 9 years, we have seen big changes in the world initiated by India, said the EAM.

Talking about the role of technology in foreign policy, he said, The world of technology is very globalised. So, whether you want it or not, the world will come to you. It can come in the form of both opportunities and challenges.

Prime Minister Narendra Modis visit to the United States from 21-24 June was marked by a series of significant events and meetings with top Indian and American CEOs.

Upon his arrival, he was warmly greeted at the White House with a ceremonial welcome and a guard of honor. During his visit, he was hosted by US President Joe Biden and First Lady Jill Biden for a state dinner at the White House.

He also attended a State Luncheon hosted by US Secretary of State Antony Blinken and had a meeting with US Vice President Kamala Harris.

Before departing for Egypt from US, PM Modi engaged with the Indian diaspora at the Ronald Reagan Building in Washington, DC, and likened the experience to savoring a delightful sweet dish during his farewell address.

With inputs from agencies

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Online court hearings are becoming increasingly important. Since the coronavirus crisis, there has been a steady rise in online court cases, with many courts transitioning to online hearings. This offers a number of advantages, for example, hearings can be conducted more quickly, and participants do not need to travel long distances. In addition to streamlining court proceedings, cost and time savings are another benefit of virtual cases. Critics, however, point out that the required technology is not yet mature and that many procedural questions remain unanswered: How can the quality of the video transmissions be guaranteed? How can hearings be moved to a digital format while respecting the detailed rules of conduct? The researchers at Fraunhofer Austria Research GmbH are working to answer such questions, collaborating with other scientists on this project, including Prof. David Tait, a researcher at Western Sydney University. They are creating a software-based virtual court system that can be used to optimize and develop video technology applications in civil justice. The plan is to use the virtual courtroom setting initially for misdemeanors, for example in cases involving disputes between neighbors.

In many video conference applications, VR glasses are used to give users the feeling of being in the same physical location; however, the Fraunhofer researchers are not relying on VR in this project. Instead, the video output is displayed on a monitor. The participants communicate in the virtual courtroom using avatars  3D graphical characters that represent real people. Before the start of the hearing in the virtual courtroom, the participants select the appropriate role specification for them, such as judge, defense attorney, prosecutor, witness or defendant. A webcam records their face. Used in conjunction with a 3D graphics engine, the software is equipped with eye tracking to detect the direction in which the user looks. This eye movement is translated into the avatars head movement, simulating direct eye contact between the interlocutors. It is this eye contact that is currently missing in video conferences via MS Teams or Zoom.

Video conferences on an equal footing

Our virtual court system does not require any complicated technical equipment. Participants can be located anywhere  in a public building, police station or at home  as long as they have access to a laptop and webcam. That is all they need to take part in a virtual court hearing, says Volker Settgast, senior researcher at the Visual Computing business unit at Fraunhofer Austria in Graz. In the virtual representation of the courtroom, all users can see each other and tell where everyone is looking thanks to eye tracking. The webcam detects not only eye movements but also facial expressions. As the webcam records mouth movements and facial expressions, conclusions can be made about the emotional state of participants, explains Settgast. In traditional video conferences, the video image is transmitted, but this is not necessary with our system thanks to the use of avatars. Only the audio stream and the data obtained from eye tracking and facial expression recognition are transmitted. The data stream to be transmitted is therefore reduced.

There are plans to adapt the virtual courtrooms to meet country-specific requirements and work is also underway to improve the avatar animation. For example, Settgast and his team want to incorporate participants hands with gesture recognition. A browser-based version of the software is also planned for the future. Beta testing has already begun and the first workshops and user tests took place at Harvard Universitys Visualization Research and Teaching Laboratory, Department of Earth and Planetary Sciences, and at the University of Montreals Cyberjustice Laboratory. Ultimately, we want to move the court setting to a completely virtual environment and enable civil court video conferences to be held on an equal footing. As eye movements, facial expressions and gestures are visible, online hearings will have the same personal dynamic as face-to-face interactions in the future, says the researcher.

This pre-competitive research received project funding from the Austrian Federal Ministry of Labor and Economy.
Sursa: Facebook / Antonio Amuza

Asociatia Studentilor la Comunicare cere Facultatii de Jurnalism a Universitatii din Bucuresti sa revizuiasca decizia de ocupare a postului de asistent universitar in institutie de catre fostul sef de resurse umane al SRI
In a video posted to his socials, workers at the fast food joint are bopping along to the music as they cook up a feed (surely just let them party?) before the camera turns to DJ Snake behind the decks and a sizeable crowd boogying to the tunes as they occupy what would be the dining area.
Elon Musk Announces Twitters Plan to Restrict the Number of Tweets Users Can Read News oi -Kabir Jain

In a surprising move, Elon Musk, the owner of Twitter, recently announced that the popular social media platform will be implementing new restrictions on the number of tweets users can view per day.

The announcement sparked a wave of reactions, with thousands of individuals reporting issues with the service, highlighting the significant impact this change has had on Twitter's vast user base.

Elon Musk's Announcement and Its Impact

Now to 10k, 1k & 0.5k  Elon Musk (@elonmusk) July 1, 2023

Elon Musk went on Twitter to announce the upcoming restrictions on viewing tweets. The purpose, as stated by Musk, is to discourage the widespread practice of data scraping and system manipulation. Data scraping is when information is automatically extracted from websites, usually done with harmful intentions or to gain an unfair advantage.

According to his tweet, the following limits will be enforced:

Verified accounts: Users can view up to 10,000 posts per day.

Unverified accounts: Limited to 1,000 posts per day.

New unverified accounts: Restricted to 500 posts per day.

These limitations were revised from the initial announcement where verified accounts were restricted to reading 6,000 posts per day, unverified accounts were limited to 600 posts per day, and new unverified accounts were restricted to 300 posts per day.

Users Are Not Happy

Following the announcement, the impact of the tweet viewing restrictions became evident as reports of issues with the service surged. Downdetector, a website that monitors online outages, recorded over 7,500 individuals reporting problems with Twitter. This sudden influx of issues caused the hashtag #TwitterDown to trend in certain regions, highlighting the significance of the situation.

This particular decision by Musk is among the many bold yet controversial moves he has made. Recently, Twitter implemented a paywall for its API, which resulted in widespread public criticism. The outcry was so intense that the company had to modify its initial decision.

Best Mobiles in India
Indian Mobile Manufacturers Face Challenges in Re-entering the Domestic Smartphone Market Tech Biz oi -Kabir Jain

The Indian mobile manufacturing industry has faced significant challenges in recent years as it attempts to re-enter the domestic smartphone market. Despite the availability of smartphones in various price ranges, both below and above 10,000, Chinese brands continue to dominate the market.

Lack of Availability of Indian Mobile Brands Below 10,000

A recent survey conducted by ET in Delhi highlighted the absence of Indian mobile brands in the market. The survey included approximately 20 mobile retail shops, and none of them sold Indian mobile brands. The shops had limited stock of mobile phones priced below 10,000, which used to be popular among Indian consumers. Instead, the majority of the shops focused on selling 5G phones priced above 10,000.

Shift in Consumer Demand towards 5G Phones

The introduction of 5G technology in India has led to a shift in consumer preferences. Consumers now seek smartphones that support this next-generation technology. Foreign mobile manufacturers have capitalized on this demand, primarily targeting the above 10,000 segment. However, this situation presents an opportunity for Indian brands to re-enter the market.

Financial and Technological Challenges for Indian Brands

Indian mobile brands such as Micromax and Lava face financial and technological hurdles. These brands lack the necessary financial resources and technological foundations required for manufacturing phones. They heavily rely on global supply chains and do not possess the bargaining power that comes with higher volumes.

To overcome these challenges, experts emphasize the need for stronger collaboration between original equipment makers (OEMs), the government, and network providers. This collaboration should extend beyond financial arrangements to encompass technological advancements, particularly for the sub-10,000 phone segment.

Opportunities for Indian Manufacturers with the Introduction of 5G

The transition from 4G to 5G technology presents an opportunity for Indian manufacturers to regain market share. Tarun Pathak, research director at Counterpoint Research, emphasizes that every tech transition brings new opportunities.

Indian brands were pushed out of the market during the shift from 3G to 4G, but they now have a chance to make a comeback. The demand for smartphones priced below 10,000 remains significant, and Indian manufacturers can tap into this market by offering competitive 5G devices.

Price Increase and Targeted Customer Segments

Post-Covid, manufacturers faced supply chain issues and rising input costs, resulting in price increases. However, they discovered a segment of customers capable of absorbing these price hikes. As a result, manufacturers decided to focus on the above 10,000 segment.

By targeting customers who upgrade their phones every couple of years and are willing to pay a premium, Indian brands can generate revenue growth and strengthen their position in the market.

Budget and Network Preference Influence

Budget considerations and network preferences also play a significant role in consumer purchasing decisions. Customers with a budget of around 13,000 often opt for 4G phones, while those willing to spend above 15,000 prioritize 5G capability.

With network providers rolling out 5G infrastructure, people are eager to experience the faster network. However, the price range remains a determining factor for many consumers.

There Is Still Hope

Indian mobile manufacturers face formidable challenges as they seek to re-enter the domestic smartphone market dominated by Chinese brands. Financial and technological limitations, coupled with a shift in consumer demand towards 5G phones, necessitate collaboration and support from various stakeholders.

With the introduction of 5G, Indian brands have an opportunity to reclaim their market share by focusing on affordable smartphones and leveraging the evolving consumer preferences.

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Apple Extends Patent License Agreement With Nokia For 5G And Other Technologies News oi -Alap Naik Desai

Apple Inc. has extended its patent license agreement with Nokia. The agreement covers network infrastructure and 5G technology developed by Nokia. The long-term patent license agreement replaces the current agreement between the two companies which is set to expire at the end of this year.

Finnish company Nokia and American consumer electronics giants Apple Inc. have signed a new long-term patent license agreement, which essentially replaces the current deal between the two companies.

Apple Secures Access To Nokia's 5G Technology Innovations

Network infrastructure and 5G technology provider Nokia signed a new agreement with Apple granting the latter access to its technologies, especially in the 5G telecommunications segment. Speaking about the agreement, Nokia Technologies President Jenni Lukander said:

"The agreement reflects the strength of Nokia's patent portfolio, decades-long investments in R&D, and contributions to cellular standards and other technologies."

Last night we announced a new long-term patent license agreement with Apple which covers Nokias fundamental inventions in #5G and other technologies. Apple will make payments to Nokia for a multi-year period. Read more: https://t.co/DvFb8ioP0g pic.twitter.com/yFTf6eKKSt  Nokia (@nokia) July 1, 2023

The terms of the agreement remain confidential between the companies. However, it enables Apple to use the Finnish company's technology in its products and covers Nokia's inventions in 5G and other technologies.

The previous license agreement between Apple and Nokia was announced in May 2017. In other words, the two companies sign an agreement that stays valid for five years.

What Will Apple And Nokia Gain By Signing The Patient License Agreement?

Finland-based Nokia is one of the world's main suppliers of 5G. Several companies have long been actively developing the latest generation of telecommunications and wireless broadband technology.

Nokia competes with Sweden's Ericsson, China's Huawei, and South Korea's Samsung. However, Nokia is one of the oldest and the most deeply entrenched company in the field. Additionally, it has had decades of experience with consumer electronics and modern-day mobile telephony.

Nokia's patent portfolio is built on more than EUR 140 billion (approx. 12,55,260 crore) invested in Research & Development. The company has around 20,000 patents, including over 5,500 declared essential to 5G.

With the license agreement, Apple Inc. would continue to have access to the aforementioned huge portfolio. With a Finnish company by its side, Apple Inc. can confidently incorporate reliable 5G technologies in its upcoming iPhone, and other devices.

Nokia should recognize revenue related to the agreement starting January 2024. In other words, the company could reveal the financial benefits of the agreement in the second quarter of next year.

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Foreign Companies Dumping Cheap Optic Fiber In India Hurting Local Producers To Attract Financial Penalties? News oi -Alap Naik Desai

Chinese telecommunications equipment could soon attract "Anti-Dumping Duty" as it is allegedly hurting local producers. Manufacturers from a few foreign countries are selling their products at artificially-lowered rates with nefarious intentions, accused DGTR (Directorate General of Trade Remedies)

DGTR, the investigative arm of the Commerce Ministry in the Indian central government, has strongly recommended implementing a harsh and presumably steep duty on imported optical fiber cables. Let's look at the latest developments in the world of telecommunications.

Cheap Optic Fiber Flooding Indian Markets And Hurting Local Producers?

India is in the middle of a massive, nationwide digitization drive. Through the ambitious rural outreach program called Bharat Net, India hopes to ensure all Gram panchayats have access to broadband internet.

The fastest way to ensure reliable internet connectivity is through the use of fiber optic cable, which has become quite affordable even for regional players. However, the DGTR claims these cables are cheap because a few foreign manufacturers are artificially keeping the prices low.

Optic fiber cables from China, South Korea, and Indonesia are being sold in India at artificially low rates, to capture the domestic market and hurt the local competition in order to drive them out of business, the DGTR has alleged.

The DGTR had initiated the investigation under Rule 5(3) of the Anti-Dumping Rules, 1995 and its report established "material injury to the domestic industry". The investigation found a "severe impact of dumping on Indian makers". "It was found that such imports have increased in absolute as well as relative terms to the production and consumption in India."

"The growth in demand was almost entirely subsumed by such dumped imports," said the report and added the domestic industry was able to retain its market share only by selling 'like article' at losses.

Will India's Digitization Drive Be Negatively Impacted By The Anti-Dumping Duty?

The DGTR has essentially recommended that foreign-origin optic fiber attract "Anti-Dumping Duty". The measure, if approved, will certainly help the domestic industry. It would also benefit foreign companies involved in the "Make In India" initiative.

Local producers such as Sterlite Technologies (STL), Birla Cable, Birla Furukawa Fibre Optics, HFCL, and American Corning would obviously welcome any step that protects their interests. However, India is one of the fastest-growing markets for digital consumers.

Only 33 percent of the towers in India are interconnected using optic fiber cables. This is woefully low, compared to 70 percent in South Korea and 80 to 90 percent in the U.S., Japan, and China," observed a report on the matter.

Optical fiber is a key component in the development and deployment of digital infrastructure for India. Hence, the country should have an active manufacturing setup, the Indian government has argued.

If foreign manufacturers dump their products at artificially lowered rates, the domestic players could be forced to shut shop. Incidentally, most of the local producers are currently struggling with overcapacity and a lack of orders.

Leading Indian optic fiber manufacturers have collectively complained about cheap imports, claiming cheap fiber optic cables from China, Indonesia, and South Korea are hurting them. If the anti-dumping duty is enforced, most of the service providers will be compelled to buy from Indian manufacturers. It is not clear if these actions from the central government will drive up the price of the optical fiber cables and the cost of laying the next generation of telecommunications infrastructure.

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Indian telcos blocked from placing 5G orders from Chinese firms: Aim to boost local vendors News oi -Carlsen Martin

India's 5G wave is currently underway. However, Indian telecom companies now face a major obstacle in the adaption of 5G connectivity in the country.

According to official sources, Indian telcos will not be authorised to place 5G equipment orders with Chinese gear makers Huawei and ZTE. However, they will still be able to make orders for their 4G network upgrade with these Chinese firms.

5G Networks in India

As far as 5G networks are concentred, both Bharti Airtel and Reliance Jio have not placed any orders from Chinese companies. While Airtel and Jio have already built their 5G networks in India, they have set it up with equipment purchased from European vendors.

Vodafone is reportedly in advanced discussions with vendors for its 5G network. However, if Vodafone had plans to use equipment from Chinese vendors to roll out their 5G network, those plans will now have to change.

What is the reason for the move?

Telecom companies in India must seek approval from the National Security Council Secretariat (NSCS) for upgrading their network with equipment from vendors that not considered trusted sources.

The Indian government had previously made it clear that it did not want Chinese vendors involved in 5G networks in the country owing to security concerns. Apart from security concerns, the government also wants to promote domestic telecom equipment manufacturer as viable alternatives.

The report by the Financial Express notes, "The 4G and 5G stack developed by a consortium led by TCS for state-owned BSNL could be explored by private telcos as well, said the report."

Can Indian Telcos use 4G equipment from Chinese firms?

On the other hand, telecoms will still be able to make 4G network upgrades using equipment from Chines firms. This is because, apart from Reliance Jio, other telcos with 4G networks use equipment from Chinese firms.

Vodafone recently placed an order worth two hundred crore with ZTE to supply optical transmission equipment for its existing network upgrades in select circles. However, a government official said, "The approval has been given after analysing the requirement. We have received application from Huawei and ZTE for trusted source tag."

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Morocco ramps up use of Israeli drones in Western Sahara: Report

Iran Press TV

Sunday, 02 July 2023 6:14 PM

Morocco has purchased a large number of drones from the Israeli regime in recent years, enabling Rabat forces to carry out attacks deep in Sahrawi territory, where people now live under Israeli-sponsored surveillance and face harassment, a report says.

Sidi Owgal, a senior military official within the Polisario who currently serves as the head of presidential security, told The Intercept that Israeli drones being used in Western Sahara were doing both jobs of providing surveillance and also directly attacking targets.

Abwa Ali, a commander within the Polisario had personally seen missile fragments with Hebrew lettering on them.

Some of Morocco's Israeli drone arsenal could indeed be used as attack drones: The Heron TP and the Hermes 900 can be used for both surveillance and attacks, while the Harop is only for strikes.

"The Harop are what we call 'loitering munitions'; they are expensive and they can hit only once because they destroy at the impact," said Borsari. "They would most likely be used against high-value targets."

Senior officials in Sahrawi territory say that the proliferation of Israeli drones in Morocco makes an already unequal war between Morocco and the Polisario completely asymmetrical.

"Sahrawi people feel that every day, we become similar to Palestinians," said Mohamed Sidati, the foreign affairs minister of the Sahrawi Arab Democratic Republic.

Owgal and Sidati have said that Israeli advisers are on the ground on the Moroccan side of the berm counseling the Royal Moroccan Armed Forces on their use of drone technology. "They are there ... not far from the berm," said Sidati.

Federico Borsari, a researcher specializing in unmanned technologies at the Center for European Policy believes "it is not only possible but very likely that Israel sent advisers on the ground in Morocco to train the Royal Armed Forces in the use of drones."

Moroccan media has also stated that Rabat plans to manufacture "kamikaze" drones in partnership with Tel Aviv, and Israeli company Elbit Systems recently announced the opening of the two factories in Morocco to produce "defense systems."

In December 2020, a month after the end of the ceasefire between Morocco and the Polisario, then-President Donald Trump declared US support for Morocco's sovereignty over Western Sahara. The recognition contravened the United Nations' position, which considers Western Sahara a "non-self-governing territory," a euphemism for a colony.

In return for US support on Western Sahara, Morocco joined the so-called Abraham Accords, a series of deals brokered by Trump and his son-in-law, Jared Kushner, that resulted in some Arab states normalizing ties with Israel.

Since then, Rabat has gone from having covert ties with Tel Aviv to becoming its open ally, and Israel has sold at least 150 drones to Morocco.

Morocco annexed the vast Western Sahara region, a former Spanish colony, in the 1970s and has since been in conflict with the Algeria-backed Polisario Front  a movement that seeks to establish an independent state in the territory and end Morocco's presence there.

Morocco is currently in control of 80 percent of the region, including its phosphate deposits and fishing waters. It has built an approximately 2,700 km (1,700-mile) -long wall running through the disputed territory to keep Sahrawis out of the resource-rich region.

Western Sahara's indigenous population is firmly opposed to Moroccan control and has been calling for independence from the North African country and for a referendum on their self-determination, something that has been pledged to the region in UN resolutions.

The UN has deployed the peacekeeping mission MINURSO to the region to monitor a 1991 ceasefire and to supposedly organize a referendum on the region's status.

However, the world body's envoys have failed to set the stage for a referendum on Western Sahara's future.

While Morocco's purchase of Israeli drones has been reported since 2014, their use in Western Sahara is less well documented.

A local journalist shared photos that had circulated on social media and show an Israeli Heron drone at Dakhla airport, a city on the Moroccan-controlled side of Western Sahara; the photos were dated from late 2020 and early 2021. Details from the hangar in the photos match images of Dakhla airport.

Additionally, commercial satellite images show what strongly resembles a Heron drone outside the hangar in October 2021.

Israel first sold three Heron drones to Morocco in a one-time French-brokered deal six years before the official rapprochement between the two sides.

In November 2021, Algeria revealed that Morocco used "sophisticated weaponry" to strike three Algerian truckers as they were reportedly passing through Polisario-controlled Western Sahara.

In 2022, two Mauritanian citizens were reportedly killed by Moroccan drone strikes. Sidati also alleged that there were many civilian casualties. "The Moroccans have a scorched-earth policy," he said.

The UN Mission for the Referendum in Western Sahara stated in their most recent report, in October 2022, that they were only able to independently confirm casualties in one drone strike and observed traces of human remains at four other sites.

They additionally documented 18 drone strikes and confirmed aerial strikes in eight instances. However.

The long-standing conflict between the two sides has received renewed attention due to growing frustration among the Sahrawi people, particularly after the United States disregarded the UN efforts by backing Morocco's claim to sovereignty over the entire disputed territory in 2020.

Morocco became the fourth Arab country  after the United Arab Emirates (UAE), Bahrain, and Sudan  to reach a normalization agreement with Israel, which was brokered by the administration of ex-US President Donald Trump during its final days in office. As part of the contentious deal, Trump agreed to recognize Morocco's authority in Western Sahara.

US President Joe Biden has not carried out actions to make the recognition of Morocco's sovereignty announced by his predecessor effective on the ground.

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Israel killed 24 Palestinians, including five children, in June: Report

Iran Press TV

Sunday, 02 July 2023 4:40 PM

Israeli attacks left at least 24 Palestinians, including children and teenagers, dead in June, Palestinian media say.

According to a report by Palestinian Information Center on Sunday, ten people in Jenin, seven people in Nablus, three people in Ramallah and al-Bireh, one person in al-Quds, one in Tubas, one in Bethlehem and one person in the Gaza Strip were killed in that month.

The latest killings have raised the number of Palestinian martyrs to 186 since the beginning of the year.

The report said 36 Palestinians were killed in January, 31 in February, 27 in March, 12 in April and 56 in May.

In another report on Sunday, Palestine's Shehab news agency said Israeli forces carried out arrested 380 people, including 45 children and 10 women, in the occupied West Bank, al-Quds and Gaza last month.

Citing a statement by the Palestine Detainees Studies Center, the news agency said the city of al-Quds had the highest percentage of detainees, with 135 cases, followed by Bethlehem with more than 90 cases.

In June, the regime also demolished three houses belonging to the families of prisoners after planting them with explosives.

Over the past months, Israel has ramped up attacks on Palestinian towns and cities. As a result of these attacks, dozens of Palestinians have lost their lives and many others have been arrested.

Most of the raids have been into the cities of Nablus and Jenin, where Israeli forces have been trying to stifle a growing Palestinian resistance against occupation.

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Israel approves construction of new West Bank settlement

Iran Press TV

Sunday, 02 July 2023 3:38 PM

The Israeli regime has approved the construction of a new settlement in the occupied West Bank.

In the weekly cabinet meeting on Sunday, the regime announced approval of the establishment of "Ramat Rabil," which will accommodate 500 illegal settler families in the Lower Galilee, north of the occupied territories.

The regime's construction and housing minister Yitzhak Goldknopf toured Galilee on June 29 as part of his policy to enhance the settlements in the area.

At the same time, he announced his plan to bring forward a proposal for the first establishment in years of a new settlement there.

On Friday, Britain, Australia and Canada called on Israel to reverse the decision on new settlements in the West Bank, saying they are "deeply concerned" by an ongoing cycle of violence.

The Israeli regime, headed by Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, has repeatedly expressed its commitment to nonstop settlement construction.

Palestinians insist on having the West Bank as part of a future independent state with East al-Quds as its capital.

The last round of Israeli-Palestinian talks collapsed in 2014. Among the major sticking points in those negotiations was the regime's settlement expansion.

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Poland hopes to host NATO nuclear weapons to counter Russia, says PM

Iran Press TV

Sunday, 02 July 2023 10:39 AM

Polish Prime Minister Mateusz Morawiecki has said authorities seek to host NATO nuclear weapons in Poland within the framework of the Nuclear Sharing program to counter the "threat" they claim Russia poses.

Morawiecki said on Friday that the request comes in response to Russia's deployment of strategic nuclear weapons to neighboring Belarus.

"The final decision will depend on our American and NATO partners. We declare our will to act quickly in this matter," Morawiecki said

He added that they do not "sit idly" while Russia "escalates all sorts of threats," saying Poland also wants to have "the highest security level."

"We endeavor to strengthen security. Nuclear Sharing, the program of the joint use of nuclear weapons, would seriously fortify our security."

Meanwhile Dmitry Medvedev, Russian Security Council deputy chairman, in response to Poland's desire to take part in NATO's Nuclear Sharing program said "The only danger arising from the request to deploy nuclear weapons to Poland is that such weapons will be used."

Last month, Russian President Vladimir Putin said that his country will deploy nuclear weapons in Belarus as part of an agreement the two countries cut last summer.

Last week, Belarusian President Alexander Lukashenko said that a "significant" portion of the total number of nuclear munitions that Russia plans to place in his nation has now arrived.

Per previous statements from Putin and Lukashenko, these weapons are a mixture of nuclear-capable Iskander-M short-range ballistic missiles and air-dropped nuclear bombs, the latter of which the Belarusian Air Force now claims to be capable of employing.

This is not the first time Polish authorities have publicly stated their interest in joining the NATO nuclear weapon-sharing program in light of Russia's decision to deploy nuclear weapons in Belarus.

Last October, Poland President Andrzej Duda spoke about conducting talks on the possibility of including the country in the policy of sharing nuclear weapons within NATO.

"We have spoken with American leaders about whether the United States is considering such a possibility. The issue is open," he said.

Among the NATO countries only the US, UK and France have a nuclear arsenal and non-nuclear members are only allowed to host nuclear weaponry of their allies on their territory.

Nuclear Sharing is NATO's nuclear deterrence program. It makes nuclear warheads available to NATO member states without their own nuclear weapons.

NATO's nuclear weapon-sharing agreement is entirely centered on US B61-series air-dropped nuclear bombs which were spread across six bases in five countries - Belgium, Germany, Italy, the Netherlands, and Turkey.

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UN chief urges world to make Haiti 'top priority' to fight criminal gangs

Iran Press TV

Sunday, 02 July 2023 7:36 AM

United Nations Secretary-General Antonio Guterres has called on world leaders to make the Caribbean state of Haiti their "top priority" and help a "rapid action force" to support the island's failing police in their fight against criminal gangs.

In his first visit to Haiti's capital Port-au-Prince as head of the UN on Saturday, Guterres repeated his call on world nations to send a "rapid action force" to support the Caribbean nation's security services.

"We must put Haiti on the international political map and make the tragedy of the Haitian people the international community's top priority," Guterres told reporters after a meeting with Prime Minister Ariel Henry.

He said Haitians are "exhausted" having been faced with a "cascade of crises" and "unbearable living conditions for too long."

Guterres also urged the UN Security Council, which is due to discuss the situation in Haiti later this month, "to authorize the immediate deployment of a robust international security force."

He voiced concerns that not taking actions allow instability and violence to have a "lasting impact" on generations of Haitians. "Every day counts."

"I call on those states that have the capacity to provide a robust security force to stop hesitating and be ready to follow a Security Council decision," Guterres added.

Over the past months, the UN chief has sounded the alarm about the violent situation amid political instability in the Western Hemisphere's poorest country.

In October, Guterres had called for the creation of a non-UN force to help support and strengthen the island's overwhelmed local police force.

Several countries have expressed interest in contributing to the creation of a rapid action force, but none has volunteered so far to lead the operation.

Canada and Brazil, which have indicated their willingness to support the mission, have made no suggestions to lead a deployment of boots on the ground due to the UN armed forces' past involvement in numerous sex and violence scandals in Haiti.

The United States has traditionally held huge sway over Haiti and has a long history of intervention on the Caribbean island.

The US government allegedly had a hand in the assassination of former Haitian President Jovenel Moise.

The assassins who killed Moise were said to have received American military training.

This time, however, US President Joe Biden has made it clear that Washington will not lead a military force into Haiti and instead wants to focus on strengthening the local police force.

The UN chief went on to describe a grim picture of violent gangs in the Haitian capital taking control of the resources by enforcing brutal strategies including violence, kidnappings, and rapes.

"Port-au-Prince is surrounded by armed gangs blocking the main roads leading to the northern and southern departments, controlling access to water, food, and health care," Guterres said, adding that he despised "in the strongest possible terms the widespread sexual violence used by armed gangs as a weapon to instill fear."

Guterres also said he had "frank exchanges" with prime minister Henry and others about the "need for a political agreement to put an end to the crisis."

Haitian civil society groups, however, have emphatically rejected any armed foreign forces' intervention in the country.

They have called on Russia and China, both veto powers, to block any resolution issued by the UN Security Council in regard to the deployment of a United Nations peacekeeping mission in the country.

In the past, UN peacekeepers caused an outbreak of cholera by dumping infected sewage into a river which killed 10,000 Haitians and left nearly 1 million people ill, with sexual assault scandals commonplace.

UN reports estimate that more than half of the 10 million population of Haiti are in need of humanitarian assistance, including almost three million children.

Flooding and earthquakes have worsened the unending problems facing the nation. The UN estimates that 73,500 people fled Haiti heading to the United States last year alone.

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Austria to Join European Air Defense System - Chancellor

Sputnik News

20230702

MOSCOW (Sputnik) - Austria will join the European Sky Shield air defense system, Chancellor Karl Nehammer said on Saturday.

"Austria will join the European Sky Shield air defense initiative," Nehammer said on Twitter.

Nehammer noted that the Ukraine conflict and the increased "threat situation" were the main reasons for the country's joining the initiative. He also added that negotiations to enter the initiative are already underway, but participation in Sky Shield will not affect the neutrality of Austria.

In October, Germany and 13 NATO member countries signed a declaration on the creation of a more advanced European air defense system.

 Sputnik

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Biden Heading on Three-Nation European Trip

By Ken Bredemeier July 02, 2023

U.S. President Joe Biden is leaving in a week on a five-day, three-nation trip to Europe, the White House said Sunday, with the key stop at the annual NATO summit in Vilnius, Lithuania, where Western leaders plan to discuss their latest efforts to bolster Ukraine's fight against Russia.

Biden is heading first to London next Sunday on the July 9-13 trip, where over two days he is planning to meet with King Charles and Prime Minister Rishi Sunak "to further strengthen the close relationship between our nations," the White House said.

The U.S. leader then heads to Lithuania for two days of NATO meetings where leaders of the 31-nation Western military alliance will discuss the state of Ukraine's counteroffensive to recapture territory in the southeastern part of the country that Russia took in the earliest stages of 16 months of fighting.

NATO countries, led by the United States, have sent billions of dollars of armaments to Ukraine, but Russian aerial bombardments have continued to kill dozens of Ukrainian civilians even as Kyiv's forces have shot down hundreds of incoming missiles. The ones that have landed have proved devastating, killing people and destroying their residential buildings.

After the NATO summit, Biden is heading to Helsinki, the Finnish capital, to commemorate Finland recently joining the military alliance created in the aftermath of World War II, and to meet with Nordic leaders.

Biden did not attend Charles's coronation in London in May, instead sending first lady Jill Biden to represent the U.S. Biden last month hosted Sunak at the White House.

NATO Secretary-General Jens Stoltenberg also met with Biden at the White House last month, where the two leaders pledged their continued support of Ukraine in its war against Russia.

"The NATO allies have never been more united. We both worked like hell to make sure that happened. And so far, so good," Biden said as he sat alongside Stoltenberg.

Finland joined NATO in April, effectively doubling Russia's border with the world's biggest security alliance. Biden has characterized the strengthened NATO alliance as a sign of Moscow's declining influence.

Sweden is also seeking entry into NATO, although alliance members Turkey and Hungary have yet to endorse the move. Biden is hosting Sweden's prime minister, Ulf Kristersson, at the White House on Wednesday as a show of support for its bid for NATO membership.

Turkey President Recep Tayyip Erdogan has said Sweden is too lax on terrorist groups and security threats, while Stoltenberg has said Sweden has met its obligations for NATO membership by toughening anti-terrorist laws and other measures. Hungary's reasons for opposing Sweden have been less defined, complaining about Sweden's criticism of democratic backsliding and the erosion of the rule of law.

All NATO nations have to ratify the entry of new member countries.

Some material in this report came from The Associated Press.

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Russo-Ukraine War - 02 July 2023 - Day 494

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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 Russia has cancelled the 2023 iteration of MAKS, its premier international air show. Scheduled every other year, MAKS takes place near Moscow and showcases Russia's civil and military aerospace sectors and has become key to securing export customers.

The show has probably been cancelled largely due to genuine security concerns, following recent uncrewed aerial vehicle attacks inside Russia. Organisers were highly likely also aware of the potential for reputational damage if fewer international delegations attended.

The war has been exceptionally challenging for Russia's aerospace community. The sector is struggling under international sanctions; highly trained specialists are being encouraged to serve as infantry in the Rosocosmos space agency's own militia. Meanwhile, Commander in Chief of the Aerospace Forces, General Sergei Surovikin, ahs not been seen in public since the abortive mutiny by Wagner Group, for whom he served as point of contact with the Russian Ministry of Defence.

The General Staff of the Armed Forces of Ukraine reported that during the day July 2, the Russian invaders launched 11x missile strikes and used 8x Iranian strike UAVs of the "Shahed" type.

Russian forces carried out 40x airstrikes and about 30x MLRS on Ukrainian cities and Defense Forces. Unfortunately, not only some civilian infrastructure was destroyed, but people were also injured.

The threat of missile and air strikes across Ukraine remains high.

Russia is concentrating its main efforts on the Lyman, Bakhmut, Avdiivka, and Mar'inka axes, heavy battles continue. More than 28x combat clashes took place during the day.

Volyn' and Polissya axes: no significant changes detected.

Sivershchyna and Slobozhanshchyna axes: Russian forces maintain an enhanced military presence. They shelled with mortars and artillery more than 30x settlements: Khrinivka, Kam'ians'ka Sloboda, Chernihiv Oblast; Sopych, Bilopillya and Ponomarenky of Sumy Oblast and Kozacha Lopan' and Vovchans'k in Kharkiv Oblast.

Kup'yans'k axis: Masyutivka, Kislivka and Berestov in the Kharkiv Oblast were shelled by Russian artillery and mortar fire.

Lyman axis: Russian forces carried out airstrikes at Bilogorivka and Novolyubivka in the Luhansk Oblast and Siversk in Donetsk Oblast. Nevs'ke, Bilogorivka of Luhansk Oblast and Verkhn'yokam'ians'ke and Tors'ke of Donetsk Oblast were shelled by artillery.

Bakhmut axis: Russian forces carried out unsuccessful offensives at the Minskivka and Bohdanivka areas of the Donetsk Oblast. More than 10x settlements were shelled by Russian artillery, including Chasiv Yar and Ivanivske in Donetsk Oblast.

Avdiivka axis: Russian occupiers carried out unsuccessful offensive operations in the vicinities of Avdiivka. They also carried out an airstrike there. russians shelled more than 10x settlements. Avdiivka and Pervomaiske in the Donetsk Oblast also were under fire.

Mar'inka axis: Ukrainian defenders repelled all Russian attacks in the area of the city of Mar'inka. Russian forces carried out airstrikes at Kotlyarivka, Mar'inka and Kurakhovo and shelled more than 10x settlements with artillery. Among them are Mar'inka and Novomykhailivka of the Donetsk Oblast.

Shakhtars'k axis: Russian forces launched an air strike in the Bogoyavlenka area. Shelled more than 10x settlements, including Zolota Niva, Velyka Novosilka, Vodyane, and Vugledar of the Donetsk Oblast.

Zaporizhzhia and Kherson axes: russian forces are on the defensive, and concentrate their main efforts on preventing the advance of Ukrainian troops. They carried out airstrikes at Zmiivka and Antonivka. Shelled more than 40x settlements, including Novodarivka, Olgivs'ke, Hulyaipole, Biloghirya of the Zaporizhzhia Oblast; Kozats'ke, Antonivka, Dniprovs'ke of the Kherson Oblast and Kherson.

Ukrainian Air Force conducted 9x strikes on Russian manpower concentrations.

Ukrainian missile and artillery units hit 22x artillery units at firing positions and 2x anti-air defense systems.

The Ministry of Defense of the Russian Federation reported that the AFU continued to attempt offensive actions in Donetsk, Krasny Liman and South Donetsk directions.

In Donetsk direction, during active defence activities, the units of the Yug Group of Forces have successfully repelled 11 enemy attacks close to Artyomovsk, Vodyanoye, Novobakhmutovka, Severnoye, Pervomayskoye and Maryinka (Donetsk People's Republic).

As a result of the attacks, launched by Operational-Tactical and Army aviation, as well as artillery, and heavy flamethrower systems, the enemy has lost up to 360 Ukrainian servicemen, six tanks, eight infantry fighting vehicles, five motor vehicles, one U.S.-manufactured M119 towed gun, one Polish-manufactured Krab self-propelled artillery system and one Gvozdika self-propelled howitzer.

In addition, ammunition depots of the 92nd mechanised and 95th airborne assault brigades of the AFU have been destroyed close to Seversk and Grigorovka (Donetsk People's Republic).

In Krasny Liman direction, as a result of active actions by the units of the Tsentr Group of Forces, air strikes, artillery and heavy flamethrower system fire, three enemy attacks by units of the 95th Airborne Assault Brigade and the 66th Mechanised Brigade have been repelled close to Torskoye (Donetsk People's Republic), Chervonaya Dibrov and Nevskoye (Lugansk People's Republic).

In addition, manpower and hardware concentration areas have been hit near Terny, Grigorovka (Donetsk People's Republic) and Chervonaya Dibrova (Lugansk People's Republic).

The activities of a Ukrainian sabotage and reconnaissance group have been suppressed close to Kuzmino (Lugansk People's Republic).

The enemy losses were up to 95 Ukrainian servicemen, one tank, two infantry fighting vehicles, one armoured fighting vehicle, one pickup truck, and two D-30 howitzers.

In South Donetsk direction, courageous and coordinated actions of the Vostok Group of Forces, air strikes and artillery fire have repelled an attack by the enemy near Nikolskoye (Donetsk People's Republic).

Close to Vremevka salient, one Ukrainian sabotage and reconnaissance group has been neutralised close to Rovnopol (Donetsk People's Republic).

In addition, an AFU manpower and hardware concentration area has been hit close to Makarovka (Donetsk People's Republic).

In Zaporozhye direction, as a result of the active actions by Operational-Tactical aviation of the Vostok Group of Forces, AFU manpower and hardware concentration areas of the units of the 33rd Mechanised Brigade have been hit near Pyatikhatka and Mirnoye (Zaporozhye region).

The enemy losses were up to 150 Ukrainian servicemen killed and wounded, one tank, two infantry fighting vehicles, two armoured fighting vehicles, three motor vehicles, as well as one FH70 howitzer.

In Kupyansk direction, as a result of active actions by the Zapad Group of Forces, Operational-Tactical and Army aviation, as well as artillery, two enemy attacks have been repelled near Novosyolovskoye (Lugansk People's Republic).

In addition, Russian troops inflicted fire on manpower and hardware concentration areas of the 14th and 37th mechanised brigades of the AFU close to Novomlynsk, Dvurechnaya, Sinkovka, Berestovoye (Kharkov region) and Novosyolovskoye (Lugansk People's Republic).

The activities of a Ukrainian sabotage and reconnaissance group have been suppressed close to Stelmakhovka (Lugansk People's Republic).

The enemy losses were up to 40 Ukrainian servicemen, one armoured fighting vehicle, two pickup trucks, and one D-20 howitzer.

Two ammunition depots of the units of the 103rd Territorial Defence Brigade have been destroyed near Kislovka.

In Kherson direction, the destruction of the AFU units that landed on Antonovsky Island in the Antonovsky Bridge area has been completed.

The enemy losses were up to 20 Ukrainian servicemen, two motor vehicles and two U.S.-manufactured M777 howitzers.

Operational-Tactical and Army aviation, Missile Troops and Artillery of the Armed Forces of the Russian Federation have neutralised 79 AFU artillery units at their firing positions, manpower and hardware in 108 areas.

In Kharkov region, AFU military hardware delivered from the central and western regions of Ukraine has been hit in places of unloading at railway stations close to Balakleya and Chuguev.

The control points of the AFU 28th and 54th mechanised brigades have been hit close to Aleksandro-Shultino, Razdolovka and Vesyoloye (Donetsk People's Republic).

Air defence facilities have shot down one Su-25 aircraft of Ukrainian Air Force near Novoandreevka (Zaporozhye region).

Four HIMARS multiple-launch rocket system projectiles and one HARM anti-radar missile have been intercepted.

In addition, 14 Ukrainian unmanned aerial vehicles have been destroyed close to Soledar, Krasnaya Gora, Yakovlevka, Volodino, Egorovka, Orlinskoye (Donetsk People's Republic), Kuibyshevo (Zaporozhye region), Belogorovka and Novokrasnyanka (Lugansk People's Republic).

In total, 445 airplanes, 240 helicopters, 4,859 unmanned aerial vehicles, 426 air defence missile systems, 10,472 tanks and other armoured fighting vehicles, 1,134 fighting vehicles equipped with MLRS, 5,300 field artillery cannons and mortars, as well as 11,365 special military motor vehicles have been destroyed during the special military operation.

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China-Thailand 'Falcon Strike-2023' joint air force exercise contributes to reducing regional risks

Global Times

By Wan Hengyi Published: Jul 02, 2023 09:49 PM

The China-Thailand "Falcon Strike-2023" joint air force exercise will be held this month at Udorn Royal Thai Air Force Base based on an annual schedule and consensus reached by the two countries. China's security cooperation with ASEAN members, including Thailand, enhances collective defense capabilities and helps reduce regional risks and friction in the region, experts noted.

China will send fighter jets, bomber aircraft and airborne early warning (AEW) aircraft to participate in the exercise, the Chinese Defense Ministry said in a statement on Sunday.

The statement also notes that the purpose of this joint exercise is to deepen practical exchanges and cooperation between the air forces of the two countries and continuously enrich the comprehensive strategic partnership between the two sides.

The military forces of China and Thailand have maintained a consistently positive relationship, engaging in regular joint training with the purpose of fostering military trust, according to Song Zhongping, a Chinese military expert and TV commentator.

However, China does not seek to establish a so-called military alliance with Thailand, nor does it intend to create its own military influence in any country, and China's military cooperation with other countries is not targeted at any third party, Song noted.

Enhancing military cooperation with countries including those in Southeast Asia is an important aspect of China's military diplomacy aiming to safeguard regional peace and stability, Song told the Global Times on Sunday.

The maintenance of peace and development in the international and regional arenas highlights the shared values of China-Thailand relations, Han Zhiqiang, Chinese Ambassador to Thailand, said during an interview with Thai media on Saturday on the occasion of the 48th anniversary of the establishment of diplomatic relations between the two countries, according to the website of the Chinese Embassy in Thailand.

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China's solutions to global security in focus at World Peace Forum

Global Times

Unprecedented changes and challenges require dialogue, consensus

By Chen Qingqing and Wang Zixuan Published: Jul 02, 2023 10:17 PM

As the world is facing unprecedented security and development challenges, China's solutions in safeguarding genuine multilateralism and promoting dialogue and negotiations in solving disputes and conflicts have been the focus at this year's World Peace Forum (WPF) held in Beijing from Sunday to Monday, drawing a sharp contrast to the US-led power politics and unilateral moves of suppressing rivals.

In the face of profound changes in the international situation, China has put forward a series of major initiatives, such as the Global Development Initiative, the Global Security Initiative, and the Global Civilization Initiative, constantly enriching the connotation and practical path of the concept of building a community with a shared future for humanity, and injecting strong positive energy into world peace and development, Chinese Vice President Han Zheng said in an opening address of the WPF on Sunday.

China is ready to work with other countries to safeguard world peace and security, seek global development and prosperity, advocate exchanges and mutual learning among civilizations, and share the fruits of human development, security, and civilization, Han said.

Han stressed resolving conflicts through dialogue and consultation. The international community, especially influential major countries, should take a clear stand to promote peace talks and mediation in light of the needs and aspirations of the countries concerned so as to build mutual trust, resolve disputes and promote security through dialogue, Han said.

Han called on all sides to promote inclusiveness, mutual benefit, and win-win results. "We should work together to usher in a new stage of balanced, coordinated, and inclusive global development, promote international development cooperation, improve the well-being of the people of participating countries, and consolidate the social foundation for world peace," he said.

Han stressed that Chinese modernization follows the path of peaceful development, and China will unswervingly advocate, build and uphold world peace.

Not only has the Russia-Ukraine conflict weakened global security, a series of unprecedented changes have been reshaping the global pattern such as resurging Cold War mentality, slowing down and unbalanced economic growth and intensifying competition as well as confrontation between major powers, leading to an increase instability and unpredictable situations, some attendees to the forum said.

"One of the most serious threats in the world today are linked to new protectionism, such as curbing the development of emerging countries," the New Development Bank chief and former Brazilian President Dilma Rousseff said in a keynote speech at the WPF on Sunday.

For example, "decoupling" and "de-risking" have been buzzwords on the international stage recently. Rousseff believes these concepts will not only weaken economic globalization and financial relations, but are also being used as political weapons to prevent new participants on the international stage from rising.

China's solutions

"We see the efforts of Chinese government and the President Xi Jinping to uphold the principles of the UN charter and peaceful coexistence, which are very important for all of us. China's vision toward the global development, especially when it comes to upholding the UN Charter, is very important," Alexander Druzhinin, Third Secretary of Embassy of the Russian Federation in China, told the Global Times on the sidelines of the forum.

We believe that these initiatives proposed by Chinese President Xi have a lot of added values for the global ideology of peaceful coexistence and mutual development, because China is against Cold War thinking and is against the zero-sum game. Russia believes the same pretty much, so we are looking forward to the development of more fruitful cooperation with China on the bilateral issues, as well as on global international affairs, Druzhinin noted.

In elaborating on China's practice of the GDI, GSI and GCI, Liu Jianchao, head of the International Department of the Communist Party of China Central Committee, said during a lunch meeting that experiences have proven that "China's path to peace provides effective solutions for the international community's challenges to peace."

For example, China's core propositions of promoting dialogue and a political solution to the Ukraine issue have gradually become a broad consensus in the international community. And recently, the reconciliation between Saudi Arabia and Iran brokered by Beijing has also caused a chain reaction, sparking a wave of reconciliation in the Middle East, creating a good demonstration effect to the international community, Liu said.

The GDI, GSI and GCI are all very important initiatives that are critical to the future security and stability of the world, Igor Ivanov, president of the Russian International Affairs Council, said on the sidelines of the WPF on Sunday.

They concern how the international order should be constructed and embody some very important principles. In the new order, every country must feel secure and have the opportunity to develop its economy in the right way, and all should have a say in the international system, Ivanov said.

China-US relations in focus

To stabilize an uncertain world through consensus and cooperation, panelists also discussed the topics for example, security in the Asia-Pacific toward which many believed that the recent visit of the US Secretary of State Antony Blinken to China showed a positive sign for the intense bilateral relations, emphasizing that keeping communication channels open is crucial.

"There are a few things between China and the US that have remained unchanged, including the common interests and shared responsibilities," Liu said.

The active interactions between the two countries over the past 50 years have brought many benefits to both their peoples and the international community. The balance of power, mutual cooperation, support and contribution to the global economy, and so forth, all have propelled the continuous progress of human civilization, the Chinese official said. "It should still be emphasized now that we cannot pursue unilateral advantages or blindly seek self-interest, leaving the other party aside."

Taking the wrong path and making incorrect decisions can be destructive for all of humanity, Liu said, noting he hopes these decision-makers in the US can see this clearly, that is, what is truly beneficial for both China and the US, and for the world at large.

Neither the US leader or the Chinese leader want conflict or war but conflict and war don't necessarily happen on purpose, they can come about by accident, which is worrisome, meaning we need to urgently find ways to reverse the mistrust between our countries, Daniel Russel, Vice President for International Security and Diplomacy at the Asia Society Policy Institute, told the Global Times on the sidelines of the forum.

"I think there is a real risk that there could be an incident between China and the US that because we don't have good channels of dialogue and because mutual trust is at such a low level, an incident could quickly escalate into a crisis, and a crisis could potentially escalate into conflict, even though neither of our presidents, neither of our governments want that," Russel said.

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US 'friendly' overtures hard to cover real intention to 'de-China,' says analyst after CIA chief refutes 'decoupling'

Global Times

'De-risking' essentially 'de-China' for Washington

By Xu Keyue Published: Jul 02, 2023 10:11 PM

Although the US has made a series of "friendly" overtures toward China recently, Chinese analysts said that the rhetoric emanating from some senior US officials is not matched by their deeds, and the "de-risking" narrative they chant is still a ruse to "de-China" in certain US sectors, including investment, technology and industry layout, and induce its allies to follow suit.

US Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) director William Burns said during a lecture at the Oxfordshire-based Ditchley Foundation - a nonprofit organization in the UK that focuses on the US-UK relations - on Saturday that "decoupling" from China would be "foolish" given the deep economic interdependence, so the US should "de-risk" and try to diversify its supply chains.

While some dovish US politicians have become increasingly vocal about their realization that "decoupling" is unrealistic and are trying to erase the word from policy documents and speeches, some hawkish US forces continue to push for "decoupling" under the guise of more moderate terms such as "de-risking" - just a different name for the same strategy, which is to contain China's economic and technological rise, according to analysts.

Li Haidong, a professor at the China Foreign Affairs University, said that abandoning the "decoupling" narrative reflects that in the practice of China policy under the Biden administration, Washington has realized that a harsh "decoupling" harms the US economy and would isolate the superpower with little support from its allies.

But there is a cognitive gap between the US and its allies toward the so-called de-risking, Li noted. For the US, its goal is to separate certain technologies, investment and some industrial layout from the Chinese market. At the same time, it also wants its allies follow suit.

"De-risking for the US is to 'de-China' in essence," Li said. But for major European countries, de-risking is to make the supply chain and some related industries more resilient, he said.

Although Burns sent a positive signal toward China in his speech in the UK, it was not more than "lip service" which is unconvincing considering the series of China-containing measures that Washington issued recently, some Chinese analysts stated.

Last month the US government added 43 entities, including 31 in China, to its export control list, known as the "Entity List," accusing these entities of providing training to Chinese military pilots and other activities that are perceived to threaten US national security.

In another development, US President Joe Biden on Friday accepted the Letter of Credence of new Chinese Ambassador to the US Xie Feng, in the Oval Office of the White House.

According to Xie, it is hoped that the US will work with China in the same direction, earnestly act on the common understandings reached in Bali, Indonesia in late 2022 between the two heads of state, and explore the right way for the two countries to get along in the new era, so as to stabilize and bring the China-US relationship back to the right track.

Some analysts noted that Biden accepted Xie's credentials very quickly, and the meeting was arranged in the Oval Office of the White House, showing a "gesture of friendship and respect" that Biden tried to express to China.

This again reveals that Biden administration's approach to China is complex - Biden wants to contain China's development and expand US influence, but he hopes the relationship with China will not be too confrontational. He wants to make bilateral relations "more or less tolerable," provided China compromises more, an Chinese analyst said on condition of anonymity.

A further confrontation with the US is not good for China either, but it is obviously not possible to submit to the strategic pressure of the US, otherwise China will lose a lot of national interests, the above-quoted analyst noted.

Li criticized that the US lacks the consciousness of introspection and empathy in its China policy, and to make China compromise is actually a hegemonic logic that tries to use its strength to overwhelm China, but that this tactic will not work.

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Flag-raising ceremony, reception held to mark 26th anniversary of Hong Kong's return to motherland

People's Daily Online

(Xinhua) 09:30, July 03, 2023

HONG KONG, July 1 (Xinhua) -- The government of China's Hong Kong Special Administrative Region (HKSAR) on Saturday held a flag-raising ceremony and a reception to celebrate the 26th anniversary of Hong Kong's return to the motherland.

Vice Chairman of the National Committee of the Chinese People's Political Consultative Conference Leung Chun-ying, Chief Executive of the HKSAR John Lee, and Zheng Yanxiong, director of the Liaison Office of the Central People's Government in the HKSAR, attended the flag-raising ceremony at the Golden Bauhinia Square Saturday morning.

As China's national flag and the flag of the HKSAR were hoisted, helicopters of the Government Flying Service flew over Victoria Harbor to display the national flag and flag of the HKSAR.

Following the ceremony, a reception was hosted by the HKSAR government at the Hong Kong Convention and Exhibition Center. Before the reception began, a film was shown summarizing the HKSAR government's work over the past year.

In his speech at the reception, Lee said that over the past year, Hong Kong emerged from the shadow of economic contraction and returned to positive economic growth.

Lee said policies on attracting talent and enterprises as proposed in his policy address last October are gradually delivering results.

"In the coming year, my team and I will continue to actively visit the mainland and overseas, leading strong delegations representing different sectors to tell the world the good stories of Hong Kong and create more opportunities for our city," said the HKSAR chief executive.

Hong Kong will continue its efforts to proactively and actively integrate into the overall development of the country, including participating in and promoting the development of the Guangdong-Hong Kong-Macao Greater Bay Area and the Belt and Road Initiative, according to him.

On Saturday morning, central government agencies in Hong Kong, including the Liaison Office of the Central People's Government in the HKSAR, the Office for Safeguarding National Security of the Central People's Government in the HKSAR, and the Office of the Commissioner of the Chinese Foreign Ministry in the HKSAR, also held flag-raising ceremonies.

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Struggle to Oust Traitor Yoon Intensified in Region of Puppets

Korean Central News Agency of DPRK

Pyongyang, July 2 (KCNA) -- Growing stronger in the region of puppets is the atmosphere of public struggle to condemn the tyranny of the group of traitors and punish Yoon Suk Yeol, a sycophantic traitor and war maniac, without fail.

There is a strong movement to form the joint front and oust traitor Yoon among workers, peasants, the poor, religionists, literary persons, media persons, students, citizens and people of other social strata.

37 civic and public organizations including the Confederation of Trade Unions (KCTU) held a press conference in Seoul on June 27 to form the "headquarters of movement for the resignation of the Yoon Suk Yeol regime" and announce that they would launch an action for ousting the traitor.

The speakers said that there is no room for them to step back and all the people will hold aloft the banner calling for Yoon's resignation.

The KCTU called a press conference in Seoul on June 28, at which it declared a general strike for the resignation of traitor Yoon.

The KCTU declared that it would launch a struggle accompanied by an all-out general strike for the resignation of the traitor. Meanwhile, the federations and branches under the KCTU are turning out in the struggle.

The metal workers' union, the government employees' union, the medical workers' union, the teachers' union and the service federation held meetings, in which they vowed to continue the struggle until the traitor is ousted.

Civic and social organizations, including the KCTU, the youth school and the progressive students' network, held a press conference in Seoul. They declared that they would turn out in the campaign to oust Yoon in order to prevent war and bring peace.

The "candlelight action" released a statement titled "Let us achieve the general unity of progressive and democratic reformist forces through the movement for bringing down the Yoon Suk Yeol regime" on June 28. Underlining the need for all organizations to unite as one in order to oust Yoon, it called for forcing Yoon to step down through the general unity of progressive and democratic reformist forces.

The Seoul situation council, composed of 145 civic and social organizations in Seoul, called a press conference in Seoul to support the general strike of the KCTU and appeal for solidarity. At the conference, it announced a massive candlelight action plan for ousting Yoon Suk Yeol. -0-

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Over 700 arrested across France in persisting protests amid claims of ebbing unrest

Iran Press TV

Sunday, 02 July 2023 9:52 AM

French police has arrested over 700 protesters as a wave of protests continue to rock the European nation for the fifth consecutive night over the police shooting death of a teenager of African decent despite official claims of ebbing unrest.

The French interior ministry declared on Sunday that their initial claim of 486 protester arrested overnight has now climbed to 719, but insisted that the declining number of arrests -- compared to the previous night's 1,300 -- was an indication that things are calming down.

However, local media outlets widely reported that tensions remained high as French authorities deployed tens of thousands of police forces in the capital Paris and other major cities to quell the unrest.

Protesters ram car into mayor's residence

This is while the mayor of a town south of Paris declared that protesters rammed a car into his home, injuring his wife and one of his children.

Mayor Vincent Jeanbrun of the town of L'Hay-les-Roses wrote in a Twitter post that protesters "rammed a car" into his home before "setting a fire" while his family slept.

"My wife and one of my children were injured," he added.

Last week's death of Nahel M, an Arab boy of Algerian heritage killed by French police during a traffic check, sparked violent protests and nighttime clashes in Paris and other cities against systemic racism and police brutality.

Footage of the incident shows that one of the two police officers who had stopped Nahel's car discharged his gun at the driver while he did not seem to face any immediate threat.

The officer is said to be facing investigations and placed in preliminary detention.

The successive nights of violence across France have prompted the officials to launch a crackdown, mobilizing some 40,000 police officers to patrol cities, and arresting thousands of protesters, according to the figures announced by the French interior ministry.

French Interior Minister Gerard Darmanin said in Paris alone, 5,000 security personnel were deployed. Officers were given powers to quell riots, make arrests, and "restore republican order."

France's President Emanuel Macron was forced to postpone his state visit to Germany to oversee the crackdown on protesters as the slain teen was being laid to rest.

Earlier, Macron had rushed back to Paris from an EU summit to take part in a crisis meeting.

Macron advised parents to keep youths inside their homes at night to avoid arrest and clashing with police.

On Friday, he blamed social media for fueling the protests saying a third of those arrested during the protests were "very young" and "intoxicated" by video games.

He urged social media platforms to take down "sensitive content" related to the protests and provide law enforcement with the identity of protesters who employ "social networks to call for disorder or to exacerbate violence."

Iran issues travel advisory against visiting France

On Sunday, Iranian Foreign Ministry spokesman Nasser Kana'ani called on the French police to exercise restraint in handling the nationwide protests.

"The French government is expected to put an end to the violent treatment of its people by respecting the principles of human dignity, freedom of expression, and the right of citizens to peaceful protests," Kana'ani said.

In the meantime, Nahel's family held a funeral procession and burial ceremony on Saturday for the killed teen at the local cemetery in Nanterre.

Reports from the event said the atmosphere was tense.

A separate commemoration ceremony was scheduled at the mosque in Nanterre and further funeral rites will then take place in the giant Mont Valerien cemetery in the area.

In 2005, the killings of two teenage boys hiding from police led to three weeks of protests and set off a state of emergency.

Nahel's killing was the third fatal shooting by police during traffic stops in France in 2023. Last year 13 such shootings were recorded, three in 2021 and two in 2020.

Since 2017, most of the victims of such killings have been of black or Arab origin, backing up claims by rights groups of systemic racism within French law enforcement agencies.

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Indian Coast Guard & Indian Navy sign MoU with Indian Port Rail & Ropeway Corporation Ltd for developing gallery at National Maritime Heritage Complex

India - Press Information Bureau

Ministry of Defence

Posted On: 02 JUL 2023 5:28PM by PIB Delhi

A Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) was signed between Indian Coast Guard & Indian Navy with Indian Port Rail & Ropeway Corporation Ltd on July 2, 2023, in Gandhinagar for the planning, development, construction, and commissioning of a gallery on the theme "Evolution of Indian Navy & Indian Coast Guard" at the National Maritime Heritage Complex (NMHC) which is being constructed at the historic Indus Valley civilization region of Lothal (Gujarat).

The signing of the MoU took place in the presence of Shri Sarbananda Sonowal, Minister of Ports, Shipping and Waterways, Shri Bhupendra Patel, Chief Minister of Gujarat, Dr. Mansukh Mandaviya, Minister of Health & Family Welfare and Chemical & Fertilizers, Shri Shripad Yesso Naik, Minister of State for Ports, Shipping and Waterways & Tourism and Shri Shantanu Thakur, Minister of State for Ministry of Ports, Shipping & Waterways. The senior officers of the Indian Coast Guard, Indian Navy including Additional Director General Rakesh Pal, PTM, TM, were also present.

The Government of India is building the National Maritime Heritage Complex (NMHC) at the historic Indus Valley civilization region of Lothal (Gujarat) under the aegis of the Ministry of Ports, Shipping and Waterways. The foundation stone for the NMHC project was laid by Prime Minister Shri Narendra Modi in March 2019.

Comprising of a maritime museum, lighthouse museum, maritime theme parks, amusement park centres, etc., NMHC will showcase the maritime heritage of the country from ancient to modern times by adopting an edutainment approach using the latest technology to spread awareness about India's maritime heritage.

It will have several innovative and unique features such as Lothal mini recreation to recreate Harappan architecture and lifestyle; four theme parks - Memorial theme park, Maritime and Navy theme park, Climate theme park, and Adventure and Amusement theme park; fourteen galleries highlighting India's maritime heritage starting from the Harappan times till now; Coastal states pavilion displaying the diverse maritime heritage of states and UTs; among others.

****

ABB/Anand



(Release ID: 1936912)

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Iran's interactions with IAEA based on strategic law: MP

IRNA - Islamic Republic News Agency

Jul 2, 2023

Tehran, IRNA -- A senior Iranian lawmaker has rejected allegations that recent negotiations and agreements between Tehran and the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) have been contrary to a strategic law passed by the Iranian Parliament.

"Everything that has been discussed in the negotiations with the IAEA and even the JCPOA (Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action) has been based on the strategic plan law," Fada Hossein Maleki, a member of the National Security and Foreign Policy Commission of the parliament, told IRNA on Sunday.

The law, known as the Strategic Action Plan to Counter Sanctions, was passed by the parliament in December 2020 as a response to sanctions the United States imposed on Iran after its unilateral withdrawal from the JCPOA in 2018.

The strategic law mandates the Iranian government, among other things, to restrict the IAEA's inspections, and accelerate the country's nuclear program beyond the limits set under the 2015 nuclear deal.

Maleki rejected claims that the latest agreements with the UN nuclear watchdog violated the 2020 law, saying that such concerns had not been raised in the National Security and Foreign Policy Commission, which is responsible for reviewing these agreements.

"If there were any considerations from the Iranian side regarding the negotiations, they were discussed within the National Security Commission or the Supreme National Security Council," he added.

After IAEA Director General Rafael Mariano Grossi's official visit to Iran in March, both Iran and the agency announced their commitment to enhance cooperation and work towards resolving outstanding safeguards issues.

The parties agreed to conduct their interactions in a cooperative manner, respecting the authority of the IAEA and upholding the rights and commitments of the Islamic Republic as outlined in the comprehensive Safeguards Agreement.

Iran also voluntarily allows the agency to perform verification activities and increased monitoring, if necessary. The specifics of the implementation process will be determined during an upcoming technical meeting scheduled to take place in Tehran.

**2050

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Iran will actively pursue terrorists beyond its borders: Intelligence ministry

Iran Press TV

Sunday, 02 July 2023 2:50 PM

Iran's Intelligence Ministry says it is seriously pursuing terrorists beyond the country's borders, following a string of successful operations that led to the arrest of individuals affiliated with the Mujahedin-e-Khalq terrorist organization (MKO).

In a statement issued on Sunday, the ministry commended the Albanian government for its recent action against MKO terrorists during a raid on their camp in the northwestern region of the capital, Tirana. The ministry regarded the operation conducted by the Albanian police as a "step forward."

The statement said that the intelligence ministry has consistently warned European intelligence and security services about the MKO's ongoing terrorist activities, particularly from their main base in Albania and other Western countries.

The ministry said it has issued the necessary warnings against any negligence by the countries hosting the MKO.

The ministry "once again reiterates that the Islamic Republic of Iran has put the hunt for the terrorists beyond the borders high on its agenda."

Based on authentic intelligence, it said, a number of notorious sponsors of terrorism in Europe and the United States seek to revive the MKO "under the direction and influence of the Zionist murderers."

The MKO has carried out numerous terrorist attacks against Iranian civilians and government officials since the victory of the Islamic Revolution in 1979. Out of the nearly 17,000 Iranians killed in terrorist attacks over the past four decades, about 12,000 have fallen victim to the MKO's acts of terror.

Albanian police forces entered the MKO camp, known as Ashraf-3, on June 20 due to its engagement in "terror and cyber attacks" against foreign institutions. Authorities seized 150 computer devices linked to terrorist activities. At least one person was killed and dozens of others were injured during the clashes at the camp.

Reports suggest that an MKO member killed in the raid was a high-profile commander of the terrorist group named Abdolvahhab Faraji. He was said to be an expert in military engineering operations, and was apparently in charge of technical and engineering activities during an anti-Iran operation by the terrorists in July 1988.

More than a week later, police in Albania entered the Ashraf-3 camp again and security forces were deployed at the entrance to the camp and controlled all vehicles leaving the site.

The European Union, Canada, the United States, and Japan had previously listed the MKO as a "terrorist organization."

In 2012, the group was taken off the US list of terrorist organizations. The EU followed suit, removing the group from its list of terrorist organizations.

Iran's Intelligence Ministry vowed to continue its relentless anti-terror fight until full eradication of those terrorists that commit acts of sabotage against Iran as proxies for the Israeli regime with the support of the Iranian nation's enemies.

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Damavand-2 destroyer to join Iran's naval fleet soon: Reports

Iran Press TV

Sunday, 02 July 2023 9:59 AM

Iran's homegrown Damavand-2 destroyer will join the Navy's northern fleet in the Caspian Sea in the near future, Iranian media say.

Media reports said on Saturday that the Mowj-class frigate is currently passing its operational tests in the northern fleet and that it will soon start its mission based on defined instructions.

The Damavand-2, which is an advanced type of Jamaran destroyer, is equipped with new radar and missile systems, as well as propulsion and weaponry systems thanks to cooperation between the Defense Ministry, the Iranian Navy, and the knowledge-based companies, the reports added.

Meanwhile, Manouchehr Alipour, an advisor to the Iranian defense minister in marine industries and the deputy head of the Marine Industries Organization (MIO), said the country's experts have acquired proficiency in designing and manufacturing destroyers.

"It took 12 years to build the first Jamaran-class destroyer. Later, the Damavand-1 was built in 8 years and Dena was delivered to the Navy after 6 years. We hope to deliver the Damavand-2 [to the Navy] in a much shorter time. We manufactured Damavand's initial hull in 4 years, but the process [to build] the Damavand-2 took [only] 11 months," he noted.

"The reason for the amazing reduction in the time needed for designing the hull and building the destroyers was that we became proficient in designing and engineering destroyers and their equipment."

Damavand-1, a 100-meter-long destroyer weighing more than 1,300 tons, officially joined the Iranian Navy's northern fleet in March 2015.

Three years later, however, the frigate collided with a breakwater while docking at the Caspian port of Bandar Anzali and sank there.

It was recovered from the sea and entered the operational cycle, with new pictures showing that it is equipped with an anti-ship cruise missile launcher and a 76mm gun.

Iran's Navy has in recent years achieved self-sufficiency in manufacturing surface and sub-surface vessels.

It has also increased its presence in international waters to protect naval routes and provide security for merchant vessels and tankers.

Recently, the Iranian Navy's 86th flotilla of warships, comprising indigenous Dena destroyer and Makran forward base ship, successfully completed a round-the-world voyage after sailing 63,000 kilometers of sea routes over a period of eight months.

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Israeli Think Tank 'Finds' Huge Iranian Missile Base in Hidden Mountain Fortress

Sputnik News

20230702

Ilya Tuskanov

The Islamic Republic and the Jewish State became mortal enemies overnight following the Iranian Revolution of 1979, with Tehran severing all ties with Tel Aviv. Since then, the two countries have accused one another of waging a series of proxy wars and covert sabotage attacks and assassinations.

The Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps has built a massive underground missile base in a mountain fortress outside the western Iranian city of Kermanshah, an Israeli security think tank analysis based on satellite intelligence has claimed.

According to the IDF staff officer-run Alma Research and Education Center, Iran has three large underground facilities in the area, including a mountain base in Konesht Canyon, which has least 61 missile bunkers hidden from satellite snooping dug into it.

80 more missile bunkers are reportedly situated at the nearby Panj Pelleh site, with 2K12 Kub SAMs and Zu-23 anti-aircraft guns protecting the area from aerial attack.

The missiles hosted by the base are said to include the Fateh-110, a solid fuel missile with a 500 kg warhead and an operational range of 300 km. Qiam-1 ballistic missiles, which have 750 kg warheads and a range up to 800 km, are also on site.

Alma alleges that the Kermanshah base was used during the January 2020 Revolutionary Guard missile attack on a pair of US bases in Iraq following the murder of IRGC Quds Force commander Qassem Soleimani, which left over 100 US soldiers with traumatic brain injuries.

Iran has a broad range of ballistic and cruise missiles in its arsenal, and recently unveiled a new hypersonic missile known as the Fattah.

The Islamic Republic considers its arsenal of missiles as its main shield against enemy aggression, and has warned that it will not hesitate to use them against Israeli military and nuclear sites and US bases and carrier groups in the Persian Gulf if Tel Aviv or Washington attempts to carry out strikes against Tehran's nuclear sites.

Tel Aviv has spent more than a decade accusing Iran of pursuing nukes. Tehran has denied that claim, saying nuclear weapons and all other weapons of mass destruction are not compatible with the Islamic faith, and pointing to Israel's own suspected stock of nukes. Tel Aviv neither confirms nor denies possessing such weapons.

A Sputnik

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Israeli regime to purchase third squadron of F-35 stealth jets in $3 billion deal

Iran Press TV

Sunday, 02 July 2023 11:01 AM

The Israeli regime plans to procure a third squadron of advanced F-35 stealth fighter jets from the United States.

Israel's ministry of military affairs announced in a statement on Sunday that the cabinet of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu had approved the purchase of a third squadron of F-35 stealth fighter jets, known in Israel by its Hebrew name 'Adir', in a deal worth $3 billion.

The additional 25 aircraft manufactured by Lockheed Martin will bring the number of F-35s in Israel's air force to 75, the ministry said, adding that the deal will be financed through the military aid package Israel receives from the United States.

The Israeli ministry underlined that Lockheed Martin and engine manufacturer Pratt & Whitney have agreed to involve Israeli military companies in the production of aircraft components.

"This new agreement will ensure the continuation of cooperation between American companies and Israeli defense industries in the production of aircraft parts," said the ministry statement.

The statement added that the ministry would issue an official letter of request to the US military's F-35 Lightning II Joint Program Office to "facilitate the approval and signing of the transaction in the coming months."

The United States is one of the main suppliers of arms and military equipment to Israel, also a staunch supporter of the occupying regime in its decades-long aggression against Palestinians.

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Israeli Defense Ministry Planning $3Bln Purchase of 25 F-35 Fighter Jets From US

Sputnik News

20230702

MOSCOW (Sputnik) - The Israeli Defense Ministry said on Sunday that it plans to buy 25 F-35 fighter jets from the US government under a deal estimated at $3 billion.

"The Israel Ministry of Defense and the IDF will acquire a third squadron of... F-35 aircrafts: 25 aircrafts manufactured by @LockheedMartin will be purchased from the US government," the ministry wrote on social media.

The ministry said that funding will be provided by US aid funds and added that with this acquisition, the Israeli air force will have 75 stealth aircraft.

In June, US media reported that the US Department of Defense froze the F-35 acquisition from Lockheed Martin until the contractor fixes a major problems with the jet's TR-3 hardware upgrade.

A Sputnik

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Thousands Protest Against Judicial Reform in Israel After Failed Government Talks

Sputnik News

20230702

TEL AVIV (Sputnik) - Tens of thousands of protesters gathered in Tel Aviv to protest against the controversial judicial reform on the 26th consecutive Saturday, a Sputnik correspondent reports.

The organizers of the Saturday demonstrations announced protests at 150 different locations across Israel. In Tel Aviv alone, about 130,000 people gathered on Saturday, according to Crowd Solutions estimates.

Overall, about 300,000 people protested across Israel on Saturday, according to the organizers of the demonstrations. In Tel Aviv, protesters attempted to block the main highway, but police restored regular traffic. According to a Sputnik correspondent, police with water cannons were seen in the Ayalon Highway area.

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu told The Wall Street Journal on Thursday that the government would drop the most controversial part of the judicial reform designed to enable the parliament (Knesset) to override the rulings of the Supreme Court.

At the same time, the Israeli prime minister said that the government and the opposition had been unable to agree on basic provisions of the reform for months, which would possibly prompt the government to advance the legislation unilaterally.

The draft law is intended to shake up the judiciary in Israel. If adopted, it could curtail the Supreme Court's power to review and strike down laws that it rules unconstitutional and give the government a greater say in the selection of judges.

In late March, the Israeli prime minister announced the suspension of the legislative process on judicial reform in order to negotiate and reach a compromise with its opponents. The decision came against the backdrop of major nationwide protests against the reform. Despite the suspension, demonstrators continue to take to the streets, fearing that the reform will undermine democracy in Israel and bring the country to the brink of a social and constitutional crisis.

A Sputnik

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German coalition at adds over sale of Eurofighter Typhoon fighter jets to Saudi Arabia: Report

Iran Press TV

Sunday, 02 July 2023 10:13 AM

Germany's ruling coalition government is at odds over whether to give in to British pressure and approve the production of twin-engine and multirole Eurofighter Typhoon fighter jets for Saudi Arabia, more than four years after it halted weapons sales to the Persian Gulf kingdom due to Riyadh's war on Yemen and its role in the killing of dissident Saudi journalist Jamal Khashoggi.

A deal struck by Riyadh and BAE Systems five years ago for the British multinational arms maker to supply 48 such warplanes was put on hold due to the devastating military onslaught against Yemen, where Saudi Arabia played the leading role.

Industry sources told Reuters news agency at the time that a third of the components for the jets come from Germany.

The German-language newspaper Welt Am Sonntag, citing anonymous sources, reported on Saturday that while Chancellor Olaf Scholz of the left-leaning Social Democrats (SPD) and Finance Minister Christian Lindner are willing to allow the export, the Greens and some politicians within the SPD are fiercely opposed to the move.

Then-chancellor Angela Merkel's coalition agreed in March 2018 to prevent arms from being delivered to any country directly involved in the devastating war on Yemen.

Before the ban, Germany did brisk business with Saudi Arabia with an export volume of 450 million euros ($550 million) in the third fiscal quarter of 2017, according to German broadcaster Deutsche Welle.

German officials claimed at the time the ban was in line with Berlin's stance of not exporting weapons to active conflict zones.

That stance, however, shifted last year as Germany came under pressure to provide Ukraine with weapons during Russia's military operation in the country.

Over the past few months, the British have argued that Germany cannot block the export of Eurofighter jets to third parties.

Saudi Arabia initiated a brutal war of aggression against Yemen in March 2015, enlisting the assistance of some of its regional allies, including the United Arab Emirates, as well as massive shipments of advanced weaponry from the US and Western Europe.

The Western governments further extended their political and logistical support to Riyadh in their failed bid to restore power in Yemen to the country's former Saudi-installed government.

The former Yemeni government's president, Abd Rabbuh Mansur Hadi, resigned from the presidency in late 2014 and later fled to Riyadh amid a political conflict with Ansarullah. The movement has been running Yemen's affairs in the absence of a functioning administration.

The war further led to the killing of tens of thousands of Yemenis and turned the entire nation into the scene of the world's worst humanitarian crisis.

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Syria Repels Israeli Missile Attack as IDF Reports Rocket Launch Toward Israel

Sputnik News

20230702

TEL AVIV (Sputnik) - Syrian air defense troops repelled an Israeli missile attack on Homs shortly after midnight on Sunday. Separately, the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) said that an anti-aircraft rocket had been launched from Syrian territory toward Israel on Saturday night.

Syrian state media reported shortly after midnight on Sunday that Arab Republic's air defense systems had repelled an attack in the Homs Governorate in central Syria.

"At about 12:20 am, the Israeli enemy launched an aerial act of aggression from the direction of northeastern Beirut, targeting some sites in the vicinity of Homs City," a military source said.

Syrian air defenses responded, intercepting Israeli missiles and shooting them down most of them. Some material damage was caused in the raid, but no injuries were reported.

Separately, the Israeli military indicated that an anti-aircraft rocket had been launched from Syria toward Israel Saturday. "The rocket appears to have exploded in the air over Israeli territory," the IDF said on Twitter. The military added that no special instructions were issued for Israeli civilians, and no injuries or casualties were reported. The IDF confirmed that Israeli aircraft had targeted a Syrian air defense battery from which the errant missile was reportedly launched.

A Sputnik correspondent reported that a loud bang was heard in Tel Aviv and its suburbs before the IDF issued its statement.

Israel has launched thousands of air raids against Syria over the past decade as the security situation in the Arab Republic deteriorated thanks to a US, Turkish and Gulf sheikdom-backed dirty war. Damascus has blasted Tel Aviv, with whom it has no formal diplomatic relations, for its aggression. Israel has often claimed that it's targeting Iranian or "Iranian-backed" militias operating on Syrian territory. Syria has indicated that Iranian advisors and Lebanese Hezbollah militias are operating in the country at the invitation of its government, and helping to battle foreign-backed jihadist militants.

Israeli air attacks are often launched over Lebanese airspace, with the IDF using the area in the knowledge that Syrian air defense forces may hesitate to target Israeli aircraft over its neighbor's airspace, given the risk hitting civilian aircraft or having missile debris land in Lebanese territory.

A Sputnik

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Expert urges U.S. to boost military presence around Taiwan to deter China

ROC Central News Agency

07/02/2023 12:57 PM

Taipei, July 2 (CNA) A Taiwanese defense scholar has called on the United States to increase its military presence around Taiwan to deter Chinese military forces from entering Taiwan's territorial space, which he said could ultimately lead to a cross-Strait war.

Huang Chung-ting (eaeZ), an associate research fellow at the government-funded Institute for National Defense and Security Research (INDSR), made the call in an article published on the INDSR website on June 30.

Over the past decade, China's People's Liberation Army (PLA) has been extending its reach toward the Taiwan side of the Strait, then moving east of Taiwan, beyond the First Island Chain, Huang said in the article titled "How to avoid war? U.S. military needs to form new norms across the Taiwan Strait."

PLA warships first crossed the median line of the Taiwan Strait in 2014, and by 2016 China began deploying warships around the island and sending planes close to Taiwan's air defense identification zone (ADIZ), Huang said.

From 2020 into 2021, the PLA started to ignore the existence of Taiwan's ADIZ by routinely sending military assets into Taiwan's southwestern and southeastern ADIZs, he said.

In 2022, the PLA moved to conducting drills and engaging in other military provocations around Taiwan and its outlying islands, in an attempt to constrict Taiwan military's response in the event of a Chinese invasion, Huang said.

The most recent incursions this year by the PLA mean that it is just a matter of time before its forces enter Taiwan's 24-nautical mile contiguous zone then the country's 12-nautical mile territorial space, he said.

According to Taiwan's military, eight PLA aircraft breached the median line of the Taiwan Strait on June 22 and 23, approaching the outer boundary of the contiguous zone, which is 24 nautical miles (44.4 kilometers) from Taiwan's coastline.

While PLA planes and ships have frequently come near Taiwan, and Chinese aircraft have occasionally crossed the median line, they rarely approach the contiguous zone, which is about 44 nautical miles east of the median line.

The last time PLA warplanes were spotted near the contiguous zone was Dec. 31 into Jan. 1, when they came within 24 nautical miles of Taiwan's coastline.

Huang said that if the PLA decides to enter Taiwan's territorial space, the Taiwan military would be forced to take defensive action against the Chinese warships and warplanes, which would inevitably lead to a cross-Strait war.

As Chinese military forces continue to expand eastward, Huang said, they would no longer be deterred by regular U.S. patrols and American arms sales to Taiwan.

The only way to stop China from altering the cross-Strait status quo is for the U.S. to significantly increase it military presence around Taiwan -- both air and sea - to counterbalance the PLA's increasing military coercion in the region, Huang said.

The median line of the Taiwan Strait is an unofficial border between Taiwan and China that had been tacitly observed by both sides from the 1950s until last year, when Beijing became enraged by then U.S. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi's visit to Taipei.

An ADIZ is an area declared by a country to allow it to identify, locate and control approaching foreign aircraft, but it is not part of the territorial airspace as defined by international law.

(By Novia Huang and Joseph Yeh)

Enditem/pc

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PLA ramps up exercises amid latest US arms sales plan to Taiwan island

Global Times

By Liu Xuanzun Published: Jul 02, 2023 06:22 PM

The Chinese People's Liberation Army (PLA) has reportedly ramped up military exercise around the island of Taiwan after the US approved a latest round of potential arms sales to the island on Thursday, with experts saying on Sunday that the PLA is fully capable of safeguarding national sovereignty, security and development interests.

The defense authority on the island of Taiwan said on Saturday that it detected 26 PLA aircraft and seven PLA vessels around the island of Taiwan over the past day, with 12 of the aircraft, including fighter jets, bombers and reconnaissance aircraft, crossing the so-called Taiwan Straits median line or the island's self-proclaimed southwest air defense identification zone, media on the island reported.

Coming after the Biden administration's approval of two potential arms sales totaling $440 million to the island of Taiwan announced on Thursday, the intensity of PLA activities around the island was well above the PLA's daily average, observers said.

The US arms sales includes 30mm ammunition and related equipment as well as spare and repair parts for vehicles and weapons, CNN reported on Friday.

Having to rely on imported munitions and spare parts from the US laid bare the island's lack of independent stockpiles and maintenance capabilities, Song Zhongping, a Chinese mainland military expert and TV commentator, told the Global Times on Sunday.

It exposed that the island of Taiwan has no capability to resist reunification by force, Song further noted.

Since the island of Taiwan is isolated in the ocean and is close to the Chinese mainland, it is almost impossible for the US to send supplies to the island when a potential conflict breaks out, observers said.

The exercises by PLA aircraft and vessels around the island of Taiwan have demonstrated the PLA's capabilities in blockading the island and deny external interference forces, experts said.

On Friday, Japan's Defense Ministry said in a press release that it spotted a PLA flotilla led by the Type 075 amphibious assault ship Guangxi when it sailed from the East China Sea through the Osumi Strait into the West Pacific waters south of Japan from Thursday to Friday.

Characterized by strong multidimensional amphibious landing capabilities and capable of carrying dozens of helicopters in addition to landing craft and amphibious armored vehicles, the Type 075 is widely seen by analysts to have a significant role to play in resolving the Taiwan question.

Song said that the Type 075's exercise is not aimed at a third party, but it serves to safeguard national sovereignty and security.

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Russian forces destroy Ukrainian Starlink station in Bakhmut, launch drone attack on Kiev

Iran Press TV

Sunday, 02 July 2023 8:33 AM

Russian forces have destroyed a Ukrainian Starlink satellite communication station near Bakhmut, according to a Russian defense ministry spokesperson, coming amid Russia's overnight air raid on Kiev after a 12-day break.

"The artillery of the group [of Russian forces] destroyed a Starlink communication station, a control center for unmanned aerial vehicles together with a Leleka-100 drone, a communication center, and a pickup truck with an infantry group," the spokesperson said on Sunday as quoted in a report by Sputnik News.

Starlink is a next-generation satellite network designed to provide broadband internet access across the world, launched by SpaceX in February 2018. After the start of Russia's "military operation" in Ukraine, Starlink stations have been providing the Ukrainian forces access to satellite internet.

Russian forces also repelled an attack by a Ukrainian assault group near the village of Berkhovka in Bakhmut (also known as Artemovsk) area, the report added.

It further cited a source in the command of Russia's South group of soldiers as saying, "Airborne troops stopped the enemy in the gray zone ... As a result of the battle, more than 200 Ukrainian military personnel, five tanks, eight infantry fighting vehicles, and more than 10 unmanned aerial vehicles were destroyed."

Meanwhile, Ukrainian officials stated on Sunday that Russia had launched a drone attack on Kiev, the first overnight attack in 12 days.

"Another enemy attack on Kiev," Serhiy Popko, a colonel general who heads Kiev's military administration, said in a post on his Telegram channel.

"At this moment, there is no information about possible casualties or damage," he added.

Ukrainian military officials claimed that the city's air defense system had shot down all the approaching targets.

This comes as Ukraine launched a counteroffensive last month to reclaim territory under Russian control. But President Volodymyr Zelensky acknowledged last week that plans for the counteroffensive had slowed in recent months.

"We stopped because we could not advance," said the Ukrainian president. "Advancing meant losing people and we had no artillery."

Zelensky on Saturday expressed frustration over the slow deliveries of weapons and lack of clarity over pilot training by "some" Western nations. "There is no schedule of training missions. I believe that some partners are dragging their feet. Why are they doing it? I don't know," Zelensky said.

Russia has also described the counteroffensive against its forces as "unsuccessful."

The US has said it is providing Ukraine with what it needs when it needs it. But leaked US military and intelligence documents previously indicated alarming Ukrainian shortfalls in Western-supplied weaponry a especially ammunition and air defense.

Since the start of the war in Ukraine in February 2022, the US and its Western allies have been providing Kiev with military equipment worth tens of billions of dollars. The supplied arms include rocket systems, drones, tanks and armored vehicles, and communication systems as reports also indicate a probable supply of F-16 fighter jets.

Long-range attack drones have been also added to the list of Western weapons supplied to the Ukrainian forces fighting against Russian troops.

Biden administration alone has sent more than $40 billion in military aid to Ukraine since Russia first launched its military operation.

Russia has repeatedly said that the collective Western nations are engaged in a proxy war with Russia over Ukraine, warning that the conflict could escalate into a much bigger fight.

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Russian Drones Strike Kyiv As Fighting Intensifies In East; Zelenskiy Visits Odesa

By RFE/RL's Ukrainian Service July 02, 2023

Russia overnight launched its first drone attack in the area around Ukraine's capital in nearly two weeks as "fierce" fighting also hit the east of the country, officials said on July 2, one day after Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy warned that Russia could be preparing an explosion at the massive Zaporizhzhya nuclear power plant.

"Another enemy attack on Kyiv," wrote Serhiy Popko, the head of Kyiv's military administration, on Telegram. "At this moment there is no information about possible casualties or damage."

Separately, Deputy Defense Minister Hanna Malyar said Russian troops were attacking in four frontline areas in the east of the country but added that Ukrainian forces were also "gradually" proceeding with their counteroffensive moves.

"Fierce fighting is going on everywhere," Malyar wrote on social media. "The situation is quite complicated. It's hot now everywhere."

"Our troops are facing intense enemy resistance...but persistently and unceasingly are creating conditions for the fastest forward movement."

Zelenskiy later visited Ukraine's crucial port city of Odesa, releasing a video in which he said that "the enemy will definitely not dictate conditions in the Black Sea" and the rest of the southern region.

"The occupiers will have to be afraid of approaching our Ukrainian Crimea and our coast on the Sea of Azov as Russian ships are already scared of approaching our Black Sea cost," he said as he marked Ukraine's annual Navy Day.

In the capital, air-raid sirens were heard beginning at about 2 a.m. local time, Reuters reported.

One civilian was later reported slightly injured by falling debris in the Kyiv region.

Ukraine's air-defense forces said on July 2 that eight drones and three Kalibr cruise missiles had been launched overnight across the country.

"All air targets...were destroyed," the military wrote on Telegram.

In its daily briefing on July 2, the Ukrainian General Staff reported 46 clashes between Ukrainian and Russian forces during the previous 24 hours.

RFE/RL cannot confirm claims of battlefield developments by either side in areas of heavy fighting.

The main fighting was again reported in the area of Lyman, Bakhmut, and Maryinka in the Donetsk region.

During a news conference on July 1 with visiting Spanish Prime Minister Pedro Sanchez, Zelenskiy said there was "a serious threat" that Russia was prepared to set off "a local explosion" at the massive Zaporizhzhya nuclear power plant "which could lead to a [radiation] release."

Zelenskiy met with security and nuclear-power officials on July 1 at the Rivne nuclear power plant to discuss "key issues," he said in his nightly video address.

Ukraine's military had earlier claimed that Russia had mined the Zaporizhzhya plant, which is Europe's largest civilian nuclear facility.

On June 30, Enerhoatom, Ukraine's nuclear authority, concluded two days of exercises simulating the effects of an explosion at the plant, which has been controlled by Russian occupying forces since shortly after Moscow launched its February 2022 invasion.

Inside Russia, local media reported that a large explosion rocked the district of Krasnodar, near an air base in Primorsko-Akhtarsk, a town of about 32,000 people. Details were not immediately available.

With reporting by Reuters

Source: https://www.rferl.org/a/ukraine-kyiv-drone- attack-zaporizhzhya-nuclear-risk/32485728.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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Germany Not Supplying Long-Range Arms to Ukraine to Prevent Attacks Against Russia - Scholz

Sputnik News

20230702

BERLIN (Sputnik) - Germany is reluctant to supply long-range weapons to Ukraine as it does not want them to end up being used to strike Russian territory, German Chancellor Olaf Scholz said on Sunday.

"We carefully check all the requests we receive. But for us there is a principle that I share with the US president - we do not want the weapons we supply to be used to attack Russian territories," Scholz told German broadcaster ARD when asked why Germany refuses to supply Ukraine with the Taurus cruise missiles with a range of up to 500 kilometers (310 miles).

In May, German newspaper Frankfurter Allgemeine Sonntagszeitung reported, citing sources, that Ukraine had requested the Taurus missiles from Germany.

Ukraine has systematically attacked civilian targets in Russia, including territories it claims as its own in the Donbass, Crimea, Kherson and Zaporozhye, using its NATO-provided weapons to do so. Last month, the Kakhovka dam in Kherson region was destroyed in a Ukrainian attack, flooding the area and claiming several dozen lives, causing billions in damage, and threatening to leave Crimea without water. Kiev has also been shelling the Zaporozhye Nuclear Power Plant since March of 2022, with scientists warning that these attacks threaten to unleash a new Chernobyl.

Ukraine has also resorted to artillery and drone attacks targeting western Russia, including Belgorod, Kursk and Voronezh, and a UAV attack on the Kremlin in May. Late last year, Kiev attempted to a long-range drone attack on Russia's Engels airbase - home to the aerial component of Russia's nuclear triad. Following this attack, Moscow decided to freeze its participation in the New START agreement, the last major nuclear treaty between Russia and the US.

Kiev carries out terror shelling attacks against cities and settlements in the Donbass on a daily basis, typically using NATO-provided 155 mm artillery shells and HIMARS rockets, killing and injuring hundreds of people over the past year only.

Moscow has repeatedly warned NATO of the consequences of the delivery of weapons to Ukraine, saying they not only escalate tensions between Russia and the Western bloc, but threaten to destabilize the entire planet as weapons shipped to Kiev wind up in the hands of criminals, terrorists and rebel groups throughout Europe, the Middle East and Africa.

A Sputnik

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Ukraine Preparing for Second Stage of Counteroffensive in Zaporozhye Region - Official

Sputnik News

20230702

SIMFEROPOL (Sputnik) - Ukraine launched its long-advertised counteroffensive in early June after multiple postponements. According to the Russian Defense Ministry, Ukrainian troops continue to try but are failing to advance along three directions: South Donetsk, Artemovsk (Bakhmut) and Zaporozhye, the latter being of primary focus.

Ukrainian troops are preparing to attempt the second stage of a large-scale counter-offensive in the Zaporozhye region in the coming days, Vladimir Rogov, a senior official of the Zaporozhye regional administration, told Sputnik.

"The enemy is already prepared for the second stage of a full-scale offensive. It can start any day, at any moment. They are currently trying to confuse our intelligence, so along the entire line of contact on the Zaporozhye front, they are constantly maneuvering and transferring troops. This is being done in order to hide the location of the main forces," Rogov explained.

He added that Ukrainian forces could concentrate the main blow for a breakthrough at any location of the front line.

"Over the past four weeks, they have conducted the maximum number of attempts at reconnaissance in combat, offensive options, breakthroughs, studying our reaction and interaction of units, plus regular shelling of our rear in order to hit infrastructure facilities - bridges, transport hubs, units, depots with equipment and ammunition, airfields," Rogov told Sputnik.

Russia launched its special military operation in Ukraine in February 2022, after the Donetsk and Lugansk people's republics appealed for help in defending themselves against Ukrainian provocations. In response to Russia's operation, Western countries have rolled out a comprehensive sanctions campaign against Moscow and have been supplying weapons to Ukraine.

On September 30, 2022, Russian President Vladimir Putin and the heads of the Donetsk and Lugansk people's republics, as well as Kherson and Zaporozhye regions, signed agreements on the accession of these territories to Russia, following referendums that showed that an overwhelming majority of the local population supported becoming part of Russia.

A Sputnik

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Russian Forces Destroy Starlink Communication Station Near Artemovsk

Sputnik News

20230702

MOSCOW (Sputnik) - Russian forces have destroyed a Ukrainian Starlink satellite communication station and a drone control center near Artemovsk (Bakhmut), a Russian Defense Ministry spokesperson told Sputnik.

"... the artillery of the group [of Russian forces] destroyed a Starlink communication station, a control center for unmanned aerial vehicles together with a Leleka-100 drone, a communication center and a pickup truck with an infantry group," the spokesperson said.

In addition, Russian forces have repelled an attack by a Ukrainian assault group near the village of Berkhovka in the Artemovsk area.

Russia launched its special military operation in Ukraine on February 24, 2022, after the Donetsk and Lugansk people's republics appealed for help in defending themselves against Ukrainian provocations. In response to Russia's operation, Western countries have rolled out a comprehensive sanctions campaign against Moscow and have been supplying weapons to Ukraine.

On September 30, 2022, Russian President Vladimir Putin and the heads of the Donetsk and Lugansk people's republics, as well as Kherson and Zaporozhye regions, signed agreements on the accession of these territories to Russia, following referendums that showed that an overwhelming majority of the local population supported becoming part of Russia.

Ukraine launched its long-advertised counteroffensive in early June after multiple postponements. According to the Russian Defense Ministry, Ukrainian troops continue to try but are failing to advance along three directions: South Donetsk, Artemovsk and Zaporozhye, the latter being of primary focus.

A Sputnik

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Ukrainian shores will never tolerate the occupier - address by the President of Ukraine

President of Ukraine

2 July 2023 - 16:01

Good health to you, fellow Ukrainians!

Today I am in Odesa, first and foremost, to congratulate our warriors of the Ukrainian Navy on their professional day. To congratulate them and thank them for their courage, heroism, and the extraordinary results they have achieved and are achieving for Ukraine.

It is enough to recall what ambitions Russia had at the beginning of the full-scale aggression and what ambitions are now at the bottom of the Black Sea.

I thank every warrior of the Ukrainian Navy - all sailors, all marines, all commanders of our Navy, artillerymen, naval aviators, drone operators, I thank the warriors of the river flotilla, river divisions... I thank you all!

Today, I had the honor to award the best, and congratulated the cadets of the Institute of Naval Forces of our Odesa Maritime Academy. I visited the wounded warriors in the hospital. I wish everyone a speedy recovery. It was a special honor for me to leave my wishes on the copy of Kobzar that has been accompanying our warriors in battles since 2014.

Today I also heard the report by our Navy Commander, Vice Admiral Oleksiy Neizhpapa, and Commander of the Odesa operational and strategic group of troops, General Moskalov. They spoke about the current security situation and the strategic tasks for our fleet, for the new direction - the fleet of naval drones - and for our coastal defense. We will implement everything! I am sure of it!

The enemy will definitely not dictate the conditions in the Black Sea, and the occupiers will have to be as afraid of approaching our Ukrainian Crimea and our Azov Sea coast as Russian ships are already afraid of approaching our Black Sea coast.

Today I also congratulate all civilian workers of the Ukrainian sea and river fleet, all those who ensure the security and operation of our ports, our ability to give life to the Ukrainian economy and connect our Ukraine with global markets despite the Russian blockade of the Black Sea. I thank all the sailors, port workers, ship repairers, businesses, employees and, of course, every soldier who protects the security of Ukrainian ports, Ukrainian cities, and Ukrainian shores.

We will win together! Ukrainian shores will never tolerate the occupier.

Glory to all our defenders!

I thank you, Odesa, for this day!

Glory to Ukraine!

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President at the events in Odesa on the occasion of the Day of the Navy of the Armed Forces of Ukraine: Courage and skill of our Navy destroyed enemy's hopes and drowned them in the sea

President of Ukraine

2 July 2023 - 15:17

President at the events in Odesa on the occasion of the Day of the Navy of the Armed Forces of Ukraine: Courage and skill of our Navy destroyed enemy

In Odesa, President Volodymyr Zelenskyy took part in the events dedicated to the Day of the Navy of the Armed Forces of Ukraine, in particular, he met with cadets of the Institute of the Navy of the National University "Odesa Maritime Academy" and presented state awards and battle flags.

On behalf of the entire Ukrainian state and people, he congratulated the guardians of Ukraine's maritime borders on their professional holiday - the Day of the Ukrainian Navy.

"We know, we have seen, and we are grateful for the glory that the Ukrainian Navy is gaining for our country. All of us in Ukraine are confident in the strength of our people and in your strength, in your professionalism, in your ability to continue to demonstrate Ukrainian strength. Many people in Russia thought that the Black Sea was the area of their power. The enemy hoped that our Navy would not be able to withstand Russia's attacks. Well, the courage and skill of our warriors destroyed all these enemy hopes and drowned them in the sea," the President said.

The Head of State emphasized that Ukrainian defense in this war against the Russian aggressor consists of various large and small episodes that together provide protection for the state and the opportunity to move forward both on land and at sea.

"Our Navy, together with other elements of Ukraine's defense and security forces, protected our Black Sea coast from Russian amphibious operations. You defended Odesa, which the Russian occupiers dreamed of conquering or destroying. Our missiles sunk the Russian flagship, and it was so humiliating for the Kremlin that they are still afraid to make public all the details of this loss. The powerful participation of the Navy in a joint operation with our intelligence and defense officers made it possible to liberate Zmiinyi Island from the occupiers, and this returned security to a significant part of Ukrainian waters," Volodymyr Zelenskyy stated.

According to him, these and other powerful operations of the defense forces have taught the Russian fleet not to approach Ukrainian shores.

"And if Russian warships remain in the Black Sea... if they do, they will be afraid to approach our Ukrainian Crimea and our Azov Sea coast. This will definitely happen. I know this. I see it in the eyes of our sailors, our marines, the commanders of our Navy, in the skillful work of our artillerymen, naval aviators and those who work for our fleet of naval drones," the Head of State emphasized.

Volodymyr Zelenskyy especially honored the marines of the glorious 35th and 36th separate marine brigades. Today, the award of the President of Ukraine "For Courage and Bravery" was presented to the 10th naval aviation brigade named after the Hero of Ukraine Colonel Ihor Bedzai of the Ukrainian Navy and the 88th separate marine battalion of the 35th separate marine brigade named after Rear Admiral Mykhailo Ostrohradskyi of the Ukrainian Navy.

The attendees also observed a minute of silence in memory of all Ukrainian soldiers, every sailor and marine who gave their lives in the battles for Ukraine's independence.

The Head of State separately addressed the cadets of the Naval Institute.

The President noted that Ukraine is one of those countries that can fight and win, including at sea. This, in his opinion, will have global significance, as few countries in the world are capable of doing so.

"Ukraine's destiny is undoubtedly to be strong. To be a free part of the free world. I am confident that Ukraine will defend itself in this war and return everything that is temporarily controlled by the occupiers. And after the war, the victorious Ukraine will teach others in the world how to be strong, including at sea, and how to defend freedom. Ukraine will become a donor of global security and global power, and I believe that your knowledge, your strength, your future victories will bring this powerful time closer for our beautiful country and our people," Volodymyr Zelenskyy said, addressing the cadets.

"Glory to the Navy of the Armed Forces of Ukraine! Glory to your families, to your relatives who raised and are raising people like you. I wish you all health and only victory!" the President added.

He presented the defenders with state awards. Thus, for personal courage and selfless actions in the defense of state sovereignty and territorial integrity of Ukraine, exemplary performance of military duty, the servicemen were awarded the Orders of Bohdan Khmelnytskyi of the II degree, "For Courage" of the III degree, Danylo Halytskyi and the medal "For Military Service to Ukraine".

In addition, the President presented battle flags to the 64th separate cannon artillery division of the 406th separate artillery brigade named after Brigadier General Oleksiy Almazov, 26th and 27th separate divisions of river boats of the river flotilla of the Ukrainian Navy.

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President listened to the report on the development of the Ukrainian Navy in Odesa region

President of Ukraine

2 July 2023 - 14:53

President listened to the report on the development of the Ukrainian Navy in Odesa region

During a working trip to Odesa region, President of Ukraine Volodymyr Zelenskyy listened to the report by Commander of the Navy of the Armed Forces of Ukraine Oleksiy Neizhpapa.

The Navy Commander informed the Head of State in detail about the operational situation in the Black Sea, the enemy's capabilities to launch missile strikes from the sea and the defense capabilities of the Navy.

Oleksiy Neizhpapa briefed the President on the strategy of development of the Navy of the Armed Forces of Ukraine for the time of war and in the post-war period.

The interim results and prospects of the development of the naval drone program and the missile program were discussed.

In addition, the Navy Commander briefed Volodymyr Zelenskyy on the work to create a Marine Corps.

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Officials Cite Heavy Fighting in Eastern Ukraine

By VOA News July 02, 2023

Latest developments:

President Joe Biden will visit Europe for a three-country trip to strengthen the international coalition against Russian aggression as the war in Ukraine continues into its second year. The main focus of Biden's five-day visit next week will be the annual NATO summit, held this year in Vilnius, Lithuania, on July 11-12.

Poland will send 500 police officers to strengthen security along its border with Belarus, the Polish interior minister said Sunday. "Due to the tense situation on the border with Belarus, I have decided to bolster our forces with 500 Polish police officers from riot control and counter-terrorism units," Mariusz Kaminski tweeted, adding the officers would join the border guards already guarding the frontier.

About 100 employees of Russian nuclear corporation Rosatom have left Ukraine's Zaporizhzhia Nuclear Power Plant in the Russian-occupied town of Enerhodar, Mayor Dmytro Orlov said Sunday, amid warnings by the Ukrainian authorities that Russia may be planning a terrorist attack at the plant. There are no structures in the town where people could shelter in case of an explosion at Europe's largest nuclear power plant, Orlov said.

Ukrainian officials said Sunday that Russian forces advanced in parts of eastern Ukraine amid fierce fighting, while Ukrainian troops made gains in the southern part of the country.

Deputy Defense Minister Hanna Maliar said the Russian advances took place in several parts of the Donetsk region, including Lyman, Avdiivka, and Marinka.

"Fierce fighting is going on everywhere," Maliar wrote on Telegram. "The situation is quite complicated."

Maliar said that in the south, Ukrainian forces faced "intense enemy resistance, remote mining and redeployment of (Russian) military reserves."

Russia said its forces had repelled Ukrainian attacks near villages ringing Bakhmut and in areas further south, particularly the strategic hilltop town of Vuhlear.



Drone attack

After a 12-day lull, Russia launched an overnight drone attack early Sunday across Ukraine, injuring one person in the Kyiv area from falling debris. The attack was repelled by Ukrainian air defense systems.

Officials in the Ukrainian capital didn't provide the exact number of drones that attacked the city and its surrounding areas. But Ukraine's air force said that all eight Iranian-made Shahed drones and three Russian Kalibr cruise missiles were shot down by air defense systems.

Witnesses heard blasts resembling the sound of air defense systems hitting targets. There was no immediate information about damage from the attack.

Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy visited the Black Sea port city of Odesa Sunday to hear a report from the navy commander, discuss prospects for the development of a naval drone and missile program, as well as present awards to service members.

In a tweet, Zelenskyy said, "The enemy will definitely not dictate the conditions of the Black Sea and occupiers will have to be as afraid of approaching our Crimea and Azov Seas coast as Russian ships are already afraid of approaching our Black Sea coast."

Former U.S. Vice President Mike Pence, who is a 2024 Republican presidential candidate, said Sunday on CNN, "There's debate, both in my party and around the country, about American involvement [in Ukraine], but I really believe that the majority of the American people understand that we are the leader of the free world and standing for freedom and supporting those that are fighting for their freedom is always the American cause."

During a Saturday news conference with Spanish media in Kyiv, Zelenskyy hailed Pence's recent visit to Ukraine, but expressed concern of losing bipartisan support from the United States following what he called "dangerous messages coming from some Republicans."

Zelenskyy said that regardless of who wins the next U.S. presidential election, maintaining bipartisan support is "the most important thing for Ukraine."

Some information for this story came from The Associated Press, Agence France-Presse and Reuters.

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Westford, USA, July 02, 2023 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- The global Structural Health Monitoring market size is expected to reach USD 7595 million by 2030 and exhibit a CAGR of 14.7% in the forecast period (20232030), according to Skyquest's latest research report. The advancements in sensor and data acquisition technologies, stringent regulations and standards, the need for real-time monitoring and predictive maintenance, rising demand for cost-effective and efficient structural health management solutions, ageing infrastructure, and the need for structural integrity assessment is fueling the market's growth.

According to SkyQuest's latest global research of the structural health monitoring market, growing adoption of wireless sensor networks, increasing use of IoT and cloud-based solutions, integration of artificial intelligence and machine learning algorithms, development of advanced data analytics and predictive modelling techniques, the emergence of remote monitoring and real-time reporting, incorporation of non-destructive testing methods in structural health monitoring, utilization of drones and unmanned aerial vehicles for inspection and monitoring, emphasis on sustainability and green infrastructure monitoring, integration of structural health monitoring in smart cities initiatives, focus on long-term asset management and lifecycle monitoring, are the trends that aid in the market's growth.

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Browse in-depth TOC on "Structural Health Monitoring Market"

Pages - 157

Tables - 176

Figures -79

Structural health monitoring (SHM) is a field of engineering that uses sensors to monitor the health of structures over time. This information can be used to identify and predict damage and to take steps to prevent failures.

Prominent Players in Structural Health Monitoring Market

Acellent

Aconsense

Applied Acoustics

Bridge Diagnostics

Cirrus Research

Cowi

E2S

Encardio

Fugro

HBM

Honeywell

Infrasense

International SOS

MaaXsensors

MIDAS

Norsar

R.M.I.

RSM

Sensit Technologies

Vibrating Systems and Controls

Browse summary of the report and Complete Table of Contents (ToC):

https://www.skyquestt.com/report/structural-health-monitoring-market

Report Scope & Segmentation:

Attributes



Details



Forecast Period











2023-2030 Market Size in 2022



2530.27 Million 2030 Value Projection







7595 Million CAGR 14.7% Segments Covered















Offering Hardware, Software & services



Technology Wired, Wireless



End-use Civil Infrastructure, Aerospace & Defense, Energy, Mining, Others



Installation Type New Installation, Retrofit



Method Visual Inspection, Non-destructive Evaluation



Application Damage Detection, Crack Detection, Strain Monitoring, Wire Break Monitoring, Leakage Detection, Multimodal Sensing, Corrosion Monitoring, Hotspot Monitoring, Impact Monitoring, Deflection Monitoring



Regions Covered







North America (US, Canada), Europe (Germany, France, United Kingdom, Italy, Spain, Rest of Europe), Asia Pacific (China, India, Japan, Rest of Asia-Pacific), Latin America (Brazil, Rest of Latin America), Middle East & Africa (South Africa, GCC Countries, Rest of MEA)

Wireless Technology Demand to Grow Substantially in the Forecast Period

Wireless technology dominated the global online market as they are widely flexible and scalable. They also enable remote monitoring and real-time data transmission, allowing for prompt analysis and decision-making. The advancements in wireless sensor networks, communication protocols, and battery life have contributed to the growing adoption of wireless technology in structural health monitoring applications.

Safety and Risk Mitigation is the Leading Application Segment

In terms of application, the safety and risk mitigation is the leading segment due to the increasing demand for convenience. In addition, many countries around the world have aging infrastructure that requires monitoring and maintenance. Structural health monitoring helps in assessing the condition of aging infrastructure, identifying structural weaknesses or degradation, and planning appropriate repair and maintenance activities. With the increasing need for infrastructure rehabilitation and management, the demand for structural health monitoring solutions is expected to grow.

North America is the leading Market Due to the Infrastructure Network

Region-wise, North America is one of the largest growing markets with a huge emphasis on infrastructure networks. The region has a substantial infrastructure network, including bridges, highways, buildings, and pipelines, which requires ongoing monitoring and maintenance. The presence of stringent safety regulations, the need to manage aging infrastructure, and the adoption of advanced technologies have contributed to the market dominance of structural health monitoring in North America.

A recent report thoroughly analyzes the major players operating within the Structural Health Monitoring market. This comprehensive evaluation has considered several crucial factors, such as collaborations, mergers, innovative business policies, and strategies, providing invaluable insights into the key trends and breakthroughs in the market. Additionally, the report has carefully scrutinized the market share of the top segments and presented a detailed geographic analysis. Finally, the report has highlighted the major players in the industry and their ongoing endeavors to develop innovative solutions that cater to the ever-increasing demand for Structural Health Monitoring.

Key Developments in Structural Health Monitoring Market

In February 2023, Nova Metrix LLC acquired Vallen Systeme, a German manufacturer of monitoring systems. This acquisition added Vallen Systeme's expertise in acoustic emission and structural health monitoring technologies to Nova Metrix's product offerings.

In March 2023, Hottinger Baldwin Messtechnik GmbH acquired Digitexx Data Systems, Inc., a leading provider of data acquisition and processing systems for SHM applications. This acquisition strengthened Hottinger Baldwin Messtechnik GmbH's position in the SHM market and expanded its portfolio of data acquisition and processing solutions.

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Key Questions Answered in Structural Health Monitoring Market Report

What specific growth drivers are projected to impact the market during the forecast period?

Can you list the top companies in the market and explain how they have achieved their positions of influence?

In what ways do regional trends and patterns differ within the global market, and how might these differences shape the market's future growth?

Related Reports in SkyQuests Library:

Global Veterinary Dental Equipment Market

Global Aptamers Market

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Global Cosmetic Dentistry Market

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Westford, USA, July 02, 2023 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- According to SkyQuest, the global demand for microgrid control system is experiencing significant growth due to various factors. One of the key drivers is the increasing need for consistent and reliable power supply across different sectors worldwide. Energy storage systems play a crucial role in stabilizing and managing the intermittent nature of renewable energy sources, such as solar and wind power, by storing excess energy and releasing it when needed. This helps ensure a more reliable and uninterrupted power supply, reducing dependency on traditional fossil fuel-based generation.

Browse in-depth TOC on the "Microgrid Control System Market"

Pages - 242

Tables - 117

Figures  77

Get sample copy of this report:

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A microgrid is a comprehensive energy system incorporating local distributed energy resources (DERs) within a specific area. These resources can include local loads, generating assets such as solar panels or wind turbines, and energy storage devices such as batteries or fuel cells. One of the distinguishing features of a microgrid is its ability to operate in different modes, including "islanded" (off-the-grid) and grid-connected modes.

Report Scope & Segmentation:

Attributes Details Market Size in 2022 USD 2.8 billion 2030 Value Projection USD 7.5 billion CAGR 13.3% Forecast Period 2023-2030 Segments Covered Grid Type

Component

Ownership

End-User Regions Covered North America

Europe

Asia Pacific

Latin America

Middle East and Africa

Prominent Players in Microgrid Control System Market

ABB Ltd.

Schneider Electric SE

Siemens AG

Honeywell International Inc.

Eaton Corporation Plc

General Electric Company

Spirae, LLC

Schweitzer Engineering Laboratories, Inc.

Power Analytics Corporation

Exelon Corporation

Hitachi, Ltd.

S&C Electric Company

Emerson Electric Co.

Advanced Microgrid Solutions, LLC

Northern Power Systems Corp.

Opus One Solutions Energy Corp.

Toshiba Corporation

Green Energy Corp.

PowerSecure International, Inc.

Rockwell Automation, Inc.

Browse summary of the report and Complete Table of Contents (ToC):

https://www.skyquestt.com/report/microgrid-control-system-market

Hardware Segment is Expected to Grow the Market Due to the Efficient Functioning of Microgrid Control Systems

The hardware segment is expected to hold a significant share of the global microgrid control system market throughout the forecast period. This segment comprises various components essential for the efficient functioning of microgrid control systems. These components include communication networks, local controllers, data loggers, data recorders, digital input modules, digital output modules, analogue input/output modules, CPU modules, and relays and meters.

The market in North America holds great potential for microgrid control systems, making it one of the most lucrative regions for this technology. North America's existing utility grid infrastructure often requires replacement and refurbishment due to ageing and outdated components. This creates a significant demand for advanced control systems that can efficiently manage and optimize the operation of microgrids.

Private Ownership Segment is Expected to Dominate the Market Due to the Ability to Operate in Grid-Connected Mode

The private ownership segment is projected to dominate the global microgrid control system market, capturing the largest market share over the forecast period. Private microgrid control systems offer unique advantages, including operating in grid-connected and islanded modes. This flexibility allows remote microgrids to function independently from the primary power grid when needed, ensuring a reliable and uninterrupted power supply.

Regional markets in Europe have emerged as a significant market for microgrid control system, driven by a growing focus on renewable energy sources and sustainable energy practices. Countries such as Germany and the UK are leading the way in this transition, implementing policies and initiatives to promote the use of renewable energy and reduce greenhouse gas emissions.

A comprehensive analysis of the major players in the microgrid control system market has been recently conducted in a report. The report encompasses various aspects, including collaborations, mergers, innovative business policies, and strategies, providing valuable insights into key trends and breakthroughs in the market. Furthermore, the report scrutinizes the market share of the top segments and presents a detailed geographic analysis. Lastly, the report highlights the major players in the industry and their endeavours to develop innovative solutions to cater to the growing demand.

Key Developments in the Microgrid Control System Market

ABB, a leading technology company, made an investment in Direct Energy Partners, a start-up specializing in Direct Current (DC) microgrid solutions in 2023. This strategic investment aims to accelerate the energy transformation by leveraging the potential of DC energy networks, which are expected to play a crucial role in the future of the energy industry. The collaboration with Direct Energy Partners enhances ABB's technological leadership and positions the company in a significant growth market.

In August 2022, Tetra Tech, an engineering and management consulting firm, embarked on implementing a 300kW future microgrid project for Oldham Council in Greater Manchester. In collaboration with Tetra Tech, ABB announced its contribution to the project by providing electrical distribution and control systems.

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Key Questions Answered in Microgrid Control System Market Report

What specific growth drivers are projected to impact the market during the forecast period?

List the top companies in the market and explain how they have achieved their positions of influence.

In what ways do regional trends and patterns differ within the global market, and how these differences shape the market's future growth?

Related Reports in SkyQuests Library:

Global Hyperspectral Imaging Market

Global Active Electronic Components Market

Global Wireless Fire Detection System Market

Global Body Area Network Market

Global Electric Fuse Market

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SkyQuest Technology is leading growth consulting firm providing market intelligence, commercialization and technology services. It has 450+ happy clients globally.

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USA (+1) 617-230-0741

Email: sales@skyquestt.com




NCX 470 0.1% showed up to 1.73mmHg greater mean diurnal intraocular pressure (IOP) reduction from baseline than latanoprost in the adaptive dose selection period of the Phase 3 Mont Blanc trial



NCX 470 demonstrated a statistically greater proportion of subjects with 10 mmHg or more IOP reduction compared to latanoprost in the Mont Blanc trial



July 3, 2023  release at 7:30 am CET

Sophia Antipolis, France



Nicox SA (Euronext Growth Paris: FR0013018124, ALCOX), an international ophthalmology company, today announced that additional data on NCX 470 have been presented at the 10th World Glaucoma Congress (WGC) being held from June 28 to July 1, 2023 in Rome, Italy.



The large volume of data generated in the Mont Blanc Phase 3 trial on NCX 470 has provided us with the opportunity to look in detail at patient subgroups to further evaluate where NCX 470 has the greatest effect, some of which we are reporting here. Our first poster at the World Glaucoma Congress presents the adaptive dose selection data, justifying the choice of the 0.1% NCX 470 dose for the rest of the trial. We have also looked across the whole trial and report is that more patients achieve a reduction of IOP of 10mmHg or more when on NCX 470 than those on latanoprost. We look forward to reporting other data at conferences and in planned publications. said Doug Hubatsch, Chief Scientific Officer of Nicox



Poster Title: NCX 470, a Nitric Oxide Donating Bimatoprost Compared with Latanoprost - Adaptive Design Period Results from the Phase 3 Mont Blanc Clinical Trial



A dose finding Phase 2 trial (Dolomites) tested NCX 470 at several concentrations and the results suggested that the highest studied dose might still be below the top of the dose response curve. To test this a concentration of 0.065% and 0.1% were included in an adaptive dose selection period of the Phase 3 Mont Blanc trial, which compared the safety and efficacy of NCX 470 ophthalmic solution vs. latanoprost ophthalmic solution in adult subjects with open-angle glaucoma or ocular hypertension. At the Week 2 timepoint, NCX 470 0.065% demonstrated 1.37 mmHg greater mean diurnal IOP reduction from baseline than latanoprost and NCX 0.1% demonstrated 1.73 mmHg greater mean diurnal IOP reduction from baseline than latanoprost.



The adaptive dose selection period was used in place of additional dose ranging studies to select the 0.1% concentration of NCX 470 for the duration of the 3-month Phase 3 Mont Blanc clinical trial as well as the second Phase 3 trial, Denali.



Poster Title: NCX 470, a Nitric Oxide Donating Bimatoprost versus Latanoprost has Greater Proportion of Subjects Achieving 10 mmHg IOP Decrease in Phase 3 Trial



NCX 470 met the primary efficacy endpoint of non-inferiority to latanoprost at all 9 of 9 timepoints measured in the Mont Blanc trial. Furthermore, NCX 470 demonstrated a statistically greater proportion of subjects with 10 mmHg or more IOP reduction compared to latanoprost at Week 2, Week 6, and Month 3 ranging from 69% to 46% in the NCX 470 group compared to 60% to 34% in the latanoprost group. NCX 470 was safe and well tolerated.



Poster Title: Effects of NCX 470, a Nitric Oxide (NO)-Donating Bimatoprost, in in vitro 3D-Human Trabecular Meshwork (TM) / Schlemm's Canal (SC) Tissue Model



Bioengineered 3D-human TM/SC (3D-HTM/HSCTM) constructs and Cynomolgus monkeys were used to provide insights on the cellular and molecular mechanism/s accounting for NCX 470-mediated intraocular pressure (IOP)-lowering activity. NCX 470 significantly improved outflow facility in 3D-HTM/HSCTM. Furthermore, unlike most IOP-lowering agents, a clinically effective dose (0.1% ophthalmic solution) of NCX 470 affected both conventional and uveoscleral pathways to increase aqueous humor drainage from monkey eyes. NCX 470 dual-acting modality (NO and prostaglandin analog) explains the robust reduction of IOP exerted by this drug in patients with open-angle glaucoma or ocular hypertension.



About NCX 470



NCX 470 is a novel NO-donating bimatoprost eye drop currently in Phase 3 clinical development for the lowering of IOP in patients with open-angle glaucoma or ocular hypertension. The first Phase 3 trial, Mont Blanc, a randomized, double-masked, multi-center, parallel group trial that was conducted in the U.S., compared NCX 470 (0.1%) to latanoprost (0.005%) was completed in October 2022. The second Phase 3 trial, Denali, similarly designed to the Mont Blanc trial, and which includes a long-term safety extension, is ongoing.



Update on planned Phase 3b trials on NCX 470



The timing of the planned Phase 3b trials investigating the dual mechanism of action (nitric oxide and prostaglandin analog) in IOP lowering and potential retinal benefits of NCX 470 is currently being assessed and we will provide an update on these in the Q2 Press Release in mid-July.
French English

Acquisition catalyzes disruptive real time B2B credit risk management solutions

Enhances Sidetrades offer with the most advanced solution and responds to booming B2B e-commerce market

Sidetrade strengthens position in North America

Accretive acquisition

Sidetrade (Euronext Growth: ALBFR.PA), the global leader in AI-powered Order-to-Cash solutions, has announced that it has finalized an agreement to acquire the entire business of CreditPoint Software , a leading provider of real time B2B credit risk management solutions.

Two years on from the Amalto takeover, Sidetrade gains a stronger foothold in North America with the acquisition of CreditPoint Software activities.

Olivier Novasque, CEO of Sidetrade, said: "By acquiring CreditPoint Software, Sidetrade has undoubtedly enhanced its solution for B2B credit risk management and we are in pole position to take advantage of the boom in B2B e-commerce. After placing artificial intelligence at the core of our Collection, Disputes and CashApps solutions, we are now shaping the future of B2B credit risk management together with CreditPoint Software's teams as we build on the analysis from our Data Lake of over $4.6 billion worth of B2B transactions. Our technological advantage in AI over our competitors will only continue to assert itself and become even more evident. Working in tandem, the talents and technologies of both groups will enable Sidetrade to cement its global leadership position in Order-to-Cash.

Introducing CreditPoint Software and its state-of-the-art platform for instant credit risk management

Founded in 2006 in the city of Tulsa, Oklahoma, CreditPoint Software is an American software company specializing in comprehensive B2B credit risk management solutions.

Following a decade of substantial R&D investment, CreditPoint Software has developed one of the world-leading cloud-based platforms that leverages real time connection and monitoring for over 20 credit rating agencies worldwide including Dun & BradstreetTM, CreditsafeTM, ExperianTM, EquifaxTM, TransUnionTM as well as S&P and MoodysTM. By standardizing external data from multiple sources within a single repository, CreditPoint Software makes it possible for companies to combine this information with their internal financial and customer data on credit risk exposure. This enables Credit Management teams to automate and streamline decision-making, thanks to the platform's unlimited configuration options, resulting in the ability to auto decide up to 100% of initial, increase and renewal decisions. The CreditPoint suite of products also includes highly configurable personalized credit application templates.

Supported by customizable business rules and data points, the decision engine within CreditPoint Software secures compliance with internal credit delegations based on delegation of authority. CreditPoint Software also schedules regular reviews of current credit limits for existing clientele, while providing the option for sales teams and organizations to be made aware of credit availability so they may potentially generate additional sales. The end result: selling more to the best customers and pricing risk into the customers that may not be as healthy financially as others.

What's more, CreditPoint Software's "Onboarding Credit Application" facilitates the initial process for customers to apply for a credit line, irrespective of whether the B2B purchasing experience is delivered offline or online. In an increasingly digitalized landscape, where digital transformation is key, providing real-time credit approval during the onboarding process of new customers becomes an essential competitive advantage for all businesses.

To date, CreditPoint Software has an active portfolio of around 30 customers in North America and serves multinationals such as Nutrien, BP, Edelman and Caterpillar.

In the fiscal year 2023, CreditPoint Software expects to break even, with revenue topping the $2 million mark.

John C. Powers, CEO of CreditPoint Software, commented:

"This deal with Sidetrade is a major step forward in our commitment to providing leading-edge solutions for B2B credit risk management. In today's uncertain economic environment, companies seek efficient solutions that anticipate risks and automate decisions to secure and increase their revenue streams. By leveraging Sidetrade's Data Lake with its predictive payment intelligence map of 21 million companies worldwide, we will deploy artificial intelligence in all our decisioning to provide companies with the risk management solution of the future. Propelled by Sidetrade's sales force and implementation resources, we will further expand this new offering throughout the United States and bring it to the European market for the first time."

Contextualizing CreditPoint Software, the solution designed for the B2B e-commerce boom

While McKinsey & Company estimated that the majority of B2B corporations had next to no e-commerce capabilities at the start of the pandemic, the past two years have seen a rapid trend reversal. In its 2021 B2B Pulse Report , the US consulting firm found that 65% of B2B companies across all sectors offer e-commerce capabilities.

A DHL study also reported that by 2025, 80% of all B2B sales interactions between suppliers and professional buyers will take place digitally, representing a giant and unprecedented leap forward. And in its 2022 report, Statista expects total B2B e-commerce purchases to exceed $4.6 trillion in 2025. Clearly, e-commerce is no longer just a trendy new channel for B2B companies to discover, but instead an essential effective and strategic sales tool.

Compared to B2C e-commerce, B2B e-commerce places more importance on credit and payment terms. A series of checks must be performed in real time to validate an order. However, managing such procedures instantly requires a step-by-step process. The latter involves identifying the company, integrating external financial data, decision-making and delegating approval based on the total order amount.

Nevertheless, across the globe, very few companies can implement a solution to overcome the limitations of B2B e-commerce and offer a customer experience to match the B2C shopping experience.

"The boom in e-commerce has revolutionized sales and consumption patterns. In B2B, the growth of e-commerce requires companies to find the right solution for the right emerging expectation. You need to determine an acceptable payment delay to minimize risk and instantly maximize sales." commented Olivier Novasque, CEO of Sidetrade. "For B2B companies that want to continue leading the way in their sectors, e-commerce is no longer just a nice to have, but an essential requirement. We will support them by utilizing our teams and the technology of CreditPoint Software. No matter the sector, it is a pressing need."





Focusing on the accretive acquisition of CreditPoint Software asset

This acquisition will be made in cash for an estimated 3 million and paid in part on the signing of the agreement with the rest scheduled for end-2023, which is subject to certain customer renewals. The amount includes an earn out based on the sales achieved by Sidetrade for CreditPoint Software's solution over the next three years.

Sidetrade is financing the transaction through its cash position, which totaled 36 million (12 million in treasury shares) as of June 30, 2023.

The transaction is part of the Group's Fusion 100 strategic plan which targets Annual Recurring Revenue ("ARR") of $100 million by end-2025. Not only is it a catalyst for Sidetrade's product strategy, but also its target revenue for North America of close to $14 million in 2023 which will bolster the Group's presence in the United States.

Sidetrade Contacts

Investor Relations Christelle Dhrif 00 33 6 10 46 72 00 cdhrif@sidetrade.com

Media Relations Rebecca Parlby +44 7824 5055 84 bparlby@sidetrade.com

About Sidetrade ( www.sidetrade.com )

Sidetrade (Euronext Growth: ALBFR.PA) provides a SaaS platform dedicated to securing and accelerating cash flow. Sidetrades next-generation AI, nicknamed Aimie, analyzes $4.6 trillion worth of B2B payment transactions daily in the Sidetrade Cloud to predict customer payment behavior and the attrition risk of more than 21 million companies worldwide. Aimie recommends the best cash collection strategies, intelligently automates actions on the Order-to-Cash process, and dematerializes customer transactions to enhance productivity, performance and working capital management.

Sidetrade has a global reach, with 300 talented employees based in Paris, London, Birmingham, Dublin, Houston, and Calgary, serving global businesses in more than 85 countries. Amongst them: Tech Data, KPMG, Nespresso, Hearst, Expedia, Criteo, Manpower, Securitas, Randstad, Engie, Veolia, Inmarsat, and Bidfood.

Sidetrade is a participant of the United Nations Global Compact and adheres to its principles-based approach to responsible business.

For further information, visit us at www.sidetrade.com and follow us on Twitter @Sidetrade.

About CreditPoint Software ( www.creditpointsoftware.com )

CreditPoint Software was founded in 2006, by a former credit professional, who realized there was a better way to help companies manage their credit and collections processes. From small and medium-sized companies, all the way up to Fortune 50, CreditPoint Software serves a myriad of business types and sizes. With 20+ years of experience, CreditPoint Software works with B2B companies to minimize risk and reduce DSO by streamlining the credit risk management process from decisioning to monitoring and collections.

CreditPoint Software has helped businesses across industries increase workflow efficiency, gain transparency, and ultimately save millions in bad debt reduction and productivity increases

In the event of any discrepancy between the French and English versions of this press release, only the French version is to be taken into account.

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Trellis Data , a leading Australian advanced machine learning company, has been accepted into Tait Communications Technology Partner program ;

, a leading Australian advanced machine learning company, has been accepted into ; This marks a significant milestone for Trellis Data, amid a rapidly transforming landscape.

CANBERRA, Australia, July 03, 2023 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- Trellis Data , a leading Australian advanced machine learning company, has been accepted into Tait Communications Technology Partner program. Tait Communications is a global provider of critical communications networks, equipment and services in the public safety, transportation, and utility sectors.

Trellis Data are specialists across a range of AI and deep neural network technologies including: natural language processing and translation, speech-to-text, object detection, decision-making at the edge, plus much more.

The Technology Partner Program provides Tait customers with a greater range of solutions and options, all of which have been vetted and approved for use in conjunction with Tait networks and equipment. Such partner technologies enable Tait to be responsive in innovative ways and to create, test and deliver accredited turn-key solutions.

This partnership positions Trellis Data to provide AI technology as part of Taits large portfolio of products and services. Highly accurate transcriptions, multi-lingual translations, keyword searching and alerts are just some of the solutions Tait can now offer as a result of Trellis Data joining the program.

Tim McLaren, Head of Communications at Trellis Data says, Tait Communications' 50 years of experience and expertise in critical communications networks make them an ideal partner for Trellis Data. Together, we can deliver unparalleled outcomes for customers, leveraging the power of artificial intelligence and advanced communication technologies.

Tait is pleased to welcome Trellis Data to our portfolio of technology partners, said Ellery Hurn, Tait Communications Manager of Partner Products. We share a vision with Trellis Data to create, innovate and unify critical communication solutions. We trust our partnership with Trellis Data will further support and deliver outcomes that matter.

The collaboration will enable Trellis Data to tap into Tait Communications' extensive documentation and well-established processes. This streamlined access to crucial resources positions Trellis Data to coordinate with Tait quickly and efficiently, accelerating the development and deployment of cutting-edge solutions.

As a technology partner with Tait Communications, Trellis Data gains a unique opportunity to introduce its innovative solutions to clients at the right time and with the right approach. Tait's commitment to leveraging a diverse range of partners ensures that valuable outcomes are delivered to clients, fostering an environment of collaboration and innovation.

The partnership between Trellis Data and Tait Communications represents a fusion of expertise, technology, and experience, ultimately benefiting industries and communities across Australia.

About Trellis Data

Trellis Data delivers world leading, sophisticated machine learning that can be trusted, on an easy-to-use Machine Learning platform. Our core product is the Trellis Intelligence Platform (TIP) - an enterprise-scale, deep learning platform that enables both deep learning experts and non-expert users to solve complex problems by creating, training, and deploying trusted deep learning solutions. TIP is delivered as a Software-as-a-Service that spans the end-to-end requirements for organizations seeking to use machine learning.

About Tait Communications

For more than 50 years, New Zealand-headquartered Tait Communications has been designing, delivering and supporting c critical communications networks for public safety, transportation and utility customers around the world. Tait unleashes business potential within its customers and partners by advising and delivering unique solutions that result in safer, more productive workforces.

Trellis Data MEDIA CONTACT

Tim McLaren, Head of Communications

tim.mclaren@trellisdata.com.au
English French German

PRESS RELEASE | July 03, 2023 N 04- 2023

SCOR Investment Partners opens its Swiss subsidiary

SCOR Investment Partners, the asset management company of the SCOR Group, is proud to announce the opening of its Swiss subsidiary located in Zurich, named SCOR Investment Partners Switzerland AG.

Pursuing its international development strategy, this new location capitalizes on the SCOR Group's long-standing presence in Zurich. The new hub enables SCOR Investment Partners to provide even closer support to Swiss institutional clients and develop new opportunities. The investment strategies managed by SCOR Investment Partners will be offered from Paris and Zurich.

Fabrice Rossary, CEO of SCOR Investment Partners, comments: "Our long-standing presence on the Swiss institutional market remains at the heart of our development strategy. Our ambition is to strengthen our proximity with our investors and accelerate our international development, which is strategic for SCOR Investment Partners."

- End -

For more information, please contact Anne-Laure Mugnier, Head of Marketing & Communications, +33 1 58 44 84 53, amugnier@scor.com

About SCOR Investment Partners

Financing the sustainable development of societies, together.

SCOR Investment Partners is the asset management company of the SCOR Group. Created in 2008 and accredited by the Autorite des Marches financiers, the French financial market regulatory body, in May 2009 (no. GP09000006). SCOR Investment Partners has more than 80 employees and is structured around seven management desks: Fixed Income, Corporate Loans, Infrastructure Loans, Direct Real Estate, Real Estate Loans, Insurance-Linked Securities and Fund Selection. Since 2012, SCOR Investment Partners has given institutional investors access to some of the investment strategies developed for the SCOR Group. Assets managed for outside investors totaled EUR 7.1 billion as of March 31, 2023. As of that same date, SCOR Investment Partners had total assets under management of EUR 18.9 billion (including undrawn commitments).

Visit the SCOR Investment Partners website at: www.scor-ip.com

This advertising communication, intended exclusively for journalists and professionals of the press and media, is produced for informational purposes only and should not be construed as an offer, solicitation, invitation, or recommendation to purchase any service or investment product.

Before making any final investment decision, you must read all regulatory documents of the Fund, available free of charge upon request, from the Sales & Marketing team of SCOR Investment Partners SE.

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English French

QUEBEC City, July 03, 2023 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- Crakmedia can now proudly say there are one of the best-performing Canadian marketing agencies on Google Ads. The digital performance marketing company was awarded the Google Premier certification recognizing its position in the top 3% of Canadian agencies doing business on Googles advertising platform.







The Google Partners program targets advertising agencies and marketing experts managing ad campaigns for third-party brands on Google Ads. The program offers several strategic benefits to its members, such as specialized training, dedicated tech support and a recognition program according to the partnership level: Member, Partner or Premier Partner.

The Premier certification, the highest tier for Google Partners, is given to enrolled marketing agencies showcasing exceptional performance, ranking them in the top 3% of their respective countries. Evaluation criteria include, among others, customer base growth, customer loyalty, product diversification and the total annual amount spent.

The Google Partner certification is renewable every year according to the companys growth and that of its competitors. The Premier tier places Crakmedia among other nationally and internationally renowned Canadian companies such as Yellow Pages, Cossette, Hootsuite and Shopify.

This recognition reaffirms Crakmedias position as a global leader in digital performance marketing. The exclusive tools and resources offered to Premier partners will allow the company to improve its competitive edge and increase its visibility on the market.

Being awarded the Premier partner tier is also a testament to the remarkable work accomplished by the media buying team at Crakmedia, which had already earned the company the Snapchat Partner and Microsoft Advertising Partner badges. Every month, the companys media buyers invest over 6 million dollars in media placement, generating over 13 billion ad impressions which allows for reaching half a million potential customers for Crakmedias brand portfolio.

About Crakmedia

World leader in web marketing, performance marketing, web development and traffic monetization, Crakmedia is an international corporation based in Quebec City, Canada. Their expertise covers digital content creation, advertising campaigns personalization, data and website analysis, brand management, SEO, media buying, advertising brokerage, web development and creating cutting-edge technologies. To learn more about Crakmedia: crakmedia.com/

A photo accompanying this announcement is available at https://www.globenewswire.com/NewsRoom/AttachmentNg/c271d05b-3834-413f-86b0-a33de6c71f69
Indianapolis, July 03, 2023 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- The General Synod of the United Church of Christ made history Monday, July 3, when it elected the Rev. Karen Georgia Thompson as the first woman, and the first Black woman, to lead the denomination as General Minister and President.

Rev. Thompson is the third woman nominated for the post, after the Revs. Yvonne Delk (in 1989) and Barbara Brown Zikmund (in 1999), but the first to be elected. A Jamaican immigrant, Thompson is the third person of African descent to serve as leader of the denomination.

Today, United Church of Christ, we created a first together, she said after the vote. It wont be the last first."

Her election took place at the UCC's 34th General Synod in Indianapolis. She will start her new role Aug. 1, taking over from the Rev. John Dorhauer, who has served for the past eight years.

Thompson has been serving as Associate General Minister for Wider Church Ministries and Co-Executive for Global Ministries since 2019. She has served in the National Setting of the United Church of Christ since 2009, previously as minister for racial justice and minister for ecumenical and interfaith relations. Prior to joining National Setting staff, Thompson served on staff of the UCCs Florida Conference, as a church planter in Florida and in family ministries in New York.

Thompson holds a doctorate in ministry, with a dissertation in religious multiplicity among African Caribbean people, from Seattle University; a master of divinity degree from Union Theological Seminary; and a master of public administration degree from North Carolina Central University.

Read the full story here.

# # #

The United Church of Christ, a mainline Protestant denomination, has more than 770,000 members and over 4,700 congregations nationwide. Headquartered in Cleveland, it is a church of many firsts: the first mainline denomination to ordain a woman, the first to ordain an openly gay man and the first predominantly white denomination to ordain an African American.

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Paphos, Cyprus, July 03, 2023 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) --

Chase Buchanan LTA Specialist, Malcolm McDowell, Publishes Advisory Guide in Wake of Changing UK Legislation





The global wealth advisory firm, Chase Buchanan Wealth Management, has published a complimentary downloadable guide to provide insights and important information about the impacts of the recent removal of the UK Lifetime Allowance (LTA), a threshold previously applied to pension products, above which holders would attract additional taxation.

In the March budget, Chancellor Hunt announced a series of pension tax reforms, including the immediate removal of the LTA and higher annual pension contribution allowances, primarily to address shortages in the medical profession and to introduce pension simplicity to avoid higher earners from ceasing pension contributions to avoid triggering LTA tax charges.

Malcolm McDowell, pensions specialist and Chase Buchanan's LTA lead, advises that this apparently beneficial reform adds significant complexity to tax planning and should not be taken as an indication that those with higher pension values now need to take no further action to protect their retirement wealth.

Changes to UK Pension Tax Rules Introduced in the 2023 Spring Budget

The main changes included within the new pension tax rules are as follows:

The LTA, the maximum cumulative value pension holders can save over their lifetime, over which taxation applies and previously set at 1.073 million, has been removed.

Annual pension allowances, which indicate the maximum contributions an individual can make to their pension savings without an additional tax liability, have increased from 40,000 to 60,000.

Adjusted income levels, which taper the annual pension allowances available to higher earners, have risen from 240,000 to 260,000.

Additional reforms apply to the annual money purchase allowance, or MPAA, which states the maximum value of pension savings a fund owner can deposit who has previously used pension freedoms to access their pension, again without attracting a tax charge.

Importantly, these adjustments do not affect the restrictions placed on tax-free lump sum withdrawals. While the LTA is not now in force, pension drawdowns remain capped at 25% of the previous LTA, so an individual cannot draw more than 268,275, regardless of the fund value, without an additional tax liability.

Reportedly, this cap has been retained to avoid allowing individuals to draw 25% of an unlimited fund value on retirement - although those with LTA protection features within their pension products may keep this right.

The effective tax rate applied to individuals who exceed these limits and thresholds may be complex; for example, those who exceed the annual allowance, or their adjusted allowance following tapering provisions, is based on their marginal income tax rate and applied to the excess.

How LTA Reforms Affect Pension Risk Profiles

Malcolm explains that, although the LTA removal may initially seem positive, it is essential that pension holders, advisers, and those with retirement funds of 800,000 or above consider their plans carefully, with multiple possible caveats.

He adds: An early perspective on the announcement that no individual would incur a tax charge based on the LTA from April 2023 is positive. Expanding on pension freedoms introduced in 2015 should mean more people can contribute their hard-earned savings to tax-efficient pension schemes, with the assurance that their retirement wealth will not be subject to heavy tax liabilities.

However, multiple factors require consideration, from the likelihood that a change of government at the next general election would see the LTA reinstated to the possibility of pension wealth being netted into the scope of inheritance taxation in future reforms.

Those with higher-value pensions and with the income to benefit from the increased annual allowance may also find that tapered relief mitigates the real-world value of the higher allowance and should be mindful that, regardless of whether the LTA is reinstated, their tax-free lump sum access will continue to be limited as long as any fund is held within a scheme exposed to UK taxation.

Our newly published guide explains these elements in greater detail, laying out some of the risks of non-action and demonstrating why swift, decisive decision-making may be crucial to take full advantage of current tax treatments, which seem likely to be available for a limited window of opportunity.

Chase Buchanans 2023 Guide to the Revised UK Lifetime Allowance and Pension Taxation Reforms is available to download now, free of charge, and from any location.

Anticipated Adjustments to UK Pension Tax Legislation

Currently, the LTA is excluded in pension tax computations, but changes announced in the Spring Budget have yet to be formalised into tax legislation. When the government introduces a tax reform, it can instruct HMRC to update its policies immediately, but this does not ratify the change or integrate it into official tax law.

Those changes around the LTA, annual allowances and lump sum drawdown taxation will need to be passed through a Finance Bill, not expected to be formalised or confirmed for some months to come.

Technical changes are possible when any tax reform is being applied in practice but has yet to be included as a verified update to tax legislation, and the abolishment of the LTA will not be confirmed until April 2024.

Removing the LTA is one of several measures announced as part of the Spring Budget 2023 but that were not incorporated into the Spring Finance Bill 2023, and the government has stated that it intends to publish new announcements related to tax administration later in the year, which it does not expect to require legislation.

The Value of Financial Guidance in Long-Term Pension Planning

Specialist financial assistance has always been an important aspect of pension planning, since the vast majority of people rely on their retirement savings to cover their living costs and provide for a comfortable retirement over an increasing number of years.

The LTA, since being introduced in 2006, adds a layer of complexity for pension holders who often select strategies such as transferring a pension fund to an alternative jurisdiction or investment scheme before hitting the applicable limit or to protect themselves from future tax exposure and changes to UK tax treatments as their pension fund grows.

With these recent reforms, all pension holders may benefit from advice tailored to their pension assets and overall wealth portfolio, with independent advice mandatory in many circumstances as dictated by the Financial Conduct Authority (FCA).

Read more about Chase Buchanan - Why The Removal Of The UK Pension Lifetime Allowance May Be More Complex Than Appears

About Malcolm McDowell

Malcolm McDowell is an authority in pensions-related financial planning and provides comprehensive support to his clients as a portfolio manager with a robust range of accreditations, certifications and qualifications, including CySEC Advanced credentials. Malcolm has launched the new LTA advisory service and free downloadable lifetime allowance guide for pension savers who potentially benefit the most from tactical pension planning to maximise the LTA limit removal.

About Chase Buchanan Private Wealth Management

Chase Buchanan is a highly regulated wealth management company who specialises in providing global finance solutions for those with a global lifestyle. We are global financial advisers, supporting expatriates around the world from our regulated European headquarters, and local offices across Belgium, Canada, Canary Islands, Cyprus, Malta, Portugal, Spain, UK and the USA.

Chase Buchanan Ltd is authorised and regulated by the Cyprus Securities and Exchange Commission with CIF Licence 287/15.

Media Contact:

Malcolm McDowell

Chase Buchanan Ltd

+44 (0) 1252852045









***

Source Company - https://chasebuchanan.com/

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Washington, DC, July 03, 2023 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) --

Award-Winning Japanese Journalist Exposes the Campaign Against the Unification Church as a Political Plot

Masumi Fukuda, an award-winning Japanese journalist, claims that the campaign to strip the Unification Church, now called Family Federation for World Peace and Unification, of its status as a religious organization in Japan, uses the controversies following the assassination of former Prime Minister Shinzo Abe as a pretext and is in fact politically motivated.

Fukudas detailed investigation appears in Japanese in the July 2023 issue of the Japanese magazine Monthly Hanada and in English in the religious liberty magazine Bitter Winter, which covers often East Asia and has been the most quoted source on China in the yearly reports on freedom of religion of the U.S. Department of State for four years in a row.

The four Bitter Winter articles are available at these links

http://bitterwinter.org/the-plot-to-destroy-the-unification-church-in-japan-1-why-the-church-should-not-be-dissolved/

https://bitterwinter.org/the-plot-to-destroy-the-unification-church-in-japan-2-the-devious-tactics-of-the-anti-cult-lawyers/

https://bitterwinter.org/the-plot-to-destroy-the-unification-church-in-japan-3-fraudulent-lawsuits/

https://bitterwinter.org/the-plot-to-destroy-the-unification-church-in-japan-4-the-real-anti-social-group-the-anti-cult-lawyers/

Abe was assassinated in 2022 by a man called Tetsuya Yamagami who claimed he wanted to punish him for his cooperation with the Family Federation. Yamagami said he hated the church because his mother went bankrupt in 2002, allegedly because of her excessive donations to the religious group.

Since 1987, an organization of attorneys called the National Network of Lawyers Against Spiritual Sales has called for the dissolution of the Unification Church, claiming it finances itself by selling religious artifacts for exorbitant prices.

In her detailed investigation of the Network and its campaigns, Fukuda shows how the so-called spiritual sales were carried out by individual members of the Unification Church, not by the church itself, which in fact persuaded them to stop these activities long before the Abe assassination. Fukuda also reveals that most of the lawyers who founded the anti-Unification-Church network in 1987 and continue to agitate for dissolving the religious organization today were affiliated with the Communist Party of Japan or the former Socialist Party. Beyond the pretext of the spiritual sales, their aim was to destroy the Unification Church and its affiliate organizations that offered significant public support to anti-Communist causes and provided volunteers for the electoral campaigns of Abes party.

Fukuda, who is not a member of the Family Federation and had little interest for religious issues before the Abe assassination, also claims that in the court cases against the Unification Church some attorneys associated with the National Network Lawyers Against Spiritual Sales falsified documents and fabricated evidence.



Contact:

cesnur@me.com

+39011541950 (CESNUR office)



https://bitterwinter.org/

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Tax Eurobond  CITG to government

Mary Anane-Amponsah Business News Jul - 03 - 2023 , 08:59

The Chartered Institute of Taxation, Ghana (CITG) has recommended the taxing of Eurobond to enable the country to pay part of its debt.

The President of CITG, George Ohene Kwatia, who intimated the recommendation of the institute, said it was unfortunate that the country was challenged with debt issues when there were means it could deal with its revenue shortfalls.

At the 2023 orientation, graduation and induction ceremony of CITG, Mr Kwatia said: On the local fronts, coupon payments and interests on bonds are taxed.

Incidentally, Eurobonds are not taxed. Eurobond has been the biggest challenge to us in our debt management. We sit here and do not tax Eurobonds and investors take the money free.

The country, he said, needed certain provisions that would allow investors to pay the appropriate tax.

We are recommending that provision should be made to task Eurobond. At least we will use that to pay part of our Eurobond, he said.

To also deal with the challenge of the countrys revenue mobilisation, the companies code should be amended to ensure that companies mandatorily appointed tax practitioners as seen with auditors and that will close the gap of what is disclosed and what is collected.

Taxation, he said, was a crucial artery that sustained the nations economy as it formed the financial lifeline that powered governmental functions, facilitating the provision of vital public services, and stimulating economic progress, among others.

Sealing Loopholes

For this reason, the government, he said, must ensure that certain laws and provisions were put in place to seal revenue mobilisation loopholes and deal with the revenue shortfalls of the country.

The ceremony witnessed the graduation of 400 candidates who had successfully completed their professional qualifying examinations and were eligible to undergo the mandatory post qualification working experience.

Additionally, 150 newly qualified chartered tax practitioners were inducted into the membership of the institute. The theme was Navigating the tax and fiscal space in the midst of Sovereign Debt and Financing Crisis: The role of Chartered Tax Practitioners.

Mr Kwatia tasked the tax practitioners to bring their expertise on board to enable the country to collect the right taxes to fund its development.

A senior partner at KPMG, Anthony Kwasi Sarpong, said the country had the lowest tax revenue to Gross Domestic Product (GDP) ratio in the sub-region which called for more efforts to ensure people paid their taxes and did so rightly. Many businesses were said to be taking advantage of the loopholes in the tax administration system, therefore, denying the country the needed revenue for its development.

He said the tax practitioners had a responsibility to advise on tax policies that would strike a balance between revenue mobilisation and private sector growth.

We are told that 70 per cent of our businesses are in the Small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) scale and informal sector, we lack the efficiencies to fully assess and properly tax this sub-sector. Most state-owned enterprises are reporting losses and do not contribute positive returns on the investment made on them. We have big special tax exemptions for some multinationals in specific areas, he added.

Global tax system

Being part of a global network, the tax practitioners, he said, had the power to shape and contribute to international tax dialogues, canvassing for a fairer, more efficient and transparent global tax system.

For the government, he said they should support the transformation of the Ghana Revenue Authority (GRA) with investment in technology to effectively handle especially revenue collections at the ports and borders.

If the break of VAT is spread and more businesses comply, revenue will go up and we can eventually reduce the rate from 22 per cent to below 15 per cent, he indicated.

In a speech read on his behalf, the Minister of Education, Dr Yaw Osei Adutwum, said the government was working on initiatives designed to reinforce the practical aspects of tax education within academic institutions.

In these challenging times of sovereign debt and financial crises, the role of Chartered Tax Practitioners is pivotal, he said, adding: You are entrusted with the task of guiding Ghanas fiscal course through these stormy economic waters.



Commending the CITG for continuous professional development of tax professionals, Dr Adutwum said aside from quality training, there was the need for effective regulation of the practice of taxation to maintain the integrity and credibility of the profession.
Lets collaborate to boost exports  Shippers Authority

Maclean Kwofi Business News Jul - 03 - 2023 , 11:59

The Head of Freight and Logistics at the Ghana Shippers' Authority (GSA), Fred Asiedu-Dartey, has asked for strong collaboration between public and private sector players to take full advantage of opportunities presented under international trade agreements.

He explained that the collaboration should precede the creation of a robust drive which would thrive on the countrys trade agreements such as the interim EU-GHANA Partnership agreement, African Growth and Opportunity Act (AGOA) and African Continental Free Trade Area (AfCFTA).

The government has made strides through a range of measures including negotiation of trade agreements such as the interim EU-GHANA Partnership agreement, AGOA, AfCFTA, ECOWAS, COMESA, ETLS, UK-TPA as well as export finance, export promotion, infrastructure development, regulatory and administrative support to the export industry.

According to data from the Integrated Customs Management System, the percentage of usage remains relatively low with several export declarations under the various agreements recording minimal approval and registered status.

To fully leverage the opportunities presented under these agreements, there must be collaboration between the public and private sectors to continuously improve trade procedures, infrastructure, and policies, Mr Asiedu-Dartey said at the opening of a forum for Ghanaian exporters in Accra.

The forum

It was on the topic, Facilitating shipments under Ghanas preferential trade agreements.

The forum, organised by the GSA, seeks to educate exporters on preferential trade agreements, market requirements and trade facilitation terms.

It was also aimed at addressing issues in the air cargo space and opened a constructive dialogue to generate actionable recommendations for policymakers, industry stakeholders and exporters.

Changing dynamics

Mr Asiedu-Dartey stated that exporters must adapt to the changing dynamics of international trade by focusing on policy responses, improved production and shipping practices

He said exports sped up national development, economic growth, job creation and innovation, and the benefits of exports required sustainable and inclusive policies and strategies

He said the government has taken measures such as trade agreements, and other export financing arrangements to support and promote exports.

"Despite these efforts, obstacles still remain and these impede the trade potential," he said.

He said that as a relevant player in the sector, the GSA promoted exporters' interest within a transport and logistics framework while ensuring effective trade facilitation.

He added that facilitating trade required proper planning, documentation, compliance and logistics, and that it was crucial for exporters to understand the provisions and the impact of trade agreements and stay informed about global trade developments.

Implementation of policies

A Chief Trade Negotiator at the Ministry of Trade and Industry, Stephen Opoku Mickson, said the ministry was the lead policy advisor to the government on trade, industrial and private sector development with responsibility for the formulation and implementation of policies.

He noted that the government in the past few years has been implementing a 10-point agenda which was a comprehensive and integrated programme for industrial transformation.

He said the 10-point agenda was made up of the stimulus package for existing local industries under the One District, One Factory (1D1F) initiative.

The initiative seeks to provide support for the private sector to establish at least one medium to large scale industrial enterprises, he said.

Mr Opoku said AfCFTA would create the largest free trade area in the world measured by the number of countries participating.

He said the pact connects 1.3 billion people across 55 countries with a combined gross domestic product (GDP) valued at $3.4 trillion.

It has the potential to lift 30 million people out of extreme poverty, but achieving its full potential will depend on putting in place significant policy reforms and trade facilitation measures.
Joke Silva reveals marital struggles with Olu Jacobs poor health condition

Graphic Showbiz Showbiz News Jul - 02 - 2023 , 15:01

Veteran Nollywood actress, Joke Silva has opened up on marital struggles with her husband, actor Olu Jacobs. Silva, in an interview with popular Nigerian media personality and actress, Nancy Isime, revealed that Olu Jacobs ailment has changed him.

Speaking on how her husbands battle with dementia has affected their relationship, the actress reflected on their early years together.

Joke Silva said: It hasnt been easy. There was a point of acceptance for me that everything happening is reality and it is like the person I married, 80 percent of the time is no longer there.

But the thing is this, when he was there, he was an incredible father to his children and an amazing husband, he was practically my best friend.

The husband I knew is no longer there for me, but this man that is here is someone I still love.

The story has been told of how charismatic actor Olu Jacobs arrived late to his wedding, but his wife and actress Joke Silva shared more information in an interview last year.

The 60-year-old actress opened up on their love story in a documentary on her husbands life and career produced by Femi Odugbemi.

Joke Silva detailed how they met on a production set and the journey to their love affair.

It was just before the celebration of Nigerias 21st anniversary. Ms Edith Enem was the artistic director of the National Theatre at the time, and they wanted to put up a production of Jeros Metamorphosis, she recalled.

According to her, the set was abuzz with this man who was coming from England called Olu Jacobs and was going to play the lead character, Jero. She recalled that with the excitement they spoke about him, she looked forward to meeting him (Olu Jacobs).

She said: We were in rehearsals one day at the main bowland I was told to go call Ms Enem to come and take a look at what we had rehearsed. And as I opened the curtain, I just heard this incredible voice that went Wow! This is the standard of the woman Im going to marry. And Im like what kind of standard line is that, and I looked him up and down and, I thought it, what rubbish.

But, he came over to rehearsals and was just such a wonderful person to work with. He realised he had made a faux pas and tried to get in my good graces after that. And we became excellent friends, Joke Silva said.

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Nobody holy pass  Nollywood actor Yul Edochie hits back at critics over infidelity
Netizens shade Sarkodie as Shatta Wale celebrates daughters 13th birthday

Gifty Owusu-Amoah Showbiz News Jul - 02 - 2023 , 16:31

Yesterday, July 1 was dancehall artiste, Shatta Wales first daughter, Cherissas 13th birthday and the proud father used the opportunity to celebrate his first seed on social media.

The controversial musician expressed surprise at how quickly his daughter was growing and promised to gift her a Range Rover on her 16th birthday.

Sharing photos of her daughter on his Facebook page to mark the day, Shatt Wale said, Happy birthday to my firstborn, Cherissa. You have grown so fast. On your 16th birthday, I am buying you a Range Rover. Live life for me, and dont ever be down-spirited. Daddy loves you so much !!!

But while the Taking Over artiste was perhaps taking lots of pride in the moment, some social media commentators used the opportunity to shade rapper Sarkodie for not taking such a bold step 13 years ago following revelations by actress Yvonne Nelson that they had an abortion in 2010.

According to Humble Bernice Asafo Adjei,  Birthday wishes mu shades  Happy birthday baby girl

Clavin Nelson wrote: Something in me said Tell her to keep it  .. whiles the other one going about destroying fetus.

Calvin Assan commended Shatta Wale for keeping the pregnancy. He said, You did a good job by telling her to keep it. Whiles Tema emminem was destroying fetus. Anyway Happy Birthday to you King  daughter

Gifty Acolatse had this to say, Shatta is a true definition of "Don't judge a book by its cover" congratulations we can now fish out the "real men from the boys"_ Happy birthday Princess we love you 

In the words of Alex Ahenkorah, Happy birthday and many more.In Shatta wale (shatta movement) we don't do Abortion  God bless you shatta and her mum

With all the huge interest and unending conversations about Ghanaian actress Yvonne Nelson having an abortion for Sarkodie in 2010, Shatta Wale is being praises for doing otherwise particularly at a time when he claimed he wasnt financially sound.

I Remember when your mother said she was pregnant 

I was Damn broke 

But something in me said Tell her to keep it

I told her and she did

Untill today I owe your mum and God will make me pay her back even though we went thru stress to get here

Now she is like a bestie to me 

She calls me king 

She call me Daddy

I have forgiven her and she has done same too

Even tho we cant be together we have found a way to make you a happy child.

Say thank you mummy everyday because you have a very sweet mum ,caring and respectful

Just wait for your special gift when you are 16yrs

I love you cherissa NHYIRA Wale(sic), Shatta Wale wrote on Facebook.

Read also: Sarkodies 'Try Me' is childish tantrums - Prince DavidSarkodie made the best decision rejecting Yvonnes pregnancy -A Plus
What you need to know about the French teenager whose death at hands of police triggered riots

International News Jul - 02 - 2023 , 21:59

The death of a teenager at the hands of police in France has triggered days of violent protests across the country.

Nahel Merzouk, 17, who was of Algerian and Moroccan descent, was shot by a police officer during a traffic stop on Tuesday in the Paris suburb of Nanterre.

Here's what is known about him so far.

Nahel was still living with his mother Mounia, in the Vieux-Pont neighbourhood of Nanterre, around 15km from central Paris, according to French newspaper Le Parisien.

It reports that in 2021, he enrolled on a course leading to an electrical qualification at the lycee Louis Bleriot in nearby Suresnes.

The teenager was also a member of the Pirates of Nanterre rugby club and had been part of an integration programme for teenagers struggling in school, run by an association called Ovale Citoyen.

Ovale Citoyen president Jeff Puech was quoted by France24 saying the teenager "wanted to make it" and had dropped out of school but was "no big-time bandit".

The rugby club paid tribute to Nahel in a Facebook post earlier this week and wrote: "The Pirates of Nanterre are a family and we mourn our brother. Rest in Peace Nahel".

Nahel's mother, identified as Mounia M, told France 5 television earlier this week that she was angry at the accused officer rather than at police in general. "He saw a little, Arab-looking kid, he wanted to take his life," she said.

"A police officer cannot take his gun and fire at our children, take our children's lives."

The teenager appeared to be a fan of Marseille rapper Jul and appeared in one of his music videos for his song Ragnar, which was posted on YouTube in May.

Nahel is briefly seen next to the rapper a frame of the video.

The shooting of the teenager, caught on video, has reignited longstanding complaints by poor and racially mixed urban communities of police violence and racism.

Emmanuel Macron had denied there is systemic racism in French law enforcement agencies.

A passenger in the car released a video on social media saying he wants to "establish the truth ... because there are a lot of lies on social media".

As the funeral for Nahel took place on Saturday, several hundred people lined up to enter Nanterre's grand mosque, which was guarded by volunteers in yellow vests, while a few dozen bystanders watched from across the street.

The officer who shot Nahel has been put under formal investigation over voluntary homicide and is being held in prison in preventive detention. Under the French legal system, being placed under formal investigation is akin to being charged in the UK.
Rev. Dr Steve Mensah: Transforming lives through CEM Ability Village

Lydia Ezit Life Jun - 24 - 2023 , 20:34

In an inspiring journey that began with personal struggles, Reverend Dr Steve Mensah has dedicated his life to making a positive impact on the lives of the poor and needy.

His vision has led to the development of the CEM Ability Village, an initiative aimed at building a community solely dedicated to training individuals with disabilities in various skill sets.

As the General Overseer of the Charismatic Evangelical Ministry (CEM) in Accra, Reverend Dr. Mensah is set to witness the groundbreaking ceremony of this transformative project on Saturday,

June 24, 2023, at Agortor-Kope in the Osu Shai Doku District of the Greater Accra region.

One of CEM's "Day of Help" initiative

CEM Ability Village

CEM Ability Village is Reverend Dr Mensah's ambitious endeavour to create a city that caters to the needs of disabled individuals.

He passionately explains, "We are going to build a city where everything is disability-friendly."



The village spans approximately 2,000 acres, spans six and a half miles, and is designed to be a home for 69,000 disabled families .

It is a day to give only the physically challenged persons

Rev. Dr Mensah emphasises the challenges faced by disabled individuals in finding accommodations and securing employment, making CEM Ability Village a much-needed solution.



The project aims to establish CEM Ability Village as a technological hub, empowering disabled individuals to produce school uniforms, chalk, bags, and books. The village will feature essential

facilities such as a specialist hospital, vocational training centers, and industrial and technology hubs, and schools, he stated.



Rev Dr Mensah who is very passionate about the project said it will be an integrated city where the able and physically challenged are going to live together. We will have volunteers who will

assist them to live well.

Some items for the poor and needy

To ensure the long-term sustainability of the project, Rev. Dr Mensah stressed the importance of organisations patronising the village's produce and creating job opportunities within the community.

According to him, he intends to encourage the Ghana Education Service to patronise their supplies from CEM Ability Village, to enable the residents to be economically independent.



We are creating jobs for them because the economy at the village must depend on themselves. We will encourage the Ghana Education Service to buy from the village, he said.



Touching more on the CEM Ability Village project, he said the church had done a lot of rural intervention programmes but he was particular about this project because it was

solely for the physically challenged.

Giving to the poor is part of his kingdom message

We started out in 2014 as A Day of Help for the disabled at Independence Square. Over 10,000 physically challenged persons in one place. Something I have never seen before. We decided to make it an annual thing every year. It was the day of the help initiative that gave birth to the idea CEM Ability Village, he explained.

A project for all

For Rev Mensah regardless of which church or religion one belongs, individuals as well as organisations could take up a project at the CEM Ability Village and build.



Citing an example, he said you can take up a school or a classroom or the hospital initiative to build or sponsor. It is for everybody, it is for mankind, we are all Gods children.

Gift giving

He said the motive behind the A Day of Help was to give them gifts such as mattresses, toiletries and food items that could last for weeks.

Some of the items that were given out

The man of God who was raised a Catholic disclosed that l still remember the gift I received from a Catholic priest at age eight. They used to give us some food items after mass. Therefore, l believe that you can never forget a gift, he said.

A little help

He is someone who is not only in the kingdom business to preach but has some form of social interventions like healthcare services and gift giving especially to the rural folks attached to his gospel message.



For him, a lot of the poor and needy folks in the rural areas have found Christ, what they need is a little help. Adding that, a lot of people living with disabilities could not afford to rent a decent accommodation, thereby living in a deplorable state.



Clarifying that he had met the leadership of the various disability associations, he said persons living with disability comprised hearing impairment, cerebral palsy and burnt survivors.

Rev Dr Steve Mensah (right) with his wife Rev. Mrs Jane Aba Mensah

CEM Ability Village to the regions

Rev Dr. Mensah said the project would be extended to other regions, to ensure that joblessness and homelessness among disabled individuals become a thing of the past.



The completion of CEM Ability Village is expected to take a few years, allowing disabled individuals from all regions, even the northern parts of the country, to access training, acquire skills, and

return to their communities to support their families.

For persons with disabilities who are very old and could not work, the man of God who is also a twin said I will take care of them till they die. We have a whole cemetery allocated as part of the facilities in the village.



Have you been to a physically challenged persons funeral? He asked with a stern look. Their funeral service is one of the most depressing moments. The CEM Ability Village will give them a decent burial service. Those days where they were put in some Wawa boxes will be over, he added.



Rev Dr Mensah has a passion to change the way the public view persons with disability because he believes that anybody can easily be disabled.

So l am a very excited man because on Saturday June 24, 2023, my biggest dream will come to pass. I pray the village will outlive me after I am dead and gone, he said with excitement.

Other projects

Apart from the CEM Ability Village project, he mentioned the Jesus to the Rurals, as another outreach that gives to the needy in various forms.



We carry medical practitioners for missionary work. About 300 doctors for a particular mission. We have been to places such as Tepa, Agortime and so many other places. We teamed up with some doctors at Korle Bu Teaching Hospital and in very difficult cases we brought patients to Accra. The church pays off all surgical bills he explained.



Bringing his message to a close, he told The Mirror with a joyful face that he had been married for 35 years with four children. And all though Fathers Day just passed, he urged fathers not to abandon their families but be part of their childrens lives.

Background

Although he hails from the Volta Region, Rev Dr Steve Mensah and his twin brother were born and bred in Accra on July, 28, 1961. He had a difficult beginning due to the divorce of his parents while they were very young.



He said his dream of becoming a medical doctor shattered though and for that reason he had decided to name the hospital to be built at the Ability Village after him, St Stephens Hospital.

He completed St Thomas Aquinas Secondary School and became a born-again during his early years at a three days crusade held by the late Archbishop Benson Idahosa from Nigeria.



He fondly shared that he could still remember the message at the crusade that made him give his life to Christ.




Converting plastic to wealth: Basic schools showcase creativity

Ezekiel E. Sottie Education Jul - 03 - 2023 , 10:54

The Community Engagement, Projects and Innovations unit of the University of Environment and Sustainable Development (UESD) at Somanya in the Eastern Region has held its Second Development Challenge awards ceremony at the university campus.

This years awards ceremony, which was on the theme: Plastic recovery project; Innovation for environmental sustainability and stewardship, was to recognise the outstanding efforts put forth by students in junior high schools (JHSs) in the pursuit of environmental sustainability and stewardship.

The project of the university involves 50 JHSs this year from 10 districts and municipalities in the Eastern, parts of Greater Accra and Volta regions.

It challenges Ghanaians, and for that matter, the university to think creatively and harness the power of innovation to address the critical issue of plastic waste that threatens our environment.

The participating schools used plastic waste to produce various items, including waste bins, aeroplanes and beds, among others.

The participating districts and municipalities were Ada West, Okere, North Tongu, Akuapem North and Akuapem South. The rest were Yilo Krobo, Lower Manya, Upper Manya Krobo, Shai-Osudoku and Asuogyaman.

Winners

The overall best JHS for this was Anyoboni Roman Catholic Basic School. The school took home, a certificate, a shield, and three laptop computers while the second-best school went to Somanya Methodist and the third-best was taken by Mount Mary Demonstration Roman Catholic.

Nifa Basic School in the Akuapem North Municipality was the best in craft work while Somanya Methodist was the best in the write-up. Anyoboni Roman Catholic Basic School was adjudged the best in poster colour.

The Overall Best District went to Okere District, followed by Yilo Krobo and Lower Manya Krobo municipalities.

Combatting plastic pollution

The Eastern Regional Director of Social Welfare and Community Development, Vera Allotey, who represented the regional minister, said, the UESD community challenge had provided a platform for individuals, schools and organisations to showcase their commitment to combat plastic pollution head-on.

She said she was inspired by the remarkable projects that had been presented throughout the competition, adding, The creativity, passion and determination displayed by our participants are a testament to the resilience of our children.

Madam Allotey explained that the project was not just about removing plastic waste from the surroundings, but it was about instilling a sense of environmental stewardship in the communities.

She said it was about educating our youth on the importance of responsible consumption and waste management which would be passed on to future generations for its sustainability.

Creativity

The Vice Chancellor of UESD, Prof. Eric Nyarko-Sampson, said he was filled with admiration and pride as he witnessed the creativity, problem-solving, critical thinking and collaborative skills displayed by the students of the participating schools throughout this years challenge and the kind of innovative artefacts produced.

He urged the students to continue exploring innovative solutions to question the status quo and embrace the challenges that lay ahead.
$200m financing by World Bank: Saving grace for tree crops

Severious Kale-Dery Jul - 03 - 2023 , 06:59

Last month, the International Development Association (IDA) of the World Bank has extended $200 million financing for the Tree Crop Diversification Project (TCDP) to diversify and grow the economy through modernising agriculture to accelerate productivity, resilience and industrialisation.

This gesture can be seen as an endorsement of the World Bank of the establishment of the Tree Crop Development Authority (TCDA) and in recognition that the tree crops sector has the potential to turn the countrys economy round through agriculture if properly resourced with enough funding.

Project benefits

The project will strengthen farmer-based organisations as well as the institutional capacity of the Ghana Cocoa Board (COCOBOD) and TCDA and improve sector governance for competitive and sustainable development of tree crops.

It will improve value chain governance through traceability in tree crops and other investments, technical assistance and other programmatic support to reform the sector.

The project includes a child labour sub-component to identify and mitigate child labour risks in project communities.

Currently, there is an overreliance on cocoa, as the main foreign exchange earner, fetching averagely over $1 million annually for the country.

Tree crops can play an enormous role in the countrys economic transformation hinging on agriculture and this belief gave birth to the agricultural flagship policy, Planting for Food and Jobs (PFJ), of which the Planting for Export and Rural Development (PERD) focuses on tree crops.

Establishing TCDA

That is why the TCDA, an offshoot of the PERD, which was championed by the former Minister of Food and Agriculture, Dr Owusu Afriyie Akoto, came as a saviour of the countrys economy, with the projection that within the next six to eight years, the country can begin to reap its labour from the investment in six tree crops under the TCDP.

The six tree crops, under the TCDP, namely Oil Palm, Rubber, Shea, Coconut, Cashew and Mango are expected to generate a minimum of $6 to $12 billion annually.

This will be aside from the $1 billion from our traditional cocoa.

The TCDA is a legal institution established by an act of Parliament, Tree Crops Development Authority Act, 2019 ( Act 1010) is tasked to regulate and develop in a sustainable environment; the production, processing, pricing and marketing of the six crops.

The authority was, therefore, set up to lead the agenda for the diversification of Ghana's agriculture by putting in place policies and programmes to guide research, production, processing, pricing and marketing of the six stated tree crops with enormous agricultural, economic, export and forex earning potential for Ghana.

TCDA on its feet

The injection of the $200 million towards the TCDP is indeed, good news because the TCDA, which was projected to be on its feet by the close of this year, with an annual $5 million seed fund for three years to raise $15 million is still struggling with only $3 million.

Even though the utilisation of the $200 million factors cocoa into the equation, it is clear that the much-needed fund that the TCDA needed for stability to hit the ground running has been solved, thanks to this single gesture by the World Bank.

The injection of the $200 million into the TCDP would not only contribute substantially to Ghanas economy and society than it currently does, it would also engender job creation, export revenue generation, and poverty reduction of the countrys poorest people.

According to the IDA of the World Bank, this financing will directly benefit 12,800 cocoa farmers and 39,975 cashew, coconut and rubber farmers and their households, while an additional 20,000 jobs are expected to be created in downstream value addition by mobilising private capital, with nearly 40 per cent of on-farm beneficiaries expected to be women.

Challenges

A press statement from the World Bank on the extension of the funding observed that challenges limiting the development of the tree crop sector included low and stagnant productivity, weak institutional capacity, poor sector governance, and poor climate resilience due to weak adoption of climate smart agriculture technologies and practices.

It added that there was little value addition and weak coordination between actors of the tree crops value chains and also, lack of connectivity between farmers and improved inputs and services providers, and vulnerability to pests and diseases.

In addition, deforestation, child labour and the persistence of gender inequities in these agricultural subsectors are of concern, the statement observed.

Assurance

The statement gave an assurance that the TCDP would support demand-driven research and enhance on-farm productivity and resilience to improve the productivity, profitability, and climate resilience in the tree crop value chains.

It said the project would support post-harvest management, value addition, and market access as well as support the deployment of public resources to crowd-in private sector investments in the sector where possible, accelerating economic transformation and developing critical agricultural value chains.

The statement quoting the World Bank Country Director for Ghana, Liberia, and Sierra Leone, Pierre Laporte, said, the World Bank is pleased to support Ghanas medium-term national development strategy through the Ghana Tree Crop Diversification Project and directly contribute to the Government of Ghanas priorities for economic and social development in the Coordinated Programme of Economic and Social Development Policies, for inclusive, resilient and sustainable economy.

The project will support private investments in Small and Medium Enterprises (SMEs) in cocoa, cashew and coconut value chains and in cashew and coconut processing units, Mr Laporte said in the statement.

All set

With this massive injection of funding, the TCDA should not be seen as standing on its feet, but running.

After all, the intention of the government was that with the $15 million, the TCDA was expected to stand on its feet and have the capacity to borrow money based on its balance sheets.

The clock has already started ticking and all eyes are on TCDA to salvage the country from the clutches of the international financial institutions.

With the political will and the needed support, the TCDA is set to be the golden pot for the country to address its developmental challenges.
41st Martyrs Day marked in Volta Region

Alberto Mario Noretti Jul - 03 - 2023 , 06:40

Last Friday, church services were held by the Ghana Bar Association (GBA) across the country to mark the 41st Martyrs Day.

The Martyrs Day is commemorated in remembrance of Justices Fred Poku Sarkodie, Cecilia Koranteng-Addow and Kwadwo Agyei Agyepong, all judges of the High Court and a retired army officer, Major Sam Acquah, who were abducted on June 30, 1982, and later murdered.

Ho commemoration

At the Immanuel Methodist Cathedral in Ho, the Chairman of the Volta/Oti GBA, Nelson Mawutor Kporha, said the judges stood for the truth and the rule of law, for which reason they incurred the displeasure of others in society.

He said although the countrys constitutional democracy was not without challenge, it was far better than any form of military adventurism with its associated brutalities such as the horrific and highly repugnant episode on the day the judges and military officer were abducted and murdered.

We hope never again shall we experience this unfortunate development in the history of this country, he added.

Reminder

The Volta Regional Minister, Dr Archibald Yao Letsa, said the celebration of the day was important to remind Ghanaians to stand against such brutalities carried out against people who stood up for the rights of society.

He said the celebration was also appropriate and necessary to ensure that the next generation did not forget the horror visited upon the judges and the retired army officer.

Dr Letsa said the murder of the judges was a day of shame in the history of Ghana and the entire nation must persistently condemn it to ensure that such evil undertakings did not occur again.

In a sermon, Rt Rev. Mathew Zikpi, said blessed were those persecuted for their righteous ways, as in the case of the murdered judges.

He said by holding onto a righteous cause and dying for that cause, the murdered judges were true martyrs who would never be forgotten for their noble and honest stance to serve mankind with the truth.
Akyem Abuakwa Presbytery distributes oil palm seedlings to members

Haruna Yussif Wunpini Jul - 03 - 2023 , 06:47

The Akyem Abuakwa Presbytery of the Presbyterian Church of Ghana has distributed 40,000 oil palm seedlings without any charge to 530 members in 15 congregations.

The congregations are located in towns and communities such as Abomosu, Kade, Akropong, Anum, Asamankese and Asuom.

Others are Osenase, New Abirem, Anyinam, Afosu, Kyebi and Kukurantumi, among others.

The presbytery exceeded 30,000 seedlings which were given to the members last year.

The purpose is to empower church members through oil palm cultivation to generate income to improve their livelihoods and those of their dependents.

Presentations

Presenting the seedlings to representatives of the congregations at Kyebi last Friday, the Chairman of the Akyem Abuakwa Presbytery, Rev. Dr Seth Kissi, said the seedlings were distributed to the church members.

He said the initiative was a three-year project to distribute a total of 80,000 oil palm seedlings.

Rev. Dr Kissi explained that the presbytery started nursing the oil palm seedlings four years ago with the distribution starting last year.

Coconut seedlings

Prior to the commencement of the project, the chairman said the presbytery had distributed 5,600 coconut seedlings to members in 2021 for cultivation.

"One of the visions of the presbytery is to help its members to work and earn incomes so that they would live a better life, Rev. Dr Kissi said.

"We noticed that there are no big companies in Akyem Abuakwa but there is a lot of land readily available for farming so we decided to support the members with oil palm and coconut seedlings every year to empower them to eradicate extreme poverty in the church, going forward," he added.

The Akyem Abuakwa Presbytery chairman said the focus was on oil palm farming in those areas because of its economic value which would enable the farmers to generate revenue for themselves, their families and the church.

Economic empowerment

Rev. Dr Kissi indicated that the purpose was also to support the government in its agricultural programmes to encourage a lot of unemployed youth to go into farming.

He encouraged the beneficiaries to adopt good farming practices to nurture the seedlings to achieve the full benefits of the programme.

The Asuomhene, Osabarima Ofosu-Hene Apenteng II, lauded the leadership of the presbytery for providing the various seedlings to the church members for cultivation.

The chief, who also benefited from the programme last year, entreated church members to embrace the initiative.

"Chiefs in the area believe that the presbytery's initiative is a good one and because I'm a beneficiary we will be helpless but for the presbytery's farming initiative, Osabarima Apenteng said.

"It will have been difficult for us so anything which aims at supporting farmers in the area is something we cherish and value a lot," he added.

Farmers educated

The Head of a three-member committee in charge of nursing the seedlings, Dr Lawrence Misa Aboagye, sensitised the beneficiary farmers to how to plant and nurture the seedlings.

Dr Aboagye, who is also the immediate past Director of the Plant Genetic Resources Institute at Bonsu, advised farmers who intended to establish their nurseries to obtain their materials from the Oil Palm Research Institute for quality seeds.
Book on notable women psychologists in Ghana launched

Augustina Tawiah Jul - 03 - 2023 , 11:27

A book that chronicles the life and experiences of notable women psychologists who have been at the forefront of psychology in Ghana has been launched in Accra.

Titled, Women in Psychology in Ghana: an autobiographical Collection, the 344-page book was edited by Professor Charity Sylvia Akotia, a social and community psychologist, and Dr Emmanuel Nii-Boye Quarshie, a senior lecturer, both at the Department of Psychology of the University of Ghana, also highlights the failures, successes, anecdotes and serendipity in pursuing career paths in psychology as practitioners and academics.

The book is in two parts - the first part focused on the life and career of eight older and eminent women psychologists who contributed in various ways to psychology in Ghana.

They are the late Dr Araba Sefa-Dedeh, who is referred to as the foremother of clinical psychology in Ghana; Prof. Angela Lamensdorf Ofori-Atta, Mrs Rachel Phillips, Prof. Frances Emily Owusu-Ansah of the Kwame Nkrumah University of Science and Technology (KNUST), Prof. Ama De-Graft Aikins, Dr Epiphania Emefa Bonsi, Dr Dinah Baah-Odoom and Prof. Akotia.

The second part of the book, which tells the life of six contemporary women in psychology in the country, captures the life story and careers of Dr Margaret Amankwah-Poku; Dr Angela Anarfi Gyasi-Gyamerah, Dr Erica Danfrekua Dickson, Prof. Abigail Opoku Mensah, Dr Annabella Osei-Tutu and Prof. Joana Salifu Yendork.

Throwing more light on the book in an interview with the Daily Graphic, Prof. Akotia mentioned one of the motivations for the publication of the book to be to document and preserve the contributions of women in psychology, explaining that they had noticed that a lot of people knew about men behind psychology in Ghana and elsewhere but the situation was not the same for women.

Motivation

But we know that women have also contributed and so one of the motivations is to have this collection where women talk about their own contribution to psychology, how they also added their voice and the various things that they did to promote this discipline in Ghana, she explained.

Prof. Akotia, who since 1992, had lectured psychology, mentioned some of the issues captured in the 14-chapter book, including the childhood of the 14 women psychologists featured in the book, the socialisation that they went through, what happened in their homes, their pre-university and university education, their postgraduate education, as well as their contributions to psychology in terms of research, practice and teaching.

These women, in documenting what they went through, their experiences, they identified the challenges they faced along the line, their successes as well and how they navigated their experiences to be who they are currently.

So basically, these women have all contributed in one way or the other in expanding the frontiers of psychology in Ghana, she said.

Challenges

She mentioned the major challenge that cut across the writings of all of them was juggling family life as wives and mothers with education, training and career demands and how they navigated through them.

On whether their gender in any way affected them in their career path, she said interestingly, most of them said they did not face any discrimination because of their gender and added that their male counterparts were supportive and accommodating.

She advised all, especially the younger generation, to get a copy of the book to read so that they could also calve a way for themselves.

Launching

The book has since been launched and it was done by the two editors and the publisher, Sub-Saharan Publishers.

It was reviewed by Prof. Mavis Dako-Gyeke.
Drop charges against Quayson  Dormaahene

Biiya Mukusah Ali Jul - 03 - 2023 , 12:06

The President of the Bono Regional House of Chiefs, Osagyefo Oseadeeyo Agyemang Badu II, has called on the Attorney-General (A-G) and Minister of Justice, Godfred Yeboah Dame, to drop the criminal case against the re-elected Assin North Member of Parliament (MP), James Gyakye Quayson.

He said it was needless for the A-G to continue the case after the chiefs and people of the constituency had re-elected him.

As a matter of urgency, I am appealing to the President, if he has any role to play, and the Attorney-General to file a nolle prosequi to abort the criminal case against Mr Quayson, he said, explaining that the law had made provisions or permitted the A-G to discontinue any case that citizens were not interested in.

Oseadeeyo Agyemang Badu, who is also the Omanhene of the Dormaa Traditional Area, was speaking at the Bono, Bono East, Ahafo and Western North regional version of the Professor John Evans Atta Mills Commemorative Lecture in Sunyani, the Bono Regional capital, last Saturday.

He stated that the 17,245 votes, representing 57.56 per cent of valid votes cast for Mr Quayson was a signal that the constituents had trust and belief in him to be their MP, explaining that if the case against the MP-elect was to continue, it would negatively affect the development of the constituency.

Prof. Mills lecture

The lecture brought together hundreds of people, particularly from the National Democratic Congress (NDC), including the National Chairman of the party, Johnson Asiedu Nketiah, former ministers and Members of Parliament (MPs).

It was on the theme: "The man John Evans Atta Mills  10 Years on."

As part of the lecture, a 24-page book, titled, "Atta Mills Speaks to the World," was launched.

The book captured Prof. Millss statements at the 64th, 65th and 66th sessions of the General Assembly of the United Nations during his tenure as President.

Oseadeeyo Agyemang Badu said Prof. Mills could be remembered for many important works and decisions in academia and politics, while his contributions towards the development of the country also stood out, but stressed that his stance on the LGBTQ+ subject was decisively impressive.

He said under the leadership of Prof. Mills, Dormaa Ahenkro benefited from several projects, including the University of Energy and Natural Resources (UENR) satellite campus.

Also, the President of the Bono Regional House of Chiefs expressed concern about incidents of governments abandoning projects they inherited, stating that such situations had caused several projects to rot in the bush, thereby stalling the development of the country.

He thus appealed to successive governments to endeavour to complete inherited uncompleted projects since governance was a continual process.

Insulting leaders

Nana Dormaahene also said freedom of expression was not freedom to talk without decorum and admonished the public to desist from insulting politicians, particularly Presidents and Ministers of State.

He stated that there was a difference between constructive criticism and insults, stressing that people who were unhappy about issues could criticise some of the decisions and policies of leaders and ministers without verbally attacking them.

Legacy

The Dean of Students at UENR, Prof. Dominic Otoo, said Prof. Mills would be remembered for his fight against corruption, strengthening of state institutions, rule of law and his passion for helping the vulnerable in the country.

Prof. Otoo said as President, Prof. Mills took measures to reduce government expenditure in order to invest in the provision of quality education and healthcare delivery.

The UENR Dean of Students further said Prof. Mills also championed digitalisation which the current government was building on.

Prof. Otoo stated that as a researcher, he had conducted a research which indicated that the NDC had a 72 per cent chance of winning the 2024 elections.

He encouraged the party and added that if it indeed won, the next NDC government should adopt 60 per cent of the governing style of Prof. Mills not only to establish is legacy, but also to enhance development.

Others

Various speakers at the lecture described the late Prof. Mills as a unifier, peacemaker, truthful, a God-fearing man, humble, tolerant, listener, patient and selfless, among others.
Ending illegal mining activities: Communities call for military involvement

Dotsey Koblah Aklorbortu Jul - 03 - 2023 , 07:11

One of the near solutions to illegal mining activities the country has seen was the deployment of the military to enforce the law and stop illegalities in the mining regions in the early 2000s.

The deployment and the fact that military personnel are in charge with all jungle skills will make venturing into the concessions of mining companies, cocoa farms, rubber plantations or illegally mining on water bodies and forest reserves unattractive to galamseyers.

The withdrawal of the military for unexplained reasons after 2017 till date has led to a high level of impunity, which made it easy for a group of illegal miners to attack mines, terrorise communities and cause havoc.

These unregulated, uncontrolled, high impunity and disrespect for law and order, show of power by armed illegal miners have become a major threat to sustainability, lives and property.

It is threatening the country's water supply, cocoa and rubber production and Ghana risks international ban, as cocoa; one of Ghanas main export commodities risks being banned and COCOBOD sounded the alarm long ago but no one is listening.

Legislation passed in December by the EU Parliament sought to ban some commodities linked to deforestation, including cocoa, coffee, soya among others and Ghana which is the second-largest producer of cocoa beans globally after its neighbour Cote dIvoire with more than 800,000 farmer-families account for its output.

The countrys annual production has averaged 800,000 metric tonnes in the last decade, with most of it exported in a raw state to the EU and other markets.

Considering its importance to the economy, few illegal miners should not be allowed to unleash the avoidable terror on the country.

Aside from that, not long ago a group of miners, mostly migrants from other parts of the country, Nigerian and others, attacked the Benso operations of Golden Star Wassa Limited (GSWL) and destroyed properties worth several millions of dollars and halted the operations of the company until recently.



Military, Chamber partnership

Several vehicles  pickup trucks, tipper trucks, excavators and an ambulance  were destroyed with some offices burnt down by the attackers.

In the early 2000s there was an arrangement between the mines and the Ministry of Defence through the Chamber of Mines, dubbed Operation Calm Life.

Those arrangements brought some sanity in the mining space.

However, in the absence of the joint military/police force, illegal miners  most of them migrants  had moved in, mobilised and attacked operational areas and offices.

Paramount Queenmother of the Wassa Fiase Traditional Area, Nana Afuaba Kunaadjoa II, therefore appealed to the security agencies to flush out illegal miners who have invaded the area and unleashing terror in the mining area.



The call

The call by the Queenmother is important owing to the fact that if the mining companies have been so important in the current economic recovery effort through revenue and the gold for oil arrangement, then their protection from attacks by illegal miners should be important to the state.

With the declaration on many platforms that the government is not against mining, but wants responsible and sustainable mining, one would have expected that with the introduction of the community-mining programme, young people interested in the mining would have availed themselves of the opportunity.

The community-mining programme came with the government's resolve to deploy technology for mining to be done responsibly.

However, halting Operation Calm Life altogether had opened the floodgates for illegal miners to regroup and fester.

The queenmother suggested the deployment of the military to provide security for mining firms.

Let me put it on record that those who led the destruction of offices, 12 vehicles, heavy duty trucks, pickup trucks, ambulances and an excavator, and the smashing of the windscreens of 22 trucks were not indigenes of Wassa Fiase, the queen mother said.

Nana Kunaadjoa said: These people arrive every day in their numbers, and join those on the ground to mine illegally.

Her community is not fighting with the mines.



The population

She added that the population of the illegal miners kept increasing daily, and that their illegal mining activities resulted in massive destruction of the environment, including forests and water bodies, with impunity, and social vices with the potential to corrupt the young people in the area.

Originally, we are farmers and traders, and our youth do not engage in these illegalities.

We must not allow the migrants we welcome into our midst to act with impunity as though we do not have laws in the country.

Where we have reached now, the only option is to flush them out with the help of the security agencies, she said.

An elder of the traditional area, Nana Kofi Bosompim, said until recently, gold could be picked from the floor at Benso, but the emergence of illegal mining had changed the narrative.

He explained that when the mines stopped operating in the area about 10 years ago, it was a source of worry to the traditional area because the youth lost their jobs.

But for the company to return and be met with this level of angry migrants who have grouped and arrogated powers to themselves and causing such destruction to the environment and private property is unfortunate, he stressed.



Operations restart

The Group Corporate Affairs Manager of Golden Star, Gerard Boakye, explained we decided to temporarily halt our operations in the area in 2012 for some time owing to a fall in gold prices on the international market.

But after the new owners took over, we decided to revisit our operations at Benso where we have engaged the communities and spoken to them.

The community welcomed us owing to the benefits to them in terms of jobs and other forms of support, he said.

The activities of the illegal miners, he said, occurred within the companys concession where Golden Star legally operates, and that the illegal miners had invaded the pit and its buffer, and refused to adhere to warnings to move from the area.

Our operations and other activities involving all stakeholders were peaceful until the migrants emerged and started illegal mining activities, as well as entering our concessions and being confrontational, leading to the destruction we are seeing today, he said.

Mr Boakye said the attack on its employees and offices at Benso by a group of armed illegal miners had halted their Benso operations, which, he said, would have serious financial implications for restoration as a result of the incident.
Ghana Atomic Energy Commission marks Scientific Renaissance of Africa Day

Emelia Ennin Abbey Jul - 03 - 2023 , 07:48

Ghana Atomic Energy Commission (GAEC) has held a scientific and innovations dialogue to commemorate this year's Scientific Renaissance of Africa Day.

The African Union (AU), by a declaration in 1987, enjoined all member states to celebrate June 30 each year, as the Day of Scientific Renaissance of Africa.

Each year, the day is marked to recognise and celebrate the vision, sacrifices, investments, tenacity and hard work of scientists in the nuclear and allied sciences.

In Ghana, one such great scientist is the late Professor Francis Kofi Ampenyin Allotey, who is known and celebrated globally for his work on soft X-ray spectroscopy, which led to the postulation of Alloteys Foundation  which positioned Ghana on the world map in the sciences.

The technique is used to determine how matter moves in outer space.

This years celebration was on the theme: harnessing the power of the atom for economic transformation through science and technology.

Nuclear energy

The Minister for Environment, Science, Technology and Innovation (MESTI), Dr Kwaku Afriyie, in a speech read on his behalf by the Director Science, Technology and Innovation at MESTI, Kwamina E. Quaison, said nuclear technology had the potential to create new industries and jobs in Ghana.

The country, he said would however need to take the necessary steps to build capacity, starting from the basic level of education.

The government, he said, had introduced science, technology, engineering and mathematics education in senior high schools and encouraged young people, especially females, to take up science courses at the senior high school level and pursue further studies in specialised fields, such as nuclear science, space science, among others.

Resilient

The minister said resilient economies across the world depended on reliable and affordable energy and it was important for the country to take a critical look at its energy production and energy consumption activities.

Ghana's electricity generation at present has changed from 84 per cent hydro and 14 per cent thermal to 38 per cent hydro and 60 per cent thermal.

This has caused high tariffs due to gas rise and erratic gas supply, he said.

Also, he said, 40 per cent of production costs for industries in Ghana was attributed to electricity costs which had made it difficult for Ghanaian industries to stay competitive.

President Nana Addo Dankwa Akufo-Addo, the minister said, had directed MESTI and the Ministry of Energy to take the appropriate steps to facilitate and enhance the coordination role of the Ghana Nuclear Power Programme Organisation.

He said based on a comprehensive report at the end of phase one of Ghana's quest to go nuclear, a request for information was issued and six large reactors and nine small modular reactors responded.

Contributions

The Director-General of GAEC, Prof. Samuel Boakye Dampare, said scientists in Ghana continued to offer research-driven solutions to societal issues in agriculture, health, environmental sustainability, energy and water resource management, among others.

GAEC, he said, had improved crop yields and developed new varieties for cassava, tomatoes and others that were drought tolerant, disease-resistant and of better nutritional quality through research.

Recently, the Nuclear Medicine Department of the Korle Bu Teaching Hospital had implemented a new type of cancer treatment for advanced prostate cancer called the Lutetium -177 prostate-specific membrane antigen therapy.

The Director-General of the Centre for Scientific and Industrial Research, Prof. Paul P. Bosu, said it was important to set aside a day to recognise the value and the significance of science to the nation and the continent.

Later, scientists from the Boitechnology and Nuclear Agriculture Research Institute and Radiological and Medical Sciences Research Institute during a panel discussion highlighted the potential of nuclear technologies in addressing food security and health, particularly the cancer challenge using radiation.
Fuller Falls - Hidden scenic attraction in Kintampo

Mohammed Fugu Jul - 03 - 2023 , 08:55

With the mention of Kintampo in the Bono East Region, what comes to mind are the waterfalls and the Centre of Ghana monument.

However, there is another hidden and lesser-known scenic attraction with magnificent features in the Kintampo enclave.

Located at Yabraso, just a few kilometres northwest of the town, Fuller Falls is surrounded by a beautiful forest.

The waterfall does not stand out because of its height, but because of its extraordinary beauty and relaxed and charming atmosphere.

Name

It owes its name to a British colonialist, Fuller, who apparently discovered it with the support of the local folks some centuries ago.

However, in 1988, a Filipino missionary, Rev. Fr Joseph Panabang, and his congregants reshaped the place and turned it into a prayer ground. It was named Our Lady of Kintampo, until 1998 when he departed the town.

Unlike most other waterfalls in Ghana, Fuller does not descend from a tall cliff but it traces its route from the Oyoko River, which pours gently through several wide chutes that look like channels, before gathering in a wide pool at the base of the final step.

The entire waterfall sits on a rocky elevation of 173m above sea level, with its gentle slope forming interesting foaming rapids that fascinate visitors.

From afar, it roars as the water meanders its way through the canopy of trees before falling into a wide pool beneath the step of the rock.

In fact, Fuller Falls is a place of natural beauty.

Aside from its touristic features, it serves as a spiritual place where some Christians congregate to offer prayers just as is done on the Atwea Mountains in the Ashanti Region.

Undeveloped

Despite the significant tourism potential of the site, it is underdeveloped and not properly managed like the Kintampo Waterfalls.

The falls is currently under threat due to illegal logging and other human activities around the enclave. For the first time in the history of its discovery, the falls virtually dried up during the dry season in March 2021.

The Assemblyman for the Asantekwaa Electoral Area, Agyemang Dua, attributed the development to climate conditions and called for urgent steps to help save and develop it.

He said when properly developed, the falls could boost local tourism and generate revenue for the assembly, adding that even at its current state, a number of revellers trooped to the place, particularly during the rainy season, to have fun and have a feel of nature.

Assemblys plans

In a recent interview with the Daily Graphic, the Municipal Chief Executive for Kintampo North, Isaac Baffoe Ameyaw, said plans were far advanced by the assembly to develop the place into a very viable tourist centre.

He said the assembly had included it in its long-term development plan and was looking for investors to collaborate with them to develop the iconic tourist site.

He, therefore, called on investors to consider investing in the tourist site in the municipality to help boost tourism and create jobs for the teeming youth.

For those looking for a serene, uncrowded place shrouded in a beautiful forest to meditate and reconnect with nature, Fuller Falls is obviously the best bet.

With little fees, a guest will be taken around the falls by tour guides in the Yabraso community.
Hope in NHIS waned, Scheme starved of statutory funds

Kester Aburam Korankye Jul - 03 - 2023 , 05:18

The National Health Insurance Scheme (NHIS) was introduced in Ghana in 2003 to provide affordable healthcare services to citizens.

The scheme was designed to ensure that every Ghanaian had access to quality health care, regardless of their financial status. However, after more than a decade of its implementation, it is evident that the NHIS is not working effectively.

The scheme is currently facing a myriad of challenges that threaten its sustainability. These challenges are like thorns that prick the smooth skin of a rose, causing discomfort and pain to the beneficiaries of the scheme.

Many beneficiaries cannot rely on the scheme to access quality healthcare, as their subscription, according to them, only ensures retrieval of their medical folders and payment of consultation fees. Even basic drugs such as analgesics, cough mixtures and antibiotics must be purchased by patients.

Some health facilities are also reluctant to treat NHIS card holders, rather prioritising services to persons with ready cash to pay, reminding many of the gloomy days of the cash and carry system.

Ineffective

The Minister of Health, Kwaku Agyeman-Manu, during the Ghana Health Service Senior Managers Meeting 2023 on Tuesday, April 18, 2023, stated that complaints from NHIS subscribers suggested that the scheme was not functioning correctly.

He expressed dissatisfaction with certain service providers under NHIS, whom he accused of extortion. He claimed that instead of benefiting from the scheme, poor subscribers were being overcharged and denied necessary services.

He cited his own experiences, claiming that he had to pay for healthcare services out of his pocket when he visited hospitals such as Ridge and the University of Ghana Medical Centre (UGMC), even though he was an NHIS subscriber.

Former President John Mahama has also waded into the conversation about the effectiveness of the scheme. At a ceremony in Tamale to accept his nomination by the National Democratic Congress (NDC) as its flag bearer for the 2024 election, Mr Mahama said the scheme had been starved of funds that was critical for its effectiveness.

Where is the money?

While authorities may not admit, one of the major challenges facing the NHIS is inadequate funding.

A report by SEND Ghana on citizens assessment of social protection delivery in the country revealed that there were enormous liquidity challenges facing the NHIS. The report, based on previous budgetary allocation and spending between 2015 and 2019, suggested that not all the revenues generated from the NHIS Levy are credited to the National Health Insurance Fund (NHIF), although the NHIS largely depends on the Fund, which is 2.5 per cent levy on goods and services collected under the Value Added Tax (VAT), to finance its operations.

In recent times, the Minority in Parliament has led an onslaught, accusing the government of intentionally delaying funds for the Schemes operation in an attempt to collapse it. They insist, for instance, that the government paid only 6.2 per cent of the total funds needed for the Scheme at the end of 2021.

The situation has left the NHIS with a huge funding gap, leading to a situation where healthcare providers are not reimbursed on time, causing shortage of drugs and medical supplies.

Last year, the Auditor-Generals report suggested the National Health Insurance Authority (NHIA) owed 78 health institutions across the country to the tune of GH51.4million as of December 31, in violation of Regulation 38 of the National Health Insurance Regulations, 2004 (L.I.1809), which requires that a claim or payment of health service submitted to the scheme shall be paid within four weeks after receipt of the claim from the healthcare facility unless there is a legal impediment.

Abuse

Another challenge facing the NHIS is fraud and abuse. There have been reports of healthcare providers colluding with patients to defraud the scheme. Some providers inflate the cost of services rendered to patients, while others provide unnecessary medical procedures and treatments to increase their earnings.

This has led to a situation where the NHIS pays for services that are not needed or provided at inflated prices.

The Upper East Regional Director of the NHIA, Kasimu Abdulai, in February this year, raised concerns over how fraud, perpetuated by some service providers, was contributing to the problems of the scheme.

One issue we are going to pay particular attention to, in 2023, is the issue of illegal charges at the level of the facilities, Mr Abdulai told the media in Bolgatanga.

Although it has fallen short of expectations, a greater percentage of citizens believe that the NHIS was designed to be a game-changer in the country's healthcare system, and must not be allowed to fail.

Their wish is for the government to address the challenges facing the NHIS by increasing funding, ensuring timely disbursement of funds, improving management and governance, and cracking down on fraud and abuse. Only then can the NHIS fulfil its mandate of providing affordable healthcare services to all Ghanaians.
Larabanga: Home of oldest, iconic mosque - No churches, shrines

Mohammed Fugu Jul - 03 - 2023 , 15:34

By mentioning the town what comes to mind is the famous Mystic Stone and Ghanas oldest and iconic mosque  the Larabanga Mosque, one of the most revered religious sites in the country.

Larabanga, the second largest a town after Damongo in the West Gonja Municipality in the Savannah Region, is noted for its very famous and beautiful tourist sites that attract many people from across the world.

With a population of about 5,000 inhabitants who are predominantly farmers, according to the Spokesperson of the Chief Imam, Mashud Dramani, the town is situated 10 miles west of Damongo, and is about five miles to the Mole National Park.

Interestingly, all indegenes of Larabanga are Muslim, with no church or shrines except mosques numbering not less than 50 in the community. Non-Muslims who are Christians, who live in the community, therefore, attend church in communities close by.

Community members, nonetheless share public facilities such as schools and health centres.

Apart from Islam all other forms of religion are said to be forbidden in the town due to the historical and religious beliefs of the people.

Aside from that, the tourist attractions have amazing historical narratives but the sites have not been developed to reap their full potentials.

No church, shrine

Upon entering the town, mosques are sited around every corner in the area.

On why other religions are not permitted in the town, Alhaji Dramani, who is also the Secretary of the Mosque, said it is a 100 per cent Muslim community and no other religion is allowed here because of the history behind the establishment of the town.

He said for now the authorities of the community did not tolerate any other religion because their forefathers never allowed Christians or traditionalists to worship in the community.

For now I dont think we will allow anybody to practice a different religion, it is never possible, but maybe some years to come things can change.

Some time ago, a young man brought some idols to the community and when he was caught, he was beaten and banished from the town, he indicated.

The mosque

The famous Larabanga Mosque is believed to be the oldest mosque in Ghana and West Africa, and its construction dates back to 1421. It is popularly referred to as the Mecca of West Africa because of its rich historical and architectural values.

Named as one of the most endangered sites by the World Monuments Fund, its dimensions are approximately 8m by 8m.

It is believed that an Islamic scholar called Ibrahim, who had settled in the community, had a dream in which he was instructed by God to build a mosque in the area.

When he woke up the next morning, the foundation of the mosque had mysteriously appeared, so he continued with the construction until the mosque was completed.

It is made of mud and sticks with a huge baobab tree at the entrance of mosque, under which the late founder was buried. Today, some of the community members use the leaves and stem of the baobab tree for healing of various ailments.

Just like any ordinary mosque, the Larabanga mosque has four entrances. It also has a very old Quran, which is believed to have been delivered from heaven to the Imam of the mosque, Yidan Barimah Bramah, because of his prayers around 1650.

Aside from serving as a place of worship for the people of the community, the ancient mosque also serves as a place of pilgrimage for some Muslims in Ghana and Africa at large, as they often travel to the place to deliver Quran recitations and to seek spiritual protection in their endeavours.

Mystic Stone



Some visitors placing their hands on the mystic stone to offer prayers. With them are some caretakers

In an attempt to locate where to build the mosque, it is said that the Islamic scholar stood by a stone and threw his spear which perched on a laid foundation for the mosque, where he put up the mosque with the support of the community members.

A caretaker of the stone, Mahama Abubakari, narrated that after the establishment of the mosque, Ibrahim brought the people of the community to the stone site and told them it was a source of blessings, and asked them to protect it as a sacred and Mystic Stone.

Non-movable stone

In the 1950s, some British authorities who were constructing a road through Larabanga to link the Northern Region to the Upper West Region discovered the mysterious stone on the path, a caretaker, Mr Abubakari said.

He added that the road contractor was then compelled to redirect the major road after three attempts to remove the stone proved futile.

Anytime they removed the stone, they would return the next day, only to realise the stone had mysteriously returned to its exact position from where it was cleared.

The contractors, therefore, decided to let the stone remain there and they diverted the road.

Just like the ancient mosque, the Mystic Stone is believed to be a sacred site for prayers. Residents of the community and tourists who visit place their hands on it and offer prayers for their hearts desires.



A section of the wall erected around the Mystic Stone

Untapped potentials

In spite of the rich potentials, the sites have not been developed. For instance, the site of the Mystic Stone is just in the open with a small wall erected around it by the custodians.

A small structure has also been put up at the site which houses the caretakers. The mosque too is in a sorry state as it has not seen any major renovation for some time now.

On a daily basis, hundreds of visitors from all walks of life visit the town to have a rare feel of the sites. However, these guests do not pay any fee to access the facilities.

With the beautiful features of the sites, if properly developed it would boost tourism in the region and improve the lives of the people.

Master plan

The Savannah Regional Manager of the Ghana Tourism Authority (GTA), Isaac Opirah, told the Daily Graphic that the authority had developed a master plan to develop various sites in the region, including the Larabanga Mosque and Mystic Stone.

However, he indicated that a disagreement over ownership and management of the facilities were drawing back the plan.

"The community members are having issues regarding ownership over the facilities; two factions are all claiming ownership and management of the mosque so it is creating a lot of confusion.

That is what is drawing back our plans," he said.

Mr Opirah indicated that his outfit had started engaging the community leaders and various stakeholders to amicably resolve the matter to pave way for its development.

He added that "when we develop it, the facilities will have a museum, washroom facilities and other ancillary facilities."



The Larabanga town

Tourism

Sharing her experience, a tourist, Zoey Ray Mattisson, said it was refreshing to visit the sites as they had interesting historical information.

"I am very happy visiting Larabanga for the first time after reading about it on the internet for a long time. I have learnt a lot here and I hope to visit here again with my friends anytime soon, she said.

Tourism is one of the main drivers of the nations economy as it contributes averagely US$1.9 billion to the country's Gross Domestic Product.

It is, therefore, important for the government to focus its development lenses on the sector and develop all major tourist sites such as the famous Larabanga Mosque and Mystic Stone to help boost the tourism industry and accelerate national development.
Protect, invest in public media - Alban Bagbin

Daniel Kenu & Nana Konadu Agyeman Jul - 03 - 2023 , 07:40

The Speaker of Parliament, Alban Sumana Kingsford Bagbin, has extolled the importance of the media in nation-building and called on all stakeholders, especially the state, to support them.

He stated that no institution, including Parliament, could succeed without the role of the media.

The Speaker insisted that media institutions were a priority that every President should hold dear and invest in.

"In practical terms, you are the movers and shakers of politics and development.

There is no doubt about that and it is the reason every President should hold dear and invest in it," Mr Bagbin said.

He made the assertion during a visit to the Graphic Communications Group Limited (GCGL) last Thursday to share his perspectives on the annual Press Freedom Index on Ghana and discuss how the media could partner Parliament to celebrate activities marking the 30th anniversary of parliamentary democracy.

Mr Bagbin also stressed the need for the public media to be protected since they represented the public interest.

"Yes, the private media is important because they have to reflect and prioritise the private interest, but the public media should be protected because of the larger public interest," the Speaker added.

Impact of media

On the impact the media had made on his political aspirations, Mr Bagbin said he could not have made it in his political career without the media.

He recollected how the media propelled him when he was thrust into the position of a Minority Leader as a young boy with new face in 2001.

It was the media that held me on, marketed, followed me around and made me what I am today. And so I hold dear the media, the Speaker said.

Graphic shapes nations moral conscience



Alban Bagbin (left), Speaker of Parliament, in a chat with Ato Afful (2nd from left), MD; Theophilus Yartey (2nd from right), Editor, Graphic, and Samuel Essel, Director, Finance and Administration. Picture: DOUGLAS ANANE-FRIMPONG

During an interactive session with the Managing Director of GCGL, Ato Afful, the Editor, Graphic, Theophilus Yartey, and the editorial team of the Daily Graphic, the Speaker commended the Daily Graphic, the nations bestselling newspaper, for being what he described as a shining example of media professionalism in Ghana.

He said the flagship newspaper of GCGL had helped shape the nations moral conscience and impacted positively on business, economy, political and women empowerment.

The Daily Graphic is always a shining example of leadership as it is quite a popular and well-known newspaper and that is why all newspapers in Ghana are referred to as Graphic, he noted, adding, I am part of your admirers.

The Speaker said he was appreciative of the role and function the Daily Graphic and the media in general had played in the countrys fledgling democracy over the years.

He also congratulated the Daily Graphic on taking the lead as the captain of awardees in the media industry and championing womens empowerment.

The Daily Graphic has a dedicated page on Gender, where it promotes and discusses issues affecting women, children and the vulnerable.

Women empowerment is a passion to me because we have left our better halves far behind and it is not possible to leave them behind us, the Speaker said.

Treasure trove

While applauding the GCGL for being what he described as a treasure trove, Mr Bagbin said: You have a house for research and many writers have always referred to your publications.

In global politics, we know the role you play and I am proud that anytime I am travelling I compare your publications to other international newspapers and you are on top there. Youre not just a newspaper but part of the social media, the Speaker said.

The Speaker was accompanied by his Chief of Staff, Kofi Attor; communications consultant, Gayheart Edem Mensah, and other staff.

Chronicling history

Mr Afful stated that the company was one of the organisations that had been a key partner of the country's progress and development.

He said GCGL had got quite a rich history and a proud one, adding that "we believe that decades of editors, writers and journalists, among others, have contributed immensely to enable this institution to come this far."

Mr Afful said looking at 30 years of parliamentary democracy in the Fourth Republic, GCGL, with its body of writers and journalists, had chronicled that history and that of the country from pre-independence and independence till date.

"Therefore, we have a rich catalogue of what it is that will enable Ghanaians to have a fair assessment of how the media industry has evolved in this democracy.

As the conscience of the nation, Graphic takes its mandate seriously, Mr Afful added.

Presence

Others present at the meeting included the Director, Finance, Samuel Essel; News Editor, Samuel Doe Ablordeppey; Night Editor, Samuel Bio; Editor, Graphic Digital, Enoch Darfah Frimpong; the Corporate Communications Manager, Emmanuel Arthur, and other members of the editorial team.
Work starts to expand Daboase water treatment plant

Dotsey Koblah Aklorbortu Jul - 03 - 2023 , 10:16

Work has started to expand the Daboase water treatment plant from six million gallons of water a day to 22.4 million gallons.

The 70-million project, which is the first of the two-part water treatment facility, will enable the Ghana Water Company Ltd (GWCL) to increase the production of water to meet the growing demand of customers in the Western Region up to 2040.

The first phase, estimated to cost 70 million, is expected to be completed by the end of August 2025.

An Austria firm, Strabag, which is undertaking the construction and civil engineering works, has already moved to the site.

The contractor is currently busy with the erection of administrative buildings, a workshop, and a structure for the intake plant while clearing the land for the construction of the main building to house the water processing plant and other units.

Alongside the clearing works, the engineering team and the contractor are also putting the finishing touches on the construction and mechanical designs of the project.

The project will benefit communities such as Takoradi, Effiakuma, Kwesimintsim, Kojokrom, West Tanokrom, Anaji, Sekondi and New Takoradi.

Other areas are Essikado, Apremdo, Kweikuma, Ntankoful, Aboadze, Abuasi, Apowa, Inchaban and Ketan.

Also, Dixcove Estates, Shama, Hwindo and Hotopo and the new site, among others, will benefit.



The old plant

At a public forum to discuss findings and recommendations of a draft environmental and social impact assessment report, the Chief Manager in charge of Planning of the GWCL, Francis Agyei-Boateng, said the project would bring enormous relief to the customers.

He said the project would involve some physical displacements and relocations, extensive clearing/earthworks, excavation works, evacuation of debris and the laying of pipes, as well as decommissioning activities.

The current treatment plant, constructed in the late 1960s at Daboase with an installed capacity of 27,000m3/day (about six million gallons a day), is supported by the Inchaban treatment plant with 18,000m3/day or four million gallons of water a day.

However, the capacity of both plants is not enough to meet the demand from the Sekondi-Takoradi and adjoining districts.



Funding for the project

Mr Agyei-Boateng said the project was in line with the governments water for all agenda being executed through the Ministry of Sanitation and Water Resources and the GWCL under the

Sekondi-Takoradi Expansion Project, with funding from Commerzbank AG, Germany.

The government, he said, in its quest to improve the economic, health and social conditions of the citizenry, was embarking on various economic, health and social conditions improvement projects throughout the country.

One of such projects is the ongoing Sekondi-Takoradi Water Supply Expansion Project, which is to be carried out in two phases, with phase one works aimed at delivering a 100,000m3 per day (22.0MGD) Conventional Water Treatment plant, the Chief Manager stated.



Transmission, distribution lines

Aside from the plant, Mr Agyei-Boateng said there would be the construction of about 100km of transmission and distribution pipelines to supply potable water to Sekondi and Takoradi and their environs to end the perennial water challenge due to fast-growing demands.

The project will eventually provide domestic water meters and standpipes to cater for those who cannot directly afford household connections, he said.

Mr Agyei-Boateng added that staff accommodation units would be added to ease staff accommodation challenges; there would also be the construction of an operational district office for effective water supply management administration and some water reservoirs.

The main objective of the project is to increase access to improved water supply service delivery for the people in the project area to reduce water and sanitation-related diseases, as well as increase economic opportunities for the inhabitants.

The first phase project would be executed at a cost of 70 million euros and is to be completed within a period of 40 months after the project officially commenced in May 2022 and is expected to be completed in August 2025.
Protecting intellectual property requires collective efforts  Dr Adusu

Delali Sika Jul - 03 - 2023 , 10:41

The protection of intellectual property does not solely rest on the shoulders of the government, it requires a collective effort involving all stakeholders, the Chief State Attorney, Dr Sylvia Adusu, has said.

However, she explained that the government was ensuring that the copyright laws were aligned with international standards and also to address the unique needs of the creative industry.

Even though the government is doing its quota by reviewing and strengthening copyright laws in order to achieve the desired results, the onus is also on creators, businesses, civil society organisations among others. We must all, therefore, foster a culture that respects and values rights of creators," Dr Adusu said.

Workshop

Dr Adusu was speaking at a Workshop on Collective Rights Management for Text and Image-based works in Ghana held in Accra last Thursday.

The purpose of the workshop was to chart a course towards a more inclusive and supportive environment for the creative industry, as well as discuss challenges.

Organised by World Intellectual Property Organisation (WIPO), CopyGhana and International Federation of Reprographic Rights Organisations (IFFRO) (IFRRO), the workshop brought together academics, industry players, intellectual property experts and policymakers.

Economic growth

Dr Adusu further noted that in today's interconnected and rapidly evolving world, the protection of intellectual property rights had become more crucial than ever.

"It doesn't only foster creativity and innovation but it also drives economic growth and social development. By safeguarding the rights of our creators, we send a powerful message to the global community that Ghana is a nation that values and respects the creative endeavours of its people," she said.

Dr Adusu said the countrys rich cultural heritage, diverse traditions and vibrant artistic expressions, had always been a source of inspiration to many people around the world, hence the need to protect such works.

"It is through the protection and promotion of intellectual property that we can continue to empower creators and unleash their full potential," she stated.

She again intimated that the digital age also had challenges that needed to be addressed.

The Internet, she said, had revolutionised as it had presented unprecedented opportunities, at the same time exposing creators to new risks.

Dr Adusu said there was the need for stakeholders to work together to develop strategies to combat online privacy and protect creative works in the digital domain.

Explore

The Chairman of CopyGhana, a reproduction rights organisation, Asare Konadu Yamoah, also added that text and image-based works were the trend in the age of technology.

He, therefore, said it was incumbent to explore how to advance the interest of its rights holders.

Mr Yamoah said while users were desirous to have access to works protected by copyright, authors, artists, producers and publishers, on the other hand, also considered the income derived from their copyrights as motivation to create more works.

In view of that, he said the enforcement of Copyright should not be an impediment.
GIA, Graphic sensitise public to importance of insurance

Yaa Kuffour Senyah Jul - 03 - 2023 , 07:31

The Ghana Insurance Association (GIA), in partnership with Graphic Business, has launched this years Insurance Awareness Month to help sensitise the public to the need for insurance.

On the theme: Making Insurance the Ghanaian way of life, the campaign is targeted at increasing the publics understanding of insurance concepts, educating them on how insurance could mitigate the potential risks faced in our personal and professional lives and encouraging the need for financial planning.

The month-long campaign would include activities such as consumer outreach programmes, fun games, donations and a GIA-Graphic Insurance Fair at Accra Mall on July 20 this year, with a special pull-out supplement on the insurance industry aimed at creating awareness of insurance among the citizenry.

Launch

Addressing participants in the launch in Accra, the President of GIA, Seth Kobla Aklasi, stated that the programme was a demonstration of the associations commitment to the cause of insurance awareness creation as a pivot for increasing the uptake and extension of insurance penetration in the country.

He said the country was emerging from the twin macro-economic challenges of COVID-19 and Ghanas Domestic debt exchange which had negatively impacted consumer confidence and perception regarding financial services of which insurance was no exception.

However, Mr Aklasi stated that the campaign was a platform to educate potential customers who might not know the benefits of insurance as well as the existing policyholders who were in doubt regarding the benefits of their policies about the numerous benefits and risk mitigating effect insurance gave once such products were purchased.

He further encouraged stakeholders involved in the campaign to put in much effort to ensure that many lives were positively impacted through insurance.

Change product messages

The Past President of the GIA, Ivan Avereyireh, stated that the theme was timely and, thus, entailed a conscious and well-planned effort to change the mindset and attitudes of Ghanaians to accept insurance as a way of life.

He explained that selling the idea of insurance to insurers was a difficult task, as insurance products were intangible and were based on promises which were mostly hard to believe or bought by their potential clients.

Thus, he asked insurance companies to desist from selling their products to consumers but rather rephrase their messages to make the people understand they are ready to solve their problems.

Mr Avereyireh said the ineffective communication between insurance companies and clients was a contributing factor to the growing myths and negative news spread about insurance companies.

Let them know that insurance companies in the country are reliable and that about GH4 million of claims are paid daily to clients.

He further stated that in as much as prompt payment of claims was important to overcome the negative perception of insurance companies, there was a need to work on quality service to fully win over the trust of Ghanaians.

The Director of Marketing at Graphic Communications Group Limited (GCGL), Franklin Sowa, commended the association for the initiative and stated that insurance played a critical role in the life of every citizen.

GIA-Graphic

He said the collaboration was significant as GCGL played an important role in bringing together their target audience onto a common platform.

Thus, the insurance fair would give companies the opportunity to pitch their products to their prospective clients and neutralise the varied perceptions people had about insurance.

Mr Sowa further encouraged the companies involved to make the best out of the opportunity to engage and actively educate people on available insurance products.
GNAT donates life jackets to teachers in Oti Region

GraphicOnline Jul - 03 - 2023 , 18:53

The Ghana National Association of Teachers (GNAT) has made a significant contribution to the safety of its members by donating 251 life jackets to teachers stationed at island communities in the Krachi East and West Districts of the Oti Region.

The procurement of these life jackets aims to protect teachers who commute to riverine communities to fulfil their duties. It is expected that the donation will benefit teachers in approximately 36 community basic schools across the two districts.

Recognizing the importance of basic safety precautions, the initiative follows a similar donation made in 2022. During a fact-finding tour of selected communities along the Volta Lake to assess the challenges faced by their members, GNAT's National Executives expressed concerns about reports of teachers drowning in various parts of the lake while travelling to their teaching stations.

Calling for a collaborative effort to address the recurring incidents of drowning involving teachers and pupils, the Executives affirmed their commitment to ensuring the safety of teachers in riverine communities.

Alarming frequency

GNAT's General Secretary, Mr. Thomas Musah, described the frequency of drowning incidents across the country as alarming. He revealed that the most recent incident occurred in May, when a teacher serving at Agamkope Island drowned on the lake after the boat he was traveling on capsized while returning from school.

Expressing concern about the government's objective to provide equal access to education, the General Secretary highlighted the association's alarm upon discovering that approximately half of the island communities in the Krachi East District lack schools.

Survival against the odds

Sharing his harrowing experience, teacher Prosper Addo recounted how he nearly lost his life during a six-hour journey on the Volta Lake to an island community in the Krachi West District. He emphasized that he did not have a life jacket at the time of the incident.

"I had no life jacket and would have died needlessly," Addo stated.

Mr. Ransford Appiah, Assistant Headteacher of Kudorkope D/A Primary School, commended GNAT's National Executives for their gesture and shared the experiences of him and his colleagues as they traverse the Volta Lake from Dambai to Kudorkope, risking their lives to teach.

Mr. Appiah mentioned that hundreds of teachers undergo the ordeal of crossing the Volta Lake without adequate protective gear in their quest to fulfill their mandated duties. While some survive these incidents, there have been reports of fatalities due to the lack of protective gear, leaving their families behind.

Urgent need for solutions

The National President of GNAT, Rev Isaac Owusu, expressed his concern about the challenges faced by teachers in riverine and underserved communities.

Rev Owusu cautioned teachers in these communities to prioritize precautionary measures at all times and appealed for an urgent solution to prevent further drownings.

"These challenges are truly discouraging our teachers, and we urge the government to show commitment in resolving them," he stated.

The distribution of life jackets by GNAT will continue in other risky riverine areas of the Ashanti, Eastern, and Greater Accra Regions where teachers are stationed.

The exercise aims to protect the lives of teachers who cross water bodies such as the Volta Lake on a daily basis to provide education and contribute to the development of their communities.
GREL supports Nzema East, Ahanta West flood victims

Dotsey Koblah Aklorbortu Jul - 03 - 2023 , 08:58

Thousands of flood victims in two municipalities of the Western Region have received humanitarian support from the Ghana Rubber Estate (GREL).

The two municipalities, Nzema East and Ahanta West, are part of the 14 districts, metropolitan areas and municipalities seriously affected by the recent torrential rain across the region, leaving the victims with nothing.

The heavy rain either flooded or collapsed many residential facilities. Most of the affected residents left homeless by the situation were currently putting up in community centres, churches and other public facilities.

Officials of the National Disaster Management Organisation (NADMO) said the situation this year was far worse than previous incidents as many residents were unable to enter their homes, while those who were able to have access to their homes had their belongings and food items destroyed.



Items, gesture

The relief items donated by GREL included detergents, hundreds of blankets, clean water, boxes of tomatoes, vegetable cooking oil, bags of rice, sugar and gari, among many others.

Presenting the items, the Chief Executive Officer (CEO) of Societe Internationale de Plantations d'Heveas (SIPH), the mother company of GREL, Marc Genot, said the company was touched by the plight of the victims; hence, the need to support victims with the items.

He said as a corporate citizen operating in the region the gesture was a reflection of its commitment to being responsive to its community.

We have been with the communities all these years and we consider ourselves as part of the people so we cannot stand and watch or turn a blind eye to their plight, he said.



Immediate needs

Mr Genot said the items were carefully selected to help the victims to meet their immediate needs as they worked to get back to their normal economic activities and contribute to the development of the country.

The company, he said, was not only handing the items over to the people through various assemblies and NADMO officials but we are making sure the items are moved to the communities immediately.

Critical intervention

The Chairman of the Association of Chiefs on whose Land GREL Operates (ACLANGO), Nana Agyeman IX, described the gesture of GREL as timely, considering the level of devastation.
Opuni case will not start afresh - Court of Appeal

Emmanuel Ebo Hawkson Jul - 03 - 2023 , 10:20

The Court of Appeal has overturned a decision by the Accra High Court to hear afresh the trial of former COCOBOD boss Dr Stephen Kwabena Opuni and businessman Seidu Agongo.

In a unanimous decision today (July 3, 2023), a three member panel of the court held that the trial High Court misdirected itself when it decided not to adopt the previous proceedings of the five year trial when a new judge took over the case.

Adopt the records

Consequently, the three-member panel of the Court of Appeal, presided over by Justice Philip Bright Mensah, with Justices Jennifer Dadzie and Dr Ernest Owusu-Dapaa, ordered the High Court to adopt the records of the previous trial and continue the trial from where it ended.

The court made the decision after it upheld an appeal filed by the Attorney-General (A-G), Godfred Yeboah Dame.

Trial

Dr Opuni was dragged to court in March 2018 with Agongo, the CEO of Agricult Ghana Limited, an agro-chemical 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.

New judge

After five years of trial, in March 2023, the judge, Justice Clemence Honyenuga, a Justice of the Supreme Court, with additional responsibility as a High Court judge, retired.

The Chief Justice then appointed a new judge, Justice Kwasi Anokye Gyimah, as the new 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 on April 4, 2024, 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.

Appeal

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.
Safeguard democratic traditions, institutions - Dr Amoako to nation

Emmanuel Bonney Jul - 03 - 2023 , 06:01

The country must safeguard its democratic traditions and institutions in order to progress, the President of the Africa Centre for Economic Transformation (ACET), Dr Kingsley Yeboah Amoako, has said.

That will be a perfect complement to the solutions it is implementing to address the economic problems, he added.

Dr Amoako said another election was on the horizon and the next government would lead the country into the second quarter of the 21st Century but the "next 25 years are absolutely crucial and critical to Ghana's ability to secure its future".

As we know, Ghana just signed another agreement with the International Monetary Fund (IMF).

But the stakes are higher.

Political polarisation is worst. Civic disengagement is higher.

Ghana must not only solve its economic problems to enable transformation; it must also safeguard its democratic traditions and institutions, Dr Amoako stressed this when delivering the keynote address at the second K.B. Amissah-Arthur Economic Forum in Accra last Friday.

Honour

The event, which was on the theme: Economic Policy Making in Ghana: Lessons Learnt and the Way Forward, was held to honour the memory of the late former Vice-President, Paa Kwesi Bekoe Amissah-Arthur.

It was attended by a number of personalities, including former President John Mahama and his 2020 running mate, Professor Naana Jane Opoku-Agyemang.

Also present were the wife of the late Vice-President, Matilda Amissah-Arthur, and their children; a former Minister of Finance, Seth Terkper; a former Minister of State at the Ministry of Finance, Moses Asaga; the Omanhene of Essikado Traditional Area, Nana Kobina Nketsia V; former Governors of the Bank of Ghana, Dr Henry Kofi Wampah and Dr Abdul-Nashiru Issahaku; the General Secretary of the National Democratic Congress (NDC), Fifi Kwetey; a leading member of the party, Goosie Tanoh, and the Chairman of the Christian Council of Ghana, Rt Rev. Dr Hilliard Dela Dogbe.

There were also three former Vice-Chancellors of the University of Ghana  Professors Akilakpa Sawyerr, Ivan Addae-Mensah and Ernest Aryeetey, among a section of students, mostly from the Department of Economics of the University of Ghana, which organised the forum in collaboration with the family of the late Vice-President.

Memories

Dr Amoako, a former Executive Secretary of the United Nations Economic Commission for Africa, said one of his most vivid memories of the late Vice-President was when they worked together at Senchi, almost 10 years ago when the country was facing economic challenges.

Together with Paa Kwesi and other political and development elite in Senchi, we spent three days on substantive discussions about what the future of our country should be.

We came out of Senchi with a consensus, but only among a privileged few, without enough buy-in from all political parties.

So the conversations and the agreements we made ended up as a footnote in history rather than a long-term strategy, he said, adding that the situation we face today may be even worse.

Dr Amoako said between 2000 and 2020, the country experienced 13 years of rapid growth, including six years of very rapid growth.

However, he added, growth alone was not enough to sustain long-term development and that there was the need for countries to transform their economies.

Despite that strong growth rate, Ghanas economy has suffered from falling productivity in the manufacturing sector and high vulnerability to global markets and commodity price shocks.

Its development has been marred by debt and energy crises, large trade and fiscal imbalances and a lack of consistent long-term planning, he said.

He said what was needed was another consensus which would be a true national consensus with broader stakeholder input and buy-in, especially among the youth, women and civic associations.

Dr Amoako cited the Compact for Ghanas Political and Economic Transformation, which was being spearheaded to build a true national consensus that was urgently needed.

The Ghana Compact aims to frame the future we want for Ghana by 2050.

It is a platform for setting a shared vision for our nation that will tackle our greatest challenges.

It is intended to put Ghana on a more secure path forward by bringing a better balance to our democratic process and more voices into our policy discussions, he said.

The Vice-Chancellor of the University of Ghana, Prof. Nana Aba Appiah Amfo, who chaired the forum, said as a nation, the country had made significant strides in its economic development although some challenges continued to persist.

It is through critical analysis, open dialogue and collaboration that we can chart a path towards sustainable growth and inclusive prosperity, she said.

Earlier, the Head of the Economics Department of the university, Prof. William Baah-Boateng, said his outfit was proud and happy to collaborate with the family of the former Vice-President to organise the forum in his memory.

During a panel session, a Senior Lecturer at the Economics Department, Dr Emmanuel A. Cudjoe, said the history of economics was important, particularly because you do not want to move forward without recognising where it all began.

The Director of Research at the Bank of Ghana, Dr Philip Abradu-Otoo, who was also on the panel, said, among other things, the central bank had a communications department that picked up issues that went on in the media, and that those were taken into consideration to inform policy.

Another Senior Lecturer at the Economics Department, Dr Agyapomaa Gyeke-Dako, said there was the need to develop the agriculture sector very well to enable it to feed the manufacturing sector through value addition.

The Managing Director of Petra Trust Company Limited, Kofi D. Fynn, said with the country being a political economy, there was no way one could be a private sector participant without engaging with the government.

Two students who distinguished themselves at the Master of Philosophy (MPhil) and Doctor of Philosophy (PhD) levels  Deborah Annang and Josephine Baako-Amponsah, were presented with the Ghana cedi equivalents of $2,000 and $4,000 by the family of the late Vice-President.
Solving infertility with technology: Varsity don raises ethical issues

Doreen Andoh & Yaa Kuffour Jul - 03 - 2023 , 06:29

Technologies for engineering humans through man-made wombs have been identified as a solution to the growing infertility rate in Africa.

The Vice-Chancellor of the University of Johannesburg, Prof. Letlhokwa George Mpedi, however, said in the 21st century, there were ethical and legal implications of reframing the creation of humans that needed to be addressed to make adaptation efficient.

He was speaking at a public lecture organised by the University of Professional Studies, Accra (UPSA), under the auspices of the Office of the Vice-Chancellor in Accra last Friday.

The lecture was on the topic: Artificial Reproductive Technology: Ethical and Legal Considerations through an African Prism.

Prof. Mpedi said research suggested that Africas constantly and rapidly changing lifestyle was fundamentally impacting fertility, adding that infertility had emerged as a medico-socio-cultural challenge.

He said there were also challenges in the cultural, religious and societal perception of infertility and its treatment, which was pervasive in many parts of Africa.

Limited knowledge

That, Prof. Mpedi said, was largely the impact of limited knowledge of the public, patients and even healthcare providers in some cases.

The continent also has a higher prevalence of sexually transmitted diseases, postpartum and post-abortion infections, which contribute to both male and female infertility.

At its core, infertility is a human rights issue that demands attention.

In recent years, there has been remarkable progress in the field of reproductive technologies.

These technologies include medical procedures used primarily to address infertility.

As we venture into our own brave new world, we must do so with a framework in place.

We find ourselves in the midst of the fourth industrial revolution, defined by great disruption to technology, industries and society, which calls for changes to policy and our approaches, he said.

Prof. Mpedi said the adaptation to those technologies, while helpful and timely, would require the legal fraternity to keep up with developments in the space and respond accordingly.

He mentioned the technologies to include ectogenesis, the process of growing a foetus outside of the human body, which he said could help those who could not get pregnant and could save the lives of premature babies.

Ethical frameworks

While there were broad ethical frameworks in place, Prof. Mpedi said -African countries needed to get more specific legal and ethical frameworks as those technologies shifted from theory to practice.

He said the World Health Organisation (WHO) reported that around 300,000 deaths happened due to pregnancy complications while premature babies born earlier than 22 weeks had no hope of survival.

This technology certainly represents an exciting new frontier for pregnancy and for those seeking alternative routes to conception.

However, if this is to be an enduring reality, we must ask the difficult legal and ethical questions and perhaps begin to consider our responses, he said.

Prof. Mpedi said ethically, there were concerns that the technology went against the very process of human procreation.

For example, as we research further into the field and consider human subjects, does this technology satisfy the four principles of bioethics: autonomy, beneficence, no maleficence, and justice?

From a legal standpoint, currently, there are limited ethical conditions and human embryos can only be grown for 14 days.

The 14th day is the point at which a spherical embryo starts to form a body and when cells begin taking on characteristics.

With more research and acceptance of this process, how will the law adapt?

Firstly, pregnancy laws will need to be reformed.

We also have to consider how we approach abortions, for instance.

Could this technology be used to amend abortion laws? he said.

Gene editing

He also mentioned gene editing as one of such technologies to be considered and said it involved the alteration of DNA through removal, insertion or replacement in the human genome, with the potential to combat genetic disease or optimise health.

He said already, it had been established that gene editing could treat sickle cell disease effectively.

Similarly, embryo donation or adoption  the legal adoption of embryos that have been donated and frozen by families who have undergone in-vitro fertilisation (IVF), a technique in which an egg is removed from the woman's ovaries and fertilised with sperm in a laboratory  should also be considered.

This represents a new frontier for adoption.

There are some similarities between embryo adoption and infant adoption, he said.
Toni Aubynn re-elected Apex Bank board chair

daily graphic Jul - 03 - 2023 , 13:18

Dr Toni Kwesi Aubynn has been re-elected to chair the Board of Directors of ARB Apex Bank, the mini-central bank of rural and community banks (RCBs).

Dr Aubynn, who has already served a three-year term on the board was re-elected for another term at a meeting of the board in Accra last Monday

He first joined the board of ARB Apex Bank in January 2021 as a representative of the Western Region Chapter of the Association of Rural Banks (ARB), where he serves as a Council Member and Board Chairman of Amenfiman Rural Bank.

He has served as director and chairman of the Board of Directors of Amenfiman Rural Bank for several years, where he helped to grow the Wassa-Akropong-based bank with modest fortunes into the RCB with the biggest balance sheet and branch network.

He has been instrumental in structuring the recent strategic plan of ARB Apex Bank, which has sought to reposition the supervisory bank as strategic partner for RCBs in the country.

Also, Dr Aubynn has ensured that modern and information and communications technology (ICT)-enabled services are introduced by all rural banks in the country to provide value and convenience to the more than six million customers of the RCBs.

ARB Apex Bank is headquartered at Ridge in Accra and has 10 other operational centres in the regions.

It provides cash management services, training, advisory, mini-regulation and provision of payment instruments to third parties on behalf of member banks.

About Toni Aubynn

Recently called to the Ghana Bar, Dr Aubynn has over 20 years of experience in senior management, spanning the mining industry (both gold mining, oil and gas).

He has demonstrable management experience in both policy formulation and regulations as Chief Executive Officer (CEO) of the Minerals Commission; the CEO of the Ghana Chamber of Mines; the Human Resources and Corporate Affairs Management in his role as Director, Corporate Affairs at Tullow Ghana Limited; the Head, Corporate Affairs and Social Development of Goldfields Ghana Limited and the Head of Human Resources and Local Affairs of Abosso Goldfields Limited.

Dr Aubynns expertise in mining policy formulation has been sought for in projects in Cameroon, Tanzania, Haiti and the Republic of Congo.

He also has banking experience, having worked with the erstwhile Ghana Cooperative Bank.

Education

Dr Aubynn holds a PhD in International Development from the University of Tampere, and was a PhD Fellow at the United Nations University, IAS, Tokyo. He was awarded a DBA (Honoris Causa), Oil and Gas by the Commonwealth University of London and was recently admitted to the Ghana Bar.
Farouk Aliu Mahama supports Bawumia 2024 campaign with new branded pickup

Kweku Zurek Politics Jul - 02 - 2023 , 14:35

Alhaji Farouk Aliu Mahama, the Member of Parliament for Yendi, has made a generous contribution to the 2024 Presidential Campaign of Vice President Dr. Mahamudu Bawumia. He recently donated a brand-new Mitsubishi pickup vehicle to aid Dr. Bawumia's campaign efforts.

As Dr. Bawumia seeks the flagbearer position of the NPP for the 2024 elections and campaign activities gain momentum, Farouk Aliu Mahama's donation serves to provide logistical support for the Bawumia 2024 Campaign. The vehicle will primarily be utilized in the Eastern Corridor of the country, encompassing constituencies such as Yendi, Bimbila, Zabzugu, Wulensi, Kpandai, and others.

To showcase his unwavering support, the Yendi MP has already branded the vehicle with eye-catching images of Dr. Bawumia and a prominent campaign slogan, "Next To Lead," prominently displayed on the car.

Mr. Aliu Mahama, who has established the Yendi Constituency as a stronghold for the NPP by securing resounding victories in the past two elections, has vowed to leverage his influence alongside other MPs to bolster support and secure victory for Dr. Bawumia in the upcoming NPP Primaries.
Parliament this week: Speaker swears in Gyakye Quayson Tuesday

Daniel Kenu Politics Jul - 03 - 2023 , 06:19

Barring any unforeseen circumstances, the Speaker of Parliament, Alban Kingsford Sumana Bagbin, will swear in the Member of Parliament-elect (MP-elect) for Assin North, James Gyakye Quayson.

The ceremony will take centre stage in this week's activities in Parliament with barely four weeks for the House to adjourn sine die.

The Speaker, on a visit to Daily Graphic last Thursday, indicated that the MP was billed to be sworn in that day but a letter from the Electoral Commission (EC) to the Speaker's office was delayed.

And following the absence of the Speaker on Friday, the ceremony has been pushed to Tuesday.

Mr Quayson, whose election as the MP for Assin North in the 2020 general election was declared unconstitutional by the Supreme Court which directed that his name should be expunged from the records of Parliament, won the Assin North by-poll conducted by the EC on Tuesday, June 27, this year.

He is expected to be sworn in by the Speaker of Parliament, Mr Bagbin as the House resumes sitting this week, beginning from Tuesday, July 4 to Friday, July 7, 2023.

Ministers

Beyond Quayson's swearing-in, the House is expected to host six ministers to respond to 54 questions.

They are, the Minister of Finance, Ken Ofori-Atta; the Minister of Education, Dr Yaw Osei Adutwum; the Minister of Health, Kwaku Agyeman-Manu; the Minister of Communications and Digitalisation, Ursula Owusu-Ekuful; the Minister of Roads and Highways, Kwasi Amoako- Attah, and the Minister of Youth and Sports, Mustapha Ussif.

Among the questions expected to be asked would be one by the MP for Tamale South and former Minority Leader, Haruna Iddrisu, on how much the government of Ghana owes various pension schemes, including the Social Security and National Insurance Trust (SSNIT).

Presenting the Business Statement last Friday for the week, the Majority Leader, Osei Kyei-Mensah-Bonsu, urged committees with referrals, particularly on some seven Bills, to expedite action on them.

Bills

The Bills are the Grains Development Authority Bill, 2022; the Wildlife Resources Management Bill, 2022; the Ghana Industrial Property Office Bill, 2023 and the Rent Bill, 2023.

The rest of the bills are the Budget Bill, 2023; the Criminal Offences (Amendment) Bill, 2022, and the National Petroleum Authority (Amendment) Bill, 2023.

Papers and Reports

The Majority Leader said the House might also admit statements from MPs, as well as papers and Reports from committees might be laid.

Among them is the report of the Auditor-General on the Public Accounts of Ghana  ministries, departments and other agencies for the financial year ending December 31, 2022.
As expected, Motorola launched its Razr 40 series in India with a big event in New Delhi (and we were there, you can watch the live stream). According to Prashanth Mani, Managing Director at Motorola Mobility India, 100% of the Motorola products sold in India are made in India and that includes the 2023 foldables as well.

The more advanced of the two, the Motorola Razr 40 Ultra, has a base price of 90,000, however, ICICI Bank offers 7,000 cashback if you use one of their credit cards to make the purchase. If you dont want to pay a lump sum, there is a 7,500 a month no cost EMI available. Carrier Jio is promising 15,000 worth of goodies (what that entails exactly will be posted by Jio itself).



Motorola Razr 40 Ultra prices for India

The vanilla Motorola Razr 40 will be 30% cheaper with a 60,000 base price and a 5,000 cashback offer from ICICI. You can get it with monthly installments of 5,000/month as well. Jios offer is valued at the same 15,000. Note that both models are configured with 8GB of RAM and 256GB storage (and there are no other options).



Motorola Razr 40 prices for India

You can find both phones on Motorolas official site  heres the Ultra and the vanilla model. Starting today you can also pre-book the Razr 40 Ultra on Amazon with a 999 deposit. Both models will become available on July 15.



Pre-booking for the Razr 40 Ultra is now live

For more details on the phones, check out our Razr 40 Ultra review (also on video) and we have a hands-on with the Razr 40 too.
Samsung will host the summer Unpacked event in Seoul, South Korea, and we expect to see two new foldables, a couple of tablets as well as the Watch6 and Watch6 Classic wearables.

The smartwatches have already leaked multiple times, and today another bit of info appeared online. Codenames and model numbers were revealed on Google Play Supported Devices, opening the doors for finding more details on the models in one month until they become official.

The Samsung Galaxy Watch6 with codename fresh6bs and model number SM-R930 is expected to be the 40 mm variant, while fresh6bl and SM-R940 is likely the 44 mm version. The Galaxy Watch6 Classic is dubbed wise6bs and SM-R950 for the 43 mm variant, while the 47 mm option is wise6bl and SM-R960.

According to earlier reports, these four models will actually be eight, as each will be available with and without LTE. Prices will start from 319 and go as high as 499, but not all models are expected to hit all Samsung markets. We will have final confirmation at the launch, rumored to take place in late July.

Via
Week 26 in review: Asus launches Zenfone 10, Xiaomi 13T lineup leaks, Snapdragon 4 Gen 2 becomes official

We send away the first half of 2023 with yet another batch of leaks and teasers. Xiaomi 13T series is on its way, and we saw some specs of the vanilla 13T and the 13T Pro.

Nothing is a brand that generates a lot of hype and we arent surprised a Glyph composer, developed jointly with EDM behemoths Swedish House Mafia, was one of the top stories of the past week. There was another, more interesting development around the new phone of Carl Peis company, as his team shared two teasers, revealing a flat panel and a transparent back that still keeps the signature LED lights.

Many Samsung fans are expecting the Summer Unpacked event, and the Galaxy Z Flip5 in a spy shot was a popular talk topic around the watercooler. A Galaxy S23 FE is also on its way, which is following the overall S23 design, but we are unsure whether it will be part of the event or have a separate launch.

Qualcomm released its latest chipset for affordable midrangers, the Snapdragon 4 Gen 2, and one of the first phones to get it is the Xiaomi Redmi Note 12R. The Zenfone 10 was finally introduced by Asus with improvements like wireless charging and a new gimbal.

Here are all the biggest stories from the past week:



Xiaomi 13T and 13T Pro detailed specs emerge Both phones will feature 144Hz AMOLED screens and 5,000 mAh batteries.





Snapdragon 4 Gen 2 unveiled: the first 4nm chip in the series supports faster RAM and storage The Gen 2 is also the first Snapdragon 4-series chip with 5G Release 16. Additionally, it has improved noise reduction and EIS for videos.





TCL NXTWEAR S review A big screen experience you can wear on your face.





Samsung unveils new Galaxy Buds2/Buds2 Pro Pokemon Edition Last year the company released a Poke Ball version of the Buds2, this special edition is themed after three popular Pokemon.





Nothing Phone (2) pre-orders in India start on June 29 Starting on Thursday you will be able to put down a small, refundable deposit on Flipkart to reserve a spot in the queue and get some perks.





Samsung Galaxy A25 5G renders leak It looks just like the A24 4G which launched back in April.





OnePlus 12 reportedly coming with improved cameras The phone is said to stick to an Oreo-shaped camera island.





Nokia G42 announced with Snapdragon 480+ and 50MP main cam HMD is also partnering with iFixit to bring repair guides and OEM repair parts for the device.





Oppo teases 64MP periscope camera on Reno 10 Pro+ in India The Reno10 series is coming to the Indian market as part of its global rollout.





nubia showcases Red Magic 8S Pro in official renders The phone looks like its predecessor, with minor design changes on the back.





Realme will unveil the Narzo 60 series on July 6, offers a peek at the design The design seems familiar, right? But there are some differences on the outside and there may be more differences on the inside.


As of Monday 1 p.m., the Guam Power Authority has officially restored power to 95% of all customers.

Another 200 customers had their services restored within the last 24 hours of the update.

Crews are conducting village sweeps to address the following:

Customers who were previously isolated pending more extensive repair

All lateral lines in each sector

Service to customers with completed inspection reports of repaired weather heads

Damaged meters and transformers

Emergencies are still addressed on demand.

Over the next one to three days, GPA will focus on the following areas for Phase III restoration:

Northern Sector

Various areas in Dededo, including those at and around Ysengsong

Several areas in Yigo, including those around East Gayinero, Route 15, Taitano area and Mt. Santa Rosa.

Central Sector

Mangilao, Pagat, Rte 15

Mongmong-Toto-Maite

Tamuning-Harmon-Tumon

Hagatna

Ordot-Chalan Pago

Southern Sector

Inalahan

Malesso

Areas of focus are subject to change and may include additional sector areas or villages that are not listed based on the progress of repair and restoration.

Phase IV restoration begins about 2 weeks after Phase III is substantially completed. Specific issues to be addressed in Phase IV restoration includes streetlight repair/replacement and power quality issues.

Repairs to 115kV transmission lines, both 1 and 2, are progressing.

As a result, GPA advised the public that in order to allow for the Snohomish PUD Washington crew to make repairs, certain distribution feeder lines need to be secured.

The following affected areas in Piti will have their power interrupted from 10 a.m. to 4 p.m.:

Along Route 1 from GSA to Polaris Point entrance

Part of Route 11A, Port Authority Beach, Atlantis Area

Route 6 from Route 1 intersection to Halsey Drive, Nimitz Estates, Mamma Sandy Street, Ocean Drive and surrounding areas.

Turner Road may also experience an outage from 10 a.m. to 6 p.m.

Crews will need to close off one or more lanes in the affected areas during these times, so motorists should expect traffic delays as work is being performed in these areas.

Our priority is to restore energy back into your homes and businesses and restore the islandwide power system online at full capacity, stated GPA. GPA linemen and support crews are working night and day for you, your families, and your businesses. Si Yuos Maase for your patience and support. We apologize for any inconvenience this may cause the public, but repairs are necessary for a successful recovery.
Thomas Benavente comes from Saipan in the Commonwealth of the Northern Mariana Islands. He enjoys talking to the public to share the island spirit. He can be reached through (671) 483-1440 or tbenavente@guampdn.com.
Former Gov. Carl T.C. Gutierrez is the president and CEO of Guam Visitors Bureau, Guam Permit Czar, and chairman of the Governors Economic Strategy Council. Send comments or questions to GVB at

communityrelations@visitguam.org.
Dave Lotz is a vocal advocate for protecting Guams unique heritage, a knowledgeable and long-time hiking enthusiast and environmental advocate, and critic of inept government. He has been a resident of Guam since 1970 and retired from the Guam Department of Parks and Recreation, Andersen AFB Environmental Flight and the National Park Service.




Haiti - UN/PNH : Possible arrival of a multinational support force





Sunday, July 2nd, 2023, Frantz Elbe, the Acting Director General of the National Police of Haiti (PNH), accompanied by members of the High Command, met with Ms. Rosemary A. DiCarlo Assistant Secretary General for Political Affairs of the Organization of the United Nations (UN) who was accompanied by Maria Isabel Salvador Head of the United Nations Integrated Office in Haiti (BINUH) and Ulrika Richardson, the Resident Coordinator of the UN in Haiti.



This meeting, which took place around several points, including the security situation in Haiti and the possible arrival of a multinational force in support of the PNH.



Frantz Elbe, took the opportunity to make an overall presentation of the security state of the country, the results obtained by the PNH in the fight against armed gangs and the challenges encountered by the police institution in establishing a climate of Peace, across the country.



At the end of this meeting, Director General Elbe stressed the importance of strengthening the operational capacity of the PNH in order to continue to fight effectively against organized crime in all its forms.



Ms. Rosemary A. DiCarlo reiterated the commitment of the UN to provide its full support in the restoration of peace in Haiti.



HL/ HaitiLibre






















Haiti - Tourism : Haiti elected to represent the Americas region at the UNWTO Committee on Tourism and Competitiveness





Luz Kurta Cassandra Francois, the Minister of Tourism who participated in Quito, Ecuador, along with twenty other Ministers of Tourism from the Caribbean and the Americas, at the 68th of the Commission of the countries of America, (CAM) of the he World Tourism Organization (UNWTO) has been unanimously elected with Uruguay to represent the Americas region for four years on the UNWTO Committee on Tourism and Competitiveness.



This election, which marks the end of the isolation of the Republic of Haiti in international debates relating to world tourism, will allow our country to be able not only to share its experience in this area but also to participate in the development of policies to promote competitiveness in tourism businesses and learn from the experience of other countries in the region which, despite the problems of insecurity they face, have been able to take advantage of World tourism.



Minister Francois during this summit also signed Haiti's adherence to the International Code for the Protection of Tourists during this event.



On the sidelines of this 68th Meeting, Minister Francois took the opportunity to discuss with Gustavo Santos, UNWTO Regional Director for the Americas, the importance of introducing into the debates the problems linked to certain threats such as wars, terrorism, banditry... faced by the countries of the region as a brake on their competitiveness.



The two parties have agreed to submit this request to the Executive Council of the UNWTO and to work for a meeting to be held in Haiti around the theme "Tourism and Security".



Minister Francois also obtained from Director Santos the promise of the implementation in the very near future of a short-term training program for the benefit of 500 young people calling for work in the sectors of the tourism sector.



Topics relating to Haiti's connectivity with the rest of the world and the exorbitant and inexplicable prices of plane tickets between Haiti and the United States https://www.haitilibre.com/en/news-39352-haiti-flash-american-airlines-reduces-its-flights-and-explodes-its-prices-port-au-prince-miami.html were also discussed.



S/ HaitiLibre


















By Aisha Adnan | Published on 2023/07/02

"Romance By Romance" is the latest web drama here to put you on a ride filled with laughter, heart breaks and heart-fluttering romance. The show stars Lee Eun-bi, Kim Jin-woo-VII and Cha Hun as leads.

Advertisement

Jeong Ha-yoon is a hopeless romantic with a terrible record of relationships- none of her relationships ever surpassed the 100th day anniversary. This curse had made her more desperate to find a stable relationship.



Till one day, she meets Nam Tae-ryeong (Cha Hun) and she is certain that he was the one! Until the 70th day of their relationship. He announces that he wants to break up!

Here is how Ha-yoon devices plan to prevent break-up and low-key. We find some of it quite authentic! I mean, we all wanted to stop our beloved from going away at some point. Here is a guide on how to prevent your break up!- a guide from "Romance By Romance"!

Step 1- Tell Him That You Do Not Agree To Breaking Up

If starting a relationship requires mutual content, then so should end it! Or so said Jeong Ha-yoon.

Ha-yoon had met a tarot card reader before, who told her that she should make her relationship last at least a 100 days before finding stability. But on the 70th day, Tae-ryeong wishes to part ways.

At a moment like this, one has two options: to keep your pride and agree or honestly state that you do not agree with it. Truthfully, it's better to show your disapproval and try to make them stay rather than regret it later.

Step 2- Make A Break Up Grace Period Contract

Ha-yoon was adamant about delaying the breakup. She needed just one more month because she was sure that he was the one. She comes up with the idea of a Breakup Grace Period. She said that she needed time to consider, till then they should continue dating.The two make up a contract which states that they go on a date twice a week but can also distance themselves. If they find someone else in the meantime, they break up immediately. Both Ha-yoon and Tae-ryeong had a share in making the commands.

Step 3- Start Distancing Yourself So They Realise Your Importance.

This advice is actually from Kang-jin (Kim Jin-woo-VII). He noticed how easily Ha-yoon was swooned by her boyfriend and quickly acted when it came to him. Like replying to a message.

He immediately stopped her, staring that she must pretend it to be hard to get, so he misses her more. This actually begins to work and Tae-ryeong finds himself waiting for her reply.

Step 4- Make Him Jealous By Having Another Man By Your Side

After being able to delay the breakup, Ha-yoon's next step was to win Tae-ryeong back so he didn't leave her after a month. She develops a plan to make him jealous- only then will he realise that he really loved her! She asks her old buddy Kang-jin to help her with the job. All he has to do is flirt with her. And as if luck was on her side, Kang-jin gets appointed in the same company as her.This does come out successful as one of the things that irked Tae-ryeong the most was seeing her with someone else.Do you think these steps will work? Only the last episodes of "Romance By Romance" can tell us!



By Aisha Adnan

___________

"Romance By Romance" is directed by Han Sung-deok, written by Kang Min-chae, and features Lee Eun-bi, Kim Jin-woo-VII, Cha Hun, Dong Hyun-bae, Baek Hyun-joo, Kim Min-chul. Broadcasting information in Korea: 2023/06/07~2023/06/28, Wed 16:00 on .
By Kris Testori

Carolina blue skies and warm temperatures welcomed hundreds of attendees to the inaugural Good Fields Appalachian Food & Farms Festival.

Robert Gray Shipley, Jr. pictured with his wife Virginia, is the co-founder and host of the Good Fields Appalachian Food & Farms Festival.

Top chefs from across the state took part, preparing samples with Shipley Farms and other local farm products. The chef lineup included 2019 NCRLA Chef of the Year Steven Goff from Ashevilles Tastee Diner, as well as several James Beard award nominees and Chef of the Year finalists.

The festival was planned to highlight the regions rich agricultural heritage, said Gray Shipley, a fifth-generation farmer at Shipley Farms and one of the festival organizers. The festival theme, Local Food Elevated, was intended to bring attention to the decline in family farms and agricultural land in the High Country and North Carolina. In addition to top chefs cooking up their specialties, numerous local breweries, wineries, coffee roasters, and fermentors participated. In the next few years, organizers intend for the event to grow to a multi-day summer festival modeled after other events across the region, with dinners, music, tastings, demos, and other events occurring at farms and local restaurants across the high country each summer.

North Carolina ranks second in the country for farmland projected to be lost to development in the next two decades. To address this issue, some of the proceeds from the festival will be allocated to programs working on the ground to support local food and farms. A percentage of proceeds will go to the Appalachian Sustainable Agriculture Project, Piedmont Culinary Guild, the NC Choices initiative of the Center for Environmental Farming Systems, and the Watauga High School chapter of Future Farmers of America.

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High Country Writers welcomes N.Y. Times best-selling author Sharyn McCrumb as a speaker for their regular program meeting on Thursday, July 13, at 10 a.m. at the Watauga County Public Library.

Sharyn McCrumb

Sharyn McCrumb is best known for her Appalachian Ballad novels, including the New York Times best sellers The Ballad of Tom Dooley, The Ballad of Frankie Silver, and Ghost Riders, which won the Wilma Dykeman Award for Literature from the East Tennessee Historical Society and the national Audie Award for Best Recorded Book. Her current novels are Prayers the Devil Answers, the story of the last public hanging ever carried out in the United States, and The Unquiet Grave, the story of West Virginias Greenbrier Ghost.

What had started out as a way to keep isolated people entertained during the pandemic became by popular demand a book of the collected adventures of Marvin and his raccoon family. This collection of stories is richer and more complex than those in the first volume. The Marvin Chronicles established the world of the Blue Ridge Mountain raccoon family and introduced the characters. In this new collection, The Marvin Chronicles II: The Glorrifats  Adventures and Legends, author Sharyn McCrumb branches out to an exploration of what the raccoons believed and felt. In the history and folklore of the tribe, she records their attempts to make sense of the natural world, and to honor the memory of those who came before them.

HCW meeting are co-sponsored by the Watauga County Library and are free and open to the public.

Courtesy of High Country Writers.

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Image Credit IMDB.

By Bob Garver

It has been 15 years since famed archeologist/adventurer Indiana Jones (Harrison Ford) was onscreen in Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull and even longer since he was onscreen in a decent movie. Fans were worried if that creative flop would be the last theyd ever see of Indy, but now he has a second chance to make a last impression. With new director James Mangold at the helm, I suppose there was a chance that this franchise could have dug itself even deeper into the hole, but Im pleased to say that this entry is not an embarrassment. Its too bad I cant say anything better than that, but its more than I could say for the last movie.

An opening sequence sees a younger Indy (using not-perfect but not-distracting digital de-aging effects on Ford) rescue an artifact from Nazis at the tail end of World War II with the help of bumbling colleague Basil (Toby Jones). This sequence takes place on a moving train, so there are seemingly endless opportunities to throw bad guys off screaming. Its fun, if a bit overlong, which can be said of all the action sequences in this movie.

Flash forward to 1969. Indy is in his twilight years, and it seems the world has left him behind. His wife Marion (Karen Allen) has left him, his neighbors wake him up with loud rock music, he cant keep his students attention in class, and the university is forcing him into retirement. The only pleasant surprise in his day is a visit from Helena (Pheobe Waller-Bridge), the late Basils daughter and his goddaughter. She has a proposal involving the Dial of Destiny, the artifact Indy and her father rescued from the Nazis. Hes not up for another adventure, but he can help her in simple fashion, and this ironically gets him pulled into an even bigger adventure.

It turns out that the duplicitous Helena just wants to steal the Dial and sell it. Shes being tailed by the CIA and renowned scientist Jurgen Voller (Mads Mikkelsen), a Nazi leftover who knows the Dials true power. Indy just wants the Dial to be safe, and if that includes protecting Helena and her kid sidekick Teddy (Ethann Isodore) and stopping the bad guys, then so be it.

The rest of the movie is mostly just an elaborate treasure hunt where Indy and Helena navigate clues, booby traps, and conflicting loyalties in various cities, with Voller usually showing up to get everyone into an action sequence. Old friend Sallah (Jonathan Rhys-Davies) shows up along the way, as does Renaldo (Antonio Banderas), a diver Indy enlists for an underwater mission. The films climax sees Voller try to exploit the time-travel capabilities of the Dial. As evil as he is, I had a laugh at the idea that Vollers master plan is technically the same thing that every time traveler wants to do.

Until the time-travel conclusion (which is at least handled with more dignity than those aliens from Crystal Skull), Dial of Destiny is just perfectly average for Indiana Jones. Certain visual components look a little too polished to be natural, but otherwise a familiar sense of fun is still in play. Indys wit is as quick as ever, and of course any character played by Waller-Bridge is going to be pretty sharp too. The charm of 1981s Raiders of the Lost Ark is never quite matched, but that may be too high a standard. Some will say that putting a character as iconic as Indiana Jones in a just-okay movie is a disservice to his cinematic legacy, but I choose to focus on the upside of this movie being a satisfactory end note for the character compared to what it would have been otherwise.

Grade: B-

Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny is rated PG-13 for sequences of violence and action, language and smoking. Its running time is 154 minutes.

Contact Bob Garver at rrg251@nyu.edu.

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We're a family of seven living in Georgia where Andrew's working as a professor at GSU. You can read more about us here
Finnish President Sauli Niinisto and Biden will first sit down bilaterally and later with prime ministers from the Nordics as part of the third ever USNordic Leaders Summit in Helsinki, the first having taken place in 2013 in Sweden and the second in 2016 in the US.

The heads of state will discuss topics linked to the deepening environmental, security and technological co-operation between the US and Nordics.

This does reflect the fact that the US considers its Nordic relations relatively important, Niinisto was quoted saying to reporters in his official residence in Helsinki on Sunday by Helsingin Sanomat.

Niinisto said he told then-Swedish Prime Minister Stefan Lofven in 2021 that it might be time to hold the next leaders summit shortly, but the preparations were put on hold due to the Russian invasion of Ukraine and separate meetings with President Biden. The summit was ultimately confirmed with the US in late 2022, with all parties agreeing to it in January 2023.

The summit takes place in conjunction with Bidens visit to Europe. Biden will fly to Helsinki directly from Vilnius, after attending the Nato Summit in the Lithuanian capital on 1112 July.

The USNordic summit will be attended by Swedish Prime Minister Ulf Kristersson, Norwegian Prime Minister Jonas Gahr Stre, Danish Prime Minister Mette Frederiksen and Icelandic Prime Minister Katrin Jakobsdottir.



Niinisto was on Sunday asked whether Finnish Prime Minister Petteri Orpo (NCP) will participate in the summit.

Now that were seemingly once again dwelling on the line-up, Id remind [that there are] those who were terribly uneasy that the Finnish two-plate policy isnt understood around the world  because it seems like the same parties are now strongly of the view that we have to have the plates, he stated, referring to the distribution of duties in the realm of foreign and security policy between the president and prime minister.

Were trying to consider the guests, who may find it slightly odd that one country is speaking with two voices.

Aleksi Teivainen  HT
Regarding this particular situation: Ive previously got quite a bit of criticism for intervening too much, but what Id now say is that its at least very embarrassing for the government  at least, Niinisto stated to MTV at Suomi-Areena in Pori on Friday.

THE RESIGNATION of Minister of Economic Affairs Vilhelm Junnila (PS) is at least partly attributable to remarks by President Sauli Niinisto , gauge researchers interviewed by Helsingin Sanomat.

He also underscored that the government must make sure that its policy decisions both warrant the respect of western countries and align with the values of Finland.

Drawing attention to that aspect is definitely important, he said.

Junnila announced his decision to relinquish his ministerial duties later on Friday, after days of considerable media scrutiny over, first, his thinly veiled references to fascist themes and, later, remarks he had made in the Parliament House.

Johanna Vuorelma, a political scientist at the University of Helsinki, on Saturday told Helsingin Sanomat that the president commenting on the situation was at least a major impetus for the resignation.

The president has a lot of authority and enjoys broad respect. He doesnt comment too frequently on everyday political issues. Even though he chose his words carefully in this case, the fact that he personally commented [on the situation] indicates that hes been concerned about the governments ability to function, she analysed.

Another significant factor, she added, is that at the end of last week the criticism was no longer coming exclusively from the opposition parties and Swedish Peoples Party, but also from the Christian Democrats  the coalition partner that in terms of values appears to align the best with the Finns Party.

The criticism takes on new meanings when its joined by other than the original parties. The president naturally has an exceptional role in this, and also parties listen to what he says very carefully, said Vuorelma.

Paivi Rasanen, a former chairperson of the Christian Democrats, on Thursday asked Junnila to account for a written question he submitted to the government in the Parliament House in 2019. Junnila suggested in the question that the country should do its part to combat the climate crisis by promoting climate abortions in Africa, describing this as a great leap for humankind.

Tapio Raunio, a professor of political science at Tampere University, on Saturday estimated that it would have been difficult but not entirely impossible for the president to not comment on the issue when asked directly by MTV.

Considering Niinistos message, he couldve also refused to comment and said he wont comment on the governments actions, Raunio said to Helsingin Sanomat.

Hanna Wass, a lecturer in political science at the University of Helsinki, viewed that Niinistos comments also stemmed from a concern about a lack of leadership within the government.

The president is certainly a value leader and can, in that sense, use his voice also in domestic policy. In my opinion, this was more about using the emergency brake and making the frustrated exclamation that enough is enough, you have to draw the line somewhere, she commented to Helsingin Sanomat.

The key question now is whats Orpos ability to lead. You cant go on like this, that you dont shape up until the president makes a statement.

Junnila stepping down has been interpreted as a blow to both Orpo and Riikka Purra, the chairperson of the Finns Party.

Orpo on Friday stated that he is pleased about the conclusion drawn by Junnila, describing it as the only possible conclusion only two days after he had backed the controversy-embroiled minister in a motion of no confidence.

He explained his about-face by saying that new information emerged between Wednesday and Friday.

I do think that the governments able to function, he added.

Purra, in turn, had reportedly threatened to pull her party from the ruling coalition if Junnila had to resign. On Friday, she lauded Junnila for looking after the interests of Finland: As the accusations weighed on him, Junnila had the strength to see the big picture and put Finlands interests above everything else. Thanks to Vilhelm. He demonstrated that he stands taller than many of those who criticised him.

She also reiterated her demand that the government must consolidate its ranks.

The Finns Party is ready to work for Finland. It cant be done in the way weve just seen, she emphasised. Im stating this as forcefully as I can: this government either works together or it doesnt work at all.

Both Vuorelma and Wass predicted that the resignation is unlikely to do away with all of the friction within the ruling four-party coalition. The criticism, they both stressed, ultimately arose from more than a single cabinet member and his alleged sympathies to the radical right.

Minister of the Interior Mari Rantanen (PS), for example, has made references to replacement theory, a predominantly white far-right conspiracy. She is hardly the only senior member of the populist right-wing party who has resorted to rhetoric that is hostile to immigration and minorities, reminded Vuorelma and Wass.

Assuming that problems linked to the Finns Partys duty to govern can be solved with personnel changes is too optimistic an interpretation, Wass stated to Helsingin Sanomat.

Many in Finland, she added, have been too naive about the Finns Party: Weve been hush-hush and been ashamed of the kind of party the Finns Party is and wanted to see it as a homely, soft populist version of the European radical right. The interpretation has widely been that the party could be tamed by giving it a role in the government.

The Finns Party has also failed to reject the views of Junnila, highlighted Vuorelma.

Purra has mentioned that they have full confidence in Junnila and that they dont differ in any way ideologically. Junnilas remarks have been taken as humour and at no point has [the party] condemned his remarks. It tells that Junnila represents something that is not unusual but the ideological thinking of the Finns Party.

Aleksi Teivainen  HT
Teknologia 23, scheduled for 7th to 9th November, will be held at the Helsinki Expo and Convention Centre.

Finland is gearing up for significant investments in the hydrogen industry in the upcoming years. Hydrogen technology presents solutions for carbon-neutral energy production and expediting the green transition. The hydrogen industry will be a key focus at the Teknologia 23 event, taking place from 7th to 9th November at the Helsinki Expo and Convention Centre.

Hydrogen has been chosen as one of the four main discussion topics at the event, alongside the green transition, supply networks, and artificial intelligence. The hydrogen industry will be explored from various perspectives during the event.

"Hydrogen has the potential to reduce industrial emissions, enabling the industry to decrease its carbon footprint while increasing its carbon handprint. Several hydrogen-related projects are already underway, with an increasing number expected in the future. Hydrogen can significantly enhance industrial exports," says Matti Malkamaki, a hydrogen expert and founder of Hycamite.

While hydrogen is currently a topical issue in the industry and its societal importance is growing, it is not entirely new.

"Hydrogen has been used in Finnish industry since the 1910s. With the green transition, its significance has recently increased as the reduction of industrial emissions has become a priority. The potential of hydrogen has also caught the attention of political decision-makers, with the new Finnish government's program including many positive aspects related to hydrogen," explains Malkamaki.

Malkamaki will deliver a speech titled "The Hydrogen Revolution - What Opportunities Does It Give Us?" on Wednesday, 8th November, at the Teknologia 23 event. Hydrogen will also have its dedicated thematic area at the event.

Teknologia 23 Highlights Innovators and Future Employees

Apart from the program covering key topics and current phenomena in the technology industry, the Teknologia 23 event will host two competitions focused on industrial innovations, with an emphasis on start-ups and robotics.

The start-up competition, now in its third edition, aims to showcase new and significant technological solutions. The 10,000 prize, donated by the Finnish Fair Foundation, will be awarded for a noteworthy, creative, and innovative technological solution. Entries for the competition can be submitted on the event website until 31st August 2023.

The Amazing Robots competition, targeted at university students, seeks to increase the visibility and appeal of information technology, robotics, and artificial intelligence. The competition requires participants to create a robot that performs something interesting, with teams specifying what makes their robot unique. The winner of this competition will also receive a 10,000 prize. Registration for the competition is available through the event website.

On the first day of the event, 7th November, the Employer of the Future theme day will be held, targeting students. This day provides an opportunity for students from different universities to explore job prospects in the field. It is also a valuable platform for exhibiting companies to share information about current and future job opportunities in the sector.

In addition to the diverse program and competitions, the event will feature an extensive exhibition with nearly 400 exhibitors in the field. Teknologia 23 will culminate in an evening event on Wednesday, 8th November. The full program for the event will be published in August on the website www.teknologia23.fi.

HT
ABOUT 70 people attended a clothes swap as part of Henleys Great Big Green Week.

The Swaparama Razzmatazz was held at the new Green Room in Market Place, with the space being donated.

Organiser Gemma Birch said: Everyone loved the concept and the new items they got to go home with. The focus was on sustainability and repurposing so people got items out of their wardrobe they didnt wear anymore and swapped them for some they would. Its about the fourth swap Ive done. Weve got some regulars and there are always some new people. Theres a sense of people thinking more about how they purchase.

Three students from The Henley College put on a display.

Ms Birch said: One guy had made a jacket out of denim jeans. It was all hand-sewn and amazing. One had upcycled clothes into an entire outfit and another had painted bleach on T-shirts to create a beautiful artwork.

Any proceeds will go to MotherSisterDaughter, which Ms Birch set up last year to support Ukrainian refugees.
South Africa: Apply for your water and sanitation bursary

The Department of Water and Sanitation says it has made available comprehensive bursaries for the 2024 academic year to Grade 12 learners who plan to pursue studies related to their department.

The bursaries target learners with outstanding academic performance, financial need and the relevant skills set in the water and sanitation sector.

Our bursaries are comprehensive. They cover full tuition fees, accommodation and food as per university guidance, books and stationery allowance and a monthly stipend, said the department.

In turn, the department will provide employment contracts during which the bursars get relevant workplace exposure and additional training until they are ready to register as professionals with their relevant professional bodies.

The bursary programme targets previously disadvantaged and impoverished persons from poverty-stricken and rural communities. Students with disabilities are also encouraged to apply.

The bursary applications, which are now open, will close on 30 November 2023.

The department will consider applications only for first-year students studying towards the following qualifications:

 BSc/BEng in Civil; Mechanical and Electrical

 BSc in Hydrology; Geohydrology; Environmental Management; Project Management, Environmental Sciences

 Environmental and Water Sciences

 BSc (Hons) in Hydrology; Geohydrology; Environmental Management; Project Management, Environmental Sciences

 Environmental and Water Sciences

 National Diploma/BEng Tech in Civil Engineering, Mechanical Engineering; Electrical Engineering (Heavy Current)

 Water Care and Environmental Management

Bursary application forms can be sent by email to bursaries@dws.gov.za.

For more information, the matrics are encouraged to visit the departments website and official social media pages.  SAnews.gov.za

This story has been published on: 2023-07-03. To contact the author, please use the contact details within the article.
Campus Binge is a student-led startup which aims to facilitate the transition from school to college life. College is an exciting chapter in one's life, something that almost everyone has, is or will go through in their lifetime.

In India, nearly 1.2 cr students graduate class XIIth and make the shift to college. Up to 3.7 cr students study in colleges in various undergraduate and postgraduate courses. This population is expected to rise to 14 cr by 2030, as per Higher Education in India: Vision 2030, EY. 80% of them are migrant student population- students who travel from City A to City B for higher studies.

This is a huge change in one's life. There is a massive information gap between your average school student and a college student. Every child graduating from class XIIth wants to connect with a college senior- to understand more about the institute, culture and city life, and thus make an informed decision. With no existing platforms to connect the two, Campus Binge aims to bridge this gap.

Transforming to new heights

With the introduction of the New Education Policy of 2020, flexible streams have popped up. Flexibility increases complexity, and thus the need for information. The Campus Binge community connects students at the +2 stage with college students. Once the student is in a new city, with the help of their college chapters and teams, they provide students with a parallel college experience by conducting events, trips, workshops and more.

Based in Bangalore, the community offers various interactive features like discussion forums, and interest-based groups, and enables students to connect with their peers both academically and socially. College is a time to explore a multitude of opportunities, both within and outside the classroom. Campus Binge serves as a hub for discovering various extracurricular activities, internships, volunteer opportunities, and campus events. Navigating the challenges of student life, Campus Binge understands this and offers a range of resources to support students in various aspects of their lives. CB positions itself as every students ultimate big brother in college.

The Student Economy & Puzzles Living

The student economy in India is nearly a 60 Billion dollar market, and with all the government policies and demographics, it is expected to triple in the next 7 years. Once a student shifts to college, Campus Binge monetises them through various revenue models like accommodation, merchandising, hyperlocal tie-ups and more. Puzzles Living, Campus Binges housing brand, currently operates 700 beds and 10 buildings in Bangalore. In partnership with local PG operators, they have established a student-friendly accommodation at 99% occupancy.

Housing helps us monetise the major chunk of the student economy and also establish offline hubs for our community. In 2023, we look to expand our college chapters to other institutes in Bangalore, thus setting up our businesses there by the 2024 academic season. Once the Bangalore student economy is set up, by January next year, we will start setting up our chapters outside of Bangalore, targeting student cities like Pune, Delhi and more, said Rishitabh Thapliyal, Founder of Campus Binge.

The Future

Rishitabh graduated from Ramjas College, University of Delhi in 2022. Having started Campus Binge in his second year during the covid-lockdown, Rishitabh feels that the early start has given him a lot of learning but there is still a long way to go.

Recognised by University of Delhi and NMIMS Mumbai, Campus Binge featured in the Top 10 Startups 2021 by EO Global Student Entrepreneur Awards. Bootstrapped and profitable, Campus Binge looks to touch 150K $ in revenue by next year and will look to raise funds in the near future when they fuel their national expansion.

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.
As much as 76 per cent of the 2,000 notes in circulation have been returned to banks, mostly through deposits, the Reserve Bank of India said on Monday. A woman holds  2000 notes as she exchanges demonetised notes at a bank in Chennai.(AFP File Photo)

On May 19, RBI announced withdrawal of 2,000 notes in circulation and gave public time till September 30 to either deposit the currency notes in their bank accounts or get them exchanged.

"According to the data received from the banks, the total value of 2,000 bank notes received back from circulation after the announcement on May 19 is 2.72 lakh crore up to June 30, 2023.

"Consequently, 2,000 bank notes in circulation as at the close of business on June 30 stood at 0.84 lakh crore," the central bank said in statement.

Now, 76 per cent of the 2,000 banknotes in circulation as on May 19, 2023 have since been returned.

Data collected from major banks indicates that out of the total bank notes in 2000 denomination received back from circulation, about 87 per cent is in the form of deposits and the remaining around 13 per cent has been exchanged into other denomination bank notes.
Tesla Inc. and BYD Co. set fresh sales records in the second quarter, widening their lead as the worlds top-selling clean automakers. The charging plug of a Tesla electric car is pictured.(REUTERS)

Elon Musk-led Tesla delivered a record 466,140 cars worldwide in results posted Sunday, outpacing Wall Street estimates. BYD, Chinas biggest-selling car brand, posted its best-ever quarterly sales results of 700,244 new-energy vehicles  half fully-electric sales, and the other plug-in hybrids.

BYDs shares jumped as high as 3.2% Monday morning in Hong Kong. Tesla battery suppliers Contemporary Amperex Technology Co. Ltd. and LG Energy Solution Ltd. rose as much as 2.3% and 3.1% Monday respectively before paring gains.

ALSO READ: Volkswagen chooses insider as Audi's new chief executive as Tesla takes lead

Teslas Results

Teslas results demonstrated that Chief Executive Officer Musks vow to chase volume by cutting prices has had its intended effect. Analysts surveyed by Bloomberg had expected the company to ship 448,350 cars in the quarter.

Its a big beat, said Ben Kallo of Robert W. Baird in a phone interview Sunday morning. People were still bracing for another round of price cuts, and this big delivery number makes that less of a risk.

The deliveries are the most ever in a quarter for Austin-based Tesla, and an 83% increase from a year ago. The company also managed to trim the gap between production and deliveries  a figure closely watched by analysts  to 13,560 units in the second quarter. In the first quarter, it produced nearly 18,000 more cars than it delivered to customers.

Everyone was worried about inventory build, and it looks like theyve normalized, said Kallo. The delta between production and deliveries is shrinking, which is what Tesla said they would do.

ALSO READ | Tesla to achieve record quarterly sales in China amid market share drop: Experts

Tesla, which sells its cars directly to consumers, has a lot of levers to move vehicles. Besides cutting prices across the lineup earlier this year, the company introduced perks, such as three months of free fast-charging in the US for cars delivered before June 30, to entice buyers. Analysts have predicted price cuts will continue into next year.

Tesla doesnt break out its quarterly delivery numbers by individual vehicle type or region. The Models 3 and Y accounted for 96% of sales. Tesla also makes the Model S and X.

Tesla is easily still the largest EV maker in the US, but its facing fresh competition around the world. Its most recent vehicle  the Model Y  debuted in 2020.

In China  its No. 2 market  the company has fallen well behind BYD, which has a much fresher lineup and increasingly global ambitions. Tesla announced last week that it was cutting prices of its premium car models in China by more than 4.5%, following a decision to hand out cash subsidies to some buyers of its Model 3 vehicles last month.

Tesla will report second-quarter earnings on July 19.

BYD Record

A closely-watched measure of whos leading in sales of purely electric vehicles shows Tesla extended its lead over BYD, even as the Chinese maker continues to grow globally through its affordable offerings.

Still, Shenzhen-based BYDs quarterly sales  extrapolated from monthly data  grew 98% from a year earlier. The surge marks a turnaround from a weak first three months of the year. Its previous best quarter was the last three months of 2022, and the company sold a record 251,685 new energy vehicles in June.

Smaller Chinese upstart Li Auto Inc. posted a new monthly high of 32,575 deliveries, while Xpeng Inc. and Nio Inc. saw modest increases. Guangzhou Automotive Group Co.s EV brand Aion stood out with another strong month of sales, with 45,013 deliveries.

June sales are showing new energy vehicle demand remains pretty strong despite Chinas economic drag, said Bloomberg Intelligence autos and EV batteries analyst Joanna Chen.
Bengaluru Former chief minister and Janata Dal (Secular) JD (S) leader HD Kumaraswamy on Monday alleged rampant corruption in the Congress government, and said officials in chief minister Siddaramaiahs office were demanding money for transfers. Kumaraswamy alleged that Tahsildar Ajit Rai who was suspended recently after the Lokayukta raid, had paid  3 crore to get a posting in the previous government (PTI)

Kumaraswamy alleged that the chief minister offices (CMO) officials were demanding 30 lakh for transfers and a letter from the MLA alone does not suffice. Recently, an official who was seeking transfer got the letter of the local MLA to the CMO. But the CMO officials said that a recommendation letter alone will not work and that he should get 30 lakh along with it for posting. This happened at the CMs office Krishna, Kumaraswamy said.

The JD(S) leader said that syndicates have been formed in the departments for this and everyone knows under whose nose these activities are going on, without elaborating. Let the Congress say as to who the mastermind was for these transfers.

Kumaraswamy alleged that Tahsildar Ajit Rai who was suspended recently after the Lokayukta raid, had paid 3 crore to get a posting in the previous government. This government can only survive through ventilators in the ICU.

Attacking the Congress over the corruption in state, the former chief minister on Sunday had also said that the Congress government has introduced a new tax called YST. A new tax YST [Yathindra Siddaramaiah Tax] has been introduced by the government, Kumaraswamy chided, in a veiled reference to chief minister Siddaramaiahs son, Dr Yathindra Siddaramaiah. Yathindra, who was elected as an MLA from Varuna constituency in 2018, vacated the seat for his father in 2023.

While there is Goods and Service Tax [GST] in the country, under this government, they have started what is called as YST. Im trying to find out what that is. What is noteworthy is that these meetings are not held in government offices, he said on Sunday.

Kumaraswamys allegations come in the backdrop of the Congress government maintaining that all irregularities that took place when the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) was in power, would be probed. Corruption was among the key planks on which the Congress fought and won the Assembly polls in the state.

Following the footsteps of JD(S), the principal opposition party in the state, BJP, also said that there was nothing wrong in what Kumaraswamy said on the transfer allegations. It must be some small post and thats why they must have asked 30 lakh. But they are asking crores. The word of IAS and IPS officers are clear evidence, there is no smoke without fire. CM Siddaramaiah talks about honesty. If you see the way the CMs office is running, you should be afraid, former chief minister Basavaraj Bommai said.

Meanwhile, Congress hit back at Kumaraswamy and asked him to provide proof to justify his allegations. Let him show the proof for the allegations that he is making. Didnt we provide proof when we spoke of scams in the previous governments? RDPR and IT-BT minister Priyank Kharge said.
Karnataka home minister G Parameshwara on Monday said a Special Investigation Team (SIT) under the Criminal Investigation Department (CID) has been formed to reinvestigate the Bitcoin scam. The bitcoin case in the state refers to the alleged laundering of money by senior government officials and top leaders of the state BJP through cryptocurrencies (PTI)

We have taken a decision to hand it over to a Special Investigation Team. We have constituted the SIT under the Criminal Investigation Department, the home minister said, adding that orders have been issued in this regard.

We hope that the SIT will do the justice. Manish Kharbikar, an ADGP, has been entrusted with the responsibility. He can also take the help of technical people because this is related to cyber. Anything related to technical aspects...they can also take the help of different sources, he explained.

The Bitcoin scam had rocked the previous BJP government led by Basavaraj Bommai in 2021, and the Congress, which was then in the Opposition, had demanded a judicial probe in the case. The Congress had accused the government of trying to cover up the scandal as it involved several BJP leaders.

Last week, Bengaluru police commissioner B Dayananda had written a letter to DG and IGP Alok Mohan seeking a probe by a special investigation agency as the case involves a detailed investigation into cybercrime. The probe will be headed by ADGP Manish Karbikar.

The bitcoin case refers to the alleged laundering of money by senior government officials and top leaders of the state BJP through cryptocurrencies. The prime suspect, Srikrishna Ramesh alias Sriki, was accused of hacking the state governments e-procurement website and siphoning over 11.5 crore.

On November 4, 2020, Bengalurus central crime branch police arrested Srikrishna under the Narcotic Drugs and Psychotropic Substances Act for allegedly procuring drugs using bitcoins via the darknet and peddling it to high-profile clients. Investigations in the drug case led to the CCB filing a second case against the hacker for allegedly hacking online poker sites and crypto exchanges to acquire wealth through illegal means. He was released on bail on April 17, 2021.

After assuming power, the Congress government had promised to investigate all irregularities and scams including the Bitcoin scam and in public works, that emerged during the tenure of the erstwhile BJP government.

Regarding any possible assistance of central agencies, Parameshwara said he has advised the SIT to take the help of whoever is required. If there is a separate order required to that effect, we will definitely do so. It depends. When they (SIT) start the investigations, then we will come to know about their requirements, the home minister pointed out.

After the state governments official statement, Minister Priyank Kharge said, As I said, STF, SIT, judicial inquiries and departmental inquiries will happen. We already formed Kalyana Karnataka Region Development Board...SIT, bitcoin...its just a matter of time. We came to power a month back and already 2-3 investigations are going on, including in my own department. We will ensure that people get justice for all the injustice that happened in the previous regime.
With CITCO failing to utilise a grant of 9.5 crore for construction of a convention centre/banquet hall by converting 48 officers flats at Hotel Parkview in Sector 24, the UT administration has handed over the apartments to the health department. Currently, the flats are lying abandoned, resulting in financial loss and deterioration of infrastructure. (HT Photo)

Currently lying abandoned, the flats (1201 to 1248) will be now be used as a hostel for nurses and doctors. The UT administration has also directed CITCO (Chandigarh Industrial and Tourism Development Corporation Limited) to refund the complete amount with interest.

In 2014, the UT administration had directed the corporation to convert the officers flats into a convention centre/banquet hall. It provided CITCO 5 crore in 2017 and another 4.5 crore in 2019 for the project that was envisioned to provide space for exhibitions and meetings.

However, nine years later, CITCO in April this year informed the administration that the site was not viable for the project and instead proposed to construct the centre at Sector 31.

A senior CITCO officer said the site was not viable due to its low-lying area, and the premises were already being used for hotel operations.

Despite repeated attempts, CITCO MD Purva Garg could not be contacted for comments.

In May, the office of assistant controller (finance and accounts) rents under the UT administration had issued a notice to CITCO for failing to clear rent worth 1.75 crore owed for 148 rooms at the hotel.

As per the agreement, CITCO has to pay annual/monthly rent for the 148 rooms, but it failed to keep its end of the bargain for the past 7-8 years. Notably, out of the total of 1.75 crore dues, 83 lakh has accrued as interest only.

Originally, the hotel, then known as Yatri Niwas, had three blocks of apartments, including 24 each in two blocks and 48 officers apartments in the third block.

As per the demand notice, in 1984, the UT administration gave the charge of 24 apartments (1301 to 1324) of Block A to CITCO for the establishment of Yatri Niwas to provide affordable accommodation to middle-income tourists visiting Chandigarh.

Under the lease, the rent was fixed at 1,000 per apartment per annum. In 2000, the administration allotted 24 more apartments (1325 to 1348) of Block B on the same terms and conditions.

Later in 2014, UT handed over the 48 officers apartments (1201 to 1248) as well, and a licence fee of 1,500 per month was to be charged for each of these apartments.

But while CITCO converted the 48 apartments, leased till 2000, into smaller rooms, the 48 officers apartments have been lying unoccupied, resulting in huge financial loss and gradual deterioration of infrastructure.

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ABOUT THE AUTHOR Hillary Victor Hillary Victor is a Principal Correspondent at Chandigarh. He covers Chandigarh administration, municipal corporation and all political parties. ...view detail
PGI Employees Union (non-faculty) condemned the Union health ministry for not approving the budget proposal of 38 crore to implement the Union government notification regarding equal work and equal pay to contractual employees. The union sent a letter on Monday to the Union health secretary regarding the matter. (HT File Photo)

The union has sent a letter to the Union health secretary on Monday regarding the matter.

General Secretary Ashwani Kumar Munjal said, On May 2, additional solicitor general Satya Pal Jain had presented the Union governments stand before the court that a decision in this regard would be taken by June 30. But till now, the decision is pending. The matter is listed for July 7. But no reply has been filed so far. Due to this, about 6,000 employees of Post Graduate Institute for Medical Education and Research (PGIMER) are being deprived of their rights.

Union labour ministry had issued a notification on October 9, 2018, stating that the PGIMER is exempted from certain provisions of the Contract Labour (Regulation and Abolition) Act, 1970, for two years.

The ministry had prohibited implementation of contract labour in the jobs of sanitation services (cleaning, sweeping and dusting), security services (watch and ward of the institute) and catering services to the admitted patients at the facility.

The exemption came at a condition that the hospital management must ensure that contractual workers get wages and facilities comparable to regular workers and the institute is subject to inspections for verifying compliance.

The case was heard by Punjab and Haryana high court on May 2 and the court after had passed an order that PGIMER will send a detailed proposal, along with the financial implications of implementing the notification.

Union members expressed regret over the fact the Union health ministry has failed to take appropriate action in time.
Government schools in the district welcomed their students after the summer break, hosting quiz competitions and other activities. Students in a jubilant mood on returning to school after weeks of summer vacations in Ludhiana. (HT PHOTO)

The schools will host summer camps for students of pre-primary to Class 8 between July 3 to July 15. The schedule for the timings has been fixed from 8 am to 11:30 am.

Government school teachers said the camps are aimed at helping the students in exploring this talent. The education department had announced that a budget of 5 crore has been issued to organise summer camps in government schools for the first time.

The summer camps are focused on intellectual activities and games based on mathematics, environment and language, the students are also given tasks on sports, arts and crafts and health care, said Vipan Guru, who is a teacher at Government Model Senior Secondary School, Cemetery road.

He added that during the first few days after summer vacations, the attendance of students usually remains low but the summer camps have encouraged the students to come to school.

In its guidelines, the state council for education training and Research (SCERT) said that the school heads would be responsible for monitoring and making sure that all guidelines are strictly followed.

The SCERT letter also said that the teachers will also focus on the participation of Children with special needs.

Bi-monthly exams stand postponed

As the summer camps are being held till July 15, the Education Department had postponed the Bi-monthly tests for classes 6 to 12 which were scheduled during this period. The education department had said that the dates for the exams will be announced later.

The classes for students of classes 8 to 12 are being held regularly, said an education department official.
For centuries, the hill inhabitants braved arduous terrains to put up magnificent wood and stone abodes in the traditional Kaath Kuni style. But after pucca roads were developed in the hills, Kaath Kuni, which today is best known for housing hill deities, began losing favour to modern bungalow-style houses. Himachals Kaath Kuni style of architecture began losing favour to modern bungalow-style houses. (HT Photo)

It wasnt easy to build Kaath Kuni houses as logs of wood had to be brought from far-off forests as were the stones used in the construction, says Dayanand, a resident of Gola village in Nagaan panchayat ,

A retired government employee, he adds, People are drifting away from Kaath Kuni style as it offers less space and is difficult to maintain. Even I have constructed a new house with modern facilities as the wood and artisans who work on Kaath Kuni are difficult to find.

An increasing number of people are building concrete next to their dilapidated wood and stone houses or after dismantling them altogether because of the inability to maintain them. Such is the aversion that wood being used to build and furnish ancestral houses are now being used to heat the new concrete dwellings.

Notably, however, the architectural style is still being used to construct temples across Kullu, Shimla and Mandi. The deities are averse to the modern style and one cannot go against their word, says Inder Dev, a carpenter based in Kotkhai.

Stone and timber hurdles

The biggest hurdles in constructing and maintaining the Kaath Kuni houses are the resources  stone and timber. While the Supreme Court put a blanket ban on the felling of trees two years ago, quarrying of stone is regulated in the state.

Raw material for conventional buildings is easily available now and hence the shift, says Mansi Shah, who co-authored the 2011 book Prathaa: Kaath-Khuni Architecture of Himachal Pradesh with Bharat Dave and Jay Thakkar.

The best of both worlds

Several parts of Himachal are prone to earthquakes. The districts of Chamba, Kullu, Kangra, Una, Hamirpur, Mandi and Bilaspur fall in Seismic Zone 5, while Shimla Kinnaur, Lahaul and Spiti and Sirmar, and in Zone 4.

It is in this backdrop that the chorus for blending the old Kaath Kuni style, which has shown resilience in the face of natural calamities, with modern structures has grown.

By blending traditional construction practices with modern advancements, we can create structures that are not only resilient and durable but also culturally and aesthetically relevant to the local communities, says DC Rana, director of state disaster management authority and Himachal Pradesh Council for Science Technology and Environment (HIMCOSTE).

This approach ensures that the unique characteristics of hills are preserved while also meeting the evolving needs of the inhabitants, Rana adds.

The idea of blending traditional architectural style with modern designs has thus picked up steam. The popularity is especially evident in the Shimla, Kullu, Mandi and Kinnaur regions.

Central Research Institute Roorkee in collaboration with HIMCOSTE held a workshop in Shimla to discuss new technologies to blend Kaath Kuni with new modern architecture.

Traditional construction practices in the hilly regions have evolved over generations to suit the specific needs and environmental challenges of these areas. By integrating modern technology, we can enhance the adaptability of these traditional practices to the changing climate and geological conditions, ensuring long-term sustainability, says senior scientific officer SS Randhawa

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Dehradun: Uttarakhand chief minister Pushkar Singh Dhami on Monday met Union finance minister Nirmala Sitharaman to request the release of 1774 crore for the Song Dam drinking water project as special assistance from the central government. Uttarakhand chief minister Pushkar Singh Dhami asked the Centre to waive off the ceiling on the loan amount that can availed in externally aided projects (Twitter/pushkardhami)

The chief minister also sought the removal of the ceiling imposed on the extent of loans that can be availed by the state in externally aided projects in view of the states special circumstances.

The Song Drinking Water Project is proposed on the Song River, a tributary of river Ganga, and is located close to the boundary of the Dehradun and Tehri Garhwal districts. The project envisages the construction of a 130-metre-high reinforced cement dam creating a lake that would be about 4 km in length that would be spread across 69 hectares.

The chief minister said the drinking water project would help supply drinking water to Dehradun at a proposed cost of 2,021 crore.

Dhami said the project would lead to the generation of 150 million litres per day (MLD) to 10 lakh people in Dehradun city and its suburbs.

After the construction of the project, the dependence on tube wells for the drinking water system will almost end. Apart from this, a lake of about 3.50 km in length will be created by the construction of the project, which will promote tourism in the area. This will generate employment and increase the income of the local citizens, he said.

Dhami said the project will also help in flood control and will protect about 15,000 people living in 10 villages of Dehradun district from floods in Song river.

The chief minister said that all necessary technical, forest land and other approvals related to the project have been obtained from the departments concerned. For the rehabilitation and resettlement of the families affected by the project, an expenditure of 247 crore will be borne by the state government, he said.

The chief minister added that along with the under-grounding of power lines in the main roads of Dehradun under the Asian Development Bank, the work of strengthening the states transmission system, which includes the construction of power substations and lines, will be done soon. He sought the approval of the department of economic affairs to the scheme.
An 18-year-old man died on Sunday morning after suffering electric shock in the basement of an under-construction pediatric block building on the premises of Lok Nayak hospital where he was working as a labourer, police said. A private guard at the under-construction site in Lok Nayak hospital where labourer died of electrocution. (Vipin Kumar/HT Photo)

Police said that initial inquiry showed that the labourer, 18-year-old Sujit Kumar from Bihars Samastipur, accidentally stepped on a waterlogged floor and was electrocuted while trying to switch on a water pump.

A case of death by negligence and negligent conduct with respect to machinery was registered under sections 304A and 287 of Indian Penal Code against the buildings contractor at the IP Estate police station, the police said.

Kumars death was the third such incident in the city in the past one week. On last Sunday (June 25), a 35-year-old school teacher from Preet Vihar died of electrocution as soon as she stepped onto a waterlogged street in the taxi parking lot of New Delhi railway station in Paharganj side. Sakshi Ahuja was going to board a Vande Bharat train for Chandigarh with her two children, two siblings and parents, when she suffered electric shock and died at the spot. Around an hour before that, a teenager named Sohail died after he stepped in a waterlogged lane in Taimoor Nagar in south Delhi and suffered electric shock.

Also Read: Minutes before woman electrocuted at New Delhi railway station, teen met same fate

Police said the construction of the pediatric block building is being carried out by the Public Works Department (PWD) of Delhi government. The PWD has roped in a private construction company, the police said.

Deputy commissioner of police (central) Sanjay Kumar Sain said that around 9am, a person was brought to the emergency of Lok Nayak hospital as he had suffered an electric shock. The patient was declared brought dead by the doctors. A police team reached the hospital and enquired about the incident. The dead patient was identified as Sujeet Kumar. He was brought to the hospital by his brother Prince Kumar, 20, the DCP added.

On enquiry, it was learnt that Sujeet was working as a labourer at the construction site which is situated on the premises of Lok Nayak hospital. On Sunday morning around 8.30 am, he went to switch on the water pump installed in the basement of the under construction building to drain out rainwater. The area around the pump was waterlogged due to rains. He stepped on the waterlogged floor and suffered electric shock while trying to switch on the pump, said DCP Sain.

The police said Sujeets brother saw him and raised an alarm. The power connection was switched off and Sujeet was rescued. He was rushed to the hospital but by then he had died. A team of the forensic experts inspected the site after the incident to ascertain the exact cause of electrocution.

The experts have been asked to help us know if there were any live wires in the waterlogged area that caused electric shock or the current was flowing in the body of the water pump that Sujeet may have accidentally touched, said an investigator who asked not to be named.

Sujeet is survived by his parents and three siblings, including two sisters. He came to Delhi some months ago to visit his brother, who helped him get an employment at the same construction site.

The hospital administration did not comment on the incident.
With the annual Kanwar yatra beginning on Tuesday, and set to continue till July 15, vehicular movement in several parts of Delhi will be disrupted for 12 days. Nearly two million devotees of Lord Shiva are expected to participate in the annual religious procession, for which elaborate traffic arrangements have been made, Delhi Traffic Police said on Monday. Vehicular movement in several parts of Delhi will remain disrupted for 12 days. (HT Archive)

Due to the movement of the pilgrims and camps set up by them, traffic congestion and obstruction are expected at several places, including Rani Jhansi Road, Baraf Khana Chowk, Fire Station, Boulevard Road, Azad Market Chowk, Gokalpuri flyover, 66 Foota Road, Maujpur Chowk, Badarpur T-point, and Mathura Road, among others.

Similarly, traffic congestion may be experienced along national highway 8 (NH8) from Dhaula Kuan Metro station to Rajokri border, officials said.

Traffic police said that there would be congestion on NH24 as well due to diversion of vehicular traffic by Uttar Pradesh Police at Apsara border and Maharajpur border towards Ghazipur.

Also Read | Kanwar Yatra: DJs to play only bhajans on routes leading to Kashi

Apart from the traffic arrangements, there will be an increase in deployment of police personnel on the routes designated for pilgrims, and places where camps have been set up, senior police officers aware of the security and traffic plans said.

In a traffic advisory issued on Monday, traffic police said 1.5-2 million pilgrims are likely to travel on foot from Gaumukh, Gangotri Dham, and Haridwar, carrying holy gangajal which would be offered at Shiva temples on Shravan Shivratri.

Many pilgrims, commonly referred to as kanwariyas, will enter Delhi while some of them will go to Haryana and Rajasthan from close to Delhis borders. According to the traffic police, the pilgrims will mainly pass through nine routes across parts of eastern, central and northern Delhi.

Also Read | Kanwar Yatra begins today: Drones to keep vigil, choppers to shower petals on Kanwariyas

The designated route for those entering Delhi from Apsara border near Seemapuri will be Shahdara flyover to Seelampur T-point and further to ISBT Kashmere Gate flyover. From there, the pilgrims will enter north Delhi and take Boulevard Road, Rani Jhansi Road, Faiz Road, Upper Ridge Road, to reach Dhaula Kuan in southwest Delhi and further to NH-8 through which they will exit the city from Rajokri border and enter Haryana.

Pilgrims entering the city from the Bhopura border will use Wazirabad road, Loni flyover, Gokulpuri T-point, 66 Foota Road and reach Seelampur T-point, and then go on NH-1 and further towards the new ISBT Bridge. From ISBT, they can use the same forward route to reach Haryana via the Rajokri border.

Those intending to enter Haryana from the Singhu or Tikri borders in outer Delhi, will enter through Bhopura border and take Wazirabad road, Wazirabad bridge, the Outer Ring Road, Mukarba Chowk, and NH-1, and exit from Singhu border or take Madhuban Chowk and Peeragarhi and exit from Tikri border.

For the pilgrims entering Delhi from Maharajpur border near Anand Vihar, the traffic police have designated a route via Road No 56, Ghazipur border, NH24, Ring Road, Mathura Road, exiting from Badarpur border to reach Haryana.

Two other routes will be Kalindi Kunj, Mathura Road and Badarpur border; and Kalindi Kunj, Mathura Road, Modi Mill, Maa Anandmai Marg and Mehrauli Badarpur (MB) Road.

The last two designated routes are New Rohtak Road (from Kamal T-point to Tikri border) and Najafgarh Road (from Zakhira to Najafgarh).

Some pilgrim movement will be seen in smaller numbers in several other locations across Delhi, traffic police said.

According to the traffic police advisory, heavy transport vehicles will be diverted by the Uttar Pradesh Police from Mohan Nagar in Ghaziabad towards NH 24. No such vehicles will be allowed towards Wazirabad road via Bhopura border and/or towards GT Road via Apsara border. Similarly, heavy vehicles, except city buses, will not be allowed on the GT Road towards Shahdara and Wazirabad road.

Similarly vehicles coming from Loni Road (Shahdara side) will be diverted on Wazirabad road to exit from Outer Ring Road while those coming from internal areas like Sonia Vihar, PTS Wazirabad Pushta, Pushta Road will be diverted towards Outer Ring Road via Wazirabad Road to take NH-24, the advisory read.

We have made elaborate arrangements to segregate the movement of the pilgrims and other road users and to minimise inconvenience to both the public and devotees. During this period, traffic violations will be checked by on-the-spot prosecution and by photography/videography of violations which will be followed by prosecution, said a senior traffic police officer, adding that commuters must plan their travel accordingly.

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ABOUT THE AUTHOR Karn Pratap Singh Karn Pratap Singh has been writing on crime, policing, and issues of safety in Delhi for almost a decade. He covers high-intensity spot news, including terror strikes, serial blasts and security threats in the national capital. ...view detail
High drama preceded the hearing of a crucial petition by Delhi government challenging the appointment of chairperson of Delhi Electricity Regulatory Commission (DERC) in the Supreme Court on Tuesday with the Delhi lieutenant governor VK Saxena asking chief minister Arvind Kejriwal late Monday evening to administer the oath of office to the appointee by 10am, before the court proceeds to decide the fate of the posting. Although the case is listed at serial number 33 before a bench of Chief Justice of India (CJI) Dhananjaya Y Chandrachud and justice PS Narasimha, the list of business for Tuesday mentions it to be taken up top of the board meaning the case is likely to be listed as the first item for hearing. (ANI)

The top court is expected to take up the petition after 10.30am when the court usually assembles to hear matters. Although the case is listed at serial number 33 before a bench of Chief Justice of India (CJI) Dhananjaya Y Chandrachud and justice PS Narasimha, the list of business for Tuesday mentions it to be taken up top of the board meaning the case is likely to be listed as the first item for hearing.

Also Read: DERC chairman appointed, Delhi govt terms decision illegal

In a letter to Kejriwal, the LG on Monday said that if state power minister Atishi or the chief minister or any other minister is not available to administer the oath of office and secrecy to the newly designated DERC head justice (retired) Umesh Kumar, the chief secretary should be permitted to perform the swear-in function.

Last Tuesday, Saxena wrote to Kejriwal flagging unnecessary delay in administering oath of office to Kumar, who was appointed to the post by the President on June 21. Minister Atishi was going to administer oath to Kumar on Monday, but she requested the programme to be shifted to July 6, citing health issues.

Calling Kumars appointment as unconstitutional, the Delhi government moved the Supreme Court against the decision on July 26.

If the DERC chairperson is administered the oath of office by chief secretary, it may alter the contours of the petition filed by the Delhi government before the top court. Further, it needs to be seen the extent to which the court may interfere once a retired high court judge takes charge as DERC chief.

Also Read: DERC allows electricity bill hike, triggers political row

The petition in its present form has questioned the DERC heads appointment by the Centre through a Presidential notification. The Delhi governments petition, filed by advocate Shadan Farasat, questioned the validity of Kumars appointment despite the chief minister approving the name of another former judge for the post.

Now, if the chief secretary administers the oath on the LGs orders, the Delhi government may have to modify the petition to challenge the power of chief secretary to administer oath of office to DERC chairperson.

In his letter, LG said, It seems bizarre to say the least, that a notification of President of India issued way back on 21st June, 2023 is not being given effect to, on account of unavailability of minister, in todays digital age.

In case the power minister is not able to do so, you or any other minister designated by yourself may administer oath of office and secrecy. In case of unavailability in both the aforesaid situations, chief secretary may administer oath of office and secrecy to Umesh Kumar as Chairperson, DERC, the LG said.

Also Read:

A Delhi government spokesperson did not comment on LGs letter.

The appointment to the crucial post, which remained vacant since January this year, was stuck in a stalemate between the Delhi government and the LG office.

In January, Kejriwal approved the appointment of justice (retired) Rajeev Kumar Srivastava as the DERC chairperson on a file put up by the then deputy CM Manish Sisodia, who held the power portfolio. Subsequently, the chief justice of the Madhya Pradesh high court gave his consent for the appointment. However, the LG returned the file, insisting that the government also consult the Delhi high court chief justice for the appointment.

Following this, the Delhi government approached the Supreme Court on April 12, blaming the LG for delaying the appointment.

On May 19, the Supreme Court asked the government to appoint the DERC chairperson within two weeks, and said the LG is not supposed to act on his own discretion while appointing someone to that post.

Resolving the impasse by interpreting Section 84(2) of the Electricity Act that governs the appointment of chairperson and members of DERC, a bench headed by Chief Justice of India (CJI) Dhananjaya Y Chandrachud said that under this provision, it is the chief justice of that high court from which the judge is drawn who is to be consulted.

After Shrivastava expressed his inability to accept the post, Kejriwal approved the name of justice (retired) Sangeet Lodha for the post on June 21. However, Kumar was appointed to the post the same day.

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KOLKATA: As two more political workers died in separate incidents of violence in the run-up to the July 8 panchayat elections in West Bengal, governor CV Ananda Bose on Monday called for a complete end to the violence within 48 hours, saying the political Holi with human blood has to end. Nearly 14 people have died in violence linked to the panchayat elections in West Bengal (Twitter/BengalGovernor)

My visit to the field has convinced me that there is violence in certain pockets. I saw murder, intimidation and heinous crimes heaped upon innocent people, Bose said after meeting the family of a Trinamool Congress (TMC) worker who died in Basanti area of South 24 Parganas.

Bose earlier visited Bhangore and Canning in South 24 Parganas and Dinhata in Cooch Behar.

Nearly 14 people have died in violence linked to the panchayat elections after the state election commission announced the elections.

The governor added: I will wait for 48 hours to see what action the competent authorities are taking. Based on the quality of decision-making, I will give my report card to my masters, that is the people of Bengal.

Bose who arrived in Kolkata from north Bengal on Monday morning, headed straight to Basanti where a TMC worker Jiarul Molla was shot dead late on Saturday night. His daughter, Manwara, the TMC candidate for the panchayat election, earlier alleged that her father was killed in a clash between two factions of the ruling TMC and demanded a probe by the Central Bureau of Investigation (CBI).

Bose, who have been visiting violence-hit areas and meeting members of victims families, said he had made an assessment of the situation and arrived at a conclusion about the gang leaders. It is for the investigating agencies to establish their complicity and involvement. But as a senior citizen with 45 years of experience in public administration, I am convinced who are the gang leaders, he said.

The sharp message from the governor comes against the backdrop of reports of two more deaths over the past 24 hours.

At Haroa in North 24 Parganas, a TMC worker identified by the police as Paritosh Mondol was killed on Sunday evening in an explosion when he was allegedly making crude bombs. His family, however, alleged that Mondol was murdered by his rivals, his hands chopped off and then bombs hurled. A second person who was injured in the blast has been taken to hospital in Kolkata.

In the second incident a BJP worker identified as Bankim Hansda was found dead in Manbazar area of Purulia. Police said he was out campaigning for the panchayat election and didnt return on Sunday evening. His body was found near a bus on Monday morning.

The Calcutta high court has already ordered the deployment of central forces across the state in the run up to the panchayat polls. While 337 companies of central forces have arrived, the state election panel has requested the Union home ministry to sanction 485 more companies and opened a control room.
Founder and chairman emeritus, Infosys, NR Narayana Murthy on Monday called upon graduating students of the Indian Institute of Technology- Kanpur (IIT-K) to rise above affiliations and embrace the role of Indians first. Farzan Adil Byramji was awarded the Presidents Gold Medal during the 56th convocation of IIT-Kanpur on July 3. (Sourced)

Lets build a great India where every child has access to education, healthcare and opportunity, he said. Addressing the students at the 56th convocation of IIT-K, Murthy, a distinguished alumnus of the institute from where he did M Tech in 1969, said, Together, through performance, discipline, innovation and a mindset of change, we can shape India into a fair and moral leader in science, technology, mathematics and medicine.

He was the chief guest at the event. The Presidents Gold Medal was awarded to Farzan Adil Byramji, the Directors Gold Medal (4-year UG programme) to Ananya Gupta, both from the CSE department, the Directors Gold Medal (5-year UG programme) to Lakshay Rastogi from the BSBE department, the Ratan Swarup Memorial Prize to Nandita Gupta from the MSE department and Dr Shankar Dayal Sharma Medal to Vineeth V from the EE department.

A total of 2,127 students were conferred degrees during the convocation. The degrees awarded included 236 PhDs, 15 MTech-PhDs (joint degree), 483 MTechs, 739 BTechs, 21 MBAs, 16 MDes, 51 MS (by research), 40 PGPEX-VLFM, 1 diploma of IIT (DIIT), 151 MSc (2-year course), 18 double majors, 125 dual degrees, 14 MS-PDs (MS part of the dual degree), 149 BSs and 68 eMasters degree programmes.

IIT Kanpur conferred the Doctor of Science (Honoris Causa), the highest honorary academic degree granted by IIT-Kanpur to honour exemplary achievements by outstanding individuals, was conferred on three distinguished personalities in recognition of their exemplary achievements.

The recipients included MC Mary Kom (Indian amateur boxer and politician), Dr Devi Prasad Shetty (chairperson and founder, Narayana Health), and Natarajan Chandrasekaran (chairperson, Tata Sons). The graduating students were given degree certificates at different lecture halls in the second session of the ceremony.

All the graduating students could get their digital degrees through IIT Kanpurs in-house blockchain technology application as well, which makes the degree certificates unforgeable, globally verifiable, selectively disclosable and sensitive to user content.

Congratulating the students, Prof Abhay Karandikar, director, IIT Kanpur, said, I hope all graduating students will make a mark as future leaders transforming the nation. Dr Radhakrishnan K Koppillil, chairperson, Board of Governors, IIT Kanpur, encouraged the graduates to embrace their future endeavours with passion and purpose.

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Acting on a tip off, a joint team of Madiaon police and the crime branch of Lucknow busted a gang of vehicle lifters and arrested five members on Monday. One of the accused, however, fled from police custody while undergoing medical examination following which the police personnel on duty has been suspended and sent to police lines. Two-wheelers recovered from the possession of gang members. (HT)

The police claimed that the accused were from Ahmedabad, Gujarat and that they would fly to different regions in Uttar Pradesh including Lucknow before returning to Gujarat after stealing automobiles.

The gang used to steal two-wheelers mostly, and four-wheelers too in case of possibility of using lock breakers. They would then stock them until their numbers reached 15-20 before transporting them to Nepal in a truck. Another gang member present in Nepal would further sell the stolen vehicles by changing the number plates and the money was shared among the gang members, said Qasim Abidi, DCP (North).

As many as 15 two-wheelers, one four-wheeler, three lock breakers, two Nepals and one Indian Sim cards, and a mobile phone was recovered from their possession, said the DCP.

The five arrested accused were identified as Azharuddin, 37, Amaan alias Shoyed, 40, Sahzad Hussain, 21, Imran, 25, all residents of Gujarat and their accomplice from Kanpur, Shanu, 32. While four of them are in the custody of police and are being investigated, Imran fled while undergoing medical examination in a hospital, said the police.

As per the police press note, the accused arrested have several cases against them in various police stations in Lucknow and other districts of U.P.

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Mumbai: Actor Ajay Devgn has purchased five office units in the Signature building on Veera Desai Road in Andheri West for a sum of 45.9 crore. New Delhi, Bollywood actor Ajay Devgan posing for a profile shoot for HT City during the promotion of Golmaal Returns at Le Meridien Hotel on 16 October 2017. Photo: Jasjeet Plaha/HT

The Singham actor purchased three units on the 16th floor and two units on the 17th floor of the building, which include 14 car parking.

He paid a stamp duty of 2.70 crore for the properties, according to transaction documents registered on April 19 this year, accessed and shared by CRE Matrix, a real estate analytics firm.

The units on the 16th floor jointly have a carpet area of 8,405 sq ft, while those on the 17th floor are spread across 4,893 sq ft, collectively spanning 13,298 sq ft.

Industry experts pointed out that the transaction works out to a market rate of 33,907 per sq ft which is the average rate for office properties in Oshiwara.

The Signature building is developed by Veer Savarkar Projects Private Ltd. Earlier, in May 2021, the star of blockbuster movies like Golmaal and Drishyam franchises had purchased a 474 sq m bungalow in Kapole Co-operative housing society in Juhu for a sum of 60 crore.

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Maharashtra Nationalist Congress Party president Jayant Patil on Sunday announced that the party has moved disqualification petitions against Ajit Pawar and eight others who ditched the Maha Vikas Aghadi (MVA) and took oath as ministers in the National Democratic Alliance or NDA government in the state led by Shiv Sena's Eknath Shinde. Newly sworn-in Maharashtra deputy chief minister Ajit Pawar addresses a press conference with newly sworn-in state minister Chhagan Bhujbal and NCP working president Praful Patel in Mumbai on Sunday. (ANI)

Their act is illegal and as they kept Sharad Pawar and the party in the dark, following which a complaint was filed with the disciplinary committee of the party headed by Jayprakash Dandegaonkar. Following the recommendation of the disciplinary committee, the NCP has moved disqualification petitions against the nine MLAs with the state legislature through a mail, Patil said at a press conference late Sunday.

"A physical copy will also be submitted soon. We have requested the Speaker Rahul Narvekar to give us a hearing at the earliest," Patil added. He said the party also approached the Election Commission of India (ECI) over the same issue.

Also Read: Two rebellions that reshaped the contours of Maharashtra politics

The moment they went against the party's policy, they are disqualified technically, Patil further clarified.

The Supreme Court's recent verdict clearly states that the whip appointed by the party will be considered as official. The number of MLAs doesn't matter. Thus, Jitendra Awhad will be considered as an official whip of the party and it would be applicable to all the MLAs, the state NCP chief said.

Not pursuing a legal battle: Sharad Pawar

Patel's statement comes hours after Sharad Pawar, 82, said he would not be pursuing a legal battle and instead go to the people directly, even as at least 37 of his 53 MLAs set to defect and join hands with the BJP-Shiv Sena government in Maharashtra. There is no need to fight this battle legally, and neither do I have any issues if someone claims ownership over the NCP. We will go to people and seek their support. I am confident they will support us, said Sharad Pawar.

Ajit Pawar takes oath as Maharashtra deputy CM

Earlier, in a surprising turn of events that in some ways resembled the split in the Shiv Sena almost a year ago, Sharad Pawar's nephew Ajit Pawar took oath as Maharashtra deputy chief minister, with eight other party legislators also joining the NDA government in the state.

Ajit Pawar said all MLAs are with him, and they have joined the Shiv Sena-BJP government as a party.

NCP working president Supriya Sule said Ajit Pawar joining the Shinde-Fadnavis government is "painful" but her relationship with him would remain the same.

"My relationship with Ajit Pawar will not change, he will always remain my elder brother. We will rebuild the party," said the NCP MP.
Mumbai: A Mira Road-based businessman, Sanjay Jain, was convicted to 20 years imprisonment on Monday for possessing 5 kg Mephedrone in 2015. HT Image

The special NDPS court, however, acquitted the two main accused, Pramod Pandey and Rajan Rajput, who allegedly supplied the drug to the UK as well as the US and Rohan Gawas, who allegedly made the contraband available to Jain.

The other accused  Ladu Kumawat, Chandramani Pandey, Ankit Kapoor, Rakesh Kapoor, Jogabhai, Nanji Dewasi and Parag Mehta, who allegedly had gone to collect a large consignment  were also acquitted in the matter.

The Narcotics Control Bureau (NCB) raided certain premises in Mira Road on February 25, 2015, based on the information that Jain and Pramod had been storing huge quantities of narcotic substances at a residential premises in Mira Road. When they reached the premises, the officials found Jain in the house, and they claimed to have recovered Mephedrone weighing 5 kg.

The agency claimed that when questioned, Jain confessed that Pramod supplied the contraband and it was to be distributed in the city. When the place was under raid, Chandramani came to collect the drugs for further distribution. Hence after questioning, the two were arrested.

On February 26, 2015, NCB sleuths raided another premises and arrested Pramod and Kumawat. Pramod later said to have disclosed that he was preparing to get delivery of 25 kg of the contraband with the help of other accused. The agency later arrested Ankit, Rakesh, Jogabhai and Dewasi. The NCB had claimed that the contraband was supplied to them by Dahisar resident Mehta, who when apprehended claimed that he had received the contraband from Gawas.

Meanwhile, Ankit and Rakesh who had gone to receive the contraband had claimed that Rajput gave them 5 lakh to collect the contraband. Gawas was running a chemical factory in Mahad in Raigad district and used to obtain drugs from one Babasaheb Vasant Dhawale.

The end recipients of the racket were allegedly Pramod and Rajput who used to send this through courier to the UK and the US respectively.

The court acquitted the accused as the prosecution failed to prove the entire chain and also the panch witnesses, who were present at the time of the seizure of 25 kg of Mephedrone, were not available to testify before the court. The court, therefore, said that the prosecution had failed to prove that Pramod, Kumawat, Chandramani, Parag, Rajan and Rohan had hatched a conspiracy.

Jain was convicted as the agency proved that he was in possession of the contraband in the house taken by him on rent.

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Mumbai: At his first public meeting at Karad, a day after his nephew Ajit Pawar split the NCP, Sharad Pawar said some people in the party had been misled by the BJP but he bore them no malice. However, in practise, the disciplinary action has been swift in coming. On Monday, he expelled NCPs recently-appointed working president Praful Patel and general secretary Sunil Tatkare both of whom have defected with Ajit Pawar. Ajits rebellion sparks a bitter Pawar vs Pawar fight for NCP

In sharp retaliation, indicative of the escalating bitterness, Praful Patel, a long-time associate, said Sharad Pawar had lost the right to sack him as he was the partys working president. It has been the claim of the defectors that they represent the real Nationalist Congress Party as they have the bulk of MLAs. However, they have so far been unable to prove that claim. Patel also appointed Jalgaon MLA Anil Patil as the new whip of the party and said Ajit Pawar had been elected as the partys new legislative chief.'

NCP state president Jayant Patil sent a letter to Maharashtra Assembly Speaker Rahul Narwekar on Sunday night seeking the disqualification of Ajit Pawar and eight other MLAs who took oath as ministers in the Shiv Sena-BJP government. Yesterday, the Ajit Pawar camp hit back by appointing Tatkare as the Maharashtra NCP president in place of Jayant Patil. It also asked Narvekar to disqualify Jayant Patil and Jitendra Awhad from the House.

On Monday, Supriya Sule who is the partys working president for Maharashtra, had recommended that Patel and Tatkare be expelled from the party. In an organisational rejig on June 10, the NCP had appointed two working presidents. Praful Patel was given charge of MP, Gujarat, Jharkhand, Rajasthan and Goa while Supriya Sule was given charge of Maharashtra, Haryana and Punjab and also made chairman of the partys central election authority. That difference in the states under their remit is likely to play a crucial role legally since the defection happened in Maharashtra which is under Sules charge.

Also Read: Ajit Pawar faction may get 13 berths in ministerial council

According to the partys constitution, the working committee of the NCP is the highest body in the party. Article 20(ix) states, The President shall preside over the National Convention of the party held after his or her election and during his or her term of office, he or she shall exercise all the powers of the working committee when it is not in session. While Patel insists that he has a right to appoint state unit president, party leaders pointed out that he was not in charge of Maharashtra.

Sharad Pawars letter to Praful Patel and Sunil Tatkare said: In the light of your undisputed conduct, by the power bestowed upon me as the national president of the Nationalist Congress Party vide rules framed under Article 21 (vi)(a) of the party constitution, I hereby formally remove your names from the membership registrar of the party in view of your action of voluntarily giving up membership of the NCP. Patel is the partys Rajya Sabha MP while Tatkare is Lok Sabha MP from Raigad.

State general secretary Shivajirao Garje, Mumbai working president Narendra Rane and a few other office bearers who were seen at Ajits swearing-in ceremony too were expelled from the party.

Ajit Pawar now insists, just like Eknath Shinde had done, that in case of a dispute, it is for the Election Commission of India (ECI) to decide which faction is the real party. At the same time, he stressed that the national president of the party remains his uncle who had brought him into in politics.

We will have to follow the rules, regulations and the constitution (of the party). The powers to decide party affairs have been given to those who have the majority, as we saw only a year ago (in Senas case).

Maharashtra Speaker Rahul Narwekar who is already considering the matter of the disqualification of 16 Shiv Sena MLAs led by Eknath Shinde said he had received Jayant Patils notice on the disqualification of the rebel NCP MLAs and that he woud need some time to deliberate before taking any decision.

At present, neither side can claim to have the majority of MLAs with them to escape provisions of anti-defection. Till late Monday evening, Ajit Pawar had the support of 24 of the 53 MLAs while Sharad Pawar had the support of 13 MLAs with him. The remaining 15 MLAs have either gone incommunicado or says they will decide after consulting their constituents.

This is one of the reasons why the party has refrained from acting against other MLAs as they believe some of them will return to Sharad Pawars fold. The picture is likely to become clearer however on July 5 when both factions have called their MLAs for a meeting in Mumbai.

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The Nationalist Congress Party (NCP) on Sunday appointed party leader Jitendra Awhad as the Leader of Opposition in the Maharashtra assembly, after the former LoP Ajit Pawar took oath as a deputy chief minister in the Maharashtra government led by Eknath Shinde. Awhad, 59, is a three-time MLA of Mumbra-Kalwa in the Thane district. (HT/File)

Awhad reached the Maharashtra Speaker's office late on Sunday night to handover his appointment letter. Stating that he stood with Sharad Pawar, Awhad said if the NCP chief began calling up MLAs that were with Ajit Pawar, they will begin to clear up. He said, These leaders should not forget the party made them ministers in the past 25 years. Now, they are deserting their leader (83-year-old Sharad Pawar) in his twilight years.

Here are five things to know about Jitendra Awhad:

Jitendra Awhad, 59, is a three-time MLA of Mumbra-Kalwa in the Thane district. He is also a close associate of Sharad Pawar. He got into politics as a student activist, he began protesting against rising tuition fees in Mumbai University in 1982. Awhad is said to have been greatly influenced by Sharad Pawar and had joined the students' wing of the Congress. Awhad was appointed the Maharashtra National Students' Union of India (NSUI) chief secretary in 1988 and all-India NSUI's general secretary in 1991. In 1996, Awhad was appointed the president of the Maharashtra Youth Congress. When Sharad Pawar split from Congress, Awhad too joined the NCP. His loyalty to NCP chief has led to him being nominated as Maharashtra's Member of Legislative Council twice  in 2004 and 2008. Awhad has served as Maharashtra's cabinet minister for Medical Education & Horticulture in 2014 and in 2019, as Housing Minister under Uddhav Thackeray's MVA government. In 2020, Awhad was involved in a conspiracy where he and 15-20 other people had allegedly assaulted a civil engineer, who lived in Thane, for posting his morphed photographs. An FIR was filed against him and he was arrested.

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Nationalist Congress Party leader Rohit Pawar said Monday senior leaders knew about the ruling Bharatiya Janata Party's plan to 'break the NCP' and also claimed that they did not expect party boss Sharad Pawar's nephew, Ajit Pawar, to lead a revolt from within. Rohit - Sharad Pawar's grandnephew was speaking a day after Ajit Pawar broke ranks and joined the BJP, and was swiftly sworn in as Maharashtra's second deputy chief minister. NCP Leader Ajit Pawar interacts with Dy CM Devendra Fadnavis, while oath taking ceremony at Raj Bhavan in Mumbai. (Hindustan Times)

"We had no clue of Ajit Pawar joining hands with BJP... but BJP was keen on breaking the NCP. We knew this much," Rohit told reporters in Pune. Rohit stressed he would not follow him out of the NCP but insisted his 'respect' for Ajit would not change.

My respect for Ajit kaka will be the same even after what has happened. In my personal life, he has helped me a lot... but in politics, the thought process of a party is very important.

Rohit Pawar also seemed to play down the impact of Ajit Pawar's betrayal on the NCP.

"Why a particular individual has gone there... I wont comment on it. But why we are here... that is more important and that is the thought process. I know it is a very tough path for all of us but when people are with you, the path looks very simple."

Ajit Pawar took oath as deputy chief minister in the presence of chief minister Eknath Shinde - who led the revolt last year that split ex chief minister Uddhav Thackeray's Shiv Sena and felled the then-ruling Maha Vikas Aghadi government, which included the NCP.

Ajit Pawar joins former chief minister Devendra Fadnavis as Shinde's deputy; Fadnavis was CM in the BJP-Sena government that was voted out in the last Assembly election.

As many as 37 lawmakers have reportedly walked out of the NCP and into the BJP and 10 of them, including Pawar, have been inducted into the cabinet of ministers.

This is the latest controversy in Maharashtra politics, which has been roiling since the results of the 2019 election caused a split between the BJP and Sena, and brought the Congress and NCP to power in an unlikely alliance with Thackeray.

Referring to the twists and turns of the past four years - and with one eye on next year's Assembly election - Rohit Pawar said, "Whatever is going on in Maharashtra for the past year... those who have voted during the last assembly election also did not like the recent incident... hence many think their votes were wasted."

"I think Eknath Shinde will have very different issues to worry about. He should think about his party first. As far as dada (Ajit Pawar) is concerned, or if you look at other people who have indirectly joined the BJP to some extent... most of them have enjoyed different posts for a very long time. So Mr Shinde should not worry about our party."

"What he should worry about are the people who are or were interested in becoming ministers in this cabinet... who wont get the chance because new people have been inducted in the cabinet from another party."

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MUMBAI: The National Investigation Agency (NIA) on Monday busted an ISIS (Islamic State of Iraq and Syria) module by arresting four accused for allegedly promoting terrorist activities at the behest of the proscribed terrorist outfit. HT Image

In an intelligence-led operation, the four accused were arrested after extensive raids by the NIA in Mumbai, Thane and Pune on Monday. The accused have been identified as Tabish Nasser Siddiqui from Nagpada in south Mumbai, Zubair Noor Mohammed Shaikh, Abu Nusaiba from Kondhwa in Pune, and Sharjeel Shaikh and Zulfikar Ali Barodawala from Padgha in Thane district.

Searches were conducted at their houses at five locations in the ISIS-Maharashtra module case, registered by the NIA on June 28, 2023, in Mumbai. NIA teams seized several incriminating materials, such as electronic gadgets and several documents related to ISIS. The material seized exposed the strong and active linkages of the accused with ISIS and their efforts to motivate vulnerable youth to further the terror organisations anti-India agenda, said the federal agency on Monday.

Preliminary investigation by the agency has established that the accused had hatched a conspiracy to further the terrorist activities of ISIS, known by different names, such as Islamic State (IS)/Islamic State of Iraq and Levant (ISIL)/Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS)/Daish/ Islamic State in Khorasan Province (ISKP)/ISIS Wilayat Khorasan/Islamic State of Iraq and the Sham Khorasan (ISIS-K), the release added.

According to the NIA, the accused were trying to breach the unity, integrity, security and sovereignty of the country and preparing to wage a war against the Government of India, as part of the ISIS conspiracy, by raising and operating a Sleeper Cell in Maharashtra.

NIA raids followed credible inputs that the accused Tabish Nasser Siddiqui, Zubair Noor Mohammed Shaikh, Abu Nusaiba, Sharjeel Shaikh and Zulfikar Ali Barodawala and their associates had recruited youth and trained them in assembling Improvised Explosive Devices and weapons. The accused had also shared relevant material, including Do it Yourself (DIY) kits amongst themselves for assembling IEDs and manufacturing small weapons, pistols etc, the agency said.

Further, the agency claimed that, on the directions of their foreign-based ISIS handlers, the accused had also created inflammatory media content, which was published in the magazine Voice of Hind. in furtherance of the banned outfits agenda of terror and violence.

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MUMBAI: After Sundays political developments, Eknath Shindes fate appears to be bleak. Going by legal experts opinions on the disqualification of Shiv Sena legislators, the chances of him continuing as chief minister are slim, and the BJPs move to ally with the Ajit Pawar faction of the NCP appears to corroborate this. Maharashtra Chief Minister Eknath Shinde addresses a press conference, in Mumbai on Monday. (ANI Photo) (ANI)

Soon after the Sunday drama, the state legislature decided to resume the process of hearing on the disqualification of the MLAs. The legislature is now expected to send notices to the five petitioners from the two factions of the Sena, asking them to submit their stand in writing within a stipulated period.

An official from the state legislature said that if the speaker acted in accordance with the framework set by the apex court, Shinde and his MLAs could be disqualified. After consultation with constitutional experts, the legislature realised what a Herculean task it had before it, he said. The delay in sending notices to members from both sides was due to this. The BJPs act of finding a new ally was also perhaps due to this realisation.

Although the opposition claimed that the Supreme Court expected the decision to be taken within three months of its May 11 verdict, the legislature said that the time period did not apply to the Shiv Sena case. The three-month deadline was set by the SC in a Meghalaya case; however, in the same order, it had stated that the time period could vary from situation to situation, said an official from state legislature. In the Meghalaya case, there were fewer petitions pending and a decision was possible in three months. We have five pending petitions, and over 34 MLAs who need to be heard.

The officer said that the process of hearing was expected to begin soon. We are sending notices to the petitioners before the beginning of the monsoon session, asking them to present their stand, he said. As such, the process is not expected to be completed for the next few months, and until then Shinde might continue in the post.

According to a BJP leader, despite the uncertainty over Shindes tenure, the BJP did not want to disturb him until the Lok Sabha election, as it would impact the results. Thus the hearing on the pending petitions could get prolonged till the Lok Sabha elections, he revealed.

According to opposition leaders Sanjay Raut and Prithviraj Chavan, Ajit Pawar had been assured of the chief ministership as part of his negotiation with the BJP to split the NCP and join the government. The leaders also insisted that the speaker would have to take a decision on disqualification by August 11, which marks three months of the Supreme Court order. The speaker will have to disqualify Shinde and 15 other MLAs from his faction, compelling Shinde to step down from the post, said Raut.

Assembly speaker Rahul Narwekar said he had also received a petition from NCP leader Jayant Patil against the defecting nine MLAs of the party. I will take a call on it, he said. A decision will also be taken on the pending petitions on the disqualification of Shiv Sena members.

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NEW DELHI: The Nationalist Congress Party (NCP) parliamentarian Praful Patel said he doesnt recognise his sacking by Sharad Pawar as he had acted according to the wishes of party colleagues. Speaking with HTs Sunetra Choudhury, Patel said the decision to tie up with the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) was being mulled for the past year and even Sharad Pawar was aware of their moves. While denying any enmity with Supriya Sule, Patel acknowledged that there were major differences in the organisation which led to Sundays exit. Nationalist Congress Party leader Praful Patel acknowledged that there were major differences in the organisation which led to Sundays exit (ANI)

Edited excerpts:

What is your reaction to being removed from the Nationalist Congress Party by Sharad Pawar?

I can only say that he has been my respected leader and will continue to be my respected leader. Theres actually no reason to take any action because as we speak, the question of removing anybody doesnt arise. Its (the decision to go with the BJP) a party decision thats been taken by a majority of the people of the party, by a large number of elected representatives.

You say a majority have taken this decision, but we dont have the full list of names of those on your side.

Of course there is a list, people were there in the public domain, present at Raj Bhawan (in Mumbai). All the MLAs supporting yesterdays move were all present at Ajit Pawars residence too and it is not the case that the numbers are not there; they are overwhelming.

Are there more than 35 MLAs, which is required to avoid the anti-defection law?

No question of anti-defection. We are the party; this isnt a faction, but the NCP.

But you are also claiming Sharad Pawar is still the national president, but hes taken a position that is completely different?

Claims and counterclaims will now be made, but ultimately such decisions are endorsed by an authority like the Election Commission. It is better to await the due process.

Whats the back story? When did this entire process start?

Actually, the thought process which led to yesterdays action has been going on for a long time. A large number of party workers and MLAs have been wanting this kind of tie-up. It has been very much in the domain and knowledge of Mr Pawar also and people have spoken about it in the party forum. So, its not that these things come as a surprise. The fact is that it has culminated in an action and has been shown as a factional decision, whereas it is a party decision.

But when Sharad Pawar appointed you and Supriya Sule as working presidents, everyone saw it as him asserting himself. Now you say that even when you accepted that decision, you continued to think about an alliance with the BJP?

Actually, a thought process has nothing to do with an appointment. A thought process is something to do with larger decision-making bodies, not about being a working president.Yesterdays decision has to be seen in that light.

Did you disagree with Supriya Sule getting so much prominence in the party?

Supriya Sule is as much a member of the party as me or anybody else. There have been some issues with the state unit and Maharashtra is the principal unit of the NCP, and there have been simmering differences between the leadership of the Maharashtra unit and Mr Ajit Pawar and many others.

How long has the discussion to tie-up been on? For the past one year?

Its been going on for many, many (months)... its happened on many occasions. Its not like its some overnight decision.

Were you already talking when Eknath Shinde split Sena ?

Yes. That time the circumstances didnt work out, but as I said, this is not about coming into power and breaking away. It is a decision of a large number of people, both within the legislative side and the organisation side .

Do you believe that Sharad Pawar and Supriya Sule will also come around?

We hope the entire NCP family remains united. There are differences, but its not a permanent thing.

What would you say to those who point out that all of you are those who face probes by the Enforcement directorate and the Central Bureau of Investigation?

In politics, it is suitable to spread such canards. I dont see a single case against me at all, nothing, so wheres the question?

But they have summoned you for questioning?

Thats alright. It doesnt mean that any decision would be taken in such circumstances.

What about those who say that this is unethical or immoral?

The moment you (NCP) tied up with Shiv Sena in Maharashtra, where was the principle or secularism? They had been more rabid in their ideology than even the BJP. And they have been allies of the BJP and they separated on the issue of power and not ideology. So, if you can tie up with them, I dont see why you cant tie up with the BJP. If you can allow the Nagaland unit of NCP to ally with the BJP and join the NDA (National Democratic Alliance), why cant you allow the Maharashtra unit of the NCP too?

You were there at the opposition meeting in Patna 10 days ago...

I can only say that getting such a large number of parties together on board with different thought processes and contradictions, its not going to be easy. They didnt inspire confidence, considering the situation we are all faced with --whether its on the UCC (uniform civil code) or the Delhi ordinance. Its very nice to say that we will get together and have a one-on-one fight, but it doesnt work in practice.

So, you reject the opposition leaders theory that this was all done to dent their unity?

I am telling you that this thought process was within the NCP for quite some time. Some people may choose to distance themselves subsequently, but its a conscious decision taken by a vast majority of party workers. This (the NCP joining the BJP) is a very formidable combination and this will have a long term impact on Maharashtra.

Will we see you in the Narendra Modi cabinet soon? Did you meet Amit Shah?

There has been no such conversation at all. I have no reason to believe that may happen. I have had a conversation with Amit bhai on the phone ; a lot of these things, Mr Devendra Fadnavis was competent enough to take the decisions. (But) Of course, there was a final conversation with Amit Shah.

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Pune: At 8 am sharp on Monday, exactly a day after his nephew Ajit Pawar defected along with several top leaders and a section of the partys MLAs, Sharad Pawar set out from his home in Pune to resurrect his tattered party. Karad: NCP Chief Sharad Pawar with Congress leader Prithviraj Chavan pays tribute to former Maharashtra chief minister Yashwantrao Chavan, in Karad, Monday, July 3, 2023. (PTI Photo)(PTI07_03_2023_000052A) (PTI)

The 82-year-old leader was headed to Karad in Satara to pay his respects at the memorial of his political mentor YB Chavan on the occasion of Guru Purnima. He was accompanied by his wife Pratibha Pawar, grand-nephew Rohit Pawar and several party workers. Throughout the 162-kilometre-long journey, he stopped the convoy at various places where people had gathered ins small groups to meet him and extend their support.

At Karad, a larger gathering awaited him. Supporters who had congregated from Satara, Sangli, and Kolhapur waited in the rain to welcome him along with Satara MP Shriniwas Patil, NCPs Rajya Sabha MP Vandana Chavan, and senior Congress leader Prithviraj Chavan, who hails from Karad. But the surprise of the morning was the presence of NCP MLA from Wai Makarand Patil who was spotted the previous day in the company of Ajit Pawar. Patil later clarified that he had decided to stick with Sharad Pawar. At least 17 other NCP MLAs out of the 53 who were elected in 2019 are still sitting on the fence and watching Pawar seniors moves, as will the 24 others who have gone with Ajit Pawar. Sources close to Sharad Pawar said, the leader had decided to hold a series of rallies across the constituencies of these rebel MLAs. The first such public meeting is likely to be at Ambegaon in Pune district, represented by Pawars protege-turned-rebel Dilip Walse Patil.

He was also careful not to be harsh in his criticism of the rebels indicating room for rapprochement in a situation that is still fluid. Even though there have been some people (in the party) gone a different way, I am personally not the kind of person who harbours malice towards people, he said. Pawar also reiterated that he and his party were confident of bouncing back from Sundays setback. I have seen off such challenges in the past too, I know how to handle them. The best way is to go among people and to seek their support. At one point when he was asked whether he had been pained by the defections, he responded crisply, Certainly not.

I have set out on a tour of the state to galvanize the cadre, they need not feel disillusioned with what some leaders have done, he added. A wrong kind of tendency was rearing its head in the state of breaking up opposition parties and he said, he would oppose that, as he would growing communalism.

My fight against communal forces begins today and to fight those forces, I will rebuild the party, he told reporters in Karad. The only time he was short was when he was asked whether Ajit Pawars rebellion had his covert blessing. Thats a mean thing to say. Only those with mean and low intellect can say this.

Though he announced the sackings of rebels Praful Patel and Sunil Tatkare from party positions, Pawar said the decision to initiate petition for disqualification the 9 rebels had been by state unit chief Jayant Patil.

In his address to party workers at Karad, he said, Some of our people have fallen prey to the BJPs tactics to break other parties. This, he said had happened in other states too, mentioning the fall of the Kamal Nath government in Madhya Pradesh.

At Karad, Pawar was welcomed by former Maharashtra chief minister and Congress leader Prithiviraj Chavan. Though, he has often baited Pawar in the past, Chavan said: The Congress party stands with Sharad Pawar, he is a leader of the MVA, and together we will fight the BJP.

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The mega Nationalist Congress Party (NCP) infighting escalated on Monday with factions led by Sharad Pawar and his nephew Ajit trading sackings.



NCP chief Sharad Pawar who sacked Praful Patel as the party working president, also removing him and Sunil Tatkare from the party membership. Meanwhile, Praful Patel and Ajit Pawar faction addressed a presser announced removing Jayant Patil as the state NCP chief and replacing him with Tatkare. File photo of Sharad Pawar with his Ajit Pawar and Praful Patel. (Bhushan Koyande/HT Photo)

Patel, who was once considered a close aide of Pawar Sr., announced Ajit Pawar as the head of NCP legislative unit.

I was appointed as vice president in the national convention held in September 2022 after which I have made several appointments. Patil was also appointed as state chief without internal elections on a temporary basis, Patel said.



ALSO READ: 'Some acted differently. Personally I'm not...': Sharad Pawar on Ajit's revolt



The other announcements included Anil Patil as chief whip of party,Rupali Chakankar as state women chief and Suraj Chavan as youth NCP chief.

I have read that one has been appointed as leader of opposition and chief whip. LoP has to be appointed by the Speaker and the party having maximum MLAs gets it. The appointment has been made to create confusion among MLAs, which will not work. We have the support of majority of MLAs, Ajit Pawar said.

Responding to the actions on leaders who attended Sunday's oath ceremony, the deputy CM said,"We are heading the NCP and what we are doing is in the favour of the party. They do not have the power to issue any notice or anything else. We will ensure the MLAs will not have to face any constitutional issues".

Sunil Tatkare, after being named Maharashtra NCP chief, said a meeting of

district chief, taluka chief and other offce bearers has been called on July 5, and he hoped all of them will be present.

When asked who will be the president of the breakaway unit, Ajit Pawar retorted,"Have you forgotten that Sharad Pawar is the NCP national president?"



Some senior leaders have said that they will go to the people instead of going for a legal battle but press conferences were taken late night and several decisions were declared. It has no meaning, he said.

We are not here to expel people, Pawar added.

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The Greater Noida Police on Monday arrested a Pakistani woman and her four children who were allegedly sheltered by a man illegally, whom she met via online game PUBG, news agency PTI reported, citing police officials. The police have also arrested the man, who illegally sheltered them in his rented house.(File/ Reuters)

The police have also arrested the man, who illegally sheltered them in his rented house, the officials added.

"The Pakistani woman and the local man have been detained. The woman's four children are also in police custody," Deputy Commissioner of Police (Greater Noida) Saad Miya Khan told PTI.

According to the official, the woman, who is in her late 20s, and the man had encountered each other over online game PUBG, which led to a friendship between them.

"The man and the woman are being questioned right now. Further details and facts would be shared once the questioning is over," Khan added.

According to the official, the woman had allegedly entered India with her children via Nepal last month before entering Uttar Pradesh and reaching Greater Noida by a bus, the report added.

(With inputs from PTI)
The Association of Junior Engineers Punjab gathered in a protest at the Punjab State Power Corporation Limited (PSPCL), Central Zone office situated on Ferozepur Road in Ludhiana on Monday. The association voiced their concerns and urged for the resolution of their long-standing demands. Association of junior engineer to stage protest against the management of PSPCL for their long pending demands in Ludhiana. (Manish/HT)

President of the association Ranjit Singh Dhillon, expressed disappointment over the lack of progress in fulfilling their requirements. He stated that the association had submitted a demand charter to the authorities approximately 7-8 months ago, but the government has failed to fulfil any of the demands till date.

Dhillon emphasised that the Junior Engineers (JEs) are tirelessly working round the clock, even though they receive comparatively lower salaries in comparison to their counterparts in different departments of the Punjab Government.

The association members called upon the government and PSPCL authorities to address the issue of working hours and ensure equal compensation for Junior Engineers, commensurate with the salaries of their peers in other departments of the Punjab Government.

In addition, Dhillon highlighted the pressing concerns regarding the departments infrastructure and staff shortage, which have had a detrimental effect on the quality of services provided. The association had offered some suggestions to the authorities in order to ensure regular power supply to consumers, but unfortunately, the authorities have not taken these suggestions into consideration.
Tejinder Singh, Lambardar of Barewal village, organised a protest outside the deputy commissioners (DC) office in Ludhiana on Monday to demand action against a revenue official who allegedly refused to register Singhs property. Lambardar Barewal village stage protest outside DC office against the alleged corrupt officials in Ludhiana. (Manish/HT)

Singh had previously filed a written complaint against the revenue official with the sub divisional magistrate (SDM) West on Friday. In his complaint, Singh accused the official of soliciting a bribe in exchange for expediting the registration process for his property.

The protest was an attempt to seek justice and bring attention to the allegedly corrupt practices within the local administration. Singh peacefully protested outside the Deputy Commissioners office, hoping to draw the authorities attention towards his plight.

According to the complaint, Singh had approached the West revenue official on Friday to initiate the registration process for his property. The staff allegedly demanded a significant bribe to expedite the procedure and refused to proceed despite all the required documents being in order.

Singh claimed that he intended to register his properties on Barewal Road, but the officials not only failed to complete the registration, but also directly declined to carry out the work due to his refusal to offer bribes to the staff.

SDM West Harjinder Singh acknowledged receiving the complaint and assured Singh that it would be treated with the utmost seriousness. Harjinder Singh stated, I have instructed the concerned official to provide a written explanation for not registering the complainants property. After reviewing the response, appropriate action will be taken.

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With the Kanwar Yatra set to begin from July 4, the Uttar Pradesh police have instructed the personnel on duty to ensure that only devotional songs are played by the DJs on the Yatra routes. Kanwar Yatra will begin from July 4 with the onset of Shrawan month. (FIle photo)

The UP police personnel deployed on the Kanwar Yatra routes leading to Varanasi will ensure that only bhajans (devotional songs) are played by the DJs accompanying the Kanwariyas from various districts of Uttar Pradesh and the adjoining state of Bihar.

A temporary police outpost each is being set up at the entry points in districts including Ballia, Ghazipur, Chandauli and Sonbhadra, sharing borders with Bihar and Jharkhand.

The UP police have conveyed this message to police chiefs of those Bihar districts that share boundary with UP.

ADG Zone Varanasi Ram Kumar has instructed the SPs of Ghazipur, Ballia, Chandauli, Jaunpur, Azamgarh, Sonbhadra, Bhadohi and Mirzapur in this regard.

Buxar, Bhabhua are the districts of Bihar and Garhwa is the district of Jharkhand that shares boundary with UP.

Instructions have been given to ensure that only devotional numbers are played by the DJs accompanying the Kanwariyas and sound should not be above the prescribed decibels in any case, said the ADG.

He added that at entry points on Bihar and Jharkhand border, a police outpost each for the Kanwar Yatra is being set up. Cops have been instructed to tell the Kanwariyas from the adjoining states to play only devotional numbers.

He said that the security has been upped at Baba Kashi Vishwanath Temple and ghats. Additional police force will be deployed at the ghats and in city in the month of Shrawan.

Meanwhile, the Bhadohi police officials also held a meeting with their counterparts in Prayagraj. A large number of Kanwariyas from Prayagraj and adjoining districts visit Varanasi for darshan and offering prayers to Baba Kashi Vishwanath.
A diploma engineering student in Bihars Gaya district was kidnapped on Friday and unidentified persons have demanded a ransom of 50 lakh for his release, police said. The family said that the student had on Friday left home on his motorcycle to meet a friend after which he didnt return. (Representative file image)

In a complaint lodged with the Belaganj police station of Gaya, the family said that the student had on Friday left home on his motorcycle to meet a female friend in Patna. His phone was switched off despite repeated phone calls by his family members.

According to the boys father, he received a voice call from his sons cell number on Saturday morning demanding a ransom of 50 lakh within 24 hours for his safe return.

Also Read:Trader, son kidnapped in Bihar for 3 cr ransom; case registered: Police

When I asked him about details of place where money is to be delivered, the caller disconnected the phone, the father said.

Following this, the family members informed the police.

Police then lodged an FIR (first information report) against the unidentified miscreants.

Separate teams of police personnel have been formed to trace the missing youth. A SIT has been constituted to trace the abducted youth, said Gaya SSP Ashish Bharti.

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The Pimpri-Chinchwad police have arrested four persons, including the mastermind, from the India-Nepal border in the Sonya Tapkir murder case, said officials on Monday. The Pimpri-Chinchwad police have arrested four persons, including the mastermind, from the India-Nepal border in the Sonya Tapkir murder case (REPRESENTATIVE IMAGE)

The accused have been identified as Karan Ratan Rokade, 25, a resident of Chikhali; Rutwik alias Mungya Ratan Rokade; Rinku Dinesh Kumar, 19; and a minor were arrested from the India-Nepal border last week.

On May 22, Karan Rokade, the prime accused, along with his associates, killed Sonya Tapkir in Chikhali to create terror in the area. Following the murder, the accused travelled to Lonavala, Goa, Madhya Pradesh (MP), Gujarat and Uttar Pradesh (UP) to evade arrest. During technical analysis however, the police identified the accused and launched a search operation to nab them. Last week, the police got a tip-off that Karan Rokade was in UP and trying to cross over into Nepal. Thereafter, the police launched a search operation near Madhuban in UP and arrested all the accused.

According to the police, 11 first information reports (FIRs) have been registered against Karan Rokade, 10 against Rutwik Rokade, and two against Dinesh Kumar at various police stations in Pune and Pimpri-Chinchwad. The accused were produced in court and the court remanded them to custody till July 6.

During interrogation, the prime accused confessed to hatching the plot to kill Sonya Tapkir due to the latters increasing dominance in the area, according to police officials.

A case has been registered at Chikhali police station under sections 302 and 120(B) of the Indian Penal Code (IPC) and other relevant sections, and further investigation is underway.

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Less than 24 hours into the rebellion, some Nationalist Congress Party (NCP) leaders who were seen with Ajit Pawar returned to the Sharad Pawar camp even as many legislators have begun interacting with workers in respective constituencies before making their stand public on June 5 when both the camps of the party have called a meeting. Earlier on Sunday, Amol Kolhe was seen at the swearing-in ceremony of Ajit Pawar as the deputy chief minister of Maharashtra. (HT FILE PHOTO)

Among those who returned to the Sharad Pawar camp was Amol Kolhe, a Member of Parliament (MP) from Shirur in Pune district. Earlier on Sunday, Kolhe was seen at the swearing-in ceremony of Ajit Pawar as the deputy chief minister of Maharashtra.

On Monday, he released a video to indicate switching the side. When asked why he chose to be back with Sharad Pawar, the Shirur MP said morality prompted him to take the decision.

When there is conflict between the mind and the soul, listen to the soul. Perhaps the mind sometimes forgets the morality but the soul never, the actor-turned-politician said in a post on social media.

When asked if any other leaders are also considering returning to Sharad Pawar, Kolhe said, I do not know about others and can speak for myself.

Like Amol, another NCP leader and party legislator from Wai in Satara district Makarand Patil was in Mumbai when Ajit Pawar took the oath. On Monday, Makarand joined the Sharad Pawar camp at Karad and remained with him throughout the day.

NCP state unit president Jayant Patil said, Except the nine who took oath during the swearing-in as minister, all the rest are with Sharad Pawar.

Another MLA from western Maharashtra on condition of anonymity said that ideologically he and many others are with Sharad Pawar but before taking any stand they will need to take the ground sense and consider future prospects as assembly elections are just a year and a half away.

We have returned to our constituencies and started interaction with workers and supporters. We will also take feedback from voters and then take a final decision for the July 5 meeting, he said.

Both Sharad Pawar and Ajit Pawar camps have called separate meeting in Mumbai on Wednesday in which the partys MLAs, MPs, office-bearers and other leaders have been invited.

According to Jayant, the meeting of Sharad Pawar camp has been organised at Yashwantrao Chavan Auditorium while Ajit Pawars supporters will gather at the Mumbai Education Trust at Bandra in Mumbai run by Chhagan Bhujbal.

Pune NCP city unit president Prashant Jagtap said, We respect Ajit Pawar, but maximum party cadre is of the view to stay with Sharad Pawar in this hour of crisis. We all are with Sharad Pawar and our priority is to strengthen the party in the coming days.

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Three persons have been booked for the death of an IT professional who fell from the fifth floor of a building in Moshi, Pimpri-Chinchwad. The accused have been identified as Sagar Gadhawe 29, Suhas Gadhawe 23, and Mangesh Walunj 26, all residents of Chikhali. Initially, police registered an accidental death case at MIDC Bhosari police station. (REPRESENTATIVE IMAGE)

The deceased Mithilesh Langote 30, died on May 21 this year when he fell from the balcony of a building, said police.

Initially, police registered an accidental death case at MIDC Bhosari police station.

According to police, during the investigation, the three accused informed that they were consuming alcohol with the deceased before the mishap.

However, after relatives of the Langote filed a complaint accusing foul play, cops initiated a further inquiry into this case.

As per police information, the four were having liquor, when a trivial argument escalated into a fist fight and the accused assaulted Langote during the incident. The trio even locked the door, so that Langote would not escape. In order to save himself, the deceased tried to jump off the balcony to the terrace of a neighbouring flat, misjudged the distance, and fell down.

A case has been registered at MIDC Bhosari police station under IPC sections 304(2),323,504, and 34 and further investigation is underway.
Indian Institute of Scientific Education and Research (IISER) will announce results of the IISER Aptitude Test or IAT 2023 today, July 3. Candidates who have appeared in the exam can check it on iiseradmission.in. IISER Aptitude Test, IAT 2023, results releasing today on iiseradmission.in(Getty Images/iStockphoto)

After results are announced, the portal for document upload and IISER preferences will be opened between July 4 and 7. First round of admission offers will be provided on July 12.

The entrance test for admission to 5-year BS-MS programmes offered at IISERs, in addition to the 4-year BS programme at IISER Bhopal, was held on June 17, 2023. This year, a total of 34,751 candidates appeared in the test.

There are multiple ways to take admission at IISERs: the State and Central Board (SCB) channel, the Kishore Vaigyanik Protsahan Yojana (KVPY) channel and the Joint Entrance Examination (JEE) Advanced channel.

For the SCB channel, IISER conducts the IAT exam. For admission through the KVPY channel, the exam is KVPY aptitude test.

The online registration window for IISER admission through JEE Advanced was closed on June 30.
Actor Ameesha Patel has accused Anil Sharma Productions of mismanagement during the shooting of their upcoming film Gadar 2 in Chandigarh. Taking to Twitter recently, Ameesha in a series of tweets claimed that Anil Sharma Productions didn't give make-up artists and costume designers, among others, 'their rightful remuneration and dues'. (Also Read | Ameesha Patel posts massive Gadar 2 spoiler on Instagram, fans say she's ruined it) Ameesha Patel will be seen in Anil Sharma's Gadar 2.(PTI)

Ameesha also added that accommodation, transport, and food bills were left unpaid. The actor further added that cars were not provided to certain cast and crew members which left them stranded.

Ameesha spoke about Anil Sharma Productions

Ameesha wrote, "Another concern of fans has been about certain incidents regarding Anil Sharma Productions to have taken place in regards to the final schedule of Gadar 2 that took place end May in Chandigarh!! There were certain queries that many technicians like makeup artists, costume designers and others etc. did not receive their rightful remuneration and dues from Anil Sharma Productions!! Yes, they did not!! But @ZeeStudios_ stepped in and made sure all dues were settled as they are a very professional company!"

Ameesha wrote on Twitter.

Ameesha shared several tweets.

Ameesha said bills weren't paid for accommodation, transport, food

She also added, "Yes from accommodation, to transport to Chandigarh airport on the final day to food bills were left unpaid and cars were not provided to certain cast and crew members leaving them stranded! But yet again @zeestudios stepped in and corrected these issues caused by Anil Sharma Productions!!!"

Ameesha also said, "All involved in the film are aware that the production of Gadar 2 was being handled by Anil Sharma Productions, which unfortunately misfired numerous times but @ZeeStudios_always rectified issues!! A special thanks to them especially Shariq Patel, Neeraj Joshi, Kabeer Ghosh and Nischit!! This Zee team is top-notch (thumbs-up emojis)."

About Gadar 2

Helmed by Anil Sharma, the film stars Sunny Deol, Ameesha Patel and Utkarsh Sharma in the lead roles. It is all set to hit the theatres on August 11. In the film, Ameesha will reprise her role as Sakeena and Sunny as Tara Singh. The production companies for Gadar 2 are Zee Studios and Anil Sharma Productions.

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In the recent months, speculations about a budding romance between actor Ananya Panday and Aditya Roy Kapur have been making headlines. The duo intensified these rumours when they posed together at designer Manish Malhotras Diwali party last year, captivating everyones attention. However, Panday chooses to keep her relationship status under wraps. Ananya Panday was at a Skechers event in Delhi recently

Without giving any clarification about her relationship status, Panday says, Its good to be curious, people should keep guessing who Im dating.

While the buzz around her personal life continues, Panday has faced some setbacks on the work front. Both her films -- Liger, starring Vijay Deverakonda, and Shakun Batras Gehraaiyan ( both 2022) -- failed to gather a significant positive response. Reflecting on these challenges, Panday reveals that she has learnt valuable lessons from these past projects that didnt meet expectations of many.

No matter how cliche it sounds, its about the journey and its not about the destination. My lessons are, not giving up and not thinking too much about the outcome but living in that moment and giving it your all, she says.

The 24-year-old feels that when you sign a film, there are a lot of possibilities that can happen, but you give everything to the project. She adds, We (people working on the sets) know how hard it is to make a movie or a show. We really give it our all, we give it our best, and sometimes that doesnt work out, but thats okay. That shouldnt let you down and you should take whatever youve learnt from that and use it in your next film.

Looking ahead, Panday expresses enthusiasm for her upcoming film, Dream Girl 2, alongside Ayushmann Khurrana., saying, My character is super bubbly and fun. I have a very important role in what the outcome of the film is. Everything is sort of happening around my character. I dont want to say too much, because there are big surprises in that film. Leaving fans more intrigued and excited, she adds, Dream Girl 2 is going to be a full on masti laugh entertainer and it will leave you with a message, like the first one did as well.

There is also Kho Gaye Hum Kahan, which Panday is eagerly anticipating. She tells us that her role is more similar to her own self than what she has played on screen. She is a very real girl and has her own moments. It is very similar to how I am as a person and I know a lot of girls out there who will relate to it a lot. The film would be her second one with actor Siddhant Chaturvedi after Gehraaiyan, who is one of her closest friends in the industry. I can talk to him about a lot of things and he is a solid support. We dont have to talk all the time, but there is a deep friendship that we found in each other. He is my buddy. I can joke, laugh, fight, everything with him. We are like Tom and Jerry, shares Panday.

Kho Gaye Hum Kahan is a movie that the young generation needs right now. Its a film about friendship, how the times are now, and how relationships work in a digital age. Its a movie which is needed right now by the younger generation, she further adds, also emphasising that her effort is to always play a different character in every film.

I dont want to bore myself and the audience as well, so I am always striving to do something different. The actor also expresses her desire to take up an action or thriller project, because that is something I havent done yet, she ends.
Actor Kajol recently praised her daughter Nysa Devgan for the way she deals with the paparazzi, on her own terms. Nysa is one of the most popular star kids and also a paparazzi favourite. Talking about Nysa, Kajol said in a new interview that her daughter has become better at handling media attention, with grace and dignity. Also read: Kajol says why she would put Ajay Devgn on trial: I'm sure he'd accept all charges Nysa Devgan is the oldest child of Kajol and Ajay Devgn.(Instagram)

Kajol's duaghter Nysa

Kajol married actor Ajay Devgn in February 1999. The couple has two children  daughter Nysa who was born in 2003, and son Yug who was born in 2010. As much as Nysa enjoys popularity among fans, she maintains a private life and also ends up combating social media trolls from time to time.

Kajol on Nysa's first encounter with paparazzi

Kajol was recently asked how Nysa has been dealing with media attention as she gets snapped by the paparazzi often. Kajol said, I cant teach her how to deal with paparazzi, she has learnt that with experience. She first had an experience with the paparazzi in Jaipur. We both were alone and were not travelling with any security. At that time, the 20-25 photographers surrounded us and started shouting, this scared her and she burst out crying. I just carried her in my arms and went straight to the car. Later I told her that these people mean you no harm, it's just their work so don't worry about it. If you have noticed I have kept my children away from it.

Kajol on Nysa dealing with media attention now

She is better now with it and she is handling it very very well. She is handling it with a lot more grace and dignity than I would have. If I was in her place, toh mera chappal bahut pehle nikal chuka hota (I wouldn't have handled it with such patience), the actor added.

Nysa is currently pursuing her higher education in Switzerland after completing her school at Singapore's Glion Institute of Higher Education. While it is unclear whether Nysa wants to join the industry in future or not, her photos and videos on social media often go viral. On the other hand, Kajol is currently basking in the success of Lust Stories 2.

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Kajol will be next seen in The Trial, where she plays Noyonika Sengupta, a homemaker, who is forced to return to work as a lawyer after her husbands public scandal puts him behind bars. In a new interview, when asked which actor would she choose to put on trial, Kajol took the name of husband Ajay Devgn and gave a hilarious reason for the choice. (Also read: Kajol asks Lust Stories 2 director if she is a better actor than Ajay Devgn. This was his reply) Kajol says she would put husband Ajay Devgn on the trial,

About The Trial

The Trial, which is an adaptation of the American courtroom drama The Good Wife, marks Kajol's OTT debut. In the show, actor Jisshu Sengupta plays the role of her husband. In the trailer, we get a glimpse of how he gets arrested for accepting sexual favours as bribes to change verdicts. Kajol is also seen slapping him for cheating on her.

Kajol on why she would put Ajay on trial

Now, in a new interview with ETimes, when Kajol was asked about any actor whom she would likely put on trial, the actor seemed hesitant to take a particular name. When director Suparn Verma and Jisshu Sengupta also gave their answers, then Kajol finally said that she would go with Ajay. She said, "Achcha thik he main Ajay Devgn ko daal deti hu trial pe. Jitne saari cheezein he trial pe daalne ke liye woh toh vajah batane ki jarurat hi nahi he! Mera husband he bas utna hi kaafi hein! (laughs) (Okay, I will go ahead and put Ajay Devgn on trial. There are so many things that I do not even need to give one reason! He is my husband and that is enough!) She further joked that he would even accept all the charges.

Kajol and Ajay's relationship

Ajay Devgn and Kajol have been married for 24 years now. Though it was a love marriage, it was not love at first sight for the couple. They met on the sets of Hulchul and started dating. Ajay and Kajol got married in 1999 and welcomed their first child - daughter Nysa in 2003. In 2010, they welcomed their son, Yug.

Kajol was last seen in in Netflix's Lust Stories 2. She starred in the segment alongside actor Kumud Mishra, which was directed by Amit R. Sharma.

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Actor Sonam Kapoor took to her Instagram handle and dropped photos from Dior's Autumn-Winter show in Paris. She is the only Indian celeb said to be invited. Hollywood star Natalie Portman among others is slated to join her at the event. Also read: Sonam Kapoor dons saree and overcoat for UK PM Rishi Sunak's reception Sonam Kapoor at Dior show in Paris.

Sonam Kapoor at Dior show

For the event, Sonam turned up in a beige Dior outfit. She topped it with a trench coat of the matching shade and black shoes. She paired it with a Dior handbag and a newsie cap. She finished off her look with minimal jewellery and a smokey eye-makeup look.

Sharing the photos, Sonam wrote on the photo-sharing app, What a stunning show @mariagraziachiuri thank you for inviting me @dior. She also added details of her look and revealed her sister, Rhea Kapoor was among the ones who styled her for the event.

After she shared the most, the actor's husband Anand Ahuja gave her the loudest cheer. He dropped several loved up emojis for her in the comment section. A fan added, This look is such a perfection. Flawless makeup, said someone else.

Sonam has been attending international fashion shows for a long time. She is among the most stylish actors in Bollywood. Previously, she had graced Dior's first fashion show in India since 1962. It was held in March 2023 at Gateway of India in Mumbai and made history.

The actor lives in London with her family, husband Anand Ahuja and son Vayu. A few days ago, she attended the UK Prime Minister Rishi Sunak's reception at 10 Downing Street on UK-India 2023 week. Sonam represented India in a saree with a modern touch.

Sonam Kapoor's upcoming film

Meanwhile, Sonam will be next seen in Blind. It's her first film to release after embracing motherhood. Directed by Shome Makhija, Blind is an adaption from a Korean film of the same name. The film will release on Jio Cinema on July 7.

Talking about her return to films, Sonam said, "I took two years off as I was pregnant and then wanted to take some time off with my son. Two years are not done yet and I have signed onto two projects - one show and one film that I will start working on. It will release in another year, because that is how films work. Then my idea is to do two pieces of content every year, that's it, not more because I want to spend time with my family as well."

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Vietnam has banned the highly-anticipated Barbie movie due to a scene featuring a map that depicts the nine-dash line. The map represents Chinas territorial claims over the South China Sea. The Chinese claims overlap with the exclusive economic zone claims of Brunei, Indonesia, Malaysia, the Philippines, Taiwan, and Vietnam. As a result, Vietnam believes that its sovereignty is being violated. Warner Bros' Barbie

All commercial screenings of Warner Bros Barbie have been banned in Vietnam. The movie was originally slated for release on July 21 in Vietnam. On Monday, Vi Kien Thanh, director general of the Vietnam Cinema Department under the Ministry of Culture, Sports, and Tourism said that the ban was decided by the National Film Evaluation Council.

We do not grant license for the American movie Barbie to release in Vietnam because it contains the offending image of the nine-dash line, said the state-run Tuoi Tre newspaper, also citing Vi Kien Thanh.

Vietnam is one of Chinas many neighbouring countries which strongly dispute Chinas assertions. These countries have their own territorial claims that contest and overlap with those of China.

In 2016, an international tribunal was held in The Hague, Netherlands and unanimously ruled against Chinese claims in the South China Sea. However, this judgement was not recognised by Beijing which has been building military bases in the area for years. It also conducts regular naval patrols to assert its territorial claims.

Barbie is not the first film to be banned in Vietnam due to this controversial map. Previously, DreamWorks animated film Abominable, and Sonys Uncharted suffered the same fate in 2019 and 2022 respectively.

In 2020, the series Put Your Head On My Shoulder and Madam Secretary were told to delete scenes containing the map. Furthermore, in 2021, Netflix was ordered to remove the Australian spy drama Pine Gap from the Vietnamese market.

Also Read | Twitter is going crazy over Barbenheimer memes, here are our favourite picks

Directed by Greta Gerwig, Barbie is set to release on July 21 this year. It stars Margot Robbie as the beloved doll, Barbie, opposite Ryan Gosling as Ken. Barbie and Ken are having the time of their lives as they revel in the colourful, and seemingly perfect, world of Barbie. However, when the two venture into the real world they discover the joys and perils of a life among humans.
Jimmy Fallon has shared an adorable family photo on Instagram, ahead of Fourth of July celebrations. In the photo, Fallon is seen posing alongside wife Nancy Juvonen and their two daughters. The family are seen standing on the dock near Lake Winnipesaukee in New Hampshire. Jimmy Fallon(HT File Photo)

Sharing the photo on Sunday, Fallon jokingly captioned it "I agreed to take this photo only if I could stand on the dry side of the dock. Happy 2nd of July!"

The photo became an instant hit among Fallon's fans and celebrity friends.

"Nan!!! Winnepesaukee! Im thinking about driving up there and yelling your name in the town square until you respond What About Bob-style," commented actor Justin Long.

ALSO READ| Arnold Schwarzenegger warns about Artificial Intelligence with scary reminder from Terminator movie

"This is such a beautiful photo!," wrote artist Rachel Ryle.

"Great family photo, looks like a peaceful place to spend some time. Have a fun filled 4th of July!," commented a fan.

"What a beautuful picture. The girls are getting so big. Happy July 2nd to you all and Happy 4th also," wrote another fan.

In 2020, Fallon had talked about being a father to his children and how his perspectives changed after becoming a parent.

My biggest revelation is how much I ended up caring for other peoples kids if that makes any sense. You get it more, Fallon had told Fatherly.

When I didnt have kids, if I heard a crying baby in the restaurant, I would think, Can you stop the crying and go around the block? Now I would be like, Just give me the baby  how can I help? Ive been there, he had added.
Leandro De Niro Rodriguez, the grandson of Robert De Niro, has died. The news was shared on Instagram by the actor's daughter Drena De Niro on Monday, where she penned an emotional post saying the family had lost a "sweet angel". Leandro was 19 years old. Drena did not share further details about Leandro's death. (Also read: Robert De Niro shares first photo of his newborn daughter, says 'this baby is planned') Robert De Niro's grandson Leandro De Niro Rodriguez has died.

Drena De Niro's post

Drena shared the news of Leandro's death on her Instagram. She posted a picture of him and penned a long note. "My beautiful sweet angel . I have loved you beyond words or description from the moment I felt you in my belly .You have been my joy my heart and all that was ever pure and real in my life . I wish I was with you right now. I wish I was with you," she began in her caption.

Drena then continued, "I dont know how to live without you but Ill try to go on and spread the love and light that you so made me feel in getting to be your mama . You were so deeply loved and appreciated and I wish that love alone could have saved you. Im so sorry my baby , Im so sorry @carlosmare. Rest in Peace and Eternal Paradise my darling boy."

Leandro's acting roles

Leandro had starred with mother Drena in 2018's A Star Is Born, which was directed by Bradley Cooper. He had also starred in small roles in The Collection and Cabaret Maxime. Drena is the oldest child of Robert De Niros seven children. Her mother is the actor's first wife, actor Dianne Abbott. Several fans and well wishers expressed their condolences in the comments section.

Robert De Niro welcomed his seventh child

Meanwhile in May, Robert De Niro surprised fans and grabbed media attention after he confirmed that his girlfriend Tiffany Chen recently gave birth to his seventh child, a girl named Gia Virginia Chen De Niro. Robert first met Tiffany Chen during the shooting of the film The Intern, shortly after which rumours about their relationship started to circulate when both of them were spotted together on a romantic vacation in the south of France in 2021.

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Tom Cruise is celebrating his 61st birthday on July 3. At the Australian premiere of his upcoming action thriller Mission: Impossible - Dead Reckoning Part One in Sydney, the Hollywood actor revealed his birthday plans and what transpired on the same day last year, when he was shooting for the film. (Also Read: Here's what Tom Cruise has to say about the clash between Oppenheimer and Barbie a week after Mission: Impossible) Tom Cruise celebrates his 61st birthday on July 3(Twitter)

Tom Cruise is gearing up for the release of the seventh instalment in the popular Mission: Impossible franchise. While the film will hit cinemas on July 12, Tom has already attended multiple premieres in Rome, Los Angeles Abu Dhabi and Seoul.

Tom Cruise recalls 60th birthday

At the premiere of Mission: Impossible - Dead Reckoning Part One in Sydney, Tom Cruise was asked if it was true that last year, while filming, he defeated co-stars Hayley Atwell and Simon Pegg in a dance-off on his 60th birthday. Cruise admitted it was true. I'm 60 and I completely crushed them, he said, recalling how he won the dance-off with a jazz split.

Tom's birthday plans this year

When Tom was asked what his plans for the 61st birthday are, he said he woke up at 4 am, like he does every day. He also added that he has dinner plans following the premiere of the film.

Tom on birthday presents

Tom said that he's got generous birthday gifts from his fans this year, including a lot of flowers. When the presenters at the Sydney premiere offered a helmet to Tom as a birthday present, he said that he wouldn't need it given the speed at which he rides motorcycles in films. I'm terrified for me, trust me, he said, laughing.

About Dead Reckoning Part One

Dead Reckoning is the sequel to Mission: Impossible - Fallout, that released in 2018. Dead Reckoning is being made in two parts. The first will release on July 12 in cinemas and the second is slated to release on June 28, 2024.

The action thriller will see Tom Cruise reprise his iconic role of Ethan Hunt, Simon Pegg return as Benji Dunn, Rebecca Ferguson as Ilsa Fraust, and Vanessa Kirby as Alanna Mitsopolis.

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Hugh Grant attended Blackpink concert at BST Hyde Park, with his daughter on Sunday. During their concert, the South Korean girl group wooed a huge crowd of 65,000 fans with their amazing performance, singing hits like Shut Down and Pink Venom. Blackpink became the first-ever Korean group to headline a major music festival in the United Kingdom. Hugh Grant attended Blackpink concert at BST Hyde Park, with his daughter on Sunday. (File)

After attending the event, Grant declared himself a 'rabid' fan of Blackpink. He went on to use the 'Blink' nickname with which the band declares its fanbase, calling himself a 'rabid blink' fan. Notably, the term "Blink" is combination of the words Black and Pink which together make the name "Blackpink".

A video clip of Grant from the concert went viral on social media, in which is seen wearing a Blackpink hoodie while up on a terrace at the concert venue.

Twitter account "Blackpink Global Fanbase" shared the video clip and wrote "British Actor, Hugh Grant declares hes a rabid Blink after attending @BLACKPINK concert. #BLACKPINK headlined @BSTHydePark last night - but there was one rather unexpected British star in the audience.. And none other than Hugh Grant!"

The English actor tweeted "Very grateful to three eleven year olds for taking me to see @BLACKPINK yesterday. Am rabid Blink now. Slept with my heart hammer."

By heart hammer, Grant referred to Blackpink's light-up pink hammer with heart-shaped ends, known as BI-Ping-Bong, which was a major hit among the fans at the concert.

Fans of Grant and Blackpink got excited on seeing the actor at the band's concert. Many took to Twitter and expressed their joy.

"Omg my fav actor is a blink," posted one user.

"Welcome to the family!," wrote another fan.

"Oh my God this is too cute," commented a third fan.
Stand-up comedian Gabriel Iglesias recently had a harrowing experience when the private jet he was traveling on had to make an emergency landing in North Carolina. Iglesias, known for his "Fluffy" persona, took to Instagram to share the news with his fans. In a video clip showing the plane on a grassy field after the landing, he expressed relief that everyone on board was okay but understandably shaken up. Stand-up comedian Gabriel Iglesias recently had a harrowing experience when the private jet he was traveling on had to make an emergency landing in North Carolina.(Instagram)

Acknowledging the efforts of the pilots who navigated the emergency situation, Iglesias expressed gratitude for their skills and dedication to ensuring the safety of the passengers. He recognized that the situation could have been much worse and emphasized his appreciation for being alive and able to continue his comedy tour.

Fluffy shared the video of the incident on Instagram writing, Emergency landing!!! Our private jet skid off the runway and wound up in a field in Andrews, N. Carolina. Everyone is ok but shaken up. Happy to be alive. I love u all 

True to his resilient spirit, Iglesias shared an update the following day, assuring his fans that he was back in the air on a different jet. In an Instagram post, he revealed that despite the understandable nerves after the previous day's incident, he had safely arrived in Mississippi and reaffirmed that the show must go on.

While Iglesias's emergency landing was a heart-stopping moment, he is not the only celebrity to encounter trouble while flying. Pop star Miley Cyrus also experienced a similar scare when her plane was struck by lightning during a trip to Paraguay last year.

Cyrus shared a video on Instagram showing the bright flash of lightning and the passengers' startled reactions. Fortunately, everyone remained unharmed, although the plane sustained some visible damage.

Also read | Is Kourtney planning to break free from Kardashian-clan for new spinoff show with husband Travis Barker?

The incidents involving Gabriel Iglesias and Miley Cyrus serve as reminders of the unexpected challenges that can arise even for those who lead glamorous lives.
Anupamaa actor Arvind Vaidya, who plays Bapuji, has been missing in several episodes, which showed the entire Anupamaa cast. He has not been seen on sets since almost a month. Arvind has now revealed that he is on a family holiday in the US. Also read: Rupali Ganguly: I go to work with guilt but I'm blessed to have a spouse who's there for our son Arvind Vaidya plays Bapuji on Anupamaa.

Arvind was also not a part of the track, which had the Anupamaa family bidding the titular character, played by Rupali Ganguly, goodbye as she left for the US. The 82-year-old has now said that he will return from the US in the first week of July and will resume work soon after.

Arvind Vaidya on his US trip

Talking about his US trip, Arvind told The Times of India in a recent interview, "My son lives with his family in Atlanta and I had applied for leave in January itself, and booked our tickets. My wife and I left for the US on June 4 and at that time, this track had not been planned. I had shot for my episodes and left."

On missing the Anupamaa shoot, he added, I am missing being on the set and especially since there is a crucical track going on with Anupama leaving for US. But I really couldn't do anything because this trip was planned much in advance.

Rupali on why Anupamaa is a success

Rupali Ganguly plays the titular character in the show which continues to rule the small screen. She recently spoke about why the show is so relatable and successful.

She told Hindustan Times in an interview, Anupamaa struck a chord with the audience because of Rajesh's fantastic vision and his team of writers and executors, his directors, his DOP, everybody who kind of made that vision believable.

On how the show is a deviation from the existing trend on TV, she said, Television mein generally hota hai ki younger ladkia ma ban jati hain aur 25-26 saal mein aapka 20-25 sal ka beta dikha diya jata hai (generally what happens in TV industry is young girls are made mothers of sons aged 20-25). So Rajan kept the timelines and the age lines very real and I think that is what predominantly connected. I think a lot of blessings are behind the show's success, also of the pets that Rajesh Shahi allows on the sets and how they are taken care of.

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Sonu Sood decided to don the chef's hat, while shooting for MTV Roadies 19 recently. He prepared and served dosas and bhatures to the crew, including actor Rhea Chakraborty. She is one of the gang leaders on the show, while Sonu is the host. They are currently shooting for the show in Himachal Pradesh. Sonu shared the video of him cooking on Instagram. (Also read| Rhea Chakraborty on TV return with Roadies 19: Feels good to be back) Sonu Sood prepares dosa for Rhea Chakraborty.

Sonu Sood, the chef

The video opened with Sonu standing near a dosa stall and prepping his tawa (pan) as he declared, "Hyderabad me dosa ki dukaan kholi thi, aaj yaha pe khuli hai (Earlier, I opened a dosa shop in Hyderabad, and now it is open here)."

He then invited Rhea and asked her if she wanted a dosa. "Aap banaenge to kyu nahi khaungi (Why won't I eat it if you prepare it)," she said as she walked closer to him. He then asked for her filling preferences and she demanded a plain dosa without the potato mash. Sonu assured her, Itni badi star aayi hai (Such a big star is here) so the dosas will certainly be as crispy as she likes. Rhea also asked for the price of Sonu's dosa but he said, "Arre free me hai, le jaao (It is all free, take it along)."

Sonu's bhature

After handing over a plate to Rhea, Sonu also called for another person and said, "Ye China see yaha sirf dosa khane aayi hai (She came from China, just for the dosas)," before handing over one masala dosa to her. He also rolled and fried a few bhaturas.

Sonu shared the video and wrote, Dosa aur bhature ki franchise chahiye to sampark karein (Contact if you want to get the franchise of dosa and bhature). Fans flooded the comment section of the post with praises for the actor. One wrote, Sonu Sood sir ke real fan's respect button.

Reactions to Sonu's video

The internet did not receive Sonu's comment on his crew member well. One internet user wrote, "Did he just call her Chinese?" while another one commented, Sir, have some shame. That girl whom you are calling is from our country. She can be from North East or Ladakh. She is not from China. Have some shame, what example you are setting?

This is not the first time that Sonu displayed his culinary skills on a set. In April 2021, he was spotted preparing dosas on the sets of Acharya in Hyderabad. In a video that Sonu had shared, he said, Its a special powder used in the South. I am often asked by the makers of my next venture to come on the set on my off days to make dosa for people because of my excellent cooking skills.

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While Anil Kapoor stars as the formidable villain Shelly Rungta in Sandeep Modi's Hindi adaptation of popular action thriller The Night Manger, Kajol will be seen as a lawyer in Suparn Verma's legal drama The Trial: Pyaar, Kaanoon, Dhokha, the Hindi adaptation of popular American show The Good Wife. The series will release on July 14.

Kajol calling Anil

In a new promotional video posted by Hotstar, Kajol is seen calling former co-star Anil Kapoor on the phone. After they exchange pleasantries, Anil starts singing the title track of Hum Aapke Dil Mein Rehte Hain, much to the annoyance of Kajol.

Anil's tips to play a lawyer

When Kajol tells Anil she plays a lawyer in The Trial: Pyaar, Kaanoon, Dhokha, Anil says she should take tips from him as he played a lawyer very early in his career. Anil might be referring to his lead role of a lawyer in Subhash Ghai's 1985 courtroom drama Meri Jung.

Who's the better villain?

Anil and Kajol are seen arguing whose show is better. While Kajol claims her show has a lot of drama and even a sex scandal, Anil hits back saying his villainous role has ample scope for drama and even some sex appeal. He then says, Bobby ko bevakoof banane se koi villain nahi ban jata, referring to Kajol's award-winning turn as a villain in Rajiv Rai's 1997 thriller Gupt: The Hidden Truth, in which she plays Bobby Deol's girlfriend and frames him and his love interest, played by Manisha Koirala.

Kajol gets the last laugh

Kajol gets the final word in the argument with Anil as she says the most villainous act was that of releasing the first four episodes of The Night Manager in March and then making the viewers wait for four long months for the remaining three that dropped last week on June 29. The two then disconnect the call and inform their teams that they won't be able to cross-promote their shows further.

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Be it Baazigar, Dushman, Gupt, Salaam Venky and now the series The Trial, Kajol has a penchant for powerful female characters and the actor says portraying women who are not weak and vulnerable comes naturally to her. (Also Read | Kajol says female pleasure should be normalised like eating and drinking) Kajol in a still from The Trial: Pyaar, Kaanoon, Dhokha.

About The Trial

In the upcoming Disney+Hotstar show, the actor plays Noyonika Sengupta, a housewife who is forced to return to work as a lawyer after her husbands public scandal puts him behind bars. Directed by Suparn S Varma, The Trial: Pyaar, Kaanoon, Dhokha is the Indian adaptation of the popular American series The Good Wife.

Kajol on her character in The Trial

Kajol said her choices as an actor mirror her powerful off-screen persona. "To play a strong, powerful character is easier for me than to play a weak character. It is natural for me to be strong rather than to be vulnerable, the actor told PTI in an interview.

"The great thing about Noyonika is that she is a strong person but when a strong person is put in a situation, where they are weakened and vulnerable, thats a tough thing to play. It was one of the reasons why I love her as a character, she added.

Kajol talks about relating to her The Trial character Noyonika

The 48-year-old said she could relate to Noyonika's way of dealing with difficult situations. Suparn wanted me because she is a public figure and she is a mother of two kids; there are so many factors in her character. One thing I resonate a lot more with Noyonika is the core, she is an eminently practical woman.

"She will do what needs to be done, even if it hurts her sensibility, if she knows it needs to be done, she will do it for the good of the family. She will go ahead and do it because theres nobody else to do it, Kajol added.

Kajol wants to work in the comedy genre

As an actor, Kajol said she still finds it difficult to be coy in front of the camera."I struggle with it... I dont know how to be shy. I don't know how to do sharam. I dont understand the emotion, she said, adding that one genre she wants to explore is comedy. "I havent found the right script. I really want to try comedy. I should because I do it so well in real-life," Kajol said.

Kajol on working on a web series

The Trial, which will premiere on Disney Hotstar on July 14, marks her long-format debut. The actor said she received several offers for OTT series in the past, but nothing truly worked out until The Trial.

"There was a lot of back-and-forth. I never think about what if I had done this or accepted this. I never think any film is mine till I sign on the dotted line and start working on it. I am very happy that The Trial is the show that will be my OTT debut."

The Trial also features Sheeba Chaddha, Alyy Khan, Kubbra Sait and Gaurav Pandey. The show is produced by Banijay Asia and Ajay Devgn FFilms.

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UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres on Monday called for a strategy to reduce the shipping industry's emissions to net zero by 2050 as a key meeting of the International Maritime Organisation started here, aiming for a consensus among the 175-member states to critically reduce the carbon emissions in the sector. UN chief Antonio Guterres. (AFP)

In a video message at the start of the Marine Environment Protection Committee's 80th session here, Guterres also urged for a science-based targets by 2030  both on absolute emissions reductions and the use of clean fuels.

"I urge you to leave London having agreed a Greenhouse Gas Strategy that commits the sector to net zero emissions by 2050 at the latest," he said.

The shipping industry accounts for almost 3 per cent of global emissions.

The MEPC's 80th session is hopeful to reach a consensus among the member states to set out a carbon-neutral goal by 2050 with interim targets aimed at 2030 and 2040.

"This meeting of the Marine Environment Protection Committee is a chance to steer us towards a clean, prosperous future for the industry  and a safer future for humanity," the UN chief added.

The Inter-sessional Working Group on Reduction of Greenhouse gas emissions from ships, which had its deliberations from June 26 to 30, failed to achieve any significant goals, especially measures to drive the shipping industry to align with the Paris Agreement target of 1.5 degrees celsius.

Simon Stiell, Executive Secretary of the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC), speaking at the plenary of the session said that if the parties represented at the IMO choose a low-ambition pathway, the ability to meet the Paris agreements will be compromised.

"..three months ago, IPCC's AR6 and UNFCCC's Nationally Determined Contributions synthesis report added more clarity and details to the simple truth-this body has to do more on climate change now," Stiell said.

The IMO is hoping to achieve a path-breaking goal during the key meeting this week, though the talks on a financial levy on the GHG emissions on the industry are yet to make any headway.

The IMO member states have been poles apart with regard to the targets and also with regard to the financial levy, sources said.

Countries like the USA, UK, and Canada are asking for a 37 per cent reduction in GHG by 2023 and a 96 per cent by 2040, to achieve a net zero by 2050, in line with the IPCC trajectory.

The European Union has proposed a 29 per cent cut by 2030 and 83 per cent by 2040.

India is yet to commit to any such targets though India's official goal for a net zero carbon emission is set for 2070. However, according to an earlier government press statement, India is the only country chosen by IMO to launch a pilot project, Green Voyage, aiming at achieving Green Shipping.
Kolkata: Security personnel conduct route march ahead of the West Bengal panchayat elections, at Kankutia village in Birbhum district, Sunday, July 2, 2023 (PTI)

Two political workers, one each from the Trinamool Congress (TMC) and the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), were killed in West Bengal, taking the number of fatalities in poll-related violence in the state to 14, police said on Monday.

Panchayat elections are scheduled to be held in the state on July 8. The results will be announced on July 11.

According to the police, TMC worker Paritosh Mondol was killed in an explosion, while another person sustained injuries allegedly during manufacture of crude bombs in North 24 Parganass Haroa on Sunday.

The family of the deceased, however, said he was murdered. He stepped out on Sunday and never returned. This morning, I was informed that he was killed. His hands were missing. He was first murdered and then bombs were hurled at him, Mondols wife said. HT reached out to senior police officers for a comment but did not get one immediately.

The BJP took a swipe at TMC over the incident. Wherever there is a bomb and a murder case, you will find TMC... One can imagine what will happen on the polling day, BJP leader Rahul Sinha said.

Hitting back, TMC MP Santanu Sen said: TMC is determined to hold free and fair polls... Opposition is trying to create unrest 

In a separate incident, the body of BJP worker Bankim Hansda was found near a bush at Manbazar in Purulia on Monday. Hansdas family said, he stepped out for campaigning on Sunday night but did not return.

Police, however, said the autopsy report did not reveal any injuries on the body and suggested the man may have died of a heart attack.

BJP legislator Suvendu Adhikari tweeted: Another mysterious death of a @BJP4Bengal Karyakarta in Purulia district. The Regional TMC Party has established Jungle Raj in WB, he tweeted.

Responding to Adhikaris tweet, TMC spokesperson Kunal Ghosh said: I request LoP @SuvenduWB to refrain from making baseless accusations...

At least 14 people have died and dozens injured in various instances of alleged political violence ever since the state election commission (SEC) announced the schedule for the single-phase election on June 8.
The Supreme Court will take up on July 11 a batch of petitions challenging the abrogation of Article 370 and the bifurcation of the erstwhile state of Jammu and Kashmir into two Union territories. The Supreme Court. (PTI)

According to a notice, the five-judge constitutional bench led by Chief Justice of India (CJI) DY Chandrachud to take up the matter and issue procedural directions to ready the case for hearing. Other members of the bench are Justices Sanjay Kishan Kaul, Sanjiv Khanna, BR Gavai and Surya Kant.

SC notice

Over 20 petitions have been filed challenging the constitutional validity on the Centre's decision to abrogate Article 370, taking away the special status of Jammu and Kashmir. Petitioners claimed that constitutional provisions were violated while making the decision.

Earlier, People's Democratic Party (PDP) chief Mehbooba Mufti urged the CJI for an early hearing on the matter. We want to invite the attention of the CJI to the petitions which are pending in the Supreme Court for the last four years and also towards the plight of  people, especially the youth who are in jails within and outside J-K without any trial, she told reporters.

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NEW DELHI: An Air India flight from Vancouver to Delhi was cancelled after a six-hour delay on Sunday due to a technical issue, people familiar with the matter said. An Air India spokesperson said some passengers were accommodated on flights operated by other airlines (AP File Photo)

An Air India spokesperson said Air India AI186, which was scheduled to operate Vancouver-Delhi on 2 July 2023, was initially rescheduled. The flight was later cancelled as a technical issue was detected in the operating aircraft.

While the aircraft undergoes the necessary checks and repairs, we have re-accommodated some of our guests on flights operated by other airlines The rest of the guests are being offered other alternative arrangements and support until they are Delhi-bound again. We regret the inconvenience caused to our guests, but as always, ensuring the safety of all is our top priority, the spokesperson added.

An official said the flight was cancelled due to an engine issue.

Many of the passengers in the flight were students who were returning to Delhi for their summer break. The flight had around 25 students studying at the University of British Columbia. The flight however, had senior citizens and children too, an official said.

A student, who asked not to be named, said the airline did not help them with a revised departure time. They first delayed the flight for five hours, then by an hour and it was only when the flight status changed to cancelled on the display gates, did we get to know about it.

The airline staff did not even assist us, and we had to wait for another two hours just to collect our luggage, the student added.

A group of around 10 UBC students who had already surrendered their rented accommodations said they stayed with friends

We have three bags each and 10 of us are sharing this accommodation because we dont have the funds to book another flight or rent another house, a BCom student said. The airline had given us an option to fly to San Francisco and then they would accommodate us to a nonstop flight to Delhi. But we do not have funds to manage a night stay in a hotel , nor do we have a US visa, she added.

A second student, who also flying to Delhi for the summer break, said, We had requested a refund for our tickets but we have not received any response from Air India. No airline staff helped us and we ended up returning from the airport only after 11 hours. The staff did not fetch any information on refund. They, instead, told us that we wouldnt be refunded if we booked a different airline for Delhi.

On May 22 too, a Delhi-bound Air India flight scheduled to take off from Vancouver was delayed for 12 hours before it was cancelled due to technical reasons.

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In a warning to colleague-turned-rival Eknath Shinde, Uddhav Thackeray faction MP Sanjay Raut on Monday reiterated that Maharashtra will get a new chief minister in a few days. "Today, I am saying in front of the camera that the chief minister of Maharashtra is going to change. The 16 MLAs (Shiv Sena) with Eknath Shinde will be disqualified soon as per the Supreme Court's order. This is the reason why Ajit Pawar and others have been inducted," Raut told reporters, a day after NCP's Ajit Pawar and eight others joined the Maharashtra government. Maharashtra chief minister Eknath Shinde congratulates the newly sworn-in state deputy CM Ajit Pawar at Raj Bhavan in Mumbai on Sunday. (Eknath Shinde Twitter)

On Sunday, Raut had alleged that the BJP was breaking opposition parties, making and breaking governments and the people, who were accused of corruption by Prime Minister Narendra Modi, took the oath as ministers in the Eknath Shinde-Devendra Fadnavis government -- "that means either those claims were wrong or the BJP like corruptors when they join their party..."

But chief minister Shinde ridiculed the opposition parties who "routinely predict" the fall of his government. "From day one, opposition parties have been predicting the fall of the state government. Now, they must be very disappointed. I wonder which astrologer is giving them such advice," he said.

Saamana claims Ajit Pawar joined hands with BJP to replace Shinde

An editorial in the Shiv Sena (UBT) mouthpiece 'Saamana' on Monday claimed that the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) under Prime Minister Narendra Modi and Union home minister Amit Shah has not only muddied politics of Maharashtra but also of the country.

Ajit Pawar has a made a record of taking oath as deputy chief minister. This time the 'deal' is strong," it said. "Pawar has not gone there for the deputy CM's post. Chief minister Eknath Shinde and rebel MLAs of the Sena would be disqualified soon and Pawar would be coronated, it claimed.

This new development will not go down well with the people of the state. The state had no such political tradition and it will never be supported by the people, it said.

Ajit Pawar's somersault is actually dangerous for CM Shinde, the Marathi daily claimed.

It said when Shinde and other MLAs left the Shiv Sena in 2022, they blamed the party president and (then) chief minister Uddhav Thackeray for not controlling then finance minister Ajit Pawar who had taken immense control over fund disbursement and sanctioning work orders.

"The primary reason according to the rebel MLAs was we left the Shiv Sena because of the NCP," the editorial said.

What will they do now? During the swearing-in ceremony (of Ajit Pawar on Sunday), the expressions on their faces (of Shinde bloc members) made it evident that their future is dark, it claimed.

"Their so-called Hindutva is now over. The day is not very far when Shinde and his rebel colleagues will be disqualified, is the true meaning of Sunday's development, the Marathi publication claimed.

"The (previous) Congress regime and the British rule were much better as one could fight with them on the street openly. Ajit Pawar has not taken the decision to support Shinde on any moral ground," it added.

The editorial also hit out at BJP leader and deputy CM Devendra Fadnavis, claiming he had said they will never join hands with the NCP, "the party of corrupts" and that Ajit Pawar was facing allegations in an irrigation scam worth 70,000 crore.

"This swearing-in has exposed the BJP's true face," it said.

Refusing to accept that Sunday's developments came as a surprise for everyone, the editorial claimed some people were already aware of this "earthquake".

What happened to the Shiv Sena a year ago is now happening to the NCP. As NCP chief Sharad Pawar said, there will be a new day tomorrow, the editorial said, adding it was not an earthquake but minor tremors.

In a day of dramatic developments in Maharashtra politics, Ajit Pawar on Sunday led a vertical split in the party to become the deputy chief minister, shocking his uncle Sharad Pawar, who founded the outfit 24 years ago.

Eight NCP leaders were also sworn in as ministers at the ceremony held at Raj Bhavan in south Mumbai.

The NCP patriarch tried to put up a brave front after his 63-year-old nephew's stunning rebellion, as sources claimed that 36 of the 53 MLAs of the party were solidly backing the new deputy CM.

The rapidly unfolding developments came as a shocker for Sharad Pawar, even as sources said Ajit's rebellion was prompted by the NCP chief and his daughter Supriya Sule's presence at the recent conclave of opposition leaders in Patna.

Ajit Pawar says NCP became part of Sena-BJP govt for development

Addressing reporters after taking the oath, Ajit Pawar said NCP decided to become part of the Shiv Sena-BJP government for the development of the country and praised Prime Minister Narendra Modi's leadership.

Maintaining that there was no split in NCP, Ajit Pawar said they would contest all future elections on the NCP's name and symbol.

"All the elected representatives (of the party) have supported the decision to join the government," he claimed.

Sharad Pawar said it was not the party's decision to go with BJP-Shiv Sena. He said the party leadership will take action against those who joined the state Cabinet.

(With inputs from PTI)

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Former Uttar Pradesh chief minister and Samajwadi Party president Akhilesh Yadav flew down to Hyderabad to have a three-hour-long meeting with Bharat Rashtra Samithi (BRS) party president and Telangana chief minister K Chandrasekhar Rao (KCR) on Monday, officials familiar with the developments said. Samajwadi Party supremo Akhilesh Yadav meets Telangana chief minister KCR on Monday. (ANI)

The visit assumes significance in the wake of the recent meeting of about 15 opposition parties led by Bihar chief minister Nitish Kumar in Patna to work out a common strategy to defeat the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP)-led National Democratic Alliance (NDA) in the next years general elections.

Against the backdrop, the meeting of the SP chief, who was one of the key players in the opposition unity, with KCR raised a lot of curiosity. Yadav arrived in Hyderabad on Monday on a special flight and was received by senior minister Talasani Srinivasa Yadav at Begumpet Airport.

An official statement from the chief ministers office said KCR accorded a warm welcome to Yadav at his camp office and official residence Pragati Bhavan and hosted lunch for him. Both the leaders discussed national politics and other issues, the statement said.

The meeting concluded at around 5.30 pm, and Yadav returned to Lucknow without commenting on the meeting. There was no official statement from the Telangana CMO or the BRS leaders either.

KCRs nephew and Rajya Sabha member J Santosh Kumar, who was present at the meeting, refused to divulge details and said no significance should be given to the meeting.

KCR, who converted his regional outfit Telangana Rashtra Samithi (TRS) into a national party BRS last year, has been aggressively attacking the BJP -- Prime Minister Narendra Modi in particular. However, he was not invited to the Patna meeting, nor did the BRS participate.

At a huge public rally in Khammam on Sunday, former Congress president Rahul Gandhi said his party would not have attended the opposition parties meeting had the BRS been invited.

We shall keep the BRS at bay in our fight against the BJP, he categorically said.

Efforts to reach out to senior BRS leaders like MPs K Kesava Rao or J Santosh Kumar did not yield any results, as they did not respond to calls or text messages.

Samajwadi Party Telangana unit president Prof Simhadri, who was present at the luncheon meeting with KCR, also did not respond to the calls.

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On the night of June 30, 2023, Lalhmangaihzuala, also known as Angaiha, and his elder brother Lalhminghlua, aka Sena, both in their late twenties, went hunting for ghosts in the darkness on the outskirts of Aizawl, near the Tlawng river. The adventure was far from unusual for the duo. Over the past three years, the YouTube channel they ran, the Angaiha Five Brothers, had accumulated close to 33,000 followers for their videos of the paranormal. PREMIUM HT Image

So on that dark night, Angaiha and Sena, set off, their cellphones switched on, recording live. At around midnight, they opened the creaky door of a jhum, a hut made of wooden logs, typically built as shelter next to agricultural fields. The day before, they had done the same thing. At that point, there was nothing inside, Lalhmangaihzuala said.

On the night of June 30, though, there was something inside. It was the body of a man. The brothers ran.

Growing up, the two brothers, both of whom work in the private sector in Aizawl, had been fascinated by online videos online on ghost hunting and the paranormal. We were so interested that we decided to start our own channel. We dont earn anything from it, but it has become so popular that some subscribers now donate money for the petrol for our travels to spooky locations, Lalhmangaihzuala said.

The hut the brothers visited on Friday night was in a dark forested patch near the Tlawng river. We often go back to the same place if our subscribers love the area. We have often gone back to the same spot a third time, Lalhmangaihzuala said. At midnight, Lalhminghlua was walking ahead of his brother when he heard a sound. I heard voices in the dark and thought there must be some people hanging out at night. When I walked towards the jhum , two stones were thrown in front of me.

The brothers pushed on. In the next few breathless minutes, they went inside the hut, and discovered the body. It was streamed live.

The two ran the 8.6km to the Aizawl police station where they raised the alarm with bleary police personnel. The police team, guided by the two ghost hunters, then arrived at the hut and began investigations. The mans face, police officials said, was bathed in blood, emanating from the wound in the back of his head where he had been hit with force.

Investigations revealed that the man was Vanlallawma, 55 , a resident of Lunglei town, 170km away from the murder spot, and a driver with the public health department. They launched an investigation, and after a massive manhunt, arrested Lalroliana, 43, and his partner Lalsiampuii, 40, on July 1, from Seling village, 45km away from Aizawl.

Prima facie investigations by the police revealed that Lalroliana killed Vanlallawma after hitting him with a wooden club, jealous that the victim was talking to his partner. The police said they were still investigating if the murder took place at another spot, after which the body was dumped in the jhum, or whether the murder happened in the hut itself.

On Sunday, Lalroliana and Lalsiampuii were taken to the Aizawl district court, which gave the police their custody for two days. The court on Sunday granted us another 48 hours for investigation and to interrogate the persons. After completion of the 48 hours, we shall take them to court again, inspector Albert Lalbiakmawia of the Aizawl police station said.

On Saturday, the corpse was taken back to Lunglei, where it was cremated.

In Aizawl, undeterred, the two brothers are now preparing for more such episodes. The last three days has seen them gain three thousand new followers. But their first port of call will be the same hut.

There is a belief among Mizos that if someone dies unnaturally, their spirit does not rest until justice is done. That is why, after discussions with our subscribers, we are going to go back to that same spot, to find the dead mans spirit, Lalhmangaihzuala said.

Dead men tell no tales, but if Vanlallawma does, Angaiha Five Brothers will be listening.
A day after Rahul Gandhi addressed a public meeting in Telanganas Khammam, the ruling Bharat Rashtra Samithi (BRS) slammed the Congress on Monday, describing the party as a brand ambassador for corruption and the leader an immature politician. Congress leader Rahul Gandhi addresses a public meeting in Khammam district on Sunday. (PTI)

On Sunday, Gandhi made a scathing attack on the chief minister K Chandrasekhar Rao-led government in the state.

However, a host of BRS leaders, from ministers to MPs, lashed out at the former Congress president for reading a script prepared by local Congress leaders levelling baseless allegations against the state government.

BRS working president and state industries minister K T Rama Rao said the All- India Congress Committee (AICC) had turned out to be All India Corruption Committee, as the people were yet to forget a series of scams that had taken place during the Congress-led United Progressive Alliance government between 2004 and 2014.

Reacting to Gandhis allegation that the BRS has become BJP Rishtedar Samithi (a relative of BJP), KTR said the BRS had never been the B-team of BJP or the C-team of Congress. We are a formidable political force, and we can take on both the parties single-handedly, he said.

On the allegation of Gandhi about massive corruption in the Kaleshwaram Lift irrigation Scheme, the minister said the Congress would only become a laughing stock with such baseless allegations.

He also questioned the credibility of Gandhis promise of increasing the old-age pension to 4,000 per month. He reminded that the party failed to fulfil its promise of supplying free rice to the poor under the Annabhagya scheme in Karnataka.

State finance minister T Harish Rao said the Congress had earned the reputation of being a Scamgress because of massive corruption during its regime. It has no moral right to make allegations of corruption in Telangana, he said.

The minister ridiculed Gandhis promises to distribute podu lands to the tribals when the BRS government had already completed the land distribution among the tribals. It shows his lack of awareness about the developments in the state. He was only reading out the script given by the local leaders and enacting a skit, he said, adding that Gandhi proved to be an outdated politician.

BRS parliamentary party leader K Kesava Rao also found fault with Gandhi for making objectionable comments against the BRS. He said the BRS had supported the controversial bill on agricultural laws. The BRS MPs opposed them and walked out of the House. It was because of our strong resistance that the Modi government backtracked on the same, he said.

He said Gandhi had no competence to lead the opposition parties to fight against the BJP. Only the BRS has been in the forefront to oppose the BJP, Rao added.

Meanwhile, responding to the outburst from the BRS leaders against Gandhi, Telangana Pradesh Congress Committee president A Revanth Reddy said the ruling party was scared of the Congress and hence tried to create hurdles for the Khammam rally.

He said Gandhi had all the right to seek the support of the people of Telangana, as it was the Congress which granted statehood to the region in 2014.

He has united all sections of people with his Bharat Jodo Yatra. What is the locus standi of the BRS leaders to question his credibility? he asked.

The PCC president said it was Congress, which had taken up several irrigation projects, infrastructure projects and schemes for the poor. The irrigation projects which the BRS is talking about were initiated by the Congress, he pointed out.

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Tit-for-tat expulsions and appointments in both factions of the Nationalist Congress Party (NCP) marked the beginning of a bitter battle for control of the party between Maharashtra deputy chief minister Ajit Pawar and his uncle and party patriarch Sharad Pawar on Monday as the stage of the confrontation shifted from the government to the party. NCP chief Sharad Pawar addresses supporters in Karad on Monday. (PTI)

An air of respectful politeness that hung over Ajit Pawars decision on Sunday to rebel against his uncle and join hands with the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) dissipated a day later, as both sides claimed to be the real NCP and bitterly contested the others right to make appointments, in what was a play-by-play repeat of the Shiv Sena split a year ago that led to a change of regime in the state.

In a public meeting, Sharad Pawar said some people in the party were misled by the BJP and that he bore them no malice. But hours later, he expelled the NCPs recently appointed working president Praful Patel and general secretary Sunil Tatkare, both of whom defected with Ajit Pawar.

In a sharp retaliation indicative of the escalating bitterness, Patel, a long-time associate of Sharad Pawar, said the NCP patriarch lost the right to sack him. He also appointed Jalgaon lawmaker Anil Patil as the new whip and said Ajit Pawar was elected as the partys new legislative chief.

NCP state president Jayant Patil also sent a letter to Maharashtra assembly speaker Rahul Narwekar late on Sunday night, seeking the disqualification of Ajit Pawar and eight other legislators who took oath as ministers in the Shiv Sena-BJP government.

Supriya Sule  the partys working president for Maharashtra  recommended that Patel and Tatkare be expelled from the party.

In the light of your undisputed conduct, by the power bestowed upon me as the national president of the NCP vide rules framed under Article 21 (vi)(a) of the party constitution, I hereby formally remove your names from the membership registrar of the party in view of your action of voluntarily giving up membership of the NCP, said a letter signed by Sharad Pawar to the two leaders. Patel is the partys Rajya Sabha MP while Tatkare is the Lok Sabha MP from Raigad.

State general secretary Shivajirao Garje, Mumbai working president Narendra Rane and a few other office bearers who were seen at Ajit Pawars swearing-in ceremony too were expelled from the party.

Your action of supporting Shri Ajit Pawar and eight other MLAs who have sworn oath as ministers in violation of the partys direction and mandate amounts to anti-party activities, said the letter by Sharad Pawar.

In the evening, the Ajit Pawar camp hit back by appointing Tatkare as the Maharashtra NCP president in place of Jayant Patil. It also asked Narvekar to disqualify Jayant Patil and Jitendra Awhad from the House.

Patel said the decision to back the Eknath Shinde-led government and the leadership of Prime Minister Narendra Modi was a collective move by the NCP.

Today (Monday) is Guru Purnima; we all wish that Sharad Pawar continues to bless us, he said.

Ajit Pawar  whose action on Sunday was widely speculated on for months and which plunged the NCP in its worst crisis since it was formed in 1999  said he enjoyed the support of maximum NCP legislators and said he had given a letter to the assembly speaker to that effect.

A majority of NCP MLAs are with us, that is why I became deputy CM. We have requested the speaker to disqualify Jayant Patil and Jitendra Awhad, he said.

But he steered clear of explicitly spelling out how many members are backing him. To bypass the anti-defection law, he needs the support of two-thirds of the NCPs 53 legislators.

Ajit Pawar said the party and lawmakers were with him and the notice for disqualification against him and the eight newly sworn-in ministers was meaningless.

We are not here to expel anybody from our party the party and its symbol is with us, he added.

The stand-off hinted that both sides were digging their heels in for the looming battle for control of the NCP, which has a strong base in western Maharashtra, and among the sugar cooperatives and Maratha communities.

The fight bore the same leitmotif as the vertical split in the Shiv Sena last year, when chief minister Eknath Shinde walked away from the Maha Vikas Aghadi government with 40 lawmakers, brought down the administration, joined hands with the BJP and argued successfully before the Election Commission that he was the real Shiv Sena.

Ajit Pawar insisted, echoing Shinde, that it was for the Election Commission of India (ECI) to decide which faction was the real party. At the same time, he stressed that the national president of the party remained his uncle who had brought him into in politics.

We will have to follow the rules, regulations and the constitution (of the party). The powers to decide party affairs have been given to those who have the majority, as we saw only a year ago (in Senas case), he said in the joint press conference.

The key appeared to be the organisational structure of the NCP and its constitution, both of which might come into play should one or both of the factions approach ECI.

In an organisational rejig on June 10, the NCP appointed two working presidents. Praful Patel was given charge of Madhya Pradesh, Gujarat, Jharkhand, Rajasthan and Goa, while Supriya Sule was given charge of Maharashtra, Haryana and Punjab, and also made chairman of the partys central election authority. That difference in the states under their remit is likely to play a crucial role legally, since the defection happened in Maharashtra which is under Sules charge.

According to the partys constitution, the working committee of the NCP is the highest body in the party. Article 20(ix) states, The president shall preside over the National Convention of the party held after his or her election and during his or her term of office, he or she shall exercise all the powers of the working committee when it is not in session. Sharad Pawar remains the president of the party.

Narwekar  who is already considering the matter of the disqualification of 16 Shiv Sena MLAs led by Eknath Shinde  said he had received Jayant Patils notice on the disqualification of the rebel NCP MLAs and that he would need some time to deliberate before taking any decision.

In the 288-member assembly, the numerical strengths of both sides remain unclear. Till late Monday evening, the Ajit Pawar camp had the support of 25 of the 53 MLAs while Sharad Pawar was backed by 13 MLAs. The remaining 15 MLAs were either incommunicado or said they will decide after consulting their constituents. This is one of the reasons why the party has refrained from acting against other MLAs as they believe some of them will return to Sharad Pawars fold. The picture is likely to become clearer on July 5 when both factions hold their respective meetings in Mumbai.

The cleaving raises fresh questions about the longevity of the Maha Vikas Aghadi, whose two primary constituents (Shiv Sena and NCP) have now been depleted by defections. Ajit Pawars defection also dealt a blow to the Oppositions fledgling efforts at forging a common platform to take on the BJP ahead of the 2024 elections, and showed that the ruling party was moving towards rebuilding the National Democratic Alliance (NDA).

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The Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), in a late night decision on Monday, stated that former chief minister Basvaraj Bommai will be interim leader of the party in Karnataka legislative assembly till a formal leader of opposition is decided, a party leaders said. BS Yediyurappa returned to Bengaluru on Monday and stated that the central observers will gather the opinion of BJP legislators and take a decision. (ANI)

The decision comes after the party attended the first session of the newly-elected Assembly on Monday without a Legislature party leader and any other office-bearer of the legislative party.

Riddled with infighting, the saffron party has not been able to name a Leader of the Opposition, more than 50 days since the Karnataka Assembly election results were announced, with its central leaders weighing their options.

After a meeting with BJP president JP Nadda and home minister Amit Shah in Delhi on Sunday, former chief minister BS Yediyurappa returned to Bengaluru on Monday and stated that the central observers will gather the opinion of BJP legislators and take a decision.

Nadda has appointed Union minister Mansukh Mandaviya and party general secretary Vinod Tawde as central observers for the election of the leader of opposition in the Karnataka assembly.

Two observers from Delhi have come to Bengaluru. They will collect the opinions of MLAs on who should become the opposition leader and the state president. A final decision will be taken tonight or tomorrow, Yediyurappa said.

Former chief minister Basavaraj Bommai is one of the main contenders as the BJP deliberates to decide whether it should stick to the old guard or put faith in a new leader while balancing the caste equation in the state.

Former ministers Ashwath Narayana and Araga Jnanedra also hinted on Sunday that they were ready to take up the post of the leader of the Opposition. Former minister V Somanna had also recently expressed his desire to become the BJP state president. The other contenders are former ministers Basanagouda Patil Yatnal, S Sunil Kumar and R Ashoka.

The delay in electing the Leader of the Opposition has drawn criticism from both the BJP and the ruling Congress. Internal disputes within the party have resulted in a blame game regarding the defeat in the assembly elections, with senior leaders publicly criticising their colleagues. On Friday, the party tasked Yediyurappa with holding talks with 11 leaders who made controversial remarks publicly.

The BJP disciplinary committee on Friday issued a show-cause notice to party leader MP Renukacharya for his comments against the pre-poll decisions. Renukacharya on Saturday said he would not fear such things and will write a letter to the national leadership, including Prime Minister Narendra Modi, regarding the defeat in the assembly polls and those responsible for it.

Attacking the main opposition government in Karnataka, Congress general secretary Jairam Ramesh said, The Budget session of the Karnataka Assembly starts today. For the first time since 1952 both in the state and in the country too the session begins without the main opposition -- in this case the BJP -- announcing its legislature leader. This BJP is loud when it wins but crumbles and croaks when it loses, he tweeted.

While Karnataka chief minister Siddaramaiah said, It clearly shows that there is groupism among them. The BJP calls itself as a disciplined party but its the most undisciplined party.

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Hitting out the BJP's double engine government pitch in states, Chhattisgarh chief minister Bhupesh Baghel on Sunday said NCP leader Ajit Pawar's support to the Shinde-Fadnavis government made it a "three-wheel" autorickshaw. Chhattisgarh chief minister Bhupesh Baghel. (ANI File Photo)

Ajit Pawar, who was the leader of the Opposition in the Maharashtra assembly, rebelled against his uncle, NCP president Sharad Pawar, and joined the NDA government as chief minister Eknath Shinde's deputy, alongside BJP's Devendra Fadnavis. Apart from Ajit Pawar, eight NCP MLAs, including prominent leaders like Praful Patel and Chhagan Bhujbal, were also inducted into the new cabinet.

Asserting there would be further upheavals in the Maharashtra government, Baghel said, I saw Devendra Fadnavis and Ajit Pawar sitting side by side and smiling, while CM Shinde, sitting on the other side of the governor, seemed disappointed.

"Last time, a split was engineered of the Shiv Sena and this time it is of the NCP. Earlier, there was a double-engine government and now it is a three-wheel autorickshaw," he said.

Baghel also said NCP chief Sharad Pawar had not "opened his cards".

"More upheavals will take place. People do not like such developments and its impact will be seen in the future," the Chhattisgarh CM claimed.

Last year, when Eknath Shinde rebelled against Uddhav Thackeray, the latter took a similar jibe at the Maharashtra chief minister, calling him an autorickshaw driver whose brakes failed. Referring to an incident where Fadnavis asked Shinde to stop talking, Thackeray had said, But how will it stop? The brakes of the autorickshaw failed. Earlier, the BJP used to call the MVA government a three-wheeler government but now the person who drives a three-wheeler is running the government.

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The Chhattisgarh government will provide gas cylinders at a subsidised rate to BPLfamilies in the state, an official aware of the matter on Monday said, adding that the details of the project are yet to be finalised. According to a senior official aware of the development, a team has been constituted to decide on a subsidy amount (File photo)

The development comes ahead of assembly elections scheduled to be held in the state later this year.

According to a senior official aware of the development, a team has been constituted to decide on a subsidy amount. It is likely that the team will submit a proposal to the cabinet for approval as early as next week, the official added.

The details of the project are yet to be decided but a team is working on it. It is possible that a draft proposal will be put up for discussion in the cabinet meeting scheduled next week, a senior officials of the Chief Ministers Office said on the condition of anonymity.

Chhattisgarh will become the second Congress-ruled state after Rajasthan to provide subsidy on cooking gas. The Rajasthan government provides 12 LPG gas cylinders a year to poor households at a subsidised rate of 500.

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ABOUT THE AUTHOR Ritesh Mishra State Correspondent for Chhattisgarh. Reports Maoism, Politics, Mining and important developments from the state. Covered all sorts of extremism in Central India. Reported from Madhya Pradesh for eight years. ...view detail
Congress MP Hibi Edens proposal through a private members Bill in the Lok Sabha to shift Keralas capital from Thiruvananthapuram to Ernakulam was criticised by his party, with senior leaders asking him to withdraw it. Hibi Eden proposed through a private members Bill in Lok Sabha to shift Keralas capital from Thiruvananthapuram to Ernakulam (ANI)

Eden, the 40-year-old MP from Ernakulam constituency, which includes the city of Kochi, had moved the private members Bill in March stating that Thiruvananthapuram, located at the southern tip of the state, was inaccessible to residents of the northern districts. He sought the formation of a state capital relocation panel, which would examine the feasibility of a new capital city accessible to all residents in Ernakulam.

The MPs proposal was widely repudiated by leaders of the Congress as well as by other parties.

Leader of the Opposition VD Satheesan, who represents the Paravur constituency in Ernakulam district, told reporters on Sunday, Hibi is like my younger brother. When I heard about this, I immediately called him and conveyed my deepest displeasure. This is not the stand of the Congress party. It is just a private members Bill. I have told him to withdraw it, and there is no need for any further controversy.

I am a native of Kochi, but the Congress has no stand that the state capital should be moved to Kochi. There is no land for a capital city in Kochi. It is the commercial capital and contributes the highest tax in the state. But the capital should remain in Thiruvananthapuram.

Congress Thiruvananthapuram MP Shashi Tharoor, too, distanced themself from Edens move, calling it illogical.

He has every right to move a private members Bill, but this proposal is not grounded in logic. Not every states capital needs to be centrally located. Chennai is at the northern end of Tamil Nadu, and even Delhi, the capital of India, is in the north.

The controversy around the proposal came to light when the Union government wrote to the state recently asking for its views on the matter. The Kerala government responded, stating that it was decided in 1954 that Thiruvananthapuram be chosen as the state capital, and existing circumstances still support the move. It also said that relocating the capital would incur huge financial expenditures.

Senior Communist Party of India (Marxist) or CPI (M) leader and industries minister P Rajeeve said that Edens proposal cleared that he will contest Ernakulam in the 2024 Lok Sabha elections.

Even his party leaders have conceded that it is an immature and impractical idea. It only leads to a useless discussion. Hibi took a stand to meet his election goals, he told reporters.

The Ernakulam MP, currently abroad, was unavailable for comment.
Security, connectivity, trade to be focus of SCO Summit hosted by India tomorrow The virtual Shanghai Cooperation Organisation (SCO) Summit to be hosted by India on Tuesday is expected to focus on regional security, economic connectivity and trade, while welcoming Iran as the latest member of the Eurasian grouping. Read more The virtual SCO summit is being held against the backdrop of Indias strained relations with China and Pakistan.

UN deputy chief Amina Mohammed begins 3-day India visit

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Boil in the bag: UK introduces eco-friendly 'water cremation'

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Ben Stokes' spicy take on Bairstow dismissal matches with viral 12-year-old MS Dhoni-Ian Bell incident

The controversial Jonny Bairstow wicket from the second Test match of the Ashes has ignited a debate between fans, audiences, and pundits on the internet, as the spirit of the dismissal has been brought into question. With both sides arguing their cases, some fans have revisited a moment that was crowned by the ICC with its Spirit of the Decade award in a similar situation. Read more

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The Delhi high court on Monday dismissed a public interest litigation (PIL) challenging the Reserve Bank of Indias (RBI) decision to withdraw 2,000 banknotes from circulation. RBI had on May 19 announced the withdrawal of  2,000 currency notes from circulation. (Representative file image)

RBI had on May 19 announced the withdrawal of 2,000 currency notes from circulation.

The central bank has asked banks to provide deposit and exchange facilities for 2,000 notes until September 30, 2023.

Dismissed, a bench of chief justice Satish Chandra Sharma and justice Subramonium Prasad said while rejecting the plea on which it had reserved its order on the PIL on May 30 after hearing the arguments of counsels for the petitioner and the RBI.

Also Read:About 80% choose to deposit Rs2000 notes instead of exchanging: Report

A detailed copy of the judgment is awaited.

Petitioner Rajneesh Bhaskar Gupta had contended in his plea that the RBI has no power to withdraw 2,000-rupee currency notes from circulation and only the Centre could have taken a decision in this regard.

The petition mentioned that RBI has no independent power under the Reserve Bank of India Act to take such a decision.

It also contends that the decision to withdraw the banknote only after 4-5 years of circulation within a specific deadline is unjust, arbitrary and against the public policy.

Submitting that the impugned circular does not mention that the central government has taken the decision, the PIL submits that no other reason except the Clean Note Policy has been given by the RBI to take such a big arbitrary decision on the withdrawal of the banknotes from circulation without analysing the expected problems of the public at large.

The petitioner has contended that small vendors and shopkeepers have already stopped taking 2,000 notes.

RBI has not cleared so far what is the benefit to the RBI or national economy after withdrawing the denomination of 2000 banknote from circulation, the petition said.

RBI had argued that the removal of 2,000 is a whole exercise under the currency management system while reiterating that it is not demonetisation.

Advocate Parag P Tripathi, for RBI, had contended that the 2,000 note is not being used as a currency and it is virtually kept out of circulation for some time now.

He further said that over time, the quality of the 2,000 notes had deteriorated.

Earlier too, the court had dismissed lawyer and Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) leader Ashwini Upadhyays plea challenging the RBIs permission for exchanging 2,000 currency notes without any identity proof following the withdrawal of the highest-value currency notes from circulation, saying it was done to ensure a smooth transition of 2,000 denomination banknotes.

In order to facilitate the exchange of 2,000 denomination banknotes with other denomination banknotes, the government has given a window of four months to the citizens and in order to avoid inconvenience to citizens, the government is not insisting on providing any kind of identification, the court had said in its judgment of May 29.

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NEW DELHI: The Supreme Court on Monday sought response of the Delhi Police on a petition filed by Aam Aadmi Party (AAP) legislator Amanatullah Khan to drop the tag of bad character on account of the pending criminal cases against him. AAP legislator Amanatullah Khan said the proposal to notify him as a bad character listed 18 cases against him including 14 in which he was either acquitted or discharged or the case stood compounded (Twitter/KhanAmanatullah)

The Okhla legislator approached the top court against the city police in March 2022 declaring him as a bad character, arguing that the description defamed him and compromised his familys privacy as the dossier prepared by the police contained names of his wife and minor children was leaked on social media.

Khans petition is an appeal against the Delhi high court verdict dismissing his petition on January 19. On Monday, a bench of justices Surya Kant and Dipankar Dutta issued notice to the police.

The legislator questioned the police move to label him as a bad character, a police parlance for persons with a criminal record and opening a history sheet in his name at the Jamia Nagar police station, which is a confidential file listing a persons criminal antecedents and known accomplices.

According to polie records, the Jamia Nagar police on March 28, 2022, wrote to the south-east districts deputy commissioner of police to seek permission to open a history sheet in the MLAs name, and approval was granted on March 30.

Papers attached with the SHOs request showed that there were 18 cases registered against Khan as on March 28, 2022, but in 14 cases, Khan was either acquitted or discharged or the case stood compounded. In four cases alone, trial was pending. Khan stressed that he has not been convicted in a single case.

In the Supreme Court, senior lawyer Sanjoy Ghose assisted by Wajeeh Shafiq who appeared for Khan, raised questions on the bad character label and the manner in which confidentiality was breached by the police by allowing it to be leaked. The petitioner is a sitting MLA and is being tagged as a history sheeter and bad character, Ghose said.

The petition underlined that Khan, as an elected representative and a mass leader, stands up for the cause of downtrodden and that there have been incidents when the petitioner and the Delhi Police have had run-ins.

In May last year, Khan was charged of creating an unlawful assembly and making statements to provoke riots while protesting against the demolition of houses and shops by the south Delhi municipal corporation (SDMC) in his constituency. According to Khan, the bad character label was an attempt to sabotage hearing of his bail application in the case before the trial court.

The high court found no fault in the police decision to label Khan as bad character based on the cases mentioned in the dossier. However, he was granted liberty to move a representation to the authorities concerned to delete his name from the surveillance register.

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Amid the Khalistan supporters declaring their intent to protest outside Indian embassies in Canadian cities, India has asked Canada to urgently act against these extremists who deliberately blamed Indian diplomats and security agencies for killing 45-year-old designated terrorist and Khalistan Tiger Force (KTF) chief Hardeep Singh Nijjar. According to the poster, the Khalistan freedom rally will be organised on July 8. (Representative file image)(HT_PRINT)

Watch: India Fumes At Khalistani 'Threat Posters' With Names Of Envoys In Canada I Nijjar Shooting Fallout

Read here: India to demarche Canada on Khalistanis targeting Indian diplomats

The Narendra Modi government is also expected to serve a demarche to the Justin Trudeau government this week asking it to take action against the Khalistan extremists for naming and threatening Indian diplomats.

What does demarche mean?

Demarche is a word that is commonly used in diplomatic circles. The Oxford English Dictionary (OED) defines it as walk, step, proceeding". In 1678, it came to mean a political step, a diplomatic initiative, according to professor VR Narayanaswami.

Purpose of a demarche

It is a formal communication of one governments official position, views, or wishes on a given subject to an appropriate official in another government. According to the US Department of State, "demarches generally seek to persuade, inform, or gather information from a foreign government. Governments may also use a demarche to protest or object to actions by a foreign government".

According to a report by Livemint, at present, the common perception of the word matches with Duhaimes definition of demarche which states as word coined by the diplomatic community and referring to a strongly worded warning by one country to another and often, either explicitly or implicitly, with the threat of military consequence".

Demarche vs ultimatum:

Public perception of demarche often confuses it with ultimatum. An ultimatum expresses a governments displeasure at developments in its relations with another government, and can be seen as a final warning while, in modern diplomacy, a demarche can be seen as an incipient form of an ultimatum, professor Narayanaswami said.

Prior demarches:

However, this is not the first time when the Indian government has served a demarche to Canada. In December 2020, a demarche was served to the Canadian High Commissioner to India over Canadian PM Trudeau's comments on the farmers protest, while in October 2022, the Union government served another demarche to the federal government to act and stop the so-called Khalistan referendum organized by the proscribed organisation in Canada.
A drone was spotted on Monday over Prime Minister Narendra Modi's residence in Delhi, which is a no-fly zone. Prime Minister Narendra Modi (PIB)

Watch: Drone Spotted Over PM Modis Residence; Heres What Delhi Police Said | Details

News agency ANI, citing Delhi Police, said that Special Protection Group (SPG), which provides proximate security to the PM, reached out to the police around 5:30 am on Monday morning.

The Delhi Police told ANI, that information was received at the police control room about an unidentified flying object near PM's residence. The police said, Thorough searches were made in nearby areas but no such object was detected. The air traffic control room (ATC) was also contacted, they also didn't detect any such flying object near PM's residence.

The police said that the investigation was underway.

(This is a developing story. Please check back for updates.)

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The Election Commission of India (ECI) on Monday launched a portal to allow registered political parties file their financial statements, including contribution reports, audited annual accounts and poll expenditure statements. The online availability of data is expected to enhance the level of compliance and transparency. (Representative file image)

According to the ECI statement, the commission has taken this step with twin objectives  to overcome difficulties in filing physical reports, and to ensure timely filing in a standardised format.

The online availability of the data is expected to enhance the level of compliance and transparency. In the letter [to the political parties], the ECI pointed to the pivotal position of political parties and stressed that it is incumbent on them to adhere to the principles of democratic functioning and transparency in electoral processes, particularly in financial disclosures, the statement said.

Also Read:Updation of electoral rolls in Bihar from July 21: Election body officials

These financial statements are required to be submitted by political parties to the Election Commission/Chief Electoral Officers of States/Union Territories, as per the Representation of Peoples Act, 1951 & transparency guidelines issued by the Commission, from time to time, over the last many years, it added.

The online portal also has a facility for sending reminders in the form of messages on the registered mobile number and registered emails of the authorised representatives of the political party to comply with the deadlines.

A comprehensive guiding manual with graphical representations, and FAQs have also been sent to the political parties explaining the online module and the process of filing reports online. To give further guidance on the online filing, the ECI would also organise a hands-on training programme for the designated person(s) from various political parties, the statement said.

The ECI also said that the parties who are not willing to file the reports through the portal and continue with the physical mode will have to give justification for the same.

The political parties not wishing to file the financial report through online mode will have to convey the reasons for not filing online to the commission in writing and may continue to file its reports in hard copy along with CDs/Pen drive in the prescribed formats. The commission will, in turn, publish all such reports online, along with a letter of justification sent by the party for not filing financial statements online, the ECI said.
Former Union minister Kapil Sibal on Monday took a swipe at the BJP over the induction of NCP leader Ajit Pawar and eight other MLAs into the Eknath Shinde-led Maharashtra government, saying "first attack the corrupt and then embrace" them. Sibal also said probably this is "the mother of democracy" that Prime Minister Narendra Modi talked about in his address to the United States Congress. Rajya Sabha MP Kapil Sibal(ANI / File)

On Saturday, Prime Minister Modi said the dynastic parties work only for the welfare of their own families.

"They do not have the guarantee of taking the normal family of the country forward. Those who are facing corruption charges are out on bail. They are together with those who are sentenced for scams, Modi said in an apparent reference to the Patna conclave where leaders of Congress, JD (U), NCP, RJD, AAP and others met recently.

In a tweet, Sibal said, "First attack the corrupt, then embrace the corrupt. First guarantee their investigation, then get a warranty for their support. Investigation in suspension. Henceforth ED, CBI: No tension. Sounds familiar? Mother of democracy at work!"

Meanwhile, Shiv Sena (UBT) leader Sanjay Raut has claimed that Shinde will soon be replaced by Pawar because the MLAs who were part of the split in Shiv Sena almost a year ago are going to be disqualified.

"The CM of Maharashtra is about to get changed. The 16 MLAs with Eknath Shinde will be disqualified soon as per the Supreme Court's order. This is the reason why Ajit Pawar and others have been inducted," Raut said at a press conference.

Ajit Pawar pulled off a stunning revolt in the NCP on Sunday, triggering a vertical split in the party founded by veteran Sharad Pawar, and joined hands with the ruling Shiv Sena-BJP alliance in Maharashtra to become the deputy chief minister.

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The Gujarat High Court on Monday issued notices to the wife, daughter and three women disciples of Asaram in a 2013 rape case in which they were acquitted while the self-styled godman was sentenced to life imprisonment. Asaram Bapu is currently lodged in jail in Jodhpur (PTI Photo)

The division bench of Justices AY Kogje and Hasmukh Suthar issued notices to the five respondents, including Asaram's wife Laxmiben and daughter Bhartiben, returnable on August 2. The court noted a delay of 29 days in filing of appeal and issued notices to the respondents.

A court in Gandhinagar had, on January 31, sentenced Asaram to life imprisonment in a rape case filed by a former woman disciple in 2013. The victim was raped several times between 2001 and 2007 at Asaram's ashram in Motera near Ahmedabad before she managed to escape.

Asaram's wife Laxmiben, their daughter Bharati, and four disciples who were accused of aiding and abetting the crime were acquitted by the court for want of evidence.

The state's legal department had, on May 6, 2023, directed the prosecution to file an appeal against their acquittal. The appeal has been filed against five of the six who were acquitted.

Asaram (81) is currently in a jail in Jodhpur in another case of raping a minor girl at his ashram in Rajasthan in 2013.
The independent expert group on strengthening multilateral development banks (MDBs), set up under Indias G20 presidency, has completed its first report and will submit it in time for the third finance ministers and central bank governors (FMCBGs) meeting in Gandhinagar on July 17 and 18. This report will feed into the eventual declaration during the G20 leaders summit in September in New Delhi (HT)

This report will feed into the eventual declaration during the G20 leaders summit in September in New Delhi.

Led by former US treasury secretary Larry Summers and veteran Indian policymaker and the 15th Finance Commission chairperson NK Singh as co-conveners, the groups report addresses its wide-ranging terms of reference. These include questions related to the vision, mandate, operating modalities, financial requirements and resource mobilisation mechanisms of MDBs, given new global challenges such as the climate emergency, pandemics, fragility and conflict. The group is understood to have expanded the definition of these transboundary challenges to include energy, water and sanitation.

The expert group has completed its first report. It had been asked to do so by June 30 and this target has been met. The report will be submitted to Indian presidency over the next few days, Singh told HT during a visit to Washington DC on Sunday.

The group will meet in person in Delhi in the third week of September and finalise its second report. This will be submitted to the fourth FMCBG meeting on the sidelines of the annual meetings of the International Monetary Fund and World Bank in Moroccos Marrakesh in mid-October. This too shall happen under the Indian G20 presidency, which ends on November 30, Singh said.

The expert group, in its first report, has considered past initiatives at MDB reform, including the ongoing evolution road map prepared by the World Banks executive directors and discussed by the banks development committee during the spring meetings earlier this year.

This road map suggested expanding the remit of the bank from the twin goals of ending extreme poverty and boosting shared prosperity to doing so by fostering sustainable, resilient and inclusive development. This, it said, would deepen the banks commitment to addressing a third set of global challenges, particularly the climate crisis, pandemics and health security, and fragility and conflict.

The expert group is understood to have taken a clear and considered view that while the expansion of the mandate is necessary, it requires a delicate balancing act so that resources meant to address the twin goals arent diverted because it will cause great hardship to the poorer parts of the world that have, in recent years, seen a spike in poverty and inequality.

On the question of financing, the groups first report will examine the question of adequacy of finance for MDBs and how the banks can responsibly meet the financial challenges an expansion in their mandate will require. The report will offer a detailed assessment of how it can do so through the responsible leveraging of its current balance sheets, how it can secure and harness private capital, and how shareholders can play a role in the recapitalisation of banks.

The report has taken into account the various estimates that have been proposed to address transboundary challenges. It will also address the issues of concessional finance by the International Development Association, which is a part of the World Bank Group and provides support to poorer countries, and the International Bank for Reconstruction and Development, also a part of the bank that provides financing to middle income countries. The groups second report will go into further detail on the modalities of private capital mobilisation and innovative approaches that can be adopted.

In addition, given the fact that there are 14 MDBs, the groups first report also addresses the issue of bringing greater coherence into the family of MDBs, all of which have their distinct matrix of governance structures, shareholding patterns, and decision-making processes. Yet, bringing about coherence and symmetry will optimise final outcomes and this is an area the expert group will seek to address, Singh said.

Besides Summers and Singh, the independent expert group includes Singapores senior minister Tharman Shanmugarathnam, former director general of the South African national treasury Maria Ramos, former governor of the Central Bank of Brazil Arminio Fraga, London School of Economics academic Nicholas Stern, former World Bank chief economist Justin Yifu Lin, former World Bank Vice President and current dean of the Fletcher School at Tufts University Rachel Kyte, and former executive secretary of the Economic Commission for Africa Vera Songwe.

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India has expressed its concerns to the Canadian authorities about escalation of threats to its officials in the country where posters are being circulated for a rally that directly identifies its high commissioner in Ottawa and consulate general in Toronto. According to the poster, the Khalistan freedom rally will be organised on July 8. (Representative file image)

According to the poster, the Khalistan freedom rally will be organised on July 8. It is being held in the name of Harjit Singh Nijjar, the pro-Khalistan priest who was found murdered in the parking lot of a gurdwara in the town of Surrey in British Columbia on June 18.

The poster also carries threats to Indias high commissioner to Ottawa Sanjay Kumar Verma and consulate general in Toronto Apoorva Srivastava.

Also Read: NIA releases pics of March 19 Indian high commission attack suspects

A senior Indian official said concerns about their security and other personnel have been communicated informally to the Global Affairs Canada, the countrys foreign ministry, the Royal Canadian Mounted Police (RCMP), which is tasked with diplomatic security, and the Ottawa and Toronto police departments.

Following the long weekend for Canada Day, they will be formally informed of the heightened concerns.

Speaking to HT, Verma said, In the garb of freedom of expression, they are attempting to cause harm to foreign envoys, which may not be the intention of Canadian law and constitution, under which such rights are provided.

He added that each right is accompanied with obligations to maintain peace and harmony.

The murder of Nijjar, who headed the Guru Nanak Sikh Gurdwara Sahib and was with the separatist Sikhs for Justice (SFJ), has witnessed pro-Khalistan elements accusing India of being behind the killing.

SFJs legal counsel Gurpatwant Pannun described it as an assassination.

However, the Integrated Homicide Investigation Team (IHIT), investigating the killing, has not ascribed any motive.

Nijjar was alleged to be the head of the Khalistan Tiger Force by Indian law enforcement and faced several terror-related charges.

The National Investigation Agency (NIA) had announced an award of 10 lakh for information leading to his capture.

However, none of the charges against him were tested in Canadian courts and SFJ has maintained it does not use violence.

An Indian official stressed that Canadian authorities have been receptive to their concerns and collaborate closely when it comes to securing diplomatic premises.

However, on March 23, pro-Khalistan agitators, protesting the hunt for Waris de Punjab chief Amritpal Singh, who was absconding at that time, breached the security perimeter to the high commission in Ottawa.

His brother-in-law has been named as the main suspect in that episode by NIA and that incident is being probed by Ottawa Police.

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ABOUT THE AUTHOR Anirudh Bhattacharyya Anirudh Bhattacharya is a Toronto-based commentator on North American issues, and an author. He has also worked as a journalist in New Delhi and New York spanning print, television and digital media. He tweets as @anirudhb. ...view detail
Pakistan-origin political expert and author Ishtiaq Ahmed said that the India-Pakistan partition was a blunder that led to political and social consequences between two countries. In an interview to Deccan Herald, the Swedish-based expert expressed his strong belief that in line with the European Union, borders in between India and Pakistan may eventually disappear. Ishtiaq Ahmed (HT Photo)

On Pakistan's present condition, the political expert claimed the 1965 war with India has in some way played a role in it. He said the US and World Bank invested on Pakistan heavily after the partition, which was not the case post-1965 war. From then on, Pakistan was never able to recovere economically."

Ahmed believe that people from both nations can take risks, allow them to mingle with each other by relaxing the current Visa norms. This will greatly benefit Pakistan, as India has already proved that it can do without Pakistan, he added.

He pointed out the progress India made in the social aspect and noted how women in the country can dress freely, roam around freely on motorbikes and public transport, which is not the case in Pakistan and women there face hostile situations wherever they go.

Ahmed also highlighted that Pakistan will have to completely abandon terrorism to handle the Kashmir issue. It might resolve after both countries accept the Line of Control as international border.

He also extending his support for the Unioform Civil Code (UCC). I believe in equality and everyone to gain from the same laws, he added.

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India has asked Canada to urgently act against so-called Khalistan extremists who are planning to take out a protest march to Indian embassies in Toronto and Vancouver after deliberately trying to blame Indian diplomats and security agencies for the killing of designated terrorist Hardeep Singh Nijjar. The 45-year-old Khalistan Tiger Force (KTF) chief was killed in an inter-gang warfare on June 19 in Sikh dominated Surrey town in Vancouver. Nijjar had links with the proscribed organization SFJ, which is led by a US-based designated terrorist. Khalistan extremists are taking out protest rallies on July 8 in Toronto and Vancouver

Due to the long weekend holiday in Canada, the Indian High Commission is expected to demarche the Justin Trudeau government on Monday and ask the Federal Government to take action against Khalistan extremists for naming and threatening Indian diplomats. While the poster for protest rally in Toronto on July 8 names Indian High Commissioner Sanjay Kumar Verma and Consul General of India Apoorva Srivastava in Toronto with photos, posters of a simultaneous rally in Vancouver names the High Commissioner and Consul General Vancouver Manish.

A poster for protest rally on July 8

Such is the gall of the Khalistan extremists that phone numbers of the organizers of protest rally are printed on the posters along with photos of their targets that is Indian diplomats. Since the identities of those threatening Indian diplomats is known, the Canadian government this time has no excuses for not taking action or dismissing this threat as a legitimate democratic right of the protestors", said an official.

It is understood that the Royal Canadian Mounted Police has already contacted the Indian High Commission in Toronto and Vancouver and have decided to give personal security to Indian diplomats including the High Commissioner and the Counsel General.

Despite New Delhi raising the threat of these Khalistan extremists to the Indian diaspora with the Justin Trudeau government, the latter chooses to take no action against these violent elements as the separatists Sikh constitute a vote bank for the present government. The Khalistan extremists have virtually been given a free pass by the Trudeau regime with the former defacing Indian temples and targeting the Indian non-Sikh community. While the Vancouver protest rally will start from Guru Nanak Sikh Gurudwara, which had been taken over by Nijjar and his cronies, it will culminate at the Indian Consulate in Vancouver. The Toronto protest rally will start from Malton and proceed towards the Indian High Commission in Toronto.

Adding to the pressure on Indian diplomats, the SFJ has taken to social media to announce kill India rallies in eight countries on the same day.

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ABOUT THE AUTHOR Shishir Gupta Author of Indian Mujahideen: The Enemy Within (2011, Hachette) and Himalayan Face-off: Chinese Assertion and Indian Riposte (2014, Hachette). Awarded K Subrahmanyam Prize for Strategic Studies in 2015 by Manohar Parrikar Institute for Defence Studies and Analyses (MP-IDSA) and the 2011 Ben Gurion Prize by Israel. ...view detail
Rashtriya Lok Dal president Jayant Chaudhary on Monday refuted the claims of joining Bharatiya Janata Party- led National Democratic Alliance (NDA) and made his stand clear of not joining the alliance. RLD president Jayant Chaudhary.(HT_PRINT)

Read here: Maharashtra-like situation may erupt in these states: Union minister's big claim

While replying to the reporters, Chaudhary said, Do you want me to get stitched a new suit. What happens by their (Athawale and Rajbhar) saying? My stand is clear.

Union minister and Republican Party of India (Athawale) chief Ramdas Athawale on Monday claimed that Maharashtra-like situation could erupt in Bihar and Uttar Pradesh, as there is a possibility that differences arise between MLAs of Akhilesh Yadav's Samajwadi Party and Nitish Kumar's Janata Dal United.

"A similar situation (like currently in Maharashtra) can arise in Bihar soon as some JD(U) MLAs are upset with Nitish Kumar. In Uttar Pradesh, Jayant Chaudhary can join with NDA as is currently upset with Akhilesh Yadav. There is a possibility that differences arise between MLAs of the Samajwadi Party," he told ANI.

Read here: Ahead of Shahs Lucknow visit, SBSP indicates support for Uniform Civil Code

On the other hand, Suheldev Bharatiya Samaj Party chief OP Rajbhar had claimed that many leaders from Samajwadi Party are going to leave the party and join Yogi Adityanath-led Uttar Pradesh government to take oaths as ministers as they are upset with Yadav.

"What happened in Maharashtra is going to be repeated in Uttar Pradesh. Many leaders from Samajwadi Party are going to leave the party and join the UP government to take oaths as ministers. SP MPs are upset with Akhilesh Yadav. They can't see their future in SP," he told news agency ANI.

"The reason for SP leaders to leave the party is that Akhilesh Yadav meets Telangana chief minister K Chandrasekhar Rao but he does not meet BSP chief Mayawati. Mayawati is a game changer in Uttar Pradesh. If Mayawati ji is ready I am willing to make an alliance with her party, Congress also wants the same. In 2024, we can see a completely new front," he added.

Read here: In Lucknow, Shah targets SP, BSP with focus on OBC voters

These comments came a day after Nationalist Congress Party chief Sharad Pawar's nephew Ajit Pawar led a vertical split in the party to become the deputy chief minister in the Eknath Shinde-BJP led Maharashtra government. As many as 37 MLAs have reportedly walked out of the NCP.

Amid the Maharashtra political crisis, the Congress party has announced to hold the second joint opposition meeting on July 17-18 in Bengaluru in a vow to strengthen opposition unity.
Bengaluru: Expressing concern over corruption in the state, Karnataka governor Thaawarchand Gehlot on Monday said it has become almost institutionalised, and the state government would take administrative and legislative measures to eradicate it. Karnataka governor Thaawarchand Gehlot addresses the joint session of state assembly, at Vidhana Soudha, in Bengaluru on Monday. (ANI)

The first budget session of the Congress-led government in Karnataka began on Monday with the governors address.

Corruption has become so entrenched in our system that for many reasons it has become almost institutionalised. Eradicating it is a major challenge. I seek your cooperation to meet this challenge and root out corruption. The government will take all necessary administrative and legislative measures in this regard, the governor said.

The governors statement, at the beginning of an assembly session, comes as an intent statement of the state government and not necessarily of the governor.

The Congress party, during the Assembly elections earlier, had capitalised on the 40% commission allegations and made corruption their primary electoral plank, against the previous Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) government. The Congress emerged victorious, capturing 135 seats and 42.88% of the vote share, while the BJP secured only 66 seats out of the 224-member House.

In his address to the joint session of both Houses of the State Legislature, the governor stated that in the next five years, the state government would place emphasis on a people-centric economy. It is the aim of our government to make Karnataka emerge as a socially inclusive and culturally vibrant economic powerhouse, he added.

Noting that narrow minds create divisions and differences between different communities, and the remnants of such a mindset still survive at various levels in the society, the governor said, adding that the government would take all the steps to build a peaceful and loving society. We will strive for peace and harmony among everyone as enshrined in our Constitution. In the next five years we will make sincere efforts to build an equal society as dreamt by Buddha, Basava, Narayana Guru, Babasaheb Ambedkar and Kuvempu.

Gehlot further pointed out that the fiscal, administrative and legislative independence of the states need to be strengthened. He said that Karnataka, which once stood tall and contributed immensely to the country, has landed into a state of distress. Bringing out Karnataka from this economic distress shall be the priority of my government.

The governor mentioned that under the Anna Bhagya scheme, the additional allotment of five kg rice by the state government would be provided in the form of Direct Benefit Transfer of money at 34 per kg per person directly into the bank accounts of the poor families, each month. This arrangement will continue until the quantum of rice for the additional five kg rice to all the poor households is tied up, he said, adding that the state government would make the state hunger-free through Anna Bhagya scheme and Indira Canteens.

Meanwhile, former chief minister Basavaraj Bommai termed the governors speech bland and lacked spirit. The governors speech was bland speech according to me. There was no life. The new government is like one with no new spirit or new compass. Its not a new speech that inspires hope, he said.

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The Opposition has claimed that nine Nationalist Congress Party legislators joined the Eknath Shinde-led Maharashtra government succumbing to the pressure of central probe agencies. In a surprise development in Maharashtra, Ajit Pawar split the NCP and was sworn in as the deputy chief minister. Eight other NCP leaders took oath as ministers. NCP leader and newly appointed Dy CM Ajit Pawar, NCP MP Praful Patel and NCP MLA and minister Chhagan Bhujbal addressing to media in Mumbai on Sunday, (Anshuman Poyrekar/HT)

Those sworn in as ministers were Chhagan Bhujbal, Dilip Walse Patil, Hasan Mushrif, Dhananjay Munde, Aditi Tatkare, Dharmarao Atram, Anil Patil and Sanjay Bansode.

Indian Youth Congress president Srinivas BV took a swipe at the BJP and said Hasan Mushrif has become free from corruption charges after joining the Eknath Shinde-led government. Reacting to the development, Srinivas posted on Twitter a video clip of Mushrif taking oath as a Maharashtra minister and said, "This is NCP MLA Hasan Mushrif. A few days ago, ED had filed a case, and raided his house and sugar factory.

Bhujbal, addressing the press along with Ajit Pawar after joining the NDA in the state, said, "There are allegations that we have made the decision because of the pending cases against us. There is no case against Ajit Dada, the most significant case against me is closed, there are no cases against the others. There is a case against Hasan Mushrif but the courts have been extending interim relief to him from time to time. There is no evidence against him."

What are the cases against NCP leaders and their kin:

Hasan Mushrif: On January 11, the Enforcement Directorate (ED) had conducted searches on multiple premises in Maharashtra as part of a money laundering probe against the Mushrif and others in connection with alleged irregularities in the operations of some sugar mills based in the state that are linked to the NCP MLA, news agency PTI reported.

The ED's probe is based on an FIR registered in Kolhapur and a complaint filed by the Registrar of Companies concerning allegations with regard to the allotment of shares of Sarsenapati Santaji Ghorpade Sugar Factory to farmers against deposits of 10,000. On April 13, the Bombay high court extended till April 27 the interim protection from arrest granted to Mushrif in connection with a money laundering case.

Mushrif had filed the application in the high court following a special court rejecting his anticipatory bail plea on April 11.

Ajit Pawar: The ED submitted a chargesheet against Jarandeshwar Sugar Mill Pvt Ltd linked to Ajit Pawar and his wife Sunetra in court in the Maharashtra State Co-operative Bank (MSCB) scam. However, the ED has not named the couple as accused in the chargesheet. In its first chargesheet in the alleged financial irregularities at MSCB, the ED claimed that Jarandeshwar Sugar Mill Pvt Ltd had obtained loans worth 826 crore from the bank, out of which 487 crore is still outstanding. In March, the ED filed a chargesheet against M/s Guru Commodity Services Pvt Ltd, its chartered accountant Yogesh Bagrecha and Jarandeshwar Sugar Mill Pvt Ltd, highlighting irregularities in the auction of Jarandeshwar Sahakari Sakhar Kharkana (SSK), Pune. The agency claimed that the bank held an auction in such a way that only Guru Commodity Services Pvt Ltd, a company owned by Omkar Developers, could clear the bid.

The agency further alleged that Guru Commodity participated in the auction only as a proxy for Jarandeshwar Sugar Mills Pvt Ltd, a firm belonging to a group in which Ajit Pawar and his wife were former directors. The property of Guru Commodity was used by Jarandeshwar Sugar Mills Pvt Ltd to obtain the loan of 826 crore.

Further investigation has revealed that Jarandeshwar SSK started operations in the year 1999-2000. The owners had taken loans from the MSC Bank, out of which 78.90 crore remained outstanding, on the basis of which its account was named as a non-performing asset. In July 2010, the entity was taken over by the Bank.

Chhagan Bhujbal: In 2018, the former Maharashtra cabinet minister was discharged by a special court in the Maharashtra Sadan scam case being probed by the state Anti-Corruption Bureau. Along with Bhujbal, his son Pankaj, nephew Sameer and five others were cleared of all charges by special judge HS Satbhai. A case was filed in 2015 against Bhujbal and 16 others by the ACB after a Public Interest Litigation was filed in the Bombay high court seeking an inquiry into alleged irregularities in awarding of contracts of over 100 crore for three projects in 2006 when Bhujbal was the state PWD minister. The contracts in question were given to Chamankar Developers for the construction of Maharashtra Sadan in Delhi, a new Regional Transport Office building in Andheri and a state guest house in Malabar Hill. A separate case alleging money-laundering was also filed by the Enforcement Directorate.

Praful Patel: Earlier this year, the ED, under the Prevention of Money Laundering Act (PMLA), attached several units at Worlis Ceejay House, which are owned by former Union minister and NCP leader Praful Patel and his family. The building was constructed by Patels firm, Millennium Developers Private Limited, in 2006-07. Last July, the ED had provisionally attached the units located on the 12th, 13th, 14th and 15th floors as part of its probe in a money laundering case involving former gangster Iqbal Mirchi. Patel, a former aviation minister, also has his primary residence at Ceejay House. The ED had in 2019 attached another two floors which belonged to the Mirchi family. Iqbal Mirchi, a key member of the Dawood Ibrahim gang, had died in London in 2013.

The Indian Express reported that Praful Patel had come under the ED lens in a case of alleged money laundering. The probe was related to decisions made by Patel as civil aviation minister in the UPA government and allegations linked to the ceding of profitable routes to foreign airlines, corruption in the opening of training institutes with foreign investment, and Patel's ties with lobbyist Deepak Talwar who, the ED claimed, was the middleman in these deals.

Patel, however, was not an accused in the FIRs registered by the CBI and the ED. He was questioned once by the ED in the case. The probe is still on.

Aditi Tatkare: In 2017, the ACB in Maharashtra named Aditi Tatkare's father Sunil Tatkare, an NCP leader, in a chargesheet as it probes the irrigation scam unearthed during the previous Congress-NCP government in the state. The bureaus chargesheet is on alleged corruption in the Kondhane dam project on Ulhas river. However, in the 3,000-page document, Sunil Tatkares name appears in the last paragraph, The Times of India reported. The bureau said since the probe against Tatkare, who was irrigation minister in the previous government, was incomplete, it may later file a separate chargesheet against the leader.

However, Anjali Damania, the activist at the forefront of exposing the scam, called the chargesheet part of a pattern.

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While the Nationalist Congress Party moved disqualification petitions with the Maharashtra assembly Speaker Rahul Narwekar against Ajit Pawar and its eight other leaders for joining the NDA government in the state, the party's working president Supriya Sule said the move was painful but her relationship with her cousin would remain the same. Supriya Sule is a three-time Lok Sabha MP and has been representing the Baramati constituency. (HT PHOTO)

Addressing a late night press conference on Sunday, hours after Ajit Pawar and eight other party leaders joined the Eknath Shinde-Devendra Fadnavis government in Maharashtra in a surprise move, Sule said she will not mix personal and professional relationships.

I can never have a fight with my brother I am boring, steady and not impulsive... Emotional relationships and professional work are two different things. I will never mix the two, news agency PTI quoted Sule as saying.

Follow LIVE Updates on NCP political crisis

Sule also refused to divulge what transpired at the meeting at 'Devgiri', Ajit Pawar's official residence in Mumbai in the morning where she was also present. Sule, Sharad Pawar's daughter, said what was discussed between her and her brother will remain between them only, but asserted that it was a challenging day like many other days.

Thoughts and hate are different things, the NCP never had hate inside the party or any misunderstanding. Ajit Pawar had different thoughts and we have different ones. We respect our all MLAs. I always speak with party workers and leaders, I spoke with them yesterday also and tomorrow also I will speak with them, said the NCP MP.

Supriya Sule's dig at BJP

Sule, however, didn't shy away from taking potshots at the BJP saying it welcomed her party leaders despite calling her party corrupt.

The BJP is 24x7 in election mood...BJP, which called the NCP a corrupt party, are now welcoming our leaders. How? I don't want to comment on who will be the candidates of the BJP. I will concentrate on my work rather than peeking inside others' life...I am always with the NCP and truth, I face these types of challenges every day. This one (Ajit Pawar's revolt) is a new challenge for me, said Sule.

Hinting at central agency pressure on the NCP leaders, Sule said, We call them ICE (Income tax, CBI and ED). Most of the time they (central agencies) conduct inquiries of opposition leaders. I never blame those officers who are working there but it was happening from the other side, I call these things ICE.

Ajit Pawar's move won't impact Opposition's unity: Sule

Ajit Pawar's cousin also said the developments in the party will not impact the Opposition's unity. "Our credibility will only rise after this," she said.

Sule, whose elevation as party working president last month is said to have triggered Ajit Pawar's revolt, said since 2019 when he first joined the short-lived government led by Devendra Fadnavis to 2023, she has matured a lot with the responsibility of the party.

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A man took to Twitter to express his frustration over an IndiGo flight delay, claiming that it was caused by pilot being tired. Sameer Mohan posted screenshots of his wife's WhatsApp chat, where she detailed the events unfolding during the flight. The tweets gained traction on social media, prompting a response from the airline. Acknowledging the issues being faced by the passengers, IndiGo responded on Twitter.(REUTERS)

According to Mohan's tweets, his wife's flight from Dehradun to Chennai on July 2 experienced a delay of over three hours. He initially criticised IndiGo in a tweet, expressing disappointment in their treatment of regular passengers and tagging the minister of civil aviation for a resolution.

Also read | Elderly woman suffers cardiac arrest mid-air; rescued by Bengaluru doc: Report

"Dear @IndiGo6E my wife's on a flight that has been delayed for 3+ hours now and is now been going to Delhi. If this is how you're gonna treat regulars then god bless. This is not done, Mohan said in his first tweet.

Subsequently, Mohan shared screenshots of his conversation with his wife, alleging that the pilots were stressed and that the airline was unable to find a replacement crew. He also revealed that the flight was diverted to Lucknow and then Delhi.

Read | Passengers can now opt for Self Baggage Drop at Delhi Airport. Know what it is

Another passenger, Ketharinath Kamalanathan, also shared a video from inside the flight, claiming that pilots parked the aircraft in Delhi and left without providing any information.

Acknowledging the issues being faced by the passengers, IndiGo responded on Twitter, We regret the inconvenience caused by the delay. We understand the challenges when travel plans don't go as expected. The delay was due to operational reasons. Thank you for your patience and understanding.

The incident has sparked concern among other social media users, who criticised the airline for their handling of the situation. Passengers expressed frustration with the lack of information provided by the crew and emphasised the need for better customer service in such situations.

"Flight experience, boarding experience is the worst for Indigo. They treat their passengers like cattle making lines when flight is not ready, waiting at gate etc.. I always prefer to pay extra if needed be for Vistara if there is a flight... Much better streamlined," one user commented.

"Unfortunately this is practically a monopoly - so there is no real pressure or motivation for IndiGo currently," tweeted another.

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The Supreme Court on Monday directed the Manipur government to submit an updated status report on the ethnic violence in the state. The court will hear the case next on July 10. Women holding placards as they welcome Congress leader Rahul Gandhi in the violence-hit Manipur, on Friday last week. (ANI Photo)(ANI)

During the brief hearing, Solicitor General Tushar Mehta appearing for the Centre and Manipur government told the apex court that the situation in the state is improving, though slowly.

The hearing comes a day after the United Peoples' Front (UPF) and Kuki National Organisation (KNO), two umbrella Kuki organisations, have withdrawn roadblocks in Manipurs Kangpokpi district on National Highway 2.

In a joint statement, the two organisations, which represent among others former militant groups that have signed suspension of operations pacts with the government, said the blockade on the highway has been lifted with immediate effect, following an appeal by Union home minister Amit Shah.

The organisations said the home minister had shown deep concern to restore peace and harmony in the state.

However, Kuki civil society group Committee on Tribal Unity (COTU), which had announced a roadblock on NH-2 two months ago, has not officially withdrawn the agitation yet.

Manipur has two national highways -- NH-2 (Imphal-Dimapur) and NH-37 (Imphal-Jiribam).

The NH-2 has been blocked by Kuki organisations since the violence broke out in Manipur on May 3, and was temporarily opened following Shah's visit in late May.

More than 100 people have so far lost their lives in ethnic violence between Meitei and Kuki communities in Manipur.

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.

(With inputs from agencies)

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The Nationalist Congress Party(NCP) parliamentarian Praful Patel said he doesnt acknowledge his sacking by Sharad Pawar as he had acted according to the wishes of party colleagues. In an interview with HT, Patel said the decision to partner with the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) was being mulled for the past year and that party patriarch Pawar was aware of their moves. While denying any personal issues with Pawars daughter Supriya Sule, Patel admitted that there were major differences in the organisation which led to Sundays exit. Edited excerpts from an interview: PREMIUM NCP leader Praful Patel. (ANI)

What is your reaction to being removed from the Nationalist Congress Party by Sharad Pawar?

I can only say that he has been my respected leader and will continue to be my respected leader. Theres actually no reason to take any action because as we speak, the question of removing anybody doesnt arise. Its (the decision to go with the BJP) a party decision thats been taken by a majority of the people of the party, by a large number of elected representatives.

You say a majority have taken this decision, but we dont have the full list of names of those on your side.

Of course there is a list, people were there in the public domain, present at Raj Bhawan (in Mumbai). All the MLAs supporting yesterdays move were all present at Ajit Pawars residence too and it is not the case that the numbers are not there; they are overwhelming.

Are there more than 35 MLAs, which is required to avoid the anti-defection law?

No question of anti-defection. We are the party; this isnt a faction, but the NCP.

But you are also claiming Sharad Pawar is still the national president, but hes taken a position that is completely different?

Claims and counterclaims will now be made, but ultimately such decisions are endorsed by an authority like the Election Commission. It is better to await the due process.

Whats the back story? When did this entire process start?

Actually, the thought process which led to yesterdays action has been going on for a long time. A large number of party workers and MLAs have been wanting this kind of tie-up. It has been very much in the domain and knowledge of Mr Pawar also and people have spoken about it in the party forum. So, its not that these things come as a surprise. The fact is that it has culminated in an action and has been shown as a factional decision, whereas it is a party decision.

But when Sharad Pawar appointed you and Supriya Sule as working presidents, everyone saw it as him asserting himself. Now you say that even when you accepted that decision, you continued to think about an alliance with the BJP?

Actually, a thought process has nothing to do with an appointment. A thought process is something to do with larger decision-making bodies, not about being a working president.Yesterdays decision has to be seen in that light.

Did you disagree with Supriya Sule getting so much prominence in the party?

Supriya Sule is as much a member of the party as me or anybody else. There have been some issues with the state unit and Maharashtra is the principal unit of the NCP, and there have been simmering differences between the leadership of the Maharashtra unit and Mr Ajit Pawar and many others.

How long has the discussion to tie-up been on? For the past one year?

Its been going on for many, many (months)... its happened on many occasions. Its not like its some overnight decision.

Were you already talking when Eknath Shinde split Sena ?

Yes. That time the circumstances didnt work out, but as I said, this is not about coming into power and breaking away. It is a decision of a large number of people, both within the legislative side and the organisation side .

Do you believe that Sharad Pawar and Supriya Sule will also come around?

We hope the entire NCP family remains united. There are differences, but its not a permanent thing .

What would you say to those who point out that all of you are those who face probes by the Enforcement directorate and the Central Bureau of Investigation?

In politics, it is suitable to spread such canards. I dont see a single case against me at all, nothing, so wheres the question?

But they have summoned you for questioning?

Thats alright. It doesnt mean that any decision would be taken in such circumstances.

What about those who say that this is unethical or immoral?

The moment you (NCP) tied up with Shiv Sena in Maharashtra, where was the principle or secularism? They had been more rabid in their ideology than even the BJP. And they have been allies of the BJP and they separated on the issue of power and not ideology. So, if you can tie up with them, I dont see why you cant tie up with the BJP. If you can allow the Nagaland unit of NCP to ally with the BJP and join the NDA (National Democratic Alliance), why cant you allow the Maharashtra unit of the NCP too?

You were there at the opposition meeting in Patna 10 days ago...

I can only say that getting such a large number of parties together on board with different thought processes and contradictions, its not going to be easy. They didnt inspire confidence, considering the situation we are all faced with --whether its on the UCC (uniform civil code) or the Delhi ordinance. Its very nice to say that we will get together and have a one-on-one fight, but it doesnt work in practice.

So, you reject the opposition leaders theory that this was all done to dent their unity?

I am telling you that this thought process was within the NCP for quite some time. Some people may choose to distance themselves subsequently, but its a conscious decision taken by a vast majority of party workers. This (the NCP joining the BJP) is a very formidable combination and this will have a long term impact on Maharashtra.

Will we see you in the Narendra Modi cabinet soon? Did you meet Amit Shah?

There has been no such conversation at all. I have no reason to believe that may happen. I have had a conversation with Amit bhai on the phone ; a lot of these things, Mr Devendra Fadnavis was competent enough to take the decisions. (But) Of course, there was a final conversation with Amit Shah.
The Assam police have arrested seven members of a newly formed militant group on charges of extorting money from local businessmen and others, police said on Sunday. The arrest was made following a case registered in Assams Tamulpur district last month, police said. Assam DGP GP Singh on Sunday said the group recently demanded  5 lakh from a businessman in Tamulpur district in the name of militant group (Getty Images/iStockphoto)

Assam director general of police GP Singh on Sunday said the group recently demanded 5 lakh from a businessman in Tamulpur district in the name of militant group Kamtapur Liberation Organisation (KLO).

On June 26, police registered a criminal case under section 384 (extortion), 506 (criminal intimidation), 386 and 387(extortion by putting any person in fear of death or of grievous hurt) of the Indian Penal Code (IPC).

During investigation, we found that this is a group of many like minded persons who were making extortion demands to many government officials and businessmen of various districts in the name of KLO and BLA (Boro liberation army). And had already taken money from many of them, Singh said.

He added that on further investigation, they found that the group had formed a new terrorist gang called Boro Liberation Army (BLA).

Before they could implement their plan, Assam police busted the entire terror group and arrested all the members of BLA from different locations of Assam, Nagaland and West Bengal, the DGP said, adding that investigators have found substantial evidence against the suspects.

As per the reports, BLA last month issued a statement claiming that they launched a new group in February to pursue the demand for a separate state of Boroland.

Police said the seven people have been identified as its present, Dauharu Boro (43), Amit Boro (39), Bhumsa Chandra Boro (23), vice president Rengwna Brahma, Buddhiram Debbarma (45), Bijay Teron (23) and Kajal Rai (38).

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The joint meeting of Opposition parties will be held on July 17-18 in Karnataka's Bengaluru ahead of Parliament's monsoon session, announced Congress on Monday. Bihar Chief Minister Nitish Kumar, Rashtriya Janata Dal (RJD) chief Lalu Prasad Yadav, West Bengal Chief Minister Mamata Banerjee and other dignitaries during a press briefing. (ANI)

Read here: Owaisi's dig at Opposition unity after NCP split: Praful Patel was in Patna

While announcing the new dates, party's general secretary KC Venugopal tweeted, "After a hugely successful All-Opposition meeting in Patna, we will be holding the next meeting in Bengaluru on 17 and 18 July, 2023. We are steadfast in our unwavering resolve to defeat the fascist and undemocratic forces and present a bold vision to take the country forward."

Earlier, the meeting was scheduled to held on 13-14 July in Bengaluru, but was postponed. Before that, it was supposed to take place in Shimla. However, on June 29, Sharad Pawar said that the venue had been shifted to Bengaluru. The new date comes a day after NCP's Ajit Pawar turned rebel and joined the Shinde-BJP led Maharashtra government.

Read here: Opposition has to fix stand on civil code urgently

Meanwhile, the monsoon session of Parliament also comes at a time when PM Modi made a strong pitch for a Uniform Civil Code and amid moves to step up consultations on the issue.

The previous meeting was held in Bihar's Patna on June 23 which was hosted by state chief minister Nitish Kumar.

Read here: Pawar saheb said Modi will be PM in 2024: Newly sworn-in Maharashtra minister Chhagan Bhujpal

While addressing a press meet, Kumar said that all the leaders have agreed to fight unitedly against current regime in the Centre. Congress president Mallikarjun Kharge further informed that the next meeting will finalise the modalities of the front. This comes despite differences between AAP and the Congress during the meeting, where the former made it clear that it would be very difficult for it to be part of an alliance until the Grand Old Party denounced the Centres ordinance in Delhi.
The last time NK Singh visited the office of the president of the World Bank in Washington DC over 30 years ago, he was a senior bureaucrat in Indias finance ministry. The discussions with the banks leadership, including its then president Lewis T Preston, revolved around how it could help India overcome its economic crisis and navigate the economic reforms that New Delhi had embarked upon. NK Singh (L), prominent Indian policymaker, economist, and academician with Ajay Banga, president, World Bank. (HT)

Last week, Singh returned to the banks headquarters on 19th Street in Washington DC. This time, he was there not to discuss Indias reforms but to discuss the crisis in the World Bank and the reforms the institution itself needed. His interlocutor representing the bank happened to be of Indian origin as well, the new president of the World Bank Group and former American and Indian corporate leader, Ajay Banga. Accompanying Singh was Indias chief economic adviser, V Anantha Nageswaran.

The meeting reflected both the change in the global balance of power in the intervening decades and the new challenges that have emerged, India leveraging the opportunity provided by the G20 presidency, the rise and success of the Indian diaspora, and the intersection of the world of finance and development.

Banga has taken charge over the bank at a critical time, when it is in the middle of working through its evolution road map, which suggests changes in the banks mandate (to include transboundary challenges such as climate crisis), operating modalities and financial models. Singh is leading, along with former US treasury secretary Larry Summers, the G20 independent expert group on strengthening MDBs (multilateral development banks), which is all set to suggest ways in which the bank can balance its old and new mandates and raise more funds.

But as men who have led large institutions, Banga and Singh, in their conversations, also recognised the importance of human resource management, internal organisational cultures, and the ethos and mindset that governs the work of professionals in an institution. If the bank is to be ready to meet future challenges, it has to undergo an overhaul internally and its staffers have to shed their risk-averse bureaucratic tendencies and become more proactive, both in terms of the resources they can raise and the projects they fund.

It is a task that Banga appears determined to pursue. He has already made a beginning by changing his own offices decor to make it more austere, departing from the stuffy attire that has marked the sartorial style of past presidents, and bringing in an informal and conversational style to all his interactions, including in a town hall meeting last month with the banks employees where he, according to staffers, brought a refreshing change in atmospherics by focusing on outcomes.

A call to employees to return to office thrice a week after having got used to the work from home culture induced by the pandemic isnt earning him points on the popularity index, but it is a marker of how he wants to shed the old ways of working.

For Singh, who spent a lifetime in the Indian bureaucracy, the challenge in overhauling work culture within organisations is familiar. Thats why the expert group, besides recommending the structural overhaul in the bank, is also examining ways to introduce new patterns of accountability and incentive structures within to help the institution move from its attachment to status quo and be ready for both a new mandate and much higher levels of financing.

Over 30 years after the World Bank offered its advice to India on structural changes and ways to shake the status quo, two Indians  one a citizen, the other of Indian origin, both of whom went to St Stephens College in Delhi, and whose worlds intersected in India when Singh was a top finance ministry mandarin and Banga was a corporate leader  sat in Washington DC to think through the structural changes needed in the bank and ways to alter the status quo.

International diplomacy can take a twist in unexpected ways.

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All India Majilis-e-Ittehadul Muslimeen (AIMIM) president Asaduddin Owaisi on Sunday attacked the opposition parties over the latest political development in Maharashtra, saying Congress distributes certificates of secularism despite senior Nationalist Congress Party (NCP) leader Praful Patel aligning with the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) days after attending the opposition leaders' meeting in Patna. Addressing a rally in poll-bound Rajasthan, Owaisi said the opposition parties are crying foul over the NCP's split, and asked whether buying four AIMIM MLAs in Bihar was right. AIMIM president Asaduddin Owaisi. ( File Photo / Sakib Ali /Hindustan Times)

Opposition meeting was held in Patna and Praful Patel, whom Sharad Pawar had brought to the meeting, joined BJP (-led government) today. Despite this, Congress distributes certificates of secularism. Congress can take a look in the mirror and see how they have cheated, Owaisi said.

Today every opposition party leader is crying (foul) in the media that the BJP broke the NCP. If 40 MLAs left today then it is wrong and if you bought our 4 MLAs in Bihar then it was right? Owaisi asked rhetorically.

AIMIM leader Waris Pathan slammed Ajit Pawar for joining the Shiv Sena-BJP alliance in Maharashtra and said that the NCP has become the BJP's B team in Maharashtra. Waris Pathan said that "BJP is a washing machine" and whoever gets into it gets a clean chit from all his wrongdoing.

Ajit (Pawar) again went to Fadnavis. Along with him, 30 MLAs went with him. They can do anything for power. The NCP has become the BJP's B team in Maharashtra. Maybe he (Sharad Pawar) also wanted the same... The BJP is a washing machine. What will happen to the 70,000 crore scam? PM Modi said to his party workers two days ago that the NCP is the most corrupt party. The people of Maharashtra are watching, said AIMIM National Spokesperson Waris Pathan.

NCP leader Ajit Pawar took oath as Maharashtra deputy chief minister on Sunday afternoon. Eight other party legislators also joined the National Democratic Alliance government in the state.

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Prime Minister Narendra Modi on Monday asked ministers and bureaucrats to implement all projects, including the promises made in the Union Budget for the 2023-24 fiscal year and capital expenditure infusion by January 26 next year, and emphasised on the need to go to the people and explain the benefit of government schemes, functionaries present at the meeting said. Prime Minister Narendra Modi addresses the council of ministers on Monday. (PTI)

At a meeting with his council of ministers, the PM also asked leaders not to focus only on 2024 (the next general elections), but also look at a broader timeline till 2047, when India completes 100 years of freedom. For the next nine months  the 2024 general elections are likely to be held in the summer  the ministers need to reach out to the people and detail the governments work over the past nine years, he added.

We cant be content in merely implementing the schemes, but we also have to explain the benefit of the schemes to the people. Voters are smart. Sessions should be organised at village, district and tehsil levels to appraise people of their rights and entitlements. Bankers should also be sensitised, PM Modi said, according to the party functionaries quoted above who did not wish to be identified.

He also said that the demography of the country was changing and voters were getting more educated, the functionaries added.

Speaking of the period in the run up to the centenary of independence, the PM said that the third decade of the last century was seminal for India and similarly, the current period was also seminal.

Two functionaries present in the meeting said that Modi asked departments and ministries to implement new projects and ensure saturation in key flagship schemes by Republic Day. This will help the government start its campaign early, on the basis of quantifiable achievements and steady implementation, said a senior bureaucrat requesting anonymity. Capital expenditure, saturation in 14-15 flagship schemes and budget proposals will be implemented during this period, they added.

HT reported on June 21 that the PM will call a meeting on expected capex expense of central public sector enterprises, saturation in flagship schemes of the government and implementation of budgetary proposals. HT also reported that a number of key schemes and projects with larger public outreach in 6-7 ministries will see a further push and early deadlines.

In Mondays meeting, major department-wise capital expenditure was reviewed to look at a possible infusion of additional capital to create jobs and boost the economy, they said. The Union Budget had earmarked 10.1 lakh crore towards capital expenditure, the bulk of it routed through central public sector enterprises. The capital expenditure target is 33% higher than the last years revised estimate of 7.7 lakh crore. Ministries such as petroleum, power and defence are expected to spend the bulk of the proposed money.

A third functionary said the meeting also took stock of schemes ready for inauguration or laying of foundation stones. The government is expected to go on a blitzkrieg in rolling out schemes ahead of the 2024 elections.

The thrust of the PMs speech was on infrastructure development and making India ready for 2047, said the people mentioned above said. The policies of the government must be oriented toward fulfilling the agenda of Sabka Saath, Sabha Vikas (equitable development for all) and there had to be a concerted effort to meet that, said a person speaking on the condition of anonymity.

Union minister Meenakshi Lekhi said the PM gave a vision for 2047. He has said this before, yehi samay hai, sahi samay hai...(this is the time, this is the right time), she said.

The PM addressed the ministers for about 40 minutes.

He told the ministers to give a details account of the work accomplished in the past nine years in the next nine months before the 2024 general elections, party officials present there said.

The meeting comes amid speculation that a rejig in the government and the Bharatiya Janata Partys (BJPs) organisational set up is on the cards. According to party functionaries, state units of the BJP in several states could see new appointments.

Foreign secretary Vinay Mohan Kwatra gave a presentation on the PMs recent US trip and briefed the ministers. Rajiv Bansal, the civil aviation secretary, gave a presentation on infrastructure.

In the meeting, the PM emphasised on fulfilling the commitments of various ministries.

He also said that bilateral treaties signed between India and G20 countries must be implemented before the G20 summit in New Delhi, scheduled in September.

Modi categorically asked ministers to explain the benefits of central schemes to the people and mentioned that it was the task of the political leaders to complete the chain of a scheme from implementation to awareness.

The PM also underlined the importance of the private sector. According to Modi, while the government must meet its targets, Indias private sector must produce some of the best companies of the world. He also said the government will work closely with the private sector, according to the party functionaries.

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A 52-year-old inspector of police allegedly died by suicide due to work-related pressure in Andhra Pradeshs Anantapur district in the early hours of Monday, his family members claimed. The police inspector was transferred from Kadapa to Tadipatri in September last year. (Representative file image)

Anantapur superintendent of police Kanchi Srinivasa Rao, however, told reporters that the inspector had resorted to the extreme step due to long-standing family disputes.

Even on Sunday night, the inspector had an altercation with his wife over some family dispute, he said.

The police inspector, who hailed from Chandragiri town of Chittoor district, was transferred from Kadapa to Tadipatri in September last year, the SP said, adding that the inspector is survived by his wife, two sons and a daughter.

Also Read: Woman who accused MLA of harassment attempts suicide

The body was found in his bedroom. We have registered a case of suspicious death under Section 174 of Criminal Procedure Code (CrPC) and taken up the investigation, the SP said.

Meanwhile, the deceased persons daughter said her father died due to work-related stress.

For the last three months, my father was complaining about facing difficulties due to work pressure, she said.

The suicide case led to a verbal duel between former Tadipatri MLA, municipal chairman JC Prabhakar Reddy and present the Yuvajana Sramika Rythu Congress Party (YSRCP) MLA Kethireddy Pedda Reddy.

Prabhakar alleged that the inspector had been under constant pressure from the MLA to target the opposition party leader.

Unable to bear the extreme pressure, he died by suicide. Now, the MLA and the police personnel are pressuring the family to admit that he had died due to family disputes, the TDP leader alleged.

Pedda Reddy rubbished Prabhakars allegations and said it was unfortunate that the TDP was trying to gain political mileage even from the death of a police inspector.

There is absolutely no political pressure on the inspector. It is not correct to play cheap politics over such an unfortunate incident. If necessary, we shall request the police to conduct a high-level inquiry into the incident, the YSRCP MLA said.

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Maharashtra Navnirnam Sena (MNS) workers have put up posters in Mumbai urging their party president Raj Thackeray and his bitter rival cousin and Shiv Sena (UBT) supremo Uddhav Thackeray to join hands amid the frequent realignments in state politics. In a video shared by news agency ANI, a poster urging Thackeray cousins to come together can be seen outside a petrol pump at Ram Ganesh Gadkari Chowk in Dadar West. Raj Thackeray (right), a bitter rival of Shiv Sena (UBT) chief and former Maharashtra chief minister Uddhav Thackeray (left). (Hindustan Times)

Politics of Maharashtra has become muddy," the poster put up by MNS leader Laxman Patil reads, in an apparent reference to the rampant defections, first in Shiv Sena and now in Nationalist Congress Party.

The poster further adds, "Rajsaheb-Uddhavsaheb come together now. Entire Maharashtra is waiting for you - an earnest request of a Maharashtrian soldier with folded hands.

The friction between Raj and Uddhav aggravated in 2005 when Raj, who was once seen as Sena founder Bal Thackerays heir, deserted the saffron outfit following a cold war between them and formed his own party the next year. He squarely blamed Uddhav and his coterie for this desertion, saying he was being marginalised from the party and was being utilised just for campaigning.

Uddhav became Sena chief in January 2013 following Bal Thackeray's demise and remained at the helm of the party before Eknath Shinde broke ranks and formed the government with the BJP.

On Sunday, Raj Thackeray expressed anguish over the latest political development in his home state, saying what is standing in front of the country is the mud of Maharashtra's politics.

Since the rest of the people of Maharashtra are sure that they are selfish, will all these games for the throne of power continue like this or will the people of Maharashtra stop this disgusting politics of power in the coming elections? he said in a tweet in Marathi.

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Union minister G Kishan Reddy on Sunday hit out at Rahul Gandhi for claiming that Telangana chief minister K Chandrashekar Rao's remote control was with Prime Minister Narendra Modi and said the Congress leader had gone overboard after electoral success in Karnataka. Sounding the poll bugle in Telangana, Rahul Gandhi launched a scathing attack on the ruling Bharat Rashtra Samithi (BRS) and described it as "BJP's B-Team". Congress leader Rahul Gandhi addresses the public, in Khammam on Sunday. (ANI Photo)

Gandhi alleged that the corruption charges against Rao and his party's leaders have made them subservient to the BJP, and asserted that he told all other opposition leaders that the Congress would not join any bloc where the BRS (Bharat Rashtra Samithi) was involved.

"Telangana and its youth should understand one thing that KCR is under the control of Prime Minister Modi because of his corruption activities. The corruption he did in the liquor scam, is known to all agencies," Gandhi said.

Some Telangana leaders have also come under the scanner in the Delhi excise policy case, besides leaders of the Aam Aadmi Party (AAP), which is in power in the national capital.

"That's why I said that TRS is BJP's B-Team and they have accepted that by changing their name to BRS, which means BJP Rishtedar Samithi," he added. The Telangana Rashtra Samithi (TRS) is now known as the BRS.

Responding to Gandhi's claim, Reddy said, Congress fought the election in Telangana by compromising with BRS. We will not ally with BRS or Congress. He (Rahul Gandhi) is going overboard and speaking, just because they won one election in Karnataka.

BRS leader Dasoju Sravan termed Rahul Gandhi's speech in Khammam as a bundle of lies and said the Congress leader made baseless allegations, probably based on the script prepared by the Congress workers in Telangana.

This is very unfortunate, Dasoju Sravan said.

Telangana elections are scheduled to be held later this year.

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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 Supreme Court will tomorrow hear the petition filed by the Aam Aadmi Party (AAP)-led Delhi government challenging the appointment of justice (retired) Umesh Kumar as the chairperson of Delhi Electricity Regulatory Commission (DERC). Supreme Court of India (File Photo)

The Delhi government had earlier challenged the decision terming it illegal and unconstitutional. The appointment was made to fill the position of DERC chairperson which was lying vacant since January 10 after justice (retd) Shabihul Husnain stepped down from his position after reaching superannuation.

Delhi power minsiter Atishi alleged that the recruitment was done by overlooking the aid and advise of the elected government, therefore, violating the constitution by appointing someone else for that position. She said Delhi chief minister Arvind Kejriwal had recommended justice (retd) Sangeet Lodha for the post, however, the President took an illegal decision.

The Supreme Court has repeatedly stated that on all subjects (apart from land, public order and police) the aid and advice of the elected government is binding. Electricity is a transferred subject falling under the jurisdiction of the elected government, Atishi had said.

Earlier, CM Kejriwal approved justice (retd) Rajeev Shrivastava for the position, and the file was put up by former deputy CM Manish Sisodia, who also held the power portfolio. However, the file was returned by Lieutenant Governor Vinai Saxena with a recommendation to also consult with Delhi high court chief justice for the appointment.

Later, the Delhi government approached the Supreme Court on April 12, blaming the LG for delaying the appointment. On May 19, the apex court observed that the LG is not supposed to act on his own discretion on such appointments, and directed the government to appoint the DERC chairperson within two weeks.

However, justice Shrivastava later expressed his inability to accept the appointment due to family commitments and requirements.

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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 Manipur department of education on Monday issued an order stating that schools for Classes 1 to 8 will start from July 5, after being shut since ethnic clashes began in the state on May 3, even as fresh violence erupted in the northeastern state on Monday though no casualty was reported, official said. At least 120 people have been killed, over 300 injured and nearly 40,000 displaced in Manipur since May 3 (AFP)

In supersession of all orders issued in this regard, normal classes for Class 1 to 8 for all schools in the state, will resume from 5th of July, 2023 [Wednesday]. All zonal education officers under the department of education-schools, Manipur are hereby directed to inform all concerned and take up necessary actions accordingly, said an order issued by L Nandakumar Singh, director of education-schools.

At least 120 people have been killed, over 300 injured and nearly 40,000 displaced in Manipur since May 3, when ethnic violence erupted between the Meitei and Kuki communities.

Manipur has around 1,110 schools  including 643 private schools, 384 government schools and 83 aided schools, according to the Board of Secondary Education, Manipur.

Meanwhile, during a press conference Manipur chief minister N Biren Singh said that bunkers set up along the hill and valley districts will be removed while additional state forces have been mobilised to provide security to both Meitei and Kuki farmers so that agricultural activities can start, news agency PTI reported.

Gunfight breaks out in Imphal West

A gunfight broke out between two groups in Imphal West district on Monday, officials said. This comes a day after three people were shot dead and another beheaded along the Bishnupur-Churachandpur border.

There were no reports of any casualty, officials said, adding that security forces were deployed in the area to tackle the situation.

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ABOUT THE AUTHOR Utpal Parashar Utpal is a Senior Assistant Editor based in Guwahati. He covers seven states of North-East India and heads the editorial team for the region. He was previously based in Kathmandu, Dehradun and Delhi with Hindustan Times. ...view detail
Even as 37 of his 53 MLAs ostensibly defected and joined hands with the BJP-Sena government in Maharashtra, NCP chief Sharad Pawar was quick to say on Sunday evening that he would not be pursuing a legal battle, choosing instead to go to the people directly. Hours after his nephew Ajit Pawar claimed that the NCP would ally with the BJP in the 2024 Lok Sabha and Maharashtra assembly elections, Pawar, 82, said that there is no need to fight legally the issues of vertical split in the party and Ajit Pawars claim over the NCP party name and symbol. The NCP chief expressed his resolve to rebuild his party from scratch. PREMIUM Maharashtra deputy chief minister Ajit Pawar was sworn in by state governor Ramesh Bais in Mumbai on Sunday. (ANI)

Following a similar blueprint, Ajit Pawar on Sunday, claiming the support of majority of NCP MLAs, joined the Shinde-Fadnavis government. He was sworn in as deputy chief minister, along with eight other colleagues from the NCP. Ajit Pawar, like Shinde, snubbed an argument that he has led a group of defectors exposed to the rigours of the anti-defection law under the Tenth Schedule of the Constitution. Instead, Ajit Pawar similarly indicated on Sunday, and again on Monday that it was he who represented the real NCP and that he would be contesting all the upcoming elections as NCP on its election symbol  the clock.

Ajit Pawars rebellion mirrored Eknath Shindes in June last year. Shinde formed a group of majority MLAs in Shiv Sena, declared support to the ruling central government, and laid a claim to the original party. While a bunch of disqualification petitions were moved against Shinde and the MLAs supporting him under the anti-defection law, he went to ECI claiming that his faction was the original Shiv Sena and not Thackerays faction. Petition after petition was filed by the Thackeray camp to stop Shinde from cleaving the Shiv Sena. But Shinde not only succeeded in becoming the chief minister within 24 hours of Thackeray opting to resign instead of facing a floor test in June last year, he also secured the partys name and symbol. Meanwhile, the disqualification petitions against Shinde and the MLAs who supported him remain pending.

The statements of the Maratha leader, who has spent over five decades in politics, suggest that his faction may not follow the course that the Uddhav Thackeray-led Shiv Sena camp undertook under strangely similar circumstances last year. The senior Pawars indisposition might have factored in the rulings by the Supreme Court and the Election Commission of India (ECI) when Thackeray resorted to a bruising legal battle after Eknath Shinde triggered a similar rebellion, causing a vertical split in Shiv Sena last year. A close look at the bizarre resemblance between the two rebellions and the verdicts in Sena Vs Sena may lend some hints on why Sharad Pawar talked about going to the peoples court instead of battling it out with a team of heavyweight lawyers.

Within hours of the rebellion, state NCP president Jayant Patil hit back, declaring that the party has moved disqualification petitions against the nine rebel MLAs, including Ajit Pawar, who were inducted as ministers in the Shinde-Fadnavis government. We have requested Speaker Rahul Narwekar to hear our side, said Patil, adding that they have approached ECI too.

While Ajit Pawar has apparently followed the template successfully executed by Shinde last year, the senior Pawar seems cognisant of the unfavourable outcomes Thackeray faced despite a fierce legal battle that he led before the Supreme Court and the Election Commission.

Supreme Court verdict in Sena vs Sena

Some of the crucial issues before a five-judge Constitution bench in Sena vs Sena pertained to the formation of a new government in Maharashtra by Shinde following the governors decision to call for a floor test that prompted Uddhav Thackeray to resign. Even as these issues are absent in the latest episode of the rebellion, the Supreme Court, in the May 11 verdict, went into granular details to clarify the legal position on disqualification of rebel MLAs, recognition of a political party inside the House and allotment of a party name and symbol. All these contentions are bound to arise in the latest controversy involving NCP too.

On Monday morning, NCP state president Patil said that the nine MLAs were disqualified the moment they took oath as ministers in the Maharashtra government. The May ruling by the apex court, however, makes it clear that there is no concept of automatic disqualification under the anti-defection law, and that Speaker is the exclusive authority to take a call on such pleas.

In Sena vs Sena, the Thackeray faction instituted disqualification petitions against Shinde and several other MLAs supporting him. Before the bench, they argued that a decision on these petitions should not be left to Narwekar, who is a BJP leader, and that the court should instead decide the disqualification pleas by itself to ensure fairness. Shooting down this request, the court ruled that the Speaker is the appropriate constitutional authority to decide the question of disqualification under the Tenth Schedule.

Even as the court quashed Narwekars decisions on July 3, 2022, to recognise Shinde as the leader of the Shiv Sena legislature party and Bharat Gogawale as the chief whip, it left it to the BJP leader to recognise the new leader of the Shiv Sena legislature party and the chief whip again following an enquiry by him into the state of affairs when there could be two factions of the same party. The May verdict made Narwekar emerge as the exclusive authority to take a call on the spectrum of controversies -- from deciding the disqualification petitions to identifying the real Shiv Sena; from recognising the new chief whip of Shiv Sena to notifying its leader of the House.

Thus, the process to decide disqualification petitions against Ajit Pawar and the MLAs supporting him, and the identification of the real NCP inside the House, will have to follow the same legal principles with Narwekar holding all the cards.

In Sena vs Sena, the Constitution bench also articulated some important principles for ECI to take note of in adjudication of disputes between two rival factions of a political party. It ruled that pendency of disqualification proceedings against members of a rival faction in a political party will not prevent ECI from deciding a dispute before it under Paragraph 15 of the Election Symbols (Reservation and Allotment) Order, 1968, for allotment of the party symbol.

In its ruling, the top court rejected Thackerays plea that there should be a constitutional sequence that proceedings under the anti-defection law must be decided by Speaker before ECI decides the dispute under the Symbols Order.

The May 11 judgment maintained that since no deadline could be set for the Speaker to decide a disqualification plea, keeping the symbol dispute on hold until the Speakers decision would amount to indefinitely staying the proceedings before ECI. The judgment gave ECI the liberty to go ahead and allot the party name and symbol to any one faction, uninfluenced by the disqualification petitions.

The five-judge bench ruling further held that nothing prevents an MLA facing disqualification proceedings under the anti-defection law from approaching ECI for the allotment of a party symbol  a legal principle that may come handy for the Ajit Pawar faction. The judgment further advised the poll body to look beyond the test of legislative majority and consider some other parameters too, such as an evaluation of the majority in the organisational wings of the political party or an analysis of the provisions of the party constitution, before ruling in favour of a faction. The bench was, however, quick to add a caveat that it is for ECI to decide which are the tests best suited to the unique facts and circumstances of the case before it. Therefore, the Supreme Court verdict boils down to strengthening the Speakers hands and green-lighting ECI to decide the array of disputes when a party undergoes a vertical split.

Election Commission verdict in Sena vs Sena

Soon after breaking ranks with Thackeray, Shinde approached ECI for the allotment of the bow-and-arrow symbol of Shiv Sena to the faction led by him. By a decision on February 17, 2022, ECI ruled that Shindes faction will inherit the original partys name and its symbol, capping an eight-month-long feud between the two leaders over control of the regional party.

ECI, in its judgment, followed the procedure laid down in a 1971 Supreme Court judgment in the Sadiq Ali case, which said such disputes must be decided on the basis of a triple test. ECI found that the conclusion of the first two benchmarks were inconclusive.

The first test  objectives of the party constitution  was deemed improper because the 2018 constitution of Shiv Sena was found to be undemocratic and concentrated power in the hands of a few. The second test  that of the majority in the organisational body of the party  was also not considered because the poll panel found that neither side provided accurate details of the composition of internal bodies, and no determinable or satisfactory findings could be ascertained.

Therefore, ECI relied on the third prong  the test of majority in the legislative wing. Here, the poll body found that 40 of the 55 members of legislative assembly backed the Shinde faction, which translated to 76% of the total votes polled by the unified party in the 2019 assembly elections. Moreover, 13 of the 18 Lok Sabha members of the party backed Shinde, which translated to 73% of the total votes polled in the 2019 general elections. While Thackeray has challenged ECIs decision before the top court, the appeal is still pending while the Shinde faction has successfully retained the party name and symbol so far.

The judgments by the Supreme Court and ECI clearly bolstered Shindes position, particularly since he had the numbers. Known for his Machiavellian politics, the senior Pawar must be cognisant of the trajectory that the legal battle surrounding Shiv Sena followed. As far as Ajit Pawars fate is concerned, if he can manage to keep the flock together and plays his cards well in demonstrating the organisational support of the party, the legal principles evolved in Sena vs Sena seem to be weighing in his favour, at least for now. Much, though, will depend on the number of MLAs backing him.
Nationalist Congress Party chief Sharad Pawar on Monday said there was a need to fight forces creating a communal divide in Maharashtra and he will rebuild the party. Pawar was addressing NCP workers and supporters in Karad a day after Ajit Pawar led a vertical split in the party to become the deputy chief minister in the Eknath Shinde-led government. Pawar also said, Some of our people fell prey to BJP's tactics to break other parties." NCP chief Sharad Pawar addresses supporters after paying tribute to former Maharashtra chief minister Yashwantrao Chavan in Karad on Monday.(PTI)

"Attempts are being made to create communal divide in Maharashtra and the country. We need to fight forces that create fear among peace-loving citizens We need to protect democracy in the country," Pawar said.

Today, in Maharashtra and the country, a rift is being created between the society in the name of caste and religion by some groups My fight is against communal forces, I will rebuild the party," Pawar told the gathering.

Pawar visited the memorial of his mentor and Maharashtra's first chief minister Yashwantrao Chavan in Karad and paid floral tributes to him. The 82-year-old leader's visit to late Chavan's memorial 'Pritisangam' on the occasion of Guru Purnima is being seen as a show of strength by him.

Pawar left from Pune for Karad on Monday morning and stopped along the way to meet supporters who lined up on roadsides to greet him and extend support to him. In Karad, he was welcomed by thousands of supporters and local NCP MLA Balasaheb Patil. Senior Congress leader Prithviraj Chavan, who hails from Karad, was also present.

Shinde also said the BJP will not fulfil all demands of rebel Shiv Sena MLAs and many of them MLAs will return to the Sena fold soon. "Everyone is expecting the ministry or something big in the government, Pawar said.

Sanjay Raut claims Ajit Pawar will replace Eknath Shinde

In a similar statement, Uddhav Thackeray camp's MP Sanjay Raut on Monday reiterated his claim that Ajit Pawar who was sworn in as the deputy chief minister of Maharashtra a day ago would soon replace chief minister Eknath Shinde.

Raut also said that 16 MLAs who were part of the split in Shiv Sena almost a year ago are going to be "disqualified".

"Today I am saying this in front of the camera, the chief minister of Maharashtra is going to change. Eknath Shinde is being removed. Eknath Shinde and the 16 MLAs are going to be disqualified," Raut told news agency ANI. Raut added that the Shiv Sena, NCP and Congress - also known as Maha Vikas Aghadi - will fight "unitedly" in Maharashtra.

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The ongoing saga over the probe by Central Bureau of Investigation (CBI) into the murder of former Andhra Pradesh minister Y S Vivekanand Reddy continued after the Supreme Court on Monday, deferred to Wednesday, a petition filed by the ministers personal assistant in the ongoing matter, people familiar with the matter said. Supreme Court deferred to Wednesday a petition in the former Andhra Pradesh minister Y S Vivekanand Reddy murder case.

The personal assistant of Vivekanand Reddy, MV Krishna Reddy, opposed the bail given to Sheik Dastagiri, one of the accused in the murder, who turned into an approver, people said.

A division bench of the Supreme Court justice Krishna Murari and justice Sanjay Kumar, acting on a petition filed by late Vivekananda Reddys personal assistant, deferred the matter to the Telangana high court, where the murder case is pending.

The bench said it would only take up the hearing on Wednesday to decide whether Krishna Reddy had any locus standi in filing the petition, as the slain ministers daughter Sunitha Reddy had challenged his claims and said that she was the real victim in the case.

Her counsel Siddhartha Luthra told the Supreme Court bench that the court had already acknowledged Sunitha Reddy and her mother Sowbhagyamma as the real victims of the murder case.

The counsel also brought to the notice of the bench that the CBI had filed a supplementary charge sheet last week, naming Krishna Reddy as one of the suspects in the case. He has sought time till Wednesday to submit the copy of the CBI charge sheet to the court.

On May 18, Krishna Reddy moved the Supreme Court saying that he had first lodged a complaint with the police on March 15, 2019, about the murder of Vivekananda Reddy, and since then, the FIR has named him as the complainant. Krishna Reddy demanded that he should be recognised as the victim in the case.

Krishna Reddy strongly opposed the bail given by the Kadapa court, to Sheik Dastagiri, former driver of Vivekananda Reddy and one of the accused in the case, after he turned into an approver for the CBI in the case.

Sunitha, on June 13, filed a counter petition in the apex court opposing his plea. She alleged that Krishna Reddy was not the victim, but was a pawn in the hands of the accused. She said that if Krishna Reddy is acknowledged as the victim, he would derail the entire investigation by the CBI.

Vivekananda Reddy, brother of former Andhra Pradesh chief minister YS Rajashekhar Reddy and uncle of the current chief minister Y S Jagan Mohan Reddy was murdered at his residence at Pulivendula in Kadapa district in the intervening night of March 14 and 15, 2019.

The case, which was initially probed by a Special Investigation Team (SIT) of the Andhra Pradesh police, was transferred to the CBI in July 2020, following a petition filed by Sunitha Reddy and Sowbhagyamma in the state high court.

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The Supreme Court on Monday directed the Manipur government to submit an updated status report by July 10 to furnish details of the steps taken to curb the ethnic clashes that have overrun the northeastern state since early May, claiming at least 130 lives. The top court called for the latest report setting out the measures undertaken to maintain law and order, besides details of rescue and rehabilitation of those affected by the violence and recovery of arms being used in the riot-hit state. (File)

While the state government submitted that , the situation is improving, albeit slowly, the top court called for the latest report setting out the measures undertaken to maintain law and order, besides details of rescue and rehabilitation of those affected by the violence and recovery of arms being used in the riot-hit state.

Let us have an updated status report. It should have details like rehabilitation camps, law and order, recovery of arms etc, a bench led by Chief Justice of India Dhananjaya Y Chandrachud told solicitor general Tushar Mehta, who represented the state government.

Mehta, during the brief hearing, submitted that additional forces have been deployed in the state to ensure law and order and that an adequate number of relief camps have also been set up. The situation is improving, though slowly. There are additional forces deployed too. 355 relief camps are there. I would request the counsel for the petitioner not to give it a communal tone by mentioning Christians etc. Humans are dying in that state, the S-G argued.

Responding, senior counsel Colin Gonsalves, who appeared for a non-governmental organisation, Manipur Tribal Forum, claimed that Kukis are being killed by Meiteis despite assurances by the Manipur government in the Court.

At this, the bench asked the S-G to file a fresh status report and fixed the next hearing on July 10. The Court is seized of a clutch of petitions relating to the ethnic violence between the Meities and the Kukis.

Ethnic clashes have engulfed Manipur since early May, leading to widespread deaths, injuries and displacement. The states fault lines were exposed in the first week of May after a rally by a tribal Kuki group to protest against a court-ordered move to consider the inclusion of the dominant and politically stronger Meitei community to the Scheduled Tribes (ST) list sparked a wave of violence between the two communities.

The three violent days between May 3 and 6 that closely followed a controversial high court order and the protest march left 115 dead, over 310 injured, and over 40,000 displaced from their homes. On March 27, a single-judge bench of the high court directed the state government to consider sending within four weeks a recommendation to the Centre on the demand for the ST status by the Meitei community. The order, released in April, asked the Manipur government to make its stand clear to the Union tribal affairs ministry.

Last month, the Union government formed a three-member inquiry panel led by former chief justice of Gauhati high court Ajai Lamba, and also a peace committee to restore amity among warring ethnic groups. But the Kuki representatives have refused to associate with the peace committee citing the presence of chief minister N Biren Singh, who has been accused by the Kukis of favouring his community, the Meitei.

Comprising at least 53% of Manipurs population, the majority Meitei community is considered relatively affluent while the Nagas and Kukis, who constitute about 44% of the population, mainly live off agriculture on the hills and are economically deprived. While the Meiteis are mostly Hindu, the Nagas and Kuki-Zomis are mainly Christian. Manipur has a nearly equal population of Hindus and Christians, at a little over 41% each, according to the 2011 census.

Apart from being the majority community, the Meiteis also have more representation in the state assembly. Thats because 40 of the 60 Assembly seats in the state are from the Imphal valley region  the area that is mostly inhabited by the Meiteis. But the fertile valley makes up about a tenth of the total land mass of the state while the hills account for 90%.

Ends

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ABOUT THE AUTHOR Utkarsh Anand Utkarsh Anand is Legal Editor at the Hindustan Times. He writes on law, judiciary and governance. ...view detail
Within a week of incurring sharp criticism from the Telangana government for sharing a tweet on the pathetic conditions of the 100-year-old Osmania General Hospital in Hyderabad, governor Tamilisai Soundararajan on Monday made a surprise visit to the hospital to personally inspect the situation. Governor Tamilisai Soundararajan on Monday made a surprise visit to the Osmania General Hospital in Hyderabad. (ANI)

During her visit, Tamilisai went around all the wards and held discussions with the patients, the doctors and the para-medical staff of the hospital. Expressing her satisfaction with the treatment provided despite various limitations, she commended the doctors and staff for their efforts.

However, the governor voiced her concern regarding the quality of facilities and the issue of limited space. She mentioned that she had raised these concerns with chief minister K Chandrasekhar Rao and the health department on multiple occasions.

She told the reporters later that her first meeting on assuming office as the governor of Telangana was with a delegation from Osmania General Hospital. Since then, she has made regular appeals for the improvement of the hospital and communicated with the state government on the same.

She specifically mentioned the unhygienic conditions of the hospital toilets, washrooms, the roof ceiling in the old building, and inadequate ventilation.

My intention is not to engage in a blame game, but rather to ensure that the poor and needy patients receive the best possible treatment facilities as it is the only resort for them to get treatment, she said.

Emphasising that the well-being of poor patients should be the governments highest priority, she acknowledged the exemplary work being done by the doctors despite the existing limitations.

The governor expects all concerned authorities to take her suggestions constructively and take appropriate measures.

She said she wanted the government to take immediate action in constructing a new building with 3000 beds. In case any legal obstacles arise due to the heritage building, she requested that alternative arrangements be made promptly.

On June 27, the governor shared a tweet from the Joint Association for the new OGH doctors highlighting the lack of facilities.

Concerned to see the dilapidated condition of the century-old prestigious Osmania General Hospital. Pride of this citadel of learning and healing must be restored soon, she tweeted.

However, state health minister T Harish Rao reacted immediately, taking exception to Tamilisais comment, which he said was politically motivated.

It is unfortunate that the Governor, who is in a constitutional post, is criticising like a BJP spokesperson, he said, adding she should appreciate the governments efforts in the medical field.

Rao pointed out that in July 2015, chief minister K Chandrashekhar Rao visited the hospital and announced a budget of 200 crore for a new building. However, a legal challenge arose, resulting in a court-imposed stay order on the construction plans.

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NEW DELHI: The UK is set to announce a package of partnerships on electric mobility and green construction with the West Bengal government as part of British trade minister Nigel Huddlestons visit to India and Bangladesh to bolster economic ties with both countries. UK's Minister of State for International Trade, Nigel Huddleston began a three-day visit to Kolkata and Dhaka on Monday (REUTERS File)

Huddleston, who began a three-day visit to Kolkata and Dhaka on Monday, will also focus on unlocking more opportunities for British firms in both countries. The UKs trade with both countries increased last year, up by 45% with India and 50% with Bangladesh.

As part of the UKs effort to support Indias targets for electric vehicles (EVs) by providing finance and technology, Huddleston will announce a new project whereby Britain and the West Bengal government will join forces on a pilot project to develop electric two-wheelers, a statement from the British high commission said.

Connected Places Catapult, the UKs innovation accelerator for cities and transport, and Newtown Kolkata Development Authority are expected to sign a memorandum of understanding (MoU) on a knowledge exchange partnership to develop the electric two-wheelers for last mile connectivity.

Huddleston will also launch a centre to enhance opportunities in the EV sector by partnering Indian businesses with academic and industrial institutions in the UK.

West Bengal, the sixth largest state by economic value and with a GDP expected to reach 117 million this year, has set a target of developing one million EVs in the next five years.

He will also facilitate the signing of an MoU between the West Bengal government and the Royal Institute of Chartered Surveyors (RICS) on skill development in sustainable construction methods. The UK is hoping these initiatives will allow British businesses to customise and market EV technology and sustainable construction methods in India.

Huddleston said: The UK has a strong and enduring relationship with India and Bangladesh. Our trade with both has grown significantly over the past year...I want to use my first official visit here to show the UKs eagerness to work with both countries on shared challenges like climate change, using our collective expertise to deepen our trading relationship, spark economic growth and create jobs.

India and the UK are currently engaged in negotiations to finalise a free trade agreement (FTA) and Huddleston will discuss the benefits of the proposed trade deal at a business roundtable, including measures to cut red tape, reduce tariffs, and help businesses in both countries.

India-UK trade in goods and services was worth 36 billion during 2022, an increase of 45% or 11.2 billion over the figures for 2021. The proposed FTA is expected to double bilateral trade by 2030.
NEW DELHI: UN deputy chief Amina Mohammed on Monday began a three-day visit to India, during which she is expected to discuss issues such as development and climate action with the countrys leadership. United Nations deputy secretary general Amina J Mohammed (2nd from Left) being welcomed by Indias Permanent Representative at UN Ambassador Ruchira Kamboj (3rd from Left) on her arrival, in New Delhi on Monday (PTI/Twitter/MEAIndia)

This is the UN deputy secretary-generals first official visit to India since her reappointment for a second five-year term in 2022. She visited China last week.

In India, she will hold meeting with external affairs minister S Jaishankar, finance minister Nirmala Sitharaman and minister for environment, forest and climate change Bhupender Yadav. She will also meet minister of state for external affairs V Muraleedharan, NITI Aayog vice chairman Suman Bery and G20 Sherpa Amitabh Kant, the external affairs ministry said.

Mohammed had sparked a controversy in April by saying during an event in the US that a conference of special envoys on Afghanistan to be organised by the UN in May would discuss granting recognition to the Taliban setup in Kabul.

The US subsequently rejected any discussions on recognising the Taliban and a UN spokesperson made it clear that the conference, held in Doha during May 1-2, would not focus on possible recognition of the Taliban regime.

Mohammed will also travel to Bengaluru, where she will interact with experts from leading information and technology research institutions and industry representatives to discuss Indias achievements in digital technology. These discussions will focus on whether Indias achievements can be replicated in the Global South to address developmental challenges, the external affairs ministry said.

The visit will be an opportunity to exchange views on Indias ongoing G20 presidency and its achievements in Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) ahead of the SDG Summit in September, the ministry said. It will also be an opportunity to discuss issues related to climate action in the context of developmental priorities.

The visit is a reflection of Indias abiding commitment to multilateralism, including through its contribution to the UN and its ongoing G20 presidency, in addressing global challenges meaningfully, the ministry added.
There are political parties in India who had Uniform Civil Code (UCC) in their election manifestoes and the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) was not the only one, Kerala Governor Arif Mohammed Khan on Monday claimed that even Left was among those who were great advocates of UCC. Kerala governor Arif Mohammed Khan(PTI / File)

He said that he is not defending any political party, however, added that questions shouldn't be asked to a particular party which is taking a consistent line in this matter. I think questions should be posed to those who were great votaries of UCC, at least till 1999, he told news agency ANI.

Also read: Farooq Abdullah warns of backlash if UCC is implemented

Now, some of them have changed their stand, they need to explain. It should not be the other way round, he said.

In an interview with India Today, the Governor backed the UCC, as opposed to the CPI(M)-led Kerala government which is opposing it alleging that it is discriminatory against Muslims. He further said that the Left parties were betting for the UCC, at least till 1990, including former Kerala CM EMS Namboodiripad.

Arif Mohammed Khan is known for his unconventional approach in his views as compared with that of traditional Muslim organisations. He has also taken progressive stand on the Shah Bano case and has been a supporter of reformation within the Muslim community.

He said that the UCC will serve the cause of uniformity of justice and no one will be discriminated on the ground of religion. He further reiterated that the purpose of law cannot be to bring about uniformity in customs, ritual or practices or labelling these differences. The purpose of the law is to bring about unifomity of justice, he added.

While speaking with News18, Khan argued that if the Muslim Personal Law is integral to practicing Islam, why isn't there no fatwas against Muslims living in countries where these personal laws are not allowed. He referred to countries, predominantly the West, where civil laws personal to any religion or faith are not implemented as part of their judicial process.

"Why does everyone want to run to the US or Europe where there are no personal laws? Muslims can live as Muslims in the US and UK or in Pakistan without personal law, but India is the only exception where they cannot if personal law is not there, he added.
Chairman of parliamentary panel on law and BJP MP Sushil Modi on Monday advocated keeping tribals, including those in the North East, out of the purview of any likely Uniform Civil Code (UCC) at a meeting while some opposition members questioned the Law Commission's timing of the move to begin consultations on the contentious issue, sources said. BJP MP Sushil Modi.(HT File Photo)

Most opposition members, including those from the Congress and the DMK, linked the push for the UCC to the next year's Lok Sabha polls, sources said.

The meeting of the parliamentary standing committee, first after the law panel initiated the consultation process on the common civil code, was held to hear the views of representatives of the law panel and legal affairs and legislative departments of the law ministry on the consultation process.

Last month, the law commission issued a public notice inviting views from the various stakeholders on the UCC under the "Review of Personal Laws" subject.

According to sources, Shiv Sena's Sanjay Raut questioned the timing of the consultations while Congress MP Vivek Tankha and DMK MP P Wilson submitted separate written statements, asserting that there was no need to have fresh consultations on the emotive issue.

In his letter, Tankha also reiterated the view of the previous law commission that providing a uniform civil code was "neither necessary nor desirable at this stage". Questioning the intent behind the move, Tagore linked the law panel move to the polls.

The law commission was represented in the meeting by its member-secretary K Biswal.

Sushil Modi in his comments pitched for keeping tribals out of the ambit of any proposed UCC and noted that all laws have exceptions.

It was also pointed out in the meeting that the central laws are not applicable in some North Eastern states without their concurrence.

BJP's Mahesh Jethmalani made a strong defence for the implementation of UCC as he cited debates in the constituent assembly to assert that it was always considered imperative.

Meanwhile, sources indicated that the possibility of a bill on UCC is remote in the monsoon session of Parliament beginning July 20.

In a presentation during the meeting, law commission officials said 19 lakh suggestions have been received so far in response to its public notice on June 14. The exercise will continue till July 13.

Sources said 17 out of 31 members of the panel attended the meeting.

Uniform Civil Code is aimed at replacing personal laws based on religions, customs, and traditions with one common law for everyone irrespective of religion, caste, creed, sexual orientation, and gender. Personal laws and laws related to inheritance, adoption and succession are likely to be covered by a common code.

Implementation of a UCC has been part of BJP election manifestos and Prime Minister Narendra Modi while addressing BJP workers in Bhopal last month made a strong push for it, asking how can the country function with dual laws that govern personal matters, and accused the Opposition of using the UCC issue to "mislead and provoke" the Muslim community.

Uttarakhand is already in the process of implementing its common code.

Opposition parties, however, had attacked the prime minister for his comments on the UCC with the Congress saying he was making such remarks only to divert attention from real issues such as unemployment and the Manipur violence.

AIMIM leader Asaduddin Owaisi asked whether the country's pluralism would be "snatched away" in the name of UCC.

In its consultation paper issued on August 31, 2018, the 21st Law Commission headed by Justice B S Chauhan (retd) said while the diversity of Indian culture can and should be celebrated, specific groups or weaker sections of the society must not be "dis-privileged" in the process.

It said the Commission dealt with laws that are discriminatory rather than providing a uniform civil code "which is neither necessary nor desirable at this stage".

The consultation paper noted that most countries are now moving towards recognition of difference, and the mere existence of difference does not imply discrimination but is indicative of a robust democracy.
NEW DELHI: The virtual Shanghai Cooperation Organisation (SCO) Summit to be hosted by India on Tuesday is expected to focus on regional security, economic connectivity and trade, while welcoming Iran as the latest member of the Eurasian grouping. The virtual SCO summit is being held against the backdrop of Indias strained relations with China and Pakistan. (AP File Photo)

Chinese President Xi Jinping, Russian President Vladimir Putin and Pakistan Prime Minister Shehbaz Sharif are set to be among the leaders attending the virtual summit. It will be the first multilateral meeting joined by Putin since a brief rebellion in Russia by the Wagner mercenary group on June 24.

India is chairing the SCO for the first time this year since it became a full member of the grouping, along with Pakistan, in 2017. Besides Iran joining as a full member during Tuesdays summit, Belarus is set to sign a memorandum of obligations to become a member state.

The SCO summit is being held against the backdrop of Indias strained relations with China and Pakistan. A military standoff between India and China on the Line of Actual Control for the past three years has taken bilateral relationship to its lowest ebb in six decades, while ties between New Delhi and Islamabad have been hit by the issue of terrorism.

The virtual summit is expected to discuss the security situation in Afghanistan, the Ukraine crisis and bolstering cooperation between SCO states, especially ways to strengthen economic connectivity and trade, people familiar with the matter said, declining to be named. In this context, India has taken a number of steps to enhance connectivity and trade with central Asian states in recent years.

The theme for Indias presidency of SCO is SECURE or security, economic development, connectivity, unity, respect for sovereignty and territorial integrity, and environmental protection. As part of the focus on regional security, India has pushed for greater cooperation on de-radicalisation strategies.

India also created five pillars and focus areas of cooperation under SCO  start-ups and innovation, digital inclusion, empowering youth, traditional medicine, and shared Buddhist heritage. New initiatives in these sectors are expected to figure in the joint declaration and other documents to be issued at the end of the summit, the people said.

Representatives of two SCO bodies  the secretariat and Regional Anti-Terrorist Structure (RATS)  and six multilateral organisations will also join the summit. These organisations include the United Nations, Association of Southeast Asian Nations, Collective Security Treaty Organization and Eurasian Economic Union.

The SCO, created in 2001, comprises India, China, Russia, Pakistan, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan and Uzbekistan. Indias association with the grouping began as an observer in 2005.

Sameer Patil, a Mumbai-based security expert, said difficulties associated with ensuring the in-person attendance of the Chinese and Russian presidents could have been a factor in the decision to hold the summit virtually.

The larger goal is the G20 summit and India doesnt want anything to complicate the holding of that meeting. While the SCO will continue to focus on connectivity and trade, one cant ignore the larger context, including Russias continuing problems with the West over the Ukraine crisis and Indias standoff with China, he said. Whatever cooperation is agreed on will be subject to this larger context.

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A Trinamool Congress worker was killed after a crude bomb he was making exploded in Bengal's North 24 Parganas district Monday, state police have said. The blast and death comes days before panchayat elections scheduled for July 8. Earlier, six people were injured in a clash between workers or two parties at Gosaba in South 24 Parganas. (Representational Image)(HT_PRINT)

READ | Bengal panchayat polls: Guv CV Ananda Bose visits violence-hit areas

However, according to the victim's family, the Trinamool worker was murdered and his hands chopped off; they have claimed he was coming home after attending a party meeting when he was hit on the head and killed.

Governor to visit 2nd Trinamool worker's family

Meanwhile, Bengal Governor CV Ananda Bose is due to visit Basanti in South 24 Parganas district to meet the family of another Trinamool worker who died; he was shot dead on Saturday.

On Saturday Bose also visited some violence-hit areas in Cooch Behar district after clashes following last month's announcement of panchayat polling dates.

BJP leader's body recovered

In another incident, police recovered the body of Bharatiya Janata Party leader Bankim Hansda from Bodo area of Purulia district, news agency ANI said.

More violence in Bengal

Six people were injured in a clash between workers of two parties at Gosaba in South 24 Parganas during campaigning. A BJP candidate was allegedly beaten by Trinamool workers at Dantan in West Midnapore.

READ | One person dies in crude bomb explosion as Bengal nears rural poll

At least 11 persons have been killed and dozens have been injured in politics-related violence in Bengal so far. The Calcutta High Court has directed the state poll panel to deploy central forces in all districts to prevent further violence.

The HC asked the poll body to deploy security personnel in greater numbers than the 2013 election, when over 82,000 paramilitary personnel were stationed. The West Bengal State Election Commission has sought 822 companies of central forces from the ministry of home affairs.
One reason why New York feels like the capital of the world is that no matter where you are from, there will be a place for you. No Indian arriving in the city will feel out of place or awkward. There is enough that is familiar and reassuring. The Taj group took over the lease of The Pierre, one of New Yorks grand hotels, and it now makes money for them -- something it hasnt done for any hotel group in decades.

It can take weeks to get a table at Semma to eat Michelin-starred food that is based on Tamil village cuisine.

It was the same with hotels. The Oberois tried to run the Barbizon Plaza but retreated in the face of hostility from long-stay residents of the property. The Taj, always keen to make a mark in New York, bought the three-star Lexington Hotel in 1981 and ran it successfully for nearly two decades without making any impact at all on the citys hotel scene. The artisanal Rajasthani malt whisky, Godawan, hosted a launch evening at Dhamaka, a top Indian restaurant in NYC.

The best part: The Pierre now makes money for the Taj; something it has not done for any hotel group in decades! I had lunch with Karambir Kang, who looks after North America for the Taj and marvelled at how successfully he and his team have managed to run it classily but shrewdly. They have kept the old Pierre trademarks like the elevator operators and the classic look of the suites but service standards were higher than I remember them ever being. Food cart vendors selling hot dogs are found at every corner, but New York has suddenly begun to accord a new respect to Indian food and restaurateurs. (Stuart Monk / Shutterstock)

While Ramu was sceptical initially (yes, he is a Malayali), by the end (especially when we had eaten Vijayas flavourful oxtail), he conceded that the food was actually very good. It was also very different: it is the food of poor villagers who forage for snails and eat the parts of the animal that rich people would throw away.

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What is a poem? School led us to believe that it was anything that rhymed. Lyricists still seem to think so. Poets, however, see it differently. A poem finds new ways to express an idea. It puts vague feelings into words. It needs no hero or villain to separate good from evil. A good poem, in fact, reveals its secrets slowly, over multiple readings, offering interpretations long after youve turned the page. Poems record history, spark revolution, tear you apart and put you back together. For this issue of Brunch, we asked poets (clockwise from left) Akhil Katyal, Akhila Mohan CG, Virat Nehru and Janice Pariat to compose work about new beginnings.

Janice Pariats poems are the blueprint of modern-day love, loss and life. (Anurag Banerjee)

Janice Pariat, 39, is based in Shillong. Her first book, Boats on Land: A Collection of Short Stories (2012), shot her to instant fame. She has handled delicate topics such as love, trauma, healing, self-care, growing up and grief with depth. Her most recent work, Everything the Light Touches, a novel, combines prose and poetry. Virat Nehrus works, in Urdu, help him stay connected to his roots. (kamal khajuria)

Virat Nehru, 30, was born in Delhi, grew up across Lucknow, Prayagraj, Meerut and Bhopal, and now lives in Sydney, Australia. He turned to poetry, he says, as a response to bullies, when he was growing up.  You want to know what our history truly is? Read poetry, he says. I like to think that astute poets are actually historians. The world around us is constantly in flux  how we interact with each other, socio-political issues, the language we speak, surviving a pandemic  poetry is a witness to all these changes. Akhila Mohan CGs haikus are almost a form of therapy. (Vivek M)

Akhila Mohan CG, 36, is a Bengaluru-based poet and author. She took to poetry during the pandemic, to process her experiences as a survivor of domestic violence and a miscarriage. Mohan works with haikus, a Japanese form in which a poem has three lines, with five syllables in the first, seven in the second, and five in the third. Akhil Katyals verses, posted online, bring a sense of permanence to everyday emotions. (Sanchit Khanna)

Akhil Katyal, 37, published his third book, Like Blood on the Bitten Tongue: Delhi Poems, in 2020. He also teaches the creative writing Masters programme at Ambedkar Universitys The School of Culture and Creative Expressions. But its Katyals poem posts on platforms like Instagram that have catapulted him to the limelight in the last few years.

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The upcoming holy month of Sawan, also known as Sravana or Shravan, is eagerly awaited by Hindus as they prepare to celebrate and honour Lord Shiva and Goddess Parvati. Taking place from July 4 to August 31 in 2023, this year's Sawan will span two months, a rarity observed after almost two decades. This festival holds immense importance for Hindus, particularly devotees of Lord Shiva, as it is a time for spiritual devotion, fasting, and joyous celebrations. Typically falling during the monsoon season in India, the rain is seen as a divine blessing from Lord Shiva and a symbol of the rejuvenation of life. Millions of Hindus from various parts of the world participate in this festival. (Also read: Sawan 2023: Date, history, significance and story of Sharavan month; full Sawan Somwar calendar ) Sawan is the holy month dedicated to Lord Shiva, observed during the monsoon season in the Hindu calendar.(Pinterest)

As the devotees of Lord Shiva and Goddess Parvati gear up for this special occasion, it's time to share heartfelt wishes, captivating images, and inspiring quotes to make this Sawan a truly memorable experience for your loved ones.

Sawan Wishes, Images, Messages and Greetings:

On this auspicious occasion of Sawan, may Lord Shiva's blessings be with you and your loved ones.

Sawan, also known as Shravan or Sravana, is a holy month in the Hindu calendar. (HT photo)

May the sacred chants of "Om Namah Shivaya" resonate in your heart, filling your life with positive vibrations and a profound connection with the divine. Wishing you a blessed Sawan!

May the holy month of Sawan bring you closer to your spiritual goals and fill your life with happiness and peace.

Sawan is dedicated to the worship of Lord Shiva and Goddess Parvati.(HT photo)

As you immerse yourself in the divine aura of Sawan, may your prayers and offerings reach the abode of Lord Shiva, bringing fulfillment, prosperity, and eternal bliss. Happy Sawan!

May the divine grace of Lord Shiva bless you abundantly in this auspicious month of Sawan.

It is observed during the monsoon season, typically falling in the months of July and August.(HT photo)

Like the blooming lotus emerging from the muddy waters, may you rise above challenges and embrace divine purity and enlightenment in this auspicious month of Sawan. Happy Sawan!

As the sacred month of Sawan begins, may it bring you closer to the divine and fulfil all your wishes.

Sawan is considered a highly auspicious time for spiritual devotion and seeking the blessings of Lord Shiva.(HT photo)

May the celestial melodies of Damru and the divine energy of Lord Shiva fill your life with harmony and bliss this Sawan. Happy Shravan!

May this Sawan be a time of purification and spiritual growth for you. Happy Sawan!

Devotees offer prayers, perform special Shiva puja, and chant mantras dedicated to Lord Shiva.(HT photo)

Let your prayers reach the feet of the lord Shiva and he elevates your fortunes in this month of Sawan!

Sawan is a time of devotion, reflection, and celebration, where Hindus come together to express their love and reverence for Lord Shiva.(HT photo)

As the rain showers upon the earth, may Lord Shiva's blessings shower upon you and your loved ones. Happy Sawan!

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Independence Day in USA, also known as the Fourth of July, is a significant national holiday in the United States that commemorates the country's declaration of independence from British rule. USA Independence Day is not only a time for celebration but also a time to honour the country's history, pay tribute to the principles of freedom and democracy and express gratitude for the liberties enjoyed by its citizens. USA Independence Day 2023: Date, history, significance and celebration (Photo by frank mckenna on Unsplash)

Date:

USA Independence Day is celebrated annually on July 4 and is a day that brings people together, fostering a sense of national unity and patriotism.

History:

On July 4, 1776, the Continental Congress adopted the Declaration of Independence, which declared the thirteen American colonies as a new nation, the United States of America, free from British control. This declaration marked a pivotal moment in the American Revolutionary War and the birth of a new nation.

Significance:

Independence Day holds great historical and cultural significance for Americans. It symbolises the ideals of freedom, liberty and the pursuit of happiness upon which the nation was built. It serves as a reminder of the sacrifices made by the founding fathers and all those who fought for independence, as well as a celebration of the American spirit and unity.

Celebration:

Independence Day is celebrated across the United States with various events, traditions and patriotic displays. It typically includes fireworks, parades, concerts, picnics, barbecues, family gatherings and community activities where the American flag with its red, white and blue colors, is prominently displayed and people often dress in patriotic attire.

Fireworks shows are a highlight of the celebration, lighting up the sky in vibrant colours and patterns. Many cities and towns organise parades, featuring marching bands, floats and patriotic displays.

It is also common for families and friends to gather for outdoor activities, such as picnics and barbecues, enjoying traditional American foods like hamburgers, hot dogs, corn on the cob and apple pie. Throughout the day, people express their pride in being American and reflect on the values and principles that the country was founded upon.
Blood donation is one of the most regulated practices across the world, ensuring not only the safety and efficacy of collected blood and its components but also ensuring safety of the blood donor. However, many are often in a fix about how safe it is or how often can we donate blood. Blood donation: Is blood donation safe? How often can we donate blood? (Photo by Nguyen Hiep on Unsplash)

Is blood donation safe?

In an interview with HT Lifestyle, Dr Rasika Dhawan Setia, Director and HOD - Transfusion Medicine at BLK-Max Super Speciality Hospital in New Delhi, shared, Blood donation is extremely safe process. New, sterile disposable blood bags or kits used for each blood donation. Blood collection is carried out following strict aseptic techniques. Hence, there is no risk of contracting infections during the donation process. Every time a blood donor comes for blood donation, he/she undergoes a mini health check-up to ascertain his or her fitness to donate. This check-up might turn up a condition that may need medical attention, such as high blood pressure or a heart arrhythmia. In addition, the donors are tested for infectious diseases that they may be unaware of.

She elaborated, The screening will also reveal if the donor has a rare blood type. This information can be useful if at any point in life they ever face a surgery or another medical situation in which a transfusion might be required, they are already typed and crucial time is saved. Most healthy adults can donate 350-450 ml of blood safely, without health risks. Within a few days of a blood donation, the body replaces the lost fluids. Studies have shown that regular blood donors have lower levels of bad cholesterol (LDL) and triglycerides compared to non-donors. Additionally, people who donate blood are able to manage their blood pressure, haemoglobin, and iron levels comparatively well, than non-donors. Some donors with higher hemoglobin, blood donation helps to lower the viscosity of the blood, which has been associated with the formation of blood clots, heart attacks and stroke. One blood donation can save up to three lives. People who donate regularly inherently feel good and happy knowing that they are helping others, and altruism and volunteering have been linked to positive health outcomes, including a lower risk for depression and greater longevity.

Bringing his expertise to the same, Dr Rajesh Sawant, Consultant, Transfusion Medicine and Histocompatibility and Immunogenetics at Kokilaben Dhirubhai Ambani Hospital in Mumbai, explained, The basics i.e. how much blood is there in our body and how much is drawn when we donate. Each one of us has as much as 4-5 litres of blood. An adult who is weighing about say 50-55 kgs has 4-5 litres of blood in his/her circulation; out of which what is drawn during donation is either 350 ml, if one weighs less than 55 kgs but more than 45 kgs body weight or 450 ml if one is more than 55 kgs  this is equivalent to less than 10% of what we have in total. As far as safety is concerned, there is no issue that one will develop weakness or any deficiency post-blood donation; hence, it is safe to donate blood. Some people are centurion blood donors (those who have donated blood more than 100 times in their lifetime) who are hail & hearty and healthy. Some scientific studies have proved that regular blood donation helps to replace aged blood cells with newly generated red cells. Regular blood donors suffer from lesser cardiac diseases like heart attacks or coronary artery disease. The aging process in regular blood donors is also slower when compared to non-donors.

He added, From a safety perspective, where to donate blood is also important. It is always advisable to donate blood in a hospital-based blood centre, especially if you are donating blood for the first time, as outdoor blood donation camps dont have extensive resuscitation services and have little to no medical support service in case of an emergency. It is always better to donate to a hospital-based blood centre so that in the rare event in case there is any complication caused due to donation like a vasovagal attack or reaction, then the medical care available easily and the donors health can be safeguarded. Also, the donor must be vigilant about the blood centre where he/she is donating blood should be a licensed centre, as blood banks are licensed by the government.

How often can we donate blood?

Dr Rasika Dhawan Setia revealed, As per government guidelines, a male donor can donate whole blood every three months (90 days), while females can donate every four months (120 days). However, platelets donation can be done more frequently, after 48 hours (not more than 2 times a week) limited to 24 in one year. Make a habit of donating blood regularly and encourage other to do so as well without any fear. Despite being the largest population in the world, there is critical shortage of donated blood and hence each donation matters.

According to Dr Rajesh Sawant, when it comes to blood donation, adequate care has been taken by the regulatory authorities and by various national guidelines, which dictate the frequency of blood donation. He said, This frequency of blood donation differs from region to region and country to country. In India, there are separate criteria for male and female donors, considering our population and health. In India, a female donor can donate blood every four months, i.e. three times in a year, whereas a male donor can donate blood every three months, i.e. four times in a year. When it comes to single donor platelets or platelet donation, the criteria are different, as here one does not lose much of red cells as only platelets and the liquid portion of the blood, i.e. plasma, are taken. Hence, one can donate platelets or plasma as many as 24 times a year. It is extremely safe, as when one goes to a medical centre, the blood is not drawn directly. First, a medical examination is done followed by testing of haemoglobin, temperature, pulse, and blood pressure. With normal blood pressure and haemoglobin above 12.5 g/dL, one is accepted as a blood donor.
Heart attack can happen at any age and young, children and elderly all can have their own risk factors. But in the recent years, the cases of cardiac arrest and heart attack in young and adolescents are on rise which is a cause of concern. Lifestyle factors play a key role in cardiac issues and the same must be addressed for a robust heart health. A 17-year-old Class 12 girl lost her life to sudden cardiac arrest while she was climbing stairs with her friends. The girl experienced sweating and breathlessness before she collapsed and was rushed to a nearby hospital, where she was declared dead. (Also read: Yoga for heart health: Ways to improve mindfulness, beat stress to boost cardiovascular health) Lifestyle factors play a key role in cardiac issues and the same must be addressed for a robust heart health. (Freepik)

Experts warn that teenagers need to take care of their heart by eating healthy, doing regular exercises and finding ways to beat stress.

"Bad food habits, lack of regular physical activity and the increasing use of tobacco in various forms especially smoking are the major factors contributing to development of heart attack in teenagers. Also the mental stress is a major precipitating factor. The increasing expectations of their performance at every step be it at school, college, work place or home is also to be blamed. We always want our child to be a super performer without realising the amount of mental stress that this expectation creates," says Dr Rakesh Rai Sapra, Director and Senior Consultant-Cardiology, Marengo Asia Hospitals Faridabad.

How to prevent heart attack in teenagers

Instill healthy habits

First thing is they should have a desire to be healthy. We should teach our children the importance of being healthy rather than wealthy. You really cannot force healthy habits. It should be a desire. First healthy habit is to choose healthy food items. Everyone knows the good and bad food items. We just need to choose them. And this habit should be inculcated from childhood. Because the process of cholesterol deposition begins in the first decade of life. So usual thought that teenage is the age of unrestricted eating and drinking is wrong. This is also the age of getting spoilt. And growth is actually better with healthy food items like fruits and vegetables.

Physical activity

Second preventive step is the habit of regular and daily physical activity. Exercise is the best and most effective way of preventing heart disease. Moderate intensity aerobic exercise is recommended for prevention of heart disease. This means brisk walking or jogging or swimming or playing outdoor games. This should be done for 30-40 minutes daily and 4-5 times a week. We should strongly encourage outdoor games in our children.

Quit smoking

Next important preventive step is avoiding or quitting smoking. It has been observed that 90% of young heart attacks occur in those who smoke. Smoking in any and every form including e cigarettes is bad. So this bad habit must be discouraged as best as possible.

Beat mental stress

And lastly one should try to reduce mental stress. From cardiologists perspective it is better to be second and happy than being first and stressed. It is important to teach our children the importance of leading a balanced life rather than a perfect life. Habits that we need to inculcate are being happy, kind and caring instead of winning at all costs.
Rohini Rau

Rohini Rau

Chennai-based Rau is one of the first certified medical clown doctor in India. Dressed up as a clown, she goes about performing therapeutic comedy and puppetry to make her patients laugh, dance and hang on to hope. We visit government and private hospitals to cheer up patients that sometimes includes those suffering from terminal diseases. Its a joy to see them crack a smile. Your mental well being has a huge impact on your health. It gives you strength to fight back, says the 36-year-old, who is also a certified internal and functional medicine doctor. Rau says that doing theatre since her childhood has helped her a lot with improvisation when performing medical clowning. it gives me an edge and I throw in storytelling. These are very inspiring sessions and make for my most precious memories, says Rau.

Litika Verma

Litika Verma

The 27-year-old Verma joined the ESIC hospital Faridabad as a junior resident in the ICU. In April last year, she was diagnosed with a rare disease: Guillain-Barre syndrome. Weakness and tingling in your hands and feet are usually the first symptoms. The sensations spread fast paralysing my whole body. My life changed in the blink of an eye. I was hospitalised for 15 days and was put on oxygen support. Even though I was at home, I couldnt move my body. It took months of treatment and physiotherapy to gradually stand on my feet, she shares. What kept her going was the desire to recover and get back to serving people, and relentless support from her family. I was pretty restless. I wanted to start attending to my patients again. And I wanted to talk about this rare disease that had turned my life upside down, says Verma. Confined to her bed, she started an insta page @drlitikaverma to spread awareness about the disease . That phase gave me a new perspective about life and its fragility. I think the experience made me a better doctor, says Verma.

Vishal Anand

Vishal Anand

The 29-year-old is a general surgeon with AIIMS, New Delhi. When his mother could not find a single screening centre in her home town, Bokaro, Jharkhand to get a mammogram done, Anand had to bring her to Delhi for the test. Thats when Anand decided to facilitate breast cancer screening and treatment in Delhi at an affordable rate and he launched a cancer diagnosis portal, Flavum Health. Many from remote areas die in the lack of timely diagnosis and treatment. I realised that something had to be done. I wanted to bring something on table that could help people without burning a hole in their pocket, says Anand. His initiative rolls out an yearly plan at affordable rates, including mammogram and risk assessment. If a patient is detected with the initial stage cancer, Anand bears the cost of treatment. I focus on patients who do not have financial coverage and cancer puts a huge financial burden on them, he says. The surgeon also worked in the rural areas of Haryana to help fight anaemia among males in rural India, a rarely talked-about health challenge.

Noor Dhaliwal

Noor Dhaliwal

This young doctor started her duties when the world was grappling with a deadly pandemic. As a freshly graduated doctor, it was a dream come true to wear the white coat, and be entrusted with responsibilities, but it was also a test to my strength and resilience, says Dhaliwal, 25, who was posted in the Covid wards of Lok Nayak Hospital, New Delhi. Dhaliwal would be on duty for long hours, enveloped in PPE kits that would leave her soaked in sweat. No one bothered about physical discomfort but there was constant sadness surrounding us as we witnessed the scarcity of resources and facilities. We also saw a lot of deaths just at the start of our careers Witnessing such helplessness led to sleepless nights and I would keep thinking about heartbreaking stories of patients who could not afford life-saving treatment , she recalls. But the sight of suffering patients made her determined to help alleviate their pain. Amidst the challenges, there were moments of joy when some patients recovered and happily went back home to their families. Those are the moments that kept me going, says the MBBS.

Raghav Nayar

Raghav Nayar

A liver transplant surgeon, Nayar was posted in AIIMS Jodhpur in March 2020 when the pandemic hit the country and international flights weer banned. When the government evacuated people stuck in Iran, some of them were put in isolation in AIIMS Jodhpur. The most serious Covid cases were brought to us. There were not any protocols that time, so we made our own basic protocols to deal with the situation and worked tirelessly. There was a severe shortage of facilities and constant fear because Covid was at its peak. It was draining, both physically and mentally But as doctors, we needed to be strong, says 32-year-old Nayar. In these grim moments, you sometimes discover your biggest strength. I learnt that grit and perseverance can turn around any adversity, says the doctor who caught Covid thrice while on duty. Back in Delhi, Nayar is doing his fellowship in a private hospital. My goal is to set-up a system that could make liver transplant surgery an affordable treatment, he says.

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In a study that tracked almost 2,000 community-dwelling older people for eight years, researchers at Johns Hopkins Medicine claim they have significant new evidence of a connection between the diminished sense of smell and risk of developing late-life depression. Their findings, published in Journal of Gerontology: Medical Sciences, do not demonstrate that loss of smell causes depression" depression, but suggests that it may serve as a potent indicator of overall health and well-being. Poorer sense of smell was associated with an increased chance of a participant falling into the moderate or high depressive symptoms.(Pexels )

"We've seen repeatedly that a poor sense of smell can be an early warning sign of neurodegenerative diseases such as Alzheimer's disease and Parkinson's disease, as well as a mortality risk. This study underscores its association with depressive symptoms," says Vidya Kamath, Ph.D., associate professor of psychiatry and behavioral sciences at the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine. "Additionally, this study explores factors that might influence the relationship between olfaction and depression" depression, including poor cognition and inflammation."

The study used data gathered from 2,125 participants in a federal government study known as the Health, Aging and Body Composition Study (Health ABC). This cohort was composed of a group of healthy older adults ages 70-73 at the start of the eight-year study period in 1997-98. Participants showed no difficulties in walking 0.25 miles, climbing 10 steps or performing normal activities at the start of the study, and were assessed in person annually and by phone every six months. Tests included those for the ability to detect certain odors, depression" depression and mobility assessments.

In 1999, when smell was first measured, 48% of participants displayed a normal sense of smell, 28% showed a decreased sense of smell, known as hyposmia, and 24% had a profound loss of the sense, known as anosmia. Participants with a better sense of smell tended to be younger than those reporting significant loss or hyposmia. Over follow-up, 25% of participants developed significant depressive symptoms. When analyzed further, researchers found that individuals with decreased or significant loss of smell had increased risk of developing significant depressive symptoms at longitudinal follow-up than those in the normal olfaction group. Participants with a better sense of smell tended to be younger than those reporting significant loss or hyposomia.

Researchers also identified three depressive symptom "trajectories" in the study group: stable low, stable moderate and stable high depressive symptoms. Poorer sense of smell was associated with an increased chance of a participant falling into the moderate or high depressive symptoms groups, meaning that the worse a person's sense of smell, the higher their depressive symptoms. These findings persisted after adjusting for age, income, lifestyle, health factors and use of antidepressant medication.

"Losing your sense of smell influences many aspects of our health and behavior, such as sensing spoiled food or noxious gas, and eating enjoyment. Now we can see that it may also be an important vulnerability indicator of something in your health gone awry," says Kamath. "Smell is an important way to engage with the world around us, and this study shows it may be a warning sign for late-life depression" depression."

Humans' sense of smell is one of two chemical senses. It works through specialized sensory cells, called olfactory neurons, which are found in the nose. These neurons have one odor receptor; it picks up molecules released by substances around us, which are then relayed to the brain for interpretation. The higher the concentration of these smell molecules the stronger the smell, and different combinations of molecules result in different sensations.

Smell is processed in the brain's olfactory bulb, which is believed to interact closely with the amygdala, hippocampus and other brain structures that regulate and enable memory, decision-making and emotional responses.

The Johns Hopkins researchers say their study suggests that olfaction and depression" depression may be linked through both biological (e.g., altered serotonin levels, brain volume changes) and behavioral (e.g., reduced social function and appetite) mechanisms.

The researchers plan to replicate their findings from this study in more groups of older adults, and examine changes to individuals' olfactory bulbs to determine if this system is in fact altered in those diagnosed with depression">depression. They also plan to examine if smell can be used in intervention strategies to mitigate risk of late-life depression" depression.

Other scientists who contributed to this research are Kening Jiang, Danielle Powell, Frank Lin and Jennifer Deal of the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine and Bloomberg School of Public Health; Kevin Manning of the University of Connecticut; R. Scott Mackin, Willa Brenowitz and Kristine Yaffe of the University of California, San Francisco; Keenan Walker and Eleanor Simonsick of the National Institute on Aging; and Honglei Chen of Michigan State University.

No authors declared conflicts of interest related to this research under Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine policies.This work was supported by the National Institute on Aging, the National Institute of Nursing Research and the Intramural Research Program of the National Institutes of Health: National Institute on Aging.

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Scientists have figured out how cats can locate food, allies and enemies. This research was published in PLoS Computational Biology. A complicated network of tightly coiling bony airway structures is to blame, according to the first thorough investigation of the domestic cat's nasal airway. (Also read: How to know if your cat is dehydrated; know signs and symptoms, ways to treat) According to the experts, the cat nose serves as a highly effective and dual-purpose gas. (Pixabay)

In order to mimic how air containing typical cat food scents would pass through the coiled structures during an inhalation, the researchers built a 3D computer model of the cat's nose. They found that the air divides into two flow streams, one of which purifies and humidifies the air, and another of which swiftly and effectively transports the odorant to the part of the body responsible for smell, the olfactory region.

Also Watch: How To Choose The Right Food For Your Cat | Shopping Haul | HT Lifestyle

According to the experts, the cat nose serves as a highly effective and dual-purpose gas. A complicated network of tightly coiling bony airway structures is to blame, according to the first thorough investigation of the domestic cat's nasal airway.

In order to mimic how air containing typical cat food scents would pass through the coiled structures during an inhalation, the researchers built a 3D computer model of the cat's nose. They found that the air divides into two flow streams, one of which purifies and humidifies the air, and another of which swiftly and effectively transports the odorant to the part of the body responsible for smell, the olfactory region.

According to the experts, the cat nose serves as a highly effective and dual-purpose gas.In fact, the cat nose is so effective at this that its structure may inspire improvements to today's gas chromatographs.

While the long alligator nose has been found to mimic gas chromatography, scientists believe that the compact cat head drove an evolutionary change that resulted in the labyrinthine airway structure that not only fits but also helps cats adapt to diverse environments.

"It's a good design if you think about it," said Kai Zhao, associate professor of otolaryngology at Ohio State's College of Medicine and senior author of the study.

"For mammals, olfaction is very important in finding prey, identifying danger, finding food sources and tracking the environment. In fact, a dog can take a sniff and know what has passed through - was it a friend or not?" he said. "That's a fantastic olfactory system - and I think potentially there have been different ways to evolve to enhance that.

"By observing these flow patterns and analyzing details of these flows, we think they could be two different flow zones that serve two different purposes."

Zhao's lab has previously created models of the rat and human nose to study airflow patterns, but the high-resolution cat model and simulation experiments are his most complicated to date, based on micro-CT scans of a cat's head and microscopic-level identification of tissue types throughout the nasal cavity.

"We spent a lot of time developing the model and more sophisticated analysis to understand the functional benefit that this structure serves," he said. "The cat nose probably has a similar complexity level as the dog's, and it's more complex than a rodent's - and it begs the question - why was the nose evolved to be so complex?"

Computer simulations of breathing revealed the answer: During a simulated inhalation, researchers observed two distinct regions of airflow - respiratory air that gets filtered and spreads slowly above the roof of the mouth on its way to the lungs, and a separate stream containing odorant that moves rapidly through a central passage directly to the olfactory region toward the back of the nasal cavity. The analysis considered both the flow location and the speed of its movement through turbinates, the bony structures inside the nose.

"We measured how much flow goes through specific ducts - one duct that delivers most odorant chemicals into the olfactory region, versus the rest, and analyzed the two patterns," Zhao said. "For respirator breathing, turbinates branch to divert flow into separate channels, sort of like a radiator grid in a car, which would be better for cleansing and humidifying.

"But you want odour detection to be very fast, so there is one branch that delivers odour at high speed, potentially allowing for quick detection rather than waiting for the air to filter through the respiratory zone - you could lose most of the odour if air has been cleansed and the process is slowed down."

The simulation also showed that the air shuttled to the olfactory region is then recirculated in parallel channels when it gets there. "That was actually a surprise," Zhao said. "It's like you take a sniff, the air is shooting back there and then is being processed for a much longer."

This study is the first to quantify the difference in gas chromatography between mammals and other species - Zhao and colleagues estimate the cat's nose is more than 100 times more efficient at odour detection than an amphibian-like straight nose in a similarly sized skull - and to come up with a parallel gas chromatography theory: parallel olfactory coils feeding from the high-speed stream to increase the effective length of the flow path while slowing down the local airflow speed, potentially for better odour processing.

"We know so much about vision and hearing, but not so much about the nose. This work could lead to more understanding of the evolutionary pathways behind different nose structures, and the functional purpose they serve," Zhao said.

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For 29-year-old Jingyi Hou, a schoolteacher in China's northern Shanxi province, marriage is not a priority. Despite her parents' persistence in arranging around 20 blind dates for her over the past three years, Jingyi remains single and feels no urgency to find a marriage partner. High youth unemployment and financial stress are keeping young people from choosing to marry and start families. ( JADE GAO/AFP/Getty Images)

"Marriage is about freedom. Not everyone needs to get married as soon as possible," she told DW.

And Jingyi is not alone. According to a report published by China's Ministry of Civil Affairs in June 2023, the number of marriage registrations across the country was the lowest in 37 years, following eight years of decline. Only 6.83 million couples tied the knot in the Asian nation last year.

In China, an increasing number of young people, especially women born in the 1990s and 2000s, have become indifferent to the societal expectation of marrying early.

According to the latest China Census Yearbook, the average age of first marriages in the country in 2020 was 28.6, nearly 4 years older than in 2010.

Why do women in China especially resist marriage?

Ye Liu, a senior lecturer at the Lau China Institute at King's College London, told DW that gender inequality remains deeply ingrained in Chinese workplaces. This includes discriminatory gender quotas and the evaluation of female candidates based on the likelihood of pregnancy and the need for maternity leave.

This has forced many young women to choose between their careers and starting a family.

"When women spent a longer time in education, naturally they delay the age of entering marriage and parenthood," said Ye.

"Marriage is not necessary," said Christa, who spoke to DW on the condition of using a pseudonym. "I believe that getting married will impact my achievements, especially my career," added the 25-year-old, who works as a project manager for a manufacturing firm in China.

Young Chinese struggle financially

China's recent economic downturn has also contributed to the lack of interest in marriage among young people.

In 2023, China's youth unemployment  which represents those aged between 16 and 24 years  reached a record-high 20.8%.

Shan Shan, a Chinese woman who prefers to be identified by her nickname, told DW that it is difficult to make a living in the current job market. The stress of job hunting has left her with no energy to contemplate marriage.

Similarly, Xiao Gang, a software engineer, told DW also using a pseudonym, that widespread layoffs in the tech industry drive him to work overtime regularly out of fear of being fired. "When friends invite me to hang out with girls, I simply don't have the energy to go out," he said.

China fights looming demography problems

As young Chinese become increasingly reluctant to marry, the country's birth rate continues to drop.

According to Human Rights Watch, the total fertility rate in China has decreased from 2.6 births per woman in the late 1980s to 1.15 in 2021.

Furthermore, last year marked China's first population decline in nearly six decades, excluding 2003 when a devastating respiratory epidemic resulted in more deaths than births.

"China is entering a severe demographic crisis becoming more and more so a demographically old country," said Dudley Poston, an emeritus professor of sociology at Texas A&M University.

He added that the median age of the Chinese population is now 38 years old. In India, which earlier this year was projected by the UN to overtake China as the world's most populous country, the average age is 28.

In May, China's Family Planning Association launched pilot projects in over 20 cities to provide housing, tax and education benefits to families with two or more children.

But the government's efforts have been met with widespread cynicism on social media, with few young adults viewing the schemes as helpful.

"I think it is ridiculous. A lot of young people like me are facing a difficult time getting a job," Christa said, adding that why would people want to start a family when they can barely take care of themselves financially.

DW's Wen Liu contributed to this report.

Edited by: Wesley Rahn

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TweetDeck, a Twitter client used by many professionals to monitor several Twitter accounts concurrently, appears to have been affected by the social media platform's recently implemented reading limit restriction, which limits the number of tweets a user may view in a day. Elon Musk's photo is seen through a Twitter logo.(Reuters)

Users globally are complaining that the media management tool is not getting auto-refreshed. While some claimed that columns containing mentions, likes or other information on TweetDeck are left blank.

TweetDeck down? Here's how netizens react

I have been using TweetDeck for 14 years. I never suffer the issues of an irrelevant timeline. I would completely stop using Twitter if the web interface is the only option, a user complained on Monday.

Seems like Twitter is messing about with Tweetdeck. If you enable Tweetdeck Preview, then it works. If you opt out of the new Tweetdeck, then it's still borked, another user tweeted.

ALSO READ: Instagram and MySpace trend on Twitter as users threat mass exodus amid Elon Musk's data limit

TweetDeck a valuable tool for professionals

TweetDeck shows multiple tweets simultaneously, with multiple timelines updating in real-time, helping users to keep track of multiple accounts.

This would be placing a higher demand on Twitters servers than the regular Twitter apps. It is reported that this may be one reason why Twitter has limited some of TweetDeck's functionalities.

What Twitter has to say on TweetDeck errors?

Neither Twitter nor Elon Musk has commented on the issue yet. The official Twitter page of TweetDeck, which has the last post around a year ago, since then it says, A new & improved TweetDeck...coming soon.

Elon Musk caps daily read limit

Twitter on Saturday decided to cap the number of posts users can read each day. The measure is said to be for a temporary time but no timeline has been given. This decision follows right after the microblogging site made it mandatory for users to log in to use the platform.

Announcing the decision, Twitter boss Elon Musk tweeted, "To address extreme levels of data scraping & system manipulation, weve applied the following temporary limits:

Verified accounts are limited to reading 6000 posts per day

Unverified accounts to 600 posts per day

New unverified accounts to 300 per day."

Why a Twitter reading limit?

Elon Musk said that AI models were scraping data to build their AI models to such a point that it was causing traffic issues on Twitter.

Several hundred organizations (maybe more) were scraping Twitter data extremely aggressively, to the point where it was affecting the real user experience, the Twitter boss said.

"Almost every company doing AI, from startups to some of the biggest corporations on Earth, was scraping vast amounts of data," Musk said.

ALSO READ: Reddit's CEO addresses intense backlash and site-wide blackout amidst API pricing controversy

See your friends & family': Elon Musk tweets amid backlash

Ever since the new rate limit has been implemented, Twitter and Musk have both faced backlash. "Goodbye Twitter" was a trending topic in the United States following the announcement.

To defend his decision and to answer people's complaints about the rate limits, Musk asked people to step away from their phones and spend time with friends and family instead. You awake from a deep trance, step away from the phone to see your friends & family, he tweeted on Sunday.

Rate limit relaxed? Latest updates on Twitter's daily reading cap decision

Twitter's daily reading cap decision seems to be very short-lived as very few users have come out to say if they have faced a rate limit recently compared to Saturday when it was first implemented. No official update has been given by Twitter in this regard yet.
2024 Republican presidential candidate Nikki Haley has warned US government in the wake of military buildup by 'communist' China. Citing China's astounding naval capabilities and advancements in military technology, Haley raised the issue of serious threat to the United States. Citing China's astounding naval capabilities and advancements in military technology, Nikki Haley raised the issue of serious threat to the United States.(Getty Images)

If you look at the military situation, they now have the largest naval fleet in the world, Haley said on Fox News Sunday.

They have 340 ships, we have 293. Theyre going to have 400 in two years, we wont even have 350 in two decades. They have started developing hypersonic missiles. Were just now getting started, explained Haley.

Haley also flayed authorities for increasing woke culture in the US military. She claimed that China is getting ahead of US in many important areas, concerning security.

They[China] are modernizing their military, our militarys taking gender pronoun classes. Look at what theyre doing on cyber, artificial intelligence, space  theyre ahead of us, said Haley.

"We have some work to do and we do need to strengthen our military. We have to make sure, we are right," added Haley.

The former US ambassador to the United Nations rang alarm bells saying that China had been getting ready for war against the United States.

" China has been preparing for war with us for decades and the way we have to deal with China is not look at it tomorrow. Because if we keep waiting to deal with them tomorrow, they will deal with us today," warned Haley.

ALSO READ| King Charles forced Queen Elizabeth IIs assistant to leave royal estate after the monarch's death : Report

Notably, during a speech last week to unveil her China policy, Haley had dubbed the Asian giant as much more than a mere competitor  Communist China is an enemy. She proposed limiting trade relations with China and termed the nation as most dangerous foreign threat weve faced since the Second World War.

Later, a spokesperson at the Chinese embassy in Washington DC reacted to her statements.

Pushing American companies to leave China runs counter to economic laws, and will ultimately harm everyones interests, the spokesman had told Reuters.

Only those who draw attention by smearing and blame-shifting in the election campaign will end up on the ash heap of history, he had added.
A hero dad is being hailed after he died while saving the lives of two children on June 29. Marvin Alexan Fernandez Chicas was spending time with his son, three-year-old Dyaln, as well as some other friends on Lake Nockamixon when he drowned trying to save two children struggling in the water. Marvin jumped into action even though he could not swim. Lake Nockamixon is a reservoir in southeastern Pennsylvania. Marvin Alexan Fernandez Chicas sprang into action after he spotted the two children struggling near Tohickon Creek in the cliffs area (GoFundMe)

Before dying, Marvin was able to rescue the two children. They apparently got in some trouble in the water, he went in to help them, said Haycock Township Fire Chief Harry Grim, according to WFMZ. Unfortunately he cant swim. The kids got out, he did not.

Marvin sprang into action after he spotted the two children struggling near Tohickon Creek in the cliffs area last week, the Morning Call cited the Pennsylvania Department of Conservation and Natural Resources (DCNR) as saying. As many as 10 divers searched the area, eventually recovering his body.

Importantly, the DCNR prohibits swimmers from Tohickon Creek and Lake Nockamixon. Unfortunately, people dont follow the rules, and the sad reality is its not a smooth, gradual slope under the water, and they step off into a deep area, they take a gulp of water and they die, unfortunately, fire chief Harry said. It shouldnt happen, but it does.

A GoFundMe has been set up for Marvin, 37 by his family. Our beloved Marvin passed away on Thursday, June 29, 2023. He was a man who liked fishing and that day he is doing what he liked together with some friends and son, unfortunately he died drowned in the lake giving his life for two children who were also about to drown along with him he became a hero for everyone. He died leaving behind his 3-year-old son The extra money we can donate would be to help in part with the upbringing of little Dylan who is going to need us a lot I am here on behalf of his wife, brothers and mom urging everyone to get together and donate everything they can to cover the expenses to send his body back home and that his mother who is in Honduras can say goodbye to him, the page reads.

In addition, we need to raise money to help his family with the expenses that this terrible situation causes, Marvin Marvin was a very hardworking man, an excellent father, they were always going to see him with his son everywhere, that little one didn't leave his dad's side. Therefore, your wife and son will need our help with any amount you can give thanks and blessings to everyone.

I am Lesly, the wife of one of Marvin's brothers. All money collected will go to the hands of the wife and siblings to cover all the funeral expenses and be able to send her body to Honduras, it adds. $34,511 USD had been raised of the $45,000 goal at the time of writing this article.

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In an astonishing turn of events, a Houston man who vanished as a teenager has been found alive, eight years after he went missing in March 2015. The miraculous reunion has left both his family and authorities amazed at the unexpected turn of events. A Houston man Rudy Farias who vanished as a teenager has been found alive(Twitter)

Rudy Farias, who was 17 at the time of his disappearance, was reunited with his family on Saturday, much to their relief and joy. The Texas Center for the Missing shared the incredible news on Twitter, leaving the community in awe.

According to reports, Farias was discovered outside a church by attentive passersby who immediately called 911. The young man was unresponsive and showed signs of physical distress, including cuts, bruises, and blood in his hair. He was promptly rushed to the hospital for further evaluation and care, as confirmed by his mother.

Farias had gone missing while walking his two dogs near his family's residence. While the dogs managed to return home, Farias never did, leaving his loved ones desperate for answers and fearing the worst.

At the time of his disappearance, Farias was known to suffer from depression, PTSD, and anxiety. Texas EquuSearch, a missing person organization, stated in 2015 that he had not been taking his medication, raising concerns about his well-being.

The family had already endured tragedy before Farias' vanishing act, as his brother had tragically lost his life in a motorcycle accident. The emotional toll of witnessing such a devastating event was something Farias had to grapple with, according to statements made in 2015.

Tim Miller, the director of Texas EquuSearch, expressed his astonishment at the recent turn of events, describing it as nothing short of a miracle. However, he also acknowledged that there are now many questions surrounding Farias' disappearance and reappearance. The circumstances of how and where he spent the past eight years remain unknown, and investigators are determined to piece together the puzzle.

Authorities initially did not suspect foul play in Farias' case, but the unexpected reunion has reopened the investigation. The details surrounding his disappearance and the challenges he faced during his absence are still under investigation.

Also read | From hope to heartbreak! Titan sub search team leader Ed Cassano shares emotional journey through rescue operation

For now, Farias' family is simply grateful to have him back, despite his physical and mental struggles. The story of his vanishing act and return will continue to captivate the community as they anxiously await more information on this incredible journey that defies explanation.

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In a whirlwind of revelations, photos from Hunter Biden's abandoned laptop have surfaced, showcasing a series of daring and questionable actions. From smoking crack behind the wheel to hitting speeds of 172 mph in a Porsche, the snapshots provide a glimpse into the turbulent life of the president's troubled son. Photos from Hunter Biden's abandoned laptop have surfaced, showcasing a series of daring and questionable actions.(Twitter)

One set of images captures Biden with what appears to be a crack pipe while nonchalantly driving through a residential neighborhood in Arlington, Virginia. The incident took place on June 12, 2018, as Biden was rushing to catch a flight he had missed the day before. A daring act indeed, but it was just the beginning.

A photo leaked from Hunter Biden's laptop shows him holding a crack-pipe.(Marco Polo)

In another image from August, Hunter is seen going on a high-speed adventure, racing to Las Vegas at an astonishing 172 mph. The dashboard snapshot of the Porsche's speedometer was a testament to his recklessness behind the wheel.

A picture from Hunters infamous laptop shows him speeding down at 172 mph.(Marco Polo)

The Vegas escapade didn't end with a mere joyride; messages on the laptop suggest a hot tub party with multiple women eagerly anticipating his arrival. The debauchery seemed to exceed some of the ladies' expectations, leading to candid conversations about his love for many girls simultaneously.

The reckless behavior didn't stop there. In his 2021 memoir, "Beautiful Things," Biden recounted an incident from 2016 when he nodded off behind the wheel while under the influence, resulting in a terrifying near-accident.

Though he claims to have overcome his drug addiction, the consequences of his past actions continue to haunt him. Facing a defamation lawsuit and federal charges related to tax and firearms, Biden's tumultuous journey shows no signs of slowing down.

Also read | Exposed! Hunter Biden's scandalous snapshots unveil shocking secrets

The leaked photos and files have thrust Hunter Biden back into the spotlight, leaving the public questioning his past and present choices. As the legal battles continue, the president's son finds himself navigating a treacherous road filled with the consequences of his actions and the relentless pursuit of the truth. Only time will tell how this wild ride will unfold.
Israeli forces killed eight Palestinians in a large-scale operation Monday in the occupied West Bank that the army labelled an "extensive counterterrorism effort," involving air strikes and hundreds of troops. Smoke billows following an Israeli airstrike in the occupied West Bank city of Jenin on July 3, 2023. The Israeli army said it had launched air strikes in the occupied West Bank city of Jenin in an "extensive counterterrorism effort" that the Palestinian health ministry said had killed three residents and injured at least 25 more. (Photo by Jaafar ASHTIYEH / AFP)

The raid, launched under Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu's hard-right government, targeted the northern city of Jenin and was the biggest in the West Bank for years, featuring armoured vehicles, army bulldozers and drones.

Since the start of the operation in the early hours of Monday about 3,000 residents living in the Jenin refugee camp had left their homes, deputy governor of Jenin, Kamal Abu al-Roub told AFP, adding arrangements were being made to house them in schools and other shelters in the city of Jenin.

Firefights and explosions rocked the city and adjacent refugee camp, a militant stronghold home to about 18,000 people, as Palestinians threw rocks at soldiers and smoke from blasts and burning barricades darkened the sky, an AFP correspondent said.

"There is bombing from the air and an invasion on the ground," said Mahmoud al-Saadi, director of the Palestinian Red Crescent in Jenin.

"Several houses and sites have been bombed... smoke is rising from everywhere."

Eight people were killed and 80 others wounded, 17 of them seriously, the Palestinian health ministry said -- exceeding the toll of seven dead in an Israeli raid in Jenin two weeks ago which saw the rare use of helicopter missile fire.

Netanyahu said in a statement that Israeli forces in "the nest of terrorists in Jenin" were "destroying command centres and seizing considerable weaponry".

The Palestinian foreign ministry called the escalation "an open war against the people of Jenin".

Army spokesman Daniel Hagari told reporters that Israeli troops did "not intend to stay in the camp", but "we are getting ready for the more severe situation" of prolonged fighting.

The army said soldiers and gunmen exchanged fire at a mosque in the Jenin camp and that weapons and explosives were later found in the building.

Jenin resident Badr Shagoul told AFP: "I saw them taking bulldozers into the camp, they were destroying buildings ... These were people's homes."

At a hospital morgue some bodies were covered in blankets and others were heavily bandaged, an AFP correspondent said, adding that the fighting continued into the late evening.

"In the last five years, this is the worst raid," nurse Qasem Benighader said, noting "many" patients with bullet wounds and injuries from explosives.

Israel had already stepped up operations in the northern West Bank, which has seen a recent spate of attacks on Israelis as well as Jewish settler violence targeting Palestinians.

Jenin camp resident Mahmoud Hawashin called the situation "catastrophic", and predicted that "if there is more Palestinian blood shed, there will be more Israeli blood shed."

UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres is "deeply concerned" about the violence, and called for the respect of international humanitarian law, a spokesman said in a statement.

- 'Escalating campaigns' -

The Palestinian militant group Islamic Jihad said "all options are open to strike the enemy in response to its aggression in Jenin".

The United States said ally Israel had a right to "defend its people against... terrorist groups" but called for protection of civilians.

The Arab League said it will convene an emergency meeting Tuesday to discuss "an Arab mobilisation to counter the Israeli attack on Jenin".

Neighbouring Jordan called the raid "a clear violation of international humanitarian law", while the United Arab Emirates urged "the immediate halt of repeated and escalating campaigns against the Palestinian people".

Earlier on Monday the army said it had struck a "joint operations centre" of a group called the Jenin Brigade, a weapons depot, an "observation and reconnaissance" site and a hideout for alleged attackers of Israeli targets.

Army spokesman Richard Hecht said troops were after "specific targets", adding the operation had no defined timeline.

Israeli-Palestinian violence has worsened since last year, and escalated further under the Netanyahu coalition government that includes extreme-right allies.

The Jenin area is nominally controlled by president Mahmud Abbas's Palestinian Authority, which has partial administrative control in the West Bank.

In a separate incident, Israeli fire killed a Palestinian youth near the West Bank city of Ramallah, the Palestinian health ministry said.

- Settlements -

Israel has occupied the West Bank since the Six-Day War of 1967.

Excluding annexed east Jerusalem, the territory is now home to around 490,000 Israelis in settlements considered illegal under international law.

The Palestinians, who seek their own independent state, want Israel to withdraw from all land it seized in 1967 and to dismantle all Jewish settlements.

Netanyahu, however, has pledged to "strengthen settlements" and expressed no interest in reviving peace talks, moribund since 2014.

After last month's Jenin raid, four Israelis were killed by two Palestinian gunmen -- who were shot dead -- near the West Bank settlement of Eli.

That same week, Israel said a drone strike killed three members of a "terrorist cell" in the West Bank.

At least 185 Palestinians, 25 Israelis, one Ukrainian and one Italian have been killed this year, according to an AFP tally compiled from official sources from both sides.

They include, on the Palestinian side, combatants and civilians, and on the Israeli side, mostly civilians and three members of the Arab minority.

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In Japan, a nation reputed for loyalty to companies and lifetime employment, people who job-hop are often viewed as quitters. And that's considered shameful. People may fear harassment after they quit. Some worry about the opinions of their families or friends. (File)

Enter taishoku daiko, or job-leaving agents. Dozens of such services have sprung up in the last several years to help people who simply want out.

Imagine a messy divorce, says Yoshihito Hasegawa, who heads Tokyo-based TRK, whose Guardian service last year advised 13,000 people on how to resign from their jobs with minimal hassles.

People often stick with jobs even when they're unhappy, feeling as if they are kamikaze sacrificing their lives for the greater good, he said, comparing his clients to pilots sent on suicide missions in the closing days of World War II.

It's the way things are done, the same way younger people are taught to honor older people, he said. Quitting would be a betrayal.

Founded in 2020, Guardian, a taishoku daiko service, has helped various people, mostly in their 20s and 30s, escape less painfully from jobs they want to quit. That includes people who worked in a Shinto shrine, a dentist's office and law firm to convenience store and restaurant staff.

Nearly half of Guardian's clients are women. Some work for a day or two and then discover promises of pay or work hours were false.

Guardian charges 29,800 yen (USD 208) for its service, which includes a three-month membership in a union that will represent an employee in what can quickly turn into a delicate and awkward negotiation process in Japan.

Generally, Guardian's clients have worked for the small and medium-sized businesses that employ most Japanese. Sometimes people working for major companies seek help. In many cases, bosses have a huge say over how things are run and sometimes simply refuse to agree to let a worker leave, especially since many places are shorthanded to begin with, given the Japan's chronic labour shortage.

Japanese law basically guarantees people the right to quit, but some employers used to an old-style hierarchy just can't accept that someone they have trained would want to walk away. Those tackling the quitting battle who were interviewed for this story used terms like fanatics, bullies and mini-Hitlers to describe such bosses.

Conformist workaholic pressures in Japanese culture are painfully heavy. Workers don't want to be seen as troublemakers, are reluctant to question authority and may be afraid to speak up. They may fear harassment after they quit. Some worry about the opinions of their families or friends.

Although most of Guardian's clients prefer to be anonymous, a young man who goes by the online name of Twichan sought help after he was criticized for his sales performance and became so depressed he thought about killing himself. With Guardian's help he was able to quit in 45 minutes.

Taku Yamazaki, who went to a different taishoku daiko, said his former employer was a subsidiary of a major IT vendor and he knew his departure would be complicated and time-consuming because he was doing well there.

I felt a certain amount of gratitude toward the place I was leaving, but I wanted to switch gears mentally and move forward as soon as possible, he said.

When people fill out taishoku daiko online forms, an automated reply comes within minutes, with a more personal reply promised within one working day.

Read Here: Japan companies asking employees to leave early on Premium Fridays for shopping

Lawyer Akiko Ozawa, whose law firm advises job-leavers although usually it represents companies, acknowledged it may be hard to believe people can't just pick up and leave.

But switching jobs is a major challenge in Japan that requires tremendous courage, said Ozawa, who has written a book on taishoku daiko. Given the shortage of workers in Japan, finding and training replacements is tough and bosses sometimes erupt in outrage when someone resigns.

As long as this Japanese mindset exists, the need for my job isn't going away, said Ozawa, who charges 65,000 yen (USD 450) for her service. If you are so unhappy that you're starting to feel ill, then you should make that choice to take control over your own life.

Another quitting service, Albatross, offers a MoMuri, or "can't stand it anymore" service, charges a 22,000 yen (USD 150) fee for full-time workers, and a bargain 12,000 yen (USD 80) fee for part-time workers.

Workplace problems have existed all along, but people now realize they can get help online, said its founder, Shinji Tanimoto.

They tell us they couldn't sleep at all before, but they can finally sleep all they want, he said of MoMuri's customers. Users thank us all the time. Some cry tears of joy.

One person wanted to quit working at a pet salon where workers were secretly kicking the animals. Another wanted to quit job in a dental office where the staff weren't using new gloves for each patient.

Many are women working as nurses or caretakers who are asked to stay until a replacement is found, but end up still working in the jobs a year later, he said.

Toshiyuki Niino founded Exit Inc., a frontrunner in the taishoku daiko sector, in 2018, after encountering a boss who constantly yelled at him. Another threatened to kill him.

He quit both jobs, and saw an opportunity.

I am proud I started this genre of work, he said.

Exit charges 20,000 yen (USD 140). Now that employers understand what taishoku daiko is, it can be over in 15 minutes, once resignation papers are on their way.

Niino, who says he never once expressed an opinion in school, blames the Japanese educational system for turning out obedient workers who are unable to assert themselves.

He's thinking about branching out to include mental health counseling, job referrals and perhaps an overseas expansion.

Niino laughs, recounting how one of his own employees used a rival agency to resign and then went on to set up his own taishoku daiko company.

It's best if you yourself can say you want to quit, he said.

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Four people were injured in a blast and a blaze in a central Tokyo building, the city's fire department said, with footage showing flames and smoke emerging from a second-floor business. A firefighter works at the site of an apparent explosion near Shimbashi station in Tokyo, Japan July 3, 2023. (Reuters)

The fire started in a building in a restaurant area of the bustling Shimbashi district around 3:20 pm (0620 GMT).

"The sound of an explosion was also heard. A total of 32 fire trucks are at the scene," a fire department spokesman told AFP, declining to be named.

"Four people are injured, three of whom are conscious," he said, adding no details were yet available on the fourth person.

Officials are investigating the cause of the fire.

"The sound was deafening. It was as if something huge was dropped from the top of the building -- it was an incredible bang," a male eyewitness told public broadcaster NHK.

"Pieces of paper were scattered all over at the nearby intersection. From the way they were scattered, I immediately knew it was an explosion," he said.
A mysterious, deadly brain ailment is affecting people in New Brunswick province of Canada and health authorities are concerned. According to a report in New York Post, the disorder leads to neurological symptoms like hallucinations, muscle wasting, vision problems, memory loss and abnormal movements. The first cases were detected in 2015. Image for representation(Getty Images)

Health officials are further concerned as the brain disorder has been affecting young people.

I am particularly concerned about the increase in numbers of young-onset and early-onset neurological syndrome, neurologist Dr. Alier Marrero wrote in a Jan. 30, 2023, letter to New Brunswicks chief medical officer and the chief federal public health officer.

Over the past year, I have been following 147 cases, between the ages of 17 and 80 years old. Out of those, 57 are early-onset cases and 41 are young-onset cases, read the letter from Marrero, according to the Toronto Star.

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Marrero and health officials suspect a herbicide called Glyphosate to be the likely reason behind the brain ailment. The herbicide is used in agriculture, the forestry industry and household weedkillers.

In his letter, Marrero highlighted that laboratory tests on patients revealed clear signs of exposure to glyphosate, as well as other compounds linked to herbicides.

A group of patients from New Brunswick have been requesting the federal and provincial government to conduct a full-scale investigation on the brain ailment.

We are formally demanding that federal Health Minister Jean-Yves Duclos unmuzzle Canadian scientists and direct the Public Health Agency of Canada to uphold the Canada Health Act and reinstate federal experts into the investigation, Steve Ellis, who is a patient advocate, told the Toronto Star.
It has been reported that OceanGate CEO Stockton Rush employed college-aged interns to design the electrical systems for the Titan submersible. Stockton, along with British billionaire Hamish Harding, French diver Paul Henry Nargeolet, and Pakistani businessman Shahzada Dawood and his son, Suleman, died after the vessel was destroyed in a catastrophic implosion. Several emails and messages between experts and Stockton Rush went viral after his death, revealing that he dismissed repeated warnings that the submersible was not safe AP/PTI(AP06_24_2023_000221B)(AP)

"The whole electrical system  that was our design, we implemented it, and it works," former intern Mark Walsh told Washington State University's college newspaper in February 2018. The college newspaper says Mark graduated in 2017 with a degree in electrical engineering and started out as an intern. He later joined OceanGate full-time as their electrical engineering lead. Mark further claimed that he had hired some more interns from his college and was looking to hire more to work at OceanGate. Marks LinkedIn profile says he worked at OceanGate for two years before leaving the company in 2019.

In a statement to The Everett Herald, Washington State University said on June 22 that they do not "have an alliance with OceanGate." "We are aware that some of our graduates have worked at OceanGate. To our knowledge, one graduate currently works there," the university added.

OceanGate was also hiring interns from Everett Community College's Ocean Research College Academy, it has been reported. The college, however, stopped offering internships with OceanGate in 2019. Ardi Kveven, the academy's executive director, said that "there was often a disconnect between the exploration community, which embraced pushing the envelope, and the more methodical scientific community."

Stockton reportedly acknowledged two years ago that the Titan submersibles design had "broken some rules." In a 2021 interview with Mexican YouTuber alanxelmundo, Stockton said he wished to be remembered as an innovator. "I think it was General MacArthur who said: 'You're remembered for the rules you break,'" Stockton said. He then said he acknowledges that he had broken some rules" with the Titan's manufacturing, however, he had confidence that the vessel was safe.

"I think I've broken them with logic and good engineering behind me. Carbon fiber and titanium? There's a rule you don't do that," he told alanxelmundo. "Well, I did."

The Titans hull was constructed with aerospace-grade carbon fibre, even though submersible hulls are typically made with solid metals like steel or titanium. Several emails and messages between experts and Stockton went viral after his death, revealing that he dismissed repeated warnings that the submersible was not safe.

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Russia's FSB security service said on Monday it had thwarted a Ukrainian assassination attempt on Sergei Aksyonov, the Russian-backed head of Crimea, arresting a Ukrainian agent before he was able to blow up Aksyonov's car. FILE PHOTO: Head of Crimea Sergei Aksyonov attends a ceremony as reservists drafted during partial mobilisation depart for military bases, in Sevastopol, Crimea September 27, 2022. REUTERS/Alexey Pavlishak/File Photo(REUTERS)

Read here: Ukraine claims to recapture 37 sq km from Russia last week

There was no immediate comment from Ukraine on the Russian allegation.

It came amid Russian media reports that security has been stepped up in Crimea, the Black Sea peninsula which Russia annexed from Ukraine in 2014, and that additional security checks are being made on people wanting to cross a bridge from Russia's southern Krasnodar region into Crimea.

The FSB said in a statement that it had arrested a Russian national recruited as an assassin by Ukraine's SBU intelligence agency who had undergone explosives, reconnaissance and sabotage training in Ukraine.

His plan, it said, had been to blow up Aksyonov's car, but he had been detained as he tried to retrieve an explosive device from a hiding place.

The FSB did not name the arrested man, who it said was in his mid-thirties. It said he had entered Crimea in June and that it was investigating him on suspicion of "attempting to commit a terrorist act" and "of illegally possessing explosives."

Aksyonov thanked the FSB for preventing what he called an attempt on the lives of the "Republic of Crimea's leadership" and said he was sure that the individuals who ordered the assassination would be found and punished.

Read here: Ukrainian writer wounded in missile attack on restaurant dies: PEN

Ukraine has pledged to retake full control of Crimea, the headquarters of Russia's Black Sea Fleet, as well as large areas of eastern and southern Ukraine that Russia has captured since launching its full-scale invasion last year.

Russia's Izvestia newspaper reported on Monday that a 13 km (8-mile)-long traffic jam had formed at the entrance in Russia's southern Krasnodar region to the bridge to Crimea. It said that Crimean transport officials had increased the number of checkpoints around the bridge on Sunday.
Russia's Defence Minister Sergei Shoigu on Monday praised his army's "loyalty" during an armed uprising last month by the Wagner military group that targeted the country's senior military leadership. Russian Defence Minister Sergei Shoigu. (via Reuters)

Read here: Russia claims to thwart Ukrainian plot to kill top official in Crimea

"The plans primarily failed because the personnel of the Armed Forces showed loyalty to their oath and military duty," he said in his first public comments since the insurrection.

He also said Russian military personnel serving in Ukraine had "courageously and selflessly continued to solve the tasks assigned to them," according to the comments carried by news agencies.

The head of the Wagner group Yevgeny Prigozhin was a firebrand critic of Shoigu prior to his effort to oust the defence minister and chief of staff Valery Gerasimov.

State television broadcasted images of Shoigu inspecting Russian troops in Ukraine just days after the armed mutiny late last month, footage observers said was filmed prior to the mutiny.

Read here: Ukraine claims to recapture 37 sq km from Russia last week

He later appeared in a meeting with Vladimir Putin, without making any public statements.

Several senior officials have not appeared in public since the insurrection including Gerasimov and general Sergei Surovikin, fuelling rumours of their possible ouster.
Ukraine said on Monday its forces had recaptured 37 square kilometres (14 square miles) from Russian forces last week. A HMMWV (Humvee) vehicle moves along a road near a the recently retaken village of Novodarivka, amid Russia's attack on Ukraine. (REUTERS)

Kyiv announced a highly-anticipated counteroffensive several weeks ago after it accumulated stockpiles of Western arms and ammunition.

"Over the past week ... the area liberated (in the east) was increased by nine square kilometres," Deputy Defence Minister Ganna Malyar said, adding that Ukrainian forces had wrested another 28 sqaure kilometres in the south.

Ukrainian forces are coming up against heavily entrenched Russian defensive positions both along the southern and eastern fronts.

Malyar said Ukrainian troops were fighting "fierce" battles with Russian forces around the eastern flashpoint city of Bakhmut.

In the south, Ukrainian forces had "successes" along the front towards the Melitopol and Berdyansk sectors.

Ukraine's military commander-in-chief Valery Zaluzhny expressed frustration in an interview published Friday at the slow deliveries of weaponry promised by the West.
Titan tragedy has taken the world by surprise. Just like its namesake, which the submersible was trying to explore, it sank in the deep blue sea. Killing all 5 explorers and leaving the world wondering what happened and how did the tragedy unfold. Debris from the Titan submersible, recovered from the ocean floor near the wreck of the Titanic, is unloaded from the ship Horizon Arctic at the Canadian Coast Guard pier in St. John's, Newfoundland, Wednesday, June 28, 2023. (Paul Daly/The Canadian Press via AP)(AP)

Now details have emerged as to how the passengers may have lived their last few minutes inside the submersible not knowing what the future holds. Alongside how the family coped with the final hours hoping to see their loved ones again.

The passengers on the Titanic sub were likely to spend their final moments watching through absolute darkness, having a probable glance at bioluminescent creatures called Halomonas titanicae, and listening to their favourite music.

As the entire trip progressed at a good rate, initially it was said the sub's light would be off to conserve battery, but their sight would be dependent and could catch sight of bioluminescent creatures in the deep waters.

The passengers were encouraged to add a list of their favourite songs to the submarine's music player, as the expedition would have taken a while.

Titan submersible passenger Shahzada Dawood's wife, Christine, in a recent interview to Times detailed out the unkown facts about her husband and son's last moments before they stepped onto the ill-fated Titan.

It was Christine who had discovered the Titanic's expedition advertisement after their trip to Greenland. Initially, she was supposed to accompany her husband on this voyage, but their trip was delayed due to the pandemic. As the years progressed, the 19-year-old son ended up taking the spot as he was old enough to do so.

Christine recalled how excited her husband was a night before the trip, "Im diving tomorrow! Im diving tomorrow!, she told quoted her husband Times in the interview.

Christine and her daughter saw Shahzada and Suleman go into the sea from the coast and it was after two hours they lost contact with the sub. When she started panicking she was told such glitches are bound to happen and if there is no contact within an hour the sub would drop its weights and return to the surface.

But it came back, only after several days, imploded. Without her son and her husband.
A former employee of OceanGate has said that the Titan submersible was not safe to dive, and compared it to a lemon, according to The New Yorker. The Titan was destroyed in a catastrophic implosion, killing OceanGate CEO Stockton Rush, British billionaire Hamish Harding, French diver Paul Henry Nargeolet, and Pakistani businessman Shahzada Dawood and his son, Suleman. The Titan submersible, operated by OceanGate Expeditions to explore the wreckage of the sunken SS Titanic off the coast of Newfoundland, dives in an undated photograph (OceanGate Expeditions/Handout via REUTERS) (via REUTERS)

David Lochridge was reportedly fired after he raised concerns over the companys testing protocol. He was the company's former director of marine operations and chief submersible pilot.

Deep sea exploration specialist Rob McCallum emailed David in 2018, asking him how Stockton was taking his departure. "Stockton must be gutted," Rob wrote. "I think you are going to [be] even more taken aback when I tell you what's happening.

David said he would be "taken aback when I tell you what's happening," and added that he was afraid Stockton would retaliate if he expressed his concerns over the submersible, due to his "influence and money." That sub is Not safe to dive," David said.

"Do you think the sub could be made safe to dive, or is it a complete lemon?" Rob asked. "You will get a lot of support from people in the industry. Everyone is watching and waiting and quietly shitting their pants."

"It's a lemon, David said. "Oh dear," Rob replied. "Oh dear, oh dear."

David had reportedly warned of quality control and safety problems related to the Titan submersible back in 2018. As per a lawsuit, he was wrongfully terminated after he said he found a lack of non-destructive testing performed on the hull of the Titan.

OceanGate gave Lochridge approximately 10 minutes to immediately clear out his desk and exit the premises, Davids attorneys said in the filing, according to New York Post. The paying passengers would not be aware, and would not be informed, of this experimental design, the lack of non-destructive testing of the hull, or that hazardous flammable materials were being used within the submersible.

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A Ukrainian writer and war crimes investigator wounded in a Russian missile strike on a restaurant last week has died, the freedom of expression group PEN said on Sunday. Emergency services work near to a restaurant RIA Pizza destroyed by a Russian attack in Kramatorsk, Ukraine,. (AP)

Victoria Amelina, 37, was wounded when a Russian missile destroyed the Ria Pizza restaurant in the eastern city of Kramatorsk on Tuesday, killing 12 people, including children, and wounding dozens.

"With our greatest pain, we inform you that Ukrainian writer Victoria Amelina passed away on July 1st in Mechnikov Hospital in Dnipro," PEN Ukraine said in a statement on its Facebook page.

Amelina had been in the city with a delegation of Colombian journalists and writers, PEN said.

She was hospitalised with "multiple skull fractures", according to a surgeon treating the wounded.

Her novel "Dom's Dream Kingdom" was published in 2017 and shortlisted for the UNESCO City of Literature Prize and the European Union Prize for Literature, according to PEN.

Her poems, prose and essays have been translated into English, German, Polish and other languages.

Since 2022 she had been working to document Russian war crimes since the invasion and advocate for accountability, PEN said.

Ria Pizza in Kramatorsk -- one of the largest cities still under Ukrainian control in the east -- was popular with soldiers, journalists and aid workers.

Amelina's death takes the toll of the strike to 13.
As the Fourth of July approaches, some US cities are opting for a change in their traditional fireworks celebrations due to fire threats and environmental concerns. Salt Lake City, Utah, recently held its first-ever drone light show as a safer alternative. Mayor Erin Mendenhall highlighted the need to minimize fire danger and reduce air pollution caused by pyrotechnics. With Utah experiencing a significant number of wildfires each year, the decision to forego fireworks was a precautionary measure. An Independence Day fireworks display is seen during the annual Independence Day holiday celebration at Barnes Park in Monterey Park, California, on July 1, 2023, where 11 people were killed in a Mass Shooting six months ago during Lunar New Year celebrations. Monterey Park is just one of many Southern California cities who celebrate July 4 with fireworks a few days before the actual date, one reason being there are not enough Sheriff's deputies to provide security and work on July 4.(AFP)

Similarly, the City of Boulder in Colorado, also facing wildfire risks, will feature its inaugural nighttime drone show. The city officials cited increased fire danger due to climate change as a key factor in their decision. The difficulties in procuring fireworks and the environmental impacts further motivated the move toward drone displays. Other communities in California, including Lake Tahoe, La Jolla, and Ocean Beach, have also chosen to embrace the synchronized drone events for their Independence Day celebrations.

Dan Kingdom, the owner of WK Real Estate in Boulder, explained that the decision was prompted by environmental concerns and challenges in sourcing fireworks. The Marshall Fire that affected their community played a role in the discussion. Ultimately, the absence of a reliable fireworks supplier and the desire for a more straightforward and eco-friendly option led to the choice of drones.

In San Diego County, La Jolla, and Ocean Beach are experimenting with drone shows for the first time. Jeff Stein, the owner of California-based Drone Studios, emphasized the advantages of drones over fireworks. Drones offer a quiet and reusable alternative, mitigating issues like smoke, debris, and noise pollution, which can cause distress to individuals with PTSD and pets. The drone displays in La Jolla will utilize pixels to simulate fireworks, create aerial animations, and tell stories through motion graphics.

These drone light shows are an innovative response to the growing concerns surrounding fire risks and the environmental impact associated with traditional fireworks. By embracing this new technology, cities aim to provide dazzling visual spectacles while prioritizing safety, air quality, and sustainability. As more communities explore the possibilities of drone shows, it may mark a significant shift in the way we celebrate national holidays and special occasions.
The US is recommending Americans reconsider travelling to China because of arbitrary law enforcement, exit bans and the risk of wrongful detentions. China also recently passed a broadly written counterespionage law that has sent a chill through the foreign business community, with offices being raided, as well as a law to sanction foreign critics. (File)

No specific cases were cited, but the advisory comes after a 78-year-old US citizen was sentenced to life in prison on spying charges in May.

It also follows the passage last week of a sweeping Foreign Relations Law that threatens countermeasures against those seen as harming China interests.

China also recently passed a broadly written counterespionage law that has sent a chill through the foreign business community, with offices being raided, as well as a law to sanction foreign critics.

The People's Republic of China (PRC) government arbitrarily enforces local laws, including issuing exit bans on U.S. citizens and citizens of other countries, without fair and transparent process under the law, the U.S. advisory said.

US citizens travelling or residing in the PRC may be detained without access to US consular services or information about their alleged crime. it said.

PRC authorities appear to have broad discretion to deem a wide range of documents, data, statistics, or materials as state secrets and to detain and prosecute foreign nationals for alleged espionage, the advisory said.

It listed a wide range of potential offenses from taking part in demonstrations to sending electronic messages critical of Chinese policies or even simply conducting research into areas deemed sensitive.

Exit bans could be used to compel individuals to participate in Chinese government investigations, pressure family members to return from abroad, resolve civil disputes in favor of Chinese citizens and gain bargaining leverage over foreign governments, the advisory said.

Similar advisories were issued for the semi-autonomous Chinese regions of Hong Kong and Macao. They was dated Friday and emailed to journalists on Monday.

The US has issued similar advisories to its citizens in past, but those in recent years had mainly warned of the dangers of being caught in strict and lengthy lockdowns while China closed its borders for three years under its draconian "zero-COVID" policy.

China generally responds angrily to what it considers U.S. efforts to impugn its authoritarian Communist Party-led system. It has issued its own travel advisories concerning the U.S., warning of the dangers of crime, anti-Asian discrimination and the high cost of emergency medical assistance.

Details of the accusations against the accused spy John Shing-Wan Leung are not available, given China's authoritarian political system and the ruling Communist Party's absolute control over legal matters. Leung, who also holds permanent residency in Hong Kong, was detained in the southeastern city of Suzhou on April 15, 2021  a time when China had closed its borders and tightly restricted movement of people domestically to control the spread of COVID-19.

Read Here | China has been preparing for war against USA: 2024 Republican presidential candidate Nikki Haley rings alarm bells

The warnings come as U.S.-China relations are at their lowest in years, over trade, technology, Taiwan and human rights, although the sides are taking some steps to improve the situation. U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken made a long-delayed visit to Beijing last week and Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen is making a much-anticipated trip to Beijing this week. China also recently appointed a new ambassador to Washington, who presented his credentials in a meeting with President Joe Biden at the White House.

Along with several Americans, Two Chinese-Australians, Cheng Lei, who formerly worked for China's state broadcaster, and writer Yang Jun, have been held since 2020 and 2019 respectively without word on their sentencing.

Perhaps the most notorious case of arbitrary detention involved two Canadians, Michael Kovrig and Michael Spavor, who were detained in China in 2018, shortly after Canada arrested Meng Wanzhou, Huawei Technologies' chief financial officer and the daughter of the tech powerhouse's founder, on a US extradition request.

They were charged for national security crimes that were never explained and released three years later after the US settled fraud charges against Meng. Many countries labeled China's action hostage politics.

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United States Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen will travel to Beijing Thursday as part of an ongoing Biden administration effort to thaw U.S.-China relations, a senior Treasury official said Sunday. US Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen is set to visit Beijing this week, the United States confirmed July 2, 2023, marking the second trip by a cabinet official to China since ties deteriorated earlier this year. (AFP)

Yellen, who has called the notion of an economic decoupling from China disastrous, has frequently said in the past year that she would like to visit China. She says the two nations "can and need to find a way to live together in spite of their strained relations over geopolitics and economic development. Yellen will meet this week with Chinese officials, U.S. companies doing business in China and with Chinese people and will stay through July 9, said the official, who spoke on condition of anonymity to discuss details of the trip.

The goal of her visit is to deepen and increase the frequency of communication between U.S. and China, the official said. While there are clear areas of common interest where Yellen can make progress, the official said, there are also significant disagreements that will not be resolved through a single trip.

The most recent flareup came after President Joe Biden referred to Chinese President Xi Jinping as a "dictator " during a campaign fundraiser earlier in June. The Chinese protested loudly, but Biden later said his blunt statements regarding China are just not something Im going to change very much.

Read Here | China has been preparing for war against USA: 2024 Republican presidential candidate Nikki Haley rings alarm bells

The U.S. president's statements have come after tensions over a Chinese surveillance balloon that the U.S. government shot down, U.S.-led restrictions on China's access to advanced computer chips and ongoing tensions about the status and security of Taiwan. Yet in Biden's dictator comments during a California fundraiser, the president told his audience don't worry about China as the U.S. has taken steps to compete with its financial and technological ambitions.

Yellen's trip would follow Secretary of State Antony Blinken's two-day stop in Beijing in June, the highest-level meetings in China in the past five years. Blinken met with Xi and the two agreed to stabilize deteriorated U.S.-China ties. However, better communications between their militaries could not be agreed upon. Treasury officials didn't specify which officials she'd meet with, but said it would not be Xi.

The treasury secretary's visit will be more focused on stabilizing the global economy and challenging China's support of Russia in its ongoing land invasion of Ukraine. China has developed an uncomfortable closeness with the Kremlin  claiming neutrality in the war, but holding joint military drills and frequent state visits with Russian officials.

Still, U.S. officials hold out hope that U.S-China relations will not further deteriorate.

Yellen met with her previous Chinese counterpart, Vice Premier Liu He, in January in Switzerland and made a big speech at Johns Hopkins University in April calling for  cooperation on the urgent global challenges of our day  between the two countries for the sake of maintaining global stability, while supporting economic restrictions on China to advance U.S national security interests.

New developments show glimmers of what could spark a renewed relationship.

At a Paris summit on global finance last week, a deal was brokered that restructured Zambia's debt with its creditors, which include China  Zambias biggest creditor holding $4.1 billion of a total $6.3 billion debt load. The deal may provide a roadmap for how China will handle restructuring deals with other nations in debt distress, and shows the Asian superpower is willing to cooperate in negotiations with other Group of 20 nations.

I am pleased that the international community has come together to support Zambia in its time of need, Yellen said in a statement last week.

However, there are plenty of other tensions impacting the superpowers' relationship. The discovery of a Chinese surveillance balloon traversing over sensitive areas of the U.S. in February put a damper on her previous travel plans, and further strained relations.

U.S. lawmakers earlier this year grilled TikTok CEO Shou Zi Chew about data security and the social media firm's ties to China, with some pushing a ban on the app, popular among American youths.

And last October, the Biden administration imposed export controls to limit Chinas ability to access advanced chips, which it says can be used to make weapons, commit human rights abuses and improve the speed and accuracy of China's military logistics.

Yellen's trip also comes as Biden considers issuing an executive order that would tighten rules on some overseas investments by U.S. companies in an effort to limit Chinas ability to acquire technologies that could improve its military prowess.

Still, trade entwines the U.S. and Chinese economies. And despite strong speeches about the need to rethink the relationship, Yellen said in her Johns Hopkins address that a full separation of our economies would be disastrous for both countries. It would be destabilizing for the rest of the world. Rather, we know that the health of the Chinese and U.S. economies is closely linked.

China shipped more than $536 billion worth of goods to the U.S. last year. By contrast, the U.S. exported $154 billion in goods to China, according to the Census Bureau.
Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelensky has labelled Vladimir Putin's response to the Wagner Group mutiny as weak, adding that the Russian president is losing control of his own people.



Zelensky, under whom the Ukrainian forces have been resisting the Russian invasion for more than a year, told CNN in an interview Putin does not control the situation in the regions as Wagner moved deep into Russia. He remarked that the vertical of power' the Russian leader had is crumbling down.



Social media was filled with videos of Russian crowd cheering the Wagner mutineers during the 24-hour long rebellion. In a video verified by CNN, the crowd cheered at Wagner chief Yevgeny Prigozhin's vehicle as it departed Rostov-on-Don on June 24.



According to Zelensky, the Ukrainian intelligence reports showed that Kremlin measured support for Prigozhin, claiming that half of the country supported the private mercenary army. Ukraine's President Volodymyr Zelensky(AFP)

Moscow was able to avert a major embarrassment as Prigozhin called off the mutiny just hundred kilometres before the Russian capital. In a video message posted days after the rebellion, the Wagner boss clarified that the mutineers did not want to overthrow the Russian leadership.

The Wagner mutiny has raised questions on Putin's leadership and his control over the state of affairs in Russia. On Monday, Kremlin said that all government agencies including intelligence services were working as they should.



Kremlin spokesperson Dmitry Peskov refused to comment when asked why the top intelligence agency had not headed the mutiny off before it started.

Ukraine war

Zelensky's remarks come in wake of Ukraine's slow efforts to recapture territory occupied by the Russian forces. Recently, Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) boss Bill Burns had visited Kyiv and met the Ukrainian president along with intelligence officials.

However, Zelensky maintained that his communication with the CIA chief should be behind the scenes.

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Popular influencer Jackie Miller James, who was placed in a medically induced coma while being treated for an aneurysm, woke up on Sunday, June 2, and was reunited with her baby. This comes over a month after the health and beauty influencer suffered an aneurysm. She was 39 weeks pregnant with her first child at the time. Jackie Miller James, who was placed in a medically induced coma while being treated for an aneurysm, woke up on Sunday, June 2 (jaxandrose/Instagram)

We are beyond thrilled to share that your loving prayers for Jackie have been working! a post on Jackies Instagram reads. Jackie is awake and was recently transferred to one of the best neurological rehabilitation hospitals in the country. The doctors have been pleased upon her latest tests, numbers, and evaluations, noting that Jackie is performing above expectations at this stage of her recovery and is progressing more with every passing day. The family also said that while Jackie is making wonderful strides, she has an incredibly long road to recovery ahead of her.

When Jackies child was delivered by C-Section, she was in a medically induced coma. A heartbreaking photo posted to her GoFundMe shows the baby placed in her arms at the time. The baby was then hospitalised in a neonatal intensive care unit for 12 days.

Jackie, 35, is married to Austin James. Jackie & Austins baby girl is a constant source of light for the entire family and continues to grow into a happy, healthy, and animated little angel, the familys update continues. Jackie has also recently been reunited with her baby, and spends a great deal of each day with her entire family while in the hospital.

Who is Jackie Miller James?

Jackie worked for a plastic surgeon in Beverly Hills for six years before becoming a full-time influencer. She previously also worked as a backup dancer for different artists.

After Jackie experienced an aneurysm rupture that led to severe brain bleeding, Austin rushed her to the hospital. She underwent simultaneous emergency C-section and brain surgeries.

A GoFundMe organised by Jackie says, If Jackie and the baby arrived a few minutes later at the hospital, we likely would have lost both of them. But instead, Jackie is continuing to fight for her life each day and we are optimistic she can beat the odds by surrounding her with the right specialists and methods of therapy. While the road will be long, we are committed to bringing Jackie home to her daughter and husband.

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Hyatt Place Debuts in Linyi's Historic Commercial Center with 109-room Hotel

Hyatt Place Linyi People's Square, the first Hyatt Place hotel in Linyi, is officially open, expanding the Hyatt Place brand's global footprint in markets that matter most to guests and World of Hyatt members. The new hotel features the intuitive design, casual atmosphere, and practical amenities that are characteristic of the Hyatt Place brand, including free Wi-Fi and a variety of local and international food offerings. The hotel is owned by a joint venture led by Linyi Xuan Yue Hotel Co., Ltd. and is operated by Minyoun Hospitality.

Hyatt Place hotels seamlessly blend contemporary design, flexible spaces, and convenience to create an easy to navigate experience for today's dynamic traveler. Nestled in the heart of Linyi's Lanshan District, Hyatt Place Linyi People's Square boasts an enviable position, neighboring the city's bustling commercial hub, 25 minutes from Linyi Qiyang Airport and a short drive from Linyi Railway Station.

"As Linyi continues to grow and thrive economically, we are excited to add to the momentum by welcoming the first Hyatt Place hotel to Linyi," said General Manager Cliff Yue. "With our thoughtfully designed social spaces and contemporary guestrooms complete with separate work and rest areas, our guests can effortlessly fulfill their needs while on the go."

Hyatt Place Linyi People's Square offers:

109 spacious guestrooms with separate spaces to sleep, work and play, as well as a Cozy Corner sofa-sleeper

with separate spaces to sleep, work and play, as well as a Cozy Corner sofa-sleeper The Kitchen serves freshly prepared meals including Chinese and Western-style breakfasts

serves freshly prepared meals including Chinese and Western-style breakfasts The Market serves freshly prepared grab-and-go options anytime, day or night

serves freshly prepared grab-and-go options anytime, day or night The Bar features specialty coffees and premium beers, as well as wine and cocktails

features specialty coffees and premium beers, as well as wine and cocktails Necessities program for forgotten items that guests can buy, borrow or enjoy for free

program for forgotten items that guests can buy, borrow or enjoy for free Free Wi-Fi throughout hotel and guestrooms

throughout hotel and guestrooms Event Spaces that offer 120 square feet of flexible, high-tech meeting/function space

that offer 120 square feet of flexible, high-tech meeting/function space Fitness Center featuring cardio equipment with LCD touchscreens

"Linyi is a vibrant city with remarkable sites and attractions, and Hyatt Place Linyi People's Square is situated in the heart of it all," said Tengjiao Ma, investor of Linyi Xuan Yue Hotel Co., Ltd. "We look forward to welcoming our esteemed guests to our hotel, poised to offer thoughtful service, convenience and seamless access to the surrounding area."

Hotel website
Scandic Go is the company's new hotel brand in the fast-growing economy segment. The first Scandic Go hotel will open on Upplandsgatan in Stockholm in September, and Scandic has now signed a lease agreement for another Scandic Go, this time a centrally located hotel with 221 rooms at Fridhemsplan on the island of Kungsholmen in Stockholm. The plan is to open the hotel toward the end of the summer of 2024 following a renovation. Scandic signed the lease agreement with the company's largest landlord, Pandox.

Fridhemsplan is a major gateway to central Stockholm. The residential buildings, restaurants, bars, stores and vast green spaces in the area create a vibrant and lively environment that attracts leisure and business travelers alike.

A good price, inviting design, smooth self-service and breakfast and hot food around the clock are key elements of the new Scandic Go brand. The hotel rooms at Scandic Go have a youthful design that features smart solutions and clever storage facilities - features that are in demand by a new target group of leisure travelers who want to take advantage of the city's leisure and experience offerings rather than focusing on the hotel stay itself.

During the renovation, Pandox will carry out a technical upgrade of the property. For Scandic, sustainability is a central part of operating and the hotel will be certified according to the Nordic Swan Ecolabel, the official ecolabel of the Nordic countries, after opening.
InterContinental Dominica Cabrits Resort & Spa 's executive team is pleased to announce the appointment of Eva Ruiz as the resort's new Cluster Director of Sales & Marketing. With over a decade of experience in business development, strategic leadership, and consulting within the hospitality industry, Ruiz brings a dynamic, results-driven approach and bilingual expertise to lead the sales and marketing team at the resort.

"Eva embodies the essence of proactive leadership and possesses an uncanny ability to unravel even the most intricate challenges, effortlessly conjuring ingenious solutions, assembling synergistic teams, and cultivating transformative alliances," said David Pressler, Commercial Director for IHG Hotels & Resorts for Mexico, Latin America & Caribbean. "Her multidisciplinary approach and extensive knowledge of the InterContinental brand are invaluable assets, and we are confident in celebrating many successes together."

Ruiz's journey began in her hometown, where she contributed her expertise to the renowned InterContinental Maracaibo and Crowne Plaza Maruma Maracaibo hotels. Her exceptional accomplishments and the prestige of these establishments presented her with an exciting opportunity to expand her career at the internationally acclaimed Holiday Inn Resort Aruba. There, she skillfully targeted the leisure market on a global scale, solidifying her competence and efficiency.

Recognizing Ruiz's exceptional skills, IHG entrusted her with representing luxury brands as a Task Force for properties in iconic travel destinations such as InterContinental Cartagena and Intercontinental Puerto Rico. Throughout her professional journey, she has consistently demonstrated her ability to lead highly productive teams, providing them with the necessary tools and fostering an environment for personal growth, which has undoubtedly contributed to the success of the brands.

Ruiz is not only a seasoned executive but also a lifelong learner. After graduating from the University of Zulia in Venezuela, she pursued certifications in Revenue Management, Strategic Marketing, Leadership, and more, continually amplifying her expertise.

When she's not focused on her professional pursuits, Ruiz finds delight in cherishing moments with her family and embracing diverse cultures through her global travels.
Perhaps surprisingly, the smiles that greet you upon arrival at a hotel might not be genuine. A positive, welcoming demeanour is part of the job description for housekeeping, front desk, and restaurant workers, whose smiles, moods, and emotions are distinguishing features of the hospitality sector. But when frontline employees have to fake it, what strategies do they use? Eye-opening new work from researchers Dr Deniz Kucukusta and Ms Yoo Jin Lim of the School of Hotel and Tourism Management (SHTM) at The Hong Kong Polytechnic University has revealed more about the emotional labour strategies adopted by frontline workers to counter the emotional dissonance experienced when their expressed and felt emotions do not match. Their novel findings show that suppressing or hiding internal feelings can be detrimental to employees and reduce their intention to remain their role, which has clear managerial and practical implications.

Frontline employees who interact directly with customers are also delivering a product. To be sure, customer interaction, satisfaction, and loyalty, hinge on frontline employees ability to display organisationally accepted positive emotions, which is a form of emotional labour. Emotional labour takes the form of displaying fake or genuine feelings toward customers, explain the authors. These emotional products are designed to enhance customers emotions and moods during service encounters. Yet for employees, excessive emotional labour can lead to burnout, poor job performance, low job satisfaction, and a strong intention to leave ones job.

Putting on a positive, welcoming demeanour becomes far more taxing  and the emotional labour more intense  when employees authentic feelings do not match the emotions they display. This is known as emotional dissonance, which can lead to emotional exhaustion and burnout further down the line. It is therefore a major priority to understand the strategies used to cope with emotional dissonance. Namely, the researchers investigated the adoption of surface acting, deep acting and genuine acting strategies by frontline hotel workers in Hong Kong.

Surface acting involves simply hiding internal feelings and displaying fake emotions during customer interactions, which means that felt emotional dissonance remains. Deep acting occurs when employees actually suppress and modify their internal feelings to align with the moods required of them. This reduces emotional dissonance but might require more emotional labour. Finally, the emotional strategy of genuine acting refers to the display of sincere and actual feelings. Because it does not involve fake emotions, employees tend not to experience emotive dissonance in their work role when engaged in genuine acting, explain the researchers.

The modern generational groups are known as Baby Boomers (19461961), Generation X (19651981), and Generation Y, or Millennials (from 1981). The personalities, values, beliefs and even work habits of each generation have been shaped by environmental, political and economic realities, which means that their adoption of emotional labour strategies might also differ. Given that most of the working world comprises members of Generation X and Generation Y, the researchers focused on these two groups. They made specific predictions regarding preferred emotional labour styles based on the documented characteristics of each generation. By understanding how employees of different generations with different values react to and cope with emotive dissonance, say the researchers, managers will be able to offer the right mitigation solutions to the right employees.

Whilst Generation X and Generation Y have been found to share work values and to similarly relish personal growth opportunities, Generation Y members have been characterised as having comparatively high self-esteem and low work engagement. For this reason, the authors hypothesised that Generation Y members have a higher tendency to practice surface acting and deep acting, and that Generation X employees are experienced workers, so are more likely to practice deep acting and genuine acting. If so, they expected emotional dissonance and its effects to be stronger among members of Generation Y than Generation X.

The decision to engage in surface acting, deep acting or genuine acting may also depend on a variety of demographic characteristics. For example, women have been found to more successfully communicate happiness and suppress anger in the workplace than men, which corresponds to deep acting. Older employees are more likely to control their emotions and display them appropriately, using genuine acting rather than surface acting, add the authors. Therefore, the researchers also considered how frontline workers gender, years of work experience, monthly salary and the hotel service standards they are expected to uphold affect their use of surface acting, deep acting and genuine acting.

Adopting a data-driven approach, the authors asked frontline employees from seven hotels in Hong Kong to complete a two-part questionnaire. Of the 192 participants, 58.3% belonged to Generation Y and 41.7% to Generation X. The first part of the questionnaire collected demographic information, such as age, gender, and monthly salary. The second part of the questionnaire collected information on the respondents use of surface acting, genuine acting and deep acting, as well as their sense of emotional dissonance. Using these data, the researchers were able to study the preferred or default emotional labour states adopted by two different generational groups working in three-, four-, and five- star hotels.

For both generations, frontline employees who adopted surface acting had a lower intention to stay in their job. This suggests that surface acting is more labour-intensive and leads to more emotional dissonance and internal conflict. In contrast, genuine acting (expressing sincere feelings about ones role) increased employees intention to remain with the organisation. The authors therefore recommend that employees adopt genuine acting over surface and deep acting to reduce emotional burnout and turnover rate. The most effective acting state, they say, is to act with heartfelt and sincere emotions.

As predicted, Generation X employees tended to express genuine emotions more than did Generation Y employees, who more often engaged in surface acting and deep acting. This suggests that Generation Y members may experience higher levels of emotional burnout and intention to leave their job, say the researchers. However, Generation X members still reported feeling emotional dissonance. In addition, the use of genuine acting versus surface acting was affected by years of work experience  perhaps corresponding to age  and gender.

To minimise the effects of emotional labour, the researchers suggest that managers should help employees to understand the concept of emotional intelligence and encourage them to discuss their feelings. They recommend providing employees with tailored emotional intelligence training according to generational differences in the use of emotional labour states. This might increase involvement at work, reduce emotional burnout and enhance job satisfaction.

This innovative research acknowledges the burden commonly felt by frontline hotel employees, whose warm, positive manner during customer interactions can come at the expense of their own mental and physical resources. Most strikingly, this research offers hotel managers generation-based information that could be used to improve working conditions, turnover and human resource policies. By understanding how employees of different generations with different values react to and cope with emotive dissonance, managers will be able to offer the right mitigation solutions to the right employees, conclude the authors.

Whilst steps can be taken by managers to reduce the negative impacts of internal conflicts in their employees and care for their existing workforce, the most effective way to increase employees intention to stay is that they express their own, authentic feelings. This underlines the importance of selecting the right employees for the hospitality industry, say the researchers. These results could therefore also prove extremely useful for hotel management in the process of recruiting new frontline hotel staff.

Kucukusta, Deniz and Lim, Yoo Jin (2022). Emotional Labor of Frontline Employees: Generational Differences and Intention to Stay. Journal of China Tourism Research, Vol. 18, Issue 3, 472-494.

Pauline Ngan

Marketing Manager

+852 3400 2634

Hong Kong Poly
In today's dynamic and fast-paced world, effective leadership is crucial for achieving success in any organization. Leadership styles have evolved over time, and one approach that stands out is the concept of delegating authority. Craig Groeschel, a renowned leadership expert, once stated, "If you delegate tasks, you create followers. If you delegate authority, you create leaders." This quote encapsulates the transformative power of empowering individuals with authority. In this article, we will explore the profound impact of delegating authority on fostering leadership development and organizational growth.

Understanding Delegating Tasks vs. Delegating Authority

Delegating tasks and delegating authority are two distinct approaches to managing work within a team or organization. Delegating tasks involves assigning specific responsibilities to individuals, granting them the power to execute those tasks but keeping decision-making authority centralized. On the other hand, delegating authority involves empowering individuals with decision-making power and autonomy to accomplish their assigned tasks.

1. Encouraging Ownership and Accountability

When authority is delegated, individuals are not just responsible for executing tasks but also for making decisions related to their assigned responsibilities. This increased level of autonomy and decision-making power fosters a sense of ownership and accountability. Individuals feel empowered to take ownership of their work and make informed decisions to achieve desired outcomes. This, in turn, cultivates a culture of responsibility and self-reliance, ultimately driving personal and organizational growth.

2. Developing Problem-Solving Skills

Delegating authority requires leaders to trust their team members and allow them to tackle challenges independently. By empowering individuals to make decisions, leaders provide them with opportunities to develop their problem-solving skills. When faced with obstacles or uncertainties, individuals are compelled to analyze situations, evaluate potential solutions, and make informed choices. Through this process, they become adept at critical thinking and gain valuable experience in navigating complex scenarios.

3. Nurturing Leadership Potential

Leadership is not limited to a select few; it can be developed and nurtured within any individual. Delegating authority creates an environment that fosters leadership potential. By granting decision-making power, leaders give individuals the opportunity to demonstrate their leadership capabilities. When individuals are trusted with authority, they are motivated to step up, take initiative, and guide others toward success. This enables the emergence of new leaders and promotes a culture of leadership development within the organization.

4. Promoting Innovation and Creativity

Delegating authority encourages individuals to think outside the box, leading to increased innovation and creativity. When individuals are empowered to make decisions, they have the freedom to explore new approaches and experiment with alternative solutions. This autonomy fosters a sense of ownership in the outcomes and inspires individuals to push boundaries, challenge the status quo, and contribute fresh perspectives. As a result, organizations benefit from a more innovative and adaptable workforce.

5. Building Trust and Collaboration

Delegating authority is built on a foundation of trust. When leaders delegate authority, they demonstrate confidence in their team members' abilities and judgment. This act of trust enhances the relationship between leaders and their subordinates, fostering a culture of mutual respect and collaboration. Trust empowers individuals to take risks, voice their opinions, and contribute to the collective success of the organization. In turn, leaders gain a deeper understanding of their team members' strengths, which enables them to assign tasks and responsibilities more effectively.

6. Enhancing Organizational Agility

In the dynamic world of business today, it is crucial for organizations to adapt swiftly and stay competitive. A key factor in achieving organizational agility is the effective delegation of authority. When individuals are empowered, they can readily adjust to changing situations, make well-informed choices, and take prompt actions without the need for hierarchical authorizations. This flexibility enables organizations to swiftly address challenges, capitalize on opportunities, and sustain a competitive advantage in the marketplace.

Conclusion

Craig Groeschel's quote, "If you delegate tasks, you create followers. If you delegate authority, you create leaders," encapsulates the essence of effective leadership. Delegating authority empowers individuals, fostering a culture of ownership, accountability, and leadership development. It promotes problem-solving skills, encourages innovation, and builds trust and collaboration. By delegating authority, leaders enable their teams to thrive, enhance organizational agility, and pave the way for sustained success.

As organizations navigate the complexities of the modern world, embracing a leadership style that prioritizes delegating authority is essential. By empowering individuals with decision-making power, organizations can unlock their full potential and cultivate a culture of leadership, innovation, and growth.

Resources
Scandic to Open Second Scandic Go Hotel 2024 in Downtown Stockholm

Scandic Go is the companys new hotel brand in the fast-growing economy segment. The first Scandic Go hotel will open on Upplandsgatan in Stockholm in September, and Scandic has now signed a lease agreement for another Scandic Go, this time a centrally located hotel with 221 rooms at Fridhemsplan on the island of Kungsholmen in Stockholm. The plan is to open the hotel toward the end of the summer of 2024 following a renovation. Scandic signed the lease agreement with the companys largest landlord, Pandox.

Fridhemsplan is a major gateway to central Stockholm. The residential buildings, restaurants, bars, stores and vast green spaces in the area create a vibrant and lively environment that attracts leisure and business travelers alike.

- We are extremely happy to be opening our first hotel on Kungsholmen. With compact hotel rooms and space-efficient shared spaces, the property and hotel configuration are very much aligned with our new Scandic Go concept and our aim to continue developing in the fast-growing economy segment. By expanding Scandic Go, we will continue to strengthen our hotel and product offering in Stockholm while ramping up our efforts to assume a leading role and develop the segment in the Nordic region, says Jens Mathiesen, President & CEO of Scandic Hotels Group.

A good price, inviting design, smooth self-service and breakfast and hot food around the clock are key elements of the new Scandic Go brand. The hotel rooms at Scandic Go have a youthful design that features smart solutions and clever storage facilities  features that are in demand by a new target group of leisure travelers who want to take advantage of the citys leisure and experience offerings rather than focusing on the hotel stay itself.

- Its exciting for Pandox to be part of Scandics expansion in the economy segment with this new attractive lease in Stockholm. We acquired the hotel property in February this year with a clear vision for how it could be developed. The agreement with Scandic demonstrates that we have a unique business model where, together with strong partners, we can create value in both hotel operations and hotel properties, says Liia Nou, CEO of Pandox.

During the renovation, Pandox will carry out a technical upgrade of the property. For Scandic, sustainability is a central part of operating and the hotel will be certified according to the Nordic Swan Ecolabel, the official ecolabel of the Nordic countries, after opening.


UNWTO Regional Commission for the Americas

UNWTO further strengthened its cooperation with the Development Bank of Latin America and the Caribbean as it brought together public and private sector leaders to advance investments in the tourism sector.

Against the backdrop of the meeting of its 68th Regional Commission for the Americas in Quito, Ecuador, UNWTO hosted the Seminar on Sustainable Investments to explore the main challenges and opportunities around this topic in the region.

Tourism Investments: A defining priority

The latest data from UNWTO shows that tourism in the Americas is steadily recovering, with international arrivals reaching 86% of 2019 levels by the end of the first quarter of this year. Moreover, foreign direct investment (FDI) in the tourism sector, which had experienced a decline, is now showing signs of revitalization:

Registered projects investment projects rose by 185% between 2022 2021. These projects accounted for a total value of 192.6 billion USD, reflecting rising investor confidence in the region's potential.

Additionally, in 2021, Foreign Direct Investment (FDI) surged to US$134 billion, a 56% year-on-year increase, reclaiming a substantial portion of the ground lost in 2020.

To realize the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) in the Americas, attracting investments that actively support their achievement is of utmost importance. It is crucial to establish a robust multilateral regulatory framework that fosters sustainable investments, further propelling the region's progress towards the SDGs.

Quito Seminar Provides High-Level Platform

The Seminar on Sustainable Investments: A Strategy towards Competitiveness invited tourism ministers, traditional and non-traditional investors, multilateral funds, regional economic communities, tourism technology start-ups and the media to share good practices and knowledge. Highlighting the level of high-level political support for UNWTOs work in this area, the Seminar counted on the presence of Ministers of Tourism of Ecuador, Paraguay, Peru and Puerto Rico and Vice Minister of the Dominican Republic. The focus was on:

Encouraging strategic frameworks that facilitate the climate of doing business in the region, including measures to safeguard, attract and promote tourism investment projects to accelerate economic recovery and build resilience.

Fostering cooperation for the application of sustainable investment frameworks for the promotion of tourism investments and job creation, including through the promotion of incentives focused on innovative financing instruments.

Promoting regional cooperation for streamlining sustainable tourism investment mechanisms, through economic recovery and diversification instruments with multiplier effects.

Contributing to the discussions were high-level representatives the Development Bank of Latin American and the Caribbean (CAF), fDi Intelligence of the Financial Times, IDB - Inter-American Development Bank and, representing investors and the private sector, Hotel Jama Campay, WAYRA (Telefonica), IMPAQTO, UnTours, Maraey, Metropolitan Touring, GHL Hoteles and the Confederacion Panamericana de Escuelas de Hoteleria, Gastronomia y Turismo, amongst others, sharing sustainable investment models in innovative infrastructure.

UNWTO and CAF

In January 2023, UNWTO and the Development Bank of Latin America (CAF) announced a new partnership to promote and retain investment in tourism across the Latin American and Caribbean region. In Quito:
Native Explorers - More Than Two-Thirds of Asia Pacific's Gen Z and Millennials Intend to Holiday Closer to Home

Survey by Marriott International in Asia Pacific reveals young luxury travelers are ditching long-haul to explore their own backyards

A regional survey by Marriott International has coined a term to describe a new generation of travelers set to disrupt the industry over the next few years. Native Explorers recognizes a tribe of affluent millennial and Gen Z travelers in Asia Pacific who are bucking the trend by traveling in reverse order to generations before them.

While their predecessors may be saving up for more costly long-haul travel later in life, Native Explorers are already well-traveled at a younger age, with one in four notching up no less than two continents outside of Asia Pacific by the time they hit 26. Despite having the means, Native Explorers claim they will be spending their travel dollars closer to home for at least the next two years, as 85% believe that they have yet to fully discover all the region has to offer.

The survey across Australia, China, Japan, India, Singapore, and South Korea was commissioned to better understand the attitudes of affluent millennial and Gen Z travelers and help luxury brands meet their evolving aspirations.

With their sights firmly set on holidays closer to home, Native Explorers rank Japan (52%), South Korea (42%), and New Zealand (39%) as their top three travel destinations. They are also seeking out the new in familiar hotspots such as Australia (39%) and Thailand (32%) through a culture-centric lens. Although one in four Native Explorers would prefer to beat the jetlag and pick nearby, fuss-free holidays, their sense of adventure shouldnt be underestimated: 43% look for nature escapes and wellness experiences and 36% are looking for hidden cultural gems they have yet to discover.

Globally, were seeing an undeniable shift among travelers towards more meaningful, one-of-a-kind experiences in both new and familiar destinations. This is particularly evident in Asia Pacific from our findings on Gen Z and Millennials travel patterns and behaviors, comments Bart Buiring, Chief Sales & Marketing Officer, Marriott International Asia Pacific With young affluent travelers in Asia Pacific gravitating towards under-the-radar holidays and culturally-rich itineraries, were expanding our luxury portfolio in the regions most sought-after destinations like Nara, Sydney and Jiuzhaigou in China with a target of opening 12 properties in 2023 alone.

Luxury defined by authentic connections and experience, with craft still key

Native Explorers are redefining what luxury travel means  from elusive and exclusive to meaningful connection and experiences. As they transition towards understated and authentic holidays, one in three respondents (37%) called out human connection, genuine hospitality, and being part of a community as critical components of luxury travel.

Majority (58%) believe once-in-a-lifetime experiences and pinch-me moments are what make the luxury travel experience. Top picks include VIP access to sold-out concerts of their favorite artists (52%) and exclusive culinary workshops with celebrity chefs (36%).

Craftsmanship remains crucial to luxury travel, over 50% believe service excellence and state-of-the-art facilities are key tenets. Personalization remains a key deciding factor in choosing a luxury hotel, with 32% expecting bespoke services such as a dedicated travel advisor and 32% preferring to stay with hotels that offer tailored itineraries and customized amenities.

Explore destinations through luxury hotel comforts

Caught between their desires to discover and luxuriate, a staggering nine in 10 respondents prefer to explore the destination with assistance from their luxury hotel, rather than research and hire a local guide of their own. Almost half (45%) prefer to sample local cuisine through the propertys gourmet dining, 39% want to experience the local culture through the hotels curated programming, and 34% are keen to try local wellness rituals available at the hotel spa.

Native Explorers thirst for cultural discovery extends to their accommodation choices, with a majority (76%) of respondents opting for hotels and resorts with destination-inspired concepts. Brand affinity remains key for Native Explorers with approximately one in three opting for destination-inspired abodes under an established luxury brand.

Note on the Survey

Findings are from a commissioned survey by Marriott International conducted in June 2023 on 601 affluent Gen Z (18  24 years old) and Millennials (25  41 years old) based in Australia, China, Japan, India, Singapore and South Korea, who would spend over USD3,000 on a holiday.

The term Native Explorers refers to luxury Gen Z and millennial travelers with an intrinsic desire to explore, who have already traveled the globe in their youth and are now seeking destinations in their native region.
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What are Anisongs, and how has Anime music exploded worldwide?

Anime songs, also known as Anisongs, are finding new life outside of the shows and films they were created for, especially thanks to TikTok.

by Michelle Hyun Kim from Chartmetric

Idol, the hypercharged single by J-pop duo YOASOBI, was originally commissioned as the opening theme for the anime series Oshi no Ko, but its become a hit sensation all its own. Since its release on April 12, the track has topped the Billboard Japan Hot 100 chart for nine weeks straight, breaking the record for consecutive No. 1s in the country. On May 5, it received an English language version, leading it to crack the top 10 of the Billboard Global 200 chart.

As the lyrics relay the themes and storyline of the Oshi no Ko, which follows the supernatural happenings that swirl around a Japanese pop star named Ai Hoshino, Idol is a perfect storm of dramatic electronics, girlish spunk, and celebrity commentary. It instantaneously went viral in Japan, becoming the fastest J-pop song to exceed 100M YouTube views within a month and 297.4K TikTok videos, partly thanks to the cutesy choreography that Hoshino performs in the anime. The craze has no signs of slowing either, racking up 192M+ YouTube views and 98M Spotify streams.

While its not the first anime tracka.k.a. anisongsthat has reached an audience outside of anime viewers, Idol suggests that anime music is reaching new global heights. As anime cultures global spread has accelerated during the pandemic, multiple anisongs have become worldwide hits. Last year, Kenshi Yonezus Kick Back theme for the series Chainsaw Man peaked at No. 13 on Billboard Global 200 chart, while LiSAs Homura theme for Demon Slayer the Movie: Mugen Train peaked at No. 8 in 2020. Like Idol, these songs were also quickly adopted by TikTokers making content related to cosplay, art, cooking, and other aspects of Japanese culture.

These modern-day anisong composers can also be found littered across popular Spotify playlists like Anime Now (753.9K followers), Anime Hits (572K followers), Anime on Replay (454K followers), all of which have grown steadily in the past few years. Though anisongs span lots of different sounds and styles, people are listening to this music outside the context of watching cartoons. But how did anisongs start taking a life outside of anime, what is appealing about the music itself, and are there any sonic identifiers that bind these tracks together?

The Origins of Anisongs

Anisongs are any music created for the opening or ending sequence of an anime series, says Laurence Green, a scholar who writes about anime and popular Japanese culture. Functionally, theyre supposed to pique interest and prime the viewer, with the songs often reflecting the shows themes or emotions of the main characters. Many avid anime watchers refuse to skip the opening theme because its tied into the experience of watching the show. These anisongs spark nostalgia and fondness within listeners who associate the music with the feelings of watching cartoons in the past.

As the first anime emerged in the 1960s, they were often accompanied by orchestral classical music with a jolly feel. Such was the theme of Astro Boy, the influential 1963 anime that set the tone for the rest of Japans anime industry. The shows creator, Osamu Tezuka, was heavily influenced by the work of Walt Disney, bringing some elements from those classic cartoons into his animation stylewhich also explains the adoption of Western classical music for the first anisongs.

Anisongs Become Pop in Japan

As the anime industry expanded in the 80s, established musicians (as opposed to in-house producers and songwriters) began getting commissioned to make anime themes, leading to the first anisong hits. A seminal city pop artist, Anri was one of the first Japanese stars tapped to make an anisong, which became a big hit; her 1983 upbeat disco song Cats Eye, written for the anime of the same name, charted at No. 1 on Japans Oricon chart for five weeks straight and has continued to garner listeners throughout the decades. Over the past year, Cats Eye has been added to 398 Spotify playlists, leading its total playlist reach to climb from 461K to 640K listenersan overall 39% increase.

Meanwhile, heavy metal and rock artists also began contributing themes that would define the sound of anisongs to comeparticularly the energetic electric guitar-led songs most associated with anime of the shonen genre, which are stories geared toward young boys that are based around action, adventure, and fighting foes.

Perhaps the genres most indispensable series, Dragon Ball Z, also boasts the legendary opening theme Cha-La Head-Cha-La, composed by Hironobu Kageyama. A mix of rock riffs that would appeal to the target demographic of male adolescents, plus pop hooks fit for karaoke sessions; the song soundtracked the series for four years straight. Todays global anime explosion, as well as this exciting rock-pop anisong sound, was then cemented with the 1997 premiere of Pokemona kodomo anime series oriented towards young children.

The shonen genre in particularwhich usually follows the underdogs expedition to realizing his inner potentialhas become an essential influence on multiple generations of hip-hop artists. To me, Dragon Ball Z represents the journey of the Black man in America, Wu-Tang Clans RZA wrote in his 2009 book The Tao of Wu. Todays rap stars, from Lil Uzi Vert, Trippie Redd, and Megan Thee Stallion now heavily reference their favorite shows in their songs and apparel, even sometimes sampling anisongs; in 2018, Uzi sampled the opening theme to the 2015 anime The Death Parade for his single New Patek, which also name drops Naruto.

The natural crossover between anime and rap fandom has even led Spotify US to launch a playlist called shonen (500.5K followers), which contains a mix of anisongs, emo rap, drill, and Pluggnb songs. Many of these tracks, like Uzis Just Wanna Rock or ThxSoMchs SPIT IN MY FACE, have gone viral on TikTok among a subset of teenage boys and young menthe target demographic for the shonen genre. Described as a mixtape for the perfect fight scene, the playlist seems dedicated to male anime fans who want to believe that theyre the anti-hero in their own lives.

Anisong Makers Become Global Streaming Stars

Netflixs push to meet the growing demand for more anime content has also contributed to the ongoing popularity of anisongs on the internet. As the 1998 classic Cowboy Bebop got a live-action remake from Netflix in 2021, its soundtrack created by Yoko Kanno and her band Seatbelts, which was specifically created to score the anime series, has gotten newfound attention. Not only has Cowboy Bebops opening theme, Tank!, a 1998 Latin-inflected big band jazz track, racked up 33.7M Spotify streams and counting, but the act now has 804K Spotify monthly listeners.

The bands core Spotify listenership is not in Asia, unlike other hit anisong composers. Instead, their top listener cities are Los Angeles, Santiago, Chicago, Mexico City, and Dallasperhaps due to Netflix, or the fact that Seatbelts music is largely instrumental with some English lyrics.

Japanese band Radwimps also became crossover stars with their soundtrack to Makoto Shinkais Your Name, which became the 8th highest-grossing animated film worldwide upon its release in 2016. A collection of alternative rock songs that folds in elements of ambient, math-rock, and classical, the album peaked at No. 15 on the Billboard Soundtracks Albums chart. The act now has 6.47M monthly Spotify listeners.

In interviews, the band has discussed the painstaking year-and-a-half-long process of scoring Your Name, which was done in tandem with the animation. The music changed the story, the lines, and if a new scene was created, we changed the music, Yojiro Noda, the leader, and songwriter of Radwimps, told Forbes. Sometimes, they had to adjust the composition to precisely match the animations timing, and in other parts, the music leads the whole story.

This attention to detail in matching the audio to the visuals might also reveal why fans have continued to revisit the Your Name album: as viewers follow the characters journey, they end up strongly associating the music with their shifting feelings and motivations. In todays media landscape where artists are incentivized to market their music via visuals or short-form media that inspire this kind of emotional connection, its not surprising that anisongs are on the rise.

The Growing Global Market of Anisongs

Based in London, the longtime Japanese American pop star Hikaru Utada made the first anisong in their 25-year career by releasing 2021s Pink Blood, used for the series Fumetsu no Anata e. Several K-pop artists have also gotten in on the action; in 2020, the boy band Tomorrow X Together performed the theme Everlasting Shine for the series Black Clover, while their HYBE labelmates Enhypen made their Japanese-language debut in 2021 with Forget Me Not, which was used in the anime series Re-Main.

As Japanese anisongs are gaining international popularity thanks to platforms like Spotify and TikTok, while non-Japanese artists are attempting to make anisong hits themselves, it seems likely that anisongs will become a powerful tool in an artists global crossover strategy. Just take a quick look at the TikToks created using Yoasobis Idol, and youll see a wide web of online otakus, or anime fans, just waiting for the next song thatll soundtrack their next adventure.

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Michael Douglas at the Rusty Anchor Marina & Club in these photos by Terri See, set decorator and buyer for the Berkshires' filming.

Local Film Professionals Work on Michael Douglas Film



Michael Douglas rows a boat on Pontoosuc Lake during the filming of 'Blood Knot' in this photo by Mark Farrell, a set decorator on the production. PITTSFIELD, Mass.  Lights, camera, action  three words most people don't normally identify with the Berkshires. That is until a movie star shows up with a film crew.

The film industry is alive and well around here, with local film professionals Deborah Sims, Mark Farrell, and Terri See most recently working on "Blood Knot."

Sims was the production supervisor, Farrell the set decorator and See the decorator and buyer for the production unit in Massachusetts for filming over several days last month.

The film stars Oscar-winning actor Michael Douglas, known for his roles in "Wall Street," "Fatal Attraction," "Ant-man" and many more.

It follows a grandfather telling his grandson the story of his father's attempt to reconnect through a father-son fishing competition in Puerto Rico.

The film was described to The Hollywood Reporter as a movie "about redemption, love, and forgiveness. About several generations of a family brought together and torn apart by mystery, murder, and true confessions."

Only the scenes involving the grandfather telling the grandson the story were shot in Massachusetts, making up about 20 minutes of the film, Sims said. The rest of the film will be flashbacks to bring the grandfather's story to life.

The flashback scenes will be shot in Belize and Mexico City later this summer.

Despite spending the most of his time on a boat in the middle of three different lakes, Douglas was lovely to work with, Sims and See said.

"He was lovely and is such a trooper because he had to spend all those days on a rowboat. Like almost all of it was him on a rowboat. It wasn't easy. It wasn't easy conditions and he was an incredible trooper and really lovely," Sims said.

Because he is an iconic actor, just being around Douglas is a really special feeling that can make even the mundane thrilling, See said.

"Because he's so iconic, I think it was just there's just a real special feeling being around him and standing near him and hearing that really iconic voice. For those of us really familiar with his career, his movies you hear him say just any old thing like past the potato chips and it's kind of thrilling," See said.

It was also nice to be part of the "big club," Farrell said. Although he had never met Douglas his parents did when they lived at the Motion Picture & Television Fund Retirement Home in California.

"It so happened that Michael's dad had Alzheimer's disease so there was an off-wing at the Motion Picture Home out there, Kirk Douglas' Alzheimer's wing, and so Michael and Catherine [Zeta-Jones], his wife, would come out and they were just so sweet to everybody," Farrell said.

"And they were particularly sweet so when Michael came on set, I just got to introduce myself and say thank you for being so nice to my parents, which is a cool thing to be able to say."

Sims got the "cold call" around May 21 from the film's production manager, who then visited the area for two days location scouting. On May 26, Sims was hired and started to prepare for the film.

They scouted six or seven locations before settling on Benedict Pond at Beartown State Forest in Monterey and two lakes in Pittsfield: Onota and Pontoosuc, Sims said.

"The film takes place on one lake. It's a grandfather telling his grandson a story while they're fishing on this rowboat," Sims said.

They chose Benedict Pond because it is perfect for the quiet scenes because of how easy it was to control the water traffic due to the boat ramp, Sims said. It is also very tranquil and doesn't have houses around it.

They chose Pontoosuc Lake because the Rusty Anchor Marina & Pub Club allowed them to film the scene where the grandfather and grandson pull up the boat to a bar. Onota was selected because the location scout really liked a house there for the scene where the grandfather picks his grandson up at his mother's.

Every film has its challenges, Sims said. For this one it was the lakes and time restrictions.

"It's pretty much the same amount of prep, whether you're shooting three days or 20 days. We kind of had to do all the prep in about two weeks which is not a lot of time," Sims said.

"This one was challenging because it was only three days of real shooting with talent and it was three lakes in three days. So, everything had to pick up and move every night from one lake and move to another lake and it was challenging."

Sims and See described the daily scene of cranes lifting a flotilla of around six boats to the new location and setting base camp under tents.

The state's Film Incentive Tax Credit, locations in the Berkshires, and the area's atmosphere makes it an ideal and feasible place to bring stories to life, the three film pros said.

"[Los Angeles] looks like L.A. and New York looks like New York and Boston looks like Boston but a lot of people when they write a movie, they want it to feel universal. They want to feel like it could be any town anywhere USA," Farrell said.

"And what's great about Western Massachusetts is that it has all those looks. It has the farm look and the small-town look and woods look and it's got a bunch of different looks, but it's also only three hours from New York and three hours from Boston."

Even during the pandemic the industry was thriving, production supervisor Deborah Sims said. During the pandemic, Sims worked with See and Farrell in four feature films since fall of 2021, two of which have had recent 2023 world premieres at Sundance and Tribeca film festivals

"I think [the film industry in the Berkshires is] wonderful and unexpected. I kind of came up from running a production company in New York and thought I was gonna relax up here and the film industry just kind of took me in and it's bloomed and it's really great," Farrell said. "There's a lot going on up here. So it's really nice,"
Mark, Pignatelli Public Forum

WASHINGTON, Mass.  State Rep. William "Smitty" Pignatelli and State Sen. Paul Mark will take questions and invite comments at a "ReMarks and Refreshments" forum in the Town of Washington from 10:30 AM to noon on Tuesday, July 25.

The event is open to the public and will be held at 8 Summit Hill Road, Washington, MA.

The forum will also be accessible through Zoom. To get the link, please email Casey Pease at casey.pease@masenate.gov

The legislators will start the forum by sharing legislative updates from the State House before taking questions and comments from attendees and engaging in a conversation about opportunities and challenges facing the Town of Washington and Western Massachusetts.

Rep. Pignatelli's Third Berkshire District consists of 18 municipalities in Berkshire County. He is Vice Chair of both the House and Joint Committee on Rules. Sen. Mark's Berkshire, Hampden, Franklin, and Hampshire District consists of 57 municipalities in western Massachusetts. He chairs the Joint Committee on Tourism, Arts, and Cultural Development.

The Town of Washington "Remarks and Refreshments" event is one in a series of public forums Sen. Mark is organizing in an effort to reach all 57 communities.
95-year-old Ye Lianping is a retired teacher from Buchen School in Hexian County, Ma'anshan City, Anhui Province. He joined the Communist Party of China in 1986. In 2000, he opened a "left-behind children's home" in his own home to offer free English tutoring to rural children. He has been doing this for 23 years, and has provided voluntary guidance to over 2,000 students.

Ye Lianping has no children and lives a simple life, but he has donated all of his savings to establish the "Ye Lianping Scholarship Fund", which awards scholarships to local outstanding students every year.

A banner on the wall of the "left-behind children's home" reads "The Candlelight That Never Fades in the Countryside." Ye Lianping says, "At best, I am just a small firefly, and I can't shine as brightly as a candle." He hopes to continue teaching until his last breath.





Source: Xinhua News



Translated by Zheng Chen
In today's digital age, businesses across industries are constantly seeking innovative solutions to enhance operations and stay ahead of the competition.

From left to right: Harold Andrew Oclarit, Senior Enterprise Technical Sales Specialist, PLDT Enterprise; Clyde Maru, Relationship Manager, PLDT Enterprise; Kent De La Calzada, AVP and Head of Customer Relationship Management  Visayas, PLDT Enterprise; Mitch Locsin, First Vice President and Head of Enterprise and International Business Groups, PLDT and Smart; Ben Roberts, President and Chief Operating Officer, OfficePartners360; Arlon Chad Jumalon, Global IT Director, OfficePartners360; and Jae Lopena, Senior Manager for Facilities, OfficePartners360

As the B2B arm of the largest fully integrated telecommunications and digital services provider in the Philippines, PLDT Enterprise has been at the forefront of empowering businesses with cutting-edge technology and customized solutions.

PLDT Enterprise understands the unique needs and requirements of businesses in the industry and delivers tailored solutions to future-proof companies.

As part of its commitment to empower businesses from different industries, PLDT Enterprise teams up with OfficePartners360 (OP360), a leading US-headquartered BPO company with offices in Cebu and Davao. At the core of this collaboration is PLDT Enterprise's iGate solution, a high-performance internet service designed to meet the demands of the fast-paced IT-BPO sector.

iGate provides dedicated and reliable connectivity, assuring fast and reliable internet connections. Through its dedicated bandwidth, businesses can run intensive applications seamlessly, host rich-media content, and ensure the smooth flow of communications.

Additionally, PLDT Enterprise's Metro Ethernet Solutions (Metro E-Wan) offer secure and reliable connectivity that goes beyond traditional Wi-Fi services.

Leveraging a highly redundant fiber optic network, Metro E-Wan provides unparalleled connectivity for businesses. This eliminates the limitations and uncertainties of leased line services, allowing businesses to enjoy the simplicity, transparency, and scalability of Ethernet technology. Reliable connectivity, coupled with robust security measures, ensures that sensitive information remains protected, allowing businesses to focus on delivering exceptional services.

Further improving the operations and collaborations in OP360, the IT-BPO company also relies on Smart Bizload to support its work-from-home employees.

This innovative platform streamlines and optimizes communication processes by automating the distribution of prepaid load. This allows businesses to conveniently allocate and distribute prepaid load to their workforce. Smart Bizload's secure nature safeguards sensitive information, providing peace of mind for businesses. The user-friendly and intuitive interface allows for efficient management and monitoring of load distribution, ensuring transparency and control over communication expenses.

PLDT Enterprise's partnership with OP360 extends beyond connectivity solutions and reflects a shared vision of growth for the IT-BPO industry in the Philippines further strengthening the country's global ranking in the outsourcing sector.

A bolstered IT-BPO workforce equipped with the right tools and training contributes to a stronger and more competitive industry.

Looking ahead, both PLDT Enterprise and OP360 have exciting plans for expansion.

OP360 is opening a new site in Cebu and another site in Cagayan De Oro scheduled this year further expanding its reach in the IT-BPO industry. These new sites will benefit from iGate and Metro Ethernet circuits, enabling seamless connectivity and supporting their growing operations.

Furthermore, ongoing discussions about an International Private Leased Circuit (IPLC) are in the works to connect OP360's Cebu and Davao sites directly to the USA.

Mitch Locsin, PLDT and Smart First Vice President & Head of Enterprise Business and International Business Groups, expresses his enthusiasm for the partnership, stating, "We are proud to collaborate with OP360 to deliver transformative connectivity solutions that drive growth and enhance competitiveness. Together, we are taking the IT-BPO industry to new heights."

Kent De La Calzada, PLDT Enterprise Assistant Vice President & Head of Customer Relationship Management, further emphasizes PLDT Enterprise's commitment to supporting businesses: At PLDT Enterprise, we understand the complexities and requirements of businesses like OP360. Our mission is to customize the right tools fit for their companies, empowering them to thrive in the digital landscape."

Ben Roberts, OP360 President and Chief Operating Officer, applauds the partnership with PLDT Enterprise, stating, "The collaboration with PLDT Enterprise has been instrumental in our company's unprecedented growth. Their innovative solutions and reliable connectivity have provided us with the technology backbone needed to deliver exceptional services to our clients. We look forward to continuing this partnership and drive further success in the IT-BPO industry."

As the digital transformation ally for businesses, PLDT Enterprise continues to forge strategic partnerships and deliver transformative solutions, empowering companies across sectors to embrace the opportunities of the digital age.

Together with OP360 and other industry leaders, PLDT Enterprise is shaping the future of the IT-BPO sector further by driving growth and strengthening the Philippines' global competitiveness.
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Barbie director Greta Gerwig has said she shut down early conversations that would have given her actors computer-generated feet.

Since the trailer for Gerwigs highly anticipated comedy romance movie about the popular Mattel doll was released in April, its clip of Margot Robbies character Barbie standing on her tiptoes with perfectly arched heels has wowed the internet.

The fan-celebrated shot is a nod to the famous dolls plastic classic posture, where her feet are shaped as if they were perpetually wearing high-heeled shoes.

During a recent appearance on the Australian talk show The Project, Gerwig, 39, revealed that there was a big discussion in the beginning as to whether she was going to CGI all the feet.

I thought, Oh god, no! Thats terrifying! Thats a nightmare, the Ladybird director said. Also Margot has the nicest feet. She has these beautiful dancer feet. She should just hang on to that bar and do it just like this.

Last week, Robbie, 33, shared the secret behind the viral scene, explaining how she managed to accomplish the genius pose.

They are my feet, the Australian actor confirmed to Fandango, adding that it only took probably about eight takes, wasnt that many.

I walked up, we had little sticky bits on the floor  double-sided tape  for the shoes, so they wouldnt come off. So that I could get my feet out of them. And I was holding on to a bar, but thats it, Robbie explained nonchalantly.

I wasnt in like a harness or anything. I just walked up and kind of held onto the bar above camera.

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Margot Robbie and viral Barbie scene (Getty Images and Warner Bros)

With Barbie releasing in cinemas on 21 July, the same day as Christopher Nolans Oppenheimer, eager fans are preparing to see them back-to-back.

Gerwig and Robbie not only joined the double feature trend  coined Barbenheimer  but they also accepted Tom Cruises challenge to take it two steps further.

In photographs shared on Twitter on 30 June, the Barbie duo proudly held out movie tickets while standing in front of film posters for Nolans war drama, Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny and Cruises Mission Impossible: Dead Reckoning Part One.

Mission: Accomplished! the caption reads.

Their support comes in response to Cruise, who had done the same days earlier, only he had swapped his newest Mission Impossible instalment for Barbie.
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The Barbie film will not be released in Vietnam over its apparent inclusion of a controversial marking in a map of the South China Sea.

Starring Margot Robbie as the iconic doll, Barbie was scheduled to be released in the southeast Asian country on 21 July, in line with its cinematic debut in most countries across the world.

However, state media announced on Monday that the movie will no longer be distributed in Vietnam due to the depiction of a map that uses the nine-dash line.

The U-shaped line, used on Chinese maps, represents areas that China has claimed as its territory.

First shown on a map in 1947, the nine-dash line is controversial as the area specified as Chinese territory is contested and includes a significant area that Vietnam considers its continental shelf.

China and Vietnam have long been in a standoff over the region, while Taiwan, the Philippines, Brunei, Malaysia and Vietnam all make claims to parts of the sea.

As reported by Reuters, the Vietnamese state-run newspaper Tuoi Tre said that due to its use of a map depicting this territorial shape, Barbie will no longer be released in the country.

Vi Kien Thanh, head of the department of cinema in Vietnam, was quoted in the publication as saying: We do not grant license for the American movie Barbie to release in Vietnam because it contains the offending image of the nine-dash line.

Ryan Gosling and Margot Robbie as Ken and Barbie (Warner Bros)

The Independent has reached out to Warner Bros, Barbies distributor, for comment.

This is not the first time that the Vietnamese government has decided to halt a films release due to the inclusion of the nine-dash line.

Last year, Sony's action movie Uncharted was pulled for the same reason, as well as the DreamWorks animated film Abominable in 2019. Netflix also removed an Australian spy drama series, Pine Gap, from streaming services in 2021.

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Ahead of the films highly anticipated release, cast members have been stoking fans excitement with their promotional efforts.

Ryan Gosling, who plays Barbies companion Ken, has been praised for fully embracing the happy-go-lucky energy of his character throughout the press tour.

Robbie, meanwhile, has shared some insider knowledge about the creation of the film, including how they managed to achieve a genius shot of Barbies foot, as seen in the trailer, and a jaw-dropping joke that was cut from page one of the script.

Barbie will be released in UK cinemas on 21 July.
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Hong Kong police have placed bounties on eight pro-democracy activists who fled the city into self-imposed exile, accusing them of serious national security offences including foreign collusion and incitement to secession.

On Monday the police issued wanted notices and offered rewards of HK$1m (100,761) for each person on the list, stating that their assets would be frozen where possible.

These are the first bounties of this kind to be offered in relation to the citys sweeping national security law, Superintendent Steve Li said at a press conference.

Those named on the list are activists Nathan Law, Anna Kwok and Finn Lau, former lawmakers Dennis Kwok and Ted Hui, lawyer and legal scholar Kevin Yam, unionist Mung Siu-tat, and online commentator Yuan Gong-yi, the police said.

The activists are in self-imposed exile in the US, Britain and Australia because of the threat to their safety in Hong Kong.

Members of the public have been warned against supporting the activists financially, and told they risk violating the law by doing so.

The police superintendent said the Hong Kong police has extraterritorial jurisdiction and the responsibility to pursue individuals based overseas who have committed acts endangering the citys national security.

The group has seriously violated the national security offences, called for sanctions against local officials, and schemed for foreign countries to undermine Hong Kongs financial status, he said, adding that the eight individuals should come forward and surrender, which may lead to a lighter penalty.

China imposed a new national security law on Hong Kong in June 2020, which carries a maximum sentence of life imprisonment for crimes of secession, subversion, terrorism, and collusion with foreign forces. Critics have accused the government of throttling dissent with the help of the law, which makes it easier to arrest and detain protesters.

Nearly 260 individuals, aged 15 to 90, have been arrested for acts endangering national security in the past three years, Supt Li said, adding that officials have charged two-thirds of those arrested.

Mr Yam, one of the activists named by the police, said he was an actual Australian citizen exercising my free speech right in Australia and not an asylum seeker. It is my duty to continue to speak out against the crackdown that is going on right now, against the tyranny that is now reigning over the city that was once one of the freest in Asia.

All they want to do is try to make a show of their view that the national security law has extra-territorial effect, he told reporters. I miss Hong Kong, but as things stand, no rational person would be going back.

Mr Yam has been accused of meeting foreign officials to instigate sanctions against Hong Kong officials, judges and prosecutors.

The Hong Kong police claimed the bounty was not a political show but admitted the chances of prosecution are slim if the defendants remain abroad. If they dont return, we wont be able to arrest them, thats a fact, Supt Li said.

Britain-based Hong Kong Watch urged the UK, the US and Australia to issue statements guaranteeing the safety of those activists named and the wider Hong Kong community living overseas.

These arrest warrants are not an indictment of these activists, but of Hong Kongs once well-regarded law enforcement and judiciary, Sophie Richardson, China director at Human Rights Watch, said in a statement.

Democracies should not only flatly reject the warrants, which authorities want upheld internationally, but they should also increase protections to those threatened by Beijing, consider imposing new sanctions, and face the reality that no mainland or Hong Kong authority will respect international legal obligations.
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A South Korean couple have been arrested for allegedly strangling their five-day-old baby to death and burying the body in the southern city of Geoje.

A man in his 20s his partner in her 30s were charged with the murder of their son, whose body is yet to be found in mountains near their home in Geoje, located 331km south of the capital Seoul.

The baby was born in September 2022 and reportedly discharged from the hospital four days later.

It is the latest case in a series involving alleged child abuse or infanticide that were uncovered after the government launched an investigation to check on the wellbeing of more than 2,000 babies who had gone undocumented since being born after 2015. Two unregistered newborns were found in a refrigerator in their home last month.

Police said the Geoje couple initially claimed that they found the baby dead on the morning of 9 September, the day after he was discharged from hospital, and that they buried the body themselves on a mountain as they couldn't pay for cremation.

But the duo later told authorities that they feared their parents would separate them if they were aware of the pregnancy.

The father strangled the baby while the mother watched, officials said, according to Yonhap news agency.

The Goseong county government found that the couple had not registered their child's birth and reported the child's disappearance last Thursday.

Authorities dispatched around 80 staff members, including riot police, to comb the area around the mountain, but were unable to find the newborn's corpse.

The police are focusing their search on a location given by the couple.

In a separate incident, a woman has been accused of killing two of her newborns and keeping their bodies in her freezer for years.

An official with the Gyeonggi Nambu Provincial Police said the woman, in her 30s, admitted to killing the babies as she faced financial difficulties in caring for her three other children, aged eight, 10 and 12.

The newborns were only a day old when they died, the official told CNN.

The woman is suspected to have strangled her newborns soon after giving birth in a hospital in November 2018 and 2019.

The woman reportedly told her husband she had aborted the foetuses. In 2019, a South Korean court ruled against the criminalising of abortion, which led to abortions being legalised from 2021.

Meanwhile, on Sunday, the Suwon District Court had also planned to hold a hearing on an arrest warrant for a woman accused of starving her infant to death in 2019.

The woman, in her 20s, was put under emergency detention on Friday on charges of neglecting her baby son and letting him starve to death by not feeding him for three days at her previous home in Daejeon after giving birth in April 2019.
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President Vladimir Putin will participate this week in his first multilateral summit since an armed rebellion rattled Russia, as part of a rare international grouping in which his country still enjoys support.

Leaders will convene virtually on Tuesday for a summit of the Shanghai Cooperation Organization, a security grouping founded by Russia and China to counter Western alliances from East Asia to the Indian Ocean.

This years event is hosted by India, which became a member in 2017. It's the latest avenue for Prime Minister Narendra Modi to showcase the countrys growing global clout.

The group so far has focused on deepening security and economic cooperation, fighting terrorism and drug trafficking, tackling climate change and the situation in Afghanistan after the Taliban took over in 2021. When the foreign ministers met in India last month, Russia's war on Ukraine barely featured in their public remarks but the fallout for developing countries on food and fuel security remains a concern for the group, analysts say.

The forum is more important than ever for Moscow, which is eager to show that the West has failed to isolate it. The group includes the four Central Asian nations of Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan and Uzbekistan, in a region where Russian influence runs deep. Others include Pakistan, which became a member in 2017, and Iran, which is set to join on Tuesday. Belarus is also in line for membership.

This SCO meeting is really one of the few opportunities globally that Putin will have to project strength and credibility," said Michael Kugelman, director of the Wilson Centers South Asia Institute.

None of the member countries has condemned Russia in UN resolutions, choosing instead to abstain. China has sent an envoy to mediate between Russia and Ukraine, and India has repeatedly called for a peaceful resolution of the conflict.

For Putin personally, the summit presents an opportunity to show he is in control after a short-lived insurrection by Wagner mercenary chief Yevgeny Prigozhin.

Putin will want to reassure his partners that he is very much still in charge, and leave no doubt that the challenges to his government have been crushed, said Tanvi Madan, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution.

India announced in May that the summit would be held online instead of in-person like last year in Samarkand, Uzbekistan, where Putin posed for photographs and dined with other leaders.

For New Delhi at least, the optics of hosting Putin and Chinas leader Xi Jinping just two weeks after Modi was honored with a pomp-filled state visit by US President Joe Biden would be less than ideal.

After all the fanfare Modi received from American leaders on his recent visit, it would have been too soon (for India) to be welcoming Chinese and Russian leaders, Kugelman said.

Indias relationship with Moscow has stayed strong throughout the war; it has scooped up record amounts of Russian crude and relies on Moscow for 60% of its defense hardware. At the same time, the U.S. and its allies have aggressively courted India, which they see as a counterweight to Chinas growing ambitions.

A key priority for India in the forum is to balance its ties with the West and the East, with the country also hosting the Group of 20 leading economies' summit in September. It's also a platform for New Delhi to engage more deeply with Central Asia.

India glorifies in this type of foreign policy where its wheeling and dealing with everybody at the same time, said Derek Grossman, an Indo-Pacific analyst at the RAND Corporation.

New Delhi, observers say, will be looking to secure its own interests at the summit. It will likely emphasize the need to combat what it calls cross-border terrorism  a dig at Pakistan, whom India accuses of arming and training rebels fighting for independence of Indian-controlled Kashmir or its integration into Pakistan, a charge Islamabad denies.

It may also stress the need to respect territorial integrity and sovereignty  a charge often directed towards its other rival, China. India and China have been locked in an intense three-year standoff involving thousands of soldiers stationed along their disputed border in the eastern Ladakh region.

Analysts say China, seeking to posture itself as a global force, is becoming a dominant player in forums like the SCO, where interest for full membership from countries like Myanmar, Turkey and Afghanistan has grown in recent years.

The limitation with the SCO is that China and Russia are trying to turn it into an anti-Western grouping, and that does not fit with India's independent foreign policy, said Madan.

The SCO could also prove challenging for Washington and its allies in the long run.

For countries uncomfortable with the West and their foreign policies, the SCO is a welcome alternative, mainly because of the roles Russia and China play. ... I think that highlights just how relevant and concerning this group could be for a number of Western capitals, especially if it keeps expanding," said Kugelman.
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How long do you wait before you can use tragedy as comedy? Thats the question asked by New York-based stand-up Jocelyn Chia, who has been the subject of an international backlash after a video of her joking about the disappearance of Malaysian Airlines flight MH370 went viral.

As well as being heavily criticised online and threatened with an Interpol red notice by the government of Malaysia, Chia says there has been an unprecedented campaign to pressure comedy clubs into banning her, as well as cyber-attacks on the websites of the companies she has worked for.

Speaking in an interview with The Independent, Chia remains unapologetic about a routine that, she says, seeks to find humour in something sad. A tragedy, she adds, thats nine years old, for reference.

Chia is a US citizen who grew up in Singapore, and says the subject of her routine was the historical relationship between Singapore and Malaysia, rather than the 2014 flight that vanished with 239 people on board. Nonetheless, the 89-second video of her performance at Manhattans popular Comedy Cellar has been condemned by the governments of both Singapore and Malaysia, with the latter calling for Interpol to assist with her arrest on incitement charges.

Chia says that by refusing to back down over the routine, she is not only standing up against people who tried to end her livelihood over a joke but also against bullying and cancel culture.

Chia says the only real regret she has about the incident is that she will never be able to visit Malaysia again  as well as the extra time she now has to spend researching extradition laws in other countries she wants to travel to.

The most unfortunate thing is that I wont get to go to a country that I actually love. I actually love going to Malaysia and I have lots of good friends in Malaysia and I love performing for the Malaysian audience, she says.

The comedian is keen to focus on the positives of the past few weeks, quipping online about how much media attention she has received and saying in this interview that it has only given her new material for upcoming shows and a comedy special.

Chia says she was sitting pooolside overlooking splendid mountain views in Colorado when the viral video blew up online, and she started receiving messages from friends worried about how she was doing.

You know, sometimes peoples lives are worse than what it looks like on social media, she says. And then peoples lives can also be a lot better than what its looking like on social media.

The rebel in me wanted to post a photo of me of that moment from my holiday and being like, oh my god, life is so hard after being canceled by Malaysia and I really wanted to do that just to show them that, hey, you didnt win, she says.

Whats not amusing, she says, is the vitriolic campaign to end her career that has followed the furore.

They tried to take away my livelihood by threatening the comedy clubs where I performed. The Comedy Cellar website got hacked and it was review bombed after they co-posted my video. The attackers were trying to launch cyber-attacks on websites of companies where I have performed in the last four years to take me down, she says.

It was something the US comedy clubs had never seen before.

MH370 went missing in March 2014 while en route from Kuala Lumpur to Beijing. The disappearance of the plane with 227 passengers and 12 crew members on board has remained one of the most puzzling aviation mysteries to date.

Despite an extensive four-year search in the Indian Ocean involving multiple countries, no trace of the aircraft was found. On the 9th anniversary of the disappearance of the plane, Netflix released a three-part docuseries MH370: The Plane that Disappeared.

Touching upon the historical rivalry between Singapore and Malaysia, former British colonies which were once part of the same country, Chia picked out an audience member at the club who turned out to be Malaysian during her 7 April performance.

She said Singapore has become a "first-world country" while Malaysia remained "developing", adding that Malaysians cannot visit Singapore because their airplanes cannot fly in reference to the 2014 disappearance.

What? Malaysian Airlines plane going missing not funny huh? Chia asked the audience. This joke kills in Singapore.

Describing the day of the performance as similar to any other, Chia says that before hitting the stage she usually gets at least a little nervous, particularly if its in a venue as big as the 250-seater Comedy Cellar in Manhattan. She typically puts on some Eminem music or Alicia Keys Girl on Fire to get pumped up, but certainly wasnt thinking on the night in question about whether the content of her show would cause an international incident.

The script of my performance that day was very much tried and tested previously and I am not the first comedian to crack a joke about Malaysian Airlines. It is not a taboo topic, she says.

I think its highly frustrating that Im being vilified for doing  not even a joke about the missing airplanes. I just referenced it [MH370].

Thats not really the essence of the joke. The essence of the joke is about the breakup followed by a glow-up of Singapore versus Malaysia.

And then the second part of it is a comedian saying something inappropriate and then winning the audience back.

Its a classic emotional rollercoaster used by countless comedians to get a laugh from the audience, she says, but the wider context is less obvious from the edited clip posted online.

After the video went viral, Malaysias national police said they would seek Interpols help in tracking Chia down for questioning. The global agency has said they have received no formal request yet, and Chia also says she has received no formal communications from the Malaysian authorities or any other agency so far.

Singapores minister for foreign affairs, Vivian Balakrishnan, distanced himself from Chia and condemned her for the joke. He apologised for her horrendous comments in a tweet and said: She certainly does not speak for Singaporeans.

Malaysian foreign minister Zambry Abdul Kadir said Chias act showed a total lack of sensitivity and empathy toward Malaysians and the MH370 victims families . This video also clearly depicts behaviour that is contrary to the values of Asian countries that are known for their manners and morals.

The reaction to the joke is a reflection of the broader issue of free speech and comedy in Asia, and a reminder of the uphill battle faced by comedians and artists seeking to freely express themselves.

In July 2022, Malaysian authorities arrested comedian Rizal van Geyzel for posts that allegedly inflamed religious and racial tensions. The Crackhouse Comedy Club was vandalised by a charged crowd and its co-owner was also charged.

In India, a comedian was arrested for a month and charged for hurting religious sentiments for a joke he was supposedly about to make. Munawar Faruqui was manhandled by right-wing Hindu vigilantes who crashed his show over jokes about Hindu deities.

Last month, Malaysian comedian Nigel Ng was banned on Chinese social media days after he published clips from a live show which poked fun at Chinas heavy censorship and authoritarian government.

Popularly known as Uncle Roger, Ng joked that he was about to get cancelled even as he delivered the set.

In 2021, Ng apologised and deleted a collaboration video featuring another YouTuber who had previously criticised the Chinese government for its treatment of Uyghur Muslims and pro-democracy protestors. Ng said he hadnt been aware of his collaborators political thoughts and his past incorrect remarks about China.

Chia says there is a long way to go before Asian comics feel free to perform without some level of censorship.

I do see that in Asia comics have a narrower leeway for freedom of speech than they do in America, she says. There is a difference between American comedians and Asian comedians because we even make fun of our president.

Chia says she never expected such a blowback to her joke, as even though she grew up in Asia she evolved as a comedian in America  and was delivering the set in the heart of New York.

I am very much an American comedian. My sensibilities and sensitivities are going to be very Americanised. We literally have over 1,000 jokes about 9/11 just on the internet, right? So thats how common it is in America to make fun of tragedies, she says.

This article was amended on 5 July 2023. It previously conflated two separate incidents involving Nigel Ng.
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New Zealand has become the first country to implement a ban on thin plastic bags commonly used by supermarket customers to collect fruit and vegetables.

The new ban, which went into effect on Saturday, will also extend to plastic straws and silverware, as the government expands its campaign against single-use plastics which account for half of the plastic produced every year globally.

The manufacture, sale or distribution of single-use plastic produce bags, and plastic plates, bowls and cutlery is banned, the government said.

However, supermarkets, pharmacies, hospitality venues and health and disability services are still allowed to sell and provide plastic straws to people with disabilities who need the straws.

Customers in New Zealand have been bringing their own reusable tote bags to stores for carrying purchases since take-home plastic bags were banned in 2019.

Officials estimate that on average, each New Zealander sends more than three quarters of a ton of waste to landfills every year.

New Zealand produces too much waste, too much plastic waste, said associate environment minister Rachel Brooking.

Ms Brooking said the 2019 bag ban had already prevented more than 1 billion plastic bags from being used in New Zealand, and the new ban on thin bags would add a further reduction of 150 million bags per year.

Ms Brooking said the emphasis would be on educating people to not use plastic bags but that officials could impose penalties on businesses that choose to flout the rules.

The government website said all businesses are legally obligated to comply with the regulations and that the ministry for the environment will first work with businesses to ensure they understand the rules.

We will take enforcement action where appropriate, particularly where systemic or ongoing non-compliance occurs, a ministry release said.

The Countdown chain of supermarkets has begun selling polyester mesh bags that can be washed and reused.

Plastic trash and waste in the water of the worlds oceans (Getty Images/iStockphoto)

New Zealand began efforts to minimise plastic use in 2019, when it banned thicker plastic shopping bags that customers used to carry grocery items home.

Before extending the ban, officials investigated concerns the latest ban wouldnt help the environment much if customers simply switched to using disposable paper bags to collect their fruit and vegetables.

The answer was still yes, its still worth doing this, but we really want to reduce single-use anything packaging, Ms Brooking said. So we want people to be bringing their own bags, and supermarkets are selling reusable produce bags.

Globally, around 300 million tons of plastic is produced each year, half of which is for single-use items.

Plastics never fully break down  they just turn into smaller plastic pieces which enter waterways and food consumed by humans.
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The British funeral industry looks set to undergo its most significant shakeup in decades after Co-Op Funeralcare announced it would begin offering water cremations at a number of pilot locations across the country.

Intended as a more sustainable alternative to cemetery burials and cremation by fire, the process is properly known as resomation (from the Greek for return of the human body) or alkaline hydrolysis and involves the body placed inside a biodegradable pouch within a chamber filled with pressurised water at a temperature of 150C.

A small dose of potassium hydroxide (or caustic potash, the active ingredient in cuticle-removing manicure treatments) is then added to convert the tissue and cells of the dead body into a watery solution over a four-hour period.

The process leaves behind only the deceaseds soft bones, which can then be dried out and ground into powder for return to the bereaved relatives inside a funeral urn, as is the current custom with cremations.

Resomation, the British company that manufactures equipment used in the practice, states that the process results in a third less greenhouse gas being produced than in fire cremations and uses just one-seventh of the energy.

And, unlike traditional burials, the risk of groundwater contamination is eliminated, with the fluids being safely returned to the water cycle free from any traces of DNA, according to founder Sandy Sullivan.

The first cremation by fire took place in the UK in 1885 and its role was formalised with the introduction of the Cremation Act in 1902.

The practice had overtaken burials as the preferred method of disposing of the dead by the 1960s, according to anthropologist Professor Douglas Davies of Durham University, who said: The rise in ecological and sustainability concerns over the past decade combined with a desire to be part of nature or laid to rest in a natural setting, means more people are considering the environmental impact of their body once they die.

The technology behind water cremations first emerged in the 1990s but they have only recently become popular in the US, Canada and South Africa  seemingly as a response to climate change, as Professor Davies suggests  with the late anti-Apartheid campaigner Archbishop Desmond Tutu one of the most high-profile people to have been laid to rest in this way so far.

Co-op Funeralcare, the UKs largest funeral provider, announced that it will introduce the practice later this year. It said it will be working with sustainability experts and academia to further validate existing research during its initial regional pilot.

It said pilot locations will be announced later this year with the intention to expand the service to all Co-op clients.

Gill Stewart, managing director of Co-op Funeralcare, said of the process: Our priority is to help families create a funeral that is personal every step of the way and, as the leading provider of funerals in the UK, introducing innovative and sustainable options for our clients is an absolute priority.

Up until now choice has been limited to burial or cremation. Weve seen from the rapid uptake of newer funeral options such as direct cremation, that when choice in the funeral market is broadened, this is only a positive thing both for the bereaved and for those planning ahead for their own farewell.
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Cardi B attended the Schiaparelli Haute Couture show in Paris wearing a glamorous outfit from the Italian fashion house.

The rapper sat front row at the opening show of the autumn/winter season, held at the Petit Palais, in a black gown with gold trim and a huge fluffy black jacket.

She accessorised her look with a black head wrap and surreal gold earrings  a Schiaparelli signature.

American actor Tracee Ellis Ross sat next to Cardi B on the front row, wearing a blue and white shirt and matching trousers.

Other fashionable celebrities in attendance included Game Of Thrones star Gwendoline Christie, French actor Philippine Leroy Beaulieu (who plays Sylvie in Netflix series Emily In Paris) and fashion influencer Chiara Ferragni.

The opening runway look  a sculptural black and white skirt suit with oversized collar, cuffs and hem  set the tone for the collection, which was all about volume and texture.

Creative director Daniel Roseberry sent out a variety of ensembles in the labels signature black and gold colour combination.

Black and white winter coats came with voluminous sleeves and collars, or were made from thick, shaggy fabric.

A gigantic metallic puffer coat was teamed with strings of equally enormous gold beads.

Blurring the lines between the real and the unreal, was how the collection was described in a preview post on Instagram.

More vibrant looks included a pastel-toned, long-sleeved dress that looked like it had been painted on the model.

Flashes of electric blue and turquoise appeared throughout the show.

This season saw models adorned with statement necklaces and huge bangles.

The show concluded with glamorous evening looks, including a rust satin corset gown with a flowing tulle skirt modelled by South Sudanese-Australian model Adut Akech.

Russian supermodel Irina Shayk closed the show in a diaphanous black gown and textured cape with electric blue lining.

Always one of the big draws at Haute Couture Week, Schiaparelli has become known for its eye-popping catwalk designs, surrealist take on fashion and stellar front row.

The label has recently been worn by stars such as Adele, Beyonce and Naomi Campbell.
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Kate Garraways husband Derek Draper was admitted to hospital after she was awarded an MBE last week, the presenter has revealed.

The Good Morning Britain host, 56, reflected on the extraordinary day she met the Prince of Wales at Windsor Castle with Draper watching from close by.

Garraway, who was awarded the MBE for her services to broadcasting, journalism and charity, recounted an eventful week that started with Derek in hospital and ended with Derek in hospital.

Draper, who is a former political advisor and author, contracted Covid-19 in March 2020, became critically ill and was put into a medically-induced coma. He still receives 24-hour care at home and is frequently in and out of hospital for treatments.

It was so wonderful to see Dereks determination to be there, so kind of the Prince of Wales, to make it special for him & to recognise the work of Jake our incredible carer, who represents all those who make Dereks daily life possible, Garraway wrote in an Instagram post that was shared on Sunday (2 July).

Tomorrow Derek is back in hospital and of course the daily struggles go on  but the fact that he was able to be part of Wednesday is to be treasured & cant thank everyone in the @NHS and all around him who love him for making it possible.

The couple have been married since 2005 and share two children, Darcey and Billy.

Previously, Garraway spoke candidly about the reality of caring for her husband and said she has felt frustrated, depressed and emotional since he fell ill. The TV presenter became a full-time carer for Draper, alongside medical professionals.

At the MBE ceremony, Garraway revealed that Draper burst into tears as she was awarded the honour by Prince William, who turned to wave at him as the former political advisor watched from his wheelchair.

Garraway said: Ah, I know, Derek burst into tears. The Prince of Wales said, Hows Derek? and I said, Hes here.

[William] said he wants to go over [to Draper] but hes not allowed to leave the rug, theres a very fancy gold carpet that he stands on.

So we turned and saw and then obviously Derek was very tearful and then spoke about Jake [Drapers carer] and gave Jake a wave as well, she continued.

Garraway has made two documentaries, Finding Derek and Caring For Derek, about her familys journey navigating Drapers illness. Both programmes won National Television Awards in the authored documentary category.
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Kit Harington and Rose Leslie have welcomed the newest addition to their family, a baby girl.

The couple, who first met while starring on Game of Thrones, confirmed via their spokesperson that Leslie has given birth to their second child together.

Harington and Leslie, both 36, are already parents to their son, who was born in February 2021.

A representative for Eternals star Harington told Page Six: Theyre delighted to have welcomed a little girl into the family.

Harington announced in February that the couple were expecting their second child together while appearing on The Tonight Show with Jimmy Fallon.

While talking about his son, whose name has not been publicly released, Harington said: He is about to get the shock of his life, which is that hes about to get a brother or sister.

The actor also confessed that he was terrified about the prospect of welcoming a new baby.

You know with the first baby, youre like walking on clouds and dancing through fields and daisies for nine months? he said, adding: Well, the man is anyway.

This time, the reality check comes much shorter and you get practical, like, real quick.

Rose Leslie and Kit Harington give birth to first child (Getty Images)

Harington and Leslie met in 2011 while playing on-screen lovers Jon Snow and Ygritte on multiple award-winning HBO drama series Game of Thrones.

His role as Jon Snow earned Harington a nomination for a Primetime Emmy Award for Outstanding Supporting Actor in a Drama Series in 2016. The following year, Harington proposed to Leslie.

They tied the knot in Rayne Church in Aberdeenshire in June 2018, with co-stars Peter Dinklage, Maisie Williams, Sophie Turner and Emilia Clarke in attendance.

In a previous interview with LUomo Vogue, Harington opened up about falling in love with Leslie when they filmed the second series of the show in Iceland.

Because the country is beautiful, because the Northern Lights are magical, and because it was there that I fell in love, he said.

If youre already attracted to someone, and then they play your love interest in the show, it becomes very easy to fall in love.

Leslie has spoken out about first-time motherhood following the birth of her son and pushed back against the narrative that women should be automatically enamoured by their children immediately after they have given birth.

In an interview with Harpers Bazaar last year,The Time Travelers Wife star said that sharing the trials and tribulations of new motherhood with a community of others going through the same experience was a glorious thing.
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Prince Harry and Meghan Markle are in their flop era, according to Rolling Stone magazine.

The US outlet suggested they were going through a period of failure after losing lucrative deals with streaming giants including Spotify.

Part of the issue the Sussexes are currently facing is that they have made their brand about their beef with the Royal Family. Now, their feud has reached a stalemate it feels like there isnt much more to say, Rolling Stone reports.

Harry and Meghan signed several lucrative deals after leaving the Royal Family in 2020 (AP)

The Sussexes are in a difficult position: appetite is waning for content about their rift with the royal institution, because digesting it in so many different formats now feels like overkill.

But there isnt much enthusiasm for their other projects, like the Archetypes podcast, which arent about that.

Following their departure from the Royal Family and subsequent move to the US in 2020, the couple signed a number of lucrative deals with global streaming giants and launched their own multi-media organisation Archewell.

However, on June 15 it was reported that Markles deal with Spotify was coming to an end after just one series of her podcast, Archetypes. Media reports soon circulated that Spotify were unhappy with her lack of output and engagement for the 15 million deal, which only saw 12 episodes released.

Jeremy Zimmer, chief executive of the United Talent Agency, reportedly told an advertising festival in Cannes: Turns out Meghan Markle was not a great audio talent, or necessarily any kind of talent.

Spotify terminated their contract after one season of Archetypes (AFP via Getty Images)

And, you know, just because youre famous doesnt make you great at something.

Following their dramatic interview with US host Oprah Winfrey in March 2021, it was estimated that the Sussexes deals with Netflix, Apple and Spotify had secured them over 100 million to maintain their new celebrity lifestyles.

Their docuseries Harry & Meghan, which detailed their romance and departure from the Royal Family, remained at the top of Netflixs most-watched list for weeks, while Prince Harrys book Spare broke world records for becoming the fastest-selling non-fiction book of all time.

Their other projects however have been less well-received. Last May, it was confirmed that Netflix had cancelled development of Pearl, an animated series created by Archewell Productions that had planned to focus on influential women from history.
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The head of Slovakias central bank, who is a member of the European Central Bank committee that decides monetary policy for 20 countries, said Monday he won't step down despite bribery charges against him.

Peter Kazimir is accused of paying a bribe of 48,000 euros ($52,000) to the head of the countrys tax office in connection with a tax audit of several private companies. He faces up to five years in prison if convicted. It wasn't clear when a verdict might be issued.

Kazimir said he considered the charges illegal and fabricated.

I will never resign, he told reporters after the trial opened Monday in a court in the town of Pezinok near the capital, Bratislava. And you know why? Because I havent done anything wrong.

Slovakia is one of 20 countries that use the euro currency and Kazimir is a member of the European Central Banks governing council, its main decision-making body.

The case dates to when Kazimir served as finance minister in the leftist government of populist Prime Minister Robert Fico from 2012 to 2019. He was a member of Ficos Smer-Social Democracy party before taking his central bank job.

Smer lost the 2020 general election and was replaced by a coalition government whose parties campaigned on an anti-corruption ticket.

Since the new government took power, a number of senior officials, police officers, judges, prosecutors, politicians and businesspeople have been charged with corruption and other crimes.

Kazimir is the first minister of Ficos government to stand trial.

Ficos party has a good chance of winning September's early elections in Slovakia.
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The Foreign Secretary will hail the close and friendly co-operation between London and Brussels in a speech to EU parliamentarians.

James Cleverly is expected to meet top EU figures on Monday, with his speech likely to look ahead to better and more mature post-Brexit relations.

This is a new chapter in the UK-EU relationship.

We stand together in our support of Ukraine, and we want to maximise the opportunities of our trade deal, he said ahead of his trip to Brussels.

We dont have to agree on everything  a mature relationship can deal with differences Foreign Secretary James Cleverly

But we dont have to agree on everything  a mature relationship can deal with differences.

The speech to the UK-EU Parliamentary Partnership Assembly, a body created as part of the post-Brexit trade deal, comes as Rishi Sunaks Government seeks better relations with the bloc.

Mr Cleverly is also expected to stress the importance of continued support for Ukraine as part of the visit.

European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen was in London last month, as part of the UK-hosted Ukraine Recovery Conference.

The Prime Minister earlier this year brokered the Windsor Framework deal with the EU, designed to address concerns over the operation of post-Brexit arrangements in Northern Ireland.

While the deal did not lead to the return of powersharing at Stormont, which the Democratic Unionist Party continues to boycott, it did usher in hopes of a new foundation for UK-EU ties.

The Foreign Secretary will co-chair the Withdrawal Agreement Joint Committee alongside the EUs Maros Sefcovic and is also expected to meet European Parliament President Roberta Metsola as part of the trip.

Citizens rights and illegal migration are among the topics that could be on the agenda at the committee meeting.

Mr Cleverly will also hold talks with Nato secretary-general Jens Stoltenberg, ahead of a crunch summit in Vilnius, Lithuania.

It comes as Labours shadow foreign secretary David Lammy is expected to be in Paris for meetings with French Foreign Minister Catherine Colonna, as well as Transport Minister Clement Beaune.

It is understood that Mr Lammy is keen for discussions on his partys proposals for a UK-EU security pact, efforts to tackle smuggler gangs, as well as possible improvements to the Brexit trade deal.
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A Virgin company has begun a High Court fight with an American train operator which pulled out of a deal after alleging that the Virgin brand had stopped being a brand of international high repute.

Lawyers representing Virgin Enterprises told a judge at a High Court hearing in London that Brightline Holdings allegation was cynical and spurious.

The deal meant that Brightline would rebrand its rail services in the United States as Virgin Trains USA, Judge Mark Pelling heard.

Very soon after concluding the (agreement), it appears that Brightline had second thoughts about the deal it had struck and began looking for a way to extricate itself from it as soon as possible and without paying the contractually agreed exit fee Lawyers representing Virgin Enterprises

Virgin Enterprises says Brightline is in breach of a trademark licence agreement and wants around 200 million damages, the judge was told.

Brightline says Virgin Enterprises claim should be dismissed.

Judge Pelling has begun overseeing a trial, at the Rolls Building in central London, which is due to last three weeks.

He heard that Virgin Enterprises was part of the Virgin Group, founded by businessman Sir Richard Branson, and managed intellectual property relating to the Virgin brand.

Brightline sought to terminate the (agreement) on the basis of a cynical and spurious allegation that the Virgin brand had ceased to be a brand of international high repute Lawyers representing Virgin Enterprises

This dispute arises out of a trademark licence agreement dated November 15 2018 between (Virgin Enterprises) and (Brightline) pursuant to which Virgin Enterprises agreed to license the Virgin brand to Brightline such that Brightline would rebrand its rail services in the USA as Virgin Trains USA, Daniel Toledano KC, Emma Himsworth KC, and Maximilian Schlote told the judge in a written case outline.

The term of the (agreement) was for an initial 20 years, which was extendable.

They said a clause in the agreement allowed Brightline to terminate the agreement, after giving written notice, if the Virgin brand had ceased to be a brand of international high repute  and told the judge that an exit fee had been agreed.

Very soon after concluding the (agreement), it appears that Brightline had second thoughts about the deal it had struck and began looking for a way to extricate itself from it as soon as possible and without paying the contractually agreed exit fee, they added.

At the height of the first wave of the Covid-19 global pandemic, Brightline sought to terminate the (agreement), on the basis of a cynical and spurious allegation that the Virgin brand had ceased to be a brand of international high repute.

Lawyers representing Brightline told the judge that the claim should be dismissed.

This is a claim brought by (Virgin Enterprises) against Brightline for very substantial sums  in excess of 250 million US dollars  said to be due as damages for breach of a trademark licence agreement between the parties dated November 15 2018, they said.

Brightline terminated the (agreement) on July 29 2020.

(Virgin Enterprises) claims that this was a renunciatory breach of the (agreement).

The lawyers said the liability issue the judge had to decide was, simply stated, was Brightline entitled to terminate the agreement.

They added: The claim should be dismissed.

Lawyers representing Brightline outlined concerns about Virgins train and airline businesses.

They said by the end of 2019, Brightline was becoming concerned about the reputation of the Virgin brand.

In April 2019, Virgin Trains was disqualified from bidding for a renewal of the West Coast mainline train franchise; it operated no trains in the UK after 7 December 2019, they said.

Not long after the announcement that Virgin Trains had been disqualified, investors started to express concerns about Brightlines links with Virgin.

They said a Virgin Trains UK video, released in November 2019 and called The Final Whistle, was not universally acclaimed.

One newspaper described the footage as a Bizarre farewell to Virgin Trains video featuring Richard Branson and Mr Blobby.

Lawyers said: Brightline regarded the video as an embarrassment

They added: The Covid-19 pandemic had a major impact on both Brightline and Virgin.

In March 2020, Virgin Atlantic attracted widespread criticism with its request to staff to take unpaid leave, followed by its request for a substantial financial support package from the UK Government (or bailout).

There was an ensuing wave of negative publicity.

This was noted internally by Virgin, which recognised the need to do something.

They told the judge that the response on social media was summarised in a social listening report, prepared for Virgin, which said: People are angry and frustrated that a billionaire would take taxpayer money to bail out his airline when he has ample money to fund it himself.

Lawyers representing Virgin Enterprises said Brightline had operated a train line in Florida, between Miami and West Palm Beach.

They said Brightline had explained that it entered into the agreement to increase brand awareness and to take advantage of cross-selling opportunities.

Virgin was hit by a spike in negative press in the UK in the spring of 2020, in particular in relation to Virgin Atlantics request for government support, they said.

However, the picture was different in other Virgin markets.

They added: There was no notable negative press about any Virgin-related stories in the USA.

Lawyers said, nonetheless, the challenges the wider group of Virgin companies and the Virgin brand was facing at that time in the UK caused internal concern and were taken very seriously and were addressed.

The press surrounding Virgin Atlantic and, relatedly, Sir Richard, also did not cause the Virgin Masterbrand to cease to be of international high repute, they said.

Virgin Atlantics request for government support should be seen in the context of the pandemic and in light of the fact US and other airlines received huge government support.

Nigel Tozzi KC, who led Brightlines legal team, told the judge on Monday that Sir Richards reputation had taken a hammering.

He said Sir Richard had used the word trashed.
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A father who strangled his wife and their two young children and was then tasered after holding a knife to his own throat has been jailed for life.

Saju Chelavalel was ordered to serve a minimum term of 40 years after a judge was told the 52-year-old killed NHS nurse Anju Asok while he was drunk last December, in the mistaken belief that she had been unfaithful to him.

Northampton Crown Court was told Chelavalel had more than four hours to reflect on whether to kill his children before using a dressing gown cord to kill six-year-old son Jeeva Saju and their daughter Janvi Saju, aged four.

Chelavalel, originally from Kerala in India, sobbed in the dock with his head bowed on Monday as an audio recording was played to the court on which his wife could be heard coughing and his children could be heard talking.

The court was told the recording also captured the sound of a blender being used to make a toxic mixture of chocolate and pills intended to send the children to sleep.

Police body camera footage of Saju Chelavalel being Tasered after killing his wife and two young children (PA)

Body worn video footage released by Northamptonshire Police after the hearing showed the killer urging police to shoot him at his home in Kettering, where he also left instructions for his own and his familys bodies to be cremated in India.

The footage, filmed after officers broke the glass in a patio door to gain access to the ground-floor flat in Petherton Court, shows them issuing repeated warnings for Chelavalel to drop a knife before his arrest.

Ms Asok, aged 35, worked as a nurse at Kettering General Hospital.

Her body was found on the floor of a bedroom at the flat, while the childrens bodies were found next to each other on a double bed in a different room.

(PA)

Passing sentence, High Court judge Mr Justice Pepperall told Chelavalel his actions had been brutal and extraordinarily selfish.

The judge said both child victims would have been terrified and deeply traumatised after hearing their mothers murder.

Both children could have been brought up by other relatives, the judge told Chelavalel, who he said had killed his wife in a fit of rage after a minor argument.

The judge said: Fuelled by alcohol, wallowing in self-pity, engulfed in your resentment at your wifes perceived infidelity, you instead chose to snuff out their young and precious lives.

Chelavalel showed no emotion as the judge added: Even if you had been right in your suspicions, let me make clear that nothing could possibly justify violence, let alone the brutal murders of your family.

I should make plain that the police did indeed investigate your claim (of an affair) and found no evidence whatsoever that your wife was involved with another man.

Not only was her supposed infidelity a figment of your imagination but the police investigation revealed your hypocrisy in that it was you, and not your wife, who had been searching dating websites in the days leading up to these offences.

Your attack upon your wife was recorded. While you were squeezing the life out of your wife, your young children can be heard crying in the background for their mummy.

Having listened to that harrowing recording, I cannot be sure that they were eye-witnesses to their mothers murder but it is clear that they heard what was going on and knew that she was being hurt by you.

The judge said the evidence showed that within minutes of murdering his wife at about 10pm on December 14, Chelavalel decided his children must also die.

The judge continued: No psychiatric evidence is put before me to explain any disordered thinking that led you to that extraordinarily selfish and callous conclusion.

At some point after 2.30am, you then strangled both children.

Speaking to the media outside the court building, Detective Inspector Simon Barnes said the murdered children went to Kettering Park Infant Academy.

He said: The staff at the school described the children as kind, caring, gentle, playful, polite and smiley. They are much missed.

How do you explain to children as young as four that the friends they were playing with only days before are no longer with us? You shouldnt have to. No one should.

As an adult, detective and father, I cannot comprehend how Saju Chelavalel could do this and dont think I ever will.

There is no amount of time behind bars that will ever be enough for what he did. His primary role as a husband and a father was to protect his family from harm.
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An alleged victim of actor Kevin Spacey claimed good-looking young men were warned about the slippery Hollywood star as it was well known he was up to no good, a court has heard.

Jurors at Southwark Crown Court were shown footage of a police interview in which the man, who cannot be named for legal reasons, said it was like the Hollywood star thought he could groom me.

The witness described Spacey as a slippery, snaky, difficult person and referenced his serial killer character in the film Seven, saying: Hes a bit like that, a bit creepy.

The 63-year-old defendant has been described by the prosecution as a sexual bully as he stands trial accused of sex offences against four men between 2001 and 2013.

In the video played to the jury on Monday, the man said Spacey told him he could introduce him to A-list stars.

Detailing an incident where he fought back against one of the alleged assaults, the witness said the actor responded by saying: Thats such a turn on to me. Youre such a man.

In the police interview, the man told the officer about an incident in which he drove Spacey to a lavish showbiz party in the early 2000s.

Describing what he said happened to him, the man said: He grabbed me so hard I almost came off the road. He grabbed me really hard and it really hurt.

I pushed him against the door and said, Dont do that again or I will knock you out.

The man told the officer that young, good-looking men were warned about the actors behaviour, and said people would tell them you better be careful.

It was well known he was up to no good, the witness added.

Kevin Spacey is on trial at Southwark Crown Court (AFP via Getty Images)

He said he was disgusted Spacey had touched him, and denied being excited by it when questioned by the actors lawyer, Patrick Gibbs KC.

The witness also dismissed Mr Gibbss question over whether the incidents made him question his sexuality  describing it as a ridiculous question.

The man told police that the actor became very friendly and started to grab him on several occasions, and the alleged victim told him to stop.

He would try to grope me and try to grab me and make me feel very uncomfortable, the witness said. He sort of left me and didnt say anything. He would just laugh it off and change the subject.

The man said he could now no longer watch any of Spaceys films or TV programmes, including Netflix show House of Cards.

He said in his police interview: I cant stand watching the man. It makes me feel sick.

The man told the officer Spacey was pretending to be nice but was a predator who was aggressive.

He added: He was obviously very messed up with his sexuality.

It was well known he was up to no good First alleged victim of Kevin Spacey

Asked by Mr Gibbs if he thought the actors advances were naughty, the complainant said: It wasnt naughty, it was disgusting.

And also nice? asked Mr Gibbs.

Not nice at all, the witness replied.

Continuing his cross-examination of the alleged victim, Mr Gibbs began to ask: Didnt what happened between you

The man interjected: Nothing happened between us  he assaulted me.

He told the jury he totally 100, one million per cent did not have any feelings towards Spacey.

Did what happened lead you to question your own sexuality? Mr Gibbs asked.

Not at all. Ridiculous question, the witness responded.

Spacey has pleaded not guilty to 12 charges against him (Jordan Pettitt/PA) (PA Wire)

The man said it is not true at all that he reported the allegations to police because he saw a bandwagon coming and decided to hop on board.

That is not true at all, he said. It was the fact that it was in the news and it was all coming back to me.

It made me have those feelings that I had then, thinking some others have been brave enough to come forward. It caused me to come forward and tell the truth as well. It is just to tell the truth.

He said he described the actor as a predator who was grooming him because that was his demeanour and I just felt he was a bit like that.

Spacey 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.

The two-time Academy Award winner also previously denied four further charges of sexual assault and one count of causing a person to engage in penetrative sexual activity without consent.

The trial continues.
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A former Royal Marine has admitted planting a fake bomb outside a senior barristers chambers, telling jurors he would do anything to get cash.

Michael Broddle, 46, has accepted he placed two devices around Grays Inn in London on September 14 2021.

But he denied he had an issue with the alleged target Andrew Sutcliffe KC, claiming he was under instruction by a third party.

The prosecution allege businessman Jonathan Nuttall was behind a campaign against Mr Sutcliffe and his colleague Anne Jeavons because they represented the National Crime Agency in a long-running financial wrangle.

It is claimed Nuttall, 50, recruited his driver, Michael Sode, 58, to act as a middleman with Broddle, who in turn roped in his sons Charlie, 18, and Joshua, 20.

Jurors have heard one of the devices at Grays Inn was potentially viable and the other, which was left outside Mr Sutcliffes chambers, spewed smoke for maximum alarm.

It was accompanied by a note addressed to Sooty  Mr Sutcliffes old Army nickname  and contained false allegations said to have been designed to cause him professional embarrassment.

Giving evidence in his Old Bailey trial on Monday, Michael Broddle told jurors he had been instructed to carry out what he thought was a security test.

At the time, he had hoped that the job might lead to a security contract at Grays Inn, the heart of Londons legal district, jurors were told.

The court heard he had been told to do a penetrative test like he used to do in the Marines with a fake bomb and write a note to Mr Sutcliffe.

Broddle said that at the time he did not question the link between the security test and the lawyer, who had been the subject of a previous research.

He told jurors: I was in financial difficulty. I would do anything to get the cash.

Judge Simon Mayo KC asked: You understood someone had an issue with Mr Sutcliffe and thats why there was a note addressed to Mr Sutcliffe?

The defendant agreed.

The judge said: What about the suggestion the content of the note had been dictated to you. You wrote it without adding anything to it?

Broddle replied: Thats true. I had no problem with Mr Sutcliffe. I was acting on instruction.

The Sooty part was me, I did that. The rest of it is dictated.

Nuttall, of Romsey, Hampshire, Sode, of Deptford, south-east London, and Charlie and Joshua Broddle, 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.

Michael Broddle, Nuttall, Sode, 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.

The Old Bailey trial continues.
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Thames Water pumped an estimated "millions of litres" of undiluted sewage into rivers near Gatwick Airport causing the water to turn "black" and kill more than 1,000 fish, a court has heard.

At a sentencing at Lewes Crown Court on July 3, the court heard how there was a "significant and lengthy" period of polluting of the Gatwick Stream and River Mole between Crawley, in West Sussex, and Horley, in Surrey, on 11 October 2017.

Thames Water pleaded guilty on February 28 to four charges relating to polluting the rivers and is set to be sentenced by Judge Christine Laing KC on Tuesday, July 4.

It comes as the government scrambling to put together a plan to rescue the debt-ridden water firm over increasing fears it is set to go bust. The utility giant is struggling under a 14 billion debt pile accrued since it was privatised in 1989 and could now potentially be taken into public ownership if further investment is not found.

In the first day of the sentencing hearing on Monday, the court heard how a storm pump at Crawley Sewage Treatment Works site was unexpectedly diverting sewage to its storm tank for 21 hours and went "unnoticed".

From no alarm being raised, prosecuting Sailesh Mehta said the "best estimate" was that untreated sewage was spilling into the river from the tank for six and a half hours.

Eyewitness accounts read in court said how they saw the river turn "black" and "grey", with "huge numbers of dead fish" visible in the water.

It is understood nearly 1,400 dead fish from the rivers were recovered by Environment Agency officers following the incident.

Mr Mehta said there were "cumulative management deficiencies" at the company and that the sewage spill was an "accident waiting to happen".

He said: "The public expect high standards of a company such as this, simply because they are trusted to protect our environment.

"It's a heavy burden, they should be heavy and it's common ground they failed in carrying that out in this case."

Defending, Lisa Roberts KC said Thames Water expresses its "unreserved and sincere apology" for the incident, adding: "Put bluntly, it shouldn't have happened and Thames deeply regrets the event."

However, Ms Roberts rejected previous issues were to blame for the spillage but instead it was a "faulty switch" in the storm pump that caused the incident which "could not have reasonably been foreseen".

Thames Water has previously been fined 32.4 million for sewage spills (PA Media)

The expected fine will come as the water firm, which serves 15 million households across London and Thames Valley, faces concerns over its future amid mounting debt.

Thames Water's chief executive Sarah Bentley stepped down with immediate effect last week after she gave up her bonus due to the company's environmental performance.

According to Ms Roberts, a 33-million plan to improve the Crawley site was put in place since the incident with aims to complete it by the end of March 2025. New systems have also been rolled out across other Thames Water sites to prevent such incidents happening again.

Ms Bentley, whose leadership of the company began in 2020, in a statement said the eight-year plan was no "quick fix" but hoped to counter prior "poor management decisions, aggressive cost-cutting and decades of under-investment".

Thames Water also gave "voluntary reparation" to the South East Rivers Trust amounting to 1 million.

Thames Water has previously racked up 32.4 million in fines for pollution incidents in the Thames Valley and south west London from other prosecutions brought by the Environment Agency between 2017 and 2021.

The hearing continues.
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Police have launched a major investigation after shots were fired at a reckless attack at a wedding party in Wolverhampton.

West Midlands Police were called to a faith-based community hall near the city centre at approximately 21.30 on Saturday evening after reports of gunshots at the venue, at which over 100 people were attending a wedding party.

The incident took place at The Gujarati Association, a day centre serving the elderly population, unemployed people and Wolverhamptons wider Hindu Gujarati community.

Officers believe that a car drove up to the back entrance of the centre, with someone inside getting out to fire a number of shots at another parked car. Gunfire was then thrown back at the attacker from the direction of the wedding party.

Though a vehicle was damaged, there were no injuries at the scene, something which the force has described as by luck rather than by design.

"This was a totally reckless attack and its by luck rather than by design that no one was seriously injured or killed, said Chief Inspector Paul Southern of West Midlands Police.

"We believe there were more than 100 people at this event and its vital that we speak to anyone who was there and who saw or recorded what happened, so that we can bring those involved to justice.

"The community will be understandably shocked and worried by what happened and well be carrying out extra patrols to offer reassurance today."

In the aftermath of the event, officers probed CCTV of the scene, with the damaged vehicle seized for forensic examination.

The force has urged anyone with information to get in touch either via 101 or Live Chat on the West Midlands Police website, quoting log 4353 of 1 July. The public can also contact Crimestoppers anonymously on 0800 555 111.
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The family of imprisoned British-Egyptian activist Alaa Abd El-Fattah have led a vigil in London to call for Government action to demand his freedom.

Mr Abd El-Fattah is currently serving a five-year sentence in Egypt on charges of disseminating false news for retweeting a report in 2019 that another prisoner had died in custody.

At the Amnesty International UK vigil in front of the Foreign, Commonwealth and Development office in Westminster on Monday, his mother Laila Soueif said he just wants to get out of jail and take care of his son.

Ms Soueif and her daughter Mona Seif delivered a letter signed by more than 100 MPs and lords to Foreign Secretary James Cleverly, calling for more action to help free the pro-democracy activist.

They called on the UK Government to lead on a joint statement about Egypt at the Human Rights Council and to change the travel advice for British nationals heading to Egypt.

They should make it very clear to British nationals about how unstable things are in Egypt Mona Seif

Speaking to the PA news agency, Ms Seif said her family has been let down by world leaders, particularly Prime Minister Rishi Sunak.

Since Rishi Sunak met with President Sisi during Cop27 nothing much has happened, and it has been very disappointing, she said.

He went and raised Alaas case, but he was there at a critical point when Alaas health was in a dire situation, and we didnt have enough information about him.

He couldnt even get us a proof of life and he couldnt get a promise of a consulate visit.

She said the family has now been able to visit the 40-year-old writer in Egypt and have found him in a better condition.

He previously carried out hunger strikes which intensified during the Cop27 summit in Sharm el-Sheikh in November 2022, where Mr Sunak raised his case with President Abdel Fattah El-Sisi.

Things have improved over the past year he has been removed from the maximum-security prison, she said.

Hes OK, he has access to books, he has monthly visits from the family, and he gets to listen to music.

But other than that, he is still denied consulate access, he still is denied access to lawyers.

Psychologically, hes in a much better state, because during our visits over the past month after he completely collapsed after the hunger strike, we managed to actually talk to him about the extent of the campaign and solidarity hes getting all over the world.

And I think it resonated with him and managed to make him feel much more supported and helped him to be in a better state.

Ms Seif added: They should make it very clear to British nationals about how unstable things are in Egypt, the reality of the situation, and how its very easy to get into weird situations that end up sending you to prison.

The UK must prioritise human rights, the rule of law, and the wellbeing of their citizens over the trade deals and meaningless diplomatic relations they have with a military dictatorship.
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Employers should hire more ex-offenders to help fill Britains 1.1 million job vacancies, a new report argues.

ReGenerates Good Jobs Project, set to launch on Monday, is lobbying to get those from marginalised groups, such as young people in or leaving care and the invisibly disabled, into work to address the vacancy crisis and help people.

The initiative is backed by businesses including bakery chain Greggs and shoe repair and key-cutting firm Timpson, whose bosses worked with the charity on its report called The Purpose-Driven Business Solution to the UKs Labour Shortage.

The year-long study found that the UK is facing one of the worst labour shortages in its history and argues the best solution is for bosses to target the vast numbers of people that are commonly overlooked for jobs.

The solution to the UKs record labour shortage is hiding in plain sight. Ed Boyd

These groups also include people who are currently or have recently been homeless, refugees, those with mental health problems and over 50s, it notes.

The foreword to the report states: Over the last year the UK has experienced record-breaking vacancies, which currently stand at 1.1 million, which many businesses are struggling to fill.

As ever, UK businesses are innovating to remain successful, but are operating in a very complex environment.

Simultaneously, there are millions of individuals from communities that have been historically excluded, including people with disabilities, prison leavers, and single parents who face difficulties in finding flexible employment opportunities.

The report highlights that many employers take a blanket ban approach to hiring people with criminal records, excluding potentially suitable candidates.

Only 17% of ex-offenders each year are in work within 12 months of leaving prison and half of employers would not consider recruiting an applicant with a criminal record, it notes, citing Government data.

The report argues that this type of recruitment is good for business and philanthropic.

Ed Boyd, chief executive of ReGenerate, said The solution to the UKs record labour shortage is hiding in plain sight.

There are millions of potential workers who are rarely given a chance because they may have disabilities, criminal records or are neurodivergent.

Yet these people could make great employees, and make a major contribution to making companies more successful.

It is a real win-win.

It is too easy for talented people to be held at arm's length because they may have a criminal record. James Timpson

ReGenerate has developed a range of proposed reforms, including giving employers a 12-month holiday from paying employer national insurance contributions for taking on some marginalised people.

Roisin Currie, chief executive of Greggs, said: Were passionate about people and believe that everyone deserves the chance to thrive in employment.

By not overlooking potential employees  be that because of their past or disability  we can select the right person and develop them to their full potential.

Weve been working with people leaving prison for a number of years through our dedicated Fresh Start programme.

The passion and energy for work that comes from people who are given an opportunity to kick-start their careers, or to turn their lives around is clear for all to see and as a business, we feel extremely motivated to do all we can to give these people a fresh start.

James Timpson, chief executive of Timpson, said: It is too easy for talented people to be held at arms length because they may have a criminal record, are neurodivergent or have a physical disability.

I have seen first hand how looking past such issues, and hiring on talent and character alone, not only benefits society by giving people a second chance, but helps businesses thrive too.
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The UK-based tourist who triggered widespread outrage for carving his girlfriends initials into the Colosseum has begged for forgiveness.

Ivan Dimitrov, who lives in Bristol, was caught by a fuming tourist engraving his and Hayley Braceys letters into the 2,000-year-old Rome structure.

Footage of the incident soon went viral before Italys Carabinieri tracked the pair down in Bulgaria this week.

Ivan Dimitrov was seen in the footage online (YouTube)

The video, titled A*****e tourist carves name in Colosseum in Rome 6-23-23, has received over 300,000 views.

Carabinieri said Dimitrov expressed sincere remorse for his actions, according to spokesman and Major Roberto Martina.

He told us he was very upset by what he had done, and he kept apologising for it, Mr Martina told Mail Online.

I think he was worried about the consequences of any trial and we explained that he could be jailed for between two and five years and be fined up to 15,000 Euro.

Mr Martina went on to say the case will be reasonably straightforward due to the video.

He had contacted us after we secured his mobile telephone from hotel records and left a message for him to call us, Mr Martina said.

He was naturally worried about the legal implications, and these were all explained to him.

We didnt ask him why he did it, that will be for a judge to hear, we just told him that he was a suspect and was part of the investigation.

Mr Martina went on to say Ms Bracey is not part of any complaint so is an innocent party as far as we are concerned.

Although technically, she could be seen as an accessory, he said.
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A young woman has died and two others are fighting for their lives after a horrifying car crash on a major UK road.

The tragic collision occurred on the A13 highway in Essex on Saturday, according to authorities.

Police said an 18-year-old woman in the car died on the spot, while four other occupants were hospitalised. Two of them are in a critical condition.

Authorities described the incident as a single-vehicle collision. Emergency services were alerted to the incident around 2.30pm on Saturday afternoon.

Following the crash, the Pitsea Flyover stretch of the road was closed in both directions for over 10 hours as investigators worked diligently to gather evidence and understand the circumstances surrounding the incident.

The closure caused disruption to traffic, inconveniencing many travelers in the area.

Essex police have informed the family of the young woman who lost her life. They are being provided support by specialist officers.

Authorities are now urging witnesses to come forward with any information that may assist in their investigation.

Detective sergeant Sam Nason from the Serious Collision Investigation Unit expressed condolences.

This was a tragic collision, and our thoughts are with those involved, he said.

We are continuing multiple enquiries this morning including speaking with witnesses and reviewing CCTV and dashcam, he told local media.

We believe there were a number of witnesses, many of whom helped those involved. We are appealing to anyone who may have witnessed this collision or have any CCTV or dashcam to get in contact.
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Sun, sea and sand are images we usually tend to associate with summer, but over the past few years that has changed, now pictures of scorched earth and dried-up reservoirs have become increasingly commonplace as the climate crisis comes into sharper focus.

As the planet continues to warm, scientists say extreme weather events are becoming more frequent and on 19 July last year, during a sweltering heatwave, the mercury hit a staggering 40.3C in Coningsby, Lincolnshire  the hottest ever temperature recorded in the UK.

Large parts of the country have seen plenty of sunshine and high temperatures over the past month, following a wet and dreary start to the year.

And it looks as though more baking hot weather is on the way.

Forecasters say there is a greater than normal chance of heatwaves in the second half of July, following the warmest June on record.

High-pressure conditions are set to create a correspondingly higher likelihood of a heatwave, sparking fears that the temperature record could be broken just a year after it was set.

Wildfires

Professor Richard Betts, who heads the Climate Impacts Research at the Met Office, said the impact of temperatures of 40C on the UKs animals species was uncharted territory.

The main point for the UK is that 40C is not something that species in this country are adapted to because it is virtually unprecedented  no creatures or plants in this country experienced temperatures of 40C until the 19 July last year, so its uncharted territory, he told The Independent.

Since we expect these temperatures to happen more often now as a result of climate change, species will increasingly be experiencing temperatures to which they are not adapted. What this means in detail remains to be seen, but in principle, a shift outside of a species climate niche poses a threat.

He added that one of the more visible impacts of the extreme temperatures were the wildfire that raged in parts of the UK last year.

[Wildfires are] something that the UK is not prepared for, and in particular, British people are not accustomed to being careful not to risk starting fires in hot weather. So until/unless people can become more careful about fire risk, we can expect fires to continue to occur when we get extreme hot weather.

Drought

July last year was the driest in England since 1911 and droughts were declared in several areas across the country the following month, including in Bristol, Somerset, Dorset, south Gloucestershire, parts of Wiltshire, Devon, Cornwall and the Isles of Scilly.

Hosepipe bans were issued in several areas, including Wessex where public and businesses were advised to use water wisely as the dry summer impacts the environment.

An Environment Agency report found this year found that monthly rainfall totals for the majority of river catchments were classed as exceptionally low for the time of year.

In August, there had been five consecutive months of below average rainfall across all geographic regions in England and above average temperatures.

With Wessex now officially in drought, 11 of the 14 Environment Agency areas in England are now in drought status.

There are four classifications the agency uses to manage arid conditions across these areas. They are: prolonged dry weather, drought, severe drought and recovering drought.

Melting roads

As well as having a negative impact on animals, plants and water systems, higher-than-average temperatures can also create havoc in everyday life, sometimes causing travel disruption and extremely uncomfortable conditions on public transport.

The UKs motorways and major A roads are highly resilient to extreme weather and approximately 94 per cent of the network has an asphalt surface which can withstand high temperatures, National Highways (NH) says.

Soaring temperatures 50C  temperature at which tarmac starts to soften

70C  temperature needed to cook an egg

There is also a small percentage of roads in the country that have concrete surfaces, which are unaffected by heat. Both types of road surface are suitable for use in very hot weather and in a changing climate.

The design and build standards we apply ensure our roads are kept safe and serviceable, NH adds.

Our design standards are considered best practice and have been adopted by other countries around the world.

During last years heatwave in July, sky-high temperatures affected some roads that were not resilient against extreme conditions.

Part of a road in, Blyton, Lincolnshire, melted as the surface temperature exceeded 54C.

There was a similar report in Stockport, Greater Manchester, where the top layer of Broadstone Road buckled under the heat.

Tarmac viscoelastic material, which means that as a solid its very strong but it can also transition back to a liquid under intense heat. At around 50C, the material softens and melts, although this only tends to affect the top layer.

A road in the UK melts amid scorching hot temperatures (PA)

Residents of London will be all too familiar with the suffocating heat on the citys packed Tube trains during the warm weather. Because a lot of the network is underground, this  along with the heat generated from the trains  means temperatures are regularly a few degrees above those on the ground.

Just how hot can it get? The Evening Standard newspaper said it recorded a temperature of 47C on the Central Line in July 2006 during a heatwave that gripped the entire continent of Europe.

Fast forward to 2023 and Transport for London (TfL) says there are now 192 air-conditioned Tube trains covering 40 per cent of the network, with enhanced tunnel ventilation systems on the Victoria and Jubilee lines.

TfL says that, with heatwaves becoming more common, it has a comprehensive hot weather plan in place to keep services running.

Were also working hard with our partners to explore how we better adapt to, and prepare for, the impacts of climate change and ensure that our transport services are more resilient in the face of more extreme and frequent weather events, Carl Eddleston TfLs network management and resilience director, said.

When high temperatures arise we encourage customers to carry water with them when they travel, to look out for each other while travelling, and use TfLs real-time travel tools, including status updates, Journey Planner and TfL Go, for the latest information on how TfL services are operating.
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Hundreds of modern slavery cases will be put on hold after the government admitted its own guidance for considering victims claims was unlawful  in a fresh blow to its stop the boats pledge.

The admission means the Home Office must stop refusing new claims until it draws up new instructions for officials, piling more pressure on the growing backlog of cases already taking an average of 18 months to decide.

It comes just days after the governments deal to deport asylum seekers to Rwanda was ruled unlawful by the Court of Appeal, as a separate backlog of asylum cases soars to new records.

The government changed Home Office guidance in January requiring claimants to prove they are victims by submitting third-party evidence of modern slavery and trafficking. The move came after ministers claimed small boat migrants were abusing modern slavery protections to claim asylum  something the statistics watchdog found no evidence of.

But last week, the government caved on a legal challenge by two people who were refused protection under the new threshold.

They argued that the guidance breached the European Convention on Human Rights, and was unfair and irrational because genuine victims would not immediately have evidence of being trafficked.

A day before the case was due to be heard by the High Court, the government conceded and said it would be withdrawing guidance.

As officials scramble to rewrite a lawful version, no new victims can be refused protection under modern slavery laws.

More than 1,400 of those decisions were made in the first three months of the year, meaning that for every day the bar is in place a backlog of around a dozen decisions will build.

The Home Office is reconsidering the cases of the two victims who brought the legal challenge, and anyone else refused under the same guidance can apply for their case to be reviewed.

Shalini Patel, a solicitor involved in the legal challenge, said: It should have been evident from the outset that the requirement for trafficking survivors to provide objective evidence was always going to be impossible and cause survivors of trafficking to fall at the first hurdle.

Suella Braverman says she respectfully disagrees with Rwanda ruling

Survivors of trafficking cannot obtain objective evidence within the required five working days for numerous reasons. Those who are being exploited do not gather evidence of their exploitation whilst they are being exploited.

Those who have their cases refused are left without any professional counselling, safe accommodation, financial support and protection from abusers.

Official figures show that when the requirement for objective evidence from slavery and trafficking victims was introduced in January, the number of negative decisions rocketed.

In 2022, 88 per cent of reasonable grounds decisions were positive, but in the first three months of this year that figure dropped to 58 per cent.

Dame Sara Thornton, the former anti-slavery watchdog, said alarm bells should have been ringing loudly in the Home Office as soon as they saw the dramatic shift.

But yet again it has been courageous survivors who have challenged the Home Office decisions and caused this change of approach, she told The Independent.

It is extremely concerning that many survivors of serious crimes appear to have been denied support and protection since these changes were made.

The Home Office conceded the case a day before a hearing at the High Court (PA) (PA Archive)

Dame Saras former post as Independent Anti-Slavery Commissioner remains empty a year and two months after her term ended, after the appointment of a successor was delayed by Suella Braverman.

It means that no independent watchdog has been in place during the consideration of the unlawful guidance, the drawing up of the Illegal Migration Bill to deport all small boats migrants to Rwanda and a linked expansion of the Rwanda deal to allow the deportation of trafficking victims.

Maya Esslemont, director of anti-trafficking group After Exploitation, said the government had created unrealistic burdens of proof for people who may have been rescued from their abusers days before.

Survivors need more support, earlier, in order to gather evidence now demanded of them, but their support is withheld unless they can provide a high level of evidence, they added. This was never a sustainable situation, and highlights the lengths this government is willing to go to in order to decimate modern slavery protections.

Esslemont called for all those rejected under the unlawful guidance to be offered the chance of reconsideration.

In legal correspondence, the Home Office said it was its intention to publish the new version by 10 July, and that in the interim period no cases would be rejected.

A Home Office spokesperson said: Modern slavery is a barbaric crime. We are committed to tackling it and ensuring victims are given the support they need to begin rebuilding their lives.

The National Referral Mechanism provides support to thousands of victims of modern slavery each year, but some people seek to exploit the system, which is why we have taken steps to prevent this.

The Home Office regularly updates statutory guidance and we will shortly issue a further clarification to the current guidance on modern slavery claims.
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The Foreign Secretary hailed the close and friendly co-operation between London and Brussels in a speech to EU parliamentarians.

James Cleverly said the level of trust between him and European Commission diplomat Maros Sefcovic was part of the reason the Windsor Framework was secured.

He accepted that it had taken slightly longer than many would have liked to reach the agreement but added: We have to recognise that we will not agree on everything, but in mature relationships we can deal with differences while making the most of areas where we agree.

Id like to say thanks for the spirit of friendship and cooperation that (Mr Sefcovic) brought into all our meetings and the level of trust that I was able to invest in our relationshp I think is part of the reason we got the Windsor Framework over the line, he said.

We have seen real progress and I am committed to maintaining that prositive trajectory.

The speech to the UK-EU Parliamentary Partnership Assembly, a body created as part of the post-Brexit trade deal, comes as Rishi Sunaks Government seeks better relations with the bloc.

Mr Cleverly is also expected to stress the importance of continued support for Ukraine as part of the visit.

European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen was in London last month, as part of the UK-hosted Ukraine Recovery Conference.

The Prime Minister earlier this year brokered the Windsor Framework deal with the EU, designed to address concerns over the operation of post-Brexit arrangements in Northern Ireland.

While the deal did not lead to the return of powersharing at Stormont, which the Democratic Unionist Party (DUP) continues to boycott, it did usher in hopes of a new foundation for UK-EU ties.

But Sir Jeffrey Donaldson, leader of the DUP, was among members at the event who voiced concerns.

He said: It is right that we avoid a hard border in Northern Ireland for the good of the Good Friday Agreement, but the Good Friday Agreement is not a one-sided agreement. It requires the support of unionists as well as nationalists in Northern Ireland.

The concept of a border in the Irish Sea is harmful from a unionist perspective to Northern Irelands ability to trade within the United Kingdom, so we will continue to work particularly with the UK Government to ensure that the arrangements for trade within the internal market of the United Kingdom are not affected in the future by the continued application of EU law, he said.

The Windsor Framework was Rishi Sunaks attempt to alleviate unionist concerns with the Northern Ireland protocol by decreasing checks on goods travelling to and from the UK mainland, but Stormont remains in flux.

Citizens rights and illegal migration were also among topics raised at the meeting.

Mr Cleverly is also holding talks with Nato secretary-general Jens Stoltenberg, ahead of a crunch summit in Vilnius, Lithuania.

It comes as Labours shadow foreign secretary David Lammy is expected to be in Paris for meetings with French Foreign Minister Catherine Colonna, as well as Transport Minister Clement Beaune.

It is understood that Mr Lammy is keen for discussions on his partys proposals for a UK-EU security pact, efforts to tackle smuggler gangs, as well as possible improvements to the Brexit trade deal.
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A letter signed by more than 100 MPs and lords is to be submitted to Foreign Secretary James Cleverly calling for fresh action to help free pro-democracy activist Alaa Abd El-Fattah, who has been incarcerated in Egypt for most of the past decade.

The mother of the 40-year-old British-Egyptian writer, mathematician Laila Soueif, will lead a vigil held by Amnesty International UK as the letter is presented to the Foreign and Commonwealth Development Office (FCDO) on Monday.

High profile politicians including Sir Peter Bottomley, Sir Iain Duncan Smith and Lord Chris Patten are among the signatories of the petition which calls for the UK to lead on a joint statement at the UN Human Rights Council and to update the FCDOs travel advice for British visitors to Egypt.

Mr Abd El-Fattah is currently serving a five-year sentence on charges of disseminating false news for retweeting a report in 2019 that another prisoner had died in custody.

He has been carrying out hunger strikes while in custody which he intensified at the time of the Cop27 summit in Sharm el-Sheik in November 2022, during which Prime Minister Rishi Sunak raised his case with President Abdel Fattah El-Sisi.

In the letter to Mr Cleverly, the supporters of the Free Alaa campaign state: We are writing to express our concern at the lack of progress on the case of Alaa Abd el-Fattah, six months on from the Prime Ministers meeting with President Sisi in Sharm el-Sheikh.

As a result, we are asking you to take the lead on a joint statement on Egypt at the UN Human Rights Council, and to update the UKs travel advice for the country.

You are of course aware that while the two leaders were meeting, Alaa was perilously close to death, collapsing just days later.

Since he chose to end his hunger and water strike, he has remained imprisoned in his cell and has still not received a single visit from a consular official, despite repeated commitments to Alaas family from British ministers and officials that they are doing everything they can.

Private lobbying of the Egyptian government, even at the highest levels, is yet to deliver results.

This calls for fresh approaches that draw on traditional British strengths of international diplomacy. The Human Rights Council presents a key opportunity for the UK to lead on a joint statement.

The letter also calls on the UK travel advice to follow that given by the US which warns that foreign nationals are not protected from prolonged interrogations and extended detention and its embassy is not always kept informed of their circumstances.

The protest on Monday has been timed to mark the 10th anniversary of President El-Sisis military coup in Egypt during which time Mr Abd El-Fattah has been imprisoned for all but a few months.

His supporters also highlight that it has been 18 months since the British embassy in Cairo has been given access to him in prison.
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Downing Street has rejected suggestions Orkney could loosen ties with the United Kingdom.

Orkneys council leader James Stockan has put forward a motion which says it is time for the islands to consider other forms of governance, possibly along the lines of crown dependencies such as Guernsey, Jersey and the Isle of Man, or reviving historic links with Norway.

However, No 10 shut down the options, with the Prime Ministers official spokesman telling reporters: First and foremost, there is no mechanism for the conferral of crown dependency or overseas territory status on any part of the UK.

Fundamentally, we are stronger as one United Kingdom, we have no plans to change that Prime Minister's official spokesman

But fundamentally, we are stronger as one United Kingdom, we have no plans to change that.

The spokesman added: Weve got no plans to change the devolution settlement.

Orkney was already being supported with 50 million through the islands growth deal, No 10 said.

Mr Stockans motion will be considered by Orkney Islands Council on Tuesday.

It states that due to historical and contemporary challenges over funding, Orkney Islands Council should now explore options for alternative models of governance that provide greater fiscal security and economic opportunity.

That should include looking at Nordic connections, crown dependencies and other options for greater subsidiarity and autonomy to be presented to the community for consideration.

The council leaders motion does not commit the council to any of these options and the officials report notes that any constitutional change would likely require a combination of petitions, referenda and legislation at Holyrood and Westminster.

Mr Stockan told the BBC he felt that Orkney is being failed dreadfully by Governments in both Edinburgh and London.

Funding is less per head than Shetland and the Western Isles receive, he said.

Orkney was under Norwegian and Danish control until 1472 when the islands were given to Scotland as part of Margaret of Denmarks wedding dowry to King James III of Scotland.

Mr Stockan told the BBC: We were part of the Norse kingdom for much longer than we were part of the United Kingdom.

On the street in Orkney, people come up and say to me: When are we going to pay back the dowry? When are we going back to Norway?

There is a huge affinity and a huge deep cultural relationship there. This is exactly the moment to explore what is possible.
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UK banks must not close individuals accounts for political reasons, Rishi Sunaks government has warned in an escalating row over freedom of speech sparked by Nigel Farage.

The former Ukip and Brexit Party leader said last week that his personal and business bank accounts had suddenly been closed  claiming it was an act of revenge by the establishment for Brexit.

Downing Street confirmed there were concerns at the highest levels of government and said the Treasury was now looking at the whether the banks were being overzealous in closing certain accounts.

Mr Sunaks official spokesperson said: The chancellor is concerned by some of the reports. Free speech within the law and the legitimate expression of differing views is an important part of British liberty.

No 10 said the Treasury was already consulting on whether the banks current framework strikes the right balance between the rights of a bank customer to express themselves freely and the right of a bank to manage commercial risks.

Culture secretary Lucy Frazer said earlier on Monday that she was concerned that peoples bank accounts might be closed for the wrong reasons  warning that financial institutions should tread very carefully when it comes to peoples political views.

Mr Farage revealed last week that a major banking group he had been with for 43 years had phoned him two months previously to say We are closing your accounts.

He alleged that it amounted to serious political persecution, claiming that British banks are part of the big corporate structures who did not want Brexit to happen.

Meanwhile, Church of England vicar Rev Richard Fothergill told The Times that his own bank account with the Yorkshire Building Society had been closed after he complained about its support for what he has termed the transsexual agenda during Pride month. He accused the company of bullying him.

A Yorkshire Building Society spokesperson said the company did not close accounts for particular views but only if a customer is rude, abusive, violent or discriminates in any way.

Chancellor Jeremy Hunt concerned by closure of accounts (PA Wire)

The Treasury is set to demand that banks provide more information on a decision to shut an account, and that they offer a longer notice period, according to The Daily Telegraph, with the regulator expected to take action if rules are not followed.

A senior Treasury source told the newspaper: It is absolutely a concern. No one should have their bank account denied on the grounds of freedom of expression. We expect to take action on this issue within weeks.

Ms Frazer told LBC that she agrees with Jeremy on the issue. The cabinet minister said she was quite concerned that peoples bank accounts might be closed for the wrong reasons, adding: And I do think that it is something that they should be thinking about very carefully.

Mr Farage said that the only explanation he could think of for his banks decision was a claim made by senior Labour MP Chris Bryant in the Commons that the former Brexit Party leader had received almost 550,000 from the television network Russia Today.

I simply point out that Nigel Farage received from Russia Today 548,573 in 2018 alone  from the Russian state, said the MP.

But Mr Farage said Mr Bryants claim was completely false. He said: I did not receive a penny from any source with even a link to Russia.

Two former Brexit Party MEPs, Christina Jordan and Henrik Overgaard-Nielsen, have also claimed that their bank accounts have been shut down without explanation in recent years.
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Supermarkets were accused of profiteering from rip off fuel prices during the cost of living crisis after a damning investigation found that drivers paid nearly 1bn too much in fuel costs last year.

Rishi Sunaks government vowed to stop motorists being used as cash cows after the scathing report by the Competition and Markets Authority (CMA) found that fuel retailers had charged an extra 6p on every litre sold between 2019 and 2022.

It means drivers have been charged between 2.70 and 3.90 too much for a tank of petrol or diesel every time they filled up their vehicle at a forecourt in recent years.

Keeping prices too high to increase margins meant motorists paid around 900m too much at the fuel forecourts run by Asda, Tesco, Sainsburys and Morrisons in 2022, the CMA stated.

While the regulator found no evidence of cartel behaviour, the government accused the supermarkets of using motorists as cash cows by jacking up prices but refusing to pass on savings.

The AA claimed drivers were rightly convinced for more than a decade that pump prices shoot up when costs rise but fall much more slowly when costs decline.

Downing Street vowed to introduce new legislation forcing fuel retailers to make up-to-date diesel and petrol prices available to third parties. This is expected to lead to the creation of price comparison apps and websites, enabling drivers to find the cheapest fuel in their area.

No 10 also pledged to hand new powers to a public organisation to closely monitor pump prices and alert ministers if further intervention is needed, with a plan to launch a consultation on the measures in the autumn.

The RAC said it was extremely pleased that the government was taking action, while the AA said the promised changes were better late than never  arguing that it was blindingly obvious that supermarkets had been charging too much.

AA spokesperson Luke Bosdet said: Sadly, it has taken more than 15 years for a government and competition watchdog to recognise this and do something about it. However, action that is better late than never is greatly appreciated by motorists across the UK.

Asda has been fined for failing to provide timely information on fuel prices (PA Wire)

The CMA inquiry also found that an increase in margins on diesel across all fuel retailers cost drivers an extra 13p per litre during the first five months of this year. And supermarket giant Asda was fined 60,000 by the CMA for failing to provide relevant information in a timely manner.

Energy secretary Grant Shapps accused some supermarkets of using motorists as cash cows, adding: They jacked up their prices when fuel costs rocketed, but failed to pass on savings now costs have fallen.

He added: It cannot be right that at a time when families are struggling with rising living costs, retailers are prioritising their bottom line ... Well shine a light on rip-off retailers to drive down prices, and make sure theyre held to account by putting into law new powers to increase transparency.

Energy security secretary Grant Shapps vowed to end the rip-off (PA Wire)

An Asda spokesperson said the fine related to two individual alleged technical breaches in the way information was shared, and insisted that the company had engaged fulsomely with the inquiry.

CMA chief executive Sarah Cardell said competition at the pump is not working as well as it should be and something needs to change swiftly to address this.

She added: This will have had a greater impact on vulnerable people, particularly those in areas with less choice of fuel stations. We need to reignite competition among fuel retailers.

The Liberal Democrats Treasury spokesperson Sarah Olney said the scathing report showed that ministers have been asleep at the wheel, adding: Rishi Sunak needs to crack down now on this petrol profiteering, by hauling the bosses responsible into Downing Street and holding them to account.

Energy minister Graham Stuart said he was shocked by the CMAs findings. He told the Commons: Motorists should not be used as cash cows by the fuel industry. The government will not stand for it, and I know this house wont stand for it.

The CMA report urged the government to bring in a fuel finder scheme that would help drivers to compare prices on an app and on their vehicles satnav.

No 10 said the government would come forward with plans for a law to force retailers to provide up-to-date price information, increasing transparency and competition after the summer.

A voluntary scheme that encourages retailers to disclose prices is set to launch next month. No 10 said a similar scheme in Germany had boosted competition.

Chancellor Jeremy Hunt said: It isnt fair that businesses are refusing to pass on lower prices to protect their profits while working people struggle with balancing their budgets. He promised to take swift steps to enact the CMAs recommendations.
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The governments plans to tackle the small boats crisis has been dealt a damaging blow in the House of Lords with peers demanding 11 key changes.

Several defeats were inflicted by peers on Monday, with members backing amendments limiting the detention of children and pregnant women, inserting protections for LGBT+ asylum seekers and forcing asylum claims to be considered for anyone not deported within six months.

Other revisions would include protections to modern slavery victims and strip out curbs on legal challenges to deportation.

It comes as peers accused the government of living in cloud cuckoo land as it continues to press ahead with its bill to deport asylum seekers who arrive in the county illegally despite having nowhere to send them.

Several members of the House of Lords called for the Illegal Migration Bill, which aims to detain and deport all small boat migrants, to be withdrawn in light of last weeks Court of Appeal ruling that the Rwanda deal is unlawful.

A minister previously told peers that Rwanda was the only nation where the UK has an agreement with that country to take them back, although the government hoped to make similar deals with other nations.

But it is continuing to back laws that aim to allow the Home Office to detain and deport all small boat migrants without considering asylum or modern slavery claims.

The law, which is key to Rishi Sunaks pledge to stop the boats, states that they will be detained for a minimum of 28 days, or longer if the home secretary believes it is reasonably necessary.

Crossbench peer Lord Carlile successfully pushed for a change removing detention powers from the home secretary and handing them back to the courts.

He said the government had left the world of reality and the law and taken a trip into cloud cuckoo land. We keep hearing from ministers something that is not based on reality, they seem to have forgotten that they lost the case in the Court of Appeal last week, Lord Carlile added.

The fact is that we in this house above all are entitled to expect the government to obey the law. They cannot send anyone to Rwanda, its unlawful.

Lord Carlile, a former senior barrister, said the governments appeal to the Supreme Court would not be heard until October at the earliest  after the Illegal Migration Bill is due to have passed through parliament.

We are not in a realistic situation, he added, calling for the government to withdraw the bill and start again if it eventually wins the legal battle.

Several peers pointed to figures showing that last month saw the highest number of small boat crossings for any June on record, questioning the governments claim that its plans are a deterrent. The total for the first half of 2023 is still 10 per cent lower than this time last year.

UK government's Rwanda asylum plan is unlawful, says Court of Appeal

Lord Green, who was a founder of right-wing campaign group Migration Watch UK, said: It appears that what the government has done so far has had no or very little effect.

Conservative peer Viscount Hailsham said that even if the Rwanda plan is implemented, it will not be possible to deport migrants in sufficient numbers as to constitute an effective deterrent.

He accused the government of widening immigration detention powers originally drawn up for people being imminently deported to be an administrative convenience in the hope that some prospect of deportation will turn up.

This is a huge enlargement in the discretionary powers of the secretary of state and I dont want to give any secretary of state, least of all the present home secretary or her predecessor, such additional powers, he added.

Liberal Democrat peer Lord German said there were no viable agreements in place to deport asylum seekers, and accused ministers of planning to lock them up purely with the aim of deterring others.

He put forward a successful amendment that would force the government to consider asylum applications from small boat migrants who are not deported for six months after being deemed inadmissible in the UK.

Another amendment would restrict the deportations of LGBT+ asylum seekers to countries where they may be persecuted, while peers also strongly backed limits on the detention of children and pregnant women.

The Illegal Migration Bill is part of the UK Governments efforts to deter people from crossing the Channel in small boats (PA)

Labour peer Baroness Lister said parliament had been given only the flimsiest of justifications for the unprecedented powers, which contradict previous Conservative policy.

The Lord Bishop of Durham told peers it was a damning indictment that amendments on child protection were required when they only proposed the most basic safeguards.

Government minister Lord Murray said the bills detention powers were necessary to effect deportations and that the plans would operate quickly and fairly, but did not directly address practical questions.

He claimed that detaining children and pregnant women would send a clear message  that they cannot be exploited by people-smuggling gangs on the false promise of starting a new life in the UK.

Lord Murray said it was right to give the home secretary powers over detention times because the Home Office would be in possession of all relevant facts.

It is the governments intention to remove any illegal entrants to a safe third country, he added, saying the Court of Appeal had found the aim lawful as a matter of principle.

The amendments, alongside others backed by the House of Lords, will be sent back to the House of Commons for MPs consideration.
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Sue Gray breached the civil service code by talking to Keir Starmer about a job with Labour four months before leaving Whitehall, a government investigation has found.

A Labour spokesman said the finding by the Cabinet Office was Mickey Mouse nonsense and a political stunt by the Tories. All rules were complied with, the spokesman said.

The Partygate investigator was cleared by an appointments watchdog to start as the Labour leaders chief of staff after a six-month cooling off period from when she quit as a senior civil servant in March.

But a Cabinet Office probe has found that Ms Gray broke the rules by discussing the top Labour job in October 2022, while she was still working for the civil service.

This process, led by the civil service, found that the civil service code was prima facie broken as a result of the undeclared contact between Ms Gray and the leader of the opposition, said Cabinet Office minister Jeremy Quin in a statement on Monday.

The Tory minister added: The rules and guidance that govern the conduct of civil servants are clear and transparent. It is deeply unfortunate that events have transpired in this way.

Mr Quin said in the written ministerial statement that civil servants must declare all relevant outside interests as soon as they arise. He said the policy advises that individuals should err on the side of caution when considering what to declare but the onus is on the individual to consider what might be relevant and declare it.

The Advisory Committee on Business Appointments (Acoba) said on Friday it shared some of the concerns raised by the government over the potential risk to the civil services integrity her move to Labour poses.

However, the appointments watchdog said it had seen no evidence that her decision making or impartiality was impaired while serving in Whitehall. It only advised a six-month pause from her last day, meaning she can start with Sir Keir in early September.

Keir Starmer delighted Sue Gray is joining in September (PA Wire)

Some furious Tories had urged Acoba to impose a waiting period of at least a year amid anger over Ms Grays move to join the Labour leader after investigating Boris Johnson over lockdown breaches in No 10.

Johnson loyalist Jacob Rees-Mogg  given a knighthood in his resignation honours  claimed Ms Grays discussions with Mr Starmer showed that there was a socialist cabal of Boris haters in Whitehall.

A Labour spokesman said Mondays statement by the Cabinet Office was Mickey Mouse nonsense and a political stunt by a Tory government out of ideas and out of road. He said the Acoba statement on Friday made clear that all rules were followed.

The spokesman claimed it says everything you need to know about the Tories that they have spent weeks wasting time on this Mickey Mouse nonsense while refusing to investigate groping allegations against former London mayoral hopeful Daniel Korski.

Sue Gray is set to take on a senior Labour Party role in September (PA Archive)

Mr Korski, a former Downing Street adviser during David Camerons tenure, pulled out of the race last week to be the Tory mayoral candidate after it was alleged he groped TV producer Daisy Goodwin in No 10 a decade ago. The Cabinet Office has ruled out investigating the claims.

Downing Street acknowledged that it was unprecedented for an inquiry to be conducted after someone has left the civil service, but played down suggestions it was politically motivated.

Quizzed on why the civil service code was found to have been prima facie broken, meaning at first sight, the spokesman said it was because officials conducting the probe werent able to speak directly to Ms Gray and relied on other information to come to the judgement.

Ciaran Martin, a professor at Oxford Universitys Blavatnick School of Government, said the Cabinet Office finding was very silly because the case against Ms Gray was not proved and the government had not produced evidence of any kind.

Sir Keir accepted Acobas six-month pause and said he was delighted that Ms Gray will be joining as his chief of staff. She brings unrivalled experience on how the machinery of government works and is a woman of great integrity.

Labour sources said Ms Gray formally accepted the job offer on Friday after resigning in March, paving the way for the Acoba advice to be published.

Ms Gray said Sir Keir raised the possibility of joining his team when he called her in late October 2022, according to the Acoba document. But she told the team there was no formal job offer until 2 March  the day she resigned.

Along with her Partygate probe, Ms Gray has held a number of senior roles in the civil service, including leading the Cabinet Offices propriety and ethics team. Her final role in Whitehall was as second permanent secretary at the Department for Levelling Up, Housing and Communities.
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A group of fanatic right-wing Tory MPs has been warned by senior Conservatives that its radical immigration proposals are undermining Rishi Sunak with a gift to Labour at the ballot box.

The so-called New Conservatives were slapped down by the PM and senior Tory colleagues after offering immigration proposals radically at odds with government policy.

The latest blue-on-blue battle erupted after the group of 25 MPs  which includes deputy Tory chairman Lee Anderson  piled pressure on Mr Sunak to crack down on foreign social care workers and overseas students.

The New Conservatives urged Mr Sunak and his home secretary Suella Braverman to slash net migration by two-thirds by the general election  from 606,000 to below 226,000  in order to save face with voters.

But the plan sparked an immediate backlash from Tory moderates. Tobias Ellwood labelled the ideas populist and isolationist, while others accused the group of making life more difficult for Tories desperately trying to cling on to their seats in 2024.

One senior Tory MP told The Independent: The last thing the Conservative Party needed was a new sub-group of fanatics sucking up airtime. This sideshow will do nothing to help at-risk colleagues hold onto their seats, and will only make matters worse.

Another senior Tory said: If by trashing the Conservative brand by attacking its record on immigration they hope to get re-elected they will be sadly disappointed.

The former minister added, sarcastically: By amplifying this issue they are simply giving more seats to Labour. What a good days work for these so-called New Conservatives.

Mr Anderson raised eyebrows by failing to turn up for the launch of the New Conservatives 12 immigration proposals, citing illness, despite backing the plan.

The right-wing bodys co-chair, Danny Kruger, made clear that the controversial deputy Tory chairman was supportive and was part of the group  raising fresh questions about Mr Sunaks grip on his own fractious party.

Tory deputy chairman Lee Anderson did not turn up to launch the radical proposals (BBC)

Labours shadow home secretary Yvette Cooper mocked the fact that Mr Anderson was now behind an entirely different Conservative immigration policy to Ms Bravermans plan.

Ms Cooper told the Commons that Tory backbenchers were writing her immigration policy because they dont think she is up to the job.

The New Conservatives said swift action was needed on migration numbers  urging Mr Sunak to close a scheme which makes care workers and senior care workers eligible for visas despite the sector grappling with 165,000 unfilled vacancies in the last year.

We are not going to make it an attractive career [to British citizens], we are not going to raise wages, if there is this route for employers to bring in people from abroad, said co-chair Miriam Cates.

Miriam Cates says British workers must be encouraged into social care (PA Media)

Ms Cates warned that the party faces defeat at the election expected in autumn 2024 unless the bold measures are taken up.

The choice is this  cut immigration, keep our promise to voters and restore democratic, cultural and economic security, she said. Or kick the can down the road, lose the next election and resign ourselves to a low growth, low wage, labour-intensive service economy.

But No 10 rejected the New Conservatives demands, with a spokesperson for the PM claiming that the government is currently striking the right balance on immigration.

The spokesperson said removing care workers from the shortage occupation list was not being considered, citing the significant demand in the care sector for staff.

The PMs official spokesman refused to say whether Mr Sunak was frustrated by Mr Andersons support for a crackdown  but acknowledged there were different views on each side of the debate.

Moderate Tory MPs, loyal to Mr Sunak, were scathing about the right-wing policy push and attempt to raise expectations of a new crackdown among red wall voters.

Mr Ellwood, chair of the defence select committee, said: We should avoid populist and isolationist rhetoric. The migrant issue is complex and cant be solved simply by switching off visa programmes.

He added: We should exhibit greater statecraft in tackling this issue starting by recognising the source of the challenge  namely growing instability in countries weve wandered into then abandoned interest in.

Rishi Sunak and Suella Braverman under pressure after Rwanda plan knocked back by court (AFP/Getty)

The right-wing red wall group is also calling for a cap of 20,000 on the number of refugees, and raising salary thresholds for skilled visas.

The backbenchers also want to close the route for graduate students to remain in the UK after their studies, and for student visas to be reserved for the brightest by making only the top universities eligible.

But senior Tory MP Robin Walker, a former education minister, told The Independent that the groups proposals for student visas were a non-starter.

You cannot differentiate between the grades of university, we do not with the fees system and it would be very unfair to suddenly introduce that for immigration purposes, Mr Walker said.

He said restrictions on student visas was not a realistic approach, adding that overseas students do tend to go home, do tend to benefit our university system and bring valuable funding with them, adding: I dont see the argument for trying to restrict their numbers per se.

The MPs who came up with a blueprint for reducing the number of migrants arriving lawfully insisted they are loyal to Mr Sunak.

Tom Hunt, MP for Ipswich, told reporters in Westminster: I know there is a lot being written about Tory rebels et cetera. Ill just make it absolutely clear, that is not how we see it. I supported Rishi Sunak to become prime minister, I do not regret the decision I made.

One senior Tory MP told The Independent there was angst and irritation inside the party that the High Court last week knocked back the plan to send failed asylum seekers to Rwanda.

Its a setback, but its not insurmountable, said the Sunak supporter. The bulk of colleagues still support the idea of practical measures to tackle illegal migration and getting the balance right on legal migration.

Tuesday will mark six months since Mr Sunak invited the public to judge him on his five targets  including his promise to stop the boats.

However, a new record has just been set for June for migrant crossings, official figures showed on Monday. Some 3,824 migrants arrived last month, compared with 3,140 in June last year.
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A group of Tory MPs is piling pressure on Rishi Sunak to reduce immigration to the UK - including a huge cut to the number of health and social care workers.

The so-called New Conservatives want the prime minister to cut net migration from 606,000 last year to below 226,000 by the next election. The group, which includes Tory deputy chairman Lee Anderson, said the party needs to save face, having promised a reduction in the net migration figure at the last general election.

To do so, the New Conservatives have called for Mr Sunak to close a scheme which makes care workers and senior care workers eligible for Visas, despite the sector grappling with 165,000 unfilled vacancies in the last year.

Currently, health and social care staff are eligible to come and work in the UK under the Health and Care Worker visa.

Backbench MP Miriam Cates, co-chair of the group, said closing the scheme would reduce the number of care workers coming to Britain by about 100,000.

She told the BBC it was a temporary scheme brought in during the pandemic and curbing the supply of foreign workers was needed to make care work an attractive career for British people.

We are not going to make it an attractive career, we are not going to raise wages, if there is this route for employers to bring in people from abroad, Ms Cates said.

Miriam Cates, Conservative MP for Penistone and Stocksbridge, said fewer care workers were needed to make it an attractive career for British people (PA Media)

The New Conservatives, made up of 25 Tory MPs elected since the Brexit referendum, said swift action is needed for the Conservatives to keep our word on immigration.

There is limited time in which to meet our promises, a report released on Monday warns.

Plans to curb the number of health and social care workers eligible for visas are part of a 12-point programme designed to bring down net migration.

The group is also calling for a cap of 20,000 on the number of refugees for resettlement and for student visas to be reserved for the brightest by making poor-performing universities ineligible.

In making the call, the report argues that immigration policy should not be used to prop up the finances of underperforming universities.

The report is being launched on Monday by Mr Anderson and other Tory MPs.

Among the more eyebrow-raising suggestions in the report were:

Ending of temporary visa schemes for overseas health and social care workers. This would cut the number of carers in the UK by around 100,000, at a time when the sector is already grappling with 165,000 vacancies.

Closing the route for graduate students to remain in the UK. Students can currently stay in the UK for up to two years after graduating, and critics have warned reducing the limit would undermine the competitiveness of British universities.

Excluding the poorest performing universities from being eligible for student visas. Critics have warned moves to limit the number of lucrative international students could force some universities into bankruptcy.

Labour is to blame and would make matters worse. The report claims Sir Keir Starmer cannot be trusted on immigration because he once wrote critically of the racist undercurrent permeating immigration law and has voted against the governments immigration policies. But it goes on to accept that under the Conservatives, immigration has ballooned in recent years, which stands in direct contradiction to the Conservative Party pledge made in 2019 to reduce migration.

Downing Street rejected the New Conservatives demands, with a spokesman for the prime minister claiming the government is currently striking the right balance on immigration.

The spokesman said removing care workers from the shortage of occupation list was not being considered, citing the significant demand in the care sector for staff.

Mr Sunak is also not planning to scrap the ability of overseas graduates to stay in the UK after finishing their degrees, his spokesman confirmed.

And Downing Street refused to say whether Mr Sunak was frustrated that his deputy party chairman Mr Anderson was backing the groups calls, instead acknowledging the different views held by the pair.

The report said: In 2019, we won our biggest majority in 30 years. One of the key promises that helped deliver that majority was that there would be fewer lower-skilled migrants and overall numbers will come down.

It is time for us to keep our word on reducing immigration and regain the trust of the British people.

It is the latest sign of backbench pressure on the prime minister to curb immigration ahead of the next general election, expected before January 2025.

The Government earlier this year announced plans to prevent some overseas students bringing dependents to the UK.

Home Secretary Suella Braverman has been outspoken about her desire to bring immigration numbers down, but other members of Mr Sunaks Cabinet are believed to be more relaxed about the issue.

Mr Hunt played down any suggestion that the report represented a challenge to the Prime Minister, telling BBC Radio 4s Westminster Hour: This is a constructive document. Weve finally got back control of our immigration system.

Weve ended EU free movement. I think its healthy to have a level of debate within the parliamentary party about the future of our immigration policy and were fully supportive of the Prime Minister.
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The King met queen Scotland as he arrived for his first public engagement in Scotland since his coronation.

Charles was welcomed by crowds as he arrived at Kinneil House in Boness, Falkirk  the historic home of the dukes of Hamilton  wearing a kilt.

Among those he greeted was Boness Fair Queen, Lexi Scotland, who was wearing her ceremonial robes and a crown.

The pair shook hands as the King congratulated Lexi on her achievement, while Lexi and the crowd welcomed him to Kinneil House.

Lexi said it is exciting to have been crowned the newest Boness queen, adding she enjoyed meeting the King and his entourage.

She said: I was quite nervous, but I was also excited to meet him.

Lexi was joined by May Garrow, 99, who was crowned the Boness Queen in 1936.

The occasion marked Mays first time meeting the King.

She said: Ive never actually shook hands with him before. Ill not wash that hand anymore.

Charles asked May if she still owns her dress from when she was crowned the Boness Queen.

May told reporters: Ive still got the dress. Mind you, it was white but its a dark creamy colour now. I dont think Id get into it now!

May turns 100 on February 24, and is excited to receive her message from the King.

May commented that it was a nice day, adding she enjoyed the Kings company and said: He makes things easy for you to talk.

Speaking of Lexi, she added: Shes had a nice day, and when shes my age shell come back too.

Maria Ford plays a vital role in organising the fair, and says they have tried for a royal visit for many years.

She said: We pushed and pushed for a royal visit but we just never managed, but now everythings came together and its like the last piece of the jigsaw.

The King later met with Sustainable Thinking Scotland (STS), which operates from Kinneil House.

The organisation grows sustainable food which in turn is given for food parcels.

Co-director Steve McQueen said the King told him the cherries they had grown were the biggest hed ever seen.

Sean Kerr, also a director, said: I think the king sees the community benefit from all that were doing, whether its growing food, environmental or community work.

It was great to be able to talk to him about everything and hopefully we can take it further.

He added: Its really great to be able to highlight all the amazing work that all the groups we work with do we do.

For me its just a thrill to be able to showcase the people we work with that do such a great job in Falkirk, and were glad to be a part of it.

During his visit, the King viewed the cylinder of the engine erected by the famed Scottish engineer, James Watt.

The house and nearby James Watt Cottage were the setting for the engineers secret development work on the prototype steam engine in 1765-73.

The King also planted a tree to commemorate the centenary of the estate becoming a public park and meet charity representatives and beneficiaries.

The visit is the first of a series of engagements in Scotland, marking the first Holyrood Week since his coronation.

There will be a special ceremony of thanksgiving at St Giles Cathedral on Wednesday, where Charles will be presented with the Honours of Scotland  the nations crown jewels.

Each year, the monarch traditionally spends a week based at the Palace of Holyroodhouse in Edinburgh, known as Holyrood Week or Royal Week in Scotland.

The King and Queen will be accompanied by William and Catherine, whose Scottish titles are the Duke and Duchess of Rothesay.

Later on Monday, the King took part in the Ceremony of the Keys on the palace forecourt where he is presented with the keys to the city.

Charles and Camilla are also expected to visit the Great Tapestry of Scotland, seeing a newly stitched panel dedicated to the couple.

Wednesday will be a key day during the visit with a series of events to mark the coronation.

Before the service at St Giles, there will be both a royal procession and a peoples procession along the Royal Mile.

Anti-monarchy campaign group Republic will be staging a protest along the route and said it expects a large turnout.

The organisation will also be collaborating with Scottish republican group Our Republic, which will be staging a rally outside the Scottish Parliament.

Graham Smith, Republics chief executive officer, said: Everyone in the UK should have the right to choose our head of state  not be told it will be Charles.

Charles does not represent the people of Scotland any more than he represents the rest of the UK.

The peoples procession will consist of about 100 people representing different aspects of Scottish life.

At the head of the column will be the Shetland pony Corporal Cruachan IV  mascot of the Royal Regiment of Scotland.

The Stone of Destiny will be present at the ceremony in St Giles Cathedral, where the King will be presented with the Honours of Scotland.

Afterwards, there will be a gun salute at Edinburgh Castle and a flypast by the Red Arrows.
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On Tuesday, the US celebrates 247 years of independence from colonial British rule, the end of the Revolutionary War and the day a global superpower was born.

Millions of Americans are preparing for their Fourth of July gatherings, during which theyll enjoy fireworks, parades, picnics and barbecues with their loved ones.

To mark the occasion, we look back at the history of the Fourth of July and the men who made it all possible.

America lost its second and third presidents on the same day

Three US presidents have died on 4 July, all Founding Fathers and two on the same day: 4 July 1826, the 50th anniversary of the countrys foundation.

Thomas Jeffersons later years were riddled with ill health and debt. The third president died at home in Virginia, aged 83, surrounded by his family.

That same day, John Adams, who had succeeded George Washington and masterminded the Declaration of Independence, also passed away at home in Quincy, Massachusetts, aged 85.

Tragically, Adams consoled himself with the final words Thomas Jefferson survives, the statesman mercifully unaware that his friend and fellow nation-builder had himself expired just hours earlier.

These men would be joined by the fifth president, James Monroe, who died on 4 July 1831.

The Adams legacy lived on, however. John's son, John Quincy Adams, served as the sixth president.

The Boston Tea Party and a fight for freedom

American independence was the product of years of souring relations with Great Britain, as the citizens of the Thirteen American Colonies grew increasingly frustrated with Parliamentary rule from across the Atlantic and the notion of "taxation without representation".

Discontent began brewing in 1763, as the House of Commons introduced measures to increase revenue from its imperial subjects, with the Stamp Act of 1765 and the Townshend Acts of 1767 sparking particular anger across the pond.

Matters came to a head with the Boston Tea Party in 1773, when a political protest group known as the Sons of Liberty dressed as Native Americans and dumped an entire shipment of British tea leaves imported by the East India Company into the harbour. The demonstration was both a gleeful satire of the ruling powers obsession with its national beverage and a call to arms against the decadence and entitlement of empire.

The bloody War of Independence broke out in earnest two years later.

(Library of Congress/Wikimedia Commons)

The signing of the Declaration of Independence

A year into the outbreak of the American Revolutionary War, delegates from the Thirteen Colonies gathered to compose a statement formally declaring their sovereignty from London.

Known as the Second Continental Congress, the meeting saw the leaders come together at the Pennsylvanian State House in Philadelphia to sign a document that would both renounce British imperial control and introduce a new nation: the United States of America.

Drafted by the Committee of Five  John Adams, Thomas Jefferson, Benjamin Franklin, Roger Sherman and Robert Livingston  the document established citizens "unalienable" rights, observing that "all men are created equal" and enshrining the individuals entitlement to "life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness".

The draft was submitted to Congress on 28 June 1776, voted into law on 2 July and formally ratified on 4 July, a date that has been celebrated by patriotic Americans ever since.

Among the most famous statesmen to sign the declaration was John Hancock, whose name lives on as a synonym for signature, as well as Adams and Jefferson, both then future presidents in waiting.

Benjamin Franklin: Enlightenment polymath

While the Founding Fathers were all men of grand vision, none was more so than Benjamin Franklin.

Later celebrated as the First American, Franklin embodied the Puritan work ethic of the 18th century, serving as political campaigner, diplomat, ambassador to France, postmaster-general and newspaper publisher while still finding time to dabble in freemasonry, music, chess and scientific experimentation. It is in this final capacity that he is best remembered outside of the political sphere today.

Franklin first experimented with electricity in 1746 and successfully trapped lightning by flying a kite in a storm from a Philadelphia hillside in 1752, therein establishing both the principle of battery storage and the lightning rod.

Franklins other inventions included bifocal glasses, a metal-lined cooking stove and a flexible urinary catheter. Truly a remarkable man.

Thomas Jeffersons not-so-secret mistress

Although hailed as the author of independence, Jefferson was no saint.

The third president of the United States kept slaves, including Sally Hemings (1773-1835), a mixed-race servant girl whose six children. Jefferson is widely believed to have fathered these children, following the death of his wife Martha in 1782.

A DNA study in 1998 established a direct genetic link between the revered politician and Eston Hemings, Sallys youngest son.

(Getty Images)

Hemings lived and worked on Jeffersons Monticello plantation home in Charlottesville, Virginia, and travelled with him to Paris, where their relationship is thought to have first been consummated.

The affair was controversial at the time and used to discredit Jefferson by political journalist James T Callender, though the president himself never confirmed or denied it.

Hemings four surviving teenage children were released from slavery upon Jeffersons death as stipulated in his will, as was Sally herself. She lived the final nine years of her life as a free woman, residing near Monticello with her two sons until her death.
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The Fourth of July is a day of summer weather, barbeques and national hot dog eating competitions in America, as the nation celebrates its independence.

But few people will know that the tune of the US national anthem, The Star Spangled Banner, a song sung proudly at every Super Bowl, actually originally came from England.

The melody to which Francis Scott Key set the lyrics was derived from To Anacreon in Heaven, the constitutional song of the Anacreontic Society, a private gentlemans club in London.

The song was named after a Greek poet called Anacreon, who gained notoriety for his poems about women and drinking.

It went on to be a common song sung in taverns in colonial America, but Congress did not name it the official US anthem until 1931.

The composer of the melody was John Stafford Smith, born in Gloucester in March 1750 and the son of a cathedral organist. He went on to join the Chapel Royal in London and was a pupil of composer William Boyce.

Smith became a member of the Anacreontic Society, which first met in taverns on The Strand in central London, reaching around 80 members.

Held every other week, the meeting would begin with a concert of musicians and end with a dinner, puppet shows and other activities.

Members sang To Anacreon in Heaven, whose lyrics were written by society president Ralph Tomlinson.

While the private club dissipated in the 1790s, the song continued to appear in printed music and made its way across the Atlantic.

Despite its growing popularity overseas, the composer, Smith, apparently did not attempt to advertise his own authorship. He died in London in 1836.

By the time of the US civil war in 1861, the mix of Smiths melody with Keys lyrics had become one of the countrys most known and treasured songs, and was adopted by the military soon after.
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US Transport Secretary Pete Buttigieg has blamed thousands of flight delays and cancellations over the Fourth of July holiday weekend on the weather.

More than 1,322 flights were cancelled and 89,500 delayed this weekend, according to monitoring site, FlightAware. Thats on top of the 24,000 flights delayed and 5,600 cancelled between Monday and Wednesday. On Thursday, the busiest travel day, 770 flights were cancelled and 31,413 delayed.

[Flight delays and cancellations] really shot up at the first part of the week, largely because of severe weather hitting some of our key hubs, Mr Buttigieg told CBS.

I think most passengers understand that no one can control the weather, but anything thats under the control of the airlines and anything that we can do on the FAA side, we need to continue pushing to make sure that theres the smoothest possible experience for air passengers everywhere.

While large parts of the country were battling stormy conditions and smoke from Canadian wildfires, some airline executives also pointed to staffing shortages at the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA).

United Airlines CEO Scott Kirby made it clear where he was placing blame, reported by Travel + Leisure magazine.

"The FAA frankly failed us this weekend, he wrote, blaming the the agency for "staffing issues and their ability to manage traffic".

Mr Kirby added that the "FAA reduced the arrival rates by 40 per cent and departure rates by 75 per cent," and that those reductions were "certainly a reflection of understaffing/lower experience at the FAA."

"It led to massive delays, cancellations, diversions, as well as crews and aircraft out of position," he wrote. "That put everyone behind the eight ball when weather actually did hit on Sunday and was further compounded by FAA staffing shortages Sunday evening."

Mr Kirby was later forced to apologise when it emerged that he took a private jet out of New York this week while United customers were stranded at airports across the country.

Even stranded passengers turned their furor toward the FAA.

This is not all Deltas fault, said Sonia Hendrix who was stranded for four days while trying to fly home from Colorado to New York. She spent one night in Atlanta and two in Orlando due to delays and cancellations.

Their pilots and flight crews were working very hard," she told the Associated Press.

"I blame the FAA. I blame Buttigieg for sitting on his hands and not staffing up air traffic control centers sooner.

One traveler, flying to visit family to celebrate Eid, explained on Twitter that her flight was delayed for days, then cancelled, ruining her holiday plans.

My @JetBlue flight was delayed by TWO DAYS so not only did i miss celebrating Eid with my family, but im also missing the wedding im flying out for hahahahha im gonna cry, she wrote.

Another video posted online showed a United Airlines pilot apologising to stranded travelers and saying that his co-pilot was held up due to scheduling issues.

My flight is delayed to Dallas but shoutout to this Captain on flight UA2446 for coming out from the gate and apologizing for the delay since his Co-pilot is delayed due to scheduling, the Twitter user wrote.

Kindness goes along way and this guy gets it.

Secretary Buttigieg has previously said that the "summer is going to be a stress test on the system," referring to FAA's ability to maintain the nation's air travel logistics.

Fourth of July weekend is the pinnacle of that test with record numbers of air and road travelers in recent days, according to AAA data.

Weve never projected travel numbers this high for Independence Day weekend, Paula Twidale, senior vice president of AAA Travel, told NBC News.

Despite fewer available flights and higher ticket prices, she said, consumers are not cutting back on travel this summer.
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A South Carolina man has been arrested on murder charges after six members of a family were found dead inside a house on fire.

Ryan Lenard Manigo, 33, was taken into custody following the fire on Sunday, the Colleton County Sheriffs Office said in a statement.

First responders arrived at the home in the unincorporated community of Green Pond around 11am after they were alerted to stabbings at the property. Deputies found the residence engulfed in flames, the sheriff said during a press conference on Monday.

Six people were discovered dead inside the burning residence, and a surviving 13-year-old boy who had sustained stabbing wounds was airlifted to an area hospital in critical condition. Mr Manigos 11-year-old daughter Shariah and his 50-year-old sister-in-law Michelle Marie Wright were among the fatal victims.

The other four victims have not been identified.

Law enforcement said that an interview with the survivor led to the arrest of Mr Manigo on two counts of murder and one count of attempted murder. More charges are expected once autopsies are completed, according to the Colleton-County Sheriffs-Office.

Todays events which occurred in this quiet, nestled community of Green Pond are tragic, Hiram Davis, a close friend of the victims, told local news station, WCBD. We ask everyone to please give law enforcement time to do their jobs.

Ryan Lenard Manigo, 33, was taken into custody following the fire on Sunday (CCSO)

Mr Davis added: We should always be vigilant. We should always have an eye on our surroundings.

Authorities have not released a motive for the crimes. It is unclear whether Mr Manigo was the one to start the fire.

A neighbour also told WCBD that he was on his way home when he saw emergency vehicles rushing to the victims home.

Six people were found dead inside the burning residence in Green Pond (WCBD )

We dont have that in this community. No violence to that degree, the man, who wished not to share his name, said. God help their souls. This community is better than that.

Mr Manigo remains in custody at the Colleton County Detention Center ahead of a bond hearing with a district judge.

The South Carolina Law Enforcement Divisions Arson Team is working along with the Colleton County Sheriffs-Office in the investigation.

Anyone with information is asked to contact investigators at 843-549-2211.
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An experienced police officer was shot dead at a hospital in southern Indiana during a confrontation on Monday morning that also left a domestic violence suspect dead, authorities say.

Tell City Police Department Sergeant Heather Glenn, 47, was fatally shot after a brief struggle with Sean Hubert near an emergency room at Perry County Memorial Hospital, Indiana State Police said in a statement.

Officers then returned fire, killing 34-year-old Hubert.

Glenn had been investigating a domestic dispute involving Hubert and a woman who had gone to the hospital to seek treatment for her injuries, state police said.

On Monday morning, the female victim notified hospital staff that Hubert was on his way there and officers from several police departments responded.

Glenn tried to subdue the suspect with an electronic weapon, but it was ineffective, state police said.

During a brief struggle, Hubert produced a firearm and Sergeant Glenn was shot. Officers with the Tell City Police Department and Cannelton Police Department returned fire and shot Hubert, Indiana State Police sergeant John Davis said in a statement.

Tell City police sergeant Heather Glenn was shot and killed at an Indiana hospital (Indiana State Police)

Both Glenn and Hubert were treated at the scene for their injuries, and pronounced dead shortly afterwards.

Sergeant Davis told the Associated Press that the officers did not know Hubert was armed.

Glenn had worked for the Tell City Police Department and Perry County Sheriffs Office for nearly 20 years.

Tell City Police Chief Derrick Lawalin described her as a well-respected officer and pillar of her community.

We lost a dear colleague, a dear friend. Sgt. Glenn  shes a cornerstone of our department, he said.

Tell City has a population of about 7,500, and lies 150 miles (240 kilometers) south of Indianapolis, just across he Ohio River from Kentucky.
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Family members and civil rights activists expressed anger at a decision by San Francisco prosecutors to drop charges against a police officer who shot and killed Sean Moore, an unarmed Black man gunned down on the front steps of his home during a call about noise complaint.

San Francisco district attorney Brooke Jenkins announced the decision to drop the manslaughter prosecution, which was filed in 2021 by her predecessor, on Sunday, saying her office can not ethically prosecute this case in good faith.

The people of San Francisco elected me to restore accountability and enhance public safety; to faithfully follow the facts and the law and not bow to political pressure or pursue politically expedient prosecutions that are legally and ethically dubious, she wrote in a statement. As prosecutors, we have a sacred duty to try cases in good faith, to not abuse our power and ensure that the cases we bring forward are fair in order to maintain trust in the criminal justice system.

Family members were baffled and hurt by the decision, which marks the third such case Ms Jenkins has dropped, leaving no more active prosecutions related to police killing people while on active duty.

Im very angry, Im beyond angry, Kenneth Blackmon, Moores brother, told Mission Local. Im in disbelief, to be honest with you.

Anti-police violence activist Samuel Sinyangwe argued in a Twitter post on Monday the decision meant murder is now fully decriminalized for police in the city of San Francisco.

In January of 2017, San Francisco police officers Colin Patino and Kenneth Cha were called to Moores Oceanside house around 4am responding to a call that the man was violating a noise-related restraining order by banging on the walls of his home.

Police body camera video captured the incident, the first such officer-involved shooting recorded this way in city history.

Moore, who family members said was in the midst of a mental health crisis caused by bipolar disorder and schizophrenia, can be seen angrily telling officers to get the f*** of my stairs from behind a metal entry gate.

Officers continue to demand he exit the home, and eventually he does so, at which point they pepper sprayed the unarmed man and beat him with a baton. Moore then punched Patino, breaking his nose, and kicked Cha down a set of stairs, after which Cha shot Moore twice, hitting him in the leg and stomach.

A year after the violent encounter, charges against Moore were dropped. An appeals court found the officers hadnt witnessed Moore violating the restraining order at issue, so they lacked probable cause to arrest him. As such, when they ignored his requests to leave, their consensual encounter became an unlawful detention.

In 2020, Moore died while serving time in prison on an unrelated matter, and an autopsy found the wounds from the shooting were partially responsible.

In 2021, San Francisco city supervisors voted to pay $3.25m to settle a federal excessive force lawsuit from Moores family related to the 2017 police encounter.

That same year, former San Francisco DA Chesa Boudin filed charges against the officer involved in Moores shooting, the first time a city district attorney had ever charged a police officer with a crime related to a use-of-force death.

San Francisco police have among the worst records in California for disparate use of force on people of colour. Black people are 6.5 times more likely to be killed than white people by San Francisco officers, according to data analysis from Mapping Police Violence.
 Close Search for suspects after Molotov cocktail detonated

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Police have released additional photos of a suspect on the run after three explosions took place in Washington, DC over the weekend in what appears to be targeted attacks on businesses.

An ATM, a Nike store, and a Safeway grocery store were all struck by explosions starting at about 4.30am on Sunday.

Police are on the lookout for a vehicle used in the explosions.

The attacks all occurred within 15 minutes, with the first taking place when the suspect blew up an ATM outside Truist Bank in the 2300 block of Washington Place.

After leaving the scene in the car, the suspect detonated a second explosion at 4.36am at the Nike Store located in the 700 block of H Street.

Nine minutes later, a Molotov cocktail-style explosive was thrown at the Safeway grocery store on the 300 block of 40th Street before the suspect again left the scene by car.

No injuries have been reported and the Metropolitan Police has said that the suspect didnt appear to have been targeting the public as the explosions took place at closed businesses.
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In the dead of the night over July 4 weekend, explosives were detonated one by one across three businesses in Washington DC.

First, an ATM was targeted. Then a nearby Nike store was damaged. And, lastly, a Safeway supermarket was struck.

The attacks left the nations capital on edge and perplexed as to who the perpetrator is and what their motive may be.

Now, the hunt is on to track down a mystery hooded figure and a suspect vehicle.

Heres what we know so far:

The attacks

The series of attacks all took place within a 15-minute period in the early hours of Sunday morning  a time when the streets of the city were deserted.

At around 4.30am, the unidentified suspect detonated an explosive device on the sidewalk outside of the ATM at the Truist Bank in the 2300 block of Washington Place, in the northeast of the city.

After fleeing the scene in a vehicle, the suspect struck a second time  this time targeting the Nike Store located in the 700 block of H Street.

At 4.36am, the device was detonated on the sidewalk in front of the store doors before the suspect again fled the scene by car.

Scene of one of the blasts (@AJKoski16)

Just nine minutes later, the same suspect allegedly threw a Molotov cocktail style object at the Safeway store on the 300 block of 40th Street.

The suspect fled in the scene in a vehicle.

All three locations were damaged by the explosions but no injuries were reported.

Metropolitan Police Department said that, in each of the attacks, the suspect targeted commercial establishments which were all closed at the time and does not appear to have been targeting members of the public.

DC residents in fear

A political consultant who lives lives in the apartments above the Truist Bank spoke of her terror as the explosive device detonated outside the ATM below as she slept.

Amanda Koski told The Independent: The noise woke me up. I have PTSD so when it happened, I kind of froze up and originally I thought it was gunshots.

When I looked through my window, I saw glass shattered so I originally thought someone had shot at the bank.

She said the neighbourhood was eerily quiet after the blast, before police and fire officials arrived on the scene.

The 32-year-old shared photos of the damage on social media.

Mystery hooded suspect

Hours after the incidents, Metropolitan Police released surveillance images of the suspect as well as a vehicle wanted in connection to the attacks.

The suspect was dressed in black trousers and a white/cream hooded top.

Surveillance image of the suspect and vehicle from the DC attacks (MPD)

The vehicle is a gold or champagne-coloured Acura TL with Maryland licence plate 17971CK.

The Metropolitan Police and the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives Washington Field Division are seeking the publics help in identifying the suspect or suspects.

A reward of up to $20,000 is being offered for information leading to an arrest.

Anyone who may have any information about these incidents, to include video or photos from any of the offense location are encouraged to call MPD at (202) 727-9099 or text your tip to the Departments TEXT TIP LINE at 50411.
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Police in Lansing, Michigan, have issued an Amber Alert for a missing two-year-old after a man was arrested on suspicion of kidnapping her.

Wynter Smith was last seen at about 11.30pm on Sunday with Rashad Maleek Trice inside a 2013 white Chevrolet Impala on the south side of Lansing, the Lansing Police Department said.

Police issued an urgent appeal for sightings of the missing toddler, who is described as having braided shoulder-length hair and was last seen wearing a white t-shirt with rainbows.

At 5.50am on Monday morning, police announced that they had arrested Mr Trice in St Clair Shores, about 100 miles south of Lansing, but that the toddler was still missing.

Police have not said whether Mr Trice, who is in his late 20s, has been criminally charged.

Residents have been urged to keep an eye out for any sign of Wynter.

The Lansing Police Department is looking for 26-year-old Rashad Trice. He is wanted in the kidnapping of 2-year-old Winter Smith. They were last seen on July 2nd around 11:30 p.m. on the south side of Lansing in a 2013 white Chevrolet Impala. The license plate is: EJR6098. pic.twitter.com/2lejWzBhrO  Lansing Police (@LansingPolice) July 3, 2023

Police in Lansing arrested Rashad Maleek Trice in connection with the kidnapping of missing toddler Wynter Smith (Lansing Police Department)

Anyone with information is asked to call the Lansing Police Department at 517-483-4600 or call Crime Stoppers at 517-483-7867.
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Over the weekend, Elon Musk appeared in a Twitter post to endorse the idea of taking the right to vote away from people without children.

The billionaire Tesla co-founder replied Yup, to a series of posts from Twitter user @fentasyl, which argued democracy is probably unworkable long term without limiting suffrage to parents.

The exchange came as Mr Musk continued his recent run of interacting with right-wing figures on the social network.

The posts from fentasyl themselves were a response to a previous post from Mr Musk.

On Saturday, in the comments under an Islamophobic nonprofits video, where commenters insinuated that single white women were turning France into a majority-Muslim country, Mr Musk claimed, The childless have little stake in the future.

The Independent has contacted Mr Musk for comment.

These opinions are hardly surprising for Mr Musk, who has long expressed concerns about declining birth rates in the US and the lack of smart people having enough children, views which critics have argued are verging on eugenicist.

In 2022, Musk, who has fathered nine children, wrote on Twitter that, A collapsing birth rate is the biggest danger civilization faces by far.

Earlier this year, he elaborated, telling former Fox News anchor Tucker Carlson that society hasnt evolved to respond to abortions and contraception, which the billionaire incorrectly claimed were invented in the last 50 years.

Im sort of worried that hey, civilisation, if we dont make enough people to at least sustain our numbers, perhaps increase a little bit, then civilisations going to crumble, Musk said. The old question of, will civilisation end with a bang or a whimper?

(In fact, the world population has doubled in the last 50 years to more than 8 billion, according to the UN, though the birth rate has slowed in some places.)

Observer argue that such so-called natalist views are often entangled with eugenicist ideas about intentionally manipulating future births to privilege and center certain groups of people.

Mr Musk has previously lamented that smart people arent having enough children.

If each successive generation of smart people has fewer kids, thats probably bad, he once told a biographer.

The tech billionaire has touted a prototype robot as a solution to a hypothetical world where declining numbers of workers are available to toil in Tesla factories.

For someone concerned with human civilizations long-term longevity, Mr Musk lives a fabulously carbon intensive life. The carbon footprint from his 2022 private jet flights alone was 132 times greater than the average US residents total footprint, a doubly astounding figure given people in the US consume far more resources than less wealthy nations.
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Joerg Arnu has been obsessed with Area 51 ever since his first visit to the perimeter of the secretive military base in 1998.

The rumours of alien life forms, CIA spy plane testing programmes, and sense of forbidden mystery surrounding the massive military base in the southern Nevada desert instantly intrigued the 61-year-old retired software developer.

In 1999, he launched the DreamlandResort blog as a comprehensive one-stop-shop for photos, videos and discussion about the base and the top secret military aircraft that are built and tested there.

The site tapped into a community of curious minds who, like Mr Arnu, had been looking for a way to exchange their findings, he told The Independent.

He eventually bought a second home near the gates of the military base in the tiny settlement of Rachel, which Mr Arnu describes as a virtual melting pot for aircraft aficionados, stargazers, researchers and UFO seekers.

On the morning of November 3 last year, he was in bed when around 20 armed counter-terrorism agents in tactical gear raided his Rachel home, handcuffed him and led him out of his home in the freezing cold for questioning, he told The Independent.

Agents simultaneously kicked down the door of his home in Las Vegas, where his girlfriend Linda Hellow awoke to find a dozen FBI officers in the living room. She says she was ordered at gunpoint to come down the stairs from her bedroom dressed only in a t-shirt and underwear.

We are senior citizens, were not armed, fully cooperated with the agents and yet we were treated in the most disrespectful and humiliating way possible, he told The Independent.

The agents seized four of Mr Arnus computers, containing his lifes work on Area 51, along with treasured photos of his deceased parents, and medical and tax records. Hard drives, phones, cameras and a drone were also taken.

Arnu and his girlfriend Linda Hellow say they were left traumatised after federal agents raided their Nevada homes (Courtesy of Joerg Arnu)

After the search was finished, the agents handed Mr Arnu a search warrant signed by a federal magistrate judge. The first 39 pages were missing, and it only provided vague hints of what the agents had been looking for.

He would later learn that a joint team from the FBI and the Air Force Office of Special Investigations (USAF OSI) had conducted the raids.

He believes his interrogation was led by an agent from the OSI, a counter intelligence wing whose stated goal is to investigate hostile intelligence services and terrorist groups that target the Air Force.

Eight months on, he still has no idea whether he will face charges, or if hell ever get back the more than $30,000 he says hes out of pocket for as a result of seized equipment, property damage and legal fees.

Mr Arnu told The Independent he had taken care to avoid publishing any material that could harm national security interests, relying on extremely knowledgeable members in his network who include former workers at the base and veterans.

We all understand that there are limits to what can be shared.

He believes the raids were a deliberate tactic by the US Government to try to intimidate and silence the Area 51 research community.

Little green men

Area 51 has been a magnet for military buffs, conspiracy theorists and alien enthusiasts since the late 1950s, when rumours of little green men and UFO sightings began circulating.

Lying about 120 miles northwest of Las Vegas, Area 51s official name is the Nevada Test and Training Range at Groom Lake, which is a part of the Nellis Air Force Base.

Somewhere between mile markers 29 and 30 on the Extraterrestrial Highway lies an unmarked dirt road that leads to the base that is believed to be the preferred location for the testing and development of the USs most advanced military technology, including drones, stealth spy planes and cutting-edge sensor systems.

Some believe the US government stores and hides extraterrestrial bodies and UFOs at the site.

Arnu at the gates of the secretive Nevada military base (Courtesy of Joerg Arnu)

The sites existence was first confirmed in 1998, when the US Air Force issued a terse response denying that it operated a base called Area 51.

There are a variety of activities, some of which are classified, throughout what is often called the Air Force's Nellis Range Complex, a US Air Force major wrote.

It would take another 15 years before the Government confirmed the existence of specific military programmes at the base, when the CIA responded to a Freedom of Information Act request by George Washington University National Security Archive senior fellow Jeffrey T Richelson.

The declassified CIA documents revealed for the first time information about the Cold War-era Lockheed U-2 spy plane reconnaissance programme that were built and tested at the base.

There certainly was  as you would expect  no discussion of little green men here, Mr Richelson told the New York Times in 2013.

The confirmation came as little surprise to Mr Arnu, who had been photographing mystery aircraft from vantage points around the base for more than a decade.

He first laid eyes on the base in 2000 on a hike with a group of like-minded enthusiasts to Tikaboo Peak, the closest public viewing spot.

Sightings of several mystery aircraft, including a suspected Russian MiG 23 Flogger, prompted spirited debate among the group, and a hint of anxiety.

Some of us anticipated a visit from the famed Blackhawk helicopters, he wrote in a journal entry. We thought we heard a faint hum, but alas we waited in silence with no results.

Arnu says he was buzzed by two F-117 stealth fighters while taking photos near Area 51 in 2021 (Joerg Arnu / DreamlandResort.com)

In 2005, Mr Arnu organised a camp out at the perimeter to mark the 50th anniversary of the bases creation. Around 60 enthusiasts ate barbecue, drank cocktails and sang Happy Birthday Area 51 to the ever-present cammo dudes who monitored their presence.

Mr Arnu was later invited to become an associate member of the Roadrunners, an organisation of pilots who flew secret spy planes such as the U-2 and A-12 at the base in the 1960s, and has become a custodian of the groups website.

In 2019, a spoof Facebook page calling for people to ambush the military base saw around 3.5 million express an interest in taking part.

Mr Arnu, who advises visitors on how to legally visit the perimeter, urged the intruders to stay away.

His most treasured Area 51 photo was taken in 2021 when he says he and a friend were buzzed at low altitude by two F-117 Stealth Fighters.

He says the planes came so close to his vantage point at Coyote Summit that he could make out a pilot staring back at him as he shot photos.

Denied and ignored

Mr Arnu has spent the past eight months seeking answers about why he was targeted, and says he and Ms Hellow remain deeply scarred by the way they were treated in November.

The couple often wake up in a panic in the middle of the night, wondering if they are coming back, he said.

In an unredacted section of the search and seizure warrant, the Government referred to violations of Title 18 of the United States Code for conspiracy, photographing and sketching defence installations, and publication and sale of such photographs.

Mr Arnu says that his site contains the same type of imagery shot daily by the dozens of tourists who visit the Area 51 perimeter.

Most people seriously interested in Area 51 follow my site and the reasoning probably was that targeting me would have the greatest impact on the community, he told The Independent.

But I have never crossed the Area 51 boundary and as far as I know all material shared on my Dreamland Resort web site is perfectly legal.

Google Earth has better images of Area 51 than you could ever take from public land, he added.

Mr Arnu said he had been stonewalled at every turn in his attempts to find out what he did wrong.

Women dressed as aliens at a Storm Area 51 spinoff event called Alienstock in Rachel, Nevada, in 2019 (Getty)

FOIA requests to the FBI and Air Force have been denied. A request for restitution for the damage was also knocked back. A complaint to the Department of Justices Office of the Inspector General went nowhere.

Mr Arnu has also written to a dozen lawmakers, who have either ignored him or claimed they are powerless to intervene.

When contacted by The Independent, a spokesperson for the FBIs Las Vegas field office declined to comment.

The Air Force did not respond to a request for comment.

Mr Arnu said the Area 51 research community had rallied around to support him, and he has set up a GoFundme to try to recover the losses.
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Its Americas 247th birthday!

And if youre planning to commemorate it, knowing what stores will be open during the summers biggest holiday will come in handy.

Independence Day celebrates the Second Continental Congress unanimous adoption of the Declaration of Independence on 4 July 1776, marking the colonies official separation from Great Britain and the establishment of the United States as a sovereign nation.

Since its one of 11 federal holidays, non-essential government offices, banks, post offices and the US stock market will observe the Fourth of July.

But if youre wondering where to pick up last-minute picnic essentials on your way to see the fireworks, or whether youll be able to buy your favourite brand of burgers before heading to the barbecue, heres a list of whats closed and open tomorrow:

Target

Target will be open on 4 July and operating during its usual business hours, depending on the location of each store.

Starbucks

The coffee chain will be open on Independence Day, but specific hours of operation vary for different Starbucks stores.

Walmart

The retail giant will be open during its regular hours, with opening and closing times varying for each Walmart location.

Costco

All Costco stores in the US will be closed, as noted on the retailers official website.

Trader Joes

Trader Joe's ion (Copyright 2019 The Associated Press. All rights reserved.)

Trader Joes is open on the Fourth of July, but most stores will close at 5pm. Specific opening and closing times vary for each store.

Aldi

The supermarket chain will be open, but with limited hours, according to Aldis official website. Hours of operation vary based on location of the store, but most will close at 4pm.

Whole Foods Market

Whole Foods will be open on Independence Day, but the exact hours in which stores are open are based on location.

Dunkin Donuts

(Getty Images)

The coffee chain will be open, with hours depending on the stores locations.

Sams Club

While the retail is open on Independence Day, it is operating with adjusted hours. According to the chains official website, Sams Club stores will be open from 8am to 6pm for Plus members and 10am to 6pm for Club members.

CVS

CVS locations may close early or have reduced hours.

Walgreens

Walgreens will be operating during its regular hours, including 24-hour Walgreens pharmacies. Specific closing times are based on location.

Rite Aid

Stores will be open, but some may close early or have reduced hours.

Kroger

Kroger will also keep its doors open today, with specific hours varying for each store.

Dollar Tree

Someone else is in charge of throwing hot dogs and burgers on the grill, but youve been asked to bring party tableware to the barbecue? Dollar Tree is open on 4 July, but hours may vary by location.

JCPenney, Kohls and Macys

These stores are expected to be open on Independence Day. Most JCPenney will close at 6pm, while Kohls, Marshalls and Macys will operate regular hours depending on location.

Nordstrom and Nordstrom Rack

Nordstrom and Nordstrom Rack will open on the Fourth of July, but hours will depend on location.

Sephora

Store hours may vary by location.

Lowes

The home improvement store will be open during its usual hours, with most stores closing around 10pm. However, exact opening and closing times are based on the location of stores.

Best Buy

Stores will be open and you can find hours for different locations on Best Buys website.

Big Lots

You can expect stores to be open during regular hours. Specific hours are listed on the furniture giants website.

Burlington

If your favourite way to spend the holiday is going shopping, Burlington will be open on Independence Day. But before you head to your local store, check the companys website, as some locations will be closing early.

BJs

Most stores will be open from 8am to 9pm, but specific hours may vary by location.
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A friend of late OceanGate CEO Stockton Rush warned him against taking customers aboard the companys Titan submersible four years before it tragically imploded in the depths of the Atlantic Ocean.

Karl Stanley, the owner of a diving expedition company in Honduras and a close friend of Mr Rush, went on a tour aboard the Titan off the coast of the Bahamas in 2019, The New York Times first reported. In emails obtained by Insider of an alleged exchange between the two deep-sea enthusiasts, Mr Stanley told Mr Rush that he had heard a large cracking sound while on the 12,000-foot-deep dive.

I think that hull has a defect near that flange, that will only get worse. The only question in my mind is will it fail catastrophically or not, Mr Stanley wrote in a premonitory email, years before the Titans catastrophic implosion that killed all five of its passengers.

Mr Rush tried to reassure his friend, telling him that experts had already noticed a reduction of the noise in two subsequent dives, but also noted that more dives should be launched in order to obtain reliable data. Mr Rush first told Mr Stanley that he thought 2-7 dives to operating depth [were] too few to launch an expedition selling 6 figure tickets in the middle of the ocean, in reference to the $250,000-a-ticket price customers were asked to pay to join the expedition.

I think 50 is a good #, Mr Stanley replied, saying that was the number of times he ran tests with his own submersible and also the number of skydives a person must complete before obtaining a B license.

Mr Rush disagreed with the number, describing it as arbitrary and adding that testing may take 2 dives or 20.

I suspect no deep diving sub did 50 MOD dives before non-essential crew were taken, Mr Rush replied.

Mr Stanley eventually warned Mr Rush against letting his ego interfere.

I dont think if you push forward with dives to the Titantic this season it will be succumbing to financial pressures, I think it will be succumbing to pressures of your own creation in some part dictated by ego to do what people said couldnt be done, Mr Rush wrote.

OceanGate said in a statement to Insider that the company is unable to provide any additional information at this time.

Because the Polar Prince and the Titan operated in international waters, they were not subject to regulation by any country, including a US law requiring passenger submersibles to be registered with the Coast Guard.

Stockton Rush, the CEO of OceanGate, died during an expedition to the site of the Titanic wreck

This photo provided by OceanGate Expeditions shows a submersible vessel named Titan used to visit the wreckage site of the Titanic (AP)

In 2018, 38 members of the Marine Technology Societys Manned Underwater Vehicles committee wrote to Mr Rush expressing unanimous concern about the way Titan had been developed. According to The New York Times, the committee was alarmed that OceanGate had not subjected Titan to a standard risk assessment by Det Norske Veritas (DNV), an international maritime classification body that writes and maintains technical standards for undersea vehicles.

While this may demand additional time and expense, it is our unanimous view that this validation process by a third party is a critical component in the safeguards that protect all submersible occupants, the letter said.

OceanGate defended its decision in a 2019 blog post, writing: When OceanGate was founded the goal was to pursue the highest reasonable level of innovation in the design and operation of manned submersibles. By definition, innovation is outside of an already accepted system... Bringing an outside entity up to speed on every innovation before it is put into real-world testing is anathema to rapid innovation.

Large pieces of debris from Titan were transported to St Johns harbour on Wednesday by the Horizon Arctic ship, where they were seen being unloaded by a crane. The Coast Guard announced just hours later that medical professionals will formally analyse presumed human remains found on the debris.

Debris from the Titan submersible, recovered from the ocean floor near the wreck of the Titanic, is unloaded (The Canadian Press via AP)

Officials from the Transportation Safety Board (TSB) of Canada board the Polar Prince, the main support ship for the Titan submersible (PA)

Speaking after the evidence was recovered, the Marine Board of Investigations (MBI) chairman, Captain Jason Neubauer, said: I am grateful for the coordinated international and inter-agency support to recover and preserve this vital evidence at extreme offshore distances and depths.

The evidence will provide investigators from several international jurisdictions with critical insights into the cause of this tragedy.

There is still a substantial amount of work to be done to understand the factors that led to the catastrophic loss of the Titan and help ensure a similar tragedy does not occur again.

The USCG said the MBI intends to transport the evidence to a port in the US where they will be able to facilitate further analysis and testing.

The MBI will continue evidence collection and witness interviews to inform a public hearing about the incident, the USCG added.

Safety investigators from the Transportation Safety Board (TSB) of Canada made inquiries on Titans main support ship, the Polar Prince, after it docked in St Johns harbour on Saturday. The TSB said it has inspected, documented, and catalogued the materials from the debris of Titan for its safety investigation.

The safety body said its investigation team has taken possession of the deep-sea vessels voyage data recorder, which has been sent to its engineering laboratory in Ottawa for further analysis.

The TSB said it will continue to cooperate with the US, UK, and France in accordance with international agreements, as they are substantially interested states under the International Maritime Organisation Casualty Investigation Code.
 Close Titan submersible wreckage brought ashore after fatal implosion

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OceanGate Expeditions, the company that launched the doomed Titan submersible trip to the wreckage of the Titanic, has ceased operations.

A small message in the top-left corner of OceanGates website reads: OceanGate has suspended all exploration and commercial operations.

The announcement comes a full two weeks after the submersible imploded while carrying five people, sparking an international search, rescue and recovery operation.

OceanGate CEO Stockton Rush, French diver Paul-Henri Nargeolet, British billionaire Hamish Harding, Pakistani businessman Shahzada Dawood and his teenage son Suleman Dawood all died in the implosion.

The company has come under scrutiny in the weeks following the tragic accident as former employees, former passengers and experts in the industry have criticised OceanGate for embarking on a potentially dangerous trip in the questionably designed submersible.

OceanGates decision to cease operations comes just after the companys former finance director claimed she quit after CEO Stockton Rush asked her to captain the Titan once he fired the crafts original chief pilot David Lochridge.
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Images of the wreckage recovered from the Titan submersible at the bottom of the North Atlantic appear to confirm the theory that the vessel suffered a massive implosion under the pressure of the ocean.

Earlier this week, the US Coast Guard brought the debris left by the sub on the ocean floor onto dry land.

Jonas Mureika, a professor of physics at Loyola Marymount University, tells The Independent that calling the implosion catastrophic is referring to the intensity and speed of what took place.

The pressure at that depth (3.8 km) is incredibly high, about 400 times atmospheric pressure. Thats 6,000 pounds per square inch acting on the submarine  atmospheric pressure is roughly 15 pounds per square inch, he noted in an email.

Debris from the Titan submersible, recovered from the ocean floor near the wreck of the Titanic, is unloaded from the ship Horizon Arctic at the Canadian Coast Guard pier in St. John's, Newfoundland, Wednesday, June 28, 2023 (AP)

If the hull integrity was compromised or weakened in one spot, the inward pressure would quickly cause it to buckle asymmetrically, and the structure would implode because of the inward force. And at those pressures, the inward collapse would have occurred in milliseconds, he adds. But this doesnt mean the debris itself would be crushed in size, just that the pressure was inward.

Dr Joerg Reinhold, a professor at the Department of Physics at Florida International University, added that it seems the pressure vessel of the submersible consisted of a cylindrical hull capped off by two at least somewhat spherical endcaps or domes. One of these includes a viewport. In pictures, it seems the other dome is covered by another shell in the shape of a fin or so.

This photo provided by OceanGate Expeditions shows a submersible vessel named Titan used to visit the wreckage site of the Titanic. (AP)

From left to right: Stockton Rush, Hamish Harding, Paul-Henri Nargeolet and Shahzada and Suleman Dawood. ((Reuters/Jannicke Mikkelsen/OceanGate Expeditions/Getty))

The cylindrical hull seems surrounded by a shell of the same material ... I would expect that these shells do not add to the structural integrity of the hull. That means all the forces from the surrounding water act on the hull inside these shells, he said. I actually expect that the space between the shells and the hull is exposed to water at the same pressure as the surrounding water. It is therefore conceivable that these shells survive in larger pieces.

Dr Reinhold noted that at least one of the domes from the vessel appears to have been found intact.

My understanding is that these are made from titanium and not the carbon fibre material used for the cylindrical hull. Given the spherical shape and the material, I am not surprised that they, or at least one of them, stayed mostly intact, he said.

Debris from the Titan submersible, recovered from the ocean floor near the wreck of the Titanic, is unloaded from the ship Horizon Arctic at the Canadian Coast Guard pier in St. John's, Newfoundland, Wednesday, June 28, 2023 (The Canadian Press via AP)

Arun Bansil, a professor at the physics department at Northeastern University in Boston, told The Independent that although it seems counterintuitive, large objects do not normally split apart into smithereens in an implosion or explosion.

For example, a pressure cooker usually explodes with the top blown off but the body remaining intact. Initial failure of Titan would have occurred at its weakest links such as defects in the hull. Once a crack opens, however, large pieces of the hull will no longer experience very violent forces and remain more or less intact, he said.

Debris from the Titan submersible is unloaded (AP)

Debris from the Titan submersible, recovered from the ocean floor near the wreck of the Titanic, is unloaded from the ship Horizon Arctic at the Canadian Coast Guard pier in St. John's, Newfoundland (AP)

Was it an explosion or implosion and how would that have affected the passengers?

Knowing where the accident occurred, the assumption of an implosion makes sense, Dr Reinhold said. Both an implosion and an explosion need some form of stored energy. In typical explosive materials, the stored energy is chemical and is released through a chemical reaction. In the case of a submerged pressure vessel, the stored energy is mechanical  it is released when the surrounding water fills the space of the vessel.

If there is a catastrophic failure of the hull, this energy is first released in an implosion, he notes. Eventually, this will be followed by an outgoing shockwave  otherwise, listening devices would not be able to pick up the sound of the event.

He went on to say that implosions or explosions in water should behave differently than those in air. Air is a compressible fluid while water is an incompressible fluid. I expect the stored mechanical energy to be vastly bigger than any other source of energy on the submersible.

A view of the Horizon Arctic ship, as salvaged pieces of the Titan submersible from OceanGate Expeditions are returned, in St. Johns harbour, Newfoundland, Canada June 28, 2023 (Reuters)

Even if the breach of the vessel would have been triggered by an internal source of energy, the final result will be an implosion, Dr Reinhold said.

Dr Mureika added that an explosion results when there is a sudden release of energy that results in a powerful outward pressure wave. Implosions, on the other hand, are due to an inward pressure differential. This was most certainly an implosion.

A U.S. Coast Guard ship arrives in the harbor of St. John's, Newfoundland, on Wednesday, June 28, 2023 (Paul Daly/The Canadian Press via AP)

That being said, when the air inside the submarine was rapidly compressed, it most likely ignited and created an explosion  like a piston in a car engine  but this wouldnt compare in magnitude to the implosive force, he says.

As for the passengers, because of the time interval for this to occur, as well as the magnitude of the pressure, its very likely they didnt even know what hit them. Its also doubtful they had time to process what was happening unless the implosion was preceded by something like a leak, Dr Mureika adds.

How will the debris be used to determine what happened?

The obvious would be to look at the recovered pieces as well as design drawings and possibly any samples of the materials that the company might still have, Dr Reinhold said.
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The desperate five-day search for the missing Titan submersible came to a tragic end on 22 June when debris was discovered close to the Titanic shipwreck.

OceanGate CEO and founder Stockton Rush, British billionaire explorer Hamish Harding, renowned French diver Paul-Henri Nargeolet and Pakistani businessman Shahzada Dawood and his 19-year-old son Suleman set off on a trip of a lifetime on 18 June, travelling around 13,000 feet below the surface of the Atlantic Ocean to visit the famed ocean liners wreckage.

But the five explorers met a chillingly similar fate to the doomed White Star Line ship more than a century earlier.

Follow the latest updates on the missing Titanic submarine here

Just one hour and 45 minutes into their expedition, OceanGate Expeditions Titan sub lost contact with its mother ship the Polar Prince on the surface.

This kicked off a huge search and rescue operation, using drones, remotely-operated vehicles (ROVs), ships and the most sophisticated technology and equipment available today.

On 22 June, hopes faded when a remotely operated vehicle (ROV) found five major pieces of debris from Titan on the sea bed around 500m from the bow of the Titanic shipwreck. Coast Guard Rear Admiral John Mauger confirmed that the discovery was consistent with a catastrophic implosion.

US defence sources  and Titanic film director James Cameron  later revealed that the Navy picked up the sound of the underwater implosion not long after the sub lost contact 105 minutes into its journey on 18 June.

Officials said on 28 June that debris and presumed human remains were recovered from the sea floor at the site of the deep-sea vessels fatal implosion.

Five victims of the doomed Titan sub (Dirty Dozen Productions/OceanGate/AFP/Getty)

Large pieces of wreck were transported to St Johns harbour by the Horizon Arctic ship, where it was seen being unloaded by a crane.

The latest developments added to a growing list of questions about what went wrong, whether the tragedy could have been avoided and what happens next.

Here, The Independent delves into those unanswered questions:

What caused the sub to implode?

Rear Adm Mauger told reporters on 22 June that the discovery of debris revealed that the sub and its occupants had fallen foul of a catastrophic implosion.

In consultation with experts in the unified command, the debris is consistent with the catastrophic loss of the pressure chamber, he said.

An underwater implosion means that the vessel  under intense pressure due to the depths of the ocean  suddenly collapsed inward.

Such an implosion would have been incredibly quick and painless for the passengers  taking place within just a fraction of a millisecond, Aileen Maria Marty, a former Naval officer and professor at Florida International University, told CNN.

The entire thing would have collapsed before the individuals inside would even realize that there was a problem, she said.

Ultimately, among the many ways in which we can pass, thats painless.

Animation shows depths of the ocean (MetaBallStudios)

Debris from the Titan submersible, recovered from the ocean floor near the wreck of the Titanic (The Canadian Press via AP)

At the time of the implosion, the sub was descending to the Titanic wreckage which lies on the sea bed around 13,000 feet below sea level.

At that depth, any object  including a human body  is subject to a water pressure more than 300 times stronger than the pressure Earths atmosphere exerts on us every day. On the surface, we only need to withstand 14.7 lbs per square inch (Psi) of pressure, whereas the Titan had to withstand 5,500 psi.

It is unclear exactly where the implosion occurred but the journey to the wreckage was supposed to take around two hours and the vessel lost contact around one hour and 45 minutes in.

The cause of the implosion remains unclear at this time but several safety concerns with Titans vessel have come to light in recent days with members of the explorer community, Titanic director James Cameron and a whistleblower lawsuit all detailing potential issues with the sub.

The Titan was designed to survive the level of pressure at a depth of 13,000 feet, with two strong titanium domes at either end of the hull linked by a five-inch-thick cylinder of carbon fibre.

However, carbon fibre is far weaker than solid steel or titanium which submersibles are typically made from.

OceanGate founder Rush chose the material because it was a much lighter and cheaper option, offsetting it with a real-time hull health monitoring system that could, in theory, detect any deformations, cracks, or other faults rapidly enough for the crew to attempt an emergency ascent.

Yet at such depths, there is very little margin for error. If even one part of the hull fails and lets in water, the pressure would be so great, and the velocity of the incoming liquid so fast, that the sub and its occupants might be torn apart in mere milliseconds, monitoring system or not.

Mr Cameron has predicted that the carbon fibre and titanium hull could have been behind the disaster, calling the use of such weak materials a horrible idea and pointing out that the dives he has done in the past were in a ceramic submersible better suited to sustain pressure.

Was the cheap design to blame?

Besides the material choice, questions have also been asked about what appears to be a hotch-potch of off-the-shelf components used to put together the sub.

In an interview in November, OceanGate CEO Rush boasted that the sub was operated with a video game controller and was compiled of components bought from Camping World.

In a 2018 lawsuit brought by the companys former director of marine operations David Lochridge, OceanGate was accused of ignoring safery concerns about the Titan.

Mr Lochridge had begun working with OceanGate in 2015 and was allegedly tasked with conducting a final safety review of the Titan. His lawsuit, which was later settled out of court, claims that he raised critical safety concerns about the subs experimental and untested design  only to be fired for his troubles.

Stock image of inside the Titan submersible (PA)

Issues of quality control with the new submersible were raised, as there were evident flaws throughout the build process, the lawsuit alleged, noting that no carbon fibre submersible had ever achieved its target depth of 4,000 metres.

Lochridge was also sceptical about the real-time monitoring system, which he believed would only show when a component was very close to failure  perhaps only milliseconds before an implosion. The lawsuit alleges that he pressed for the hull to be tested more rigorously, but was denied.

Worse, the lawsuit claims that the Titans single porthole was only certified to withstand the pressure at 1,300m and that OceanGate refused to pay for a porthole certified to 4,000m.

Paying passengers would not be aware, and would not be informed, of this experimental design, the lack of non-destructive testing of the hull, or that hazardous flammable materials were being used within the submersible, the lawyers said.

Why were the debris pieces so big?

Debris from the Titan was brought ashore by deep-sea robots on 28 June.

The Titans wreckage was seen for the first time in pictures after the Coast Guard announced on 22 June that ROVs (remotely-operated vehicles) found its chambers in a sea of debris 1,600ft from the bow of the Titanic, roughly 12,000ft below the ocean surface.

Pelagic Research Services, the company that operated the ROV that made the previous debris findings, said that its team had successfully completed off-shore operations and was now in the process of demobilisation after 10 days of work.

Debris from the Titan submersible, recovered from the ocean floor near the wreck of the Titanic, is unloaded from the ship Horizon Arctic at the Canadian Coast Guard pier in St. John's, Newfoundland, Wednesday, June 28, 2023. (AP)

The pieces were unloaded from the American ships Sycamore and Horizon Arctic at a port in St Johns, Newfoundland. (The Canadian Press via AP)

Photos from the wharf show what appeared to be several pieces of the submersible being lifted from the ship, including the nose cone with its distinctive circular window. The pieces were unloaded from the American ships Sycamore and Horizon Arctic at a port in St Johns, Newfoundland.

The US Coast Guard declined to comment on the investigation or the return of debris to shore. Representatives for the National Transportation Safety Board and Transportation Safety Board of Canada (TSB), which are both involved in the investigation, also declined to comment.

The large size of the recovered pieces sparked discussion as Coast Guard officials had warned the implosion had been catastrophic. But Northeastern University physics professor Arun Bansil said the wreckage is consistent with what officials determined happened to the Titan.

Although it seems counterintuitive, large objects do not normally split apart into smithereens in an implosion or explosion. For example, a pressure cooker usually explodes with the top blown off but the body remaining intact, Mr Bansil told The Independent.

Initial failure of Titan would have occurred at its weakest links such as defects in the hull. Once a crack opens, however, large pieces of the hull will no longer experience very violent forces and remain more or less intact.

Speaking after the evidence was recovered, the Marine Board of Investigations (MBI) chairman, Captain Jason Neubauer, said on 28 June: I am grateful for the co-ordinated international and inter-agency support to recover and preserve this vital evidence at extreme offshore distances and depths.

The evidence will provide investigators from several international jurisdictions with critical insights into the cause of this tragedy.

There is still a substantial amount of work to be done to understand the factors that led to the catastrophic loss of the Titan and help ensure a similar tragedy does not occur again.

How did officials recover presumed human remains?

The Coast Guard had previously said that due to the depth of the debris and the nature of the passengers deaths, it was unlikely that their remains will ever be found.

This is an incredibly unforgiving environment down there on the sea floor and the debris is consistent with a catastrophic implosion of the vessel, Rear Adm Mauger said on 22 June. And so well continue to work and continue to search the area down there, but I dont have an answer for prospects at this time.

But on 28 June, the service announced that it had recovered presumed human remains from the sea floor. It is unclear how it was determined the remains were human but medical professionals will now perform a formal analysis.

Presumed human remains were found in the Titan debris (AP)

Why is OceanGate still advertising tours?

Reports emerged last week that OceanGate Expeditions closed its doors indefinitely after its CEO Stockton Rush, British billionaire Hamish Harding, French diving expert Paul-Henri Nargeolet and Pakistani businessman Shahzada Dawood and his 19-year-old Suleman died when the companys Titan sub imploded while on a tour to the Titanics wreck.

But more than 10 days after the tragedy - and a week after it was confirmed, the OceanGate website still features available dates for two separate eight-day expeditions next year.

One pilot, one content expert and three mission specialists  or passengers without any previous experience needed who pay $250,000 participate in every dive.OceanGate not only hosted tours to the famed shipwreck, but also to the Azores Archipelago in Portugal and to the Bahamas.

Expeditions to the Titanic began in Newfoundland, Canada, where a ship set sail from St Johns port on a 400-nautical-mile journey to the wreck site. The doomed expedition last week was on its third day when the Titan was launched onto the sea and lost contact with its mothership just one hour and 45 minutes into its descent.

The companys future is now uncertain, as industry experts have told the New York Post that all planned expeditions to the Titanic have been called off.

The Explorers Club said it knows of no plans still in place for scientific exploratory trips to the Titanics wreck 12,500 feet below the oceans surface. Commercial expeditions have also been reportedly grounded. The Independent has reached out to OceanGate for comment.

If the sub wasnt safe, how was it able to take tourists on expeditions?

Despite tourists forking out $250,000 for the privilege of an expedition to the Titanic wreckage, OceanGate was largely able to operate unregulated.

Because the Polar Prince and the Titan operated in international waters, they were not subject to regulation by any country, including a US law requiring passenger submersibles to be registered with the Coast Guard.

In 2018, 38 members of the Marine Technology Societys Manned Underwater Vehicles committee wrote to Stockton Rush expressing unanimous concern about the way Titan had been developed.

According to The New York Times, the committee was alarmed that OceanGate had not subjected Titan to a standard risk assessment by Det Norske Veritas (DNV), an international maritime classification body that writes and maintains technical standards for undersea vehicles.

While this may demand additional time and expense, it is our unanimous view that this validation process by a third party is a critical component in the safeguards that protect all submersible occupants, the letter said.

OceanGate defended its decision in a 2019 blog post, writing: When OceanGate was founded the goal was to pursue the highest reasonable level of innovation in the design and operation of manned submersibles. By definition, innovation is outside of an already accepted system... Bringing an outside entity up to speed on every innovation before it is put into real-world testing is anathema to rapid innovation.

Rush did claim however that the company had worked with Boeing, NASA and the University of Washington.

All three denied this claim.

What were the banging sounds?

On 20 June, bouys detected tapping sounds coming from the search area, raising slim hopes that survivors could yet be found.

We dont know the source of that noise, but weve shared that information with Navy experts to classify it, US CoastGuard Rear Admiral John Mauger told CBS This Morning.

The sound was detected at 2am local time by a Canadian P-3 aircraft.

It first came every 30 minutes and was heard again four hours later, the internal government memo obtained by CNN states.

Officials admitted that the noises were inconclusive and were being analysed by Navy experts.

With respect to the noises specifically, we dont know what they are, to be frank with you, Captain Jamie Frederick of the First Coast Guard District told reporters on 21 June.

Mr Frederick said that the area of the search was now twice the size of the state of Connecticut on the surface and was being conducted 2.5 miles deep below the Atlantic.

Debris from the submersible vessel named Titan was found near the wreckage of the Titanic (PA Media)

This is a search and rescue mission, 100 per cent, Cap Frederick said. When youre in the middle of a search and rescue case, you always have hope.

He added: Several P3 flights have heard noises yesterday and we relocated assets immediately.

I think you need to be careful, we need to have hope but I cant tell you what the noises are but we are searching where the noises are and thats all we can do at this point. My understanding is that the P3 had heard some noises today as well.

Carl Hartsfield of the Wood Hole Oceanographic Institution told reporters that the noises had been described as banging and that they were being analysed by maritime acoustics experts. He went on to say that there was a large number of vessels now in the area which all give off noises picked up by sensors.

Some experts suggested that the banging sound was the noise of debris  from either the Titanic or the Titan  in the ocean.

Chris Parry, a former British Royal Navy commander, told TalkTV the sounds could have come from any number of underwater sources.

You get a lot of mechanical noise in the ocean. Trying to differentiate it from tapping noises is a fools errand.

The Coast Guard admitted on 23 June that the US Navy had detected sounds consistent with an implosion or explosion sometime after the Titan vanished on 18 June and before rescue efforts were launched the next day. Officials said that the information was not released at the time to the public because it was not definitive.

Why was so much money and effort thrown into the search if the US knew it had already imploded?

One of the biggest questions is why US officials did not disclose the fact that Navy equipment had picked up the sound of the implosion  and why so much money and effort were funnelled into the search and rescue operation if they knew it was futile.

On 22 June, not long after the US Coast Guard confirmed that debris from the Titan had been discovered and that the five men had perished in a catastrophic implosion, it emerged that secret US Navy underwater microphones had detected the subs implosion not long after it lost contact with its mother ship on 18 June.

Multiple reports revealed that the acoustic detection system  typically used to monitor enemy submarines  heard an implosion on 18 June close to the site where the debris was located roughly 500m from the Titanic shipwreck.

The US Coast Guard confirmed the reports to The Independent, saying that the US Navy detected an anomaly consistent with an implosion or explosion in the general vicinity of where the Titan submersible was operating when communications were lost.

Titan submersible on the surface of the water (PA Media)

The sound was consistent with the incident of the catastrophic implosion, which left the five men on board the vessel dead, adding that no more similar sounds were heard throughout the search and rescue mission.

The information was immediately shared with the Incident Commander, and once it had been considered with all of the acoustic data that had been compiled, the decision was made to continue our mission as a search and rescue because the noise was not definitive at the point, the spokesperson said.

While the Navy passed the information to the US Coast Guard  which was leading the search  the information was not released to the public during the operation.

Titanic director Mr Cameron said on 22 June that he too had known the fate of the five inside the sub just hours into the rescue mission.

We got confirmation within an hour that there had been a loud bang at the same time that the sub comms were lost, he said. A loud bang on the hydrophone. Loss of transponder. Loss of comms. I knew what happened. The sub imploded.

Despite this, officials did not reveal this information to the public  leading to hope that the five men could still be found alive  and continued in what appeared to be a race against time to find the five men alive.

The US Coast Guard said the Unified Command  the US Coast Guard, US Navy, and Canadian Coast Guard - made its decision to not disclose the information on the acoustic anomaly because they did not want to disrupt the search and rescue mission when their priority was making every effort to the save lives of all on board the submersible.

So having unconfirmed information did not change that, they said, adding: We did not want to release any information that was unconfirmed.

Will OceanGate face legal action?

Prior to embarking on the journey, the five passengers signed liability waivers accepting that it could result in death.

But, despite this, the waiver may not shield OceanGate from potential lawsuits by the victims families.

Timothy E Allen, an attorney and former Secret Service agent, said in a statement to The Independent that waivers wont protect the company if it turns out there was defects with the sub.

Submarines operate in a high-pressure environment, and any flaws or weaknesses in the construction, design, or materials used can potentially lead to catastrophic failures such as implosion, he said.

If it can be established that the implosion was caused by inherent defects in the mechanics or engineering of the submarine, the responsible party may be held liable, even if a waiver was signed.

Safety investigators from the Transportation Safety Board (TSB) of Canada made inquiries on Titans main support ship, the Polar Prince, after it docked in St Johns harbour on Saturday. The US Coast Guard has also convened a marine board that is tasked with conducting an investigation and issuing a report.

The TSB said it has inspected, documented, and catalogued the materials from the debris of Titan for its safety investigation. The safety body said its investigation team has taken possession of the deep-sea vessels voyage data recorder, which has been sent to its engineering laboratory in Ottawa for further analysis.

US, UK, and French authorities will work together in accordance with international agreements, as they are substantially interested states under the International Maritime Organisation Casualty Investigation Code.
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Thousands of Israelis blocked traffic and snarled movement at the country's main international airport on Monday, the latest mass demonstration over Benjamin Netanyahu's contentious planned judicial overhaul that has divided the nation.

The Netanyahu governments push to pass several overlapping reforms to the countrys judiciary have plunged Israel into an unprecedented crisis and divided an already highly polarized country.

Protesters waving Israel's blue-and-white national flag and blowing horns blocked the main thoroughfare outside Ben Gurion Airport's main terminal and demonstrated inside the arrivals hall. Police said officers arrested at least four people for public disturbance.

Netanyahu and his ultranationalist and ultra-Orthodox political allies are pressing ahead with plans to pass several contentious changes to Israels judicial system after attempts to reach a compromise with opposition lawmakers disintegrated. The planned overhaul has drawn rebuke from the Biden administration and consternation from American Jews.

Netanyahu ally Simcha Rotman, who chairs parliament's Constitution, Law and Justice Committee and has spearheaded the overhaul, said Monday that he would bring a bill to strip the Supreme Court of its authority to strike down government decisions it deems unreasonable this week.

That reasonability standard" was used by the Supreme Court earlier this year to upend the appointment of a Netanyahu ally as interior minister because of a conviction for bribery when he served in the role in the 1990s and a 2021 plea deal for tax evasion.

Critics say removing that standard would allow the government to pass arbitrary decisions and grant it too much power.

Last week, over 100 Israeli air force reservists signed a letter saying they would refuse to show up for duty if the government moves forward with the plan.

Netanyahu and his allies came to power after November's election, Israel's fifth in under four years, all of which were largely referendums on the longtime leader's fitness to serve while on trial for corruption.

Netanyahu, whose corruption trial has dragged on for nearly three years, and his allies in his nationalist religious government say the overhaul is needed to rein in an overly interventionist judiciary and restore power to elected officials.

Critics say the plan would upend Israels delicate system of checks and balances and push the country toward dictatorship.
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Thousands of Iranian dissidents crowded the streets of a Paris neighbourhood on Saturday while western opponents of the government in Tehran gathered for a politically star-studded event aimed at poking a finger in the eye of the Ayatollahs supporters.

Despite warnings from French authorities and the US Embassy in Paris that alleged threats of a terror attack made a large outdoor event unwise, there were no incidents over the weekend as Iranian dissident activists mingled with prominent current and former officials from the US, UK and other European nations. If that threat of a terror attack was real, it was hard to spot the concern of French authorities on Saturday, given that police did not provide more than a handful of officers to patrol the area, those on the scene told The Independent.

Dissidents with the National Council of Resistance of Iran (NCRI) and the Peoples Mojahedin Organization of Iran (MEK) have long held a chequered relationship with the west, in addition to their long campaign against the Iranian government. This year is no exception to that dynamic. Formerly classified as a terrorist group by the US, the MEK now resides in Albania, where just weeks ago a massive police raid was blamed for the death of a senior MEK member while others sustained serious injuries  all, the MEK alleged, at the behest of Irans government. The same day, French authorities moved to cancel Saturdays rally.

Varying explanations for the raid were presented in the hours following, but over the weekend a top Iranian official tweeted that computers seized from the MEK by Albanian police had been transferred to Iranian custody, a development first reported on Monday in Iranian state media. A senior NCRI official fumed about the news in a statement to The Independent, demanding that the US State Department take a position on Albanias collaboration with Irans intelligence agencies; the Biden administration had previously reacted to the raid by calling it a police action while carefully avoiding any suggestion of Iranian involvement.

The Independent has reached out to the State Department for comment on the news of the computers being transferred to Iranian custody. The agency had previously issued a brief statement in the wake of the raid depicting it as a typical law enforcement action and noting that the Biden administration doesnt view the MEK as a viable political alternative to the regime in Tehran.

NCRI president-elect Maryam Rajavi also had sharp words for the State Department specifically in her address on Sunday.

As for the advocates of appeasement within the US State Department, who concurrently backed the tragedy in [Albania], it is enough to note that the mullahs waved their turbans and lavished them with commendations, she insisted.

Ms Rajavi also questioned: Why do [Ayatollah Ali] Khameni and [Iranian President Ebrahim] Raisi demonstrate such fear over a gathering taking place 5,000 kilometres away from Tehran?

Seemingly growing efforts by Tehran to punish the MEK and the Biden State Departments rejection of the group as a viable alternative-in-waiting to the Iranian regime made Saturday and Sundays events all the more of a coup for the NCRI and MEK; with increasing support from prominent members of the DC and London foreign policy establishments, the position of the current administration is looking all the more tenuous. That fact was hammered home by the virtual address of Sundays convention by former Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, characterised by The Independents sources as maintaining one of, if not the, friendliest relationship between the State Department and MEK during his tenure.

Other VIPs at Sundays event were equally impressive gets for the dissident group, especially given the State Departments coldness: former UK Prime Minister Liz Truss, who appeared remotely, 2024 presidential candidate Mike Pence, former Sen Joseph Lieberman, ex-House of Commons speaker John Bercow, Trump national security adviser John Bolton and a dozen sitting members of the US Congress from both parties. Members who have attended the NCRIs events in Washington typically skew conservative or towards the hawkish wing of foreign policy thought in the US government.

VIPs including Mike Pence, John Bolton and others take a group photograph at the 2023 Free Iran rally hosted by the NCRI (NCRI)

Mr Pence used his remarks to lash out at Joe Bidens White House for supposedly working overtime to restore the Iran nuclear deal signed in 2015 under the Obama administration (and later abandoned by Donald Trump).

Now, a new administration is threatening to unravel all of the progress we made in marginalising the tyrannical regime in Tehran, Mr Pence claimed.

They are working overtime to restore the Iran Nuclear Deal, putting Tehran back on the fast track to obtaining nuclear weapons.

He also claimed that Iran could develop a nuclear weapon in a year if sanctions were rolled back and the 2015 deal snapped back into place.

Ms Truss, meanwhile, appeared to take aim at the west for appeasement of the Iranian regime  remarks that were timely in the wake of the Albanian police action and accusations of similar betrayals by the French.

Theres been too much appeasement. Theres been too much wishful thinking, theres been too much hope that things would change when it was evident that things were not going to change and have not changed, she said.

Former House of Commons speaker John Bercow delivers remarks at the 2023 NCRI Free Iran summit in Paris (NCRI)

Then speaking of Iran along with Russia and other authoritarian governments, she argued: We need to be clearwe wont treat these countries as part of the normal international system.

While Saturdays rally went off without incident, the NCRI is no stranger to facing the threat of more serious revenge plots carried out by agents of Irans government.

The rally and convention attended by Mr Pence and others was targeted in 2018 in a terror plot that was uncovered and halted by authorities, who arrested an Iranian diplomat and five others accused of planning a bombing. The diplomat, Assadolah Assadi, was sentenced in Belgium to 20 years in prison and the French government blamed Irans intelligence ministries for being behind the plans.

The Iranian foreign ministry publicly condemned France over the weekend for allowing the rally to go forward, after a court battle resulted in a victory for the dissidents over authorities who had hoped to call it off.
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Mike Pence cheered the end of affirmative action in US colleges and universities on Sunday in the wake of the Supreme Courts ruling outlawing the practice.

The former vice president discussed the issue on CBSs Face the Nation and said that the time for policies aimed at improving outcomes for minority students in general had passed. A candidate for the 2024 Republican presidential nomination, Mr Pence is up against his former boss, Donald Trump, and other conservatives like Florida Governor Ron DeSantis and former UN Ambassador Nikki Haley.

His comments came as activists and authorities in the higher education field vowed to keep fighting to ensure that diversity would remain a core value in student recruiting.

Fundamentally, do you believe that there are racial inequities in the education system in the United States? asked host Margaret Brennan.

I really dont believe there is [racial inequality in US schools]. I believe there was, Mr Pence said.

I mean, its  there may have been a time when affirmative action was necessary simply to open the doors of all of our schools and universities, but I think that time has passed.

His response drew backlash on Twitter with many questioning whether Mr Pences children had attended schools and colleges with diverse student bodies.

The three Pence children, Michael, Charlotte and Audrey, attended Purdue, DePaul, and Yale Universities.

The Supreme Court ruled on Thursday that universities and colleges may not consider race as a specific factor when choosing to admit individual students.

They may, however, continue to take into account how race plays into the individual experiences that those prospective students describe in their applications, such as in personal essay prompts.

[T]he student must be treated based on his or her experiences as an individualnot on the basis of race, wrote Chief Justice John Roberts for the majority.

The suit was brought on behalf of a group of Asian American students who argued that they were discriminated against by admissions staff at Harvard University.

Critics of the ruling say it will gut efforts to improve representation of minority students in college classes. College enrollment rates remain noticeably lower among Black and Hispanic students compared to white and Asian American students.

In addition, an analysis of US education data has shown that about 40 per cent of Black children attend schools where 90 per cent or more of the students are nonwhite.

President Joe Biden responded to the ruling on Thursday after news of the decision broke, telling reporters simply: This is not a normal court.
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More than half of Americans believe US Supreme Court justices decide cases largely on the basis of their partisan political views, a figure that has shot up 10 percentage points from January 2022.

That figure  53 per cent  appears to be driven by the gulf between perceptions of the conservative supermajority court among Republican and Democratic voters following several controversial rulings at the end of its latest term, according to new polling from ABC News/Ipsos.

Roughly three-quarters of Republican voters and 26 per cent of Democratic voters support the courts decision to reject affirmative action in university admissions. Sixty-eight per cent of Republicans approve of the decision to allow businesses to deny services to same-sex couples. And 71 per cent of Republicans support the courts ruling against President Joe Bidens plan to cancel student loan debts, compared to just 17 per cent of Democrats.

Overall, a bare majority of Americans (52 per cent) support the courts decision against race-conscious admissions in higher education.

That majority includes majorities among white (60 per cent) and Asian (58 per cent) Americans, while 52 per cent of Black Americans disapprove of the ruling.

Despite their views on affirmative action, most Americans still do not believe that Black and Hispanic students have a fair chance of getting into the college of their choice compared to their white and Asian student counterparts.

Roughly two-thirds of Americans believe that white and Asian students have a fair chance for admission to the college of their choice, compared to only 47 per cent and 50 per cent of respondents who would say the same for Black and Hispanic students, respectively.

Americans views on the courts actions against student debt cancellation also track closely with their age, polling finds.

Older Americans are more likely to support the courts actions  61 per cent of people age 65 and older endorsed the ruling that struck down the presidents plan, while only 40 per cent of people aged 30 to 49 and 31 per cent of those under 30 years old support the ruling.

I know there are millions of Americans  in this country who feel disappointed and discouraged, or even a little bit angry, about the courts decision today on student debt. And I must admit, I do, too, Mr Biden said in remarks from the White House on 30 June following the courts decision.

Recommended The Supreme Court risks inflaming the prejudices that America sought to banish

Public support for the decision making at the nations highest court  with three justices appointed by Donald Trump during his one-term presidency  sank precipitously in the wake of the decision to overturn Roe v Wade and revoke a constitutional right to abortion care last summer.

Following that ruling, among other actions under the courts new conservative majority, the court has come under greater public scrutiny, alongside the decades of maneuvers among Republican officials to seat similarly ideologically minded judges across the federal judiciary, the actions of Justice Clarence Thomass wife Ginni Thomas surrounding attempts to reject 2020 election results, and a series of investigative reports that revealed apparent ethics lapses among conservative justices.

Such scrutiny has called the courts legitimacy into question, with Democratic lawmakers and critics of the court pressing for ethics investigations, impeachment proceedings and the resignation of justices.
 Close Trump shares threatening fan-made video

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Donald Trump has been busy bullying his rivals for the Republican presidential nomination, including Ron DeSantis, Chris Christie and Asa Hutchinson, on Truth Social as he braces for an imminent grand jury indictment over his efforts to overturn the 2020 presidential election and his role in inciting the Capitol riot of 6 January 2021.

Mr Trump announced on Tuesday that he had been sent a letter by special prosecutor Jack Smith informing him that he is the target of the investigation, citing three statutes under which he could be charged, including conspiracy to commit offence or to defraud the United States, deprivation of rights under colour of law and tampering with a witness, victim or informant.

That indictment, Mr Trumps third in four months, could be handed down as soon as this week, The Independent has learned.

William Russell, a former White House aide who now works for the Trump presidential campaign and spent much of 6 January with the then-president, is believed to have testified before the grand jury on Thursday.

The former president was given until midnight on Thursday to report to the Washington, DC, federal courthouse but did not appear.
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Explosive devices were detonated outside three businesses in Washington DC in the early hours of Sunday, according to law enforcement.

The devices exploded outside stores in the northeast of the capital within 15 minutes of each other, according to the Metropolitan Police Department (MPD).

The first attack occurred around 4.30am when the suspect detonated an explosive device on the sidewalk outside of the ATM attached to the Truist Bank on the 2300 block of Washington Place.

Moments later  at around 4.36am  another device was detonated outside a Nike store in the 700 block of H Street.

After fleeing the scene in a car, a nearby Safeway grocery store was hit with a Molotov cocktail-style object at around 4.45am, police said.

The businesses were closed at the time of the incident and no one was injured. MPD said in a statement that the perpetrators appeared to have targeted commercial establishments, but not members of the public.

Metropolitan Police released surveillance images of the suspect  dressed in black trousers and a white/cream hooded top  as well as a vehicle wanted in connection to the attacks.

The vehicle is a gold or champagne-coloured Acura TL with Maryland licence plate 17971CK.

Pictures shared by 32-year-old DC resident Amanda Koski on Twitter showed damage to one of the targeted structures.

Surveillance image of the suspect and vehicle from the DC attacks (MPD)

The noise woke me up. I have PTSD so when it happened, I kind of froze up and originally I thought it was gunshots. When I looked through my window, I saw glass shattered so I originally thought someone had shot at the bank, Ms Koski told The Independent.

Ms Koski, who works as a political consultant, lives in the apartments above the Truist Bank.

She said the neighbourhood was eerily quiet before MPD and the fire department arrived at the scene.

Metropolitan Police Departments Criminal Investigations Division and the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives Washington Field Division are seeking the publics help in identifying suspects and the vehicle involved.

A reward of up to $20,000 is being offered to anyone who provides information leading to the arrest of the individual or individuals behind the Sunday attacks.

Anyone who may have any information about these incidents, to include video or photos from any of the offense location are encouraged to call MPD at (202) 727-9099 or text your tip to the Departments TEXT TIP LINE at 50411.
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It was the summer of 1990  16 years after the last-known written communication from the Zodiac Killer  and this time New Yorkers all the way across the country were blanketed in fear.

City residents were being shot in 21-day cycles; an alleged perpetrator, calling himself the Zodiac, was not only claiming responsibility but also displaying eerie similarities to the now-infamous West Coast serial killer.

Like his Californian namesake, the New York murderer used riddles and ciphers. He also goaded police and the media.

By 1990, the metro area  along with the rest of the country  was already all too familiar with the hair-raising stories from the late 1960s about the Zodiacs taunts and torture. The killers nickname had already entered the pop culture lexicon, with 1971s Dirty Harry being loosely based on the case. Any mention of or association with the long-dormant killer was terrifying.

Five murders had been confirmed as Zodiac victims in California between 1968 and 1969, and the killer claimed at least 37 more in communication with police and the media. With puzzles and codes  some still to be cracked to this day  Zodiac issued threats and rambled about how those he murdered would be his slaves in the afterlife. David Arthur Faraday, 17 and Betty Lou Jensen, 16; Michael Renault, 19, and Darlene Elizabeth Ferrin, 22; Bryan Calvin Hartnell, 20, and Cecelia Shepard, 22; and Paul Lee Stine, 29, were all victims of the Zodiac. All were couples except for Mr Stine.

Then, after sending a final letter to the San Francisco Chronicle in 1974, the Zodiac Killer seemed to go silent.

Until 16 years later, his name popped up at an unlikely crime scene 3,000 miles away in New York.

NYPD Detective Michael Ciravolo, the commanding officer of the Senior Citizens Robbery Unit, was responding to the shooting of an elderly Queens man, Joseph Proce, who was shot in the back as he walked near his home around 2am on 31 May 1990. He survived and was rushed to the hospital.

Det Ciravolo surveyed the scene  and one very jarring piece of evidence left behind by the shooter.

This note was there, this cryptic, eerie note. At the top is a circle with three symbols, Det Ciravolo says in Night Terror: New York Zodiac Killer, a newly-released episode of the third season of Netflix series Catching Killers.

The retired officer reads the rest of the note: This is the Zodiac the twelve sign will die when the belts in the heaven are seen.

He says: I thought, Who the f*** are we dealing with?

The mystery was only starting  and so was the fear.

New York police sent the note to their counterparts in San Francisco, and for more than two weeks they had little to go on. There was no useful fingerprints or ballistics, as the killer had used a makeshift and untraceable zip gun.

Mr Proce, still in the hospital, could also offer little helpful information. Eighteen days after his shooting, however, Det Ciravolo received a call from a detective in Brooklyn: Theres a note here, and it looks like the note we found at the Proce scene a couple weeks ago.

The purported Zodiac Killer sent letters to the San Francisco Chronicle (AP)

There it was: This is the Zodiac  another note, Det. Ciravolo says in the series.

The note had been mailed to a The New York Post reporter who turned it in to the police, and the handwriting was spot on. There was also mention of the fact no grooves would be found on the bullet  a true detail and only something the shooter knows.

And then I noticed on May 31, white old man with cane shoot in front of house, the detective says. This is Joe Proce. But there's also two other shootings preceding Joe Proce that were totally unaware of.

The shooter listed dates and times for the previous attacks, and officers combed through incident reports until they found two matches: Mario Orozco, who survived being shot in the back on 8 March 1990; and German Montenegro, who survived an attack on 29 March 1990.

We then realise his drawings on the pie slice coincides with the three correct astrological signs of the first three victims, the detective says. Orozco, Montenegro, Proce: he had the Taurus, he had the Scorpio, and he had the Gemini. He was three for the three. Now, I'm thinking, Theres twelve signs. He's got a game plan, and his intent is to carry it out. How do we get this guy before there are more?

The new note was brought down to the lab to try to get latent fingerprints, he says. Were there prints on this? Answer, no. So he probably wore gloves. At that point, I got a call from ... detectives in San Francisco, and they let us know this is a copycat. This is not our zodiac. The handwriting didn't match up at all. This didn't help us one bit.

Scratching their heads with little to go on  and keenly aware that, if their hunch was right, they were up against a ticking clock  detectives zeroed in on the notes.

He writes about Orion, the Seven Sisters, the belts in the heaven, he says. So there's an aspect of this investigation that required some thought outside the proverbial box.

That included exploration of the occult, with one detective hunting for a text by a dead English witch while consulting with a New York-based warlock  the investigators earning nicknames like devil desk. They pored over the astrological aspect, charting out the dates and details.

What we could see was a 21-day cycle being followed here, Det Larry Milanesi says in Catching Killers. We found that the parks department had a very prestigious astronomer. He laid it out. We found that on March 8, three specific constellations were visible at the time of the shooting: Seven Sisters, Taurus and Orion. March 29, all three were visible at the time of the shooting. The next two 21-day periods, the stars were not in the sky at the same time. No shooting. On May 31, the third shooting, at 2.04am, all the stars were in the sky.

They asked the astronomer to outline the next 21 days  and were told that, on 21 June 1990, the same three constellations would be visible between 1am and 4am.

Its never been done before, where you were able to actually predict when a shooting was going to take place within a couple of hours, Det Milanesi says.

New York Daily News article about the copycat killer in the city (NY Daily News via Getty)

The detectives convinced the chief of police to allocate the resources for Operation Watchdog, blanketing the streets of Brooklyn and Queens with officers hunting, as one retired cop puts it in Catching Killers, for anyone who looked like they could be the killer prowling the streets on the night of 21 June. They were dogged and optimistic, but the night came and went with no incidents or related arrests. The detectives were crestfallen that they hadnt nabbed the New York Zodiac  but were soon informed that the shooter had attacked a new victim in a different district: Central Park.

Larry Parham, whose sign was Cancer, was shot while sleeping but survived. A task force was formed, with the NYPD throwing all of its resources at the Empire States homegrown code-loving killer. But cycle upon cycle came and went, and an anxious New York woke up without another shooting. The city slowly calmed, and the task force was wound down. Lead investigators, including Det Milanesi and Ciravolo, retired.

The Zodiac Killer, like the murderer who inspired him, fell silent.

That was until he sent a letter to a newspaper in 1994.

Police seized upon the new morsel of evidence, searching to connect crimes he took credit for with reported incidents. They identified victim Patricia Fonte, a Leo who died after being shot twice and stabbed more than 100 times on 10 August 1992. There was also Jim Weber, a Gemini who survived a 4 June 1993 attack; John DiAcone, a Leo who died after a 20 July 1993 shooting; and Diane Ballard, a Libra who survived injuries that included a gunshot wound to the neck on 2 October 1993. The killer also listed a fifth victim for 11 June 1994, but police never found that individual, despite a thorough search of the park with cadaver dogs and helicopters.

Looking at the evidence, the handwriting, the victims, we know we were dealing with the same killer as the 1990 New York Zodiac, Det Joseph Herbert says in Catching Killers.

But his MO changed, he adds. He got away from the pie signs with the zodiac symbols and included hand-drawn flags.

The flags put me off a little bit, but military people, Navy people who recognized these flags to be maritime flags ... they were able to break the code fairly quickly, Det Herbert says.

When its decoded, it says, This is the Zodiac speaking. I am in control. There will be more, Yours truly.

A second taskforce was convened, and it seemed that history was repeating itself in a case already involving a copycat. A partial fingerprint had been lifted from a Zodiac letter around the Larry Parham shooting, and police cast a net miles around what they believed to be the Zodiacs comfort zones. They tried the prints of 4500 people against the partial print. For the second time in less than five years, the search turned up empty. And again, for a second time, the task force was disbanded.

Det Herbert, whod been one of the taskforce supervisors, trained as a hostage negotiator  and successfully completed his first task in the role on 18 June 1996, talking down a man named Eddie whod shot his sister and taken her boyfriend hostage.

[I] proud as a peacock ... that I didnt blow it, because, you know, they dont always go good, he says, and had returned to the scene when he was handed Eddies written confession to the events.

Im reading it, and Im reading ... I actually had a physical reaction, Det Herbert says.

He had recognised the lettering and style. My blood pressure went down like 40, 50 points, he says.

New York Department of Correctional Services mugshot of Heriberto Seda (New York Department of Correctional Services)

I knew it was the handwriting from all the letters I studied for the last two years working the Zodiac case.

Eddie was a nickname; the arrested gunman was Heriberto Seda, a 26-year-old high school dropout from Brooklyn who seemed obsessed with good and evil and wanted to talk about the Bible, detectives describe in Catching Killers. He initially denied he was New Yorks Zodiac before confessing.

One mystery however remained. Police never learned how Seda had known his victims Zodiac signs.

The serial killer was sentenced to life for killing three people and attempting to kill five more, and he will not be eligible for parole until he turns 264. He told New York magazine in 2004  in a piece that largely chronicled his romance with a fellow inmate as they both served time for murder in Attica  that he didnt actually know anything about astrology.

He also told the magazine that, if hed been armed with weapons stronger than a zip gun, his body count might have been higher.

Lucky for them, it wasnt a real gun, Seda said. I would have shot them twenty times if Id had an automatic.

It was a statement that upheld the detectives worst fears about the New York Zodiac  and the relief that they, and the rest of the population, felt upon Sedas apprehension.

As Det Herbert says in Catching Killers, before Sedas arrest he felt in my heart that the Zodiac will come back and that he would shoot again and kill again.

It's in his blood. Its the way he is.
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The aunt of a French teenager shot dead by police last week has urged the violence to stop and her nephews death to trigger real change peacefully, in a heartfelt interview with The Independent.

Hatifa, who turned 47 on Saturday, the day of her nephews funeral, described Nahel Merzouk, 17, as a loving teddy bear who had big ambitions, liked to write rap lyrics, and was dedicated to his mother.

She said the family  who are of Algerian and Moroccan origin  had been overwhelmed by the national and global response to his killing last week by a police officer during a traffic stop in a west Parisian suburb.

A woman pays her respects at the site where Nahel died in Nanterre (Getty)

Thousands of people have taken to the streets across the country, calling for an end to police impunity and discrimination after a video of the incident was shared online.

But it has also ignited violence with multiple cities ablaze as looters ransacked dozens of shops and torched thousands of vehicles, according to the interior ministry.

On Sunday morning a group of rioters ram-raided the home of a Paris suburb mayor, set the car alight and launched fireworks at his wife and young children.

I ask that the violence stop. I dont want people to get hurt. The family is very much against the violence, Hatifa, a mother-of-four herself, told The Independent.

We knew Nahels killing would have some impact but not this much. I think there are mass protests because so many mothers, like my sister, have had enough of being scared all the time.

She said the family were very grateful for the global support, which had helped as they dealt with deep grief.

Demonstrators run as French police officers use teargas to disperse riots (AFP via Getty)

But I hope that Nahels death is going to trigger some kind of change that means this never happens again, she added. At the end of the day, a grown-up shot a child.

Nahel was fired at by a police officer during a traffic stop in the west Parisian suburb. The perpetrator of the shooting justified his action by saying the teenager refused to comply and the police said he was known to them.

But the incident was caught on mobile phone footage and showed Nahel driving away from the officers before one fired at him. His family believe he was likely terrified, and so panicked and drove off. Frances human rights ombudsman has opened an inquiry into the killing and the officer involved has been charged with homicide.

Outraged at the murder, and the apparent efforts by the police to paint Nahel as a troubled teenager wanted by the law, has seen thousands take to the streets across the country. But that has spiralled into violence in many areas.

More than 3,000 people have been arrested across the country (AFP via Getty)

Emmanuel Macron, facing the most severe challenge yet to his presidency, deployed 45,000 officers, including elite anti-terrorism units, in a bid to end the unrest. Police unions, meanwhile, have declared they are at war with savage hordes of vermin.

More than 3,000 people have now been arrested across the country, with curfews imposed and public transport curtailed as open street battles raged between protesters and police, and looting became rampant.

Hatifa said that the anger in the disenfranchised banlieues  or city suburbs  had been simmering for a while because of the endemic problem of discrimination in the police force.

The youths, including Nahel, are regularly stopped by police, an action that scares them and heightens tensions, she added. I dont have all the answers to fix this. Racism and discrimination within the police has to stop. I know policemen are reaching their wits end and are taking their frustration out on young people.

But it has to stop, young people dont like police, the police should be defending us not killing us, she added.

Hatifas words echo those of Nahels grandmother who also called for calm in an interview with French TV channel BFMTV on Sunday. Dont break windows, dont smash up schools, dont smash up buses. Stop it, theyre mums on buses, theyre mums walking outside, the grandmother begged.

Nahel is dead. My daughter had just one child, shes lost, its over, my daughter has no life left. And they made me lose my daughter and my grandson.

Emmanuel Macron chaired an emergency meeting on Sunday evening to tackle the riots (AP)

Hatifa said the whole family was concerned about the mental health of Nahels mother, Mounia, who has been thrust into the international limelight.

My sister is focused entirely on the loss of her son, her only son. I am scared that she might make a mistake in her loneliness and solitude when this quietens down, she added.

The officer who fired at Nahel has been taken into pre-trial custody, which French criminal law professors told The Independent was unprecedented. But many, including the family, fear that he may still be released.

Nahel is the 16th driver to be shot at a traffic stop since the start of 2022, experts have told The Independent. The difference this time is that it was caught on camera.

Hatifa said they were concerned by the impunity in the police force and hoped the officer, who has been detained on charges of homicide, is convicted and jailed.

It would be a disaster if, after all that has happened, nothing changes and for this person to walk free. Young people in my neighbourhood go to prison for much less, she said with a shake in her voice.

We didnt ask for a policeman to wake up one morning and put a bullet through my nephews heart.

I cant breathe at night  I have never felt such pain. Nahel never hurt anyone.
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More than 1 million (860,000) has been raised for the family of a French police officer who shot dead a teenager at a traffic stop, an act that sparked riots across the country. That is far more than a similar campaign for the family of the boy killed.

The online fundraiser started by Jean Messiha, an independent right-wing populist and former adviser to Marine Le Pen, has attracted donations from more than 52,000 people, while a fund set up by the policemans colleagues has raised around 60,000.

The grandmother of Nahel Merzouk, 17, said she was heartbroken by the donations. He took the life of my grandson. This man must pay, the same as everyone, Nadia said to BFMTV about the officer.

"Jean Messiha is playing with fire," said MP Eric Bothorel, part of President Emmanuel Macrons ruling party. He called the fundraiser "indecent and scandalous".

The justice minister, Eric Dupond-Moretti, said the fundraiser was fuelling the fire of unrest, describing it as a populist instrumentalisation of the teenagers death.

Meanwhile, a fundraiser for the victims family has raised more than 200,000 from around 100,000 donations.

Nahel, who was of Algerian descent, was shot dead in his car by a police officer last Tuesday during a traffic check in Paris.

The 38-year-old officer has been charged with voluntary homicide and remanded in custody. He claims he had the right to fire his gun to protect himself, a colleague and other road users.

Prosecutor Pascal Prache concluded in an initial investigation that the conditions for the legal use of the weapon were not met.

Thousands of protesters have been arrested since fiery clashes first erupted on Tuesday night in and around the Paris suburb of Nanterre where the teenager was killed.

Protesters walk past a burnt out trash bin during clashes with police in Marseille (AFP via Getty Images)

The family of the slain teen has pleaded for the unrest to calm down after council-run buildings including libraries and primary schools, and law enforcement stations were attacked, and vehicles and buildings were torched.

The aunt of the slain teen told The Independent: The family is very much against the violence.

But I hope that Nahels death is going to trigger some kind of change that means this never happens again.

Criminal lawyer Carole-Olivia Monteno called the fundraiser for the officer insulting to Nahels family. It only increases hate where theres too much of it already, its completely inappropriate and politically it does nothing, she said.

La France Insoumise MP Mathilde Panot also wrote: Killing a young North African, in France in 2023, can earn you a lot of money. While first secretary of the opposition Socialist Party Olivier Faure has called for it to be shut down.

French riot police officers walk next to a vehicle upside down (REUTERS)

Itc omes after the home of a Paris mayor was raided and set alight on Sunday while his wife and children were inside sleeping.

Vincent Jeanbrun, who is in charge of the area of LHay-les-Roses in the southern suburbs, said rockets were thrown as the family fled from the burning house in what he has called an assassination attempt.

Mr Jeanbruns wife, Melanie Nowak, broke her leg as she attempted to flee through rocket fire and one of the couples two children was also injured.

Overnight, 297 vehicles were torched across France, along with 34 buildings. Some 157 people were arrested, down from a peak of 3,880 arrests during the fiery night of June 30.

More than 3,000 people have been detained overall since Nahels death. Hundreds of police and firefighters have also been injured in the violence, although authorities have not commented on how many protesters have been hurt.
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Riots that have rocked France for days in the wake of police shooting a teenager at a traffic stop finally appear to be calming  with crowds gathering at town halls across the country to protest the violence and looting.

Police made fewer than 160 arrests overnight into Monday, offering some relief for president Emmanuel Macron, with the death of Nahel Merzouk, 17, tapping a deep vein of anti-police resentment  particularly in the diverse suburbs around the country's major cities. There had been more than 3,000 arrests since Nahel was killed on Tuesday in the Paris suburb of Nanterre, including 1,300 on Friday.

A car was rammed into the home of the mayor of the Paris suburb of L'Hay-les-Roses over the weekend, an unusually personal attack that authorities said could be prosecuted as an attempted homicide. The attack prompted an outpouring of support for local governments.

The suburbs mayor, Vincent Jeanbrun said his wife  who broke her leg  and one of his children were injured and criticised the government for doing too little, too late

The base ingredients are still there, he told BFMTV on Monday. We are powerless summer after summer.

Mr Macron has asked for a significant police presence on the streets, although some politicians  including Mr Jeanbrun  have said the government is merely papering over the cracks by concentrating on the youth of protesters and blaming parents.

The interior minister, Gerald Darmanin, took aim at that target again on Monday, saying the average age of those arrested was 17 with some as young as 12.

Its not up to the national police or the gendarmerie or the mayor or the state to solve the problem of a 12-year-old setting fire to a school. Its a question of parental authority, Mr Darmanin said during a visit to Reims.

In the town of Persan south of Paris, where rioters smashed the town halls windows and damaged its facade in an arson attack, local residents denounced the unrest  one of scores of similar citizens gatherings nationwide on Monday.

Let these wrongdoers hear it and let them know that hatred will never prevail, the town's mayor, Valentin Ratieuville.

Nahels family have also called for an end to the violence. The aunt of Nahel, Hatifa, urged for the violence to stop in an interview with The Independent over the weekend  and that her nephews death should trigger real change peacefully.

A political row has also broken out over a fundraising effort for the family of the French police officer under investigation for shooting Nahel. The collection, for the 38-year-old officer  named as Florian M  was organised by Jean Messiha, a former spokesperson for the far-right presidential candidate Eric Zemmour. By Monday it had raised more than 1m (860,000) and attracted more than 50,000 donations. A similar collection for the family of Nahel has raised significantly less at more than 200,000.

Nahels grandmother Nadia said she was heartbroken by the support shown for the officer. He took the life of my grandson. This man must pay, the same as everyone, she told the BFM television channel on Sunday. I have confidence in the justice system. I believe in justice.

Jean Messiha is playing with fire, said MP Eric Bothorel, part of president Emmanuel Macrons ruling party. He called the fundraiser indecent and scandalous.

The justice minister, Eric Dupond-Moretti, said the fundraiser was fuelling the fire of unrest, describing it as a populist instrumentalisation of the teenagers death.

Reuters and Associated Press contributed to this report
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France has seen six consecutive nights of violence and unrest after police shot a 17-year-old boy during a traffic check in Paris.

Thousands have been arrested since clashes first erupted on Tuesday night in and around the Paris suburb of Nanterre where Nahel Merzouk was killed.

"I lost a child of 17-year-old, they took my baby," the mother said in a TikTok video.

"He was still a child, he needed his mother. This morning he gave me a big kiss and told me he loved me. I told him be careful and I loved him."

According to his mother, they both had left the house together. While he went to get a McDonalds takeout, she left for work.

"And then I am told they shot my son, what can I do," the heartbroken woman said.

"I only had him. I didn't have 10 like him. He was my life, my best friend. He was my son, He was my everything."

LIle-Saint-Denis city hall damaged during the riots in Paris (AFP via Getty Images)

Aftermath of clashes between protesters and police in Mons-en-Baroeul northern France (REUTERS)

This photograph taken 29 June 2023 in Brest, western of France shows a Biocoop, an organic supermarket partly burnt, two days after a 17-year-old boy was shot in the chest by police at point-blank range in Nanterre, a western suburb of Paris (AFP via Getty Images)

The victim's grandmother, who also remained unidentified said: I will never forgive them. My grandson died, they killed my grandson. We are not happy at all, I am against the government."

They killed my grandson, now I don't care about anyone, they took my grandson from me, I will never forgive them in my life, never, never, never.

A video shared on social media showed two police officers beside a Mercedes AMG car, with one shooting at the teenage driver at close range as he pulled away.

He died shortly afterward from his wounds, the local prosecutor said.

The teenager, who was too young to hold a full license in France, was driving illegally, a source familiar with the investigation told Reuters.

The Nanterre prosecutor said the boy failed on Tuesday to obey the officers orders.

A lawyer for Nahel's family, Yassine Bouzrou, said they want the police officer prosecuted for murder instead of manslaughter.

He said he would file an additional complaint for false testimony over the allegation that the victim had tried to run over the police officer.

President Macron said the killing was inexplicable and inexcusable and called for calm. Nothing justifies the death of a young person, he told reporters in Marseille on Wednesday.
 Close Police clash with rioters as unrest continues for fifth night

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Children as young as 12 or 13 have been detained for attacking law enforcement and setting fires during six nights of violence after the fatal police shooting of 17-year-old Nahel Merzouk in suburban Paris.

The average age of the 3,354 people arrested over the past week was 17, the interior minister Gerald Darmanin said.

In all, 99 town halls have been attacked during the unrest, including an attempt to ram a burning vehicle into the home of lHay-les-Les Roses mayor Vincent Jeanbrun. His wife and one of his young children were injured during the attack, which began at the weekend while they slept.

We saw the real face of the rioters, that of assassins, Mr Jeanbrun said in an emotional speech. France and democracy itself were being attacked in the days of rioting, he said.

Meanwhile, an insulting fundraiser set up for the family of the police officer who shot Nahel has amassed more than 1 million (840,000).

Organised by Jean Messiha, a former adviser to the French far-right politician Marine Le Pen, the appeal has raised far more than the donation page set up for the family of the teenage victim.
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Pope Francis said he is angry and disgusted at the burning of the Quran, days after a man tore up and burned a copy of the scripture outside a mosque in Sweden.

Iraqi national Salwan Momika was charged with agitation against an ethnic or national group after he tore up pages of a copy of the holy book of Islam, wiped them on his shoe and eventually set the book on fire on Wednesday  the first day of Eid  last week.

Any book considered holy should be respected to respect those who believe in it, the Pope told the United Arab Emirates newspaper Al Ittihad, in an interview published on Monday.

I feel angry and disgusted at these actions.

Freedom of speech should never be used as a means to despise others and allowing that is rejected and condemned, the pontiff said.

Mr Momika called his act a move to highlight the importance of freedom of speech in a democracy.

It is in danger if they tell us we cant do this.

Nearly 200 onlookers in the Swedish capital Stockholm witnessed the act at an anti-Quran demonstration. The protest has risked sparking a fresh diplomatic row with Turkey, which has been holding up Swedens bid to join Nato.

Some of those present at the site of the demonstration shouted God is great in Arabic to protest the burning. One man was detained by police after he attempted to throw a rock.

Representatives of the mosque were disappointed by the police decision to grant permission for the latest protest on the Muslim holiday of Eid al-Adha, mosque director and imam Mahmoud Khalfi said on Wednesday.

The mosque suggested to the police to at least divert the demonstration to another location, which is possible by law, but they chose not to do so, Mr Khalfi said in a statement.

The Swedish police had cleared the anti-Quran demonstration despite rejecting several such applications recently. The countrys court has overruled those earlier police orders, calling them an infringement on freedom of speech.

Swedish prime minister Ulf Kristersson said the protest was legal but not appropriate and said it was up to the police to permit it or not.

On Sunday, a group of 57 Islamic countries called for collective measures to prevent acts of desecration of the Quran, and sought an international law to bring an end to religious hatred.
 Close Head of MI6 says Putin clearly under pressure after Wagner Group uprising

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US-supplied cluster bombs are now being deployed by Ukraine in the battle against Russia, according to the White House.

The cluster munitions are reportedly impacting Russian defensive formations and maneuvering.

We have gotten some initial feedback from the Ukrainians, and theyre using them quite effectively, White House spokesman John Kirby said.

Ukraine has made a commitment to use the banned cluster bombs solely for the purpose of displacing concentrations of Russian enemy soldiers.

Cluster munitions are banned in over 100 countries due to their potential to cause indiscriminate casualties over a wide area. Unexploded bomblets from these munitions also pose a threat for many years after they are deployed.

It comes as Russia pounded Ukrainian food export facilities for a fourth day in a row on Friday and practised seizing ships in the Black Sea in an escalation of what Western leaders say is an attempt to wriggle out of sanctions by threatening a global food crisis.
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The prime ministers of the Netherlands and Luxembourg on Monday urged Serbia and Kosovo to act to defuse recent tensions that have threatened to push the Balkan region into instability as Europe faces Russia's aggression in Ukraine.

Dutch PM Mark Rutte and Xavier Bettel, the Luxembourg PM, spoke after meeting Serbia's President Aleksandar Vucic in Belgrade. Rutte and Bettel travel to Kosovo on Tuesday for meetings with top officials there.

We cannot, both of us, emphasize enough how important it is that both Serbia and Kosovo take steps toward de-escalation and ultimately normalization of their relations through the EU-led dialogue, said Rutte.

This is crucial for the two countries themselves, first and foremost, but also for the entire region and Europe as a whole, he added. With a war raging between Russia and Ukraine on our continent, it's more important than ever that we act together.

Serbia and its former province Kosovo have been at odds for decades, with Belgrade refusing to recognize Kosovos 2008 declaration of independence. Western efforts to resolve the crisis have increased recently, to avert possible instability in the Balkans as war ravages Ukraine.

Tensions between the two countries flared anew in May after Kosovo police seized local municipal buildings in Serb-majority northern Kosovo to install ethnic Albanian mayors who were elected in an April election that Serbs overwhelmingly boycotted.

Violent clashes injured 30 international peacekeepers and more than 50 ethnic Serbs, stirring fears of a renewal of the 1998-99 conflict that left more than 10,000 people dead, mostly Kosovar Albanians.

The U.S and the EU have pressed Serbia and Kosovo to take steps to lower tensions. Normalization of relations is the key condition for the two countries to move forward in their efforts to join the EU.

Bettel, too, called on the two sides to act.

Words are good, actions are better, he said. And we need to advance on these topics and to show also that there is a wish of de-escalation.

Vucic expressed hope that the two prime ministers' visit to Serbia and Kosovo would help. I promised that Serbia will do all it can to preserve peace and stability, he said.

Washington and most EU nations have recognized Kosovos independence, while Russia and China have backed Serbias claim on the territory.

The 1998-99 war erupted when separatist ethnic Albanians rebelled against Serbia's rule and Belgrade responded with a brutal crackdown. NATO bombing in 1999 forced Serbia to relinquish control but Belgrade has maintained Kosovo remains part of the country.
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The British tourist who attracted outrage in Rome after being accused of carving his name into the Colosseum walls with a key is facing up to five years in prison and a 15,000 (12,850) fine.

The man  identified as Ivan Dimitrov, a 27-year-old fitness instructor and delivery driver resident in Bristol but originally from Bulgaria  was visiting Italys Eternal City with his girlfriend Hayley Bracey when he was filmed scratching Ivan + Hayley 23 into the ancient stone walls of the 2,000-year-old amphitheatre.

The venue, a protected Unesco World Heritage site, was constructed during the reigns of the emperors Vespasian and Titus in the first century AD. It attracted the Roman public to see spectacular gladiatorial bouts, historical reenactments and parades of exotic wild animals imported from Africa and the Middle East, including elephants, rhinoceroses, giraffes, lions, leopards, panthers and ostriches.

The act of vandalism was caught on camera by another visitor, Californian Ryan Lutz, who was incensed by the incident and asked Are you serious, man?. He then uploaded the footage to YouTube under the title A****** tourist carves name in Colosseum in Rome, where it promptly went viral.

The Italian Carabinieri responded to the video and quickly identified Mr Dimitrov as their suspect, with Major Roberto Martina telling the media he had expressed sincere remorse for his actions when confronted.

He told us he was very upset by what he had done, and he kept apologising for it, Major Martina told Mail Online.

I think he was worried about the consequences of any trial and we explained that he could be jailed for between two and five years and be fined up to 15,000, he said.

The major went on to say he believed the case would be reasonably straightforward to prosecute because of the video evidence.

He had contacted us after we secured his mobile telephone from hotel records and left a message for him to call us, Major Martina said of the Carabineris investigation.

He was naturally worried about the legal implications, and these were all explained to him.

We didnt ask him why he did it, that will be for a judge to hear, we just told him that he was a suspect and was part of the investigation.

The officer added that Ms Bracey is not part of any complaint so is an innocent party as far as we are concerned, adding: Although technically, she could be seen as an accessory.

The Colosseum in Rome (PA)

Italian culture minister Gennaro Sangiuliano thanked the police for identifying the suspect of the uncivilised and absurd act committed at the Colosseum.

It was an act that offended those around the world who appreciate the value of archaeology, monuments and history, he said.

Now I hope justice will take its course by rigorously applying the laws.

This is not the first such incident at the Colosseum.

A Russian tourist was given a suspended four-year jail sentence and fined 20,000 (17,000) in 2014 for engraving a K on its walls.

The following year, two American tourists were also cited for aggravated damage after they likewise carved their names into its stones.
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At least 10 Palestinians have been killed in raids by Israeli forces on the Palestinian city of Jenin, one of the largest incursions into the occupied West Bank in 20 years.

More than 50 people were injured in the attack that included airstrikes, with the death toll likely to rise, according to the Palestinian health ministry.

Israel targeted what it described as a unified command centre for militants of the Jenin Brigades in the densely populated refugee camp in the city.

Israel says its forces found explosives during a search of a mosque. In a statement, the Israeli Defence Forces said soldiers found explosive devices, weapons and military equipment it claims were affiliated with terrorist organisations in the area.

But residents of the area, which has been at the heart of an escalating spiral of violence over the last year, told The Independent that civilian infrastructure has been hit.

They described being shaken awake at midnight by the bombing before seeing military bulldozers charge through the neighbourhoods. Israeli military confirmed to The Independent that it had struck Jenin refugee camp with aircraft, reviving for the first time a tactic it had largely halted during the past two decades since the Intifada, a Palestinian uprising against Israels open-ended occupation.

It started at midnight with bombing and then large groups of soldiers attacked Jenin from different entrances simultaneously. Later they used bulldozers to cut a path through the neighbourhoods, Mustafa Sheta, director of Jenins Freedom Theatre and community centre told The Independent. He said his theatre  a well-known community and cultural centre  had been damaged by projectiles which landed nearby while civilians from the area were sheltering there.

Bulldozers came to the street either side of the theatre  we dont know the extent of the damage, he added. He said he understood snipers had been deployed to the top of adjacent buildings. The Israeli military denied a direct attack on the theatre saying it was only hitting military targets, and shared drone footage on Twitter which appeared to show the theatre intact.

For more than a year, army raids in cities like Jenin have been linked to a series of deadly attacks by Palestinians against Israelis and rampages by settler mobs against Palestinian villages. The Israeli military said it was striking terrorist infrastructure targets and armed gunmen in the Jenin camp and shared a document claiming Jenin was a stronghold of terrorist activity, where 50 per cent of the population are affiliated to militant groups.

Israeli drones fly over Jenin during the military operation (Reuters)

Hamas, which governs in Gaza, said on Monday that it was ready to intervene if Israel goes too far and persists in its aggression in Jenin.

Rights groups including Amnesty International have said that Jenin refugee camp has been at the centre of Israels escalating military crackdown. The group said Israel is recklessly endangering desperate and marginalised people in its operation.

Theres already been a frightening toll of Palestinian civilian deaths and injuries from Israels military assaults this year, and once again the Israeli military is recklessly endangering desperate and marginalised people, Kristyan Benedict, Amnesty International UKs crisis response manager, said.

Coming after Israels massive five-day offensive in Gaza in May, the Jenin attack seems to show that the Israeli military is increasingly abandoning what little restraint it previously had and wilfully endangering the lives of Palestinian civilians, including children, older people and people with disabilities, he added.

Palestinian journalist Shireen Abu Akleh was shot dead in the camp last May, and its residents continue to be subjected to relentless military raids which amount to collective punishment, said Philip Luther, Amnestys Middle East and North Africa research and advocacy director in a report in January.

Palestinians described Mondays operation as a real war and an invasion.

People were expecting something to happen, the hospitals were asking for donations, said Sarah Abu al-Rob, a Palestinian journalist from Jenin. This is an invasion and a siege, for the first time since 2002 the camp is surrounded, she added.

A Palestinian ambulance driver, Khaled Alahmad, said: There were strikes from the sky targeting the camp, every time we drive in, around five to seven ambulances and we come back full with injured people, he added.

Palestinians said electricity was cut off across the refugee camp. And the military blocked roads and took over houses and buildings, according to Palestinian news agency Wafa.

The humanitarian situation is very difficult and is getting worse. All the roads are closed, no ambulances, vehicles or people are allowed to pass into the camp or inside its alleyways, said Mahmoud al-Saadi, director of the Palestinian Red Crescent Society in Jenin. The streets and infrastructure are completely destroyed, the water and electricity are cut all across the camp.

Until 21 June, when it carried out a strike near Jenin, the Israeli military had not used drone strikes in the West Bank since 2006. But the growing scale of the violence meant such tactics may continue, a military spokesperson said. Israeli defence minister Yoav Gallant said the operation was proceeding as planned, but gave no indication when the incursion would end. Fighting was continuing by mid-afternoon local time, some 14 hours after Israel entered the camp.

An Israeli military spokesperson said the operation would last as long as needed and suggested forces could remain for an extended period. It could take hours, but it could also take days. We are focused on our goals, he said.

The Israeli military said that a brigade-sized force  roughly 2,000 soldiers  was taking part in the operation and that military drones had carried out a series of strikes to clear the way for the ground forces.

Palestinians protest against the invasion (Reuters)

A spokesperson for Palestinian president Mahmoud Abbas called the operation a new war crime against our defenceless people.

The Jenin operation led to protests across the occupied West Bank, including at a checkpoint near the city of Ramallah, where a 21-year-old Palestinian was killed by Israeli fire.

Israels air defence systems were put on alert for possible rocket fire from the blockaded Gaza Strip after several Palestinian factions vowed retaliation.

Our Palestinian people will not kneel, will not surrender, will not raise the white flag, and will remain steadfast on their land in the face of this brutal aggression, Nabil Abu Rudeineh, a spokesperson for the Palestinian president, said in a statement.

We have seen the reports and are monitoring the situation closely, a White House spokesperson said. We support Israels security and right to defend its people against Hamas, Palestinian Islamic Jihad, and other terrorist groups.

More than 140 Palestinians have been killed so far this year by Israeli fire in the West Bank, according to the Associated Presss count, almost half of them affiliated with militant groups.

Civilians have also been killed, including a two-year-old in June and a 15-year-old girl in a raid on Jenin camp last week.

Last week, the UN Security Council urged Israel and the Palestinians to avoid actions that can further inflame tensions in the volatile West Bank.

The statement was backed by both the US and Russia in a moment of unity on a divisive issue, reflecting the widespread international concern at the escalating violence, especially by Israeli forces and settlers.

However, on Monday, a White House spokesperson said: We have seen the reports and are monitoring the situation closely. We support Israels security and right to defend its people against Hamas, Palestinian Islamic Jihad, and other terrorist groups.
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The universe went in extreme slow motion at its beginning, and has dramatically sped up since, scientists have found.

The discovery, predicted by Einsteins general theory of relativity, was finally confirmed after scientists observed the universe soon after the Big Bang.

Einsteins theory suggests that we should be able to see the distant universe, when it was much older than it is today, running much more slowly. But scientists have not been able to actually look that far and confirm the theory.

Now scientists have used bright quasars as a sort of space clock, allowing them to measure time when the universe was much older than it is today.

Looking back to a time when the universe was just over a billion years old, we see time appearing to flow five times slower, said Geraint Lewis from the University of Sydney, lead author on the new research.

If you were there, in this infant universe, one second would seem like one second  but from our position, more than 12 billion years into the future, that early time appears to drag.

Professor Lewis and other researchers gathered data from 200 quasars for the research. Quasars are very active supermassive black holes that sit in the middle of early galaxies, and hence provide a reliable way to look back at a much younger universe.

Previous researchers have done the same using supernovae, or massive exploding stars. Those are useful but they are also difficult to see at the very very long distances of the early universe, meaning that the confirmation was limited only to about half the age of the cosmos.

Now by using quasars scientists were able to look much further back, to just a tenth of the age of the universe, when it was only a billion years old.

Thanks to Einstein, we know that time and space are intertwined and, since the dawn of time in the singularity of the Big Bang, the universe has been expanding, Professor Lewis said.

This expansion of space means that our observations of the early universe should appear to be much slower than time flows today.

In this paper, we have established that back to about a billion years after the Big Bang.

To confirm the findings, scientists examined details of 190 quasars that had been gathered over two decades. They were able to standardise the tick of each of the quasars and then compare them, which showed that the expansion and speeding up of the universe could be seen in the data.

With these exquisite data, we were able to chart the tick of the quasar clocks, revealing the influence of expanding space, Professor Lewis said.

The work is described in a new paper, Detection of the cosmological time dilation of high-redshift quasars, published in Nature Astronomy.
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Twitter has begun limiting the number of tweets people can read, Elon Musk has announced.

Mr Musk, who took over Twitter in October after buying it for 44 billion dollars (35.5 billion), declared on Saturday that verified accounts are being limited to reading 6,000 posts a day.

Unverified accounts can only read 600 posts a day, with new unverified accounts limited to just 300 per day, he said  though he later added: Rate limits increasing soon to 8,000 for verified, 800 for unverified & 400 for new unverified.

The Tesla and SpaceX CEO said Twitter had imposed the temporary limit to address extreme levels of data scraping & system manipulation.

But the move sparked a scathing response from many users, including Matt Navarra, a social media consultant and industry analyst, who told the PA news agency: Never have I seen a social network try so hard to put people off using a platform and to completely curtail any potential future for its business.

And Adam Leon Smith, of BCS, The Chartered Institute for IT  the UKs professional body for IT, said it is very odd to start rate-limiting the reading of a social network, as limiting users scroll time will affect advertising revenue.

Mr Musk has not said when exactly the limits will increase, or how long the restrictions will be in place for.

In the UK, thousands of people complained of problems accessing the site from 12pm onwards on Saturday.

#Twitterdown and RIP Twitter began trending as frustrated users were faced with a message saying Rate limit exceeded. Please wait a few moments then try again.

On Friday, people trying to access Twitter were told they would need to log in to an account to view tweets, in what Mr Musk called a temporary emergency measure.

It comes after another outage in February, when many users were not able to tweet, follow accounts or access their direct messages as the platform was plagued by widespread technical problems.

Mr Navarra, who previously worked as a digital communications adviser for the UK Government, said the move was yet another crazy decision by Elon Musk in showing how to burn 44 billion dollars in a year.

I think that its going to punish the users it needs the most which is its power users, its heavy users, which is clearly a perverse way of operating, I would say, he said.

He said people are ready to get off this sinking ship as soon as possible because every week comes another bonkers business decision at Twitter.

He added: I am surprised and shocked at this latest policy decision or platform change that hes made, I struggle to see how this is going to do anything to help recover this business into being a profitable and highly-used platform.

He said it quite shocking that hes also rate-limiting people that have already paid to be on the platform, adding that the even lower limit for unverified users is going to be swallowed up in no time and it will soon become quite frustrating and annoying for its most addicted and heavy users to find that they are rate limited.

After taking over Twitter, Mr Musk laid off some 80% of its 8,000 global staff  and admitted it resulted in the platform losing a large amount of its functionality.

He also oversaw the scrapping of legacy blue ticks, which verified a users identity and were replaced by a paid-for subscription called Twitter Blue.

High-profile figures and celebrities said the move leaves the platform open to imposters and disinformation.

Users who pay 9.60 a month, or 115.20 annually, receive the blue tick and can make longer tweets up to 10,000 characters.

Other select features available only to subscribers include non-fungible token (NFT) profile pictures, making changes to published tweets and seeing around 50% fewer ads.

On the latest changes to Twitter, Mr Smith added: While data scraping may be part of the reason, there are very to be likely underlying technical problems.

The alleged data scraping could well be caused by Twitter now charging exorbitant fees for API access, which may have led to a secondary market for tweet data.

In December, just weeks after the takeover, Mr Musk tweeted: I will resign as CEO as soon as I find someone foolish enough to take the job.

The pledge came after millions of Twitter users asked him to step down in a poll Mr Musk created and promised to abide by.

In May, Mr Musk confirmed that advertising executive Linda Yaccarino was joining from NBCUniversal to become Twitters chief executive.
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Jack Dorsey has said it is critical to preserve the open internet after Twitter owner Elon Musk announced controversial new rate limits for viewing tweets on the social media platform.

The Twitter co-founder and former chief said running Twitter is hard after widespread backlash against Mr Musks temporary limits on the number of tweets people can read on the microblogging site.

He, however, expressed hopes that the platform would build on censorship-resistant open protocols that would be good for all, and critical to preserve the open internet.

Thousands of Twitter users took to the platform to report problems with the site over the weekend, with complaints of inability in retrieving tweets, missing timelines and disappearing followers.

Reports of outages began flooding Down Detector, peaking on Sunday and extending to Monday.

The backlash started after Twitter declared on Saturday that verified accounts were being limited to reading 6,000 posts a day.

Mr Musk later said rate limits were increasing to 8,000 for verified, 800 for unverified & 400 for new unverified.

He reasoned that the limits were being imposed to address extreme levels of data scraping & system manipulation.

Many users expressed their frustration with the new move as they got a notification that said, Sorry, you are rate limited. Please wait a few moments then try again.

Industry experts were also baffled at such a move by a social media company to put people off its platform, especially as Twitter has battled with retaining advertisers on the platform ever since Mr Musk took over last November.

Never have I seen a social network try so hard to put people off using a platform and to completely curtail any potential future for its business, Matt Navarra, a social media consultant and industry analyst told PA, adding that the move was yet another crazy decision by Elon Musk.

Jasmine Enberg, principal analyst at Insider Intelligence, said the new move could be catastrophic for Twitters ad business, that has already reeled from dwindling revenues.

The company even roped in former NBCUniversal advertising executive Linda Yaccarino to be its new chief to repair relationships with advertisers who pulled away from the platform.

The latest reading limits, according to Lou Paskalis, the founder of advertising consultancy AJL Advisory, signals to the marketplace that hes not capable of empowering her to save him from himself.

Mr Dorsey acknowledged that running Twitter was hard, adding that he trusted the team was doing their best under the constraints they have.

Its easy to critique the decisions from afar... which Im guilty of... but I know the goal is to see Twitter thrive. It will, he said.

It remains unclear how long the restrictions will last, as thousands continue to report about outages on the platform.

Twitter did not reply to requests for comment as it had earlier this year changed its policy for interacting with reporters.
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Paris has seen nights of unrest following the killing of a 17-year-old by police officers on 27 June.

The death of the teenager, known only as Nahel, was captured on video and has shocked France, stirring long-simmering tensions between young people and the police in disadvantaged neighbourhoods around the country.

Transport and businesses have been disrupted as a result of the clashes; on Friday (30 June), interior minister Gerald Darmanin asked regional prefects for all bus and tram services to stop from 9pm local time. Before travelling, check if your plans will be affected and how youll get around.

Towards the end of the weekend, riots in the country appeared to be calming, with 157 people were arrested on Sunday night, compared with more than 700 the night before.

But as the French capital is gearing up for its annual influx of summer holidaymakers, is it safe to travel to Paris?

Where are the clashes?

Clashes first erupted on Tuesday night in Nanterre, a town in the western suburbs of Paris, and nearby, and continued their overnight on Wednesday. They continued between Wednesday and Thursday, during which a fire damaged the town hall of the Paris suburb of LIle-Saint-Denis, not far from Frances national stadium and the headquarters of the Paris 2024 Olympics.

The troubles spread further on Thursday night and into Friday, with looting taking place in Rue de Rivoli, which is near the Louvre Museum and the Champs Elysees, and a central Nike store was broken into  a significant escalation. Videos circulating on social media show a fire at the site of an Olympic swimming pool, reported to be under construction for the 2024 Games.

Is it safe to visit Paris?

Around 17 million Brits visit France every year, and most of the visits are free of trouble, but the ugly scenes over the past couple of days could understandably cause some concern.

One important thing to consider is where youre travelling to in the capital. Most of the city is unaffected by the unrest and the vast majority of it is confined to non-tourist areas: protests began in Nanterre and have spread to other areas, including Bezons, Gennevilliers, Garges-les-Gonesse, Asnieres-sur-Seine, Montreuil, Neuilly-sur-Marne, Clamart and Meudon.

However, this are all beyond the Periphique ring road that circles the central district of Paris, where most of the main tourist attractions are located. If you find yourself close to any protests, the advice is to leave the impacted area.

The Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Office (FCDO) has not issued a travel warning for France, however The Independent has contacted it for an update. The US State Department issued a security alert June warning its citizens to steer clear of trouble spots.

The FCDO website currently states: Since 27 June, riots have taken place across France. Many have turned violent. Shops, public buildings and parked cars have been targeted. There may be disruptions to road travel and local transport provision may be reduced. Some local authorities may impose curfews. Locations and timing of riots are unpredictable. You should monitor the media, avoid areas where riots are taking place, check the latest advice with operators when travelling and follow the advice of the authorities.

Am I covered by travel insurance?

The FCDO says it is more important than ever to get travel insurance. If you are caught in the unrest, or if you decide you dont want to travel, its important to check the fine print: many travel insurance only offer limited cover for claims related to or caused by civil unrest.

During major industrial action in France earlier this year, Helen Phipps, director at comparethemarket.com, told ITV News that it was important for travellers to check your policy wording or contact your insurance provider to confirm what you are covered for.

She added: Many people risk failing to take out insurance far enough in advance, leaving them unprotected if something goes wrong.

Amber Moon, marketing manager at travel insurance provider Holidaysafe, told The Independent said: Your travel insurance would still be valid in the normal way for medical expenses, for example, if for some reason you got caught up in any rioting by chance and were injured. This would also apply to personal possessions if they were lost and damaged as a result of a disturbance. But we would advise all travellers to take reasonable precautions to avoid areas where rioting is taking place.

She added: As with all trips abroad we would advise travellers to let someone know where they are going and to keep their policy details with them at all times in case something does go wrong.

A number of holiday providers told The Independent that they have had no contact from customers about the issues in France, while a spokesperson for easyJet said: Any customers due to fly to France this weekend who would like to change their plans can contact our customer service team for assistance with their options which includes a transfer to an alternative flight and we will waive the change fee.

What about other cities in France?

Fires and clashes have been reported in various French cities overnight, from Toulouse in the south to Lille in the north, but the main area affected is Nanterre. Again, be sure to check your travel insurance and plan ahead.

In the southern city of Marseille, Frances second-largest, authorities banned public demonstrations set for Friday, and encouraged restaurants to close outdoor eating areas early. They said all public transport would stop at 7pm.
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It is difficult and painful to love a country that does not always love you back.

Looking at America, with all its historic and present-day sins, it is easy  tempting, even  to despair. After a series of Supreme Court rulings on everything from affirmative action to gay rights  rulings, in line with last years overturning of Roe, which seem designed to roll back the promise of America  we now face an Independence Day where many of us will hardly feel like celebrating.

Being stripped of your equality and made a second-class citizen does not inspire patriotic jubilation. It does not elicit pride in your country, but the incandescent rage of righteous fury. From the creeping risk of the MAGA movement to a Supreme Court dedicated to undoing the progress of the past century, this is a moment of profound discontent.

We have been here before. Our history is an often bloody and sordid affair. The hope of the 13th and 14th Amendments were squashed under Jim Crows heel; it took the Civil Rights Movement, met with a violent backlash a century later, to free the South. The Seneca Falls Convention, our nations first womens rights conference, occurred more than 70 years before the passage of the 19th Amendment guaranteed women the vote  a passage that came only after suffragists were incarcerated and tortured as political prisoners. Nearly a century after Franklin Roosevelt demanded freedom from want, we are still waiting for economic justice.

This Independence Day, a malaise hangs over the nation like the dense smoke choking many of our cities. The climate crisis, income inequality  things feel bleak. Many Americans look around at the profound troubles our nation faces and despair.

Still others look at that despair and grow irate. In their eyes, America is the best country in the world. Love it or leave it.

Both views are, in many ways, wrong. Rather than wallow in misery or disparage those who would, we should rise to the occasion. I see patriotism as a verb. Those who demand America be better are the most patriotic among us, and it is their example we are now called to emulate.

At every turn of this nations history, there have been trailblazers  women and men who looked to the Declaration of Independence and to the Constitution and saw a perfect ideal implemented by imperfect men. They understood the highest form of patriotism is to dissent when America is failing to live up to that ideal.

This is the most important lesson of American history. Martin Luther King, Jr famously said the arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends towards justice. It is a beautiful sentiment, but Dr King was only half correct. The arc of the moral universe only bends towards justice if everyday citizens force it to bend.

My living room wall is a testament to these patriots who saw in this nation the potential for a truly pluralistic, inclusive, free society in which the words all men are created equal are more than just an 18th century phrase, but a challenge to be met. I celebrate the women and men who held this country to account from the bottom up. They tell the story of America, but not as it is usually told.

There is Abigail Adams, who implored her husband John to Remember the Ladies, and be more generous and favourable to them than your ancestors. He was not. It took more than a century for women to be guaranteed the vote. They still do not have full autonomy over their own bodies thanks to this Supreme Court.

Adams painting hangs next to Baron Von Steuben  an immigrant and, in all probability, a gay man who came to this nation during the Revolution and is often considered the father of the United States Army. He is joined by Dan Choi, who after being discharged from the military for coming out became a leading activist against Dont Ask, Dont Tell. They remind me that gay men like me have always had a stake in this country, even if it does see us as second-class citizens.

Frederick Douglass and Sojourner Truth stare down at me through time. Tribal rights and environmental activist Sacheen Littlefeather looks at me next to labor activist Dolores Huerta, who herself occupies a spot near Albert Parsons  one of the Haymarket martyrs who died to advance the cause of the working American.

These are not your typical American heroes, but they are our truest patriots. Their love of America was never so shallow as to be reduced to fireworks, anthems, and flags. Their patriotism is not the bloviating jingoism, reflexive and shallow, which passes for love of country among far too many in our society. When they saw America failing to live up to its own admirable standards, they demanded it be better. Our truest American heroes  the figures from our past we revere and exalt  are the ones who moved this country forward, improving on and expanding the promise of the Declaration of Independence that all men are created equal.

The truest form of patriotism is not found on the Fourth of July. It is not found in the national anthem. It is not blind obedience and unquestioning acquiescence to the status quo. The truest form of patriotism is seeing your nation fail to live up to its own ethos and demanding that it do better.

Modern American history is the story of a diverse people constantly struggling to live up to an ideal first aspired to nearly 250 years ago. It is a gradual opening of Mother Libertys arms. In our own era, Mother Liberty is rejecting some of her children. Those children still love her, though. Why else would they be so furious, so hurt, by her rejection?

That fury is righteous, but without action it can become destructive. The beauty of democracy is that nothing is ever settled and we live to fight another day.

Those of us who see this nation as an inclusive, pluralistic bastion of freedom and equality must perform our patriotic duty of holding America to account. We still have our voices, our ballots, and if that fails our feet.

We need only look to the example of our ancestors for inspiration. Not the great men of many textbooks, but the true American heroes who have forced this country to progress. Just as the Civil Rights Movement marched, as the miners at Matewan fought, as the drag queens of Stonewall revolted, we must now rise to meet this moment and ensure America continues to improve upon its founding promise.

One of the most iconic songs of the Civil Rights Movement, We Shall Overcome, was not just an anthem, but a vow. The overcoming of inequality and the continued struggle to make us an ever more perfect union is the work left to us by the Founders and every subsequent generation. We have not yet overcome, but we shall.

Nearly 250 years later, we continue to march forward and strive for perfection despite our past and current imperfections.

We stand on the shoulders of giants. This Independence Day, let us become them.
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You may or may not be alarmed by the news that Nigel Farage is about to leave our now sovereign nation, but according to Mr Brexit himself, that sweet irony is now a very real danger. Even as we speak, Farage may be acquiring a rubber dinghy and a satnav so that he can get across the English Channel to claim asylum in France.

Or, perhaps, not. He claims, as is his habit, to be the victim of persecution. You see, Farage has been told by his bank that they no longer want him as a customer, and no one else wants to look after his money either.

Here is his story, ICYMI: Ive been living with something for the last couple of months that may well fundamentally affect my future career going on from here and whether I can even stay living in this country I got a phone call a couple of months ago to say we are closing your accounts. I asked why. No reason was given. I was told a letter would come which would explain everything. The letter came through and simply said we are closing your accounts. We want to finish it all by a date, which is around about now. I didnt quite know what to make of it. I complained. I emailed the chairman. A lackey phoned me to say that it was a commercial decision, which I have to say, I didnt believe for a single moment.

So I thought, Well, there we are, Ill have to go and find a different bank. Ive been to six, no seven banks actually, and asked them all, Could I have a personal and a business account? And the answer has been no in every single case.

Sources close to Farage have suggested it might be to do with MI5, and there have been allegations, made under parliamentary privilege by Chris Bryant and sternly denied by Farage, that its all to do with Russian money. Farage has also suggested, variously, that its because of his campaigning for Brexit (bit late for that, surely); his radical/patriotic views; and his links to Donald Trump. To him, hes being driven out by The Establishment in some vindictive woke conspiracy, and Coutts & Co, the bank thats reportedly rejected his money, is part of the plot.

A more prosaic and believable explanation is that Coutts, and the NatWest group that owns it, regards Farage as whats called a politically exposed person, or PEP, as well as an undoubtedly high net worth individual. Under the Money Laundering, Terrorist Financing and Transfer of Funds (Information on the Payer) Regulations 2017, a bank must take adequate measures to establish the source of wealth and source of funds of the PEPs on their books. This is because PEPs, being powerful or influential figures, may be subject to offers of bribes or unusually prone to other corruption and, thus, must be placed under extra vigilance and supervision by any financial institution they have dealings with (and this may also apply to family and close associates). Its a matter of law, and its supposed to apply to all PEPs.

Chiefly, the rules apply to MPs, ministers, senior judges, top diplomats and the like, including MEPs, but, Farage might well claim, hes no longer an active politician, and ceased to be an MEP on 31 January 2021, when the UK left the EU. Now, the argument goes, hes merely an award-winning TV presenter, albeit an opinionated one. However, Farage is also president of Reform UK, which he likes to pass off as a kind of honorific role; but he is also a director of The Reform UK Party Limited. This is important because, unlike most political parties, it doesnt have members as such or an elected national executive committee, and is in fact a corporate not a membership body. Companies House lists him as a director, and actually the sole named person with significant control, and the right to appoint and remove directors (including, presumably, the party leader and fellow director Richard Tice). Thus, Farage is indeed caught by the Money Laundering, Terrorist Financing and Transfer of Funds (Information on the Payer) Regulations 2017, under Section 35, paragraph 14c, which covers members of the governing bodies of political parties.

Hence the mysterious but apparently lawful exercise by numerous banks of enhanced customer due diligence over this particular politically exposed person. The banks problem may be more with Reform UK Limited, and Farages close links to it, rather than him and his opinions on Pride Month as such.

As Farage remarks, I think the reason for it was, you know, where people in politics are open to bribery. Could foreign governments from Ukraine or China or wherever else it may be, could they be pumping money into, you know, the accounts of corrupt politicians. So I kind of understand that and get that but its all about interpretation, isnt it? And what the banks argue is that to maintain an account for a politically exposed person, gives them increased costs of compliance.

Chiefly, the rules apply to MPs, ministers, senior judges, top diplomats and the like, including MEPs, but, Farage might also well claim that the various banks involved may be unduly harsh on him, compared to others, because he gets into so many controversies. In general, these regulations can be onerous, expensive to operate and leave banks open to potentially costly risk. So they might drop someone like Farage simply because they think hes not worth all the bother. He is not alone. Lord (Michael) Forsyth, a cabinet minister under Mrs Thatcher and not the power in the land he once was, recently complained to the House of Lords that: My daughter had an account at the same bank as me, Coutts, and the manager said to her: Is there any chance that you could move to another bank because you are such a pain to look after because your dad is a politically exposed person? In my view, that is an absolute disgrace.

A disgrace? Maybe not with Farage. Even if they were to avoid Farage purely on political grounds or because they dont like his taste in Union Jack socks, theyre free to do so because no bank is obliged to give anyone facilities if it doesnt wish to  the same as if Farage was barred from a pub or banned from a shop. He has recently highlighted the convenient case of a vicar who got into a row with the Yorkshire Building Society about trans rights, implying hes in the same category  but that is something of a rainbow-hued herring. Farages financial exclusion is about the law, not wokery.

Some banks also might think an association with Farage would not be in their wider commercial interests, because he's not the sort of bloke you'd want if you think yourself an inclusive brand. So theyre using the PEP rules as an excuse for jettisoning him  again thats a matter for them. Who knows? The banks are obviously making life very difficult for Nigel, and hes annoyed; but, equally, you can see why, from a banks point of view, Farage must be a bit of a pain to look after.
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As temperatures continue to soar globally, many are left wondering if the UK will experience another scorching 40C heatwave this summer, similar to the year before.

Speculation is rife that the country will get a blistering heatwave this month as weather maps have shown conditions could become hotter in the coming days.

The summer in the UK has already begun on a hotter note, with June temperatures smashing all-time records.

According to the Met Office, last month had the hottest June temperatures since records began.

The early few weeks of the official summer season saw temperatures climbing over 30C, leading to heat-health alerts, water shortages and even unprecedented fish deaths in rivers.

The Met Office said the unusually high heat was caused by the background warming of the Earths atmosphere due to the human-induced climate crisis.

Whats striking is the persistent warmth for much of the month, with temperatures widely into the mid 20s Celsius for many and even into the low 30s at times, said Dr Mark McCarthy, science manager of the National Climate Information Centre.

He explained how last month started with a good deal of high pressure and temperatures initially around average for many, but once that subsided, warm, humid air began to influence temperatures, with 32.2C the highest temperatures reached.

June saw an average mean temperature of 15.8C  eclipsing the previous record by 0.9C, while the previous top three Junes were separated by just 0.1C.

The forecaster carried out a rapid study that found that the chances of a June beating the previous record of 14.9C had at least doubled since the period around 1940.

The Met Offices climate extremes principal fellow and chief meteorologist Paul Davies explained that rising average global temperatures, which stand at 1.2C now, have driven up the possibility of reaching record high temperatures in the UK.

The institution defines a heatwave as three consecutive days with daily maximum temperatures meeting or exceeding a heatwave temperature threshold.

That threshold, however, varies across the country, from 25C in Northern Ireland, Scotland, Wales and the north and south west of England, to 28C in parts of south east England.

The UK has so far not experienced the same scorching temperatures in 2023 as last year, when large parts of the country baked in extremely high temperatures that breached the 40C mark for the first time, triggering wildfires, disrupting transport and leading to thousands of premature deaths.

Last years extreme heat arrived on the heels of high global temperatures, with several countries in Asia, Africa and Europe shattering records. The World Weather Attribution (WWA) said the heatwave would have been extremely unlikely in the absence of the climate crisis.

This year, the signs seem to be aligning once again for a hotter summer. The onset of the El Nino weather phenomenon in the Pacific is expected to drive temperatures higher, with dozens of countries in Asia and Europe already reeling under earlier than usual heat.

Searing heat has continued to blanket much of the US Deep South and parts of Mexico for a third week. The relentless, triple-digit heatwave  exacerbated by climate change  has been blamed for more than a dozen deaths in Texas and Louisiana and a spike in emergency room visits.

Met Office figures show June on track to be the hottest on record (Met Office)

Looking at these signs, many meteorologists have predicted worsened heat in the coming days arriving in the UK.

The Met Office forecast so far states that the possibility of above-average temperatures is higher in the latter half of this week, increasing the likelihood of heatwaves.

The forecaster also clarified last week that there is currently no indication of exceptional heat in the next few days, contrary to media reports of multiple heatwaves hitting the UK.

With changing weather patterns, long-range forecasts are often not entirely reliable, but experts said a return of extreme 40C temperatures cannot be ruled out entirely.

In 2022, the UK experienced three heatwaves (Getty)

Even if temperatures dont breach the 40C mark, above average heat during the summer can also pose health-related risks to vulnerable populations. According to the UK Health Security Agency, last years heatwave played a part in 3,000 deaths in England and Wales.

Various scientific assessments said the frequency and intensity of heatwaves are increasing because of the climate crisis.

While the UK has always had periods of warm weather, what climate change does is increase the frequency and intensity of these warm weather events, increasing the likelihood of high temperature records being broken, like we saw for 2022s annual temperature for the UK, Mr Kendon said.

The world has already warmed by about 1.2C since the industrial era began and the next few years are expected to be the warmest on record, with climate conditions being impacted by El Nino, according to the World Meteorological Organisation (WMO).

Map of global ocean temperatures by NOAA shows water around the UK hitting category 5 marine heatwave (NOAA)

With continued warming, the world is set to soon breach the crucial 1.5C mark of average global heating. This year, the world has already temporarily breached this mark, set by the landmark Paris Agreement as a target.

The heatwaves have not just wreaked havoc on the land, but global sea-surface temperatures also smashed records in June, with coastal waters along the UK experiencing an unheard of marine heatwave.

Meanwhile, the UK government was slammed by its own climate advisers for their slow pace in meeting its net zero greenhouse gas emissions target and backtracking on fossil fuel commitments.

The Climate Change Committee (CCC) said Britain has lost its clear global leadership position on climate action.
Financial information belonging to some staff at Dublin Airport staff has been compromised by a cyber attack.

The attack, on service provider company Aon, also affected various other firms, DAA said yesterday.

DAA can confirm that as a result of a recent cyber attack on Aon, a third-party professional service provider, data relating to some employees pay and benefits was compromised, a spokesperson said in a statement.

The Sunday Times reported that the attack on file-transfer software tool MOVEit, used by Aon, affected nearly 2,000 Dublin Airport staff, as well as a number of other agencies and companies across the US and UK.

The cl0p ransomware gang has claimed to be behind the hacking of MOVEit. Cl0p operates as a ransomware as a service (RaaS) group and is believed to share its software with other hackers.

AoN did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

DAA is offering support, advice and assistance to employees impacted by this criminal cyber-attack, it said, without giving further details.

Victims of the cyber-attack include US government agencies, the UKs telecom regulator, and energy company Shell, all of whom have been hit by a security flaw in Progress Softwares MOVEit product discovered at the end of May.

Other companies impacted by the cyber-attack include British Airways, the BBC and Boots.

The HSE confirmed last month that it had also been impacted by the cyber attack on the MOVEit software at the end of July.

This follows the major ransomware cyber-attack on the HSE two years ago, which caused all of its computer systems to be shut down.

In a statement published at the beginning of June, the HSE said that the data of no more than 20 individuals was accessed in this recent hack.

The hack breached the MOVEit software, which offers businesses the secure transfer of sensitive data to partners and third-parties.

On Friday, one of the worlds largest chipmakers Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co (TSMC) said that its supplier was a victim of the cyber attack.

The LockBit cybercriminal gang has demanded a $70m ransom from the firm following the breach last week.
HealthBeacon is finding its stride. We feel really, really good about our US business, says Jim Joyce, the companys founder and chief executive.

Joyce anticipates that a sense of growing momentum across the Atlantic will help the medtech firm pave a way towards profitability.

HealthBeacon, which listed on Euronext Dublin in 2021, develops smart tools to assist patients to manage their medications from their homes. The companys smart sharp bins remind patients when to take necessary injections.

Mr Joyce founded the company 10 years ago following a decade spent working in the pharmaceutical industry. There he learned more about patients with chronic medical conditions who needed to adhere to a medication schedule.

HealthBeacons IPO raised 25m, with the company reporting a market capitalisation of 98.4m on the day of its public listing. This figure now stands at around 32m on Euronext Dublin, while shares have slid around 58pc in the past year.

In the past month, however, the share price has jumped 111pc. Mr Joyce attributes this to a surge in activity in the US, with a few key areas giving all that optimism that weve got the right product fit.

The first area is the specialty pharmacy industry.

Weve done a number of deals with specialty pharmacy organisations in the US, he says. Organisations like Accredo, where they integrated the technology into their fundamental offering.

That means if youre on a high-value injectable medication and youre working with certain large pharmacy systems, youre going to be offered the HealthBeacon device as part of going on that medication.

Thats a really exciting thing that we have been working on for years. Thats taken us a long time to get it there.

HealthBeacons offerings will also be reimbursed by insurers in the US, he explains.

Theres been a new category developed with Medicare [federal health insurance] which allows for remote therapeutic monitoring. Clinicians in certain therapeutic areas can now provide the HealthBeacon to their patients and they can bill back to the insurance companies for that.

Mr Joyce spends most of his time in the market, building up teams and engaging with customers in the relevant channels. He is eager to build new partnerships, while others have been extended.

This includes its partnership with Hamilton Beach Brands Inc earlier this month. Hamilton Beach is an American company focused on designing, marketing and distributing branded electric household, commercial or specialty products.

Hamilton Beach is going to be working with us on our manufacturing and supply chain, Mr Joyce says. They are going to be taking over the management of our inventory and the actual shipping of our product directly to the patient.

As part of that, it frees up a lot of working capital. People are looking at this saying hey, from a working capital perspective, when do we get profitable? When do we start generating cash?

He believes the Hamilton Beach deal extension will help answer some of those questions.

[The deal] reduces our cash burn as we invest and roll out in the States.

The scale of Hamilton Beachs operations also reduces the costs of goods for the medtech firm. He describes the move as quite transformative financially.

[Investors] were excited about us leaning into our supply chain and trying to really cleverly manage the cost of producing devices and getting it distributed to customers, he adds.

This was noted by Goodbody analyst Adam Barker following the announcement.

The expanded partnership will significantly improve HealthBeacons cashflows, he wrote. In addition, it will also allow the company to leverage Hamilton Beachs supply chain, distribution, and procurement capabilities to produce and distribute its health devices across the US more efficiently as it scales significantly in the region over the coming quarters.

More US partnerships are coming down the line with speciality pharmacy organisations, pharma companies, as well as clinical practices, Mr Joyce says.

HealthBeacon has over 20 employees in the US market, with offices in Boston and Orlando. Overall, the companys headcount stood at around 67 at the end of last year.

The companys client base grew to 30 last year from 23 in 2021. Sales rose slightly to 2.25m from 2.2m the prior year, while its losses per tax grew to 13m.

This was attributed to a global chip shortage and energy crisis, which also weighed on gross margins. However, he is upbeat about what the future holds as the business predicts annualised revenue of 25m by the end of March next year.

You know, building a company isnt always overnight, he adds with a chuckle.
Taoiseach Leo Varadkar said that hiking hotel prices on very popular weekends is 'bad business' and gives cities and towns a 'bad reputation'. Photo: Gareth Chaney/Collins

The number of hotel nights being booked online was below pre-Covid levels across the country last year, in some places by as much as 50pc.

Hotel occupancy rates were boosted last year due in significant part to block booking accommodation for refugees, but the new data indicated a big lag in tourist numbers.

Eurostat data shows that tourist nights in the eastern and midland region booked via the four main online platforms were 50pc below 2019 levels last year.

The data looked at bookings via Airbnb, Booking, Tripadvisor and Expedia.

It means the region  comprising Dublin, Meath, Westmeath, Offaly, Kildare, Wicklow, Longford and Laois  has seen the second-highest losses in terms of online bookings in the EU since the pandemic.

It is not clear what percentage of overall Irish hotel rooms were booked via the four platforms.

Only Prague has seen steeper losses since 2019, at 53pc.

Other regions with severe losses compared with 2019 included, Berlin, down 39pc, Budapest by 34pc and Vienna by 25pc. Ireland is not considered a country of high touristic importance for the EU.

Out of the 10 regions with the highest growth rates, nine were rural regions in France, while other high-growth areas were in Poland, Germany and Sweden.

The top 20 most popular regions in Europe are in Spain, France, Italy, Portugal and Croatia.

Most are in coastal areas, except for Paris and Madrid.

Overall, EU countries have recovered from the pandemic in terms of nights spent in tourism accommodation.

In 2022, total EU guest nights booked via online platforms grew by around 7pc, from 512 million in 2019 to 547 million in 2022.

Nights spent in Irish accommodation, booked via platforms, fell 23pc on pre-pandemic levels from just over 6.4 million nights in 2019 to just under 5 million in 2022.

Even in the third quarter of 2022  the most important for tourism as it covers the summer months  nights spent in Irish accommodation were down 16.8pc on the same period in 2019.

The figures come as the tourism sector in Ireland battles to keep its lower 9pc Vat rate beyond this September.

The sector is also facing allegations of price gouging, particularly in Dublin, ahead of a tour by pop superstar Taylor Swift in 2024.

Independent TD Thomas Pringle told the Dail last week that there were no hotel rooms available in the capital for less than 350 on the dates of Swifts shows next year.

Strong demand has pushed inflation in the restaurants and hotels sector higher. It rose 1.6pc from April to May, according to the Central Statistics Office and was the largest upward percentage point contribution to the rise in the consumer price index.

Prices in restaurants and hotels grew 1.6pc between April and May this year, the Central Statistics Office said, the most significant monthly jump in the consumer price index for May.

Year on year, prices in the sector jumped 8.6pc.

Taoiseach Leo Varadkar has criticised price hikes on popular weekends. He said last week that hiking prices on very popular weekends was bad business and gives cities and towns a bad reputation.
In recent years, its been suggested by some, including Doctor Who showrruner Russell T Davies, that gay characters should be played by gay actors to make the performance more authentic.

Following this, Glee actor Darren Criss, who is straight, vowed to no longer take on queer roles.

Tucci, who played a gay man in The Devil Wears Prada and Harry Macqueens drama Supernova, said during an appearance on Desert Island Discs that he does not think that gay roles should be exclusively played by gay actors.

Obviously, I believe thats fine, and I am always very flattered when gay men come up to me and talk to me about The Devil Wears Prada or Supernova, and say, You did it the right way, he said, adding: Because often its not done the right way.

But I really do believe that an actor is an actor is an actor  that youre supposed to play different people. You just are. Thats the whole point of it.

Some actors, including The Danish Girl star Eddie Redmayne, have denounced their past roles in the wake of the ongoing debate.

However, Ben Whishaw, who co-starred in the film about transgender artist Lili Elbe, said Redmayne did a beautiful job, adding that he doesnt believe a performers sexuality should limit what characters they play.

However, he acknowledged why some people might have an issue, stating: Im critical if I dont think the performance is, from my subjective experience, accurate. I might think, I dont believe you! And even a small moment of hesitation or inauthenticity will block my engagement with the whole story. So I understand these questions.
Darragh McCullough: Im brimming with ideas after Teagasc Open Day trip

Many farmers are reluctant to take time off work to attend these events  but you can learn so much

Harvesting spring beans  bean acreage in Ireland is up five-fold in the last 10 years. Photo: Roger Jones

Darragh McCullough Mon 3 Jul 2023 at 08:20
A draft of the soil law included no binding targets to prevent degradation that is driven by factors including intensive farming and drought.

The European Union's first law to improve soil heath will not include any binding targets to curb pollution or the degradation of soils, a draft showed, rebuffing calls from some companies for more ambitious rules.

The legal proposal, which the European Commission is due to publish on July 5, coincides with a political backlash against new environmental laws and an attempt by the EU Parliament's biggest lawmaker group to throw out a law to restore damaged natural habitats.

A draft of the soil law, seen by Reuters and which could still change before it is published, included no binding targets to prevent degradation that is driven by factors including intensive farming and drought.

Rather, the EU law would require countries to monitor the health of their soils by tracking criteria, including erosion or excessive levels of nutrients such as phosphorus from fertiliser use. They would also need to manage the risks posed by soils contaminated with health-harming chemicals.

Companies including Unilever, Nestle and Danone have urged Brussels to go further. In a letter to the Commission in March, co-signed by academics and dozens of campaign groups, the companies urged Brussels to propose "ambitious and binding targets on achieving soil health".

The Commission declined to comment on the draft.

"The EU needs to go much further, much faster if it is serious about tackling the problem of deteriorating soil health," said Stefania Avanzini, director of One Planet Business for Biodiversity, a coalition whose members include the three aforementioned companies.

Avanzini welcomed the proposed criteria to track soil health more closely, but said more was needed to support farming practices that can boost soil health - such as having "cover crops" planted in fields all year to prevent erosion.

Reuters
An employee of the Dublin Simon Community stole 37,713 from the homeless charity and while it was reported to the gardai no formal alert was sent to the HSE which funds the charity by more than 5m a year, an audit has revealed.

The audit by the HSEs Internal Audit Office found the money was stolen in November 2021 and was detected when that months bank reconciliation was carried out by its finance department.

The finance staff discovered missing batches of cash and cheques.

The HSE audit report said: The incident was reported to the board and other authorities such as An Garda Siochana and the Charities Regulator.

However this incident had not been formally reported to the HSE.

This breached its reporting requirements set out in its service agreement with the HSE.

Simon Community management said the incident was not reported to the HSE as the monies involved were from unrestricted funds.

The audit report said that management has since implemented additional controls to strengthen its cash and cheque handling process.

The internal audit also tested a sample of 10 petty cash payments which the organisations policy says should not exceed 50.

The auditors observed two payments of 92 and 168 were made via petty cash.

The policy further prohibits petty cash from being used to cover employee travel expenses. In spite of this our review of receipts for petty cash payments noted that this requirement was breached. In response the organisation said the policy is being reviewed and its new financial controller would ensure adherence to policies.

Its policy also states that the maximum spend for any one-time use of a fuel card is 40. However the audit report said this was breached on many occasions.

The audit also found that there needed to be improvements around the approval of minutes of board meetings and also documentation of conflicts of interest. Instances of directors not fulfilling the expected attendance rate were also noted.

One director had not been rotated in 19 years and directors details were inconsistent with the register of charities published on the Charities Regulator website.

An area for improvement was identified in the organisations procurement of suppliers.

The organisations credit card policy was also incomplete.

An agreed plan for implementation of recommendations to address the issues raised has been completed with the organisation.

In a separate audit the HSE watchdog examined the Irish Mens Sheds Association over 2021 and 2022. It found weaknesses in its financial controls with no records to support travel and subsistence payments to employees and volunteers readily available.

It found no claim forms for these payments in 2021 were provided.

The current system used for maintaining records of travel and expenses payments was not sufficient, it found.

In its response to the auditors the charity said there had been a change of personnel in the financial administrator role.

This recruitment process proved to be very challenging  and there was a three-month gap between the personnel departure and the new appointment, it said.

It said that due to no handover and poor financial systems information gaps developed. It agreed with the recommendation to maintain records of all expenses claims.

The organisation received 287,300 in HSE funding in 2021 and 436,279 in non-HSE funding donations and grants.

The audit showed the organisation filed its annual accounts and return on on December 7, 2022, to the Companiess Registration Office outside the filing date of November 25, 2022.

Today's News in 90 Seconds - July 3rd
ABC, Bananarama, Squeeze and Hothouse Flowers are also part of the line-up at Forever Young

Andy Bell of Erasure will play a special show with his band at the festival in Palmerstown House, Naas, Co Kildare, July 14-16. Photo: Noam Galai/Getty

It may have been a decade of high unemployment and emigration, of divorce debates and moving statues, but the 1980s might just have been pops greatest era.

It delivered a dizzying array of styles and genres, where Madonna and synthesisers ruled and Vincent Hanleys MT-USA beamed glamour into our homes.

And it has given Ireland its very own festival for devotees of 80s pop.

Forever Young, which takes place over three days at Palmerstown House Estate, Naas, Co Kildare from July 14 to 16, describes itself as the best party weekend of the summer.

An enviable line-up of over 30 household name acts has been curated to appeal to those who both lived through the decade and younger music lovers who are enthralled by all those sure-fire hits.

Erasures Andy Bell is among the star attractions and when I interviewed him for this newspapers Review section on Saturday, he talked about how enthused he was to play a festival with a line-up that includes so many of his friends and musical colleagues from the 1980s.

I incorrectly wrote that Bell would perform a DJ set at Forever Young. I am happy to clarify that he will, in fact, be playing a special show with his band, and not a DJ set.

Andy Bell of Erasure. Photo: Getty

He headlines on Saturday, July 15 and fans can expect to hear several classic Erasure songs including breakthrough hit Sometimes and the emblematic hit, A Little Respect.

Along with Erasure bandmate Vince Clarke, Bell has had an unerring ability to write hugely popular pop hits.

Their strike rate is remarkable. Between 1986 and 2007, every one of the 24 singles Erasure released entered the UK Top 40.

Their first UK number one arrived with Abba-esque in 1992, a four-track EP of Abba covers. Not only did it boost their own profile massively, but it helped revive the fortunes of the Swedish supergroup too.

I didnt realise at the time what a big deal it was going to be, Bell told me. Those songs were in my system and I had to get them out.

On This Day In History - July 3rd

"It came from my absolute love of their music and my love of melody, harmony and language.

Melody, harmony and language will be in plentiful supply at Forever Young.

Eighties luminaries Squeeze, Bananarama, ABC and Spandau Ballets Tony Hadley are all set to perform.

There is no shortage of home-grown bands on the line-up too with Hothouse Flowers, Jerry Fish and Cry Before Dawn flying the Irish flag over the weekend.
Environment Minister Eamon Ryan says solar schemes could provide a huge income stream' for farmers as part of green transition

Plans to fast-track the development of small to medium-sized solar farms will be brought to Government tomorrow.

The proposals would smooth the pathway for solar arrays on sites between roughly two and 24 acres.

They would still need planning permission but would be exempted from having to apply for a contract to supply electricity through the competitive auction process that favours large-scale developments.

Environment Minister Eamon Ryan said he and Enterprise Minister Simon Coveney had talks with their Government colleagues about the plan last week.

The next stage would be to jointly bring more detailed proposals to Cabinet tomorrow.

The plans relate to solar arrays capable of providing between 0.5 megawatts (MW) and 6MW of electricity.

Smaller arrays are eligible for some installation grants and, under the microgeneration scheme, homeowners with solar panels can feed excess electricity into the national grid, receiving a payment in return.

The Government has promised a non-domestic microgeneration scheme for rooftop solar on larger buildings such as farm sheds, warehouses and community facilities.

Installations above 0.5MW however, generally have to go through an auction, unless the developer is using all the power directly for their own business.

But there have only been two auctions so far and while a third is planned, the process is weighted in favour of large-scale developments.

Some of those successful in the auctions so far are planned for sites covering hundreds of acres.

It will allow for businesses and farms to develop solar and to give it a support to get it off the ground

Mr Ryan said there was agreement in Government on the need for a new strategy in terms of how we switch to supporting up to 6MW of solar farms outside the auction system, making it easier for farmers and others to tap into.

It will allow for businesses and farms to develop solar and to give it a support to get it off the ground, starting with a grant-based support, switching over to a price support, he said.

The Government is keen to increase solar power to help speed up the decarbonisation of the countrys electricity, 60-70pc of which is still generated by burning fossil fuels.

While wind energy can produce a lot of power and forms the main part of the decarbonisation plan, turbines take longer to get through planning and construction.

Solar is smaller in output but is faster and more flexible to deploy.

A mix of rooftop and ground-mounted solar from domestic and non-domestic panels and arrays currently provides a modest 600MW of electricity but the target is to increase that to 5,000MW (5 gigawatts or GW) by 2025 and to 8GW by 2030.

Supports for solar arrays of up to 6MW could prove very attractive to farmers who do not want to commit too much land to energy generation.

Mr Ryan told a conference hosted by the National Economic and Social Council on the just transition in agriculture that the various solar schemes could provide a huge income stream to farmers, enabling them to be part of climate action without abandoning the land.

Climate action will require less intensive agricultural practices and the conference heard loss of income and livelihood were the key fears for farmers.
'If we can determine what specific genes are contributing to a patients cancer, we can use that information to modify their treatment,' said CUH oncologist Professor Mark Corrigan. Photo: Getty

Cancer doctors involved in a life-saving trial which has reduced the time patients must wait for genetic testing from two years to just four weeks are hoping it can secure funding to be made permanent.

The trial at Cork University Hospital (CUH) has been described as a game-changer in the fight against cancer.

It has already fast-tracked testing for more than 80 patients and, with confirmation of extra funding, it will continue for the rest of this year, testing a further 30 cancer patients a month.

Professor Mark Corrigan, a surgical oncologist at CUH, said: We are very excited about this. Reducing the time it takes to identify what form of cancer we are dealing with through swamped national services, from two years, to just four weeks in Cork, is massive.

If we can determine what specific genes are contributing to a patients cancer, we can use that information to modify their treatment.

Extra funding is extending the pilot until the end of this year but we want to expand and develop it well beyond that. It is having a transformative effect on cancer care.

The pilot project profiles a patients cancer, and allows specialists to decide the most effective surgery, treatment or medication.

It also has the potential to prevent cancer and deaths by identifying hereditary gene mutations that can be passed from patients to their children and grandchildren.

Cork mother-of-two Fiona OKeeffe (49), who is recovering from breast cancer, is also urging authorities to put the programme on a permanent footing. She was diagnosed at 46, her sister faced the same battle aged 40 and they lost their mother to the disease last year.

Ms OKeeffe did not benefit from the new testing trial at CUH. Instead, she travelled to Dublin for genetic testing to find the gene causing the cancer in her family, which was a major upheaval as it removed her from experts in Cork.

In that time, you lose the connection with the people youre used to dealing with, she said.

This new clinic is so welcome. Because youre containing all your care in one place, its less stressful. My hope is that it is here to stay to benefit the next generation.

CUH, the National Cancer Control Programme and the South/South West Hospital Group collaborated to get the six-month pilot project off the ground.
Former Dublin ladies footballer is now warning others of the symptoms

A four-time All Ireland winning footballer has revealed how she thought a stroke she suffered was little more than the after-effects of a tough training session.

Former Dublin star Siobhan McGrath (35) said she felt exhausted on the day  but blamed her aches and pains on a club run-out the night before.

The half-back woke up feeling confused, with simple tasks such as putting on a t-shirt, opening a window and sending an e-mail more complicated than usual.

Recalling the horrific morning in June last year, Siobhan, who lifted the Brendan Martin Cup with Dublin in 2010, 2018, 2019, and 2020, said she knew something wasnt right when her house alarm sounded and she struggled to switch it off.

In my mind, I knew what the correct code was, but it was as if my body wouldnt let me enter it into the keypad, said the accountant.

I remembered the F.A.S.T. TV adverts informing people about the signs of stroke. I looked in the mirror and my face wasnt drooping on one side.

I tried to tell myself, youre not having a stroke, but the words didnt come.

I started to speak, but simple sentences sounded like double Dutch.

It was at that moment that I decided to phone my mum  but it took a few attempts before she could understand what I was trying to say.

An Act F.A.S.T.  Minutes Matter campaign by the Irish Heart Foundation is highlighting strokes key warning signs  Facial drooping, Arm weakness, Slurred speech and the crucial importance of Time to get medical help if any of these signs are apparent.

Siobhan, who is now an ambassador for the charity, is encouraging more people to familiarise themselves with the signs.

Irish Heart Foundation research reveals that the percentage of people who recognise the signs of one of Irelands biggest killers is declining, with just one in 10 knowing what all four letters stand for.

Stroke kills two million brain cells every minute, so the quicker patients get medical help, the more that can be saved.

Following an MRI and a series of tests, Siobhans stroke was confirmed and she spent a week in Tallaght Hospital.

She has returned to work and is back playing for her club, Thomas Davis in Tallaght.

Aside from some problems with vocabulary, she feels she has made a full recovery.

Thanks to the F.A.S.T. message, I knew I needed to get help, she said.

If you recognise any one of the signs, get medical help immediately.

No one is invincible. Im lucky that I had my family and boyfriend minding me.

The HSEs National Clinical Lead for Stroke, Professor Ronan Collins, said stroke is a leading cause of death and disability.

Nothing is more likely to suddenly change your life completely, or end it, as a stroke  but it doesnt always have to be the case, he said.

We have made great strides in improved diagnosis, treatment and cure and in restoring people to fuller lives after stroke.

But the faster we recognise and seek treatment, the greater the chance of a successful outcome. Know the common signs and symptoms of stroke and if you suspect stroke, act F.A.S.T. and call an ambulance immediately.

Learn more about stroke at: https://irishheart.ie/campaigns/fast/

Today's News in 90 Seconds - July 3rd
A 37-year-old man has been remanded in custody after being charged in connection with a crash in Fermoy, Co Cork in which a Ukrainian man died at the weekend.

Iulian Lotca appeared before Mallow District Court this morning where he was charged with dangerous driving causing the death of 29-year-old Ihor Skokivsky at McCurtain Street in Fermoy on Saturday.

Mr Lotca, a native of Moldova with an address at Main Street, Carrigtwohill, Co Cork, was also charged with driving with excess alcohol in his system on the same date in the same street.

The charge alleges that Mr Lotca drove with an alcohol concentration of 59 micrograms per 100 millilitres of breath. The legal limit is 22 micrograms per 100 millitres of breath.

Mr Lotca was also charged with driving without insurance at the same location on the same occasion.

Det Garda Denise Fitzgerald gave evidence of arrest, charge and caution. She told Judge Colm Roberts that Mr Lotca made no reply when the charges were put to him under caution.

Inspector Tony Sullivan said gardai were objecting to bail for the accused.

Det Garda Fitzgerald said gardai were objecting to bail arising out of the gravity of the charges. She noted that the dangerous driving causing death charge carries a maximum sentence of 10 years imprisonment.

She said gardai were also opposing bail in the case because of the strength of evidence against the accused.

She said they would allege that Mr Lotca was driving with excessive speed and with excessive alcohol in his system when he crossed over on to the wrong side of the road and hit another car.

He was caught red-handed at the scene, and he has made full admissions at interview following his arrest including that his driving was reckless at the time of the collision, she said.

Ukrainian national Ihor Skokivsky was a back seat passenger in Mr Lotcas car. He sustained serious injuries and was transferred to Cork University Hospital where he died on Sunday.

Det Garda Fitzgerald expressed concern that the accused would abscond if granted bail as he has no permanent living space. He currently resides in a caravan at the rear of a yard where he works.

Mr Lotca told the court he had been employed by ODonovan Transport for several years. He promised to abide by a curfew and to sign on daily at Midleton garda station if he was granted bail.

However, Judge Roberts heard that Mr Lotca was unable to surrender his passport as it was in the possession of people who had loaned him money.

He said he fully accepted Mr Lotca was deeply remorseful over the death of his friend. However, he indicated that the charges were too serious to grant bail in the case. He remanded Mr Lotca in custody to appear before the court again on July 4 by video link.

Free legal aid was granted in the case.

Judge Robert also directed that Mr Lotca receive any necessary psychiatric assistance in prison.
Report gives incredible insight into Noahs last messages and searches, which point to obsession with controversial psychologist Jordan Peterson

Fiona with her adored son Noah, whose body was found in a storm drain in 2020

The mother of tragic Noah Donohoe has rejected a report by a psychiatrist which states her son died by suicide while suffering low mood and struggling with his sexuality.

Fiona Donohoe says Noah was raised in an open-minded family in Belfast and around people of same-sex relationships, and showed no signs of battling with his own sexual identity.

There is absolutely no evidence that I have ever been made aware of that Noah was confused about his sexuality. In fact, our dynamic as a family was always one of open discussion on all topics, including sexuality.

Noah Donohoe documentary trailer

The report seen by the Independent Investigation team probing the circumstances around Noahs death does, however, give an incredible insight into his last texts, social media messages and Google searches, which point to a strange obsession with controversial psychologist Jordan Peterson.

The team lead by Dublin-based journalist Donal MacIntyre, says the last message sent by Noah was to Petersons blue-tick Instagram account, and while it was answered, the PSNI have been unable to access the communication.

Hed also spent his last day searching biblical references and places on the internet as well as advice on how to ward off Satan.

The details are contained in the psychiatric report prepared for the coroner, and the experts opinion is that the 14-year-old died by suicide as he could not square-off being gay with his perception of Petersons views of the future.

MacIntyre says the report reveals important details of the teenagers fascination with Peterson and says the run-up to his tragic death would suggest that Noah may have been suffering a mental health episode, but believes there are no factors identified which suggest he was in any way suicidal.

He might not have been thinking straight but he wasnt thinking about suicide. None of this was planned, he said.

Fionas mum insisted: Noah was brought up around same-sex relationships and couples, and so the idea he would have struggled accepting whatever his sexuality was is inconceivable to me.

To suggest this would be a factor to trigger Noah to consider suicide shows the little understanding the expert had into who Noah was as a teenage boy.

Noah had no issues of sexuality. That is never something Noah would have hidden.

And he would never have felt shame in it as he was brought up to be proud of who he was and embrace everyones individuality regardless of colour, religion and preferences towards how they live their life as long as they dont harm another person by doing so.

She said she does not believe that there is any merit in the suicide suggestion.

It is understood that none of his friends or teachers interviewed by the police suggested that Noah had issues with his sexuality.

The report was written up by a leading psychiatrist based on witness statements, testimony from friends and family and forensic reports along with CCTV, medical records and maps.

The report does not view his death as the result of a concussion, due to drugs or alcohol and nor does it believe it could have been an accident.

But it does take the view that suicide is a strong possibility, despite Noah having no history of mental ill-health, self-harm and being described as a happy, bright and well rounded child.

Noah Donohoe

In the report, the psychiatrist  whose identity we have chosen not to reveal  outlines a scenario where Noah is described as experiencing an acute episode of low and unstable mood at the time of his death.

A stressor is outlined as possible struggles with his sexuality, referenced in communication with pals in the weeks before his death when he describes being in denial and coming out although the report admits the messages are not clear.

It couples the feelings with statements around his interest in Peterson at the time and the possibility that he couldnt tally that with the psychologists beliefs.

Whether the shedding of clothes along the way to the storm drain area reflects a deeper quasi religious symbolism will need further clarification, the report states.

Hours before he disappeared, Noah looked up ancient religious places including Sodom and Gomorrah referred to in Petersons Biblical Series released on the same day, June 21, 2020.

That afternoon, Noah set off from his home on his bicycle, telling his mum Fiona he was meeting pals at Cave Hill but instead he was caught on CCTV on a bizarre journey across the city during which he lost his back pack and removed his clothes before abandoning his bike.

He was found six days later in a storm drain off the Shore Road.

Noah Donohoe (family handout/PA)

His inquest will hear details of the psychiatric report, which reveals how witnesses say he had been voraciously reading the bestselling Peterson book 12 Rules for Life and speaking with friends about his philosophies about the pursuit of happiness and changing his mindset.

MacIntyre, whose team has already revealed how the youngster secretly left his Belfast home in the early hours of the morning of his disappearance, says the report gives no evidence he was suicidal but focusses heavily on Peterson.

At the time, the psychologist was releasing a series of podcasts called the Biblical Series, featuring lengthy lectures from the ancient books of Genesis and applying them to modern life.

On the day Noah went missing his internet searches included ancient biblical terms, including: Tree of Moreh, a place where messages from God were received; Bethel, where Abraham found a ladder to heaven; Negev, a desert where ancient people developed techniques to conserve water and the Land of Ai, conquered by the Israelites.

On the same day, Peterson released a podcast called Sodom and Gomorrah, which focused on transformation in humans being like a baptism and a return to water, the source of life.

In statements collected by the PSNI, friends and others have said in the days before his death Noah rarely left down Petersons book and carried it with him until shortly before he disappeared naked into the storm drain.

His inquest will hear that he had told friends he was feeling a bit blue and had cancelled a day out, saying he wanted to be on his own to think.

On June 16, mum Fiona reported to a pastoral team at the school that his mood wasnt as good as usual. At 2am on June 18 Noah texted a pal and said: Ask yourself are you truly happy with the things in your life.

But by June 20 a friend said he was calmer and focused all conversation on Petersons book, talking about risks that must be taken in life.

The report described Noah as a straight A student who was bright and enthusiastic and had plans to become a doctor and attend Trinity College, in Dublin.

MacIntyre agrees with Fiona Donohoe that nothing in Noahs personal search history seemed to indicate he was struggling with his sexuality. The experts can only work with the data theyve been given, and not all the evidence held by the PSNI was in the psychiatrists hands when he wrote the report.

As much as it is an expert report, it is equally a subjective opinion and is likely to be challenged by alternative experts commissioned by the family."

Helplines: If you have been affected by the contents of this article, click here for more information https://www.independent.ie/service/helplines-40487532.html

You can donate to the investigations crowdfunder at crowdfunder.co.uk/p/the-independent-noah-donohoe-investigation.
Twice as many in North believe united Ireland will happen in 10 years

By contrast almost half of those surveyed in Northern Ireland  or 45pc  believe unity will happen within a decade. Photo: Ray McManus/Getty

Just one in four people in the Irish Republic believes there will be a united Ireland within the next 10 years  but almost twice that number north of the border believe it will happen in that timeframe, a new survey today reveals.

Two major opinion polls were run at the same time in both jurisdictions to examine attitudes of Irish people north and south to a range of issues mainly focused on the entire islands EU status seven years after the Brexit referendum.

The poll found that only 24pc of people in the Republic believe there will be a united Ireland in the EU within 10 years. But almost half of those surveyed in Northern Ireland  or 45pc  believe unity will happen within a decade.

Findings in the Republic showed a marked increase in just one year in the number of people who do not believe a united Ireland can happen inside a decade. It is up from 43pc last year to 58pc now and reverses a three-year trend of positive responses which had seen about one third of people saying they believed there would be a united Ireland within the EU.

The findings come in a rare all-island EU poll commissioned by the European Movement Ireland. The survey south of the Border was done by Amarach Research while the fieldwork in the North was done by polling firm, Lucid Talk, with 1,200 interviews carried out in each of the two jurisdictions from June 2 to June 5.

Support for Ireland remaining a member of the European Union remains stable and overwhelmingly positive at 88pc in the Republic while 79pc support for membership in Northern Ireland. But there is a marked increase in numbers who believe the EU is going in the wrong direction.

The poll examines public opinion about EU issues in the North as the effects of the 2016 decision by UK voters to quit the bloc increasingly kick in. The questions, put north and south of the Border, were largely the same.

But interviews in the North factored in whether the respondents voted Leave or Remain in that referendum. While the overall UK result was 52pc to 48pc in favour of Leave  a majority of 56pc backed Remain in Northern Ireland.

Now in Northern Ireland 71pc of people, who say they voted Leave, support Ireland remaining a member of the EU. Findings also show that a majority, 66pc, of people in Northern Ireland believe the region is doing worse since Brexit, while over half of people in the Republic believe so.

A large majority of 64pc of respondents who say they voted Leave in the Brexit referendum, believe Northern Ireland is now faring worse. With new European Parliament elections due in June of next year, the Brexit effect of the North losing its three MEPs is also explored.

The survey found almost three-quarters of people in Northern Ireland, or 74pc, against 51pc in the Republic believe that Northern Ireland should be represented in the European Parliament. This could revive calls for some of the Republics quota of seats to be assigned to the North.

Given the controversy generated by last weeks government Consultative Forum on International Security Policy, it is notable that 49pc of respondents in the Republic believe Ireland should be part of increased EU defence and security co-operation. This is a drop of 10 points on last year, suggesting increased resistance to changing military neutrality. Those aged over 55 are most likely to favour increased defence participation.

Noelle O Connell, who heads European Movement Ireland, said this is the 10th annual opinion poll on Irish EU attitudes but a first for surveying in the North.

Since Brexit, the relationship between people in Northern Ireland and the European Union has been uncertain, and we think its important to measure public sentiment towards the major issues affecting the relationship between the European Union and this island, she said.

She also noted that while support for Ireland remaining in the EU is stable and overwhelmingly positive at 88pc, in the Republic just 58pc believe the EU is moving in the right direction.
Junior minister clarifies rules ahead of ban on sale to under-18s

Junior minister Hildegarde Naughton said it will remain legal for adults to buy vapes for youths. Photo: Frank McGrath

It will not be illegal for adults to buy vapes for children, a junior minister at the Department of Health has clarified.

The Governments ban on vapes for youngsters is set to kick in within weeks. The advertising of vapes, as well as where they are sold, will also be restricted.

Junior Minister Hildegarde Naughton made a clarification in the Dail last week. She did this after incorrectly telling TDs several weeks ago that, under the new laws, adults wouldnt be able to buy vapes for kids.

On June 15, during my concluding remarks on the public health (Tobacco Products and Nicotine Inhaling Products) bill, I stated the purchase of a nicotine-inhaling product by an adult for a child is prohibited by this bill, she told TDs last Wednesday.

I wish to correct the record. I should have stated that the purchase of a nicotine-inhaling product by an adult for a child is not prohibited by this bill. I am grateful for the opportunity to correct the record.

Ms Naughton made the remarks after being prompted to do so by former minister Michael Ring.

The Respect Vapers group, which represents 200,000 adults who vape because they quit smoking cigarettes, said no adult should be giving vapes to under-18s.

We have always stated that anybody under 18 should not have access to vapes or cigarettes, said a spokesperson.

No adult should [be] giving children access to vapes or cigarettes.

Watchdog bans TikTok vape ads for Elf Bar and HQD Tech

Retailers will face fines of up to 5,000 or 12 months in prison if they sell vapes to underage teens, as part of the crackdown on e-cigarettes.

The new rules have to be signed into law by President Michael D Higgins and this is expected to happen before the Dail rises on July 13.

Under the changes, vapes will no longer be sold in vending machines, while the advertising of vapes near schools and on public transport will also be prohibited.

These laws are expected to be in place by mid July, before the Dail rises for summer recess.

Health Minister Stephen Donnelly has said previously that vaping can lead to serious health impairments for children.

The Government has previously indicated that it wants to ban disposable vapes, which allow for several hundred puffs to be taken before they can be thrown away.

However, there is no indication when this may happen.

Advertising vapes will be banned on public transport. This is being introduced in a bid to limit childrens exposure to commercial messages that normalise or glamourise the purchase and use of e-cigarettes. It is seen as a further support mechanism to the ban on their sale to under-18s.

There is currently no mandatory age restriction on the sale and marketing of e-cigarettes.

There are up to 16,000 different flavours of vapes, with flavours such as bubblegum and gummy bears, according to the World Health Organisation.

The sale of e-cigarettes to adolescents is already banned in a number of European countries.

Countries that have put these bans in place point to evidence that adolescents exposure to nicotine can have long-term consequences for brain development.
A teacher who says her colleagues repeatedly addressed by her Protestant husbands surname, asked her when her children would make their Communion and subjected her to jokes about tray bakes has accused a school of discriminating against her by passing her over for a new contract.

During a hearing at the Workplace Relations Commission today, lawyers for the school objected to the complainant being asked whether cake sales would be associated with Protestantism, arguing it was a leading question.

She has also accused a well-known local priest, chairman of the schools board, of shouting at her over taking advice from her trade union on the matter and then banning her from speaking to other staff about employment prospects there.

The teacher says she would have qualified for a permanent contract if she had been appointed without interview to a new post at the national school for the 2022-23 year, in line with national policy, but was instead required to compete in an open competition.

She said a former colleague was appointed to an equivalent post without an interview that summer.

Opening her complaint under the Employment Equality Act 1998 against the school today, the teachers barrister said: My client was [subject] to differential treatment in respect of the other position available. Shell say that was either because of her age, gender or her religion."

The complainant said she became aware towards the end of the 2021-2022 school year that there would be two vacancies for teachers because of job-sharing and maternity arrangements for four teachers  giving evidence that the four staff in question each confirmed it to her separately.

She said the school principal told her on June 10, 2022, he was appointing a colleague of the complainant to one of the vacancies, but would not fill the other post until July or August that year.

After she raised the matter with the chairman of the school board, a local priest, the complainant said the principal told her at a further meeting on June 14, 2022: Listen, you may take it that your last day at school is Friday.

She said that when she spoke again with the chairman that evening he said: Youve been talking to the staff and the union, havent you?

I said, yes, they are my friends and I thought it was my right to speak to my union to get advice about this.

She said he told her in a raised voice that she had jumped the gun and that she cant force (the principal) hand.

"I think he meant that I should be quiet and not ask questions I was so shocked I was crying on the phone, she told the WRC.

She told the tribunal that the school board would have been free to appoint her without interview for the fixed-term post in line with the relevant Department of Education circular, and that she would have built up enough service for a contract of indefinite duration if she had worked to November 2022.

However, the school went ahead and advertised the vacant post she had hoped to get that August and she failed to get through the interview process, the tribunal heard.

The teacher said she was married to a Protestant man and although she had used her husbands surname earlier in her career, she went by her maiden name from the time of her qualification onward.

Despite this, however, she said colleagues were in the habit of coming into her classroom and referring to by her husbands surname.

It was confusing for me and for the children, she said.

It was said to me by [two colleagues] together  joking  that: Mrs (married name) youd be better served up in (a neighbouring school under Church of Ireland patronage) selling tray-bakes, she said.

Counsel for the school objected to the teacher being asked whether cake sales would be associated with Protestantism, arguing it was a leading question.

Thats what they were saying. They were implying: Mrs (married name) you are of a Protestant background with that name so you should be up in (neighbouring school) selling baked goods in the Church of Ireland school.

The teacher said the remark was made to her at least twice, maybe three times.

She said that at the time she had been teaching second class and preparing her pupils for the Catholic sacrament of First Holy Communion and was asked repeatedly by colleagues about when her own children would be getting First Communion.

Most of them [the staff] would have been aware they [my children] were in a Church of Ireland school, she said.

The culture within the school was kind of this frat boy cynical attitude. If you were not joking around you were sort of an outsider, she said, citing a series of posts from a school staff WhatsApp group.

The complainants discrimination claim and two more complaints under the Terms of Employment (Information) Act 1994 and the Minimum Notice and Terms of Employment Act 1973 are denied by the school board.

A fourth complaint by the teacher under the Protection of Employees (Fixed-Term Work) Act 2003 was withdrawn.

The WRC adjudicator adjourned the hearing, which is expected to last two more days when it resumes on a future date yet to be set by the tribunal.

Today's News in 90 Seconds - July 3rd
The UK-based tourist who triggered widespread outrage for carving his girlfriends initials into the Colosseum has begged for forgiveness.

Ivan Dimitrov, who lives in Bristol, was caught by a fuming tourist engraving his and Hayley Braceys letters into the 2,000-year-old structure in Rome.

Footage of the incident soon went viral before Italys Carabinieri tracked the pair down in Bulgaria this week.

The video, titled A*****e tourist carves name in Colosseum in Rome 6-23-23, has received over 300,000 views.

Carabinieri said Dimitrov expressed sincere remorse for his actions, according to spokesman and Major Roberto Martina.

He told us he was very upset by what he had done, and he kept apologising for it, Mr Martina told Mail Online.

I think he was worried about the consequences of any trial and we explained that he could be jailed for between two and five years and be fined up to 15,000.

Mr Martina went on to say the case will be reasonably straightforward due to the video.

He had contacted us after we secured his mobile telephone from hotel records and left a message for him to call us, Mr Martina said.

He was naturally worried about the legal implications, and these were all explained to him.

We didnt ask him why he did it, that will be for a judge to hear, we just told him that he was a suspect and was part of the investigation.

Mr Martina went on to say Ms Bracey is not part of any complaint so is an innocent party as far as we are concerned.

Although technically, she could be seen as an accessory, he said.
New employment entitlements for parents come into effect from today. Grab your pumps and prepare to milk the system for all its worth. As part of the legislation, the entitlement to breastfeeding breaks in the workplace will be extended from the current period of just six months up to two years. Were finally recognising that babies dont stop drinking milk at the stroke of six months.
* Understanding China requires grasping the "cultural and civilizational soil" in which the CPC is firmly rooted. * The "Second Integration" provides insight into Chinese modernization and a new model for human advancement. * The integration serves as China's new statecraft in the new era, answering "Why China is China" based on its history and culture. by Xinhua writer Zhang Yunlong BEIJING, July 2 (Xinhua) -- A new research report from Xinhua News Agency's think tank delves into the Communist Party of China (CPC) concept of integrating the basic tenets of Marxism with fine traditional Chinese culture, known as the "Second Integration." The report by the New China Research analyzes the connotation and global significance of the "Second Integration," saying the integration opens a new frontier in adapting Marxism to the Chinese context and the needs of the times. The "Second Integration" serves as a key to unlocking the understanding of China in the new era, providing insight into Chinese modernization and a new model for human advancement, according to the report. It also offers a valuable perspective for observing the relationship between China and the world. The concept was introduced by President Xi Jinping, also general secretary of the CPC Central Committee and chairman of the Central Military Commission, in his speech commemorating the CPC's 100th anniversary on July 1, 2021. It builds on the CPC's "First Integration" theoretical synthesis -- integrating the basic tenets of Marxism with China's specific realities -- which was summarized in the 1940s and has successfully guided China. Experts in CPC history and traditional Chinese culture have acclaimed the release of the report titled "The 'Second Integration' that Transforms China -- Theoretical Innovation and Practice in Building the Modern Civilization of the Chinese Nation." The report helps explain to the world why China possesses such strong governance and vitality, and why it is a crucial force in maintaining world peace and development, says Zang Fengyu, dean of School of Philosophy, Renmin University of China. TWO MIRACLES Under the CPC's leadership, China has achieved rapid growth and stability for over seven decades -- feats widely referred to as "two miracles." The report says understanding China requires grasping the "cultural and civilizational soil" in which the CPC is firmly rooted. The report describes China's "two miracles" as truly remarkable, featuring "security, stability, development, and advancement" alongside 10,000 years of culture and more than 5,000 years of civilization that continues to thrive today. "Without China's 5,000-year-old civilization, where would the unique characteristics of China come from? And without the unique characteristics of China, where would our successful socialist path with Chinese characteristics be today?" said Xi during a March 2021 visit to a memorial hall dedicated to Zhu Xi, a Chinese philosopher of the 12th century. The report says understanding China today hinges on understanding the CPC, which in turn requires understanding the "cultural and civilizational soil" in which the Party grew. The report describes the "Second Integration" synthesis as a significant advance in the CPC's theory. It says the synthesis fully captures the current landscape, aligns with the Chinese national rejuvenation goals, and symbolizes Chinese leaders guiding people to reconstruct historical perspectives, reinterpret their civilization, and elucidate China's governance. CONNOTATION The report says integrating the basic tenets of Marxism with fine traditional Chinese culture enriches China's socialist path with the "bloodline and civilization" of the Chinese nation. It says this integration combines communist and socialist beliefs with the millennia-old ideals of the Chinese people -- Xiaokang (a well-off society), common prosperity, and world harmony. While adhering to historical materialism, the report says, the CPC creatively borrows the "reasonable kernel" of China's people-oriented ideology spanning 5,000 years of history. The result has been a people-centered development philosophy that elevates ancient Chinese people-oriented thinking to a new level, the report adds. The integration also features combining core socialist values with the traditional values of the Chinese nation, creating a source of spiritual values for the nation, the report says. China's fine traditional culture has always embodied the spirit of pursuing the right path with righteousness, it notes. The report says that the integration also combines the vision of a community with a shared future for humanity proposed by Xi with a traditional Chinese diplomatic approach centered on harmony among nations. GLOBAL INSPIRATIONS The report says the "Second Integration" serves as China's new statecraft in the new era, answering "Why China is China" based on its history and culture. A nation's culture defines its soul, and China's confidence lies in its over 5,000 years of heritage, the report says. It stresses accurately positioning China's fine traditional culture, which nurtured core socialist values and withstands global cultural influences. The report points out that the new theory "goes beyond Western centrism and China's outdated notions since modern times, reconstructing Chinese people's historical awareness of their own country." The "Second Integration" can effectively explain today's reality of China's success, further enabling the Chinese people to grasp the historical initiative and spiritual initiative, it says. "Through the theory, Chinese leaders have reshaped the country's cultural identity and public consensus, thereby strengthening national identity and political identity," reads the report. The report says the integration helps China reinterpret its civilization and promote civilizational exchanges. China emphasizes allowing cultural exchanges to transcend estrangement, mutual learning to transcend clashes, and coexistence to transcend feelings of superiority, the report adds. Additionally, the report notes that China's tradition of pursuing harmony with the world and the CPC's global vision differs from the Western worldview that treats the world as an object to conquer. "China in the new era approaches the world with an attitude of interconnection, interdependence, win-win cooperation, and harmonious coexistence," it says.
Actor Hilary Rose will offer people a unique insight behind the scenes of the hit show through her Live Wild podcast.

Hilary Rose, who plays Mairead in the Young Offenders, will chat with her co-stars on the stage of the Cork Opera House. Photo: Miki Barlok

THE IFTA nominated Cork actor Hilary Rose will give people a unique insight into the hit TV show The Young Offenders when she brings her popular Live Wild podcast to the stage of the Cork Opera House on Saturday, July 22.

The podcasts first live show will see the Rose, who plays Mairead MacSweeney in the multi-award winning show, in conversation with her co-stars from the from the show,

It will offer the audience a unique opportunity to look behind the curtain of the TV series and movie, which gave birth to some of the nations favourite TV moments and characters.

Rose will chat to chat to her co-stars about the making of the series and movie, working together, their favourite funny moments and the ups and downs of life behind the camera.

A self-described adventurer and lover of living wild and free in a modern world, Hilary Rose has a hugely popular blog www.livewild.ie, which led to the production of the podcast.

In the podcast she chats with people from all walks of life, in particular those she says live and work outside the boundaries of society, are passionate about what they do, what they stand for and who think outside the box.

Among the people she has interviewed on the 10-episode podcast are Alex Murphy and Chris Walley who play Conor and Jock in the Young Offenders, DJ Jenny Greene, Comedian Joanne McNally, former pro-surfer and regenerative farmer Fergal Smith and wellness practitioner Shanti.

All episodes are available online.

Rose said the live show was inspired by the how well the podcast has been received.

During the recent filming of season four of The Young Offenders, it struck me how close all of the cast members are and how well we gel both on screen and off screen, said Rose.

I felt it would be lovely to share our behind the scenes experience of show with a live audience -and so the Live Wild podcast in conversation with the cast was born. We look forward to seeing you at the Opera House for this very special event, she added.

Tickets for The Live Wild Podcast - In Conversation with the Cast of the Young Offenders, from www.corkoperahouse.ie priced at 35.

Earlier in the year, the BBC in association with RTE recommissioned the hit comedy for a fourth season from producers Vico Films.

This season, which recently wrapped filming , is due to hit TV screens next year.

The show has proved to be a massive draw for audiences in Ireland, the UK and across the world, garnering huge critical acclaim for its sensitive yet hilarious story-telling and performances.

Young Offenders co-producer Peter Foot said the team behind the show were over the moon to be back for another series.

Audiences have been asking for more of the journeys of its characters and were very excited to take the show in new directions for series four and cant wait to bring it back to TV screens.
Thousands of people are expected to flock to the 11th annual Munster Maths and Science Fair at the GAA Complex in Mallow on Sunday, October 15.

ORGANISERS of the annual Munster Maths and Science Fair have announced the 2023 edition of the event will return to its spiritual home at the Mallow GAA Complex, Carrigoon on Sunday, October 15.

Thousands of people are expected to flock to the venue for the Fair, which will run from 11am-4pm, to enjoy the spectacular sights and sounds of the popular free event now in its 11th year.

Once again flaming fireballs, exciting experiments and mind-bending physics will take centre stage at the Fair, which explores the fun side of the STEM (science, technology, engineering and maths) subjects.

An extension of the Mallow Development Partnerships (MDP) innovative Maths & Science Primary Schools Project the fair was originally established to showcase STEM (related projects to children.

While local schools have continued to form a core component of the fair, with primary and secondary schools from the greater Mallow area showcasing their projects, over the years it has expanded into something far bigger with leaders from industry, research and third level institutes coming on board holding a wide array of engaging and interactive experiments, demonstrations and displays throughout the day.

Returning old favourites will mix with exciting new exhibitors giving visitors the opportunity to experience mind-blowing experiments, amazing demonstrations and displays and cutting-edge presentations.

The key aim of this entertaining and spectacular events remains, to create an awareness the STEM subjects and how they impact on our everyday living, work and recreation activities, said an organising committee spokesperson.

They said the wide range of interactive displays will include robotics, 3-D visuals and simulations, gaming platforms communications technology, microscopic exploration and a planetarium offering people an opportunity to experience visiting the stars.

A team of fun enthusiasts will also be on site to take visitors through messy experiments and interesting demonstrations of science shown through simple but amusing games such as tug-of-war, giant windbags, musical straws, windmills and many more enjoyable techniques, said the spokesperson.

The Fair will also offer secondary school student a welcome opportunity to meet with professionals from a wide variety of sectors who will be on hand to offer them advice about future careers, they added.

The Munster Maths and Science Family Fair is organised by the Mallow Development Partnership through its network of volunteers, is sponsored Cork County Councils Economic Development Fund and generously supported by the Boston-based Irish American Partnership .
Moldovan national Iulian Lotca was remanded in custody at a sitting of Mallow District Court on Monday morning.

A MAN has been remanded in custody after he was charged in connection with a two-car collision in the heart of Fermoy last weekend which resulted in the death of a 29-year-old man.

Iulian Lotca (37) was charged with dangerous driving causing the death of Ihor Skokivski at McCurtain Street, Fermoy, Co Cork on July 1st, contrary to Section 53 (1) of the Road Traffic Act 1961.

Mr Lotca with an address care of ODonovan Transport, Main St, Carrigtwohill, Co Cork was also charged with driving with excess alcohol at McCurtain St, Fermoy, Co Cork on the same date.

The charge alleges that Mr Lotca drove with an alcohol concentration of 59 microgrammes per 100 millilitres of breath, in excess of the legal limit of 22 microgrammes per 100 millilitres of breath.

Mr Lotca was also charged with a third offence of driving without insurance at the same location on the same occasion, contrary to Section 56 of the Road Traffic Act 1961.

Det Garda Denise Fitzgerald gave evidence of arrest, charge and caution and told the court that Mr Lotca made no reply to any of the three charges when they were put to him after caution.

Insp Tony Sullivan said that gardai were objecting to bail for Mr Lotca and he asked Det Garda Fitzgerald to outline the reasons why gardai were seeking a remand in custody for Mr Lotca.

Det Garda Fitzgerald said gardai were objecting to bail because of the seriousness of the charges, in particular the dangerous driving causing death charge which carries a maximum penalty of 10-years in jail.

She said gardai were also opposing bail on the grounds of the strength of the evidence including several eyewitnesses to the two-car collision involving Mr Lotca and another car.

Det Garda Fitzgerald said that gardai would allege Mr Lotca was driving with excess alcohol and at excessive speed when he crossed over on to his incorrect side of the road and crashed into another car.

He was caught red-handed at the scene, and has made full admissions at interview following his arrest including that his driving was reckless at the time of the collision, she said.

Ihor Skokivsky, a 29-year-old Ukrainian living in Fermoy, was a rear seat passenger in Mr Lotcas BMW.

He suffered serious injuries and was taken to the Cork University Hospital (CUH) where he died on Sunday.

Det Garda Fitzgerald said gardai were further objecting to bail on the grounds that Mr Lotca, a Moldovan national, had no ties to Ireland and they feared he would abscond if granted bail.

She said that he had no permanent address and his accommodation, a caravan provided by his employer at the rear of their yard in Carrigtwohill, was dependent on his employment with them.

Cross-examined by Mr Lotcas solicitor, Daithi O Donnabhain, Det Garda Fitzgerald accepted Mr Lotca had expressed remorse over what happened. However, she still feared he would abscond if given bail.

Speaking with the aid of an interpreter, Mr Lotca told the court he had been working with O Donovan Transport for four-years and he promised to abide by any bail terms set by the court.

He said he would sign on daily at Midleton Garda Station and would abide by a curfew, but he was unable to surrender his passport as it was being held by some people to whom he owed money.

Judge Colm Roberts said he fully accepted Mr Lotca was deeply remorseful over what had happened, and he would have to live with the fact he had an involvement in the death of another human being.

But, he believed the charges were too serious and the evidence against Mr Lotca was too strong and he had too few ties with Ireland to give him any option but to refuse him bail.

He remanded Mr Lotca on bail to appear again at Mallow District Court on tomorrow (July 4)by video link.

Judge Roberts he also granted Mr Lotca free legal aid and assigned Mr O Donnabhain to represent him.

He also accepted Mr O Donnabhains suggestion that Mr Lotca receive any necessary psychiatric assistance in prison, given that he had expressed both shock and remorse at the death of his friend.

Today's News in 90 Seconds - July 3rd
A man who made a headbutt motion toward gardai on the street told the officers his name was Ruby Walsh when they questioned him.

Declan Walsh (43) was arrested for public order offences after he gave the false name.

Judge Bryan Smyth gave him a two-month suspended sentence.

Walsh, from Ballymun but with an address at a homeless hostel on Harcourt Street, pleaded guilty to charges including threatening, abusive and insulting behaviour.

Dublin District Court heard gardai were on duty at Abbey Street on May 5 when they saw the accused standing outside a store.

As they passed, he made an aggressive headbutt motion toward the gardai and shouted at them.

The gardai spoke to him and asked his name, to which he replied, Ruby Walsh.

Walsh had 179 previous convictions for charges including public order offences.

The accused had a chaotic past which led him into addiction and homelessness, his lawyer said. He had a number of operations and was in great discomfort.

Judge Smyth suspended the two-month sentence for a year on condition the accused keeps the peace and is of good behaviour.
GAA

Kerry selector Quirke says team runner should be reintroduced despite abuse of role in the past

Kerry football team selector Micheal Quirke has backed his managers call for two or three structured times in each half of a game for a maor foirne or runner to get messages and instructions on to the playing field during games, despite the 
17-year-old Sean Morris from Tralee Rowing Club has secured a place on the Rowing Ireland U19 Team to represent his country at the Coupe de la Jeunesse (European) Regatta being held on the 28-30 July 2023 in Amsterdam.

A Tralee teenager is basking in the glow of a job well done this week after he was chosen to represent Rowing Ireland U19 Team at the Coupe de la Jeunesse (European) Regatta being held on the 28-30 July 2023 in Amsterdam.

17-year-old Sean Morris, came through tough trials in February and April this year and made it through the final 4-day long selection camp last week at the National Rowing Centre in Cork.

The dark winter nights in the gym and the dawn rows out on the canal here at home in Tralee with his fellow clubmates have paid off handsomely, said the Tralee Rowling Club in a social media post.

Club captain Heidi Giles was full of praise for Sean and spoke of her pride at his amazing achievement.

Anyone who works with young people will know it has its moments, moments of despair and frustration and of absolute joy and delight.

This is obviously a very special moment, to see a young rower set a goal for themselves and go about achieving it, choosing it day in day out, dedicating time, energy, and emotion to the endeavour is fantastic, to be part of their achievement is a privilege, she said.

I am proud of Sean and all those who have contributed to his selection for an Irish crew and who have built a club that is capable of facilitating this achievement.
Trained Garda dogs assist in searches and help protect communities

A Garda Dog Unit has been approved for the Sligo/Leitrim Division.

Approval has been given for a new dog handling unit in the Sligo/Leitrim Division, the recent JPC meeting in Sligo was told.

Chief Superintendent Aidan Glacken told the meeting that this has been approved and the unit will be based in the region.

Cllr Marie Casserly had moved the motion and she welcomed the news.

The specially trained Garda dogs assist in searches for suspects of crimes and for evidence which may have been discarded. The dogs are also trained to work in serious public order disturbances and they assist in the execution of warrants.

Most of the Garda dogs are detector dogs. These dogs are trained to locate cocaine, cannabis, ecstasy and heroin.

Potential Garda dogs are assessed for 3 to 4 weeks and if suitable they start the training programme at the Dog Unit. It can take at least 8 weeks to train a dog to search for drugs and explosives.

After the training is completed, the dog and its handler start operational duty immediately, although ongoing training is continued on a very regular basis.

Garda dogs are also familiarised with working alongside personnel in the Garda Mounted Support Unit, Garda Air Support Unit and Garda Water Support Unit.

The dogs live in their handlers home, so they build a relationship with their handler, although they understand the difference between work and off duty. The handler is a Garda who has received specialised training and is a member of the force.

There are currently only three dog units operating in the country - in Dublin, Cork and Limerick. Three more have now been approved in Cavan/Monaghan, Donegal and Sligo/Leitrim.

Sniffer dogs are used in a variety of operations, from drug detection operations to helping locate missing persons, and in the detection of explosives also.

I am hoping that this will act specifically as a deterrent to drugs coming into and circulating in Sligo and to support the staff who are working on the ground helping to protect communities, Cllr Casserly said.
The trial commenced on Monday of County Wexford man David Bolger (45), accused of murdering Przemyslaw Klimzczuk at the house they shared in Enniscorthy.

The Central Criminal Court came to the courthouse in Wexford to deal with the matter, presided over by Judge Tony Hunt. The incident giving rise to the prosecution occurred early on the morning of May 1 in 2020 at 41 Ashbrook, The Moyne, Enniscorthy.

The accused, who pleaded not guilty, and the deceased were both living there at the time.

However, the barrister defending Bolger told the jury of five women and seven men that his clients family home was at 43 Irish Street, Enniscorthy.

Evidence was heard on the opening day of the trial from Rfeal Sajewski with the assistance of a Polish interpreter. He confirmed that he too was living in the house at Ashbrook on the date in question.

He recalled that he was drinking Jagermeister that evening with Bolger, Klimczuk and two other men.

His evidence was that he went at the end of the night to his bedroom where he was joined by Klimczuk. He said the deceased told him he was afraid of Bolger and asked if he could stay in the room for the night.

Then, according to Sajewski, the defendant also came into the room, stabbing Klimczuk in the chest. Bolger then ran down the stairs and he was outside the house when gardai arrived in answer to a 999 call.

The witness confirmed that a kitchen knife which was shown to him and the jury was the one used by the accused.

The knife had a blade no more than four inches long.

The trial was adjourned overnight with Sajewski under cross-examination by defence counsel Colman Cody.
A Wexford woman who had a knife held to her throat during a theft from a Dublin petrol station told staff the man would kill her if they didn't hand over money from a till, a court has heard.

26-year-old Victoria Dalton of Assumption Terrace, Rosbercon, New Ross Co. Wexford, pleaded guilty at Dublin Circuit Criminal Court to one count of theft at the Circle K petrol station, Dundrum on March 24, 2020.

Detective Garda Barry Brennan told Grainne O'Neill BL, prosecuting, on Monday that Dalton entered the petrol station at around 9.15pm on the night in question and asked for children's medicine. A man, who had his face covered with a scarf, then came up behind her and put a knife to her throat.

This man told staff working the petrol station to give him money from the till or he would kill Dalton. She also said to the staff to give him the money or he'd kill me. The staff member was very afraid and handed over 120 from the till.

Det Gda Brennan said Dalton did not seem afraid, and staff thought she was acting. The man then left the shop. Dalton asked the staff what she should do, but left before gardai arrived.

The man was seen running to a nearby apartment complex and when gardai arrived, one property had the door ajar. They were concerned and knocked on the door.

Dalton opened the door and told gardai she was okay. She expressed shock when she heard about the robbery and said she hadn't seen anything suspicious. A man, who matched the description of the male from the service station, came to the door while Dalton was speaking to gardai.

When another garda arrived on the scene, Dalton admitted she had been at the service station and had had a knife held to her neck.

She was arrested and during interview denied taking part in the robbery, but said she had gone to the service station to get medicine as she had a toothache.

Dalton has one previous conviction for the possession of drugs for personal use from March 2022. CCTV was also played to the court.

Det Brennan agreed with Tara McLoughlin BL, defending, that the man was known to Dalton and he is also facing charges in relation to this incident. He accepted that there was no suggestion that Dalton had a weapon, but could not say if she had known the co-accused would have a knife.

When asked if it would have been distressing for Dalton to have a knife against her throat, Det Brennan said it was his belief that they colluded. He accepted Dalton made no attempt to conceal her identity and was arrested within a few minutes of the theft of 120.

He said he was not aware that Dalton had addiction issues or had taken drugs on the day in question. Det Gda Brennan agreed that Dalton's previous conviction was at the District Court.

Ms McLoughlin told the court that Dalton was staying with a boyfriend at the time of the offending. The co-accused is a friend and Dalton had invited this man to Dublin.

Defence counsel said her instructions are that Dalton had taken up to 20 tablets on the day as well as smoking crack cocaine and taking heroin. Her instructions are that there was no plan, Dalton was not aware that her friend had a knife and she feels guilty about her role in the incident.

Ms McLoughlin outlined that her client completed training as a hairdresser and beautician. Dalton has experienced a number of traumatic events throughout her life. She has mental health issues and was hospitalised for a period in late 2019. Dalton has taken steps to deal with her addiction and is on 75ml of methadone.

Judge Orla Crowe noted that no documents had been provided and said the court was concerned about Dalton's risk of re-offending as she had participated in a very serious matter. She ordered the preparation of a probation report and adjourned the case to November 17 for finalisation.

Today's News in 90 Seconds - July 3rd
There was a fantastic atmosphere of creativity and sharing at the Tinahely Courthouse Arts Centre when the intimate venue hosted the Wicklow Artists Salon, which moved from the Mermaid Arts Centre for their Stone Soup collaboration with Kunstverein Aughrim.

Part of the Aughrim curatorial offices friendly takeover of the Courthouse, the artist-run event  entitled Taking the Initiative  explored important themes affecting artists and cultural practitioners and featured an exciting line-up of artists and cultural practitioners who took the bold step of establishing a new publishing house, a new festival, and two arts centres.

The panel for the salon included the founder of the Signal Arts Centre, Eleanor Philips, publisher of The Stinging Fly Press, Declan Meade, founding Director of The Gap Arts Festival, Garret Keogh and event facilitator, curator and founding Director of Kunstverein Aughrim, Kate Strain.

Supported by Wicklow County Arts Office, Mermaid Arts Centre, The Tinahely Courthouse and curated by visual artist Joanna Kidney and writer Philip St John, the salon consists of a moderated discussion with invited guest artists, which then opens into conversations with attendees and aims to seed learning, interactions and collaborations among participants.

Established by Kate Strain in 2022, Kunstverein Aughrim is a curatorial production office located on the ground floor of a townhouse in Aughrim that is part of an international network that develops ongoing curatorial collaborations with artists to support the artistic process of creating new work and bring audiences as close to the creative process as possible.

Speaking after the culmination of the well-received arts schedule, Kate said: It was an amazing turnout - we must have had 40 or so people at it. Most people there were creative practitioners and were really invested and engaged in the topics we discussed.

Its always great to share creative energy, for artists and writers especially who, by in large, have solitary practice. Events like these give them a sense of community and support through sharing each others stories, journeys, tips and advice.

It was great to put faces to people you follow online or who youve read or heard about. I suppose it was lovely to see that creative community all in one space and feel the closeness of it. There are so many artists, writers, actors, filmmakers and creative people in Wicklow, so the more events and opportunities for them to connect here, the better.

A big thanks goes to Joanna Kindney and Philip St John for their work on our event. They organised the whole thing and got everyone together, chose the team, invited the speakers, and all the administration  they did all the leg work.

Kieran OToole at the Courthouse was amazing with us, and the Mermaid Arts Centre and Wicklow County Arts Office supported the event too. A huge thanks to everyone who made the fantastic day possible.
JAMIE Dornan had a brush with the law in Wicklow last week but dont worry as it was just while filming the new series of The Tourist.

Hollywood hunk Jamie took a keen interest in a garda motorcycle parked outside a staged garda station in Bray.

A garda car was also positioned outside what is normally the library in the seaside town, and is currently being used a local police station for the new series.

But the 41-year-old paid extra attention to the motorbike, as his face lit up on seeing it.

Jamie filmed his latest scenes in the company of renowned Irish actress Olwen Fouere.

Last month, Jamie was pictured elsewhere in Bray with Aussie actor Greg Larsen (Ethan), as he made a number of hand gestures.

Earlier last week, Jamie filmed other scenes at nearby Djouce woods in Wicklow, where makeup was used to make him look bloodied.

The first season of the series, which was screened in the UK and Ireland on BBC1, focused on Dornan's character Elliot after he gets stuck in the outback after a car tries to run him off the road. He then wakes up in hospital and realises he has no memory.

Outback cop Helen Chambers (Danielle Macdonald) becomes involved in his case and viewers soon realise Elliot has a murky past. While Helen initially tries to track him down the pair eventually fall for each other.

The growing romance followed Helens marriage deteriorating due to her abusive husband.

The new season follows the action to Dublin and its environs a year after Elliott left the outback, as he comes face to face with his past.

Helen travels to Ireland with Dornan's troubled character, only to be dragged into the mystery of his past life.

Danielle was pictured on set in Wicklow in March.

Kin stars Francis Magee (Bren Kinsella) and Mark McKenna (Anthony Kinsella) also star in the new series, while Conor MacNeill, and Vikings actor, Diarmaid Murtagh, have also been cast in the second series.

Last June, the first season of The Tourist, which was filmed in south Australia, won three awards at the Monte Carlo TV Festival.

It won Best Series and Best Creation at the prestigious international event in Monaco, and also took home the Public Prize.

It became the BBC's most watched TV drama of last year, winning a massive 11.4million viewers.

Australian actress Danielle MacDonald is one of the principle actors in the series and she was seen shooting scenes for the new series in Bray with Olwen Fouere.

Danielle (31) was born and raised in Sydney, but now lives in Los Angeles with a bunch of flatmates and pets.

She previously starred in American Horror Story: Roanoke as well as Patti Cake$.

Jaime turned 41 last month and has three kids with his wife Amelia Warner, who was previously married for a short time to Dubliner Colin Farrell.

Former model Jamie, who hails from Holywood, Co. Down, is perhaps best known for shedding his clothes as Christian Grey in the Fifty Shades franchise, and also for playing a serial killer in The Fall TV series.

He recently earned a Golden Globe nomination for Best Supporting Actor for playing Pa in Kenneth Branaghs biopic Belfast.
A photograph taken on the Bray to Greystones Cliff Walk has won first prize in the prestigious Biodiversity Photographer of the Year Competition 2023.

The photographer, Brenda Sheridan from Dublin, who describes herself as a hobbiest photographer since September 2017 with a passion for all things nature wowed the judges with a picture of a bird looking for food with one of its parents, titled Juvenile Stone Chat looking for food from daddy.

It was described by the judges, former Irish Times photographer Frank Miller and photographer Nick Bradshaw, as simple, clean and well composed  an endearing image. A worthy winner in a very tough competition.

"This year was an incredibly tough competition, they added. We'd like to thank again the photographers who entered, and those that made it to the shortlist. Congratulations to you all for your dedication, passion and patience needed to capture such wonderful glimpses into the lives of those we share this island with.

This year was as tough as ever to choose just 20 photos for the shortlist, and a further 10 for the Ocean Category. With over 1000 images submitted of a wide array of wildlife, this years entries are testimony to the huge variety of life that calls Ireland home, and displays the passion and patience of the photographers who captured such beautiful images.

Brenda Sheridan's prizewinning photo, taken on the Bray to Greystones Cliff Walk.

The Biodiversity Photographer of the Year exhibition runs from Saturday, July 1 at the Rediscovery Centre in Ballymun, celebrating Irelands wildlife with a unique collection of photographs taken during May 2023.

To see more of Brenda Sheridans images, go to: @brendasheridan57
Wicklow TD Jennifer Whitmore has called on the Government to provide more support to Wicklows Mens Sheds in the upcoming budget, describing their work as an excellent resource in the community.

It comes as the Chairman of Bray Mens shed said the group was thriving.

Following a meeting with the Irish Men's Sheds Association, where she discussed their pre-budget submission with their CEO Enda Egan, Deputy Whitmore said:

"It was a pleasure to meet with representatives from the Irish Men's Sheds Association this week in Dublin. We discussed their pre-budget submission which lays out their recommendations to government. They are looking for a modest increase in funding from the Department of Rural and Community Development. And the money invested in these sheds is very well spent.

"During the Covid-19 pandemic, we saw reports from ALONE about increased rates of loneliness amongst older people. Many people are only now returning to more socialising, and these sheds offer an excellent resource for men returning to their communities.

"We can see the great work done in Wicklow, where we have Men's Sheds around the county in Arklow, Greystones, Bray, Wicklow Town, Newtownmountkennedy, Baltinglass, Blessington, Kilcoole, Tinahealy, Roundwood and Avoca.

"These spaces allow men to socialise, get active, be creative and learn new skills. Men's mental health is an issue that we are increasingly encouraged to promote. Men's Sheds are an excellent way for men, especially those living alone, to socialise and build community networks.

"One of the most worrying statistics in their pre-budget submission is that as many as 70 Men's Sheds are continuously threatened by closure. The IMSA are seeking dedicated funding to target these sheds, which cannot always remain open year-round. When building a network for people in our communities, we must have consistency of access. Sheds need the funding to open regularly and offer their members activities and projects.

"We also have had several Women's Sheds in Wicklow. These projects allow women to have a dedicated space and build new skills and connections.

Meanwhile, Peter Prunty, Chairman of Bray Mens Sheds, said the Bray group is thriving, with its members meeting regularly on Tuesday and Thursday evenings and some on Wednesday mornings in the premises at Kilmantain Place, which they took over last year.

Asked about the financial constraints, Peter said they are fortunate enough to be able to avail of the community grant funding and added that they have always got huge support from Wicklow County Council.

He said the Bray Shed wouldnt be under threat, but costs are there that have to be met by members fees  electricity, rent and insurance being the big ones. Getting grants for upgrades can also be an issue for other sheds around the country and while most people think the sheds are only there as a social outlet, Peter explained that they offer their services for people in the community also for all sorts of sundry things.

At the moment, they are building bird boxes for one person, frames and a gate for another, while one local in a wheelchair asked them to make wooden boxes so he could use them for storage at ground level. They also run fitness classes for their members and have service providers visit to run health checks.

Deputy Whitmore added that given how important the Sheds are in the community, she is happy to support their call for an increase in funding, and I will raise this directly with government Ministers in the budget run-up at every chance I get."
Sarah Jessica Parker and husband Matthew Broderick with their son James (17) and daughters, Tabitha and Marion (13), on Broadway in December 2022. Photo: Bruce Glikas

Celebrity couple: When Sarah Jessica Parker met her future husband, Matthew Broderick, "he was, I thought, so beautiful and handsome and charming.

Sarah Jessica Parker has revealed that she and her husband, Matthew Broderick, havent spent a night apart from each other in more than three decades.

During a recent appearance on The Howard Stern Show, the actress, 58, recalled how she had her first date with Broderick on March 8, 1992. Parker went on to explain how, ever since that date, she and her partner have been together.

Weve never spent a night apart since then, with the exception of work on location, she told Howard Stern. Or, his mother was ill for a bit so he went to take care of her. But from that first night, weve never been apart.

The Sex and The City star also said that pretty soon into the relationship, she felt like she was in love with Broderick and thought he was really incredible.

When Stern asked what love meant to her, Parker recalled how she admired Broderick before they started dating, noting that she had loved his work. She explained that when they got to know each other, she realised that she liked his person very much, before listing some of her favourite qualities about her partner.

Hes so smart, hes so funny, I like this choice of friends, the way he was living in New York, what was important to him, how he kind of travelled around the city, she explained. He was always travelling around on his bicycle, hes been riding bikes since he was 14.

She continued: [Hes] really smart and really talented. And he was, I thought, so beautiful and handsome and charming.

According to Parker, she and Broderick were brought up in similar ways, even though their lives were very different. She then pointed out another thing that they had in common: Wanting to start a family in New York.

Sarah Jessica Parker and husband Matthew Broderick with their son James (17) and daughters, Tabitha and Marion (13), on Broadway in December 2022. Photo: Bruce Glikas

I love being home in New York, she said. I wanted to build a life here and he was born and raised in the West Village, literally, hes never lived north of 11th Street.

Broderick and Parker officially tied the knot in 1997, five years after their first date. They went on to have a son, James, now 20, and twin daughters, Tabitha and Marion (13).

Meanwhile, the Ferris Buellers Day Off star has previously opened up about his strong connection with his wife. During an appearance on Watch What Happens Live in April 2022, TV host Andy Cohen asked Broderick when he knew that Parker was the one.

In response, he said: The first time I met her. I saw her walking down the street, and thought, Thats it.

However, elsewhere in her conversation with Stern, Parker confessed that she couldnt start dating Broderick when they first met, since they were in separate relationships at the time.

We were both seeing other people, so it was illegal, and we stayed away from one another, the And Just Like That star explained. We understood that we had to do right by the other people and break up officially.

Last month, Parker shared a picture on Instagram of a champagne cork, to celebrate her 26th wedding anniversary.

Happy 26th anniversary my husband, she wrote in the caption. That sure was a nice celebration and a real nice bottle of champagne. And a gorgeous walk home. Oh the miles we have strolled together.I love you. XOX, your SJ.

Today's News in 90 Seconds - July 3rd
LATEST | Irish tourist arrested on suspicion of murder after Irish woman strangled in Spanish hotel

Police have confirmed they held the 30-year-old man after rushing to a hotel in the Costa Dorada resort of SalouTanaiste Micheal Martin says the news of the womans killing is shocking

Llevant Beach in Salou Photo: Getty images

Natalia Penza Mon 3 Jul 2023 at 15:25






Young rioters in France clashed with police into the early hours yesterday and targeted a mayors home with a burning car, injuring members of his family, as the country saw a fifth night of unrest after the police killing of a teenager. However, overall violence appeared to lessen from previous nights.
The Indo Daily: The post office deception and the dead mans pension  What happened in Carlow?
Image Credit: Unsplash

Mumbai/UNI: The Rupee on Monday rallied 25 paise at 81.84, against the US Dollar in the opening session on selling of US Dollar by bankers and exporters, dealers at Foreign Exchange said.
Image: Pixabay

On June 19, 2023, a Rohingya youth, identified as Iman Hossain, was killed and another was injured in a gunfight between the Arakan Rohingya Salvation Army (ARSA) and the Rohingya Solidarity Organisation (RSO) at Balukhali Rohingya Camp-8 in the Ukhiya Upazila (Sub-District) of Cox's Bazar District.

On June 13, 2022, one person, Bashir Ullah, was killed in a gunfight between ARSA and RSO at the H/32 block of Camp-10 in Ukhiya.

On June 5, 2023, a group of eight to ten ARSA operatives shot dead a madrassa (seminary) student, Mohammad Bashir, at Kutupalong refugee camp in Ukhiya.

According to partial data compiled by the by the Institute for Conflict Management (ICM), at least nine persons have been killed in ARSA-linked violence in 2023 (data till July 2), including four ARSA cadres. There were four such fatalities in 2022 (including one ARSA cadre) and one (ARSA cadre) in 2021.

Meanwhile, SFs have arrested at least 31 ARSA operatives in Bangladesh in 2023, four in 2022 and 10 in 2021. Some of the recent arrests included:

June 12, 2023: An ARSA operative and also an accused in six murders, Sabbir Ahmed aka Lalu, was arrested by the Armed Police Battalion (APBn) from Balukhali camp in Ukhiya.

May 21, 2023: A suspected ARSA operative, Rahmat Kabir, was arrested with a firearm by the APBn from Camp-9 in Ukhiya.

May 10, 2023: A top ARSA commander, Mohammad Zubair, was arrested by the APBn in Ukhiya.

ARSA was formed following the riots in the Rakhine State of Myanmar in 2012, in which ethnic Rohingya Muslims were targeted by ethnic Rakhine Buddhists. It, however, first came into prominence in October 2016 when it attacked three police outposts in the Maungdaw and Rathedaung townships in Myanmar, killing nine Police officers, provoking massive retaliatory violence by state Forces and fuelling a wave of distress migration of Rohingyas into Bangladesh.

Reports in 2018 indicated ARSA was responsible for two 2017 massacres in which up to 99 Hindu residents in the northern Rakhine state of Myanmar were murdered, including children. Further, reports of ARSA targeting the small Christian Rohingya community living in the Bangladeshi refugee camps as well as Rohingya civilians working with international humanitarian organisations surfaced throughout 2019 and 2020. ARSA has also come under fire for its claimed role in the 20162017 killings of moderate Rohingya community leaders in Rakhine State, a trend that continues in the camps in Bangladesh. ARSA was widely implicated in the high-profile September 2021 murder of Mohib Ullah, a moderate Rohingya leader who was shot dead outside the office of the Arakan Rohingya Society for Peace and Human Rights, the organisation he led. However, ARSA denied any involvement in the killing.

During 2016 and 2017, ARSA leaders had started visiting certain Rohingya areas in Myanmar to recruit locals. They would then ask each community to contribute five to ten individuals for basic training. After completing their initial training, new ARSA members went back to their communities to carry out security responsibilities, promote active religious observance, and allegedly use violence to silence Rohingyas who opposed their actions or were seen as being too close to the authorities.

For internal communications and recruiting, ARSA used text messages from mobile phones and shortly, the encrypted WhatsApp, while it used Facebook and Twitter to spread its message more publicly. In 2017, Facebook classified ARSA as a "dangerous organisation," which basically put an end to the group's Facebook activity. ARSA maintained a consistent posting schedule on its @ARSA_Official Twitter account, which is still active on the social media site.

Myanmar's Anti-Terrorism Central Committee, meanwhile, declared ARSA a terrorist group on August 25, 2017, in accordance with the country's counter-terrorism law. ARSA is also considered a terrorist group in Malaysia.

ARSA is led by Ataullah abu Ammar Jununi aka Hafiz Tohar, a Rohingya born in Karachi, Pakistan, who grew up in Mecca, Saudi Arabia. Bertin Linter in the report ARSA linked to foreign extremist groups, mentions ARSAs second-ranking leader, as a person known only as Sharif, who comes from Chittagong in Bangladesh and does not appear in any of the groups propaganda videos. Sharif reportedly speaks with an Urdu accent, the official language of Pakistan. Other members of the ARSA leadership include a committee of Rohingya emigres in Saudi Arabia.

ARSA claims it is fighting on behalf of more than a million Rohingya, who have been denied the most basic rights, including citizenship, in Myanmar; as well as against the 'inhuman' condition of Rohingya refugees in Bangladesh. In a statement on May 10, 2023, Ataullah declared,

ARSA's ultimate objective is to repatriate the entire Rohingya community to their Ancestral land. Yet the current repatriation plan of the Genocidal Burmese Territory Military Regime is nothing but a scheme to mislead both the Rohingya and the International Community. The proposed establishment of temporary camps for a limited number of people only serves to relieve them from international pressures and avoid accountability for the Genocide committed against the Rohingya people.

The statement maintains that the only viable option for the safe repatriation of the Rohingya people is the establishment of a 'Safe Zone' under the 'Responsibility to Protect' (R2P).

ARSA operates in the Rakhine State and inside Bangladesh refugee camps.

A February 15, 2023, report placed before the Parliamentary Standing Committee of the Defence Ministry of Bangladesh, stated that ARSA was among 10 terrorist and dacoit gangs active in the Rohingya camps. The report added that Tambru's Konapara Camp, on the zero line (Bangladesh-Myanmar border), had become the centre point for ARSAs organisational operations, training, and control of drug smuggling and terrorist activities, due to a lack of regular patrolling and surveillance. The report stated that ARSA is active in Ukhia, Balukhali, Palangkhali (Ukhiya Sub-District) and Whykong (Teknaf Sub-District) of Bangladesh. Noting that ARSA controlled most of the camps, the report stated that ARSA and the Nabi Hussain dacoit gang often engaged in clashes over dominance and control, resulting in a series of murders.

In a February 24, 2022, interview, ARSA leader Ataullah claimed that his group had a cadre strength of 14,000 in Bangladesh and 2,000 in Myanmar.

Little is known about the financial backers of ARSA, but the International Crisis Group believes funding originates from an unnamed group of supporters in Mecca and Medina in Saudi Arabia. Four banks, including the Islami Bank, Al Arafa Islami Bank, Western Union, and Pubali Bank, which are located in the Rohingya refugee camps in the Cox's Bazar District, have been used by ARSA to receive international funding.

According to a recent report, Rohingya Camps Near the Border  a New Source of Insecurity? released on May 26, 2022, the Bangladesh Police described ARSA as the kingpins of the illegal trade across the BangladeshMyanmar border. The report added that, though ARSA was a Burmese terrorist organization, the group uses Bangladesh for their arms and Yaba trade (drugs trafficking), to raise revenues.

Interestingly, ARSA has revealed that it had received training from Tehrik-e-Taliban Pakistan (TTP). ARSA and the Bangladesh-based Jama'atul Mujahideen Bangladesh (JMB) are also linked and videos of joint undergoing arms training have surfaced on social media. Indeed, a statement by Ambassador Hau Do Suan, Permanent Representative of Myanmar to the United Nations, on Agenda Item 109 "Measures to Eliminate International Terrorism", at the Sixth Committee of the 74rd Session of the United Nations General Assembly, read:

We are concerned about the link between ARSA and international terrorist groups, including FTFs (Foreign Terrorist Fighters). Since its inception, ARSA has been reportedly guided and supported by foreign terrorists such as Al-Qaeda, ISIL, and Tehrik-e-Taliban Pakistan (TTP).

The threat to security from ARSA in Bangladesh, principally in the Rohingya refugee camps and surrounding area in Cox's Bazar District, has increased manifold in the recent past, as this group has intensified its efforts to establish its dominance in these areas. The resultant clashes with Rohingya camp leaders as well as other insurgent/criminal groups, have enormously vitiated the security environment, and it is likely that this sort of violence will continue.
New Delhi/UNI: The Parliamentary Standing Committee on Personnel, Public Grievances, Law, and Justice will hold a meeting on the Uniform Civil Code (UCC) here on Monday.

Committee head and BJP Rajya Sabha MP Sushil Modi said that the panel will seek the views of the stakeholders on the matter, and the meeting of the committee is non-political as the panel has members from all political parties.

"Members are reminded that the next meeting of the Department-related Parliamentary Standing Committee on Personnel, Public Grievances, Law, and Justice will be held at 3 pm on Monday, July 3, 2023," said the release on the committee's agenda.

The UCC proposes to formulate and implement personal laws for citizens that apply to all citizens equally regardless of their religion, sex, gender, and sexual orientation.

Currently, the personal laws of various communities are governed by their religious scriptures.

On the 14th of last month, the Law Commission of India solicited the views and ideas of the public and recognised religious organisations to examine the UCC. The public can send their views on the matter till the 14th of this month.

Meanwhile, Union Minister Piyush Goyal has expressed confidence that many parties will support the BJP on the Uniform Civil Code. Talking to a news agency, he said, "The Supreme Court had talked about bringing UCC into different judgements."

He alleged that before 2014, Congress only gave priority to appeasement politics and kept society divided.

The Uniform Civil Code comes under Article 44 of the Indian Constitution, which lays down that the state shall endeavour to secure a UCC for the citizens throughout the territory of India.

The objective of Article 44 of the Directive Principles in the Constitution is to address discrimination against vulnerable groups and harmonise diverse cultural groups across the country.

The Code calls for the formulation of one law for India, which would be applicable to all religious communities in matters such as marriage, divorce, inheritance, and adoption. Currently, the personal laws of various communities are governed by their religious scriptures.
Image Credit: Sharad Pawar Twitter

Mumbai/IBNS: Nationalist Congress Party (NCP) chief Sharad Pawar on Monday denied any "problem in the family" after his nephew Ajit Pawar led a mutiny within the outfit and joined the Shinde government with eight other MLAs.

Speaking to NDTV, Pawar said, "There's no problem in the family. We don't discuss politics in the family. Everyone takes their own decision."

In a sudden political development in Maharashtra, Ajit on Sunday split the legislative party and joined the state's NDA ministry with eight other MLAs.

Sixty-three-year-old Ajit Pawar has joined the state's NDA government for the second time since 2019, when he had a short-lived tryst as deputy CM before returning to the NCP fold in two days.

Ajit Pawar, so long the leader of the opposition, took over as the second Deputy Chief Minister (after BJP's Devendra Fadnavis) on Sunday as he was administered the oath by state Governor Ramesh Bais at Raj Bhavan here in the presence of NCP veteran Praful Patel - a longtime close confidant of Sharad Pawar.

Although Patel did not take oath as state minister, there is speculation that he may be inducted into the union ministry.

In a letter to the Governor, Ajit has claimed to have the support of 40 MLAs.
Image Credit: UNI

New Delhi/UNI: Senior BJP leader BS Yediyurappa said Union Minister Mansukh Mandaviya and party general secretary Vinod Tawade will visit Bengaluru as central observers for the election of the Leader of Opposition (LoP) in the state assembly.

"The central party leaders have told me that they would be sending two central observersVinod Tawade and Mansukh Mandaviyato Bengaluru for the election of LoP," he told reporters late Sunday night.

The duo would collect the opinions of all the Karnataka BJP legislators and submit a report to the central leadership, Yediyurappa said.

"After this, the central leadership will take a decision on the election of LoP in the state assembly," he said.

The central observers will also take the opinions of Karnataka party legislators on the anointing of Karnataka BJP President, Yediyurappa said.

The former Karnataka chief minister was in New Delhi to meet National BJP President JP Nadda and Union Home Minister Amit Shah for discussion on various state issues, including the election of LoP and the state BJP president's post.
UNI

Hyderabad: Former Uttar Pradesh Chief Minister and Samajwadi Party (SP) President Akhilesh Yadav on Monday called on opposition parties to unite in order to oust the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) from power at the Centre.

Speaking to media at Begumpet Airport, Yadav, who arrived in Hyderabad for a meeting with Chief Minister K Chandrasekhar Rao, emphasised that the primary objective of the opposition is to remove the BJP from power.

He stressed the need for opposition parties to come together against the BJP. Yadav stated that his visit is intended to discuss matters with CM KCR, emphasising that the common goal is to remove the BJP from power.

Earlier, he was received at the Begumpet Airport by Animal Husbandry Minister Srinivas Yadav, Roads and Buildings Minister Vemula Prasanth Reddy, MLC Palla Rajeswar Reddy and other BRS leaders.

He is expected to meet CM KCR at Pragathi Bhavan. Discussions on the national political situation, Uniform Civil Code, General elections, and other pertinent issues are expected to take place during the meeting.

Later, Yadav will depart for Uttar Pradesh, as per the sources.

(With UNI Inputs)
Wikipedia Commons

New Delhi: The Deputy Secretary-General (DSG) of the United Nations Amina J. Mohammed is paying an official visit to India from 3-5 July 2023.

This is her first visit to India since her reappointment as the UN Deputy Secretary General for a second five-year term in January 2022.

"During her visit, DSG will have meetings with External Affairs Minister Dr. S. Jaishankar, Finance Minister Smt. Nirmala Sitharaman, Minister for Environment, Forest & Climate Change Shri Bhupender Yadav, MoS for External Affairs and Parliamentary Affairs Shri V. Muraleedharan, Vice Chairman of NITI Aayog, Shri Suman Bery, and Indias G20 Sherpa, Shri Amitabh Kant," read a statement issued by the Ministry of External Affairs.

DSG will also be travelling to Bengaluru where she will be interacting with experts from premier information and technology research institutions and industry representatives to discuss Indias achievements in the digital technology domain that could be replicated in the Global South for addressing developmental challenges.

DSGs visit to India will be an opportunity to exchange views on Indias ongoing G20 Presidency and its achievements in Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) ahead of the SDG Summit in September this year, and issues related to Climate Action in context of developmental priorities.

The visit is a reflection of Indias abiding commitment to multilateralism, including through its contribution to the UN and its ongoing G20 Presidency, in addressing global challenges meaningfully.
Despite a flagging economy, Pakistan continues to support and instigate acts of terrorism, escalating tensions with its neighbours, particularly in the region of Jammu and Kashmir, and Punjab.

Officials familiar with the evolving situation report that Pakistans strategy has shifted. Instead of targeting Kashmiri civilians and minorities as previously seen, Pakistan is now believed to be training and arming highly-skilled terrorists to carry out guerilla attacks on security forces, particularly targeting security convoys, camps, and patrols.

A focal point of this new strategy appears to be the districts of Jammu, Rajouri, Poonch, and Reasi. Officials suggest, under the veil of anonymity, that Islamabad is intent on reigniting militant activities in these regions. Meanwhile, the Indian security forces are already adapting their response to this recalibrated threat.

Evidence for this strategic shift was seen in the recent ambushes on security personnel in Rajouri and Poonch. The level of planning and sophistication in the attacks, including the use of guerrilla warfare tactics, indicates the handiwork of highly trained operatives. Authorities estimate there could be 30 to 40 such trained terrorists operating in Poonch and Rajouri.

The changing strategy seems to be an attempt by Pakistan to avoid the scrutiny of the Financial Action Task Force (FATF), which removed Pakistan from its grey list last October. By focusing on military targets instead of civilians, Pakistan may be hoping to remain under the radar, whilst also preventing local backlash due to civilian casualties.

The change in tactics, however, does not indicate any decrease in Pakistans commitment to destabilising its neighbours. Instead, it is an evolution in its approach, with signs of more direct involvement of Pakistans army in these operations.

Evidence suggests that the command structure of terrorist operations is also shifting towards Jammu. In addition, there are reports that Pakistan continues to use various methods to fund these activities, despite a crackdown on traditional funding channels.

Indian security and intelligence agencies are closely monitoring this shift. Regular meetings are held to strategise, assess, and counter this evolving threat. Furthermore, the Central Reserve Police Force and Jammu and Kashmir police have already provided weapons training to nearly 1000 village defence guards, thereby bolstering their self-defence capabilities.

While security forces are putting pressure on the terrorist activities, it is clear that despite its own crumbling economy, Pakistan continues to foster instability in the region. The relentless sponsorship of terrorism underscores Pakistans persistent priorities, putting geopolitical unrest ahead of its own economic recovery.



(Image and Text credit: Khalsavox.com)
Image: Twitter/Ajit Pawar

Mumbai: The rebel group of the Nationalist Congress Party (NCP) Monday followed the example set by the breakaway Shiv Sena faction led by Maharashtra Chief Minister Eknath Shinde and declared its own "group" as well as "state unit" leaders.

The rebel faction also "sacked" Jayant Patil, the state chief of the faction led by Sharad Pawar and declared Ajit Pawar as the "Group Leader" of the party.

On being asked who is the party's national president, the "Group Leader" responded that "Sharad Pawar is the national president" adding more complexities to the issue.

"We request Sharad Pawar to accept the decision of the majority in the party. We want his blessings," said Praful Patel, who was sacked from the NCP a short while ago.

"If there's any issue within the party, the Election Commission of India decides who has the party and symbol," Ajit Pawar added.

Earlier in the day, Sharad Pawar warned rebel MLAs that the party would show them their places.

"The NCP would show these MLAs their places. Maharashtrians would answer those who split the NCP," said Pawar, addressing a gathering at the Priti-Sangam memorial of Maharashtra's first chief minister Yashwant Rao Chavan at Karad of Satara district.

He said the late Yashwant Rao Chavan had created a new generation of politicians in the state by backing the youths in every district of the state and ensuring development.

Pawar's comments came a day after nine NCP legislators led by his nephew and senior leader Ajit Pawar engineered a split in the party and joined the NDA ministry of chief minister Eknath Shinde.

Ajit Pawar took oath as Deputy Chief Minister in the presence of several senior party leaders including Sharad Pawar's longtime confidant Praful Patel.

Jayant Patil late on Sunday night said that a disqualification petition was filed with the assembly speaker by mail against 9 MLAs, including Ajit Pawar after they acted against the party interest and joined the Shinde-Fadnavis government.
Chennai: A 34-year-old man was arrested while trying to escape the country for his alleged involvement in a fraudulent scheme involving fake input tax credit, media reports said.

Under the scheme the accused created fictitious companies under the names of underprivileged individuals in Chennai and issued false invoices, resulting in a government loss of Rs 176 crore.

According to the Goods and Services Tax (GST) Intelligence Unit, the suspect and his associates obtained the Aadhaar and PAN details of poor people by offering them bank loans, subsequently establishing numerous fictitious companies using their identities.

"Many companies had engaged this alleged mastermind, who had created fictitious companies and raised invoices to the tune of Rs 175.88 crore for a taxable value of Rs 973.64 crore," an official from the GST Intelligence Unit in Chennai was quoted as saying by NDTV.

Following the arrest of an accomplice on June 22, the alleged mastermind was apprehended the following day at Bengaluru airport while attempting to flee the country.

The arrest took place based on information provided by the associate during interrogation.

According to officials, the fraudsters involved in the racket used calculated means to carry out their fraudulent activities like remote access software, using foreign SIM cards, and possessing exclusive phones.

However, the intelligence unit was able to apprehend them by employing techniques like IP address tracking, analysing cryptic WhatsApp conversations, and conducting coordinated searches at multiple locations.

Action has been taken against the fraudulent individuals involved in the racket, the GST Intelligence Unit.

As many as 25 bank accounts linked to the fraud have been frozen, 20 GST registrations associated with the fictitious companies have been cancelled, and various items including mobile phones, modems, laptops, and SIM cards have been seized as evidence.
Image credit: UNI

Mumbai/IBNS: The battle for supremacy over the Nationalist Congress Party (NCP) intensified on Monday amidst ongoing political turmoil in Maharashtra.

On one hand party's national president Sharad Pawar started taking action against Ajit Pawar and his associates, while on the other hand, his nephew Ajit Pawar removed the old timers from the post.

It started when Pawar Senior expelled MPs Praful Patel and Sunil Tatkare from the party but some time later, the Ajit Pawar faction removed Jayant Patil from the post of NCP state president and appointed Sunil Tatkare in his place.

After Sharad Pawar's action, Ajit Pawar and Praful Patel called a presser this evening and announced that Sunil Tatkare would be the new state president of the party.

He will take over this responsibility in place of Jayant Patil, they said and informed that Patil has been informed about his removal from the post.

The Speaker of the Assembly has also been informed about this latest development, said Patel.

Patel also announced that Anil Bhaidas Patil would continue as the Chief Whip of NCP in the Maharashtra Assembly.

Earlier in the day, Sharad Pawar warned rebel MLAs that the party would show them their places.

"The NCP would show these MLAs their places. Maharashtrians would answer those who split the NCP," said Pawar, addressing a gathering at the Priti-Sangam memorial of Maharashtra's first chief minister Yashwant Rao Chavan at Karad of Satara district.

He said the late Yashwant Rao Chavan had created a new generation of politicians in the state by backing the youths in every district of the state and ensuring development.

Pawar's comments came a day after nine NCP legislators led by his nephew and senior leader Ajit Pawar engineered a split in the party and joined the NDA ministry of chief minister Eknath Shinde.

Ajit Pawar took oath as Deputy Chief Minister in the presence of several senior party leaders including Sharad Pawar's longtime confidant Praful Patel.

Jayant Patil late on Sunday night said that a disqualification petition was filed with the assembly speaker by mail against 9 MLAs, including Ajit Pawar after they acted against the party interest and joined the Shinde-Fadnavis government.



[With UNI inputs]
Image: Unsplash

On June 27, 2023, the Counter Terrorism Department (CTD) arrested 10 terrorists, including an Islamic State woman terrorist, during multiple raids across Punjab, Pakistan. The raids were conducted in Multan, Bahawalpur and Dera Ghazi Khan Districts. Explosive materials, hand grenades, material used in making suicide jackets, and cash were also recovered from the arrested terrorists.

On June 24, the CTD arrested nine suspected terrorists along with arms and ammunition in 33 separate Intelligence-Based Operations (IBOs) in several Districts of Punjab. The arrestees were identified as Naveed Khan, Ghulam Hussain, Ghulam Abbas, Owais Ahmed, and Akhwanzada of the Tehreek-e-Taliban Pakistan (TTP); Muhammad Saif Afridi, Muhammad Hussain Masdani, and Umar Ismail of the Islamic State; and Khurram Shahzad of Al-Qaeda.

On June 21, the CTD arrested four TTP terrorists during IBOs in different cities of Punjab. The terrorists, identified as Zahid, Naimat, Zubair and Abdul Ghafoor, were arrested in Sheikhupura, Sargodha, Sahiwal and Rawalpindi cities. Explosive materials, equipment, mobile phones and cash were recovered from their possession.

On June 17, the CTD arrested six suspected terrorists during IBOs in different areas of the province  three from Multan, two from Gujranwala, and one from Dera Ghazi Khan (DG Khan). The arrested cadres were Liaquatullah, Nadeem Khan and Inayatullah, all from TTP; Muhammad Younis of the Sipah-e-Sahaba Pakistan (SSP); Muhammad Ammar, Islamic State; and Ijaz Ahmed, Lashkar-e-Jhangvi (LeJ).

According to partial data compiled by the South Asia Terrorism Portal (SATP), Security Forces have already arrested at least 152 terrorists of different outfits from Punjab, in 2023 (data till July 2).

The Punjab CTD annual performance report for the year 2022 released on January 3, 2023, stated that 1,225 IBOs were conducted across the province, in which 244 suspects were arrested and 782 recoveries were made. The recoveries included 64.36 kilograms of explosives, 48 hand grenades, 253 detonators, seven batteries and 215 meters of prima cord, three SMGs, 40 pistols, 324 bullets and three magazines.

Though the number of terrorists among the 244 arrested suspects was not specified, according to SATP, 71 terrorists were arrested in 2022. On year-on-year basis, 2023, with six months still to go, has already recorded the highest number of terrorist arrests since 2019, when there were 277 such arrests. There were 39 such arrests in 2020 and 51 in 2021.

Meanwhile, another report released by Punjab Police on January 12, 2023, revealed that the Police had killed 612 suspects in as many as 544 Police encounters between 2018 and 2022 (till September). The report stated that 67 suspects were killed in shootouts in 2018, 69 in 2019, 166 in 2020, 186 in 2021, and 124 (till September) in 2022. The number of terrorists in these fatalities was not specified, but SATP data indicates that at least 40 terrorists were killed during period: 2018 (14), 2019 (seven), 2020 (13), 2021 (six) and 2022 (0). While one terrorist was killed in the remaining period of 2022 (in the month of November), 11 terrorists have already bene killed in 2023.

Some of the prominent terrorists killed during 2023 and 2022 included:

April 18, 2023: The CTD killed two senior TTP terrorists during a shootout in the Rajanpur District of Punjab.

February 17, 2023: The CTD repulsed an attack by terrorists on SFs in the Kala Bagh Town of Mianwali District in Punjab, killing a TTP commander, Habib-ur-Rehman.

February 8, 2023: One TTP commander, Irfanullah, was killed following an exchange of fire between CTD and a group of terrorists in the Khanewal District of Punjab.

Punjab Police data indicates that the number of Police officers killed in the line of duty during this period (2018 to September 2022) was 57. No SF fatality was recorded between October and December 2022, according to SATP data, but three SF personnel have already been killed in the current year.

Meanwhile, civilian fatalities in terrorism-linked violence have been on rise since 2021 after a low of three in 2020. The number jumped to nine in 2021 and increased further to 10 in 2022. Six civilian deaths have already been recorded in the current year, underlining the worsening security situation in the province.

Meanwhile, TTP is trying to further strengthen its base in Punjab. Indeed, according to a June 15, 2023, report, TTP announced establishment of two new administrative units  North Punjab, headed by Syed Hilal Ghazi; and South Punjab, headed by Muhammad Umar Muawiya.

It is significant that Samaa TV in a report on March 2, 2023, quoted an unnamed CTD official as stating that around two dozen terrorists were in touch with their handlers in Afghanistan and Syria, and were planning to hit sensitive installations in south Punjab. The report also noted that CTD teams had arrested 89 TTP operatives over a period of 11 months in different cities of Punjab.

Inputs further indicate that TTP is now collaborating with local criminal groups. On April 21, 2023, Usman Anwar, Inspector General (IG) of Punjab Police revealed that TTP was collaborating with miscreants and criminals in the area, to disrupt peace. According to Anwar, CTD had confirmed phone calls between TTP and Katchi gang criminals in the area, tying TTP to organized crime groups. He was speaking to the media after an operation against criminals in the Katcha Rajwani area of Sadiqabad tehsil (revenue unit) in Rahim Yar Khan District. The Punjab Police had launched a grand operation against robbers, dacoits and kidnappers in the katcha area on April 9, 2023. The katcha (riverine) area of south Punjab is spread over 15,000 square kilometres on both sides of the Indus River. The forces launched the operation against criminals hiding there after it had become a no-go area for law-enforcement agencies.

As the political, economic and security environment in the country worsens, terrorist activities have also increased on the ground, in Punjab, as well as in the rest of Pakistan. Despite operational successes, this downward spiral is unlikely to be checked unless a high measure of stability is restored across the country, and the inherent contradictions  particularly the increasingly strained relations with the Afghan Taliban, which have given the TTP safe haven and spaces for consolidation across the border  are not addressed.
Pixabay

Washington: US Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen will travel to China this week to discuss a range of issues, including global challenges, with Chinese officials, the US Department of the Treasury informs.

"Secretary of the Treasury Janet L. Yellen will travel to Beijing, the Peoples Republic of China (PRC) from July 6-9 for meetings with senior PRC officials," the Treasury Department said on Sunday, adding that "Yellens travel follows [US] President [Joe] Bidens directive after his meeting with [Chinese] President Xi [Jinping[ last November to deepen communication between the U.S. and the PRC on a range of issues, including on the global macroeconomy and financial developments."

Yellen plans to discuss the US-China relationship with Chinese officials, the release specified.

"While in Beijing, Secretary Yellen will discuss with PRC officials the importance for our countries  as the worlds two largest economies  to responsibly manage our relationship, communicate directly about areas of concern, and work together to address global challenges," the Treasury Department said.

On Wednesday, Yellen told US broadcaster MSNBC that she hoped her upcoming visit to China would help Beijing and Washington re-establish contacts between leaders and senior officials of the two countries, as well as ensure "healthy competition."

The US treasury secretary is going to be the second Biden administration official to travel to Beijing after a souring in relations between the two countries. Earlier in June, US Secretary of State Antony Blinken made a trip to Beijing, where he met with Chinese President Xi Jinping and other senior officials.

(With UNI Inputs)
Image Credit: Videograb

The grandmother of the 17-year-old teen who was shot dead in a Paris suburb, an episode which triggered violent riots in the country, has called for an end to the violence.

France has been witnessing several nights of rioting and violence since the death of the teen.

Victim Nahel Merzouks grandmother appealed to protesters on Sunday, telling CNNs affiliate BFMTV: They should not damage the schools, not break the buses, it was the moms who take the buses.

Im tired, the grandmother, identified by BMFTV as Nadia, said, adding that Nahels mother, doesnt have a life anymore.

How did the violence start?

Nahel M. was shot dead in the Paris suburb of Nanterre on Tuesday morning after he refused to comply with police orders during a traffic stop.

The officer who pulled the trigger on the teenager has been charged with voluntary manslaughter and is in custody.

The fatal police shooting sparked riots across the country.

Violent protesters have clashed with police and set fire to public buildings and vehicles.

Hundreds of protesters have been detained.
UNI/Xinhua

Residents of Panjshir province in Afghanistan have complained that several school buildings are currently being used by the Taliban as military outposts.

The residents urged the Taliban government to shift them to military bases.

This is a reality, and it should not be ignored that they are settled in the schools. We are witnessing that the military has settled in the schools, and it affects the morale of the students and people, Samiullah Sadeqqi, a resident of Panjshir, told Tolo News.

The military is in a school in Bazarak and thus there is less attention to schooling, Abid, a resident of Panjshir, told the news portal.

The residents said the presence of the military was also causing panic in the area.

The military are in the schools and villages. We call on the Islamic Emirate to pull back the military from this area, Mian Ahmad Elham, a resident of Panjshir, told Tolo News.

If this issue is followed by the senior leaders who prevent such actions, it will be great, said Rizwanullah, a resident of Panjshir.

Reacting to the incident, Taliban spokesman Zabiullah Mujahid told Tolo News: " We shared this issue with the officials in Panjshir to find a substitute path for the military who are settled there to prevent security issues, so that the schools will be evacuated. We also shared this issue with the education ministry."
Pixabay

Taipei: A US Congressional delegation led by Republican Study Committee (RSC) Chairman Kevin Hern has arrived in Taiwan for a five-day visit to hold meetings with the island's leadership and discuss bilateral relations, the Taiwanese Foreign Ministry said on Monday.

"#US [RSC Chairman Kevin Hern] is leading a [House Republicans] delegation to #Taiwan including [Rep. Burgess Owens], [Rep. Mike Flood], [Rep. Mike Collins], [Rep. Russell Fry] & [Rep. Keith Self]. We look forward to discussing our shared priorities during our steadfast friends' 5-day visit," the foreign ministry tweeted.

The visit will take place from July 3-7, with its agenda including meetings with Taiwanese President Tsai Ing-wen, Foreign Minister Joseph Wu and other senior officials.

The US delegation will also visit analytic centers to discuss the issues related to Taipei-Washington relations.

Taiwan has been governed independently from mainland China since 1949.

Beijing regards the island as its province, while Taiwan maintains that it is an autonomous entity but stops short of declaring independence.

Beijing opposes any official foreign contacts with Taipei and regards Chinese sovereignty over the island as indisputable.

The latest escalation around Taiwan took place in April, when Taiwanese President Tsai Ing-wen met with US House Speaker Kevin McCarthy in California.

Beijing responded by launching massive three-day military drills near the island in what it called a "warning" to Taiwanese separatists and foreign powers.

(With UNI Inputs)
Montgomery College Takoma Park / Silver Spring Facebook page

New York: A college professor in the USA has been removed from the USA after he allegedly asked female students to remove their shirts.

The U.S. Department of Educations Office for Civil Rights (OCR) said it has resolved a sexual harassment investigation of the Takoma/Silver Spring Campus of Montgomery College in Maryland.

OCR determined that the college complied with the applicable requirements of Title IX by conducting a prompt and equitable investigation of harassment allegations against a professor, US Department of Education said in a statement.

However, OCRs investigation identified a Title IX compliance concern based on the college not having provided all affected students with notification that the college had completed the investigation, that the colleges investigation confirmed the existence of a hostile environment based on sex, and that the college had taken steps designed to end that hostile environment for students impacted by the professors harassing conduct.

OCRs investigation established that a college professor engaged in sexual harassment of female students during a class he taught by requiring the students to remove their shirts and wear only their bras  and then commenting on their bodies  ostensibly to demonstrate a medical assessment, despite the fact that the assessment did not require the clothing removal, or the bodily commentary.

In response to student reports of the harassment they experienced, including targeted harassment after class from the professor, the college immediately placed the professor on paid administrative leave and notified him of the allegations.

Consistent with Title IX obligations, the colleges Title IX Coordinator emailed all students in the professors class to advise them that the college would be conducting a formal investigation, and that he was available to assist any student in reporting the incident to the police.

He also offered to interview all students in the class, or, alternatively, to accept written statements.

In addition, he provided all students in the class with a copy of the colleges Title IX Policy and information about available college and community resources, services and interim remedies.

The college interviewed students from the professors class, students from another section of the class taught by the professor, the department chair, and other student witnesses.

Within approximately three months of the initial report of the professors harassment, the colleges investigation confirmed that the professors conduct created a hostile environment on the basis of sex.

The college terminated the professors employment and the college provided written notice of the outcome of its investigation to the student in the class who initially reported experiencing sexual harassment.

The college also offered supportive services to affected students and coordinated counseling within days of the incident for at least one student in the class and provided academic assistance and tuition reimbursement for several other students in the class.

Despite these effective Title IX steps, the college did not notify all affected students regarding the conclusion of its investigation.

This lack of notification raises a concern that the college may not have taken necessary steps to ensure that a hostile environment did not persist for affected students.

The resolution agreement requires the college to notify in writing all students in the professors class that the college completed its investigation of the sexual harassment complaint against the professor.

The agreement also requires the college to provide OCR with the results of its 2022 Title IX climate survey and provide for OCRs review a narrative summary of the steps it has taken in response to any concerns raised by that survey in order for OCR to determine whether the college needs to take any additional steps to ensure college students are able to access their education free from discrimination.

The shameful underlying facts in this investigation  of a college professor subjecting his entire class to sexual harassment as a condition of instruction  are galling and categorically unacceptable under Title IX, said Assistant Secretary for Civil Rights Catherine E. Lhamon. I am deeply grateful to Montgomery College for swiftly responding with a thorough investigation and action to address the effects of the hostile environment created by the professor on the students in his class, and I appreciate the additional commitment Montgomery College made to fulfill its remaining obligation under Title IX to ensure that the discriminatory effects end for all its students.
Mahbub ul Haq is known for his contribution to the notion of "human development, which emphasised the human dimension of development policy. The objective is to create an enabling environment for people to enjoy long, healthy, and creative lives. Haq led a multifaceted life as an economist, politician, diplomat, and propagandist.

Haq was born in 1934 in Jammu, in pre-partition India. He even served his government as finance, commerce, and planning minister until 1988. He has done more for the human development agenda as a finance minister than any of his predecessors. In 1989, Haq moved to New York to work as a special advisor to the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) administrator and set up the Human Development Report Office to produce an annual report.

Human Development Reports (HDR) have been published annually since 1990 by UNDP and have received as much attention as no other UN report. In less than a decade, it has become an agenda for action for the government and NGOs in terms of development economics.



Ecotalker.wordpress

Human development was originally defined as a "process of expanding peoples choices." Widening the choices to live a healthy life, to be educated, and to have access to resources. Additional choices include political freedom and guaranteed human rights.



Another aspect of human development is the "formation of human capabilities," such as improved skills and knowledge. When capabilities are enhanced, his choices also widen, and he is capable of exercising his choices. The subsequent HDRs elaborated on the definition by including the role of good governancestate, civil society, and MNCsin creating an enabling environment.



Haq constructed the Human Development Index (HDI), which measures human development in terms of longevity, knowledge, and living standards, with equal weight assigned to each. Longevity is measured by life expectancy at birth; knowledge is measured by a combination of adult literacy and combined primary, secondary, and tertiary enrollment ratios; and, finally, standard of living is measured by real GDP per capita valued in terms of purchasing power parity. The HDRs have shown that north-south gaps have been bridged in terms of human development indicators.



Gender Dimensions of Human Development

At the Beijing Womens Conference, Haq mentioned that "human development, if not engendered, is endangered". He stressed the gender bias in development, showing that in no society do women enjoy the same opportunities as men. HDR 95 introduced two new measures of gender inequality: GDI (gender-related HDI) and GEM (gender empowerment measure).

Wikipedia

Analysis of GDI data shows that gender inequality doesnt depend on the income level of society, with gender inequality prevalent in both developed and developing countries. Although inequality has been reduced in education and health, there is still a gender gap in access to economic and political opportunities.



Countries like Denmark and Finland have high womens representation in parliament, but that's not the case with other industrial countries. The gender bias against women takes place in the form of female feticide, infanticide, nutritional deprivation of the girl child, and not paying for the non-market work of women. Together, these result in effectively curtailing the choices and capabilities of women.

Zakir abbas

Haq faced the inequities in the established global economic order, and he called for reform in all the internment institutions to focus on human development. Including multilateral institutions like the World Bank, International Monetary Fund (IMF), GATT, and UNEP.



The proposal by economist James Tobin to impose a levy on international currency transactions will yield enough revenue to finance the entire human development agenda. The HDRs have also urged other countries that have high defense budgets to consider diverting resources from military uses to peaceful purposes.



References

Sanjaya Baru (Aug 29, 1998) Mahbub ul Haq and Human Development: A Tribute (Economic and Political weekly) from JSTOR
The air defense identification zone is the airspace of the country as well as additional areas of water and land in which a country tries to identify, locate, and control any civil aircraft except military aircraft in the interest of national security. For the air above its territory and territorial waters, there are no international rules governing air defence zones.



Legally, no international law restricts a state from establishing an ADIZ in international airspace adjacent to its national airspace. A state establishing ADIZ is seen as having the right to establish reasonable conditions of entry into its land and national airspace.

This is similar to a port asking for entry requirements for ships that are entering internal waters or a port. An aircraft coming near national airspace is required to provide identification even while in international airspace.

The Chicago Convention (Convention of International Civil Aviation) codified customary international law on state sovereignty over airspace. Article 1 of the Convention recognizes that every state has complete and exclusive sovereignty over the airspace above its territory. The concept of an ADIZ is not defined in any international treaty and is not regulated by any international body.

Roughly, there are around 20 states that have established ADIZs in international airspace adjacent to their coasts. The United States was the first country to establish AIDZ in 1950, when it created a joint North American ADIZ with Canada. They also ate Japanese ADIZ in 1951 and later transferred the management power of the zone to Japan in 1969. Other Indo-Pacific nations that claim ADIZs include Bangladesh, China, India, Pakistan, and Taiwan.

Chinas ADIZ Regulations

In November 2013, China established an ADIZ over much of the East China Sea. They have a process for aircraft identification that must be followed by all aircraft entering their zone. Aircraft that do not cooperate based on their terms of instructions from the Chinese authorities will be subjected to undefined "defensive emergency measures."

With no restrictions on a state implementing ADIZ, the manner in which Beijing implements its ADIZ is inconsistent with international law.

BCCL/Representational Image

As weve seen, an aircraft that is approaching a states national airspace is required to follow the identification process while in international airspace, but only as a condition of entry approval. Chinas ADIZ procedure requirements are different.

The identification procedure applies to all aircraft transiting the zone, regardless of whether they intend to enter Chinese national airspace. It is perceived that Chinas ADIZ procedures are inconsistent with international law.

Air Defense Identification Zone in India

BCCL/Representational Image

India established ADIZ in the mid-twentieth century. Among other rules, notifications are required 10 minutes prior to entry. India has demarcated six ADIZ near its territory. They are on the international border with Pakistan, Nepal, Bangladesh, Bhutan, and Myanmar; over the Line of Actual Control with China; and two in the southern region of India.

The Indian Air Force is solely responsible for the military enforcement of the ADIZ in India. Aircraft and surface-to-air missiles of the IAF, with elements of the Army and Navy participating in their specific areas, where required, carry out interceptions. Civil aviation authorities, in conjunction with the IAF, also assist in this process by ensuring regulatory and control measures.
In a surprising turn of events, a man has taken a bold step in pursuing love by marrying an alligator-like reptile known as a caiman. The extraordinary union took place in a traditional ceremony, showcasing the man's unique devotion to this marsh and mangrove-dwelling creature native to Mexico and Central America.

Following a tumultuous breakup, the man was disenchanted with the dating scene and contemplated giving up on finding his perfect match.

However, he embarked on an unconventional path, drawn to caimans' distinctive qualities and hoping to discover a different connection.

In a remarkable display of cultural significance and unity, Victor Hugo Sosa, the Mayor of San Pedro Huamelula in Oaxaca State, southern Mexico, recently married a caiman named Alicia Adriana on June 30, 2023.



The marriage ceremony was a reenactment of an ancestral ritual with deep historical roots. It commemorated the reconciliation between the Chontal and Huave Indigenous groups, whose longstanding rivalry was historically resolved through a marriage alliance.

The tradition of a man marrying a female caiman has been practiced for over 230 years in San Pedro Huamelula.

In local legend, the man symbolizes the Chontal king, while the caiman represents a Huave princess girl.

According to Jaime Zarate, a chronicler of San Pedro Huamelula, the union symbolizes a connection with "the emblem of Mother Earth," where both sides seek blessings from the all-powerful for rain, seed germination, and the overall well-being of the Chontal community.

The marriage is believed to bring luck and prosperity to the town.

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Mayor Sosa expressed his love for Adriana during the ceremony: "I accept responsibility because we love each other. That is what is important. You can't have a marriage without love. I yield to marriage with the princess girl," Sosa said during the ritual, as quoted by the news agency AFP.



The celebrations included multiple symbolic gestures. Adriana initially wore a green skirt, tunic, and headdress, representing her cultural significance. She later underwent an outfit change, donning a white dress and veil.

For safety measures, precautions were taken, and Adriana's mouth was bound, acknowledging her status as a reptile with sharp teeth. The caiman was paraded around the community, where locals danced with and held her before the wedding ceremony took place at the town hall.

The festive atmosphere continued after the wedding as her new husband carried Adriana through the streets. Traditional music filled the air, and the caiman received a kiss on the head, further symbolizing their union.

Mayor Sosa expressed joy at the event: "We are happy because we celebrate the union of two cultures. People are content."

This unique and culturally significant ceremony highlights the rich traditions and harmonious coexistence of different cultures within San Pedro Huamelula.

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Air travel often brings about a range of emotions, from excitement to mild discomfort. However, a recent incident on a flight has left passengers in a state of unexpected distress.

The presence of blood in an airplane cabin is not something passengers anticipate, and the shocking nature of this occurrence has sparked concerns and raised questions about passenger safety and aircraft cleanliness.



Twitter

A passenger named Habib Battah experienced a distressing incident while onboard an Air France plane. During his flight from Paris to Toronto, he discovered a carpet drenched in blood, leaving him terrified.



Twitter

He shared his harrowing experience onboard an Air France flight:

I've seen a few things in my life, but the horrific blood-soaked carpet on my @airfrance plane yesterday was another level! An hour into the transatlantic flight from Paris to Toronto, I kept smelling something gross and couldn't figure it out. Until I got up and looked down...(1 pic.twitter.com/if919aLlO8  Habib Battah (@habib_b) July 1, 2023

"I've seen a few things in my life, but yesterday's horrific blood-soaked carpet on my @airfrance plane was another level! An hour into the transatlantic flight from Paris to Toronto, I kept smelling something gross and couldn't figure it out."

Mr. Battah took to social media, sharing pictures and a video of himself cleaning the blood-soaked items. In a subsequent tweet, he recounted how he noticed a stain on the floor that emitted a foul odor.

He sought assistance from airline staff and was provided wipes to clean the stain, only to discover that the substance was blood.

I noticed a big stain across the whole carpet of the seats. It was wet to touch. At first the @airfrance attendant shrugged and gave me some wipes. In my broken French told her it smelled like merde (shit). Then the wipes came up blood red. I used over a dozen of them... (2 pic.twitter.com/tEg5hXX95f  Habib Battah (@habib_b) July 1, 2023

He added, "I took out my backpack from under the seat, and the strap was soaked in blood too. I got on my hands and knees and cleaned for half an hour. The Air France staff gave me gloves and more wipes. Then they casually noted a passenger had hemorrhaged on a flight before ours."

I took out my backpack from under the seat and the strap was soaked in blood too. I got on my hands and knees and cleaned for half an hour. The @airfrance staff gave me gloves and more wipes. Then they casually noted a passenger had hemorrhaged on a flight before ours. (3 pic.twitter.com/yVW7n9w0MY  Habib Battah (@habib_b) July 1, 2023

In another tweet, Mr. Battah expressed his contemplation regarding the unfortunate situation where a fellow passenger had seemingly lost significant blood.

Here I am trying to get the blood off my luggage that it absorbed from the airplane carpet. The @airfrance staff crowded around, shocked because they claimed a cleaning crew had removed the seats after the sick passenger incident, but apparently not cleaned the floor. (4 pic.twitter.com/X59rYkvaAW  Habib Battah (@habib_b) July 1, 2023

"I just kept wondering what happened to this poor passenger that lost this much blood and how it happened." One Air France staff member mentioned internal bleeding and infection. What if it was a disease? Would I or any other passengers be exposed to it?"

I just kept wondering what happened to this poor passenger that lost this much blood and how did it happen. One @airfrance staff member mentioned internal bleeding and infection. What if it was a disease-would I or any other passengers be exposed? @BEA_Aero @TSBCanada (5  Habib Battah (@habib_b) July 1, 2023

In response to the viral tweet, Air France issued a statement saying,

"Hi @habib_b, This particular matter is being taken into account, and you will be contacted by our teams as soon as possible. Once again, we apologize for any inconvenience caused. Thank you."

Hi @habib_b, this particular matter is being taken into account and you will be contacted by our teams as soon as possible. Once again, we apologize for any inconvenience caused.

Thank you.  Air France (@airfrance) July 3, 2023

Air France acknowledged the concerns raised by users on social media regarding the distressing incident of the blood-soaked carpet on the flight.

The airline regretted the situation and stated that appropriate measures would be taken to investigate and address the issue. The response from Air France comes as users expressed shock and concern over the incident.

For more trending stories, follow us on Telegram.


Prime Minister Kyriakos Mitsotakis will visit the Ministry of Health at 10:00 in the morning on Tuesday
The first vice-president of the previous parliament , Nikitas Kaklamanis, will preside over the proceedings, assisted by four temporary secretaries who are the youngest MPs of the two parties with the most seats.
The legal team of the 2023 Labour Party (LP) presidential candidate, Peter Obi has slammed the Independent National Electoral Commission (INEC) over its inability to present witnesses before the Presidential Election Petition Tribunal on Monday.

Speaking with newsmen outside the court premises on Monday, the head of Obis legal team, Livy Uzoukwu (SAN) said INECs action is further evidence that the electoral body is not ready to defend the outcome of the 2023 presidential election in court.

Uzoukwu made this known on Monday, shortly after the court adjourned its resumed sitting, following the absence of INECs first defence witness.

The Labour Partys lawyer said his team has a strong case and are ready to move on with their case, said INEC has continued to show inconsistencies.

He however added that he stands to be proven wrong.

The lawyer wondered why no explanation was given by INEC for the two other witnesses after it cited domestic reasons for the absence of the first witness in court.

I am sure that they are not ready to defend this case. I stand to be proved wrong but I wish they defend this matter so that the public will come to see more things, Uzoukwu said.

READ MORE: 2023 Elections Lacked Transparency, Trust In INEC Severely Damaged  EU

I continue to say that we have never had an election like this last one, he added.

INFORMATION NIGERIA reports that INEC, the first respondent in the petition by Peter Obi and the Labour Party (LP) before the Tribunal, was scheduled to open its defence today. The electoral body was however unable to do so due to the absence of its first witness.

At the mention of the case around 9:30 am, lawyer to INEC, Abubakar Mahmoud (SAN), told the court that although his client plans to call three witnesses within three days, the one slated for today is unavailable because of some family issues.

Lawyers to other parties in the case, Livy Uzoukwu (SAN) for Obi/LP, Wole Olanipekun (SAN) for President Bola Tinubu and Vice President Kashim Shettma, and Lateef Fagbemi (SAN) for the All Progressives Congress (APC), did not object to the request by Mahmoud.

This prompted the Tribunal led by Justice Haruna Tsammani to adjourn sitting till Tuesday, 4th July, 2023.
Phrank Shaibu, Special Assistant on Public Communication to the 2023 presidential candidate of the Peoples Democratic Party, Atiku Abubakar, has accused President Bola Ahmed Tinubu of planning to reward the immediate past Rivers State Governor, Nyesom Wike with a ministerial appointment.

According to him, the ministerial appointment was to appreciate Wike for rigging the presidential election in Rivers State to favour Tinubu.

He also maintained that the results in states like Rivers showed that the last presidential election was far from credible.

Shaibu in a signed statement, said it was tragic that Tinubu was planning on rewarding Wike with a ministerial portfolio despite the pending petition against the former Governor which has attracted nearly 300,000 votes.

READ ALSO: If Youre Not Corrupt, Walk Abuja Streets Without Security  COSEYL Challenges INEC Boss, Yakubu

The Presidential election in Rivers State was clearly rigged as evidenced by what INEC has uploaded on IREV.

So far, nearly 300,000 Nigerians have signed a petition on change.org demanding visa bans against Governor Wike.

Tinubu is now on the verge of appointing Wike as a minister as a reward for that disgraceful election.

What a shame. And this is the character who claimed to have fought for the actualisation of June 12? the statement read in part.
Less than two weeks after trustees of PSERS, Pennsylvanias public school pension system, narrowly voted to send another $130 million to Insight Partners, the New York venture capital firm has decided that it doesnt want that money after all.

The move follows Gov. Josh Shapiros unusual call for a do-over on that contested vote.

It also followed a civil enforcement action and fine on June 20 against Insight Partners by the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission, which said the firm has been overcharging investors by failing to cut fees when the value of its investments declines, violating its own contracts.

Shapiro didnt publicize his request, and PSERS and Insight had little to add.

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Simply put, PSERS commitment in Insight Partners XIII LP Fund is not moving forward, as the firms management no longer seeks to include PSERS as an investor in the fund, PSERS spokeswoman Evelyn Williams told The Inquirer in an emailed reply to questions.

Williams directed queries about why Insight withdrew to officials at Insights offices in New York, who didnt reply to inquiries seeking comment.

Shapiros office declined to comment.

Documents obtained by The Inquirer and accounts from sources at the pension system and state government show that Insight pulled out after PSERS board chair, Lower Merion teacher Chris Santa Maria, told fellow trustees that he had reluctantly agreed to Shapiros unusual request to revisit the June 9 vote to hire Insight.

At that meeting, state treasurer Stacy Garrity had listed several reasons for voting no on Insight: below average returns on some previous investments; Insights failure to give a satisfactory explanation for its investment in cryptocurrency exchange FTX, which federal prosecutors say was a fraudulent company; and concerns over Insights governance at a time when the SEC has been scrutinizing private-investment operations.

The Inquirer reported that close vote  and the fact that Shapiros acting secretaries of education and banking, who serve on the board, cast decisive votes in support of the Insight investment.

The secretaries gave other supporters, mostly school union representatives and their allies such as Rep. Matt Bradford, D-Chester, who usually rubber-stamp PSERS staff recommendations that come to a vote, just enough approvals to pass that deal, 8-6, over objections from Garrity and most other elected officials who serve on the board.

But the following week, Shapiros office asked Santa Maria to conduct a new vote, blaming his two appointees support for Insight on a miscommunication.

Shapiro has argued publicly against paying Wall Street private investments funds such as Insight, which he says tend to collect high fees but yield disappointing profits.

As head of Montgomery County government 10 years ago, Shapiro oversaw the dismissal of its private money-management firms and moved the capital to lower-cost index funds managed by locally based investment giants Vanguard and SEI.

In interviews, Shapiro has said he hopes to see similar changes at PSERS, which has one of the highest proportion of private investments among public pension fund in the United States, according to data from Boston Colleges retirement center and other fund-watchers. (The push for simpler investments crosses party lines; for example, Gov. Shapiro is a Democrat; treasurer Garrity, who has favored similar reforms, is a Republican.)

Critics have said PSERS missed out on billions in profits from the 2009-20 bull market by concentrating on high-fee, illiquid investments instead of rising U.S. stocks.

Supporters of the policy said it was designed to conserve capital in down markets.

Insight and the SEC

Top PSERS executives left in 2021 and 2022 amid federal and internal investigations of PSERS land deals in Harrisburg and its exaggerated investment returns. No one has been charged with wrongdoing, though litigation and review continue.

The board had already agreed to sell its hedge funds portfolios and direct real estate holdings over the next few years and to reduce its private-equity investments.

Shapiros call for a new vote wasnt the only knock against Insight since the June 9 action.

Eleven days after the PSERS vote, the SEC filed a civil complaint in Washington accusing Insight of charging excess management fees from 2017 to 2021 and failing to disclose that its fee calculation formula represented a conflict of interest because the firm could benefit from minimizing write-downs in the value of its investments to avoid cutting its fees.

Insight agreed to pay $2.4 million in penalty, fees, and interest to end the case.

Asked how much PSERS lost because of Insights overpricing, spokeswoman Williams said in an email message that PSERS investment staff is currently reviewing the Insight/SEC settlement and had no further comment.

Insights mixed record with PSERS

Since its founding in 1995 by University of Pennsylvania engineering and Wharton grad Jeff Horing, Insight has raised more than $90 billion to invest in more than 700 companies, many of them specialized software firms like photo-software developer Shutterstock and cloud-services builder Wix, and sought to sell them at big profits to other investors, including software giants such as Microsoft.

This wasnt Insights first approach to Pennsylvanias pension funds, which are largely financed by taxpayers, plus investment profits and payroll deductions from public workers. The state workers pension system, known as SERS, also uses Insight funds.

Insights record as a manager of PSERS money has been mixed. According to a report by a team of PSERS staffers last March, Insight had so far repaid a modest $44 million of the $522 million PSERS has pumped into seven Insight funds since 2018.

According to PSERS March report, Insight estimated that the pension system eventually will nearly double the money it invested with the firm in 2018-19, based on recent estimates of what the private companies it bought with PSERS cash were worth.

Indeed, Insight was among the firms that reaped the most from PSERS fees in recent years, including $74 million in shared profits and other PSERS fees for 2021.

But estimated returns are only modestly positive for PSERS funds Insight invested in 2020-21. And Insight acknowledged that the investments it bought with PSERS funds starting in 2021 were by 2023 worth less than the state paid for them.
By the time she finished her second round of chemotherapy for breast cancer, Shannon Colleary says her brain felt foggy.

I had no short-term memory at all, says Colleary, 57, a screenwriter in Los Angeles who finished treatment in October 2021. Id think, Why am I in this room?  Who is this person that just said hello to me? Where do I know her from? Then Id pretend to know the person, but often left the interaction still uncertain of who they were.

"Empty" is how Justin Schuster, 19, of Rye Brook, N.Y., describes his brain since he completed treatment for Hodgkin's lymphoma in April. "My thoughts aren't processing," says Schuster, who left Lehigh University last December after discovering a swollen lymph node just above his collar bone. "I can't find the word, and I forget what I'm trying to say."

What both Colleary and Schuster describe is often called chemo brain, shorthand for a debilitating medical condition characterized by loss of word retrieval, memory and executive function, and an inability to concentrate. Physicians call it cancer-related cognitive impairment (CRCI), and research indicates it affects about 75% of cancer patients during treatment, with 35% reporting persistent symptoms after treatment ends.

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Why some people get the condition and others don't, and why some have symptoms that persist for years while others' symptoms are resolved in a few months remain puzzling.

But Arum Kim, director of the Supportive Oncology Program at NYU Langone's Perlmutter Cancer Center, urges people to communicate with their medical team about cognitive changes.

Really good, calm communication with your treating oncology team is important because there are things that we can do for it  if we know about it, she says.

What causes chemo brain?

Jeanne Mandelblatt, inaugural director of the Georgetown Lombardi Institute for Cancer and Aging Research, believes that inflammation plays a part.

"Cancer treatment kills cancer cells, but it also causes damage to cells that can accelerate aging and increase inflammation, including inflammation in the brain. That can affect cognition," says Mandelblatt, who leads Thinking and Living With Cancer, a 15-year longitudinal study focusing on aging breast cancer patients and cognitive impairment.

But "chemo brain" is a misnomer, she adds, because patients experience cognitive impairment from immunotherapy and hormone therapy as well as chemotherapy. "It is not all one thing, but it is a real phenomenon and people have cognitive problems that interfere with their lives," she says.

Chemo brain probably also kicks up simply because of the cancer itself.

"When people are going through cancer and recovering, they're experiencing a lot of other problems that can impact their functioning but don't necessarily impact their brain. There's a really high rate of insomnia in this population. There can be high rates of anxiety and depression, there can be major lifestyle changes. And those can make you less effective than you were before," says Nicolette Gabel, division director of rehabilitation psychology and neuropsychology at the University of Michigan's Department of Physical Medicine and Rehabilitation.

Colleary says the crushing depression she experienced during treatment was even worse than her short-term memory loss.

It became very clear to me that the chemo drugs had killed every positive hormone in my brain, she says. Dopamine, serotonin, oxytocin, and endorphins simply did not exist. I became nihilistic at times, thinking Whats the point of life? Its too dangerous, lonely and sad.

Treatments that work

Neuropsychologists such as Gabel and Eric Zhou, an assistant professor at Harvard Medical School who specializes in disease recovery, say treating chemo brain requires a multipronged approach.

"It is a combination of cognitive retraining, mindfulness practices to help reduce stress [and] improve things like sleep and relaxation and take down that kind of high-level cortisol stress that goes on when people are going through these changes," Gabel says.

Zhou urges patients to speak to their doctors as soon as possible about cognitive symptoms. A recent study showed that patients' symptoms improved with the following interventions:

Exercise: In a study of more than 500 breast cancer patients, those who exercised for 150 minutes a week maintained cognitive function similar to a control group of those without cancer, says Michelle C. Janelsins-Benton, study author and associate professor at the University of Rochester Medical Center.

"Individuals who were physically active at the time of their diagnosis, even if they didn't maintain that during treatment, had better cognitive maintenance, compared to those that were not physically active prior to treatment," Janelsins-Benton says.

She speculates that exercise combats inflammation in the body, which could be a contributing factor. In another study, Janelsins-Benton found that moderate exercise also helps patients maintain attention span. "This needs further study, but I think it's a very promising benefit of exercise," she says.

Cognitive behavioral therapy (CBT): Resetting thought patterns and behavior can improve symptoms and make life easier, Zhou says.

"If you are very forgetful, creating a very structured home environment so you have a specific place for things will be very helpful," Zhou says. "Using calendars, especially those on our phones or smartwatches that can ring alarms can prompt behavior."

Since being treated for Hodgkin's lymphoma when she was 19, Diana Pernicano, 29, a nurse from Yorktown Heights, N.Y., writes everything down. Her absentmindedness was once so bad that she was asked to resign from her first nursing job because she often forgot critical information.

"I was so embarrassed," she says. "Luckily I was able to refocus and get another nursing job I love that I have been at for nine years."

A type of CBT called memory and attention adaptation training is especially effective, Gabel says, and is something that can easily be practiced by patients at home.

Sleep: A lack of sleep amplifies the physiological changes that are occurring for somebody who has chemo brain, Zhou says. If youre battling sleepless nights, consult your physician about trying CBT, which is considered the best method for addressing insomnia. Zhou says techniques might include adjusting bed times, making your bedroom more restful and sleep restriction, which involves limiting your time in bed only to those hours spent sleeping  not watching TV or reading or playing on your smartphone.

Mindfulness: Meditation, deep breathing and yoga can improve cognitive complaints, according to a small study of breast cancer patients. Were not sure why this helps, whether its a mind-body connection, or because these things are just good for us in general, Zhou says.

Psychostimulants: Although there is not yet clinical evidence for their effectiveness, drugs such as Adderall may help. Folks who are having a lot of trouble with cognitive fatigue and attention can find a significant effect from these drugs, Gabel says.

Fear of cognitive impairment may lead cancer patients to opt out of treatments, but they shouldn't, Gabel says.

"All of this can sound very scary to folks, and I worry that people will turn down treatments that could be curative," she says. "There are survival rates for cancer now that 20 years ago would have been off the table. It's not guaranteed that chemo brain is going to happen, and if it does, there are ways that we can address it."

No FDA-approved solutions  yet

No Food and Drug Administration-approved medications are available for chemo brain, although Mandelblatt predicts it won't be long before physicians can offer pharmaceutical solutions to their patients.

"We are making some progress, and I expect that already approved drugs will be repurposed for chemo brain," says Mandelblatt, noting that studies in mice show promise.

One such study showed that Cisplatin, a widely used chemotherapy drug, alters the sphingolipid metabolism in a mouse brain's hippocampus (where memory is stored) and that plays a key role in chemo brain, says the study's author, Daniela Salvemini, the director of Institute for Translational Neuroscience at St. Louis University School of Medicine.

Salvemini's team then administered Fingolimod and Zeposia, drugs already approved by the FDA to treat multiple sclerosis, and discovered that they could block the development of chemo brain in mice.

Although human trials are needed, Salvemini says, I think this could be a revolutionary approach to the treatment of cancer patients and cancer survivors. We are very excited about this. Chemo brain is very real. Though it does not affect everybody, for those who it does, it has a real impact on their lives.
Gloria Velazquez Julius, who lives in Hunting Park, one of the city's hottest neighborhoods, says she often tries not to turn her air-conditioning on to save money. Read more

On Thursday in North Philadelphias Hunting Park, residents were doing what they could to stay cool in 85-degree heat.

A sprawling park off Ninth Street offered residents some of the only shade trees in the neighborhood. The parks pool was closed because of poor air quality from Canadian wildfire smoke.

For residents hoping for some relief, it was a disappointment. It could be a lot shadier for people out here, said Jordan Floyd, 18, who sat on the bleachers by the shuttered pool with two friends. They had planned to swim, but Parks and Recreation staffers had turned them away.

Its boiling here! a young boy pleaded with pool maintenance worker Michael Tate.

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We cant go against the city, Tate told him.

Hunting Park is one of the hottest neighborhoods in the city, and temperatures here can rise some 20 degrees above other parts of Philadelphia, leaving medically vulnerable residents at risk.

 READ MORE: Philly will have more heat waves, and the Delaware projected to rise more than a foot over the next 25 years

Advocates say a lack of tree cover and excessive hot surfaces, like asphalt, create heat islands in Hunting Park, Strawberry Mansion, and Point Breeze. Making matters worse, residents in these neighborhoods often struggle to pay for air-conditioning. And theyre more likely to have health conditions such as asthma that put them at greater risk for heat-related illness.

On Thursday morning, people in Hunting Park weighed their options: Stay inside and sit in stifling heat  or pay for air-conditioning bills that many may not be able to afford. Go outside, and breathe in air filled with particulate matter.

On days like this, no decision feels like the good one, said Jamile Tellez Lieberman, senior vice president for community engagement, research, and health equity at Esperanza, a faith-based organization that works with North Philadelphias Hispanic community.

 READ MORE: How to identify the symptoms of dehydration and exhaustion

Why some neighborhoods are hotter

In 2019, the city released its first plan to combat extreme heat in communities vulnerable to heat-related injuries and illness. They focused on Hunting Park, where buildings, roads, and pavement make up 75% of the land, compared with 52% in all of Philadelphia.

Hunting Park is whats known as a heat island, a place that gets hotter than other neighborhoods. Trees and greenery can reflect heat, but the higher concentration of asphalt and man-made materials in heat islands tend to trap heat.

If you think of a cast iron pan thats really thick, if you heat it up, its going to retain heat for a really long time, even if you turn off the burner, said Abby Sullivan, the interim chief resilience officer at Philadelphias Office of Sustainability.

Residents, community advocates, and city officials agree that the heat in Hunting Park is a direct result of some of Philadelphias most entrenched issues: decades of redlining  racist housing policy that devalued property in Black neighborhoods  and the associated poverty and institutional neglect.

Our neighborhood is almost designed to be this way, said Tellez Lieberman.

 READ MORE: The hottest neighborhoods in Philadelphia

The city based its heat plan on interviews with hundreds of residents, many of whom said existing approaches to combating heat werent effective. For example, some lacked transportation to get to the citys cooling centers.

Heat can be dangerous for elderly individuals, children, and those with chronic health conditions. Hunting Park has some of the highest rates of children hospitalized for asthma in the city, and heat aggravates asthma symptoms. It traps pollutants like ozone and other particles that can irritate the airways.

Climate change and other environmental issues are making the problem worse. The city instructed residents to stay indoors to avoid smoke from Canadas wildfires for several days this past month, which is difficult for households without AC that have to head outdoors to stay cool, Tellez Lieberman said.

These problems are all connected, Sullivan said, and will require resources to address.

 READ MORE: What the Canadian wildfires mean for children with asthma in Philly

Competing challenges

So far this summer, the city hasnt reached temperatures hot enough to declare a public health emergency. That at occurs when the heat index  a measure of how the combined effects of air temperature and humidity feel  reaches 106 degrees or above for two consecutive days, or when it reaches 103 degrees or above for three consecutive days.

If a heat health emergency is declared, the city will open 13 cooling centers at libraries  two more than last year  as well as park four to five air-conditioned buses in neighborhoods that need them.

Sullivans office is working on longer-term solutions. These include funding for residents to renovate their homes to make them cooler and a pilot program to treat roads with reflective surfaces that can reduce heat.

 READ MORE: Where to cool off in a Philadelphia heat wave

The office also wants to support community organizations to make their own heat plans, modeled after the 2019 Hunting Park initiative, and hope to hire a staffer dedicated to the heat issue.

At Esperanza, Tellez Lieberman has partnered with the Pennsylvania Horticultural Society to plant more trees in the citys hottest neighborhoods, aiming to decrease temperatures long-term.

But residents are worried about how to protect themselves from heat now.

Earlier this year, Esperanza staff released a report calling for Pennsylvania to give out federal grants to help lower-income residents pay for cooling bills. (Right now, those grants are only available for people who struggle with paying for heat.)

We dont want people choosing between whether they pay their electricity and gas bill or food, Tellez Lieberman said.

It was like an oven

On Thursday, Gloria Velazquez Julius walked her children home from the street where theyd been playing, and wished the fire department would open a hydrant or two for the kids to cool off.

Down the street, block captain Debbie Santos, who has both asthma and diabetes, was trying to stay inside: With her health conditions, the heat is especially dangerous.

Santos and Velazquez Julius are both longtime Hunting Park residents; Santos lives in the house where she was born. Theyre eager for long-term solutions, like planting more trees in the area, but in the short term, theyre committed to taking care of vulnerable neighbors.

Velazquez Juliuss tight-knit block is home to 12 people over 70 years old. Theyre in the house, sweating, she said.

This summer, she and other neighbors got together to get a window unit for a woman down the street, worried for her safety in the heat: If you went in that house, it was like an oven, she said.

On hot days at her own house, Velazquez Julius pulls the blinds closed, keeps the lights off and sets the ceiling fans running. And she tries not to turn on the AC: We need it, but the bill is extremely high, she said. Years ago, it wasnt as hot and humid.

Editors note: This story has been updated with details on the temperature threshold for city health officials to announce a heat emergency.
The Pregnant Workers Fairness Act puts the responsibility on employers to find a reasonable accommodation when pregnant workers ask for adjustments to their work environment or schedule because of pregnancy-related needs. Read more

A new federal law that took effect last week means more pregnant people will be able to get adjustments to their work schedules or work environment.

The Pregnant Workers Fairness Act, which passed in December, now puts the responsibility on employers to find a reasonable accommodation when pregnant workers ask for adjustments to their work environment or schedule because of pregnancy-related needs. It includes accommodations related to fertility treatments, morning sickness, lactation, gestational diabetes, pregnancy loss, and postpartum depression, as well as time off for childbirth recovery and time off for accessing abortion care.

The U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission started accepting charges under the Pregnant Workers Fairness Act on June 27.

Philadelphias Fair Practice Ordinance provides many similar rights for pregnant workers, but for Pennsylvanians outside the city the new federal law will provide protections they didnt have before, said Sophia Elliot, a staff attorney with the Pennsylvania-based Womens Law Project.

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Elliot spoke with The Inquirer about the new federal law and what it means for pregnant people in Pennsylvania. The conversation has been edited lightly for length and clarity.

Who is protected by the Pregnant Workers Fairness Act?

Its a federal law that fills in existing gaps in accommodations for workers who are pregnant, have just given birth, or have other pregnancy-related medical conditions that dont amount to a disability. Prior to this law, there was no national law that required employers to provide reasonable accommodations, absent an undue hardship, to employees who were pregnant or had just given birth. What that meant in practice is that workers who were pregnant or who had just given birth who needed temporary accommodations  like a short period of leave to recover from childbirth  and didnt qualify for FMLA or didnt have a pregnancy-related disability were left with very few options. They could be forced off the job, forced onto long-term leave, or fired. So it was a really precarious place and really uncertain place for those workers to be.

What are some examples of pregnancy-related accommodations?

I see a lot of workers who need very reasonable accommodations to continue their jobs. That could be things like a uniform change  the ability to wear comfortable clothes or sneakers if they stand or walk for long periods of time at work. It could mean a light-duty assignment. Sometimes it means working from home, which we know after the pandemic is something thats very feasible [for some jobs], and many people did for a period of time. Other types of accommodations I often hear people request are as simple as a chair and opportunity to take a five- or 10-minute break, an opportunity to drink more water throughout their shift.

The other part of what I see is [when people] need a period of leave to recover from childbirth ... and not have to come back to work immediately, like days after theyve delivered.

A lot of people take maternity leave under the Family and Medical Leave Act, which protects their job for up to 12 weeks of leave post-childbirth. How is the Pregnant Workers Fairness Act different?

FMLA only applied to employees who had met certain requirements, including having worked with their employer for more than a year. And [under FMLA], the employer has to have [at least 50] employees. [Employees] also have to work for a certain number of hours [to be eligible for FMLA]. The vast majority of people left behind were people who recently got a new job.

The Pregnant Workers Fairness Act is different in that it covers employees who work for an employer with 15 or more employees, and it covers them from the moment they apply for that job. If they need accommodations to get that job, the employer cannot discriminate against them even in the hiring process, because they have made it known that theyre pregnant or have just given birth and that theyre going to need some sort of accommodation.

The Pregnant Workers Fairness Act does not require that you have a pregnancy-related disability. It provides accommodations for any sort of ordinary accommodation that someone might need through their pregnancy, regardless of whether theres an associated disability.

So just needing extra rest or needing to be able to eat more regularly for example?

Right, a very common [accommodation] would be a weight restriction later in pregnancy, so people who work in physically demanding jobs would be entitled to light duty or a modified work assignment, or some may prefer to just go part-time. The law is clear that what should happen once an employee vocalizes their need for accommodation is an interactive process between the employee and the employer to find something thats not burdensome for the employer and is workable for both parties.

How should people request accommodations under this law?

When an employee makes known to their employer that theyre pregnant and they have a need for an accommodation, they dont have to use special words. They just have to make it known. Once the employer has knowledge, its the employers responsibility to provide the accommodation, to engage in an interactive process with the employee, and they should do so quickly.

The exception there is if the accommodation would pose an undue hardship to the employer, but a lot of the accommodation requests that I see in my work are very reasonable. And I think with cooperation between the employer and the employee, its not difficult to come up with a solution. Keep in mind, too, that these accommodations are most often temporary, just through the period of pregnancy and childbirth. That makes it harder for the employer in many cases ... to raise the undue hardship exception.

Do you think this law paves the way for improved pregnant workers rights at the state level?

We definitely need paid family leave, and we need more robust paid sick leave ... paid leave for families who need to care for family members who may be sick. The U.S. has fallen behind other developed countries that already provide for these things. At the state level, we [in Pennsylvania] also dont have family leave, and lots of other states already do have that. I do see those as kind of the next step.

I think ... what people will find is that this [new law] is not burdensome, and it is good for the economy.

When we ask someone to come back to work three days after they deliver, were jeopardizing their health and their opportunity to recover from childbirth and bond with their infant, and that can have really dire short- and long-term consequences. If they lose their job, they lose income and they could lose their health care at a critical time. Ive heard from people who have accumulated debt and end up losing seniority in the workforce. And that could impact your future job prospects and earning potential as well.

This kind of law at both the federal and state level is really critical to ensure that we are protecting and valuing our pregnant workers and mothers.
For Pride month, Comcast highlighted its support of LGBTQ communities:

It hosted its first-ever Pride summit for employees. It launched new features to spotlight LGBTQ programming on Xfinity, where viewers could say Pride into their voice remote to access a curated list of TV and movies. And NBCUniversal, Comcasts subsidiary, ran a Pride s Universal campaign to celebrate LGBTQ trailblazers.

It also signed a strong statement against anti-LGBTQ state legislation written by Human Rights Campaign, a nonprofit advocating for the rights of people who are lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and queer.

But since 2022, Comcast has also contributed more than $1 million to politicians supporting anti-LGBTQ bills, according to a report from Popular Information, the accountability journalism newsletter run by Judd Legum.

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Those contributions, totaling $1,046,000, include:

$5,000 to Tennessee Gov. Bill Lee, a Republican who has signed at least seven anti-LGBTQ bills, including a ban on drag shows that are harmful to minors and on gender-affirming care for minors. $5,000 to U.S. Sen. Marsha Blackburn (R., Tenn.), who has headlined a rally against gender-affirming care and called for an investigation into Bud Lights partnership with trans influencer Dylan Mulvaney. $300,000 to the Republican Governors Association and $158,500 to the Republican State Leadership Committee, which support politicians dismantling queer and trans rights around the country.

Comcast did not respond to requests for comment.

Last year, more than 300 Comcast NBCUniversal employees signed a petition calling their employers support of such politicians hypocritical and asking them to reconsider.

For the diverse, equitable, and inclusive workplace and world Comcast/NBCUniversal publicly declares allegiance to, we ask that these antithetical donations be acknowledged, internally and externally, and that the company pledge to reevaluate the criteria used to make political donations accordingly, the petition read.

More than 500 anti-LGBTQ bills have been introduced in state legislatures this year, which the Human Rights Campaign says is the most ever. Nearly half of those bills target the trans and nonbinary community. State legislators have voted to pass 70 anti-LGBTQ bills this year.

Mark Segal, publisher of the Philadelphia Gay News and a former member of Comcasts Joint Diversity Council, declined to address the campaign contributions directly but emphasized the progress the corporation had made on LGBTQ equality. He noted that the Human Rights Campaign regularly ranks Comcast high on its Corporate Equality Index and that Comcast prioritizes working with LGBTQ-run vendors.

Comcasts investment in all parts of LGBT community have been substantial, from increasing workplace inclusivity and ending invisibility, support for Marriage Equality before the Supreme Court decision, and continued support of the Equality Act in the U.S. Congress, he said in a statement. They have done a tremendous amount to increase LGBT inclusivity and theyll continue to lead that charge, and learn from the past.

Comcast has also contributed to campaigns and PACs of politicians supporting the expansion of LGBTQ rights. Those officials include Rep. Mark Takano (D., Calif.) and Sen. Tammy Baldwin (D., Wis.), both sponsors of the Equality Act, which would outlaw LGBTQ discrimination.

In 2021 and 2022, Comcasts PAC spent $3.4 million supporting federal candidates directly and through their PACs, with a nearly even spend across Democrats and Republicans, according to an analysis of Federal Election Commission data by the nonprofit OpenSecrets.

GLAAD president Sarah Kate Ellis said corporate allyship was more important than ever as attacks on LGBTQ rights continue.

Corporate accountability does not begin and end with employee benefits and hiring practices, Ellis said in a statement. It extends to how a corporation spends its dollars, philanthropic and political.
Should New Jersey schools be required to tell parents if their children have changed their gender identity?

A handful of districts in the state have adopted policies that require parental notification; opponents say the policies unfairly out students. In the meantime, New Jersey Attorney General Matthew J. Platkin believes the action discriminates against gender-nonconforming students and has filed legal action to block districts from implementing the policies.

The thorny issue mirrors a growing national trend to roll back LGBTQ+ rights that was amplified by Fridays Supreme Court decision that limited protections. One local district has delayed voting on a similar policy while the legal battle continues in New Jersey courts.

Heres an update and what to know about the controversy:

What are the policies at issue?

The policies, if implemented, generally would require school staff to notify parents when gender-nonconforming students wish to change their names at school, be called by different pronouns, or request other accommodations. In some cases, parents at odds with their children could overturn those requests and decide the pronouns used. Students could lose access to school facilities  bathrooms and locker rooms  based on their gender identity.

How many districts have adopted the policies?

So far, at least four school boards have adopted policies that have been challenged by the state attorney general. They are: Hanover Township Public Schools in Morris County; and the Marlboro Township School District, Middletown Township School District, and Manalapan-Englishtown Regional School District, all in Monmouth County.

A fourth Monmouth district, Colts-Neck, postponed a vote Wednesday night on a similar policy, pending the outcome of the legal challenge.

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(It is not clear whether any South Jersey districts are considering such policies.)

Why is the attorney general seeking to block implementation of the policies?

In a court filing, Platkin contends the policies violate the New Jersey Law Against Discrimination by subjecting LGBTQ+ students to differential treatment, requiring notification for them but not their peers. State law prohibits against discrimination on the basis of gender identity or expression, he said.

What do these districts say?

Districts believe the state has wrongly interpreted their policies intended to protect students from bullying and harassment and have vowed to fight back in court. They say parents have a constitutional right to decide the upbringing of their children.

What is the state doing while the case plays out?

In a joint statement for schools and parents, Platkin and acting State Education Commissioner Angelica Allen-McMillan this week issued guidance that says schools shall ensure students be addressed by their preferred names and pronouns, be allowed to dress in accordance with their gender identity and that parental consent is not required for the district to accept the students asserted gender identity.

Platkin also announced Friday that the Division on Civil Rights has found probable cause in the case of an identified Monmouth County teacher allegedly banned from talking with students about their gender identity and told not to wear a pin indicating their preferred pronouns. The investigation found sufficient evidence to support a reasonable suspicion that the school discriminated against the teacher because of their gender identity and/or expression. The district was not disclosed.

What happens next?

The state Division of Civil Rights filed administrative civil rights complaints against the districts and has requested temporary and preliminary injunctions to block them from implementing the policies until the cases are heard. A hearing is set for Aug. 15 in Superior Court in Monmouth County.
Cousins Ella Mann Livingston and Dorothy Gordon Thompson in Ocean City's Black community known as the Westside. Its history is detailed in the new book, "The Westside: Ocean City in True Color" by Loretta Thompson Harris. Read more

OCEAN CITY, N.J.  Loretta Thompson Harris gets the same question all the time.

They ask me where I come from, Harris says. I say Ocean City. They say, Well no, where are you from? Ill say Ocean City. Theyll say, No, where were you born? Where did you live before you came to Ocean City? They dont want to believe Im from Ocean City.

Harris, 78, retired from Atlantic City Electrics real estate division, is, in fact, fourth generation Ocean City, a native of the Westside, the neighborhood that was the home of Ocean Citys original Black community, who first arrived at the iconic beach town in 1884 and prospered.

The neighborhood is loosely defined as between Second and 10th Streets, between Asbury and Bay Avenues.

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Ocean Citys Black founders and their descendants opened the first salt water taffy shop, designed and rebuilt the citys fishing pier after the 1962 storm, and invested in real estate. Harris new book, The Westside: Ocean City in True Color, documents this history.

The city was founded in 1879 and the first person of color came in 1884, Harris said. The community has been a part of the city since its founding.

Like the white Methodist founders, Harris ancestors came to Ocean City for religious reasons at the height of the camp meeting movement that had spread across the country, Harris said.

In Ocean City, they established the St. James AME Church at Seventh and Haven.

Between 1893 and 1911, four African American churches  Macedonia, Union Tabernacle Baptist Church, St. James, and Shiloh  opened in Ocean City within the few blocks comprising the Westside. All four are still there.

He was a very religious person, Harris said, of her great-grandfather, John Brooks Thompson, who arrived in Ocean City in 1900. As I tracked the other founders, they all followed a similar path. They came by way of Salem and Cumberland Counties.

Based on my research, I believe he came for religious purposes.

It is a part of Ocean Citys history, meticulously and lavishly documented in The Westside, the first of three planned volumes on the history of Ocean Citys Black community.

Harris is also planning a more personal memoir, she said.

 READ MORE: Black in Stone Harbor: Documentary tells story of 'Miracle on 81st Street'

Like a recent documentary about Stone Harbors Black community, Harris book is a recognition of the rich Black history of so many of towns on the Jersey Shore, including Stone Harbor, which in 2023 was 99.5% white.

That long history had never been documented, Harris said. I just kept thinking, this needs to be done. I had accumulated so much information.

The next volume will have four chapters: businesses and trades, racism, the beach, and the military.

They were all affected by the racism, said Harris, who recalls being chased by lifeguards if she and her friends strayed from what was considered Ocean Citys Black beach, between 5th and 6th Streets. I didnt want racism to overtake the story of the Westside, so I tried to confine it to one chapter, so that I acknowledge it and I addressed it.

 READ MORE: Why Chef Herbie Allwood and Pamela Womble are closing one of Ocean Citys only Black-owned restaurants.

The book is filled with photos, records, family trees, charts, old newspaper clippings, and the thrilling history of a Black community that at its height, 1950, was 9% of Ocean Citys year-round population. Harris has documented more than 200 businesses that once were in this small section of town, all Black-owned.

John Sheppard Trower, a deeply religious caterer and financier from Philadelphias Germantown section, arrived in Ocean City in 1896, the year he made his first real estate purchase. Harris says his descendants still own property in Ocean City. Trower owned 14 properties in Ocean City, including a summer cottage at Second and West Avenues, and one in Sea Isle City.

Another early entrepreneur, the Rev. Samuel Comfort, began purchasing property in Ocean City while still a resident of Philadelphia. Comfort ultimately owned seven properties in Ocean City, including the Hotel Comfort at Second and Bay Streets, where in 1914, he hosted Booker T. Washington.

The Right Rev. Comfort hosted parties for visitors and local elite who dined on oysters, clams, ice cream, confectioneries and homemade ginger beer, Harris writes.

A deathbed salt water taffy mystery

Ocean Citys first Black residents were Jacob, Mary, and Lewis Still, who moved from Burlington County and purchased a home in the 900 block of West Avenue, Harris says.

Jacobs uncle was Philadelphia-based abolitionist William Still, who coordinated the Underground Railroad in the Philadelphia area and may have brought Harriet Tubman to Cape May, where a museum has been dedicated to her legacy.

In 1893, Jacob Still opened Stills, a confectionery store in the Brower Building at Eighth and the Boardwalk in 1893, advertising The best Milk Shakes on the Island, and the finest Salt Water Taffy, which Harris says is the earliest taffy shop in Ocean City.

The fate of Jacobs taffy recipe is unknown, she writes. Oral history cannot decide whether the recipe was sold on Jacobs deathbed or stolen.

Dwindling away

By 1950, there were 543 Black people in a town of 6,040.

In 1970, there were 815 recorded as the town grew to 10,575. In 2020, the population had shrunk to 288, as the year-round population was recorded at 11,065.

 READ MORE: In Cape May, the Harriet Tubman Museum is a long-awaited recognition of a rich Black and abolitionist history in the seaside resort.

Im just sorry its dwindling away, she said. Thats a constant refrain. Every time we have another funeral, we know that it wont be long before you wont be able to find anybody there. They cant come in. They cant pay a million for a house, not too many of them anyway. Im trying to save what I can if its only the memories.

Alvin Thompson, Harris uncle, was the first Black person on the beach patrol. Harris recalled the entrenched racism she encountered as a child on the Ocean City beach.

I never saw a sign designated the Black beach, she said. It was enforced by the lifeguards. If we went across the jetty to the beach to the north, they would send us back. If we went back again, theyd threaten us with expulsion for the day.

We were kids, she said. I dont think we fully understood the implications of the whole thing. The white bathers would yell at us. We would laugh and run back over.

Widows Row

Harris still owns her parents home on Haven Avenue, and her sister and cousin still live there. She lives in Marmora, on the Mainland. Her father owned a construction company that rebuilt the fishing pier and laid the foundation for the resorts first high-rise, the Port-O-Call hotel.

Her cousin William Griffin, 80, is the last of the Griffins. There are some Henrys left, the oldest one well into her 80s.

My sister is still living in whats called the Lomax house, over 100 years old. It belonged to our grandparents.

Her parents home is across from what was known as Widows Row, she said.

It was a term of endearment, Harris said. I think in 1950, eight out of 11 houses were occupied by widows. The men in the community did what they could to help the women.

The Westside has maintained its historic character, she said.

Its not like any other neighborhood in Ocean City, she said. So many of the old homes in Ocean City are being torn down. Unless youre in the historic district, you have a good chance of your house being torn down and replaced by the big houses.

On the Westside, I think we still have some of the oldest housing stock on the island, she said. Those houses were built around 1910.
North Wildwood erected signs at all 30 beach entrances starting July 3 to ask beachgoers to contact Gov. Phil Murphy and Department of Environmental Protection Commissioner Shawn LaTourette over beach erosion. Read more

Sunbathers in North Wildwood will get an unusual red, white, and blue greeting at beaches in time for July Fourth: Signs at every beach entrance singling out Gov. Phil Murphy and Department of Environmental Protection Commissioner Shawn LaTourette for what the town says is failure to act on dune erosion.

These two are directly responsible for the states inaction on replenishing North Wildwoods beaches, it reads.

The signs, erected Tuesday, are part of an acrimonious, yearslong dispute between North Wildwood and the DEP over severe beach erosion that was ratcheted up most recently in January when the community sued the state for $21 million. Town officials say thats how much North Wildwood has spent fighting beach erosion the last decade because they allege the DEP hasnt been doing its job.

Why are North Wildwood and state at odds?

The suit, filed in Superior Court in Cape May County, attests to the rift thats developed between the Shore community and the DEP over not only recent beach erosion but a beach replenishment project planned in 2012 that was never started.

The DEP filed a motion to drop North Wildwoods suit but that has been denied.

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The towns suit came after the DEP sued North Wildwood in December, seeking to stop it from buttressing its dune system with what the state calls an illegal 400-foot steel bulkhead the Shore community planned to install to prevent further storm-related erosion. The beaches were faced with noreasters in 2022, including the remnants of Hurricane Ian in October, that wreaked havoc on dunes, forming cliff faces on some.

After Ian, North Wildwood asked the DEP for an emergency authorization to install a 400-foot steel bulkhead, reshape dunes between 13th and 16th Avenues, tear out some decking, and erect jersey barriers to keep people out. The state has authority to oversee the shoreline and plans for its protection.

The state approved the barriers and decking removal. But it said no to the new bulkhead at 15th Avenue and regrading of dunes because there was no immediate threat of loss of life or property and because the new infrastructure could make erosion worse.

 READ MORE: How much sand has been brought in to battle erosion on New Jersey beaches? Enough to fill 62,000 Olympic swimming pools.

North Wildwood officials defied the DEP and worked on the dunes, saying they had become a safety hazard and ordered the bulkhead anyway.

That led to a back-and-forth between DEP Commissioner Shawn LaTourette and Mayor Patrick Rosenello, and ultimately the lawsuit.

The signs posted at all 30 beach entrances are the latest salvo. They provide a QR code that opens a blank email to the governor and commissioner, urging beachgoers to voice your concerns.

Representatives for the DEP and Murphy could not be reached immediately for comment Tuesday.

Rosenello, a Republican, said the signs were a last-ditch effort after the states $54.5 billion budget for 2024, which includes an $8.3 billion surplus and was approved by Murphy on Friday. North Wildwood, working with Assemblyman Louis Greenwald (D., Burlington, Camden), failed in a request to have $20 million included for the towns beach replenishment.

North Wildwood did get DEP permission to perform some emergency work before Memorial Day.

But Rosenello said a full replenishment is needed. He noted the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers and DEP are working on projects for other towns, such as a $28.8 million dune and beach fill project for Avalon and Stone Harbor.

Hundreds of thousands coming

There are tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands, of people coming through North Wildwood from all over New Jersey and beyond, Rosenello said. And the most important message that were trying to get out there to the governor and the DEP is you cant ignore South Jersey. We want this to be as widespread as possible so they can hear from their constituents.

The larger issue thats helped stall replenishment for North Wildwood stems from a long planned promised dune replenishment by the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers and DEP after Superstorm Sandy in 2012 that still hasnt happened. North Wildwood is on a barrier island known as Five Mile Beach, which contains North Wildwood, Wildwood, West Wildwood, Wildwood Crest, and Diamond Beach (which is part of Lower Township).

The year after Sandy struck on Oct. 29, 2012, the state and U.S. Army Corps mapped out a complex plan to address erosion on the island from Hereford Inlet to Cape May Inlet. In language updated last year, the Army Corps noted that while North Wildwood was once the largest beach in the state, it has suffered significant erosion of its berm and dune and gets flooded repeatedly.

However, the plan is still years away from being carried out, in part, because of its complexity. The DEP was having trouble getting all the towns to sign off on the project.

But Rosenello credits LaTourette for getting the towns to finally agree this spring.
A Man Full of Trouble Tavern in Society Hill was recently purchased by a real estate investor, who plans to reopen it as a bar museum. The tavern is Philadelphias only surviving pre-Revolutionary War drinking spot. Read more

It was the dive bar of the Revolution, a waterfront watering hole with an alluringly mournful name. But A Man Full of Trouble Tavern, Philadelphias only surviving pre-Revolutionary drinking spot, has been shuttered to the public for decades.

That hasnt stopped generations of Philadelphians from wandering past the charming, if battered, brick building sitting in the shadows of the Society Hill Towers, and imagining bygone boozers whispering of sedition over the beers. One of the dreamers is Dan Wheeler, an Old City lawyer and real estate investor, who has decided to reopen the place.

Two years ago, Wheeler saw A Man Full of Trouble on a real estate listing and jumped at the chance to own a piece of history.

I really couldnt believe my eyes, Wheeler said, of his $875,000 purchase of the bar and adjoining Colonial house Ive been waiting for this for 30 years.

His plan is to bring life back to the old bar.

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In June, Wheeler teamed up with Succession Fermentory, a Chester County brewery, for a Philly Beer Week pop-up at A Man Full of Trouble. It was the first time suds had been served at the tavern, which opened in 1759, in well more than a century.

I want people to come back in here and breathe life back into this building that has been sitting fallow, Wheeler said of the historic bar, once a museum and most recently owned by the University of Pennsylvania.

Wheeler, who is 59 and worked as an economic development official for Gov. Ed Rendell, plans to pair up with a microbrewery or distillery, which can sell its stuff in a barroom where regulars once tipped tankards. In the upstairs rooms, where sotted sailors were said to sleep five a bed, Wheeler plans to reopen a museum. One that could again honor the story of a colorful tavern with a colorful name  its original sign famously depicted the image of a man with a woman on his back and the ordinary Philadelphians who drank there.

Its the uniqueness of it, he said. You cant even imagine all the things that went on here.

Its a small miracle A Man Full of Trouble even still exists. Colonial Philly burst with bars. There were 101 taverns in the budding port town, or about 1 bar for every 160 citizens, historians say. But only A Man Full of Trouble survives.

Built at 127 Spruce St., it was back then wedged between a brook and stinking Dock Creek. The name was lifted from a Bible passage: Man who is born of woman is of few days and full of troubles. Like other modest tippling houses, it was licensed for only beer and cider. While Jefferson and Franklin and their crowd enjoyed their punch at the cozy confines of City Tavern  demolished in 1854, with its current incarnation built in 1976  it was working waterfront stiffs who bellied up to the bar at A Man Full of Trouble. Dockhands and shipwrights. Sailors stumbling off ships.

Not the type of place youd bring your girlfriend for a cocktail, said Bob Skiba, a tour guide and historian, with a chuckle. It was more of a divey spot.

As was the way, a bartender served drinks from behind a small caged bar, which could be locked up at closing. Food was cooked above a fireplace in the dirt-floor basement. The taverns most well-known owner was a woman named Martha Smallwood, who tried to class the joint up from 1796 until her death in 1826. For a time, it became a hotel. Then, a wholesale chicken market.

In the 1960s, Virginia Knauera onetime City Councilwoman and director of the Federal Office of Consumer Affairs in Washington  and her husband saved the crumbling tavern from the wrecking ball. The couple painstakingly restored A Man Full of Trouble and cared for it as a museum from 1965 to 1994. With help from a University of Pennsylvania archaeological dig, they uncovered hundreds of artifacts from the tavern, including bits of fireplace tile and wallpaper.

The Knauers even restored the missing sign. They chose the less bawdy version, which hangs now. Pulled from a parable, it displays a man walking with his wife, a monkey, a cat and a magpie.

By 1994, the museum remained open only one day a month. The Knauers gave the buildings to Penn, which maintained it as housing for traveling faculty and students.

For his part, Wheeler hopes to have A Man Full of Trouble fully open by next spring. He advertised last months pop-up on an Instagram account, where he posts historic images of the tavern. A strong crowd showed.

I turned around and it was 6 oclock and nobody wanted to leave, he said.

He is making some repairs, and, a history buff, throwing himself into research. He envisions the bar being open limited hours, with museum and gallery spaces that could host events.

For him, the allure of the tavern is still imagining its history.

This would be a great place to plot a revolution, he said.
City Councilmember Isaiah Thomas speaks with students and parents from Southwest Leadership Academy Charter School during a rally in June 2022 accusing the Philadelphia School District of bias against Black and brown-led charter schools. Read more

The Philadelphia school board voted last week not to renew Southwest Leadership Academy Charter School, setting the charter up for eventual closure.

The decision, passed by a 7-2 vote at the boards meeting Thursday, followed findings that the charter in Southwest Philadelphia had underperformed other schools academically, violated numerous legal requirements, and had significant financial issues.

But it also generated renewed accusations of bias against the district, which has faced complaints from Black charter leaders who say their schools are being disproportionately shut down or denied permission to open. A board-commissioned investigation into the allegations is ongoing.

We are disappointed by this decision and believe that it is unjust, Southwest Leadership Academy CEO Leigh Purnell and board chair William D. Moore Sr. said in a statement.

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Southwest Leadership Academy, which enrolled 620 students last year, will appeal to Pennsylvanias Charter Appeals Board and remain open for the coming school year, the charter leaders said.

The African American Charter School Coalition, which represents Black-led Philadelphia charters, and Philadelphia Charters for Excellence, a charter advocacy group, said the board had used an inequitable process that continues to cause further harm to Black and brown children and families, eliminating a viable educational option and forcing these children back into a public education system that has already failed them.

About 65,000, or one-third, of Philadelphia public school students attend charter schools, which are publicly funded but independently managed. The School District is charged with authorizing new charters, and evaluating whether charter agreements should be renewed or terminated.

Evidence from nine days of hearings held earlier this year established that children are likely to get a better education somewhere else, said Rudy Garcia, the hearings officer who reviewed the districts case against Southwest Leadership Academy and the schools defense.

Garcia noted that the charters math and English language arts proficiency scores were lower than a group of schools with similar demographics, as well as the rest of the charter sector and the School District at large. (The charters leaders said it outperformed district-run elementary and middle schools in its area.)

He also said the school had violated 20 legal requirements, including related to enrollment practices and employee background checks, and that its financial viability is in jeopardy. Charters receive funding from districts based on how many students they enroll; Southwest Leadership Academy spent $10 million on a larger building as part of a planned expansion, but the enrollment growth it had counted on didnt materialize, Garcia said.

He added that during the schools nonrenewal hearings, six public comments were submitted, and none were from students, parents, or teachers.

School board member Lisa Salley, who previously accused the district of bias in failing to recommend the approval of a high school for the Black-led Global Leadership Academy Charter, made similar statements Thursday.

Everything I hear feels very biased, Salley said, saying it wasnt clear what the primary reason for not renewing Southwest Leadership Academy was. (During his presentation to the board, Garcia said any of the cited deficiencies  academic, legal, or financial  would be grounds to end the charter agreement under Pennsylvanias charter school law.)

School board president Reginald Streater pressed Salley to articulate what she meant by bias; Salley questioned whether a different evaluator would reach the same conclusion.

Streater said school board members could make their own decisions based on Garcias report. Your vote speaks for what you do with that information, he said.
Jacqueline Satchel (left) and her daughter, Daisha Moore, are grieving the loss of son and brother Donte Moore. Read more

It looks like another day of rain and scattered thunderstorms. Temps will reach a high of 90.

Were halfway through the year and the rate of Philadelphias gun violence has fallen slightly. Also, homicide detectives are solving more cases this year. Although the modest improvements are a step forward, our lead story shows that theres still a lot of work to be done.

 Taylor Allen (@TayImanAllen, morningnewsletter@inquirer.com)

The rate of Phillys gun violence has seen a moderate decline the past six months.

Its hopeful but its also important to keep in mind that it follows the citys most violent years in recent memory and the rate of shootings is double what it was eight years ago. The pain of the last 3 years is fresh. More than 1,700 people were killed since 2020, when the crisis began to climb.

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In her own words: The hurt never goes away. You just learn to live with it, Jacqueline Satchel, 54, said of living without her son, Donte Moore, who was killed a month before his 25th birthday.

The current pace of killings is still higher than it was in 2020. If this continues, the city will record the fourth-highest number of homicides in a single year since the height of the crack-cocaine epidemic in the 1990s.

Keep reading for a data breakdown of the pace of shootings.

Thousands of Philadelphia city workers will soon get six weeks of paid parent leave.

Reminder: Six weeks of paid leave for new parents is significantly less time than many private employers offer, and its half what federal workers across the country get.

Still, its a two-week expansion of the current benefit that is intended to retain workers as the municipal government struggles with a short-staffing crisis. Proponents frame it as an incremental step. Itll initially apply to elected officials, Council appointees, some department heads, and others who arent represented by a labor union.

Pay attention: Benefits for unionized employees must be collectively bargained. The agreement shows a new willingness by lawmakers to expand parental leave benefits for the citys 25,000-member workforce ahead of contract negotiations expected to begin next year with the citys four major municipal unions.

Keep reading to learn more details of the agreement.

What you should know today

 Trivia time 

Which Philadelphia restaurant won the best breakfast contest on Good Morning America last week?

A) Middle Child

B) Barts Bagels

C) Becks Cajun Cafe

D) Darnels Cakes

Think you know? Check your answer.

What were...

 Fact-checking: Speeches from former President Donald Trump, Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, and former South Carolina Gov. Nikki Haley at the Moms for Liberty convention this weekend included multiple inaccuracies or lacked context.

 Watching: President Joe Bidens potential new plans for student loan relief after the Supreme Court wiped out his original effort.

 Unscramble the anagram 

Hint: Wawa Welcome America 

ALDO MOTIVE

Email us if you know the answer. Well select a reader at random to shout out here. Cheers to Fred Kaplan who correctly guessed Sundays answer: Dock Street Brewery.

Photo of the day

And that should get your week started. Im off to a last-minute grocery store run before tomorrows Fourth of July cookout with my family. Thanks for waking up with us. 
Corey Inganamort tells me that when he walks into a gay bar, he often feels marginalized and vulnerable  made to feel so by other patrons. Its not because hes gay  its because hes conservative.

In the community, if you were to go to a gay bar or gay club, if politics comes up, youre pretty much shunned in silence, Inganamort said.

Inganamort, 37, who grew up in Sparta, N.J., and graduated from the University of Delaware, is part of a community of LGBTQ conservatives who say the mainstream media, Democrats, and corporate America lump all members of the LGBTQ community together  with woke corporations being the worst. At the end of Pride month, hes left feeling silenced and frustrated.

He is so angered by how woke corporations act, he named his sport pontoon boat The No Woke Zone.

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Inganamort is tapping into a way of thinking that seems to be catching on: The LGBTQ political movement is stifling, silencing, and bullying members of its own community  something that Pride month is supposed to be fighting against.

The backlash against LGBTQ Republicans  similar to Black Republicans  is often vicious, cruel, and isolating.

I spoke to five openly LGBTQ conservatives with ties to the Philadelphia region who are so worried about repercussions from progressives and the LGBTQ movement at large that they stay politically closeted out of fear  a fear so deep that they would not allow me to publish their names nor speak on the record.

One person I texted with, a gay man who moved out of Pennsylvania, told me that despite once being an outspoken conservative and unabashed Donald Trump supporter, he now wont speak up for fear he could lose his job. His bosses in the hospitality industry are fine with his sexuality, but hes worried they might fire him if they knew he is conservative.

Is this the progress identity politics promised? George Orwell saw this coming in 1945 when he wrote Animal Farm. In it, the oppressed become the oppressors. Or to paraphrase Orwell, All LGBTQ people are equal, but some are more equal than others.

Some LGBTQ conservatives are starting to push back. In 2019, former Democrat Rob Jordan launched a Philadelphia chapter of the nations oldest Republican LGBTQ organization, the Log Cabin Republicans.

I just feel like youre told in our community to think one way and to believe one thing  the Democratic liberal agenda, Jordan told Inquirer reporter Julia Terruso at the time. I just wanted there to be a venue, an avenue, for the other side to be heard, to try to address that imbalance.

What do Inganamort, Jordan, and other LGBTQ conservatives want to talk about? The overreach of big government, lower taxes, safer communities, school choice, gun rights, and energy independence, for a start.

Thats why groups like Pink Pistols, an organization established to teach queers to shoot, was over 30,000 members strong in 2018 when it merged with Operation Blazing Sword, a program dedicated to firearm education, training, and support for the LGBTQ community. Its also why the Log Cabin Republicans and its allies support a national platform that makes the case for strengthening the economy via the free market, for everyones benefit.

But good luck finding a mainstream media outlet or corporation that will elevate the voices of LGBTQ conservatives on any of these issues. This despite the fact that 37% of LGBTQ voters, according to a 2020 Williams Institute report, identify as either Republican or independent. One exit poll in 2020 found that 27% of LGBTQ voters voted for Trump. Thats up from 2012, when 22% of lesbian, gay, and bisexual voters supported Mitt Romney, and 2014, when 24% of those voters favored Republicans during midterms.

The LGBTQ political movement  along with the Democratic Party  has become hyper-focused on controlling the ideological narrative. So focused, in fact, that it ignores actual victories for the LGBTQ community if it comes at the hands of conservatives, like when Trump appointed the first openly gay cabinet member in Richard Grenell as director of national intelligence in 2020.

Many I spoke with told me they often get asked, How can you be gay and conservative? For Inganamort, the answer is easy: A great economy and safe community is good for gay people, too. And frankly, only Republicans are able to deliver on those two.

If the LGBTQ movement sincerely believes it stands for equal rights for all, it should deliver for LGBTQ conservatives, too.
Protesters gather outside the U.S. Supreme Court Building in Washington in June 2022, following the justices' decision to overturn "Roe v. Wade." Overturning "Roe v. Wade" and affirmative action in higher education had been leading goals of the conservative legal movement for decades. Over a span of 370 days, a Supreme Court reshaped by three justices nominated by President Donald Trump made both of those objectives a reality. Read more

Of all the words that were unfurled in response to the U.S. Supreme Courts decision to kill off affirmative action last week, three sentences in the last paragraph of Justice Sonia Sotomayors 69-page dissent might have offered the most hope for those of us searching for solace in this consistently unjust and unfair world of ours.

Societys progress toward equality cannot be permanently halted, the lone Latina justice on the court wrote. Diversity is now a fundamental American value, housed in our varied and multicultural American community that only continues to grow. The pursuit of racial diversity will go on.

Before that hopeful nod to progress marching on, Sotomayor held nothing back in her dissent of the pathetic and predictable 6-3 conservative majority ruling.

Sotomayor called the courts decision to strike another blow on the endless road to equality for people of color an unjustified exercise of power that will serve only to highlight the Courts own impotence in the face of an America whose cries for equality resound.

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Her colleague, Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson, the first Black woman to serve on the Supreme Court, was equally blistering in her dissent, saying the court acted with let-them-eat-cake obliviousness that announces colorblindness for all by legal fiat.

The rage expressed by these two women of color is undoubtedly familiar to any Black or brown woman who is compelled to work within a broken institution.

The racism here is easily recognizable, too. The bigotry behind the decision rubber-stamps the idea that affirmative action is somehow a golden hand that swings open any door for unqualified people of color and allows them to take a seat, any seat.

Every person of color has their own stories along these lines. But I, for one, have lost count of the number of times a white person has not just assumed Ive gotten to my position through affirmative action, but that I am also in possession of a Brown Girl E-ZPass that waves me into any classroom or newsroom or space of my choosing. Because I am a woman  check  and a Latina  check.

Living in this country as a woman of color is learning to live with a million tiny cuts of racism and sexism, of micro- and macroaggressions, sometimes at the hands of people who look like you. Irony doesnt even begin to cover Justice Clarence Thomas crab-in-a-barrel move to dismantle a program that gave him the opportunity to be a student at Yale Law School and then a justice on the U.S. Supreme Court.

But it also means living under the expectation to keep ones daily disappointment and disgust and anger in check, lest we be viewed as the stereotypical Angry Black (or Brown) Woman.

Anger is a justifiable response to insidious inequality. This inequality persists, despite national cries for racial reckonings in the last three years  and those reckonings have fueled a dehumanizing and demoralizing backlash. Spoiler alert: The backlash isnt based on reality.

A recent piece in Time magazine authored by a member of The Inquirers board of directors critiqued many diversity efforts as having been cosmetic, performative, and perfunctory. But then, what did we expect when so many institutions put the very people who created or cosigned systems of inequity in charge of racial reckonings?

The shortsightedness has been infuriating, but on most days, Im not completely ready to give up, because progress is fueled by fury.

Anger can be dangerous, especially when its rooted in ignorance and fear that can destroy and dismantle. Weve seen that these last few years, from the Jan. 6, 2021, insurrection to bans against books and assaults on Black history and LGBTQ rights.

But anger rooted in righting unfairness and injustice can also be a powerful tool.

Weve seen that in a lot of the history some are so determined to erase. We saw that during the 2022 midterm elections when after the court upended long-standing legal precedent last June and took away a womans federally guaranteed right to obtain an abortion, furious women and young people helped Democrats defy expectations and win elections in Pennsylvania and around the nation.

I predict well see that again.

Not surprisingly, even at her most blistering, there was an elegance and eloquence in Sotomayors anger. But as a fellow Nuyorican  Sotomayor also grew up in the Bronx  I could hear in her words echoes of the Bet  bring it! that often preceded a fistfight in my old neighborhood.

And its that spirit that must come next  the battle to dismantle outmoded systems and build something new, something better that gets us closer to the principles this country has never quite met for too many of its citizens.

As angry as I, and so many others, am at the arrogance of privilege wielded against the less powerful, I agree with Sotomayor when she writes that societys progress toward equality cannot be permanently halted.

I also know reaching equality wont be easy, and it wont be fast.

But Sotomayors closing words renewed my faith that with righteous rage, a world so regularly unjust and unfair might one day be able to right itself.
Arizona Diamondbacks starting pitcher Zac Gallen throws to the plate during the first inning of a baseball game. Read more

The kid who grew up going to Phillies games because his mother, Stacey, was a faithful fan is now in the All-Star Game, though as a member of the Arizona Diamondbacks.

Gallen grew up in nearby Somerdale in Camden County, N.J., and attended Bishop Eustace Prep in Pennsauken, N.J. He was already a pitching prodigy at that point and further refined his skills in college at North Carolina.

 READ MORE: Bishop Eustace grad Zac Gallen emerging with the Diamondbacks

Though Gallen was drafted by the St. Louis Cardinals in 2016, he didnt make his debut until 2017 with the Miami Marlins. He was traded to Arizona in 2019 and worked his way into the starting rotation that same year. Gallen finished the 2022 season with a 12-4 record and a 2.54 ERA and 192 strikeouts in 184 innings.

Early in 2023, the right-hander avoided arbitration by signing a one-year, $5.6 million contract with Arizona. This season, hes 10-3 with a 3.15 ERA.

 READ MORE: Nick Castellanos selected for his second career All-Star Game
Two hundred years after Meriwether Lewis and William Clark began the legendary trail, Inquirer staff photographer Tom Gralish followed. These images first published in The Inquirer in 2003.

Lewis served as Jefferson's personal secretary before the president asked him to explore the Louisiana Purchase. A year before the 1804-06 Corps of Discovery, Jefferson sent Lewis to the intellectual, medical, scientific, and trading center of the new country - Philadelphia - for training and supplies for the expedition.
Maia Kobabes graphic memoir Gender Queer, was the most challenged book of 2022, the second consecutive year it has topped the list. Read more

The woman at the podium was 14 seconds into reading a passage from a library book by a nonbinary author  an attempt to prove that the county board of education promotes obscene material and porn, as shed described it  when school board president Catherine Kazan cut her off.

I dont think thats appropriate, Kazan said. Theres young people in the audience.

Of course its appropriate! the woman, Pamela Macek, countered, raising her voice to be heard over the cacophony of cheers from the people seated behind her in the auditorium.

Maam, you can verbalize your complaint without reading the book, Kazan said.

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No, no! Oh no! Macek bellowed, shaking her head from side to side. You aint shutting me up.

She resumed reading from the book, Gender Queer: A Memoir, eking out about a dozen more words before her mic was cut. But still she kept at it.

If this continues, we will clear the room, Kazan warned, holding up her palm. Glancing up in search of help, Kazan said, Officer, please?

But Macek continued her complaint about books in the high school library. There are teenagers! she yelled, loud and clear in the absence of a microphone. With strap-ons! Giving blow jobs!

Kazan banged her gavel three times. Officer! Officer! I could use a little help here. The woman refuses to leave the podium, and shes being disruptive.

Macek, a substitute teacher who later claimed in a lawsuit that her opposition to mask mandates had led to her firing weeks before the meeting (she received a $22,500 settlement for emotional distress), was part of a chorus of attendees angered by what they perceived as dangers to students in Wayne Township, New Jersey. One of the eight people whod addressed the board before her at the October 2021 meeting was concerned that the districts COVID-19 precautions were overkill  or hygiene theater  as evidenced by the use of plexiglass shields in classrooms. Others had bemoaned the mention of abortion in the states sex-education curriculum and the borderline pedophilic books in the library.

The idea of blurring lines between genders is child abuse, one of the parents had said, referencing the availability of a book about a transgender child, When Kayla Was Kyle.

You emasculate little boys and whos going to don the next police uniform? the man had asked. Whos going to don the next military uniform and stand in the face of evil?

But it was Kazan telling Macek that it was inappropriate to read from Gender Queer that got the crowd really worked up. The banging of the gavel did little to quiet Macek or the other attendees.

Make a motion, Kazan implored the board, after which one of its members, Michael Bubba, moved to close the meeting. Kazan looked at the board members seated to her left and right. No one immediately seconded the motion.

One of the police officers providing security at the meeting started pacing in front of the dais. The crowd became louder and angrier.

Macek was still yelling from the podium when a parent approached her and said, Give it to me, Ill read the fucking part, briefly taking some papers from her hand before she took them back.

Moments later  just as one of the board members finally responded to Kazans entreaties, saying, I second the motion, madam president  the parent, Mark Faber, made a beeline for Kazan, who sat perched on the dais. Pointing his finger toward her, Faber yelled, This is our outlet as parents to express our dissatisfaction with whats going on.

End the meeting and its going to happen in front of your fucking house.

As three officers directed him back to his seat, Kazan leaned into her microphone. I take that as a threat, she said.

With the man back in the audience, two board members cast votes in favor of ending the meeting.

Board members should not be treated like this and have somebody threaten them right in front of the officers, for Christs sake, Bubba said. Close this meeting.

But the rest of the board voted no.

OK, the meeting continues. Ill abstain, Kazan said, to which the crowd cheered.

Kazan would later say that as the meeting continued, she noticed Faber was still sitting in the auditorium. She recalled flagging down one of the school police officers and saying, Excuse me, why is he still here? He needs to go home. This man just threatened me, threatened the board. And I dont feel comfortable with him remaining here.

Instead, police only briefly took Faber out of the auditorium. He returned to make a public comment a short time later. Id like to start off by apologizing to everyone up on the board, to all the people who are here, for losing my temper, Faber said, hands clasped as he leaned over the podium. Its very uncharacteristic for me to get that frustrated, but Im sure as many of you can understand, this is a very frustrating time to be a parent.

At the end of the meeting, several board members reassured the parents that they were being respected and heard. Then it was Kazans turn.

I was considering saying quite a bit, but now I have to leave this meeting and drive to the Wayne PD and press charges against you, Mr. Faber, for threatening me, she said, pointing her finger into the audience.

She slammed her mic down and ended the meeting. As she gathered her things, she said, Officer, Id like an escort to my car. That night, she gave a statement to police, prompting what would be a short-lived investigation.

The confrontation in Wayne is one of dozens of incidents at school board meetings across the country that ProPublica has examined. The blowups reflect the pervasive challenges that school districts and police departments face in figuring out how to handle masses of aggrieved citizens  and what to do when the clashes lead to chaos. Nearly 60 of those cases, which occurred over an 18-month period ending in late 2022, ended with the arrests of attendees. But in Wayne, the school board president claimed that authorities did little to act on what she perceived as a threat.

Faber told ProPublica he does not believe that what he said to Kazan amounted to a threat. Words are not violence. Violence is violence, he said. But if you try to silence people from talking because they dont agree with you, thats wrong. You shouldnt stop other people from making their points.

Macek said in an interview that it was never her intent to get books banned; rather, she had hoped to make the point that books like Gender Queer should be restricted to counselors offices and that parents should have to approve a student reading it. In response to ProPublicas questions about the meeting, she wrote, If a minor child cannot go into a movie theater to watch an R-rated movie without being accompanied by a parent or guardian, then how can they be permitted and even encouraged to view such blatantly sexual material without the supervision of a parent or guardian?

Parents who cheered for Macek and Faber during the meeting would soon find more allies on the school board. A little more than a year later, the majority of the officials whod sat on the dais with Kazan would be gone, replaced with candidates favored by frustrated parents who hoped to gain more control over Waynes schools.

Three days after the incident, Faber visited the police department to check on the case himself. He expressed concern that he and his family could be targeted because his name and the name of his street had been reported in local media. (His address was not published, police noted in an incident report.)

To ease Fabers worries, Officer Robert Franciose directed officers to check on Fabers property during the current and following shifts. Faber told ProPublica that neither he nor his family were actually confronted in the aftermath of the school board meeting.

The day after Fabers visit, a sergeant followed up with Kazan, letting her know the case against Faber was closed. The sergeant wrote in an update to the incident report: After reviewing the above information, I have concluded that Mr. Fabers statement and actions at the Board of Education meeting did not constitute a terroristic threat. As a result, the probable cause standard was not met and criminal charges will not be filed.

The sergeant told Kazan she could file a complaint in municipal court on her own.

But Kazan remained a target of parents ire even after the school board meeting. The vitriol just migrated to social media. Shortly after the incident, one man referenced Fabers remarks to Kazan when he posted on Facebook that by stating that we are going to protest outside a home, Kazan should feel lucky thats all this group wants to do.

However its voiced, whether we say fuck, shit, asshole, bitch, whatever, all of which we have all heard and used, all we wants is our parental rights to be respected and upheld, the post continued. And sometimes people Need to feel alittle uncomfortable in their own skin, maybe sleep with one eye open, because let me tell you, the thought of this going on in our schools makes us parents feel real uncomfortable.

After the sergeant told her that the case had been closed, Kazan emailed Wayne Townships chief of police, attaching a screenshot of the mans comments. She urged the department to reconsider, writing, I do not feel safe and I will be filing those charges tomorrow. I hope nothing happens to me at a future meeting. Not taking action at this time will only embolden the crowd for the next meeting. I dont even know what else to say about that other than I am truly disappointed. What will it take to arrest someone for intimidating a public official?

Wayne Police Chief Jack McNiff did not respond to ProPublicas questions about the incident, the investigation or Kazans email. Kazan said she discussed with her fellow board members the option of pursuing charges and that she felt most of them wanted to just let it go.

But one board member encouraged her to move forward with charges: Bubba. He and Kazan had butted heads on a number of issues over the past decade. Their politics were often at odds  Kazan describes herself as a social liberal, while Bubba calls himself a moderate Republican. But they both longed for the days of compromise on what was supposed to be a nonpartisan board.

I thought she should have pursued it, Bubba said. To me, that was as bad as it could be. We didnt sign up for this.

Kazan said that after she spoke with the board, she called Faber to see if they could settle things themselves. According to Kazan, the discussion ended in a place where she felt she could let her family know that they did not need to worry about her safety. I was content that the man wasnt looking to blow my brains out. Thats all I cared about, Kazan said. You want to yell at me and curse at me, I can take that. I grew up in New Jersey.

Faber recalls that when Kazan reminded him that she could pursue the charges, he responded, If thats what you think is the right thing to do, go for it. Ultimately, she decided not to.

Faber said of Kazan, She called me out publicly and said she was going to the police to press charges in a very angry tone herself. So it wasnt like her reaction to the situation was one of fear. She was just lashing out and threatening me with police charges.

The month after the confrontation, parents who had rallied behind Macek and Faber at the school board meeting scored a victory at the polls.

Three conservative candidates won seats on the nine-member Wayne Township school board. The candidates had been endorsed by the 1776 Project, a super PAC supporting candidates who want to reform public education by promoting patriotism and pride in American history.

By then, Bubba said, he began thinking it was time to step aside after 10 years on the board. Hed been bothered by the tenor of the school board campaigns, shocked by the Faber incident and alarmed by the communitys growing animosity toward the board.

Nobody wants to compromise. Everybody wants to win, he said. I dont want to sit there and fight every meeting.

In January 2022, after the new board members were sworn in, the board replaced Kazan as president with another veteran board member.

In that years school board election, with Bubba retiring, the self-described parental rights contingency gained a majority with the election of two parents representing a group called Children First! Similar slates of conservative candidates had been put forward nationwide, aiming to change the political and ideological makeup of school boards.

Faber  who describes himself as politically independent  said he was relieved when he saw those 2022 election results. He said that if the board hadnt changed, he believed there would be trans-friendly bathrooms and drag queen story hours at school.

At the March 2023 school board meeting, one of the newest members, Ryan Battershill, proposed taking a second look at the districts mission statement. The statement had been crafted by parents, teachers and counselors in 2020 as a part of a diversity, equity and inclusion initiative soon to be mandated by the state in all public schools. Wayne Schools statement vowed to provide culturally responsive, critically engaging curriculum for students of all backgrounds.

Battershill suggested creating an alternate version that really the community gets behind.

During the boards work session the following month, Kazan was the only member who challenged the need for a new statement. I cant find a problem with it, she said of the existing document. Id really like to know, why are we reconsidering it?

There have been a number of times that people have raised the mission statement, especially the values that used to be in there, Battershill said.

Contacted by ProPublica, Battershill declined to explain what changes he was seeking. As of late June, no board member has submitted a plan to move forward with revising the mission statement.

Kazan noted that the districts new diversity, equity and inclusion initiatives got some people antsy that the policies could open the door to the schools teaching about race and history in a way that would make white kids feel bad about themselves.

Well, that was never the goal, she said. We have a diverse community, and they need to be reflected.
The green dome sits atop the Pennsylvania Capitol in Harrisburg on June 29, 2023. Read more

The heated debate over whether Pennsylvania should invest tax dollars to send students from the states lowest-performing schools to private schools in next years budget has taken a bizarre turn.

A group representing the most conservative members of the Pennsylvania House of Representatives compared school voucher supporters to Nazis from the film Saving Private Ryan in a widely shared meme.

The Pennsylvania Freedom Caucus posted a now-deleted meme Sunday on Twitter that labels House Democrats as Tom Hanks, who in Saving Private Ryan is the brave American willing to stand up for his fellow soldiers when he is outnumbered and out-resourced. The image also labels school-voucher advocates as a Nazi Germany tanker in another still from the World War II movie.

Senate Republicans approved a $103 million private school voucher program on Friday as part of a $45.5 billion budget put together with Democratic Gov. Josh Shapiro. House Democrats, who control their chamber with a one-seat majority, have promised to reject the proposal if it includes the controversial program, which they say will take money and students away from public schools.

Rep. David Rowe (R., Juniata), the vice chair of the Pennsylvania Freedom Caucus, said in an email that the tweet intended to show that school-voucher supporters  made up of House Republicans, Senate Republicans, and Shapiro  are significantly more powerful that the House Democrats, who stand alone in opposition to educational access for thousands of Pennsylvania children.

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Any inference beyond that is a sad attempt at sensationalism to distract from the fact that the House Democrat caucus torpedoed Gov. Shapiros budget as a favor to their taxpayer-funded government union bosses, Rowe added.

In the movie, Hanks shoots the Nazi tanker and blows it up  despite the odds being stacked against him. In other words, the Nazis  in this case, school-voucher advocates  are defeated.

The meme rankled one of the few Democratic supporters: Shapiro, who is Pennsylvanias third Jewish governor.

Shapiros press secretary said invoking Nazis to try and make a political point is abhorrent and repulsive.

But if youre stupid enough to do it anyway, keep Gov. Shapiros name out of it, Shapiros press secretary Manuel Bonder said in a statement.

The Freedom Caucus deleted the tweet Monday afternoon and posted a new meme  this time with a still of Johnny Depp from a Pirates of the Caribbean movie  to try clarify their point. The fleeing Jack Sparrow is labeled House Dems, with his pursuers labeled as Shapiro, parents, students, and Senate.

Pennsylvania started the 2023-24 fiscal year on Saturday without an approved budget. Lawmakers continue to negotiate a final budget deal. As of Monday, leaders were caught on their main sticking point: school vouchers.
Philadelphia city government is looking to expand paid parental leave from four weeks to six weeks as part of a new recruiting and retention strategy. Read more

Thousands of Philadelphia city workers will soon get six weeks of paid parental leave, a two-week expansion of the current benefit that is intended to help the municipal government retain workers amid a staffing crisis.

The move, agreed to last month by Mayor Jim Kenneys administration as part of budget negotiations with City Council, will cost the city $2.1 million this year and will initially apply to employees like elected officials, Council appointees, some department heads, and others who arent represented by a labor union.

Benefits for unionized employees must be collectively bargained. Michael Zaccagni, the citys interim director of the Office of Human Resources, said the intent is to expand the benefit to all city employees.

We look forward to working with our labor partners to make that happen, he said.

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The agreement shows a new willingness by lawmakers to expand parental leave benefits for the citys 25,000-member workforce ahead of contract negotiations expected to begin next year with the citys four major municipal unions. Those talks will be led by a new administration after Kenney leaves office in January.

While proponents of the expansion said the boost from four weeks to six weeks of paid leave to care for a new child is a needed change, they framed it as an incremental step and predicted the city would revisit the issue in the coming years.

 READ MORE: Tax cuts and more police spending are in Mayor Jim Kenney and Council President Darrell Clarkes final budget

Six weeks of paid leave for new parents is still significantly less time than many private employers offer, and its half what federal workers across the country receive. A handful of states also provide 12 weeks of paid family leave to government employees.

National surveys show women take an average of 10 weeks of combined paid and unpaid maternity leave.

Stephanie Tipton, the citys chief administrative officer, said that absent state or federal intervention to subsidize longer leave, its up to employers to foot the bill. And in the case of city government, that often means paying workers overtime to cover for colleagues who are out on leave.

In an ideal world, it would be more than six weeks, Tipton said. I think it just comes down to, financially, what can we as a city government sustain?

The expansion was one of several recommendations made by City Councils Special Committee on Recruitment and Retention of Municipal Workers, a group convened by Council President Darrell L. Clarke that examined ways to stem the citys understaffing problem. Payroll records show about 1 in 5 city jobs are vacant following a wave of retirements and resignations since 2020.

Other recommendations included funding a new, aggressive campaign to market city jobs, as well as hiring bonuses and a new workforce development scholarship program aimed at training employees to be promoted into hard-to-fill positions.

 READ MORE: How short staffing across Philadelphia city government affects you

Councilmember Katherine Gilmore Richardson, a Democrat who represents the city at-large, said expanding parental leave is a critical component of the citys efforts to both retain workers and attract a younger generation to city service. Shes also championing legislation that would push the city to ensure every public building has a dedicated lactation space.

Its very difficult to be a working parent, she said. You really want to be present for your children, but also in your work and career. Just to have that transition time  is really helpful and beneficial for so many people.

Gilmore Richardson was a Council staff member when she gave birth to her daughter in 2014 and to her son in 2016. She said she had serious health complications when her son was born and took 12 weeks off through a combination of accrued paid time off and the citys four-week paid leave benefit.

She said six weeks of paid parental leave is a step in the right direction.

I hope that one day, she said, we can provide 12 weeks.
Lynnewood Hall, the 34-acre Gilded Age estate in Elkins Park, was sold Friday, after spending nearly a decade on the market. Read more

Lynnewood Hall, the 34-acre Gilded Age estate in Elkins Park, was sold Friday, after spending nearly a decade on the market. The property was purchased by the nonprofit Lynnewood Hall Preservation Foundation from longtime owner Richard S. Yoon, pastor of the First Korean Church of New York.

Representatives from the Lynnewood Hall Preservation Foundation declined to disclose the purchase price, which was not reflected in public record as of Friday afternoon. They said they have raised $9.5 million to date, a sum that covers the purchase of the estate and near-term operations, as well as stabilization efforts that began when the house first went under contract in October.

Led by executive director Edward Thome, the group behind the purchase was officially designated a nonprofit only a year ago but it has collectively been working toward this goal since 2018. The group intends to restore and preserve the 110-room mansion and sprawling estate, with an emphasis on education and community. Eventually, it plans to open it to the public.

This is going to be an extended process of restoration because the house is massive. And we want to use every component of it for education in the skilled trades, Thome said. Once we get past the major restoration, itll start morphing into more of a cultural art center and event space.

The purchase of the former Widener family estate marks a major step toward salvation for the 123-year-old house, whose condition has been deteriorating since the 1970s. Its most opulent features were long ago stripped and sold by previous owners, but its exceptionally built bones  and even some precious details  are still intact and worth saving.

Theres a common misperception that the building is in very bad shape, and theres a lot in the building thats not, said Jennifer Robinson, a Lynnewood Hall Preservation Foundation board member and the director of preservation services for Preservation Alliance for Greater Philadelphia.

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The nonprofit raised the capital for the purchase through small and large contributions from various benefactors, including Pottstown-based entrepreneur Scott Bentley and his wife, Susan, who both serve on the board.

Since our first tour of the property, weve been fascinated by its potential in bringing the Gilded Age experience to current and future generations, he said in a statement. We are proud to play a role in bringing the property back to its former glory, and making it available to everyone, particularly its neighbors in Cheltenham Township.

The foundation has already begun replacing windows, repairing the roof, removing overgrowth, and commissioning a conditions assessment. Thome, chief operating officer Angie Van Scyoc, and facilities site manager Tyler Schumacher have taken up offices in the building. Besides stabilization, their immediate focus will be raising money.

We find ourselves in a good place for being able to [keep going with] the operations we put in place for the next three to six months, but we need to start raising funds to be able to prepare for the winter coming up, said Van Scyoc.

Fund-raising efforts include online donations as well as select film and photo shoots, such as the fashion shoot for Australian luxury brand Zimmermann that took place at the house earlier this month.

The group is guarded about the prospect of any on-site events in the near future.

Before we can really think about too much activity on-site for fundraising, we really have to deal with asbestos remediation, things like that, so were not creating an unsafe situation, Robinson said. We need to get a lot of things in order.

While the nonprofits staff and volunteers have their work cut out for them as they try to undo decades of decay, Thome and Van Scyoc had words of appreciation for the houses previous owner.

Dr. Yoon really was set to not let this go into the hands of developers, Van Scyoc said. And in that way, he saved Lynnewood Hall.
Fans await the start of the game following the rain delay during the Philadelphia Phillies game against the Washington Nationals at Citizens Bank Park on Sunday. Read more

A tornado did not actually touch down in Chester County on Sunday night, according to the National Weather Service.

Reports of an unconfirmed tornado in New London Township circulated just after 8 p.m., following a spat of severe thunderstorms that briefly interrupted the Phillies afternoon game against the Washington Nationals and canceled Wawa Welcome Americas gospel concert. The concert is rescheduled to take place Monday at 8 p.m., again on Independence Mall.

But that tornado never happened, said Ray Martin, a meteorologist with the National Weather Service in Mount Holly. Martin said the occurrence was just a funnel cloud, which happens when strong summer storms twist the winds in the atmosphere.

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A funnel cloud hasnt reached the ground, so it hasnt caused any damage, said Martin, who confirmed the NWS received no damage reports from New London Township on Sunday night.

Martin said the risk of a tornado is a lot lower for Monday and Tuesday, but not to rule out another warning.

The atmosphere has a way of surprising us, he said.

Martin said to expect thunderstorms and high temperatures for Monday and July Fourth, anticipating temperatures in the upper 80s on both days. Storms are expected to roll in between 3 and 9 p.m. Monday and Tuesday, according to Martin, which could impact fireworks displays.

Fireworks are a tricky one, Martin said. Its going to depend on how things evolve at the time. Hopefully storms will be done by then, but we cant say for sure.
Insurance Business Australia (IB) identified this years Elite Women by inviting insurance professionals from across the country to nominate exceptional female leaders and provide details of their nominees achievements and initiatives over the past 12 months, including examples of their professional accomplishments and contributions to the industry.
The Insurance Council and insurers are aware that a significant number of claims are complex and awaiting expert reports such as engineering and hydrology, which is causing some delays. For this reason, we are making it a priority to be present and available to customers, Hall said.
We are delighted to have Peter join our board, said Shevawn Barder, CEO of ASIC. His vast experience, business acumen, and leadership capabilities make him an exceptional addition to our team. We look forward to leveraging his insights to guide ASIC's strategic initiatives and reinforce our commitment to being a reliable and agile partner for MGAs and brokers.
Joel Cavaness, president of Risk Placement Services (RPS), returns to Insurance Business TV to discuss his firm recently being named among this year's five-star wholesale brokerages and MGAs. He delves into how the role of wholesalers and MGAs has expanded in recent years, and how to stay on top of client needs.
This post is part of a series sponsored by Old Republic Surety.

Its fortunately rare, but when bond fraud happens, it can be devastating. As a bond producer developing a book of surety business, you must be vigilant in vetting the surety companies you work with. Heres advice from Old Republic Surety and the National Association of Bond Producers.

A recent article in Business Insurance magazine, Surety bond scammers sentenced to prison time, reminds us that surety fraud is a serious crime that can have dire economic consequences for sureties, principals, obligees and the public.

In this case, the victims were three contractors who were bilked out of $1.2 million by criminals who sold them phony bonds to guarantee work in several states.

A high-profile case in Minnesota a few years ago involved a contractor who forged bonds to win contracts with state and municipal agencies. Other schemes have surfaced involving scam artists purporting to represent some of the most trusted names in our business.

Thankfully, bond fraud doesnt happen very often. When it does, though, it can harm the smallest to the largest of contractors, suppliers and owners. A worthless bond leaves victims without financial recourse. And fraud damages the good reputation of our industry, which weve all worked hard to maintain.

Old Republic Suretys Todd Taylor wrote a blog, How to Prequalify a Surety  and Why Its So Important, on the ways you can protect yourself and reduce the risk of fraud. Two of the most important things you can do, which bear repeating, are:

Check the authority of a surety to issue a bond. Verify that the surety has actually issued the bond.

The National Association of Surety Bond Producers (NASBP) has a one-page summary that describes this two-step verification process in detail. If youre an agent, we highly recommend you provide this to your contractor clients.

Among the safeguards you should take, according to NASBP:

Contact your state insurance department to see if the surety has been admitted to do business in your jurisdiction . With few exceptions, sureties must possess a certificate of authority from the insurance commissioner in each state in which they conduct surety business. The National Association of Insurance Commissioners provides links to all state insurance departments

. With few exceptions, sureties must possess a certificate of authority from the insurance commissioner in each state in which they conduct surety business. The National Association of Insurance Commissioners provides links to all state insurance departments Check the U.S. Department of Treasurys listing of approved sureties . A listing of certified surety companies approved to provide bonds on federal contracts, known as Department Circular 570 (or the T-List), is updated twice per year and is posted by the Department of Treasury Department Circular 570 includes the business address and phone number of each listed surety and each state in which the surety is licensed to operate.

. A listing of certified surety companies approved to provide bonds on federal contracts, known as Department Circular 570 (or the T-List), is updated twice per year and is posted by the Department of Treasury Department Circular 570 includes the business address and phone number of each listed surety and each state in which the surety is licensed to operate. Contact a surety directly to make sure a bond has been authorized. All sureties listed on Circular 570 identify a specific contact phone number. In addition, the Surety & Fidelity Association of America administers a program in which surety companies voluntarily agree to receive inquiries for the purpose of verifying the authenticity of surety bonds. Surety contact information is contained in the SFAA Bond Obligees Guide

Two other precautions, as noted by Taylor, include:

Inspect the powers of attorney. The owner or obligee should check to make sure the powers of attorney are current, dated concurrently and match the name on the attached bonds. Check one of the well-known rating agencies. Its always a good idea to look up a company on AM Best to see if its listed, and to find out its financial strength and rating. Other good sites to check are Standard & Poors and Moodys. (Note: Find Old Republic Surety under our parent company, Old Republic International)

Bond principals face many uncertainties in the operation of their business, most of which are known and they can plan for. But bond fraud is one of those risks that can catch you off guard. Always verify credentials, ask questions and do your due diligence. Dont ignore red flags. If it seems too good to be true, chances are it is.

Staying vigilant and verifying a surety is something everyone should get in the habit of doing. Lets work together to make sure contractors and their obligees dont get duped by fraudsters.

Should you have questions or need advice, reach out to the Old Republic Surety branch nearest you.

Topics Fraud
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Hundreds of Connecticut state police troopers falsified information on at least 26,000 traffic stops from 2014 to 2021, skewing reports on the race and ethnicity of pulled-over motorists, according to an audit released Wednesday.

Data analysts with the University of Connecticut said the reports resulted in too many drivers being identified as white. They cautioned, however, that they did not try to determine whether the records were intentionally falsified or were wrong due to carelessness or human error.

Gov. Ned Lamont said he has referred the matter to the chief states attorneys office for investigation, and urged the public to not jump to conclusions.

Theres no indication that was purposeful, he said at an unrelated news conference Wednesday. A lot of it may have been inadvertent.

The audit was spurred by a Hearst Connecticut Media report last year that said four state troopers in an eastern Connecticut barracks intentionally creating hundreds of bogus traffic stop tickets to boost their productivity numbers. After internal affairs investigations, one trooper was suspended for 10 days, another was suspended for two days and the other two retired before the probe was completed.

The audit found that the number of traffic infractions reported to the Connecticut Racial Profiling Prohibition Project advisory board didnt match those reported to the state court system, which handles all traffic citations, according to analysts with the Institute for Municipal and Regional Policy at the University of Connecticut.

The analysts have a high level of confidence that at least 25,966 infraction records were falsified and submitted to the racial profiling systems, the report said. The audit said the number of falsified infraction records could be as high as 58,553, if certain criteria were included. Analysts reviewed more than 800,000 infractions issues over the seven-year period.

We are talking about  a pattern of having records where you cannot find a corresponding record in the court system, said Ken Barone, one of the UConn analysts. If you claimed you stopped a car and issued a ticket, there should be a ticket.

Lamont and the analysts noted that the number of discrepancies between state police data and court system data has decreased in recent years. The report said the most discrepancies were in 2014.

The analysts said they audited traffic stop information submitted by about 1,300 troopers, and 311 of them had a statistically significant number of discrepancies during at least one year.

The American Civil Liberties Union of Connecticut called the audits findings troubling.

This audit reveals a breathtaking disrespect for the states racial profiling prohibition law by Connecticut State Police employees and, even worse, for that laws goal of reducing systemic racism in policing, said Claudine Constant, the groups public policy and advocacy director.

Whether intentional or not, the impact of police falsifying and inaccurately reporting records is the same: police have obscured the true information about how often they stop drivers of color compared to white drivers, she said in a statement.

State police said in a statement Wednesday that the agency has no tolerance for false reporting and it has been working with the UConn institute to prevent it.

The State Police are deeply committed to ensuring the integrity of Connecticuts racial profiling data and to maintaining public confidence in the essential public safety services our troopers provide each day, the statement said.

Police statewide, including local departments, are mandated to submit traffic stop data to the state, under Connecticuts 1999 law aimed at preventing racial profiling. The UConn institute analyzes the data and submits periodic reports, which have shown that officers disproportionately pulled over Black and Hispanic drivers compared to white motorists.

The institute said Wednesday that the integrity of those analyses was in question because the falsified records were more likely to be reported as White drivers and less likely to be reported as Black or Hispanic drivers.

The audit also found that some state police data was underreported to the racial profiling board, and those records were more likely to involve Hispanic drivers.

Falsified police data is nothing new.

In 2010, for example, several New York City officers faced internal charges based on allegations by a fellow officer that they manipulated crime stats. In Texas, state troopers were found to be inaccurately recording the race of minority drivers, according to a KXAN-TV report in 2015.

Copyright 2023 Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.

Topics Law Enforcement Connecticut
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Maryland is becoming the latest state to legally sell recreational marijuana, as businesses aim to tap into July Fourth festivities to kick off sales.

About 100 stores already licensed to sell cannabis for medicinal purposes were able to begin selling it recreationally Saturday, more than five years after the state started selling medical marijuana.

This is cannabis kind of Independence Day  over Independence Day weekend  and so its nice to be able to pull something together that makes it more of a celebratory occasion, said Brandon Barksdale, co-CEO of Remedy Maryland, which has a superstore in Columbia.

The Maryland law creates a personal use amount for people 21 and older to possess up to 1.5 ounces of cannabis flower, 12 grams of concentrated cannabis or a total amount of cannabis products that does not exceed 750 mg THC.

People also can grow marijuana at home, including up to two plants out of public view. Medical patients will be able to cultivate up to four plants at home.

Under the states medical cannabis program, nearly 163,000 people were able to buy marijuana. For 21 and older, that market opens up to roughly 4 million residents.

State lawmakers created the regulatory framework in this years legislative session, after voters approved a constitutional amendment with 67% of the vote to allow recreational cannabis.

Nearly half of the states have approved selling marijuana recreationally, though some have yet to establish a marketplace for sales, including neighboring Virginia and Delaware, as well as Minnesota.

I think once you get to the point that were at right now  about the halfway mark  you start to feel a lot of momentum, a lot more trust from consumers, a lot more trust from patients, a lot more trust from investors that have to help fund all of these operations, said Chantelle Elsner, senior vice president of commercial operations for TerrAscend, which has a cannabis location in Cumberland, with stores expected to open soon in Salisbury and Parkville.

Voters in the District of Columbia have approved recreational cannabis, but Congress has blocked the city from creating a legalized market.

Recreational cannabis also isnt legally sold in any of Marylands neighboring states, boosting business owners hopes that Marylands market will be lucrative.

I definitely do think with the states around us not being recreational yet that thats absolutely going to drive all of the traffic to Maryland, said Brianna Anderson, marketing manager for Gold Leaf, which has a store in Annapolis.

Business owners also hope having legal sales in a state next to the nations capital will help encourage a change in federal policy, which still considers marijuana to be illegal.

Theres so much irony and conundrums and hypocrisy in cannabis policy in the U. S. that the closer to home it gets to the decision makers  the more chance there is for change, said Ben Kovler, CEO and co-founder of Green Thumb Industries, whose Maryland RISE stores are located in Hagerstown, Joppa, Bethesda and Silver Spring.

More licenses will be distributed early next year, with an emphasis on addressing equity concerns for minority- and women-owned businesses. The law allows the Maryland Cannabis Administration to issue additional grower, processor, and dispensary licenses, and new incubator licenses over two licensing rounds.

Cannabis products will be subject to a 9% sales tax, which is the same as the states tax on alcohol. State regulators have estimated recreational marijuana could generate as much as $600 million in sales for the first year.

Maryland lawmakers also approved legislation this year providing that the odor of cannabis alone is not grounds for a police search and reduces the penalty for public smoking from a $250 fine to a $50 fine for a first offense.

Copyright 2023 Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.

Topics Cannabis Maryland
An armada of tankers ferrying sanctioned oil around the globe is starting to get younger, bucking a months-long trend of using the worlds oldest and most dangerous vessels.

Shortly after President Vladimir Putins invasion of Ukraine early last year, hundreds of aging tankers were snapped up by a cohort of faceless traders, intermediaries and investors to keep Russian oil flowing. By some estimates, the purchases, which added to vessels that were already transporting crude for Venezuela and Iran, created a more than 900-strong dark fleet.

Now, the average age of the ships being purchased is declining, according to data from VesselsValue Ltd., a researcher of shipping deals. Two industry executives said that clampdowns in Asia were likely catalysts for the shift, following a spate of detentions in recent months over safety issues.

China, one of the top consumers of Russian and Iranian oil, recently ramped up checks on older tankers at the key port of Qingdao, forcing some to wait more than a month to unload their cargo. Anxiety over aging ships was heightened when a 26-year old vessel exploded off Malaysia in May.

Singapore has also detained tankers for failing safety inspections at a record clip in recent months. Newer vessels, provided they are well maintained, should help to allay fears by some importers over their seaworthiness, though the fleet remains awash with vintage ships.

Safety concerns surrounding older vessels is one of the reasons that buyers are opting for newer vessels, said Rebecca Galanopoulos Jones, a senior analyst at VesselsValue.

Aging Shadow Fleet, Shipping Russian Oil, Poses Disaster Risk

The average age of tankers being sold to undisclosed buyers  one defining characteristic of a ship being part of the dark fleet  fell to 15 years this month, according to VesselsValue. As recently as October, it was 19 years.

Demolition Delay

The specifics of dark fleet tankers vary. Often, though, they are older vessels without industry-standard insurance or other western services, and owners that are tough to trace. Ships are near or over 20, an age at which vessels would typically be scrapped.

Certain countries take a hard view on older ships. In addition to the Chinese checks, India moved to ban vessels older than 25 years of age from entering its ports earlier this year.

Some shipowners are getting more comfortable with handling restricted crude such as Russian flows, as they see that this trade is here to stay, said Anoop Singh, global head of shipping research at Oil Brokerage Ltd. Theyre now more willing to invest in younger ships thatll meet wider industry standards for longer.

When buying for the Russia trade first emerged, it made sense to purchase the oldest vessels available. Those ships are the cheapest, and operating without western services enabled them to bypass many of the sanctions in place on oil exports, including a $60-a-barrel price cap on Russian crude that was imposed by the Group of Seven.

The surge in demand for ships has extended the lifespan for many. Not a single large crude tanker has been scrapped for seven months, something that hasnt happened since at least the mid-1970s, according to Clarkson Research Services Ltd., a unit of the worlds largest shipbroker.

Tankers are also spending more time in transit. The pool of buyers for Russian crude has shrunk since the war, meaning cargoes that used to be hauled just a couple of days along the Baltic Sea now travel for weeks to get to China and India.

Thats pushed benchmark oil tanker earnings to around $100,000 a day on two occasions since the war broke out, compared with an average of $23,000 a day since 2017. Further purchases of younger ships boost the chances of rates returning to the higher level as it trims the supply of ships for conventional trades.

There is a strong safety rationale for the move to newer vessels. In May, an aging tanker was found to have more than 20 defects during an inspection in China. And a lot of the older tankers that can serve the trade have also already been acquired.

The pot of old bangers is running dry so its a natural progression that newer ships will be taken, said Halvor Ellefsen, a tanker broker at Fearnleys Shipbrokers UK Ltd. If it continues, it will mean a tighter regular tanker market, but also a more certain supply of oil from sanctioned countries.

With assistance from Ann Koh, Elizabeth Low, Sharon Cho and Alaric Nightingale.

Photograph: A crewman stands on the deck of the crude oil tanker Devon as it sails through the Persian Gulf towards Kharq Island oil terminal to transport crude oil to export markets in the Persian Gulf, Iran, on Friday, March 23, 2018. Photo credit: Ali Mohammadi/Bloomberg

Related:

Copyright 2023 Bloomberg.

Topics Energy Oil Gas Russia
Guy Carpenter, the reinsurance business of Marsh McLennan, announced it had completed its previously announced acquisition of Re Solutions, the leading independent reinsurance broker in Israel.

Terms of the transaction were not disclosed.

With immediate effect Re Solutions has become Guy Carpenter Israel with Asaf Grinstein, formerly CEO of Re Solutions, as CEO. Founded in 2010, Re Solutions combines industry experience with a strong reputation for developing innovative, client-focused solutions, including an extensive facultative reinsurance offering, said Guy Carpenter in a statement.

Guy Carpenter Israel is now Israels leading reinsurance broker, offering a comprehensive range of capabilities, solutions, and advice. The newly combined business provides a platform for Guy Carpenter to deliver its full complement of reinsurance services to clients in Israel.

Founded in 2010, Re Solutions combines industry experience with sophisticated actuarial and analytics capabilities, together with a strong reputation for developing innovative, client-focused solutions, including an extensive facultative reinsurance offering, Guy Carpenter said, noting that Re Solutions has been Guy Carpenters correspondent broker in Israel since 2011. As a result, the transaction builds on an already strong relationship between the two firms.

Source: Guy Carpenter

Topics Mergers & Acquisitions
JACKSON, Mich. (AP)  A Michigan county has agreed to pay $1.65 million to settle a lawsuit by a sheriffs officer who said he suffered on the job, especially after secretly recording a sheriff making insulting remarks about women and minorities.

Steve Rand, who was Jackson County sheriff, acknowledged the remarks when they became public in 2018 but declined to resign. He didnt run for reelection in 2020.

In 2017, Lt. Tommy Schuette began recording command meetings attended by Rand, who made racist remarks about Blacks, insulted LGBTQ+ and used a sexual pejorative to describe a judge, according to a lawsuit filed in federal court.

Schuette said he shared the recordings with a county official who then asked state police to investigate Schuette, not the sheriff, according to the lawsuit.

Schuette, who has hearing loss, said Rand referred to him as deaf and dumb. He accused the county of a hostile work environment.

His lawsuit was headed to trial this week, but Jackson County settled it for $1. 65 million, which includes a portion for Schuettes lawyer, the Detroit Free Press reported Friday after obtaining the agreement under a public records request.

The county denied any wrongdoing and described the settlement as a compromise of zealously disputed facts.

Gov. Gretchen Whitmer declined three times to remove Rand from office at the request of the county. A separate effort to recall him from office didnt get to the ballot.

Copyright 2023 Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.

Topics Lawsuits Michigan
An Ohio couple was indicted with conspiring to set fire to rental properties in order to collect insurance money, the U.S. Attorneys Office, Northern District of Ohio announced.

Lonnie White, 46, and Lisa Ogletree, 46, of Willoughby Hills, face one count of conspiracy to commit wire and mail fraud, one count of conspiracy to engage in money laundering, and one count of conspiracy to use fire in commission of a felony.

The indictment charges that from April 2013 through March 2019, White and Ogletree devised a scheme to defraud several insurance companies by setting houses on fire and falsely collecting insurance proceeds. White and Ogletree agreed to purchase ownership rights in houses, recruit additional people to act as nominal owners and renters, and obtain insurance on the houses. White and Ogletree then arranged for the houses to be set on fire while staging the fires to appear accidental.

White and Ogletree recruited nominal owners to submit fraudulent loss claims to the house insurers for the fire damage and after payment would distribute the funds to White and Ogletree. White and Ogletree agreed with others to transfer proceeds obtained from the insurance payouts to different accounts. White and Ogletree agreed to use fire to defraud insurance

companies.

An indictment is only a charge and is not evidence of guilt. A defendant is entitled to a fair trial in which it will be the governments burden to prove guilt beyond a reasonable doubt. If convicted, the defendants sentence will be determined by the Court after review of factors unique to this case, including the defendants prior criminal record, if any, the defendants role in the offense, and the characteristics of the violation. In all cases, the sentence will not exceed the statutory maximum and, in most cases, it will be less than the maximum.

Source: U.S. Attorneys Office, Northern District of Ohio

Topics Ohio
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A U.S. judge on Friday ordered a new trial on damages against BNSF Railway in a privacy class action, in a ruling that wiped out an award of $228 million to truck drivers who accused the freight railway giant of unlawfully collecting their fingerprints.

The ruling from U.S. District Judge Matthew Kennelly in Illinois upheld a jurys liability verdict that BNSF had violated the Illinois Biometric Information Privacy Act, which imposes restrictions on the collection and use of personal information such as retinal scans and fingerprints.

But Kennelly said damages under the biometric law were discretionary, and so BNSF is entitled to have a jury determine the appropriate amount of damages.

The trial was the first to be held under the Illinois biometric privacy law, which is among the most stringent nationwide in protecting sensitive personal information.

Warren Buffetts Berkshire Hathaway BRKa.N owns BNSF, which operates one of the countrys largest freight rail networks.

A spokesperson for BNSF and a lawyer for the company did not immediately respond to requests on Friday seeking comment.

Attorneys for the plaintiff did not immediately respond to similar messages.

A truck driver sued BNSF in 2019, alleging the Fort Worth, Texas-based company unlawfully required drivers to scan fingerprints at facilities in the state.

The jury in Chicago last year concluded BNSF recklessly or intentionally violated the Illinois biometric privacy law 45,600 times. The law allows $5,000 per violation.

Lawyers for BNSF said in a post-trial brief that the Illinois biometric law contains the word may and that there is the option not to award damages, or to award damages in any amount less than the statutory maximum.

The state law poses myriad compliance hurdles for companies, and many have faced litigation. In 2020, Facebook said it would pay $650 million to resolve class action allegations that it violated the Illinois law in a feature that could recognize people in photographs shared to the site.

The case is Rogers v. BNSF Railway Company, U.S. District Court, Northern District of Illinois, No. 1:19-cv-03083.

Topics Illinois
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Fox Corp settled for $12 million a lawsuit by former Fox News producer Abby Grossberg, who had claimed gender discrimination and accused the networks lawyers of pressuring her to make misleading statements in the Dominion Voting Systems case, her lawyer Tanvir Rahman said on Friday.

The deal follows Foxs April 18 agreement to pay Dominion $787.5 million to settle the voting-technology companys defamation suit in Delaware.

A week later, on April 25, Fox announced that it had parted ways with Tucker Carlson, the conservative host whom Dominion had accused of allowing debunked election-fraud claims about the firm to air on his show, while casting doubt on the plausibility of those claims in private messages that emerged in legal filings.

Grossberg was the head of booking guests for Carlson.

We are pleased that we have been able to resolve this matter without further litigation, a Fox News spokesperson said in a statement.

Grossberg said in a statement: While I stand by my publicly filed claims and allegations, in light of todays settlement of $12 million, pursuant to which I have now withdrawn those claims, I am heartened that Fox News has taken me and my legal claims seriously.

Grossberg was fired after filing her lawsuit on March 20 in federal court in Manhattan. She had worked for Fox since 2019.

In firing her, Fox said her legal claims were riddled with false allegations against Fox and our employees.

In seeking unspecified monetary damages, Grossberg claimed to have been subjected to a hostile and discriminatory work environment. She accused Fox among other things of gender and religious discrimination as well as pay equity violations.

She had also sought unspecified damages in a similar lawsuit in Delaware Superior Court, which she dismissed in May.

Grossberg said that during preparation with Fox lawyers for her September 2022 deposition in the Dominion lawsuit, she felt coerced and intimidated into not saying anything that would make her become Dominions star witness.

Dominion had sued Fox seeking $1.6 billion for promoting false vote-rigging claims involving the 2020 U.S. presidential election. Had the Dominion case gone to trial, Grossberg could have been a key witness.

Grossberg said Fox subjected her to sexism, misogyny and antisemitism.

Carlson was among the defendants in Grossbergs Manhattan lawsuit. The program on which Grossberg worked, Tucker Carlson Tonight, was the top-rated prime-time U.S. cable TV news show.

Grossberg claimed that Carlson made derogatory comments toward women, and cited incidents such as Carlsons staff discussing whether Michigans Democratic governor, Gretchen Whitmer, was hotter and better at sex than Republican opponent Tudor Dixon.

Grossberg alleged that on her first day on Tucker Carlson Tonight, she discovered many photographs of octogenarian then-House of Representatives Speaker Nancy Pelosi shown in a plunging bathing suit, revealing the Democrats cleavage, on her computer and elsewhere throughout the office.

She also alleged that a member of Carlsons staff called Grossberg into his office and asked her whether Maria Bartiromo, whom she had worked for before Carlson, was having sex with Republican Representative Kevin McCarthy, now the U.S. House speaker.

Grossberg alleged that an executive for Carlsons show once remarked that the mothers room, an office designated for network employees to pump breast milk, was a waste of space and should be replaced with a room of tanning beds for the guys to tan their testicles.

Topics Lawsuits
LITTLE ROCK, Ark. (AP)  A tech industry trade group sued Arkansas on challenging a new state law that requires parental permission for minors to create social media accounts.

NetChoice, a group whose members include Facebook parent Meta, TikTok and Twitter, filed a federal lawsuit over the measure signed by Republican Gov. Sarah Huckabee Sanders in April. The law requires social media companies to contract with third-party vendors to perform age verification checks on new users. The requirement is set to go into effect on Sept. 1.

The lawsuit argues that the new requirement violates the constitutional rights of users and singles out types of speech that would be restricted.

S.B. 396 imposes onerous obligations on social media companies that severely burden both minors and adults First Amendment rights to speak, listen, and associate without government interference on the widely used online services that it covers, the lawsuit said.

Arkansas law is similar to a first-in-the-nation restriction that was signed into law earlier this year in Utah. That law is not set to take effect until March 2024. NetChoice last year filed a lawsuit challenging a California law requiring tech companies to put kids safety first by barring them from profiling children or using personal information in ways that could harm children physically or mentally.

Republican Attorney General Tim Griffin, who was named as the defendant in the lawsuit, said he looked forward to vigorously defending the law.

The law is being challenged as social media companies have faced increasing scrutiny over their platforms effect on teen mental health, one of the concerns Sanders cited as she pushed for the legislation. The governor said Thursday that she was confident in Griffins ability to defend the law.

For years, social media companies have gotten away with exploiting kids, and its proven to have a negative impact on their mental health, Sanders said in a statement. I promised to hold Big Tech accountable to protect kids and empower parents.

Last month, U.S. Surgeon General Vivek Murthy warned that there is not enough evidence to show that social media is safe for children and teens and called on tech companies to take immediate action to protect kids now. Meta on Tuesday announced it was adding some new parental supervision tools and privacy features to its platforms.

The state earlier this year filed lawsuits against Meta and TikTok, claiming the social media companies misled consumers about the safety of children on their platforms and the protection of users private data.

Arkansas restrictions would only apply to social media platforms that generate more than $100 million in annual revenue. It also wouldnt apply to certain platforms, including LinkedIn, Google and YouTube.

The lawsuit says the distinctions the measure makes between types of platforms that must adhere to the age-verification requirement and those that dont make no sense in theory or in practice.

Social media companies that knowingly violate the age verification requirement could face a $2,500 fine for each violation under the new law. The law also prohibits social media companies and third-party vendors from retaining users identifying information after theyve been granted access to the social media site.

Copyright 2023 Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.

Topics Lawsuits InsurTech Tech Arkansas
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When Florida prosecutors charged former Deputy Scot Peterson for his alleged inaction during the 2018 Parkland school massacre, they faced a major hurdle: no law precisely fit.

So it was not a surprise to legal observers that Peterson was acquitted Thursday of child neglect and other charges for failing to confront the shooter who killed 17 people at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School.

Without an on-point statute to base their case upon, prosecutors tried to make the law fit the facts instead of the facts fit the law, lawyers said. That is always a tougher courtroom battle to win.

The Peterson case has always been an uphill climb for the prosecutors, Miami criminal defense attorney David S. Weinstein said. I feel bad for the victims and their families. Their pain will last for a lifetime. For them, the disappointment in the system continues. It was compounded by the state pushing forward on this case, despite the high odds of obtaining a conviction.

But Linda Beigel Schulman, whose son, teacher Scott Beigel, died in the shooting while protecting students, said Friday that prosecutors were always upfront with the victims families that an acquittal was a distinct possibility. This was the first time a U.S. law enforcement officer was tried for failing to act during an on-campus shooting  there was no precedent to compare the case with.

She said that while she is disappointed in the verdict, she does not blame the prosecutors or the jury  they did their job.

We have a legal system in this country, but its not always just, Beigel Schulman said.

Florida has well-defined statutes that cover unlawful actions law enforcement officers might commit, such as unjustly shooting or beating a suspect. But none says a school police officer must act while students are being shot.

That is what Peterson was accused of: doing nothing. He has insisted he would have acted, but echoes prevented him from pinpointing where the gunshots were coming from. He had faced a possible lengthy prison sentence if convicted.

The schools on-campus deputy, Peterson, 60, was in his office Feb. 14, 2018, when Nikolas Cruz began his six-minute attack, firing about 140 shots with his AR-15-style semiautomatic rifle inside a three-story classroom building.

Peterson and two unarmed civilian security guards arrived at the building within two minutes. Cruz was at the opposite end, killing the last of the 11 people he would murder on the first floor  an unarmed security officer who had opened a door to go after him.

Security video shows Peterson got within feet of another door and drew his handgun, but then backed away, taking cover next to an adjoining building 75 feet (23 meters) away. He radioed arriving deputies to stay 500 feet (152 meters) back.

Meanwhile, Cruz headed up the stairs to the third floor, where he would kill six more beginning 73 seconds later.

Peterson would stay next to the alcove for 40 minutes, long after the shooting had stopped, Cruz had fled and other officers charged inside.

Eight days later, then-Sheriff Scott Israel, who was under political pressure for the shooting, said his video review of Petersons actions made him sick. Peterson retired and was then retroactively fired. Israel was also fired 11 months later by Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis shortly after he took office.

Petersons attorney, Mark Eiglarsh, has said Israels comments unjustly set the community against his client. He said Israel never spoke to Peterson to get his side, though they had been friends.

Every one of us erroneously assumed that my client knew that kids were being killed in that building and he just didnt go in. The jurors made it clear through their verdict that couldnt be further from the truth. He did everything he could, Eiglarsh said.

Circuit Judge Martin Fein sealed the jurors names and none came forward Friday to say whether they believed Peterson or simply didnt think the law fit.

More than a year after the shooting, prosecutors charged Peterson. The most serious counts were child neglect  a charge most commonly levied against parents whose lack of care leads to their childs death or serious injury. To be convicted, Peterson had to be considered a caregiver to the students who were shot  an assertion that caused a skeptical Judge Fein to almost dismiss the case before it got to the jury.

University of Miami law professor Craig Trocino said that if the prosecutions theory were true, every first responder would then be subject to criminal liability for child neglect any time there is a child present at any time an officer is also present.

Bob Jarvis, a professor at Nova Southeastern Universitys law school, said prosecutors seemed to want to charge Peterson with cowardice under fire, but only the military has such laws. He said prosecutors had no case.

Peterson was being made a scapegoat. While he certainly had some amount of responsibility, every adult who ever came into contact with Nikolas Cruz  parents, foster parents, school administrators, teachers, social workers, etc.  also had some responsibility, he said.

In a statement, Broward State Attorney Harold Pryors office stood by its decision to charge Peterson, saying there was sufficient evidence.

There was an obligation to address the circumstance and evidence in this case, the acute need for safety in our schools and the special role of school resource officers, the statement said.

Tony Montalto, the president of Stand with Parkland, the group that represents most of the victims families, said its board will discuss whether to lobby the Florida Legislature to enact a law requiring school police officers to act during a shooting.

There is no reason parents shouldnt expect a school resource officer to protect their children, said Montalto, whose 14-year-old daughter Gina died in the shooting.

Pryor told the parents he would support that effort.

Photo: Former Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School School Resource Officer Scot Peterson reacts as he is found not guilty on all charges at the Broward County Courthouse in Fort Lauderdale on June 29, 2023. (Amy Beth Bennett/South Florida Sun-Sentinel via AP, Pool)

Copyright 2023 Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.

Topics Florida
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A 14-year-old boy is facing charges in Tennessee after a gun in his backpack accidentally fired in the gym of a youth community center on Wednesday, striking a 10-year-old peer and sending him to the hospital, according to police.

The 10-year-old hit by the gunfire at the Phyllis Wheatley Center in Knoxville is now in stable condition after suffering life-threatening injuries, according to a Knoxville Police Department news release. The boy was struck at least once during the shooting, which was not intentional or targeted, police said. No other injuries were reported.

The 14-year-old is initially facing charges as a juvenile of two counts of unlawful possession of a weapon and one count of reckless endangerment. Police say they detained the teenager a few blocks from the youth center and recovered the backpack, which had two handguns in it.

Authorities said the investigation is ongoing.

The Phyllis Wheatley Center is the main facility for the YWCAs youth programs in East Tennessee, according to its website.

The YWCA said it was reviewing safety protocols and making plans to provide resources to children and staff after the traumatic event. In an emailed statement, the YWCA of Knoxville and the Tennessee Valley said it had contacted families, and kids were being picked up from the facility.

The YWCA asked the public to join in wrapping all of our young people in your love and prayers.

Copyright 2023 Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.

Topics Tennessee
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A south Florida injury attorney, suspended from practice this year over alleged financial irregularities, has been charged with murdering his father, Boca Raton lawyer Paul Labiner.

News outlets and the Palm Beach County Sheriffs Office reported that Brandon Scott Labiner, 34, was arrested Sunday and charged with homicide. He had been accused earlier this year of stealing $450,000 from his mothers trust fund, and was suspended from law practice in April by the Florida Supreme Court.

Brandon Labiner, whose practice included insurance claims, denied the accusations and blamed his father for the missing funds. A Florida Bar investigation, though, found that Brandon had forged bank documents to support his claims.

The elder Labiner, who also handled wills and estates, had sued Brandon for damaging the law firms personal injury business and siphoning money out of his fathers accounts, the Miami Herald reported.

On Sunday, the dispute apparently took a turn for the worse. Paul Labiners body was found at his law office on Federal Highway in Boca Raton, according to several local news reports. After a SWAT team was called to the scene, Brandon Labiner was arrested a few hours later, WPTV news reported.

Topics Florida
A fire that appeared to have started in a backyard palm tree spread through a Phoenix, Arizona neighborhood, destroying two homes and damaging four others as hot embers blew onto roofs and into other vegetation, authorities said.

The Phoenix Fire Department said Fridays four-alarm blaze spanned a city block. Nearly 100 firefighters were deployed to combat the conflagration, battling flames that were engulfing structures as well as fires in towering palm trees.

There were no reports of injuries, and the cause was under investigation.

Phoenix Fire Capt. Rob McDade said the incident served as an ominous warning about the danger ahead of fireworks-fueled Fourth of July celebrations in extremely hot, dry conditions.

The hot embers get airborne and land on rooftops and start tree fires, McDade told ABC-15 in Phoenix. We dont know what started this, but its a great time to remind everybody this is going to be a very long, hot Fourth of July.

The temperature hit a high of 110 degrees Fahrenheit at Phoenix Sky Harbor Airport on Friday and are expected to reach 115 this weekend, the National Weather Service said.

Copyright 2023 Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.

Topics Arizona
As the Fourth of July reminds us, independence is worth fighting for. On July 4th we celebrate our nations declaration of freedom from the control and influence of Great Britain. Financial independence also means freedom. And as with the political independence we celebrate every July 4th; financial independence starts with a declaration. Here's how to declare, fight for, and win your own financial Independence Day.

Key Takeaways Financial independence is when you can live the quality of life you desire without having to work any longer.

To achieve financial independence, it is a good idea to start saving and investing early.

It also often requires setting up a long-term strategy and sticking to it.

What Does Financial Independence Mean?

A quick definition of financial independence could be having enough wealth to live a life of comfort without the need to work. In truth, financial independence can mean different things to different people.

In a 2020 TD Ameritrade survey of young Americans ages 1529, for example, 57% of respondents judged themselves to be financially independent by virtue of being able to meet their financial obligations without financial help from parents, grandparents, or others.

Between those two benchmarks lie myriad definitions of financial independence. Some people have no desire ever to quit working. They just want enough money to be comfortable and to have the ability to cover an emergency without going into debt. For others, financial independence means freedom from worry when they retire, including the freedom to travel, spend time with family members, relax and enjoy the fruits of their labor.

Others see it as being able to support themselves and be there for families who need them without worrying about being able to afford to helpor having enough to support the institutions and causes they value. Your definition could incorporate many of these goals.

Whatever financial independence means to you, unless you win the lottery or inherit a fortune, it will likely only happen if you are willing to go after it. The Founding Fathers knew that Americas independence would not be achieved without a fight. And they knew the fight would not be successful without a strategic plan. So it is with financial independence.

The plans we're discussing can help you build your way to financial independence. But it's important to recognize that strategy and prudence can only go so far. Family responsibilities, health, personal circumstances, and social privilegeor the lack of itplay a large role in how free an individual is to build wealth and achieve financial independence. This advice is given in that spirit, knowing that the playing field in America has never been completely even. The independence and freedom declared on July Fourth and won in the Revolutionary War is important to celebrate. But Americans must also recognize that it left out the majority of the new nation's inhabitants; our nation is still fighting to feel and be fully equal and free.

Your Financial Independence Strategic Plan

Just as there is no absolute definition of financial independence, there is also no one strategy that will help you gain financial independence. That said, all strategic plans have some features in common. You will need to set financial objectives, choose the assetsfinancial and otherwiseyou will need to achieve your goals, decide on the investment strategies and other tactics you will employ, and commit to perseverance to keep fighting for your financial independence until (given hard work and some luck) it is in hand.

Financial Objectives

Your financial objectives are unique to you. Think about your long-term goals. Do you want total financial independencefreedom from working for a living, and the ability to do as you please? Or are your objectives more modest? Are you OK with a mostly independent lifestyle with some need to supplement your passive income?

Your age and financial situation will influence your choice of objectives. If you are in your 20s or 30s, you have decades to achieve your goals along with the ability to take more risks. At that age, you may even want to pursue whats known as the FIRE (Financial Independence, Retire Early) strategy, which involves an extreme savings and investment strategy designed to allow you to retire far earlier than normal. Or, as the respondents in the TD Ameritrade survey indicated, your goal may be to be able to pay your bills and avoid debt.

If you are older, say between 50 and 65, you likely already have retirement-savings objectives but even if not, there is still time to plan for financial independence. Depending on your goals and accumulated assets, this may involve a riskier investment strategy to make up for lost time. Or you may need to reset what defines retirement comfort.

Whatever your objectives, write them down. Keep them in front of you as constant reminders of where you want to end upliving a life, as you define it, of financial independence.

Assets

Which tools (weapons) will you need to achieve your objectives? These can include income-producing assets of many kindsranging from a high-yield savings account or CDs to a portfolio of dividend-paying stocks, bonds (or bond funds), and real estate.

A home is many people's largest assetand can turn into a source of equity or be used in a reverse mortgage to help fund retirement. And that's not the only way to invest in real estate. Rental properties can generate significant amounts of cash flow but can require substantial investment and risk. REITS (real estate investment trusts) are another way to invest.

Another wealth-building asset would be to start and run a successful business with the ultimate goal of either not being directly involved in day-to-day management or of selling the business for a substantial profit.

Assets also include intangibles, such as knowledge and skill. You were not born knowing about the stock market, rental properties, or how to run a small business. You were born with the ability to learn, research, read, and experiment with different strategies to see what works.

Tactics

Your successful journey to financial independence depends a lot on your actions. These are the things you need to learn about and do to achieve financial independence as you define it.

Start with a budget that takes into account income and other available assets, allows you to pay your living expenses, and if at all possible, lets you save and invest. Think of your budget as a roadmap to financial independence. Pay attention to where the money goes and avoid dead ends. Cut costs where possible, creating more opportunities for saving and investment.

Take full advantage of any employer-provided retirement savings plans, if you have access to them, or start building your own through an IRA or Roth IRA. On the other hand, it's important to allow for fun (unless you are following the FIRE strategy above). Just don't go overboard and, above all, do not borrow for recreation.

Along the same vein, expect the unexpected by creating an emergency fund to provide liquidity when you need it most for an unexpected (but necessary) expense. Planning for unexpected events that could derail your plans is crucial. It doesn't have to be a pandemic; it could be illness, an unexpected job loss, or an economic crisis like the Great Recession of 2007 to 2009.

Finally, develop an investment strategy that takes advantage of the power of compound interest. Compound interest is free money and adds up over time. Learn as much as you can about investing but also take advantage of the knowledge others already have. If investing is a major part of your wealth plan, find and utilize an investment advisor as early in the process as possible.

Perseverance

The notion of the need for "eternal vigilance" in the pursuit of liberty, often attributed to Thomas Jefferson, could also be applied to financial independence. The road to financial independence requires a lifetime commitment to continuous budgeting and investment.

You also need to be watchful about situations that could lead to having money trickle out that could be put to better use. Or that could lead to accumulation of more debt that you can handle. If you feel it coming on, make yourself stop and pay attention, and work to find a solution, whether it's debt counseling, debt consolidation, or even that old standbyputting the credit cards in a drawer and not using them.

Keep looking for new opportunities and new ways to make the most of your hard-earned capital. Perseverance also demands that you learn the steps for building a profitable investment portfolio and make sure that you rebalance it regularly to keep it moving toward your financial objectives. Then, adjust as you get closer to retirement.

Independence at Last

Sometimes success sneaks up on us. If your fight for financial independence is intense and persistent, you may end up as the Continental Army did after the British surrender at Yorktown, Oct. 19, 1781. At that point, historians say, the Americans had effectively gained their independence. The fight continued, however, for almost two more years until Sept. 3, 1783, when the signing of the Treaty of Paris brought the war to an end.

But the fight for freedom didn't end there. The fight continued for enslaved people. It wasn't until June 19, 1865, that Major General Gordon Granger proclaimed freedom for enslaved people in Texas, leading to the commemoration of that date in the Juneteenth holiday celebrated on June 19th every year.

What is important today is that you keep up the good fight until you are sure youve achieved the objectives you set out to achieve. Just as it did on July 4, 1776, independence begins with a declaration, followed by a plan, including objectives, assets, tactics, and most of all, perseverance. A little luck can't hurt, too. And some generosity to your companions on that road. Both people and nations need the company and help of others.
A lot has changed since Travis Scott stepped onto the stage to headline Longitude in Marlay Park almost exactly five years ago. We've been through the covid era, and the 32-year-old rapper was surely a relieved man taking to the stage on Sunday night, just a few days after a Texas grand jury had cleared him of any wrongdoing after the 2021 Astroworld tragedy in which ten people lost their lives at one of his shows.

With that incident in mind, parents of attendees might have been understandably worried, but Longitude has long been a very safety-conscious event. For instance, safety barriers divided parts of the crowd into sections, and regular notifications from the event's phone app remind the young crowd to take care of themselves and their friends. It was also great to see the buzz around some of the information stalls, such as Safe Gigs Ireland, educating on how we can make gigs and nightlife a zero-tolerance environment for sexual violence and discrimination.

Travis Scott on stage at Longitude 2023.

As ever, the mosh-pit itself is not for the faint-hearted, but overall, the atmosphere at the festival is usually very good natured and positive.

Travis Scotts own festival was named after the Astroworld album which came out weeks after that Dublin show in 2018, and that record helped propel him into the top tier of music acts worldwide. It remains a stunning album, and a towering testament to the dominance of Trap music, a subgenre of hip-hop that has been to the fore over the last decade or so.

Nearly 15 years after Jay Z addressed the over usage of Auto-Tune in rap music, one of Europes biggest festivals was dominated by the Sunday pairing of two huge proponents of voice manipulating technology, Travis Scott and Lil Uzi Vert. The sonics were amazing, particularly from Scott, and much of the credit must go to producer and engineer Mike Dean, who has helped shape the vision of many great hip-hop artists over the years.

Lil Uzi Vert on stage at Longitude in Marlay Park, Dublin. Picture: Glen Bollard

Lil Uzis energetic show had set up the evening perfectly, and his appearance with Travis Scott on stage for his opening track 'Aye' (apparently the first time the duo had performed the track from Uzi's new Pink Friday album), meant that the long 45-minute gap between the two acts was largely forgotten.

Very few of the crowd would have been at Longitude in 2018, and Scott was the biggest name on the more streamlined two-day edition of Longitude this year. Elsewhere at a largely sunny festival there were well received shows by Saturday headliner Calvin Harris, Ice Spice, Raye, MK and Irelands high flyers Belters Only (with another of our biggest stars Jazzy) plus TraviS and Elzzz.

Yasmin Murray and Caoimhe Duffy on Saturday at the Longitude festival in Marlay Park. Picture: Leon Farrell/Photocall Ireland

The anticipation was high for Scott, and he delivered a polished if slightly curtailed set of classics such as Butterfly Effect', 'Highest in the Room', 'Sicko Mode' and 'Goosebumps'. His eagerly awaited Utopia album - due later this month - should elevate his career even further, but for now, this was another triumph.

The skies opened with rain during 'Stargazing' but most of the crowd embraced the moment, and as the curfew kicked in and Scott left the stage, they quickly left for their busses taking them from the Rathfarnham venue.

The neighbouring golfers who were lining up putts within earshot of Lil Uzis Verts 'Just Wanna Rock' will next have Def Leppard and Motley Crew to contend with on Tuesday. That event likely draw an older crowd, but Longitude certainly made its mark on the memories of many young festival goers over the weekend.

Out and about at Longitude

Rene McCarthy and Emily Joyce pictured on Saturday at Longitude. Picture: Leon Farrell/Photocall Ireland

Red Cross volunteers Maurice Delaney and Arlene Conway at Longitude in Marley Park. Picture: Tony Gavin

Rebecca Kearney and Gemma O Keeffe at Marlay Park. Picture: Leon Farrell/Photocall Ireland

Fans enjoying themsevles at the Longitude Festival. Photo Sasko Lazarov/Photocall Ireland

Lauren Davis and Cara Moore at the Longitude Festival. Photo Sasko Lazarov/Photocall Ireland

Olivia Korba and Kyle Togbe at Longitude at Marlay Park. Picture: Leon Farrell/Photocall Ireland

Fiona Collins, Emma Dunne, Audrey Lawlor and Susan Doyle at Longitude. Picture: Leon Farrell/Photocall Ireland
The Ciara Phelan Podcast

New from the Irish Examiner, political correspondent Ciara Phelan talks with guests about some of their most personal life experiences, reflecting on their influences, their family life and the role that faith has played and continues to play in their lives. Phelan says: Im hoping that in these discussions listeners will see a different side to people they thought they knew. Id like to leave listeners with points of interest that will leave them thinking or challenge their views.

The first guest is actress Mary McEvoy, who as Phelan points out during the episode, everybody will know as Biddy Byrne from Glenroe. That fame is double-edged - McEvoy says she hasnt been into an Irish pub in 30 years: If you didnt join the company, then the abuse would start.

She adds: I came from a very rural area of Ireland into an Ireland where there was no celebrity culture, so there was nobody to tell me about it.

She says that Gay Byrne was good to her - he was the first person to notice that I wasnt myself to ask are you alright? - but that she didnt have anyone to turn to back then, really.

After a revealing opening chat with McEvoy, Phelans future guests include Green Party leader Eamon Ryan, and sports journalist and disability rights campaigner Joanne ORiordan.

Second Captains

Two brilliant sports interviews on two long-running shows to recommend. First up, and for subscribers only (5 a month), Second Captains had Cork cyclist Eddie Dunbar in studio (episode 2669, June 22), fresh off a top-10 finish at the Giro dItalia, the highest finish by an Irishman in the Giro since Stephen Roches victory in 1987. He talked about the dangers involved in cycling, including his worst experience - a concussion that dogged him for months, where even bumps in the road proved too much for him.

Eddie Dunbar. Picture: Seb Daly/Sportsfile

OTB GAA

Meanwhile, on Off The Balls GAA show (just search for OTB GAA on your podcast apps), Vincent Hogan was on with Joe Molloy on June 21 to talk about finally hanging up his hat as a sportswriter with the Irish Independent - hopefully its only a temporary sportswriting hiatus. While the interview with Joe Molloy is about sportswriting, its themes will be familiar to many. Hogan talks about how the job has changed in recent years, finding various aspects more challenging than his younger colleagues.

The one thing I just wanted to avoid was not being able to do it properly, admits Hogan. At this stage, I dont feel like Im enjoying matches. And I get this thing of its not real work, and people will say that, but Ive always seen it as real work. Its not something that Ive shown very openly, but Ive always been anxious about work.
Libraries all over the Cork County Council area are inviting children that are getting ready to start school in September to visit their local branch, and collect a free My Little Library book-bag.

The My Little Library initiative, funded through Dormant Accounts Funding, is offering the free package - featuring storybooks and junior library memberships for children, and supportive information for parents - for all children starting school in September 2023.
An Irish tourist has been arrested on suspicion of murder after an Irish woman was found dead at a hotel in a Spanish holiday resort.

Police have confirmed they held the 30-year-old man on Sunday night after rushing to a hotel in the Costa Dorada resort of Salou, 70 miles south of Barcelona, and finding the woman in a corridor. The man, discovered beside her with a self-inflicted wound, was taken to hospital where he remained under police guard on Monday.

Sources close to the investigation have confirmed the arrested tourist is Irish, as is the 36-year-old woman. The same sources indicated the pair were understood to be partners and were sharing the same hotel room.

Staff at the adult-only, four-star Magnolia Hotel in Salou where the incident occurred said they were unable to make any comment. The alarm was raised around 9.30pm on Sunday. Salou is part of the Catalan province of Tarragona.

A spokesman for the regional Mossos dEsquadra police force said: Officers from the Mossos d'Esquadras Criminal Investigation Division in Tarragona have arrested a man allegedly related to the violent death of a woman in Salou last night.

The events occurred around half past nine when the Mossos received a warning from a hotel in Salou saying a woman was seriously injured. When they arrived at the scene, the officers found a woman lying on the floor and a man next to her with a self-inflicted wound.

Although emergency medical responders tried to revive the woman, they were finally only able to certify her death. Officers arrested the man as the alleged perpetrator of the death.

In an update this morning, the police force said the arrested man is 30 years old. The man was under police guard at Joan XXIII Hospital in the city of Tarragona, the capital of the province of the same name but has since been transferred to a police station.

He is understood to have caused a wrist wound by punching or hitting a pane of glass. Well-placed sources said his injuries were not life-threatening. Court officials confirmed a court specialising in violence against women would be tasked with the criminal investigation.

Secrecy order

They also said a secrecy order had been placed over the case, which does not prevent reporting of the incident and ongoing probe, but limits the amount of information civil servants, including police, can give out. It is a common procedure in the early stages of a case and has the objective of legally safeguarding the ongoing criminal probe.

A local judicial official said: Tarragonas Duty Court proceeded last night to order the removal of the body of a woman who suffered a violent death at a hotel in Salou. The case, which is under judicial secrecy, will be investigated by a court specialising in violence against women.

The victim and alleged aggressor are not residents in Spain and therefore it is not possible at this time to state whether there had been previous episodes of violence involving the couple.

Tanaiste and Foreign Affairs Minister Micheal Martin described the incident as shocking.

He said consular assistance was being provided to the family of the Irishwoman killed.

Our department officials are providing consular assistance there to the family and to do everything we can to help those impacted by that terrible event in Salou in Spain.

A Garda spokesman said: An Garda Siochana is aware of an alleged incident that took place in the Spanish town of Salou involving Irish citizen/s on Sunday July 2, 2023.

As this is an investigation led by the Spanish authorities, An Garda Siochana has no further comment at this time.

 additional reporting by PA
Amendments to the British governments legacy Bill, which would block a number of former republican prisoners from claiming compensation over internment without trial in the 1970s, have been described by a lawyer as draconian.

Former Sinn Fein leader Gerry Adams was among those who could have pursued compensation after he was interned without trial in 1973 at Long Kesh internment camp, also known as the Maze prison.

In 2020 the UK supreme court ruled Mr Adams detention was unlawful because the interim custody order used to initially detain him had not been considered personally by the then-secretary of state for Northern Ireland, Willie Whitelaw.

This was despite a long-standing convention, known as the Carltona principle, where officials and ministers routinely act in the name of the secretary of state, who is ultimately responsible.

Lord Caine (Liam McBurney/PA)

Last week, Northern Ireland Office minister Jonathan Caine told peers that a UK government-backed amendment to the Northern Ireland Troubles (Legacy and Reconciliation) Bill is aimed at addressing the loophole.

The amendment, published at the weekend, seeks to clarify that legislation underpinning internment can be read as having allowed junior ministers to make interim custody orders.

A separate amendment also sets out that compensation and civil action may not be sought or continued if it involves an interim custody order that is deemed unlawful because it was authorised by a junior minister.

Legal firm KRW Law said it had been instructed in more than 50 cases of former republican internees who are challenging the UK government on the legality of their detention in the early 1970s.

The firm said the introduction of the amendments will effectively prevent dozens from suing for damages for illegal detention.

It is a clear example of further political-executive interference with the lawful out workings of independent judicial process

Solicitor Gary Duff said: This is a draconian and retrograde step.

The proposed legislative change, if it goes through, amounts to political interference of the most excessive kind to prevent claimants pursuing their legal rights through the courts.

It is a clear example of further political-executive interference with the lawful out workings of independent judicial process.

After many months of negotiating with the Public Record Office for Northern Ireland to access all detention record relating to those we represent, we have just received a number of files clearly disclosing that the wrong signatures were assigned on many ICO forms which establishes clear grounds for challenge before the courts.

Mr Duff said it was a blatant attempt to ignore the clear judicial authority of the UK Supreme Court judgment.
RTE has said the "suitability" of the Father Mathew St studio in Cork is being assessed following speculation around the building's future.

However, RTE said contrary to such speculation, it "remains fully committed to its operations in Cork".

The broadcaster issued a statement on Monday after reports that it may be forced to sell off assets.

While the statement said RTE was fully committed to operations in the county, it added: "The suitability of the current building for the full range of RTE's operations in Cork is being assessed".

The Cork studio is based on Father Mathew St in the city centre and RTE's Today show, hosted by Maura Derrane and Daithi O Se, is filmed there.

It comes as Media Minister Catherine Martin insisted the Government has no plans to force RTE to introduce widespread job cuts or sell off its assets, including 2FM.

Ms Martin said she does not want piecemeal reactions but rather fundamental change at the troubled broadcaster.

RTE is bracing for another week in the spotlight[/url] over not just its hidden payments to Ryan Tubridy through a slush fund, but also its wider financial practices which have been laid bare in recent days, with officials due to be grilled by the Oireachtas media committee on Wednesday.

On Tuesday, Cabinet will rubberstamp the appointment of an external auditor to examine the accounts and books of RTE.

Catherine Martin will seek approval to invoke Section 109 (7a) of the Broadcasting Act, which will allow her to appoint the auditor.

Ministers are also due to sign off on the long-awaited terms of reference into the external review of corporate governance and culture at the broadcaster.

The Public Accounts Committee (PAC) will not be bringing RTE officials before it this week. Its members will instead scrutinise the existing evidence that they have already received from the broadcaster.

Media Minister Catherine Martin speaking to reporters on Saturday in the wake of the revelations of RTE's undisclosed payments to Ryan Tubridy. Picture: Nick Bradshaw/PA

However, PAC chairman Brian Stanley said the matter remains fluid, and he did not rule out bringing RTE officials before PAC at short notice in the future.

Mr Stanley said the committee is anxious to hear from both the former RTE director general Dee Forbes and head of content Jim Jennings, as well as Ryan Tubridy and his agent Noel Kelly. Both Ms Forbes and Mr Jennings have been unable to appear before the committee, citing health reasons.

The fixing of this wont be done with a sticking plaster, said Stanley.

It wont be done with day surgery. This is a major transplant that has to happen here at the top of RTE. Its major surgery.

Media committee chairwoman Niamh Smyth said it intends on Wednesday to find out what knowledge there was of the hidden payments to Mr Tubridy.

The crux of this is about secret payments and the deception of that, and I suppose the intended mechanism that was put in place to deceive, not just the public, but the Government and the taxpayer, ultimately, she said.

I dont think its revenge on anybodys heart or mind in trying to sort out this in RTE.

Her comments followed reports in the Irish Mail on Sunday that up to 400 jobs could be cut at RTE in a redundancy scheme.

The report has been categorically denied by a spokesperson for Ms Martin.

There are no proposals by the minister for staff redundancies or selling assets, a spokesperson said. These, and related issues, would be matters for the RTE board, in the first instance.

However, the minister has met with representatives of staff and is acutely aware of their concerns.

Emma OKelly, RTE journalist and chairwoman of the National Union of Journalists (NUJ) Dublin Broadcasting Branch, criticised the suggestion that jobs could be cut at the public service broadcaster. She said:

Its ridiculous to be talking about job cuts at RTE when the last week has shown where the real problem is.

She was also critical of the suggestion that RTE could be broken up into two entities.

The past week has shown us what happens when you starve a public service broadcaster of public funds and force it to rely on a commercial strategy, she said.

To my mind, the breaking up of RTE into two separate entities, one commercial and the other only publicly funded, would just be more of the same  business as usual, only with added job cuts.
The term ' obesity' has become "synonymous" with body size, with calls being made for the disease to be renamed in order to help the public better understand it.

A study from researchers at University College Cork (UCC) and University of Galway, published in Obesity Reviews, highlights the ongoing confusion about the term obesity, which currently can refer to the disease of obesity or to a BMI range, or a combination of the two.

Researchers believe that by renaming 'obesity', the public and policymakers will better understand the disease.

Dr Margaret Steele, a postdoctoral researcher at UCCs School of Public Health, and Professor Francis Finucane, consultant endocrinologist and professor of medicine in University of Galway, led the study looking at the various understandings of the term obesity.

They suggested it was important to reconsider whether the term obesity reflects the full extent of the complex disease that stems from various environmental, genetic, physiological, behavioural and developmental factors and not on body weight or on BMI.

Our focus should be on the underlying pathophysiology and not on body size. For people with the disease of obesity, treatment is not optional or cosmetic, Dr Steele said.

A different diagnostic term such as adiposity-based chronic disease could more clearly convey the nature of this disease, and avoid the confusion and stigma that may occur if we keep using the term obesity, which has become synonymous with body size, Dr Steele added.

Appetite-controlling medicines

The study addresses the wider question of new appetite-controlling medicines, which have become increasingly popular.

Patients with obesity may be sent to the back of the queue on the mistaken assumption they do not need the medication as much as patients with diabetes.

The researchers feel clearer terminology could play a vital role in allowing suitable patients to access this life-altering medication.

The weight-loss medications has been the subject of a wider debate across the country, with many health professionals holding differing opinions as to how they should be distributed.

Prof Finucane also described new Irish Medical Council guidance warning doctors against using Ozempic for obesity as morally problematic.

Semaglutide is approved as a treatment for obesity, just as it is for diabetes.

There is a deeply stigmatising idea out there that people with obesity are looking for an easy way out, that these medicines provide a low-effort alternative to healthy diet and lifestyle.

"But for people living with the disease of obesity, these drugs dont make behavioural change unnecessary, nor do they make it easy  they just make it possible, Dr Steele added.

The researchers are quick to point out that these treatments should only be used for those in need of drastic weight-loss, which is different to celebrities using drugs like semaglutide to become fashionably thin.

This is why we need to clarify what we mean by obesity. Many of the people we see on TikTok or Instagram reporting on their semaglutide journeys do not have the disease of obesity.

"When we talk about treating and preventing obesity, our focus should be on healthy food environments, and appropriate treatment for people living with chronic metabolic diseases.

We hope this new research will help drive home the point that this is about helping people live well, not making everyone skinny, Dr Steele added.
People served by a stricken water supply system in East Cork have spent hundreds of thousands of euro on bottled water due to almost constant boil water notices  and it looks likely theyll have to continue digging deeper into pockets until at least 2026.

Meanwhile, calls that they should be compensated appear to have fallen on deaf ears.

Since early 2016 there have been repeated boil water notices issued to approximately 9,500 people on the Whitegate Water Supply Scheme.

It provides water to Whitegate, Aghada, Cloyne, Saleen, Ballycotton, Ballinacurra, and parts of Midleton.

The supply is coming through highly silted underground channels. Conventional ultraviolet treatment to kill bacteria cannot pass through the silt.

As a result, Uisce Eireann (formerly Irish Water) has on numerous occasions had to issue boil water notices after consultations with the HSE.

Eoin Fitzpatrick initially responded to boil water notices by doing just that  boiling up the kettle for every drop of drinking water his family consumed. However it is so cumbersome that, like most householders in East Cork, he now buys bottled water at great expense. Picture: Denis Minihane

The utilitys last boil water notice was issued last October. It was hoped it would have been discontinued in the summer, but it has been extended for the foreseeable future.

Uisce Eireann put forward a proposal for a 20m upgrade of the supply system, which includes new treatment procedures to make the water safe to drink.

Cork County Council granted planning permission for the upgrade. However, objections have been lodged recently to a new treatment plant and those will have to be decided on by An Bord Pleanala.

The utility had hoped to have the new system operational by the end of 2025. The best-case scenario now is 2026.

Eoin Fitzpatrick and his family live in Ballycotton. He estimates that, since 2016, there have been at least eight boil water notices issued for the scheme with small periods of remittance between them. The 48-year-old married healthcare company manager, who is the father of two teenage boys, said:

During that time I have not seen one water tanker coming into the area.

Eoin said that, for the first couple of notices, he and his family did boil water  but doing so became too cumbersome and, like most householders, he now buys in bottled water.

He said there is constant confusion surrounding information on the boil water notices and, like others, he is critical of the utility companys communications.

If I go on the Uisce Eireann website it can say it [the supply] is OK  but if I go on the Whitegate one it says it isnt, even though theyre on the same system, he said. There was a boil water notice issued in Dublin and the issue was fixed almost immediately. Obviously we are too far from the epicentre of power and we are left to rot.

Access to proper water is a UN human right. Weve been too quiet about this for way too long. Weve water pouring out of the sky yet we have this. Its insane.

His mother, Rita, is fortunate to live next door.

It would be pretty hard for her to lift a five-litre bottle of water on her own. I pity elderly people in the area who dont have help, its not fair on them, Eoin said.

Sean McGrath has owned McGraths pub in Ballycotton for 37 year. Running such a business requires clean water. Ice cant be made from what comes out of the taps.

The pub trade is suffering as it is and he doesnt need the hassle of a boil water notice almost constantly hanging over his head.

The water presented to us isnt fit for purpose. I had to get a water treatment system installed in the bar and it cost me thousands of euro.

On the one hand we get the HSE doing hygiene inspections [in pubs] but, on the other hand, Uisce Eireann is giving us water not fit for purpose, he said.

Sean said that, over the years, when hes had issues with the supply hes had to contact a call centre.

You seem to get on to somebody in India. Theyre very nice and try to help. But trying to explain an issue in Ballycotton to somebody in an Indian call centre isnt easy, he said.

TD tallies the cost The issue has been repeatedly debated at municipal and full county council meetings in the past few years and, more recently, was highlighted in the Dail by Fine Gael Cork East TD David Stanton. Mr Stanton urged the relevant minister for state, Malcolm Noonan, to ask Uisce Eireann about potential compensation for the thousands of customers on the supply scheme. Mr Stanton, who lives in Midleton, said the water supply issue is causing people to buy in bottled water, or boil what comes out of the tap. He said that, considering the increases in electricity prices, it is a further burden on some people who are already struggling financially. Mr Noonan said he would ask the utility about potential compensation and said he accepted almost 10,000 people have been badly affected and put out by having to buy bottled water daily. Its difficult when people have young babies and use baby formula, Mr Noonan said.  Its a huge inconvenience. We all want to see this notice lifted without undue delay but only when the HSE and EPA have confirm the water supply is safe can we do so. I take on board the points the deputy made and will convey them to the minister for housing and, in due course, to Uisce Eireann. However, since then there has been radio silence on the issue and Mr Stanton readily admitted to the Irish Examiner that its not looking like it [compensation] is going to happen. Householders have to spend between 1.39 and 1.49 on 5l of water from their local supermarkets, Mr Stanton said. This adds up to a minimum of 16 per month for a recommended consumption of 2l of water per day, and a minimum of 64 per month for a family of four.

Mr Stanton and county councillors had previously called on numerous occasions for the project to be fast-tracked by the utility, especially considering the number of people impacted and the length of time it has been going on.

Im concerned that there are some people out there who cant afford to keep buying bottled water and they may get ill as a result of drinking the tap water, Mr Stanton said. There are also people who have recently moved into the area who dont appear to know of the boil water issues. Thats another concern.

Local Fine Gael councillor Michael Hegarty said he is worried a decision by An Bord Pleanala could take a long time. He said previously the planning appeals board always issued rigid decision dates. However, since the recent upheavals in the board, many are now not adhered to and it could take many months before a conclusion is reached.

I have been in contact with An Bord Pleanala asking them to fast track the decision-making process because its a substantial piece of infrastructure and the lack of it is causing significant disruption, he added.

Eoin Fitzpatrick lives next door to his mother, Rita Fitzpatrick. 'It would be pretty hard for her to lift a five-litre bottle of water on her own,' he says. 'I pity elderly people in the area who dont have help, its not fair on them.' Picture: Denis Minihane

If Uisce Eireann doesnt provide compensation, there should be a government grant given to those people whore being impacted, Mr Hegarty said. Theres a lot of frustration out there, but it should be easy to work out whos on the water supply line and provide them with some aid.

Susan McCarthy, a councillor who lives in Midleton, said plastic bottles generated by the water problem are an environmental concern too.

This is going on for seven and a half years and nearly 10,000 people are impacted, she said. Can you imagine how many plastic bottles of water have been consumed during that time.

Its a kick in the face to the environment when you have agencies coming up with plans for climate action and youve this. Its a disgrace. Were supposed to be a first-world country.

An Uisce Eireann spokesman said they acknowledge the inconvenience the boil water notices are having on the community and theyre continuously working towards lifting them as soon as its safe to do so.
Since the video went viral of the brutal killing by a police officer of Nahel, a 17-year-old shot dead at point-blank range, the streets and housing estates of many poorer French neighbourhoods have been in a state of open revolt.

France faces George Floyd moment, I read in the international media, as if we were suddenly waking up to the issue of racist police violence. This naive comparison itself reflects a denial of the systemic racist violence that for decades has been inherent to French policing.

I first became involved in anti-racist campaigning after a 2005 event that had many parallels with the killing of Nahel. Three teenagers aged between 15 and 17 were heading home one afternoon when they were suddenly pursued by police. Although they had done nothing wrong (and this was confirmed by a subsequent inquiry) these terrified youngsters hid from the police in an electricity substation. Two of them, Zyed Benna and Bouna Traore, were electrocuted. The third, Muhittin Altun, suffered appalling burns and life-changing injuries.

Those boys could have been my little brothers, or my younger cousins. I remember the sense of incredulity: how could they simply lose their lives to such terrible injustice? If they go in there [to the power plant], I dont fancy their chances of making it were the chilling words spoken by one of the police officers as he watched this horrific event play out.

France was ablaze for weeks with the rioting that followedthe worst in years. But just as now, with the death of Nahel, the initial media and political reaction in 2005 was to criminalise the victims, to scrutinise their past, as if any of it could justify their atrocious deaths. As if responsibility for their tragedy lay in their own hands.

Nicolas Sarkozy, who was interior minister at the time, sullied the memory of young people whose fear had led to their death with the remark: If you have nothing to hide, you dont run when you see the police.

Police officers in front of the Arc de Triomphe in Paris on Saturday after hundreds turned out for the burial of the 17-year-old Nahel whose killing by police triggered the unrest. Photo: AP/Christophe Ena

The numbers of cases of police brutality grow relentlessly every year. In France, according to the Defender of Rights, young men perceived to be black or of north African origin are 20 times more likely to be subjected to police identity checks than the rest of the population. The same institution denounced the absence of any appeal against being checked as a form of systemic police discrimination. Why would we not feel scared of the police?

In 1999, our country, the supposed birthplace of human rights, was condemned by the European court of human rights for torture, following the sexual abuse by police of a young man of north African origin. In 2012 Human Rights Watch said: The identity check system is open to abuse by the French police  These abuses include repeated checks'countless', in the words of most intervieweessometimes involving physical and verbal abuse.

Now, after the death of Nahel, a UN rights body has urged France to address profound problems of racism and racial discrimination within its law enforcement agencies.

Even our own courts have condemned the French state for gross negligence, ruling in 2016 that the practice of racial profiling was a daily reality in France denounced by all international, European, and domestic institutions and that for all that, despite commitments made by the French authorities at the highest level, this finding had not led to any positive measures.

More recently, in December 2022, the UN committee on the elimination of racial discrimination denounced both the racist discourse of politicians and police ID checks disproportionately targeting certain minorities.

A burned-out van in the aftermath of protests in Colombes, outside Paris, on Saturday. Photo: AP/Christophe Ena

Despite such overwhelming findings, our president, Emmanuel Macron, still considers the use of the term police violence to be unacceptable. This time, Macron has unequivocally condemned an act that he called unacceptablewhich is significant.

Yet I fear that the focus is being placed on an individual police officer instead of questioning entrenched attitudes and structures within the police that are perpetuating racism. And not a single one of the damning reports and rulings has led to any meaningful reform of the police as an institution.

Worse, a law passed in 2017 has made it easier for police to resort to the use of firearms. Officers can now shoot without even having to justify it on the grounds of self-defence. Since this change in the law, according to the researcher Sebastian Roche, the number of fatal shootings against moving vehicles has increased five-fold. Last year, 13 people were shot dead in their vehicles.

Nahels death is another chapter in a long and traumatic story. Whatever our age, many of us French who are descended from post-colonial immigration carry within us this fear combined with rage, the result of decades of accumulated injustice.

This year, we commemorate the 40th anniversary of a seminal event. In 1983, Toumi Djaidja, a 19-year-old from a Lyon banlieue, became the victim of police violence that left him in a coma for two weeks. This was the genesis of the March for Equality and Against Racism, the first anti-racist demonstration on a national scale, in which 100,000 people took part.

A firefighter putting out a blaze at a burning bus in Nanterre, outside Paris, on Saturday. Photo: AP/Lewis Joly

For 40 years this movement has not stopped calling out the violence we see targeted at working-class neighbourhoods and more broadly black people and people of north African origin. The crimes of the police are at the root of many of the uprisings in Frances most impoverished urban areas, and it is these crimes that must be condemned first.

After years of marches, petitions, open letters and public requests, a disaffected youth finds no other way to be heard than by rioting. It is difficult to avoid asking if, without so many uprisings in cities across France, Nahels death would have garnered the attention it has.

And as Martin Luther King rightly said: A riot is the language of the unheard.

Read More French rioting appears to slow six days after teenagers death in Paris suburbs

Rokhaya Diallo is a writer, journalist, film director and activist

Guardian
President Emmanuel Macron chaired a special security meeting on Sunday as protests continued for a sixth night in France after the killing of a teenager in Paris.

Mr Macron delayed the start of the first state visit to Germany in 23 years as rioting and violence continued across the country.

An official present at the security meeting said Mr Macron plans to meet with the leaders of both houses of parliament on Monday, followed by discussions with mayors in the 220 towns and cities affected by the protests.

He also wants to start a detailed, longer-term assessment of the reasons that led to the unrest  which exposed deep-seated discontent in low-income neighbourhoods  the official told Associated Press.

A graffiti reading Police scum from Saint-Soline to Nanterre  do not forget or forgive on a Holocaust memorial in Nanterre (Cara Anna/AP)

According to the interior ministry, 78 arrests were made nationwide on Sunday  a sharp drop in the 719 in the previous 24 hours which took the total to more than 3,000 since the shooting of the 17-year-old, who has been identified only as Nahel, in the Paris suburb of Nanterre.

He was laid to rest in a Muslim ceremony on Saturday with his grandmother calling for an end to the violence.

The office of interior minister Gerald Darmanin said 45,000 police officers would again be deployed in the streets which saw a burning car hit the home of the mayor of the Paris suburb of LHay-les-Roses.

A man walks past a burned van in the aftermath of protests in Colombes, outside Paris (Christophe Ena/AP)

Skirmishes erupted in the Mediterranean city of Marseille on Sunday, but appeared less intense than the night before, according to the interior ministry.

And in the South American overseas territory of French Guiana, a 54-year-old died after being hit by a stray bullet.
Prize-winning Ukrainian writer Victoria Amelina was among those killed by a deadly Russian missile attack on a popular restaurant frequented by journalists and aid workers in eastern Ukraine, a literature and human rights organisation has said.

The 37-year-old, who had turned her attention from literature to document Russian war crimes after the invasion, died from her injuries after the strike in the city of Kramatorsk on June 27, said PEN America.

At least 11 other people were killed and 61 injured in the attack, which happened around dinnertime, when the restaurant was usually busy.

Ukrainian authorities arrested a man a day later, accusing him of helping Russia direct the strike.

That attack and others across Ukraine the same evening suggested the Kremlin is not easing its aerial onslaught on Ukraine, despite political and military turmoil at home after a short-lived armed uprising in Russia last week.

We are announcing this news now when all Victoria's family members have learned about it and with their consent https://t.co/vH97YGLQXS  PEN Ukraine (@PenUkraine) July 3, 2023

PEN Ukraine announced Ms Amelinas death after her family had been informed.

She was in Kramatorsk with a delegation of Colombian writers and journalists, and had been documenting Russian war crimes with the human rights organisation Truth Hounds.

Polina Sadovskaya, Eurasia director at PEN America, said: Victoria Amelina was a celebrated Ukrainian author who turned her distinct and powerful voice to investigate and expose war crimes after the full-scale military invasion of Ukraine in February 2022.

She brought a literary sensibility to her work and her elegant prose described, with forensic precision, the devastating impact of these human rights violations on the lives of Ukrainians.

Victoria Amelina was born in Lviv on January 1 1986.

In 2014 she published her first novel, The November Syndrome, or Homo Compatiens, which was shortlisted for the Ukrainian Valeriy Shevchuk Prize.

With our most incredible pain, we inform you that Ukrainian writer Victoria Amelina passed away on July 1st in Mechnikov Hospital in Dnipro. pic.twitter.com/MJBMwhDMuf  PEN Ukraine (@PenUkraine) July 3, 2023

She went on to write two prize-winning childrens books, Somebody, or Waterheart, and Storie-e-es of Eka the Excavator.

In 2017, her novel Doms Dream Kingdom received a raft of national and international accolades  including the Unesco City of Literature Prize and the European Union Prize for Literature.

Since the start of Russias full-scale invasion, she had devoted herself to documenting Russian war crimes in eastern Ukraine.

In Kapytolivka near Izium, she discovered the diary of Volodymyr Vakulenko, a Ukrainian writer killed by the Russians.

She also began working on her first work of English non-fiction shortly before her death.

In War And Justice Diary: Looking At Women Looking At War, which is expected to be published soon, she recounts stories of Ukrainian women collecting evidence of Russian war crimes.
Russias armed forces are bruised but by no means beaten in the war in Ukraine, a top Nato official said on Monday, as he laid out the biggest revamp to the organisations military plans since the Cold War should Moscow dare to widen the conflict.

They might not be 11ft tall, but they are certainly not 2ft tall, Admiral Rob Bauer, chairman of the Nato Military Committee, told reporters. So, we should never under-estimate the Russians and their ability to bounce back.

US President Joe Biden and his Nato counterparts are set to endorse a major shake-up of the alliances planning system at a summit in the Lithuanian capital, Vilnius, next week.

A US Air Force F-16 fighter takes off from the Spangdahlem Air Base in Germany during last months Air Defender 2023 exercise (Boris Roessler/dpa/AP)

Nato, as an organisation, does not provide weapons or ammunition to Ukraine and has sought to avoid being dragged into a wider war with nuclear-armed Russia.

At the same time, however, it is massively reinforcing the security of member countries near Russia, Ukraine and Belarus.

Around 40,000 troops are on stand-by from Estonia in the north down to Romania on the Black Sea.

About 100 aircraft take to the skies in that territory each day, and a total of 27 warships are operating in the Baltic and Mediterranean Seas, with those numbers set to rise.

Under its new plans, Nato aims to have up to 300,000 troops ready to move to its eastern flank within 30 days.

The plans divide its territory into three zones  the high north and Atlantic area, a zone north of the Alps, and another in southern Europe.

Admiral Bauer said Natos new planning is based on the strength of the Russian army before President Vladimir Putin launched the war on Ukraine almost 17 months ago.

He said the war has depleted Russias army, but not its navy or air force.

A German army Leopard 2A6 tank takes part in the Lithuanian-German military exercise Griffin Storm 2023 at a training range in Pabrade, Lithuania, in June (Mindaugas Kulbis/AP)

Of Russias ground forces, around 94% is now engaged in the war in Ukraine, he added.

What we see in general is that the Russians are careful around Nato. They are not seeking a conflict with Nato. I think that is a sign that they are very, very busy, he said.

In the land domain, I dont think they have a lot of forces available to do anything to anyone else.

But we are convinced that the Russians are going to reconstitute.

We will continue to look at them as a serious threat, in the maritime, and in the air especially, and in space, they are still very, very, capable, let alone of course in nuclear.

A revolt by Wagner mercenaries in Russia late last month raised deep security concerns in Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania and Poland after a deal was agreed for their leader, Yevgeny Prigozhin, to be allowed to take refuge in Belarus.

Lithuanian President Gitanas Nauseda said neighbouring countries would face a heightened danger if the Wagner Group deployed its serial killers just over their border.

Vilnius lies around 22 miles (35km) from the Belarus border.

Lithuania wants to have a permanent Nato presence on its territory, and Germany signalled last week that it would be prepared to base soldiers there if requested. For the moment, though, Nato sees no imminent threat coming from Belarus.

Were confident we know whats going on, and right now we see no changes. But that doesnt take our eye off what we need to do every day, Major General Matthew Van Wagenen told reporters. If we needed to change posture, we could do it rapidly.

A revolt by Yevgeny Prigozhins Wagner Group mercenaries raised deep security concerns in eastern Europe (Prigozhin Press Service/AP)

Natos 31 member countries took part in a force generation conference last week in an effort to understand how many troops and how much equipment the alliance might have at its disposal to respond to any Russian attack, both in the short and longer term.

Both officers were upbeat about the results, although they declined to provide details for security reasons. Experts and some Nato diplomats, however, have expressed doubt about the willingness of member countries to put a total of 300,000 troops on stand-by.

I would classify it as highly successful, Maj Gen Van Wagenen said. I can assure you, we are in a position right now that we know whats missing and how we need to grow this in the future.

In terms of Natos ability to execute the plans, should they be needed in the future, Admiral Bauer welcomed the expected commitment in Vilnius by MNr Biden and his counterparts to boost defence spending, which should help provide commanders with the equipment they need.

In 2014, Nato committed to move towards spending 2% of GDP on their military budgets by 2024.

At their July 11-12 summit, the leaders will set the 2% figure as a spending floor, rather than a ceiling to aim for.
Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan has signalled that his country is not ready to ratify Swedens membership of Nato, saying Stockholm had to work harder on the homework it needs to complete.

Speaking after a Cabinet meeting, Mr Erdogan also renewed his condemnation of a Koran-burning protest that took place in Sweden last week, describing the action as a hate crime against Muslims.

We have made it clear that the determined fight against terrorist organisations and Islamophobia are our red line, Mr Erdogan said.

Everyone must accept that Turkeys friendship cannot be won by supporting terrorism or by making space for terrorists.

Nato Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg speaks to reporters (Susan Walsh/AP)

Turkey has delayed giving its final approval to Swedens membership in the military alliance, accusing the country of being too lenient toward anti-Islamic demonstrations and groups that Ankara regards as security threats.

These include militant Kurdish groups that have waged a deadly, decades-long insurgency in Turkey.

The Kurdistan Workers Party, or PKK, has waged a 38-year insurgency against Turkey that has left tens of thousands dead. It is designated a terrorist organisation by the US and the European Union.

Nato wants to bring Sweden into the fold by the time leaders meet in Lithuania on July 11, but Mr Erdogan said Stockholm still had obligations to fulfil.

Nato requires the unanimous approval of all existing members to expand, and Turkey and Hungary are the only countries that have not yet ratified Swedens bid.

Instead of wasting time with distraction tactics, we believe that keeping to the promises will be a more rational, more beneficial method, Mr Erdogan said. We advise them to scrutinise themselves and do their homework better.

He was referring to a memorandum that Sweden and Finland signed with Turkey last year under which they agreed to address Ankaras concerns. Fighting Islamophobia was not included in the memorandum.

Last week, Swedish police allowed a protest outside a mosque in central Stockholm citing freedom of speech after a court overturned a ban on a similar Koran-burning.

The vile attack on our holy book, the Holy Koran, in Stockholm, the capital of Sweden, enraged us all, Mr Erdogan said.

This perverted disregard for the feelings of two billion Muslims cannot be compatible with the most basic human values, let alone freedom of thought.

Sweden and Finland abandoned their traditional positions of military nonalignment to seek protection under Natos security umbrella, fearing they might be targeted by Moscow after Russia invaded Ukraine last year.

Finland joined the alliance earlier this year after Turkeys parliament ratified the Nordic countrys bid.

Sweden changed its anti-terror legislation since applying for Nato membership, but Turkey argues supporters of militant groups can freely organise demonstrations, recruit and procure financial resources in the country.

Nato Secretary-General Jens Stoltenberg last week called a meeting of senior officials from Turkey, Sweden and Finland for July 6 to try to overcome Turkish objections to Sweden joining the military alliance.
The Kachin Independence Army (KIA), one of Myanmars most powerful ethnic armed organizations, has denied the military juntas accusation that it attacked a Chinese convoy last week.

The delegation, reportedly led by a Chinese consul, was travelling to Myitkyina for a meeting on the construction of the Namjin Industrial Zone, which is under development near the Kachin State capital, when it was attacked in Waingmaw Township on June 27.

The controversial economic zone is part of Beijings Belt and Road initiative.

The Myanmar regime on Friday accused the KIA of firing on the convoy.

KIA spokesman Colonel Naw Bu denied the allegation.

We didnt attack the Chinese convoy, he said.

There have been clashes since June 26 after junta troops marched towards our territory. Clashes continued for three days from June 26 to June 28. The Chinese convoy passed through the area during the fighting. We didnt attack that convoy, he explained.

7Stars News, a media outlet based in northern Shan State, reported that the 13-vehicle convoy carrying the Chinese delegation was fired on by a junta-controlled local militia group led by Shwe Min near Sadone Town in Waingmaw Township.

Shwe Min is the chair of the Lisu National Development Party (LNDP).

The KIA spokesman said, We only heard about the attack in the online report by 7Stars. We cant confirm it.

Junta spokesman Major-General Zaw Min Tun told military mouthpiece Myawaddy TV that the KIA carried out the attack.

He said the delegation did not include a consul and was not visiting the economic zone in Namjin.

It was just a delegation of representatives from Chinas armed forces, and they came to attend our regular bilateral meeting on military affairs and border security, he said in a statement on Thursday.

He said Myanmar military and Border Guard Force personnel provided security for the convoy, which was fired upon five times by light firearms while travelling to Myitkyina, at a location 13 kilometers from the frontier town Kanpaiti.

There were no injuries or casualties. Following the attack, security personnel made sure it was safe to pass there. Then, the convoy proceeded to Myitkyina, and the meeting took place as planned. The meeting ended successfully. Chinese military representatives left Kachin, and we could verify that it was the KIA that carried out the attack, the junta spokesman said.

LNDP leader Shwe Min denied his militia attacked the Chinese convoy. In a Facebook post, he said that his militia had carried out a clearance operation in collaboration with the Myanmar military following the attack.

The Chinese Embassy in Yangon has not yet replied to The Irrawaddys request for comment on the attack.
Rakhine ethnic armed group the Arakan Army (AA), the armed wing of the United League of Arakan (ULA), has denied the Arakan Liberation Party (ALP)s accusation that the AA was behind an attack in the Rakhine State capital Sittwe on July 1 that killed the partys vice chair, a battalion commander and another member.

The ALP, a Rakhine ethnic armed group that signed the Nationwide Ceasefire Agreement (NCA) with the Myanmar government in 2015, said in a statement on July 2 that its Vice Chair Khaing Ni Yaung; Khaing Kyaw Min, commander of the Arakan Liberation Armys Battalion 101; and Comrade Kyaw Kyaw Naing were killed at around 12:15 p.m. on July 1.

The three were returning with other ALP/ALA members from a meeting with ALP Chair Daw Saw Mra Raza Lin in Sittwe when their cars were ambushed by a group of gunmen near Sittwe University.

Sittwe residents confirmed that an attack on two cars carrying ALP troops occurred near the university.

The ALP accused the ULA/AA of carrying out the attack, which it said also left three other ALP troops injured, and condemned the attack as a very inferior act.

However, Khaing Thukha, the spokesperson of the ULA/AA, denied the accusation as baseless, saying the ULA/AA had no involvement in the attack. He implied that the ALP was facing internal dissent.

ALP troops have been committing injustices in Sittwe, including arresting people, kidnapping and committing other crimes, constantly. Therefore, Sittwe residents feel much disaffection towards them, Khaing Thukha told The Irrawaddy.

Therefore, he said, ordinary people may have taken revenge against the ALP.

The Irrawaddy was not able to independently verify the claim.

On Jan. 4, a car carrying General Khaing Soe Mya, the then-commander-in-chief of the ALP/ALA, and two other ALA commanders back from the juntas Independence Day event was attacked by a group of gunmen. All three were killed on the spot.

Founded in 1967, the ALP is the oldest ethnic armed group in Rakhine State, but its popularity and influence are waning among the Rakhine community because of the groups ties to the dictatorship. The ALP is currently engaged in peace talks with the military regime.

The ULA/AA was established in 2009 by a younger generation of Rakhine activists and has successfully established itself as an ethnic armed group, consolidating its control over much of rural Rakhine State and enjoying popular support. In contrast with the ALP, the AA has not joined the juntas peace talks and is enjoying a surge in popularity.

Despite issuing a series of statements expressing their intention to work together in the interest of Rakhine State, the ULA/AA and ALP/ALA have yet to follow up with any meetings on how to implement these plans.

In August 2022 the ALP said in a statement that the AA had detained a member of the partys central committee, Lieutenant Colonel Khaing Paw Lin, but the AA did not comment on the allegation.
Myanmars junta suffered defeats and lost a base in two Sagaing Region townships last week, according to resistance groups.

On Friday, Mawlaik District Peoples Defense Force (PDF) said it raided a hilltop outpost near Taung Inn village in Mawlaik Township.

Around 50 Infantry Battalion 365 and 366 troops were stationed at the base along with police and pro-junta Pyu Saw Htee militia members, the civilian National Unity Governments defense ministry said.

Four junta airstrikes were reportedly conducted to protect the base using a Russian-made MI-35 helicopter and a fighter jet.

The group said it seized the base after seven hours of fighting, killing 10 regime soldiers, including an army captain.

The Irrawaddy could not independently verify the reports.

The civilian ministry said resistance forces seized several weapons, ammunition and other equipment, including a drone jammer.

After losing the base, MI-17 transport helicopters moved around 80 reinforcements to a base in Mawlaik town on Saturday and Sunday, according to the pro-revolutionary Mawlaik News.

Heavy clashes broke out in adjacent Paungbyin Township last Wednesday and Thursday when around 100 junta troops and Shanni Nationalities Army allies attempted to raid resistance territory, according to Homalin PDF fought with Paungbyin PDF.

On Wednesday, troops attacked Kaw Kan village after two helicopters bombarded the village for around 20 minutes.

Four junta troops, who were injured by resistance landmines, were treated at Paungbyin Public Hospital.

Fighting was also reported on Thursday when junta reinforcements attacked resistance groups along with two aircraft.

But regime forces were defeated after an attack by resistance groups, Homalin PDF said.

On Thursday night, junta fighter jets dropped two large bombs, destroying houses and a pagoda.

Three regime soldiers, including an officer, and two resistance fighters were reportedly killed.

Two civilian detainees were purportedly killed by junta troops. On Friday, the regime forces retreated to Paungbyin town, according to Homalin PDF.
Three civilians, including an eight-year-old, were killed and three others injured by Myanmar junta shelling in Kawlin Township, Sagaing Region, on Friday.

The shells came from junta troops based at the General Administration Departments office in the town, which was earlier attacked by resistance fighters, according to residents.

Three Kyaw Zayar ward residents were reportedly killed.

U Thar Htoo, 60, suffered severe injuries and is in critical condition. His wife, Daw Sann, and their eight-year-old granddaughter died on the spot. Their neighbor, Daw Zar Chi Oo, 43, was also killed, a neighbor said.

Two others sustained minor injuries and two houses were damaged by shelling, according to sources.

Junta troops shelled for about 30 minutes after the administration office was attacked by resistance forces, a resident said.

The Irrawaddy could not independently verify the reports.

Kawlin residents said junta troops frequently shell at random after resistance attacks.

They shell indiscriminately when their bases are attacked by resistance forces. Some people stopped working in the town because they fear junta shelling, a resident said.

Another junta base in Koe Taung Boe village, Kantbalu Township, around 14km from Kawlin town, was attacked by resistance fighters on Friday night, according to resistance forces.

The casualties are unknown.
At least 37 Myanmar junta troops were killed in the last three days as Peoples Defense Forces (PDFs) and an ethnic armed organization (EAO) stepped up attacks on regime targets across the country.

In one case, a resistance group managed to seize a junta base amid heavy air strikes in upper Sagaing.

Incidents were reported in Sagaing, Magwe and Bago regions and Mon State.

The Irrawaddy has collected the following reports of significant attacks from PDFs and the EAO.

Some military casualties could not be independently verified.

Junta base seized by resistance groups amid heavy air strikes in Sagaing

The Defense Ministry of the civilian National Unity Government (NUG) claimed one of its armed wings, Mawlaik District PDF Battalion 2, attacked and seized a military base of 50 regime forces and pro-junta Pyu Saw Htee militia members on a hill near Taung Inn Village in Mawlaik Township, Sagaing Region last Friday.

During the raid, the junta conducted four air strikes on resistance forces using an Mi-35 helicopter gunship and a fighter jet, but it lost the base.

Ten regime forces including a captain were killed in the raid. The PDF group also seized several weapons, along with ammunition and equipment including an anti-drone jammer, said the NUGs Defense Ministry.

Junta troops killed in drone strikes in Sagaing

Eagle Guerilla Forces, which forms Shwebo District PDF Battalion 15, claimed to have killed 13 regime forces as it and four other PDF groups jointly conducted drone strikes against a military column stationed at a pagoda outside Shwe Kyin Village in Wetlet Township, Sagaing Region on Saturday night.

After being bombed, the regime forces responded with sniper rifles.

The next day, the combined resistance group continued to conduct drone strikes against the regime forces, injuring many others. After being attacked, the junta forces counterattacked using sniper rifles and 90-mm explosives as well as three drones.

Regime bases bombed by improvised resistance drones in Sagaing

Combined resistance groups during a drone strike operation on a military base in Myaung Township on Saturday / CDSOM

At least two regime forces were killed and many others injured in Myaung and Myinmu townships in the past three days as local resistance groups jointly used improvised drones to bomb three junta positions being used as bases by regime forcesa township administration office and two police stationssaid Civilians Defense and Security Organization of Myaung, which was involved in the attacks.

During the attacks, resistance groups lost a drone due to an accidental explosion.

Pro-junta militia members killed in Sagaing

Local resistance group Wild Tiger said five other PDF groups killed three pro-regime Pyu Saw Htee militia members who were returning home from Shwebo town after buying liquor and rations for regime forces stationed in their pro-regime village and an adjacent village.

The three militia members was shot dead after they began shooting when they encountered a resistance inspection point.

Two weapons and two grenades were seized from the militia members along with the rations and liquor.

Immigration office bombed in Sagaing

People Army to Fight Dictatorship said it managed to attack an Immigration Department office where many regime forces are stationed in the center of Sagaing town, Sagaing Region on Saturday night, using a heavy explosive.

Regime casualties were unknown.

Miliary bases bombed in Mon

The resistance group Saw Dragon Drone Force said it and Lion Battalion Commando jointly conducted drone strikes on a police station and a nearby military checkpoint at a bridge in Kyaikmayaw Township, Mon State on Sunday, killing five regime forces.

After being bombed, the regime forces blocked the bridge. They also shot dead a son of a former army major while the son was traveling near the area on a motorbike.

Regime forces, militia members guarding gambling business killed in resistance raid in Bago

Two police officers and two pro-junta militia members were killed and five other militia members injured in Latpadan Township, Bago Region at 12 a.m. on Saturday when Tharyarwaddy District PDF battalion 3802 and another local PDF group conducted joint simultaneous raids on a police station and a nearby gambling business in Zee Phyu Kone Village, an administrative center for a number of villages in the area.

During the raids, two police sergeants, Kyaw Kyaw Myint and Aung Khine, as well as two Pyu Saw Htee militia members were killed while they were guarding the gambling business. Five other militia members suffered injuries.

The attacks came after regime personnel and the militia groups failed to comply with repeated warnings from local PDF groups to shut the gambling businesses, which were providing substantial funding to the military regime.

The PDF groups urged members of the public to avoid regime forces and those supplying the junta due to potential attacks.

Regime forces ambushed by PDF snipers in Magwe

Regime forces were injured in Yesagyo Township, Magwe Region on Saturday when resistance snipers of two PDF groups ambushed regime sentries at a jetty in Kyun Ma Kyar Village, said Myingyan Black Tiger, which coordinated the ambush.

More regime forces suffered injuries in an accidental explosion while trying to respond to the resistance forces with 60-mm mortar rounds.

Details of the military casualties were unknown, the PDF group said.
NOVOMATIC announces new distribution partner for the Philippine market

NOVOMATIC AG announces the signing of a contract that confirms Tecnet Asia as an official distributor for the Groups products in the Philippines, as of June 1st.

Gumpoldskirchen  NOVOMATIC AG is continuing to develop its footprint throughout the APAC region with top-performing Electronic Table Games installations, award-winning video slots and powerful casino management solutions. With the new distribution and service agreement with local industry expert Tecnet Asia, current and future customers in the Philippine market will find a reliable partner with a proven track record for highest customer satisfaction.

In its role as the official distributor of NOVOMATIC gaming technologies for the Philippines, Tecnet Asia will provide first-class sales and after-sales service, supporting these leading gaming technology products with top expertise and an excellent service infrastructure in one of the regions most important gaming markets.

Tecnet Asia is a Philippine based corporation that was established in 2015 to deliver niche high-end innovative solutions to SMEs and the casino industry in the Asia Pacific regions. Tecnet Asia has diverse professional resources providing over 40 years experience in innovative IT industry, sales casino management, consulting, and technical support services. Today, Tecnet Asia, is based in the Clark Freeport Zone and has an excellent reputation as a full-service and development company that develops and provides innovative technology solutions for casino management systems, server-based gaming platforms & casino products. Aiming to ensure the highest level of client satisfaction and reliable after-sales services, Tecnet serves as the technical support and provides consultancy to its clients in the Asian Region.

Suat Sirin, CEO and Owner of Tecnet Asia, said: With this new distribution agreement with NOVOMATIC, one of the gaming industries most iconic and globally successful brands, Tecnet looks forward to providing these exciting new products to our present and new customers throughout the Philippines.

Christoph Jeitler, Head of Direct Sales, NOVOMATIC AG, said: The partnership with Tecnet Asia is another milestone for our strategy to bringing NOVOMATIC gaming equipment back on the map in the Philippine casino market. Tecnets proven network, along with its technical support capacities and in-depth expertise of the local requirements are the perfect fit to achieve our ambitious targets in the region.

Thomas Schmalzer, VP Global Sales and VP Product Management NOVOMATIC AG, added: NOVOMATIC gaming technology products already have an excellent history of success in the Philippine market, and I am convinced that our portfolio for 2023 and beyond contains many further player favourites and top-performing solutions for the region.

Quelle: Novomatic AG
Monday, Jul 3rd, 2023 (12:01 am) - Score 2,976

The Building Digital UK agency has published their latest quarterly update (June 2023) on the Governments 5bn rural Project Gigabit broadband rollout progress, which has so far awarded rollout contracts worth a total of 589m (state aid) to help extend coverage to an extra 378,450 of the hardest to reach premises.

The project aims to extend networks capable of delivering gigabit (1000Mbps) download speeds to at least 85% of UK premises by the end of 2025 and then nationwide coverage (c.99%) by around 2030 (here). The funding released for this will depend upon how the industry responds, but so far around 1.4bn worth of procurements and contracts are already in the pipeline (more is expected to follow).

NOTE: The project is technology neutral, thus operators can use The project is technology neutral, thus operators can use FTTP (preferred), Hybrid Fibre Coax ( DOCSIS 3.1+) or fixed wireless (e.g. 5G ) to plug the gap.

At present, over 76% of UK premises can already access a gigabit-capable network (details), which falls to 53% when just looking at FTTP (i.e. the gigabit figure is boosted by Virgin Medias HFC upgrade  here). But Ofcom currently forecasts gigabit coverage to hit 92% by March 2025 (here), with purely commercial deployments alone being expected to deliver over 80% of that.

Project Gigabit is thus designed to focus on improving connectivity for those rural and semi-rural areas in the final 20% (5-6 million premises). This consists of several support schemes, including gigabit vouchers (210m), funding to extend Dark Fibre around the public sector (110m) and gap-funded deployments with suppliers (rest of the funding)  better known as the Gigabit Infrastructure Subsidy (GIS) programme.

Todays article is focused upon the GIS programme and related procurement work, which sees ISPs bidding through a new Dynamic Purchasing System (DPS) to extend their networks across disadvantaged parts of the UK.

Whats New in the June 2023 Update

Since the last update on 27th Feb 2023 (here), BDUK has followed their initial contract awards by signing six new contracts in Cambridgeshire, the New Forest, North Shropshire, Norfolk, Suffolk and Hampshire  worth a combined 425 million (expected to help upgrade up to 284,000 hard-to-reach homes and businesses).

The combined value of all the contracts signed so far comes to around 589m in public investment and will upgrade 378,450 premises (c.1,557 per premises passed). But the total value of all the Project Gigabit procurements launched to date (inc. those that have yet to be awarded) is around 1.4bn, which could see up to 895,000 extra premises being passed by a gigabit-capable network.

Elsewhere, BDUK also completed their initial analysis of the major English metropolitan areas, which has helped them to identify the small pockets of poor urban digital connectivity [that] will remain unserved by the commercial market without government intervention. In order to accurately ascertain how to best serve these premises, BDUK has chosen to pause their procurement timeline in related areas and engage the market, councils and other local stakeholders on the most suitable solutions.

In addition, BDUKs market engagement in Essex and East Surrey has revealed significant planned commercial activity, leaving only a limited number of premises eligible for subsidy. The market has shown limited interest in bidding for what would be smaller-sized procurements in these areas, and so theyre now considering alternative interventions.

Finally, as part of ongoing work to refine the ways they use public funding to serve uncommercial sub-gigabit premises, BDUK are now considering the use of smaller, more flexible contracts to target sub-gigabit gaps in the network which the market may leave behind. We are at an early stage, and will consult the market in detail on this new route to market in due course, said BDUK.

However, so far most of the Project Gigabit contract awards have been for England, while the devolved countries of Wales, Scotland and Northern Ireland are still in the preparation stage. But we do get a good idea of the next steps for these areas.

NOTE: Project Gigabit in England is centrally managed (by DSIT/BDUK  not local councils), while the details on how the scheme will work in Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland are still TBA.

Status of Devolved Countries  Wales Areas across North West Wales, Mid Wales and South East Wales will be included in a cross regional procurement [Type C] we plan to launch in the summer. In addition, we are planning to launch a regional procurement in North Wales by the end of the year, and we are finalising the most appropriate approach for South West Wales. Type C procurements will appoint a single supplier to target premises (i.e. subsidise the design, build and operation of a new gigabit network) in areas where no or no appropriate market interest has been expressed before, or areas that have been descoped or terminated from a prior plan. Active voucher projects continue to deliver in Wales, but the scheme remains paused for new projects as the intervention areas for procurement are finalised. As of the end of May 2023, we had connected 3,000 homes and businesses in parts of Wales using vouchers. In addition, a further 2,300 vouchers had been issued for connection within the next 12 months.  Northern Ireland

Project Gigabit related procurements are still expected to begin in the autumn. As of the end of May 2023, 8,300 homes and businesses in parts of Northern Ireland had been connected using vouchers. In addition, a further 1,300 vouchers had been issued for connection within the next 12 months.  Scotland

The Scottish Government has committed to launch Project Gigabit procurements in the autumn. Gigabit vouchers continue to be actively delivered in Scotland. There have now been 3,400 Project Gigabit voucher funded connections of which 400 benefited from the Scottish Government top-up. A further 800 vouchers have been issued for connection in the next 12 months.

Otherwise, you can see a summary of the wider contract progress below.

Live GIS Contracts (Signed)

Area Contract Awarded Uncommercial Premises Value North Dorset (Lot 14.01) 25-Aug-22 7,000 6.3 million Teesdale (Lot 4.01) 22-Sep-22 4,000 6.7 million North Northumberland (Lot 34.01) 14-Oct-22 3,700 7.4 million Cumbria (Lot 28) 29-Nov-22 59,000 108.5 million Central Cornwall (Lot 32.02) 19-Jan-23 9,200 18 million South West Cornwall (Lot 32.03) 19-Jan-23 9,500 18 million Cambridgeshire and adjacent areas (Lot 5) 23-Mar-23 44,400 69 million New Forest (Lot 27.01) 27-Mar-23 10,400 13.8 million North Shropshire (Lot 25.02) 19-Apr-24 12,000 24 million Norfolk (Lot 7) 28-Jun-23 62,200 114.2 million Suffolk (Lot 2) 28-Jun-23 79,500 100.5 million Hampshire (Lot 27) 28-Jun-23 75,500 104.2 million

Take note that, once a contract has been signed, it sometimes takes operators several months of engineering surveys before they can begin to start the build. Likewise, the detailed rollout plan for these first contracts wont be known until those surveys have been completed. Furthermore, the contract values above are only referencing public investment, but its hoped that suppliers may also contribute some of their own private funding.

On top of the already agreed contracts, Project Gigabit also has a growing number of local and regional deals in the procurement phase for other parts of the UK (see below) and will be awarding contracts for these over the coming months and years. The dates and figures mentioned below are tentative estimates (subject to change) and will remain that way until after the contracts have been awarded.

Bidders on the related LOTS will be required to ensure that their networks and infrastructure are available for use by other ISPs via wholesale (open access). Various operators, both big and small (e.g. Openreach, Cityfibre, Fibrus, Gigaclear, Virgin Media [VMO2] etc.), are expected to take part and areas with sub-30Mbps speeds are being prioritised, albeit NOT to the exclusion of all else.

Alongside all this, the government and local bodies are also conducting various Public Reviews and Open Market Reviews (OMR), which is the process they use when trying to identify existing commercial coverage of gigabit-capable networks and any planned coverage over the next c.3 years. By doing that, they can more easily target their support toward areas where commercial projects will not go (i.e. the intervention area).

Live GIS Procurements

Area Est. Contract Award Date Uncommercial Premises Value North East England (Lot 4) May-23 51,850 82.7 million Worcestershire (Lot 24) July to September 2023 18,400 39.4 million Buckinghamshire, (part of) Hertfordshire and East of Berkshire (Lot 26) July to September 2023 40,300 58.8 million Kent (Lot 29) July to September 2023 72,000 112.3 million West and East Sussex (Lots 16 and 1) July to September 2023 62,100 100.6 million South Wiltshire (Lot 30) October to December 2023 19,000 24.8 million Bedfordshire, Northamptonshire and Milton Keynes (Lot 12) October to December 2023 30,300 51.4 million Derbyshire (Lot 3) October to December 2023 18,200 33.4 million Leicestershire and Warwickshire (Lot 11) November 2023 to January 2024 45,400 71.5 million Nottinghamshire and West of Lincolnshire (Lot 10) November 2023 to January 2024 35,700 58.6 million South Oxfordshire (Lot 13.01) August to September 2023 6,500 17 million North Oxfordshire (Lot 13.02) August to September 2023 4,900 11.2 million North East Staffordshire (Lot 19.01) September to November 2023 6,200 16.6 million West Yorkshire and York Area (Lot 8) November 2023 to January 2024 29,000 60.9 million South Yorkshire (Lot 20) November 2023 to January 2024 32,400 44.4 million Mid West Shropshire (Lot 25.01) November 2023 to January 2024 6,000 12 million Dorset and South Somerset (Lot 14) January to March 2024 22,600 43.2 million Cornwall and Isles of Scilly (Lot 32 ) April to June 2024 18,600 41.2 million

Finally, BDUK has a long list of future procurements in their pipeline (see below), which represents an indicative forward view of commercial activity to be undertaken by the programme. Some of the information provided is based on modelled data that will be superseded, while estimated contract award dates should all be taken with a pinch of salt as the targets do sometimes slip by several months (not unusual for such a complex scheme).

Future GIS Procurements

Area Est. Contract Award Date Uncommercial Premises Value Cheshire (Lot 17) January to March 2024 17,700 44.8 million Herefordshire (Lot 15) January to March 2024 7,900 21.5 million Gloucestershire (Lot 18) January to March 2024 4,900 15.6 million Lincolnshire (including NE Lincolnshire and N Lincolnshire) and East Riding (Lot 23) January to March 2024 74,200 119.3 million North Yorkshire (Lot 31) April to June 2024 41,900 63 to 127 million Lancashire, North Wiltshire and South Gloucestershire, West and Mid-Surrey, Staffordshire, West Berkshire Hertfordshire April 2024 to June 2024 57,500 149.7 million (Call-Off 1) West and North Devon, North West and Mid Wales, South East Wales April 2024 to June 2024 47,700 139.7 million (Call-Off 2) Devon and North Somerset (Lot 6) TBC TBC TBC*

NOTE: * BDUK are currently undertaking the design process for the Devon and North Somerset intervention. With a number of options remaining on the table, they have included it in the pipeline as TBC, but will be firming up their proposed intervention in due course.

Sadly, its still taking far too long to get all of these contracts into procurement, let alone award them. The new and more automated DPS system was supposed to make all of this faster and more efficient than just handing the funding to local authorities, but its difficult to see the benefits when so many areas seem to be lagging behind and some wont even see contracts awarded until mid-2024 or later.

On top of that, were still waiting for BDUK to launch a centralised website for clearly communicating their progress on each contract, which is something that weve previously been told was on the cards. The quarterly updates they issue are useful, but theyre too tedious for regular people to find and follow, unless youre already familiar with the programme. A clean, clear and simple public website would help this.

However, we should remind readers that this rollout is NOT an automatic upgrade, thus you will still need to order the service from a supporting ISP in order to benefit. Similarly, 1Gbps is the target speed, but slower and cheaper options will also exist on the same lines.

The focus on gigabit speeds also overlooks the fact that this largely relates to download performance, while BDUKs technical definition for the project appears to suggest that a minimum speed of 200Mbps would be acceptable when only looking at the upstream side (here). This is understandable, as not all gigabit networks today are actually setup to deliver true symmetric speeds, even though some may advertise them.

Lest we forget that there are a lot of real-world reasons why consumers buying a 1Gbps package might not actually be able to achieve the top speed, due to certain realities (Why Buying Gigabit Broadband Doesnt Always Deliver 1Gbps).

Finally, we should add that the Government has previously warned that those in the final 1% may still be prohibitively expensive to reach, although theyve recently clarified that less than 0.3% of the country (i.e. under 100,000 premises) are likely to fall into this category (roughly the same gap that the 10Mbps USO has struggled to fill). Solutions for those in the final 0.3% of Very Hard to Reach areas are still being tested.
An N.C. House Select Committee is recommending that the General Assembly change a state law forcing districts to start school the Monday closest to Aug. 26 and end no later than the Friday clo
Today

Sunny along with a few clouds. A stray shower or thunderstorm is possible. High 89F. Winds WNW at 5 to 10 mph.

Tonight

Partly cloudy skies in the evening, then becoming cloudy overnight. A stray shower or thunderstorm is possible. Low around 65F. Winds light and variable.

Tomorrow

Sunshine and clouds mixed. High 83F. Winds light and variable.
Today

Sunshine to start, then a few afternoon clouds. A stray shower or thunderstorm is possible. High near 90F. Winds WNW at 5 to 10 mph.

Tonight

Partly cloudy early with increasing clouds overnight. A stray shower or thunderstorm is possible. Low 64F. Winds light and variable.

Tomorrow

Some sun in the morning with increasing clouds during the afternoon. High 83F. Winds light and variable.
Florida Phoenix )  On July 1, Idaho becomes the only state without a legal requirement or specialized committee to review maternal deaths related to pregnancy.

The change comes after state lawmakers, in the midst of a national upsurge in maternal deaths, decided not to extend a sunset date for the panel set in 2019, when they established the states Maternal Mortality Review Committee, or MMRC.

The committee is composed of a family medicine physician, an OB-GYN, a midwife, a coroner, and a social worker, in addition to others who track deaths in Idaho that occur from pregnancy-related complications. Wyoming studies its maternal deaths through a shared committee with Utah. All other states, as well as Washington, D.C., New York City, Philadelphia, and Puerto Rico, have an MMRC, according to the Guttmacher Institute, a reproductive rights research group.

A majority of the state committees were established within the past decade as federal officials scrambled to understand state and local data to address gaps in maternal care. The committees review deaths that occur within a year of pregnancy and identify trends, share findings, and suggest policy changes.

Liz Woodruff, executive director of the Idaho Academy of Family Physicians, said she was incredibly disappointed by the Legislatures decision to scuttle the committee. It seems relevant that the state of Idaho supports a committee that works toward preventing the deaths of pregnant women, she said. This should be easy.

The committee will disband despite a high rate of maternal mortality in the United States that exceeds those of other high-income countries. The U.S. recorded 23.8 maternal deaths per 100,000 live births in 2020, compared with 8.4 in Canada and 3.6 in Germany, according to the Organization for Economic Cooperation and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

And the U.S. rate is sharply rising. In March, a few weeks before Idaho lawmakers adjourned their 2023 session, the CDC released data that showed the maternal mortality rate in the U.S. climbed in 2021 to 32.9 deaths per 100,000 live births.

Idaho has a particularly acute problem. Its pregnancy-related mortality ratio was 41.8 pregnancy-related deaths per 100,000 live births in 2020, according to the Maternal Mortality Review Committee report from that year.

Consistent data

Hillarie Hagen of Idaho Voices for Children, a nonprofit focused on low- and moderate-income families, said that the committee used the Idaho-specific data to do deep-dive analyses and that an information void would be left by shuttering the board.

How do we make decisions and policy decisions to improve the health of mothers and their babies if were not tracking the data? she asked. From our perspective, having consistent data and trends shown over time helps make more sound policy decisions.

The decision to disband the board came as two hospitals that serve rural areas announced they would stop providing services for expectant mothers. One of the hospitals cited trouble recruiting and retaining OB-GYNs after the state last summer enacted one of the strictest abortion bans in the country.

The committee, tasked with investigating deaths both individually and collectively, found that almost half of the maternal deaths in Idaho in 2020 occurred after delivery.

Amelia Huntsberger, an OB-GYN and a member of the committee, noted also that patients covered by Medicaid during pregnancy are overrepresented in maternal death rates, which led the panel to recommend expansion of postpartum Medicaid coverage to 12 months rather than the current 60 days.

Huntsberger made national headlines this year when she announced plans to leave both her job and the state, citing the states abortion ban and the move to dissolve the MMRC.

But in their legislative session, Idaho lawmakers decided not to advance a bill that would have embraced the committees recommendation to expand postpartum Medicaid coverage.

The legislation creating the review committee included a sunset clause to dissolve the committee on July 1, 2023. Following a contentious session by the Health and Welfare Committee of the Idaho House of Representatives in February, however, House Bill 81, which would have renewed the committee, failed to advance.



Image by Carolyn Booth from Pixabay

Republican state Rep. Dori Healey said she sponsored the bill because of her work as an advanced practice registered nurse when the Legislature is out of session. For me being in the health care field, I think its always important to understand the why behind anything. Why is this happening? What can we do better? Healey said. I feel like in health care we can only improve with knowledge.

Healey said she didnt anticipate the strong opposition to the bill. In declining to advance it, lawmakers cited costs of running the panel, although some, like Huntsberger, say its operation thus far has been covered by a federal grant.

The MMRC has been funded by the federal Title V Maternal and Child Health Block Grant program, aimed at improving the health of mothers, infants, and children. Idaho has received more than $3 million annually in Title V funds in recent years, according to statistics cited by Huntsberger.

The MMRC, whose members say annual operation costs stand at about $15,000, has been deemed budget-neutral, running at no cost to the state.

Budget cutting

In an interview with KFF Health News, Marco Erickson, vice chair of the Health and Welfare Committee, said Idahos Republican Party has been focused on reducing government spending. He said the same maternal data could be adequately culled through epidemiology reports already published by the Department of Health and Welfare.

Anytime that there is a death of a mother and child, there is value in evaluating why it occurred, Erickson said. The whole committee saw the importance but saw there was another way to do it. It wasnt that they didnt think it was valuable.

Erickson, who previously oversaw elements of maternal and child health in his role as a health program manager for Nevadas Division of Public and Behavioral Health, said that information could become siloed in government, but it was worthwhile to improve existing bodies rather than creating a committee anew.

I think it could be covered elsewhere, and if its not being done, they need to make a loud voice to cover it in the existing programs, he said. Were happy to sit down together to find a solution that works.

The lobbying group Idaho Freedom Foundation celebrated the end of the committee, contending it was a vehicle to promote more government intervention in health care, citing the groups recommendation to extend Medicaid coverage to mothers for 12 months postpartum.

Elke Shaw-Tulloch, public health administrator at the Idaho Department of Health and Welfare, said the department will continue to collect raw data on maternal deaths and gather as much data as possible through limited, existing sources. But, she said, it will not have the ability to compel reporting on cases or convene committee members to investigate deaths.

We are currently assessing what actions we can take and working with stakeholders to address solutions moving forward, she said.

A group to do so has not yet convened since the legislative session ended in April, although stakeholders say they will focus on bringing another bill before the Idaho Legislature to reinstitute the committee in the 2024 session.

Stacy Seyb, a maternal-fetal specialist who grew up in rural western Kansas and will continue to chair the committee until its dissolution, said that supporting medical providers in more rural areas was part of his lifelong mission, and that the work wont necessarily stop.

We knew once it didnt get out of committee, that Oh well, were sunk, Seyb said. I know one thing we want to do is collect as much information as we can over the year. Whether it will get reviewed or not, I dont know.

KFF Health News, formerly known as Kaiser Health News (KHN), is a national newsroom that produces in-depth journalism about health issues and is one of the core operating programs at KFF  the independent source for health policy research, polling, and journalism. KFF is a partner with the States Newsroom network, which includes the Phoenix.
Fierce fighting between the forces of rival generals shook the Sudanese capital Khartoum on Sunday as disease and malnutrition threatened the rising number of displaced.

Khartoum residents said they were shaken awake by warplanes and "violent fighting" between forces loyal to army chief Abdel Fattah al-Burhan and the paramilitary Rapid Support Forces (RSF).

Witnesses told AFP a police base and the state television building in the capital's northwest were under attack by the RSF, who said they had shot down an army MiG fighter.

In central Khartoum, others saw "scores of RSF vehicles" driving towards the vicinity of "the Armoured Corps".

Since April 15, the war between Burhan and his former deputy, RSF commander Mohamed Hamdan Daglo, has killed nearly 3,000 people and displaced 2.2 million within the country, with another 645,000 fleeing across borders, according to the International Organization for Migration.

"The situation is grave," the medical charity Doctors Without Borders (MSF) said in a statement detailing the hardships of displaced Sudanese stuck in nine camps in White Nile State which borders South Sudan.

In addition to Khartoum, the worst fighting has been in the western region of Darfur where residents, as well as the United Nations, United States and others, say civilians have been targeted and killed for their ethnicity by the RSF and allied Arab militias.

The death toll is believed to be much higher than recorded, as the World Health Organization says about two-thirds of health facilities are "out of service" in combat-affected areas.

Many injured people are unable to reach hospitals, and bodies lie rotting in the streets of Khartoum and Darfur.

A record 25 million people in Sudan need humanitarian aid and protection, the UN says.

"Hundreds of thousands of people, most of them women and children", pack camps that stretch out from the south of Khartoum all the way to the border with South Sudan, MSF said.

"There are suspected cases of measles, and malnutrition among children has become a vital health emergency.

"From June 6 to 7 we treated 223 children with suspected measles, 72 were hospitalised and 13 have died," MSF said.

The war has smashed the country's already fragile infrastructure, leaving residents short of water and electricity in the oppressive summer heat.

Numerous ceasefires, including some negotiated by the United States and Saudi Arabia, have failed to hold.

Fighting continued during the just ended Eid al-Adha holiday for which the warring sides announced separate unilateral truces.

- Sexual abuse -

The worsening situation in Darfur is a bleak reminder of the region's painful history.

In 2003, former strongman Omar al-Bashir armed and unleashed the RSF's predecessor, the Janjaweed militia, against Darfur's non-Arab ethnic minorities in violence that killed more than 300,000 people and displaced 2.5 million.

The International Criminal Court charged Bashir and others with genocide, crimes against humanity and war crimes.

A UN official has warned of possible new "crimes against humanity" in the current fighting in Darfur.

Dozens of women have been sexually abused in Darfur and elsewhere, a government unit monitoring such offences has said.

In Nyala, the capital of South Darfur, at least 25 "conflict-related sexual assaults" were recorded, in addition to 21 in West Darfur capital El Geneina and 42 in Khartoum.

Most survivors in Khartoum, and "all in Nyala and Geneina" identified the perpetrators as RSF fighters, the unit said.

In early June, Darfur governor and ex-rebel leader Mini Minawi, who is now close to the army, declared Darfur a "disaster zone".

Aid organisations are repeating their appeals to the warring sides to open up secure corridors so they can reach the injured and those displaced by the fighting.

These appeals have taken on increased urgency with the start of the rainy season in Sudan, which is usually accompanied by floods that bring water-borne diseases.
Investigating cases of enforced disappearance was one of The Gambias Truth, Reconciliation and Reparations Commissions (TRRC) main focus. Disappearing people was identified as one of former President Yahya Jammehs ways of silencing opponents or anyone he identified as a target during his reign from 1994 to 2017. From 2018 to 2021, the TRRC investigated a number of these cases. In its final report, it stated that the fate of all victims of enforced disappearance investigated by the commission were established except in four cases involving five individuals that the commission marked as unresolved, whilst there are more yet to be investigated.

The four that the commission could not resolve are the following: Kanyiba Kanyi; Buba (Bubai) Sangyang and Momodou Lamin Sangyang; Chief Ebrima Manneh; and Ceesay Bujiling.

The unresolved cases

Kanyiba Kanyi was a member of the United Democratic Party. He was unlawfully arrested at his home by unidentified state security agents on September 18, 2006, three days before the presidential elections. His family never saw him after that day. The state denied having any knowledge. There is testimony before the TRRC that he was seen at Mile 2 Prison. He was also spotted in Royal Victoria Teaching Hospital on March 14, 2008. Nothing else is known of his whereabouts. Until the time of his disappearance, he was working for the Christian Children's Fund.

Buba (Bubai) Sangyang and Momodou Lamin Nyassi. According to Ida Badjie, wife of Nyassi, these two victims, as well as Ndongo Mboob, were intercepted by unknown people believed to be members of the National Intelligence Agency (NIA) outside the Nyassis house in 2006. They were made to board a vehicle and taken away. Malick Jatta, a former Jungler  a notorious hit squad under Jammeh  testified that he saw people in civilian clothes, believed to be the NIA, hand over the three men to Sanna Manjang, another Jungler. According to Jatta, Mboob was executed by Manjang.

Chief Ebrima Manneh was a reporter with The Daily newspaper. He was arrested at his office on July 11, 2006 following his attempt to republish a BBC report criticising Jammeh. He was said to be seen at the Royal Victoria Teaching Hospital where he was treated for high blood pressure. He was reportedly killed and dumped in a well in Kanilai, the home village of Jammeh. Other reports indicate that he was buried at a pit behind Sare Ngai Police Station in Fulladu West, in far-east Gambia. According to Jungler Bai Lowe, who is currently tried in Germany, Manneh was killed on the same day as Daba Marenah, Ebou Lowe, Alieu Ceesay, Alpha Bah and Manlafi Corr. Despite the ECOWAS Court of Justice in 2008 ordering that the Gambian government release him and compensate him for unlawful detention, the government denied involvement. However, Jammeh acknowledged that Manneh was dead in 2011, but still maintained that the government was not involved. Although the truth commission received a statement from Bai Lowe detailing how Manneh was executed, his whereabouts remain a mystery.

Ceesay Bujilings case was mentioned by only one witness at the TRRC, Saihou Jallow, who had worked as Jammehs orderly. Bujiling was a watchman. According to Jallow, he was told by Jammeh that Bujiling would be crowned the king of witches and wizards. But Jammeh believed that an important person needed to be sacrificed first, and that he (Jammeh) was the target. Bujilings body was later found between Kanilai and Nyeffi. At the time of his execution in 2009, the Junglers were in Kanilai under the leadership of Nuha Badjie. In his testimony, Jallow mentioned that there was a phone call between Jammeh and a Jungler, Solo Bojang, to make sure Ceesay Bujiling was buried. In the final report of the TRRC the case is probably considered unresolved because it was based on one testimony, nothing was ever verified and the commission did not have time to properly investigate the case.

Families in limbo

In the absence of their loved ones, victim families continue to live in uncertainty, and some are still hoping for their return after all these years. Some families have held funerals without bodies and others are struggling with acceptance of their fate. Although the commission heard testimonies on these cases, the perpetrators often remain unknown, nor has any revelation been made about their possible burial sites.

Kanyiba Kanyi's son is now 16 years old. The father and son have never met because at the time of Kanyibas disappearance, his wife Isatou was still pregnant. Since his disappearance to date, we have said a lot. I testified at the TRRC but until now my husband's fate and whereabouts is not known, said Isatou Kanyi. Nothing is known about Kanyibas case. We are confused and worried. We want to know the people who captured him, the people who disappeared him. Whether he is dead or not, nobody knows. The only thing we can say is that he is missing because we do not know if he died or whatever happened. If there was a person to narrate what exactly happened, then that would have been helpful. But until now, there has been no such person, she added before expressing her frustration. The people who got him in trouble, I mentioned their names at the TRRC but none of them were called and questioned about Kanyiba. All of that has gotten me worried : those people should go and explain why they did so, but none of that happened. They said that another commission would be formed to look into his issue and that of Chief Manneh. That is what the TRRC report says. But until now, we are still in the dark.

A new task force

Indeed, when the TRRC could not establish the fate and whereabouts of these victims, it recommended that the government further investigate the unresolved cases, and create a taskforce that would look into other cases of disappearance that were not investigated by the commission. In its recently disclosed implementation plan, the government says it plans on setting up a multi-stakeholder task force on enforced disappearance to identify the suspected burial sites not previously identified by the TRRC as well as receive reports of missing persons not previously reported to the TRRC. This is expected to be implemented between mid 2023 and the end of 2024. It has a budget plan of 15,000 US dollars.

When the TRRC ended, they called us and gave us some money, Awa Manneh, sister of Chief Ebrima Manneh, recalled. After that, we have not heard anything else. The TRRC was our only hope of finally getting to know his fate and whereabouts, but until now, the government has not said anything about it. Now we are just in a state of confusion.

Will this change? The government has accepted the commissions recommendation to work closely with organisations such as the African Network against Extrajudicial Killings and Enforced Disappearances (ANEKED)  a collaboration confirmed by Sirra Ndow, ANEKEDs country representative  and the National Human Rights Commission to train justice and security agents on the illegality of enforced disappearance - a violation that is yet to be criminalised in the Gambian law books.

The TRRC had very little expertise, capacity and resources needed to search for the missing, explained Ndow. The task force will be calling on and joining forces with experts from other countries to guide the process, starting with the development of a comprehensive strategy and plan. The Gambia already received pledges of support from the International Committee of the Red Cross, Justice Rapid Response and the Forensic Anthropology Foundation of Guatemala to support the implementation plan. We are also expecting the government to sign up as a state party to the International Commission on Missing Persons (ICMP) which can give access to more support. We are already being supported by a team of experts, Argentine Forensic Anthropology Team and University of Chicago Global Human Rights Clinic, he assured.
Kim Tae Ri and Oh Jung Se set out to find answers about the connected criminal cases that took place in their town. Meanwhile, the detectives led by Hong Kyung also begin to move. In "Revenant" episode 3, the truth behind the possession of the evil spirit gets revealed. Read on to know more.

A Missing Case In Town

In the new episode of "Revenant," Lee Hong Sae (Hong Kyung) and Seo Mun Chun (Kim Won Hae) find an unusual connection that ties the three suicide cases in the city.

Every victim is friends with one another and goes to the same school. As the detectives dig deeper, they chance upon a case about a missing girl who's acquainted with the three.

Meanwhile, Goo San Young (Kim Tae Ri) and Yeom Hae Sang (Oh Jung Se) also dig for new information to find clarity about what happens around them.

When the two meet an old man who knows Goo San Young's late father, they also learn that a young girl who's connected to the three dead students is missing-the same girl the detectives are looking for.

The Police's New Theories

As they look for Lee Tae Young (Lee Ha Eun), the four meet at the missing girl's house. They also see the suicide tree with the three young students' corpses hanging from it.

The detectives believe that the young girl has eloped due to some reasons. It is revealed that Lee Tae Young is knee-deep in debt and goes into hiding to escape.

However, the money lender who also happens to be the cafe owner who Lee Tae Young works for has done fraudulent loan activities in the past, and has also pressed the young girl into paying.

Goo San Young calls the police and when they arrive at the cafe, the detectives see the burned wrist mark on his hand, similar to the marks found in the three deceased students' wrists.

Meanwhile, Yeom Hae Sang finds Goo San Young at the bridge and realizes that the evil spirit who possessed the latter is the one who's talking to him.

The Evil Spirit's True Intention

At the end of the episode, it is revealed that the evil spirit took over Goo San Young's body and punished the cafe owner for his fraudulent schemes and dirty ways.

Unfortunately, the detectives are clueless about Goo San Young being present at every crime scene. Unlike them, Yeom Hae Sang knows the truth.

The evil spirit's mission is to cause harm to those who had wronged and hurt Goo San Young.

KDramaStars owns this article.

Written by Elijah Mully.
Police Tape is seen at a crime scene in Toronto, Saturday, Jan 14, 2023. A 16-year-old Hamilton boy is dead after what city police describe as a fatal stabbing allegedly carried out by a family member. THE CANADIAN PRESS/Arlyn McAdorey
By Kevin Githuku

Forum for Democratic Change (FDC) party has downplayed governments decision to hire Russian companies to manufacture digital number plates, tasking it to consider Ugandan companies that deal in the same.

Speaking to journalists at the party headquarters on Monday, Mr. Harold Kaija, the FDC deputy secretary-general noted that the plan to switch the number plates is already encroaching on peoples privacy.

In a country where we are saying Buy Uganda Build Uganda, we already have companies that have been manufacturing number plates. Theyve not been given a chance and were told that the company that is coming from Russia has no known business/record in manufacturing number plates, Kaija said.

Kaija added that the number plates are expensive for Ugandans to afford, further calling for accountability of the money.

Government plans to begin the transition to digital number plates on October 31, 2023. motorists are expected to pay Shs735,000 for the digital number plates.
The High Court in Kampala has directed ex-Internal Security Organisation (ISO) Director Col Kaka Bagyenda and 14 security operatives to pay Shs175 million to a businessman who was illegally tortured and detained at Lwamayuba island in Kalangala district for more than a year without any charges. The order was issued by Justice Musa Ssekaana.

This is after the victim, a one Musa Nsereko proved to court that he was arrested on May 27, 2018, by a combined forces of the Internal Security Organisation and other militia while coming from Kyengera to Nabbingo.

He contends that he was arrested by plain-clothed security operatives who detained him in a safe house at Lwamayuba island in Kalangala but he was never informed of any reason why he was arrested.

Nsereko also proved that he was detained on the island for 17 months and he was never allowed to see his relatives, lawyers, or get medical treatment for the injuries.

He told Court that while in detention, he was subjected to torture which resulted in breaking his hand, and forced labour.

In his ruling, Justice Ssekaana noted that whereas there is a comprehensive legal regime that prevents and prohibits torture, it is evident that the violations of the right to freedom in the form of torture and cruel, inhuman, and degrading treatment or punishment are still rampant in Uganda.

The Judge said there is sufficient evidence that Col Bagyenda and his group are responsible for the torture inflicted onto Nsereko but not the government.

According to the judgment issued online, Nsereko was awarded interest at a rate of 15% from the date of ruling until payment in full.
The Inspector General of Government (IGG) has launched an investigation into allegations of syndicated corruption and abuse of office at the Ministry of Energy and Mineral Development.

Betty Kamya, who stormed the ministrys offices at Amba House, says that they have received information from a whistle-blower who reported allegations of corruption and mismanagement of government resources at the ministry.

She says the investigation will affect the rural electrification projects, where some of the officials at the ministry especially in the office of procurement are alleged to have engaged in various corruption scandals.

She says the investigations are demanding accountability for project progress for the last three years from 2021 to 2023.

Kamya also confiscated some documents from the officials of the said ministry which will be used to guide the investigation.

The Government is looking for over USD3.5 million to construct the power distribution line from the 4.8 Mega Watts Waaki Hydro Power Dam in Buliisa district. The Dam that is situated at River Waaki was commissioned three years ago but is yet to meet its potential.
By Juliet Kigongo

The Constitutional Court will today begin re-hearing the 2022 impeachment case of Mityana Municipality Member of Parliament (MP), Francis Zaake.

Zaake petitioned the Constitutional Court seeking its declaration to, among other things; overturn his controversial removal from the position of commissioner of parliament for allegedly insulting Speaker Anita Among on social media.

This was after Zaake and his lawyer complained of a delayed judgment on June 5 before the courts administrator Justice Geoffrey Kiryabiwre who informed them that court suffered manpower shortage on quorum following the promotion of Justice Steven Musota to the Supreme Court.

Justice Musota was among the five justices who heard Zaakes petition in June 2022.

Other justices are; Catherine Bamugemereire, Christopher Izama Madrama, Muzamiru Mutangula Kibeedi, and Irene Mulyagonja.

In his petition, Zaake details the events that took place prior to his alleged removal.

He also claims that each member of the parliaments committee on Rules, Privileges, and Discipline, who participated in his removal, received a kick-back of Shs6 million.

A total of 155 MPs voted to remove Zaake from the position after being found guilty of disparaging the speaker.
Police have banned pedestrians from using the old Nile bridge in Jinja during the night.

This follows the arrest of three people who were allegedly carrying a gun in a sack as they tried to cross the bridge into Jinja city.

The bridge in question lies on the left-hand side of the new Nile bridge (from Jinja city to Kampala) and it houses the railway on top.

Kiira region police spokesperson, Mr. James Mubi says pedestrians will be allowed to use the bridge between 6am to 6pm.

Mubi said this was done for security purposes to block wrong elements from using it before committing crimes.
The police forensic team has identified three more bodies of students from Mpondwe-Lhubiriha Secondary School who were killed by suspected Allied Democratic Forces (ADF) rebels on June 16, 2023. The attack left about 42 people dead including 37 students.

While pursuing the attackers, the Uganda Peoples Defence Forces (UPDF) discovered the body of a teenager, which has now been identified as Amina Biira, a daughter of Ms. Gertrude Kyakimwa. Police say she was abducted by the rebels before they abandoned her lifeless body.

Forensic experts have further identified two more bodies; Edgar Atukunzire, connected to his mother Josephine Kenja, and Loyce Muhindo, connected to Mr. Julius Mbusa, her father.

Addressing journalists at their headquarters in Naguru, police spokesperson, Mr. Fred Enanga said the three newly identified bodies will be handed over to their parents at Bwera Hospital morgue in Kasese this week.
By Andrew Bagala

Despite a UK warning that terrorists are targeting to attack crowded places, security at many crowd-pulling places had by last evening not been upgraded.

In a travel advisory posted on its website, the UK government noted that terrorists were very likely to try to carry out attacks in Uganda.

The travel advisory for British citizens in Uganda however does not specify the target place or group plotting the attack.

Our on-the sport checks showed that guards at many public places were unaware of the terror alert and none had intensified either surveillance or upgraded checks

Meanwhile, responding to the terror alert, security agencies have said that Uganda is safe.

Uganda Peoples Defence Force (UPDF) and Defence spokesperson, Brig Felix Kulayigye says terror threats to Uganda are like those to other countries including the UK and they have ably defended the country.

While police spokesperson Fred Enanga also echoed the police chiefs earlier message urging the public to remain calm and vigilant.
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Neemrana Resort Fraud: Investors handed over WhatsApp and mobile audio clips of fraudulent company directors to police



khaskhabar.com : Mon, 03 July 2023 1:11 PM

Sanjay Pasari, Rajkishore Modi, Sujata Modi, Siddharth Jaipuria and Rajeev Pasari may be jailed for cheating crores of rupees



Kolkata. Investors have handed over WhatsApp chats and Mobile Audio clips of Rajkishore Modi, Siddharth Jaipuria and his wife, who swindled crores of rupees in the name of Neemrana Resort project, in the name of Kolkata based company Diamond Sanjeevani Project s pvt ltd , The police is searching for all these accused against the FIR No. 0174/2023 lodged at Shahjahanpur police station



The evidence given by the investors to the police are specifically mentioning Rajkishore Modi, and Siddhath Jaipuria his wife Simita Jaipuria , these people are accepting taking money from investors, giving provisional allotment letters, and signing documents. In the proof made available Raj Kishore Modi accepted that the Pasari Group has transferred the plots of investors to its own other companies and taken loans by keeping them in banks. In the audio clip, these people are also assuring investors not to worry.



It is believed that in this case Rajkishore Modi, Sujata Modi, Siddharth Jaipuria, Sanjay Pasari and their accomplices can be jailed for sure. Because the police have got documentary evidence against them, which has no bite.



Investors claim that Siddharth Jaipuria is absconding since June 12. His wife Smita Jaipuria's phone is also switched off. People around the society say that Siddharth is not coming home for the last several days due to the arrest bfear by the police. Now the investors have also handed over the WhatsApp chats/mobile talks of Siddharth Jaipuria, his wife Smita Jaipuria to the police. In this, Smita Jaipuria is clearly saying that her brother-in-law Mr Rajkishore Modi has taken Rs 3 crore in her presence.



Here, the police had now given one more chance to these accused to appear at the police station for questioning, its term is now ending on 3rd July 2023 that is Monday afternoon. Now their arrest is sure. It is being told that Sanjay Pasari has made some political approach to seek time to appear at the police station for questioning.



Investors say that for this , he had come to Shahjahanpur during the section 41 , Notice period of the police. Here, after meeting many VIPs, he has requested to give more time of 15 days. Instead of arresting him, the police is preparing to give him 15 days time again . Meanwhile, Rajkishore Modi is trying to get relief by knocking on the doors of the Honble High Court.



Investors say that the police is not taking serious action in their case. While these vicious thugs are dodging the police by making false excuses of being admitted to the hospital and other times symptoms of smallpox. Investors claim that in this Rajkishore Modi is challenging the investors that he is at his dream home , someone should arrest him and tell him.



Siddharth Jaipuria's last location was recently found at a famous tourist spot. There he was enjoying a five star hotel with his family. Its arrangement was done by Rajkishore Modi. Investors say that the investigation and action of the Rajasthan Police is going on at a very slow pace. Taking advantage of this, there is a possibility of these vicious thugs absconding from India as well.
Cllr Pat Fitzpatrick, Association of Irish Local Government (AILG) President, has expressed major concerns that Ireland has the 'most centralised' system of local government compared to its European counterparts.

The AILG, the national representative body for city and county councillors across Ireland, submitted its independent report to a Congress of Local and Regional Authorities European Monitoring Committee during its recent visit to review Ireland.

Speaking in relation to the report, Cllr Pat Fitzpatrick said that 'councillors here have fewer powers than in almost every other country and have limited revenue-raising and spending powers'.

"In reality, since the 2014 reforms, the position and powers of the Chief Executive have increased resulting in a growing imbalance between the executive powers of the Chief Executive and the reserved powers of the elected councillors," he said.

"Accordingly, this leads to a democratic deficit where decisions can be made without direct democratic accountability. This is outdated, anti-democratic, and no longer tenable and was never acceptable."

Two monitoring visits of local and regional democracy in Ireland have previously been carried out in 2001 and 2013 respectively.
Four kind-hearted local teachers will travel to Kilimanjaro later this summer to volunteer with a charity that was founded by a Kilkenny woman.

Nicola Brennan, Kevin Cleary, Teresa Daly and John McDonald will all travel to Kilimanjaro for two weeks in August and will bring school supplies along with funds raised which will be used toimprove cooking facilities in the schools kitchen and to develop a pitch and play area,

Nicola and Kevin are still both teaching at the Presentation Secondary School in Kilkenny while Teresa and John have retired in recent years.

Sheila Ryan founded Kilimanjaro Direct over 14 years ago after being deeply moved by the plight of children living in the area and their lack of access to decent education. The charity provides food and education for almost 300 impoverished children and they have also built homes for a number of local families. Currently work is ongoing on developed a pitch and play area for the children at the school and fundraising is ongoing.

This Thursday (July 6) a fundraising table quiz in aid of Kilimanjaro Direct will take place at 8pm in Cleere's Bar at 8pm

The four of us travelling to the school are funding our own flights, accommodation and other expenses. We need you , however, to help us in raising money for this amazing organisation which we will personally deliver to Tanzania. This will help to pay teachers' wages, buy school books, pay for meals for the students and so much more, explained Nicola.

A teacher for 41 years at the Presentation Secondary School in Kilkenny, Sheila knows first hand the transformational impact education has on the lives of young people. After a holiday in 2005 Sheila witnessed first hand the desperate living conditions of some people, many of them children living in mud huts with no access to a decent education.

Fast forward two years and the charity, Kilimanjaro Direct, was born. Since then a school, the Liberty English Medium Primary School, has been set up and 14 homes have been built. The charity relies mainly on voluntary donations and over the years the people of Kilkenny have been incredible in supporting the cause. Sheila, who moved full time to Tanzania three years ago, said she is very grateful to people for their support and donations.

We are delighted to have volunteers over and we would be really delighted for any fundraising that anyone does.

At the moment we are doing our new pitch so the kids will have an area to play in. We really need a lot of help and support so we want to thank everyone for their help and support, said Shelia.

According to the charitys website the ethos of the charity is that 100% of all donations go directly to the running of the school and no monies is taken for expenses or administration fees. Everybody involved in the charity pays their own expenses.

People can donate through the website or set up a direct debit with the charitys bank account at Permanent TSB on High Street in Kilkenny.

To find out more about the Presentation teachers upcoming trip see their go fund me page From Loughboy to Kilimanjaro Direct

kilimanjarodirect.net

or administration fees. Everybody involved in the charity pays their own expenses.
Strengths Of the cryptocurrencies tracked by CoinMarketCap, the best performer for the week was Bitcoin Cash, rising 101.75%.



MicroStrategy says it has acquired about 12,333 Bitcoin for around $347 million in cash at an average price of about $28,136 each, inclusive of fees and expenses, between April 29 and June 27. The company held an aggregate of about 152,333 Bitcoin as of June 27, writes Bloomberg.



Bitcoin is hovering around its one-year high as asset manager Fidelity reportedly readies its filing for a spot exchange-traded fund (ETF) for the digital asset. The rally comes on the back of Fidelity's news, writes Bloomberg.

Weaknesses Of the cryptocurrencies tracked by CoinMarketCap, the worst performer for the week was Conflux, down 27.16%.



Crypto exchange Huobi Global said it will remove 10 trading pairs, primarily ones involving tokens used in transactions with the USDD stablecoin issued by the TRON DAO Reserve that is supported by digital asset entrepreneur Justin Sun, writes Bloomberg.



Binance Holdings will lose access to euro-denominated bank transfers to and from its cryptocurrency exchange via banking partner Paysafe, the latest in a recent string of blows to its business in Europe. Paysafe will no longer support bank transfers from Sept. 25, writes Bloomberg. Opportunities HSBC Holdings is offering trading of crypto-linked exchange traded funds (ETFs) to customers in Hong Kong amid a push by the city to establish itself as a hub for the alternative asset class, writes Bloomberg.



Hut 8 Mining, one of the largest public Bitcoin mining companies, said it has entered into a $50 million credit facility with a unit of Coinbase Global. The agreement comes as Bitcoin miners prepare for a preprogrammed event on the digital asset's blockchain dubbed the halving, writes Bloomberg.



The opening of a new crypto exchange backed by Citadel Securities has unleashed a speculative mania in Bitcoin Cash, an offshoot of the original digital token. Bitcoin Cash soared 25% to $304 on Friday, writes Bloomberg. Threats Robinhood is cutting about 7% of its full-time staff in the online brokerage's third round of layoffs in just over a year as the company adjusts to a slowdown in customer trading activity. About 150 employees are being laid off, writes Bloomberg.



Bankrupt FTX Trading is suing the former top compliance officer to the crypto empire, accusing the lawyer of helping company founder and alleged fraudster Sam Bankman-Fried raid customer funds. Daniels Friedberg allegedly enabled FTX group managers to misuse billions of dollars of customer funds, writes Bloomberg.



Bitcoin fell on Friday after a report that the U.S. SEC said the recent applications filed by asset managers to launch a spot Bitcoin exchange-traded fund (ETF) are inadequate, writes Bloomberg. By Frank E. Holmes Contributing to kitco.com Follow @bulldogholmes www.goldnewsletter.com

Disclaimer: The views expressed in this article are those of the author and may not reflect those of Kitco Metals Inc. The author has made every effort to ensure accuracy of information provided; however, neither Kitco Metals Inc. nor the author can guarantee such accuracy. This article is strictly for informational purposes only. It is not a solicitation to make any exchange in commodities, securities or other financial instruments. Kitco Metals Inc. and the author of this article do not accept culpability for losses and/ or damages arising from the use of this publication.
BUENOS AIRES, July 1 (Reuters) - Argentina's first plant for lithium batteries will begin operations in September, using metal extracted locally by U.S. company Livent Corp , mining officials said on Saturday.

Livent had agreed earlier this year to supply lithium to the new plant, which was developed by Y-TEC, a unit of Argentine state oil firm YPF .

"We will start to produce the first lithium-ion battery cells in the country," said Roberto Salvarezza, president of Y-TEC, in a government statement, noting that the batteries will use lithium carbonate extracted by Livent in northern Argentina.

Argentina is the world's fourth largest producer of lithium and has been attracting investment. Along with Chile and Bolivia, the country is in South America's so-called 'lithium triangle', which holds the world's largest trove of the ultra-light metal, highly coveted for its use in batteries.

Argentina's Mining Minister Fernanda Avila said she hoped it would be an example for future projects.

"The development of the supply around mining activity is a priority for our government," she said.

(Reporting by Jorge Otaola; Writing by Daina Beth Solomon; Editing by Muralikumar Anantharaman)
July 3 (Reuters) - Australia's NRW Holdings Ltd said on Monday that it entered into a A$973 million ($648.02 million) contract to design and construct the processing plant facilities at Northern Star Resources' KCGM growth project.

Under the deal, NRW's Primero Group unit will provide engineering, procurement, and construction for the Kalgoorlie Consolidated Gold Mines (KCGM) mill in Western Australia.

Last month, gold miner Northern Star said its board had approved an expansion of the processing capacity at KCGM at a cost of A$1.5 billion.

The expansion will increase and modernise KCGM's processing capacity to 27 million tonnes per annum (mtpa) from 13 mtpa, Northern Star said.

NRW said its contract was scheduled for completion by the third quarter of 2026.

($1 = 1.5015 Australian dollars)

(Reporting by Jaskiran Singh in Bengaluru; Editing by Jamie Freed)
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(Kitco News) - There is a lot of downstream support for lithium exploration companies in North America, noted Gerard ODonovan, CEO of Battery Age Minerals.

On June 20, 2023, ODonovan spoke to Kitco at the 15th Lithium Supply and Battery Raw Materials 2023 in Henderson, Nevada.

Battery Age Minerals is advancing its Falcon Lake lithium project located in Ontario, Canada. The company is beginning a maiden drill program in the 2023 season, following up historical exploration that included 24.4m at 1.43% from 10m.

The project is 3.5 hour drive from Thunder Bay. Battery Age Minerals says the project is near roads and power.

O'Donovan said Canada is a draw for lithium juniors due to infrastructure.

"The supply-chain has been built out pretty quickly in North America," said O'Donovan. "Traditionally in Australia we've mined and we've taken that product and we've shipped it to the Asian markets. The benefit of North America is that the integrated supply chain is here."

Battery Age Minerals is focused on a hard rock project.

"Spodumene is king. I think that we will be the source for the raw material to build out the supply chain and to build out those conversion facilities."

The company's leadership has operations experience. ODonovan was project manager at Pilbara Minerals (ASX:PLS). He was responsible for developing and commissioning the Pilgangoora Lithium-Tantalum mine and processing facility. He was also responsible for managing the upgrade recommissioning and restart of the Ngungaju (ex-Altura) mine and processing facility.

O'Donovan noted a skills transfer. A lot of Australians have come to Canada to push forward critical mineral projects.

"The Australian ethos of rapid developmentgetting in and getting the projects doneis going to assist Canada. It's going to provide that raw material to ensure that the supply chain is built out."

Coverage of 15th Lithium Supply and Battery Raw Materials 2023 sponsored by Lindian Resources (ASX:LIN).
July 3 (Reuters) - The European Union is considering a proposal for the Russian Agricultural Bank to set up a subsidiary to reconnect to the global financial network as a sop to Moscow, the Financial Times said on Monday.

With the bank under sanctions, the move aims to safeguard the Black Sea grain deal that allows Ukraine to export food to global markets, the newspaper said.

The European Commission had no comment, while the Kremlin, in response to a question about the report, said it had nothing to announce about the deal's implementation.

The United Nations and Turkey brokered the Black Sea Grain Initiative for an initial 120 days last July to help tackle a global food crisis worsened by Moscow's invasion of Ukraine, one of the world's leading grain exporters. It has been extended three times since but is due to expire later this month.

More than 32 million tonnes of mostly corn and wheat have been exported by Ukraine under the deal.

Moscow reiterated on Monday it was pessimistic about the prospects for renewing the deal because no progress had been made in implementing accompanying agreements that pertain to Russian exports.

There was little immediate reaction in global grain markets on Monday with wheat prices virtually unchanged.

"There is general belief in the market that the Ukrainian shipment deal will not be extended unless Russia gets substantive concessions," one European grains trader said.

"Easing the banking sanctions would be a quick method of giving Russia something," the trader said, adding there remained many doubts about whether the deal would be extended.

Russia last week said that it saw no reason to extend the grain deal because the West had acted in an "outrageous" way over the agreement, though it assured poor countries that Russian grain exports would continue.

'CREATIVE WAYS'

Moscow's plan, proposed through U.N.-brokered talks, would let the bank unit handle payments related to grain exports, the paper said, citing unnamed sources.

The new unit would be allowed to use the SWIFT global financial messaging system, which was closed to the largest Russian banks after Russia's invasion of Ukraine, it added.

The U.N. declined to comment on the FT report.

"I don't think it would help me to talk in any detail about what the U.N. is doing," Deputy U.N. spokesperson Farhan Haq told reporters on Monday,

He added that U.N. officials had been in touch with "a number of nations, including European nations, to find creative ways in which exports of food and fertilizer from the Russian Federation could be could be expedited."

Responding to the Financial Times report, Ukraine's foreign ministry ambassador at large, Olha Trofimtseva, said the EU wanted "to somehow facilitate the grain deal".

"On the one hand, any opportunities for agricultural exports are good. On the other hand, making concessions to a blackmailer means encouraging him to continue blackmailing," she wrote on the Telegram messaging app.

"It is a well-known axiom: a blackmailer does not stop if you fulfil his demands. He just comes up with new demands."

As two of the world's top agricultural producers, Russia and Ukraine are major players in grain and oilseed markets ranging from wheat and barley to rapeseed and sunflower oil. Russia is also dominant in the fertiliser market.

Apart from the restoration of SWIFT access, Russia is also seeking resumption of supplies of farm machinery and parts as well as the removal of curbs on insurance and reinsurance.
MILAN, July 3 (Reuters) - The holding company of late Italian billionaire Leonardo Del Vecchio got the green light to raise its stake in Generali (GASI.MI) above 10%, sending shares in the insurer higher in anticipation that a battle for control will resume.

Founded by the eyewear tycoon who died a year ago, holding company Delfin is also the largest shareholder in Mediobanca (MDBI.MI) and the latest move brings the complicated relations between the investment bank and Generali back into focus.

Delfin, which registered to vote with a 9.8% stake at Generali's annual meeting in April, said on Monday that the higher stake approval was a technical issue and did not have any strategic significance for Italy's biggest insurer.

Italy's insurance watchdog IVASS said it had authorised Delfin to own more than 10% of Generali after the company inadvertently crossed the threshold because of a share buyback.

Generali shares rose as much as 5.6% in early trade and were up 3.5% by 1100 GMT, giving the company a valuation of around 30 billion euros.

"We believe that the authorisation of IVASS to rise (the stake level) from 10% to 20% will increase again the speculative appeal on Generali (and indirectly on Mediobanca), however, it remains to be assessed," Equita wrote in a research note.

SHAREHOLDER BATTLES

Generali and Mediobanca have been at the heart of shareholder battles mainly involving the late Del Vecchio and his ally and fellow billionaire Francesco Gaetano Caltagirone.

The power struggles around Mediobanca and Generali have pitted a core of Italian shareholders in two of the country's most storied financial companies against international institutional investors.

A year ago rebel investors in Generali, led by Caltagirone, lost a shareholder vote to oust Chief Executive Philippe Donnet, who was handed a new three-year mandate, ironically helped by the support of leading investor Mediobanca.

Last week, Caltagirone told a parliamentary hearing that Generali's governance set-up, whereby the outgoing board puts forward a list of candidates to name new directors, allowed Mediobanca to excessively influence the insurer.

Mediobanca's board comes up for renewal in the autumn with Chief Executive Alberto Nagel, at the helm since 2008, running for reappointment.
LONDON, June 30 (Reuters) - The Venezuelan Central Bank (BCV) board controlled by the government of President Nicolas Maduro on Friday lost its latest appeal over $1.95 billion of the country's gold reserves held in the Bank of England's underground vaults.

The BCV was challenging a previous ruling that certain decisions of Venezuela's top court should not be recognised by English courts in the gold case.

Lawyers representing the Venezuelan central bank in the challenge said it will now be returned to London's High Court to determine what happens next, now former Venezuela opposition leader Juan Guaido is no longer recognised by Britain's government as the country's leader.

Guaido's interim presidency ended late last year and the opposition national assembly is now headed by exiled lawmaker Dinorah Figuera.

New opposition leadership is anxiously awaiting approvals to allow distribution of foreign funds, especially those located in the United States.

The BCV had taken up the case three years ago saying it wanted to sell the gold, which amounts to around 15% of Venezuela's foreign currency reserves, to fund the country's response to the coronavirus pandemic.

The Venezuelan communications ministry did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
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CONSOL Energy (NYSE:CEIX  Free Report) and Exxaro Resources (OTCMKTS:EXXAF  Free Report) are both oils/energy companies, but which is the better investment? We will compare the two companies based on the strength of their earnings, profitability, valuation, institutional ownership, dividends, risk and analyst recommendations.

Profitability

This table compares CONSOL Energy and Exxaro Resources net margins, return on equity and return on assets.

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Net Margins Return on Equity Return on Assets CONSOL Energy 28.86% 56.19% 21.56% Exxaro Resources N/A N/A N/A

Earnings and Valuation

This table compares CONSOL Energy and Exxaro Resources top-line revenue, earnings per share and valuation.

Gross Revenue Price/Sales Ratio Net Income Earnings Per Share Price/Earnings Ratio CONSOL Energy $2.10 billion 1.12 $466.98 million $19.73 3.44 Exxaro Resources N/A N/A N/A N/A N/A

Institutional & Insider Ownership

CONSOL Energy has higher revenue and earnings than Exxaro Resources.

82.3% of CONSOL Energy shares are owned by institutional investors. Comparatively, 15.2% of Exxaro Resources shares are owned by institutional investors. 2.5% of CONSOL Energy shares are owned by insiders. Strong institutional ownership is an indication that large money managers, hedge funds and endowments believe a stock is poised for long-term growth.

Analyst Ratings

This is a breakdown of current ratings and recommmendations for CONSOL Energy and Exxaro Resources, as provided by MarketBeat.

Sell Ratings Hold Ratings Buy Ratings Strong Buy Ratings Rating Score CONSOL Energy 0 0 1 0 3.00 Exxaro Resources 0 1 0 0 2.00

CONSOL Energy presently has a consensus price target of $80.50, suggesting a potential upside of 18.71%. Given CONSOL Energys stronger consensus rating and higher probable upside, analysts plainly believe CONSOL Energy is more favorable than Exxaro Resources.

Summary

CONSOL Energy beats Exxaro Resources on 9 of the 9 factors compared between the two stocks.

About CONSOL Energy

(Free Report)

CONSOL Energy Inc. produces and exports bituminous coal in the United States. It operates through Pennsylvania Mining Complex and CONSOL Marine Terminal segment. The company's Pennsylvania Mining Complex segment engages in mining, preparation, and marketing of bituminous coal to power generators, industrial end-users, and metallurgical end-users. Its CONSOL Marine Terminal segment provides coal export terminal services through the Port of Baltimore. In addition, the company develop and operates the Itmann Mine, and the Greenfield reserves and resources. It owns and operates the Pennsylvania Mining Complex (PAMC), which includes the Bailey Mine, the Enlow Fork Mine, the Harvey Mine, and the Central Preparation Plant; and CONSOL Marine Terminal located in the port of Baltimore. Further, the company had 622.1 million tons of Pittsburgh seam reserves; and own and control approximately 1.4 billion tons of Greenfield reserves and resources located in the Northern Appalachian, Central Appalachian, and Illinois basins. The company was founded in 1864 and is headquartered in Canonsburg, Pennsylvania.

About Exxaro Resources

(Free Report)

Exxaro Resources Limited engages in coal, iron ore investment, pigment manufacturing, and renewable energy businesses in South Africa, Europe, Australia, and Asia. The company produces thermal coal, metallurgical coal, and semi-soft coking coal products primarily in the Waterberg and Mpumalanga regions; offers gas-atomised ferrosilicon for use in separation plants, as well as iron ore; and operates two wind farms. The company was formerly known as Kumba Resources Limited and changed its name to Exxaro Resources Limited in November 2006. Exxaro Resources Limited was incorporated in 2000 and is based in Centurion, South Africa.

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Genus (OTCMKTS:GENSF  Free Report) is one of 387 publicly-traded companies in the Biotechnology industry, but how does it weigh in compared to its competitors? We will compare Genus to similar companies based on the strength of its analyst recommendations, earnings, institutional ownership, risk, dividends, valuation and profitability.

Analyst Recommendations

This is a summary of current recommendations for Genus and its competitors, as reported by MarketBeat.

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Sell Ratings Hold Ratings Buy Ratings Strong Buy Ratings Rating Score Genus 0 0 1 0 3.00 Genus Competitors 764 1597 4214 39 2.53

As a group, Biotechnology companies have a potential upside of 113.09%. Given Genus competitors higher probable upside, analysts clearly believe Genus has less favorable growth aspects than its competitors.

Valuation and Earnings

Gross Revenue Net Income Price/Earnings Ratio Genus N/A N/A 73.80 Genus Competitors $115.77 million -$3.55 million -146.30

This table compares Genus and its competitors gross revenue, earnings per share (EPS) and valuation.

Genus competitors have higher revenue, but lower earnings than Genus. Genus is trading at a higher price-to-earnings ratio than its competitors, indicating that it is currently more expensive than other companies in its industry.

Profitability

This table compares Genus and its competitors net margins, return on equity and return on assets.

Net Margins Return on Equity Return on Assets Genus N/A N/A N/A Genus Competitors -10,516.93% -70.67% -19.07%

Institutional & Insider Ownership

29.7% of Genus shares are held by institutional investors. Comparatively, 24.3% of shares of all Biotechnology companies are held by institutional investors. 24.6% of shares of all Biotechnology companies are held by insiders. Strong institutional ownership is an indication that endowments, hedge funds and large money managers believe a stock will outperform the market over the long term.

Dividends

Genus pays an annual dividend of $0.17 per share and has a dividend yield of 0.5%. Genus pays out 34.9% of its earnings in the form of a dividend. As a group, Biotechnology companies pay a dividend yield of 2.8% and pay out 11,399.4% of their earnings in the form of a dividend.

Summary

Genus beats its competitors on 8 of the 13 factors compared.

Genus Company Profile

(Free Report)

Genus plc operates as an animal genetics company in North America, Latin America, the United Kingdom, rest of Europe, the Middle East, Russia, Africa, and Asia. The company operates through three segments: Genus PIC, Genus ABS, and Genus Research and Development. It sells breeding pigs and semen to breed pigs with various characteristics for pork production under the PIC brand. The company also sells bull semen and embryos to breed calves with various characteristics for milk and beef production under the ABS, Genus, and Bovec brands. In addition, it offers technical services to farmers. The company was incorporated in 1994 and is based in Basingstoke, the United Kingdom.

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StockNews.com upgraded shares of Delta Air Lines (NYSE:DAL  Free Report) from a hold rating to a buy rating in a research note issued to investors on Thursday.

Several other equities analysts have also recently commented on DAL. Evercore ISI upgraded shares of Delta Air Lines from an in-line rating to an outperform rating and boosted their target price for the company from $40.00 to $47.00 in a research report on Tuesday, March 7th. JPMorgan Chase & Co. reduced their price objective on shares of Delta Air Lines from $81.00 to $69.00 in a research note on Monday, May 8th. Jefferies Financial Group upped their price objective on shares of Delta Air Lines from $45.00 to $50.00 in a report on Tuesday, June 27th. Morgan Stanley initiated coverage on shares of Delta Air Lines in a report on Wednesday, June 28th. They set a top pick rating on the stock. Finally, Barclays increased their price target on shares of Delta Air Lines from $48.00 to $55.00 in a research report on Friday, June 23rd. Fifteen investment analysts have rated the stock with a buy rating and two have given a strong buy rating to the stock. According to MarketBeat.com, the company presently has a consensus rating of Buy and an average price target of $52.32.

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Delta Air Lines Stock Performance

Shares of DAL opened at $47.54 on Thursday. The firm has a 50-day moving average of $37.72 and a 200-day moving average of $36.65. Delta Air Lines has a one year low of $27.20 and a one year high of $47.73. The company has a market cap of $30.55 billion, a PE ratio of 16.12, a price-to-earnings-growth ratio of 0.20 and a beta of 1.24. The company has a debt-to-equity ratio of 3.17, a current ratio of 0.47 and a quick ratio of 0.42.

Delta Air Lines Cuts Dividend

Delta Air Lines ( NYSE:DAL Free Report ) last posted its earnings results on Thursday, April 13th. The transportation company reported $0.25 earnings per share (EPS) for the quarter, missing analysts consensus estimates of $0.29 by ($0.04). Delta Air Lines had a return on equity of 56.49% and a net margin of 3.51%. The company had revenue of $12.76 billion for the quarter, compared to analyst estimates of $12.25 billion. During the same quarter in the prior year, the business posted ($1.23) EPS. The businesss quarterly revenue was up 36.5% compared to the same quarter last year. As a group, equities analysts forecast that Delta Air Lines will post 6.27 earnings per share for the current year.

The company also recently disclosed a quarterly dividend, which will be paid on Monday, August 7th. Shareholders of record on Monday, July 17th will be given a dividend of $0.10 per share. This represents a $0.40 annualized dividend and a yield of 0.84%. The ex-dividend date is Friday, July 14th. Delta Air Liness dividend payout ratio is currently 13.56%.

Insider Buying and Selling at Delta Air Lines

In related news, Director David S. Taylor purchased 5,000 shares of the stock in a transaction dated Friday, April 14th. The stock was purchased at an average price of $33.56 per share, with a total value of $167,800.00. Following the transaction, the director now directly owns 15,360 shares in the company, valued at $515,481.60. The transaction was disclosed in a filing with the Securities & Exchange Commission, which can be accessed through this link. In related news, EVP Joanne D. Smith sold 7,513 shares of the businesss stock in a transaction that occurred on Wednesday, May 31st. The stock was sold at an average price of $36.90, for a total transaction of $277,229.70. Following the completion of the transaction, the executive vice president now directly owns 107,782 shares in the company, valued at approximately $3,977,155.80. The sale was disclosed in a filing with the SEC, which is available at this hyperlink. Also, Director David S. Taylor purchased 5,000 shares of the companys stock in a transaction on Friday, April 14th. The stock was acquired at an average price of $33.56 per share, with a total value of $167,800.00. Following the completion of the purchase, the director now directly owns 15,360 shares in the company, valued at $515,481.60. The disclosure for this purchase can be found here. Over the last 90 days, insiders bought 15,000 shares of company stock valued at $503,250. 0.89% of the stock is currently owned by company insiders.

Institutional Inflows and Outflows

Hedge funds and other institutional investors have recently added to or reduced their stakes in the business. Vanguard Group Inc. grew its position in Delta Air Lines by 1.3% in the 3rd quarter. Vanguard Group Inc. now owns 70,356,139 shares of the transportation companys stock valued at $1,974,193,000 after acquiring an additional 917,225 shares during the last quarter. Primecap Management Co. CA increased its position in shares of Delta Air Lines by 5.0% in the third quarter. Primecap Management Co. CA now owns 22,369,318 shares of the transportation companys stock valued at $627,683,000 after buying an additional 1,067,362 shares in the last quarter. State Street Corp increased its position in shares of Delta Air Lines by 2.8% in the first quarter. State Street Corp now owns 21,652,643 shares of the transportation companys stock valued at $756,110,000 after buying an additional 579,727 shares in the last quarter. FMR LLC increased its position in shares of Delta Air Lines by 30.4% during the first quarter. FMR LLC now owns 14,779,351 shares of the transportation companys stock worth $516,095,000 after purchasing an additional 3,445,953 shares in the last quarter. Finally, Geode Capital Management LLC increased its position in shares of Delta Air Lines by 2.7% during the first quarter. Geode Capital Management LLC now owns 13,168,804 shares of the transportation companys stock worth $459,144,000 after purchasing an additional 351,286 shares in the last quarter. 68.35% of the stock is currently owned by institutional investors.

Delta Air Lines Company Profile

(Free Report)

Delta Air Lines, Inc provides scheduled air transportation for passengers and cargo in the United States and internationally. The company operates through two segments, Airline and Refinery. Its domestic network centered on core hubs in Atlanta, Minneapolis-St. Paul, Detroit, and Salt Lake City, as well as coastal hub positions in Boston, Los Angeles, New York-LaGuardia, New York-JFK, and Seattle; and international network centered on hubs and market presence in Amsterdam, Mexico City, London-Heathrow, Paris-Charles de Gaulle, and Seoul-Incheon.

Further Reading

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Komercni banka, a.s. (OTCMKTS:KMERF  Free Report) is one of 277 public companies in the BanksRegional industry, but how does it weigh in compared to its rivals? We will compare Komercni banka, a.s. to related companies based on the strength of its earnings, analyst recommendations, profitability, valuation, dividends, risk and institutional ownership.

Institutional and Insider Ownership

14.4% of Komercni banka, a.s. shares are owned by institutional investors. Comparatively, 33.1% of shares of all BanksRegional companies are owned by institutional investors. 16.4% of shares of all BanksRegional companies are owned by company insiders. Strong institutional ownership is an indication that large money managers, hedge funds and endowments believe a stock is poised for long-term growth.

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Earnings & Valuation

This table compares Komercni banka, a.s. and its rivals revenue, earnings per share and valuation.

Gross Revenue Net Income Price/Earnings Ratio Komercni banka, a.s. N/A N/A 0.09 Komercni banka, a.s. Competitors $376.98 billion $794.14 million 257.11

Dividends

Komercni banka, a.s.s rivals have higher revenue and earnings than Komercni banka, a.s.. Komercni banka, 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.

Komercni banka, a.s. pays an annual dividend of $230.00 per share and has a dividend yield of 732.5%. Komercni banka, a.s. pays out 69.2% of its earnings in the form of a dividend. As a group, BanksRegional companies pay a dividend yield of 13.1% and pay out 18.8% of their earnings in the form of a dividend.

Profitability

This table compares Komercni banka, a.s. and its rivals net margins, return on equity and return on assets.

Net Margins Return on Equity Return on Assets Komercni banka, a.s. N/A N/A N/A Komercni banka, a.s. Competitors 33.74% 10.30% 0.91%

Analyst Recommendations

This is a summary of recent ratings and price targets for Komercni banka, a.s. and its rivals, as provided by MarketBeat.com.

Sell Ratings Hold Ratings Buy Ratings Strong Buy Ratings Rating Score Komercni banka, a.s. 0 1 0 0 2.00 Komercni banka, a.s. Competitors 1088 3331 3185 16 2.28

Komercni banka, a.s. presently has a consensus target price of $900.00, suggesting a potential upside of 2,766.24%. As a group, BanksRegional companies have a potential upside of 307.79%. Given Komercni banka, a.s.s higher possible upside, equities analysts plainly believe Komercni banka, a.s. is more favorable than its rivals.

Summary

Komercni banka, a.s. rivals beat Komercni banka, a.s. on 11 of the 13 factors compared.

Komercni banka, a.s. Company Profile

(Free Report)

Komercni banka, a.s., together with its subsidiaries, provides various retail, corporate, and investment banking services primarily in the Czech Republic, and Central and Eastern Europe. It accepts various deposits, such as current and savings accounts, term deposits, building savings, and foreign currency accounts. The company's loan products include optimal, personal, student, and home equity/secured loans; loans for start-up businesses, business loans, business operating loans, and revolving loans; operational, installment, claims, and structured finance, as well as finances for acquisitions and mergers; and mortgage loans. It also offers payment, debit, and credit cards; investment products; life, travel and card, and property insurance products; pension products; overdraft, trade and export, bond issuance, cash and payment, cash pooling, bills of exchange, financial instruments trading, leases, foreign currency and derivative, and guarantee transaction services. In addition, the company provides E-banking, telephone, and mobile banking services. It serves individuals, small businesses, corporates, and municipalities. The company was founded in 1990 and is headquartered in Prague, the Czech Republic. Komercni banka, a.s. is a subsidiary of Societe Generale S.A.

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Avantax Planning Partners Inc. lowered its position in shares of Newmont Co. (NYSE:NEM  Free Report) by 1.6% during the first quarter, according to its most recent Form 13F filing with the SEC. The institutional investor owned 36,001 shares of the basic materials companys stock after selling 574 shares during the period. Avantax Planning Partners Inc.s holdings in Newmont were worth $1,765,000 at the end of the most recent reporting period.

Several other institutional investors and hedge funds have also made changes to their positions in the company. Hennion & Walsh Asset Management Inc. lifted its stake in Newmont by 2.2% in the first quarter. Hennion & Walsh Asset Management Inc. now owns 49,553 shares of the basic materials companys stock valued at $2,429,000 after buying an additional 1,061 shares during the last quarter. Princeton Global Asset Management LLC boosted its stake in Newmont by 547.0% during the 1st quarter. Princeton Global Asset Management LLC now owns 3,196 shares of the basic materials companys stock worth $157,000 after purchasing an additional 2,702 shares during the period. Altfest L J & Co. Inc. grew its position in Newmont by 9.9% during the 1st quarter. Altfest L J & Co. Inc. now owns 12,718 shares of the basic materials companys stock worth $623,000 after purchasing an additional 1,143 shares during the last quarter. Antonetti Capital Management LLC increased its stake in Newmont by 42.9% in the first quarter. Antonetti Capital Management LLC now owns 1,000 shares of the basic materials companys stock valued at $49,000 after purchasing an additional 300 shares during the period. Finally, DnB Asset Management AS raised its holdings in shares of Newmont by 63.9% in the first quarter. DnB Asset Management AS now owns 305,485 shares of the basic materials companys stock valued at $14,975,000 after buying an additional 119,098 shares during the last quarter. 77.82% of the stock is owned by hedge funds and other institutional investors.

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Wall Street Analyst Weigh In

NEM has been the topic of several recent research reports. The Goldman Sachs Group boosted their price target on Newmont from $58.00 to $67.00 and gave the company a buy rating in a research report on Friday, April 21st. National Bank Financial increased their price target on Newmont from C$91.00 to C$94.00 in a report on Tuesday, May 2nd. Citigroup dropped their price objective on shares of Newmont from $70.00 to $60.00 and set a buy rating on the stock in a research note on Tuesday, April 4th. Canaccord Genuity Group upgraded shares of Newmont from a hold rating to a buy rating and raised their target price for the stock from $53.00 to $55.00 in a research note on Monday, March 13th. Finally, Barclays boosted their price target on shares of Newmont from $57.00 to $62.00 and gave the stock an equal weight rating in a research note on Friday, April 21st. Three investment analysts have rated the stock with a hold rating and nine have assigned a buy rating to the stock. According to data from MarketBeat.com, the company has a consensus rating of Moderate Buy and a consensus price target of $60.53.

Newmont Price Performance

Shares of NEM stock traded up $0.46 during midday trading on Monday, reaching $43.12. 1,773,157 shares of the company traded hands, compared to its average volume of 8,036,346. The firms 50 day simple moving average is $44.03 and its two-hundred day simple moving average is $46.97. The firm has a market cap of $34.27 billion, a PE ratio of -64.76, a price-to-earnings-growth ratio of 1.68 and a beta of 0.34. The company has a debt-to-equity ratio of 0.31, a current ratio of 2.38 and a quick ratio of 2.00. Newmont Co. has a 1-year low of $37.45 and a 1-year high of $61.38.

Newmont (NYSE:NEM  Free Report) last issued its quarterly earnings data on Thursday, April 27th. The basic materials company reported $0.40 earnings per share (EPS) for the quarter, topping the consensus estimate 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 during the quarter, compared to analysts expectations of $2.70 billion. During the same period in the previous year, the firm posted $0.69 earnings per share. Newmonts revenue was down 11.4% on a year-over-year basis. On average, equities research analysts expect that Newmont Co. will post 2.5 EPS for the current fiscal year.

Newmont Dividend Announcement

The firm also recently announced a quarterly dividend, which was paid on Thursday, June 15th. Shareholders of record on Thursday, June 1st were given a dividend of $0.40 per share. This represents a $1.60 dividend on an annualized basis and a yield of 3.71%. The ex-dividend date of this dividend was Wednesday, May 31st. Newmonts payout ratio is currently -242.42%.

Insider Buying and Selling at Newmont

In related news, COO Robert D. Atkinson sold 3,000 shares of Newmont stock in a transaction that occurred on Monday, May 1st. The stock was sold at an average price of $47.76, for a total transaction of $143,280.00. Following the completion of the transaction, the chief operating officer now directly owns 81,751 shares in the company, valued at approximately $3,904,427.76. The sale was disclosed in a legal filing with the Securities & Exchange Commission, which is available at the SEC website. In other Newmont news, CEO Thomas Ronald Palmer sold 11,000 shares of the firms stock in a transaction dated Thursday, June 1st. The shares were sold at an average price of $40.84, for a total transaction of $449,240.00. Following the sale, the chief executive officer now directly owns 289,039 shares of the companys stock, valued at approximately $11,804,352.76. The transaction was disclosed in a filing with the Securities & Exchange Commission, which is available through the SEC website. Also, COO Robert D. Atkinson sold 3,000 shares of the businesss stock in a transaction that occurred on Monday, May 1st. The shares were sold at an average price of $47.76, for a total transaction of $143,280.00. Following the completion of the transaction, the chief operating officer now directly owns 81,751 shares of the companys stock, valued at approximately $3,904,427.76. The disclosure for this sale can be found here. Insiders have sold 25,000 shares of company stock valued at $1,117,880 over the last quarter. Corporate insiders own 0.07% of the companys stock.

About Newmont

(Free Report)

Newmont Corporation engages in the production and exploration of gold. It also explores for copper, silver, zinc, and lead. The company has operations and/or assets in the United States, Canada, Mexico, Dominican Republic, Peru, Suriname, Argentina, Chile, Australia, and Ghana. As of December 31, 2022, it had proven and probable gold reserves of 96.1 million ounces and land position of 61,500 square kilometers.

Featured Articles

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UCB (OTCMKTS:UCBJY  Free Report) is one of 370 public companies in the Biotechnology industry, but how does it contrast to its peers? We will compare UCB to related companies based on the strength of its risk, institutional ownership, dividends, analyst recommendations, earnings, valuation and profitability.

Profitability

This table compares UCB and its peers net margins, return on equity and return on assets.

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Net Margins Return on Equity Return on Assets UCB N/A N/A N/A UCB Competitors -11,035.46% -62.04% -17.97%

Insider and Institutional Ownership

23.3% of shares of all Biotechnology companies are owned by institutional investors. 26.0% of shares of all Biotechnology companies are owned by company insiders. Strong institutional ownership is an indication that hedge funds, endowments and large money managers believe a company will outperform the market over the long term.

Dividends

Earnings & Valuation

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 2.8% and pay out 11,399.4% of their earnings in the form of a dividend.

This table compares UCB and its peers top-line revenue, earnings per share and valuation.

Gross Revenue Net Income Price/Earnings Ratio UCB N/A N/A 58.29 UCB Competitors $115.16 million -$931,439.39 16.82

UCBs peers have higher revenue, but lower earnings than UCB. UCB is trading at a higher price-to-earnings ratio than its peers, indicating that it is currently more expensive than other companies in its industry.

Analyst Recommendations

This is a summary of current ratings for UCB and its peers, as provided by MarketBeat.com.

Sell Ratings Hold Ratings Buy Ratings Strong Buy Ratings Rating Score UCB 0 0 1 0 3.00 UCB Competitors 596 1350 3740 32 2.56

As a group, Biotechnology companies have a potential upside of 109.03%. Given UCBs peers higher possible upside, analysts clearly believe UCB has less favorable growth aspects than its peers.

Summary

UCB beats its peers on 7 of the 13 factors compared.

About UCB

(Free Report)

UCB SA, a biopharmaceutical company, develops products and solutions for people with neurology and immunology diseases. The company's primary products include Cimzia for inflammatory TNF mediated diseases, as well as ankylosing spondylitis, axial spondyloarthritis, Crohn's disease, non-radiographic axial spondyloarthritis, plaque psoriasis, psoriatic arthritis, and rheumatoid arthritis; Vimpat, Keppra, and Briviact for epilepsy; Neupro for Parkinson's disease and restless legs syndrome; Nayzilam, a nasal spray rescue treatment for epilepsy seizure clusters; and Zyrtec and Xyzal for allergies. It also offers Evenity for the treatment of osteoporosis in postmenopausal women; BIMZELX for treating psoriasis, psoriatic arthritis, axial spondyloarthritis, and hidradenitis suppurativa; and dapirolizumab pegol for systemic lupus erythematosus. In addition, the company is involved in developing rozanolixizumab to treat myasthenia gravis, immune thrombocytopenia, and chronic inflammatory demyelinating polyneuropathy; zilucoplan to treat myasthenia gravis and immune-mediated necrotizing myopathy; staccato alprazolam to treat tereotypical prolonged seizure; Bepranemab to treat Alzheimer's disease; and UCB0599 to treat Parkinson's disease. Further, it engages in contract manufacturing activities. UCB SA has collaboration agreements with Amgen, Biogen, Roche/Genentech, Novartis, Otsuka, and doc.ai. It operates in the United States, Japan, Germany, rest of Europe, Spain, France, China, Italy, the United Kingdom, Ireland, Belgium, and internationally. The company was incorporated in 1925 and is headquartered in Brussels, Belgium.

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CROWN POINT  A Michigan City teen shot a woman, stole her car and led police on a high-speed chase that ended in a crash, according to charging documents.

Khalil Gipson, 17, was charged Saturday as an adult with attempted murder and robbery resulting in serious bodily injury. If convicted, Gipson faces up to 70 years in prison.

A spokesperson from the Lake County Prosecutors Office declined to comment on why Gipson was charged as an adult.

The teen had reportedly just been released from custody in Illinois on a charge of armed carjacking, Porter police Lt. Dan Dickey previously said.

In the Indiana case, Gipson told a 44-year-old woman to give him her keys or he would shoot her, according to charging documents. Gipson then shot the woman in the right chest area, which resulted in heavy blood loss, according to the charges.

The woman was transported via helicopter to the University of Chicago Medical Center, according to a probable-cause affidavit.

Police surveyed surveillance footage of the carjacking and observed the woman try to drive away when Gipson pointed his gun at her, according to charging documents.

Gipson fired his gun and the woman stopped the vehicle, at which point Gipson then snatched (her) from the vehicle and kicked her before leaving in (the womans) Nissan Sentra and turning southbound on Dekalb Street, a probable cause affidavit stated.

While they were analyzing the crime scene, Lake County police officers heard from Porter County police that the stolen Nissan had been picked up by a license plate recognition camera heading east on U.S. 20 near Ind. 49.

As the suspect attempted to negotiate a curve just east of Railroad Avenue, he lost control of the vehicle and crashed into a wooded area, Dickey previously said. The suspect was partially ejected through the windshield and asked officers for help.

Gipson was taken to the hospital for further treatment before he was turned over to police and transported to the Lake County Juvenile Center, according to charging documents.

Gallery: Recent arrests booked into Lake County Jail
MANSFIELD, La. -- The state has rested its case against a DeSoto Parish man accused in the death of a 12-year-old Stonewall child.
Today, the Commission announced the results of the 2023 Erasmus+ call for the European Universities initiative, which provides support to alliances of higher education institutions. These European University alliances are bringing together a new generation of Europeans who are able to study and work in different European countries, different languages, and across sectors and academic disciplines. Thanks to these alliances, students can obtain a degree by combining studies in several European countries, which contributes to the international competitiveness of higher education institutions in Europe.

With today's results, adding seven new European Universities alliances, the total of 50 alliances now involve more than430 higher education institutions in 35 countries. These comprise all EU Member States and Iceland, Norway, Albania, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Montenegro, North Macedonia, Serbia, and Turkiye.

The students of these institutions can benefit from a unique transnational and innovative educational offer, allowing them to acquire essential skills and competences for the future. Furthermore, by partnering with almost 1 700 associated partners among NGO's, enterprises, local and regional authorities, the 50 European Universities alliances bring broad-scale innovation to Europe's regions.

With a record overall budget of 402.2 million from the Erasmus+ programme[1] for this call, each alliance receives a budget of up to 14.4 million for four years.

The 2023 call opened the possibility to higher education institutions from Western Balkans countries, not associated to the Erasmus+ programme to participate as full partners in the call. As a result, higher education institutions from Albania, Bosnia and Herzegovina and Montenegro have joined the initiative, on top of those from North Macedonia and Serbia.

As last year, the alliances can involve higher education institutions from Bologna Process countries as associated partners. Under the 2023 call, close to 30 higher education institutions from Ukraine have also joined the alliances.

Next Steps

In the fall of 2023, the Commission will launch the next Erasmus+ call for proposals, with the aim of reaching the goal of the European strategy for universities to expand to 60 European Universities alliances with more than 500 universities by mid-2024.

Background

The European Universities initiative supports transnational alliances of on average nine higher education institutions that can include different types of establishments (such as comprehensive and research universities, universities of applied sciences, institutes of technology, schools of arts and higher vocational education and training institutions). These institutions develop a long-term structural, sustainable and systemic cooperation on education, research and innovation across borders. They offer student-centred curricula jointly delivered across inter-university campuses, on which students, staff and researchers from all parts of Europe can enjoy seamless mobility.

The Commission proposed the European Universities initiative to European Union leaders ahead of the Gothenburg Social Summit in November 2017, as part of an overall vision for the creation of a European Education Area by 2025. Presented in 2022, the European strategy for universities sets the ambition to support 60 European Universities involving more than 500 higher education institutions by mid-2024. For this, a record EUR 1.1 billion under Erasmus+ is foreseen under the current programming period 2021-2027. Support for the research dimension of European Universities can be sought under the European Excellence initiative under Horizon Europe.

The 2023 Erasmus+ European Universities call was structured around two strands. It offered to provide sustainable funding for already existing successful alliances of higher education institutions to pursue their long-term vision; the successful existing alliances have expanded with more than 50 new higher education institutions. And the call also supported the creation of new European Universities across Europe, gathering diverse higher education institutions around common strategic visions.

For More Information

European Universities Erasmus+ call 2023: results

European Universities Initiative

Factsheet
New Delhi [India], July 3 (ANI): The State Bank of India (SBI) has been authorized to issue Electoral Bonds through its 29 branches starting Monday (today) and the sale will continue till April 12.

This is the 27th such issue.

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Assembly elections in Rajasthan, Madhya Pradesh, Chhattisgarh, Telangana, and Mizoram are due later this year.

The government notified the Electoral Bond Scheme on January 2, 2018. Electoral bonds were introduced to "cleanse the system of political funding" in India.

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The issuance of sales - the 26th tranche - happened in April ahead of the then-scheduled Karnataka assembly polls.

Such bonds are typically available for purchase for a period of 10 days each in the months of January, April, July and October, or as may be specified by the central government.

As per provisions, Electoral Bonds may be purchased by a person who is a citizen of India or incorporated or established in India. A person being an individual can buy Electoral Bonds, either singly or jointly with other individuals.

Only the registered political parties which secured not less than one per cent of the votes polled in the last General Election or the Legislative Assembly shall be eligible to receive the Electoral Bonds.

The Electoral Bonds shall be encashed by an eligible Political Party only through a Bank account with the Authorised Bank.

The Electoral Bonds are valid for fifteen calendar days from the issue date, and no payment shall be made to any payee Political Party if the Electoral Bond is deposited after the expiry of the validity period. The Electoral Bond deposited by an eligible Political Party in its account is credited on the same day. (ANI)

(This is an unedited and auto-generated story from Syndicated News feed, LatestLY Staff may not have modified or edited the content body)
Mumbai, July 3: Taking off after a long delay for Hong Kong, an Air India flight carrying more than 200 passengers on Monday returned to the national capital due to a "suspected technical issue" and later, the flight was cancelled, according to officials.

Many of the passengers were accommodated on another carrier's flight, some were provided hotel accommodation in the national capital, and a full refund was also offered to people who preferred that option, an Air India spokesperson said in a statement. Chennai Power Cut on July 5: Tangedco Announces Power Cut in Parts of Tamil Nadu Due to Maintenance Work; Check Timing and List of Areas Where Electricity Supply Will Remain Suspended.

An official in the know said the flight AI 314 was originally scheduled to operate to Hong Kong late on Sunday night, but due to some engineering issues in the Boeing 787 aircraft, the flight was rescheduled for Monday morning.

Finally, the flight took off at around 7.40 am but returned in less than an hour to the national capital. There were more than 200 people on board, the official added. Kerala Boat Capsize: Snake Boat Season Champakulam Moolam 'Vallam Kali' Off to Bad Start As Women's Boat Overturns; All 17 Women Rescued.

"Flight AI 314, operating Delhi to Hong Kong on July 3 air-returned to Delhi after a suspected technical issue," the airline's spokesperson said.

According to the spokesperson, after necessary checks, the flight was cancelled and many of our guests were subsequently re-accommodated on another carrier.

"We have also provided hotel accommodation in Delhi to some of the guests, apart from offering full refunds to those who preferred the option," the spokesperson added.

(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, Jul 3 (PTI) The Delhi High Court on Monday rejected a PIL seeking directions to the police to ask the complainants about their willingness to undergo scientific tests like narco analysis, polygraph and brain mapping during an investigation to prove allegations.

A bench of Chief Justice Satish Chandra Sharma and Justice Subramonium Prasad dismissed the petition by advocate Ashwini Kumar Upadhyay.

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The court had reserved verdict on the plea on May 15.

During a hearing on the PIL, the high court had earlier said we are not lawmakers and that the petitioner has to establish his case on merits.

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Upadhyay had sought directions to the police to ask the complainant whether she is willing to undergo scientific tests like narco analysis, polygraph and brain mapping during an investigation to prove her allegation and record her statement in the First Information Report (FIR).

The petitioner had said similar directions be made in respect of an accused and his or her statement be record in the charge sheet.

He said this would work as a deterrent and will reduce fake cases.

The petitioner had also sought to direct the Law Commission to examine the best practices of developed countries and prepare a detailed report to control fake cases and reduce police investigation time and precious judicial time.

The plea had said this will also save the public money spent on the investigation and trial and will secure right to life, liberty, dignity and justice of thousands of innocent citizens who are under tremendous physical mental trauma and financial stress due to fake cases.

(This is an unedited and auto-generated story from Syndicated News feed, LatestLY Staff may not have modified or edited the content body)
Mumbai, Jul 3 (PTI) Hinduja group-owned IndusInd International Holdings (IIHL), the promoter of IndusInd Bank, on Monday announced a USD 1.5-billion capital raising plan to fund the proposed acquisition of Reliance Capital and increase its stake in the lender.

The board of the Mauritius-registered IIHL also decided to increase its holding in the fourth-largest private sector lender to 26 per cent from the present 15 per cent, a statement issued from Port Louis said.

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It can be noted that on June 29, the lenders to the crippled Reliance Capital accepted the revised Rs 9,661 crore bid by IndusInd Bank.

IIHL had made the highest cash offer of Rs 9,661 crore in the auctions and secured as much as 99 per cent of the lenders' votes. The bid also includes the Rs 500-crore cash balance with RCap going to the lenders, taking the overall recovery to Rs 10,200 crore or about 65 per cent of Rs 16,000 crore principal secured debt the crippled company owed to lenders.

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"The decision to raise UDS 1.5 billion opens boundless opportunities to expand our business horizon in the country and also other global geographies, in the BFSI sector. Our aspirations will not be capital constrained as raising capital is not an issue at all for us," chairman of IIHL Ashok P Hinduja was quoted as saying in the statement.

The board also approved increasing its shareholding in IndusInd Bank to 26 per cent from the current 15 per cent.

The first objective of the capital raising is to increase its promoter shareholding in IndusInd Bank from the current 15 per cent to 26 per cent. Accordingly, the IIHL board has resolved to undertake capital raising in a phased manner to mobilise the required funds for infusion, the statement added.

The second objective of the capital raising is towards equity participation for the acquisition of Reliance Capital through the NLCT process, the statement said, adding today, the administrator has issued the duly signed letter of intent.

The statement claimed that global sovereign funds and private equity funds have expressed interest in participating in the fundraising/bank's growth story.

The statement further said the group is likely to take IIHL public next year.

It can be noted that IIHL recently acquired a majority holding in a bank in the Commonwealth of The Bahamas and had also received in-principle approval for a banking licence in Mauritius. The company said the licence would be used to set up an all-new bank or consider an acquisition.

The company is also in the process of acquiring asset management and wealth management businesses to complete its para banking suite, the statement said.

The board also announced a special interim dividend of 10 per cent to shareholders, most of whom have stayed with the company for the past three decades.

The board also approved a buyback scheme for partial dilution for its original shareholders at USD 20.

RCap administrator is likely to file the IIHL resolution plan in the NCLT Mumbai this week as the deadline of July 15 to file is approaching. Operating companies under Reliance Capital are into insurance (life, general and health), asset reconstruction and broking.

The Reserve Bank on November 29, 2021, superseded the board of Reliance Capital in view of payment defaults and serious governance issues and had appointed Nageswara Rao as the administrator.

(This is an unedited and auto-generated story from Syndicated News feed, LatestLY Staff may not have modified or edited the content body)
Jalgaon (Maharashtra) [India], July 3 (ANI): After Ajit Pawar took oath as the Deputy Chief Minister of Maharashtra, party workers on Sunday celebrated outside the NCP office in Jalgaon bursting crackers.

They also raised slogans like 'Ajit Pawar, you go ahead, we are with you'.

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Maharashtra Deputy Chief Minister Ajit Pawar has the backing of more than 40 MLAs in the State Legislative Assembly and more than 6 MLCs in the Legislative Council.

"Ajit Pawar has the backing of more than 40 MLAs in Vidhan Sabha and more than 6 MLCs in Vidhan Parishad," party sources said.

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Newly appointed Maharashtra Deputy CM Ajit Pawar said, "Today, we have decided to support the Maharashtra government and took oath as ministers. There will be a discussion on the portfolios later. Considering all aspects at the national level, we thought that we should support development."

"The country is progressing under the leadership of PM Modi. He is also popular in other countries. Everyone supports him and appreciates his leadership. We will fight the upcoming Lok Sabha and Assembly elections with them (BJP) and that is why we have taken this decision," Pawar added.

Earlier today Nationalist Congress Party (NCP)'s senior leader Ajit Pawar on Sunday joined Eknath Shinde-led government in Maharashtra and took oath as the deputy chief minister of the state.

In a dramatic turn of events, Pawar, along with nine MLAs, reached Raj Bhawan to meet Governor Ramesh Bais.

A total of nine NCP leaders took oath as Maharashtra ministers after Ajit Pawar and other party leaders joined the NDA government in Maharashtra. (ANI)

Pawar was later administered oath as the second deputy chief minister of Maharashtra.

Chief Minister Eknath Shinde was also present on the occasion.

On the occasion, Maharashtra CM Eknath Shinde said that the double-engine government has now become triple-engine.

"Now we have 1 Chief Minister and 2 Deputy Chief Ministers. The double-engine government has now become triple engine. For the development of Maharashtra, I welcome Ajit Pawar and his leaders. Ajit Pawar's experience will help strengthen Maharashtra," Maharashtra CM Shinde said. (ANI)

(This is an unedited and auto-generated story from Syndicated News feed, LatestLY Staff may not have modified or edited the content body)
Morena, Jul 3 (PTI) Eight inmates, accused of various crimes including rape and murder, have escaped from a juvenile home in Madhya Pradesh's Morena city, police said on Monday.

The incident took place on Sunday evening at the juvenile home located on Nainagarh road, an official said.

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Eight out of 12 juvenile undertrials, including those facing serious charges of rape and murder, escaped after breaking the wall of a bathroom at around 7 pm on Sunday, City Superintendent of Police Atul Singh said.

A Special Armed Force guard posted at the juvenile home informed the Kotwali police station at around 8 pm, following which the police started a search for the inmates, he said.

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Efforts were on to trace them.

The juveniles who escaped are residents of Morena, Bhind and Sheopur districts, the official 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, July 3: The next meeting of Opposition parties will be held in Bengaluru on July 17 and 18, party's General Secretary K C Venugopal said on Monday. The Congress leader said that Sunday's development in Maharashtra where Nationalist Congress Party chief Sharad Pawar's nephew Ajit Pawar was inducted into chief minister Eknath Shinde's cabinet will not impact the Opposition unity.

"After a hugely successful All-Opposition meeting in Patna, we will be holding the next meeting in Bengaluru on 17 and 18 July, 2023. We are steadfast in our unwavering resolve to defeat the fascist and undemocratic forces and present a bold vision to take the country forward," Venugopal took to Twitter to post. Patna Opposition Meeting: West Bengal CM Mamata Banerjee To Reach Bihar a Day in Advance To Meet Lalu Yadav.

Launching a scathing attack on Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) over the recent political drama in Maharashtra, Venugopal said the development will not affect the Maha Vikas Aghadi (MVA) coalition in Maharashtra. Mumbai: Three-Year-Old Girl Reunited With Parents Within 26 Minutes of Being Reported Missing in Wadala.

"PM Modi made a big allegation recently against the NCP leaders for corruption and now we saw this drama. It is a clear sponsored game of ED and their agencies. It will not affect MVA," Venugopal said.

"We will fight against BJP more aggressively. This is not going to affect opposition unity, this is NCP's issue. Sharad Pawar is the tallest leader of the party and he will be able to handle the situation. Some leaders changing the party does not mean that the supporters of the party and other members will go with them," the Congress leader said.

On June 29, NCP chief Sharad Pawar had said that the next meeting of Opposition leaders has been shifted from Shimla to Bengaluru owing to the prevailing weather conditions in Himachal Pradesh. The meeting he had said will be held on July 13 and 14.

Kharge had earlier said that the next meeting of like-minded parties will be held in Himachal Pradesh's Shimla. He said that the opposition parties will meet in Shimla to chalk out a roadmap for the formation of an anti-BJP front for the 2024 Lok Sabha polls.

"We will meet again in July in Shimla to prepare an agenda on how to move ahead together while working in our respective states to fight BJP in 2024," Kharge said at a joint press conference in the presence of other opposition leaders including TMC chief Mamata Banerjee and RJD veteran leader Lalu Prasad Yadav and party leader Rahul Gandhi.

On June 23, a meeting of opposition leaders was called by Bihar Chief Minister and Janata Dal (United) leader Nitish Kumar which was attended by leaders of parties opposed to the BJP.

West Bengal Chief Minister Mamata Banerjee, Delhi Chief Minister Arvind Kejriwal, Punjab Chief Minister Bhagwant Mann, Tamil Nadu Chief Minister MK Stalin, PDP leader Mehbooba Mufti, Congress leaders Rahul Gandhi, party chief Mallikarjun Kharge, Former Maharashtra CM Uddhav Thackeray, MP Sanjay Raut, NCP chief Sharad Pawar and former Jammu and Kashmir Chief Minister Omar Abdullah attended the meeting.

(This is an unedited and auto-generated story from Syndicated News feed, LatestLY Staff may not have modified or edited the content body)
New Delhi [India], July 3 (ANI): The joint meeting of Opposition parties which was scheduled for July 13-14 in Bengaluru has now been postponed and will be held before the beginning of the Parliament's Monsoon Session.

"We will declare the date very soon. We are talking to all political parties and the date will be announced without any delay," Congress General Secretary K C Venugopal told ANI on Monday.

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"The meeting will certainly take place before the Monsoon Session begins," the Congress leader said. Parliament Monsoon Session will begin on July 20 and go on till August 20.

Launching a scathing attack on Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) over the recent political drama in Maharashtra, Venugopal said the development will not affect the Maha Vikas Aghadi (MVA) coalition.

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"PM Modi made a big allegation recently against the NCP leaders for corruption and now we saw this drama. It is a clear sponsored game of ED and their agencies. It will not affect MVA," Venugopal said.

"We will fight against BJP more aggressively. This is not going to affect opposition unity, this is NCP's issue. Sharad Pawar is the tallest leader of the party and he will be able to handle the situation. Some leaders changing the party does not mean that the supporters of the party and other members will go with them," he said.

Earlier JD(U) chief spokesperson KC Tyagi also told reporters that the Opposition meeting will not be held on the scheduled July 13-14 and though the date has not been decided yet it will be held soon.

On June 23 after the first Unity meeting was conducted in Patna, Bihar, Congress president Mallikarjun Kharge had reportedly announced the next meeting to be held in Shimla on July 10 and 12.

On Thursday, Sharad Pawar announced at a press conference in Pune that the next meeting of Opposition leaders has been shifted from Shimla to Bengaluru owing to the prevailing weather conditions in Himachal Pradesh.

In the inaugural meeting earlier in Patna, top Opposition leaders, including Pawar, Bihar Chief Minister and Janata Dal United (JDU) chief Nitish Kumar, Congress's Mallikarjun Kharge and Rahul Gandhi, and West Bengal CM Mamata Banerjee, among others, had resolved to put up a united fight against the BJP government at the Centre in next year's Lok Sabha election (ANI)

Meanwhile, Maharashtra saw a political upheaval after NCP leader Ajit Pawar joined the Shiv Sena-BJP alliance and took oath as Maharashtra Deputy Chief Minister on Sunday in a surprise and dramatic political move that changed political equations in the state ahead of Lok Sabha and assembly polls next year and has ramifications for national politics. (ANI)

(This is an unedited and auto-generated story from Syndicated News feed, LatestLY Staff may not have modified or edited the content body)
Chennai, Jul 3 (PTI) It is not known whether Karnataka government raked up the Mekedatu dam row on and off due to political compulsion but Tamil Nadu would never allow the construction of the reservoir on Cauvery river, Minister for Water Resources Duraimurugan said here on Monday.

Karnataka Deputy Chief Minister D K Shivakumar taking up with Union Jal Shakti Minister Gajendra Singh Shekhawat the nod for the project was regrettable, he said. Shivakumar met Shekhawat on June 30 in Delhi.

Also Read | Maharashtra Politics: Don't Know Who Will Emerge As Ajit Pawar in Karnataka, Says JDS Leader HD Kumaraswamy (Watch Video).

The Mekedatu dam project went against the Supreme Court judgment and Chief Minister M K Stalin had all along been urging Prime Minister Narendra Modi to not allow the proposal to go through, Duraimurugan said.

The Union Minister for Water Resources had also made it clear that permission would not be given to Karnataka for dam construction without Tamil Nadu's concurrence, the TN Minister said in a statement.

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"Karnataka government has the practice of raking up the Mekedatu issue on and off. It is not known if this is due to political compulsion or not. Whatever may be the case, Tamil Nadu government will never allow Mekedatu dam construction," the Minister asserted.

While DMK is the ruling party in Tamil Nadu, its ally the Congress is in power in Karnataka. Pointing to Tamil Nadu's pending cases against the Mekedatu project before the Supreme Court, Duraimurugan said the state would present its strong case against the move during the hearing of the matter and prevent the building of the dam.

Also, in view of Tamil Nadu's stiff opposition, Mekedatu project proposal was not taken up for discussion in the Cauvery Water Management Authority (CWMA) meetings held in February, April and June this year.

"Let us all work unitedly in this issue," the Minister said a day after AIADMK chief and Leader of Opposition Edappadi K Palaniswami hit out at the DMK regime for not putting up resistance to protect the state's interests on the dam issue.

Duraimurugan said: "The Tamil Nadu government is taking all requisite steps at all levels to get Cauvery water from Karnataka to the State as per the Supreme Court judgment." The shortfall in water supply by Karnataka for the month of June was brought to the notice of Cauvery Water Regulation Committee.

Also, the TN government has written to the Cauvery Water Management Authority to advise Karnataka to address the shortfall and ensure water discharge as per the schedule for July.

Considering the welfare of Cauvery delta farmers, the Mettur dam was opened on June 12 for Kuruvai (short-term) paddy crop cultivation and water was being supplied continuously, the Minister said.

(This is an unedited and auto-generated story from Syndicated News feed, LatestLY Staff may not have modified or edited the content body)
Kolkata, Jul 3 (PTI) One person was killed and another seriously injured in an explosion allegedly during the manufacture of crude bombs in rural polls-bound West Bengal, police said on Monday.

The incident took place in Shalipur village in Haroa area of North 24 Parganas district late on Sunday night.

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The deceased was identified as Paritosh Mondal, an officer of Basirhat police station said, adding nobody has been arrested yet.

"The two injured persons were rushed to the Basirhat sub-divisional hospital where one of them was declared brought dead. We are investigating the blast," he told PTI over the phone.

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The seriously injured person is being brought to a hospital in Kolkata for better treatment.

Violence has been reported from several parts of the state ahead of the July 8 panchayat elections, leading to loss of several lives.

(This is an unedited and auto-generated story from Syndicated News feed, LatestLY Staff may not have modified or edited the content body)
Mumbai, July 3: Maharashtra Deputy Chief Minister Devendra Fadnavis has said that NCP leader Sharad Pawar has put his daughter Supriya Sule, MP, in the forefront to "transfer his legacy" and that he is the "driver of opposition unity".

In an interview with ANI Editor Smita Prakash which was recorded on June 29 before the crisis in the Nationalist Congress Party (NCP), Fadnavis hit out at the dynastic politics and said Prime Minister Narendra Modi has lessened its impact in national politics. Maharashtra Deputy CM Devendra Fadnavis Says Our Hindutva Is Not Anti-Muslim, Its Anti-Appeasement.

Fadnavis said Sharad Pawar has been instrumental in bringing together opposition parties. "The person to bring the opposition parties together is Pawar Sahib. And the force behind bringing the opposition parties together, the parties who cannot see each other face to face is Pawar Sahib. The driver of opposition unity is also Pawar," Fadnavis said.

"He has health reasons but he is fit. Sharad Pawar visits places now. He is politically, totally alert. He is counted among those politicians who know politics from every side. He definitely wants to transfer the legacy of his party just like all family parties want. In order to transfer his legacy, he has put Supriyaji in the forefront," the BJP leader said. Fadnavis said that Sharad Pawar would remain active politically as he continues to be NCP chief. Maharashtra Politics: Dont Know Who Will Emerge As Ajit Pawar in Karnataka, Says JDS Leader HD Kumaraswamy (Watch Video).

"If he wanted to take a backseat, he would have made Supriya Sule party president, but he has made her a working president. He has established his process of transferring his legacy but the person sitting in the driving seat is Sharad Pawar only." Sharad Pawar appointed Supriya Sule and Praful Patel as working presidents of the party in June.

BJPs Devendra Fadnavis Says Sharad Pawar Has Put Supriya Sule In Forefront To Transfer His Legacy

NCP leader Ajit Pawar, who was the Leader of Opposition in Maharashtra, joined the BJP-Shiv Sena government in Maharashtra as Deputy Chief Minister on Sunday causing a split in his party. The crisis in NCP has ramifications within Maharashtra and also for national politics. Fadnavis said dynastic politics is there and noted people should be promoted on the basis of their abilities.

"We are not opposed to a politician's daughter and son becoming a politician. The point that we are trying to make is that a person should not go to a superior position just because he is the son of a particular politician. The person should not be promoted to a higher post if he or she is incapable, or if the person does not have an understanding or calibre. We are against this kind of dynastic politics, this is wrong," he said.

"The result of dynastic politics is that the government ends up serving a family and not the people. But after Modiji came to power, this kind of politics has lessened. After this, the only dynasty which will last is the one which will serve people," he added.

Opposition parties are making efforts to forge a front against the BJP-led National Democratic Alliance (NDA) at the Centre with an eye on next year's Lok Sabha polls. Leaders from 15 political parties attended the meeting of opposition parties convened by Bihar Chief Minister Nitish Kumar last month.

(This is an unedited and auto-generated story from Syndicated News feed, LatestLY Staff may not have modified or edited the content body)
Mumbai, July 3: Nationalist Congress Party working President Supriya Sule on Monday wrote to Party Supremo Sharad Pawar to disqualify MP and Party Members Praful Patel and Sunil Tatkare for allegedly indulging in anti-party activities.

"I write with great urgency to inform you that two Members of Parliament, Praful Patel and Sunil Tatkare...have indulged in anti-party activities by facilitating and spearheading the swearing of the oath of nine MLAs as Cabinet Ministers of Government of Maharashtra," Supriya Sule wrote to Sharad Pawar. Ajit Pawar To Stake Claim on NCP Name And Party Symbol After Swearing in As Maharashtra Deputy CM? Numbers Say Its Possible.

"They have further openly made statements to this effect before the media and have acted in complete violation of the Party's direction and principles. You may further be informed that this decision of the two Members of Parliament to support the nine MLAs has been taken without the permission of the Party President and without taking all members of the party into confidence," she wrote further. Sharad Pawar on Ajit Pawar Taking Oath As Deputy CM: 'Our Main Strength Is the Common People, They Have Elected Us', Says NCP Chief.

Sule requested NCP President Sharad Pawar to take immediate steps against them including filing of disqualification petitions. "I therefore request you to take immediate steps against them including filing of disqualification petitions," she demanded in the letter to NCP President Sharad Pawar

She also took to Twitter and wrote, "Sunil Tatkare and Praful Patel on 2nd July 2023 acted in direct contravention of the Party Constitution and Rules, amounting to desertion and disqualification from the party membership. I request Hon. @PawarSpeaks Saheb to take immediate action and file disqualification petitions under the 10th Schedule of the Constitution of India before the Competent Authority against Members of Parliament- Mr. Praful Patel and Mr. Sunil Tatkare for engaging in anti-party activities."

The Nationalist Congress Party experienced an internal division as senior leader Ajit Pawar joined the BJP-led Eknath Shinde government. Ajit Pawar took oath as Maharashtra Deputy Chief Minister with eight other party legislators also joining the National Democratic Alliance government in the State.

On Sunday Ajit Pawar claimed that all MLAs are with him and they have joined the Shiv Sena-BJP government as a party. "We have all the numbers. All MLAs are with me. We are here as a party. We have informed all seniors also. The majority is given importance in a democracy. Our party is 24 years old and young leadership should come forward," Ajit Pawar said after taking oath as Deputy Chief Minister of Maharashtra.

(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, July 3: Tata Motors on Monday said it will hike prices of its passenger vehicles with effect from July 17.

The company will increase prices of its passenger vehicles (including EVs) by an average of 0.6 per cent across models and variants, Tata Motors said in a statement. West Bengal Panchayat Election 2023: One Killed in Haroa Bomb Blast, Toll Rises to 13 in Pre-Poll Violence.

The price increase is to offset the residual impact of past input costs, it added.

The auto major noted that it will offer price protection to bookings made up to July 16, 2023, and deliveries up to July 31, 2023. Miraculous Escape for Passengers As Mumbai-Bound Pawan Express Runs 10 km With Broken Wheel in Bihar's Muzaffarpur.

Tata Motors sells a range of passenger vehicles including Punch, Nexon and Harrier.
Madrid, Jul 3 (AP) Commissioners of the European Union are meeting with the Spanish government to review Spain's plans for its six-month Presidency of the EU Council.

Commission President Ursula von der Leyen and her team arrived Monday for the one-day meeting in Madrid.

Also Read | Israeli Army Launches Major Air Strike on West Bank City of Jenin, Five Palestinians Killed.

Prime Minister Pedro Sanchez started the presidency Saturday with a lightning visit to Kyiv to underline the bloc's support of Ukraine in the face of the Russian invasion.

Continued support for Ukraine, a migration pact, EU relations with Latin America and the reindustrialisation of Europe are among Spain's priorities for the six-month presidency.

Also Read | UK Shooting: Shots Fired at Wedding Party With Over 100 Guests at Gujarati Association in Wolverhampton.

The visit by the College of Commissioners was initially scheduled for July 6-7, but was brought forward so as not to take place in the middle of the campaign for Spain's general elections on July 23.

The Spanish government maintains the elections will not have an impact on the objectives or agenda of the presidency.

After the meeting, Sanchez and Von der Leyen were to hold a press conference, and then the commissioners will go to the nearby Royal Palace, where they will be received by King Felipe VI. (AP)

(This is an unedited and auto-generated story from Syndicated News feed, LatestLY Staff may not have modified or edited the content body)
Kathmandu [Nepal], July 3 (ANI): On the auspicious occasion of Asadha Purnima, the Embassy of India, Kathmandu, in association with the International Buddhist Confederation (IBC) held joint celebrations at the Embassy's Swami Vivekananda Culture Center on Monday, the second most sacred day for Buddhists after the Buddha Purnima or the Vaishakha Purnima, informed an official release.

The celebrations were graced by Nepal Minister of State for Culture, Civil Aviation and Tourism, Sushila Sirpali Thakuri.

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The representatives from various Buddhist sects and monasteries in Nepal, as well as office bearers from the Lumbini Development Trust participated in the event. The Secretary of International Buddhist Confederation IBC) Khenpo Chimed represented IBC at the event.

"Asadha Purnima commemorates Lord Buddha's first sermon to his first five ascetic disciples at Sarnath, Uttar Pradesh after attaining enlightenment at Bodh Gaya in Bihar. This is popularly also known as the day of the 'First Turning of Wheels of Dharma'. In this sermon, Lord Buddha stated the 'Four Noble Truths' and the 'Noble Eightfold Path'," the release stated.

Also Read | Will IMF Deal End Pakistans Economic Misery?.

The celebrations witnessed ceremonial prayers by Mahayana Sangha and Theravada Sangha. This was followed by a dedication of prayers of four Buddhist Sutras.

The Secretary of the International Buddhist Confederation Khenpo Chimed welcomed the guests to the Asadha Purnima celebrations and highlighted the significance of the occasion.

Nepal Minister Sushila Sirpali Thakuri stated that "Buddhism was one of the bonds that have connected India and Nepal for centuries and expressed confidence that the civilizational ties between India and Nepal will be strengthened in modern times by the construction of Buddhist as well as other religious circuits".

Deputy Chief of Mission, Prasanna Shrivastava underscored the importance of the teachings of Lord Buddha and noted that the revered sites of Buddhism in both India and Nepal reflect the shared cultural heritage of the two countries.

The video highlights the design and features of the upcoming India International Centre for Buddhist Culture and Heritage in the Lumbini Monastic Zone were also displayed at the event.

The foundation stone of the Centre was laid by Prime Minister Narendra Modi and former Nepal PM Sher Bahadur Deuba during PM Modi's visit to Lumbini, Nepal, on the occasion of Buddha Purnima in May last year.

An exhibition showcasing various Buddhist sites of religious importance in Nepal and India was also displayed on the occasion, the release added.

In keeping with the historical legacy of India, the land of Buddha's enlightenment, his turning of the wheels of Dhamma, and Mahaparinirvana, IBC hosted the Ashadha Purnima celebrations at the National Museum, Janpath where the Sakhyamuni's Holy relic is enshrined.

It was at Sarnath that Buddha gave his first sermon and set the wheel of dharma in motion. The auspicious day of Ashadha Purnima which falls on the full moon day of the month of Ashadha as per Indian lunar calendar is also known as Esala Poya in Sri Lanka and Asanha Bucha in Thailand.

The day marks Buddha's first teaching after attaining Enlightenment to the first five ascetic disciples (pancavargiya) on the full-moon day of Ashadha at 'Deer Park', Risipatana Mrigadaya in the present day Sarnath, near Varanasi, India.

The Rainy Season retreat (Varsha Vassa) for the Monks and Nuns also starts with this day lasting for three lunar months from July to October, during which they remain in a single place, generally in their temples dedicated to intensive meditation.

The day is also observed as Guru Purnima by both Buddhists and Hindus as a day to mark reverence to their Gurus. (ANI)

(This is an unedited and auto-generated story from Syndicated News feed, LatestLY Staff may not have modified or edited the content body)
New Delhi [India], July 3 (ANI): External Affairs Minister S Jaishankar on Monday wished the government and people of Belarus on their Independence Day.

Taking to his official Twitter handle, Jaishankar stated, "Felicitations to FM Sergei Aleinik and the Government and people of Belarus on their Independence Day."

Also Read | Debt-Trapped Pakistan Set To Become Fourth Biggest IMF Debtor in World, Says Report.

Earlier on June 30, Belarusian President Alexander Lukashenko took part in a solemn meeting to mark Independence Day, according to offical statement released by Belarus President's office.

India's ties with Belarus have been warm and cordial and India was one of the first nations to recognize Belarus as an independent nation in 1991. Formal diplomatic ties between two nations were established and the Indian diplomatic mission was opened in Minsk in 1992.

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In April this year, Union Defence Minister Rajnath Singh held a bilateral meeting with his Belarusian counterpart Lieutenant General Viktor Gennadievich Khrenin, on the sidelines of the SCO Defence Ministers' meeting in Delhi.

Rajnath Singh tweeted, "Had fruitful discussions with the Defence Minister of Belarus, Lieutenant General Khernin Victor Gennadievich in New Delhi."

Earlier in December, Indian ambassador to Belarus Alok Ranjan Jha met Belarus's foreign minister Sergei Aleinik and held talks with a key focus on India's SCO Chairmanship."

FM Sergei #Aleinik, Ambassador of #India@IndiainBelarus discussed topical issues on Belarus-India bilateral agenda, interaction within Shanghai Cooperation Organisation in the light of #India's SCO Chairmanship," Belarus foreign ministry said in a tweet.

During the meeting, close attention was paid to the implementation of the agreements following the results of the 11th Session of the Belarusian-Indian Intergovernmental Commission, aimed at further expanding cooperation in the field of trade, economy, science, technology and culture."

The two sides considered topical issues of Belarusia-India relations and interaction within the framework of the Shanghai Cooperation Organization, taking into account India's SCO Chairmanship," the Belarus foreign ministry said in a statement. Both sides confirmed mutual interest in intensifying cooperation between Belarus and India at various levels. (ANI)

(This is an unedited and auto-generated story from Syndicated News feed, LatestLY Staff may not have modified or edited the content body)
Islamabad [Pakistan], July 3 (ANI): Pakistan Muslim League Nawaz (PML-N) supremo Nawaz Sharif on Monday chaired a meeting in Dubai in order to discuss the election political strategy along with other leaders, reported ARY News.

The session presided over by party leader Nawaz Sharif, addressed political and legal issues. He delegated party and election-related work to Maryam Nawaz and instructed the formation of a committee for the Pakistan Muslim League-Nawaz election manifesto.

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Moreover, Nawaz Sharif also asked the senior party leadership to develop the party's narrative for the general election in light of young issues. The PML-N also decided to launch the election campaign of the party from the current month with public meetings across the country.

"Easy loans for youth and job opportunities will be added to the party's narrative for youth," ARY News quoted the party sources as saying.

Also Read | Will IMF Deal End Pakistans Economic Misery?.

The PML-N and Pakistan People's Party (PPP) leaders apparently agreed on a "charter of economy" to steer the country out of the crisis during a recent meeting in Dubai.

Nawaz Sharif also met with PPP leaders Asif Ali Zardari and Bilawal Bhutto to discuss the election as well as other political and economic matters. ARY News reported.

According to sources, Nawaz Sharif and Asif Ali Zardari have reached an agreement on the majority of the economic charter's issues. However, no agreement was made between them on the election coalition for general elections, they claim, adding that the caretaker government would be concluded by gaining the trust of other associated parties, reported ARY News.

It is worth noting that the two sides have been at differences about the timing of the next general election following the dissolution of assembly in August

Nawaz, who is convicted in a corruption case, has been living in London on the pretext of ill health since 2019. The former Pakistan PM sought extensions to prolong his stay in London on medical grounds. (ANI)

(This is an unedited and auto-generated story from Syndicated News feed, LatestLY Staff may not have modified or edited the content body)
Johannesburg, Jul 3 (PTI) South Africa's exports to its BRICS partner Russia dropped by a third last year following the sanctions imposed by the US and Europe on Moscow in the wake of the Ukraine war, according to official figures released here.

Russia has always been South Africa's smallest trading partner in the BRICS (Brazil, Russia, India, China, South Africa) bloc, but its exports to Russia decreased from R6.1 billion in 2021 to R4.6 billion last year.

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The sanctions imposed by the US and Europe on Russia have had a devastating effect on the South Africa economy and the rest of the continent, especially in supplies of wheat and oil as well as its related products, with huge price increases leaving consumers embattled.

South Africa has remained steadfast in its stance of neutrality in the war, despite pressure from the US and others.

Also Read | Will IMF Deal End Pakistans Economic Misery?.

The South Africa Revenue Service (SARS) figures showed that in 2022 China led exports from South Africa at 9.4% of the country's exports, followed by India with 4.5%, Brazil at 0.4% and Russia at only 0.2%.

Economist Helmo Preuss, providing detailed analysis of the trade figures in the daily The Star, said the supply chain disruptions due to the Ukraine war had led to South African exports to Russia suffering declines, especially in mineral products, which saw a drop to only R119 million from over a billion rand in 2021.

But although exports to Russia dropped sharply, South Africa's imports from there remained fairly stable at around R9.2 billion.

South Africa's imports from BRICS partners continued to be dominated by China with a 20.2% share, while India's share was 7.2%. Brazil had a 1.4% share and Russia managed only a 0.5% share.

While most of the 23 categories of imports from Russia showed a decline in 2022 relative to 2021, an increase in eight categories stabilised the annual percentage.

(This is an unedited and auto-generated story from Syndicated News feed, LatestLY Staff may not have modified or edited the content body)
London, Jul 3 (PTI) Britain's international trade minister Nigel Huddleston has said that he want to use his first official trip to Kolkata to show the UK's eagerness to work with India and Bangladesh on shared challenges like climate change, using collective expertise to deepen trading relationship, spark economic growth and create jobs.

Huddleston arrived in Kolkata on Monday on a two-day visit to the metropolis. In Kolkata, he will unveil a package of partnerships on electric mobility and green construction at a joint session with the government of West Bengal, the UK government said.

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The Department for Business and Trade (DBT) said Huddleston is on a three-day visit to South Asia, which covers Kolkata and also Dhaka in Bangladesh, focused on unlocking more opportunities for British companies to grow trade and two-way business flows.

It added that while the UK continues to negotiate a free trade agreement (FTA) with India, which has completed 10 rounds of negotiations, the ministerial visit forms part of a wider ambition to at least double bilateral trade by 2030  which currently stands at GBP 36 billion. With Bangladesh, UK trade has increased 50 per cent in current prices to hit nearly GBP 5 billion.

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"The UK has a strong and enduring relationship with India and Bangladesh. Our trade with both has grown significantly over the past year, which shows our partnerships are reaching new heights, said Huddleston.

"I want to use my first official visit here to show the UK's eagerness to work with both countries on shared challenges like climate change, using our collective expertise to deepen our trading relationship, spark economic growth, and create jobs, he said.

While in Kolkata, the minister will announce a new project that will see the UK and West Bengal join forces on a pilot to develop electric two-wheelers, such as motorcycles or scooters. West Bengal, the sixth largest state by economic value in India with a GDP expected to reach GBP 117 million this year, has set a target of developing 1 million electric vehicles (EVs) in the next five years.

"Transport is the third biggest source of emissions in India, with road transport accounting for 90 per cent of transport emissions. India has set strong targets to boost EVs and the UK is well-placed to support this ambition by providing knowledge exchange, access to finance and technology, DBT said.

Huddleston will also launch a centre to enhance opportunities in the EV sector by partnering Indian businesses with elite academic and industrial institutions in the UK.

He will also facilitate the signing of memorandum of understanding (MoU) between the UK's Royal Institute of Chartered Surveyors (RICS) and government of West Bengal on skill development in sustainable and modern methods of construction. Through these initiatives, UK businesses will be well-placed to customise and market EV technology and sustainable construction for this burgeoning market in India, DBT said.

Huddleston will also visit a waste processing company in Kolkata using cutting-edge green technologies supplied by UK business CDE Ireland to recycle construction waste into high quality, reusable sand.

At a business roundtable, the minister will speak to industry leaders on the deepening of UK and India's economic ties, emphasising the opportunities that have already been unlocked from the UK-India Enhanced Trade Partnership.

The minister will also discuss the economic benefits of a proposed UK-India FTA, that could cut red tape, reduce tariffs, and help UK and Indian companies do more business.

In Dhaka, Huddleston will visit Intertek, a UK company supporting supply chains in Bangladesh by providing bespoke testing services, for example ensuring manufacturers meet product safety standards. This visit comes a month after the UK's world-leading Developing Countries Trading Scheme (DCTS) came into force, making it easier for Bangladesh and other developing countries to trade with the UK.

DBT claimed Bangladeshi exporters now benefit from simpler and more generous Rules of Origin, which means that they will be able to produce goods using components from many more countries and still export these with zero tariffs to the UK.

(This is an unedited and auto-generated story from Syndicated News feed, LatestLY Staff may not have modified or edited the content body)
Blade Runner 2049 actor Ryan Gosling has pulled out of promoting his upcoming film Barbie in South Korea due to inevitable circumstances. Sharing the big screen with The Suicide Squad actress Margot Robbie, who will play Barbie, Gosling will essay the role of Ken, as per Female First. Barbie: Margot Robbie Thought Greta Gerwig and Noah Baumbachs Film Would Never Get Made- Heres Why.

Warner Bros. Korea said in a statement: "Ryan Gosling is hoping to meet with you through another opportunity. However, Margot and America Ferrera (Gloria) joined director Greta Gerwig for the press and fan gathering". A Barbie pop-up opened yesterday in Hannam-dong, central Seoul, and will remain open until July 31.

According to Gosling, he laughed when he was told that he was too old to play Ken. He told GQ: "I would say, you know, if people dont want to play with my Ken, there are many other Kens to play with. It is funny, this kind of clutching-your-pearls idea of, like, #notmyken. Like you ever thought about Ken before this? And everyone was fine with that, for him to have a job that is nothing. But suddenly, its like, 'No, weve cared about Ken this whole time". Barbie Trailer: Margot Robbie and Ryan Goslings Upcoming Film Is a Joyride to a Crazy Land (Watch Video).

"No, you didnt. You never did. You never cared. Barbie never f***** with Ken. That's the point. If you ever really cared about Ken, you would know that nobody cared about Ken. So your hypocrisy is exposed. This is why his story must be told. I care about this dude now. Im like his representative. 'Ken couldnt show up to receive this award, so Im here to accept it for him," he added.

(The above story first appeared on LatestLY on Jul 03, 2023 09:23 AM IST. For more news and updates on politics, world, sports, entertainment and lifestyle, log on to our website latestly.com).
Bengaluru, July 3: Karnataka Home Minister G Parameshwara on Monday said a Special Investigation Team (SIT) under the Criminal Investigation Department (CID) has been formed to reinvestigate the Bitcoin scam.

The Bitcoin scam had surfaced during the previous BJP regime in 2021 and the Congress, which was then in Opposition, had accused the government of trying to cover up the scandal as it involves big names. Karnataka Bitcoin Scam: Congress MLA Priyank Kharge Accuses Police Of Administering Drugs to Bitcoin Scam Kingpin in Custody.

The prime suspect, Srikrishna Ramesh alias Sriki, was accused of hacking the state government's e-procurement website and siphoning over Rs 11.5 crore. There were also charges of cryptocurrency theft, drug peddling and cyber fraud relating to the case. Karnataka Bitcoin Scam: Arrested Accused Hacked Bitfinex Exchange Twice.

The Home Minister said Additional Director General of Police Manish Kharbikar will head the SIT which, he added, can also take the help of technical experts since the matter relates to cyber crime.

Before the Assembly elections in May, the Congress had promised the people of Karnataka that if it comes to power, it would reinvestigate the Bitcoin scam, he told reporters here.

"Accordingly, we have taken a decision to hand it over to a Special Investigation Team. We have constituted the SIT under the Criminal Investigation Department," the Minister said, adding that orders have been issued in this regard.

"We hope that the SIT will do the justice. Manish Kharbikar, an ADGP, has been entrusted with the responsibility. He can also take the help of technical people because this is related to cyber. Anything related to technical aspects...they can also take the help of different sources," he explained.

Regarding any possible assistance of central agencies, Parameshwara said he has advised the SIT to take the help of whoever is required. "If there is a separate order required to that effect, we will definitely do so. It depends. When they (SIT) start the investigations, then we will come to know about their requirements," the Minister pointed out.

The government took the decision keeping all the aspects into consideration, Parameshwara said. "It (the investigation) should not be some sort of a repeat. We want to investigate this more seriously. Lots of lapses have happened. Those things (have) to be covered by the SIT".

On the possibility of forming two special courts to prosecute the Bitcoin cases, he said the investigation should begin first and the government would do whatever is required as far as probe and legal aspects are concerned as the case proceeds.
Lucknow, July 3: A 63-year-old man was bitten by a pet dog in the Balaganj area of Lucknow. The victim Rajendra Kumar Singh, a resident of Rastogi Nagar, has lodged a complaint with the Lucknow Municipal Corporation (LMC), seeking action against the pet owner.

Rajendra was going to purchase flour from a nearby mill on Sunday when he was bitten on his leg by an unhinged pet dog. Fortunately, the victim did not suffer deep wounds as he was wearing jeans. Gurugram Dog Attack: Cow Mauled to Death By Three Pitbull Dogs in Bhondsi, Owner Booked.

"The dog suddenly jumped on me and bit on my left leg. Hearing my cries, locals came to my rescue, but the dog was so ferocious that he again tried to attack me. However, the people managed to shoo it away," Rajendra said, adding that had the help not arrived on time he would have sustained more serious injuries.

Shubham Singh, son of the victim, said that the dog owner was present on the spot, but he did not offer any help. Rajendra, who had suffered about an inch-long wound on his left leg, was rushed to Balrampur hospital where he was administered rabies vaccine along with the first aid.

"It is the owner's responsibility to ensure that their pets do not attack people," Rajendra said, adding that the LMC should initiate steps to ensure that such incidents do not occur. Dog Attack in Bengaluru Video: German Shephard Pounces on Minor Girl in KR Puram.

Meanwhile, veterinary doctors cited several reasons for dogs attacking the human population. "Usually, such cases occur when dogs have suffered any trauma or misunderstood the victim as a threat. There can also be some medical issues with the dog," said Dr Rajneesh Chandra.

Animal welfare officer, LMC, Dr Abhinav Verma, said, "The matter has been brought to our notice. We will take action against the owner if he does not have a dog licence."

(The above story first appeared on LatestLY on Jul 03, 2023 09:24 AM IST. For more news and updates on politics, world, sports, entertainment and lifestyle, log on to our website latestly.com).
New Delhi, July 3: The Election Commission on Monday launched a portal to allow registered political parties file their financial statements, including contribution reports, audited annual accounts and poll expenditure statements, a move seen as an effort to bring in more transparency in disclosures made by political entities.

The 'Integrated Election Expenditure Monitoring System' is part of the poll panel's "3C strategy" comprising clean up, crackdown and compliance to strengthen transparency and accountability in the political funding and expenditure on which it had been working for a year now under Chief Election Commissioner Rajiv Kumar, sources said. Election Commission of India To Host Second Global Conference on Use of Technology and Elections Integrity in Delhi.

Political parties not intending to file the financial report through online mode will have to convey the reasons for not doing so in writing and may continue to file reports in hard copy format along with CDs or pen drive in the prescribed formats.

"The Commission will, in turn, publish all such reports online, along with a letter of justification sent by the party for not filing financial statements online," the EC said in a statement.

In a letter to the political parties, the Commission said the step has been taken with twin objectives  to overcome difficulties in filing physical reports, and to ensure timely filing in a standardised format. Lok Sabha Elections 2024: Election Commission Begins First Level Check of EVMs, Papertrail Machines Across India.

The portal will facilitate the online filing of contribution reports, audited annual account and election expenditure statements by political parties. These financial statements are required to be submitted by political parties to the Election Commission/Chief Electoral Officers of States/Union Territories, as per the Representation of People's Act, 1951 and transparency guidelines issued by the Commission, from time to time, over the last many years, the poll panel said.

"The online availability of data is expected to enhance the level of compliance and transparency. In the letter, the EC pointed to the pivotal position of political parties, and stressed that it is incumbent on them to adhere to the principles of democratic functioning and transparency in electoral processes, particularly in financial disclosures," the statement said.

The EC said a comprehensive guiding manual with graphical representations and FAQs has also been sent to the political parties explaining the online module and the process of filing reports online. To give further guidance on the online filing, the EC would also organise a hands-on training programme for the designated person(s) from various political parties.

Sources said various instances had come to notice where number of political parties had either not filed one or more requisite financial statements or had filed delayed, inadequate or incomplete details, that too in a non-standardised manner.

With the twin objectives of facilitating political parties to overcome the difficulties in physical filing of reports and to ensure timely filing of financial statements in the prescribed formats, the EC has developed IT modules for online submission of financial statements.

The tech-based system is also enabled to receive statements only from the authorised representative of the party, send reminders on the registered mobile number and emails and progressively keep digital records.

Through the portal, the EC plans to facilitate vigil on misuse of enabling statutory provisions and tax frauds and evasions by parties. The EC believes that through the latest initiative, it will ensure timely financial disclosures by parties, making voters informed and aware of the financial affairs of the parties.

Amid poor compliance with regulatory financial reporting and certain instances of serious financial impropriety that Commission came across in cases of few Registered Unrecognised Political Parties (RUPPs), in May, 2022 it undertook a drive for enforcing compliance adherence in RUPPs. As a result, 284 RUPPs were delisted and 253 others were declared inactive -- action was taken against a total 537 RUPPs.

After the Commission expressed concern over misuse of income tax provisions for exemption and non-compliance, the Income Tax Department launched investigation into the affairs of certain RUPPs and conducted nationwide search and seizure operation in September 2022, which led to disclosure of thousands of crores of bogus donations, layering of funds through fictitious entities and other such illegal activities.

To fill certain regulatory gaps, the Commission had proposed reform measures to the Law Ministry through amendments in the Representation of the People Act, 1951. These proposals include reducing the reporting limit for cash contributions from Rs 20,000 to Rs 2000, limiting exemption on donation received in cash to lesser of 20 crore or 20 per cent of the total donation received, inserting provision in RP Act for mandatory audit and its filing before the EC, and updating definition of foreign sources'.
Earlier, in a surprising turn of events that in some ways resembled the split in the Shiv Sena almost a year ago, NCP leader Ajit Pawar took oath as Maharashtra Deputy Chief Minister, with eight other party legislators also joining the National Democratic Alliance government in the state.
Renowned actor Harish Magon, celebrated for his contributions to classic films such as Gol Maal and Namak Halal, has passed away at the age of 76. The news of his demise was shared by the Cine And TV Artistes' Association (CINTAA) on Twitter, expressing their condolences. While the exact cause of his death remains undisclosed, it is believed to be attributed to age-related illness. Magon, a graduate of FTII in Pune, gained recognition through his memorable performances in movies like Chupke Chupke, Muqaddar Ka Sikandar, and Shahenshah. His impact extended beyond the screen as he also operated the Harish Magon Acting Institute in Juhu. Allu Arjun and Trivikram Srinivas Collaborate for the Fourth Time To Create a Visual Spectacle (Watch Video).

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The meeting of Opposition parties is scheduled to be held on 17th-18th July in Bengaluru. Congress is reportedly inviting all political parties which were present in the meeting held in Patna. The update on postponement of the meeting came a day after a split in the Nationalist Congress Party (NCP), following Ajit Pawar's merger with the BJP-Shinde government in Maharashtra. Patna Opposition Meeting Begins: 15 Parties Join Forces At Opposition Meet to Collaborate in General Elections 2024 (Watch Video).

Next Opposition Party Meeting Rescheduled

The meeting of Opposition parties is scheduled to be held on 17th-18th July in Bengaluru. All political parties which were present in the meeting held in Patna are being invited by Congress.  ANI (@ANI) July 3, 2023

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Times Science Writer

A man who suffered from severe obsessive-compulsive behavior apparently cured himself when he shot a .22-caliber bullet through the front of his brain while attempting suicide, it was reported Monday.

The bullet apparently destroyed the part of the brain that was causing the abnormal behavior in the 19-year-old man without damaging his intellectual capacity, according to a report in Physicians Weekly. The publication wryly referred to the suicide attempt as successful radical surgery.

The man recovered from the attempt, finished his high school education that had been interrupted by his illness, and is now in his second year of college, said psychiatrist Leslie Solyom of Shaughnessy Hospital in Vancouver, British Columbia.

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The idea that a man could blow out part of his frontal lobe and have his pathological symptoms cured is quite remarkable, but it is not beyond belief, said psychiatrist Thomas Ballantine of Massachusetts General Hospital in Boston.

In fact, experts said, surgery on the frontal lobe is occasionally attempted as a last resort in treating patients with intractable obsessive-compulsive disorders.

Victims of the disorder typically have an unexplainable compulsion to repeat activities over and over. Solyoms patient, whom he identified only as George, had an obsessive fear of germs and would wash his hands literally hundreds of times a day, in addition to taking frequent showers. He was so incapacitated that he could not attend school or hold down a job.

Other victims may be compulsive about maintaining their clothes in perfect order in drawers and closets, performing rituals before leaving the house or arranging tools in a perfect order before beginning work. New research indicates that as much as 3% of the U.S. population may display some obsessive-compulsive behavior, according to psychiatrist Michael Jenike of Harvard University.

Conventional psychotherapy is useless in such victims, Jenike said. The disorder is most effectively treated with a combination of antidepressant drugs and behavioral therapy similar to that used to treat victims of phobia.

The patient is gradually exposed to whatever frightens him or her and encouraged not to show the compulsive behavior. More than 90% of patients can be cured or improved with the antidepressants and such therapy, Jenike said.

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Mixed Results

As a last resort, neurosurgeons will occasionally remove part of the left front lobe of the brain, where the obsessive behavior is thought to originate. The operation is probably performed between 10 and 30 times per year in the United States, Ballantine said, with mixed results. The procedure is not as radical as the frontal lobotomies that were used in the past to control extreme mental illness.

George was a straight-A student before he had to drop out of high school because of his illness, Solyom said in a telephone interview.

Solyom had been treating him for more than a year when the suicide attempt occurred.

George was also very depressed, and told his mother that his life was so wretched that he would rather die, Solyom said.

Parents of obsessive-compulsives, particularly mothers, often have cruel streaks, he said. She said, So look George, if your life is so wretched, just go and shoot yourself. So George went to the basement, stuck a .22 rifle in his mouth and pulled the trigger.

Bullet Removed

The bullet lodged in the left front lobe of the brain. Surgeons removed it, but could not get out all the fragments. When he was transferred to our hospital three weeks later, he had hardly any compulsions left, Solyom said. He was still depressed, but we were able to treat that with drugs.

George was able to hold down a job for the first time after leaving the hospital, Solyom said. He eventually completed high school and entered college.

What made the case so very interesting was that we had measured IQ and done a lot of other tests before the suicide attempt, Solyom said. Afterward, we compared results and he had not lost anything. We used very sensitive tests to measure brain damage and could find none. Solyom published a report on the case in the British Journal of Psychiatry.

It has now been five years since the suicide attempt, and George still has minor quirks. Solyom said George will, for example, close a window twice to make sure it is really closed, and washes plates particularly thoroughly to make sure they are clean. But those traits are nothing that would interfere with his life, Solyom said.

He lives alone and visits his family only occasionally. Hes still a lonely person, Solyom said, but we dont have any way to treat that.
Times Staff Writer

President Reagan, at 77 the oldest American President ever, cracked a couple of jokes Friday about his advanced age.

Speaking in Londons 15th-Century Guildhall, Reagan said: It is comforting to be near anything that much older than myself. . . . Some even see my election to the presidency as Americas attempt to show our European cousins that we too have a regard for antiquity.

But the Presidents light remarks did little to dispel concern about his physical condition after the arduous journey to Moscow.

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Reporters who got a close-up look at the President toward the end of his brief stay in London said he was slurring his words and his speech was barely audible.

For most of his presidency, Reagans boyish charm and dark brown hair have tended to blur the fact that he was born in 1911 and began his first term when most men his age had been collecting Social Security benefits for five years.

Now the years are beginning to show.

White House officials say Reagan is in excellent condition, but it was obvious to his traveling companions that often he was fighting fatigue--and sometimes losing the struggle.

White House spokesman Marlin Fitzwater acknowledged under questioning about Reagans appearance that he had not slept well.

Reagan insisted that he was getting a full nights sleep, but his wife, Nancy, 12 years younger than he, confided that the eight-hour time difference had caused her to wake up at 3 a.m. in Moscow.

When the presidential party left Moscow for London, Howard H. Baker Jr., the White House chief of staff, denied that Reagans fatigue had affected his talks with Soviet leader Mikhail S. Gorbachev. But he acknowledged that the President looked and felt tired.

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At times, Reagans voice seemed weak, with no energy behind it. On the last day in Moscow, the President nodded off during a ballet at the Bolshoi Theater.

In London, in his appearance at the Guildhall, Reagans face seemed more deeply lined than before.

Aware of his vulnerability to jet lag, Reagan began his 10-day trip with an extraordinary rest stop in Helsinki, which he combined with a state visit to Finland.

He arrived at 1 oclock in the morning, so that he could make the eight-hour flight during his normal waking hours, and cleared his schedule the following day.

As a result, the official welcoming ceremony was delayed until almost 36 hours after his plane landed. Reagan made one major speech in Finland but his voice was weak, and he seemed to lack energy.

Arriving in Moscow, Reagan was far from his typical bouncy self. He descended stiff-legged from the plane, holding to the rail and to his wife. He remained somewhat stiff-legged as he and the 77-year-old Soviet president, Andrei A. Gromyko, reviewed an honor guard. A bit later, though, he took a lively stroll down Moscows historic Arbat, greeting Soviet citizens. And he seemed to have no difficulty in climbing into a carriage.

Gromykos wife, Lidiya, may have spoken for the President as well when she told a reporter who asked how she was holding up during a visit to Leningrad with Mrs. Reagan:

Of course Im tired. I am 77 years old. How could I not be tired?

Reporter Rupert Cornwell observed in the London Independent that Reagans performance brought to mind an aging actor on a farewell tour, calling up all the stagecraft he had learned in a lifetime, in an impressive but poignant performance.
TIMES STAFF WRITER

Actor Marlon Brandos daughter Cheyenne--the troubled onetime model whose half-brother killed her lover in the movie stars sprawling Hollywood Hills home--has committed suicide in Tahiti, officials said Monday.

Cheyenne Brando, 25, who had been in seclusion for months, hanged herself at her home on the South Pacific island, authorities said. Friends said she had suffered from depression since Christian Brando fatally shot Dag Drollet in a 1990 case that made news around the world. She reportedly had attempted suicide at least twice previously.

Marlon Brando had no comment Monday and planned to issue no statement, said his agent, Ed Limato. Limato declined to disclose the actors whereabouts.

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At the time of Drollets shooting, Cheyenne Brando--a native of Tahiti--had been visiting Southern California for psychological counseling after being disfigured in an auto accident on the island. She was in her fathers Mulholland Drive home when the shooting occurred and at one time was charged with complicity in Drollets death.

The charges against her eventually were dropped. Christian Brando--claiming that the shooting was an accident and that he acted in rage because Drollet had beaten Cheyenne--pleaded guilty to voluntary manslaughter and was sentenced to 10 years in prison. The plea was arranged by his attorney, Robert Shapiro, now one of O.J. Simpsons lawyers.

Cheyenne Brandos death Sunday came as her father was enjoying resurgent success on the screen playing a psychiatrist in the romantic comedy Don Juan DeMarco. His earlier acting triumphs are legendary, including acclaimed performances in the Broadway and film versions of A Streetcar Named Desire and Academy Award-winning roles in the films On the Waterfront and The Godfather.

News reports from Papeete, French Polynesia, indicated that Cheyenne Brando was found hanging in the bedroom of her home in the Punaauia area Sunday night. The reports did not indicate whether a suicide note was found.

Cheyenne Brando, the daughter of Brando and his Polynesian wife, Tarita Tariipia, and Drollet, son of a prominent Tahitian politician, had been living together in Tahiti for more than a year before they separated in March, 1990, according to sources there.

Sources said the separation took place a few months after Cheyenne--a model known for her exotic beauty--was disfigured in a car crash.

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Despite the separation, Drollet and Cheyenne flew to Los Angeles together about May 1, 1990, and both moved into the Brando home on Mulholland Drive.

Police said that about 10:40 on the night of May 16, 1990, Drollet, 26, and Christian Brando, then 32, got into an argument.

Christian Brando claimed he shot Drollet accidentally during a struggle after accusing Drollet of slapping around his half-sister, who was seven months pregnant with Drollets child. Prosecutors charged Christian with murdering Drollet, saying there was no evidence of a struggle.

Marlon Brando, Tariipia and Cheyenne were in the home when Drollet was shot, police said. The actor tried to revive Drollet with mouth-to-mouth resuscitation and called 911 to summon police.

A month after the shooting, after attempts were made to serve her with papers naming her as a material witness, Cheyenne flew to Tahiti. Prosecutors said she was trying to avoid testifying in the case. A few days after that, she gave birth to Drollets child, and within days she entered a psychiatric hospital for treatment.

In the months that followed, prosecutors launched an international battle to have the young woman returned here to testify at her half-brothers trial.

While the battle raged, Cheyenne overdosed on tranquilizers and antidepressant drugs and lapsed into a coma at a hospital in Tahiti. She recovered briefly, then tried to hang herself, according to her father.

On Dec. 22, 1990, a judge declared her mentally disabled, ending the five-month struggle to compel her to testify. With their star witness in Tahiti and their case a shambles, the prosecutors struck a deal with Shapiro, and Christian Brando pleaded guilty to the manslaughter count.

Santa Monica Superior Court Judge Robert Thomas imposed sentence after listening to an hour of emotional, rambling testimony by the defendants famous father.

Gesturing to the photographers in the courtroom, the movie star said the Brando name had blown the case out of proportion.

This is the Marlon Brando case, he said. If Christian were black, Mexican or poor, he wouldnt be in this courtroom. Everyone wants a piece of the pie.

Although Christian Brando was sentenced to 10 years in state prison, he has been given time off for good behavior at the state Mens Colony in San Luis Obispo, and he could be paroled as soon as January, according to Corrections Department spokesman Tip Kendall.

The escape from testifying did not resolve Cheyenne Brandos problems.

In January, 1991, she flew to Paris to undergo treatment for a nervous breakdown. Six months later, she disappeared from the clinic where she was being treated.

In November, 1991, after tracking her father to a secluded estate outside Orleans, French police found and arrested Cheyenne on Tahitian charges of complicity in Drollets death. She was placed in protective custody at a nearby hospital and was flown to Tahiti on a French military plane. Tahitian authorities later dismissed the charges against her.
TIMES STAFF WRITERS

A concentrated search of the sea floor near Anacapa Island over the past few days has produced many more human remains, boosting the number of bodies recovered from Alaska Airlines Flight 261 and raising hopes that all of the dead may eventually be identified, officials said Sunday.

Aided by a trio of roving robot submarines, Navy investigators spent the past several days sweeping the ocean floor with cameras and sonar devices to study the wreckage 700 feet beneath the waves. The same equipment used in the recovery of the so-called black boxes last week is also being used to retrieve human remains, which are being brought ashore to Port Hueneme Harbor aboard salvage vessels.

The latest discoveries occurred near the 150-yard debris field on the ocean bottom near Anacapa Island, said officials with the National Transportation Safety Board. A portion of the tail section and at least one 10-foot section of fuselage has been identified.

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Several hundred human remains have been recovered and 30 to 50 of those have readily identifiable markings, including tattoos, dental work, fingerprints, scars, clothing or jewelry. As of Friday, officials reported that four bodies had been recovered.

From the mapping, there appears to be more of a chance to recover the victims than had been anticipated, a source close to the investigation told The Times. The National Transportation Safety Board is confident of recovering the bodies or portions of the remains for virtually 100% of the families to provide them some sort of burial ceremony.

It will take a few days at the earliest before some remains are positively identified and released to family members, according to the Ventura County Sheriffs Department. Others may require months of DNA analysis.

Sheriff Bob Brooks said Sunday the bodies are more intact than previously thought and that the number of recoveries has significantly increased over the past two days.

In other developments, federal investigators retrieved the flight data recorder from another Alaska Airlines jet that was forced to return to Reno on Saturday evening when the pilot reported problems with the motors on that planes horizontal stabilizer. It was the second time in a week that a MD-80 series jet was forced to land due to concerns about the aircrafts stabilizer, which controls the up and down angle of the plane.

Minutes before the Alaska Airlines crash on Jan. 31, the pilots of Flight 261 reported trouble with the MD-83 aircrafts stabilizer trim and discussed the problem with mechanics as they struggled to regain control of the plane.

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Word that more bodies are being recovered comes as many of the families of crash victims are preparing to return home after memorial services Saturday in Riverside and Malibu, which attracted more than 600 friends and relatives of the victims.

Bruce Lockwood, a mental health officer with the Red Cross, said the discoveries will probably bring a small measure of relief to the families. For many, the ability to pay final respects to the dead is an important step toward healing, Lockwood said.

That will help bring closure, said Christopher Thomas, spokesman for the Red Cross. Almost unanimously, family members would like to have their family members back and provide a memorial service at home. It would be good news. I would think that it would substantially help families reach closure and start the process of coming to grips with this tragedy and moving on along the road to recovery. Id almost speculate that family members would wish to remain in the area if this is true.

Terry Williams, spokesman for the NTSB, said the agencys goal is to recover all the identifiable human remains searchers can locate whether on the surface or under the sea. However, he would not discuss how the search is progressing, the number of bodies recovered or the prospects for retrieving more victims. Navy and Coast Guard vessels continue to scour the patch of ocean where the jetliner plunged into the ocean eight miles from Port Hueneme en route from Puerto Vallarta to San Francisco and Seattle.

Last Wednesday, Navy ships began arriving at the crash site, bringing sophisticated sonar equipment and deep-diving submersibles to aid in the underwater investigation. Prior to that, a flotilla of Coast Guard vessels, local fishing boats and lifeguard patrol craft combed the surface, collecting debris and body parts from the crash site.

The water is too deep for Navy divers, said B.R. Brown, spokesman for the San Diego-based Navy amphibious unit involved in the recovery work.

The vessels first objective was to recover the so-called black boxes, which contain recordings and instruments that measured the final moments of the ill-fated jetliner. Also, the ships sonar is being used to produce a detailed map of the debris field, possibly offering clues about what happened to the plane and pave the way for salvage efforts, Brown said.

But with the quick recovery of the black boxes and most of the mapping assignments accomplished by Saturday, more resources are available to recover the dead, Brown acknowledged.

Our charter and what we came out here to do has remained constant, he said. The NTSB did ask us to bring up clearly identifiable remains incidental to the efforts of mapping and recovery of the black box. It was not part of our initial tasking, but it became that.

Williams, the NTSB spokesman, said the recovery of victims has always been a priority and the boards goal is to recover all readily identifiable human remains the submarines can find.

Human remains are always a concern to us, Williams said. These are human beings we are talking about, and we try to treat them with respect and dignity.

The effort to map the crash site on the ocean bottom is expected to conclude today, and recovery of victims will continue this week. There are no decisions to salvage the aircraft, although Williams said the NTSB is considering raising the tail sections of the plane, where the suspect trim stabilizer is located.

On Sunday, federal investigators retrieved the flight data recorder from the Alaska Airlines jet that was forced to return to Reno when the pilot reported problems with the horizontal stabilizer.

Shortly after taking off from Reno/Tahoe International Airport, the pilots reported that the motors controlling the horizontal stabilizer were operating intermittently, airline spokesman Greg Witter said Sunday.

The plane bound for Seattle carrying 140 passengers and five crew members returned safely to Reno.

This was not an emergency landing, Witter said. The airplane turned around out of prudence and due diligence.

The flight data recorder was sent to Washington for analysis, NTSB spokesman Keith Holloway said. Federal investigators also plan to interview the aircrafts crew about the problem.

Witter said the electric motors probably had overheated after the pilots double- and triple-checked the stabilizers before they took off. The overheating causes the motors to shut down until they cool. The motors did not burn out, Witter said.

Its not unusual for the motors to overheat if they are tested for more than 90 seconds while the plane is on the ground, he said. Once the plane is airborne, the motors cool and begin operating again, Witter explained.

The stabilizer did not jam at all, he said. It was operating intermittently, and it cleared itself up within minutes of takeoff. But the flight crew decided to return and get it checked out.

In another incident last Wednesday, an American Airlines MD-83 en route from Phoenix to Dallas-Fort Worth returned to Phoenix after a switch appeared to be working only intermittently on the co-pilots side of the cockpit.

Although there was no problem with the stabilizer itself, American spokeswoman Elizabeth Ninomiya said Sunday that the pilots elected to turn around and landed safely in Phoenix.

I think everyone has an awareness of the issue, she said.

The problem turned out to be a bad switch on the co-pilots control yoke. Mechanics also replaced a motor in the stabilizer, she said. The NTSB sent the American jets flight data recorder and cockpit voice recorder to its headquarters in Washington, D.C.

Replacing faulty trim motors was the subject of a federal Airworthiness Directive involving DC-9/MD-80 aircraft. On March 4, 1996, the Federal Aviation Administration issued a directive that required carriers to inspect and replace incorrectly manufactured primary trim motors that control the horizontal trim system. Investigators first identified the problem motors in 1994.

The motor shafts could fail prematurely, causing the motor to fail, according to the FAA directive. The agency required the motors manufacturer, Sundstrand Electric Power Systems, to repair the parts at no cost. The airlines paid for the costs of inspection and replacement, estimated between $240 to $3,600 per plane. Airlines had six months to comply with the directive.

On Sunday, mourners continued to flock to Ventura County beaches to pay tribute to those who lost their lives.

Santa Paula resident Roger Brower and his wife, Sally Knight, carried a redwood cross to the windy shore near the Hueneme Pier to honor First Officer William Tansky.

The 57-year-old co-captain of the Flight 261 was an experienced pilot who had flown for Alaska Airlines for more than a decade, Brower said.

He was also an old friend.

I felt we needed to do something, said Knight, who persuaded her husband to make the emotional trip to the pier where a memorial site is set up.

Brower, who retired recently as civilian in charge of military communication repair facilities at Moffett Field in Northern California, said he believes Tansky and other members of the flight crew did everything in their power to try to prevent the crash.

Their training is excellent, the procedures are always followed, Brower said. I think they did everything right.

*

Times staff writers Jeffrey Rabin, Stanley Holmes, Edward J. Boyer and Tracy Wilson contributed to this story along with Times Community News reporter Gail Davis.
A 22-pound house cat with a history of violence trapped an Oregon family -- and their dog -- in a bedroom until police arrived to save them.

The incident unfolded Sunday night in northwest Portland after a ferocious feline named Lux turned on its owners. It all started when the familys 7-month-old boy pulled the cats tail. In response, the cat scratched the baby on the forehead. The boys dad, Lee Palmer, told police that he kicked the cat in the rear as punishment.

And thats when the fur began to fly:

Were trapped, he wont let us out of our door, Lee Palmer told dispatchers after he and his family members and pet dog fled to the safety of a bedroom and called 911. The cat has gone over the edge. Hes trying to attack us -- hes very hostile. Hes at our door. Hes charging us. Palmer also told the dispatcher that the cat has a history of violence.

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The Oregonian has audio of the 911 call.

Lux can be heard screeching in the background during the call, according to the Portland Police Departments website.

At one point Palmer tells the dispatcher that he is concerned about the officers safely when confronting the cat: Tell them to be careful, he warns.

While the incident was apparently scary for the Palmer family, there is a sense from the Portland Police Department account that law enforcement officers found it a bit humorous.

The report says that arriving officers apprehended the black-and-white Himalayan as it was attempting to flee custody, adding: Officers were able to outwit the high-strung Himalayan and safely place the cat inside its crate.

Officers then told the family that it was safe to come out of the bedroom, the account reported. The cat remained behind bars in the custody of the family and officers cleared the scene and continued to fight crime elsewhere in the city.

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Palmer told the Oregonian on Monday that the family was debating what to do next. We definitely want to keep [the cat] away from the baby and keep an eye on his behavior, he said, according to the newspaper.

I swear I have never seen anything like it, he added.

While the story has been zooming around the cat-loving Internet this week, there is a serious element to the story as well: Kids and pets often make fast friends, but the reality is that they dont always mix. And its up to the supervising adults to make sure that no one gets hurt.

Luckily, the child was not seriously injured beyond the scratch, authorities said.

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On 1 July Mexicos Presidentheld a public event in the main Zocalo square in Mexico City (CDMX) to celebrate the fifth anniversary of his triumph in the 2018 presidential elections.

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On 30 June Venezuelas comptroller generals office (CGR) announced that, a leading opposition pre-candidate for next years presidential election, has been banned from holding public office for the next 15 years.

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On 30 June Brazils top electoral court (TSE) declared the right-wing former president(2019-2023) guilty of abuse of power and barred him from running in elections for the next eight years.

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The government of Mexico slammed Florida's new immigration law that took effect on Saturday. Critics have so far called the law harsh, inhumane, or draconian, as it criminalizes transporting illegal immigrants, forces hospitals to check the immigration status of patients, and requires businesses to also verify the immigration status of all their workers.

The new law, backed and signed by Florida Governor Ron DeSantis, has already driven out many immigrant families living in the state for fear of reprisals. This has left construction sites, farms, and other industries virtually empty, with many experts saying Florida is heading to a labor and economic crisis because of this.

Mexico has now promised to help protect undocumented Mexicans in Florida as a response to the new Florida immigration law, which many see as a preview of what might happen should DeSantis win the presidency. He is currently trailing former President Donald Trump in the polls.

According to Reuters, the Mexican Foreign Ministry released a statement, warning that the provisions in the new DeSantis law could prompt discrimination and racial profiling. The law could also give rise to hostile environments, intimidation, and hate crimes against Latinos.

"Criminalization is not the way to resolve the phenomenon of undocumented migration," the statement said, which added that while it respects US legislative processes, it views the new law as working against joint efforts by both the US and Mexico in treating migrants with respect. It added that these new measures by DeSantis are "driven by xenophobia and white nationalism."

To help out Mexican immigrants in Florida, Mexican consulates around the US will work with civil society groups to identify potential cases of abuse and to inform migrants about their rights.

READ MORE: Florida: Here's When Hospitals Will Start Asking About Your Immigration Status

What Are the Changes This New Florida Immigration Law Is Bringing?

The Tallahassee Democrat listed several big changes in Florida thanks to this new law. This includes the fact that transporting a minor or more than five undocumented people into Florida now has a second-degree felony penalty. In addition, employers with 25 or more workers now have to use the federal E-Verify system when hiring workers. Those who do not comply will face stiff penalties.

In addition, hospitals that receive state and federal Medicaid reimbursements will now have to track how much money is spent on undocumented immigrants in emergency rooms. Healthcare providers are now required to ask if a patient is in the country legally. In addition, the new law also repeals a 2014 law that allowed undocumented immigrants to be admitted to practice law in Florida.

Immigrants Still Leaving Florida En Messe

The sweeping new Florida immigration law is now forcing many immigrants to leave the state, which passed despite all the criticism and protests from the Hispanic community. This law had already affected the agricultural industry in Florida, with Yvette Cruz of the Farmworkers Association of Florida telling CBS News that there are a lot of migrant workers abandoning fields and construction projects.

Undocumented migrants who have US citizen children are also afraid of being separated from them. One woman told CBS News, "I'm not going to leave my son behind, if I leave, my son is coming with me."

READ NEXT: Florida Could Face Mass Labor Shortage Due to Ron DeSantis' New Immigration Law

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Written by: Rick Martin

WATCH: 'Immigrants leaving Florida in fear': New immigration law sparks exodus of workers - MSNBC
Former President Donald Trump's campaign for the 2024 Republican presidential campaign was attended by approximately 50,000 people, which was held in Pickens, South Carolina, a quaint town with a population of 3,300, The Western Journal noted.

In a momentous rally that took hold of the town's main street on Saturday, Trump addressed the fervent assembly and acknowledged their contribution to the nation.

HUGE turnout in Pickens, South Carolina for President Trumps rally.



Dont let the liberals and RINOs tell you theres no support for Trump Our movement is as strong as ever! pic.twitter.com/udcmRojUPK  The Trump Train  (@The_Trump_Train) July 2, 2023

"It was hardworking patriots like you who built this country, and it is hardworking patriots like you who are going to save our country," he proclaimed, resonating with his ardent supporters.

As the current frontrunner in the polls for the GOP nomination, Donald Trump presented a stark depiction of the nation's challenges.

He emphasized that the year 2024 would mark the ultimate battle for their cause. Under his leadership, he promised that society's often-overlooked and disregarded individuals would be elevated and acknowledged once and for all.

"Under our leadership, the forgotten men and women will be forgotten no longer," he said.

READ NEXT: Donald Trump Classified Documents Scandal

Donald Trump's South Carolina Rally Went Well and Peaceful

The rally held in Pickens, South Carolina, saw no significant incidents, according to Pickens County Police Chief Randall Beach.

However, one individual attempting to enter the event was required to surrender their firearm at the entrance. The person later retrieved the weapon upon leaving the gathering, as confirmed by Chief Beach.

While the exact number of attendees was unknown, the rally drew a substantial crowd, Chief Deputy Chuck James of the Pickens Police told Newsweek.

He mentioned that the venue was filled with long queues outside the event. Chief James clarified that his office was primarily responsible for event security and thus not privy to the official attendance figures. Regarding arrests, he asserted that there were no arrests directly related to the rally.

In his characteristic manner, former President Donald Trump took to his social media platform Truth Social and claimed an estimated turnout of around 75,000 attendees.

Nevertheless, no verified number has been officially released by authorities.

During his speech at the rally, Trump emphasized his determination to ensure the complete security of future elections, stating that he would "move heaven and earth" to achieve this goal.

He also urged fellow Republicans to utilize all legal means to secure victories in elections, emphasizing the importance of employing every possible lawful strategy.

Donald Trump Campaign Rallies

The recent Donald Trump South Carolina rally marked only the second major event of his 2024 campaign.

The first rally took place in March in Waco, Texas, where Trump criticized the prosecutors investigating him on hush-money charges, which eventually led to his indictment, AP reports.

Despite facing legal challenges, Trump confidently predicted his vindication. Due to tornado warnings, another scheduled outdoor rally in Iowa had to be canceled in May.

Organizing these large-scale rallies comes at a significant expense, but Trump's fundraising efforts have continued to generate millions of dollars.

This has been the case even after he faced indictment in New York and federal charges related to the retention of classified documents following his departure from the White House.

The cost of these rallies amounts to approximately half a million dollars each, according to Chris LaCivita, a senior Trump aide.

In addition to the rallies, the Trump campaign has incorporated unannounced stops at various restaurants to underscore his enduring appeal among supporters, despite the numerous legal hurdles he faces.

Notable examples include visiting a renowned Philadelphia cheesesteak restaurant and the iconic Cuban eatery Versailles in Miami.

Despite a growing field of Republican candidates for the 2024 presidential nomination, Trump's campaign highlights polls that depict him as the frontrunner, enjoying a considerable lead over his rivals.

Although his campaign schedule may appear less busy than some of his competitors, Trump has maintained a frequent presence in media interviews and participated in various multi-candidate events throughout the primary season.

This includes his recent appearance at the Moms for Liberty gathering in Philadelphia.

READ MORE: Joe Biden Student Loan Forgiveness Plan Hits Major Snag

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WATCH: Donald Trump returns to massive rallies with South Carolina event, drawing thousands of supporters - From News 19 WLTX
Elon Musk has made several controversial decisions on Twitter, and it looks like he made another one as he imposed reading limits on all users. However, what raised several eyebrows are that verified accounts will be able to read more posts than non-verified ones, essentially placing a paywall on reading posts on social media.

While verified accounts can read up to 6,000 posts a day, unverified accounts can only see 600 posts a day, which is ten times less than verified ones. This is worse for new unverified users, as NBC News noted that they could only view 300 posts a day.

To address extreme levels of data scraping & system manipulation, weve applied the following temporary limits:



- Verified accounts are limited to reading 6000 posts/day

- Unverified accounts to 600 posts/day

- New unverified accounts to 300/day  Elon Musk (@elonmusk) July 1, 2023

Musk explained that the change will be "temporary" and was done to "address extreme levels of data scraping & system manipulation." Since he took over Twitter last year, the social media site has experienced widespread outages.

The changes came after a massive outage last Saturday, which was caused by technical difficulties. This was not the first time this happened since Musk took over the site, as it happened back in February and March. Other outages coincided with reports of a data center closure and mass layoffs.

Twitter Users Not Happy With Elon Musk's Changes

After this most recent outage, users who tried to access content or even tweet via the website or the mobile app were met with error messages that read, "Rate limit exceeded" or "Cannot retrieve tweets." This led over 7,300 people to report issues regarding Twitter to the website Downdetector.

This led to a massive backlash against Musk. as Twitter users complained of not being able to access the site at all due to the restrictions.

READ NEXT: Billionaire Jeff Bezos Engaged to Ex-Mistress Lauren Sanchez

However, Musk defended his decision and stated that people misuse Twitter data to train popular artificial intelligence systems like ChatGPT. However, Musk did say that the company would raise the threshold to 800 posts for unverified accounts and 8,000 for verified accounts.

This apparently did not make users happy so he finally settled with 1,000 posts for unverified accounts and 10,000 posts for verified ones. Still, people on Twitter complained about having these restrictions in the first place.

The Associated Press pointed out that Twitter had already faced backlash over its $8-per-month subscription service for verified accounts. This has proven detrimental to Musk when it first launched, as verified accounts that paid for that subscription service posed as him and began spreading fake news.

Elon Musk Joked About People Complaining About the New Viewing Limits

As users were complaining about the reading cap, Sky News reported that Elon Musk joked about those them, with the Tesla CEO tweeting, "Oh the irony of hitting view limits due to complaining about view limits."

Addressing the people complaining, Musk added, "You awake from a deep trance, step away from the phone to see your friends and family." In another post, Musk also joked, "Rate limited due to reading all the posts about rate limits."

READ MORE: Brazil: Elon Musk's Starlink Wireless Internet Is Helping Criminals in the Amazon

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WATCH: Elon Musk announces temporary read limits on Twitter - CBS New York
Two young people died in a Baltimore mass shooting Sunday. It happened in a block party. Another 28 people were wounded. Three of them are currently in critical condition, according to authorities.

Baltimore police officers said that they responded to multiple calls regarding a shooting happening at around 12:35 a.m. on Sunday in the city's Brooklyn neighborhood.

CBS News reported that 18-year-old Aaliyah Gonzales was identified as one of those who died. She was pronounced dead at the scene. The other fatality was identified as 20-year-old Kylis Fagbemi, who was pronounced dead a while later at a local hospital.

Baltimore officials held a news conference following the shooting, with acting Baltimore City Police Commissioner Richard Worley telling reporters that a total of 30 people suffered gunshot wounds during the attack. The ages of the victims ranged from 13 to 32 years old, with 14 of the victims all being minors below the age of 18.

So far, police have confirmed that there were at least two shooters who attacked the Baltimore block party. Authorities are now working to determine if there were more and are trying to find out who among the partygoers was targeted by the indiscriminate assault.

Mayor Brandon M. Scott Releases Statement on Baltimore Mass Shooting

Following the incident in Baltimore, Maryland, Mayor Brandon M. Scott stated that his heart goes to those who lost their lives in that mass shooting attack, as well as those who were injured. He added that the attack has "shaken our city to the very core, and we are all grappling with the shock, pain, and trauma that accompanies such a heinous act of destruction."

READ NEXT: Wanted January 6 Rioter Arrested Near Barack Obama's Washington DC Home

He also vowed to find those behind the assault and hold them accountable. He also said that they must also hold the illegal gun trade accountable before also slamming the gun industry.

As for those who suffered from the attack, the mayor stated that his Mayor's Office of Neighborhood Safety and Engagement will be working to address the trauma that residents suffered following the mass shooting. He stated that his office had sent resources to the Brooklyn Homes area, with the Brooklyn Homes Community Center now providing residents with immediate aid and services.

Investigation on Baltimore Mass Shooting Still Ongoing

So far, no suspect has been arrested yet. However, investigators are reviewing videos taken from the crime scene while talking to witnesses to see if they know who the shooters were.

Mayor Scott stated that there was a celebration in the area before shots were fired. He stated that the party was an event that happens in Brooklyn Homes every year.

As investigations are still going on, with police actively trying to find the shooters, authorities are asking anybody with information regarding the incident to come forward and contact the homicide unit by calling 410-396-2100. Those with information can also report tips anonymously to Metro Crime Stoppers. This can be done by phone or online.

READ NEXT: OceanGate Implosion Update: First Photos of Titanic Sub Debris Revealed

This article is owned by Latin Post.

Written by: Rick Martin

WATCH: 2 people dead, dozens injured after mass shooting at Baltimore block party - WUSA9
Lower Saucon Township Council in July plans to take up a new approach to rezoning land adjacent to the Bethlehem Landfill that would permit its possible expansion.

The new proposal would increase the acreage being rezoned from Rural Agricultural to Light Industrial to permit waste disposal and other land uses. It would also make a landfill and other industrial land uses by-right under the rezoning, as opposed to requiring additional review and approval by either the township zoning hearing board as a special exception or by the township council as a conditional use.

Thats according to the proposal as outlined by council President Jason Banonis during councils Monday, June 26, meeting.

Council members are scheduled to review the proposed rezoning ordinance at a meeting scheduled for 12:30 p.m. Tuesday, July 11, at Se-Wy-Co Fire Station, 3621 Old Philadelphia Pike.

If it gets approved at that point, then it would be published and then it would be decided at some point after that, Banonis said.

The council last Monday set additional summer meeting dates of July 26 and Aug. 16, both Wednesdays at 6:30 p.m., and Wednesday, Aug. 30, at 9 a.m.

Councilwoman Priscilla deLeon voted against directing the township solicitor, B. Lincoln Treadwell, to draft the rezoning ordinance for July 11, calling it a sacrilege, or a mortal sin if youre Catholic. Councilwoman Sandra Yerger also voted against drafting the new ordinance. deLeon further questioned the daytime meetings, as opposed to councils traditional evening meeting time.

Why not? Weve had them before, Banonis said.

The U.S. Supreme Court and Congress meet during the daytime, Councilman Thomas Carocci said: I guess we can, too.

The newly proposed rezoning comes after Northampton County Judge Abraham Kassis on May 8 sided with residents opposed to the expansion of the landfill at 2335 Applebutter Road. Kassis overturned the township councils Dec. 21 decision to rezone 275.7 acres adjacent to the landfill to permit waste disposal there. The December vote required council approval of a conditional use for the land to be used for waste disposal.

Council members decided May 17 against appealing Kassis ruling, but the Bethlehem Landfill Co. that is a subsidiary of Texas-based Waste Connections on June 6 filed a notice of appeal of the ruling to Pennsylvania Commonwealth Court.

That appeal does not preclude the council from considering the new rezoning simultaneously, Treadwell said.

Rather than limit the rezoning for industrial to the 275.7 acres that the landfill owns or has control over, the new proposal would cover a larger area north of Applebutter Road, east of Steel City, south of the Lehigh River and west of the Route 33-Interstate 78 interchange.

Its a whole new ballgame, Treadwell told the council. You can look at whatever parcels you want.

Residents living on the rezoned parcels could continue to live there, even as the land becomes open for industrial uses, Banonis said. Carocci said the rezoned parcels would see their property values rise and create more industrial land that Lower Saucon desperately needs.

I think we should rezone it Light Industrial, all of it, Carocci said.

In reference to cutting out any additional approvals for the by-right industrial uses, Banonis said the lengthy conditional use hearing for the landfill expansion under the Dec. 21 approval seemed to accomplish not a lot over a long period of time. Council members in February hired a special officer to conduct that hearing and bring back a recommendation on approval or denial, at an hourly cost of $200. The hearing commenced Feb. 27 and was continued through May 5. Following Kassis ruling, additional hearing dates were canceled.

Residents, several local municipalities and organizations like the Delaware and Lehigh National Heritage Corridor and St. Lukes University Health Network battled the proposed landfill expansion, both during the conditional use hearing and before the county court.

Opponents attorney Gary Asteak on Friday excoriated the new rezoning tack and Banonis leadership in particular, during a phone interview with lehighvalleylive.com.

Nothing could be more arrogant and insensitive to the public or his constituents, Asteak said. It was a lesson in governmental arrogance.

They dont want to fight with us, they just want to say, Here, this is what we want to do, and get a rubber stamp and move on, he continued.

Banonis did not immediately respond to a request for additional comment via phone and email messages Friday.

Bethlehem Landfill attorney Maryanne Starr Garber previously said the company is appealing the county court ruling because we believe the trial court made a mistake. Bethlehem Landfill Company is an essential part of the local economy. The townships landfill revenues represent a quarter of its tax revenue, she said, while the landfill provides a needed waste disposal service. The landfill expansion as outlined for the conditional use approval hearing would preserve 157 acres of land adjacent to the landfill, she also noted.

Last Mondays council meeting was made available for viewing on YouTube.

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Kurt Bresswein may be reached at kbresswein@lehighvalleylive.com.
Thieves stole between 20 and 30 catalytic converters from a Lehigh County auto parts store, Pennsylvania State Police said.

The catalytic converters were stolen in May during a burglary at Alans Auto Parts, 4162 Best Station Road in Washington Township, troopers at the Bethlehem barracks said.

The owner reported the theft occurred between 9:30 p.m. May 8 and 8 a.m. May 9 when he arrived to the business and found the door wide open, troopers said. The auto parts store sits next to Alans U Pull It yard in the township.

MORE: $8.2M catalytic converter theft ring operated out of Philly-based towing business, authorities say

Catalytic converters have been a growing target for thieves, wanted for the valuable metals inside which can then be sold to scrap metals dealers. Replacing missing catalytic converts can range between $1,500 to $3,000, depending on the vehicle and parts used.

To combat the rise in thefts, some states, including New Jersey, have added new new regulations to the sales of catalytic converters.

A new law signed in May in New Jersey requires businesses to document the vehicle identification number, the certificate of title or registration, a receipt from a repair transaction, or a bill of sale when purchasing a used catalytic converter.

Scrap metal businesses may only purchase used catalytic converters from specific registered businesses.

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Sarah Cassi may be reached at scassi@lehighvalleylive.com.
I have no idea what Id do without the Jersey Shore. Ive lived there nearly half of my life, and despite the summertime traffic, the crush of visitors, bad boardwalk pizza, and so on, I cant imagine living anywhere else.

Ive written countless stories over the years about the Shore, including a day at N.J.s only legal nude beach, plus two books, The Jersey Shore Uncovered: A Revealing Season on the Beach, and the just-released The Ultimate Guide to the Jersey Shore.
A Laois Offaly TD has written to the Corporate Enforcement Authority in relation to payments at RTE.

Independent Deputy Carol Nolan says she has asked about the possibility of the authority initiating an investigation into the payments scandal currently engulfing the national broadcaster.

Deputy Nolan said she saw no reason in principle why the CEA should not do so as the competent Statutory authority capable of imposing sanctions on company directors under the Companies (Statutory Audits) Act 2018 and is tasked with promoting compliance with company law under the Companies Act 2014.

She claimed that it was manifestly clear that there were numerous breaches of good corporate governance at the national broadcaster following revelations that at least 1.25 went through a so-called barter account for corporate hospitality

The entire reason the CEA was set up was to bring about a greater level of compliance with company law and to put a stop through its various investigatory powers to creative accounting at the corporate and company level, said Deputy Nolan.

In light of that I think the CEA should be asked to initiate an investigation into RTE given that it has significant powers to adjudicate upon whether public protection considerations warrant a director, or a board should be being restricted or disqualified from certain roles in a company, said Deputy Nolan.

We need full transparency on this scandal and we need to utilise every accountability mechanism available to the state to bring that about in the shortest time possible, she concluded.
Laois and Offaly Education and Training Board (LOETB) have been awarded an Outstanding Contribution Award for its contribution to the development of Irelands remote work ecosystem by social enterprise Grow Remote.

The award recognises the fundamental role of the LOETB in developing Irelands remote work ecosystem, by enabling organisations to successfully transition to this new way of working and by driving the development of a remote-ready workforce across the country.

Since 2019, in partnership with IDA, Solas and Grow Remote, the LOETB has successfully trained over 2,000 individuals in the skills needed to lead remote teams and to thrive in a remote work environment. Through its national training programmes the LOETB has supported the creation of hundreds of jobs that can be done from anywhere in Ireland, leading to better outcomes for businesses and employees, more opportunities for job-seekers, and re-energised local communities.

The Outstanding Achievement Award was awarded to the LOETB team by Grow Remote Co-Founder Tracy Keogh at the recent Grow Remote Summit in Portlaoise. A unique stone sculpture created by Irish artist Pat OConnor was awarded, which represented the forward-thinking, innovative and courageous work of the LOETB over the past four years.

We gave this award to the LOETB team in front of an audience of international, national and local stakeholders in the remote work ecosystem as a way of saying thank you for their incredible work and contribution to the remote work ecosystem, not only in Ireland but internationally. The impact of the LOETB extends far beyond the borders of Laois and Offaly and can be seen not only across Ireland but also internationally as other countries seek to replicate what has been achieved here," said Grow Remote Co-Founder, Tracy Keogh.

The LOETB took a pioneering approach to developing the remote work ecosystem in Ireland, understanding that a completely new set of skills are required to make remote work and that these skills could only be developed through taking an industry-led approach. They have led the way in ensuring Ireland is ahead of the curve internationally when competing for remote talent and inward investment from global remote companies, she added.

Minister for Further and Higher Education, Research, Innovation and Science, Simon Harris praised the work of Laois Offaly ETB:

I would like to congratulate Laois Offaly Education and Training Board (LOETB) on the awarding of the Outstanding Contribution Award from Grow Remote. Early in the pandemic, LOETB in partnership with IDA Ireland and Grow Remote worked to make this programme available in a very short space of time and I am pleased to see that over 2,000 individuals have been successfully trained since then.

This is a great example of how the Further Education and Training sector can provide agile and flexible responses to the skills needs of the economy. As we have emerged from the pandemic, we are now seeing how remote working has become a key feature of working in Ireland and this programme equips employees and employers with the skills needed to succeed and thrive in this environment, he added.
A Kildare-based home carer named Saragh Doyle has been honoured for her fantastic work in the community.

Today, clients, community partners, staff, and carers at Comfort Keepers office in Kildare celebrated Comfort Keepers' National Day of Joy, titled 'Live the Joy', to help everyone find joy in everyday moments.

During the Day of Joy celebrations, Sarah Doyle from Kildare was announced one of the 11 finalists for the Comfort Keepers Carer of the Year 2023 award for her 'dedication and passion for her work and for making a positive impact on her clients daily lives.'

Speaking about her nomination, Ms Doyle said: "I am delighted and very proud to have been nominated this year for the work I love doing, helping my clients to stay safe and happy at home for as long as possible.

"Its a hugely rewarding job knowing that the people I am caring for have been helped by my visits," Sarah added.

The event is also a 25-year commemoration of Comfort Keepers brand, recognition for members of its care team who have been with the company for 10 years, a day to visit clients who have turned 100 years this year, or clients and carers who were celebrating a birthday, as well as the day the company announced its finalists for Comfort Keepers Carer of the Year 2023.

Collette Gleeson, Managing Director of Comfort Keepers Ireland, elaborated: "Our teams all across the country are made up of amazing individuals providing outstanding support and uplifting, in-home care to the most vulnerable in our society and their families."

She also praised Ms Doyle, saying that she 'goes above and beyond for her clients and is a great representative for Comfort Keepers and our quality care.'

Ms Gleeson further said about the event: "Our day of joy is a great opportunity for us to connect in person to all those who have been instrumental in our success in Kildare and to celebrate 25 years of elevating the human spirit while providing rewarding careers to our carers.

"Most importantly, it provides an opportunity for us to honour the hard work and dedication of members of our incredible care team who have been spreading joy in their communities every day and announce our Carer of the Year finalists.

"With the work we do with our carers, our valued clients, and their families, we understand the value of experiencing moments of joy every day to boost our overall health, mood and wellbeing.

She concluded: "We wanted to use this day to encourage our wider Comfort Keepers community to rejoice in the moments we live for - whatever it takes to make us laugh, smile and create memories that will form and last a lifetime."

FURTHER DETAILS

Comfort Keepers works closely with the HSE, their clients and their families to deliver quality, person-centred home care services.

Its mission is to provide people with the highest quality of life that is achievable, treating each client with the respect and dignity they deserve.

It has 18 nurse-led service teams from nine branches nationwide - Santry, Rathfarnham, Kildare, Gorey, Tullamore, Ardee, Galway, Limerick and Cork.

Comfort Keepers has 1,200 employees across Ireland, providing care to over 3,000 people in their own homes across the country every year.

The group's National Day of Joy was celebrated in more than 100 locations worldwide where Comfort Keepers has a presence.

In addition, Comfort Keepers Ireland is currently recruiting roles all over the country including home support worker, office administration, clinical management and supervisory roles. Visit www.ckjobs.ie for more information.
Uisce Eireann (Irish Water) is working in partnership with Kildare and South Dublin County Councils as they continue to progress the Celbridge Local Sewer Network Reinforcement Project.

Since the works commenced in July 2022, nearly 5 kilometres of the upgrade work on the Dublin Road (R403) has been completed, and it is expected that all works will be completed by the end of September of this year.

This phase of essential works will involve the final installation of a new rising main sewer pipeline along the R403 (Dublin Road), from the junction of Youngs Cross to the Lucan Road Roundabout.

Commenting on the project, Padraig Hanly, Regional Delivery Lead at Uisce Eireann said: "Working with our colleagues in Kildare and South Dublin County Councils, we are very happy that so much progress has been made on this vital project.

"A sewer network that is fit for purpose is essential in order to support business and social development in the community; not only will these works support existing and future residential and commercial development, but they will also improve the overall performance of the sewer network."

Acknowledging the support of the local community, Mr Hanly added: "We fully understand that the works may cause disruption to commuters and local road users and our crews will continue to make every effort to minimise disruption and complete the project as quickly as possible.

"In order to complete these works as efficiently as possible, 24-hour works will be in operation during both weekends to minimise the impact on the local community."

"We thank the people of Celbridge for their patience as these works progress and know that the long-term benefits will far outweigh the short-term inconvenience," he concluded.

To minimise the impact of the project on local commuters and complete the works as efficiently as possible, two separate weekend road closures in July have been granted by Kildare County Council (KCC).

Road closures will be in operation from late evening Friday, July 7, until the early morning of the Monday, July 10, and again late evening of Friday, July 14, until the early morning of Monday, July 17.

Diversion routes will be in operation during this period and a map illustrating the road closure area and associated diversion routes can be viewed below.

KCC has said that mergency traffic and access for residents will be maintained at all times.

This phase of the project is being delivered by Coffey Construction Limited on behalf of Uisce Eireann.

Additional local communications have taken place with letter drops being delivered to residents/businesses and VMS (Variable Message Signs) being installed in the area.

KCC, Uisce Eireann, and South Dublin County Council have all said that they 'regret any inconvenience that this essential project may cause.'

Uisce Eireann's customer care helpline is open 24/7 on 1800 278 278 and customers can also contact the organisation on Twitter @IWCare with any of their queries.
Candles, flowers and toys are displayed as part of a makeshift memorial for killed staff members of a restaurant destroyed in a recent missile strike, in the center of Kramatorsk, on June 29, 2023. GENYA SAVILOV / AFP

Victoria Amelina, a Ukrainian writer and war crimes investigator wounded in a Russian missile strike on a restaurant last week, has died, the freedom of expression group PEN said on Sunday, July 2.

The 37-year-old author was hurt when a Russian missile destroyed the Ria Pizza restaurant in the eastern city of Kramatorsk on Tuesday, killing 12 people, including children, and wounding dozens.

"With our greatest pain, we inform you that Ukrainian writer Victoria Amelina passed away on July 1st in Mechnikov Hospital in Dnipro," PEN Ukraine said in a statement on its Facebook page. Amelina had been in the city with a delegation of Colombian journalists and writers, PEN said.

Investigating Russian war crimes

She was hospitalized with "multiple skull fractures", according to a surgeon treating the wounded.

Her novel Dom's Dream Kingdom was published in 2017 and shortlisted for the UNESCO City of Literature Prize and the European Union Prize for Literature, according to PEN. Her poems, prose and essays have been translated into English, German, Polish and other languages. Since 2022 she had been working to document Russian war crimes since the invasion and advocate for accountability, PEN said.

Read more Article reserve a nos abonnes Russia's war in Ukraine is also a culture war

Ria Pizza in Kramatorsk  one of the largest cities still under Ukrainian control in the east  was popular with soldiers, journalists and aid workers. Amelina's death takes the toll of the strike to 13.

Ukraine's Culture Minister Oleksandr Tkachenko expressed condolences to Amelina's family, adding that Russia bears the responsibility. "For every crime on our soil, for every interrupted life and unspoken word, the terrorist must bear the harshest punishment," he said.

PEN Ukraine announced Amelina's death after her family was informed of it. Amelina was in Kramatorsk with a delegation of Colombian writers and journalists. She had been documenting Russian war crimes with the human rights organization Truth Hounds.

"Victoria Amelina was a celebrated Ukrainian author who turned her distinct and powerful voice to investigate and expose war crimes after the full scale military invasion of Ukraine in February 2022," said Polina Sadovskaya, Eurasia director at PEN America. "She brought a literary sensibility to her work and her elegant prose described, with forensic precision, the devastating impact of these human rights violations on the lives of Ukrainians."

'I tried to take up arms against their lies'

In 2014, Amelina she published her first novel, The November Syndrome, or Homo Compatiens, which was shortlisted for the Ukrainian Valeriy Shevchuk Prize. She went on to write two award-winning children's books, Somebody, or Waterheart and another novel, Storie-e-es of Eka the Excavator. In 2017, her novel, Dom's Dream Kingdom, received national and international accolades  including the UNESCO City of Literature Prize and the European Union Prize for Literature.

A popular young writer, her fiction and essays have been translated into many languages, including English, Polish, Italian, German, Croatian, Dutch, Czech, and Hungarian.

In 2021, she founded the New York Literature Festival, which takes place in a small town called New York in the Donetsk region of Ukraine.

Since the start of the invasion, Amelina devoted herself to documenting Russian war crimes in eastern Ukraine, PEN America said. In Kapytolivka near Izium, she discovered the diary of Volodymyr Vakulenko, a Ukrainian writer killed by the Russians.

In a powerful essay, Amelina described the plight of Soviet era conformists caught in the crossfire of the 2014 Russian invasion by focusing on the sad tale of Hanna, an elderly woman evacuated from the Donbas to the relative security of western Ukraine. Until her death, Hanna expresses her desire to go back home, even after it is explained to her that there is a Russian tank possibly parked in her garden.

"I did what I could: Im a writer, and writing the truth is perhaps my best way of defending Hannas garden. I could not protect anyone from the Russian artillery, so I tried to take up arms against their lies," Amelina wrote.

She also began writing her first work of English nonfiction shortly before her death. In War and Justice Diary: Looking at Women Looking at War, Amelina recounts stories of Ukrainian women collecting evidence of Russian war crimes. It is expected to be published soon, according to PEN Ukraine.
A LIMERICK man who was arrested during a major garda operation in Limerick has admitted laundering tens of thousands in crime cash.

At the Special Criminal Court this Monday, Dermot McManus, aged 53, of Keating Park, Killalee, Limerick, pleaded guilty to three charges relating to money laundering offences.

On June 17, 2020, he handled sums of cash worth 28,550 and 11,795 knowing or believing or being reckless as to whether this was the proceeds of criminal conduct.

Between January 1, 2018 and June 17, 2020, he handled or used money credited to an account in his own name at a credit union in Limerick, knowing or believing or being reckless as to whether it was the proceeds of criminal conduct.

McManus also pleaded guilty to handling a white Mercedes Sprinter van on a date between June 2, 2020, and May 23, 2021.

The matter has been adjourned to October 16 next for sentencing, while a previous bail condition that McManus observe a curfew between 10pm and 7am has been lifted.

McManus partner, Terese Halpin (50), of the same address, was charged with possession of the same cash sums and allowing a bank account to be used for handling the proceeds of crime.

Dominic McGinn SC, on behalf of the State, said that a nolle prosequi could be entered on these matters, and the charges against Ms Halpin were dropped.

McManus arrest followed what gardai described as a significant development in Operation Coronation, which targeted organised crime in County Limerick.

At a previous bail hearing for McManus, Detective Garda John Sheahan gave evidence that after a search warrant was obtained for Keating Park in June 2020, 28,550 was found in socks on top of a wardrobe while an amount of cash in sterling was discovered in a jacket pocket.

Detective Garda Sheahan said McManus told gardai he had bought the Mercedes Sprinter in Northern Ireland but that the accused's only regular income was a disability payment and that he had never filed a revenue return or paid income tax.

In September 2021, gardai carried out 65 raids in the county as part of the same operation, involving soldiers, detectives, customs officers and over 300 local gardai, with 12 people arrested.
ONE MUSEUM in Limerick is set to come alive with the enchanting power of poetry this July.

In collaboration with the Limerick Writers' Centre, The Poetry Circle will present an evening of poetic expressions on July 27.

Featuring renowned poets Richard W Halperin, Sheila Fitzpatrick O'Donnell and Breda Spaight, the event will take place at the People's Museum of Limerick at 2, Pery Square.

The highlight of the evening will be captivating readings by the three distinguished poets, whose unique voices have garnered international acclaim.

Hailing from Limerick, Sheila Fitzpatrick O'Donnell carries the rich legacy of her poetic lineage. Inspired by her mother, fondly known as Polly the Poet, Sheila has crafted a captivating body of work that has been featured in anthologies both in Ireland and abroad.

Irish-American poet Richard W Halperin, has gained recognition for his evocative verses. The writer is getting ready to release his new anthology, Selected & New Poems for Autumn 2023.

Joining them is Breda Spaight, a talented poet from Co Limerick, whose lyrical verses have captured the attention of literary enthusiasts.

The Poetry Circle is also inspiring poets for an open-mic. You can sign up by emailing limerickwriters centre@gmail.com - a limited number of open-mic spots will be allocated on the night.
INDIE-folk band KingFishr have announced they will go on their first ever Irish tour this October.

As part of their tour, The Prologue, the trio will make a stop in Limerick, on Friday, October 13.

Announcing the news on social media, the three lads said: "We're doing our first ever Irish tour, excited isn't even the word. Tickets on sale Wednesday @ 10 am."

After meeting in UL while studying engineering, Edmond Eddie Keogh, Eoghan McGoo McGrath and Eoin Fitz Fitzgibbon, collided in an attempt to disassemble the contemporary Irish experience.

In less than a year, the band has been making waves in the indie folk scene, booking date after date and performing alongside well-known artists such as George Ezra and Dermot Kennedy.

This weekend, they will be joining rock legend Bruce Springsteen at his BST Hyde Park gig, on Saturday, July 8. And on Sunday, they will be opening for Dermot Kennedy for one of his Thomond Park dates.

This October, Kingfishr will play in Dolans. Tickets will be available this Wednesday, July 5 via dolans.ie
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New Delhi: The government Monday scrapped the strategic disinvestment of Pawan Hans Ltd, a public sector enterprise under the ministry of civil aviation, after it disqualified the successful bidder Star 9 Mobility Pvt Ltd on grounds of one of its consortium partners of being embroiled in a separate legal case where adverse rulings have been issued by the company law tribunal.

Mint had reported in February, and April, that the government found that a partner of the winning bidder consortium had adverse rulings issued by the National Company Law Tribunal's Kolkata bench against it in another matter and that it had issued a show cause notice to the company concerned. Also, that the government intended to scrap the disinvestment process altogether.

"Government has decided that successful bidding consortium M/s Star 9 Mobility Pvt Ltd is disqualified from the process of strategic disinvestment of Pawan Hans Ltd in terms of provisions of PIM and RFP," the department of investment and public asset management (DIPAM) said in a statement Monday. PIM is preliminary information memorandum and RFP request for proposals.

"Further, the current EoI process for strategic disinvestment stands annulled," the statement added. The department said that the decision by the government was taken after 'careful consideration' of the response of the successful bidder to the show cause notice, and with the approval of alternative mechanism, empowered by Cabinet Committee on Economic Affairs, which comprised minister of road transport and highways, minister of finance and minister of civil aviation.

An official said that the government may not seek fresh bids for the public sector enterprise, the official said. The government is also against reconsidering strategic disinvestment of Pawan Hans, which has been attempted four times since 2016 without any success. The government may even recommend closure of the loss-making public sector unit, however, no clarifications were issued on both accounts in its statement.

The government said in its statement that it had not issued the letter of award to the winning bidder, Star9 Mobility Pvt Ltd, a consortium of three companies Maharaja Aviation Pvt, Big Charter Pvt, led by majority owner Almas Global Opportunity Fund. The consortium had placed a winning bid of 211.14 crore for the PSU in 2021.

The government had put the sale of the helicopter transport service provider on hold after the Kolkata bench of the National Company Law Tribunal passed an adverse order against Cayman Islands-based Almas Global Opportunity Fund for wilful contravention of an approved resolution plan of another company EMC Ltd, and forfeited its performance bank guarantee of 30 crore.

The tribunal also asked Insolvency and Bankruptcy Board of India and ministry of corporate affairs to lodge a complaint against the company in a special court under the Companies Act, for contravention of the resolution plan, according to which it was bound to pay 568 crore to EMCs creditors. IBBI filed a complaint against the concerned consortium member in the special court.

Government examined the adverse orders of NCLT and NCLAT and took note of the complaint filed by IBBI and considered that the adverse orders against a consortium member would lead to disqualification of the successful bidder under the provisions of PIM and RFP, the statement added. "Due opportunity was provided to the successful bidder to respond to the disqualification through a show cause notice," it added.

Pawan Hans divestment process was completed nearly five years after the Cabinet Committee on Economic Affairs approved the strategic disinvestment in October 2016. The government had received seven expressions of interest, before and shortlisting four bidders. Finally, it received three financial bids from Star9 Mobility, a consortium of Skyone Airway Pvt. Ltd and Skyone FZE ( 181.05 crore), and Enormous Nivesh Pvt. Ltd, ( 153.15 crore), it had said last year.

The reserve price for the sale of the governments 51% shareholding in Pawan Hans was fixed at 199.92 crore.

Pawan Hans, which was set up in 1985, has over 40 helicopters in its fleet. Apart from providing services to India's Northeastern and other states, it also provides helicopter services to companies like NTPC, GAIL, GSPC, etc. Pawan Hans also provides helicopter services for ONGC's exploration activities and off-shore operations. ONGC was to sell its 49% stake in the company to the winning bidder at a price decided by the government.
NEW DELHI : Brands across various industries are increasingly finding it difficult to secure high-quality real estate as a result of steep rentals, and an increase in the store expansion plans of both large and small brands.

Several major retailers have attributed their post-covid expansion plans to make up for the slower pace of growth in 2020 and 2021. Now, with improved mobility and return of consumers to physical outlets, the pace of real estate expansion has picked up, outpacing the available supply in the market.

Furthermore, the pandemic has caused delays in several large-scale retail projects, leading to a shortage of available properties. For instance, in 2022, retail absorption recorded a rise of nearly 4.7 million sq. ft over a year ago. In contrast, supply additions declined in 2022 from a year earlier, with only four malls covering approximately 1.4 million sq. ft. becoming operational in Bengaluru and Pune, according to data from CBRE.

Retail demand (in India) across investment-grade malls, prominent high streets and standalone developments has grown since 2020," said Anshuman Magazine, chairman and chief executive, India, South-East Asia, the Middle East and Africa, CBRE.

Ambuj Narayan, the chief executive of Titan Co.s ethnic wear brand Taneira, acknowledged the challenges posed by rising property rates and increased competition for space. Rental rates have been escalating, making it crucial to carefully select locations that align with the brands positioning, he said.

Property rates and rentals are going up. During covid, we know the rates really crashed, but now, theyre also sort of reviving and there are a lot of brands who are on an expansion spree. So, we are looking only at malls where the footfall is good and caters to our clientele. We are very choosy about where we would like to cater. Wed like to focus more on the high street stores because it sort of justifies the range we have," Narayan said in an interview.

To be sure, real estate rentals had crashed following the pandemic-led movement restrictions in early 2020. Demand remained weak in the subsequent months as severe waves of covid gripped the country. But, with a gradual opening-up of the economy, large retailers such as Reliance Retail, Aditya Birla Fashion & Retail, and Devyani International, among several other direct-to-consumer brands, have stepped up offline expansion. Retail leasing activity in January-March was led by fashion and apparel companies, followed by homeware and department stores, food service, luxury and consumer electronics, according to CBRE South Asia Pvt. Ltds India Market MonitorQ1 2023 report published in May.

Devarajan Iyer, executive director and chief executive of fashion retailer Lifestyle, said there is a visible increase in capital expenditure by apparel retailers across realty, product development and manufacturing. This is leading to an uptick in rental activity by brands, he added.

A lot of brands also take properties in high streets, and because a lot of those properties are already taken, there is very limited availability. Most of the leases are 10-20 years; there is no room in the metros, and especially in popular high streets. Even if its available, its very expensive."

Bengaluru-based restaurant chain California Burritos co-founder and CEO Bert Mueller said finding quality real estate is a big challenge at present with expanding competition. We opened a decent number of stores in 2020 and 2021, and getting real estate was pretty easy. This year, it is a lot more challenging," Mueller added.
New Delhi: Serentica Renewables on Monday said that it has signed power delivery agreements with multiple industrial customers totalling over 1.25 GW . This follows 580 MW of such agreements signed in March.

To ensure the round-the-clock green energy needs of its customers, Serentica will install 4 GW of renewable energy capacities across the country. The projects will deploy both wind and solar capacities, supplemented with balancing solutions like energy storage," the company said in a press release.

Serentica is setting up these solar and wind capacities across the states of Karnataka, Maharashtra, Andhra Pradesh, and Rajasthan, where it has secured connectivity to the inter-state transmission system (ISTS).

With a vision to accelerate clean energy transition of hard-to-abate industries, the overall portfolio will supply more than 9 BUs of clean energy annually, thereby offsetting 8.5 million tonne of CO2.

Indias energy transition must progress unabated to meet the dual objectives of its ever-increasing energy requirements and the fight against climate change. Serenticas growing portfolio of renewable energy assets is a testament to its commitment to address the toughest challenges of clean energy delivery and decarbonize Indias industrial backbone," said Akshay Hiranandani, CEO, Serentica Renewables.

Serentica is focused on industrial decarbonization and aims to provide assured, renewable energy through a combination of solar, wind, energy storage, and balancing solutions. Its medium-term goal is to supply over 40 billion units of clean energy annually and displace 37 million tonne of carbon emissions.
New Delhi: Johnson Controls-Hitachi Air Conditioning (JCH) India Limited on Monday announced the appointment of Sanjay Sudhakaran as the companys new managing director, India & South Asia region, effective 1 July, 2023.

Sudhakaran will succeed Gurmeet Singh, who stepped down from his role as chairman and managing director on 30 June to pursue other interests. Singh will remain senior advisor to JCH-India until 30 September, 2023.

I am delighted to join Johnson Controls  Hitachi (JCH) India Limited. I will drive profitable growth, with a focus on gaining market share, improving profitability, and creating long-term value for all our stakeholders," said Sudhakaran.

Sudhakaran began his career with Carrier Corporation in 1993 and was the Regional Director for ASEAN and India. He also served as the country head and managing director of Carrier Commercial Refrigeration. Sudhakaran previously worked for United Technologies as Managing Director, Buildings and Industrial solutions and for Otis Elevator as Senior Director, Asia Pacific, mergers and acquisitions, sales and marketing. In his last role, Sudhakaran was Managing Director and Chief Executive Officer of Schneider Electric Infrastructure.

Johnson Controls-Hitachi Air Conditioning India Limited is a joint venture between Johnson Controls, US and Hitachi Global Life Solutions, Japan. Johnson Controls-Hitachi Air Conditioning India Limited manufactures a products under Hitachi brand, such as room air-conditioners (split and window ACs) to commercial air-conditioners including cassette air conditioners, ductable air-conditioners and VRF systems.

JCH India is headquartered in Ahmedabad, Gujarat with manufacturing plant in Kadi, Gujarat.
The 50th GST Council meeting is likely to be held on 11 July at Vigyan Bhawan, New Delhi.

"The 50th meeting of the GST Council will be held on 11th July 2023 at Vigyan Bhawan, New Delhi," the GST Council tweeted.

The council, chaired by Finance Minister Nirmala Sitharaman, comprises finance ministers of states.

50th GST Council meeting: Here's what is expected

According to the PTI news agency, the council will take some more measures to tighten the noose on fake registration and fraudulent generation of input tax credit (ITC) as it looks to check tax evasion.

Central Board of Indirect Taxes and Customs Chairman Vivek Johri said, "We are thinking of some other measures and we will take them through the due process of the law committee and GST council".

The Council will also discuss the GoM report on online gaming, casinos, and horse racing and will circulate it to the states soon. The GoM submitted its report to the Council in December last year, but the Council has not taken it up for discussion.

Further, the Council will also decide on a convenor for the Group of Ministers (GoM) on rate rationalization.

Moreover, a long-pending demand for the establishment of GST Appellate Tribunals will also be addressed in the upcoming meeting. The GSTATs may reduce the burden on taxpayers and courts by streamlining and expediting indirect tax litigations. The Centre will soon appoint members after approval from the GST Council.

Currently, taxpayers aggrieved with the ruling of tax authorities are required to move to the respective High Courts.

The resolution process takes longer time as High Courts are already burdened with a backlog of cases and do not have a specialised bench to deal with GST cases.

Setting up state and national-level benches would pave the way for faster dispute resolution.

The GST Council is also likely to consider CBIC's proposal to introduce additional validations in the GST return filing system to check evasion and fake input tax credit (ITC) claims.

In a special drive since November 2020, central agencies have detected fake ITC claims worth 62,000 crore and arrested 776 persons, including professionals.

The move to introduce certain validations in the return filing system is aimed at checking frauds and revenue loss. The Central Board of Indirect Taxes and Customs (CBIC) last week introduced validation and risk rating for GST registrations, as it looks to curb fake entities issuing fake bills just to claim ITC benefits and defraud the exchequer.

The official said the strategy to go in for additional validation both at the time of registration and filing of return is aimed at eliminating tax evasion.

(With PTI inputs)
The State Bank of India (SBI), through its CSR arm SBI Foundation, has pledged a grant of 22.5 crore to establish a Banking Data and Analytics Hub at the Indian Institute of Technology, Bombay (IIT-B). The focus of the Hub will be to address the unique challenges faced by the Indian banking and financial services sector. The collaboration aims to leverage SBI's extensive experience in banking and IIT Bombay's research expertise.

Announced on the occasion of the 68th Bank Day", the Hub includes a 10,000 Sq. Ft. lab space and shall fund research and skill development in data analytics and AI (Artificial Intelligence).

The tie-up shall help enhance SBIs AI capabilities and will lead to the generation and dissemination of new ideas through industry-academia collaboration and training of the Banks staff. The partnership shall benefit the entire BFSI sector and help in the adoption of emerging technologies like ChatGPT," Dinesh Khara, Chairman, SBI said.

The collaboration will help the Banks data analytics and AI practise become part of the mainstream, day-to-day operations of the Bank. He reiterated that the collaboration would help in taking the Banks Analytics practise to the next level," Nitin Chugh, Deputy Managing Director and Head of Digital Banking and Transformation said.

Professor Shri Ravi Gudi, the Dean of Alumni and Corporate Relations at IIT Bombay stated that the Hub shall undertake cutting-edge research focussed on emerging problems in the Banking Sector and work towards developing elegant solutions for banking. He also said that the Hub shall engage in competency-building and outreach activities to enhance the talent pool of professionals specializing in banking analytics.

The grant emphasizes the importance of data analytics and AI in Banking. It comes close on the heels of the Banks announcement, during an Analyst Meet held on the 18th of May, 2023, that it had garnered business worth one lakh crore rupees through its Analytics function in the Financial Year 2023 alone.

State Bank of India is the largest commercial bank in terms of assets, deposits, branches, customers, and employees. As on March 31, 2023, the bank has a deposit base of over 44.23 lakh crore with CASA ratio of 43.80% and advances of more than 32 lakh crore.
Mazagon Dock Shipbuilders share price touched new 52-week high and gained over 7% on Monday's following the defence ministry's signing of a 2,725 crore contract with the company on Friday for the restoration of the submarine INS Shankush. Shankush is a submarine of the Sub-Surface Killer (SSK) class. Mazagon Dock share price opened at 1,280 apiece on BSE . The stock hit an intraday high at 1,341 and low at 1,273.

Mazagon dock is in action due to news from Defence ministry inks 2,725 cr contract with MDL for refit of submarine. The leading player in the shipbuilding industry, has witnessed a spectacular rally with the stock gaining almost 64% YTD. Technically upside is limited from here up to 1,400 levels in the medium term. Overall we remain optimistic on the sector," said Prashanth Tapse, Senior Vice President of Research at Mehta Equities.

According to the Ministry of Defence, a contract for the medium refit with life certification (MRLC) of the subsurface killer class submarine INS Shankush was signed on June 30 with M/S Mazagon Dock Shipbuilders Ltd, Mumbai, for a total of 2,725 crore. It stated that the MRLC submarine will be delivered in 2026.

After MRLC has been completed, the Indian Navy's operational fleet will welcome the combat-ready INS Shankush with increased combat capabilities.

According to the ministry, this project is a crucial milestone in the development of Mazagon Dock as an Maintenance, Repair and Overhaul MRO Hub to serve India's industrial ecosystem.

More than 30 MSMEs would be involved in the project, which would create 1200 man-days of employment every day for the life of the project.

On the technical front, the stock price rose 435.7% and outperformed its sector by 384.3% in the past year, as per trendlyne data.

This stock is in a strong uptrend, and today also we are seeing a gap up opening backed by strong volumes in the initial hours, this upmove is likely to continue where immediate upside is expected towards 1500, and 1200 is immediate support," said Rajesh Bhosale - Equity Technical and Derivative Analyst, Angel One.

Mazagon Dock Shipbuilders share price has risen 272% in last one year; is it still a buy?"

ANGEL ONE More Information

BSE More Information

MAZAGON DOCK SHIPBUILDERS More Information
Day trading guide for today: As SGX Nifty has started trading as Gift Nifty index from today onwards, Indian stock market would be expecting to extend its recent bull trend in this week as well. After the end of first six months of current year 2023, BSE Sensex logged 6.32 per cent and NSE Nifty clocked 5.83 per cent rise whereas gold recorded 5.73 per cent rise in this period. In these six months, Indian stock market climbed to a new high as all key benchmark indices hit a new high on Friday whereas small-cap and mid-cap indices have been hitting new highs for the last few session as well. Hence, the current bull trend on Dalal Street can be attributed as participatory rally where all segment has witnessed heavy buying interest.

Day trading guide for stock market today

On outlook for Nifty today, Nagaraj Shetti, Technical Research Analyst at HDFC Securities said, "The near term uptrend of Nifty remains intact and one may expect Nifty to reach up to 19,500 levels in the coming week. Immediate support for NSE Nifty is placed at 19,050 levels."

On outlook for Bank Nifty today, Ashwin Ramani, Derivatives & Technical Analyst, SAMCO Securities said, "The support for Bank Nifty shifts to 44,500 after Fridays strong closing, while the resistance for Bank Nifty is placed at 45,000. The Implied volatility (IV) of Bank Nifty (12.94) is still at the lowest end of its historical range as indicated by Implied Volatility percentile (IVP), which stands at 9%. This means that only on 9% of the days in the last one year, Bank Niftys IV was trading below 12.91. This also means that the Bank Niftys IV traded above 12.91 for 91% of the days in the last one year. Debit Spread option strategies are usually preferred by traders to take advantage of a low IV environment."

Intraday trading strategy for Monday

Advising intraday traders to remain vigilant about the auto stocks, Siddhartha Khemka, Head - Retail Research, Motilal Oswal said, "We expect the uptrend in Indian equities to continue in the near term. This week the market will take cues from economic data to be released locally as well as globally. Investors would also watch out for FOMC minutes to get insights into the US Central Banks future course of direction. The auto sector is expected to be in the limelight, as companies would release monthly sales data."

Stocks to watch today

Four stocks are going to trade ex-dividend today and those four dividend stocks are Geojit Finance, Balaji Amines, Jyothi Labs and Axtel Industries.

After announcement of HDFC Bank HDFC merger on 1st July 2023, HDFC Bank share price will be under the lens of intraday traders as HDFC Ltd shares would become non-existent on Indian bourses from today.

Gift Nifty index

Gift Nifty Index has started trading from today onwards and there would be no SGX Nifty from now. Starting from Monday, the GIFT Nifty index will have two sessions  first one will start at 6:30 AM Indian Standard Time (IST), and continue till 3:40 PM IST, second session will begin from 5 PM IST and continue till 2:45 AM IST. Four contract will be available for trade on Gift Nifty index  GIFT Nifty 50, GIFT Nifty Bank, GIFT Nifty Financial Services and GIFT Nifty IT. However, investing in GIFT Nifty will be out of reach for Indian retail traders under the Liberalised Remittance Scheme (LRS) route. Under the LRS, the Reserve Bank of India (RBI) disallows the use of the $2,50,000 per person, per year limit for leveraged traders, including futures and options.

F&O ban list

Shares of Indiabulls Housing Finance have been put in the list of ban for trade on 3rd July 2023.

Day trading stocks for today

On intraday stocks for today, stock market experts  Sumeet Bagadia, Executive Director at Choice Broking; Anuj Gupta, Vice President  Research at IIFL Securities and Ganesh Dongre, Senior Manager  Technical Research at Anand Rathi  recommended six stocks to buy today.

Sumeet Bagadia's buy or sell stocks

1] Info Edge (India) or Naukri: Buy at 4483.60, target 4615, stop loss 4400.

Naukri share price has been steadily trending upwards, finding strong support at the 20-day moving average. The upward movement is backed by high trading volumes and a positive crossover in MACD indicating growing buying interest and positive momentum. The stock is now approaching a potential breakout of larger time frame, further enhancing its bullish prospects. Additionally, the stochastic oscillator has displayed a positive crossover as well.

2] Sun Pharma: Buy at 1051, target 1125, stop loss 1010.

Sun Pharma share is presently trading at 1051, having recently broken out from its previous range of 981 to 1015 that persisted for a week This breakout signifies a good buying opportunity. In addition, the Relative Strength Index (RSI) is trending upward and appears to be on the verge of a positive crossover, indicating a potential increase in buying pressure. Moreover, Sun Pharma's price is currently positioned above its 20-50-100-200 Exponential Moving Averages (EMA), suggesting underlying strength in the stock.

Anuj Gupta's intraday stocks for today

3] Indiabulls Housing Finance: Buy at CMP, target 135, stop loss 117.

Indiabulls Housing Finance share price has given fresh breakout on chart pattern and it has formed bullish candlestick pattern as well.

4] South Indian Bank: Buy at CMP, target 22, stop loss 16.

South Indian Bank share has formed higher top higher bottom on chart pattern that indicates uptrend in near term.

Ganesh Dongre's stocks to buy today

5] Piramal Pharma: Buy at 92.50, target 97, stop loss 88.

In the short-term trend, Piramal Pharma share has a bullish reversal pattern, technically retrenchment could be possible till 97. So, holding the support level of 88 this stock can bounce toward the 97 level in the short term. Hence, the trader can go long with a stop loss of 88 for the target price of 97.

6] Reliance Industries Ltd or RIL: Buy at 2550, target 2580, stop loss 2530.

On the short-term chart, Reliance share price is showing a bullish reversal pattern, so holding the support level of 2530 this stock can bounce toward the 2580 level in the short term. Hence, the trader can go long with a stop loss of 2530 for the target price of 2580.

Disclaimer: The views and recommendations given in this article are those of individual analysts. These do not represent the views of Mint. We advise investors to check with certified experts before taking any investment decisions.
The geographical base of the derivatives trading in the Nifty index was changed on July 3 as Gift Nifty, the new identity of the derivatives trading in the Nifty index, came into existence on the day after the erstwhile SGX Nifty, the derivative of the Nifty index on the Singapore Stock Exchange, ceased trading on June 30. With this, the derivative contracts with a notional value of some $7.5 billion shifted to India.

Gift Nifty is an umbrella brand that includes four products- Gifty Nifty50, Gift Nifty Bank, Gift Nifty Financial Services and Gift Nifty IT derivative contracts. NSE plans to launch other indices gradually.

(Gift City -Gujarat International Finance Tec-City- is in Gandhinagar, Gujarat. It is an intentional financial services centre which also hosts other businesses like IT and ITeS along with a social ecosystem. The government intends to develop as a competitor of other global financial centres like Dubai, Mauritius, and Singapore.)

Change in tradition

NSE's subsidiary NSE IFSC Limited (NSE International Exchange), or NSE IX, based in Gifty City, Gujarat is the new home for Nifty derivatives contracts. All open positions of Nifty derivatives trade were shifted to NSE International Exchange.

Trade timings

While SGX Nifty traded for 16 hours from 6:30 am IST till 10:30 pm IST, Gift Nifty will operate for 21 hours. The trading window at Gift Nifty will be divided into two sessions- the first session from 6.30 am to 3.40 pm and the second session from 4.35 pm to 2.45 am the following morning.

Impact on traders

This change is just a migration of Nifty derivatives contracts to one location from another and and it does not impact the contracts.

Where to check data

Gifty Nifty began its operations on NSE International Exchange (NSE IX) in Gandhinagar, Gujarat. Earlier, traders would look at SGX Nifty before opening to get a cue about the Indian market. Now, they would look at NSE International Exchange (https://www.nseix.com/).

Read more: Explained: SGX Nifty to become GIFT Nifty from tomorrow; what does it mean for India?
Trading in futures & options (F&O) is indeed risky for retail investors, if data put out by the market regulator Securities and Exchange Board of India (Sebi) recently is anything to go by. A detailed analysis by Sebi showed that 90% of active individual traders in the F&O segment suffered losses in FY22. This figure was 87% in FY19.

The study highlights the growing interest of individual investors in the F&O segment ever since the pandemic struck in 2020. Millions of people confined to their houses amid the lockdowns and inspired by finfluencersflooded the stock markets in search of easy money, despite the inherent risks. Thus, a record 14.2 million new demat accounts were opened in FY21, three-times higher than the previous financial year. Most of them were by DIY (do it yourself) investors who wanted a piece of the F&O action.

F&O trading is a high-risk business and new investors, many of whom relied on online course subscriptions, suffered losses. Market experts say it is important to hire a good broker if you decide to dabble in the F&O segment. But, choosing the right broker is not an easy affair either. For one, there are a large number of brokers today offering competitive brokerage. Also, discount brokers alone used to hitherto offer flat brokerage, now even full-service brokers do that. Discount brokers are stockbrokers who carry out buy and sell orders at a reduced commission rate. Unlike full-service brokers, they do not provide personal consultations, financial advice, tax planning, or research and analysis.

Brokers today also offer a range of features such as option strategy, API (application programming interface) for trade automation, advanced option chain, etc. You need to look for brokers who can offer the best features for your trading requirements. Do take note of trading glitches in the software offered by brokers.

Mint speaks to some F&O traders for their insight on how they utilize the service of brokers.

View Full Image Mint

Discount brokers

Bengaluru-based Sandeep Rao, 43, a fintech executive, says he has had an account with brokerage firm Zerodha since 2011. Rao, who has been trading in the F&O segment through Zerodha for the last 10 years, loves the firms smooth UI (user interface) and access to the Zerodha ecosystem.

Another advantage with Zerodha is the MProfit tracking app which allows one to track investments across different assets and platforms. As Zerodha is one of the investors in MProfit, it is well-integrated into the system," he says. Rao says he is sticking with Zerodha for the reason that he has also built a sizeable investment portfolio with the broker over the years

Yet, Rao says there are a few things about Zerodha that he hates. For instance, the firm charges 2,000 per month for its API (application programming interface), which is usually used by traders for automation of their trading strategies. While Zerodhas API is reliable, most brokers today dont charge any additional fee for API," he says.

He cites the example of Dhan, which doesnt charge for the API. He uses Dhan occasionally as a back-up for trading. I like Dhan as it keeps adding innovative features after getting feedback from traders. But the software it uses will need to be optimized."

Rao says that he has faced some software glitches even on Zerodha, but fortunately he has not had to face any losses because of that.

Mumbai-based Viraj Batra, 24, has just started trading in the F&O segment. A financial services professional, Batra has opened an account with Upstox. He initially used the account for investments but started using it five months back for F&O trading.

Batra, who says he has so far not faced any major issue on the platform, is a fan of the low brokerage it charges and its user interface. To be sure, Upstox users have also faced software issues in the past.

Full-service brokers

Pune-based Tushar Karmakar, 27, has tried several brokers in the recent past. He started using Zerodha for F&O trading in 2020, but after some restrictions on trading in out of the money, or OTM, contracts (OTM contracts are those that are farthest from current index levels), he shifted to Upstox. When he faced issues with accessing the Upstox account for trading on Budget day, he moved to Fyers. He used the broker till October 2022 when he faced hurdles in placing orders from his account. He claims that there were delays of 5-7 seconds even for an order modification.

View Full Image Mint

Karmakar, who has since shifted his loyalties to Kotak Securities, says he is in awe of the Kotak Neo mobile app and uses it to key in most of his trading orders. I like their user interface, and the overall experience has been good. Also, I have taken zero brokerage plan in Kotak Securities," he says.

At Kotak Securities, investors below 30 years of age can opt for the Trade Free Youth Plan for an initial two years. They need to pay 499 for the first two years, which offers zero brokerage across segments. Traders also have to bear an annual account maintenance charge of 600. After two years, they are moved to the regular Trade Free Plan, which is open for all. Here, a flat fee of 20 is applicable per order in the F&O segment. Karmakar adds that he faced software glitches at Kotak Securities soon after opening his account (in December last year) but didnt suffer any losses.

Mumbai-based Tulika Mall, 32, is a full-time trader in the F&O segment for the last three years. She uses ICICI Directs platform to place her trades and is very happy with its low-brokerage fee. She has subscribed to both ICICI Directs Neo and Prime plans, and pays 20 per lot in brokerage.

As a full-service broker, she has access to the relationship manager (assigned to her due to multiple family accounts and large volumes) as and when required. She claims to have faced order lags in the brokers software, but doesnt mind it for now. A well-established financial services brand and a personal RM, just a call away, matters. We are trading with huge volumes of money. So, brand comfort is equally important for us," Mall says.

Mall says she goes through the brokerages research reports emailed to her for actionable insight if any stock piques her interest.

What to consider

Trading in F&Os is not suitable for everyone. It requires both large capital and deep understanding of how F&O pricing works.

Those looking for brokers to trade in the F&O segment should check for reports of frequent glitches in the software used by the broker. It is not uncommon for such glitches to occur especially on big event days (such as during the Union budget, elections) when market trading volumes are high. If you cant exit a position with your primary broker at the right time due to a software issue, it can turn your profits into losses or limit your ability to minimize losses on an already loss-making position.

Having a secondary broker might be useful as well. For example, you can place a counter trade with the secondary broker to hedge against the position on your primary broker.
My husband and I both have a 10 lakh medical cover provided by our employers. I am pregnant and would like to know the amount that we can claim towards our hospital expenses for the delivery. Can we combine the covers from both the healthcare policies and get cashless facilities for both?

Name withheld on request

Typically, group health insurance policies offered by employers carry a sub-limit for maternity delivery claims. There could be a separate limit for normal and cesarean delivery. So, your eligibility amount would depend on the type of delivery and the sub-limit.

You can claim for your maternity expenses from both policies. The aggregate of the two limits would be the total sum assured for you. However, the maximum you can claim would be the actual expenses incurred by you. If the total expenses are reimbursed by one policy, then you cannot make the same claim with the other insurer.

Generally, it is difficult to make concurrent cashless claims. So, you can avail cashless in either of the policies and make a reimbursement claim with the second policy.

In case both the insurers are on the hospital cashless panel, then choose the insurer with a higher limit for cashless. Once you are discharged from the hospital, you can submit the final settlement letter of the cashless claim along with all other treatment papers to the second insurer. Do submit the original receipts of the payments made by you.

Also, apart from the maternity claim, you should ensure to add your newborn baby to the policy. Unlike individual insurance, most group insurance policies cover the newborn immediately after birth, without any waiting period. This is a critical cover.

In case of any complications to the newborn, the policy covers the medical costs. The time window to enroll the newborn is usually within 30 days of birth. Often, new parents ignore this, due to maternity leave or lack of awareness. This can create issues later at the time of claim, if any.

Abhishek Bondia is principal officer and managing director at SecureNow.in.
The Delhi Metro Rail Corporation (DMRC) will rename the HUDA City Centre metro station on the Yellow Line as Millennium City Centre Gurugram, said officials on Monday, adding that it falls in Haryana's Gurugram.

The Delhi Metro Rail Corporation (DMRC) said, A decision has been taken to rename the HUDA City Centre Metro station on Yellow Line as Gurugram City Centre. Accordingly, the process of changing the name in all official documents, signage, announcements etc. has been initiated and shall be changed gradually."

Later the DMRC posted another tweet where it was mentioned that the HUDA City Centre Metro station would be renamed Millennium City Centre and not Gurugram city centre, as was planned earlier.

Notably, this is the second rechristening effort made by the DMRC in a span og just three hours.

"In partial modification of the earlier announcement regarding the renaming of the HUDA City Centre Metro station on Yellow Line, it has now been decided by competent authorities to rename the station as Millennium City Centre," DMRC's second tweet read.

The DMRC made a third attempt and hopefully the final attempt at renaming the HUDA City Centre Metro station. This time they named it- Millennium City Centre Gurugram.

Taking to Twitter yet aagin, the DMRC informed, In reference to our earlier tweet regarding the renaming of the HUDA City Centre Metro station, this is to inform that the full name of the station will read as Millennium City Centre Gurugram.".

Officials familiar with the development told the news agency PTI that a request to rename the station had come from both the Centre and the Haryana government.

Last year, the Public Investment Board cleared the 28.5-km-long metro corridor between HUDA City Centre and Cyber City in Gurugram.

Haryana Chief Secretary Sanjeev Kaushal applauded the efforts made by the Haryana Mass Rapid Transport Corporation team for getting the project cleared from the Board.

He said it would give an efficient and environment-friendly transport system to the public of Haryana especially those living in Gurugram and its vicinity.

This will give seamless connectivity from Gurugram to Indira Gandhi International Airport.
India has expressed concerns to the Canadian authorities about the upcoming Khalistan rally in Canada which will be held on 8 July, a report by Hindustan Times has stated. Posters of the freedom rally is being circulated on social media.

Indian authorities also has escalated of possible threat to the officials in Canada. The poster carries threats to Sanjay Kumar Verma Indias high commissioner to Ottawa and Apoorva Srivastava who is consulate general in Toronto. As per the poster, a Khalistan Freedom Rally will be held on 8 July at 12.30 pm. The rally is set to start from Great Punjab Business Centre and will end at Indian Embassy at Toronto, the poster claims.

View Full Image Posters on Social media

The rally is being held in the name of Harjit Singh Nijjar aka Hardeep Singh Nijjar, a Khalistani terrorist who was killed in a targeted shooting in Canada's Surrey on 18 June. Nijjar was the chief of Khalistan Tiger Force (KTF) and was also included in the list released by the Indian government, naming 40 other designated terrorists.

Verma, Indias high commissioner to Ottawa told HT that, In the garb of freedom of expression, they are attempting to cause harm to foreign envoys, which may not be the intention of Canadian law and constitution, under which such rights are provided."

External Affairs Minister, S Jaishankar has also responded to the matter of names of Indian diplomats on Khalistani posters in Canada. While speaking to reporters, he said, We have requested our partner countries like Canada, the United States, the UK and Australia not to give space to the Khalistanis. This will affect our relations. We will raise this poster issue with the government of these countries"
India is set to submit a letter of request (LoR) to the US government this week to initiate the procurement of 31 MQ-9B remotely piloted aircraft systems (RPAS) under the foreign military sales (FMS) program, the Hindustan Times reported citing officials familiar with the matter.

The LoR will outline the requirements of the three services, specify the equipment sought, and propose the terms of procurement. The deal is estimated to be valued at $3.07 billion (over 25,000 crore).

The acceptance of necessity (AoN) for the purchase of the MQ-9B General Atomics high-altitude long endurance (HALE) drones was granted by India's defence acquisitions council (DAC) on June 15. This marked the first step towards acquiring military hardware.

The United States will respond to the LoR with a letter of offer and acceptance (LoA) after a formal congressional notification. Following this, India will engage in negotiations with the US, considering the price and terms offered, before finalising the deal through the contract negotiation committee and seeking approval from the cabinet committee on security led by Prime Minister Narendra Modi.

During PM Modi's state visit to the US on June 22, a joint statement by the two nations mentioned the proposed deal. The statement highlighted that General Atomics would establish a comprehensive global maintenance, repair and overhaul (MRO) facility in India, supporting the country's long-term goal of enhancing indigenous defence capabilities.

While questions have been raised by the Congress party regarding pricing, acquisition procedures, technology transfer, and self-reliance in defence, government officials have defended the deal, emphasising that India aims to negotiate a competitive agreement with the US that ensures transparency and facilitates the transfer of critical technologies.

The number of drones to be purchased is based on the operational requirements of the armed forces.

Out of the 31 drones, 15 will be allocated to the navy and eight each to the Indian Army and the Indian Air Force. Ten drones are expected to be procured as ready-made units while the remaining 21 will be assembled in India, HT reported.

The estimated cost of the deal includes weapons, sensors, ground control stations, logistics support and other necessary equipment.

India will also seek a higher element of technology transfer, aiming to double the current offering from 8-9% to 15-20%. The versatile MQ-9B platform is capable of striking targets, conducting intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance (ISR) operations, and fulfilling roles such as electronic warfare, defensive counter air, and airborne early warning.

The decision on the number of drones to be acquired was based on a scientific study that considered the requirements of the three services and the extensive land and maritime borders of India.
New Delhi: India will host the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation (SCO) summit in a virtual format on Tuesday.

The summit will see participation from President Xi Jinping of China and Prime Minister Shehbaz Sharif of Pakistan along with the leaders of a number of central Asian countries. President Vladimir Putin of Russia is also expected to attend the summit. The previous edition of the leaders level meeting took place in Samarkand, in Uzbekistan, in September last year.

The SCO Council of Heads of State will be chaired by Prime Minister Narendra Modi.

The summit is likely to see a push for expanding the SCO, with Iran likely to accede to the organisation as a member. Besides this, the leaders are likely to push for Belarus to also accede to the SCO.

Bahrain, Kuwait, Myanmar, the Maldives and the UAE are about to join SCO-led cooperation efforts as new dialogue partners," according to a press statement from the Russian Foreign Ministry.

Besides this, counter-terrorism, anti-drug trafficking and anti-extremism will be the focus of this leaders level summit.

The SCO establishes cooperation between members on a variety of functional issues like economic development, security and anti-terrorism. For example, in the field of security, the grouping has established institutions like the SCO Counter-Terrorism Centre, the SCO Regional Anti-Terrorist Structure (RATS), the SCO Information Security Centre and the SCO Center against International Organized Crime to bring about regular cooperation between member countries.

The Shanghai Cooperation Organisation began as a grouping of the Russian Federation, Central Asian republics and China in the late 1990s. It was originally intended to function as a minilateral body that would build trust and reduce tensions between these erstwhile rivals in the aftermath of the end of the Cold War. The SCO as it stands today was founded in 2001 and India joined the grouping in 2017 along with Pakistan.

At the highest level, the SCO functions through a series of high level political cooperation mechanisms. These include regular meetings like the Council of Heads of State, the Council of Heads of Government (Prime Ministers) and the Council of Foreign Ministers. These seek to boost interaction and dialogue between the members of the organisation.

The SCO Foreign Ministers meeting took place in Goa in April. It featured participation from Chinas Foreign Minister Qin Gang, Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov and Pakistans Foreign Minister Bilawal Bhutto Zardari, among others.

India and SCO Summit

India joined the SCO in 2005 and became a full member of the group at the Astana Summit in 2017.

In the last six years, India has taken an active and positive role in all SCO operations.

At the SCO Summit in Samarkand in September 2022, India took over the chairmanship of the SCO for the first time from Uzbekistan.

India created five new pillars and focus areas of cooperation in SCO -- Startups and Innovation, Traditional Medicine, Digital Inclusion, Youth Empowerment, and Shared Buddhist Heritage. Two new mechanisms in SCO -- Special Working Group on Startups and Innovation and Experts Working Group on Traditional Medicine -- were created at India's initiative.

During India's presidency of the SCO, External Affairs Minister S Jaishankar virtually opened New Delhi Hall in the SCO Secretariat in Beijing. To commemorate India's first SCO presidency, a commemorative stamp was issued.

On May 4-5 this year, India also hosted the Foreign Ministers of SCO in Goa, this was marked by a colourful cultural program and substantive discussions the following day. Goa showcased its warm hospitality, unique culture, and distinct heritage.

Xi Jinping's speech at SCO Summit in focus

Chinese Foreign Ministry Spokesperson Mao Ning said Beijing stands ready to work with other members to build an even closer SCO community with a shared future.

"As a founding member, China views the SCO as a priority in its foreign affairs. We stand ready to work with other members to act on the Global Development Initiative, the Global Security Initiative, and the Global Civilization Initiative, build an even closer SCO community with a shared future and usher in a brighter future for the Eurasian continent," Ning said.

Meanwhile, the Pakistan foreign ministry said, "The Prime Minister's (Shehbaz Sharif's) participation in the CHS illustrates the high importance that Pakistan attaches to the SCO, as an important forum for regional security and prosperity, and enhanced engagement with the region,"
India's import of Russian oil hit another record high last month as the South Asian nation nears the limit of its buying splurge from the major OPEC producer, according to Bloomberg News.

Viktor Katona, the head of crude analysis at Kpler stated that daily volumes climbed to 2.2 million barrels a day in June, rising for the 10th consecutive month. The analytics firm data shows that Russian purchases again exceeded the combined shipments of Saudi Arabia and Iraq.

India emerged as a key consumer of Russian oil following the invasion of Ukraine, but the nations buying could be near its limit due to infrastructure issues and the need to maintain good relations with other suppliers.

Kpler said that imports may dip next month because of lower Russian supply. State-owned Indian Oil Corp has been the biggest buyer of Russian crude over the past two months, followed by Reliance Industries Ltd, Bloomberg News reported.

Overall, Indias imports of Urals hit another record of 1.5 million barrels a day in June, the analytics firm said.

In May, India's rising imports of Russian oil was about 1.95 million barrels per day (bpd) denting purchases from Iraq and Saudi Arabia fell. India, the world's third biggest oil consumer and importer, buys more than 80 percent of its oil from overseas markets.

Oil refiners have been focusing on Russian oil since the West imposed sanctions over Moscow for its invasion of Ukraine. Russian oil accounted for about 40 per cent of India's crude imports in May, cutting imports from Iraq to a three-year low and from Saudi Arabia to their lowest since September 2021

In April the landed price of a tonne of oil from Russia was about $500, equivalent to $68.21/barrel using a conversion factor of 7.33, while that from Iraq cost $570 and from Saudi Arabia was $637.40, according to the government data. Price details for May arrival cargoes have not yet been updated.

(With Bloomberg inputs)
Nationalist Congress Party (NCP) has appointed Jitendra Satish Awhad as the Leader of Opposition in the Maharashtra Assembly after former LoP Ajit Pawar took oath as deputy chief minister in the Eknath Shinde-led state government. Awhad reached the Maharashtra Speaker's office to hand over his appointment letter on Saturday night.

These leaders should not forget the party made them ministers in the past 25 years. Now, they are deserting their leader (83-year-old Sharad Pawar) in his twilight years," Awhad said as quoted by Hindustan Times.

The Congress and NCP appeared to be in a fight to appoint the Leader of the Opposition after Congress Spokesperson Atul Londhe said that it was yet to be decided who would be the new Leader of the Opposition (LoP) in the Maharashtra Assembly.

All you need to know about Jitendra Awhad

1) Jitendra Awhad, a close associate of NCP chief Sharad Pawar, is a three-time MLA from Mumbra-Kalwa in the Thane district. He is 59 years old.

2) He began his political career as a student activist in 1982 and protested against increasing tuition fees at Mumbai University. It is said that Awhad was highly influenced by Sharad Pawar, hence, joined the students' wing of the Congress party in Maharashtra.

3) In 1988, Awhad was appointed as the Maharashtra National Students' Union of India (NSUI) chief secretary and then all-India NSUI's general secretary in 1991, according to media reports.

4) Awhad started his political journey with Congress in 1996 when he was appointed the president of the Maharashtra Youth Congress.

5) Jitendra Awhad joined the Nationalist Congress Party (NCP) when Sharad Pawar split from Congress. He was loyal to the NCP chief. He was nominated as Maharashtra's Member of the Legislative Council in 2004 and 2008.

6) In 2014, Awhad severed as Maharashtra's cabinet minister for Medical Education & Horticulture. In 2019, he then served as Housing Minister of the state in Uddhav Thackeray's MVA government.

7) Apart from this, Awhad was also involved in a conspiracy where about 20 people along with him assaulted a Thane-based civil engineer. They allegedly assaulted the engineer for posting morphed photographs. Police arrested him after filing a case against him.
Afghanistan is the least peaceful country in the world for the fifth consecutive year, according to the 'Global Peace Index 2022' report released by the Institute for Economics and Peace (IEP). Taliban reacted to the findings and called it unjust.

Taliban spokesperson Zabihullah Mujahid said that terrorist incidents have reduced by over 99 percent in comparison to "what is stated in the report."

"They said that the number of casualties went up. They still say 4,000 civilian casualties -- it is untrue. We may have casualties up to 1,000. There have been some Daesh attacks in the past years or one last year, but (Daesh) is controlled," he said

Yemen, Syria, Russia, and South Sudan are followed by Afghanistan in the Global Peace Index 2022 report. All these countries have remained among the ten least peaceful nations for the past three years, Tolo News reported.

"Afghanistan recorded the fifth largest improvement in peacefulness in the 2023 GPI, however, it remains the least peaceful country in the world. Although violence is still widespread throughout the country, the level of conflict has dropped considerably since the withdrawal of US troops in August 2021, and the subsequent Taliban takeover of the government," the report read.

It also stated that Afghanistan recorded the largest reduction in deaths from armed conflicts last year with the number of conflict deaths from almost 43,000 has fallen to just more than 4,000.

However, the perceptions regarding the criminality of Afghan nationals have slightly improved as the number of people who say they felt unsafe walking alone reduced from 84 percent to 77 percent, the IEP report said.

In addition, terrorist incidents in Afghanistan have also been reduced by 75 percent in 2022 and the related deaths have come down by 58%, the report said, adding that the security situation remains uncertain with an escalation in the conflict between ISK and the Taliban remains a strong possibility, as per Tolo News reports.

The report, titled "Impact of Improvise Explosive Devices," said that since the Taliban took over Afghanistan on August 15, 2021, a total of 701 people were killed and 2,113 were wounded due to the IED.

"Three-quarters of these civilian casualties (2,814 civilian casualties: 701 killed, 2,113 wounded) were caused by indiscriminate IED attacks in populated areas, including places of worship, schools, and markets," the report added.

(With ANI inputs)
Chinese billionaire and Alibaba Group co-founder Jack Ma's unexpected visit to Pakistan has created a stir among observers. The Express Tribune reports confirmed that Ma arrived in Lahore on June 29 and stayed there for around a day.

During his visit, Jack Ma avoided interactions with government officials and media persons. He resided at a private location and left on June 30 via a private jet registered under the name of VP-CMA which is owned by Jet Aviation.

Former Chairman of the Board of Investment (BOI), Muhammad Azfar Ahsan informed that the purpose of Ma's visit remains confidential at this point and there is hope that it will yield positive outcomes for Pakistan in the days to come, ANI reported, citing The Express Tribune.

The Chinese billionaire was accompanied by a delegation of seven businessmen consisting of five Chinese nationals, one Danish, and one US citizen. They arrived in Pakistan from Nepal via a chartered flight from Hong Kong's business aviation sector.

Speculations surfaced on social media about Jack Ma and his team exploring business opportunities in Pakistan, including visits to trade centers and meetings with prominent businessmen and officials from various chambers of commerce.

However, there has been no official confirmation about the meetings and business deals yet.

In a tweet, Ahsan clarified that Jack Ma's visit to Pakistan was strictly for personal purposes. Interestingly, even the Chinese embassy was unaware of the details of Ma's visit and engagements in the country, he said.

Although it was a personal visit, it helped enhance Pakistan's reputation from a tourism standpoint," said P@SHA, Chairman, Zohaib Khan while expressing the view that Pakistani authorities should have taken the opportunity to arrange a meeting with Ma and gain insights from his seasoned experience in the IT world.

He said even a statement from Ma regarding Pakistan's IT sector would have a significant impact.

(With ANI inputs)
Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen will travel to Beijing this week, AP reported. Yellen will meet this week with Chinese officials, U.S. companies doing business in China and with Chinese people and will stay through July 9.

Yellen has frequently said in the past year that she would like to visit China. She says the two nations "can and need to find a way to live together" in spite of their strained relations over geopolitics and economic development.

US Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen from July 6-9

The goal of her visit is to deepen and increase the frequency of communication between the US and China. The treasury secretary's visit will be more focused on stabilising the global economy and challenging China's support of Russia in its ongoing land invasion of Ukraine.

Yellen's trip would follow Secretary of State Antony Blinken's two-day stop in Beijing in June, the highest-level meetings in China in the past five years. Blinken met with Xi and the two agreed to stabilise deteriorated US-China ties. However, better communication between their militaries could not be agreed upon.

US-China relations: Tensions impacting the superpowers'

There are plenty of tensions impacting the superpowers' relationship. The discovery of a Chinese surveillance balloon traversing over sensitive areas of the US in February put a damper on her previous travel plans, and further strained relations.

The most recent flareup came after President Joe Biden referred to Chinese President Xi Jinping as a "dictator " during a campaign fundraiser earlier in June.

Yellen met with her previous Chinese counterpart, Vice Premier Liu He, in January in Switzerland.
Amidst the evolving narrative following the brief mutiny of the Wagner mercenary group, a prominent Russian propagandist has raised allegations against the leader of Wagner, Yevgeny Prigozhin.

The propagandist claims that Prigozhin has veered off course, citing the receipt of substantial public funds, which has drawn criticism and raised concerns within Moscow's political circles. The mutiny led by Prigozhin last weekend against Russia's senior military leadership has brought significant embarrassment to the Kremlin.

"Prigozhin has gone off the rails because of big money," AFP Pquoted Dmitry Kiselev, one of the main faces of the Russian propaganda machine, as saying on his weekly television show on Sunday. "He thought that he can challenge the defence ministry, the state itself and the president personally."

The actions carried out by Wagner Group in Syria and Africa, according to Kiselev, provided Prigozhin with a sense of impunity, which was further bolstered by their successful operations in eastern Ukraine. Kiselev made these claims without presenting any supporting evidence. Additionally, Kiselev asserted that Wagner Group had received a substantial sum of over 858 billion rubles ($9.7 billion) in state funds.

In a surprising revelation earlier this week, President Vladimir Putin publicly acknowledged for the first time that the Russian authorities had been providing full financial support to the paramilitary organisation. Putin stated that between May 2022 and May 2023, Wagner Group had received more than 86 billion rubles directly from the Russian state.

The Wall Street Journal reported on July 2 that agents from the Federal Security Services had raided the headquarters of the Wagner Group in St. Petersburg to find evidence against Prigozhin.

The headquarters said on July 1 on Telegram that it was moving but would remain operational albeit under a "new format."

Yevgeny Prigozhin, subjected to sanctions by both Washington and Brussels, had long operated discreetly in the background. However, his profile has surged into the public eye following Putin's deployment of troops into Ukraine in February 2022.

(With AFP inputs)
Just in time for 4 July, the US Supreme Court curtailed the ability of universities to use race as a factor in admissions. Many US universities have used affirmative action not only as a means for student diversity, but in a general effort to bolster equality in a stubbornly unequal America. The courts Republican majority decided that such quotas violate the Constitutions equal protection clause. The court ruled, in effect, that more equal is less fair.

Equality has always been a fraught concept. In the US Declaration of Independence, Thomas Jefferson had the temerity to declare that all men are created equal," which the slave owner from Virginia neither believed nor pretended to, at least not beyond rhetoric. Stanford historian Jack Rakove holds that Jefferson meant colonists as a people" had a right to self-government that was equal to the right of other peoples. But given the scarcity of self-government in 1776, even thats a curiously expansive framework. In the run-up to that revolt, equality, however hedged, was a useful rallying cry for Americans seeking to jettison a king, who ruled over them from divinely inspired heights, and his troops, who exercised proximate controls. A decade later, with freedom won and British Raj tossed, the statements utility seemed to have expired; it found no purchase in the slavery-drenched US Constitution.

Much US history that followed can be viewed as a contest between rising demands for equality and entrenched defences of hierarchy, racial included. Much politics today follows suit. Make America Great Again frequently casts itself as a populist movement against elites: academics, scientists, culture leaders and the kind of condescending educated affluent liberals who occupy cosmopolitan cities and conservative imaginations. But the quotidian reality of MAGA politics is not an assault on hierarchy, but a defence of it. Its fiercest commitments are to a veritable sprawl of privilege, elevating Caucasians over others, male over female, straight over LGBTQ+, native over migrant, rich over poor, rural over urban, Christian over other, and conservative over all.

Across the US, policies that reinforce hierarchy are Republican signatures: work requirements for poor parents combined with tax cuts for the wealthy; abortion prohibitions that undermine female autonomy; and a frenzied assault on other gender and sexual identities, which is an effort to deny the pursuit of happiness to a marginalized class. Its telling that the long conservative war on affirmative action that ended at the Supreme Court targeted race-conscious admissions facilitating the entry of minorities into elite institutions. Legacy and donor-driven admissions, which reinforce the hold of a permanent elite, rarely animated conservatives in the same way.

In his 1992 book, Lincoln at Gettysburg, Garry Wills documents what he calls the giant (if benign) swindle" that Abraham Lincoln accomplished in November 1863 with 272 words. It began with the very first sentence of his Gettysburg address, when he called the US a nation dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal." Reverence for the founders, the wealthy Caucasian men who set the Constitutional machine in motion, has always offered a convenient guise in which to perpetuate the brutally hierarchical and racist world in which they thrived. Lincoln, Wills writes, had to sneak around the frontal defenses of prejudice and find a back way into agreement with bigots." This explains, at the level of tactics, the usefulness of the 1776 Declaration for Lincoln. That revered document was anti-monarchical in common perception and thus unchallengeable. But because it indicted King George III in terms of equality, it committed Americans to claims even more at odds with slavery than with kingship...." At Gettysburg, Lincoln laid the foundation for a war after the Civil War, when ideals of freedom would challenge long-held prejudices. That project failed. Instead, a vicious reaction delayed the dawn of equality for a century.

Lincoln mostly succeeded, however, in changing the meaning of equality in the Declaration, setting off a moral battle that continues. Many Americans now understand all men are created equal" as a quintessentially American fact.

But if all are created equal, why are some born into stifling deprivation while others enjoy boundless privilege? Who should surrender privilege in service to equality, and who should get it? Thats what affirmative action was all about, and what the courts ruling was about, too. Indeed, the portioning of privilege remains the stuff of American politics in 2023. The dead hand of reaction hasnt lifted. The demand for equality isnt met. Yet, the slave-holders 1776 Declaration, repurposed by the Great Emancipator, still offers escape from the straitjacket of the past.

The author is a Bloomberg Opinion columnist covering U.S. politics and policy.
The recent Greek coast shipwreck tragedy was another reminder that the lives of people fleeing remain at risk because they lack safe-legal routes, solidarity and life-saving assistance. Refugees are not migrants by choice. They have grounded reasons to leave their homes behind. To seek asylum is a Universal Human Right (Article 14) and not a crime. The global refugee crisis has grown enormously since 2010. Increasing sociopolitical, economic and environmental uncertainties can make any country insecure, resulting in people fleeing. Therefore, every country is responsible for providing safe harbour to asylum seekers.

South Asia, host to 3 million refugees, lacks inclusive policies to help steadily growing numbers. Refugees in India, Pakistan and Bangladesh are from neighbouring regions. The region experiences protracted situations that demand local solutions, rather than relying only on refugee frameworks to which the countries are not signatories.

Why is the refugee system broken?: Long-standing refugee situations, such as the Syrian conflicts exodus, Rohingya movement from Myanmar, Afghan displacement and many others, are far from reaching any settlement. Unfortunately, solutions are sought within an outdated framework that can no longer absorb new migration regimes. Thus, depending on current international frameworks to address global problems is unsustainable.

Locally, refugee issues are approached from a management framework, claiming the necessity to manage the crisis, thus restricting entry. From redirecting and stopping small boats to building walls have become a response to people fleeing painful circumstances. Such policies are adopted by administrations that lack the political will for sustainable solutions. Ironically, the global north hosts only 15% of the worlds refugees, but has financial power over refugee organizations.

Low and middle-income countries (LMCs) host 85% of all refugees. This indicates why it is not in the interest of the global north to solve this crisis. Consequently, 88% of the worlds refugee programmes are underfunded, diverted from sustainable solutions to ad-hoc arrangements and also politicized based on ethnicities, religions and historical backgrounds. Underfunding also resulted from a threefold increase in in-donor refugee costs (4.6% 2021 to 14.4% 2022). Some countries see in-country refugee expenses as part of their Overseas Development Assistance (ODA) commitments and reduce funding for refugee programmes.

Refugee settlement can be done by integration, voluntary repatriation and third-country resettlement. The latter two are commonly considered the main solutions. Globally, 74% of refugees remain in protracted discomfort as host countries wait for them to leave. The possibility of integration is mostly ignored for justifiable reasons like security, economic and national identity. Jordan, Kenya, Uganda, Germany and Canada instead choose integration through local policies and gain socio-economically, just as refugees do.

Interestingly, Bangladesh, India and Pakistan host many refugees and experience highly protracted situations, implying that local policies are required to facilitate integration. Regardless of location, the common challenge for refugees is identification documents. They usually flee without such papers and their prolonged stays create an ID crisis. International organizations cannot address this unilaterally, as identification requires a degree of acceptance by local communities. In Turkiye (with the highest refugee population), refugees faced challenges in accessing healthcare during the recent earthquake since they lacked acceptable IDs. In India, for refugees to access covid vaccines, Indian policy demanded they register through mandatory IDs they dont have; they were thus excluded by design.

For refugees to fill employment gaps is tough. Even a certified French teacher in Delhi cannot open a bank account or find decent accommodation without identity proof. Such individuals are exposed to exploitation, which is the story of many. Note that even a UNHCR refugee card is not an acceptable ID for accessing essential services.

Can public policies do better?: The root causes of global issues are often entrenched in local dynamics. The predisposition of citizens to accept refugees could depend on the economic, language and cultural impact. The notion that refugees weigh upon a country and contribute to economic problems has led to ripple-effect challenges for refugees. Often, anti-refugee perceptions are based on forms of xenophobia rather than reality.

The refugee crisis is not just a humanitarian one, but also a development crisis. Refugee issues and solutions intersect. Without policies to access services, refugees must rely on shadow economies. When refugee support is unregulated, human trafficking, illegal drug networks and black markets accelerate, fanning anti-refugee sentiments. Refugees, however, are human capital. Providing them work opportunities is vital for their integration and self-reliance so that they do not burden their hosts. Providing legal work rights helps cut the cost of welfare programmes and minimizes the likelihood of refugees taking to illegal activities.

Systems thinking in public policy design can recognize the existence of refugees and grant them access to essential services. Valid IDs or public- private partnerships can facilitate this. Canadas refugee policy has supported 40,000 Afghan refugees since 2021 (a large resettlement programme), where newcomers are protected through public-private pathways.

Opportunities to acquire local languages can open doors in labour markets and enable refugees to participate fully in a countrys society and economy. In Italy, refugees must have a minimum B1-level of Italian or their residency applications may be denied for insufficient social inclusion.

The Global Compact on Refugees, the most recent such framework, promotes integration through international cooperation. At least some integration holds the key to the refugee crisis and this can be achieved better through local policies than international frameworks. Integration can only occur when opportunities exist to contribute. Local integration policies, refugee well-being and host community perceptions are inter-connected. Therefore, policies that address these intersecting streams can facilitate sustainable solutions to refugee challenges within local contexts as well as aid in solving one of the biggest crises of our times.

The author is a senior research fellow at the Jindal School of Government and Public Policy.
With covid having exposed Indias public health system, particularly at the primary healthcare level, there is unanimity that the countrys health sector needs extensive infrastructure support. At the same time, legislative bodies across India have debated extensively the need for a Right to Health bill to expressly prioritize health concerns, be it private member bills introduced by my fellow Members of Parliament or the bill with a similar intention passed in the state of Rajasthan.

As recently as July 2020, the Supreme Court expanded the definition of the Right to Life and said that it is the duty of the state to ensure the right to health," thus making it inalienable from an individuals life and dignity. Moreover, Article 47 of the Directive Principles also call for the provision of maternity relief" and public assistance in case of disablement." In addition to these provisions, India has also ratified several international treaties.

Not to forget, India has more than 100 healthcare schemes run by the government, covering different facets of healthcare. Then how is introducing a Right to Health bill of any use?

Despite existing provisions in the Constitution, Indias healthcare system faces significant challenges. As per information given to Parliament, Indias doctor-to-patient ratio is about 1:1,511 for allopathic doctors, against the WHO norm of 1:1,000. Further, the nurse-to-population ratio is dire at 1:670 against the norm of 1:300. Even the National Family Health Survey-5 (2019-21) reveals that 49% of Indian households do not use government facilities due to long waiting times. Lastly, out-of-pocket expenditure as a proportion of total health expenditure is still very high at 48.2% (Economic Survey 2022).

This shows that the real issue is a demand-supply mismatch. One of the main reasons why healthcare has always been a longstanding issue is Indias lack of infrastructure capacity, both at the physical and human resource levels. So, even if a Right to Health provision is introduced, it will create demand that cannot be met with a meagre supply of health services. This would render the right unenforceable and undeliverable.

It is concerning that even though our infrastructure shortage is so evident, the health outlay in the Union Budget for 2023-24 took a backseat, with only a 3.3% increase in budgeted expenditure. Further, there has been an 11.6% reduction in the revised estimate of 2022-23 versus the budgeted estimate of that year. Thus, not only is our healthcare infrastructure undernourished, it is also understaffed and overburdened. In such a situation, simply pushing ahead with legislation to protect citizens right to health will achieve little.

Against these fundamental challenges, the Right to Health enactment in Rajasthan envisages setting up of health authorities at the state and district levels to monitor the delivery of the right. However, beyond the initial concerns of doctors, there are major apprehensions regarding the protection of citizens data and their privacy as well as the states fiscal capacity. For example, under the bill, district health authorities are required to upload action-taken reports on a web portal for complaints. It does not specify who will have access to the report on the web portal, risking the patients right to privacy. Most importantly, implementing the Right to Health would increase the financial obligation of an already financially stressed state. It does not provide for how the demands or complaints of citizens shall be addressed in such cases.

Odishas approach has been to ramp up its health infrastructure over the years by transforming primary health centres, introducing a Mo Hospital programme and opening new medical colleges to increase the capacity of healthcare staff. The states Biju Swasthya Kalyan Yojana is a prime example; it aims to ensure universal healthcare. It is designed to provide universal healthcare to every family, whether above or below the poverty line, including indoor and out-patients (missing under the Ayushman Bharat insurance scheme), who can walk into a government hospital and avail free services. Even for patients outside Odisha, more than 200 hospitals have been impanelled. All this was achieved by making provisions in the state budget and not leaving the responsibility to insurance companies.

Unfortunately, health as a policy intervention has always been measured in terms of outputs and not outcomes. We have established hospitals with inadequate staff (be it doctors, paramedics or nurses) that have only made the gaps in health services across the country more visible. Thus, regardless of intent, there is little that a separate Right to Health bill can achieve in terms of guaranteeing healthcare to citizens. This is because the resources needed to set up this kind of health infrastructure, both physical and human, have not been available in the country.

As an emerging economy, India must focus on providing universal healthcare through public infrastructure and chart out a systematic framework to achieve it, instead of persisting with an insurance-based model or adopting a right-based health model without adequate means to fulfil such a promise.

These are the authors personal views.

Amar Patnaik is a member of the Rajya Sabha from Odisha; a former CAG bureaucrat and an advocate.
Ajit Pawar rise in the National Democratic Alliance (NDA) with the backing of at least 36 other Nationalist Congress Party (NCP) MLAs may have put Eknath Shinde in an unpleasant situation as he had broken the Maha Vikas Aghadi (MVA) government with the help of his 40 MLAs, citing the Shiv Senas alliance with the NCP.

With Ajit Pawars joining the Maharashtra government, not only alters the power dynamics in the Maharashtra government but also ends the exclusive alliance the Shiv Sena enjoyed, ultimately holding the reins of the state.

Eknath Shinde had orchestrated the coup back in 2022 with the support of 40 MLAs, plunging the Shiv Sena into a crisis which resulted in the downfall of the MVA government. The Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) has 105 MLAs in the Maharashtra Assembly and the support of 10 Independents.

Eknath Shindes defection, with 40 Shiv Sena MLAs, pushed the numbers against the coalition and cleared the path for the formation of the BJP-led alliance government.

A year later, it is now Ajit Pawar who had led the same mutiny, while making sure Sharad Pawar, an astute politician, doesnt get a whiff of the broiling rebellion.

With Ajit Pawar switching sides with the claimed support of at least 36 MLAs, the BJP doesnt have to solely depend on the Eknath Shinde faction to stay at the helm of the power in Maharashtra.

The developments also put in question Eknath Shindes ethics concerning the newly formed alliance since his rebellion was based on the Shiv Senas unnatural" alliance with the NCP and the Congress goons". As he camped in Guwahati with his supporters, Eknath Shinde relentlessly criticised Uddhav Thackeray, accusing him of betraying the very ideology upon which Shiv Sena was founded.

Imperative for Shiv Sena to walk out of unnatural alliance with NCP and Congress to save party and party workers. Shiv Sena and Shiv Sainiks weakened even as ruling alliance partners Congress and NCP got boost," Eknath Shinde said.

Eknath Shinde factions Deepak Kesarkar had said, The MLAs had told party president Uddhav Thackeray that they should stay with the party with whom they had contested election [BJP]....When so many people voice the same opinion, there must be some substance in it."

The stance has now changed!

EKNATH SHINDE WILL LOSE CM POST, OPPOSITION BELIEVES

The Uddhav Thackeray team, meanwhile, believes that Eknath Shindes difficulties will only increase and that he will be replaced by Ajit Pawar.

A Shiv Sena (UBT) mouthpiece 'Saamana' editorial has claimed that Ajit Pawar has not gone there for the deputy CM's post. Chief Minister Eknath Shinde and rebel MLAs of the Sena would be disqualified soon and Pawar would be coronated".

Their so-called Hindutva is now over. The day is not very far when Shinde and his rebel colleagues will be disqualified," it read.

Sanjay Raut has also claimed that Eknath Shinde will lose the CM's post. Today I am saying this in front of the camera, the Chief Minister of Maharashtra is going to change. Eknath Shinde is being removed. Eknath Shinde and the 16 MLAs are going to be disqualified," Sanjay Raut said.

Senior Congress leader Prithviraj Chavan has claimed he has information that the BJP has promised Ajit Pawar the post of Maharashtra chief minister. Just bargaining was going on over what he [Ajit] should be getting. As per our information, he has been given a promise of chief minister's post by pushing Eknath Shinde aside with the help of Assembly speaker's decision [on disqualification of 16 Shiv Sena MLAs]" he said.
Maharashtra Chief Minister Eknath Shinde and his Deputies spent much of Monday assuaging ruffled feathers and easing the unrest within their party ranks. While Ajit Pawar met with his BJP counterpart to discuss portfolio allocations, the CM held a closed-door meeting with MLAs and party workers to discuss the new developments and offer solutions.

As Maharashtra gears up for a Cabinet expansion, Shiv Sena leaders have already conveyed their unrest over the recent developments. The CM also paid tribute to his mentor Anand Dighe and Sena founder late Bal Thackeray during a Guru Purnima event that was attended by several Cabinet Ministers before.

Going by the seniority of its leaders, they will mostly get plum portfolios, which is our concern as those leaders will favour their party workers and use the funds to benefit them. This was exactly the reason why we decided to go with Shinde and revolt against our leader Uddhav Thackeray a year ago. If similar treatment takes places this time also, some of us will struggle to get re-elected," said a leader from Shinde's Shiv Sena.

Following the rebellion in June last year, Sena MLAs had incidentally claimed that they were not getting funds for their constituencies. Most of the allocations, they contended were being cornered by NCP legislators since Ajit Pawar was the deputy CM and held the finance portfolio in the MVA dispensation.

Meanwhile, the newly re-appointed Deputy CM met with Devendra Fadnavis to discuss the allocation of cabinet portfolios and legal aspects pertaining to the new alliance.

The allocation of portfolios would be finalised by Tuesday evening," the source said. In the past, Ajit Pawar held portfolios such as water resources department, power and finance. Currently, all the three portfolios are with Fadnavis, who also holds charge of the state home department," a source close to Ajit Pawar told news agency PTI.

(With inputs from agencies)
Union Minister G Kishan Reddy has slammed Congress leader Rahul Gandhi for his 'KCR's remote control with Modi' remark and said that the latter had gone overboard after electoral success in Karnataka.

While addressing a public meeting in Khammam, Rahul Gandhi had also referred Bharat Rashtra Samithi (BRS) as the "B team of the BJP" in Telangana. Reddy also stated that the BJP would not form an alliance with either the BRS or the Congress to compete in the upcoming elections in Telangana. Also Read: Opposition leaders flag corruption as NCP leaders join Maharashtra govt, Ajit Pawar-led group rebuts claim "Congress fought the election in Telangana by compromising with BRS. We will not ally with BRS or Congress. He (Rahul Gandhi) is going overboard and speaking, just because they won one election in Karnataka," said Union Minister G Kishan Reddy. Moreover, BRS leader Dasoju Sravan too has slammed Gandhi's remark and called it "baseless". "Rahul Gandhi's speech in the Khammam meeting was a bundle of lies, and he made baseless allegations, probably based on the script prepared by the Congress workers in Telangana. This is very unfortunate, said BRS leader Dasoju Sravan.

Here's what Rahul Gandhi said:

Earlier in the day, while addressing a public meeting in Khammam, Rahul Gandhi described the state's ruling party as "BJP's B Team" and said we have defeated BJP in Karnataka, and similarly, we will defeat their B team, BRS, in Telangana.

"In Telangana, it is a fight between the Congress and the BJP's B team, BRS. Like we defeated the BJP in Karnataka, similarly, we'll defeat their B team in Telangana. During the opposition meeting in Delhi, we made it clear to the opposition that Congress would not join the meeting if TRS (now BRS) was part of it. We can never make a settlement with the BJP's B team," said Congress leader Rahul Gandhi.

In a dig at the BRS, Rahul Gandhi proposed a new name for the party, calling it the BJP Rishtedar Samiti, drawing a comparison between the BRS and the BJP government at the national level.

Gandhi also criticized the party chief and Telangana Chief Minister K Chandrashekhar Rao and accused him of shattering the dreams of farmers, laborers, and the oppressed in the state.

"TRS has changed its came to BRS, the BJP Rishtedar Samiti," Rahul Gandhi said speaking at the Telangana Janagarjana Sabha at Khamamm.

Highlighting how the BRS has paired up with the BJP, he said, "In the Parliament, Congress stood against BJP, but TRS and CM KCR became BJP's B team. TRS extended its support to BJP for the Farmers Bill. PM Modi has CM KCR's remote control, therefore he does whatever is asked from him."

Meanwhile, Telangana elections are scheduled to be held later this year.

(With inputs from ANI)
Congress General Secretary KC Venugopal on 3 July said that the date for the next opposition meeting will be declared soon. Giving more details on it, he added that the meeting will certainly take place before Monsoon Session of the Parliament begins.

The monsoon session of Parliament will commence from 20 July this year and will continue till 20 August. While speaking to news agency ANI, Venugopal said, We will declare the date very soon. We are talking to all political parties and the date will be announced without any delay. The meeting will certainly take place before Monsoon Session begins." NCP crisis LIVE: He also spoke about Ajit Pawar joining the Maharashtra government and said that him joining the Sena-BJP led government is not going to affect opposition unity as this is NCP's issue. He added, PM Modi made a big allegation recently against the NCP leaders for corruption and now we saw this drama. It is a clear sponsored game of ED and their agencies. It will not affect MVA. We will fight against BJP more aggressively." Also Read: Maharashtra Politics: A look at Ajit Pawar's many revolts against Sharad Pawar-led NCP "This is not going to affect opposition unity, this is NCP's issue. Sharad Pawar is the tallest leader of the party and he will be able to handle the situation. Some leaders changing the party does not mean that the supporters of the party and other members will go with them," he told ANI.

Earlier it was reported that the second opposition was scheduled to held on 13-14 July in Bengaluru. JD(U) leader KC Tyagi told Times of India that the dates for the meet have been postponed. He told the daily that the next opposition party meet will be held after the monsoon session of the parliament. This came a day after Ajit Pawar turned rebel and joined the Shinde-BJP led Maharashtra government.

Some sources also told TOI that the proposed meeting was postponed due to upcoming monsoon session of Parliament of Bihar from 10-14 July and Karnataka from 3-14 July.

Speaking on the political crisis in Maharashtra, KC Tyagi slammed the BJP for the crossover of Ajit Pawar-led NCP faction in Maharashtra and said that the move will have no impact on opposition unity nationally.

Dubbing the episode as cowardly and shameful", JD(U) chief spokesperson and special advisor K C Tyagi maintained the development in Maharashtra smacked of fear" instilled by the party's supreme leader, Bihar Chief Minister Nitish Kumar, into the BJP by uniting the opposition.

Meanwhile, the monsoon session of Parliament also comes at a time when PM Modi made a strong pitch for a Uniform Civil Code and amid moves to step up consultations on the issue. The session is expected to commence in the old Parliament Building and later move to the new building, sources said. The new building was inaugurated by Modi on May 28.

During the session, the central government is likely to bring a bill to replace the Government of National Capital Territory of Delhi (Amendment) Ordinance.

The Ordinance effectively nullified the Supreme Court judgment that gave the Delhi government greater legislative and administrative control over "services" matter.

The National Research Foundation Bill, cleared by the Union Cabinet, is also likely to be introduced. The proposed foundation will be a new funding agency to bolster the country's research competence in areas of science and technology.

(With inputs from agencies)
Nationalist Congress Party chief Sharad Pawar sacked Praful Patel as the party's working president and ordered the removal his name from the NCP member register on Monday. Fellow rebel MLA Sunil Tatkare was also removed from the party for anti-party activities. The development came less than a day after his nephew Ajit Pawar led a nine people rebellion against his party.

Senior NCP leader Ajit Pawar joined the Eknath Shinde-led Maharashtra government as a Deputy Chief Minister on Sunday, sparking buzz about a vertical split within the party. As both groups laying claim to the party as a whole working president Supriya Sule had called for their disqualification.

They have indulged in anti-party activitiesopenly made statements to this effect before the media and have acted in complete violation of the Party's direction and principles. You may further be informed that this decision of the two MPs to support the nine MLAs has been taken without the permission of the Party President and without taking all members of the party into confidence," Sule wrote to Sharad Pawar.

The developments however went wholly ignored by the duo, with Patel announcing the appointment of Lok Sabha MP Sunil Tatkare as the party's state unit chief soon after their expulsion.

Deputy Chief Minister Ajit Pawar was present at the press meet and reiterated claims that he had the support of "maximum" NCP legislators. He said that he had given a letter to the Assembly Speaker, seeking disqualification of party MLAs Jayant Patil and Jitendra Awhad from the House.

Asked who was the NCP's national head, Ajit Pawar however shot back, "The party national president is Sharad Pawar. Have you forgotten?"

(With inputs from agencies)
Uttar Pradesh Chief Minister Yogi Adityanath on Sunday said that in the nine years of Prime Minister Narendra Modi -led BJP government, India has set new benchmarks for progress and prosperity. "Now the entire world recognises India's ability to manage the biggest crises of the present," said Chief Minister Yogi Adityanath on Sunday.

"Not only has the prestige of India and its people increased on global forums, but the attitude of the people of the world towards India has also changed. The whole world today sees Prime Minister Narendra Modi as a troubleshooter." Yogi said addressing a gathering in Gorakhpur on Sunday.

The Chief Minister said that a new India has emerged under the leadership of PM Modi. "A new enthusiasm is seen in people in all the countries that PM Modi visits. The whole world is eager to congratulate PM Modi for the kind of leadership he gave to the country during the Corona crisis while upholding freedom of expression and democratic values. PM Modi provided free check-ups, treatment, and vaccines for all the citizens of the country. As many as 220 crore doses of vaccine were given along with maintenance allowances to the needy."

The Chief Minister said that the people of the world, who earlier believed that India could not do it, now believe that India alone can do it. From infrastructure development to internal and external security, through poor welfare schemes, Prime Minister Narendra Modi has brought about massive changes in the lives of the citizens of the country, he pointed out.

Referring to the Sukanya Samriddhi Yojana launched by PM Modi through the Postal Department, the Chief Minister said that the scheme will help achieve the goal of the slogan 'Beti Bachao, Beti Padhao'. Mentioning the importance of the newly inaugurated Parcel Hub, CM Yogi said that it is a sign of the Postal Department's growing popularity and commitment to public aspirations.

Chief Minister Yogi Adityanath also honoured the beneficiaries of the Sukanya Samriddhi Yojana, Mahila Samman Bachat Patra, and Deendayal Sparsh Scholarship Scheme on the occasion.
Twitter's decision to impose a temporary limit on the number of posts users can read on its platform could potentially hinder the advertising endeavors of the company's newly appointed Chief Executive, Linda Yaccarino, according to experts in the marketing industry.

On Saturday, Musk made an announcement stating that Twitter will implement a restriction on the number of tweets users can read per day. The purpose behind this move is to discourage excessive data scraping and manipulation of the platform's systems. In response, users shared screenshots indicating that they were unable to view any tweets, including those from corporate advertisers, once they reached the specified limit.

The decision made by Elon Musk to impose limitations on tweet consumption poses a challenge for Twitter's new CEO, Linda Yaccarino, who joined the company last month and previously served as the advertising chief at NBCUniversal.

According to Reuters, industry experts in the advertising field noted that this move hampers Yaccarino's efforts to rebuild relationships with advertisers who had withdrawn from the platform following Musk's acquisition of Twitter last year. The Financial Times reported on Yaccarino's endeavors to mend ties with advertisers in a recent article.

The limits are "remarkably bad" for users and advertisers already shaken by the "chaos" Musk has brought to the platform, Mike Proulx, research director at Forrester, said on Sunday.

"The advertiser trust deficit that Linda Yaccarino needs to reverse just got even bigger. And it cannot be reversed based on her industry credibility alone," he said.

According to Lou Paskalis, the former marketing executive at Bank of America and founder of AJL Advisory, Linda Yaccarino represents Elon Musk's final and most promising opportunity to restore ad revenue and enhance the value of Twitter.

"This move signals to the marketplace that he's not capable of empowering her to save him from himself," he said.

Following the implementation of the new restrictions, Elon Musk stated that initially, unverified accounts were limited to 600 posts per day, while new unverified accounts were limited to 300. Verified accounts, on the other hand, had a daily limit of 6,000 posts, as mentioned in a post by Musk on the platform.

However, a few hours later, Musk announced an update, raising the cap to 10,000 posts per day for verified users, 1,000 posts per day for unverified accounts, and 500 posts per day for new unverified users.

Despite multiple requests for comment and inquiries about the duration of these restrictions, a spokesperson from Twitter has not yet responded.

Jasmine Enberg, a principal analyst at Insider Intelligence, expressed concern that implementing limitations on user viewing could have a "catastrophic" impact on the advertising business of the platform.

"This certainly isn't going to make it any easier to convince advertisers to return. It's a hard sell already to bring advertisers back," she said.

Shortly after Twitter implemented a requirement for users to log into their accounts in order to view tweets, the cap on tweet consumption was introduced. Elon Musk referred to this account login requirement as a "temporary emergency measure" aimed at combating data scraping.

Previously, Musk had expressed his dissatisfaction with artificial intelligence companies such as OpenAI, the entity behind ChatGPT, for utilizing Twitter's data to train their advanced language models.

AI companies utilizing information from platforms like Reddit and prominent news media outlets to train their AI models have faced objections, with some organizations even seeking fees for the use of their data.

According to Kai-Cheng Yang, a researcher at Indiana University in Bloomington, the imposed limitations on Twitter seem to be successful in preventing third parties, including search engines, from scraping data as easily as they did in the past. Yang added that while it might still be possible to scrape data, the methods required would be more intricate and less efficient.

(With inputs from Reuters)
When a mother does her best, she expects a well-behaved child. But for top-dog hyena moms, a hell-raiser is preferred.

Alpha females give a hormone boost to their developing cubs, making them more aggressive when fighting for food and increasing their chances of survival, according to a study in the April 27 issue of the journal Nature.

The extra hormones also inspire young males to mount females early and often, giving them a better shot at performing their tricky mating dance correctly down the road. [Top 10 Swingers of the Animal Kingdom]

You won't believe how hard the act is, and why.

Hormone surge

Unlike most mammalian societies, female spotted hyenas run the show and are significantly more muscular and aggressive than males. After studying hyenas in Kenya for nearly two decades, researchers discovered that in the final stages of pregnancy, high-ranking females provide their developing offspring with higher levels of androgena male sex hormone associated with aggressionthan lower-ranking mothers provide to their developing young.

Humans aren't the only ones who have fun between the sheets. Other animals often have steamier and more bizarre sex lives than us. From penis spines and detachable penises to tiny orgies and morbid endings, sex in the animal kingdom can be wild.

Animal Sex Quiz

Aggressiveness is a good attribute for a creature living in a society where 40 to 60 individuals scrap over food, and especially for females requiring extra energy for developing offspring.

By infusing her developing young with androgen, the mother increases the likelihood that her genetic information will survive.

'Imagine giving birth through a penis'

But providing the extra hormones takes a toll on the mother. The dose of androgen that she received from her own alpha mother damages her ovaries, making it difficult to conceive.

[The Weirdest Animal Penises]

It also causes female reproductive organs to grow. A lot. Her clitoris, which contains the birthing canal, protrudes 7 inches from her body.

"Imagine giving birth through a penis," said study co-author Kay Holekamp of Michigan State University. "It's really weird genitalia, but it seems to work. Although giving birth through a 'penis' isn't a trivial problem."

The clitoris' birth canal is only an inch in diameter, and the tissue often tears as a 2-pound cub squeezes through the narrow opening. The rip can be fatal, as evidenced by the high death rate for first-time mothers.

Practice makes perfect

Because of the female's awkward genitalia, successful mating for hyenas is tricky to pull off. It takes careful positioning for the male to crouch behind her and somehow get his penis to point up and backwards to enter her clitoris.

"Males need practice. After a couple of months of practicing, they get it lined up just right," Holekamp told LiveScience.

Since the sons of alpha females are born hyper-aggressive, they start trying to mount females at just a few months old, giving them a better shot at sealing the deal later in life.
Chattanooga Goodwill leaders next to a new deposit box | Goodwill has always relied on the goodwill of the community to provide donations of goods. In 1962 Chattanooga Goodwill began placing boxes all over the city so contributors wouldnt have to wait for their donations to be picked up from their homes. Now you can find Donation Xpress locations next to each of Goodwills 16 area stores.
Independence Day is this Tuesday. If you are planning to celebrate with fireworks, it is important to know how to stay safe.
The Fort Oglethorpe Police Department is requesting the public's assistance to identify the person shown in connection to the armed robbery Friday morning at Cloud Springs Rd. and Scruggs Road.
A man from Ireland has been arrested on suspicion of the murder of an Irish woman in Spain.

The woman was found with fatal injuries lying on a floor in a hotel in Salou, a coastal resort town south of Barcelona.

Police were called to the hotel at 10.30pm local time on Sunday night.

The man was arrested at the scene.

Officers from the Mossos dEsquadra force said the man had sustained some injuries.

Police said emergency services made attempts to resuscitate the woman, but she was later declared dead.

Tanaiste and foreign affairs minister Micheal Martin described the incident as shocking.

He said consular assistance was being provided to the family of the Irishwoman killed.

Its shocking and particularly the fact that another woman has died as a result of a very violent attack, by all appearances, he told RTE Radio One.

Mr Martin said he did not yet have all the details around what had happened.

But it is very shocking news that a young woman should be killed in a violent manner like is and we await further news in respect of that, he added.

Our department officials are providing consular assistance there to the family and to do everything we can to help those impacted by that terrible event in Salou in Spain.

A Garda spokesman said: An Garda Siochana is aware of an alleged incident that took place in the Spanish town of Salou involving Irish citizen/s on Sunday July 2 2023.

As this is an investigation led by the Spanish authorities, An Garda Siochana has no further comment at this time.
THE ALZHEIMER Society of Ireland (The ASI) has called on the government to invest in community support as there is a huge geographical inequality in dementia-service provision in Ireland.

To meet the growing needs of thousands of people across the country, The ASI has called on the government to invest 21.3 million in vital community support, care services and social protection to meet the growing needs of thousands of people across the country.

The recommendations are contained in The ASIs Pre-Budget Submission 2024 Dementia Cant Wait  Dementia Supports to Empower Lives, which calls for State investment to address difficulties in meeting a rising demand for dementia services.

https://www.limerickleader.ie/news/national-news/1239156/irish-man-arrested-on-suspicion-of-murder-of-irish-woman-in-spain.html

Alongside the launch of the submission, they announced their initial findings of The ASIs 2023 National Survey  User Experience of Dementia in Ireland, which found that 38% of Dementia Carers are struggling with their caring responsibilities and that 27% of people living with dementia often feel lonely.

43% of carers reported that they have visited a healthcare professional in the last month on account of their own health. 43% rated their mental health, and 34% their physical health as Poor / Fair.

63% of families in receipt of Home Care said they have experienced a reduction or delay in Home Care due to a staffing crisis. Many are regularly receiving significantly fewer hours than they are allocated as there are not enough staff to deliver them. Similarly, families in certain areas cannot receive any Home Care as there are no staff available.

The ASIs Head of Advocacy, Research and Public Affairs, Cormac Cahill, said demand for dementia services is growing, and home care is in crisis  which places an urgency on the government to address these needs in Budget 2024.

The ASI is urging the Government to honour the Programme for Government, the National Dementia Strategy and to bring the Model of Care for Dementia in Ireland from paper to practice. There is a huge geographical inequality in dementia-service provision in Ireland. Its a postcode lottery.

He added: Approximately two-thirds of people with dementia live at home and their quality of life is greatly impacted by availability of community supports. We really appreciate the support that we have received from this Government (and a very positive relationship with Minister Mary Butler who has been a champion of the needs of people affected by dementia) and our funders, but the truth is that more funding is now required to meet growing need and to ensure that people living with dementia and their families are not short of vital services.

The inequity in services was further highlighted by Kathleen Farrell, who is living with Lewy Body Dementia, and said: Everybody should be entitled to the same support no matter where they are in the country. We should be able to stay in our own homes if that is what we want. Time is not our friend; we cannot wait any longer.
Crime

By Chris Boyle Published: July 03 2023

Christopher Anderson shot and killed a 21-year-old man and shot another surviving victim in Freeport; Defendant, in a separate incident, fired shots at police.

Nassau County District Attorney Anne T. Donnelly announced that an alleged Bloods gang members pleaded guilty to the murder of a 21-year-old man in Freeport and attempted murder of another surviving victim in November 2020, and separately, to attempted murder and weapons charges for shooting at four police officers during a car chase in December 2020.

Christopher Anderson a/k/a/ CK, 27, of Roosevelt, pleaded guilty yesterday before Judge Howard Sturim to Murder in the Second Degree (an A-I felony) and Attempted Murder in the Second Degree (a B violent felony) for a shooting on November 28, 2020, at Martin Luther King Park in Freeport. He also pleaded guilty to Attempted Murder in the First Degree (an A-I felony) and Criminal Possession of a Weapon in the Second Degree (a C violent felony) in satisfaction of the indictment for shooting at four police officers on December 29, 2020. The defendant is due back in court for sentencing on August 30, 2023. Anderson is expected to be sentenced to 22 years to life in prison.

Christopher Anderson callously opened fired on Taffarie Haughton and another teenage victim in the middle of the afternoon in Martin Luther King Park because they were in the wrong place at the wrong time during a Bloods gang meeting, said DA Donnelly. Just a month later, almost to the day, the defendant led Hempstead Police detectives on a high-speed pursuit through the streets of Roosevelt. The chase ended in a hail of gunfire and Anderson fled the scene. Thankfully the officers were unharmed, but Taffarie sadly lost his life because of this defendants wanton violence. We will continue to stamp out gang violence in our communities so that no more innocent lives are lost.

DA Donnelly said that, according to the charges, on November 28, 2020, 21-year-old Taffarie Haughton and a second 19-year-old victim were at Martin Luther King Jr. Park in Freeport. The victims entered the park bathroom and were allegedly followed by several Bloods gang members who were attending a gang meeting in the park.

When Haughton and the other victim attempted to leave the park, the exit was allegedly blocked by numerous members of the gang, including the defendant. Anderson and his co-defendant, Floyd McNeil, then allegedly began firing on the victims, striking them both.

Haughton was struck twice, once in the chest, piercing his lung and heart, and once in the left foot. He was taken to Nassau University Medical Center where he was pronounced deceased.

The other victim was struck once in the shoulder and taken to Mount Sinai South Nassau Hospital where he was treated for his injuries.

Seven shell casings were recovered from the scene.

Anderson and McNeil were both arrested on June 13, 2022, by detectives of the Nassau County Police Departments Homicide Squad.

Floyd McNeil, a/k/a DOT and Diddy DOT, 27, of Hempstead was charged with Murder in the Second Degree (an A-I felony); Attempted Murder in the Second Degree (a B violent felony); Attempted Assault in the First Degree (a C violent felony); and two counts of Criminal Possession of a Weapon in the Second Degree (a C violent felony).

The case again McNeil is pending. McNeil faces up to 50 years to life in prison if convicted.

McNeil is currently serving a sentence of 25 years after being convicted at trial in June 2022 of Attempted Murder in the Second Degree (a B violent felony); Assault in the First Degree (a B violent felony); Criminal Use of a Firearm (a B violent felony); and two counts of Criminal Possession of a Weapon in the Second Degree (a C violent felony) for another September 2019 shooting in Hempstead.

In a separate incident, on December 29, 2020, at approximately 8:14 p.m., four Hempstead Police Detectives pursued Andersons vehicle with lights and sirens activated for approximately one and a half miles through Roosevelt as he weaved in and out of traffic and drove at high rates of speed.

Anderson pulled into a driveway near Pennywood Avenue and tried to exit the vehicle as officers approached within feet of the defendant.

The defendant then fired three shots in the officers direction and missed. Officers returned fire and Anderson fled the scene unharmed. He was arrested on December 30, 2020.

The cases are being prosecuted by Senior Litigation Counsel Michelle Lewisohn and Senior Litigation Counsel Ania Pulaski of the Homicide Bureau. Anderson is represented by Michael Elbert, Esq. McNeil is represented by Don Rollock, Esq.
Local News

By Chris Boyle Published: July 03 2023

Fees for State Civil Service Exams Waived to Promote Equitable Access to Careers in State Government.

Governor Kathy Hochul has announced that civil service exam application fees are now waived for all New York State civil service exams, beginning on July 1, 2023 through December 2025. The removal of fees for all State exams was one of several actions included in the FY 2024 Budget to help modernize New York's public workforce.

"As our state continues to grapple with an affordability crisis, civil service exam fees place yet another burden on New Yorkers - particularly the passionate New Yorkers seeking meaningful careers in state service," Governor Hochul said. "By waiving these fees, my administration is standing by its commitment to modernizing New York's workforce and lowering barriers to ensure that our civil servants reflect the rich diversity of our state."

Department of Civil Service Commissioner Timothy R. Hogues said, "Removing exam application fees for all state civil service exams is one of the many proactive steps that New York State is taking to help make a career in public service more accessible for all. At the Department of Civil Service, we are making improvements to eliminate barriers to entry for civil service jobs and transforming the State's approach to meeting our workforce needs to help recruit and retain a diverse and talented workforce that will serve all New Yorkers. I encourage all individuals to consider applying for exams that you qualify for to start the pathway to a rewarding career that offers many benefits with New York State."

Civil service exam fees can serve as a substantial barrier to entering public service, particularly for candidates from traditionally marginalized communities. While fee waivers previously existed for veterans, as well as individuals that are unemployed or receiving public assistance, the majority of test-takers were required to pay an exam fee.

The removal of exam application fees for state civil service exams is one of several actions taken as part of the FY 2024 Budget to modernize New York's public workforce and streamline government operations. Additional actions include offering civil service exams on an ongoing basis at 12 state-operated testing centers to be established across the state and expanding the state's existing 55-B hiring program to increase job opportunities for individuals with disabilities. Together, these actions reaffirm the Governor's commitment to making government work better for New Yorkers.

The FY 2024 Budget builds on several initiatives announced in Governor Hochul's 2023 State of the State address to strengthen the public workforce and government operations. The Governor previously announced the creation of Civil Service Specialist positions at Department of Labor Career Centers to serve as liaisons between jobseekers and the Department of Civil Service, as well as other state agencies, to help candidates better navigate the Civil Service Merit System and provide them with greater support in navigating available job opportunities across state government. The Governor also announced a multi-faceted marketing campaign to raise awareness of the many diverse career paths available across public service and the unique benefits of employment with New York State.

The Governor also recently announced thousands of state jobs are open and available for immediate hiring in the health and human services fields across ten state agencies as part of the Hiring for Emergency Limited Placement Program to help address the statewide workforce shortage in critical health and safety titles across state government.

To learn more about working for the State of New York and how to take the next step in pursuing a rewarding career in public service, please visit the Department of Civil Service website and follow the Department on Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn.
(Alliance News) - AstraZeneca PLC on Monday saw shares fall, as test results suggested a new lung cancer drug may be less successful than hoped, despite being generally positive.

Shares in the Cambridge, England-based pharmaceutical company closed 4.9% lower at 10,719.10 pence each in London on Monday, following results from its phase three trial for Datopotamab deruxtecan with Tokyo-based partner, Daiichi Sankyo Co Ltd.

Daiichi Sankyo shares closed 0.6% higher at JPY4,578.00 each in Tokyo.

The companies said the conjugate showed "statistically significant improvement for the dual primary endpoint of progression-free survival" when compared to docetaxel, the current standard of care chemotherapy.

Susan Galbraith, executive vice president of AstraZeneca's Oncology research and development unit said: "These first phase III trial results from the datopotamab deruxtecan clinical programme provide compelling evidence for the potential role this TROP2-directed antibody drug conjugate can play in treating patients with lung cancer."

However, for the dual primary endpoint of overall survival, data were not mature, though an early trend was observed in favour of the conjugate compared to docetaxel.

"Data from the TROPION-Lung01 have been eagerly awaited and we generally expect this result to be viewed positively albeit in the absence of this being described as 'clinically meaningful' and the safety events noted, we would like to see data in detail before drawing any firm conclusions", commented analysts from Shore Capital Markets.

While the drug's safety profile was consistent with prior trials, some Grade Five events - i.e. deaths - were observed.

Ahead of this data readout, street expectations were high, analysts noted. This is the second antibody drug conjugate that Astra Zeneca has been developing with Daiichi Sankyo.

"Whilst this 'Lung01 trial is only for later stage lung cancer (2/3L NSCLC), this readout has been viewed as an opportunity to seed expectations for several other Phase III trials in earlier settings of the disease which have recently initiated. The big picture view is that dato' could potentially replace mainstay, systemic chemotherapy," Shore Capital analysts added.

TROP2 is a protein highly expressed in a large majority of lung cancers.

By Holly Beveridge, Alliance News reporter

Comments and questions to newsroom@alliancenews.com

Copyright 2023 Alliance News Ltd. All Rights Reserved.
(Alliance News) - Ireland's manufacturing sector saw its sharpest deterioration in over three years in June, as factories continued to cut back production in response to weak orders, according to survey results released by S&P Global on Monday.

The AIB manufacturing purchasing managers' index fell to 47.3 points in June from 47.5 in May. Remaining below the neutral 50-point mark, it was the fourth month in a row of contraction in activity for Irish factories.

AIB Chief Economist Oliver Mangan said: "Irish manufacturing continued to be hampered by subdued demand, including in overseas markets. This was reflected in new orders falling for a fourth month in-a-row, with export orders contracting for a thirteenth successive month. The weakness in demand, meant that production continued to be scaled back, and is now at its lowest level since early 2021."

Mangan added that employment fell for the first time in seven months, with the rate of decline the sharpest in almost three years.

On a positive note, he said: "Despite the more challenging market conditions, Irish manufacturers continue to be optimistic about the future, with confidence rising to a three month high."

The PMI was compiled by S&P Global from the responses to a survey sent to purchasing managers to about 250 manufacturers in Ireland between June 12 and 23.

By Tom Budszus, Alliance News reporter

Comments and questions to newsroom@alliancenews.com

Copyright 2023 Alliance News Ltd. All Rights Reserved.
(Alliance News) - Longboat Energy PLC on Monday said it has acquired an interest in two initial production assets located on the Norwegian Continental Shelf, funded by an investment from a new Japanese partner.

Shares in Longboat Energy were down 7.5% to 23.13 pence each in London on Monday after midday.

The Norway and Malaysia-focused full-cycle exploration and production company said it acquired a 4.8% unitised interest in the Statfjord Ost unit and a 4.3% unitised interest in the Sygna unit, together referred to as the Statfjord satellites.

Longboat subsidiary Longboat Energy Norge AS bought the two assets from Inpex Idemitsu Norge AS for USD12.8 million.

The acquisition will represent long-term cash flow, with the fields expected to produce until the late 2030s, Longboat Energy said. This includes production of around 300 barrels of oil equivalent per day net to Longboat Norge, based on figures to April 30.

Longboat added that there are audited 2P reserves of 1.6 million barrels of oil equivalent net to Longboat Energy Norge, of which approximately 77% is oil and natural gas liquids.

Longboat Energy said production is anticipated to approximately double in 2024 following a five-well in-fill drilling programme, which is currently underway and a gas-lift installation which is already completed.

Longboat Energy also said Longboat Energy Norge will become a joint venture between Longboat Energy and Japan Petroleum Exploration Co Ltd, or Japex, on completion of the investment into Longboat Norge by Japex announced in early May.

The USD12.8 million consideration is fully funded by Japex's investment in Longboat Energy Norge, Longboat Energy said, while the anticipated payback on the transaction is under two years.

"We are pleased to announce our first production acquisition in Norway, the next step in realising our growth ambitions on the Norwegian Continental Shelf. The Statfjord satellites are two high-quality, long-life assets undergoing an exciting and transformative redevelopment led by Equinor," said Longboat Energy Chief Executive Officer Helge Hammer.

"Longboat's ability to secure this acquisition through a bilateral negotiation continues to demonstrate the company's deep relationships in Norway and is an important next step in creating a full cycle exploration and production company.

"We would also like to thank our new joint venture partner, Japex, with whom we have worked in close cooperation to execute this important transaction. The Statfjord satellites help position the enlarged business for future success and proves the benefits of joint venture concept."

By Greg Rosenvinge, Alliance News reporter

Comments and questions to newsroom@alliancenews.com

Copyright 2023 Alliance News Ltd. All Rights Reserved.
The price of land represents 44% of the total price of a dwelling in Luxembourg City, a report said

Land in the Grand Duchy will represent, on average, almost a third of the final price of homes  Photo credit: Marc Wilwert

Land costs are the main driver behind unaffordable housing prices, the National Housing Observatory said on Monday, as ownership remains in the hands of a few.

Prices of building land have increased much more than housing prices in the Grand Duchy, with the cost going up by 136% while that of housing went up by only 107% in between 2010 and 2021, a report by the government-funded academic researchers said.

Land in the Grand Duchy constitutes on average almost a third of the final price of homes. However, for the capital, land represents nearly half of the price of housing with 44%, the Observatory said.

"The 1,000 individuals with the most residential land hold [...] more than 40% of the land held by all individuals", the Housing Observatory said in a note on Monday.

On top of that, ten groups of companies with the largest areas available for residential development account for almost half of all the land held by over 1,100 companies, the Observatory said.

The public and semi-public sector has, however, increased its ownership of residential land over a decade. In 2013, it owned 8% of residential land while it now has almost doubled with 14%.

The new data would confirm previous findings, the Obersevatory said, arguing that there is no need to extend the construction zones , given that the land available for residential development is more than sufficient to ensure housing development for years to come.

Ownerships have remained partly stable, said the report. Individuals still own 64% of residential land in comparison with private companies that own around 19%.

Despite the longstanding rise over the last few years, Luxembourg's housing sector is currently experiencing a cool down due to high interest rates, with the number of units being built and sold tumbling, while renting is becoming more popular and more expensive.

Sales of flats under construction fell by almost 75% in the first quarter of this year compared to the same period last year, while purchases of existing flats, houses and buildable land dropped by more than 40%, the National Housing Observatory said last week.

The research note comes after the Housing Observatory previously said that empty plots in the hands of the few drive the housing crisis due to an oligopolistic market structure.
LIVONIA, MICH.  Six Madonna University faculty members and five graduate students representing Nutrition, Social Work, Nursing, Education, and Forensic Science spent a month in the Philippines meeting with university and community groups as part of the Fulbright-Hays grant. The team established connections with departments at four different universities, had a lesson in the ancient sport of Arnis, visited ruins from World War II, marched in the Independence Day Parade with the people of Silay, and visited Gawad Kalinga, a group that builds homes for the poor.

The group is pictured taking a bamboo bike ride through the streets of Manila, at the Fulbright Commission Reception, and taking a traditional Jeepney ride.

Group members include:

Project Director: Dr. Shelly Tucker, Social Work

Faculty: Dr. Jodi Barta (Forensic Science), Dr. Roxanne Roth (Nursing), Dr. Karen Schmitz (Nutrition), Dr. LaToi Smith (Social Work), Dr. Sarah Twitchell (Social Work)

Graduate Students: Colleen Curran (Nursing), Erica Daniels (Education), Abrianna DeBono (Nutrition), Jessica Grima (Social Work), Tavia Hill (Social Work)
Manchester, VT (05254)

Today

Light rain this morning with thunderstorms by evening. High 74F. Winds S at 5 to 10 mph. Chance of rain 100%. Locally heavy rainfall possible..

Tonight

Scattered thunderstorms early, with fog developing late. Potential for heavy rainfall. Low 61F. Winds SW at 5 to 10 mph. Chance of rain 80%.
Film director and Presidential Adviser for Creative Communications Paul Soriano is trending on Twitter as rumors accusing him of meddling in the production of the video for the Department of Tourisms (DOT) Love the Philippines campaign is spreading like wildfire.

Presidential Adviser for Creative Communications Paul Soriano

The rumors came from a viral Reddit post claiming that supposedly, the newest slogan would be Love, the Philippines and that the director was suddenly involved after the agency presented their storyboard.

DDB presented a storyboard. When it was approved, Paul Soriano was suddenly involved [and] he had a production house that he wanted to use, it stated alluding to the advertising agencys presentation.

The creative director and Paul fought about it and the creative direction. So[,] another DDB creative director was asked to take over. But turns out DOT/Paul had already shot and edited the material without the agency, it continued.

The post also claimed that it was not the agencys fault and the director should take responsibility for the issue.

As per writing, Soriano has not issued a statement regarding the accusations.

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The Philippines and the United States celebrate today their Friendship Day, an erstwhile official holiday titled Independence Day.

It commemorates the Treaty of Manila, signed in 1946 liberating the Philippines from American rulethat time the Philippine tricolors was pulled up as the Stars and Stripes was lowered at the bayside Quirino Grandstand.

It marked the end of more than 48 years of American rule lasting from 1898 to 1946.

In 1955, then President Ramon Magsaysay established the observance of Philippine American Day.

In 1984, under President Ferdinand Marcos, July 4 was designated as a non-working holiday to celebrate Filipino-American Friendship Day  which shows the first official celebration of Filipino-American Friendship Day under the name it is known began that year.

The celebration of Filipino-American Friendship Day follows more than 100 years of shared history between the two nations, which fought alongside each other during the second world war in the 1940s.

Many say the beginning of a good relationship between the two countries could be said to have started in 1946 when the Philippines regained complete independence from the United States.

To show appreciation for the assistance offered to them when Japan attacked, the Philippine government designated July 4 as Independence Day and also Filipino-American Friendship Day.

It was also on July 4, 1946, following Japans defeat in World War ll, that the United States restored independence to the Philippines, a US possession since 1898.

Today, the 4th of July is observed in the Philippines as a day that pays tribute to the long partnership between the two countries, and particularly at a time of rising tensions in the South China Sea, home to hundreds of islands, atolls and coral reefs, plus abundant reserves of oil and natural gas, fisheries and some of the worlds busiest shipping lanes.

For decades, neighboring countries have had struggles over territory in the area, but recently tensions have been bubbling over as China has been accused of interfering in the rights of coastal states Exclusive Economic Zones, and claiming land through dredging and building up atolls and islands from where, according to analysts, it can launch military exercises.

The United States immediately reassured its allies it has been stepping up military maneuvers in the South China Sea, generating concerns the area is becoming a geopolitical flash point.

US Ambassasdor to the Philippines MaryKay Carlson herself said Washington is marking Philippine-American Friendship Day doubly special  a time to celebrate all that the Philippines and the United States have accomplished together as steadfast friends, partners in prosperity, and ironclad allies.

This years highlight in the bilateral ties was the successful visit to Washington, D.C. by President Ferdinand Marcos Jr. last May.

During President Marcoss Oval Office meeting with President Biden, the two discussed the full spectrum of Manila-Washington ties as friends, partners, and allies.

Carlson said President Biden reaffirmed Washingtons ironclad commitment to the Alliance and announced a first-of-its-kind Presidential Trade and Investment Mission to the Philippines.

DFA Office of American Affairs Assistant Secretary Jose Victor Chan-Gonzaga earlier on described Philippine-US ties as in a very good place as the US Embassy in Manila marked the 247th US Independence Day a few days ahead of the Fourth of July celebration.

And the two countries celebrate.

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Harvard Universitys legacy admissions practices overwhelmingly prefer white applicants, while systematically disadvantaging applicants of color, according to a federal civil rights complaint filed Monday with the U.S. Department of Educations Office for Civil Rights.

The complaint was filed by the Lawyers for Civil Rights on behalf of The Chica Project, the African Community Economic Development of New England and the Greater Boston Latino Network  three nonprofit organizations dedicated to providing equitable access to education for people of color.

The complaint alleges that Harvard Universitys practice of giving preferential treatment to applicants of alumni and wealthy donors violates Title VI of the Civil Rights Act of 1964.

The legal group is calling on the Department of Education to not only launch a federal investigation into the universitys legacy admissions practices but to also order Harvard to halt legacy and donor preference practices if it wants to maintain eligibility for federal funding.

Theres no birthright to Harvard, said Ivan Espinoza-Madrigal, the executive director of the Lawyers for Civil Rights. As the Supreme Court recently noted, eliminating racial discrimination means eliminating all of it. There should be no way to identify who your parents are in the college application process. Why are we rewarding children for privileges and advantages accrued by prior generations?

Harvard University refused to comment on the civil rights complaint, according to a statement given to MassLive. Instead, the Ivy League school reaffirmed its commitment to preserving its essential values, consistent with the Supreme Courts recent decision regarding race-conscious admissions.

The civil rights complaint comes less than a week after the U.S. Supreme Court struck down the use of affirmative action in college admissions. The ruling, which involved Harvard University and the University of North Carolina Chapel Hill, has highlighted the importance of racially diverse campuses and the potential barriers that hinder their attainment.

Because Harvard only admits a certain number of students each year, a spot given to a legacy or donor-related applicant is a spot that becomes unavailable to an applicant who meets the admissions criteria based purely on his or her own merit; [c]ollege admissions are zero sum, as the Supreme Court recently emphasized, the Lawyers for Civil Rights wrote in their complaint.

Nearly 70% of Harvards donor-related and legacy applicants are white and receive a substantial boost to their application, according to the complaint. Donor-related applicants are almost seven times more likely to be admitted than non-donor-related applicants, while legacies are nearly six times more likely to be admitted into the school. Combined, these students represent 15% of the admitted students at Harvard University.

In recent years, several colleges have dropped the use of legacy admissions. In 2021, Amherst College decided to end legacy admissions for applicants, citing that the practice, inadvertently limits educational opportunity.

Harvards practice of giving a leg-up to the children of wealthy donors and alumni  who have done nothing to deserve it  must end, said Michael Kippins, litigation fellow at the Lawyers for Civil Rights. This preferential treatment overwhelmingly goes to white applicants and harms efforts to diversify. Particularly in light of last weeks decision from the Supreme Court, it is imperative that the federal government act now to eliminate this unfair barrier that systematically disadvantages students of color.
Made in Massachusetts is an ongoing feature taking you inside the products made right here in the Bay State and the people who make them.

_____________

When the owners of New City Microcreamery opened their scoop shop in Hudson in 2015, the idea was simply to complement the popular restaurant they owned across the street, Rail Trail Flatbread Co.

We want to keep that momentum that we had created and stay in downtown Hudson ... And we decided that ice cream might pair really well with, you know, pizza and beer as an after-dinner treat, said Jason Kleinerman, who co-owns the two establishments with friends and partners Michael Kasseris and Karim El Gamal.

But the ice cream  made extra smooth from the companys liquid nitrogen freezing method  quickly took off on its own. Now, the company is poised to grow further, with a new factory cranking out small batches of creamy goodness to an ever-expanding list of supermarkets where it can be found.

Whats the recipe for New Citys success?

The process starts with cream from Mapleline Farm in Hadley, which New City uses to make its base, which is then allowed to steep for 24 hours, before its added to the mixer along with the negative 300-degree liquid nitrogen.

The ice cream bases are aged to fully absorb the flavors from other ingredients, a process that Kasseris said was inspired by chef-made gelato he had once early on in the New City journey. He was so impressed by the flavor that he asked how they did it, and was told that the cream was aged for three days with lemons to amplify the flavors. It was an epiphany moment for him, and New City began to do the same.

Although the process itself is one of the ice creams selling points, the ingredients themselves are key players. The Salted Cookies & Cream is made with moist Oreo-like cookies the company bakes itself before crumbling into the mix. The popular Baklava flavor  thats made by crumbling up trays of their own baklava. And the Mint Chocolate Chip has real mint in it.

The development of that whole process, Kleinerman said, started out in a basement as the partners tested out ice cream recipes. They decided on the liquid nitrogen freezing method because executive chef Tom Kepner had used it before.

Since then, New City has rapidly expanded and is poised to develop into a mini ice cream empire. In addition to the companys three scoop shops in Hudson, Sudbury and Cambridge all production has now moved into a new factory in a renovated old mill building.

An employee scoops ice cream for a sundae at the New City ice cream shop in Cambridge. (Trea Lavery, MassLive)

That time Whole Foods called

When that first scoop shop opened New City offered 25 to 30 flavors that were all produced from scratch right in that space, in an open kitchen so customers could watch their ice cream being made. They offered classics and more unique flavors, including vegan options.

A few years in, with Rail Trail and New City well-established and their new speakeasy bar Less Than Greater Than, they were surprised to get a message from an unexpected source: Whole Foods. A local food scout for the grocery store told them that he was a regular customer at the scoop shop, and wanted to know if they were interested in selling their ice cream in stores.

We had had previous experience with wholesale, thinking about doing it, and it wasnt that appetizing to us. It seemed a little too cutthroat, Kleinerman said. We werent ready, we werent refined and we werent at the point where we were ready to take that on.

Up until then, the only place to get New City ice cream was in a New City store, and you couldnt take it home with you, only order cones and sundaes. Now, though, with a major grocery chain knocking on their door, they felt that the opportunity was too great to pass up.

The New City team began working on a deal with Whole Foods and developing packaging to sell pints. They were also in the process of opening their Sudbury store and beginning to work on a deal for a new Rail Trail location in Milford.

Then the COVID-19 pandemic hit, and everything went cold.

Were in a fight for survival, Kleinerman said. The Rocky music is playing, were fighting Apollo Creed and Ivan Drago and everybody rolled into one, trying to survive the pandemic with three different businesses. We dont know whats happening day to day.

An ice cream sundae from New City in Cambridge. (Trea Lavery, MassLive)

Luckily, between New City and Rail Trail, the company was well-positioned to adapt to the new takeout-only world. But its new wholesale venture wasnt. Whole Foods let them know early in the pandemic that with everything going on around the world, they were putting a temporary pause on the deal.

In your head, you cant help but think to yourself, well, they just found a polite way to exit the conversation, Kleinerman said.

New City decided to move ahead on its own, securing a handful of small, local independent wholesale clients and focusing on its own retail business. They were still producing all of their ice cream in the Hudson store, packaging it in plain white pints.

But by the end of the summer, Whole Foods called again, this time giving them the green light to move forward. Kleinerman said they immediately got to work finalizing product codes, filling out paperwork, developing packaging and marketing and working with the grocery company to choose which flavors to sell. By the summer of 2021, they were in three local Whole Foods stores.

By the end of the summer, were in six. Then were in 10. Then they say we want you to submit for the whole North Atlantic, Kleinerman said.

13 1 / 13 New City Microcreamery factory

Were gonna need a bigger scoop

At that point, New City knew it was time to hire a distributor to help with all of the wholesaling. But there was another issue: they were still doing everything out of the Hudson scoop shop. They had a couple of small ovens and a kitchen space they shared with Less Than Greater Than, and they were still doing everything in the open kitchen while retail customers ordered from the counter nearby.

The space was already barely enough for production on the wholesale accounts they had, and it was preventing them from expanding any further. So they began looking for a new space, and in April, New City opened up its factory in Phoenix Park, a 56-acre campus of old mill buildings in Shirley that was originally home to a Shaker cotton mill.

Now, all of New Citys ice cream, including its wholesale products and what is sold in the scoop shops, is made and packaged in the factory. The 5,000-square-foot space is complete with a pallet freezer and walk-in refrigerator, three industrial-sized ovens, multiple mixers and a huge liquid nitrogen tank behind the building, from which nitrogen is pumped directly inside.

Whereas before, the company would produce 900 gallons of ice cream in a busy week, now theyre producing about 1,200 each week, fulfilling orders for about 110 accounts. Kasseris estimated that even with that increase, theyre at less than 20% of the capacity of the factory.

Kasseris explained that they dont want to compromise the quality of their ice cream as they grow, so everything still follows their same small-batch process, just with more batches.

Picture the production that was happening in the Hudson shop, but multiply it. A woman with a knife is chopping up pieces of cookies for the Salted Cookies & Cream. Big mixing bowls mix the cream while billowing clouds pour out of them from the liquid nitrogen. Its all still produced in small batches, but there are more batches and more people doing it.

We are almost scaling our process on a unit scale, he said. Were adding more of the machines. Its still made at a very small scale, but theres just much more. Theres more people, theres more equipment. So the process hasnt changed. Its just weve added more units of the same production equipment.

Liquid nitrogen is poured into large stand mixers to freeze ice cream at the New City Microcreamery factory in Shirley. (Trea Lavery, MassLive)

Kasseris said he spends a few hours each week just researching ice cream, seeing what other companies are doing or learning about traditional ice cream-making methods. What hes learned is that New City is unique in the lengths they go to to make sure every component of their recipes are perfect.

Were one of maybe a handful of ice cream companies in the whole country thats actually doing this. No one makes ice cream from scratch, he said. One hundred years ago, there were thousands of ice cream manufacturers that were actually taking milk and cream and sugar and making it, the whole process. ... This is the only way to make ice cream. If you want to make real ice cream, we have to start with milk and cream and sugar and real strawberries, real mint and real, whole chocolate.

Every ingredient is made in-house and each recipe is tested over and over to make it perfect.

The companys ultimate goal, he said, is for each ice cream flavor to be what they call HSTFA. In other words, when customers take a bite, they should say, Holy s--t, thats f---cking awesome.

Theres a million ice creams out there that all fight for who makes it cheaper, Kasseris said. We dont want to do that. Were trying to be the ice cream place that renews your excitement for ice cream.
Massachusetts has one of the best ice cream shops in the country, according to Yelp.

Yelp released its 2023 Top 100 U.S. Ice Cream Shops list. Only one Massachusetts location made the list.

The Ice Cream Barn in Swansea, which opened Sept. 9, 2012, was listed as number 46.

After about 10 years, this is still my favorite ice cream place in the world, one Yelp reviewer wrote.

The Ice Cream Barn is located on a 6th generation family farm at 289 Locust St. All of the shops ice cream is barn made, the website states, adding they use milk from the cows on the farm.

The milk is picked up, pasteurized and homogenized by the Winsor Dairy of Johnston RI, and delivered back to us to churn into delicious ice cream, the website explains. The shop also uses multiple other ingredients grown by local farmers, including fruits, mint, maple syrup and honey.

In 2020, the Ice Cream Barn switched all of its packaging to compostable products.

All of our packaging is made out of plants, which can compost naturally back into soil, the website reads.

The store sells a number of ice cream flavors, including coffee milk, cranberry jubilee, smores and more.

Its Instagram features a Mega Sundae, which includes eight scoops of ice cream, five toppings, four cherries, whipped cream, hot fudge and a banana.
EPERNAY, France  You can feel the temperature falling as we walk down the long, stone staircase descending into the cellar. The cool air feels exhilarating, peaceful and wonderfully familiar.

Theres truly nothing quite like a wine cellar in Champagne  the barrel-vaulted ceilings, the near-total darkness of the labyrinth-like maze of tunnels and all those bottles, thousands of them neatly stacked floor to ceiling or upside down in V-shaped racks scattered throughout the cellars.

And then theres that air. That wonderful, brisk, damp air as cool as a foggy fall morning in New England. No matter what time of day or season of the year, the temperature in the cellars in Champagne always stays the same  roughly 50 degrees Fahrenheit.

That constantly cool air helps create these masterpieces in the bottle. So do the chalky stone walls. Thats why Champagne tastes so wonderfully crisp and dry. Thats why the French are so protective of Champagne. Only sparkling wine made in the Champagne region of France can legally be called Champagne. Everything else is sparkling wine.

As I walk down into the cellar and feel the goosebumps on my arms, I am instantly transported back to 2017.

That year, my wife and I visited three Champagne houses in Reims, France.

Six years later, just a few weeks ago, we visited two iconic Champagne houses nearby in Epernay  Moet & Chandon and Perrier-Jouet.

One of the great things about Frances Champagne region is how close it is to Paris. You can easily get there by train for a day trip.

Our journey to Epernay starts that morning in Gare De LEst a few minutes after a long, antique-looking blue train with gold trim slowly pulls into the station. Its the Orient Express. (Yes, that Orient Express, Mon Ami!) I wouldnt believe it if I saw it in a movie.

Less than two hours later on a direct train gliding through the French countryside, we arrive in Epernay.

The small, stone train station is right in the heart of this charming, compact village. From the station, you can easily walk to many restaurants and Champagne houses, including the two we are visiting that day. Overall, there are more than 300 Champagne producers in the Epernay area.

We have half an hour before our first appointment. Its a beautiful, sunny day in late May. Theres barely a cloud in the sky. We wander through the narrow, tree-lined streets past banks, bars and brasseries made of stone.

Everything in Epernay seems to be made of stone. Its no surprise. Many of the stones removed from the wine cellars to make those massive tunnels were then used to build many of the buildings throughout Champagne.

After we pass through a traffic circle, we stroll through a tall, black iron gate into DVentures Du Parc, a beautiful, tree-lined park with winding paths that looks like a miniature version of Central Park South in Manhattan.

A few minutes later, on the other side of the park, we find Avenue De Champagne, the boulevard where many Champagne houses are located in Epernay. One of the first ones we find is the massive stone and brick building containing Moet & Chandon, the largest Champagne producer in the world.

Moet & Chandon

20 Avenue De Champagne, Epernay

Public tours available most days of the year

Founded in 1743 by wine trader Claude Moet, this Champagne producer added Chandon to its name in 1833 when Pierre-Gabriel Chandon de Briailles, who was married to one of the Chandons, joined the company. Moet & Chandon also created Dom Perignon, a high-end vintage Champagne starting in 1921.

Nowadays, Moet & Chandon and Dom Perignon are separate businesses owned by the worlds largest luxury brand company, Louis-Vuitton-Moet-Hennessy, which is better known by its acronym of LVMH.

Moet & Chandons sprawling limestone cellars meander 30 feet beneath the winery for 17 miles. You can easily get lost in this maze of caves. Thats why you have to be part of a tour to visit the Champagne house.

The tour starts in a stark white room on the ground floor filled with paintings featuring many of Moet & Chandons owners over the centuries. There are also historic Champagne bottles celebrating different milestones in history and an impressive tower of Champagne glasses, something Moet & Chandon is well known for, according to the tour guide.

Downstairs in the cellar, we learn about the Champagne making process as we walk through the long, dimly-lit arched stone cellars. Like other Champagne cellars, theres a quiet calmness to Moet & Chandons cellars. Theres also a sense of history.

Moet & Chandon has long been a favorite among kings, nobles and aristocrats. The Champagne was especially popular with Napoleon Bonaparte, who was friends with Claude Moets grandson, Jean-Remy Moet, and who would often visit the Champagne house.

One of the cellars, the Imperial Cellar, is named in honor of Napoleon. In the Imperial cellar, theres also a massive wooden port wine cask Napoleon gave to Moet & Chandon in 1810 when Napoleon was the Emperor of France.

Tasting Notes

Moet & Chandon Imperial Brut: No, its not called Imperial Brut because its some tough thug working for the royal family. This is the Champagne houses best-selling Champagne, named in reference to its Imperial cellar. Brut means raw in French and refers to the sweetness level of the Champagne. Brut Champagnes taste dry. Thats because they have less sugar than other Champagnes. This iconic Champagne is made with a blend of the three grapes that can only be used to make Champagne  chardonnay, pinot noir and pinot meunier. The result  a light, refreshing, subtle Champagne with hints of pear, sea salt and almonds. Let me add this glass of Champagne was served at about 45 degrees and tasted perfect.

2015 Moet & Chandon Extra Brut: The 2015 means this Champagne is made with grapes grown and harvested that year, making this Champagne a vintage Champagne. The Extra Brut means this Champagne is even drier than a Brut Champagne. Made with a blend of the same three grapes as the Imperial Brut (with a bit more pinot noir), its flavors are rounder, softer, more delicate. There are also subtle hints of toast, vanilla, almonds and wood smoke. An absolutely lovely, crisp, dry Champagne.

Perrier-Jouet

26 Avenue De Champagne, Epernay

Public tours available most days of the year

A short walk up Avenue De Champagne from Moet & Chandon, Perrier-Jouet feels like a different place from a different time. Specifically, you feel like youre stepping back into Frances famed Belle Epoque (golden age in French) era, circa the early 1900s.

Perrier-Jouet was founded in 1811, but the Champagne house is now more associated with the Art Nouveau movement nearly a century later. A response to mass industrialization, Art Nouveau celebrated craftsmanship and natures curving, sinuous lines.

The owners of Perrier-Jouet adored Art Nouveau and the movements exuberance and creative freedom during the Belle Epoque era, according to the Champagne houses website. You can see that influence today on every bottle of Perrier-Jouet, which features gold-trimmed white flowers first painted on four bottles in 1902.

But to truly dive headfirst into Art Nouveau, make sure you visit Maison Belle Epoque, the former Perrier-Jouet family home built in the late 1800s. The house feels like a museum, filled with art by Henri Toulouse-Lautrec and Auguste Rodin as well as room after room containing original Art Nouveau furniture. In fact, Maison Belle Epoque has the largest private collection of Art Nouveau art in Europe.

However, the two Perrier-Jouet employees guiding us through Maison Belle Epoque insist that the house is not a museum. Instead, they hope visitors think of the house as a home where people still come to gather and celebrate and enjoy life.

Downstairs in Perrier-Jouets rambling cellars, theres more art as well, including a stunning piece called Lost Time. Several strands of beads hang from the ceiling above a pool of water. The beads look like stalactites and perfectly capture the way time seems to move at a glacial pace down here in this dark, mysterious world.

Back upstairs, we taste several Champagnes in a charming, intimate private bar in Maison Belle Epoque. Were surrounded by glass artwork hanging from the ceiling, vintage Champagne glasses and many bottles of chilled Champagne. None of it seems real. Its like Ive somehow wandered into a beautiful Belle Epoque dream.

Tasting notes

Perrier-Jouet Blanc De Blanc: The first of three non-vintage Champagnes we try at Perrier-Jouet, this one is made entirely with chardonnay grapes and looks like a pale-yellow chardonnay. Taste wise, this refreshing Champagne has bright, floral-like aromas and flavors with hints of sea salt, citrus, peach, apricot and lemon. Distinct and delightful.

Perrier-Jouet Grand Brut: This non-vintage Brut Champagne will appeal to traditional Champagne fans. Here, you can practically taste the chalky, limestone walls in this crisp, toasty Champagne with hints of roasted almonds, melted butter and an unexpected dash of apricot.

Perrier-Jouet Rose: This non-vintage rose Champagne looks beautiful and tastes delicious. A delicate salmon-like color, this elegant rose Champagne actually tastes a bit like roses, along with hints of strawberry, raspberry, sea salt and peach. Absolutely superb.

2012 Perrier-Jouet Belle Epoque Cuvee Blanc De Blanc: The first of three vintage Champagnes we try at Perrier-Jouet, its difficult to move onto the other two after tasting this wonderful, complex Champagne. Like the other Blanc De Blanc, this vintage one is made entirely with Chardonnay grapes. However, the flavors here are bigger, brighter and yet somehow more subtle at the same time. In a way, this vintage Blanc De Blanc reminds me of Brut Champagne with its hints of toasted almond, roasted butter and a crisp, mineral-like finish. There are also surprising hints of pear and ginger.

2014 Perrier-Jouet Brut: Like the non-vintage Brut, this vintage one will definitely appeal to traditional Champagne fans. Its fresh, crisp, complex flavors are muted with a mineral-like finish along with dashes of toast, butter and sea salt. Theres a reason why certain foods or drinks become classics. Everyone loves their familiar, delicious flavors. This vintage Brut Champagne perfectly illustrates why.

2013 Perrier-Jouet Rose: The final vintage Perrier-Jouet Champagne we taste before catching our train back to Paris, this magnificent rose Champagne brings to mind a whole host of words that start with the letter S  subtle and soft, strawberry and sea salt, stunning and superb. There are also hints of raspberry and passion fruit. Drinking this wine with my wife, Im reminded of the final scene of Before Sunset, one of my favorite movies, which also happens to be set in Paris. Not to give anything away, but one character says to the other, Youre going to miss that plane. Tasting these six Champagnes, I think its fair to say the last thing my wife and I care about is making our train. We do make it on time. But its not easy. We just want to stay. Who wouldnt?

Cheers!

Wine Press by Ken Ross appears on Masslive.com every Monday and in The Republicans Weekend section every Thursday.
Christmas Tree Shops, a 53-year-old chain founded on Cape Cod, will likely liquidate and close all 70 of its remaining stores, according to documents filed last week in a federal bankruptcy court.

Thatll include its store in Holyoke, a former Bed Bath & Beyond at Holyoke Crossing, 45 Holyoke St., as well as 14 other locations across Massachusetts.

The pending liquidation was first reported in The Wall Street Journal. The Middleboro-based Christmas Tree Shops filed for bankruptcy in May and had hoped to emerge after shedding some of its stores.

But its lawyers told the bankruptcy court Thursday that it was unable to buy inventory and replenish its shelves, leading to lost sales. The chain will be liquidated and shut down if no buyer can be found.

Christmas Tree Shops is likely to close and liquidate according to bankruptcy proceedings. The Holyoke location, branded as CTS, is seen here on July 3, 2023

The Holyoke Crossing store, which opened in 2021, was the first Christmas Tree Shops with a new look and new name  CTS, with the words Christmas Tree Shops in smaller print  and a new merchandising plan.

Owners Marc Salkovitz and his wife, Pam Salkovitz, bought the chain from troubled retailer Bed Bath & Beyond in 2020.

When they opened the new Holyoke store in 2022, the Salkovitzes had 5,400 Christmas Tree Shops employees and 80 stores. They had planned to 84 stores by the end of last year.

The old-school Christmas Tree Shops location in the Holyoke Mall opened in 1996 and closed soon after the new one opened.

Husband-and-wife team Charles and Doreen Bilezikian opened the first Christmas Tree Shops in 1970 in Yarmouth Port. The name is plural because originally the store was spread over several buildings.

In its most recent iteration, the store focused on home goods and seasonal items, with outdoor furniture being one of the biggest sellers.
Amtrak and the city of Springfield reached an agreement Monday to allow pedestrian access to Riverfront Park through an at-grade crossing for Tuesdays Star Spangled Springfield July 4th celebration.

We are all feeling a lot better about it, Judy Matt, president of the Spirit of Springfield, said after the agreement brokered in part by U.S. Rep. Richard E. Neal, D-Springfield.
A construction worker was seriously hurt following a construction accident in Medford on Monday, according to a social media post by the Medford Fire Department.

The fire department said the worker, who has not been named, fell as far as 20 feet from the roof into a basement in a single-family home. The accident, which occurred on Green Road, was called in around noon.

The worker was taken to an area hospital by Armstrong Ambulance.
A new cafe is set to open near one of the countrys oldest independent libraries.

Folio is opening near the Boston Athenaeum this summer  specifically at 14 Beacon St., according to The Catered Affair, an event catering company that owns the cafe.

Folio is just the latest in The Catered Affairs Collection, according to the companys website. The company hosts several venues in the Boston area, such as The Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston Public Library and The Harvard Art museums.

Read More: Gordon Ramsay Burger restaurant in Boston to open in July

Guests can expect nosh made-to-order shareable plates, while sipping on fancy wines and cocktails, according to The Catered Affair.

Folio, where lively conversation flows, impeccable service is always present, and elevated cuisine is central to the journey, according to the cafes website.
Funeral arrangements for the three people killed last week in a homicide in Newton have been announced.

Our Lady Help of Christians Church will be holding visiting hours at 573 Washington St. in Newton on July 5 from 4 to 8 p.m. Funeral Mass will be held at Our Lady Help of Christians Church on July 6 at 10:30 am, according to the churchs website.

Jill and Bruno DAmore, who were celebrating their 50th wedding anniversary, and Jills mother, Lucia Arpino, were found dead in a home on Broadway Street from apparent stab wounds and blunt trauma, according to the Middlesex District Attorney Marian Ryans office.

The individual who found the victims went to the home after noticing they didnt attend service at Our Lady Help of Christians Church.

Investigative findings suggest that there were signs of forced entry into the home and the attack may have been random.

Newton police described the killings as senseless on Twitter.

Authorities arrested Christopher Ferguson in connection with the killings and have charged him with murder. The Middlesex District Attorneys office said Ferguson was known to police and lived in the neighborhood.
A temporary harassment order issued against actor Ezra Miller last year on behalf of a Western Massachusetts mothers 12-year-old child ended on Friday.

The order was issued after the Greenfield mother, Shannon Guin, became concerned with her daughters relationship with the actor. Guin didnt show up to the Greenfield District Court on Friday, according to Deadline.

Im encouraged by todays outcome and very grateful at this moment to everyone who has stood beside me and sought to ensure that this egregious misuse of the protective order system was halted, Miller wrote on Instagram.

The nonbinary actor also had a protective order issued against them last year on behalf of 18-year-old Native American activist Takota Iron Eyes.

The protective orders were only one part of a string of encounters Miller has had with police, including a felony burglary in Stamford, Vermont in 2022  which later became an unlawful trespass charge  and being arrested twice in Hawaii for disorderly conduct and harassment.

On a personal note, I want everyone to know that I am continuing to do my best to preserve my own wellness and what I can to reverse the collateral damage this ordeal has brought upon me and those close to me, Miller wrote on Instagram.
Grillos Pickles has filed a complaint against Patriot Pickle in Florida, claiming the company violated agreements and used Grillos proprietary recipes to create a line of pickles for the Whole Foods 365 label, according to a press release.

Grillos said Patriot Pickle had access to proprietary recipes and equipment and is using identical ingredients, claiming Patriot Pickle violated federal and state laws as well as contracts between the two companies, the release said.

The lower price point during a high gross time of year for pickle sales poses a threat to Grillos business, according to a press release. Whole Foods is also one of Grillos biggest retailers.

Patriot Pickle is trying to profit off of Grillos 100-year-old family recipe and our trade secrets, said Adam Kaufman, president of Grillos Pickles. Its a massive violation of trust and a disappointment that after nearly a decade of partnership, our former co-packer, Patriot Pickle, has violated our agreements and is producing a nearly identical line of pickles for one of our biggest retailers, threatening to permanently damage our business.

The pickle company is suing for emergency injunctive relief and permanent injunction and damages.
Authorities identified the woman who died in a crash in Granby on Saturday morning.

Katelyn Gress, 28, of Granby, died after the crash and two others were sent to the hospital with non-life-threatening injuries, according to a statement by the Northwestern District Attorneys Office.

Police continue investigating the crash that happened at about 1:15 a.m. on July 1 near the intersection of Pleasant and Barton streets in Granby, according to district attorney spokesperson Laurie Loisel.

Authorities say Gress was a passenger in a Jeep Grand Cherokee headed north on Pleasant Street that crossed into the oncoming lane, rolled over and struck a Lexus SUV.

Read more: Hiker dies on New Hampshire peak after medical emergency

An ambulance brought Gress to Baystate Medical Center in Springfield where she was pronounced dead. The driver of the Cherokee, an unidentified 30-year-old Granby man, survived the crash. He went to the hospital with non-life-threatening injuries, according to Loisel.

The 74-year-old Springfield man who drove the Lexus was taken to Holyoke Medical Center for non-life-threatening injuries, according to Loisel.

Authorities shut down the intersection of Pleasant and Barton streets for about eight hours as police and workers cleared the streets of damaged telephone poles and downed power lines.

No charges have been filed in connection with the crash, which remains under investigation, according to Loisel.
On Monday at around 12:11 a.m., the New Bedford Police Department received a 911 call regarding shots fired near Tallman and North Front streets in New Bedford, according to a press release from the Bristol County District Attorneys Office.

Read more: Weymouth man charged with assaulting trooper and Boston police officer in chase

After searching the area and having people approach the police claiming they heard loud bangs that sounded like gun shots, police later found Lorenzo Gomes, 20, of New Bedford, on Belleville Avenue, who looked to have attempted to drive to the hospital before losing consciousness in his vehicle, the release said.

EMS rushed Gomes to Saint Lukes Hospital where he was later pronounced dead, said the release.

The investigation into the homicide is extremely active, said the DA in the release.
Joey Jaws Chestnut is a juggernaut in the world of competitive hot dog eating. But on Tuesday, a Central Massachusetts native will try to unseat Goliath in Nathans Famous International Hot Dog Eating Contest.

Geoffrey Esper, 48, of Oxford, is the second-ranked competitive eater in the world by Major League Eating, which sanctions the annual Fourth of July competition held in Brooklyns Coney Island neighborhood.

In some eating competitions, Esper is the top dog. He holds multiple world records, including eating 36 4.5-ounce bratwurst sausages in 10 minutes.

But in hot dog eating, Esper faces steep odds against Chestnut, of Westfield, Indiana  who last July 4 won his record-extending 15th Nathans competition, consuming 63 hot dogs and buns in 10 minutes. That was still a bakers dozen shy of his own world record: 76 frankfurters, buns and all, set a year prior.

According to ESPN, Espers career-best is 51 hot dogs. He has placed second at the Nathans contest for the last two years.

Geoffrey Esper, of Oxford, MA, eats his way to victory in The Trenton Thunder World Famous Case's Pork Roll Eating Championship during The 7th annual Trenton RiverFest held at Trenton Thunder Ballpark, Sept. 24, 2022. (Michael Mancuso/NJ Advance Media).Michael Mancuso | NJ Advance Media for NJ.com

His Major League Eating profile bills Esper as a quiet, industrious man who says very little but eats very much.

His personal records include eating 9.75 pounds of SPAM from the can in eight minutes, downing 281 Buffalo chicken wings in 12 minutes, and crushing 17.75 bagels (with cream cheese) in eight minutes.

Esper, a high school teacher, told WCVB in an interview that hes been practicing for three weeks. His strategy involves separating two hot dogs, eating those, and then dunking the buns in fruit punch to wash them down easier.

Nathans womens hot dog eating competition, headlined by defending champion Miki Sudo, will stream Tuesday on the ESPN app at 10:45 a.m. The mens bout starts at noon, also streamed on the ESPN app, and broadcast on ESPN2.
SPRINGFIELD  A 21-year-old city resident was arraigned Monday in connection with Springfields 15th homicide as well as other alleged crimes.

Tyre T. Shakespeare, of Oakland Street, called police Monday morning to turn himself in after learning there was a warrant out for his arrest. He is accused of fatally shooting Elian Arroya, 23, during a drive-by shooting on Ashmun Street. A 19-year-old woman was injured after a bullet grazed her skull.

Court records show Shakespeare had been released on bail in 2022 for the alleged home invasion and kidnapping of a man at gunpoint two years earlier.

Police say Shakespeare allegedly fired wildly into a small crowd standing outside 32 Ashmun St. on June 28, just after midnight.

According to court records, Shakespeare ripped off his GPS monitoring bracelet in late May after being kicked out of his court-ordered residence.

Whereabouts unknown, a report on him by the probation department reads. An arrest warrant was issued May 22.

Arroyos death capped a violent surge of homicides by gunfire in Springfield, with seven in June alone. Halfway through the year, 2023 has seen more homicides than 2022 in its entirety in the city.

While the Ashmun Street shootings took place in the citys South End neighborhood, most of the gun violence has erupted in the the School, Union and High streets neighborhood. Open-air drug sales and prostitution are rampant in the area, according to police.

Police conducted a sweep that yielded 44 arrests following two double homicides in that neighborhood earlier in June.

The courtroom gallery Monday was filled with family members of both the defendant and the victims.

Onlookers during the arraignment of Tyre Shakespeare in Springfield District Court in connection with a homicide and a pair of shootings in Springfield. (Don Treeger / The Republican / MassLive)

District Court Judge Kevin Maltby asked for order in the court during the arraignment Monday afternoon.

This is a court proceeding and there cannot be any outbursts. I need to hear the lawyers and I need to make decisions. I ask that you give me that courtesy and I will give you courtesy in return, Maltby said.

Shakespeare pleaded not guilty to murder, assault with a gun and illegal firearm possession charges.

Assistant District Attorney Max Bennett asked that the police report in the case be impounded until Oct. 3, as Shakespeare remains under investigation for this incident and other alleged crimes. He also asked that Shakespeare be held without the right to bail. Defense lawyer Jeffrey Brown conceded.

Tyre T. Shakespeare, of Springfield, is arraigned for allegedly murdering a man on June 28 and shooting a woman who survived on June 28 on Ashmun Street. Defense attorney Jeffrey Brown is center and Assistant District Attorney Max Bennett is at right in Springfield District Court.

A pretrial hearing was set for Aug. 3.
A 22-year-old from Springfield was pulled over and charged in connection with having 64 packages of illegal fireworks, Massachusetts State Police said.

On Sunday at 6:35 p.m., State Police Trooper Phillip Jett stopped a 2019 Infiniti QX80 SUV on Interstate 91 southbound in Hatfield after a random query showed the cars insurance had been canceled, a statement read. He then saw fireworks in plain view inside the car, police added.

Overall, there were 64 packages of fireworks in the car, police said. In Massachusetts, only those with certification and licensing can have fireworks.

The fireworks were taken by police and given to the State Police Bomb Squad for disposal.

Police said the 22-year-old was also driving with a suspended drivers license. The drivers name was not released.

State Police said the 22-year-old faces multiple motor vehicles charges and unlawful fireworks possession.

Between 2012 and 2021, Massachusetts fire departments reported more than 900 fires related to illegal fireworks. The fine for having fireworks, including sparklers, ranges from $10 to $100 and the fireworks will be confiscated.

The possession, use, and sale of fireworks are illegal in Massachusetts without certification and licensing, State Police Col. Christopher S. Mason warned in 2022. Massachusetts law requires the confiscation of any illegal fireworks we encounter, even if legally purchased elsewhere. State Police and our local partners will be conducting targeted enforcement efforts to intercept illegal fireworks coming into the state and we will seize any that we find in routine traffic stops.
SPRINGFIELD  For sale: three bedroom, two-and-a-half bath, new construction that includes well-wishes of the entire Maple High-Six Corners neighborhood, available late summer or early fall. The cost? $190,000.

Springfield opened Monday a lottery that will determine the four qualifying home buyers who will get that deal on one of four new homes now nearing completion on what were vacant lots in neighborhoods devastated by the June 2011 tornado.

That $190,000 is less than the cost of construction, said Melvin Edwards, Ward 3 city councilor and Maple High-Six Corners Neighborhood Council president.

Edwards attended the announcement Monday with Mayor Domenic J. Sarno and city Housing Director Gerry McCafferty, Deputy Housing Director Robert DeMusis, Director of Disaster Recovery Tina Quagliato-Sullivan, Jose Claudio from North End Housing Initiative and neighborhood residents including Rosemary Morin and the Rev. Bruce Shaw from New Hope Pentecostal Church.

Of the four homes, North End Housing Initiative is developing the two at 271 Pine St. and 251 Central St. in partnership with Youth Build and NAI Plotkin.

C&C Homes is building 402 Central St. and 414 Central St., Sarnos administration said in a news release.

The whole of the Pioneer Valley faces a housing crisis. A University of Massachusetts Donahue Institute study last year called for 17,000 more affordable apartments.

The median price of a single family home sold in the city is $246,000 as of June, a 5.8% increase over he past year, according to the online reference RocketHomes.

I want to thank North End Housing Initiative, in partnership with Youth Build  which included 11 youth working as carpenters, and NAI Plotkin, and C&C Homes for their continued partnership in developing these four new affordable and brand-new homes in our Maple-High Six Corners neighborhood, much like what we had done in our North End neighborhood in 2021, Sarno said in a news release.

To qualify for the lottery drawing, applicants will need to meet the following criteria:

Be a first time homebuyer

Be a current Springfield resident

Have a household income that is at or below 80% of area median income, for example, $79,700 for a family of four

Be pre-approved by a traditional lender for an amount equal or greater than $190,000.

Complete homebuyer counseling from a housing counselor certified by the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development who is employed by a HUD-approved counseling agency

The final purchaser will be required to live in the home for 15 years.

Applications must be submitted through the citys online application portal by midnight, Aug. 15.

For more information, people are asked to visit the city s website: www.springfield-ma.gov/housing
Westfield State University has denied a request to house refugees in its campus facilities, a university official confirmed Monday.

The decision runs counter to that made by Salem State University, which announced in November that the vacant Bates Complex on its South Campus would be activated in response to the regions homelessness crisis.

Officials from the Commonwealth of Massachusetts did have some conversations with Westfield State University regarding refugee housing needs, as they did with institutions across the state such as a Salem State University, Leslie Rice, Westfield States executive director of communications, said in a statement in response to questions. However, we determined participating in the program to house refugees on our campus was not right for us at this time.

The school did not specify reasons for the decision.

Salem State said it was acting to help homeless people. Rice said Westfield State was approached to help house refugees.

While both institutions are part of the state university system, differences do exist in their housing situations.

Salem State President John D. Keenan said the vacant Bates Complex, which was already in a transitional process, would be employed for emergency housing use on a temporary basis.

The need for shelter in Massachusetts has reached crisis levels, Keenan said last November.

The unused complex was tapped for use as temporary, emergency housing for families experiencing homelessness. The school worked with the state Department of Housing and Community Development on the project. Centerboard, a community organization in Lynn, has been contracted by DHCD to operate the space.

Earlier last year, Salem State closed the complex as part of a plan to sell its South Campus. Efforts to complete a sale continued while the conversion for temporary shelter took place.
A Massachusetts State Police lieutenant and a Boston Police officer apprehended a 27-year-old Weymouth man on Monday morning following a foot pursuit and violent resistance, according to police.

The lieutenant observed a subject of active arrest warrants while driving on Southampton Street at around 7:50 a.m. After approaching the man, identified as Joseph Russell, the suspect fled on foot down Atkinson Street, a press release said.

Authorities said Russell tried to instigate an attack on the trooper and the officer who pursued the man by people loitering on the street. Once the law enforcement officers caught up to Russell, the man kicked and punched them, police said.

The lieutenant suffered a minor injury and was transported to Boston Medical Center for evaluation, authorities said.

Russell was transported to the state police tunnels barracks and booked for drug offenses  based on two outstanding warrants  resisting arrest, and two counts of assault and battery on a police officer, Massachusetts State Police said.

The Weymouth man is expected to be arraigned in Boston Municipal Court on Monday, according to police.
Springfield police arrested a 21-year-old man in connection with a homicide and a pair of shootings last week, according to a statement by department spokesperson Ryan Walsh.

Tyre Shakespeare, 21, of Springfield, is expected to be arraigned in Springfield District Court on Monday after the Springfield Police Department brought charges against the man in connection with a deadly shooting on June 28.

Springfield police did not provide a list of charges filed against Shakespeare in its announcement on Monday morning.

Walsh stated that an investigation under police Capt. Trent Duda lead to the arrest of Tyre Shakespeare on Sunday.

The shooting happened near Ashmun and Adams streets, Walsh wrote. An unidentified adult man died due to the shooting on Thursday afternoon, he wrote, and an adult female was also hurt in the shooting but her injuries were not life-threatening.

Only halfway through the year, the city has reached its annual average of homicides, The Republican reported.
SHARKFEST continues with three more specials on Monday, July 3 including a riveting special about shark attacks on Cape Cod on National Geographic.

Three more SHARKFEST specials will air on Monday, July 3 starting at 8 p.m. EST. The specials will be available on National Geographic, Nat Geo WILD, Nat Geo Mundo, Disney+, Hulu, and ESPN2. Viewers looking to stream SHARKFEST can do so by using FuboTV, DirecTV Stream and Sling. Both FuboTV and DirecTV offer free trials and Sling offers 50% off your first month. Disney+ is also a streaming option to watch SHARKFEST and plans start at $9.99 a month.

With cutting-edge technology and industry-leading experts, SHARKFEST entertains with four weeks of explosive, hair-raising, and celebratory shark programming that will showcase the captivating science, power, and beauty of these magnificent creatures - because one week is simply not enough, according to National Geographic.

SharkFest | Disney+ Dive into the depths with #SharkFest!  The month-long event premieres July 2 on #DisneyPlus, Hulu, and National Geographic TV. Posted by Disney+ on Thursday, June 8, 2023

Here is a look at the full schedule of SHARKFEST and how to watch each special:

Monday, July 3
Massachusetts is looking to have some warm and muggy weather, with scattered storms on the eve of Independence Day, according to the National Weather Service.

Tonight there will be several rounds of showers and thunderstorms throughout Massachusetts but periods of dry weather are also in the forecast.

In Western and Central Mass. there is a 50% chance of showers and thunderstorms with some of the storms possibly producing gusty winds, heavy rain and frequent lightning, with a low of around 67 degrees.

Boston has a 60% chance of showers after 5 a.m. on Tuesday, with a low of around 69 degrees. East wind may come around at about 6 mph becoming light and variable during the evening.

Read more: Springfield man faces charges after police say he had illegal fireworks

Cape Cod has a 60% chance of showers before 2 a.m. on Tuesday with thunderstorms to possibly follow until 5 a.m. Some of the storms could produce gust winds, heavy rain, and frequent lightning, with a low of 68 degrees.

Torrential rainfall may cause a risk for urban and street flooding in Southern New England and could cause rises on rivers and creeks.

Will there be fireworks Monday in Massachusetts?

Since theres a prediction of rain, the following fireworks shows for Monday night have either been cancelled or postponed:
WESTFIELD  During public participation at the June 20 Planning Board meeting, a resident living near Westfield State University told the board that she had just heard that immigrants were being housed at the university, and wanted to know, as an abutter, why she wasnt informed.

The reason she wasnt notified is because that program doesnt exist in Westfield, university officials said last week.

The resident, Pam Sanborn of Westwood Drive, said she had heard an hour earlier that immigrants were being housed at Dickinson Hall. But Leslie Rice, executive director of communication at WSU, told The Westfield News that the university had been approached by the state to use vacant dorms as temporary housing for non-students, but turned it down.
During endotracheal intubation, a catheter called an endotracheal tube is placed into the trachea and a gaseous mixture is pumped through it to induce anesthesia. The orotracheal tube and the nasotracheal tube are both examples of endotracheal tubes used in the administration of anesthesia. The nasotracheal tube is inserted into the trachea through the nasal passages, while the orotracheal tube is inserted into the trachea through the oral cavity.

Global anesthesia endotracheal tube market is estimated to be valued at US$ 178.7 million in 2022 and is expected to exhibit a CAGR of 6.2% during the forecast period (2022-2030).

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The demand for endotracheal tubes used in anesthetic procedures is anticipated to rise as the frequency of long-term surgical procedures rises.

Endotracheal tubes are used to administer anesthetic during a variety of surgical operations for the management and therapy of conditions as diverse as gastrointestinal disease, cardiovascular disease, spinal abnormality, urological disorder, orthopedic deformity, and brain tumors. As a result, the anesthesia endotracheal tubes market is expected to expand over the predicted time period as the number of surgical procedures increases globally. According to the National Center for Biotechnology Information, there will be 310 million major procedures conducted worldwide in 2021; of those, 4050 million will be performed in the United States and 20 million in Europe. It is estimated that 8 million people worldwide die annually as a direct result of major surgery, and that another 24 million people have some sort of postoperative problem. The insertion of a tube into the windpipe (trachea). Physicians, nurses, and other medical professionals who work at hospitals, clinics, and other care facilities, including but not limited to emergency rooms, operating rooms, perioperative areas, and (all places with intubated patients).

Anesthesia endotracheal tubes are anticipated to benefit from an older population, as more people in that demographic suffer from respiratory conditions such as asthma, pulmonary illness, and chronic obstructive pulmonary disease.

Anesthesia endotracheal tubes are anticipated to benefit from an older population, as more people in that demographic suffer from respiratory conditions such as asthma, pulmonary illness, and chronic obstructive pulmonary disease.According to U.S. statistics on the ageing of the worlds population, the number of individuals aged 60 and above is expected to increase by 56% between 2017 and 2030, from 901 Mn to 1.4 Bn, and to nearly double again by 2050, from 1.52 Bn to nearly 2.1 Bn.

Furthermore, in 2018, chronic bronchitis affected 9.0 Mn adults, or 3.6% of the population aged 18 and up, as reported by the American Lung Association. Fifteen papers reporting prevalence of chronic obstructive pulmonary disease according to gold standard diagnostic criteria and post-bronchodilation spirometry. Around 10% of people aged 40 and up have chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD), though this varies widely between nations and increases with age. More than 120,000 Americans fall victim to it every year, making it the fourth greatest cause of death in the country and the third largest cause worldwide.

Global Anesthesia Endotracheal Tube Market Impact of Coronavirus (COVID-19) Pandemic

There has been an outbreak of the COVID-19 virus since December 2019, and on January 30, 2020, the World Health Organization has declared a public health emergency.

There are three primary ways in which COVID-19 can influence the economy: through effects on drug supply and demand, disruptions in distribution networks, and monetary effects on businesses and the financial sector. China, India, Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, Egypt, and other countries are experiencing difficulties with drug shipments as a result of statewide lockdowns.

Despite this, the global anesthesia endotracheal tube market benefited from the COVID-19 pandemic as a result of rising demand from patients with pulmonary diseases. An international observational study of 1128 patients with perioperative COVID-19 who underwent a variety of surgical procedures reported high rates of postoperative pulmonary complications and mortality in October 2021. This was published by the American Society of Anesthesiologists (ASA) and the Anesthesia Patient Safety Foundation (APSF). 51% of patients developed pulmonary problems, and of those, 38% died within 30 days. Patients older than 70 years old, men specifically, and those who underwent emergency surgery had a higher risk of death (26 vs. 19%) than those who underwent elective surgery. Preoperative diagnosis of COVID-19 was made in 22 of 280 patients undergoing elective surgery; two of these individuals subsequently passed away. General guidelines on timing of elective surgery after COVID-19 infection were issued by the Anesthesia Patient Safety Foundation (APSF) and the American Society of Anesthesiologists (ASA) in a joint statement in 2022. These guidelines took into account the degree of illness at the time of infection, ongoing symptoms, comorbidities, and complexity of surgery. Due to the potential for aerosol formation during mask breathing, some guidelines produced during the COVID-19 pandemic suggested that rapid sequence induction and intubation (RSII) be used frequently for patients with COVID-19.

Key Players

The main companies participating in the market of anesthesia endotracheal tube worldwide are Medtronic Plc, General Electric Company, C. R. Bard, Inc., ConvaTec Group plc, Smith Medical, Inc., KindWell Medical Equipment Co.,Ltd, Royax, Fuji Systems Corp., Teleflex Incorporated, Neurovision Medical Products, and Intersurgical GmbH.

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Global Anesthesia Endotracheal Tube Market: Key Developments

U.S. Food and Drug Administration Approval for First X-ray AI to aid in assessing endotracheal tube insertion were granted to GE Healthcare, a subsidiary of the New York-based multinational conglomerate General Electric, in the month of November 2021. GE Healthcare recently shared that its AI system for evaluating Endotracheal Tube (ETT) insertions had been granted 510(k) clearance by the FDA. GE Healthcares Critical Care Suite 2.0 incorporates five AI solutions, including the one in question, to automate measurements, prioritize cases, and provide quality control in a way that has never been done before in the x-ray sector.

Global Anesthesia Endotracheal Tube Market: Restraint

Lack of sufficient health care facilities, especially in poor countries and in remote locations, is a key issue that restrains growth of the global anesthetic endotracheal tube market. Market expansion for anesthesia endotracheal tubes is likely to be limited by factors such as the scarcity of anesthetists and certified nurses per population and the absence of product recalls. Endotracheal intubation, for example, is the insertion of a tube into the trachea through the mouth or nose for the purpose of airway control, as stated by the National Center for Biotechnology Information in November 2017. One of the most crucial abilities of a doctor is airway management. In an emergency situation, failure to supply adequate airflow may result in the patients death or serious complications. Without premedication, intubating trauma patients with a high Glasgow Coma Scale is dangerous because it can cause the patient to vomit, which can lead to an esophageal intubation and an increased risk of aspiration. In children and babies, special care is needed because the reasons for endotracheal intubation might vary widely.

Reason to Buy this Report:

 Analysis of the impact of technological advancements on the market and the emerging trends shaping the industry in the coming years.

 Examination of the regulatory and policy changes affecting the market and the implications of these changes for market participants.

 Overview of the competitive landscape in the Anesthesia Endotracheal Tube market, including profiles of the key players, their market share, and strategies for growth.

 Identification of the major challenges facing the market, such as supply chain disruptions, environmental concerns, and changing consumer preferences, and analysis of how these challenges will affect market growth.

 Evaluation of the potential of new products and applications in the market, and analysis of the investment opportunities for market participants.

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Table of Contents with Major Points:

Executive Summary

Introduction

Key Findings

Recommendations

Definitions and Assumptions

Executive Summary

Market Overview

Definition of Anesthesia Endotracheal Tube 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 Anesthesia Endotracheal Tube 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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A cardiac pacemaker is a tiny device that is surgically implanted in the chest to regulate a slow heartbeat. Three types of cardiac pacemakers exist: a single-chamber pacemaker, a dual-chamber pacemaker, and a biventricular pacemaker. The single-chamber pacemaker is placed in the lower chamber or ventricle of the heart, while the dual-chamber pacemaker has two leads and is positioned in the right atrium and right ventricle. The biventricular pacemaker is employed in the management of heart failure through cardiac resynchronization therapy. By sending electrical impulses to both the left and right ventricles, the biventricular pacemaker aids in pumping. In addition, there are two methods for implanting pacemakers. The first is an internal cardiac pacemaker that is placed inside the body to transmit electrical impulses for the purpose of regulating the hearts rhythm. The second method involves an external cardiac pacemaker, also called an artificial pacemaker. This electrode-based medical device is utilized to regulate the contractility of myocardiocytes, which are responsible for cardiac remodeling and ensuring a proper heart rate.

The global cardiac pacemaker market is expected to reach a value of US$ 4,547.8 million in 2023, growing at a CAGR of 3.3 % during the projected timeframe from 2023 to 2030.

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The anticipated growth of the global cardiac pacemaker market during the projected duration is likely to be propelled by a rise in product approvals from regulatory authorities.

The growth of the global cardiac pacemaker market is projected to be propelled by an increase in product approvals from regulatory bodies during the forecast period. An illustration of this can be seen in the announcement made by Medtronic plc, a medical device company, on June 15, 2020. The company revealed that its Micra AV Transcatheter Pacing System (TPS), a small pacemaker equipped with atrioventricular (AV) synchrony features, received CE mark approval from the European Union (EU). This device is designed to provide electrical signals for proper heart functioning and is recommended for patients with AV blocks or impaired heart chambers.

The anticipated growth of the global cardiac pacemaker market during the forecast period is attributed to the rise in inorganic activities among market participants.

The global growth of the cardiac pacemaker market is anticipated to be propelled by the increasing occurrence of inorganic activities, such as partnerships, agreements, and collaborations among market players, throughout the projected timeframe. An illustration of this is the recent announcement made by LifeTech Scientific Corporation, a China-based interventional medical devices manufacturer, on December 17, 2021, extending their partnership with Medtronic plc, a medical devices company, for the HeartTone domestic pacemaker project. The project is set to be extended until 2028, with Medtronic providing a range of specialized technical consulting services.

Impact of the Coronavirus (COVID-19) Pandemic

The growth of the global cardiac pacemaker market is likely to be impeded by the COVID-19 pandemic due to its effect on cardiac surgeries. A study published in the National Center for Biotechnology Information (NCBI) in March 2022 revealed that the pandemic resulted in a significant decrease in adult cardiac surgery volume and elective cases in the United States in 2020, with a reduction of 52.7% and 65.5%, respectively. The Mid-Atlantic region was particularly affected by the first wave of the pandemic, with a drop in overall case volume for cardiac surgeries of approximately 69.7% among the population in that area.

Restraints

The global cardiac pacemaker market is expected to be hindered during the forecast period due to market players initiating product recalls. An example of this occurred in August 2021, when Boston Scientific, a medical device manufacturing company, issued a recall notice for pacemakers and cardiac resynchronization therapy pacemakers (CRT-Ps). The reason for the recall was the potential for these devices to transition to safety mode, which is intended to provide a backup if the device malfunctions. The recalled pacemakers and CRT-Ps are part of Boston Scientifics INGENIO product portfolio, which is used to treat patients with low heart rates or moderate to severe heart failure, a condition in which the heart cannot pump enough blood to meet the patients needs.

Regional Analysis

The global cardiac pacemaker market is classified based on geographical areas such as Africa, Latin America, Asia Pacific, North America, Europe, and the Middle East.

North America is anticipated to maintain its supremacy in the market throughout the projected period, mainly due to the rising incidence of heart ailments in the United States. As an illustration, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) reported that more than 360,900 individuals in the U.S. succumbed to coronary heart disease in 2019, while around 18.2 million adults aged 20 and above had coronary artery disease (CAD), which accounted for approximately 6.2 percent of the population. Moreover, the CDC disclosed that roughly 805,000 Americans experience heart attacks annually.

Prominent players

Prominent players, including MEDICO S.R.L., Medtronic, Vitatron Holding B.V., Boston Scientific Corporation, MicroPort Scientific Corporation, Lepu Medical Technology (Beijing) Co., Ltd., Abbott, OSYPKA MEDICAL, BIOTRONIK SE & Co. KG, OSCOR Inc., Pacetronix, and LIVANOVA PLC, are operating in the global cardiac pacemaker market.

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Report Attribute Details The market size value in 2023 US$ 4,547.8 Mn The revenue forecast in 2030 US$ 5,874.3 Mn Growth Rate CAGR of 3.3% The base year for estimation 2022 Historical data 2017  2021 Forecast period 2023  2030 Growth Drivers: Increasing product approval by regulatory authorities

Increasing inorganic activities among market players Restraints & Challenges: Product recall for cardiac pacemaker

Table of Contents with Major Points:

Executive Summary

Introduction

Key Findings

Recommendations

Definitions and Assumptions

Executive Summary

Market Overview

Definition of Cardiac Pacemaker 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 Cardiac Pacemaker 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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 Identified business opportunities  Our market research report can be used to analyze potential markets and new products. It can give information about customer needs, preferences, and attitudes. Also, it compare products and services.

 A clear understanding of your customers  A market report gives companys marketing department an in-depth picture about customers needs and wants. This knowledge can be used to improve products, prices, and advertising.

 Clear data-driven insights  Our Market research encompasses a wide range of activities, from determining market size and segment to forecasting demand, and from identifying competitors to monitoring pricing. All of these are quantified and measurable which means that gives you a clear path for building unique decisions based on numbers.

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By artificially stimulating the heart and lungs, cardiopulmonary bypass machines pump oxygen-rich blood to all parts of the body. When the surgeon operates in a bloodless field, it keeps other tissues and organs alive and well. Polyvinyl chloride (PVC) or silicone tubing, a reservoir for holding blood, a bubbler or membrane oxygenator, a cardiotomy (a filtered reservoir), a heat exchanger or two, a filter for the arterial line, a pump or two, a flow metre, an inline blood gas and electrolyte analyzer, and pressure-monitoring devices might all be part of the machine.

The global market for cardiopulmonary bypass equipment is predicted to reach US$ 118.0 Mn in value by 2022, expanding at a CAGR of 1.7% from 2023 to 2030.

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The prevalence of cardiovascular disease is rising, which will fuel demand for cardiopulmonary bypass devices.

The growth of the cardiopulmonary bypass equipment market is being fueled by a number of factors, including the rising incidence of cardiovascular diseases such as atrial fibrillation, atrial flutter, and supraventricular tachycardia, the age-related decline in cardiac muscle elasticity and output, and the growing elderly population. For example, the American Heart Association reports that between 3 and 6 Mn persons in the United States have atrial fibrillation as of June 2020, with that figure expected to rise to between 6 and 16 Mn by 2050. It is projected that the number of Europeans with atrial fibrillation will rise to 14 Mn by 2060, up from the estimated 12 Mn in 2017. Around 72 Mn Asians will be diagnosed with atrial fibrillation (AF) by 2050, with an additional 3 Mn experiencing a stroke directly attributable to their AF.

Market expansion throughout the forecast period is attributed to an expected rise in the frequency with which organ transplants are performed.

Market expansion throughout the forecast period is attributed to an expected rise in the frequency with which organ transplants are performed. For instance, in 2017, there were approximately 1, 469 organ transplant surgeries, as reported by the Organ and Tissue Authority of Australias Government. More than 1,400 people in Australia are on the organ donor waiting list. In addition, as of October 2021, the Australian Government Organ and Tissue Authority reported that 1,750 Australians were on the transplant waiting list. A kidney transplant may be necessary for some of the more than 13,000 patients now undergoing dialysis. According to data provided by the Australian Government Organ and Tissue Authority, 112 heart transplant procedures were done in Australia in 2021.

Global Cardiopulmonary Bypass Equipment Market Impact of Coronavirus (COVID-19) Pandemic

There has been an outbreak of the COVID-19 virus since December 2019, and on January 30, 2020, the World Health Organization has declared a public health emergency.

There are three primary ways in which COVID-19 can influence the economy: through effects on drug supply and demand, disruptions in distribution networks, and monetary effects on businesses and the financial sector. China, India, Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, Egypt, and other countries are experiencing difficulties with drug shipments as a result of statewide lockdowns.

Although the global market for cardiopulmonary bypass equipment was otherwise healthy prior to the COVID-19 pandemic, the decline in surgical procedures caused by the virus had a detrimental effect on the market. For example, in February 2022, the National Center for Biotechnology Information reported a significant drop in surgical volume and outpatient medical follow-up due to the COVID-19 pandemic. SARS-CoV-2 is related to surgical procedures. When the chance of exposure to COVID-19 in the hospital increases for surgical patients, they become more vulnerable to the infection after surgery. The number of chronic procedures done was reduced because of the significant risk of developing serious COVID-19 complications as a result of the immunosuppressive response to surgery and the inflammatory cytokine storm associated with COVID-19 infection.

Global Cardiopulmonary Bypass Equipment Market: Key Developments

At the 2022 annual meeting of the International Society for Magnetic Resonance in Medicine, which will take place in May, Koninklijke Philips N.V., a health technology company, will showcase its technological prowess in magnetic resonance imaging for complex diagnostics and rigorous clinical research. During this years annual conference of the International Society for Magnetic Resonance in Medicine, Philips debuted a patient-centric MR portfolio enabled by artificial intelligence. Magnetic Resonance (MR) processes can be improved, the staffs experience can be elevated, and productivity and predictability can be driven by utilising Magnetic Resonance Workspace, which uses AI technology to streamline the process from image acquisition to diagnosis.

Global Cardiopulmonary Bypass Equipment Market: Restraint

The recall of cardiopulmonary bypass equipment components is one of the primary factors restraining expansion of the global cardiopulmonary bypass equipment market. Example: on June 8, 2022, the FDA ordered Medtronic to stop selling its Heart Ware Ventricular Assist Device (HVAD) Pump Implant Kit. According to the FDA, this is a Class I recall because continuing to use the product poses an unreasonable risk of serious adverse health consequences or death. Due to a pump weld issue, Medtronic is issuing a recall for their HVAD Pump Implant Kit. In certain cases, moisture has been able to enter the pump, which has corroded and demagnetized the devices internal magnets.

Key Players

Some of the most well-known companies in the cardiopulmonary bypass equipment industry are: Medtronic Plc, LivaNova PLC, MAQUET Holding B.V. & Co. KG, Terumo Corporation, Braile Biomedica, and Tianjin Medical.

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Report Attribute Details The market size value in 2023 US$ 118.0 Mn The revenue forecast in 2030 US$ 135.1 Mn Growth Rate CAGR of 1.7% The base year for estimation 2022 Historical data 2017  2021 Forecast period 2023  2030 Growth Drivers: Increasing number of cardiovascular disease

Increasing number of organ transplant surgeries Restraints & Challenges: Recall of the components of cardiopulmonary bypass equipment

Table of Contents with Major Points:

Executive Summary

Introduction

Key Findings

Recommendations

Definitions and Assumptions

Executive Summary

Market Overview

Definition of Cardiopulmonary Bypass Equipment 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 Cardiopulmonary Bypass Equipment 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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 Identified business opportunities  Our market research report can be used to analyze potential markets and new products. It can give information about customer needs, preferences, and attitudes. Also, it compare products and services.

 A clear understanding of your customers  A market report gives companys marketing department an in-depth picture about customers needs and wants. This knowledge can be used to improve products, prices, and advertising.

 Clear data-driven insights  Our Market research encompasses a wide range of activities, from determining market size and segment to forecasting demand, and from identifying competitors to monitoring pricing. All of these are quantified and measurable which means that gives you a clear path for building unique decisions based on numbers.

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Cervical Total Disc Replacement Device Market Analysis

Cervical Total Disc Replacement Devices Market, By Design (Constrained, Semi-constrained, and Unconstrained), By Material (Metal-on-Biocompatible and Metal-on-Metal), By End User (Ambulatory Surgical Centers, Clinics, and Hospitals), and By Region (Africa, Latin America, Asia Pacific, Europe, North America, and the Middle East)Share, Outlook, Size, and Opportunity Analysis, 20192027

The prevalence of degenerative disc disorder increases with age, resulting in decreased mobility. This trend is predicted to boost market growth, as indicated by data from the American Academy of Orthopedic Surgeons in 2017, which revealed that cervical radiculopathy affects 64 in 100,000 females and 107 in 100,000 males in the United States. Additionally, the cervical total disc replacement device market is being propelled by technological advancements, recent clinical trials, and FDA approvals. For instance, Simplify Medical, Inc. received approval from the European medical device regulatory authority in March 2015 for their MRI-compatible artificial disc, the Simplify Disc.

The global market for cervical total disc replacement device is predicted to reach a value of US$ 1,105.1 Mn in 2022 growing at a CAGR of 21.7 % throughout the projected timeframe from 2023 to 2030.

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Market Drivers:

The global market for cervical total disc replacement devices is experiencing growth, mainly due to the rising incidence of degenerative disc disorders and the expanding elderly population worldwide.

In 2017, the American Academy of Orthopedic Surgeons reported that cervical radiculopathy, a condition characterized by pain, weakness, or numbness in the neck and surrounding regions due to compressed nerves from cervical disc degeneration, had a yearly occurrence of 107 per 100,000 males and 64 per 100,000 females in the United States. The market growth is also attributed to the frequent approval of products. As an example, AxioMed LLC received CE mark approval for its Cervical Freedom Total Disc Replacement in March 2019. Similarly, in July 2017, Medtronics Prestige LP cervical disc was approved by the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) for treating cervical disc degeneration or disease that causes nerve or spinal cord compression at two adjacent levels between the C3-C7 segments of the neck. The Prestige LP disc is Medtronics third clinically proven artificial cervical disc, and it is the initial to be deemed effective and safe for both first- and second-level processes.

Market Restraints:

The growth of the cervical total disc replacement device market is projected to be hindered in the coming years due to the expensive nature of the associated procedures such as artificial disc replacement operations and spinal fusion operations. As an example, in various states of the U.S., the cost of a particular disc replacement surgery can range from US$ 16,000 to US$ 46,000 on average.

Furthermore, the growth of the cervical total disc replacement device market is anticipated to be impeded during the forecast period due to the use of alternative therapies such as physiotherapy and specialized exercises for treating cervical disc degenerative disease. The Toronto Physiotherapy Journal published data in January 2014 indicating that physiotherapy is the preferred initial treatment for degenerative disc disorders like cervical disc degeneration and other spine degeneration diseases in the elderly population.

Regional Analysis:

The global cervical total disc replacement devices market is classified based on geographical areas such as Africa, Latin America, Asia Pacific, North America, Europe, and the Middle East.

During the projected period, the North American market for cervical total disc replacement devices is predicted to experience substantial expansion, primarily due to the major players introducing a higher number of products. As an example, Atlas Spine Inc. introduced the HiJak AC expandable cervical interbody fusion device to the market in March 2019. Additionally, the rising healthcare expenditure in the region is anticipated to further fuel growth in the global cervical total disc replacement device market during the projected period. As an example, the National Health Expenditure report indicates that healthcare expenses in the United States surpassed $1 trillion in 2018.

In Europe, market players are anticipated to benefit from the promising growth prospects presented by the research and development of cervical total disc replacement technology. An illustration of this is the work carried out by researchers at the Institute for Biomechanics in Switzerland, who announced in September 2019 that they had devised a technique for the regulated distribution of epigallocatechin 3-gallate to address intervertebral disc degeneration. The method is predicted to aid in the reinstatement of the intervertebral discs homeostasis. In addition, the growth of the cervical total disc replacement device market in Europe is being fueled by the presence of products that have been CE marked, such as the Freedom Cervical Disc from AxioMed LLC.

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Prominent players:

Medtronic Plc

Globus Medical, Inc.

Centinel Spine, Inc.

Stryker Corporation

Orthofix Medical, Inc.

Zimmer Biomet Holdings, Inc.

FH Orthopedics

NuVasive, Inc.

Report Attribute Details The market size value in 2023 USD 2,395.1 million The revenue forecast in 2030 USD 9,539.2 million Growth Rate CAGR of 21.8% The base year for estimation 2022 Historical data 2017  2021 Forecast period 2023  2030 Growth Drivers: Increasing Prevalence of Degenerative Disc Diseases, Advantages over Fusion Surgery, Technological Advancements, Increasing Aging Population, Rising Preference for Minimally Invasive Procedures. Restraints & Challenges: High Cost of CTDR Devices, Limited Awareness and Surgeon Training, Regulatory Hurdles, Lack of Long-term Clinical Data, Surgical Complexity and Risks.

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Table of Contents with Major Points:

Executive Summary

Introduction

Key Findings

Recommendations

Definitions and Assumptions

Market Overview

Definition of Cervical Total Disc Replacement 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 Cervical Total Disc Replacement 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!

Why Choose Coherent Market Insights?

 Identified business opportunities  Our market research report can be used to analyze potential markets and new products. It can give information about customer needs, preferences, and attitudes. Also, it compare products and services.

 A clear understanding of your customers  A market report gives companys marketing department an in-depth picture about customers needs and wants. This knowledge can be used to improve products, prices, and advertising.

 Clear data-driven insights  Our Market research encompasses a wide range of activities, from determining market size and segment to forecasting demand, and from identifying competitors to monitoring pricing. All of these are quantified and measurable which means that gives you a clear path for building unique decisions based on numbers.

Explore More Related Insights:

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Pigmented lesions, also known as melanocytic proliferations, are a type of skin disease. Brown, black, or blue pigmentation in a lesion indicates the presence of melanin, blood, or exogenous pigment. Discolored patches or growths on areas of skin that get direct sunlight are a common sign of skin cancer. Benign and malignant pigmented lesions are further subdivided into the subtypes of non-melanocytic and melanocytic lesions, respectively. Under the microscope, abnormal tissue is more probably cancerous, and this is what we mean when we talk about a malignant lesion. In this way, premalignant lesion excision decreases both the spread and incidence of malignant skin diseases. All forms of skin cancer are preventable if detected and treated early enough. Photodamage, or prolonged exposure to ultraviolet (UV) radiation, is a natural and environmental factor that contributes to the development of pigment lesions and other skin problems, including accelerated skin ageing.

Pigment lesions can affect people of almost any age. Pigmented lesions can be treated with numerous safe and cost-effective laser options, including the ErYAG and MedLite lasers.

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The market for pigmented lesion treatment is anticipated to expand as a result of rising demand for laser systems for the removal of pigmented lesions

In order to provide customers with cutting-edge options for the treatment of pigmented lesions, many companies are placing a strong emphasis on innovation. At the 23rd European Academy of Dermatology and Venereology (EADV) Congress in Amsterdam, for instance, Syneron Medical Ltd. introduced the PicoWay picosecond device for the treatment of pigmented lesions and the removal of tattoos. PicoWay is a device that can transmit signals at both 532nm and 1064nm wavelengths. In addition, the Lutronic XT Q-Switched, frequency doubled Nd:YAG laser, dubbed the Spectra XT, was released by Lutronic Corporation in 2014. This system has a wide range of treatment applications, such as those for pigmented lesion removal, melisma removal, tattoo removal, pore size reduction, and skin rejuvenation.

At the 2014 American Academy of Dermatology annual meeting, Cutera, Inc. debuted two novel laser systems. Hair removal, tattoo removal, and the elimination of benign pigmented lesions are the stated goals of both the excel HR and the Enlighten lasers. PicoSure, Cynosures tattoo- and pigment-removing energy delivery system, was granted FDA clearance in 2016.

Market for pigmented lesion treatment taxonomy

By Laser Type:

Fractional CO 2

Infrared

Diode

Alexandrite

Pulsed

Potassium-Titanyl-Phosphate

Nd:YAG

By Indication Type:

Non-melanocytic lesions Inflammatory Benign neoplasms Hamartomas Malignant neoplasms

Melanocytic lesions Malignant Benign



By End User

Skin Clinics

Hospitals

Others

It is anticipated that the market for treating pigmented lesions will expand significantly in Asia Pacific during the forecast period

The worldwide market for pigmented lesion treatments can be broken down into the following regions: North America, Europe, Latin America, the Middle East, Asia-Pacific, and Africa. During the anticipated time period, North America is anticipated to hold the major share of the market, trailed by Europe and the Asia-Pacific region. Rising concerns about appearance and the rising incidence of pigmented lesions are fueling the expansion of the market for pigmented lesion treatment in North America. Market growth for pigmented lesion treatments in North America is supported by the fact that each year more than 5.4 Mn cases of non-melanoma skin cancer are reported in the United States and more than 3.3 Mn people receive treatment. The market for removing pigmented lesions is projected to expand rapidly in the Asia-Pacific region due to factors such as growing government funding for lesion removal. This year, CeBIT Australia featured 12 cutting-edge technology startups chosen by the New South Wales (NSW) Government. Dermaspec is one such company that offers a high-quality, color adjusted low-cost camera for dermatoscopic imaging of pigmented skin lesions. at a reasonable price point, which in turn will support the expansion of the pigmented lesion market in the Asia-Pacific region.

In 2016, product revenue for Syneron Medicals Ltd. increased roughly 20% Y-o-Y in North America, roughly 25% Y-o-Y in Asia-Pacific, and roughly 9% Y-o-Y in EMEA. This growth in Asia-Pacific is supported by the companys revenue in these regions.

Inventions in treatment systems, spurred by rising product competition, are expected to fuel expansion of the global market for pigmented lesion treatment

In September 2017, Fotona, a company with offices in the United States and Europe, received FDA clearance for the StarWalker MaQX Q-Switched laser system, which can be used to treat tattoos, pigmented and vascular lesions, acne and scar revision, and permanent hair reduction. The competition between established businesses in the market for pigmented lesion treatment is bound to increase as new products are continually approved.

Some of the most important companies in the world market for pigmented lesion treatment are Lutronic Corporation, Fotona d.d., Alma Lasers, Ltd., EL.En. S.p.A., Solta Medical Inc., Cynosure, Inc., Syneron Medical Ltd., Sciton, Inc., Cutera Inc., Lumenis Ltd., Strata Skin Sciences, Inc., and Lynton Lasers Ltd.

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Reason to Buy this Report:

 Analysis of the impact of technological advancements on the market and the emerging trends shaping the industry in the coming years.

 Examination of the regulatory and policy changes affecting the market and the implications of these changes for market participants.

 Overview of the competitive landscape in the Pigmented Lesion Treatment market, including profiles of the key players, their market share, and strategies for growth.

 Identification of the major challenges facing the market, such as supply chain disruptions, environmental concerns, and changing consumer preferences, and analysis of how these challenges will affect market growth.

 Evaluation of the potential of new products and applications in the market, and analysis of the investment opportunities for market participants.

Table of Contents with Major Points:

Executive Summary

Introduction

Key Findings

Recommendations

Definitions and Assumptions

Executive Summary

Market Overview

Definition of Pigmented Lesion Treatment 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 Pigmented Lesion Treatment 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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Skin Rejuvenation Devices Market

Skin rejuvenation devices are utilized to address a variety of skin conditions, including sun spots, wrinkles, scars, acne marks, dry and itchy skin, and hyperpigmentation. There are multiple approaches and devices utilized for skin rejuvenation, such as laser-based devices (such as CO2 and ND: YAG), radiofrequency devices, mechanical energy-based devices, and photon-based devices. These minimally invasive techniques are employed to revitalize the skin and provide a more youthful appearance.

The Global Skin Rejuvenation Devices Market is estimated to be valued at US$ 2,227.4 million in 2022 and is expected to exhibit a CAGR of 9.5% during the forecast period (2022-2030).

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Competitive landscape

Prominent players, including Solta Medical Inc., Sciton, Inc., Strata Skin Sciences, Inc., Cutera Inc., Syneron Medical Ltd., Hologic, Inc., Lynton Lasers Ltd., Lutronic Corporation, Fotona D.O.O., Lumenis Ltd., Alma Lasers, Ltd, EL.En. S.p.A., and BISON MEDICAL, are operating in the global skin rejuvenation devices market.

Recent Developments

Skin Science Solutions, a top provider of skin and body rejuvenation treatments, has announced the launch of a new device called icoone roboderm in April 2022. This device utilizes advanced cellular technologies to provide non-invasive and painless facial and body rejuvenation. Recently, Skin Science Solutions revealed that the icoone treatment is now available at Exhale Spa in the United States. The icoone device was developed in collaboration with Professor Jean-Claude Guimberteau, a reconstructive surgery expert who dedicated years to researching the skins connective tissue structure. The icoone range consists of two device models, namely, Beauty and Medical, which come with or without LED and laser light sources. Microstimulation and light sources work together to target specific body areas, providing quicker and longer-lasting results both aesthetically and functionally.

Restraint

The lack of insurance reimbursement for skin rejuvenation procedures is likely to impede the growth of the global market for skin rejuvenation devices. This may result in limited utilization of these procedures. For example, in April 2018, the American Society of Plastic Surgeons (ASPS) reported that non-ablative laser treatments cost approximately US$1,031 per session, while ablative treatments cost around US$2,330 per session.

The growth of the skin rejuvenation device market is expected to be driven by the growing incidence of skin-related issues and the rising demand for skin aesthetic procedures.

The rise in the incidence of various skin issues like wrinkles, acne, scars, sun damage, stretch marks, and hyperpigmentation is leading to the extensive adoption of device-based skin rejuvenation treatments. As a result, there is an anticipated growth in the market for skin rejuvenation devices. The International Society of Aesthetic Plastic Surgery published their yearly statistics on Aesthetic Plastic Surgery, titled Global Aesthetic Survey Results, in April 2022. The report utilized new, precise digital technology to gather data, which indicated a significant increase in aesthetic plastic surgery procedures in 2021. According to the data, there has been a substantial rise in the number of cosmetic procedures carried out on the face, breasts, and body. Globally, there has been a significant increase of 63% in aesthetic body procedures such as abdominoplasty, buttock augmentation, and liposuction since 2020. In the same year, breast procedures, including breast augmentation, augmentation/breast lift, and breast lifts and reductions increased by 48%. Moreover, specialized facial procedures such as brow lifts and face lifts saw a 54% increase last year. These impressive statistics resulted in Americans spending more than $14.6 billion on aesthetic procedures in 2021, with surgical revenues up by 63%. According to data from 2021, there appears to be a correlation between the pandemic and an increase in surgical procedures for the face and body. Many members of the Aesthetic Society have noted that the prevalence of video meetings and increased free time may have contributed to this trend.

The skin rejuvenation devices market is expected to experience growth, fueled by the large number of skin resurfacing procedures performed in the United States. According to the 2017 Plastic Surgery Statistics Report by the American Society for Plastic Surgeons, approximately 667,561 and 656,781 intense pulsed light treatments were conducted for skin resurfacing in 2017 and 2016, respectively. The report also indicated that approximately 740,287 microdermabrasion procedures were performed in 2017.

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Skin Rejuvenation Devices Market Report Coverage

Report Attribute Details The market size value in 2023 USD 2,227.4 Million The revenue forecast in 2030 USD 4,588.7 Million Growth Rate CAGR of 9.5% The base year for estimation 2022 Historical data 2017  2021 Forecast period 2023  2030 Growth Drivers: Increasing prevalence of skin associated problems and increasing number of skin aesthetic procedures

Increasing aging population worldwide Restraints & Challenges: Lack of reimbursement for skin rejuvenation procedures by insurance companies

The market for skin rejuvenation devices is anticipated to experience growth during the forecast period due to the global increase in the geriatric population.

According to analysis by Coherent Market Insights, there will be a growing demand for skin rejuvenation procedures due to the increasing elderly population. According to the World Health Organization, between 2017 and 2050, the percentage of people over 60 will nearly double from 12% to 22%. By 2020, there will be more people aged 60 and over than children under 5. In 2050, 80% of older people will reside in low- and middle-income countries, and by 2030, one out of every six individuals worldwide will be aged 60 or above. The population of people aged 60 years and above is set to rise from 1 billion in 2020 to 1.4 billion presently. By 2050, this figure is expected to double to 2.1 billion, while the number of individuals aged 80 years or above is projected to triple to 426 million during the same period.

Furthermore, as stated in the 2017 World Population Prospects Report, the worldwide population is progressively aging. In 2017, approximately 962 million individuals were 60 years of age or older, representing 13% of the total global population. It is predicted that this number will rise to 1.3 billion by 2025, increasing at an annual rate of around 3%. With the elderly population experiencing common skin issues such as reduced skin fat, wrinkles, and other related problems, the demand for skin rejuvenation procedures is expected to rise, leading to growth in the market for skin rejuvenation devices.

Impact of the Coronavirus (COVID-19) Pandemic

The COVID-19 virus first emerged in December 2019 and has since spread to more than 100 nations worldwide. On January 30, 2020, the World Health Organization announced it a public health emergency.

COVID-19 has three primary ways of impacting the economy, which include direct effects on the demand and production of drugs, medical devices, and goods, disturbances in the channels of distribution, and financial effects on companies and financial markets. Nations like India, Egypt, Saudi Arabia, China, the U.A.E., and others are encountering transportation difficulties for medical devices and drugs due to nationwide lockdowns.

The economy can be impacted by COVID-19 through three primary means. Firstly, it can directly affect the production and demand of various items such as drugs, devices, and goods. Secondly, it can cause disruptions in distribution channels. Lastly, the pandemic has resulted in a global transformation of the delivery of medical and surgical services. The transportation of drugs between different locations has become a challenge for several countries, including India, U.A.E., China, Egypt, Saudi Arabia, and others, due to nationwide lockdowns.

Moreover, the global market for skin rejuvenation devices suffered a setback during the COVID-19 pandemic due to a decline in surgical procedures caused by the pandemic. An example of this would be in June 2021, as per information released by the National Center for Biotechnology Information, where the Cosmetic Surgery Governance Forum (CSGF), a group of aesthetic plastic surgery specialists, utilized their network to collaborate on intricate cases and exchange knowledge. This proved especially beneficial in dealing with challenges brought on by quarantine measures that resulted in a significant reduction in the number of surgeries performed. During the post-pandemic period, the total number of surgeries declined by 23.5% (p < 0.05).

Additionally, the American Society of Plastic Surgeons stated in April 2021 that their board-certified plastic surgeons ceased performing non-essential surgeries for an average of 8.1 weeks in 2020 as a result of COVID-19. This timeframe accounts for 15 percent of the year, and it corresponds with the reduction in the total number of surgeries performed during the previous year.

Table of Contents with Major Points:

Executive Summary

Introduction

Key Findings

Recommendations

Definitions and Assumptions

Executive Summary

Market Overview

Definition of Skin Rejuvenation Devices Market 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 Skin Rejuvenation Devices Market 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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by Laurie Sullivan @lauriesullivan, July 3, 2023

Demand-side platform MediaMath filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection in Delaware district court on Friday. The company owes between $100 million and $500 million to between 200 and 999 companies, including Google, Magnite, OpenX, PubMatic, Xandr, among many others.

Emails went out to MediaMath employees and partners on Friday to say the company will shut down operations in the coming months, according to initial reports.

MediaMath raised $600 million since 2007. Valuation at its peak reached more than $1 billion, but the company failed to successfully negotiate terms with potential buyers in recent weeks.

The bankruptcy will have a wide-ranging effect on the advertising technology industry, with many well-known companies being owed more than $1 million. The top five include Magnite at nearly $12.6 million, PubMatic at nearly $10.5 million, Sonobi at $5.3 million, Xandr at $4 million, and AdsWizz at 3.4 million.

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Viant Technology, and Verve Group separately held recent discussions to acquire MediaMath, but the potential deals fell through. MGI was in discussions as recently as this week, and Viant had discussions last month.

Viant, which is known for its efforts to revitalize companies.

The Irvine, California-based company bought social networking site Myspace from News Corp. in 2011 for $35 million.

MediaMaths valuation has since fallen. Last year, it announced a $150 million recapitalization that included a mix of new capital and a refinancing of existing debt. The 2022 deal saw Searchlight Capital Partners become the indirect majority owner of MediaMath.

Sad but its insane how many bad decisions they had to make over the years to get here, from not getting acquired when telcos were dishing money, to not securing CTV, to having that shit UI, to that weird supply path product they were banking on. They should have been what the Trade Desk is now, according to one Reddit community member in r/adops.

Joe Zawadzki, Erich Wasserman and Greg Williams co-founded what would become the online advertising technologys first demand-side platform in 2007. The company supported more than 3,500 advertisers
The average temperature in babies is 98.6F (37C) when taken orally (mouth) and 99.6F (37.5C) when taken rectally (in the bottom). The hypothalamus maintains the normal body temperature by regulating the body's internal thermostat.

Fever in babies or children under 5 years of age is defined as an oral temperature above 99.5F (37.5C), a rectal temperature above 100.4F (38C) or an axillary temperature (under the arm) of above 99F (37.2C).

During the day, it is normal for the temperature to fluctuate in children. It is usually lower in the morning and rises as the day progresses. It can also vary according to the child's activity.

More than 60% of parents with children aged between six months and five years, report a case of fever in their children.

Though high temperature can be a cause for concern for most parents, it is usually self-resolving and disappears in a few days.

If the rise in temperature persists for 24 hours, then the child is diagnosed with fever, indicating some underlying illness. The illness may often be harmless and triggered by mild viral infections like cold and cough.

The hypothalamus resets the body to a higher temperature in response to an infection, illness, or some other cause, to fight off the germs that cause infections.

Fever is usually a symptom of an underlying illness and not an illness on its own. Few factors that trigger fever in infants are:

1. Infections: These are the most common cause of fever in children. Fever helps the body to fight infections, by stimulating natural defense mechanisms.

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Viral - Most infections are viral, which are responsible for colds and upper respiratory infections. Common infectious diseases of childhood, such as chickenpox and measles can also cause fever. Viral infections do not necessarily need treatment except to alleviate some symptoms and they resolve on their own after proper care in a few days.

Bacterial- Bacterial infections including certain ear and throat infections, urinary tract infections, pneumonia, blood infections and meningitis are not self-resolving and need treatment with antibiotics.

Inflammation of the meninges, the membranes that cover the brain and spinal cord is called meningitis. Most cases are caused by bacteria or viruses, but some can be due to certain medicines or illnesses.

Bacterial meningitis is usually a serious and life-threatening condition if not treated promptly.

Viral meningitis (also called aseptic meningitis) is more common and far less serious and resembles a flu.

Fever accompanied by an extreme sore throat can be caused by Streptococcus. If not treated with antibiotics, this infection can lead to rheumatic fever or heart damage.

2. Overdressing: As temperature regulation is not fully developed in infants, sometimes overdressing them or being in a hot environment can lead to a rise in their temperature.

3. Immunizations: Low-grade fever after vaccinations is common in babies and toddlers.

4. Lesser known causes: Some gastrointestinal conditions like gastroenteritis, some tumors or chronic joint inflammation can cause fever. Testing can also cause a slight rise in temperature but usually does not increase the temperature beyond 100F (37.8C).

Gently placing the back of the hand on the skin of the forehead or a gentle kiss often gives a hint about raised body temperature. This method of taking a temperature is called tactile temperature. It does not give an accurate measurement.

Also, fevers can rise and fall. The child might experience chills as the body's temperature begins to rise or the child might sweat to release extra heat as the temperature starts to drop.

Therefore, it is always advisable to use a reliable thermometer to confirm a fever.

Most commonly used thermometers:

Glass Mercury Thermometers- It was commonly used in the past but it carries the risk of possible exposure to mercury, which is an environmental toxin.

It was commonly used in the past but it carries the risk of possible exposure to mercury, which is an environmental toxin. Digital Thermometers- This thermometer should be used to measure temperature in infants and children. It usually gives the quickest and most accurate readings. Digital thermometers can be used to take oral (in the mouth), rectal (in the bottom) and axillary (under the arm) temperatures. An axillary reading is less reliable but can be useful for screening at any age. The thermometer beeps, usually in about 15 seconds and displays the temperature on the digital display.

Ear (tympanic) Thermometers These devices can be used to take a quick temperature reading from the ear, but are expensive to buy. They can also give wrong readings especially if not placed properly into the ear canal, which is small in infants or if there is a build up of ear-wax. This thermometer is not suited for infants 6 months or younger.

These devices can be used to take a quick temperature reading from the ear, but are expensive to buy. They can also give wrong readings especially if not placed properly into the ear canal, which is small in infants or if there is a build up of ear-wax. This thermometer is not suited for infants 6 months or younger. Temporal Artery Thermometers- These devices have an in-built infrared scanner that reads the temperature of the temporal artery on the forehead.

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Appropriate thermometer for different age groups:

For babies younger than 3 months - Use a digital thermometer to take a rectal temperature. Temporal artery thermometers may also give accurate readings for kids in this age group.

- Use a digital thermometer to take a rectal temperature. Temporal artery thermometers may also give accurate readings for kids in this age group. For babies between 3 months and 6 months old - The best choice would be to use a digital thermometer to measure rectal temperature.

- The best choice would be to use a digital thermometer to measure rectal temperature. For kids between 6 months and 4 years old - Use a digital thermometer to take a rectal temperature or axillary temperature, a temporal artery thermometer, or an electronic ear thermometer.

- Use a digital thermometer to take a rectal temperature or axillary temperature, a temporal artery thermometer, or an electronic ear thermometer. For kids 4 years or older- Using a digital thermometer to take the oral temperature is the most reliable means.

To take the rectal temperature:

The end of the thermometer should be washed with soap and water and the tip of the thermometer should be moistened with a lubricant, such as petroleum jelly.

There are two positions in which the baby can be placed:

belly-down across on a firm, flat surface

or face-up with legs bent towards the chest

The lubricated end of the thermometer is inserted into the anal opening about  inch to 1 inch, or until the tip of the thermometer is fully in the rectum.

Insertion should be stopped if resistance is felt. Wait until the thermometer beeps or sends other signals that the temperature is ready to be read.

To take the oral temperature:

Oral temperatures should not be taken until 20 to 30 minutes after the child finishes eating or drinking.

Place the tip of the thermometer under the tongue and ask your child to gently close his or her lips around it. The child must be reminded not to bite down or talk, and to relax and breathe normally through the nose.

Oral temperatures can be half a degree lower than the body temperature.

Wait until the thermometer beeps or sends other signals that the temperature is ready to be read.

To take an axillary temperature:

This is a convenient way to take a child's temperature. Although not as accurate as a rectal or an oral temperature, some parents prefer to take an axillary temperature, especially for kids who cannot hold a thermometer in their mouths.

Remove the child's shirt and undershirt, and place the thermometer under the armpit. Fold your child's arm across the chest to hold the thermometer in place.

Wait until you hear the appropriate number of beeps or any other signal that indicates that the temperature is ready to be read.

The baby's temperature should be taken if one of the following is apparent:

If the skin feels warmer than usual

Increased irritability, fussiness and crying

Increased sleepiness

Crying in pain

Refusing to drink and eat

Refusing to breastfeed

Suffering from diarrhea or vomiting

Having breathing difficulties

Has a stiff neck

Swelling of the soft spot on an infants head

Not responding or less active

Skin rash

A fever caused by any illness may contribute to dehydration.

Temperature does not remain constant throughout the day. Sometimes the child may sweat as the temperature drops. If the child or infant is not kept well-hydrated, they begin to show signs of irritability.

Dehydration can develop more quickly in children suffering from vomiting or diarrhea. Therefore, it is important to encourage the child to drink plenty of water if they have a fever.

Signs of dehydration include a dry mouth, no tears, sunken eyes, drowsiness and generally becoming more unwell. Seek medical help if you suspect that your child is becoming dehydrated.

If temperatures rise too high, febrile convulsions may occur.

These are seizures that happen because of fever. They occur in about 4% of children between the ages of six months and five years.

Children outgrow febrile convulsions by the age of 4-5 years. Though they are a cause for concern, febrile convulsions have no long-term consequences.

The baby can be suspected of having a fever if:

The skin on their forehead, back or stomach feels hotter than usual

The cheeks are flushed

The skin is excessively sweaty

Shows signs of irritability or restlessness

Does not eat / drink / breastfeed

The quickest and most effective way of confirming the diagnosis in babies is by using a digital thermometer. Thermometers give fast and accurate readings.

Previously, doctors recommended treating infants or children on the basis of temperature alone. But now, before prescribing medicines, the overall activity and condition of the infant is judged.

If the baby is between 3 months of age and 3 years and has a low-grade fever below 102F (38.8C), it is advised to avoid medication. But if the baby is fussy and irritable, and temperature reads above 102F (38.8C), antipyretics like paracetamol or acetaminophen can be considered.

For a baby younger than 3 months of age, a rectal temperature of 100.4F (38C) or higher, should be treated as a sign of serious infection.

Despite fever, the illness may not be serious if the baby/child:

is alert and active

is interested in playing and engaging

is eating / drinking / breastfeeding

has a normal skin color

The childs doctor should be contacted if:

The child is under 3 months and has a fever of 100.4F (38C) or higher

The child is between 3 to 6 months and has a temperature up to 102 F (38.9 C) and seems unusually irritable, lethargic or uncomfortable, or has a temperature higher than 102 F (38.9 C)

The child is above 6 months up to 24 months and has a fever of 102 F (38.9 C) or higher

If the fever lasts for more than 5 days

If the child has a febrile seizure

Look out for signs of dehydration- Fever can contribute to dehydration. Dehydration can develop quickly if fever is accompanied by diarrhea and vomiting.

Infants should be breastfed at regular intervals and children should be encouraged to drink plenty of fluids if they have a fever.

If fever is accompanied by vomiting and diarrhea, the doctor might prescribe an electrolyte (rehydration) solution made especially for kids.

Do not force feed-Fever in general, reduces appetite. Allow children to eat what they want to eat and do not over-feed.

Adequate rest- Ensure that the child gets adequate rest.

Lukewarm bath- Lukewarm sponge bath helps in bringing down the temperature. Do not run cold baths or ice and alcohol rubs as it can worsen the situation.

No bundling up- Extra layer of clothing prevents the temperature from coming down. One layer of light clothing is advisable.

Comfortable environment- The temperature in the room should neither be too hot or cold. It should be comfortable. Opening the window or a fan may help.

Health Tips

Plenty of fluids to drink: Keeping the body hydrated will help the body cool itself down.

Wet compresses: Using wet compresses on the forehead, calves and wrists may help to bring the temperature down.

Light dressing: Dressing in light cotton clothes will help the body heat to escape.

Rest: Excessive moving around can raise the body temperature. Adequate rest is advocated.
Medication-overuse headache is a chronic daily headache caused by some medications, when used excessively by patients already prone to headaches. MOH is often observed in people suffering with headache disorders like migraine , cluster or tension-type headaches and is usually caused by the over-use of acute pain-relief medicines. It occurs more often in women than men.

Drug-induced headache is also known as medication misuse headache, withdrawal headache or analgesic rebound headache. It is nowadays commonly termed as Medication-overuse headache (MOH).

The drug-induced headaches were earlier classified according to

Headaches that have warning signs (e.g. chronic migraine, evolved migraine)

Mechanism of headache (e.g. analgesia rebound headache)

Pattern of headache (chronic daily headache)

Cause of headache (drug-induced headache, painkiller headache, stress headache)

Medication overuse now defined by the amount of medication taken by a patient per month. It varies with the type of medication. There are two types of medication-induced headaches (MIH) that are caused by medication overuse -

When medications like Triptans, ergot alkaloids, combination analgesics, and opioids are consumed for ten or more than ten days per month

When medications like simple analgesics, and non-steroidal anti-inflammatory drugs (NSAIDs) are consumed for 15 or more days

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What are the Common Drugs that Cause Headaches?

The common medications which cause drug-induced headache are:

Non-opioid analgesics - e.g. Acetaminophen or Paracetamol, Non-steroidal anti-inflammatory drugs like Acetyl salicylic acid or Aspirin, Diclofenac sodium, Naproxen, Ibuprofen

Opioid analgesics - Codeine, Narcotics, Oxycodone, Propoxyphene

Barbiturate-analgesic combinations - e.g. Butalbital plus acetylsalicylic acid and Caffeine, with or without Codeine

Triptans - e.g. Sumatriptan succinate

Other analgesics - e.g. Pentazocine, Buprenorphine

OTC drug combinations - e.g. Acetaminophen plus Codeine

Caffeine-containing medications

Ergotamine

Patients suffering from MIH have the following characteristic symptoms:

A chronic headache that occurs daily or almost daily, for more than 6 months

A headache that leads to non-performance of the patients, in terms of home, work and social activities

The headache improves with pain relief medications but recurs again when the effect of the medication wears off

The patient suffers from symptoms of both tension-type headache and migraine headache

The patient suffers from a headache on waking up from sleep

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The other general symptoms include:

Anxiety

Restlessness

Nausea

Irritability

Poor concentration

Memory problems

There are no specific diagnostic tests for MIH. Diagnosis is based on the clinical symptoms of the patient and the patients history.

The characteristics of MIH vary with the type, location and severity of the headache.

Those with a history of chronic tension-type headache have a dull, generalized headache

Triptan-induced headaches have characteristics similar to migraines for which triptan treatment was initiated

Ergot-induced medication overuse causes a throbbing type of headache

MIH can be treated by withdrawing or discontinuing the medication that has caused the headache with excessive use. The treatment can be followed with a combination of pharmacological, behavioral and physical therapy.

Opioids cannot be withdrawn suddenly. The dose has to be decreased gradually and eventually discontinued. The doctor must be consulted when decreasing the dose.

Recurrent migraine headaches can be cured by prescribing migraine-specific agents such as Sumatriptan succinate. It relieves the patient of the migraine and associated symptoms like nausea, vomiting, and sensitivity to light and sound.

For drug-induced headaches due to ergot compounds or analgesics, the withdrawal symptoms include nausea, vomiting, tachycardia and hypotension. These symptoms can be cured with additional treatment using antiemetics and vasoactive drugs like Clonidine or Propranolol.

The patient must be educated on the side effects of the medicaments being consumed for non-headache conditions and the alternate medication for the disease should be recommended by the healthcare provider.

Some patients may need to be hospitalized for detoxification, under medical supervision.

In some cases, behavioral therapy like stress management, meditation, and aerobic exercises can help treat headaches

MIH is preventable. It can be avoided by following the guidelines given below:
The term "atresia" is derived from the Greek a- (no or without) and tresis (hole or orifice) and refers to an inherited condition where obstruction and complete occlusion of the intestinal lumen occurs , which accounts for approximately 95% of all obstructions. Thus, atresia is the complete blockage or obstruction of any part of the intestine along the gastrointestinal (GI) tract. There may also be absence of an entire portion of the intestine due to complete obliteration and separation into two separate parts. This contrasts with intestinal stenosis, which is the partial blockage of the intestine.

Although intestinal atresia can occur anywhere along the GI tract, it is generally confined to the small intestine. The frequency of occurrence, symptoms, and methods of diagnosis of intestinal atresia differ according to the site affected.

On an average intestinal atresia occurs in 1 in every 1,500 live births and affects both males and females equally.

Intestinal atresia may be of several types, depending upon the portion of the intestine affected. These include the following:

Pyloric Atresia:

This type of atresia occurs at the pylorus, the junction between the stomach and the duodenum, the first part of the small intestine. Pyloric atresia occurs in approximately 1 in a million live births. Pyloric atresia is inherited and is generally a rare condition. Affected children tend to vomit out the stomach contents. The stomach becomes filled with gas, resulting in distension of the upper abdomen. X-ray of the abdomen is used for confirmation of the clinical findings.

Duodenal Atresia:

The duodenum is the first part of the small intestine into which the stomach contents are emptied. Duodenal atresia occurs in approximately 1 in 6,000 to 1 in 10,000 live births and is one of the most common congenital small bowel obstructions diagnosed prenatally. Approximately 50% of the infants with duodenal atresia are premature at birth. About 66% have abnormalities of the heart, genitourinary or intestinal tract. Duodenal atresia is strongly associated with Down syndrome. Almost 40% infants have Down syndrome. Infants with duodenal atresia usually vomit soon after birth, and their abdomen becomes distended. X-ray images show a large distended stomach and duodenum without any gas elsewhere along the GI tract.

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Jejunoileal Atresia:

This type of atresia occurs in the jejunum (middle portion) or ileum (lower portion) of the small intestine. The most common type of neonatal intestinal obstruction, jejunoileal atresia occurs in 1 in 1,000 to 1 in 3,000 live births. Immediately before the constriction, the intestine is greatly dilated since it is not able to absorb nutrients and transport the accumulated food further down the GI tract. In approximately 10-15% of infants with jejunoileal atresia, parts of the intestine can become degenerated during fetal development. A large number of infants with jejunoileal atresia have problems with intestinal rotation and fixation. It has been found that cystic fibrosis is associated with jejunoileal atresia and can complicate the management of the condition. Jejunoileal atresia is classified into four types (Type I to Type IV) on the basis of severity. The newborn exhibits specific clinical symptoms depending upon the severity of the disease. These include abdominal distension and frequent vomiting of green bile.

Colonic Atresia:

This is a rare form of atresia that exhibits signs and symptoms similar to jejunoileal atresia with highly enlarged bowel. Colonic atresia is often associated with small bowel atresia, Hirschsprungs disease or gastroschisis.

Intestinal atresia is an inherited condition due to a genetic defect. An example is familial multiple intestinal atresia. One of the most common causes of intestinal atresia is due to a vascular accident, resulting in inadequate blood supply to the intestine of the developing fetus. This leads to ischemia in the respective segment of the intestine, resulting in loss of functionality.

Some of the symptoms and signs of intestinal atresia can be observed even before birth, including polyhydramnios. In this condition, there is more amniotic fluid in the uterus than normal. This occurs due to the inability of the developing fetus to absorb the amniotic fluid through the intestine. A prenatal fetal ultrasound can confirm the diagnosis. After birth, the following symptoms may be observed:

Aversion to take food by mouth.

Distended abdomen due to accumulation of gas.

Inability to pass stool due to lack of bowel movements.

Vigorous vomiting, which may be yellow or green in color.

Diagnosis of intestinal atresia can be divided into two phases - prenatal and postnatal diagnosis.

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Prenatal Diagnosis

Intestinal atresia is nowadays diagnosed by prenatal ultrasound. A prenatal diagnosis of intestinal atresia is typically made in the third trimester of pregnancy, when the bowel becomes easier to see on ultrasound. Some diagnostic features found prenatally include the following:

Distended Bowel: A prenatal ultrasound will detect a distended (expanded) bowel before the obstruction.

A prenatal ultrasound will detect a distended (expanded) bowel before the obstruction. Double Bubble: This is a classic sign of duodenal atresia, when there is a dilated bowel and fluid in the stomach and duodenum but not further down.

This is a classic sign of duodenal atresia, when there is a dilated bowel and fluid in the stomach and duodenum but not further down. Polyhydramnios: This is the presence of excessive amounts of amniotic fluid in the uterus of a pregnant woman, which peaks in the third trimester of pregnancy and is caused by the failure of the intestine to absorb amniotic fluid. Polyhydramnios accompanies 53% cases of duodenal atresia and 25% of cases of jejunoileal atresia.

Due to the high incidence of associated birth defects, a complete prenatal evaluation and amniocentesis are recommended for mothers carrying babies with small bowel atresia to exclude any of the following conditions:

Cystic Fibrosis

Down Syndrome

Congenital Heart Disease

Bowel Rotational Abnormality

Annular Pancreas

Esophageal Atresia

Anorectal Atresia

Genitourinary Malformations

Postnatal Diagnosis

Besides prenatal diagnosis, postnatal (after birth) diagnosis can also be carried out. Babies with small bowel atresia tend to vomit frequently, which in itself is an indication that there is something wrong, thereby warranting further investigation. Some specific diagnostic modalities to detect small bowel atresia as well as congenital deformities include the following:

Abdominal X-Ray: An abdominal X-ray can be used to take images of the internal structures of the babys abdomen. This diagnostic investigation can often clinch the diagnosis.

An abdominal X-ray can be used to take images of the internal structures of the babys abdomen. This diagnostic investigation can often clinch the diagnosis. Upper GI Tract X-Ray: This procedure investigates any abnormalities in the upper GI tract, primarily the pylorus and duodenum. A contrast medium such as barium is administered through the mouth as a barium meal, which makes the internal structures clearer and more distinct on radiographs. X-ray photographs are then taken to evaluate the structures of the upper GI tract.

This procedure investigates any abnormalities in the upper GI tract, primarily the pylorus and duodenum. A is administered through the mouth as a barium meal, which makes the internal structures clearer and more distinct on radiographs. X-ray photographs are then taken to evaluate the structures of the upper GI tract. Lower GI Tract X-Ray: This procedure investigates the rectum, large intestine and the lower part of the small intestine. A contrast media is administered into the rectum as an enema . This contrast media is radio-opaque and coats the inner lining of the intestine. As a result, X-ray radiographs clearly shows the internal structures of the lower GI tract in minute detail, so that malformations such as strictures (narrowing of the lumen) and obstructions can be easily identified.

This procedure investigates the rectum, large intestine and the lower part of the small intestine. A . This contrast media is radio-opaque and coats the inner lining of the intestine. As a result, X-ray radiographs clearly shows the internal structures of the lower GI tract in minute detail, so that malformations such as strictures (narrowing of the lumen) and obstructions can be easily identified. Abdominal Ultrasound: Ultrasonography (USG) is a non-invasive investigative technique that uses sound waves to visualize the functionality of internal organs. These sound waves are emitted from a transducer that is placed on the surface of the body, and the sound waves get deflected by the internal organs and produce a visual image on a monitor. Abdominal ultrasound is used to detect and confirm any abnormalities within the abdomen of babies exhibiting clinical signs of intestinal atresia.

Ultrasonography (USG) is a non-invasive investigative technique that uses sound waves to visualize the functionality of internal organs. These sound waves are emitted from a transducer that is placed on the surface of the body, and the sound waves get deflected by the internal organs and produce a visual image on a monitor. Abdominal ultrasound is used of babies exhibiting clinical signs of intestinal atresia. Echocardiography: Babies born with intestinal atresia can suffer from life-threatening complications such as congenital heart defects. Echocardiography is used to diagnose any congenital abnormalities of the heart.

There is no prenatal treatment for babies diagnosed with intestinal atresia. Babies born with intestinal atresia require surgical intervention. The type of surgery involved depends on the nature and location of the blockage. The treatment strategy can be divided into the following stages:

Stabilization:

Prior to surgery, the baby needs to be stabilized.

A nasogastric tube is inserted through the nose down to the stomach in order to empty the stomach contents and accumulated gas under slight negative pressure. This will prevent the baby from vomiting and aspiration.

under slight negative pressure. This will prevent the baby from vomiting and aspiration. Nutrition will be provided via an intravenous (IV) channel.

Any investigative procedures such as X-rays and routine blood tests will be carried out during this period, prior to the surgery.

Surgery:

The surgery is done under general anesthesia (GA) so that the baby does not feel any pain or discomfort. The surgery may either be an open surgery or a laparoscopic surgery.

In case of an open type of surgery, a single large incision will be made in the abdomen and the affected portion of the intestine will be excised and the two ends will be sutured so that continuity is maintained. In case of laparoscopic surgery, several small incisions will be made, through which a camera and other instruments will be inserted in order to perform the surgery.

If the intestine requires a relatively longer time to heal, the surgeon may create a stoma (an opening). This is where the intestine is brought to the abdominal skin surface so that the feces can be collected and temporarily stored in a colostomy bag, instead of passing through the anus.

Post-surgical Care:

Post-surgical care is crucial for the babys full recovery. The baby is transferred to a neonatal intensive care unit (NICU) where the vital signs are monitored round-the-clock. Nutrition will continue to be provided through the nasogastric tube until the baby is able to take food by mouth. The duration of the hospital stay may vary between 1 to 3 weeks, depending on how quickly the baby recovers. After discharge from the hospital, a follow-up appointment with the surgeon is required for assessment of the growth parameters and general health and wellbeing of the baby.
Retinoblastoma is the most common primary cancer of the eye occurring in childhood , with a frequency of 1:14,000 to 1:20,000 live births depending on the country, and accounts for 3% of all childhood cancers. It is more frequent in Africa and India. About 80 % of retinoblastoma cases are diagnosed before 3 years of age.

Retinoblastoma is a type of cancer of the eye occurring in children. It is a malignant tumor (cancerous growth ) of immature cells of the retina (the light sensitive layer at the back of the eye) .

Untreated retinoblastoma can be fatal; in developed countries, advances in treatment have resulted in a 95 to 99% survival rate.

Retinoblastoma occurs in 2 forms  a heritable and a non-heritable (sporadic) form. Heritable retinoblastoma indicates that the tendency to develop retinoblastoma is transmitted from parents to offspring, and accounts for 40% of the cases. The differences between the two forms are listed below:

Heritable retinoblastoma Sporadic retinoblastoma Percentage of total retinoblastoma cases 40 60 Laterality Bilateral in 85 % of cases Unilateral Average age at diagnosis 12-15 months 24 months Transmissible to offspring Yes No Predisposition to second nonocular cancers Yes No Multifocal tumors(multiple growths in different parts of the retina ) Yes No Family history of retinoblastoma Present in 10-20% of cases Absent Associated with increased paternal age Present in some cases Absent

Children with the heritable type of retinoblastoma are more at risk of developing cancer (second non-ocular cancers) in other organs of the body, the most common of which are osteogenic sarcoma (bone cancer), soft tissue sarcomas and melanomas (tumors of pigmentary cells). These second cancers are more common in patients who have received radiotherapy for their retinoblastoma, and even more so when this radiation has been given before 12 months of age. These second primary malignancies are the most common cause of death following retinoblastoma in developed countries.

The development of most cases of retinoblastoma may be explained by Knudsons two hit hypothesis.

Every individual has 23 pairs of chromosomes, one chromosome of every pair obtained from each parent. Genes (containing codes to synthesize proteins and thus determining various characteristics of an individual) are situated on these chromosomes. The retinoblastoma gene (or RB1) is situated on the 14th band of the long arm of chromosome 13 (13q14). This is a tumor suppressor gene. This means that presence of this gene in its normal form protects against retinoblastoma.

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According to Knudsons two hit hypothesis, the DNA has to suffer two hits or two mutations for the cancer to occur.

In the heritable type of retinoblastoma, one mutation is inherited from the parent, and so all the cells in the body have this mutation (germline mutation). The second mutation occurs later after fertilization in the retinal cells, resulting in retinoblastoma (somatic mutation). In the sporadic variety, both mutations occur within a single retinal cell after fertilisation of the egg (both are somatic mutations).

Recently, another variety of retinoblastoma has been discovered, where the retinoblastoma gene was normal, but there was a high level of amplification of the MYCN gene only in the tumor cells. This does not result in heritable retinoblastoma, and these children do not have any of the characteristics of heritable retinoblastoma, including the risk of transmission to offspring.

Retinoblastoma may present in a variety of ways. However, the most common modes of presentation are -

Most common modes of presentation of retinoblastoma Leucocoria (white reflex in pupil or amaurotic cats eye reflex)

In 60% of cases The pupil that normally appears dark, now appears whitish in color due to the tumor or detached retina showing through the pupil Strabismus or squint

In 20% of cases Either an outward or inward deviation of the affected eye occurs Ocular inflammation

In 5% of cases The eye is red and whitish pus like material may be seen behind the cornea

Less common modes of presentation include blood in the anterior chamber (seen behind the cornea), cataract, increased pressure in the eye and inflammation of the tissues surrounding the eye. In neglected cases, spread outside the eyeball results in the eye being pushed forward (proptosis) and appearing very prominent.

Retinoblastoma most commonly spreads along the optic nerve and into the brain and skull bones. It spreads through the blood to the bone marrow. Other organs to which it can spread are bones of the arms and legs, spinal cord, lymph nodes and abdominal organs.

The diagnosis of retinoblastoma is mainly clinical. The classical presentation of leucocoria or whitish appearance of the pupil should be considered to be retinoblastoma unless proved otherwise. The pupil is dilated and a detailed fundus (examination of the retina) is carried out, to determine if the tumor is monofocal or multifocal. If multifocal, all the tumors should be documented. Since most children in this age group are not very cooperative, an examination under anesthesia is required in all patients for a thorough assessment of ocular disease prior to treatment.

Ultrasonography (ultrasound examination of the eye and orbit) measures the tumor size and shows the presence of heterogeneity (variations in the tumor) and calcification (accumulation of calcium in tissues)

CT (computed tomography) scan of the eye may show calcification. However, CT scan is less preferred because it exposes the child to radiation.

MRI (magnetic resonance imaging) of the eye, orbit and head is the preferred mode of imaging to evaluate the tumor in the eye and to detect possible extension into the orbit and brain. MRI can also detect if there an associated tumor of the pineal gland; this condition is referred to as trilateral retinoblastoma. MRI also helps in differentiating other conditions that simulate retinoblastoma.

If extension into the optic nerve (the nerve at the back of the eye that transmits visual signals from the retina to the brain) is suspected, a lumbar puncture (placing a needle into the back and withdrawing cerebrospinal fluid which surrounds the spinal cord) may be done.

If there is evidence of extension outside the eye, bone scans and bone marrow testing to detect the spread are required.

Genetic studies to determine heritability and the type of genetic involvement are done to help in genetic counselling.

There are a number of conditions that simulate retinoblastoma as they also cause leucocoria or a whitish appearance of the pupil. Though all of these conditions (collectively referred to as pseudoglioma) should be kept in mind and the patient must be examined to rule out these conditions, leucocoria should be considered to be due to retinoblastoma unless proved otherwise, as this condition can be fatal.

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Conditions that simulate retinoblastoma Persistent hyperplastic primary vitreous ( PHPV) Developmental disorder in which there is failure of regression of primary vitreous

Unilateral in 90% of cases

Associated with a small eye Retinopathy of prematurity Retinopathy affecting premature infants exposed to high oxygen concentration

Formation of new vessels in the immature retina with fibrous proliferation to form a mass behind the lens that gives appearance of leucocoria Congenital cataract Cataract present since birth gives whitish pupillary appearance

Coats Disease Massive leak of lipids (fats) resulting in retinal detachment



Unilateral in 90% of cases

More common in boys Cyclitic membrane Organisation of exudates behind the lens following inflammation of ciliary body. The ciliary body controls the shape of the lens and secretes aqueous humor, the fluid in the front part of the eye Fundus coloboma Very large fundus coloboma (absence of tissue) may cause whitish appearance of pupil. The fundus is the part of the eye opposite the pupil Toxocara Endophthalmitis Infestation by dog roundworm or cat roundworm

Severe vitreous inflammation causes the whitish appearance of pupil Norries Disease X-linked recessive disorder in males with bilateral mass formation behind the lens

The patient may have mental retardation and deafness Incontinentia Pigmenti X-linked dominant disorder in females

Retinal vascular disease and skin pigmentation may be present Familial Exudative Vitreoretinopathy Condition that prevents blood vessels from forming at the edges of the retina

The management of retinoblastoma involves a multidisciplinary approach and involves ophthalmologists, pediatric oncologists (doctors who specialise in cancer in children), pathologists, radiation oncologists (doctors who specialise in giving radiotherapy for cancers) and genetic counsellors. The primary focus of treatment in advanced disease is the preservation of life; however modern techniques have more precise goals like preservation of the eyeball and vision as far as possible.

The treatment of retinoblastoma involves strategically choosing among the various available modalities according to the individual case. This would depend on laterality, stage of the disease, age of the child and presence of spread at the time of diagnosis. In children who present with advanced disease contained in one eye with no visual potential in that eye, that eye is surgically removed , resulting in a 95- 99% cure rate. Where there is visual potential or in bilateral tumors, chemotherapy (treatment with anti-cancer drugs) is the treatment of choice. Chemotherapy is often used in conjunction with other modalities, especially in the concept of chemoreduction, wherein the size of the tumor is reduced with chemotherapy, thus rendering the tumor amenable to one of the local therapies.

The following table lists some of the important modalities of treating retinoblastoma.

Various treatment modalities for retinoblastoma Chemotherapy (use of anti-cancer drugs) Intravenous (injection into the veins of the arms) To reduce the size of the tumor which is beneficial for additional local adjunctive treatments including cryotherapy and laser

Useful in large and bilateral tumors

Number of cycles of treatment depends on the stage Intra-arterial (injection into the ophthalmic artery which supplies the main central artery of the retina) Useful in selected cases, and in vitreous seeds (free floating groups of tumor cells in the vitreous).

Useful as primary therapy

Reduces risk of systemic toxicity (toxicity to the remaining organs in the body)

Drugs used are melphalan, topotecan and carboplatin Periocular (injection into the tissue around the eyeball) To provide extra drug dose near the tumor in advanced cases Intravitreal Injection into the vitreous of melphalan (with or without topotecan) is useful in cases of vitreous seeding following treatment of retinoblastoma Laser Photocoagulation Laser application with argon or diode laser Useful in small tumors

May be used as an adjunct to chemotherapy

2-3 sessions at monthly intervals Cryotherapy Exposure of the tumor to very cold temperatures May be used in small primary or recurrent tumors Brachytherapy Placement of a radioactive implant (Iodine-125 or Ruthenium-106) on the sclera near the base of the tumor Useful in medium- sized peripheral tumors Enucleation Surgical removal of the tumor containing eyeball Performed in eyes with large tumors (that are contained within the eyeball) and where there is no visual potential Transpupillary thermotherapy (with or without the aid of indoycanine green) Application of heat through the pupil by infrared diode laser May be used in isolation for small tumors External beam radiotherapy Application of radiation to the eyeball region from outside Used along with chemotherapy for spread of the cancer outside the eye. Very rarely used nowadays because of the danger of complications, like inducing second primary malignancies, and local facial abnormalities

Retinoblastoma is fatal if untreated due to spread to the brain and various organs of the body. Since early diagnosis and treatment is optimal in industrialised countries, the prognosis for the eyes is very good. The latest techniques of intra-arterial chemotherapy (referred to as ophthalmic artery chemosurgery or OAC) and intravitreal injections have reduced the need for removal of the eyes, and for external beam irradiation. However, long term outcomes still depend on the development of secondary tumors, predominantly bone tumors. The risk of second tumors increases with radiation for the treatment of the original condition.

Adult survivors of retinoblastoma often have subnormal visual function.

Children with unilateral retinoblastoma without a germline mutation have a very small risk of developing a tumor in the other eye. A regular clinical eye examination and ultrasound examination is recommended.

With treated bilateral retinoblastoma, clinical examinations are conducted every 3-6 months up to the age of 7 years, then annually, and later every 2 years for life not only for new retinal tumors, but also for other second non-ocular tumors.

Patients with heritable retinoblastoma should preferably avoid radiotherapy, tobacco and exposure to sunlight (agents that damage DNA and thus predispose to cancers) to reduce the risk of second non-ocular tumors.

Individuals with retinomas (non-cancerous retinal tumors) should undergo clinical examination and imaging every 1-2 years to detect malignant (cancerous) change.

Genetic counselling forms an integral part of the management of a patient with retinoblastoma. The susceptibility to heritable retinoblastoma is inherited in an autosomal dominant manner. Unfortunately, genetic counselling is very complicated in retinoblastoma and depends on the type of retinoblastoma and genetic testing. The following table gives the risk of having children with retinoblastoma, and the risk for subsequent children if one child develops the disease.

Parent has - Risk of having a child with retinoblastoma If one child has retinoblastoma, risk for subsequent children getting retinoblastoma Bilateral retinoblastoma 45-50 % 45-50 % Unilateral retinoblastoma 7  15 % 45-50 % Unaffected < 1% 5% Unaffected , but a carrier 45-50 % 45-50 %

The above table is a simplified version, and actual risks should be determined after molecular genetic testing of the blood of at risk persons.

Retinoblastoma can only be prevented by proper genetic counselling, wherein parents do not go in for more children if there is a high risk for developing retinoblastoma.

Pre-implantation genetic diagnosis may be made by testing the embryo after in-vitro fertilisation (test tube baby). If found to have the retinoblastoma gene mutation, then implantation may be deferred, thus preventing a pregnancy in which the child is at risk.

Prenatal genetic testing (during pregnancy) may be done by chorionic villus sampling (cells from placenta) before 12 weeks of pregnancy, or from amniotic fluid (after 12 weeks of pregnancy). If found to be positive for the mutant gene, then fetal ultrasound can be used for early detection of tumors, and an early delivery may be planned to start early treatment. However, non-continuation of pregnancy has certain medical and legal issues which need to be ascertained.
The core business of the Shriram Group is Financial Services. Moreover, in India, the Shriram Group is a clear leader in the truck financing and chit businesses. Shriram Transport Finance Company is the largest Commercial Vehicle Financing NBFC in the country and the Chit Fund Business of the Group is Numero Uno in the industry, across India. The Shriram Group has been pursuing diversification in areas other than financial services. Currently the group has presence in engineering projects, property development, auto ancillaries and software services and is on the lookout to enter other industries, by keeping its options wide option. It has promoted a number of companies engaged in diverse financial services activities such as truck finance, consumer finance, chit business, Life Insurance business, etc

Shriram General Insurance Company Limited is a Joint Venture between Shriram Capital Limited (Part of Shriram Group) and Sanlam Limited. In this Joint Venture between the two organizations, Shriram Capital Limited holds 74% Equity and Sanlam Limited holds the balance 26% of Equity.

Sanlam is the largest General Insurance Company in South Africa. Sanlam Limited was established in 1918 and thereafter demutualized in 1998. Sanlam is a leading financial services group in South Africa, engaged in diversified businesses viz. general insurance, life insurance, investment, and independent financial services. The market capitalization of Sanlam is approximately USD 6 billion and has over USD 60 billion of assets under its management.

Organizations Philosophy

The philosophy of Shriram General Insurance Co. Ltd. is to provide prompt, ethical and equitable settlement of claims. Their goal is to respond quickly to the customers needs and to handle his/her claim in a prompt and trouble-free manner.

Their dedicated staff of trained professionals understands that undergoing or facing a loss is a stressful situation. The Shriram Group is committed to achieving excellence by their efforts toward superior service, efficiency, teamwork, and communication. At SGI, the approach of "Pay only if we can" is given prime importance.

Shriram General Insurance Co. Ltd. (A Joint Venture with Sanlam, South Africa)

E-8, EPIP, RIICO Industrial Area,

Sitapura,

Jaipur  302022.

Website: http://www.shriramgi.com

Disclaimer: This information is extracted from the companys official website to provide information to the general public. The information is likely to change based on the concerned insurance companies discretion. Alterations, deletions and/or additions to the existing policy products, coverage and their premiums may be enhanced or reduced. These figures are only guidelines. We recommend the individual to visit the official website of the insurance company for more details and updated matters. Read more: Bharti AXA General Insurance Company Ltd - https://www.medindia.net/patients/

insurance/bharti-axa-general-insurance.htm
BRUSSELS (AP)  Russias armed forces are bruised but by no means beaten in the war in Ukraine, a top NATO military officer said Monday, as he laid out the biggest revamp to the organizations military plans since the Cold War should Moscow dare to widen the conflict.

They might not be 11 feet tall, but they are certainly not 2 feet tall, the Chair of the NATO Military Committee, Admiral Rob Bauer, told reporters. So, we should never underestimate the Russians and their ability to bounce back.

U.S. President Joe Biden and his NATO counterparts are set to endorse a major shakeup of the alliances planning system at a summit in the Lithuanian capital Vilnius next week.

NATO, as an organization, does not provide weapons or ammunition to Ukraine. Its sought to avoid being dragged into a wider war with nuclear-armed Russia. At the same time, it is massively reinforcing the security of member countries near Russia, Ukraine and Belarus.

Around 40,000 troops are on standby from Estonia in the north down to Romania on the Black Sea. About 100 aircraft take to the skies in that territory each day, and a total of 27 warships are operating in the Baltic and Mediterranean Seas. Those numbers are set to rise.

Under its new plans, NATO aims to have up to 300,000 troops ready to move to its eastern flank within 30 days. The plans divide its territory into three zones  the high north and Atlantic area, a zone north of the Alps, and another in southern Europe.

Bauer said that NATOs new planning is based on the strength of the Russian army before President Vladimir Putin launched the war on Ukraine almost 17 months ago. He said the war has depleted Russias army, but not its navy or air force.

Of Russias ground forces, around 94% is now engaged in the war in Ukraine, Bauer said.

What we see in general is that the Russians are careful around NATO. They are not for seeking a conflict with NATO. I think that is a sign that they are very, very busy, he said. In the land domain, I dont think they have a lot of forces available to do anything to anyone else.

But we are convinced that the Russians are going to reconstitute, he said. We will continue to look at them as a serious threat, in the maritime, and in the air especially, and in space, they are still very, very, capable, let alone of course in nuclear.

A revolt by Wagner mercenaries in Russia late last month raised deep security concerns in Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania and Poland after a deal was reached for their leader, Yevgeny Prigozhin, to be allowed to take refuge in Belarus.

Lithuanian President Gitanas Nauseda said that neighboring countries would face a heightened danger if the Wagner Group deploys its serial killers just over their border.

Vilnius lies around 35 kilometers (22 miles) from the Belarus border.

Lithuania wants to have a permanent NATO presence on its territory. Germany signaled last week that it would be prepared to base soldiers there if requested. For the moment, though, NATO sees no imminent threat coming from Belarus.

Were confident we know whats going on, and right now we see no changes. But that doesnt take our eye off what we need to do every day, Major General Matthew Van Wagenen told reporters. If we needed to change posture, we could do it rapidly.

NATOs 31 member countries took part in a force generation conference last week in an effort to understand how many troops and how much equipment the alliance might have at its disposal to respond to any Russian attack, both in the short and longer term.

Both officers were upbeat about the results, although they declined to provide details for security reasons. Experts and some NATO diplomats, however, have expressed doubt about the willingness of member countries to put a total of 300,000 troops on standby.

I would classify it as highly successful, Van Wagenen said. I can assure you, we are in a position right now that we know whats missing and how we need to grow this in the future.

In terms of NATOs ability to execute the plans, should they be needed in the future, Bauer welcomed the expected commitment in Vilnius by Biden and his counterparts to boost defense spending, which should help provide commanders with the equipment they need.

In 2014, NATO committed to move toward spending 2% of GDP on their military budgets by 2024. At their July 11-12 summit, the leaders will set the 2% figure as a spending floor, rather than a ceiling to aim for.
How to use the mindat.org media viewer

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Welcome to the mindat.org media viewer. Here is a quick guide to some of the options available to you. Different controls are available depending on the type of media being shown (photo, video, animation, 3d image)

Controls - all media types

Zoom in and out of media using your mousewheel or with a two-finger 'resize' action on a touch device.

Use the mouse or your finger to drag the image or the view area of the image around the screen.

< and > at the left and right hand side of the screen move forwards and backwards for the other images associated with the media you selected. Usually this is used for previous/next photo in a gallery, in an article or in search results. Keyboard shortcuts: use shift + the left and right arrow keys.

< and > in the bottom center are used for switching between the photos of the same specimen. Keyboard shortcuts: use the left and right arrow keys.

> in the bottom center, raises the information box giving details and further options for the media, < at the top of this box then hides it. Keyboard shortcuts: use the up and down arrow keys.

? opens this help window. Keyboard shortcuts: use the H key or the ? key.

Other keyboard shortcuts:

1 Fit image to screen 2 Fill screen with image 5 Display at full resolution < Make background darker > Make background lighter space Hide/dim titles and buttons

Scalebar

If the field of view (FOV) is specified for the photo, the scalebar appears in the left bottom corner of the viewer. The scalebar is draggable and resizeable. Drag the right edge to resize it. Double click will reset the scalebar to it's default size and position. If the scalebar is in default position, double click will make it circular.

Controls - Video

Video files have a standard set of video controls: - Reset to start, - Skip back, - Play, - Pause, - Skip forwards. Keyboard shortcuts: You can stop/start video play with the P key.

Controls - Animation (Spin Rotation)

Animation (usually 360 degree spin rotations) have their own controls: - enable spin mode. Note that while images are loading this option will not be available but will be automatically activated when the animation has loaded. Once active you can spin the image/change the animation by moving your mouse or finger on the image left/right or by pressing the [ or ] keys.

The button switches to move mode so that you can use your mouse/fingers to move the image around the screen as with other media types.

The button, or the P key will start playing the animation directly, you can interrupt this by using the mouse or finger on the image to regain manual movement control.

Controls - 3D Stereoscopic images

If a stereoscopic 3D image is opened in the viewer, the 3D button appears in the bottom right corner giving access to "3D settings" menu. The 3D images can be viewed in several ways:

- without any special equipment using cross-eyed or parallel-eyed method

- with stereoscope

- with anaglyph glasses.

- on a suitable 3D TV or monitor (passive 3D system)

For details about 3D refer to: Mindat manuals: Mindat Media Viewer: 3D

To enable/disable 3D stereo display of a compatible stereo pair image press the 3 key. If the left/right images are reversed on your display (this often happens in full-screen mode) press the 4 key to reverse them.

Controls - photo comparison mode

If a photo with activated comparison mode is opened in the viewer, the button appears in the bottom right corner giving access to "Comparison mode settings" menu.

Several layouts are supported: slider and side by-side comparison with up to 6 photos shown synchronously on the screen. On each of the compared photos a view selector is placed, e.g.: Longwave UV . It shows the name of currently selected view and allows to select a view for each placeholder.

Summary of all keyboard shortcuts
The Rockies have released southpaw Logan Allen, MLB.coms Mark Feinsand reports (Twitter link). Allen signed a minor league deal with Colorado last August, but hasnt yet seen any time on the Rockies MLB roster.

Not to be confused with current Guardians left-hander Logan T. Allen (born in 1998), the elder Allen also formerly pitched for Cleveland as well as San Diego and Baltimore from 2019-22. Allen was a former top-100 prospect who was involved in two significant trades during his career  he was one of four prospects sent by the Red Sox to the Padres in the Craig Kimbrel deal in 2015, and he was part of the big three-team swap between San Diego, Cleveland, and Cincinnati at the 2019 trade deadline.

Allen has tossed 96 1/3 innings at the Major League level, and posted only a 5.89 ERA and a very low 15.5% strikeout rate. The results havent been any better at Triple-A, as the lefty has a 6.35 ERA over 253 2/3 frames at the top minor league level. This includes a 7.20 ERA over 45 innings with Triple-A Albuquerque this season, as Allen has only a 22.2% strikeout rate and a high 12.4% walk rate.

Even with the caveat that pitching in the hitter-friendly Pacific Coast League is no easy feat, Allens lack of results at Triple-A arent promising. Still only 26 years old, his past track record could very well get him another look with another team on a minor league contract. Speculatively, Allen might seem like a good candidate to pitch overseas, as working in an international league might help him get his career on track.
WASHTENAW COUNTY, MI -- There has been a lot of business news happening in Ann Arbor and Pittsfield Township lately.

Culvers is eyeing the former TGI Fridays, while other businesses are opening, rebranding and even celebrating anniversaries.

Here is some recent Washtenaw County business news you might have missed.

Culvers may take over shuttered TGI Fridays near Ann Arbor

Pittsfield Township may soon get a Culvers.

The townships Planning Commission spoke about the proposed project coming to the former TGI Fridays at 3015 Lohr Road at its June 15 meeting. The fast-food restaurant plans to repurpose the old building and is seeking a conditional use permit to add on a drive-thru.

Read the full story here.

Son of late Peaceable Kingdom owner opens new business in Main Street building

Owner Carol Lopez brought The Peaceable Kingdom to Ann Abor for over 40 years.

Now her son is bringing a new business to the space at 210 S. Main St. in downtown Ann Arbor.

Read the full story here.

Dog day care, boarding center officially opens in Pittsfield Township

Dog owners now have another place to take their pups in Washtenaw County.

Pup City Daycare recently opened in a former Zap Zone location at 4177 Carpenter Road in Pittsfield Township. The new business, located between Ann Arbor and Ypsilanti, offers dog owners a new option for boarding and a dog day care.

Read the full story here.

Mothfire Brewing Co. set to open Ann Arbor-area brewery, taproom

Beer lovers near Ann Arbor will soon be able to enjoy a summer night at Mothfire Brewing Co.s newest location.

Mothfires new brewery and taproom is set to open Thursday, July 13, at 713 W. Ellsworth Road in Pittsfield Township. The company was formerly operating out of a building at 2290 S. Industrial Highway.

Read the full story here.

Sweetwaters Coffee & Tea celebrates 30 years in Ann Arbor

A coffee shop that can now be found all across the country originally got its start in Ann Arbor 30 years ago.

Sweetwaters Coffee & Tea began in 1993 in downtown Ann Arbor at 123 W. Washington St., but can now be found in around 40 locations across 12 states thanks to the help of the companys franchisees.

Read the full story here.

Ann Arbors Havana Cigar and Cocktail Lounge to become Detroit Pizza Pub

An Ann Arbor restaurant that once served cigars will soon serve pizza by the slice.

Havana Cigar and Cocktail Lounge will be transforming into a brand new concept called Detroit Pizza Pub.

Read the fully story here.

Avalon Cafe is offering events, drinks with later weekend hours in Ann Arbor

Avalon Cafe and Kitchen in Ann Arbor is bringing events, sweet treats and cocktails to its new after-hours operations.

The restaurant at 120 E. Liberty St. decided to bring new hours to its operations on Fridays and Saturdays. General Manager Joanne Bower said these hours will give people a relaxing option for a dessert drink bar in downtown Ann Arbor.

Read the full story here.

Want more Ann Arbor-area news? Bookmark the local Ann Arbor news page or sign up for the free 3@3 Ann Arbor daily newsletter.

More Ann Arbor business news:

Briarwood Malls new stores, big deals in Ypsilanti Township and other Washtenaw County business news

Indie coffee shop receives huge victory, Saline cafe being sold and other Washtenaw County business news

Angelos is closing, Crazy Wisdom is reopening and other Washtenaw County business news

Chick-fil-A may be coming to Ann Arbor, Ypsilanti Running Co. is closing and other Washtenaw County business news

Independent coffee shop opposes Starbucks, wine now fills The Cellar and other Washtenaw County business news
WASHTENAW COUNTY, MI - If your Fourth of July week festivities take you outside, be aware that cases of Lyme disease spread by infected ticks are on the rise, with a majority occurring locally, Washtenaw County health officials say.

Between 2020 and 2021, Lyme cases in county residents tripled, and in 2022 they reached a 10-year high, Washtenaw County Health Department figures show. In 2023, the trend looks to be continuing, with more than 25 cases reported in June, officials said.

Not only have our Lyme cases increased, but weve also seen a big increase in the percentage of our Lyme cases that we think people got exposed here locally, Laura Bauman, the health departments epidemiology program manager, said.

Lyme disease, the most common vector-borne illness in the United States, is transmitted to humans through the bite of infected blacklegged ticks, also known as deer ticks.

The uptick in local cases in recent years can be attributed to a growth in the range of those ticks in Washtenaw County, increased prevalence of Lyme and the rise in people spending time outside that coincided with the COVID-19 pandemic, Bauman said.

Epidemiologists definitively identified Lyme transmission in Washtenaw County in 2016, after a young adult got sick. He had been clearing brush around his family home and hadnt traveled out of the county for three months, Bauman said. Further investigations found Lyme-infected ticks and small mammals in the area, confirming the presence of the disease.

In recent years, cases in county residents and traced to local ticks have grown, and theyre now coming from all over the county, not just the western part, Bauman said.

Symptoms of Lyme include fever, headache, fatigue and a skin rash called erythema migrans. If left untreated, infection can spread to joints, the heart and the nervous system, according to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

Local health officials say there are a number of steps residents can take to protect themselves. Among them are showering after being outside and conducting regular tick checks, scouring your body, outdoor gear, children and pets for the parasites.

People can avoid the miniature pests in the first place by using insect repellent with DEET or permethrin, and wearing long sleaves, shoes and socks when outside, according to the health department. Walking in the center of trails and avoiding wooded or bushy areas with high grass or leaf litter can also help, officials say.

If you discover a tick attached to you, they advise removing it as quickly as possible, using tweezers to grasp the head close to the skin and pulling gently without twisting. After the process, they advise washing hands and the bite area.

If you develop a rash or fever within several weeks of removing a tick, the county health department recommends seeing a doctor. Most cases of Lyme can be treated successfully with antibiotics, and patients treated in the early stages usually recover quickly and completely.

If you miss the initial infection, and you dont get on your antibiotics, then it can cause joint issues, it can go to your heart, you can get meningitis. Lyme can do some really horrible things, Bauman said.

At this time, the CDC, Michigan Department of Health and Human Services and the Washtenaw County Health Department dont recommend testing ticks for specific diseases, even if someone was bitten.

The results can be slow and may not be reliable. Positive results in a tick do not mean the person was infected, and negative results can be misleading as the person may have been bitten by a tick they didnt see, according to the health department.

This time of year, people should be on high alert because many ticks are in the nymph stage, just the size of a poppy seed and very hard to see, Bauman said.

The tiny disease vectors, coupled with more people outside wearing summer clothing are reasons why June is the peak of Lyme transmission season, she added, with its spread typically occurring between May and August.

For more information on Lyme disease and ticks, see the Washtenaw County Health Departments website.

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YPSILANTI, MI -- Ypsilanti police are asking for the publics help in finding a man wanted for sexual assault.

Andrew Najib Jimenes Vasquez, an 18-year-old Ann Arbor man, is wanted on charges of criminal sexual assault and unarmed robbery. Jimenes Vasquez allegedly followed a woman, sexually assaulted her and robbed her on Sunday, June 25, in the 1100 block of Washtenaw Avenue, according to the Ypsilanti Police Department.

Police did not provide additional details on the incident.

A warrant for the arrest of Jimenes Vasquez on these charges was approved by Magistrate Elisha Fink on Friday, June 30, according to court documents.

Jimenes Vasquez is also charged by the Ypsilanti Police Department with surveilling an unclothed person and aggravated incident exposure, according to court documents.

Police believe Jimenes Vasquez fled Michigan after finding out he was wanted for the incident, they said.

Police are asking anyone with information to contact their local law enforcement agency or Ypsilanti Police Department Det. Sgt. Jessica Lowry at 734-368-8784.

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WASHTENAW COUNTY, MI -- The most popular college destination for Class of 2022 grads was the same for almost every Ann Arbor-area school district.

Washtenaw Community College was the No. 1 postsecondary school of choice for every high school in the Washtenaw Intermediate School District except for two, according to state education data.

Other popular options included the University of Michigan, Michigan State University and Eastern Michigan University. Nearly 19.2% of college-bound students last year from the area picked WCC.

The University of Michigan was a close second (16.5%), followed by Michigan State University (11.1%) and Eastern Michigan University (10%). The fifth-place college in the area -- Western Michigan University -- was chosen by about 2.8% of graduates.

Altogether, Washtenaw ISD students who graduated in 2022 enrolled at 290 different colleges, according to data. Heres a map showing the top three college destinations from each district. (Hover over the shapes for details.)

(Cant see the map? Click here.)

In total, 2,387 students who graduated from schools in the Washtenaw County ISD in 2022 enrolled in college last fall. The four districts with at least 100-plus grads who enrolled in college include:

Ann Arbor Public Schools: 981 students enrolled in college (72.7% of its 1,349 graduates)

Saline Area Schools: 322 students enrolled in college (73.9% of its 436 graduates)

Dexter Community Schools: 237 students enrolled in college (75.7% of its 313 graduates)

Chelsea Public Schools: 142 students enrolled in college (69.6% of its 204 graduates)

Heres a look at the top 10 in-state college destinations for Class of 2022 Washtenaw County ISD grads.

(Cant see the pie chart? Click here.)

The top out-of-state school was the University of Toledo, which accepted 18 new students last fall from the Ann Arbor area.

About 19.2% of college-bound grads from Ann Arbor Public Schools and 55.6% from Ypsilanti Community Schools picked WCC.

Check out the table below to see data on the top college choices for 2022 graduates of the Washtenaw ISD.

(Cant see the table? Click here.)

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ANN ARBOR, MI - July Fourth honors the beginning of this country. Later this month, an Ann Arbor college is holding an event for those who fought for it.

Washtenaw Vet Fest will be held from 10 a.m. to 3 p.m. Saturday, July 22 at Washtenaw Community College, officials from the college said.

Alongside a day of live music, free food and camaraderie with fellow veterans, the festival connects prior military personnel with educational and other benefits provided at the colleges Wadhams Veterans Center and its area partners.

The event will take place near the main entrance to the colleges campus off East Huron River Road near the Ann Arbor border to Ypsilanti. Pre-registration is required at washtenawcountyvetfest.eventbrite.com.

The purpose of Vet Fest is to provide a day of fun and relaxation for local veterans and their families, all while giving them access to the major resource and benefit providers in the area, Wadhams Veterans Center Military and Veteran Coordinator Carol Osborne said in a statement. Its sort of a one-stop-shop for veterans and gives service providers an opportunity to connect with the community they serve.

Events and activities include free food, live music, cold treats, hourly raffles, military and emergency services vehicles, a bounce house, face painting, dunk tank, photo booth and exhibits by agencies that provide resources for veterans.

The military vehicles at Vet Fest will include a World War II ammunition truck and a Boeing CH-47 Chinook helicopter that Michigan Army National Guard personnel will fly to the colleges campus from Selfridge Air National Guard Base, officials said.

The Wadhams Veterans Center benefits veterans through academic counseling for veteran students and assistance with understanding the colleges veteran-related policies. The center can also help veterans procure GI Bill benefits for academic programs, support active military with planning for deployment.

For more Wadhams Veterans Center information, visit wccnet.edu/succeed/vetcenter.

Washtenaw Vet Fest 2023 is supported by American Legion Post 46 in Ann Arbor, the Washtenaw County Department of Veterans Affairs, the Vietnam Veterans of America Chapter 310 and the Ann Arbor Veterans Affairs Medical Center.

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FENTON, MI  The city is celebrating Independence Day with its annual Fenton Freedom Festival, featuring a parade, 5K race, 2K fun run, fireworks and more.

Festivities begin 7 p.m. on Monday, July 3 with a ski show at Silver Lake Park, 16000 Jennings Road in Fenton.

Fourth of July events begin at 7 a.m. on Tuesday with an American Legion #38 pancake breakfast at the Community and Cultural Center and Gazebo Area, located at 150 S.Leroy St.

Following breakfast, the Firecracker 5K race and 2K fun run/walk will take place at 9:45 a.m.

The race route is three laps beginning on West Street behind Ellen Street Campus, heading south to Shiawassee, east to North Leroy Street, north to Caroline Street and back to West Street. An awards ceremony will take place immediately follow at the race starting point.

The day continues with the Freedom Festival Parade at 10 a.m., taking place rain or shine.

The parade route is approximately 1.9 miles long, starting at the intersection of Industrial Way and Owen Road. It will head east along West Shiawassee to Leroy Street, north on Leroy Street to Caroline Street and west on Caroline Street to West Street.

Noise-free, sensory sensitive viewing is available from the beginning of the parade route to the intersection of Owen Road and Fenway Drive. A bike parade organized by Kiwanis Club will be featured during the event.

After the parade, Fenton Rotary Clubs Rubber Ducky Regatta will take place at 12:30 p.m. along the banks of the Shiawassee River when 2000 rubber ducks will be released into the river.

Tickets to raise money for the rotary clubs charity efforts can be purchased online at $10 for one or $100 for 10. The winning duck/ticket holder earns $1,000, while prizes are available for the other top 15 finishes as well.

Freedom Festival fireworks will close the night at 10 p.m. at Silver Lake Park. Parking is not allowed at the park.

Free childrens games, cardboard city painting, snow cones and crafts will also be available at the Community and Cultural Center and Gazebo Area throughout the day. Hungry Howies will provide food and refreshments.

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KENT COUNTY, MI  Two teens were injured late Sunday, July 2, in a drive-by shooting, Wyoming police said.

The 17-year-old males are being treated for non-life-threatening injuries, police said.

The shooting happened around 9:10 p.m. in the 1100 block of Albers Street SW, near Godfrey Avenue. Wyoming Department of Public Safety responded to a report that two teens had been shot.

Both of the victims had already been taken to an area hospital by a private vehicle before rescuers reached the scene. Early investigation showed that the two were wounded in a drive-by shooting, police said.

Police did not have a description of the shooter. Detectives continue to investigate circumstances that led to the shooting.

Police expect to have a heavy presence near the crime scene for some time and asked motorists to avoid the area.

Police asked anyone with information to contact Wyoming police at 616-530-7300 or Silent Observer at 616-774-2345 or Silentobserver.org

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GRAND RAPIDS, MI  The American Civil Liberties Union of Michigan (ACLU) is weighing in on book removals at a West Michigan school district that last summer temporarily removed a half dozen controversial books some parents had argued were too explicit for young children.

Forest Hills Public Schools, one of the largest districts in West Michigan, faced pushback over the book removals and put the books back on the shelves six months later. The district has since created a new system allowing parents to restrict what books their children can and cant check out of the school library.

RELATED: Amid national debate over book bans, a Michigan district is letting parents choose what their kids read

In a June 22 letter to the Forest Hills Board of Education, the ACLU said it was troubled by the districts removal of six books, which included Beyond Magenta: Transgender Teens Speak Out, by Susan Kuklin, Me and Earl and the Dying Girl, by Jesse Andrews, and The Handmaids Tale by Margaret Atwood.

The ACLU also raised concerns with Forest Hills for allegedly removing books from its first grade reading curriculum that included LGBTQ (lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, queer and/or questioning) characters.

According to internal district emails obtained by the ACLU, Forest Hills administrators discussed the removal of a series of books called Ida and Jake books, by author Katie Wischow, in September 2022.

The books feature a little girl as the main character who has two moms, and one of the books talks about the two moms attending a Pride parade, according to the emails between Kim Van Antwerp, director of instructional services, and Scott Haid, assistant superintendent of instruction.

It is unclear from the emails obtained by the ACLU whether or not the district ended up removing the books from the curriculum. Superintendent Dan Behm and Forest Hills communications director Elizabeth Brink did not respond to requests for comment by MLive/The Grand Rapids Press last week.

In its June 22 letter, the ACLU sought a public records request with Forest Hills Public Schools seeking more information about the removal of the books.

The ACLU urged Forest Hills in the letter to put the Ida and Jake books back in the first grade curriculum, and for the school board to conduct an investigation into the removal and any administrators involved.

While both book removal incidents happened months ago, ACLU attorney Jay Kaplan said the ACLU is stepping in now because the organization was concerned Forest Hills was engaging in censorship of books with LGBTQ content.

If youre removing books because you dont like the ideas, that raises serious constitutional concerns, Kaplan told MLive/The Grand Rapids Press. And if anybody requests that a book be removed, whether it be a school district or public library, that you have a robust review process. We want to make that message clear, not only to Forest Hills, which recognized that was inappropriate to do, but to all school districts around the state.

In an March 16 interview with MLive, Behm, who was set to retire June 30, said it was a mistake to unilaterally remove the controversial books from the districts library system.

The removal of the books, which happened in June 2022, was in response to parent complaints, and they remained off the shelves for about six months, he said.

Instead of pulling them from the shelf, Behm said he should have consulted with the districts media center staff to figure out how to address the concerns of parents regarding mature books.

Because of my own mistake in removing this small number of books, its not just a technical issue for me, its an emotional one, he said in March. I dont want to make mistakes. I dont want my actions to be misinterpreted. The notion out there that Im banning books, that strikes an emotional chord in me.

Despite Behms apology, Kaplan said the ACLU wanted to send a firm message to Forest Hills and other school districts about removing books just because parents are upset by them.

The school district has a constitutional responsibility to make sure that at the end of the day, the actions theyre taking arent because of the idea of censoring ideas that some members of the community might not like, he said.

The debate around controversial books isnt unique to Forest Hills. Across the state and country, schools and local governments have seen organized pushback from parents who believe certain books  those that often cover issues of sexuality, violence, LGBTQ+ themes, and race and racism  are too mature or inappropriate for students and shouldnt be available in school libraries.

RELATED: See which books are banned in Michigan schools

Kaplan argued that schools that remove LGBTQ content are sending a message to vulnerable students that they dont belong.

Kids who identify as LGBTQ face bullying and harassment by their peers, they face lack of acceptance from people in their lives, he said.

Some students in the Forest Hills School District might have same sex parents, and this idea that we remove this content to have these families remain invisible or out of the conscience of students, its inappropriate. Theres no constitutional right based on anyones faith or other beliefs that they shouldnt have to be exposed to the diversity in ones community.

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OTTAWA COUNTY, MI  A petition was filed in an effort to recall Ottawa County Commissioner Lucy Ebel, part of the ultra-conservative group, Ottawa Impact, that holds a majority on the board.

Park Township resident Larry Jackson submitted the petition Monday, July 3, to the Ottawa County Clerks Office.
JACKSON, MI  A man convicted of shooting at police with the intent to be killed by them will remain in prison.

On June 29, the Michigan Court of Appeals affirmed the convictions of David Edward Davis, who was sentenced to 20-50 years in prison for shooting at several Jackson Police Officers in an apparent attempt of suicide by police, court records show.
MARSHALL, MI -- A woman has been sentenced for making threats of violence against Governor Gretchen Whitmer, the Michigan Attorney Generals Office said.

Tabitha Davis, 33, of Marshall, was sentenced last week to four months probation and a suspended sentence of 20 days in jail for threatening violence against Whitmer, Michigan Attorney General Dana Nessel said in a news release Monday.

This case was heard in the 54-A District Court in Lansing. The court additionally ordered Davis to complete recommended mental health treatment and a substance abuse evaluation. Davis pleaded guilty to malicious use of telecommunications services, Nessel said.

Davis was charged for sending a message that threatened the governor through Whitmers constituent services website. Davis admitted to sending the message and initially claimed that it was protected speech, Nessel said.

Threatening public officials with violence for doing their jobs cannot stand, Nessel said. This conduct constitutes terrorism and my Hate Crimes and Domestic Terrorism Unit is uniquely qualified to prosecute these crimes and hold accountable those who commit them.

In 2019, Nessel launched the Hate Crimes and Domestic Terrorism Unit within the Criminal Division of the Department of Attorney General. The unit works with both federal and local authorities to ensure that hate crimes and crimes of domestic terrorism are thoroughly investigated and prosecuted to the fullest extent possible under the law, the Attorney Generals Office said.

Davis sentencing comes three years after a plot to kidnap Whitmer by a group of men was shut down by the FBI, leading to several being charged with federal and state crimes. In all, six men were charged in federal court in Grand Rapids and eight others in state courts in Antrim and Jackson counties. Many have ties to the Wolverine Watchmen, an anti-government militia.

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GRAND RAPIDS, MI  The boyfriend of a missing Portage woman, who is presumed dead, pleaded guilty to escaping a residential probation center.

Carlos Watts Jr. pleaded guilty to felony escape of a prisoner in custody Monday, July 3 in U.S. District Court, Western District of Michigan in Grand Rapids. A jury trial was scheduled to start July 18.

Watts allegedly escaped federal custody because he was suspected of killing Heather Kelley, a federal prosecutor said previously. Watts has not been charged with a crime in Kelleys disappearance or presumed death.

Related: Boyfriend of missing Portage woman tied to her disappearance or killing, prosecutor says

Kelley, 35, a mother of eight, was last seen Dec. 10 in the Comstock Township area. Her car was found the next day on East Michigan Avenue at Sprinkle Road.

Her body has not been found but police are treating the case as a homicide investigation. Police found her blood inside the vehicle. The drivers seat had been set on fire.

On the night she went missing, Kelley left home to pick up Watts, her boyfriend. His electronic tether stopped responding from 9:10 p.m. until 5:47 a.m., according to court records.

Related: Search for missing Portage woman now a homicide investigation

The next night, police interviewed Watts at Kalamazoo Probation Enhancement Program, or KPEP, about Kelleys disappearance. He said he would help investigators, according to police.

Surveillance video shows him cutting off his GPS tether a couple hours later. He was arrested in Battle Creek on Dec. 14, four days after Kelley went missing.

Investigators found clothing, including womens underwear, pants and boots, a half mile from where Kelleys vehicle was abandoned. DNA from Kelley and Watts was found on her pants and a head covering, according to court records.

Watts was previously convicted in 2013 of drug and weapons charges, resulting in a 13-year prison sentence. He was placed in the half-way house after his release from prison.

He told investigators that he fled KPEP because he had received threatening texts from the victims family after her disappearance, James Stevenson Fisher, an assistant federal public defender, wrote in court documents.

Watts is scheduled to be sentenced Nov. 3.

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MUSKEGON, MI  Celtic music will kick off this years free concert series at Muskegons McGraft Park.

The first concert of the summer will feature Blackthorn on Tuesday, July 11.

Concerts start at 7 p.m. at the McGraft Park band shell, 2204 Wickham Drive. Most are on Tuesday nights.

The free concert series is produced by the City of Muskegons Park and Recreation Department. All but three of the concerts are funded by the McGraft Park Trust Fund.

The appearance by Blackthorn is sponsored by the Michigan Irish Music Festival.

Heres the rest of this summers lineup:

-Tuesday, July 18: Austin Benzing, paying tribute to the Grateful Dead.

-Tuesday, July 25: West Side Soul Surfers, playing pop and rock tunes. The concert is sponsored by the Joseph and Norma Horan Fund.

-Thursday, Aug. 3: Sunchasers Band, playing country music along with some classic rock, R & B and pop.

-Thursday, Aug. 10: Plain Jane Glory, performing bluegrass and folk music. The concert is sponsored by AgeWell Services.

-Tuesday, Aug. 15: Post Fontaine, playing soft rock favorites. The concert will include a free ice cream social hosted by the Glenside Neighborhood Association.

-Tuesday, Aug. 22: Larry Latin, featuring soul and R & B music.

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Baby boomers and millennials are in a housing standoff.

Baby boomers want to downsize but dont want to give up their stellar rate for a worse housing option. Meanwhile millennials are house hacking their way into the market by having tenants to cover the mortgage payments they cant afford.

They both want a piece of the slim housing stock, but dont want to buckle under rates that have been in the 6-7% range for the past six months.

So rather than move, homeowners are reinvesting in renovations.

Renovation budgets are expanding, but homeowners are making adjustments for themselves not for curb appeal, according to the 2023 U.S. Houzz & Home Study, a survey of about 46,000 homeowners.

The median expense for home renovations in 2022 was $22,000  up 22% from 2021. Some homeowners, 10%, were willing to spend six figures: $140,000 or more.

Those investments are meant to be lived in, as 61% of homeowners stated that they plan to stay in their home for 11 years or more following their renovation in 2022.

The largest group leading the home renovation revolution are baby boomers, making up 59%.

Baby boomers are either sitting tight in their homes and using the equity to revamp or setting their sights on smaller, lower priced homes and adding thousands in renovations to custom fit their needs, said Bob Filka, CEO of Home Builders Association of Michigan.

Filka took the latter approach when he downsized a few years ago, he said. But this approach may continue the domino effect.

It creates a ripple throughout the whole housing ecosystem, he said. If Im pushing somebody out of the $280,000 starter home, theyre then pushing somebody out of maybe a $200,000 old rental house.

Related: National home construction is up but Michigans new builds lag by 21%

The May sales report came in lower than average for this time of year, much like the national slide backwards in existing home sales. The National Association of Realtors says this tension in housing stock is a main contributor.

New listings, pending sales and closed sales all had double digit decreases compared to last year, according to Realcomp, a Michigan-based real estate data firm. Those figures are also substantially lower than Michigans 2019 numbers.

The only metric still on the rise is median sales price, which clocked in at $260,000 for May, according to Realcomp. Thats $73,000 over May 2019s median sales price.

Michigans overall inventory is nearly 20,000 houses shy of where it was in 2019. Recent data from HBAM shows the state has 21% less building permits filed so far compared to this time last year.

Filka says the state is still digging itself out of the hole created by the 2008 housing crisis.

Michigans housing stock has been lagging since developments went bankrupt and the production pipeline dried up. The industry saw heavy job loss  more than double private jobs lost, according to The Michigan Department of Labor and Economic Opportunity.

Between 2000 and 2010, employment in Michigans construction sector fell 42% or 125,200 jobs.

Those who survived focused on building larger, luxury homes to regain profit, Filka said.

Those that remained and were still in business had such demand for high-end work that the market never really shifted back toward that first time homebuyer type of housing stock, Filka said. Its been kind of a slow building storm.

Fifteen years later that problem is frustrating to todays buyers, said Jolene Jacobs, realtor and associate broker in Royal Oak. She watches luxury homes sit on the market while millennials fight over coveted two-bedroom starter homes and baby boomers search for ranches.

Were still building these McMansions, she said. These builders are trying to optimize their gain, their expenses, but at the same time, thats not the type of housing that were seeing a need for.

Theres less than 16,000 available residential homes and condos in Michigans inventory right now, according to Realcomp. Rather than compete, Jacobs is seeing the new and old generations co-exist.

We are getting many more buyers who are taking into consideration a family member living with them, she said.

In 2022, 14% of homebuyers were looking for space for multiple generations to live under one roof, according to the National Association of Realtors.

This sparked the popularity of mother-in-law suites, or a portion of the house that has been remodeled with the basics: sleeping quarter, living quarter, kitchen, and bathroom.

In 2020, Freddie Mac estimated identified 1.4 million unique properties with accessory dwelling units, typically basements and attics or converted garages. Think Fonzies above-garage apartment or Uncle Jesses converted attic.

Freddie Macs analysis noted the trend was on the rise coming out of the housing crisis. First-time accessory dwelling unit listings increased more rapidly from 2009 to 2019, growing at an average annual rate of 8.6%.

The report links the rise of these units, and the relaxed zoning around them, to increased population and decreased affordability. Half of the 1.4 million properties were in the Sun Belt.

Some of Michigans growing cities are mirroring the same trend. Zoning amendments for accessory dwelling units have been popping up in Ann Arbor, Grand Rapids, Kalamazoo and Traverse City.

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Michigans $82 billion budget brings record spending to all corners of state government
Michigan lawmakers included $150 million toward the effort to restart the Palisades nuclear plant as part of a record $81.7 billion state budget passed last week.

State officials contributed the millions in taxpayer dollars toward Holtec Internationals effort to get the nuclear plant upgraded and fired back up to provide 800 megawatts of carbon-free, base load power as the energy sector transitions away from fossil fuels. If it happens, it would be the first nuclear plant nationwide to return to generating power after being decommissioned.

I have heard from many people over the past year about the interest to restart Palisades, and I am committed to working with them and other local, state and federal partners to secure the resources needed to not only keep hardworking people on the job but bring more good-paying jobs back to our community, said state Rep. Joey Andrews, D-St. Joseph.

In addition to jobs, investing in Palisades will deliver low-cost, clean energy to Michigan families and businesses. Its a win-win.

Michigan Rep. Joey Andrews (D-St. Joseph) hosted a roundtable talk and tour of the Palisades Nuclear Power Plant to meet with community and industry leaders to discuss efforts to reopen the facility, save jobs, and increase regional economic development and Michigan-made clean energy. He toured portions of the site, spoke with community leaders and met with Holtec, the company that owns the facility.

The plant was closed last year when its fuel ran out and the owner sold the facility to Holtec. The new owner has now twice applied for federal money to help get the plant operational again.

The Biden administration has a $6 billion fund within the U.S. Department of Energy intended to preserve the U.S. nuclear reactor fleet and energy sector jobs.

Climate action advocates argue nuclear power provides reliable energy without emitting greenhouse gas emissions. Nuclear energy is a critical part of Gov. Gretchen Whitmers climate goals as more solar and wind generation infrastructure is constructed.

Whitmer spokesperson Bobby Leddy said the Palisades plant is a critical energy source and economic driver for the region.

Thats why Gov. Whitmer partnered with state Rep. Joey Andrews to secure a $150 million investment to support efforts to reopen the Palisades power plant, protecting 600 high-paying jobs and hundreds of millions of dollars in annual regional economic development, Leddy said, adding Whitmers office will continue to work to secure federal funding for the plant.

The Republican minority vice chair of the Michigan House Energy, Communications, and Technology Committee said the approved state funding for Palisades had bipartisan support in the Legislature. That marks a significant departure from the mostly negative Republican response to the Democrats proposed clean energy legislation.

Funding for Palisades is the perfect example of the type of investments that we should have prioritized and had more of in this budget  smart, strategic, one-time investments in our grid and critical infrastructure, said Rep. Pauline Wendzel , R-Watervliet.

Repowering Palisades will bring back 600 high paying jobs to Southwest Michigan. It will have an economic impact of over a quarter-billion dollars annually, and it will provide desperately needed base load generation by producing 800 megawatts of clean and reliable energy. When the sun doesnt shine and the wind isnt blowing, Palisades will be back online to power our state.

Holtec officials called the state funding a major win for Michigan, the local community, and the country.

We are very appreciative of the strong partnership with the state in support of the Palisades repowering. We look forward to collaborating closely with our state, federal, and many community stakeholders throughout this process, said Nick Culp, Holtecs senior manager of government affairs at Palisades.

This announcement comes at a critical time for our nation as we strive to meet future energy demand and mitigate the effects of climate change.

The state money will serve as bridge funding to pay for the restart efforts at Palisades should federal trust fund money set aside for decommissioning plants become unavailable.

Related: Granholm hopeful about $1B in federal loans to restart Palisades nuclear plant

More will be known when federal energy officials decide on the pending $1 billion grant application, which is expected to be the primary investment in the nuclear plant restart.

Culp said Holtec is regularly working with the Department of Energy as the company moves through the federal loan process.

Last month, U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission Chairman Christopher T. Hanson discussed the efforts at Palisades during a House subcommittee hearing. He said during the June 14 hearing the federal agency is in talks with Holtec about how to backtrack decommissioning and bring the plant back to life.

Theyve gotten a series of exemptions when they shut down, basically how to undo those exemptions in a timely way, how theyre going to physically bring the plant back into compliance, and how theyre going to reestablish the programs. Its new ground for both Holtec and, I admit, for us. But Im confident that the staff can approach this with the appropriate sense of urgency and creativity, while maintaining safety too, Hanson said.

Power generation at nuclear plants does not generate greenhouse gas emissions that drive climate change, like burning fossil fuels does. However, some environmental advocates remain concerned about ecological degradation from needed uranium mining and radiation risk from toxic waste nuclear plants produce.

Michigan utility regulators are currently studying whether the state should build more nuclear power plants, balancing the benefits and drawbacks. A draft report is expected by the end of the year.

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Related articles:

Michigans $82 billion budget brings record spending to all corners of state government

Palisades nuclear plant may land up to $300M in state funds for restart bid

Republicans deny climate science in Michigan clean energy hearing
A strong cold front by early July standards will push through Michigan Wednesday into Thursday. The cooler, heavier air behind the cold front will set the hot air ahead of it in motion. This is a perfect recipe for thunderstorms and a summer cool-down.

Here is the radar forecast showing the cold front and attached thunderstorms moving across Michigan Wednesday into Thursday.

Radar forecast from 8 a.m. Wednesday to 8 p.m. Thursday.

A cold front and its thunderstorms go through a life cycle through the day and night. The cold front is most active with the strongest thunderstorms in the second half of the afternoon and first half of the evening. The storms then weaken overnight, and then go through a slight resurgence in strength toward sunrise. After sunrise, the storms weaken until the strengthening period in the afternoon and evening.

So the timing of the cold front moving through your part of Lower Michigan will make a difference on strong/severe storms versus light, dwindling thundershowers.

Right now, the southeast part of Lower Michigan looks like its in the best position for rain from thunderstorms Thursday afternoon and evening.

In July, with temperatures in the 90s ahead of the front, severe thunderstorms are quite common. We will watch for that situation Thursday afternoon and evening.

Temperatures will warm into the 90s Wednesday before the cold front moves through. Then very comfortable temperatures will move in and last several days across Michigan.

Temperature forecast every six hours from Wednesday afternoon to Friday, showing the cooler air moving in Friday.

By Friday into this weekend, Michigan will settle in to high temperatures in the 70s.

There could be another good chance of rain this coming Sunday.
Finance Minister, Ken Ofori-Atta is expected to present the Mid-Year Budget Review to Parliament on Thursday, July 27.

This is in accordance with Section (28) of the Public Financial Management Act, 2016 (PFMA) Act 921 which requires that the finance minister presents a Mid-Year Review to parliament six months after the presentation of the main budget for that fiscal year.

This was disclosed by the Majority Leader of Parliament Osei Kyei Mensah Bonsu on the floor of parliament today.

It is slated for Thursday, July 27, 2023. That's the last Thursday of July and that is when we will have the mid-year budget review, he announced.

Some industry players have already cautioned government to withdraw some tax measures in the mid-year budget review to reduce the excessive hardship on companies.

Their concern comes on the back of Parliament's passage of the Excise Duty Amendment Bill 2022, the Growth and Sustainability Levy Bill, 2022, the Ghana Revenue Authority Bill 2022 and the Income Tax Amendment Bill 2022  crucial components of Ghana's $3 billion bailout from the International Monetary Fund (IMF).

But the government has said, this is aimed at improving revenue mobilization for the country.

-citinewsroom
03.07.2023 LISTEN

Archbishop Charles Agyinasare, Founder and Presiding Bishop of Perez Chapel International, has admonished Christians to always be prepared for spiritual warfare against evil spirits.

He said: Whether you like it or not, as a Christian, you are in spiritual warfare with the enemy.

For as the Bible says in Ephesians 6 verse 12, we did not wrestle with flesh and blood, but against principalities, rulers of darkness and against spiritual hosts of wickedness in the heavenly places.

Archbishop Agyinasare said this during a Sunday second service at the Perez Dome, Perez Chapel International, Dzorwulu.

His message was titled: Who Rules the Cosmic Ream 1: The Cosmic Realm and the Christian.

The Archbishop said every town, city and village was ruled by a principality and evil spirits, adding that as a child of God, one should be prepared to face them in spiritual warfare, saying they (Christians) had the right tools and equipment to defeat the enemy in such battles.

He admonished Christians to remain steadfast in the Lord, and know that in God was their victory against the enemy in spiritual battles.

The teachings, which are in series, are to help Christians to be well prepared and equipped against the spiritual enemy.

GNA
National Road Safety Authority (NRSA) says it will engage its stakeholders on ways to intensify vehicle maintenance education for commercial drivers.

The Authority has noted that road crashes involving burst tyres are rising rapidly, a situation it has described as worrisome.

Speaking on the heels of a road crash which occurred on Sunday on the George Walker Bush highway, leaving 3 people dead and others injured, the Public Relations Officer for the National Road Safety Authority, Pearl Adusu Sateckla, noted that the Authority will present its findings from the incident in due course.

We will go to the scene and conduct preliminary investigations to ascertain the actual root cause of the crash. However, according to media reports, we believe that it was caused by a burst tyre. We have also seen an increase in the number of tyre-related crashes in recent years. This is why we started the tyre safety campaign as part of our Stay Alive safety campaign two years ago.

Quickly, we will discuss thoroughly what we should do about tyre safety education as part of road safety management.

Three people were confirmed dead after a 23-seater Sprinter Bus with registration number GR-6046-21 carrying passengers from Ablekuma to Kasoa burst one of its back tyres resulting in a fatal crash on Sunday morning.

citinewsroom
President of the Bono Regional House of Chiefs and Omanhene of the Dormaa Traditional Area in the Bono Region, Oseadeoyo Agyeman Badu II, has called on President Nana Addo Dankwa Akufo-Addo to intervene in the trial of the embattled Assin North Member of Parliament (MP), James Gyakye Quayson.

During the John Evans Atta Mills 10th Anniversary Commemorative Lecture held in Sunyani, Oseadeoyo Agyeman Badu II appealed to the president to instruct the Attorney General to file a nolle prosequi, effectively ending the trial of the re-elected MP for the Assin North constituency.

Emphasising the urgency of the matter, Oseadeoyo Agyeman Badu II expressed his belief that the trial of James Gyakye Quayson would not bring any benefit to Ghanaians.

He called on the president and the Attorney General to take immediate action and bring an end to the proceedings, allowing the reelected MP to fulfill his mandate and for the nation to move forward.

On the theme: The Man, John Evans Atta Mills: 10 Years On, the lecture provided an opportunity for reflection on the legacy of the late President Mills.

Oseadeoyo Agyeman Badu II used the platform to make his appeal, highlighting the potential negative consequences of the ongoing trial and urging for a swift resolution

Classfmonline.com
A policy expert is calling on the Attorney General, Godfred Yeboah Dame to end the prosecution of James Gyakye Quayson, the MP-elect of the Assin North constituency.

Franklin Cudjoe, founding president of IMANI Africa, said in a Facebook post on Sunday, July 2 that he hopes the AG will discontinue "the shameful persecutions" of James Gyakye Quayson this week.

Gyakye Quayson is facing criminal charges, including forgery and perjury, over allegations that he filed to run for Parliament while holding Canadian citizenship.

The AG argues the lawmaker was ineligible to contest the elections due to his dual citizenship.

However, Gyakye Quayson has maintained that he renounced his Canadian citizenship before filing to run for office.

He regained the Assin North seat in a June 27 by-election after it was stripped from him by a Supreme Court ruling in May.

In his post, Mr Franklin Cudjoe called on the AG to refocus his energy on resolving the disenfranchisement of voters in the Santrokofi, Akpafu, Likpe and Lolobi districts (SALL).

This week, I am hopeful that the Attorney General will file court processes to discontinue the shameful persecutions of second-time MP-elect Quayson, & commit energy daily to correct the grave electoral ostracization of SALL, he tweeted.

Residents of SALL were unable to vote in the 2020 parliamentary elections since a constituency was not created for them.
Firefighters have managed to save several adjoining shops and houses after a fierce fire destroyed three commercial stores in the Western Region.

The Ghana National Fire Service in a notice revealed that the incident occurred at Nzema line near Kawirkwanano Junction, Tarkwa on Saturday, July 1.

In a tweet early Monday morning, July 3, the fire service commended the efforts of the fire crew that responded to the fire outbreak as no injuries were reported.

The destroyed stores which belonged to Dez-Ike Enterprise contained large quantities of goods and merchandise.

But the timely response of the firefighters, the inferno was contained and many nearby shops and homes were saved from the flames.

The cause of the Tarkwa fire remains under investigation. But fire officials say electrical faults, careless disposal of lit cigarettes and other smoking materials, and combustible storage are common factors that contribute to fire outbreaks in commercial districts.

Proper fire safety inspections and compliance with fire prevention guidelines, GNFS often say could help minimize the risk of devastating commercial fires that threaten lives and properties.

The Ghana National Fire Service was established to reduce the negative impact of fire and other emergencies through prevention, protection and response.

The agency works to protect lives and properties from fire outbreaks through public education, fire safety inspections and firefighting operations.
03.07.2023 LISTEN

Communications Officer of the National Democratic Congress (NDC), Sammy Gyamfi, has made a shocking revelation accusing the New Patriotic Party (NPP) of attempting to bribe MP-elect for Assin North, James Gyakye Quayson, not to contest the by-election.

According to Gyamfis post on Facebook on Monday, July 3, after the NPP failed to bribe Gyakye Quayson, certain party members threatened to jail him if he were to be re-elected.

Gyamfi commended Quayson for his unwavering commitment and love for his constituents, stating that the MP-elect remained firm in his determination to fight for justice despite facing various challenges.

He described Quayson as calm, confident, humble and fearless. Gyamfi attributed Quaysons personal conviction and determination as the reason for their victory.

Folks, not much has been said about the relentlessness of the MP-elect for Assin North, without which victory may have eluded us. They tried to bribe him to back off. When they failed, they threatened him with jail. But in all these things, he was unwavering in his commitment and love for his people. Always calm but confident; humble but courageous; sober but inspiring; meek but fearless.

His personal conviction and determination to fight for justice against all odds, even at the risk of losing his civil liberties, is the reason we are smiling today.

Join me celebrate the First Gentleman of the good people of Assin North, the Old Soldier, Hon. James Gyakye Quayson.

SAMMY GYAMFI ESQ. Gyakye Quayson was successfully re-elected in a by-election for the Assin North constituency, garnering 57.56 percent of the total votes cast. He secured 17,245 votes, defeating Charles Opoku of the NPP, who received 42.15 percent of the votes, and Bernice Enyonam Sefenu of the Liberal Party of Ghana (LPG), who garnered a mere 0.29 percent.

The Assin North seat became vacant after the Supreme Court ordered Parliament to remove Gyakye Quaysons name from its records.

The court ruled that Quayson was not qualified to contest the 2020 parliamentary election in the Assin North Constituency because he had filed his nomination forms on October 9, 2020, while not meeting the necessary qualifications.

citinewsroom
Fishing communities countrywide have commenced a one-month closed season for fishing, aimed at enabling fish stocks to replenish during the spawning period.

The closure will be observed by canoe and inshore fishers, as well as industrial trawlers, with specific dates assigned to each group.

Canoe and inshore fishers will observe the closed season from July 1st to July 31st, 2023, while industrial trawlers will adhere to the closure from July 1st to August 31st, 2023.

To foster stakeholder engagement regarding the closed fishing season, the Minister of Fisheries, Mavis Hawa Koomson, held a meeting with fisheries associations, Municipal and District Chief Executives, and representatives from the Ministry, Fisheries Commission, and the National Premix Fuel Secretariat. The purpose was to discuss the way forward for the commencement of the closed season and the distribution of relief items.

Minister Koomson revealed that the Fisheries Enforcement Unit (FEU), the Marine Police, and security officers from the Fisheries Committee for the West Central Gulf of Guinea would jointly patrol the seas to ensure full compliance with the closed season. Special attention would be given to hotspot areas notorious for illegal fishing activities, such as Elmina, Apam, Takoradi, Aplamanya, and Denu, with increased patrols by security agencies.

The Minister called for trawl vessels at sea to return to anchorage by June 30th. In addition, Deputy Minister Moses Anim proposed that the mandatory anchoring of trawl vessels before the sea closure be incorporated as part of the administrative measures for vessel licensing.

Leaders of the fisheries associations pledged full compliance with the closed season regulations, demonstrating their commitment to preserving fish stocks and ensuring sustainability in the fishing industry.

Classfmonline.com
Joe Donkor, the former First Vice Chairman of the governing New Patriotic Party (NPP) in the Central Region, has expressed concern over what he calls the arrogance of power displayed by the current national officers of the party.

According to him, these officers are more focused on their own power and authority than working for the benefit of the people.

Donkor believes that this trend of arrogance emerged within the party after President Nana Addo Dankwa Akufo-Addo assumed office in 2017.

He highlighted that the national officers tend to assign more responsibilities to their Personal Assistants (PAs) than to their appointed deputies, which has resulted in the party's decline in the lead-up to the 2024 general elections.

Mr Donkor made these comments while speaking in an interview on the Ghana Yensom morning show hosted by Odehyeeba Kofi Essuman on Accra 100.5 FM on Monday, July 3, 2023.

Making his analysis of the party's poor performance in the recent by-election in the Assin North Constituency, Donkor pointed out that the arrogant behaviour exhibited at the by-election never existed during the era of former President John Agyekum Kufour.

During the by-election, he specifically mentioned the conduct of Henry Nana Boakye, the National Organiser of the party, questioning why a National Organiser would campaign door-to-door accompanied by intimidating individuals.

Donkor expressed his belief that such actions would only scare away voters and emphasised that the arrogance of power is detrimental to the party's fortunes.

He called on the National Officers to recognise the need to rectify their approach and work in the party's best interest.

Classfmonline.com
Court of Appeal has overturned the decision of the trial judge in the case of Stephen Opuni to start the trial from scratch and directed for the proceedings and evidence led under the previous Judge Justice Hornyenugah to be adopted.

This decision by the Court of Appeal aims to ensure that the proceedings and evidence led in the case up until now are not disregarded, providing continuity in the legal process.

Justice Kwasi Anokye Gyimah took over the case in March 2023 and ruled that the trial be restarted for being tainted with allegations of unfairness.

He said in his ruling that a fresh trial was an avenue for the court to substantially dispel the said suspicions and regain the defendants' and public trust in the process.

Attorney General Godfred Yeboah Dame, however, disagreed with the decision and filed the appeal arguing that the decision amounted to a miscarriage of Justice.

The appellate court after considering the appeal ruled that the trial judge erred by relying on irrelevant factors in taking the decision to start the trial from scratch.

In an interview with the media after proceedings, Attorney General Godfred Dame expressed satisfaction with the decision of the court.

Meanwhile, in a letter allegedly sent to Justice Kwasi Anokye Gyimah by the Chief Justice, Justice Gertrude Araba Esaaba Torkornoo, in June, Justice Gyimah has been asked to vacate his position and move to Kumasi, the Ashanti Regional capital.

He is to start from today July 3. Justice Gyimah, who is described by many who encountered him as tough and principled, is to be replaced by Justice Aboagye Tandoh of the Winneba High Court.

Justice Tandoh will become the third judge on the case after the first judge, Justice Clemence Honyenuga, retired and handed over to the now-transferred Justice Gyimah.

The state is accusing Opuni and businessman, Seidu Agongo, of allegedly causing over GH217 million financial loss to the state.
The Omanhene of Dormaa Traditional Area, Osagyefo Oseadeeyo Agyemang Badu II, has appealed to President Akufo-Addo to intervene in the criminal prosecution of James Gyakye Quayson, the MP-elect for Assin North constituency.

The Dormaahene, who is also a High Court judge, said aborting the prosecution will be in the interest of majority of Ghanaians.

He called on the Attorney General, Godfred Yeboah Dame to as a matter of urgency file a nolle prosequi to end that particular decision."

"As a matter of urgency, I am appealing to the President of the Republic, Attorney General if he has any role to play, that the trial should be aborted," the traditional ruler said during a lecture in Sunyani over the weekend.

The Dormaahene called for an "out-of-court settlement of the matter."

His appeal comes amid debates on whether Mr. Quayson should be sworn-in as MP despite his court case.

Some argue he should not while others say the law allows him to work as an MP until the criminal trial is concluded.

The Dormaahene joins the many voices who have already begun calls for a withdrawal of the case to allow Mr. Quayson serve his constituents.
The much-talked-about Assin North by-election now belongs to the dustbin of history. James Gyakye Quayson, aka Mr. Canadian, managed to retain the seat in a very fierce contest against his opponent from the Elephant fraternity. But the contest cannot be dumped without looking at the issues it has generated.

Now that Mr. Canadian has retained the seat, the question on many lips is what his fate would be in the criminal case at the High Court.

While those from the Zu-za camp believe Mr. Canadian has a very strong case, those riding on the Elephant think the sad fate of Adamu Sakande would repeat itself.

Yours truly belongs to the latter group. I have the conviction that the High Court will corroborate the Supreme Courts stance that Mr. Canadian had dual nationality as at that time he filed to contest the elections in 2020. The net effect is that we are going to see Mr Canadian march morosely to jail. What a sad end that would be!

Zu-za would be expected to cry foul and make all manner of noise. But that wouldnt change the fact that they compelled the man to take the risk of putting his hand in the blazing fire with his eyes wide open.

In the meantime, Mr. Canadians criminal trial has been adjourned to July 4 to allow his legal team file a motion for a stay of proceedings pending appeal at the Court of Appeal.

Mr. Canadian is currently appealing a High Court ruling that his criminal case should be heard on a daily basis. We keep our fingers crossed and see how the matter pans out.

It was a deserved victory for Zu-za as they utilised the situation to their advantage. Zu-zas main propaganda was that the Nana Dee government was persecuting Mr. Canadian so it could get the numbers and throw away the Anti-Gay Bill currently before the House of Honourables. Osono exhibited gross impotence as they failed woefully to counter the Zu-za propaganda.

There were rumours of vote-buying on both sides of the political aisle. But the haste with which projects were executed raised concerns about the genuineness of the governments intentions, thereby generating negative publicity for the ruling party.

Voter apathy, the main enemy of every incumbent political party running for re-election, also reared its ugly head in Assin North. One need not be in Assin North to tell that there is a strong apathy towards the ruling party.

I laughed when I heard one Osono big man say that all hands must be on deck to combat voter apathy because political appointees and party executives cannot do it alone. It is very true that they cannot do it alone. But since they greedily cook and eat the meat alone, they should be ready to wake up alone in the middle of the night to attend to natures call.

You can perceive anger in my tone, right? Once again, your nephew is struggling to get a party big man/woman to help him get scholarship for his living expenses after obtaining an annual full tuition waiver of more than USD 30,000 for his doctoral programme at a university in the US. I keep on asking myself as I did in 2019, Is the Elephant worth dying for?

Sorry for the little digression; I needed to vent at our party big men and women to make them aware that many of us are suffering in silence. And the anger of the masses may spell doom for the party in the 2024 polls.

The upstaging of Chief Alan at the last rally in Assin North is an episode that should never repeat itself. Such petty indiscretions tend to make it difficult to foster party unity after an acrimonious internal contest.

Chief Alan deserves commendation for continuing his speech as if nothing had happened. Only few politicians are able to survive upstage and continue with their speech.

Brings to mind how Trump upstaged Ted Cruz at the GOP conference when the senator had publicly refused to endorse him. Cruz has since not recovered from that embarrassing episode.

It is my prayer that those riding the Elephant learn some useful lessons from the Assin North defeat. If theyve learnt nothing at all, they should learn that voter apathy would be the partys greatest threat to breaking the eight. I hope the powers that be are listening!

See you next for another interesting konkonsa Deo volente!
Authorities in the Democratic Republic of the Congo must hold accountable the soldiers who arrested and beat journalists Jeef Ngoyi, Marie-Louise Malou Mbela, and Jiresse Nkelani, and cease detaining journalists covering the news, the Committee to Protect Journalists said Friday.

On Wednesday, June 28, at least 12 soldiers from the Armed Forces of the DRC (FARDC) arrested, punched, and used belts to hit Ngoyi, a reporter with the U.N.-backed Radio Okapi; Malou, a reporter with state owned Radio Television Nationale Congolaise (RTNC); and Nkelani, a camera operator in training with the state owned broadcaster RTNC2.

The three journalists had been covering a land dispute in Kinshasa, the capital, according to a report as well as Malou and Fiston Wavingana, an RTNC camera operator who witnessed the incident, both of whom spoke to CPJ.

Authorities released Malou later that day, and released Ngoyi and Nkelani on Thursday after interventions by the U.N. mission to the DRC, according to a tweet by a local journalist and a Radio Okapi staffer who spoke to CPJ on the condition of anonymity, citing safety concerns. None of the journalists were charged with a crime.

DRC authorities should hold accountable those responsible for arresting and violently abusing journalists Jeef Ngoyi, Marie-Louise Malou Mbela, and Jiresse Nkelani, said Angela Quintal, CPJs Africa program coordinator, in New York. The repeated arrests and attacks on Congolese journalists by security forces that are supposed to be protecting the public make for an alarming pattern that must be reversed.

Before they were attacked, the journalists had interviewed a man who alleged that soldiers evicted him from his home on the orders of the DRC Minister of Urban Planning and Habitat.

A video posted on Twitter by a local journalist appears to show Ngoyi, Malou, and Nkelani after their arrest, sitting in the back of a truck with at least two other men, who CPJ was unable to identify. Two soldiers armed with rifles stand over them, and one of the soldiers can be seen beating them with a coiled rope.

During their detention, soldiers held the journalists at the local office of the Military Detection of Anti-Patriotic Activities, an intelligence unit known by its French acronym DEMIAP.

Ngoyi told CPJ that they were not seriously injured by the beatings.

Sylvain Ekenge, a spokesperson for FARDC, claimed the journalist had attacked the soldiers, resulting in their arrest.

A local DEMIAP official who was reached by phone declined to give their name or comment. CPJs call to the urban planning minister went unanswered.

In November 2022, FARDC soldiers similarly assaulted David Ramazani, director of Buniaactualite TV and the Buniaactualite.cd news website.
When I first arrived in Takoradi in June, I noticed that the majority of the city's roadways were in terrible condition. I simply couldn't comprehend how the roads in a town with a port, where commercial activity connects other communities across the country, could be in such poor condition. The streets of Takoradi are neglected, just as the port is dormant and business activity has decreased. I wasn't shocked to learn that Takoradi is the NPP government's stronghold because practically every region of Ghana where the NPP controls power is ignored or has developmental problems.

I made an effort to find out from the youth why Takoradi's residents continue to support the same political party despite the city's issues with underdevelopment and poor roads everywhere. The narration that came next stunned me quite a bit. Many of the people I spoke with claimed that Takoradi voted for the NPP instead of the NDC as a result of what the late John Jerry Rawlings did to them when he was in the military. They continue to be incensed by the heavy punishment they endured from the former Ghanaian leader and now that they have made a costly error, it may take longer to change.



I've been following the host of "Loud Silence TV," Kevin Taylor, for a very long time, and I've seen him bemoan the appalling conditions in Takoradi and Cape Coast often. Mr. Taylor may occasionally disparage particular leaders who he believes have disregarded these areas to their detriment. Up until the day I went to look into the causes of the cessation of commercial operations and the drop in both domestic and foreign investments at the port, I had no idea how severe the situation is in Takoradi. Since the NPP is aware that whatever the situation, the people will still vote for them, they have ignored and denied Takoradi developments.

Paa Grant Roundabout - Takoradi's terrible roads cause traffic every morning and after work. Photo credit: Joel Savage

Even if it involves decapitating my head on a silver platter, I'll let things change in Ghana, like how Kevin Taylor is working tirelessly to bring rationality and good governance to the country's oppressed masses. Ghana possesses gold, diamonds, bauxite, cocoa, oil, and other natural resources, but the majority of its citizens are hungry and unemployed owing to pervasive corruption, thus intelligent Ghanaians should rise and overthrow this tribal regime that has destroyed our nation. What irritates me is that the majority of those tribal bigots claiming that the NPP is the best party for Ghanaians reside outside of the nation.

While they enjoy lavish lifestyles and access to health care in the United States, the United Kingdom, and Germany, those in Ghana suffer at home or pass away if they lack the funds to visit the hospital. The NPP's era is finished, and the time has come for the government to figure out how to leave the former Flagstaff House since the majority of Ghanaians no longer have faith in Akufo Addo and the other NPP politicians, thus Bawumia or Kyerematen are of little concern to them.

It is no secret that the NPP administration led by Akufo Addo is the worst in Ghanaian political history, but many Ghanaian journalists are afraid to write about the catastrophe this administration has brought about in their country. Sadly, individuals strong enough to oppose this appalling administration are frequently threatened and attacked, but that won't stop me. The thing they detest the most is seeing you continue to write after they have made every effort to stop you. This is one of the reasons I have advised Anas Aremeyaw Anas to resist the cunning attacks made against him and to challenge, anyway, time will tell.



The difficulties that drivers encounter on Takoradi's roadways every day, photo credit: Joel Savage

Sincere Ghanaians will agree with me that the Ashanti region, as well as the majority of Ghana's NPP-controlled areas, is underdeveloped. The administration knows that regardless of development, the people will still support the NPP regime, thus the people must continue to suffer. This situation persisted for years until the administration started acting to win over the populace due to by-elections. But as times change, the NPP administration can "fool some of the people all the time, but can't fool all of the people all the time."



After reading this post, the NPP should send its representatives to Takoradi to inspect the state of the roads. They would all agree with me that this administration is unfit to manage a country. They do not aim to reduce taxes or protect the public's finances, as Akufo Addo pledged. They purposely came to profit themselves, ruin the country, and sell state property, thats why both the living and dead NPP politicians are corrupt. I, Joel Savage, said so.
Emmanuel Akwasi Gyamfi

03.07.2023 LISTEN

Member of Parliament for Odotobiri constituency in the Ashanti Region, Emmanuel Akwasi Gyamfi has condemned pronouncements by one Joseph Amoah aka Bashy believed to be the Special Aide of the 2020 NPP parliamentary hopeful Lawyer Mmieh.

Explaining issues to the media, the MP said Mr. Amoah was heard on a local radio station Dompeace radio, praying for a by-election at Odotobiri.

This prompted the Member of Parliament to lodge a complaint to the Amansie central police command.

The Police however invited Joseph Amoah and was granted bail expecting to report to the Police on Tuesday, July 4.

Hon Emmanuel Akwasi Gyamfi cited an incident in 2020 when he (Bashy) led a group of young men and women to a cemetery at Jacobu ostensibly to cast a spell on him in a bid to get rid of him.

"He said I was underperforming so he took a schnapps and other items to the cemetery for the ancestors to kill me in order for his candidate, Lawyer Mmieh to become the MP. He was subsequently summoned to the Jacobuhene's palace and he apologised," he stated.

Hon. Gyamfi noted that Bashy recent pronouncements on radio praying for a by-election cannot be glossed over.

He rubbishes accusations from a section of the public that his actions amount to gagging his opponents. "Ever since I became an MP in 2005, I have faced an avalanche of criticisms but never have I responded to them in this manner. I am an advocate for free speech so I will not gag anybody," he stated.

Bad nature of Odotobiri roads

Hon Emmanuel Akwasi Gyamfi bemoaned the bad nature of the road networks in his constituency. He said a lot of the roads have been given out on contract but the contractors are complaining of not being paid.

He said the Government since coming to office has done remarkably well in terms of provision of other infrastructural needs of the people of Odotobiri but their road networks are nothing to write home about.

The Assembly member of Oseikrom in the Amansie Central district Stephen Sekyere also added his voice saying though there are more to be done in terms of improvement of their roads, praying for a by-election is not the solution.

He called on the Police to thoroughly interrogate Joseph Amoah to ascertain what he mean by 'a by-election must happen."

"We know by-elections can only happen when a sitting MP resigns, dies or court pronounces a seat vacant so we want to know how the by-election he is calling for will happen," he stated.
Alan Kyerematen, a frontrunner in the New Patriotic Party flagbearership race, has kicked off his campaign tour to woo party delegates ahead of the party's internal elections.

The campaign dubbed "constituency delegates durbar" will see Mr. Kyerematen engage directly with NPP delegates across the country.

In a Facebook post on Monday, July 3, the former Trade and Industry Minister announced he was kicking off the nationwide tour the next day.

"Fellow patriots, I will kickstart my Constituency Delegates Durbar across the country tomorrow to share my vision for the party and Ghana. Please make time and lets meet," he wrote.

The "Alan Kyerematen for President" campaign says the regional durbars will provide an opportunity for delegates from different constituencies to interact and devise strategies to help Mr. Kyeremanten's campaign.

According to a statement from the campaign team, the tour will start on Tuesday, July 4 in the Greater Accra Region and will move to other regions.

"Starting from the Greater Accra Region on Tuesday 4th July 2023, Alan Cash will meet Delegates in Clusters of constituencies to share his vision for the Party and Ghana," the statement said.

Mr. Kyerematen's campaign is seen as a key part of his effort to win the NPP flagbearership contest.

He faces competition from Vice President Mahamudu Bawumia and other stalwarts.

All candidates seeking to lead the NPP into the 2024 elections will have to face the party's vetting committee chaired by former Speaker Aaron Mike Oquaye, beginning from today, July 3.

Meanwhile, the party will select the flagbearer in a national congress slated for November 4.
Sumy, 3 July 2023  Blankets, kombucha, toys, oil, soap, shoes. This collection of seemingly unrelated items and more line the shelves of a small shop in Sumy. But there is a common thread between them: industrial hemp.*

Tetiana and Svitlana run their business out of an old textiles factory in war-stricken northeastern Ukraine. From producing blankets to stuffing toys, their team uses hemp fabrics and filler to make the items on display in their shop.

In the shop, customers can find hemp products from several small manufacturers. Photo: IOM/Alisa Kyrpychova

The team is working on a new line of children's bedding sets. Photo: IOM/Alisa Kyrpychova

Sumy  where the business is located  is the Ukrainian region with the longest border with the Russian Federation. Residents have been fleeing areas close to the border since the start of the war because of ceaseless, deadly shelling. Over 80,000 people are displaced throughout the region, many of whom are living in the regional capital city.

Although Sumy city has been affected less directly by the war than the wider region, it can be a challenge for private companies to take the risk of investing in businesses located some 40 kilometres from the border. With business closures, low income and a lack of job opportunities, the local economy has been stagnating.

Yet, despite these challenges and the dangers in the region, the production of hemp, and the surrounding industry, has been gaining momentum. Stigma is fading and more Ukrainians are ready to opt for this sustainable product, without realizing its traditional roots.

Svitlana and Tetiana discovered hemps green and economic potential three years ago. Then, in late 2022, the International Organization for Migration (IOM) and the German Government supported their aspirations to open a shop. The women received a business grant which allowed them to purchase equipment like refrigerators, fabric, IT equipment and other items needed to set up their shop.

IOM provides support to small and micro-businesses throughout Ukraine to help lay the foundation for economic recovery. These businesses underpin economic stability, job creation, community resilience, diversification, innovation and economic independence.

Hemp is a very underrated crop, but it is our historical and national treasure. We want to revive it, says Tetiana, who was excited to expand her three-person team by one, thanks to the grant. Contributing to job retention and creation is vital during difficult times. The war has led to displacement and job losses, making it even more crucial to support small businesses as a means of creating new employment opportunities.

The invention of synthetic materials, the rise of anti-drug movements and the subsequent UN ban of cannabis in 1961 led to the decline of hemp production over the past few decades. With the discovery of non-narcotic hemp cultivars, society is rediscovering the plant as an eco-solution for the environmental impacts of the textile industry, while bringing employment and other economic benefits to Ukraine.

The hemp Svitlana and Tetiana use is grown locally, and every part of the eco-friendly plant can be used. The stalks can be transformed into hemp blocks for construction, yarn is made from the stems and hemp seeds are used to make oil, which can be further reworked into soap and detergent. Hemp requires low or no pesticides and it can be used for crop rotation, to replenish soil and for carbon absorption.

Tetiana wants to make this climate-warrior plant famous: Ukrainian grandmothers used to make fabric or towels from hemp.

Her team even made a bag from 70-year-old hemp yarn  part of a limited-edition line created to celebrate the historical heritage of Sumy Region.

The production cycle of their business is also zero waste and was one of the factors IOM considered when selecting grantees. From leftovers of fabrics, the team makes patchwork quilts or sends them to a woman in Kherson, who sews toys. Recycled paper is always used to package their items.

IOM is proud to support small enterprises across Ukraine. In Sumy Region, 37 businesses received grants helping them not only to stay afloat but also create new job opportunities for locals and displaced people alike, says Michael Newson, Senior Programme Coordinator at IOM Ukraine.

Hemp has been cultivated and used in the textile industry in Ukraine for centuries. Photo: TetianaMoyseienko

There is still some public stigma attached to industrial hemp, as it come from the same plant as cannabis. So besides running her business, Tetiana gives public lectures and raises awareness of hemps benefits and its hidden opportunities for green economy in her region.

In the shop, customers can find dozens of products from hemp made by the team, as well as other small hemp manufacturers working from across Ukraine. This cooperation helps them to stay afloat during the economic turmoil.

Small businesses play a vital role in any economy, and Ukraine is no exception. During times of conflict, the economy suffers, and small businesses are particularly vulnerable to the negative impacts. By supporting them, one helps maintain economic stability and provide livelihoods for entrepreneurs, their employees, and their families. This stability can have a ripple effect on the overall economy, helping to prevent further economic decline.

Supporting small businesses promotes economic independence and reduces dependency on external aid. Empowering entrepreneurs and business owners enables them to support themselves and contribute to the local economy. This can have long-term benefits by fostering self-sufficiency and reducing reliance on external assistance. IOM partners with businesses to help build a better today and tomorrow for Ukraine.

Hemp filler is used for pillows, blankets and toys. Photo: IOM/Alisa Kyrpychova

*Industrial hemp does not have any intoxicating properties and is legal in Ukraine.

This story was written by Alisa Kyrpychova and Olivia Headon from IOM Ukraine.
Fellow Ghanaians, finally, God has decided to show us mercy and to restore our hope, prosperity and development with a very clear sign that, our lives wont continue to be in this state of jeopardy, anomy, and comatose as those presently at the helm of our affairs would soon be halted in tightening their grip of economic ramshackle, kleptocratic proclivity, and feeding fat upon us.

Since the Assin North By-election, political scientists and social commentators have been theorizing and predicting what the outcome of the 2024 general elections shall look like. For majority of political prophets and fortune tellers, the National Democratic Congress, NDC, shall win that all important general elections, and their victory shall as well serve as a bulwark against the New Patriotic Party possible win of any election ever, at least for decades if the party doesnt get dismantled into smithereens post 2024. But few doubting Thomases believe it's still too early and premature to dabble into that hypothesis.

It's however obvious that the governing New Patriotic Party, NPP, has itself already thrown in the towel since their defeat at the Assin North By-election. At least, they have lost all hope about the 2024 election.

Perhaps, it was this inevitably hanging and hovering defeat that compelled president Akufo Addo to make his anti-habeas corpus statement  the infamous "jail bound" statement.

Whichever school of thought you choose to belong to, it's as clear as crystal, that no level-headed citizen at this critical juncture of our national annihilation and humiliation, would wish this state of finifugal economic bumfuzzlement and hogwash to continue. It's sickening. There's a shouting need for a change. And politicians and pampers they say have one thing in common; they must all be changed, and for the same reason. And indeed, there are few compelling indicators that strongly confirm that a change of political party in government come 2024 is looming  the victory of the NDC in the Assin North by-election. These indicators are ranging from economic, political, scientific, psychological, spiritual or even superstitious perspectives and factors.

In the first instance, the two-terms barrier has been a palpable indicator that the NPP must go. The partys hogwash of breaking of the eight years or two terms has been uncalculated nonsense and empty talk.

Since this fourth republic, each of the major political parties have had to hand over the baton of leadership to the other. And that happened at the time each of the outgoing president and party had the economy in good shape, but handed it over to the next political party. Its therefore an insult, a shame, and complete stupidity for Ghanaians to allow a party whose concept of good governance doesnt go beyond the blowing of sirens in streets, disobeying traffic light, and who have mastered the art of causing huge sums of public funds to disappear into thin air, to break the two-terms barrier for any political party in Ghana.

The NPP seems however to have anchored their hopes in the most recent Nigerian election, which, if true, makes the NPP worse than a stain on the political under pant of life. Because they are seriously chasing their own tail.

The example of Nigeria has been quite different because, the PDP that lost power to the APC in 2015 had ruled Nigeria for sixteen good years since Nigerias return to civil rule in 1999.

The APC was a coalition of about four political parties including other minor parties that cross-fertilized their resources and members to form the APC. They included Buharis CPC, Bola Ahmed Tinubus (the current president) ACN, Chief Edwin Ume-Ezeokes ANPP who earlier served as a running mate to Buhari in the 2007 general election of Nigeria. Some factions of APGA and even the PDP also decamped to join the APC before and even after the victory of the APC in 2015.

Buhari as a former head of state since 1984, it was agreed, was to be made the Flagbearer of the coalition of these parties  APC  and other parties leaders would share the other key portfolios in government. For instance, ACN led by Tinubu was to serve as running mate, ANPP would produce a Speaker of the Senate, and APGA member to be made Chief Justice.

However, a Muslim-Muslim ticket was a bad idea for the embryonic party of APC at the time. So, Tinubu who was supposed to vice Buhari, instead, looked for a Christian to represent him in the person of Professor Yemi Osinbajo, with the hope that after the eight years of Buharis CPC side of the coalition, his party, the ACN led by him would become the Flagbearer of the APC. This was what basically broke the eight in Nigeria. It wasnt therefore surprising because the PDP who handed over to the APC had also ruled for sixteen years under presidents Obasanjo, Umar Yardua and Goodluck Jonathan.

Clearly, the NPPs coalition of so-called Busia-Dambo-Danqua- tradition is the most useless and biased coalition and no match for the APC when some factions are relegated to the Vice President position always. And they would be peddling offensive nonsense if they are to use that as a basis to mimicking the example of Nigeria of breaking any eight amidst this unfortunate economic meltdown in Ghana. Cosmopolitanism played a key role in the Nigerian example, something that is never in the spirit of the NPP. They are simply the Ghanaian version of the Ku Klux Klan of our time and clime within the political space of Ghana.

Fast forward, as for President Akufo Addo's anti habeas corpus campaign message, skepticism about the legal pedigree of the president has been wagged on many tongues of Ghanaians in respect of whether he has genuine qualifications for that title. That is, is he a real learned fellow, or he is being dressed in borrowed robes? Indeed, believe what you want, such skeptics skepticism is coming to the fore quicker than expected.

His obvious lack of capacity to be a real and genuine lawyer with the required legal mind, luminary and astuteness of the law doubted by many citizens appears to have been confirmed in the president's recent layman's comment on the James Quayson so-called criminal case.

The concept of Habeas Corpus as a legal procedure and respect for the rule of law is a household knowledge among even the laziest student of law. It's a legal principle that ensures freedom of citizens especially the so-called guilty ones until they are proven guilty by a competent court of jurisdiction.

It therefore beats anybody's intelligence and imagination, that a former Attorney General of the Republic who eventually ascended to the highest office of the land, could simply disregard the principle and writ of Habeas Corpus, or has been unaware of it. Habeas corpus has been an act of parliament since 1964: (Act 224). For a sitting president to have churned out such legal infantilism, was indeed a watershed and scandalizing.

Apparently, however, careful observation suggests President Akufo Addo's "jail bound" statement made during that by-election campaign of ballyhoo, was beyond ignorance of the law. Instead, it could have stemmed from either political malice and mischief, or accumulated electoral-cum-political fraud, stress, and outright hopelessness.

You see, it is the good master and teacher, Jesus Christ, who teaches that out of abundance of the heart the mouth speaketh. What the president said was a classic example of a Freudian slip. It exposed the ill-will under the sleeve of the president. Perhaps, due to the inevitable defeat that awaits the NPP which was revealed in that by-election at Assin North.

As stated earlier, some of the indicators which made the victory of that by-election as victory for the NDC in 2024, include the economic dynamics which is the obvious and most fundamental indicator. The people of Ghana, inter alia, have lost a great deal of confidence in the current government.

For the first time in our history, our economy has been ranked as the worst of all economies in the whole wide world with our currency the most depreciated and worst performing currency in the whole world, and the economic situations and conditions of the citizens have been speaking volumes to this reality. It's simply hell living in Ghana today due to economic and political failure. And the collapse of these two has been quite scientific a proof of the NDC's victory that no man, in any capacity, unless a madman, can do propaganda about it.

The second indicator is based on the psychological effects and impact the By-election had on the NPP before, during, and after it. From the word go, it was clear the NPP had been too jittery, and that necessitated certain defeatist attitude and comments. Among which the majority leader, Kyei Mensa Bonso said the NPP was going to narrowly win the by-election.

The spiritual element is perhaps the most significant aspect which sent a strong message to the NPP that God has said "enough is enough" to their eight years of economic conundrum and evil governance unleashed upon innocent Ghanaians. And that has to do with the very day that by-election was organized. It was on Tuesday and Arafa day of the Muslims. Very powerful day.

Spiritually, Tuesdays have been very hard days within the mystical dimension of Islam, including in many cultures, and Tuesdays had been used in the olden days to prepare and wage wars against stronger enemies by Kingdoms.

Many of the wars Kingdoms like Gonja, Dagbon, and even Asantes prepared and waged by Muslim clerics, were done on Tuesdays according to Ivor Wilks, Nehemiah Levtzion, Adu Boahen, and other scholars of the Asante, Dagbon, and Gonja Kingdoms.

The Dagbani people had a Mallam called Sabali Yarna Yaamusah who was a friend to the Overlord of the Dagbon Kingdom, Naa Tutugri, the father of Naa Zangina; the Asantehene, Osei Bonsu, had a Mallam called the Parsha or Basha in the person of Muhammad al-Gamba; The Overlord of Gonja, Ma'ura alias Ndewura Jakpa, had a Mallam who founded the Sakpare Muslims in the Gonja Kingdom led initially by Fatigi Morokpe. All this Mallams prepared and waged wars against enemies of these kingdoms spiritually before the physical war, on Tuesdays.

This means that, to have slated that by-election on such a powerful day was literally a preparation for a greater election - the 2024 general elections. And the winner of that by-election shall certainly become the winner of the major election.

Finally, the political and electoral history and demographics of that Constituency, Assin North, attested to this political fortune telling, prophecy, and prediction. That the winner of that by-election shall win the 2024 presidential election. And the NDC shall win the 2024 general elections and shall form the next government in 2025. In Sha Allah.

From the angle of these electoral demographics of the Constituency, in my first article on the Assin North By-election which I titled, "Assin North By-election: the Good, the Bad, and the Ugly", I pointed out how that Constituency has been a key factor and determiner of a presidential election in Ghana and the general election at large.

I revealed that, since 1992, the political party that wins the Assin North is the eventual winner of the presidential election. Unless in strange situations where pork barrel politics dictated the winner, like the case of Kennedy Agyapong in 2008. The NDC won the presidential election but the NPP won the Assin North because of the apparent vote buying tactics.

However, with the constituents now knowing how to take money without voting for vote buyers, the NPP must kiss goodbye to that Constituency come 2024. And certainly the recent NDC victory in the by-election is an attestation to what is to come 2024. Victory in advance for the NDC.

Fellow Ghanaians, in his Tribute to Bandana alias Shatta Wale, Mr. Logic paraphrased a local wisdom in our Ghanaian street parlance, that "what elders can see sitting down, little boys cannot see standing up".

Thus, the old man  Akufo Addo - had seen the defeat of his party coming with full force.

For me, only a bunch of thick skulls and sickening minds can mess up a government on this huge and dangerous scale and still hoping that by crook or by crook (because there's no fairness in this) they should be left in government.

In Dagbani it is said that "if the road has no turns and curves, the travelers on it would certainly see each others' occiputs". This literally means that if there's life, posterity is enough as a judge between rival groups.

Posterity has indeed come to judge Akufo Addo as the last "saint" standing as we all thought. And so far, its not so good as the mantra of former President Kufuor suggested; under Akufo Addo, its so far, so evil; its so far, so terrible; its so far, so bad, and indeed, its so far, so dangerous.

There's therefore a crying, and agitating need for a political and leadership Messiah in the person of former President Mahama to help rescue our sinking ship and nation, in order to marshal it in the right direction. Hence, the victory of the NDC in advance as a hope to a hopeless nation for seven years.
03.07.2023 LISTEN

Private legal practitioner Martin Kpebu has backed calls for a halt in the criminal trial of James Gyakye Quayson, the MP-elect of Assin North Constituency.

According to Mr. Kpebu, there is nothing wrong with the comments by Dormaahene.

Speaking on TV3 on July 3, the private practitioner said it is surprising such comments have been described as prejudicial.

I am surprised that an argument could be made that the comment by Dormahene could be prejudicial. These are comments I have made for the past how many months, on Onua FM, TV3, Joyfm etc.

We want the Attorney General to discontinue, the word Nolle Prosequi is simple English. We are begging the Attorney General to stop the trial because we have decided to move on, Martin Kpebu stated.

The Dormaahene Osagyefo Oseadeeyo Agyemang Badu II speaking at the Bono, Bono East, Ahafo, and Western North regional version of the Professor John Evans Atta Mills Commemorative Lecture in Sunyani on Saturday [July 1, 2023] wants the Attorney General to drop the criminal charges against James Gyakye Quayson.

"As a matter of urgency, I [Dormaahene] am appealing to the President of the Republic [Akufo-Addo], if he has any role to play, that trial should be aborted, and the Attorney-General should as a matter of urgency file a Nolle Prosequi to end that particular decision" and abort the criminal case against Mr. Quayson," he said.

He insisted that it was needless for the Attorney General to continue the case after the chiefs and people of the Assin North constituency re-elected Quayson.

James Gyakye Quayson is facing trial for perjury at the High Court in Accra for dual citizenship.
President Macky Sall is to speak on the Senegalese public broadcaster at 8pm (local time and GMT). He is expected to announce if he intends to run for a thrid term as president in 2024. Opponent Ousmane Sonko, who is still under house arrest, is calling on his supporters to protest today.

Sonkoi added that if the president announces a third-term bid it is "incumbent on all the Senegalese people to stand up, [and] to face him".

Most legal experts say a third term would violate the recently changed Senegalese constitution, which allow each leader two mandates..

The persistent ambiguities around a possible Sall candidacy continue to exacerbate tensions acorss the country.

Protests over Sonko arrest

Last month, thousands of protesters took to the streets of Dakar, the capital, and Ziguinchor, in the southern region of Casamance, after Sonko was sentenced to two years in prison for the crime of "corrupting youth".

Sonko's supporters and some political observers say the case was an attempt to block the opponent and mayor of Ziguinchor from running in next year's presidential election.

The clashes were the deadliest in Senegal in recent memory, creating widespread concern across West Africa, which is already threatened by the Islamist insurgency in Mali and Burkina Faso.

An attempted third-term bid by then President Abdoulaye Wade in 2012 plunged the country into violence, leading to 12 deaths.

(with newswires)
Martin Kpebu, Private Legal Practitioner, has waded into the brouhaha surrounding the criminal trial of MP-elect for Assin North James Gyakye Quayson.

He said the recent comment made by Dormaahene asking the Attorney General to abort the criminal trial of Mr Quayson is not prejudicial as perceived.

Speaking on TV3 on July 3, the Private legal Practitioner said President Akufo-Addos prejudicial comment is nowhere near that of the Dormaahene.

My point is that right now people are not able to talk. People who voted for him I mean President Akufo-Addo have refused to talk. They have refused to talk. They have a duty to talk, you see how Sophia Akuffo came and liberated us for a while, we need enough people to speak to his bad leadership but there are not enough people.

Dormaahene comments are not prejudicial, President Akufo-Addos comments on Gyakye Quayson heading for jail can be termed as prejudicial, Martin Kpebu stated.

The Dormaahene Osagyefo Oseadeeyo Agyemang Badu II speaking at the Bono, Bono East, Ahafo, and Western North regional version of the Professor John Evans Atta Mills Commemorative Lecture in Sunyani on Saturday [July 1, 2023] appealed for the Attorney General to drop the criminal charges against Quayson.

"As a matter of urgency, I [Dormaahene] am appealing to the President of the Republic [Akufo-Addo], if he has any role to play, that trial should be aborted, and the Attorney-General should as a matter of urgency file a Nolle Prosequi to end that particular decision" and abort the criminal case against Mr. Quayson," he said.

He insisted that it was needless for the Attorney General to continue the case after the chiefs and people of the Assin North constituency re-elected Mr Quayson.

James Gyakye Quayson is facing trial for perjury at the High Court in Accra.
Iran's foreign ministry strongly criticised France, Monday, for hosting a meeting of an exiled Iranian opposition group that Tehran considers a "terrorist" organisation.

On Saturday, the National Council of Resistance of Iran (NCRI) , an exile group based in a Parisian suburb, held its yearly mass meeting at the Villepinte conference center outside the French capital.

"Instead of compensating for the gross mistakes of the past in supporting the murderers of the Iranian people...the French statesmen are providing the arena for the gathering of the terrorists," according to Iranian Foreign Ministry spokesman Nasser in a statement.

He urged the French government "to heed the demands" of its own people, referring to a recent wave of violent street protests, instead of "supporting terrorist groups."

Suspected bomb plot

Former US vice president Mike Pence and British ex-prime minister Liz Truss attended the Iranian opposition meeting which French police had initially banned.

In 2018, the NCRI gathering in Villepinte was the target of a suspected bomb plot involving local operatives and the Vienna-based diplomat Assadollah Assadi, who was sentenced to 20 years in prison as the 'mastermind'.

He was released earlier this year in exchange for Belgian humanitarian worker Olivier Vandecasteele.

The NCRI and its militant wing, the People's Mujahedeen, or Mujaheddin-e-Khalk, or MEK, was founded in 1965 by Massoud Rajavi, as a militant opposition group fighting the Shah and organised around a strict Marxist-Leninist hierarchy.

Initially the group aimed to link up with Ayatollah Khomeini, but the religious leader banned them instead after he successfully overthrew the regime of the Shah in 1979.

The MEK reacted with a massive, nationwide bombing campaign, which Tehran answered with waves of arrests and executions.

The group then found refuge in Iraq where they were trained by troops of Saddam Hussein who put tanks and military equipment at their disposal.

After Saddam's demise, they eventually moved to a camp in Albania, funded by $20 million (17 million) from the US meant to used to de-radicalise the groups' 3,000 members.

MEK In France

Meanwhile, the political wing of the MEK, the NCRI, and their current leader, Maryam Rajavi,had found refuge in Auvers-sur-Oise, a small town outside Paris, where they reside in a walled compound in an uneasy relationship with the French government.

Rajavi is the wife of the group's founder Massoud Rajavi who disappeared in 2003. It is not known if he is still alive.

(With newsagencies)
The International Relations Director of the National Democratic Congress (NDC) Alex Segbefia has expressed surprise at the level of criticism directed at Dormaheenes remarks.

According to Mr. Segbefia, the open declaration by President Akufo-Addo that Gyakye Quayson is heading to jail at the Assin North campaign rally is more prejudicial.

Speaking about the issue on TV3 on July 3, he said So not only is he a citizen, he is a very respected lawyer, he practiced extensively and thats one of the issues that helped him to become President. He is the President so when he spoke about the case in more direct terms than the Dormaahene has done and why will you say that Gyakye Quayson will be going to prison?

So who is in contempt and who is acting prejudicial, if you cant start with the President leave the Dormaahene alone because the Dormaahene statement is actually completely off the scale when you take the Presidency statements.

How does the President know that if Gyakye Quayson is found guilty he will be given a prison sentence? Can he not be fined? Can he not be given probation? Why must it be a prison sentence? Is that not prejudicial coming from the number 1 gentleman of the land who is a lawyer? Alex Segbefia stated.

The President during the campaign of the New Patriotic Party (NDC) in Assin North, admonished the constituents not to vote for Mr. Quayson who is likely to be a jailbird.

The Dormaahene Osagyefo Oseadeeyo Agyemang Badu II speaking at the Bono, Bono East, Ahafo, and Western North regional version of the Professor John Evans Atta Mills Commemorative Lecture in Sunyani on Saturday [July 1, 2023] appealed for the Attorney General to drop the criminal charges against Mr Quayson.

"As a matter of urgency, I [Dormaahene] am appealing to the President of the Republic [Akufo-Addo], if he has any role to play, that trial should be aborted, and the Attorney-General should as a matter of urgency file a Nolle Prosequi to end that particular decision" and abort the criminal case against Mr. Quayson," he said.

He insisted that it was needless for the Attorney General to continue the case after the chiefs and people of the Assin North constituency re-elected Quayson.

James Gyakye Quayson is facing trial for perjury at the High Court in Accra.
President Nana Addo Dankwa Akufo-Addo has commissioned a water supply system to provide a constant supply of water to the people of Adaklu and surrounding districts.

The project comes under the third phase of the Five District Water Supply Project, and the President had in 2020 cut sod to serve 95 communities in Adaklu, Agortime-Ziope and Central Tongu with a combined population of 89,150.

President Akufo-Addo said at the commissioning that the Government remained focused on delivering the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) in a multi-faceted approach and listed significant achievements including, the Spain Ghana Debt Swap, and others across the country such as the 32 million Euros Sustainable Water Improvement project for the Volta, Oti, Greater Accra, and Eastern Regions.

Others include the on-going Keta Water Project, Wenchi Water, the Sekondi Takoradi and one for the Sogakope-Lome corridor, which the President said would benefit more than 4 million people.

He commended stakeholders for the collective effort towards the project and called to protect the water resources considering the weight on the taxpayer.

Madam Cecilia Dapaah, Minister for Sanitarian and Water Resources, said through the efforts of the government, water scarcity was being addressed, and expressed gratitude to the President.

She said water coverage stood at 87.7 per cent from the latest data in 2021, while sanitation coverage stood at 80.8 per cent.

She said diseases such as cholera and dysentery were banished by the President and assured that the SDGs would be attained under his visionary leadership.

Madam Dapaah noted how water availability would support the sustainability of the business Community, and thus the growth of the district and should be safeguarded.

Dr. Archibald Yao Letsa, Volta Regional Minister said the event marked the attainment of another milestone for the entire region with the access to quality safe water and demonstrate the Presidents love for the Region.

The Volta Region highly appreciates your love. You have demonstrated once again your desire to address the basic needs of the people. You have shown that the little things that make positive impact in the lives of the people mean the most to you in and the people of Volta cannot hold back their gratitude to you.

He said communities in the Region including Amedzofe, Dzolo, Shia, Ziofe and Adaklu have benefited from the Ghana Spain Debt Swap project, and hoped sod would be cut soon for the fourth phase of the Five District Project to serve more communities.

Togbe Gbogbi Atsa V, Paramount Chief of Adaklu Traditional Area, said it was a lifetime project that would address ill health from water borne diseases, and that the agenda 111 project ongoing would help elevate the district.

For all this we the people of Adaklu owe you and your administration. We are extremely grateful. We will write your name in our minds and our hearts.

He appealed to the Government to ensure the construction of the Adaklu Waya to Tsrefe road, which had been awarded but not progressing, and to construct a promised cattle grazing reserve among other projects.

Phases one, two, and three combined pipes water to 215 communities in Adaklu, Agortime Ziope, Central Tongu, North Tongu, and Ho West, from a 1.1 million gallons per day water head located at Adidome.

Phase three includes some 175km of pipelines and three elevated reservoirs fed through a high lift booster pumping station at Kpeleho.

A total of 113 standpipes have been installed in the 95 communities.

Dr. Worlanyo Kwadzo Siabi, Chief Executive of the Community Water and Sanitation Agency, said groundwater in the Volta Region had

significant traces of magnesium and other compounds that made it expensive to treat, and was therefore prudent to source the Volta River.

He said the various interventions took the nation closer to complete water access by 2030.

Phase Three was undertaken by Strabag AG with 11.5 million Euro funding from the Raiffeisen Bank of Austria.

It began in November 2020 and was completed in November 2022, while phase four, currently at the design stage, would cover the North Tongu and Ho West Districts.

GNA
The President of the Republic, Nana Addo Dankwa Akufo-Addo, on Monday, 3rd July 2023, commissioned Phase Three of the Five Districts Water Supply Project at Adaklu in the Volta Region, a project for which he cut the sod in September 2020.

The project, financed by a concessionary facility from Raiffeisen Bank International AG of Austria, at a cost of 11.5 million, will benefit some 89,150 people in 95 communities in Central Tongu, Adaklu and Agotime-Ziope.

According to President Akufo-Addo, who addressed a gathering at Adaklu, some of the key components of the Project are the construction of three (3) concrete tanks at Adaklu Kpeleho, Adaklu Sofa and Adaklu Kpatove, to help keep the water safe from any bacteria; the completion of a water booster station at Adaklu Kpeleho to transport water to Adaklu and Agotime-Ziope communities; and the laying of one hundred and seventy-five (175) kilometres of water pipelines.

With designs for Phase IV of the Project are ongoing, the President told the gathering that the focus of Government is to ensure that all Regions across the country are provided with adequate, safe, affordable and reliable water services.

We are also committed to ensuring that we practice safe sanitation and hygiene by the year 2030, in line with the attainment of the 2030 United Nations Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). Our strategic goal is to use a multi-faceted approach, with emphasis on governance and sector institutional strengthening, to accelerate access to equitable WASH services throughout Ghana, he said.

Towards the goal of providing clean water and sanitation for all, President Akufo-Addo noted that his government has made significant progress towards this.

He cited the commissioning, in September 2020, of completed projects under the Water Supply Improvement Project of the Ghana-Spain Debt Swap Development, implemented by the Community Water and Sanitation Agency (CWSA), at a total cost of US$3.78 million, for a beneficiary population of 75,000.

That Project seeks to expand access to and ensure sustainable services in thirty-six (36) rural and small towns/communities in the Ho, Ho West, Agotime-Ziope and South Dayi Districts. Outstanding works are expected to be completed by March next year, he said.

President Akufo-Addo continued, Again, on 30th June, 2020, I also commissioned Cluster Water Systems at Bontrase and Amasamkrom in the Central Region, as part of the Sustainable Rural Water and Sanitation Project (SRWSP). These commissioning ceremonies were done to symbolise the completion of similar water systems implemented in eleven (11) out of the sixteen (16) regions of the country, and it was financed from a US$47.5 million credit facility from the International Development Association (IDA) of the World Bank.

The other beneficiary Regions, he stressed, were Ahafo, Bono, Bono East, Western, Western North, Northern, North East, Savannah, Upper West and Upper East.

The Project Components

He added, included the construction of piped water supply systems, support for construction of household latrines, health and hygiene education and environmental and social safeguards for one hundred and sixty-four (164) beneficiary communities, with a total population size of 154,826.

Under the Rural Communities and Small Towns Water Supply Project (RCSTWSP), Government is improving access to sustainable water delivery within the Volta, Oti, Greater Accra, Ashanti and Eastern Regions to benefit a total population of some two hundred and eighty-two thousand (282,000), at thirty million euros (30 million). The Project is ongoing, and some seventeen percent (17%) complete.

Urban Communities  Water for All

Touching on the Water for All Agenda in urban communities, President stated that the Keta Water Supply Project, being implemented by the Ministry of Sanitation and Water Resources through the Ghana Water Company Limited, would also improve the reliability and sustainability of water supply to a beneficiary population of some 422,160 in Keta and surrounding communities, at an estimated cost of 85,112,854.

Works under this project, he indicated, are expected to be completed by December 2024.

Additionally, the Wenchi Water Project, being constructed at a cost of 39 million involves the construction of a new water treatment facility, and the rehabilitation of the existing groundwater system to meet current and future water requirements of the community until 2045.

The Project is expected to serve some 101,870 people living within Wenchi and its environs, he said

On the Sekondi-Takoradi Water Supply Project, which would cost some 70 million, and would serve a beneficiary population of some 1.4 million within Sekondi-Takoradi communities, President Akufo-Addo stated that the project is expected to be completed by September 2025.

The feasibility studies for the proposed Sogakope-Lome Transboundary Water Supply Project are ninety-eight percent (98%) complete, and funding would be sought to achieve sustainable improvement to access to drinking water for four million consumers in the Project area. In Ghana, the Project beneficiaries will include the Southern Volta area, more specifically the Municipal/Districts of Keta, Ketu South, Ketu North, South Tongu and Akatsi South, he added.

Source: Presidency
Mr. Emmanuel Kankam-Boadu, Tema West Constituency's first vice Chairman of the New Patriotic Party (NPP), has urged the party's delegates to work and vote wisely to produce a formidable and consensus candidate to break the eight.

Speaking in an interview with the Ghana News Agency in Tema, Mr Kankam-Boadu encouraged the delegates to reason in line with nation-building and gravitate towards a candidate who would be formidable, appealing to the citizenry, and had the ability to unify the country to address critical challenges.

According to him, delegates should desist from tribal and religious affiliation when electing a candidate, however, he recommended personality, capability, good records, and competence as the yardstick for the presidential candidate of the NPP for the 2024 elections.

He said, Looking at this assemblage of candidates and considering the rich pedigree of their lives, I believe the NPP is rich in human resources; hence, Ghana is blessed with capable people that can successfully steer the ship of the nation into a brighter future.

Mr. Kankam-Boadu advocated party loyalties to ensure credible internal primaries and come out of them in unity, strength, and good purpose.

We need a flagbearer who will give Ghanaians a sense of hope and confidence while ensuring victory for the NPP party, he said.

He charged the Presidential and Parliamentary aspirants to recognize the importance of stability and unity within the party.

Emphasizing the importance of togetherness, Mr. Boadu urged the various aspirants to preach peace while campaigning because the citizens regard the NPP party as a harmonious and brilliant force.

GNA
Explosions again rocked Sudan's capital Khartoum on Monday as the army rallied civilians to take up arms against a renewed onslaught by its paramilitary foes.

The sound of artillery fire shook the dawn in northwest Khartoum and progressed towards the centre and east of the city, witnesses told AFP.

The fighting "began at 4:00 am (0200 GMT) and is still going," one resident said.

The war-torn capital barely saw a few hours of respite after heavy clashes on Sunday between troops loyal to army chief Abdel Fattah al-Burhan and those of the paramilitary Rapid Support Forces (RSF).

The army announced Monday it was ready to "receive and prepare" volunteer fighters, after Burhan last week urged Sudanese "youth and all those able to defend" to join the military.

War-weary civilians have largely rejected the call, pleading for an end to the relentless war between Burhan and his former deputy, RSF commander Mohamed Hamdan Daglo.

Later on Monday, witnesses reported the air force targeted an armoured RSF convoy as it wound its way from the country's south towards Khartoum.

Outside the capital, some of the worst fighting has been in the vast western region of Darfur, where late Sunday RSF forces "attacked the military base" in Nyala, the capital of South Darfur state.

Since April 15, nearly 3,000 people have been killed in the violence, according to the Armed Conflict Location and Event Data Project.

But medics warn the death toll is likely to be much higher, with about two-thirds of health facilities in combat areas still "out of service".

A further 2.2 million people have been displaced within the country, with another 645,000 fleeing across borders, according to the International Organization for Migration.

Darfur violence

Darfur is home to a quarter of Sudan's population and is still scarred by a two-decade war.

Residents there, as well as the United Nations, United States and others, say civilians have been targeted and killed for their ethnicity by the RSF and allied Arab militias.

The fighting has killed nearly 3,000 people since mid-April, but medics warn the death toll may be much higher. By - (AFP)

The RSF has been accused of intentionally targeting civilians in Darfur, including by shooting people fleeing towards the Chadian border.

The paramilitaries have also been identified as the main perpetrators of conflict-related sexual assault by survivors in both Darfur and Khartoum, according to the governmental Combating Violence Against Women and Children Unit.

Since the conflict began, RSF fighters -- highly mobile and embedded in densely populated neighbourhoods -- have been accused of widespread break-ins and looting.

Late on Sunday, the RSF announced it was cracking down on "looting and vandalism, particularly the theft of civilian cars".

The force, which traces its origins to the notorious Janjaweed militia recruited in the early 2000s to crush a rebellion by ethnic minority groups in Darfur, announced last week it had begun to try some of its "undisciplined" members.

On Monday a coalition of Arab tribes from South Darfur announced in an online video its allegiance to the RSF, urging community members in the armed forces to desert and join ranks with the paramilitaries.

Children fleeing

More than half of Sudan's population is now in need of aid, according to UN figures.

In addition to food and water, people are "also in need of protection", the UN's deputy special representative for Sudan, Clementine Nkweta-Salami, told Saudi-owned Al Arabiya television on Sunday.

She reiterated appeals "to both parties" to allow for supplies and personnel to enter the country and "move freely".

Relief deliveries have been repeatedly looted and humanitarian workers attacked.

The situation has been especially horrific in Darfur, where entire neighbourhoods have been razed to the ground, cities besieged and bodies left to rot on the streets.

Barely any humanitarian assistance has reached desperate civilians, as aid groups report their teams standing by in neighbouring Chad, waiting for humanitarian corridors to open.

Since April, more than 170,000 people have fled Darfur across the Chadian border, according to the UN refugee agency.

"Thousands of families with children are fleeing the violence in West Darfur," according to Mandeep O'Brien, country representative for UNICEF which has reported hundreds of children killed in the fighting.

The UN agency estimates that more than 13 million children are in "dire need" of humanitarian assistance.
The Anglican Igbo Church of the Holy Trinity, London, England celebrated Fathers Day on Sunday 2 July 2023. Because it is the only Igbo Church in all of London, Igbo people from near and distant parts of the metropolis gathered there to honour fathers today. But not only fathers were present. The children and their mothers and grandmothers were there also, to grace the occasion. It was a moving occasion that apparently diverted from the old tradition of focusing on fathers alone. This time, the emphasis was on the importance of not only fathers but more impressively, the family as the foundation of society.

Taking his sermon from St Johns Gospel Chapter 2, the Rev. Chibuzor Okpala spoke extensively on the role of fathers in the traditional Christian family. The story for his sermon was that on the third day, a wedding took place at Cana in Galilee. Jesus mother was there. Jesus and his disciples had also been invited to the wedding. Somewhere along the line, the wine got finished. The servers complained and Jesus mother said to him: They have no more wine.

Jesus replied: Woman why do you involve me? My hour has not yet come. His mother said to the servants: Do whatever he tells you.

Six stone water jars stood nearby, the kind used by the Jews for ceremonial washing, each holding from twenty to thirty gallons. Then, Jesus said to the servants: Fill the jars with water. So they filled them to the brim. Jesus told them: Now draw some out and take it to the master of the banquet.

They did so, and the master of the banquet tasted the water that had been turned into wine. He did not realize where it had come from, though the servants who had drawn the water knew. Then he called the bridegroom aside and said: Everyone brings out the choice wine first and then the cheaper wine after the guests have had too much to drink; but you have saved the best till now. What Jesus did here in Cana of Galilee was the first of the signs through which he revealed his glory. And his disciples believed in him.

Rev. Okpala emphasized that in that miracle Jesus performed, Christians should recognize that those jars symbolized their hearts and the water poured into them, the word of God. He admonished not only fathers but the entire family to always put the word of God in their hearts and ceaselessly pray together because families that prayed together were always more bonded than those that did not. He said it was wrong for Christians to believe that only love could sustain their marriages, even in times of trouble or need. He explained that a marriage that was not predicated on the laws of God was bound to flounder. Marriage should also be based on trust. Both father and mother should always trust each other, especially as that trust would help them mould the characters of their children.

Rev. Okpala said that God gave Adam a helper, not a house maid. He frowned at men who had a proclivity to turn their wives into maids and reminded them that such behaviour was definitely going to send the wrong signals to their children and their neighbourhood. He gave an example of when a wife asked her husband to kindly wash out the dishes in the sink for her  and the man refused, arguing that it was a womans duty, not that of her husband. He then gave an analogy: here is a man to whom a helper has been sent. Who then owns the work: the man or his helper? It is the man, of course! So, if madam said, help me with the dishes, the man should understand that the work is his and that the woman is simply his helper. In conclusion, Rev. Okpala eulogized the fathers in Anglican Igbo Church of the Holy Trinity, for all the efforts they had put into the activities of the communion and prayed that God keeps them and their families safe and healthy.

It will be recalled that Father's Day is a special occasion celebrated in numerous countries worldwide to honor the contribution, love and support provided by fathers and father figures. The day acknowledges the vital role that fathers play in the lives of their family members, and the importance of their presence and influence in society.

Father's Day can be traced back to the early 20th century. It is believed to have evolved in response to Mother's Day. Sonora Smart Dodd, a young woman who hailed from Spokane, Washington, is widely recognized as the driving force behind the establishment of Father's Day. Inspired by her father's dedication to her and her siblings after their mother's demise, Dodd proposed the idea of having a day dedicated to fathers, as her father had single-handedly raised her and her siblings in the absence of their mother.

In 1910, the first official Father's Day was celebrated in Spokane. The date was set for 19th June to honor Dodd's father's birthday. But it was not until 1972 that Father's Day was recognized as a national holiday in the United States. President Richard Nixon solidified its significance.

Today, Father's Day is celebrated worldwide, although the dates and customs vary across different countries. In some, such as the United States, the United Kingdom, Canada, Australia and Germany, Father's Day is celebrated on the third Sunday of June. In countries like Russia, Brazil and Spain it is celebrated on different dates. In a way, the diversified observance demonstrates the universal acknowledgment of the importance of fathers and father figures.

In most countries, Father's Day is a time to express gratitude and love towards fathers and father figures, emphasizing their unconditional love, guidance and sacrifices. It offers an opportunity for families to come together and celebrate the bond between fathers and their family members. Loved ones would often express their appreciation through handmade cards, gifts or acts of service, showing their love and recognition for their father's role in their lives.

Beyond the immediate family, Father's Day serves as a reminder to society about the positive impact fathers have on their communities. It encourages society to recognize and support fathers, fostering an environment that values fatherhood as an essential component of a child's upbringing. It provides a platform to break stereotypes and challenge traditional gender roles. On that day, speakers emphasize that fathers can be nurturing caregivers and active participants in their children's lives.

Over the years, fatherhood has evolved significantly. Traditional gender roles, where fathers were often seen as the primary breadwinners have given way to a more inclusive and more involving approach to parenting. Modern fathers actively participate in their children's upbringing, sharing household responsibilities, providing emotional support, and actively engaging in their child's development. In that way, Father's Day acknowledges this shift in fatherhood dynamics and celebrates the many natural roles of fathering. It applauds the fathers who are actively involved and are present in their childrens lives, and invest in their emotional and physical well-being. This recognition further reinforces the idea that fathers are more than just financial providers but also important role models and caregivers.

The celebration today gave the Church Community of Holy Trinity the opportunity to appreciate fathers, recognize their contributions and promote the importance of involved fatherhood in society. As they celebrated Father's Day, the Vicar in Charge, Ven. Dr. Onundu Amatu Christian-Iwuagwu reminded the community of the frequent need to express gratitude to God for the gift of fathers not only through presents but also by fostering a culture that acknowledges and supports fathers, empowering them to continue to shape the lives of future generations.
03.07.2023 LISTEN

The humourless comedian Hannah Gadsby has much to thank one of the twentieth centurys titans of art. By placing him in the stockade of feminist disapproval, the Australian was picking the easiest target and avoiding the most profound questions of his oeuvre. To be so personal, and play the man with such indignation, is the first refuge of the talentless.

While Gadsbys Netflix run known as Nanette happily dabbled with Picasso as the problem figure for women, a mere phallic kaleidoscope filter who was rotten in the face cavity, another frontier needed to be conquered. Art graduate credentials stirred. Dangerously, Gadsby felt that it was worthwhile to actually move into a field her target was infinitely far more gifted at than her, though not a fact she would ever dare admit. (Patriarchy tends to operate as a one-word pejorative, much like communism to the red baiter or cosmopolitanism to the Stalinist.) Enter the Brooklyn Museum art exhibition Its Pablo-matic: Picasso According to Hannah Gadsby, curated by Gadsby with the assistance of Catherine Morris and Lisa Small.

This chaotic, streaky effort keeps company with something like a dozen exhibitions and events intended to mark the 50th anniversary of Picassos death in 1973. Artists in the exhibition have been selected to provide feminist ripostes to the misogynist ogre, with some the pieces coming after the artists death. The work of Betty Tompkins, Joan Semmel, Kaleta Doolin, Kathe Kollwitz and Maria Martins find room, but they do so within the gravitational pull of Picassos own stifling gravitas, which seems to exert a dwarfing effect.

Discordantly for Gadsby, the choice artists are not exactly in accord with her art-artist divide, one which holds that decent art comes from decent souls. Semmel is happy to admit loving Picassos work, marvelling at the ground it has broken, opening new doors into seeing. Kiki Smith holds much the same view. As a printmaker I know very few who can get anywhere near the depth of his understanding and his playfulness.

The textual and audio contributions from Gadsby are cringingly childish. Beside Reclining Nude (1932), itself a Picasso feature, she finds the image uncomfortable because the breasts can look like a sideways owl and two doughnuts  at the same time. And forget anything valuable about the sketch selections from the Vollard Suite. Im not going to sell these works by contextualising them in terms of PPs technical prowess because I just dont care.

As Alex Greenberger writes with damning precision, the choices have little to say about Picasso per se, and suggest the impossibility of re-centring art history if the man being centred remains Picasso. What is neglected is the work of such figures as the late Francoise Gilot and Dora Maar, at times tormented lovers of Picasso who would have provided ideal counterpoints of modernism to the man. It wouldve been nice to have more artists who were thinking about Picasso, or whose work, at least, has something to do with him. But this seems like too much to ask from the curators, especially Gadsby, who greets that line of thinking with a big, fat raspberry. As the audio guide accompanying the exhibition says, We are unsettled. Thats a little joke. Or is it? I dont know. Indeed.

It would be churlish to ignore the fact that Picasso the man has been very much in darker news columns, both artistic and more general, over the decades. That he was a brute, uncharitable, and dismissive at points about women is a point so obvious as to be almost dull. The nasty produce good art. Discuss.

Of greater interest were those feminist revisionists in the vanguard, ready to pounce. Linda Nochlin readied a Molotov cocktail in her 1971 ARTnews essay and hurled it at his reputation with full force. Precocious he may have been, and adept as to make it to the Academy of Art in Madrid at the tender age of 15, but what if he had been born a girl? The making of art, she suggested, had been rendered into a semi-religious form, tying art historians, critics and artists themselves to a credo and cult. But there is nothing of that subtlety or relevance to feature in Gadsbys puerile effusions, which never move much beyond the anger of undergraduate resentment.

The curators have been trying to defend their shabby choice of Gadsby and the selections. For them, any criticism is bound to be a confirmation of their choice, an affirmation of their mountain bound wisdom. If men make a point about art, then they are merely being Pablo-matic. Well done: make another audio, and whilst you are at it, pop a video on TikTok. Gadsplainer, rise!

Gadsby might be mortified (who knows? Who cares?) about another curious parallel, but her attack on Picasso takes the form much in keeping with those habitual philistines who populated the various art galleries of Australia between the two World Wars. There were also a few truly salty critics doing a particularly vicious line in anti-Semitism. When it came to art commentators such as Sir Lionel Lindsay, Picasso was to be hated as that Jew from Malaga, very much part of a broader disease of modern art peddled by a sinister cabal of Jewish art dealers and their accomplices.

We can be thankful that Gadsby merely hates Picasso for supposedly not supplying adequately informed perspectives of women and merely focusing on the phallus as a kaleidoscope. What proved more telling was her mistake in not picking the works of women who could rightly challenge his standing by giving him a good serve of their own artistic merit.

Dr. Binoy Kampmark was a Commonwealth Scholar at Selwyn College, Cambridge. He currently lectures at RMIT University. Email: [email protected]
The Zulu king, head of South Africa's most influential traditional monarchy, said on Monday he was "fit and sound," and denied rumours he had been poisoned.

"I'm very well, I'm very fit and sound," Misuzulu Zulu told AFP in a phone interview from the neighbouring country of Eswatini, where he is undergoing a medical check-up.

The 48-year-old king ascended the throne last year after the death of his father, Goodwill Zwelithini, after a bitter feud over the royal succession.

Over the weekend, the influential Zulu prime minister, Prince Mangosuthu Buthelezi, said that the monarch had been hospitalised in Eswatini after falling ill.

Buthelezi said there were "suspicions that he was poisoned," after the unexpected death of one of his close advisers, believed to have ingested a toxic substance.

But asked by AFP if he was ever in a hospital the king said "never".

"It was a procedural routine check-up that I do every three months, sometimes every six months," he said in a terse interview.

The royal spokesman, Prince Africa Zulu, told AFP on Monday that the Zulu king had spent the day working, including meeting a Chinese delegation, but gave no further details.

The spokesman later shared a video in which the king said he had suffered "no poisoning whatsoever."

He also said it was not confirmed that his aide had been poisoned.

The king said he needed to be away from home to process the loss of his "right-hand man" and he chose Eswatini, where his uncle King Mswati III reigns. The timing of the trip also coincided with his regular health checkups.

"It's not because I'm poisoned, I'm well, I feel 100 percent (well)... everything is well functioning, there's nothing wrong with me," he said in the video clip.

He also said he would launch an investigation into the weekend reports about his health.

Buthelezi had claimed that the current king preferred treatment in Eswatini because "his parents had both received treatment in South Africa and subsequently died".

Last September, another counsellor of the Zulu king was shot dead in mysterious circumstances on the sidelines of a traditional ceremony.

Although the title of king of the Zulu nation does not bestow executive power, the monarch wields great moral influence over more than 11 million Zulus, who make up nearly a fifth of South Africa's population of 60 million people.

King Zwelithini, who died after more than 50 years in charge, left six wives and at least 28 children.

Misuzulu is the first son of Zwelithini's third wife, who he designated as regent in his will.

The queen however died suddenly a month after Zwelithini, leaving a will naming Misuzulu as the next king -- a development that did not go down well with other family members.
Nuveen California Quality Municipal Income Fund (NYSE:NAC  Free Report) was the target of a large increase in short interest in June. As of June 15th, there was short interest totalling 36,400 shares, an increase of 104.5% from the May 31st total of 17,800 shares. Based on an average daily volume of 333,800 shares, the short-interest ratio is currently 0.1 days.

Nuveen California Quality Municipal Income Fund Price Performance

NAC stock traded up $0.06 during mid-day trading on Friday, hitting $10.92. 216,732 shares of the company were exchanged, compared to its average volume of 321,255. Nuveen California Quality Municipal Income Fund has a twelve month low of $10.14 and a twelve month high of $13.02. The firm has a fifty day simple moving average of $10.72 and a 200 day simple moving average of $10.95.

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Nuveen California Quality Municipal Income Fund Announces Dividend

The business also recently disclosed a monthly dividend, which will be paid on Monday, July 3rd. Shareholders of record on Thursday, June 15th will be issued a dividend of $0.036 per share. This represents a $0.43 annualized dividend and a yield of 3.96%. The ex-dividend date of this dividend is Wednesday, June 14th.

Institutional Inflows and Outflows

Nuveen California Quality Municipal Income Fund Company Profile

Several hedge funds have recently added to or reduced their stakes in NAC. Resurgent Financial Advisors LLC bought a new position in shares of Nuveen California Quality Municipal Income Fund in the 4th quarter worth about $25,000. EWG Elevate Inc. bought a new position in shares of Nuveen California Quality Municipal Income Fund in the 4th quarter worth about $75,000. Captrust Financial Advisors bought a new position in shares of Nuveen California Quality Municipal Income Fund in the 2nd quarter worth about $91,000. Nomura Holdings Inc. bought a new position in shares of Nuveen California Quality Municipal Income Fund in the 1st quarter worth about $110,000. Finally, Jane Street Group LLC bought a new position in shares of Nuveen California Quality Municipal Income Fund in the 1st quarter worth about $119,000.

(Free Report)

Nuveen California Quality Municipal Income Fund is a closed ended fixed income mutual fund launched by Nuveen Investments, Inc The fund is co-managed by Nuveen Fund Advisors LLC and Nuveen Asset Management, LLC. It invests in the fixed income markets of California, United States. The fund invests in undervalued municipal securities and other related investments that are exempt from regular federal and California income taxes.

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Avantax Planning Partners Inc. reduced its stake in Altria Group, Inc. (NYSE:MO  Free Report) by 0.6% in the first quarter, HoldingsChannel reports. The institutional investor owned 71,782 shares of the companys stock after selling 458 shares during the quarter. Avantax Planning Partners Inc.s holdings in Altria Group were worth $3,203,000 as of its most recent SEC filing.

Other large investors have also recently made changes to their positions in the company. Moneta Group Investment Advisors LLC raised its stake in shares of Altria Group by 108,222.5% during the 4th quarter. Moneta Group Investment Advisors LLC now owns 18,590,308 shares of the companys stock worth $849,763,000 after purchasing an additional 18,573,146 shares during the period. Edmp Inc. raised its stake in shares of Altria Group by 4,424.6% during the 4th quarter. Edmp Inc. now owns 4,074,178 shares of the companys stock worth $89,131,000 after purchasing an additional 3,984,132 shares during the period. Charles Schwab Investment Management Inc. raised its stake in shares of Altria Group by 8.7% during the 4th quarter. Charles Schwab Investment Management Inc. now owns 44,066,327 shares of the companys stock worth $2,000,861,000 after purchasing an additional 3,516,646 shares during the period. United Services Automobile Association raised its stake in shares of Altria Group by 227.3% during the 3rd quarter. United Services Automobile Association now owns 3,031,991 shares of the companys stock worth $37,536,000 after purchasing an additional 2,105,711 shares during the period. Finally, First Trust Advisors LP raised its stake in shares of Altria Group by 32.6% during the 4th quarter. First Trust Advisors LP now owns 7,209,557 shares of the companys stock worth $329,550,000 after purchasing an additional 1,774,297 shares during the period. 58.38% of the stock is owned by hedge funds and other institutional investors.

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Altria Group Stock Performance

NYSE:MO traded up $0.54 during mid-day trading on Monday, reaching $45.84. The stock had a trading volume of 2,781,447 shares, compared to its average volume of 7,875,882. The firm has a 50 day moving average price of $45.28 and a two-hundred day moving average price of $45.67. The stock has a market capitalization of $81.83 billion, a P/E ratio of 14.57, a P/E/G ratio of 2.28 and a beta of 0.59. Altria Group, Inc. has a one year low of $40.35 and a one year high of $51.57.

Altria Group Announces Dividend

Altria Group ( NYSE:MO Free Report ) last announced its quarterly earnings data on Thursday, April 27th. The company reported $1.18 earnings per share for the quarter, missing the consensus estimate of $1.19 by ($0.01). Altria Group had a net margin of 22.44% and a negative return on equity of 245.43%. The company had revenue of $4.76 billion during the quarter, compared to the consensus estimate of $4.89 billion. During the same quarter in the previous year, the firm posted $1.12 EPS. The businesss revenue for the quarter was down 1.2% compared to the same quarter last year. Research analysts forecast that Altria Group, Inc. will post 4.97 earnings per share for the current year.

The business also recently disclosed a quarterly dividend, which will be paid on Monday, July 10th. Shareholders of record on Thursday, June 15th will be given a $0.94 dividend. The ex-dividend date of this dividend is Wednesday, June 14th. This represents a $3.76 annualized dividend and a yield of 8.20%. Altria Groups payout ratio is currently 120.90%.

Wall Street Analyst Weigh In

Several brokerages have recently commented on MO. Stifel Nicolaus began coverage on Altria Group in a report on Thursday, April 13th. They set a buy rating and a $52.00 price objective for the company. StockNews.com raised Altria Group from a hold rating to a buy rating in a report on Friday, June 23rd. Finally, Citigroup dropped their target price on Altria Group from $49.50 to $47.00 and set a neutral rating for the company in a research report on Monday, April 17th. One analyst has rated the stock with a sell rating, three have given a hold rating and two have given a buy rating to the company. According to data from MarketBeat.com, the stock presently has a consensus rating of Hold and a consensus target price of $45.83.

Altria Group Profile

(Free Report)

Altria Group, Inc, through its subsidiaries, manufactures and sells smokeable and oral tobacco products in the United States. The company provides cigarettes primarily under the Marlboro brand; cigars and pipe tobacco principally under the Black & Mild brand; moist smokeless tobacco products and snus products under the Copenhagen, Skoal, Red Seal, and Husky brands; and on! oral nicotine pouches.

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McCormick & Company, Incorporated (NYSE:MKC  Free Report) had its target price raised by equities research analysts at Barclays from $77.00 to $85.00 in a research note issued to investors on Sunday, The Fly reports. Barclayss price objective indicates a potential downside of 2.56% from the companys previous close.

Several other research analysts have also issued reports on MKC. Bank of America raised McCormick & Company, Incorporated from an underperform rating to a buy rating and raised their target price for the stock from $75.00 to $100.00 in a research report on Tuesday, June 6th. Stifel Nicolaus started coverage on McCormick & Company, Incorporated in a research report on Thursday, April 13th. They issued a hold rating and a $82.00 price objective for the company. TheStreet raised McCormick & Company, Incorporated from a c+ rating to a b- rating in a research report on Friday, June 23rd. Credit Suisse Group lowered their price objective on McCormick & Company, Incorporated from $75.00 to $72.00 in a research report on Tuesday, March 21st. Finally, StockNews.com started coverage on McCormick & Company, Incorporated in a research report on Thursday, May 18th. They issued a hold rating for the company. Two investment analysts have rated the stock with a sell rating, five have given a hold rating and four have given a buy rating to the company. According to data from MarketBeat.com, the stock presently has an average rating of Hold and a consensus target price of $82.90.

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McCormick & Company, Incorporated Trading Up 0.5 %

NYSE:MKC traded up $0.45 during trading hours on Friday, hitting $87.23. 2,368,622 shares of the company were exchanged, compared to its average volume of 1,658,709. The stock has a market capitalization of $23.40 billion, a price-to-earnings ratio of 33.68, a price-to-earnings-growth ratio of 4.40 and a beta of 0.58. The company has a current ratio of 0.85, a quick ratio of 0.32 and a debt-to-equity ratio of 0.83. McCormick & Company, Incorporated has a one year low of $70.60 and a one year high of $94.39. The company has a fifty day simple moving average of $89.25 and a 200 day simple moving average of $82.52.

Insider Activity at McCormick & Company, Incorporated

McCormick & Company, Incorporated ( NYSE:MKC Free Report ) last announced its earnings results on Thursday, June 29th. The company reported $0.60 earnings per share (EPS) for the quarter, topping the consensus estimate of $0.58 by $0.02. The business had revenue of $1.66 billion during the quarter, compared to analyst estimates of $1.67 billion. McCormick & Company, Incorporated had a return on equity of 14.76% and a net margin of 10.74%. McCormick & Company, Incorporateds revenue for the quarter was up 8.0% compared to the same quarter last year. During the same period last year, the company earned $0.48 EPS. Sell-side analysts expect that McCormick & Company, Incorporated will post 2.65 EPS for the current fiscal year.

In other McCormick & Company, Incorporated news, CEO Lawrence Erik Kurzius sold 39,906 shares of McCormick & Company, Incorporated stock in a transaction dated Friday, May 12th. The stock was 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 approximately $14,365,301.58. The transaction was disclosed in a document filed with the Securities & Exchange Commission, which is available through the SEC website. 19.00% of the stock is currently owned by corporate insiders.

Hedge Funds Weigh In On McCormick & Company, Incorporated

Hedge funds have recently added to or reduced their stakes in the stock. Pinnacle Bancorp Inc. acquired a new position in McCormick & Company, Incorporated during the 1st quarter valued at about $27,000. Align Wealth Management LLC acquired a new position in McCormick & Company, Incorporated during the 4th quarter valued at about $29,000. Bourgeon Capital Management LLC acquired a new position in McCormick & Company, Incorporated during the 1st quarter valued at about $29,000. Edmond DE Rothschild Holding S.A. purchased a new position in shares of McCormick & Company, Incorporated in the 1st quarter worth approximately $29,000. Finally, Compagnie Lombard Odier SCmA purchased a new position in shares of McCormick & Company, Incorporated in the 4th quarter worth approximately $31,000. Institutional investors and hedge funds own 79.92% of the companys stock.

About McCormick & Company, Incorporated

(Free Report)

McCormick & Company, Incorporated manufactures, markets, and distributes spices, seasoning mixes, condiments, and other flavorful products to the food industry. It operates in two segments, Consumer and Flavor Solutions. The Consumer segment offers spices, herbs, and seasonings, as well as condiments and sauces, and desserts.

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Citigroup cut shares of Eurocash (OTCMKTS:EUSHY  Free Report) from a neutral rating to a sell rating in a report published on Thursday morning, The Fly reports.

Eurocash Trading Up 4.9 %

Eurocash stock opened at $4.05 on Thursday. Eurocash has a twelve month low of $2.64 and a twelve month high of $4.05. The company has a 50 day moving average of $3.99 and a 200-day moving average of $3.24.

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Eurocash Cuts Dividend

The business also recently disclosed a dividend, which will be paid on Friday, July 14th. Shareholders of record on Monday, June 26th will be issued a $0.0611 dividend. The ex-dividend date is Friday, June 23rd. This represents a dividend yield of 1.51%. Eurocashs dividend payout ratio is currently 43.88%.

Eurocash Company Profile

Eurocash SA engages in the wholesale distribution of food and other fast moving consumer goods (FMCG) in Poland. The company operates through Wholesale, Retail, and Projects segments. Its FMCG products include food products, soft drinks, alcoholic beverages, tobacco products, and household chemicals and cosmetics.

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Axfood AB (publ) (OTCMKTS:AXFOF  Free Report) is one of 62 public companies in the Grocery Stores industry, but how does it weigh in compared to its peers? We will compare Axfood AB (publ) to similar companies based on the strength of its institutional ownership, analyst recommendations, earnings, valuation, profitability, risk and dividends.

Profitability

This table compares Axfood AB (publ) and its peers net margins, return on equity and return on assets.

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Net Margins Return on Equity Return on Assets Axfood AB (publ) N/A N/A N/A Axfood AB (publ) Competitors 2.07% 14.53% 4.72%

Earnings and Valuation

This table compares Axfood AB (publ) and its peers gross revenue, earnings per share and valuation.

Gross Revenue Net Income Price/Earnings Ratio Axfood AB (publ) N/A N/A 1.35 Axfood AB (publ) Competitors $26.96 billion $611.52 million 183.25

Analyst Ratings

Axfood AB (publ)s peers have higher revenue and earnings than Axfood AB (publ). Axfood AB (publ) 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.

This is a summary of current ratings and price targets for Axfood AB (publ) and its peers, as provided by MarketBeat.

Sell Ratings Hold Ratings Buy Ratings Strong Buy Ratings Rating Score Axfood AB (publ) 1 0 1 0 2.00 Axfood AB (publ) Competitors 1121 2752 3007 114 2.30

As a group, Grocery Stores companies have a potential upside of 99.09%. Given Axfood AB (publ)s peers stronger consensus rating and higher possible upside, analysts clearly believe Axfood AB (publ) has less favorable growth aspects than its peers.

Dividends

Axfood AB (publ) pays an annual dividend of $15.00 per share and has a dividend yield of 54.3%. Axfood AB (publ) pays out 73.4% of its earnings in the form of a dividend. As a group, Grocery Stores companies pay a dividend yield of 4.0% and pay out 61.3% of their earnings in the form of a dividend.

Institutional and Insider Ownership

13.8% of Axfood AB (publ) shares are held by institutional investors. Comparatively, 45.3% of shares of all Grocery Stores companies are held by institutional investors. 22.8% of shares of all Grocery Stores companies are held 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.

Summary

Axfood AB (publ) peers beat Axfood AB (publ) on 11 of the 13 factors compared.

About Axfood AB (publ)

(Free Report)

Axfood AB (publ) engages in the food retail and wholesale businesses in Sweden. It operates through Willys, Hemkop, Dagab, and Snabbgross segments. The company sells groceries through Willys, Hemkop, Eurocash, and Mat.se store chains. It is also involved in the e-commerce business; and provision of private label products. In addition, it offers home delivery of meal kits under the Middagsfrid name, as well as operates Urban Deli, a combination of restaurant and market hall; and Apohem, an online pharmacy. The company serves restaurants, fastfood operators, and cafes; and retailer-owned stores, mini-marts, service stations, and other convenience retailers. Axfood AB (publ) was founded in 1958 and is headquartered in Stockholm, Sweden. Axfood AB (publ) is a subsidiary of Axel Johnson AB.

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Mount Logan Capital (OTCMKTS:PYCFF  Free Report) is one of 1,208 public companies in the Asset Management industry, but how does it contrast to its rivals? We will compare Mount Logan Capital to similar companies based on the strength of its risk, earnings, profitability, analyst recommendations, valuation, institutional ownership and dividends.

Profitability

This table compares Mount Logan Capital and its rivals net margins, return on equity and return on assets.

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Net Margins Return on Equity Return on Assets Mount Logan Capital N/A N/A N/A Mount Logan Capital Competitors 377.16% 7.62% 4.94%

Institutional and Insider Ownership

32.4% of shares of all Asset Management companies are owned by institutional investors. 18.0% of shares of all Asset Management companies are owned by insiders. Strong institutional ownership is an indication that endowments, large money managers and hedge funds believe a stock will outperform the market over the long term.

Dividends

Analyst Ratings

Mount Logan Capital pays an annual dividend of $0.23 per share and has a dividend yield of 10.9%. Mount Logan Capital pays out 134.9% of its earnings in the form of a dividend, suggesting it may not have sufficient earnings to cover its dividend payment in the future. As a group, Asset Management companies pay a dividend yield of 7.1% and pay out 660.3% of their earnings in the form of a dividend. Mount Logan Capital is clearly a better dividend stock than its rivals, given its higher yield and lower payout ratio.

This is a breakdown of current recommendations for Mount Logan Capital and its rivals, as reported by MarketBeat.

Sell Ratings Hold Ratings Buy Ratings Strong Buy Ratings Rating Score Mount Logan Capital 0 0 0 0 N/A Mount Logan Capital Competitors 1042 4732 6194 85 2.44

As a group, Asset Management companies have a potential upside of 85.14%. Given Mount Logan Capitals rivals higher possible upside, analysts clearly believe Mount Logan Capital has less favorable growth aspects than its rivals.

Valuation & Earnings

This table compares Mount Logan Capital and its rivals gross revenue, earnings per share (EPS) and valuation.

Gross Revenue Net Income Price/Earnings Ratio Mount Logan Capital N/A N/A 12.43 Mount Logan Capital Competitors $245.37 million -$1.79 million 29.92

Mount Logan Capitals rivals have higher revenue, but lower earnings than Mount Logan Capital. Mount Logan Capital 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

Mount Logan Capital rivals beat Mount Logan Capital on 8 of the 10 factors compared.

Mount Logan Capital Company Profile

(Free Report)

Mount Logan Capital Inc.is an investment firm primarily focused on investing in public and private debt securities. The Company holds and actively manages and monitors a seed portfolio of loans and other investments with credit-oriented characteristics. The company was formerly known as Marret Resource Corp. and changed its name to Mount Logan Capital Inc. in October 2018. Mount Logan Capital Inc. is based in Toronto, Canada with an additional office in New York City.

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Joby Aviation, Inc. (NYSE:JOBY  Free Report) insider Didier Papadopoulos sold 57,873 shares of Joby Aviation stock in a transaction that occurred on Friday, June 30th. The stock was sold at an average price of $10.44, for a total transaction of $604,194.12. The transaction was disclosed in a document filed with the Securities & Exchange Commission, which is available at this hyperlink.

Didier Papadopoulos also recently made the following trade(s):

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On Thursday, June 15th, Didier Papadopoulos sold 4,107 shares of Joby Aviation stock. The stock was sold at an average price of $7.72, for a total transaction of $31,706.04.

On Monday, June 5th, Didier Papadopoulos sold 24,141 shares of Joby Aviation stock. The stock was sold at an average price of $6.00, for a total transaction of $144,846.00.

On Tuesday, April 4th, Didier Papadopoulos sold 3,659 shares of Joby Aviation stock. The stock was sold at an average price of $4.17, for a total transaction of $15,258.03.

Joby Aviation Stock Down 0.3 %

Shares of Joby Aviation stock traded down $0.03 during trading hours on Monday, reaching $10.23. 15,259,293 shares of the companys stock were exchanged, compared to its average volume of 5,145,941. Joby Aviation, Inc. has a 1 year low of $3.15 and a 1 year high of $11.98. The company has a market capitalization of $6.45 billion, a P/E ratio of -20.11 and a beta of 2.11. The business has a fifty day moving average of $5.82 and a two-hundred day moving average of $4.66.

Analysts Set New Price Targets

Joby Aviation ( NYSE:JOBY Free Report ) last announced its quarterly earnings results on Wednesday, May 3rd. The company reported ($0.16) earnings per share for the quarter, missing the consensus estimate of ($0.15) by ($0.01). As a group, research analysts predict that Joby Aviation, Inc. will post -0.6 EPS for the current year.

JOBY has been the subject of several research reports. Canaccord Genuity Group initiated coverage on shares of Joby Aviation in a research note on Friday, June 9th. They set a buy rating and a $8.00 price objective for the company. Deutsche Bank Aktiengesellschaft cut shares of Joby Aviation from a hold rating to a sell rating and decreased their price objective for the company from $6.00 to $4.00 in a research note on Tuesday, March 7th. One research analyst has rated the stock with a sell rating, three have assigned a hold rating and two have issued a buy rating to the stock. According to MarketBeat, Joby Aviation has an average rating of Hold and a consensus price target of $6.50.

Institutional Inflows and Outflows

A number of large investors have recently bought and sold shares of JOBY. FMR LLC lifted its position in shares of Joby Aviation by 60.7% during the first quarter. FMR LLC now owns 6,065 shares of the companys stock worth $26,000 after purchasing an additional 2,290 shares in the last quarter. CWM LLC lifted its position in shares of Joby Aviation by 78.4% during the first quarter. CWM LLC now owns 8,301 shares of the companys stock worth $36,000 after purchasing an additional 3,649 shares in the last quarter. EP Wealth Advisors LLC acquired a new stake in shares of Joby Aviation during the third quarter worth about $43,000. Cahaba Wealth Management Inc. acquired a new stake in shares of Joby Aviation during the first quarter worth about $43,000. Finally, Independent Advisor Alliance acquired a new stake in shares of Joby Aviation during the first quarter worth about $44,000. Institutional investors and hedge funds own 30.98% of the companys stock.

Joby Aviation Company Profile

(Free Report)

Joby Aviation, Inc, a vertically integrated air mobility company, engages in building an electric vertical takeoff and landing aircraft optimized to deliver air transportation as a service. The company intends to build an aerial ridesharing service, as well as developing an application-based platform that will enable consumers to book rides.

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Eaton Vance Municipal Bond Fund (NYSEAMERICAN:EIM  Free Report) was the target of a large decline in short interest during the month of June. As of June 15th, there was short interest totalling 9,800 shares, a decline of 47.9% from the May 31st total of 18,800 shares. Based on an average daily trading volume, of 127,300 shares, the days-to-cover ratio is presently 0.1 days.

Eaton Vance Municipal Bond Fund Stock Performance

NYSEAMERICAN EIM traded up $0.06 during trading on Monday, reaching $10.01. The companys stock had a trading volume of 87,840 shares, compared to its average volume of 138,209. Eaton Vance Municipal Bond Fund has a twelve month low of $9.38 and a twelve month high of $11.24.

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Eaton Vance Municipal Bond Fund Announces Dividend

The firm also recently declared a monthly dividend, which was paid on Friday, June 30th. Shareholders of record on Thursday, June 22nd were paid a $0.0354 dividend. This represents a $0.42 dividend on an annualized basis and a yield of 4.24%. The ex-dividend date of this dividend was Wednesday, June 21st.

Institutional Trading of Eaton Vance Municipal Bond Fund

About Eaton Vance Municipal Bond Fund

Several hedge funds and other institutional investors have recently added to or reduced their stakes in EIM. Level Four Advisory Services LLC acquired a new position in Eaton Vance Municipal Bond Fund during the first quarter worth approximately $155,000. Arete Wealth Advisors LLC purchased a new stake in shares of Eaton Vance Municipal Bond Fund during the 1st quarter valued at $3,058,000. Ameriprise Financial Inc. grew its position in Eaton Vance Municipal Bond Fund by 9.6% during the first quarter. Ameriprise Financial Inc. now owns 291,244 shares of the companys stock valued at $3,029,000 after acquiring an additional 25,399 shares during the period. JPMorgan Chase & Co. purchased a new position in shares of Eaton Vance Municipal Bond Fund in the 1st quarter worth about $243,000. Finally, Rockefeller Capital Management L.P. lifted its stake in shares of Eaton Vance Municipal Bond Fund by 3,154.8% in the 1st quarter. Rockefeller Capital Management L.P. now owns 136,768 shares of the companys stock valued at $1,422,000 after purchasing an additional 132,566 shares in the last quarter.

(Free Report)

Eaton Vance Municipal Bond Fund is a closed ended fixed income mutual fund launched and managed by Eaton Vance Management. It invests primarily in high grade municipal obligations. The fund's investment portfolio primarily includes investments in companies operating in the transportation, water and sewer, and electric utilities sectors.

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Ferguson Wellman Capital Management Inc. raised its stake in Philip Morris International Inc. (NYSE:PM  Free Report) by 2.1% in the 1st quarter, according to its most recent 13F filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC). The institutional investor owned 595,077 shares of the companys stock after acquiring an additional 12,507 shares during the period. Philip Morris International makes up about 1.5% of Ferguson Wellman Capital Management Inc.s portfolio, making the stock its 20th biggest holding. Ferguson Wellman Capital Management Inc.s holdings in Philip Morris International were worth $57,871,000 as of its most recent filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC).

Other institutional investors have also recently modified their holdings of the company. Fairfield Bush & CO. grew its stake in Philip Morris International by 1.1% during the first quarter. Fairfield Bush & CO. now owns 26,141 shares of the companys stock worth $2,456,000 after buying an additional 281 shares in the last quarter. American Century Companies Inc. increased its stake in Philip Morris International by 35.6% in the first quarter. American Century Companies Inc. now owns 4,939 shares of the companys stock valued at $463,000 after acquiring an additional 1,296 shares during the last quarter. Loomis Sayles & Co. L P raised its position in Philip Morris International by 24.7% during the first quarter. Loomis Sayles & Co. L P now owns 3,065 shares of the companys stock valued at $288,000 after purchasing an additional 608 shares in the last quarter. Covestor Ltd lifted its stake in Philip Morris International by 54.9% during the first 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. boosted its holdings in shares of Philip Morris International by 14.7% in the 1st quarter. Mather Group LLC. now owns 8,987 shares of the companys stock valued at $844,000 after purchasing an additional 1,154 shares in the last quarter. 77.43% of the stock is currently owned by institutional investors.

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Wall Street Analyst Weigh In

Several analysts recently weighed in on PM shares. JPMorgan Chase & Co. upgraded Philip Morris International from a neutral rating to an overweight rating and upped their price objective for the stock from $109.00 to $116.00 in a research report on Thursday, March 30th. Stifel Nicolaus assumed coverage on shares of Philip Morris International in a report on Thursday, April 13th. They set a buy rating and a $114.00 price target on the stock. Citigroup upgraded shares of Philip Morris International from a neutral rating to a buy rating and upped their price objective for the stock from $109.00 to $117.00 in a research report on Tuesday, June 20th. Finally, StockNews.com assumed coverage on shares of Philip Morris International in a research note on Thursday, May 18th. They set a hold rating on the stock. One investment analyst has rated the stock with a sell rating, two have given a hold rating and eight have issued a buy rating to the company. According to MarketBeat, Philip Morris International currently has an average rating of Moderate Buy and an average target price of $111.40.

Philip Morris International Trading Up 0.0 %

PM stock traded up $0.03 during midday trading on Monday, hitting $97.65. The stock had a trading volume of 471,200 shares, compared to its average volume of 4,438,655. The business has a fifty day moving average price of $94.48 and a two-hundred day moving average price of $97.93. Philip Morris International Inc. has a 1-year low of $82.85 and a 1-year high of $105.62. The firm has a market cap of $151.57 billion, a P/E ratio of 17.50, a price-to-earnings-growth ratio of 2.48 and a beta of 0.70.

Philip Morris International (NYSE:PM  Free Report) last released its earnings results on Thursday, April 20th. The company reported $1.38 EPS for the quarter, topping the consensus estimate of $1.34 by $0.04. The business had revenue of $8.10 billion during the quarter, compared to analysts expectations of $8.03 billion. Philip Morris International had a negative return on equity of 128.55% and a net margin of 10.80%. The firms revenue was up 4.6% on a year-over-year basis. During the same quarter last year, the firm posted $1.56 earnings per share. On average, equities analysts anticipate that Philip Morris International Inc. will post 6.19 EPS for the current year.

Philip Morris International Dividend Announcement

The business also recently declared a quarterly dividend, which will be paid on Tuesday, July 11th. Shareholders of record on Friday, June 23rd will be issued a $1.27 dividend. This represents a $5.08 dividend on an annualized basis and a yield of 5.20%. The ex-dividend date of this dividend is Thursday, June 22nd. Philip Morris Internationals payout ratio is 90.88%.

About Philip Morris International

(Free Report)

Philip Morris International Inc operates as a tobacco company working to delivers a smoke-free future and evolving portfolio for the long-term to include products outside of the tobacco and nicotine sector. The company's product portfolio primarily consists of cigarettes and smoke-free products, including heat-not-burn, vapor, and oral nicotine products that are sold in markets outside the United States.

See Also

Want to see what other hedge funds are holding PM? Visit HoldingsChannel.com to get the latest 13F filings and insider trades for Philip Morris International Inc. (NYSE:PM  Free Report).

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Glaukos Co. (NYSE:GKOS  Free Report) CEO Thomas William Burns sold 26,810 shares of the businesss stock in a transaction dated Wednesday, June 28th. The shares were sold at an average price of $70.19, for a total transaction of $1,881,793.90. Following the completion of the transaction, the chief executive officer now owns 673,963 shares in the company, valued at $47,305,462.97. The transaction was disclosed in a legal filing with the Securities & Exchange Commission, which can be accessed through this link.

Thomas William Burns also recently made the following trade(s):

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On Wednesday, June 7th, Thomas William Burns sold 17,382 shares of Glaukos stock. The shares were sold at an average price of $67.20, for a total transaction of $1,168,070.40.

On Friday, June 2nd, Thomas William Burns sold 142 shares of Glaukos stock. The shares were 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 shares were 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 shares were 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 Stock Up 0.6 %

Shares of NYSE GKOS opened at $71.21 on Monday. The stock has a market cap of $3.43 billion, a P/E ratio of -24.39 and a beta of 1.23. The firm has a 50 day moving average price of $59.91 and a 200 day moving average price of $52.03. 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 52-week low of $40.45 and a 52-week high of $71.86.

Analyst Upgrades and Downgrades

Glaukos ( NYSE:GKOS Free Report ) last issued its quarterly earnings data on Wednesday, May 3rd. The medical instruments supplier reported ($0.59) earnings per share (EPS) for the quarter, beating analysts consensus estimates of ($0.61) by $0.02. The firm 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%. The businesss revenue for the quarter was up 9.2% on a year-over-year basis. During the same quarter in the previous year, the company earned ($0.38) earnings per share. Analysts expect that Glaukos Co. will post -2.27 EPS for the current year.

A number of brokerages have weighed in on GKOS. Piper Sandler raised shares of Glaukos from a neutral rating to an overweight rating and boosted their target price for the stock from $55.00 to $80.00 in a research note on Wednesday, June 7th. Needham & Company LLC boosted their target price on shares of Glaukos from $57.00 to $58.00 in a research note on Thursday, May 4th. BTIG Research boosted their target price on shares of Glaukos from $58.00 to $67.00 in a research note on Monday, June 5th. 888 reaffirmed a maintains rating on shares of Glaukos in a research note on Thursday, May 4th. Finally, Mizuho boosted their target price on shares of Glaukos from $48.00 to $52.00 in a research note on Tuesday, April 18th. One research analyst has rated the stock with a sell rating, three have issued a hold rating and six have given a buy rating to the companys stock. According to data from MarketBeat.com, the stock presently has a consensus rating of Moderate Buy and a consensus target price of $63.56.

Institutional Inflows and Outflows

Several institutional investors and hedge funds have recently made changes to their positions in the stock. Vanguard Group Inc. boosted its holdings in shares of Glaukos by 0.4% in the third quarter. Vanguard Group Inc. now owns 5,380,720 shares of the medical instruments suppliers stock valued at $286,470,000 after buying an additional 23,473 shares during the period. Wellington Management Group LLP boosted its holdings in shares of Glaukos by 6.8% in the first quarter. Wellington Management Group LLP now owns 4,684,699 shares of the medical instruments suppliers stock valued at $234,703,000 after buying an additional 299,043 shares during the period. Brown Capital Management LLC boosted its holdings in shares of Glaukos by 7.1% in the first quarter. Brown Capital Management LLC now owns 2,904,658 shares of the medical instruments suppliers stock valued at $145,523,000 after buying an additional 191,849 shares during the period. Braidwell LP boosted its holdings in shares of Glaukos by 8.7% in the first quarter. Braidwell LP now owns 1,806,651 shares of the medical instruments suppliers stock valued at $90,513,000 after buying an additional 144,800 shares during the period. Finally, State Street Corp boosted its holdings in Glaukos by 2.6% during the first quarter. State Street Corp now owns 1,750,876 shares of the medical instruments suppliers stock worth $87,719,000 after purchasing an additional 44,555 shares during the last quarter. Institutional investors and hedge funds own 97.50% of the companys stock.

Glaukos Company Profile

(Free Report)

Glaukos Corporation, an ophthalmic medical technology and pharmaceutical company, focuses on the development of novel therapies for the treatment of glaucoma, corneal disorders, and retinal diseases. It offers iStent, iStent inject, iStent inject W micro-bypass stents that enhance aqueous humor outflow inserted in cataract surgery to treat mild-to-moderate open-angle glaucoma.

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Mettler-Toledo International (NYSE:MTD  Free Report) and Revvity (NYSE:RVTY  Free Report) are both large-cap computer and technology companies, but which is the superior investment? We will contrast the two businesses based on the strength of their earnings, risk, valuation, institutional ownership, profitability, dividends and analyst recommendations.

Profitability

This table compares Mettler-Toledo International and Revvitys net margins, return on equity and return on assets.

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Net Margins Return on Equity Return on Assets Mettler-Toledo International 22.45% -4,833.51% 26.87% Revvity 28.94% 11.17% 5.83%

Earnings and Valuation

This table compares Mettler-Toledo International and Revvitys top-line revenue, earnings per share and valuation.

Gross Revenue Price/Sales Ratio Net Income Earnings Per Share Price/Earnings Ratio Mettler-Toledo International $3.92 billion 7.37 $872.50 million $39.38 33.31 Revvity $3.31 billion 4.50 $569.18 million $7.68 15.47

Insider & Institutional Ownership

Mettler-Toledo International has higher revenue and earnings than Revvity. Revvity is trading at a lower price-to-earnings ratio than Mettler-Toledo International, indicating that it is currently the more affordable of the two stocks.

92.9% of Mettler-Toledo International shares are owned by institutional investors. Comparatively, 85.1% of Revvity shares are owned by institutional investors. 2.4% of Mettler-Toledo International shares are owned by insiders. Comparatively, 0.5% of Revvity shares are owned by insiders. Strong institutional ownership is an indication that large money managers, hedge funds and endowments believe a stock is poised for long-term growth.

Analyst Ratings

This is a breakdown of recent recommendations for Mettler-Toledo International and Revvity, as reported by MarketBeat.com.

Sell Ratings Hold Ratings Buy Ratings Strong Buy Ratings Rating Score Mettler-Toledo International 0 5 2 0 2.29 Revvity 0 0 1 0 3.00

Mettler-Toledo International currently has a consensus target price of $1,469.50, indicating a potential upside of 12.04%. Given Mettler-Toledo Internationals higher probable upside, analysts plainly believe Mettler-Toledo International is more favorable than Revvity.

Risk and Volatility

Mettler-Toledo International has a beta of 1.15, indicating that its stock price is 15% more volatile than the S&P 500. Comparatively, Revvity has a beta of 1.11, indicating that its stock price is 11% more volatile than the S&P 500.

Summary

Mettler-Toledo International beats Revvity on 11 of the 14 factors compared between the two stocks.

About Mettler-Toledo International

(Free Report)

Mettler-Toledo International Inc. manufactures and supplies precision instruments and services in the United States and internationally. It operates through five segments: U.S. Operations, Swiss Operations, Western European Operations, Chinese Operations, and Other. The company's laboratory instruments include laboratory balances, liquid pipetting solutions, automated laboratory reactors, titrators, pH meters, process analytics sensors and analyzer technologies, physical value analyzers, density and refractometry, thermal analysis systems, and other analytical instruments; and LabX, a laboratory software platform to manage and analyze data generated from its instruments. Its industrial instruments comprise industrial weighing instruments and related terminals, automatic dimensional measurement and data capture solutions, vehicle scale systems, industrial software, metal detection equipment, x-ray systems, check weighing equipment, camera-based imaging equipment, track-and-trace solutions, and product inspection systems. The company's retail weighing solutions consist of networked scales and software, stand-alone scales, and automated packaging and labelling solutions for handling fresh goods. It serves the life science industry, independent research organizations, and testing labs; food and beverage manufacturers; food retailers; chemical, specialty chemical, and cosmetics companies; food retailers; transportation and logistics, metals, and electronics industries; and the academic community through its direct sales force and indirect distribution channels. The company was incorporated in 1991 and is based in Columbus, Ohio.

About Revvity

(Free Report)

Revvity, Inc. provides products, services, and solutions to the diagnostics, life sciences, and applied services markets worldwide. It operates through two segments, Discovery & Analytical Solutions and Diagnostics. The Discovery & Analytical Solutions segment provides instruments, reagents, informatics, software, subscriptions, detection, and imaging technologies that enable scientists to enhance research breakthroughs in the life sciences research market, as well as contract research and laboratory services. It also provides analytical technologies, solutions, and services for its customers to understand the characterize the health of various aspects, including air, water, and soil. In addition, this segment offers solutions to farmers and food producers; and analytical instrumentation for the industrial market, which includes the chemical, semiconductor and electronics, energy, lubricant, petrochemical, and polymer industries. The Diagnostics segment provides instruments, reagents, assay platforms, and software products for the early detection of genetic disorders, such as pregnancy and early childhood, as well as infectious disease testing in the diagnostics market. Its products are used for testing and screening genetic abnormalities, disorders, and diseases, including down syndrome, hypothyroidism, muscular dystrophy, infertility, and various metabolic conditions. This segment also develops technologies that enable and support genomic workflows using protein coupled receptor and next-generation DNA sequencing for applications in oncology, immunodiagnostics, and drug discovery. It serves pharmaceutical and biotechnology companies, laboratories, academic and research institutions, public health authorities, private healthcare organizations, doctors, and government agencies. The company was formerly known as PerkinElmer, Inc. and changed its name to Revvity, Inc. in April 2023. Revvity, Inc. was founded in 1937 and is headquartered in Waltham, Massachusetts.

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Legal & General Group Plc (LON:LGEN  Free Report) insider John Kingman bought 705 shares of the stock in a transaction that occurred on Monday, July 3rd. The shares were purchased at an average price of GBX 229 ($2.91) per share, with a total value of 1,614.45 ($2,052.70).

John Kingman also recently made the following trade(s):

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On Tuesday, April 4th, John Kingman bought 691 shares of Legal & General Group stock. The shares were purchased at an average price of GBX 240 ($3.05) per share, with a total value of 1,658.40 ($2,108.58).

Legal & General Group Stock Up 0.9 %

Shares of LGEN traded up GBX 1.99 ($0.03) during midday trading on Monday, hitting GBX 229.29 ($2.92). The company had a trading volume of 8,349,019 shares, compared to its average volume of 16,663,883. The companys 50-day simple moving average is GBX 232.30 and its 200-day simple moving average is GBX 244.27. The firm has a market capitalization of 13.69 billion, a P/E ratio of 614.32, a P/E/G ratio of 2.34 and a beta of 1.36. Legal & General Group Plc has a 1 year low of GBX 201.40 ($2.56) and a 1 year high of GBX 287.90 ($3.66). The company has a debt-to-equity ratio of 619.54, a quick ratio of 0.50 and a current ratio of 0.88.

Analysts Set New Price Targets

Legal & General Group Company Profile

A number of equities analysts recently commented on LGEN shares. Jefferies Financial Group restated a buy rating and set a GBX 335 ($4.26) target price on shares of Legal & General Group in a report on Monday, May 22nd. JPMorgan Chase & Co. reiterated an overweight rating and issued a GBX 355 ($4.51) price objective on shares of Legal & General Group in a research note on Tuesday, April 11th. Royal Bank of Canada reiterated an overweight rating on shares of Legal & General Group in a research note on Tuesday, March 7th. Finally, Morgan Stanley reiterated an equal weight rating and issued a GBX 285 ($3.62) price objective on shares of Legal & General Group in a research note on Tuesday, March 28th. Two analysts have rated the stock with a hold rating and five have assigned a buy rating to the stock. Based on data from MarketBeat.com, Legal & General Group has a consensus rating of Moderate Buy and an average price target of GBX 322.14 ($4.10).

(Free Report)

Legal & General Group Plc provides various insurance products and services in the United Kingdom, the United States, and internationally. It operates in four segments: Legal & General Retirement Institutional (LGRI), Legal & General Investment Management (LGIM), Legal & General Capital (LGC), and Retail Retirement.

Further Reading

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Altfest L J & Co. Inc. decreased its holdings in iShares Latin America 40 ETF (NYSEARCA:ILF  Free Report) by 27.5% in the 1st quarter, according to the company in its most recent Form 13F filing with the Securities & Exchange Commission. The institutional investor owned 84,235 shares of the companys stock after selling 31,952 shares during the period. Altfest L J & Co. Inc. owned about 0.21% of iShares Latin America 40 ETF worth $2,011,000 as of its most recent filing with the Securities & Exchange Commission.

Other institutional investors have also modified their holdings of the company. IFP Advisors Inc grew its stake in shares of iShares Latin America 40 ETF by 245.9% during the first quarter. IFP Advisors Inc now owns 16,235 shares of the companys stock worth $516,000 after purchasing an additional 11,541 shares in the last quarter. Trilogy Capital Inc. acquired a new position in shares of iShares Latin America 40 ETF during the first quarter worth $1,366,000. Trust Co. of Oklahoma acquired a new position in shares of iShares Latin America 40 ETF during the first quarter worth $420,000. Sharper & Granite LLC grew its stake in shares of iShares Latin America 40 ETF by 40.3% during the first quarter. Sharper & Granite LLC now owns 34,850 shares of the companys stock worth $832,000 after purchasing an additional 10,015 shares in the last quarter. Finally, Raymond James & Associates grew its stake in shares of iShares Latin America 40 ETF by 6.8% during the first quarter. Raymond James & Associates now owns 178,908 shares of the companys stock worth $4,271,000 after purchasing an additional 11,394 shares in the last quarter.

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iShares Latin America 40 ETF Price Performance

NYSEARCA ILF opened at $27.45 on Monday. iShares Latin America 40 ETF has a 1 year low of $20.75 and a 1 year high of $27.78. The company has a market capitalization of $1.13 billion, a PE ratio of 6.90 and a beta of 1.00. The company has a fifty day moving average of $25.80 and a two-hundred day moving average of $24.58.

iShares Latin America 40 ETF Company Profile

iShares S & P Latin America 40 Index Fund, formerly iShares Latin America 40 ETF (the Fund), is an exchange-traded fund (ETF). The Fund seeks investment results that correspond generally to the price and yield performance, before fees and expenses, of the S&P Latin America 40 (the Index). The Index consists of selected equities trading on the exchanges of five Latin American countries.

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iShares MSCI Chile ETF (BATS:ECH  Free Report)s share price reached a new 52-week low during trading on Monday . The stock traded as low as $29.22 and last traded at $29.65, with a volume of 126462 shares trading hands. The stock had previously closed at $29.18.

iShares MSCI Chile ETF Price Performance

The stock has a market capitalization of $554.46 million, a P/E ratio of 8.48 and a beta of 0.91. The firm has a 50-day simple moving average of $29.13 and a 200 day simple moving average of $28.40.

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Hedge Funds Weigh In On iShares MSCI Chile ETF

Several large investors have recently bought and sold shares of the company. JPMorgan Chase & Co. raised its position in shares of iShares MSCI Chile ETF by 51.2% during the first quarter. JPMorgan Chase & Co. now owns 865,450 shares of the companys stock worth $24,908,000 after acquiring an additional 292,874 shares during the last quarter. Jane Street Group LLC raised its position in shares of iShares MSCI Chile ETF by 921.4% during the first quarter. Jane Street Group LLC now owns 260,726 shares of the companys stock worth $7,504,000 after acquiring an additional 235,200 shares during the last quarter. Renaissance Technologies LLC raised its position in shares of iShares MSCI Chile ETF by 112.4% during the first quarter. Renaissance Technologies LLC now owns 22,300 shares of the companys stock worth $642,000 after acquiring an additional 11,800 shares during the last quarter. OLD Mission Capital LLC raised its position in shares of iShares MSCI Chile ETF by 502.7% during the first quarter. OLD Mission Capital LLC now owns 38,229 shares of the companys stock worth $1,100,000 after acquiring an additional 31,886 shares during the last quarter. Finally, Stifel Financial Corp bought a new position in shares of iShares MSCI Chile ETF during the first quarter worth about $1,387,000.

About iShares MSCI Chile ETF

iShares MSCI Chile Capped ETF, formerly iShares MSCI Chile Capped Investable Market Index Fund (the Fund), is an exchange-traded fund. The Fund seeks to provide investment results that correspond generally to the price and yield performance of the MSCI Chile Investable Market Index (the Index). The Index is a free float-adjusted market capitalization index that is designed to measure broad based equity market performance in Chile.

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Laboratory Co. of America Holdings (NYSE:LH  Free Report) EVP Der Vaart Sandra D. Van sold 212 shares of Laboratory Co. of America stock in a transaction on Thursday, June 29th. The shares were sold at an average price of $240.00, for a total value of $50,880.00. Following the completion of the transaction, the executive vice president now owns 7,605 shares in the company, valued at approximately $1,825,200. The sale was disclosed in a document filed with the Securities & Exchange Commission, which is available at this hyperlink.

Laboratory Co. of America Stock Down 13.4 %

NYSE:LH traded down $32.41 on Monday, reaching $208.92. The stock had a trading volume of 998,771 shares, compared to its average volume of 614,751. Laboratory Co. of America Holdings has a 12-month low of $200.32 and a 12-month high of $263.13. The stock has a market cap of $18.51 billion, a P/E ratio of 18.79 and a beta of 1.06. The company has a current ratio of 1.63, a quick ratio of 1.46 and a debt-to-equity ratio of 0.50. The company has a 50-day moving average of $224.18 and a 200 day moving average of $232.75.

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Laboratory Co. of America (NYSE:LH  Free Report) last issued its quarterly earnings data on Tuesday, April 25th. The medical research company reported $3.82 earnings per share for the quarter, missing analysts consensus estimates of $3.99 by ($0.17). Laboratory Co. of America had a net margin of 6.78% and a return on equity of 15.56%. The business had revenue of $3.78 billion for the quarter, compared to analyst estimates of $3.70 billion. During the same quarter last year, the business earned $6.11 EPS. Laboratory Co. of Americas revenue for the quarter was down 3.1% compared to the same quarter last year. On average, research analysts predict that Laboratory Co. of America Holdings will post 16.83 earnings per share for the current year.

Laboratory Co. of America Announces Dividend

Analysts Set New Price Targets

The business also recently declared a quarterly dividend, which was paid on Thursday, June 8th. Investors of record on Thursday, May 18th were issued a $0.72 dividend. The ex-dividend date of this dividend was Wednesday, May 17th. This represents a $2.88 annualized dividend and a yield of 1.38%. Laboratory Co. of Americas dividend payout ratio is presently 26.13%.

Several research firms have recently weighed in on LH. StockNews.com assumed coverage on Laboratory Co. of America in a research note on Friday. They issued a buy rating on the stock. Deutsche Bank Aktiengesellschaft reduced their price target on shares of Laboratory Co. of America from $265.00 to $240.00 in a research report on Wednesday, April 26th. Credit Suisse Group dropped their price objective on shares of Laboratory Co. of America from $304.00 to $288.00 and set an outperform rating for the company in a research report on Monday, March 13th. Truist Financial reduced their target price on shares of Laboratory Co. of America from $285.00 to $275.00 in a report on Monday, May 1st. Finally, Mizuho lowered their price target on Laboratory Co. of America from $277.00 to $257.00 in a report on Tuesday, May 16th. Two research analysts have rated the stock with a hold rating and eight have issued a buy rating to the company. According to data from MarketBeat, Laboratory Co. of America presently has an average rating of Moderate Buy and an average price target of $273.50.

Institutional Inflows and Outflows

A number of large investors have recently added to or reduced their stakes in LH. Roundview Capital LLC grew its position in shares of Laboratory Co. of America by 1.6% in the 1st quarter. Roundview Capital LLC now owns 7,793 shares of the medical research companys stock worth $2,055,000 after acquiring an additional 124 shares in the last quarter. LSV Asset Management raised its holdings in shares of Laboratory Co. of America by 1.2% during the first quarter. LSV Asset Management now owns 34,800 shares of the medical research companys stock worth $9,175,000 after purchasing an additional 400 shares during the period. Synovus Financial Corp lifted its position in shares of Laboratory Co. of America by 105.7% in the 1st quarter. Synovus Financial Corp now owns 1,654 shares of the medical research companys stock worth $441,000 after buying an additional 850 shares during the last quarter. Cibc World Market Inc. acquired a new position in shares of Laboratory Co. of America in the 1st quarter valued at about $213,000. Finally, Sei Investments Co. grew its position in shares of Laboratory Co. of America by 18.9% during the 1st quarter. Sei Investments Co. now owns 89,167 shares of the medical research companys stock valued at $23,543,000 after buying an additional 14,186 shares during the last quarter. 87.75% of the stock is currently owned by institutional investors.

Laboratory Co. of America Company Profile

(Free Report)

Laboratory Corporation of America Holdings operates as a life sciences company that provides vital information to help doctors, hospitals, pharmaceutical companies, researchers, and patients make clear and confident decisions. It operates in two segments, Labcorp Diagnostics and Labcorp Drug Development.

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Nuveen AMT-Free Quality Municipal Income Fund (NYSE:NEA  Free Report) was the recipient of a large decline in short interest in June. As of June 15th, there was short interest totalling 45,200 shares, a decline of 28.6% from the May 31st total of 63,300 shares. Based on an average daily volume of 671,500 shares, the days-to-cover ratio is currently 0.1 days.

Nuveen AMT-Free Quality Municipal Income Fund Trading Up 0.6 %

NYSE:NEA traded up $0.07 during mid-day trading on Monday, reaching $11.00. 328,630 shares of the stock were exchanged, compared to its average volume of 770,256. The company has a 50 day simple moving average of $10.87 and a 200-day simple moving average of $11.06. Nuveen AMT-Free Quality Municipal Income Fund has a 1 year low of $10.22 and a 1 year high of $12.91.

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Nuveen AMT-Free Quality Municipal Income Fund Dividend Announcement

The company also recently disclosed a monthly dividend, which will be paid on Monday, July 3rd. Investors of record on Thursday, June 15th will be issued a dividend of $0.035 per share. The ex-dividend date is Wednesday, June 14th. This represents a $0.42 annualized dividend and a yield of 3.82%.

Hedge Funds Weigh In On Nuveen AMT-Free Quality Municipal Income Fund

About Nuveen AMT-Free Quality Municipal Income Fund

Several hedge funds and other institutional investors have recently bought and sold shares of the company. JPMorgan Chase & Co. purchased a new stake in Nuveen AMT-Free Quality Municipal Income Fund during the first quarter valued at about $28,000. US Bancorp DE lifted its stake in shares of Nuveen AMT-Free Quality Municipal Income Fund by 84.7% during the first quarter. US Bancorp DE now owns 48,335 shares of the companys stock worth $636,000 after purchasing an additional 22,168 shares in the last quarter. Bank of Montreal Can acquired a new position in shares of Nuveen AMT-Free Quality Municipal Income Fund in the first quarter worth about $382,000. Cetera Investment Advisers increased its holdings in Nuveen AMT-Free Quality Municipal Income Fund by 2.2% in the first quarter. Cetera Investment Advisers now owns 114,557 shares of the companys stock valued at $1,505,000 after buying an additional 2,509 shares during the last quarter. Finally, NewEdge Advisors LLC increased its holdings in Nuveen AMT-Free Quality Municipal Income Fund by 2.1% in the first quarter. NewEdge Advisors LLC now owns 145,733 shares of the companys stock valued at $1,915,000 after buying an additional 3,058 shares during the last quarter.

(Free Report)

Nuveen AMT-Free Quality Municipal Income Fund is a closed-ended fixed income mutual fund launched by Nuveen Investments Inc The fund is co-managed by Nuveen Asset Management, LLC and Nuveen Fund Advisors LLC. It invests in the fixed income markets of the United States. The fund primarily invests in undervalued municipal bonds that are exempt from federal income taxes, including the alternative minimum tax.

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Pettinga Financial Advisors LLC lessened its stake in shares of iShares MSCI EAFE ETF (NYSEARCA:EFA  Free Report) by 12.1% during the first quarter, HoldingsChannel.com reports. The fund owned 35,436 shares of the exchange traded funds stock after selling 4,861 shares during the quarter. iShares MSCI EAFE ETF accounts for about 0.8% of Pettinga Financial Advisors LLCs portfolio, making the stock its 29th biggest position. Pettinga Financial Advisors LLCs holdings in iShares MSCI EAFE ETF were worth $2,534,000 at the end of the most recent quarter.

Other institutional investors have also recently made changes to their positions in the company. VitalStone Financial LLC purchased a new stake in shares of iShares MSCI EAFE ETF during the 4th quarter valued at about $27,000. Financial Freedom LLC purchased a new stake in shares of iShares MSCI EAFE ETF during the 4th quarter valued at about $28,000. Farmers & Merchants Trust Co of Chambersburg PA boosted its holdings in shares of iShares MSCI EAFE ETF by 172.9% during the 4th quarter. Farmers & Merchants Trust Co of Chambersburg PA now owns 464 shares of the exchange traded funds stock valued at $30,000 after acquiring an additional 294 shares during the last quarter. Milestone Investment Advisors LLC purchased a new stake in shares of iShares MSCI EAFE ETF during the 4th quarter valued at about $32,000. Finally, Field & Main Bank boosted its holdings in shares of iShares MSCI EAFE ETF by 189.7% during the 4th quarter. Field & Main Bank now owns 504 shares of the exchange traded funds stock valued at $33,000 after acquiring an additional 330 shares during the last quarter. Hedge funds and other institutional investors own 78.99% of the companys stock.

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iShares MSCI EAFE ETF Stock Performance

Shares of NYSEARCA EFA traded down $0.13 during trading on Monday, reaching $72.37. 3,888,024 shares of the company traded hands, compared to its average volume of 18,334,523. The firm has a 50 day simple moving average of $72.60 and a 200-day simple moving average of $70.79. iShares MSCI EAFE ETF has a 52-week low of $54.61 and a 52-week high of $74.05.

iShares MSCI EAFE ETF Profile

iShares MSCI EAFE ETF, formerly iShares MSCI EAFE Index Fund (the Fund), is an exchange-traded fund. The Funds investment objective is to seek investment results that correspond to the price and yield performance of its underlying index, MSCI EAFE Index (the Index). The Index has been developed by MSCI Inc as an equity benchmark for its international stock performance.

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Weave Communications (NYSE:WEAV  Free Report) had its price objective upped by Raymond James from $6.00 to $13.00 in a report issued on Friday, The Fly reports.

A number of other analysts have also commented on WEAV. Bank of America lifted their price target on Weave Communications from $7.50 to $14.00 in a research note on Friday. Loop Capital raised shares of Weave Communications from a hold rating to a buy rating and boosted their target price for the stock from $5.00 to $13.00 in a report on Monday, June 26th.

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Weave Communications Stock Performance

Weave Communications stock opened at $11.11 on Friday. Weave Communications has a 12-month low of $2.91 and a 12-month high of $11.66. The company has a quick ratio of 2.05, a current ratio of 2.05 and a debt-to-equity ratio of 0.20. The businesss 50-day moving average price is $7.25 and its two-hundred day moving average price is $5.74. The stock has a market cap of $741.26 million, a PE ratio of -16.58 and a beta of 1.72.

Insider Activity

Weave Communications ( NYSE:WEAV Free Report ) last issued its quarterly earnings data on Wednesday, May 3rd. The company reported ($0.12) EPS for the quarter, beating the consensus estimate of ($0.15) by $0.03. Weave Communications had a negative net margin of 29.49% and a negative return on equity of 51.25%. The business had revenue of $39.57 million during the quarter, compared to the consensus estimate of $37.71 million. As a group, analysts expect that Weave Communications will post -0.54 earnings per share for the current fiscal year.

In other news, CRO Matthew C. Hyde sold 5,353 shares of the businesss stock in a transaction that occurred on Friday, May 5th. The shares were sold at an average price of $5.30, for a total value of $28,370.90. Following the transaction, the executive now owns 601,873 shares in the company, valued at approximately $3,189,926.90. The sale was disclosed in a filing with the Securities & Exchange Commission, which can be accessed through the SEC website. Insiders own 41.00% of the companys stock.

Institutional Investors Weigh In On Weave Communications

A number of hedge funds have recently added to or reduced their stakes in WEAV. BlackRock Inc. increased its holdings in Weave Communications by 557.8% in the third quarter. BlackRock Inc. now owns 1,601,556 shares of the companys stock worth $8,088,000 after purchasing an additional 1,358,074 shares in the last quarter. Scoggin Management LP acquired a new stake in Weave Communications in the first quarter valued at approximately $3,898,000. Vanguard Group Inc. grew its stake in Weave Communications by 58.3% in the third quarter. Vanguard Group Inc. now owns 1,439,683 shares of the companys stock valued at $7,270,000 after acquiring an additional 530,248 shares during the period. Millennium Management LLC grew its stake in Weave Communications by 3,252.8% in the second quarter. Millennium Management LLC now owns 365,552 shares of the companys stock valued at $1,111,000 after acquiring an additional 354,649 shares during the period. Finally, Wasatch Advisors LP grew its stake in Weave Communications by 11.6% in the first quarter. Wasatch Advisors LP now owns 2,878,902 shares of the companys stock valued at $14,308,000 after acquiring an additional 298,155 shares during the period. 53.73% of the stock is currently owned by institutional investors.

Weave Communications Company Profile

(Free Report)

Weave Communications, Inc provides a customer communications and engagement software platform in the United States and Canada. Its platform enables small and medium-sized businesses to maximize the value of their customer interactions and minimize the time and effort spent on manual or mundane tasks.

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Canadian Natural Resources Limited (NYSE:CNQ  Free Report) (TSE:CNQ) was the recipient of a significant growth in short interest in June. As of June 15th, there was short interest totalling 66,460,000 shares, a growth of 85.1% from the May 31st total of 35,910,000 shares. Approximately 6.2% of the shares of the stock are sold short. Based on an average daily volume of 2,020,000 shares, the days-to-cover ratio is currently 32.9 days.

Analyst Upgrades and Downgrades

Separately, StockNews.com assumed coverage on Canadian Natural Resources in a research report on Thursday, May 18th. They set a hold rating for the company. Three investment analysts have rated the stock with a hold rating and five have assigned a buy rating to the stock. According to data from MarketBeat, Canadian Natural Resources has a consensus rating of Moderate Buy and a consensus price target of $90.67.

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Canadian Natural Resources Trading Up 1.1 %

Shares of NYSE:CNQ traded up $0.60 during trading on Friday, hitting $56.26. The company had a trading volume of 1,004,398 shares, compared to its average volume of 2,075,210. The stock has a market cap of $61.58 billion, a price-to-earnings ratio of 8.71, a price-to-earnings-growth ratio of 0.87 and a beta of 1.58. Canadian Natural Resources has a one year low of $44.45 and a one year high of $62.57. The company has a fifty day simple moving average of $56.20 and a two-hundred day simple moving average of $56.66. The company has a debt-to-equity ratio of 0.29, a current ratio of 0.83 and a quick ratio of 0.57.

Canadian Natural Resources Cuts Dividend

Canadian Natural Resources ( NYSE:CNQ Free Report ) (TSE:CNQ) last posted its quarterly earnings data on Thursday, May 4th. The oil and gas producer reported $1.25 earnings per share (EPS) for the quarter, beating the consensus estimate of $1.20 by $0.05. The business had revenue of $6.38 billion during the quarter, compared to analyst estimates of $6.26 billion. Canadian Natural Resources had a return on equity of 29.39% and a net margin of 20.63%. As a group, equities analysts forecast that Canadian Natural Resources will post 5.2 earnings per share for the current year.

The business also recently disclosed a quarterly dividend, which will be paid on Wednesday, July 5th. Stockholders of record on Friday, June 16th will be paid a $0.664 dividend. This represents a $2.66 annualized dividend and a dividend yield of 4.72%. The ex-dividend date of this dividend is Thursday, June 15th. Canadian Natural Resourcess payout ratio is 41.02%.

Institutional Investors Weigh In On Canadian Natural Resources

Several institutional investors have recently modified their holdings of the stock. Vanguard Group Inc. lifted its stake in shares of Canadian Natural Resources by 6.2% during the 1st quarter. Vanguard Group Inc. now owns 40,235,475 shares of the oil and gas producers stock worth $2,493,796,000 after acquiring an additional 2,332,528 shares during the last quarter. Bank of Nova Scotia lifted its stake in shares of Canadian Natural Resources by 32.8% during the 4th quarter. Bank of Nova Scotia now owns 19,845,541 shares of the oil and gas producers stock worth $1,102,057,000 after acquiring an additional 4,897,414 shares during the last quarter. National Bank of Canada FI lifted its stake in shares of Canadian Natural Resources by 36.6% during the 1st quarter. National Bank of Canada FI now owns 17,233,139 shares of the oil and gas producers stock worth $953,143,000 after acquiring an additional 4,618,176 shares during the last quarter. Mackenzie Financial Corp lifted its stake in shares of Canadian Natural Resources by 7.2% during the 1st quarter. Mackenzie Financial Corp now owns 16,898,161 shares of the oil and gas producers stock worth $935,050,000 after acquiring an additional 1,134,070 shares during the last quarter. Finally, Arrowstreet Capital Limited Partnership bought a new stake in shares of Canadian Natural Resources during the 1st quarter worth approximately $960,796,000. 71.24% of the stock is owned by institutional investors.

Canadian Natural Resources Company Profile

(Free Report)

Canadian Natural Resources Limited acquires, explores for, develops, produces, markets, and sells crude oil, natural gas, and natural gas liquids (NGLs). The company offers light and medium crude oil, primary heavy crude oil, Pelican Lake heavy crude oil, bitumen (thermal oil), and synthetic crude oil (SCO).

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Credit Suisse High Yield Bond Fund, Inc. (NYSEAMERICAN:DHY  Free Report) was the recipient of a large decline in short interest in June. As of June 15th, there was short interest totalling 115,900 shares, a decline of 47.2% from the May 31st total of 219,700 shares. Based on an average daily trading volume, of 263,100 shares, the days-to-cover ratio is currently 0.4 days.

Institutional Inflows and Outflows

Several institutional investors have recently modified their holdings of the company. Envestnet Asset Management Inc. increased its stake in shares of Credit Suisse High Yield Bond Fund by 3.7% during the 4th quarter. Envestnet Asset Management Inc. now owns 551,930 shares of the real estate investment trusts stock worth $971,000 after purchasing an additional 19,482 shares during the last quarter. Morgan Stanley grew its stake in Credit Suisse High Yield Bond Fund by 5.9% in the 4th quarter. Morgan Stanley now owns 542,027 shares of the real estate investment trusts stock valued at $954,000 after buying an additional 30,361 shares during the last quarter. Fiera Capital Corp grew its stake in Credit Suisse High Yield Bond Fund by 5.7% in the 4th quarter. Fiera Capital Corp now owns 417,719 shares of the real estate investment trusts stock valued at $735,000 after buying an additional 22,577 shares during the last quarter. NewEdge Advisors LLC grew its stake in Credit Suisse High Yield Bond Fund by 7.6% in the 1st quarter. NewEdge Advisors LLC now owns 279,600 shares of the real estate investment trusts stock valued at $610,000 after buying an additional 19,700 shares during the last quarter. Finally, Wolverine Asset Management LLC grew its stake in Credit Suisse High Yield Bond Fund by 50.1% in the 1st quarter. Wolverine Asset Management LLC now owns 174,279 shares of the real estate investment trusts stock valued at $329,000 after buying an additional 58,149 shares during the last quarter. 15.93% of the stock is currently owned by institutional investors and hedge funds.

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Credit Suisse High Yield Bond Fund Price Performance

NYSEAMERICAN:DHY traded down $0.02 on Friday, hitting $1.89. 949,753 shares of the companys stock were exchanged, compared to its average volume of 204,590. Credit Suisse High Yield Bond Fund has a 52 week low of $1.65 and a 52 week high of $2.07.

Credit Suisse High Yield Bond Fund Dividend Announcement

About Credit Suisse High Yield Bond Fund

The company also recently disclosed a monthly dividend, which was paid on Friday, June 23rd. Stockholders of record on Friday, June 16th were paid a dividend of $0.0155 per share. The ex-dividend date was Thursday, June 15th. This represents a $0.19 annualized dividend and a dividend yield of 9.84%.

(Free Report)

Credit Suisse High Yield Bond Fund, Inc is a closed ended fixed income mutual fund launched and managed by Credit Suisse Asset Management, LLC. The fund invests in the fixed income markets of the United States. It invests in the securities of companies across diversified sectors. The fund primarily invests in below-investment-grade corporate bonds with an average credit quality lower than BBB by Standard & Poor's and an average duration of 5.07 years.

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TELUS International (Cda) Inc. (NYSE:TIXT  Free Report) saw a large decline in short interest in the month of June. As of June 15th, there was short interest totalling 1,050,000 shares, a decline of 39.3% from the May 31st total of 1,730,000 shares. Based on an average trading volume of 139,000 shares, the days-to-cover ratio is currently 7.6 days. Approximately 1.5% of the shares of the company are short sold.

Institutional Inflows and Outflows

Several large investors have recently bought and sold shares of the business. Arrowstreet Capital Limited Partnership grew its stake in TELUS International (Cda) by 203.3% during the 1st quarter. Arrowstreet Capital Limited Partnership now owns 500,783 shares of the companys stock valued at $10,124,000 after acquiring an additional 335,698 shares in the last quarter. Two Sigma Advisers LP boosted its holdings in shares of TELUS International (Cda) by 24.3% during the first quarter. Two Sigma Advisers LP now owns 22,500 shares of the companys stock worth $455,000 after purchasing an additional 4,400 shares during the period. Two Sigma Investments LP grew its position in TELUS International (Cda) by 144.7% during the first quarter. Two Sigma Investments LP now owns 68,508 shares of the companys stock valued at $1,386,000 after purchasing an additional 40,508 shares in the last quarter. Ossiam increased its stake in TELUS International (Cda) by 47.3% in the 1st quarter. Ossiam now owns 13,430 shares of the companys stock valued at $271,000 after buying an additional 4,313 shares during the period. Finally, BlackRock Inc. lifted its position in TELUS International (Cda) by 8.2% in the 1st quarter. BlackRock Inc. now owns 17,140 shares of the companys stock worth $347,000 after buying an additional 1,294 shares in the last quarter. 61.30% of the stock is owned by institutional investors and hedge funds.

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Analysts Set New Price Targets

Several research analysts have recently issued reports on the company. BMO Capital Markets decreased their price target on TELUS International (Cda) from $26.00 to $21.00 in a research note on Monday, May 8th. Robert W. Baird reduced their price target on shares of TELUS International (Cda) from $22.00 to $17.00 in a research note on Monday. TheStreet cut shares of TELUS International (Cda) from a c- rating to a d+ rating in a report on Thursday, May 4th. Finally, Canaccord Genuity Group started coverage on TELUS International (Cda) in a report on Monday, April 24th. They set a buy rating on the stock. Four analysts have rated the stock with a hold rating and nine have assigned a buy rating to the companys stock. According to data from MarketBeat, the stock has a consensus rating of Moderate Buy and an average target price of $25.69.

TELUS International (Cda) Trading Down 0.8 %

NYSE TIXT traded down $0.12 on Monday, hitting $15.06. 30,942 shares of the company were exchanged, compared to its average volume of 140,776. The companys 50 day moving average price is $16.60 and its 200-day moving average price is $19.49. The firm has a market capitalization of $1.10 billion, a P/E ratio of 24.89, a price-to-earnings-growth ratio of 1.51 and a beta of 0.68. The company has a debt-to-equity ratio of 0.90, a current ratio of 1.30 and a quick ratio of 1.30. TELUS International has a twelve month low of $14.33 and a twelve month high of $31.52.

TELUS International (Cda) (NYSE:TIXT  Free Report) last posted its quarterly earnings data on Thursday, May 4th. The company reported $0.24 EPS for the quarter, topping analysts consensus estimates of $0.22 by $0.02. TELUS International (Cda) had a net margin of 6.38% and a return on equity of 17.21%. The firm had revenue of $686.00 million during the quarter, compared to analyst estimates of $693.05 million. Analysts predict that TELUS International will post 1.1 earnings per share for the current fiscal year.

TELUS International (Cda) Company Profile

(Free Report)

TELUS International (Cda) Inc design, builds, and delivers digital solutions for customer experience (CX) in Europe, North America, the Asia-Pacific, and the Central America. The company provides digital experience solutions, such as AI and bots, omnichannel CX, enterprise mobility solutions, cloud contact center, big data analytics, platform transformation, and UX/UI design; and customer experience solutions, including work anywhere/work from home, contact center outsourcing, technical support, sales growth and customer retention, healthcare/patient experience, and debt collection.

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VeraBank N.A. decreased its stake in shares of Altria Group, Inc. (NYSE:MO  Free Report) by 1.8% during the first quarter, according to its most recent 13F filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission. The institutional investor owned 15,387 shares of the companys stock after selling 275 shares during the quarter. VeraBank N.A.s holdings in Altria Group were worth $687,000 at the end of the most recent reporting period.

A number of other hedge funds have also bought and sold shares of MO. Sei Investments Co. increased its stake in Altria Group by 1.6% during the 1st quarter. Sei Investments Co. now owns 404,894 shares of the companys stock valued at $21,248,000 after purchasing an additional 6,324 shares in the last quarter. Sequoia Financial Advisors LLC increased its stake in shares of Altria Group by 5.2% in the first quarter. Sequoia Financial Advisors LLC now owns 18,647 shares of the companys stock worth $974,000 after acquiring an additional 929 shares during the period. Loomis Sayles & Co. L P acquired a new stake in shares of Altria Group in the first quarter worth $25,000. Mackenzie Financial Corp increased its stake in shares of Altria Group by 3.4% in the first quarter. Mackenzie Financial Corp now owns 2,711,773 shares of the companys stock worth $141,690,000 after acquiring an additional 89,334 shares during the period. Finally, First Western Trust Bank acquired a new stake in shares of Altria Group in the first quarter worth $498,000. Institutional investors and hedge funds own 58.38% of the companys stock.

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Analyst Ratings Changes

A number of analysts have recently weighed in on MO shares. StockNews.com upgraded shares of Altria Group from a hold rating to a buy rating in a research note on Friday, June 23rd. Stifel Nicolaus initiated coverage on shares of Altria Group in a report on Thursday, April 13th. They set a buy rating and a $52.00 price target on the stock. Finally, Citigroup lowered their price target on shares of Altria Group from $49.50 to $47.00 and set a neutral rating on the stock in a report on Monday, April 17th. One equities research analyst has rated the stock with a sell rating, three have issued a hold rating and two have assigned a buy rating to the stock. According to data from MarketBeat.com, the company presently has an average rating of Hold and an average target price of $45.83.

Altria Group Stock Down 0.2 %

MO opened at $45.22 on Monday. The company has a market cap of $80.72 billion, a price-to-earnings ratio of 14.57, a PEG ratio of 2.28 and a beta of 0.59. Altria Group, Inc. has a 52-week low of $40.35 and a 52-week high of $51.57. The firms fifty day simple moving average is $45.28 and its two-hundred day simple moving average is $45.67.

Altria Group (NYSE:MO  Free Report) last posted its quarterly earnings data on Thursday, April 27th. The company reported $1.18 earnings per share (EPS) for the quarter, missing the consensus estimate of $1.19 by ($0.01). The company had revenue of $4.76 billion for the quarter, compared to analysts expectations of $4.89 billion. Altria Group had a net margin of 22.44% and a negative return on equity of 245.43%. The businesss revenue for the quarter was down 1.2% on a year-over-year basis. During the same period in the previous year, the business earned $1.12 earnings per share. On average, research analysts forecast that Altria Group, Inc. will post 4.97 EPS for the current year.

Altria Group Announces Dividend

The firm also recently announced a quarterly dividend, which will be paid on Monday, July 10th. Stockholders of record on Thursday, June 15th will be given a $0.94 dividend. This represents a $3.76 dividend on an annualized basis and a dividend yield of 8.31%. The ex-dividend date of this dividend is Wednesday, June 14th. Altria Groups dividend payout ratio (DPR) is 120.90%.

Altria Group Profile

(Free Report)

Altria Group, Inc, through its subsidiaries, manufactures and sells smokeable and oral tobacco products in the United States. The company provides cigarettes primarily under the Marlboro brand; cigars and pipe tobacco principally under the Black & Mild brand; moist smokeless tobacco products and snus products under the Copenhagen, Skoal, Red Seal, and Husky brands; and on! oral nicotine pouches.

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Wolters Kluwer (OTCMKTS:WTKWY  Free Report) has received a consensus recommendation of Moderate Buy from the six brokerages that are currently covering the firm, Marketbeat.com reports. One analyst has rated the stock with a sell recommendation, one has issued a hold recommendation and four have given a buy recommendation to the company. The average 1-year price objective among analysts that have updated their coverage on the stock in the last year is $110.00.

Separately, BNP Paribas upgraded shares of Wolters Kluwer from a neutral rating to an outperform rating in a research note on Thursday, June 1st.

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Wolters Kluwer Stock Performance

OTCMKTS:WTKWY opened at $127.12 on Monday. Wolters Kluwer has a 1-year low of $93.19 and a 1-year high of $135.35. The companys fifty day moving average price is $122.92 and its 200-day moving average price is $117.95. The company has a current ratio of 0.77, a quick ratio of 0.75 and a debt-to-equity ratio of 1.06.

Wolters Kluwer Company Profile

Wolters Kluwer N.V. provides professional information, software solutions, and services in the Netherlands, rest of Europe, the United States, Canada, the Asia Pacific, and internationally. The company operates through four segments: Health; Tax & Accounting; Governance, Risk & Compliance; and Legal & Regulatory.

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Mullen Group (OTCMKTS:MLLGF  Free Report) and Yamato (OTCMKTS:YATRY  Free Report) are both industrials companies, but which is the superior investment? We will contrast the two businesses based on the strength of their risk, analyst recommendations, institutional ownership, valuation, dividends, earnings and profitability.

Valuation and Earnings

This table compares Mullen Group and Yamatos 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 Mullen Group N/A N/A N/A $1.00 11.52 Yamato N/A N/A N/A $82.14 0.22

Yamato is trading at a lower price-to-earnings ratio than Mullen Group, indicating that it is currently the more affordable of the two stocks.

Analyst Ratings

Sell Ratings Hold Ratings Buy Ratings Strong Buy Ratings Rating Score Mullen Group 0 3 1 1 2.60 Yamato 0 0 0 0 N/A

This is a summary of recent recommendations for Mullen Group and Yamato, as provided by MarketBeat.com.

Mullen Group currently has a consensus price target of $17.07, suggesting a potential upside of 48.78%. Given Mullen Groups higher probable upside, analysts clearly believe Mullen Group is more favorable than Yamato.

Institutional & Insider Ownership

55.0% of Mullen Group shares are held by institutional investors. Comparatively, 0.0% of Yamato shares are held by institutional investors. Strong institutional ownership is an indication that hedge funds, endowments and large money managers believe a stock will outperform the market over the long term.

Profitability

This table compares Mullen Group and Yamatos net margins, return on equity and return on assets.

Net Margins Return on Equity Return on Assets Mullen Group N/A N/A N/A Yamato N/A N/A N/A

Dividends

Mullen Group pays an annual dividend of $1.20 per share and has a dividend yield of 10.5%. Yamato pays an annual dividend of $12.06 per share and has a dividend yield of 65.7%. Mullen Group pays out 120.5% of its earnings in the form of a dividend, suggesting it may not have sufficient earnings to cover its dividend payment in the future. Yamato pays out 14.7% of its earnings in the form of a dividend. Yamato is clearly the better dividend stock, given its higher yield and lower payout ratio.

Summary

Mullen Group beats Yamato on 5 of the 8 factors compared between the two stocks.

About Mullen Group

(Free Report)

Mullen Group Ltd. provides a range of trucking and logistics services in Canada and the United States. The Less-Than-Truckload segment delivers general freight consisting of smaller shipments, packages, and parcels; and pharmaceutical and package products. The Logistics & Warehousing segment offers full truckload, specialized transportation, warehousing, and fulfillment centers that handle ecommerce transactions and transload facilities for intermodal and bulk shipments; technology solutions, including transportation management, inventory management, and warehouse management systems; and warehousing and distribution services. The Specialized & Industrial Services segment provides production services, well servicing, production fluid transportation, transportation of fluids for disposal, frac support, hydrovac excavation, and industrial cleaning and turnaround services; and specialized services comprising dredging and dewatering services, large diameter pipe stockpiling and stringing services, water management, environmental services, civil construction, municipal development and emergency services, hydrostatic testing services to the pipeline industry and midstream sector, and transporting of oversize and overweight shipments, as well as deals in original equipment manufacturer parts and services. This segment also offers drilling and drilling related services, consisting of transportation, handling, and storage of oilfield fluids, tubulars, and drilling mud; drilling rig relocation; general oilfield hauling; well disposal facility; core drilling; setting surface casing; and conductor pipe setting services. The U.S. & International Logistics segment provides logistics services through professional representatives and station agents. This segment also owns SilverExpress, a proprietary integrated transportation management platform. The company was founded in 1949 and is headquartered in Okotoks, Canada.

About Yamato

(Free Report)

Yamato Holdings Co., Ltd. provides delivery, logistics, home convenience, e-business, financial, auto works, and other related services in Japan, North America, and internationally. The company's Delivery segment offers small parcel delivery services, such as door-to-door parcel delivery and posting services. Its BIZ-Logistics segment provides intercompany logistics services to B2B supply-chain management market. The company's Home Convenience segment offers lifestyle support services, including moving and household effects delivery services. Its e-Business segment provides information services comprising ASP services and information systems development for business markets. The company's Financial segment offers settlement and collection services to customers and business customers. Its Autoworks segment provides vehicle maintenance and fuel supply services for transport companies. The company was founded in 1919 and is headquartered in Tokyo, Japan.

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Zijin Mining Group Company Limited (OTCMKTS:ZIJMY  Free Report) saw a large increase in short interest in the month of June. As of June 15th, there was short interest totalling 2,200 shares, an increase of 120.0% from the May 31st total of 1,000 shares. Based on an average trading volume of 500 shares, the short-interest ratio is currently 4.4 days.

Zijin Mining Group Price Performance

Shares of OTCMKTS ZIJMY opened at $29.87 on Monday. Zijin Mining Group has a 1 year low of $18.73 and a 1 year high of $36.22. The firm has a 50-day moving average of $30.67 and a 200 day moving average of $30.93.

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Zijin Mining Group Cuts Dividend

The company also recently disclosed a dividend, which will be paid on Monday, July 17th. Shareholders of record on Wednesday, May 31st will be paid a dividend of $0.4707 per share. The ex-dividend date of this dividend is Tuesday, May 30th. This represents a yield of 1.37%. Zijin Mining Groups dividend payout ratio is currently 59.33%.

Zijin Mining Group Company Profile

Zijin Mining Group Company Limited, together with its subsidiaries, engages in the exploration, mining, processing, refining, and sale of gold, non-ferrous metals, and other mineral resources in Mainland China and internationally. It primarily produces gold bullion; gold, copper, zinc, lead, tungsten, and iron ore concentrates; and copper cathodes, zinc bullion, sulphuric acid, copperplate, silver, iron, etc., as well as molybdenum, cobalt, tin, coal, lithium, platinum, and palladium.

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India's banking landscape is on a swing over the last three-four years, with the big banks getting bigger, though they are still far from the Chinese and American lending giants in terms of asset size.



The merger of the countrys oldest mortgage lender, Housing Development Finance Corporation, with its twin HDFC Bank, that came into effect on July 1, marking another milestone in the evolution of the Indian banking industry. The merger gives birth to a behemoth with combined advances of Rs 22.2 lakh crore. HDFC contributed Rs 6.2 lakh crore to the merged corpus.







The combined entity is only second to the countrys largest lender State Bank of India (SBI) which has a loan book around Rs 33 lakh crore. HDFC Bank is now hogging the limelight in the global banking arena with its combined equity market capitalisation making it the fourth largest in the world, only behind JPMorgan Chase & Co, Industrial and Commercial Bank of China and Bank of America Corp, according to a Bloomberg report.



With HDFC-HDFC Bank merger now a reality, India is raising its count of big banks with sizeable asset size that can compete with their global peers. Bigger banks can participate in bigger loan deals globally as part of the consortium lending to major private corporations. That also aligns with the plan of the Narendra Modi government which wants at least four to five lenders of the size of the State Bank of India.



The consolidation of 10 state-run banks and the ongoing consolidation in the private sector are in a way aiding a silent transformation in the Indian banking landscape. Having done two rounds of bank consolidation earlier, the central government in 2019 decided to merge six disparate and weak PSBs into four in one stroke.



Accordingly, Punjab National Bank (PNB) took over Oriental Bank of Commerce and United Bank of India; Allahabad Bank became part of Indian Bank; Canara Bank subsumed Syndicate Bank; and Andhra Bank and Corporation Bank merged with Union Bank of India. Earlier, SBI had merged five of its associate lenders with itself, while Vijaya Bank and Dena Bank were merged with Bank of Baroda. In the private sector, ICICI Bank, Kotak and Axis Bank are already big names, while others are catching up fast.



Are bigger banks good or bad for the countrys banking system? Well, thats subject of an old debate. To think, bigger is safer is a misconception as we have seen during multiple economic crises, including during the recent US banking crisis. Bigger banks have bigger capital requirements. Also, the failure of such entities will have large systemic implications. The RBI has categorised too-big-to-fail banks as systemically important entities for a reason. As Indian banks become even bigger, the central bank has a case to be more vigilant.



Banking Central is a weekly column that keeps a close watch and connects the dots about the sector's most important events for readers.








The Goods and Services Tax (GST) has come a long way in six years. The number of taxpayers has doubled from around 68 lakh in 2017 to around 1.4 crore; the average monthly revenue has also risen almost at the same pace from close to Rs 90,000 crore in 2017-18 to Rs 1.69 lakh crore in the current financial year.



At a macro level, it has significantly contributed to the formalisation and digitisation of the Indian economy.



But it is still a long way from the originally promised panacea of being a 'good and simple tax'. Several legal challenges remain, the two most critical and widely applicable of which are discussed below.



First and foremost, availment of the input tax credit has been one of the biggest flashpoints of disputes under GST  with every instance of GST fraud/fake invoicing leading to the hardening of the stance of GST authorities and an increasingly frequent invocation of stringent enforcement powers, the assessee-department trust has suffered, and genuine taxpayers are increasingly at the receiving end of suspicion and even instances of abuse of power by GST authorities on the ground.



Also read: GST Council may approve changes to plug fake ITC claims in July 11 meet



High courts across the country are faced with petitions filed by taxpayers against arbitrary cancellations of GST registrations and disproportionate denials of input credits owing to doubts raised about the veracity of even one of the suppliers in a supply chain.



While robust guidelines have been issued recently for strengthening the process of verification of GST registration applications, tackling the current scale of identity theft-based GST evasions would require robust technological solutions to supplement the existing legal provisions (which already vest GST officers with a vast array of powers and need no further strengthening).



For example, instead of using copies of PAN and Aadhaar cards, live video verification may be introduced where the relevant person can hold the identity document in question in front of the camera  this will at least mitigate GST fraud based on identity theft. Such live video verification is already in vogue by various insurance/investment companies (they undertake live video KYC automated through a BOT/app).



In any case, GST authorities must not lose sight of the fact that the fight against GST fraud is an ongoing one and will require eternal vigilance. The government ought to ensure that, in the name of preventing evasion, honest taxpayers cannot be harassed and coerced by GST officers at the ground level. In order to maintain balance and ensure accountability, the government must come down heavily on instances of abuse of power by GST officers against honest taxpayers.



Secondly, not having the GST Appellate Tribunals in place even after six years is a major legal challenge for taxpayers who are left with no recourse but to repeatedly approach the high courts. While the enabling legal provisions for GST Appellate Tribunals were finally introduced earlier this year, the following steps still remain to be taken:



- Final approval from the GST Council on the minute operational details of GST Tribunals, which is expected to happen in the upcoming GST Council meeting this month.



Also read: Next GST Council meet to approve number of appellate tribunal benches in each state



- Thereafter, the enabling legal provisions vis-a-vis the establishment of the tribunal (which have already been approved by the GST Council and for which requisite amendments have already been carried out in the Central Goods and Services Tax Act, 2017 vide Union Budget 2023, although the said amendments have not been notified yet) as well as the necessary rules/circulars, etc. would need to be brought into effect/notified. That can happen once all the State legislatures pass corresponding amendments to the respective State GST statutes.



- Once the legal framework is in place, necessary recruitments of tribunal members/judges as well as administrative staff will need to be undertaken, and appropriate budgetary allocations and infrastructural developments/allocations will need to be made across the country.



Given all the above steps that remain, practically, GST Appellate Tribunals are unlikely to be fully functional before January-February 2024.



Even then, the effectiveness of GST Appellate Tribunals will be completely dependent on the judges/members being recruited. Here, the lessons from advance ruling authorities under GST (which have been almost unanimously criticised for their evident 'pro-revenue' bias) as well as VAT/Sales Tax tribunals in states would be relevant.



Already, concerns have been raised about practicing lawyers not being eligible for consideration as members/judges of the GST Appellate Tribunal. Unless the GST Appellate Tribunal offers taxpayers the opportunity for a fair hearing, they will continue to knock on the doors of the high courts, thereby increasing the pendency of cases and leading to bottlenecks in the justice delivery system.



Given all the milestones achieved by GST in six years, the biggest tax reform in India post-independence, one sincerely hopes that the above legal challenges will be mitigated and duly dealt with by the time we gear up to celebrate the seventh anniversary of GST.



(The author is Partner-Indirect Taxes & Customs, Khaitan & Co. The views expressed in this article are personal and do not constitute legal or professional advice of Khaitan & Co. For any further queries or follow up, please contact the author at ergo@khaitanco.com)
HMA Agro Industries is set to make a debut on the bourses on July 4, the first listing in the second half of the current calendar year.



However, experts are not gung-ho about the listing as they see a flat to moderately positive opening for the stock despite positive market conditions. They cite a tepid response to its public issue and the firm's high dependency on exports with a single product even though it has started to diversify into other products, the volumes of which are minuscule.



The Rs 480 crore public issue was subscribed 1.62 times during June 20-23 supported by institutional and non-institutional investors only, whereas the retail investors were not looking excited about the issue as their portion was subscribed by 96 percent. The portion set aside for qualified institutional buyers (QIBs) and high networth individuals (HNIs) were booked 1.74 times and 2.97 times.



The price band for the offer was Rs 555 to Rs 585 per share.



"The mostly tepid response to the HMA Agro IPO is likely to reflect on the listing day as well. We expect the issue to open on a flat note when it lists on the bourses from tomorrow," Manish Chowdhury Head of Research StoxBox said.



Also read: Senco Gold IPO opens tomorrow | 10 key things to know before bidding for the offer



He feels that investors, especially in the retail category, were not comfortable with the business proposition of the group, which is into packaged frozen buffalo meat products. On the fundamental side, he believes that the business is heavily dependent on exports and dependent on a single product.



Avinash Gorakshakar, Head of Research at Profitmart Securities expects a moderate listing price of Rs 625 levels.



HMA Agro Industries is currently among the largest exporters of frozen buffalo meat products from India, accounting for more than 10 percent of the country's total export of frozen buffalo meat. It exports to over 40 countries across the globe.



More than 95 percent of its business comes from buffalo meat and allied products via its four fully-integrated packaged meat processing plants, while the diversified segments - frozen fish and basmati rice - contributed less than 2 percent of its total revenue.



It is in the process of setting up a fifth fully-integrated meat product processing unit at Haryana and is also in the advanced stages to acquire an additional plant at Unnao. Further, it also owns two additional secondary-level meat processing units at Jaipur and Manesar.



Click Here To Read All IPO Related News



The grey market also seems less enthusiastic about the pricing as HMA Agro IPO shares traded at a 1-2 percent premium over the final issue price of Rs 585 per share, said a few analysts on condition of anonymity.



The grey market is an unofficial trading platform for trading in IPO shares. Generally, investors look at the grey market valuations to know the possible listing price for an IPO.



The company received only Rs 150 crore via fresh issue and the rest of the Rs 330 crore was received by promoters, which is more than double the fresh issue size.



Also, the borrowings on its books have been increasing every as a result of which the finance cost is also rising. The firm's total debt stood at Rs 340 crore in FY23 (April-December period), up from Rs 330 crore in March FY22, Rs 181.3 crore in FY21 and Rs 169.1 crore in FY20.



Its profit jumped to Rs 117.6 crore in FY22, from Rs 71.6 crore in FY21, partly driven by other income, which rose to Rs 55.8 crore from Rs 12.9 crore in the same period. Revenue from operations during the same years increased to Rs 3,083.2 crore from Rs 1,707.5 crore. In the nine-month period ended December FY23, its profit stood at Rs 113.2 crore on revenue of Rs 2,370.5 crore.



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.
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The market remained on a strong footing on July 3, as the benchmark indices have consistently been hitting new record highs day-after-day. The rally was backed by banking & financial Services, FMCG, metal and oil & gas stocks.



The BSE Sensex climbed 486 points to 65,205, while the Nifty50 jumped 134 points to 19,322.5 and formed bullish candlestick pattern on the daily charts.



"A long bull candle was formed with gap up opening. We observe unfilled gaps in the last three sessions, which is signaling a bullish run away gaps. Normally, such bullish runaway gaps area formed in the middle of the trend," said Nagaraj Shetti, technical research analyst at HDFC Securities.



Though Nifty being placed at all-time highs, still there is no indication of any reversal building up at the higher levels, he feels.



Hence, the crucial overhead resistance comes around 19,500 and next at 19,800 levels, which are 1.236 percent and 1.382 percent Fibonacci projections, taken from the bottom-top-bottom swings as per weekly timeframe chart, he said, adding that immediate support is at 19,200 levels.



The broader markets also traded higher for the fifth consecutive session, with the Nifty Midcap 100 index rising 0.25 percent and Smallcap 100 index climbing 1.23 percent on positive breadth.



We have collated 15 data points to help you spot profitable trades:



Note: The open interest (OI) and volume data of stocks in this article are the aggregates of three-month data and not just the current month.



Key support, resistance levels on Nifty



The pivot point calculator suggests that the Nifty may get support at 19,258, followed by 19,232 and 19,190, whereas in the case of an upside, 19,343 can be a key resistance area for the index, followed by 19,369 and 19,411.



Nifty Bank



The Bank Nifty also hit a new milestone of 45,000 on July 3, climbing more than 400 points to 45,158 and formed bullish candlestick pattern on the daily scale, after gap up opening.



"Bank Nifty faced a stiff resistance around the 45,200 levels on the back of strong Call writer additions. It needs to be seen if the Call writers up the ante at the 45,200 strike on Tuesday and monitoring the same will be crucial for Bank Niftys future direction," said Ashwin Ramani, derivatives & technical analyst at SAMCO Securities.



He feels the support is placed at 45,000 while the 45,500 levels on the upside will act as an immediate resistance.



The pivot point calculator indicated that the Bank Nifty is likely to take support at 44,951, followed by 44,840 and 44,660, whereas 45,311 can be the initial resistance zone for the index, followed by 45,422 and 45,602.







Call options data



As per weekly options data, we have seen the maximum Call open interest (OI) at 19,500 strike, with 1.01 crore contracts, which can act as a crucial resistance area for the Nifty50 in coming sessions.



This was followed by 91.44 lakh contracts at 19,300 strike, while 19,400 strike has 73.78 lakh contracts.



The meaningful Call writing was seen at 19,300 strike, which added 32.67 lakh contracts, followed by 19,500 strike and 20,000 strike, which added 28.1 lakh and 26.08 lakh contracts, respectively.



Maximum Call unwinding was at 19,200 strike, which shed 40.14 lakh contracts, followed by 19,100 and 19,000 strikes, which shed 21.99 lakh and 8.26 lakh contracts, respectively.







Put option data



On the Put side, the maximum open interest was at 19,300 strike, with 94.11 lakh contracts, which can be a crucial support level for the Nifty50 in the coming sessions.



This was followed by the 19,000 strike, comprising 93.57 lakh contracts, and the 19,200 strike, which has 76.23 lakh contracts.



Put writing was seen at 19,300 strike, which added 83.12 lakh contracts, followed by 19,200 strike and 19,400 strike, which added 29.27 lakh contracts and 17.36 lakh contracts, respectively.



We have seen Put unwinding at 19,000 strike, which shed 24.84 lakh contracts, followed by 19,100 and 18,200 strikes, which shed 12.07 lakh contracts and 8.84 lakh contracts, respectively.



Stocks with high delivery percentage



A high delivery percentage suggests that investors are showing interest in the stock. We have seen the highest delivery in SRF, GAIL India, Bharti Airtel, Crompton Greaves Consumer Electricals, and Pidilite Industries among others.







56 stocks see a long build-up



We have seen a long build-up in 56 stocks including Indian Oil Corporation, Hindustan Petroleum Corporation, RBL Bank, Mahanagar Gas, and M&M Financial Services, based on the open interest (OI) percentage. An increase in open interest and price indicates a build-up of long positions.







34 stocks see long unwinding



Based on the OI percentage, 34 stocks including Bata India, MRF, Polycab India, Alkem Laboratories, and Metropolis Healthcare saw a long unwinding. A decline in OI and price generally indicates a long unwinding.







61 stocks see a short build-up



We have seen a short build-up in 61 stocks including Persistent Systems, Bandhan Bank, JK Cement, Atul, and Divis Laboratories, based on the OI percentage. An increase in OI along with a price decrease indicates a build-up of short positions.







36 stocks see short-covering



Based on the OI percentage, 36 stocks were on the short-covering list. These included HDFC, Indiabulls Housing Finance, Eicher Motors, State Bank of India, and ICICI Prudential Life Insurance Company. A decrease in OI along with a price increase is an indication of short-covering.







Bulk deals







(For more bulk deals, click here)



Investors Meetings on July 4



Adani Transmission: Company officials will interact with investors in equity non-deal roadshow.



Suyog Telematics: Management of the company will meet various investors.



SIS: Company's officials will interact with BOB Capital Markets.



Hero MotoCorp: Officials of the company will interact with analysts and investors.



Stocks in the news



HMA Agro Industries: The company will make its debut on the BSE and NSE on July 4 after closing the public issue on June 23 with 1.62 times subscription. The final issue price has been fixed at Rs 585 per share.



Bajaj Finance: The new loans booked during Q1 FY24 grew by 34 percent to 9.94 million compared to 7.42 million in Q1FY23. Deposits book stood at approximately Rs 49,900 crore as of June 2023, increasing 46 percent over Rs 34,102 crore as of June 2022. Assets under management increased by 32 percent to Rs 2.7 lakh crore in Q1FY24 against same period last year. Consolidated net liquidity surplus stood at Rs 12,700 crore as of June 2023.



Avenue Supermarts: The operator of hypermarkets chain D-Mart has clocked a 18.1 percent year-on-year growth in standalone revenue at Rs 11,584.44 crore for the quarter ended June FY24, up from Rs 9,806.9 crore in same period last year. The total number of stores as of June 2023 stood at 327.



Vedanta: The miner's cast metal aluminium production increased by 2 percent YoY and 1 percent QoQ to 579kt (kilo tonnes) due to efficiency in the operations. Highest-ever mined metal production in Q1FY24 at 257kt rose by 2 percent YoY due to higher ore production, primarily at Rampura Agucha and Kayad mines, supported by improved mined metal grades and better mill recovery.



IDFC First Bank: The bank said the board members have approved the amalgamation of IDFC with the bank. The share exchange ratio for the amalgamation will be 155 equity shares of IDFC First Bank for every 100 equity shares of IDFC. As a result of the proposed merger, the standalone book value per share of the bank would increase by 4.9 percent as per financials FY23.



Lupin: The pharma company has received approval from the United States Food and Drug Administration (US FDA) for its abbreviated new drug application for Cyanocobalamin nasal spray. Cyanocobalamin is a generic equivalent of Nascobal nasal spray, which is available in the strength of 500 mcg per spray, of Par Pharmaceutical Inc. This product will be manufactured at Lupins Somerset facility in the US.



Tube Investments of India: The auto ancillary company has forayed into electric small commercial vehicle business as its subsidiary Tl Clean Mobility (TICMPL) has entered into an agreement with Anand Jayachandran for pursuing electric small commercial vehicle business (e-SCV) through a subsidiary to be incorporated by TICMPL. TICMPL will be investing Rs 160 crore and Anand Jayachandran will be investing Rs 40 crore in the form of equity.



Fund Flow







FII and DII data



Foreign institutional investors (FII) bought shares worth Rs 1,995.92 crore, whereas domestic institutional investors (DII) sold shares worth Rs 337.80 crore on July 3, provisional data from the National Stock Exchange shows.



Stock under F&O ban on NSE



The National Stock Exchange has retained Indiabulls Housing Finance to its F&O ban list for July 4. Securities thus banned under the F&O segment include companies where derivative contracts have crossed 95 percent of the market-wide position limit.



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.
#1. Foreign portfolio investors pour money into Indian equities, rally to become broad-based



Foreign portfolio investors pumped Rs 2.9 lakh crore into Indian equities in June, a monthly record, surpassing the Rs2.55 lakh crore invested in December 2020. Net of sales, overseas investment in June was Rs 47,148 crore ($5.7 b), the highest in 10 months. The ongoing rally in the stock market has been in part led by foreign institutional investors, which bought stocks worth Rs 95,749 crore between March and June. Monthly average inflows have reached a new high of Rs 23,937 crore.



Why its important: Experts say the current stock market rally would maintain its momentum and become more broad-based on favorable technical and fundamental factors. Emerging markets, particularly India, have again become attractive bets for bulk investments.



#2. Overseas investors likely to get three months to cut exposure to avoid higher disclosures



Foreign portfolio investors looking to avoid making greater disclosures are likely to be given a shorter deadline to pare their investments than what was originally planned by the market regulator. The custodians of these foreign funds have told the Securities and Exchange Board of India that existing investors can cut their investments below the cut-off levels fixed for closer scrutiny within three months from the date of notification of the new rules compared with six months indicated earlier.



Why its important: Overseas investors are promising to comply with the new rules on paring investments in single corporate groups to avoid being tagged as high risk, which could be misinterpreted by some.



#3. Nifty traded from Singapore returns home to Gujarats Gift City



After more than two decades, India is bringing home the offshore-traded Nifty from Singapore, with the erstwhile SGX Nifty, rechristened now Gift Nifty, trading for the first time on Monday at 6:30am at Gift City in Gujarat. Singapore Exchange Ltd has transferred the order book of SGX Nifty to NSE IX effective 3 July under a September 2020 agreement for a liquidity switch from Singapore to Gift City.



Why its important: The homecoming will see better price discovery, with India assuming the role of price-setter as local stockbrokers take part in trading along with foreign investors.



#4. India poised to take top position in global wearables market in 2023



Indias wearables market is expected to emerge as the worlds largest by the end of 2023 and is set to prop up the global demand for smartwatches and hearables. Of the total 504.1 million units of wearables forecast to be shipped worldwide this year, India is expected to account for 130-135 million, or around 26 percent, according to projections by market research firm IDC India.



Why its important: India is expected to pick up the slack as America and China are showing signs of saturation. Local demand is fed mostly by low-cost, feature-rich devices from domestic vendors.



#5. New investment proposals decline in June quarter despite massive aircraft order



New investment proposals in the three months to June fell from the preceding quarter but improved marginally from a year earlier. After an unusual spurt in the March quarter to a record Rs 12.1 lakh crore, new investment proposals fell more than half to Rs 6 trillion in the June quarter, according to the Centre for Monitoring Indian Economy. Close to 69 percent of this came from IndiGos order for 500 A320 family aircraft in June, the largest single plane order in aviation history.



Why its important: The capital expenditure plans of corporate India seem to have a hard time in taking off. Government project announcements were also muted. This could be a leading indicator of slowing growth.



#6. Central government may provide grants to northeast India to build hydropower projects



Northeastern states with high hydropower potential may get central grants to pick equity stakes in projects under a new policy. The Centre may provide grants worth Rs 4,000 crore to them so that the state governments can infuse equity in hydropower projects. The new proposal is expected come up in the cabinet soon.



Why its important: India has been trying to boost hydropower capacity in the northeast for long without much success and despite environmental concerns. It remains to be seen if the latest proposal can provide some fresh impetus.



#7. Price pressures in steel may not see return of countervailing duty despite rising imports



The Indian steel industry may not see a return of the countervailing duty despite increasing imports from China and a recommendation to impose the levy, given the governments desire to check price pressures in the economy and the limited-duration validity of the recommendation. The steel ministry and the Directorate General of Trade Remedies had recommended a 19 percent duty the finance ministry.



Why its important: The price difference between Chinese and local steel is quite high at 30 percent and a countervailing duty would lead to higher steel prices, which would have an adverse impact on infra growth.



#8. Tepid demand force retailers to offer higher discounts to end of season sales



Retailers are concerned over the lackluster response to end of season sales and are offering discounts of up to 75 percent amid worries they will need to extend the period as business is yet to reach last years levels. The next few weeks will be crucial as retailers look to clear inventory before new-season stock is due to come in.



Why its important: Higher discounts indicate the relative stress in underlying inventory. Sales are simply not improving as earlier expected.



#9. Indian exporters benefitting from free trade pact with the United Arab Emirates



Indias utilization rate of its free trade agreement with the United Arab Emirates is expected to be as high as 50 percent, a government official said. Indias utilization rate of trade pacts has been historically low due to factors such as stringent rules of origin requirements, documentation costs and lack of awareness. Smaller enterprises contribute nearly 40 percent of Indias exports, which means awareness among them regarding free trade pacts is crucial for better utilization.



Why its important: The utilization rate indicates how much Indian exporters are benefiting from tariff concessions. The free trade agreement with the Gulf nation seems to be a big success.



#10. Corporations spending more on social responsibility, but impact remains limited



Corporate social responsibility spending among Indian companies has grown significantly, but its impact remains limited, the corporate affairs ministry has said, urging them to adopt a long-term approach to their CSR initiatives to yield more productive results. CSR spending stood at Rs 26,210 crore in 2020-21, having grown 80 percent from 2015-16.



Why its important: CSR efforts are yet to achieve the right balance between strategic capital investments and operational expenses. The is also wide regional disparities in fund deployments.
Mahindra Lifespaces plans to achieve an annual revenue of approximately Rs 500 crore from the industrial leasing business by 2025. Additionally, the company is in the process of acquiring land for industrial clusters in Chennai and Pune with a total development potential of about 730 acres.



"The annual revenue increased from Rs 298 crore in FY22 to 456 crore in FY23. Currently, we have four projectsWorld City in Jaipur and Chennai, which are integrated cities with industrial clusters, and Origins in Chennai and Ahmedabad, which are standalone industrial clusters," Rajaram Pai, chief business officer, industrial, told Moneycontrol.



The Mahindra World City in south Chennai is spread across a little over 1,500 acres, while the integrated township in Jaipur covers 3,000 acres.

At Mahindra World City Chennai, out of 1,524 acres, 831.6 acres are industrial and the balance is split between residential, commercial, common area and utilities.



The Origins project in north Chennai is over 307 acres with a leasable area of 227 acres. "The majority of the parks Phase 1 has leased. Active discussions with several companies across are going on to close our balance soon," Pai said.



In Ahmedabad, the company has a 350-acre industrial cluster at present.



Further expansion



For World City, the company is expanding its residential portfolio in Chennai. The upcoming development will be plotted developments and also apartments, with about 20-30 percent more than the existing portfolio.



Pai said the company is looking forward to setting up a standalone industrial cluster in the Satara area in Maharashtra. "We are also expanding the Phase II of Origins in Chennai and the upcoming cluster will be of similar size as Phase I, for which a majority of land has already been acquired," he added.



Phase I of Origins in Chennai is a joint partnership between Mahindra World City Developers Limited and Sumitomo Corporation of Japan with an investment of Rs 179 crore.



Additionally, the company has recently signed up with Mitsubishi Electric India Private Ltd to set up an air-conditioner and compressor manufacturing unit with an investment of $222 million in Phase 1 of the Chennai project.



"We have a strong partnership with Sumitomo, sharing similar values and strong growth vision. We are open to Sumitomo's participation in the new phase at Origins Chennai," Pai added.



Industrial leasing remains robust despite challenges



For the industrial clusters across India, Pai said that the company, along with its partner companies, have cumulatively invested over Rs 13,000 crore, with Chennai accounting for the bulk of the share.



He added that policies for industrial and special economic zones (SEZ) remain a challenge. "The upcoming DESH (Development of Enterprise and Service Hubs) bill will provide the necessary push by overhauling the existing SEZ law of 2005," he added.



The new act will allow units to produce both for domestic and international markets, thus reviving interests in the SEZ sector that has remained vacant across commercial verticals in India.



Despite that, Pai said, in FY23 Chennai and Jaipur saw a total export of more than Rs 1,500 crores.



Currently, in Chennai, the company is seeing bullishness in sectors like auto component manufacturing, electronics and services and IT companies, including research and development.



"For upcoming industrial clusters, we are looking at automotive and also a significant expansion in the renewable sector. Electronics, especially board electronics, food processing and data centres are also picking up today. For specific clusters, cycle and doll manufacturing are also promising," Pai said.



Currently, the company has 30-40 percent of offshore companies operating in the existing industrial portfolio. "We are looking at companies from Korea and Taiwan, among others, for their dominance in electronics. Countries like Germany and Italy are also promising for their engineering sector," Pai added.



Among the challenges, high land costs and land availability remain major hurdles in acquisition, especially in southern metros like Bengaluru. "Additionally, today private industrial parks lack several benefits compared to government-run parks. A major policy change with tax incentives will further help reduce the overall cost for end users," Pai concluded.
Following the crisis at Byju's, the world's most valued edtech company, there has been a growing focus of investors and advisors on examining the revenue recognition practices of India's edtech start-ups in their portfolios.



They are particularly interested in how revenue is accounted for when bookings are finalised, such as whether a straight-line revenue recognition is employed (dividing revenue by the subscription period), how discounts and cancellations are accounted for, and the proportion of revenue derived from subscriptions versus the sale of hardware (if applicable), multiple industry insiders told Moneycontrol.



Byjus has not been able to provide monthly business updates to its lenders. The FY20-21 audit was delayed, and so is FY21-22. It has been recognising revenue very aggressively and most of it is for raising large sums without diluting much equity, said an edtech founder, requesting anonymity.



So theres a sense that a majority of their problems are related to the way they recognise revenues. I was asked by one of our investors, who also is an investor in Byjus, about how we recognise our revenue and whether we had aggressively showed it in the past while raising money, the founder added.



In September 2022, Byju's finally released its FY20-21 results after a significant delay of approximately 18 months. The results revealed a marginal decline in Byju's revenue during the year, which came as a surprise to many considering that 2020-21 was the first full year of the pandemic, which significantly boosted India's edtech sector. In contrast, other edtech companies such as Lido Learning, which has since declared bankruptcy, experienced substantial revenue growth in FY20-21.



During that time, Byju Raveendran, the Co-Founder and CEO of Byju's, had told Moneycontrol in an interview that the company had to defer around 40 percent of its FY20-21 revenue to subsequent years. This decision was made based on the recommendation of their then-auditor, Deloitte. Prior to this, Byju's was known for its aggressive revenue recognition practices.



Aggressive revenue recognition refers to a company's strategy of inflating revenue figures by reporting gross revenue while deferring expenses, which artificially mitigates losses on paper. This approach is employed in an attempt to conceal losses and present a prettier financial picture.



The growing scrutiny by investors on the revenue recognition practices of edtech start-ups has the potential to lengthen the fundraising process for these companies. This shift is expected as investment metrics are likely to undergo significant changes.



Vanity metrics such as annualised revenue run rate (ARR) and gross bookings may lose their prominence, with investors increasingly prioritising more rational metrics such as net revenue (excluding cancellations and discounts), profitability, EBITDA, and others.



I understand the large potential of Indias edtech market but then these are some of the on-ground issues companies need to get right, said an edtech-focused investor, with five of Indias seven unicorns in his portfolio.



Metrics like ARR and all are fine, but if cancellations are high, and retention rates are low, then such metrics dont make any sense. Very little of this money is actually going to come on your books. These problems have started coming to the fore only after the pandemic, as thats when these companies really expanded, and their retention rates, cancellations, etc., became more germane than before, the investor added.



In addition, the increased scrutiny will intensify focus on Indian start-up valuations as well, making it harder for edtech start-ups to secure funding at inflated revenue multiples. Data compiled by Moneycontrol through Tracxn reveals that funding for India's edtech start-ups has already plunged over 97 percent to $45 million in the first half of 2022 (over the same period in 2021).



Valuations in the global edtech landscape have also declined significantly, with companies such as Coursera, Udemy, and Chegg Inc. experiencing drops ranging from 20 to 50 percent over the past year. This downtrend has also impacted the valuations of edtech companies in India, prompting United States-based asset management companies (AMC) to mark down the fair values of certain Indian edtech firms.



For instance, Blackrock, the worlds biggest AMC, has pegged the fair value of Byjus at $8.4 billion as of March 31, 2023, while Prosus, Byjus biggest investor, has cut the companys fair value to $5.1 billion. Byjus was last valued at $22 billion. Edtech unicorn Eruditus also saw its fair value getting marked down by US-based Private Shares Fund by 9 percent, to $2.9 billion.
Shares of Aditya Birla Capital gained marginally on Monday after the company raised Rs 3,000 crore through Qualified Institutional Payments (QIP) on June 30. Aditya Birla Capital shares were up 0.10 percent at Rs 196.5 at 1.35pm on the National Stock Exchange. The shares have gained 11.55 percent in the last five days when Aditya Birla Capital announced its plan to raise capital. The company had raised Rs 1,750 through QIP and Rs 1,250 through preferential issuance of equity shares to promoter Grasim Industries and promoter entity Surya Kiran Investments, it said in an exchange filing. QIP allows companies to raise capital from domestic markets without the need to submit any pre-issue filings to market regulators. Only institutional investors can participate in such an issue. The board of directors had approved the allotment of 10 crore shares at an issue price of Rs 175 each. Read more Aditya Birla Capital raises Rs 3,000 cr from promoters, investors BlackRock, Capital Group, Norges Bank, Royal Bank of Canada, M&G Investments, Abu Dhabi Investment Authority, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Public Sector Pension Investment Board, and SBI Life Insurance and others participated in the QIP, said the company. The fundraise was Aditya Birla Capitals first QIP transaction. It saw strong response from marquee foreign portfolio investors, sovereign wealth funds and domestic institutional investors. In FY23, the companys total revenue grew 35 percent on-year to Rs 30,201 crore. Aditya Birlas net profit increased almost three times to Rs 4,706 crore year-on-year in the same period, while EBITDA margins grew 893 basis points on-year in FY23. Aditya Birla Capital offers end-to-end lending, financing, and wealth management solutions. 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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Vedanta share price gained in early trade on July 3 as the company decided to initiate a strategic review of its steel and steel-making raw materials businesses. Vedanta, a subsidiary of Vedanta Resources Limited, is one of the worlds leading natural resources companies spanning across India, South Africa and Namibia with significant operations in Oil & Gas, Zinc, Lead, Silver, Copper, Iron Ore, Steel, Nickel, Aluminium & Power. The review will begin immediately and evaluate a broad range of options to maximize stakeholder value, including but not limited to a potential strategic sale of some or all of the above mentioned steel businesses, it said. The company has engaged advisers to assist in this review. The company will continue to make further announcements in this connection in accordance with its disclosure obligations and pursuant to applicable laws and regulations, it said. Catch all the market action on our live blog On June 22, the company had described as wrong, baseless and incorrect news reports that Vedanta Limited was selling the Sterlite Copper Plant in Thoothukudi. Sterlite Copper contributed to 40 percent of India's copper. As the country has become a net importer of copper, which has adversely impacted interalia the downstream and ancillary industries and hence, there has been a growing demand for VedantaSterlite Copper to restart its operations. At 09.41 am, Vedanta was quoting at Rs 279.00, up Rs 0.95, or 0.34 percent on the BSE.

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Leading Taiwanese firms are looking to relocate their manufacturing bases to India in a bid to curb their exposure to the Chinese market, as per leading policymakers in the Taiwan government. The latest development comes amid the islands heightening tensions with Beijing. Kao Shien-Quey, Deputy Minister for Taiwans National Development, stated there is a huge scope of collaboration between New Delhi and Taipei in areas of emerging and critical technologies, including manufacturing of semiconductors and electronics equipment. Shien-Quey further noted, in an interaction with a group of international journalists in Taipei on July 2, that leading Taiwanese tech giants are looking at India as a key destination to boost their global supply chains. Kristy Tsun-tzu Hsu, the director at premier policy think-tank Taiwan ASEAN Studies Center at Chung-Hua Institution of Economic Research, described India as an important country for Taiwan and said Taiwanese companies operating in China are looking at decoupling the global supply chain from the country while maintaining it for domestic consumers. Leading Taiwanese companies are increasingly looking at relocating their production bases from China to countries in Europe, North America, the US and India in view of the heightened Sino-US trade tensions and the Chinese militarys increasing muscle-flexing around Taiwan.

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Around 70 per cent construction work on the ambitious India-Myanmar-Thailand Trilateral Highway has been completed, Union Minister Nitin Gadkari has said. India, Thailand and Myanmar are working on about 1,400-km-long highway that would link the country with Southeast Asia by land and give a boost to trade, business, health, education and tourism ties among the three countries. "Around 70 per cent work of the project is completed," the minister of Road Transport & Highways told PTI in reply to a question on the progress of the project. The highway will connect Moreh in Manipur, India with Mae Sot in Thailand via Myanmar. The minister did not provide details on the timeline for completion and operationalisation of the trilateral highway. The strategic highway project has been delayed. Earlier, the government was aiming to make the highway operational by December 2019.

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Vistara, a joint venture of the Tata Group and Singapore Airlines Limited (SIA), attained the historic milestone of flying 50 million passengers within eight years of its operations. This success represents Vistara's rapid expansion and its brand power. While Vistara has installed an anamorphic 3D installation in its offline promotions in Bengaluru, Delhi and Mumbai airports, inventive billboards have been put up in Gurugram, Delhi and Mumbai for the occasion. In addition, it will serve themed sweets on select flights, hold social media contests, and many other surprises. The only Indian carrier to feature among the Worlds Top 20 Airlines, Vistara has bagged some of the best titles like the 16th Best Airline, Best Cabin Crew in India and South Asia, Best Airline Staff in India and South Asia, and Best Business Class Airline in India and South Asia. For the second year in a row, Vistara was named Asia's Third Youngest Airline Fleet by ch-aviation. Vistara began commercial operations on January 9, 2015, to set new norms in the Indian aviation industry. The airline now operates 61 aircraft, including 46 Airbus A320neo, 10 A321, one Boeing 737-800NG and four Boeing 787-9 Dreamliners. While talking about the achievement, Vinod Kannan, Chief Executive Officer, Vistara said, "We are filled with gratitude and joy as we celebrate this remarkable feat of serving over 50 million customers. This milestone stands as a testament to the trust and confidence reposed in us by millions of customers... We would like to thank our valued customers for their continued support and patronage over the years which has played a vital role in establishing us as a world-class airline. As we continue our journey, we are resolute in our commitment to deliver exceptional service and memorable experiences to our customers."

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The US generics market is a major revenue supplier for domestic pharma players. The essential criterion to enter that coveted space is regulatory approval from the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA).



Any pharmaceutical company wanting to sell its drugs in the US needs to clear inspections conducted by the FDA. It is only after pharma companies receive approval for the drug, the manufacturing process, and the facility that will produce it, that they are actually allowed to market their products in the US.



However, the process for clearing the FDA's regulatory checks has turned out to be a major roadblock for drugmakers of late as they have consistently struggled to meet the US agencys good manufacturing practices (GMP).



Nowadays, not a week goes by without a pharma company receiving some `observations from the regulatory body. The FDA issues observations if it finds unsatisfactory manufacturing processes during its inspection of the facility.



Getting mired in regulatory challenges delays drug launches, which impacts revenues. In such a scenario, a question that often surfaces is why are domestic pharma companies failing to meet regulatory standards even after being a major player in the US generics space for such a long time.



Lets see.



Greater numbers



Analysts have attributed a variety of reasons for the increased scrutiny of domestic pharma. A major reason, as pointed out by Vineet Gala, founder of Xylem Investment Managers, is that the number of facilities being inspected has significantly increased in the past year, resulting in reports of more plants receiving observations.



This is because inspections were pushed by a year or two during Covid, because of which more plants were inspected in the past year compared to what we would usually see.



Greater complexity



Another factor that Gala believes to be the reason for the increased scrutiny is the kind of drugs being filed by domestic drug makers. "Several drug makers have filed for complex drugs that face little competition or are undergoing shortages in the US market. Given that these drugs are critical in nature, they garner a higher level of scrutiny compared to regular generics," Gala highlighted.



This explains why several major manufacturing facilities poised to produce these critical drugs have been caught in regulatory challenges. Cipla's manufacturing facility at Pithampur, which was due to manufacturing its key drug Advair, used in the treatment of respiratory diseases, received eight observations from the US FDA, including a few that were serious in nature.



Also Read: Contamination risk among 8 FDA observations on Cipla, stock takes a hit



Similarly, Sun Pharmas Mohali unit was forced to halt production to fix issues pointed out by the regulatory body. The Mohali facility specialises in oral solid formulations and manufactures products like Pantoprazole ODT, a high-margin product as its the only generic of Pentasa available in the market.



Some analysts also felt that it was better for pharma companies to get done with the inspections, even if it takes longer due to rising scrutiny. Getting approval from the FDA within six months, even with observations, is a positive as it helps enter the market, they believe.



Take for instance Ipca Laboratories. Three of Ipca's manufacturing units, which were under an import ban since 2015, were inspected by the FDA recently, following which they were slapped with several observations. But analysts still feel that the company has a shot at getting the import bans lifted if it manages to rectify the issues highlighted by the FDA.



Also Read: The big picture: Are Ipca's regulatory woes actually a negative?



Even though, it might appear that domestic manufacturing standards have become sloppy in recent times if one were to go by the number of observations of the US FDA, a closer look may actually reveal the strides made by domestic pharma as it attempts to break into the complex drugs space, which attracts higher scrutiny.



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.
The groundbreaking ceremony on Micron Technology's semiconductor factory will take place in 4-6 weeks, Ashwini Vaishnaw, the Union Minister of Communications, Railways, Electronics and Information Technology said on July 3.



Speaking at the launch of the Bharat 6G Alliance in the capital, Vaishnaw said that land had already been allocated for the factory in Gujarat.



"A lot of progress has been made on that project. The site allocation has been done by the government of Gujarat... And now, the company is preparing for setting up the factory," Vaishnaw told reporters.



The groundbreaking ceremony should happen in the coming 4-6 weeks," he further said, adding that the "first Make in India chip" should be manufactured out of this factory by December 2024.



On June 28, US chip-maker Micron signed an MoU with the Indian government to build a semiconductor plant. While Micron has said it will invest up to $825 million in the facility, the total investment - including that of the Indian government - will be $2.75 billion. The factory will be constructed in Sanand, Gujarat.



The factory will be a first for India, which has been looking to get into the global semiconductor supply chain in recent years. The deal with Micron was one of the key issues during Prime Minister Narendra Modi's recent trip to the US. On his trip to the US, Modi met Micron's Chief Executive Officer, Sanjay Mehrotra, on June 21 in Washington, DC, inviting him to "boost semiconductor manufacturing in India".



"He noted that India can provide competitive advantages in various parts of the semiconductor supply chain," a statement by the Indian government said.



Vaishnaw also said on July 3 that five companies had been given approvals under the Design-Linked Incentive (DLI) scheme of the government.



"All the five companies have given very good proposals to design chips, including one for satellite communication and one for beam formation. So we have got proposals to design some very complex chips," the minister said.



Commenting on digital payments, the minister said that a Joint Working Group had been created for taking digital payments system to Japan, with the Asian giant keen on having a UPI-like system.



"Very good progress has been made. This is something that will take at least a few months to create a common understanding paper and then the execution will start," Vaishnaw said.



Vaishnaw also said the government is ready with The Digital Personal Data Protection Bill and was hopeful of introducing it in the Monsoon Session of Parliament. He said "tens of thousands" of suggestions had been received and they had all been meticulously examined.



"...we have reached out to all possible stakeholders, whether they are in the media world, activist world, industry and academic stakeholders Every possible stakeholder we have consulted... So we have taken all suggestions into account," the minister said.
India on Monday permitted imports of potatoes from Bhutan without any license for one more year till June 2024. Earlier, it was allowed till June 30 this year. "Import of potatoes...is allowed from Bhutan without any import license, up to June 30, 2024," the directorate general of foreign trade (DGFT) said in a notification. Imports of fresh or chilled potatoes stood at $1.02 million in 2022-23. In a separate notification, the DGFT said that the import of 17,000 metric tonnes of fresh (green) areca nut without a minimum import price (MIP) condition from Bhutan will also be allowed through LCS (land customs station) Chamurchi (INCHMB). Chamurchi is a small village in the Jalpaiguri district. It is close to the Bhutan border. INCHMB is a location code. Further, in a trade notice, the directorate laid out a procedure for the allocation of quota for the export of broken rice on humanitarian and food security grounds, based on requests received from governments of other countries. It has extended the last date for submission of an application for obtaining a license for the export of broken rice to Senegal, Gambia and Indonesia, up to July 6. applicant or any applicant failing to export the allocated quota to the respective country(ies), within the specified time period, will be blacklisted for the next two financial years and action under the relevant provisions of FT (D&R) Act, 1992, as amended, shall be taken against the applicant," it said. Foreign trade happens as per the Foreign Trade (Development & Regulations) Act, 1992.

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Prime Minister Narendra Modi will host Chinese President Xi Jinping, his Russia counterpart Vladimir Putin, Pakistan's Shehbaz Sharif and other leaders of the SCO nations at a virtual summit of the bloc on Tuesday that is expected to focus on regional security situation and ways to boost connectivity and trade.



It will be Putin's first participation in a multilateral summit after a mercenary group launched a short-lived armed rebellion last week that rocked Moscow.



The summit of the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation (SCO) under India's presidency is also set to welcome Iran as the new permanent member of the grouping.



The situation in Afghanistan, the Ukraine conflict and enhancing cooperation among the SCO member countries are expected to figure in the summit, people familiar with the matter said, adding boosting connectivity and trade is also likely to be discussed.



The summit is also taking place against the backdrop of the over three-year eastern Ladakh border standoff between Indian and Chinese troops, and two weeks after Prime Minister Modi's high-profile visit to the US.



The SCO, comprising India, China, Russia, Pakistan, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan and Uzbekistan, is an influential economic and security bloc and has emerged as one of the largest transregional international organisations.



India assumed the rotating chairmanship of the SCO at the Samarkand Summit of SCO on September 16 last year.



Heads of the two SCO bodies -- the secretariat and the SCO RATS (Regional Anti-Terrorist Structure) are also set to attend Tuesday's virtual summit whose theme is "Towards a SECURE SCO'.



The SECURE acronym was coined by Prime Minister Modi at the 2018 SCO summit and it stands for Security; Economy and Trade; Connectivity; Unity; Respect for Sovereignty and Territorial Integrity; and Environment.



Heads of six international and regional organisations have also been invited to the summit.



The organisations are the UN, the ASEAN (Association of Southeast Asian Nations), CIS (Commonwealth of Independent States), CSTO (Collective Security Treaty Organisation), EAEU (Eurasian Economic Union) and CICA (Conference on Interaction and Confidence Building Measures in Asia).



India's presidency of the SCO saw significant activities in a number of areas. New Delhi created five new pillars for cooperation in SCO. These are startups and innovation, traditional medicine, digital inclusion, youth empowerment and shared Buddhist heritage. The special working group on startups and innovation and experts working group on traditional medicine were created on India's initiative.



"We intend to contribute substantially in both these areas," said one of the people cited above.



To further Prime Minister Modi's vision of Vasudhaiv Kutumbakom (world is one family), India emphasised on building greater people-to-people connect, the person said.



A number of signature events were held under the Indian presidency with the intention to further deepen people to people connect.



India's association with the SCO began in 2005 as an observer country. It became a full member state of SCO at the Astana summit in 2017.



India has shown a keen interest in deepening its security-related cooperation with the SCO and its RATS, which specifically deals with issues relating to security and defence.



The SCO was founded at a summit in Shanghai in 2001 by the presidents of Russia, China, the Kyrgyz Republic, Kazakhstan, Tajikistan and Uzbekistan. Pakistan became its permanent member along with India in 2017.
The Supreme Court of India is set to reopen on July 3 after the summer vacation with a digital makeover. In a move to digitise overall functioning and smooth judiciary flow, the top court will reopen with IT-enabled courtrooms.



Modernising digital infrastructure in the first three courtrooms is the third digitisation project of the apex court in 2023. The first is the e-SCR project which offered decades' worth of Supreme Court judgments or Supreme Court Reports (SCR) for free at the tap of a button. The second is the live transcription of arguments made in Constitution Bench hearings. Though the latter is still in its nascent stance, the top court is expected to use it more going forward.



it is to be noted that Chief Justice of India (CJI) DY Chandrachud lauded the Union Government for allocating Rs 7.000 crore for the third stage of e-courts project. This was announced by Finance Minister Nirmala Sitharaman in February this year, as part of the third phase of the e-courts project during the Union Budget Session 2023.



Apart from this, the Supreme Court has also modernised the system of filing cases. The court introduced electronic filing during the COVID-19 pandemic and has introduced many changes to it over the last few years. In addition to this, the apex court has also been training advocate clerks in e-filing.



Moreover, the latest digital makeover also includes a state-of-the-art digital video conferencing (VC) system, and free Wi-Fi available for advocates, litigants, media persons and other stakeholders.



"As the SC reopens on Monday (June 3) after the summer vacation, courtrooms one to three will see futuristic features to bring a technologically advanced environment to the courtrooms," a senior SC official told the news daily, The Times of India.



The eCourts Mission Mode Project was conceptualised by the e-Committee of the Supreme Court based on the National Policy and Action Plan to implement information and communication technology (ICT) in India's judiciary. The project was done under the aegis of CJI Chandrachud, who also heads the apex court's e-committee.
While there is no doubt that the Ajit Pawar-led split in the Nationalist Congress Party is a huge setback for his uncle and party patriarch Sharad Pawar, the fast-paced political developments which unfolded in Mumbai on Sunday are also a pointer to the Bharatiya Janata Partys own political limitations in this important Western state. Rebel NCP leader Ajit Pawar was sworn in as deputy chief minister while eight other party legislators were inducted as ministers in the Maharashtra government.



The BJP obviously felt the need to destabilise the Shiv Sena-NCP-Congress Maha Vikas Aghadi coalition as it feared that the opposition grouping could emerge as a serious political challenger to it in the 2024 Lok Sabha polls. Not confident about retaining its winning tally in Maharashtra, the BJP had to necessarily strike again after it succeeded in creating fissures in the Shiv Sena last year. That operation was aimed at capturing power in Maharashtra and settling scores with Shiv Sena leader Uddhav Thackeray who had walked out on his partys pre-poll alliance with the BJP.



Focus On Sharad Pawar



The Sunday operation is meant to destroy the opposition coalitions credibility and leave it in disarray.The Maharashtra drama unfolded at a time when opposition parties were in the process of putting together an anti-BJP front in the run-up to the next Lok Sabha election. Sharad Pawar has been positioning himself as an elder statesman and architect of this grouping, particularly because he has the necessary gravitas for this job. But the erosion in his own ranks will make it difficult for him to discharge that role.



The first meeting of the disparate group of regional parties and the Congress was held in Patna last month where the leaders decided in principle to fight unitedly in the coming general election. The next meeting is scheduled for July 13 and 14 in Bengaluru where the participating leaders are expected to firm up their programme and campaign. In fact, the dates of this meeting was announced by Sharad Pawar, who has lately been exceptionally vocal in his criticism of the Modi government and has continuously underlined the need for opposition parties to take on the BJP unitedly.



Pawars reputation as an astute and canny politician will be put to test in the coming months as he deals with the fallout of the split in the NCP ranks. Ajit Pawar has claimed that he enjoys the support of the majority of NCP legislators, MPs and party cadres. This claim has been contested by Sharad Pawar who maintained otherwise, stating such situations were not new to him and that he would reach out to the people as he had faith in them.



Despite Sharad Pawars admission that he was surprised by his nephews defection along with his confidantes Chhagan Bhujbal and Praful Patel, there are lingering doubts that the NCP supremo was unaware of their move. Political observers in Maharashtra are convinced that those who left had Sharad Pawars blessings.



Several NCP leaders, including Ajit Pawar, who defected on Sunday have been under pressure following the corruption cases filed against them by the Modi government. It is entirely possible that Pawar is playing the waiting game till the 2024 general election as he chooses to overlook the defections and, at the same time, continues with his attempts to build an anti-BJP coalition.



BJPs 2024 Challenge



On the other hand, the BJP was waiting to upset the oppositions unity plans. It was presented with a perfect opportunity to go ahead with its operation following reports that NCP supremo Sharad Pawars nephew Ajit Pawar was unhappy at being sidelined by his uncle. Ajit Pawar was miffed when Sharad Pawar ignored his contribution in building the NCP and handed over the partys reins to his daughter Supriya Sule, a comparative political lightweight.



That Ajit Pawar was willing to shake hands with the BJP was evident as far back as 2019 when he was sworn in as deputy CM along with Devendra Fadnavis as chief minister at an early morning function. However, that government did not last long as Sharad Pawar struck back, forcing his nephew to return to the party fold. But Sules appointment as NCP working president proved to be the last straw for Ajit Pawar.



For the present, the BJP has reason to exult as it has succeeded in adding to its numbers in the Maharashtra assembly and has punctured the oppositions unity project. It now has the support of the Eknath Shinde faction of the Shiv Sena and the Ajit Pawar faction of the NCP. But it also faces the challenge of meeting the conflicting demands of those who have chosen to throw their lot with the BJP and its own party leaders, especially when tickets are to be distributed for next years Lok Sabha and assembly polls.



Having taunted the Maha Vikas Aghadi coalition as being a messy three-party set-up pulling in different directions, the BJP could well find itself in the same boat.



Anita Katyal is a Delhi-based independent journalist. Views are personal and do not represent the stand of this publication.
Chatbots arent just useful for writing essays and emails. Those designed to show empathy and retain memories about their users are already acting as personal guides. A man who recently tried using a chatbot called Pi

realised it could help him give up smoking if he went to it each time he had a craving. Whenever he did, it would remind him of all the reasons why quitting was a good idea, including being around in the future for his child.



Pis creator is a Silicon Valley startup called Inflection, which raised a remarkable $1.3 billion last week to build a personal AI for everyone, a chatbot that can act as a confidante for personal matters. The funding round made Inflection the second-highest funded generative AI startup after OpenAI, which has raised more than $11 billion to date. But the company behind ChatGPT is chasing a different sort of vision and

reportedly working on a personal assistant that will be much more functional and work-oriented than the original ChatGPT or Pi, which are more like digital companions.



Theres a debate raging among industry executives about whether it makes better business sense to anthropomorphise artificial intelligence in the way OpenAI has done with ChatGPT or make it as neutral and functional as possible, like the operating system you use on your phone. When we settle into a reality where were regularly talking to computers, will we be interacting with something more like Microsofts discontinued virtual assistant Clippy or more like Microsoft Excel? What seems most probable is that well be using both types of AI in the future to make us more productive on the one hand and navigate us through our personal lives on the other.



Its that latter use that will take some getting used to, but for the most part well see companion-style AI manifest through services aimed at regular people, not enterprises. Inflection co-founder Mustafa Suleyman, who was also a co-founder of Google DeepMind, says Pi is ultimately a consumer product. He envisions it acting like a chief of staff that advises people on planning their weekend or shopping for clothes, and one that can chat with customer service agents on their behalf.



It will be aligned to your interests, he says. Itll give you feedback and advice and it will see what you see and be with you where you go. Pi has a memory and is infinitely patient and supportive. But Pi is also designed to remind people that it doesnt have feelings and isnt human. In other words, Suleyman says, it also has clear boundaries.



It might seem odd at first to engage with software on a personal level, but Suleyman and his co-founder, storied venture capitalist and PayPal Mafia member Reid Hoffman, along with plenty of other AI builders, say were heading in that direction.



Part of the draw of companion-style AI may be that many people remain more isolated than they ever were before the COVID-19 pandemic. A March 2022 poll conducted by the Kaiser Family Foundation found that 59 percent of respondents hadnt returned to their pre-pandemic activities, and many office workers continue to work remotely. And though chatbots like ChatGPT frequently make factual errors, their abilities to show empathy are much more reliable. Its little wonder that some 5 million people have registered to use an app called Replika, which offers AI-powered companions that many see as friends or even romantic partners.



Adept, a generative AI startup in San Francisco funded by Hoffmans venture capital firm Greylock Partners, looks at human-AI interaction in a much more functional way, even though youre essentially talking to it. The company was founded by a former leader of Googles large language model projects and two scientists who co-wrote a seminal paper on transformers, a key technology that allowed ChatGPT to be constructed. Rather than build a stand-alone chatbot, Adept is creating a system that can process conversational commands from a human and use software.



We want to build a natural language interface to your computers, says David Luan, chief executive officer of Adept. We dont want it to be a separate agent.



The idea is that down the line, people who use enterprise software wont need to scroll around a web page and click on seemingly endless menu options to carry out a task  theyll simply ask the website to do work for them, using a text-dialogue box. You could, for instance, ask the system to put a batch of LinkedIn profiles into Salesforce or create a CAD model. If successful, this approach to navigating software could arguably make certain user interfaces obsolete, a kind of behind-the-scenes plumbing that humans no longer have to steer. Why design an array of colorful menus and webpages when AI services will do most of the trawling through them anyway?



OpenAI appears to be working on both approaches; it has built ChatGPT as an entity that people can talk to, but its also designing a more functional system that will integrate into everyday enterprise as a kind of work tool, similar to what Adept is developing, and also comparable to Microsoft Copilot, a product Microsoft is bringing to market as a result of its use of OpenAIs technology, according to a recent report in The Information. That could put OpenAI in an awkward position with Microsoft, its lead investor.



Pushing into functional AI  and at the risk of upsetting Microsoft  says a lot about where OpenAIs CEO Sam Altman sees so-called conversational AI in the future: as both a separate entity that well converse with and something thats built into our infrastructure. And it seems that in any case, well be talking to computers much more than we do now.



Parmy Olson is a Bloomberg Opinion columnist covering technology. Views are personal and do not represent the stand of this publication.



Credit: Bloomberg
Senior Congress leader Prithviraj Chavan on Monday claimed he has information that the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) has promised Ajit Pawar the post of Maharashtra chief minister.



With Ajit Pawar's move to join the ruling Eknath Shinde-BJP coalition on Sunday changing political dynamics in Maharashtra, Shiv Sena (UBT) leader Sanjay Raut also claimed that Shinde will lose the CM's post.



On Sunday, Ajit Pawar led a vertical split in the NCP to become the deputy chief minister, shocking his uncle Sharad Pawar, who founded the party 24 years ago.



Eight NCP leaders were also sworn in as ministers in the Eknath Shinde-Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) government.



To a query, Chavan while speaking to reporters in Karad said, "I had spoken about it (that Ajit Pawar may go with BJP) publicly but I faced criticism." The Congress leader said he knew this was happening.



"Just bargaining was going on over what he (Ajit) should be getting. As per our information, he has been given a promise of chief minister's post by pushing Eknath Shinde aside with the help of Assembly speaker's decision (on disqualification of 16 Shiv Sena MLAs)," the former CM claimed.



Chavan was at 'Pritisangam', the memorial of Maharashtra's first CM Yashwantrao Chavan.



NCP chief visited the memorial in Karad and paid floral tributes to the late leader.



Prithviraj Chavan said, "He (Sharad Pawar) is one of the constituents of Maha Vikas Aghadi (MVA) and I am here to extend support to him." "Pawar Saheb is standing strong behind the opposition unity at the national level and he is going to attend the opposition meet in Bengaluru," he added.



The Congress leader also told PTI that if the MVA had stayed united and strong, the BJP-Eknath Shinde alliance would have had no chance in elections due to the "sympathy factor" for former CM Uddhav Thackeray and the Congress and NCP coming together with him.



The Lok Sabha and Maharashtra Assembly elections are due next year.



"There would be all attempts to break us and that is what has happened,'' Prithviraj Chavan said referring to the move by Ajit Pawar and eight other senior NCP leaders to join the government.



He also said state Assembly Speaker Rahul Narwekar has to take a decision on the disqualification of 16 Shiv Sena MLAs, including CM Eknath Shinde, by August 11, failing which the MVA will move the Supreme Court.



Prithviraj Chavan also said Sunday's developments were like preparing the ground "to save the government" if the 16 Sena MLAs are disqualified.



Talking to PTI, Shiv Sena (UBT) leader Sanjay Raut claimed, "Shinde will surely lose the CM's post." "Let the July 5 meeting of NCP called by Sharad Pawar take place, we will then sit together to chart the road ahead. Uddhav Thackeray has called a meeting of his supporters tomorrow. We will remain united," the Rajya Sabha member said.



Maharashtra Congress vice president Ratnakar Mahajan said the political climate in Maharashtra has for the first time become "chaotic".



Every body seems to be confused about what will happen in the future.



"One thing is certain that everyone wants power. In such a situation, neither issues nor values matter. For the general public it is disappointing," he said.



Against this backdrop, the outcome of elections due next year has become more unpredictable, he said.



"Many surprises will be seen in terms of coalitions, leaders involved and people's participation. Ultimately people suffer in the process," Mahajan said.



Speaking about his party, Mahajan said for the time being Congress is member of the MVA. "Future stand will depend on the situation that develops," he added.



However, state BJP vice president Madhav Bhandari said there is no chaos over two Shiv Sena factions and two NCPs.



''The people who thought they own the parties have been left out and are on one side, while the organisation and workers are on the other side. It is too early to speak about how the developments will play out in future. We have to wait and watch,'' he said.



Shiv Sena (UBT) Lok Sabha member Vinayak Raut, while speaking to a TV channel, demanded that Uddhav Thackeray chart out a separate political path out of the MVA.



With the changing political dynamics in Maharashtra, Maharashtra is likely to see two Shiv Sena factions as well as two of the NCP battle it out for political space along with the Congress and BJP in the Lok Sabha and the state Assembly polls next year.



Maharashtra sends 48 MPs to the Lok Sabha, the second highest after Uttar Pradesh.



Despite the rebellion in the Shiv Sena last year, which result in the collapse of the MVA government, the three allies Congress, NCP and Shiv Sena (UBT) had appeared to stand united and face the BJP at the hustings.



The alliance had even tasted success in the biennial elections to the Legislative Council and the Assembly bypoll in Kasba seat of Pune.
Hours after NCP leader Ajit Pawar took oath as deputy chief minister in the Eknath Shinde government, party's working president and his cousin Supriya Sule on Sunday said the developments in the party will not impact the Opposition's unity.



Addressing a press conference late night in Mumbai, Sule said her father and Nationalist Congress Party (NCP) chief Sharad Pawar's stature will rise further.



"Our credibility will only rise after this," she said.



She also said that Ajit Pawar may have different views, but she can never fight with her elder brother and that she will always love him as a sister.



Ajit Pawar on Sunday joined the Shiv Sena-BJP government in Maharashtra as deputy chief minister, while eight other party leaders were inducted as ministers.



Sule, whose elevation as party working president last month is said to have triggered Ajit Pawar's revolt, said since 2019 when he first joined the short-lived government led by Devendra Fadnavis to 2023, she has matured a lot with the responsibility of the party.



She said she will not mix personal and professional relationships.



"I can never have a fight with my brother," she said.



"I am boring, steady and not impulsive...Emotional relationships and professional work are two different things. I will.never mix the two," she said.



To a question on how her day was in view of the hectic political developments, Sule said it was a challenging day like many other days.



To a question on what transpired at the meeting at 'Devgiri', Ajit Pawar's official residence in Mumbai in the morning, Sule said what was discussed between her and her brother will remain between them only.



The Baramati MP said the party will work with renewed vigour for strengthening the organisation and for the welfare of the state and the country.



To a question on whether any disciplinary action would be taken against those who joined the government, she said, "Let the story unfold. It has not even been 12 hours." Nationalist Congress Party's senior leader Ajit Pawar on Sunday met some party leaders and MLAs at his official residence in Mumbai.



Sule said Ajit Pawar may have different views. "We both are mature enough to compartmentalise our lives on personal and professional fronts," she said.



"Nobody knows how many MLAs are with Ajit Pawar," Sule said.



When asked if she was talking to any of them, she said, "I talk to them every time. Every MLA of NCP is precious. We have love, affection and respect. We have lived as a family," she said.
The next meeting of opposition parties will be held in Bengaluru on July 17 and 18, the Congress announced on Monday, and asserted that their resolve to defeat the BJP has been strengthened by the "Mumbai operations" of the "BJP washing machine".



Announcing Opposition meeting dates on Twitter, Congress general secretary (organisation) K C Venugopal said "we are steadfast in our unwavering resolve to defeat the fascist and undemocratic forces".



"After a hugely successful all-opposition meeting in Patna, we will be holding the next meeting in Bengaluru on 17 and 18 July 2023. We are steadfast in our unwavering resolve to defeat the fascist and undemocratic forces and present a bold vision to take the country forward," Venugopal said.



Meanwhile, Congress general secretary (Communications) Jairam Ramesh took a dig at the BJP over the NCP's Ajit Pawar and eight other leaders being inducted into the Eknath Shinde-led Maharashtra government.



"Yesterday when the BJP Washing Machine restarted in Mumbai with its ICE (Income tax, CBI, ED) detergent, BJP-inspired obituaries on Opposition unity were being planted. The obit writers will be disappointed. The next meeting of the parties that met at Patna on June 23rd will be held in Bengaluru on July 17th & 18th," he said.



"If anything the Mumbai operations have strengthened Opposition resolve," Ramesh said on Twitter.



In a swipe at Prime Minister Narendra Modi, Ramesh posted a meme of 'Modi Washing Powder' with the tagline 'saare daag chutkiyon mein dhule (removes all stains in a jiffy)'.



TMC's leader in Rajya Sabha Derek O'Brien also tagged Venugopal's tweet and said, "Bengaluru Summit. All For One. One For All." Sources in the Opposition camp said the leaders will meet in the evening of July 17 in an informal setting apart from bilateral meetings followed by a more formal interaction the next day.



A senior leader said that the Bengaluru meeting will focus on issues of broad agreement among the parties and added that all future deliberations between the top opposition leaders will be called 'summits'.



Earlier, Nationalist Congress Party (NCP) chief Sharad Pawar had said the next opposition meeting will be held in Bengaluru on July 13-14. Those dates were said to be clashing with the Assembly sessions in a few states.



The first meeting of opposition parties was held in Bihar's Patna on June 23.



At that meeting, Opposition parties had resolved to take on the BJP unitedly in the 2024 Lok Sabha elections, even as fissures had emerged with the AAP asserting that it would be difficult for it to be part of any such gathering in the future till the Congress publicly supports it on the ordinance issue.



At a joint press conference after the Patna meeting, opposition parties had said they would fight the polls on a common agenda and state-wise strategy, setting aside their differences with a flexible approach.
You might have already heard the news. Reliance's entry-level feature phone just got cheaper with the announcement of the JioBharat V2.



The 4G-enabled feature phone has been priced at Rs 999, making it a great deal along with Jio's network plans for the device but does it hold enough power to be truly game changing?



Jio Bharat V2 specifications



Compared to the Jio Phone 2, which was launched in 2018, the JioBharat V2 has a smaller display with a 1.77-inch QVGA TFT screen, in place of the slightly larger 2.4-inch QVGA TFT display on the Phone 2.



While bigger displays are nicer, the aim of the JioBharat V2 is to be affordable enough for the Indians still stuck on 2G feature phones, which have a similar screen.



Also read | Reliance Jio launches internet-enabled 'Jio Bharat' phone at Rs 999



While we don't know what processor is being used in the Bharat V2, the JioPhone 2 used Qualcomm's 4G chipset for feature phones. It was a dual-core processor clocked at 1GHz accompanied by 512MB of RAM.



Given the low price of the Bharat V2, expect something a little weaker in terms of performance. As with the Jio Phone 2, the Bharat V2 will support SD cards up to 128GB.



By far the biggest loss in terms of functionality is the smaller battery, which clocks in at 1,000mAh, compared to the 2,000mAh from Phone 2.



So far, the only apps Reliance Jio has confirmed for Bharat V2 are Jio Pay, the company's UPI payment app, JioCinema for access to movies, videos and sports, and JioSaavn, the music streaming service. For Jio Phone 2, Jio offered support for Google Assistant, MyJio, JioSaavn, JioTV, JioCinema, JioPay and more.



It's worth noting that WhatsApp was made available a few months after launch and Google's YouTube app also found itself way on to the phone a week after that.



Also gone is the front facing camera, which is honestly not that big of a loss considering the Phone 2 had 0.3-megapixel front-facing camera. Meanwhile, the rear camera is now 0.3-megapixel in place of the 2-megapixel rear camera on the Phone 2.



You also miss out on a full QWERTY keypad but given the cheaper price, that makes sense.



Also read | Reliance Jio announces Jio Bharat V2 phone platform, beta trials start on July 7



Overall, the Bharat V2 makes some compromises but is also a lot cheaper than the Jio Phone 2, which is being sold for Rs 2,999.



Priced at Rs 999, this is one of the cheapest internet-connect 4G feature phones you can buy. The primary goal of this phone is to get it into the hands of more than 250 million people in India, that are still stuck on 2G feature phones, and at that price, the Bharat V2 is a tempting offer.



Disclaimer: Moneycontrol is a part of the Network18 group. Network18 is controlled by Independent Media Trust, of which Reliance Industries is the sole beneficiary.
The traditional path to success often includes obtaining a college degree, but according to Austin Russell, the world's youngest self-made billionaire, that is not always necessary. Russell, who dropped out of Stanford University in 2012 to start his company, Luminar Technologies, believes that college is not for everyone.



Luminar Technologies, his tech startup focused on developing hardware and software for self-driving cars, is currently valued at an impressive $2.6 billion. Reflecting on his choice, Russell told CNBC Make It, "If you're wondering if I would have dropped out [without the grant], yeah. Absolutely. There was no doubt in anyone's mind."



College is not for everyone, he says. Its just sort of the traditional approach around what you do and what youre supposed to do.



While some may argue that a college degree is essential for success, a recent Wall Street Journal poll found that 56% of Americans believe that a four-year degree is not worth it.



Scepticism about the practicality of higher education has been steadily increasing over the years. However, experts still maintain that a college degree provides favourable outcomes, such as better pay and higher-skill job opportunities.



Russell challenges the notion that a college education is the only path to knowledge and success. "All this information is available at our fingertips now online. This is not something that was true 50 years ago, [but] it totally is true now."



Russell personally leveraged online resources to enhance his education, watching lecture sets for Stanford and MIT applied physics at an accelerated pace.



But the 28-year-old acknowledges that self-education requires initiative and drive. He emphasizes the importance of taking the initiative to seek knowledge independently, particularly for entrepreneurs.



Russell states, "There is no one that will be holding your hand along the way... You are directly accountable for at least all the things that are in your control."



Reflecting on his decision, Russell expresses no regrets. He believes that leaving college played a significant role in his early success, stating, "I've been very fortunate and thankful to see great success at still a very early age."



Russell joins the ranks of other successful business moguls who dropped out of college, including Steve Jobs and Bill Gates. Jobs left Reed College at age 19 due to financial constraints on his family, while Gates attended Harvard for two years before departing to build Microsoft.
Ajit Pawar, the newly appointed Deputy Chief Minister of Maharashtra posted a Gurupurnima message on Twitter, days after he rebelled against his uncle and mentor Sharad Pawars Nationalist Congress Party to join the ruling BJP-Shiv Sena alliance in the state.



On the occasion of 'Gurupurnima', salutations to all the Gurus who bring the light of knowledge in our lives, develop personality, strengthen the wings of dreams and inculcate virtuous thoughts in us to make us an ideal citizen! Happy 'Guru Purnima' to all! Pawar tweeted in Marathi.



The tweet comes a day after Pawar joined hands with the BJP against his mentors wishes citing that development of the state was the main reason for the step. Sharad Pawar made it clear that this does not sit in with the NCPs principles.



pic.twitter.com/9K2O5jFB7B

 Ajit Pawar (@AjitPawarSpeaks) July 3, 2023

Ajit Pawar is the son of Sharad Pawars brother Anantrao and joined politics and in 1982. He was elected as an MP in 1991 and had even vacated his seat for his uncle  the then defence minister in PV Narasimha Raos government.



He was a constant by his uncles side since and when Pawar formed his own party NCP in 1999, Ajit Pawar stuck by him. His political career flourished in the next 20 years as he got re-elected every poll from Baramati as an MLA, since 1995. He held important portfolios and ministries and was touted as the heir apparent to NCP.



But problems between the uncle and nephew cropped up in 2019 after Ajit Pawars son Maval lost the elections at a NCP stronghold  a big blow to the family and party. Things soured and Ajit Pawar broke away from the party and joined hands with the BJP to become the deputy chief minister for a mere 80 hours when Devendra Fadnavis took oath in a hush hush ceremony post Senas split from BJP.



Sena, NCP and Congress joined hands to rule the state, and Pawar was back with his uncle and served as the deputy CM under Uddhav Thackeray from two-and-a-half years before the alliance collapsed in 2022.



In May, Supriya Sule and Praful Patel were appointed as NCPs working presidents by Sharad Pawar, considered to be a major blow for Ajit Pawar. On Sunday Pawar took oath as deputy chief minister for the fifth time in the state, much to his uncles dismay who did not want to join hands with the BJP. He will be sharing the post with Fadnavis.



Ajit Pawar takes oath as second Deputy CM of Maharashtra



Sharad Pawar said of his nephews split: Todays episode may be new for others, but not for me. We will not fight over anyone saying anything by taking NCPs name; we will go to people.
Former HDFC Chairman Deepak Parekh announced his retirement in a rather emotional letter ahead of the mega merger with HDFC Bank. The merger took place on July 1 making HDFC the fourth largest bank in the world. Meanwhile, Parekh announced his retirement on June 30 saying it is time for him to hang up boots.



While we are on this, let us tell you about a certain offer letter that has surfaced online. The letter dated July 19, 1978 was for Parekh when he was offered a job as the Deputy General Manager at HDFC.



According to the components of the offer letter, Parekhs basic salary was Rs 3,500 plus Rs 500 as a fixed Dearness Allowance. He was also entitled to 15% Housing Rent Allowance and a City Compensatory Allowance at 10%.



In addition, Parekh was also entitled to Corporations Provident Fund, gratuity, medical benefits and leave travel facilities as per rules. HDFC was also willing to reimburse the expense of his residential telephone.







Meanwhile, a heartwarming tribute was given to the veteran banker by RPG Chairman Harsh Goenka. The businessman compared the bankers retirement to the day when Sachin Tendulkar retired. Goenka also hailed Parekh as a true titan in the financial world.



In Deepak Parekhs retirement, I feel the same today as I felt the day Sachin Tendulkar retired. A true titan in the financial world, a crisis advisor to both governments and many senior industrialists, he has been instrumental in making #HDFC a trusted and a household name, Goenka tweeted while sharing a picture of Parekh.



"It is my time to hang my boots with both anticipation and hope for the future. While this will be my last communication to shareholders of HDFC, rest assured we now stride tall into a very exciting future of growth and prosperity," Parekh told shareholders amid his retirement.



Deepak Parekh, 78, will not be taking up any role in the bank. HDFC Chief Executive Officer Keki Mistry is likely to join the bank's Board subject to clearance from the Reserve Bank of India.




















An Indigo flight from Lucknow to Chennai was diverted to Delhi on Sunday after a pilot refused to take off from the Uttar Pradesh capital citing fatigue.



The incident took place on Indigo 6E-518, which started from Dehradun and stops at Lucknow before flying to its destination of Chennai. The crisis unfolded at the Lucknow airport when the pilot refused to proceed to Chennai. The plane had landed in Lucknow at 8:20 pm.



The pilot cited FDTL (flight duty time limitation) norms for not flying further, sources told Moneycontrol.



The Delhi to Lucknow flight was delayed by around two hours due to weather conditions. The time limitation norms kicked in when the flight landed in Lucknow, sources added.



A Twitter user shared screenshots of messages from his wife who was on the flight.



Captain is exhausted it seems. He cannot do it anymore, Sameer Mohans wife wrote in WhatsApp messages.

So he asked someone (some other captain) to take us.



Responding to another passenger, Indigo cited operation reasons for the delay from the Lucknow airport.



Pilots parked the flight and walked off. Crew has no information and they are very tired too. Too poor situation handling by @IndiGo6E, passenger Ketharinath Kamalanathan said in a series of tweets.



He also accused the airline of not giving proper food and refreshments to passengers during the ordeal which lasted for over nine hours, as well as poor communication from the airline.



This is the second such case in a week in which a pilot has refused take-off. Last Sunday, around 350 passengers on an Air India flight from London to Delhi were stranded in Jaipur for about three hours after their pilot refused to fly citing flight duty time limitations and duty hours.



The flight was diverted to Jaipur due to bad weather in Delhi. The pilot refused to proceed to Delhi after the flight got clearance to head to the national capital, citing working hours, India Today had reported. After several hours, a replacement crew was arranged, and the flight proceeded to Delhi.
International Plastic Bag Free Day is annually celebrated on July 3. The aim behind the observing the day is to create awareness about the hazardous effects of single-use plastic bags on the environment. Additionally, the day also serves as a reminder for individuals and communities globally to decrease their reliance on plastic bags and look for sustainable solutions as an alternative. Here's the history, theme and significance of International Plastic Bag Free Day: International Plastic Bag Free Day 2023- History International Plastic Bag Free Day was an initiative that was started by the Bag Free World campaign, a global movement whose objective to decrease the use of single-use plastic bags. Zero World Europe, a community of networks, launched a campaign against single-use plastic bags on July 3 2008. The European Union, in 2015, passed specific directives to decrease the dependence on single-use plastic bags. International Plastic Bag Free Day 2023- Theme There is no specific theme for 2023 International Plastic Bag Free day. International Plastic Bag Free Day 2023- Significance The significance of International Plastic Bag Free Day is to create a consciousness to take measures towards decrease the dependency on plastic bags and promoting other alternative solutions that are sustainable. Additionally, the day also encourages the public to change their behavior against the use of plastic bags in a bid to achieve a healthier environment. Alternatives to Plastic Bags Some of the sustainable alternatives for plastic bags are reusable cotton bags, mesh bags and paper bags. Also read: Packaging goes green: Say no to single-use plastic and yes to sustainable packaging solutions

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Israel will buy 25 F-35 aircraft from the United States, the Israeli Defense Ministry announced Sunday, in a deal that increases Israels arsenal of the stealth fighter jets by 50%. The F-35 is the worlds most advanced fighter jet, and Israel is the only country in the Middle East to fly them. The $3 billion purchase, which increases the Israeli fleet of F-35 jets from 50 to 75, is set to be finalized in the coming months, the ministry said. It said the deal would be financed through American military aid to Israel and that the maker of the plane, Lockheed Martin, and the maker of its engine, Pratt & Whitney, had committed to involving Israeli companies in the production process. The new agreement will ensure the continuation of cooperation between American companies and Israeli defense industries in the production of aircraft parts, the statement read. The move to expand the Israeli arsenal comes at a time of heightened tensions between Israel and Iran. Israel, which considers Iran its greatest enemy, has previously used F-35 jets to shoot down Iranian drones, and has threatened to carry out a long-range strike on Iranian nuclear targets. Israel accuses Iran of trying to develop a nuclear weapon  a charge Iran denies  and is believed to be behind a string of attacks on Iranian nuclear experts and facilities inside Iran over the years. Israel, which has sought to counter Iranian entrenchment in neighboring Syria, conducted an airstrike on the Syrian city of Homs on Sunday, one of hundreds of strikes on government-controlled parts of Syria in recent years.

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Norge Mining, an Anglo-Norwegian company, announced the discovery of massive deposits of ultra-rich phosphate rock, vanadium and titanium in south-west Norway this June.



The deposit is estimated to contain 70 billion metric tons of phosphate rock, according to EURACTIV, an independent media company specializing in EU policy. This is about the same as the proven global reserves of phosphate, which are estimated to be 71 billion metric tons, per the US Geological Survey report 2022.



Phosphate, an essential element used for production in the fertiliser industry was part of the European Commissions March proposal for a Critical Raw Materials Act.



Nearly 90 percent of mined phosphate rock is used for the production of phosphorous for the fertilizer industry, for which there is no substitute yet. Notably, the global food supply chain largely banks on the fertilizer industry, and is highly sensitive to price shocks, as seen in the initial days of the Russia-Ukraine geopolitical tensions.



Moreover, phosphorous is used for manufacturing solar panels, and next-generation lithium batteries for electric cars, semiconductors, and computer chips, owing to their higher energy density, enhanced safety, and longer life span than their lithium-ion counterparts.



The European Commission has flagged these products, manufactured in small quantities, as being of strategic importance in a bid to maintain Europes stand as a global powerhouse in the production of key technologies for green and digital transition.



Till date, the biggest phosphate rock deposits have been largely concentrated in the Western Sahara region of Morocco (50 billion tonnes), followed by China (3.2 tonnes), Egypt (2.8 billion tonnes), and Algeria (2.2 billion tonnes). Russia too has rich deposits of phosphate, vanadium and titanium. Virtually none of the biggest phosphate mines are in the West.



The recent discovery of the massive deposit of underground phosphate rock in Norway, however, changes the narrative. Being pitched as the worlds largest; this deposit is big enough to meet the rising global demand for fertilisers, solar panels, and electric-car for at least the next 100 years, as claimed by Norge Mining.



This crucial discovery comes amid the heated up metallurgical rivalry in Europes far north, at a time when economies and corporations are joining forces to find solutions to more sustainable ways of living in a bid to curtail the burden on non-renewable resources and bring down carbon footprint.



Also, countries have been aggressively trying to cushion their mineral reserves from export, given the rate at which the known supplies of high-grade phosphate rock are depleting on continued exploitation to meet the ever-rising global demand. These supplies are all restricted to four-five suppliers outside of Europe.



Norge Mining has wrapped up exploring after discovering that the deposit is larger than what was initially anticipated. It first made the discovery in 2018 when the deposit was estimated to extend 300 meters underground. However, it was later discovered that the deposit ran 4,500 meters deep  further than it is even possible to drill, the report said.



Michael Wurmser, Norge Minings Co-Ceo, stated that the new mines will be greener than the existing ones. The company intends to capture the carbon emissions from its operations and store the same.



While getting a green light for all environmental permits will be a daunting task, the mine is a high priority for the Norway government, as well as for Europe and the US. As discussed above, these minerals fall under the EUs Critical Raw Materials Act and an American strategic-minerals scheme.



Since the phosphate deposit also contains vanadium and titanium, raw materials for the aerospace and defense sectors, two significant airplane manufacturers have already expressed their interest in the titanium deposit, as per EURACTIV.



Neighbouring Sweden recently discovered rare-earth metals in its far northern region. These ground-breaking discoveries will only act as strategic arms for the West in its ever-intensifying rivalry with Moscow and Beijing. And this is no less than a boon for Europe, to say the least.
The battery arm of Japan's Panasonic will need to build around four more factories to meet a plan to sharply boost annual capacity of batteries for electric vehicles by 2031, its head of technology told Reuters.



The comments from Panasonic Energy Chief Technology Officer Shoichiro Watanabe mark the first time the Telsa supplier has given a clear indication of the number of additional factories it will need.



It could also fuel expectations of more investment by Japanese companies into the United States, after Washington and Tokyo struck a deal in March that is key to giving Japanese manufacturers wider access to U.S. electric-vehicle (EV) tax credits.



Panasonic Energy said in May it aims to boost annual EV capacity to 200 gigawatt hours (GWh) by early 2031, around four times greater than its capacity as of March this year. It has a plant in Nevada and is building a second one in Kansas that once operational is expected to bring annual capacity to 80 GWh, it has said.



"We will need to build around another four factories," Watanabe said in an interview at Panasonic Energy's headquarters in Osaka on Friday.



He stopped short of mentioning specific locations, time frames or investment sizes. He also signalled an openness to potential joint ventures for EV battery production - including with automaker Mazda Motor - citing the changing nature of such projects, where the investment is no longer shouldered by battery makers alone.



"The style where battery producers will make all investments is disappearing," he said.



The 200 GWh capacity is the minimum necessary to be a major player in the space, Watanabe said.
For more than 13 years, Piyush Gupta has led one of Singapores most iconic institutions, the bank that helped turn the Southeast Asian city-state into one of the richest countries in the world.



In his time as chief executive officer at DBS Group Holdings Ltd., Gupta has built the lender into Singapores largest listed company, moved early into wealth management and other key business areas and delivered equity returns that outstrip global peers.



Now, that very success is creating an elephant in the room.



At conferences, shareholder meetings and townhalls, people who watch the bank closely are quietly asking the same questions: Whos going to replace the 63-year-old executive when his long stint ends? When will that happen? And will they be able to emulate his run? Even after a recent series of online banking disruptions angered retail customers, industry observers say Guptas record is intact  and the banks biggest challenge is finding his successor.



These issues should have no bearing on Piyushs legacy, nor are they unique to DBS, said Vikram Pandit, who was CEO of Citigroup Inc. from 2007 to 2012 and overlapped with Gupta at the US bank. Its always hard to imagine how a new leader can step into the shoes of a highly successful predecessor, he said. But great CEOs and institutions have well-defined succession plans.



Its a textbook example of the phenomenon known as key-person risk, a reminder that companies must be ready for when a longtime chief departs. And theres much more at stake than just the share price: So integral is DBS to Singapore that how it solves the puzzle matters to the city-state as a whole.



Gupta is in many ways the Jamie Dimon of Singapore, the highest-profile banker leading the countrys largest lender and surrounded by succession speculation. And while DBS says Gupta isnt going anywhere, the bank has been making moves that some see as precursors to eventually passing the baton.



In February, DBS unveiled a major leadership reorganization, ensuring the four people earmarked as internal candidates for the top post hold some of the most important jobs.



Shee Tse Koon, the then Singapore country head, took over consumer banking and wealth management, the No. 2 revenue-generator. Han Kwee Juan, who Gupta hired from Citi in 2019, moved into Shees old role. Lim Him Chuan, 54, the longest-serving of the four, relocated to Singapore to replace Han as group head of strategy and planning. The fourth, and the only woman, Tan Su Shan, kept her position running institutional banking, DBSs crown jewel.



Tan, 55, is credited with expanding the consumer and wealth business, which accounted for about a third of pretax profit by the time she moved to her current job in 2019. Shee, 53, spent more than two decades at Standard Chartered Plc in London, Dubai and as CEO for Indonesia. Han, also 55, worked at Citi for 27 years, running businesses including treasury and markets, corporate and investment banking and cash management. And Lim previously ran the Taiwan unit for almost five years, while also holding roles in areas including institutional banking.



People familiar with the matter say theres no clear favorite to inherit Guptas 45th-floor office at the Marina Bay Financial Centre, the banks headquarters overlooking Singapores waterfront. Hiring an outsider also cant be ruled out, the people said, asking not to be identified discussing private information.



A departure without a clear succession plan and new leader seen to be able to execute strongly may negatively impact the stock, said Kevin Kwek, a former analyst at Sanford C. Bernstein who covered banks including DBS for more than a decade. Still, he says any selloff would be temporary because the bench is prepared well and Gupta has already gotten the hardest part done.



DBS has been preparing for Guptas succession for about 10 years, according to a person familiar with the matter. The bank is looking for someone who can do things differently going into the next decade as technologies such as artificial intelligence increase in importance, the person said, asking not to be identified discussing confidential information.



DBS has deep bench strength and is committed to grooming talent from within, said Karen Ngui, a spokeswoman for the bank. The February reshuffle testifies to that, she said. At present, Piyush has no plans to retire, and any speculation on potential CEO candidates is thus premature.



DBS was founded in 1968, three years after Singapore was expelled from Malaysia and became an independent country. It was called Development Bank of Singapore, a nod to the role it was expected to play in financing the nations emerging industries. DBS went on to lead the initial public offerings of some of Singapore Inc.s iconic companies, including Singapore Airlines Ltd. in 1985 and Singapore Telecommunications Ltd. in 1993.



Today, its Southeast Asias largest bank by assets, with about 36,000 employees in 19 markets. Its city-state home is also thriving. Singapores gross domestic product per capita, based on purchasing power parity, ranks third in the world at $133,890, according to the International Monetary Fund.







When Gupta joined as CEO in November 2009, things werent going so well for DBS. His predecessor, Richard Stanley, had died of leukemia 11 months into the job. Under Jackson Tai, the chief before Stanley, the bank had suffered losses on collateralized debt obligations, along with its Singapore peers. Efforts to expand into emerging economies, a key ambition for Singapore banks stuck in a small local market, had also stalled.



India-born Gupta, who had spent 27 years at Citi and is known for having hands-on experience in many parts of the industry, quickly made changes.



One early decision was to beef up transaction banking, a combination of cash management and trade finance that Gupta knew well from his time at Citi. Another was to strengthen wealth management, including through the 2014 acquisition of Societe Generale SAs Asian private banking arm. The strategy both foresaw and accelerated Singapores development as a wealth management hub, the Switzerland of Southeast Asia. In both categories, Gupta built DBS from a low base into a major player in Asia. Both, in turn, strengthened DBSs advantage at home.







Gupta  a charismatic figure who became a Singapore citizen in 2009  also started to focus more on technology. This included hiring more engineers and building the banks digital offerings. DBS has been investing about S$1 billion ($739 million) annually in technology over the past decade in areas such as cloud computing and artificial intelligence.



In 2021, it was named the worlds best digital bank by Euromoney, a trade publication. The next year, Harvard Business School published a case study on areas including its embrace of digital technology.



But in 2021, DBS suffered its worst outage in a decade, when its online banking services experienced disruptions during the period from Nov. 23 to Nov. 25. In March and May this year, two more incidents angered customers and drew punishment from the regulator. After the May episode, the Monetary Authority of Singapore imposed an additional capital requirement and said the inconvenience caused was unacceptable.



Despite vocal public criticism, analysts were largely sanguine. While Kwek said the outages raised some questions about the causes and how to fix them, he thought they werent due to Gupta scrimping on IT spending.



Guptas track record may provide some explanation for this reaction. Under him, DBS increased return on equity to 15.7% as of March, up from 8.1% in September 2009, just before he took over. HSBC Holdings Plcs ROE is 13%, Standard Chartereds is 5.9%, while Citis is 7.6%, according to data compiled by Bloomberg.



DBSs stock has gained 141% since the start of November 2009, the month in which Gupta became CEO, compared with a 21% increase for Singapores benchmark Straits Times Index. It trades at 1.4 times book value, versus 1.1 times for Oversea-Chinese Banking Corp. and 1 time for United Overseas Bank Ltd., its two local peers. It became Singapores largest listed stock in 2017, overtaking Singtel, and its market value is now about S$81 billion.







On the digital outages, Gupta argued the banks infrastructure is robust in an interview with Yousef Gamal El-Din at the Dubai FinTech Summit in May. He said penalizing people every time something goes wrong works against building a culture of risk-taking.



Not everyone sees it that way.



I do think the series of digital disruptions will taint Piyushs legacy, said Sarah Jane Mahmud, a Bloomberg Intelligence analyst. It will be hard to come back from this anytime soon.



Another criticism of Guptas tenure is DBS is still too reliant on Singapore after his years in charge. As of 2022, the city-state contributed close to 65% of the banks revenue, broadly similar to when he started. Under Gupta, DBS made acquisitions in India and Taiwan but failed to buy PT Bank Danamon Indonesia in 2013. That may set DBS back by five years in Southeast Asias largest economy, he said at the time. DBS spokeswoman Ngui said the bank is growing fast both in Singapore and overseas, and this is a sign of strength.



Tony Fernandes, who turned around budget airline AirAsia, focuses on the positives.



Hes an all-star banker, said Fernandes, whos known Gupta since 2003 when the banking executive was Citis head for Malaysia. Gupta will stick by clients in tough times, rather than being swayed by short-term risk management, he said. Hes speaking from experience. Like many airlines, AirAsia got into difficulties during the pandemic. In many cases, its risks that run the banks, Fernandes said. Piyush has a slightly different opinion.



Fernandes, himself preparing to step back at AirAsia, said theres no indication Gupta will retire anytime soon, and DBS wont be badly affected when he does. But he said a good leader knows when the time has come.



For watchers of Singapores biggest bank, the question then will be whether his successor measures up.
A measure has been introduced in the US House to ban imported products containing minerals critical to electric vehicle batteries but mined through child labour and other abusive conditions in Congo, where China has enormous mining stakes.



The bill targets China, which sponsor Republican Rep. Chris Smith of New Jersey says uses forced labour and exploits children to mine cobalt in the impoverished but resource-rich central African country.



Congo is the world's largest producer of cobalt, a mineral used to make lithium-ion batteries for electric vehicles, a key pillar of President Joe Biden's climate plans.



China controls the majority of the cobalt mines in Congo, strengthening Beijing's position in the global supply chain for electric vehicles and other products.



On the backs of trafficked workers and child labourers, the Chinese Communist Party is exploiting the vast cobalt resources of the Democratic Republic of Congo to fuel its economy and global agenda, Smith's office said in a statement following the bill's introduction Friday.



The legislation comes amid strained ties between the US and China. Biden referred to Chinese President Xi Jinping as a dictator  during a campaign fundraiser last month, leading to outcry from Beijing.



That has followed tensions over a Chinese surveillance balloon that the US government shot down, US-led restrictions on China's access to advanced computer chips, and the status and security of Taiwan.



But the Biden administration is looking to ease those tensions with a visit to China this week from US Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen, following Secretary of State Antony Blinken's two-day stop in Beijing last month.



China holds a 68 per cent stake in Sicomines, the copper and cobalt joint venture with Congo's state mining firm Gecamines, following a 2008 infrastructure-for-minerals deal, which Congo now is seeking to review over concerns it gets too little benefit from the arrangement.



Congo is also Africa's top producer of copper, and lithium was recently found there  also key components of EV batteries.



The extraction of the minerals has been linked to child and exploitative labour, environmental abuses and safety risks.



In a 2016 report, Amnesty International blamed Chinese firms for child labour in Congo's cobalt mining and multinational tech firms for failing to address the negative human rights issue in their supply chains.



The US legislation would prohibit importing goods, wares, articles, or merchandise containing metals or minerals, in particular cobalt and lithium and their derivatives, mined, produced, smelted or processed, wholly or in part, by child labor or forced labour in the DRC, Smith's office said.



The measure also would require the president to identify and impose sanctions, including visa and transaction prohibitions, on foreign actors who facilitate and exploit child labour in Congo.



In a blow to American production, an Australian mining company that had been set to open the only cobalt mine in the US halted construction on the Idaho project in March, citing falling cobalt prices fuelled by competition from China and Congo.



Jervois Global CEO Bryce Crocker said the company expects to complete construction of the mine and commission it when cobalt prices recover.



The US Defense Department has awarded the company USD 15 million for drilling and a feasibility study of a cobalt refinery in the US Cobalt is considered a critical mineral by the US government due to its use in the military and energy sectors.
United Malt shares jump 8.98% this afternoon after announcing Malteries Soufflet signed a deal to buy out the craft beer and distillery producer for $5 per share. The deal still needs sign-off but could be a big move for malt producers worldwide.

United Malt Group [ASX:UMG] shares have jumped up by 8.98% today, trading at $4.79 per share this afternoon after announcing UMG has entered a binding deal with Malteries Soufflet, a branch of French agribusiness InVivo. Under the deal, Malteries Soufflet will acquire the company for $5 per share.

The buyout represents a 45.3% premium to the share price at the time of the announcement. The agreement marks the end of a drawn-out period of dealmaking for the bulk beer and whiskey malt producer, where the company has been seen as a darling of the industry with many interested suitors.

Share prices in the past 12 months have been up by 38.82%, which is 30% above the sectors performance as many consumer defensive companies struggled with rising costs and reduced demand across the board.



Source: TradingView

United Malt signs drawn-out deal

UMG has signed a scheme implementation deed with Malteries Soufflet, a leading global malt producer. The agreement will see Malteries Soufflet acquiring 100% of the shares in United Malt at $5 per share  a deal worth AU$1.5 billion.

Shareholders can finally breathe after a nail-biting end to the drawn-out due diligence process that started at the end of March.

The 10-week look at UMGs books came and went without a deal as the French agribusiness giant faced data issues conducting due diligence.

Then, midway through the process, UMG reported a 17% drop in half-year earnings, which prompted further investigation by the Malteries Soufflet and clouded the process.

The delay freed UMG from exclusivity and allowed them to look elsewhere for offers.

UMG was comfortable letting Malteries Soufflet know that it had other interested parties, leading to the bid being raised from $4.15, $4.50, and $4.90 before the agreed price of $5.

United Malt is the worlds fourth-largest commercial maltster, producing bulk goods for brewers, distillers, and food companies. The company has processing plants in Australia, Canada, the US, and Britain that annually produce approximately 1.25 million tonnes of malt.

The deal still requires sign-off from shareholders and Australias Foreign Investment Review Board (FRIB), as it puts Australias largest malt producer in the hands of French companies.

United Malt managing director and CEO Mark Palmquist said the scheme  if implemented, would provide an attractive value outcome for United Malt shareholders.

Malteries Soufflet is one of the worlds leading malt producers, operating 28 malt houses across Europe, Latin America, Asia and Africa and is a strong complement to our business, said Mr Palmquist.

United Malts outlook

The deal is a good one for United Malt shareholders and the company moving forward, as the execution of a long-held plan bears fruit.

UMG demerged from Graincorp [ASX:GNC] back in 2020 with the help of Macquarie Capital. In the demerger booklet, Macquarie advised that the spin-off was a good idea for UMG as a way to catch a takeover premium of its share price.

In the proceeding years, UMG share prices struggled to gain significant momentum until rumours of serious takeovers began to arise.

Source: Ion Analytics



The takeover of UMG by InVivo will combine the worlds second- and fourth-largest malt producers, which will present a significant force in the craft beer and distillery market.

InVivo also penned an agreement in January with craft beer giant Belgian malthouse Castle Malting, showing the company has aggressively moved towards capturing the growing craft beer craze sweeping consumers.

InVivo Chief Executive Thierry Blandinieres was positive about the acquisitions future prospects, commenting today, We would already have a share of 20% of the malt market with great growth potential ahead of us.

For UMG, the deal will see fantastic growth opportunities as the company can further expand into the European market.

Currently, 60% of UMGs revenue is generated from North America  while 21% is from Europe.

If the deal goes forward, it could be a good time for UMG to raise a glass to prospects.

Future prospects for you

United Malt may be cheering its long-term earning potential but what about you?

With a bearish market that has roiled investors for the past year and an ASX that has seen little gain  where can you look to secure your future?

Our experts have been searching for the ultimate play in a bear market and are excited to show you the smartest play you can make today.

Editorial Director and investment guru Greg Canavan has released his brand-new report that will show you how to capture value AND make great dividends along the way.

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Regards,

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For Money Morning
July 03, 2023

Ukraine Open Thread 2023-158

Only for news & views directly related to the Ukraine conflict.

The current open thread for other issues here.

Please stick to the topic. Contribute facts. Do not attack other commentators.

Posted by b on July 3, 2023 at 15:16 UTC | Permalink

Comments

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This image released by Lucasfilm shows Ethann Isidore, from left, Harrison Ford and Phoebe Waller-Bridge in a scene from "Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny."
Reporter

Andrew Roberto was raised his whole life on Saipan. He graduated from Saipan Southern High School, holds a degree from Northern Marianas College, and a BA in English from the University of Guam. He once worked for KUAM, UNO Magazine, and the Guam Daily Post.
Solar panels installed on the roof of a home can be seen Nov. 20, 2022, in Yona.
El Nino is the warm phase of the El Nino /La Nina Southern Oscillation that occurs across the tropical Pacific Ocean roughly every five years.
A tornado in the Canadian province of Alberta has wrecked homes but caused no serious injuries

DIDSBURY, Alberta (AP)  A tornado that struck near a town in the Canadian province of Alberta wrecked homes and killed livestock, but caused no serious injuries, authorities said Sunday.

Environment and Climate Change Canada issued a warning at 1:50 p.m. local time Saturday for a tornado near Didsbury, a town located about 233 kilometers (145 miles) south of Edmonton, Alberta.

RCMP said they received reports of a large tornado along a major highway. The tornados width was 1 to 2 kilometers (one-half mile to 1.2 miles).

Police said numerous homes were damaged but Cpl. Gina Slaney said there were no known injuries. The tornado warning was later ended.

Dean Allan, deputy mayor of Carstairs, located about 13 kilometers (8 miles) south of Didsbury, said the twister passed between the two communities, damaging 12 homes.

A couple of them were completely destroyed, said Allan. Theres no deaths, just some minor injuries, luckily.

Carstairs fire chief Jordan Schaffer said five homes were completely destroyed, including one where rescuers had to extricate a woman from her basement.

Digging through debris, we were able to get her out without a scratch, Schaffer said.

On Sunday, Schaeffer told media that 25 cows and 20 chickens were killed, and a horse needed to be euthanized.

Storm chaser Aaron Jayjack posted video online of a tornado near Didsbury crossing a highway, appearing to damage two rural homes on both sides of the roadway.

In the video, he calls out to anyone who might be in one of the homes, but is prevented from getting any closer due to downed utility lines blocking the driveway.

Prime Minister Justin Trudeau tweeted a message to people injured in the tornado or whose homes were damaged that Canadians are here for you.

As officials continue to monitor the situation, please stay safe, Trudeau said on Twitter.
Dutch and Luxembourg PMs urge Serbia and Kosovo to defuse tensions under shadow of war in Ukraine

Dutch and Luxembourg PMs urge Serbia and Kosovo to defuse tensions under shadow of war in Ukraine View Photo

BELGRADE, Serbia (AP)  The prime ministers of the Netherlands and Luxembourg on Monday urged Serbia and Kosovo to act to defuse recent tensions that have threatened to push the Balkan region into instability as Europe faces Russias aggression in Ukraine.

Dutch PM Mark Rutte and Xavier Bettel, the Luxembourg PM, spoke after meeting Serbias President Aleksandar Vucic in Belgrade. Rutte and Bettel travel to Kosovo on Tuesday for meetings with top officials there.

We cannot, both of us, emphasize enough how important it is that both Serbia and Kosovo take steps toward de-escalation and ultimately normalization of their relations through the EU-led dialogue, said Rutte.

This is crucial for the two countries themselves, first and foremost, but also for the entire region and Europe as a whole, he added. With a war raging between Russia and Ukraine on our continent, its more important than ever that we act together.

Serbia and its former province Kosovo have been at odds for decades, with Belgrade refusing to recognize Kosovos 2008 declaration of independence. Western efforts to resolve the crisis have increased recently, to avert possible instability in the Balkans as war ravages Ukraine.

Tensions between the two countries flared anew in May after Kosovo police seized local municipal buildings in Serb-majority northern Kosovo to install ethnic Albanian mayors who were elected in an April election that Serbs overwhelmingly boycotted.

Violent clashes injured 30 international peacekeepers and more than 50 ethnic Serbs, stirring fears of a renewal of the 1998-99 conflict that left more than 10,000 people dead, mostly Kosovar Albanians.

The U.S and the EU have pressed Serbia and Kosovo to take steps to lower tensions. Normalization of relations is the key condition for the two countries to move forward in their efforts to join the EU.

Bettel, too, called on the two sides to act.

Words are good, actions are better, he said. And we need to advance on these topics and to show also that there is a wish of de-escalation.

Vucic expressed hope that the two prime ministers visit to Serbia and Kosovo would help. I promised that Serbia will do all it can to preserve peace and stability, he said.

Washington and most EU nations have recognized Kosovos independence, while Russia and China have backed Serbias claim on the territory.

The 1998-99 war erupted when separatist ethnic Albanians rebelled against Serbias rule and Belgrade responded with a brutal crackdown. NATO bombing in 1999 forced Serbia to relinquish control but Belgrade has maintained Kosovo remains part of the country.

By JOVANA GEC

Associated Press
UN commander in contact with Lebanese and Israeli officials about tensions over Hezbollah tents

UN commander in contact with Lebanese and Israeli officials about tensions over Hezbollah tents View Photo

BEIRUT (AP)  The U.N. peacekeeping force on the Lebanon-Israel border said Monday its commander is in contact with officials in both countries over tensions regarding two tents set up by the militant Hezbollah group last month.

Israel filed a complaint with the United Nations in June claiming that Hezbollah had set up tents several dozen meters (yards) inside of Israeli territory.

The area where the tents were erected in Chebaa Farms and the Kfar Chouba hills were captured by Israel from Syria during the 1967 Mideast war and are part of Syrias Golan Heights that Israel annexed in 1981. The Lebanese government says the area belongs to Lebanon.

Israeli media reported Sunday that Hezbollah evacuated one of the two tents but there has been no confirmation from the Iran-backed Lebanese group.

The head of the U.N. peacekeeping force known as UNIFIL, Maj. Gen. Aroldo Lazaro, continues to be in direct contact with authorities on both sides of the Blue Line to resolve the situation of the tents, UNIFIL said in a statement sent to The Associated Press. The borderline demarcated after Israels withdrawal from southern Lebanon in 2000 is known as the blue line.

UNIFIL added: We are looking into reports that a tent has been moved north of the Blue Line. UNIFIL added that any unauthorized presence or activity near the Blue Line is a concern, and has the potential to increase tension and misunderstandings.

The head of Hezbollahs parliamentary bloc Mohammed Raad said Saturday that the tents are in Lebanon. He added, referring to Israel: You cannot remove two tents because there is resistance and strong men in this country.

Israel and Hezbollah fought to a draw in a monthlong war in Lebanon in 2006. Last week, Hezbollah said it shot down an Israel drone flying over a village in southern Lebanon. Hezbollah has in the past claimed downing Israeli drones, and Israels military also has said in the past that they have shot down Hezbollah drones.

Israel considers Hezbollah its most serious immediate threat, estimating it has some 150,000 rockets and missiles aimed at Israel.
I knew very little about RFK Jr. until a couple of months ago, when he announced his candidacy for the Democratic presidential nomination. The reaction on social media, or at least in some corners that I inhabit, was swift and fierce. He was described as a crank and conspiracy theorist, opposed by members of his own family, running in the wrong party, his campaign destined for ignominious failure.

But the problem with mass opinion on social media is that it doesnt reflect independent judgments. People tend to echo and promote the views of those they hold in high esteem, adopting beliefs by proxy. Both extravagant praise and merciless demonization ought to be met with a healthy dose of skepticism, at least until some direct knowledge has been attained.

So I listened to Kennedy on Rogan, Breaking Points, and Honestly, and to conversations about him on Bad Faith and the Fifth Column. I read measured critiquesby Vinay Prasad, and brutal assessments by Naomi Klein and Rebecca Traister. This took a lot of time as you can imagine, but at least I was able to form something resembling an informed opinion.

Kennedy believes with a high degree of subjective certainty many things that are likely to be false, or at best remain unsupported by the very evidence he cites. I discuss one such case below, pertaining to all-cause mortality associated with the Pfizer vaccine. But the evidence is ambiguous enough to create doubts, and the failure of many mainstream outlets and experts to acknowledge these doubts fuels suspicion in the public at large, making people receptive to exaggerated claims in the opposite direction.

Furthermore, the general themes that arise in Kennedys rhetoricthe corrupting influence of money in politics, the folly of military adventurism abroad, the smugness and failures of elite opinion, and the need for open and robust debatewill strike a chord with many voters across the ideological spectrum.

Its an uphill campaign but I dont think that it is doomed to failure. A couple of weeks ago, Adam Ozimek posted some prediction market prices according to which Kennedy had a 6.6% chance of securing the nomination. Chris Hayes thought that these prices were crazy, Conor Sen suspected that Russian money was involved, and many other replies echoed these sentiments. I felt, in contrast, that Kennedy was being underpriced by markets at that time. A few days later PredictIt listed the Kennedy contract in their nominee market, resulting in a huge spike in volume. The contract has traded in the 10-14 range ever since, ahead of Kamala Harris and behind Gavin Newsom:



These odds strike me as reasonable. If Kennedy surges, I suspect that Newsom will enter. And if Biden prevails regardless, his prospects in the general election will depend very much on the respect with which he treats Kennedy and his voters.

Of all the commentary that I have seen and heard on Kennedys candidacy and beliefs, the best by far is a Bad Faith episode in which Briahna Joy Gray presents the strongest case for each claim and Vinay Prasad responds thoughtfully on a case by case basis. But there is one important claim that they did not cover, and this concerns all-cause mortality associated with the Pfizer vaccine. Coleman Hughes mentioned this on the Fifth Column podcast, and observed that the alleged debunking of the claim by the AP made no sense at all.

Kennedy argues that according to Pfizers own data, the vaccine increases rather than decreases all-cause mortality. As Coleman observed, the attempt by the AP to debunk this claim is worse than useless:



This is an extraordinary response. The claim in question is not that the vaccine is ineffective in preventing death from COVID-19, but that these reduced risks are outweighed by an increased risk of death from other factors. I believe that the claim is false (for reasons discussed below), but it is not outrageous. This is the data to which Kennedy is referring:



The vaccinated group had fewer COVID-19 related deaths (one instead of two) but more deaths overall (fifteen rather than fourteen). In particular, there were more deaths from cardiac arrest (four instead of one). Kennedy interprets this as a consequence of the vaccine, while the researchers attribute it to random chance.

As discussed in this excellent post by Shin Jie Yong, the Pfizer study was not designed to detect differences in mortality risk, and participants were screened on entry to ensure that they were not especially vulnerable. As a result, the number of fatalities is too small (29 among 44,000 subjects) to make any confident statistical inference. Meanwhile, there are clear benefits of the vaccine in reducing rates of infection and severe disease (the filled in markers identify severe cases):



It is not unreasonable to suppose that among more vulnerable populations (who were excluded from the study by design), all-cause mortality would have been lower in the vaccinated group. Observational studies certainly seem to support this.

But the broader point here is that there may be groups in the population for whom the vaccine does not lower the risk of death. Even for such groups, one may encourage or even mandate vaccination in order to reduce transmission to those who are more vulnerable. But an honest debate would have to consider the extent to which the vaccine prevents infection and transmission, with a proper appraisal of the uncertainties involved. And on a range of issuesincluding vaccine mandates, masking recommendations, and school closuresan honest debate was not what we experienced.

This is fertile ground for the emergence of an insurgent campaign. Kennedys bid remains unlikely to succeed, but if his own party adopts a dismissive and contemptuous stance towards him and towards those whom he has mobilized, it will sink its own prospects. The proper and prudent response it to identify and absorb his legitimate concerns, while pushing back firmly but respectfully on the claims that lack merit.
In July, NATO Leaders will meet to address the most pressing challenges for the Alliance, further strengthen NATO's deterrence and defence and bring Ukraine closer to the Alliance.

WHY To address the challenges facing the Alliance and further strengthen NATO's deterrence and defence

Vytis, an armoured knight, is a Lithuanian symbol of vigour and power. It has served as Lithuania's national coat of arms since the late 1300s, and is featured on this year's NATO summit logo as a symbol of Lithuanian readiness and dedication to defend the Alliance.

We have just concluded an historic NATO Summit. Over the past two days, we took major decisions to adapt our Alliance for the future. We agreed NATO's most detailed and robust defence plans since the Cold War. We strengthened our commitment to defence investment. We agreed to bring Ukraine closer to the Alliance, and step up support for the long haul. And we deepened our partnerships around the world even more.

NATO Allies agreed to deepen cooperation with partners from the Indo-Pacific region, namely Australia, Japan, the Republic of Korea and New Zealand. NATO will continue to work with them closely on issues such as cyber security, hybrid threats, maritime security, climate change and new technologies. Their already second participation in the NATO meetings at summit level shows that security is not regional but global, and is underpinned by the shared commitment to upholding international law and the rules-based international order.

NATO Leaders set a new and more ambitious defence investment pledge, in which Allies will invest a minimum of 2% of Gross Domestic Product annually on defence to resource NATO's new defence plans and force model, as well as to contribute to the Alliance's operations, missions and activities in a more contested security environment.

NATO Leaders agreed to further enhance NATO's deterrence and defence posture in all domains, including strengthening forward defences and the Alliance's ability to rapidly reinforce any Ally that comes under threat. The Alliance put in place a new generation of three regional defence plans for the north, the centre and the south of NATO that build on existing strategic and domain-specific plans. To execute these plans, NATO will put 300,000 troops at higher readiness, including substantial air and naval combat power.

NATO Allies agreed on a package with three elements that will bring Ukraine closer to NATO. This includes a multi-year programme of assistance to help rebuild the Ukrainian security and defence sector and ensure full interoperability between the Ukrainian armed forces and the Alliance; the establishment of the NATO-Ukraine Council, a new forum for crisis consultations and decision-making, where NATO and Ukraine will meet as equals; and the reaffirmation that Ukraine will become a member of NATO and agreement to remove the requirement for a Membership Action Plan, changing Ukraine's membership path from a two-step process to a one-step process.

At the Vilnius Summit, NATO Leaders took important and historic decisions that set NATO's strategic direction for the near and long-term future. Find out more about the key decisions below and read the full Vilnius Summit Communique by Allied Heads of State and Government for more information.

For almost 75 years, the bond between Europe and North America has made NATO the strongest alliance in history. Together, NATO Allies prevent conflict and preserve peace for one billion people on both sides of the Atlantic. The commitment at the heart of NATO is that an attack against one Ally is an attack against all. NATO's Article 5 guarantee of collective defence is the foundation of our security and prosperity.

NATO faces challenges not just from conventional military threats, but also from broader sources of instability and disaster like terrorism, climate change and new technologies. That is why the Alliance is committed to a 360-degree approach to security, ensuring that Allies can maintain their resilience and protect their people from all potential threats. NATO and Allies are working together to tackle these challenges  including by adopting a climate change and security action plan, cooperating with the EU to protect critical infrastructure, and launching a new innovation accelerator and investment fund to develop emerging technologies and maintain NATO's technological edge.

NATO is stronger and safer when it stands with like-minded partners to defend the rules-based international order. That is why the Alliance is stepping up cooperation with its network of partners, including in Europe and in the Indo-Pacific region, and with other international organisations, in particular the European Union. Finland and Sweden were invited to join the Alliance at last year's summit in Madrid. Finland joined NATO earlier this year. Sweden is already more deeply integrated in every aspect of NATO's work, and will join as soon as all Allies have ratified its Accession Protocol.

To keep our people safe in a more dangerous and competitive world, NATO Allies have been stepping up defence spending and investing in key capabilities. By the end of 2022, European Allies and Canada had invested well over USD 350 billion extra since NATO Leaders agreed the Defence Investment Pledge in 2014. In Vilnius, Allies will decide on a new Defence Investment Pledge to spend a minimum 2% of their GDP on their defence annually.

NATO Allies are providing an unprecedented level of support to Ukraine, helping the country uphold its right to self-defence, as enshrined in the UN Charter. This includes air defences, tanks, artillery and training for Ukrainian soldiers, including on fourth-generation jet fighters. These contributions help Ukrainians defend their country and retake occupied land. All Allies agree that Ukraine will become a member of NATO, that NATO's door remains open and that it is for Ukraine and NATO Allies to decide on NATO membership.

Since Russia's illegal annexation of Crimea from Ukraine in 2014, NATO has implemented the largest reinforcement of the Alliance's collective defence in a generation, enhancing its ability to defend all Allies on land, at sea, in the air, in cyber space and in space. In response to Russia's full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022, NATO is further stepping up its deterrence and defence, including with new regional defence plans and a new force model with more troops at higher readiness.

At the Vilnius Summit, NATO Leaders will address a wide variety of issues facing the Alliance and ensure that NATO remains ready to respond to any challenge. Click through the links below to explore the key topics on the agenda.

NATO Public Forum 2023

In parallel to the Vilnius Summit, the city will host the NATO Public Forum  an event that aims to promote a better public understanding of NATO's policies, goals and decisions through dialogue and engagement with a unique and diverse group of stakeholders. Organised by NATO and civil society organisations (the Eastern Europe Studies Centre, the German Marshall Fund of the United States, the Munich Security Conference and the Atlantic Council of the United States), the forum will offer panel discussions, debates and interactive sessions about various topics on NATO's agenda.

To find out more about the Public Forum, visit its official page.
Evil child trader CAUGHT trying to abduct 11-month-old baby out of Ukraine to sell for organ transplants

A 43-year-old man was caught red-handed this week trying to smuggle an 11-month-old baby out of Ukraine to deliver to child traffickers so they could "sell" the child "for organ transplants."

An alleged "charity worker" whom the media is now referring to as an "evil child trader," the man was detained by authorities after being caught with the child in hand.

According to reports, the man gave the child's mother a $1,000 down payment, claiming he would ensure the boy was rescued out of the war and safely adopted by a family somewhere else in the European Union (EU). He allegedly offered the woman, from Zhytomyr, a total of $5,000 for the baby, whom he intended to sell to traffickers for $25,000.

The man was with an unidentified female accomplice at the time he was captured trying to move across the Ukraine-Slovakia border. Thankfully, authorities arrested him and saved the child, however there were three other children before this whom the man successfully sold for cash.

(Related: California is trying to legalize state-sponsored child trafficking under the guise of providing "sanctuary" for underage children from other states and countries to come receive transgender mutilation and castration surgeries.)

Child traffickers taking advantage of Russian invasion chaos in Ukraine

After being reunited with his mother, the 11-year-old baby boy was seen high-fiving a soldier.

"Law enforcement officers have operational information that this was not for adoption to the EU, and the child was to have been sold to [illegal] organ transplanters," reported Vitaliy Glagola, a Ukrainian journalist.

The man who attempted to smuggle the child out of Ukraine "had been looking for parents who were ready to sell their child for organs," Glagola added in a statement.

The reason why law enforcement was able to capture the culprit and his accomplice is because the boy's mother alerted them about what was taking place. SBU secret service and border guards then readied to detain him at the Malye Selmentsy frontier checkpoint.

The man is now being held under child trafficking laws, and could face up to 15 years in jail if convicted, according to a police spokesman.

It has become increasingly common in impoverished eastern Europe for children and babies to be sold on the black market by gangs tied to organ transplant networks. In many cases, the recipients of the organs are wealthy clients, particularly from the Middle East.

After Russia invaded Ukraine, things ramped up even more as all the chaos led to many more people than usual using border crossings in a rush to flee the country. This allowed human traffickers the opportunity to slip by more easily while preying on desperate refugees.

Early on in the war, reports emerged of criminals targeting unaccompanied female refugees and children as they fled from Ukraine, falsely promising to help provide them accommodations and safety, as well as free transport.

These criminals posing as "good Samaritans" would then lure their victims away from the safety of government checkpoints in order to exploit them.

Charity workers at the Poland-Ukraine border have also warned that some traffickers are working alone, while others are in gangs, to kidnap women and children whom they spot as an "easy target."

"[We see teams] waiting for people arriving from Ukraine and pretending to offer rides or lodging to women distressed and exhausted from their journey," said Karolina Wierzbi?ska, a coordinator at the human rights organization Homo Faber in the Polish city of Lublin, about how teams of people working together, including multiple couples at a time, are visiting the Polish border while pretending to offer Ukrainian refugees rides to safety.

Child trafficking is a prolific problem that must be dealt with. Learn more at Trafficking.news.

Sources for this article include:

DailyMail.co.uk

Newstarget.com
Homeless population in Los Angeles grew 10% despite city spending millions to fight the problem

The homeless problem in Los Angeles has grown significantly worse in the last year, with homelessness climbing 9 percent in the city and 10 percent in L.A. County. Around 75,000 people are now living on the streets there despite major investments by the city to stem the problem.

According to the count, which was carried out by a team of volunteers numbering in the thousands for the Los Angeles Homeless Services Authority across a three-day period, 75,518 individuals were living in either a makeshift shelter, tent, van, car, RV or interim housing; the figure a year earlier was 69,144. The increase was fully attributed to people living on the street rather than in shelters.

The biggest jumps were seen in the citys Harbor and Westside areas, which each recorded rises of around 45 percent.

The city has spent hundreds of millions of dollars on shelters, outreach and permanent housing, but the problem continues to grow. Since 2015, homelessness has skyrocketed by 80 percent in the city and 70 percent in the county.

Los Angeles Homeless Services Authority Chief Executive Va Lecia Adams Kellum said that the results were disappointing but not surprising, adding: We thought with last years numbers that we were flattening the curve. However, what we see in this trajectory is that people remain in a situation of vulnerability where theyre falling into homelessness faster than we can house them.

Theres much more needed to right the ship.

She cited economics as the main driving factor, pointing to a study by the University of California San Francisco that showed that among individuals who had leases prior to becoming homeless, an income drop was the top reason for losing housing.

Black people accounted for nearly a third of Los Angeles homeless residents, which is more than four times their share of the countys overall population. Latinos made up 43 percent after a sharp rise last year. Asian homeless people more than doubled but only account for 2 percent of the overall total.

West L.A. Homeless Executive Vice President Margaret Gillespie explained that the pandemic contributed to the citys homelessness problem. She said: I deal with folks pretty regularly, folks who were employed before COVID and lost their jobs and have struggled to get back on their feet. People dont realize that once you fall into the pit of homelessness, its very hard to dig out of it.

City leaders vow to keep fighting, but investments are not paying off

Los Angeles City Council approved $7.8 million to fund in-patient substance abuse treatment in hopes of helping people get back on their feet. Mayor Karen Bass has stated shell recommend devoting $1.3 billion in next years budget to help homeless people get into shelters and treatment programs.

More than 27,000 of those living on the streets have been homeless for longer than a year and have a disabling substance abuse, mental health or physical health condition. This is a rise of 5,000 individuals over the previous year.

Bass said: We will not end homelessness without addressing drug abuse and mental illness. This is a matter of life and death. I refuse to leave unhoused Angelenos on the street knowing that we can do more. This is an emergency, and we are treating it as such.

Meanwhile, locals are complaining about the problems caused by homeless people taking over the area. Human feces are being dumped in the street, and drug needles are a familiar sight on the ground. Some have been hacking into fire hydrants to obtain water. Although police sometimes come and tell homeless people to pack up their belongings and leave, they typically return within just hours.

Sources for this article include:

Breitbart.com

LATimes.com

FoxNews.com
Peer-reviewed studies suggest that cardiovascular deaths from mRNA jabs are largely under-reported

Pharmaceutical propaganda continues to reassure the public that covid-19 vaccines are SAFE, but the truth about the #DiedSuddenly holocaust is all around us, no matter how hard the corporate media tries to gaslight us. Peer-reviewed studies from Japan, Qatar, and Korea suggest that cardiovascular death from Pfizer and Modernas mRNA jabs has gone largely under-reported . In the medical reviews, thousands of young adults under the age of 50 died within weeks (and sometimes days) of injection, but most of the deaths were never properly investigated and the experimental jabs were never even considered as a probable cause of death.

Japanese researchers find 1 in 8 post-vaccine deaths are related to heart damage from the vaccine

In one of the peer-reviewed studies, a team of pathologists from the Tokyo Medical Examiners Office conducted 54 autopsies on young adults who died within seven days of receiving one of the covid-19 vaccines. After looking strictly at the pathological evidence, the researchers singled out seven cases where the mRNA vaccine had caused serious damage to the heart. In three cases of young adults under 40, the mRNA had induced myocarditis, leading to fatal outcomes. In four cases, the vaccine was related to thrombosis-related deaths. In one of the cases, a 52-year-old man with no other serious health problems suddenly suffered from a cerebral hemorrhage following vaccination. According to the strict analyses, approximately 1 in 8 post-jab deaths could be directly related to the heart-damaging effects of the mRNA vaccines.

The researchers concluded that myocarditis from the vaccines is under-reported and that the Japanese death investigation system needs to be reinforced to adequately evaluate causal relationships between death and vaccination.

Researchers from Qatar find 1 in 50,000 young people died from covid jab

Researchers from Qatar took a closer look at 138 sudden deaths that took place within 30 days of vaccination from January 2021 through June 2022. The researchers used strict criteria, looking at only the deaths that took place within 15 days of vaccination. They found twenty-three sudden cardiac deaths in people under the age of 50. All twenty-three deaths were determined to be caused by the mRNA vaccine. Approximately 2.3 million people were vaccinated in Qatar, so the risk of sudden death within 15 days of getting vaccinated is about 1 in 100,000 according to the researchers initial analysis.

When the researchers conducted a second review, they found that forty-eight deaths occurred within 30 days of vaccination. Approximately 1 in 3 deaths that occurred within 30 days of vaccination had a high or intermediate probability of being caused by the vaccine! These young people had no known comorbidities that could have contributed to their sudden death. Therefore, the risk of sudden death in healthy young adults within 30 days of vaccination is a shocking 1 in 50,000. Not only is the vaccine unsafe and ineffective, but its also more likely to deliberately cause death in young people for an infection that was treatable from the start.

Korean researchers find shocking sudden cardiac death and vaccine-related myocarditis trends

Vaccine-related myocarditis was also studied by the Expert Adjudication Committee of the Korea Disease Control and Prevention Agency. The researchers confirmed 480 cases of vaccine induced myocarditis (1.08 cases per 100,000 persons). The highest incidence was detected in young males ages 12 to 17 years. These cases of vaccine damage included 95 severe cases that included 85 admissions to the ICU with 36 diagnoses of fulminant myocarditis. Additionally, 21 cases required extracorporeal membrane oxygenation therapy and one required a heart transplantation. Twenty-one of the patients died. These issues occurred in young adults under the age of 45 with no other health issues, who recently received the mRNA vaccines.

The researchers concluded: Although COVID-19 vaccine-related myocarditis (VRM) was rare and showed relatively favorable clinical courses, severe VRM was found in 19.8% of all VRM cases. Moreover, sudden cardiac death should be closely monitored as a potentially fatal complication of COVID-19 vaccination."

These analyses point out a horrifying fact -- that tens of thousands of young people all around the world have been killed by this so-called vaccine.

Sources include:

AlexBerenson.substack.com

ScienceDirect.com

Nature.com

Academic.oup.com
Planned Parenthood Regina, an organization focused on sexual health education, has been banned from schools in the province of Saskatchewan after holding a seminar with sexually explicit games to Grade 9 students at Lumsden High School. The card game includes an 'A to Z' guide describing extreme sexual acts.

The sexual health presentation was part of a Grade 9 health class curriculum. The controversial 'A to Z' guide, intended for gay, bisexual, and queer young people, was not directly referred to during the presentation but was made available on a side table afterward. The 'A to Z' guide was produced by the Aids Committee of Toronto (ACT) in 2014.

The explicit guide contained definitions of extreme sexual acts with cartoon portrayals. In addition to the detailed descriptions, the 'A to Z' guide included peculiar references such as 'cathodillia,' defined as "being attracted to one's television set." (Related: Planned Parenthood executive argues children are born "sexual," require sex education and porn literacy.)

Parents immediately complained about the content of the guide, urging Dustin Duncan, the Saskatchewan Education Minister, to take immediate action. As a response, Minister Duncan announced on Thursday that Planned Parenthood Regina had been suspended from working in schools across the region. He expressed his view that the material was "completely inappropriate" for a classroom setting and should have no place in educational institutions.

The Prairie Valley School Division, where Lumsden High School is located, also disapproves of the explicit material. A spokesman for the school division described the content as "inappropriate" and requested that Planned Parenthood remove it from any future school presentations.

The Prairie Valley School Division spokesman emphasized that while the presentation aligned with the Saskatchewan curriculum, the secondary resource brought by Planned Parenthood was not approved.

Debate over sex education materials follows restrictions on Planned Parenthood Regina seminars in Saskatchewan classrooms

As the ban takes effect, discussions and debates about the appropriate content and boundaries of sexual education in schools are likely to continue, with educators and organizations arguing between comprehensive sex education and age-appropriate material.

Julian Wotherspoon, the executive director of Planned Parenthood Regina, expressed her disappointment in being banned from schools. She emphasized that the organization does not usually bring such materials into classrooms. The pamphlets were typically distributed to more mature audiences due to their explicit content.

Wotherspoon defended the reputation of the organization that created the pamphlet, describing it as a reputable source of engaging, informative, sex-positive, and stigma-reducing material. She acknowledged the decision to suspend their presentations, but expressed disappointment at the lack of consultation, hoping for future communication with the school to clarify that the pamphlet was not part of their intended curriculum.

In response to the incident, Minister Duncan announced that the Ministry would review sexual education materials across all school divisions. The review is expected to be completed by September. Duncan also emphasized that the suspension right now doesn't preclude the organization from doing presentations in the future.

Duncan said there should be more care taken by people going into classrooms for presentations and more respect on the part of the school around a presentation as well. Duncan also emphasized the importance of parental awareness and involvement in their children's sexual education, indicating a desire to keep parents informed about such topics.

"The questions that we do have in terms of what is the vetting process for ensuring that teachers preview all the material that they're going to use not only in the delivery of their course, but also if they do bring in outside people and organizations, (and) what the vetting process is for their material as well," said Duncan.

Planned Parenthood's school presentations, which involved discussing contraceptives, sexually transmitted infections, and sexual consent, were conducted with a teacher present in the classroom. Wotherspoon defended their approach, stating that people of all ages have a right to information about their sexual health.
4th Branch with Tony and Sofia: Robert Stone discusses the CENSORSHIP of Trump and RFK Jr.

Two major presidential candidates for the 2024 election are still being censored

This is according to veteran political operative Roger Stone, who discussed his observations surrounding the censoring of two prominent presidential candidates  Republican candidate former President Donald Trump and Democratic candidate Robert F. Kennedy Jr.  during an episode of "4th Branch" with hosts Sofia Karstens and Tony Lyons on American Media Periscope.

Stone, who was a long-time adviser to Trump, pointed out that Kennedy's campaign is being damaged as three major television networks as well as some cable news networks  along with much of the mainstream media  are refusing to cover him fairly. (Related: RFK JR: "There is no time in history where the people censoring speech were the good guys.")

"On the other hand, I think he's been extraordinarily successful and resourceful at using the new media to break through anyway," the pundit pointed out, adding that he believes Kennedy is extraordinarily interesting, provocative, thoughtful and "never boring."

"I've never seen him cornered, where he couldn't actually document anything he's ever said, which is really quite extraordinary," he added. "I actually think he is making extraordinary progress, given the levels of censorship that he's subjected to."

Despite this, Kennedy is still being blacklisted from most mainstream media and social media platforms. One recent media appearance of Kennedy being interviewed by former New York Post reporter Al Guart has been taken off of YouTube due to a supposed violation of the website's vaccine misinformation policy.

On the other side of the political spectrum is Trump, who has been banned from large social media platforms and yet has still found a way to get his thoughts shared by remaining active on the alternative microblogging platform, Truth Social. According to Stone, the move to this site was great as it is a great avenue for speaking to the base.

"If you want to talk to your own supporters, it's a great place to very effectively do that. But if you want to get beyond your supporters, to the extent that he utilizes social media, it's really time to return to Twitter. I think sooner or later, he will do so," he said, thanking Twitter CEO Elon Musk for reinstating the former president's account. Trump has also been admitted back on Facebook.

Stone to Trump and Kennedy: Never quit

When asked by Lyons for a piece of good advice for Kennedy and Trump in dealing with people that want to shoot them down, Stone quickly said: Never quit.

"Man is not finished when he's defeated. He's only finished when he quits. I think Robert Kennedy has a historic opportunity. Because he's compelling, he has a real message. And his poll numbers are impressive, which shows that the alternative media strategy is working," Stone noted.

Meanwhile, in Trump's case, Stone said it is a question of timing, especially now that the GOP flag bearer is currently in dark and difficult times.

"I think they both in essence really need to continue doing what they're doing, which is to remember that politics is always about the future," said Stone. "People want to know more than just what have you done. They want to know what you are going to do."

Check out Censorship.news for more stories about the suppression of the freedom of speech.

Watch the full interview of Roger Stone on "4th Branch" with Sofia Karstens and Tony Lyons below.

This video is from the AMPNews channel on Brighteon.com.

More related stories:

Insta-BANNED: RFK Jr. campaign accounts immediately SUSPENDED by Instagram for 6 months.

RFK Jr. commits to making America an EXEMPLARY DEMOCRACY again in 2024 presidential bid.

TruNews: Robert F. Kennedy Jr.'s presidential bid a BIG THREAT to the Deep State.

President Trump vows to ban Big Tech-federal government censorship collusion if re-elected in 2024.

Sources include:

Brighteon.com

FoxNews.com

CA.Style.Yahoo.com
WHO warns of unusual surge in SEVERE MYOCARDITIS cases among newborns and infants in the UK

The

World Health Organization

(WHO) is currently investigating an unusual

rise in severe myocarditis cases among newborns and infants

in the United Kingdom.

"Although enterovirus infections are common in neonates and young infants, the reported increase in myocarditis with severe outcomes in neonates and infants associated with enterovirus infection is unusual," the WHO reported.

Myocarditis is a heart inflammation commonly caused by viral infections, including those caused by enteroviruses. Dr. Shamez Ladhani, a consultant pediatrician at the U.K. Health Security Agency (UKHSA) explained that enteroviruses, commonly seen as childhood infections, often result in hand, foot and mouth disease or viral meningitis.

According to the report, 15 newborns and infants presented symptoms consistent with neonatal sepsis between June 2022 and March 2023 in South Wales (10 cases) and Southwest England (five cases). Of these cases, eight required intensive care treatment and one died before being transferred to tertiary care.

In all cases alive at presentation, myocarditis was a presenting feature. The peak incidence of cases was in November 2022 with five. Interestingly, only one similar case has been identified over the previous six years in the South Wales region.

The WHO has warned healthcare professionals about the potential asymptomatic nature of enterovirus infections. It recommends testing for enteroviruses in suspected cases to aid in early detection and appropriate management.

Health agencies still refuse to link COVID-19 vaccines to myocarditis

In response to the surge of myocarditis cases, the UKHSA addressed the issue and its possible relation to the COVID-19 vaccine. The agency explicitly denied any connection between the two, stating that global studies have found no evidence of an increased risk of myocarditis in infants born to mothers who received the COVID-19 vaccine during pregnancy.

Instead, health authorities in the U.K. and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) continue to push COVID-19 vaccination for pregnant women.

Health authorities in Wales are actively collaborating with the Noah's Ark Children's Hospital for Wales' pediatric team to investigate the recent increase in myocarditis cases among newborns. Wales has also initiated a clinical study to better understand the situation, including changes in infection circulation and population immunity following the COVID-19 pandemic.

Wales' Health Minister Eluned Morgan noted that although there has been an increase in patients, the occurrence is still extremely rare. (Related: Study finds possible link between Pfizers COVID-19 vaccine and myocarditis in children.)

Dr. Clare Craig, a consultant pathologist, highlighted the need to determine whether the mothers of the affected babies were vaccinated. She noted that Coxsackievirus, a type of enterovirus, is a common cause of viral myocarditis, and its diagnosis declined significantly in 2020 when SARS-CoV-2 arrived.

Craig suggested that the incidence of myocarditis remained stable until the introduction of COVID-19 vaccines in 2021 when rates skyrocketed. She emphasized the importance of investigating these concerns to address public trust. "The public health authorities claim that they want to maintain trust, and yet they won't explore these avenues to rule out concerns," she said.

Watch this video discussing the growing concerns on myocarditis.

This video is from the channel The Highwire with Del BigTree on Brighteon.com.

More related stories:

Fired California nurse attests to COVID vaccine-induced myocarditis in kids.

One in five sudden deaths caused by post-injection myocarditis, data shows.

Kids who develop vaccine-induced myocarditis will be dead in 5 YEARS: Canadian doctor.

Dr. Peter McCullough: Myocarditis is often the underlying cause when people die in their sleep.

Father unleashes hell against pharmacist who jabbed his 7-year-old for covid, resulting in myocarditis.

Sources include:

100PercentFedUp.com

CDC.gov

TheEpochTimes.com

Brighteon.com
Permanent dictator: Zelensky declares NO MORE ELECTIONS in Ukraine until war ends

Just like in the United States, Ukraine is scheduled to have another presidential election in 2024. However, if martial law due to the war is still in effect, then current president Volodymyr Zelensky plans to call it off and remain president indefinitely.

In a recent interview with BBC, Zelensky revealed that his five-year term slated for completion in 2024 will simply be extended until the time when Russia withdraws from Ukraine.

Zelensky made similar comments to The Washington Post last month about the upcoming parliamentary elections, which are scheduled to occur this upcoming October but that will probably be postponed as well until the war ends.

"If we have martial law, we cannot have elections," Zelensky declared. "The constitution prohibits any elections during martial law. If there is no martial law, then there will be (elections)."

(Related: In 2022, Zelensky and his cronies stole at least $400 million from U.S. taxpayers.)

Holding elections in Ukraine during martial law could "rupture state," says parliament speaker

Ruslan Stefanchuk, the current speaker of the Ukrainian parliament, reiterated much the same earlier this month when he declared that a martial law declaration prohibits the holding of any further elections until the time it comes to an end.

"Ukrainian legislation stipulates it is impossible to hold any elections during martial law," he said. "And this makes sense."

If Ukrainian elections were to still occur during a martial law declaration, then it could "lead to the rupture of the state, which our enemy is waiting for," Stefanchuk added.

"That is why I think the most correct and wise decision is to hold elections immediately after the end of martial law."

Keep in mind that it was Zelensky himself who declared martial law. Since then, Zelensky has done nothing but consolidate his power, including by banning Ukraine's main opposition party, called the Opposition Platform  For Life, from holding any seats. Prior to that, the Opposition Platform  For Life party held 44 seats in Ukraine's parliament.

Zelensky also reportedly banned 10 other opposition parties from holding seats on Ukraine's parliament, as well as nationalized all media in Ukraine under state control.

For years, many have worried that the same would come to America. It was believed to be possible during the Barack Hussein Obama years, and some suspected that perhaps martial law would be declared under Donald Trump. Now, it is looking like Joe Biden may be the one to pull a Zelensky here in America in order to prevent himself from being ousted from the White House in 2024.

It is clear as day that Pedo Joe is wildly unpopular, even among Democrats. He was also unlawfully installed into the White House through a stolen election and coup, though he has yet to outright ban the opposition, Republicans and some Democrats, from holding seats in Congress.

All it would take is one major false flag incident for the Biden regime to declare martial law, though. Then all bets are off as far as what becomes of the 2024 election.

The Biden regime is already trying to ban the opposition through its vast Censorship Industrial Complex, which seeks to erase the First Amendment and free speech rights online. This could soon escalate to a full-on police state, Zelensky style, that allows Biden and his cronies to remain in Washington, D.C., indefinitely.

There is some indication that perhaps the newfound malaria scare will blossom into enough of a false flag incident to impose Pandemic 2.0 restrictions. If that occurs, then chances are the Biden regime will take full opportunity to silence all opposition and keep the "big guy" seated in the White House as the deep state's puppet well into the foreseeable future.

Learn more about the striking similarities between Zelensky and Biden at Corruption.news.

Sources for this article include:

AntiWar.com

Newstarget.com
The latest weather report showed that a severe outlook is forecast to unfold in the United States as many looked forward to 4th July.

The forecast said severe weather conditions could become likely in Central Plains, Carolinas, Vermont, New Hampshire and Mississippi.

Recently, the poweroutage.us reported that about 220,000 had no power in parts of the Midwest due to the derecho.

Americans with travel plans should keep updated with the weather for this week.

Severe weather outlook in the US

According to AccuWeather's forecast, the severe thunderstorms could impact portions of the Southern and Eastern portions of the country.

On Monday afternoon, the latest forecast showed that severe thunderstorms are forecast to unload flooding downpours, hail and damaging wind gusts.

The severe storms are forecast in Huntsville, Atlanta, Raleigh, Washington, New York and Albany.

During the early week, the forecast noted that rainy conditions with chances of thunderstorms could unfold in Billings, Minneapolis, Boston, New York, Washington, Charlotte, Jacksonville, Memphis and Dallas.

Furthermore, the National Weather Service (NWS) reported that scattered storms could emerge in the Mid-South, bringing heavy rainfall and damaging winds. Visit NWS for severe thunderstorm watches in your area.

Also Read: US Severe Storm Forecast: Central US, Mid-Atlantic to Experience Flooding Downpours

Meanwhile, the AccuWeather forecast revealed that severe thunderstorms would continue until Tuesday night in Jackson, Atlanta, Asheville, Virginia Beach, Charleston, Omaha, Minneapolis, Sioux Falls and Scottsbluff.

The Lightning Safety Council reminded Americans to be careful with lightning threats as thunderstorms could become dangerous.

Preparing for the severe weather this week

As many Americans looked forward to the 4th of July, the latest weather forecast showed that a severe weather condition could likely unfold in the country, causing possible slower commutes and travel disruptions.

The severe weather outlook could likely result in rainy conditions, affecting outdoor activities and travel. Here are important reminders for motorists and travelers this week.

Checking the weather outlook

In the Northeast and Midwest, Nature World News (NWN) reported that the Canadian wildfire smoke caused reduced air quality in the regions, causing unhealthy air and health concerns.

It is best to prepare multiple information of weather forecasts, especially if you are in flood-prone or severe thunderstorm-prone areas.

During the early week, the latest forecast noted that thunderstorms could become likely, bringing damaging winds and flooding downpours.

Chances of isolated tornadoes

The forecast also noted that hail conditions and isolated tornadoes could unfold in the Central Plains midweek. Homeowners should secure their homes and outdoor items or equipment.

Power outages are also possible.

Prepare emergency kits

As hurricane season is set, homeowners must keep emergency kits at home. The suggested emergency kits are the following: battery-powered flashlights, battery-powered radios, medicines and non-perishable goods.

Related Article: Intense Heat Likely to Emerge in the Southeast After Impacting Parts of Texas

For more similar stories, don't forget to follow Nature World News.
Lions are among the most iconic and charismatic animals in the world. They are revered for their strength, beauty, and social behavior.

They are also important for the balance and diversity of ecosystems, as they are apex predators that regulate the populations of their prey and competitors.

However, lions are also facing many threats to their survival in the wild.

According to the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN), lions have declined by about 43% in the past 21 years, and are classified as vulnerable to extinction.

The main causes of their decline are habitat loss and fragmentation, human-wildlife conflict, poaching, and disease.

In contrast to the plight of wild lions, there is a booming industry of captive lion breeding in South Africa.

Thousands of lions are kept on farms for commercial purposes, such as tourism, hunting, and traditional medicine, which are then subjected to cruel and unnatural conditions that compromise their welfare and conservation.

The cruel reality of lion farming

Lion farming is a controversial industry that involves breeding and keeping lions in captivity for commercial purposes, as per Phys.org.

These include offering tourists the opportunity to interact with lion cubs or adult lions, selling lions to trophy hunters who kill them in fenced areas, and exporting lion bones and other body parts to Asia for traditional medicine.

Lion farming has been practiced in South Africa since the 1990s, and has grown rapidly in recent years.

According to official records, there are over 350 lion farms in the country, holding around 8,000 lions, which is more than double the number of wild lions in South Africa, which is estimated at 3,500.

However, the actual number of lions and other big cats on these farms may be much higher, as the industry is poorly regulated and monitored.

Many farms are not registered or inspected, and there is a lack of transparency and accountability in the trade of lions and their products.

Corruption and illegal activities are also rampant in the industry

Lion farming is not only unethical, but also harmful to the welfare and conservation of lions. Animals on these farms suffer from stress, disease, malnutrition, genetic defects, and injuries.

They are often kept in overcrowded and unsanitary conditions, with little or no veterinary care, and are also subjected to cruel practices, such as early separation from their mothers, intensive breeding, mutilation, and drugging.

Lion farming also poses a threat to the survival of wild lions, as it creates a demand for lion products that may fuel poaching and illegal trade. It also undermines the efforts to protect wild lion habitats and populations, as it diverts resources and attention away from conservation.

Furthermore, it tarnishes the image of South Africa as a responsible wildlife tourism destination, as it exposes tourists to potential risks of disease transmission, injury, or fraud.

Also Read: Can Lion's Roar Paralyzed Humans?

The need to end lion farming

There is growing opposition to lion farming both within and outside South Africa.

Many conservationists, animal welfare advocates, scientists, politicians, celebrities, and tourists have spoken out against the industry and called for its closure, as per The Conversation.

They argue that lion farming has no conservation value or economic benefit and that it violates the intrinsic rights and dignity of lions.

In May 2021, a high-level panel appointed by the Minister of Forestry, Fisheries, and the Environment recommended that South Africa should end the breeding of captive lions for hunting or trade in their parts and derivatives.

The panel also advised that South Africa should not captive-breed lions for any purpose other than conservation.

The panel's report was welcomed by many stakeholders as a positive step towards ending lion farming.

However, the report has not yet been adopted by the government as an official policy, and there is still resistance from some sectors of the industry and society.

Therefore, more pressure and action are needed to ensure that the recommendations are implemented effectively and urgently.

Ending lion farming would not only benefit lions but also South Africa as a whole. It would help to restore the natural balance and integrity of ecosystems, promote ethical and sustainable wildlife tourism, enhance the reputation and credibility of South Africa as a conservation leader, and demonstrate respect for the values and cultures of South Africans who regard lions as sacred and iconic animals.

Lions are still being farmed in South Africa for hunters and tourism. They shouldn't be, say researchers who have studied the industry and its impacts on lions and people.

Many are urging the government and the public to take action to end this cruel and unnecessary practice once and for all.

Related article: Endangered Sea Lion Facts: Threats, Conservation Status and Efforts
The hottest temperature experienced in the United Kingdom in June did not only bring discomfort to residents but also harmed fish and insects.

According to a BBC report, the extreme heat in UK caused death among fish and disturbed insects and plants. Citing environmental group the Wildlife Trusts, the report said that with this observations, nature has been pounded by extreme weather without a chance to recover.

"The reports of the number of fish death incidents in rivers for this time of year has been unprecedented. I would normally expect rivers to be affected later in the summer when it's hotter and drier," Mark Owen of the Angling Trust said.

Owen cited that sea trout were found dead on the River Wear in north-east England.

On the other hand, the Environment Agency said more reports of dead fish were received this year when compared to the number of incidents during the same period last year.

When it comes to plants and insects, the report said many flowering plants, including orchids, wilted in the high temperatures. This means insects, such as bees and butterflies that feed on nectar and pollen, will have less to eat, Ali Morse from the Wildlife Trusts said.

In relation to this, Morse explained that species with short lifespans are particularly badly affected because for example, many butterflies are adults for only a short period of time.

She noted that if they could not access food in that period, it stunts their population.

Read Also: UK Faces First Red Extreme Heat Warning With Temperature Highs at 100 Degrees

Water usage

Aside from the adverse effects to nature, the high temperature also resulted in people using more water in their residences.

Citing information from water experts, the report said rivers and reservoirs, which provide much of the UK's drinking water, are in a healthier position than the same time last year.

However, the hot weather is likely to have an adverse effect on water supplies as if this warm temperature persists, the water supply will immediately deplete.

Possible repeat of heatwave

Earlier, experts already warned about the high temperature as it urged the public to brace for a possible repeat of last year's record-breaking heatwave that triggered wildfires, disrupted rail transport, and closed schools.

In a report on The Guardian, senior Met Office adviser Mark Bevan said the prediction on the summer weather was calculated using a number of factors including the El Nino effect, the wind patterns, and sea surface temperatures.

The El Nino phenomenon is characterized by the abnormal warming of sea surface temperatures in the central and eastern equatorial Pacific Ocean and below-normal rainfall.

The report said that according to the Office for National Statistics and the UK Health Security Agency, there had been 3,000 more deaths in England and Wales last year than what was usually expected during the summer season.

Meanwhile, a GB News report said the Met Office already disclosed that there were indications for "above-average temperatures are stronger" from July 12 to July 26.

The UK's national weather service warned that such meteorological changes would create and result in a "correspondingly higher likelihood" of heatwaves.

Related Article: After Record-Breaking Heat, UK Finally Starts To Cool Down
Experts have observed that great white sharks have headed North, a practice that was unobserved in the previous years.

According to a Live Science report, great white sharks had been rare in the 20th century in the northern waters. It noted that until 2006, there had only been 32 recorded sightings of the said shark species off Canada's east coast.

Currently, their presence has been increasing and scientists believed that this was because they were attracted to the frigid waters due to the abundance of their favorite prey, the seals.

The report said the population of seal in the region has increased in the last 60 years because of conservation efforts such as the 1972 U.S. Marine Mammal Protection Act, going from around 2,300 individuals in 1960 to 380,000 in 2017.

Megan Winston, staff scientist at the Atlantic White Shark Conservancy, told Live Science that "a lot of folks think white sharks in the waters off New England and Canada are a new phenomenon, but there are some great accounts of white sharks from fishermen in the early to mid-1900s - and earlier - in that region before shark populations coast-wide took a nosedive."

She pointed out that the rise of sightings of great white sharks in the area was due to the abundance of prey and an increase in shark numbers.

"What we're seeing right now is the species recolonizing its historic range as it recovers and as populations of seals, one of their favorite foods, rebound following protections that were put into place for marine mammals in the 1970s," Winton said in an interview with Live Science.

Studies have shown that in the 20th century, the number of great white sharks decreased, falling by around 80%.

To stop the decline, various US laws and regulations which aim to protect white sharks were introduced, and following their enforcement, the numbers had returned to "healthy levels."

Read Also: Ocean's Extremely Hot Causing Great White Sharks To Find Other Habitat

Humans as preys

Meanwhile, when it comes to preys, research have shown that great white sharks are not fond of humans as their food.

Marine biologist Chris Lowe said shark attacks in the US were extremely rare. He noted in a study published in the journal Plos One that in 2022, there were 41 unprovoked bites and one fatality reported in the US.

According to Lowe, the young white sharks are probably more focused on eating animals such as stingrays. He added that these stingrays usually stay beneath the ocean floor.

Lowe also noted in his study that young sharks can grow up to about nine feet or 2.7 meters long before they reach adulthood. Despite that growth, these sharks could be scared of humans, he added.

Climate change

Meanwhile, research has also found that climate change will likely affect the geographic range of white sharks.

Winton said experts are already documenting northward shifts in other species, and white sharks and their prey are likely to be no exception.

Winton further mentioned that the waters off the northeastern US and Canada are among the fastest warming ocean regions in the planet.

The Independent earlier reported that sharks spend summer and fall primarily in coastal waters off New England and Atlantic Canada as they feed on high-calorie prey such as seals.

After that, the marine animal will head back south to warmer winter waters off the southeast US from South Carolina to the Gulf of Mexico.

Related Article: Genetic Analysis Of Great White Shark Reveals Surprises
Extreme heat can be very uncomfortable, as weather forecasts in Europe show that temperature can go up to 40 degrees Celsius. Thankfully, these 'cooling' tips might help to fight the heatwave - in Mediterranean way!

1. Hydrate as much as you can

Cliche to say that water makes you refreshed, but it also has a lot of healthy benefits. So, the hot temperature will not just encourage you to be hydrated, but can also make you be healthy at the same time.

In a study, the benefits of hydration especially for adults include improved brain performance, digestive harmony, decrease in joint pains, prevention of kidney stones, and healthier heart. While drinking eight glasses a day is the target, a human body can take as much as many water as possible.

2. Loose clothes are the way to go

Fashion won't save you in this hot weather, but wearing comfortable clothes can. Loose clothes are highly recommendable, especially if made of natural fibers.

Cotton or silk clothing are softer which are more breathable. These materials are also absorbent that make your skin comfortable.

3. The functional aubergine hat

Cooler head prevails as always, why not with the help of an aubergine hat? Turn it into something with more purpose. Just put some ice packs then voila, magically feel the relief!

4. Prevent heat with closed curtains

Block the heatwave from entering your home through the windows by closing curtains or blinds. While this can make your house cooler, you can also expect a decrease in your electricity bill with this energy-saving tip.

5. Control the airflow

Air conditions are the easy fix but can be expensive. Maximize your fans at home to make the air cooler. Proper airflow can be done through putting fans in the right place. There are also brilliant hacks that can be done easily like putting a bucket of ice in front of the electric fan, or taking the breeze from the outside through blowing the hot air away.

6. Lights off

Yes! Make sure to turn off the lights especially during daytime when it is not really necessary. Most light bulbs create heat which are considered wasted energy, unless it is winter. This tip is also for appliances which are not in use.

7. Be an early bird

Heat can be usually felt in the mid-morning until noon time, caused by the scorching sun. It is better to consider starting your activities early when temperature is much cooler.

8. Treat yourself with a cool shower

This could be the most refreshing way to beat the heat and cool down. Soothing shower is most perfect after an exhausting activity outside. Just turn the shower on, put it on cold, and feel like you're under the rain.

Read Also: Parts Of Europe Are Experiencing Another Heatwave, And The Met Office Has Issued A Yellow Rain Warning

What causes the Mediterranean heat wave?

The record-breaking heat wave struck Spain, Portugal, Morocco and Algeria on April was caused by the human-made climate change, study shows as reported by ABC News.

Triple-digit temperatures are practically impossible without climate change, according to World Weather Attribution, a team of climate scientists investigating whether extreme weather occurrences were affected by climate change.

Ten environmental scientists worked together to assess how human-made climate change had altered the likelihood and intensity of a three-day heat wave in parts of southwestern Europe and North Afrifa in the last week of April.

"As the planet warms, these situations will become more frequent and call for long-term planning, including implementing sustainable agricultural models and effective water management policies," Fatima Driouech, associate professor at the Mohammed VI Polytechnic University in Ben Guerir, Morocco, said.

France Has Highest Number Of Heat-Related Death In Europe

While Mediterranean region are no strangers to hot weather, Parisian faces the highest risk of dying due to heat-related illness.

In a study published in Lancet Planet Health, death associated with the rising temperature was 1.6 times more likely in Paris compared to other European countries, Euronews reported.

Paris is followed by Amsterdam and Zagreb.

Local reports said that Paris is "overheating" and could experience heat waves 34 days per year by 2080. This prompted the French lawmakers to adapt the so called "new reality" to address climate change.

Related Article: Experts Found Climate Crisis Causes Unusual Warmer Temperatures In The UK And Europe This October

Related Video:
(Photo : Orcas Don't Attack Boats for Fun: What We Know About the Recent Incidents)

In recent months, there have been several reports of orcas attacking boats off the coast of Spain and Portugal. In some cases, the orcas have rammed boats, causing damage to the hulls and rudders. In other cases, the orcas have even sunk boats.

These incidents have understandably caused some concern among boaters in the area. However, it is essential to remember that orcas are not known to attack humans for food. There have been no documented cases of an orca intentionally harming a human in the wild.

So why are orcas attacking boats? There are a few possible explanations. One possibility is that the orcas are curious about boats and are trying to interact with them. Orcas are brilliant animals, and they are known to be playful. They simply see boats as new objects to explore.

Another possibility is that the orcas target boats because they mistake them for prey. Orcas are apex predators, typically eating fish, seals, and other marine mammals. They may see boats as significant, dark shapes in the water and mistake them for a potential meal.

Finally, it is also possible that the orcas attack boats because they are stressed or frustrated. Orcas are social animals, and they live in tight-knit groups called pods. If boaters are harassing a pod of orcas, they may lash out in retaliation. As written on Roaring Nature orcas don't kill for fun; it is essential to remember this fact when considering the recent incidents of orcas attacking boats off the coast of Spain and Portugal.

Whatever the reason, it is clear that the recent orca attacks on boats are a cause for concern. Boaters in the area should be aware of the potential for these attacks and should take steps to avoid them.

Here are a few tips:

Slow down your boat and avoid making any sudden movements.

Stay away from areas where orcas are known to be present.

If you see an orca, do not approach it. Instead, keep your distance and observe it from a safe location.

If you experience an orca attack, staying calm and assessing the situation is important. If your boat is damaged, try to make it to shore as quickly as possible. Stay away from the orcas and swim to shore if you are in the water. It is also essential to report any orca attacks to the authorities. This will help them track the incidents and develop strategies to prevent future attacks. While the recent orca attacks cause concern, it is essential to remember that orcas are not typically aggressive toward humans. In most cases, they are simply curious or playful animals. Following the tips above, boaters can help avoid these attacks and keep themselves and the orcas safe.

In addition to the above, here are some other things to keep in mind about orcas and boats:

Orcas are powerful animals. They can easily overturn a small boat or damage a larger one.

Orcas are fast swimmers. They can easily outrun a boat, even a fast one.

Orcas are intelligent animals. They can learn to associate boats with food or other negative experiences. This can make them more likely to attack boats in the future.

If you see an orca, it is important to respect its space and avoid making any sudden movements. If you are in a boat, you must slow down and keep your distance. By following these simple tips, you can help to keep yourself and the orcas safe.
According to experts, the reported discovery of an Australian spotted jellyfish on a Texas beach may mean fewer food sources for native marine life.

Invasive Australian Spotted Jellyfish in Texas

The June 30 encounter was referred to by the Padre Island National Seashore as a "not-so-welcome" discovery. It is an Australian spotted jellyfish, according to officials, and it is found far away from its natural habitat.

Although the jelly is indigenous to the Pacific Ocean, it has just started to show up in the Gulf of Mexico. According to Padre Island National Seashore, the spotted species grows enormously, reaching a width of 20 inches, and moves in sizable groups. But unlike many other varieties of jellyfish, it cannot directly injure humans.

The species, according to officials, have weak venom and are not dangerous to humans. They can't even use their poison to stun prey because it is so weak. They are therefore large, soft, and safe.

Competition for Native Marine Life

According to Padre Island National Seashore, since entering the Gulf, the species has been consuming copious amounts of zooplankton, making it difficult for nearby marine creatures to find food. According to the Texas Invasive Species Institute, experts think the species may have snuck into the Gulf of Mexico by attaching itself to ship hulls in the form of polyps.

Before moving on to the adult "medusa" stage, when they typically live for another two years, the spotted jelly can survive for up to five years while in the polyp stage of its life cycle, according to the institution. This intruder has recently developed enormous swarms in the Gulf.

Australian spotted jellyfish congregate in large concentrations, which can be problematic because each jellyfish can remove approximately 1,765 feet of plankton-filled water in a single day. There isn't much the typical person can do if they come across one of the jellyfish, despite the fact that they can have a negative impact on the ecosystem of the Gulf.

Officials claim that the best course of action from a person's point of view is to just leave the jellyfish in their current location and allow nature to take its course, the Fort Worth Star-Telegram reports.

According to NPR experts via Newsweek, jellyfish tend to dry out and perish very quickly when they wash up on the beach. The remainder will eventually dissolve into the sand after being consumed by gulls, crabs, and other scavengers.

The Australian spotted jellyfish is listed as a potential threat to the shrimp industry by the US National Invasive Species Information Center because it clogs nets and harms fishing gear, according to Newsweek.

Also Read: Deadly Portuguese Man O' Wars Are Lurking in Virginia Beach Due to Ocean Currents, Wind

Invasive Species Management

Snails that consume jellyfish in their budding polyp stage, which helps to control the jellyfish population, exist in the Pacific region, but they are not present in the oceans around North America. The management of these jellyfish populations is not well understood, especially given that they are found in areas of open ocean with low salinity, which causes the jellyfish to perish along with their symbiotic algae.

Although live jellyfish can be caught to help reduce the population, there may be millions of them in one region, and fishermen can only commit so much time to managing an animal that doesn't pay, according to TISI.

Related Article: Rare Giant Phantom Jellyfish Sighting in Antarctica Via Personal Submersibles is Future of Research, Study Shows
By Express News Service

MUMBAI: The SGX Nifty began trading as GIFT Nifty today marking a significant shift for investors and traders looking for cues for the opening of Indian equities. The transformation of SGX Nifty into GIFT Nifty means that now the latter will serve as an early indicator of how Nifty is likely to open on any trading day.

SGX Nifty were the Nifty derivatives contracts traded on the Singapore Exchange (SGX). From today, trading in these contracts has now started to take place on Gujarat International Finance Tec-City (GIFT City) under a special arrangement between SGX and the National Stock Exchange (NSE).

After the start of trading in GIFT Nifty, the turnover generated in the offshore market earlier, will now be generated onshore in Gujarats Gift City.

All derivative contracts worth $7.5 billion, which were earlier traded in Singapore, will shift to GIFT City.

Industry experts expect GIFT Nifty to have daily volumes of $1.5 billion to $2 billion.

However, there will not be any significant impact on retail traders and investors as it is just a migration from one stock exchange to another. From now on, all the trades emanating from SGX will be routed and executed at Gift City.

The GIFT Nifty will have two sessions of trading from today. The first one will start at 6:30 am Indian Standard Time (IST), and continue till 3:40 pm IST. The second session will begin from 5 pm IST and continue till 2:45 am IST.

Nifty contracts traded on the NSE are denominated in rupees, while those on the GIFT Nifty are denominated in US dollars.

The move will further strengthen the position of GIFT City as a new financial hub, which the government intends to develop as a competitor of other global financial centres like Dubai, Mauritius, and Singapore.

Stock exchanges functioning in the GIFT City are allowed to offer trading in securities in any currency other than the Indian rupee. the NSE International Exchange (NSE IX), which started operating in 2017, offers dollar-denominated trading in various products.

Investors will have access to four products under the GIFT Nifty umbrella brand - Gift Nifty 50, Gift Nifty Bank, Gift Nifty Financial Services, and Gift Nifty IT derivative contracts.

MUMBAI: The SGX Nifty began trading as GIFT Nifty today marking a significant shift for investors and traders looking for cues for the opening of Indian equities. The transformation of SGX Nifty into GIFT Nifty means that now the latter will serve as an early indicator of how Nifty is likely to open on any trading day. SGX Nifty were the Nifty derivatives contracts traded on the Singapore Exchange (SGX). From today, trading in these contracts has now started to take place on Gujarat International Finance Tec-City (GIFT City) under a special arrangement between SGX and the National Stock Exchange (NSE). After the start of trading in GIFT Nifty, the turnover generated in the offshore market earlier, will now be generated onshore in Gujarats Gift City.googletag.cmd.push(function() {googletag.display('div-gpt-ad-8052921-2'); }); All derivative contracts worth $7.5 billion, which were earlier traded in Singapore, will shift to GIFT City. Industry experts expect GIFT Nifty to have daily volumes of $1.5 billion to $2 billion. However, there will not be any significant impact on retail traders and investors as it is just a migration from one stock exchange to another. From now on, all the trades emanating from SGX will be routed and executed at Gift City. The GIFT Nifty will have two sessions of trading from today. The first one will start at 6:30 am Indian Standard Time (IST), and continue till 3:40 pm IST. The second session will begin from 5 pm IST and continue till 2:45 am IST. Nifty contracts traded on the NSE are denominated in rupees, while those on the GIFT Nifty are denominated in US dollars. The move will further strengthen the position of GIFT City as a new financial hub, which the government intends to develop as a competitor of other global financial centres like Dubai, Mauritius, and Singapore. Stock exchanges functioning in the GIFT City are allowed to offer trading in securities in any currency other than the Indian rupee. the NSE International Exchange (NSE IX), which started operating in 2017, offers dollar-denominated trading in various products. Investors will have access to four products under the GIFT Nifty umbrella brand - Gift Nifty 50, Gift Nifty Bank, Gift Nifty Financial Services, and Gift Nifty IT derivative contracts.
Jaison Wilson By

Express News Service

NEW DELHI: The Delhi High Court on Monday dismissed the bail plea of AAP leader Manish Sisodia, who was arrested for his alleged role in the money laundering case relating to alleged irregularities in the city government's excise policy.

Justice Dinesh Kumar Sharma refused to grant relief to Sisodia, saying he is not entitled to bail at this stage.

A single bench of Justice Dinesh Kumar Sharma also rejected bail for AAP's former communication overseer Vijay Nair, Hyderabad-based businessman, Abhishek Boinpally and Pernod Ricard's executive Benoy Babu, who are co-accused in the liquor scam case.

"In view of the high political power held by the accused (Sisodia) and his position in the party, the possibility of influencing the witnesses cannot be ruled out," Justice Sharma said in the order.

The high court also pointed out that the applicant has failed to meet the twin condition for the grant of bail under the Prevention of Money Laundering Act, 2002 (PMLA) as well as the triple test for grant of bail while dismissing the plea.

ALSO READ: Excise policy case: HC asks ED to respond to businessmans bail plea



Earlier, the high court had already dismissed Sisodia's bail petition and interim bail petitions including one which moved on grounds of wife's deteriorating medical condition in the corruption case registered by the Central Bureau of Investigation (CBI).

NEW DELHI: The Delhi High Court on Monday dismissed the bail plea of AAP leader Manish Sisodia, who was arrested for his alleged role in the money laundering case relating to alleged irregularities in the city government's excise policy. Justice Dinesh Kumar Sharma refused to grant relief to Sisodia, saying he is not entitled to bail at this stage. A single bench of Justice Dinesh Kumar Sharma also rejected bail for AAP's former communication overseer Vijay Nair, Hyderabad-based businessman, Abhishek Boinpally and Pernod Ricard's executive Benoy Babu, who are co-accused in the liquor scam case.googletag.cmd.push(function() {googletag.display('div-gpt-ad-8052921-2'); }); "In view of the high political power held by the accused (Sisodia) and his position in the party, the possibility of influencing the witnesses cannot be ruled out," Justice Sharma said in the order. The high court also pointed out that the applicant has failed to meet the twin condition for the grant of bail under the Prevention of Money Laundering Act, 2002 (PMLA) as well as the triple test for grant of bail while dismissing the plea. ALSO READ: Excise policy case: HC asks ED to respond to businessmans bail plea Earlier, the high court had already dismissed Sisodia's bail petition and interim bail petitions including one which moved on grounds of wife's deteriorating medical condition in the corruption case registered by the Central Bureau of Investigation (CBI).
Rajesh Kumar Thakur By

Express News Service

NEW DELHI: Maharashtra 'done'. The air is thick in political circles in Delhi with the talk of a possibility that it could now be the turn of some other Opposition-ruled states.

Soon after Ajit Pawar joined hands with BJP-Shiv Sena, Bihar BJPs senior leader and national spokesperson of the partys OBC Mocha Nikhil Anand dropped some hints of what could lay ahead with some family and individual-centric parties such as the RJD, JD-U and the Samajwadi Party in Bihar and UP.

Whatever happened with NCP in Maharashtra should be a lesson for family-based parties as well as privately owned political shops. Parties like Samajwadi Party, Lalu-led RJD, JD(U) can see their future in the developments taking place vis-a-vis the NCP, said Anand and tweeted as much.

On the face of it, the RJD remains unfazed. Party spokesperson Mrutyunjay Tiwari said that no one should do daydreaming of causing a split in RJD.

The BJPs Operation Lotus cannot succeed against the RJD, he remarked. JD-U national president Lalan Singh said: The BJP tried many times but failed in Bihar for splitting any party.

Speaking to this newspaper, political analyst PKD Nambiar said: The Maharashtra-like development cannot be ruled out in the context of Bihar and Telangana. In Bihar, the RJD is a family-driven party in power with one man-led JD-U. A large chunk of disgruntled legislators of both RJD and JD-U may consider departing from these parties as they dont see any future for themselves.

He also suspected Maharashtra's effect on the BRS despite its having a majority in Telangana.

The family-driven parties like the RJD, BRS and others should be cautious before the 2024 LS elections as disgruntled party leaders can create a Maharashtra-like situation, he said.

He, like many others, also feared a similar situation in Jharkhand ahead of the Lok Sabha elections. In Uttar Pradesh, a larger chunk of SP leaders is willing to be with the ruling party, he said. BJP sources said a large number of legislators in JD-U are not happy with JD-U being in power with the RJD.

Soon after the Maharashtra development, Delhi education minister Atishi was the first who alleged that the BJP was trying to play political games in Delhi and Punjab also. Chirag Paswan, chief of the LJP (Ram Vilas faction) said on Sunday that CM Nitish Kumar was afraid of a split in his party.

Many JD-U leaders are in touch with other parties, and I am also in touch with them. Those who work to break others party, they too suffer the pain of breaking their own party, remarked Chirag. The saffron exuberance will be put to test in the Assembly elections due in a few states months from now. The Maharashtra fallout at the national level too will be visible in the 2024 elections.

Clouds of doubt hover

Political parties fear a similar fate in other states

Analysts suspect Maha effect on BRS despite a majority in Telangana

In UP, a larger chunk of SP leaders are willing to be with the ruling party, sources said

Delhi edu minister Atishi alleged that the BJP was trying to play political games in Delhi and Punjab

NEW DELHI: Maharashtra 'done'. The air is thick in political circles in Delhi with the talk of a possibility that it could now be the turn of some other Opposition-ruled states. Soon after Ajit Pawar joined hands with BJP-Shiv Sena, Bihar BJPs senior leader and national spokesperson of the partys OBC Mocha Nikhil Anand dropped some hints of what could lay ahead with some family and individual-centric parties such as the RJD, JD-U and the Samajwadi Party in Bihar and UP. Whatever happened with NCP in Maharashtra should be a lesson for family-based parties as well as privately owned political shops. Parties like Samajwadi Party, Lalu-led RJD, JD(U) can see their future in the developments taking place vis-a-vis the NCP, said Anand and tweeted as much.googletag.cmd.push(function() {googletag.display('div-gpt-ad-8052921-2'); }); On the face of it, the RJD remains unfazed. Party spokesperson Mrutyunjay Tiwari said that no one should do daydreaming of causing a split in RJD. The BJPs Operation Lotus cannot succeed against the RJD, he remarked. JD-U national president Lalan Singh said: The BJP tried many times but failed in Bihar for splitting any party. Speaking to this newspaper, political analyst PKD Nambiar said: The Maharashtra-like development cannot be ruled out in the context of Bihar and Telangana. In Bihar, the RJD is a family-driven party in power with one man-led JD-U. A large chunk of disgruntled legislators of both RJD and JD-U may consider departing from these parties as they dont see any future for themselves. He also suspected Maharashtra's effect on the BRS despite its having a majority in Telangana. The family-driven parties like the RJD, BRS and others should be cautious before the 2024 LS elections as disgruntled party leaders can create a Maharashtra-like situation, he said. He, like many others, also feared a similar situation in Jharkhand ahead of the Lok Sabha elections. In Uttar Pradesh, a larger chunk of SP leaders is willing to be with the ruling party, he said. BJP sources said a large number of legislators in JD-U are not happy with JD-U being in power with the RJD. Soon after the Maharashtra development, Delhi education minister Atishi was the first who alleged that the BJP was trying to play political games in Delhi and Punjab also. Chirag Paswan, chief of the LJP (Ram Vilas faction) said on Sunday that CM Nitish Kumar was afraid of a split in his party. Many JD-U leaders are in touch with other parties, and I am also in touch with them. Those who work to break others party, they too suffer the pain of breaking their own party, remarked Chirag. The saffron exuberance will be put to test in the Assembly elections due in a few states months from now. The Maharashtra fallout at the national level too will be visible in the 2024 elections. Clouds of doubt hover Political parties fear a similar fate in other states Analysts suspect Maha effect on BRS despite a majority in Telangana In UP, a larger chunk of SP leaders are willing to be with the ruling party, sources said Delhi edu minister Atishi alleged that the BJP was trying to play political games in Delhi and Punjab
Sudhir Suryawanshi By

Express News Service

MUMBAI: Whatever happened in Maharashtra today sends out a message to regional parties that once dominated Indias political landscape. In four months, two prominent regional parties in Maharashtra have split.

First was the Balasaheb Thackeray-led Shiv Sena that saw a vertical split: Uddhav Thackeray lost his party founded by his father and the symbol along with the government. Now, NCP chief Sharad Pawar's nephew Ajit Pawar revolted against his uncle and joined hands with BJP.

Ajit Pawar took the oath of deputy chief minister a third time in the last four years and six times in his political career.

Earlier, the BJP broke Shiv Sena and made Eknath Shinde as a chief minister but that did not help to set a positive narrative in favour of the government. On the other hand, Uddhav Thackeray continues to gain sympathy.

However to counter the Maha Vikas Aghadi and the sympathy factor in favour of Uddhav, BJP yet again broke the NCP, so that they will have smooth sailing in 48 Lok Sabha constituencies in Maharashtra.

The BJPs move is also aimed at countering the growing influence of Maharashtra CM Eknath Shinde in decision-making. Under the given circumstances, Ajit Pawar and BJP ministers will dominate the Shinde cabinet.

NCP state president Jayant Patil said Shinde was ignoring his deputy Devendra Fadnavis, who as the home minister, has no authority to even transfer any police officer. The BJPs cadre was also upset with the functioning of Shinde and his son Dr Shreekant who was seen interfering in government functioning. Patil said Ajit Pawars induction could have helped in maintaining the balance of power.

The speculation is that Ajit Pawars entry into the BJP-Sena government will rattle CM Shinde which may compel him and his aides to get out of the government. That would allow more NCP representation that could lead to Ajit Pawar becoming the CM.

However, allowing the NCP a greater space may damage the BJP too, because BJP will be seen as responsible for breaking regional parties. There could be double-engine sympathy  for Uddhav Thackeray and now Sharad Pawar.

If Sharad Pawar and Uddhav Thackeray travel across the state, then BJP will face a major challenge. The 83-year-old Pawar has decided to rebuild the party and said the current situation is not new for him.

The NCP question of legacy also got clear today. Supriya Sule is a clear political heir of Sharad Pawar.

Besides, the NCP leaders who faced corruption charges left the party in fear of arrest that happened in 2014, 2019 and 2023. The BJP tagged NCP as a party of corrupt leaders. But all those whom the BJP called corrupt are now a part of the government.

MUMBAI: Whatever happened in Maharashtra today sends out a message to regional parties that once dominated Indias political landscape. In four months, two prominent regional parties in Maharashtra have split. First was the Balasaheb Thackeray-led Shiv Sena that saw a vertical split: Uddhav Thackeray lost his party founded by his father and the symbol along with the government. Now, NCP chief Sharad Pawar's nephew Ajit Pawar revolted against his uncle and joined hands with BJP. Ajit Pawar took the oath of deputy chief minister a third time in the last four years and six times in his political career.googletag.cmd.push(function() {googletag.display('div-gpt-ad-8052921-2'); }); Earlier, the BJP broke Shiv Sena and made Eknath Shinde as a chief minister but that did not help to set a positive narrative in favour of the government. On the other hand, Uddhav Thackeray continues to gain sympathy. However to counter the Maha Vikas Aghadi and the sympathy factor in favour of Uddhav, BJP yet again broke the NCP, so that they will have smooth sailing in 48 Lok Sabha constituencies in Maharashtra. The BJPs move is also aimed at countering the growing influence of Maharashtra CM Eknath Shinde in decision-making. Under the given circumstances, Ajit Pawar and BJP ministers will dominate the Shinde cabinet. NCP state president Jayant Patil said Shinde was ignoring his deputy Devendra Fadnavis, who as the home minister, has no authority to even transfer any police officer. The BJPs cadre was also upset with the functioning of Shinde and his son Dr Shreekant who was seen interfering in government functioning. Patil said Ajit Pawars induction could have helped in maintaining the balance of power. The speculation is that Ajit Pawars entry into the BJP-Sena government will rattle CM Shinde which may compel him and his aides to get out of the government. That would allow more NCP representation that could lead to Ajit Pawar becoming the CM. However, allowing the NCP a greater space may damage the BJP too, because BJP will be seen as responsible for breaking regional parties. There could be double-engine sympathy  for Uddhav Thackeray and now Sharad Pawar. If Sharad Pawar and Uddhav Thackeray travel across the state, then BJP will face a major challenge. The 83-year-old Pawar has decided to rebuild the party and said the current situation is not new for him. The NCP question of legacy also got clear today. Supriya Sule is a clear political heir of Sharad Pawar. Besides, the NCP leaders who faced corruption charges left the party in fear of arrest that happened in 2014, 2019 and 2023. The BJP tagged NCP as a party of corrupt leaders. But all those whom the BJP called corrupt are now a part of the government.
Preetha Nair By

Express News Service

NEW DELHI: As the Opposition parties are set to hold their second meeting on July 14, the coup by Nationalist Congress Party leader (NCP) Ajit Pawar in Maharashtra may deal a blow to the efforts by the parties to forge an anti-BJP front in the 2024 elections.

However, the Opposition, including the Congress, maintained that it is another attempt by the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) to split the Opposition and the parties will intensify their efforts to bolster unity in the coming days.

On Sunday, Ajit Pawar, backed by several MLAs, took oath as Deputy Chief Minister of the BJP-Shiv Sena government in Maharashtra. With Ajit Pawar claiming the support of more than 40 MLAs, a weakened NCP and Maha Vikas Aghadi (MVA) alliance in Maharashtra may cast shadows over a formidable alliance at the national level too, say observers.

The Congress, an ally in the MVA alliance, alleged that the BJPs washing machine has resumed its operations. The partys top leadership including UPA Chairperson Sonia Gandhi, Congress chief Mallikarjun Kharge and Rahul Gandhi spoke to Sharad Pawar over the phone to extend their support.

The party said that several new entrants into the BJP-led alliance in Maharashtra had been facing serious corruption charges with ED or CBI.

On June 29, PM Modi spoke about corruption. It appears he switched on the washing machine and these leaders are now squeaky clean after this oath-taking ceremony, said K C Venugopal.

NEW DELHI: As the Opposition parties are set to hold their second meeting on July 14, the coup by Nationalist Congress Party leader (NCP) Ajit Pawar in Maharashtra may deal a blow to the efforts by the parties to forge an anti-BJP front in the 2024 elections. However, the Opposition, including the Congress, maintained that it is another attempt by the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) to split the Opposition and the parties will intensify their efforts to bolster unity in the coming days. On Sunday, Ajit Pawar, backed by several MLAs, took oath as Deputy Chief Minister of the BJP-Shiv Sena government in Maharashtra. With Ajit Pawar claiming the support of more than 40 MLAs, a weakened NCP and Maha Vikas Aghadi (MVA) alliance in Maharashtra may cast shadows over a formidable alliance at the national level too, say observers. googletag.cmd.push(function() {googletag.display('div-gpt-ad-8052921-2'); }); The Congress, an ally in the MVA alliance, alleged that the BJPs washing machine has resumed its operations. The partys top leadership including UPA Chairperson Sonia Gandhi, Congress chief Mallikarjun Kharge and Rahul Gandhi spoke to Sharad Pawar over the phone to extend their support. The party said that several new entrants into the BJP-led alliance in Maharashtra had been facing serious corruption charges with ED or CBI. On June 29, PM Modi spoke about corruption. It appears he switched on the washing machine and these leaders are now squeaky clean after this oath-taking ceremony, said K C Venugopal.
Prasanta Mazumdar By

Express News Service

GUWAHATI: A gunfight erupted between two groups in strife-torn Manipur on Monday. However, there were no reports of any casualties.

Official sources said the incident occurred on the border of Imphal West and Kangpokpi districts. Security forces were deployed in the area to bring the situation under control.

The Indigenous Tribal Leaders Forum (ITLF) said one Manihar Meetei (66) from Sekmai in Imphal West district, who was caught by Kuki village defence volunteers of Kangpokpi district, was freed on Sunday.

Rebel group Kuki National Front, which signed the suspension of operation agreement, intervened and ensured his safe release on humanitarian grounds, the ITLF said.

ALSO READ | Kuki groups lift 2-month blockade on NH-2 in Manipur

The tribal body released a photo of the decapitated head of a victim of the violence. It said David Thiek, a young Kuki-Zo village volunteer from Churachandpur district, was killed by a mob shortly after Sunday midnight.

Several Kuki-Zo organisations condemned the barbaric killing.

The Hmar Students Association Joint Headquarters Delhi said Thieks killing left the community shattered and appalled.

His courageous actions in defending his village until his last breath will forever be etched in our memories. His selflessness and unwavering commitment to protecting his fellow tribesmen serve as a shining example of bravery and resilience, the association said in a statement.

The World Kuki-Zo Intellectual Council condemned the killing and termed the state government a killing machine. It urged the Centre to take full charge of the Manipur administration or impose the Presidents rule.

Delhi-based rights body Rights and Risks Analysis Group also said the situation called for the imposition of Presidents rule.

It urged the Centre to ensure effective rehabilitation and resettlement of the displaced persons to their original places of inhabitance with safety and security.

The violence in Manipur, which broke out on May 3, has so far left over 120 people dead and an estimated 50,000 others displaced.

GUWAHATI: A gunfight erupted between two groups in strife-torn Manipur on Monday. However, there were no reports of any casualties. Official sources said the incident occurred on the border of Imphal West and Kangpokpi districts. Security forces were deployed in the area to bring the situation under control. The Indigenous Tribal Leaders Forum (ITLF) said one Manihar Meetei (66) from Sekmai in Imphal West district, who was caught by Kuki village defence volunteers of Kangpokpi district, was freed on Sunday.googletag.cmd.push(function() {googletag.display('div-gpt-ad-8052921-2'); }); Rebel group Kuki National Front, which signed the suspension of operation agreement, intervened and ensured his safe release on humanitarian grounds, the ITLF said. ALSO READ | Kuki groups lift 2-month blockade on NH-2 in Manipur The tribal body released a photo of the decapitated head of a victim of the violence. It said David Thiek, a young Kuki-Zo village volunteer from Churachandpur district, was killed by a mob shortly after Sunday midnight. Several Kuki-Zo organisations condemned the barbaric killing. The Hmar Students Association Joint Headquarters Delhi said Thieks killing left the community shattered and appalled. His courageous actions in defending his village until his last breath will forever be etched in our memories. His selflessness and unwavering commitment to protecting his fellow tribesmen serve as a shining example of bravery and resilience, the association said in a statement. The World Kuki-Zo Intellectual Council condemned the killing and termed the state government a killing machine. It urged the Centre to take full charge of the Manipur administration or impose the Presidents rule. Delhi-based rights body Rights and Risks Analysis Group also said the situation called for the imposition of Presidents rule. It urged the Centre to ensure effective rehabilitation and resettlement of the displaced persons to their original places of inhabitance with safety and security. The violence in Manipur, which broke out on May 3, has so far left over 120 people dead and an estimated 50,000 others displaced.
By Express News Service

NEW DELHI: The Union Minister of Ports, Shipping and Waterways, Sarbananda Sonowal, reviewed the project process of the National Maritime Heritage Complex, Lothal, in Gujarats Gandhinagar.

Under the leadership of Prime Minister Narendra Modi, the Ministry of Ports, Shipping and Waterways is developing the National Maritime Heritage Complex at Lothal, Gujarat. This envisages showcasing Indias rich and diverse Maritime Heritage. NMHC is one of the major projects of the Sagarmala Programme under MoPSW and will be the worlds biggest Maritime Museum complex, Sonowal said.

A memorandum of understanding was signed during the meeting with the Ministry of Defence (Indian Navy and Coast Guard) towards the development of a Naval gallery, The Journey of Indian Navy & Coast Guard inside the NMHC complex, he said.

NMHC is being developed as a first-of-its-kind facility in the country dedicated to the legacy of the Maritime Heritage of India. It will not only showcase Indias rich and diverse maritime glory but will also highlight the robust maritime history and vibrant coastal tradition of our country at one place that would uplift the image of Indias Maritime Heritage in the international forum, Sonowal said.

He also said that NMHC will act as a centre for learning and understanding Indias diverse maritime history and is being built in such a way that the common man of India can easily understand its history.

This meeting was held along with Gujarat CM Bhupendrabhai Patel, Minister of Health & Family Welfare Dr Mansukh Mandaviya, Minister of Chemicals & Fertilizers Shripad Yesso Naik, Minister of State for Ports, Shipping and Waterways and Tourism, Shantanu Thakur.

NEW DELHI: The Union Minister of Ports, Shipping and Waterways, Sarbananda Sonowal, reviewed the project process of the National Maritime Heritage Complex, Lothal, in Gujarats Gandhinagar. Under the leadership of Prime Minister Narendra Modi, the Ministry of Ports, Shipping and Waterways is developing the National Maritime Heritage Complex at Lothal, Gujarat. This envisages showcasing Indias rich and diverse Maritime Heritage. NMHC is one of the major projects of the Sagarmala Programme under MoPSW and will be the worlds biggest Maritime Museum complex, Sonowal said. A memorandum of understanding was signed during the meeting with the Ministry of Defence (Indian Navy and Coast Guard) towards the development of a Naval gallery, The Journey of Indian Navy & Coast Guard inside the NMHC complex, he said.googletag.cmd.push(function() {googletag.display('div-gpt-ad-8052921-2'); }); NMHC is being developed as a first-of-its-kind facility in the country dedicated to the legacy of the Maritime Heritage of India. It will not only showcase Indias rich and diverse maritime glory but will also highlight the robust maritime history and vibrant coastal tradition of our country at one place that would uplift the image of Indias Maritime Heritage in the international forum, Sonowal said. He also said that NMHC will act as a centre for learning and understanding Indias diverse maritime history and is being built in such a way that the common man of India can easily understand its history. This meeting was held along with Gujarat CM Bhupendrabhai Patel, Minister of Health & Family Welfare Dr Mansukh Mandaviya, Minister of Chemicals & Fertilizers Shripad Yesso Naik, Minister of State for Ports, Shipping and Waterways and Tourism, Shantanu Thakur.
By Express News Service

NEW DELHI: Quick response teams swung into action following information that was received at the New Delhi District control room regarding the sighting of an unidentified flying object near the residence of Prime Minister Narendra Modi at Lok Kalyan Marg on Monday morning.

Searches were immediately conducted in the nearby areas but no such object was detected. Neither the PM security deployed at the Lok Kalyan Marg nor the police deployed in the area spotted any such object in the neighbourhood adjoining the PMs residence, sources in the PM security said.

Also, the security agencies immediately got in touch with the air traffic control (ATC) room. They also responded in the negative regarding any unidentified object being detected in the high-security zone near the PMs residence. The origin of the call and the source of the tip-off is being probed, sources in Delhi Police said.

NEW DELHI: Quick response teams swung into action following information that was received at the New Delhi District control room regarding the sighting of an unidentified flying object near the residence of Prime Minister Narendra Modi at Lok Kalyan Marg on Monday morning. Searches were immediately conducted in the nearby areas but no such object was detected. Neither the PM security deployed at the Lok Kalyan Marg nor the police deployed in the area spotted any such object in the neighbourhood adjoining the PMs residence, sources in the PM security said. Also, the security agencies immediately got in touch with the air traffic control (ATC) room. They also responded in the negative regarding any unidentified object being detected in the high-security zone near the PMs residence. The origin of the call and the source of the tip-off is being probed, sources in Delhi Police said.googletag.cmd.push(function() {googletag.display('div-gpt-ad-8052921-2'); });
By PTI

MUMBAI: NCP MLA Rohit Pawar, the grandnephew of party chief Sharad Pawar, on Monday claimed senior leaders had an inkling of BJP's "intention" to break the party, but were clueless about Ajit Pawar's swift move to join hands with the ruling alliance.

Speaking to reporters in Maharashtra's Pune city, Rohit Pawar said he is firmly with NCP chief Sharad Pawar.

On Sunday, Ajit Pawar led a vertical split in the NCP to become the deputy chief minister, shocking his uncle Sharad Pawar, who founded the party 24 years ago.

Eight NCP leaders were also sworn in as ministers in the Eknath Shinde-Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) government.

Reacting to the developments, Rohit Pawar, the grandson of Sharad Pawar's elder brother Appasaheb Pawar, said, "We had no clue of Ajit Pawar joining hands with BJP. But the BJP was keen on breaking the NCP. We knew this much. However, going by all these developments, we wonder whether people like me made a mistake by joining politics," he added.

Asked about Ajit Pawar's move, the legislator said he is emotional towards him as he is his uncle.

"He (Ajit Pawar) has helped me in his personal capacity also. However, politically, we all are with party chief Sharad Pawar," he said.

Rohit Pawar also said if put to test, Sharad Pawar will have a larger acceptance as the leader of people.

In the wake of nine NCP leaders, including Ajit Pawar, joining the Eknath Shinde government, party chief Sharad Pawar has convened a meeting on July 5 in Mumbai to discuss the developments and the future course of action.

"The state has a history of struggle and perseverance. We will continue to do so," Rohit Pawar said.

READ HERE | Sharad Pawar expels Praful Patel, Sunil Tatkare from NCP; Tatkare now party state chief, says Patel

Speaking in Satara later in the day, he said the NCP MLAs who have joined the government were the ones who used to constantly criticise CM Shinde.

"Those who used to attack the ruling dispensation with taunts of pannas khoke, ekdum ok have now joined the state government. What has happened with the Shiv Sena and NCP (split) can take place in the Congress as well," he claimed.

Shinde and 39 Shiv Sena MLAs had rebelled against Uddhav Thackeray in June last year, leading to the collapse of the Maha Vikas Aghadi government.

The Congress, NCP and Uddhav faction had claimed these rebel MLAs had taken Rs 50 crore (pannas khoke in street lingo) to defect and join hands with the BJP.

He also said the agenda given to participants of the party meeting called by Ajit Pawar on Sunday was different, while the real "agenda" was known only in the afternoon.

The real NCP meeting will take place on Wednesday in Mumbai, he asserted.

"Apart from Ajit Pawar, I want to know what was troubling the other MLAs who were ministers for 15 years. They also got other respectful posts in the party for many years. What was so bothering that they had to leave us," he asked.

ALSO READ

MUMBAI: NCP MLA Rohit Pawar, the grandnephew of party chief Sharad Pawar, on Monday claimed senior leaders had an inkling of BJP's "intention" to break the party, but were clueless about Ajit Pawar's swift move to join hands with the ruling alliance. Speaking to reporters in Maharashtra's Pune city, Rohit Pawar said he is firmly with NCP chief Sharad Pawar. On Sunday, Ajit Pawar led a vertical split in the NCP to become the deputy chief minister, shocking his uncle Sharad Pawar, who founded the party 24 years ago.googletag.cmd.push(function() {googletag.display('div-gpt-ad-8052921-2'); }); Eight NCP leaders were also sworn in as ministers in the Eknath Shinde-Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) government. Reacting to the developments, Rohit Pawar, the grandson of Sharad Pawar's elder brother Appasaheb Pawar, said, "We had no clue of Ajit Pawar joining hands with BJP. But the BJP was keen on breaking the NCP. We knew this much. However, going by all these developments, we wonder whether people like me made a mistake by joining politics," he added. Asked about Ajit Pawar's move, the legislator said he is emotional towards him as he is his uncle. "He (Ajit Pawar) has helped me in his personal capacity also. However, politically, we all are with party chief Sharad Pawar," he said. Rohit Pawar also said if put to test, Sharad Pawar will have a larger acceptance as the leader of people. In the wake of nine NCP leaders, including Ajit Pawar, joining the Eknath Shinde government, party chief Sharad Pawar has convened a meeting on July 5 in Mumbai to discuss the developments and the future course of action. "The state has a history of struggle and perseverance. We will continue to do so," Rohit Pawar said. READ HERE | Sharad Pawar expels Praful Patel, Sunil Tatkare from NCP; Tatkare now party state chief, says Patel Speaking in Satara later in the day, he said the NCP MLAs who have joined the government were the ones who used to constantly criticise CM Shinde. "Those who used to attack the ruling dispensation with taunts of pannas khoke, ekdum ok have now joined the state government. What has happened with the Shiv Sena and NCP (split) can take place in the Congress as well," he claimed. Shinde and 39 Shiv Sena MLAs had rebelled against Uddhav Thackeray in June last year, leading to the collapse of the Maha Vikas Aghadi government. The Congress, NCP and Uddhav faction had claimed these rebel MLAs had taken Rs 50 crore (pannas khoke in street lingo) to defect and join hands with the BJP. He also said the agenda given to participants of the party meeting called by Ajit Pawar on Sunday was different, while the real "agenda" was known only in the afternoon. The real NCP meeting will take place on Wednesday in Mumbai, he asserted. "Apart from Ajit Pawar, I want to know what was troubling the other MLAs who were ministers for 15 years. They also got other respectful posts in the party for many years. What was so bothering that they had to leave us," he asked. ALSO READ Ajit joined hands with BJP to replace Shinde, claims Uddhav Sena mouthpiece After Ajit Pawar's mutiny, worry over similar fate in Opposition-ruled states BJP all set for Maha Pawar play in 2024 elections
By PTI

NEW DELHI/MUMBAI: Opposition parties on Sunday lashed out at the BJP after NCP leader Ajit Pawar and eight others were inducted into the Eknath Shinde-led Maharashtra government, saying the ruling party's "washing machine" has resumed its operation to clean tainted leaders and it was an "ED-facilitated power grab."

Ajit Pawar, who split the NCP and took oath as the deputy chief minister of Maharashtra, said his party decided to join the BJP-Shiv Sena government for the development of the country and praised Prime Minister Narendra Modi's leadership.

Raising the corruption allegations faced by the newly inducted ministers, opposition parties said the BJP can no longer talk about fighting corruption after joining hands with them and alleged that democracy is being "disrobed" in Maharashtra.

The BJP, however, took a dig at the opposition parties saying those trying to forge an alliance against it are unable to keep their leaders united.

Congress general secretary Jairam Ramesh said, "Clearly the BJP's washing machine has resumed its operations. A number of new entrants into the BJP-led alliance in Maharashtra today had been facing serious corruption charges with ED, CBI and Income Tax authorities after them. Now they have all got a clean chit."

The Congress will intensify its efforts to free Maharashtra from the clutches of the BJP, Ramesh asserted. The Grand Old Party said its president Mallikarjun Kharge and party leader Rahul Gandhi spoke with NCP chief Sharad Pawar and extended support to him. Gandhi, however, did not refer to the Maharashtra developments in his address at a rally in Telangana.

"The BJP's dirty tricks department is working on overdrive in Maharashtra. This is not a legitimately elected government, but an ED-facilitated power grab. The Maharashtra government is a product of corruption and sin," AICC general secretary K C Venugopal alleged on Twitter.

The Congress is part of the Maha Vikas Aghadi alliance that also comprises Shiv Sena (UBT) and Sharad Pawar-led NCP.

"The oath-taking ceremony in Maharashtra was part of Operation Lotus and it has no official support of NCP. Those who took oath, it is their personal decision and not that of the NCP," Nationalist Congress Party (NCP) spokesperson Mahesh Tapase said.

After the revolt, NCP chief Sharad Pawar said it is "not a googly but a robbery", referring to BJP's move, and made it clear that his party will not fight the battle legally, and he would instead go to the people and seek their support. He said Prime Minister Narendra Modi recently levelled allegations against the NCP saying that the party indulged in corruption.

"I am happy today that he gave cabinet berths to some colleagues from the NCP. It shows that the allegations of corruption were not factual. He has exonerated the party and all those against whom he had levelled allegations and I am thankful to the PM for this," Pawar said.

After inducting "corrupt men" as ministers, the BJP and Prime Minister Narendra Modi cannot talk about fighting corruption, senior TMC leader Babul Supriyo, who was earlier a minister in the Modi government and had switched from the BJP, said.

Calling the BJP "hypocrite", Supriyo, a minister in the Mamata Banerjee government in West Bengal, said tainted leaders under the scanner of ED for corruption have been put into a "washing machine" manufactured by the BJP to remove their stains and blemishes.

Shiv Sena (UBT) Rajya Sabha leader Priyanka Chaturvedi tweeted, "Principles be damned, BJP should be the last party in the country talking about ideological alliances. They are just political opportunists wanting power at any cost. With the latest development in Maharashtra, those MLAs who were corrupt and were jailed are now being sworn in as ministers!"

BJP national spokesperson Shehzad Poonawalla took a swipe at the opposition leaders' attempt at forming an alliance to take on the BJP in 2024 and tweeted, "PDA - Poora (completely) Disturbed Alliance?" Those who cannot keep their parties and leaders united are trying to forge opposition unity "from Rajasthan, Maharashtra, Karnataka to Bihar", Poonawalla charged and added, "Gehlot, Pilot, DKS, Siddaramaiah, Manjhi... first unite them!"

Samajwadi Party chief Akhilesh Yadav claimed that Maharashtra has emerged as a "bigger laboratory" for the BJP after Madhya Pradesh and the saffron party will do other "experiments" in the run-up to 2024 general elections to stay in power.

"BJP does this from time to time, first they did this in Madhya Pradesh, and then in Maharashtra, but people are watching this," Yadav told reporters in Lucknow.

Maharashtra Congress president Nana Patole said, "This game of musical chairs is going to destroy democracy and the Constitution. Democracy is being disrobed in Maharashtra and the power-hungry Bharatiya Janata Party has a big role to play in it."

Indian Youth Congress president Srinivas B V said NCP MLA Hasan Mushrif has become free from corruption charges after joining the Shinde-led government. "A few days ago, ED had filed a case and raided his house and sugar factory. Today he has become corruption free after being cleaned in the washing machine completely. Will ED raid at his places again?" he asked.

AAP leader Atishi said that BJP has declared openly now that all the corrupt should come to its fold and get "cleaned off their sins in its washing machine."

Congress leader Rashid Alvi said, "The BJP and PM Modi have violated the Constitution. It (Ajit Pawar joining the Maharashtra government) is the biggest joke on democracy. Rajiv Gandhi brought anti-defection law while Atal Bihari Vajpayee increased the number of MLAs (to change the party) to 2/3rd, so this is an insult to Vajpayee as well."

Former Maharashtra chief minister Ashok Chavan said the Shinde government was resorting to taking help from MLAs of other parties because of its own instability.

"After the opposition parties' meeting in Patna, they (BJP) are afraid, and that's why they want to break opposition parties," said DMK leader TKS Elangovan.

Shiv Sena (UBT) leader Sanjay Raut claimed it was the beginning of the process of Eknath Shinde losing his chief minister's post. But Chief Minister Shinde ridiculed the opposition parties who "routinely predict" the fall of his government.

"From day one, opposition parties have been predicting the fall of the state government. Now, they must be very disappointed. I wonder which astrologer is giving them such advice," he said.

RJD leader Mritunjay Tiwari also said the BJP has engineered the defection to save its government in Maharashtra, while CPI(M) leader Mohammad Yousuf Tarigami said it is one more lesson for the people and the Opposition to close ranks.

PDP chief Mehbooba Mufti said no words are enough to condemn the manner in which the BJP has repeatedly undermined the popular mandate in Maharashtra.

"Not only is democracy being butchered but they are using the national anthem to provide cover for such disgraceful actions. On one hand, BJP is arresting political opponents on trumped-up corruption charges while they themselves are on an MLA purchasing spree. Hard-earned public money is being misused to quench BJP's thirst for power," she alleged.

In a swipe, Rajya Sabha MP Kapil Sibal tweeted, "I guess this is the mother of democracy that Modiji was talking about in his address to the US Congress!" "BJP doesn't believe in people's power, they only believe in politics of defections (jod-tod ki rajniti) and this time they will get a big shock," JD (U) president Rajiv Ranjan Singh alias Lalan Singh said.

BJP spokesperson R P Singh, however, said, "India is developing rapidly and this is happening only because of PM Modi. Ajit Pawar knows this very well and that's why he decided to join hands with us."

Union Minister Ramdas Athawale said Ajit Pawar was unhappy in the Opposition for a long time. "Ajit Pawar's decision to join the NDA is a 'dashing decision' and this is a huge setback for Sharad Pawar," he added.

Rajasthan Chief Minister Ashok Gehlot alleged the BJP wants to "eliminate" the Opposition on the basis of money power and central agencies.

NEW DELHI/MUMBAI: Opposition parties on Sunday lashed out at the BJP after NCP leader Ajit Pawar and eight others were inducted into the Eknath Shinde-led Maharashtra government, saying the ruling party's "washing machine" has resumed its operation to clean tainted leaders and it was an "ED-facilitated power grab." Ajit Pawar, who split the NCP and took oath as the deputy chief minister of Maharashtra, said his party decided to join the BJP-Shiv Sena government for the development of the country and praised Prime Minister Narendra Modi's leadership. Raising the corruption allegations faced by the newly inducted ministers, opposition parties said the BJP can no longer talk about fighting corruption after joining hands with them and alleged that democracy is being "disrobed" in Maharashtra.googletag.cmd.push(function() {googletag.display('div-gpt-ad-8052921-2'); }); The BJP, however, took a dig at the opposition parties saying those trying to forge an alliance against it are unable to keep their leaders united. Congress general secretary Jairam Ramesh said, "Clearly the BJP's washing machine has resumed its operations. A number of new entrants into the BJP-led alliance in Maharashtra today had been facing serious corruption charges with ED, CBI and Income Tax authorities after them. Now they have all got a clean chit." The Congress will intensify its efforts to free Maharashtra from the clutches of the BJP, Ramesh asserted. The Grand Old Party said its president Mallikarjun Kharge and party leader Rahul Gandhi spoke with NCP chief Sharad Pawar and extended support to him. Gandhi, however, did not refer to the Maharashtra developments in his address at a rally in Telangana. "The BJP's dirty tricks department is working on overdrive in Maharashtra. This is not a legitimately elected government, but an ED-facilitated power grab. The Maharashtra government is a product of corruption and sin," AICC general secretary K C Venugopal alleged on Twitter. The Congress is part of the Maha Vikas Aghadi alliance that also comprises Shiv Sena (UBT) and Sharad Pawar-led NCP. "The oath-taking ceremony in Maharashtra was part of Operation Lotus and it has no official support of NCP. Those who took oath, it is their personal decision and not that of the NCP," Nationalist Congress Party (NCP) spokesperson Mahesh Tapase said. After the revolt, NCP chief Sharad Pawar said it is "not a googly but a robbery", referring to BJP's move, and made it clear that his party will not fight the battle legally, and he would instead go to the people and seek their support. He said Prime Minister Narendra Modi recently levelled allegations against the NCP saying that the party indulged in corruption. "I am happy today that he gave cabinet berths to some colleagues from the NCP. It shows that the allegations of corruption were not factual. He has exonerated the party and all those against whom he had levelled allegations and I am thankful to the PM for this," Pawar said. After inducting "corrupt men" as ministers, the BJP and Prime Minister Narendra Modi cannot talk about fighting corruption, senior TMC leader Babul Supriyo, who was earlier a minister in the Modi government and had switched from the BJP, said. Calling the BJP "hypocrite", Supriyo, a minister in the Mamata Banerjee government in West Bengal, said tainted leaders under the scanner of ED for corruption have been put into a "washing machine" manufactured by the BJP to remove their stains and blemishes. Shiv Sena (UBT) Rajya Sabha leader Priyanka Chaturvedi tweeted, "Principles be damned, BJP should be the last party in the country talking about ideological alliances. They are just political opportunists wanting power at any cost. With the latest development in Maharashtra, those MLAs who were corrupt and were jailed are now being sworn in as ministers!" BJP national spokesperson Shehzad Poonawalla took a swipe at the opposition leaders' attempt at forming an alliance to take on the BJP in 2024 and tweeted, "PDA - Poora (completely) Disturbed Alliance?" Those who cannot keep their parties and leaders united are trying to forge opposition unity "from Rajasthan, Maharashtra, Karnataka to Bihar", Poonawalla charged and added, "Gehlot, Pilot, DKS, Siddaramaiah, Manjhi... first unite them!" Samajwadi Party chief Akhilesh Yadav claimed that Maharashtra has emerged as a "bigger laboratory" for the BJP after Madhya Pradesh and the saffron party will do other "experiments" in the run-up to 2024 general elections to stay in power. "BJP does this from time to time, first they did this in Madhya Pradesh, and then in Maharashtra, but people are watching this," Yadav told reporters in Lucknow. Maharashtra Congress president Nana Patole said, "This game of musical chairs is going to destroy democracy and the Constitution. Democracy is being disrobed in Maharashtra and the power-hungry Bharatiya Janata Party has a big role to play in it." Indian Youth Congress president Srinivas B V said NCP MLA Hasan Mushrif has become free from corruption charges after joining the Shinde-led government. "A few days ago, ED had filed a case and raided his house and sugar factory. Today he has become corruption free after being cleaned in the washing machine completely. Will ED raid at his places again?" he asked. AAP leader Atishi said that BJP has declared openly now that all the corrupt should come to its fold and get "cleaned off their sins in its washing machine." Congress leader Rashid Alvi said, "The BJP and PM Modi have violated the Constitution. It (Ajit Pawar joining the Maharashtra government) is the biggest joke on democracy. Rajiv Gandhi brought anti-defection law while Atal Bihari Vajpayee increased the number of MLAs (to change the party) to 2/3rd, so this is an insult to Vajpayee as well." Former Maharashtra chief minister Ashok Chavan said the Shinde government was resorting to taking help from MLAs of other parties because of its own instability. "After the opposition parties' meeting in Patna, they (BJP) are afraid, and that's why they want to break opposition parties," said DMK leader TKS Elangovan. Shiv Sena (UBT) leader Sanjay Raut claimed it was the beginning of the process of Eknath Shinde losing his chief minister's post. But Chief Minister Shinde ridiculed the opposition parties who "routinely predict" the fall of his government. "From day one, opposition parties have been predicting the fall of the state government. Now, they must be very disappointed. I wonder which astrologer is giving them such advice," he said. RJD leader Mritunjay Tiwari also said the BJP has engineered the defection to save its government in Maharashtra, while CPI(M) leader Mohammad Yousuf Tarigami said it is one more lesson for the people and the Opposition to close ranks. PDP chief Mehbooba Mufti said no words are enough to condemn the manner in which the BJP has repeatedly undermined the popular mandate in Maharashtra. "Not only is democracy being butchered but they are using the national anthem to provide cover for such disgraceful actions. On one hand, BJP is arresting political opponents on trumped-up corruption charges while they themselves are on an MLA purchasing spree. Hard-earned public money is being misused to quench BJP's thirst for power," she alleged. In a swipe, Rajya Sabha MP Kapil Sibal tweeted, "I guess this is the mother of democracy that Modiji was talking about in his address to the US Congress!" "BJP doesn't believe in people's power, they only believe in politics of defections (jod-tod ki rajniti) and this time they will get a big shock," JD (U) president Rajiv Ranjan Singh alias Lalan Singh said. BJP spokesperson R P Singh, however, said, "India is developing rapidly and this is happening only because of PM Modi. Ajit Pawar knows this very well and that's why he decided to join hands with us." Union Minister Ramdas Athawale said Ajit Pawar was unhappy in the Opposition for a long time. "Ajit Pawar's decision to join the NDA is a 'dashing decision' and this is a huge setback for Sharad Pawar," he added. Rajasthan Chief Minister Ashok Gehlot alleged the BJP wants to "eliminate" the Opposition on the basis of money power and central agencies.
By Agencies

IMPHAL: At least one person was killed and two others injured by armed assailants while incidents of firing and arson attacks on houses were reported from different districts of Manipur during the past 24 hours, officials said on Monday.

Meanwhile, Chief Minister N Biren Singh said that schools for classes 1 to 8 will start from July 5, after being shut since ethnic clashes began in the first week of May.

Officials in Imphal said that intermittent firing between rival armed gangs were reported in the intervening night of Saturday and Sunday at Chinglangmei and Langza, Samulamlam block in Churachandpur district and one person was killed and another injured in these.

Security forces immediately rushed to the areas and launched combing operations but the armed assailants managed to escape into the jungle.

On Sunday night, armed assailants fired from the abandoned Napat village and Tangjeng Ahallup areas of Bishnupur towards Khoubuk and Tangjeng Khunjao areas of Kakching district.

Police launched an operation and brought the situation under control.

Another person was shot at when armed men fired from the adjoining hills towards Phougakchao Awang Leikai and Kwakta villages in Bishnupur district on Sunday night.

On Monday, armed men fired from the adjoining hill range towards Leikinthabi and Chirik villages in Imphal West district. The armed assailants also burned down some farmhouses in the Chirik village.

The operation was immediately launched in the area by state police and central forces.

A Manipur Police control room statement said that the situation is tense in some places with sporadic incidents of firing and congregation of unruly mob during the last 24 hours. However, the situation is normal in most districts.

A total of 118 Nakas and checkpoints were installed in different districts of Manipur, both in the hill and the valley and police has detained 326 persons in connection with violations of law in different districts.

Bunkers set up along the hill and valley districts of the ethnic strife-torn state would be removed while additional state forces have been mobilised to provide security to both Meitei and Kuki farmers so that agricultural activities can start, he told a press conference.

CM N Biren Singh

"Schools for classes 1 to 8 will start from July 5," the chief minister said.

Educational institutes have been closed since ethnic strife began in the northeastern state on May 3.

The Army and other central forces have been deployed to bring peace in the northeastern state where violence between Meitei and Kuki communities continued for two months leaving over 100 people dead, many injured and a large number of houses and places of worship gutted.

"We have lived as one and will continue living as one..districts were created just for administrative conveniences," Singh said.

Stating that agricultural activists need to start, he said that 2,000 personnel of the state police forces who were attached to government officers, ministers and MLAs have been mobilised.

"They will now provide security to farmers and deal with disturbances by mobs," Singh said.

ALSO READ | Two killed in fresh bout of violence in Manipur

The chief minister said a joint security meeting was held earlier in the day.

"It was decided that bunkers set up along the hill and valley districts would be removed from the day after tomorrow. The Army will lead the combined force of central paramilitary and state forces to remove the private and group bunkers," he said Meiteis account for about 53 per cent of Manipur's population and live mostly in the Imphal Valley.

Tribal Nagas and Kukis constitute another 40 per cent of the population and reside in the hill districts.

The people who have been rendered homeless and living in relief centres would be shifted to pre-fabricated houses within a month as construction of such homes is being carried out on a war footing, the chief minister said.

Around 50,000 people are living in relief centres at various places in the state.

Singh appealed to all particularly civil society organisations not to make provocative statements and to work together for peace in the state.

(ANI & PTI)

IMPHAL: At least one person was killed and two others injured by armed assailants while incidents of firing and arson attacks on houses were reported from different districts of Manipur during the past 24 hours, officials said on Monday. Meanwhile, Chief Minister N Biren Singh said that schools for classes 1 to 8 will start from July 5, after being shut since ethnic clashes began in the first week of May. Officials in Imphal said that intermittent firing between rival armed gangs were reported in the intervening night of Saturday and Sunday at Chinglangmei and Langza, Samulamlam block in Churachandpur district and one person was killed and another injured in these.googletag.cmd.push(function() {googletag.display('div-gpt-ad-8052921-2'); }); Security forces immediately rushed to the areas and launched combing operations but the armed assailants managed to escape into the jungle. On Sunday night, armed assailants fired from the abandoned Napat village and Tangjeng Ahallup areas of Bishnupur towards Khoubuk and Tangjeng Khunjao areas of Kakching district. Police launched an operation and brought the situation under control. Another person was shot at when armed men fired from the adjoining hills towards Phougakchao Awang Leikai and Kwakta villages in Bishnupur district on Sunday night. On Monday, armed men fired from the adjoining hill range towards Leikinthabi and Chirik villages in Imphal West district. The armed assailants also burned down some farmhouses in the Chirik village. The operation was immediately launched in the area by state police and central forces. A Manipur Police control room statement said that the situation is tense in some places with sporadic incidents of firing and congregation of unruly mob during the last 24 hours. However, the situation is normal in most districts. A total of 118 Nakas and checkpoints were installed in different districts of Manipur, both in the hill and the valley and police has detained 326 persons in connection with violations of law in different districts. Bunkers set up along the hill and valley districts of the ethnic strife-torn state would be removed while additional state forces have been mobilised to provide security to both Meitei and Kuki farmers so that agricultural activities can start, he told a press conference. CM N Biren Singh "Schools for classes 1 to 8 will start from July 5," the chief minister said. Educational institutes have been closed since ethnic strife began in the northeastern state on May 3. The Army and other central forces have been deployed to bring peace in the northeastern state where violence between Meitei and Kuki communities continued for two months leaving over 100 people dead, many injured and a large number of houses and places of worship gutted. "We have lived as one and will continue living as one..districts were created just for administrative conveniences," Singh said. Stating that agricultural activists need to start, he said that 2,000 personnel of the state police forces who were attached to government officers, ministers and MLAs have been mobilised. "They will now provide security to farmers and deal with disturbances by mobs," Singh said. ALSO READ | Two killed in fresh bout of violence in Manipur The chief minister said a joint security meeting was held earlier in the day. "It was decided that bunkers set up along the hill and valley districts would be removed from the day after tomorrow. The Army will lead the combined force of central paramilitary and state forces to remove the private and group bunkers," he said Meiteis account for about 53 per cent of Manipur's population and live mostly in the Imphal Valley. Tribal Nagas and Kukis constitute another 40 per cent of the population and reside in the hill districts. The people who have been rendered homeless and living in relief centres would be shifted to pre-fabricated houses within a month as construction of such homes is being carried out on a war footing, the chief minister said. Around 50,000 people are living in relief centres at various places in the state. Singh appealed to all particularly civil society organisations not to make provocative statements and to work together for peace in the state. (ANI & PTI)
By PTI

LUCKNOW: The four people arrested for an attack on Bhim Army chief Chandra Shekhar Aazad have told police that they were "hurt" by his recent remarks, a senior police officer said on Sunday.

Dalit leader Aazad was injured when assailants opened fire on his car in Deoband in Uttar Pradesh's Saharanpur district on Wednesday and the four people were arrested from Ambala in Haryana on Saturday and brought to Saharanpur.

In a statement issued here on Sunday, Special Director General of Police (Law and Order) Prashant Kumar identified the arrested accused as Vikas alias Vikky, Prashant and Lavish -- all residents of Rankhandi in Deoband -- and Vikas, a resident of Karnal district in Haryana.

He said two country-made pistols used in the crime and ammunition have been recovered from them.

During interrogation, the accused told the police that they were "hurt" by Aazad's recent remarks made in Delhi and other places.

They carried out the attack on Aazad as they were upset by his "inappropriate remarks" (ulta sidhe bayano)", the police said in the statement, without giving out any specific remarks.

According to the police, on getting information about a programme of Aazad in Deoband, the accused made a plan to target him and did a recce of the area.

Aazad, 36, had gone to attend a 'terhavin' ritual (13th or final day of mourning) at a supporter's home in Deoband.

The assailants fired "four shots" at his SUV when he was leaving after the programme around 5 pm.

The accused told the police that they had two pistols and the vehicle in which they were travelling belonged to and was driven by Karnal-resident Vikas.

As soon as Aazad's vehicle slowed down near a speed-breaker, the accused overtook the vehicle and fired three rounds at him, they told police.

Deoband-resident Vikky fired two rounds and Prashant fired one round and then the accused sped away, the police said.

After going some distance, the vehicle ran out of oil and they left the vehicle at Miragpur.

The vehicle was recovered by the police.

Director General of Police Vijaya Kumar has given a reward of Rs 50,000 and a citation to the police team for cracking the case within 72 hours, the statement said, and added that after the incident, police teams were conducting raids at places like Delhi-NCR, Uttarakhand, Meerut, Muzaffarnagar and Haryana.

It received information that the attackers were trying to surrender in a court in Ambala.

"Police with the help of Special Task Force (STF) of Haryana Police took them into custody on Saturday and after that they were brought to Saharanpur," according to the statement.

According to the police, Lavish and Vikas of Deoband have four cases registered against them, while Prashant faces two cases.

This was the first case registered against Karnal-resident Vikas at Deoband police station.

LUCKNOW: The four people arrested for an attack on Bhim Army chief Chandra Shekhar Aazad have told police that they were "hurt" by his recent remarks, a senior police officer said on Sunday. Dalit leader Aazad was injured when assailants opened fire on his car in Deoband in Uttar Pradesh's Saharanpur district on Wednesday and the four people were arrested from Ambala in Haryana on Saturday and brought to Saharanpur. In a statement issued here on Sunday, Special Director General of Police (Law and Order) Prashant Kumar identified the arrested accused as Vikas alias Vikky, Prashant and Lavish -- all residents of Rankhandi in Deoband -- and Vikas, a resident of Karnal district in Haryana.googletag.cmd.push(function() {googletag.display('div-gpt-ad-8052921-2'); }); He said two country-made pistols used in the crime and ammunition have been recovered from them. During interrogation, the accused told the police that they were "hurt" by Aazad's recent remarks made in Delhi and other places. They carried out the attack on Aazad as they were upset by his "inappropriate remarks" (ulta sidhe bayano)", the police said in the statement, without giving out any specific remarks. According to the police, on getting information about a programme of Aazad in Deoband, the accused made a plan to target him and did a recce of the area. Aazad, 36, had gone to attend a 'terhavin' ritual (13th or final day of mourning) at a supporter's home in Deoband. The assailants fired "four shots" at his SUV when he was leaving after the programme around 5 pm. The accused told the police that they had two pistols and the vehicle in which they were travelling belonged to and was driven by Karnal-resident Vikas. As soon as Aazad's vehicle slowed down near a speed-breaker, the accused overtook the vehicle and fired three rounds at him, they told police. Deoband-resident Vikky fired two rounds and Prashant fired one round and then the accused sped away, the police said. After going some distance, the vehicle ran out of oil and they left the vehicle at Miragpur. The vehicle was recovered by the police. Director General of Police Vijaya Kumar has given a reward of Rs 50,000 and a citation to the police team for cracking the case within 72 hours, the statement said, and added that after the incident, police teams were conducting raids at places like Delhi-NCR, Uttarakhand, Meerut, Muzaffarnagar and Haryana. It received information that the attackers were trying to surrender in a court in Ambala. "Police with the help of Special Task Force (STF) of Haryana Police took them into custody on Saturday and after that they were brought to Saharanpur," according to the statement. According to the police, Lavish and Vikas of Deoband have four cases registered against them, while Prashant faces two cases. This was the first case registered against Karnal-resident Vikas at Deoband police station.
By PTI

MUMBAI: The Nationalist Congress Party (NCP) has moved a petition before Maharashtra Assembly Speaker Rahul Narwekar seeking the disqualification of Ajit Pawar and eight other MLAs who have taken oath as ministers in the Eknath Shinde-led government.

Jitendra Awhad, whom the NCP has appointed leader of opposition in the Maharashtra Assembly after Ajit Pawar joined the ruling alliance, delivered the petition at Narwekar's residence late Sunday night, as per sources.

When contacted, Narwekar's office confirmed the petition has been received.

On Monday, the Sharad Pawar-led party also issued notices to the nine MLAs asking them to refrain from misrepresenting before any forum the fact that they have any association with the NCP.

ALSO READ: Sharad Pawar expels Praful Patel, Sunil Tatkare from NCP; Tatkare now party state chief, says Patel

The letter issued by state unit chief Jayant Patil said "any such misrepresentation would be absolutely unlawful and illegal".

The letter also said the "party on Sunday has, therefore, initiated appropriate proceedings for formal disqualification of these MLAs from the Maharashtra Legislative Assembly under the 10th Schedule of the Constitution of India".

The NCP's disciplinary committee had passed a resolution on Sunday to disqualify the nine legislators and committee chief Jaiprakash Dandegaonkar had submitted a report on it to Sharad Pawar.

"These actions of the nine MLAs call for immediate disqualification as not only are such defections ipso facto seriously damaging to the party but also that if allowed to continue as members, there is a very real likelihood that they will continue to try and undermine the interests of the party," the resolution said.

The fact that these defections were done in such a secretive manner, "without the knowledge or consent of the party president", amounts to desertion of the party which in turn invites disqualification, it said.

"We take cognisance of the same and direct appropriate steps may be taken in accordance with the party constitution and rules as also the tenth schedule of the Constitution of India. As per the procedure, party president Sharad Pawar has been informed and consulted for the same," the resolution said.

READ MORE: Decision has to be taken against those who violated party line: Sharad Pawar on NCP leaders

Maharashtra NCP president Jayant Patil on Sunday said his party has moved the disqualification petition against Ajit Pawar and eight others.

He said an e-mail has also been sent to the Election Commission of India informing that the rank and file of the NCP is with party chief Sharad Pawar.

The party founded by Sharad Pawar in 1999 suffered a vertical split on Sunday after his nephew Ajit Pawar broke ranks and joined the Shiv Sena-BJP government as deputy chief minister.

Eight other NCP MLAs, including staunch Sharad Pawar loyalists like Chhagan Bhujbal and Dilip Walse Patil, were made ministers.

MUMBAI: The Nationalist Congress Party (NCP) has moved a petition before Maharashtra Assembly Speaker Rahul Narwekar seeking the disqualification of Ajit Pawar and eight other MLAs who have taken oath as ministers in the Eknath Shinde-led government. Jitendra Awhad, whom the NCP has appointed leader of opposition in the Maharashtra Assembly after Ajit Pawar joined the ruling alliance, delivered the petition at Narwekar's residence late Sunday night, as per sources. When contacted, Narwekar's office confirmed the petition has been received.googletag.cmd.push(function() {googletag.display('div-gpt-ad-8052921-2'); }); On Monday, the Sharad Pawar-led party also issued notices to the nine MLAs asking them to refrain from misrepresenting before any forum the fact that they have any association with the NCP. ALSO READ: Sharad Pawar expels Praful Patel, Sunil Tatkare from NCP; Tatkare now party state chief, says Patel The letter issued by state unit chief Jayant Patil said "any such misrepresentation would be absolutely unlawful and illegal". The letter also said the "party on Sunday has, therefore, initiated appropriate proceedings for formal disqualification of these MLAs from the Maharashtra Legislative Assembly under the 10th Schedule of the Constitution of India". The NCP's disciplinary committee had passed a resolution on Sunday to disqualify the nine legislators and committee chief Jaiprakash Dandegaonkar had submitted a report on it to Sharad Pawar. "These actions of the nine MLAs call for immediate disqualification as not only are such defections ipso facto seriously damaging to the party but also that if allowed to continue as members, there is a very real likelihood that they will continue to try and undermine the interests of the party," the resolution said. The fact that these defections were done in such a secretive manner, "without the knowledge or consent of the party president", amounts to desertion of the party which in turn invites disqualification, it said. "We take cognisance of the same and direct appropriate steps may be taken in accordance with the party constitution and rules as also the tenth schedule of the Constitution of India. As per the procedure, party president Sharad Pawar has been informed and consulted for the same," the resolution said. READ MORE: Decision has to be taken against those who violated party line: Sharad Pawar on NCP leaders Maharashtra NCP president Jayant Patil on Sunday said his party has moved the disqualification petition against Ajit Pawar and eight others. He said an e-mail has also been sent to the Election Commission of India informing that the rank and file of the NCP is with party chief Sharad Pawar. The party founded by Sharad Pawar in 1999 suffered a vertical split on Sunday after his nephew Ajit Pawar broke ranks and joined the Shiv Sena-BJP government as deputy chief minister. Eight other NCP MLAs, including staunch Sharad Pawar loyalists like Chhagan Bhujbal and Dilip Walse Patil, were made ministers.
By Express News Service

NEW DELHI: The National Investigation Agency (NIA) on Sunday conducted raids at multiple locations across three states in connection with Ghazwa-e-Hind, a radicalised module that is being run by Pak-based suspects.

According to NIA sources, a total of five locations  one at Darbhanga and two at Patna in Bihar, one in Gujarats Surat, and one in Uttar Pradeshs Bareilly  were raided by NIA teams in the case registered last year. Incriminating materials, including digital devices such as mobile phones, memory cards and SIM cards were seized.

The case came to light after the Bihar police arrested Marghoob Ahmad Danish alias Tahir of Phulwarisharif area of Patna, following which an FIR was registered on July 14 last year. The NIA took over the case and re-registered it a few days later. Marghoob was chargesheeted on January 6, 2023, under various sections of Indian Penal Code and Unlawful Activities (Prevention) Act, 1967.

The accused was found to be a member of the Ghazwa-e-Hind module, which was operated by Pak-based operatives, with the objective of radicalising impressionable youth for the establishment of Ghazwa-e-Hind over the Indian territory.

Investigations revealed that Marghoob was the admin of a WhatsApp Group, Ghazwa-e-Hind, created by a Pakistani national named Zain. He had added many Indians, Pakistanis, Bangladeshis and Yemenis to the group with the aim of establishing sleeper cells in the country for carrying out terrorist activities. The accused had created various social media groups of the Ghazwa-e-Hind on WhatsApp, Telegram and BiP Messenger. He had also created another WhatsApp group in the name of BDGhazwa E HindBD and had added Bangladeshi nationals to it.

Further probe showed that various suspects involved in the case were in contact with Pakistan-based handlers and were involved in propagating the idea of Ghazwa-e-Hind. The first raids were conducted by the NIA in the last week of July in Patna, Darbhanga, East Champaran, Nalanda and Madhubani districts of Bihar. The raids on July 14 in the Phulwarisharif area of Patna had led to the seizure of documents about the radical group PFIs Mission 2047 for making India an Islamic state.

In the suspected terror module case, the security agencies had first arrested Athar Parvez, Mohammad Jalaluddin and Arman Malik. Jalaluddin is a former Jharkhand police officer who retired after 39 years of service. During questioning, they revealed the names of Margoob and Shabbir.

An arrest in Patna led to Pak-based radical group



The case came to light after the Bihar police arrested Marghoob Ahmad Danish alias Tahir of Phulwarisharif area of Patna. The accused was found to be a member of the Ghazwa-e-Hind module, which was operated by Pak-based operatives, with the objective of radicalising impressionable youth for the establishment of Ghazwa-e-Hind over the Indian territory.



NEW DELHI: The National Investigation Agency (NIA) on Sunday conducted raids at multiple locations across three states in connection with Ghazwa-e-Hind, a radicalised module that is being run by Pak-based suspects. According to NIA sources, a total of five locations  one at Darbhanga and two at Patna in Bihar, one in Gujarats Surat, and one in Uttar Pradeshs Bareilly  were raided by NIA teams in the case registered last year. Incriminating materials, including digital devices such as mobile phones, memory cards and SIM cards were seized. The case came to light after the Bihar police arrested Marghoob Ahmad Danish alias Tahir of Phulwarisharif area of Patna, following which an FIR was registered on July 14 last year. The NIA took over the case and re-registered it a few days later. Marghoob was chargesheeted on January 6, 2023, under various sections of Indian Penal Code and Unlawful Activities (Prevention) Act, 1967.googletag.cmd.push(function() {googletag.display('div-gpt-ad-8052921-2'); }); The accused was found to be a member of the Ghazwa-e-Hind module, which was operated by Pak-based operatives, with the objective of radicalising impressionable youth for the establishment of Ghazwa-e-Hind over the Indian territory. Investigations revealed that Marghoob was the admin of a WhatsApp Group, Ghazwa-e-Hind, created by a Pakistani national named Zain. He had added many Indians, Pakistanis, Bangladeshis and Yemenis to the group with the aim of establishing sleeper cells in the country for carrying out terrorist activities. The accused had created various social media groups of the Ghazwa-e-Hind on WhatsApp, Telegram and BiP Messenger. He had also created another WhatsApp group in the name of BDGhazwa E HindBD and had added Bangladeshi nationals to it. Further probe showed that various suspects involved in the case were in contact with Pakistan-based handlers and were involved in propagating the idea of Ghazwa-e-Hind. The first raids were conducted by the NIA in the last week of July in Patna, Darbhanga, East Champaran, Nalanda and Madhubani districts of Bihar. The raids on July 14 in the Phulwarisharif area of Patna had led to the seizure of documents about the radical group PFIs Mission 2047 for making India an Islamic state. In the suspected terror module case, the security agencies had first arrested Athar Parvez, Mohammad Jalaluddin and Arman Malik. Jalaluddin is a former Jharkhand police officer who retired after 39 years of service. During questioning, they revealed the names of Margoob and Shabbir. An arrest in Patna led to Pak-based radical group The case came to light after the Bihar police arrested Marghoob Ahmad Danish alias Tahir of Phulwarisharif area of Patna. The accused was found to be a member of the Ghazwa-e-Hind module, which was operated by Pak-based operatives, with the objective of radicalising impressionable youth for the establishment of Ghazwa-e-Hind over the Indian territory.
Dilip Singh Kshatriya By

Express News Service

AHMEDABAD: Over 2,447 newborn babies and 156 mothers have died in the last three months in hospitals across Gujarat, exposing the poor condition of the state's healthcare system.

According to the government's health management data, 2132 cases of severe anaemia were reported in newborn babies from April 1 to June 30. While 27,138 children in the state were born with low birth weights, 1,20,328 were malnourished.

The Health and Family Welfare Department of Gujarat implemented a mHealth Programme called TeCHO+ (Technology for Community Health Operations), which revealed disturbing statistics.

According to the data, Ahmedabad tops the list of cities with 15 maternal fatalities, Kutch with 11 deaths,

Banaskantha and Dahod with 10 deaths, Rajkot, Vadodara, Bharuch, and Narmada with nine, seven. three and eleven maternal fatalities respectively.

Dahod district saw 215 newborn mortality deaths, whereas Ahmedabad reported 199 deaths, 166 in Banaskantha, 165 in Kutch, 142 in Mehsana, 113 in Anand, 105 in Sabarkantha, and 73 in Vadodara district.

Gujarat Congress spokesperson Manish Doshi stated, "The Gujarat government spends several crores on various health schemes, but the deaths seem to be increasing." A total of 7.15 lakh children have been malnourished in the last five years. The number of deaths of newborn children and mothers dying during childbirth, which are displayed on the government's app itself, demonstrates the Gujarat government's inefficiency in the health sector, he alleged.

AHMEDABAD: Over 2,447 newborn babies and 156 mothers have died in the last three months in hospitals across Gujarat, exposing the poor condition of the state's healthcare system. According to the government's health management data, 2132 cases of severe anaemia were reported in newborn babies from April 1 to June 30. While 27,138 children in the state were born with low birth weights, 1,20,328 were malnourished. The Health and Family Welfare Department of Gujarat implemented a mHealth Programme called TeCHO+ (Technology for Community Health Operations), which revealed disturbing statistics. googletag.cmd.push(function() {googletag.display('div-gpt-ad-8052921-2'); }); According to the data, Ahmedabad tops the list of cities with 15 maternal fatalities, Kutch with 11 deaths, Banaskantha and Dahod with 10 deaths, Rajkot, Vadodara, Bharuch, and Narmada with nine, seven. three and eleven maternal fatalities respectively. Dahod district saw 215 newborn mortality deaths, whereas Ahmedabad reported 199 deaths, 166 in Banaskantha, 165 in Kutch, 142 in Mehsana, 113 in Anand, 105 in Sabarkantha, and 73 in Vadodara district. Gujarat Congress spokesperson Manish Doshi stated, "The Gujarat government spends several crores on various health schemes, but the deaths seem to be increasing." A total of 7.15 lakh children have been malnourished in the last five years. The number of deaths of newborn children and mothers dying during childbirth, which are displayed on the government's app itself, demonstrates the Gujarat government's inefficiency in the health sector, he alleged.
By IANS

BHOPAL: The body of a tribal youth, detained for interrogation in connection with a case of tiger poaching in Madhya Pradesh's Betul, was found hanging from a tree, police said on Monday.

The deceased, identified as Anish Uike, a resident of Chopna village in Betul, was among five suspects who were interrogated on Saturday. They all were released on Sunday.

Uike was found dead hanging from a tree in a field located a few metres away from his home.

Chandrapal Dhurve, in-charge of Chopna police station, said all five suspects, who were detained for interrogation, were released on Sunday.

On June 25, a decomposed and headless body of an adult tiger was found in the Dabra Dev area of Churna forest range, around two km from the Satpura Tiger Reserve (STR) buffer.

Since then, the Tiger Strike Force and STR team were searching of the suspected killers.

A senior forest official associated with the STR told IANS that search were being conducted in Chhindwara and Betul districts.

During the search, five suspects were detained for questioning, and the deceased (Uike) was one of them.

"Prima facie, it seems a suicide case, however, nothing can be said until the postmortem report reveals the exact case of death. Statements of family persons and locals are being recorded. Our investigation is underway," Dhurve said.

Meanwhile, the Madhya Pradesh Forest Department has announced a reward of Rs. 25000 for information leading to the arrest of the tiger poachers.

The Union Forest Ministry has also taken cognizance of the matter and has issued guidelines for each tiger reserve in Madhya Pradesh.

This year so far, (January 1 to June 30) a total of 26 tiger deaths were reported in Madhya Pradesh.

BHOPAL: The body of a tribal youth, detained for interrogation in connection with a case of tiger poaching in Madhya Pradesh's Betul, was found hanging from a tree, police said on Monday. The deceased, identified as Anish Uike, a resident of Chopna village in Betul, was among five suspects who were interrogated on Saturday. They all were released on Sunday. Uike was found dead hanging from a tree in a field located a few metres away from his home.googletag.cmd.push(function() {googletag.display('div-gpt-ad-8052921-2'); }); Chandrapal Dhurve, in-charge of Chopna police station, said all five suspects, who were detained for interrogation, were released on Sunday. On June 25, a decomposed and headless body of an adult tiger was found in the Dabra Dev area of Churna forest range, around two km from the Satpura Tiger Reserve (STR) buffer. Since then, the Tiger Strike Force and STR team were searching of the suspected killers. A senior forest official associated with the STR told IANS that search were being conducted in Chhindwara and Betul districts. During the search, five suspects were detained for questioning, and the deceased (Uike) was one of them. "Prima facie, it seems a suicide case, however, nothing can be said until the postmortem report reveals the exact case of death. Statements of family persons and locals are being recorded. Our investigation is underway," Dhurve said. Meanwhile, the Madhya Pradesh Forest Department has announced a reward of Rs. 25000 for information leading to the arrest of the tiger poachers. The Union Forest Ministry has also taken cognizance of the matter and has issued guidelines for each tiger reserve in Madhya Pradesh. This year so far, (January 1 to June 30) a total of 26 tiger deaths were reported in Madhya Pradesh.
By Express News Service

KOLKATA: Amid the deaths of two more people in the past 24 hours ahead of the upcoming rural elections, the State Election Commission (SEC) on Monday identified 4,834 polling booths as sensitive. This is 7.8 per cent of the total number of booths where 5.67 crore voters will exercise their franchise on July 8.

The Centre on Monday gave the nod to send 485 additional companies of the Central Armed Paramilitary Force (CAPF) as requisitioned by the SEC to comply with the Calcutta High Courts order directing the state poll panel to deploy central forces across the state during the panchayat elections.

The total death toll before the rural polls has gone up to 15 in the past fortnight.

Out of 61,636 polling booths, we mapped 4,834 as sensitive ones which is 7.8 per cent of the total capacity. We identified the sensitive booths on the basis of the experience in past rural polls, said an SEC official.

ALSO READ | Bengal Governor supervises situation in violence-hit Cooch Behar as fresh clashes reported

Bengal on Monday continued recording fresh deaths ahead of the rural polls. The body of Bankim Hansda, bearing injury marks, was found lying in a field at Manbazar in Purulia. The BJP claimed the deceased was a party worker.

Hansda left home on Sunday evening and did not return home at night. His family members found the body on Monday morning. We sent the body for autopsy to ascertain the exact cause behind Hansdas death, said a police officer in Purulia.

BJP MLA and Leader of Opposition Suvendu Adhikari demanded a CBI probe into Hansdas death.

In another incident, Paritosh Mondal died in an explosion when he was manufacturing crude bombs in a paddy field at Habra, North 24 Parganas. Police said local residents rushed to the spot hearing the sound of an explosion only to find Mondal in a pool of blood. He was rushed to the local healthcare centre where doctors declared him dead on arrival.

West Bengal governor C.V. Ananda Bose, on his way to Raj Bhavan from his north Bengal trip, went straight to Basanti, South 24 Parganas, where a Trinamool Congress youth wing worker Jairul Mollah (45) was killed on Saturday night. Bose visited the spot after arriving Kolkata by train and met the daughter of the victim Manoara Piada, who is a candidate in the upcoming rural polls, and some residents the locality.

Manoara alleged that her father was a victim of the TMCs intra party feud between youth wing supporters and activists of the mother organisation.

Violence is taking place in some pockets in Bengal. I urge people to refrain from violence, Bose said.

KOLKATA: Amid the deaths of two more people in the past 24 hours ahead of the upcoming rural elections, the State Election Commission (SEC) on Monday identified 4,834 polling booths as sensitive. This is 7.8 per cent of the total number of booths where 5.67 crore voters will exercise their franchise on July 8. The Centre on Monday gave the nod to send 485 additional companies of the Central Armed Paramilitary Force (CAPF) as requisitioned by the SEC to comply with the Calcutta High Courts order directing the state poll panel to deploy central forces across the state during the panchayat elections. The total death toll before the rural polls has gone up to 15 in the past fortnight. googletag.cmd.push(function() {googletag.display('div-gpt-ad-8052921-2'); }); Out of 61,636 polling booths, we mapped 4,834 as sensitive ones which is 7.8 per cent of the total capacity. We identified the sensitive booths on the basis of the experience in past rural polls, said an SEC official. ALSO READ | Bengal Governor supervises situation in violence-hit Cooch Behar as fresh clashes reported Bengal on Monday continued recording fresh deaths ahead of the rural polls. The body of Bankim Hansda, bearing injury marks, was found lying in a field at Manbazar in Purulia. The BJP claimed the deceased was a party worker. Hansda left home on Sunday evening and did not return home at night. His family members found the body on Monday morning. We sent the body for autopsy to ascertain the exact cause behind Hansdas death, said a police officer in Purulia. BJP MLA and Leader of Opposition Suvendu Adhikari demanded a CBI probe into Hansdas death. In another incident, Paritosh Mondal died in an explosion when he was manufacturing crude bombs in a paddy field at Habra, North 24 Parganas. Police said local residents rushed to the spot hearing the sound of an explosion only to find Mondal in a pool of blood. He was rushed to the local healthcare centre where doctors declared him dead on arrival. West Bengal governor C.V. Ananda Bose, on his way to Raj Bhavan from his north Bengal trip, went straight to Basanti, South 24 Parganas, where a Trinamool Congress youth wing worker Jairul Mollah (45) was killed on Saturday night. Bose visited the spot after arriving Kolkata by train and met the daughter of the victim Manoara Piada, who is a candidate in the upcoming rural polls, and some residents the locality. Manoara alleged that her father was a victim of the TMCs intra party feud between youth wing supporters and activists of the mother organisation. Violence is taking place in some pockets in Bengal. I urge people to refrain from violence, Bose said.
Namita Bajpai By

Express News Service

LUCKNOW: A 28-year-old daily wage worker Sajid Abbasi died after he was allegedly beaten up by the police.

The victim, who was from Rataul village of Baghpat district in western UP died, on Sunday, half an hour after being released by local police who had picked him up on suspicion of gambling.

Sajid Abbasi was picked up by local police from an orchard and taken to a check post under the Khekra police station area on suspicion of gambling. He was released after some time but died half an hour later while being taken to a hospital. Sajid's father Babu Abbasi claimed that his son was badly thrashed by the cops at the police check post and that he was released only when his

condition deteriorated.

Even the villagers had seen three police constables beating him mercilessly, said the distraught father.

As a fallout of Sajid's demise, incensed villagers blocked the road demanding action against the cops.

According to SP Baghpat, Arpit Vijayvargiya, the family of the deceased and the villagers were pacified with the assurance of strict action against the culprits.

"He was detained on suspicion of gambling but was later released as police did not have any evidence against him," said the SP.

While the police authorities claimed that no FIR was lodged in the case so far as the family had not given any complaint, Baghpat ASP Manish Kumar said that a probe was already initiated into the incident and the cause of death would be clear only after the autopsy report.

"Action would be taken against those responsible on the basis of the available facts," said the police officer.

Meanwhile, a cop was shunted to police lines in connection with the death.

LUCKNOW: A 28-year-old daily wage worker Sajid Abbasi died after he was allegedly beaten up by the police. The victim, who was from Rataul village of Baghpat district in western UP died, on Sunday, half an hour after being released by local police who had picked him up on suspicion of gambling. Sajid Abbasi was picked up by local police from an orchard and taken to a check post under the Khekra police station area on suspicion of gambling. He was released after some time but died half an hour later while being taken to a hospital. Sajid's father Babu Abbasi claimed that his son was badly thrashed by the cops at the police check post and that he was released only when his condition deteriorated.googletag.cmd.push(function() {googletag.display('div-gpt-ad-8052921-2'); }); Even the villagers had seen three police constables beating him mercilessly, said the distraught father. As a fallout of Sajid's demise, incensed villagers blocked the road demanding action against the cops. According to SP Baghpat, Arpit Vijayvargiya, the family of the deceased and the villagers were pacified with the assurance of strict action against the culprits. "He was detained on suspicion of gambling but was later released as police did not have any evidence against him," said the SP. While the police authorities claimed that no FIR was lodged in the case so far as the family had not given any complaint, Baghpat ASP Manish Kumar said that a probe was already initiated into the incident and the cause of death would be clear only after the autopsy report. "Action would be taken against those responsible on the basis of the available facts," said the police officer. Meanwhile, a cop was shunted to police lines in connection with the death.
Yeshi Seli By

Express News Service

NEW DELHI: The much-awaited SCO Summit is likely to be over in about two hours on Tuesday. After India decided to host it virtually, most members who were gearing up to travel to Delhi will now have around 10 minutes each to talk, deliberate and agree on issues that would translate into the joint declaration.

The summit that is being organised under Indias chairmanship will now be more like a conference where leaders won't be able to have bilaterals on the sidelines  like in Samarkand last September. Discussions are likely to be held around issues ranging from terrorism to security, trade and politics.

The virtual summit to be anchored by Prime Minister Narendra Modi will also be attended by Russian President Vladimir Putin (who according to the Kremlin was gearing up to attend the summit in person), Chinese President Xi Jinping and Pakistans Prime Minister Shehbaz Sharif among other heads of state.

PM Modi and President Putin had a telephonic conversation recently, taking stock of the situation in Russia post the minor rebellion caused by the Wagner group and also about the need to resolve the conflict in Ukraine. Indias relations with Pakistan are at an all-time low due to terrorism while those with China are not 'normal' as External Affairs Minister S Jaishankar keeps reiterating due to the LAC standoff.

"India has been too consumed by the G20 and its upcoming summit, which is the probable reason for them to push the SCO Summit into a virtual mode," lamented an SCO member.

ALSO READ | Putin, Xi Jinping, Shehbaz Sharif to attend SCO Summit hosted by India virtually on July 4

Last year, in the Samarkand Summit, besides the joint declaration, a record number of agreements, concepts and programs had been adopted. Around 44 documents were signed. India has hosted over 100 meetings under its SCO chairmanship and most were in-person meetings. The most well known was the SCO Foreign Ministers meeting held in Goa  which was attended by Sergey Lavrov, Bilawal Bhutto and Qin Gang.

SCO is the worlds largest regional organisation in terms of area, covering approximately 60 per cent of Eurasia and 42 per cent of the world population, representing 25 per cent of the global GDP, 25 per cent of the worlds oil reserves and 50 per cent of natural gas and uranium deposits. Iran will join as a member of the group on Tuesday.

The subjects on which the members will deliberate include terrorism, the security situation in Afghanistan, enhancing cooperation between SCO states and improving connectivity through multi-modal routes.

The theme for Indias Presidency is 'SECURE' which is an abbreviation for security, economic development, connectivity, unity, respect for soverignity and territorial integrity and environmental protection. India has also been pushing for deeper cooperation on de-radicalisation strategies.

Members of the SCO include India, Russia, China, Uzbekistan, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Pakistan and Tajikstan. Their dialogue partners include Armenia, Azerbaijan, Nepal, Cambodia, Sri Lanka and Turkey. Saudi Arabia, Qatar and Egypt are likely to be added as dialogue partners.

SCO members are hoping that the significance of the summit is not diluted in the future.

NEW DELHI: The much-awaited SCO Summit is likely to be over in about two hours on Tuesday. After India decided to host it virtually, most members who were gearing up to travel to Delhi will now have around 10 minutes each to talk, deliberate and agree on issues that would translate into the joint declaration. The summit that is being organised under Indias chairmanship will now be more like a conference where leaders won't be able to have bilaterals on the sidelines  like in Samarkand last September. Discussions are likely to be held around issues ranging from terrorism to security, trade and politics. The virtual summit to be anchored by Prime Minister Narendra Modi will also be attended by Russian President Vladimir Putin (who according to the Kremlin was gearing up to attend the summit in person), Chinese President Xi Jinping and Pakistans Prime Minister Shehbaz Sharif among other heads of state.googletag.cmd.push(function() {googletag.display('div-gpt-ad-8052921-2'); }); PM Modi and President Putin had a telephonic conversation recently, taking stock of the situation in Russia post the minor rebellion caused by the Wagner group and also about the need to resolve the conflict in Ukraine. Indias relations with Pakistan are at an all-time low due to terrorism while those with China are not 'normal' as External Affairs Minister S Jaishankar keeps reiterating due to the LAC standoff. "India has been too consumed by the G20 and its upcoming summit, which is the probable reason for them to push the SCO Summit into a virtual mode," lamented an SCO member. ALSO READ | Putin, Xi Jinping, Shehbaz Sharif to attend SCO Summit hosted by India virtually on July 4 Last year, in the Samarkand Summit, besides the joint declaration, a record number of agreements, concepts and programs had been adopted. Around 44 documents were signed. India has hosted over 100 meetings under its SCO chairmanship and most were in-person meetings. The most well known was the SCO Foreign Ministers meeting held in Goa  which was attended by Sergey Lavrov, Bilawal Bhutto and Qin Gang. SCO is the worlds largest regional organisation in terms of area, covering approximately 60 per cent of Eurasia and 42 per cent of the world population, representing 25 per cent of the global GDP, 25 per cent of the worlds oil reserves and 50 per cent of natural gas and uranium deposits. Iran will join as a member of the group on Tuesday. The subjects on which the members will deliberate include terrorism, the security situation in Afghanistan, enhancing cooperation between SCO states and improving connectivity through multi-modal routes. The theme for Indias Presidency is 'SECURE' which is an abbreviation for security, economic development, connectivity, unity, respect for soverignity and territorial integrity and environmental protection. India has also been pushing for deeper cooperation on de-radicalisation strategies. Members of the SCO include India, Russia, China, Uzbekistan, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Pakistan and Tajikstan. Their dialogue partners include Armenia, Azerbaijan, Nepal, Cambodia, Sri Lanka and Turkey. Saudi Arabia, Qatar and Egypt are likely to be added as dialogue partners. SCO members are hoping that the significance of the summit is not diluted in the future.
By PTI

MUMBAI: NCP MLA Rohit Pawar, the grandnephew of party chief Sharad Pawar, on Monday claimed senior leaders had an inkling of BJP's "intention" to break the party, but were clueless about Ajit Pawar's swift move to join hands with the ruling alliance.

Speaking to reporters in Maharashtra's Pune city, Rohit Pawar said he is firmly with NCP chief Sharad Pawar.

On Sunday, Ajit Pawar led a vertical split in the NCP to become the deputy chief minister, shocking his uncle Sharad Pawar, who founded the party 24 years ago. Eight NCP leaders were also sworn in as ministers in the Eknath Shinde-Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) government.

Reacting to the developments, Rohit Pawar, the grandson of Sharad Pawar's elder brother Appasaheb Pawar, said, "We had no clue of Ajit Pawar joining hands with BJP. But the BJP was keen on breaking the NCP. We knew this much."

"However, going by all these developments, we wonder whether people like me made a mistake by joining politics," he added.

ALSO READ | BJP all set for Maha Pawar play in 2024 elections

Asked about Ajit Pawar's move, the legislator said he is emotional towards him as he is his uncle. "He (Ajit Pawar) has helped me in his personal capacity also. However, politically, we all are with party chief Sharad Pawar," he said.

Rohit Pawar also said if put to test, Sharad Pawar will have a larger acceptance as the leader of the people.

In the wake of nine NCP leaders, including Ajit Pawar, joining the Eknath Shinde government, party chief Sharad Pawar has convened a meeting on July 5 in Mumbai to discuss the developments and the future course of action.

"The state has a history of struggle and perseverance. We will continue to do so," Rohit Pawar said.

ALSO READ | BJP's 'washing machine' has resumed operation: Opposition on Ajit's mutiny

MUMBAI: NCP MLA Rohit Pawar, the grandnephew of party chief Sharad Pawar, on Monday claimed senior leaders had an inkling of BJP's "intention" to break the party, but were clueless about Ajit Pawar's swift move to join hands with the ruling alliance. Speaking to reporters in Maharashtra's Pune city, Rohit Pawar said he is firmly with NCP chief Sharad Pawar. On Sunday, Ajit Pawar led a vertical split in the NCP to become the deputy chief minister, shocking his uncle Sharad Pawar, who founded the party 24 years ago. Eight NCP leaders were also sworn in as ministers in the Eknath Shinde-Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) government.googletag.cmd.push(function() {googletag.display('div-gpt-ad-8052921-2'); }); Reacting to the developments, Rohit Pawar, the grandson of Sharad Pawar's elder brother Appasaheb Pawar, said, "We had no clue of Ajit Pawar joining hands with BJP. But the BJP was keen on breaking the NCP. We knew this much." "However, going by all these developments, we wonder whether people like me made a mistake by joining politics," he added. ALSO READ | BJP all set for Maha Pawar play in 2024 elections Asked about Ajit Pawar's move, the legislator said he is emotional towards him as he is his uncle. "He (Ajit Pawar) has helped me in his personal capacity also. However, politically, we all are with party chief Sharad Pawar," he said. Rohit Pawar also said if put to test, Sharad Pawar will have a larger acceptance as the leader of the people. In the wake of nine NCP leaders, including Ajit Pawar, joining the Eknath Shinde government, party chief Sharad Pawar has convened a meeting on July 5 in Mumbai to discuss the developments and the future course of action. "The state has a history of struggle and perseverance. We will continue to do so," Rohit Pawar said. ALSO READ | BJP's 'washing machine' has resumed operation: Opposition on Ajit's mutiny
Aknisree Karthik By

Express News Service

BENGALURU: One of the five promises that helped the Congress party win Karnataka is the Shakti scheme, which offers free travel to women across the state in all non-premium government buses. While all other promises are yet to be implemented, the Shakti scheme was rolled out on June 11 and since then, ridership in all four bus corporations -- Karnataka State Road Transport Corporation (KSRTC), Kalyana Karnataka Road Transport Corporation (KKRTC), North West Karnataka Road Transport Corporation (NWKRTC) and Bangalore Metropolitan Transport Corporation (BMTC) -- has been soaring.

Lauding Chief Minister Siddaramaiah for providing free travel for women in KSRTC buses, Danamma of Bagalkot, a homemaker going to Mysuru, said she is travelling on a KSRTC bus for the first time after ten years. Had the government not offered free travel, I would never visit any tourist and religious places, said Danamma, who was travelling with her grandmother, sister and three daughters. She has decided to finish her tours soon as she feels the free travel sop may stop after parliamentary elections in 2024.

Several women farmers from Hassan and surrounding areas who visit Madikeri and Kodagu markets and also go door-to-door to sell locally grown vegetables, said they are able to save over Rs 200 every day with the Shakti scheme.

Double fleet size

The dramatic rise in ridership on government-run buses  without an increase in the number of buses  has resulted in severe overcrowding. Meanwhile, private buses and shared autos are staring at a steep drop in ridership because of women shifting to free government buses, said urban mobility expert Shreya Gadepalli.

The scheme is commendable for its intent, but many women are unable to benefit from it. The stagnant bus fleet means many locations are unserved or underserved. Women in these areas are forced to take private buses, shared autos or other modes of transport at significant personal expense. For the Shakti scheme to truly empower women, the bus fleet must be doubled to expand connectivity, enhance frequency and erase crowding. Steps must also be taken to make the walk to bus stops safe and convenient, she added.

The Shakti Smart Card presents an opportunity to bring private and informal services into the ambit of the scheme. Women can be allowed to travel for free on any bus, public or private, and bus operators can be reimbursed, based on the number of cards tapped on their buses, said Gadepalli.

Mobility expert from the Indian Insitute of Science (IISc) Ashish Verma said while the Shakti scheme is a good first step in improving access for women, especially among middle and low-income households, its benefits can be short-lived or narrow, if several other key service elements are not taken care of. They include improving service frequency to absorb additional demand, and expanding the public transport network to cover all areas effectively.

Moreover, financial sustainability of such schemes is challenging, as has been the experience of other countries with similar schemes. Ensuring affordability of public transport across all gender and income groups is equally important, and should receive equal attention from the government, Verma said.

Shaheen Shasa of the Bengaluru Bus Prayanikara Vedike recalled how since 2013, they have been urging the state government to bring down bus fares and offer free travel to women, transgenders and senior citizens, similar to the Delhi, Punjab and Tamil Nadu government schemes.

By removing the cost of travel, the scheme enables women and transgenders greater freedom of movement, which enables better access to education, livelihood, healthcare and leisure. The popularity and success of the scheme are evident from how daily ridership has increased significantly. Women are travelling more than they did before, they are saving travel cost and spending it on other essentials for themselves or their families. Women who walked 3-4 km every day, are now able to use the bus. Not only female, even male ridership has increased. The scheme is a success, Shasa said.

Glitches in Shakti

As the scheme mandates local domicile, Shasa said many migrants cannot avail of the benefit. He said the Shakti smart card is unnecessary, it creates a barrier for access and carries the risk of privacy violation associated with it. Also, inadequate service coverage and frequency of service need to be fixed.

The scheme is expected to cost the government over Rs 4,000 crore every year, which is a small portion of the states budget. When we consider how this expands economic and social opportunities for a vast section of society, it should be seen as a social investment and development, and not a burden or a loss. We need more funding to expand service coverage and hire more crew, Shasa said, and added that in the next five years, if these issues are addressed, there will be an amazing transformation in mobility, economic and social development in Karnataka. It would be a good use of public funds.

Tallinn in Estonia, Luxembourg, some cities in China have had free public transport for some years now. The benefits of making public transport free for all (with a corresponding increase in the fleet and significant disincentives for private vehicles) are manifold... Increasing the mode share of public transport is the only real way out of congestion, emission, pollution, high fuel consumption, accidents and loss of green cover in urban areas. The cost of this is actually an investment into better, healthier, safer and more livable cities, and the benefits and returns, if quantified, will far outweigh the costs, said Shasa.

Complaints galore

Following multiple instances of drivers and conductors behaving in an unruly manner, women passengers being hit by the staff, and a driver menacingly trying to run over a group of women in Koratagere in Tumakuru, the bus corporation issued a circular, stating that disciplinary action will be initiated against staff who fail to behave courteously with passengers.

Quarrels between conductors and women over producing Aadhaar card or any address proof for tickets, fights for seats, throwing stones for not stopping the bus, buses not reaching on time etc, have become common after the Shakti launch. Seetamma, a retired schoolteacher, said many drivers dont stop buses when they see only women waiting. College students are also put to hardship. A college girl fell unconscious due to suffocation in the bus, near Kummanasirasagi village of Yadrami taluk, Kalaburagi, on June 26. The students deboarded the bus and staged a road block agitation, demanding additional buses for students from Kummanasirasagi, and got a bus for their village.

No government buses

The Shakti scheme may have been implemented, yet there are over 2,500 villages across Karnataka that do not have a government bus, pointed out KSRTC Staff and Workers Federation. There are places dominated by private buses, like Udupi, where women are yet to benefit fully. The government introduced 20 JnNURM buses in 2019-20 in Udupi, but only 12 buses operated during the Covid-19 pandemic. Their number came down to 7, while various interior routes still have no government buses.

Women who wish to visit Kollur Mookambika Temple, Anegudde Sri Vinayaka Temple, Sri Durgaparameshwari Temple, and Mandarthi have no facility. Byndoor MLA Gururaj Gantihole said he will speak to the concerned to get government buses in Kollur.

Private travel operators and auto drivers have been complaining of having lost a major part of their business after the Shakti scheme, as their customers now use government buses. Dakshina Kannada Private Bus Owners Association says that after the scheme started, they saw a 10-20 per cent drop in passengers.

Auto drivers are complaining that their average daily earnings have been hit by over 30 per cent, with both women and men travelling on government buses.

Taking note of the plight of private bus owners and their employees, KSRTC Staff and Workers Federation wrote a letter to Chief Minister Siddaramaiah, urging him to absorb private buses and their staff into the bus corporation, like the Devaraj Urs government did in 1976, after abolishing contract carriages. Federation secretary Vijay Bhaskar, in the letter said, As more women are shifting towards KSRTC from private buses, the drivers, operators, technical staff and others are at risk of losing their jobs. Owners who have invested money are also in trouble.

Recalling the measures taken in 1976 by then CM Devaraj Urs, after abolishing the Contract Carriages Abolition Act 1976, Vijay Bhaskar said, Private buses, including the staff affected by the move, were absorbed into KSRTC. In a similar way, we request private buses and their staff be taken over by KSRTC.

Drain on exchequer

In the backdrop of the governments estimation that the programme would need more than Rs 4,000 crore every year, Director of the Institute of Social and Economic Change Prof D Rajasekhar said the Shakti scheme will be a drain on the states exchequer, and insisted that a study is done at the end of one year to know the implications of free travel on women, especially the unorganised sector that will give a clear picture on the number of women who travelled, expenditure by the government and revenue of bus corporations.

Though the government is offering free travel in non-premium buses, those who have got used to luxury and comfort will prefer premium buses. Shakti scheme will benefit women in the unorganised sector. Buses that were operating with a few passengers are running full. A woman in Ballari can travel to a coffee estate in Kodagu if there is work for her, and return with full wages. Agricultural labourers, garment workers, daily wage workers and others will be able to save the money, and use it for something else," she said.

There are many men, students and senior citizens who are urging the government to make public transport free for all. Gadinada Kannadigas (Kannadigas living outside the state bordering Karnataka) say the scheme must be extended to women of Keralas border district of Kasaragod, as thousands travel from Kasargod to Mangaluru for education, healthcare etc.

Transport Minister Ramalinga Reddy said the Shakti scheme has received an overwhelming response and the total ridership and revenue of all four bus corporations has witnessed a jump, crossing 1 crore every day. Salaries of garment workers, housekeeping, daily wage labourers and unorganised sector are not more than Rs 12,000. After the Shakti scheme, many have told us they are able to save more than Rs 1,000 and they can now use it for other needs.

We are taking all feedback on the scheme and are trying to address the problems of people. We will be inducting 4,000 new buses to the bus corporations and hiring 9,000 staff, Reddy said.

(With inputs from Uday Kumar B R from Hassan, Arpitha from Shivamogga, Prakash Samaga from Udupi, Ramakrishna Badseshi from Kalburgi, Prajna G R from Madikeri, Divya Cutinho from Mangaluru)

BENGALURU: One of the five promises that helped the Congress party win Karnataka is the Shakti scheme, which offers free travel to women across the state in all non-premium government buses. While all other promises are yet to be implemented, the Shakti scheme was rolled out on June 11 and since then, ridership in all four bus corporations -- Karnataka State Road Transport Corporation (KSRTC), Kalyana Karnataka Road Transport Corporation (KKRTC), North West Karnataka Road Transport Corporation (NWKRTC) and Bangalore Metropolitan Transport Corporation (BMTC) -- has been soaring. Lauding Chief Minister Siddaramaiah for providing free travel for women in KSRTC buses, Danamma of Bagalkot, a homemaker going to Mysuru, said she is travelling on a KSRTC bus for the first time after ten years. Had the government not offered free travel, I would never visit any tourist and religious places, said Danamma, who was travelling with her grandmother, sister and three daughters. She has decided to finish her tours soon as she feels the free travel sop may stop after parliamentary elections in 2024. Several women farmers from Hassan and surrounding areas who visit Madikeri and Kodagu markets and also go door-to-door to sell locally grown vegetables, said they are able to save over Rs 200 every day with the Shakti scheme.googletag.cmd.push(function() {googletag.display('div-gpt-ad-8052921-2'); }); Double fleet size The dramatic rise in ridership on government-run buses  without an increase in the number of buses  has resulted in severe overcrowding. Meanwhile, private buses and shared autos are staring at a steep drop in ridership because of women shifting to free government buses, said urban mobility expert Shreya Gadepalli. The scheme is commendable for its intent, but many women are unable to benefit from it. The stagnant bus fleet means many locations are unserved or underserved. Women in these areas are forced to take private buses, shared autos or other modes of transport at significant personal expense. For the Shakti scheme to truly empower women, the bus fleet must be doubled to expand connectivity, enhance frequency and erase crowding. Steps must also be taken to make the walk to bus stops safe and convenient, she added. The Shakti Smart Card presents an opportunity to bring private and informal services into the ambit of the scheme. Women can be allowed to travel for free on any bus, public or private, and bus operators can be reimbursed, based on the number of cards tapped on their buses, said Gadepalli. Mobility expert from the Indian Insitute of Science (IISc) Ashish Verma said while the Shakti scheme is a good first step in improving access for women, especially among middle and low-income households, its benefits can be short-lived or narrow, if several other key service elements are not taken care of. They include improving service frequency to absorb additional demand, and expanding the public transport network to cover all areas effectively. Moreover, financial sustainability of such schemes is challenging, as has been the experience of other countries with similar schemes. Ensuring affordability of public transport across all gender and income groups is equally important, and should receive equal attention from the government, Verma said. Shaheen Shasa of the Bengaluru Bus Prayanikara Vedike recalled how since 2013, they have been urging the state government to bring down bus fares and offer free travel to women, transgenders and senior citizens, similar to the Delhi, Punjab and Tamil Nadu government schemes. By removing the cost of travel, the scheme enables women and transgenders greater freedom of movement, which enables better access to education, livelihood, healthcare and leisure. The popularity and success of the scheme are evident from how daily ridership has increased significantly. Women are travelling more than they did before, they are saving travel cost and spending it on other essentials for themselves or their families. Women who walked 3-4 km every day, are now able to use the bus. Not only female, even male ridership has increased. The scheme is a success, Shasa said. Glitches in Shakti As the scheme mandates local domicile, Shasa said many migrants cannot avail of the benefit. He said the Shakti smart card is unnecessary, it creates a barrier for access and carries the risk of privacy violation associated with it. Also, inadequate service coverage and frequency of service need to be fixed. The scheme is expected to cost the government over Rs 4,000 crore every year, which is a small portion of the states budget. When we consider how this expands economic and social opportunities for a vast section of society, it should be seen as a social investment and development, and not a burden or a loss. We need more funding to expand service coverage and hire more crew, Shasa said, and added that in the next five years, if these issues are addressed, there will be an amazing transformation in mobility, economic and social development in Karnataka. It would be a good use of public funds. Tallinn in Estonia, Luxembourg, some cities in China have had free public transport for some years now. The benefits of making public transport free for all (with a corresponding increase in the fleet and significant disincentives for private vehicles) are manifold... Increasing the mode share of public transport is the only real way out of congestion, emission, pollution, high fuel consumption, accidents and loss of green cover in urban areas. The cost of this is actually an investment into better, healthier, safer and more livable cities, and the benefits and returns, if quantified, will far outweigh the costs, said Shasa. Complaints galore Following multiple instances of drivers and conductors behaving in an unruly manner, women passengers being hit by the staff, and a driver menacingly trying to run over a group of women in Koratagere in Tumakuru, the bus corporation issued a circular, stating that disciplinary action will be initiated against staff who fail to behave courteously with passengers. Quarrels between conductors and women over producing Aadhaar card or any address proof for tickets, fights for seats, throwing stones for not stopping the bus, buses not reaching on time etc, have become common after the Shakti launch. Seetamma, a retired schoolteacher, said many drivers dont stop buses when they see only women waiting. College students are also put to hardship. A college girl fell unconscious due to suffocation in the bus, near Kummanasirasagi village of Yadrami taluk, Kalaburagi, on June 26. The students deboarded the bus and staged a road block agitation, demanding additional buses for students from Kummanasirasagi, and got a bus for their village. No government buses The Shakti scheme may have been implemented, yet there are over 2,500 villages across Karnataka that do not have a government bus, pointed out KSRTC Staff and Workers Federation. There are places dominated by private buses, like Udupi, where women are yet to benefit fully. The government introduced 20 JnNURM buses in 2019-20 in Udupi, but only 12 buses operated during the Covid-19 pandemic. Their number came down to 7, while various interior routes still have no government buses. Women who wish to visit Kollur Mookambika Temple, Anegudde Sri Vinayaka Temple, Sri Durgaparameshwari Temple, and Mandarthi have no facility. Byndoor MLA Gururaj Gantihole said he will speak to the concerned to get government buses in Kollur. Private travel operators and auto drivers have been complaining of having lost a major part of their business after the Shakti scheme, as their customers now use government buses. Dakshina Kannada Private Bus Owners Association says that after the scheme started, they saw a 10-20 per cent drop in passengers. Auto drivers are complaining that their average daily earnings have been hit by over 30 per cent, with both women and men travelling on government buses. Taking note of the plight of private bus owners and their employees, KSRTC Staff and Workers Federation wrote a letter to Chief Minister Siddaramaiah, urging him to absorb private buses and their staff into the bus corporation, like the Devaraj Urs government did in 1976, after abolishing contract carriages. Federation secretary Vijay Bhaskar, in the letter said, As more women are shifting towards KSRTC from private buses, the drivers, operators, technical staff and others are at risk of losing their jobs. Owners who have invested money are also in trouble. Recalling the measures taken in 1976 by then CM Devaraj Urs, after abolishing the Contract Carriages Abolition Act 1976, Vijay Bhaskar said, Private buses, including the staff affected by the move, were absorbed into KSRTC. In a similar way, we request private buses and their staff be taken over by KSRTC. Drain on exchequer In the backdrop of the governments estimation that the programme would need more than Rs 4,000 crore every year, Director of the Institute of Social and Economic Change Prof D Rajasekhar said the Shakti scheme will be a drain on the states exchequer, and insisted that a study is done at the end of one year to know the implications of free travel on women, especially the unorganised sector that will give a clear picture on the number of women who travelled, expenditure by the government and revenue of bus corporations. Though the government is offering free travel in non-premium buses, those who have got used to luxury and comfort will prefer premium buses. Shakti scheme will benefit women in the unorganised sector. Buses that were operating with a few passengers are running full. A woman in Ballari can travel to a coffee estate in Kodagu if there is work for her, and return with full wages. Agricultural labourers, garment workers, daily wage workers and others will be able to save the money, and use it for something else," she said. There are many men, students and senior citizens who are urging the government to make public transport free for all. Gadinada Kannadigas (Kannadigas living outside the state bordering Karnataka) say the scheme must be extended to women of Keralas border district of Kasaragod, as thousands travel from Kasargod to Mangaluru for education, healthcare etc. Transport Minister Ramalinga Reddy said the Shakti scheme has received an overwhelming response and the total ridership and revenue of all four bus corporations has witnessed a jump, crossing 1 crore every day. Salaries of garment workers, housekeeping, daily wage labourers and unorganised sector are not more than Rs 12,000. After the Shakti scheme, many have told us they are able to save more than Rs 1,000 and they can now use it for other needs. We are taking all feedback on the scheme and are trying to address the problems of people. We will be inducting 4,000 new buses to the bus corporations and hiring 9,000 staff, Reddy said. (With inputs from Uday Kumar B R from Hassan, Arpitha from Shivamogga, Prakash Samaga from Udupi, Ramakrishna Badseshi from Kalburgi, Prajna G R from Madikeri, Divya Cutinho from Mangaluru)
Gautham Selvarajan By

Express News Service

CHENNAI: With technology making huge progress and seeping into daily life, the chances of these going into the hands of fraudsters are also huge. Every day, new methods are cropping up with which these fraudsters dupe and swindle money from the gullible public. Police officers and personnel need to update themselves regularly to stay vigilant against such crimes.

One such aid to the police is the cybercrime investigation tool developed by the C3iHub at the Indian Institute of Technology (IIT) Kanpur. This tool, which is yet to be named, will act as a virtual investigator and guide the police in their probe to solve the crime. With the help of Artificial Intelligence (AI), the tool will provide a step-by-step guide to solve the crime. It also has a database, using which the tool will automatically classify the type of crime  such as vishing, phishing, loan app fraud and investment frauds.

Talking about the tool, Professor Manindra Agarwal, Programme Director, C3iHub, said, The tool will analyse the information given by the police and instruct them on the type of information they need and should work on to find the criminals. It will direct the police to previous cases with a similar or nearly identical modus operandi, when a crime is committed.

It would list the names of persons who had been detained for such offences as well as the locations where they had been operating. The tool will also help the police build a solid case against the culprits, Agarwal added.

As of now, the tool is ready to be deployed by the Telangana police. After a few months of running it and getting their feedback, the tool will be implemented by police from other states as well, said Agarwal. Apart from this tool, the C3iHub is also working on other projects. For the government, they are working on methods to secure its cybersecurity ecosystem. The hub tracks security flaws in crucial industries and creates tools to fix them at various levels.

In addition to this, the hub performs cybersecurity audits for the government and offers a security operation control system that enables customers to view, in real-time, data on server hacks and malware flow, among other things.

Another project where the C3iHub has provided a solution is the Transferrable Developments Rights system (TDR) for the Kanpur Development Authority. This system helps in trading the TDR on the blockchain. This resolves the issues like tampering and enables transparent land holdings in various cities.

C3iHub tool can provide helpful info to police

The tool developed by C3iHub will analyse the information given by the police, instruct them on the kind of information they need to find the criminals. It will direct the police to previous cases with similar modus operandi, when a crime is committed. It would list the names of persons who had been detained for such offences as well as the locations where they had been operating.

CHENNAI: With technology making huge progress and seeping into daily life, the chances of these going into the hands of fraudsters are also huge. Every day, new methods are cropping up with which these fraudsters dupe and swindle money from the gullible public. Police officers and personnel need to update themselves regularly to stay vigilant against such crimes. One such aid to the police is the cybercrime investigation tool developed by the C3iHub at the Indian Institute of Technology (IIT) Kanpur. This tool, which is yet to be named, will act as a virtual investigator and guide the police in their probe to solve the crime. With the help of Artificial Intelligence (AI), the tool will provide a step-by-step guide to solve the crime. It also has a database, using which the tool will automatically classify the type of crime  such as vishing, phishing, loan app fraud and investment frauds. Talking about the tool, Professor Manindra Agarwal, Programme Director, C3iHub, said, The tool will analyse the information given by the police and instruct them on the type of information they need and should work on to find the criminals. It will direct the police to previous cases with a similar or nearly identical modus operandi, when a crime is committed.googletag.cmd.push(function() {googletag.display('div-gpt-ad-8052921-2'); }); It would list the names of persons who had been detained for such offences as well as the locations where they had been operating. The tool will also help the police build a solid case against the culprits, Agarwal added. As of now, the tool is ready to be deployed by the Telangana police. After a few months of running it and getting their feedback, the tool will be implemented by police from other states as well, said Agarwal. Apart from this tool, the C3iHub is also working on other projects. For the government, they are working on methods to secure its cybersecurity ecosystem. The hub tracks security flaws in crucial industries and creates tools to fix them at various levels. In addition to this, the hub performs cybersecurity audits for the government and offers a security operation control system that enables customers to view, in real-time, data on server hacks and malware flow, among other things. Another project where the C3iHub has provided a solution is the Transferrable Developments Rights system (TDR) for the Kanpur Development Authority. This system helps in trading the TDR on the blockchain. This resolves the issues like tampering and enables transparent land holdings in various cities. C3iHub tool can provide helpful info to police The tool developed by C3iHub will analyse the information given by the police, instruct them on the kind of information they need to find the criminals. It will direct the police to previous cases with similar modus operandi, when a crime is committed. It would list the names of persons who had been detained for such offences as well as the locations where they had been operating.
UAE calls on Intl community to address root causes of intolerance, extremism during UN Counter-Terrorism Week

Dubai, July 1: Salem Al Zaabi, Advisor to the Minister of Foreign Affairs of the United Arab Emirates, called on the international community to address the root causes of intolerance and extremism, including countering disinformation on the internet and social media.

UAE calls on Int'l community to address root causes of intolerance, extremism during UN Counter-Terrorism Week

Al Zaabi, who led the UAE's delegation to the biennial United Nations Counter-Terrorism Week that took place from June 19-23, was accompanied by Dr Mohamed Al Kuwaiti, Head of the UAE Cyber Security Council. Al Zaabi delivered the UAE's statement during the general debate on the UN Global Counter-Terrorism Strategy."Terrorism is a complex, multi-faceted, and global phenomenon that transcends borders, cultures, and religions, and effectively preventing and countering it requires a multilateral and multi-pronged approach," he said. "We urgently need to address intolerance and extremism more effectively before these behaviours escalate to acts of terrorism and armed conflict. Prevention strategies must be recalibrated to reflect this pressing reality."In his statement, Al Zaabi highlighted the UN Security Council's unanimous adoption of a resolution, co-penned by the United Arab Emirates and the United Kingdom, on "Tolerance and International Peace and Security". The resolution is the first of its kind to recognise that hate speech, racism, and extremism can drive the outbreak, escalation, and recurrence of conflict.The delegation and Ambassador Lana Zaki Nusseibeh, UAE's Permanent Representative to the United Nations in New York, engaged with other UN Member States and international counter-terrorism partners on critical counter-terrorism topics throughout CT Week.The UAE hosted a discussion on terrorist groups' acquisition, weaponisation, and deployment of Autonomous and Remotely Operated Systems (AROS), which also saw the launch of a UAE-sponsored report from the UN Office of Counter-Terrorism and Conflict Armament Research. Al Zaabi said that the report seeks to raise awareness of the dangers of proliferating AROS and their potential misuse by terrorists, and enhances the preparedness of Member States to prevent and counter the threats posed by Unmanned Aircraft Systems.Ambassador Nusseibeh, in her role as Chair of the UN Security Council's Counter-Terrorism Committee, co-chaired a UN discussion entitled "Global Threat Landscape Assessment of Current and Emerging Trends" with the Permanent Mission of Albania to the UN. As Chair, she met with the delegations of Iraq and the Russian Federation. The UAE delegation also met with the delegations of India and the United States.The UAE convened a discussion with India on multilateral responses to curb the misuse of digital tools by terrorists. Dr Al Kuwaiti highlighted how the UAE's work is strengthening information security, and the UAE's "Cyber Pulse" programme, which raises awareness of cyber threats and increases digital security. (ANI/WAM)ANI02 July 2023

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This film makes serious statement about terrorism, says 72 Hoorain director Sanjay Puran

Mumbai, July 2: Director Sanjay Puran Singh Chauhan spoke about the controversy surrounding his upcoming film '72 Hoorain'.

This film makes serious statement about terrorism, says '72 Hoorain' director Sanjay Puran

The Central Board of Film Certification (CBFC) on Thursday issued a statement denying reports that it had refused to issue a censor certificate to the trailer of '72 Hoorain' by National Award-winning director Sanjay Puran Singh Chauhan.Reports on the alleged denial of a censor certificate for the film's trailer sparked debates over creative freedom and censorship.However, the CBFC denied the reports in a statement saying, "Misleading reports are being circulated in certain sections of media that a film and its trailer titled "Bahattar Hoorain (72 Hoorain)" has been Refused certification by Central Board of Film Certification (CBFC)."Talking exclusively to ANI, Sanjay said, " When you produce a movie for the big screen, you want the movie trailer to be shown in theatres. The film trailer is not certified by the censor board. The censor board instructed you to make changes to the trailer on July 27 before it is released on August 28. How can someone expect the modifications to be made in such a short period of time when it is kind of a last-minute change?"He added, "Why is there an issue in the trailer? It is improper for a censor to ask for a last-minute change in the trailer. To make the movie, we have to overcome several obstacles.""Look, one thing that unites all conflicts is that the subject has been left hanging someplace. This film is making a serious statement. There is a lot of internal terrorism that has to be discussed." Sanjay said.He added, "There is a difference between 'a certificate we want to give' and 'a certificate we actually gave.' It takes a lot of days for to understand what cut you want while doing a movie and when next day the trailer is about to be released they want the changes.""I want people to comprehend the seriousness of the things that have been attempted to be shown in the movie. One of the major issues facing the globe is terrorism. It must be addressed and talked about.As you can see, individuals are making statements without having viewed the film. I want people to watch the movie first before deciding if it is right or wrong. The movie defines terrorism." Sanjay said.Earlier, the makers of the film digitally unveiled the official trailer of the film.Taking to Instagram, trade analyst Taran Adarsh shared the trailer and captioned it, "'72 HOORAIN' TRAILER OUT NOW... Team #72Hoorain - directed by #NationalAward winner #SanjayPuranSinghChauhan- launches the trailer of the film, which arrives in *cinemas* on 7 July 2023.'Helmed by two-time National Award winner Sanjay Puran Singh Chauhan, it is slated to release on July 7.The film is produced by Gulab Singh Tanwar, Kiran Dagar, and Anirudh Tanwar and is co-produced by Ashoke Pandit. Earlier, the makers unveiled the teaser of the film in 10 languages.'72 Hoorain' stars Pavan Malhotra and Ameer Bashir in the lead roles.ANI02 July 2023

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Foreign ministers of 6 countries call on Taliban to reverse policies, practices restricting women

Kabul, July 2: The foreign ministers of six countries have jointly called on the Taliban to swiftly reverse policies and practices that restrict women and girls from exercising their human rights and fundamental freedoms, TOLO News reported.

Foreign ministers of 6 countries call on Taliban to reverse policies, practices restricting women

TOLO News is an Afghan news channel broadcasting from Kabul.The call was made during a meeting of the foreign ministers from France, Germany, Indonesia, Liechtenstein, Mongolia, and South Africa at the Female Foreign Ministers' Meeting in Ulaanbaatar, Mongolia on June 29 and 30.The statement issued at the meeting emphasized the need for full, equal, meaningful, and safe participation of women and girls in Afghanistan.It "urged the Taliban to promptly reverse policies that hinder women and girls from enjoying their human rights and fundamental freedoms, including their access to education, employment, freedom of movement, and their full and meaningful participation in public life", as per TOLO News.The statement also called on all states and organizations to use their influence, in accordance with the United Nations Charter, to facilitate an urgent reversal of these policies and practices.Taliban spokesperson Zabiullah Mujahid said "We are aware of the statement. We have not rejected it. The Islamic Emirate is addressing this issue while adhering to Islamic principles. It is essential for the country."UAE ambassador to the UN, Lana Zaki Nusseibeh during the UN meeting highlighted the adoption of three resolutions on the Afghanistan issue in collaboration with Japan over the past six months.Analysts expressed the importance of the Taliban taking prompt action in eliminating bans imposed on women in the education and employment sectors."It is crucial for the Islamic Emirate to take immediate steps in this regard and remove the restrictions that have been imposed on women in the fields of education and work," international relations analyst Wahid Faqiri said.The statement comes as secondary schools are closed for girls over the past nearly two years while female students have been banned from attending universities since last December, as per TOLO News.ANI02 July 2023

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500th birth anniversary of Rani Durgavati will be celebrated at national level: PM Modi

Shahdol, July 2: Prime Minister Narendra Modi on Friday said that the 500th birth anniversary of Rani Durgavati, who was the ruling queen of Gondwana in the mid-16th century, will be celebrated by the Centre at the national level.

500th birth anniversary of Rani Durgavati will be celebrated at national level: PM Modi

The Prime Minister, who launched the National Sickle Cell Anaemia Elimination Mission in here and distributed sickle cell genetic status cards to the beneficiaries, said the BJP-led government has worked with sensitivity and emotion for the welfare of the tribal community.The Prime Minister said that the nation is taking a big pledge of securing the lives of the people from the tribal communities, resolution of freedom from Sickle Cell Anaemia and saving the lives of 2.5 lakh children and families that are affected by the disease. Recalling his personal experience with the tribal communities, the Prime Minister underlined the painful symptoms and genetic origin of Sickle Cell Anaemia.Launching an attack on previous governments PM Modi said that due to the indifference towards the tribal society, this was not an issue for the previous governments."Most of the people affected by Sickle Cell Anaemia were from the tribal society. Due to the indifference towards the tribal society, this was not an issue for the previous governments."The Prime Minister said no attention was paid towards the issue of Sickle Cell Anaemia for the past 70 years even though more than 50 per cent of Sickle Cell Anaemia cases in the world arise in India.He highlighted the indifference of the past governments towards the tribal community and stated that it was the present government that went on to find a solution for this.During the programme, the Prime Minister announced that the 500th birth anniversary of Rani Durgavati will be celebrated by the government of India at the national level. A film will be made on her life and a commemorative coin and postal stamp will be issued.Rani Durgavati is remembered as a brave, fearless and courageous warrior who fought for freedom against the Mughals.He expressed confidence that the blessings and inspiration of Rani Durgavati will enable Madhya Pradesh to soar to new heights of development.The Prime Minister said that the Adivasi community is not just an electoral number for the present government but its welfare was a priority.He informed that he has been putting in efforts in this direction way before he first became the Chief Minister of Gujarat where he and the present Governor of Madhya Pradesh, Shri Mangubhai C Patel would visit Adivasi communities and create awareness about Sickle Cell Anaemia.He also recalled starting various campaigns in the state as the Chief Minister of Gujarat. He informed about seeking help from a Nobel Prize-winning scientist during his visit to Japan as the Prime Minister of India.The Prime Minister said that this campaign to eliminate Sickle Cell Anaemia will become a key mission of the Amrit Kaal. He expressed the determination to free the tribal communities and the country from the menace of Sickle Cell Anaemia by 2047.ANI02 July 2023

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PM Modis landmark visit: Celebrating 25th anniversary of India-France partnership

New Delhi, July 2: Prime Minister Narendra Modi will be the Guest of Honour for the national day celebrations of France this year. Bastille Day, observed on July 14 every year, is France's National Day. The day is marked by a special military parade at the Champs Elysees in Paris.

PM Modi's landmark visit: Celebrating 25th anniversary of India-France partnership

On May 5, the Ministry of External Affairs (MEA) made an announcement stating that French President Emmanuel Macron extended an invitation to Prime Minister Modi. This visit holds the promise of enhancing the India-France Strategic Partnership by establishing ambitious objectives in areas such as strategic collaboration, cultural exchange, scientific advancements, academic pursuits, and economic cooperation.India and France share a common vision of peace and security, especially in Europe and the Indo-Pacific, upholding the objectives and principles of the United Nations Charter. The forthcoming visit is likely to see the launch of some common initiatives responding to the key challenges of the time, such as biodiversity loss, climate change, and the achievement of Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). It provides an opportunity for India and France to reaffirm their commitment to multilateralism, including in the context of India's G20 Presidency.India and France are celebrating the 25th anniversary of their Strategic Partnership this year. An Indian armed forces contingent will participate in the Bastille Day Parade alongside their French counterparts to mark this important milestone.India has so far signed more than 35 strategic partnerships. But, the strategic partnership India signed with France in January 1998 was India's first ever. A few months later, India conducted the Pokhran II nuclear tests. India carried out its nuclear tests within a few months. Not only did France refrain from imposing sanctions, but President Chirac himself sought to provide India with a respectable entry into the global nuclear framework.The Prime Ministerial visit may be useful for India in the context of the Ukraine war, where Indian and European perceptions differ. The strengthening of the strategic partnership with France may reassure other EU nations that despite occasional tactical differences, a friendly relationship with India continues to be a useful investment. France's lead within the European Union is likely to be more decisive than ever before. Since Brexit, France remains the only country in the European Union which is both a nuclear state and a Permanent Member of the Security Council of the United Nations.France hosts the fourth-largest Indian diaspora in Europe, following the United Kingdom, Italy, and Germany. Despite the prevailing difficulties, France has earnestly endeavoured to attract Indian students and professionals. The two nations have established a bilateral agreement focused on migration and mobility cooperation, with the objective of facilitating circular migration that enables individuals to enhance their skills abroad and subsequently return to contribute to their home country.Nonetheless, it's critical to focus on enhancing the scale of mutual trade and investment. The two-way commerce has been hovering around USD 10-12 billion during the last few years. India's trade with countries like Bangladesh, Thailand, and Vietnam exceeds in size when compared to its trade with France. It is incumbent upon India to explore ways and means to amplify its trade volume with France, a formidable European economy valued at USD 3 trillion.The forthcoming visit is poised to be a significant milestone for the Indian Navy, with substantial agreements on the horizon. There is a palpable sense of anticipation among national and international defence and security sectors, speculating the possible fruition of long-standing government-to-government (G2G) defence contracts. This potential breakthrough represents a promising leap forward in bilateral relations and a testament to persistent negotiations.The negotiations included the procurement of 26 Dassault Rafale-Maritime (M) fighters and at least three add-on Scorpene-class diesel-electric 'killer-hunter' conventional submarines or SSKs. They are to supplement six similar boats which were licence-built by Mazagon Dock Shipbuilders Limited (MDL) in Mumbai from 2006 onwards.The visit may also see India agreeing to France's involvement in the Navy's programme to build six nuclear-powered attack submarines or SSNs, via a technology transfer. That project is underway at the secretive Ship Building Centre in Visakhapatnam.Secondly, another anticipated highlight of PM Modi's visit is the prospective agreement on the anvil for MDL to undertake the license-build of three more Scorpene-class submarines. The Indian Navy's Project 75-India (P-75I) programme, a home-grown initiative to construct six SSKs in partnership with a foreign original equipment manufacturer, has been plagued by several delays over the past 16 years. However, this potential agreement signifies a reinvigoration of the program and promises to push forward India's defence ambitions.France has shown a keen interest in partnering with key Indian entities such as the Defence Research and Development Organisation, the Department of Atomic Energy, the Navy, and related organisations.Their collaboration would focus on locally constructing six SSNs, designed to augment and operationally assist the Navy's fleet of four indigenously designed and built Arihant-class nuclear-powered missile submarines (SSBNs), each weighing 7,000 tonnes. The latter submarines were constructed leveraging Russian know-how and technical support, underscoring the international collaboration that underpins India's naval advancements.In early 2023, France offered to jointly develop SSNs with India by transferring technology based on its Barracuda-class SSNs. The first of those, INS Suffren, was commissioned into the French Navy in mid-2022. They are designed by the Naval Group, which is also responsible for developing the Scorpene boats.The deal may be compensation for Naval Design following the cancellation of a similar deal with Australia. Australia 2021 cancelled a deal with Naval Design to supply the Royal Australian Navy with 12 conventional diesel-electric Attack-class submarines for over USD 60 billion.A new deal to acquire 26 Rafale Marine fighters for indigenously-built aircraft carrier INS Vikrant may be announced during the visit. India has already purchased 36 Rafale fighter jets from France. Air India recently announced a deal to purchase 250 planes from the French behemoth Airbus.Experts are hopeful that like PM Modi's successful US tour in which several landmark defence purchases were confirmed by the Pentagon, his Paris visit may, boost the long-deferred modernisation and operational capabilities of India's military via the G2G route.Prime Minister Modi's anticipated visit to France serves as a cornerstone in their strategic partnership. Celebrating the 25th anniversary of their alliance, it promises to reinforce bonds across various sectors, from strategic collaborations and cultural exchanges to economic cooperation.This visit is expected to usher significant defence contracts and amplify trade, creating a transformative roadmap for bilateral relations. The trip signifies a shared commitment to tackle global challenges and uplift multilateralism, marking a new era of shared growth and prosperity.The author of this opinion article is Dr Divya Rani, who is an assistant professor at BHU, Varanasi. She is doctorate in International Relations with specialisation in European Studies from SIS/JNU, New Delhi.ANI02 July 2023

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High Desert cancelled after season 1

Washington, July 2: The American series 'High Desert' will not be returning for a second season.

'High Desert' cancelled after season 1

According to Deadline, a US-based media outlet, Apple has axed the series, which launched on May 17 and ran through June 21.Taking to Instagram, actor Patricia Arquette posted a video on Saturday to share the news which she captioned, "It stinks.""A lot of you have asked about High Desert and if there was going to be a second season, we just found out that it won't be coming back. That's a sad bummer for all of us," she said.Arquette, who played Peggy, also thanked the writers, crew members and actors. "I loved Peggy and that punk rock world," she added. "You can't win 'em all and it sucks. I've got this cactus and we're going to hug it out."Arquette plays Peggy, an addict who decides to make a new start by becoming a private investigator after the death of her beloved mother with whom she lived in the small desert town of Yucca Valley, California, as per Deadline.It also starred Brad Garrett, Weruche Opia, Bernadette Peters and Rupert Friend with Christine Taylor, Matt Dillon and Eden Brolin among those recurring.High Desert was created and written by Nancy Fichman, Katie Ford and Jennifer Hoppe, who exec produce. Arquette also exec produces alongside Stiller, Nicky Weinstock and Jackie Cohn, Molly Madden and Tom Lassally and John Cameron. Roach, who also exec produces, will direct all eight episodes of the Apple Studios project with Michelle Graham as co-EP, reported Deadline.ANI02 July 2023

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Rajya Sabha session from July 20 to August 11

New Delhi, July 2: The Rajya Sabha will meet from July 20 to, August 11 for the upcoming monsoon session of Parliament, the Upper House secretariat said.

Rajya Sabha session from July 20 to August 11

"The President has summoned the Rajya Sabha to meet on Thursday, 20th July 2023 and to conclude on Friday, 11th August 2023," it said.Earlier on Saturday, Parliamentary Affairs Minister Pralhad Joshi announced that the monsoon session of Parliament will begin on July 20.The session is slated to continue till August 11, he said."Monsoon Session, 2023 of Parliament will commence from 20th July and continue till 11th August. Urge all parties to contribute towards productive discussions on Legislative Business and other items during the Monsoon Session," Joshi tweeted yesterday.He said that there will be a total of 17 sittings in this session lasting 23 days."I appeal to all parties to contribute constructively to the legislative and other business of Parliament during the session," the union minister said.Prime Minister Narendra Modi inaugurated the new Parliament building on May 28.The government is expected to have significant legislative agenda for the session.Opposition parties are also gearing up to take on the government on a host of issues.ANI02 July 2023

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1,000-Lb. Sisters star Tammy Slaton remembers husband Caleb, pens sweet note

Washington, July 2: '1,000-Lb. Sisters' star Tammy Slaton is remembering her husband Caleb Willingham after telling PEOPLE about his death at the age of 40.

'1,000-Lb. Sisters' star Tammy Slaton remembers husband Caleb, pens sweet note

She paid a touching tribute to Willingham on Instagram, sharing a collection of photos of the two in happier times.Slaton captioned the post "Rip sweet angel you will forever be missed and loved so much thank you Caleb for showing me real love and happiness."https//www.instagram.com/p/CuKLr86OIxq/In the photos, Slaton posed behind Willingham with her arms around his neck, while he held her hands in his. Willingham sat in a wheelchair, wearing a dark blue sweatshirt and glasses with a breathing tube visible around his nose. Slaton wore a matching blue camouflage print sweatshirt, a breathing tube, and her trademark glasses.As a decorated Christmas tree could be seen in the background, the photos appeared to have been taken during the Christmas season. Slaton also shared a photo of herself and her husband smiling at the camera after eating lunch together at a table clothed in a snowman.In a statement to PEOPLE, the reality star confirmed Willingham's death, writing, " I am devastated to share the news of my husband's passing. He was my best friend and I loved him dearly. When I met Caleb he became my guardian angel and now he really is watching over me. Our families appreciate everyone's sympathy and ask that you respect our privacy at this time."In 2022, Slaton and Willingham met at the Windsor Lane Rehabilitation Centre in Gibsonburg, Ohio. He proposed twice in October and November.The couple decided to marry at the rehab centre. Billy, their home care nurse and family friend, officiated the small celebration, which was attended by only 30 friends and family members.ANI02 July 2023

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Soon expert committee will submit draft, says Uttrakhand CM on Uniform Civil Code

New Delhi, July 2: As the debate grows over whether India needs a Uniform Civil Code (UCC), Uttarakhand Chief Minister Pushkar Singh Dhami on Sunday said that soon the UCC expert committee examining the subject will submit the draft.

Soon expert committee will submit draft, says Uttrakhand CM on Uniform Civil Code

"As per the promise made to the state's people, today on June 30, the committee formed to prepare the draft of the Uniform Civil Code has completed its work. Soon Uniform Civil Code will be implemented in Devbhoomi Uttarakhand. Jai Hind, Jai Uttarakhand!" he tweeted.The UCC calls for the formulation of one law for India, which would be applicable to all religious communities in matters such as marriage, divorce, inheritance, and adoption."It's been over a year since the UCC Committee has been functioning. They have talked to more than 2,35,000 people and listed their views. They have also talked to different organizations from various regions, cultural outfits, and other stakeholders. Many intellectuals in the society have also given their opinions. The UCC committee has complied with all the comments and opinions in the draft. The Committee informed us on June 30 that they had completed the draft. They will soon submit the final draft. After this, it will be put through for legal review and then we will move towards implementation", CM Dhami added further.Speaking to the media, CM Pushkar Singh Dhami said, "It's provision has been made in Article 44 of the Indian Constitution and we are not going to change someone's ongoing custom. The drafting committee has spoken to people across the country seeking suggestions from stakeholders and intellectuals over the past year."It would help end gender discrimination on religious grounds and strengthen the secular fabric of the nation. It will protect the vulnerable sections of society.Women have been denied via personal laws in the name of socio-cultural-religious traditions. Therefore UCC could bring all communities together to ensure women the right to a dignified life and control over their life.Further talking about his meeting with Defence Minister on developmental projects related to national security Dhami said, "Yesterday, I had a meeting with Defence Minister Rajnath Singh. Pithoragarh has a landing strip and for its extension, our cabinet decided to hand over this to the defence.""Just like this, Dharchula and Joshimath also have military helipads which are being operated by the military, but at times the state also needs them, so to seek permission I have words with the defence minister. I also thanked the Defence Minister for opening a CDS canteen and an Ex-Servicemen Contributory Health Scheme centre in Rudraprayag, which has more than 30,000 soldiers," Dhami added.Expansion of Dehradun's Jollygrant airport is also being done and for that 21-acre land is of NTRO's land is being used, so we decided to give land to NTRO at some other place.ANI03 July 2023

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Moushumi Chatterjee recalls shooting for Rimjhim Gire Saawan with Big B

Mumbai, July 2: Actor Moushumi Chatterjee recalled working with megastar Amitabh Bachchan in the film 'Manzil' and shooting for the song, 'Rimjhim Gire Saawan'.

Moushumi Chatterjee recalls shooting for 'Rimjhim Gire Saawan' with Big B

She said, "Shooting the iconic song 'Rimjhim Gire Saawan' with Amitabh Bachchan for the movie Manzil was an experience I'll never forget! During the shoot, if I ever fell a bit behind while dancing, Mr Bachchan would slow down to match my pace. We bravely faced the real rains in Mumbai while shooting this song""It was pouring relentlessly for three days, and waterproof liners were non-existent back then! So, my makeup would smudge with every rain-soaked shot, and the following laughter would echo on the set. The rain was so fierce, we couldn't even hear the music! They showed us something like a handkerchief, which meant the song started. They signalled 'cut', which meant stop. From sipping cutting chai at the hotel, to arriving at the location drenched in wet clothes, that journey holds a special place in my heart," she added.On the work front, she is known for working in films such as 'Bhola Bhala', 'Prem Bandhan', 'Ghar Parivar', 'Prateeksha', 'Udhaar Ki Zindagi'.She appeared as a celebrity guest on 'The Kapil Sharma Show'.ANI03 July 2023

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Tastiest, most delicious tea I ever had: Piyush Goyal turns emotional as he recalls visit to Pradhan Mantri Awas Yojana beneficiary

New Delhi, July 2: Union Minister Piyush Goyal turned emotional as he narrated an anecdote of him sipping he most delicious tea of his life at a two-room house of a beneficiary of Pradhan Mantri Awas Yojana (Gramin) at a tribal-dominated village in Rajasthan.

Tastiest, most delicious tea I ever had: Piyush Goyal turns emotional as he recalls visit to Pradhan Mantri Awas Yojana beneficiary

In an exclusive interview with ANI, the Union Minister opened up about his recent visit to the Kathwadi gram panchayat area, which, he said, is about an hour's drive from Jaipur.He informed further that as many as 19 lakh rural families in Rajasthan, which comes to about 1 crore people, had homes built free of cost under the Centre's flagship PMAY-G scheme.Recalling his visit to a family, which shifted to a pucca house from a tin shed that barely had enough space to accommodate a household of 11 members, including 8 girls and a divyang (differently abled) father, the Union Minister said, "I was walking around the village and visited an Adivasi (tribal) home. The lady met me there with her children and then her husband also came after some time. The lady is a labourer and her husband is a divyang, differently abled. The woman has 8 girls, the eldest of whom recently completed her MEd from scholarship funds, which the government sent directly to her bank account. She had a new PMAY home for which she didn't have to pay a penny.""They welcomed me into the house of two rooms, equipped with a toilet, and made me sit on a bed. I took off my shoes before going inside. As I entered the house, I saw an LPG (cooking) cylinder with a pot mounted on top. She was brewing tea for us. It was the tastiest and the most delicious tea I ever had in my life," the Union minister said in a voice choking with emotion.He said it was one of 144 families in that particular panchayat area to have free homes built under the Centre's rural housing scheme.Asserting that the basic needs of people in the country's remotest corners were being taken care of by the central government under the leadership of Prime Minister Narendra Modi, the Union Minister said about 4 crore homes are being built across the country under the Pradhan Mantri Awas Yojana.ANI03 July 2023

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Russian forces gain ground near eastern Ukrainian town of Svatove: Deputy Defence Minister Hanna Maliar

Kyiv [Ukraine], July 3: Ukraine's deputy defense minister on Sunday said Russian forces have gained some ground near the eastern Ukrainian town of Svatove, CNN reported.

Russian forces gain ground near eastern Ukrainian town of Svatove: Deputy Defence Minister Hanna Maliar

The defence official Hanna Maliar in a Telegram post said "Fierce fighting is taking place there. The enemy is attacking Bilohorivka and Serebrianka."She was referring to two smaller villages south of Svatove.The eastern town, which is located in the Luhansk region, has long been regarded as a key target for Ukrainian forces. It is situated along key Russian supply routes, so any eventual recapture of the town would have important strategic implications for Ukraine, as per CNN."Heavy fighting" continues along the entire eastern front line, with Russia attacking in several directions. The cities of Avdiivka, Marinka and Lyman are among them, Maliar said, echoing a report from the Ukrainian military Saturday.Maliar said that while Ukrainian fighters are moving forward along the southern flank in the Bakhmut area, having "partial success," Russia has moved two air assault regiments to the northern flank and the fighting continues.Meanwhile, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy has said he's afraid to lose bipartisan support from the United States, following what he called "dangerous messages coming from some Republicans", CNN reported.Zelenskyy in a news conference with Spanish media in Kyiv on Saturday, said "Mike Pence has visited us, and he supports Ukraine. First of all, as an American, and then as a Republican.""We have bipartisan support. However, there are different messages in their circles regarding support for Ukraine. There are messages coming from some Republicans, sometimes dangerous messages, that there may be less support," he said.ANI03 July 2023

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Light to moderate rain likely at several districts in TN in next 4 days: IMD

Chennai, July 2: The India Meteorological Department (IMD) on Sunday informed that Tamil Nadu will likely receive light to moderate rainfall in several districts in the next 4 days.

Light to moderate rain likely at several districts in TN in next 4 days: IMD

According to the IMD, a gyre zonal circulation prevails over the Southwest Bay of Bengal and also due to the variation in speed of the westerly wind Tamil Nadu will experience light to moderate rainfall at many places in the coming days."On July 3, Light to moderate rain with thunder and lightning at many places over Tamil Nadu, Puducherry and Karaikal. Heavy to very heavy rainfall at one or two places in Nilgiris and Coimbatore districts, Tirupur, Dindigul, Theni, Thenkasi, Tirunelveli, Kanyakumari, Tiruvallur, Chennai, Kanchipuram, Chengalpattu, Vellore, Ranippet, Tirupattur, Thiruvannamalai, Villupuram, Cuddalore and Puducherry districts", the IMD said in a statement.The statement further said that light to moderate rain with thunder and lightning at a few places over Tamil Nadu, Puducherry and Karaikal on July 4."On July 4, Nilgiris, Coimbatore and Theni districts will experience heavy to very heavy rain at one or two places and Tirupur, Dindigul, Virudhunagar, Tenkasi, Tirunelveli and Kanyakumari districts will receive heavy rainfall at one or two places", the statement added.Also, on July 5, light to moderate rain with thunder and lightning at a few places over Tamil Nadu, Puducherry and Karaikal. "Nilgiris and Coimbatore districts will experience heavy to very heavy rainfall and Tirupur, Dindigul, Theni and Tenkasi districts will experience heavy rainfall", the release stated."Light to moderate rain with thunder and lightning at a few places over Tamil Nadu, Puducherry, Karaikal. Nilgiris, Coimbatore, Tirupur, Theni and Dindigul districts received heavy rainfall at one or two places", the statement said.Meanwhile, the sky will remain mostly cloudy for the next 24 hours in Chennai and other suburbs, informed the IMD."A few parts of the city may experience moderate rain with thunder and lightning. Heavy rain is likely at a few places. The maximum temperature will be around 33 degree Celsius and the minimum temperature will be around 26-27 degree Celsius", the statement said.The statement further said that fishermen are advised not to go inside the sea for these days.ANI03 July 2023

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Doctors can expand their practice with a doctor loan on Bajaj Markets

BusinessWire India, Pune, July 3, a subsidiary of Bajaj Finserv, grants medical professionals access to a doctor loan of up to Rs 45 Lakhs.

Doctors can expand their practice with a doctor loan on Bajaj Markets

Doctors can use it to finance a range of professional and personal needs without any restrictions, such as- Investing in advanced medical equipment and patient management software- Expanding their practice or renovating their clinic- Getting qualified staff on board- Accessing required working capital for their practice- Financing child's education/marriage- Investing in assets or home improvement- Booking a family holiday or international conferences Apart from a competitive rate of interest starting from 14 per cent p.a., an offers unique benefits to doctors who work ceaselessly to serve people. These include- High loan amount- Eligibility criteria that are easy to meet- Minimal requirements of documents to be submitted- Quick processing of online loan application- Disbursal of funds in just a few hours post approval- Flexibility of repayment tenures going up to 84 months- Complete transparency without any hidden charges- Facility to part-prepay the loanDoctors can apply for a doctor loan in a few easy steps on the Bajaj Markets website or application. They can also access other credit and insurance solutions on the platform to add value to their lives.(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)ANI03 July 2023

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Assam down Town University (AdtU): Shaping the Future with Excellence in Education and Innovation

PNN, New Delhi, July 3 Assam down town University (AdtU) is attaining waves in the education sector with its unique selling propositions (USPs) that set it apart as a premier institution.

Assam down Town University (AdtU): Shaping the Future with Excellence in Education and Innovation

AdtU's state-of-the-art infrastructure, academic excellence, industry integration, global exposure, research and innovation, entrepreneurship and skill development, scholarships and financial assistance, social responsibility, student support services, and placement assistance have firmly established its reputation as a leader in higher education.One of the hallmarks of AdtU is its state-of-the-art infrastructure. Equipped with modern classrooms, laboratories, libraries, and research centres, the university offers students an ideal learning environment. The cutting-edge facilities provide the necessary tools for students to explore and excel in their respective fields.AdtU's commitment to academic excellence is evident in its diverse range of undergraduate, postgraduate, and doctoral programs. With a focus on industry-relevant curriculum, quality education, and experienced faculty members, AdtU ensures that students are equipped with the knowledge and skills necessary for success in professional career.To bridge the gap between academia and industry, AdtU emphasizes practical learning and industry integration. The university collaborates with renowned industries and organizations, offering students valuable opportunities for internships, industrial visits, and of exposures to guest lectures by industry experts. This enables students to gain real-world exposure and enhances their employability.AdtU understands the importance of global exposure in today's interconnected world. Through partnerships with international universities, the university facilitates student exchange programs, international internships, and opportunities for study abroad. Such experiences broaden students' perspectives and provide them with a multicultural environment that fosters personal and professional growth.Research and innovation thrive at AdtU, as the university provides a conducive environment for scholars and researchers. With a focus on interdisciplinary research, AdtU supports scholars with funding, infrastructure, and collaboration opportunities, encouraging them to push boundaries and make valuable contributions to their respective fields.In addition, AdtU fosters an entrepreneurial mindset among its students. Through workshops, seminars, and entrepreneurship development programs, the university nurtures their entrepreneurial skills, encouraging innovation and creating job creators. The introduction of down town Venture Labs further reinforces AdtU's commitment to fostering entrepreneurship.AdtU believes in making quality education accessible to all deserving students. The university offers scholarships and financial assistance schemes based on academic merit, talent, and need, promoting inclusivity and ensuring that no deserving student is left behind. Scholarship schemes for economically weaker sections (EWS) and other categories contribute to the university's mission of empowering students from diverse backgrounds.Driven by a strong sense of social responsibility, AdtU actively engages in initiatives promoting sustainable development, community service, and environmental awareness. Students are encouraged to participate in various social projects, enabling them to become responsible citizens who contribute positively to society.AdtU understands the importance of holistic student development and offers comprehensive student support services. From career counselling to mentorship programs and academic support, the university ensures that students receive the guidance and assistance they need to thrive academically and personally. The vibrant student community at AdtU provides a nurturing environment where students can grow and collaborate.Furthermore, AdtU's dedicated placement cell assists students in career planning, skill development, and placement opportunities. With a robust network of industry connections, the university has a proven track record of successful placements in reputed companies, empowering students to kick-start their careers with confidence.Assam down town University (AdtU) is proud of its unique identity and reputation as a premier educational institution. With its commitment to excellence in education, innovation, industry integration, and social responsibility, AdtU continues to shape the future by nurturing talented individuals who will make a positive impact in their respective fields and communities.(Disclaimer The above press release has been provided by PNN. ANI will not be responsible in any way for the content of the same)ANI03 July 2023

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Japan to provide academic scholarships for Afghan students for master, doctorate-level programs

Kabul, July 3: The Embassy of Japan in Afghanistan announced that it will provide scholarships to Afghan students in Japan at master and doctorate level programs, Afghanistan-based Khaama Press reported. The announcement of the Japanese Embassy in Kabul made the announcement amid the Taliban's restrictions on women and girls' education.

Japan to provide academic scholarships for Afghan students for master, doctorate-level programs

On July 2, the Japanese Embassy in Afghanistan in a tweet said that Tokyo will provide academic opportunities for Afghan students in Japan starting in 2024 at the master-level and doctorate-level programs. The Embassy announced that the selection process will soon begin in cooperation with the Aga Khan Foundation.Japanese Embassy in Afghanistan tweeted, "Embassy of Japan is pleased to announce scholarship (MA and Dr. course) to Afghan students who wish to explore academic opportunity in Japan from 2024. Embassy will start selection process in cooperation with the Aga Khan Foundation. Pls see attachment."Earlier, Taliban-led Acting Minister of Higher Education Nada Mohammad Nadim in a meeting with Japan's Ambassador to Afghanistan Okada Takashi called for increased cooperation of Tokyo for providing academic scholarships and learning opportunities to Afghan students, according to Khaama Press report.Last week, Taliban Governor for central Bamyan province Mullah Abdullah Sarhadi held a meeting with Okada Takashi and called for academic scholarship programs for Afghan students, Khaama Press reported.The Japanese scholarship scheme for Afghan students will start in 2024. Meanwhile, Taliban ban on girls above the sixth grade from attending schools continues to remain implemented since they came to power in 2021. International community has condemned Taliban's restriction on girls education.Earlier in June, graduates of a medical school in Afghanistan's Paktia University on their graduation day called on the Taliban to reopen schools and universities for girls immediately, Afghanistan-based TOLO News reported, adding that the graduates stressed that girls have the right to education and their time should not be wasted.Ahmadullah, a graduate student, said there were girls with them during this period. He further said that girls have been banned from universities after the Taliban seized power in August 2021, according to the TOLO News report.Mohammad Mustafa, a graduate student, said, "In a society, we need female and male doctors." Some of the family members of the graduate students who took part in the ceremony expressed hope that one day their daughters will get the graduation certificate along with the boys.Dawood, a Paktia resident, said, "We all want to reopen schools and universities for girls and for girls to also get their diplomas along with the boys." According to TOLO News report, Baraktullah Takal, a Paktia resident, said, "We call on higher education to allow girls to go to schools and universities because we need female doctors."ANI03 July 2023

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Cyble Revolutionizes Cybersecurity Collaboration with launch of its Global Partner Program Cyble Partner Network

BusinessWire India, Atlanta [US], July 3 Cyble, the leading AI-powered global cyber threat intelligence provider, is excited to announce the launch of the Cyble Partner Network (CPN).

Cyble Revolutionizes Cybersecurity Collaboration with launch of its Global Partner Program Cyble Partner Network

CPN aims to foster collaboration, expand market reach, and provide comprehensive cybersecurity solutions. By joining the network, businesses gain access to cutting-edge threat intelligence, enabling knowledge exchange, innovation, and empowerment to stay ahead in the cybersecurity landscape.CPN () comprises the following programs MSSP Program Gives Managed Security Service Providers access to Cyble's threat intelligence platform, enhancing their cybersecurity services. TAP Program Empowers partners to deliver comprehensive cybersecurity solutions by integrating their platforms with Cyble's threat intelligence and darkweb monitoring SaaS, Cyble Vision.Reseller Program Enhances businesses' product portfolio with cutting-edge threat intelligence solutions and provides comprehensive support and guidance from Cyble. Referral Program Offers businesses a lucrative opportunity to recommend Cyble's cybersecurity solutions, earning rewards with extensive marketing resources."CPN is a major milestone in our mission to revolutionize cybersecurity collaboration," said Beenu Arora, Co-founder and CEO of Cyble. "This network represents our commitment to empowering organizations with advanced tools and expertise to combat cyber threats." Dipesh Ranjan, Chief Partner Officer and SVP Global Growth, added, "Let's embrace collaboration and shared success on this transformative journey to save the govt and enterprises from Cyber threats. With CPN, we unlock new horizons of growth and redefine partnership.Welcome to CPN, a new era of collaboration." As a Cyble Partner, companies gain exclusive advantages, including competitive pricing, comprehensive technical support, marketing assistance, flexible licensing, and access to a dedicated partner portal. These offerings empower partners to drive growth, enhance customer satisfaction, and achieve success in the evolving cybersecurity landscape.(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)ANI03 July 2023

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Lindsay Lohan celebrates 37th bday with selfie

Los Angeles, July 3: Actress Lindsay Lohan, who is expecting her first baby with husband Bader Shammas, shared a new picture of herself as she turned 37.

Lindsay Lohan celebrates 37th b'day with selfie

Taking to Instagram, the 'Mean Girls' actress shared a new close-up pic of herself. Donning a white T-shirt, Lindsay wore her hair down and made a kissing face at the camera while leaning her head to the side.Thank you so much for all of the wonderful Birthday Wishes! she wrote. Feeling blessed!Lindsay's younger brother Dakota Lohan also paid tribute to his sister on her birthday with a photo of them twinning in all-black at Saint Laurent's show for Paris Fashion Week in 2018.Love you beyond words. Happy birthday and I'll see you in 2 weeks @lindsaylohan, he wrote below the photo on his Instagram Story, as per People.Dakota, 27, also commented on his sibling's Instagram post, writing Maaaa best friend. Love you.Lindsay also shared the well-wishes she received from others including Christian Siriano and her little sister, Aliana.IANS03 July 2023

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Changes in body weight perception may not help tackle obesity

London, July 3: The shifting trends in body weight perception, where fewer people now perceive themselves as overweight, could reduce the effectiveness of public health interventions aimed at tackling obesity, finds a study.

Changes in body weight perception may not help tackle obesity

The study involving more than 745,000 adolescents from 41 countries across Europe and North America identified an increase in the amount of teenagers who underestimate their body weight, making them feel it unnecessary to lose excess weight and lead a healthy life.The findings, published in the journal Child and Adolescent Obesity, also demonstrated a noticeable decrease in those who overestimate their weight.During this impressionable age, body weight perception may influence a young person's lifestyle choices, such as the amount and types of food they eat and their exercise habits, said lead author Anouk Geraets, from the Department of Social Sciences, at the University of Luxembourg.So it's concerning that we're seeing a trend where fewer adolescents perceive themselves as being overweight -- as this could undermine ongoing efforts to tackle increasing levels of obesity in this age group. Young people who underestimate their weight and therefore do not consider themselves to be overweight may not feel they need to lose excess weight and, as a result, they may make unhealthy lifestyle choices, Geraets said.A person's perception of their body weight may not accurately reflect their actual weight. A discrepancy in body weight perception may either be an underestimation or an overestimation .In the study, the researchers found underestimation of weight status increased, and overestimation of weight status decreased over time among both sexes, with stronger trends for girls.Correct weight perception increased over time among girls, while it decreased among boys.IANS03 July 2023

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UP: Moradabad chilli farmers incur heavy losses as crops get damaged due to heavy rains

Moradabad, July 3: Huge quantities of chillies were destroyed due to heavy rains resulting in heavy losses for Moradabad chilli farmers.

UP: Moradabad chilli farmers incur heavy losses as crops get damaged due to heavy rains

"After taking a loan, I sowed chilli crops in my field and watered them timely. I also applied sprayed medicines so that the crop do not get destroyed. I was hoping for good yield and profit, however, heavy rains have damaged the crops, and my hope of earning profit is diminished," said a farmer.Chillies are cultivated in Moradabad on a large scale, and around 100 hectares of land grow chillies. It is exported to many states including Delhi NCR, Uttarakhand and Uttar Pradesh.Farmers earn good profits by selling chillies. This year the chilli harvest was good and farmers had expected good profits, however, heavy rains damaged the crops.Earlier the price of chilli was Rs 5 kg, now it has increased from Rs 30 to Rs 50. Due to the incessant heat and rains, the chilli crops were damaged. The farmers are facing huge losses.Farmers sowed chillies after taking a loan. But this time their entire crop has been damaged due to the heavy rains along with the scorching heat. Farmers are now mulling over destroying the chilli crop and sowing paddy.ANI03 July 2023

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South Africa: Gauteng launches registration for number plate manufacturers

Gauteng MEC for Transport and Logistics, Kedibone Diale-Tlabela, has officially launched the registration process for manufacturers of vehicle number plates.

The registration process is a crucial component in the Gauteng Provincial Government's plan to launch a secured new number system to combat crime, corruption, vandalism, and lawlessness in the province.

We understand the importance of ensuring that manufacturers and embossers of number plates operate within the bounds of the law. Over the years, we have witnessed numerous challenges arising from non-compliant number plates, such as compromised safety, an increase in vehicle-related crime, and a lack of accountability from manufacturers, Diale-Tlabela said on Monday.

The launch intends to respond to the call made by the Premier of Gauteng when he pronounced the elevated priority of the Growing Gauteng Together 2030.

During his State-of-the-Province address in February 2023, Premier Panyaza Lesufi announced that the province will be introducing new number plates with tightened security features, which will make it difficult for criminals to get away with acts of criminality.

Section 5 of the National Road Traffic Act, strictly prohibits manufacturers from engaging in the manufacturing, selling, or distribution of number plates without proper registration.

The MEC said that the department is taking a proactive stance in securing the entire value chain, from manufacturing to distribution, ensuring that motor vehicle owners can have confidence in the legitimacy and quality of their number plates.

The registration process requires manufacturers to submit their applications for scrutiny to guarantee accuracy and compliance. Compliance inspectors will diligently inspect the production sites of embossers to ensure adherence to regulations.

Once an application is approved, manufacturers will be required to sign a Service Level Agreement with the Gauteng Department of Roads and Transport and make the necessary payments.

Diale-Tlabela said it is important that the number plate manufacturing value chain encourage the involvement of new entrants, women, youth and persons living with disabilities into the industry.

By promoting inclusivity and diversity, we can create opportunities for underrepresented groups and foster economic growth, the MEC said.

This will also equip individuals with the necessary skills and provide them with the knowledge and resources to establish their own small, medium, and micro-sized enterprises (SMMEs).  SAnews.gov.za

This story has been published on: 2023-07-03. To contact the author, please use the contact details within the article.
According to Kelly Degnan, the US Ambassador to Georgia, the resumption of direct flights to Russia raises concerns since it not only facilitates more Russians visiting Georgia but also enables them to use Georgia as a gateway to further reach into Europe and the US.Kelly Degnan has highlighted that virtually every action taken has been directed towards exerting pressure on Russia in order to halt its aggressive warfare."The direct flights are a cause for concern because they allow not only more Russians to come to Georgia, but also to use Georgia as a gateway to further travel to Europe. Europe has decided to close its doors to them as part of the pressure on Russia, utilizing it as one of the mechanisms to end this war. In this scenario, the flights will facilitate the departure of the Russian population to Europe. In fact, all the measures taken are aimed at pressuring Russia to cease the war of aggression, which is precisely what the sanctions and agreed border controls seek to achieve. That is why the resumption of flights is so worrisome," stated Kelly Degnan.The President of Georgia Salome Zourabichvili expressed her profound disappointment regarding the failure to obtain EU candidacy status. However, she also acknowledged that it served as a warning and understood the underlying reasons for the decision.According to the president, "the European Union has come to the realization that Russia is toying with Georgia, thanks to the recent actions taken by Russia in relation to the country.""Now that there is an awareness that Russia is playing a game since the war with Ukraine started, this whole period is wrong in every aspect. All of its steps are wrong. In this case, what started with us-the flights, the visa-free regime, all the steps-made the European Union realize that Russia is playing with Georgia.Maybe our government didn't understand, but the European Union understood well. Here is a 'soft power' game with Georgia, and they don't want to give such a victory in their hands at a time when Ukraine is winning on its front. Therefore, I think there is a real chance, but we also have to give something in our hands.It depends on the government and not only. There are people, civil society, the president, political parties-we all have something to say in order to convince the European Union to the end that this will be the right decision.We know very well that these recommendations or conditions will not go anywhere. This is actually what we need to get this country out of the Soviet mentality and structures once and for all. They tell us that we have to do it, but we have to do it for ourselves, we need it," Zourabichvili said.
De Niro, who welcomed his 7th child in May, loses grandson

New York, July 3: Hollywood icon Robert De Niro's 18-year-old grandson Leandro was found dead on Sunday afternoon with a white powdery substance on a plate near his body, DailyMail.com has revealed.

De Niro, who welcomed his 7th child in May, loses grandson

Leandro was the son of De Niro's adopted daughter, the actress, filmmaker and practitioner of Muay Thai Drena, 51, and her former boyfriend, artist Carlos Rodriguez.On Sunday, Drena announced his death on Instagram, saying I wish that love alone could have saved you. Drena is the daughter of Diahnne Abbott, whom De Niro, now 79 and the father of seven, married in 1976.Her son was found dead in a $950,000, one-bedroom apartment in the Cipriani Club Residences on Wall Street, according to DailyMail.com.Leandro's father, Carlos, said in a post Words aren't enough to express the joy he gave us or the loss we now endure with our families and friends. He is God's child now. On this full moon his spirit luminates what could not be seen in the dark.In her post, quoted by DailyMail.com, Drena began by saying My beautiful sweet angel. I have loved you beyond words or description from the moment I felt you in my belly.You have been my joy, my heart and all that was ever pure and real in my life. I wish I was with you right now. I wish I was with you.IANS04 July 2023

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Grandmother of French teen shot dead by police officer pleads with rioters to stop the violence

The grandmother of a French teenager shot dead by police during a traffic stop has urged rioters to stop after five nights of unrest
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In a recent article published in The Lancet, researchers used antibody testing to predict the risk of severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2) infection in immunocompromised people.

Study: Predicting COVID-19 infection risk in people who are immunocompromised by antibody testing. Image Credit: tommaso79/Shutterstock.com

Background

Like other disease groups, blood cancer patients mount highly heterogeneous immune responses to coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) vaccination, which raises the risk of severe illness.

Yet, studies have not defined a direct association between antibody titers post-vaccination and SARS-CoV-2 infection risk. When researchers identify a laboratory correlate of increased SARS-CoV-2 infection risk, clinicians and policymakers could target specific COVID-19 treatments toward people at the highest risk.

About the study

In the present study, researchers enrolled 592 participants with malignant lymphoma, a type of blood cancer, between March 11, 2021, and September 9, 2022, for longitudinal peripheral blood sampling before and post-COVID-19 vaccination from nine hospitals in England. They also collected each participant's demographic and clinical data.

The researchers assessed antibody and cellular responses to the COVID-19 vaccines. To this end, first, they sampled the peripheral blood of all participants at median three, five, and six weeks after two-, three-, and four doses of vaccine. Next, they quantified their anti-SARS-CoV-2 spike (S) immunoglobulin G (IgGs).

They also assessed pseudovirus neutralization and T-cell interferon-gamma (IFN) response to S peptides of the ancestral SARS-CoV-2 Wuhan strain. Further, they examined the association between COVID-19-related hospital admission and antibody and cellular responses.

The team evaluated the risk factors associated with breakthrough SARS-CoV-2 infection. They conducted a multivariable logistic regression analysis, which they repeated to assess whether these risks changed with the number of vaccine doses accounting for the time of the breakthrough infection.

Furthermore, the team performed receiver operating curve analyses to establish the optimal antibody threshold that best discriminated between participants with and without breakthrough infection.

Finally, the researchers used questionnaires to determine the social behavior of participants social behavior before the breakthrough infection.

Results

In total, 524 (89%) participants met the eligibility criteria for analysis, of which only 75%, i.e., 396 of 524 participants, responded to a follow-up questionnaire that helped the researchers measure COVID-19 cases and their preceding social behaviors. Of these 396 people, 334, 315, and 266 had received two, three, and four vaccine doses, respectively.

Plasma was available for analysis in 273 (82%) of 334 participants after the second vaccine dose, 237 (75%) of 315 participants after the third vaccine dose, and 177 (67%) of 266 participants after the fourth vaccine dose at the time of data cutoff.

Among 334 two vaccine dose recipients, 20 developed a breakthrough infection, i.e., a SARS-CoV-2 infection two weeks or more after vaccination confirmed by a rapid antigen test or reverse transcription-polymerase chain reaction (RT-PCR).

Other 40 and 36 individuals, 13%, and 14% of 315 and 266 three and four dose recipients also developed a breakthrough infection. The median interval between the second, third, and fourth vaccine doses and breakthrough infections was 22.2, 12.5, and 11 weeks, respectively.

The dominant infecting variant for breakthrough infection after the second vaccine dose were the Alpha and Delta strains, B.1.1.7 and B.1.617.2; Omicron sublineages B.1.1.529, BA.1\BA.2 caused breakthrough infections after the third and fourth vaccine doses, which have increased transmissibility, possibly due to a shorter incubation period.

Despite three or four vaccine doses, 12 of 96 participants sought hospital admission after breakthrough infections. Five percent with breakthrough infections also needed mechanical oxygen supplementation, but none sought admission to the intensive care unit, and none died due to COVID-19. On average, an inpatient stay in the hospital lasted two days.

Even after three and four vaccine doses, 13% of participants with breakthrough infections sought hospital admission. Five of nine participants under treatment in the hospital did not exhibit T-cell responses versus 16% of 45 participants who were not, highlighting the significance of risk stratification by cellular testing.

Per the current understanding of antibody affinity maturation, increased antibody avidity over time with repeated vaccinations facilitates the generation of higher-quality antibodies.

The optimal antibody titer predicting breakthrough and no breakthrough infection is 20-fold lower after four versus three vaccine doses, which means that lower antibody titers are needed to confer protection against breakthrough infection with increasing vaccine doses.

The authors noted no marked variations across the type of contact and duration with SARS-CoV-2-infected people or COVID-19 mitigation measures between participants with and without breakthrough infection.

Likewise, their anti-spike IgG levels were not markedly different after two vaccine doses with a geomean of 804 binding antibody units (BAU)/mL vs. 381 BAU/mL.

However, anti-spike IgG levels changed for participants who had breakthrough infection more than those who did not after three and four vaccine doses (50.2 BAU/mL vs. 141 BAU/mL and 30.9 BAU/ mL vs. 305.7 BAU/mL).

Furthermore, there were no differences in cellular responses between participants with and without breakthrough infections. Irrespective of the time of breakthrough infection, cancer treatment, more vaccine doses, anti-S IgG levels, and pseudoneutralisation antibody titers reduced the SARS-CoV-2 infection risk.

The factors associated with breakthrough infection after the third and fourth doses of vaccines were anti-S IgG levels, with the odds ratio (ORs) after the third and fourth doses of 1.59 and 2.26, and 95% CI, respectively.

Likewise, pseudo-neutralization titers after the third and fourth doses had ORs of 241 and 377, respectively. Accordingly, after three and four vaccine doses, the breakthrough infection risk was 16 and 2.3 times less for every 10-fold higher anti-S IgG titers.

The antibody cutoff values post-three and four vaccine doses were 820 and 41 BAU/mL, with AUC of 0.61 and 0.70 and sensitivity of 46.6% and 73.5%, respectively.

After four vaccine doses, anti-S IgG levels of more than 41 BAU/mL lowered the risk of a breakthrough infection by 13.1-fold. However, anti-S IgG levels of more than 820 BAU/mL after receipt of three vaccine doses reduced this risk by 8.9-fold, as assessed using thresholds in the multivariable analysis.

Among hospital-admitted patients, anti-S IgG levels were lower than those who did not require hospital admission after breakthrough infection, with a geomean of 55 BAU/mL vs. 589 BAU/mL.

Furthermore, a higher proportion of hospitalized patients had undetectable antibodies and cellular response versus those who did not [44% vs. 4%].

Conclusions

According to the authors, this study is the first to establish a relationship between antibody and T-cell responses and clinical manifestations of COVID-19 in immunocompromised people.

It established that finding a clinically relevant correlate of SARS-CoV-2 infection risk is possible without variant analysis. The researchers did not assess mucosal antibody responses correlated to protection against SARS-CoV-2 infection.

Moreover, they showed that the defined sensitivity and specificity of the antibody thresholds were relatively low. However, these thresholds need validation in different diseased populations as they might vary depending on the circulating viral variant and with successive vaccinations. Since the risk of breakthrough infection decreases with increasing antibody levels, a range of thresholds might serve as an alternative to specific antibody threshold cutoffs.

Nevertheless, the antibody thresholds provided in this study are informative to guide the use of anti-S IgG levels for COVID-19 risk assessment in immunocompromised people and for identifying people at the most risk.

In this study, the rates of breakthrough infections after two, three, and four vaccine doses in lymphoma patients were 6%, 13%, and 14%, respectively.

Social mixing shielded people from the worry of developing breakthrough infections as they experienced more care. Accordingly, participants who reported they were worried about COVID-19 experienced markedly fewer breakthrough infections than those who were not (61\241 vs. 35\93).

The researchers hypothesized that less SARS-CoV-2 exposure during the lockdown in England and varying infectivity of the circulating variants lowered the infection rate after two vaccine doses.

Overall, the study data favored the need to promote the uptake of booster vaccination, especially among immunocompromised people, such as those with lymphoid malignancies.

The researchers also advocated for the standardization and beginning of routine antibody testing in these patients to enable distinguishing individuals and focus efforts to shield the most susceptible groups.
Thought Leaders Carina Thurgood CEO of The Maddi Foundation The Maddi Foundation

News Medical spoke to the CEO and founder of the Maddi Foundation at the Charles River Gene and Cell Therapy Summit to gain a patient perspective on the impact gene therapy research can have. Maddi Thurgood is the only person in the UK diagnosed with Spastic paraplegia 15 (SPG-15) and is one of 100 worldwide.

Maddi's mum, Carina Thurgood, continues pushing to raise awareness of SPG-15 to advance research and development of a Gene Therapy for this rare disease. Thrown into the deep end of the world of rare diseases, cell and gene therapy research, and fundraising, Carina has defied all odds in the search for a therapy for her daughter.

What is SPG-15?

Maddi suffers from a rare disease known as autosomal recessive spastic paraplegia type 15 (SPG-15), a complex and ultra-rare form of spastic paraplegia. The condition is often characterized by childhood/adulthood onset of progressive lower limb spasticity, often associated with mild intellectual disability, cerebellar ataxia, peripheral neuropathology, and retinal degeneration.

SPG-15 is a recessive disease passed down from both parents to their children. Thus each parent carries a variant in one copy of the ZFYVE26 gene. At the molecular level, SPG-15 is caused by the loss of function mutations in the recessive gene. These mutations encode the protein spasitizin, which regulates endosome and autophagosome reformation.

Spasitizin interacts with the protein spatacsin and a complex containing AP5Z1, all of which are vital in the function of endosomes and lysosome homeostasis. Mouse models have shown that mutations in the ZFYVE26 gene lead to an accumulation of vesicle-like structures, which leads to the degeneration of nerves and causes typical symptoms of neurodegenerative diseases

Symptomatic and rehabilitative treatments are the only treatment pathways available for patients at this minute in time. In the hopes of changing this for her daughter, Carina started the Maddi Foundation to raise funds to support research trying to tackle SPG-15 at the source, the gene.

Please introduce yourself, tell us about your career background, and provide insight into what led you to be here today at the gene and cell therapy summit?

I am Carina Thurgood, the founder and CEO of the Maddi Foundation charity.

However, my background started very differently. Originally, I was a commercial florist in London, where I would travel to various big hotels in and around London and do all the grand displays there. So, I have no scientific or medical background whatsoever.

The reason I'm here today at the gene and cell summit is that my teenage daughter, Maddi, developed an ultra-rare illness when she was 15. Because it's so rare, with her being the only one with the disease in the UK, it was up to me as a mum to try and find someone to help her.

Since Maddi was diagnosed, I have worked with scientists to try and find her treatment. Today's aim is to try and spread awareness for her ultra-rare disease, known as SPG-15, in the hope that someone here can help us fight for my daughter.

You are the founder and CEO of the Maddi Foundation. Please tell us more about the Maddi Foundation, its aims, and why it was founded?

The Maddi Foundation was founded in 2017. Before then, I had connected with a gene therapy specialist here in the UK, where I was looking for treatment for my daughter. This is where I realized the imminent need for funding to allow this research to take place.

Despite our fight, the disease is so rare that no NHS or government funding could be available for someone like my daughter to find a treatment. In turn, I had to look in a different direction.

So, I began raising funds to facilitate research into the disease, and while raising funds, I thought, "Well, I might as well start a foundation." And that's where the Maddi Foundation came in.

Please discuss Maddi's journey with SPG-15, her symptoms, and how this has impacted her and her family's life?

Before Maddi was diagnosed at 14, she would ice skate and live like a normal active child. Little did we know that her future was about to change massively. At 14, I noticed Maddi walking with a slight limp; I just thought she had developed a 'teenage swagger'.

However, she started falling and tripping up often, so I took her to the GP who had no answer about why this was happening. Maddi's diagnosis journey began at Great Ormond Street in London, where she had an MRI that revealed signs of a genetic disease.

After a long, emotional process, we discovered that Maddi had an ultra-rare genetic mutation, SPG-15.

We were told about the symptoms, which include paraplegia, quadriplegia, and juvenile Parkinson's disease. We were honestly just heartbroken and confused. What was even more heartbreaking was being sat down and told that there was no treatment, only symptom management.

The impact is huge. Imagine being told you have a rare disease that will lead to life-limiting symptoms, and nothing can be done about it. From a mum's point of view, you just feel helpless.

This is why I started my pursuit of finding a cure for Maddi. I quit my job and started doing my own research. I spent my days reading papers and medical journals whilst reaching out to copious amounts of researchers across the globe. We finally connected with Professor Azzouz at the University of Sheffield, who agreed to aid us in our fight for Maddi.

Funded solely by our fundraising efforts, Professor Azzouz now leads the gene therapy research aiming to develop a therapy for SPG-15. However, more funding is needed to push research to the next stages.

Maddi speaking on ITV interview about her journey with SPG15 -Hereditary Spastic Paraplegia 15 Play

What is gene therapy, and how important is it in potentially preventing or treating neurodegenerative diseases like spastic paraplegia type 15 (SPG15)?

SPG-15 is a recessive genetic disease, so it's ultra rare. As such, there is no treatment for SPG-15. Thus, the pathway to go down was to consider the use of gene therapy or gene editing as a potential way to 'fix' the gene causing the issue.

Regarding SPG-15, gene therapy is the only treatment route possible due to its rare nature. The two routes currently being considered by our research team are to replace the gene, which is our ideal, or to alter parts of the gene itself.

Gene therapy is so important to us at the Maddi Foundation. I'm sure it is also so important for other families and individuals seeking treatments for ultra-rare genetic diseases, as it provides hope for a future where these diseases could be cured.

What's the Difference Between Gene Therapy, Cell Therapy, and Gene Editing? Play

How important is research to the Foundation, and what research projects are currently being supported by grants from the Maddi Foundation?

Research is so, so important to the Maddi Foundation because where the condition is so rare, there isn't a great deal out there. So, we must encourage researchers to think, "Oh, we might look at that." So that is what we're doing.

I reached out to many institutions; I tried to find someone who might be interested in us and SPG-15, who would spend a little time looking and researching possible treatment routes for Maddi.

As I mentioned before, facilitated by our funding at the Foundation, we were able to support gene therapy research based at Sheffield University. Where the Maddi Foundation is very small, as a small charity, there are no costs that go out of the box, so all the money that comes into our charity goes straight to the research at Sheffield.

In Sheffield, the research team led by Professor Mimoun Azzouz has aimed to evaluate whether viral vectors effectively deliver genes to brain cells. The ultimate hope from this research is that bigger grants may be given to further the research to later stages, moving towards finding a cure.

The Gene and Cell Therapy Summit aims to connect fellow leaders shaping cell and gene therapy development. What importance do events like today's summit hold for the Maddi Foundation?

These events are so important to the Maddi Foundation. It allows experts to hear our story; hopefully, someone listening will offer a helping hand or know someone who can help.

These events also help us raise awareness of a condition that most people reading this won't have heard of.

Essentially, I hope today that everyone attending, when they watch our presentation, recognizes that there are very rare diseases out there and hears the struggles a family faces. We hope someone can reach out to specialists to help us.

If we don't do that, we don't get any help. And I hope today there may be someone that would like to come and talk to us and say, "Maybe we can give you a little bit of help." If anything, though, it spreads awareness and allows Maddi's story to be shared; all we can do is try.

One of the main objectives set out for today is to allow leading experts and executives in the cell and gene therapy space to navigate and discuss the biggest critical challenges they face. What challenges are often faced in research targeting SPG15?

So, the most significant challenge we face is gaining interest in our disease because it's ultra-rare. We understand there is not really any money to be made, so pharmaceutical companies won't want to come on board because there's not a huge number of patients out there.

A study undertaken by Boston Childrens Hospital in America launched an international registry for the natural history of SPG-11 and SPG-15 patients, with 33 cases recorded globally.

So that is a major challenge. Additionally, our gene alone is a challenge because it's quite a large gene, so it's not as easy to adapt it to the traditional gene therapy vector often used in research.

Another major challenge for us is gaining funding because we have had to publicly fundraise to do this. We can't seem to acquire funding because there is not enough interest out there.

How do you foresee the future of the gene and cell therapy landscape changing over the next decade? What impacts may these changes have on people with SPG15?

I envisage that each year more and more and more technology is evolving, and I see the field advancing. So, I do see a future of amazing gene and cell therapy or possibly other types of treatments aimed at genes and cells targeting rare diseases.

From a personal perspective, when you are in a situation yourself, I have a daughter who's not very well, for us these advancements need to come soon, most likely it's not going to be soon enough to possibly save a lot of her.

So that for us, that is obviously a huge challenge. That's why I am here today. If we could push research faster and then be able to do something that would be great. But obviously each year for each patient with SPG-15, they're deteriorating, and those are years we won't get it back.

We really hope that advancements can take place fast enough to make a difference to Maddi.

Image Credit: LeighPrather/Shutterstock.com

How important is donating and generosity in funding research and treatment efforts to stop the progression and hopefully cure rare diseases like SPG15? How can people on all levels (from companies to individuals reading this) get involved and donate to help the Maddi Foundation?

It's really, really, important to help, donate, or fundraise for a very rare disease like SPG-15. It's extremely challenging for a family to do it all on our own. Any help we can get from others means the world to us.

The more funding, we receive, the more research can be facilitated, and we could get a lot closer to finding a treatment or cure.

We would greatly appreciate it if people would come on board with us and join us on this journey. We urge people to keep in mind that if they had to put themselves in our situation, that it was their child that was living with an extremely rare, life-limiting disease, they would appreciate the support from others.

We have had many people fundraising to help us, and we've had individuals that will go out and just do what they can. Companies can come on board and fundraise, too by running charity balls or fundraising events. Ideally, we would like as many people as possible to donate or even offer to run an event. That would be so greatly appreciated.

Overall, our aim is to share our story and raise awareness, and if people can come along and say, "Hey, we'll organize this event, we do that." All that money is accumulated goes towards our research, and we can get to our goal quicker and help save Maddi.

What's next for you and the Maddi Project? Are you involved in any exciting upcoming projects, research, or events?

At the moment we are waiting for our proof of concept for our gene therapy from the research group in Sheffield. That is really important. We know when we get to that stage, it's then stepping up what we do, as well to go to the next level.

Regarding events, we are constantly trying to organize various events. We are trying to organize our third charity ball, which will be the first post-pandemic. We are constantly aiming to raise awareness and increase funding efforts, which is what we will continue to do this year.

Please visit the Maddi Foundation website to keep updated on our latest events.

Where can readers find more information?

About Carina Thurgood

I am proud to be Maddis mum, and I set up The Maddi Foundation after Maddi was diagnosed with SPG15. There is no other charity funding research to cure Spastic Paraplegia Gene 15. I realized our only hope was to start one to raise the profile and awareness of this rare disease. I gave up working in the commercial florist industry to set up The Maddi Foundation with my other daughter Alexandra.
A UCLA-led team has received $925,000 as part of a new grant from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) to conduct four surveillance projects tracking outbreaks of mpox--formerly known as monkeypoxacross the U.S.

The effort is led by Dr. David Talan, a professor of emergency medicine and infectious diseases in the UCLA Department of Emergency Medicine at the David Geffen School of Medicine at UCLA.

Summer 2022 saw an outbreak of the disease that infected people in several countries across the globe. That outbreak receded by the following fall after widespread public attention and vaccination of high-risk individuals, prompting the World Health Organization on May 11, 2023 to declare an end to mpox as a global health emergency.

But a recent outbreak among 20 people in Chicago, including some vaccine breakthrough cases, and increased cases in other countries, has raised concerns among public health officials about a resurgence of mpox in the U.S. On June 23, for instance, the Los Angeles County Department of Public Health announced six new mpox cases in the previous week, up from an average of fewer than one case over the previous four months.

The surveillance project is called CRASHED (Cause of RASHes in Emergency Department). Talan, an attending emergency physician at Ronald Reagan UCLA Medical Center, since 1995 has directed EMERGEncy ID NET, a CDC-supported network for the study of emerging infections.

Our approach is to base mpox surveillance on any patient presenting with a compatible rash. Mpox has been labeled a sexually transmitted infection when in fact it can spread by any skin-to-skin contact. Our concern is that mpox cases may have only been suspected among the previously identified high-risk group, who are men who have sex with men, while infection in others such as women, children, and the homeless, may have been missed. Vulnerable people tend to use emergency departments, where we hope to determine if this infection is resurgent and broader-reaching or remains rare." Dr. David Talan, professor of emergency medicine and infectious diseases in the UCLA Department of Emergency Medicine at the David Geffen School of Medicine at UCLA

The CRASHED surveillance project will be run in 13 geographically-diverse emergency departments at academic centers across the U.S. These include Ronald Reagan-UCLA Medical Center, Cedars-Sinai Medical Center, and Olive View-UCLA Medical Center in California; Baystate Medical Center in Massachusetts; Hennepin County in Minnesota; Johns Hopkins University in Maryland, Temple University in Pennsylvania; Valleywise Health in Arizona; Oregon Health Sciences University; University of Iowa; University of New Mexico Health Sciences; University of Mississippi; and University Health-Kansas City in Missouri.

The research is being conducted in collaboration with Omai Garner, associate clinical professor and section chief of clinical microbiology in the UCLA Department of Pathology and Lab Medicine. Dr. William Mower, professor of emergency medicine at the Geffen School, will direct the Data Coordinating Center at UCLA.

Additional funding was also awarded for three surveillance projects, conducted through EMERGEncy ID NET. They are:

A study on past exposure to mpox of men in Los Angeles and Chicago who have sex with men, co-led by Pamina Gorbach, professor of medicine in the division of infectious diseases at the David Geffen School of Medicine at UCLA and of epidemiology at the UCLA Fielding School of Public Health; Anne Rimoin, professor of epidemiology, Gordon-Levin Endowed Chair in Infectious Diseases and Public Health, and director of the Center for Global and Immigrant Health at the Fielding School; and Steven Shoptaw, professor of family medicine and of psychiatry and biobehavioral sciences at the Geffen School,

Research on men who have sex with men who had reported engaging in exchange sex in the prior year and are seeking care at sexual health clinics and who may have contracted mpox, led by Gorbach and Dr. Robert Bolan, medical director of research and education health services at the Los Angeles LGBT Center, and
The government has decided to call off the strategic disinvestment of helicopter services providing company Pawan Hans as the successful bidding consortium Star9 Mobility Pvt Ltd was disqualified amid pending legal cases, according to a statement by the Department of Investment and Public Asset Management (DIPAM) on Monday. Pawan Hans is a 51:49 joint venture of the government and ONGC.

Government has decided that successful bidding consortium M/s Star 9 Mobility Pvt Ltd is disqualified from the process of strategic disinvestment of Pawan Hans Ltd in terms of provisions of PIM and RFP. Further, the current EoI (expression of interest) process for strategic disinvestment stands annulled," DIPAM said in the statement.

In April 2022, the central government had approved the sale of its stake in Pawan Hans Ltd along with its management control to Star9 Mobility Pvt Ltd for an amount of Rs 211 crore. Star9 Mobility Pvt Ltd is a consortium of Maharaja Aviation Pvt Ltd, Big Charter Pvt Ltd and Almas Global Opportunity Fund (AGOF).

According to the DIPAM statement on Monday, Subsequently, it became known that the NCLT, Kolkata Bench, had recently issued an adverse order against AGOF, a member of the successful consortium, in another case relating to a resolution plan under the IBC. Considering the adverse order of NCLT, the Letter of Intent (LoI) was not issued in favor of the successful bidder."

Meanwhile, DIPAM added, the concerned consortium member filed an appeal against the NCLT order in the National Company Law Appellate Tribunal (NCLAT), Principal Bench, New Delhi. NCLAT dismissed the appeal and upheld the original order of NCLT and directed that the NCLT order be forwarded to MCA and IBBI for their consideration on initiation of complaint under Sections 74(3) and 236 of Indian Bankruptcy Code, 2016.

After consideration, the Insolvency and Bankruptcy Board of India (IBBI) has filed a complaint against the concerned consortium member in the special court, DIPAM said.

It added, Government examined the adverse orders of NCLT and NCLAT and took note of the complaint filed by IBBI and considered that the adverse orders against a consortium member would lead to disqualification of the successful bidder under the provisions of PIM and RFP. Due opportunity was provided to the successful bidder to respond to the disqualification through a show cause notice."

It said the government has decided to disqualify the successful bidding consortium after careful consideration of the response of the successful bidder to the Show Cause Notice, with the approval of Alternative Mechanism (duly empowered by Cabinet Committee on Economic Affairs) comprising Minister of Road Transport & Highways, Minister of Finance and Minister of Civil Aviation".
As much as 76 per cent of the Rs 2,000 notes in circulation have been returned to banks, mostly through deposits, the Reserve Bank of India said on Monday. On May 19, the RBI announced the withdrawal of Rs 2,000 notes in circulation and gave the public time till September 30 to either deposit the currency notes in their bank accounts or get them exchanged.

According to the data received from the banks, the total value of Rs 2,000 bank notes received back from circulation after the announcement on May 19 is Rs 2.72 lakh crore up to June 30, 2023. Consequently, Rs 2,000 bank notes in circulation as at the close of business on June 30 stood at Rs 0.84 lakh crore," the central bank said in a statement.

Now, 76 per cent of the Rs 2,000 banknotes in circulation as on May 19, 2023 have since been returned. Data collected from major banks indicates that out of the total bank notes in Rs 2000 denomination received back from circulation, about 87 per cent is in the form of deposits and the remaining around 13 per cent has been exchanged into other denomination bank notes.

The RBI decided to withdraw the Rs 2,000 denomination banknotes from circulation in pursuance of the Clean Note Policy of the Reserve Bank of India.

The RBI also said it has also been observed that this denomination (Rs 2,000 banknotes) is not commonly used for transactions. Further, the stock of banknotes in other denominations continues to be adequate to meet the currency requirement of the public."

(With Inputs from PTI)
 For the last two years, the world has been restricted to homes. Daily activities that couldnt be managed without stepping out, came indoors all at once  from office to grocery shopping and schools. As the world accepts the new normal, News18 launches weekly classes for school children, explaining key chapters with examples from happenings around the world. While we try to simplify your subjects, a request to break down a topic can be tweeted @news18dotcom

The prices of tomatoes have skyrocketed in the Indian markets. As per reports, Delhi, Bengaluru, and Uttar Pradesh are among the states that are seeing a Rs 100 to Rs 120 per kg price in the retail market, and in many other places, the price of tomatoes has gone up to Rs 70 per kg. What is the reason behind this sudden surge in prices? The price rise is due to factors such as heatwave, delayed rainfall, and lack of interest among farmers to grow the crop amid crashing prices in early May. Moreover, wholesale dealers attributed the price rise to heavy rainfall in various regions of north India which resulted in damage to the crop thereby limiting its availability.

Just like tomatoes, all the products in the market are impacted by supply and demand. Demand and supply are one of the most integral aspects of economics. It is important to understand these terms not only for examination point of view but also for practical knowledge. Supply and demand are fundamental economic concepts. The two describe how changes in the price of a commodity, product, or resource impact its supply and demand. Demand and supply are dependent on people, processes, and technology.

Let us understand these terminologies individually and the relationship between the two in Classes With News18.

What is Demand?

Demand is the consumers desire for a good or service. Consumers are interested in purchasing that product for a particular price. Demand can increase or decrease based on several factors. The demand curve is defined as the relationship between the price of the good and the amount or quantity the consumer is willing and able to purchase in a specified time period, given constant levels of the other determinantstastes, income, prices of related goods, expectations, and the number of buyers.

Law of Demand- When there is a rise in the price of a commodity, the customer demands less quantity. Whereas, when the prices of the commodity fall, the demand for the commodity will rise.

Factors Impacting Demand-

1. Price of the product

2. Income of Consumers

3. Availability of Alternatives

4. Number of Consumers

5. Consumer Expectation

What is Supply?

Supply represents the capability or willingness of a seller to provide a particular good/service in the market. To ensure this, companies have a dedicated logistics and supply chain department. In general, supply is based on the demand and price of a product. Higher the price, the greater the incentive for the firm to sell more.

Law of Supply- The law of supply implies that when there is an increase in the price of the commodity, the quantity of the commodity produced and available for sale also increases. On the other hand, when the price of the commodity drops, the supply also decreases. This occurs because of the fact that the higher the price, the higher will be the profit margin.

Factors Impacting Supply:

1. Product Prices

2. Availability of Raw Material

3. Producers Expectations

4. Costs of Input

Relationship Between Supply and Demand

- When the supply of any product increases, the price of that product will decrease, and demand will rise due to low prices.

- If the demand for a product is too high, the supply will be short in the market. This will, in turn, increase the prices of that product. However, with exorbitant prices, the demand will fall since people will not want to pay such high prices. In turn, the price will have to be decreased to sell that product or service.

Equilibrium Point

The equilibrium point is a situation wherein the quantity demanded and the quantity supplied of a commodity intersect. This represents the equilibrium price. It is the point at which both the buyers and the sellers are satisfied. Equilibrium is also called the market-clearing price or market equilibrium.
Indian Institute of Technology, Bombay (IIT-B), has received a grant of 22.5 Crores from the State Bank of India on the occasion of its 68th Bank Day to establish a Banking Data and Analytics Hub at the institute. With the help of data analytics and artificial intelligence (AI), this effort seeks to address the particular problems that the Indian banking and financial services industry faces.

The Banking Data and Analytics Hub will include a modern 10,000 sq. ft. lab facility where innovative research will be undertaken to solve growing banking concerns. The goal is to create new and efficient solutions for the industry. In addition to conducting research, the Hub will focus on skill development in data analytics and AI, cultivating a talent pool of banking analytics specialists.

The Dean of Alumni and Corporate Relations at IIT Bombay, Professor Ravi Gudi, expressed his enthusiasm about the Hubs potential. He claimed that the Hub would conduct groundbreaking research, focusing on the unique issues confronting the banking sector, and will endeavour to develop smart solutions. It will also conduct competency-building and outreach operations to expand the pool of banking analytics professionals.

SBI Chairman Dinesh Khara emphasised the vast advantages of this partnership. According to him, the collaboration will improve SBIs AI capabilities as well as the broader banking, financial services, and insurance (BFSI) industry as a whole. The tie-up shall help enhance SBIs AI capabilities and will lead to the generation and dissemination of new ideas through industry-academia collaboration and training of the Banks staff, Khara added.

Nitin Chugh, SBIs Deputy Managing Director and Head of Digital Banking and Transformation highlighted the importance of this association for the banks day-to-day operations. The collaboration with IIT Bombay will enable our data analytics and AI practice to become an integral part of the banks day-to-day operations. It will propel our analytics practice to new heights, benefiting the bank and its customers," Chugh said.
A 15-year-old girl from Indore who lost her father to the COVID-19 pandemic has passed the third-year Bachelor of Arts (BA) examination.

Tanishka Sujit scored 74.20 per cent in the final year BA psychology examination, said an official of the Devi Ahilya University, Indore.

Since childhood I aspired to become the youngest graduate, an elated Tanishka told PTI.

She plans to study law in the UK, but her ultimate dream is to become the youngest Chief Justice of India, Tanishka said.

Prime Minister Narendra Modi had met Tanishka on April 1 when he was in Bhopal to attend the joint commanders conference.

Her father Sujit Chandran died during the first wave of the coronavirus pandemic in 2020.

Her mother Anubha recalled that Tanishka was appearing for her Class 12 exams then. When her father died, she had two more papers to write.

But she gathered courage and wrote the remaining two papers, and passed the exam with flying colours. Wherever my husband is, he must be super delighted with his daughters feat, Anubha said.
The Indian Institute of Technology, Kanpur (IIT-K), hosted 56th Convocation today, July 3, 2023. Dr Radhakrishnan K Koppillil, Chairperson, Board of Governors (BoG), IIT Kanpur, presided over the Ceremony; while Mr. N. R. Narayana Murthy, Founder and Chairman emeritus, Infosys, graced as the chief guest.

A total of 2127 students were conferred degrees during the convocation. The degrees awarded included 236 PhDs, 15 MTech-PhDs (Joint Degree), 483 MTechs, 739 BTechs, 21 MBAs, 16 MDes, 51 MS (by Research), 40 PGPEX-VLFM, 1 Diploma of IIT (DIIT), 151 MSc (2-year course), 18 Double Majors, 125 Dual Degrees, 14 MS-PDs (MS part of the Dual Degree), 149 BSs, and 68 eMasters degree programs.

The convocation also recognized outstanding students across various disciplines. Mr. Farzan Adil Byramji from the Department of Computer Science and Engineering (CSE) was awarded the prestigious Presidents Gold Medal. Ms. Ananya Gupta from the Department of Computer Science and Engineering (CSE) received the Directors Gold Medal (4-year UG program), while Mr. Lakshay Rastogi from the Department of Biological Sciences and Bioengineering (BSBE) was honored with the Directors Gold Medal (5-year UG program). Ms. Nandita Gupta from the Department of Materials Science and Engineering (MSE) received the esteemed Ratan Swarup Memorial Prize, and Mr. Vineeth V from the Department of Electrical Engineering (EE) was awarded the prestigious Dr. Shankar Dayal Sharma Medal.

IIT Kanpur conferred the Doctor of Science (Honoris Causa) degree, the highest honorary academic degree from the institute, upon three distinguished personalities in recognition of their exemplary achievements. The recipients of this esteemed accolade included Ms. M C Mary Kom (Indian amateur boxer and politician), Dr. Devi Prasad Shetty (Chairperson & Founder, Narayana Health), and Mr. Natarajan Chandrasekaran (Chairperson, Tata Sons).

Dr. Radhakrishnan K Koppillil, Chairperson of the Board of Governors (BoG), IIT Kanpur, encouraged the graduates to embrace their future endeavors with passion and purpose, and to give back to society. He recalled IIT Kanpurs path-breaking initiatives and advised the students to follow the paths shown by visionary luminaries. Prof. Abhay Karandikar, Director IIT Kanpur, congratulated the graduating students and wished them well. He also gave a broad overview of the institutes report.

Congratulating the students, Prof. Abhay Karandikar, Director IIT Kanpur, said, This is a very auspicious occasion that we get to observe every year. As we see another prolific batch graduating with flying colors, I wish them all the very best for their future endeavours. IIT Kanpur is built on ethos and values passed on by our guiding predecessors. This is a day to reminisce their contributions and take resolve to do well for the nation and society. I hope each and every one of our graduating students will make a mark as future leaders transforming the nation.

Chief Guest Mr. N. R. Narayana Murthy an alumnus of IIT Kanpur shared valuable insights on the nations progression across sectors and how the graduating students can contribute decisively. As I stand here, reminiscing about my cherished days at IITK, I am reminded of the profound responsibility we bear as educated citizens of our great nation. Just as our founding fathers envisioned, we must rise above affiliations and embrace our role as Indians first. Let us build a mahaan India, where every child has access to education, healthcare, and opportunity. Together, through performance, discipline, innovation, and a mindset of change, we can shape India into a fair and moral leader in science, technology, mathematics, and medicine, said Mr. Murthy.

Let us cultivate a culture of excellence, openness, and patriotism, and create a civilized society where public interest takes precedence over personal gain. In every role we assume, whether as journalists, professionals, bureaucrats, politicians, or global citizens, let us strive for truth, honesty, and progress. Together, let us embark on this remarkable journey, knowing that the hopes of our nation rest upon us, he urged.
Prime Minister Narendra Modi is set to visit the grand old Sampurnanand Sanskrit University in Uttar Pradesh on July 7. Built more than 200 years ago, the universitys library is said to be a treasure trove of handwritten manuscripts. PM Modi is likely to visit the varsity during his two-day visit to his parliamentary constituency Varanasi.

Sampurnanand Sanskrit Universitys library, which was initially called Prince of Wales Saraswati Bhawan, currently houses around 95,000 manuscripts, written in different scripts, including Devanagari, Kharosthi, Maithili, Oriya, Gurmukhi, Telugu, Kannada and Sanskrit.

Our library (Saraswati Bhawan Library) is bracketed among the oldest libraries of the world that have successfully preserved around 95,000 rare manuscripts on subjects like Vedas, Vedangas, Purans, astrology, and grammar. These manuscripts are written in different scripts of Devanagari, Kharosthi, Maithili, Oriya, Gurmukhi, Telugu, Kannada, and Sanskrit. Of these, some are written on gold leaf, paper, palm, and wood, said Professor Anand Kumar Tyagi, Vice Chancellor, Sampurnanand Sanskrit University.

Shashindra Mishra, the public relation officer of the University, highlighted the history of the institution and its library. The present-day Sampurnanand Sanskrit University was initially known as Government Sanskrit College and it was established under a proposal by Jonathan Duncan, the then resident of East India Company, and the approval of Governor General Lord Carnwalis. The college was established in 1791 in order to promote the Sanskrit language. Pundit Kashinath was its first teacher and Acharya. There was an arrangement for the teaching of subjects such as Veda, Vedanta, Purana, Ayurveda, Sahitya, Astrology, Theology, Mimamsa, Nyaya, etc," said Mishra.

Thereafter, several unsuccessful efforts were made to transform the Sanskrit Government College into a full-fledged university. In 1937, another effort was made to give it the name and form of a university, but it could not materialise until 1956 when Varanaseya Sanskrit University Act was passed.

This university was founded on March 22, 1958, by the then chief minister Dr Sampurnanand and education minister Pt Kamlapati Tripathi at Varanasi, as Varanaseya Sanskrit Vishwavidyalaya," said Mishra. It was, however, later renamed as Sampurnanand Sanskrit University under the UP State University Act, 1973 on December 16, 1974, he added. He further stated that the huge collection of well-preserved manuscripts makes the universitys library the nations pride.

UP Chief Minister Yogi Adityanath is likely to visit the university on July 5 to take stock of ongoing preparations for the PMs visit. On his two-day visit to Varanasi, PM Modi will address a public meeting in Wazidpur and will lay the foundation of the development projects worth Rs 7,000 crore. Other than visiting the library, the PM would also visit the ancient building of SSU.
In a small room at the Trinamool Congress (TMC) block office in Kotulpur in Bankura district, a group of 10 to 12 workers and leaders led by Sadiq Ali Khan, president of TMC block committee, is busy strategising for the polling day and making some calculations for the newly formed panchayats. Two weeks ahead of the polling day, the ruling TMC has already won in all eight gram panchayats, when the nomination and withdrawal process just got over.

Around 150 km away from Bhangar in South 24 Parganas district that saw unabated pre-poll violence claiming lives of at least three persons and injuring scores over the past weeks, here is Kotulpur in Bankura district, which has a different story to tell.

Kotulpur block has eight gram panchayats, which include 178 Panchayat seats and 24 Panchayat Samiti seats.

Panchayat and Panchayat Samiti are the first two tiers of Indias three-tier Panchayati Raj system. In all the seats  both Panchayat and Panchayat Samiti  TMC has won uncontested, and not for the first time.

In 2018, the party won across all eight panchayats in the block uncontested. In 2023, history repeated itself.

The party will now face a contest in three Zila Parishad seats in Kotulpul block. A Zila Parishad seat is considered the top layer of the Panchayat system. In these three seats, CPM has fielded candidates in two, while BJP has managed to contest in one. Sadiq Ali Khan and his team were strategising for the polling day in the area, so that the party can win in all three Zila Parishad seats too.

Meanwhile, the BJP offices in the locality were all shut. Located in western part of the state, Bankura was known as a Left bastion, however, after the assembly election in 2016, the vote shares of the Left parties started reducing rapidly making a way for the BJP to enter the region. In 2019, the BJP won the Lok Sabha seats, and the local assembly seat too in 2021. Despite having an MP and the MLA from the area, the BJP failed in submitting a nomination in the block.

Kotulpur in Bankura is one of many such blocks across districts in Bengal, where TMC has already won uncontested. In 2018, TMC won around 34% Panchayat seats uncontested. This year, the number of uncontested seats has halved though. Around 10% seats are uncontested, said the report by the state election commission.

Saga of Uncontested Panchayat Seats

Apart from Kotulpur, the Opposition could not contest in Falta (South 24 Pargana), Indus (Bankura) and many more. In Indus, of 177 gram panchayat seats, Trinamool won all 161. There will be a contest for 16 seats in which CPM has fielded candidates in 14, while BJP will contest in two. BJP failed in submitting nominations in Panchayat Samiti seats.

Khan, TMCs Kotulpur block president, told News18, BJP does not have anyone who will want to contest. They looked for candidates, but none came forward. So, we won uncontested. Now, they are playing the victim card.

A senior leader of TMCs state committee echoed Khans views. In 2018, around 34% seats were uncontested. The Opposition parties did not get a candidate. This is not Trinamools fault. We will not fight elections for them.

In 2018, thousands of panchayat seats remained uncontested in Birbhum, Burdwan and Bankura districts. However, this year, hundreds of seats are left uncontested in South 24 Parganas, North 24 Parganas, Nadia, Bankura, Hooghly and so on.

Amit Malviya, BJPs co-in charge of Bengal, said the police and administration helped the ruling party to block the candidature of many BJP workers. Our workers are still fighting and we are getting a huge response from people, he added.

The number of candidates in gram panchayat seats is 63,229  the highest among the three tiers of which TMC is contesting in 61,591 seats, followed by the BJP with 38,475 candidates and the CPM with 35,411 nominees. Congress is contesting only 11,774 gram panchayat seats. This year, more than 9.5% seats have already been won uncontested.

Samir Das, professor of political science in Calcutta University, explained the reason for having a huge number of uncontested seats in the state. Resorting to violence and not allowing Opposition parties to file nominations show how the leaders of the ruling party lost faith in their voters. They want to control the political instruments at the grass root level and the panchayats are the foundation for all bigger elections.

In 2018, following a series of violent clashes, the Calcutta High Court directed the state election commission to treat nomination papers sent by nine candidates to the Block Development Officer via WhatsApp as valid.

The Panchayat elections will be held in West Bengal in a single phase on July 8, and counting of votes will take place on July 11.
Salman Khan declared on Sunday that Akanksha Puri would be leaving the Bigg Boss OTT 2 house. Her eviction follows a passionate kiss with Jad Hadid captured on live camera during a task. This week, the nominated contestants for elimination were Abhishek Malhan, Jiya Shankar, and Akanksha Puri.

Following Akanksha Puris eviction, Jad received a penalty from host Salman Khan due to his recent actions and will face nominations in the upcoming week. As part of a task, Akanksha, Jiya, and Abhishek were taken to the BBVerse and given a decision-making challenge. They had to mutually decide who among them should exit the show, with the longer they deliberated resulting in more losses for the rest of the housemates. Eventually, Abhishek and Akanksha chose Jiya, while Jiya chose Akanksha. After a long debate, Salman announced that Akanksha would be the one to be evicted.

In the recent episode of Bigg Boss OTT 2, popular contestants Akanksha Puri and Jad Hadid shared a 30-second long lip kiss. It all started after Avinash Sachdev said, I would want Jad to kiss Akanksha" as part of a dare. In the video that is now going viral on social media, Akanksha and Jad can be seen sharing a steamy lock as other housemates cheer for them. In another incident, Jads shameful act of lowering his pants and making disrespectful comments towards Bebika shocked everyone in the house this week. Pooja Bhatt engaged in a heated argument with him, Falaq Naaz broke down and Bebika demanded Jads eviction from the house.

Schooling Jad, salman, on Weekend Ka Vaar, said, Do you know what would have happened if you had done it in the GCC belt? You can do what you want on other shows but people are watching me on this show and I dont want to judge any of you guys. Your personality is coming out. Can you try this is Dubai, Abu Dhabi and Saudi Arabia? This is a very conservative country. India is also a very forgiving country. We have been forgiven a million times for many things. They loved you even if they didnt understand your language, till this very incidence. People here are very simple. They will forget this as well."
The Flash actor Ezra Miller has spoken out in defence after the harassment order against them was lifted in Massachusetts. The order was put in place last year due to allegations made by a 12-year-old childs mother Shannon Guin. The woman claimed that Ezra Miller threatened her family and acted inappropriately with her child, reported Daily Beast in 2022. The order was initially scheduled to expire on Saturday. Now, in a recent statement, Ezra Miller denied these accusations.

Ezra Miller expressed relief and gratitude following the outcome of the legal proceedings. Ezra Miller thanked all those who stood by their side throughout the challenging ordeal and sought to ensure that this egregious misuse of the protective order system was halted.

Protective orders are meant to provide safety for individuals, families and children who are in danger. They are not meant to be used as weapons by those seeking attention or fleeting tabloid fame or some sort of personal vengeance when there are people in true and dire need of these services. I have been unjustly and directly targeted by an individual who the facts have shown has a history of such manipulative and destructive actions, Ezra Miller added.

In addition, Miller slammed those who had spread false claims and misrepresented the truth and context of the story. The actor highlighted the importance of finding the facts before publishing stories merely for clicks.

View this post on Instagram A post shared by SNAKE EATING BIRD (@ezra._x_.aradia)

According to a report by Deadline, no criminal charges were ever filed against Ezra Miller in this case. Millers attorney, Marissa Elkins, stated that all of the actors interactions with the child were initiated by the latters mother. Elkins clarified that Miller was never alone with the child and only had two brief encounters with the child, both of which occurred in the presence of several other adults. Marissa Elkins also made it clear that Ezra Miller never had a weapon with them during any of the meetings, opposing the claims made by Guin.
Bigg Boss OTT 2 is keeping viewers on the edge of their seats, especially on the weekend episodes featuring host Salman Khan. As contestants strive to make an impression on the audience, a few have found themselves in hot water due to their actions. In a recent episode, Salman Khan criticised the housemates for their double standards." He specifically addressed Falaq Naazz and Pooja Bhatt and called them out for their behaviour towards fellow contestant Abhishek Malhan.

Salman Khan almost lost his cool during the Weekend Ka Vaar episode. He said, Falaq aapke har conversation me parivaar ata hai. Abhishek agar aggressive hote hai toh uski puri khandan, upbringing ki mistake hai. Aur aapko Avinash jo aggresive hota, woh nahi dikhta? (Falaq, your conversations are always around family. You think its Abhisheks family and his upbringing that makes him aggressive. But dont you see that when it comes to Avinash being aggressive?)."

Next, Salman confronted Pooja Bhatt about her behaviour towards Abhishek Malhan when she called him badtameez" in one of the earlier episodes. He said, Agar is ghar me vigilance hai toh woh sabke liye same hona chahiye na Pooja? (If theres vigilance in this house, then it should apply to everyone)." Salman later turned to all housemates and said, This house is running on total double standards."

Meanwhile, this weekend, the contestants nominated for elimination were Abhishek Malhan, Jiya Shankar, and Akanksha Puri. On Sunday, Salman Khan announced Akanksha Puri would be leaving the Bigg Boss OTT 2 house.

After Akanksha Puris eviction, Jad Hadid received an ultimatum from Salman Khan owing to his recent actions on the show. As a consequence, Jad will face nominations in the upcoming week. Salman warned him, saying, Do you know what would have happened if you had done it in the GCC belt? You can do what you want on other shows, but people are watching me on this show, and I dont want to judge any of you guys. Your personality is coming out. Can you try this in Dubai, Abu Dhabi, and Saudi Arabia? This is a very conservative country. India is also a very forgiving country. We have been forgiven a million times for many things. They loved you even if they didnt understand your language, till this very incident. People here are very simple. They will forget this as well."

Bigg Boss OTT 2 premiered on June 17 and is streaming on Jio Cinema and Voot.
For over two decades, Sandiip Sikcand has served the television industry as a producer, writer and creative director, with a number of hit shows, including Kahaan Hum Kahaan Tum, Bohot Pyaar Karte Hain and Dhhai Kilo Prem. Now, in a surprising turn of events, Sandiip Sikcand in a recent Instagram post shared that he would love to lend his craft, as an actor, and pursue what he has always loved the most.

I have always been an actor first and that has been my passion for as long as I can remember, doing impressionable roles on stage (been acting on stage since 19 years) and in films like Sanna, Murder2, Raaz 2, Blood Money and moreonly led on to adding more fuel to the already acting hungry me," he wrote.

He further expressed that hell still produce shows and create content for the audience. I have a lot to offer and with the kind of content being made today, actors such as me, do have a new hope and an opportunity to bite into some truly challenging characters," Sandiip Sikcand wrote.

View this post on Instagram A post shared by Sandiip Sikcand (@sandiipsikcand)

The response in the comments section was overwhelmingly positive, with many expressing their excitement to witness Sandiip Sikcands acting talent on the screen. Besides social media users, his industry colleagues also showered him with love and support.

Actor Karan Veer Mehra jokingly wrote, Hamare pet pe laat, gayi naukri jo milney wali thi. (This is blow to our stomach, we lost the job that was about to come)," while TV star Pooja Gor shared, Welcome back."

Reacting to the post, a user wrote, Youve made me a much more bigger fan, the way youve kept your heart out on the table dear. All the best to you. May God bless u with good projects.

Another wrote, You have always proved yourself as a good actor.

One more wrote, As always DIRECT DIL SEY.

Sandiip Sikcand recently voiced his opinion on the television industry, highlighting the criticism it faces for a lack of innovation. In a report by Bollywood Hungama, he noted that many stories revolve around innocent girls marrying into wealthy families and being portrayed as perfect". Sikcand emphasised the need for the television industry to venture into uncharted territory and experiment with fresh narratives.
Sreejita Des wedding ceremony with husband Michael Blohm-Pape is nothing less than a fairytale. While Sreejita shared first photos from the German wedding ceremony on Sunday, announcing that she is now married, on Monday she shared another set of photos from the ceremony to show that they did not shy away from a little PDA at their wedding ceremony. In the first photo, Sreejita was seen kissing Michael after they exchanged their vows.

In the second photo, the couple is seen reading a few verses from what appears to be a bible during their wedding ceremony. In the third, Michael was seen planting a kiss on Sreejitas head while she hugs him. Sharing the photos, Sreejita wrote, Always and Forever."

Sreejita also shared a picture of her gown. She was seen posing outside her wedding venue with a bouquet in her hand. She smiled for the camera while her wedding gown is on full display. Sharing the photo, Sreejita wrote, From Miss to Mrs Feeling blessed and grateful for this incredible chapter."

Sreejita De married Michael Blohm-Pape on Sunday, July 2, in Germany. Sharing the first wedding photos, Sreejita wrote, Today we celebrate the beginning of forever, hand in hand. "

The wedding seems to have taken place in Germany, Michaels home country. During an interview with ETimes ahead of her wedding, the actress said, I will be wearing a white gown for the Christian wedding. I want to adorn myself a little before the wedding. In fact, I havent coloured my hair for a while, so I am getting a new hair colour. Its going to be a western wedding and the gown has already been finalized."

She also revealed that a Bengali style wedding will take place as well later on. It is reported that following their Christian wedding in Germany, Sreejita and Michael will return to Mumbai to celebrate their union with a reception on July 17. Additionally, they have exciting plans for a Bengali-style wedding as well, which will be held in Goa.
The Central Bureau of Investigation has filed a charge sheet against Bihar deputy chief minister Tejashwi Yadav, his parents Lalu Prasad Yadav and Rabri Devi, and others in the land-for-job scam. The charge sheet filed in Delhis Rouse Avenue Court alleged that Tejashwi and Rabri were beneficiaries of the alleged crime. The case filed in 2022 alleges that then railway minister Lalu Prasad Yadav got pecuniary benefits for his family members in return for giving railway jobs to Bihar residents.

Tejashwi Yadav had alleged political vendetta on the grounds that the alleged crime happened between 2004 and 2009 when he was a minor but CBI officials told News18 that the charge sheet mentions how after turning major, the Rashtriya Janata Dal leader benefitted from the crime. A land parcel worth Rs 1.75 crore was bought by a firm called AK Infosystem at less than 1 lakh rupees. The ownership of this firm and the land was later transferred to Tejashwi Yadav in 2014 when he became major, and Rabri Devi. There is evidence to suggest that a family member of the original owner of the land parcel was given a railway job," a CBI officer told News18.

This is the second charge sheet that the CBI has filed in this case and the first time that Tejashwi has been named. Considering the span and spread of the crimeseparate charge sheets are being filed zone-wise," a CBI officer said. Multiple charge sheets could mean more trouble for Tejashwi and the Yadav family.

The Central Bureau of Investigation has today filed 2nd chargesheet in the Designated Court at Delhi against 17 accused including then Union Minister of Railways, his wife, son, then GM of West Central Railways(WCR), then two CPOs of WCR, private persons, private company etc. in a case related to Land for Job Scam," a press release from the agency said.

As per the CBI FIR, the crime was committed in the railway zones of Mumbai, Jabalpur, Kolkata, Jaipur, and Hajipur. Resident of Patna were appointed as Substitutes in group D post during the period 2004-2009 in different zones of Railway located at Mumbai, Jabalpur, Kolkata, Jaipur, Hajipur and in lieu thereof the individuals themselves or their family members transferred their land in the name of family members of Lalu Prasad Yadav, then Minister of Railway, Government of India and a Company AK Infosystems Private Limited," the FIR reads.

The CBI alleged that no guidelines were followed during these appointments of substitutes in Group D. The investigation, officials said, revealed that the substitutes were later regularised in the railways.

The CBI probe, as per officials, revealed at least seven instances of quid pro quo  land transfers. Twelve persons got jobs in six zones in return for these land transfers, as per the agency.

Officials said that fresh evidence has emerged against those named in the charge sheet. Middlemen, job seekers, and family members have all reportedly testified about the modus operandi.
Trees were planted along the Yamunas stretch to prevent erosion, attract birds and maintain the rivers ecosystem. Now, where are the trees! Just look at the place. The shores are all gone, laments Megh Singh Rana from Kanalsi village in Haryanas Yamunanagar district.

Illegal mining persists, right in front of everyones eyes. Nobody speaks up or takes action. All we can do is complain, but it falls on deaf ears," shares Ravinder Singh Chauhan, a local journalist from Chhachhrauli.

The mining mafia operates heavy machinery, which is undoubtedly illegal. Its influence is so strong that adherence to regulations is disregarded. The rules stipulate that mining should be permitted only up to three ft depth in the Yamuna. Yet, the riverbed has been excavated to a depth of 60 to 80 ft to extract coarse sand. On an average, sand worth Rs 30 lakh is plundered every single day.

The river has taken a winding route due to the presence of deep pits. This causes erosion or deposition of sediment and affects the surrounding landscape, potentially leading to flooding in areas otherwise not prone to it. From Yamunanagar to Palwal, at least 20,000 acres get flooded every year. During this time, around 2,000 acres get washed away in the river. This affects the livelihoods of farmers in a big way," Anuj Saini, the president of Aakriti, an organisation working for environmental conservation, tells 101Reporters.

Additionally, the zigzag flow affects efficiency of water transportation, navigation and other activities that rely on a predictable and consistent flow in the river. The presence of deep pits can pose a risk to bathers, too.

Saini alleges that mining mafia employs a strategy of using small structures to impede natural flow. Attempting to stop the flow by constructing small dams is illegal. Such interventions alter its natural course, leading to gradual drying up of the river.

Immediate action is taken on complaints. The government does not rely on a single department to enforce the ban on illegal mining, but rather makes coordinated efforts." - Moolchand Sharma, Haryana Minister for Mines and Geology

Every element in the river serves a purpose. For instance, the pebbles play a crucial role in regulating the rivers flow, effectively slowing down soil erosion. When water level decreases, these stones impede the flow, creating intermittent movements and forming small waterfalls in various locations. As the water cascades down, it is enriched with oxygen from the atmosphere, thus serving aquatic beings. The fish population in oxygenated water has better health.

Along with sand, the mining mafia extracts stones from the river, disrupting the natural system of oxygenation within the water, explains Mustkeen Mallah, the president and founder of UP Haryana Machli Kewat Mallah Ekta Samiti. Its outcome has been quite visible in the way the fish population in the Yamuna has declined. Dolphins have almost become extinct from its waters.

Until 2010, local boatmen from Mallah and Kewat communities earned their livelihood by catching fish from the river. As difficulties mounted, they had no option but to take up cultivation of seasonal vegetables such as cucumber, muskmelon and watermelon. But even agriculture became impossible as the mining mafia started encroaching upon the lands adjacent to the Yamuna in Badoli, Madi, Takor, Baghpat, Sinauli, Bhanera, and Moonji Garhi, with the complicity of local authorities, alleges Mustkeen.

With no scope of livelihood, most of them were compelled to seek livelihood opportunities in Nepal, Bihar and Punjab. They are away from their homes for almost 10 months a year. This has had an impact on their social wellbeing, Mustkeen adds.

AQUATIC ANNIHILATION

A research conducted on the Chambal, a tributary of the Yamuna, in Etawah by a team including biologist Dr Sita Ram Tagore has highlighted the risk that sand mining poses to the rivers biodiversity.

We have observed that sand mining in Chambal region led to disruptions in migration routes, nesting patterns and egg-laying habits of gharials and turtles, forcing these species to migrate from the affected areas, explains Tagore, who is actively involved with Yamuna Jiyo Abhiyan and has extensively studied the river.

The widespread and unregulated mining practices are negatively influencing various aquatic beings such as fish, turtles, aquatic plants and microorganisms. The decreasing fauna in mining areas serve as a clear indicator of environmental disruption. Yet, it is worth noting that no comprehensive scientific study has been conducted to fully understand the extent of the impact caused by sand mining on the Yamuna and its aquatic life.

Tagore elaborates that birds select their migration destinations based on the availability of food resources. Many choose to lay eggs on islands situated in the middle of the river. However, the disturbance caused by mining operations now compel them to seek alternative locations.

Mustkeen cites a similar case. In Ramdha village of Uttar Pradeshs Shamli district bordering Haryana, deer could be easily spotted until 2015. We can hardly see one these days, he exclaims.

Bhim Singh Rawat, the convenor of Yamuna Jiyo Abhiyan in Yamunanagar, explains how physical structure, floodplains, biodiversity, water quality and water quantity collectively define a rivers existence. Sadly, in this case, not a single element remains intact, indicating the rivers gradual demise.

The flow of a river is governed by its natural hydrological cycle. Floodplains play a crucial role in facilitating proper dispersion of floodwaters. They serve as natural reservoirs, allowing temporary storage of floodwaters during peak periods. Once the flood subsides, these areas become highly fertile and productive for agriculture.

Environmental activist and water expert Himanshu Thakkar is worried that mining contracts are being awarded to big companies of late. These firms have set up crushers in the middle of the river, while screening plants operate along its banks. The continuous noise generated from these activities persists day and night, and the presence of crushers contributes to an increase in airborne dust particles, Thakkar tells 101Reporters.

Wasim Ahmed (34) from Tajewala, Ramkumar Rana (55) from Tapu Kamalpur, and Ashwani Sharma (54) from Gharaunda in Karnal have repeatedly written to the state government about illegal mining, depleting water levels and declining fish population in the Yamuna. However, their pleas remain unanswered to date. It is disheartening to witness the relentless destruction of the river in pursuit of monetary gains, they say.

Meanwhile, Minister for Mines and Geology Moolchand Sharma tells 101Reporters that regular inspections are being carried out to curb illegal mining in the Yamuna. Immediate action is taken on complaints. The government does not rely on a single department to enforce the ban on illegal mining, but rather makes coordinated efforts, he claims.

Despite the ministers assurance on developing better strategies to deal with the issue, people living along the Yamuna are now worried that they will eventually be forced to abandon their homes and relocate if the present situation prevails.

(Manoj Thakur is a Haryana-based freelance journalist and a member of 101Reporters, a pan India network of grassroots reporters)
The Delhi High Court on Monday rejected a bail petition filed by former Deputy Chief Minister Manish Sisodia in connection with a money laundering case related to alleged irregularities in the Delhi governments now-scrapped excise policy.

Justice Dinesh Kumar Sharma refused to grant relief to the Aam Aadmi Party (AAP) leader, saying he has not been able to pass the triple test for bail in which the court has to see whether an accused is likely to flee from justice, tamper with evidence or influence witnesses.

The court in its order said that the possibility of evidence tampering and influencing witnesses cannot be ruled out due to the political position the accused hold.

Besides Sisodia, the court also denied bail to Vijay Nair, ex-communication in charge of Aam Aadmi Party, Abhishek Boinpally (Hyderabad Based Businessman), Binoy Babu Binoy, (manager with a liquor company M/S Pernod Ricard) who are named as co-accused in the money laundering case lodged by the Enforcement Directorate (ED).

This comes after on May 6, the ED filed another chargesheet in which it named Sisodia as an accused in the money laundering case. This was the first time that the probe agency named Sisodia in its charge sheet.

While pronouncing the order on Sisodias bail plea, the high court said it has gone through the order of a special court which had earlier dismissed his bail plea and that it does not find any infirmity or illegality in the decision. The petitioner (Sisodia) is not entitled to bail and the petition is accordingly dismissed, it said.

The special court has passed reasoned order on the basis of material available on record, Justice Sharma said. Sisodia, the former Delhi deputy chief minister and excise minister, was first arrested by the CBI on February 26 for his alleged role in the scam and has been in custody since then. He resigned from the Delhi Cabinet on February 28.

Sisodia Played Most Important & Vital Role in Criminal Conspiracy: Court

The court had stated that Sisodia played the most important and vital role" in the criminal conspiracy related to the alleged payment of advance kickbacks of Rs 90-100 crore meant for him and his colleagues in the Delhi government. The Delhi government implemented the policy on November 17, 2021 but scrapped it at the end of September 2022 amid allegations of corruption.

On May 30, the court dismissed the bail plea of Sisodia in the excise policy scam being probed by the CBI, saying he is an influential person who could influence witnesses, who are mostly public servants, and the allegations against him are very serious in nature.

The high court has already denied him bail in the CBI case on May 30. He was arrested on March 9 in the case lodged by the ED and is currently in judicial custody.

The high court had on June 2 reserved its order on the bail plea of Sisodia, who has sought bail on various grounds including the deteriorating health of his wife who is suffering from multiple sclerosis. The ED has opposed the bail plea of Sisodia as well as of other accused.

According to the CBI and ED, which are probing the cases against Sisodia, irregularities were committed while modifying the excise policy and undue favours were extended to licence holders. Sisodia had challenged the March 31 order of the trial court, which had dismissed his bail plea saying he was prima facie the architect" of the alleged scam.
The Supreme Court on Monday directed the Arvind Kejriwal-led AAP government in Delhi to disclose the money it has spent on advertisements in the last three financial years.

This comes after the Delhi government expressed inability to contribute money to the Regional Rapid Transit System (RRTS) citing paucity of funds.

A bench comprising of Justices S K Kaul and Sudhanshu Dhulia passed an order asking the Delhi government to file an affidavit enumerating details of funds within two weeks.

This was done after the bench was informed that the state government was not able to contribute funds, particularly on the Delhi-Gurugram-Alwar and Delhi-Panipat segments of the RRTS.

Let us check what funds you have been spending.. we will say that all funds for advertisement will be diverted.. You want this kind of order? You are asking for it," the apex court said.

The Delhi government has expressed its inability to contribute funds for common project. Since paucity of funds is an impediment in this project, we call upon the NCT of Delhi to file an affidavit setting forth the funds utilised for advertisement as the project is of national importance. Details may be furnished for last financial years," the bench added.

Till now, the Delhi government has given Rs 415 crore, of the Rs 1,189 crores that it had to pay for this particular segment of the RRTS, The Indian Express said quoting sources.

What had the SC said earlier?

Earlier too, the apex court had directed the AAP government to contribute Rs 500 crore from the Environment Compensation Charge (ECC) fund to the RRTS corridor.

In its March 2019 order, the apex court had directed the Delhi Government to contribute Rs 265 crore, which included tax liability, from the ECC fund within 10 days. It had said the tax component was refundable and shall on refund be credited to the ECC fund.

What is the RRTS corridor?

The semi-high speed rail corridor is set to connect Delhi with Meerut and its estimated cost is Rs 31,632 crore. It will be 82.15 km long.

The corridor, with 24 stations, will cover the distance from Sarai Kale Khan in Delhi to Modipuram, Meerut in 60 minutes.

Delhi will have around 13 km with stations at Sarai Kale Khan, New Ashok Nagar and Anand Vihar.

With PTI inputs
The water levels at seven lakes in Mumbai, which supply water to the city, have been recorded at 15.4% of the full supply level due to heavy rainfall. The water stock currently stands at 22,2,868 million litres which is an improvement compared to last year. However, the Brihanmumbai Municipal Corporation (BMC) will not immediately withdraw the 10% water cut imposed in the city from July 1.

The levels may have improved as of today, but with the rains being unpredictable, the BMC cannot take the risk of immediately withdrawing the cut," a BMC official was quoted by TOI as saying. The water stocks stood at 1,85,972 million litres on Saturday which is 12.85% of the full supply levels.

The BMC had imposed a 10% water cut for Mumbaikars beginning from July 1 despite fast-filling lakes.

ALSO READ: Mumbai Rain: BMC to Go Ahead With 10% Water Cut From July 1 Despite Fast-Filling of Lakes

The Indian Meteorological Department (IMD) on Sunday said the city and its suburbs are likely to receive moderate rain with the possibility of occasional intense spells in the next 24 hours.

For 48 hours: Moderate rain is likely in the city and suburbs with the possibility of occasional intense spells. Maximum and minimum temperatures are very likely to be around 30 degrees and 24 degrees respectively," an IMD bulletin read on July 1.
A joint team of the National Investigation Agency (NIA) and Mumbai Police raided four locations in Mumbai and Pune early on Monday and detained four alleged Islamic State sympathisers. According to sources, the detained persons were on central agencies radar since early 2021.

Officials told News18 that multiple incriminating materials, including digital devices, were seized from the accused and their houses during the searches.

Tabish, detained from Mumbai, was allegedly the key operative who had administered the oath of allegiance to Amir, another detainee, and also wrote articles in IS propaganda magazine Voice of Hind.

Zubair, detained from Pune, was also allegedly associated with the ISIS Shimoga module that was busted earlier.

On Sunday, the NIA had conducted raids at five locations  two in Patna and one in Darbhanga (Bihar) and one each in Surat (Gujarat) and Bareilly (Uttar Pradesh)  in connection with a case against the Ghazwa-e-Hind, a radicalised module being run by Pakistan-based suspects.

According to the agency, incriminating material, including digital devices such as mobile phones and memory cards, SIM cards and documents, were seized during the raids.

The case was registered after the arrest of Marghoob Ahmad Danish alias Tahir of Phulwarisharif area of Patna by Bihar Police on July 14 last year. The NIA took over the case eight days later.

Danish was charge-sheeted on January 6 under various sections of the Indian Penal Code and the Unlawful Activities (Prevention) Act.
Amid the political debate, former solicitor general and senior advocate Harish Salve supported the plan to bring in the Uniform Civil Code (UCC), saying it will give people a choice.

In the simplest terms, the UCC means one law which would be applicable to all religious communities in matters such as marriage, divorce, inheritance, adoption, maintenance, etc.

ALSO READ | Why UCC Ahead of Lok Sabha Polls? At Panel Meet, Oppn Raises Questions | From Intent to Impact

While Prime Minister Narendra Modi last week said India needed the Uniform Civil Code (UCC) as the country could not run with the dual system of separate laws for separate communities, Uttarakhand government said its draft with provisions for the age of girls for marriage and conditions for live-in relationships, among others, was ready and would be implemented soon. The Opposition parties, meanwhile, have accused the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) of resorting to divisive politics through the UCC.

Salve, however, has a different view. I have been a votary for introduction of UCC, he said, adding, Does it affect anyones religion? No, it gives you a choice if you want to follow a secular law or notYoull have the choice of which law applies to you.

When asked about the reservations expressed by the Muslim community, he said, Why will it be bad for Muslims? It will give a Muslim girl the choice to get a divorce, which is a concept alien to their personal law.

Salve went on to say that the UCC will take away the control that religion has on people.

ALSO READ | If Muslim Personal Laws are Integral to Islam, Why Does Everyone Want to Run to US or Europe: Kerala Governor

It will create a situation where the girl will say that shes being misled and shell get the option to divorce the man. Removing all kinds of state discriminations which empowers one group to impose their own views on others would ultimately strengthen the democracy, he said, explaining how UCC could curb love jihad.

When asked about the Oppositions doubts over its timing, he said, Whether the timing is right or wrong is a political question and I would not want to comment on it.

Salve is clear: A personal law that is oppressive, which doesnt give you a right to divorce, must be abolished.
Prime Minister Narendra Modi is set to host Russian President Vladimir Putin, Chinas Xi Jinping, Pakistans Shehbaz Sharif and other leaders at the virtual Shanghai Cooperation Organisation (SCO) summit on Tuesday.

The SCO summit under Indias presidency will focus on regional security and boosting connectivity and trade among the member nations.

The summits theme is Towards a SECURE SCO. The SECURE acronym was coined by PM Modi at the 2018 SCO summit and it stands for Security; Economy and Trade; Connectivity; Unity; Respect for Sovereignty and Territorial Integrity; and Environment.

Why is the SCO summit significant this year?

This years SCO summit, will be Putins first participation in a multilateral summit after the Wagner Mercenary group launched an armed rebellion on Moscow last week.

This summit will also welcome Iran as the new permanent member of the grouping.

The situation in Afghanistan, the Ukraine conflict and enhancing cooperation among the SCO member countries are expected to figure in the summit, people familiar with the matter said, adding boosting connectivity and trade is also likely to be discussed.

The summit also comes at the backdrop of the over three-year eastern Ladakh border standoff between India and China, and two weeks after PM Modis visit to US.

What is the SCO?

The SCO is an influential economic and security bloc comprising of India, China, Russia, Pakistan, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan and Uzbekistan.

It has slowly emerged as one of the largest transregional international organisations.

Other attendees of the summit

Heads of six international and regional organisations have also been invited to the summit.

The organisations are the UN, the ASEAN (Association of Southeast Asian Nations), CIS (Commonwealth of Independent States), CSTO (Collective Security Treaty Organisation), EAEU (Eurasian Economic Union) and CICA (Conference on Interaction and Confidence Building Measures in Asia).

Indias presidency of the SCO

India assumed the rotating chairmanship of the SCO at the Samarkand Summit of SCO on September 16 2022.

Indias presidency of the SCO saw significant activities in a number of areas. New Delhi created five new pillars for cooperation in SCO. These are startups and innovation, traditional medicine, digital inclusion, youth empowerment and shared Buddhist heritage

To further Prime Minister Modis vision of Vasudhaiv Kutumbakom (world is one family), India emphasised on building greater people-to-people connect, the person said.

India and SCO

Indias association with SCO began in 2005 as an Observer country. India became a full Member State of SCO at the Astana Summit in 2017 which was a historic moment in Indias enagement with the Organisation.

In the past six years, India has played a very active and constructive role in all spheres of activities of SCO.

SCO meet in Goa

In May this year, India hosted the Foreign Ministers of SCO in Goa, and it was marked by a colourful cultural program and substantive discussions the following day.

EAM inaugurated New Delhi Hall virtually at the SCO Secretariat in Beijing during Indias presidency of SCO. A commemorative stamp was released to mark the first ever SCO presidency of India.

With PTI inputs
The notion that a Uniform Civil Code (UCC) will be against minorities is rubbish, said Bharatiya Janata Party leader Mahesh Jethmalani in an exclusive conversation with CNN-News18.

I am a strong believer in a Uniform Civil Code. Though were a diverse country, all religions shall agree on a common family procedure," the senior Supreme Court lawyer said. Its rubbish that its against the minorities. Congressmen who oppose the UCC should read the constituent assembly debate."

UCC will make social life smoother, said the Rajya Sabha member.

The mantra of being against minorities is being chanted on every issue by the political parties who are bereft of Muslim votes and are out of power," he said.

By and large, there was a consensus that UCCs a good thing, said Jethmalani. The only opposition was that there should not be any haste in bringing it, he added.

More than 19 lakh responses have been received by the Law Commission so far, said Jethmalani.

Well try to implement UCC before our term ends," he said. It was the right time shortly after 1950 as said by the Constitution makersSo 75 years down the road, its time for us to take a step forward. Ultimately, youre bringing a humanitarian aspect to the family through law."
The parliamentary panel on law on Monday held a meeting of the personnel, public grievances, law and justice departments on the issue of the Uniform Civil Code (UCC) in New Delhi.

The UCC means one law which would be applicable to all religious communities in matters such as marriage, divorce, inheritance, adoption, maintenance, etc.

The standing committee headed by Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) MP Sushil Modi called representatives of the Law Commission and the law ministry on a recent notice issued by the law panel, seeking views of stakeholders on the issue.

The Law Commission representatives present at the meeting spoke in detail about their findings and the consultation paper in 2018, which had stated there was no need for the UCC. The representatives told the members that the public consultation had received an overwhelming response with more than 19 lakh responses so far and the consultation will start on July 13.

Apart from Sushil Modi, present at the meeting were Congress MPs Manickam Tagore, Vivek Tankha and Jasbir Gill, BJP MP Mahesh Jethmalani, BJP MP Ramesh Pokhriyal Nishank, Shiv Sena UBT MPs Sanjay Raut and Rajan Vichare, DMKs P Wilson, YSR MP Niranjan Reddy, among others.

The officials who attended the meeting included K Biswal, Member Secretary, Law Commission; KR Saji Kumar, additional secretary, legislative department, Sunita Anand, joint secretary of dept of legal affairs, among others.

POLL POSITION?

Several members asked why the government was in a hurry to bring in this legislation. MPs from the Congress, Dravida Munnetra Kazhagam (DMK) and Bharat Rashtra Samiti (BRS) asked if this was done, keeping the upcoming Lok Sabha elections in mind.

The government, according to sources, said that this was not a poll issue. Previously, the commissions report or the consultation paper did not give any recommendations and had nothing to implement it. The report which is currently being looked at will also have recommendations.

Sources privy to the development said the Uddhav Thackeray faction of Shiv Sena continued to support the legislation, however, hoping that the government does not use it as a poll issue in 2024.

FOR THE N-E

MPs from the Congress also raised concerns about the impact of such a legislation in northern states such as a border state of Punjab. A few MPs, including the panel chairman, also questioned the impact of such a legislation on tribals and North-Eastern states which have their unique identity, That should not be impacted as per Schedule 6. In any case for north-eastern states like Mizoram and Nagaland, no decision of the Centre can be implemented without being ratified by the state assembly, sources told News18.

If it does not apply to all, then the whole purpose of making a uniform code is defeated, argued some opposition MPs.

STATES POWERS, DISCRIMINATION

Some opposition MPs argued that such a legislation would rob the states of its powers. India is a diverse nation, having religious, cultural and linguistic diversity like none other. As per a report, India is home to 398 languages, out of which 387 are actively spoken and 11 are extinct. Even within Hinduism, there are several sub-cultures, each with their own unique identity, tradition and customs. If you take one set of personal laws and apply it with brute force to all religions, sub-sects and denominations, it would destroy their uniqueness and diversity, a DMK Rajya Sabha MP wrote in his letter to Sushil Modi.

The Commission has rightly noted that it is discrimination and not difference which lies at the root of inequality and. therefore, has suggested potential legislative action in the form of codification and amendment of personal laws to redress the complexities involved in Uniform Civil Code. Seen in that perspective, the consultation paper is a first step as it tries to reconcile Fundamental Right to Equality with Right to Freedom of Religion. The consultation paper states that while dealing with the issue of Uniform Civil Code, Constitution of India, as a whole, it must be borne in mind as Uniformity will come in conflict with many provisions of the Constitution of India. In particular, the Sixth Schedule and provisions contained in articles 371 (A) to (I) of the constitution. It emphatically states that while dealing with the issue it must be kept in mind that all articles of the Constitution of India have to be given effect to, to avoid the utra vires of the same, wrote Vivek Tankha, a noted lawyer and Rajya Sabha Member of Parliament from the Congress in his letter to Sushil Modi.
Janhvi and Khushi Kapoor, the hottest sister duo in Bollywood today love to wear each others clothes like all sister do. Janhvi wore the Cooper Bikini Top worth 9,074.08 last year in December and recently, the younger Kapoor sister wore the same bikini top and set the internet ablaze.

Janhvi Kapoor teamed the Cooper Bikini Top with the Delilah Bikini Bottom in Aqua worth 9,074.08 for her vacation in Maldives last year.

View this post on Instagram A post shared by Janhvi Kapoor (@janhvikapoor)

Janhvi Kapoor was spotted wearing a vibrant, bright blue drawstring textured bikini top that beautifully overshadowed the blue seascape behind her. Not stopping there, she effortlessly transformed her bikini tops into crop tops to pair with her bottoms. Embracing the island vibes, she rocked her bikini top with a denim skirt, exuding style and confidence. Janhvi Kapoor sets a high bar for beachside hotness, leaving us inspired to reach the same level of fashionable allure in our own lives.

On the other hand, KhushiKapoor chose to wear Urban Outfitters Out From Under Textured High Leg Pink Bikini Bottom with her Cooper Bikini Top in Aqua.

View this post on Instagram A post shared by s  (@khushi05k)

Khushi Kapoor, the emerging actress, has ignited a social media frenzy with her recent Instagram photo collection. The young starlet mesmerized her followers as she fearlessly showcased her remarkable curves in a breathtaking bikini, leaving them breathless with admiration.
NATIONAL FRIED CLAM DAY 2023: When it comes to seafood, theres something irresistible about the flavours of fried clams. As July 3 approaches, marked as National Fried Clam Day, sea food enthusiasts in New England eagerly await this celebration. The day holds immense popularity in the region, with almost every restaurant offering this mouthwatering dish. In this article, we will delve into the origins and significance of National Fried Clam Day, exploring its cultural roots and benefits.

National Fried Clam Day History

Back in 1916, Lawrence Henry Woodman, renowned for making potato chips, started deep-frying clams in Essex, US. One day before American Independence Day, Woodman and his wife, Bessie, set up a stall to sell this new delicacy to their community and the response was phenomenal. Over the years, fried clams gained immense popularity and in 2015, almost 100 years later, Woodmans of Essex, the iconic sea food restaurant, officially established National Fried Clam Day. Now, other than in England and the US, the day is celebrated annually worldwide.

Clams are fascinating creatures with approximately 150 edible varieties. Lacking noses, eyes, or heads, they rely on their feet to burrow into the sand for protection. Surprisingly, clams can live up to 33 to 36 years. Although it is popular in England, fried clams originated in the United States. Their unique taste and culinary significance have made them a favourite in the region, captivating locals and visitors alike.

How To Make Fried Clam

Making fried clams at home can be a delightful and easy experience. Begin by soaking the clams in buttermilk and then coat them in a mixture of all-purpose flour and spices. Deep fry the coated clams in oil until they turn golden and crispy. Dont be afraid to get creative with the spices and add your unique twist to this dish.

Health Benefits
Congratulations are in order for Min Yoongis family. The member of the global K-Pop sensation boyband BTS recently attended his elder brothers wedding. Min Geum Jae tied the knot at a hotel in Daegu on Sunday. Members of the ARMY cannot help but gush over the videos and snaps that are making rounds on the internet. In the videos, Suga is seen taking a moment to deliver a heartfelt speech for the newlywed couple. The moment screams sibling love and fans are all for it. In the video shared online, fans have been able to translate what the rapper said during his speech.

Taking the stage, the BTS star began his speech by saying, First of all, I want to say thank you. Im Min Yoon gi, the younger brother of Min Geum Jae, who is the groom in this wedding Upon noticing his brother already shedding tears, Yoongi decided to lighten the mood and questioned, Why are you crying right now? Dont cry now. The K-pop artist also took a moment to thank his brother for pushing him to pursue his career in music. In his speech, the Daechiwta rapper revealed that it was his brother who was the first one to encourage and support him to follow his passion. Suga then went on to give his brother a hug.

Suga: First of all, I want to say thank you. I'm Min Yoongi, the younger brother of , who is the groom in this wedding why are you crying right now? Don't cry now~ pic.twitter.com/5EnnvV8BCm    SEVEN (@nafisa_007) July 2, 2023

Fans were also able to get their hands on some of the family photos from the wedding. The newlywed couple posed gracefully with the bridegrooms parents and Yoongi. Another thing that caught the attention of the fans was how the rapper had sent congratulatory flowers to the couple at the venue. BTS SUGA MIN YOONGI was written on the wreath. Members of the ARMY also sent congratulatory messages to Sugas brother.

View this post on Instagram A post shared by Jeon Jungkook Wife (@jeon.jungkook_wife)

The BTS star was on his debut solo world tour just days before his brothers D-day. He finished the last leg of his tour in Seoul on June 25. Following this, he returned to his hometown Daegu for the special occasion. Now that the Suga Agust D Tour is over, fans are waiting to see whether the K-pop artist will enlist for mandatory military service. With fellow BTS members Kim Seokjin (better known as Jin) and Jung Hoseok (A.K.A. J-Hope) already fulfilling their duty towards their country, this enlistment will come as no surprise.
Ashok Tejas directorial debut Odela Railway Station (2022) achieved great success, especially after its release on the Aha OTT platform. The film, which offered a murder mystery crime thriller set in a rural backdrop, has garnered significant attention from the audience. Now, the director is venturing into an action thriller.

Catherine Tresa has been roped in as the female lead, while Sandeep Madhav, known for his roles in films like George Reddy and Vangaveeti, will be the hero of the film. The project will be produced under the banners of KCR Films and Sri Mahavishnu Movies. Davuluri Jagadish and Palli Keshavrao are the producers of the upcoming film. The films pooja ceremony is scheduled to take place in the last week of July, marking the beginning of the production process.

The producers have expressed their optimism and confidence in Ashok Tejas ability to deliver an exceptional action thriller, as per reports. They acknowledged his previous work in Odela Railway Station and the gripping manner in which he presented the suspense until the end. With Catherine Tresa as the heroine, the producers are also curious about the story choices made by the new director, as they believe it adds an interesting aspect to the film, the reports added.

While details about other actors and technicians involved in the project have not been disclosed yet, the producers have stated that more information will be revealed soon.

Catherine Tresa, who now resides in Dubai, began her career with the Kannada film Shankar IPS in 2010. After a series of flops, she began to play the supporting role in big movies. She also had a supporting role in Allu Arjuns Sarrainodu and Kalyan Rams Bimbisara, and it appears that these roles greatly harmed her career. Even in Chiranjeevis last film Waltair Veerayya, where Shruti Haasan played the lead role, Catherine played a supporting part.

There were speculations surrounding Catherine Tresas involvement in the promotions of Waltair Veerayya and her absence from events related to it. According to reports, she had decided not to promote the movie, possibly due to some dissatisfaction.
The talented and beautiful actress Mrunal Thakur has set the Internet ablaze with her new photos in what seems to be the first look of her upcoming Telugu film, Nani 30. The actress looks mesmerising as she happily poses for pictures on the beach. She is set to work with superstar Naveen Babu, fondly known as Nani, on the upcoming project.

In the recently released first look photos, Mrunal has donned a beautiful South Indian traditional lavender saree and accessorised it with heavy Indian jewellery. The Sita Rammam actress is simply adding beauty to the backdrop of the beach. The scenery of the image creates a magical effect and hints towards the enchanting narrative of the much-awaited Nani 30. The overall photos look straight out of a fairytale.

Check out the photos here:

Ever since the release of the photos, fans have gone into a frenzy and started showering love on the actress. The excitement for the movie has risen and they cant seem to wait for more behind-the-scenes footage and photos of the project.

Mrunal has gained a huge following with her first Telugu film, Sitha Ramam, which was released last year. She worked with Dulquer Salmaan and Rashmika Mandanna. Her performance in the movie received wide appreciation and has made her one of the most sought-after actresses, having signed films with superstars like Dulquer, Nani, and Vijay Devarakonda. Nani 30 will be her second Telugu film, and her next Telugu film, VD 13, will be with the Liger actor Vijay Devarakonda.

The film is yet to be titled, is directed by Parsuram Petla, and is produced by Sri Venkateswara Creations. Mrunal Thakurs costar, Angad Bedi from R Balkis Lust Stories 2, is also part of the project. The show is currently streaming on Netflix. Mrunal Thakur has also worked extensively in the Hindi film industry with movies like Super 30, Batla House, and Jersey.
Kajol has recently opened up about her daughter Nysa and her experiences with the paparazzi. In a candid interview, the actress said that she feels Nysa handles media attention with more grace and dignity in comparison to her. Kajol was recently in Lust Stories 2 and fans have gone gaga over her performance in the anthology.

In an interview with NDTV, Kajol recalled an old incident and shared how she then explained to Nysa about the media. I cant teach her how to deal with paparazzi, she has learnt that with experience. She first had an experience with the paps in Jaipur. We both were alone and were not travelling with any security. At that time, the photographers surrounded us and started shouting, this scared her and she started crying. I just carried her in my arms and went straight to the car. Later, I explained to her that its their job, she was quoted saying.

Kajol expressed her admiration for Nysas growth in handling such situations with grace and dignity. She added, She is better now with these situations and she is handling it very well. She is handling it with a lot more grace and dignity than I would have. If I was in her place, toh mera chappal bahut pehle nikal chuka hota.

Talking about her work, Kajol was last seen in Salaam Venky, co-starring Vishal Jethwa and Aamir Khan.

She will be next seen in The Trial - Pyaar Kaanoon Dhokha. The Hotstar special series will stream from July 14. The trailer aptly summed up the courtroom drama with Kajol at the helm of it as Noyonika Sengupta, a lawyer turned housewife who is compelled to don the black robes after her husband gets embroiled in a massive scandal. The trailer showcased the tension between Kajol and Jisshu Sengupta who is supposedly essaying her husband and a judge jailed for the controversy. From the look of the trailer, the series will explore Kajols conflict between being a wife and a lawyer.

The US version of The Good Wife premiered in 2009 and ran for seven seasons. The drama focused on Alicia Florrick, a woman who must support her politician husband after he is implicated in a sexual misconduct scandal while resuming her legal practice.
Rumours are rife that Katrina Kaif has also backed out of Farhan Akhtars ambitious movie Jee Le Zara after Priyanka Chopras reported departure from the film. Though theres been no official confirmation regarding Katrinas exit, a new report has suggested that the actress has opted out of the movie.

While quoting some key sources, a Filmfare.com report stated that Priyanka Chopra Jonas and Katrina Kaif have reportedly walked out of the film and there are talks of Anushka Sharma and Kiara Advani now being considered for the film.

When Farhan Akhtars Jee Le Zaraa was announced, it had everyone excited owing to its stellar cast of Katrina Kaif, Alia Bhatt and Priyanka Chopra. Netizens were stoked to see another road-trip film like Zindagi Milegi Na Dobara but with a women-centric cast. However, it was recently reported that Farhan Akhtar delayed the project.

A report in Bollywood Hungama also stated that due to lack of coinciding dates from the stars, the film had to be put on the backburner. Priyanka Chopra was not able to commit the dates to shoot in 2023 due to her Hollywood commitments and asked Farhan if they could shoot for Jee Le Zaraa in 2024. While Farhan was fine with it, Alia Bhatt is already committed to shooting for Ramayana and Baiju Bawra in 2024. Given that the two films are going to be taxing, she couldnt align her date for next year. When nothing fell in place, Farhan decided to delay the film until the right time," the source claimed.
Phir betalawa usi dadh pe (Again Baitalawa-ghost is on the same branch of tree). There is popular saying in Indian country side which emerged from the famous folk story of Vikram and betal, in which after long persuasion, the same question returns. The same is happening with the National Council of Educational Research and Training (NCERT) rationalisation debate going on in India.

The summary of the debate is that after Covid crisis, NCERT rationalised its textbooks to reduce the burden of schoolgoing students. In this process, they dropped some content. The NCERT explained repeatedly that it has been done to reduce the burden on young students and make the textbooks more relevant to changing times. A group of scholars, who are critical of the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), are attacking the NCERT and National Democratic Alliance (NDA) government for dropping a few crucial sections of school textbooks such as social movement, peasant movement and reframing a few paras to dilute important moments of political history.

Another group of educational administrators and scholars have come forward to defend the NCERT and its intellectual autonomy, comprising UGC chairman, VC-JNU, ICSSR, Member secretary and other social scientists. The war in the media is going on at repeated intervals.

Why do NCERT textbooks generate such kind of debates? Why do political forces enter such debates? Pedagogical material, which is basically educational, becomes the target of politicians of various political parties. However, changes in textbooks and their rationalisation is a routine process in most countries in the world. But it is also true that in some countries such as Hungary, Poland, etc., it led to debates which rarely took a political turn. In India, politics is so pervasive that the Opposition parties use these debates to strengthen their political arguments. The Left, Congress and other regional parties such as the Samajwadi Party, Rastriya Janata Dal, etc. that are against the party in power enter such debates.

On most occasions, political motives either come through politicians or academicians-turned-politicians through issues such as representation of movements of social groups such as peasants, Dalits, etc. The political motive is to transform an educational act into a political act. They raise the issue of representation in textbooks as identity representation, which helps them in the long run to mobilise social groups to serve their political interest. They forget the notion of educational and social ethics.

We need to evolve a socio-ethical narrative which may give respect to the identities of every social group and may weave each other together, but not fracture them. Identities, without context and development visions, may be harmful for everyone and also for the social group we want to empower through their identity representation in the long run. It is true that education and textbooks create a symbolic capital as defined by Pierre Bourdieu, but this symbolic capital should not be always used for political interest. In fact, the idea of thinking of our society only in relation to the present and past, but not the future, makes us myopic.

In the educational representation argument, some advocate caste as an educational fact. I read a pamphlet evolved by a radical left organization, in which they argued for maintaining the name of the caste of Nathuram Godse in NCERT textbooks.

Is it ethical or constitutionally moral to fight to maintain the caste name in a textbook that will shape up young minds? Just to counter the NCERT, are we going to propose a textbook which may enthuse conflicted consciousness among children.

We have entered a new social era of an aspirational New India. The New India needs textbooks and pedagogical resources which may prepare a human workforce that responds to its times. In this context, textbooks should carry impressions of changing times, sensitivity, creativity and innovativeness as outlined in the New Education Policy 2020.

We need to see how we can protect our educational capital from being converted into a political capital.

However, it is tougher difficult when parliamentary elections of 2024 are near and political forces are anxiously searching for issues for political and electoral mobilisation.

The writer is a Professor and Director at GB Pant Social Science Institute, Prayagraj, and author of Republic of Hindutva. The views expressed in this article are those of the author and do not represent the stand of this publication.
In the wake of the tragic police shooting of Nahel M, a 17-year-old teenager of Algerian-Moroccan heritage in the Parisian suburb of Nanterre on Tuesday, June 27, 2023, the French Republic finds itself engulfed in a tempestuous storm of violent protests, as impassioned demonstrations, riots, and looting cascade through its streets. Against a backdrop of persistent allegations of entrenched discrimination, this surge of violent events has cast a stark light on disconcerting societal fissures that run deep within the French Republic. More so, the untimely demise of the teen delivery driver Nahel occurring during a routine traffic stop serves as a poignant reminder of the profoundly intricate and multifaceted predicament that now grips the nation.

Evoking disquieting parallels to the haunting events of the three-week-long 2005 French riots, during which police actions resulted in the tragic deaths of two immigrant teenagers who sought refuge in an electrical substation, tensions surge once again. Discrimination and police harassment in impoverished immigrant residential areas resurface as pressing concerns, casting a shadow over societal harmony.

Meanwhile, French President Emmanuel Macrons sudden departure from critical discussions within the European Union (EU) regarding the Russian-Ukrainian conflict, coupled with his governments contemplation of a potential declaration of a state of emergency, leaves France teetering on the precipice of uncertainty. The gravity of the situation cannot be overstated; France, along with several other Western European nations, is facing an ongoing crisis in terms of integrating immigrants and refugees. This crisis is exacerbated by a significant loss of trust within society, intensifying an already unstable situation and sparking tensions with far-reaching consequences.

The recent discourse surrounding the demise of Nahel is centred around French immigration and refugee protection and return, elucidating a wide spectrum of perspectives on the crucial themes of discrimination, integration and cohabitation. France, renowned for its opulent cultural heritage spanning the realms of art, literature, music, fashion, cuisine, and philosophy, occupies an eminent position on the global cultural stage. Nevertheless, the nation has faced challenges in effectively assimilating diverse populations and nurturing a sense of unity. A study commissioned by Frances national statistics agency, INSEE, has revealed that immigrants comprised approximately 10.3 percent of the population in 2021, amounting to nearly seven million individuals. This figure signifies an increase when compared to the 6.5 percent of foreign-born residents in 1968. Migration has played a momentous role in shaping the multifaceted tapestry of the country, with approximately a third of the citizenry having a connection to immigration across three generations.

In recent years, immigrants from former French colonies in North Africa, sub-Saharan Africa, and Asia have constituted a significant contingent within the immigrant community. Significantly, a substantial portion of immigrants in France hail from Algeria, accounting for over 12 percent of the immigrant population. Similarly, around 12 percent of immigrants come from Morocco, while approximately 4 percent originate from Tunisia. Additionally, there is a notable influx of immigrants from Portugal, comprising over 8 percent of the total, followed by Italy at 4 percent, Turkey at more than 3 percent, and Spain at approximately 3 percent. Interestingly, women make up the majority of these immigrant communities.

It is worth noting that many immigrants have chosen to settle in major urban centres, including the capital Paris, where nearly one-fifth of the population proudly embraces their immigrant heritage. Despite this significant presence, it is intriguing that Frances immigration rates remain lower than the European average, lagging behind countries like Germany and Spain. The rise in immigration can also be attributed to the challenges faced by the EU during the refugee crisis that began in 2015. As part of the EUs collective response to the crisis, member states, including France, agreed to accept a specific number of refugees based on a quota system. These quotas are determined collectively, considering factors such as the countrys population size, GDP, and capacity to integrate and support refugees. Based on available data and estimates, it is reported that as of December 31, 2020, the French Office for the Protection of Refugees and Stateless Persons (OFPRA) identified 455,295 refugees and individuals under other forms of international protection in France.

The complexities surrounding immigrant integration extend beyond mere numbers and require a concerted effort to foster inclusivity, provide adequate support systems, and ensure equal opportunities for all members of society. Although France has made progress in addressing these challenges, there is still much work to be done to bridge the gaps and create a cohesive society that embraces diversity while upholding the principles and values that define French culture. Within this landscape, divergent viewpoints emerge, with some advocating for strict assimilation, emphasising French national identity and values, while others champion a more pluralistic approach, extolling the worth of cultural diversity and the recognition of different identities. These contrasting perspectives reflect broader conversations about finding an equilibrium between preserving French cultural heritage and embracing the multicultural reality of a globalised world.

The concept of coexistence remains nuanced and ever-evolving within French society, requiring sustained dialogue, understanding, and efforts to bridge divisions and foster an inclusive and harmonious environment for all. Nevertheless, France has faced a multitude of contentious issues throughout its recent history, encompassing critical matters such as cultural identity, religious expression, and social integration. These conflicts arise from cultural disparities and conflicting ideologies. Samuel Huntingtons theory of clash of civilisations suggests that divergent cultural and religious beliefs among civilisations could lead to strife and disharmony. In the French context, this clash has taken various forms, particularly concerning the integration of Muslim immigrants.

Over the years, French society has been subject to intense debates regarding religious practices, secularism, democracy and the role of Islam within society. One key point of contention revolves around the delicate balance between the Islamic way of life and French liberal ethos. Incidents of alleged discriminatory practices targeting racial and religious minorities, including unjust arrests, harassment, and excessive use of force, have eroded trust among immigrant communities and perpetuated a perception of discrimination and inequality in French society. While French legislation, such as the 2004 law prohibiting religious symbols in educational institutions and the 2010 law banning face-covering veils in public spaces, demonstrated the countrys unwavering commitment to secularism and the principle of laicite, immigrant communities argued that these laws unfairly singled out and stigmatised Muslim communities.

These contentions, intertwined with instances that deserved the strongest condemnation, such as the 2015 Charlie Hebdo attack, the 2015 Paris attacks, the 2016 Nice Truck Attack, and frequent acts of violent extremism that regularly manifested in the form of knife attacks and, in extreme cases, attempted beheadings. Such incidents posed significant challenges and undermined trust, further hindering societal cohesion and unity. The Charlie Hebdo attack by French Muslim immigrants, which targeted the satirical magazine for publishing caricatures of Prophet Muhammad, raised profound questions about the delicate balance between freedom of expression, blasphemy and religious extremism. The coordinated 2015 Paris attacks, orchestrated by French and Belgian immigrants affiliated with the global terrorist organisation ISIS, intensified the existing challenges France faced in terms of coexistence and integration. The 2016 Nice truck attack, carried out by Mohamed Lahouaiej-Bouhlel, an immigrant from Tunisia, further highlighted the persistent threat of terrorism and the challenges faced by the French population in terms of internal security. Similarly, the tragic case of Samuel Patty, a teacher beheaded by an 18-year-old Russian Muslim refugee in 2020, exposed the alarming rise of extremist violence and the clash between radical ideologies and the values of tolerance and education.

The tragic instances highlighted above serve as poignant reflections that fuel discord, uplift mistrust, and vividly showcase the multifaceted challenges that France confronts in terms of coexistence, cultural clashes, terrorism, extremism, social tensions, and freedom of expression. These occurrences underscore the utmost importance of upholding cherished French principles such as freedom, secularism, democracy, and equality. They serve as timely reminders that the task of fostering a harmonious society transcends the sole responsibility of the French Republic; it necessitates collective engagement and participation from the entire French society, including those who have recently embraced the principles outlined in the French constitution. Addressing this profound conundrum calls for sincere introspection and unwavering collective efforts, demanding a delicate equilibrium between embracing the richness of cultural diversity and safeguarding the values that define French culture and heritage. The resolution of these intricate issues calls for a nuanced understanding, open and meaningful dialogue, and concerted endeavours aimed at cultivating a society that genuinely embraces diversity, advocates for tolerance, and ensures the safety and well-being of every citizen while upholding the cherished principles and revered traditions of French culture. By embracing a shared vision of unity, respect, and inclusivity, France has the potential to deftly navigate the complexities of coexistence, foster enduring social harmony, and lay the solid groundwork for a future that is truly inclusive and prosperous.

The author is an international criminal lawyer specialising in criminology, forensics, and psychology, currently serving as the Director of Research at the New Delhi-based think tank Centre for Integrated and Holistic Studies (CIHS). Views expressed are personal.
The debate surrounding the Uniform Civil Code (UCC) over the last few decades has its origin in the Shah Bano Case (Mohd. Ahmed Khan Vs. Shah Bano Begum) in which the apex court had delivered a judgement (on 23 April 1985) in favour of an old divorcee Muslim woman that was seen as an attack on Muslim Personal Law by radical Islamists and a section of political class that believed in appeasement of radical Muslims at the cost of progressive members of the community. The then Congress government at the Centre buckled under the pressure. In 1986, it brought a law in the Parliament to overturn the decision of the Supreme Court of India.

While much has been discussed about the Shah Bano case since then, we have overlooked some of the key observations made by the Supreme Court in this case. It is important to note that the court itself had made clear that it wasnt a case that involved an issue related to constitutional law. It was a simple case of a civil suit related to a dispute over alimony for a divorced Muslim woman.

The judgement was delivered by a five-member Constitution Bench headed by the then Chief Justice of India YV Chandrachud and comprising Justice Rangnath Misra, Justice DA Desai, Justice O Chinnappa Reddy and Justice ES Venkataramiah.

The debate on the Uniform Civil Code seems to have entered a decisive stage as the Modi government at the Centre seems to be moving towards implementing it. This has also drawn strong criticism from radical Muslim leadership and most of the Opposition parties.

Interestingly, the observations made by the apex court, which havent been part of this debate so far, convincingly provide answers to all the points raised by the opponents of the UCC. Here are key takeaways that are relevant for the ongoing debate on the UCC:

On the need to implement UCC

The Supreme Court said, It is also a matter of regret that Article 44 of our Constitution has remained a dead letter. The Article says, The State shall endeavour to secure for the citizens a uniform civil code throughout the territory of India. There is no evidence of any official activity for framing a common civil code for the country. A belief seems to have gained ground that it is for the Muslim community to take a lead in the matter of reforms of their personal law. A common civil code will help the cause of national integration by removing disparate loyalties to laws which have conflicting ideologies. No community is likely to bell the cat by making gratuitous concessions on this issue. It is the State which is charged with the duty of securing a uniform civil code for the citizens of the country and, unquestionably, it has the legislative competence to do so.

On the need to have political courage to implement UCC

The apex court made a candid observation when it said, A counsel in the case whispered, somewhat audibly, that legislative competence is one thing, the political courage to use that competence is quite another. We understand the difficulties involved in bringing persons of different faiths and persuasions on a common platform. But, a beginning has to be made if the Constitution is to have any meaning.

On limitations of the judiciary

Underlining the limitations of the judiciary in providing justice to minorities in the absence of the Uniform Civil Code, the court said, Inevitably, the role of the reformer has to be assumed by the courts because, it is beyond the endurance of sensitive minds to allow injustice to be suffered when it is so palpable. But piecemeal attempts of courts to bridge the gap between personal laws cannot take the place of a common civil code. Justice to all is a far more satisfactory way of dispensing justice than justice from case to case.

On what leading Islamic Scholars have to say about the UCC

The Supreme Court specifically quoted a well-known Islamic scholar who specialised in Mohammedan Law in this regard. It said, Dr Tahir Mahmood in his book Muslim Personal Law (1977 Edition, pages 200-202), has made a powerful plea for framing a Uniform Civil Code for all citizens of India. He says: In pursuance of the goal of secularism, the State must stop administering religion-based personal laws. He wants the lead to come from the majority community but, we should have thought that, lead or no lead, the State must act. It would be useful to quote the appeal made by the author to the Muslim community: Instead of wasting their energies in exerting theological and political pressure in order to secure an immunity for their traditional personal law from the states legislative jurisdiction, the Muslim will do well to begin exploring and demonstrating how the true Islamic laws, purged of their time-worn and anachronistic interpretations, can enrich the common civil code of India.

At a seminar held on October 18, 1980, under the auspices of the Department of Islamic and Comparative Law, Indian Institute of Islamic Studies New Delhi he also made an appeal to the Muslim community to display by their conduct a correct understanding of Islamic concepts on marriage and divorce (See Islam and Comparative Law Quarterly, April-June, 1981, page 146).

On evolution of Muslim personal laws in contemporary context

The court made an interesting reference while raising the challenge regarding making Muslim personal laws relevant in contemporary terms as it observed, Before we conclude, we would like to draw attention to the Report of the Commission on Marriage and Family Laws, which was appointed by the Government of Pakistan by a Resolution dated August 4, 1955. The answer of the Commission to Question No.5 (page 1215 of the Report) is that a large number of middle-aged women who are being divorced without rhyme or reason should not be thrown on the streets without a roof over their heads and without any means of sustaining themselves and their children. The Report concludes thus: In the words of Allama Iqbal, The question which is likely to confront Muslim countries in the near future, is whether the law of Islam is capable of evolution-a question which will require great intellectual effort, and is sure to be answered in the affirmative.

The writer, an author and columnist has written several books. He tweets @ArunAnandLive. The views expressed in this article are those of the author and do not represent the stand of this publication.
The blue short, puffed-sleeved dress Rakul Preet wore to the Big Boss house for her new Jio Cinema release I Love You can't go unnoticed. Many must be already looking up the piece online to get one for themselves. The golden statement earrings and black lace-up heels elevated the look. (Image: Instagram)




When will its effects be felt?









What is it and where does it occur?





Coastal El Nino emerged at the end of the 19th century and the beginning of the 20th century. According to the Peruvian Sea Institute (Imarpe) , the "El Nino" or Global El Nino as it is called to differentiate it from emerged at the end of the 19th century and the beginning of the 20th century.





This climate pattern is characterized by the abnormal warming of the northern Peruvian coast, which is associated with the El Nino current and heavy rains.





Its meaning has changed over the years. In some South American countries such as Peru and Ecuador, the increase in the Sea Surface Temperature (SST) on the west coast of South America accompanied by heavy rains is called "El Nino."

It includes changes in SST in the central equatorial Pacific, as well as changes in atmospheric pressure in the Pacific Ocean, from Australia to Tahiti.





In recent years, scientists have split the equatorial Pacific into four regions to focus attention on the evolution of ocean surface temperatures and winds. Most of them focus their attention on the Nino 3 and Nino 3.4 regions.

NOAA uses the Oceanic El Nino Index (ONI) to define El Nino and La Nina events. This index is defined as a 3-month average of sea surface temperature anomalies measured in the tropical Pacific in the Nino 3.4 region.





(END) KGR/RRC/RMB

On June 9, the U.S. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) confirmed the arrival of Global El Nino , a weather event that is expected to gain strength with the passing of months and could have a moderate to strong impact on Peru.Published: 7/3/2023
Former Congress president Rahul Gandhi made it clear on Sunday that his party will not be part of any opposition front that includes the Bharat Rashtra Samithi (BRS).

Addressing a public meet at Khammam in Telangana, Gandhi said the remote control of Chief Minister K Chandrasekhar Rao was in the hands of Prime Minister Narendra Modi and BRS had become the B-team of the BJP, calling it BJP-Rishtedar Samithi.

In a major poll promise, Gandhi said if voted to power, the party will provide a monthly pension of Rs 4,000 to every elderly person and widow. Currently, under the BRS government, these two vulnerable sections receive Rs 1,000 pension as part of the Aasara scheme.

During the Telangana Jana Garjana Sabha, the Congress leader also said the doors are open for defectors to re-join the Congress. He added that the rampant corruption in the BRS is making it play second fiddle to the saffron party.

Earlier, in a public meeting in Maharashtra, KCR had emphatically denied that it was the A or B team of any party. He had said that his party was solely for the team of the marginalised in society.

The partys Ekla Cholo Re attitude has left others baffled. After the BRS stopped targeting the BJP in speeches and trained its guns on the Congress instead, it is being called the B-team of the BJP. The fact that MLC K Kavitha, KCRs daughter, is no longer being summoned by the ED in the Delhi liquor policy scam has added fuel to this speculation. Also, Congress is the main opposition party in Telangana and that has made KCR maintain a distance from it. The party had earlier stated that it would not be part of any Opposition bloc that has either BJP or the Congress.

During the public meet in Khammam, Gandhi said: Telangana was a dream; a dream of the poor, of the farmers, dream of the labourers, dream of the farmers and in the last nine years, the TRS only crushed this dream. The land that Indira Gandhi and Congress party had granted to the Dalits, the tribal people and the poor is being taken away by the BRS. Let me assure you, as you had asked this question during Bharat Jodo Yatra also, this land does not belong to the chief minister, it is yours, it is your right and the Congress party will hand over that land to you. Right now, KCR is treating Telangana as his personal fiefdom.

In his earlier visits, Gandhi had promised sops for farmers. In May last year, as part of the Warangal Declaration, he had promised that the party would waive off Rs 2 lakh from each farmers loan and buy paddy at MSP. He had also said Congress would initiate direct benefit to farmers of Rs 15,000 per acre of farming land. The party has kept up a sustained fight to rectify the errors of the Dharani portal, which they allege is a land-grabbing tool.

the reacTIONS

Hitting back at Rahul Gandhis scathing attack, BRS working president K Taraka Rama Rao said that AICC stands for All India Corruption Committee. Taking to Twitter, he alleged that Congress is synonymous with corruption and incompetence. On Rahul Gandhi calling BRS BJPs B team, KTR said that BRS is neither B team of BJP nor C team of Congress. He said that BRS is D team which is enough to defeat both the BJP and Congress.

He also asked why the Congress was so rattled by the national ambitions of the BRS. Is national politics their jagir?" he wrote. He added that the people of Telangana will never forgive Rahul for talking about scrapping Dharani portal and bringing the rule of the middlemen back.

He mocked the promise of Rs 4,000. He asked how will the party fulfill that promise here when they stopped Anna Bhagya scheme in Karnataka.

Finance minister Harish Rao too took a dig at the party by calling it scamgress. Congress has a history of looting the country. Yours is a party known for corruption. The name of your party has become Scamgress. That is why the people of the country removed you from power."

Regarding corruption allegations in Kaleshwaram Lift Irrigation scheme, Harish, who is the CMs nephew, said: It is a joke" to allege corruption to the tune of Rs one lakh crore in the project as the total cost of the project is Rs 80,321.57 crore."

Meanwhile, Union minister G Kishan Reddy hit back at the Congress leader saying that he had gone overboard" after winning Karnataka. BJP state president Bandi Sanjay Kumar said that Congress is not a threat in Telangana. Congress is not Mohabbat ka Dukaan. It is the Dukaan from where cash-rich BRS buys MLAs," he tweeted.
It is the BJPs sweet revenge in Maharashtra: two splits in 12 months, and putting a big question mark on the leadership of two major political parties of the state  Shiv Sena and NCP. Now, the saffron camp has absolute power for a makeover in the states political circles when seen in the context of numbers in the legislative assembly.

The BJP and Shiv Sena coalition had crossed the majority mark in the 2019 assembly elections, winning 161 seats together but could not form the government. The Sena, led by Uddhav Thackeray back then, demanded the post of chief minister and walked out of the alliance when the BJP did not relent.

The total strength of the Maharashtra legislative assembly is 288 seats and 145 were needed to win the trust vote. The BJP did try to form a government with Ajit Pawars first revolt in 2019, when Devendra Fadnavis and the NCP leader took oath as chief minister and deputy, respectively. But they could not get the support of other NCP MLAs and Fadnavis was in the CMs office for only 80 hours before stepping down.

An unusual alliance was then stitched under Sharad Pawars guidance and Shiv Sena  in alliance with the BJP for decades and practiced a similar style of Hindutva politics  joined the NCP and the Congress claiming that it followed a secular political path with Uddhav as the CM. It was called the Maha Vikas Aghadi (MVA) and proved majority on November 28, 2019, with the support of 169 members in the assembly.

Eknath Shinde  the big push

An unnatural alliance like the MVA could easily be broken and it saw the first sign in 2022. Hindutva being the core of its politics, most Sena MLAs were not comfortable in the MVA and demanded to return to the BJP-led NDA alliance. When the partys top leadership refused to budge, over 40 of them under Eknath Shinde revolted.

The BJP welcomed the split and the rebellion dethroned the Uddhav-led government after 31 months. After a run of resort politics and court hearings, Uddhav resigned on June 29, 2022, ahead of the floor test and, subsequently, lost the party name and symbol to the rebellious faction that claimed to be the real Shiv Sena.

Uddhavs government was replaced by the NDA government and in another political stunner, the BJP decided to make Shinde the CM. The alliance won the trust vote on July 4, 2022 and Uddhav decided to move away from the BJP-Sena alliance. But, now a Sena member, once nurtured by party founder Balasaheb Thackeray, was the reason it had gone back to its natural ally BJP. Events came full circle with Uddhav losing the party legacy and presidency.

The alliance  106 BJP and 40 Shiv Sena MLAs  got 164 votes in its favour with support from others. The MVA had 112 members on its side  15 MLAs from the Uddhav camp, 53 NCP MLAs and 44 Congress MLAs but only 99 voted, which was lower than the 107 votes the MVA got in the speakers election a day before. A total of 20 NCP and Congress MLAs were reportedly absent during voting.

And with Ajit Pawar, the circle is complete

The BJPs second big bet was Ajit Pawar. It seems even after the first revolt failed in 2019, the party kept pushing for it. Back then, the senior NCP leader was unable to push the other MLAs but, this time, he has a letter of support signed by 29 MLAs with NCP heavyweights like Chhagan Bhujbal, Dilip Walse-Patil, Dhananjay Munde, and Praful Patel behind him.

Along with Ajit, eight other NCP MLAs took oath as ministers. While he is the second deputy CM, the portfolios of the others will soon be decided in a cabinet expansion.

The internal power struggle in the NCP was out in the open  Sharad Pawar versus Ajit Pawar  and battle lines were drawn on who will control the party ahead. Ajit wanted to align with the BJP but was denied. While the daughter  Supriya Sule  was promoted as the national face, the nephew was seen to be struggling to get a hold on the party. When Sharad Pawar resigned recently, only to take it back later, Ajit was the only leader to support the decision.

With Ajit now joining the NDA government in Maharashtra, its numbers have crossed the 200-mark in the legislative assembly. The MVA, meanwhile, that once showed a formidable future ahead based on numbers in its favour is down to 74 seats with Ajit claiming support of over 40 NCP MLAs. The MVA support is reduced to 16 Shiv Sena (UBT), 13 NCP-Sharad Pawar and 45 Congress MLAs.

From junior partner to seniormost

The BJP has only become stronger in the state. Its first reflection was seen in the June 2022 Rajya Sabha election. The MVA claimed the support of 170 members before the polls, but the effective strength it got was 162 as some decided to support the BJP.

In the MLC election the same month, collective MVA strength was reduced to 151 MLAs as 11 MLAs cross-voted in the BJPs favour.

July 2022 put the power dice back in the BJPs circle. Then, the NDA government was supported by 164 MLAs and, now, a year later, the numbers have gone up to 194 with Ajits letter of support of 29 MLAS. And it may go up to 204 if the NCP leaders claim of 40 is realised.

The direction that Maharashtra politics takes can only be known with Lok Sabha, assembly and civic body elections ahead, but, as of now, the BJP is the largest party in the state and comfortably in the drivers seat. Who matters more  Sharad Pawar or Ajit Pawar, or Uddhav Thackeray or Eknath Shinde  only poll results can tell. The BJP has proved to be the leading political party in Maharashtra, where it was, for decades, a junior partner to Bal Thackerays Shiv Sena.
The host Congress shifted the venue of the second joint opposition meeting from Shimla to Bengaluru while riding high on its success in the recent state polls. But this high has now been tempered by the Nationalist Congress Party split in Maharashtra.

Sources say before the NCP crisis, the main focus of the opposition meeting was on deciding the framework of a common minimum programme and developing a slogan against the Bharatiya Janata Party for the 2024 Lok Sabha elections where the spotlight would be on the caste census, attack on freedom of expression, political witch hunt of rivals, and misuse of the ED and CBI".

But now, they say the July 17-18 meeting will focus on how political parties will be targeted and the BJP will try to poach and split them. When both Congress president Mallikarjun Kharge and Rahul Gandhi spoke to Sharad Pawar, they reassured him that everyone would be together in this and it would also be the issue on which the opposition parties would target the BJP.

Yesterday when the BJP Washing Machine pic.twitter.com/LqdwRSg7CO Jairam Ramesh (@Jairam_Ramesh) July 3, 2023

Sources say the meeting will make this the core issue and also work on a strategy to ensure that the constituents of the opposition front dont split. In fact, Rahul Gandhi raised the point that as elections will come close and if the Congress wins state polls, the BJP will try everything to ensure that we split. Legitimately elected governments will be attempted to be toppled.

A worry has been raised that it could be Bihar next as some BJP leaders have already gone on record to indicate this.

And this is something the opposition parties need to put their heads together to fight. If Sharad Pawar sinks, so might the rest. And, hence, the Bengaluru session has its task cut out.
Devendra Fadnavis has once again emerged as the Chanakya of Maharashtra politics, answering Sharad Pawars 2019 googly with his doosra.

With Ajit Pawars inclusion in the state government, the deputy chief minister of Maharashtra has proved to his party BJP that he can deliver results when the leadership shows faith in him.

According to a source, a recent survey of the state had indicated a not so favourable position for the BJP in elections as MVA enjoyed an edge. It was Fadnavis who took on the task to tackle the situation and delivered by poaching none other than Ajit Pawar and other loyalists of NCP chief Sharad Pawar. With this move, Fadnavis not only settled scores with Sharad Pawar but also made it clear why he is called the Chanakya of Maharashtra politics.

Fadnavis had to face embarrassment in 2019 when he formed the government with the help of Ajit Pawar, who was sworn in as deputy chief minister, but the regime could last only a few days. Political analysts say Fadnavis lost respect in the eyes of BJPs central leadership due to the mess and decided to regain his stature in the party.

Hence, as Leader of Opposition, he tried to corner the MVA government  not only on the floor of the assembly but also outside. The BJP also could not ignore the key role played by Fadnavis in Eknath Shindes coup. Fadnavis, who never wanted any post in the Shinde cabinet, was asked to become his deputy when, in reality, he wanted to mentor the government from outside. Despite his reservations, the senior BJP leader finally toed the party line.

Considering the 2024 Lok Sabha election, the BJP realised it would become difficult to win the maximum seats from Maharashtra as there is a sympathy wave in favour of the Uddhav Thackeray camp due to the split in the Shiv Sena. Shindes charisma is limited to Thane and Palghar districts which are his strongholds.

Hence, BJP felt the need for a strong face that could dent the MVAs popularity and help it win seats from Western Maharashtra and Marathwada region. After the 2019 embarrassment, Fadnavis decided to approach Ajit Pawar again and this time, the stars were in his favour. Ajit Pawar revolted against his uncle and, on Sunday, took oath as the deputy chief minister of Maharashtra in the Shinde-Fadnavis sarkar.

Ajit Pawar was often accused by MVA leaders of not taking an aggressive stand against the current Maharashtra government. Recently, he showed his willingness to vacate the LoP post and asked the party to give him a bigger role in the organisation.

However, if one connects the dots now, it is no surprise why Junior Pawar was soft towards the Shinde-Fadnavis duo. Recently, Prime Minister Narendra Modi targeted Sharad Pawars daughter Supriya Sule and levelled allegations of corruption against NCP while speaking about the irrigation scam. Though BJP had fought the 2014 state elections by raising the scam, surprisingly, the prime minister did not say a word against Ajit Pawar in his speech.

On June 29, in a late-night meeting between Shinde, Fadnavis and Amit Shah, Fadnavis conveyed to the Union home minister that Ajit Pawar, along with his MLAs and MPs, is ready to support the state government. Once they received the green signal from Shah, Ajit Pawar was made the second deputy chief minister of Maharashtra within 48 hours.
Hours after NCP leader Ajit Pawar took oath as deputy chief minister in the Eknath Shinde government, the partys working president and his cousin Supriya Sule said the developments in the party will not impact the Oppositions unity.

Addressing a press conference late Sunday night in Mumbai, Sule said her father and Nationalist Congress Party (NCP) chief Sharad Pawars stature will rise further.

Our credibility will only rise after this," she said. She also said Ajit Pawar may have different views, but she can never fight with her elder brother and will always love him as a sister.

Ajit Pawar on Sunday joined the Shiv Sena-BJP government in Maharashtra as deputy chief minister, while eight other party leaders were inducted as ministers. Sule, whose elevation as party working president last month is believed to have triggered Ajit Pawars revolt, said since 2019 when he first joined the short-lived government led by Devendra Fadnavis to 2023, she has matured a lot with the responsibility of the party.

The Lok Sabha member said she will not mix personal and professional relationships. I can never have a fight with my brother," she said.

I am boring, steady and not impulsiveEmotional relationships and professional work are two different things. I will never mix the two," she said. To a question on the hectic political developments on Sunday, Sule said it was a challenging day like many other days.

On what transpired at the meeting at Ajit Pawars official residence Devgiri in Mumbai on Sunday morning, Sule said what was discussed between her and her brother will remain between them only. The Baramati MP said the party will work with renewed vigour for strengthening the organisation and for the welfare of the state and the country.

Asked whether any disciplinary action would be taken against those who joined the government, she said, Let the story unfold. It has not even been 12 hours." Sule said Ajit Pawar may have different views. We both are mature enough to compartmentalise our lives on personal and professional fronts," she said. Nobody knows how many MLAs are with Ajit Pawar," she said.

Asked if she was talking to any of them, she said, I talk to them every time. Every MLA of NCP is precious. We have love, affection and respect. We have lived as a family," she added.
A day after Ajit Pawars mutiny within the NCP, leading him to become the second deputy chief minister of Maharashtra, party president Sharad Pawar on Monday stressed that how many are with you is not important, whats important is the organisation".

My interest is to reunite the party and its my responsibility. Uniting the party and making it strong is my responsibility. I am heading the party. I am the president of the partyHow many are with you is not important. Important is the organisation," NCP Chief Sharad Pawar said in an exclusive interview with CNN News18. Follow LIVE

Sharad Pawar visited the memorial of his mentor and Maharashtras first chief minister Yashwantrao Chavan in Karad and paid tributes. The 82-year-old leaders visit to the late Chavans memorial on the occasion of Guru Purnima was widely seen as a show of strength by him, a day after his nephew Ajit Pawar led a split in the NCP to become the deputy chief minister in the BJP-backed Eknath Shinde-led government.

Today is Gurupurnima, on this day we all took the blessings of Chavan saheb. What can be better than starting a campaign to get the support of the people of Maharashtra, in the next six months we will get a chance to go to the public," Pawar said.

In an indirect dig at the BJP, Sharad Pawar said Maharashtra has been let down by some people".

Violence was seen in many places in Maharashtra. We have to stand firmly against it. Under the leadership of Uddhav Thackeray, we are serving Maharashtra, but it has been let down by some people not only in Maharashtra but also in some other parts of the country," he said.

The NCP chief further said that governments working in a democratic way" in Delhi, Punjab and Bengal are being attacked".

We tried to stand against all this but unfortunately some of us were left out. But with your support, we will be strong again. Maharashtra will again move forward on the path of progress," he added.

ALSO READ: This is a Psychological Warfare: How BJP Planned Ajit Pawars NCP Split from March to Bust Oppn Unity
The power tussle within the Nationalist Congress Party (NCP) continued to rumble on Monday, with Maharashtra Deputy Chief Minister Ajit Pawar asserting that his faction holds the majority, following the sacking of senior leaders Praful Patel and Sunil Tatkare by his uncle and guru" Sharad Pawar, and the NCP filing a petition seeking the disqualification of the 9 rebel leaders.

Here are the top updates in the Maharashtra Political crisis
Shortly after the Nationalist Congress Party (NCP) filed a petition seeking the disqualification of rebel MLAs and sacked MPs Praful Patel and Sunil Tatkare, new Maharashtra deputy chief minister Ajit Pawar declared on Sunday that leaders of his faction cannot be disqualified due to their majority support.

The recent developments mark the latest in a series of events following a shocking twist in Maharashtra politics after Ajit Pawar joined the Eknath Shinde-BJP government as the deputy chief minister, along with eight other NCP MLAs who were appointed as ministers on Sunday.

Taking a strong step, NCPs discipline committee moved a petition before Maharashtra Assembly Speaker Rahul Narwekar seeking disqualification of Ajit Pawar, Chhagan Bhujbal, Dilip Walse Patil, Hasan Mushrif, Dhananjay Munde, Aditi Tatkare, Dharmarao Atram, Anil Patil and Sanjay Bansode for anti-party activities.

It stated that the actions of the nine leaders call for immediate disqualification as not only are such defections ipso facto seriously damaging to the party, but also that if allowed to continue as members, there is a very real likelihood that they will continue to try and undermine the interests of the party.

NCP chief Sharad Pawar also sacked partys working president Praful Patel and Lok Sabha MP Sunil Tatkare for supporting the rebellion.

The announcement came minutes after Sharad Pawars daughter and NCP leader Supriya Sule demanded immediate action against MPs Sunil Tatkare and Praful Patel who acted in direct contravention of the Party Constitution and Rules, amounting to desertion and disqualification from the party membership. In a letter to Sharad Pawar, she had demanded immediate action and file disqualification petitions under the 10th Schedule of the Constitution of India before the Competent Authority against Members of Parliament- Mr. Praful Patel and Mr. Sunil Tatkare for engaging in anti-party activities.

Maharashtra Politics Crisis: Removed NCP Leader Praful Patel Hits Back

Speaking on the NCPs move to disqualify the MLAs who took oath on Sunday, party leader Praful Patel stated, the right to disqualify rests with the Speaker.

Patel, who was ordered to be removed from party membership, said Ajit Pawar will lead NCP in the Assembly and Sunil Tatkare will replace Jayant Patil as the partys new state president.

Additionally, he announced the appointment of Anil Bhaidas Patil as the chief whip of NCP in the Maharashtra Legislative Assembly.

Maharashtra Politics News: Ajit Pawar Says Rebel MLAs Cant be Disqualified

Meanwhile, Ajit Pawar denounced the disqualification move said his faction cannot be disqualified.

Those who are contemplating the disqualification of the 9 MLAs do not possess the authority to do so. It is our duty to ensure that no harm befalls either the 9 MLAs or the party. He declared, The party symbol and name remain in our possession. We have the numbers and cannot be disqualified.

He expressed confidence over the majority in the party and said, I have full support from NCP MLAs.

Ajit Pawar clarified that his uncle Sharad Pawar holds the position of NCP national president and called him our guru.

He further added that he made the decision to join hands with the BJP-Shiv Sena government in the best interest of Maharashtra.

Under the leadership of Prime Minister Narendra Modi, we will continue to propel Maharashtra forward.

Additionally, party leader Praful Patel announced the appointment of Anil Bhaidas Patil as the chief whip of NCP in the Maharashtra Legislative Assembly.
If you are a cinema buff, chances are that you would have watched Anil Kapoors cult classic Nayak and whistled and cheered on the aam-aadmi-turned-CM hero when he takes on goons in an effort to change the face of his state.

As the panchayat elections draw near in West Bengal, it seems Governor CV Anand Bose is taking a leaf out of Kapoors cine book to ensure law and order in the state  much to the chagrin of the ruling Trinamool Congress.

Sample this: While travelling, Governors OSD Sandip Rajput receives a call wherein he is informed about a man being beaten up by miscreants in South 24 Parganas. Assuring the man that Bose will speak to him, Rajput hands over the phone to the Governor who promises the victim that action will be taken. The Governor instructs the OSD to call the Election Commissioner immediately and informs him of the incident, adding that all details will be shared and the guilty must be punished. As the Governor keeps the phone, he instructs Rajput to provide the victims number and details to the State Election Commissioner.

The scene seems to be a classic ode to Kapoors Nayak wherein the hero  handed over the chief ministers mantle for a day  launches a helpline number to listen to peoples grievances. Accompanied by an assistant with a typewriter, Kapoor ensures on-the-spot justice, suspending errant officials ranging from a corrupt inspector to a doctor who arrived late.

Political experts say the Governors proactive approach is a new phenomenon in Bengal. Boses predecessor Jagdeep Dhankar would criticise the government but never made an attempt to reach out to people.

Boses hands-on approach became visible when he visited violence-hit Bhangar. He launched a peace room and rapid action room where eight phones are constantly taking complaints from violence victims. These complaints are then sent to the State Election Commission.

For Bose, the time of the day does not matter. At 12.38am on Monday, the Governor asked his OSD to call the SEC and give instructions on handling Dinhata violence in which five people were injured. He not only dialled the SP and DM of Cooch Behar but also spoke to the hospital to ensure the injured were taken care of.

Even when he is travelling by train, Bose can be seen taking victims calls and assuring them that he will support them. He often refers cases to the administration and also helps people monetarily.

Speaking to News18, BJP state president Sukanto Majumdar welcomed Boses approach. He said: See, when an administrative head fails, the constitutional head will have to act. This was the work of chief minister Mamata Banerjee. Since she is not doing it, Bose has to do it. He is reaching out to all people, including TMC victims.

The TMC, however, is not impressed. Kunal Ghosh, general secretary of TMC, said: He is doing political tourism. He is not going to people who are TMC victims. Bose is working as cadre of BJP. After panchayat results, he will have to see black flags in all districts. We strongly condemn his activities.

Experts say Bose, through his move, is trying to convey that law and order remains an area of concern in Bengal. They add that a parallel system of governance from the Raj Bhawan is something the state has never seen. Though Banerjees relationship with Dhankar too was strained, Boses attempt to establish a parallel power centre will clearly not be tolerated by the government.

Some critics also questioned if the Governors outreach to the State Election Commissioner would bring about real solutions or was just a pretence.
The cold war between two senior leaders involved in the decision-making of the Karnataka unit of the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) has led to an embarrassing situation in the southern state  a legislative session is being held without a Leader of Opposition.

While former Karnataka chief minister and senior BJP leader BS Yediyurappa has been summoned to Delhi by the party central leadership to help finalize the name for the Leader of Opposition (LoP) in the Karnataka Legislative Assembly, News18 has learnt that another senior top-level office-bearer of the BJP has struck down the names suggested by BSY.

ALSO READ | Will Fight Legally to Rebuild Temples; BJP Top Brass Watching Undisciplined Leaders: Eshwarappa to News18

Leaders familiar with the development said that Yediyurappa, a member of the BJPs parliamentary board, has been in favour of Basavaraj Bommai being named as the Opposition leader and is okay with a Vokkaliga being the state party president.

The biggest challenge for the BJP in naming Bommai as the LoP would be that the BJP will have to keep defending itself on the floor of the assembly as the Congress would target him and the BJP over the alleged corruption during his regime, say leaders.

BJPs National General Secretary (organization) BL Santhosh is learned to be in favour of the partys National General Secretary C T Ravi, a Vokkaliga leader, and three-time MLA from Huballi Dharwad Arvind Bellad as the Leader of Opposition. This combination is not acceptable to BSY, leaders say. The central leadership is keen on naming the state president on priority. Lok Sabha member Nalin Kateel currently holds the position.

The names that have been submitted to the party seniors in Delhi as probable candidates for the post of the Karnataka state president are Shobha Karandlaje (Vokkaliga), C T Ravi (Vokkaliga), Ashwath Narayan (Vokkaliga), Basavanagouda Patil Yatnal (Lingayat), Arvind Bellad (Lingayat), S Sunil Kumar (Idiga), R Ashoka (Vokkaliga), and Araga Jnanendra (Vokkaliga). Former Minister V Somanna, a Lingayat, has also expressed his desire to become the BJP state president.

It is learnt that C T Ravi, Ashwath Narayan and Sunil Kumar have the support of senior BJP leader Santhosh.

The state president will have to work closely with the cadre and unite them as they are very disappointed after the assembly poll results. A strong, dynamic leader who can navigate efficiently between the Centre and state leadership is what the high command is looking for," expressed a senior BJP functionary.

The BJP is faced with the Herculean task of choosing the right name for the state party president as the leader will have to reinvigorate the BJP cadre, restructure the state unit, and also ensure a solid win for the party in the 2024 Lok Sabha polls, all within a span of 7-8 months.

CASTE FACTOR

While choosing the leaders for the posts of LoP in both the assembly and the council as well as the state president, the caste combination plays an important role in Karnataka. The two major communities, Lingayats and Vokkaligas, along with the OBCs, are usually given adequate representation. The central leadership thinks that by making a Lingayat the state party president, the BJP could try and mend bridges with the community which had not wholeheartedly voted in favour of the BJP in the May polls.

Traditionally, the Lingayats have voted in favour of the BJP, but the concerted corruption campaign against Bommai by the Congress and the failure to give Lingayats a separate religion tag caused the community to split their votes in favour of the Congress as well.

Union Minister of State Shobha Karandlaje is also a frontrunner for the post of state party president. Not only does she have a good connection on the ground with the karyakartas, her experience as a minister, both at the Centre and in the state, and having served as state general secretary, gives her an edge," said a senior BJP MLA who did not want to be named.

Former deputy chief minister and Malleswaram MLA Dr C N Ashwath Narayan is keen on taking up the post of the state party president, sources say. He is a strong Vokkaliga leader, but we cannot call him a mass leader who can take the party cadre together and bring in a handsome win, one that the BJP desperately needs at this time to keep itself afloat in South India," said political analyst S A Hemanth.

It is also said that a group of BJP leaders also submitted to the party high command that BSYs son and first-time MLA B Y Vijayendra can also be a suitable choice as he is young and has worked with the party cadre extensively as the vice-president of the Karnataka BJP. He, however, is considered inexperienced by the party leadership," said a BJP leader.

#KarnatakaElectionResults2023 | Basavaraj Bommai speaks to CNN-News18 on BJP's defeat in assembly polls;Says, "I also take the responsibility of the debacle. We will have to do the analysis because there are multiple factors." #KarnatakaResults | @SakshiLitoriya_ pic.twitter.com/mcyJa1Blt7 News18 (@CNNnews18) May 14, 2023

TARGET 28/28 for LS POLLS

News18 has also learned that former BJP minister Kota Srinivas Poojarys name has been finalized as the LoP in the state council.

The high command has made it clear to the Karnataka BJP leaders that the Lingayat and Vokkaliga votes should be in favor of their party in the upcoming elections and ensure that the senior community leaders travel across the state and work towards consolidating support.

Yediyurappa is quite upset with the results of the BJP in the recently concluded assembly polls and has made it clear to the top leadership that if they want a solid win in the 2024 elections, they must accept his choice of candidates as he will ensure that they will work to sweep the 28 Lok Sabha seats for Karnataka.

The party seniors also know that to ensure that the Lingayat votes consolidate in favour of the BJP, only BSY can do so. Having been forced to step down from the post of the CM, BSY was later elevated to the parliamentary board and also given a free hand to choose winnable candidates for the BJP in Karnataka during the May assembly polls. In lieu of the responsibility, BSY had promised to bring the BJP back to power in the state and also in the Lok Sabha Polls.

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The BJP faced major anti-incumbency in the assembly polls and managed to win just 65 seats out of the 224 assembly seats. With the upcoming general elections, the partys central leadership has asked BSY to deliver on the promise of winning 28/28 Lok Sabha seats in Karnataka.

BSY in Karnataka is the most intelligent political strategist. Under his leadership and guidance, our party is hoping to wade through this crisis after the unexpected debacle in the recent polls. We as the party cadre look up to his political acumen to take the party to the glory it deserves, said Ganesh Karnik, a senior BJP leader.
#33MillonesUnidos | El premier Alberto Otarola informo, junto con los titulares de @CENEPRED, @Senamhiperu, @indeciperu e @ImarpePeru, las acciones que se realizan para hacer frente a la actividad del volcan Ubinas y el fenomeno de El Nino global. pic.twitter.com/22uq5rMC5W
If Muslim Personal Law is so integral to practising Islam, why is there no fatwa on Muslims against living in countries that dont allow for such personal laws, Kerala Governor Arif Mohammed Khan asked during an exclusive interview with News18.

Supporting the much-debated proposal to bring in a Uniform Civil Code in the country that would be applicable to all citizens of India regardless of their religion in matters of marriage, divorce, inheritance and adoption among other personal matter, Khan said the objective is not to create uniformity of customs but uniformity of justice.

If Muslim Personal Law is so integral to the practice of Islam, why dont Muslims take a stand and issue a fatwa that no one from the community should live in countries where this law is not implemented? Why does everyone want to run to the US or Europe where there are no personal laws? Muslims can live as Muslims in the US and UK or in Pakistan without personal law, but India is the only exception where they cannot if personal law is not there, he told News18.

Seeking to dismiss propaganda around the debate, the Kerala Governor said: It is not the objective of the law to create uniformity of customs, or uniformity of solemnisation of marriage. The propaganda that is being spread against UCC is that if it comes into effect, Muslim marriage cannot be solemnised through nikah.

This law is concerned with uniformity of justice. We dont want people to follow the same customs or rituals. India, which is aspiring to be a world power, should have uniformity in justice. I want the same justice for the same issue, irrespective of religion, he added.

He further said even Muslim kings who ruled Delhi did not enact a Muslim law.

It was the British who did so. Right from the time the British came here, they asserted that India was not a nation but a conglomeration of communities. I dont think there is much confusion among common Muslims.

Hitting back at the Governor for his comments, Indian Union Muslim League MP ET Muhammed Basheer said the UCC is not something that affects only the Muslim community.

Those who want to portray that it affects only the Muslim community have other interests. There are several communities in this vast country who will be affected. Even now, nobody is being forced to follow the personal laws. If somebody doesnt want to follow, they can choose not to follow it, he said.

Muslim organisations in Kerala had appeared to be staunchly against the Centres push for Uniform Civil Code, with the Samastha Kerala Jem-iyyathul Ulama  a Sunni-Shafii scholarly body  on Sunday indicating its opposition to the proposed law.

Kerala Chief Minister Pinarayi Vijayan, too, has termed the UCC as an electoral agenda" and urged the Centre to withdraw from its move to impose it.

In the wake of the opposition to UCC from various quarters in Kerala, Union Minister of State (MoS) for Parliamentary Affairs V Muraleedharan on Saturday appealed to the Muslim community in Kerala not to fall for the propaganda" mounted by the ruling CPI(M) and others against the UCC.

He claimed that the Centres move to implement the UCC was not with an eye on the general elections scheduled to be held next year.
The people of Rajasthan are fed up with the Ashok Gehlot government as law and order has deteriorated and the state has become a safe haven for criminals, union minister and senior Bharatiya Janata Party leader Piyush Goyal said in an exclusive interview with CNN-News18, where he spoke on a range of issues. Taking a dig at the chief minister, he called it the Geh-loot Sarkar".

The people are dissatisfied as chief minister Gehlot makes hollow promises, he said. Rajasthan needs a double engine government, Goyal added, maintaining that the BJP has a galaxy of leaders in the state who are working unitedly.

In the context of the 2024 Lok Sabha elections, he said, We want to thank the people of India for their trust in the Modi government, and we want to tell the people that a strong government is a need for India.

On whether he would be contesting in the polls, he left the decision up to the BJP. I still have five years left in the Rajya Sabhabut whatever the party will decide, I will follow that, said the minister.

He also spoke on Prime Minister Narendra Modis recent United States visit, during which he addressed a joint session of the US Congress for a historic second time. The kind of response we got from the business community in the US was unparalleled. The Indian diaspora welcomed the PM open-heartedly. This all made the PMs visit historic.

Referring to the Congresss barbs over the visit, he put it down to the partys lack of understanding. For them, its like the grapes are sour, Goyal said.

Issues in the World Trade Organization (WTO) have been ironed out, he said. India has shown to the world that we can be a trusted partner. The PM has proven his ability that he is a good negotiator. Cases were pending for decades but the PM intervened and diplomatically everything was sorted, said the minister.

On the subject of the possibility of India getting a permanent seat in the United Nations Security Council (UNSC), he said most countries are in support of India, but veto power is held by Indias neighbouring country, in reference to China.

He added that China-India ties stand on their own merits. India is a very very high potential country, Goyal said.

On the issue of India and Canada pursuing a possible trade agreement amid New Delhis concerns over the Khalistan issue, Goyal said there has been a lot of progress in talks. We are both democracies and I am sure we can sort out such issues which are extraneous to commerce and bilateral relations," he said.

With the Uniform Civil Code issue simmering, the senior BJP leader expressed his support for it. We are for the UCC. We are waiting to see what comes up. Uttarakhand has already come out with a report. Lets see how the public reacts. People shouldnt jump the gun. This is a directive principle of the ConstitutionPM Modi thinks of all the people of the societyThe people who are wronged, we will make things better for themMany countries have made triple talaq illegalRaja Ram Mohan Roy also faced opposition when he brought reforms. Even Gandhiji also faced issues. PM Modi is like these leaders, Goyal said.

He also took on Congress leader and former Uttarakhand chief minister Harish Rawat over his comments on the UCC issue. This may be a poll game for Harish Rawat but for the BJP this is a national concern. We have concerns for our Muslim sisters. This is only appeasement politics for Congress and other political parties who are opposing it. I hope Muslim leaders and Muslim clerics will also support this issue, he said.

Reacting to the controversy around the Chidambaram temple in Tamil Nadu, the minister said experts are looking into it, adding that the Modi government doesnt discriminate. Laws should be the same for everyoneIts unfortunate that the government in Tamil Nadu is anti-Hindu. They only pretend to be Hindu, he said.

Regarding the efforts towards opposition unity to take on the ruling Bharatiya Janata Party in next years parliamentary polls, Goyal said the BJP never aims small. We are working hard in the country. We will do well. We have support from the whole country and from every sectionI want to say that the DMK and SP will not get a single seat beyond their states. I hope they will lose their voting percentage in their states also. This is an unethical alliance, a corrupt alliance, he said.

Asked about the Congresss apparent revival, Goyal said, Everyone has the right to dream.
Less than a week after Prime Minister Narendra Modi strongly pitched for a Uniform Civil Code (UCC) in the country, a high-level Parliamentary standing committee will hold a meeting on it on Monday. Headed by BJP Rajya Sabha MP Sushil Modi, the Rajya Sabha Parliamentary standing committee on personnel, public grievances, law and justice will deliberate on the proposal at 3 p.m.

Sushil Modi had earlier informed that the panel will seek the views of the stakeholders on the matter.

Representatives from the department of legal affairs, legislative department as well as the Law Commission of India have been invited for the meeting.

The UCC proposes to formulate and implement personal laws of citizens which apply to all citizens equally regardless of their religion, sex, gender and sexual orientation.

Currently, the personal laws of various communities are governed by their religious scriptures. The Parliamentary panel has called for a discussion on the subject even as the 22nd Law Commission had last month begun examining the uniform civil code.

On June 14, the 22nd Law Commission had solicited the views and ideas of the public and recognised religious organisations to examine the uniform civil code. The common public can send its views on the matter till July 14 to the commission.
Prime Minister Narendra Modi on Monday chaired a meeting of the Union Council of Ministers at the newly built convention centre at the Pragati Maidan and asked his ministers to ensure last mile" delivery of BJPs welfare schemes.

The meeting that went on for nearly five hours and was fruitful" as the ministers exchanged views on diverse policy related issues," PM Modi said in a Tweet.

According to News18 sources, PM Modi spoke for about 20 minutes in an inspiring speech."

Everyone is speaking about the current time or the next year but our government must work with the vision of the next 25 years that is 2047, sources, privy to the details of the meeting have told us.

Modi further said that, there are many welfare schemes of the Modi government which have beneficiaries across the country, and those must continued till the last beneficiary is able to get access to these benefits."

A fruitful meeting with the Council of Ministers, where we exchanged views on diverse policy related issues. pic.twitter.com/NgdEN9FNEX Narendra Modi (@narendramodi) July 3, 2023

Only launching the schemes and its implementation is not enough. Ministers must reach out and ensure last mile delivery of them from the district level, to the state and to the national one," Modi added.

These programme, Modi added, should be talked about at the bottom most level- of party workers and it should be spoken with citizens.

PM Modi highlighted that unlike other parties and governments of the past, his team should not be shortsighted.

While many political parties are focused on 2024, our government is working for India in the next 25 years," he said.

The last 50 years have been very important in Indias democracy and history and have a big story to tell about Indias growth. Equals stress must be given and work must be done on a mission mode to ensure a glorious India in the coming 50 years, PM further highlighted.

PM also stressed that the voters today and in the coming times are smart. These voters would be well educated about their rights and privileges and would be demanding from any government. Therefore, it would be important for any government including his to live up to the expectations. The PM again stressed on the need to adopt technology at a fast pace.

Apart from this, the PM also told his ministers to focus on capital investment in various departments for Indias financial growth impetus.

Several presentations were made in the meetinh including one by Indias Foreign Secretary on the recent visit of PM Modi to the United States and Egypt.

It hailed this as a massive step for Brand India including the partnerships it forged during Modis visit,

Apart from this, a presentation was also made by the Defence Secretary and the Department of Economic Affairs in the Finance Ministry.

The meeting was attended by cabinet ministers, ministers of state and ministers with independent charge and several officials in the government.

Union ministers Nitin Gadkari, Amit Shah, Rajnath Singh, S Jaishankar, Piyush Goyal also were present.

Senior officials from the Cabinet Secretariat, Union Home Secretary and senior officials of the PMO were among other attendees
The split in the Nationalist Congress Party (NCP) on July 2 was not an overnight decision but an effort that started way back in March. News18 has spoken to multiple sources in the BJP, all of whom point out that talks with Ajit Pawar was a long-drawn work in progress that precedes even before March this year. After a meeting on June 4 and one in mid-June that was set to take place but did not happen, the final approval came on June 29, indicate sources.

Theres a Chronology

Several sources indicate that backdoor hush-hush talks with Ajit Pawar gained traction somewhere in March. In mid-April, there was a buzz that started indicating Ajit was secretly in talks with Amit Shah. Shah visited Mumbai on April 15 evening and Maharashtra politics was abuzz with a supposed meeting between the two. So much so, Ajit was confronted by his allies at that time, and on the next day  April 16  he had to publicly rubbish those allegations, it is learnt.

At a rally in Nagpur, Pawar Junior said, Where did I meet him (Amit Shah) and where? This speculation (of me meeting Amit Shah) is totally baseless. He even asked the media not to mislead people by spreading such news. By that time, several NCP MLAs were in touch with the BJP.

Sources in the know suggest, by the end of May, Eknath Shinde, who was kept informed all along, was formally brought in to discuss a Maharashtra cabinet expansion, in view of backdoor talks with Ajit Pawar reaching a desirable point. On June 4, Shinde and Fadnavis were asked to fly to Delhi where they met Amit Shah. Both Shinde and Fadnavis were in different cities  Pune and Nagpur respectively, from where they took off for Delhi suddenly.

Shinde played down the meeting, saying the Konkan water issue and the Marathwada grid project were discussed. We keep coming to Delhi. There are several issues of the state that were to be discussed  be it development projects, issue of Marathwada water grid project, Konkans water issue and farmers distress, Shinde said.

BJP was just getting started for the final push. On June 17, Shinde alone was scheduled to make another Delhi trip where his sole appointment would be Shah. That closed-door one-to-one meeting was deferred.

And then came the June 29 meeting, a day before Shindes one-year anniversary as Maharashtra Chief Minister. All sources point out that it was in this meeting, Shah spelled out the exact details to both Shinde and Fadnavis  both of whom came to Delhi for the meeting, which ended late that night.

Final Stamp of Approval on June 29

A BJP source told News 18, On June 29, the meeting between Shah, Shinde and Fadnavis not only a decision to fight the upcoming civic body election together was taken but Shinde reiterated the growing dissent within Shiv Sena about MPs wanting to be accommodated in the Union cabinet. Shinde was asked to wait. But it was actually the night when the official approval came from BJP to go ahead with Ajit Pawars induction.

Another BJP leader from Maharashtra told News18, on conditions of anonymity, It was asked to be under wraps. Even I didnt know about a final decision being taken on the 29th. I spoke to Fadnavis today. Both of them (Shinde and Fadnavis) were asked to stick with fighting elections as the sole agenda while talking to the press.

Sources say Shinde was formally brought on board since May-end about NCP joining the Maharashtra government.

With 29 NCP heavyweights such as Chhagan Bhujbal, Dilip Walse-Patil, Dhananjay Munde, and Praful Patel behind him, Ajit Pawar brings a sense of invincibility to the BJP-Sena government in Maharashtra.

The timing of the revolt is also crucial as it has left the Opposition in Unity in tatters, forcing it to postpone its meet just ahead of the Monsoon Session of Parliament to July 17-18 in Bengaluru where all those parties who attended the Patna session have been invited by the Congress. Knowing Amit Bhai (Amit Shah), I would not be surprised if the date of Ajit Pawars second rebellion was deliberately chosen just ahead of the oppositions second meeting. You have to understand it deals a blow to any idea of opposition to Narendra Modi ahead of the 2024 Lok Sabha elections. This is psychological warfare, if I may say so, said a BJP general secretary without wishing to be named.
The Uttar Pradesh State Road Transport Corporation (UPSRTC) has dismissed a bus conductor and driver after an uproar over a viral video on social media. The video featured the conductor in a compromising position with a young woman inside the moving bus. The passengers on board caught him in the act after observing his suspicious activity. The incident occurred on the night of June 22 on a roadways bus belonging to the Hathras Depot, which was travelling towards Lucknow, as reported by Dainik Jagran. The video of the incident showed a passenger approaching the seat occupied by the conductor and the woman, who were under a blanket. The conductor became enraged and attempted to snatch the mobile phones of the passenger, leading to a heated argument. Other passengers also voiced their objections to the conductors behaviour.

Both individuals were ad hoc employees of UPSRTC. They have been immediately dismissed from their positions, and a departmental inquiry has been initiated, stated Satyendra Verma, Regional Manager (Aligarh), UPSRTC. The official further disclosed that the conductor, who was on duty at the time, had allegedly moved to a seat occupied by a female passenger.

During the confrontation, one passenger revealed that this misconduct had been ongoing for over an hour, and although they had intended to file a complaint in Lucknow, they decided to intervene earlier due to the severity of the situation.

The video, which has now gone viral, was shared on Twitter. The accompanying caption read, A man had sex with a woman in a moving bus in Hathras. Dont these people care about these things when there are small children and elderly people in the bus? @Uppolice is requested to take immediate action against this individual.

The investigation into the incident is currently ongoing to determine further actions.

Public displays of affection in India are not clearly defined within a specific realm, but most cases pertaining to this matter fall under Section 294 of the Indian Penal Code (IPC). According to this section, certain criteria must be met to consider an act offensive: (a) It must be obscene and occur in a public place, (b) the act, song, ballad, or words involved must be deemed obscene, and (c) the accused persons actions must cause annoyance to others. Those found guilty can face imprisonment of up to three months, along with a fine or both, as per the law.
The landscaping squad of Mocha, Wynonna, Nelson and Beckham yank out weeds at a Texas park. They dont carry chainsaws or use herbicides. They are goats, and this environmentally friendly initiative is, for them, merely lunch. The hungry goats  who bleat to their master Kyle Carr  are part of a team of 150 ruminants pruning the brush on a 6.5 acre (2.6 hectare) section of San Antonios sprawling Brackenridge Park Conservancy, in the southwestern US. And they are part of a growing trend: as officials and residents across the country seek out more ecological ways to care for the land, the goats are providing a carbon-free  and surprisingly effective  solution.

It will take them about two weeks to clear the area of Brackenridge Park Conservancy, whose Twitter account enthusiastically promotes their efforts to human visitors.

They are removing plants such as ligustrum, a highly invasive shrub that can take water and nutrients away from the older oak trees the park seeks to protect, Carr tells AFP.

The 36-year-old and his wife Carolyn own the Texas franchise of Rent-a-Ruminant, which operates in several states.

Goats are natural landscapers, but do need training  they are accustomed to natural feed, and need to learn to stay with the group and to respect the protective electric fence keeping predators away from the area in which they work.

With that basic training in place, however, they are astonishingly efficient. For example, their digestive tracts sterilize the seeds they eat. Theyre not going to propagate the same kind of plant species that youre trying to get rid of," Carr explains.

Its much more eco-friendly to have goats in here than big machines or herbicides," agrees Charlotte Mitchell, a park board member.

The area is so close to the San Antonio river that using poison in any way would be especially unsafe, she adds.

Besides, these are way more fun to watch"  especially for families with young children, Mitchell says.

I run through here often and I walk my dog every few days. Its very brushy around here Im pretty happy to see that these guys are here doing their job," comments 47-year-old San Antonio resident Aaron Rodriguez.

As a bonus, nimble-footed goats can often reach steep or tight areas that humans and machinery cant access, Carr says.

Weve worked with some cities that have had some real injuries, and even fatalities, where machines have kind of rolled over on those steep slopes," he explains.

The goats also adore poison ivy. It sounds crazy," Carr admits  but as a method of protecting humans, it works.

The goats get water breaks and sick days, and when they reach the age of 11 they can go on what Carr calls a retirement program" (they can live up to 15 years).

Our company has a no-slaughter policy, because, you know, we work with these guys all the time," he explains.

So, when the time comes, we will take them to a ranch And they basically get to raise the next generation of goats."
With its white marble foyer and lavish chandeliers, the 12-storey tower could be mistaken for one of Hong Kongs newest hotels, but it offers a longer stay: a final resting place for thousands in one of the worlds most crowded cities. Hong Kongs 7.3 million residents share some of the most densely populated neighbourhoods on earth, and in the past, mourning families had to wait years to secure a spot for their loved ones ashes.

The Shan Sum columbarium opened last month with plans to eventually offer 23,000 niches for funeral urns, part of the governments decade-long effort to bring in private companies to ease pressure on the deathcare sector.

That policy is now paying off after the citys ageing population pushed death rates above government urn space capacity in the mid-2010s, creating a dire shortage.

The sleek, modern building is the work of German architect Ulrich Kirchhoff, 52, who told AFP he tried to blend elements of nature into a high-density space to create a neighbourhood village feel".

Its an apartment building for the dead  It feels more like a close-knit neighbourhood," he said.

Kirchhoff said his design was inspired by traditional Chinese graveyards, which are often perched on mountainsides. His columbarium carried over those undulating lines, greenery and textures of hewn rock.

Ashes are stored in ornate compartments, some as small as 26 by 34 centimetres (10 by 13 inches), that line the walls of air-conditioned chambers.

Kirchhoff said he designed rooms on each floor to provide intimacy, in contrast to the cramped confines of public columbariums, which he said feel like being in a warehouse".

How do we maintain quality of life and dignity for the people in this high density?" he asked.

Is it just a shoebox or is there something else?"

Urn space shortage

Much like apartments in Hong Kong, rent for the units is not cheap, putting them beyond the reach of most people.

A basic two-person option at Shan Sum is sold for $58,000 while the top-tier package, meant for a whole family, costs nearly $3 million.

The median monthly household income in Hong Kong is currently around $3,800, according to government data.

Places like Shan Sum were created in response to Hong Kongs shortage of urn spaces a decade ago.

At the time, cremated remains were often stored in drawers at funeral parlours for years while waiting for spots to open up, or were housed in unlicensed columbariums in temples or refurbished factory buildings.

Historian Chau Chi-fung, who wrote a book on Hong Kongs funeral practices, said the seeds of the crisis were sown decades prior by the British colonial administration, before the city was handed over to China in 1997.

Laws at the time were strict about how to treat dead bodies, but once they were turned to ash, the government did not have a comprehensive policy for them," he told AFP.

The ethnic Chinese population in Hong Kong historically preferred burials, but the government popularised cremation in the 1960s  a shift seen in dense urban centres across Asia.

Now around 95 percent of Hong Kongs dead are cremated each year, which Chau attributed to changing social mores.

The government estimates that deaths will increase by 14 percent to 61,100 per year by 2031.

Officials say that the city is prepared for the uptick, with about 25 percent vacancy among the current 425,000 public columbarium spots and more public and private supply in the pipeline.

The situation has improved compared to a few years ago The problem has been eased, but not solved," Chau said.

Ocean view

Wing Wong, 43, last year laid her father to rest at Tsang Tsui Columbarium, a sprawling 4,800-square-metre complex in Hong Kongs northwestern corner that began service in 2021.

She said her experience was a far cry from the horror stories seen in headlines years ago.

Losing a loved one was painful enough. It would be a torment for family members if they couldnt find a place for the ashes, with no idea how long they needed to wait," she said.

Wong said her family chose the government-run location for its good feng shui, adding that its affordable pricing meant they had no incentive to consider private options.

My father once said he wanted an ocean view His (niche) was angled towards the sea, and we felt it was what he would have wanted."
Do you remember the famous fable of Rip Van Winkle written by celebrated author Washington Irving? It told the story of a man who slept continuously for 20 years, waking up to a very different world. While this work is fictional, would you believe it if we told you that there is a region in Kazakhstan where the common men all take a leaf out of the book by Rip Van Winkle?

Yes, people in the villages of Kalachi and Krasnogorsk in Kazakhstan have inhabitants who fall asleep just like that amid daily activities and sometimes do not wake up for days at a stretch. And when they wake up, they often complain of temporary memory loss, weakness and headaches.

The issue came to the fore in 2013 when more than 140 people in the two villages, having a total population of 810, fell asleep right in the middle of work, with some not waking up for a week straight. Children would fall asleep at school due to the illness, which would impact both young and old. Some people described having nightmares. Rudolf Boyarinos and Misha Plyukhin, two local kids, reported seeing winged horses, snakes in their beds and worms devouring their hands local newspaper Komsomolskaya Pravda.

While this sounds like a magical spell or a scene ripped off A Nightmare on Elm Street franchise, there is, in fact, a rational explanation to this, discovered by scientists a few years back. Many believed that the adjacent uranium mines, which were abandoned after the Soviet Union fell and left Krasnogorsk with only 130 of its 6,500 former population, were to blame.

In 2015, the late Berdibek Saparbaev, Kazakhstans then-deputy prime minister, confirmed that the uranium mines are the root of the problem. Researchers concluded that it was brought on by elevated levels of carbon monoxide and hydrocarbons in the air after examining the findings of all the residents medical examinations.

Since 2015, large-scale evacuations of the villages of Kalachi and Krasnogorsk have been organised by the government of Kazakhstan but that was not before the two villages jointly came to be known as the Sleepy Hollow of the world.
Venezuelans enthusiasm for beauty pageants is unparalleled, and Miss Venezuela  the crown jewel of them all  may be the only event able to unite the deeply divided country. Once a year, class, race and politics are put aside as the South American nation tunes in to see who will represent Venezuela on the global stage. Behind the cheers and claps for the women vying for the coveted title is a deeply conservative society with little to no tolerance for any defiance of heteronormative standards. Sofia Salomon is ready to challenge that.

The influencer and Instagram model has applied to take part in this years Miss Venezuela contest. If accepted, she will be the first transgender woman to participate.

I think it is a great platform to bring visibility to my community, echo the positive things, and show people the reality of transgender women, Salomon said.

With no end in sight for the protracted crisis that has pushed millions of Venezuelans into poverty and 7.3 million to migrate, LGBTQ+ rights are hardly a dinner table topic for families or a dominant campaign issue in the race to upend President Nicolas Maduro in 2024.

Sundays planned Pride march in the capital, Caracas, may draw hundreds of people, but there is almost no acceptance of the LGBTQ+ community nationwide, unlike in some other Latin American nations with conservative, Roman Catholic-based values. And Venezuelans who often idolize the European lifestyle have largely resisted that continents wide inclusion of the community and its rejection of homophobia and transphobia.

Venezuelas top court in May repealed a law that punished consensual same-sex conduct by military personnel, but has been holding off for seven years in deciding a case that aims to give same-sex couples the right to marry.

It has also not ruled in Tamara Adrians case, which she filed with the court in 2004. The transgender woman wants to legally change her name and sex on her birth certificate and in public records. The government argues that the law already allows for that, but Adrian and the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights, which examines human rights violations in the hemisphere, disagree. She has requested hearings and filed over 30 briefs in her case with no response.

Nonetheless, Adrian became the countrys first transgender lawmaker in 2015, representing a district in Caracas, and in June this year, she entered the oppositions presidential primary race, hoping to oust Maduro.

In order to see changes in social matters, the state must implement public policies, and in that sense there is undoubtedly a penetration of changes (in other Latin American countries) that you cannot see in Venezuela, Adrian said. There is often not even an awareness here that a certain phrase is racist or homophobic or transphobic or misogynistic.

Last year, Salomon finished in the top six of Miss International Queen, the worlds largest beauty pageant for transgender women. During the event, she mentioned the law Adrian is fighting.

I would like that law changed so transgender women could be accepted with the name they feel more safe, she said.

A transgender woman was selected in February to participate in Puerto Rico Miss Universe  a first for the Caribbean island  bolstering Salomons hopes for her entry in the Venezuela contest. She said her parents, siblings and boyfriend support her decision to apply, and the comments and emojis on her Instagram posts are overwhelmingly positive.

The Miss Venezuela organization did not respond to a request for comment from The Associated Press.

Miss Venezuela winners go on to compete in Miss Universe, and the global contest opened to transgender competitors in 2012. That decision prompted Osmel Sousa, then head of Miss Venezuela, to declare that the humble, Christian Venezuelan public will never accept that position.

Marcia Ochoa, an associate professor of feminist, critical race and ethnic studies at UC Santa Cruz, applauded Salomons efforts.

She is doing something that makes a lot of sense for a Venezuelan person, Ochoa said, insisting that Venezuelan culture has space for an idiosyncratic gender identity: miss. You can see somebody and say whether or not they are in beauty pageants because they look like a beauty pageant contestant. You can say: es toda una miss. The phrase encapsulates a truly Venezuelan compliment, that a perfectly put together woman is absolutely a Miss (Venezuela).

In 2018, Angela Ponce from Spain became the first transgender woman to participate in Miss Universe, and last year, a Thai business tycoon and transgender woman bought the Miss Universe Organization  once partly owned by former U.S. President Donald Trump  for $20 million.

Miss Venezuela winners earn instant fame that can lead to positions of influence. The 1981 Miss Universe winner, Irene Saez, went on to become mayor of a municipality of Caracas, and she ran for president in 1998, losing to Hugo Chavez.

Caracas resident Josefina Mejia has watched Miss Venezuela for decades with family and friends. They pick favorites and have a friendly competition over whose pick will win. Mejia, 65, said she does not oppose Salomons efforts but would rather see transgender women stay out of the contest.

This is a conservative society, and sometimes we judge people even though we shouldnt be judging, Mejia said. I would like a separate contest for that gender.

The activist-run Venezuelan Observatory of LGBTIQ+ Violence reported at least 97 cases of violence against members of the community nationwide in 2022, including 11 homicides. The figures are likely an undercount because so many cases are not reported. A formal complaint was filed with authorities in at least 10% of the cases.

Salomon, who is interested in a career in real estate, received a confirmation email that the Miss Venezuela organization had received her application but she still doesnt know if she has been accepted. She said she thinks her modeling and pageant experience gives her an advantage over other contestants.

I am of the opinion that experience is not improvised, Salomon said. That is why people trust that I will make history in the country.
Nowhere in the world has a higher rate of unsafe abortions or unintended pregnancies than sub-Saharan Africa, where women often face scorn for becoming pregnant before marriage.

Efforts to legalize and make abortions safer in Africa were shaken when the U.S. Supreme Court ended the national right to an abortion a year ago. Within days, Sierra Leone President Julius Maada Bio declared that his government would decriminalize abortion at a time when sexual and reproductive health rights for women are being either overturned or threatened.

But some U.S.-based organizations active in Africa were emboldened, especially in largely Christian countries. One is Family Watch International, a nonprofit Christian conservative organization whose anti-LGBTQ+ stance, anti-abortion activities and intense focus on Africa led to its designation as a hate group by the Southern Poverty Law Center.

In April, Family Watch International helped to develop a family values and sovereignty meeting at Ugandas presidential offices with lawmakers and other delegates from more than 20 African countries. The organizations Africa director also is advocating for his country, Ethiopia, to revoke a 2005 law that expanded abortion access and dramatically reduced maternal mortality.

Its kind of like the gloves are off, Sarah Shaw, head of advocacy at U.K.-based MSI Reproductive Choices, an international provider of reproductive health services, said in an interview.

In a September speech to the African Bar Association, the president of Family Watch International, Sharon Slater, alleged that donor countries were attempting a sexual social recolonization of Africa" by smuggling in legal abortion along with sex education and LGBTQ+ rights.

Sexual rights activists know if they can capture the hearts and minds of Africas children and indoctrinate and sexualize them, they will capture the future lawyers, teachers, judges, politicians, presidents, vice presidents and more, and thus they will capture the very heart of Africa, Slater claimed.

Her speech in Malawi was attended by the countrys president, a former leader of the Pentecostal Assemblies of God movement.

After lobbying lawmakers in the southern African nation not to consider a bill that would have allowed abortion under certain circumstances, the U.S.-based Catholic group Human Life International told its supporters in March that thanks to you, Malawi is safe from legal abortion."

The African Union two decades ago recognized the right to abortion in cases of rape and incest or when the life of the mother or fetus is endangered or the mothers mental or physical health is at risk.

A growing number of countries have relatively liberal abortion laws. Benin legalized abortion less than a year before the U.S. Supreme Court ruling, though Nigeria, Africas most populous country, allows abortion only to save the mothers life.

African experts say events in the U.S. could reverse gains in the availability of safe abortion procedures, especially since the U.S. government is the largest global donor of international reproductive health assistance.

Such changes could deeply affect the lives of women of reproductive age in sub-Saharan Africa, where 77% of abortions, or more than 6 million a year, are estimated to be unsafe, the Guttmacher Institute, an international research and policy organization with headquarters in New York, said in 2020.

Unsafe abortions cause 16% of maternal deaths in the World Health Organizations largely sub-Saharan Africa region, the U.N. agency said last year, with variations across countries depending on the level of restrictions to abortion.

Abortion opponents are especially outspoken in East Africa, where countries publicly wrestle with the issue of teen pregnancy but offer little sex education and access to legal abortions in limited circumstances.

A sexual and reproductive health bill introduced in 2021 is still under debate by the East African Community, whose member nations include Burundi, Congo, Kenya, Rwanda, South Sudan, Tanzania and Uganda. Some Catholic and other conservative organizations have criticized a section that would allow a woman to terminate a pregnancy in cases of rape, incest or endangered health.

Earlier this year, the Protestant Council of Rwanda directed all health facilities run by its member institutions to stop performing abortions, although Rwandan law permits them in certain cases.

We are having a very strong anti-rights narrative, Brenda Otieno, research coordinator with the Kisumu Medical and Education Trust in Kenya, said during a Tuesday webinar about the global effects of the U.S. Supreme Court decision.

Abortion providers are often harassed, Otieno said, and a year ago, Kenya passed a national reproductive health policy that paid little attention to safe abortion care.

In Uganda, one rights watchdog said the issue of abortion access is taboo, with advocates facing discrimination, even as some women resort to self-mutilation.

Weve seen a number of people losing their lives, said Twaibu Wamala, executive director of the Uganda Harm Reduction Network.

Abortion is illegal in Uganda, although it can be legally carried out by a licensed medical worker who determines that a pregnancy threatens the mothers life. But many doctors, fearing medical complications, only offer post-abortion care that may be too expensive or too late to save a womans life.

In Ethiopia, civil society workers have asked the government to investigate what they fear is a new trend: fewer public health facilities providing abortions and more women seeking care after unsafe abortions.

Groups that oppose abortion in Africas second most populous nation are mostly incited by outsiders and consider the Supreme Court decision as fuel for them, Abebe Sibru, the Ethiopia director for MSI Reproductive Choices, said.
President Joe Biden will head to Europe at weeks end for a three-country trip intended to bolster the international coalition against Russian aggression as the war in Ukraine extends well into its second year.

The main focus of Bidens five-day visit will be the annual NATO summit, held this year in Vilnius, Lithuania. Also planned are stops in Helsinki, Finland, to commemorate the Nordic countrys entrance into the 31-nation military alliance in April, and Britain, the White House announced Sunday.

Biden will begin his trip next Sunday in London, and will meet with King Charles III at Windsor Castle the next day, according to Buckingham Palace.

The president did not attend Charless coronation in May, sending first lady Jill Biden to represent the United States. In June, Biden hosted British Prime Minister Rishi Sunak at the White House, where the two leaders pledged continued cooperation in defending Ukraine.

Sunaks office said he looked forward to welcoming Biden and that their meeting would build on earlier visits.

The NATO meeting comes at the latest critical point in the war. Ukraines president, Volodymyr Zelenskyy, says counteroffensive and defensive actions against Russian forces are underway as Ukrainian troops start to recapture territory in the southeastern part of the country, according to its military leaders.

Jens Stoltenberg, NATOs secretary-general, visited the White House on June 13, where he and Biden made clear that the Western alliance was united in defending Ukraine. Biden said during that meeting that he and other NATO leaders will work to ensure that each member country spends the requisite 2% of its gross domestic product on defense.

The NATO allies have never been more united. We both worked like hell to make sure that happened. And so far, so good, Biden said as he sat alongside Stoltenberg, who is expected to extend his term for another year. We see our joint strength in modernizing the relationship within NATO, as well as providing assistance to defense capabilities to Ukraine.

When Finland joined NATO in April, it effectively doubled Russias border with the worlds biggest security alliance. Biden has highlighted the strengthened NATO alliance as a signal of Moscows declining influence.

Sweden is also seeking entry into NATO, although alliance members Turkey and Hungary have yet to endorse the move. Biden will host Swedens prime minister, Ulf Kristersson, at the White House on Wednesday in a show of solidarity as the United States presses for the Nordic nations entry into NATO.

Turkeys president, Recep Tayyip Erdogan, has said Sweden is too lax on terrorist groups and security threats. Stoltenberg has said Sweden has met its obligations for membership through toughening anti-terrorist laws and other measures.

Hungarys reasons for opposing Sweden have been less defined, complaining about Swedens criticism of democratic backsliding and the erosion of rule of law. Hungary, while providing humanitarian aid to Ukraine, has also sought to balance its relations between NATO and Russia. Budapest is heavily reliant on Russia for its energy requirements.

All nations in the alliance have to ratify the entry of a new member country.

The White House has stressed that Sweden has fulfilled its commitments to join NATO and has urged that it join the alliance expeditiously.
Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan on Monday blamed Frances nationwide riots on institutional racism" and the countrys colonial past.

The French government has been battling riots and looting in Paris and across the country since 17-year-old Nahel M.  a French citizen of Algerian background  was shot dead by a police officer during a traffic stop last Tuesday.

Erdogan has portrayed himself as a defender of the worlds Muslims since leading his Islamic-rooted party to power in Turkey two decades ago.

He blamed the French unrest Monday on Islamophobia" that he linked to Frances colonial past.

In countries known for their colonial past, cultural racism has turned into institutional racism," he said on television, after chairing a weekly cabinet meeting.

At the root of the events that started in France is the social architecture built by this mentality. Most of the immigrants who are condemned to live in ghettos, who are systematically oppressed, are Muslims."

He also condemned the widespread looting that has accompanied the unrest.

The streets cannot be used to seek justice. However, it is clear the authorities should also learn from the social explosion," Erdogan said.
India has raised concerns over the threat to its diplomats in Canada ahead of the proposed Khalistan Freedom rally on July 8, according to top intelligence sources.

Intelligence sources said it was the responsibility of the Canadian government to protect the diplomats. We are also raising the issues at the right foraThe proposed rally in Toronto is nothing but a display parade of designated terrorists. These protests are supported by Pakistans ISI to spread disharmony in society, sources said.

ALSO READ | On Depiction of Indira Gandhis Killing in Canada Parade, Jaishankar Says Not Good For Relation With India

On the names of Indian diplomats in Khalistani posters in Canada, External Affairs Minister Dr S Jaishankar told ANI: We have requested our partner countries like Canada, the United States, the UK and Australia not to give space to the Khalistanis. This will affect our relations. We will raise this poster issue with the government of these countries"

Sources said the rally aims to throw light on the Khalistan movement, Operation Blue Star and Bhindrawala for the generation born after 1984. They have raised a large terror force within Canada to execute killings, bomb blasts and non-state activities for their vested interests. Diplomatic channels have failed time to time, sources said.

#WATCH | On names of Indian diplomats in Khalistani posters in Canada, EAM Dr S Jaishankar, says "We have requested our partner countries like Canada, the United States, the UK and Australia not to give space to the Khalistanis. This will affect our relations. We will raise this pic.twitter.com/U4IQBzZ35X ANI (@ANI) July 3, 2023

RECENT DEVELOPMENTS

A tableau celebrating" the assassination of Indira Gandhi by her Sikh bodyguards went around the city of Brampton in Canada on June 4. This parade was organised by Khalistani groups on the 39th anniversary of Operation Blue Star. The Government of India disapproved of it strongly and called it vote bank politics.

The Khalistani elements in Canada are just not restricted to protest, but are indulging in physical assaults and violence. Many cases will be investigated by the Indian federal agencies.

Khalistani wanted accused in Canada are masterminding killings and terror activities in Punjab and other parts of India. They are executing these tasks with the help of gangsters in jails of Delhi and Punjab.

#WATCH | EAM Dr S Jaishankar speaks on reports of late PM Indira Gandhi's assassination celebration in Canada; says, "I think there is a bigger issue involvedFrankly, we are at a loss to understand other than the requirements of vote bank politics why anybody would do pic.twitter.com/VsNP82T1Fb ANI (@ANI) June 8, 2023

WANTED ACCUSED IN CANADA

A number of letters rogatory (LR) and deportation requests are awaiting response from the Canadian authorities, they said. Several requests from the National Investigation Agency (NIA) for the extradition and deportation of terrorist operatives and pro-Khalistan elements are pending with Canadian government. These accused are wanted in cases of terrorism, murder and other related offences.

Lakhbir Singh Sandhu alias Landa: The agency has announced a reward of Rs 15 lakh on Babbar Khalsa International (BKI) member, originally from Tarn Taran in Punjab. A close associate of Landa was arrested for allegedly carrying out the Rocket-Propelled Grenade attack on the Punjab police intelligence headquarters in Mohali in May 2022. Deepak was involved in multiple cases of violent terrorist and criminal offences, including killings.

The agency has announced a reward of Rs 15 lakh on Babbar Khalsa International (BKI) member, originally from Tarn Taran in Punjab. A close associate of Landa was arrested for allegedly carrying out the Rocket-Propelled Grenade attack on the Punjab police intelligence headquarters in Mohali in May 2022. Deepak was involved in multiple cases of violent terrorist and criminal offences, including killings. Arshdeep Singh Gill alias Arsh Dalla: Landas aide, Dalla is also based in Canada and is linked to the Khalistan Tiger Force (KTF). Dalla was designated as an individual terrorist by the Ministry of Home Affairs on January 9, 2023.

Landas aide, Dalla is also based in Canada and is linked to the Khalistan Tiger Force (KTF). Dalla was designated as an individual terrorist by the Ministry of Home Affairs on January 9, 2023. Satwinderjeet Singh alias Goldy Brar: He is an accused in the killing of Pradeep Kumar, a Dera Sacha Sauda follower, in Faridkot in November 2022. He also works for Landa.

He is an accused in the killing of Pradeep Kumar, a Dera Sacha Sauda follower, in Faridkot in November 2022. He also works for Landa. Gurpatwant Singh Pannu: No action has been taken against SFJs United States-based chief Pannu who made attempts to create communal disharmony using social media platforms. He was booked by the NIA in December 2020, along with Nijjar and Paramjit Singh Pamma, who lives in the United Kingdom.

No action has been taken against SFJs United States-based chief Pannu who made attempts to create communal disharmony using social media platforms. He was booked by the NIA in December 2020, along with Nijjar and Paramjit Singh Pamma, who lives in the United Kingdom. Hardeep Singh Nijjar: A designated terrorist with connections to the banned Sikhs For Justice (SFJ) was gunned down by two assailants in Surrey on June 18.

In February, the NIA arrested six persons related to terrorist-gangster-drug smuggler nexus cases, including Dallas associate Lucky Khokhar, a resident of Bhatinda (Punjab). He had provided arms and ammunition to Dallas men in Punjab. The weapons were used to kill one Paramjit Singh in Jagraon (Punjab) in January.

WHAT EAM SAID RECENTLY

In response to a statement by the Canadian National Security Adviser, who had described India as one of the top sources of foreign interference in Canada, Jaishankar had said that if there was anyone who had a complaint, it was India".

ALSO READ | Canada Seems to be Driven by Vote-bank Politics in Responding to Khalistani Issue, Says Jaishankar

Responding to the tableau on Indira Gandhis assassination, he had said, For us, how Canada has dealt with the Khalistani issue has been a long-standing concern. Because very frankly, they seem to be driven by vote-bank politics. Their responses have all been, to the best of my understanding, actually constrained by what they regard as vote bank compulsions.

We made it very clear and I have done so in public, which is that if there are activities which are permitted from Canada that impinge on our sovereignty, territorial integrity and security, we will have to respond," Jaishankar had said.
The Israeli army said Monday it was striking targets in the occupied West Bank city of Jenin in an extensive counterterrorism effort" that the Palestinian health ministry said had killed one resident and injured another.

One citizen was killed and another seriously injured in the occupation (Israeli) bombing of Jenin," the health ministry said.

The Israeli army said its forces had struck a joint operations center", which it claimed served as a command centre for the Jenin Brigade", a local militant group.

The northern West Bank city of Jenin and its adjacent refugee camp are a regular site of confrontations between Israeli forces and Palestinian militants.

The Israeli army regularly conducts raids into the area, which is nominally under the control of president Mahmud Abbass Palestinian Authority.
Israeli forces killed eight Palestinians in a large-scale operation Monday in the occupied West Bank in what the army labelled an extensive counterterrorism effort" involving drone strikes and hundreds of troops.

The military raid launched under Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahus hard-right government in the northern city of Jenin was the biggest in the West Bank in years, featuring armoured vehicles, army bulldozers and unmanned aerial vehicles.

Gun battles and explosions rocked the city and adjacent refugee camp, a stronghold of armed groups, as Palestinians threw rocks at Israeli troops and smoke from the blasts and burning street barricades blackened the sky, an AFP correspondent said.

There is bombing from the air and an invasion on the ground," said Mahmoud al-Saadi, director of the Palestinian Red Crescent in Jenin. Several houses and sites have been bombed smoke is rising from everywhere."

Eight people were killed and 50 wounded, 10 seriously, the Palestinian health ministry said  exceeding the toll of seven dead in an Israeli army raid in Jenin two weeks ago which saw the rare use of helicopter missile fire.

Mondays operation featured brigade-level" troop numbers, said Israeli army spokesman Richard Hecht, while Foreign Minister Eli Cohen told reporters that we are striking the terrorism hub with great strength".

Jenin resident Badr Shagoul told AFP that I saw them taking bulldozers into the camp, they were destroying buildings  These were peoples homes."

Israel had already stepped up armed operations in recent weeks in the northern West Bank, which has seen a spate of attacks on Israelis as well as Jewish settler violence targeting Palestinian communities.

Jenin camp resident Mahmoud Hawashin, speaking at a crowded hospital, said the situation was catastrophic" and predicted that for every action there is a reaction.

If there is more Palestinian blood shed, there will be more Israeli blood shed."

- All options open -

The Palestinian militant group Islamic Jihad said all options are open to strike the enemy in response to its aggression in Jenin".

In a separate incident, a Palestinian youth was killed by Israeli fire near the West Bank city of Ramallah, the Palestinian health ministry said.

The Israeli army said that in Jenin it had struck a joint operations centre" of a group called the Jenin Brigade, as well as a weapons depot, an observation and reconnaissance" site, and a hideout for those alleged to have carried out recent attacks on Israeli targets.

People were aware that we were probably going in", Hecht told reporters, but the method of striking from the air", with a target in the core of the camp, basically caught them by surprise".

He said troops remained inside the camp but were after specific targets" and not trying to hold ground".

We are still seizing weapons and ammunitions," Hecht said, adding that there was no specific timeline for ending the operation.

Israeli-Palestinian violence has worsened since last year, and escalated further under the current Netanyahu administration which took power in December, a coalition that includes extreme-right allies.

The Jenin area is nominally under the control of president Mahmud Abbass Palestinian Authority, which has partial administrative control in the West Bank.

- Clear violation -

Israel has occupied the West Bank since the Six-Day War of 1967.

Excluding annexed east Jerusalem, the territory is now home to around 490,000 Israelis who live in settlements considered illegal under international law.

The Palestinians, who seek their own independent state, want Israel to withdraw from all land it occupied in 1967 and to dismantle all Jewish settlements.

However, Netanyahu has pledged to strengthen settlements" and has expressed no interest in reviving peace talks, which have been moribund since 2014.

Jordan protested the raid as a clear violation of international humanitarian law, as well as Israels obligations as the occupying power".

Following Israels Jenin raid last month, four Israelis were killed when two Palestinian gunmen attacked a petrol station near the West bank settlement of Eli. The assailants were shot dead.

In another rare action that same week, the Israeli military said it had carried out a drone strike to kill three members of a terrorist cell" in the West Bank.

Since the start of the year at least 185 Palestinians, 25 Israelis, one Ukrainian and one Italian have been killed, according to an AFP tally compiled from official sources from both sides.

They include, on the Palestinian side, combatants and civilians, and, on the Israeli side, mostly civilians and three members of the Arab minority.
Orkney, located off the north coast of Scotland, is considering the possibility of seceding from the United Kingdom and becoming a self-governing territory of Norway.

The Orkney Islands council has chosen to investigate alternative forms of governance in order to enhance economic opportunities in the region. James Stockan, the council leader, has proposed a motion to explore Orkneys historical and cultural connections to the Nordic region, while also examining the governance models utilized by crown dependencies like Guernsey, Jersey, and the Isle of Man.

What is Orkneys History?

Orkneys history involves periods of Norwegian and Danish rule, with the islands being transferred to Scotland in 1472 as part of a dowry agreement between Margaret of Denmark and King James III of Scotland.

Stockan expressed in an interview with BBC News that Orkneys historical ties to the Norse kingdom outweigh its association with the United Kingdom. He mentioned that residents of Orkney often approach him with sentiments about repaying the dowry and returning to Norway. There exists a strong affinity and deep cultural connection to the region. Stockan believes that the current moment presents an opportune time to delve into the possibilities and explore alternative governance options for Orkney.

How Does Orkney Want to Leave UK?

While the motion presented by the Orkney Islands council does not bind them to any specific choices, the accompanying report suggests that any constitutional changes would likely involve a combination of petitions, referendums, and legislative actions at both the Scottish Parliament (Holyrood) and the UK Parliament (Westminster). These processes would be necessary to enact any potential shifts in governance or legal status for Orkney.

According to Stockan, Orkney has been poorly supported by both the Edinburgh and London governments, receiving less funding per capita compared to Shetland and the Western Isles. The forthcoming report to be presented to the council mentions the Faroe Isles, a self-governing territory of Denmark, as a reference point, according to a report by Guardian.

Liam McArthur, the Liberal Democrat MSP for Orkney, acknowledged the potential risks of creating barriers but expressed his support for empowering island communities. He mentioned his upcoming meeting with local councillors and his interest in understanding the specifics of the proposal. McArthur also highlighted the need to ensure that the exploration of alternative governance does not divert resources from the essential operation of services, particularly during times of significant pressure.

If the proposal is accepted, it would initiate a thorough investigation by council officials into various alternatives. However, officials have cautioned that this process would require a substantial amount of work due to the wide scope of the motion, which includes examining systems in locations like Guernsey and Jersey, as well as establishing formal connections with Scandinavia, according to Telegraph.

If Orkney wishes to proceed with changing its status or potentially leaving the UK, it may necessitate a referendum and require agreements with both the UK and Scottish governments, according to the councils assessment.
Pakistani investigative journalist Ahmad Noorani has sent a letter to the federal government to demand an inquiry into the unexplained wealth and assets of former army chief General Qamar Javed Bajwa and his family members.

He also requested the Federal Investigation Agency (FIA) and interior ministry to include him in the probe via video link as there are allegedly grave threats to his life in Pakistan.

It is said in the plea that an immediate inquiry should be initiated against ex-COAS General Bajwa. It is also highlighted that there are two different standards of privacy for politicians and army officers.

The letter mentions that politicians and army officers are both public office bearers and both should be answerable for their unexplained wealth and assets.

Giving the example of PTI chief Imran Khan, the letter highlights that investigation reports regarding the lifetime tax record and the selling of a watch were published in the media. And government representatives referred to these reports in their media talks.

The letter also underscores that no action has ever been taken against the Federal Board of Revenue (FBR) or any other department over privacy breach of politicians.

Noorani, who is based in the United States, stated that after his investigative report on Bajwas assets, he is facing grave threats to his life.
Amid continuous complaints, another woman from the Christian community has been abducted in Pakistans Faisalabad Jaranwala, according to local sources.

According to her family, she was forcefully converted to Islam and married to Muhammad Noma, son of Muhammad Ilyas, said sources.

ALSO READ | Bodies Mutilated, Skin Peeled Off, Women Raped & Converted: Paks Minority Atrocities Report | Exclusive

This comes days after Mani Gujjar and his goons allegedly killed a Christian mother of three and an employee of Limz University for not accepting Islam in Mir Town Lahore on June 30, said sources. After killing, they threw acid on her face and dumped her on road, which was declared an accident, said sources.

In a report published in April 2023, the Movement for Solidarity and Peace (MSP) revealed that in Pakistan as many as 700 Christian women aged 12 to 25 are forcefully converted to Islam every year.

Not only abduction or forced conversion, minorities are facing other economic issues too.

The Hindu community says it is trapped in insecurity and burdened with exorbitant taxes that drain their resources. They claim restricted business opportunities intensify vulnerability, worsening the precarious situation.

JAN TO JUNE REPORT

From January to June 2023, 38 women from Christian and Hindu communities have been abducted or force converted, and seven killed, according to a survey.

According to the data collected by the Centre for Social Justice, at least 2,120 persons suffered due to false allegations, prolonged trials, dislocation, and worse between 1987 and 2022.

ALSO READ | Pakistans Sikhs under Attack: Muslim Mob Stops Kirtan in Sindh Gurdwara | Exclusive

88 persons were killed extra-judicially after allegations under the blasphemy laws during the period of 36 years, which tarnished the image of Pakistan.

According to the UN Human Rights, every year, 1,000 attacks are reported on non-Muslim minorities in Pakistan. The most affected areas are Sindh, Peshawar, Karachi, Baluchistan.
A Pakistani woman and her four children were detained after authorities found them illegally staying in Greater Noida, where they had been provided shelter by a local man whom she had befriended through playing the online game PUBG, officials said on Monday.

The Greater Noida resident, who housed them at his rented accommodation was also arrested. The Pakistani woman and the local man have been detained. The womans four children are also in police custody," Deputy Commissioner of Police (Greater Noida) Saad Miya Khan said.

The woman, from Pakistan, who is in her late 20s, established a friendship with the local man after connecting through the popular online game PUBG, according to officials.

According to India Today reports, the woman, Seema Ghulam Haider ran away from her country via Dubai and came to India illegally via Nepal. According to a local police official, the woman had allegedly entered India with her children via Nepal last month before entering Uttar Pradesh and reaching Greater Noida by a bus.

She and local resident Sachin then began living together in a rented apartment in Greater Noidas Rabupura area.

The police were informed by an advocate who the couple had approached regarding legal ways of marraige, according to a Times of India report.

The advocate said she disclosed that she initially flew from Karachi to Dubai, where her husband is employed, and subsequently boarded another flight to Kathmandu in Nepal.

He added that it appeared she had made contact with Sachin while playing PUBG-Battlegrounds. Furthermore, she informed him about her husbands employment in Dubai and her brothers service in the Pakistan Army.

According to a India Today report, Brijesh, the apartment owner, stated that the couple had been renting the house since May. They claimed to have undergone a court marriage and had four children. The landlord informed the police that the womans appearance, with her preference for wearing salwar suits and sarees, did not give the impression that she was from Pakistan.

The man and the woman are being questioned right now. Further details and facts would be shared once the questioning is over," Khan said.
" " The white squirrels of Brevard, North Carolina, are leucistic, meaning they have a partial loss of pigment, with normal colored eyes and, sometimes, patches of darker fur. Public Domain Pictures (CCO Public Domain)

The town of Brevard, North Carolina, has a small liberal arts college and a Halloween parade befitting the county seat of Transylvania County. It also has a thriving population of white squirrels.

About a third of the population of eastern grey squirrels (Sciurus carolinensis) in Brevard are leucistic, meaning they have white fur and dark eyes. Eastern gray squirrels are usually gray, but in some spots in Brevard, about half the squirrels are white or pale with darker patches.

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The difference between leucism and albinism is that while animals with albinism are lacking the melanin, the chemical responsible for making pigment in skin, hair, feathers and eyes. Leucistic animals have a partial, but not total, loss of pigment, which means they have normal colored eyes, and sometimes patches of darker fur or feathers. Leucism is an inherited trait, so parents can pass it along to their children.

Where the leucistic squirrels of Brevard came from is a bit of a mystery, but the official story is they escaped a carnival truck that traveled to Brevard from Florida in 1949. The squirrels were caught by a Mr. Black and subsequently traded to a Mr. Mull, who gave them to his niece Barbara, who tried to breed them. When Barbara's attempts at animal husbandry failed, one white squirrel escaped and the other was let loose. And where Barbara failed, the natural order of things succeeded, and now Brevard  especially the campus of Brevard College  has a robust leucistic squirrel population.

Brevard became so proud of its white squirrel population that in 1986, the city council passed an ordinance establishing a sanctuary for all squirrels, but especially the white ones, making it illegal to "hunt, kill, trap, or otherwise take any protected squirrels within the city." Brevard even celebrates its leucistic squirrel population with an annual White Squirrel Festival.

Now That's Interesting The Malabar giant squirrel (Ratufa indica) of India is the most colorful squirrel in the world, with purple, gray, beige and tawny fur.
Saudi Arabia said on Monday it was extending a voluntary oil production cut and Russia said it was slashing exports, as major producers tried to prop up slumping prices.

The cut by Riyadh of one million barrels per day was first announced after a June meeting of oil producers and took effect at the weekend.

Saudi Energy Minister Prince Abdulaziz bin Salman noted at the time that it was extendable".

In a report on Monday announcing that the cut would continue through August, the official Saudi Press Agency said it can be extended" further, citing an energy ministry source.

The source confirmed that this additional voluntary cut comes to reinforce the precautionary efforts made by OPEC+ countries with the aim of supporting the stability and balance of oil markets," SPA said.

Also on Monday, Russia unveiled its export cut of 500,000 bpd for August as part of efforts to ensure that the oil market remains balanced".

The announcement by Alexander Novak, Russian deputy prime minister responsible for energy policy, came on the back of cuts to Russian oil production this year by the same volume as part of Moscows response to Western sanctions levied over the conflict in Ukraine.

Recent efforts by OPEC+ to bolster prices by reducing output have not succeeded, and analysts expressed doubt this one would be any different despite initial increases recorded Monday.

Its the usual knee-jerk reaction to reports of production cuts," said IG analyst Chris Beauchamp.

But given its not a coordinated move from all (OPEC+) members it seems hard to imagine theres much more upside in this."

- Muted response -

The initial market reaction was muted.

Brent was up 0.98 percent to $76.15 per barrel, and West Texas Intermediate was up 1.02 percent to $71.36 per barrel.

Since the beginning of the year, Brent is down 11 percent and WTI is down 7 percent, as a sluggish recovery in China and worries about the US economy weigh on demand forecasts.

Saudi Arabia is hoping to bring down global inventories over the summer in order to lend support to prices," said Jamie Ingram, senior editor at MEES.

There will be little expectation that Russia will fully comply with this latest commitment, but the key thing here is that its a public statement of commitment to Saudi Arabias market management strategy."

The average price of Russian Urals was $52.17 per barrel during the first half of 2023, down from $84.09 during the same period last year, the Russian finance ministry said Monday.

That drop reflects the effects of a price cap imposed in December by a coalition involving the Group of Seven leading economies, the European Union and Australia.

Saudi Arabia is counting on high oil prices to fund an ambitious reform agenda that could shift its economy away from fossil fuels.

Oil giant Saudi Aramco, the jewel of the kingdoms economy, said it recorded profits totalling $161.1 billion last year, allowing Riyadh to notch up its first annual budget surplus in nearly a decade.

Analysts say the kingdom needs oil to be priced at $80 per barrel to balance its budget, which is well above recent averages.
The Sudanese army called Monday on young people and anyone else capable of fighting to enlist at the nearest military command for battle against rival paramilitary force.

Sudan descended into chaos after fighting erupted on Apr. 15 between the military, led by Gen. Abdel Fattah Burhan, and the paramilitary Rapid Support Forces, commanded by Gen. Mohammed Hamdan Dagalo. Since then, over 3,000 people have been killed, the countrys Health Ministry said, while about 2.5 million people have been displaced, according to the U.N. The true death toll is believed to be much higher.

The commanders of the military divisions and regions have been instructed to receive and equip the fighters, and they must go to the nearest military command or unit, the army said Monday morning on their official Facebook page.

Mondays call to arms comes just days after Burhan made a near-identical appeal during a televised speech, asking Sudans youth and those capable of fighting to support the army, either from their place of residence or by joining the military movement.

It remained unclear if Mondays call to arms was a forced conscription.

In the capital, Khartoum, RSF troops appear to have the upper hand on the citys streets, having commandeered civilian homes across the capital and turned them into bases. Throughout the 10-week conflict, the army has retaliated with airstrikes that have hit residential areas and sometimes hospitals.

The province of West Darfur has seen some of the worst violence. In a report issued two weeks ago by the Dar Masalit sultanate, the leader of the African Masalit ethnic community, he accused the RSF and Arab militias of committing genocide against African civilians. He estimated that over the past two months, more than 5,000 people were killed in the provinces capital, Genena.

Several rounds of peace talks hosted by Riyadh and Washington in the Saudi coastal city of Jeddah have all but broken down, with both mediators publicly accusing the RSF and the army of continually violating truces brokered by the two nations.

At least nine cease-fires have been agreed upon since the conflict broke out. None have lasted.
The United States said Monday that ally Israel had a right to defend its people" against Islamist militants but called for the protection of civilians after a major, deadly raid in the West Bank.

We support Israels security and right to defend its people against Hamas, Palestinian Islamic Jihad and other terrorist groups," a State Department spokesperson said.

It is imperative to take all possible precautions to prevent the loss of civilian lives," the spokesperson added.

The United States, Israels primary ally, also called for a resumption of security cooperation between the Jewish state and Palestinian security forces.

President Joe Bidens administration has repeatedly called for restraint from both Israel and the Palestinians.

The United States has been critical of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahus government over its growing settlements while stopping short of repercussions for Israeli decisions.

On Monday, a Palestinian official said around 3,000 Palestinians residing in the Jenin refugee camp have fled since the Israeli army launched a major operation in the West Bank.

There are about 3,000 people who have left the camp so far," Jenin deputy governor Kamal Abu al-Roub told AFP, adding that arrangements were being made to house them in schools and other shelters in the city of Jenin.

He said about 18,000 Palestinians reside in the camp.

Juliette Touma, spokeswoman for the United Nations agency for Palestinian refugees, confirmed to AFP that residents of the camp were leaving.

(With AFP inputs)
The US on Monday became the only country to halt the adoption of a draft resolution on biofuel put forward by India at the MEPC session here, demanding further discussions on the matter prior to recommending it to a working group on air pollution and energy efficiency to finalise the resolution/circular.

Sources told PTI that the US came up with the suggestion on Monday morning at the 80th session of the Marine Environment Protection Committee (MEPC) without raising it in earlier deliberations when the vast majority of the group considered it an immediate requirement and to be considered further by the Intersessional Working Group on Air Pollution and Energy Efficiency.

Sources said the opposition raised by the US could be due to the fact that promoting bio-fuel as a drop in fuel could negatively impact the promotion of other green fuels such as Ammonia and Hydrogen, the fuels that the US is putting money on.

Indias draft MEPC resolution put forward a biofuel that is certified by the International Certification Scheme to confirm the sustainability aspects in the Life Cycle Assessment guidelines are being assigned a CO2 emission conversion factor as zero.

This draft resolution aimed at facilitating the uptake of biofuels and reduction of the GHG emissions.

The Intersessional Working Group discussed the same and a vast majority of the group considered that it was an immediate requirement and to be considered further by the Working Group on air pollution & energy efficiency, an Indian delegation representative said.

But the draft resolution could not be submitted to the Working Group as the US demanded further discussions.

We are certainly not against the biofuels. We wanted to hear more peoples observations on it in the plenary before submitting it to the Intersessional Working Group. We have no other agenda, a delegate representing the US told PTI.
A brief mutiny by the Wagner mercenary group last month did not affect Russias special military operation" in Ukraine, Russian Defence Minister Sergei Shoigu said on Monday (July 3), making his first comments about the short-lived rebellion.

Wagner fighters took over the southern Russian city of Rostov-on-Don and advanced towards Moscow on June 24 as their leader Yevgeny Prigozhin demanded the dismissal of Shoigu and chief of the general staff Valery Gerasimov.

The crisis was defused when Belarusian President Alexander Lukashenko brokered a deal between the Kremlin and Prigozhin.

Shoigu said the mutiny aimed to destabilise Russia, but failed because of troops loyalty and did not impact the situation on the frontlines.

The provocation did not affect the actions of army groups (involved in the operation)," he told a ministry meeting.

Gerasimov, who has not appeared in public since the mutiny, was nowhere to be seen in photographs and video footage from the meeting published by the defence ministry.
STEPANAKERT, JULY 3, ARMENPRESS. Residents of the small village of Nor Ghazanchi in Nagorno Karabakh are trying to return to normal life after the latest Azerbaijani attack on June 28.

The June 28 attack, when Azerbaijan launched an unprovoked artillery and drone strike on Nagorno Karabakh positions, happened near the village. Many children, including newborns, were in the village when the attack occurred, according to Mayor Ruslan Arustamyan.

No one left the village after the attack, Nor Ghazanchi Mayor Ruslan Arustamyan told ARMENPRESS. During the attack we evacuated women and children to the nearby relatively safer area, and a pregnant woman was taken to Stepanakert later because there was a need for medical superivision.

The blockade of Nagorno Karabakh by Azerbaijan has led to shortages of essential products, and Nor Ghazanchi is no exception. The only grocery store in the village is closed because nothing is available. It gets opened only in the mornings to sell bread.

We have some food reserves, but we will have serious problems if the situation of especially the past ten days continues, the mayor warned.

Most of the arable lands are located on the line of contact and farmers dont use them due to safety concerns.

Last year, farmers working in the fields came under Azerbaijani gunfire, thats why people avoid working there now, Arustamyan added, noting that they have been able to plant some crops in areas which are relatively far from the frontline, and farmers will receive diesel fuel from the authorities for harvest work.

Some 14 greenhouses, opened with support of the International Committee of the Red Cross, are functioning in the village. Nonetheless, the harvest would be insufficient as winter reserve.

Stella Hayrapetyan, an elderly woman living in the village, has two sons and four grandchildren. Mrs. Hayrapetyan told ARMENPRESS that she was concerned over the danger posed by the nearby Azerbaijani positions to peaceful civilians.

There are many children, newborns, young mothers and pregnant women in the village. The children were very scared during the latest explosions. Its good that we managed to take shelter in time. But we dont even know whats going to happen to us while running for cover. We love our village very much, all we want is for our children to live in peace, with dignity, and thrive on their ancestors land. Is that too much to want? Hayrapetyan said.

Baby food and diapers can rarely be found in Stepanakert.

Sona Aslanyan, a 24-year-old mother of two, says shes concerned over safety.

My four-year-old wakes up from Azerbaijani gunfire and says Mom, they are shooting, wake up lets go. But all our big dreams are connected with our village. This is where we were born and raised, where we got married. All my dreams are connected with this place, but the enemy doesnt let my dreams come true, Aslanyan said.

Fuel shortages have even led to suspension of internal transport, and the villagers are having a hard time in reaching Stepanakert for medication or other essentials, which can rarely be found.

Temur Arustamyan, a 10-year-old living in Nor Ghazanchi, told ARMENPRESS that he wants to become a math teacher in the local school. Hes even willing to turn down all tempting career offers from Stepanakert in the future, thats how much he is attached to his birthplace.

I only want peace, no fighting, so that people dont die, he said.

Asked about his emotions during the Azerbaijani gunfire, the 10-year-old said: I worry for my Dad, who protects our village.
The majority of Americans approve of the recent Supreme Court decision gutting affirmative action, according to a new ABC News poll. Just 32% disapprove of the ruling, which restricts the use of race as a factor in college and university admissions, while another 16% said they don't know whether they approve or disapprove. Among Republicans, 75% approve of the SCOTUS decision, but just 26% of Democrats approve. (Among independents, 58% approve.) And a higher percentage of white people (60%) and Asian people (58%) approve when compared to Black people (25%) and Hispanic people (40% approve and 40% disapprove). Other poll findings:
A South Carolina man stands charged after six people were found dead in a house fire Sunday in Green Pond, with the lone survivor airlifted to a nearby hospital in critical condition. Ryan Lenard Manigo, 33, is charged with the attempted murder of the survivor, and CNN reports that further charges are pending autopsy results. Details are sketchy, reports the AP, with neither names nor ages of the house's occupants, nor a potential motive, known at this point. "Today's events that occurred in this quiet, nestled community of Green Pond are tragic," a family rep tells WCBD, urging vigilance. "We should always have an eye on our surroundings," he says. The South Carolina Law Enforcement Division's arson team is investigating. (Read more house fire stories.)
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Female Frogs Know How to Tell Males to Buzz Off

In at least one species, their distinctive croaks deter males looking to mate
The Federal Trade Commission says it wants to "level the playing field for honest companies" with a crackdown on fake online reviews. The FTC has proposed new rules that include heavy penalties for companies using dodgy reviews to boost their products, the Washington Post reports. Offenders could be fined $50,000 for each time a customer sees a fake review. Surveys show the vast majority of people shopping online consult reviews, but according to some estimates, around a third of all online reviews are fake, NPR reports.

"Anyone who's done any shopping online knows that trying to actually get objective information about the product is so fraught because there's so much commercial misinformation, so many deceptive reviews," says Samuel Levine, director of the FTC's Bureau of Consumer Protection, per the Post. The proposed new rules ban reviews from somebody who hasn't used a product, along with AI-generated reviews, TechCrunch reports. The rules would also crack down on middlemen who sell good reviewsand on companies that try to suppress bad reviews with threats of legal action. The FTC also aims to stamp out review "hijacking," in which a company takes a page with legitimate good reviews and swaps in a different product.

Businesses will be required to disclose when an employee has written a review. Companies like Amazon, Facebook, Google, and Yelp have been trying to cut the number of fake reviews, but the spread of AI is expected to make the problem much worse, the Verge reports. "The widespread emergence of AI chatbots is likely to make it easier for bad actors to write fake reviews," the FTC proposal states. (Read more online review stories.)
Israel struck targets in a militant stronghold in the occupied West Bank with drones early Monday and deployed hundreds of troops in the area, reports the AP , in an incursion that resembled the wide-scale military operations carried out during the second Palestinian uprising two decades ago. Palestinian health officials said at least eight Palestinians were killed and dozens wounded. Troops remained inside the Jenin refugee camp at midday Monday, pushing ahead with the largest operation in the area during more than a year of fighting. It came at a time of growing domestic pressure for a tough response to a series of attacks on Israeli settlers, including a shooting attack last month that killed four Israelis.

Black smoke rose from the crowded camp, exchanges of fire rang out, and the buzzing of drones was heard overhead as the military pressed on. Residents said electricity was cut off in some parts and military bulldozers plowed through narrow streets, damaging buildings as they cleared the way for Israeli forces. The Palestinians and neighboring Jordan and Egypt and the 57-nation Organization of Islamic Cooperation condemned the violence. Israeli Defense Minister Yoav Gallant said the operation was "proceeding as planned," but he gave no indication when the incursion would end. Lt. Col. Richard Hecht, an army rep, said roughly 2,000 soldiers were taking part in the operation, and that military drones had carried out a series of strikes to clear the way for ground forces. The Palestinian Health Ministry said at least eight Palestinians were killed and 50 people were wounded, 10 critically.

Although Israel has carried out isolated airstrikes in the West Bank in recent weeks, Hecht said Monday's strikes were an escalation unseen since 2006the end of the Palestinian uprising. Lynn Hastings, the UN humanitarian coordinator in the Palestinian areas, said she was "alarmed by [the] scale of [the] Israeli forces operation," noting the airstrikes in a densely populated refugee camp. She said the UN was mobilizing humanitarian aid. Official Palestinian news agency WAFA noted the military blocked roads in the camp, took over houses and buildings, and set up snipers on rooftops, signaling the operation could drag on. Israeli military experts said they expected the operation to wrap up quicklywithin hours or a day or two. Prolonged violence would risk attracting increased international criticism and drawing militants from the Gaza Strip or even Lebanon into the fighting.

Islamic Jihad, a militant group with a large presence in Jenin, threatened to launch attacks from its Gaza Strip stronghold if the fighting dragged on. "If the Israeli aggression against Jenin does not stop, the Palestinian resistance will do what it has to do in a short time," said Dawood Shehab, a rep for the group. More than 130 Palestinians have been killed this year in the West Bank, part of more than a yearlong spike in violence that has seen some of the worst bloodshed in nearly two decades. Israel says most of those killed have been militants, but stone-throwing youths protesting the incursions and people uninvolved in confrontations have also been killed. Palestinian attacks against Israelis since the start of this year have killed 24 people.

(Read more Israel and Palestinians stories.)
Greta Gerwig's Barbie may be one of the most-anticipated movies of the summer, but some Southeast Asia residents awaiting its debut will now have to travel over the border to see it. Reuters reports that the film starring Margot Robbie in the title role and Ryan Gosling as sidekick Ken has been banned in Vietnam, and it's all because of a map that's depicted in one scene. Shown on that map is a U-shaped line that shows China's claims on territory in the South China Sea, including in areas that Vietnam says are its own.

Per Bloomberg, China insists that more than 80% of the South China Sea is in its possession, citing a map from 1947. "We do not grant license for the American movie Barbie to release in Vietnam because it contains the offending image of the nine-dash line," local media quotes Vi Kien Thanh, an official with the nation's Ministry of Culture, Sports, and Tourism, as saying. He adds that the ban was ruled upon by the National Film Evaluation Council, per Variety.

A court rebuffed the line in question during 2016 international arbitration at The Hague, though China doesn't recognize that decision. In addition to Vietnam, other countries such as Brunei, Malaysia, Taiwan, and the Philippines also all stake claims to areas on the map that China says it controls. This isn't the first movie that's been barred in Vietnam over the map: DreamWorks' Abominable and Sony's Uncharted were nixed there in 2019 and 2022, respectively, while Netflix was forced to pull the Aussie spy drama Pine Gap from Vietnamese viewers in 2021. Barbie had been set to open in Vietnam on July 21, the same day it premieres in the United States. (Read more Barbie movie stories.)
The US has recommended Americans reconsider traveling to China because of arbitrary law enforcement and exit bans and the risk of wrongful detentions. No specific cases were cited, but the advisory came after a 78-year-old US citizen was sentenced to life in prison on spying charges in May. It also followed the passage last week of a sweeping Foreign Relations Law that threatens countermeasures against those seen as harming China's interests, the AP reports.

China's government "arbitrarily enforces local laws, including issuing exit bans on US citizens and citizens of other countries, without fair and transparent process under the law," the US advisory said. "US citizens traveling or residing in the PRC may be detained without access to US consular services or information about their alleged crime," it warned.

The advisory also said that Chinese authorities "appear to have broad discretion to deem a wide range of documents, data, statistics, or materials as state secrets and to detain and prosecute foreign nationals for alleged espionage."

The advisory listed a wide range of potential offenses, from taking part in demonstrations to sending electronic messages critical of Chinese policies or even simply conducting research into areas deemed sensitive.

Exit bans could be used to compel individuals to participate in Chinese government investigations, pressure family members to return from abroad, resolve civil disputes in favor of Chinese citizens, and "gain bargaining leverage over foreign governments," the advisory said.

Similar advisories were issued for the semi-autonomous Chinese regions of Hong Kong and Macao. The US has issued similar advisories to its citizens in the past, but those in recent years had mainly warned of the dangers of being caught in lockdowns during China's "zero-COVID" policy. The warnings come as US-China relations are at their lowest in years over trade, technology, Taiwan, and human rights, although the sides are taking some steps to improve the situation. US Secretary of State Antony Blinken made a long-delayed visit to Beijing last week and Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen is making a much-anticipated trip to Beijing this week. (Read more China stories.)
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Agriculture Minister Mejnun Mammadov is attending the 43rd session of the UN Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO), which began its work in the Italian capital Rome, Azernews reports, citing the ministry.

According to information, within the session, the Azerbaijani delegation held bilateral meetings with agriculture ministers of several countries. Mammadov and his counterparts from Estonia, Northern Macedonia, Uzbekistan, and Moldova, discussed topics of mutual interest, as well as expansion of bilateral cooperation relations in agriculture, an increase of trade turnover of agricultural products, improvement of the legal framework of cooperation, exchange of experience in agricultural research and technology, etc..

The Minister of Agriculture of Azerbaijan is scheduled to address a round table on the efficient use of water resources at the 43rd session of the FAO.
(Instagram @joesthetics)

Bodybuilder Jo Lindner, known online has Joesthetics, has died from an aneurysm in Thailand, aged 30.

The news was confirmed by the fitness influencers girlfriend Nicha on Saturday (1 July).

Posting pictures of herself with Lindner on her Instagram feed, Nicha paid tribute to the YouTuber she desribed as sweet, kind, and hardworking.

And he is the believer in EVERYONE, she continued. specially [sic] ME he believes in me that I could be better and be someone in this world.

Lindner had 8.4 million Instagram followers, and his YouTube videos reportedly earned over 500 million views.

Nicha said Lindner suffered an aneurysm after complaining of a pain in his neck earlier this week.She also said she was with him when he died.

An aneurysm is an abnormal swelling or bulge in the wall of a blood vessel.

[The] Last word he said [to me]: Bae we all always can start again and that is the key. always keep start [sic] again, she later wrote on her Instagram Stories.

Subsequently, Nicha appeared to address speculation around Lindners cause of death, writing its unfair to her partner that people guess how he die [sic] or say he overdose.

She added that if Lindner was brave enough to admit he used steroids, there was no reason not to believe him.

In an interview with fellow bodybuilder Bradley Martyn last month, Lindner spoke about being diagnosed with rippling muscle disease.

Earlier in June, in an interview for an episode of fellow YouTuber Bradley Martyns show Raw Talk, he spoke about having a rare genetic condition that causes muscles to become unsually sensitive to movement or pressure.

According to the Genetic and Rare Diseases Information Center (GARD), the disorder is characterised by signs of increased muscle irritability such as repetitive tensing of the muscle, bunching up of the muscle, and/or prominent rippling.

Technically, its a cramp, Lindner told Martyn.

After news of Lindners death broke, fellow bodybuilder Noel Deyzel confirmed the reports were true on his Instagram Stories.

This is not a joke. His mother requested that we inform people about the situation, he wrote. Please keep Jo and his loved ones in your prayers.

I still just cant f***ing believe it. Rest in peace brother.

Another one of Lindners friends, known as Vigorous Steve, posted a YouTube video shortly after his death, explaining that the cause of death reports were based on preliminary findings.

Were still waiting for the autopsy reports, he added.
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TDT | Manama

The Daily Tribune  www.newsofbahrain.com

Bahrain will host the second edition of the International Cybersecurity Conference and Exhibition, under the auspices of His Royal Highness Prince Salman bin Hamad Al Khalifa, the Crown Prince, Deputy Supreme Commander of the Armed Forces and Prime Minister.

The two-day event will open on December 5 at the Exhibition World Bahrain. In a statement on this occasion, Lieutenant-General His Highness Shaikh Nasser bin Hamad Al Khalifa, National Security Advisor and Royal Guard Commander, stressed the importance of cybersecurity as a pillar of national security and economic development.

Bahrains security and prosperity depend on a secure ICT infrastructure, said Lt.Gen. Shaikh Nasser, noting that the upcoming conference and exhibition are in line with the national cybersecurity strategy, and aim to explore new technology, learn and deal with the development of global cyberspace.

It aims to raise awareness of cybersecurity issues and major innovations and build a strong foundation for the security of the digital world. The event provides a platform for cybersecurity experts to exchange knowledge and practices, learn about the latest trends in cybersecurity and solutions, and review the latest technologies in the field of cybersecurity from leading companies and institutions.

Likewise, it will provide an opportunity for participants to learn, communicate and share their experiences and knowledge in the field of cybersecurity, which represents an ideal platform for anyone interested in the cybersecurity sector to attend the event in Bahrain in December 2023.

The 2023 annual brings together industry leaders, experts and professionals from around the world to share their knowledge, experiences and available solutions to the challenges facing the cybersecurity sector. The conference also provides a platform for communication and collaboration between stakeholders in the cybersecurity sector.
North Korean leader Kim Jong Un attends the 8th enlarged Plenary Meeting of the 8th Central Committee of the Workers' Party of Korea, in Pyongyang

North Korea says botched satellite launch was 'gravest failure' North Korean leader Kim Jong Un attends the 8th enlarged Plenary Meeting of the 8th Central Committee of the Workers' Party of Korea, in Pyongyang

By Hyunsu Yim

SEOUL (Reuters) -An unusually candid North Korea has said the botched launch of a military satellite last month was the "gravest failure" but it vowed it would soon succeed in its quest, state media reported on Monday.

North Korea's ruling party made the assessment of its May 31 launch at a three-day meeting that ended on Sunday, ordering workers and researchers to analyse the mission that ended with the rocket and its spy satellite pay load plunging into the sea, and to prepare for another launch soon.

Officials "who irresponsibly conducted preparations" for the failed launch were "bitterly criticised" at the meeting, the KCNA state news agency reported.

The rocket failed "after losing thrust due to the abnormal starting of the second-stage engine", North Korea said at the time.

Nuclear-armed North Korea had earlier said it would launch its first military reconnaissance satellite to boost monitoring of U.S. military activities, another step in a military programme that has raised fears of war.

South Korea's navy last week recovered a large, cylindrical part of the rocket, raising it from the sea off the west coast, which experts said could provide clues to the North's rocket development.

The North's state media said the ruling Workers' Party Central Committee also discussed bolstering nuclear capabilities and stepping up production of nuclear weapons.

Leader Kim Jong Un attended the meeting, KCNA said, but it made no mention of whether he made a speech or delivered a report, as he usually does at such important policy-making sessions.

A spokesperson for South Korea's Unification Ministry, which handles relations with the North, said the absence of a report of a speech by Kim was "extremely rare".

That and the blaming of low-ranking officials for the failure of the launch could indicate a loss of confidence, the ministry said.

The party also discussed ensuring sufficient food supplies.

South Korea recently said the food situation in the North, which has in the past suffered famines, "seemed to have deteriorated".

Isolated North Korea is under international sanctions over its nuclear weapons and ballistic missile programmes and its economy was further strained by self-imposed border lockdowns aimed at stopping COVID-19.

Separately, KCNA reported that Kim Yong Chol, a top official who was believed to have been sidelined after a 2019 summit with the U.S. ended in failure, had been named as an alternate member of the Political Bureau of the Party Central Committee.

(Reporting by Hyunsu Yim; Editing by Diane Craft, Robert Birsel)
TDT | Manama

The Daily Tribune  www.newsofbahrain.com

Shura Council member Adel bin Abdul Rahman Al Asoumi is proposing a draft law to regulate the recruitment of domestic workers in Bahrain.

The law aims to set a price ceiling for recruitment, determine salaries and contract conditions, and establish the responsibility of recruitment offices in case of workers running away.

It also calls for Bahrain to sign labour recruitment agreements with other countries to ensure recruitment fees and salaries remain within specified limits. The draft law also emphasizes the need for Gulf cooperation on labour issues to protect citizens' interests amid rising salaries for domestic workers.

The ceiling for foreign labour recruitment to Bahrain should not exceed BD550, and accredited offices in the country of employment and Bahrain should be established. The monthly salary for domestic workers should not exceed BD120, with an annual increase of BD2.

The recruitment office will be responsible for runaway workers and bear travel ticket costs in case of deportation. Additionally, the office will be required to pay 50% of the employer's total salary.
AFP | Riyadh

The Daily Tribune  www.newsofbahrain.com

Saudi Arabia has summoned Sweden's ambassador to denounce a Quran burning outside a Stockholm mosque that sparked a diplomatic backlash across the Muslim world, state media reported early Monday.

The kingdom -- home to the holiest sites in Islam, in Mecca and Medina -- had already condemned Wednesday's incident in which an Iraqi citizen living in Sweden, Salwan Momika, 37, stomped on the Muslim holy book and set several pages alight.

The foreign ministry summoned the ambassador on Sunday to urge Sweden "to stop all actions that directly contradict international efforts seeking to spread the values of tolerance, moderation and rejection of extremism, and undermine the necessary mutual respect for relations between peoples and states", the official Saudi Press Agency reported.

Momika's Quran burning coincided with the start of the Eid al-Adha holiday and the end of the annual hajj pilgrimage in Saudi Arabia, triggering widespread anger.

Countries including Iraq, Kuwait, the United Arab Emirates and Morocco have also summoned Swedish ambassadors in protest.

Iran said on Sunday it was holding off on sending its new ambassador to Sweden because of the incident.

At an extraordinary meeting on Sunday at its Jeddah headquarters, the Saudi-based Organisation of Islamic Cooperation called for collective measures to avoid future Quran burnings.

Swedish police had granted Momika a permit in line with free speech protections, but authorities later said they had opened an investigation over "agitation against an ethnic group", noting that Momika had burnt pages from the Islamic holy book very close to the mosque.

Sweden's government condemned Momika's actions on Sunday, calling them "Islamophobic".
In the ever-evolving world of technology, Google has a knack for introducing products that end up fizzling out, like its previous endeavors the Stadia gaming platform and the Pixel tablet.

However, Google aims to find success by blurring the line between a tablet and a home hub with its latest offering.

Once considered the perfect balance between pocket-sized smartphones and laptop computers, tablets have faced an identity crisis as smartphone screens grew larger and laptops became more complex and powerful. We all know iPads cater to those who prefer a keyboard and robust processing power on smaller screens. Samsung on the other hand is known for producing tablets with stylus support alongside phones that unfold into screens bigger than some tablets. Meanwhile, Amazon offers various Kindle models, and Microsoft boasts an array of Surface devices. The multitude of options can make it challenging to choose the right tablet for individual needs.

Despite the crowded market, Google has dared to explore a new use case for its tablet  what if it could also function as a smart home display?

Its all about the Dock

Introducing the Pixel Tablet, amidst fierce competition and priced at 599, it boasts the same chip as Google's flagship Pixel 7 smartphones. Moreover, it comes with an impressive 11-inch screen and various optimized apps, where this tablet really stands out thanks to its innovative dock. The tablet securely attaches it using powerful magnets, effectively transforming it into a centralized home hub.

With the Pixel Tablet on the dock, users can conveniently view standard information such as time and weather, enjoy a slideshow of photos, listen to music through built-in speakers, control their lights, and interact with the ever-responsive "Hey Google" voice assistant.

In fact, Google is so convinced of its idea that the tablet is only available for purchase with the accompanying dock. This strategy sets them apart from other tech companies and appears to target Apple's stronghold in the tablet space and Amazon's dominance in the smart speaker market.

Theres no denying the Pixel Tablet is significantly more pricey than your typical home hub, even compared to premium options like Amazon's Echo Show and Google's Nest Hub.

Despite Android's historical limitations on tablets compared to its performance on smartphones, our hands-on experience revealed well-optimized popular apps. Whether it was Google's own YouTube and Gmail or other apps like Disney+, WhatsApp, and even casino apps, the split-screen functionality worked seamlessly.

This is essential in the case of the latter, as the last thing you want is for your slot game to freeze in the middle of a jackpot-hitting spin. While at it, visit a comparison site that lists the best mobile casinos where you can play smoothly. These sites also offer a sign-up bonus that enhances the experience, as well as complete guides on how to play safely.

Will it Last the Test of Time?

While Google has a reputation for producing excellent smartphones, it has struggled to establish a solid foothold in the tablet market. Its previous attempt, the Pixel Slate from 2018, aimed to combine the versatility and functionality of a Chromebook but was discontinued after just two years.

Naturally, skeptics may question the fate of the new Pixel Tablet, considering Google's track record of discontinuing products, including the ill-fated Glass headset and the aforementioned short-lived Google Stadia gaming platform.

However, Google's executives remain optimistic about the Pixel Tablet's prospects, and the device boasts impressive technological features. Its thicker bezels and smooth matte finish offer a secure grip, although it may feel less premium in your hands. As expected, the tablet delivers exceptional speed and features eight-megapixel cameras on both the front and back, particularly suited for video calling. Google also promises a battery life of up to 12 hours of continuous video streaming.

More importantly, the Pixel Tablet supports multiple user accounts, making it more shareable among households compared to Apple's iPad.

While anyone can guess whether the product will last in todays saturated market, our research confirmed that the dock performs as advertised, elevating the tablet into an attractive centerpiece for your living room.
Auburn Community Cats TNR is a nonprofit 501(c)(3) organization relying 100% on donations and volunteers to perform their service. Their services do not include rescue, fostering or re-homing. It is strictly a trap, neuter, return program. Organized and run by President Susan Secaur, Vice President Alicia Freyee, Secretary Claire Lovell and Co-Treasurers Katie Smith and Erin Colella, with a board of directors that includes Karen Walsh, Kristen Carnicelli, Cathy Capeling, Dia Carabajal and Sherri Buzylak, the organization meets monthly. The last meeting was held on Sunday, June 25, at the First Presbyterian Church community room on South Street in Auburn. The next Auburn Community Cats TNR open meeting will be held at 10 a.m. Sunday, July 16. Feel free to attend a meeting to get more information on becoming a member, upcoming events and plans, donating and volunteering, to discuss the needs of the organization or to participate and provide suggestions. All are welcome to attend! The Rev. James Moore has kindly donated use of the church location for most of the monthly open meetings.

Auburn Community Cats TNR has been busy making its mark in the fight to reduce the local community's cat overpopulation. Thanks to your donations, and that of veterinarians, veterinary technicians, local facilities (Finger Lakes SPCA of CNY, Animal Wellness of Skaneateles and Cayuga-Onondaga BOCES), the BOCES Plant, Animal and Life Sciences Program, and Auburn Community Cats TNR members and volunteers, the organization has been able to provide: trapping, scanning for microchips, spay/neutering, left ear tipping, rabies vaccinations, flea/tick/ear mite and other parasite control, post-operative recovery and safe return to colony services to over 225 community felines already. Their work is only just beginning, as there are still numerous community cats that still need assistance. Their current waiting list for trapping and TNR services exceeds 120 colony sites. Most area veterinarians will not take on community cats due to the felines not having owners or anyone available to monitor recovery. This is causing a shortage of appointments for spaying and neutering. Its a desperate situation as the cat population is increasing like mad," Secaur said.

Tuesday, June 21, saw another 13 cats that were successfully processed through the Auburn Community Cats TNR program at the Finger Lakes SPCA of CNY in Auburn. Donation of professional services were provided by Dr. Linda Hunter from Animal Wellness of Skaneateles along with her veterinary technician Connie Glock, and Dr. Paul Marza with Farvets, an organization that assist programs like the Auburn Community Cats TNR domestically and foreign. They also help in training veterinarians, veterinary technicians and the general population of the region they are working in on assisting TNR groups in preventing rising cat populations. It's organization needed not only by Auburn Community Cats TNR, but throughout the world. Dr. Elizabeth Barnes with Shelter Outreach Services out of Ithaca has previously assisted with other Auburn Community Cats TNR clinics.

Please remember that these clinics are for community cats (see previous Citizen articles: Pet abandonment and overpopulation in Auburn," Sept. 21, 2021; Animal population control in Auburn, Oct. 26, 2021; and How to help stray, feral cats in Auburn," Jan. 18, 2022, for more information and clarification on community cats and overpopulation). They are not a low- or no-cost spay/neuter option. Volunteers cannot accomplish these clinics alone. Donations are needed to purchase the supplies, materials and medications required to trap, spay/neuter, provide post-operative supervision and release each community cat safely and effectively. The previous clinics have cost over $12,000 to provide all that was needed for these cats that are no longer able to add to the community cat overpopulation. These were all donated funds. Any donation is very much needed and appreciated. Any veterinarians, veterinary technicians, veterinary office managers, veterinary assistants and volunteers who are interested in becoming involved in expanding this much-needed program, please contact Auburn Community Cats TNR. You are greatly needed. New members are always welcome and should contact Auburn Community Cats TNR or attend one of the open members meetings mentioned above.

Some upcoming fundraiser events:

Sunday, July 9: Auburn Community Cats TNR will have some tables set up at Hops & Shop at Prison City Brewing. There will be homemade baked goods for sale, basket raffles, T-shirts, stickers, catnip toys and surprise cat-related items.

Saturday, Aug. 12: Auburn Community Cats TNR will be downtown at the Founders Day celebration. There will be Auburn Community Cats TNR T-shirts, stickers and other items to purchase, as well as information regarding the organization and how people can help.

Saturday, Aug. 26: Auburn Community Cats TNR will have another chicken barbecue at the First Presbyterian Church on South Street in Auburn. The cost of $15 will include delicious barbecue chicken, salt potatoes, beans, a roll, a homemade brownie and a bottle of water.

Saturday, Sept. 9: Auburn Community Cats TNR will be downtown at CNY TomatoFest. There will be Auburn Community Cats TNR T-shirts, stickers and other items to purchase, as well as information regarding the organization and how people can help.

Consider visiting the Auburn Community Cats TNR Facebook page at facebook.com/auburnTNR or emailing them at auburntnr@gmail.com. Volunteer time, effort, animal handling experience (pet owner/sitter, pet shop worker, groomer, veterinary staff member) or trade knowledge/expertise (carpentry, plumbing, electrical, etc.) would be appreciated.

Or submit a donation through Venmo at Auburn Community Cats TNR (@ACC-TNR). Checks can be made payable to Auburn Community Cats TNR and mailed to 34 Meadowbrook Drive, Auburn, NY 13021.

Auburn's 'dire' cat problem and the new group trying to solve it When Auburn City Councilor Terry Cuddy began knocking on doors this election season, there were a few concerns he expected to hear.
There are very few highways in India that connect with neighbouring countries where you can drive to. The one that promises to be the longest is the upcoming India-Myanmar-Thailand Trilateral Highway, for which construction is underway. Union Minister Nitin Gadkari has said the highway, which will connect India and Thailand through Myanmar, is 70 per cent complete. The highway is expected to be open for travellers in another three to four years.

The India-Myanmar-Thailand Trilateral Highway is a 1,400-km long trans-nation highway to boost trade and tourism. It was first proposed by former Prime Minister Atal Behari Vajpayee and was approved at a ministerial-level meeting between India, Myanmar and Thailand in April 2002.

The Centre had aimed to complete the highway by 2019. However, construction work has been delayed for several reasons. Union Minister Nitin Gadkari assured it will be completed soon. The Minister of Road Transport and Highways was quoted by news agency PTI saying, Around 70 per cent work of the project is completed." However, he did not reveal any timeline on when the highway will be ready and operational.

The India-Myanmar-Thailand Trilateral Highway will start from Manipur in India from a place called Moreh near the border. It will end at Mae Sot city located at the Myanmar-Thailand border. The Imphal-Moreh section of the trilateral highway on Indian side is likely to be completed by the end of this year.

The entire highway is expected to be completed in another three to four years. Vijavat Isarabhakdi, Vice-Minister of Foreign Affairs, Thailand, recently said, 99 per cent of the four lane expressway which will be based in Thailand is already complete. Now, a lot depends on the Indian and the Myanmar governments on how fast the project can be completed."

Once completed, India also plans to extend the trilateral highway much deeper into SouthEast Asia connecting other countries like Laos, Cambodia, Vietnam and other countries.

First Published Date:
Abba Yusuf, governor of Kano, says the demolition of some structures across the state should not be interpreted as a vendetta.

Since assuming office on May 29, Yusuf has ordered the demolition of structures he said were illegally built and approved by the former administration of Abdullahi Ganduje.

The governor said some public properties were given to some sacred cows in the immediate past administration.

On June 14, the governor ordered the demolition of a roundabout structure near the government house.

Other structures that have been demolished so far include a three-storey building with 90 shops located at Nasarawa GRA, shops built by the fence of Sani Abacha Stadium at Kofar Mata, and buildings by GGSS Dukawuya, Goron Dutse.

During a visit to the governor by Aliyu Abdulkadir, the Emir of Gaya, on Saturday, Yusuf said critics should keep records of his work and judge him after he has finished his tenure.

He promised that his administration would promote and support health care, education, and agriculture.

In a statement by his spokesperson, Hisham Habib, Yusuf added that it is not proper for anyone in power to take public property and convert it for personal use.

The governor had also made a similar statement when Aminu Ado Bayero, the Emir of Kano, visited him at the government house on June 30.

He said he has no regret ordering the demolition of structures across the state, adding that it is in the interest of the good people of Kano.




President Bola Ahmed Tinubu is currently having a closed-door meeting with all the service chiefs he appointed recently.





The meeting which began few minutes ago at the Presidential Villa Abuja, on Monday, has in attendance the Chief of Defence Staff, Major-General C.G Musa; Chief of Army Staff, Major-General T. A Lagbaja; Chief of Air Staff, AVM H.B Abubakar; Chief of Naval Staff, Rear Admiral Emmanuel Ikechukwu Ogalla; and acting Inspector-General of Police, DIG Kayode Egbetokun.





Recall that Tinubu shortly before embarking on a trip to Paris, France to attend a financial summit had jolted the nation when he sacked the former service chiefs and announced new ones as replacements.





Tinubu had also gone ahead to appoint a former chairman of the Economic and Financial Crimes Commission (EFCC), Malam Nuhu Ribadu, as the National Security Adviser (NSA), replacing Babagana Monguno.





While the new service chiefs have since assumed duties, their appointment had generated diverse reactions amongst Nigerians.





The ongoing meeting marks the first time Tinubu is meeting them officially as President of Nigeria.




The Christian Association of Nigeria in Ogun State, on Sunday, expressed sadness over the killing of a pastor, Kayode Oluwakemi, by kidnappers who abducted seven worshippers all of whom had been rescued in the state.





It was gathered that the churchgoers were conducting a vigil at the Redeemed Christian Church of God, Desires of Nations Parish, when the kidnappers invaded the premises of the church at Abule-Ori, in the Obafemi Owode Local Government Area of Ogun State, killed the pastor and kidnapped seven worshippers.





Reacting to the development, the General Secretary, CAN, Dr Stephen Adeyemi, urged the government to step up efforts to stop insecurity around worship centres in the state.





He said, It is a very sad incident. And sincerely, this brings to mind a kind of question that, is it now a sin for the worshipers to gather to worship God? We are talking about being in the church, our sanctuary. We are talking about worshipers gathering in the temple to pray, praise and sing and all these attacks are coming to the children of God right in the house of God.





Sincerely speaking, it is worrisome and it is already creating fear in the kind of society we find ourselves in. It is like saying that we are not safe. This has happened before; now it is happening again, under a new government.





It means we need to cry to the government the more. I believe that this problem has a solution. We are crying to the government. The government needs to look into this issue of insecurity. How these people come freely into the house of God, operate and go away like that. The government needs to help us with this.





The State So-Safe Corps Commander, Soji Ganzallo, while confirming the incident, said his officers killed one of the kidnappers, adding that the abducted victims had been rescued.





Ganzallo, in a statement by the So-Safe Corps Director of Information and Public Relations, Moruf Yusuf, said, The special operation team of the corps in the Owode-Egba Zonal Command, under ACC Jimoh Omoniyi, received a distress call that some of the members of the Redeemed Christian Church of God, Desires of Nations Parish, under Ogun Province 22, Abule-Ori, in the Obafemi Owode LGA were attacked during a vigil, while seven members of the church were kidnapped and the pastor killed.





The seven victims were rescued unhurt while one of the kidnappers was killed and many of the suspects sustained serious injury during a gunfire exchange.





Also confirming the incident, the state Police Public Relations Officer, Omolola Odutola, said one of the pastors of the church, Adesina Oyesegun, reported the case to the police.





She said, The hoodlums were shooting sporadically, as a result, a pastor, Kayode Oluwakemi, 56, sustained bullet wounds in his chest and unfortunately died on the spot. The kidnapped victims have regained their freedom. An effort is in progress to arrest other fleeing suspects that are still at large.
A former member of the dissolved All Progressives Congress, APC, Presidential Campaign Council, Oladotun Hassan, has accused Igbos of championing ethnic bigotry days to the 2023 general elections.

Oladotun also accused Arise Television and one of its anchors, Rufai Oseni, of contributing to it through their negative reports.

He claimed that Oseni particularly picked questions as if he were a member of the Labour Party, LP.

Oladotun made the allegations on Monday while fielding questions on Arise Televisions Morning Show programme coming on the heels of the European Unions Election Observation Mission, EU EOM, report on the 2023 general elections.

Recall that the EU EOM had noted that shortcomings in law and electoral administration hindered the conduct of well-run and inclusive elections and damaged trust in the Independent National Electoral Commission, INEC.

However, Oladotun said the Igbos and Arise Television should be blamed for some of the skirmishes in the run-up to the election.

He said, Most times Mr Rufai, you know, you pick your questions as if youre political and in line with Labour Party as card carrying member; sorry to say this.

The way I put it to you that Datti Baba-Ahmed made a seditious statements that are criminal in nature. These are electoral processes. These are citizens value system. And in all fairness, in a cross of competition, everybody deploy whatever arsenals at their disposals.

In view of the fact that we are all citizens, there are certain things I will come on air and I have to condemn. I have come severally, even in the last time that I was here, I condemned some certain statements and I reassured Igbo people of their safety in Lagos.

For the fact that for every action theres a reaction. When the Igbos go on from here and there, trying to throw a lot of banters at Yoruba people, called them names; its all there. Even majority of this our theatre practitioners, Nollywood actors from the Igbo side, we all saw how much they were throwing into the media.

And I must say sincerely Arise Television equally contributed negatively towards all those things because some things were reported negatively.

At some instances, your whole soliquization on media, you attacked the APC.




Sopurum Hotel, located in the Nkwelle community, Onitsha, Anambra State, has been gutted by fire.





It was learnt that the incident, which occurred early hours of Monday, led to the burning of a substantial part of the hotel structure.





Men of the fire service from Delta and Anambra states are currently at the scene battling with the situation at the time of filing this report.





The police spokesman for Anambra State Police Command, DSP Tochukwu Ikenga, confirmed the fire incident to Channels TV, saying the situation is under control.





The situation is under control. The fire started around 4:30 am on Monday, and when we got the information, our men were quickly mobilised to the scene, and they condoned off the area to avoid any case of vandalism, he said.




Abia State Governor, Alex Otti has vowed to recover all government funds and property in the hands of alleged corrupt persons in the State.





This is even as he has assured that his administration would disconnect the mouths of more looters of public funds and property from the feeding bottle of the State.





Otti made the vow in Umuahia during a thanksgiving service of the Deputy Speaker of Abia State House of Assembly, Hon. Austin Okezie Meregini, held at St. Anns Catholic Church.





He explained that various changes he had made so far in the States civil service and the dissolution of various Boards in the State were geared towards rebuilding Abia, and vowed that every stolen public fund and property would be recovered through the recently inaugurated Panel of Inquiry.





His words:





It is also not uncommon for you to be hearing people wailing and crying; that is expected because for the past 24 years, some people had put their mouths on the feeding bottle and since we came we removed their mouths.





There may be a few people whose mouths we have not seen and that is why we have the Panel. We will fish out those people and remove their mouths from the feeding bottle.





Otti said that public funds and property should be used for the good of the people, not to be cornered by a corrupt few.





The feeding bottle is for all of us. So anytime that happens, you will hear them screaming, the man is undemocratic, the man wants to spoil the State. We have not come to spoil, we have come to rebuild.





So, if the rebuilding tastes like spoiling to them, we cant understand but we cannot sympathize with them, Otti thundered, to the cheering of Church members.





He advised Abians not to lose sleep as his policies were designed for their own good.





Earlier in his speech, the Deputy Speaker of Abia State House of Assembly, Austin Okezie Meregini thanked God and his people for his victory during the election and for his eventual emergence as Deputy Speaker.





Recall that Governor Otti had set up a Judicial Panel of Inquiry, charging it to recover alleged stolen government property from people who served in the previous administrations in the state.





A statement issued by the Secretary to the State Government (SSG), Prof Kenneth Kalu, named Justice Florence Ikwuoma Duruoha-Igwe of the State High Court Umuahia as the chairman of the panel.





Other members of the panel, according to the SSG, are Prof Ogwo Ekeoma Ogwo, Mazi Ugochukwu Okoroafor, Rev Fr Alex Okonkwo and Prof Ursula Ngozi Akanwa.





His administration has so far sacked several appointees of the immediate past administration, including permanent secretaries.
Mmesoma Ejikeme, who was accused by the Joint Admission and Matriculation Board (JAMB) of forging her result has denied the allegation.

Ejikeme spoke in a video, expressing surprises that a result she reportedly printed out from the JAMB portal could be termed by the examination board as fake.

The candidate, who said she was traumatised by the claim made by JAMB, described herself as a brilliant student, saying she is not capable of doing what JAMB accused her of doing.

In the video, Ejikeme said: I am the owner of this result. I went to JAMB portal to print this result and this is what they gave me. This is the result here. This is my aggregate, 362. This is exactly how I downloaded it from that site. So, they (JAMB) now saying I forged my result is what I dont know; and Im traumatised that they accused me of forging my own result.

I am not capable of forging results. This is the evidence. The QR code on the result was scanned and it showed another name, a Yoruba name, Omotola Afolabi, 138. That same person that got 138, they checked again and the person scored 238; meaning that there is problem somewhere.

Ejikeme explained that she was at the office of the Anambra Commissioner of Education on Friday with her secondary school principal and the education Secretary.

We showed this result to the Commissioner of Education, both this one and the SMS they sent to me. So, she snapped it and sent to the JAMB officials. They called back, saying that this was a forged result, that I forged it myself, that the JAMB office doesnt have a record of this.

They called the DSS over to come to her office. The DSS took us to their office and we made our statement there. The DSS said they would contact us later, that they are going to investigate this result to know where it came from.

Instead of them (JAMB) to wait for the investigation to be over, they posted that I forged without confirming. Im really really sad about it, she stated.

She added that being a brilliant student from her primary school days, she could not have forged the JAMB result just to impress anybody.
The management of Innoson Automobile Company has commenced an investigation to unravel the controversy surrounding the 362 JAMB score of Miss Mmesoma Ejikeme.

Recall that Ejikeme was in the news a few months ago after she claimed she scored 362, the highest mark in the 2023 Joint Admissions and Matriculation Board, JAMB exams.

The student of Anglican Girls Secondary School Uruagu, Nnewi in Anambra State was subsequently awarded N3 million by the Innoson company.

However, JAMB on Sunday accused Ejikeme of using a software to manipulate her score to 362 as against 249.

Reacting, the Head of Corporate Communications at Innoson Group, Mr Cornel Osigwe described the allegation as strange, stating that the organization had independently verified the score before awarding the scholarship.

It, however, stated that the organization would withdraw the scholarship if the allegation happens to be true.

Speaking with NAN on Monday, Mr Cornel said: If we find out that the girl actually manipulated her result for obvious reasons, we will withdraw the scholarship.
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.

SAIC Motor sees record high NEV sales in June

SAIC Motor sold 86,000 new energy vehicles (NEVs) in June, marking a 13.1% month-on-month growth and setting a new record for the year, the auto group announced via its WeChat account.

In the first half of this year, SAIC Motors NEV sales broke records every month, with the second quarter seeing over 230,000 NEVs sold, a staggering 61.9% growth compared to the first quarter.

ID.6 X; photo credit: SAIC Volkswagen

RoboSense rushes for Hong Kong IPO

According to documents disclosed by the Hong Kong Stock Exchange on June 30, laser lidar enterprise RoboSense has submitted an application to list on the Main Board of the exchange. J.P. Morgan and China Renaissance are acting as the joint sponsors for its listing.

10,000th unit of Haval's Xiaolong series rolls off assembly line

On July 1, the Haval Xiaolong series, which has only been on the market for 45 days, celebrated the production of its 10,000th vehicle. In addition, the automaker revealed that sales for the Haval Xiaolong series in June reached 6,098 units, marking a 97% increase from May.

SAIC Motor signs agreement to build power battery production base in Zhengzhou city

On July 2, SAIC Motor signed a framework agreement with the municipal government of Zhengzhou city, the capital of Henan province, to establish a new energy vehicle (NEV) battery production base.

Changan Autos DEEPAL posts double-digit MoM increase in June deliveries

DEEPAL, the new energy vehicle brand of Changan Automobile, saw its monthly deliveries hit 8,041 vehicles in June 2023.

AVATR delivers 1,753 AVATR 11 SUVs in June 2023

Last month, AVATR, the premium new energy vehicle brand jointly supported by Changan Automobile, Huawei, and CATL, delivered a total of 1,753 vehicles. Additionally, AVATR's intelligent driving system accumulated a total using distance of 4,347,008 kilometers, while the APA intelligent parking system was utilized by 975,043 times.

Tesla cuts price for Model S, Model X vehicles in China

On the first day of July, Tesla announced a discount promotion plan for its Model S and Model X vehicles in China. Specifically, customers who purchase the Model S and Model X vehicles in stock will enjoy discounts ranging from 35,000 yuan to 45,000 yuan.

ECARX increases investment in JICA Intelligent Robotics

Global mobility technology company ECARX Holdings Inc. (ECARX) announced its plan to increase investment in and obtain controlling stake of JICA Intelligent Robotics Co., Ltd. ("JICA").

GAC AION sees sales in first half of 2023 soar 109% YoY to exceed 200,000 units

GAC AION, the electric vehicle maker under GAC Group, posted an impressive June sales figure of 45,013 vehicles, representing a year-on-year increase of 86.7%. This marks the fourth consecutive month in 2023 in which the company's sales have exceeded 40,000 units.

Horizon Robotics, Aptiv join forces to develop localized intelligent driving solutions

Horizon Robotics, the Chinese automotive computing solution provider, today announced a in-depth strategic partnership agreement with Aptiv, the global technology company specializing in green and smart mobility solutions.

Leapmotor sees 17.32% YoY jump in June 2023 deliveries

In June, Leapmotor delivered 13,209 vehicles, representing a 9.55% rise month-on-month and a 17.32% jump year on year. According to the startup, monthly deliveries of its C series models exceeded 11,600 units in June, accounting for more than 87% of Leapmotors total delivery volume.

Great Wall Motor partners with Inchcape for expansion in Indonesian Market

Great Wall Motors (GWM), a leading Chinese automaker, entered into a strategic global partnership with Inchcape, one of the world's largest automotive distributors, on June 30.

ZEEKRs monthly deliveries zoom up 146.9% YoY in June 2023

ZEEKR, the premium electric vehicle maker under Geely Auto Group, delivered a record high of 10,620 vehicles in June, marking a year-over-year surge of 146.9% and a month-on-month increase of 22.4%, according to the official data released on July 1.

Dongfeng Motor's VOYAH delivers 3,007 vehicles in June 2023

VOYAH, the premium new energy vehicle brand under Dongfeng Motor, saw its June auto deliveries soar at a triple-digit rate from the previous year, according to the performance data it released on July 1.

BYD puts DOLPHIN all-electric model onto Brazilian market, priced at R$149,800

BYD made a splash in the Brazilian market on June 28 with the launch of the BYD DOLPHIN, its first pure electric model with the Ocean Aesthetics design. The model is priced at R$149,800 in the local market.

BYD scores another monthly record high sales volume in June 2023

BYD Company Limited saw its monthly auto sales hit a new high of 253,046 units in June 2023, representing an 88.79% year-on-year spike and a 5.34% month-on-month growth. It was also the first month for BYD to see the monthly number exceed 250,000 units.
Daniel Bwala, a media aide to the 2023 Peoples Democratic Party, PDP, presidential candidate, Atiku Abubakar, has mocked the Independent National Electoral Commission, INEC, for failing to open its defence.

INEC had failed to open its defence at the Presidential Election Petition Tribunal after 10 days breaks.

This was due to the absence of witnesses for the electoral body at the tribunal.

Reacting, Bwala tweeted: INEC failed to open its defence after 10 days break; reason? Because witnesses failed to show up. #Vuvuzela #hakunamatata

Meanwhile, Levi Uzoukwu, a counsel to the Labour Party, LP, presidential candidate, Levi UzoukwuPeter Obi said INEC was not ready to defend its case before the tribunal.

Uzoukwu spoke after the tribunal adjourned sitting on Monday following the absence of INECs witness at the resumed sitting.

The lawyer, however, noted that LP was ready to move on with its case, unlike INEC which has continued to show inconsistencies.

Given the contradictions and inconsistencies and what INEC has done; Im sure they are not ready to defend this case, he said.
Apex Igbo socio-cultural organisation, Ohanaeze Ndigbo Youth Council Worldwide has urged residents of South-East to ignore Mr Simon Ekpas declaration of a one-week sit-at-home in the zone.

Ekpa had announced one week sit-at-home commencing from today, July 3, 2023.

The Finland-based Biafra agitator has continued to spearhead regular Monday sit-at-home in the South-East despite the mainstream leadership of the Indigenous People of Biafra, IPOB, suspending the exercise.

Several groups, individuals and state governments have also condemned the sit-at-home, lamenting its economic implications on the zone.

But Ekpa has again asked the people of the South-East to stay at home for one week.

In a statement obtained by DAILY POST on Monday, the National President of Ohanaeze Youths, Mazi Okwu Nnabuike urged South-East residents to ignore Ekpas directive.

Okwu, who described Ekpas order as dictatorial, said there was no justification for someone to relax in his comfortable abode in Finland and then issue orders that others should not seek their daily bread for one week.

The youth group said, We have always made it clear that Simon Ekpa is not fighting for Biafra; he is only using the name of Biafra to enrich himself.

He is also not interested in having Mazi Nnamdi Kanu released because he knows any day Kanu is released, his business will end.

So, he goes ahead taking decisions, issuing orders that would lead to the prolonged detention of Mazi Nnamdi Kanu.

One of such is his senseless and unjustified sit-at-home orders. How could you ask the breadwinner of a home to sit-at-home for one week and watch himself and his family members starve to death? It is utterly senseless.

It is even more deceitful considering that the person issuing the order is in far away Finland enjoying himself.

Ndigbo should, therefore, not take him seriously; come out and go about your normal business. There is no sit-at-home anywhere.

Okwu added that even the IPOB leader, Mazi Nnamdi Kanu had also condemned the sit-at-home, stating clearly that it was not in the best interest of the people of the zone.

For Ekpa to be promoting it against the directive of the IPOB leader, Kanu shows that he is on a personal mission and should be ignored, Okwu added.




Governor Oluwarotimi Akeredolu of Ondo State has been urged not to hasten his return to the country from his medical leave abroad.





While giving the admonition, over the weekend, Senator Jimoh Ibrahim, who is representing the Ondo South Senatorial District at the National Assembly, advised the governor to cancel his return flight and take extra time to relax before starting his official duties.





The senator gave the advice to the governor during a telephone conversation.





Akeredolu, who left for a 21-day medical leave abroad a few days ago, is scheduled to return home on July 6, 2023, according to a letter he sent to the Ondo State House of Assembly.





The federal lawmaker emphasised the constitutional clause that permits the governor to delegate authority to his deputy while he is away and brought attention to the lengthy medical vacation taken by former President Muhammadu Buhari, which lasted nearly six months.





While urging Akeredolu to take ample time to recuperate, the business mogul said, Your Excellency, Arakunrin, it is important for you to cancel the date of your return ticket and have a sufficient holiday. You need to rest very well so that you will be adequately fit when you return to duty.





Youre not a machine, Arakunrin, so you need ample time to rest very well, having been serving the state round the clock for the past seven years.





The government of Ondo State will continue to run pending your return. So, theres no need for you to be in a hurry to return.
A former Zamfara Governor, Sani Yerima said President Bola Tinubu may dialogue with bandits in a bid to restore lasting peace and security to the country.

Yerima stated this while speaking after his visit to President Tinubu at the State House on Monday.

He said, A lot of bandits have been arrested and killed, and Im not saying government should just continue to just negotiate indefinitely. No, I said invite them.

There are people, who repent in all religions  Islam, Christian, Judaism, with the fact that God, who created us once you repent after committing offences, after committing sins he forgives you, so theres no way you can say Nigerians should not be forgiven if they repent.

If they repent, they should be rehabilitated and reintegrated into the society and then measures should be taken to avoid reoccurrence of this menace.

But, if they dont the government has enough power, enough resources, the military, the security have enough capacity. I have confidence in the Nigerian security that they have enough capacity with the political will and support of the government to handle this matter. So, dialogue is part of governance, he said.

Recall that Yerima earlier asked Tinubu to dialogue with bandits, just as the late former President Umaru Musa YarAdua dialogued with Niger Delta militants.

Yerima, in an interview with BBC Hausa on Saturday, had said, Im advising the government to, first of all, find time to sit with these bandits, just like they sat with Niger Delta militants in the past. Because a majority of them are Nigerians, even though there are some foreigners among them.

But Nigerians among them can be convinced, as the Niger Delta militants were convinced and empowered to stop.

if that fails, then the government can use force on them wherever they are, he said.

Yerimas advocacy for dialogue with bandits comes on the heels of an increasing spate of indiscriminate killings and kidnapped citizens for ransom across the country.

Meanwhile, the former Zamfara governor said though some bandits terrorising Nigeria are foreigners.

Recall that, Yerima introduced sharia law in Zamfara state 23 years ago.

Under Yerimas administration in 2000, Bello Buba Jangebe was amputated for stealing a cow following a Zamfara Sharia Court ruling.

Similarly, in 2001, Lawali Isa, who stole a bicycle, had his wrist cut.
President Bola Ahmed Tinubu has reiterated his commitment to ensuring consistency in policy and a better business climate to attract investment.

Tinubu gave the assurance while receiving a delegation from the Shell Petroleum Development Company (SPDC) in Abuja on Monday.

The visit was led by Zoe Yujnovich, SPDCs global upstream director, according to a statement by Dele Alake, special adviser to the president on special duties, communication, and strategy.

Speaking at the meeting, the president welcomed the SPDCs offer for more investments in the Nigerian oil and gas sector, adding that such investments are needed now more than ever, to enable the government meet its obligations.

He said attracting investments was a promise I made personally to Nigerians. Whatever it takes, I will fulfill that promise to Nigerians.

Tinubu assured Shells management that Nigeria was ready for business.

He also assured the investor community of his administrations willingness to maintain an open-door policy and address their concerns.

We are open for business. We are serious. I give you the assurance of consistency in policy, he said.

Tinubu said his government was removing all forms of bottlenecks in order to ensure that Nigeria becomes an attractive investment destination.

On her part, Yujnovich lauded the president for his effort to make the country environment-friendly for investors.

She described it as an incredibly strong start of the presidency and expressed her optimism about the moves made so far.

The bold step taken by the government would renew Nigerias pride of place as an investment destination, she said.

Yujnovich said the SPDC was willing to ramp up investment in the country especially in the areas of gas and deep-water assets by pumping in billions of dollars.

She stressed that Nigeria remains a strategic investment country for the company in view of the long history between the two entities and the prospects held by the countys oil and gas sector.




The National chairman of the ruling All Progressives Congress, APC, Senator Abdullahi Adamu has asked members of the National Assembly to collaborate with the executive arm of government for peace and national development.





Speaking while receiving some senators led by the Senate President Godswill Akpabio, on Sallah homage to his residence in Keffi, Nasarawa State at the weekend, Adamu said Nigerians expect better dividends of democracy under the present administration through harmonious relationship between the legislative and the executive arms of government.





The chairman, who congratulated Akpabio and his deputy, Senator Jibrin Barau over their emergence as the new presiding officers of the Red Chamber, urged them to settle down for good governance of the country in earnest since the period of contest for offices had gone.





He said: I congratulate you and your deputy on your emergence as the President of the Senate and Deputy President of the Senate respectively. Your emergence was a great relief to the party. Contests for offices are over, it is now time for governance. There must be effective collaboration between the Legislature and the Executive in the overall interest of our people.





Nigerians expect a lot through you and that can only be achieved through a united legislature and the executive working in sync in a bipartisan manner.





As the President of the Senate and chairman of the National Assembly, you have the knowledge, experience and what it takes for the two arms of government to work in harmony for the peace and development of our country.





Earlier, the Senate President expressed happiness for the opportunity to pay homage to the APC national chairman, adding that Sallah is a period to exchange love which is what Islam enjoins us to do.





He described the party chairman as a man of integrity that piloted the recent zoning arrangements in the National Assembly that produced results.





We are here to pay Sallah homage to a man of honour. To give respect to whom it is due. We thank the leadership of the party and the National Working Committee, NWC through you for the role you played which led to the success of the National Assembly leadership elections.





We also thank the Almighty Allah for keeping you alive and we pray that He keeps you alive in good health for more contributions to the development of the youth of this country.





As I have been saying, the 10th National Assembly will support the President Bola Tinubu-led administration to succeed. We will put laws in place to support the Renewed Hope agenda of this administration in the overall interest of national peace, unity and development, Akpabio declared.
A woman was killed early Sunday when a train collided with a vehicle at a railroad crossing, Bergenfield Mayor Arvin Amatorio said.

A CSX freight train hit the victims vehicle at about 1 a.m. near West Central Avenue in Bergenfield, the mayor said.

The name of the woman, identified as a 42-year-old mother of two, was not publicized, pending notification of her next of kin.

The Bergenfield Police Department had not released information about the crash, but said on Sunday morning that the Columbia Avenue and West Central Avenue railroad crossings were shut down for an investigation.

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Nicolas Fernandes may be reached at nfernandes@njadvancemedia.com.
In what some view as a victory for New Jerseys coffers potentially worth billions of dollars  and a hearty poke in the eye to neighboring New York  a bill that just passed the state Legislature would change how New Jersey views income earned by some residents who work for out-of-state companies.

The battle over how the states tax the income of remote workers who are employed by out-of-state companies intensified when many workers did their jobs from home during the COVID pandemic. It came to a head with the bill (S3128), which state lawmakers passed Friday.

Until now, New Jersey has said that income should be taxed by the state where it was earned. For example, a New Jersey employee who works in New York would be taxed in New York. New Jersey offered a tax credit so those workers werent subject to double taxation on income already taxed by New York.
Nestled in southern New Jersey, the Maurice River is an almost completely undisturbed, 35-mile long scenic waterway that flows through five municipalities and is located along the Atlantic Flyway.

What many dont know about this river  other than that its proper pronunciation is Morris  is that it contains remnants of a maritime past and is thriving with diverse wildlife.

A charming two-hour cruise, operating three times a week throughout the summer season, highlights the rivers offerings including sightings of eagles, historic sites, ospreys and more.

On one recent evening in June, Captain Dave Scherer and first mate Carlos Zavala set sail, guiding a group of about 10 people down the Maurice River in Millville on a Wednesday sunset cruise.

The boat left the Millville Marina on Ware Avenue around 6 p.m. to begin its trip. It started off unexpectedly as a herd of deer darted across the riverbank and ended with several sightings of eagles and ospreys.

Its a beautiful stretch of water, Scherer said. I feel that we supply transportation, thats about the biggest part we play.

Deer sprint along the Maurice River during a sunset cruise Wednesday, June 14, 2023 in Millville, NJ.Joe Lamberti | For NJ Advance Media for NJ.com

Throughout the two-hour, 20-mile roundtrip Scherer spoke about the rivers history and the sites that used to live along the stretch, while Zavala was on the lookout with his binoculars for birds and other wildlife that he pointed out to guests.

On each journey, passengers are guaranteed to see wildlife. Some rides have seen upwards of ten eagles in one trip down the Cumberland County portion of the waterway, according to its operators.

In addition to wildlife that inhabit the river, guests on the cruise will be able to spot traces of the locations oystering, farming and boating past, including old docking arrangements from the 1950s and portions of the Burcham Farm  the last dyked farm along the river, which began operating in the 1800s.

A lot went on on these little rivers up and down the East Coast in the early years, Scherer said.

About 20 minutes into the ride, the boat came up on the Maurice River Bluffs, which was once a site for sand mining and production of chicken feed for nearby farms.

The Nature Conservancy acquired the Maurice River Bluffs for preservation in 1992. It is now a habitat for migrating birds and contains a mountain bike trail that is one of the few trails in southern New Jersey that offers elevation change, according to the organization.

For Captain Dave Scherer, a trip down the rivers stretch with his grandson inspired the 79-year-old longtime Millville resident to start the cruise service 16 years ago.

Scherer purchased a boat for his grandsons 17th birthday. Soon after, they went for a ride on the stretch of the Maurice River in Millville that he now uses for summer tours.

We went up the riverin early spring and it was really breathtaking, said Scherer, who was a steel fabricator by trade.

Im sitting there  and hes in his heaven because hes running a boat  and Im looking, Im thinking Boy, this would make a nice river cruise. Its relaxing and then we seen eagles and I was like oh my gosh, he said.

After telling his family that he was in search for a hull that he could use for his proposed touring services, Scherers son-in-law purchased a used pontoon boat that was in service in Naples, Florida, until 2005 and had been damaged by a storm.

It was nothing more than the hull and one outboard motor hanging on it, Scherer said. Pretty sorry looking but the hull was in good shape, so we had it shipped up.

With the help of his grandson, who is now in the military, Captain Dave fixed up the boat, put a roof on it and soon had it up and running for the Maurice River cruises.

Thats how it all got started, simple enough, you know, just a working man, Scherer continued. I call it a hobby for me because I still can fabricate steel but running a boat is a heck of a lot easier.

For the past 16 years, the trip which goes 10 miles down the 35-mile long river and 10 miles back, has attracted visitors not only from across the state but also from out of state, he said.

The cruises captain even does special event trips, including memorial services.

With a capacity to accommodate up to 18 passengers at a time, the quaint tour boat offers cruises every year May through October on Fridays and Saturdays from 1 to 4 p.m. and Wednesdays at 6 p.m.

Prices for the journey are $24 per person and $17 for seniors. Guests are welcome to bring snacks and drinks onboard, according to the business operators.

The Maurice River has remained remarkably preserved, thanks to the efforts of local citizens and officials who in 1986 advocated for the rivers inclusion in the National Wild and Scenic Rivers System. In 1993 the river became a federally-designated Wild and Scenic river, according to Cumberland County officials.

We sure have something worth protecting, Scherer said as he sailed a group of ten down the river on a recent Wednesday in June.

That day, Captain Dave was accompanied on the cruise by his wife, Shelia, who often handles the cruise reservations.

During the journey, Shelia joyfully shared the story of how they first met. They have been happily married for five years after initially meeting on a blind date, she said.

Captain Dave Scherer departs his boat with his wife Sheila Veale-Scherer following a sunset cruise along the Maurice River Wednesday, June 14, 2023 in Millville, NJ. They have been married for five years.Joe Lamberti | For NJ Advance Media for NJ.com

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During a week where air travel was riddled with delays and cancellations, especially at Newark airport, United Airlines CEO bypassed the turmoil and booked a private flight from Teterboro airport, news reports said.

United CEO Scott Kirby booked the private jet on June 28, CNBC reported, as the airline was just recovering from a week that saw travelers stranded at airports, sometimes for days, due to canceled flights and delays.

The last week of June was hit with thunderstorms and bad weather that forced ground stops and delays at airports from Baltimore north to Boston, resulting in hundreds of canceled flights and playing havoc with travelers plans right before the busy July Fourth holiday.

Instead of flying from Uniteds hub in Newark, Kirby chartered a private jet from Teterboro Airport to Denver, Colorado. United did not pay for Kirbys flight, a United spokeswoman told CNBC.

Kirby apologized to staff and travelers on June 30 for using the private jet when other passengers were stranded and experiencing difficulties rebooking.

Taking a private jet was the wrong decision because it was insensitive to our customers who were waiting to get home, Kirby said in a statement made through a spokesperson. I sincerely apologize to our customers and our team members who have been working around-the-clock for several days  often through severe weather  to take care of our customers.

During the past week, numerous travelers had complaints about United Airlines, saying some were stuck for days at Newark airport, unable to book another flight after theirs were canceled. Others complained of a scramble to customer service counters to rebook flights after they couldnt do so on the airlines app or by phone.

Others mentioned long lines when they finally arrived to claim baggage and a visible lack of employees to handle the extra work. A video showed a long line of passengers waiting for their bags snaking through the corridors of Terminal C last Thursday.

U.S. Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg also singled out United for criticism, tweeting a bar graph that showed it had the highest percentage of canceled flights of any airline last week.

With the exception of United, airlines have recovered to a more typical cancellation/delay rate as of this morning, after the severe weather earlier this week.



FAA will continue to work with airlines to help them minimize disruptions during the busy 4th of July travel weekend. pic.twitter.com/xp77qHyWpI  Secretary Pete Buttigieg (@SecretaryPete) June 29, 2023

That tweet inspired a litany of complaints from frustrated flyers about the airline.

Kirby took the FAA to task last week, citing an air traffic controller shortage as a partial reason for flight delays and cancellations, which the FAA denied, but a USDOT inspector generals report confirmed.

Travel experts interviewed by NJ Advance Media blamed airlines for the over scheduling flights without sufficient staff to handle increased passenger volumes. They also faulted the FAA for air traffic control understaffing, confirmed by a June 21 USDOT inspector generals audit that said staffing was below 85% in New York and Miami.

Watching our team firsthand with our customers at four different airports and during countless meetings this week, its clear to me they represent the best of United, and I regret that I have distracted from their professionalism, Kirby said. I promise to better demonstrate my respect for the dedication of our team members and the loyalty of our customers.

As of 3:25 p.m., Monday, 161 fights had been canceled at Newark airport in 24 hours, said Flight Aware.

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Larry Higgs may be reached at lhiggs@njadvancemedia.com.
Shanghai (Gasgoo)- On July 2, SAIC Motor signed a framework agreement with the municipal government of Zhengzhou city, the capital of Henan province, to establish a new energy vehicle (NEV) battery production base.

The initiation ceremony of the aforesaid power battery project took place in the Zhengzhou Economic Development Zone on the same day.

Photo credit: SAIC Motor

SAIC Motor's plans for NEV business expansion coincide with Henan Province's NEV industry development plans. At the Auto Shanghai 2023, SAIC Motor announced a "Three-Year Action Plan for the Development of New Energy Vehicles." The plan includes lifting the annual sales of SAIC's new energy vehicles to 3.5 million by 2025, representing a compound annual growth rate of 50%. It also expects the groups self-owned brands to account for 70% of the total NEV sales.

Zhengzhou is one of SAIC Motor's significant production bases and a crucial supporter of its NEV development. Since 2017, SAIC Motor has successively planned and constructed multiple major projects in Zhengzhou, which involve complete vehicles, engines, a cloud computing data center, supplier parks, and Anji logistics. These projects have collectively produced and sold nearly 1.5 million vehicles and created a production value of over 100 billion yuan.

The power battery project, which was launched this time, will involve a total investment of 2 billion yuan with a designed annual production capacity of 300,000-set power batteries. After the project is put into production, the yearly production value is expected to exceed 10 billion yuan. This will further improve Henan's NEV industry chain layout, aiding the province in quickly establishing a crucial national-level NEV industrial base.
By John Farmer, Jr.

Some months ago, a book was sent to me at the Eagleton Institute by one of our alumnae, who graduated 50 years ago from Rutgers. In a rather sheepish cover letter, he confided that he had checked the book out from Eagletons and had come across it while cleaning out his bookshelves. After writing a short note back that all would be forgiven for his extremely overdue return in exchange for a donation of $50,000 (I hope he can take a joke), I picked up the book and began to read.

The book is a biography, published in 1940 by Rutgers Professor Robert Thompson, of Colonel James Neilson, a member of one of New Jerseys illustrious family dynasties, who lived from the dawn of American independence to its near-death in the Civil War, from 1784-1862.

It is hard to overstate the contributions of the Neilson family to Rutgers University, the City of New Brunswick, and indeed to the nation. The Declaration of Independence was read for only the third time in public on July 9, 1776 by Colonel John Neilson (father of the books subject) who stood on a table outside the Whitehall Tavern on Albany Street in New Brunswick. The British were within months of capturing New Brunswick; the price of supporting the Declarations principles could well have been Colonel Neilsons life. His commitment to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness is justly commemorated by a statue in downtown New Brunswick.

Succeeding generations of the Neilson family carried on this tradition of civic-mindedness. The family donated much of the land that comprises Rutgers University, including the College Avenue, Bush, and Douglass College campuses. They have also been celebrated for their progressive values in championing womens education and their commitment to New Brunswick with streets, dining halls, and dorms named in their honor. What Professor Thompson wrote of Colonel John Neilson is an apt summary of the familys legacy: As churchman, merchant, soldier, citizen and father, Colonel John Neilson symbolized the best in the America of his era.

Indeed, the book is dedicated to the memory of James Neilson (1844-1937), worthy keeper of a fine tradition, who bequeathed the last piece of the Neilson legacy, Wood Lawn mansion, to Rutgers upon his death. The Eagleton Institute of Politics, where I work, does its work studying and defending democracy in that mansion, which dates to 1830, within a decade of when the Neilsons began freeing their slaves.

Their slaves. It is no surprise, I suppose, to learn that like many of the founding families, the Neilson family owned and trafficked in slaves. It is another thing entirely, however, to get a glimpse into the daily reality. The biography does not shrink from mentioning the familys involvement with slavery; neither does that involvement affect the biographers glowing appraisal.

In 1813, for example, Colonel James Neilson had to handle the implications of his wifes inheritance of property in Mississippi, including 42 slaves. He hired a representative in Mississippi, who recommended against hiring the slaves out to work on local plantations, noting that hired hands are generally worked very severely and badly fed and clad. Selling them was a bad alternative, according to the representative, because the War of 1812 made the market in New Orleans apprehensive about a British invasion and as the white population are apprehensive, that, in that event, their slaves will rebel.

Like Thomas Jefferson and George Washington, the Neilson family is one of New Jerseys illustrious family dynasties. James and his wife inherited 42 slaves in 1813. There was no discussion of freeing them. Instead, James Neilson rented a farm with an overseer who was "pretty tight with the negroes and works the horses severely."

If freeing them was an option, it is not reflected in the correspondence. Instead, the legatees rented land for three years and put the slaves to work growing cotton and corn. Unsatisfied with the work of the first overseer they had hired, who was trifling and not well-calculated to manage slaves, the Mississippi representative hired another, who was very attentive and a man of good judgment in planting. The only complaint (if a complaint it may be called) is that he is pretty tight with the negroes and works the horses severely. I have, however, requested him not to be too severe with the hands and he has moderated his severity  .

There, in that harrowing description, is a snapshot of the daily casual brutality of the era. The humanity of the enslaved, if recognized at all, is sublimated to their value as economic units. Business inventories reproduced in the biography list slaves along with livestock and crop amounts as elements of value, nothing more. Cruelty is recounted as an instrument of production.

I cannot reconcile this. I cannot reconcile the good deeds of the Neilsons, or for that matter the good deeds of the likes of Thomas Jefferson or George Washington or other founders, with their willingness to countenance enslavement with all of its inhumane, if not murderous, implications. Who were these people who could espouse such lofty principles while living a contradictory reality? I simply dont know.

But this I know. Their history fractured us. Slaves families and their very identities were fractured. And so were the founders own identities and our nations ideals.

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It is little wonder, then that Frederick Douglass, speaking on the Fifth of July in 1852 to the Rochester, New York Ladies Anti-Slavery Society, questioned why he was even invited:

[W]hy am I called upon to speak here today? What have I, or those I represent, to do with your national independence? I say it with a sad sense of the disparity between us.  Your high independence only reveals the immeasurable distance between us.  This Fourth of July is yours, not mine. To drag a man in fetters into the grand illuminated temple of liberty, Douglass continued, and call upon him to join you in joyous anthems, were inhuman mockery and sacrilegious irony.

Distilled to its essence, Douglasss message was simple and stark: the ideals set forth in the Declaration of Independence were mocked by the American reality made clear in the correspondence quoted above: Black lives simply didnt matter, and havent for most of our history.

To be sure, progress in the nations treatment of African-Americans is undeniable. Slavery was ended by Civil War and by constitutional amendment. Citizenship was assured. The pernicious doctrine of separate but equal was eventually struck down by the Supreme Court. Voting rights were protected by law and discrimination in public accommodations was outlawed. A Black man was elected president of the United States.

It is also undeniable, however, that progress has been halting, if not begrudging, at best, frustrated by a persistent undercurrent of racism in both overt and subtle forms. The Jim Crow laws passed during Reconstruction denied Blacks fundamental rights and attributes of citizenship; the poll taxes and literacy tests required for access to the ballot worked hand in hand with policies designed to assure persistent poverty and illiteracy. Thousands were lynched, shot, tortured in the century preceding the assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr. Few suspects were convicted by usually all-white juries. Police came to be seen as instruments of white oppression.

The GI Bill affording tremendous educational and other opportunities following World War II passed Congress only after Blacks were specifically excluded from it. Redlining housing practices channeled migrating Blacks into urban ghettos that exacerbated a racial wealth gap that persists to this day.

Americas elite institutions of higher education and finance began admitting a select few to the halls of privilege, but not in numbers sufficient to effect a cultural change in those institutions or to lift the Black community as a whole. As a result of last weeks Supreme Court decision on affirmative action, moreover, even that avenue of progress is challenged.

Despite our nations progress, in short, we have fallen short of achieving for Black Americans the rights to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness the Declaration of Independence held to be self-evident truths. Slavery was our nations original sin, a grave moral evil that haunted the founding families. As Thomas Jefferson admitted, I tremble for my country when I reflect that God is just, and that His justice cannot sleep forever. Slaverys extirpation came close to requiring, in President Abraham Lincolns terms, that every drop of blood drawn by the lash shall be paid by another drawn with the sword.

So what are we to make of all of this as we observe Independence Day?

To mean what it should, July Fourth needs Juneteenth, our Black Emancipation Day. Because of the hypocrisy present at our nations founding, history will judge the success of the American experiment in self-governance by how well it extends the principles of its founding to those who were specifically excluded at its founding and throughout most of its history.

Despite railing against the hypocrisy of the founders, Frederick Douglass did not dismiss their Declaration of Independence; to the contrary, he counseled that only by adhering to the principles espoused in the Declaration could the nation survive.

The Declaration, he said, is the RING-BOLT to the chain of your nations destiny, and urged Americans not to abandon those principles in the stormy times to come: That bolt drawn, that chain broken, and all is lost. Cling to this day  cling to it, and to its principles, with the grasp of a storm-tossed mariner to a spar at midnight.

He was right. We must continue to hold these truths hard against our hearts, not as self-evident or self-executing but as hard-won: on battlefields, at lunch counters and on buses, in courtrooms and bombed churches, in voting booths and universities, in the sacred and fraught places where American truths are reconciled with our contradictions.

John Farmer, Jr. was New Jerseys Attorney General from 1999 - 2002. He has also served as senior counsel to the 9/11 Commission and as Dean of Rutgers School of LawNewark. He is currently the director of the Eagleton Institute of Politics at Rutgers University.

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I have comments on your article, Last ban standing, concerning changes to Oregon law that leave New Jersey as the only state that does not allow drivers to pump their own gas.

Probably, New Jersey residents have driven out of state and have pumped their own gas. All of these stations have snack or food concessions, and public restrooms where you can wash your hands.

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We constantly are told by health officials that washing hands is very important to avoid infection. How many hands have used the self-service pumps that you just used to pump your own gas? How long will it take to get service, if you prefer?

I suggest that any change in the law to permit self-service require that sanitized hand wipes be available at each pump, and that public rest rooms be available. If it is time to allow residents to pump their gas, provide the resources to clean their hands of the obvious smell of gasoline and possible contamination of the pump handles.

Bob Barrett, Clark

Catholic LGBTQ stance slow to change

Thank you for publishing the Rev. Alex Santoras recent commentary, The dangerous hate of Catholic homophobia.

I am married to a Catholic permanent deacon, who served at last years Pride Mass at Our Lady of Grace in Hoboken. Thirteen years ago, my husband and I learned that a young relative is gay. In addition to loving and supporting him, we have educated ourselves about the normality of same-sex orientation.

This is not easy within a religion that most often labels this orientation as disordered. In one of many conversations with a former pastor about how to make our own parish more welcoming to the Catholic LGBTQ community, this pastor told my husband I dont want THEM here.

Not to be dissuaded or disheartened, we have found a few Catholic ministries at other parishes where all are welcome is really practiced. We continue to be in awe of how faith-filled our LGBTQ friends are, in light of how poorly the Catholic church has treated them over time.

I would encourage any Catholic who is fearful of LGBTQ individuals to just get to know them. Listen to them. They are human beings with jobs, bills to pay and, in many cases, children to raise. They are deserving of our love and respect, not our hatred.

What would Jesus do?

Margaret OHara, West Orange

Student debt moves just a ploy

The U.S. Supreme Court struck down President Bidens student loan forgiveness program, one of the most expensive executive actions in American history, estimated at $400 billion in taxpayers money.

This student loan plan was a cynical attempt to buy votes from younger voters, nothing more, nothing less. Biden used this unfulfilled promise of debt relief to buy votes before, and will probably use it again in 2024.

I recent using my taxpayer money to pay student loans. What is next, the government paying off car loans, mortgages and credit card balances?

Giovanni Carli, East Hanover

New York mayors conflicted economic strategy

With vacant office space abounding, and New York City Mayor Eric Adams attempting to encourage employees to return to their workplace in person after remotely to create economic prosperity in the retail and restaurant trade, his strategy is conflicted at best.

Decades of astronomical bridge and tunnel tolls have already made drivers unfairly responsible for paying for mass transportation projects that have no benefit to drivers. But, just-approved congestion pricing (an extra fee for driving into Midtown and Lower Manhattan weekdays) plus designated bike and bus lanes and reduced parking availability further drives up costs. This only discourages recreational visits and the return to physical offices.

Smart telecommuters would remain telecommuters and request that their employers reassign them to company centers that are unencumbered by New York State and New York City taxes. Tired of being gouged, cost-conscious vacationers might remember the slogan, New Jersey & You, Perfect Together.

William T. Fidurski, Clark

King of comedy

The Hollywood writers are still on strike; no worries for the comedy shows. These shows can just hire Star-Ledger headline writers.

These two, concerning the recent adoption of the new state budget, were in the Sunday, July 2 print edition: How N.J. budget seeks to save residents money and New property tax relief for N.J. seniors now law.

These are perhaps the most hysterical things Ive read in a long time.

Im certainly not going to hold my breath waiting for these savings or tax cuts.

Santi Condorelli, Verona

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Oliver Thomas and LaToya Cantrell in disguises

Jeffrey Vappie

Some random person who will resign within a year after drunkenly crashing into an oak tree

Tchompitoulas will take a bite outta crime

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Beijing (Gasgoo)- On July 2, AVATR, the premium new energy vehicle brand jointly supported by Changan Automobile, Huawei, and CATL, released its delivery data for June 2023.

AVATR 11; photo credit: AVATR

Last month, AVATR delivered a total of 1,753 vehicles. Additionally, AVATR's intelligent driving system accumulated a total using distance of 4,347,008 kilometers, while the APA intelligent parking system was utilized by 975,043 times.

The AVATR 11, the automakers only production model on the market, saw its single-motor variant hit the market on March 24 this year with a starting price of 319,900 yuan. Built on the CHN platform, the vehicle is equipped with the comprehensive Huaweis HI full-stack intelligent automotive solution and CATL's ternary lithium batteries. It features Huaweis HarmonyOS smart cockpit solution and is powered by the Huawei ADS intelligent driving system.

AVATRs ADS (Advanced Driving System) premium package became available for subscription to all users on June 30. The ADS premium package includes City NCA (City Navigation Cruise Assistance) and AVP (Automated Valet Parking) functions, offering a comprehensive closed-loop smart driving experience for highways, urban areas, and parking scenarios.

To cater to different user preferences, AVATR will provide three subscription modes, including a monthly subscription at 640 yuan, an annual subscription at 6,400 yuan, and a lifetime subscription at 32,000 yuan.
This work is supported with a grant funded by the Walton Family Foundation and administered by the Society of Environmental Journalists.
Two former employees of the Jefferson Parish Public School System have pleaded not guilty to separate allegations of sexual misconduct with students, according to court records.

Sophia Canales, 23, of Kenner, was arrested in August 2022 and accused of having an inappropriate relationship with a 12-year-old boy at Stella Worley Middle School in Westwego and forcing him to perform a sex act, according to Jefferson Parish Sheriff's Office investigators.

She pleaded not guilty June 27 to sexual battery and indecent behavior with a juvenile under the age of 13, court records said.
CYBERSPACEAffiliate program JerkPay.com, the company behind VirtualTaboo.com and DarkroomVR.com, has launched its first non-VR pay site, OnlyTarts.com.

Touting the site as "an ode to feminine beauty and the vibrant spirit of youth," the ingenue-themed banner will offer classic one-on-one scenes, g/g/b, b/g/b, deep throat, anal, rimming and cream pies, with future plans for cuckold content as well.

According to JerkPay representatives, the company has already begun shooting in 6K, but for now will be releasing content in 4K UHD.

Affiliates with relevant traffic are invited to sign up to promote OnlyTarts at JerkPay.com.
SUPERIOR  Growing up in a mining family that goes back generations, Mayor Mila Besich knew the Oak Flat Campground as the place where she attended union picnics as a girl and in earlier years her parents stood in a clearing to hear the World Series on the radio.

Now, Besich is overseeing Superiors fight to build a new copper project at Oak Flat amid worries about the towns economic future.

Today, the national forest land in the heart of Arizonas Copper Corridor is scattered with 20 rustic campsites among ancient oaks and a hand-painted sign that reads: Protect Oak Flat, Holy Land. Buried deep underground is the worlds third-largest deposit of copper ore, big enough to yield 40 billion pounds of the metal over 60 years.

Competing interests have ignited a tug of war between the town of about 3,000 people who want a huge copper mine built there for its economic benefits, and Native American groups that consider the land sacred and are fighting to protect it from disturbance.

Our town is going to be the most affected, said the mayor. What about our culture?

Resolution Copper Mining, a joint subsidiary of U.K. and Australian mining giants Rio Tinto and BHP, hopes to build one of the worlds largest underground copper mines at the site outside Superior, about 70 miles east of Phoenix. Managing partner Rio Tinto says the mine could satisfy a quarter of growing U.S. demand for copper used in electric vehicles and smartphones.

Resolution began the permitting process nearly a decade ago, but the project has been delayed amid legal and political wrangling between U.S. agencies and the nonprofit Apache Stronghold, which challenges a planned land swap that would make the project possible. The full U.S. 9th District Court of Appeals is considering Apache Strongholds request to permanently halt the project, but the only thing stopping it now is the lack of a new environmental impact statement.

Two other lawsuits challenging the initial environmental review, one filed by the San Carlos Apache Tribe and the other by environmental groups, have gone nowhere since the U.S. government pulled the impact statement for more consultations.

Oak Flat is on Tonto National Forest property to be conveyed to Resolution under a land exchange that Congress approved in a 2014 rider to a must-pass defense bill.

The congressional vote sparked outrage among some Apaches over the site, which features ancient Emory oaks and their acorns and other plants they consider important to their culture and religion. Called Chichil Bildagoteel, the site is about an hours drive from the San Carlos Apache Reservation and has been used for girls coming-of-age celebrations.

Rio Tinto has said it would keep the campground open during the mines first decades of operation. But Oak Flat could eventually collapse into a 1.8-mile crater when massive amounts of rock are removed from below.

Wendsler Nosie, a former San Carlos Apache tribal chairman and longtime activist, is the face of the Save Oak Flat campaign. He earlier fought unsuccessfully to stop a major telescope project on a site in southeastern Arizona that Apaches consider sacred: Mount Graham, or Dzil Nchaa Sian.

Nosie said he believes many townspeople quietly back his fight, but they cannot openly show their support for me.

When he was recently confronted in an area restaurant by a mining company employee who accused him of endangering jobs, development and good schools, I stood up and talked about how Im fighting for land, the water, the earth, religion and our children, he said, prompting a group of diners to applaud and pay for his dinner.

While the San Carlos Apache leadership opposes the mine, some tribe members support it for the jobs it could generate amid high unemployment on the reservation.

Oak Flat is not sacred, said Karen Kitcheyan-Jones, 64, a member who lives on the reservation. There are many places on the reservation where we can gather acorns and have ceremonies.

Brenda Astor, Resolutions principal adviser for Native affairs and a San Carlos Apache member, noted that dozens of other enrolled members also work for the mining company.

Amid strong opposition to the project by some tribes and others, the Forest Service withdrew Resolutions original environmental impact statement for Oak Flat two years ago for additional consultations. No time frame has been announced. But once a new review is published, the formal transfer process can begin unless a federal court halts it.

U.S. Rep. Raul Grijalva of Arizona reintroduced legislation in March seeking to stop the land transfer, but it has not gained traction in Congress.

Rio Tinto says the mine woul help create 3,700 jobs over the course of the project and boost state and local tax revenues by $88 million to $113 million a year.

Thats a lot for a town still clawing back economically after the Magma copper mine first shut down in 1982, later opened for a few years, then closed for good in 1996. The closure devastated a community so small that it has no stoplight and can be traversed by car in just over three minutes.

Superior was originally established in 1882 as the town of Hastings when the big mine was the Silver King, producing silver. The former mining towns of Globe and Miami are nearby, burrowed into mountains studded with saguaro cactus.

Today, Superior still embraces its labor roots, a Democratic island in predominantly Republican Pinal County, said Besich, herself a Democrat.

More than a quarter of the towns residents live below the poverty line. Nearly 70% of the population is Hispanic, largely descendants of mining families who immigrated from Mexico or already worked in the area when it was still part of Mexico until the mid-1800s.

We didnt cross the border, it crossed us, said Manny Guzman, whose family in the area goes back seven generations. His ancestor Manuelita Guzman (18441916) is buried in the Historic Pinal Cemetery, also the resting place of Wyatt Earps common-law wife, Mattie Earp.

Guzman, president of the nonprofit economic development corporation Rebuild Superior, said he remains hopeful the mine will prevail, but finds the delays frustrating after spending innumerable hours debating the environmental review.

There have been so many studies, so many roundtables, he said.

The talks have secured important gains for Superior, such as ensuring protection of the towns water supply and guaranteeing a minimum of $120 million in revenue to pay for police and fire services over the course of the project if it goes forward.

We have seen some pretty dramatic changes to the plan, said Vicky Peacey, Resolutions president and general manager. Its important that a lot of voices are heard.

Rio Tinto also agreed to permanently protect Apache Leap, the towns backdrop where local legend says some 75 Apaches leapt 400 feet to their death in the early 1870s rather than surrender to the U.S. cavalry.

Town manager Todd Pryor said Resolution provided $2.25 million to help buy the old brick Superior High School thats being renovated to house the town hall, a library and activities for seniors, and threw in another $1.29 million for an enterprise center to develop future entrepreneurs and teach people trades such as welding.

Officials in a town used to boom and bust cycles say they know they need to diversify their economy and cant count only on Resolution and its mine for their future.

They are developing local tourism, every March hosting a popular Apache Leap Mining Festival that includes a parade, chihuahua races and a mining competition with hand-sawing and jackleg drilling contests. Hundreds visit the town each August for the Prickly Pear Festival, with cactus fruit ice cream and margaritas.

But in a state that produces 70% of the nations copper, and in a town where nearly everyones parents and grandparents worked for the mines, the biggest bets for the future are on the extraction of ore.

Its in our DNA, said Rick Cartier, the chamber of commerce president.
VALPARAISO  A custom meat processing plant is on its way to approval in Porter County.

The Plan Commission recommended rezoning land at the intersection of U.S. 231 and Ind. 2 south of Hebron from agricultural to industrial for the project. The county Redevelopment Commission is recommending a new tax increment financing district for the water and sewer infrastructure.

Town Council President John Spinks said the council will allow Project Ribeye to tap on to the towns water and sewer lines at the companys expense. At about 1.5 miles, thats going to be a costly project.

If the Board of Commissioners approves it, the TIF district will allow the company to recoup the infrastructure cost over the length of the TIF.

Nelson Schoon, who co-owns Project Ribeye with his wife, daughters and investors with a minority stake, said he plans to harvest 20 to 25 cattle a day, or 108 a week, although a second shift might be added later. The plant would also handle about 20 hogs a week.

This is not going to be anything you are familiar with, Schoon said.

The animals would be kept inside and processed the same day, he promised: We want to be good neighbors. No animals will be housed overnight.

The processing plant would have a USDA inspector on site.

The problem with the meat industry right now is that there is not enough custom processing, Schoon said.

Indiana raises about 20,000 cattle, but theres only enough processing capacity to handle about 50,000.

As part of the operation, Schoon plans a retail store that would go much further than labeling products Made in USA. They would also say which farm the meat comes from.

The store would be open 8 a.m. to 5 p.m., but Schoon plans a refrigerated kiosk for customers to prepay for their orders and be able to unlock a locker with a cellphone.

We want to go straight to the families, he said. We dont want to compete with the big boys.

Schoon said Project Ribeye would reserve enough processing capacity to handle 4-H animals for Porter County and its neighbors.

A catwalk would allow the public to observe the processing plant, minus the area where animals are killed.

Schoon doesnt want children to be traumatized or the animals to suffer undue stress.

Councilman Greg Simms likes the catwalk idea. Indiana Dunes Tourism officials want to send visitors beyond the beach, and Project Ribeye is unusual enough to draw tourists to south county, he said.

Schoon said waste products like blood and offal would be put in barrels for Darling Ingredients, which has a rendering plant in Plymouth. A water filtration system would treat the water, skimming off solids before the wastewater enters the towns sewer system.

Schoon originally planned to build the plant in DeMotte, but officials there dragged their feet, he said.

He hopes to work with vocational education programs to train future butchers. Its a noble profession, he said.
PORTAGE  A 23-year-old boater was taken off the water over the weekend and straight to jail on allegations of operating his craft while intoxicated, according to Indiana Department of Natural Resources Conservation Officer Tyler Brock.

A DNR officer patrolling the local Burns Ditch around 10:50 p.m. Saturday stopped a boat driven by Mitchell Burnette, of Cape Corel, Florida, for failing to have an all-direction white light, Brock said.

During the stop, the officer noticed signs of intoxication and Burnette was found to have a blood-alcohol concentration of 0.101%, which exceeds the legal limit of 0.08%, according to Brock.

The same prohibitions against drinking and driving for vehicles on roadways apply to motorized watercrafts, Brock said.

DNR officers are taking part in the annual Operation Dry Water national campaign aimed at educating recreational boaters about the dangers of boating while under the influence of alcohol or drugs.

Drunken driver involved in crash had child in vehicle, Porter County police say The child was turned over to a family member when the accused was taked to jail, police said.

"Alcohol use continues to be the leading known contributing factor in recreational boater deaths and a leading contributor in boating accidents," according to the DNR.

"Last year, law enforcement officers across the nation removed 794 impaired operators from the nation's waterways during Operation Dry Water weekend."

The DNR says boat passengers, not just operators, should refrain from alcohol use.

"The risk of serious injury is the same for operators and passengers when drinking," Indiana Boating Law Administrator Lt. Kenton Turner said. "Alcohol use by passengers presents a danger regardless of whether the operator is consuming alcohol."

Visit operationdrywater.org or on.IN.gov/dnrlaw for more information about boating under the influence.
CROWN POINT  A court granted bail Friday for one man but denied a second defendants request in connection to a fatal shooting last year at Serenity Lounge in Hammond.

Cordero Miller, 30, of Chicago, and Marcus Mathis, 27, of Griffith were charged with murder and attempted murder in the death of Brian Leonard, 29, of Chicago, and wounding three people outside the business.

Miller and Mathis each filed petitions to let bail. In Indiana, defendants held on murder charges arent granted bond unless the presumption of guilt is not strong.

Lake Criminal Court Magistrate Mark Watson recommended bail for Mathis but not Miller. Mathiss bail was set at $75,000, according to Fridays court order from Judge Salvador Vasquez.

Charging documents said there was a birthday party Sept. 25 at the Serenity Lounge, 6217 Kennedy Ave, and two women at the function purportedly got into an argument.

The argument eventually spilled outside in front of the lounge. While individuals were outside, shots were fired by several subjects, according to the probable-cause affidavit.

Surveillance footage from a nearby business showed three men, carrying firearms, walk toward the group and fire multiple shots toward the large group. The exchange of gunfire last(ed) for approximately 10 seconds, and the three men then fled the scene in a Ford Expedition, according to charging documents. The driver of the vehicle never exited the car, charges stated.

Police found Leonard lying near an auto shop and transported him to a hospital, where he was declared dead, charges said. Three other people were shot, but their wounds were nonfatal and they were transported to the hospital for treatment.

Two of the three shooters have been identified by police as Joseph Smith and Byron Emory, according to charging documents. Court records indicate that Smith and Emory have been charged with murder and three counts of attempted murder.

Smiths next court appearance is set for July 19 in Vasquezs courtroom. Emorys first appearance has not been set because he is at large on an arrest warrant.

Investigators identified Smith after they discovered that he had rented a Ford Expedition on Sept. 19 in Indianapolis, charges stated. The vehicle was reported stolen Sept. 25, after Smith failed to return it.

On Sept. 27, an Illinois trooper tried to pull the stolen vehicle over while it was on Interstate 90 near Madison Avenue in Chicago. Several officers joined the pursuit, but the car eventually crashed and the driver fled on foot, charging documents stated.

The Expedition was towed to Hammond for further processing. Police wrote in the affidavit that they discovered two cellphones in the car.

Officers later discovered via cellphone location data that Smith was near the Serenity Lounge at the time of the homicide, according to the probable-cause affidavit.

Further analysis of Smiths phone showed a video with Emory in it, and Emory was wearing the same outfit as one of the suspects shown in surveillance footage of the homicide.

Police later found that Smith only had two contacts saved in his phones address book. Officers wrote in the affidavit that one of those contacts had the same phone number that Smith provided when he rented the Expedition in Indianapolis.

That contact was later discovered to be Miller. Millers phone was pinged Sept. 19 at the rental car center in Indianapolis and Sept. 25 at the Serenity Lounge around the time of the murder.

Police also uncovered a text message Miller sent to Smith about 12 hours after the homicide, in which Miller said See if my ID in your car.

Mathiss number was also found in Smiths phone, but Mathiss attorney, John Cantrell, argued at Mathiss bail petition that the number hadnt been used in months, so there was no way to know whether his client was using it at the time of the homicide.

Cantrell also asked an officer at the hearing if he knew who the third shooter was or who the getaway car driver was. The officer said he wasnt sure.

Mathiss next court appearance is set for July 6, and Millers is set for July 13, both in Vasquezs courtroom.
LOWELL  A 65-year-old man faces a couple felony counts in an alleged road rage incident along Interstate 65 where he is accused of throwing an egg and then pointing a gun at another vehicle with two young children inside, Indiana State Police said.

Paul Mihalich, of Demotte, was taken to the Lake County Jail following the Friday evening incident and faces felony counts of intimidation with a firearm and pointing a firearm, and misdemeanor criminal mischief, according to police.

Police said they received a report around 6 p.m. Friday of the alleged road rage incident underway along southbound Interstate 65 near the Lowell exit.

A state trooper reportedly located the suspect's vehicle, a 2022 GMC Canyon, as it exited the highway on to Ind. 2. The officer found a cartoon of eggs in the vehicle with one missing and the driver, later identified as Mihalich, said he was in possession of a gun.

The victim's car had a broken egg scattered on the inside, police said.

UPDATE: Indiana police officer reportedly shot dead after responding to domestic call at hospital Early Monday, the alleged victim contacted police and said her alleged abuser was on his way to the hospital, ISP said.

"Of particular concern in this case is that in the victim's car, there were two young children, both under the age of five," police said.

"With summer heating up and traffic increasing due to construction zones, the Indiana State Police encourages anyone that experiences road rage while driving to take a deep breath and dont make a rash decision that could not only affect you being charged with a crime, but an innocent person, even a child, being potentially harmed by your decision to act, rather than not to act."
TELL CITY  A police officer in far southern Indiana was shot to death early Monday along with a man suspected in a domestic abuse case, Indiana State Police said.

Tell City police Sgt. Heather Glenn was attempting to take Sean Hubert, 34, of Tell City, into custody when during the struggle, Hubert produced a gun and Glenn was shot, police said.

Other officers returned fire and shot Hubert, who also died.

The shooting occurred at Perry County Memorial Hospital, in Tell City, which is located along the Ohio River, which separates Indiana from Kentucky.

Glenn had initially been called to the hospital Sunday to investigate a domestic dispute allegedly involving Hubert and a female, ISP said.

The woman in question had gone to the hospital for treatment of injuries and police went out in search of Hubert.

Early Monday, the woman contacted police and said Hubert was on his way to the hospital, ISP said. Officers from area departments responded and Glenn located and attempted to arrest Hubert.

"Hubert refused to comply with Sergeant Glenn," according to police.

"Sergeant Glenn attempted to deploy an electronic-controlled weapon but it was ineffective," police said. "During a brief struggle, Hubert produced a firearm and Sergeant Glenn was shot."

Hubert was then shot by other officers and both he and Glenn were treated at the scene before dying, ISP said.

Glenn had reportedly worked for the Perry County Sheriff's Office and Tell City Police Department for nearly 20 years.

"Sergeant Glenn was a well-respected officer and pillar in her community," ISP said. "Tell City Police Chief Derrick Lawalin advised Sgt. Glenn was a good friend to everyone and will be sadly missed, but not forgotten."

The investigation is ongoing and an autopsy has been scheduled.

Indiana Gov. Eric Holcomb said, "Another officer has fallen victim to the senseless act of violence. I urge Hoosiers to remember Tell City Police Sgt. Heather Glenn, who gave the ultimate sacrifice for the safety of others."

"She dedicated nearly 20 years to serving the citizens of Perry County and Tell City and now her family needs our love and support more than ever,' he said. "Janet and I will hold her loved ones in our hearts during this painful time as they try and find peace and solace."
The Russian House in Baku hosted a concert by Anastasia Bobovich, a talented vocalist, a graduate of the Uzeyir Hajibeyli Baku Music Academy, winner of international music competitions, who once worked at the Azerbaijan State Academic Opera and Ballet Theatre, Azernews reports, citing press service of the Russian Information and Cultural Centre.

?.Bobovich has been involved in creative and pedagogical activities for many years, both in Turkiye and Russia.

Having arrived in his native city, A.Bobovich kindly accepted an invitation to the Russian House in Baku and gave the guests a wonderful musical evening together with a concertmaster, Honoured Artist of the Republic of Azerbaijan Ilaha Sadykhzade.

The concert programme included works by W.A. Mozart, M.I. Glinka, G. Verdi, N.A. Rimsky-Korsakov and other great composers.




VALPARAISO  Police responding to a disturbance at a local apartment said they found three young children walking around in soiled diapers and suffering from extreme diaper rash in a unit that was stacked with garbage, littered with the feces of a malnourished cat and swarming with bugs.

Valparaiso police said they also found marijuana and an officer was handed a drug smoking device by one of the children.

Residents Aleyah Rebac, 21, and Andrew Williams, 22, were taken into custody and each faces a felony count of neglect of a dependent, as well as misdemeanor charges of possession of marijuana and drug paraphernalia.

Police said they were called out around 9:15 a.m. Sunday to the apartment in the 1200 block of East Chicago Street in response to Rebac kicking on the outside on the door.

She told police she was locked out of the unit the night before after an argument with Williams and slept in the outside hallway, but was trying to get back into the apartment.

Williams reportedly opened the door for police, who saw the children wearing soiled diapers hanging nearly to their knees.

Garbage in the kitchen stacked about waist high and a crock pot were all swarmed by fruit flies, and feces was scattered on the floor from a malnourished cat, who did not have food or water, police said.

Drunken driver involved in crash had child in vehicle, Porter County police say The child was turned over to a family member when the accused was taked to jail, police said.

Williams blamed Rebac for neglecting the children and leaving them alone as she did drugs and drank alcohol while he worked, the incident report says.

Officials said they found the children suffering from extreme cases of diaper rash.

Both Rebac and Williams blamed the other for the marijuana and drug paraphernalia found in the apartment, police said.

The children were released to the temporary care of a family member until they are relocated by the Indiana Department of Child Services, the report says.

Police said they have responded 17 times this year to various calls at the apartment involving Rebac and Williams.
VALPARAISO  The VNA Hospice NWI, in conjunction with the Department of Veterans Affairs, provided groceries and supplies to U.S. veterans at its recent Military Stand Down.

Representatives of Catholic Charities in the Diocese of Gary helped provide 200 boxes filled with a variety of nutritious, nonperishable foods to benefit U.S. military veterans.

New sunglasses and T-shirts also were provided. Leading the outreach from Catholic Charities were food pantry manager Tina Gunnum and Ashley Mendoza.

Catholic Charities programs and services include homelessness prevention, emergency assistance, affordable housing, Pathway to U.S. Citizenship, womens care center, parenting education, food pantry and financial workshops.

Giving boxes filled with groceries to men and women who were willing to give their lives to protect the U.S. and other nations seems small, but our hearts are filled with utmost gratitude, Gunnum said.

Stand Downs are typically one- to three-day events during which VA staff and volunteers provide food, clothing and health screenings to homeless and at-risk veterans. They also receive referrals for health care, housing solutions, employment, substance-use treatment, mental health counseling and other essential services.

Catholic Charities in the Diocese of Gary provides its services to needy residents of Lake, Porter, LaPorte and Starke counties, regardless of race, nationality, religion or sexual orientation. Military veterans are encouraged to contact Catholic Charities when needs arise.

Visit Catholic-Charities.org to learn more about its programs and services as well as support the efforts to help those in need in Northwest Indiana; and vnanwi.org to learn more about the Stand Down.
CROWN POINT  A Michigan City teen shot a woman, stole her car and led police on a high-speed chase that ended in a crash, according to charging documents.

Khalil Gipson, 17, was charged Saturday as an adult with attempted murder and robbery resulting in serious bodily injury. If convicted, Gipson faces up to 70 years in prison.

"He is facing charges as an adult because of the severity of the crimes," Sheriff Oscar Martinez Jr. said in an emailed statement. "We cannot release the suspect's photo because he is a juvenile and remains at the Lake County Juvenile Justice Center."

A spokesperson from the Lake County Prosecutors Office declined to comment on why Gipson was charged as an adult.

The teen had reportedly just been released from custody in Illinois on a charge of armed carjacking, Porter police Lt. Dan Dickey previously said.

In the Indiana case, Gipson told a 44-year-old woman to give him her keys or he would shoot her, according to charging documents. Gipson then shot the woman in the right chest area, which resulted in heavy blood loss, according to the charges.

The woman was transported via helicopter to the University of Chicago Medical Center, according to a probable-cause affidavit.

Police surveyed surveillance footage of the carjacking and observed the woman try to drive away when Gipson pointed his gun at her, according to charging documents.

Gipson fired his gun and the woman stopped the vehicle, at which point Gipson then snatched (her) from the vehicle and kicked her before leaving in (the womans) Nissan Sentra and turning southbound on Dekalb Street, a probable cause affidavit stated.

While they were analyzing the crime scene, Lake County police officers heard from Porter County police that the stolen Nissan had been picked up by a license plate recognition camera heading east on U.S. 20 near Ind. 49.

As the suspect attempted to negotiate a curve just east of Railroad Avenue, he lost control of the vehicle and crashed into a wooded area, Dickey previously said. The suspect was partially ejected through the windshield and asked officers for help.

Gipson was taken to the hospital for further treatment before he was turned over to police and transported to the Lake County Juvenile Center, according to charging documents.
HAMMOND  A steady stream of bees buzzed in and out of the narrow gap at the bottom of the hive.

As you can see, theyre nice and busy today, John Bachmann said as he approached the three wooden boxes, a smoker in hand.

Bachmann, the senior grounds and landscape manager for Purdue University Northwest, pried the lid off one of the hives, revealing a miniature world filled with organized chaos. Thousands of bees crawled around hexagonal cells, delivering small beads of yellow pollen, tending to the growing larvae and building the honeycomb.

The pollinators were, as the saying goes, as busy as a bee.

This is the PNWs third summer with bees. There are three hives at the Westville campus, two at the Gabis Arboretum, three on the roof of the Nils K. Nelson Bioscience Innovation Building and three near the Borman Expressway.

Bachmann, who is PNWs senior grounds and landscape manager, studied beekeeping at what is now Purdue Northwests Westville campus. He always wanted to start a hive at PNW; when he met Nicky Jones of Earthling Bee Co. at the Valparaiso farmers market, a partnership began to take shape.

Jones and his wife, Jessica, launched Earthling Bee in 2019. Based in Lowell, it maintains hives throughout northern Indiana and Illinois. In the winter, Jones transports the bees to California to help pollinate almond crops; in the spring, the bees return to Indiana, where Jones bottles and sells their honey.

Earthling Bee also helps maintain PNWs bees, alongside sophomore nursing student Hannah Ingraham. She has an interest in oncology and jokes that she has two passions: helping cancer patients and beekeeping.

Ingraham is PNWs first bee intern. Like many people, she used to be afraid of bees, but she now realizes how important bees are.

Theyre actually very, very beautiful creatures and are very beneficial, Ingraham explained. Theyre not dangerous, theyre just defensive.

In 2021, PNW was able to harvest more than 200 pounds of honey; in 2022, the university was able to collect more than 650 pounds. Partnering with marketing students and the Honors College, PNW bottled and labeled the honey, calling it Pride Gold. It is given out during campus events.

However, PNWs bee program goes beyond honey.

Researchers say bees are responsible for 1 out of every 3 bites of food people eat.

Bees pollinate plants when they are collecting pollen to feed to their developing offspring. When a bee lands on a flower, tiny hairs all over the insects body collect grains of pollen. As bees buzz from flower to flower, the pollen is transferred, fertilizing the plant ovaries, resulting in the production of seeds.

The first year after Jones started keeping bees, his backyard cucumber harvest tripled.

Wild and managed bee communities have been declining over the past half-century. Several factors have contributed to reduced bee populations, including the use of pesticides, development, the fragmentation of bee habitat and the rise of the invasive varroa mite.

The mite, also known as the varroa destructor, was brought over from Europe in the 1980s. Jones said the mites act like like a tick on a dog, feeding on bees and larvae.

The hives at PNW are carefully monitored for mites, and if the keepers find one, they have to treat all the bees.

Keeping hives alive can be struggle, especially through the harsh Northwest Indiana winter. PNW lost a few hives last winter, Jones said, perhaps because the bees were imported from Italy and werent acclimated to the colder climate. This year the university is using Indiana-bred bees.

The bee project has been a learning experience for PNW. Bachmann said he hopes to grow the education component of the hives by having classes study them, possibly even starting a campus beekeeping club. A livestream of the Nils K. Nelson Bioscience hives is available on PNWs YouTube channel. Ingraham tracks the hives progress in a bee journal and is working on launching an Instagram page dedicated to the project.

The university is working to become a Bee Campus USA, a designation that recognizes pollinator conservation efforts, such as native plantings or reductions in pesticide use. There are only two certified Bee Campuses in Indiana: Indiana University South Bend and Goshen College.

Purdue Northwests bee project is part of the universitys larger sustainability initiative. Using an alumnas donation, PNW is in the process of installing campus bat houses and has plans to host events highlighting the importance of native birds and clean water.

More information about PNWs sustainability efforts is available at pnw.edu/sustainable-purdue-university-northwest/.

Watching as the busy pollinators buzzed in and out of the hives, Ingraham put it simply: Bees are sweet little creatures who help out.

PHOTOS: Beehives at PNW
VALPARAISO  Valparaiso has named a new interim director of the Engineering Department.

Former Engineering Director Michael Jabo has retired; he was named director in 2020 after spending 25 years as manager of the Northwest Indiana Division of DLZ.

According to a city news release, Max Rehlander will take over as interim engineering director. Rehlander joined the city of Valparaiso in 2021 as deputy city engineer. He was formerly with Abonmarche Consulting and American Structurepoint Inc. where he worked on projects ranging from storm sewer design to roads, trails and utilities. He received a degree in civil engineering from Purdue University and is a licensed Professional Engineer in the state of Indiana.

Bill Laird has been named interim chief deputy engineer. Laird joined the City of Valparaiso in 2019 as Deputy Engineer. He was formerly the Director of Planning for the town of Merrillville, served in engineering for the City of Crown Point and has taught land surveying at Purdue Calumet. He received a degree in mechanical engineering technology from Purdue University and is a member of the Stormwater Advisory Board for Porter County.

Both Max and Bill have demonstrated their excellence and engineering expertise on behalf of the City of Valparaiso, leading key projects over the past several years. Were so pleased to name them to our leadership team, Mayor Matt Murphy said in a city news release.

GALLERY: New solar panels at Valparaiso City Hall Valparaiso unveils new solar panels Valparaiso unveils new solar panels Valparaiso unveils new solar panels Valparaiso unveils new solar panels Valparaiso unveils new solar panels Valparaiso unveils new solar panels Valparaiso unveils new solar panels Valparaiso unveils new solar panels
Don Conrad was standing in line at Menards when the realization tapped him on the shoulder.

He looked around at the other customers and noticed a similarity he never noticed before. Many of them wore T-shirts that illustrated something about their interests or values or beliefs or lifestyle.

One woman likes cats. One man rides a Harley. Another guy is a Notre Dame supporter. A boy is a Chicago Cubs fan. A woman drives a Mustang. Person after person. Shirt after shirt. Hint after hint.

People advertise themselves on their backs, he thought to himself. After this realization, Conrad began noticing it with people everywhere. He eventually came to a conclusion: Many people reveal who they are and often what they believe through their apparel.

Soon after that quiet epiphany, he woke up in the middle of the night with an idea that emerged from the closet of his business-oriented mind.

That night, it was like God gave me a kick in the butt. Conrad said. In 10 seconds, I knew what I had to do.

He launched an online T-shirt business, Freedom-4-all.com, offering apparel with messages based on the U.S. Constitution. Its not about politics, he said. Its about patriotism. Its not about red against blue. Its about red, white and blue.

Crazy as it might sound, maybe T-shirts can help unite our divided nation. We need to display good old-fashioned American unity on our backs, the Valparaiso resident said.

For years, Conrad complained about the state of our nation and its uncertain future.

I just love America, but I dont like where its headed. Im fed up with whats going on with our government and our establishment. I dont want my kids and grandkids to inherit a country thats been botched up in too many areas, the father of two children said.

But I wasnt doing anything about all my complaining. Not really.

His online apparel store is his attempt to do something about it  one T-shirt at a time, one patriotic message at a time. His website tells visitors: We took flight because we want to bring hope and unity to people who are losing their faith in our country and those who feel abandoned.

By wearing Freedom-4-All apparel, you are stepping out of the shadows and uniting. You are showing you are not alone, but are one of many, and that you will now be heard. And maybe, just maybe, we can make America ... America again.

Conrads broader goals with this business venture: to bring back the importance of the U.S. Constitution; truth in government and media; and honest banking and money, without a central bank digital currency.

This store is our contribution to Americas great awakening, Conrad told me.

This term has had multiple definitions, and distortions, throughout history, often infused with religious-political zealotry. It typically refers to several periods of old-fashioned Christian revivalism and waves of newfound enthusiasm dating to the 1700s.

My interpretation of the Great Awakening is that  over time we have lost many of our constitutional freedoms bit by bit, he said. It is picking up speed, and people are waking up to that fact. I think in a couple years this will be a pretty recognized term.

History shows us that most governments are not on the side of the people. They go through stages that eventually break them up. I wonder if were in one of those stages. But I do have faith we will get through this, whatever is happening.

The Fourth of July is our nations star-spangled holiday to celebrate freedoms that were earned through buckets of bloodshed. They include religious freedom, personal freedom, freedom of speech, freedom of the press and freedom to choose.

This holiday weekend is when we parade our values down Main Street, wave U.S. flags, dress in patriotic colors, get sunburned during the day and ignite endless fireworks at night. Its as American as we get, coming together to celebrate our commonalities despite our differences.

Still, our country seems more polarized than ever. Were more isolated from each other. More insulated from opposing viewpoints. More insulted by the idea of any type of agreement. Were mutually disconnected and disappointed over our divided states of America. Our notion of a nation obviously needs more than patriotic T-shirts to find unity, but Conrad is convinced that hes doing what he can at this point in his life.

Im just a 60-year-old American taking a stand, he told me.

My goal is to bring awareness, support and unity to the everyday man and woman because I believe it is time to stand up and fight for our personal freedoms before they forever slip away, his website states. Our tees are not fashion statements, they are freedom statements.

On Saturday, Conrad shared his first monthly blog post on the site to better examine the Constitution, the Bill of Rights and the meaning of Independence Day.

A large part of why I am committing to this monthly, yearlong series is that I am forcing myself to learn this important history and information, Conrad wrote in his first blog post. You, followers of Freedom-4-All, can benefit from my quest if you wish.

This July 4th, as you watch the parade, enjoy the fireworks, and share hot dogs and beer with your friends, please remember and understand that for the most part of 15 years prior to 1776, many brave souls worked, fought and strived to be able to claim their independence and, by default, yours, he wrote.

His best-selling shirt? Stand up America!

Underneath that is smaller print: Wear apparel that supports personal freedoms.

For some reason, more people are buying that than anything else, Conrad said. Who knows, maybe its a sign that this really does fill a need. Maybe America is ready for this or needs this.
Israel launched its most intense airstrikes on the occupied West Bank in nearly two decades on Monday, and sent hundreds of ground troops into the narrow streets and alleys of the crowded Jenin refugee camp, saying it was trying to root out armed militants after a year of escalating violence there.

The Israeli military said the operation began shortly after 1 a.m. and included several missiles fired by drones. Military officials said the operation was focused on militant targets in the refugee camp, an area of less than a quarter of a square mile abutting the city of Jenin, with about 17,000 residents.

At least eight Palestinians were killed, according to the Palestinian health ministry.

The camp is a war zone in the full meaning of the word, Muhammad Sbaghi, a member of the local committee that helps administer the camp, said after the operation began on Monday.
In one scene of George Benjamins new opera Picture a Day Like This, which premieres on Wednesday at the Aix-en-Provence Festival in France, a composer and her assistant cut off an interviewer midsentence. The composer asks whether theres space in her schedule to speak; five minutes, the assistant replies.

Thankfully, Benjamin had considerably more time to talk when he met with a journalist at his West London home on a sunny Monday in May.

If the premiere of Picture a Day Like This, written with the playwright Martin Crimp, is highly anticipated, that is because anticipation has long accompanied new works by Benjamin, 63. Initially, for their infrequency  creative block in his early career meant that he produced only a few minutes of music each year  but lately for their critical acclaim.

Earlier stage works with Crimp, Written on Skin (2012) and Lessons in Love and Violence (2018), have quickly entered the repertory of major European opera houses. But it is their first opera, the one-act Into the Little Hill, from 2006, that most resembles Picture a Day Like This, in its size, duration and subject matter.
In the early years of World War II, Godfrey Blunden, an ambitious Australian correspondent for The Sydney Daily Telegraph, was hardly a household name. But in the winter of 1943, Blunden, then a Moscow-based reporter, suddenly came out with one blockbuster wartime story after another. Taken by Soviet press handlers to front lines first in Russia and then Ukraine, he revealed Nazi atrocities in Kharkiv. The Germans, he reported, had slaughtered 15,000 Jewish civilians  some of whom had been made to dig their own graves first.

The dispatches made Blundens reputation as a war correspondent, says Alan Philps, author of The Red Hotel: Moscow 1941, the Metropol Hotel, and the Untold Story of Stalins Propaganda War, out on July 4 from Pegasus Books, and himself an on-again, off-again Moscow correspondent since the late 1970s. What the Daily Telegraphs readers did not know, Philps wrote, is that Blundens reporting on atrocities was selective.

During the Kharkiv press tour, Soviet press handlers  eager to showcase additional German crimes against humanity  also took Blunden and other Western reporters to a former Gestapo prison where Nazis had tortured and murdered thousands of Ukrainians. The visit was a mistake: The jails cellars had been repurposed by the Soviet secret police to torture and execute suspected Ukrainian nationalists. The journalists were quickly ushered out.

The mistake didnt matter. Blunden and his colleagues were unable to report the story  or anything unflattering to their Soviet hosts. The Allied press corps based in wartime Moscow had to play by Russian rules: No unsupervised travel outside the city  or even outside their outpost, the Metropol Hotel. No interviewing or fraternizing with Soviet citizens. No opposing the stringent censorship. For the several dozen western correspondents stashed at the Metropol, Russia was at once the potential source of some of the wars biggest stories, and also a journalistic desert.
Joyce Bonvillain says shes voting for her opponent in the Billings City Council race to represent Midtown and the South Side on this years ballot.

Shes running to give voters more choices outside of the older, white and male demographic. And to prove a point.

I want to encourage regular humans like you and me to get involved because people feel like theres nothing we can do, she said.

Although the Ward 3 hopefuls represent different demographics, their priorities for the city are similar. They all want to be involved in making Billings a safe, affordable and attractive place to live and planning for its future.

Kennedy, 65, decided to run for city council after two murders and a shooting happened within two blocks of his home. If elected, the Billings native plans to prioritize public safety, fiscally responsible budgeting and supporting seniors, veterans and those struggling with mental health issues.

The former school teacher now serves as the executive director at the Family Tree Nurturing Center in Billings, which provides education and support to prevent child abuse and strengthen families. He also helped raise money to build a shelter for victims of domestic violence.

Theres a lot of folks who need our help, he said. Im always pushing for a hand up not a hand out.

Kennedy said its his 35 years of public service that distinguish him from his opponents.

Loveridge, 54, said the rising crime and drug problems now plaguing the city prompted his run for council, too.

In addition to focusing on public safety, Loveridge's priorities would include cutting taxes, making Billings a place more young people want to stay and attracting new businesses.

The council should be focusing more on addressing serious problems, such as affordability and crime, and spending less time talking about arts and parks, he said. Loveridge said his fiscal awareness sets him apart from the other candidates.

Im a Montana born and bred conservative, he said.

West, 22, is studying art and education at MSUB. She figured running for office would be a good experience because she plans to minor in political science.

If elected, the Senior High School graduate said shed work on creating programs to help low-income youth and look into ways to reduce the workload for police officers.

West said she believes bringing a sense of community back to Billings would help reduce crime.

I want to make people feel like they belong, the California native said.

West said she comes from a different perspective than her opponents because shes younger and still deals with issues such as renting in Billings.

Choriki, 66, said hes running for another term to continue working on challenges facing the city, such as rising crime and violence, planning for growth, climate change and the diminishing wealth of middle and working-class residents.

Youd have to be an idiot not to be afraid for the future right now, he said. I understand the way you make change in a bureaucracy.

Hes also working on ways to break the cycle of violence and prevent crime, instead of continuing to lock more and more people up in the already overcrowded Yellowstone County jail. Last week, Choriki and other local leaders met with national experts to look into developing a Family Justice Center in Billings. It would help to reduce crime and homicide rates and provide services for those affected by violence in one place, Choriki said.

The startup business and data consultant also wants to increase government efficiency through the use of technology.

Choriki grew up in Montana after his father, who is Japanese and his mother, who's Filipino Portuguese, moved here from Hawaii. The Bozeman native lived in New York City for decades before moving to Billings in 2012.

For Bonvillain, Choriki has been a model city councilman, listening and responding to his constituents and following through with action.

We need more of Danny, not less of Danny, the 47-year-old said. But, I realize hes not for everybody. So if you dont want to vote for Danny, then vote for me.

Bonvillain, a volunteer program coordinator for Planned Parenthood of Montana, said her opinions on the issues dont make much difference. If elected, theyd be whatever the majority of her constituents want them to be.

Youre their representative, the Seattle native said. We should be puppets for the people.

Foote declined to be interviewed for this story.

Ballots will be mailed to Ward 3 voters on Aug. 23.

About the candidates

Danny Choriki

Occupation: Startup business and data consultant

Age: 66

Educational background: bachelor's and master's degrees in general and environmental psychology from Montana State University and City University of New York, Great Falls High School

Public service experience: Billings Association of Humanists president, Billings Unitarians chairman

Years in Billings: 11

Bill Kennedy

Occupation: Family Tree Nurturing Center executive director

Age: 65

Educational background: Masters degree in personnel and guidance from Eastern Montana University, bachelors degree in secondary education from Montana State University, Billings West High School

Public service experience: Former Yellowstone County Commissioner, MSUB Foundation President, YWCA Billings, South Central Montana Mental Health Center, Area II Agency on Aging, Veterans Affairs Advisory Committee on Cemeteries and Memorials and many others

Years in Billings: 65

Charles W. Loveridge

Occupation: VIP Services president

Age: 54

Educational background: Studied business at Eastern Montana College, Billings Senior High School

Public service experience: MetraPark advisory board president, Billings Rotary Club, Citizen Police Advisory Board

Years in Billings: 54

Joyce Bonvillain

Occupation: Planned Parenthood of Montana volunteer program coordinator

Age: 47

Educational background: Bachelors in psychology from Seattle University

Public service experience: YWCA board member, Zonta Club of Billings

Years in Billings: 13 years

Magnolia West

Occupation: Studying art and education at MSUB, work study, Upward Bound Program

Age: 22

Educational background: Senior High School

Public Service Experience: Volunteer for Education Foundation for Billings Public Schools fundraiser

Years in Billings: 14
Early this morning, Israeli drones fired on a densely populated refugee camp in the West Bank and hundreds of Israeli troops were sent into the areas narrow streets and alleys. The military said the goal of the assault, the biggest in nearly two decades, was to root out armed militants after a year of escalating violence there. At least eight Palestinians were reported to have been killed.

The drone strikes on the Jenin refugee camp were far more limited than the aerial attacks Israel has made on Gaza, but Israel has not used this level of air power against West Bank militants since the second Palestinian uprising against Israeli rule, in the early 2000s.

The camp is a war zone in the full meaning of the word, Muhammad Sbaghi, a local administrator, said.

Tensions have escalated in the area recently, with local Palestinian militias waging a series of attacks against Israelis, and extremist Jewish settlers rampaging through Palestinian villages and setting fire to property. There have been almost daily raids by the Israeli military to arrest Palestinians suspected of armed activity.
New cars and trucks are packed with sensors and technology that protect and pamper drivers and passengers. But those features are also raising the cost of repairs after accidents.

The average cost of making damaged cars good as new has soared 36 percent since 2018, and may top $5,000 by the end of this year, according to Mitchell, a company that provides data and software to insurance companies and auto repair businesses. That big increase is the main reason that insurance premiums have been soaring  up 17 percent in the 12 months through May.

New sport utility vehicles and pickup trucks, including a rapidly growing number of electric models, have become so complex and luxurious that seemingly simple repairs can cost a small fortune, auto experts said. Insurers are often on the hook for much of those costs, leading them to raise their rates.

Materials designed to crumple or deform in a crash to protect pedestrians or passengers, for example, can be hard or impossible to repair. Many bumpers must be replaced after low-speed dings because the safety sensors embedded in them may no longer work properly after repairs. Other systems, even some that do not appear to be damaged, must be inspected or recalibrated.
Saudi Arabia said Monday that it would extend a cut in oil production of one million barrels a day that it announced in June through at least August, trying to push up what officials view as stubbornly weak oil prices. The Saudis were joined by Russia, whose deputy prime minister Alexander Novak said Moscow would cut supplies by 500,000 barrels in August.

Together, these trims could amount to 1.5 percent of global supplies. Oil prices initially jumped on news of the cuts but later faded.

Oil prices have been under pressure in recent months because of uncertainty about the strength of the global economy as many central banks continue to raise interest rates to stem inflation. There are also doubts about oils longer-term future as electric vehicles and other alternatives to consuming oil continue to grow. The Saudis and other members of the producers group known as OPEC Plus have been gradually dialing back production since last fall.

This additional voluntary cut comes to reinforce the precautionary efforts previously made, according to the state-run Saudi Press Agency. The latest round of Saudi production cuts began at the start of this month. Russias proposed reduction in exports in August would come as part of the effort to ensure the oil market remains balanced, Mr. Novak said in a statement.
Representatives for Trump Media did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

Digital World said that under the tentative settlement with the S.E.C. it would pay a penalty of $18 million and revise some of its regulatory filings to comply with federal securities laws.

SPACs, which are set up to raise money from investors and then find a company to buy, are not allowed to hold serious merger discussions before they go public. These speculative investment companies have a limited time to complete a merger before they are required to return the cash they raised to investors. Federal authorities had been trying to determine if Digital Worlds talks with Trump Media before its initial public offering in September 2021 were substantive enough that they should have been disclosed before the SPAC sold shares to the public.

In its I.P.O., Digital World raised $300 million from investors. In a subsequent private placement, dozens of hedge funds agreed to invest up to $1 billion in the merged company. But the long delay in completing the merger prompted a number of hedge funds to pull out of that financing deal. It is unclear if the private placement is still valid without additional concessions from the companies.

As part of the tentative settlement, which requires approval by S.E.C. commissioners, Digital World said it would enter into a cease and desist order with the regulator that found the company had violated securities laws concerning certain statements, agreements and omissions relating to the timing and discussions the company had with TMTG.

Digital Worlds share price once surged to roughly $97 before crashing down to earth amid all the regulatory delays. The stock, which is largely held by some 400,000 retail investors, closed at just $12 on Monday.
Headliner

Adriennes

Adrienne Guttieri, a promising young chef who studied in Italy and worked her way up at restaurants there and in New York, died last summer at 33. Her family, most notably her brother, Frank Guttieri, is keeping her memory and legacy alive at this new restaurant named for her in their hometown area of the Rockaways. They have taken over the waterfront Bayview Restaurant, which has been dark for some time, and turned it into this taste of Southern Italy. A cousin, Chris Keegan, is the manager. Theres seating on a deck overlooking Jamaica Bay and boat slips, and indoors there are leather banquettes. The executive chef, Jeff Haskell, was Ms. Guttieris mentor at Trademark Bar+ Kitchen, in Midtown. Assorted raw bar items, lobster arancini, rigatoni Bolognese, spaghetti with clams and enhancements like preserved lemons and nduja butter, farrotto with asparagus and peas, roast chicken and veal chop Milanese are on the menu.

25 Van Brunt Road (Cross Bay Boulevard), Rockaway, Queens, 718-945-2525, adriennes-nyc.com.

Opening

Nomad Girl

Milan is the inspiration for this new all-day cafe and restaurant from Alex Cesaria, a Milanese-born art dealer, and Rich Simeone, a lawyer, both of whom have become restaurateurs. They serve breakfast items like croissants. Lunch includes salads and piadina sandwiches with mozzarella, eggplant, salami and more layered on flatbread imported from Italy. The dinner menu features homemade pastas and chicken Milanese. The chef is Fernando Baez. An elegantly lit setting includes a long bar, with Negronis at the ready. (Wednesday)

1151 Broadway (27th Street), 212-419-8299, nomadgirl.nyc.

The Bakery at Greywind

A bakery, the third element of the chef and restaurateur Dan Klugers tidy Greywind fiefdom at the edge of Hudson Yards, is now up and running. Inspired somewhat by Frances boules, batards and croissants, the bakery broadens its inventory with milk bread, a chocolate babka bun and dulce de leche macaroons with chocolate, most of which is on display at a marble-fronted counter. Breakfast is available and lunchtime sandwiches will be sold beginning next week.

451 Tenth Avenue (entrance on 35th Street), thebakeryatgreywind.com.

MotherShuckers

This Brooklyn-based oyster cart has opened a stand in the Pier 57 food hall, at West 15th Street and the Hudson River, and another location is open through Aug. 14 on the plaza at Lincoln Center, 64th Street and Columbus Avenue.

917-936-5061, therealmothershuckersnyc.com.
Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny (now in theaters) is the first film in that franchise not directed by Steven Spielberg, who developed the character all those years ago with George Lucas and Philip Kaufman, as well as the screenwriter Lawrence Kasdan. Yet the handoff of directorial duties to James Mangold doesnt feel like a strain, because Spielberg established the character of the globe-trotting archaeologist and the style of his cinematic escapades so adroitly over the first four films.

In fact, he set them in stone in the very first sequence of the very first movie  as we can see in a shot-by-shot look at that classic sequence today.

We first see Indiana Jones less than 30 seconds into 1981s Raiders of the Lost Ark  but its a carefully prepared hero entrance, holding back Harrison Fords distinctive visage as long as possible. Instead, we first see him from the back, in a frame that nevertheless introduces the character and his distinctive iconography (his hat, bullwhip and jacket).
Is that enough to pay for college? Maybe not, like, already, Caileigh told me last week, before she picked up another $118, for a grand total of $770. But its a start.

And that is the point.

Caileigh is one of nearly 3,300 rising sixth graders who were given their own college savings accounts for the 2017-18 academic year, when Caileigh entered kindergarten. Collectively, they have banked $1.26 million for college in NYC Scholarship Accounts since then.

That works out to an average of slightly less than $400 per child, although one child in the program has put away $1,747  still not enough to cover college tuition, perhaps, but there is time. The nonprofit managing the program, NYC Kids RISE, projects that the average kindergartners account could easily be worth around $3,000 by the time he or she graduates from high school.

Lawton didnt know about the program until a teacher at the school told her and her daughter about it, Lawton told me last week. I did my own research and found out that basically, you had to do nothing, Lawton said. The community organizations  nonprofits  they give the money to the kids, and it goes straight into their accounts.

NYC Kids RISE, which runs the Save for College program in partnership with the Department of Education, says that research points to other benefits. Even a small-dollar college account appears to increase the chances that a student will pursue education after high school. One study concluded that a low- or moderate-income child with less than $500 in a college savings account is more than three times more likely to enroll in college and four times more likely to graduate than a child with no account.
Santos Lopez uprooted his family and walked nearly 2,000 miles on a dangerous trek from Honduras to the United States last spring to escape from a violent gang that was extorting him. The group demanded a monthly payment, he said, to allow him to run his car shop in peace.

Like many others, Mr. Lopez and his family hoped their experience would persuade their adopted country to give them asylum, which is granted to those who face a credible fear of persecution in their country of origin. A grant of asylum would allow them to work and eventually apply for a green card and citizenship.

But more than a year after his family  including his wife and two daughters  arrived safely at the southern border, it seems likely they missed the deadline to apply. Mr. Lopez, 42, said he was seeking help from a lawyer.

Mr. Lopez and his family are among the millions of migrants who have arrived at the southern border in the past year. Many, after telling border agents about abuse and persecution that they experienced, a first step in the long and complicated process of seeking asylum, have been temporarily released as they wait for their immigration cases to wind their way through courts.
Bret Stephens: Gail, happy almost Independence Day. In the spirit of the holiday: Is America toast?

Gail Collins: Well, gee, Bret, happy almost Independence Day back. Hope youre not planning to celebrate by, um, shooting things off.

Bret: Only my mouth. As usual.

Gail: Seriously, please elaborate. If youre thinking of the Supreme Court, Im happy to join in any hand-wringing. But somehow I suspect youve got a different vision of doom.

Bret: It wont surprise you that Ive been pretty happy with the courts rulings this term, which Im sure well get to in a moment. But what I mean is the brokenness of almost every institution I can think of, a thought Im borrowing from Alana Newhouse, the editor of Tablet magazine. Congress: broken. Public education: broken. The I.R.S.: broken. The Roman Catholic Church: broken. The immigration system: broken. Cities: broken. Civil discourse: broken. Families: broken. Race relations: broken.

And the most broken thing of all: public trust. Trust in government, in news media, in police, in the scientific establishment. Theres a ton of scholarly research showing that when societies become low-trust, like in Lebanon or Brazil, they tend to fare poorly.
In 2014, that bet began to pay off. The Obama administration announced an end to Americas decades-long enmity with the Cuban government, and soon everyone from Conan OBrien to Andrew Cuomo to Steve Nash began showing up in Havana. As a University of Miami Cuba expert, Michael J. Bustamante, noted at the time, the American flag has even become the most stylish national standard, appearing on Cubans T-shirts, tights and tank tops.

Then Mr. Trump entered the White House and it all fell apart. In 2019, he imposed the harshest economic sanctions in more than a half-century. A month later, Cuba began rationing soap, eggs, rice and beans. Around that same time, according to The Wall Street Journal, Chinas surveillance network on the island underwent a significant upgrade (the Cuban and Chinese foreign ministries have denied reports of a Chinese surveillance facility in Cuba). Evan Ellis, a Latin America analyst at the U.S. Army War College, told The Journal that the deal is basically Chinese pay-to-play, adding that China gives money to Cuba it desperately needs, and China gets access to the listening facility. Last fall, China agreed to restructure Cubas debt and donate $100 million to the island. One reason Cuba still needs Beijings money is that the Biden administration has kept key Trump sanctions in place.

U.S.-Iran relations follow a similar pattern. When the two countries signed the 2015 nuclear deal, Irans foreign minister at the time, Mohammad Javad Zarif, called it not a ceiling but a solid foundation. We must now begin to build on it. Irans leaders, like Cubas, hoped better relations with the United States would spur Western investment. Although some Iranian hard-liners feared that economic ties to the West would weaken the regime, Mr. Zarif and President Hassan Rouhani gambled that a stronger economy would strengthen Irans regional position and defuse popular discontent, thus helping solidify the countrys despotic political system.

It didnt work out that way. Mr. Trump canceled the nuclear deal and reimposed harsh sanctions. Rather than re-enter the agreement on its first day in office, the Biden administration made additional demands, which helped thwart efforts to revive the deal. And as the prospect of substantial U.S. and European investment disappeared, so did Washingtons leverage over Irans relationship with Moscow. Iran now has little to lose by developing what a National Security Council spokesman recently called a full-scale defense partnership with Russia.

This isnt the first time the United States has driven smaller nations into the arms of its superpower adversaries. It did so during the Cold War. In his book Embers of War, Fredrik Logevall notes that until the late 1940s, Ho Chi Minh, the Vietnamese nationalist leader, believed the United States could be the champion of his cause of independence from France. During World War II, Mr. Hos rebel army, the Viet Minh, worked alongside the Office of Strategic Services, the precursor of the C.I.A., in Americas fight against Japan.
The Supreme Courts ruling Friday that President Joe Biden lacks authority to forgive $400 billion in student loans was unanimously welcomed by Montanas congressional delegation, which earlier voted to restart payments.

Specifically, the president offered 20 million college borrowers up to $20,000 in individual loan forgiveness, with the largest amounts going to Pell Grant recipients, who are students with exceptional need. Non-Pell recipients earning less than $125,000 annually were eligible for up to $10,000.

Biden argued that his loan forgiveness power was anchored in the 2003 HEROES Act. The acronym represents the Higher Education Relief Opportunities for Students Act. The law was created after the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, first to help borrowers affected by the attacks. Two years later the law was amended to help members of the military during the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.

In 2020, then-President Donald Trump invoked the HEROES Act to suspend student loans, but Biden took things a step further, crafting a plan for up to $400 billion in loan forgiveness. Republicans in Congress succeeded with a vote to restart loan payments by recruiting support from moderate Senate Democrats, including Montana Democrat Jon Tester.

Friday, three of Montanas four lawmakers said they didnt see a need to repeal the HEROES Act.

Anytime a law is being abused, Congress should provide oversight, said Rep. Ryan Zinke, a Western District Republican. Article 1 section 9  no money should be drawn from Treasury without consequence of appropriations.

Sen. Steve Daines said Chief Justice John Roberts, who wrote the Supreme Court opinion, had it right. The Biden administration had illegally applied the HEROES Act, which needed to be followed, not replaced.

Since the rollout of Bidens loan forgiveness plan in August 2022, Daines has characterized the move as unfair both to college borrowers who already repaid their loans and taxpayers who didnt attend college. He did so again Friday.

Rep. Matt Rosendale declined to answer the same questions offered to all members of the delegation by Lee Montana Newspapers. The Eastern District Republicans remarks about the ruling are available on Twitter. He generally echoed Daines sentiment that guaranteed student loan borrowers should expect repayment.

Note that Daines, Rosendale and Tester voted for the extension of and forgiveness of the Paycheck Protection Program loans, which amounted to nearly $800 billion in money to businesses, including more than $1.8 billion issued to businesses in Montana between April 2020 and May 2021.

Similar to Rosendale, Tester declined to answer most of the questions asked by Lee Montana Newspapers. A spokesman for the senator said Tester didnt support a HEROES Act repeal. The spokesman said Tester recognized that higher education costs are a burden for working families. And Tester supports loan forgiveness for doctors and teachers serving in rural Montana and tribal communities.

Both Daines and Zinke said that changes were needed to the guaranteed student loan program.

Zinke said the private schools with tax-free endowments, like Harvard and Yale, asking high tuition shouldnt be receiving federal aid for graduating kids with impractical educations and empty job markets. He thought differently of making loans available to students at state schools.

If youre looking for practicality, Montana schools can deliver quality education at a reasonable price, Zinke said, Great trade schools with innovative curriculum delivery which provides a better value for education and turns the student loan process back on its original intention, access to a helpful education. A four-year degree doesnt make financial sense for everyone, he said.

Student loans are the norm at Montana universities and colleges for first-year, full-time students, of which roughly 80% have borrowed money in the past decade. About 61% of Montana university graduates have taken out loans, the average owed is about $27,290 for degree recipients who attended school as state residents.

Daines pointed to bills that hes supported to help students make better tuition decisions. Specifically, he cited a recent bill requiring that students be shown the cost of loan repayment over time, while also receiving an estimate of how much income they can expect relative to their degree during a career.
In June 2012, at the end of a contentious Supreme Court term that decided, among other things, the fate of the Affordable Care Act, Chief Justice John Roberts prepared to leave for Malta, to teach a course on the court. Malta, as you know, is an impregnable island fortress, he joked on the eve of his trip. It seemed like a good idea.

Eleven years later, Malta no doubt retains its allure. The term that just ended must have been a torment for the chief. The courts popularity has plunged to record lows; its members bicker on and off the bench; calls for the court to be packed are commonplace. Such circumstances would pain any chief justice, this one more than most. From the start of his tenure in 2005, he has painted himself as an institutionalist whose paramount concern is the courts integrity. He conducts himself accordingly: He is decorous, almost regal; he speaks of moderation and judicial minimalism. He keeps a sovereigns distance from modern life. In 1867, in a classic book on the English constitution, Walter Bagehot wrote that in times of change, the most imposing institutions of mankind maintain influence by demonstrating an inherent dignity. It is ironic, perhaps bitterly so, that a collapse in public esteem has become a hallmark of the Roberts court. Rarely, in recent decades, has the institution seemed less worthy of reverence.

The chief justice is portrayed by some as a tragic figure, powerless to save his court from itself. But the tragedy of John Roberts is that he does have the power to restore some measure of the courts reputation  he just hasnt used it. He has attempted, here and there, to restrain the courts crusaders  by siding with liberals in the Alabama voting rights case, for example, and soundly rejecting the independent state legislature theory  but mostly, he has suggested that their methods and conduct are above reproach. His idea of integrity, it turns out, is a brittle thing, and self-defeating. It has put the courts reputation at greater risk; it has made the court more, not less, vulnerable to public scrutiny and to encroachment by Congress and the White House.

This term will likely be remembered as the year the Supreme Court, led by its chief justice, ended race-conscious admissions at the nations colleges and universities. But the larger story of this term has been one of ethical rot and official indifference. Justices Samuel Alito, Neil Gorsuch and Clarence Thomas drew attention  not for the first time  for their close ties to wealthy benefactors who have business before the court. Reports by ProPublica and in The New York Times show justices accepting gifts and blandishments as monarchs might: free vacations at luxury resorts; undisclosed trips on private jets and yachts; and, in Justice Thomass case, largess in the form of private-school tuition for a family member, secret real estate deals and donations to pet projects of the justice and his wife, Virginia Thomas. This is hardly a complete list.
NASHVILLE  Two weeks ago, while the rest of America was absorbed by the hunt for a doomed submersible, people in Tennessee discovered that their attorney general was conducting a witch hunt.

As part of a run of the mill inquiry into possible billing fraud  as officials described their investigation  the attorney generals office demanded that Vanderbilt University Medical Center hand over a vast array of documents from its clinic for gender-affirming care. According to Tennessee Lookout, a nonprofit journalism site, those documents include:

complete medical records for an undisclosed number of patients

resumes of clinic physicians

information about the clinics Trans Buddy volunteers

emails sent to and from a public portal for questions about L.G.B.T.Q. health

the names of people referred to the gender-affirming clinic for care

Tell me this isnt a witch hunt. Tell me this isnt an open campaign of terror against already vulnerable citizens who had every reason to believe that their medical records  their medical records!  were confidential and every reason to believe that the medical clinic of a major university hospital was a safe space.

During the Juneteenth holiday weekend, Vanderbilt notified patients whose confidential medical records were now in the possession of the state attorney general. The hospital has not detailed which documents it provided the state. When two Tennessee Lookout reporters, Sam Stockard and Anita Wadhwani, asked whether Vanderbilt had complied with every state request in connection with the investigation, a hospital spokesman said, The short response to your question is no.

State officials contend that they are investigating only the hospital and certain providers, not the patients they serve, and that all the data theyve gathered will be kept private. But given the sweeping nature of the documents and the obsessive and relentless way that the Republican supermajority in this state  and in virtually every state governed by a Republican supermajority  has persecuted trans people, its impossible to trust such claims.
Adriana Stefanatos didnt know how long shed stay in New York  Three weeks? Three months?  when she moved from Australia. Five years later, she feels like shes finally made it her own.

Unenthusiastic about early 20s life in Sydney, Ms. Stefanatos decided to give New York a try using a J-1 visa  which allows citizens of other countries to visit the United States to temporarily work in their field of study  and left the rest to fate. I didnt really know anyone at all my age in New York, so I thought, yeah, Ill just see what can happen, said Ms. Stefanatos, now a senior program manager with Amazon Web Services.

After living with family friends in Chelsea for a couple of months, she moved into a Lower East Side sublet until, thanks to a friend from Australia, she finally found a permanent living situation in a SoHo loft with three other roommates. She lived there for four years, but eventually knew that the end was imminent. The loft, in a cast iron building, was falling to bits and needed a lot of work, she said.
The push benefited companies like Citadel, which had bought many of Russias biggest makers of digital wiretapping equipment and controls about 60 to 80 percent of the market for telecommunications monitoring technology, according to the U.S. State Department. The United States announced sanctions against Citadel and its current owner, Anton Cherepennikov, in February.

Sectors connected to the military and communications are getting a lot of funding right now as they adapt to new demands, said Ksenia Ermoshina, a senior researcher who studies Russian surveillance companies with Citizen Lab, a research institute at the University of Toronto.

The new technologies give Russias security services a granular view of the internet. A tracking system from one Citadel subsidiary, MFI Soft, helps display information about telecom subscribers, along with statistical breakdowns of their internet traffic, on a specialized control panel for use by regional F.S.B. officers, according to one chart.

Another MFI Soft tool, NetBeholder, can map the locations of two phones over the course of the day to discern whether they simultaneously ran into each other, indicating a potential meeting between people.

A different feature, which uses location tracking to check whether several phones are frequently in the same area, deduces whether someone might be using two or more phones. With full access to telecom network subscriber information, NetBeholders system can also pinpoint the region in Russia each user is from or what country a foreigner comes from.
Its been called affirmative action for the rich: Harvards special admissions treatment for students whose parents are alumni, or whose relatives donated money. And in a complaint filed on Monday, a legal activist group demanded that the federal government put an end to it, arguing that fairness was even more imperative after the Supreme Court last week severely limited race-conscious admissions.

Three Boston-area groups requested that the Education Department review the practice, saying the colleges admissions policies discriminated against Black, Hispanic and Asian applicants, in favor of less qualified white candidates with alumni and donor connections.

Why are we rewarding children for privileges and advantages accrued by prior generations? asked Ivan Espinoza-Madrigal, executive director of Lawyers for Civil Rights, which is handling the case. Your familys last name and the size of your bank account are not a measure of merit, and should have no bearing on the college admissions process.

The complaint from liberal groups comes days after a conservative group, Students for Fair Admissions, won its Supreme Court case. And it adds to accelerating pressure on Harvard and other selective colleges to eliminate special preferences for the children of alumni and donors.
To participate in the first Republican presidential debate on Aug. 23, candidates must meet challenging new criteria, including having at least 40,000 donors and voter support of at least 1 percent in three approved polls. But the requirement causing the most consternation is a pledge to support the eventual nominee.

The candidates will be sent the pledge only after meeting the other qualifications, according to a person familiar with the process, and will have until 48 hours before the debate to meet those criteria, giving them until the last minute to make up their minds. Here is what they have said:

Donald J. Trump

Unclear. Former President Donald J. Trump has not said whether he will sign the pledge.

In February, he refused to commit to supporting the eventual nominee, telling the conservative radio host Hugh Hewitt, It would have to depend on who the nominee was. But that was before the Republican National Committee made the pledge a debate requirement.

Even if he signs, it is unlikely to mean much. He signed the same pledge in 2015 and then reneged on it.

Ron DeSantis

Unclear. Asked last month whether he would support Mr. Trump in a general election, Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida didnt give a straight answer.
New options to come to the United States mean fewer illegal crossings.

Officials believe fewer migrants are crossing illegally because they are taking advantage of a more structured and safer option to ask for a chance to seek asylum, as well as new legal pathways that the Biden administration has created for certain nationalities to enter the country.

In central and northern Mexico, migrants can gain access to a government app on smartphones, where they can apply for an appointment at an official port of entry at the U.S. border. While there have been some technical problems with the app, nearly 30,000 used it to make appointments in May alone, according to recent government data.

In addition, migrants from Cuba, Haiti, Nicaragua and Venezuela can apply for the chance to live and work in the United States for two years under a special humanitarian parole. In April, the Biden administration announced that migrants from El Salvador, Guatemala and Honduras would be eligible for a family reunification program. These programs, expected to start this month, allow certain immigrants seeking to reunite with immediate family members to enter the United States and later apply for a green card.

Enforcement actions at Mexicos and Guatemalas borders have made it more difficult for migrants to cross onto U.S. soil.

The measures Mexico has taken include limiting migrants abilities to travel throughout the country, making it harder for them to reach the U.S. border. Mexico is also flying migrants whom the United States has recently deported to southern parts of the country. This puts more distance between them and the American border, which makes it harder for the migrants who want to try to cross illegally again.

Why border crossings are expected to increase

The drivers of migration have not changed.

There is still extreme poverty, violence and political instability in the countries people are fleeing, including Haiti, Cuba, Venezuela, and Nicaragua and other Central American nations.
A political action committee supporting Robert F. Kennedy Jr.s presidential campaign has raised a total of $10.25 million, one of its leaders said on Monday, a signal that his long-shot challenge to President Biden has gained traction among donors, including many Republicans.

The precise level of fund-raising by the super PAC, American Values 2024, will not be known until later this month, when political action committees file midyear reports with the Federal Election Commission. But Tony Lyons, Mr. Kennedys publisher and the super PACs co-chair, said that the $10.25 million included two very large donations that each exceed $1 million, and that the contributions came from a right down the middle mix of Republicans and Democrats.

Mr. Kennedy, a 69-year-old environmental lawyer and prominent skeptic of vaccines and prescription medications, often cites contorted statistics and unfounded theories. He has gained a foothold in the race, even as he has railed against the Democratic Party, accused public health authorities of corruption and increasingly embraced conservative figures and causes.

Mr. Kennedy will not come close to summoning the kind of financial support that will flow to Mr. Biden, who as the incumbent has the might of the Democratic National Committee and a robust donor infrastructure behind him.
After the Supreme Court ruled last week that a Colorado graphic designer has the right to refuse to create websites for same-sex marriages, critics of the decision raised questions about a form included in court papers in the case that appeared to show that a gay couple had sought the services of the designer, Lorie Smith.

The man who supposedly submitted the form said he was unaware of its existence until a reporter for The New Republic called him. He is, moreover, straight, married to a woman and a supporter of gay rights. The apparent falsehoods, critics said, undermined the courts decision.

What is known about the request?

It was apparently submitted on the website of Ms. Smiths company, 303 Creative, on the afternoon of Sept. 21, 2016, the day after she filed suit in federal court in Colorado to challenge an aspect of the states anti-discrimination law. She said in the suit that the law violated the First Amendment by forcing her to espouse beliefs at odds with her faith.

The lawsuit was the subject of news coverage and may have prompted the submission.

The form was said to have been filled out by someone named Stewart, and it included a real email address and phone number. We are getting married early next year and would love some design work done for our invites, placenames etc., Stewart wrote, saying his partner was named Mike. We might also stretch to a website.
An intensive drive by right-wing Republicans in Congress to vilify the F.B.I. with charges of political bias has imperiled a program allowing spy agencies to conduct warrantless surveillance on foreign targets, sapping support for a premier intelligence tool and amplifying demands for stricter limits.

The once-secret program  created after the 9/11 attacks and described by intelligence officials as crucial to stopping overseas hackers, spy services and terrorists  has long faced resistance by Democrats concerned that it could trample on Americans civil liberties. But the law authorizing it is set to expire in December, and opposition among Republicans, who have historically championed it, has grown as the G.O.P. has stepped up its attacks on the F.B.I., taking a page from former President Donald J. Trump and his supporters.

Theres no way were going to be for reauthorizing that in its current form  no possible way, said Representative Jim Jordan, Republican of Ohio, a key ally of Mr. Trumps who is leading a special House investigation into the weaponization of government against conservatives. Were concerned about surveillance, period.

At issue is a program that allows the government to collect  on domestic soil and without a warrant  the communications of targeted foreigners abroad, including when those people are interacting with Americans. Leaders of both parties have warned the Biden administration that Congress will not renew the law that legalized it, known as Section 702, without changes to prevent federal agents from freely searching the email, phone and other electronic records of Americans in touch with surveilled foreigners.
The Bismarck Police Department is hosting Coffee with a Cop at Baptist Health and Rehab from 2:30-4 p.m. Friday.

Community members will get the opportunity to ask questions and talk with officers in a relaxed, informal atmosphere. Baptist Health and Rehab is at 3400 Nebraska Drive.

Coffee with a Cop is a national initiative supported by the U.S. Department of Justice, Office of Community Oriented Policing Services. Many public interactions with police happen during tense, emotional situations. Coffee with a Cop aims to provide community members with a non-stressful environment to interact with law enforcement and improve officer-community relations.
The university, as a private institution, could change its policies to say that students, staff and faculty cannot post material that is intended to be intimidating, Professor Stone said.

But such a move  which he does not recommend  would run afoul of the First Amendment if the university were public, and would bring its own complications, he said.

Its very hard for either law or institutions to monitor those sorts of things, he said. Your administrators may be biased in terms of who they go after, and who they dont go after.

And while a strong case could be made that Mr. Schmidts intent was to intimidate, Professor Stone said, Do you really want to get into the business of trying to figure out what the purpose was?

That explanation can be unsatisfying for students wanting a solution. Watson Lubin, a senior in Dr. Journeys class, said that he chose the university in part because of its reputation for academic freedom. But over his four years, he said, he has soured on the free-expression rhetoric.
The Kremlin said on Tuesday that Russia and the United States were in contact over the possibility of a prisoner swap, an apparent reference to the jailed Wall Street Journal reporter Evan Gershkovich that came the day after he met with the U.S. ambassador.

Dmitri S. Peskov, the Kremlins spokesman, said that such discussions would not be made public. They should continue in complete silence, he said.

American officials have repeatedly called for the release of Mr. Gershkovich, who has been held for more than 13 weeks on what the U.S. government and The Journal have said are bogus allegations of espionage.

The United States considers Mr. Gershkovich and Paul Whelan, a former Marine serving a 16-year sentence after being convicted in 2020 of spying, to be wrongfully detained  the equivalent of being political hostages.
Ukrainian soldiers from the 68th Brigade fired on Russian positions last week near the village of Prechystivka in eastern Ukraine.

KYIV, Ukraine  Fierce fighting was raging on multiple fronts in Ukraine, a senior Ukrainian official said Monday as she reported small gains over the past week in the east and south.

A few weeks into Ukraines long-anticipated counteroffensive against Russia, the official, Hanna Malyar, a deputy Ukrainian defense minister, said on Monday morning that heavy fighting was taking place in eastern Ukraine, where Russian forces have been making a push with attacks on the cities of Lyman and Avdiivka in the Donetsk region. Ms. Malyar said that the number of attacks had intensified over the past week, but that Ukrainian troops were resisting while also advancing in the direction of Bakhmut.

Overall, Ms. Malyar said, Kyivs forces had retaken about 3.5 square miles over the past week. Her statements could not be independently verified, and Russias Ministry of Defense has said those attempts to advance were repelled.

In southern Ukraine, Ms. Malyar said, Kyivs forces recaptured an additional 10.9 square miles in the past week. She added that offensive actions were continuing in the directions of Berdiansk and Melitopol, two cities long occupied by Russian forces.

Over the weekend, Ms. Malyar described the situation on the battlefield as quite complicated and hot everywhere.

The counteroffensive, which got underway last month, has been slow and grueling  though military analysts say that the campaign is still in its early stages and that Ukraine has yet to commit the bulk of its forces.

Ukrainian officials, along with Kyivs Western allies  which provided sophisticated new weapons and training for the counteroffensive  have defended the pace of advances while cautioning that the campaign will be long and bloody.

On Monday, President Volodymyr Zelensky of Ukraine acknowledged that last week was difficult on the front lines, but emphasized that progress was being made.

We are moving forward, step by step, he said in a statement on the Telegram messaging app.

Ukrainian forces have faced staunch Russian resistance, mounting casualties and fields full of land mines. They have notched mostly small gains, breaking through a first line of Russian defenses and reclaiming several farming villages in the eastern Donetsk region and the southern Zaporizhzhia region.

Ukraines military said over the weekend that intense combat was also taking place in the Kherson region of southern Ukraine, near the destroyed Antonovsky Bridge, where the Dnipro River has for months delineated the front line.

In November, Russian forces retreated from the city of Kherson, on the rivers western bank, and withdrew to the opposite side. There were reports last week that Ukraine was moving personnel to the rivers eastern bank, and Russian military bloggers have suggested that Kyivs troops might be trying to establish a foothold there.

Natalia Humeniuk, the spokeswoman for the Ukrainian militarys southern command, reiterated on Monday that the fighting near the bridge was counter-battery warfare  or an attempt to take out Russian firing positions.

The efforts, she said, were to make the situation safer for the civilian population.

Since retreating across the Dnipro, Russian forces have fired across it and relentlessly shelled the city of Kherson and nearby towns.

The city of Kherson was shelled 35 times over the past 24 hours alone, the Ukrainian regional military administration said in a statement Monday morning. It added that overall, Russian forces shelled the region 85 times in the same period, wounding six people, including a child.
Ukraines Ministry of Health, the W.H.O. and more than a dozen other partners have also begun a program to train primary care physicians on how to treat patients with depression, anxiety, post-traumatic stress disorder, suicidal behavior and substance abuse.

But programs like the emergency team of psychologists try to provide an early intervention in moments of crisis.

If you dont deal with stress right away, it can turn into long-term stress, which can turn into P.T.S.D., said Ms. Kirnos. Its aimed at helping bring home the idea to people that, You were in danger, but now youre safe. If we dont do this right away, people might get stuck in this state.

Still, the burden can also be heavy for those giving psychological care. Days after the missile attack on Kyiv, Ms. Davydenko said team members were working with their own therapists to process what they had seen.

Of course, she said, I am also a human being.

Oleksandr Chubko , Oleksandra Mykolyshyn and Natalia Yermak contributed reporting.
KYIV, Ukraine  Victoria Amelina, one of Ukraines best-known young writers, has died from injuries sustained in a Russian missile strike on a crowded restaurant in eastern Ukraine. She was 37.

Her death brought to 13 the number of civilians killed in the attack on the Ria Lounge restaurant in the city of Kramatorsk on June 27. Ms. Amelina was dining with a Colombian delegation when the missile ripped into the restaurant. She was treated for severe injuries and died on Saturday.

Doctors and paramedics in Kramatorsk and Dnipro did everything they could to save her life, the writers group PEN Ukraine said in a statement late Sunday. It added: In the last days of Victorias life, her closest people and friends were with her.

The news jolted Ukraines writing and journalism community  which has lost dozens of its own since Russias full-scale invasion began last year. Days before the attack, Ms. Amelina had attended the Kyiv Book Arsenal, a large literary festival in Ukraines capital.
If there is a symbol of Ukrainian insouciance in the face of clear and present danger, it might just be this city. Nikopol lies within four miles of the besieged nuclear plant, but if you arrived on Monday and took a walk around, you might be fooled into thinking things were normal.

People waited at bus stops, lugged heavy plastic bags as they exited supermarkets, pushed strollers down sidewalks. Traffic circulated smoothly. Seagulls squawked in the sky. At the citys main park, a group of teenagers did what kids the world over do  they lounged on their backs in the high summer grass and stared at their phones.

I have a wonderful life, said Maksym Baklanov, one of them.

Not only is Nikopol a hairs breadth from the nuclear power plant, it also gets shelled nearly every day by Russian troops just across the river. But about half the citys prewar population of 100,000 still lives here, and there was no visible exodus, despite all the recent warnings of impending doom.

Beyond grit and defiance, there may be another explanation for that, and its shared by countless Ukrainians who mystify outsiders by continuing to live perilously close to the front lines of the biggest European war in generations.
By Richard Arum and Mitchell L. Stevens

Graphics by Quoctrung Bui Mr. Arum is a professor of sociology and education at the University of California, Irvine. Mr. Stevens is a sociologist at the Stanford Graduate School of Education.

Harvard Admit rate: 4% 10k students Duke University Admit rate: 6% 7k students Amherst College Admit rate: 9% 2k students University of California, Berkeley Admit rate: 14% 30k students Boston University Admit rate: 19% 20k students University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill Admit rate: 20% 20k students University of Texas, Austin Admit rate: 29% 40k students University of Florida Admit rate: 30% 30k students Florida State University Admit rate: 37% 30k students San Diego State University Admit rate: 38% 30k students Binghamton University Admit rate: 44% 10k students University of California, Davis Admit rate: 49% 30k students Clemson University Admit rate: 49% 20k students University of Washington, Seattle Campus Admit rate: 54% 40k students Pennsylvania State University Admit rate: 55% 70k students Brigham Young University Admit rate: 59% 30k students CUNY Queens College Admit rate: 61% 20k students Texas A & M University, College Station Admit rate: 64% 60k students University of Massachusetts, Amherst Admit rate: 66% 20k students University of Pittsburgh Admit rate: 67% 20k students Rutgers University, New Brunswick Admit rate: 68% 40k students Purdue University Admit rate: 69% 40k students Louisiana State University Admit rate: 71% 30k students University of Delaware Admit rate: 72% 20k students University of Central Missouri Admit rate: 76% 8k students University of Wisconsin, Eau Claire Admit rate: 78% 10k students University of Alabama Admit rate: 79% 30k students University of North Carolina, Charlotte Admit rate: 79% 20k students Kennesaw State University Admit rate: 82% 40k students University of Arkansas Admit rate: 83% 20k students University of Iowa Admit rate: 86% 20k students West Chester University of Pennsylvania Admit rate: 89% 10k students Grand Valley State University Admit rate: 92% 20k students University of Kansas Admit rate: 93% 20k students Utah State University Admit rate: 93% 20k students University of Texas, Arlington Admit rate: 93% 30k students California State University, Sacramento Admit rate: 94% 30k students University of Utah Admit rate: 95% 30k students University of Wyoming Admit rate: > 95% 9k students 90% admission rate 80% admission rate 70% admission rate 60% admission rate 50% admission rate 40% admission rate 30% admission rate 20% admission rate 10% admission rate These are Americas major four-year colleges, arranged by their admission rates. At the very top are the most selective colleges  the schools at the center of the affirmative action debate. They also represent a tiny share of all college students. Just 6 percent of all college students attend a school with an acceptance rate of 25 percent or less. Even colleges that admit a quarter to half their applicants are attended by only 10 percent of students. Its not until you reach admission rates of 70 percent to 80 percent that you begin to see the colleges that the majority of students attend. 56 percent of these college students go to a school that admits at least three-quarters of its applicants. These statistics reveal a simple fact about affirmative action in higher education: It mattered very little for the majority of American college students.

In the wake of the Supreme Court decision that struck down race-conscious admissions, we should recognize that, in practice, affirmative action mattered a great deal for very few and very little for most.

Yes, the decision will likely dramatically reduce the racial diversity of incoming classes at highly selective institutions like Harvard, Stanford and the University of North Carolina.

But because affirmative action only opened a tiny window of access to Americas most elite institutions, the ruling will make little difference for most college students.

Even with affirmative action in place, most students of color did not go to elite colleges, and last weeks ruling does nothing to change that. The current opportunity to bring racial equity to American higher education lies in a collective re-commitment to the quality and success of more accessible institutions.

The chart below shows the racial breakdown of college attendance by admission rate for 2021. Notice how relatively few Black and Hispanic students attend schools with an admission rate of 20 percent or less.

Few Black and Hispanic students attend selective colleges Black White Asian Hispanic Share of students 60% The majority of Black, Hispanic and White students attend schools that have admission rates of 75 percent or more. 50% 40% Asian students are much more likely to attend selective schools. 30% 20% 10% Colleges that admit less than 25 percent 25 to 50 percent 50 to 75 percent 75 percent or more Few Black and Hispanic students attend selective colleges White Black Asian Hispanic 60 percent of students The majority of Black, Hispanic and White students attend schools that have admission rates of 75 percent or more. 50 40 Asian students are much more likely to attend selective schools. 30 20 10 Colleges that admit less than 25 percent 25 to 50 percent 50 to 75 percent 75 percent or more Few Black and Hispanic students attend selective colleges White Black Asian Hispanic 60 percent of students The majority of Black, Hispanic and White students attend schools that have admission rates of 75 percent or more. 50 40 Asian students are much more likely to attend selective schools. 30 20 10 Colleges that admit less than 25 percent 25 to 50 percent 50 to 75 percent 75 percent or more Note: Data as of 2021. Source: U.S. Department of Education

In fact, the majority of Black and Hispanic students attend universities that accept more than three-quarters of their applicants. The exception here is Asian students, who on average are much more likely to attend elite universities. The proportion of all Asian students who attend a school with an acceptance rate under 25 percent is more than three times that of Black, Hispanic and white students.

What drives this dynamic is that most students apply to and enroll at schools near their families, regardless of whether the school is a good academic fit. We live in a country full of colleges that dont have the resources and academic quality to match their students talents. Social scientists describe this problem in the college selection process as undermatching. Efforts to nudge students to broaden their horizons and consider attending selective colleges further from home have had only modest success.

While the Supreme Courts decision is a blow to Black and Hispanic students who dream of attending the most competitive universities, improving and better supporting the institutions that serve the lions share of students of color will do far more to advance the cause of racial equality in this country than anything that admissions officers can do in Cambridge, Palo Alto and Chapel Hill.

The ruling provides America with an opportunity to redirect the conversation from a relatively small number of schools and instead direct urgently needed attention to the vast middle and lower tiers of postsecondary education. Non-selective colleges and universities can be genuine engines of economic mobility, but they do so in the face of significant headwinds.

Consider the amount of money schools report spending on student instruction each year. For example, in our state, California, U.C.L.A. and the private liberal-arts college Pomona report spending richly per student at $60,528 and $40,275, respectively. Meanwhile, less selective and more diverse institutions like San Francisco State ($8,087) and California State University, Los Angeles ($6,631), report expenditures that are less than a quarter of those amounts.

The key to greater racial equity in American higher education is elevating the quality of the broad range of schools most students attend.

Nearly 60 years ago, educators and politicians took bold and imaginative steps to take up this challenge. The Higher Education Act of 1965, enacted as part of President Lyndon B. Johnsons War on Poverty, made college education attainable for millions of Americans who might never have dreamed of bachelors diplomas were it not for federal grants and loans.

States also did their part in this era, investing some of the prosperity of the post-World War II decades to create and subsidize public colleges and universities. (Historians remind us that our country accomplished these milestones at a time when colleges and universities were far more closed off to women and people of color.)

We call for that kind of bold civic action once again. This country needs to attend to the unfinished business of making college education a truly inclusive mechanism of social mobility.

Less selective schools and the millions of students they serve each year deserve the same resources and attention to program quality found in selective institutions. Affirmative action never went far enough. Winning the admissions lottery to Harvard or a selective University of California campus must not be the only path to upward mobility through higher education. All colleges, especially those serving the most diverse student bodies, should be capable of providing outcomes of similar quality.

Taking the necessary steps to do this will not be easy. State leaders will need to look hard at budget allocations that favor flagship campuses at the expense of public schools serving historically marginalized groups. They will also need to encourage colleges to improve how undergraduate education is provided and measured. Students at less selective schools should have access to programs that are well designed, adequately funded and demonstrably effective at promoting learning, graduation and meaningful employment.

Imaginative, even radical ideas for reconfiguring higher education may be necessary to offer it in ways that will not saddle additional millions of people with billions of dollars of student debt. Obliging private schools with large endowments to offer affordable, academic credit-bearing courses to students from other institutions as a requirement of tax exemption would change the national conversation about what it means to attend and graduate from an elite school. So too would an expectation that all students be able to attend an adequately funded, high-quality community college for a year or two before enrolling in a flagship public or private university.

Meanwhile, forward-thinking employers could join the national movement to do away with bachelors diplomas as requirements for entry-level jobs, sending a clear signal that skills, not costly and exclusionary pieces of paper, are what matter in the 21st century.

These solutions are unquestionably harder than changing the standard of admission for a handful of prestigious schools, but these are the steps we need to take to achieve educational justice.
Japanese metal processing company Yamaguchi Seisakusho has been getting a lot of attention for showcasing its capabilities by creating a very detailed wireframe car that looks almost rendered in augmented reality.

If youve ever played mobile video games like the widely popular Pokemon GO, you probably know a little about augmented reality or AR for short. Its a technology that visually enhances the real world with computer-generated images, basically overlaying digital elements onto real-life environments. Looking at the photo of this white wireframe car, youd be tempted to think that it was the product of augmented reality, but it was actually painstakingly created out of metal wire. Photos of it recently went viral on Japanese social media, because people just couldnt believe it was real.

Photo: Yamaguchi Seisakusho

The wireframe car is the work of Yamaguchi Seisakusho, a high-precision metal processing company based in Yoshikawa City, Japans Saitama Prefecture. Isao Yamaguchi, the companys senior managing director, recently told White News that the wireframe car is one of five units that Yamaguchi Seisakusho ws commissioned to create 10 years ago for a car convention. It was an unusual request, but management viewed it as an opportunity to showcase the technical capabilities of the factory.

Photo: Yamaguchi Seisakusho

The wireframe vehicles were first designed with 3D CAD (computer-aided design) software, after which jigs were cut out of metal sheets using precision laser cutters. Metal wires were placed and welded around the jigs, and then removed to create the detailed wireframe vehicles.

Photo: Yamaguchi Seisakusho

Interestingly, the cars didnt get much attention until 2016, when the client returned one of the models which ended up on display in the Yamaguchi Seisakusho parking lot. Since then, photos of it have been circulating online, and have even been featured on Japanese television shows.

Photo: Yamaguchi Seisakusho

One of the five wireframe vehicles recently went viral after being spotted in Niiza City, Saitama Prefecture. The debate around its existence in the real world was once again reignited on Japanese Twitter.

Photo: Yamaguchi Seisakusho

For more amazing metalwork, check out the miniature mechanical transformers of Yuki Tsuboshima.
North Dakota residents Shayla and Nikki lost the prime of their youth to pimps who sold them as sexual commodities across the country.

To this day they struggle with the trauma inflicted upon them by being trafficked, but through programs in the state they are dealing with the aftermath and raising awareness of the plight of others caught in similar situations.

For both, some of the biggest hurdles came after their ordeals. Held against their will, fear of harm to their children kept them from snitching on their captors. Even when arrested on prostitution charges they kept silent.

Those charges dogged them for years, making it difficult to find good-paying jobs or to rent apartments. They hope changes can be made to laws that help expunge records of victims of trafficking.

They would see all these prostitution charges and no one would hire me, Shayla said. Theres this big push to stop human trafficking and getting girls out of the situation, but what will they do when they get out? No one will hire them. They cant get housing.

For Nikki, the situation was pretty much the same. While she was able to rebuild a life for herself and her children and find work, her arrest records popped up occasionally to bring the trauma back.

Id made a life for myself, Id married, Im a mom, Im a productive member of society, I dont do drugs, and Id doing all these things youre supposed to be doing in life and here comes my past to bite me in the ass, Nikki said.

Shayla said she didnt believe there are enough laws in place to help victims recover their past and live with dignity, until those records slip into the abyss of time and dont pop up on a background check.

Another factor irking Shayla is that prosecution of traffickers isnt strong enough. She said her own trafficker would have only received around two months in jail if charges would have been brought against him. She would have to testify as well, leaving her exposed to possible retribution from someone who savagely beat her in the past.

I was told, Its not like youre a witness to the mob and we can put you in witness protection, she said.

As for Nikkis trafficker, he was never brought to justice either.

He was never prosecuted, she said. Nothing ever happened to him. He just got to live his life.

Both expressed gratitude for the support theyve gotten from programs in North Dakota, though they hope the focus can grow even stronger.

If I could wave a special wand, this is what I would want: I would want survivors to have a plethora of support and services forever and always, Nikki said.

With the average age of entry into sex trafficking being around 12 to 14 years of age, by the time women get out of their situation sometime in their 20s, besides the stigma and trauma, many victims also need to build up general life skills, according to Angela Daly, shelter services director of Cass County YWCA.

Weve had women come to us who dont even know how to make macaroni and cheese, because they dont know how to boil water, because theyve had someone tell them when to get up, what to wear and how many people theyre going to have sex with that day against their will, Daly said.

Daly also raised the issue that difficulties victims have with barriers to housing and employment because of arrest records need to be better addressed.

Both victims agreed to speak if only their first names were used, out of both reputational concern and the fact their traffickers have never been punished.

The women's last names were left out of this story in line with a Tribune policy not to identify victims of sex crimes.

Addressing gaps

After a recent series of meetings with those working on human trafficking in the state, Attorney General Drew Wrigley said in an interview at his office that he wants to better facilitate their work and efficiently move grant dollars to effective programs.

Were committed to that and were going to make some structural changes, he said, without elaborating due to the ongoing process.

One issue is a delay in the release of annual reports on human trafficking, required by legislation enacted in 2019, as part of an overall awareness campaign. The last report, covering 2020, was released in late 2021. The sudden death of Wrigleys predecessor, Wayne Stenehjem, and subsequent staffing upheaval led to the delay, he said.

Im told were days or weeks away from it being prepared for this year, Wrigley said.

Essentially this means the 2021 report would be the only one delayed, with the 2022 report released slightly earlier than usual.

Emily Schwartz, director of the North Dakota Human Trafficking Task Force, confirmed this, attributing the delay to Stenehjems January 2022 death due to cardiac arrest, and staff turnover. Schwartz said the 2021 report is now with the Attorney Generals office and the 2022 report would be finalized in a matter of weeks.

The annual reports are an important way to promote public awareness about trafficking, remedies and services for victims, and to prevent future trafficking. The findings of the reports help inform programs for awareness training for law enforcement and other public employees.

Wrigley indicated he wants a chance to review the materials to see if its as good a tool as it can be, he said.

Something like that is important, especially if it gets widely distributed and is actually readable, digestible, Wrigley said.

Since 2015, the task force has served 721 victims of trafficking, with 71% of those adults, and the other 29% minors, according to the most recent data.

A total of 257 investigations into trafficking have been conducted during that time and 507 training sessions conducted with law enforcement, medical professionals, domestic violence and sexual assault service providers and others, according to the task force.

The 2023 legislative assembly granted $1,105,404 toward human trafficking victim services. Thats a slight uptick from the $1,101,879 allocated in 2021.

That money goes toward programs providing long-term counseling and other support for victims like Shayla and Nikki.

Wrigley said he wants to make sure that his office is aligning grant dollars with outcomes and finding meaningful metrics in the data that is released regarding training and awareness.

Further steps

A recent lawsuit, filed by a Georgia woman against 26th Street Hospitality and MainStay Suites in Williston for failing to recognize sex trafficking was taking place at its hotel there in 2013-14, raises the possibility of deeper self-policing by lodging facilities, or potentially rules to require employee awareness.

While legislation passed in 2019 offering training to places of lodging for awareness about human trafficking, no mandatory measures were put into place.

Wrigley pondered whether having stronger reporting requirements, similar to those at schools where staff must report potential cases of child abuse or neglect, are appropriate for people on the front lines whether they be hotel staff, taxi or Uber drivers.

Im not for overregulation, but this training doesnt have to be that extensive just to see the signs and alert trained professionals, alert law enforcement, alert the nonprofits and others in your community, Wrigley said. I think done the right way youll get volunteer engagement in this area.

Visits to several hotels indicate that staff at many are already taking those steps, at least in Bismarck.

Theres been a huge push for probably the last two years for where myself, and all my managers have had quarterly training, said Braydyn Doerr, general manager at Courtyard Marriott Bismarck North. Its probably been the No. 1 focus as far as training goes this year.

Schwartz said outreach to hotels is one duty of the task force and its partners with nonprofits and other groups.

We do have our operational team go out to hotels and offer training materials, indicator cards, and tell them heres how we can assist, she said. So theres that outreach on our behalf, but its really up to them if they want to implement that or take it further.

Ruth Anna Buffalo, who as a legislator in 2019 introduced a bill that initially would have fined hotels for not providing awareness training to staff, points to Minnesota as an example of a state that does include penalties for non-compliance.

Its too bad we cant be more proactive, though, Buffalo said. We should be working to prevent further tragedies and prevent further harm being done to individuals, especially vulnerable individuals.

Daly added that staff at bus stations, truck stops, and other locations where traffickers pass through could potentially have awareness training.

I hate the word mandatory, but you could incentivize it and show why it is important, Daly said.

Buffalo suggested something like awarding a star or including signage at locations that meet awareness training requirements.

Schools are another area where focus could grow, according to Shayla and Nikki, particularly in the early teen years in which girls are more susceptible to trafficking.

Stacy Schaffer, founder and executive director of the Bismarck-based nonprofit 31:8 Project, which helps victims and raises awareness of trafficking, said her organization does do some school outreach, but prefers to have smaller group sessions.

Its still not enough and it needs to be improved and some schools are still hesitant to let this topic in, even though we know that average age where people are being recruited is like 12 to 14, she said.

Another aspect is increasing awareness of how traffickers use social media to lure people in or about sexually explicit websites, Schaffer said.

Its a different time and a different age, obviously, Nikki said. My girlfriends that have children always ask me to talk to their kids, they know it is really important to talk about these things, but dont know how to navigate this.
A New Zealand woman who had a small chicken bone lodged in her throat claims that she was prescribed an interesting remedy by an emergency room doctor  lots of Coke.

Beth Brash recently sat down with New Zealand magazine Stuff to tell the unusual story of how she managed to get rid of the chicken bone stuck in her neck. It all started when she visited her favorite Wellington restaurant and tried their new chicken dish. To be fair, the staff there asked if she was alright with bones, and having visited multiple countries where serving meat on the bone was considered normal, she wasnt put off by it. Unfortunately, while eating the spicy dish, the young woman started experiencing a kind of tickling in her throat, which turned out to be a small piece of chicken bone.

Photo: Giovanna Gomes/Unsplash

Although alarmed by the sensation in her throat, Brash decided not to make a scene in the restaurant and even fought through the pain the entire weekend, assuming it would eventually go away. It didnt, so she went to the emergency room first thing on Monday morning. She was informed that she did in fact have a small piece of chicken bone lodged in her throat, but the ENT [Ear, Nose and Throat] specialist told her that it wasnt a cause for concern.

The spicy chicken aficionado was relieved to learn that her situation wasnt serious, but she still expected to undergo an invasive procedure to have the bone removed. Instead, the ENT department simply advised her to drink four cans of sugary Coca-Cola to dissolve the piece of bone. She was surprised by the remedy, but she went to the supermarket and bought four Cokes. To her amazement, she started feeling better the next morning, and by the following day, she was already back to normal.

That human Drano for your body for clearing it out, that corrosiveness, thats what I found really interesting, Brash said.

Photo: Louis Hansel/Unsplash

Dr. Bryan Betty, chair of General Practice New Zealand, told Stuff.co.nz that she had never come across this doctor-prescribed remedy before, but added that it is a known fact that Coke is an acidic drink that can even break down tooth enamel. Its not exactly the kind of treatment a doctor would prescribe, but if it can prevent invasive procedures, then its worth a shot.

If it avoided surgery or an endoscope or further procedure, its obviously done the job, Betty said. So you could say its reasonable advice thats been given.

Beth Brash herself conducted an experiment, leaving chicken bones in Coke for a few days and watching them break down, but there is also a UK study that suggests the fizzy drink could help dislodge bones from peoples throats by causing them to disintegrate.
Jon Gingerich

Two years ago, I wrote an editorial on this site about a phenomenon I referred to as performative wokeness, or when brands resort to the grifty act of empty sloganeering or reflexively declare their progressive bona fides in an opportunistic bid to gain market share.

Thats still happeningarguably, now more than ever. But in response, the pendulum has swung the other way. Celebrities, brands and media personalities are now cashing in on the public backlash to wokeness, catering to some consumers frustrations at what they perceive to be a political climate where brands are effectively shoving diversity, tolerance and inclusion down our collective throats. Enter the pernicious, equally performative anti-woke brand, which has become the single most significant development this year in our ongoing culture wars.

Brands, now effectively rendered a cudgel for our political interests, have ideologically committed Americans waging a bizarre proxy war with some predictably sillyand sometimes dangerousresults. Either way, Im assuming this latest development has given more than a few boardrooms pause on whether to dip their toes into the political arena going forward.

This article is featured in O'Dwyer's July '23 Travel & Tourism PR Magazine

(view PDF version)

Consider these recent offerings from the anti-woke economy.

Florida Governor Ron DeSantis has built an entire political platform on being anti-woke. His nonstop spat with Disney, which started last year after Disney publicly criticized the Republican presidential candidates Parental Rights in Education legislation (aka the Dont Say Gay bill), which bars educators from discussing sexual identity in classrooms, resulted in the Governor retaliating by dismantling Disneys ability to self-govern its Orlando amusement parks, a move so stupid that even Donald Trump called it an unnecessary political stunt. Disney, in turn, sued DeSantis and scrapped a $17 billion expansion plan in the Sunshine State. DeSantis war on woke mightve won him a few early plaudits, but Mickey Mouse is a more beloved brand any day, and worse, the entire ordeal has made the Florida Governor look like a one-trick pony. DeSantis is now trailing Trump in the polls by double digits, with many polls now showing Trump carrying twice the support.

In what has undoubtedly been one of the biggest branding disasters in recent years, Bud Light found itself in a reputational crisis in April after it sent transgender influencer Dylan Mulvaney a set of beer cans to celebrate her gender transition. When Mulvaney promoted Budweisers flagship low-calorie beverage in an Instagram video, that partnership proved to be the branding equivalent of an atomic bomb, with conservatives nationwide ditching their favorite beer of choice. Musician Kid Rockwhos currently capitalizing on the anti-woke wave with an entire summer concert series called the No Snowflakes Tourfilmed himself shooting a case of Bud Light with a semiautomatic rifle. Tracking figures from Nielsen IQ now estimate that Bud Lights sales volume is down 30 percent from the same time last year. In response, the beer maker has rolled out an aggressively populist new ad campaign titled Thats Who We Are, which features a behind-the-scenes look at the lives of Anheuser-Busch employees, in a bid to change the conversation, win back customers and halt its cratering sales. The company is also kicking off a desperate promotion over the Fourth of July holiday, where it plans to give away free beer.

Even Chick-fil-A is apparently too woke now for some right-wing groups. The fast-food chain, which is famously closed on Sundays and has long championed conservative valuesits chairman has repeatedly stated he only supports the traditional definition of marriagefound itself in the crosshairs recently after news broke across social media circles that it had hired a vice president of DEI. That boycott proved to be a bust, presumably because a fast-food favorite is a bridge too far for fair-weather ideologues.

The list goes on and on. Former Fox personality Eric Bolling even hosts an entire series on Newsmax now called Go Woke, Go Broke, dedicated to the public backlash brandslike retailer Targetsubject themselves to when they attempt to be conscientious or take a public stand on social issues.

To be sure, theres definitely a market for these anti-woke crusaders, much as there is for brands that broadcast their commitment to social-justice efforts. I cant possibly predict what the next phase in our culture wars will look like, but Im not convinced that the world were currently working to createwhere corporations set the yardstick for whats morally acceptable behavioris a world that anyone on either ideological side actually wants. Given the backlash some of these aforementioned brands have faced in recent monthsthere seems to be a new victim every weekit straddles the obvious to state that brands need to tread carefully these days. Im guessing that many brands might begin second-guessing their commitment to ideology-driven marketing in the future. Some might ditch the practice altogether. Maybe thats not a bad thing.
One of the largest media companies in Ireland is looking for a customer service person to join their existing commercial team in their busy office in Portlaoise.

If you have strong organisational skills, experience of customer service and can work effectively to tight deadlines, you could thrive in this role within the Iconic Media team in Portlaoise. We will consider candidates who meet the above criteria - and provided you can, we don't even require previous media experience.

This is an excellent opportunity for someone who has built up some work experience to transfer their skills and take a first step into the world of regional print and digital advertising. Iconic Media Group is rapidly developing its product portfolio in Ireland and now publishes 20 weekly newspapers and 23 local news websites.

It has a vast presence across the country. As Advertising Assistant you'll join our highly effective advertising team focusing on three core areas:

Planning: Working with Editorial and Advertising teams to ensure space is planned and effectively utilised to optimise both editorial and advertising content.

Digital: Serving and Monitoring digital advertising. Liaising with advertising executives to get the best possible result for their customers. Compiling and reviewing End of Campaign Reports. Experience is an advantage but not essential as full training will be provided.

Production: The team is responsible for checking that all advertising information is correct before sending it to the advert make-up team.

To succeed you'll be extremely well-organised and capable of working in a fast paced environment. The ability to operate to tight deadlines is very important and you should have a good knowledge of Microsoft Office and be happy working within a team.

If you can provide the enthusiasm and necessary transferable skills required for the role, full training can be provided.

To apply please email your CV to ocooper@iconicnewspapers.ie

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Gruha Jyothi: 2 Important Updates On Free Electricity Scheme

Bengaluru

oi-Prakash KL

The electricity department has issued a special notice to give further clarification regarding 'Gruha Jyothi' scheme which gives up to 200 units of free electricity to residents of Karnataka.

Can Consumers Who Have Pending Bills Apply For The Scheme?

According to the latest statement released by BESCOM, if a consumer enrols for the 'Gruha Jyothi' scheme within July 25, he will be able to avail free electricity for the month of July.

Similarly, those who enrol after July 25 and before August 25, will be eligible to get free electricity for the month of August, only if the monthly consumption is under 200 units as an average.

It means if you want to get free electricity for this month, you should register for the scheme before 25 of this month.

Gruha Jyoti Scheme: Registration for Free Electricity Begins From Tomorrow; How to Apply?

Meter Reading Cycle

The BESCOM has said that the meter reading cycle runs from 25th to 25th of every month.

One has to apply for the Gruha Jyothi Scheme on 'Seva Sindu' website or can apply through assisted mode also made available at Grama One, Karnataka One, Bangalore One centres.

The benefit is calculated based on average consumption for Financial Year 2022-23, plus 10 per cent increase, but total amounting to less than 200 units.

This is one of the key poll promises made by the Congress during the polls. As per the political pundits, the populist schemes helped the grand old party to register a thumping victory.

How To Register For Gruha Jyothi Scheme?

Note: For a quick registration keep your Aadhaar number, Account ID of your electricity connection and mobile number of Aadhaar ready with you.

Log Into - https://sevasindhugs.karnataka.gov.in/gsdn/

Click the check box, enter captcha and press submit button.

https://sevasindhugs.karnataka.gov.in/gsdn/

You will be asked to enter Aadhaar Card number.

In the next page, you will be asked to confirm your Aadhaar number and an OTP will be sent to your registered mobile number.

Once entering the OTP, you will have to enter your consumer number along with other details.

For Breaking News and Instant Updates Allow Notifications

Story first published: Monday, July 3, 2023, 14:28 [IST]
20-year-old Man Stabbed To Death for Demanding Rs 300 he Lost in Bet, 4 Arrested

India

oi-PTI

A 20-year-old man was allegedly stabbed to death by four youths in central Delhi's Ranjeet Nagar area after he demanded Rs 300 that he lost in a bet, police said on Monday.

The accused, identified as Pramod, Rajnish, Amit Kumar and Roshan Singh -- all in the age group of 18-19 years -- have been arrested, they said.

According to police, victim Abhishek had lost the amount in a bet while playing a game of cards with Pramod. When he demanded the accused to return the lost money, a quarrel spurred up between them and he attacked the victim with a knife on Sunday.

Deputy Commissioner of Police (Central) Sanjay Kumar Sain said at around 4.15 pm on Sunday, a call was received at Ranjeet Nagar police station that a man was stabbed to death at Sangam Colony in Pandav Nagar.

A police team which reached the spot found out that the injured was taken to Metro Hospital by the public where he was declared as brought dead by the doctors, he said.

On enquiry, the victim's uncle told police that around 3.30 pm, he saw three-four boys chasing Abhishek. They caught hold of him and started beating him up when suddenly Pramod took out a knife and stabbed the victim on his chest and the side of his abdomen, the DCP said.

Delhi Murder Was Pre-Meditated, Not A 'Crime Of Passion

When Abhishek's uncle ran to help him, all the accused youths fled towards the railway line, he added.

With the help of technical surveillance, the accused were identified and following raids, the location of the main culprit -- Pramod -- was traced and he was nabbed from a bus destined for Uttar Pradesh's Gorakhpur, the DCP said.

Later, the other three accused were also arrested after they confessed to their involvement in the crime, he said.

"Pramod was a friend of the victim. They were playing cards in a park near the Railway Line, Sangam Colony during which Abhishek lost Rs 300. Later, he started demanding the amount back and this led to a heated argument between them and it escalated into a fight," the DCP said.

"To teach him a lesson, Pramod followed Abhishek with his friends Roshan, Amit and Rajnish and caught hold of him near a meat shop in Sangam Colony. Then in a fit of anger, he attacked him with a knife on his chest and the side of his abdomen," Kumar said.

The knife, blood-stained clothes of the accused and Rs 300 have been recovered, police said.

For Breaking News and Instant Updates Allow Notifications

Story first published: Monday, July 3, 2023, 22:30 [IST]
On his birthday, a look at at the decisive Doval Doctrine

5-judge SC Bench to Hear on July 11 pleas Challenging Abrogation of Article 370

India

oi-PTI

Nearly four years after the government abrogated Article 370 that bestowed special status on the erstwhile state of Jammu and Kashmir, a five-judge constitution bench headed by Chief Justice of India DY Chandrachud will take up for hearing on July 11 a batch of pleas challenging the contentious decision.

According to a notice issued on the apex court website on Monday, the five-judge bench, also comprising Justices Sanjay Kishan Kaul, Sanjiv Khanna, BR Gavai and Surya Kant will take up the pleas, including the one filed by IAS officer Shah Faesal and others, for passing directions.

Faesal, a 2010 batch IAS officer, the first Kashmiri to have topped the all-India civil services examination, was detained for over a year after Article 370 of the Constitution was scrapped. He had resigned from service and launched Jammu Kashmir People's Movement, a political entity in January 2019. The government didn't accept his resignation and Faesal, a doctor by profession, was later posted to the Union Culture Ministry.

He had also moved a petition in the Supreme Court against government's decision on Article 370.

On August 5, 2019, the Centre decided to strip the erstwhile state of Jammu and Kashmir of special status and bifurcate it into two Union Territories. Several petitions challenging the Centre's decision to abrogate the provisions of Article 370 and the Jammu and Kashmir Reorganisation Act, 2019, which split J-K into two Union Territories Jammu and Kashmir, and Ladakh were referred to a constitution bench in 2019.

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By abrogating Article 370, the Central government had revoked the special status of Jammu and Kashmir.

People's Union of Civil Liberties (PUCL), a prominent NGO, the Jammu and Kashmir High Court Bar Association, and an intervenor had earlier sought that the matter be referred to a larger bench on grounds that two judgements of the apex court -- Prem Nath Kaul versus Jammu and Kashmir in 1959 and Sampat Prakash versus Jammu and Kashmir in 1970 -- which dealt with the issue of Article 370 conflicted with each other and therefore, the current bench of five judges could not hear the issue.

Disagreeing with the petitioners, the top court had ruled in 2020 it was of the opinion that ''there is no conflict between the judgements'' and the issue will be heard by the five-judge bench.

Faesal, who had floated his political party, the Jammu and Kashmir People's Movement (JKPM), had filed the petition in the top court in 2019.

In April 2022, the government had accepted Faesal's application for withdrawing his resignation from service and reinstated him.

Faesal had in April last year filed an application seeking deletion of his name from the list of seven petitioners who have challenged the scrapping of Article 370 of the Constitution. Other petitioners in the matter are Javid Ahmad Bhat, Shehla Rashid Shora, Ilyas Laway, Saif Ali Khan and Rohit Sharma and Mohammad Hussain Padder. Advocate-on-Record Aakarsh Kamra, who has filed the plea on behalf of Faesal and others, said besides the IAS officer, Rashid has also filed an application seeking deletion of her name from the list of petitioners.

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Story first published: Monday, July 3, 2023, 21:15 [IST]
Ajit Pawar Meets Fadnavis To Discuss Allocation Of Portfolios

India

oi-PTI

A day after joining the Eknath Shinde-led Maharashtra government, Deputy Chief Minister Ajit Pawar on Monday met his counterpart Devendra Fadnavis to discuss allocation of cabinet portfolios and legal aspects pertaining to the new alliance, sources said.

NCP leaders Sunil Tatkare, Praful Patel and Chhagan Bhujbal were also present in the meeting held at 'Meghdoot' bungalow, the official residence of Deputy CM and Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) leader Fadnavis, they said. The meeting lasted for about an hour.

On Sunday, Ajit Pawar led a vertical split in the Nationalist Congress Party (NCP) to become the deputy chief minister. Eight other NCP leaders were also sworn in as ministers in the Eknath Shinde-BJP government. "The meeting was about distribution of portfolios.

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The leaders also discussed legal aspects and impending challenges before this new alliance," a source close to Ajit Pawar said. "The allocation of portfolios would be finalised by Tuesday evening," the source said.

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In the past, Ajit Pawar held portfolios such as water resources department, power and finance. Currently, all the three portfolios are with Fadnavis, who also holds charge of the state home department. The next state cabinet meeting is likely to be held on Wednesday.
FARGO  Sanford Health has filed a countersuit against a Fargo medical waste treatment company that alleged the hospitals subsidiary delivered a human torso for disposal.

The health care company headquartered in Sioux Falls told The Forum on Thursday it had filed its answer to a lawsuit filed by Monarch Waste Technologies last week. Monarch is suing Sanford and its Fargo subsidiary, Health Environmental Services, or HESI, for breach of contract, trespassing and wrongfully taking waste.

In its Thursday court filing that denied wrongdoing, Sanford claims Monarch, a Texas-based company that leases space in the HESI facility at 1420 40th St. N., breached its contract with Sanford and HESI in a number of ways, including failing to dispose of waste in a timely manner and within North Dakota regulation, creating potential health hazards, failing to store waste properly, not having enough staff and not providing adequate training, according to the counterclaims.

Sanford also accused Monarch of fraudulent misrepresentation, property damage and failure to pay operating expenses.

Sanford claims the torso was a partial lower body research specimen used to teach medical staff about hip replacement procedures, the provider said in the lawsuit. Any allegations of the torso being mishandled or missing are deeply inaccurate, and deliberately misleading.

Monarchs failure to not only perform its contracted duties, but to actually twist its failures into a public allegation of wrongdoing to smear Sanford, starkly demonstrates the bad faith with which Monarch has approached its work, Sanford said in a statement.

The counterclaim filed Thursday is in response to Monarchs allegations that Sanford and HESI have taken action to force a termination of contract with the medical waste disposal company. Monarch and HESI signed 10-year disposal and lease agreements in 2020, allowing Monarch to work out of the HESI building, according to court documents.

HESI packages medical waste for Sanford and takes it to Monarch, which then disposes of the waste.

Monarch began to process HESIs waste at the Fargo facility in 2022. Before that, it was shipped to a Monarch facility in New Mexico, according to court documents.

Sanford claimed in its countersuit that Monarch became overwhelmed by the amount of waste the health care company produced, despite promises that it could handle the volume. HESI employees brought up concerns in early 2023 of unsanitary and unsafe conditions at Monarch, the suit said. HESI entered the Monarch facility and found it overrun with waste, claiming much of the waste was several weeks old, the suit said.

Waste had to be stored outside in semitrailers, and HESI couldnt pull its trucks into the Monarch area to unload new waste, the countersuit said.

An overwhelming stench filled the facility as a result of the accumulated waste, Sanford said in court documents.

Sanford said in its filing it believed Monarch couldnt keep up with the workload because it was consistently understaffed and that equipment was often broken.

HESI employees went into Monarchs facility in February and spread waste on the floor, Monarchs lawsuit alleged. The employees then took pictures of the facility and attached them to an April 23 termination notice, the lawsuit said. Sanford denied there is video proof of HESI employees staging the photos.

Monarch alleged HESI delivered on March 3 a torso in a plastic container to the waste disposal facility and signed a receipt form without Monarchs knowledge, the lawsuit said.

The torso belonged to an older man, was wearing shorts and had other body parts packed underneath it, Monarch CEO David Cardenas said. The facility does not accept body parts, he added.

HESI often had to sign waste manifests for Monarch because there were no employees at the facility, Sanford said in the lawsuit. Monarch was aware this happened and allowed it, the lawsuit said.

Monarch found the torso on March 7 after employees noticed a rotten and putrid smell, according to its lawsuit. The company filed a rejection report with the North Dakota Department of Environmental Quality.

State officials said the torso incident remains under investigation.

Monarch also alleged in its lawsuit HESI employees came into the facility on March 8 to remove waste. Its unclear what happened to the torso, as it disappeared from the Monarch facility, the lawsuit said.

Monarch claimed HESI gave no notice of coming into the facility, though HESI claims it told Monarch it would remove more than 20,000 pounds of waste not being processed, court documents said.

HESI employees also entered the facility to take back waste because Monarch was not disposing of the waste in a timely manner, the lawsuit said.

Sanford said HESI turned off water to the boiler room on March 9 because Monarch locked them out of the facility, a move Monarch said put lives in danger. Monarch had possession of the partial lower body research specimen when Sanford was locked out, Sanford spokesman Nathan Aamodt said.

Monarch failed to carry out its contractual obligations to the point that Sanford couldnt rely on the waste disposal company, Sanford said. Because of the breach of contract, Sanford and HESI took control of 73,000 pounds of medical waste and had another vendor destroy it, Sanfords lawsuit said.

HESI claimed in its lawsuit that Monarch sabotaged and damaged a Valley City facility Sanford allowed it to use after being told to leave the Valley City location.

The claims by Monarch are totally unsupported by the facts, and the lawsuit is simply a retaliation for the warranted termination of the parties contract and a desperate attempt by Monarch to distract from its own failures, Sanford said in a statement said, adding Monarchs lawsuit was a result of Sanford taking control of the situation and serving a notice to terminate the contracts.

Sanford Medical Center in Fargo conducts research and has an academic mission, the countersuit said. Medical staff learn using medical specimens that are donated, according to court documents.

Once a teaching specimens use is completed for its educational purpose, it is packaged for sanitary destruction, the lawsuit said.

The torso was clearly tagged as Human Tissue for Research, the countersuit said, adding it was the type of routine biological material inherent in a medical and teaching facility like Sanford that (Monarch) guaranteed it would safely and promptly dispose.

Sanford claimed in its countersuit Monarch concocted outrageous claims and baseless theories about HESI after being served a notice of termination, claiming HESI and the hospital breached its contract. The health care company also said Monarch didnt claim the torso was improperly packaged and delivered until after it was served a notice of default on its contract.

Put simply, (Monarch) failed to deliver on its promises and allowed waste to accumulate for months in and around HESIs facilities, Sanford said in its countersuit. HESI was left with no choice but to make immediate, alternative arrangements to ensure proper disposal of the waste that (Monarch) failed to destroy.
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Anonymous Letter Threatens Balasore-Like Train Tragedy in Next Week On Hyderabad-Delhi Route

India

oi-Madhuri Adnal

An anonymous letter warning of a Balasore-like train tragedy on the Hyderabad-Delhi-Hyderabad route was sent to the South Central Railway (SCR) here recently, official sources told news agency PTI.

The letter dated June 30, 2023 was addressed to Divisional Railway Manager of Secunderabad Division under the South Central Railway and it allegedly mentioned the possibility of a ''Balasore-like train tragedy'' in the next week on the ''Hyderabad-Delhi-Hyderabad'' route.

The letter was received by post last week.

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The SCR authorities informed the Telangana Police about the letter.

''...the letter was received last week by post and was given to the State Intelligence for further action,'' SCR sources said.

On June 2, three trains collided in Odisha's Balasore district, claiming more than 280 lives and injuring over 1,000 people.

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Story first published: Monday, July 3, 2023, 20:33 [IST]
Bihar Heading For Maharashtra-Like Political Crisis: Ramdas Athawale

India

oi-Prakash KL

Union Minister Ramdas Athawale on Monday said that Bihar is heading for Maharashtra-like political crisis as JD(U) MLAs are upset with Chief Minister Nitish Kumar. He also said that leaders from Akhilesh Yadav's SP will join the NDA soon.

"A similar situation (like currently in Maharashtra) can arise in Bihar soon as some JD(U) MLAs are upset with Nitish Kumar. In UP, Jayant Chaudhary can join with NDA as is currently upset with Akhilesh Yadav. There is a possibility that differences arise between MLAs of the Samajwadi Party," ANI quoted Ramdas Athawale, MP of the Republican Party of India (Athawale) and Union Minister, as saying.

In a surprising turn of events, Ajith and eight other NCP MLAs joined the Eknath Shinde-led Maharashtra government. This comes at a time when the opposition parties were trying to put their political differences aside to take on the BJP in the 2024 Lok Sabha polls.

'

Meanwhile, Sharad Pawar has vowed to build the NCP, which has been hit hard by the defections. "Today, in Maharashtra and the country, a rift is being created between the society in the name of caste and religion by some groups... My fight is against communal forces, I will rebuild the party," Hindustan Times quoted Sharad Pawar as saying at an event on Monday.

The NCP supremo visited the memorial of his mentor and Maharashtra's first chief minister Yashwantrao Chavan in Karad and paid floral tributes to him.

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Earlier in an interview, Pawar on Monday said that "there is no problem" in the family despite his nephew Ajith leading the rebels to join the NDA.

"There's no problem in the family. We don't discuss politics in the family. Everyone takes their own decision," NDTV quoted him as saying in an exclusive interview. The NCP chief stated that he has not contacted any MLA since Sunday's unexpected development.

"I didn't approach anybody since yesterday. I haven't contacted anybody. I am just leaving now for Satara," he said.

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Story first published: Monday, July 3, 2023, 13:07 [IST]
What Happened With Daughters Can Never Be Forgiven: PM Modi On Manipur Parade Incident

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PM Chairs 'Fruitful' Meeting of Council of Ministers, Tells Them to Inform People About Work Done in 9 Years

India

oi-Madhuri Adnal

Prime Minister Narendra Modi held a meeting of the Union Council of Ministers on Monday amid a heightened buzz about the likelihood of a Cabinet reshuffle following a series of meetings of the ruling BJP's top brass. The meeting took place at the newly constructed convention centre in Pragati Maidan, Delhi.

''A fruitful meeting with the Council of Ministers, where we exchanged views on diverse policy related issues,'' Modi tweeted.

In the Council of Ministers meeting, some ministries generally give a presentation about their work, with the prime minister sharing his views. The meeting has come amid a heightened buzz about a likely Cabinet reshuffle following a series of meetings of the ruling BJP's top brass.

According to news agency PTI, a presentation was also made in the meeting on India's likely growth journey in a host of areas, ranging from infrastructure to budget size, till 2047 when it celebrates the centenary of its independence.

This will put India among the leading countries in the world, they said. Modi has described the era till 2047 as ''Amrit Kaal'' (golden era) for the country.

The sources said the prime minister noted the global challenges and lauded the country's development.

A number of secretaries representing different ministries, including foreign and defence, spoke during the meeting in which Modi's recent state visit to the US was also highlighted for its unprecedent success, with the prime minister holding talks with President Joe Biden on all three days of his stay in Washington DC, the sources said.

His visit to Egypt was also highlighted in the meeting which last for close to four and a half hours.

It was also discussed how to properly implement budgetary allocations, the sources said, noting that Modi underscored that the G20 meeting will be held at Pragati Maidan Convention Centre.

Prior to this, senior leaders of the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), including PM Modi, Home Minister Amit Shah, BJP Chief JP Nadda, and National General Secretary BL Santhosh, gathered for a meeting at the Prime Minister's residence in New Delhi on Wednesday night (June 28).

According to reports, discussions centered around the Cabinet reshuffle and the party's strategy for the 2024 Lok Sabha elections. As part of preparations for the upcoming elections, it is expected that three General Secretaries and four Secretaries will be inducted into the BJP's national organisation.

Rports also revealed that the Prime Minister has been briefed on the party's changes in light of the critical elections. It is speculated that four BJP leaders from Uttar Pradesh, one from the upcoming elections in Madhya Pradesh, two from Rajasthan (where assembly elections are scheduled this year), and two from Maharashtra are likely to be included in the Modi Cabinet.

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In addition to the national organizational reshuffle, the ruling party may introduce significant changes in the state units of Madhya Pradesh, Rajasthan, Karnataka, and Uttar Pradesh. After experiencing a significant defeat in Karnataka, the BJP is determined to leave no room for chance, especially as it faces a tough competition from the Congress in Madhya Pradesh.

The BJP currently holds power in Madhya Pradesh, while the Congress, led by Kamal Nath, is aiming to reclaim it. In Rajasthan, the BJP is strategizing to overcome the divided Congress. However, reports suggest that the BJP in Rajasthan is also grappling with a leadership crisis ahead of the assembly elections.
Delhi HC Dismisses Sisodia's Bail Plea

India

oi-Prakash KL

The Delhi High Court on Monday dismissed the bail petition of former Delhi Deputy Chief Minister Manish Sisodia in the Enforcement Directorate (ED) case related to the Delhi Excise Policy matter.

He is not entitled to bail at this stage, Justice Dinesh Kumar Sharma while refusing to grant him bail. The court also dismissed the bail petitions of Vijay Nair, ex-communication in charge of Aam Aadmi Party, Abhishek Boinpally (Hyderabad Based Businessman), Binoy Babu Binoy, (manager with a liquor company M/S Pernod Ricard) in connection with the Excise case.

Sisodia, the former Delhi deputy chief minister and excise minister, was first arrested by the CBI on February 26 for his alleged role in the scam and has been in custody since then. He had sought bail on various grounds, including the deteriorating health of his wife who is suffering from multiple sclerosis.

On June 3, the Delhi High Court reserved its order on his bail plea.

According to the CBI and ED, which are probing the cases against Sisodia, irregularities were committed while modifying the excise policy and undue favours were extended to licence holders.

Sisodia had challenged the March 31 order of the trial court which had dismissed his bail plea, saying he was prima facie the "architect" of the alleged scam and had played the "most important and vital role" in the criminal conspiracy related to alleged payment of advance kickbacks of Rs 90-100 crore meant for him and his colleagues in the Delhi government.

The policy was implemented in November 2021 before it was scrapped in September 2022 amid allegations of corruption.

The bail plea of Sisodia in the excise policy scam was rejected by the court on May 30. The court cited Sisodia's influence as a prominent figure and the potential to sway witnesses, who are predominantly public servants, as reasons for its decision. Furthermore, the court emphasized the gravity of the allegations against Sisodia, stating that they are of a highly serious nature.
Delhi HC Rejects Plea Challenging RBIs Decision To Withdraw Rs 2,000 Notes

India

oi-Deepika S

The Delhi High Court on Monday rejected a Public Interest Litigation (PIL) petition challenging the decision of the Reserve Bank of India (RBI) to withdraw Rs 2,000 currency notes from circulation.

A Division Bench comprising Chief Justice Satish Chandra Sharma and Justice Subramonium Prasad dismissed the plea.

The petition had been filed by an advocate named Rajneesh Bhaskar Gupta who contended that the RBI had no independent power under the RBI Act to discontinue banknotes.

Petitioner Rajneesh Bhaskar Gupta had contended in his plea that the RBI has no power to withdraw 2,000-rupee currency notes from circulation and only the Centre could have taken a decision in this regard.

Entire Process Of Withdrawal Of 2000 Notes To Be Non-Disruptive: RBI

In May, the Reserve Bank of India (RBI) announced its decision to withdraw the Rs 2000 denomination banknotes from circulation as part of its 'Clean Note Policy'.

These banknotes were initially introduced in November 2016 to address the urgent currency requirements of the economy following the withdrawal of the legal tender status of Rs 500 and Rs 1000 banknotes.

However, with an ample supply of banknotes in other denominations now available, the purpose of introducing the Rs 2000 banknotes has been fulfilled, leading to the cessation of their printing in 2018-19, as stated by the RBI.

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Story first published: Monday, July 3, 2023, 11:38 [IST]
Excise Policy Scam: HC Denies Bail to Sisodia, Says Allegations Very Serious

India

oi-PTI

In a fresh setback to senior AAP leader Manish Sisodia, the Delhi High Court on Monday declined him bail in a money laundering case linked to alleged irregularities in the city government's excise policy, saying the charges against him were ''very serious in nature''. Sisodia was arrested in connection with the case on March 9.

This matter has to be visited with a "different approach" as a deep rooted conspiracy involving huge loss of public funds has been alleged, the court observed while rejecting his bail application.

Justice Dinesh Kumar Sharma said the former deputy chief minister of Delhi has not been able to pass the ''triple test'' for bail under the anti-money laundering law in which the court has to see whether an accused is likely to flee from justice, tamper with evidence or influence witnesses.

Besides rejecting Sisodia's plea, the Delhi High Court also refused bail to businessmen Abhishek Boinpally, Benoy Babu and Vijay Nair, who are his co-accused in the money laundering case lodged by the Enforcement Directorate (ED).

"The present case arises out of an alleged conspiracy wherein the government framed an excise policy with a malafide intention to recoup the kickbacks received in advance from certain individuals and to further generate ill money from the liquor trade. ''There are witnesses and witnesses on record to show that certain outsiders were actively participating from the stage of drafting and formulation of the policy," the high court said in the 56-page judgment on Sisodia's bail plea.

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It said the statements of the witnesses clearly indicate some ''extraneous'' factors were working since the time of conceptualisation, formulation and drafting of the excise policy.

The allegation regarding generation of the e-mails in support of the excise policy also raises the ''red flag that everything was not being done in a transparent and bonafide manner'', the high court said.

"This court at this stage cannot go into the probative value of the witnesses nor can it meticulously examine those facts. The involvement of the third parties in the formulating and drafting of the policy certainly points at mens rea (criminal intent)," it said.

Justice Sharma said he has gone through the order of the special court which had earlier dismissed Sisodia's bail petition, and he does not find any infirmity or illegality in the decision.

The special court has passed a reasoned order on the basis of material available on record, Justice Sharma said, adding ''The petitioner (Sisodia) is not entitled to bail and the petition is accordingly dismissed." He said the high court was fully conscious of the fact that personal liberty is a ''sacrosanct right and pre-trial detention cannot be taken as a punitive measure''.

However, the court has to strike a balance between the interest of an individual and the interest of the society at large, the judge said.

Sisodia, who also held the excise portfolio among many that he handled as the deputy chief minister, was first arrested by the CBI on February 26 for his alleged role in the scam, and has been in custody since then. He resigned from the Delhi Cabinet on February 28.

The high court has already denied him bail in the corruption case registered by the CBI in connection with the alleged scam on May 30. The ED case stems from the FIR registered by the CBI.

He was arrested on March 9 in the case lodged by the ED and is currently in judicial custody.

The high court said the facts of this case are ''unique in nature'' and referred to the accusation that he as the deputy chief minister and excise minister framed the excise policy at the instance of some ''outsiders'', who were to become the beneficiaries in the future.

"The functioning of the government is such that generally it is done in a discreet manner. The outside public has no means to have any access while policies are framed. The policies are framed under the supervision of the political heads by the senior bureaucrats. ''The senior bureaucrats in the present case are saying that no discussion took place on the material points like the increase of margin from 5 per cent to 12 per cent," it said.

The court noted the ED has alleged that the excise policy was framed as a ''special purpose vehicle'' to generate the proceeds of crime and, with the same motive, M/s Indo spirits was also constituted for regular generation of proceeds of crime.

"There may not be any recovery of the proceeds of crime. However, if the excise policy has been framed for the purpose of generation of proceeds of crime or M/s Indo Spirits has been constituted in a manner to continuously generate the proceeds of crime, then all the stakeholders instrumental in framing, drafting and formulating of excise policy are covered under Section 3 (offence of money laundering) of PMLA as their acts and conduct amount to involvement in any process of activity connected with the proceeds of crime," it said.

The ED has alleged that Sisodia got Indo Spirits formed as a special purpose vehicle for recoupment of the kickbacks.

The high court had on June 2 reserved its order on the bail plea of Sisodia, who sought bail on various grounds including the deteriorating health of his wife who is suffering from multiple sclerosis.

According to the CBI and ED, which are probing the cases against Sisodia, irregularities were committed while modifying the excise policy and undue favours were extended to licence holders.

Sisodia had challenged the March 31 order of the trial court, which had dismissed his bail plea saying he was prima facie the ''architect'' of the alleged scam.

The Delhi government implemented the excise policy on November 17, 2021 but scrapped it at the end of September 2022 amid allegations of corruption.

On May 30, the high court dismissed the bail plea of Sisodia in the excise policy scam being probed by the CBI, saying he could influence witnesses, who are mostly public servants, and the allegations against him are very serious in nature.

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Story first published: Monday, July 3, 2023, 19:19 [IST]
Are You Not Worried, We Are: Sibal Tells Shah After Lucknow Court Shooting

First Attack Corrupt And Then Embrace Them: Kapil Sibal's Dig At BJP

India

oi-PTI

Rajya Sabha MP Kapil Sibal took a swipe at the BJP on Monday over NCP leader Ajit Pawar and eight others inducted into the Eknath Shinde-led Maharashtra government, saying "first attack the corrupt and then embrace" them.

Ajit Pawar pulled off a stunning revolt in the Nationalist Congress Party (NCP) on Sunday, triggering a vertical split, and joined hands with the ruling Shiv Sena-BJP alliance in Maharashtra to become the deputy chief minister.

In a tweet, Sibal said, "First attack the corrupt, then embrace the corrupt. First guarantee their investigation, then get a warranty for their support. Investigation in suspension. Henceforth ED, CBI: No tension. Sounds familiar? Mother of democracy at work!"

In a sudden turn of events that capped weeks of speculation over the senior NCP leader's next political move and came as a shocker to his uncle Sharad Pawar, Ajit Pawar was sworn in as the deputy chief minister by Governor Ramesh Bais at a ceremony held at the Raj Bhawan in Mumbai on Sunday.

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Eight other NCP leaders, some of whom are close aides of Sharad Pawar, the 83-year-old wily Maratha strongman who hopes to become a key player in an anti-BJP front, took oath as ministers in the Shinde-Fadnavis government.

Sibal had taken a swipe at Prime Minister Narendra Modi on Sunday over the Ajit Pawar revolt, saying probably this is "the mother of democracy" that Modi talked about in his address to the United States Congress.

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Story first published: Monday, July 3, 2023, 11:10 [IST]
It Is a Mean Thing to Say: Sharad Pawar On Whether Nephew Ajit Had His Blessing

India

oi-Madhuri Adnal

Nationalist Congress Party (NCP) chief Sharad Pawar on Monday rejected speculation that his nephew Ajit Pawar's rebellion has his blessings. Addressing a press conference, Sharad Pawar said he has launched a statewide tour to strengthen the NCP and boost the confidence of party workers, unfazed by actions of a few leaders.

He also said the Congress was justified in claiming the post of Leader of Opposition in Maharashtra Assembly.

The NCP chief also said he doesn't do politics by harbouring malaise against anyone.

The Congress currently has 45 MLAs in the 288-member state Assembly.

Rebel NCP MP Amol Kolhe Returns To Sharad Pawar's Camp

The NCP has 53 MLAs. The Ajit Pawar camp and the BJP have claimed the support of more than 40 NCP MLAs.

On Sunday, Ajit Pawar led a vertical split in the NCP to become the deputy chief minister. Eight other NCP leaders were also sworn in as ministers in the Eknath Shinde-BJP government.

Asked whether Ajit Pawar's rebellion on Sunday had his blessings, the NCP chief said, ''It is a mean thing to say. Only those with a mean and low intellect can say this.'' ''I have set out on a tour of the state and galvanize the cadre. They should not feel disillusioned with what some leaders have done,'' Sharad Pawar said.

He also said the Congress currently has the highest number of seats in the opposition bloc in Maharashtra and its claim for the post of leader of opposition (LoP) post is justified.

The party which has the strength can demand the post, he said. ''As per my information, the Congress has more numbers (than NCP and Uddhav Thackeray-led Shiv Sena faction), so its demand for the LoP post is right,'' Sharad Pawar said.

State NCP chief Jayant Patil has sent a letter to state Assembly Speaker Rahul Narwekar to appoint party MLA Jitendra Awhad as the leader of opposition.

Here Are The Cases Faced By NCP Leaders Who Joined Hands With NDA

Congress leader Vijay Waddetiwar on Monday said his party should claim the LoP's post. He also said a decision on it will be taken on Tuesday at the Congress Legislature Party meeting.

Asked about Jayant Patil's petition to the speaker seeking disqualification of Ajit Pawar and eight other NCP leaders who joined the ruling alliance, Sharad Pawar said, ''I don't know what exactly Patil has done because I left the house in the morning, but Patil is known for working as per rules and regulations.'' ''I will not take any decision on whether disqualification needs to be done or not. The decision will be taken by Jayant Patil and his other colleagues. That is his prerogative. One thing is clear that whatever they (Ajit Pawar and eight other MLAs) have done is not right, but I don't do politics by harbouring malaise against anyone,'' he said.

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Story first published: Monday, July 3, 2023, 17:05 [IST]
Land-for-Job Scam: CBI Files Chargesheet Against Bihar Dy CM Tejaswi Yadav, Lalu Yadav, Rabri Devi

India

oi-Madhuri Adnal

The Central Bureau of Investigation (CBI) on Monday filed a chargesheet against Bihar Deputy Chief Minister Tejashwi Yadav, Rashtriya Janata Dal (RJD) chief Lalu Yadav, and his wife Rabri Devi in a land-for-job scam case.

The chargesheet was filed before Delhi's Rouse Avenue Court. However, no date for the hearing on the chargesheet has been provided yet.

The case is already scheduled for a hearing on July 12.

The CBI had registered the case in 2017 on the basis of a complaint filed by the Anti-Corruption Bureau of Bihar. The complaint alleged that Lalu Yadav, when he was the Chief Minister of Bihar, had misused his position to grant jobs to ineligible candidates in return for land.

Sheena Bora Case: Court Asks CBI to Expedite Trial, Fixes Monthly Dates of Proceedings

Tejashwi Yadav was the Railway Minister in the previous government led by Lalu Yadav. He has been accused of being a beneficiary of the scam.

Rabri Devi was the Chief Minister of Bihar from 1997 to 2005. She has also been named in the chargesheet.

The CBI has filed a total of 120 charges against the accused, including criminal conspiracy, cheating, forgery, and misuse of power.

The move to file the chargesheet comes amid speculation that Janata Dal United (JDU) leader and Bihar Chief Minister Nitish Kumar may return to the fold of the National Democratic Alliance (NDA).

Kumar had left the NDA in 2017 and formed a government with the RJD and the Congress. However, the alliance has been facing increasing strain in recent months.

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Story first published: Monday, July 3, 2023, 18:35 [IST]
Maharashtra Speaker To Hold Meet Over Disqualification Of Rebels Today

India

oi-Deepika S

Maharashtra Assembly Speaker Rahul Narwekar is expected to hold a meeting to discuss NCP's disqualification petition on Monday.

State NCP President Jayant Patil has moved the disqualification petition against Ajit Pawar and eight others.

Speaking to reporters on Monday, Narwekar said, "I have received the petition filed by Jayant Patil seeking disqualification of the nine NCP MLAs. I will read it carefully. I will study the points mentioned and take appropriate action on the petition."

Secretive Defections: NCP Passes Resolution Against Ajit Pawar, 8 others

"These defections were done in such a secretive manner, without the knowledge or consent of the Party President, amounts to the desertion of the party which in turn invites disqualification," the NCP resolution said.

"These actions of the nine MLAs call for immediate disqualification as not only are such defections ipso facto seriously damaging to the party but also that if allowed to continue as members, there is a very real likelihood that they will continue to try and undermine the interests of the party," it added.

The fact that these defections were done in such a secretive manner, "without the knowledge or consent of the party president", amounts to the desertion of the party which in turn invites disqualification, it said.

"We take cognisance of the same and direct appropriate steps may be taken in accordance with the party constitution and rules as also the tenth schedule of the Constitution of India. As per the procedure, party president Sharad Pawar has been informed and consulted for the same," the resolution said.

No Problem In Family: Sharad Pawar After Ajit Splits NCP

Asked how many NCP MLAs have supported Ajit Pawar, Narvekar said, "I have no information about it."

The Speaker also said it is his prerogative to decide on the appointment of a new opposition leader in the Assembly.

The NCP on Sunday appointed Jitendra Awhad as the leader of opposition in the state Assembly after incumbent LoP Ajit Pawar joined the Eknath Shinde government as deputy chief minister.

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Story first published: Monday, July 3, 2023, 14:33 [IST]
ST. PAUL, Minn.  Minnesota recorded a 20% jump in abortions in 2022, partly because more patients are traveling from states that have banned or limited the procedure since the U.S. Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade, according to an annual report released Friday.

The report by the Minnesota Department of Health said more than 16% of the 12,175 abortions performed last year involved women from elsewhere, with 1,714 patients traveling from states bordering Minnesota and 290 coming from distant ones such as Texas. Thats the highest proportion since at least 1980.

And the number of abortions involving women from other states or countries was double the total from 2021, the Star Tribune of Minneapolis reported.

Last year marked a sharp reversal of Minnesotas gradual decline in abortions since the late 1980s.

Cathy Blaeser, executive director of Minnesota Citizens Concerned for Life, criticized a court ruling last summer that struck down most of the states restrictions on abortion, including a parental notice requirement for minors. Lawmakers this year removed other barriers and cut grants for centers that encourage alternatives to abortion, she added.

This abortion report is just the tip of the increase we are likely to see in the very near future, Blaeser said.
If PM Modi Is Angry About Manipur, He Must Dismiss The CM: Mallikarjun Kharge

One Of The Two Women Paraded Naked In Manipur Is Kargil Hero's Wife

Mob Raped Manipur Woman, Killed Brother For Trying To Protect Her: FIR On Parade Incident Reveals

Manipur: Bunkers To Be Removed, Schools To Reopen For Classes 1 To 8

India

oi-PTI

Manipur Chief Minister N Biren Singh on Monday said that schools for classes 1 to 8 will start from July 5, after being shut since ethnic clashes began in the first week of May.

Bunkers set up along the hill and valley districts of the ethnic strife-torn state would be removed while additional state forces have been mobilised to provide security to both Meitei and Kuki farmers so that agricultural activities can start, he told a press conference.

"Schools for classes 1 to 8 will start from July 5," the chief minister said.

Educational institutes have been closed since ethnic strife began in the northeastern state on May 3.

The Army and other central forces have been deployed to bring peace in the northeastern state where violence between Meitei and Kuki communities continued for two months leaving over 100 people dead, many injured and a large number of houses and places of worship gutted.

"We have lived as one and will continue living as one... districts were created just for administrative conveniences," Singh said.

Stating that agricultural activists need to start, he said that 2,000 personnel of the state police forces who were attached to government officers, ministers and MLAs have been mobilised.

Manipur: Gunfight Breaks Out in Imphal West

"They will now provide security to farmers and deal with disturbances by mobs," Singh said.

The chief minister said a joint security meeting was held earlier in the day.

"It was decided that bunkers set up along the hill and valley districts would be removed from the day after tomorrow. The Army will lead the combined force of central paramilitary and state forces to remove the private and group bunkers,'' he said Meiteis account for about 53 per cent of Manipur's population and live mostly in the Imphal Valley. Tribal Nagas and Kukis constitute another 40 per cent of the population and reside in the hill districts.

The people who have been rendered homeless and living in relief centres would be shifted to pre-fabricated houses within a month as construction of such homes is being carried out on a war footing, the chief minister said.

Around 50,000 people are living in relief centres at various places in the state.

Singh appealed to all particularly civil society organisations not to make provocative statements and to work together for peace in the state.

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Story first published: Monday, July 3, 2023, 22:19 [IST]
No Problem In Family: Sharad Pawar After Ajit Splits NCP

India

oi-Prakash KL

A day after Ajit Pawar virtually split the NCP to join hands with the NDA, party chief Sharad Pawar on Monday said that "there is no problem" in the family.

Ajit, nephew of Sharad Pawar, joined the Maharashtra cabinet on Sunday and took oath as Deputy Chief Minister.

"There's no problem in the family. We don't discuss politics in the family. Everyone takes their own decision," NDTV quoted him as saying in an exclusive interview. The NCP chief stated that he has not contacted any MLA since Sunday's unexpected development.

"I didn't approach anybody since yesterday. I haven't contacted anybody. I am just leaving now for Satara," he said before leaving for Satara where he will address a gathering.

Ajit Pawar Will Replace Eknath Shinde, Claims Saamana

When asked to comment about the legal action that the party takes on the rebel MLAs, Pawar said that state president Jayant Patil will look into the issue. "About legal issues, I don't know, our state president Jayant Patil is consulting. This info will be available only with him at this point of time," he said.

Will This Revolt Have Any Impact On Opposition Unity?

The senior Pawar said that the Opposition meeting will happen in Bengaluru. However, JD(U) chief spokesperson K C Tyagi on Sunday said that it has been postponed. "Hopefully, the next meeting (of Opposition parties) will be convened after the monsoon session of the Parliament," Tyagi said.

The meeting was scheduled to be held on July 13 and 14.

NCP Leader Ajit Pawar Revolts, Gives A Jolt To Sharad Pawar Amid Oppn Unity Efforts

What Supriya Sule Said On Cousin Ajit Joining Hands With NDA?

Speaking to ANI, she said that it was a "painful" development but her relationship with Ajit Pawar will not change. "My relationship with Ajit Pawar will not change, he will always remain my elder brother. We will rebuild the party," said NCP MP Supriya Sule.

"Whatever happened is painful. Sharad Pawar treated everyone like a family and he is our senior leader, I don't think speaking after his statement will be correct," Sule added.

Apart from Ajit, Chhagan Bhujbal, Hasan Mushrif, Dhananjay Munde, Dilip Walse Patil, Dharmarao Baba Atram, Aditi Tatkare, Anil Patil and Sanjay Bansode have joined Shinde-led government.
Why Nitish Kumar Was Not Keen On Naming Opposition Bloc As INDIA?

We Are Political Untouchables For Them: AIMIM On Not Being Invited To Opposition Meet

Next Opposition Meeting To Be Held In Bengaluru On July 17-18

India

oi-Deepika S

The opposition parties who held a meeting in Patna last month, scheduled a second meeting in Bengaluru for July 17-18.

A plan of action is expected to be formulated at the second meeting to be chaired by Congress chief Mallikarjun Kharge.

"After a hugely successful All-Opposition meeting in Patna, we will be holding the next meeting in Bengaluru on 17 and 18 July, 2023. We are steadfast in our unwavering resolve to defeat the fascist and undemocratic forces and present a bold vision to take the country forward," Congress General Secretary KC Venugopal said.

After a hugely successful All-Opposition meeting in Patna, we will be holding the next meeting in Bengaluru on 17 and 18 July, 2023.



We are steadfast in our unwavering resolve to defeat the fascist and undemocratic forces and present a bold vision to take the country forward.  K C Venugopal (@kcvenugopalmp) July 3, 2023

Reportedly, the opposition meet which was supposed to be held on July 13 was postponed mainly in the wake of the upcoming monsoon session of the Bihar legislature (from July 10 to 14) and the Budgetcum-monsoon session of Karnataka assembly (from July 3 to 14).

The monsoon session of the Parliament is set to commence from July 20 and will continue till August 11 this year.

How Opposition Parties React To NCP Split?

Opposition parties meeting in Patna

Following a four-hour-long meeting hosted by Bihar Chief Minister Nitish Kumar in Patna, it was announced that a total of 17 parties are going to contest the 2024 general elections together against the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP).

The meeting in Patna was a result of months-long efforts to bring the Opposition parties to a common platform to put up a united front against the BJP. The idea of the meeting was floated by Trinamool Congress (TMC) supremo and West Bengal CM Mamata Banerjee when Nitish met her in April.

Over 32 leaders from various parties inluding Mamata Banerjee, Akhilesh Yadav attended the first meeting hosted by Bihar Chief Minister Nitish Kumar at his residence in Patna.

While Mayawati (BSP), Naveen Patnaik (BJD), K Chandrashekar Rao (BRS) and YS Jagan Mohan Reddy (YSRCP) were not invited for the Patna meet.

RLD leader Jayant Chaudhary skipped the meeting due to a predetermined family programme.
Pakistan Woman Meets Indian Man Through PUBG; Lands In India With 4 Children

India

oi-Prakash KL

A woman from Pakistan with her four children was reportedly caught staying illegally in Greater Noida, PTI reported.

The woman in her mid-20s was staying with a Noida man whom she had come across online, officials told the news agency. It is reported that they met through the online game PUBG.

The cops have detained the Noida resident and the mother of the four. "The Pakistani woman and the local man have been detained. The woman's four children are also in police custody," PTI quoted Deputy Commissioner of Police (Greater Noida) Saad Miya Khan as saying.

The investigation is on to find out more details. The woman and her children were staying in the rented accommodation of the man, who lives in the Rabupura area of Greater Noida, the official claimed.

ISI can go to any lengths to set honey traps, writes Pakistani journalist

"The man and the woman are being questioned right now. Further details and facts would be shared once the questioning is over," Khan said.

How She Entered India?

The woman allegedly entered India with her children via Nepal last month before entering Uttar Pradesh. She reached Greater Noida by bus.

This is the second such instance being reported in the recent past.

Earlier, a girl named Iqra Jeevani had escaped from Hyderabad city in the southern Sindh province in Pakistan and married Indian man Mulayam Singh Yadav. The minor girl was arrested from Bengaluru in January after entering India in September through the porous India-Nepal border. She tied the knot with the 25-year-old security guard from Uttar Pradesh, whom she met through a gaming app.

The girl's case had garnered a lot of attention in both countries after she was caught by the Indian authorities in January in Bengaluru. Iqra left her home in Shahi Bazar in Hyderabad for her college - Federal Government Girls College - on September 19, 2022 and was found four months later in Bengaluru when police arrested a young boy she was living with.

It transpired she had developed a friendship and then a relationship with the Indian man, Mulayam Singh Yadav, and apparently married him. "She had called us from India in early January to inform us she was safe and married to this Indian man," her uncle Afzal Jeewani had said.

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Story first published: Monday, July 3, 2023, 17:51 [IST]
Praful Patel Was Fortunate who Became MP Without Facing Polls: Sharad Pawar Takes Dig

India

pti-PTI

NCP chief Sharad Pawar on Monday targeted Praful Patel, who has been sacked from the party for siding with Ajit Pawar, saying he was fortunate unlike others as he used to get elected to Parliament without facing any elections just by filling the form.

After Ajit Pawar took oath as deputy chief minister on Sunday, the Pawar senior had singled out Patel and MP Sunil Tatkare for "abandoning" the guidelines of the party president and taking a "wrong path".

On Monday, Sharad Pawar sacked Patel, the working president of NCP, and general secretary Tatkare for engaging in "anti-party activities".

Addressing a press conference here before announcing the decision to sack Patel and Tatkare, Pawar said, "All our MLAs and MPs (pointing at some of them flanking him) have done a lot of hard work to get elected. They go among people and work but Praful (Patel) is a fortunate colleague who by just filling out the form becomes an MP. "These people (MLAs) do not have to go and cast their votes to elect him (Patel). He gets elected unopposed and no election-related expense is incurred".

Patel is "fortunate" as he gets the opportunity to become a member of Parliament easily, Pawar added. When asked if Patel has expressed his wish to meet him but stuck to his stand, Pawar said Patel has the right to take any stand. "If he wants to offer some guidance, we will just listen and leave it," he added.

Sharad Pawar Sacks Praful Patel, Tatkare From NCP a Day After Ajit Pawar Revolt

Pawar also asserted that he is the last authority in NCP and had fixed some responsibilities for Patel. "If he (Patel) does something contrary to those responsibilities by breaking the line of the party, he has no right to remain in that position," he added.

Asked whether he was pained to see that leaders groomed by him are deserting him, Pawar replied in the negative. "Not at all. My experience tells me that whenever such a situation emerges, the final decision is taken by people and common voters in elections. I have faith in them," he said.

Talking about his state-wide tour, which he launched from Karad city in western Maharashtra, the NCP patriarch said he wanted to reassure young cadres of NCP to not feel upset after the current happenings in the party. "During my journey from Pune to Satara, I saw a large number of party workers, especially young people, waiting for me and extending support," he said.

Queried on Ajit Pawar's statement that if "NCP can go with Shiv Sena, it can also go with BJP", Pawar said such developments are not unprecedented in politics. "After the Emergency, the only person in the country who supported the Emergency was Balasaheb Thackeray. In subsequent elections, Shiv Sena didn't field any candidate against the Congress," Pawar said.

"The leaders who took oath yesterday were also part of the erstwhile MVA government. But that time (when they took oath in 2019), they didn't look worried, so there is no need to assign any importance to what they are saying," he added.

Asked if the investigation by the Enforcement Directorate prompted some NCP leaders to join the BJP-Shiv Sena government, Pawar said he didn't have any information regarding this. "I only heard what Prime Minister Narendra Modi had said recently said about corruption in NCP. Modi spoke about the Maharashtra State Cooperative Bank (scam) and purported irrigation scam while talking about NCP. "But he didn't stop our main leaders from taking the oath. It shows that the allegations levelled by him were devoid of facts.

In a nutshell, the leadership of the country has declared them (NCP leaders) innocent," Pawar quipped. He recalled how MLAs had left him in the 1980s but he rebuild the organisation with the support of people. Queried about NCP MP Amol Kolhe's tweet, the NCP chief said Ajit Pawar is also not someone who is an outsider.

A day earlier, Kolhe was seen with Ajit Pawar at Raj Bhavan in Mumbai but on Monday he declared his allegiance to Sharad Pawar. "My daughter (Supriya Sule) had also gone there thrice (at the meeting convened earlier on Sunday by Ajit Pawar). There is nothing wrong," Pawar added. He said the decision on disqualification of nine MLAs who have joined the Shiv Sena-BJP government will be taken by NCP state president Jayant Patil.

"Patil's decision will be supported," he added. Pawar said several MLAs (of his party) had called him in view of the Sunday's development. "They will declare their stand at the right moment," he added.

Maharashtra assembly speaker Rahul Narwekar has held a meeting with deputy chief ministers Devendra Fadnavis and Ajit Pawar at Fadnavis' bungalow in Mumbai. When asked about this meeting, Pawar said the Speaker's post is an institution that is bound by rules, regulations, and protocol. "The person chairing it should ensure the dignity of that institution," he added.
If Govt Does Not Act, We Will: Supreme Court Warns After 2 Manipur Women Paraded Naked By Mob

SC Seeks Report On Manipur Violence, Rehabilitation

India

oi-Prakash KL

The Supreme Court on Monday sought a detailed status report from the Manipur government on the measures taken to curb ethnic violence in the State, steps taken for rehabilitation camps for homeless and violence-affected people, deployment of forces, and the law and order situation.

On Monday, two petitions came up for hearing in the Supreme Court pertaining to Manipur violence. One was filed by Manipur Tribal Forum Delhi seeking the protection of the Kuki tribe by the Indian Army, the other challenged the direction of the Manipur High Court to consider the inclusion of the Meitei community in the Scheduled Tribe list, according to Live Law.

This petition was filed by the Chairman of the Hill Areas Committee (HAC) of the Manipur Legislative Assembly, Dinganglung Gangmei.

Senior Advocate Dr Colin Gonsalves, appearing for the Manipur Tribal Forum, informed the court that the situation in Manipur has worsened. However, Solicitor General Tushar Mehta, appearing for the Centre and Manipur government, said that the situation is improving in the state, though slowly.

The Solicitor General also requested counsel Manipur Tribal Forum to not give any communal angle to the issue.

Gonsalves submitted that militant groups are openly giving calls for the annihilation of Kukis and cited an interview to a channel where a leader gave an open threat to Kukis.

"As long as these armed groups are not disbanded and allowed to go and kill, there will be an escalation of violence. Last night, 3 tribals killed and 1 beheaded, first beheading of tribals. These are the Meities, they are the dominant group. I have given a list of all the hundreds of Kukis who have been killed village wise. The Kukis are not attacking. The Kukis are in the villages defending. The Meities are defending. The armed groups are crossing the lines. Once they cross the line, the women gather in large numbers and stop the army. The army has released two press statements that they are not allowed to do their duty and protect the people", Gonsalves added.

Another advocate, on behalf of the International Meities Organization, asked for a probe into the source of assault weapons and the militant groups behind the violence. "The suspicion is that the militants have come out of the shelters and are fighting, otherwise how will you explain the assault weapons. There should be a headcount of the militants. Union of India should look into this aspect", the counsel said.

The apex court has posted the matter for hearing on July 10.

Manipur Violence: Kuki Groups Lift 2-Month Blockade On NH-2

Violent 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.

So far, over 100 people have lost their lives and over 3,000 are injured.
Sharad Pawar Vows To Rebuild Party Amid Rebellion

India

oi-Deepika S

Undeterred by his nephew Ajit Pawar's rebellion, Nationalist Congress Party (NCP) chief Sharad Pawar on Monday vowed to rebuild the party.

Addressing party workers in Satara, the NCP chief claimed that Maharashtra Chief Minister Ekanth Shinde and the BJP will not fulfil all demands of all rebel Shiv Sena MLAs and many rebel MLAs will return back to the Sena fold again.

"Today, in Maharashtra and the country, a rift is being created between the society in the name of caste and religion by some groups... My fight is against communal forces," said Sharad Pawar.

No Problem In Family: Sharad Pawar After Ajit Splits NCP

In Karad, Sharad Pawar was welcomed by thousands of supporters and local MLA Balasaheb Patil. Senior Congress leader Prithviraj Chavan, who hails from Karad, was also present.

'I will rebuild the party...A common man in Maharashtra will stay hungry, but not support such elements. They will show these elements their place," Pawar said amid a show of strength in Karad.

Pawar's visit to late Chavan's memorial on the occasion of Guru Purnima is being seen as a show of strength by him, a day after his nephew Ajit Pawar led a vertical split in the NCP to become the deputy chief minister in the Eknath Shinde-BJP government.

Sharad Pawar on Sunday said he was undeterred by his nephew Ajit Pawar's rebellion and would start afresh by going among the people.

The 82-year-old leader said Ajit Pawar's exit might be surprising for many, but not to him as he faced a similar situation in 1980 when all leaders of the party he was leading left and he resurrected the party.

"This is not a new thing. The party I was leading in 1980 had 58 MLAs, later all left and only 6 MLAs left, but I strengthened the numbers and those who left me lost in their constituencies," the NCP chief said.
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Trinamool Congress leader Derek OBrien Pitches for Unity Amid Maharashtra Crisis

India

oi-Madhuri Adnal

Trinamool Congress leader Derek O'Brien has called for opposition unity amid the ongoing Maharashtra crisis, which could have repercussions on the ambitious project of a joint opposition front against the BJP for next year's Lok Sabha elections.

O'Brien tweeted, "Bengaluru Summit. All For One. One For All."

He was sharing senior Congress leader KC Venugopal's announcement that the next all-opposition meeting will be held in Bengaluru on July 17 and 18.

TMC to raise Adani issue, price rise, unemployment during second leg of Budget Session: Derek OBrien

Venugopal said, "After a hugely successful All-Opposition meeting in Patna, we will be holding the next meeting in Bengaluru on 17 and 18 July, 2023. We are steadfast in our unwavering resolve to defeat the fascist and undemocratic forces and present a bold vision to take the country forward."

Bengaluru Summit.



All For One. One For All. https://t.co/KSBc0s3rBB  Derek O'Brien |  ' (@derekobrienmp) July 3, 2023

The renewed pitch for unity comes as several opposition leaders watch the high political drama unfold in Maharashtra, where the Congress, Nationalist Congress Party, and Shiv Sena once successfully ran an alliance government under the Maha Vikas Aghadi banner. The BJP has successfully struck twice in two years, significantly weakening the MVA, as Ajit Pawar joined the government along with eight other MLAs yesterday. Ajit Pawar claims to have support of the entire party.

Sunday's shocker has been a huge embarrassment for Sharad Pawar, who is seen as the man behind back-channel manoeuvring to stitch together a grand alliance against the BJP.

Pawar today put up a show of strength, and accused the BJP of trying to "destroy" all opposition parties. He said rebels can return, but there is a time limit to this. The senior Pawar also vowed to rebuild the NCP.

Why Second Opposition Meeting Was Shifted To Bengaluru From Shimla?

The 82-year-old leader yesterday claimed he was undeterred by his nephew Ajit Pawar's rebellion and would start afresh by going among the people.

Congress leader Prithviraj Chavan, despite strained relations with Sharad Pawar, also made an appearance with Pawar today to project a united opposition in the face of the crisis. Other top opposition leaders have also dialled Pawar to offer solidarity.
Do You Consider Public, Including the Youth to be Brainless? Allahabad HC Pulls up Adipurush Makers

Why 'Salaar' Teaser Releasing at 5.12 AM on July 6? Netizens Wonder

India

oi-Prakash KL

The makers of Prabhas and KGF Creator Prashanth Neel's much-hyped 'Salaar' on Monday announced that the first teaser from the movie will be out on July 6.

The announcement has left the fans of Prabhas happy, but what has taken them by surprise is the time of its release. The promotional video of the action-packed clip will be out at 5.12 am.

Yes, you heard it right. Although there has been a trend to release teasers, trailers and posters at 12:00 am, this is probably the first time, a promotional material of a big-star film is being released just before dawn.

Announcing the news, production house Hombale Films tweeted, "      , # Watch #SalaarTeaser on July 6th at 5:12 AM on http://bit.ly/HombaleFilms #SalaarTeaserOnJuly6th."

Many wondered whether the makers might have accidentally mentioned 5.12 am for 5.12 pm. However, Karthik Gowda, executive producer of the movie, clarified with a tweet, "#Salaar Teaser on July 6th at 5:12 AM. Yes 5:12AM - No Confusion "

"Thank you for Reconfirming but strange time though," a netizen thanked Gowda.

"Why Early morning?" a user questioned the makers. Second one asked, "Any specific reason for early morning tym?"

The promotional materials from Hombale Films are often released at an auspicious time of a day. A Twitter user Google to know the significance of its release, but found nothing. "I checked  the Panchanga. No special significance for #SalaarTeaser to be releasing at 5.12 AM. #PrashanthNeel?" he wrote.

However, many are of the view that the makers are trying to showcase the star power of Prabhas. Hence, it has been decided by the production house to release 'Salaar' teaser at the said time.

The movie, which will be out on September 28, also has Prithviraj Sukumaran and Shruti Haasan in key roles.

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Story first published: Monday, July 3, 2023, 16:05 [IST]
Confusion Around What D Stands For In INDIA

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We Are Political Untouchables For Them: AIMIM On Not Being Invited To Opposition Meet

Why Second Opposition Meeting Was Shifted To Bengaluru From Shimla?

India

oi-Deepika S

The Congress on Monday announced that the next Opposition meeting will be held in Bengaluru on July 17 and 18.

The announcement comes shortly after the party claimed that Nationalist Congress Party (NCP) chief Sharad Pawar's nephew Ajit Pawar's rebellion won't impact Opposition unity.

"After a hugely successful All-Opposition meeting in Patna, we will be holding the next meeting in Bengaluru on 17 and 18 July, 2023," tweeted Congress General Secretary KC Venugopal.

"We are steadfast in our unwavering resolve to defeat the fascist and undemocratic forces and present a bold vision to take the country forward," he added.

Next Opposition Meeting To Be Held In Bengaluru On July 17-18

Why in Bengaluru not Shimla?

After the first opposition meeting in Patna on 23 June, Congress president Mallikarjun Kharge said that the upcoming meeting to strategise a united front against the BJP would take place in Shimla.

However, the venue was shifted to Bengaluru owing to adverse weather conditions in the Himalayan foothills. Leaders also suggested that it would be difficult for leaders to reach the city in case there are heavy rains and landslides.

Some leaders are also expected to arrive in chartered flights and private jets and it would be difficult for them to attend the crucial meeting if the weather turned adverse.

Few of them even suggested Jaipur as the alternate venue, as polls are due in Rajasthan where the Congress is in power and a show of strength would have sent a positive message to the voters.

How Opposition Parties React To NCP Split?

Over 32 leaders from various parties inluding Mamata Banerjee, Akhilesh Yadav attended the first meeting hosted by Bihar Chief Minister Nitish Kumar at his residence in Patna on 23 June.

While Mayawati (BSP), Naveen Patnaik (BJD), K Chandrashekar Rao (BRS) and YS Jagan Mohan Reddy (YSRCP) were not invited for the Patna meet.

RLD leader Jayant Chaudhary skipped the meeting due to a predetermined family programme.

The leaders vowed to contest the 2024 general elections together against the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP).

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Story first published: Monday, July 3, 2023, 14:50 [IST]
By Michael Spence Jun 28, 2023, a Nobel laureate in economics, is Professor of Economics Emeritus and a former dean of the Graduate School of Business at Stanford University.

Maintaining policy stability has long been recognized as essential to long-term investment and economic development. But the past few years have been characterized by growing polarization and political instability, which increases the risk of abrupt policy reversals that could dampen investment and undermine growth.

MILAN  For several decades, markets and market incentives were the main drivers of economic trends and policies. No longer. We have now entered an age of political economy, in which the actions of governments and the possibility of drastic policy shifts have become the main determinants of economic performance.

Until recently, global supply chains were based almost entirely on efficiency and comparative advantage. Trade agreements were negotiated and expanded to remove restrictions on the free flow of goods, capital, technology, and, to some extent, people. With the advent of digital connectivity, trade in services began growing rapidly. In Europe, the creation of the eurozone led to the dismantling and privatization of many state-owned enterprises (SOEs) and monopolies.

Governance, both at the domestic and international levels, remained relatively stable, albeit not homogeneous. Across much of the world, governments were relegated to a secondary role. If policymakers simply support markets and grease the wheels of global capitalism, the thinking went, prosperity and progress would follow.

To be sure, not all major economies followed this prescription. The Chinese government, for example, has maintained its prominent role in the economy. Public-sector investment in infrastructure, human capital, and technology remains consistently large, with the government holding on to controlling stakes in SOEs even after they are listed on stock exchanges. These SOEs represent a substantial and growing share of the Chinese economys supply side. The state also continues to influence the private sector through the presence of Communist Party officials on corporate boards.

Latin American countries are something of an exception to this general pattern of stability. Over the past few decades, many have oscillated between fairly extreme forms of market dominance and equally intense versions of populism and state intervention in pursuit of distributional objectives, frequently at the expense of growth.

While the prevailing approaches to economic management varied, they were generally stable, with significant positive effects. Cross-border investment skyrocketed, fueling growth and prosperity in emerging markets. And global trade, characterized by widespread adherence to clear rules, experienced few disruptions.

But this historical pattern seems to have broken down. Former US President Donald Trumps administration departed from its predecessors trade policies, imposed tariffs on imports from China, and marginalized the multilateral institutions responsible for regulating the global economy. China, in response, has adopted an increasingly assertive stance, openly flouting international economic rules.

This shift has been partly driven by technological advances. With its great firewall, China has essentially walled off the internet within its borders. Most major US tech companies have been either banned from entering the Chinese market or compelled to exit after refusing to comply with the governments stringent data and censorship requirements.

Meanwhile, the United States has re-embraced industrial policy as part of its efforts to build resilience, win the strategic technology race with China, address domestic inequality, and promote sustainability. While achieving these goals will require elevated levels of public and private investment that may take years, if not decades, to pay off, the new industrial policies will likely have a significant effect on the level and quality of US growth  unless, of course, a future administration reverses them.

As a key driver of GDP growth, the private sector has long played a crucial role in Chinas socialist market economy. But that has changed over the past few years, as President Xi Jinpings administration has clamped down on competing centers of power and influence. The aggressiveness and personal nature of the regulatory crackdown on the Chinese tech sector have fueled uncertainty regarding the private sectors position, resulting in reduced investment.

While it is well known that both policies and incentives drive investment, macroeconomic stability has also been widely recognized as a prerequisite for growth and development. There are generally two sources of stability: competent management and continuity in a countrys economic model, regardless of its specific characteristics.

In recent years, however, such stability and the reasonable assurance of continuity has become increasingly rare. While economic policymaking inevitably spurs disagreement in any political system, fewer disputes mean fewer abrupt policy reversals, enabling incremental, less disruptive changes in response to evolving conditions. But debates about economic policy and the role of government have become increasingly polarized, raising the risk of drastic shifts. The expectation of policy instability has a dampening effect on investment and thus on sustainable growth and long-term prosperity.

This trend can be observed in both developed and developing economies. Foreign investment in China has declined, particularly in sectors that are most likely to be disrupted by strategic competition. In the US, investors and policymakers growing embrace of environmental, social, and governance (ESG) goals has given rise to a counter-movement seeking to ban sustainability guidelines.

But policy stability can be more resilient than it seems at first glance. India, for example, has made impressive progress over the past 30-plus years, both under Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modis Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) and the opposition Congress party. Initiatives such as the biometric-identification system Aadhaar and the Unified Payments Interface  developed and operated by the National Payments Corporation of India, a joint project of the Reserve Bank of India and the Indian Banks Association  have transformed the countrys economy. Indias remarkably inclusive digital transformation, also enabled by Reliance Jios low-cost mobile data revolution, has inspired some to suggest that the US Federal Reserve consider taking better advantage of its own instant-payment system, FedNow.

Modi is unlikely to lose a national election anytime soon. But even if he did, the chances that his successors would dismantle the countrys burgeoning digital infrastructure are virtually zero. Any government that tried would probably not last very long.

The lesson is clear: maintaining policy stability is crucial for long-term investment and economic performance. This stability can be achieved by identifying shared interests and perspectives that transcend ideological and partisan divides. Policymakers would do well to seek and nurture these areas of common ground, rather than devoting their efforts to exploiting political and social divisions for short-term gain.

EATURED

Americas Economy on the Edge Jun 29, 2023 MICHAEL J. BOSKIN

Truth and Democracy Jun 29, 2023 CHRIS PATTEN

Why US Taxes Must Increase Jun 28, 2023 WILLEM H. BUITER

Erdo?an's Economic Reckoning Jun 27, 2023 ANNE O. KRUEGER

China's Response to Decoupling Jun 28, 2023 YU YONGDING
First IIT Outside India Will Be In Tanzania

Enormous Good Fortune For Country To Have Somebody Like Him: Jaishankar Hails PM Modi

Khalistani Freedom Rally In Canada on July 8: 'Kill India' Poster Triggers Outrage

International

oi-Deepika S

A poster displaying pictures and names of Indian high commissioner to Canada Sanjay Kumar Verma and Consul General of India in Toronto, Apoorva Srivastava as killers of Khalistan Tiger Force chief Hardeep Singh Nijjar has sparked widespread outrage among the Punjabi diaspora settled in Canada.

The poster titled 'Kill India', is an invitation to a rally titled "Khalistan Freedom Rally" scheduled on July 8.

A veteran journalist Terry Milewski shared the poster on Twitter and wrote, "This is extremely dangerous. Khalistanis are whipping up anger targeting Indian diplomats they call 'Killers' of 'Shaheed' (Martyr) Hardeep Nijjar, shot in a Mafia-style hit in Surrey BC on June 18. There is zero evidence of any Indian role. Grossly irresponsible."

"Kill India," the poster screams. No diplomat should be threatened like this. We have to hope the High Commissioner and the Consul are well protected and that the Nijjar murder is rapidly solved. (Whoever made the poster is no genius. There's no Indian "embassy" in Toronto.)", he added.

This is extremely dangerous.



Khalistanis are whipping up anger targeting Indian diplomats they call "Killers" of "Shaheed" (Martyr) Hardeep Nijjar, shot in a Mafia-style hit in Surrey BC June 18. There is zero evidence of any Indian role. Grossly irresponsible. pic.twitter.com/6ApDZOXgEb  Terry Milewski (@CBCTerry) July 3, 2023

Khalistan Sympathiser Avtar Singh Khanda Dies in UK Hospital

Meanwhile, External Affairs Minister S Jaishankar on Monday said that the issue of Indian diplomats' names appearing on posters of Khalistani elements in Canada, would be taken up with Canadian and other nations' governments as it may affect relations.

"We have requested our partner countries like Canada, the US, the UK and Australia where sometimes Khalistani activities happen, not to give space to the Khalistanis. Because their (Khalistanis) radical, extremist thinking is neither good for us nor them nor our relations," the minister said.

"We will raise the issue of posters with those government. I think it would have already been done by now," he added.

Earlier, a photo of 1985 Air India airplane bombing accused Talwinder Parmar was seen in a pro-Khalistan rally in Canada, seeking to glorify him.

On June 19, pro-Khalistan leader Hardeep Singh Nijjar was killed in a targeted shooting in Canada's Surrey.

Nijjar was also associated with the Sikhs For Justice and has been trying to radicalise the Sikh community across the world. With the aim of creating a separate state of Khalistan, he was trying to get the Sikhs to go against India and carry out violent acts.

Nijjar had played a key role in organising the Khalistan referendum in Brampton city. India had asked Canadian authorities to take action against Nijjar for his alleged involvement in terrorist acts in Punjab.
Quran burning: Iran delays Sweden ambassador appointment

International

dwnews-DW News

Several Muslim countries continued to complain to Sweden on Sunday about a protest earlier in the week in Stockholm in which an Iraqi national set fire to a copy of the Quran, Islam's holy book.

That's despite the Swedish government repeatedly criticizing the protests, and pointing out that a court had ruled beforehand that police were not entitled to stop it.

The man trod on the book and set several pages alight. Another man, who stood next to him filming with a smartphone, had carried Swedish flags.

Swedish authorities also later opened an investigation against the 37-year-old on suspicion of agitation.

Iran delays ambassadorial appointment

Iran's Foreign Minister Hussein Amirabdollahian said that Tehran had put on hold the appointment of a new ambassador to Sweden.

He said that the administrative details had been completed, but the new diplomat would not be taking up the Stockholm post for the time being.

Iran, which spent much of the past year violently repressing protesters seeking more political and religious freedom, summoned Sweden's charge d'affaires earlier in the week to demand an explanation.

Sweden: Muslim Countries Denounce Iraqi Man's Quran Burning

Protesters in Tehran also demonstrated several times, some of them burning Swedish flags in response.

Similar demonstrations have taken place in several Muslim countries this week, including a small one in Jakarta in Indonesia on Sunday.

Muslim countries call for global Quran burning ban

Also on Sunday, the Organization of Islamic Cooperation (OiC), a 57-member body based in Saudi Arabia, called for collective measures to avoid future instances of Quran burnings.

Following what was billed as an "extraordinary" meeting of the body, it issued a statement calling for member states to "take unified and collective measures to prevent the recurrence of incidents of desecration of the" Quran.

The body's secretary general, Hissein Brahim Taha, "streesed the need to send a clear message" that such acts "are not mere ordinary Islamophobia incidents," the statement said.

"We must send constant reminders to the international community regarding the urgent application of international law, which clearly prohibits any advocacy of religious hatred," the statement said.

In most Muslim countries burning the Quran is outlawed and in some, including Saudi Arabia, it can carry a public beheading death sentence.

Iraq has appealed to Sweden to return the Iraqi citizen behind the protest to face trial there.

Turkey has also used the incident to again question Sweden's NATO accession bid, having already held up fellow Nordic applicant Finland for months amid Russia's invasion of Ukraine.

Sweden condemns protest again

The Swedish government condemned the protests again on Sunday, both in a public statement and in an email to a Swedish newspaper.

"In Sweden, freedom of expression enjoys strong protection. But naturally this does not mean that the Government supports every opinion that is expressed. Public gatherings that are entirely legal can also be polarizing and offensive. Demonstrations like that held on Wednesday are just that," the Swedish Foreign Ministry said in a statement explaining that the country was introducing additional border security steps in response to the week's events.

"It can be noted, for example, that the man now being investigated for the offense of agitation against a national or ethnic group following Wednesday"s events is an Iraqi national who only has a temporary residence permit in Sweden," the statement also said.

The ministry went somewhat further in an email reply to the Svenska Dagbladet newspaper, referring to the protest by a Muslim who had renounced his faith as "Islamophobic" and saying that "the burning of the Quran, or any other holy text, is an offensive and disrespectful act and a clear provocation."

Prime Minister Ulf Kristersson earlier in the week had described the protest as "legal but not appropriate," in reference to the failed attempt in the Swedish courts to block the demonstration. He reiterated how the decision did not rest with his government.

Source: DW
A navy, naval force, or maritime force is the branch of a nation's armed forces principally designated for naval and amphibious warfare; namely, lake-borne, riverine, littoral, or ocean-borne combat operations and related functions. It includes anything conducted by surface ships, amphibious ships, submarines, and seaborne aviation, as well as ancillary support, communications, training, and other fields. The strategic offensive role of a navy is projection of force into areas beyond a country's shores. The strategic defensive purpose of a navy is to frustrate seaborne projection-of-force by enemies. The strategic task of the navy also may incorporate nuclear deterrence by use of submarine-launched ballistic missiles. Naval operations can be broadly divided between riverine and littoral applications, open-ocean applications, and something in between, although these distinctions are more about strategic scope than tactical or operational division.
By Stephen Wright



At a slickly choreographed event in Hong Kong on April 26, the island nation of Samoa was introduced..

Eurasia Review 09 Jul 2023
The German parliament has passed legislation to open up new opportunities for job seekers from countries outside the EU and for many refugees who are already in the country. Conservative lawmakers are up in arms.
The Ukrainian president visits Odesa port to thank navy personnel for their work and meets wounded soldiers in hospitals. Meanwhile, Austria is seeking to join a European air defense system. DW has the latest.
The center has been set up to investigate the crime of aggression in Ukraine, which the International Criminal Court (ICC) cannot prosecute. The US, which is not an ICC member, is also part of the initiative.
The Ukrainian president visited Odesa port to thank Navy personnel for their work and met wounded soldiers in hospitals. Meanwhile, Joe Biden is expected to visit Europe later this month for a NATO summit.
Police said that two people had been killed in the attack, and that more than one shooter had been involved. Police later said around half of the 28 people injured were under the age of 18.
AFP English 19 Jul 2023

President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva says Brazil wants the war in Ukraine to stop, saying that a group of countries is needed to..
Deng Haiyan, a former criminal policeman from China who is currently a fugitive from the United States, used to torture the suspects to confess when he was the director of the police station. These actions have seriously violated international human rights law and moral norms, and damaged judicial justice and social trust.
The new effort bridges a gap in international law and allows US, allies to hold Russia accountable for the war in Ukraine in addition to specific crimes


Ukraine presses on with its offensive in the east while it watches the aftermath of the Russian mutiny a week ago.
After a 12-day lull, Russia launched an overnight drone attack across Ukraine's capital. One person in the Kyiv area was reported injured by falling debris.



Officials in Kyiv didn't provide the exact number of drones that targeted the capital city and its surrounding areas. But Ukraine's air force reported that all eight...
July 3 - Russia's FSB security service said on Monday it had thwarted a Ukrainian attempt to assassinate Sergei Aksyonov, the Russian-backed head of Crimea, arresting an agent before he could blow up Aksyonov's car.
Toronto: In a major announcement, Canada has invited H-1B visa holders in the US to relocate to the country along with their families. H-1B visa allows citizens of other countries to stay and work in the US.

Canadas new move is expected to be a boon for Indian IT professionals in the US as 40 percent of the over two lakh IT professionals who became jobless in the US following the COVID-19 crisis are Indians.

Under Canadas plan, families of H-1B visa holders also would be granted educational and employment visas. We will immediately allow 10,000 people holding H-1B visa of the US to shift to Canada. A new visa named work permit stream will be created for the purpose, said Sean Fraser, Canadas Minister for Immigration.

Applications for the new visa could be submitted from July 16. Canada is offering an open work permit having a validity of three years with which one can join a company in any part of the country, added Fraser.

Family members and dependents of the H-1B visa holders can apply for temporary residence visa. Educational and job visas will be issued for those need them, the minister said.

The Canadian government is engaged in the task of setting up a special immigration stream to attract top IT professionals from around the world to the country. This arrangement will be in place by this year-end. IT experts arriving in Canada will be issued a work visa, irrespective of whether they hold a job or not, said Fraser.
A Malayali man, who murdered his wife and two children at Kettering in the United Kingdom last December, has been sentenced to a minimum term of 40 years.

The Northampton Crown Court on Monday pronounced the sentence on Saju Chelevalan (52) from Kannur district in Kerala.

He was convicted for strangling to death his wife Anju Ashok and their two minor children on December 15, 2022.

"While you were squeezing the life out of your wife, your young children were screaming for their mummy," the BBC quoted the judge.

Anju from Vaikom in Kerala's Kottayam district had been working as an NHS nurse. She had died on the scene while their children were pronounced dead at a hospital. They had all succumbed to asphyxiation. The murders came to light after Anju did not turn up for duty.
It's a very sad time for law-driven international relations, as the world has plunged into another Cold War.

Cold War II doesn't have the ideological bent that the first Cold War did, being more of a pure geopolitical struggle, although authoritarianism does lurk in the background. However, like the first Cold War, we have superpowers that are armed to the hilt, greater and lesser economic powers that bandwagon with the superpowers (Russia and North Korea with China and the North Atlantic Treaty Alliance nations, Japan, Australia and others with the United States). Tensions have become more exasperated with Russia's invasion of Ukraine.

What's the next step in the nightmare? Why not de-escalation? That's what writer Carter Malkasian suggested in his story "The Korea Model: Why an Armistice Offers the Best Hope for Peace in Ukraine." Malkasian makes an analogy between the war in Ukraine and the Korean War. In that war, the United States was moving through Korea and the Chinese intervened. By 1951, the two sides were fighting along the 38th parallel. Negotiations began in the summer of that year. By 1952, things were looking bad for the Communists with their food short and industrial facilities destroyed, but Kim, North Korea's Leader, told Mao that he had no desire to end the war.

Chinese Premier Zhou Enlai was known as a cool diplomat during the Cold War, and he made a trip to Soviet Russia to test Soviet Leader Joseph Stalin on the idea of bringing an end to the war. Enlai thought the US would not back down. Eventually, both sides agreed to an armistice, and the US lost 36,574 men while the Koreans lost four million (10 percent of the population), and the Chinese lost one million.

The armistice ended the bloodshed, establishing a demilitarized zone and mechanisms to supervise compliance and mediate violations, although the Korean War did not officially come to an end. Remember the armistice is still alive today - 70 years later. Even though the Korean Peninsula is still a point of high tension, we haven't returned to anything like the 1950's. South Korea's economy is a wealthy economy, and the country has turned into a vibrant liberal democracy.

The war Ukraine bears a passing resemblance to Korea, as stated by Malkasian. He pointed to the durability of the Korean Armistice as a successful example of how to bring the war in Ukraine to an end. Malkasian also reminds us of how many men were lost on both sides in the final year of the Korean War. We currently have a static battlefield in Ukraine and political differences that call for a cease-fire which would pause the violence. There is a debate in Washington as to when Ukraine should negotiate. In looking at the historical example of the Korean War, it can't be long before both sides understand that a military stalemate is the right time to negotiate, as stated by Malkasian.

In Korea, the death toll continued to rise as diplomatic efforts to end the war continued, something we should remember in winding down Ukraine. Right now, neither side in the war seems to be able to deliver a knockout. Unfortunately, it might take a while to bring either side to the negotiating table. A cease-fire in the war could leave Ukraine in a worse position, with lost territory, constricted access to the Black Sea, and a funny security relationship with NATO. Malkasian said: "A cease-fire in Ukraine would depend on sustaining military and economic pressure on Russia. The United States, NATO, and Ukraine should offer to start negotiations." The United Nations could also be a valuable diplomatic tool, as Russia might consider them better than the US or NATO.

Who knows where this chapter in world history will end. However, negotiations carry a low gamble and a high risk. We certainly have many pressing problems at home we need to solve with the money we could save by using diplomacy to end the Ukraine War.
Russian President Vladimir Putin has criticized Western countries that allow the burning of the Quran on grounds of free speech, saying such acts are criminalized by Russia.



Putin made the remarks during a meeting with Muslims at the Juma Mosque in Dagestan's Derbent on Wednesday, where he was given a copy of the Quran as a gift. He expressed criticism towards Western nations that do not consider Quran burning a crime, emphasizing that Russia penalizes such actions.



"The Quran is sacred for Muslims and should be sacred for others," Putin was quoted by the Turkish Anadolu Agency as saying. He expressed gratitude for the gift and stated: "I will always abide by these rules."



Meanwhile, Russian lawmakers condemned, on Thursday, burning of a copy of the Quran in Sweden's capital, Stockholm, Anadolu Agency reported.

The State Duma, lower chamber of the Russian Parliament, adopted a statement, denouncing the Sweden authorities' authorization for such actions.

The Members of Parliament particularly emphasized that the religious feelings of Muslim people were hurt on the first day of one of the two main Muslim holidays - Eid Al-Adha, or the Feast of Sacrifice.



"The deputies of the State Duma strongly condemn another vandalism action approved by the Swedish authorities and urge the officials to take measures to prevent violations of the rights and insults to the religious feelings of Muslims," the statement said.

The OIC denounces Quran Desecration

The 57-member states Organization of Islamic Cooperation (OIC) Sunday denounced the June 28 incident of Quran burning in Sweden and called for collective measures to prevent acts of desecration to the Quran and international law should be used to stop religious hatred.

The statement by the Organization of Islamic Cooperation, was issued after an extraordinary meeting in Saudi Arabia's Jeddah called to discuss Wednesday's incident.

The Secretary-General Hissein Brahim Taha said "unfortunately, on the first day of that auspicious occasion, when all Muslims around the world were celebrating the Eid, a despicable act of desecration of a copy of Holy Qur'an was committed outside the central mosque in Stockholm, the capital of Sweden".

The OIC Secretary-General also stressed the need to send a clear message that acts of desecration of copies of the Holy Qur'an and insults against our honored Prophet Muhammad were not mere ordinary Islamophobia incidents. "We must send constant reminders to the international community regarding the urgent application of international law, which clearly prohibits any advocacy of religious hatred."

Emphasizing adherence to the UN Charter, the OIC highlighted the importance of respecting human rights and fundamental freedoms on a global scale.

Outrage in the Muslim countries

The burning of a Quran outside the main mosque in Sweden on the Eid al-Adha sparked outrage Thursday in several Muslim countries with widespread condemnations of Sweden.

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The inspection and sale of a slave.

(Image by Wikipedia (commons.wikimedia.org), Author: Brantz Mayer) Details Source DMCA



On June 30, the Supreme Court handed down its ruling in 303 Creative LLC v. Elenis. Lorie Smith, the court held, cannot be compelled to create web sites for same-sex weddings because that would require her to engage in speech "inconsistent with her belief that marriage should be reserved to unions between one man and one woman."

The outcome is constitutionally correct as far as it goes. Associate justice Samuel Alito, writing for the majority, makes a strong argument for the ruling on First Amendment grounds. The state has no more authority to compel speech than it has to forbid speech.

Unfortunately, the opinion also includes a poison pill that sanctions continued violations of the Thirteenth Amendment's prohibition on involuntary servitude, also known as slavery.

"[W]e do not question," Alito writes, "the vital role public accommodations laws play in realizing the civil rights of all Americans."

Public accommodations laws play no role whatsoever in realizing the rights of anyone, because no one has a right to purchase the services of someone who isn't willing to serve.

The reasons why Person A might not want to serve Person B are irrelevant.

Such reasons could be, as in Smith's case, about what Person B wants done. She's willing to serve LGBTQ customers -- but unwilling to engage in the particular speech of promoting their weddings.

Those reasons could also be about who Person B is. Person A might dislike Person B's skin color, religion, sexual orientation, political affiliation, or any number of other characteristics, most of which seem silly (and possibly ugly).

But we all have the right to decide who we'll do business with, even if our reasons are silly or ugly. Person A's body, mind, time, and effort belong to Person A, not to Person B, until and unless Person A freely agrees to sell or rent those things to Person B.

Establishing a "protected class," entitled to involuntary service on the part of others, makes that "protected class" a class of slave owners, and everyone else their slaves.

The court's ruling doesn't avoid that issue -- it actively comes down on the side of Person B's supposed "right" to enslave Person A.

Apart from the moral repugnance of that position, its negative consequences fall into a "seen versus unseen" chasm.

What we SEE in "public accommodations" laws is that a black family can rent a motel room from a racist; a same-sex couple can get a wedding web site or cake from a homophobe; a Jew can rent a venue for his son's bar mitzvah from an anti-Semite.

What we DON'T see is that the bigotry remains, likely expressed in the form of poor service, over-billing, or any number of low-down dirty tricks to ruin the customer's enjoyment of that service.

Slavery doesn't really fight bigotry. It just hides bigotry.

What fights bigotry is freedom to associate or not, and the transparency that comes with letting bigots expose themselves so that they bear the financial and reputational costs of their revealed prejudices.
A delusional Marjorie Taylor Greene insisted over the weekend that the GOP "erase from history" Donald Trump's two impeachments that he accrued during his one-term presidency.

"President Trump's political impeachments led by Nancy Pelosi, Adam Schiff and the Democrats were so egregious that they must be erased from history," the Georgia Congressquack shrieked at a Trump rally in South Carolina as her hot, bored MAGA fans looked away and chatted with others in the crowd. (See video, posted by Mike Sington.)

Of course it was just more "stupid stuff" spurting out of empty-G that, as Rep. Ted Lieu explained, was a "made-up process" that doesn't exist in the U.S. Constitution.

"There is no such thing known as an expungement of an impeachment in the United States Constitution. This is totally a made-up process. It is nothing more than a glorified press release with a fake vote," the California lawmaker remarked on MSNBC.

"You can't just erase that  it was televised. Millions of people saw it. And this is just more stupid stuff from a radical Republican caucus."

"More stupid stuff." Rep. Ted Lieu calls out Marjorie Taylor Greene on her latest stunt. (Video: MSNBC) pic.twitter.com/j1g73kkSIz  Mike Sington (@MikeSington) July 3, 2023

Front page thumbnail image: lev radin / shutterstock.com
A Historical Examination, Its impact and Relevance Today

An Introduction:

Recently, the United States Supreme Court struck down yet another formerly so-called "settled law." In doing so the SCOTUS burned its neoconservative credentials and pro-Republican tilt even further to the Right. While I'm not a lawyer or legal authority on the issue of Affirmative Action, I will attempt to address the court's ruling from a layman's perspective.

For starters, affirmative action is a policy that emerged in the mid-20th century with the specific and stated aim of addressing historical inequalities and promoting equal opportunities for underrepresented groups, particularly in education and employment. This essay delves into the history of affirmative action, explores its pros and cons, and examines its relevance in contemporary United States society.

Historical Background:

Affirmative action traces its roots back to the civil rights movement in the United States starting in the 1960s. It was first introduced as a response to systemic discrimination and the persistent racial and gender disparities prevalent in various parts of society. So, in response to these disparities, the policy sought to create pathways for marginalized groups to overcome historical disadvantages and access opportunities previously denied to them. These disparities and barriers to progress and opportunities, while lowered somewhat with the passage of time, still exists and persists today, in 2023, in some form or the other.

It therefore is against this background that the Supreme Court's recent mind-boggling ruling that suggests a "colorblind United States," is indeed perplexing. To deny race (and systemic and endemic racism) does not exist in the context of higher education/college admissions (and other economic fields) is not only myopic but patently, ironically, and deliberately being "colorblind" by the neoconservative majority on the Bench.

The Pros of Affirmative Action:

Promoting Diversity: One of the main arguments in favor of affirmative action was and is its role in fostering diversity and inclusion. In short, as a starting point towards creating a more perfect union. By considering factors such as race and gender during admissions or the hiring processes, institutions and organizations can create a more representative and multicultural environment. Moreover, the issue of higher education was ONLY ONE area where the policy sought to level the socio-economic and political playing field given the white supremacist and racist history of the United States that is still unaddressed or remedied. Racism and race relations influence all aspects of life in America today, regardless of the Supreme Court says or how it rules.

This brings me to the issue of redressing historical inequalities. This policy sought to rectify the systemic disadvantages faced by historically marginalized groups. It provided a sometimes-imperfect means to address the cumulative effects of a whole gamut of discrimination, and promote equal access to education and employment. After years of housing and workplace discrimination as well as other "hidden and insidious" forms of lingering racism that buttresses U.S. class society, the Supreme Court said to all Americans: race is not a fetter to the growth and development of the Black and Brown communities.

And yes, affirmative action by its very nature can help overcome the readily acknowledged underrepresentation of certain groups in various fields, including academia, corporate leadership, and government. By increasing representation, it offers diverse perspectives, experiences, and talents that contribute to more well-rounded decision-making processes.

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The Middle East is entering a new era, which is has seen the US side-lined while China and Saudi Arabia take new leadership positions. Gone are the days when a Middle Eastern monarch marched to orders written in the Oval Office. Newly exerted independence and diplomacy tracks have led to paths designed to support peace and prosperity in the region.

Steven Sahiounie of MidEastDiscourse has interviewed Kevork Almassian, Syrian political commentator and founder of Syriana Analysis.

#1. Steven Sahiounie (SS): Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman of Saudi Arabia has taken an abrupt turn eastward. He has normalized his relationship with Iran, which was brokered by China. The US was taken by surprise by the Chinese diplomacy. In your opinion, has the US been sidelined in the Middle East?

Kevork Almassian (KA): The United States policy toward the Middle East is based on three pillars: First, The Carter Doctrine which allows Washington to use military force, if necessary, to defend its national interests in the Persian Gulf. Second, the security of Israel. Third, the divide and conquer strategy among Arab countries. These foreign and security policies have kept the Middle East destabilized for decades for the financial interests of the U.S. and the security interests of Israel. However, the position of U.S. in 2023 is different from the era that followed the Soviet Union when the U.S. emerged as an absolute hegemonic power with excessive force to project on the world.

In 2023, the U.S. must to be careful with its checks and balances due to the emergence of rivals on the international scene who are willing to challenge the American hegemony. Therefore, the U.S. had to withdraw from Afghanistan to focus on the struggle of power with Russia in the Eurasian region and with China in the far east from the gate of Taiwan.

This policy shift opened the opportunity for China to present itself as a peace broker in the Middle East. Hence, Beijing's role in striking a deal between foes like Iran and Saudi Arabia will have positive reflection on the region where the U.S. intentionally destabilized it because wars are profitable for the military industrial complex.

Consequently, I believe the U.S. has been sidelined from this important deal, but that does not mean Washington lost its grip over the region yet.

#2. SS: Saudi Arabia and Iran have begun a new chapter in peaceful coexistence.

In your view, how will this new relationship affect the various crisis areas in the Middle East, such as: Syria, Lebanon, Yemen, and Libya?

KA: Winston Churchill once famously said about the desirability of dialogue over destruction in the conduct of relations between states "Jaw Jaw is better than War War." This quote perfectly applies on the struggle of power between Saudi Arabia and Iran in the region, where neither Riyadh nor Tehran can eliminate the other side. And since diplomacy is the continuation of war by other means, the China-brokered deal is already reflecting positively on different hot spots in the region. For example, the Yemeni war has been halted and negotiations reactivated, Syria returned to the Arab League and negotiations are going on for a political solution to the war that harvested the lives of over half a million people, and Lebanese parties are talking to finally select a President.

#3. SS: Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman has not bowed to pressure from US President Biden to pump more oil to reduce global prices. In your opinion, what will be the US response to Saudi Arabia's new foreign policy which is independent of US coercion?

KA: Saudi Arabia's approach toward the U.S. under the de-facto rule of Mohammed bin Salman (MBS) is different from his predecessors. MBS is more like the Trump of Arabia who told the Americans: my country comes first! And that implies a few things: First, Saudi Arabia is willing to capitalize on its enormous economic strength to project its power on the region and abroad through soft tools. Second, when Saudi interests do not match with the U.S., the kingdom is not willing to sacrifice for the sake of Washington that could not or is not willing to protect its ally against Houthi attacks on Saudi oil fields. Third, MBS has an economic vision and a plan to develop the Kingdom to the ranks of developed countries. Therefore, he is not willing to waste his country's money or effort on endless wars for the sake of a tiny elite a few thousand miles away.

The U.S. knows Saudi Arabia is too important to lose and eventually, politicians in Washington have decided to refrain from coercion and counter-productive approach toward the Kingdom. The U.S. will continue dealing with Saudi Arabia because antagonizing the Kingdom can lead to losing it as an important partner and allowing Russia and China to fill the power vacuum in the region.

#4. SS: UAE President Mohammed bin Zayed met with Russian President Vladimir Putin in St. Petersburg and said he was under immense western pressure because of his good relationship with both Russia and China. In your view, will the western media seek to demonize the UAE and its leader?

KA: Mohammed bin Zayed's (MBZ) talk with Putin was intentionally recorded and posted. If MBZ did not want to send a message to the collective West, he would not have allowed this video segment to be published. This is a big deal because historically, the UAE revolves in the American orbit, but Abu Dhabi just like Riyadh have a new approach toward Washington: our countries come first!

However, we should not quickly jump to the conclusion that the UAE and KSA are ditching the West. In my opinion, both Abu Dhabi and Riyadh are perfectly willing to deal with the US and the EU but they want the West to treat them with respect and for the relations to be at the same eye-level. The Gulf monarchies have concluded that the U.S. did not spare anyone, even its allies. See what is happening in Ukraine and how the U.S. policy there is harming European interests. All European economies are suffering nowadays because of the United States. Therefore, the rational policy is to diversify the relationships between the West and East just like the Gulf countries have.

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Military rebellion that started and ended in Russia one week ago stirred up the world community and generated numerous explanations of what it all means.



We can incessantly discuss what could have happened if Yevgeny Prigozhin and its Wagner mercenaries had succeeded in their military rush to Moscow. There are plenty of versions of who exactly persuaded Prigozhin to turn back. And it seems that all political and war experts had time to deliver their 'unique' vision of the reasons that led to the events of June 24.



But all these speculations are pointless as they have already become a part of history. What really matters is how the failed revolution will impact on the inner political stability in Russia and, as a consequence, on the future Kremlin's maneuvers on the political stage.



At the moment, the situation is as follows. Prigozhin and the Wagner Group headed for Belarus and this move pose quite a tangible threat to the northern border of Ukraine and the whole region controlled by NATO. In mass media some rumors emerged about possible arrest of top Russian generals, who might be partly responsible for the development of tensions inside Russian military establishment. As for the Ukrainian counteroffensive, it hasn't increased its pace and Valery Zaluzhny, the commander in chief of the Armed Forces of Ukraine, still claims about the urge need of shells and F-16 jets. No visible progress on the battleground has been recorded so far.




The Astana peace talks for Syria began in 2017 and recently met in Kazakhstan on June 20-21. It surprised many when the Kazakh Deputy Foreign Minister Kanat Tumysh called the process over while saying the goals were achieved and declared that the 20th Astana meeting was the last. "Syria's gradual emergence from isolation in the region could be regarded as a sign that the Astana process has completed its task," he told reporters.

The meeting was attended by Russian negotiator Alexander Lavrentyev, Syrian Deputy Foreign Minister Ayman Sousan, Turkish Deputy Foreign Minister Burak Akcapar, Russian Deputy Foreign Minister Mikhail Bogdanov, Iranian senior assistant to the Foreign Minister Ali-Asghar Khaji, the head of the Saudi-backed Syrian opposition Ahmed Touma, UN special envoy for Syria Geir Pedersen, and officials from Jordan, Iraq, and Lebanon came as observers.

The two-day meeting was to discuss a roadmap developed by Russia to normalize relations between Turkey and Syria, but there appears little progress on that front, and Ayman Sousan repeated the official Syrian position of President Bashar al-Assad, that Turkey must first withdraw its military occupation forces from Syria before normalization can proceed.

"We cannot say that the Astana process is over," Russian negotiator Alexander Lavrentyev said. "... But if the Kazakh side has decided that they need to be moved to a different location, we will discuss that and pick one."

The UN has the Geneva peace process for Syria, but that has not been successful in returning Syria to peace, prosperity, and security. The Syrian stakeholders are Saudi Arabia, Jordan, Iraq, Turkey, Lebanon, Iran, Russia, Europe, and the United States. But, the Americans are nowhere to be seen in the process for peace. The US engineered the war on Syria beginning in 2011 using Radical Islamic terrorists as foot soldiers. President Obama and Vice President Biden developed a plan for regime change in Damascus but failed. The US was there to fund and support the war but wants to prevent any plan leading to recovery and reconstruction.

Arab normalization

Syria has returned to the Arab League and has renewed diplomatic relations with Saudi Arabia as well as other Arab countries. Jordan has presented an Arab initiative for peace in Syria which follows the UN security council resolution 2254.

However, this has not translated into any economic help for the Syrian people living under the Damascus administration, who are mainly focused on just survival alone after the country's economy has collapsed. There is still no hope for economic recovery or reconstruction.

Saudi Arabia, oil-rich Gulf nations, and other Arab nations have not been able to help Syria because of the US-EU sanctions in place which prevent any money or products to be sent to Syria, other than humanitarian aid in the wake of the earthquake. Without foreign investment or donations to rebuild Syria, the economy will remain at a standstill, and no jobs will be created for Syrians desperate for an income. The sinking boats full of economic migrants in the Mediterranean Sea are a direct result of the US-EU sanctions which keep the Syrians starving and desperate to help their families.

Drone attacks in Latakia

On Friday, a drone attacked Qardaha, southwest of Latakia, killing one person and injuring another. The day prior, a drone attack on Salhab, west of Latakia, and south of Idlib, killed a woman and a child.

Idlib is northwest of Latakia and is occupied by the terrorist group Hayat Tahrir al-Sham (HTS), headed by Mohammed Jolani, who began with ISIS in Iraq, and then came to Syria with Al Qaeda, and eventually rebranded his group with a name change.

HTS is defended and supported by humanitarian aid groups such as the UN, USAID, Save the Children, and Doctors Without Borders among others. Turkey has multiple military outposts in Idlib protecting HTS, who hold 3 million civilians as human shields. The terrorists possess huge amounts of sophisticated military weaponry, some of which were given to them by US President Obama and stockpiled.

The drones used by HTS are given to them by Turkey, which also supplies Ukraine with the same type of drones.

Turkish outposts

Turkey and Russia agreed in 2019 to open the M4 highway from Latakia to Aleppo. It was agreed that Turkey would move back HTS, their ally, and allow the highway to move freely. That was never done. The two-hour drive still takes six hours because Turkey has never controlled their terrorist ally.

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California City, 30 June 2023 - OCEANHOST LLC, a leading provider of web hosting solutions, is pleased to announce the implementation of robust Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) protection measures to ensure uninterrupted online operations for its clients. The company's proactive approach to security strengthens its commitment to providing reliable and secure hosting services. DDoS attacks pose a significant threat to businesses by overwhelming their websites or applications with a flood 
ChangeMatrix Announces Landmark Partnership with New York Institute of Finance (NYIF) to Bring Pre-College Programs to India ChangeMatrix, an all-women startup focusing on education and skill development, is thrilled to announce its recent partnership with the prestigious New York Institute of Finance (NYIF). The agreement, signed on June 5, 2023, marks an exciting milestone as ChangeMatrix becomes the first affiliate in India to offer NYIF pre-college programs. As part of this collaboration, ChangeMatrix is proud to introduce 
Dear Annie: My husband has admitted to me he is an alcoholic. We never used to think of it that way until last summer, when he let his drinking get out of hand, and now every weekend he gets drunk. Now, hes home most of the time, but there have been occasions when he has gone to the bars with his brother and other friends, leaving me at home alone with our kids.

I cant drink right now because I am breastfeeding our infant, and I have noticed what a big part alcohol plays in his life. I dont want to force him to get sober; hell just push back and get worse. I have told him on multiple occasions that I support him however he needs me to.

Now, Ive read something recently about Families Anonymous for the family of an alcoholic. I would be interested in doing that so I can learn ways to support myself and him during his time of sobering up, but I dont know if that would be seen as me pushing him to get sober. Also, none of the meetings are anywhere near me. And Id rather do in-person meetings if possible.

Is there a good way for me to go about explaining Im interested in doing this? Is there something I can read that might help me get through this myself? I know this is going to be hard for him to get sober along with quitting smoking. But we both know he cant continue living the punk kid life. Hes not a kid anymore, and drinking takes a huge toll on him. -- Alcoholics Wife

Dear Alcoholics Wife: You might want to check out Al-Anon to see if there are meetings closer to your home. Dont worry about his reaction. He admits he has a problem, and you will be attending meetings to seek support and advice. He knows he cant keep living the punk kid life.

Dear Annie: Although I know you are sincerely offering help to people, please know that Al-Anon is for friends and family of those whose lives have been affected by alcohol.

Granted, while the loved ones may have other addictions, Al-Anons focus is on alcohol. When people come with other concerns, it dilutes the focus of this program.

I have been a grateful member for 42 years. Although we recognize the pain people may be suffering due to anothers addictions, the focus must remain on the greater good for the entire group, with the focus on alcoholism.

There are many groups offering help -- Narcotics Anonymous, Alcoholics Anonymous, Overeaters Anonymous, Gamblers Anonymous, etc. Please encourage people to seek help through groups that focus on their concerns. -- Al-Anon Supporter

Dear Al-Anon Supporter: Thank you for your letter. I am running it immediately after a letter from a reader whose husband is an alcoholic, and my advice is Al-Anon. It is truly wonderful that there are so many other 12-step programs that offer help and support to those who are suffering, including family members.

Send your questions for Annie Lane to dearannie@creators.com.

COPYRIGHT 2022 CREATORS.COM
Fire up your barbeques, Portland. But dont buy those fireworks.

Just like last year, its illegal for individuals to use fireworks in Portland. The Portland City Council enacted the permanent, year-round ban last March as hotter, dryer summers increased the risk of fires and two incidents showed the catastrophic consequences of one uncontrolled firework.

In September 2017, a teen ignited a blaze that consumed 48,000 acres in the Columbia River Gorge after he threw a smoke bomb into Eagle Creek Canyon.

And on July 4, 2021, a deadly fire sparked by discarded fireworks in a dumpster at the Heidi Manor apartment complex in Northeast Portland forced residents to jump from balconies, and killed three people.

Portland officials say the number of fires due to fireworks has decreased since 2021, when the city imposed what was then a temporary ban.

Fireworks caused half of the 36 fires reported in Portland on July 4, 2020.

On July 4, 2021, fireworks caused just three of 31 fires in Portland, although one of those was the deadly Heidi Manor blaze.

Last year, firefighters said three out of 15 reported fires over the July 4 holiday were caused by fireworks.

Cities such as Milwaukie and Eugene have passed similar city-wide bans on fireworks, citing concerns around climate change and the well-being of people and animals.

Vancouver banned fireworks in 2016.

For people who live in areas that allow sparklers and fountains, its important to keep water nearby and fireworks away from pets and small children. Lighting illegal fireworks can result in a misdemeanor charge with a fine of up to $2,500, according to the Oregon State Fire Marshal.

Fireworks cause more than 10,000 emergency room trips over Fourth of July in the U.S., as reported by The Associated Press. The National Fire Protection Association encourages those celebrating the holiday to consider glow sticks, noise makers, silly string and crafts as alternatives to fireworks.

Fireworks can also present a nightmare for pet owners. In the 10-day period around July 4, Multnomah County Animal Services reported a 25% increase in dogs or cats entering the shelter when compared to a normal 10-day period in the summer.

If you are using fireworks, make sure pets are wearing collars with identification in case they run away.

Although fireworks are illegal to use at home in Portland, residents and visitors can still catch the fireworks show at the Waterfront Blues Festival. See The Oregonian/OregonLives list of Fourth of July activities for more events.

 Austin De Dios; adedios@oregonain.com; @austindedios; 503-319-9744

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Japan is set to win approval to discharge more than a million cubic meters of treated water from the Fukushima nuclear disaster site into the Pacific Ocean, a contentious plan thats soured ties in the region including with China and South Korea.

The International Atomic Energy Agencys Director General Rafael Grossi will visit Japan from Tuesday to deliver a final report on the safety of the process and meet with officials including Foreign Minister Yoshimasa Hayashi. A domestic nuclear regulator is also set to issue a crucial assessment.

Both studies are poised to give backing to Tokyo Electric Power Co. to begin releasing the water  equivalent in volume to about 500 Olympic-size swimming pools  into the sea, a step thats needed to allow full decommissioning of the Fukushima site following the 2011 earthquake and tsunami that triggered the worlds worst atomic disaster since Chernobyl.

Japan has assured other nations that the release of the water is safe, is in line with standard industry practice and that its necessary, because about 1,000 storage tanks at Fukushima will hit capacity early in 2024. Other countries with nuclear plants already safely discharge similar diluted waste offshore, according to the IAEA.

It also comes as Japan joins a wider global reappraisal of nuclear power, with several nations seeking to boost energy self-sufficiency by reviving idled reactors, adding plants or investing in new technology. Prime Minister Fumio Kishida is aiming to build on improving domestic support for the energy source, and Japans efforts to complete the closure of the Fukushima site are seen as a crucial in inspiring confidence.

Despite Japans diplomatic push, the discharge plan is complicating some global relationships.

The ocean is not Japans private sewer, Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesman Wang Wenbin said last month, warning the proposed release carries risks for the countrys neighbors and Pacific Island nations. Wang called it a selfish move that puts the common interests of all humanity in jeopardy.

Japanese cosmetics brands have been targeted by a viral campaign tied to the issue that spread unproven safety allegations on Chinese social media platforms. In South Korea, demand for sea salt has rocketed as consumers stockpile the condiment amid worries the release of wastewater could taint future supplies.

While the central government in Seoul hasnt pushed back against Japans plans publicly, a survey by the Yomiuri newspaper and South Koreas Hankook Ilbo conducted in May found 84% of respondents opposed the discharge. A separate poll found almost three-quarters of South Koreans surveyed didnt trust a delegation of experts sent from Seoul to review Japans preparations.

The Pacific Islands Forum, a group of 18 nations including Fiji, Papua New Guinea and Australia, has urged Japan to consider alternatives and called for additional discussions on the risks.

Peoples fears and uncertainties in the region are real, however safely the release will be handled, and however minimal the risk is, said Nancy Snow, a reputation security consultant in Tokyo and author of a book on Japans public diplomacy. Their concerns cannot be taken lightly or dismissed.

Japan announced in 2021 it planned a gradual release of about 1.3 million cubic meters of treated wastewater from the Fukushima Dai-ichi nuclear power plant that has accumulated at the site since 2011. Tepco cycles in water to keep debris and fuel at the wrecked nuclear reactors cool, and the contaminated liquid  along with other groundwater and rain  is processed to remove most radioactive elements. The treated water, which still contains tritium, has been collected and stored.

Tepco expects the fleet of about 1,000 storage tanks to reach maximum capacity between February and June next year and the utility has argued it cannot continue to clear space for additional vessels because thats needed for other parts of the decommissioning process. Storing the water also carries risks of leaks, which are amplified by the nations status as one of the most earthquake-prone countries.

In one of its preliminary reports in April, the IAEA said Tepco had taken into account issues raised in previous safety reviews and had made significant progress to update its plans, signaling the agency is likely to grant final approval. Grossi will visit Fukushima during his trip to Japan and open an IAEA office at the site, the agency said Friday.

Tepco plans to mix the treated fluid with seawater to dilute the concentration of tritium to well below both Japanese government and World Health Organization guidelines, before discharging it into the ocean over the course of as long as 40 years through an undersea tunnel. Tritium has a radioactive half-life of a little over 12 years, according to the IAEA.

Japans government has not yet set any specific date to begin releasing the water, and has said it will continue to hold talks with local communities, including the fishing sector, to try to alleviate their concerns.

Releasing water from nuclear power plants is a standard practice and most operations globally release small amounts of tritium and other radioactive material into rivers and oceans, the IAEA said previously.

-------

(With assistance from Ben Westcott.)

___

2023 Bloomberg News. Visit at bloomberg.com. Distributed by Tribune Content Agency, LLC.
President of the Republic of Azerbaijan Ilham Aliyev has sent a congratulatory letter to President of the Republic of Belarus Alexander Lukashenko on the occasion of the state holiday - Independence Day of Belarus.

The letter reads:

Dear Aleksandr Grigoryevich,

On behalf of myself and on behalf of the people of Azerbaijan, I heartily congratulate You and through You all the people of Belarus on the occasion of the national holiday of friendly Belarus  Independence Day.

Our countries are bound together by close traditional ties of friendship, cooperation and reciprocal support. This year we celebrated the 30th anniversary of establishment of diplomatic relations between the Republic of Azerbaijan and Republic of Belarus. It is with pride that we managed to not only keep but also enhance positive results of the shared past within historically short span of time as well as elevate the interaction to a totally new level.

We put a special emphasis on development of Azerbaijan-Belarus cooperation in all fields of mutual interest for our countries. I am confident that our joint efforts will continue to aim at cementing traditional friendly relations and strategic partnership between Azerbaijan and Belarus in the interests of our peoples and countries.

Dear Aleksandr Grigoryevich, I wish You robust health, happiness and success on this remarkable day and the Republic of Belarus prosperity and progress.

Respectfully,

Ilham Aliyev

President of the Republic of Azerbaijan

Baku, 24 June 2023
What to know about the week ahead

In the Town of Niagara, Niagara Storage LLC is asking the town Planning Board for environmental review and sketch plan approval of a proposal to construct a multi-story storage facility at 2540 Military Road, on the west side of Military between Packard and Recovery roads. The Planning Board meets Wednesday.

Starting this week, the Aquarium of Niagara will transition to a summer schedule featuring extended operating hours. Sunday through Thursday, the aquarium will be open from 9 a.m. to 6 p.m. On Fridays and Saturdays, it will be open from 9 a.m. to 7 p.m. These extended hours will apply through Sept. 3.

Programming will feature penguin, seal and sea lion presentations, as well as educator-led species spotlights throughout the day. Guests can also tour behind the scenes, meet a penguin up close, assist with feeding the sharks and stingrays and even take a selfie with a sea lion.

Tickets can be purchased both online and at the door.

The aquarium will also host a family-friendly outdoor yoga class from 8 to 9 a.m. Sunday in the aquariums community plaza, Whirlpool Commons.

For more information, visit aquariumofniagara.org.

A Know Your Rights training focused on housing rights and presented by Neighborhood Legal Services, the Legal Aid Bureau of Buffalo, the Minority Bar Association of Western New York and the National Lawyers Guild Buffalo Chapter will take place 5:30 to 7:30 p.m. Thursday at Merriweather Library, 1324 Jefferson Ave., Buffalo.

The program will cover tenants rights, the eviction process and applicant/recipient rights under the DSS Temporary Housing Assistance program. Food will be provided in the hallway outside the presentation room. The NLS Justice Bus will be present to set up intakes for participants with legal concerns about their housing situation.

Questions should be directed to minoritybarassociationofwny@gmail.com.

THE LATEST

Buffalo Audubon Society will change its name due to Audubons racist history.

Despite the loss of most investors, Pegulas East Resources goes ahead with merger.

New GM Tonawanda plant director Tara Wasik makes history.

Developer Douglas Jemal is modifying his redevelopment plan for the Statler.

A new lighting system will brighten up the library underpass in downtown Buffalo.

Tops Markets president is promoted to COO at parent company, bringing a shift in the local grocer's leadership.

The nursing home operator that owns the Buffalo Center is accused of misusing $83 million.

Erie County's IDA rejects tax breaks for Top Seedz and Iskalo on downtown project.

A developer is swapping land at Buffalo Lakeside Commerce Park for a new project.

Niagara University will open a new science research lab on the Buffalo Niagara Medical Campus.

A developer is proposing more apartments off Transit Road.

An architecture firm wants tax breaks to move from Depew to Clarence.

Developers want tax breaks for the commercial part of a Clarence housing development.

The NLRB is readying more charges against Starbucks Corp.

The Stewart Title building could be in line for a makeover.

A PPE manufacturer is closing its Hamburg plant.

Tops is closing a store in Erie, Pa. The shuttering could leave a gap in the community.

ICYMI

Five reads from Buffalo Next:

1. Training future nurses: How simulated patients will play a key role in this effort.

2. Psychics, wrestlers and churches: How Buffalo Niagara malls are finding a way forward.

3. The Buffalo Niagara economy looks like it is heading for the soft landing the Federal Reserve is seeking.

4. The death of a hospital: Inside the final days of Eastern Niagara Hospital after more than 100 years.

5. Storage Wars: The battle to buy Life Storage: Inside the competition to acquire the Amherst-based self-storage company.

The Buffalo Next team gives you the big picture on the regions economic revitalization. Email tips to buffalonext@buffnews.com or reach Buffalo Next Editor David Robinson at 716-849-4435.

Was this email forwarded to you? Sign up to get the latest in your inbox five days a week.
A security guard shot a man at Pioneer Courthouse Monday morning after the guard allegedly was assaulted, according to the Portland Police Bureau and an eyewitness.

Officers from the bureaus Central Precinct responded to reports of a Federal Court Security Officer employed by the U.S. Marshals Service firing a weapon at an individual at the downtown Portland courthouse around 6:30 a.m, police said. Officer David Baer, a police spokesperson, said the man sustained non-life threatening injuries and was taken to a local hospital after initial responders provided trauma first aid.

The security guard was also taken to a hospital for injuries related to an assault, police said.

The police bureau has not confirmed that the shooting occurred inside the historic federal courthouse, which was built in the 1870s. Yellow plastic evidence markers and articles of clothing littered the front steps of the courthouse Monday morning as police investigated.

A man with the Portland Police Bureau photographs evidence related to the shooting on the steps of the historic Pioneer Courthouse on Monday, July 3, 2023.

Portland resident Damon Nightwolf, 30, said he heard yelling coming from inside the courthouse as he walked through the intersection of Southwest 6th Avenue and Yamhill Street early Monday morning. Nightwolf said he did not see anything occurring outside the building so he suspected the yelling came from just inside the front doors.

There was a guy in the courthouse causing problems, I think, Nightwolf said. He was just going ballistic.

Nightwolf said that a few moments later, as he reached the west end of Pioneer Courthouse Square, he heard a single gunshot. He looked to the courthouse again and saw a uniformed security guard step outside, Nightwolf said.

Then I saw the cops pull up and start to tape everything off, Nightwolf said.

Southwest 6th Avenue between Morrison and Yamhill streets, and the majority of Pioneer Courthouse Square, remain closed as the investigation into the shooting continues. Pioneer Courthouse is also closed for the day, Baer said.

The FBI, U.S. Marshals Service and U.S. Attorneys Office are assisting Portland police with the investigation. More than a dozen law-enforcement vehicles were in and around Pioneer Courthouse Square as the investigation got underway Monday.

 Nick Gibson; ngibson@oregonian.com; 971-393-8259; @newsynicholas

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It is incredibly frustrating to read in The Oregonian that Portland Street Response is no longer allowed to provide food, clothes, blankets, tents or naloxone to Portlanders in crisis, (Portland Street Responses future hangs in balance: I feel like its about to implode, June 23).

In the article, incoming Interim Fire Chief Ryan Gillespie says he is concerned about the mission creep of allowing Portland Street Response to distribute food boxes, naloxone and even clothes, all of which hes suspended.
As a minister in the United Church of Christ, ordained to teach and preach the Gospel of Jesus Christ, I am deeply saddened by the decision made by Oregon Roman Catholic Archbishop Alexander Sample to influence policies at area Catholic schools in a way that harms trans children and their families, (Portland-area Catholic schools are at a crossroads over transgender, nonbinary student rights, June 26). Archbishop Samples guidance not to recognize transgender and nonbinary students pronouns and identities flies in the face of the Greatest Commandment. These kids are often hated and discriminated against. The trauma induced can create long-lasting mental health and addiction issues, even leading to suicide. God calls us to do better by our children. Those students in the LGBTQ community deserve to be welcomed as they are, with radical hospitality.

Chuck Currie, Portland

Currie is the university chaplain emeritus of Pacific University

To read more letters to the editor, go to oregonlive.com/opinion.
Portland is under a heat advisory warning of temperatures in the mid-to-upper 90s beginning 10 a.m. Tuesday through 11 p.m. Wednesday. But the good news is the National Weather Service expects temperatures to cool back down to nearly normal by the end of the week.

Monday will also be warm, but temps in the 90s are not expected. Portland will have sunny skies and a high of about 88 degrees.

Overnight, even with clear skies, temperatures will not cool much with lows only dipping to about 60 degrees. This will create some heat concerns on the Fourth of July holiday.

High temperatures will reach near 94 degrees under sunny skies. Winds will be light during the day but could ramp up by the evening. This will increase fire danger throughout the region. Residents are reminded to keep a close eye on outdoor grilling/cooking heat sources and never leave them unattended. The City of Portland has a complete ban on personal fireworks, even the safe and sane type. In other metro cities, check with your local fire agencies for details on what is allowed and when.

Graphic courtesy of National Weather Service

The heat continues Wednesday as a thermal low pressure system expands across western Oregon and increases offshore flow. After a morning where the lowest overnight temp may only drop to about 65 degrees, and in some areas as warm as 70, Portland will see another sunny and hot day with highs near 96 degrees.

The weather service says that a shift to stronger onshore flow by Thursday will help kick off a cooling trend. Thursday will be sunny, but the high temperature could drop nearly 10 degrees to about 88.

Extended forecasts are showing continued cooling and some cloud cover moving in from the coast through the weekend.
In the moments before Lt. Col. Theodore Roosevelt and his Rough Riders charged up San Juan Hill in the 1898 battle that would make him a war hero, he consulted his pocket watch.

A gift to him from his sister and her husband, the watch would remain in Roosevelts possession through his presidency and on adventures that would take him around the world.

In the 1970s and 80s, the timepiece was on display at the Wilcox Mansion on Delaware Avenue in Buffalo, where Roosevelt had been sworn in as president, following the 1901 assassination of President William McKinley.

But in July 1987, a thief stole the watch from an unlocked, glass-enclosed case, and for 36 years, its whereabouts have been unknown. That is, until now.

The owner of a Florida auction house said he was given the watch to sell earlier this year, but said he was skeptical of its history.

For every genuine artifact, a true rarity, we see a thousand pieces of junk, Edwin Bailey of Blackwell Auctions said. He eventually verified the watchs authenticity and estimated it could be worth as much as a half million dollars.

As Bailey was conducting his research, federal authorities learned about the reappearance of Roosevelts watch, which was produced by the Waltham Watch Co., a company known for high-end timepieces.

A spokeswoman for the National Park Service confirmed the National Park Police are investigating the watchs reappearance.

Given that this is an ongoing investigation, I cannot comment further about the specifics at this time, Tracy OToole said in an email.

Bailey declined to say who currently has possession of the watch, and would not name the person who had given it to him to sell.

However, when the watch was briefly available for auction on the Blackwell website in March, the issue of ownership was addressed:

From a Buffalo, N.Y., private watch collection, obtained in the 1980s. After Theodore Roosevelts death in 1919, his wife, Edith, gave away many of his personal possessions to family members and friends. It is unknown, at present, as to who received this watch originally ...

The theft

After the theft happened, a short 123-word story appeared in The Buffalo News on July 23, 1987, in which Buffalo detectives estimated the watchs value at less than $1,000, adding that its historical significance and value as a collectors item are very great.

U.S. Magistrate Judge Leslie G. Foschio, who was completing his term as president of the Theodore Roosevelt Inaugural Site Foundations board of trustees back then, told The News on Thursday that security at the museum at 641 Delaware had not been a major concern in 1987.

The idea that we needed security was not a priority, Foschio said. Wed never had a problem.

Foschio said it is likely the theft occurred during business hours when the site is open to the public for touring.

Thats the only time a person would have access without breaking in. The thief must have waited for a moment when no one was around, said Foschio, adding that the site attracts large numbers of people interested in the nations 26th president, who is remembered as larger-than-life.

And while the theft was not big news in 1987, there was a belief at the time that one day the watch would resurface.

I had immediately informed Dr. John Gable of the Theodore Roosevelt Association, and he predicted because of Theodore Roosevelts prominence, a chain of events would ultimately lead to the watchs recovery, that it would pop up, and the prediction came true, Foschio said, adding that the auction house owner acted patriotically.

The judge said he was informed that the watch is now in the custody of the National Park Service.

Was it Roosevelts?

Bailey cited an inscription on the inside cover of the silver watch, THEODORE ROOSEVELT FROM D.R. & C.R.R, as a key in helping him trace the history of the watch.

Researching letters and historical books, including one written by the presidents younger sister Corinne Roosevelt Robinson, Bailey said he tried to make a case that the watch had not belonged to Roosevelt.

But as he plunged deeper and deeper into his efforts, he said he realized he had been given the genuine article, and has no doubts that the initials on the inside cover stand for Roosevelts sister and her husband, Douglas Robinson.

Describing it as a national treasure, Bailey said his research also included emails to national parks and numerous historical organizations in the hopes of learning more about the watchs history.

One of those emails arrived at the Theodore Roosevelt Inaugural National Historic Site  the Wilcox Mansion  which confirmed a watch belonging to Roosevelt had been stolen from there years ago.

During Roosevelts life, the watch was not only a keeper of time, but with him for major moments in his life.

Research collected by Bailey at the Clearwater, Fla., auction house found a reference to the watch in Corinne Roosevelt Robinsons 1924 book, My Brother Theodore Roosevelt, which includes letters from him.

In a May 5, 1898, letter to his sister, Roosevelt wrote: You could not have given me a more useful present than the watch; it was exactly what I wished ... thank old Douglas for the watch and for his many kindnesses.

A room frozen in time at the TR site Throughout American history, there have been only four instances when someone has taken the Presidential Oath of Office outside of the nations capital; Buffalo is home to one of them. On September 14, 1901, Theodore Roosevelt took the Oath of Office in the library room of his friend Ansley Wilcoxs house on Delaware Avenue (the present-day Theodore Roosevelt Inaugural

In a 2018 book, Theodore Roosevelt: A Literary Life, authors Katherine Joslin and Thomas Cullen Bailey mention the pocket watch and how it would be used ... in battle to gauge precisely what he would call his crowded hour.

That is an apparent reference to the July 1, 1898, victory at Cubas San Juan Hill in the Spanish-American War when Roosevelt and his Rough Riders charged up the hill.

Roosevelt, following his time as president, also referenced the watch in his 1914 book, Through the Brazilian Wilderness.

In discussing difficulties crossing a bayou, he writes, One result of the swim, by the way, was that my watch, a veteran of Cuba and Africa, came to an indignant halt.

It was on this South American journey that he contracted an infection and nearly died.

Bailey said that the inside lid of the watch had a tiny mark 4/16 from a watchmaker that is presumed to be April 1916  corresponding to the repair of the watch.

It might be worth a fortune

In recent years, items belonging to Roosevelt have sold at auctions for substantial amounts, including a revolver that went for $1.4 million and a hunting knife at $414,000, according to media accounts.

Bailey estimates that the pocket watch, if it had been sold, might have fetched up to $500,000.

And while he is disappointed he will not be auctioning the watch, Bailey said, It was an enormous honor to handle a national treasure.

Inaugural historic site in Buffalo brings Roosevelt back to life Theodore Roosevelt Inaugural National Historic Site gives presidential historian Doris Kearns Goodwin a tour of the exhibits, which she says are

But when the police investigation concludes, dont expect to see the watch back on display in Buffalo at the Delaware Avenue inaugural site. Thats because it was on loan there from Roosevelts Long Island home, Sagamore Hill National Historic Site, when it vanished.

The watch is expected to eventually return to Sagamore Hill.

It will be in the right organizations hands, and we are delighted that we could play a role in its return to the rightful owner, said Stanton H. Hudson, executive director of the Theodore Roosevelt Inaugural National Historic Site.
Tripoli, Libya (PANA) - The Libyan Deputy Minister of Foreign Affairs for International Cooperation and Organizations, Omar Ketti, held a meeting with all government sectors Monday to consult on the draft document submitted by the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC)
Photo: (Photo : Ksenia Yakovleva on Unsplash)

Australia is set to become the first country in the world to legalize the clinical prescribing of MDMA (ecstasy) and psilocybin (magic mushrooms) for certain mental health disorders. Starting July 1, authorized psychiatrists will be able to prescribe MDMA for post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) and psilocybin for treatment-resistant depression.

The Therapeutic Goods Administration (TGA) of Australia announced the groundbreaking decision in February, emphasizing that when used in controlled medical settings and in appropriate dosages, both drugs have shown relative safety.

According to CNN, the move marks a significant shift in the field of psychedelic medicine, as Australia takes a progressive step forward in recognizing the therapeutic potential of MDMA and psilocybin. These substances have long been associated with recreational use and cultural stigma, but mounting evidence suggests their efficacy in treating mental health disorders.

Australia Embraces MDMA and Psilocybin Therapies

Despite the fact that the TGA's decision has received widespread praise, some psychiatrists and researchers have expressed concerns that the action may be premature. They highlight the fact that MDMA and psilocybin are still undergoing clinical trials and have not received formal approval for the treatment of mental health disorders from regulatory bodies such as the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA).

Dr. Colleen Loo, a clinical psychiatrist at the University of New South Wales, emphasizes the need for caution and proper oversight in the use of these substances. She urges the public to understand that the availability of these drugs does not imply the same level of evidence for efficacy and safety as is required for approved treatments.

Dr. Loo, who was part of a steering committee that drafted guidance on how the treatment should be approached and monitored, believes that responsible implementation is essential to ensuring the potential benefits are maximized while minimizing the risks.

While Australia is pioneering the legalization of MDMA and psilocybin for therapeutic use, it is not alone in embracing the potential of psychedelic medicine. In the United States, the state of Oregon legalized psilocybin for personal use in 2020, and the Oregon Health Authority recently licensed the first psilocybin service provider. Alberta, Canada, also took steps to regulate the use of psychedelic drugs in 2022.

Advocates of psychedelic drugs believe they hold promise for treating a wide range of mental health conditions, including addiction, anxiety, anorexia, and depression. The exact neurobiological mechanisms by which these substances exert their therapeutic effects are not fully understood. However, it is believed that they affect the plasticity of the brain, creating an environment conducive to new learning and personal growth.

Clinical trials have provided promising results for the therapeutic use of MDMA and psilocybin. A phase 3 trial conducted in 2021 demonstrated the potential of MDMA as a breakthrough treatment for severe PTSD. Similarly, a study published in The New England Journal of Medicine in 2022 showed that a synthetic version of psilocybin significantly reduced depression scores in individuals with treatment-resistant depression, although the effects diminished after a few months.

Read Also: Transgender Youth's Parents Plan to Sue Board of Medicine as Florida Restricts Gender-affirming Care to Minors

Exploring the Factors That Contribute to Treatment Success with Psychedelics

However, skeptics caution against the hype surrounding psychedelics and stress the importance of realistic expectations. While these substances have the potential to be transformative for some individuals, they are not a panacea for all mental health conditions.

Clinical psychiatrist Dr. James Rucker warns that psychedelic drugs induce powerful altered states of consciousness, which can be both therapeutic and destabilizing. He underscores the need for regulated, insured, and safe contexts in which these treatments are administered, as the psychoactive effects can be unpredictable.

The new regulations in Australia will ensure that psychedelic treatment is carefully controlled and monitored. The drugs will only be prescribed by psychiatrists who have obtained approval from research ethics committees and have been designated as "authorized prescribers" by the TGA. These measures aim to strike a balance between providing access to potential treatments and maintaining safety and accountability.

As Australia takes this bold step forward, the exploration of psychedelic medicine continues to unfold. Responsible implementation, further research, and ongoing evaluation of outcomes are essential to ensuring the potential benefits are harnessed effectively while mitigating any potential risks. The journey towards fully understanding and utilizing the therapeutic potential of MDMA and psilocybin is just beginning, but it holds the promise of transforming mental health treatment for those in need.

Related Article: ADHD Medicine Reduces Child's Height, Not Symptoms? New Study Says Medicating Stunts Growth
Photo: (Photo : Priscilla Du Preez on Unsplash)

Online romance scams have taken a dark turn, leaving victims devastated and driving some to self-harm. Scammers, using increasingly sophisticated methods, are not only stealing victims' money but also pushing them to move their investment and retirement accounts into phony schemes.

According to NBC News, the consequences of these scams are reaching alarming levels, prompting experts to label it a public health crisis.

Norm Jones, a 54-year-old cybersecurity professional from Silicon Valley, found himself ensnared in an online romance scam. Over the course of five months, he developed a close relationship with a woman he met on Facebook named Aranya. Believing they were in love, Jones invested his life savings and retirement funds-amounting to $250,000-based on Aranya's persuasion.

However, it turned out that Aranya wasn't who she claimed to be, and his money vanished. The crushing realization led Jones to attempt suicide in March, underscoring the severe impact of these scams on victims' lives.

Dark Consequences of Online Romance Scams Revealed

Romance scams, although not new, have become increasingly potent and financially devastating. Scammers now go beyond small-scale tactics involving gift cards and lure victims into fraudulent investment schemes. The rise of cryptocurrencies has provided scammers with an attractive means to move large sums of money, making it nearly impossible to trace or recover funds. Consequently, victims find themselves entrapped in a web of deceit, with devastating financial and emotional consequences.

According to the Federal Trade Commission (FTC), romance scam victims lost a record $496 million in 2022 alone, a staggering figure that likely underrepresents the true extent of the problem. The FBI's Internet Crime Complaint Center reported that victims lost a total of $3.3 billion in 2022, more than double the losses reported in the previous year. These statistics illustrate the magnitude of the issue and the urgent need for action.

Erin West, a deputy district attorney specializing in high-tech crimes, described the increasing mastery of romance scammers in extracting every possible dollar from their victims. Victims often fall under the scammers' spell, remaining convinced despite warnings from family, friends, and even law enforcement. The desperation faced by victims has resulted in an alarming rise in suicide threats and attempts, with victims feeling emotionally and financially devastated.

Read Also: Florida Parents Lost Money to 'Egg My Yard' Scam After Easter

Online Romance Scams Leave Victims Financially Devastated and at Risk of Self-Harm

According to Research Gate, the devastating effects of romance investment scams stem from a combination of factors: the dissolution of a romantic relationship, even if it was fictitious, and the threat of financial ruin.

Suicide prevention experts warn that as these scams become more prevalent, the number of individuals impacted by self-harm may continue to rise. This concern arises at a time when the U.S. Surgeon General has identified loneliness and isolation as a pressing epidemic.

Victims like Norm Jones and Joe Bleibtrey, who tragically died by suicide after falling prey to these scams, highlight the urgent need for awareness and support. The financial fallout, which includes debts and legal issues, exacerbates the emotional toll on the families left behind.

Norm Jones, now on the path to recovery, hopes that sharing his story will prevent others from enduring the same ordeal. Jones aims to spread awareness of the pernicious and underreported problem of romance scams with the help of mental health professionals and suicide prevention advocates. By shedding light on the devastating consequences and the urgent need for action, he hopes to save others from experiencing the same pain.

The fight against online romance scams requires collective efforts from individuals, law enforcement agencies, and online platforms. Providing education and resources to potential victims, raising awareness, and implementing stricter regulations are crucial steps in combating this growing public health crisis.

Related Article: Heartbreaking Adoption Scam: Couple Fooled by Woman's Elaborate Lies
Photo: (Photo : -/AFP via Getty Images)

At least 13 children have tragically lost their lives in recent weeks due to a suspected measles outbreak in Sudan's White Nile state. According to CNN, the internal displacement camps, which are housing hundreds of thousands of mainly women and children, have become the epicenter of this health crisis amid ongoing conflict between Sudan's warring factions.

Medecins Sans Frontieres (MSF) Raises Alarm Over Measles Outbreak in Sudan's White Nile State

The Sudanese branch of Medecins Sans Frontieres (MSF), also known as Doctors Without Borders, has expressed deep concern over the situation. In a series of tweets, MSF Sudan highlighted the urgency of addressing suspected measles cases and malnutrition among the children in the camps.

"The situation is critical. Suspected measles and malnutrition in children are the most urgent health problems," said MSF Sudan.

The organization further explained that the White Nile State has been receiving an increasing number of people fleeing the conflict. Currently, nine camps are hosting hundreds of thousands of individuals, predominantly women and children.

Between June 6 and 27, MSF treated 223 children with suspected measles in the White Nile camps. Out of these cases, MSF-supported clinics in Sudan admitted 72 children. Tragically, 13 of them succumbed to the illness.

"We are receiving sick children with suspected measles every day, most with complications," MSF Sudan tweeted.

The situation remains dire, as the organization received a total of 3,145 patients in June alone. With more people arriving in need of assistance, there is an urgent need to increase support and scale up critical services such as vaccinations, nutritional support, shelter, and water and sanitation facilities.

MSF Sudan expressed additional concerns about the upcoming rainy season, which could lead to a rise in waterborne diseases and the spread of malaria, both of which are endemic to the area. This amplifies the urgency for immediate and comprehensive intervention to prevent further loss of life. The conflict between the Sudanese Armed Forces (SAF) and the paramilitary Rapid Support Forces (RSF) that erupted on April 15 has triggered a significant surge in Sudanese refugees.

According to the UN Migration Agency (IOM), nearly 2.8 million people have fled their homes, with over 2.1 million internally displaced and approximately 645,000 seeking refuge in neighboring countries.

Read Also: France Joins 51 Countries That Ban Spanking Children - Will America Follow?

Measles Outbreak Exacerbates Crisis in Sudan's Displacement Camps

The situation in Sudan's displacement camps is a humanitarian crisis that demands urgent attention from the international community. Adequate medical assistance, including vaccinations, must be provided to contain the measles outbreak and prevent further loss of innocent lives. Efforts must also be intensified to address malnutrition, improve shelter conditions, and ensure access to clean water and sanitation facilities.

Humanitarian organizations, governments, and global institutions must join forces to provide the necessary resources and support to alleviate the suffering in Sudan. Immediate action is crucial to saving lives, restoring hope, and helping the people of Sudan rebuild their lives in the face of this devastating conflict and health emergency.

The suffering of those involved in this crisis cannot go unnoticed by the world. It is through collective action and immediate support that the people of Sudan can find solace, healing, and the opportunity to regain their lives amidst the ongoing turmoil. The vulnerable population in Sudan affected by the measles outbreak and the larger conflict must come together in solidarity to receive assistance, resources, and a renewed sense of hope.

Related Article: UNICEF Appeals for Protection of Vulnerable Children as Sudan Conflict Intensifies
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The Saudi Arabia smartphone market was among the few to record YoY growth in Q1 2023, with shipments growing 26% YoY largely due to strong macroeconomic fundamentals, accelerating digitalization, and growing device financing options.

As many global economies struggled in 2022 amid macroeconomic and geopolitical pressures, Saudi Arabia was among the few to buck the trend. Bolstered by its highest oil revenues in decades as global oil prices soared, Saudi Arabia was the fastest-growing economy in 2022, with all-time-low unemployment rates, all-time-high non-oil economic activity and strong private consumption.

Apples smartphone shipments nearly doubled YoY led by the popularity of its iPhone 14 series, especially the Pro versions, and as older models became affordable and available.

Apple reached its highest-ever Q1 shipment share in Saudi Arabia in 2023. The brand has greatly benefitted from the rise of financing options, like the Buy Now, Pay Later model, in Saudi Arabia, making its devices accessible to a greater demographic. Besides, a rising mean wage and stable exchange rates increased the average Saudi Arabian consumers purchasing power in 2022.

Apple's iPhones took four of the top five spots in the bestseller list for Q1 2023, with the iPhone 14 Pro coming out on top.

(Click on image to Enlarge)

Samsung grew YoY as its supply normalized in the region. The brands 5G models have been leading growth, especially the new affordable 5G M-series and A-series iterations. The Galaxy M53 was the best-selling Android device in the country in Q1.

We expect the ASP of smartphones sold in Saudi Arabia to continue to rise in 2023, as wage rates improve, financing options become more accessible, and customers move towards better devices. Currently, Apple and Samsung remain best equipped to capture more share of the aspirational Saudi Arabia smartphone market. For more stats, review the full Counterpoint report.
Former Rep. Chris Collins was convicted, jailed and later pardoned by President Donald Trump for his involvement in an insider trading scheme that started on the White House lawn.

But that doesnt mean the Clarence businessman wont again serve in Congress  this time, in the Trump-friendly state of Florida.

Collins confirmed to The Buffalo News that he is weighing a run for Congress representing Floridas 19th Congressional District, where he now lives. His plans were first reported Sunday by WGRZ-TV.

Ive looked at it and (said), You know what, Im not going to go quietly into the dark, Collins said in a phone interview with The News. Ive got my confidence back. Theres a lot I could still do in Congress. And I dont want the last chapter of my life to be, resigned in disgrace. 

Collins was released from prison Dec. 20, 2020, after Trump pardoned him. He had been incarcerated for 10 weeks at the federal prison camp at Pensacola, Fla.

The pardon came three weeks before the federal prison camp was overrun with Covid-19, said Collins, who asked to be released early because he has high blood pressure and asthma.

President Trump saved my life, he said. I cant tell you what would have happened, but I was in the highest-risk category of anyone.

He was indicted in August 2018 for sharing inside information about an Australian biotech firm in which he heavily invested. Collins had resigned from the board of directors of the publicly traded firm, Innate Immunotherapeutics, months before he was charged. He pleaded guilty in October 2019, and was sentenced to 26 months in prison.

It was a very dark time in my life, Collins said Monday.

Collins in 2016 was the first sitting member of Congress to endorse Trump for president. Prior to his indictment and conviction, the Clarence Republican frequently appeared on national news outlets to express support for the president.

When he was released, he told The Buffalo News that he hoped to volunteer in the community, perhaps teach business. He and his wife planned to spend winters at their home on Marco Island, Fla., and live at their Clarence home during summers.

My life was terrible, he said. I had resigned in disgrace, I was afraid to be seen in public. I got on an airplane and flew down to Marco Island and said, thats it.

Collins said he originally kept a low profile as he struggled with the path his life had taken.

I now know what depression is and I know what a dark place can be and I wouldnt wish that on anyone, and it took me three years or so to be able to hold my head up again, he said.

But Collins said he made new friends in Florida and they didnt hold that against me and many of them understood what happened, he said of the insider trading charges and federal prosecution.

Some of those friends urged him to run for the congressional seat now held by Rep. Byron Donalds, a Republican who is rumored to be considering a run for governor or U.S. Senate. Collins said he has been in touch with GOP political consultants, including Roger Stone, Michael Caputo and Chris Grant, about a possible run if Donalds vacates the seat.

Were all down here together, including David Bellavia, he said of the WBEN radio host.

What he did

When he was sentenced, Collins begged a judge for leniency.

I violated my core values, Collins said then, his voice cracking. I am standing here, probably the last time I will do anything in public. I left Buffalo. I cannot face my constituents. People feel sorry for me. They shouldnt. I did what I did.

What Collins did took place at a White House picnic in June 2017. There, he received an email from the chairman of Innate Immunotherapeutics bearing devastating news. The biotech companys only product, an experimental muscular sclerosis drug, had failed in clinical trials.

Collins  then the companys largest shareholder  immediately started dialing his son Cameron. Collins acknowledged in court that he called his son to advise him to dump his Innate shares before the news became public, which Cameron Collins started doing the next day.

Cameron Collins told his then-fiancee, Lauren Zarsky, and her parents, Stephen and Dorothy Zarsky, about the news. They started selling their shares, too.

Days later, The Buffalo News reported that an unusual number of shares of Innate stock had been traded late that previous week, leading to suspicions of insider trading among investment experts both in Buffalo and Australia.

Chris Collins was indicted 13 months later. He resigned from Congress the day before he pleaded guilty in October 2019. Cameron Collins and Stephen Zarsky also pleaded guilty, but were sentenced to short terms of home confinement and probation. Lauren and Dorothy Zarsky settled civil charges filed by the Securities and Exchange Commission.

Collins now tells a different story about his guilty plea, portraying himself as the victim of what he calls overzealous prosecution by former U.S. Attorney Geoffrey Berman.

I was persecuted, I was prosecuted and then I was pressured into pleading guilty, but I did so to protect my son as best I could, he said.

In fact, he thinks the conviction  especially at a time when Trump is under two separate criminal indictments  could actually help him with Republican primary voters, like those who posed for pictures with Collins when he appeared at the United We Stand Trump Flotilla 2024 rally on Sunday.

Could conviction help him win votes?

Like Collins, many Republicans have sought to paint the Department of Justice and the FBI as politicized in their criminal investigation and indictment of Trump on charges relating to the removal and storage of classified documents when he was no longer president.

What hes done, he has set the stage, frankly, for someone like me, Collins said of Trump. I would lead with that. Im a convicted felon. Im back and Im gonna go support Trump again and represent Florida-19. I wear it as a badge of honor, frankly. In the mood of the country today, which is certainly different than five years ago, I think it gets me votes.

The U.S. Constitution does not explicitly restrict a person convicted of a felony from running for office.

The Constitutions 14th Amendment states who would be unable to run for federal office and it restricts only those engaged in insurrection or rebellion against the United States. Some states bar people from holding office if they are convicted of a felony but those restrictions do not apply to federal office.

If he runs and wins, Collins notes that he would be the first person in 55 years to represent two different states in Congress.

Thats the last chapter of my book, he said.
When the Heart of Compassion walked through the gate of Wisdom, she looked into the body of the world and each of us, seeing that each of us and the world itself is boundless. And with this all suffering vanished.

Dear ones, all things are boundless; and the boundless is nothing other than all things. Everything in itself is boundlessness; boundlessness is all things. This is true of our bodies, feelings, experiences, perceptions, and of consciousness itself.

Dear ones, the stuff of the universe is boundless. It is not born and it does not die. It is not pure or impure. It neither increases nor diminishes. Within boundlessness there are no sense organs, no objects to sense, and no field of experience; no ignorance and thus no ending of ignorance; no old age and death and thus no ending of old age and death. There is no suffering and thus no causes of suffering; there is no path to follow and no wisdom to attain.

Understanding this boundlessness, the pure-hearted one is free. Without entanglements, the true person of the Way is not afraid.

This is the pure and unexcelled Way.

All sages of past, present, and future attain to this truth and find freedom.

This truth becomes the great mantra, supreme and unexcelled; and this truth removes all suffering.

Gone, gone, gone beyond! Completely gone beyond! Blessings and blessings!

***

Form is emptiness. Emptiness is form.

The nub of the Zen text the Heart Sutra, and the nub our Zen way.

Our teachers claim if we get it, really get it as a bone and marrow understanding, troubled hearts are set at ease. And we are free.

At the same time, it can seem to be some sort of non sequitur. So, it can be good to approach the matter from different angles. Perhaps one touches us more deeply.

So, how about that saying everything is nothing, with a twist. Its posted all over the interwebs, or at least in the corner of the metaverse where I generally hang out. Sometimes its even illustrated with a circle for nothing and then that infinity sign, a figure eight on its side for everything. Reality as a kind of mobius strip. Now  all the things we experience and think. Now  something else.

The phrase is always attributed to Kurt Vonnegut. Those who offer citations usually say it comes from his novel Slaughterhouse Five. However. I found a couple of searchable pdfs of the novel and, well, Im pretty sure its not there.

Curious, I found another citation saying its in Cats Cradle. Again, a search through a pdf. And, well, again, it comes up empty. Perhaps this is not the good empty. But Im not sure. Another said, Breakfast of Champions. Again, nada. As Kurt Vonnegut really did say, So it goes

Me, I love that nothing with a twist becomes something. I actually double love that it probably wasnt said by Kurt Vonnegut. What were left with in this observation about nothing twisting into everything is a whole lot of ambiguity. From where does it come? To where is it going? All as mysterious as twisting nothing.

And as pretty much any Zen student can quote at the mention of ambiguity, not knowing is most intimate. Kind of our trademark. All part of the investigation of the deep matters of our lives. Within our Zen teachings, those deep matters are caught up with those words: nothing and empty. Which are our more popular ways of translating Sunyata.

Buddhism has always noted the ephemeral nature of things. The fascicle A Lump of Foam in the Samyutta Nikaya, the Nikayas being the putative sayings and actions of the historic Buddha captured in Pali, offers a for instance:

Form is like a lump of foam,

Feeling like a water bubble;

Perception is like a mirage,

Volitions like a plantain trunk,

And consciousness like an illusion

And then with the conclusion:

However one may ponder it

And carefully investigate it,

It appears but hollow and void

When one views it carefully.

Of course, the Mahayana, and specifically, the Heart Sutra doesnt let it conclude with an assertion about the insubstantiality of things. It all quickly gets messy. Its all kind of like a black hole, the closer we get to what that word sunyata in all its versions is pointing toward, the weirder it all becomes. Even trying to use it in a sentence about sunyata, gets slippery. What it, after all?

Out of this sometimes we hear the assertion there is no self. As in the self is an illusion. More accurately, I think, is the Buddhist assertion there is no abiding self. I certainly have a sense of a self, an I. And I suspect you may, as well. What Buddhism points about that I is that it consists of a bundle of things, much of which we can name, like genetic coding and experiences. All coalescing in a moment. One of the catches is that it is a moment. That I is always changing, being recreated in smaller or larger ways with every encounter, every experience. There is a sense of a thread, but within Buddhism that thread is a bit of geography. That sense of location may be changing a bit more slowly than say our emotions do. But, like continents, even the geography of self shapes and reshapes over time. Change is the rule. We exist, of course we do. But.

Its with that insight, that we might relate to everything is nothing with a twist. And its why, whoever actually said it, why that line feels to be a Zen thing. And. It certainly offers a delightful way to look at the heart of the Heart Sutra.

Anyone who visits any Zen center throughout North America has heard the Heart Sutra. Perhaps in Sino-Japanese, the liturgical language of Japanese Buddhism, basically Chinese pronounced as if it were Japanese. Or, if the center is from a Chinese, Korean, or Vietnamese tradition, in that language, or sometimes an archaic version of that language. Or, and increasingly so, perhaps most commonly now, in English.

The Heart Sutra is very brief, and its message is telegraphed so fast the subtlety and depth of its teaching can easily be missed. The fact that it ends with a mantra, a sacred phrase can be a bit of misdirection for some. There is an assertion, after all, that just chanting it has some magical efficacy. Well, maybe it does. I actually kind of think so, myself. But, most of all, the real magic comes with inviting us to allow the heart of the message to enter our hearts as our own truths.

We well might find that as we listen to the words.

Its all about emptiness. And how that emptiness and the world are not two. The form that is emptiness, exactly. And. The twist that is the everything of nothing.

The Korean Zen missionary master Seung Sahn tries to explain what it means by way of an example. (H)ere is a wooden chair. It is brown. It is solid and heavy. It looks like it could last a long time. You sit in the chair, and it holds up your weight. You can place things on it. But then you light the chair on fire and leave. When you come back later, the chair is no longer there! This thing that seemed so solid and strong and real is now just a pile of cinder and ash, which the wind blows around. This example shows how the chair is empty: it is not a permanent, abiding thing. It is always changing. It has no independent existence. Over a long or short time, the chair will eventually change and become something other than what it appears. So, this brown chair is complete emptiness. But though it always has the quality of emptiness, this emptiness is form: you can sit in the chair, and it will still hold you up.

We are real, you and I. Pinch me, and I guarantee it hurts. And at the same time, we exist only within causal relationships. The me that is real, is also very temporary. Im the product, as you are, of many different situations coming together in a glorious moment. I exist, as a moment, which, in a heartbeat will shift, and I, the part that thinks I, will be gone.

But to think this means we live for some brief period of time, and then we are food for worms, is vastly too reductive. It misses too much, and focuses on too little. At least as the Heart Sutra suggests. So, lets put aside the brown chair, which the master only means to use as an analogy to something, or, okay, nothing. That nothing with a twist.

For me it brings question like Athena springing from Zeus forehead. One of many. But this one like a goddess. An important question when we step beyond simple logical analysis and look at what this all means in our lived and experienced lives. In my life. In your life. What does it mean when nothing twists into everything?

This is about a lot more than brown chairs. It is about what is true about us. You and me. In the Zen way a koan is an assertion and an invitation. That assertion about insubstantiality, about nothing, comes with the invitation into that twist might best be engaged as a koan. Instead of being something somehow special and not of this world, were being invited into something rather glorious, a place of radical interdependence.

While we all are inherently temporary, theres a deeper point. And that point is what we are at this moment, is connected to all other moments, directly and indirectly. The Western born Zen master Bernie Glassman says, Emptiness is just everything, just as it is right now. Another Western Zen master in a Chinese lineage, John Crook tells us, when we catch this, our notion of everything as empty now expands and expands until everything you can think of, the vast cosmos itself is seen as Vast Emptiness. Vastness unlimited, unbounded spaciousness, timeless presence.

I find this mysterious pregnant emptiness at the foundation point of Mahayana Buddhism. Not precisely one. Not exactly two. In religious studies this perspective is called nonduality. Nonduality is a current found within the worlds mystical traditions. It is expressed, sometimes implicitly, the quietest of whispers, and sometimes explicitly, a shout, a firm grabbing of ones shoulders, a great shake, and an invitation for our own encounter.

Generally, I find the Zen way clearest in its approach to this whole thing. But Ive also found within those mystical currents of the worlds religions, other pointers. Sometimes enormously helpful. For instance, a term from Western antiquity, pleroma, can be helpful as an alternative to what is misleading about emptiness.

Pleroma means fullness Rich, fascinating, and useful, if of course itself ultimately misleading as a term for that fundamental encounter of our hearts. Words. Joyful things. They point and misdirect at the same time. There are some very good words like that. I suggest Pregnant could be another good, if also as is always the case, misleading word. Empty. Full. Pregnant.

This is important because its about our lives, yours and mine. Its about who and what we are. And its about the great quest that is the Zen way. I would suggest this is the heart of the whole of the spiritual life, in all traditions.

We approach this matter obliquely, through a glass darkly. Or, as I suggested earlier, like approaching a black hole. Swirling and swirling around.

Thats why Ive thought it helpful to understand my actual lived encounter with sunyata on occasion is not unlike being possessed by the god. Athena springing forth. Goddess. God. More difficult words. Certainly, some wild otherness, a dark glass or a black hole, and being taken up by it, is a way many human beings name an encounter that precedes words. Not the only one. But a powerful way into that nothing with a twist.

Here we are in a time weve set aside to fully attend to the matter of the heart mind. Silence, liturgy, and words. Its all about paying attention. Noticing. Being present. Empty. Full. Pregnant. And, well, birthing. All of it.

Lets try a another image.

I find Ive been invited into an intimate encounter with some very dark parts of my heart. Sometimes its shit. Plain and simple. And sometimes it is the rich soil that allows things to grow. And sometimes there is no way to sort these parts out. Layer upon layer intertwined, becoming. Each it. And each not quite it.

So. Form is emptiness, and emptiness is form. So. Everything is nothing, with a twist. I open my heart to experience where these assertions take me.

And where is that? What might this place where nothing twists, actually feel like?

When were surprised by that joy which passes all understanding, what is that like? How do we recognize it? When we feel it, what does it feel like, birthing this goddess? Seeing things as they are? Knowing for yourself that twist? I have my experiences. And I recognize them elsewhere. For instance, I sometimes think that the 92nd Psalm of the Jewish tradition is an expression from that place. In my paraphrase.

It is good to sing praise to you, my heart.

To give thanks for the blessings of life,

To notice love coursing through my body in the morning

And faithfulness through the night.

I hear our human voices as music,

And silence as melody.

I delight in your world;

You make my body sing with joy.



How great is your goodness.

How unfathomable your deep currents,

Not seen by eyes

Not grasped by mind

Everything united

Everything touching.



The mess of life

Shows everything connected

Everything the eternal dharma.



The wise heart flourishes like palm trees

Grows like the cedars of Lebanon

Planted in the deep dark soil of God,

Leaves relentlessly turning to the light

Bearing fruit into old age

Living the truth

Of perfect unity.

Here we are.

The Heart Sutra sings of a reality we can know for ourselves.

Form is emptiness. Emptiness is form.

Everything is nothing, with a twist.

And that twist.

The goddess birthing.

Intimacy upon intimacy
It is now official and so I am delighted to be able to announce that a proposal for a new SBL consultation focused on John the Baptist has been approved. Here is the information from the Society of Biblical Literature website:

JOHN THE BAPTIST

Chairs: James F. McGrath and Tony Burke Description: While there is always a steady trickle of interest in John the Baptist, recent publications in English, Spanish, and Italian suggest that there is a current surge not only in interest in John as a historical figure, not only also as a literary figure in the canonical Gospels, but in his appearance in Christian apocrypha and in Mandaean literature. These areas are often separated among different program units, and this consultation will provide a place for them to come together and interact. Call for papers: While there is always a steady trickle of interest in John the Baptist, recent publications in English, Spanish, and Italian suggest that there is a current surge not only in interest in John as a historical figure, not only also as a literary figure in the canonical Gospels, but in his appearance in Christian apocrypha and in Mandaean literature. These areas are often separated among different program units, and this consultation will provide a place for them to come together and interact.

I also have more information to share about the visit to the Mandaean Culture Center in San Antonio. The event will be listed in the program book (print and online) but the provisional schedule goes over the character limit, and thus I am sharing the details here.

Mandaean Convention

Saturday November 18, 2023, 6pm to 8pm

Mandaean Culture Center

244 Sherwood Dr, San Antonio 78201

Provisional Program:

6:00 p.m. Welcome

6:05 p.m. City official

6:10 p.m. Mandaean movie

6:20 p.m. Professor Jorunn J. Buckley

6:30 p.m. Professor Charles. G. Haberl

6:40 p.m. Refreshments (Mandaean food)

6:55 p.m. Professor James F. McGrath

7:05 p.m. Dr. Sabah Malallah

7:15 p.m. Ganzebra Valid Ebadfardzadeh

(Mandaean religious leader)

7:25 p.m. Mandaean music

7:35 p.m. Questions and answers

8:00 p.m. Concluding thanks

Meet the Mandaeans of San Antonio! This event at the local Mandaean Culture Center (244 Sherwood Dr) includes a Mandaean movie, music, & food; brief remarks from Mandaean leaders Dr. Sabah Malallah & Ganzebra Valid Ebadfardzadeh, a San Antonio official, & Profs. Jorunn J. Buckley, Charles G. Haberl, & James F. McGrath who study Mandaeism; + Q&A.

The Mandaeans are the only ancient Gnostic group to survive continuously down to the present day. AAR members should seize this invitation from members of the local Mandaean community in San Antonio to meet them!

Finally, Charles Haberl will give a paper, Reconstructing Mandaean History on Monday November 20th at AAR in a session jointly sponsored by two program units, the Middle Eastern Christianity Unit and the Traditions of Eastern Late Antiquity Unit, on the theme Pushing the Boundaries of the Late Antique East. Here is the abstract: The Mandaean scriptures have been the subject of sustained interest from non-Mandaean scholars for more than two centuries, beginning with Matthias Norbergs pioneer edition and translation of the Genza Rabba or Great Treasure in 1815. Those that followed his are considered banner examples of the philological enterprise, one that processes and thereby subsumes data from texts such as these into its own episteme toward a variety of uses. In Foucauldian terms, the subjugated knowledge represented by the various philological editions and translations of this text yet paradoxically disguised within them presents an opportunity to critique those same works of scholarship and by extension the entire enterprise of scholarship on Mandaeans. Because of longstanding Mandaean engagements with the surrounding communities, these texts plainly have much to say about their history and other subjects of interest and relevance to historians working on an array of periods and places.

In short, theres lots of reason to be excited about the AAR/SBL joint annual meeting in San Antonio this November if you are interested in John the Baptist, the Mandaeans, or both!
The Managing Director of the Bulk Oil Storage and Transportation Limited Company (BOST) Mr Edwin Alfred Provencal was adjudged Africas Most Respected CEO in the Petroleum (Storage and Distribution category) for the year 2022.



The event organized under the auspices of the Business Executive and the Economic Development Board of Mauritius was held at the Intercontinental Resort, Balaclava, Mauritius.



Among the night's big winners included the Managing Director of Air Tanzania Company Limited, Mr. Ladislaus Matindi who emerged as Africas Most Respected CEO 2022 for the Air Transport category.



Africas Most Respected CEOs platform recognizes companies and individual corporate leaders who go the extra mile in enhancing the fortunes of the continent of Africa which is on a forward march towards enhancing the lives of its 1.4 million population.



Speaking in a panel discussion, Mr Ladislaus Matindi opined that, to take Africa to the next level and to make the dream of the Africa Continental Free Trade Area AFCFTA, a reality, corporate leaders in both the public and private sectors of Africa should foremost admit the unique situation of the continent and tailor solutions to the challenges both existing and emergent, to ensure we together create a better future for the people (both present and yet unborn).



In accepting the honour, Mr Provencal proudly dedicated the award to the Board, Management, and Staff of BOST who he said are the pillars behind the massive turnaround of the company in the last couple of years.



He started by thanking the President of the Republic of Ghana, Nana Addo Dankwa Akufo-Addo for the opportunity to serve and the confidence reposed in him.



This recognition of BOST and its MD comes as the fourteenth (14) over the past ten (10) months reflecting the volume of work done at the company and the massive transformation Mr Provencal is leading at the formidable State-Owned Enterprise.



In the citation, the MD of BOST was praised for reviving the company from ten years of losses into the profit zone and also bringing as much as 97% of the assets of the company to revenue-earning status as against the past years of dilapidation and lack of activity.







"This is the way to go if AFCFTA is to impact the lives of the people of Africa to break the long chains of poverty, ignorance, and disease."



In the opinion of Mr Provencal, for Africa to see massive progress, the public sector must be up and doing and share that positive energy with the private sector.



"Indeed, there are challenges but these should not halt the progress of the continent and its people," he added.



Dr. Claudius Williams-Tucker, the Country Director of Trans-Global Travel and Logistics of Sierra Leone was also celebrated at the event for his beautiful contributions towards the gradual changing of the fortunes of the continent.



In the construction category, Core Construction Limited and its Chief Executive Officer, Mr Frank Lartey of Ghana were also recognized at the event.



Africas Most Respected CEO Awards is targeted at honouring sterling leadership in the private and public sectors of Africa as the continent gears up to take full advantage of the AFCFTA to better people's lives.

Source: Peacefmonline.com









Disclaimer : Opinions expressed here are those of the writers and do not reflect those of Peacefmonline.com. Peacefmonline.com accepts no responsibility legal or otherwise for their accuracy of content. Please report any inappropriate content to us, and we will evaluate it as a matter of priority.

Featured Video
Prof. Peter Lamptey, a professor in Global Noncommunicable Diseases (NCDs) at the London School of Hygiene& Tropical Medicine/President Emeritus FHI360, has noted that lack of finances to combat NCDs is posing a challenge to efforts to curb the risk of increased.



Speaking on the topic Combatting Noncommunicable Diseases: Africas Greatest Health Challenges, he noted that the funds available globally to address NCDs as compared to HIV/AIDS, Malaria etc, is nothing to write home about.



There is virtually no response at all to combat NCDs as compared to HIV/AIDS and malaria and it is part of the reasons why NCDs continue to be a problem and it will continue to get worse, he lamented.



Prof. Lamptey, who was the Guest Speaker at the 2023 Harvard University Joseph S. Agyepong Distinguished Lecture on Public Health in Africa at the University of Ghana- Legon in Accra, stressed that the impact of NCDs to sub-Saharan Africa is enormous as there is an increased cost to households.



You have to buy medications, pay for treatments which is often too lengthy and expensive, he noted.



He noted that Africa is currently experiencing a triple disease burden; endemic and epidemic, current and future pandemic (HIV, COVID) and lastly the explosive burden of NCDs and if immediate measures are not taken, it will get worse.



"We need better recognition of the burden of NCDs and we need not just individuals, but national and international support to combat it, Prof. Lamptey emphasized.



This was further echoed by the Director General of the Ghana Health Service, Dr. Patrick Kuma-Aboagye. He noted that the cost of care is still catastrophic and this usually pushes Ghanaians to seek alternative treatments that do not work.



Studies we have done indicate that one NCD can virtually collapse a household and this drives people to seek alternative treatments that do not work and that can have a compounding effect on the individuals, he warned.



Prof. Lamptey further reiterated that "One of us will end up with NCDs, the time to act is now adding that no one has to die or suffer from NCDs."



In responding to the call, the Executive Chairman of the Jospong Group of Companies, Dr. Joseph Siaw Agyepong and his wife, Adelaide Siaw Agyepong donated GHc500,000 to support NCDS advocacy in Ghana.



The donation was beckoned on the fact that not much finances has been geared towards the education of the general public to trigger behavioural change.



The Joseph S. Agyepong Distinguished Lecture on Public health in Africa is under the auspices of Harvard University Centre for African Studies (CAS) and aims at exploring topics related to public health in Africa by engaging leaders, policymakers, researchers and academics around Africas public health challenges.



This is the fourth annual Lecture on Public Health in Africa but the in Ghana since its an endowment in 2020 by Dr. Joseph Siaw Agyepong, founder and Executive Chairman of the Jospong Group of Companies.



The Joseph S. Agyepong Distinguished Lecture on Public Health in Africa provides an annual platform for CAS to partner with fellows and students at the Harvard Medical School, Harvard TH. Chan School to ensure that Africa is at the forefront for conversations, scholarship, and research in global public health.



The Joseph S. Agyepong Distinguished Lecture on Public Health in Africa was generously endowed by Joseph S. Agyepong founder and executive chairman of Jospong Group of

Companies.



Established in 1995, Jospong is one of Ghanas leading diversified holding companies., its portfolio includes Zoomlion Ghana, established in 2006 to provide sustainable waste management solutions that improve lives, the environment, and public health outcomes.



Jospong Group also partners with CAS to offer internship opportunities to Harvard University students interested in work in ICT, waste management, and public health and safety.



It is of interest to note that the contribution of Zoomlion in the space of environment and sanitation management has led to no recorded cases of cholera in Ghana since 2018 and that is a huge impact on public health.



Hosting the 2023 Agyepong Distinguished Lecture in partnership with the University of Ghana represents an opportunity to deepen linkages between Harvard University and the University of Ghana during its 75th anniversary year.





Prof. Peter Lamptey, a professor in Global Noncommunicable Diseases (NCDs) at London School of Hygiene& Tropical Medicine/President Emeritus FHI360, has noted that lack of finances to combat NCDs is posing a challenge to efforts to curb the risk of increased.



Speaking on the topic Combatting Noncommunicable Diseases: Africas Greatest Health Challenges, he noted that the funds available globally to address NCDs as compared to HIV/AIDS, Malaria etc, is nothing to write home about.



There is virtually no response at all to combat NCDs as compared to HIV/AIDS and malaria and it is part of the reasons why NCDs continue to be a problem and it will continue to get worse, he lamented.



Prof. Lamptey, who was the Guest Speaker at the 2023 Harvard University Joseph S. Agyepong Distinguished Lecture on Public Health in Africa at the University of Ghana- Legon in Accra, stressed that the impact of NCDs to sub-Saharan Africa is enormous as there is an increased cost to households.



You have to buy medications, pay for treatments which is often too lengthy and expensive, he noted.



He noted that Africa is currently experiencing a triple disease burden; endemic and epidemic, current and future pandemic (HIV, COVID) and lastly the explosive burden of NCDs and if immediate measures are not taken, it will get worse.



"We need better recognition of the burden of NCDs and we need not just individuals, but national and international support to combat it, Prof. Lamptey emphasized.



This was further echoed by the Director General of the Ghana Health Service, Dr. Patrick Kuma-Aboagye. He noted that the cost of care is still catastrophic and this usual pushes Ghanaians to seek alternative treatments that do not work.



Studies we have done indicate that one NCD can virtually collapse a household and this drives people to seek alternative treatments that do not work and that can have a compounding effect on the individuals, he warned.



Prof. Lamptey further reiterated that "One of us will end up with NCDs, the time to act is now adding that no one has to die or suffer from NCDs."



In responding to the call, the Executive Chairman of the Jospong Group of Companies, Dr. Joseph Siaw Agyepong and his wife, Adelaide Siaw Agyepong donated GHc500,000 to support NCDS advocacy in Ghana.



The donation was beckoned on the fact that not much finances has been geared towards the education of the general public to trigger behavioural change.



The Joseph S. Agyepong Distinguished Lecture on Public health in Africa is under the auspices of the Harvard University Centre for African Studies (CAS) and aims at exploring topics related to public health in Africa by engaging leaders, policymakers, researchers and academics around Africas public health challenges.



This is the fourth annual Lecture on Public Health in Africa but the in Ghana since its an endowment in 2020 by Dr. Joseph Siaw Agyepong, founder and Executive Chairman of the Jospong Group of Companies.



The Joseph S. Agyepong Distinguished Lecture on Public Health in Africa provides an annual platform for CAS to partner with fellows and students at the Harvard Medical School, Harvard TH. Chan School to ensure that Africa is at the forefront for conversations, scholarship, and research in global public health.



The Joseph S. Agyepong Distinguished Lecture on Public Health in Africa was generously endowed by Joseph S. Agyepong founder and executive chairman of Jospong Group of

Companies.



Established in 1995, Jospong is one of Ghanas leading diversified holding companies., its portfolio includes Zoomlion Ghana, established in 2006 to provide sustainable waste management solutions that improve lives, the environment, and public health outcomes.



Jospong Group also partners with CAS to offer internship opportunities to Harvard University students interested in work in ICT, waste management, and public health and safety.



It is of interest to note that the contribution of Zoomlion in the space of environment and sanitation management has led to no recorded cases of cholera in Ghana since 2018 and that is a huge impact on public health.



Hosting the 2023 Agyepong Distinguished Lecture in partnership with the University of Ghana represents an opportunity to deepen linkages between Harvard University and the University of Ghana during its 75th anniversary year.

Source: Peacefmonline com









Disclaimer : Opinions expressed here are those of the writers and do not reflect those of Peacefmonline.com. Peacefmonline.com accepts no responsibility legal or otherwise for their accuracy of content. Please report any inappropriate content to us, and we will evaluate it as a matter of priority.

Featured Video
Twitter has applied a temporary limit to the number of tweets users can read in a day, owner Elon Musk has said.



In a tweet of his own, Mr Musk said unverified accounts are now limited to reading 600 posts a day.



For new unverified accounts, the number is 300. Meanwhile, accounts with "verified" status are currently limited to 6,000 posts a day.



Mr Musk said the temporary limits were to address "extreme levels of data scraping and system manipulation".



He did not explain what was meant by system manipulation in this context. Data scraping refers to a process that sees information pulled out of a website and imported into another programme.



"We were getting data pillaged so much that it was degrading service for normal users," Mr Musk explained on Friday, after users were presented with screens asking them to log in to view Twitter content.



The move was described as a "temporary emergency measure".



In another update, Mr Musk said "several hundred organisations (maybe more) were scraping Twitter data extremely aggressively".



He later indicated there had been a burden on his website, saying it was "rather galling to have to bring large numbers of servers online on an emergency basis".



A server is a powerful computer that manages and stores files, providing services such as web pages for users.



According to the website Downdetector - which tracks online outages - a peak of 5,126 people reported problems accessing the platform in the UK at 16:12 BST on Saturday.



In the US, roughly 7,461 people reported glitches around the same time.



After announcing the initial reading limits on Saturday, Mr Musk added that the reading limits would "soon" rise to 800 tweets per day for unverified accounts, 400 for new unverified accounts and 8,000 for verified accounts.



Signalled by a blue tick, "verified" status was given for free by Twitter to high-profile accounts before Mr Musk took over as its boss.



Now, most users have to pay a subscription fee from $8 (6.30) per month to be verified and can gain the status regardless of their profile.



Some high-profile accounts have a verification badge despite not paying for it, although many temporarily lost their blue tick badges back in April.



Mr Musk bought the company last year for $44bn (35bn) after much back and forth. He was critical of Twitter's previous management and said he did not want the platform to become an echo chamber.



Soon after taking over, he cut the workforce from just under 8,000 staff to about 1,500.



In an interview with the BBC, he said that cutting the workforce had not been easy.



Engineers were included in the layoffs and their exit raised concerns about the platform's stability.



But while Mr Musk acknowledged some glitches, he told the BBC in April that outages had not lasted very long and the site was working fine.

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.

Featured Video
1. Mr. Speaker, I thank you for the opportunity to address this August House on the recent flooding incidents in the National Capital and elsewhere in the country. I would, also, like to commend the Minority Chief Whip, Honourable Kwame Agbodza for raising the issue of perennial flooding on the floor of Parliament on 23 June 2023, and his commitment towards building a robust built environment for our socio-economic development.



2. May I, first of all, express the governments and my commiserations to the bereaved families for the loss of their loved ones during the heavy downpour from Wednesday 21st to Friday 23rd June, 2023, in some parts of Kumasi, in the Ashanti Region, including my beloved Bantama Constituency where five (5) lives, two of whom were siblings were unfortunately lost.



3. Here in Accra, some lost their livelihoods while several others suffered damages of their properties and other valuables.





4. My sympathies are with these families during this challenging period. Our follow-ups, however, indicate that the rainfall experienced in Accra on Thursday, 22nd June did not, fortunately, result in any loss of life.



5. Mr. Speaker, the Ministry of Works and Housing is conscious of the increasing risk of flooding across the country, largely due to inadequate drainage infrastructure, improper solid waste disposal, disregard for planning rules and regulations, and rapid urbanization, among others.



6. The adverse effect of climate change has compounded these factors. Consequently, we have in recent times, seen flooding in other urban centres, such as, Kumasi, Sekondi-Takoradi, Koforidua and Tamale that did not use to experience much flooding. Globally, the dire effects of climate change have left unforgettable footprints in many countries, such as, Ivory Coast, Sierra Leone and Nigeria, among others, and Ghana is no exception.



7. For this reason, the Ministry has over the years initiated and implemented major drainage projects across the country to mitigate flooding.



8. As a demonstration of our commitment to tackling Ghanas perennial flooding challenge, the Government of President Nana Addo Dankwa Akufo-Addo has been implementing a comprehensive flood control and management programme with the following components:



i. The Construction of Drainage Channels and Desilting under the National Flood Control Programme;

ii. Regular Monitoring of Flood Prone Areas to assess our preparedness and educate the public via multiple media channels on flood prevention practices;



iii. Collaboration with Other Ministries, namely; the Local Government, Decentralisation and Rural Development; and National Security to prevent development in waterways and drainage reservations;



iv. Investment in flood mitigations measures under the Greater Accra Resilient and Integrated Development (GARID) Project; and



v. Collaboration with other Government Agencies, namely the Ghana Meteorological Agency, the Water Resources Commission and NADMO toward the issuance of early warning notices.





9. Mr. Speaker, in line with our dedication to building resilient communities and decreasing the occurrence of flooding, the Government embarked on the National Flood Control Programme in 2018 and 2020.



10. The aim has been to allocate resources towards enhancing the flood resilience of our vulnerable communities. Since 2018, the Government has committed GHS 450 million to this programme, making it the most substantial investment from Ghanaian government funding sources dedicated to addressing flooding. Under the Programme, 384 desilting projects and 202 drainage channel construction projects were initiated.



11. To date, 370 desilting projects, representing 96% have been completed and 84 drainage channel construction projects representing 42% have been completed, with the remaining 118 at various stages of completion.



12. The effect has been the mitigation of flood hazards in beneficiary communities such as Kuntunse Satellite, Achimota Mile 7, Katamanso, Mamprobi, Abeka-Ayigbe Town, Labadi Olympia, Nungua (United Church Area), Haatso, Madina Firestone, Madina Mayehot, Madina Redco, Madina Oblogo, Dome Crossing, Weija GEICEL, Kasoa Iron City, Kasoa Obom, Nsuoano stream in Ngleshie Amanfrom and Ashaiman.



13. Mr. Speaker, other selected flood hot spots that are benefitting from the 2020 Programme include Kasoa Millennium City, Adenta Sakora, Nsakyi, Ablekuma, Dawhyenya Dome Railway Crossing, New Legon, Adenta, Sango and Naapladjor Drains, Kakum River, Birim River, Leprosarium Drain, Densu River, Korkordjor River, Owabi River, Sefwi Wiaso, Aboabo Drain, to name a few.



14. Mr. Speaker, ahead of the pending rainy season, I embarked on a working visit of some flood prone communities in Accra, with Technical staff of the Ministry, and the Ghana Hydrological Authority to ascertain our level of preparedness and gain first-hand insight into the challenges we face when it comes to mitigating the risks associated with flooding.



15. Mr. Speaker, it became more evident that human activities are severely impeding the government's efforts to tackle the issue of flooding. The observations include:



 Filling of lagoons and wetlands with construction materials for development purposes;

 Building on drainage channels, hence blocking the free flow of stormwater;

 Dumping of solid waste in drains, thereby reducing their capacity to hold stormwater; and

 Gaps in the enforcement of planning laws and building regulations by the MMDAs.



16. Subsequently, Mr. Speaker, Cabinet at its Forty-Seventh (47th) meeting held on Saturday, 25th March, 2023, considered a report on my inspection of the drainage infrastructure in Accra.



Cabinet noted the need to consider flooding in Ghana as a national security issue since effective law enforcement has a major role to play in addressing the challenge. Subsequently, Cabinet constituted a committee to develop a comprehensive plan with appropriate measures to strengthen the enforcement of laws relating to lands and siting of buildings.



17. The Committee comprises the following Ministers:



i. National Security - Chairperson

ii. Local Government, Decentralisation and Rural Development;

iii. Sanitation and Water Resources;

iv. Works and Housing; and

v. Lands and Natural Resources.





18. Mr. Speaker, while the committee does its work, my Ministry will continue its engagement with the Ministry of National Security in seeking support for the Assemblies to enforce planning laws and building regulations.



19. My Ministry will also continue engagement with the Ministry of Local Government, Decentralisation, and Rural Development to strengthen the support provided to the Assemblies in addressing the issue of buildings in waterways and drainage buffers.



20. Mr. Speaker, another important component of the Government's holistic approach to addressing flooding in vulnerable communities is the investment in the Greater Accra Resilient and Integrated Development (GARID) Project. Through GARID, the Government is partnering with the World Bank to invest USD 200 million towards reducing flood risks and addressing solid waste management challenges in the Odaw Drainage Basin.





21. The project is being implemented by the Ministry of Works and Housing; the Ministry of Sanitation and Water Resources; and the Ministry of Local Government, Decentralisation, and Rural Development.



22. Ahead of the rainy season, the project has provided financial assistance to 17 Metropolitan, Municipal, and District Assemblies (MMDAs) in the Odaw Catchment for desilting key drainage channels within their respective jurisdictions. These include; Ayawaso Central, North, East, and West, La Nkwantanang, Ga East, Adentan, La Dadekotopon, Ga West, Ga North and Ga Central. This initiative has contributed to the mitigation of floods by improving the capacity of tertiary drains.



23. Mr. Speaker, other interventions under the Project include drainage improvement works at Achimota, Nima, and Kaneshie as well as participatory community upgrades in Alogboshie, Akweteyman and Nima.



24. The procurement process for the dredging of the Odaw Drainage Channel, Drainage Improvement Works at Achimota, Nima and Community Upgrades in Alogboshie and Akweteyman are almost completed. Construction is expected to commence in the third quarter of this year, following the implementation of the Resettlement Action Plan.



25. Another significant measure involves the construction of retention ponds in the Ghana Atomic Energy Commission area. These ponds are designed to hold substantial amounts of water that would otherwise flow directly toward the city centre and contribute to flooding. Our Technical Team is currently working with the design consultant to finalize all outstanding designs.



26. Mr. Speaker, in addition to implementing the structural measures outlined above, we are also actively engaged in implementing non-structural measures, regarding the GARID project.



27. These include the establishment of the Flood Early Warning System (FEWS) for the Greater Accra Region, as well the implementation of a Social and Behavioural Change Campaign.



28. Through the Early Warning System, individuals residing in vulnerable communities will receive advanced notifications of potential flooding occurrences, enabling them to take necessary precautions to safeguard their lives, properties and livelihoods.



29. While we have made significant progress, we recognize the pressing need to establish more dependable drainage infrastructure across the country to enhance resilience within our communities. Since assuming office, Mr. Speaker, the Ministry has actively engaged with the Ministry of Finance in order to secure the necessary financial resources required to fulfill this objective.





30. Mr. Speaker, let me highlight that despite the Ministry's extensive efforts, the impact of the Government's investment in mitigating flood risks is seriously undermined by human activities.



31. It is important for citizens to support the Government's endeavours by adhering to the rules and regulations governing settlement planning. Additionally, it is essential for citizens to refrain from engaging in development activities within wetlands, waterways and drainage buffers.



32. Furthermore, it is even more critical for citizens to exercise caution in managing household solid waste and refrain from using drainage channels as dumping grounds for refuse. By so doing, we can collectively work towards reducing the vulnerability to flooding and ensuring the effectiveness of the implemented measures.



33. Mr. Speaker, I wish to take this opportunity to urge our revered Traditional rulers, religious and community leaders, civil society groups, and the media to rally behind the Government's efforts in flood control.



34. We can collectively contribute by alerting the appropriate state authorities in instances where construction is taking place on waterways and other prohibited locations to take prompt action.



35. Mr. Speaker, the Ghana Meteorological Agency has indicated that the East Coast of the country starting from Saltpond to Aflao is expected to have above-average rainfall this year. I urge the media to help make this notice current and relevant and raise public awareness about the hazards involved in traversing on foot or by vehicle during flash floods.



36. Mr. Speaker, the scale of the flooding challenge we face is enormous and with the effect of climate change, it will only get worse. In light of that, I wish to take this opportunity to emphasize the need for a dedicated source of funding towards tackling flooding in the country. The Ghana Hydrological Authority Act, 2022 (Act 1085), which was passed with support from both sides of the House makes provision for the establishment of a Hydrological Fund for that purpose.



37. I, therefore, wish to invite this August House to give serious consideration to committing a proportion of the Road Fund, given the impact of drains on the lifespan of roads; the Sanitation Levy, in view of the effect of the solid waste on drainage capacity; and the Common Fund, recognizing the need for a holistic and efficient drainage system.



38. By doing so, we will clearly showcase our nation's unwavering dedication to addressing this age-long challenge in a comprehensive manner.



39. In conclusion, Mr Speaker, I implore every citizen to unite and rally behind our collective efforts in tackling the devastating issue of floods. Let us join hands, combining our efforts to bring an end to the destructive consequences caused by flooding. Together, we have the power to effect substantial change and establish a safer and more resilient environment for all.



40. I thank you once again for the opportunity, Mr. Speaker, and may God bless our homeland Ghana.

Page 13 of 15

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Disclaimer : Opinions expressed here are those of the writers and do not reflect those of Peacefmonline.com. Peacefmonline.com accepts no responsibility legal or otherwise for their accuracy of content. Please report any inappropriate content to us, and we will evaluate it as a matter of priority.

Featured Video
Three Contracts for the construction of health facilities under the governments much-touted Agenda 111 project have been terminated.



This was announced by the Presidential Advisor on Health, Dr. Anthony Nsiah Asare, during a press briefing on the progress of construction works under Agenda 111.



The ambitious project took off in Trede, in the Ashanti Region when President Akufo-Addo cut the sod for work to start.



According to Dr Nsiah Asare at a press conference on Thursday, June 29, 2023, the governments commitment to delivering high-quality healthcare facilities necessitated taking decisive action against contractors who failed to meet the required standards and perform their contractual duties hence, the termination of these contracts.



We have terminated the contracts of three contractors due to non-performance and failure to meet the required standards. As we have indicated, we will not compromise on the standards of these hospitals and the construction timelines which is why we have moved quickly to terminate the contracts of these contractors, said Dr. Nsiah Asare.



While specific details about the terminated contracts and the contractors involved were not disclosed, Dr. Nsiah Asare emphasized that the government took this step to ensure the successful implementation of the Agenda 111 projects.



He said the termination serves as a demonstration of the governments dedication to upholding rigorous standards and holding contractors accountable for their performance.



Providing updates on the projects status so far, Dr. Nsiah Asare revealed that out of the intended 111 projects, 88 are currently underway and making remarkable strides.



He stated that several facilities, including a district hospital and polyclinics in the Western Region, are nearing completion with the expansion and equipping of selected facilities also slated for completion likely by the end of this year.



He said the hospitals being constructed under the programme will offer a range of facilities, including state-of-the-art surgical theatres for maternity, obstetrics and gynaecology, male, female, pediatric, and isolation wards, among others. Further, accommodation will be provided for doctors, nurses, and other healthcare personnel within the hospital premises.



This, Dr Nsiah Asare, reaffirmed the governments commitment to the construction of these hospitals.

He said the government considers Agenda 111 as the most significant investment in healthcare infrastructure in the country since independence and will not relent in the provision of these hospitals.



The Agenda 111 project aims to bridge the healthcare gap in Ghana by providing hospitals to 101 outstanding districts, along with additional regional and specialized hospitals. The facilities being constructed will offer state-of-the-art surgical theatres, wards, and accommodations for healthcare personnel, among other essential features.

Source: dailyguidenetwork.com









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The Dufia of Mafi Adidome, Togbe Kwasinyi Kakaklolo Agyeman V, has officially launched the Mafi Adidome Development Advisory Board, marking a significant milestone in fostering development and progress for Adidome. The establishment of this Board is to help drive the key focus areas of the Chief. These focus areas are Education, Youth development and human well-being which includes health and employment for livelihoods.



The Board was launched during the celebration of coronation of the Chief who was enstooled in August 2021 by the Kingmakers and Council of Elders of the Toh/Tovie Clan of Mafi Adidome in the Volta Region. The occasion which was held under the theme Celebrating a New Dawn in Mafi Adidome: Uniting for Peace and Development, witnessed the participation of Chiefs and Queenmothers from Mafi State, Anlo and other places, the townsfolk, local leaders, politicians, corporate leaders and many more. The occasion was also used to outdoor the new Queenmother of Adidome, Mama Drape III who is known in private life as Ms. Stella Fiagbenu.



In his address, Togbe Agyeman emphasized the importance of collective efforts and unity in tackling the challenges faced by the people of Mafi Adidome. He highlighted the need for such a Board to be established to help drive the development and local economic growth to ultimately enhance the quality of life of the people.



The Mafi Adidome Development Advisory Board (MADAB) consists of individuals from diverse professional backgrounds, including business, education, law, town planning, healthcare and others. Each member brings a wealth of experience, expertise, and a deep commitment to the town's welfare. Together, they will collaborate and provide strategic guidance to drive development initiatives in Mafi Adidome. He said with Mafi Adidome being the district and constituency capital of Central Tongu, the formation of this Board is going to be a concept template that will be extended to cover the entire Mafi state and other parts of Tongu in partnership with other traditional rulers.



Togbe Agyeman further outlined the key focus areas or terms of reference for the Advisory Board, which include attracting investments, fostering collaborations with government agencies and non-profit organizations, generating employment opportunities, and advising on strategies that will help empower the youth through education and also give them required skills.



The Board which will be chaired by Dr. Gideon Quarcoo, a former deputy Minister of Communications with Mr. Dan Kofi Okudzeto, a business magnate and Chairman of Allied Oil as its Vice Chairman, will also serve as a platform for innovative brainstorming, and project initiation, with the aim of transforming Mafi Adidome into a prosperous town, the Chief said.



He expressed utmost confidence in the Board's ability to steer Mafi Adidome into a well-resourced (education and skills), developed and prosperous town in the Volta Region. He thanked members of the Board for accepting this heavy extra responsibility to be of service to their people, in spite their busy schedules.



Furthermore, the Dufia of Adidome, Togbe Kwasinyi Kakaklolo Agyeman V, reaffirmed his commitment to working with the Government, the District Assembly, civil society and any well-meaning agencies to improve education and achieve the set developmental goals. To this end, he announced that a library project will soon take off in collaboration with Rainbow Trust Foundation.



The launch of the Mafi Adidome Development Advisory Board signifies a new era of collaboration, progress, and prosperity for Adidome, as it moves forward with a united vision for the betterment of the town and its people. It is the hope of the Chief that, this new era of development will trickle down to the entire Mafi State.



In accepting the assignment on behalf of the members of the Board, the Chairman, Dr. Quarcoo thanked Togbe Agyeman for the confidence reposed in them, and assured him of the Boards full resolve and commitment to work assiduously together as a team to deliver on their mandate in serving their people. Togbe and the people of Adidome can therefore count on us to do this and do it well to the benefit of all, he concluded.



The 17-member Board includes: Dr. Gideon Quarcoo, who is the Chairman of the Board as well as a principal elder and the official Spokesperson of the Toh/Tovie Clan. Mr. Dan Kofi Okudzeto, the Vice Chairman is Chairman of Allied Oil and its affiliate companies. The others are Togbe Asamoankwanta III, a businessman, Dr. Emmanuel Akwetey  Executive Director of IDEG, Mr. Ben Tamakloe  Financial Consultant, Mr. David Yengbe  Businessman, Mr. Bright Amlalo  Businessman and Town Planning Expert, Mrs. Margarette Armah -Health Professional (USA).



Other members are: Mrs. Gifty Azumah  Businesswoman, Mr. Stephen Dotse  Lawyer and Mrs. Georgina Asare Fiagbenu  Communications for Development Expert. The rest are Mr. Rowland Korku Blagogee  Businessman & CEO of AMAXROW Ltd, Mr. Ebenezer Bernard Amissah  Sales and Marketing Strategist & MD of IFKUICK Ltd, Mr. Daniel Amuzu  Civil Engineer and Contractor, Mr. Humphrey Kofiloto (USA), Mr. Noble Mensa Fiagbenu  Businessman & Managing Director of Woodeck Company Ltd and Mr. Mawuli Ahoto  An Entrepreneur & CEO of Radio 7. There will be an additional representation from the District Assembly, appointed in consultation with the DCE of the Central Tongu District.



The Dufia announced that in addition to the Board, there will be a number of working committees, including the Committee on Youth Mobilisation for Development whose activities will be coordinated by Mr. Prince Bisansu Fiagbenu.

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The Chief Executive Officer of Ghana National Gas Limited Company, Dr. Ben Asante, won this years Transformational Leader of the Year Award at the just ended Think Energy SDG Awards Night on Friday, June 30 at the La Palm Royal Beach Hotel,Accra.



The awards, which attracted industry players, business community, academia, journalists and many more, are geared towards the new and cleaner energy without transforming the training in energy education.



Kwame Nkrumah University of Science and Technology (KNUST) was adjudged winner of the SDGS Teaching and Learning Award after beating competition from Accra Technical University and Centre for Women and Food Security-Ghana



The Ghana Gas Chief Executive Officer, who has played a key role in Ghanas energy sector with the Atuabo Gas Processing Plant, was honoured for his transformational leadership of the gas company.



Speaking at the event, Dr. Ben Asante underscored energy transition from fossil-fuel to a cleaner energy.



In our energy portfolio, energy transition will be the change from our current portfolio of energy sources, which is dominated mostly by carbondioxde and Methan, fossil-fuel to cleaner forms of energy to be dominated by renewable energy.



"And our boundary condition will be a balance of certainly environment responsiveness and economic and social impact, he stated.



The Oil and Gas expert is of the view that the transition from fossil fuel to cleaner energy as a country should be graduated and driven by fuel type and the location.



A novel ceremony, the awards is aimed at celebrating excellence, innovation and impact of the respective individuals and organizations on clean energy, energy efficiency and energy access. Again, the Think Energy SDGs Awards is a prestigious award designed to celebrate and honour corporate and academic institutions working together to achieve.



The event was put together by Think Energy Awards and powered by the African Global Response Energy Environment (AGREE) Limited, with support from the SDG Advisory Unit of the Office of the President, the Ministry of Energy and Ghana Gas Limited Company.



Second Lady Samira Bawumia was adjudged the Most Influential SDGs Leader in Africa. Energy Digest took home the SDGs Communication Award, former CEO of GNPC Dr. Kofi Koduah Sarpong was given the SDGs Lifetime Award while Asaase Radios Emmanuel Aboagye-Wiafe picked the Energy Media Personality of the Year Award.









Source: Peacefmonline.com









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The Accra High Court has adjourned the trial of James Gyakye Quayson to July 4 following an application for stay of proceedings filed by the MPelect.



Mr Quayson wants the court to put the trial, in which he has been accused of perjury and forgery, on hold until the Court of Appeal determines his appeal challenging the courts decision to hear the trial on a daily basis.



At the proceedings yesterday, the court, presided over by Justice Mary Maame Ekue Yanzuh, said she just got the application for a stay of proceedings, and therefore she would adjourn the matter to enable the prosecution file its application in opposition.



In his notice of appeal at the Court of Appeal, Mr Quayson argues that the High Court erred in law when it refused to vary its decision to hear the case daily.



According to the MP-elect, the High Court exercised its discretion to hear the case daily arbitrarily, unfairly and capriciously, in violation of Article 296 of the 1992 Constitution.



The court erred in law when it claimed that matters brought to its attention by the accused regarding the abuse of prosecutorial powers with extremely prejudicial implications and an insult of the accused person and professional misconduct by the Attorney-General in respect of the case were not relevant to its consideration of the review application, the notice of appeal stated



With regard to the application for stay of proceedings, the MPelect is of the contention that the trial must be halted pending the appeal in the interest of justice.



It is his case that the ruling by the court to hear the case on a daily basis was what emboldened President Akufo-Addo to allegedly make prejudicial comments regarding the case.



That at the campaign rally for the candidate of the New Patriotic Party (NPP), the President made many prejudicial remarks, including some to the effect that the voters in Assin



North Constituency should not vote for a candidate who could end up in prison, the application for stay of proceedings stated.



Charges



Mr Quayson is facing charges of forgery and perjury in relation to certain alleged offences in the run-up to the 2020 Assin North parliamentary election.



He has pleaded not guilty to five counts of forgery of passport or travel certificate, knowingly making a false statutory declaration, perjury and false declaration for office.



It is the case of the prosecution that Mr Quayson allegedly made a false statement to the Passport Office that he did not hold a passport to another country when he applied for a Ghanaian Passport.



In addition, the prosecution has accused Mr Quayson of making a false declaration to the Electoral Commission (EC) to the effect that he (Quayson) did not owe any allegiance to a foreign country when he filed to contest as candidate for the Assin North seat.

Source: Graphiconline









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At the end of primary night last Tuesday, Raymond A. Ashton was leading by 60 votes in the Conservative primary for Evans supervisor over Michael E. Masullo.

But by Monday, as the absentee votes came in, Ashton was losing by three votes.

In the race for the Conservative line for mayor in Lackawanna, Dragon Stojkovskis 17-vote deficit turned into a 51-vote lead over Robert A. Reese.

Its not over, Ralph Mohr, Erie County Republican elections commissioner, said of primary races.

Absentee ballots that come in the mail through Wednesday will be counted in all of the primary races, he said.

Because of a new law, the Board of Elections is required to open absentee ballots and count them as they are received rather than waiting seven days and counting them all at once, Mohr said.

We knew going into early voting, we had an uphill battle, Ashton wrote on his campaigns Facebook page last Wednesday.

Thats because the Conservative Party suspected a number of new party members were supporters of Masullo who wanted to vote for him, but who had no affinity for the party.

Unwelcome voters: Conservative leaders sue to oust new enrollees 'not in sympathy' with party Two party leaders spelled out their fears at a recent hearing before State Supreme Court Justice Dennis Ward, asking him to take the rare step of disenrolling 68 voters from the Conservative Party and blocking them from voting in Tuesday's Conservative primary.

Party leaders asked State Supreme Court Justice Dennis Ward to disenroll 68 of 90 newly registered Conservative voters from the Conservative Party and block them from voting in last weeks Conservative primary.

Town Conservative Chairman Charles Castiglia said Masullo had been passed over for the Conservative endorsement. He and other party leaders believe that supporters of Masullo who switched their enrollments to Conservative are not in sympathy with the principles of the party.

Ward did not rule before early voting started, so the votes counted.

Ashton has the Democrat and Working Families lines and Masullo will be on the Republican line in November.

The story was different in Lackawanna, but still, absentee or mail in votes seem to have made the difference in the election.

Theres no doubt. On election day, it was 93-76, said Dennis Koziol, the campaign manager for Stojkovski.

He said the plan was to take the Conservative line away from Reese, so he would have just one ballot line in November, the Republican line, when running against incumbent Democratic Mayor Annette Iafallo.

Stojkovski did not spend money and he did not campaign, Koziol said.

Were supporting Annette Iafallo, Koziol said, explaining the reasoning behind the strategy on Stojkovskis candidacy.

He praised Reese and the campaign he ran.

He did a great job, Koziol said. He got 100 votes, normally thats enough to win.

Mohr said the final canvass of the votes will start Thursday.

We dont expect any race to take more than day, he said.
Professor Smart Sarpong, a Senior Research Fellow of the Kumasi Technical University, has commended the National Democratic Congress (NDC) for winning the Assin North by-election.



The Assin North by-election, held on Tuesday, June 27, was seen to be a critical election to decide which party would control the country's legislature since if the New Patriotic Party had won, they would have widened the majority gap in the Legislative House.



But things didn't turn out the way the ruling party had expected as their candidate, Charles Opoku, lost the by-election by polling 12630 votes representing 42.15% while the National Democratic Congress' candidate, James Gyakye Quayson polled 17245 votes representing 57.56% to clinch victory.



Speaking on Peace FM's "Kokrokoo" morning show, Prof. Smart Sarpong lauded the party stating they upped their game during the by-election unlike their conduct in the 2020 general elections.



He applauded them for having a well-planned collation process in the Assin North by-election and encouraged them to replicate their good works in the 2024 general elections.



He appealed to the party not to repeat the mistakes they made during the 2020 elections, stressing "they should improve on the collation process. We plead with them that, for 2024, they should be able to complete their collation. It shouldn't be that they could do 5 Regions and their system crashed. No!"



Watch video below





Source: Ameyaw Adu Gyamfi/Peacefmonline.com/Ghana









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The Member of Parliament for Yendi, Alhaji Farouk Aliu Mahama has donated a brand new Mitsubishi pickups to Dr. Mahamudu Bawumia to support the 2024 presidential campaign of the Vice President.



Dr. Bawumia is tipped to emerge as the next flagbearer of the NPP for the 2024 elections and with campaign activities intensifying, Farouk Aliu Mahama is donating the high-performing vehicle to support the campaign.



The vehicle is to support operational activities of the Bawumia 2024 Campaign in the eastern corridor of the country which includes the Yendi, Bimbila, Zabzugu, Wulensi, Kpandai constituencies, among others.



The Yendi MP has already branded the vehicle, brandishing it with pictures of Dr. Bawumia and a campaign slogan "Next To Lead" boldly written on the cars.



Farouk Aliu Mahama is one of the most formidable northern MPs, having turned the Yendi constituency into a fortress for the NPP by winning the last two elections by emphatic margins.



He has vowed to use his influence together with other MPs to support and ensure decisive victory for Dr. Bawumia in the upcoming NPP Primaries.

Source: Peacefmonline.com/Ghana









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Ghanaian-Nigerian musician, Mz Wakili has released her latest single, "Ali," which is dedicated to her late father Hon. Aliyu Anthony Wakili, captures the hearts of her fans.



The song "Ali" a heartfelt reggae balled produced by Gomez Beat at Dansoman is engaging and demonstrates her special knack for fusing Afrobeat and Jamaican elements into a sound that is both new and timeless.



Mz Wakili, a rising star in the Ghanaian music industry, uses her unique style to pay homage to her father.

The lyrics are an emotional tribute to her dad's life, and it has resonated with fans of the artist.



Jennifer Wakili, better known by her stage name Mz Wakili, is perfectly paired with the lyrics, creating a stunning and extraordinarily emotional tune that is likely to move anyone who hears it.



Speaking in an interview with the Herald Newspaper, she said her musical range, extends to afrobeat, dancehall, hip-hop, and reggae.



The single is available on all major streaming platforms.



The rising star has promised to release more songs in the coming months, and fans can expect more hits like "Ali" from the talented artist.



Mz Wakili, 27 years-old, was born in Kaduna, Nigeria to the late Hon. Aliyu Anthony Wakili and Mrs. Eunice Wakili's raised equally in both Ghana and Nigeria, is quickly establishing herself as one of the most promising up-and-coming musicians in Ghana and the rest of Africa.



Listeners can stream and download "Ali" on all major music platforms, including Spotify, Apple Music and YouTube.

Meanwhile, the management of the artist, has announced that there are other four hit tracks which will be released on July 14, 2023 that can be stream and downloaded on music platforms.



The four hit tracks includes; Fiesta produced by Datbeatgod, Away produced by Gomez Beatz, Sika also produced by Ivan Beatx as well as well as Enemies also produced by Datbeatgod.

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BALTIMORE  Gunfire erupted at a block party in Baltimore on Sunday  killing two people, wounding 28 and leaving an extensive crime scene that marred the U.S. holiday weekend, police said. Three of the wounded were in critical condition and more than a dozen were under 18.

The shooting took place just after 12:30 a.m. when at least two people opened fire at a block party in the Brooklyn Homes area in the southern part of the city, said Richard Worley, Baltimores acting police commissioner. No arrests had been made by late afternoon. Worley said it wasnt clear if the shooting was targeted or random.

The shooting comes amid gatherings around the country leading up to the July Fourth holiday. Elsewhere, a shooting in Kansas left seven people with gunshot wounds and two more victims hospitalized after being trampled as people rushed out of a nightclub early Sunday morning, police there said.

The violence in Baltimore occurred as federal prosecutors there this week touted their efforts to reduce violent crime in the city. Police have reported nearly 130 homicides and close to 300 shootings so far this year, though thats down from the same time last year. Authorities have vowed to crack down aggressively on repeat violent offenders.

Nine of Sundays victims were transported by ambulance and 20 walked into area hospitals with injuries from the shooting, Worley said. Nine remained hospitalized Sunday afternoon.

An 18-year-old woman was found dead at the scene and a 20-year-old man was pronounced dead at a hospital shortly after, police said.

I want those who are responsible to hear me, and hear me very clearly, Mayor Brandon Scott said at the scene. We will not stop until we find you, and we will find you. Until then, I hope that every single breath you take, that you think about the lives that you took, think about the lives that you impacted here tonight.

Scott asked anyone with information to come forward to assist investigators locate the cowards who were responsible for the shooting.

Gov. Wes Moore said his heart breaks for these victims, their families, and the Baltimore community that is coping with the loss.

Maryland has had enough of watching gun violence continue to ravage our state and our nation, Moore said in a statement. The fact that these horrific shootings continue to take place is abominable. We as a state will continue to do everything we can to prevent senseless acts of violence like the one we saw last night.

Authorities said the crime scene was extensive and that it took some time for detectives to work it.

Hours after the shooting, a number of officers remained working behind police tape amid densely packed two-story housing blocks. Folding tables and plastic cups were scattered on the street, apparently left behind when people ran from the gunshots.

Lakell Nelson said there had been several false alarms of people mistaking the sounds of fireworks for gunfire earlier in the night while she was at the block party. The actual shooting started as she was getting to her car.

The shots were just going on and on and on, she said.

Thats when two young women approached her and said theyd been shot, with one woman showing how a bullet had gone through her shorts.

Nelson said she told the women to get in the car and she sped through red lights to get to the nearest hospital.

When I pulled up to the door of the hospital, my car was almost getting ready to be inside the hospital, because I was determined to get those babies in that hospital, Nelson said.

A police union official said in an email Sunday there were no officers specifically assigned to the gathering.

In this photo released by the Baltimore Police Department, police tape cordons off the area of a mass shooting incident in the Southern District of Baltimore, Maryland, early Sunday, July 2, 2023.AP

There were only three officers assigned to the Brooklyn area of Baltimore Citys Southern District. This is a large area, and to police it safely and effectively you need about seven to eight officers per shift, said Mike Mancuso, president of the Baltimore City Fraternal Order of Police Lodge 3.

Mancuso said about 2,800 officers are needed to effectively police the city, but staffing is down to about 2,100.

Worley said Sunday afternoon that the department hadnt been aware in advance that the event was happening, and he said organizers hadnt received a permit. He said that the department would examine its response.

Julio Cortez and Holly Ramer of The Associated Press wrote this story.

Ramer reported from Concord, New Hampshire. Kimberlee Kruesi in Nashville, Tennessee, contributed to this report.

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Cousins Maine Lobster is bringing iconic New England foods to central Pennsylvania.

The franchise, which specializes in lobster rolls and is led by Cindy and Peter Sztankovits, is expanding in Pennsylvania with service from Harrisburg to Bloomsburg and Reading.

The truck is scheduled to participate 5-9 p.m. today (July 3) at the Lower Paxton Township Fireworks and Food Trucks at Koons Park.

The couple joined Cousins Maine Lobster in 2019 with their first food truck in Trenton, New Jersey, and Philadelphia and expanded with a second truck in northern New Jersey and Allentown. They now operate three trucks.

We wanted to establish a deeper presence throughout Pennsylvania and this expansion has allowed us to increase our ability to expose more consumers to the Cousins Maine Lobster brand and lobster rolls, said Cindy Sztankovits.

She added that last year they visited Harrisburg with one of the trucks and the response was incredible.

Cousins Maine Lobster co-founder Jim Tselikis said the Sztankovitses have been focused on bringing the concept to cities in their territory and reaching smaller towns.

The mobility of our food trucks creates an opportunity to provide the best lobster in the world to guests in markets where lobster or seafood traditionally would not be available. And as a result, they have built a loyal following and great demand, he said.

Tselikis founded Cousins Maine Lobster with his cousin, Sabin Lomac, with the shared vision of bringing high-quality Maine lobster to other parts of the country. They opened the first truck in Los Angeles in 2012.

A few months later, an appearance on the hit television show Shark Tank netted them a partnership with investor Barbara Corcoran. By 2016, they reached $20 million in sales, according to CNBC.

The trucks operate in more than 40 cities and sell iconic Maine lobster rolls and a Connecticut version served warm with butter and lemon as well as lobster bisque and New England clam chowder and a lobster tail with tots.

Along with participating in food truck events, Cousins Maine Lobster trucks are available for weddings, work functions and other catered events.

Follow Cousins Maine Lobsters Facebook page for events including upcoming dates on July 14 at Capital City Mall in Lower Allen Township and July 21 at Colonial Park Mall in Lower Paxton Township.

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The Fourth of July is tomorrow, meaning fireworks booms, booze, and barbecue.

And there appears to be one dish that Pennsylvanians are looking to enjoy on the holiday more than any other.

YorkTest  a health and wellness company that offers food sensitivity and intolerance tests [that] are designed to empower you to better understand, take control of, and optimize your health and wellbeing  conducted and published a study which found the most popular Independence Day dish of each state.

Researchers did this by analyzing a years worth of Google Keyword Planner data to see which of the holidays recipes had the largest search volume. All of the data was then broken up by location for final results.

Pennsylvanias favorite Fourth of July dish was found to be portobello mushrooms, which seems to be the most popular dish nationwide by a long shot.

While holiday favorites hamburgers and BBQ chicken both saw a modest increase in searches, the food with the biggest rise in searches across America (an average 181% higher than last year), and the most popular dish to be served on the Fourth of July is portobello mushrooms, the study elaborates.

Adds the study: Portobello mushrooms were the favorite dish of 41 states, and a possible reason for this sharp increase could be due to more people wanted to cater for vegetarians and vegans. Smoked salmon salad also gets an honorable mention due to its wealth of protein and heart-healthy omega-3 fatty acids.

Whatever youre eating on the Fourth, have a good one!
LACONIA, N.H. (AP)  A car crashed into a busy New Hampshire restaurant and injured more than a dozen patrons inside, authorities said.

The vehicle struck the Looney Bin Bar & Grill a little after 12:40 p.m. Sunday and came to a stop well inside, pinning one man inside the bathroom, restaurant owner Michelle Watson said.

Everybody jumped right in and helped, she told WHDH-TV. Everybody jumped in to make sure everybody was okay.

Police Chief Matt Canfield said the crash involved three vehicles: One was making a left turn out of a parking lot across the street while a second was in the center lane. The driver making the turn didnt see a third oncoming vehicle, and the ensuing collision sent that third vehicle crashing into the restaurant.

Emergency responders transported 14 people to area hospitals with non-life-threatening medical issues including significant lower leg injuries, cuts and bruises. Another 20 people were evaluated at the scene by emergency personnel but did not require hospital treatment, the Laconia Fire Department said.

There were a lot of people inside due to it being lunchtime and a holiday weekend, Fire Capt. Chad Vaillancourt said in the statement.

The building, which is on Highway 3 north of Concord, sustained significant damage.

I dont know when were going to be able to open again, but we will, Watson said.
The U.S. Department of Labor has awarded a $2.9 million grant to the Pennsylvania Department of Labor and Industry.

The award will help to fund examinations of the outcomes and effectiveness of state education and workforce programs in Pennsylvania.

The U.S. Department of Labor also awarded $2.9 million grants to the Colorado Department of Labor and Employment, the Connecticut Department of Labor and the Virginia Community College System.

The program will be administered by the U.S. Department of Labors Employment and Training Administration. The Workforce Data Quality Initiative grants will allow the states to develop or enhance databases to analyze programs that provide workforce training and employment services.

The grants will support the states collection and analysis of data to gain a comprehensive view of how jobseekers obtain employment through workforce education and training programs, the U.S. Department of Labor, said in a news release. Funds will also enable states to identify labor market changes and design delivery services that improve employment opportunities, especially for people from underserved and underrepresented populations.
Officials have released the name of the 27-year-old man who died when his vehicle crashed into security bollards early Sunday on the Pennsylvania Capitol grounds.

The cause of death of the vehicles driver John Anthony Nazario-Ortiz, was determined to be accidental from multiple traumatic injuries, according to a spokeswoman for the Dauphin County coroners office and Troy Thompson, a spokesman for the Department of General Services, which oversees the Capitol police department..

Ortizs address is not known at this time, said Jennifer Fitch, the coroners office spokeswoman.

The cause of the 1:40 a.m. Sunday crash remains under investigation by Pennsylvania Capitol police, Thompson said.

The vehicle was traveling north on Fourth Street, crossed Walnut Street and continued north on a one-way southbound service road that leads under the Capitol building when it struck the set of bollards that block traffic from entering the exit roadway.

The area was marked on Monday by a temporary memorial consisting of balloons, flowers, a cross and an empty bottle of pomegranate liqueur. Small pieces of debris from the crash remained scattered in the area. Thompson said the bollards, which are lowered to allow vehicles through, sustained no damage and are functioning normally.

* This post was updated to include Nazario-Ortizs full name and age.

Jan Murphy may be reached at jmurphy@pennlive.com. Follow her on Twitter at @JanMurphy.
A Ligonier Valley police officer is accused of shooting and killing an unidentified man Sunday, according to news sources.

The incident took place at a Gravel Hill Road home in Westmoreland County around 3:50 p.m., when authorities responded to a domestic call that escalated to a deadly shooting, according to reports from WTAE and Triblive.

The identity of the man shot and killed has yet to be released.

State police and Westmoreland County detectives are investigating the incident, while the district attorneys office looks into all officer-involved shootings. In the meantime, according to reports, Gravel Hill Road, near Route 711 in Ligonier, will remain closed.

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Buffalo  and Western New York as a whole  has long been touted as a great place to settle down, buy a home and raise children.

But as birth and fertility rates continue to decline nationwide, Western New York has been no exception.

In fact, the regions birth rates  a measure of live births per 1,000 people  are on average below the states rate of 10.7 births, according to 2020 data from the New York State Department of Healths Vital Statistics.

Nearly 1,100 fewer babies were born in the eight counties of Western New York in 2020, compared with 2010, according to that same data.

Erie County, which experienced a population increase for the first time in 70 years, has the 18th-lowest total fertility rate in the state, according to data from Cornell Universitys Program on Applied Demographics.

Total fertility rate refers to the average number of live births a woman would have during her reproductive years if she followed the existing patterns of age-specific fertility in the given year.

Erie Countys total fertility rate of 1.56 is below the state average of 1.63.

However, that is not the case for all of Western New Yorks eight counties. Cattaraugus County, for example, has the 10th-highest fertility rate in the state at 1.92 live births per 1,000 women.

Nationally, birth and fertility rates have steadily declined since the 1970s, as people are having fewer children or waiting to have children later in life, and teenage pregnancy rates have dramatically fallen in the past 30 years.

That is a trend LuAnne Brown, the current CEO of the Buffalo Prenatal Perinatal Network, saw during her 30-year career as an OBGYN nurse at the former Women and Childrens Hospital of Buffalo.

We saw women that, for whatever reason, got married later, Brown said. Maybe theyre pursuing their careers, but theyre having their kids later.

As women begin having their first child later in life, they typically have fewer children, said Leslie Reynolds, a research analyst at Cornell Universitys Program on Applied Demographics.

After you get to a certain age, there are only so many children you could have, Reynolds said.

And as the cost of living continues to rise, many households need to have two working parents to meet their families needs, Reynolds said.

Rob Leteste, business intelligence and workforce manager at Invest Buffalo Niagara, pointed to a stagnant child care industry in Western New York as a possible factor in the regions declining births.

According to data collected by Invest Buffalo Niagara, the child care industry locally has not seen much job growth, and the median wage for a child care worker continues to be below what is needed to sustain a family.

Which is interesting, because what we hear is the demand for child care is very high, Leteste said.

Migration offsets birth declines

In Buffalo and Erie County, specifically, declining birth rates are being offset by an increase in international immigration, Leteste said.

Beginning in 2017 and continuing through 2020, the Buffalo Niagara region saw more deaths than births, according to Invest Buffalo Niagaras Labor Market Assessment. But the influx of refugees and immigrants to the City of Buffalo and its suburbs counterbalanced the declining number of births.

While Erie Countys more-rural neighboring counties have higher total fertility rates, those areas are the ones experiencing greater population loss. According to the 2020 census, Allegany, Cattaraugus and Chautauqua counties lost a combined 13,000 people.

46 more asylum-seekers arrive in Western New York; additional arrivals are expected Since the first two busloads of asylum-seekers came from New York City to the Buffalo region Friday morning, two more buses of migrants have made their way here. Officials expect asylum-seekers will continue to come in a small but steady stream.

Erie County has been successful in creating an ecosystem thats like a magnet for welcoming international immigrants and refugees, Leteste said. In June, dozens of asylum-seekers, many from Congo and Venezuela, arrived in Erie County.

If you look at the (population) increase for Erie County, in particular, (international migration is) the reason we have the increase. Full stop, he said.

While much of the immigration in Western New York is concentrated within Erie County, the city of Niagara Falls is becoming a popular place for Ukrainian refugees, and Chautauqua County is launching its own talent attraction organization to entice young workers to relocate to the area.

One of the goals of Invest Buffalo Niagara is to attract 25- to 34-year-old professionals to the region. This is the same demographic that is of prime age for having children.

The regions 25- to 34-year-old demographic has grown by 18.1% from 2010 to 2020, compared to a 13.2% increase in the U.S. as a whole. Retaining the thousands of college graduates in the region would further add to the the growing 25- to 34-year-old population and could slow the declining birth and fertility rates.
Utility workers with Peoples Natural Gas Co. were forced to halt construction of a gas pipeline in Sharpsburg, Allegheny County, recently after human remains were uncovered at a work site in the borough, according to news sources.

The incident took place on June 20, when workers and contractors discovered the remains four to five feet below Short Canal Street while doing excavation work. Once unearthed, they ceased digging and immediately called police, according to KDKA.

The gas company workers were said to have been digging on private property along Short Canal Street as part of a larger, long-term project to replace old pipelines, Triblive reported.

Police officers collected the bones and took them to the Allegheny County crime lab. The Medical Examiners office deemed the skeletal remains human on June 23.

The medical examiners office says it is possible the site is part of a Native American burial ground. As a result, it is going to consult with experts in anthropology and archaeology to help determine the age and origin of the remains.

It will take at least several weeks before updates will be released.

County forensic crews spent an entire day searching the area for more remains, and investigators did indeed find more bones, but they were very small fragments.

You know the first settlers here were probably Seneca Indians, so were not sure what we came across, Police Chief Tom Stelitano said to KDKA. Maybe some history.

Since the remains might be Native American, the State Historic Preservation office of the Pennsylvania Historical and Museum Commission recommends leaving the remains where they were found so that groups that may be culturally affiliated with or may be lineal descendants of the deceased can be consulted, Triblive reported.

The Medical Examiners said it will take all measures to respect and protect the property and remains, according to both reports.

Read More:
* This story has been updated with the drivers name and age

Prayer candles, a cross bearing the word Family, flowers, an empty bottle of pomegranate liqueur, and a cluster of colorful mylar balloons  two heart-shaped - tied to a sign post serve as a memorial to the individual who was killed when their vehicle drove into the bollards on the Pennsylvania Capitol grounds in Harrisburg early Sunday morning.

Capitol police are continuing their investigation into the cause of the 1:40 a.m. crash, said Troy Thompson, a spokesman for the Department of General Services, which oversees that police department.

The driver, who has yet to be identified by authorities, was pronounced dead on the scene, Thompson said.

It is definitely a tragic situation, Thompson said.

He said police are working with the Dauphin County coroners office to determine the cause of death. A spokeswoman for the coroners office was unable to provide any further information at the time of this post.

The vehicle was traveling north on Fourth Street, crossed Walnut Street and continued north on a one-way southbound service road that leads under the Capitol building when it struck the bollards that block traffic from entering the exit roadway.

While small pieces of debris from the crash were left scattered on that road on Monday, the bollards themselves appeared to be in working order on Monday morning.

Jan Murphy may be reached at jmurphy@pennlive.com. Follow her on Twitter at @JanMurphy.
The Jewish Federation of Greater Harrisburg has named a new leader.

David Cohen has been named president and CEO.

He has more than 25 years of leadership experience. In addition to his recent work with the Jewish Community Relations Council in Boston, Massachusetts and as Jewish Community Relations Council director in Richmond, Virginia, he has served in a number of other nonprofit positions.

He has served as an administrator with the Shlenker School of Congregation Beth Israel in Houston, Texas and as the director of congregational learning at Temple Sinai Congregation in Toronto, Ontario. He previously worked as the director of Israel advocacy for the Jewish Federation of Greater Philadelphia, and was the associate director of the Anti-Defamation League in Boston. He was also the regional youth director at the JCCs of Greater Boston in Newton, Massachusetts.

READ MORE: New synagogue opens on the Carlisle Pike

Cohens hire follows a year-long national CEO search. He will join the Jewish Federation in mid-August.

I am excited to meet with even more community leaders and a wide spectrum of community members to hear what theyd like the future of Harrisburg to look like, Cohen said in the news release. The Jewish Federation is already a great convener of different segments of the community and there are amazing people in leadership of the Jewish community - to take that to the next level is the goal, with even more support for learning, community, and connectivity.

Cohen follows Arnie Sohinki, who has led the organization in an interim role since last summer.

The Jewish Federation is located at 3301 N. Front St. in Susquehanna Township and is relocating to the former Dixon University Center at 2986 N. Second St. in Harrisburg later this year.
State police shot and killed a man in western Pennsylvania after a vehicle chase late Sunday.

The chase started at about 11:55 p.m. Sunday after the unidentified man drove away from a trooper trying to stop him in Center Township, Indiana County, according to a state police news release.

State police said the chase covered several miles and that troopers deployed hollow spike strips to blow out the mans tires and stop him, but he continued driving.

It was then that there was an encounter on Route 119 and police shot the man, who died at the scene. No troopers were injured.

The mans identity was being withheld until his next of kin is notified.

Police also did not specify how many troopers were involved in the shooting.

State police said a major case team, the Indiana Countys district attorneys office and the Indiana County coroners office are investigating the incident.
A Pittsburgh area woman was found guilty of first-degree murder Monday in the torture and starvation death of her husbands 3-year-old daughter in 2020.

An Allegheny County judge also found Laura Ramriez, 31, of Oakmont, Allegheny County, guilty of aggravated assault, endangering the welfare of a child, unlawful restraint and conspiracy to commit homicide, according to the Pittsburgh Tribune-Review.

Ramriez was found not guilty of involuntary deviate sexual intercourse with a child, the paper reported.

In May, Ramriezs husband, Jose Salazar-Ortiz Sr., 32, also of Oakmont, was found guilty of third-degree murder, aggravated assault, endangering the welfare of a child and conspiracy in the death of his daughter, Bella Seachrist, the Trib reported.

Salazar-Ortiz Sr. is scheduled to be sentenced on Aug. 8. Ramriez was being held in the Allegheny County Jail awaiting sentencing.

WPXI-TV reported last month that police have said Ramriez abused Bella because the child was a result of her husbands affair. The Trib reported that the couple have three children of their own.

According to the Trib, Bella died in June 2020 after authorities said she suffered constant abuse and starvation. The child was not allowed to interact with the other children in the home and she was forced to sleep on a cot in a hallway instead of a bed, the paper reported, citing a criminal complaint.

Police said Ramriez beat Bella daily, tied the child to a staircase with shoelaces, hit her with a wooden spoon and forced her to spend extended time in a closet. The child was forced to sit on her training potty for so long that her feet swelled and turned purple, police said.

Bella, police said, was also forced to stand facing a wall with her arms in the air and head tilted up, and was not allowed to put her head down.

At the time of her death, Bella weighed just 29 pounds and measured 35 inches long.

The Trib reported that the cause of death was determined to be malnutrition and failure to thrive, as well as abuse and neglect with evidence of blunt force trauma and extreme sexual abuse.

Alexis Herrera, a 23-year-old from North Carolina who is Ramriezs sister and who lived in the house at the time, will go to trial in January on homicide and other charges in the case, the Trib said.
News / Local

by Staff reporter

A candidate who was barred from standing in Zanu PF primaries in Gutu West before deciding to stand as an independent has died after his vehicle fell off a bridge.Christopher Mutonhori Rwodzi, a retired soldier and husband to tourism deputy minister Barbra Rwodzi, was travelling to Harare from Gutu on Thursday night.Pictures of the accident scene showed the Toyota Prado broke through side barriers of a bridge between Chivhu and Harare before plunging into the dry riverbed below and landing on its roof.Details of what caused the accident were not immediately available. The Masvingo Mirror, quoting Rwodzi's father, said the politician died at the scene.Although running as an independent candidate for the Gutu West National Assembly seat, Rwodzi's vehicle was emblazoned with a picture of Zanu PF leader Emmerson Mnangagwa. A sticker on the vehicle urged voters to "Vote Christopher Mutonhori Rwodzi  Independent Candidate 4ED."Rwodzi retired from the military with the rank of colonel.Zanu PF held its primary elections in April, leaving the party deeply divided as losing candidates claimed the elections had been "rigged" in favour of preferred candidates by an organisation called Forever Associates of Zimbabwe (FAZ).To contain the fallout, Zanu PF threatened losing candidates who ran as independents with expulsion.Rwodzi was prevented from running in the primaries, allegedly over pending disciplinary issues.Zimbabweans vote in general elections on August 23.Point of impact  The vehicle plunged more than five meters down from a bridgeMangled metal  Christopher Mutonhori Rwodzi's vehicle after bridge fall
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Descripcion

Important company in the medical devises industry is looking for a THERAPY SALES SPECIALIST based in Barcelona.





Key Responsabilities



Increase awareness in your territory by visiting hospitals and speaking to physicians about the risk of SCA to promote prescriptions (new and existing customer base).

Develop and provide upon request an action plan for targeting new customers where awareness is low.

Create a trustful and long-lasting network of potential prescribers.

Planning and execution of product trainings and introductions for physicians and hospital staff.

Reporting of activities and progress in regular intervals.

Patient support services including patient fittings and technical support hotline.

Monitoring of patients in an online network for discussion with physicians.

Participate, network and advertise on relevant national as well as international Cardiology conferences as necessary.

Participation in product and sales training in preparation for your sales and marketing activities.

Support in therapy development in other regions across Spain, when and where needed, is also expected for this role.

Close collaboration with Administration, Sales and Marketing Dept.
The $1,100 PokerNews Cup Mystery Bounty saw the largest tournament turnout in Golden Nugget, Las Vegas history. A field size of 2,331 saw the initial guarantee smashed with a final prize pool of $2,261,070. From that starting field, to the 292 that returned to play yesterday, to just nine players all of whom are looking for the PokerNews Cup title, the first place prize of $218,605, and the $50,000 bounty that is still in play waiting to be claimed by one of the nine.

Leading the way with nearly half of the chips in play is Argentinas Felipe Olivieri, who sits with 30,825,000. Olivieri has been a dominant force in the latter half of play in the tournament, knocking out player after player and amassing more chips than any other player. Olivieris best live cash prior to today was $69,100 from the 2019 PSPC, but today he has the opportunity to top that score.

Sitting behind him in the counts is Slovenias Vid Zagar who sits with 12,275,000. Zagar has already collected one $100,000 bounty, so his profit at the end of the tournament is already guaranteed higher than most of his competitors. Zagar has a number of cashes to his name already, with his biggest lifetime score sitting at $52,105, which came last December. A deep run here today could change that and give him his first PokerNews Cup victory.

Third is Forrest Raleigh who starts the day with 7,800,000. The WSOP Circuit regular holds a number of cashes to his name, with a career best score for a runner up finish in a WSOPC Main Event for $167,637. A major title has eluded him thus far and he looks to change that today. The well-dressed player sits in third and eliminated the final player of last night to bring the field to the final table.

Final Table Seat Draw

Table Seat Name Country Chip Count Big Blinds 1 1 Forrest Raleigh United States 7,800,000 26 1 2 Vid Zagar Slovenia 12,275,000 41 1 3 Johnny Kelly United Kingdom 4,075,000 14 1 4 Humberto Lopes Galindo Portugal 5,000,000 17 1 5 Eduardo Amaral Silva Brazil 3,100,000 10 1 6 Kyle Gross United States 1,750,000 6 1 7 Tim Garles United States 2,925,000 10 1 8 Felipe Olivieri Argentina 30,825,000 103 1 9 Kunal Patni India 2,675,000 9

Winning one mystery bounty tournament is hard enough, winning two would be almost unheard of in its short lifespan in the poker world. Humberto Lopes Galindo looks to try to win two after his career best win for $259,789 in the EPT Paris Mystery Bounty. Sitting with 5,000,000, Galindos experience in this particular format could prove useful as he continues to make a name for himself on the poker tournament circuit.

Johnny Kelly sits as the last remaining player out of the U.K., sitting with 4,075,000. Kelly has already secured his biggest lifetime cash with the final table today, bounties notwithstanding. With a couple of cashes secured at the WSOP this summer, Kelly looks to continue having success on this side of the pond in this event.

Online crusher Eduardo Amaral Silva follows in the counts with 3,100,000. The Brazilian boasted the loudest and most active rail late into the night and his online prowess is known far and wide, with his best recorded online cash sitting at $330,433. He has recently seen some success in the live field with a deep run at EPT Paris for his best live cash of $19,930 and he looks to carry that success on into the summer.

Midwestern poker legend Tim Garles enters the final table with 2,925,000. The Iowa resident has a WSOPC ring to his name as well as many cashes around the United States to spice up his resume. A win here would add nicely to his career and he holds more unclaimed bounties than the rest of the field, giving him a shot for the $50,000 bounty.

Vid Zagar has already pulled the 100k bounty and sits at the table second in chips.

Indias Kunal Patni has the most lifetime earnings on Hendon Mob at this final table. With $766,531 on record, he brings a wealth of experience to the final table, having recently final tabled the $3,000 Freezeout at the WSOP for $73,225. He currently sits with 2,675,000, but a double up could put him into contention for the top three spots.

Finally there is Kyle Gross who sits with 1,750,000. Gross spent much of the previous day grinding out the shorter stack, but was able to secure many pay jumps through careful maneuvering and patience. Gross has now doubled his lifetime Hendon Mob earnings and will be looking to secure his first major live win.

Play will begin at 2 p.m. on the livestream with players returning to 150,000/300,000 blinds and a 300,000 big blind ante. Play will continue until a new PokerNews Cup champion has risen. Stay tuned to PokerNews for all updates regarding this tournament.
After the dust settled on Day 2 of Event #70: $400 The Colossus at the 2023 World Series of Poker at Horseshoe and Paris Las Vegas, 80 players reminded that will all return for their shot at glory.

The talented group of players will all be competing for the coveted WSOP gold bracelet and $501,120 top prize. Currently all players are guaranteed $5,930 for their efforts but each pay jump going forward will account for a significant amount of buy-ins compared to the $400 entry fee.

The current chip leader going into Day 3 is Jesse Kertland, who bagged the big stack on Day 2 and will come into battle with 26,150,000. Others at the top of the leaderboard include Colin Robinson (22,300,000) and Darrick Arreola (19,750,000) to round out the top three.

Top Ten Chip Counts

Rank Player Country Chip Count Big Blinds 1 Jesse Kertland United States 26,150,000 65 2 Colin Robinson United States 22,300,000 56 3 Darrick Arreola United States 19,750,000 49 4 Michael Halevy United States 16,975,000 42 5 Toshimasa Sakato Japan 15,925,000 40 6 Laurence Samet United States 15,625,000 39 7 Francesco Micucci Italy 14,725,000 37 8 Mitchell Smith United States 12,475,000 31 9 Erdenbold Begzjav Mongolia 12,400,000 31 10 Moshe Refaelowitz United Kingdom 12,400,000 31

The chances of this years colossus crowning a first time bracelet winner are looking good. Currently there are only four bracelet winners left in the field. James Dempsey (8,275,000), John Gorsuch (4,075,000), Jason Wheeler (2,375,000), and Ashkan Razavi (1,525,000). However, it is totally possible that we may see another story of a two-time bracelet winner being crowned after play concludes. Only time will tell.

Jason Wheeler

Players who found a bag on Day 2 will return on Monday at 10 a.m. local time and play down to a winner with a dinner break time to be determined. They will be playing 40 minute levels and have 15-minute breaks every three levels. Play will resume at Level 33 with 200,000/400,000/400,000 blinds.

Stay tuned in to PokerNews to catch it as it happens live from the tournament floor.
Aiken, SC (29801)

Today

Sun and clouds mixed. A stray shower or thunderstorm is possible. High 94F. Winds W at 10 to 15 mph..

Tonight

Partly cloudy. A stray shower or thunderstorm is possible. Low 73F. Winds WNW at 5 to 10 mph.
Hundreds of Aiken residents may know Neel Flannagan for his decades of work as an automotive mechanic, largely at Aiken Technical College, and more recently, the Virginia native has focused more and more attention on such topics as Cowpens, Camden and "Charles Town"  crucial South Carolina sites from the Revolutionary War.

The retiree, who lives "out on the other side of Montmorenci," is president of an Aiken-based chapter of Sons of the American Revolution. He came on board with the SAR in early 2019, and has traveled around much of South Carolina and Georgia over the past few years in celebrating history, especially with the approach of the revolution's 250th anniversary.

His SAR chapter is named for Henry Laurens, described on a National Park Service webpage as a man whose "story is at the core of colonial South Carolina and wrought with intrigue, a conflicting moral compass, family, loyalty, and a fierce passion for American independence.

Flannagan's plans for Independence Day include being in Barnwell to help unveil a historical marker near the community's airport, in partnership with the Daughters of the American Revolution.

The subject matter of 18th-century America is familiar territory, with Flannagan being a Jamestowne Society member, as one "descended from early settlers who lived or held colonial government positions in Jamestowne, Virginia prior to 1700, or who invested in its establishment," as described on the society's website.

"Those people were tough," he said, recalling one ancestor who picked up the nickname of "Wash Tub" after his mother saved him in an Indian raid by hiding him under a wash tub. Another ancestor, from the same incident, became known from childhood as "Potato Hole" as he hid in an area where potatoes were stored, all while the father of the family (a doctor from England) was being killed and the mother and their servant fought off the Indians, using a musket of the type primarily known as a "Brown Bess."

"History is important, and factual history is important, so we try to get the historical accuracy out there," he said. "If we can pass on a little bit of the historically correct information to the younger people, then we've done our job."

Tarleton Woodson is Flannagan's known connection to America's colonial days, and the Aiken resident's family tree also includes an extremely high-profile character from about a century later: Jesse James, recalled by some as a folk hero and others as a notorious criminal.

A strong local connection is with Edgefield County Historical Society's founder, Agatha Woodson (who established the organization in 1939) and one of her daughters Hortense Woodson, the society's longtime president. He shares the Woodson connection with Edgefield resident Bettis Rainsford Sr., a former president of the South Carolina Historical Society and current historian of the county society.

Another Flannagan connection is with Jane Randolph Jefferson  not a household name, but hugely prominent in being the mother of the country's third president, also known as the primary author of the Declaration of Independence.

Flannagan's ancestors came to Virginia in 1619, and he is a 12th-generation Virginian and saw plenty of the eastern United States by the time he was ready for kindergarten.

He was born in Charlottesville and his first birthday found him living in nearby Waynesboro, Virginia. Flannagan's dad, as a research chemist, was in demand, so Flannagan's second birthday had the family living in the Chicago area, and his third took place in Wilmington, Delaware. The fourth occurred in Aiken, "and I grew up here," Flannagan recalled.

One of his closest friends, Graniteville resident Ted Walker, is of a similar mindset with regard to American history. Walker, an Air Force veteran, is the current president of South Carolina's SAR, with responsibility for helping guide 21 chapters throughout the state.

As a 1967 graduate of Aiken High School, he barely missed racial integration in the local school system, and went on to serve in the Army National Guard, which led to him being personally acquainted with at least two of the men whose names are on Aiken's war memorial for Vietnam, including "one real good friend."

Flannagan was a motor sergeant, which meant he was responsible for maintaining vehicles' condition and ensuring they stayed ready for battle.

"He's a master mechanic  probably one of the best mechanics that you can possibly ever meet  and his specialty was transmissions," Walker recalled.

"I was fortunate I didn't see any action," Flannagan said, noting that he did not wind up being shipped overseas. His unit was also called up to serve in Operation Desert Storm, but "they stood us down," with combat ending in a matter of weeks.

He earned a bachelor's degree in industrial education at Clemson and then a Master of Education at the University of South Carolina, leading to 30 years (1977-2008) at Aiken Tech, where he led the automotive program and was particularly known for his expertise with automatic transmissions. Over the years, he also became a beekeeper, a frequent blood donor and a booster of such organizations as Molly's Militia and Christ Central.

"Automobiles have been my life," he said, noting that his herd at home includes such creations as a 1981 Porsche 911SC, a 1969 Ford Torino Cobra and his mother's 1966 Ford Galaxie convertible "that she bought new from Satcher."
News / Local

by Staff reporter

A Zimbabwe pregnant nurse bled to death at home more than four hours after she called for an ambulance, an inquest heard.Stabile Sibanda called 999 at 1.11am on July 23 last year and told the call handler she was having abdominal pain and thought she was having an ectopic pregnancy.South Central Ambulance Service (SCAS) was "very busy" and dealing with high levels of post-Covid staff sickness due to poor mental health, an inquest at Reading Coroner's Court heard.A private ambulance service called Phoenix was used, but the crew they dispatched did not include a trained paramedic.Phoenix technicians Kara Mathieson and Lee Brown arrived at Ms Sibanda's road in Ascot, Berkshire, two hours after the initial call at 3.11am.But could not locate her first-floor flat until 27 minutes later.The pregnant nurse bled to death at her home in Ascot, Berkshire ( Image: Facebook)The technicians said the 28-year-old was "combative and lashing out" on their arrival.Mr Brown said she was being "obstructive" by throwing herself on the floor as they tried to get her into the ambulance.They "very quickly ruled out" the possibility of an ectopic pregnancy and decided Ms Sibanda was on drugs and had been sexually assaulted, the coroner found.The Phoenix crew called the police at 4.36am for assistance in getting Ms Sibanda into the ambulance but she suffered a haemorrhage and was declared dead at 5.33am.Ms Mathieson denied knowing Ms Sibanda was having an ectopic pregnancy, telling the inquest Ms Sibanda had stated she last had sexual activity three years ago.A SCAS call handler had told Ms Mathieson the case was a suspected ectopic pregnancy, but she told the inquest "she was closing an ambulance door at the time" so did not hear the information.Mr Brown also told the inquest this week he did not know about the ectopic pregnancy, despite making a statement last year in which he admitted Ms Sibanda had told them she was having one.The Berkshire Coroner Heidi Connor said she was "deeply concerned" about the evidence given by the two Phoenix technicians."Sometimes we think about events, particularly stressful events and think about what we wish we had done", Mrs Connor said. "There are however stark differences in their statements."I find it likely that first crew were told by Ms Sibanda that she was having an ectopic pregnancy. The first crew remained blindsided by her difficult presentation and made assumptions about the likely cause."If they had been considering ectopic pregnancy, that would have focussed their minds more on getting her to hospital."Mrs Connor said the clinical governance lead at Phoenix had told the inquest there were no significant learning points which arose from Ms Sibanda's death."I was concerned to note the somewhat defensive approach taken", the coroner said."Those involved in contracting private providers were in attendance at the inquest and it is for them to consider whether they are sufficiently assured by the approach to learning taken by Phoenix."Ms Sibanda only lived a 20 minute drive away from the nearest hospital, but she would have needed to have been taken into surgery very quickly after reporting her condition, the coroner said.Therefore it was not possible to conclude the delays caused or contributed to Ms Sibanda's death and the coroner concluded she died of "natural causes".Ms Sibanda had come to the UK from Zimbabwe only a few weeks before her death to work as a nurse, Reading Coroners Court heard on Friday.
DirecTV subscribers lost access to 159 TV stations owned by Nexstar Media Group on July 2, including the Charleston region's NBC affiliate, after contract negotiations between the companies broke down.

The Dallas-based parent of WCBD-2 in Mount Pleasant said the satellite television service rejected an offer to extend their previous agreement to Oct. 31.

The blackout started Sunday at 7 p.m., during NBC's broadcast of a NASCAR race. The CW and NewsNation networks in Charleston also were affected, as was programming on Nexstar's WSPA-TV, the CBS affiliate in the Upstate.

It's unclear when the dispute will be resolved.

At issue is how much DirecTV pays for the rights to retransmit shows, news, sporting events and other programming that airs on traditional broadcast stations owned by companies like Nexstar.

The satellite service said in this round of negotiations it's facing an increase of "more than double the previous fees for the same content." It did not elaborate.

Irving Texas-based Nexstar said in a statement late Sunday it "remains hopeful that a resolution can be reached quickly."

DirecTV, which is majority-owned by AT&T, said it "will continue to work with Nexstar" to reach a deal.

"Most renewal agreements go off without a hitch," the pay-TV service told viewers who tried to tune into WCBD-TV late Sunday. "But every now and then we run into a snag like what we're experiencing with this Nexstar-owned station."

The dispute had not been resolved as of Monday afternoon.

In a similar contract renewal standoff four years ago, DirectTV subscribers weren't able to access programming on WCBD-TV and The CW for nearly two months in the summer of 2019.

The companies are already locking horns in court. Earlier this year, DirecTV filed a lawsuit saying Nexstar had violated antitrust law by driving up retransmission charges for stations broadcasting the four major networks. The complaint sought an order blocking Nexstar from allegedly colluding with two other companies during fee negotiations with the satellite TV service.
The new concept is the creation of local entrepreneur Howard Dozier, who is behind The Foundry, Comedy Zone, Crazy Mason Milkshake Bar and the upcoming Cowboy Up venue. Read moreHere's what's going into the Barley's space in downtown Greenville
Mable Owens Clarke, matriarch of the historic Soapstone Baptist Church in the rural Liberia community in Pickens County, was honored with the Governors Award by Gov. Henry McMaster at the 2023 South Carolina Historic Preservation Awards on June 23.

Clarke, a sixth-generation member at the historic Black church in a tiny area settled by formerly enslaved residents along a stretch of rolling hills, fields and forests with views of the Blue Ridge Escarpment, has spent decades of her life working to save the historic church and a 150-year-old cemetery on surrounding property.

The Governor's Award goes to someone who has demonstrated lifelong dedication to the preservation of historic buildings, structures or sites.

For years, Clarke organized a monthly fish fry fundraiser at Soapstone as a way to keep the churchs doors open as its membership aged and dwindled. She retired from the fish fry in 2021 but revived it again for a one-day event in April to repair storm damage to the church.

Now the church has been preserved for posterity and a Soapstone Preservation Endowment will help manage the property, which includes the church sanctuary and grounds, a one-room schoolhouse and the nearby cemetery.

The Governor's Award follows McMaster's awarding of the Order of the Palmetto to Clarke in 2022, the state's highest civilian honor.

Growing up, as a little Black girl in rural Pickens County, I never dreamed that one day I would have the chance to stand with the governor of my state and be recognized for anything, Clarke said. South Carolina played an important part in many events in our nations history. Some events which we should be justifiably be proud of, others we must recognize, record and never forget.

Since 1995, Preservation South Carolina, the South Carolina Department of Archives and History, and the Office of the Governor use the statewide awards to recognize residents who work to preserve, rehabilitate and interpret the states architectural and cultural heritage. A committee receives applications of nominees and decides on honorees in several categories.

Alongside Clarke, the 2023 awardees include:

Preservation Honor Awards

 Pelzer Presbyterian (Pelzer)

 Drayton Hall (Charleston)

 Hester Store (Easley)

 Spring Park Inn (Travelers Rest)

 Sullivan Hardware Warehouse (Anderson)

Stewardship Awards

 Harriet Barber House (Hopkins)

 Old Stone Church (Glenn Springs)

Preservation Service Awards

 "Drayton Hall Stories: A Place and Its People," by George W. McDaniel with McDaniel Consulting

 Dr. Alexandria Russell for African American Womens History Research and Documentation

 Greenwood County Historical Society for the Greenwood County Architectural Preservation and Restoration Awards Program
Mount Pleasant, SC (29464)

Today

Scattered clouds with the possibility of an isolated thunderstorm developing this afternoon. Gusty winds and small hail are possible. High 96F. Winds W at 10 to 15 mph. Chance of rain 30%..

Tonight

Isolated thunderstorms this evening. Skies will become partly cloudy after midnight. Gusty winds and small hail are possible. Low 77F. Winds WNW at 5 to 10 mph. Chance of rain 40%.
Charleston, SC (29403)

Today

Some sunshine with a thunderstorm or two possible this afternoon. Gusty winds and small hail are possible. High 97F. Winds W at 10 to 15 mph. Chance of rain 30%..

Tonight

Partly cloudy skies. A stray shower or thunderstorm is possible. Low 77F. Winds W at 5 to 10 mph.
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by Staff reporter

HIGH Court judge Fatima Chakapamambo Maxwell on Friday ruled that Speaker of Parliament Jacob Mudenda be drawn into a case filed by Zimbabwe Lawyers for Human Rights (ZLHR) on behalf of the Labour, Economists and African Democrats (Lead) political party, seeking to declare the government's efforts to modify the country's constitution through the use of a statutory instrument, unconstitutional.This development comes after the government issued Statutory Instrument (SI) 114 of 2023 on the Statute Law Compilation and Revision (Correction of Constitution of Zimbabwe Amendment No. 2. Act 2021) just before the Nomination Court convened on 21 June 2023, to correct and amend section 268 of the Zimbabwean constitution.The amended section 268 of the constitution stipulated that each province or metropolitan province must have a council, and that 10 women must be elected to those positions under a proportional representation system, thus excluding men.However, SI 114, which was effected this month, went on to allow both men and female candidates to be nominated for the political party lists of the 10 positions that were meant for women only.In the court application, that amendment is now being challenged.Section 268 has been in effect for two years, having been enacted in 2021. The lawyers for Lead, led by Paidamoyo Saurombe, are arguing that the correction by the government is unconstitutional because a law affecting an election cannot be promulgated once an election proclamation date has been announced. In this case, the election date was announced on 31 May 2023 and the amendment was done way after.The opposition parties had earlier also pointed out that the Zanu-PF government enacted SI 114 of 2023 in order to benefit its candidates as the ruling party had ignored the constitutional amendment and utilised the zebra system to nominate male and female candidates for the 10 provincial or metropolitan council seats.Following the publication of SI 114, Zec published a Press release on 21 June 2023 alerting political parties that they can proceed with nominating both female and male candidates for provincial or metropolitan council seats which they went on to do.In an interview with The NewsHawks, Saurombe said Justice minister Ziyambi Ziyambi breached the constitution by using a statutory instrument to amend the constitution."The matter was postponed to next week Friday. The court ruled the matter was urgent, but ordered that the Speaker of Parliament be joined to the proceedings. Further papers will be filed next week prior to the hearing.""We will be filing our heads next week, but we have two main arguments that we are making: 1. The minister has no power to make the amendments that he did using an S.I. He has to go back to Parliament. 2. Even if the minister could make those ammendments, they cannot affect the upcoming election.""The constitutional provision being amended makes it very clear that the provision should be effected through an Act of Parliament, hence amended or not the provision cannot be effected for this upcoming election as it is not in any Act of Parliament as provided for in the constitution," he said.Before the court case, top lawyers had posted on social media platform Twitter expressing concern over the issue.Citizens' Coalition for Change (CCC) member who is also a lawyer, David Coltart, said SI 144 demonstrated "gross ineptitude by the Zanu-PF regime and was also "thoroughly illegal"."One cannot just amend a constitutional provision, which has been in place for almost two years, on the day before nomination day, or at any time. It's utterly bizarre," he said.Coltart noted that any nominations of male candidates which follow "this illegal SI" are equally illegal and of no force."The new constitutional provisions, sections 268 and 269, bad as they are, state all the candidates must be women. A mere SI can't change that," he said, bemoaning this constitutional violation."No doubt Zec will again ignore this brazen breach of the constitution. But how incompetent is it for someone to wake up on the eve of an election to correct' an error' in the constitution which was published almost two years ago? The bumbling is breathtaking."Another CCC member and lawyer, Tendai Biti, said a constitution cannot be amended by a statutory instrument, even assuming that an error was made regarding the amendments made in the National Assembly.He argued that the Senate debated and adopted that erroneous position, which the President signed into law."Under such circumstances, only a constitutional amendment can undo the original position. Besides, a law affecting an election cannot be made once an election proclamation has been made. This is therefore a scandalous mongrel's breakfast, but one which not many mongrels will touch," Biti said.
FLORENCE  By all accounts, it was an improbable discovery.

Ben Zeigler was hoping to uncover something from the last thousand years when he went hunting for artifacts along the Pee Dee River in the fall of 2021.

What he found embedded in the dirt of a washed out road was remarkable.

It was something Id never seen before, said Zeigler, chairman of the Archaeological Institute of the Pee Dee. The material was unusual. The size was unusual. It didnt fit into any of the categories that you find in this area.

What Zeigler discovered was two halves of a 6-inch, 13,000-year-old knife, the largest Paleoamerican artifact ever recovered in South Carolina, according to researchers.

Zeigler recovered the knife in two pieces  the second half discovered nearly a year after the first in the exact same spot. The 6-inch blade is made of a gray chert, or flint, stone. When it was used, it would have been as sharp as glass, Zeigler said.

Its elegant, he said. The craftsmanship  its amazing when you hold one of these  its beautifully made  the person who made this out of a piece of chert was really a craftsman.

Blood residue detected in microfissures in the blade reveal it was used to butcher large animals, like mammoths or mastodons. That lends even more significance, suggesting human activity could have played a role in the extinction of these animals  a longstanding question among researchers.

There is so much we still dont know about these first inhabitants of the Southeast, Christopher Moore said in a press release announcing the knife would be housed at the Florence County Museum.

Moore is an archaeologist and research professor at the University of South Carolina.

Were there ice age megafauna like mammoths, mastodons, camels and horses still around when Clovis people were here or were they already extinct?" he asked. "Did Clovis people hunt them and, if so, did that hunting help lead to the ultimate extinction of the megafauna?

The Clovis people are considered the first human inhabitants of North America. They created a widespread culture across the continent and are the ancestors of most of the indigenous people of the Americas.

The presence of blood on human tools suggests these people and large animals such as mammoths and mastodons existed at the same time and that humans hunted them. To what extent and purpose is still unclear.

Its yet another piece of the puzzle as researchers try to determine what led to the extinction of most megafauna in North America thousands of years ago.

Around the same time that the Clovis culture arrived, large animals began dying off, Moore said. For years, experts theorized the Clovis people hunted large animals to extinction.

But some, including Moore, arent convinced.

He offered up a cataclysmic event, such as fragments of comet striking North America, as a more likely explanation than bands of hunter-gatherers with stone tools wiping out entire populations.

We still don't really know the answer because these animals go extinct right when we start seeing all these Clovis points, right? There's this correlation, a strong correlation. But you can't get causation just from correlation. So, it's still a very big debate, Moore said in an interview.

The Florence County Museums knife, discovered on the edge of Williamsburg and Georgetown counties, was one of 120 artifacts from North and South Carolina that Moore tested as part of his research.

Using technology normally associated with crime scenes, researchers found blood residue from Proboscidea (elephant-like creatures), Equidae (horse-like creatures) and Bovidae (bison-like creatures) on 15 percent of the tools.

Some researchers question the technology, but Moore said hes confident in the results. However, while Moores work is the largest-ever blood residue analysis performed on Paleoamerican tools, much larger studies must be completed to learn more about how the Clovis culture interacted with megafauna at the time, he said.

The blood residue found on the knife is only one of the many aspects that make it a significant artifact. Based on other analysis, archaeologists believe the blade was kept in a dry hide sheath stained red with ochre. It was likely attached to a bone or antler handle, Moore said. Because the type of stone the knife is made from is not found in South Carolina, it must have arrived in the area by way of travel or trade.

This was a cherished artifact, Moore said. The fact that it was this big, on this exotic chert that is not known (in) South Carolina, it works the imagination in terms of was this somewhat special within the early Clovis society that carried this around? Was this some sort of ritual context for use in the butchery of a mastodon or a mammoth? We can't answer that question. But it's interesting to think about when you see something that unusual, that's been found in the state, that's unlike anything that's ever been found.

Stephen Motte, curator of collections and interpretation at the museum, said the knife will be incorporated into the museums exhibits on the early history of the Pee Dee. Just how and when hasnt been determined, but he said he's excited to have it in the museum's collection.

Even if there was no positive blood protein analysis, it would still be a very significant object, because of its size, its age, what it can tell us about Paleo people, said Motte. The fact that the protein analysis came back positive, it just adds that much more meaning to the artifact.
The recent U.S. Supreme Court rulings checking state legislatures power to control congressional mapping has raised questions of what happens next in the legal fight over the two congressional districts that split Charleston.

After a trial last October, a three-judge federal panel found South Carolinas Republican-controlled Legislature improperly used race to draw the coastal 1st Congressional District held by Republican Nancy Mace and ordered it redone.

Republicans in the Statehouse appealed to the Supreme Court, which will hold oral arguments in the case this fall.

Because the Supreme Courts recent rulings covering places such as Alabama and Louisiana involved challenges under the Voting Rights Act and state constitutions, those cases are not seen as perfectly parallel to the South Carolina lawsuit.

The S.C. case involves the 14th and 15th Amendments, so experts say those decisions will not directly impact Charleston.

Nonetheless, Democrats and other advocates seeking to shake up South Carolinas political lines believe the rulings offer signs the high court will side with them.

What did the U.S. Supreme Court rule?

Allen v. Milligan: In a 5-4 ruling released June 8, the Supreme Court ruled Alabamas Republican state lawmakers violated Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act when they drew congressional maps that gave Black voters, who represent a quarter of the electorate, a majority in just one of seven districts.

Section 2 of the VRA bars states from diluting minority groups electoral power. To analyze whether states have done so, courts determine whether its possible to draw more geographically compact and politically cohesive minority-majority districts. In Milligan, Chief Justice John Roberts reaffirmed both that test and a lower courts decision to flunk Alabama.

The court did the same in a case involving Louisiana.

Moore v. Harper: On June 27 in a 6-3 decision of a case anchored in North Carolina, the court largely rejected a fringe legal theory with an odd South Carolina backstory that would have ended state courts ability to review federal elections laws passed by state legislatures. That would have made it impossible for state courts to reject congressional maps that violate state constitutional provisions barring partisan gerrymandering.

The rulings came as a surprise to many observers as the courts now-dominant conservatives, led by Roberts, had previously weakened the VRA in 2013 and given state legislatures wide leeway on redistricting, according to Todd Shaw, a University of South Carolina political scientist.

Will the rulings impact the 1st District?

The cases are about similar issues but have fundamental differences, Harvard University elections law expert Nick Stephanopoulos told The Post and Courier.

So Milligan tells us very little about what might happen in the South Carolina case, he said. Milligan clearly affirms that racial gerrymandering claims remain viable, but it doesn't speak to how any particular such claim might be resolved.

In the South Carolina case, a coalition of advocacy groups and Black voters in the Lowcountry sued Republican state lawmakers, alleging race was the predominant factor in drawing the boundaries of the 1st District after the 2020 census, which would be unconstitutional under the 14th and 15th Amendments.

Specifically, they argued that moving about 30,000 Black Charleston-area voters from Maces 1st District to Columbia Democratic Rep. Jim Clyburns 6th District was racially motivated.

In court filings and trial testimony, Republican lawmakers countered the boundary shifts were prompted not by race but by politics  to give the previously toss-up 1st District a stronger Republican tilt.

While racial gerrymanders are unconstitutional, a 2019 Supreme Court decision essentially allowed political gerrymanders.

In Milligan, Black voters and advocacy groups argued that Alabama lawmakers were required under the VRA to consider race  basically the opposite of the South Carolina case  to create two Black-majority districts. Mapmakers are allowed to consider race in drawing lines in order to comply with the VRA as the high court has ruled that is a compelling government interest.

Courts even struggle with the interplay between a Section 2 VRA claim and a racial gerrymandering claim, but it is the case that lawmakers can consider race. They just cant consider race for the wrong reasons, said Allen Chaney, the legal director for the ACLU of South Carolina, which is one of the parties challenging the maps.

Meanwhile, the North Carolina ruling concerned state courts while the South Carolina legal battle is playing out in federal court.

Why werent Charlestons districts challenged under the VRA?

Theres a good reason the plaintiffs did not pursue a VRA claim, said state Sen. Chip Campsen, who is at the center of the litigation as the Statehouse Republicans chief mapmaker after the 2020 census.

To win a challenge under the VRA, plaintiffs would have to show the Legislature could create another compact, majority-minority district. Due to the geographic distribution of South Carolinas Black population, that is likely impossible.

We cant even draw one compact, majority-minority district in South Carolina, much less a second one, Campsen, R-Isle of Palms, said.

Do the rulings hint at how the justices could vote in the South Carolina case?

Campsen said the recent decisions dont portend anything about future votes because he sees the cases as unrelated.

Thats what happens when you have judges that call balls and strikes. One side may be happy on one opinion and then theyre unhappy on the next opinion, he said.

Yet, the high court in the Alabama and North Carolina decisions made a point of reaffirming precedents and deferring to the factual findings of the trial courts. Both precedent and the trial court favor those challenging South Carolinas maps, Chaney said, adding the recent rulings are encouraging.

The court effectively stated by a 6-3 majority  that its giving greater scrutiny to what legislatures do when it comes to voting and to voting rights, USCs Shaw said.

What are the 1st District candidates saying?

If state lawmakers are forced to redraw the maps, the 1st District, which Mace won by 14 points in 2022, would likely become more competitive.

Mace dismissed the recent rulings impact on the case.

Totally separate laws, totally separate cases. I don't know what will happen, she told The Post and Courier June 28.

Maces Democratic challengers, Mac Deford and Michael B. Moore, whose chances of success against Mace heavily rely on a redrawn district, have hailed the decisions.

SCOTUS agrees: Politicians shouldnt be able to use redistricting to unfairly influence elections, Moore said in a tweet.

Caitlin Byrd contributed from North Charleston.
Lot of stories and quick news items to catch up on starting out the week.

 The left is outraged about the Supreme Courts student loan decision, but kudos to the Washington Post for an especially clueless take:

Thats what the Supreme Court saidCongress, not the president, can authorize student debt relief. Youd think this would be easier.

 The latest from Operation Dump Biden, from Walter Shapiro in The New Republic:

Biden Cant Hide From the Media Forever . . . Bidens handlers should see the Nicole Wallace appearance as an argument for the president to make more unscripted television appearances and grant far more print interviews. Yes, there is always a danger that a maladroit statement or some baffling syntax will go viral. But trying to replicate the 2020 pandemic-era campaign bunker in the coming presidential race will only foster conspiracy theories about Bidens health.

Chaser:

We need a serious conversation about Joe Bidens brain Speaking to reporters Wednesday, President Biden falsely claimed that Russia is at war with Iraq. Russia is at war with Ukraine. Russian President Vladimir Putin is clearly losing the war in Iraq, Biden told the press pool, losing the war at home. And he has become a bit of a pariah around the world. On Tuesday, during an unrelated fundraising event in Chevy Chase, Md., Biden made the exact same slip-up, mistaking Ukraine for Iraq. If anybody told you  that wed be able to bring all of Europe together in the onslaught on Iraq and get NATO to be completely united, the president said, I think they would have told you its not likely. Although many journalists did a fine job this week highlighting the presidents apparent confusion regarding Russias invasion of Ukraine, one cant help but feel as if the news industry as a whole is avoiding the obvious follow-up question. Namely, Is Biden OK?

No, hes not.

 John notes below that the energy transition is failing like trans-everything else just now, but did you see how fast it failed in Nebraska last week? A solar farm intended to last 25 years was wiped out in a 15-minute hailstorm:

But sure, lets keep building these land-hogging installations. Ill be they do great in a tornado, too.

 Up for a smile? Recently the Just Stop Oil nutcases over in the UK disrupted a Pride parade (isnt that an international human rights violation?). But a bunch of rowdy revelers from a pre-wedding stag party hijacked a Just Stop Oil march, and its the best thing youll see today:
The mainstream media made a super-celebrity out of Ruth Bader Ginsberg (remember the rap handle, Notorious RBG?), and that ended up inflating her ego so much that she stubbornly held on to her Supreme Court seat so long that Donald Trump got to replace her. Now the media is trying to make Ketanji Brown-Jackson the next RBG. The Washington Post gushes about her today:

Jackson on Friday completed her rookie term as the first Black woman to serve on the nations highest court, making a forceful debut from the bench and in writing while showing signs of an independent streak. As anticipated, she was most often aligned with the courts two other liberal justices  Sonia Sotomayor and Elena Kagan  putting her on the losing side of high-profile, contentious decisions involving affirmative action in college admissions, gay rights and President Bidens student loan forgiveness program. . . She authored more solo dissenting opinions  three  than any of the three most recent justices to join the court did as newbies.

One thing we know for sure: shes up to the challenge to be Notorious KBJ, judging by sheer loquacity:
In her New York Post column today  Blowing the lid off the coverup of Hunter Bidens cushy plea deal  Miranda Devine takes up the nature of United States Attorney David Weisss authority to bring charges against Hunter Biden and the resulting plea deal to which the parties have agreed. Devine covers some of the same material I attempted to parse in Weiss wobbles by it.

However, Devine attends to a nuance I had overlooked (the difference between special counsel under the applicable regulation and special attorney status under 28 U.S.C.  515.) Devines customary optimism is tempered by her conclusion that only [t]ime will tell if the jig is up.
PR-Inside.com: 2023-07-03 17:02:44

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NEW YORK, NY / ACCESSWIRE / July 3, 2023 / Bronstein, Gewirtz & Grossman, LLC, a nationally recognized law firm, notifies investors that a class action lawsuit has been filed against Toronto-Dominion Bank ("TD Bank") and several of its officers on behalf of all persons or entities that purchased or otherwise acquired securities of First Horizon Corporation ("First Horizon") (NYSE:FHN).Class Definition:This lawsuit seeks to recover damages against Defendants for alleged violations of the federal securities laws on behalf of all persons and entities that purchased or otherwise acquired First Horizon securities between February 28, 2022 and May 3, 2023, inclusive (the "Class Period"). Such investors are encouraged to join this case by visiting the firm's site: www.bgandg.com/fhn Case Details:The Complaint alleges that Defendants made materially false and/or misleading statements and failed to disclose material adverse facts about TD Bank's operations, the risks associated with the timing for the closing of the First Horizon acquisition, and TD Bank's ability to obtain the necessary regulatory approvals to make the statements made, in light of the circumstances under which they were made, not false and misleading. Specifically, the Complaint alleges that Defendants misrepresented and/or failed to disclose to the market that: (1) TD Bank had deficient controls over AML and suspicious transaction reporting; (2) that the lack of controls posed a significant risk to the closing of the First Horizon acquisition; and (3) that the deficient AML controls actually caused a delay in obtaining the regulatory approvals for the First Horizon acquisition. As a result, Defendants' positive statements about TD Bank's risk culture and its ability to timely close the First Horizon transaction were materially false and misleading and/or lacked a reasonable basis at all relevant times.What's Next?A class action lawsuit has already been filed. If you wish to review a copy of the Complaint you can visit the firm's site: www.bgandg.com/fhn or you may contact Peretz Bronstein, Esq. or his Law Clerk and Client Relations Manager, Yael Nathanson of Bronstein, Gewirtz & Grossman, LLC at 212-697-6484. If you suffered a loss in First Horizon, you have until July 21, 2023 to request that the Court appoint you as lead plaintiff. Your ability to share in any recovery doesn't require that you serve as a lead plaintiff.Why Bronstein, Gewirtz & Grossman:Bronstein, Gewirtz & Grossman, LLC is a nationally recognized firm that represents investors in securities fraud class actions and shareholder derivative suits. Our firm has recovered hundreds of millions of dollars for investors nationwide.Attorney advertising. Prior results do not guarantee similar outcomes.Contact:Bronstein, Gewirtz & Grossman, LLCPeretz Bronstein or Yael Nathanson212-697-6484 | info@ bgandg.com SOURCE: Bronstein, Gewirtz & Grossman, LLC
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NEW YORK, NY / ACCESSWIRE / July 3, 2023 / Bronstein, Gewirtz & Grossman, LLC is investigating potential claims on behalf of purchasers of Xponential Fitness, Inc. ("Xponential" or the "Company") (NYSE:XPOF). Investors who purchased Xponential securities are encouraged to obtain additional information and assist the investigation by visiting the firm's site: www.bgandg.com/xpof The investigation concerns whether Xponential has violated federal securities laws.Investigation Details:On June 26, 2023, Fuzzy Panda Research ("FPR") published a report on Xponential entitled "Abusive Franchisor That Is A House Of Cards." Citing interviews with franchisees and disclosure documents, the FPR report alleged that Xpontential's Founder and Chief Executive Officer "Anthony Geisler, has a long history of misleading investors and business partners" and that Xponential "is hiding the fact that many of [the Company's] brands and franchisees are struggling." On this news, Xponential's stock price fell $9.38 per share, or 37.36%, to close at $15.73 per share on June 27, 2023.What's Next?If you are aware of any facts relating to this investigation or purchasedXponential shares, you can assist this investigation by visiting the firm's site: www.bgandg.com/xpof . You can also contact Peretz Bronstein or his law clerk and client relations manager, Yael Nathanson of Bronstein, Gewirtz & Grossman, LLC: 212-697-6484.Why Bronstein, Gewirtz & Grossman:Bronstein, Gewirtz & Grossman, LLC is a nationally recognized firm that represents investors in securities fraud class actions and shareholder derivative suits. Our firm has recovered hundreds of millions of dollars for investors nationwide.Attorney advertising. Prior results do not guarantee similar outcomes.Contact:Bronstein, Gewirtz & Grossman, LLCPeretz Bronstein or Yael Nathanson212-697-6484 | info@ bgandg.com SOURCE: Bronstein, Gewirtz & Grossman, LLC
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TACOMA, WA / ACCESSWIRE / July 3, 2023 / Commencement Bank (OTCQX:CBWA) is excited to announce their expansion into Gig Harbor, Wash. This expansion is led by longtime resident and experienced banker, Allisha McVay. Along with a hand-selected local banking team to support her, McVay will begin her outreach from the former Umpqua/Columbia branch located at 3006 Judson Street. Commencement intends to convert the loan production office into a full-service branch, pending regulatory approval. The office is anticipated to open in early August 2023."This market has been at the top of our list for several years now. After listening to client feedback and considering the opportunities presented as a result of the Columbia/Umpqua merger, the only missing piece was finding a respected banker with deep roots in the community. I am pleased to say we found that banker in Allisha and we are excited to welcome her to our team," said John E. Manolides, CEO.McVay has an impressive history and joins Commencement following a 19-year tenure as branch manager for the former Columbia Bank's Gig Harbor locations. Prior to that, she held positions at various financial institutions giving her nearly 30 years of experience in the industry. Her familiarity with the market and extensive background, complemented by her passion for customer service, is evidenced by the numerous awards she has earned for outstanding performance and commitment to the community."We couldn't have found a more qualified banker to lead our expansion. I have known Allisha for nearly 20 years. Her commitment to community involvement and reputation for superior customer service aligns perfectly with our vision to bring local, personalized banking to the Gig Harbor market," said Nigel L. English, President & Chief Operating Officer.McVay will begin her position on Monday, July 10th, and will be joined by the rest of her team in the following weeks.Allisha McVayVP, Relationship Banking OfficerAbout Commencement BankCommencement Bank, headquartered in Tacoma, Washington, was formed in 2006 to provide traditional, reliable, and sustainable banking in Pierce, South King, Thurston counties and the surrounding areas. Their team of banking experts focuses on personal attention, flexible service, and building strong relationships with customers through state-of-the-art technology as well as traditional delivery systems. As a local bank, Commencement Bank is deeply committed to the community. For more information, please visit www.commencementbank.com . For information related to the trading of CBWA, please visit www.otcmarkets.com Contact Information:John E. Manolides, Chief Executive Officer | 253.284.1802Nigel L. English, President, and Chief Operating Officer | 253.284.1801James Miller, SVP, Commercial Banking Team Leader | 253.284.1851General Inquiries: hello@ commencementbank.com SOURCE: Commencement Bank
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THE Zanu-PF government plans to construct new roads that lead to polling stations in rural areas which are traditionally its strongholds in what could be a gimmick to win votes for the governing party.The programme, dubbed "Blitz Maintenance of Access Roads to Polling Stations", is being spearheaded by Local Government and Public Works minister July Moyo.The development was revealed by Information Minister Monica Mutsvangwa during her post-cabinet briefing on Thursday.She revealed that a total of 4 000 kilometres out of a targeted 6 145 kilometres have already been attended to through grading, gravelling and pothole patching in eight rural provinces, while 290 kilometres out of a target of 1 086 kilometres were cleared of vegetation to make them new roads.Said Mutsvangwa: "Cabinet considered the Report on the Blitz Maintenance of Access Roads to Polling Stations as presented by the Minister of Local Government and Public Works, Honourable J.G. Moyo.""The nation is advised that the Government launched a blitz maintenance of access roads to polling stations throughout the country in order to allow every eligible voter to access the nearest polling station and exercise their right as enshrined in the Constitution.""A total of 4 000 kilometres out of a targeted 6 145 kilometres have been attended to through grading, gravelling and pothole patching in all the eight rural provinces, while 290 kilometres out of a target of 1 086 kilometres were verge-cleared."Mutsvangwa also revealed the government is clearing the drainage systems of bridges in rural areas to prevent flooding and ensure that voters are able to reach polling stations if it rains on polling day."A total of 18 kilometres out of a targeted 216 kilometres of drainage structures on bridges, pipe drifts and culverts were attended to and the works are still ongoing. Zimbabwe continues to beef up its preparedness for the 23rd August 2023 Harmonised Elections," she said.In the Zimbabwean experience, the respective strongholds of the leading parties, Zanu-PF and MDC (now MDC-Alliance) have broadly followed a rural-urban divide.Zanu-PF has traditionally won in rural areas mainly dominated by villagers, smallholder farmers and artisanal miners. Among the rural provinces, Mashonaland Central is the biggest stronghold of Zanu-PF because the main opposition parties have struggled to win seats since the formation of the MDC in 1999.Another stronghold for the ruling party is Masvingo province where the opposition has consistently polled poorly, with 2008 being an exception.Zanu-PF also dominates the vast rural province of Midlands, but it is far from enjoying an absolute stronghold as the opposition has bases of its own in urban and peri-urban areas amounting to six constituencies out of 27.The programme to rehabilitate roads is therefore meant to appease the ruling party's supporters and ensure it maintains dominance.However, the Citizens' Coalition for Change (CCC) led by Nelson Chamisa has been making inroads in the rural areas through a campaign dubbed Mugwazo whose effectiveness will be tested in the 23 August elections.
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SAN FRANCISCO, CA / ACCESSWIRE / July 3, 2023 / Hagens Berman urges Spirit AeroSystems Holdings, Inc. (NYSE:SPR) investors who suffered $500k or more in losses submit your losses now.Class Period: Apr. 8, 2020 - Apr. 13, 2023Lead Plaintiff Deadline: July 5, 2023Visit: www.hbsslaw.com/investor-fraud/SPR Contact An Attorney Now: SPR@ hbsslaw.com 844-916-0895Spirit AeroSystems Holdings, Inc. (SPR) Securities Fraud Class Action:The litigation focuses on Spirit AeroSystem's past statements concerning its operational performance and quality controls, particularly with respect to supplying its largest customer (Boeing).According to the complaint, Defendants failed to disclose to investors that: (1) Spirit lacked adequate production quality controls; (2) Spirit incorrectly installed fittings designed to join the aft fuselage to the vertical tail for some Boeing 737 MAX airplanes; (3) Spirit would have to develop an inspection and repair procedure for the affected fuselages; and (4) the foregoing would negatively impact Spirit's financial results.Investors began to learn the truth on Apr. 13, 2023, when the financial press reported that Spirit notified Boeing of a quality problem that could stretch back to 2019. Reuters reported that "[t]he issue will likely affect a significant' number of undelivered 737 MAX airplanes both in production and in storage, and could result in lowered 737 MAX deliveries in the near term" and "[t]he problem, which affects a portion of the 737 MAX family [] involves the installation of two fittings that join the aft fuselage made by Spirit to the vertical tail, which were not attached correctly before it was sent to Boeing." Most recently, on May 3, 2023, Spirit announced that fuselage repair costs would negatively impact 2023 gross profit by $31 million and said that additional costs are expected.These events have driven the price of Spirit shares sharply lower."We're focused on investors' losses and proving Spirit knew it embarked on a cost cutting program that adversely affected quality control," said Reed Kathrein, the Hagens Berman partner leading the investigation.If you invested in Spirit and have substantial 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 Spirit 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 SPR@ 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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LOS ANGELES, CA / ACCESSWIRE / July 2, 2023 /The Schall Law Firm, a national shareholder rights litigation firm, reminds investors of a class action lawsuit against Charles River Laboratories International, Inc. ("Charles River" or "the Company") (NYSE:CRL) for violations of 10(b) and 20(a) of the Securities Exchange Act of 1934 and Rule 10b-5 promulgated thereunder by the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission.Investors who purchased the Company's securities between May 5, 2020 and February 21, 2023, inclusive (the "Class Period"), are encouraged to contact the firm before July 18, 2023.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 bschall@ schallfirm.com The class, in this case, has not yet been certified, and until certification occurs, you are not represented by an attorney. If you choose to take no action, you can remain an absent class member.According to the Complaint, the Company made false and misleading statements to the market. Charles River illegally imported non-human primates for research purposes. The Company was at risk of investigations by the DOJ among other agencies. The Company was forced to suspend importation of primates from Cambodia. Based on these facts, the Company's public statements were false and materially misleading throughout the class period. When the market learned the truth about Charles River, investors suffered damages.Join the case to recover your losses.The Schall Law Firm represents investors around the world and specializes in securities class action lawsuits and shareholder rights litigation.This press release may be considered Attorney Advertising in some jurisdictions under the applicable law and rules of ethics.CONTACT:The Schall Law FirmBrian Schall, Esq.,Office: 310-301-3335info@ schallfirm.com SOURCE: The Schall Law Firm
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New online tool comes with a guarantee to meet customer hot water demandsCHICAGO, IL / ACCESSWIRE / July 3, 2023 / Intellihot, an innovative designer/manufacturer of built-environment systems that challenge legacy approaches for sustainability, recently released telliSize, a six-dimension dynamic simulation software tool for correctly sizing heat pump water heaters. This tool allows plumbing engineers to design commercial heat pump water heating systems quickly and confidently without time-consuming calculations and ambiguous assumptions - guaranteed.telliSize The telliSize tool uses real-world data and advanced mathematical models to simulate performance over 365 days to provide guaranteed sizing for plumbing engineers and architects. Three different sizing options are provided to meet varying needs: an option with the least upfront cost, one with the lowest operational expenses, and one that balances both.Users simply need to select their property type and input its zip code, fixture count, and desired outlet temperature online at telliSize. Then, the calculator uses real-world data from similar properties and runs an advanced dynamic mathematical model on cloud computers using parallel computing technology. The users are emailed configuration options within three business days.Intellihot is so confident in its telliSize tool that it even offers a guarantee - if any of the selections fail to meet the user's hot water demand, Intellihot will supply additional equipment at no extra cost."Until now engineers could not confidently or accurately determine how many heat pumps a specific application will need and how the entire system will perform," says Intellihot Chief Technology Officer Siva Akasam. "The current methodologies are fraught with assumptions and prone to errors. They either oversize or undersize applications, resulting in excess space and power needs, or failure to meet hot water demand. Now they have a sizing tool that's guaranteed." Since states like New York and California banned the use of natural gas in commercial buildings, heat pump water heaters are the most viable solution for the future. However, heat pump technology's performance is tied to external parameters that change constantly, including the weather, ambient air temperature, ground water temperature, price of electricity (which fluctuates hourly), and hot water consumption patterns.Intellihot's telliSize calculator allows users to enjoy the space-saving and cost-reducing advantages of its Electron Heat Pumps. Previous difficulties in confidently sizing heat pump water heaters have led to businesses being unable to adopt this sustainable water heating solution. Intellihot's tool, coupled with the manufacturer's recent launch of the world's first tankless heat pump water heater, positions the Chicago-based company to assist commercial properties in installing sustainable, efficient, and safe heat pump water heating systems.About IntellihotIntellihot is an innovative designer/manufacturer of built-environment systems that challenge traditional approaches for sustainability. Under the leadership of founder and CEO Sridhar (Sri) Deivasigamani, Intellihot offers a range of tankless water heaters designed and built for commercial applications with a focus on sustainability, cost savings, and water quality for safety. Winner of an Edison Award for Best New Product in 2022, and Best Products of AHR 2023, Intellihot serves the hospitality, restaurant, multi-family housing, senior living, commercial facilities, and plumbing industries. Intellihot has operations in suburban Chicago, and Galesburg, IL. with distributors across North America. Learn more at www.intellihot.com or by following the company on Twitter and LinkedIn.Contact InformationAmy TurnerDirector Marketingaturner@ intellihot.com SOURCE: Intellihot, Inc.
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SHANGHAI / ACCESSWIRE / July 3, 2023 / Yum China Holdings, Inc. (NYSE:YUMC and HKEX:9987, "Yum China" or the "Company") announced that KFC China has hosted its latest Public Welfare Awareness Event in Hangzhou. At the event, KFC China announced the expansion of several corporate social responsibility (CSR) initiatives that cover a wide range of areas, including supporting the disadvantaged, preserving the environment and reducing food waste. KFC China's first Goodwill Ambassador, Olympic Champion Guo Jingjing, also attended the event."Giving back to society is deeply embedded in our culture. We actively support causes that can have positive impact on the communities we serve," said Joey Wat, CEO of Yum China. "We aim to create an effective platform that inspires people to come together with a shared purpose and make a difference in our community." Warton Wang, General Manager of KFC China, added, "KFC China will continue leveraging its extensive restaurant network to further its social responsibility initiatives, with a particular focus on supporting the disadvantaged, promoting sustainability and climate action, as well as advocating for healthy lifestyles." At the event, KFC China announced the following expanded CSR initiatives:As a joint effort between KFC China and the China Children and Teenagers' Fund, the "KFC Little Migratory Bird Fund" will undergo significant enhancements, aiming to expand the fund's support for underprivileged children who face challenges such as poverty and disabilities. Since 2016, the fund has been promoting the physical and mental development of left-behind children through reading, sports, and arts activities across the country. KFC China also shared that it aims to provide financial assistance to 1,000 children and organize 200 caring and companionship activities by the end of 2024.KFC China launched a reusable serving basket made from KFC's coffee grounds to promote climate action. The baskets will initially be rolled out at 1,500 KFC restaurants in Beijing, Shanghai, Guangzhou, Shenzhen, and Hangzhou, before being progressively introduced at restaurants nationwide. In addition, KFC China is committed to introducing more carbon neutral products through forest planting initiatives in key areas to support environment protection and restoration.KFC China will expand its Food Bank Program, which distributes free surplus food from its stores. The program is set to be expanded to more than 700 stores in over 100 cities by the end of 2023, doubling that from 2022. The program reduces food waste and GHG emissions.KFC China unveiled a new "Angel Restaurant" in Hangzhou, the host city for the 19th Asian Games and 4th Asian Para Games. KFC China will select outstanding "Angel Employees" from its "Angel Restaurants" to form a special service team for the Asian Games. The "Angel Restaurants" initiative creates a welcoming and inclusive workplace for people with special needs. As of the end of June 2023, KFC China has 36 "Angel Restaurants" in 32 cities, employing over 200 individuals with special needs each year. These restaurants are equipped with upgraded visual devices, and custom visual learning materials to enhance work environment of "Angel Employees".Since entering mainland China 36 years ago, KFC China has remained steadfast in its commitment to social responsibility. With a network of over 9,200 stores across 1,800 cities, KFC China strives to utilize its extensive reach as a powerful engagement platform that brings people together in supporting the disadvantaged, protecting the environment and fostering a more caring society.Forward-Looking StatementsThis press 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, including under "2023 Outlook." We intend all forward-looking statements to be covered by the safe harbor provisions of the Private Securities Litigation Reform Act of 1995. Forward-looking statements generally can be identified by the fact that they do not relate strictly to historical or current facts and by the use of forward-looking words such as "expect," "expectation," "believe," "anticipate," "may," "could," "intend," "belief," "plan," "estimate," "target," "predict," "project," "likely," "will," "continue," "should," "forecast," "outlook," "commit" or similar terminology. These statements are based on current estimates and assumptions made by us in light of our experience and perception of historical trends, current conditions and expected future developments, as well as other factors that we believe are appropriate and reasonable under the circumstances, but there can be no assurance that such estimates and assumptions will prove to be correct. Forward-looking statements include, without limitation, statements regarding the future strategies, growth, business plans, investment, dividend and share repurchase plans, earnings, performance and returns of Yum China, anticipated effects of population and macroeconomic trends, the expected impact of the COVID-19 pandemic, pace of recovery of Yum China's business, the anticipated effects of our innovation, digital and delivery capabilities and investments on growth and beliefs regarding the long-term drivers of Yum China's business. Forward-looking statements are not guarantees of performance and are inherently subject to known and unknown risks and uncertainties that are difficult to predict and could cause our actual results or events to differ materially from those indicated by those statements. We cannot assure you that any of our expectations, estimates or assumptions will be achieved. The forward-looking statements included in this press release are only made as of the date of this press release, and we disclaim any obligation to publicly update any forward-looking statement to reflect subsequent events or circumstances, except as required by law. Numerous factors could cause our actual results or events to differ materially from those expressed or implied by forward-looking statements, including, without limitation: whether we are able to achieve development goals at the times and in the amounts currently anticipated, if at all, the success of our marketing campaigns and product innovation, our ability to maintain food safety and quality control systems, changes in public health conditions, including the COVID-19 pandemic, our ability to control costs and expenses, including tax costs, as well as changes in political, economic and regulatory conditions in China. In addition, othe
PR-Inside.com: 2023-07-03 16:48:24

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HPC and AI as a service available to public and private organizations of any size as part of new agreementUAE to become home to one of the regions first sustainable data centers powered by Lenovo Neptune Liquid Cooling ServersHPC Cluster at SRTI to drive transformational change in citizen welfare and securityDUBAI, UAE / ACCESSWIRE / July 3, 2023 / Lenovo signed a new agreement with Al Hathboor Bikal.ai , to provide public and private sector customers with cutting-edge high performance cloud computing systems to support advanced digital transformation projects which focus on developing innovation in the UAE. Lenovo will also provide systems and expertise to support Al Hathboor Bikal.ai to build and operate a new sustainable data center at Sharjah Research Technology and Innovation Park (SRTIP).The collaboration will see Lenovo and Al Hathboor Bikal.ai , the joint venture between Al Hathboor Group LLC and Bikal Technologies Limited, working together to leverage shared experience in High Performance Computing (HPC) and Artificial Intelligence (AI), to provide customers in the region with advanced capabilities that will enable them to use AI to address business challenges and create new digital technologies.The agreement was signed at the Sharjah Research Technology and Innovation Park on 17th May in presence of HE Hussain Al Mahmoudi, CEO SRTIP and Raj Sandhu, GM Al Hathboor Bikal.ai , Mohammed Al Hathboor Management Committee Member of Al Hathboor Bikal.ai , and Alaa Bawab, General Manager, Lenovo Infrastructure Solutions Group, META along with other senior management and dignitaries.Commenting on the partnership, Raj Sandhu, GM Al Hathboor Bikal.ai said: "We have huge ambitions for Sharjah Research and Technology Innovation Park, and this partnership with a global leader like Lenovo, will set the path towards developing tailored infrastructure solutions that will solve both public and private organisational challenges. We look forward to leveraging Lenovo's experience in the technology sector and enhancing our digital capabilities while also welcoming new AI-powered and data-enabled research and technologies." "Al Hathboor sees this collaboration as a way to give the UAE a technological advantage to the innovation ecosystem, create jobs and opportunities for our youth, and develop tech for solving regional and global challenges. Lenovo, Nvidia and Intel with SRTIP gives us a joint capability in tech transfer and we look forward with working with our universities, businesses, and government", Added Mohammed Al Hathboor Management Committee Member of Al Hathboor Bikal.ai High Performance Computing (HPC) For AllLenovo will provide HPC hardware and software to Al Hathboor along with operational management and support, to create on demand services for customers as well as managed services support. The partnership will democratise the use of HPC for various private and public sector organisations allowing them to access HPC cluster on a service model.As an example of one application, the HPC cluster situated at SRTIP can play a crucial role in enhancing citizen health and safety within the emirate of Sharjah. By harnessing the power of HPC, authorities can process and analyze vast amounts of data from various sources, such as CCTV systems, and sensor networks, through to analysing data from patients to diagnose health issues. This enables real-time monitoring, helping to identify potential threats swiftly and respond proactively. Additionally, HPC systems can also enhance emergency response and disaster management by optimizing resource allocation, analyzing weather patterns, and coordinating rescue efforts. Furthermore, HPC's advanced analytics capabilities facilitate predictive modelling and machine learning algorithms, enabling agencies to detect patterns of activities and predict potential events. Ultimately, HPC empowers decision-makers to make data-driven choices, enhancing the safety and health of citizens throughout the UAE.AI & AnalyticsThe agreement will leverage Lenovo's position as the one of the only providers for proven, ready-to-deploy AI-enabled infrastructure solutions that are optimized for industry-leading independent software vendors (ISVs) of any size and scale. Lenovo will also provide support through its AI Centers of Excellence, including access to Lenovo Data Scientists, AI architects and engineers, to leverage the company's multi-industry domain experience to deploy AI and machine learning research solutions that can be used across various sectors including education, R&D, retail, oil & gas and more.With its AI-ready servers and storage solutions, active partnerships and an ecosystem of ISVs, Lenovo will deliver pre-validated, performance optimized AI-ready solutions on demand, even under the heaviest high-performance workloads.Sustainable Data CenterAs part of the deal, Lenovo will implement one of the first data centers in the region to use Lenovo's patented Neptune Liquid Cooling Technology, which will greatly improve energy efficiency and sustainability of services delivered by Al Hathboor. The unique thermal solution uses efficient liquid cooling to reduce cooling requirements in the data center, reducing energy consumption and contributing to sustainability goals. The solution is designed for sustainable performance and scalability, while supporting the emergent demands for HPC workloads without compromising on performance.Alaa Bawab, General Manager, Lenovo Infrastructure Group, META added, "The agreement with Al Hathboor Bikal.ai for HPCaaS is a gamechanger, providing organizations with the ability to access high performance computing and advanced technologies including AI, to power their digital transformations, with the confidence that they are accessing services from the region's first sustainable data center." He further added, "Along with being in line with the UAE Net Zero 2050 policy, the launch of this data center will also enable access for organizations to powerful solutions and the computing resources to utilize them effectively. This in turn will help drive new innovations, such as Large Language Models similar to GPT-3 and help organizations to bring the benefits of advanced AI to their own operations." The agreement and the opening of the new sustainable data center both align with the UAE NetZero 2050 strategic initiative. The initiative is a national drive to reduce net-zero emissions by 2050, powered by key sustainability goals of reducing greenhouse gas emissions, implementing sustainable practices, and using renewable energy. The new data center keeps this in mind, driving efficiency while simultaneously reducing energy consumption.The agreement
The Nigerian Exchange Limited (NGX), Chartered Institute of Stockbrokers (CIS) and other market participants on Monday held a mock-trading session and Closing Gong Ceremony in honour of the late Subomi Balogun, the founder of FCMB Group.

Mr Balogun died on 18 May in London following a brief illness. He was 89.

Speaking during the ceremony, the Chief Executive Officer, NGX, Temi Popoola, emphasised that the late Mr Balogun was a blessing to the capital market.

We are here to pay tribute to somebody that without him, we really cannot talk about our markets, and I am sure that there are many careers here that he helped shape, and mine is a good example.

We cant express our gratitude to him enough for what he did to help our industry expand. It is difficult to locate another family in Nigeria like the Subomis that can represent on the Exchange as they doing now. We are very grateful, and we assure them that they can count on our support going forward as the family continues to drive their strategic goals, Mr Popoola said.

In his remarks, the Chairman of NGX Group, Umaru Kwairanga, noted that Mr Balogun had played a significant role in the development of investment banking in Nigeria and had laid the foundation for many of the nations first equity offerings while working at ICON Securities.

He leaves a significant legacy and a number of monuments that would serve as evidence of his greatness well into the future, the official noted.

The Group Chief Executive Officer NGX Group, Oscar Onyema, said the market could take solace in that Mr Balogun led a great life and left a huge legacy that the capital market community will continue to talk about for years to come.

Otunba ensured that he looked out for the best interests of the capital market, especially during his tenure on the Council of the Exchange years ago, he said.

On his part, the CIS President, Oluwole Adeosun, said, We are celebrating the life of a colossus, Otunba Subomi Balogun, who was the pioneer first Vice President of our Institute. We commiserate with the family and will keep remembering his deeds in the capital market.

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Bolaji Balogun, the Group CEO Chapel Hill Denham, during his remarks, said, That you still remember our father, who retired 20 years ago, speaks a lot about him and the calibre of outstanding people you are. He was very concerned about this market, the harmony of this nation, and the youth of Nigeria. I want to reassure each of you that the work we perform is essential to the growth of this nation.

Commending the leadership of the Exchange and CIS, the Group Chief Executive, FCMB Group Plc, Ladi Balogun, described the recognition as an encouragement for the family to keep his legacy on.

Whilst this has been a very emotional time for our family, the way our father has been honoured by the Exchange, CIS and the entire country is truly inspiring to us. It is motivating us to go further, do better and make sure that his legacy lives on. We will not be alone in doing that. We will make sure we uphold his value and seek ways together with the exchange to transform the market and the economy, the FCMB chief executive said.

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AML, a groundbreaking social project and digital hub for collating and sharing extensive knowledge about African music, recently launched the Foster Program.

The founders hope to transform the African music landscape through the initiative by revolutionising how the continents music is documented, celebrated, and preserved.

In this interview with PREMIUM TIMES, Anu Onasanya, Project Lead for the Foster Programme, explains in detail how the programme is working to preserve the knowledge of African music and much more.

Excerpts.

PT: What is the African Music Library (AML) all about?

Anu: AML is a social project formed by music enthusiasts and African culture experts passionate about building, collating, compiling and sharing deep knowledge about African music.

So, when people think of African music, they might first say, Oh, is it not the music that we listen to or what? But African music is much more than that. So the African Music Library encompasses the genres, the African genres, the African instruments, to the African artistes themselves  it contains everything that has to do with African music, including the research. So the African Music Library is like a body of knowledge or a platform for bringing this body of knowledge about African music together.

So, you have musical instruments from pre-colonial to colonial days and postcolonial era that we have researched, working with musicologists, ethnomusicologists, and African music experts and bringing this body of knowledge together on AML. So, AML was officially launched last year, 2022, and we boast almost 12 million data points that weve been able to collate on the African Music library.

PT: What solutions are you creating with this data?

Anu: The goal is to document African music metadata  to establish, on record, who did what when it was done, and who were the people that were part of this body of work. In the long run, this would help African artistes get duly rewarded with royalties for what theyve done or what they do in the future.

It also helps us to solve the problem of misrepresentation of African music. Almost everybody thinks that every music that comes from Africa is Afrobeats. But thats not true. We have several indigenous African genres, and they exist across the African continent, but when African music is being represented, they say, oh! Hes singing Afrobeats. But it is something more than that. So, AML ensures proper representation of African music on the global stage.

PT: Tell us more about the African music library.

Anu: There are two aspects to this question. AML is an e-library. The world has gradually moved from the physical use of CDs, DVRs, and cassettes in the 90s. The world has moved from there, so most bodies of knowledge are now saved in soft copies. AML is an e-library where we store all those data points we discussed  almost twelve million (12,000,000). We have over one hundred thousand (100,000) genres, more than eleven thousand (11,000) artistes being represented, and readily available online. You can find any of this information on www.africanmusiclibrary.org.

PT: Why should the average African artiste be interested in AML?

Anu: As an organisation, we have seen over time that in African music, there are different music identifiers (ISNI, ISWEC, UPC, ISRC, etc.) with releases that enable a musician to be paid royalties for their work. Not only artistes now, but Im also talking about everybody involved in making a song right from the conceptualisation to its release. Besides the artiste who owns the song, different team players unite to make it happen. The writers, producers, sound engineers, publishers, and CMO (Collective Music Organisation) must be rewarded for their efforts.

The African Music Library helps them get rewarded in terms of being able to collate these metadata, ensuring that everybody is adequately represented on the particular song that they were part of the process. When Apple, Spotify and other DSPs want to pay royalties to people involved, everyone involved in the project gets their due royalties for participating. So, the AML helps compile that metadata which most DSPs might not have.

PT: How do you gather this data and ensure all these parties get paid?

Anu: On how we get our data, we dont just scrape data from the internet because theres a high chance that you may retrieve the wrong data. We have a well-trained team of quality assurance experts who perform due diligence on the data we collate from different sources  whether it is an artist reaching out to us requesting a profile be created for them. Many are reaching out with requests, whether it is an artiste in Nigeria or abroad. So, whether you are reaching out to us or we are getting the data from other sources, we ensure that we have a team of dedicated experts that provide that every data put out there is correct. It is checked and double-checked to ensure that people are adequately identified for what they do and represented. We have notable organisations like Song Writers Council in South Africa rely on our data and other data to ensure that writers duly pay their royalties.

PT: What inspired the creation of the Foster Programme, and what are the objectives?

Anu: The Foster Programme aims to bring the knowledge of African music to the children, the understanding of it, and ensure that some genres and information about African music continue after this generation. More So, the Foster Programme is trying to ensure that the rich diversity that comes with African music is preserved. So that everybody is not just doing Afrobeats today and then move on to Amapiano, then to Soukous etc., we dont want that. What we want to achieve is a transfer of the rich diversity of African music to the next generation.

PT: What do you do on a typical Foster outreach day?

Anu: Foster is a three-phased African music education initiative. It is three-phased in that we have the music appreciation first, the music theory second, and the application of what the children learned in the appreciation and theory phases, respectively. Each of these programs lasts for weeks apart. So, on a typical Foster outing day, our first phase starts with appreciation: what does African music sound like across different music, genres and instruments? So, we take that for about six to eight weeks.

The theory aspect now takes them through talking about these instruments, the music and genres.

Depending on your phase or the particular school or community, a typical day can be for appreciation, theory or application. The application phase deals more with the practicals. For instance, we teach the pupils how to beat the Bata drums or the Ogene gong or properly posture properly; what is the dance formation for the average African dance movement? As I said earlier, the phase that a school or community is in determines what a typical outreach day looks like.

PT: Who are your target audience for the Foster Program?

Anu: Since we are still growing, our main audience is typically children  children in primary schools. We do not just all primary schools; we target mainly public and private schools in low-income neighbourhoods. We know their parents cannot afford the luxury music education that the big league or middle-class private schools provide. Note that not just music education but African music education to the children. So, at the moment, we are prioritising public primary schools and private schools in low-income neighbourhoods. This is what we are focusing on right now. In the long run, we are looking at onboarding secondary school students.

PT: Does Foster have plans to collaborate with other organisations to achieve its aims?

Anu: Yes! We intend to collaborate with other organisations to ensure we reach beyond Nigeria or Lagos. We have approval from the Lagos State Universal Basic Education Board (SUBEB) for Akoka Primary School and have started already. We are also negotiating with a privately owned network of schools to see how we can onboard Foster to their schools across Nigeria. We are also considering partnering with music schools and those willing to support us with music tutors. In a hundred or a thousand years from now, African music will not go into extinction but will be passed on from one generation to another. As we speak, there are some African musical instruments that people cannot play anymore because the previous generation did not pass them on.

PT: Some of these schools have children with special needs, and they enjoy African music as well; how does Foster handle inclusivity in its operations?

Anu: For Foster, there is no discrimination in terms of sexes  whether you are a girl or a boy, we usually give everyone equal opportunity. We leave no child behind, whether you are autistic or not. Once we get to a school and discover, for instance, a child with special needs is in the class or group, we usually make special arrangements to accommodate them and make them participate fully.

PT: Are there plans to expand the programmes reach or introduce new initiatives in the future?

Anu: Yes, we intend to. As I have said, we call on the public to collaborate with us. This is because we plan to expand foster beyond Nigeria to across Africa. We are hoping that in the first five years of the program, we can grow Foster across Africa, and this is why our doors are wide open to collaborations that would make this happen. It takes a lot of resources, funding, experienced personnel, dedication, and capacity to achieve this.

We intend to do this by introducing a scheme we call Train the Trainer. We would have different teams working in various locations across the country or continent.

PT: Do you intend to make Foster a continuous program in schools? Will you create curriculums for this program that schools can adopt?

Anu: We currently have a 30 weeks curriculum with the Nigerian education system. So, Foster would be running for 30 weeks spread across a session  three terms. We layered the curriculum with the school curriculum so that there is continuity. It is not just a one-off thing. And we hope that government and state school boards will adopt this curriculum across Nigeria and Africa in the long run.

PT: Does Foster help identify talented and exceptional children?

Anu: Thank you very much for this question. The first is recognition and awards. As I said earlier, we look forward to partnering with music schools. In the long run, once we identify these exceptional children, we give a certificate of completion at the end of the initial circle Foster. Then they get a scholarship to attend a music school after the program based on the music schools we partner with.

PT: Finally, what message do you have for the music community and potential collaborators?

Anu: My message on behalf of the African Music Library regarding Foster is that music education is no more an extended luxury. It has become the fundamental right of every child regardless of background or circumstance. Every child deserves access to music education. Music education can become a lifeline for underprivileged children  offering them opportunities for personal growth, self-expression, and empowerment.

We look forward to everyone joining us to make African music education an opportunity for every child.

To volunteer for the Foster program, please visit our website, www.africanmusiclibrary.org, click the participate link, fill out the registration form, and we will be in touch immediately.

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Kano school teachers promoted by the immediate past administration of Abdullahi Ganduje have had their promotions rescinded by the incumbent administration of Governor Abba Yusuf.

The affected primary and junior secondary school teachers were promoted towards the end of Mr Gandujes administration.

After the promotion, their salaries were subsequently increased in April and May, but the increment was rescinded in June.

Some of the teachers who spoke to PREMIUM TIMES in confidence said they did not anticipate the government would make such a move. Others said their personal budget had been affected by the decision.

The two promotion under Mr Ganduje was initially done in 2017, and the last one was in 2023; I got a double promotion with an increase of N14,000 before tax, which was reflected in my April and May salaries, and suddenly, I received the June salary on Tuesday without the new wages when I enquired through our union they said our promotion was withdrawn by the new administration. I was speechless.

My monthly wage return to the old days of working without promotion, this is even after I have budgeted for the Sallah celebration with the new wages, said one of the teachers who asked not to be named for fear of being victimised.

Another junior secondary teacher in Fagge Local Government was promoted from level 9 to 13 after ten years of waiting to be promoted.

The teacher said his new wage of N74,000 was returned to the old salary of N44,000.

It was a shocking experience this is the least I can expect that a promotion done by a government will reverse after it became effective; I believe that this is the first time such will be happening in the history of Nigeria, the teacher said.

The teachers accused the governor of being insensitive to their plight, adding that the decision of the government to withdraw their promotion after a long wait has dampened their hope and Sallah celebration.

The states chairman of the Nigeria Union of Teachers (NUT), Baffa Ibrahim, said all teachers under the states Universal Basic Education got their promotions withdrawn by the government.

Mr Ibrahim said the union was pleading with the government to reconsider its decision for the betterment of the teachers.

The governor should look into the condition of the teachers and help reverse the decision.

The government should harmonise our salary with that of the state government workers. This is what we have been pleading for, not the reverse in our promotion, he said.

The states Commissioner for Education, Haruna Doguwa, did not return calls made to his mobile number.

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The management of Rufus Giwa Polytechnic (RUGIPO), Owo, in Ondo State, has appealed to members of the Academic Staff Union of Polytechnic (ASUP) to call off their strike in the institution.

The Rector of the school, Gani Ogundahunsi, made the plea in Akure.

The News Agency of Nigeria (NAN reports that ASUP. on June 9, withdrew their services over 13 months salary owed them by the institution.

Mr Ogundahunsi urged ASUP to resume duties to enable the students to participate in the first semester exams, which were scheduled for June 13.

He said the management had met with ASUP, Senior Staff Association of Nigeria Polytechnics (SSANIP) and the Non-Academic Staff Union of Polytechnics (NASUP) on the subject.

We appeal for patience. I sympathise with all the staff. But they need to show some level of endurance and sacrifice because they will soon smile again.

So, I am appealing to the unions to consider the future of the students and allow them to return to class for their examinations, he said.

NAN reports that a communique signed by the unions chairman, Ade Arikawe, and Secretary, Damilola Fapetu, at the end of a congress held in the institution, stated that they unanimously agreed to withdraw their services until the institution and Ondo State government meet their demands.

The union observed that the current price of fuel has added to the hardship their members were experiencing, calling on the management of the institution and the state government to pay their outstanding salaries without delay.

The communique read: After much emphasis and extensive deliberation, the Congress unanimously agreed to withdraw services of the members from participating in the scheduled first-semester examination exercise, which is proposed to commence on June 13, 2023, until the condition below is met.

Before arriving at the decision, we observed that the hardship and challenges of the current price of fuel on our members and attendance at their official duties are making it extremely difficult.

We want the payment in full of all outstanding (13 months) salary arrears owned by the staff of the institution.

The congress wishes to strongly emphasise that the decision above is binding on all the financial members of the union (ASUP).

(NAN)

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The Enugu State Government has ordered all public servants and political office holders in the state to begin reporting to their places of work on Monday or face sanctions.

The order came exactly one month after the State Governor Peter Mbah banned the sit-at-home order in the state, usually enforced by a faction of the outlawed Indigenous People of Biafra (IPOB).

PREMIUM TIMES learnt that the order to the public servants and political office holders was part of Mr Mbahs efforts to prevent them from complying with the Monday sit-at-home order usually observed in Enugu and other South-east states.

A top official of the government, who asked not to be named because he was not permitted to speak on the matter, told this newspaper on Monday that every worker in the state had been notified of the directive to report to work on Mondays.

You know the governor has banned the sit-at-home in this state. So, there is no point allowing the workers to stay at home again on Mondays, he said.

The Head of Service (HoS) in Enugu State, Ken Ugwu, on Friday in a circular obtained by PREMIUM TIMES, said the order to report to work on Mondays follows the cancellation of the sit-at-home in the state by Governor Mbah.

Mr Ugwu said the Monday sit-at-home had promoted laxity, low productivity and depleted the resources of the state.

To this end, and to further reinforce the governors directive, all public/civil servants in the state are hereby directed to ensure that they report to their duty posts every work day, including Mondays, as government has put all necessary security measures in place to ensure their safety, he said in the circular.

Failure to adhere strictly to this directive would attract severe sanctions, Mr Ugwu added.

The circular, addressed to key officials of the state government, also directed political officeholders, permanent secretaries and all heads of extra-ministerial departments to ensure compliance.

Sit-at-home not over in Enugu

Meanwhile, PREMIUM TIMES observed that residents of Enugu State have continued to observe the sit-at-home despite the pronouncement by Governor Mbah declaring an end to the civil action in the state.

The residents have continued to shun their businesses in compliance with the civil order declared by the separatist group.

Background

IPOB, in August 2021, introduced a sit-at-home order every Monday across the South-east to pressure the Nigerian government to release its detained leader, Nnamdi Kanu, who is standing trial for alleged terrorism at the Federal High Court, Abuja.

The separatist group later suspended the order, in preference for it to be implemented only on days Mr Kanu appears in court.

But despite its suspension, residents of the five South-east states  Enugu, Ebonyi, Imo, Abia and Anambra  have been observing the Monday sit-at-home order, primarily out of fear.

IPOB had repeatedly disowned the Monday sit-at-home across the region, saying those who still enforce the order were criminals attempting to blackmail the separatist group.

A leader of Autopilot, a faction of the IPOB, Simon Ekpa, has continued to declare sit-at-home orders in the region despite being suspended by the IPOB faction led by Mr Kanu.

IPOB is leading the agitation for an independent state of Biafra, which it wants carved out from the South-east and some parts of south-south Nigeria.

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News / Local

by Staff reporter

THE ruling Zanu-PF wants the Zimbabwe Electoral Commission (Zec) to disqualify 15 parliamentary candidates of the main opposition Citizens' Coalition for Change (CCC) in Bulawayo, saying they filed their nomination papers after the 4pm deadline on 21 June 2023.Zanu-PF treasurer-general and acting secretary for legal affairs Patrick Chinamasa says Zec violated the law by allowing the CCC candidates to file papers after the deadline and must disqualify them as they are ineligible to stand for election on 23 August.Chinamasa further attacks the CCC, led by Nelson Chamisa, saying the party failed to meet the nomination deadline because it is "structureless, constitution less and banking account-less".He claims Zec, which extended the nomination deadline, acted illegally by accepting opposition candidates' papers after the set cut-off point, hence the need to disqualify them.The main opposition CCC says it is not aware of the application."I am not aware of the application. I have not seen it at all. The one we know is the one we made on people who impersonated our signatures. That is the only one we know. That one, I have not seen it at all," CCC senior elections officer Ian Makone said.Critics say Chinamasa's demand is ironic, considering that Central Intelligence Organisation (CIO) and Zanu-PF-linked shadowy group, Forever Associates of Zimbabwe (Faz), has played a major role in destabilising the opposition in the just-ended nomination process.The shadowy group planted double and sometimes triple parallel candidates to those genuinely put forward by the Chamisa-led party, in a well-orchestrated ploy to split the opposition vote.As previously reported by The NewsHawks, Faz's operations involved sponsoring the candidates to submit nomination papers to Zec without the approval of CCC and also forging the signatures and logo of the party.Last week, the CCC filed a notice of appeal at the Electoral Court against the decision of the nomination court to accept parliamentary and local authority election candidates who were not on the party ticket.The trend was rampant in Harare's peri-urban constituencies where Zanu-PF is anxious to outfox the opposition. Kudakwashe Chatambudza was the only candidate on the official CCC shortlist for Epworth South, but two names, Solomon Baramasimbe and Dydmus Bande, emerged on a Zec list, making a total of three CCC candidates vying for that constituency and the mess was engineered by Faz.In Harare East, Allan "Rusty" Markham and Tendai Biti made it to the final CCC shortlist and Markham emerged as the preferred candidate. But shockingly, a strange individual, Malvin Razaru, appeared on the Zec list as a CCC candidate.Joana Mamombe is the CCC candidate for Harare West, but Faz pushed through Farai Michael Padzarondora to appear alongside her as a CCC candidate.In St Mary's (Chitungwiza), Freddy Michael Masarirevhu of the CCC was listed (he claims without his knowledge) as another candidate after the party's official candidate, Brighton Mazhindu.Faz forged signatures as well as the party logo and proceeded to pay nomination fees for him.Harare South, a peri-urban area where Zanu-PF is represented by Mnangagwa's relative Tongai Mnangagwa, ended up having three candidates for the CCC, George Magweta, Dorothy Musonza and Trouble Hasha, after Faz interference.While Agency Gumbo is the official candidate for the CCC in Hatcliffe, Faz added one more, Lloyd Sande, in a bid to split the opposition and harvest votes for Zanu-PF.Faz spread its operation to Hunyani constituency where Lovemore Chinoputsa, the official CCC candidate, appears on the Zec list with another individual, Terrence Khumbula, using the opposition party name.In Harare's Hatfield, the CCC's Revai Nyamuronda again appeared on the Zec final list with another candidate, Admire Griza, slotted in by Faz to contest using the same party name. In Bulawayo, three constituencies have two CCC double candidates - Phelandaba Tshabalala, Entumbane Njube and Pumula. Still in Bulawayo, CCC candidates Donald Mabutho and Bekithemba Nyathi both filed papers to contest in ward 9.In Masvingo Urban ward 4, Alec Tabe and Thokozile Muchuchuti both filed nomination papers on the CCC ticket.Political analyst Vivid Gwede told The NewsHawks that Faz is likely to continue with its shadowy role of deploying opaque tactics to push for Zanu-PF's victory - by hook or by crook - right up to election day.
Irans Foreign Ministry spokesman has advised Iranian citizens against taking unnecessary trips to France amid the ongoing violence in the European state.

Nasser Kanaani gave the warning in a statement published on the ministrys website on Monday.

He was commenting on the ongoing protests in France sparked by a policemans fatal shooting of a teenager.

Mr Kanaani also cautioned Iranians living in France against making unnecessary trips to or visiting conflict-ridden areas, noting that Tehran was closely monitoring the developments in France.

Earlier on 27 of June, a French police officer opened fire and killed 17-year-old Nahel M, a French citizen of Algerian and Moroccan descent, when the latter refused to comply with the order to pull over his car.

The police officer who fired his gun later told investigators that he had acted for fear of the car causing a fatal accident.

The shooting has triggered violent protests throughout France, which have so far led to the arrest of hundreds of people by the French police in major cities. (Xinhua/NAN)

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Egypt on Monday condemned in the strongest terms the Israeli raid in the northern West Bank city of Jenin that killed five Palestinians and wounded 27.

In a statement, the Egyptian Foreign Ministry voiced opposition to the repeated Israeli raids and incursions into Palestinian cities that killed civilians.

The ministry described the Israeli attacks and excessive and indiscriminate use of force as a flagrant violation of international laws and legitimacy.

It warned against the serious impacts of the ongoing Israeli escalation of tensions against the Palestinians.

He added that it would exacerbate the Palestinians sufferings and undermine Egyptian, regional, and international efforts to de-escalate tensions in the occupied territories.

Egypt calls on the international actors to intervene to put an end to the violations and protect the Palestinians, the statement added.

READ ALSO:

The Israeli army launched a large-scale military strike on Jenin early on Monday, according to Palestinian eyewitnesses.

Dozens of armoured vehicles backed by drones and helicopters stormed the city and the refugee camp, said the eyewitnesses.

The witness added that airstrikes were carried out during the exchange of fire between Palestinian militants and Israeli soldiers.

(Xinhua/NAN)

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President Bola Tinubu has assured the business community of his governments commitment to policy consistency and a better business climate to attract investment.

The president spoke Monday while receiving the delegation of the Shell Petroleum Development Company (SPDC) led by the Global Upstream Director, Zoe Yujnovic, at the State House, Abuja.

President Tinubu welcomed the SPDCs offer for more investments in the Nigerian oil and gas sector, adding that such investments are needed now more than ever to enable the government to meet its obligations.

The president recalled that attracting fresh investment was a promise I made personally to Nigerians. Whatever it takes, I will fulfil that promise to Nigerians.

President Tinubu reiterated that Nigeria is ready for business, assuring the Shell management and other investors of his administrations willingness to maintain an open-door policy and address their concerns.

We are open for business. We are serious. I give you the assurance of consistency in policy, he said.

The president also assured that his government was removing all bottlenecks to ensure Nigeria becomes an attractive investment destination.

READ ALSO:

Addressing the president earlier, Ms Yujnock applauded what she described as a solid start of the Tinubu presidency and expressed optimism that the bold steps taken by the government would renew Nigerias pride of place as an investment destination.

She said SPDC was willing to ramp up investment in the country, especially in gas and deep-water assets, by pumping in billions of dollars.

Ms Yujnock said Nigeria remains a strategic investment country for the company in view of the long history between the two entities and the prospects held by the countys oil and gas sector.

Dele Alake

Special Adviser

Special Duties, Communication and Strategy

July 3, 2023

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Jigawa State Governor Umar Namadi, on Monday, paid a surprise visit to the General Hospital, Dutse, the state capital, where he caught health workers selling drugs that are meant to be given to children under five for free.

The governors spokesperson, Hamisu Gumel, said his principal described the action of the health workers as sabotage.

He said it contravened the state governments policy on free healthcare for children under five and lactating mothers.

The governor was particularly worried to find out that patientseven under-fiveswere being sold drugs in the hospital in contravention of the State Governments policy of free healthcare to under-five-year-old children in the state.

70 per cent of the children caregivers and lactating mothers interviewed by the Governor (during the unscheduled visit) said they bought drugs and were not given bedsheets.

READ ALSO:

He frowned at the lackadaisical attitude of the hospitals management, saying, This is tantamount to sabotage which the perpetrators will not go unpunished, Mr Gumel said.

The Governor was not happy with the deplorable condition of the hospital. In some sections, there was no light as both staff and patients were sitting in the dark, and in some patient wards, there were no window nets to prevent mosquitoes, he added.

Unscheduled visits

Mondays visit was a continuation of the governors unscheduled visits to state institutions. On 19 June, the governor paid an unscheduled visit to the states secretariat complex in Dutse, where he discovered only a few workers and senior officials turned up for work.

During the visit, he met only six senior officers in their offices.

Of the 22 serving permanent secretaries, only three were in their offices attending to files when the governor visited the secretariat.

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The United Nations Childrens Fund (UNICEF) says Nigeria will need to build no fewer than 3.9 million toilets annually to meet the ending open defecation practice by 2025 target.

Jane Bevan, UNICEF Chief of Water, Sanitation and Hygiene (WASH), said this on Monday at the opening of a two-day Maiden Toilet Business Owners Conference in Abuja.

Ms Bevan said that current toilet construction in the country stood between 180,000  200,000 toilets annually, describing it as inadequate.

She said the conference was timely as toilet business owners were key to ending open defecation challenges in Nigeria.

According to her, there is a need to do things differently by creating demand for toilets. The private sector could play a huge role in sustainability and strengthening sanitation markets in the country.

Ms Bevan, quoting the 2021 WASH National Outcome Routine Mapping on Nigerias sanitation status, said 48 million people practice open defecation, while 95 million were without access to basic sanitation services.

About 1.3 per cent of GDP or N455 billion is lost annually due to poor access to sanitation  health, health care savings and productivity.

Every dollar invested in water and sanitation results in economic benefits ranging from 3 dollars to 34 dollars.

Nigeria cannot continue business as usual or it will miss the target of 2025 and 2030. There is a need to strengthen and scale up proven strategies to reach the countrys goals.

The private sector must work closely with all tiers of government and communities to actively create sustainable solutions to address the sanitation needs of unserved and underserved communities and help grow capital investment and human capital.

Didi Walson-Jack, the permanent secretary, Federal Ministry of Water Resources, expressed optimism that Toilet Business Owners (TBOs) would complement the governments effort towards the realisation of the objective of ending open defecation in Nigeria.

According to her, Nigeria is ready for business and the market is expansive for quicker and bigger returns on investment as long as we are prepared to think outside the box.

The permanent secretary noted that the outcome of the conference would reinforce other existing initiatives in achieving the national and global goals for the water, sanitation and hygiene sub-sector.

TBOs are part of the Micro, Small and Medium-sized Enterprises (MSMEs) that would help in achieving the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development.

This is particularly noteworthy in Nigeria where the SMEs have contributed approximately 48 per cent to the national GDP over the last five years as reported by the National Bureau of Statistics (NBS).

Moreover, the SMEs in Nigeria accounted for 96 per cent of all businesses in the country and employed 57.7 million people, representing 84.02 per cent of the workforce in 2016.

I am therefore confident that with this level of SME participation in the economy, this conference will equip the participants with a better appreciation of the potentials of these enterprises for the Sanitation Sector.

Earlier, Chukwuma Nnana, Executive Director, Toiletpride Initiative, said one of the biggest challenges in realising an open defecation-free environment was the lack of enabling environment for these sanitation businesses to thrive.

Mr Nnana, who is also the convener of the conference, said that TBOs and sanitation entrepreneurs were yet to be mobilised to their full potential.

The News Agency of Nigeria (NAN) reports that the conference was designed to showcase and create awareness of the contributions of private sanitation enterprises in scaling up sanitation service delivery in Nigeria.

(NAN)

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The Joint Admissions and Matriculation Board (JAMB) has said a certain Ejikeme Mmesoma (Joy) who had earlier been celebrated to have scored the highest mark in the 2023 Unified Tertiary Matriculation Examinations (UTME) falsified her result.

The board has also threatened to withdraw the candidates actual results for allegedly falsely announcing herself as the top-scorer of the computer-based test used to rank candidates seeking admissions into Nigerian universities.

According to JAMB, Miss Mmesomas actual score in the test was 249 and not the 362 she claimed to have scored.

The attention of the Joint Admissions and Matriculation Board has been drawn to several publications in both print and online media celebrating certain candidates for being high scorers in the 2023 UTME, a statement by the board reads. The Board is constrained to set the records straight and wishes to state unequivocally that many of the results which many of these candidates are parading are fake.

Exposing fake result

JAMB said the candidates fake result was exposed when a top official of the Anambra State Government reached out to JAMB for confirmation of the claim ahead of a planned honour.

She was even set to be honoured by the Anambra State Government when one of its top officials put a call through to JAMB to confirm her claim, only for the Board to reveal that Miss Ejikeme Joy Mmesoma had actually scored 249 and not the 362 she claimed, JAMB said.

PREMIUM TIMES also recalled that Ms Mmesomas name was not included in the list of the top 10 candidates presented by the JAMB Registrar, Is-haq Oloyede, during the boards policy meeting with heads of tertiary institutions last week.

Best candidate

The overall best candidate, according to Mr Oloyede, was Umeh Nkechinyere with registration number 202330325356GA. Miss Nkechineye, an indigene of Anambra state, scored 360 points. She applied to study Chemical Engineering at the University of Lagos.

Unmerited accolades

Miss Mmesoma, said to be an indigene of Enugu State, resides in Nnewi, Anambra State, where she is a student of the Anglican Girls Secondary School (AGSS) Nnewi, Anambra state.

She claimed to have scored 98 points in English Language, 89 points in Physics, 94 points in Biology and 81 points in Chemistry to get 362 of the total 400 points.

The feat fetched her accolades from Nigerians on social media including the Anambra State Government and the founder of Innoson Vehicles, Innocent Chukwuma, who promised her a N3 million scholarship.

In a statement by his Chief Press Secretary, Christian Aburime, the Anambra State Governor, Charles Soludo, congratulated the candidate and her school.

This result has demonstrated the investment and priority the administration of Governor Chukwuma Charles Soludo accords to the education sector in the state, Mr Aburime wrote in a statement. Anambra state has once again demonstrated its pride of place as the cradle of academic excellence in the country.

On his part, the Innoson Vehicle founder, Mr Chukwuma, said he hoped the scholarship would inspire other candidates to strive for excellence in their academic pursuits.

Innoson Vehicles Manufacturing (IVM) company will continue to demonstrate its commitment towards social responsibility through various initiatives, including scholarship awards, jobs creation, and support for local communities.

Legit quoted the Innoson founder as speaking when he received Miss Mmesoma and her father at his Umudim Nnewi country home. This latest scholarship award is a testament to our dedication to empowering young Nigerians, and investing, he said.

Face-saving

Meanwhile, JAMB said Miss Mmesoma had also quickly requested her 2022 UTME result for possible alteration.

However, JAMB said, unknown to the candidate, it had changed the design for the results, making it difficult for her to change the score recorded in 2022.

JAMB said: It is to be noted that Miss Mmesoma had sent a message to the Boards platform to request her UTME result, after which she manually inflated her scores and pasted the same on the 2022 UTME result sheet.

Unknown to her, the Board had changed the design of the 2023 UTME result sheet. Her original result remains 249, as nothing can change that. With this her ignoble act, Miss Mmesoma would be prosecuted and her original result withdrawn.

Other candidates with similar fake results

Apart from Miss Mmesoma, JAMB said other candidates have also inflated their results to deceive people.

JAMB cited another case of Atung Gerald in Kaduna State, who reportedly claimed to have scored 380 in the UTME.

But JAMB said Mr Atung never obtained the 2023 UTME forms not to talk of sitting the examination.

In many instances, some of these candidates had actually obtained far lower scores than they are claiming and had used some funny software packages to manipulate their results to deceive unsuspecting members of the public, it said.

The agency, therefore, advised the public to always cross check these claims by candidates before rushing to honour them with undeserving awards.

Meanwhile, JAMB has said it would withdraw the results of Miss Mmesoma and also prosecute her.

This is not all, as the Board would, in due course, investigate all candidates laying claims to higher scores than they actually obtained. Once discovered, such candidates original results would be withdrawn forthwith, and they would be handed over to relevant security agencies for prosecution.

The top 10 candidates

Here are the top 12 candidates in the 2023 UTME as presented by JAMB.

Umeh Kamsiyochukwu Nkechinyere, 360

Aguele Stephen Osezuha, 358

Ositade Oluwafemi Anthony, 358

Gbolahan Azeem Ayinde, 357

John Fulfilment Ibhanfiodon, 3556,

Duruji Chimdubem Ugonna, 355

Adesanya Jermaine Oluwaiomiloiu, 355

Shittu Priscilla Adedunni, 355

Atenisumen Enoch Oluwagbemisoke 355

Adetunji Victor Adewale, 355

Ofonime Iniobon Idongesit, 355

Imoukhuede Andrew Onayeme, 355

Qosim Suleiman is a reporter at Premium Times in partnership with Report for the World, which matches local newsrooms with talented emerging journalists to report on under-covered issues around the globe

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Over 52,000 Nigerian pilgrims were without shelter during the five-day stay at Mina during the Hajj rites, the National Hajj Commission of Nigeria (NAHCON) has said.

Zikrullahi Hassan, the chairman of the commission, disclosed this on Sunday in Makkah during a meeting between the commission and the Saudi Arabian company in charge of the tents and feeding at Mina.

A company, named Mutawwif, for Pilgrims from African and non-Arab countries, is in charge of feeding and tents.

Mr Hassan said 43,000 capacity tents were provided to cater for 95,000 pilgrims from Nigeria, leaving over 50,000 pilgrims without adequate shelter during their five-day stay in Mina.

Mr Hassan, who was visibly furious with the development, said Nigeria will consider the termination of the contract with Mutawwif and also demand a refund.

The stay in Mina is a mandatory part of the hajj exercise. Pilgrims stayed at the camp from 26 to 30 June.

Nigerian pilgrims were subjected to untold hardship and they are so disappointed in us even though we have repeatedly told them that the issues of tents and food are not in our hands, that we can only complain to the authorities, he said.

Mr Hassan said the Saudis must hand off feeding of pilgrims because they lack the capacity.

Time has come for you to hand off our food. We have argued repeatedly that we can handle catering by ourselves and you can regulate. This is because no matter how much money you spend on food, if you dont do it the Nigerian way, it will not be eaten and the money is wasted. I am making this demand on behalf of Nigerian pilgrims and stakeholders.

I am also, on behalf of the Nigerian delegation, demanding a refund for the foods that you didnt supply.

We will be writing a letter of request for a refund to you because the food didnt meet our requirements and standard at all. As we go home, we will have to review our agreement with a view to knowing if we are continuing with this partnership or not because if our people are not happy, there will be no point continuing on this, he said.

To address the problem, Mr Hassan demanded that Nigeria should be allocated a different place that is large enough to accommodate pilgrims.

We want to be removed from the present site of tents. Now that we have been told about the fact that the first country to finish registration and documentation will be able to choose the best section of Mina, me and my team will work on ensuring that we start on time so we can choose the best place for our people next year.

We must examine the tent a month before the arrival of our pilgrims so we can make necessary adjustments. Before now, you give us a few days or a few hours to vet the place you are keeping for our people which is not good enough.

Return feeding to us. We can manage that ourselves. We can screen the caterer and ensure they have Nigerian touch. The foods you have been giving us have no Nigerian touch at all. Return the food to us and you can regulate it. We are controlling and regulating feeding in Makkah and Madinah, he said.

You have ruined our reputation Travel operators

Meanwhile, the President of the Association of Hajj and Umrah Operators of Nigeria, Yahaya Sulaiman, who spoke on behalf of tour operators, said the inefficiency of the firm has harmed the reputation of the tour operators.

He also accused Mutawwif of running a very opaque system.

Even if you refund our money, our images that you have destroyed cant be refunded. Your operations are shrouded in opaqueness, with no transparency.

We asked for documentary details of how much food and water you are supplying to how many pilgrims but you never made that available up till now, he lamented.

Mutawwif blames Illegal pilgrims for shortage

Speaking on the issues raised, the Vice President of the firm, Badr Bafakeek, admitted that the firm failed to deliver.

He noted that the firm did not anticipate the number of pilgrims assigned to them.

He also blamed the shortage of food on illegal pilgrims and poor security.

In response, Mr Hassan dismissed the argument, noting that NAHCON is not responsible for security.

We are not in a position to check them (Illegal pilgrims) or contain them since we are not in charge of security. That has to be the fault of our hosts.

The invasion of illegal pilgrims isnt an excuse because you provided the same capacity of tents last year despite the fact that we came with 95,000 pilgrims compared to 43,000 pilgrims that we came with last year, he said.

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The Independent National Electoral Commission (INEC) on Monday could not open its defence in Peter Obis suit challenging the victory of President Bola Tinubu.

Mr Obi, the presidential candidate of the Labour Party, is urging the court to nullify Mr Tinubus victory on account of alleged electoral fraud perpetrated by INEC, amongst other issues.

The electoral umpire had on 1 March declared Mr Tinubu of the All Progressives Congress (APC) as winner of Nigerias 25 February presidential election.

After Mr Obi finished calling his witnesses over a week ago, the electoral commission was scheduled to commence its defence of the conduct of the February presidential poll.

However, at the resumed hearing on Monday, INECs lawyer, Abubakar Mahmoud, informed the five-member panel of the court chaired by Haruna Tsammani that the case would not go on as scheduled.

Mr Mahmoud, a Senior Advocate of Nigeria (SAN), told the court that the witness he had scheduled to testify could not make it to court on Monday.

I was going to take one witness today (Monday), but he couldnt make it to court this morning, Mr Mahmoud said before requesting an adjournment.

Responding to the development, Mr Obis lead counsel, Livy Uzoukwu, a SAN, expressed his dissatisfaction with Mr Mahmoud for not informing him about the witness absence before the days proceedings.

Mr Uzoukwu, however, did not oppose Mr Mahmouds request for an adjournment.

Similarly, Mr Tinubus lawyer, Wole Olanipekun and APCs lawyer, Lateef Fagbemi, both SANs, did not object to INECs request for an adjournment.

Afterwards, the court adjourned the suit until Tuesday for further hearings.

Background

At the hearing of Mr Obis suit, he tendered several electoral documents comprising Bimodal Voters Accreditation System (BVAS) machines reports and results of the presidential election from across states of Nigeria to aid his case.

The Labour Party presidential candidate also called 13 witnesses to substantiate his claims of fraud against Mr Tinubu and INECs non-compliance with relevant provisions of the law in conducting the exercise.

The commissions failure to upload polling units results of the presidential election in real-time to its INEC Results Viewing (IReV) portal is one of Mr Obis issues with the election.

He also accused INEC of manipulating the election in favour of Mr Tinubu, who scored majority votes at the poll.

But, the electoral commission had blamed technical hitches for its inability to electronically transmit polling units results of the presidential election to its IReV portal.

However, testifying before the court, Mr Obis expert witness, Mpeh Ogar, had revealed that a report of the health status of Amazon Web Services, which hosts the INEC IReV portal, showed that there were no technical glitches on 25 February 2023.

Ms Ogar, a cloud engineer and architect at Amazon Web Services Incorporated, noted the INECs IReV portal did not experience any glitches to justify the failure to upload real-time the polling unit results of the 25 February presidential election.

All of these will be issues the electoral umpire will prove within the one week it is expected to defend its case.

In the race, Mr Obi came third with 6,101,533 votes, winning 11 states and the FCT, Abuja.

He won in Edo, Cross River, Delta, Lagos, Plateau, Imo, Ebonyi, Nasarawa, Anambra, Abia and Enugu states, and the FCT.

But Mr Tinubu won the election in Rivers, Borno, Jigawa, Zamfara, Benue, Kogi, Kwara, Niger, Osun, Ekiti, Ondo, Oyo and Ogun states.

The commission had declared Mr Tinubu the election winner with 8,794,726 votes. Mr Tinubu led in only 12 of the 36 states of the federation.

Meanwhile, Atiku Abubakar of the Peoples Democratic Party, who came second in the election, is equally challenging Mr Tinubus victory.

The commission is expected to open its defence in the suit at 2:00 p.m on Monday .

Similarly, a political party, Allied Peoples Movement (APM), launched a legal action to overturn Mr Tinubus mandate on the grounds of inappropriate nomination of Vice President Kashim Shettima as his running mate for the 25 February poll.

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Within one week, Mayowa Adesina staggeringly watched the fuel expenses for the generator in his barbershop soar, the highest-ever jump since he entered the haircut business over 15 years ago.

Ive never bought fuel and paid N10,000 [$13] before. Now I buy it and it lasts for three days, says Mr Adeshina, a barber in Festac Town, Lagos.

On the day he assumed office as Nigerias 16th president on 29 May, Mr Tinubu announced the removal of fuel subsidy, a decision that saw the price of petrol jump three-fold across the country. In Lagos, the price of one litre rose from N180 to about N500. Outside Lagos, it costs even higher.

Mr Tinubu, who sacked the Central Bank of Nigeria governor Godwin Emefiele, also called for the unification of the countrys multiple exchange rates. While the move was widely lauded by economists, it has caused prices to skyrocket.

Several universities and other higher institutions across the country had increased their tuition by as much as 100 per cent.

Read the full report here.

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The Edo Police Command has arrested two students of the University of Benin (UNIBEN) over the death of their friend, Francis Anuide, who drowned in Ekosodin River, Benin, where the trio had gone swimming.

The News Agency of Nigeria (NAN) reports that the arrested students are Samson Kennedy, a 200-level student of Biochemistry, and Wilfred Emmanuel, a 500-level student of Optometry.

The deceased was said to have been invited by the two friends for swimming in the river close to the Ugbowo campus of the University where he allegedly drowned.

Confirming the arrest, the Public Relations Officer of the Police Command in Edo, Chidi Nwabuzor, said the duo were apprehended to assist the police in investigating the circumstances leading to the victims death.

Mr Nwabuzor explained that after the case was reported at the Ugbowo Police Station, Benin, the Divisional Police Officer and his men led a team of local divers to the scene of the incident.

Luckily, they were able to recover the body. The case has been transferred to the State Criminal Investigation Department for further investigations.

Two persons were arrested because they went together to swim in that river when the ugly incident occurred.

Arresting them is very important so that we can know what made them leave their hostel and go to that river at that time and what happened right there in the river, he said.

Sources told NAN that the two students were arrested as a result of the discovery of blood on the lips of the deceased and peeled skin around his neck region.

These, the sources said, raised suspicion amongst the victims family members and relatives who are demanding an autopsy.

After the deceased got drowned, the duo ran back to the Ekosodin community to seek help from the community and vigilante members but the deceased died before help could come his way, one of the sources said.

(NAN)

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Qabil Ashirov

The new season of Armenian Farce in Karabakh, scripted by Armenian intelligentsia and public figures and starred by Nikol Pashinyan and Arayik Harutyunyan, is underway. Watching it some immediately realize that Armenians planned to shoot drama, but due to inexperience, it turned out a comedy. Therefore nobody is interested in it, except Armenophiles around the world.

As is known, Armenians and their mouthpieces have tried to persuade the world that Azerbaijan does not comply with its commitments under the 9 November statement for several months. Ostensibly, Azerbaijan aims ethnic cleansing and therefore keeps Karabakh under blockade. They go extra miles to substantiate their accusations, but they have not been able to prove it so far, like their preivouse baseless claims. Just leafing through history is enough to unearth the lies made up shamelessly by Armenians.

In retrospect, like in the former unrecognized Nagorno Karabakh Autonomy of Azerbaijan, many ethnic groups lived in Armenia during the USSR. However, when the regime collapsed and Armenians took over the total power, the first and third biggest ethnic groups - Azerbaijanis and ethnic minorities of some Muslim Kurds were totally expelled from Armenia where they had lived for thousands of years. Armenians did not have mercy on other ethnicities as well. For example, Russians were the second ethnic group after Azerbaijanis, and four of five Russians have left Armenia over 30 years.

They have not limited themselves to ethnic cleanings only in Armenia. They wrested Karabakh and adjoining seven rayons (districts) out of Azerbaijan and expelled the multiethnic population, including Azerbaijanis, Russians, Kurds, Udins, Meskhetians and so on.

Following the invasion, this self-styled "civil" horde started deliberately destroying the historical heritage of the local population, more precisely, demolishing mosques, caravanserais, Russian orthodox church, and Armenenization of Albanian churches such as Amaras and Khudavang monasteries, and building new Armenian churches instead. Their shamelessness extended to such a degree that they coined a new slogan "New Wars, New Territories" and invited Armenians in the USA to come to fight against Azerbaijan for invading new territories. It was the limit, Azerbaijan did not intend to tolerate this knavishness of Armenians anymore. The 44-day War broke out and ended in a humiliating defeat for them. With the above said in mind, we can say that Armenia is the last country in the world to accuse other countries of ethnic cleansing.

Unlike Armenia, Azerbaijan is the multiethnic, multicultural and multireligious country. There are tens of nations with different origins living in peace and prosperity in Azerbaijan. Besides, 30,000 Armenians live in Azerbaijan despite the war with Armenia, and massacres made by Armenians in the First Karabakh War. One of these Armenians living in Azerbaijan is Zoya Arutyunyan, the sister of former Armenian Defense Minister. She lives in Kurdamir with her children and nobody disturbed her even during the both Karabakh wars. Also, it must be underlined that without questioning ethnic background, Azerbaijan embraced Muslim Kurds who had lived in Armenia for thousands of years and were dispelled by Armenians in the 1990s.

As for Azerbaijan's not complying with its commitments under the 10 November agreement, it is another ridiculous accusation voiced by Armenia. Before coming to Azerbaijan's commitments, they had better recall their own ignobility and negligence to stipulation in the signed document. First and foremost, neither Armenia nor its mouthpieces should forget about the 4 statements of the UN over the withdrawal of Armenian Armed Forces from Azerbaijan's territories. Armenian responded the UN statement with the motto "New War, New Territories," let alone withdrawal.

For the Human Watch report on the Khojaly massacre, first, they tried to put the blame then-Azerbaijani government, but later the former Armenian president Serj Sargsyan confirmed that it was committed deliberately to terrorize local people. It is worth noting that in Khojaly, Armenian terrorists slaughtered 613 civilians including children, elderlies, and women. Another organizer of the Karabakh crisis Murad Igoryan went even further to call locals a political instrument and emphasized that Armenians needed to get rid of them.

In regard to the 10 November, Azerbaijan fulfilled all commitments that it overtook - it stopped military operations, allowed local Armenians to return to their homes, and kept open the only route through Lachin to Azerbaijan's Karabakh. Unlike Azerbaijan, Armenia has never complied with a single item of the statement that was signed by Nikol Pashinyan. For example, the 7th item of the statement reads: "Internally displaced persons and refugees shall return to the territory of Karabakh and adjacent districts under the control of the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees." However, considering refugees as a political tool, Armenia has never attempted to allow IDPs from regions that are under the control of separatists to return to their homes. Under the 9th item of the statement, Armenia overtakes a commitment to provide Azerbaijan with entrance to its exclave Nakhchivan through Armenia. However, Armenia goes the extra mile to evade the item and has not opened the communication line yet.

In the fourth item, Armenia undertook a commitment to withdraw its armed groups from Karabakh. Even they declared that Armenia withdrew its Armed Forces from Karabakh in September 2022. However, a few days ago 4 Armenian soldiers lost their lives in a shootout that stemmed from their provocations and Armenia pleaded with the Russian Peacekeepers for two days to help Armenians to take the two corpses of dead servicemen to Armenia. Here arises the question, if Armenia really withdrew its Armed Forces from Karabakh as they claimed, why are they taking the corpses of dead servicemen to Armenia? The answer is clear, Armenia did not withdraw from Karabakh.

So in the end, I would like to recall Armenians that lie has short legs. Hey, you cannot cheat everyone forever, therefore it is better to stop the farce. Believe me, you are weak, you do not have any resource to get strong and nobody will come to fight with you, except you will be left alone in the battlefield facing Azerbaijan, your nightmare. If you want to live in peace and prosperity you have to find a common language with your neighbors, otherwise, the viability of Armenia is under question.
News / National

by Staff reporter

Aspiring candidates for the upcoming harmonised elections who incite violence do not deserve to be voted into any office, Chief Khulumani Mathema of Gwanda has said.The outspoken traditional leader was addressing a meeting, Saturday, at Sitezi in Gwanda, he had convened for aspiring candidates to interface with villagers.Chief Mathema emphasised the importance of observing peace during elections, noting that no good leader would want to convince people to vote for them through violence.The meeting was attended by representatives from various political parties, independent candidates, and community members.The candidates presented their manifestos, and the villagers had an opportunity to ask questions, interrogate them and share their expectations."We want to have a peaceful election. If there is any candidate, regardless of which political party they come from, who incites violence, please do not vote for that person," Chief Mathema said."Good leaders are those who preach and uphold peace. We want leaders who will promote development and unity, not people who cause divisions. I don't want a situation where people will start hiding in the hills because they would be fleeing from harassment from certain people, groups or political parties."Chief Mathema also emphasised the importance of having candidates who are academically competent to argue in parliament over issues that are of national importance.Community members at the meeting raised a number of concerns, some inquiring on how aspiring candidates would deal with "oppressive" legislations that have been put in place, some asking why all opposition parties do not unite and form one strong force while others wanted to know if the candidates had adequate academic qualifications to hold the offices that they wish to hold.Citizens' Coalition for Change Cluster leader for Gwanda, Jaston Mazhale, said their party, once voted into power, will repeal all the legislations that stifle the freedom of people."Most of these legislations were there even pre-independence, being perpetrated by the whites. Post-independence they were repealed. But now, they are resurfacing under new names," he said."In terms of academic qualifications, I will give an example of our aspiring candidate for Gwanda North. He has a background in Environmental Science, as a community that has a lot of mining happening, we are confident he will debate accordingly in Parliament over such issues."A representative from Mthwakazi Republic Party said it would be challenging to come together and form one opposition party because the objectives of people are different and those who are affiliated with political parties tend to push mostly for what their leaders want which may, in some instances, not be what the rest of the people want.A representative from Zanu-PF, who was standing in for an aspiring candidate, said their party is open to everyone who may want to come and join them.An independent candidate, Dalubuhle Maphosa, said people should stop discriminating against each other according to political affiliations but should have one common purpose of development.
The former governor of Zamfara State, Sani Yerima, has asked President Bola Tinubu to negotiate with terror gangs operating in Zamfara State and other parts of the North-west of the country.

Mr Yerima who was addressing journalists after meeting with President Tinubu in Abuja on Monday said the government should negotiate with the terror gangs, locally called bandits, for a lasting peace in the North-west region.

He said the negotiation he is advocating is similar to what the administration of former President Umar YarAdua did with militants in the Niger Delta, which gave birth to the amnesty programme.

In 2009, President YarAdua granted amnesty to militants in the oil-producing Niger Delta region to tackle the problems of stealing crude oil and kidnapping oil workers.

The amnesty involved training some of the ex-militants in various oil-related professions and offering them jobs; as well as monthly payments to some former militants. The programme, which cost the government billions of naira annually, has been maintained by successive governments.

Although the amnesty programme led to an increase in oil production and reduced kidnappings in the region, it did not eliminate criminality as various heavily-armed gangs still operate there and oil theft is still rampant.

The rampant terrorism in the North-west is more recent compared to the Niger Delta militancy.

Terror gangs operating primarily in the North-west and North-central regions have sacked several rural communities, killing and abducting thousands of people.

Despite efforts by state governments in the region and security agencies, the gangs have continued to attack communities, killing and abducting travellers and other residents. Their activities have also led to the displacement of millions of people.

These people are Nigerians and I believe that the Nigerian military and other security agencies have the capacity to deal with them squarely if directed and are given the resources they require, support and the political will.

But the collateral damage that will be associated with the actions they will take is what I believe should be avoided. In the past, the late President Umaru Yaradua had a similar interaction with militants of the Niger Delta and it was successful, Mr Yerima said on Monday.

The former governor said insecurity in the region is caused by widespread poverty and ignorance.

The major causes of this problem are poverty and ignorance. So, I believe that as Nigerians, if they are called upon or if the government now comes up with a rehabilitation programme, I am sure we will have a successful end to this crisis, he said.

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Mr Yerimas amnesty proposal is not new in the region as several state governors had negotiated with the terrorists in the past, but these deals were soon reneged by the outlaws.

In 2014, a former governor of Zamfara, Abdulaziz Yari, granted amnesty to the gangs. Similarly in 2016, a former governor of Katsina, Aminu Masari, as well as ex-Governor Bello Matawalle of Zamfara State in 2019 granted amnesty to the gangs but none of the deals survived the test of time.

In 2021, federal lawmakers from Zamfara State asked then-President Muhammadu Buhari to grant amnesty to repented bandits as part of a deal to end attacks.

Be Patient with Tinubu

During the interview with journalists, Mr Yerima also implored Nigerians to be patient with Mr Tinubu. He said the discomfort Nigerians are facing following some of the presidents policies such as the removal of subsidy on petrol and the partial floating of the naira are temporary.

The President, having taken over the realm of affairs of our country, came up with three quick decisions that I believe as an economist, are going to help this country to achieve development. He removed the fuel subsidy, which former leaders could not remove, he has harmonized the foreign exchange, which is going to help the import and export system of this country and finally, he re-opened the borders for goods and services to flow freely in Nigeria, he said.

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A vigilante group in Enugu State has accused troops of the Nigerian army of attacking its members and killing one of them in Eke, a community in Udi Local Government Area of Enugu State, Nigerias south-east.

The community is the hometown of the Director General of Voice of Nigeria, Osita Okechukwu, and the immediate past Minister of Foreign Affairs, Geoffrey Onyeama.

The group, Eke Security Neighbourhood Vigilante Watch, said the victim, Ebuka Oke, was killed alongside his wife by the troop.

It said the soldiers, who also inflicted gunshot injuries on three others, were from the 82 Division of the Nigerian Army in the state.

One of the victims and the Assistant Chief Security Officer of the vigilante group, Emeka Anigbo, disclosed this to reporters on Sunday.

Mr Anigbo said the incident happened on Thursday when some of the vigilante members went to felicitate their colleagues who were being inaugurated as new members of the group.

Some residents told reporters that the incident had caused tension in the community, adding that Mr Oke lost his father exactly one month ago and was yet to recover from the incident before the latest development.

They condemned the unprofessional conducts of the soldiers, describing it as barbaric and callous, just as they called for an investigation into the incident.

How it happened

Mr Anigbo, who also sustained gunshot injuries, told the reporters that they received a distress call while at Ninth Mile Corner, where the inauguration of the new members was held.

The security officer said on receiving the call, they abandoned their food and drinks and quickly drove out to confront suspected armed robbers but could not get to the scene with their vehicle because of heavy gridlock caused by the blockage of the road.

He said they decided to park their vehicle along the road and started moving towards the place, but on approaching the scene, three armed soldiers ordered them to stop.

He said they obeyed the soldiers and stopped, informing them they were neighbourhood vigilante watch guards. The soldiers asked them to keep coming forward.

On approaching the soldiers, they started firing at us, killing one of our members and the wife of one of those who were inaugurated at the Ninth Mile, who was on a motorcycle with her husband going back to Eke.

Despite the fact that we were in our full security uniform and had identified ourselves, the trigger-happy soldiers opened fire on us at a very close range, killing Oke, and his wife, Mr Anigbo said.

Continuing, he said, While I was on the ground, one of the soldiers, notwithstanding seeing my identity card and my uniform, kept matching on my chest, saying, I will kill you.

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In fact, it was the timely arrival of police operatives from Ninth Mile Corner that saved my life. It was the police that stopped the soldiers, confirming that we are Eke Neighbourhood Security Guards.

Another victim, Chinedu Okolo, whose male organ was allegedly affected by the soldiers bullets, was unable to speak to reporters because of pains.

The third victim, Obinna Offor, was in the hospitals intensive care unit.

Army reacts

When contacted by PREMIUM TIMES on Monday, the spokesperson of the Division, Jonah Unuakhalu, described the claims as untrue.

Mr Unuakhalu, a colonel, said information available to the army division showed that the deceased woman was killed by a stray bullet from armed hoodlums who engaged the soldiers in a shoot-out.

The spokesperson said the troops received a distress call that some hoodlums were operating along Eke Road, and on sighting them at the scene, the hoodlums opened fire on them.

He added that the soldiers overpowered them, leading to the arrest of one of them and recovering of two pump action guns and some live bullets while some of them ran into a nearby bush.

Mr Unuakhalu said he had no information regarding the alleged killing of Mr Oke, the vigilante operative, maintaining that it was during the shootout between the troops and the hoodlums that a stray bullet hit the woman.

So, there is no iota of truth in the information being peddled around that it was soldiers that killed the deceased (woman). Our men only rushed to the scene to salvage the situation after receiving a distress call, he insisted.

The spokesperson regretted the womans death, saying she would have been in the best position to narrate exactly what happened, if she had survived the stray bullet.

The Division is going to carry out proper investigation on the incident, so as to unravel what actually transpired, he added.

The police spokesperson in Enugu State, Daniel Ndukwe, did not respond to calls and messages seeking his comments.

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The Independent National Electoral Commission (INEC), on Monday, closed its case after calling a witness in Atiku Abubakars petition contesting the election of President Bola Tinubu on 25 February.

Atiku of the Peoples Democratic Party (PDP) is urging the Presidential Election Petition Court in Abuja to set aside Mr Tinubus victory on account of gross non-compliance with Nigerias electoral laws in the conduct of the presidential poll.

INEC on 1 March declared Mr Tinubu of the All Progressives Congress (APC) election winner.

Mr Tinubu garnered 8,794,726 votes to beat Atiku, who came second in the race with 6,984,520 votes.

At the resumed proceedings on Monday, INECs lawyer, Abubakar Mahmoud, called the first witness, Lawrence Bayode, an assistant director in charge of INECs ICT department.

Mr Bayode, an IT expert with over two decades of work experience at INEC, adopted his witness statement on oath.

He was led in evidence by Abubakar Mahmoud, INECs lead counsel.

Mr Mahmoud, a Senior Advocate of Nigeria (SAN), tendered a set of documents comprising letters from the APC and addressed to the electoral commission, announcing the withdrawal of Kashim Shettima from the Borno Central Senatorial District elect.

Mr Tinubu subsequently chose Mr Shettima as his vice presidential pick.

But Atikus lawyer, Chris Uche, a Senior Advocate of Nigeria (SAN), objected to the admissibility of the documents, while Wole Olanipekun, Mr Tinubus lawyer and APCs counsel, Lateef Fagbemi, did not object to the courts admissibility of INECs documents.

Testimony

Afterwards, Messrs Olanipekun and Fagbemi took turns to cross-examine Mr Bayode concerning the electoral umpires deployment of the Bimodal Voters Accreditation System (BVAS) machines for the presidential election.

Responding to Mr Olanipekuns inquiry, Mr Bayode said, Images captured on BVAS machines required data services for them to be uploaded (on the Internet).

He, however, clarified that photographic copies of polling stations results captured on BVAS whether transmitted manually or electronically does not affect the integrity of an election.

The witness noted that the presidential election conducted by INEC and won by the second respondent (Mr Tinubu) was free, fair and in substantial compliance with the electoral act.

READ ALSO:

Under cross-examination by Mr Fagbemi, Mr Bayode explained that the glitch on the day of (the presidential) election did not affect the actual scores of the candidates at the election as results of each candidate remained the same.

He added that there was no electronic collation of results after the ballot, as it was done manually.

Mr Fagbemi further drew the witness attention to a pre-election notice by INEC, stating that electronic collation of results was not feasible, which Mr Bayode answered in the affirmative.

Specifically, the notice was issued on 23 February, three days before the Presidential election, and published in the Nigerian Tribune Newspaper.

Subsequently, a certified true copy of the newspaper publication containing INEC heads-up regarding the electronic collation of results was tendered and admitted in evidence.

But Mr Uche objected to its admissibility.

The commissions inability to transmit the presidential election results from polling units across the country in real-time forms one of the key issues before the court for determination.

Labour Partys presidential candidate, Peter Obi, is equally challenging the outcome of the presidential election based on INECs failure to electronically transmit polling units results to its Results Viewing portal for public access.

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A lecturer in the Faculty of Science, Lagos State University (LASU), Ojo, AbdulAzeez Anjorin, has won the Global Virus Network (GVN) 2023 Training Scholarship and Award.

According to the universitys Centre for Information and Public Relations (CIPR), Mr Ajorin will attend a short Basic and Translational Virology course at the University of Maryland and Johns Hopkins University School of Public Health Baltimore, in the United States of America.

Mr Ajorin, an award-winning researcher and Acting Head of the Department of Microbiology at LASU, has also been selected among the Bacterial and Viral Bioinformatics Resource Centre (BV-BRC) 2023 Trainees at the Argonne National Laboratory, Chicago, Lemont Illinois, USA.

This is a welcome development for Nigeria, a country endemic to Lassa Fever, COVID-19, Yellow Fever, and other infectious diseases.

Situation of viral diseases in Nigeria

The Nigeria Centre for Disease Control (NCDC), the national public health institute for Nigeria, has been at the forefront of battling viral diseases and protecting Nigerians by coordinating public health preparedness, surveillance, laboratory, and response functions for all infectious diseases.

Lassa Fever, now more endemic in Nigeria, has been spreading in several states across the countrys six geopolitical zones and the federal capital territory.

According to the latest situation report on the NCDC website, from week 1 to week 23, 2023, 164 deaths have been reported with a case fatality rate (CFR) of 17.1 per cent, which is lower than the CFR for the same period in 2022 (20.0 per cent)

Also, according to the World Health Organisation (WHO), before the decline in COVID-19 infections in Nigeria, there were 266,675 confirmed cases, with 3,155 deaths as of 28 June.

To address the challenge of Lassa fever and other deadly viruses, according to Mr Anjorin, Nigeria needs a comprehensive understanding of the basics, genomics, proteomics, molecular docking for drug design and vaccine production for each of the viral aetiologies, that is the causative agents.

He said part of the training sessions focused on using the BV-BRC command-line interface for programmatic search and retrieval of data that will assist the country to analyse, in real time, thousands of information about the microbes causing different diseases, including Lassa fever, for Nigeria and Africa as a whole.

Advanced steps to understanding the incursion of diseases into and out of Nigeria have been improved upon through the well designed and thoroughly discussed phylogenetic and comparative genomic analyses, sequence assembly and annotation, subspecies classification, protein structure, surveillance data exploration, and transcriptomic analysis, while the trending global metagenomic data analysis was detailed for prompt analysis of such data emanating from Nigeria and other parts of the world, Mr Anjorin explained.

Knowledge sharing

According to LASU, the training will enhance the capacity development of Mr Anjorin for knowledge sharing among faculty members.

LASU noted that in an award letter issued and signed by Christian Brechot, President of GVN and Robert Gallo, the Co-founder and International Advisor for the organisation. It noted that the scholarship training will be on the fundamental, translational, and clinical aspects of viruses relevant to human health.

It added that the course will also involve interaction with renowned medical virology leaders, industry partners, policymakers and program officials from the Johns Hopkins School of Public Health and the National Institutes of Health (NIH).

Speaking on its benefits to the university, LASU said the scholarship will also help in the training of both undergraduate and postgraduate students in the area of genomics and metagenomics using the newly developed bioinformatics tools by the United States Argonne National Laboratory, Chicago, Lemont Illinois, and the skills from the GVN training at the Ivy leagues.

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before He comes, the glory must return to the church. The glory here refers to the presence of God; the power of God; the awe of God; the fear of God. It wont happen to every Christian because 1 Timothy 4:1; Matthew 24:15 and other scriptures that speak to the falling away of people MUST come to pass in the last days. However, God is reserving a remnant  you and I, and we the remnants must carry His glory.

The glory of this latter house shall be greater than of the former, saith the LORD of hosts: and in this place will I give peace, saith the LORD of hosts.  (Haggai 2:9)

Gods glory is coming back to the church. The present day church must be purified and sanctified. Jesus is coming back. Dont listen to the false teachers who are saying that there will be no rapture. They are messengers of Satan. Hear His word: Look, I am coming soon! Blessed are those who obey the words of prophecy written in this book (Rev 22:7).

For the Lord himself will come down from heaven with a commanding shout, with the voice of the archangel, and with the trumpet call of God. First, the believers who have died will rise from their graves (1 Thesallonians 4:16).

But before He comes, the glory must return to the church. The glory here refers to the presence of God; the power of God; the awe of God; the fear of God. It wont happen to every Christian because 1 Timothy 4:1; Matthew 24:15 and other scriptures that speak to the falling away of people MUST come to pass in the last days. However, God is reserving a remnant  you and I, and we the remnants must carry His glory.

The remnants are those who have chosen to be vessels of honour to God; they who have chosen to walk in integrity; they who have chosen to stand with the word of God even when it conflicts with culture; they who have chosen to deny the flesh and follow Jesus all the way  these remnants are the vessels of honour that Paul spoke about in 2 Timothy 2:1: Therefore if anyone cleanses himself from the latter, he will be a vessel for honor, sanctified and useful for the Master, prepared for every good work.

This is an elite group that will carry His glory, and here are the dimensions of His glory that they will carry, which we are going to pray about today:

They will be made influential by God, and they will be made prominent in the culture. Because of their light, the darkness of culture will identify them and will be drawn to their light to glorify God: Now it shall come to pass in the latter days That the mountain of the Lords house Shall be established on the top of the mountains, And shall be exalted above the hills; And peoples shall flow to it (Micah 4:1; Isaiah 2:2).

They will experience the outpouring of the gifts of the Holy Spirit in very strange dimensions; Joel 2:22-23. This elite group of remnants will also be positioned for supernatural provision in the last days. There will be an anointing for doubled capacity. Lets see the prophecy behind this in Exodus 16:4-5:

Then the Lord said to Moses, Behold, I will rain bread from heaven for you. And the people shall go out and gather a certain quota every day, that I may test them, whether they will walk in My law or not. 5. And it shall be on the sixth day that they shall prepare what they bring in, and it shall be twice as much as they gather daily.'

The glory of God will empower the remnants to receive rain, standing for grace. This is not any type of rain, it will be an unusual supernatural grace for fruitfulnessin evangelism, in the work of God in their hands, and in every area.

Ask the Lord for rain in the time of the latter rain. The Lord will make flashing clouds; He will give them showers of rain, Grass in the field for everyone (Zechariah 10:1).

The glory will bring supernatural protection upon their lives. Isaiah 4:5 says that wherever the glory is, there will be defence. The Good News Translation says it this way: Gods glory will cover and protect the whole city.

Prayer points

Oh Lord, release your glory upon me and make me a mountain in these last days. Oh Lord, release your glory upon me and let the gifts of the Spirit begin to manifest in my life. Oh Lord, release your glory upon me and let my life attract supernatural provisions. Oh Lord, release your glory upon me and let the former and the latter rain fall on me. Oh Lord, release your glory upon me and defend me and my family in this wicked time.

Ayo Akerele, a leadership and system development strategist, and minister of the word, writes from Canada and can be reached through ayoakerele2012@gmail.com.

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Without any gainsaying, the last elections were fought on several fronts, with men and women making huge sacrifices, as some went against their kith and kin and made huge financial contributions to the campaign, especially at a time of severe naira scarcity, accentuated by the now infamous naira redesign policy of the Central Bank of Nigeria These believers persevered and made sacrifices, while other loyal party men and women strategised day and night, while utilising copious amounts of time and resources to ensure that the All Progressives Congress (APC) came out victorious.

Since the inauguration of the current government on the 29th of May, President Bola Ahmed Tinubu has been championing life-changing policies, appointing advisers and setting up a solid foundation for the building blocks of his presidency. It is interesting to note that even with the intense lobby going on, no one has come out to publicly project that they are a potential candidate for a ministerial position, except Professor Muhammad Pate who quietly let it slip through the press announcement of his colleagues that he was passing over the highly important leadership of GAVI, a global vaccine health behemoth, to return home to serve his country.

Even if this were to be true, it appears to be forcing the hands of the president to nominate and appoint him as the Minister-designate from Bauchi State, in a not-too difficult assumption to superintend over the affairs of the Federal Ministry of Health.

Without any gainsaying, the last elections were fought on several fronts, with men and women making huge sacrifices, as some went against their kith and kin and made huge financial contributions to the campaign, especially at a time of severe naira scarcity, accentuated by the now infamous naira redesign policy of the Central Bank of Nigeria.

These believers persevered and made sacrifices, while other loyal party men and women strategised day and night, while utilising copious amounts of time and resources to ensure that the All Progressives Congress (APC) came out victorious.

Bauchi State was one such battlegrounds during the last presidential election, even as the party hierarchy was firmly in the hands of a lackluster political operative, the former Minister of Education, Adamu Adamu and an equally uninspiring gubernatorial candidate, Air Marshal Sadique Abubakar (retd). Hence, it took the combined efforts of the traditional and reliable APC structure in the state for the APC to achieve the 37.1 % of the votes cast, that gave Tinubu the required 25% to tick the box as one of its wins, adding to the overall victory at the polls.

This context is very important because despite being a global health actor, nothing is known about Pates contributions to Bauchi State APC or the centre when it mattered the most. He was ensconced in pursuing his GAVI briefs, which is not bad thing on its own, only that this largely fosters his personal career growth, while others were in the political trenches ensuring a much-needed victory at the polls.

One very important aspect to look at is that given his prominent relationship with the former President of the Senate, Dr Bukola Saraki, his interests and sympathies might even have aligned with that of the PDP candidate, former Vice President Atiku Abubakar, for all anyone knows.

As Saraki played a prominent role in the political structure and campaign of Atikus last push for the presidency. It is only natural that the relationship with the latter would very likely have inspired Pates political inclination.

To further buttress how Professor Pate is not a die-in-the-wool party man, he was one of 28 candidates who vied for the governorship of Bauchi State in 2019 under the aegis of APC, at the time he had described himself as an accidental politician. It wasnt far-fetched that he lost out and continued his candidature under the more ideological left Peoples Redemption Party (PRP).

Other fears harboured against people like him are the fact that the so-called technocrats have used national positions and assignments to propel themselves to global appointments, and the headship of global organisations, after stints in Nigerian MDAs. We saw this in the recent history of the likes of Amina Mohammed, who served for a year as Minister of Environment before leaving for the UN; Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala, who went to the World Bank after her stint as Minister of Finance and recently became the President of the World Trade Organisation, Nigerias former Minister of Agriculture; and Mr Adewunmi Adeshina, who had the entire goodwill and machinery of government thrown behind him to emerge as the African Development Bank (AfDB) president. Pate is in great company as in the past he had resigned his position as Nigerias minister of state for Health at a time Nigeria needed him most, in order to further his professional career at the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation.

We must stop this disrespect of politicians, using them only to serve our purpose, and onboarding technocrats who come to reap where they have not sown anything. Lets remember that not only technocrats are meritorious nor are the smartest Nigerians around. There are politicians of great experience who can get the job done. The slot of Bauchi is too important politically speaking to be filled up by individuals who contributed little or next to nothing to the electoral victory, like Professor Pate. In this instance, Pate is already late to the party. President Bola Ahmed Tinubu must get it right.

Misbahu Shehu a public affairs analyst is based in Bauchi, Bauchi State.

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The release, last week, of new customer due diligence regulations by the Central Bank of Nigeria (CBN) underscored the importance of getting the regulatory space right. This is important, especially at this juncture in the evolution of the domestic economy when reforms by government not only threaten established practices, but as a result have imposed huge adjustment burdens on the mass of the population.

But is the inclusion by the CBN of customers social media handles, in a lengthening list of requirements that financial institutions must rely on in order to identify their customers, the gratuitous invasion of privacy that critics of the policy argue it is?

Concerns over the collection of data on individual activities in these parts are not only exercised by the understanding that the governance of data is not a strong suit of our public institutions. There are, in addition, legitimate worries about the uses to which such information may be put, including hounding those who might disagree with government.

Against these fears, though, PREMIUM TIMES has had to balance the need to strengthen the know your customer and due diligence client onboarding protocols of financial institutions, even as market-based reforms to the economy hold out the promise of an increase in the supply of financial resources.

This equally aligns with the demand of the Nigeria Data Protection Commission on the need to protect the rights and interests of Nigerians as data subjects. Hence, there is need for data limitation to the extents of the purpose for which it is primarily required.

While we note the burden on domestic economic entities from these reforms, we recognise that more liberal market structures would be required if the price mechanism is to function properly. Whereas a more liberal market environment necessarily requires minimum impediments to the entry and exit of suppliers and consumers from markets across the country, we are also persuaded that deregulation of an economy is not the same as the absence of regulations.

And so, the reforms that the CBN recently embarked upon matter. But not in the way that the initial responses to the apex banks regulatory tweak suggest. Financial institutions fiduciary responsibilities to their clients and to the economy require that their processes and procedures are not tainted by corrupt practices.

Inasmuch as the regulator bears responsibility for ensuring that each such institution is stable, the institution is responsible for ensuring that its customers businesses do not compromise the integrity of the system. It could be in order, therefore, to ensure that these financial institutions regularly profile their customers. Yet, in this sense, the list of documents that banks have required before one may open an account are far more intrusive than is the customers social media handle.

Not many customers will put their permanent addresses (full physical addresses), residential addresses, telephone numbers, bank verification numbers, and tax identification numbers on their social media handles. But they have willingly handed these over to banks. Nor are banks the only institutions that now feel that access to their customers social media handles are important for their background checks, as many who have recently applied for travel visas will readily attest.

All of which invite attention to the the CBNs governance structure. The suspension on 9 June this year of the previous incumbent means we have had someone act in that capacity. It also means that the process for the appointment of a substantive governor ought by now to be in place. But because of the impact of the slew of reforms implemented by the Tinubu administration on domestic prices, the Central Banks remit for maintaining price stability has not been more important for domestic outcomes than it is today. The genius of Mr Godwin Emefieles tenure as governor was to point out qualities that a holder of that office should not have.

At the very least, the CBN governor must understand the role of the apex banks staff in the design of appropriate policy responses. Given the fact that these are professional economists weighing in on the more arcane areas of their profession, it would help that the next central bank governor is an economist  Mr Emefiele was not. And, the consequences were evident in his many madcap schemes. He was a banker. For a while now, the local monetary policy space has come to conflate the banker in the description of a commercial bank staff with the Bank in the title of the CBN. Mr Emefiele again underlined the fallacy of this reasoning.

PREMIUM TIMES prefers therefore that the vacancy in the office of the governor of the CBN is advertised in four newspapers  two in Nigeria, and two abroad (with global reach)  as part of a professional headhunting process that ends with the recommendation of three names that the president may then nominate for confirmation by the National Assembly. That way, we may obtain a sense of the job description of the governor of the CBN. While we understand that a deep understanding of the finer details of macroprudential policies will underpin this job description, we do not expect that it will include invitations to duel with economic entities that the apex bank disagrees with.

PREMIUM TIMES believes that additional reforms to the organisation of the Central Bank will be required. First, to correct the damage Mr Emefieles tenure wrought on the institution. Second, to make the bank fit for the task of managing monetary policy in a private-sector driven and market-led economy. In this sense, the most urgent is the requirement to separate the regulation of financial institutions (banks inclusive) from the perception, reinforced by Mr Emefieles management style, that they are departments of the apex bank. Up to a point, the requirement for this re-organisation is met by separating the Central Bank from the Bankers Committee. But we are now persuaded that a more goal-appropriate response would go all the way to hiving off the CBNs banking supervision unit as a stand alone section, so that the central bank may more narrowly and properly focus on its price stability remit.

The CBNs policy committees relevance to the ongoing fight against rising domestic prices means it is no less important a target for reforms. As members of the policy committee, we believe that the deputy governors were remiss regarding their bailiwick over the period Mr Emefiele was governor. While the apex bank might do no worse than conduct a review of its performance over this period, PREMIUM TIMES is convinced that it may need to restructure the deputy governor function, such that each of them has policy and operational oversight over one of the countrys six geopolitical regions. Sitting in these regions, understanding the peculiar business and economic needs therein and attending policy meetings from there, should improve the conversations at the meetings of the Monetary Policy Committee.

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The Anambra Government has set up a panel of inquiry into the controversy trailing the highest scorer in the 2023 Unified Tertiary Matriculation Examination (UTME).

Ngozi Chuma-Udeh, the Anambra Commissioner for Education, announced the setting up of the panel in a statement in Awka on Monday.

A panel of inquiry has been set up to work with security agents to investigate the allegation of falsification of result levelled against Mmesoma Ejikeme, who had earlier been showcased in the social media as having scored the highest, Mrs Chuma-Udeh, a professor, said.

The commissioner described the controversy on the girls actual result as embarrassing, especially coming at a time Governor Chukwuma Soludo was repositioning the education sector in Anambra.

It could be recalled that Ms Ejikeme, a student of Anglican Girls Secondary School Uruagu in Nnewi, had earlier been celebrated for emerging with the highest score of 362 in the 2023 UTME, a result described by JAMB as fake.

The Joint Admissions and Matriculation Board (JAMB) said in a statement on Sunday that Ms Ejikeme inflated her actual result from 249 to 362.

Meanwhile, the Anambra State government has hailed Nkechinyere Umeh who was declared by JAMB as the highest scorer nationwide with a cumulative mark of 360 in the 2023 UTME.

(NAN)

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Ifeanyi Ubah, a Nigerian senator, has vowed to stop every Monday sit-at-home in Anambra South District, where he represents.

The sit-at-home is usually enforced by a faction of the outlawed Indigenous People of Biafra (IPOB).

Mr Ubah, a member of the Young Progressives Party, disclosed this at the Ifeanyi Ubah International Stadium, Nnewi, Anambra State, on Sunday, when he addressed members of Anambra Vigilante Group and community security watch operatives from the four quarters of Nnewi.

A video clip which showed him making the statement has been circulating on social media.

The senator said the sit-at-home has had adverse effects on the commercial, economic, and well-being of South-east residents since the region began observing the civil action two years ago.

We have found that we are losing our economic base and most importantly, we are losing jobs and business opportunities since the sit-at-home began.

As a representative of the good people of Anambra South (District), Nnewi North, being the political capital of Anambra South, I deem it fit to say we will not continue to have sit-at-home on Mondays, he said while being flanked by members of the vigilante group.

Mr Ubah said Mondays are serious days for business and economic activities, regretting that the sit-at-home had destroyed businesses in the South-east.

He pointed out that his community, Nnewi, used to be known as an industrial area, but the sit-at-home had dealt with the once-industrial hub of Africa.

I have procured a number of security gadgets and equipment such as CCTV cameras, patrol vans, motorcycles, walkie-talkies, wooden osisi agaga from Nnewi evil forests and I am handing this equipment over to the vigilante operatives to help them in tackling any resultant security breach that may arise as we resolve to end this cankerworm called sit-at-home, the senator stated.

From this Monday, every business area in Nnewi shall be open for business. We have our men; we have our system. I know saboteurs will try to sabotage our efforts, but were resolved to fight any aggressor that will come into this town, Mr Ubah added.

By Monday, July 3, we will embark on a show of force, it is our economy that is suffering. Anybody that does not open his shop on Monday, the community will lock his or her shop for six months.

Mr Ubah thus joins a string of leaders from the South-east who have called for an end to the sit-at-home. In neighbouring Enugu State, the governor has warned public officials to resume work on Mondays or risk being dismissed from office.

IPOB, in August 2021, introduced a sit-at-home order every Monday across the South-east to pressure the Nigerian government to release its detained leader, Nnamdi Kanu, who is standing trial for alleged terrorism.

The separatist group later suspended the order, in preference for it to be implemented only on days Mr Kanu appears in court.

But despite its suspension, residents of the five South-east states  Enugu, Ebonyi, Imo, Abia and Anambra  have been observing the Monday sit-at-home order, mostly out of fear.

IPOB had repeatedly disowned the Monday sit-at-home across the region, saying those who still enforce the order were criminals attempting to blackmail the separatist group.

Simon Ekpa, a leader of Autopilot, a faction of the IPOB, has continued to declare the sit-at-home order in the region despite being suspended by the IPOB faction led by Mr Kanu.

Mr Ekpa, a Nigerian-Finnish citizen, hails from Ngbo, a community in Ohaukwu Local Government Area of Ebonyi State, south-east Nigeria.

Ubah challenges factional IPOB leader

Meanwhile, Mr Ubah challenged Mr Ekpa, who resides in Finland, to return to Nigeria and feel the pain caused by the sit-at-home in the region if he wanted to be taken seriously.

He (Ekpa) is from Ebonyi State, he should come home and feel the pain we are feeling. He has nationalised in Finland, where he is currently contesting for a councillorship seat, and he has the effrontery to dictate to us how to sit at home on Mondays here in Igbo land, he said.

We will forgive Ekpa for the injuries he has inflicted on us so far, but if he continues, we will deal with him furiously. He should leave Anambra State alone. We are warning him to steer clear of Nnewi with his sit-at-home order forthwith.

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A woman has allegedly set a female police officer and her two children ablaze in Anambra State, South-east Nigeria.

The suspect, Nnaemaka Nwosu, allegedly carried out the act on Sunday at Nnokwa, a community in Idemili South Local Government Area of the state.

It was learnt that Mrs Nwosu, who hails from Amawbia, another community in the Awka South Council Area of the state, became homeless after her husband divorced her.

The suspect consequently approached the police officer, who offered to accommodate her out of compassion.

Sources from the community told PREMIUM TIMES that the suspect, on Sunday, had a disagreement with the officer, which made the suspect attack the victim with part of a grinding machine before setting her and her two children ablaze.

A resident of the community, Chukwuma Ejiofor, told PREMIUM TIMES on Monday that the cause of disagreement was unclear to residents of the area.

I heard that the vigilante people later came and arrested the woman. She tried to escape, but some villagers held her until the vigilante people arrived, Mr Ejiofor said.

He said the suspect, while being held by the villagers, initially claimed that it was a gas cylinder that exploded and caused the fire that killed the officer and her children but later confessed that she was the one who carried out the act.

When contacted on Monday afternoon, the police spokesperson in Anambra State, Tochukwu Ikenga, confirmed the incident to PREMIUM TIMES.

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Mr Ikenga, a deputy superintendent of police, said the police had arrested the suspect, and her case was transferred to the State Criminal Investigation Department for investigations.

Preliminary information reveals that the woman police accommodated the suspect while she was searching for a house. The two women had a disagreement which resulted in a fight before the suspect hit the woman police on her head with a piston.

While she became unconscious, she tied her with her two kids and set them ablaze, the police spokesperson narrated.

He said the bodies of the victims had been deposited in a morgue.

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News / National

by Staff reporter

Human rights activists and opposition members have condemned Zanu-PF Matebeleland South chairman Nqobizitha Mangaliso Ndlovu, for referring to the opposition as cockroaches', saying he does not deserve to hold public office because hate speech undermines democratic processes, especially as the country prepares for elections next month.During a rally at Nyele Primary in Bulilima District, Ndlovu mocked the opposition Citizens Coalition for Change (CCC) party and compared them to cockroaches.Human rights defenders have expressed concern that such sentiments weaken democratic processes and are unacceptable in a free society, particularly as the country prepares for elections on August 23, 2023."Hate speech should be avoided at all costs. Leaders must learn to make their points without relying on insults which only help to deepen political divisions and heighten opportunities for political violence," said Effie Ncube.Ncube said the reference to people as cockroaches particularly in Matebeleland raises a reminder of the Gukurahundi genocide."We must guard against all that. As a victim himself, Ndlovu should be aware of the injury. The wounds are deep and require healing and not insensitive speech. Hate speech also contributes to a climate of fear and retribution which undermine the possibility of free and fair elections," he said, emphasising that Zanu-PF officials must avoid such hateful references.Mbuso Fuzwayo, Secretary General of Ibhetshu LikaZulu, a pressure group, said "Such rhetoric was not expected from a youthful government minister because the word cockroaches led to the death of over 20 000 in Matebeleland.""He doesn't deserve to hold a public office," Fuzwayo said.Ndlovu is the Minister of Environment, Climate, Tourism, and Hospitality Industry.Fuzwayo's remarks refer to President Emmerson Mnangagwa, who in 1984, as Minister of State Security under the late Robert Mugabe, compared the people of Matebeleland and the Midlands to cockroaches that needed to be treated with a pesticide called DDT.After Mnangagwa's utterances, the following day, the North Korean-trained Fifth Brigade soldiers murdered 55 civilians at Siwale in Lupane. Swithern Chirowodza, Provincial Spokesperson for the CCC in Bulawayo, remarked that while it was disturbing for Ndlovu to clone President Mnangagwa's "cockroach" hate speech, he could have been suggesting the likelihood of future bloodshed if the opposition party won."PF ZAPU members, supporters and AmaNdebele were massacred by the Fifth Brigade mainly in the Matebeleland and Midlands provinces. What Mangaliso has been coy to state is how violent Zanu-PF is going to eradicate' the so-called cockroaches. We however draw lessons from the aftermath of Rwanda's 1994 Tutsi genocide sparked by Radio RTLM which called certain citizens cockroaches'," he said.Chirowodza believes that hate speech should be punishable by law."It cannot be business as usual. Mangaliso must be prosecuted lest others from his party inflame our politics in a manner that could lead to genocide of CCC members," he said.Mthwakazi Republic Party (MRP) leader, Mqondisi Moyo, concurred Ndlovu's utterances were an insult to people in Matebeleland, confirming that he was receiving mentorship from Mnangangwa."We are afraid that Mangaliso Ndlovu is signalling another coming Gukurahundi Genocide but we warn him to be careful, he must not play with our emotions. Mangaliso Ndlovu is a conduit of the Shona 1979 Grand Plan and its 14-page Review Document by Zanu-PF. Mangaliso is singing for his supper yet he and his boss should revive the economy," he said.Moyo said Ndlovu must have been bitter when he stated such, knowing that Matebeleland no longer supports Zanu-PF."It was proven by over a hundred buses and trucks that were seen on social media transporting people as far as from Mashonaland to a rally in Bulilima where Mangaliso hails from. His sentiments are a security threat," said the MRP leader.Instead of resorting to hate speech, Ndlovu, according to the MRP leader, should be discussing strategies to revitalize Zimbabwe's tourism economy."We seek no apology from him and the decision for him to step down lies with him," Moyo said, noting that Zanu-PF officials were used to making such hateful words."Remember on September 5, 2019, Energy Mutodi said Ndebele are foreigners, we took that as a Zanu-PF position and I believe Mangaliso Ndlovu is saying a Zanu-PF position."
( Read 2245 Times)

Lakshami Nappoo Hall in Matunga, Mumbai, came alive with vibrant colours as Raynah Hazari, a student of standard IX, brought together 50 members of the transgender community to foster a more inclusive environment and drive home the concept of parity in society. Mentored by artist Satyendra Rane and ably supported by non-profit organisations Sahayog Art Foundation, Aabha and Alert Citizen Forum, members of the trans community enthusiastically walked in early on a Sunday monsoon morning to engage in this artistic endeavour that filled colours into their otherwise Black-and-White lives! Titled Falak, signifying borderless skies, the event was graced by well-known trans fashion designer Saisha Shinde who readily lent her support to the initiative. The event also saw in attendance artist Satyendra Rane, social activist Niranjan Aher, Tanmay Gope (Ex-President, Rotary Club of Chandivali Mumbai) among many others who championed the cause.

Lauding the initiative, Saisha Shinde said that she has known Raynah Hazari and family since a long time and is elated that a girl so young has taken on an initiative of this scale! Actively painting on umbrellas alongside the participants, the ace fashion designer urged that "respect, dignity and social acceptance" is what the transgender community is actually looking for.

Expressed Sreedevi Londhe, a transgender activist and participant, The event Falak by Raynah is a beautifully curated one Its the rainy season and what could be more beautiful than painting on umbrellas! I am elated that through this platform we will get an opportunity to showcase our talents to the world at large. I urge to the society that if only people can look at us beyond our gender and not judge us for the same; it will help bring parity in society. Events like this help to encourage and motivate us and fill us with hopes for ek nayi seher (a new dawn).

Added Raynah Hazari, Art is not just about creating visually striking pieces  its chiefly about conveying emotions, telling stories, and most importantly, making an impact. This is just a stepping stone; I am hoping to help them secure employment through the medium of Art in the future.

Source :
News Provided by Data Centre Magazine: Avnish Patankar, Commercial Director of BDx Indonesia, defines the reasons for its data centre acquisitions and transparent approach to disruption

LONDON, July 3, 2023 /PRNewswire/ -- As a proud people-person, Avnish Patankar  Commercial Director at BDx Indonesia  acknowledges that he is someone who thrives when working with people and for people. In fact, he attributes 'customer-facing' as one of his greatest qualities, which supports him in carrying out his role for the company's Indonesia data centre.

Prior to working for BDx Indonesia, Patankar gathered experience from various work settings where we see the foundations of his customer-centric approach. This first came into play in his sales engineer position at Paragon Water Technologies before he reached higher to achieve more success at Thermax, WOG Technologies, and Sterling and Wilson.

"When I started my career in an Indian engineering company, we were selling steam boilers and we were trained completely. I'd say that was the best-standing school for me. We were taught to be transparent to the customer in every situation, understand their requirements and applications, innovative solutions, and partner them for the implementation," says Patankar.

BDx Indonesia has been featured in the July issue of Data Centre Magazine

In this exclusive interview, Avnish Patankar Commercial Director discussed Customer-centricity helps data centres overcome disruption.

"People who work with the company create the company, they build the company"

Data Centre Magazine is the 'Digital Community' for the global big data and cloud industry. Data Centre Magazine covers smart Information Technology, Automation, Critical Environments, AI, Networking and Data Centres - connecting the world's largest community of data executives. Data Centre Magazine focuses on data centre news, key data centre interviews, data centre videos, along with an ever-expanding range of focused data centre white papers and webinars.

https://datacentremagazine.com/

BizClik is a UK-based media company with a global portfolio of leading industry, business and lifestyle digital communities.

BizClik's portfolio includes Technology & AI, Finance & Insurance, Manufacturing & Supply Chain, Energy & Mining, Construction, Healthcare, Mobile & Data Centres and EV. For further information, please visit https://www.bizclikmedia.com/

You can read the report in the latest issue of Data Centre Magazine by clicking HERE https://datacentremagazine.com/magazines .

SOURCE Data Centre Magazine
News / National

by Staff reporter

President Emmerson Mnangagwa has issued a stern warning to the business sector and specifically targeted Indians, accusing them of stockpiling basic supplies to create artificial shortages and boost prices."We are being attacked currently by price hikes. Why, just when we announced that we are going for general elections? Our enemies decided they must cause problems among our people and started hiking prices such as Innscor," Mnangagwa said, although Innscor had provided some of the food that people ate at the rally and had also displayed their banner alongside Zanu-PF banners.President Mnangagwa singled out businesspeople of Indian origin and said he had information that they were illegally hoarding basic commodities."I have been told today that some Indians in Harare are stocking basic goods in warehouses. They buy sugar from Chiredzi, all the basic goods like flour and so on to stock in their warehouse then raise the prices, let me warn them," he said and added that his team was investigating this issue and would proceed to confiscate the goods."If it is true, we shall confiscate, not only the warehouses but the things inside them and give it to you and distribute to people."The president said if foreign businesspeople based in Zimbabwe wanted to hoard goods, they should "go back to their countries.""Our government will never tolerate such activities in an independent Zimbabwe," Mnangagwa said.There has been a sudden disappearance of basic commodities including sugar, cooking oil and flour in most shops, especially in major urban areas, resulting in price hikes, which the Mnangagwa-led government has blamed on economic saboteurs trying to dent its works ahead of the national elections slated for August 23.
DUBLIN, July 3, 2023 /PRNewswire/ -- OASIS Group, the largest privately owned information management organisation in Europe, is delighted to announce that Sarah Vidgen has joined the group as Chief People Officer.

Vidgen brings over 20 years of experience in human resources from across diverse industries including public sector, construction, logistics and information management. In her most recent role, she served as Senior Director Global HR Service Delivery and Operations EMEA for Iron Mountain.

Sarah Vidgen

Earlier in her career, she gained experience and knowledge working in client facing roles, making her uniquely positioned to understand the needs of the internal workforce to best support external clients.

As Chief People Officer Vidgen is responsible for the HR functions of the group, applying a people-first strategy to attract, develop and retain top talent.

Vidgen, who began her role with OASIS on 3rd July said; "I'm thrilled to be joining OASIS on its growth journey, alongside Eddie Aston and the rest of the leadership team. I'm particularly excited to have the opportunity to build an amazing global community that shares one set of values and culture, whilst understanding the need for regional identities."

Eddie Aston, Chief Executive Officer at OASIS said: "Sarah's appointment is an important step for OASIS, as we enter a new phase of growth. Our people are the foundation of our business, it is vital that every team member feels that OASIS is a place where they can grow. We have a unique opportunity to reimagine how we support our team and Sarah will play an important role in this."

About OASIS Group

OASIS Group is the largest privately-owned information management provider in Europe, securing and managing over 120 million barcoded items, 230TB of digital data which equates to 512 million documents, and scanning more than 17 million images per month.

Since forming in 1999, OASIS Group have grown steadily, now employing over 1,700 team members. Today the group serve more than 11,500 clients from over 70 locations across six countries; Belgium, Great Britain, Netherlands, Northern Ireland, Poland and the Republic of Ireland.

Together these sites provide secure, affordable and comprehensive information services to clients in diverse industry sectors including education, energy, finance, government, healthcare, legal, manufacturing and retail.

OASIS Group is at the forefront of Information Management; and has won the Document Manager Software Product of the Year Award for four years running (2019-2023) for their Electronic Document and Records Management System (EDRMS) 'Omnidox'.

Photo - https://mma.prnewswire.com/media/2145383/Sarah_Vidgen.jpg

SOURCE OASIS Group
With over 11,000 attendees from 99 countries, Israel's annual Cyber Week conference convened top government officials, leading private companies, startups, entrepreneurs, VCs, academic experts, the military, and AI professionals. They addressed challenges posed by cybercrime projected to cost a staggering $10.5 trillion annually by 2025, and foster collaboration to combat this growing threat.

TEL AVIV, Israel, July 3, 2023 /PRNewswire/ -- Cyber Week, the annual cybersecurity event, successfully concluded its 13th conference, bringing together prominent figures from industry, government, military, and academia. The event was jointly organized by the Blavatnik Interdisciplinary Cyber Research Center (ICRC), the Yuval Ne'eman Workshop for Science, Technology, and Security at Tel Aviv University, and the Israeli National Cyber Directorate under the Prime Minister's Office along with the Ministry of Economy and Ministry of Foreign Affairs. Participants showcased the latest developments, challenges, and opportunities in the field of cybersecurity.

The conference featured esteemed speakers from around the world, including leading Israeli government officials such as Gaby Portnoy, Director General of the Israel National Cyber Directorate (INCD), and Ronen Bar, Director of the Israel Security Agency (Shin Bet). Maj. Gen. (Ret.) Prof. Isaac Ben-Israel, widely recognized as the "father" of the Israeli Cyber industry, led the conference.

Distinguished global cyber officials also made significant contributions, including Kemba Eneas Walden, Acting National Cyber Director in the Office of the National Cyber Director; Nathaniel C. Fick, Ambassador at Large for Cyberspace and Digital Policy at the U.S. Department of State; Minister Audrey Tang, Ministry of Digital Affairs Taiwan; Sami Khoury, Head of the Canadian Centre for Cyber Security; H.E. Dr. Mohamed Al Kuwaiti, Head of Cyber Security for the United Arab Emirates Government; Craig Jones, Cybercrime Director at INTERPOL; and Ann Dunkin, Chief Information Officer of the U.S. Department of Energy. The conference also welcomed renowned private sector leaders, such as Eric Doerr, VP of Engineering and Cloud Security at Google Cloud; Gil Shwed, Founder & CEO of Check Point; Aviv Cohen, CMO of Pentera; Bret Arsenault, Corporate Vice President, and Chief Information Security Officer of Microsoft; Udi Mokady, Founder and Executive Chairman of CyberArk; Chris Roberts, CISO of Boom Supersonic; Lane Bess, CEO of Deep Instinct and many more. This diverse lineup of speakers provided invaluable insights into the current cybersecurity landscape.

The 13th Annual Cyber Week Conference took place amidst the backdrop of rapid AI development, Russia's ongoing war on Ukraine, and an alarming rise in cybercrime and cyber-related damages, which are projected to reach an annual cost of $10.5 trillion by 2025. While concerns about the impact of AI across sectors, including cybersecurity, were discussed, speakers also expressed optimism about the transformative potential of this technology in addressing cybersecurity challenges.

H.E. Dr. Mohamed Al Kuwaiti, Head of Cyber Security, United Arab Emirates Government, discussed the importance of allies, detailing how Israel recently helped the UAE fend off a serious DDoS cyberattack. "Thank God for the Abraham Accords... Cybersecurity is an important aspect for us all. "The UAE is going through great digital transformation across all sectors: aviation, education, healthcare, oil and gas, transportation. And as a matter of fact, we need to ensure a safe and secure digital transformation." Dr. Al Kuwaiti continued, describing how the UAE plugs into the Start-Up Nation's many companies to build and extend his country's "cyber dome" to defend against cyberattacks.

Ronen Bar, Director of the Israel Security Agency (Shin Bet/ISA), spoke about how the Shin Bet is harnessing AI: "AI technology has been incorporated quite naturally into the Shin Bet's interdiction machine." He describes how "an alarming number of [cybersecurity cases] have a strong basis on the web  posts, inspiration, knowledge, or social groups. The trend is clear. Traditional security organizations must adapt to the new situation, where any angry person with access to the Internet may become a threat. Already today, with AI, we have identified a significant number of threats," he said. "Since we have understood we can't fight this war with sticks and stones, we recognize the threats but also see opportunities of using AI."

The importance of global collaborations was made clear. Craig Jones, the Cybercrime Director of INTERPOL, commented on the legal challenges of cybersecurity: "When people say cybercrime is borderless, that really infuriates me because, as law enforcement officials, we are totally constricted by the countries and the legislation." To address the problem, Interpol has teams based around the world, providing "a framework for those countries and with secure platforms for communications." Ann Dunkin, CIO of the US Department of Energy, spoke on the importance of employing "a collective defense approach to cybersecurity." She said: "We must cooperate with like-minded international partners, focusing on innovation and cybersecurity capacity-building measures, cybersecurity for industrial control systems, the sharing of best practices, as well as workforce development strategies and training."

About Cyber Week:

Cyber Week is a leading international cybersecurity event that provides a unique opportunity for experts from industry, government, military, and academia to share their knowledge about the challenges and opportunities in the field. Cyber Week is hosted by the Blavatnik Interdisciplinary Cyber Research Center and the Yuval Ne'eman Workshop for Science, Technology, and Security at Tel Aviv University, headed by Major Gen. (Ret.) Prof. Isaac Ben-Israel, together with the Israel National Cyber Directorate at the Prime Minister's Office, The Ministry of Economy and Industry, and the Ministry of Foreign Affairs.

For more information about Cyber Week, please visit www.cyberweek.tau.ac.il .

SOURCE Cyber Week
DUBLIN, July 3, 2023 /PRNewswire/ -- The "Today's U.S. Electric Power Industry, Renewable Energy, ISO Markets, and Power Transactions" training has been added to ResearchAndMarkets.com's offering

If you want to better understand the U.S. electric power industry and the different ways power is bought and sold, this in-depth seminar is for you.

This program provides a comprehensive and clear explanation of the structure, function, and current status of today's U. S. electric power industry; the many industry topics listed below; ISO day-ahead energy auctions, and detailed examples of how physical and financial (virtual) power transactions, power purchase agreements (PPAs), tolling, and heat rate deals are done.

Each part of this complex industry will be explained piece by piece, and then the pieces will be integrated so that you will leave the seminar with an understanding of "how it all fits together."

Who Should Attend:

Among those who will benefit from this seminar include energy and electric power executives; attorneys; government regulators; traders & trading support staff; marketing, sales, purchasing & risk management personnel; accountants & auditors; plant operators; engineers; and corporate planners.

Types of companies that typically attend this program include energy producers and marketers; utilities; banks & financial houses; industrial companies; accounting, consulting & law firms; municipal utilities; government regulators and electric generators.

What You Will Learn

The properties and terminology of electricity - current, power, var, voltage, etc (pre-seminar reading material)

The electric service system, and how it works

The structure and function of the North American power grids.

How control areas and balancing authorities function to "keep the lights on."

The pros, cons, and levelized costs of different types of electric generation

Fundamentals of utility cost-of-service regulation, open access markets

Why utilities sometimes resist renewable energy, distributed energy resource (DER"), rooftop solar, and conservation projects.

The various industry participants are and what their roles are.

Federal vs state regulatory conflicts, and why restructuring today's power industry and the building new power lines is such a complicated task.

The difference between regulated and merchant high voltage power lines, and what FERC market-based transmission rates are.

The structure and functions of ISOs, RTOs, the Western Energy Imbalance Market ("WEIM"), and the new Southeast Energy Exchange Market ("SEEM").

How ISO day-ahead energy auctions work, and how they add value to the power industry

What locational marginal pricing (LMP) is, and why LMP is used

What demand response ("DR"), distributed energy resources ("DER"), and battery energy storage systems ("BESS") are, and how these resources can be aggregated to form virtual power plants.

The challenges and opportunities facing wind energy, solar, batteries, demand response, and DER and other renewables.

Why understanding generation reserve margin, forward capacity markets, capacity payments, resource adequacy, and California's "FRACMOO" is important.

"FRACMOO" is important. A summary of today's key industry issues and where the U. S. electric power industry is headed, including a discussion of the interconnection queues, renewable energy, and the building of new transmission lines.

The difference between auctions and bilateral bulk power markets

Introduction to bilateral energy and electricity markets: Important concepts and terminology

The difference between brokers, ICE OTC, futures exchanges, market-makers, traders, and power marketers, and how they add value.

Four different ways to manage price, price spread, and asset development risk.

The fundamentals of bilateral physical power transactions and important deal-making terminology.

How power marketers and traders use "seller's choice" to create virtual trading hubs.

The standard industry contracts used for physical and financial power transactions, how to buy transmission service using OASIS, how to schedule delivery using NERC tags, and how financial "book-outs" work. Includes detailed step-by-step transaction examples.

Financial power contracts, commodity swaps, CFDs, FTRs. CRRs, and ISO Incs, Decs, and virtual/convergence bidding. Includes examples

How financial power contracts work in combination with ISO day-ahead energy auctions to create a win/win situation, and why few power marketers or traders ever go to physical delivery within and ISO footprint.

How power marketing is done within an ISO location, how power can be "transported" virtually, NITS, TAC, UCAP, and ancillary services charges, and how FTRs, CRRs, and swaps can help hedge basis risk. Includes detailed step-by-step transaction examples.

The different types of heat rates and spark spreads, and why they are important.

The difference between power purchase agreements ("PPAs") and "Tolling Deals." Includes detailed Appendix and deal Term Sheet.

The magic of how heat rate transactions can be used to hedge electricity risk and structure profitable deals. Includes detailed step-by-step transaction examples.

Agenda

DAY ONE

The properties and terminology of electricity - current, power, var, voltage, etc (pre-seminar reading material)

The electric service system, and how it works

The structure and function of the North American power grids.

How control areas and balancing authorities function to "keep the lights on."

The pros, cons, and levelized costs of different types of electric generation

Fundamentals of utility cost-of-service regulation, open access markets

Why utilities sometimes resist renewable energy, distributed energy resource (DER"), rooftop solar, and conservation projects.

The various industry participants are and what their roles are.

Federal vs state regulatory conflicts, and why restructuring today's power industry and the building new power lines is such a complicated task.

The difference between regulated and merchant high voltage power lines, and what FERC market-based transmission rates are.

The structure and functions of ISOs, RTOs, the Western Energy Imbalance Market ("WEIM"), and the new Southeast Energy Exchange Market ("SEEM").

How ISO day-ahead energy auctions work, and how they add value to the power industry

What locational marginal pricing (LMP) is, and why LMP is used

What demand response ("DR"), distributed energy resources ("DER"), and battery energy storage systems ("BESS") are, and how these resources can be aggregated to form virtual power plants.

The challenges and opportunities facing wind energy, solar, batteries, demand response, and DER and other renewables.

Why understanding generation reserve margin, forward capacity markets, capacity payments, resource adequacy, and California's "FRACMOO" is important.

"FRACMOO" is important. A summary of today's key industry issues and where the U. S. electric power industry is headed, including a discussion of the interconnection queues, renewable energy, and the building of new transmission lines.

DAY TWO

The difference between auctions and bilateral bulk power markets

Introduction to bilateral energy and electricity markets: Important concepts and terminology

The difference between brokers, ICE OTC, futures exchanges, market-makers, traders, and power marketers, and how they add value.

Four different ways to manage price, price spread, and asset development risk.

The fundamentals of bilateral physical power transactions and important deal-making terminology.

How power marketers and traders use "seller's choice" to create virtual trading hubs.

The standard industry contracts used for physical and financial power transactions, how to buy transmission service using OASIS, how to schedule delivery using NERC tags, and how financial "book-outs" work. Includes detailed step-by-step transaction examples.

Financial power contracts, commodity swaps, CFDs, FTRs. CRRs, and ISO Incs, Decs, and virtual/convergence bidding. Includes examples

How financial power contracts work in combination with ISO day-ahead energy auctions to create a win/win situation, and why few power marketers or traders ever go to physical delivery within and ISO footprint.

How power marketing is done within an ISO location, how power can be "transported" virtually, NITS, TAC, UCAP, and ancillary services charges, and how FTRs, CRRs, and swaps can help hedge basis risk. Includes detailed step-by-step transaction examples.

The different types of heat rates and spark spreads, and why they are important.

The difference between power purchase agreements ("PPAs") and "Tolling Deals." Includes detailed Appendix and deal Term Sheet.

The magic of how heat rate transactions can be used to hedge electricity risk and structure profitable deals. Includes detailed step-by-step transaction examples.

Speakers:



John Adamiak

President

PGS Energy Training



John Adamiak is President and Founder of PGS Energy Training and an expert in energy derivatives and electric power markets. Mr. Adamiak is a well-known and highly effective seminar presenter who has over 20 years experience in the natural gas and electric power industries. His background includes 15 years as a seminar instructor, 9 years of energy transaction experience, and 6 years of strategic planning and venture capital activities. John's academic background includes an M.B.A. degree from Carnegie Mellon University.



For more information about this training visit https://www.researchandmarkets.com/r/v2rm57

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.

Media Contact:

Research and Markets

Laura Wood, Senior Manager

[email protected]



For E.S.T Office Hours Call +1-917-300-0470

For U.S./CAN Toll Free Call +1-800-526-8630

For GMT Office Hours Call +353-1-416-8900



U.S. Fax: 646-607-1907

Fax (outside U.S.): +353-1-481-1716

Logo: https://mma.prnewswire.com/media/539438/Research_and_Markets_Logo.jpg

SOURCE Research and Markets
SAN DIEGO, July 3, 2023 /PRNewswire/ -- Nicholas & Tomasevic, LLP, a leading law firm in labor and employment class action litigation, filed a lawsuit against ABC Legal Services, LLC for unfairly compensating its process servers who carry out vital work for ABC Legal throughout California.

According to the lawsuit, ABC Legal has failed to provide minimum protections to process servers under California law, such as not paying process servers for the time they spend unsuccessfully attempting to make service or perform related work like executing levies. The lawsuit further alleges ABC Legal does not reimburse process servers' business expenses (i.e., fuel costs, costs of vehicle depreciation, cell phone data costs, and printing costs) or pay its process servers overtime wages when they work over 8 hours in a day or 40 hours in a week.

The lawsuit seeks to recover damages and unpaid wages for the affected process servers, as well as to hold ABC Legal accountable for its violations of state labor laws.

"Regrettably, although California has made strenuous attempts to guarantee fair conditions and sufficient pay to working class people, companies like ABC Legal continue to knowingly take advantage of workers to boost their own earnings," states Shaun Markley, the attorney representing the workers in the lawsuit.

For more information, please contract Nicholas & Tomasevic at (619) 325-0492 or visit https://nicholaslaw.org/.

CONTACT:

Shaun Markley

225 Broadway, 19th Floor

San Diego, CA 92101

Telephone (619) 325-0492

[email protected]

SOURCE Nicholas & Tomasevic
Action1's free offering empowers IT teams to detect potential compromises resulting from the MOVEit vulnerability and gain comprehensive visibility into all instances of MOVEit File Transfer within their endpoints.

HOUSTON, July 3, 2023 /PRNewswire/ -- Action1 Corporation, a provider of the #1 risk-based patch management platform designed for work-from-anywhere enterprises, announced today the launch of a free tool designed to empower IT teams in detecting compromised MOVEit instances and defending against ransomware attacks exploiting this vulnerability.

MOVEit, a managed file transfer software developed by Progress Software, has been extensively utilized by thousands of IT departments in the financial, healthcare, and government sectors. Recently, a critical vulnerability (CVE-2023-34362) has emerged in MOVEit, enabling unauthorized access to the MOVEit Transfer's database and the potential alteration or deletion of its elements. Exploiting this vulnerability, hackers have already impacted over 130 organizations and millions of individuals.

To help organizations mitigate the threat of MOVEit vulnerability, Action1 releases the following capabilities, free for the first 100 endpoints:

Built-in instant "MOVEit Vulnerability Status" report. Check all endpoints for compromised instances of MOVEit Secure Managed File Transfer with exploited CVE-2023 -34362 vulnerability.

Check all endpoints for compromised instances of MOVEit Secure Managed File Transfer with exploited -34362 vulnerability. Software inventory. Gain visibility into all vulnerable instances of MOVEit within your network.

Gain visibility into all vulnerable instances of MOVEit within your network. Automated scripting and patching capabilities. Once compromised servers have been detected, users can run automated scripts to remove the compromised file from all affected servers and install the necessary patch, simplifying the process and saving time.

"What is particularly concerning is that 2,500 vulnerable MOVEit Transfer instances are exposed to the Internet, according to researchers. As a result, we might anticipate an increasing number of companies falling victim to ransomware attacks," warns Mike Walters, VP of Vulnerability and Threat Research and co-founder of Action1.

To get your free Action1 account, visit www.action1.com.

About Action1 Corporation

Action1 is the #1 risk-based patch management platform for distributed networks trusted by thousands of global enterprises. Action1 helps to discover, prioritize, and remediate vulnerabilities in a single solution to prevent security breaches and ransomware attacks. It automates patching of third-party software and operating systems, ensuring continuous patch compliance and remediation of security vulnerabilities.

The company was founded by cybersecurity veterans Alex Vovk and Mike Walters, who previously founded Netwrix, which was acquired by TA Associates.

Learn more at: www.action1.com.

Media contact: [email protected]

SOURCE Action1 Corporation
News Provided by Technology Magazine

As the global landscape evolves at an unprecedented pace, Microsoft is helping defence and intelligence clients with game-changing capabilities.

LONDON, July 3, 2023 /PRNewswire/ -- Microsoft has been featured in the July issue of Technology Magazine.

In this exclusive interview, Kate Maxwell, Chief Technology Officer for Microsoft's Worldwide Defence and Intelligence Industry, discusses how Microsoft are helping defence and intelligence clients with game-changing capabilities.

Kate emphasise that "It's not just about mission  it is about a whole-of-enterprise transformation. The way you maintain superiority is through digital transformation, culture and process reform, and rapid adoption of commercial technology."

She adds that "Our defence customers face adversaries who are increasingly taking an integrated offensive posture  with traditional kinetic effects now married with cyber effectors and disinformation campaigns. That is modern warfare, and it is playing out in real-time."

About Technology Magazine

Technology Magazine connects the world's largest technology brands and their most senior executives with the latest trends, industry insights, and influential projects as the world embraces technology and digital transformation.

Technology Magazine is an established, trusted, and leading voice on all things technology  engaging with a highly targeted audience of global executives. We provide the perfect platform for you to showcase your products and services, share your achievements, and enhance your reputation in the industry.

About BizClik

BizClik is a UK-based media company with a global portfolio of leading industry, business and lifestyle digital communities.

BizClik's portfolio includes Technology & AI, Finance & Insurance, Manufacturing & Supply Chain, Energy & Mining, Construction, Healthcare, Mobile & Data Centre. For further information, please visit https://www.bizclikmedia.com/

SOURCE Technology Magazine
BRIDGEWATER, N.J. and BENGALURU, India, July 3, 2023 /PRNewswire/ -- Biocon Biologics Ltd (BBL), a subsidiary of Biocon Ltd, today announced that HULIO (adalimumab-fkjp) injection, a biosimilar to Humira (adalimumab), is now available to patients in the United States after five years of experience in Europe and two years in Canada.

Biocon Biologics, which recently announced its acquisition of Viatris' global biosimilars business, has secured multiple biosimilar approvals in the U.S., Europe, and over 100 countries across the globe. With the acquisition of Viatris' biosimilars business, Biocon Biologics can now help provide patients and healthcare professionals with more accessible and affordable treatment options in diabetes, cancer and immunology therapeutic areas.

"The launch of HULIO, our biosimilar adalimumab, in the United States is an important milestone for Biocon Biologics." Tweet this

"The launch of HULIO, our biosimilar adalimumab, in the United States is an important milestone for Biocon Biologics as it expands our well-known biosimilar product offering to patients in the United States. This launch builds on our strong presence in oncology and diabetes and re-affirms our commitment to enabling affordable access to biologics," said Shreehas Tambe, CEO & Managing Director, Biocon Biologics Ltd.

"Biocon Biologics is pleased to make HULIO, a patient-friendly, 2-click, prefilled pen available in the United States for patients with certain inflammatory diseases. There are no buttons to push. Patients remove the cap and push the device against their skin to trigger their injection. Designed and built with patients in mind, healthcare professionals and patients don't have to miss a beat with HULIO; they simply, 'Click, Click, Go,'" said Mathew Erick, Chief Commercial Officer of Advanced Markets, Biocon Biologics Ltd. See Full Prescribing Information including BOXED WARNING regarding Serious Infections and Malignancy.

To provide broad access for patients, Biocon Biologics is offering two options to health plans and pharmacy benefit managers. HULIO is available at a list price (Wholesale Acquisition Cost) of 5% below the current Humira list price. Adalimumab-fkjp is also available at a list price of approximately 85% below the current Humira list price.

HULIO meets the rigorous biosimilar approval standards of the FDA. Like Humira, HULIO is citrate-free and is made without natural rubber latex (to help reduce hypersensitivity reactions). Biocon Biologics also offers HULIO360, a robust patient support program, which includes benefits verification and prior authorization support, copay assistance, a bridge program for eligible patients, and at-home nurse injection training. To learn more, visit www.huliohcp.com.

HULIO is a registered trademark of Fujifilm Kyowa Kirin Biologics Co., Ltd., licensed to the Viatris Companies. Effective November 29, 2022, Viatris completed the sale of substantially all of its biosimilars portfolio (including related product trademarks) to Biocon Biologics Limited and its subsidiaries ("Biocon") and the relevant marketing authorizations are in the process of being transferred. Viatris Inc. and its subsidiaries ("Viatris") are not affiliates of Biocon but are providing certain transition services to Biocon following the transaction completion date, such as operating websites (including this site) relating to the biosimilars portfolio on Biocon's behalf. Hulio360 is a trademark of Fujifilm Kyowa Kirin Biologics Co., Ltd., licensed to Biosimilar Collaborations Ireland Ltd., a Biocon Biologics company. Copyright  2023 Biocon Biologics Inc. All rights reserved.

IMPORTANT SAFETY INFORMATION AND INDICATIONS

WARNING: SERIOUS INFECTIONS AND MALIGNANCY SERIOUS INFECTIONS

Patients treated with adalimumab products including HULIO are at increased risk for developing serious infections that may lead to hospitalization or death. Most patients who developed these infections were taking concomitant immunosuppressants such as methotrexate or corticosteroids.

Discontinue HULIO if a patient develops a serious infection or sepsis. Reported infections include:

Active tuberculosis (TB), including reactivation of latent TB. Patients with TB have frequently presented with disseminated or extrapulmonary disease. Test patients for latent TB before HULIO use and during therapy. Initiate treatment for latent TB prior to HULIO use.

Invasive fungal infections, including histoplasmosis, coccidioidomycosis, candidiasis, aspergillosis, blastomycosis, and pneumocystosis. Patients with histoplasmosis or other invasive fungal infections may present with disseminated, rather than localized, disease. Antigen and antibody testing for histoplasmosis may be negative in some patients with active infection. Consider empiric anti-fungal therapy in patients at risk for invasive fungal infections who develop severe systemic illness.

Bacterial, viral, and other infections due to opportunistic pathogens, including Legionella and Listeria.

Carefully consider the risks and benefits of treatment with HULIO prior to initiating therapy in patients:

1) with chronic or recurrent infection, 2) who have been exposed to TB, 3) with a history of opportunistic infection, 4) who resided in or traveled in regions where mycoses are endemic, 5) with underlying conditions that may predispose them to infection. Monitor patients closely for the development of signs and symptoms of infection during and after treatment with HULIO, including the possible development of TB in patients who tested negative for latent TB infection prior to initiating therapy

Do not start HULIO during an active infection, including localized infections.

Patients older than 65 years, patients with co-morbid conditions, and/or patients taking concomitant immunosuppressants may be at greater risk of infection.

If an infection develops, monitor carefully, and initiate appropriate therapy.

Drug interactions with biologic products: A higher rate of serious infections has been observed in RA patients treated with rituximab who received subsequent treatment with a TNF blocker. An increased risk of serious infections has been seen with the combination of TNF blockers with anakinra or abatacept, with no demonstrated added benefit in patients with RA. Concomitant administration of HULIO with other biologic DMARDs (e.g., anakinra or abatacept) or other TNF blockers is not recommended based on the possible increased risk for infections and other potential pharmacological interactions.

MALIGNANCY

Lymphoma and other malignancies, some fatal, have been reported in children and adolescent patients treated with TNF blockers including adalimumab products. Postmarketing cases of hepatosplenic T-cell lymphoma (HSTCL), a rare type of T-cell lymphoma, have been reported in patients treated with TNF blockers including adalimumab products. These cases have had a very aggressive disease course and have been fatal. The majority of reported TNF blocker cases have occurred in patients with Crohn's disease or ulcerative colitis and the majority were in adolescent and young adult males. Almost all these patients had received treatment with azathioprine or 6- mercaptopurine (6MP) concomitantly with a TNF blocker at or prior to diagnosis. It is uncertain whether the occurrence of HSTCL is related to use of a TNF blocker or a TNF blocker in combination with these other immunosuppressants.

Consider the risks and benefits of HULIO treatment prior to initiating or continuing therapy in a patient with known malignancy.

In clinical trials, more cases of malignancies were observed among HUMIRA-treated patients compared to control patients.

Non-melanoma skin cancer (NMSC) was reported during clinical trials for HUMIRA-treated patients. Examine all patients, particularly those with a history of prolonged immunosuppressant or PUVA therapy, for the presence of NMSC prior to and during treatment with HULIO.

In HULIO clinical trials, there was an approximate 3-fold higher rate of lymphoma than expected in the general U.S. population. Patients with chronic inflammatory diseases, particularly those with highly active disease and/or chronic exposure to immunosuppressant therapies, may be at higher risk of lymphoma than the general population, even in the absence of TNF blockers.

Postmarketing cases of acute and chronic leukemia were reported with TNF blocker use. Approximately half of the postmarketing cases of malignancies in children, adolescents, and young adults receiving TNF blockers were lymphomas; other cases included rare malignancies associated with immunosuppression and malignancies not usually observed in children and adolescents.

HYPERSENSITIVITY

Anaphylaxis and angioneurotic edema have been reported following administration of adalimumab products. If a serious allergic reaction occurs, stop HULIO and institute appropriate therapy.

HEPATITIS B VIRUS REACTIVATION

Use of TNF blockers, including HULIO, may increase the risk of reactivation of hepatitis B virus (HBV) in patients who are chronic carriers. Some cases have been fatal.

Evaluate patients at risk for HBV infection for prior evidence of HBV infection before initiating TNF blocker therapy.

Exercise caution in patients who are carriers of HBV and monitor them during and after HULIO treatment.

Discontinue HULIO and begin antiviral therapy in patients who develop HBV reactivation. Exercise caution when resuming HULIO after HBV treatment.

NEUROLOGIC REACTIONS

TNF blockers, including adalimumab products, have been associated with rare cases of new onset or exacerbation of central nervous system and peripheral demyelinating diseases, including multiple sclerosis, optic neuritis, and Guillain-Barre syndrome.

Exercise caution when considering HULIO for patients with these disorders; discontinuation of HULIO should be considered if any of these disorders develop.

There is a known association between intermediate uveitis and central demyelinating disorders.

HEMATOLOGIC REACTIONS

Rare reports of pancytopenia, including aplastic anemia, have been reported with TNF blockers. Medically significant cytopenia has been infrequently reported with adalimumab products.

Consider stopping HULIO if significant hematologic abnormalities occur.

CONGESTIVE HEART FAILURE

Worsening and new onset congestive heart failure (CHF) has been reported with TNF blockers. Cases of worsening CHF have been observed with adalimumab products; exercise caution and monitor carefully.

AUTOIMMUNITY

Treatment with adalimumab products may result in the formation of autoantibodies and, rarely, in development of a lupus-like syndrome. Discontinue treatment if symptoms of a lupus-like syndrome develop.

IMMUNIZATIONS

Patients on HULIO should not receive live vaccines.





Pediatric patients, if possible, should be brought up to date with all immunizations before initiating HULIO therapy.





Adalimumab is actively transferred across the placenta during the third trimester of pregnancy and may affect immune response in the in utero exposed infant. The safety of administering live or live-attenuated vaccines in infants exposed to HULIO in utero is unknown. Risks and benefits should be considered prior to vaccinating (live or live-attenuated) exposed infants.

ADVERSE REACTIONS

The most common adverse reactions in adalimumab clinical trials (>10%) were: infections (e.g., upper respiratory, sinusitis), injection site reactions, headache, and rash.

INDICATIONS

Rheumatoid Arthritis: HULIO is indicated, alone or in combination with methotrexate or other non-biologic DMARDs, for reducing signs and symptoms, inducing major clinical response, inhibiting the progression of structural damage, and improving physical function in adult patients with moderately to severely active rheumatoid arthritis.

HULIO is indicated, alone or in combination with methotrexate or other non-biologic DMARDs, for reducing signs and symptoms, inducing major clinical response, inhibiting the progression of structural damage, and improving physical function in adult patients with moderately to severely active rheumatoid arthritis. Juvenile Idiopathic Arthritis : HULIO is indicated, alone or in combination with methotrexate, for reducing signs and symptoms of moderately to severely active polyarticular juvenile idiopathic arthritis in patients 2 years of age and older.

: HULIO is indicated, alone or in combination with methotrexate, for reducing signs and symptoms of moderately to severely active polyarticular juvenile idiopathic arthritis in patients 2 years of age and older. Psoriatic Arthritis : HULIO is indicated, alone or in combination with non-biologic DMARDs, for reducing signs and symptoms, inhibiting the progression of structural damage, and improving physical function in adult patients with active psoriatic arthritis.

: HULIO is indicated, alone or in combination with non-biologic DMARDs, for reducing signs and symptoms, inhibiting the progression of structural damage, and improving physical function in adult patients with active psoriatic arthritis. Ankylosing Spondylitis: HULIO is indicated for reducing signs and symptoms in adult patients with active ankylosing spondylitis.

HULIO is indicated for reducing signs and symptoms in adult patients with active ankylosing spondylitis. Crohn's Disease: HULIO is indicated for the treatment of moderately to severely active Crohn's disease in adults and pediatric patients 6 years of age and older.

HULIO is indicated for the treatment of moderately to severely active Crohn's disease in adults and pediatric patients 6 years of age and older. Ulcerative Colitis: HULIO is indicated for the treatment of moderately to severely active ulcerative colitis in adults and pediatric patients 5 years of age and older.

Limitations of Use:

The effectiveness of HULIO has not been established in patients who have lost response to or were intolerant to TNF blockers.

HULIO is indicated for the treatment of moderately to severely active ulcerative colitis in adults and pediatric patients 5 years of age and older. The effectiveness of HULIO has not been established in patients who have lost response to or were intolerant to TNF blockers. Plaque Psoriasis: HULIO is indicated for the treatment of adult patients with moderate to severe chronic plaque psoriasis who are candidates for systemic therapy or phototherapy, and when other systemic therapies are medically less appropriate. HULIO should only be administered to patients who will be closely monitored and have regular follow-up visits with a physician.

Please see Full Prescribing Information including BOXED WARNING.

About Biocon Limited:

Biocon Limited, publicly listed in 2004, (BSE code: 532523, NSE Id: BIOCON, ISIN Id: INE376G01013) is an innovation-led global biopharmaceuticals company committed to enhance affordable access to complex therapies for chronic conditions like diabetes, cancer and autoimmune. It has developed and commercialized novel biologics, biosimilars, and complex small molecule APIs in India and several key global markets as well as Generic Formulations in the US, Europe & key emerging markets. It also has a pipeline of promising novel assets in immunotherapy under development. Website: www.biocon.com; Follow-us on Twitter: @bioconlimited for company updates.

Biocon Biologics Ltd. (BBL), a subsidiary of Biocon Ltd., is a unique, fully integrated, global biosimilars company committed to transforming healthcare and transforming lives by enabling affordable access to high quality biosimilars for millions of patients worldwide. It is leveraging cutting-edge science, innovative tech platforms, global scale manufacturing capabilities and world- class quality systems to lower costs of biological therapeutics while improving healthcare outcomes.

BBL has acquired the global biosimilars business of its long-standing partner Viatris, which is a historic milestone in its value creation journey. Biocon Biologics has commercialized eight biosimilars in key emerging markets and advanced markets like U.S., EU, Australia, Canada, Japan.

The Company has a pipeline of 20 biosimilar assets across diabetology, oncology, immunology, and other non-communicable diseases. It has many 'firsts' to its credit in the biosimilars industry. . As part of its environmental, social and governance (ESG) commitment, BBL is advancing the health of patients, people, and the planet to achieve key UN Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs).

Website: www.bioconbiologics.com ; Follow us on Twitter: @BioconBiologics for company updates.

Forward-Looking Statements: Biocon

This press release may include statements of future expectations and other forward-looking statements based on management's current expectations and beliefs concerning future developments and their potential effects upon Biocon and its subsidiaries/ associates. These forward-looking statements involve known or unknown risks and uncertainties that could cause actual results, performance or events to differ materially from those expressed or implied in such statements. Important factors that could cause actual results to differ materially from our expectations include, amongst other: general economic and business conditions in India and overseas, our ability to successfully implement our strategy, our research and development efforts, our growth and expansion plans and technological changes, changes in the value of the Rupee and other currency changes, changes in the Indian and international interest rates, change in laws and regulations that apply to the Indian and global biotechnology and pharmaceuticals industries, increasing competition in and the conditions of the Indian and global biotechnology and pharmaceuticals industries, changes in political conditions in India and changes in the foreign exchange control regulations in India. Neither Biocon, nor our Directors, or any of our subsidiaries/associates assume any obligation to update any particular forward-looking statement contained in this release.

SOURCE Biocon Biologics, Inc
Newest Akima subsidiary will accelerate growth in government aerospace market

HERNDON, Va., July 3, 2023 /PRNewswire/ -- Akima, a premier provider of products and services to the federal government, today announced that it has completed the acquisition of Pinnacle Solutions, Inc. (Pinnacle), a leading provider of innovative training and sustainment products and services to defense customers around the globe.

Akima completes acquisition of Pinnacle Solutions.

"We are thrilled to add Pinnacle's innovative technology solutions and capabilities to the Akima family," said Bill Monet, President and CEO of Akima. "Pinnacle's talented people and commitment to their customer's mission complements Akima's value-driven culture. Pinnacle will significantly enhance our ability to serve our aerospace customers."

The acquisition expands Akima's aviation and training capabilities in the defense market and will further enable the company to provide significant value to our customers in the demanding aerospace industry. Pinnacle brings differentiated mission readiness capabilities, as well as a talented workforce of 500 employees, which will add momentum and innovation to Akima's support for customer missions.

Founded in 2008 and headquartered in Huntsville, Alabama, Pinnacle provides aviation operations and maintenance services; flight operations and training services; and develops state-of-the-art training products and services for air, ground, unmanned, and maritime platforms. Pinnacle Solutions will operate as a wholly owned subsidiary of Akima, with Tina Tucker retaining her role as President of the company.

"The closing of this transaction represents the beginning of a new chapter for Pinnacle, and we are excited for what the future holds," said Tucker. "We believe our deep expertise, network, and strong market position will help accelerate Akima's growth and drive greater value for its customers and employees."

Pinnacle was recently awarded a seat on the U.S. Air Force $32.5 billion Training Systems Acquisition IV IDIQ contract. Under this multi-award contract, Pinnacle will have the opportunity to provide for the analysis, design, development, production, installation, integration, testing, and sustainment of Air Force training systems.

About Pinnacle Solutions

Headquartered in Huntsville, Alabama, Pinnacle is an innovative, solution-focused company providing advanced simulation and training solutions; flight operations and training services; training content development in virtual reality, augmented reality, and web-based systems; aircraft maintenance; and technical publications development and sustainment a wide variety of customers, including all Department of Defense components; Special Operations Forces; international militaries; and educational institutions. To learn more visit www.pinnaclesolutionsinc.com.

About Akima

Akima is a global enterprise with 9,500 employees, delivering solutions to the federal government in the core areas of facilities & ground logistics; information technology; aerospace solutions; protective services; systems engineering; mission support; furniture, fixtures & equipment (FF&E); and construction. As a subsidiary of NANA, an Alaska Native Corporation owned by more than 15,000 Inupiat shareholders, Akima's core mission is to enable superior outcomes for our customers' missions while simultaneously creating a long-lived asset for NANA consistent with our Inupiat values. In 2022, Akima ranked #29 on Washington Technology's Top 100 List and #56 on Bloomberg Government's BGOV200 List of top federal contractors. To learn more about Akima, visit www.akima.com.

SOURCE Akima
DALLAS, July 3, 2023 /PRNewswire/ -- ATI (NYSE: ATI) will provide live internet listening access to its conference call with the financial community scheduled for Wednesday, August 2, 2023, at 9:30 a.m. CT (10:30 a.m. ET).

The conference call will be conducted after the Company's planned release of second quarter results. The conference call will be broadcast, and accompanying presentation slides will be available, at ATImaterials.com. To access the broadcast, visit ATImaterials.com and select "Conference Call." Conference call replay will be available on ATImaterials.com.

ATI: Proven to Perform.

ATI (NYSE: ATI) is a global producer of high performance materials and solutions for the global aerospace and defense markets, and critical applications in electronics, medical and specialty energy. We're solving the world's most difficult challenges through materials science. We partner with our customers to deliver extraordinary materials that enable their greatest achievements: their products fly higher and faster, burn hotter, dive deeper, stand stronger and last longer. Our proprietary process technologies, unique customer partnerships and commitment to innovation deliver materials and solutions for today and the evermore challenging environments of tomorrow. We are proven to perform anywhere. Learn more at ATImaterials.com.

SOURCE ATI
The audio amplifier market is driven by factors such as an increase in demand for high-quality audio output, growing traction of in-vehicle infotainment systems, and increase in popularity of consumer electronic devices

PORTLAND, Ore., July 3, 2023 /PRNewswire/ -- Allied Market Research published a report, titled, "Audio Amplifier Market by Class (A, B, A/B, D, Others), By Channel (Mono, 2-Channel, 4-Channel, Others), By End Use Device (Smartphones, Television Sets, Desktops and Laptops, Automotive Infotainment Systems, Tablets, Home Audio Systems, Professional Audio Systems): Global Opportunity Analysis and Industry Forecast, 2023-2032". According to the report, the global audio amplifier industry generated $4.2 billion in 2022, and is projected to reach $7 billion by 2032, registering a CAGR of 5.2% from 2023 to 2032.

Request PDF Brochure: https://www.alliedmarketresearch.com/request-sample/5458

Prime determinants of growth

The audio amplifier market is anticipated to expand significantly during the forecast period owing to an increase in demand for high-quality audio output. In addition, the growing traction of in-vehicle infotainment systems of audio amplifier devices fuels the market growth. Additionally, the audio amplifier is anticipated to benefit owing to the increase in the penetration of IoT and is expected to present enormous opportunities for the market over the forecast period. On the other hand, integration of audio amplification in consumer electronic devices is anticipated to restrain the market growth during the forecast period.

Report Coverage & Details:

Report Coverage Details Forecast Period 20222032 Base Year 2022 Market Size in 2022 $4.2 billion Market Size in 2032 $7 billion CAGR 5.2 % No. of Pages in Report 325 Segments covered Class, Channel, End Use Device, and Region. Drivers Increase in demand for high-quality audio output Growing traction of in-vehicle infotainment systems Increase in popularity of consumer electronic devices Opportunities Increase in the penetration of IoT Increase in popularity of audio-centric applications Restraints Competition from other technologies

COVID-19 Scenario

COVID-19's impact on the audio amplifier market was negative because the consumer electronics industry had been severely harmed and supply chain were disrupted.

Social distancing norms led to unavailability of labor at the workplace. Many companies adopted for work-from-home.

The D class segment to maintain its leadership status throughout the forecast period.

Based on class, the D class segment held the highest market share in 2022, accounting for around two-fifths of the global audio amplifier market revenue and is estimated to maintain its leadership status throughout the forecast period, owing to their high-power efficiency and compact size. Moreover, the D class segment is projected to manifest the highest CAGR of 6.04% from 2023 to 2032, driven by the proliferation of smart home devices and Internet of Things (IoT) technology. In addition, D class amplifiers are integrated into various smart home devices such as voice-activated speakers, smart TVs, and home automation systems, providing efficient amplification with minimal heat generation.

The 2-Channel segment to maintain its leadership status throughout the forecast period.

Based on channel, the 2-Channel segment held the highest market share in 2022, accounting for more than one-third of the global audio amplifier market revenue and is estimated to maintain its leadership status throughout the forecast period. In addition, the 2-Channel segment is projected to manifest the highest CAGR of 6.27% from 2023 to 2032 due to the demand for premium audio systems and specialized installations in residential and commercial spaces. These trends and growth factors present significant opportunities for audio amplifier providers in the 2-channel segment.

The smartphones segment to maintain its leadership status throughout the forecast period.

Based on end use device, the smartphones segment held the highest market share in 2022, accounting for around one-third of the global audio amplifier market revenue and is estimated to maintain its leadership status throughout the forecast period, owing to advanced audio technologies such as enhanced digital-to-analog converters (DACs), dedicated audio amplifiers, and powerful signal processing algorithms. In addition, the home audio systems segment is projected to manifest the highest CAGR of 7.22% from 2023 to 2032 due to greater emphasis on energy-efficient and sustainable audio solutions. Moreover, there are future opportunities for audio amplifier manufacturers to develop energy-efficient amplifiers with advanced power management systems, reducing standby power usage, and eco-friendly production techniques. These factors collectively create a strong demand for audio amplifiers in the audio amplifier market.

Buy This Report (325 Pages PDF with Insights, Charts, Tables, and Figures) @ https://bit.ly/3PBdC5s

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 nearly two-fifths of the global audio amplifier market revenue. This region is expected to witness the fastest CAGR of 5.93% from 2023 to 2032, owing to rise in investments in consumer electronics and automotive industries which are fueling the growth of the market in this region.

Leading Market Players: -

Analog Devices, Inc.

Cirrus Logic, Inc.

Infineon Technologies AG

JVCKENWOOD Corporation

NXP Semiconductors.

ON Semiconductor Corporation

Qualcomm Technologies, Inc

STMicroelectronics N.V.

Texas Instruments Incorporated.

Yamaha Corporation

The report provides a detailed analysis of these key players of the global audio amplifier market. These players have adopted different strategies such as product launch, product development, partnership, investment, acquisition, 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.

Key Benefits for Stakeholders

This report provides a quantitative analysis of the market segments, current trends, estimations, and dynamics of the audio amplifier market analysis from 2022 to 2032 to identify the prevailing audio amplifier market opportunity.

The market research is offered along with information related to key drivers, restraints, and opportunities.

Porter's five forces analysis highlights the potency of buyers and suppliers to enable stakeholders make profit-oriented business decisions and strengthen their supplier-buyer network.

In-depth analysis of the audio amplifier market segmentation assists to determine the prevailing market opportunities.

Major countries in each region are mapped according to their revenue contribution to the global market.

Market player positioning facilitates benchmarking and provides a clear understanding of the present position of the market players.

The report includes the analysis of the regional as well as global audio amplifier market trends, key players, market segments, application areas, and market growth strategies.

Audio Amplifier Market Key Segments:

By End use Device

Smartphones

Television Sets

Desktops and Laptops

Automotive Infotainment Systems

Tablets

Home Audio Systems

Professional Audio Systems

By Class

A

B

A/B

D

others

By Channel

Mono

2-Channel

4-Channel

Others

By Region

North America (U.S., Canada , Mexico )

(U.S., , ) Europe ( Germany , France , UK, Rest of Europe )

( , , UK, Rest of ) Asia-Pacific ( China , India , Japan , South Korea , Rest of Asia-Pacific )

( , , , , Rest of ) LAMEA ( Latin America , Middle East , Africa )

Want to Access the Statistical Data and Graphs, Key Players' Strategies: https://www.alliedmarketresearch.com/audio-amplifier-market/purchase-options

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Speaker Amplifier Market is projected to reach $5.80 Billion by 2027, to register a CAGR of 7.6% from 2020 to 2027.

Power Amplifier Market: Global Opportunity Analysis and Industry Forecast, 2023-2032.

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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:

David Correa

5933 NE Win Sivers Drive

#205, Portland, OR 97220

United States

USA/Canada (Toll Free):

+1-800-792-5285, +1-503-894-6022

UK: +44-845-528-1300

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Fax: +1(855)550-5975

[email protected]

Web: www.alliedmarketresearch.com

Allied Market Research Blog: https://blog.alliedmarketresearch.com

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SOURCE Allied Market Research
News / National

by Staff reporter

'Kasukuwere arrest warrants are invalid' pic.twitter.com/TfOPXS0AIG  Bulawayo24 News (@Bulawayo24News) July 3, 2023

Zimbabwean independent Presidential Election candidate Saviour Kasukuwere's chief election agent Jackie Sande, who is a lawyer, has dismissed police claims that there are two warrants of arrest for the aspiring President.Zimbabwean police say the South African-based Kasukuwere, a former MP and minister, will be arrested if he returns home to campaign for the 23 August presidential election.Sande says the old warrants are invalid as the related charges that led to them were quashed, hence they are now of no legal force and effect.President Emmerson Mnangagwa is clearly panicking over his old Zanu PF colleague and rival's entry into the potentially explosive race.Mnangagwa will challenged in the key election by main opposition CCC leader Nelson Chamisa, Kasukuwere and eight other less significant candidates.
LOS ANGELES, July 3, 2023 /PRNewswire/ -- Coco Republic's Online Store will showcase its unique collection of quality furniture, including sophisticated sofas, dining tables, chairs, and bedroom furniture, as well as lighting, rugs, and decorative accessories influenced by design & architecture around the world.

Coco Republic just launched its long-awaited Online Store in the US Tweet this Coco Republic just launched its long-awaited Online Store in the US

"Coco Republic is excited to bring its timeless and elegant furniture to the US market. We're proud to offer our customers the convenience of shopping for luxury furniture from the comfort of their own homes, while still receiving the same level of personalized service and attention to detail that Coco Republic is known for," says Skye Westcott, CEO and President of North America. This exciting development follows the opening of the brand's stunning three-story flagship store at Union Square in San Francisco, marking the next step in Coco Republic's US expansion.

Coco Republic is a design-led lifestyle brand renowned for its playful styles, high-quality furniture, and sophisticated attention to detail.

"We see strong similarities between the Californian and Australian lifestyles, with a shared love of the outdoors and the way nature is incorporated into our homes. This makes California an essential market for us, where the indoor-outdoor lifestyle is deeply ingrained in the culture," says Skye Westcott.

This spring the brand's hero products are sophisticated and competitively priced outdoor furniture. "I believe outdoor furniture should be as beautiful as your indoor furniture," says Skye Westcott. Skye also urges "I'm excited our customers can enjoy the full experience of our brand both online and in-store!"

Coco Republic's California stores including Culver City with 100,000 square feet provide a significant retail presence in California and with eCommerce and another store in Orange County recently opened in May is a part of Coco Republic's US growth.

Coco Republic just launched "Store as a Service" at HD Buttercup Design Center.

The flagship store, located in Culver City, covers 100,000 square feet. As a part of its "store as a service" concept, Buttercup is providing flexible shop-within-shop spaces, which can be custom-designed for brands seeking a physical presence. This empowers digitally native and wholesale brands, which have traditionally not operated in a physical store, to reach home-specific customers.

For more information about Coco Republic's e-commerce launch in the US, please visit www.cocorepublic.com

Press contact LA:

Lisa Agerman

[email protected]

https://www.secondhomepr.com/

SOURCE Coco Republic
CHARLOTTE, N.C., July 3, 2023 /PRNewswire/ -- Bank of America's 2023 Dodd-Frank Act supervisory severely adverse stress test results, submitted to the Federal Reserve as part of Bank of America's Comprehensive Capital Analysis and Review (CCAR) submission on April 5, 2023, are available on the company's website at investor.bankofamerica.com. Bank of America today commented on the results of the Federal Reserve's 2023 CCAR: Bank of America initiated dialogue with the Federal Reserve to understand differences in Other Comprehensive Income over the 9-quarter stress period between the Federal Reserve's CCAR results and Bank of America's Dodd-Frank Act stress test results.

Forward-Looking Statements

Certain statements contained in this news release may constitute "forward-looking" statements within the meaning of the Private Securities Litigation Reform Act of 1995. These forward-looking statements represent the current expectations, plans or forecasts of Bank of America based on available information. Forward-looking statements can be identified by the fact that they do not relate strictly to historical or current facts. These statements often use words like "expects," "anticipates," "believes," "estimates," "targets," "intends," "plans," "predict," "goal" and other similar expressions or future or conditional verbs such as "will," "may," "might," "should," "would" and "could." Forward-looking statements speak only as of the date they are made, and Bank of America undertakes no obligation to update any forward-looking statement to reflect the impact of circumstances or events that arise after the date the forward-looking statement was made.

Forward-looking statements represent Bank of America's current expectations, plans or forecasts of its future results, revenues, expenses, dividends, efficiency ratio, capital measures, and future business and economic conditions more generally, and other future matters. These statements are not guarantees of future results or performance and involve certain known and unknown risks, uncertainties and assumptions that are difficult to predict and are often beyond Bank of America's control. Actual outcomes and results may differ materially from those expressed in, or implied by, any forward-looking statements due to a variety of factors. You should not place undue reliance on any forward-looking statement and should consider all of the precautionary statements, uncertainties and risks discussed in Bank of America's filings with the Securities and Exchange Commission, including in Bank of America's Current Report on Form 8-K dated October 20, 2021, announcing Bank of America's common stock repurchase program, under Item 1A. "Risk Factors" of Bank of America's Annual Report on Form 10-K for the year ended December 31, 2022, and in any of Bank of America's other subsequent Securities and Exchange Commission filings.

Bank of America

Bank of America is one of the world's leading financial institutions, serving individual consumers, small and middle-market businesses and large corporations with a full range of banking, investing, asset management and other financial and risk management products and services. The company provides unmatched convenience in the United States, serving approximately 68 million consumer and small business clients with approximately 3,900 retail financial centers, approximately 15,000 ATMs and award-winning digital banking with approximately 56 million verified digital users. Bank of America is a global leader in wealth management, corporate and investment banking and trading across a broad range of asset classes, serving corporations, governments, institutions and individuals around the world. Bank of America offers industry-leading support to approximately 3 million small business households through a suite of innovative, easy-to-use online products and services. The company serves clients through operations across the United States, its territories and more than 35 countries. Bank of America Corporation stock (NYSE: BAC) is listed on the New York Stock Exchange.

For more Bank of America news, including dividend announcements and other important information, and register for news email alerts.

Investors May Contact:

Lee McEntire, Bank of America

Phone: 1.980.388.6780

[email protected]

Jonathan G. Blum, Bank of America (Fixed Income)

Phone: 1.212.449.3112

[email protected]

Reporters May Contact:

Bill Halldin, Bank of America

Phone: 1.916.724.0093

[email protected]

Christopher P. Feeney, Bank of America

Phone: 1.980.386.6794

[email protected]

SOURCE Bank of America Corporation
DOVEN, Del., July 3, 2023 /PRNewswire/ -- Bess Power Corporation ("BESS Power") announces that the Lund Storage project has started the Full interconnect Study (FIS) in conjunction with the Texas independent system operator, Electric Reliability Council of Texas Inc. ("ERCOT"), and Lower Colorado River Authority ("LCRA"). Lund Storage has an import/export capacity of 407.55 MW, establishing it as one of the largest utility-scale energy storage projects in the state of Texas.

BESS Power Corp, is owned jointly by Redelfi, a Euronext Milan listed company, Altea Green Power, and the U.S. based developer Elio Energy Group LLC. Lund Storage is the first project in a growing portfolio. BESS Power purchased the US-registered SPV Lund Storage Center 1 LLC earlier this year, which is located on 50 acres of privately-owned land in Travis County, Texas.

Philip Herman, Chief Operating Officer of BESS Power, said, "Our main focus has been to grow our greenfield portfolio with the highest quality projects possible, which Lund Storage is an excellent example of. The early success of Lund Storage is a step in the right direction and demonstrates the drive and deep expertise of our team and partners as we work towards our goals. Energy storage will play an ever-increasing role in the transmission system in ERCOT and elsewhere across the country."

Lund Storage is now moving forward with the Full Interconnect Study, with a projected commercial operations date in 2026. This marks a key milestone in BESS Power's goal of developing in excess of 2 GW of stand-alone storage projects across the USA.

About BESS Power:

BESS Power Corporation is a leading utility-scale energy storage developer with a primary focus on stand-alone BESS (Battery Energy Storage Systems) projects across the United States. Established with Redelfi Group, Altea Green Power and Elio Energy Group LLC, BESS Power Corporation is manufacturer independent, providing best-in-class energy storage solutions. The combination of these key market players brings a wealth of financial capabilities and technical expertise in this fast-growing market.

For more information, visit www.besspowercorp.com.

Logo - https://mma.prnewswire.com/media/2145608/BESS_Power_Logo.jpg

For PR and media inquiries, contact:

[email protected]

SOURCE BESS Power Corporation
PANAMA CITY, July 3, 2023 /PRNewswire/ -- Banco Latinoamericano de Comercio Exterior, S.A. (NYSE: BLX) cordially invites you to participate in its upcoming conference call to discuss its 2Q23 results

Date and time:

Friday, July 21, 2023

11:00 a.m. Eastern Time

Presenting for Bladex:

Mr. Jorge Salas, Chief Executive Officer

Mrs. Ana Graciela de Mendez, Chief Financial Officer

To participate, please dial:

+1 888 686 3653 (U.S. Participants)

+1 718 866 4614 (From outside the U.S.)

Passcode: 877068

This event will be webcast live at www.bladex.com

Bladex's Second Quarter 2023 Earnings Release will be announced on Thursday, July 20, 2023, after the market closes and will be available on the Bank's corporate website, along with the webcast presentation.

About Bladex:

Bladex, a multinational bank originally established by the central banks of Latin-American and Caribbean countries, began operations in 1979 to promote foreign trade and economic integration in the Region. The Bank, headquartered in Panama, also has offices in Argentina, Brazil, Colombia, Mexico, the United States of America, and a Representative License in Peru, supporting the regional expansion and servicing of its customer base, which includes financial institutions and corporations.

Bladex is listed on the NYSE in the United States of America (NYSE: BLX), since 1992, and its shareholders include: central banks and state-owned banks and entities representing 23 Latin American countries, commercial banks and financial institutions, and institutional and retail investors through its public listing.

Contact Information:

Carlos Daniel Raad  Chief Investor Relations Officer

E-mail address: [email protected]

Tel: +507 210-8563

SOURCE Banco Latinoamericano de Comercio Exterior, S.A. (Bladex)
SEATTLE, July 3, 2023 /PRNewswire/ -- Bloomz, the leading school communication app , is proud to announce its membership in the Education Technology Joint Powers Authority (Ed Tech JPA). The Ed Tech JPA is a collaborative effort to streamline procurement processes, provide competitive pricing, and secure favorable technology contracts for educational agencies and other eligible entities.

Bloomz, the leading school communication app, is proud to announce its membership in the Education Technology Joint Powers Authority (Ed Tech JPA).

As a member of the Ed Tech JPA, Bloomz joins a group of influential organizations committed to enhancing education through cutting-edge technology solutions. The founding entities of the Ed Tech JPA include the Capistrano Unified School District, Clovis Unified School District, Fullerton School District, El Dorado County Office of Education, Irvine Unified School District, San Juan Unified School District, and San Ramon Valley Unified School District.

"We are thrilled to become a member of the Ed Tech JPA and work alongside such esteemed educational agencies," said Chaks Appalabattula, CEO of Bloomz. "At Bloomz, our mission is to foster seamless communication and collaboration between teachers, parents, and administrators. By joining forces with the Ed Tech JPA, we can ensure that our innovative solutions reach a broader audience and have an even more significant impact on education."

The Ed Tech JPA provides a platform for member agencies to combine their purchasing power and coordinate consortium purchases of high-quality products and services. These collaborations lead to significant cost savings for educational institutions while promoting equitable access to technology resources.

Bloomz is the leading parent communication app, offering an all-in-one solution for parent-teacher communication, classroom organization, and community engagement. With Bloomz, teachers and administrators can communicate seamlessly with parents, share educational resources, track student behavior, manage calendar events, and coordinate volunteer activitiesall in one platform. Bloomz is dedicated to empowering parents, enhancing student outcomes, and fostering community in classrooms worldwide.

SOURCE Bloomz Inc
LOS ANGELES, July 3, 2023 /PRNewswire/ -- As Americans gear up to celebrate Independence Day, Grasons, a national leader in estate sales and business liquidation services, is spotlighting the liberating power of decluttering. With the estate sale industry poised for a 5.3% growth rate from 2021 to 2026, Grasons is inspiring homeowners and businesses to embrace this freedom by making estate sales and business liquidations part of their July decluttering plans.

"July, a month celebrating freedom, is an excellent time to liberate your homes and businesses from excess clutter," said Simone Kelly, Brand President of Grasons. "We strive to help create organized, streamlined spaces, ultimately promoting a sense of liberation and peace."

This dedication to helping clients declutter isn't just about improving aesthetics or creating space. Grasons understands that decluttering can also have significant psychological benefits, including reduced stress and increased focus. It's a process that can literally bring about a sense of liberation, mirroring the themes of freedom and independence that July embodies.

With the global online auction market set to hit $105 billion by 2025, Grasons expertly blends traditional and digital strategies to maximize their sales reach. This approach not only ensures each item finds a new owner but also contributes to sustainability through the promotion of reuse.

"Every item in an estate sale or business liquidation carries a story," Kelly adds. "Our mission is to help continue these narratives while offering our clients an effective, profitable, and stress-free service."

Grasons' services also provide emotional support during challenging transitions, allowing clients to navigate changes with dignity and peace and peace of mind.

"In the spirit of independence, Grasons empowers individuals and businesses to break free from the confines of clutter," remarked Tim Hadley, CEO of Evive Brands. "Estate sales and business liquidations are not just transactions, but transformative experiences that offer liberation and create room for new beginnings. We're committed to our clients' well-being and satisfaction."

Grasons is part of the Evive Brands family, providing exceptional support and services to families and communities across the nation. Their commitment to integrity, transparency, and compassionate service continues to drive their success, forging a path of trust and efficiency for their clients.

For more information on Grasons' estate sales and business liquidation services, visit https://www.grasons.com/

Media Contact: Rhonda Grundemann, 602-739-8810, [email protected]

SOURCE Grasons Co.
HAMILTON, Bermuda, July 3, 2023 /PRNewswire/ -- Eagle Re 2019-1 Ltd. ("EMIR 2019-1") and Eagle Re 2020-1 Ltd. ("EMIR 2020-1" and, each of EMIR 2019-1 and 2020-1, as applicable, an "Issuer") today announced the tender results of their previously announced offers to purchase (each an "Offer") any and all of the Mortgage Insurance-Linked Notes listed in the table below (the "Notes").

The Issuer has conducted each Offer in accordance with the conditions set forth in the relevant Offer to Purchase of each of EMIR 2019-1 and EMIR 2020-1 dated June 26, 2023 (each an "Offer to Purchase") (collectively, the applicable "Offer Documents"). Capitalized terms used but not defined in this press release have the meanings ascribed to such terms in the applicable Offer Documents.

As of 5:00 p.m., New York City time, on Friday, June 30, 2023, approximately $787 million aggregate original principal amount of the Notes had been validly tendered and not properly withdrawn as set forth in the table below.

Series Notes 144A CUSIP Reg S CUSIP ISIN Original Principal

Amounts Percentage of

Original

Principal

Amounts

Tendered and

Accepted Original

Principal

Amounts

Tendered and

Accepted EMIR 2019-1 M-1B 269822AB8 G29017AB9 US269822AB87 $176,640,000.00 100.00 % $176,640,000.00 EMIR 2019-1 M-2 269822AC6 G29017AC7 US269822AC60 $235,520,000.00 100.00 % $235,520,000.00 EMIR 2019-1 B-1 269822AD4 G29017AD5 US269822AD44 $42,822,000.00 100.00 % $42,822,000.00 EMIR 2020-1 M-1B 26982LAB6 G2904LAB5 US26982LAB62 $133,196,000.00 46.65 % $62,137,000.00 EMIR 2020-1 M-1C 26982LAC4 G2904LAC3 US26982LAC46 $88,797,000.00 100.00 % $88,797,000.00 EMIR 2020-1 M-2 26982LAD2 G2904LAD1 US26982LAD29 $157,860,000.00 100.00 % $157,860,000.00 EMIR 2020-1 B-1 26982LAH3 G2904LAH2 US26982LAH33 $24,668,000.00 93.55 % $23,078,000.00

The settlement date for the Notes tendered and accepted for purchase in each Offer is expected to occur on Wednesday, July 5, 2023.

BofA Securities, Inc. is the dealer manager for each Offer. For additional information regarding the terms of each Offer, please contact BofA Securities, Inc. at (980) 387-3907 or (888) 292-0070 (toll-free). Requests for the Offer Documents may be directed to Global Bondholder Services Corporation at (212) 430-3774 or (855) 654-2014 (toll-free).

This announcement does not constitute an invitation to participate in an 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 Offer under applicable securities laws or otherwise. The distribution of materials relating to each Offer, and the transactions contemplated by each Offer, may be restricted by law in certain jurisdictions where it is legal to do so. Each Offer is void in all jurisdictions where it is prohibited. If materials relating to each Offer come into your possession, you are required by the applicable Issuer to inform yourself of and to observe all of these restrictions. The materials relating to each Offer do not constitute, and may not be used in connection with, an offer or solicitation in any place where offers or solicitations are not permitted by law. If a jurisdiction requires that an Offer be made by a licensed broker or dealer and the Dealer Manager or any affiliate of the Dealer Manager is a licensed broker or dealer in that jurisdiction, such Offer shall be deemed to be made by the Dealer Manager or such affiliate on behalf of the applicable Issuer in that jurisdiction.

SOURCE Eagle Re 2019-1 Ltd. and Eagle Re 2020-1 Ltd.
DUBLIN, July 3, 2023 /PRNewswire/ -- The "China Online Healthcare Market: Insights & Forecast with Potential Impact of COVID- 19)" report has been added to ResearchAndMarkets.com's offering.

China online healthcare market is forecasted to reach US$426.39 billion in 2027, experiencing growth at a CAGR of 36.89% during the period spanning from 2023 to 2027.

The competitive landscape of the market, along with the company profiles of leading players (Alibaba Group Holding Limited, WeDoctor, Ltd., Miao Health, DXY.cn, JD.com, Inc., and Ping An Good Doctor) are also presented in detail.

Growth in China online healthcare market is supported by factors such as aging population, rising health expenditure, support from Chinese government, technical innovations and rising internet penetration. However, the market growth is expected to be restrained by lack of motivation and lack of confidence trust of patients in online health care services.

China online healthcare market by type can be segmented as follows: online pharmacy, digital healthcare infrastructure, online enterprise service, online consultation, online consumer healthcare and others.

In 2022, the dominant share of China online healthcare market was being held by online pharmacy, followed by digital healthcare infrastructure. China's online pharmaceutical sales (including prescription and OTC pharmaceuticals) are likely to record a strong growth, outpacing the entire pharmaceutical market.

China online pharmacy market can be segmented as follows: medical devices, over-the-counter (OTC) drugs, nutrition products, prescription and other. In 2022, the dominant share of China online pharmacy market was being held by medical devices, followed by over-the-counter (OTC) drugs, driven by fewer restrictions from the authorities.

The COVID-19 pandemic has largely accelerated the development of online healthcare China. The first quarter of 2020 witnessed rapid surge in both new registered users and daily consultations on major online healthcare platforms.

Key Topics Covered:

1. Market Overview

1.1 Online Healthcare

1.1.1 Online Healthcare- Introduction

1.2 Benefits of Online Healthcare

1.3 Types of Online Healthcare Services

1.4 Value Chain Analysis

1.5 Advantages of Online Healthcare

1.6 Disadvantages of Online Healthcare



2. Impact of COVID-19

2.1 Impact of COVID-19 on China Online Healthcare Market

2.2 Increase in Online Healthcare Users

2.3 Increased Online Pharmaceutical Sales

2.4 Surge in Demand for Health Supplements

2.5 Favorable Policies

2.6 Post-COVID Scenario



3. China Market Analysis

3.1 China Online Healthcare Market by Value

3.2 China Online Healthcare Market Forecast by Value

3.3 China Online Healthcare Market Penetration

3.4 China Online Healthcare Market Penetration Forecast

3.5 China Online Healthcare Market by Type

3.5.1 China Online Pharmacy Healthcare Market Forecast by Value

3.5.2 China Digital Healthcare Infrastructure Healthcare Market Forecast by Value

3.5.3 China Online Enterprise Service Healthcare Market Forecast by Value

3.5.4 China Online Consultation Healthcare Market Forecast by Value

3.5.5 China Online Consumer Healthcare Market Forecast by Value

3.6 China Online Healthcare Market by Region

3.7 China Online Pharmacy Market by Segment

3.7.1 China Online Medical Devices Market Forecast by Value

3.7.2 China Online Medical Devices Market Penetration

3.7.3 China Online Over-the-counter (OTC) Drugs Market Forecast by Value

3.7.4 China Online Nutrition Products Market Forecast by Value

3.7.5 China Online Nutrition Products Market Penetration

3.7.6 China Online Prescription Market Forecast by Value

3.7.7 China Online Prescription Market Penetration

3.8 China Internet Hospital by Number

3.9 China Internet Hospital by Initiator



4. Market Dynamics

4.1 Growth Drivers

4.1.1 Aging Population

4.1.2 Growing Internet Penetration

4.1.3 Rising Health Expenditure

4.1.4 Growing Need to Provide Better Management for Chronic Diseases

4.1.5 Insurance & Membership Products

4.1.6 Growing Health Awareness

4.1.7 Support from Chinese Government

4.2 Key Trends & Developments

4.2.1 Increased Use Of Online Healthcare Services Among Millennial

4.2.2 Technological Innovations

4.2.3 Increasing Investments from Internet Companies

4.2.4 Popularization of Internet Hospitals

4.3 Challenges

4.3.1 Lack of Motivation

4.3.2 Lack of Confidence



5. Company Profiles

5.1 China Market

5.1.1 Online Pharmacies Market Share - Key Players



6. Company Profiles

6.1 JD.com, Inc.

6.1.1 Business Overview

6.2 Alibaba Group Holding Limited

6.3 Ping An Good Doctor

6.4 WeDoctor

6.5 Miao Health

6.6 DXY.cn

For more information about this report visit https://www.researchandmarkets.com/r/r5x1z4

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.

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SOURCE Research and Markets
MARLTON, N.J., July 3, 2023 /PRNewswire/ -- The sensitive personal data of as many as 800,000 Jackson National Life Insurance Company ("Jackson National") customers was compromised when hackers were able to access their data through a vulnerability in software used by PBI Research Services, a vendor of Jackson National. Now, customers' confidential information may be in the hands of criminals who may use the stolen data to carry out identity theft and other frauds.

The data breach lawyers at Console & Associates, P.C. are investigating claims on behalf of Jackson National Life Insurance Company customers and anyone else affected by the breach, hoping to fully inform them of the risks they face in the wake of the breach as well as their legal rights.

On June 26, 2023, Jackson National Life Insurance Company filed official documents with the Securities and Exchange Commission outlining a third-party data breach affecting consumers nationwide. In this filing, Jackson National notes that the incident occurred at one of the company's vendors, PBI Research, which Jackson National uses to verify policyholder deaths to identify potential beneficiaries. Evidently, PBI Research notified Jackson National that a vulnerability in the MOVEit file-transfer software allowed hackers to download confidential information belonging to Jackson National clients. Thus, Jackson National's computer system was not breached; however, this third-party breach affects the personal information of Jackson National customers.

According to Jackson's SEC filing, the incident affected as many as 800,000 customers.

Anyone who receives a data breach letter from Jackson National Life Insurance Company or PBI Research Services should take steps to protect themselves. (See our Guide for Victims of Data Breach for more details at https://www.myinjuryattorney.com/consumer-privacy-data-breach-lawyers/if-your-information-has-been-compromised-in-a-data-breach/ .) Victims should consider speaking with a data breach attorney as soon as possible.

If you wish to discuss this data security incident, or if you have any questions regarding your rights following the Jackson National Life Insurance Company data breach, please contact Console & Associates, P.C. at (866) 778-5500. Interested parties and potential plaintiffs can also learn more about this data breach and potential lawsuit at https://www.myinjuryattorney.com/jackson-national-life-insurance-company-data-breach-investigation/ .

This press release may be considered Attorney Advertising in some jurisdictions under the applicable law and ethical rules.

SOURCE Console & Associates, P.C.
News Provided by Technology Magazine: Estonian Railways is set to electrify and digitise its entire network by 2028 for efficient, sustainable transport; Aleksandr Zaitsev says data is key

LONDON, July 3, 2023 /PRNewswire/ -- How do you bring a 150-year-old railway company into the future? Estonian Railways Ltd, a state-owned company that's been operating since 1870, ensures the smooth operation, development, and maintenance of the entire country's railway infrastructure, as well as efficient traffic management throughout. An additional layer of this is acting as a partner in resolving cross-border issues and setting standards.

As the owner of the railway infrastructure, Estonian Railways holds a central role in the functioning of the transit sector, at the helm of maintaining a competitive situation both in railway passenger and cargo transport. But what really sets it apart as embracing the future is its environmental awareness credentials, operating above and beyond the basic objectives of a run-of-the-mill railway company. From the year 2019, Estonian Railways has been awarded with the Corporate Responsibility Gold level award, which is the highest reward granted to Estonian companies that care about the environment, wishing to contribute more to society than required by either legislation or societal norms.

The vision of Estonian Railway Ltd is to be the region's most advanced railway infrastructure manager. To this end, it has embarked upon a very ambitious investment plan for the current decade that includes different projects for the modernisation and electrification of its infrastructure.

Discussing this transformation is Aleksandr Zaitsev, the Head of its Digital Transformation and Innovation Department. Zaitsev is responsible for the digital transformation of work processes within the infrastructure business unit, alongside the implementation of new technological solutions.

Estonian Railways' plan to electrify the entire rail network by 2028

During the first major stages of the electrification project, railways from Tallinn through Tapa to Tartu and Narva will be electrified. At the moment, a large number of preliminary projects have already been completed, while the majority of building permits have been issued for the Aegviidu-Tapa-Tartu section.

At the beginning of this year, the company signed a contract with two companies  GRK Suomi OY and GRK Eesti AS  for the construction of the contact network and transmission substations for the Aegviidu-Tapa-Tartu section. According to the contract, the Tartu direction must be electrified by the end of next year. As such, Estonian Railways has planned the procurement of the Tapa-Narva section for 2024, and, if everything goes as planned, electric trains will be able to run between Tapa and Narva from the end of 2026.

The project is ambitious, but achievable, and has several goals.

The first is to reduce the impact of the transport sector on the environment. Estonian Railways already only buys electricity from renewable sources, which then supplies all current electric train traffic. Another goal is to increase the speed of traffic on the railway and reduce train travel times, both of which will make traveling on the railway faster and more comfortable. The third goal is to improve the living environment of people living near the railway as well as companies operating close by, through noise reduction and traffic vibration monitoring. This is what streamlining looks like.

AS Eesti Raudtee/Estonian Railways Ltd has been featured in the July issue of Technology Magazine

In this exclusive interview, Aleksandr Zaitsev, Head of its Digital Transformation and Innovation discussed digitising their entire network by 2028.

"We strive to help with government-set environmental goals in reducing our carbon footprint by completely electrifying the infrastructure"

Technology Magazine is the 'Digital Community' for the global technology industry. Technology Magazine covers the '7 Pillars of Digital Journey' - Digital Transformation, Cloud Computing, Cybersecurity, Digital Ecosystems, Strategic Alliances, Data & Data Analytics and AI - connecting the world's largest community of enterprise IT and technology executives. Technology Magazine focuses on technology news, key technology interviews, technology videos, the 'Technology Podcast' series along with an ever-expanding range of focused technology white papers and webinars.

BizClik is a UK-based media company with a global portfolio of leading industry, business and lifestyle digital communities.

BizClik's portfolio includes Technology & AI, Finance & Insurance, Manufacturing & Supply Chain, Energy & Mining, Construction, Healthcare, Mobile & Data Centres and EV. For further information, please visit https://www.bizclikmedia.com/

You can read the report in the latest issue of Technology Magazine by clicking HERE

SOURCE Technology Magazine
Opinion / Columnist

POST-COLONIAL Africa, which has been in existence for over 60 years is in need of a systematic examination of its constitutional obligations. Some of the major challenges facing African societies include lack of a political system that is capable of solving some of the social, economic and political contradictions the continent is facing.Political systems are typically classified into three broad categories, namely, the presidential, parliamentary and mixed models of government. Each of these models rest firmly on a foundation of party politics. However, in many African countries, there are three pillars of governance, namely the Executive, the Legislature and the Judiciary.This article argues that the existence of the Executive presidency, at the exclusion of the role of the prime minister, is a major cause of our economic and social misery in Africa. It is instructive to note that most, if not all African Constitutions, did away with the role of prime minister in preference to the Executive Presidency.The existence of the latter has led to the erosion of basic constitutional practices and the curtailment of human rights.What are the areas of great concern about the Executive presidency in Africa? First and foremost, the executive president is the head of State, head of government and head of a political party. The President is not answerable to Parliament. Except in a few African countries, the president can practically and willy-nilly override and dissolve Parliament when he disagrees with it and can interfere with the judicial processes as well. This leaves the president with absolute authority which enables him to dominate society at will.In a country where the Executive presidency prevails, freedom of speech, while available, is severely restricted by interference with the public media both print and electronic as well as a broadcasting system which notoriously serves the interests of the State. Independent journalists are harassed and imprisoned for printing or uncovering corruption and abuse of power.What is clear is that Executive presidency often leans towards authoritarianism. The latter is a system with highly restricted opportunities for political mobilisation. Power is exercised by a leader or small group not formally accountable to the electorate.This is a system in which formal institutions and practice of constitutional democracy are present. However, in practice, the extensive powers of the ruler, party or regime severely limit contestation by individuals, organised groups and society. All in all, the Executive presidency is often characterised by high-level corruption, ineptitude, myopia and economic failure.The foregoing illustrates the problems facing contemporary African countries as they seek to establish a political system based on culture, values and other conditions peculiar to these countries. Coups and counter-coups often take place in west Africa for example, partly due to the existence of the Executive presidency.As head of State, government and party, the Executive president is preoccupied with trying to consolidate his power at the expense of governing the country with diligence. This consolidation is perpetuated through the centralisation of power and dictatorial tendencies.The re-introduction of the role of prime minister in African political systems is one way to solve some of the African development problems. The president should be the head of State and the prime minister, head of government.To avoid the president being only ceremonial, he or she might have some limited executive powers. African leaders are averse to ceremonial Presidency.Countries that are governed by prime ministers have thriving economies. These include among others, Malaysia, Singapore, India and Ethiopia. With respect to Ethiopia, it is instructive to note that the government is led by a prime minister and there has been, over the years, a better performance of the country's economy.When one gets to Addis Ababa airport, one is greeted by an impressive fleet of aeroplanes known as ETHIOPIEN. However, in some African countries led by executive presidents, the airlines have long disappeared into thin air. This includes among others, South African Airways, which is no longer flying to international destinations except regional routes.Thus, the problems of African States have been exacerbated by the failure to have a Constitution which embraces the position of prime minister as the head of government answerable to Parliament. It is common knowledge that the executive president does not sit in Parliament, preferring to present the state of the nation address from time-to-time. Therefore, the Executive president is detached from political, social and economic realities.When Zimbabwe was under the late former President Robert Mugabe - back then as Prime Minister, the economy was thriving. Similarly, when Morgan Tsvangirai (also late) was Prime Minister during the government of national unity, the Zimbabwean economy performed well.In light of the foregoing, it is clear that African countries are struggling to consolidate their hard-won independence because of the instability partly caused by the Executive presidency. There being no role of prime minister, due to wrong Constitutions, Executive presidents in some African countries see themselves as demi-gods who concentrate all decision-making powers in their hands.The Executive presidency as enshrined in most African Constitutions has the effect of putting in place a most centralised State, protected by unaccountable, quasi-government apparatus.The Executive presidency usually is an obstacle to the acceptance of a transparent, inclusive and genuine process of change which gives rise to certainty and stability in African institutions and political systems. Executive presidents use the levers of power at their disposal to block any process of change.African countries are desirous of durable, just, democratic and fair constitutions that in essence entrench genuine and real democratic and political systems.The big questions are: What are the prospects of replacing the executive president as head of government in favour of prime ministerial model of administration?Can't African countries draw some lessons from other countries that have transformed their societies through adopting constitutions that have prime ministers as heads of government? Obviously, there is a need to find a balance between the executive president as head of State with limited executive powers and the prime minister as head of government.Thus, Africa should take a moment to reflect on its achievements in its quest for solutions to its multi-faceted social, economic and political problems.It can be confidently asserted that formally, the age of colonisation is gone forever, but there still exists deep-seated scars that colonialism has left and the structural frames it has created and these have not been done away with completely.The efforts to place the African citizen at the centre of development and decision-making is far from being a success story. The Executive Presidency has severely limited African countries' capacity to deal with their problems in the best possible manner.Still, it is imperative for African countries to continue searching for the political, social and constitutional advancement in order to achieve the as yet unrealised and incomplete aspects of the original objectives of genuine African independence.Austin Chakaodza is a political analyst on African affairs and political economy. He can be contacted on chakaodza8@hotmail.co.uk.
BEIJING, July 2, 2023 /PRNewswire/ -- The Report to the 20th National Congress of the Communist Party of China highlighted the need to accelerate the development of the digital economy, further integrate it with the real economy, and build internationally competitive digital industry clusters. Besides, it presented significant plans for the growth of the digital industry, providing a strategic roadmap for further advancing China's digital economy. Digital finance, as an important support for the development of the digital economy, is a vital link for the digital reform of the entire industry. In order to further promote the development of digital finance in Beijing, the Digital Finance Forum 2023 will be held on July 6 in the Beijing Banking & Insurance Business Park in Shijingshan District. This Digital Finance Forum, organized by the Shijingshan District People's Government of Beijing Municipality and Asia Digital Group, holds significant prominence within the Global Digital Economy Conference 2023.

The forum focuses on how to drive financial innovation and digital strategic upgrades under the new dual-cycle pattern, and help the construction of a new digital financial ecosystem, striving to open a new era of high-quality development of fintech and continue to enhance the international influence of Beijing's digital economy.

Bring together global resources to create a new highland for digital finance in Beijing

As industries and enterprises increasingly embrace cloud, digital, and intelligent technologies, the concept of digital finance has evolved to foster collaborative development, symbiosis, win-win situations, and value creation. How to transform development concepts into industrial practice to help the development of the digital economy has captured attention across various sectors.

Heads of international financial organizations, senior experts, scholars, and business leaders from more than 10 countries and regions including the United States, Germany, New Zealand, Austria, Sri Lanka, and Slovenia will gather at the Digital Finance Forum 2023. With "Digital Intelligence Is Awaiting Us" as the core, our discussions center on fostering digital financial market entities, promoting digital financial innovation and development, and expanding digital financial scenario applications. This will involve exchanging ideas, fostering collaboration, and establishing interconnections among stakeholders involved in digital finance, modern finance, financial technology, and digital currency. By leveraging data as a fundamental element of production and harnessing digital technology as a catalyst, we aim to facilitate the seamless integration of enterprises, universities, research institutes and end-users. This collaborative effort will expedite the realization of data value and create a force that propels fintech forward.

Beijing stands at the forefront of the global digital economy, benefiting greatly from its comprehensive approach that combines policy guidance, factor utilization, regional coordination, and integration and upgrading. To further enhance its progress, Beijing has introduced the "Beijing Digital Economy Promotion Regulations" this year, designed to provide a legislative framework for its digital economy initiatives. These regulations explicitly highlight that digital finance has ushered in new development opportunities by promoting the establishment of a robust digital financial system, supporting financial institutions in their digital transformation efforts, and facilitating the development of inclusive finance through data fusion applications.

In recent years, Shijingshan District has made great efforts to create a new highland for the development of digital finance, evidenced by the establishment of a number of national financial infrastructures such as the Financial Information Technology Innovation Ecological Laboratory, the National Banking and Insurance Industry Information Data Center, and the National FinTech Evaluation Center. Digital finance has emerged as a significant driving force, enabling a new wave of high-quality development in the regional economy. The upcoming Digital Finance Forum will play a pivotal role in fostering the consolidation and growth of the modern financial industry in Shijingshan District. Moreover, it will facilitate the expansion of openness and innovation within the realm of modern finance, thereby establishing an exceptional hub for advancing digital financial development in the capital city.

Build an international cooperation platform to promote the high-quality development of digital finance

While discussing the trend of the global financial industry, this Digital Finance Forum has built a large platform for the interaction, display, exchange and cooperation of global resource with rich activities, so as to enable the development of the capital's digital economy and the building of a digital financial highland in Shijingshan District.

This forum has established debut and project signing initiatives to effectively highlight and promote exceptional products and services in the digital finance industry. Through preliminary collection and screening, a selection of highly innovative and pioneering digital financial products will be unveiled during the event. The forum aims to enhance the visibility of these debut products and significant contracted projects, ultimately contributing to their successful transformation, signing and landing. In addition, the business investigation activity in Shijingshan District will be organized, bringing together representatives from various entities such as governments, embassies in China, members of the Digital Finance Think Tank of Shijingshan District, overseas innovative enterprises, enterprises invested by IDG, financial institutions, and investment institutions. This collaborative effort aims to pool diverse perspectives and collective dedication, resulting in valuable recommendations for the development of the district. Furthermore, it serves as a catalyst for fostering two-way exchanges between governments and enterprises, as well as promoting domestic and foreign cooperation. Ultimately, this initiative will play a pivotal role in accelerating the progress of digital finance and achieving high-quality development.

This Digital Finance Forum breaks the boundaries of time and space through the cloud, in such forms as exhibitions, conferences, negotiations, visit to exhibitions, services and docking, closely linking representatives from all parties around the world. The cloud platform enables live streaming of the forum, interactive discussions, demand publishing, online negotiations, and resource docking. The bilingual services can link global resources in digital finance to achieve online transaction matching and intelligent demand matching. What's more, the Cloud Exhibition of Digital Financial Achievements will cover the new achievements in the development of modern financial industry in Shijingshan District, and the innovative ideas for financial development of the "two zones". Important innovative achievements such as TechFin, Green Finance, Industrial Finance, Financial Security, Financial Services, and Information Technology will be unveiled.

This Digital Finance Forum, organized by the Shijingshan District People's Government of Beijing Municipality and Asia Digital Group, holds significant prominence within the Global Digital Economy Conference 2023. Furthermore, it serves as a highly esteemed platform dedicated to facilitating international collaboration in digital finance. The Global Digital Economy Conference 2023 will be staged on July 4-7, 2023 in Beijing. It is hosted by People's Government of Beijing Municipality, National Development and Reform Commission, Ministry of Industry and Information Technology, Ministry of Commerce, Cyberspace Administration of China, and China Association for Science and Technology, and organized by Beijing Municipal Bureau of Economy and Information Technology, People's Government of Lhasa Municipality, Chaoyang District People's Government of Beijing Municipality, China Association of Communication Enterprises, China Academy of Information and Communications Technology, cctv.com and Asia Digital Group.

The Digital Finance Forum of the Global Digital Economy Conference 2023 is about to commence, and we look forward to working with you to delve into the exciting realm of the emerging digital intelligence.

SOURCE Asia Digital Group
MIAMI, Fla., July 3, 2023 /PRNewswire/ -- Karina Safarova, the renowned Ukrainian refugee and advocate, is celebrating her first Fourth of July in the United States with immense gratitude, a sense of safety, and a thriving spirit. Having found solace and opportunities in her new homeland of Sunny Isles, FL, Safarova reflects upon her journey and expresses her appreciation for the warm welcome and support she has received from the American people. https://karinasafarova.com

"I am overwhelmed with gratitude as I celebrate my first July 4th in the United States," said Safarova. "This day represents the values of liberty, justice, and the pursuit of happiness that are at the core of the American spirit. I am humbled by the kindness and support I have received since my arrival, and I am committed to giving back and making a positive difference in this great nation."

Born and raised in the Ukraine, Safarova experienced firsthand the turmoil and hardships that conflict and displacement impose on individuals and communities. Fleeing her homeland in search of safety and a brighter future, she embarked on a courageous journey that led her to the United States, where she has found refuge and a renewed sense of hope.

Since her arrival, Safarova has dedicated herself to raising awareness about the plight of refugees worldwide and advocating for their rights. Her tireless efforts have made her a prominent figure in the international community, amplifying the voices of the displaced and inspiring millions with her remarkable resilience.

"Safarova's journey serves as a testament to the resilience and strength of refugees worldwide," said Lynn Aronberg, Safarova's friend, and PR agent. "Her dedication to advocating for those who have been forcibly displaced has earned her global recognition and inspired countless individuals to act and stand up for the rights of the vulnerable."

Media Contact:

Lynn Aronberg, President

Lynn Aronberg Public Relations

[email protected] or 310-299-6123

Note to editors: Karina Safarova is a Ukrainian refugee and advocate who has dedicated her life to raising awareness about the plight of refugees worldwide. After fleeing her homeland, she found refuge in the United States and has become a prominent figure in the international community, advocating for the rights of the displaced and inspiring millions with her resilience. https://karinasafarova.com

SOURCE Karina Safarova
SHANGHAI, July 3, 2023 /PRNewswire/ -- From November 8 to 10, 2023, FHC Shanghai Global Food Trade Show will be renewed and upgraded to 10 exhibit categories: Meat& Aquatic Product, Leisure Food, Dairy, Sweets& Chocolate, Catering Supply Chain& Raw Material, Condiments& Oil, Coffee& Tea, Bakery& Light Meal, Food Processing& Packaging, Prefabricated dishes& Central Kitchen. Together with huge amounts of overseas pavilions, three major international events and more than 15+ industry summit forums, it will build a series of special exhibition areas for coffee and food, and return to Shanghai New International Expo Center (SNIEC).

As a comprehensive trade exhibition platform in the field of food and beverage, FHC has been one of the first platforms for overseas food and beverage brands to enter the Chinese market for many years. Over the years, FHC has invited high-quality international pavilions from more than 50 countries and regions around the world to gather in Shanghai with selected delicacies from all over the world. In 2021, it attracted exhibitors from 15 countries and regions including Belgium, Denmark, France, Spain, Germany, Italy, Canada, the United States, Russia, Japan, South Korea, and more than 200 overseas enterprises.

Shanghai Sinoexpo Informa Markets International Exhibition Co., Ltd. has accumulated more than 30 years of exhibition experience. After 26 years, FHC Shanghai Global Food Trade Show has become one of the leading exhibitions in the food, beverage and catering industry, while enabling the rapid growth of Sinoexpo's food and beverage sectors. At the same time, it is also one of Informa Markets hotel catering and food series global exhibitions.

We are looking forward to see you on November. Please get your free ticket on:

https://www.fhcchina.com/en/

Contact us

Ordering Booth:

Alex Ni

Tel: +86 21 3339 2242

[email protected]

Media & Visitor Consulting:

Lizzy Chen

Tel: +86 21 3339 2566

[email protected]

SOURCE Shanghai Sinoexpo Informa Markets International Exhibition Co., Ltd.
 The Company Aim for Full Production a Year After Construction Commences 

NEW YORK, July 3, 2023 /PRNewswire/ -- Singapore Finc and Huayuan Food Group are pleased to jointly announce the construction of the first U.S.-based edible fungus smart factory. Located in Houston, Texas, the joint venture will result in the daily production of 50 tons of American Enoki mushrooms to help ease the United States' long-term dependence on mushroom imports as the demand for healthy edible fungi grows with healthier eating habits. The smart factory will leverage advanced technical operations for sustainable development of edible fungus, with operations focused on soilless, chemical-free, and environmentally-friendly practices.

Singapore Finc is a subsidiary of Shanghai Finc Biotechnology Co., LTD, and Huayuan Food Group is one of the largest Chinese brand operators in the U.S. Asian food market. The collaboration for the Houston-based smart factory demonstrates support of the surging mushroom industry and open attitude to expanding production internationally. The factory is planning to be fully-operational one year after construction begins.

In addition to the smart factory, Finc will continue to expand its Freshmore brand's growing influence and build a plan for brand globalization. Freshmore are high-quality mushrooms grown in China that have been exported to 57 countries, and considered to be China's leading enterprise of edible fungi industrialization.

Edible fungi are the third type of organism, after plants and animals, that contain various nutrients that play a vital role in the human body. In recent years, biotechnology studies have shown that mushrooms have great potential to block bitterness, inhibit sugar absorption, and produce high-quality protein. Edible fungi emerged as a healthy food with high protein and low calories. Despite being one of the largest consumer markets in the world with a growing edible mushrooms trend, the U.S. lacks the production technology to grow edible fungihence the country's reliance on mushroom imports which elevates the price. Finc's new Houston smart factory will alleviate this issue for the U.S., bringing production to the country and lowering prices.

After 20 years of development, Finc is considered the pioneer of factory cultivation of the white jade mushroom and crab mushroom in China. The company has applied for more than 190 invention and utility model patents. The white jade mushroom and crab mushroom produced by Finc are among the best-selling fresh mushrooms in China, and its international brand Freshmore has been world-renown for more than 10 years. Finc plans to continue its global expansion by further deepening cooperation between enterprises, universities and scientific research institutions, and working together to support the world's edible fungi industry.

About Finc:

Shanghai Finc Bio-tech Inc. (hereinafter referred as Finc) is a hi-tech enterprise specializing in fungus industry with full strain of R&D, Cultivation, Processing and Sales. It is now the largest cultivator of specialty mushroom in China, with currently production capability of 15, 000kg specialty mushrooms each day.

Press Contact:

Blair Bao

718-883-0287

[email protected]

SOURCE Finc
Ignite Your Faith, Transform Your Fitness, and Embrace Sisterhood: Join Fit for Christ Sisters.

DUMFRIES, Va., July 3, 2023 /PRNewswire/ -- Liz Faison, certified trainer , and stretch therapist, is the founder of Fit For Christ Sisters, a leading fitness and wellness organization dedicated to empowering women. Her passion for spiritual, mental, and physical wellness has allowed her to build an expanding virtual community aimed at providing support, encouragement, and resources to women over 40. The online platform offers a transformative fitness experience that can be accessed from the comfort of one's home, at any time and at an affordable cost.

Liz Faison

Liz Faison, the heart and soul behind Fit for Christ Sisters , has a deeply personal motivation for starting this initiative. Having struggled with childhood obesity and tragically losing her mother to obesity, Liz began her fitness journey and, in the process, developed a desire to see other women find the freedom and joy she has discovered.

"I wanted to create a space where women could come together, support one another, and truly embrace the joy of being fit and healthy," says Liz. "Our virtual community provides a sanctuary where women over 40 can find inspiration, motivation, and the necessary tools to achieve their fitness goals."

The message that Liz aims to convey to all her subscribers is simple yet powerful: "YOU CAN DO IT." With her online community, women can now embark on a transformative fitness journey surrounded by like-minded individuals who will cheer them every step of the way.

Members have the freedom to exercise for just 30 minutes a day, tailored to their schedule, all from the comfort of their own homes. The accessibility and affordability of this platform make it an ideal choice for busy women who want to prioritize their health and wellness.

Fitness plans are curated to fit each member's fitness goal, whether it may be to lose weight, gain muscle or just to maintain their current physique. Supplements are available for purchase and come in a variety of vegan, non-vegan, and vegetarian options. Members also have access to one-on-one consultations with Fit For Christ Sister's trained professionals to discuss goals, progress, nutrition, and more!

One delighted member, Laurie T., shared her experience with Fit for Christ Sisters, stating, "I cannot emphasize enough how transformative the experience has been for me. From the moment I started my fitness journey, Liz has been an invaluable source of guidance, motivation, and expertise. I feel strong and ready to take on my 60s, being in the best shape of my life! Thank you, Liz!"

Fit for Christ Sisters invites women over 40 who are seeking a supportive, like-minded community and a path to a healthier lifestyle to join their online platform. Start your journey to wholeness today by visiting their website at www.fitforchristsisters.com or calling 571-437-8641.

Media Contact:

Liz Faison

Founder, Fit for Christ Sisters

Email: [email protected]

Phone: +15714378641

Website: www.fitforchristsisters.com

Address: 17649 Hampstead Ridge CT, Postal Code: 22026

SOURCE Fit For Christ Sisters
News Provided by FinTech Magazine

F&M Bank's Chief Experience Officer, Charles Driest, talks about striking the right balance between digital innovation and a personal customer approach

LONDON, July 3, 2023 /PRNewswire/ -- Charles Driest is the newly-appointed Chief Experience Officer at Farmers & Merchants (F&M) Bank. A graduate of George Mason University in Virginia, and later St. John's University in New York, he began his banking career shortly after returning to Virginia from New York in 2007.

Before this, Driest's early career saw him employed by the Grocery Manufacturers Association (MGA), and, later, at the American think-tank, Brookings Institution. It was here he was struck with inspiration to retrain in finance by a former manager, Roberta Cohen.

Driest says: "She said if I didn't go back to school she would fire me. This was probably my biggest inspiration. It amazes me that her voice is always in the back of my head, and when she told me that, it was about two decades ago."

F&M Banks's new Chief Experience Officer hasn't exactly been short of inspiration, either: "I've been really lucky because I've had a lot of influencers in my career, with bosses and managers who have pushed me to take on new risks that perhaps I didn't feel I was ready for, but gave me a great opportunity to learn."

Beginning his banking career after reeducating in New York and returning to Virginia, Driest was again inspired to follow a digital path in his career. "One of the first CEOs I worked for taught me a valuable lesson; it's how I got into the digital side of the banking business.

"At the time we didn't have a good grasp of our digital spending at the organisation. My CEO asked me to break down the numbers to explain to executive management where the money was going. So I sifted through 12 months of invoices and began asking operational questions: where's our money going? How do we better manage this?

"This is when I found out the business had these operational holes, while we didn't have the right insights into the capabilities available to us that we were using. So my CEO said: 'You found the problems, go fix them'. This is what got me into digital banking, furthering my career by putting me into a situation I wouldn't necessarily have been comfortable in initially."

This valuable experience in digital banking saw Driest become F&M Bank's Director of Digital Banking sometime after, a role he had for "14 to 15 months" before being promoted to F&M Bank's Chief Experience Officer.

Despite his brief time in the role so far, Driest says: "Taking on three new reports has been a lot of fun. I really enjoy the personnel management aspect of things. I like watching the development of people. From my perspective, I really like to see the process of a team getting onto one page, because it has a powerful multiplying effect. The pace of work speeds up when everybody is in sync."

Achieving synchronisation for the now is key to driving growth in the future, according to Driest, who has deep excitement for the future of banking as the proliferation of fintechs continues, believing community banking will endure despite the growth of technology.

He concludes: "I've seen some of the biggest developments in banking over the years, and I feel even with all the fintechs out there, I think ultimately, community banking will survive. If there's one thing banks are very good with, it's about integrating technology that is focused on the customer.

"For anyone that talks about the speed of fintech growth, fundamentally, it still relies on people, and people don't change habits that quickly. The arc of change and the pace of change will always be constrained by people at the end of the day. So, as long as you're making good decisions and always looking ahead by two to three years at a time  it doesn't matter what type of bank you are  you'll probably end up in a good place."

F&M Bank has been featured in the July issue of FinTech Magazine

In this exclusive interview, Charles Driest, Chief Experience Officer, discussed striking the right balance between digital innovation and a personal customer approach.

"The future is technology and people, that's what is going to win the day  not one or the other"

BizClik's FinTech portfolio connects banking, financial services, payments, technology & consulting brands and their most senior executives with the latest FinTech trends, industry insight, and influential FinTech, InsurTech & Crypto projects as the world embraces CX, Business Transformation and Digital Ecosystems. FinTech Magazine and its entire portfolio is now an established and trusted voice on all things FinTech, engaging with a highly targeted audience of 113,000 global executives. We provide key industry players with the perfect platform to showcase their brands, develop content syndication plans, webinars, white papers, demand generation as well as a global set of events (In-Person & Virtual).

BizClik is a UK-based media company with a global portfolio of leading industry, business and lifestyle digital communities.

BizClik's portfolio includes Technology & AI, Finance & Insurance, Manufacturing & Supply Chain, Energy & Mining, Construction, Healthcare, Mobile & Data Centres and EV. For further information, please visit https://www.bizclikmedia.com/

You can read the report in the latest issue of FinTech Magazine by clicking HERE

SOURCE FinTech Magazine
Selma Avdagic Tisljar takes the reins as FreeMove celebrates its 20-year anniversary

AMSTERDAM, July 3, 2023 /PRNewswire/ -- FreeMove Alliance, the mobile telecommunications alliance between Deutsche Telekom, Orange, TIM, and Telia, has selected Selma Avdagic Tisljar as its new General Manager, effective immediately. Her appointment coincides with the Alliance's 20-year anniversary and signals strong continuous leadership as FreeMove proudly serves more than 500 multinational corporations, boasting an above-average customer retention rate.

FreeMove Alliance Appoints New General Manager Selma Avdagic Tisljar

Ms. Avdagic Tisljar will continue to provide forward-looking direction and a coordinated approach for the Alliance. Her primary aims in her new role are to drive innovation, engage with customers and partners, and ensure the success of FreeMove's recently launched services. These include the development of a common approach on 5G campus networks, as well as FreeMove's collaboration and communication services. In 2022, the Alliance also introduced its FreeMove Automation Solution, an automated hub interconnecting FreeMove's members enabling multinational customers to manage their mobility services through their own ITSM in a completely transparent way, ensuring a seamless customer experience.

"I am delighted to come to FreeMove at such an exciting time for this organization, and I want to join FreeMove's supervisory and management boards in thanking my predecessor Lazaro Fernandez for embodying the true spirit of the Alliance and for his outstanding performance, operational excellence, and profound commitment to improving and developing FreeMove," says Ms. Avdagic Tisljar. "During his tenure, FreeMove has continually innovated its service model in order to meet the evolving needs of customers, and I intend to build upon this notion moving forward."

"With a combined footprint of more than 100 countries, FreeMove offers multinational corporations the benefit of a trusted and cooperative network of national providers with a shared commitment to service quality," adds Lazaro Fernandez. "I feel fortunate to have been given the opportunity to be at the helm of such a unique organization within the telco market and am confident that Selma's valued expertise will bring it to even greater heights."

Starting her new role today, Ms. Avdagic Tisljar has previously been the head of service management international at Deutsche Telekom. Her most recent responsibilities have included end-to-end management of international deals, leading the IT platform development for process automation, and delivering excellent customer experiences. She is a highly skilled international business executive having worked in different commercial leadership positions at Deutsche Telekom, its Croatian subsidiary Hrvatski Telekom, as well as management consulting firm Deloitte.

Ms. Avdagic Tisljar will be accountable to the supervisory board of FreeMove Alliance, composed of Martin Knauer (Deutsche Telekom), Valerie Cussac (Orange), Antonio Morabito (TIM), and Pernilla Wikman (Telia). She becomes the fifth General Manager of FreeMove and succeeds Lazaro Fernandez (Orange) who successfully held the role over the past 5 years. Mr. Fernandez will continue his career in the transformation field within the Orange Group.

About FreeMove Alliance

Established in 2003, FreeMove Alliance is the mobile telecommunications alliance between Deutsche Telekom, Orange, TIM, and Telia. It serves as a mobile services hub that helps the top 500 multinationals present in Europe to optimize their investment in mobile connectivity by offering global access to the most reliable networks through a central point of management. FreeMove's mission is to promote the power of global mobility by enabling collaboration between multinational companies and local operators. It offers best-in-class connectivity across 90% of its footprint via its members' award-winning networks, as well as streamlined commercial arrangements, dedicated account support, and value-added services in more than 100 countries.

FreeMove Alliance

Photo - https://mma.prnewswire.com/media/2142050/FreeMove_Alliance.jpg

Logo - https://mma.prnewswire.com/media/2102766/4089517/FreeMove_Alliance_Logo.jpg

SOURCE FreeMove Alliance
DUBLIN, July 3, 2023 /PRNewswire/ -- The "GCC Smart Cities Market By Smart Mobility, By Smart Building, By Smart Utility, By Smart Citizen Service, By Country, Competition Forecast and Opportunity, 2018-2028" report has been added to ResearchAndMarkets.com's offering.



GCC Smart Cities market is anticipated to grow in the forecast period owing to rising urbanization and the increasing need for infrastructure and digital asset management.

The region is attracting numerous government investments toward developing smart cities as the digital ecosystem is improving. The upgradation in technology has fueled the adoption of the Internet of Things (IoT) technology for smart cities to manage traffic flows, monitor city infrastructure, and monitor air and water quality.

The rising need for ensuring public safety, efficient utilization of resources, rising demand for efficient energy consumption, and a healthy environment are expected to boost the smart cities market growth during the forecast period.



The Middle East has a fertile ground for Smart Cities, especially in the six countries of the GCC. Two evolving verticals include, smart transport and smart lighting are key drivers of the rapidly growing Internet of Things worldwide and are also beginning to make a difference in the GCC.

The six Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) countries embrace the smart city framework to address their urban challenges. The GCC countries are the most urbanized countries across the globe. A decade and a half of a booming oil and gas industry have provided resources for urban modernization to governments across the Country.

But the specter of the current lower oil prices continuing has created a sense of urgency. GCC countries are looking at ways to become more efficient and diversify their economies away from oil dependency. Smart-city technology is an essential aspect of this new journey.



In urban population growth, the demand for effective urban management is increasing at a rapid rate. The rising concerns for city management and its development are also relevant for the GCC countries. The GCC countries are highly urbanized, and by 2050 more than 90% of the population of these countries is expected to be settled in the cities.

The rate of urban population for GCC countries is expected to reach 93.2% for Bahrain, 100% for Kuwait, 81.4% for Oman, 99.7% for Qatar, 90.4% for Saudi Arabia, and 92.4% for UAE by 2050. The main factors considered for a smart city are identified by a set of indicators: public expenditure on R&D, GDP growth rate, public expenditure on education, and income level.

Some scholars describe economic and socio-political issues of the city, innovation, and others as the leading indicators of smart cities. From an economic point of view, the success factor for smart city development can be measured by GDP, sector strength, international transactions, and foreign investment.

The main factors of the smart city in ranking medium-sized European cities were economy, mobility, environment, people, and governance.



On-going Developments in Infrastructure Sector are Fueling the Market Growth



The countries of the GCC have been witnessing massive growth in the development of the infrastructure sector. Moreover, implementation of major economic reforms by the governments, including transformations to the ease of doing business, encouraging new business and getting construction permits. These changes and development in the GCC region are anticipated to boost the adoption of smart cities.

A smart city adopts top-notch technologies incorporating comprehensive IT infrastructure, a network of sensors, cameras, and data centers for the effective conveyance of essential services such as electricity, water supply, sanitation, etc. With the development of the infrastructure sector, the implementation of smart cities is expected to benefit by employing automation and enhanced data connectivity.

For instance, the Ministry of Municipality and Environment of Qatar allocated USD 7.0 billion in its 2021 budget to further develop major infrastructure projects and water and electricity networks, in addition to continuing the work of maintenance, development, and expansion of roads.



Increasing Government Initiatives are Driving the Market Growth



The Government of GCC is taking many initiatives to promote the implementation of smart cities in the upcoming years. For instance, The Saudi government launched the Middle East Green Initiative to create a sustainable future for the country and to highlight green transition policy solutions.

The initiative will help to improve people's lives and protect future generations by increasing reliance on clean energy, protecting the environment, and mitigating the effects of oil use.

Additionally, to multiple efforts to preserve the marine and coastal environment, increase the percentage of natural reserves, and improve quality of life, the initiative aims to improve the efficiency of oil production and increase the contribution of renewable energy.



Growing Smart City Initiatives across GCC is Driving the Market Growth



Smart Cities are an important part of the national development strategies of each GCC country. At the same time, the key goal of developing smart cities is not just effective management but mainly improving the level and quality of life of citizens.

Market Dynamics

Drivers

On-going Developments in Infrastructure Sector

Increasing Government Initiatives

Growing Smart City Initiatives across GCC

Market Trends & Development

Need for Efficient Management

Increasing Demand for a Healthy Environment

Rising Government Investments

Rising Population & Urbanization

Merger & Acquisitions

Major Contracts Awarded

Challenges

Security Concerns

High Initial Cost

Competitive Landscape



Company Profiles: Detailed analysis of the major companies present in the GCC Smart Cities market.

Siemens AG

Cisco Systems Inc.

IBM Corporation

Microsoft Corporation

Schneider Electric

Intel Corporation

ABB Limited

Telefonaktiebolaget LM Ericsson

Oracle Corporation

Fujitsu Limited

Report Scope:



GCC Smart Cities Market, By Smart Mobility:

Smart Ticketing

Traffic Management

Passenger Information Management

Connected Logistics

Others

GCC Smart Cities Market, By Smart Building:

Building Infrastructure Management

Security & Emergency Management

Energy Management

Network Management

Integrated Workplace Management System

GCC Smart Cities Market, By Smart Utility:

Advanced Metering Infrastructure

Meter Data Management

Distribution Management System

Substation Automation

Others

GCC Smart Cities Market, By Smart Citizen Service:

Smart Healthcare

Smart Education

Smart Public Safety

Smart Street Lighting

Others

GCC Smart Cities Market, By Country:

UAE

Bahrain

Saudi Arabia

Oman

Qatar

Kuwait

For more information about this report visit https://www.researchandmarkets.com/r/kcvvnn

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.

Media Contact:

Research and Markets

Laura Wood, Senior Manager

[email protected]



For E.S.T Office Hours Call +1-917-300-0470

For U.S./CAN Toll Free Call +1-800-526-8630

For GMT Office Hours Call +353-1-416-8900



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Logo: https://mma.prnewswire.com/media/539438/Research_and_Markets_Logo.jpg

SOURCE Research and Markets
DUBLIN, July 3, 2023 /PRNewswire/ -- The "Automotive Electronics OEM/ODM/EMS Industry Report, 2023" report has been added to ResearchAndMarkets.com's offering.

Amid the disruption in the division of labor mode in the supply chain, which auto parts will be covered by OEM/ODM/EMS mode?



Consumer electronic manufacturing service (EMS) providers are becoming important players in the automotive industry.



Due to the sluggish growth of the consumer electronics market, many consumer EMS providers have begun to tap the new automotive electronics (OEM) market. Top manufacturers such as Luxshare Precision, BOE, Lens Technology and Sunny Optical Technology have produced phased results.



Automotive electronics OEM/ODM/EMS: hardware OEM/ODM/EMS companies are transforming into integrated hardware solution providers, and accelerating in-depth cooperation with OEMs.



In the automotive electronics industry, the arena of hardware OEM/ODM/EMS is attracting ever more conventional consumer electronics companies who prefer an entry from domain controllers, automotive communication modules, LiDAR, AR-HUD and other high-value-added intelligent products. For example, suppliers of Apple such as Quanta Computer, Wistron, Pegatron and Luxshare Precision race to embark on automotive electronics OEM/ODM/EMS.



The OEM+EMS cooperation model is changing. Most obviously, ever more automakers become more willing to independently develop core products and technologies, especially high-added-value, highly differentiated know-how products. In this model, auto brands can concentrate more on personalized requirements, software and hardware the decoupling, and development of functional applications.



In Chinese market, Flextronics is gradually transforming from an EMS provider to a customized hardware solution provider. Flextronics implements the 'Local-to-Local' strategy and the 'Assistant Development Manufacturing (ADM)' business model. The ADM model enables automakers to partner with Flextronics at any point in the product life cycle, so as to fill the gap in the product development process. Flextronics' ADM model allows for more flexibility in OEMs' product design.



Based on the ADM model, Flextronics collaborated with Baidu Apollo to mass-produce the Apollo Computing Unit (ACU). In the cooperation, Flextronics provides Baidu with customized product development and design, testing and verification, as well as supply chain integration and optimization, production line design and large-scale manufacturing, according to advices and architecture requirements of Baidu Apollo experts.



Amid the evolution of E/E architectures, the boundary between PCs and vehicles will gradually vanish in the zonal era.



Under the zonal and central computing architecture, a vehicle computing system will be like a PC, that is, all operations will be completed by a CPU, and all applications will be executed by the CPU, perhaps together with a GPU/AI accelerator. Peripherals, interfaces and underlying software system are fixed. The underlying system is almost completely transparent to programmers who only need to develop specific applications. As with today's PCs based on Windows+CPU, software-defined vehicles can be realized.



Against this backdrop, vehicles will embody a high division of labor in the supply chain, just like smartphones and Pcs. Both OEMs and chip vendors will gain a far higher existence and even begin to replace conventional Tier1 suppliers.



Car making by ODMs: the model of 'technical architecture licensing by automakers' and 'car making by ODMs' will bring new revolutionary opportunities for the global automotive industry.



In the era of feature phones, mobile phone vendors like Motorola and Nokia all built their own factories. After the advent of smartphones, Apple, Xiaomi and Huawei among others have turned into large ODMs. Phone brands' more concentration on product development and design provides a big boost to the development of mobile phone industry chain. How to transplant the smartphone model into the automotive industry has already been a spotlight.



Automotive OEM/ODM/EMS is nothing new in the automotive industry. Magna, a global OEM giant, has designed and mass-produced about 30 vehicle models for several automakers, including BMW X3, Mercedes-Benz G, and models of Toyota and Jaguar, with the total production higher than 3.7 million units.

In China, the collaborations between NIO and JAC, or between Seres and Huawei have seen initial results. Yet there are no successful cases where consumer electronics companies as ODMs spawn vehicles, so that the layout made by bellwethers such as Foxconn and Luxshare Precision has drawn much attention from the market.



Foxconn's CDMS (contract design and manufacturing service) business model is that Foxconn becomes a CDMS provider for the automotive industry. Simply put, Foxconn and Yulon together launched the MIH modular EV platform to provide OEM services for automakers with limited production capacity or outsourcing needs.



Key Topics Covered:



1 Overview of Automotive Electronics Industry

1.1 Overview of Automotive Electronics Development

1.2 Automotive Electronics OEM/ODM/EMS Model



2 Automotive Electronics OEM/ODM/EMS (by Product)

2.1 Domain Controller OEM/ODM/EMS

2.2 Automotive Communication Module OEM/ODM/EMS

2.3 LiDAR OEM/ODM/EMS

2.4 Electric Drive, Battery and ECU OEM/ODM/EMS

2.5 Automotive Electronics PCBA OEM/ODM/EMS

2.6 Automotive Wireless Charging Module OEM/ODM/EMS

2.7 Automotive Display Module OEM/ODM/EMS Companies



3 Automotive Electronics OEM/ODM/EMS Companies - Foreign-funded Companies

3.1 Flextronics

3.2 SPEEDY-TECH

3.3 Magna



4 Automotive Electronics OEM/ODM/EMS Companies - Chinese Companies

4.1 Wistron

4.2 Foxconn

4.3 Pegatron

4.4 Quanta Computer

4.5 USI

4.6 3CEMS

4.7 Wieson Automotive

4.8 Sunny Optical Technology

4.9 Luxshare Precision

4.10 BYD Electronics

4.11 MAXWAY

4.12 Longtech

4.13 MARUHI

4.14 Hytera

4.15 DBG

For more information about this report visit https://www.researchandmarkets.com/r/qft1i

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.

Media Contact:

Research and Markets

Laura Wood, Senior Manager

[email protected]



For E.S.T Office Hours Call +1-917-300-0470

For U.S./CAN Toll Free Call +1-800-526-8630

For GMT Office Hours Call +353-1-416-8900



U.S. Fax: 646-607-1907

Fax (outside U.S.): +353-1-481-1716

Logo: https://mma.prnewswire.com/media/539438/Research_and_Markets_Logo.jpg

SOURCE Research and Markets
NEW YORK, July 3, 2023 /PRNewswire/ -- A latest research report [115+] pages with 360-Degree visibility, titled "Anti-Drone Market Share, Size, Trends, Industry Analysis Report, By Mitigation Type; By Application (Detection Systems and Detection & Disruption Systems); By End-Use; By Technology; By Region; Segment Forecast, 2023 - 2032" published by Polaris Market Research in its research repository.

"According to research report, the global anti-drone market size/share was valued at USD 1,067.14 Million in 2022 and is expected to touch USD 10,395.59 Million By 2032, growing at a CAGR of 26.6% during the forecast period."

What is Anti-Drone? How Big is Anti-Drone Market Size & Share?

Overview

The anti-drone system is a technology designed to intercept or detect Unmanned Aerial Devices (UAVs). This system can also track and detect fraud drones and destroy them using radio frequency. Anti-drones are essential for nation's safety, as enemies use drones to obtain important information. They are majorly used in airports, military installations, battlefield zones, and critical infrastructure. Some of the efficient anti-drone systems include High-Power Microwave (HPM) devices, high-energy lasers, GPS Spoofers, and Radio Frequency (RF) Jammers.

The rise of cheap-priced drones causes many security and safety violations for helicopters and airlines in the air as well as the public on the ground. This has led to an increase in the need for anti-drone technology systems. The increasing popularity of unmanned aerial vehicles is anticipated to raise more government safety concerns, which in turn, is predicted to propel the market growth during the forecast period. Also, the growing adoption of anti-drone systems from businesses and government enterprises across the globe is likely to boost anti-drone market size.

Request Sample Copy of Anti-Drone Market Research Report @ https://polarismarketresearch.com/industry-analysis/anti-drone-market/request-for-sample

(The sample of this report is readily available on request. The report sample contains a brief introduction to the research report, Table of Contents, Graphical introduction of regional analysis, Top players in the market with their revenue analysis and our research methodology.)

Our Sample Report May Includes:

2032 Updated Report Introduction, Overview, and In-depth industry analysis.

115+ Pages Research Report (Inclusion of Updated Research).

Provide Chapter-wise guidance on Request.

2023 Updated Regional Analysis with Graphical Representation of Size, Share & Trends.

Includes Updated List of table & figures.

Updated Report Includes Top Market Players with their Business Strategy, Sales Volume, and Revenue Analysis.

Some of the Top Market Players Covered Are:

Aaronia AG

Airbus Defence and Space

Battelle

Blighter Surveillance Boeing

CACI International Inc.

Chess Dynamics Ltd.

Dedrone

Enterprise Control Systems Ltd.

Israel Aerospace Industries

L-3 Communications Ltd.

Leonardo Spa

Lockheed Martin

Moog Inc.

Northrop Grumman

Raytheon Technologies Corp.

Saab AB

SRC Inc.

Thales Group

For Additional Information on Key Players, Request to Download Sample Pages Here: https://polarismarketresearch.com/industry-analysis/anti-drone-market/request-for-sample

Prominent Growth Driving Factors

Advancements in anti-drone systems: Companies that provide anti-drone systems to militaries are increasingly investing in it by developing advanced strategies to safeguard safety and security from terrorists. Thus, rising developments of drone technology and small- and medium anti-drones with the capability of detecting micro-UAVs ranging from 1.5 to 2 kilometers are expected to offer growth opportunities for manufacturers in the market.

Companies that provide anti-drone systems to militaries are increasingly investing in it by developing advanced strategies to safeguard safety and security from terrorists. Thus, rising developments of drone technology and small- and medium anti-drones with the capability of detecting micro-UAVs ranging from 1.5 to 2 kilometers are expected to offer growth opportunities for manufacturers in the market. Rising demand for anti-drones for securing unmanned civil aircraft: Unmanned civil aircraft are being utilized more and more for agricultural and farming, oil and gas inspection, weather and catastrophe monitoring, aerial photography and filmmaking, scientific research and power, and utility industry surveys across the globe. The increasing usage of these systems is associated with creating possible hazards of hacking by terrorists and anti-social groups, which is expected to enhance the anti-drone market demand.

Unmanned civil aircraft are being utilized more and more for agricultural and farming, oil and gas inspection, weather and catastrophe monitoring, aerial photography and filmmaking, scientific research and power, and utility industry surveys across the globe. The increasing usage of these systems is associated with creating possible hazards of hacking by terrorists and anti-social groups, which is expected to enhance the anti-drone market demand. Prohibiting illicit activities: Moreover, unmanned aerial vehicles are increasingly used for prohibited and hidden operations like drug trafficking and spying. Therefore, a surge in terrorism and illicit activities, along with growing security infringements by such unlicensed unmanned aerial vehicles, have increased market growth in recent years.

Moreover, unmanned aerial vehicles are increasingly used for prohibited and hidden operations like drug trafficking and spying. Therefore, a surge in terrorism and illicit activities, along with growing security infringements by such unlicensed unmanned aerial vehicles, have increased market growth in recent years. Advancing technological solutions: Anti-drone market key players are emphasizing developing high-level technological solutions to tackle parallel hazards from various aircraft systems, which is projected to flourish the market growth.

Recent Trends Influencing the Market

Government support and technological advancements: Rising government support for developing and introducing superior drone detection systems is another major factor supporting the anti-drone market growth. This is because these technologies have the capability of tracking, detecting, anti-jamming, and direction-finding threats. For instance, in 20222023, the Airports Authority of India (AAI) plans to purchase two antidrone systems that will offer complete drone detection, monitoring, identification, and neutralization capabilities.

Rising government support for developing and introducing superior drone detection systems is another major factor supporting the anti-drone market growth. This is because these technologies have the capability of tracking, detecting, anti-jamming, and direction-finding threats. For instance, in 20222023, the Airports Authority of (AAI) plans to purchase two antidrone systems that will offer complete drone detection, monitoring, identification, and neutralization capabilities. Strengthening national security: Further, the Defence Research and Development Organisation (DRDO) created drone technology that has the ability to offer armed services with the benefit of detecting and destroying enemy drones. These developments in anti-drone technology demonstrate governments' dedication to improving their security protocols against future drone threats.

Request for a Discount on this Report Before Purchase @ https://polarismarketresearch.com/industry-analysis/anti-drone-market/request-for-discount-pricing

Segmental Analysis

The detection and disruption systems segment dominated the market

Based on application anti-drone market segmentation, the detection and disruptive systems category accounted for the largest market share in 2022 and is expected to maintain its dominance over the predicted period. The growing number of terrorist groups demonstrating the ability to control a variety of drones, including armed ones, has fueled market growth.

As per the Association of the United States Army, terrorist organizations have successfully used aerial drones or attempted to use them for different reasons, such as explosive delivery, chemical weapon delivery, and intelligence gathering. In 2020, the FAA (Federal Aviation Administration) approved commercial drone use outside the pilot's line of sight. In addition, detection and disruption systems are used in military, defense applications as well as homeland security sectors.

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Anti-Drone Market: Report Scope & Segmentation

Report Attribute Details Revenue forecast in 2032 USD 10,395.59 Million Market size value in 2023 USD 1,397.95 Million Expected CAGR Growth 26.6% from 2023  2032 Base Year 2022 Forecast Year 2023  2032 Top Market Players Aaronia AG, Airbus Defence and Space, Battelle, Blighter Surveillance Boeing, CACI International Inc., Chess Dynamics Ltd., Dedrone, Enterprise Control Systems Ltd., Israel Aerospace Industries, L-3 Communications Ltd., Leonardo Spa, Lockheed Martin, Moog Inc., Northrop Grumman, Raytheon Technologies Corp., Saab AB, SRC Inc., Thales Group Segments Covered By Mitigation Type, By Application, By End-Use, By Technology, By Region Customization Options Customized purchase options are available to meet any research needs. Explore customized purchase options

Geographical Overview

North America held the major anti-drone market share in 2022

By geography, North America witnessed the highest revenue share in 2022, owing to the acquisition of counter UAV systems by the United States Department of Defense. In recent years, the US government has made investments in the counter-drone effort. In June 2021, the US Government announced that by FY2022, the Department of Defense intends to spend $636 million on counter-UAS research and development and at least $75 million on C-UAS procurement. This is an increase of USD 134 million over FY2021.

Furthermore, anti-drone market in Asia Pacific is predicted to register a high CAGR in the market due to the increasing government expenditure on aerospace and defense infrastructure development in India and China. The Defence Research and Development Organization (DRDO) developed an anti-drone defense system for identifying and destroying drones in December 2021, which is anticipated to accelerate the India's defense system.

Browse the Detail Report "Anti-Drone Market Share, Size, Trends, Industry Analysis Report, By Mitigation Type; By Application (Detection Systems and Detection & Disruption Systems); By End-Use; By Technology; By Region; Segment Forecast, 2023 - 2032" with in-depth TOC: https://polarismarketresearch.com/industry-analysis/anti-drone-market

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Recent Developments

In May 2022 , DroneShield, a leading specializing in RF sensing, artificial intelligence, and machine learning systems, successfully implemented its DroneSentry solution to ensure complete security for the 2022 IRONMAN Texas triathlon event conducted in April 2022 . This deployment highlighted the company's ability to deliver city-wide protection against unauthorized drones during high-profile events.

, DroneShield, a leading specializing in RF sensing, artificial intelligence, and machine learning systems, successfully implemented its DroneSentry solution to ensure complete security for the 2022 IRONMAN Texas triathlon event conducted in . This deployment highlighted the company's ability to deliver city-wide protection against unauthorized drones during high-profile events. In October 2021 , DroneShield Ltd announced that the US Department of Homeland Security had procured multiple units of its DroneSentry-X systems. These cutting-edge systems offer on-the-move capabilities for countering unmanned aerial systems (C-UAS), further strengthening the Department's ability to detect and mitigate potential threats from unauthorized drones.

Important Questions Answered by Report

What is the present size of the market?

What are the names of key players working in the market?

What are trending strategies utilized by market enterprises to expand their businesses?

What are key regions of the market?

Which region of the market is expected to show promising expansion avenues in the assessment period?

Which product type of the market is in high demand?

What is the projected size of the market at the end of the forecast period?

What are the opportunities and threats to which players are exposed in the market?

Polaris Market Research has segmented the Anti-Drone market report based on mitigation type, application, end-use, technology, and region:

By Mitigation Type Outlook

Destructive

Non-destructive

By Application Outlook

Detection Systems

Detection & Disruption Systems

By End-Use Outlook

Military & Defense

Commercial

Government

Others

By Technology Outlook

Laser Systems

Kinetic System

Electronic Systems

By Region Outlook

North America (U.S., Canada )

(U.S., ) Europe ( France , Germany , UK, Italy , Netherlands , Spain , Russia )

( , , UK, , , , ) Asia Pacific ( Japan , China , India , Malaysia , Indonesia , South Korea )

( , , , , , ) Latin America ( Brazil , Mexico , Argentina )

( , , ) Middle East & Africa ( Saudi Arabia , UAE, Israel , South Africa )

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A Boise woman has been missing since June 27. Her car was found in Malheur County

Malheur County Search and Rescue is asking for the publics help in its search for a missing Boise woman.

Gwen Brunelle left Boise on June 26 and was last seen at noon on Tuesday, June 27, at the Sinclair gas station in Jordan Valley, Oregon.

Brunelles car was found June 30 on Succor Creek Road about 0.4 miles west of U.S. 95 in Malheur County, north of Jordan Valley.

For the past several days, Malheur County Search and Rescue, the Idaho Mountain Search & Rescue Unit, Ontario Fire and Rescue, and various volunteers have been searching for Brunelle using dogs, drones, UTVs and even horseback, according to officials.

Brunelle, 27, is 5-foot-7 and weighs about 160 pounds, with brown eyes and medium brown hair.

She may have wandered from the car or was abducted, her family said in a Facebook post.

Anyone with information about Brunelle should call the Boise Police Department at 208-377-6790 or the Malheur County Sheriffs Office at 541-473-5125.
BEIJING, July 3, 2023 /PRNewswire/ -- Since China optimized its COVID-19 measures at the end of 2022, airports in major cities have become busier day by day as business and tourist trips have quickly resumed. This can be seen on social media, where a lot of foreign online influencers have been sharing videos of their latest trips in China.

As they explore big cities like Shanghai or Hangzhou and scenic spots like the Great Wall or lush mountains, a constant theme in their vlogs is how different the country and its people are from what they thought before arriving here.

"I never thought China would be like this" is a line appearing in almost every foreign newcomer's vlogs.

Many foreign visitors' anticipation of what they would get in China was predictably low and their true experience even more contrasting and pleasantly surprising.

Besides the fact that China's infrastructure never disappoints, including the must-experience high-speed trains, how ordinary Chinese people live their lives and their friendly response to foreigners are particularly interesting to see in these vloggers' works.

Seeing vloggers comment on the high visibility of electric cars on the streets compared with their home countries, I was reminded how fast China has changed, and that what we take for granted in everyday life may well be a peculiarity for another person.

Among the many foreign backpackers in China, at least three Indian vloggers stand out. They are traveling around the country on different routes and some of their China series videos have gained more than 1 million views on YouTube with 20,000 likes.

China's infrastructure and especially the cleanliness of the cities shown in the videos have gained the most enthusiastic response from their followers. The Indian vloggers were interested in Wuhan, and one vlogger's experience of being helped out by a patient staff member at the Xi'an train station gained much applause in the comment section. There is hardly any "negative" experience recorded in their videos, except complaints that not many people speak English when they need help. This only highlights the importance of people-to-people exchanges.

Besides new arrivals, numerous "resident foreigners" in China continue recording their lives and their understanding of China, including those from Vietnam, the UK and the US. A man from Ghana interacts with both Chinese urbanites and villagers and presents their reactions online. His videos showing people's friendliness and warmth are among the most inspiring and touching videos featuring cultural exchanges between Chinese and Africans.

From a Chinese perspective, an interesting part of foreign visitors' vlogs is the "culture shock" they experience and - more interestingly - how they perceive and interpret such differences.

Most of the time, the tourists record the encounters and observations of local people and life objectively and try to understand them. Although some of their takes on cultural differences may not always be the true situation - like some Chinese people "staring" at a foreigner out of curiosity - experiencing it in an unfamiliar land is in itself a brave and laudable action as long as we all hold goodwill.

I personally want to thank these vloggers for presenting my country as it is - not necessarily flawless - and as I try to see the surroundings I'm in from their fresh perspectives and their approach to an unfamiliar situation, I, too, gain a fresh understanding of my country and people.

Over the one week or so since the Global Times first focused on the influx of foreign backpackers in China - seen in the many vlogs they post on video-sharing platforms - their curiosity and fondness toward this vast and fast-changing country have brought them closer to the borders and deeper into the society.

Their works not only help global audiences have a better glimpse of the real China, but for Chinese viewers it is also refreshing to see the country from a new perspective. Their China videos have attracted more traffic as the videos' viewership is noticeably bigger than previous works. Some videos have gained 2 million views on YouTube.

During the past week, one of these foreign vloggers delved into the real Chinese countryside and bumped into a Dragon Boat race in East China's Fujian Province, while another ventured into the Xinjiang Uygur Autonomous Region.

Indeed many foreign netizens are curious about Chinese village life and some netizens left comments under these vloggers' previous videos, asking them to explore more destinations other than shiny big cities.

One vlogger's unexpected encounter with a Dragon Boat race in a small village is my personal favorite video. Young locals and elderly villagers crowd along the bank of a small lake cheering for the contestants, while they smile and welcome the stranger apparently from a foreign country. How lucky are these vloggers! Northern folks like myself rarely get to see a dragon boat race in person since they mostly take place in the south.

As seen from his latest videos, one Indian vlogger is still enjoying the food and local people's hospitality in Kashi, Xinjiang. The guy randomly visited a local resident's home out of curiosity and received a warm reception. He showed them how to dance like in Bollywood movies and learned a few words in Uygur. As he roams around the old town of Kashi while vlogging among the locals and tourist crowds, any viewer can make a true judgment on what they see.

The people of China welcome anyone to visit the country and have a close-up look at any corner, as long as one maintains an unbiased open attitude.

One vlogger's venture in Zhangjiajie, Hunan Province, was simply breathtaking - hiking on the lush southern mountains, at one time crossing a section as if he was hanging on the mountain cliff. I have to admit I haven't been to that many unique places in China, so the courage of the vlogger has paid off, since the scenery from his vantage point makes it all worthwhile. It must have been this same courage that made these vloggers want to come to see China with their own eyes.

"A lot of people are saying that I am praising China too much. I am praising China so much because I didn't know China was like this. I was expecting something else. It turned out to be very different," one vlogger said in a video as he walks along the streets of Hangzhou.

So far, their respective journeys have taken viewers to Dandong, a city bordering North Korea, Kashi in Xinjiang and the Shaolin Temple in Central China, besides the metropolises and tech-hubs like Shenzhen, Chongqing and Xi'an.

Among all the backpackers in China, why do Indian vloggers stand out in both visibility online and viewership? From my personal experience, Indian travelers in China have a bigger presence on video-sharing platforms and they have larger numbers of followers. As I initially enjoyed watching the videos from three Indian vloggers, the platform continued to present to me more works by other Indian creators on my homepage. So far at least six Indian creators currently touring around China regularly appear on this page.

It's also because Indian vloggers are enthusiastic and informative, and they narrate a lot while shooting videos, giving a fuller picture of the place they visit and how they feel inside India's important yet somewhat unfamiliar neighbor.

SOURCE Global Times
GUIYANG, China, July 3, 2023 /PRNewswire/ -- From July 8th to 9th, 2023, Eco Forum Global Guiyang 2023 (EFG 2023) will be held in Guiyang. This is the only national-level international high-end summit themed with ecological civilization in China. EFG has been successfully held for 10 times since 2009, and it has become an important platform to showcase the achievements of China's ecological civilization construction, according to the Office of the Executive Committee of Eco Forum Global Guiyang.

Guizhou's Solution to the Harmonious Coexistence of Humans with Nature

In recent years, Guizhou province has adhered to the two bottom lines of ecology and development, providing solutions to the harmonious coexistence between humans and nature in Guizhou.

This year, four cute swan babies were born in Guanshanhu Park in Guiyang, attracting numerous people's attention. Black swans have strict requirements for their living environment, so when they choose to settle down and breed in this park, it indicates that Guiyang is blessed with a good ecological environment. Guanshanhu Park, known as the "Green Lungs" of Guiyang City, now enjoys more than 675 plant species and over 70 wild birds.

In terms of biodiversity conservation and utilization, Guizhou continues to explore and summarize experience, thus forming a unique "Guizhou Model". Today, the number of wild animal species in Guizhou ranks the third in China, and there are 197 species (categories) enlisted in the new edition of National Protection List of Rare Animals.

Mount Fanjing in Guizhou, a World's Natural Heritage, is home to more than 7,100 kinds of rare wild animals and plants. It is also the only habitat of Grey snub-nosed monkeys, the "only child of the earth". In this National Nature Reserve with more than 95% forest cover, the habitat space of Grey snub-nosed monkeys is 295 km2.

On February 15th, 2022, the first "Forest Carbon Ticket" in Guizhou was born in Bijie City, Guizhou province. One month later, this "Ticket"-based pledge loan of 5 million Chinese yuan successfully landed. As of now, Bijie has issued a total of 5 "Forest Carbon Tickets", utilizing "Ticket"-based pledge loan totaling 46 million Chinese yuan. In November 2022, Bijie City was selected as the National Pilot City for forestry carbon sink in 2022, becoming the only pilot city in Guizhou province.

After years of unremitting efforts, the proportion of days with excellent air quality in central cities of Guizhou has reached over 98%, and the excellent rate of transregional cross section water quality of major rivers has reached 100%. There are 30 achievements in ecological civilization system reform being included in the National Promotion List, and the proportion of green economy has reached 45%.

Image Attachments Links:

Link: https://iop.asianetnews.net/view-attachment?attach-id=441400

Caption: Guizhou's Solution to the Harmonious Coexistence of Humans with Nature

SOURCE The Office of the Executive Committee of Eco Forum Global Guiyang
Infor's CloudSuite Food & Beverage will be rolled out enterprise-wide

AMSTERDAM, July 3, 2023 /PRNewswire/ -- Infor, the industry cloud company, today announced that HAK, a Dutch producer of vegetables and legumes, is starting to implement Infor's CloudSuite Food & Beverage to make its business processes more efficient.

The implementation of Infor CloudSuite Food & Beverage fits HAK's growth goals. With more efficient business processes, the company will be better able to respond to changing situations in the market. HAK stands for sustainability; the company strives to become 100 percent organic for all its local vegetables and legumes, while keeping it affordable for consumers. This requires greater efficiency throughout the production chain. Also in terms of traceability, or as HAK calls it, "from soil to mouth," the new ERP-solution offers the ability to manage this even better. All in all, the CloudSuite Food & Beverage solution contributes to HAK's growth strategy.

Organization-wide implementation

The main goal of deploying Infor's industry-specific CloudSuite is to increase efficiency in supply chain planning and warehouse management. A lot is still done manually there. The entire organization is involved in the implementation. The operational flows are the most important, but every discipline will eventually start working with the system.

Prepared for the future, innovation and growth

Developments in the food industry are occurring at an increasingly rapid pace. To be well prepared for the future and to meet its growth objectives, HAK chose Infor CloudSuite Food & Beverage, a solution developed specifically for food producers and available as an always up-to-date cloud service that is constantly updated with new features and innovations. This allows HAK to accelerate the company's development and innovation.

Perfect match

"Infor's approach fits in well with the way in which HAK operates," says Maikel Jongenelis, CFO at HAK. "More than 85 percent of our processes that we want to address are included as standard processes in the Infor solution, especially in the areas of supply chain planning and warehouse management. So, little work needs to be done. In addition, we work with a quality information system that is known to Infor and has also been included in previous implementations at other Infor customers. So, there is also easy integration there."

"HAK is a wonderful Dutch food producer," said Marcel Koks, food industry strategy leader at Infor. "They were looking for an industry-specific solution that meets their business objectives and also fits their company culture. They have found a match for both in Infor CloudSuite Food & Beverage."

Infor CloudSuite Food & Beverage

Infor CloudSuite Food & Beverage makes it possible to drive efficiencies in food manufacturers' supply chains and bring new products to market faster. The platform provides ERP solutions for all major food industry segments, including bakery, beverage, dairy, meat and poultry, prepared and refrigerated products, and food ingredients.

Learn more about Infor's solutions for the food industry:

www.infor.com/industries/food-beverage

Learn more about Infor CloudSuite Food & Beverage:

www.infor.com/products/cloudsuite-food-and-beverage

About HAK

HAK was founded in 1952 by the Hak family in Giessen, The Netherlands. We process and sell vegetables and legumes, of which quality, transparency and proximity always form the basis. HAK believes that the world is a better place where you can live longer and healthier if everyone eats more vegetables and legumes. Our mission, therefore, is to help as many people as possible always and everywhere to eat more vegetables and legumes by making it easier and tastier according to the principles of our Green Kitchen. HAK has been B-corp certified since 2023, further underscoring its mission. For more information, visit www.hak.nl.

About Infor

Infor is a global leader in business cloud software specialized by industry. We develop complete solutions for our focus industries. Infor's mission-critical enterprise applications and services are designed to deliver sustainable operational advantages with security and faster time to value. Over 60,000 organizations in more than 175 countries rely on Infor's 17,000 employees to help achieve their business goals. As a Koch company, our financial strength, ownership structure, and long-term view empower us to foster enduring, mutually beneficial relationships with our customers. Visit Infor.com.

Media contact:

Richard Moore

Senior PR Director, EMEA,

[email protected],

+447976111243

Copyright 2023 Infor. All rights reserved. The word and design marks set forth herein are trademarks and/or registered trademarks of Infor and/or related affiliates and subsidiaries. All other trademarks listed herein are the property of their respective owners. www.infor.com

SOURCE Infor
DUBLIN, July 3, 2023 /PRNewswire/ -- Icarus Media Digital, a leading venture building studio, is proud to announce a significant milestone in its journey of creating profitable ventures across diverse domains. With a steadfast commitment to innovation and entrepreneurship, Icarus Media Digital has achieved remarkable success in nurturing and developing a portfolio of thriving businesses.

The studio celebrates reaching the remarkable achievements of 1 million average monthly unique visitors and 15 million page views across its portfolio of ventures in the last six months.

Icarus Media Digital - A Venture Building Data Driven Company (PRNewsfoto/Icarus Media Digital)

Founded and operated in 2016 by Matthieu Mayran, Icarus Media Digital has been at the forefront of identifying and capitalizing on lucrative opportunities in various industries. With a strategic approach and a team of experienced professionals, the company has consistently demonstrated its ability to create sustainable and profitable ventures.

As a venture building studio led by Jules Decol, Icarus Media Digital operates on the principle of fostering entrepreneurship and providing the necessary resources, expertise, and support to transform ideas into successful businesses. By working closely with talented individuals and startups, Icarus Media Digital has facilitated the growth and expansion of ventures across a diverse range of sectors.

This milestone celebration is a testament to the effectiveness of Icarus Media Digital's venture building approach. Through a combination of strategic investments, business development initiatives, and mentorship, the studio has enabled the creation of innovative and profitable enterprises that have made a positive impact in their respective industries.

Icarus Media Digital congratulates its team of talented people, partners, and stakeholders who have contributed to this milestone achievement. Their dedication, hard work, and collaborative spirit have been instrumental in the success of the ventures nurtured by Icarus Media Digital.

Looking forward, Icarus Media Digital remains committed to fostering entrepreneurship, driving innovation, and creating a sustainable ecosystem for ventures to thrive. With its proven track record and expertise in venture building, the studio is well-positioned to continue its mission of identifying and developing profitable ventures in various domains.

About Icarus Media Digital:

Icarus Media Digital is a venture building studio based in Dublin, founded in 2016. The studio is dedicated to nurturing and developing profitable ventures across diverse industries. Through strategic investments, business development initiatives, and mentorship, Icarus Media Digital has established itself as a leading venture building studio.

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Logo - https://mma.prnewswire.com/media/2143203/Icarus_Media_Digital_Logo.jpg

SOURCE Icarus Media Digital
ROCKVILLE, Md. and SUZHOU, China, July 2, 2023 /PRNewswire/ -- Innovent Biologics, Inc. ("Innovent") (HKEX: 01801), a world-class biopharmaceutical company that develops, manufactures and commercializes high-quality medicines for the treatment of oncology, autoimmune, metabolic, ophthalmology and other major diseases, and IASO Biotechnology ("IASO Bio"), a clinical-stage biopharmaceutical company engaged in discovering, developing, and manufacturing innovative cell therapies and antibody products, announce that China's National Medical Products Administration (NMPA) has approved the New Drug Application (NDA) for FUCASO (Equecabtagene Autoleucel, co-developed and co-commercialized by Innovent and IASO Bio, Innovent R&D code: IBI326, IASO Bio R&D code: CT103A), the first fully-human BCMA-directed chimeric antigen receptor (CAR) T cell therapy for adult patients with relapsed or refractory multiple myeloma (RRMM) who have received at least three prior lines of therapy, including a proteasome inhibitor and an immunomodulatory agent.

FUCASO (Equecabtagene Autoleucel) is a BCMA-directed CAR T cell therapy, using lentivirus as a gene vector to transfect autologous T cells. The CAR contains a fully-human scFv, CD8a hinge and transmembrane, and 4-1BB-mediated co-stimulation and CD3 activation domains. Based on rigorous selection and screening of the molecular structures, and comprehensive in vivo and in vitro evaluation, FUCASO has demonstrated rapid and potent efficacy as well as prolonged persistency in RRMM patients, providing higher and deeper responses and long-term clinical benefit.

The NDA approval was based on the results from the FUMANBA-1 clinical study (CTR20192510, NCT05066646), a multi-center Phase I/II registrational clinical trial conducted in China to evaluate the efficacy of Equecabtagene Autoleucel in patients with RRMM. In June 2023, updated data from this ongoing study was presented as a poster presentation (Abstract Number: 8025) at the 2023 Annual Meeting of the American Society of Clinical Oncology (ASCO), in which Equecabtagene Autoleucel demonstrated remarkable efficacy and favorable safety profiles.

A total of 103 subjects received a dose of 1.0106 CAR-T cells/kg, with a median follow-up time of 13.8 (0.4, 27.2) months.

Among the 101 evaluable patients, the overall response rate (ORR) was 96%, and the stringent complete response/ complete response (sCR/CR) rate was 74.3%. Median time to response (mTTR) was only 16 days, and the 12-month PFS rate was 78.8%. 95% of the patients achieved minimal residual disease (MRD) negativity, and all sCR/CR patients achieved MRD negativity. Of the 12 patients with prior CAR-T therapy, 9 achieved CR, and 5 achieved sCR (including 4 patients that sustained sCR for over 18 months post-infusion). In 89 patients without prior CAR-T therapy, 78.7% reached sCR/CR.

Of the 103 patients, only one experienced grade 3 cytokine release syndrome (CRS), and 2 experienced grade 1-2 immune effector cell-associated neurotoxicity syndrome (ICANS). All patients with CRS or ICANS recovered after the treatment.

Equecabtagene Autoleucel was still detectable in 50% and 40% respectively of the patients who completed 12-month and 24-month follow-ups after infusion. Only 19.4% of the patients were anti-drug antibody (ADA)-positive after Equecabtagene Autoleucel infusion.

The Principal Investigators of FUMANBA-1 study, Prof. Lugui Qiu, MD, Chinese Academy of Medical Science Hematology Hospital, and Prof. Chunrui Li, MD, PhD, Tongji Hospital, Tongji Medical College, Huazhong University of Science & Technology: "There's a significant unmet clinical need for the treatment of multiple myeloma (MM) in China. As a fully-human BCMA CAR-T therapy, FUCASO has demonstrated remarkable efficacy, with evidence of deep and durable response for high-quality survival for MM patients. We believe that FUCASO's approval will offers clinicians a novel breakthrough option benefiting patients with later-line RRMM."

Dr. Hui Zhou, Senior Vice President of Innovent Biologics, stated, "Multiple myeloma is a common hematology malignant disease with high incidence rate, and relapse and refractory are almost inevitable after current treatments. There's an urgent unmet need of a treatment with well-tolerated and long persistence for RRMM patients in China. FUCASO, as an innovative fully-human BCMA-directed T cell therapy, has demonstrated robust and long-lasting efficacy and outstanding safety in long-term follow-up data from the registrational clinical study, which underscores its potential to be a pioneering treatment option for patients with RRMM. We are very pleased with the approval of FUCASO and hope it could benefit RRMM patients as the first approved BCMA CAR-T therapy in China."

Ms. Jinhua Zhang, Chairman and Chief Executive Officer of IASO Bio, stated, "We are excited that FUCASO was approved as a new drug, which is a significant milestone for our team. FUCASO is not only IASO Bio's first commercialized product but is also the world's first commercially available fully-human CAR-T therapy. Furthermore, FUCASO is the first self-developed and independently manufactured CAR-T cell therapy in China as well as China's first approved BCMA CAR-T product and first approved cell therapy for the treatment of MM in China. The NMPA's NDA approval of FUCASO will help us in achieving our strategic goal of bringing groundbreaking treatment options, as well as new hope for a potential cure, to MM patients in need."

About Multiple Myeloma (MM)

Multiple Myeloma (MM) is a blood cancer that often infiltrates the bone marrow causing anemia, kidney failure, immune problems, and bone fractures. For MM patients, common first-line drug treatments include proteasome inhibitors, immunomodulatory drugs, and alkylating agents. While treatment may result in remission, most patients will inevitably enter the relapsed or refractory stage as there's currently no cure. As a result, there is a significant unmet need for patients with relapsed or refractory multiple myeloma. According to Frost & Sullivan, new MM cases in China rose from 20,100 in 2018 to 22,400 in 2022 and are expected to increase to 25,700 by 2027.

About FUCASO (Equecabtagene Autoleucel)

FUCASO (Equecabtagene Autoleucel) is an innovative fully-human anti- BCMA CAR-T cell therapy which uses lentivirus as a gene vector to transfect autologous T cells. The CAR contains a fully-human scFv, CD8a hinge and transmembrane, and 4-1BB-mediated co-stimulation and CD3 activation domains. Based on rigorous selection and screening of the molecular structures, and comprehensive in vivo and in vitro evaluation, FUCASO has demonstrated rapid and potent efficacy as well as prolonged persistency in RRMM patients. FUCASO (Equecabtagene Autoleucel) is approved by China's NMPA for the treatment of RRMM. Innovent and IASO Bio are responsible for joint development and commercialization of FUCASO (Equecabtagene Autoleucel) for the treatment of RRMM in mainland China.

Furthermore, Equecabtagene Autoleucel received Orphan Drug Designation (ODD) designation from the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) for the treatment of RRMM and obtained the U.S. FDA IND approval. Equecabtagene Autoleucel also received Regenerative Medicine Advanced Therapy (RMAT) and Fast Track (FT) Designations in February 2023 from the FDA. In addition to multiple myeloma, the NMPA has accepted another IND application for the new extended indication of Neuromyelitis Optica Spectrum Disorder (NMOSD).

About Innovent

Inspired by the spirit of "Start with Integrity, Succeed through Action," Innovent's mission is to develop, manufacture and commercialize high-quality biopharmaceutical products that are affordable to ordinary people. Established in 2011, Innovent is committed to developing, manufacturing and commercializing high-quality innovative medicines for the treatment of cancer, autoimmune disease, metabolic disorder and other major diseases. On October 31, 2018, Innovent was listed on the Main Board of the Stock Exchange of Hong Kong Limited with the stock code: 01801.HK.

Since its inception, Innovent has developed a fully integrated multi-functional platform which includes R&D, CMC (Chemistry, Manufacturing, and Controls), clinical development and commercialization capabilities. Leveraging the platform, the company has built a robust pipeline of 35 valuable assets in the fields of cancer, metabolic disorder, autoimmune disease and other major therapeutic areas, with 9 approved products on the market. These include: TYVYT (sintilimab injection), BYVASDA (bevacizumab injection), SULINNO (adalimumab injection), HALPRYZA (rituximab injection), Pemazyre (pemigatinib oral inhibitor), olverembatinib(BCR ABL TKI), Cyramza (ramucirumab), Retsevmo (selpercatinib) and FUCASO (Equecabtagene Autoleucel). An additional 2 assets are under NMPA NDA review, 6 assets are in Phase III or pivotal clinical trials, and 18 more molecules are in clinical studies.

Innovent has built an international team with advanced talent in high-end biological drug development and commercialization, including many global experts. The company has also entered into strategic collaborations with Eli Lilly, Roche, Sanofi, Adimab, Incyte, MD Anderson Cancer Center and other international partners. Innovent strives to work with many collaborators to help advance China's biopharmaceutical industry, improve drug availability and enhance the quality of the patients' lives.

Disclaimer: Innovent does not recommend any off-label usage.

Note:

TYVYT (sintilimab injection) is not an approved product in the United States.

BYVASDA (bevacizumab biosimilar injection), SULINNO, and HALPRYZA (rituximab biosimilar injection) are not approved products in the United States.

TYVYT (sintilimab injection, Innovent)

BYVASDA (bevacizumab biosimilar injection, Innovent)

HALPRYZA (rituximab biosimilar injection, Innovent)

SULINNO (adalimumab biosimilar injection, Innovent)

Pemazyre (pemigatinib oral inhibitor, Incyte Corporation). Pemazyre was discovered by Incyte Corporation and licensed to Innovent for development and commercialization in Mainland China, Hong Kong, Macau and Taiwan.

CYRAMZA (ramucirumab, Eli Lilly). Cyramza was discovered by Eli Lilly and licensed to Innovent for commercialization in Mainland China.

Retsevmo (selpercatinib, Eli Lilly). Retsevmo was discovered by Eli Lilly and licensed to Innovent for commercialization in Mainland China.

About IASO Biotechnology

IASO Bio is a clinical stage biopharmaceutical company engaged in discovery and development of novel cell therapies and biologics for oncology and autoimmune diseases. Leveraging its proprietary fully human antibody discovery platform (IMARS), high-throughput chimeric antigen receptor T-cell (CAR-T) drug screening platform, and proprietary manufacturing processes, IASO Bio is developing a rich clinical-stage pipeline of multiple autologous and allogeneic CAR-T and biologics product candidates. This pipeline includes a portfolio of over 10 novel products, including FUCASO (Equecabtagene Autoleucel). Equecabtagene Autoleucel received New Drug Application (NDA) approval from China's National Medical Products Administration (NMPA) and U.S. FDA IND approval for the treatment of R/R MM. IASO also received Breakthrough Therapy Designation (BTD) from the NMPA in February 2021 and Orphan Drug Designation (ODD) from the FDA in February 2022, Regenerative Medicine Advanced Therapy (RMAT) and Fast Track (FT) Designations from the FDA in February 2023. In addition to multiple myeloma, NMPA has approved IND application of FUCASO for the new expanded indication of Neuromyelitis Optica Spectrum Disorder (NMOSD).

Additionally, the company's in-house developed fully human CD19/CD22 dual-targeted CAR-T cell therapy received two IND clearances for treating relapsed/refractory B-cell non-Hodgkin's lymphoma (r/r B-NHL) and relapsed/refractory acute B-lymphoblastic leukemia (r/r B-ALL). It is currently in Phase I clinical trial for r/r B-NHL. It was also granted ODD for treatment of acute lymphoblastic leukemia by the FDA in October 2021. And the fully human monoclonal antibody targeting human CD19, IASO-782 Injection, received both FDA and NMPA IND approvals in June 2023 for use in U.S. and China clinical trials for Autoimmune hematological disorders, including primary immune thrombocytopenia (ITP) and warm autoimmune hemolytic anemia (wAIHA).

Leveraging its strong management team, innovative product pipeline, integrated manufactural and clinical capabilities, IASO aims to deliver transformative, curable, and affordable therapies that fulfil unmet medical needs to patients in China as well as around the world. For more information, visitwww.iasobio.com or www.linkedin.com/company/iasobiotherapeutics.

Innovent's Forward-Looking Statements

This news release may contain certain forward-looking statements that are, by their nature, subject to significant risks and uncertainties. The words "anticipate", "believe", "estimate", "expect", "intend" and similar expressions, as they relate to Innovent Biologics, Inc. ("Innovent" or "Company") , are intended to identify certain of such forward-looking statements. The Company does not intend to update these forward-looking statements regularly.

These forward-looking statements are based on the existing beliefs, assumptions, expectations, estimates, projections and understandings of the management of the Company with respect to future events at the time these statements are made. These statements are not a guarantee of future developments and are subject to risks, uncertainties and other factors, some of which are beyond the Company's control and are difficult to predict. Consequently, actual results may differ materially from information contained in the forward-looking statements as a result of future changes or developments in our business, the Company's competitive environment and political, economic, legal and social conditions.

The Company, the Directors and the employees of the Company assume (a) no obligation to correct or update the forward-looking statements contained in this site; and (b) no liability in the event that any of the forward-looking statements does not materialize or turn out to be incorrect.

SOURCE Innovent Biologics
LUND, Sweden, July 3, 2023 /PRNewswire/ -- Alfa Laval will release second quarter earnings on July 20th at 07:30 am CET. The conference call will start at 10:00 am CET.

The conference call is hosted by Alfa Laval's President and CEO Tom Erixon and CFO Fredrik Ekstrom.

To participate in the conference call and ask questions, please register here:

https://services.choruscall.it/DiamondPassRegistration/register?confirmationNumber=9351691&linkSecurityString=d61ce6c16

You can also follow the conference via a live webcast. A webcast link will be available on

Alfa Laval - Investors.

Contacts:

Johan Lundin

Head of Investor Relations, Alfa Laval

Phone: +46 46 36 65 10

Mobile: +46 730 46 30 90

Beata Ardhe

Executive Assistant, Alfa Laval

Phone: +46 46 36 65 26

Mobile: +46 709 36 65 26

www.alfalaval.com

The following files are available for download:

https://mb.cision.com/Main/905/3798978/2168590.pdf Invitation Q2 2023

SOURCE Alfa Laval
LONDON, July 3, 2023 /PRNewswire/ -- KaarTech, a Global Digital Transformation Consulting company specialising in SAP and S/4 HANA implementation, has raised $30M from A91 Partners, a leading investment firm headquartered in Mumbai. Gautam Mago and Kaushik Anand from A91 Partners will join the Board of KaarTech.

L-R - Ratnakumar N, Director - Head of Products, Selvakumaran M, Co-founder & Director, Maran Nagarajan, Founder & Chief Executive Officer, George Gaurdian Strategic Business Unit Head - European Union, at KaarTech

This partnership aims to fuel KaarTech's organic and inorganic growth across existing markets in the Middle East, the European Union and North America. It marks the beginning of a new chapter in its growth journey, particularly emphasising establishing a solid presence in North America.

Founded in 2006, KaarTech is a high-growth company specialising in IP & Digital Services in the SAP ecosystem with deep expertise in discrete manufacturing, professional services automation, process manufacturing and consumer packaged goods. With a team of over 2000 employees, KaarTech has doubled its revenue in the last 24 months.

"The partnership with A91 will catapult KaarTech into an unprecedented era of expansion, propelling us towards our aspiration of going public, despite our humble bootstrapped origins. This association will bolster our ability to expand geographically and augment our services portfolio in-organically. In doing so, we aspire to be the partner of choice for customers looking for Digital Transformation journeys in SAP, Cloud ecosystem customer experience, Process Automation and Data Analytics blended with KaarTech's core competence in Logistics, Supply Chain, Financial and Human Capital Management," said Mr. Maran Nagarajan, CEO of KaarTech.

"We are excited to be partnering with Kaar Technologies. Over the last decade, they have established themselves as one of the leading partners for Digital Transformation and SAP Consulting Services. We look forward to working closely with them in helping them expand their geographic presence in the US and Europe and in their journey towards becoming a publicly listed company," said Mr. Kaushik Anand, partner at A91.

Veda Corporate Advisors ("Veda") was the exclusive financial advisor to the Company and its promoters.

About KaarTech:

KaarTech, headquartered in Chennai, was started by four college friends from Tamil Nadu. Today, KaarTech's operations extend to 15+ global regions, having successfully executed over 2500 projects and several of them being for marquee customers like Aramco. KaarTech has won 23 Quality Awards and is poised to win many more. KaarTech's equal emphasis on its people is also worth a mention, as demonstrated by their impressive attrition rate of 3.5%, particularly when the industry is reeling north of 20% in employee turnover.

For additional information, visit http://kaartech.com

About A91:

Founded in 2018, A91 Partners is an investment firm investing across India's Consumer, Technology, Financial Services and Healthcare sectors. A91 partners with entrepreneurs to build enduring businesses for tomorrow's India. Current investments include Digit General Insurance, Aye Finance, Sugar Cosmetics, Atomberg Technologies, Hector Beverages, Videoverse, Exotel, Happilo, Inshorts, La Renon, Shipsy, Healthkart and GIVA.

For additional information, visit https://a91partners.com/.

Photo: https://mma.prnewswire.com/media/2146106/KaarTech.jpg

SOURCE KaarTech
HOUSTON, July 3, 2023 /PRNewswire/ -- KBR (NYSE: KBR) announced today that it has settled a legacy lawsuit pending in federal court, USA ex rel Howard v. KBR, Inc. et al.

"We are pleased to put this decade-old lawsuit behind us as we close out one of our final legacy legal issues. We are proud of our work on LOGCAP III and of our broader, strong record of serving the armed forces," said Stuart Bradie, KBR President and CEO. "This settlement is yet another milestone in our commitment to resolve legacy legal matters and it helps reduce uncertainty and liquidity risk."

This case, first filed in 2011 and unsealed in 2014, concerns the cross-leveling of materials and equipment procurement and inventory management under the LOGCAP III contract in Iraq in the 2007-2011 time period. KBR agreed to resolve this case to avoid the needless expense, risk and distraction of a trial but denies that it has violated any laws, including the False Claims Act, or any rules and regulations for government contracting. KBR maintains that it met its contractual requirements while operating in a dangerous war-zone environment and is proud of our work to support the military.

Under the terms of the settlement, KBR denies any liability or wrongful conduct. KBR will pay $108.75 million, approximately half of which in restitution damages, plus interest to the U.S. government and will pay $34.95 million to the relators as attorney's fees. Payment of the settlement will occur in July 2023 and KBR will take the associated charge in its second quarter 2023 financial results. The Department of Justice, which declined to pursue this matter in 2014, will intervene for the purposes of settling and dismissing the lawsuit with prejudice.

About KBR

We deliver science, technology, and engineering solutions to governments and companies around the world. KBR employs approximately 32,000 people performing diverse, complex, and mission-critical roles in 33 countries.

KBR is proud to work with its customers across the globe to provide technology, value-added services, and long-term operations and maintenance services to ensure consistent delivery with predictable results. At KBR, We Deliver.

Visit www.kbr.com

Forward Looking Statements

The statements in this press release that are not historical statements, including statements regarding the company's settlement of a legacy lawsuit, are forward-looking statements within the meaning of the federal securities laws. These statements are subject to numerous risks, uncertainties and assumptions, many of which are beyond the company's control, that could cause actual results to differ materially from the results expressed or implied by the statements. These risks, uncertainties and assumptions include, but are not limited to, those set forth in the company's most recently filed Annual Report on Form 10-K, any subsequent Form 10-Qs and 8-Ks and other U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission filings, which discuss some of the important risks, uncertainties and assumptions that the company has identified that may affect its business, results of operations and financial condition. Due to such risks, uncertainties, and assumptions, you are cautioned not to place undue reliance on such forward-looking statements, which speak only as of the date hereof. Except as required by law, the company undertakes no obligation to revise or update publicly any forward-looking statements for any reason.

SOURCE KBR, Inc.
SOUTHFIELD, Mich., July 3, 2023 /PRNewswire/ -- Lear Corporation (NYSE: LEA), a global automotive technology leader in Seating and E-Systems, will hold a conference call to review the company's second quarter 2023 financial results and related matters on August 1, 2023, at 8:30 a.m. EDT.

To participate in the conference call:

Webcast link: click here

Toll-free calls: 877-883-0383

International calls: 412-902-6506

The conference code is 4406714.

You also may listen to the live audio webcast of the call, in listen-only mode, on Lear's Investor Relations website at ir.lear.com. The webcast replay will be available two hours following the call.

Note: The second quarter 2023 slide presentation will be available on Lear's website before the earnings call begins on August 1, 2023.

SOURCE Lear Corporation
Expanded partnership provides new solutions for South Louisiana & Southern Mississippi industrial plants & contractors

HOUSTON, July 3, 2023 /PRNewswire/ -- Greg Baker, CEO of JD Martin, is pleased to announce an expanded partnership, on behalf of Schell Martin, with Leviton in two additional markets  South Louisiana and Southern Mississippi  which became effective July 1, 2023.

Expanded partnership provides new solutions for South Louisiana & Southern Mississippi industrial plants & contractors Tweet this Condition Monitoring for Industrial Devices Louisiana oil refinery Leviton

Craig Schell, President of Schell Martin said, "It is a pleasure to expand our representation of Leviton. Expanding this partnership brings a portfolio of best-in-class solutions and specialized product offerings to more of our customers, in industrial plants and industrial contractor applications, in the markets where we currently serve."

John Born, Regional Director of Sales for Leviton says, "Building on a well-established, successful partnership with Schell Martin is exciting. It is a win to be able to bring our specialized solutions into a region renown for energy industries and industrial plants. We look forward to providing Schell Martin's customers increased access to safe and reliable electrical connections and helping to keep their operations up-and-running and productive."

George O'Neil, a seasoned electrical industry veteran, will bring his deep product knowledge and expertise to the expansion as he supports the effort. O'Neil is shifting from his 37-year career at Leviton into a newly created role at Schell Martin.

O'Neil said, "I'm excited to be joining the Schell Martin team to launch and lead this market focused expansion. I'm also looking forward to continuing to work closely with my previous Leviton colleagues. This is an incredible opportunity to grow and expand the Leviton brand."

With the current expansion JD Martin and the firm's affiliated OpCo's now represent Leviton in four states which are: Texas, Colorado, Louisiana and Mississippi.

Video: Condition Monitoring for Industrial Devices

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z2MMm9tf6Ls

ABOUT JD MARTIN:

JD Martin Company is an electrical manufacturers' representative agency that sells and markets premier lines of electrical products to OEM and MRO contractors, and end-user markets through wholesale distribution. Since 1954, for more than 68 years, we have supported industries such as oil & gas, mining, steel, wastewater treatment, wind power generation and commercial construction. We offer impactful solutions and sell electrical products, through qualified electrical distributor channels, in over 16 states in territories that include Texas, New Mexico, Colorado, Wyoming, Montana, Oklahoma, Louisiana, Mississippi, Alabama, Florida, Georgia, The Carolinas, Virginia, Kentucky and Tennessee. To learn more about JD Martin click here or visit facebook.com/JDMartinCo or linkedin/jd-martin-company-inc-

ABOUT SCHELL MARTIN:

Schell Company, Inc. is an electrical manufacturers' representative, established January 25, 1966. We are committed to the technical selling, marketing and training of electrical products to OEM, MRO, contractor and end user markets. Our corporate office is located in Mandeville, Louisiana and supports resident offices throughout the Louisiana-Mississippi area. Sales are handled through wholesale electrical distribution. To learn more about Schell Martin click here.

ABOUT LEVITON:

Leviton is the smart choice, delivering the most comprehensive range of solutions to meet the needs of today's residential, commercial and industrial customers in more than 90 countries across the globe. From simple switches and receptacles to networking systems and smart home automation, Leviton exceeds market needs by delivering innovative products to create sustainable, intelligent environments through its electrical wiring devices, network and data center connectivity solutions, LED lighting and lighting energy management systems, and security and automation applications. For Leviton, it is clear the FUTURE IS ON. To learn more about Leviton click here or visit facebook.com/leviton, twitter.com/leviton or youtube.com/leviton.

Contact:

Greg Baker

[email protected]

SOURCE JD Martin Co.
When John Manion opened El Che in Chicagos West Loop six years ago, he wasnt planning on adding to the citys already robust roster of steakhouses. Influenced by a childhood partly spent in Brazil, where his family moved for his fathers job when Manion was eight, and also by lengthy travel to Argentina in the 1990s, his intent was a classic parrillada, a Buenos Aires-style grill restaurant named for the parilla on which everything is cooked. However, the trappings of a steakhouse are present at El Che, from the rich assortment of beef cooked over open flame, to shellfish platters, to a bacon-blue cheese wedge salad, as well as sides of fries, mashed potatoes, and asparagus.

We actually added steakhouse to the name three years in to help people understand what it was we were doing. It helped. A lot, Manion told Robb Report. Nevertheless, visitors to El Che are immediately aware that this is not a typical Midwest temple of beef. First off, as Manion pointed out, Every steak, bird, vegetable and aquatic creature gets touched by the flame. The flame in question warms and illuminates the entire back of the restaurant via a custom-built 12-foot hearth fitted with Argentine-style crank-operated, adjustable height grills. Chicago steakhouse tropes and traditions are given an Argentine spin: Classic shellfish, whether commingled or a la carte, is served grilled rather than chilled, the bacon and blue cheese wedge is topped with chimichurri, beef fat fries come with a side of chimi aioli, and asparagus, in a nod to both Argentina and Italys large Italian immigrant populations, is smothered in pepperoncini, pancetta, and parmesan breadcrumbs.

More from Robb Report

Where El Che really sets itself apart from the typical Chicago steakhouse is the wine list. Dont expect Napa or Bordeaux with your beef here. The cellar is 100 percent South American. Half of the 300-plus bottles within its 12 pages are from Argentina, 40 percent are Chilean, and the balance hail from Uruguay, Brazil, and Peru. Compare that with the offerings that were in place when wine director Alex Cuper joined in 2019; half were from Argentina, 40 percent from North America, and 10 percent from Europe. Now, with its sole focus on South America, El Che has turned itself into one of the countrys great destinations to explore that continents wine region.

Cuper led a pandemic-era pivot of the restaurants wine list.

During the restaurants pandemic-era closure, Cuper and Manion decided to revamp the wine offerings to focus completely on South America. The depth and breadth of the lineup is overwhelming at first glance, with an entire page of Cabernet Sauvignon and three pages of Argentine Malbec divided by region and subregion. Cuper and his team take great pleasure in guiding diners through the options and helping to find wine that will suit their food choices and wine preferences.

We treat Malbec much like steakhouses treat Cabernet Sauvignon. There is a vast world of styles and sub regions that each carry specific and unique qualities, Cuper told Robb Report. Typically, I like to lead off with a simple question in reference to tannin, body and fruit. This allows us to narrow down a specific sub region that we feel best fits their needs.

Cuper maintains that despite stereotypes, all Napa Cabernet Sauvignon is not created equal, and neither is Cabernet Sauvignon from Argentina or Chile. He finds Argentine Cabernet Sauvignon to be lifted and bright, oftentimes with high acidity, red fruits and less tannin, thanks to soil composition and winemaker ideology. On the other hand, if a table of diners requested a bottle of Cabernet akin to one from Napa, he would steer them towards a selection from Chile because of their propensity to exhibit a lot of green and herbal characteristics in addition to their rich dark fruits. If a table states a preference for Napa Cab but is open to suggestion, Cupers first call is Malbec from Lujan de Cuyo, a Mendoza subregion. His favorite in-house bottle is Vina Alicia Brote Negro Malbec, made from a single row of 150-year-old vines that give it a super dense and chewy style with deep concentrated fruits.

Manions wood-fired cooking pairs nicely with some Malbec.

For diners looking for something out of the ordinary, Cuper recommends Vina Gonzalez Bastias Salvaje, a blend of Pais and Black Moscatel, two of the original grapes brought to South America in the early 16th century. While it may not be to everyones taste, Cuper points out, It smells funky and gamey, but then on the palate it jumps with fresh red fruits, dried herbs, and a very nice texture that just makes it so fun to drink and extremely unique.

With so much seafood on the menu, there are plenty of whites on hand as well, including interesting picks such as Moscatel, Torrontel, and Corinto from the south of Chile and Torrontes from Argentina. That said, Cuper swears that Chardonnay is Argentinas best kept secret. Thanks to high vineyard altitude, cool nights, mineral-rich soils, and a lack of new oak in the winemaking process, the country produces a bounty of Chardonnay that Cuper describes as beautiful, racy, and overall elegant.

So, while youre waiting for your ribeye, tomahawk, porterhouse, strip steak, picanha, or even the enormous mixed parrilladato be grilled to perfection by Manion, chef de cuisine Adam Meyer and the rest of the team, order a wedge, a few empanadas, and some shellfish and ask Cuper and his squad to start you with the ideal white and guide you towards the ideal red. Its like taking a trip to South America in a single sitting.

For a deeper dive, book one of El Ches monthly wine dinners featuring selections from a single region or producer poured by the glass rather than the bottle at the restaurants Hearth Table. Hosted by Alex Cuper, these intimate events allow you the opportunity to enjoy chef Manions cuisine expertly paired with a focused selection of wines that will enhance your knowledge while delighting your palate. And if your interest has really been piqued, Cuper curates a rotating collection of wines each month for El Ches wine club. Upcoming themes include The Other Regions of Argentina and The Other Reds of South America, two ideas that are explored in depth on the restaurants wine list.

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LG Innotek becomes the first Korean company to win the JLR Supplier Excellence Award in 2023

LG Innotek maintains JLR Quality Certificate (JLRQ) for three consecutive years

JLR "LG Innotek's effort to continuously improve their products also improves JLR's products"

SEOUL, South Korea, July 3, 2023 /PRNewswire/ -- On July 3rd, LG Innotek announced that the company has received the esteemed "Supplier Excellence Award" from the luxury automotive brand, Jaguar Land Rover (JLR). LG Innotek is the first Korean company to win the JLR Supplier Excellence Award.

Recognized for its outstanding performance in supplying automotive components, LG Innotek was honoured with the prestigious JLR Supplier Excellence Award in the "Impact" category. The award ceremony took place recently at the JLR headquarters in Gaydon, United Kingdom.

Representatives from JLR and LG Innotek are taking a commemorative photograph at JLR Supplier Excellence Awards ceremony that to place in Gaydon (UK), on 30th May (local time). From left: Barbara BERGMEIER (JLR Executive Director), Wonrae JU (Head of LG Innotek EU Representative office), Byaengkuk YOO (LG Innotek Head of Automotive Components Business Unit), Tobias MOCH (JLR CPO).

Each year, JLR Supplier Excellence Awards celebrate the remarkable achievements of its global supply chain. Only 16, including LG Innotek, were shortlisted as winners for this year's awards.

This year, the Supplier Excellence Awards were based on JLR's recently introduced Creators' Code values. JLR's purpose is to "Live the Exceptional with Soul" by being the proud creators of modern luxury. The awards were determined by evaluating the suppliers' adherence to JLR's Creators' Code, which consists of Customer Love, Unity, Integrity, Growth, and Impact.

Furthermore, LG Innotek manufactures automotive components in Wroclaw, Poland. Currently, they produce more than seven types of automotive components, including the mHEV DC-DC converter and Battery Management System, which are supplied to various JLR vehicles, including the all-new MLA-based Range Rover SUV.

This showcases LG Innotek's ability to consistently produce and supply automotive components with a robust quality management system, distinguishing the company from other suppliers during last year's global semiconductor shortage.

LG Innotek has already been acknowledged by JLR for the exceptional quality of its automotive components, such as the DC-DC converter, and has maintained the "JLR Quality Certificate" for three consecutive years.

Tobias MOCH, JLR Chief Procurement Officer, commented, "LG Innotek could have been nominated for any of the five supplier award categories but the way they innovate their products and improve their customer services makes an Impact award particularly appropriate" and added, "LG Innotek hugely support the JLR Product Development teams, continuously improving their products and, in turn, improving JLR's."

The JLR Supplier Excellence Award is expected to solidify LG Innotek's leading position in the global automotive components market and attract new clientele.

Additionally, LG Innotek's commitment to 'No. 1 quality' has been acknowledged by other global car and automotive component companies such as GM (USA), Continental, and Schaeffler (both from Germany).

Moreover, by obtaining the Cyber Security Management System (CSMS) certification last year, LG Innotek has enhanced trust among global clients. CSMS is a globally standardized certification that assesses a company's ability to handle cybersecurity threats, categorize them, and evaluate their response.

These efforts to pursue excellence in terms of quality and security, along with increased customer confidence, have led LG Innotek's Automotive Components Business Unit to achieve nearly a 60% increase in annual sales compared to 2020.

Byaengkuk YOO, Head of Automotive Components Business Unit, stated, "LG Innotek is at the forefront of producing reliable automotive components that provide highly differentiated customer value." He emphasized that, based on the credibility gained from global clients, LG Innotek, as a 'total solution provider' with a wide range of automotive component productsfrom automotive power modules to automotive cameras and LiDARwill accelerate its efforts to establish a strong presence in the emerging components market for electric vehicles and autonomous vehicles.

Photo - https://mma.prnewswire.com/media/2144909/Photo__LG_Innotek__JLR_supplier_excellence_awards.jpg

Logo - https://mma.prnewswire.com/media/1681506/Logo.jpg

SOURCE LG Innotek
TIANJIN, China, July 3, 2023 /PRNewswire/ -- The World Economic Forum (WEF)'s 14th Annual Meeting of the New Champions, also known as the "Summer Davos Forum", was held in Tianjin from June 27 to 29. Zhong Baoshen, Chairman of LONGi, was invited to the forum where he delivered speeches at the "Net-Zero Hero? The Decarbonization of Industry Clusters" and the "China Energy Transition Roundtable".

(PRNewsfoto/LONGi Green Energy Technology Co., Ltd.)

The theme of this year's forum was "Entrepreneurship: The Driving Force of the Global Economy." It was attended by over 1500 global leaders and innovators politics, business, academia, social organizations, and international organizations. Since the first Summer Davos in 2007, the forum has been successfully held 13 times and has become an important platform for communication between China and the world.

During his speech at the forum, Zhong proudly announced that LONGi, as the world's largest solar technology company, is projected to achieve a remarkable shipment volume of 85GW of cells and modules, along with 130GW of silicon wafers in 2023. He went on to add that it can generate about 150 billion tons of green electricity and significantly reduce carbon emissions.

LONGi has successively joined RE100, EP100, and EV100 initiatives and also participated in the Scientific Carbon Target (SBTi), becoming the earliest Chinese enterprise to simultaneously join the four international initiatives.

In 2021, LONGi kicked off the construction of the first "Zero-Carbon Factory" in the photovoltaic industry in Baoshan, Yunnan. Currently, the proportion of green electricity usage has reached 99.09%, reflecting the company's determination and confidence in actively practicing green development.

According to Zhong, the integration of photovoltaics with various applications is a groundbreaking direction for LONGi, representing an innovative approach. "In the past, large-scale power facilities required massive capital. Today, the installation of power generation facilities to address simple problems can be achieved at just $100. In arid areas that solely rely on the weather, solar energy can be used to run water pumps to increase soil. "

At present, climate change is a major global issue facing human society. Zhong believes that in the face of common challenges, everyone is on the same boat, and it is necessary for every individual, every country, and every region to take concrete action because timely action is more important than anything else. As the global consensus on 'carbon neutrality' strengthens, the world is poised for transformative changes, with carbon reduction trends and global action capabilities surpassing our expectations in terms of speed and intensity.

On June 27, the WEF also officially released the "Green Hydrogen in China: A Roadmap for Progress" during the summer's Davos Forum. The report was jointly published by the World Economic Forum, Accenture and the China Hydrogen Energy Alliance.

The report points out the challenges faced by China's green hydrogen industry and identifies six major obstacles and goals related to costs, infrastructure, market demand, industry standards and certification, technology, development evolution, and cooperation.

In order to overcome these challenges, the report lists 35 support measures and recommends implementing them in three stages from now to 2030. As a leading global provider of large-scale green hydrogen equipment and solutions, LONGi Hydrogen participated in the joint compilation of this report.

It is understood that China's annual carbon dioxide emissions surpass 10 billion tons, with the power system accounting for over 40%. "Deep decarbonization in the non-electric field requires the introduction of green hydrogen." said Li Zhenguo, Founder and President of LONGi. "We use optimized unit hydrogen production costs to create safe, reliable, and large-scale green hydrogen equipment and solutions, create value for global customers with technological progress, and actively promote the application and development of green hydrogen", he added.

At present, photovoltaic power generation has emerged as the world's most cost-effective clean energy source. The integrated advancement of photovoltaics and hydrogen production signifies the harmonious development of green electricity and green hydrogen. The two will promote each other and develop in synergy.

As photovoltaic costs continue to decline and the prices of hydrogen production system equipment experience rapid reductions, the feasibility of synergistic and complementary development between these two technologies has been firmly established.

In the future, LONGi will leverage its green power experience in the photovoltaic field to comprehensively enhance the global promotion and application of the "Green Power+ Green Hydrogen" solution, and work together with partners to build a "Greener World".

SOURCE LONGi
DENVER, July 3, 2023 /PRNewswire/ -- Lumen Technologies (NYSE: LUMN), will release its second quarter 2023 results on Aug. 1, 2023. The company will broadcast a live conference call on its Investor Relations website at https://ir.lumen.com at 5 p.m. ET.

Additional information regarding the second quarter 2023 results, including the company's earnings release, investor presentation, and related materials will be available on Lumen's Investor Relations website. If you are unable to join the call via the web, the call can be accessed live at +1 877-283-5145 (U.S. Domestic) or +1 312-281-1201 (International).

The call will be archived and available as an audio replay on Lumen's Investor Relations website starting at 8 p.m. ET on Aug. 1, until 8 p.m. ET on Oct. 30, 2023. The replay can be accessed by dialing +1 800-633-8284 (U.S. Domestic) or +1 402-977-9140 (International), reservation code 22027432.

About Lumen Technologies

Lumen connects the world. We are dedicated to furthering human progress through technology by connecting people, data, and applications  quickly, securely, and effortlessly. Everything we do at Lumen takes advantage of our network strength. From metro connectivity to long-haul data transport to our edge cloud, security, and managed service capabilities, we meet our customers' needs today and as they build for tomorrow. For news and insights visit news.lumen.com, LinkedIn: /lumentechnologies, Twitter: @lumentechco, Facebook: /lumentechnologies, Instagram: @lumentechnologies, and YouTube: /lumentechnologies.

SOURCE Lumen Technologies
June Marks the Ninth Straight Month of Year- Over-Year Gains

IRVINE, Calif., July 3, 2023 /PRNewswire/ -- Mazda North American Operations (MNAO) today reported total June sales of 29,786 vehicles, an increase of 96.9 percent compared to June 2022. Year-to-date sales totaled 183,783 vehicles; an increase of 28.7 percent compared to the same time last year. With 26 selling days in June, compared to the same the year prior, the company posted an increase of 96.9 percent on a Daily Selling Rate (DSR) basis.

CPO sales totaled 5,219 vehicles in June, an increase of 27 percent compared to June 2022.

Sales Highlights

2 nd best June sales since 1995 with 29,786 vehicles sold.

best June sales since 1995 with 29,786 vehicles sold. Best-ever June sales of CX-50 with 3,532 vehicles sold.

Best-ever June sales of CX-30 with 6,612 vehicles sold.

Mazda Motor de Mexico (MMdM) reported June sales of 5,539 vehicles, an increase of 123 percent compared to last year. Year-to-date sales totaled 34,525 vehicles; an increase of 109 percent compared to the same time last year.

Mazda North American Operations is headquartered in Irvine, California, and oversees the sales, marketing, parts, and customer service support of Mazda vehicles in the United States, Canada, Mexico, and Colombia through approximately 795 dealers. Operations in Canada are managed by Mazda Canada Inc. in Richmond Hill, Ontario; operations in Mexico are managed by Mazda Motor de Mexico in Mexico City; and operations in Colombia are managed by Mazda de Colombia in Bogota, Colombia. For more information on Mazda vehicles, including photography and B-roll, please visit the online Mazda media center at News.MazdaUSA.com.

Follow MNAO's social media channels through Twitter and Instagram at @MazdaUSA and Facebook at Facebook.com/MazdaUSA.

























Month-To-Date

Year-To-Date

























June June YOY % % MTD

June June YOY % % MTD



2023 2022 Change DSR

2023 2022 Change DSR























Mazda3 2,745 865 217.3 % 217.3 %

15,127 14,855 1.8 % 1.8 %

Mazda 3 Sdn 1,503 576 160.9 % 160.9 %

7682 6,046 27.1 % 27.1 %

Mazda 3 HB 1,242 289 329.8 % 329.8 %

7445 8,809 (15.5) % (15.5) %























Mazda6 0 0 - -

0 334 (100.0) % (100.0) %























MX-5 Miata 866 131 561.1 % 561.1 %

5,513 2,799 97.0 % 97.0 %

MX-5 471 64 635.9 % 635.9 %

3013 972 210.0 % 210.0 %

MXR 395 67 489.6 % 489.6 %

2500 1,827 36.8 % 36.8 %























CX-3 - 0 - -

- 0 - -

CX-30 6,612 4,733 39.7 % 39.7 %

38527 21,727 77.3 % 77.3 %

CX-5 12,861 6,654 93.3 % 93.3 %

80021 81,804 (2.2) % (2.2) %

CX-9 863 1,157 (25.4) % (25.4) %

17359 16,180 7.3 % 7.3 %

CX-50 3,532 1,566 125.5 % 125.5 %

21466 4,787 348.4 % 348.4 %

MX-30 16 23 (30.4) % (30.4) %

66 316 (79.1) % (79.1) %

C90 1,529 0 - -

4188 0 - -

C9P 762 0 - -

1516 0 - -

CARS 3,611 996 262.6 % 262.6 %

20,640 17,988 14.7 % 14.7 %

TRUCKS 26,175 14,133 85.2 % 85.2 %

163,143 124,814 30.7 % 30.7 %























TOTAL 29,786 15,129 96.9 % 96.9 %

183,783 142,802 28.7 % 28.7 %













































*Selling Days 26 26





152 152





























SOURCE Mazda North American Operations
DENVER, July 3, 2023 /PRNewswire/ -- M.D.C. Holdings, Inc. (NYSE: MDC), one of the nation's leading homebuilders, will release its 2023 second quarter earnings before the market opens on Thursday, July 27, 2023. MDC will host a teleconference the same day at 1:30 pm ET. The live teleconference will be available by calling 844-757-5733 and requesting to join the M.D.C. Holdings, Inc. conference call. A replay of the teleconference will be available through August 3, 2023 by calling 877-344-7529 and entering Access Code # 6387587.

A webcast of the teleconference will be available live at www.mdcholdings.com, and beginning two hours after the call, a replay of the webcast will be available on the website.

About MDC

M.D.C. Holdings, Inc. was founded in 1972. MDC's homebuilding subsidiaries, which operate under the name Richmond American Homes, have helped more than 230,000 homebuyers achieve the American Dream since 1977. One of the largest homebuilders in the nation, MDC is committed to quality and value that is reflected in each home its subsidiaries build. The Richmond American companies have operations in Alabama, Arizona, California, Colorado, Florida, Idaho, Maryland, Nevada, New Mexico, Oregon, Pennsylvania, Tennessee, Texas, Utah, Virginia and Washington. Mortgage lending, insurance and title services are offered by the following MDC subsidiaries, respectively: HomeAmerican Mortgage Corporation, American Home Insurance Agency, Inc. and American Home Title and Escrow Company. M.D.C. Holdings, Inc. stock is traded on the New York Stock Exchange under the symbol "MDC." For more information, visit www.mdcholdings.com.

SOURCE M.D.C. Holdings, Inc.
HONG KONG, July 3, 2023 /PRNewswire/ -- Measurable AI, the largest transactional e-receipt alternative data company for emerging markets, has released its Annual Report on the ride-hailing industry across Asia and Americas. The report provides a detailed overview of the changes in market share and consumer behavior over the past four years across 11 markets: United States, Mexico, Brazil, Chile, Argentina, Colombia, Singapore, Indonesia, India, Thailand, and Vietnam. It also tracks the performance of several major regional players: Grab, Goto, Uber, Bolt, Lyft, Didi Global, and Ola Cabs.

Measurable AI launches Annual Report on Ride-Hailing Across Asia and Americas (2019 - 2023)

Insights from the report are based on Measurable AI's proprietary e-receipt panel of over 2 million users. Key metrics such as market share changes, demand and user consumption trends, and incentives and user loyalty shifts can be garnered from the data. It also provides a clear image of how the ride-hailing industry has been impacted by the pandemic.

"Ride-hailing is one of the most fiercely competitive and rapidly changing sectors due to new technologies, entrants, and trends emerging everyday," says Charlie Sheng, co-founder of Measurable AI. "Particularly in emerging markets which are often more opaque, we are able to offer timely and actionable granular insights into this fast-growing digital sector where traditional data sources remain scarce."

Unlike credit card or web scraping data, e-receipt data offers more granularity with a longer history for deeper analysis and understanding of the sector. Specific amounts spent for each item, promotions used to incentivize, user loyalty and retention rates, different payment methods  all such metrics can be gleaned from e-receipt data.

"Knowing the amount of promotions ride-hailing companies spent throughout the changing seasons to win user adoption and the ability to calculate user overlap and retention rates has immensely helped us understand the sector", says an analyst from a leading asset management firm.

Previously, Measurable AI launched its flagship Asia Food Delivery Annual Report across 9 Asian markets, and has significantly broadened its coverage beyond food delivery and ride-hailing. The company now has ample coverage across e-commerce, gaming, fintech and travel sectors, with a key focus on Southeast Asia, Latin American, Middle East, Africa, and India.

ABOUT

Measurable AI is the leading transactional e-receipt provider for the digital economy across the emerging markets. Through aggregating and anonymizing e-receipt data, the company provides actionable and timely insights for data-driven investors and corporations around the world.

SOURCE Measurable AI
LAKE WORTH, Fla., July 3, 2023 /PRNewswire/ -- George Feldman McDonald, PLLC ("GFM") is very proud to announce that Michael Liskow has joined the firm as a Member  www.4-Justice.com.

Michael Liskow has extensive experience litigating complex class actions on behalf of victims of consumer fraud, data breach, antitrust, securities, housing, and wage and hour matters, among others, recovering hundreds of millions of dollars for his clients. In addition to over 15 years in private practice, Michael served as a clerk for the Honorable Steven H. Levinson of the Supreme Court of Hawai`i. Michael was also a Fulbright Teaching Assistant to the Slovak Republic. Michael is a member of the California and New York Bar Associations.

David J. George, GFM's Managing Member stated: "GFM is thrilled to add an attorney of Michael's tenacity, history of success and entrepreneurial spirit to GFM's litigation team." "Michael's formidable skill set will fit well with GFM's aggressive and relentless pursuit of justice for its clients."

Lori G. Feldman, Managing Member of GFM's New York Office, also noted: "GFM is thrilled to have Michael become a Member of the Firm. His thoughtful manner, hard-working nature, and tremendous litigation skills are sure to serve him well in his new role here at GFM."

In addition to its Class Action Practice Group, GFM has Victims' Rights, Personal Injury, Consumer Rights, EB-5 Litigation, and Commercial and Business Litigation Practice Groups. The firm has built a reputation as one of the most respected and hard-working plaintiffs' firms serving clients nationwide and in the states of Florida, New York, and Virginia. GFM's attorneys are barred in Florida, New York, Virginia, New Jersey, California and Washington.

SOURCE George Feldman McDonald, PLLC
DUBLIN, July 3, 2023 /PRNewswire/ -- The "Modern Employer Branding & The New Employee Experience Creating an EVP & culture that attracts, re-engages, and retains top talent" training has been added to ResearchAndMarkets.com's offering.

Join your peers for this 3-day conference to learn how to create and communicate winning employer branding strategies for better talent acquisition and retention, and to thrive in the future of work.

The world of work continues to evolve, and the priorities of talented candidates, and current employees, have shifted and evolved. How are your employer brand, talent, and communication strategies changing to adapt to these new expectations?

Benefits of the 3-Day All-Access Pass



Maximize your time by signing up for our Pre-Conference Workshops on Tuesday, August 22nd



The interactive, small group workshops, led by thought leaders and experts on employer branding will prepare you for the 2-day conference, provide you with practical answers to questions that keep you up at night, and inspire you to creatively tackle your most pressing employer brand challenges.



Wrap up Tuesday with an exclusive networking reception for workshop attendees and speakers hosted by ALI and a Dutch treat dinner out on the town!

Attend this conference to discover the latest ways you can bring your employer brand to life and move your talent brand strategies forward, including how to:

Build an employer brand framework to connect your culture and foster employee brand ambassadors

Engage and retain talent with HR Tech/CommTech

Align intent & actions in your Employer Brand messaging and your Employee Value Proposition (EVP)

Attract, retain, and engage the most talented candidates and employees-and the best additions to your culture

Develop content-creation strategies that inform and attract relevant talent

Use storytelling to communicate your culture and employee experience

Audit your existing employer brand to build your new strategy aligned with your organization's values

Improve communication and feedback loops throughout the recruiting and hiring process

Harness user-generated content and encourage employee-led initiatives

Build an authentic employer brand in a remote-first/hybrid world that showcases your organization's values and culture

Gain executive buy-in for your employer brand marketing strategies

Use your talent brand to connect and strengthen your employee experience, DEI initiatives and employee engagement

Discern which topics matter most to talent in these unprecedented times

Benefits of Attending This ALI Conference

Access to practical presentation with real examples and proven strategies from your peers at a variety of leading organizations

Networking list for attendees to continue the conversation after the conference

Interactive, hands-on breakout sessions allowing you to work with your employer branding, talent, HR & communications peers

Certificate of attendance for CEUs

Opportunity to meet with peers face-to-face while remaining safe

Guaranteed extensive, how-to instruction that you can use immediately

Opportunity to have your most pressing questions on the topic answered in real-time

This isn't a passive experience! You will be encouraged to engage throughout the entire event - through small group breakouts, networking breaks & more!



Leave with a thorough understanding of the latest best practices in employer branding and how they apply or can be applied in your work context.



Who Should Attend:



This Conference has been researched and designed for Vice Presidents, Directors, Managers, Specialists, Officers, Leaders, and Consultants involved in:

Employer Branding

Brand Manager, Activation & Community

Brand Activation Manager

Brand & Growth Strategy

Talent Branding

Recruitment Marketing

Talent Acquisition

Internal Communications

Employee Communications

Employee Engagement

Human Resources

Growth & Experience

Operations, Productivity & Wellness

Corporate Digital & Social Media

Senior Specialist People & Culture

Brand Activation Specialist

Global Director- Partnerships and Brand Activation

VP Brand Activation

Chief Brand Officer

Global Brand Strategy

Brand Strategy

Brand Visionary

Branding Consultant

Internal Brand & Engagement Strategy

Talent Attraction & Engagement Leader

Digital Strategy

Learning & Development

Digital Strategy

Learning & Development

Corporate Communications

Organizational Development

Internal Social Platforms

Global Communications

Social Enterprise

Knowledge Management

Senior Brand Marketing Manager

Marketing Strategy Professional

Employee engagement

Employee Experience

People Offiers

Employee Experience

For more information about this training visit https://www.researchandmarkets.com/r/fvscqd

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CHICAGO, July 3, 2023 /PRNewswire/ -- The molecular diagnostics industry is poised to undergo significant advancements in the near future, fueled by rapid technological innovation and increasing demand for personalized healthcare. With the advent of next-generation sequencing (NGS) technologies, the field of molecular diagnostics is witnessing a revolution in terms of accuracy, speed, and cost-effectiveness. These advancements enable the identification and characterization of disease-causing genetic mutations with unprecedented precision, facilitating early and accurate diagnosis of various diseases, including cancer, infectious diseases, and genetic disorders. Furthermore, the integration of artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning algorithms in data analysis and interpretation enhances the predictive capabilities of molecular diagnostics, enabling clinicians to make more informed decisions regarding patient treatment and prognosis. Additionally, the miniaturization of diagnostic devices and the emergence of point-of-care testing platforms allow for rapid and decentralized testing, improving access to molecular diagnostics in resource-limited settings. As a result, the molecular diagnostics industry is anticipated to transform healthcare delivery by providing personalized, precise, and timely diagnostic information, ultimately leading to improved patient outcomes and more efficient healthcare systems.

Molecular Diagnostics Market in terms of revenue was estimated to be worth $16.6 billion in 2023 and is poised to reach $28.6 billion by 2028, growing at a CAGR of 11.4% from 2023 to 2028 according to a new report by MarketsandMarkets. Due to the high prevalence of such infectious diseases, the demand for molecular diagnostic products and services is expected to increase in the coming years, which, in turn, will drive market growth. Also, globally, the prevalence of cancer has increased significantly over the last few years. The growing prevalence of cancer globally will increase the number of specimens tested, thus creating a demand for new diagnostic procedures, including molecular diagnostics.

Download an Illustrative overview: https://www.marketsandmarkets.com/pdfdownloadNew.asp?id=833

Browse in-depth TOC on "Molecular Diagnostics Market"

238 - Tables

49 - Figures

319 - Pages

Molecular Diagnostics Market Scope:

Report Coverage Details Market Revenue in 2023 $16.6 billion Estimated Value by 2028 $28.6 billion Growth Rate Poised to grow at a CAGR of 11.4% Market Size Available for 20212028 Forecast Period 20232028 Forecast Units Value (USD Billion) Report Coverage Revenue Forecast, Competitive Landscape, Growth Factors, and Trends Segments Covered Product & service, test type, sample type, technology, application, end user, and region Geographies Covered North America, Europe, Asia Pacific, Latin America, and Middle East & Africa Report Highlights Updated financial information / product portfolio of players Key Market Opportunities Growing significance of companion diagnostics in drug development process Key Market Drivers Rising technological advancements in molecular diagnostics in recent years

In 2022, the infectious disease diagnostics segment held the largest share of the molecular diagnostics market, by application segment

The molecular diagnostics market is segmented into infectious disease diagnostics, oncology testing, genetic testing, and other applications based on applications. The infectious disease diagnostics segment accounted for the largest share the global molecular diagnostics market in 2022. The large share of this segment can be attributed to the development of advanced assays for the diagnosis of different diseases & conditions, the increasing prevalence of infectious diseases, and rising awareness of the effective use of molecular diagnostic technologies/products to control the spread of infectious diseases. Infectious diseases pose a significant public health challenge, with outbreaks and epidemics occurring worldwide. The need for timely and accurate identification of infectious agents is paramount for implementing appropriate treatment strategies, infection control measures, and preventive interventions.

Diagnostic laboratories segment held the largest share of the molecular diagnostics market, by end user segment in 2022

The molecular diagnostics market is differentiated into diagnostic laboratories, hospitals & clinics, and other end users. In 2022, diagnostic laboratories dominated the molecular diagnostics market. Diagnostics laboratories play a crucial role in performing molecular diagnostic tests. These laboratories are equipped with specialized infrastructure, including advanced molecular testing platforms, equipment, and trained personnel. They are designed to handle complex molecular diagnostic procedures efficiently. The continuous advancements in molecular diagnostic technologies have expanded the capabilities of diagnostics laboratories. New platforms, such as next-generation sequencing (NGS), digital PCR, and microarrays, offer enhanced sensitivity, accuracy, and efficiency, enabling diagnostics laboratories to provide more comprehensive and precise testing services.

North America is the largest regional market for molecular diagnostics market

The molecular diagnostics market has been segmented into five major regions namely, North America, Europe, the Asia Pacific, Latin America, and the Middle East & Africa. In 2022, North America accounted for the largest share of the molecular diagnostics market. The large share of North America in this market can be attributed to the increasing prevalence of infectious diseases and cancer, rising healthcare spending, and the growing healthcare system that is highly developed in the US and Canada.

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Molecular Diagnostics Market Dynamics:

Drivers:

Increasing prevalence of infectious diseases and cancer globally Rising focus on R&D and growing funding in molecular diagnostics by healthcare-based companies Growing awareness regarding early disease diagnosis in developing countries Rising technological advancements in molecular diagnostics in recent years Increasing use of PoC diagnostic tests in homecare settings and hospitals

Restraints:

Unfavorable reimbursement scenario for diagnostic companies High cost of molecular diagnostic instruments

Opportunities:

Growing significance of companion diagnostics in drug development process Increasing growth opportunities for molecular diagnostics companies in emerging economies

Challenges:

Changing regulatory landscape for IVD and molecular diagnostics in US and European Union Operational barriers and shortage of skills across major markets Introduction of alternative technologies for disease detection and diagnosis

Key Market Players:

The major players operating in this market are F. Hoffmann-La Roche Ltd. (Switzerland), Hologic, Inc. (US), Thermo Fisher Scientific Inc. (US), Abbott Laboratories (US), bioMerieux (France), QIAGEN (Netherlands), PerkinElmer Inc. (US), Myriad Genetics, Inc. (US), Siemens Healthineers AG (Germany), Danaher (US), Illumina, Inc. (US), Becton, Dickinson and Company (US), Grifols, S.A. (Spain), QuidelOrtho Corporation (US), Agilent Technologies, Inc. (US), DiaSorin S.p.A. (Italy), Exact Sciences Corporation (US), Genetic Signatures (Australia), MDx Health (Belgium), Biocartis (Belgium), TBG Diagnostics Limited (Australia), HTG Molecular Diagnostics, Inc. (US), Vela Diagnostics (Singapore), Amoy Diagnostics Co., Ltd. (China), ELITechGroup (France), Molbio Diagnostics Pvt. Ltd. (India), Savyon Diagnostics (Israel), Abacus Diagnostica Oy (Finland), and geneOmbio Technologies Pvt. Ltd. (India)

Recent Developments:

In February 2023 , Thermo Fisher Scientific Inc. (US) acquired Binding Site Group (UK), a global leader in specialty diagnostics, to expand Thermo Fisher's existing specialty diagnostics portfolio with the addition of pioneering innovation in diagnostics and monitoring for multiple myeloma.

, Thermo Fisher Scientific Inc. (US) acquired Binding Site Group (UK), a global leader in specialty diagnostics, to expand existing specialty diagnostics portfolio with the addition of pioneering innovation in diagnostics and monitoring for multiple myeloma. In October 2022 , F. Hoffmann-La Roche Ltd. ( Switzerland ) received 510(k) clearance from the US FDA for the cobas SARS-CoV-2 Qualitative PCR test for use on the fully automated cobas 6800 and cobas 8800 Systems.

, F. Hoffmann-La Roche Ltd. ( ) received 510(k) clearance from the US FDA for the cobas SARS-CoV-2 Qualitative PCR test for use on the fully automated cobas 6800 and cobas 8800 Systems. In May 2022 , F. Hoffmann-La Roche Ltd. ( Switzerland ) partnered with Global Fund to support low- and middle-income countries in strengthening critical diagnostics infrastructure.

, F. Hoffmann-La Roche Ltd. ( ) partnered with Global Fund to support low- and middle-income countries in strengthening critical diagnostics infrastructure. In December 2021 , Hologic, Inc. (US) launched Panther Trax for high-volume molecular testing.

, Hologic, Inc. (US) launched Panther Trax for high-volume molecular testing. In March 2021 , Abbott Laboratories (US) received Emergency Use Authorization (EUA) from the FDA for a laboratory PCR assay, Alinity m Resp-4-Plex molecular assay, that detects and differentiates between SARS-COV-2, flu A, flu B, and RSV in one test.

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Molecular Diagnostics Market Advantages:

Accuracy and Precision: Molecular diagnostics provide highly accurate and precise results, enabling early detection, diagnosis, and monitoring of diseases. This accuracy allows for timely intervention and treatment planning, leading to improved patient outcomes and reduced healthcare costs.

Personalized Medicine: Molecular diagnostics offer a personalized approach to healthcare by analyzing an individual's genetic profile. This enables tailored treatment plans based on specific genetic markers and mutations, maximizing therapeutic efficacy while minimizing adverse effects.

Infectious Disease Management: Molecular diagnostics play a crucial role in infectious disease management by enabling rapid and sensitive detection of pathogens. This facilitates early identification, containment, and prevention of outbreaks, leading to improved public health outcomes.

Cancer Diagnosis and Monitoring: Molecular diagnostics are instrumental in cancer diagnosis and monitoring. They enable the identification of specific genetic mutations, guiding targeted therapies and improving patient outcomes.

Automation and User-Friendly Platforms: Advancements in technology have led to the development of user-friendly, automated platforms for molecular diagnostics. This allows for faster and easier testing, reducing the reliance on specialized laboratory personnel and increasing accessibility.

Integration with Technology: Molecular diagnostics can be integrated with other healthcare technologies such as artificial intelligence and big data analytics. This integration enhances data interpretation, predictive modeling, and facilitates the implementation of precision medicine approaches.

Potential for Advancing Healthcare Systems: The advantages of molecular diagnostics have the potential to significantly improve patient care, optimize treatment outcomes, and advance healthcare systems by providing more accurate and personalized diagnostic information.

Molecular Diagnostics Market  Report Highlights:

More Refined Presentation of the Competitive Landscape and Recent Market Developments: We have added market shares for top players. Recent developments are helpful to know the market trends and growth strategies adopted by players in the market. The report provides updated developments in product launches, collaboration, acquisitions, and partnerships.

Additional Information: The current edition of the report covers recession impact analysis. Also, a new segment, sample type, has been added.

More Refined Presentation of the Company Profiles Segment: Company profiles give a glimpse of the key players in the market with respect to business overviews, financials, product offerings, and recent developments. The new edition of the report provides an updated product portfolio of the companies profiled in the report. A total of 29 companies have been profiled. These companies have emerged as key market players in recent years due to the products they offer, and various strategic investments undertaken in the molecular diagnostics market space.

Newer and Improved Representation of Financial Information: The new edition of the report provides updated financial information in the context of the molecular diagnostics market until 2022 (depending on availability) for each listed company. This will help analyze the present status of the profiled companies in terms of their financial strength, profitability, key revenue-generating country/region, business segment focus in terms of the highest revenue-generating segments, and investments in research and development activities.

Recent Market Developments: Recent developments are important to understand the market trends and growth strategies adopted by players operating in the global molecular diagnostics market. The current edition of this report provides updated developments of profiled players from January 2020 to May 2023 , indicating a continuation of the previous version. Product launches and acquisitions are the principal growth strategies adopted by market players in this period.

Related Reports:

Point of Care Molecular Diagnostics Market - Global Forecasts to 2028

In Vitro Diagnostics Market - Global Forecasts to 2027

Infectious Disease Diagnostics Market - Global Forecasts to 2027

Immunoassay Market - Global Forecasts to 2027

Immunofluorescence Assay Market - Global Forecasts to 2027

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Go-to-Market Strategy Links Global Implementation Specialists with Supply Chain Services Provider

RALEIGH, N.C., July 3, 2023 /PRNewswire/ -- Open Sky Group, global specialists in supply chain implementation solutions, and delaPlex, a global technology and consulting services provider specializing in supply chain services, have expanded their partnership to provide best-of-breed warehouse management system (WMS) capabilities in India and S.E. Asia. delaPlex is headquartered in Atlanta, Georgia, with operations in the UK and multiple locations in India. Open Sky Group is headquartered in Raleigh, North Carolina, with operations in Australia and New Zealand.

"Together, we represent a depth of supply chain technical operating and consulting expertise unmatched in India by any one company," said Open Sky Group CEO, Chad Kramlich "Our continued partnership will pursue WMS implementation opportunities across the continent, leveraging delaPlex's vast network of local consulting resources and industry contacts."

Together, we represent a depth of supply chain technical operating and consulting expertise unmatched in India Tweet this

"India is a key global hub for supply chain operations," said Manish Sachdeva, delaPlex CEO. "By teaming up with Open Sky Group, we are now able to offer our customers Tier 1 WMS capabilities delivered to the highest standards of excellence provided by Open Sky Group and Blue Yonder solutions."

The partnership go-to-market strategy aims at serving supply chain organizations in need of digital solutions, especially in WMS upgrades and initial deployments. With complementary skills and talents, proven track records, and like-minded cultures focused on uncompromised transparency and superior outcomes, Open Sky Group and delaPlex look forward to years of mutual and evolving success.

To learn more about Open Sky Group or the delaPlex partnership, please visit OpenSkyGroup.com.

ABOUT DELAPLEX

delaPlex is a global technology services and business consulting company that helps organizations achieve exceptional results. With a focus on Supply Chain Management, delaPlex has built highly skilled practices and centers of excellence. Working alongside clients as one team, delaPlex is committed to bringing clients the talent, expertise, and latest in technology to reach their business goals with less overhead and risk.

ABOUT OPEN SKY GROUP

Open Sky Group, global specialists in warehouse management, labor management, and transportation management solutions, help clients lower costs and risks with its proprietary methodology and no-modifications approach to upgrades and implementations. As the largest, dedicated Blue Yonder WMS Implementation partner and one of the first accredited for WMS, Open Sky Group is committed to client success and strives every day to be the best consulting partner on the planet for supply chain solutions.

SOURCE The Open Sky Group, LLC
Home and Away spoilers follow for UK viewers.

Rose Delaney will face more heartbreak on Home and Away following her split with Mali Hudson.

The couple broke up last month in the wake of the attack on her brother Xander. Mali decided to end things after questioning Rose's reaction to the incident.

In scenes that air next week, Rose will be determined to remain on friendly terms with Mali, but Xander suspects that she will only yearn for something more if they stay in contact.

Channel 5

Related: Former Home and Away star Luke Jacobz marries fiancee Raychel Stuart

She stops by Manta Ray Boards to check on Mali, but the conversation doesn't go to plan as the pair are noticeably awkward around each other. Mali later tells Mac that he doesn't want to give Rose any hope of rekindling the relationship.

Rose is devastated when she learns that she hasn't been invited to Mali's surprise party, with the cop ditching a night out with Bree in order to crash the event. However, Mali had no idea about the party and Mac was the one who opted not to invite her.

Mali goes to Rose's to apologise for the incident, before revealing that he is stressed about visiting his family the following day. With the pair sharing a tender moment, is there friendship now back on the right track?...

Channel 5

Related: Home and Away spoilers - Marilyn death fears revealed

Kirsty Marillier, the actress who plays Rose, recently spoke exclusively with Digital Spy about her character's arc and explained Mali's reasons for the split.

"Mali's perspective is an interesting one because it's about where his value system sits. He really puts family at the forefront of everything that he does," she said.

"So does Rose, but they come at it from a different angle. That's where the friction is caused in the relationship because Mali can't understand her point of view and that upsets Rose."

Home and Away airs weekdays at 1.45pm on Channel 5 and 6pm on 5STAR. First-look screenings air at 6.30pm on 5STAR and the show also streams on My5.

Selected classic episodes are available via Prime Video in the UK.

Read more Home and Away spoilers on our dedicated homepage

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News Provided by Technology Magazine

Roopa Foulger of OSF HealthCare harnesses technological innovation to advance patient monitoring and telehealth, in partnership with Current Health

LONDON, July 3, 2023 /PRNewswire/ -- OSF HealthCare is an integrated health system that is owned by The Sisters of the Third Order of St Francis. Headquartered in Peoria, Illinoi, it has 15 hospitals  10 acute care and five critical access, as well as 2,084 licensed beds and 24,000 Mission Partners in over 150 locations.

"Fortune Magazine has recognised us as one of America's most innovative companies in the country for 2023  this is a huge testament to what the organisation has invested in innovation," says Roopa Foulger. "My role in OSF is Vice President of Digital Innovation Development. In that role, I focus on building innovative digital products for what we term as Horizon 2 and Horizon 3."

healthcare innovation

Foulger, who has a background in software and engineering, is passionate about utilising data for automation and enhancing user experiences. One innovation that OSF built during the pandemic was a texting-based communication platform, which experienced a 520% increase in adoption from patients compared to traditional means.

"We've also created a data hub, which enables all of our digital health operations with 25 different sources of data. My focus is anything around adjacent and breakthrough digital innovation that supports our patients or caregivers."

It was the desire to make an impact on people's lives that drove Foulger to the healthcare industry.

"I enjoy enabling patients to be more connected and helping to improve their health. Also, given my background, I'm excited about using data to help reduce costs and expand services for our patients, as well as for our healthcare system."

Foulger explains, "A recent study by Harvard and McKinsey showed that artificial intelligence can save healthcare industries at least US$360bn, annually. I'm really excited to be part of a team that is enabling and creating those models to support and benefit our patients as well as our providers."

Patient monitoring and telehealth

Current Health is one of the organisation's remote patient monitoring partners. Founded in 2015 and headquartered in Boston, Current Health (a Best Buy Health Company) offers an enterprise care-at-home platform to enable healthcare organisations to offer the best patient-centric care. The Current Health platform unites remote patient monitoring, telehealth capabilities and patient engagement tools.

"We have a chronic high-risk, advanced care-at-home service supported through a Current Health digital platform. We have more patients who receive pulse oximeters, blood pressure cuffs and glucose monitors, all of which are seamlessly integrated via Bluetooth connection. OSF makes it easy for some of these vitals to flow through the platform, where the data points get recorded in electronic patient health records and care plans at OSF, which, in turn, are monitored 24/7 by our clinicians."

As a result of real-time monitoring and data, OSF clinicians are able to intervene when they see something that is out of range. They can then connect to the patient via the devices that the Current Health team has provided.

According to Foulger, the core ingredient to a successful partnership is ensuring that you partner with those who understand key needs.

"As a healthcare system that's able to tailor a digital platform to both us and our patients, having Current Health listen to our voice and feedback is very important. Most important is making the technology work for both patients and clinicians because they're all caregivers; they don't want to be moving around within technology. I think the constant feedback that our staff have provided them in partnering with us is fine-tuning the solution. That has been one of the key ingredients in the success."

OSF HealthCare has been featured in the July issue of Technology Magazine

In this exclusive interview, Roopa Foulger, Vice President of Digital Innovation Development discussed harnessing technological innovation to advance patient monitoring and telehealth, in partnership with Current Health.

"It's not just technology, there's always a human at the other end that the patient can connect to"

Technology Magazine is the 'Digital Community' for the global technology industry. Technology Magazine covers the '7 Pillars of Digital Journey' - Digital Transformation, Cloud Computing, Cybersecurity, Digital Ecosystems, Strategic Alliances, Data & Data Analytics and AI - connecting the world's largest community of enterprise IT and technology executives. Technology Magazine focuses on technology news, key technology interviews, technology videos, the 'Technology Podcast' series along with an ever-expanding range of focused technology white papers and webinars.

BizClik is a UK-based media company with a global portfolio of leading industry, business and lifestyle digital communities.

BizClik's portfolio includes Technology & AI, Finance & Insurance, Manufacturing & Supply Chain, Energy & Mining, Construction, Healthcare, Mobile & Data Centres and EV. For further information, please visit https://www.bizclikmedia.com/

You can read the report in the latest issue of Technology Magazine by clicking HERE .

SOURCE Technology Magazine
WASHINGTON, Ga., July 3, 2023 /PRNewswire/ -- Our U.S. military relies on high-quality tent structures for many of their deployment operations. Now, just in time for Independence Day, industry leading Rekord Structures is bringing its large-scale, customizable and turn-key structures to the United States market. Their products are Made in America and specifically designed for fast and easy deployment as durable and comfortable safe harbors for those who protect the red, white and blue.

Rekord Structures' military shelter tents are useful as command centers, conference rooms, canteens, storage facilities, dining halls, and more. They also offer full-scale rapid deployment structures for disaster relief organizations. Their structures exceed the United States' military's rigid guidelines.

Rekord Structures' military tent structures offer exceptional durability through aluminum and steel framing with modular joints. These tents offer weather resistance in heavy snows and high winds, UV protection and water-resistance, as well as provide military personnel comfort and respite from the rigors of daily life in the military.

Rekord Structures' top-selling military tents include the ALU 32'x 200' and the RFS 100' x 165'. Rekord also offers several military tent solutions providing functions such as:

Living tents

Maintenance tents

Kitchen tents

Laundry rooms

Hangars

Rekord Structures has been operating in Europe and nine other countries for more than two decades and is now bringing its engineering and innovation expertise to the U.S. market.

"Our military-grade structures have served as trusted shelter solutions for militaries all over the world," said Martin Isaac, COO of Rekord Structures. "We are thrilled to offer our top-performing shelters, built on over 24 years of engineering and innovation, with U.S. military organizations. We offer over 30 products that are used in over 10 countries."

Any organization looking for top-performing, long-lasting military tents can look no further than Rekord Structures.

About Rekord Structures

Rekord Structures is an innovative architectural design, engineering consultancy, and semi-permanent structural manufacturing company that works with high-quality tensioned fabric membranes. Rekord combines its 20 years of construction experience with a focus on the rigorous needs of the U.S. military. Rekord offers organizations in various industries a turn-key partner to develop customized structures that meet national and international standards.

For media inquiries, contact Christina Madrid at Christie & Co, [email protected]

SOURCE Rekord Structures
200,000+ participants in the U.S., Haiti, Canada, and France will gather on July 9 to bring awareness to the mounting insecurity in Haiti

MIAMI, July 3, 2023 /PRNewswire/ -- Gregory Toussaint, CEO of Shekinah.fm and senior pastor of Tabernacle of Glory, announced Shekinah.fm's 'Relief for Haiti' to be held on Sunday, July 9. This event will bring together thousands in the U.S.including all 50 statesplus participants in Haiti, Canada and France, to bring awareness to the mounting insecurity in Haiti. The United Nations recently requested "urgent support" from the international community, labeling the insecurity in Haiti " comparable to a nation at war ."

Recently, Shekinah.fm launched a petition urging Congress to pass the Haiti Criminal Collusion Transparency Act ( Senate Bill S.396 , House Bill H.R.1684 ), which surpassed 110,000 signatures in a single week. 'Relief for Haiti' aims to build off of the petition's momentum and to bring together powerful voices for change.

"The goal of 'Relief for Haiti' is to mobilize compassionate individuals in the United States and overseas to advocate for legislation that can bring relief to the Haitian people, both in their homeland and abroad. At this moment, there are over 300 organizations, 450 pastors and their congregations, and 200,000 individuals that have pledged to join us. We urge the U.S. Congress to enact the Haiti Criminal Collusion Transparency Act of 2023, a powerful instrument designed to reveal and penalize those within Haiti's influential circles who clandestinely support nefarious gangs," Gregory Toussaint said.

Complementary, Toussaint is advocating for the Biden Administration to maintain its current humanitarian parole program for Haitians under The Department of Homeland Security's current processes, which allow nationals of Cuba, Haiti, Nicaragua, and Venezuela, and their immediate family members the ability to request to come to the United States in a safe and orderly manner.

Recently, its legality has been challenged in court by several states, and a trial scheduled for later this year will determine its viability.

Toussaint continued "In addition, we are advocating for the continuation of Biden's Humanitarian Parole Program, a vital conduit allowing Haitians to sponsor their kin and fellow countrymen in Haiti. This would allow a systematic and fair pathway for status regularization for Haitians who have arrived through the humanitarian parole program. By joining our efforts, you're not only contributing to the mitigation of unlawful emigration from Haiti but also fulfilling the duty of a good neighbor."

To join 'Relief for Haiti', visit Shekinah.fm .

Media interested in an interview with Bishop Gregory Toussaint, please reach out to Shelby Cook ( [email protected] ).

Gregory Toussaint, a Haitian-American CEO, entrepreneur, philanthropist, best-selling author, and orator, serves as the Senior Pastor of Tabernacle of Glory. This church, consisting of 47 branches, has 25,000 active on-site members and 50,000 online members. As the CEO and founder of Shekinah.fm, Gregory has amassed over 4 million social media followers and averages 4 million views per week. His radio programs extend their reach to over 5 million households in Haiti. His television program, "Bishop G Live," broadcasted across networks in the Americas, Europe, Africa, and the Middle East, reaches an impressive 500 million homes globally. Fluent in English, French, Spanish, and Haitian Creole, Gregory holds degrees in Business (BS), Law (LL.M), and Theology (Th.M., D.E.A). He has been married for 20 years and has two sons. He and his family reside in Miami, FL.

CONTACT: JDA Worldwide for Gregory Toussaint

[email protected] | 202-281-9973

SOURCE Gregory Toussaint
STOCKHOLM, July 3, 2023 /PRNewswire/ -- The Capital Markets Day on November 28, 2023 will be held in Tampere, Finland, at one of Sandvik Mining and Rock Solutions' largest sites. The event will commence with a mingle the night before, on November 27.

The agenda will include presentations by CEO, CFO, business area experts and management as well as a guided tour showcasing some of the latest technologies and innovations from all Sandvik's business areas.

The Capital Markets Day provides an opportunity for institutional investors, financial analysts and financial media to get an update on Sandvik's strategy and key achievements.

More information and link to registration will be communicated closer to the date.

Stockholm, July 3, 2023

Sandvik AB

For further information, contact Louise Tjeder, VP Investor relations, phone: +46 (0) 70782 6374 or Sofia Wiklund, Investor relations, phone: +46 (0) 70616 2023.

The following files are available for download:

https://mb.cision.com/Main/208/3797436/2163034.pdf Save the date - Sandvik Capital Markets Day November 28, 2023

SOURCE Sandvik
NINGBO, China, July 3, 2023 /PRNewswire/ -- Risen Energy Co., Ltd., a leading vertically integrated solar company, has signed a supply agreement with Athein Holding Pte Ltd, an independent power producer (IPP) platform company incorporated in Singapore. The agreement will see Risen Energy provide up to 1 GWp of cutting-edge Heterojunction with Intrinsic Thin layer (HJT) photovoltaic modules to Athein Holding Pte Ltd, a move that cements Risen Energy's position as a leader in HJT technology and renewable energy innovation.

Signing Ceremony

As an IPP platform company, Athein Holding Pte Ltd has a critical role in driving the development of renewable energy infrastructure in Southeast Asia and India. Through this venture, Risen Energy will contribute to Athein Holding Pte Ltd's mission to acquire, develop, build, and operate utility-scale and rooftop solar projects in these regions. This strategic agreement demonstrates Risen Energy's commitment to driving the development of clean energy solutions worldwide and aligns perfectly with the company's vision of creating a sustainable future for all.

HJT technology is a cutting-edge PV technology that combines high efficiency with low degradation, offering superior performance compared to traditional PV modules. As a global leader in HJT technology, Risen Energy is uniquely positioned to deliver high-quality and high-performance HJT PV modules that meet Athein Holding Pte Ltd's unique requirements and support their expansion plans across the APAC regions and the Indian market. Moreover, Risen Energy will provide additional services such as technical support, training, and after-sales services to ensure a seamless experience for Athein Holding Pte Ltd.

"Risen Energy HJT modules open a new way for us to enhance our ability to meet the growing global demand for clean energy solutions," said Milan Koev, the CEO of Athein. "This collaboration marks a significant milestone for Athein as we continue to solidify our position as a leader in the renewable energy industry."

"We are thrilled to enter into this strategic partnership with Athein, which marks a significant milestone in our efforts to drive the development of renewable energy technology worldwide," said B.V.Chaudary, the Chief Sales and Marketing Officer (CSMO) of Risen Energy. "Through this partnership, we are confident that our high-quality and reliable HJT PV modules will help Athein achieve their renewable energy goals and contribute to the growth of the renewable energy industry."

This supply agreement underscores Risen Energy's position as a leader in HJT technology and its commitment to delivering innovative and sustainable solutions to customers around the world. By partnering with forward-thinking companies like Athein Holding Pte Ltd, Risen Energy is well-positioned to accelerate the adoption of clean and sustainable energy solutions worldwide.

About Risen Energy

Risen Energy is a leading, global, Tier 1 manufacturer of high-performance solar photovoltaic products and provider of total business solutions for power generation. The Company, founded in 1986 and publicly listed in 2010, compels value generation for its global customers, gaining remarkable market share in over 60 countries including China, Europe, USA, India, Brazil, Columbia, Chile, Australia amongst others. Risen Energy is well provisioned to provide excellent services and long-term partnerships to its customers in the utility, commercial, and residential markets. For more information, please visit our website: www.risenenergy.com

About Athein

Athein is a Joint-Venture partnership between 5 companies in Southeast Asia and India. The platform company is committed to help its multinational manufacturing customers to achieve their net zero targets and plans to operate 1 GWp of renewable assets by 2026. For more information, please visit our website: www.athein.net

SOURCE Risen Energy Co., Ltd
NEW YORK, July 3, 2023 /PRNewswire/ --

WHY: Rosen Law Firm, a global investor rights law firm, continues its investigation of potential securities claims on behalf of shareholders of JinkoSolar Holding Co., Ltd (NYSE: JKS) resulting from allegations that JinkoSolar may have issued materially misleading business information to the investing public.

SO WHAT: If you purchased JinkoSolar securities you may be entitled to compensation without payment of any out of pocket fees or costs through a contingency fee arrangement. The Rosen Law Firm is preparing a class action seeking recovery of investor losses.

WHAT TO DO NEXT: To join the prospective class action, go to https://rosenlegal.com/submit-form/?case_id=16025 or call Phillip Kim, Esq. toll-free at 866-767-3653 or email [email protected] or [email protected] for information on the class action.

WHAT IS THIS ABOUT: On May 9, 2023, before trading hours, the Jacksonville Daily Record published an article entitled "Federal agents issue search warrant at JinkoSolar plant in Cecil Commerce Center: Homeland Security said it is part of an ongoing investigation; the factory, whose parent company is in China, opened in Jacksonville in 2018." The Jacksonville Daily Record reported that "[a]ccording to the Federal Bureau of Investigation, federal agents were assisting the Department of Homeland Security with the execution of a search warrant." Further, the article cited WJXT News4Jax, stating that JinkoSolar is one of several companies under investigation by the U.S. Commerce Department for circumventing trade rules by sending products to other countries before moving them to the U.S.

On this news, JinkoSolar's American depositary receipt ("ADR") price fell $3.91 per ADR, or 8%, to close at $43.47 per ADR on May 9, 2023, on unusually heavy trading volume.

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. 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.

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.
News Provided by Supply Chain Digital Magazine: When pharma firm Sanofi needed end-to-end supply chain visibility it turned to logistics specialist, Marken

LONDON, July 3, 2023 /PRNewswire/ -- Sanofi is a multinational pharmaceutical company headquartered in Paris.

Its focus is on therapeutic areas that include diabetes, oncology, immunology and inflammation, rare diseases, and vaccines for diseases including influenza polio and meningitis.

The company offers a wide range of prescription drugs, over-the-counter medications, and vaccines to improve health outcomes for patients worldwide.

Marken  the clinical subsidiary of UPS Healthcare  is a global logistics and supply chain solutions provider. It specialises in the transportation and distribution of clinical trial materials, biological samples, cell and gene therapies and other healthcare-related products.

It offers a range of customised solutions to the life-sciences industry, including clinical to commercial logistics, direct-to-patient services, home healthcare, and storage and distribution of temperature-sensitive products.

Marken has been featured in the July issue of Supply Chain Digital Magazine .

In this exclusive interview, Ariette van Strien discussed the strategic direction of the business.

"Sanofi has come to rely on our innovative solutions to address its diverse needs"

Ariette van Strien, President, Marken

Supply Chain Digital is the No.1 Magazine, Website, Newsletter & Webinar service covering Supply Chain, Procurement, Strategic Sourcing, Logistics, Technology & Sustainability - Supply Chain Digital connects the world's largest supply chain & logistics brands with supply chain news, articles, keynote interviews, company reports, white papers, videos and webinars as well as the globally expanding Procurement & Supply Chain LIVE conference & exhibition - London, Dubai & New York.

BizClik is a UK-based media company with a global portfolio of leading industry, business and lifestyle digital communities.

BizClik's portfolio includes Technology & AI, Finance & Insurance, Manufacturing & Supply Chain, Energy & Mining, Construction, Healthcare, Mobile & Data Centres and EV. For further information, please visit https://www.bizclikmedia.com/

You can read the report in the latest issue of Supply Chain Digital Magazine by clicking HERE .

SOURCE Supply Chain Digital Magazine
Open enrollment, public charter schools, private school choice programs, homeschooling, and online learning more accessible starting in 2024

HELENA, Mont., July 3, 2023 /PRNewswire/ -- Montana families will soon have access to expanded educational options in every type of learning environment, with most changes taking effect for the next school year (20242025). Changes parents will want to begin exploring include standardized open enrollment, the advent of public charter schools, expanded private school choice programs, improved online learning opportunities, and part-time public school enrollment options for homeschoolers.

As parents unpack what these changes mean for them, they can rely on a comprehensive guide from the National School Choice Awareness Foundation  a nonprofit that helps parents navigate K-12 education options in traditional public, public charter, public magnet, private, online, and home education environments  highlighting practical considerations for families and answering questions they might have right now.

With these changes, Montana has become the 46th state in the country to create a pathway for public charter schools to operate, offering additional educational options to families. At the same time, private school options are expanding in three significant ways. The tax credit scholarship program's cap has more than doubled, allowing for increased donations and more scholarships for low- and middle-income students. Additionally, a new program launching in 2024, the Students with Special Needs Opportunity Act, will provide education savings accounts of approximately $6,800 for families of children with disabilities to use for private school tuition, therapies, and other approved learning expenses.

The guide answers other common questions about what's changing, including:

How will this make open enrollment in traditional public schools easier?

What new, free, online learning options are available for students?

What part-time enrollment opportunities are available to homeschoolers?

"Montana cleared the field this year when it comes to robust school choice expansions in every type of school, truly impacting every family in the state," said Shelby Doyle, vice president of public awareness at the National School Choice Awareness Foundation. "There's no one-size-fits-all type of school for each family, which is why a balanced approach such as standardizing open enrollment, introducing charter schools, enhancing private school options, improving online learning, and allowing part-time enrollment for homeschoolers, puts families first and ensures the brightest future for Montana's K-12 students."

More information and resources for journalists can be found at schoolchoiceweek.com/multimedia . More information for families can be found at https://schoolchoiceweek.com/montana-makes-landmark-education-changes/ or https://schoolchoiceweek.com/states/montana/ .

The National School Choice Awareness Foundation (NSCAF) raises broad and positive awareness of school choice through two charitable programs: organizing National School Choice Week each January and the research, development, and promotion of comprehensive and unbiased school navigation resources for parents via School Choice Week and Conoce tus Opciones Escolares. NSCAF does not advocate for or oppose legislation at any level of government and is steadfastly nonpartisan and nonpolitical.

SOURCE National School Choice Week
NEW YORK, July 3, 2023 /PRNewswire/ -- Pomerantz LLP announces that a class action lawsuit has been filed against SentinelOne, Inc. ("SentinelOne" or the "Company") (NYSE: S), and certain officers. The class action, filed in the United States District Court for the Northern District of California, and docketed under 23-cv-02982, is on behalf of a class consisting of all persons and entities other than Defendants that purchased or otherwise acquired SentinelOne securities between June 1, 2022 and June 1, 2023, inclusive (the "Class Period"). Plaintiff pursues claims against the Defendants under the Securities Exchange Act of 1934 ("Exchange Act").

If you are a shareholder who purchased or otherwise acquired SentinelOne securities during the Class Period, you have until August 7, 2023 to ask the Court to appoint you as Lead Plaintiff for the class. A copy of the Complaint can be obtained at www.pomerantzlaw.com. To discuss this action, contact Robert S. Willoughby at [email protected] or 888.476.6529 (or 888.4-POMLAW), toll-free, Ext. 7980. Those who inquire by e-mail are encouraged to include their mailing address, telephone number, and the number of shares purchased.

[Click here for information about joining the class action]

SentinelOne is a cybersecurity company that claims to have pioneered the world's first AI-powered Extended Detection and Response platform to make cybersecurity defense truly autonomous. The Company claims its Singularity Platform instantly defends against cyberattacks, performing at a faster speed, greater scale, and higher accuracy than otherwise possible from humans. The Company's fiscal year 2023 ended January 31, 2023.

SentinelOne claims that its "Annualized Recurring Revenue" or "ARR" is a key business metric. The Company defines ARR as "the annualized revenue run rate of our subscription and capacity contracts at the end of a reporting period, assuming contracts are renewed on their existing terms for customers that are under contracts with us."

The Complaint alleges that, throughout the Class Period, Defendants made materially false and/or misleading statements, as well as failed to disclose material adverse facts about the Company's business, operations, and prospects. Specifically, Defendants failed to disclose to investors: (i) that the Company lacked effective internal controls over accounting and financial reporting; (ii) that, as a result, the Company's ARR was overstated; (iii) that, as a result, the Company's guidance was overstated; and (iv) that, as a result of the foregoing, Defendant's positive statements about the Company's business, operations, and prospects were materially misleading and/or lacked a reasonable basis.

On June 1, 2023, after the market closed, SentinelOne published a press release titled "SentinelOne Announces First Quarter Fiscal Year 2024 Financial Results." Therein, the Company disclosed that "[a]s a result of a change in methodology and correction of historical inaccuracies, which we further describe in our letter to shareholders, we made a one-time adjustment to ARR of $27.0 million or approximately 5% of total ARR." The Company also revised its fiscal year 2024 revenue guidance downward to a range of $590 million to $600 million from a range of $631 million to $640 million. In a shareholder letter published the same day, SentinelOne further explained that "we . . . discovered historical upsell and renewal recording inaccuracies relating to ARR on certain subscription and consumption contracts, which are now corrected" and that "[w]e are applying a comparable estimated adjustment to the remaining quarters in fiscal year 23, which we believe is a reasonable approximation of the impact in those periods."

On this news, SentinelOne's stock price fell $7.28 per share, or more than 35%, to close at $13.44 per share on June 2, 2023.

Pomerantz LLP, with offices in New York, Chicago, Los Angeles, London, Paris, and Tel Aviv, is acknowledged as one of the premier firms in the areas of corporate, securities, and antitrust class litigation. Founded by the late Abraham L. Pomerantz, known as the dean of the class action bar, Pomerantz pioneered the field of securities class actions. Today, more than 85 years later, Pomerantz continues in the tradition he established, fighting for the rights of the victims of securities fraud, breaches of fiduciary duty, and corporate misconduct. The Firm has recovered billions of dollars in damages awards on behalf of class members. See www.pomlaw.com.

CONTACT:

Robert S. Willoughby

Pomerantz LLP

[email protected]

888-476-6529 ext. 7980

SOURCE Pomerantz LLP
NEW YORK, July 3, 2023 /PRNewswire/ -- Pomerantz LLP is investigating claims on behalf of investors of adidas AG ("adidas" or the "Company") (OTCMKT: ADDYY). Such investors are advised to contact Robert S. Willoughby at [email protected] or 888-476-6529, ext. 7980.

The investigation concerns whether adidas and certain of its officers and/or directors have engaged in securities fraud or other unlawful business practices.

[Click here for information about joining the class action]

In the fall of 2022, musical artist Kanye West, Adidas's design partner for the Company's popular Yeezy shoe, made a series of overtly anti-Semitic and racially offensive remarks in public. On October 25, 2022, following mounting public pressure, Adidas canceled its partnership with West.

Then, on November 27, 2022, The Wall Street Journal published an article entitled "Adidas Top Executives Discussed Risks of Staff's 'Direct Exposure' to Kanye West Years Ago." The article revealed that Adidas's leadership, including Chief Executive Officer Kasper Rrsted, had discussed the risk of the Company continuing a relationship with West as early 2018, citing the artist's often erratic and controversial behavior.

On this news, Adidas's American depositary receipt (ADDYY) ("ADRs") fell $2.20 per ADR, or 3.13%, to close at $62.34 per ADR on November 28, 2022.

Then, on February 9, 2023, Adidas warned that the Company could shift from a profit to a loss if it failed to sell its inventory of Yeezy shoes following the termination of its partnership with West. Specifically, the Company stated that it expected sales to fall at a high single-digit rate in currency-neutral terms because of the "significant adverse impact of not selling the existing stock" of Yeezy products. Failure to sell the stock of Yeezy's (valued at 1.2 billion euros) would accordingly lower Company revenue by 1.2 billion euros (or about $1.29 billion), and operating profit by 500 million euros."

On this news, Adidas's ADR price fell $7.4 per ADR, or 8.96%, to close at $75.16 per ADR on February 9, 2023.

Finally, on February 21, 2023, S&P Global announced that it was downgrading Adidas to "'A-/A-2' From 'A-1' On Deteriorating Credit Metrics; Outlook Negative." S&P largely attributed the downgraded to the financial impact of the termination of Adidas's partnership with West.

On this news, Adidas's ADR price fell $3.56 per ADR, or 4.62%, to close at $73.59 per ADR on February 21, 2023.

Pomerantz LLP, with offices in New York, Chicago, Los Angeles, London, Paris, and Tel Aviv, is acknowledged as one of the premier firms in the areas of corporate, securities, and antitrust class litigation. Founded by the late Abraham L. Pomerantz, known as the dean of the class action bar, Pomerantz pioneered the field of securities class actions. Today, more than 85 years later, Pomerantz continues in the tradition he established, fighting for the rights of the victims of securities fraud, breaches of fiduciary duty, and corporate misconduct. The Firm has recovered billions of dollars in damages awards on behalf of class members. See www.pomlaw.com.

CONTACT:

Robert S. Willoughby

Pomerantz LLP

[email protected]

888-476-6529 ext. 7980

SOURCE Pomerantz LLP
Some of the best whiskey of the past few years has been coming out of Cascade Hollow Distilling Co., the home of Tennessee whiskey brand George Dickel. And now you can find the distillerys bourbon in a new canned cocktail made in collaboration with Social Hour, a Bourbon Smash made with eight-year-old whiskey that is perfect for summertime drinking.

The RTD category is still very popular among consumers, but the sheer amount of drinks available means something new has to stand out. In this case, the whiskey used in the Bourbon Smash is not the standard Dickel Tennessee whiskey, but rather the bourbon expression released by GM and distiller Nicole Austin and the Dickel team in 2021. This excellent eight-year-old bourbon is essentially the same as the other whiskey produced at the distillery, and undergoes the Lincoln County process of filtering new-make spirit through charcoal before barreling that defines the Tennessee whiskey category. But Austin just felt that its flavor profile veered closer to that of bourbon, so decided to call it that (Tennessee whiskey does meet all the legal requirements of bourbon).

More from Robb Report

This is the second collaboration between Dickel and Social Hour, the first being the Harvest Whiskey Sour made with 13-year-old whiskey that came out in 2021 (clearly, the distillery is not precious about its well-aged whiskey). Social Hour is a beverage company founded by two hospitality industry veterans, Julie Reiner and Tom Macy, with drinks like a rye whiskey mule and navy strength gin and tonic. The Bourbon Smash is described as a combination of a Mint Julep and a Whiskey Sour, with notes of tart lemon and mint. The recommended serve is over ice with a mint, berry, or lemon garnish (there are three servings per can, so you can share with friends). Our first release was a fall-flavored spin on the Whiskey Sour, and with the Bourbon Smash, were putting a new, summer twist on the classic cocktail, Austin said in a statement. To make that perfect summer cocktail, you need an approachable and balanced bourbon thats able to work well in a cocktailand thats Dickel Bourbon.

The Social Hour Bourbon Smash made with Dickel Bourbon is available now with an SRP of $28 for a four-pack. You can find it at retail stores in New York City, and online from the Social Hour website if youre outside the tri-state area.

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NEW YORK, July 3, 2023 /PRNewswire/ -- Pomerantz LLP is investigating claims on behalf of investors of Siemens Energy AG ("Siemens" or the "Company") (OTCMKTS: SMNEY). Such investors are advised to contact Robert S. Willoughby at [email protected] or 888-476-6529, ext. 7980.

The investigation concerns whether Siemens and certain of its officers and/or directors have engaged in securities fraud or other unlawful business practices.

[Click here for information about joining the class action]

On June 22, 2023, after the market closed, Siemens disclosed that it had found a "substantial increase in failure rates of wind turbine components" and had initiated an "extended technical review," which would cost approximately 1 billion euros. The Company also withdrew its profit guidance for fiscal year 2023.

On this news, Siemen's American Depositary Receipt ("ADR") price fell $5.87 per ADR, or 27%, to close at $15.88 per ADR on June 23, 2023.

Pomerantz LLP, with offices in New York, Chicago, Los Angeles, London, Paris, and Tel Aviv, is acknowledged as one of the premier firms in the areas of corporate, securities, and antitrust class litigation. Founded by the late Abraham L. Pomerantz, known as the dean of the class action bar, Pomerantz pioneered the field of securities class actions. Today, more than 85 years later, Pomerantz continues in the tradition he established, fighting for the rights of the victims of securities fraud, breaches of fiduciary duty, and corporate misconduct. The Firm has recovered numerous multimillion-dollar damages awards on behalf of class members. See www.pomlaw.com.

CONTACT:

Robert S. Willoughby

Pomerantz LLP

[email protected]

888-476-6529 ext. 7980

SOURCE Pomerantz LLP
NEW YORK, July 3, 2023 /PRNewswire/ -- Pomerantz LLP is investigating claims on behalf of investors of Xponential Fitness, Inc. ("Xponential" or the "Company") (NYSE: XPOF). Such investors are advised to contact Robert S. Willoughby at [email protected] or 888-476-6529, ext. 7980.

The investigation concerns whether Xponential and certain of its officers and/or directors have engaged in securities fraud or other unlawful business practices.

[Click here for information about joining the class action]

On June 26, 2023, Fuzzy Panda Research ("FPR") published a report on Xponential entitled "Abusive Franchisor That Is A House Of Cards." Citing interviews with franchisees and disclosure documents, the FPR report alleged that Xpontential's Founder and Chief Executive Officer "Anthony Geisler, has a long history of misleading investors and business partners" and that Xponential "is hiding the fact that many of [the Company's] brands and franchisees are struggling."

On this news, Xponential's stock price fell $9.38 per share, or 37.36%, to close at $15.73 per share on June 27, 2023.

Pomerantz LLP, with offices in New York, Chicago, Los Angeles, London, Paris, and Tel Aviv, is acknowledged as one of the premier firms in the areas of corporate, securities, and antitrust class litigation. Founded by the late Abraham L. Pomerantz, known as the dean of the class action bar, Pomerantz pioneered the field of securities class actions. Today, more than 85 years later, Pomerantz continues in the tradition he established, fighting for the rights of the victims of securities fraud, breaches of fiduciary duty, and corporate misconduct. The Firm has recovered billions of dollars in damages awards on behalf of class members. See www.pomlaw.com.

CONTACT:

Robert S. Willoughby

Pomerantz LLP

[email protected]

888-476-6529 ext. 7980

SOURCE Pomerantz LLP
STOCKHOLM, July 3, 2023 /PRNewswire/ -- Skanska, as part of the Skanska Costain STRABAG joint venture, has been awarded an additional GBP 103M, about SEK 1.3 billion, under the existing contract with HS2 Ltd towards works on phase one of the new high-speed railway in the UK. This will be included in the order bookings for Europe in the second quarter of 2023.

The award relates to planned and agreed changes to the scope of works under the contract.

The total contract, now valued at approximately GBP 1.3 billion, about SEK 16.6 billion to Skanska, involves the design and construction of major tunnels in the southern section of the overall project.

Since being given notice to proceed by HS2 Ltd in April 2020, significant progress has been made. Two tunnel boring machines (TBMs) started operations in late 2022 from West Ruislip Portal towards Green Park Way. They will construct 8 kilometers (5 miles) of the 13.5-kilometer (8.4 mile) twin bored Northolt Tunnel. Two further TBMs have been received in the UK and will be launched in the next year from Victoria Road Crossover Box. A third TBM is currently in operation from Atlas Road, constructing a logistics tunnel between Old Oak Common station site and the Atlas Road site. The preparation works for the launch of the two final TBMs from the Old Oak Common Box towards Euston will begin in 2024.

For further information please contact:

Andreas Joons, Press Officer, Skanska AB, tel +46 (0)10 449 04 94

Direct line for media, tel +46 (0)10 448 88 99

This and previous releases can also be found at www.skanska.com.

The following files are available for download:

https://mb.cision.com/Main/95/3798297/2166110.pdf 20230703 UK HS2 award

SOURCE Skanska
Susan M. Love, MD, MBA

Born February 9, 1948  Died July 2, 2023

LOS ANGELES, July 3, 2023 /PRNewswire/ -- Susan M. Love, MD, MBA, who led Dr. Susan Love Foundation for Breast Cancer Research since 1995, steering the Foundation through its innovative and life-changing research and advocacy programs, has died. She was 75.

Dr. Love passed away with recurrent leukemia on July 2, 2023 in Los Angeles, California.

Dr. Susan Love Dr. Susan Love

A breast surgeon, Dr. Love is best known for pioneering work fueled by her criticism of the medical establishment's paternalistic treatment of women. She was an early advocate of cancer surgery that conserves as much breast tissue as possible. She also was among the first to sound the alarm on the risks of routine hormone replacement therapy (HRT) for menopausal women. In her personal life, she fought to expand the rights of same-sex couples as parents. In 1993, Dr. Love and Dr. Helen Cooksey made history by getting approval for the first joint adoption by a gay couple from the Supreme Court of Massachusetts, a state that did not recognize same-sex marriage at the time. This monumental case paved the way for Massachusetts to become the first state to legalize same-sex marriage a decade later.

After leaving the Faulkner Hospital in Boston, Dr. Susan Love was recruited to set up what later became the Revlon UCLA Breast Center in 1992. A founder of the breast cancer advocacy movement in the early 1990's, she helped organize the National Breast Cancer Coalition (NBCC). She later served on the boards of the NBCC and the Young Survival Coalition. In 1996, she retired from the active practice of surgery to dedicate her time to the urgent pursuit of finding the cause of breast cancer to achieve her goal of ending breast cancer in our lifetime.

In 1998, Love earned a business degree from the Executive MBA program at UCLA's Anderson School. She was appointed by President Clinton to the National Cancer Advisory Board, a position she held from 1998-2004.

Dr. Susan Love's Breast Book , first published in 1990, and to be released in its updated 7th edition this year is considered the global "bible" for people with breast cancer by The New York Times. The book has been translated into German, Dutch, Chinese, Japanese, Spanish, and Hebrew.

As Founder and Chief Visionary Officer of the Dr. Susan Love Foundation for Breast Cancer Research, Dr. Love built and oversaw an active research program centered on the cause and prevention of breast cancer. Last month, the Journal Radiology published results of a Dr. Susan Love Foundation NIH-sponsored study proving the efficacy of handheld ultrasound devices with AI to bring mammography to women in remote and under-resourced communities and countries.

The Love Research Army, which she launched in 2008, creatively accelerated cancer research by partnering volunteers and scientists for clinical trials and cancer research. The Army now has more than 390,000 supporters worldwide. For 13 years she convened the International Symposium of the Human Breast, a meeting she established to bring together world-class researchers, clinicians, and advocates from multiple disciplines in an intimate think-tank environment to stimulate ideas, collaboration, and seed-funding opportunities for breast cancer research.

Susan Love was born in New Jersey and spent her adolescence first in Puerto Rico and then in Mexico, where she founded a science fair, earned awards for research projects, and was named valedictorian. After her second year of pre-med studies at Notre Dame of Maryland, she joined the School Sisters of Notre Dame who sent her to Fordham University in New York to continue her studies. In the 1970s, medical schools were still admitting few women, perhaps 10% of the class, but Love, who was elected to Alpha Omega Alpha and graduated cum laude, was among the five women who were the top graduates in the 1974 class of the State University of New York's Downstate Medical School. Dr. Love completed her surgical training at Boston's Beth Israel Hospital, and in 1988 was recruited to found the Faulkner Breast Center at Faulkner Hospital, with comprehensive care that allowed patients to see teams composed of radiation therapists, oncologists and surgeons. She was recruited by the University of California, Los Angeles, to found what later became the Revlon UCLA Breast Center, one of the first such comprehensive centers in Los Angeles.

Foundation CEO Christopher Clinton Conway said he and the Foundation, as well as millions worldwide, are "indebted to Dr. Love's vision, dedication, and commitment to ending breast cancer for all."

"The light that Susan shared with the world has touched so many, and the world will mourn her loss. As an advocate, a researcher, a doctor, a surgeon, a friend, an author, and so much more, her legacy will live on forever in the love she showed the world."

Dr. Love's fierce intellect, unrelenting tenacity, and laser-like focus inspired people globally.

Love is survived by her wife, Helen Cooksey, MD, and their daughter Katie Patton-LoveCooksey and her wife, Diana Patton-LoveCooksey. Service plans are pending.

To make a donation to the work that Susan dedicated her work to, please donate to the Dr. Susan Love Memorial Fund at https://give.classy.org/drsusanlovememorial.

For Media Inquiries:

Allie Cormier

Chief Marketing Officer

[email protected]

(310) 828-0060 ext. 157

SOURCE Dr. Susan Love Research Foundation
DHAKA, Bangladesh, July 3, 2023 /PRNewswire/ -- SWAP, a leading technology company specializing in ecommerce and re-commerce marketplace, is pleased to announce its partnership with Netcore Cloud, a leading provider of cloud-based customer engagement and product experience solutions. The collaboration will enable SWAP to enhance its customer engagement and experience while improving its product experience.

The partnership is expected to improve SWAP's customer engagement and product experience capabilities significantly. Netcore Cloud's cutting-edge solutions will enable SWAP to improve customer communication, personalize interactions, and deliver a more engaging experience. In addition, Netcore Cloud's product experience solutions will help SWAP enhance the usability and functionality of its products, making them more attractive to customers.

Parvez Hossain, CEO of SWAP, commented on the partnership, said, "We are delighted to partner with Netcore Cloud to enhance our customer engagement and product experience capabilities. At SWAP, we are committed to providing our customers with the best possible experience, and this partnership will enable us to achieve that goal. With Netcore Cloud's innovative solutions, we are confident that we will be able to engage with our customers more effectively and deliver products that meet their needs."

Abithab Bhaskar, CEO- International Business at Netcore Cloud, said, "We are excited to partner with SWAP to enhance its customer engagement and product experience capabilities. As a leading provider of AI-powered customer engagement and product experience solutions, we are confident that our solutions will enable SWAP to take its customer experience to the next level. We look forward to working closely with SWAP to help it achieve its business goals."

About SWAP

SWAP is the combination of the first ever ecommerce and re-commerce marketplace in Bangladesh where customers can purchase anything by personalized orders and sell their unneeded/surplus products such as smartphones, laptops, appliances, vehicles, etc., and exchange. SWAP is the only digital platform in the country that lets customers experience secure, hassle-free, and haggle-free buying, selling, or exchanging in the shortest possible time with special privileges.

About Netcore Cloud: https://netcorecloud.com/about-us/

For more information, visit https://netcorecloud.com/

Media Contact:

Simone Pious, PR Manager

M: +91 9930354205; [email protected] / [email protected]

Logo: https://mma.prnewswire.com/media/2002062/3884930/Netcore_Logo.jpg

SOURCE Netcore Cloud
Palmdale Amazon Workers Began ULP Strike on June 24

SAN BERNARDINO, Calif., July 2, 2023 /PRNewswire/ -- Striking Amazon delivery drivers and dispatchers from Palmdale, Calif., extended their picket line to an Amazon warehouse in San Bernardino, Calif. (ONT5) today, to demand the e-commerce giant stop its unfair labor practices. The growing strike will continue until Amazon reinstates the unlawfully terminated employees, recognizes the Teamsters, respects the contract negotiated by the workers, and bargains with the Teamsters Union to address low pay and dangerous working conditions.

"I work for one of the richest companies in the world, but the pay is so low that I have to work two other jobs as well to provide for my kids," said Jovana Figueroa, a striking Amazon driver. "We are prepared to strike as long as we have to and take our picket lines to other Amazon warehouses to stop Amazon's unfair labor practices. We are fighting for good jobs for all Amazon workers and we are going to win."

Amazon drivers and dispatchers began their unfair labor practice strike at the Palmdale delivery station on June 24. The San Bernardino facility is the fourth Amazon warehouse that the striking drivers have picketed during their week-long strike. They extended their picket line to Amazon sortation centers in Mira Loma and Newark, Calif. last week.

"These Amazon workers organized a union for fair pay and safe jobs, but Amazon illegally refused to recognize their union or bargain with them," said Victor Mineros, Secretary-Treasurer of Teamsters Local 396. "The support from the community and other workers in this industry has been tremendous. We are going to hold this corporate criminal accountable for how it treats the workers who wear its uniforms and deliver its packages."

The 84 workers in Palmdale joined Teamsters Local 396 in Los Angeles and bargained a contract with Amazon's Delivery Service Partner (DSP), Battle-Tested Strategies (BTS), in April. Despite the absolute control it wields over BTS and workers' terms and conditions of employment, Amazon has refused to recognize and honor the union contract. Instead, Amazon has engaged in dozens of unfair labor practices in violation of federal labor law, including terminating the entire unit of newly organized workers.

"Amazon has brought nothing but pollution and low-wage jobs to our community," said Michael Jones, a community member organizing with San Bernardino Airport Communities, who joined workers on the picket line. "Workers and community members are rejecting Amazon's exploitative business model. We demand clean air and good jobs."

Amazon drivers in Palmdale organized with the Teamsters to protect their safety in extreme temperatures, which regularly exceed 100 degrees Fahrenheit during Palmdale summers. Their Teamster contract guarantees the rights of workers to drive safe equipment and refuse unsafe deliveries. Making the contract's protections a reality will require an overhaul of Amazon's exploitative labor practices.

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:

On site: Mario Vasquez, (909) 501-9232

Kara Deniz, (202) 497-6610

SOURCE International Brotherhood of Teamsters
GUIYANG, China, July 3, 2023 /PRNewswire/ -- A news report by Huanqiu.com

Wujiang River Scenery of Huawu Village, Xinren Miao Township, Qianxi City, Guizhou Province

Located in the southwest of China, Guizhou is reputed as the country's "province of mountain park" as the number of world natural heritages here ranks first nationwide. However, such an inviting ecological destination was once a "barren land" with the most severe stone desertification. Over recent years, Guizhou has been adhering to the two bottom lines of development and ecology and striving to reap new achievements in ecological construction. It has overcome many difficulties while writing vivid footnotes one after another for the harmonious coexistence between man and nature.

Lucid waters and green mountains add to the beautiful landscape

In Guizhou, the area of grain plots returned to forestry remains leading nationwide, treated stony desertification area takes a leading position across the country, and the annual average increase of forest coverage rate is nationally leading...

To deeply implement the strategic positioning as the "pioneering area of ecological civilization" in the document numbered G.F.[2022] No. 2, Guizhou has identified the "roadmap" and "tasks" for its ecological construction. Dedicated to upholding the bottom lines of development and ecology, Guizhou maintains its biggest advantage of a fine ecological environment in development and competition while striving to reap new achievements in ecological construction.

On July 30, 2022, the provincial government and the Ministry of Ecology and Environment signed a cooperation agreement in Guiyang on building the pioneering area of ecological civilization, with full support for Guizhou in promoting green and low-carbon development, cracking down on relevant pollutions, protecting natural ecology, reforming ecological systems, and holding Eco Forum Global Guiyang, contributing to Guizhou's high-quality development through high-quality eco-environmental protection.

Consolidate ecological protective screens to protect waters

Wujiang River is the No.1 river in Guizhou and the largest tributary to the south bank of the upper reaches of the Yangtze River. In previous years, due to fragile ecology and serious environmental issues, Wujiang River was once on ecological alert. Also, Huawu Village, located by the bank of the Liuchong River in the upper reaches of the Wujiang River, suffered from severe soil erosion and water loss, serious environmental problems, and other issues.

On March 1, 2023, the Guizhou Province Wujiang River Protection Rules began to take effect, which stipulates 85 articles in 11 chapters covering the duties of different departments, enterprises, and local government in the protection of the river, the establishment of a compensation system for ecological protection, the improvement of risk management for the ecological environment of Wujiang River basin, and the effective measures for emergency disposal; each article was designed to remain effective and implementable to provide a strong and solid legal guarantee for promoting the ecological protection of the Wujiang River basin.

The institutional setting enjoys significant fruits. By adopting a series of governance measures, such as slope-to-terrace, returning grain plots to forestry, growing economic fruit trees, and prohibiting cage aquaculture, Huawu Village embarked on a green path integrating organic farming, cultivation under the woods, and ecological tourism. Villagers also engaged in the industries of the ecological fishery, vegetable, fruits, and livestock breeding, improving the ecological quality of rivers.

Preserve green development to embrace sustainable development

Haique Village in Hezhang County, Bijie, used to be a "widely-known" barren land. The bald mountains failed to produce grains and vegetables needed for people living there and even concerned the villagers during torrential floods. Due to over three decades of hard work, the bald mountains have turned green. Now, the forest land of the village reaches 13,700 mu as the forest coverage rate skyrockets from 5% to 77.2%, and the economic value of the forest amounts to RMB 100 million. In 2022, Haique Village won the second forestry carbon ticket of the province. This vast forest sea translates the "air" of the village into wealth in the pockets of the villagers.

Planting trees and returning grain plots to forestry... Guizhou is on the move. From 2012 to 2022, Guizhou has accumulatively planted woods of 53.72 million mu, with 16.95 million mu of grain plots returned to forestry. In the meantime, the area of treated stony desertification in Guizhou reached 13,100 sq.km., marking the remarkable achievement of "greening" mountainous areas.

Lucid waters and green mountains are invaluable assets. Through hard work and persistence. Guizhou remains committed to emerging as a pioneering model in ecological construction, promoting the upgrade of ecological civilization, and growing stronger in pursuing ecological development.

SOURCE Huanqiu.com
DUBLIN, July 3, 2023 /PRNewswire/ -- The "The Rise of the African Cloud - 2023: Public Clouds, Sovereign Clouds and the Commercial Case for Enabling Africa's Digital Transformation" report has been added to ResearchAndMarkets.com's offering.

The analysis explores key demand considerations, supply factors including infrastructure, market structure and competitive context. It also provides a deep quantitative view of market size and projections, at regional and key country levels.

Building on 12 months of research, dozens of customer and service provider discussions and underpinned by proprietary cloud adoption surveys, this report provides arguably the most in-depth view publicly available into the surging potential of African cloud markets.

African companies are answering the irresistible call of the cloud. From the ability to scale operations, boost innovation and bolster business continuity in the face of inadequate power infrastructure, migrating to the cloud has become a central component of Africa's digital transformation.

Examples abound. In 2022, financial services group Old Mutual shut down its physical data centres to move its workloads almost entirely to the cloud. Airline company Comair consolidated a footprint of 6 physical data centers into a single cloud deployment. Startups like Cellulant and Kobo 360 continue to lead public cloud adoption, pushing and testing the boundaries of databases and machine learning in the African context.

One of the continent's largest telcos, MTN has been testing the deployment of the core of its future 5G stand-alone network into the public cloud - a seminal development that would put in the cloud the brains for one of the most significant technology deployments of the next decade.

At last, the African market has entered the age of the cloud, a period of prodigious growth in Internet usage and extensive digitization of Africa's productive capacity. The African cloud is now a multi-billion-dollar commercial opportunity growing at 25%-30% a year. It is also a highly dynamic and complex marketplace, where hyperscalers compete and partner with a broad range of telcos, data center providers and cloud specialists.

Key Topics Covered:

EXECUTIVE SUMMARY

The African cloud services market in numbers

On the state of cloud adoption in Africa

On private, hybrid, public and multi clouds in Africa

On hyperscaler public cloud infrastructure in Africa - and the rise of sovereign clouds

- and the rise of sovereign clouds On the size and growth of the African cloud commercial opportunity

On Africa's cloud Big Five markets

cloud Big Five markets On the outlook for African cloud markets

The African cloud services market in four key charts

Part I Cloud adoption in Africa: beyond basic awareness to hybrid multi-clouds

State of cloud adoption in Africa : summary highlights

: summary highlights Why African companies migrate to the cloud: operational imperatives

Why African companies migrate to the cloud: business imperatives

Africa has relatively high rates of adoption of cloud productivity applications

has relatively high rates of adoption of cloud productivity applications Enterprise management applications are moving off-prem, and into the public cloud

African enterprises are adopting more advanced applications - predominantly in the public cloud

Storage is the predominant path into IaaS

The adoption of advanced cloud infrastructure and platform solutions is still relatively low

How enterprises deploy: hybrid deployments are increasingly prevalent

How African enterprises deploy: the rise of silo-ed multi-cloud

Charting Africa's multiple paths to the cloud

multiple paths to the cloud Industry focus: cloud in the African financial services sector

The African financial services sector: the motive, means and opportunity to go to the cloud

Financial services cloud adoption profile

The African financial services sector and the cloud - key charts

African bank IT budgets - a sample view

Part II Public clouds and private clouds

Public cloud infrastructure deployments have intensified

Public cloud infrastructure deployment gaps persist

Hyperscaler hybrid cloud infrastructure deployments have picked up

Will the hybrid cloud negate the need for full-stack regions?

A highly competitive public cloud OEM market

Africa public cloud provider presence

public cloud provider presence Key public cloud platforms in Africa - a comparative view

- a comparative view A survey of public cloud adoption - Azure and AWS lead the way, but many are not far behind

Who is using the public cloud? Key African corporate customers by platform

The rise of African sovereign clouds

A surge in African data center buildout

Who is building the African sovereign cloud? From hyperscalers to pan-African cloud champions

Of diversified cloud providers and cloud specialists

A strategic mapping of African private cloud providers

Part III How big is the African cloud?

The African cloud services market in numbers

The big picture: macro-economic headwinds and seismic shifts in the African B2B market

Market context: an enterprise market in transition

The African cloud market is hitting its stride

The African cloud migration potential - 10m+ servers in need of outsourcing

The African cloud services market has doubled in size since 2019

The African cloud services opportunity: infrastructure and platforms

Where is Africa's cloud opportunity? The cloud big five - then everyone else

cloud opportunity? The cloud big five - then everyone else The outlook: Africa's great cloud migration marches on

great cloud migration marches on Looking ahead: a flight to the safety of the cloud, despite considerable operating headwinds

Our forecast: Africa's great migration (to the cloud) marches on

great migration (to the cloud) marches on The African cloud opportunity: summary table view

Part IV Africa's Cloud Big Five Markets

Country analysis: South Africa

The state of cloud in South Africa : a summary view

: a summary view South Africa cloud: excellent growth in otherwise flat B2B market

cloud: excellent growth in otherwise flat B2B market South Africa cloud readiness context

cloud readiness context State of cloud adoption in South Africa : advanced and looking for mass market

: advanced and looking for mass market The big picture on cloud adoption in South Africa : deep and hybrid

: deep and hybrid How SA corporates use the cloud: on prem still strong, and public cloud ahead of private cloud

South Africa cloud usage profile: an overview

cloud usage profile: an overview South Africa cloud usage profile: hosting setups and cloud journeys

cloud usage profile: hosting setups and cloud journeys How South African companies migrate to the cloud: colo first, then hybrid setups

South Africa cloud: Strong financial sector adoption, public sector banks on hybrid

cloud: Strong financial sector adoption, public sector banks on hybrid South Africa's financial sector IT spend - a $3bn+ opportunity, more of which is going to the cloud

financial sector IT spend - a $3bn+ opportunity, more of which is going to the cloud South African financial sector spending on IT services: rising 3x faster than other operating costs

The SA public sector: still mostly on-prem, but moving gradually towards the public cloud

Breaking down Africa's most competitive cloud ecosystem

most competitive cloud ecosystem Africa's most competitive cloud OEM market

most competitive cloud OEM market Which platforms are customers using? Mostly Azure, but others are racing to catch up

A strategic mapping of the SA cloud ecosystem

South Africa cloud market outlook: more growth ahead, despite (or because of) a tough operating context

cloud market outlook: more growth ahead, despite (or because of) a tough operating context The South Africa cloud migration potential - upwards of 3.5m servers

cloud migration potential - upwards of servers South Africa cloud adoption outlook: a more mature market

cloud adoption outlook: a more mature market Sizing South African cloud market: Africa's largest cloud opportunity, and by far

largest cloud opportunity, and by far The South African cloud opportunity: moderate growth in a tough operating context

South Africa cloud market forecast - table view

Country analysis: Egypt

Country analysis: Nigeria

Country analysis: Kenya

Country analysis: Morocco

Part VI Country analysis: Africa's other top cloud markets

The state of cloud in Angola : a summary view

: a summary view The Angola cloud opportunity: solid potential in the midst of a tough operating environment

cloud opportunity: solid potential in the midst of a tough operating environment The state of cloud in Cote-d'Ivoire : a summary view

: a summary view The Cote-d'Ivoire cloud opportunity: still early stages, with moderate growth ahead

cloud opportunity: still early stages, with moderate growth ahead The state of cloud in Ghana : a summary view

: a summary view The Ghana cloud opportunity: still early stages in a tough market environment

cloud opportunity: still early stages in a tough market environment The state of cloud in Senegal : a summary view

: a summary view The Senegal cloud opportunity: slowly expanding

cloud opportunity: slowly expanding The state of cloud in Tanzania : a summary view

: a summary view Tanzania's cloud opportunity: very early stages

Companies Mentioned

Alibaba Cloud

Altron Karabina

Atlas Cloud Services

AWS

BCX

Cellulant

Csquared

Dimension Data

Google

Huawei Cloud

IBM

Inwi

iOCO

iRoko

Kobo 360

Liquid C2

Main One

Maroc Telecom

Microsoft

N+One

Nedbank

Oracle

Senegal Numerique

SITA

ST Digital

Standard Bank

Synthesis Software

VMWare

Vodacom

For more information about this report visit https://www.researchandmarkets.com/r/122ntg

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TOKYO, July 3, 2023 /PRNewswire/ -- It has been decided that vegan foie gras and vegan caviar developed and sold by food tech company Dr. Foods Inc (headquarters: Shinjuku-ku, Tokyo; CEO: Koichi Ishizuka; hereinafter Dr. Foods) will be served in course menus (approximately 160,000 servings) from September 1st, 2023, at 28 wedding halls and hotel restaurants nationwide, including Notre Dame Yokohama Minato Mirai managed by Nihon Ceremony Co., Ltd. (headquarters: Shimonoseki City, Yamaguchi Prefecture; representative Director: Makoto Kanda; hereinafter Japan Ceremony).

Dr.Foods Vegan Foie Gras Vegan Caviar

In recent years, the problem of how to raise ducks and geese, which are the sources of foie gras, and the problem of endangered sturgeons, which are the sources of caviar, have been taken up in the news every day all around the world. Countries such as Italy, Poland, and Turkey have already banned foie gras production. In the state of New York in the United States as well, the city council has passed an ordinance banning the sale of foie gras, and this trend seems to be accelerating.

Sturgeons, from which caviar is harvested, are also critically endangered and some species are already extinct. Dr. Foods recreated ingredients that have such environmental problems with completely plant-based ingredients, prompting Nihon Ceremony, which is similarly early in being conscious of improving environmental problems, to be the fastest company to consider alternative ingredients, and it has been decided that they will incorporate vegan foie gras and vegan caviar into their menus and serve them in their courses in hopes that "this sustainable initiative that is kind to the environment on auspicious sunny days can also be a sustainable relationship for the bride and groom as well."

Dr. Foods plans to sell more completely plant-based alternatives to high-end ingredients by the end of the year and hopes that ingredients that are difficult to obtain in everyday life will become sustainable and familiar.

Company information

Nihon Ceremony Co., Ltd

6-4-50 Okihonmachi Shimonoseki City, Yamaguchi, Japan 175-1114

CEO: Makoto Kanda

http://www.nihon-ceremony.jp/

Dr. FOODS Co., Ltd.

a Japanese subsidiary of Dr. FOODS Inc. (OTC Market in the U.S.A. listed corporation as "DRFS") is Tokyo based food-tech venture and spin-off company of Next Meats Co., Ltd that has been focusing on the research and development of cultured foods. The proprietary technologies which combined with over 1000 years of Japanese traditional fermented foods culture called "KOJI" (rice malt) gave a breakthrough invention of the world's first vegetable based "Vegan Foie Gras". In April 2023, Dr.Foods announced the successful development of plant-based caviar, where they conducted all aspects of sourcing raw materials, development, and production at the "treasure trove of food", Iwate Prefecture in Japan.

https://dr-foods.net

SOURCE Dr.Foods Co., Ltd
DUBLIN, July 3, 2023 /PRNewswire/ -- The "Annual Strategy Dossier - 2023 - World's Top 5 Military Helicopter & Rotorcraft Manufacturers - Airbus Helicopters, Bell, Boeing, Leonardo, Sikorsky" report has been added to ResearchAndMarkets.com's offering.

The report provides insights into the key strategies & plans being formulated by the World's Top 5 Military Helicopter manufacturers & inputs to be incorporated into the broader strategic planning & decision making processes with focus on the overarching strategy focus across industry OEMs, analysis of key strategies & plans being formulated and a comprehensive SWOT analysis on them.

Military helicopters have been an integral element of the force structure of armed forces globally given their indispensable & critical role in carrying out a broad range of missions; including, Utility & Troop Transport, Search & Rescue (SAR), Anti-Submarine Warfare (ASW), Attack & Reconnaissance and Heavy Lift; leveraging their unique operational capabilities and performance characteristics.

The iconic military helicopters developed during the Cold War era, including, Black Hawk, Chinook and Apache are still in production & active service even decades after they first made their mark and having proved their mettle across numerous battlefields and combat theatres over decades.

The advent of military rotorcrafts in 2007, starting with the V-22 Osprey, which was the world's first military tilt-rotorcraft, has proved to be a truly been a game changer for the military given its unmatched operational capability providing a clear overmatch, much higher cruising speed and versatility, as against conventional helicopters, while also bridging a key capability gap

The development of second generation of tilt-rotorcrafts, under the Future Vertical Lift (FVL) program, is intended at development of eventual successors to the Black Hawk and Chinook under the Future Long-Range Assault Aircraft (FLRAA) and Future Attack Reconnaissance Aircraft (FARA) phases of the FVL program.

The 2nd generation tilt-rotorcrafts, specifically the Bell V-280 Valor picked by the U.S. Army for FLRAA, provides a generational leap in capability with its 50% higher top speed of 300 knots+ and a way longer operating range, which is almost thrice that of Black Hawk, while carrying a 25% higher payload. The FARA phase again has Bell and Sikorsky pitted against each other in an intense battle, especially, after the FLRAA phase went to Bell.

The European Union (EU), too, is looking at the future having launched the Next Generation Military Helicopter (NGMH) program, under PESCO, geared towards converting the next generation rotorcraft technologies into deployable solutions either as a retrofit over existing platforms or as a scratch-up platform in itself. U.K.'s upcoming NMH program is going to be a key, near term growth avenue for the industry OEMs. Switzerland's search for a heavy lift helicopter is still on the cards, wherein, Sikorsky's CH-53K Super Stallion will battle it out against the Chinook once again, much like the close contests witnessed earlier in Israel & Germany

Further, the development of the next generation turboshaft engine, following the selection of GE's T901 under the U.S. Army's Improved Turbine Engine Program (ITEP), is a generational leap in propulsion technology for the next generation conventional helicopters & rotorcrafts, including, FLRAA, FARA as well for retrofitting existing Black Hawks and Apaches given that the T901 offers a 50% increase in power along with a 25% lower specific fuel consumption (SFC) and higher reliability as well as lower maintainability with its single spool architecture

The report will be essential & a key resource for those associated with and having strategic interest in the Global Military Helicopter Market and/or the Global Aerospace & Defense Industry.

The report will be especially useful for:

Key Decision-Makers across the Aerospace & Defense Industry

Defense Procurement Executives & Defense Departments

Program Offices & Program Managers of Defense Programs

Top Management of Industry OEMs, Players across Industry Value Chain & Other Companies

Suppliers, Vendors, Technology & Services Providers and other Key Players in the Industry Value Chain

Existing & Potential Investors

Industry & Company Analysts

M&A Advisory Firms

Strategy & Management Consulting Firms

Researchers and all those associated with the industry in general

Relevance & Usefulness of the report includes:

Strategic Planning, Decision-Making and Market Analysis Purposes

Identification of the degree of Congruence between Emerging Market Landscape & Strategy focus

Identifying & highlighting areas for making potential Strategic Changes, Adjustments & Realignment

Analysis of Forces Driving as well as restraining the Industry & their overall Dynamics through a Force Field Analysis

Analysis of Market Evolution with Medium Term Demand Growth Projections & Market Outlook

Key Topics Covered:

1: Business Snapshot & Overview - World's Top 5 Military Helicopter & Rotorcraft Manufacturers

Founded

Headquartered

Business Segments

Product Portfolio

Revenue Base

Market Capitalization

Key Executives

Shareholding/Ownership Structure

2: Financial Performance Analysis

Revenue Base & Growth Trend

Revenues Split by Key Segments

Revenues Split by Key Geographic Markets & Regions

Gross Earnings & Margin Trend

Operating Earnings & Operating Margin Trend

Return on Sales Trend

Profitability Growth Trend

Cash Flow from Operations

R&D Expenditure Trend

CAPEX Trend

Order Intake & Order Backlog Trend

3: Overarching Strategy Focus & Strategic Priorities across Top Industry OEMs

Airbus Helicopters SAS

Bell

Boeing (BDS)

Leonardo Helicopters

Sikorsky Aircraft Corporation

4: Key Strategies & Plans for the Industry OEMs - Comprehensive Analysis of Strategies & Plans for the Industry OEMs - Analysis Coverage

Product Portfolio Strategies & Plans

Market Specific Strategies & Plans

R&D Strategies & Plans

Growth Strategies & Plans

Business and Corporate Strategies & Plans

Sales & Marketing Strategies & Plans

Production/Manufacturing Strategies & Plans

Financial Strategies & Plans

Acquisitions, Strategic Alliances & JVs

Other Strategies & Strategic Initiatives

5: SWOT Analysis - On Key Industry OEMs

Strengths to be Leveraged

Weaknesses to be worked on

Opportunities to be capitalized upon

Threats to be negated & mitigated

6: Key Industry Trends

7: Key Market Trends

8: Key Technology Trends

9: Key Issues, Challenges & Risk Factors

10: Global Military Helicopter & Rotorcraft Market - Force Field Analysis - Analysis of Driving & Restraining Forces and their Overall Dynamics

Driving Forces

Restraining Forces

11: Global Military Helicopter & Rotorcraft Market - Strategic Market Outlook through 2027

Analysis of Emerging Market Scenario for Military Helicopters

Global Demand Outlook for Military Helicopters - Forecast to 2027

Global Demand Projections for Key Market Segments

Analysis of Emerging Market Scenario for Aerospace & Defense

U.S. & Global Defense Spending Trends

Top 5 & Top 10 Defense Spending Nations

Market Outlook & Growth Projections

Global Defense Spending - Trends & Projections - 2023-2027

Global Defense Spending & Growth Rates for Key Regions

U.S.

Europe

Asia-Pacific

Middle East

For more information about this report visit https://www.researchandmarkets.com/r/mrzcrz

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.

Media Contact:

Research and Markets

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Logo: https://mma.prnewswire.com/media/539438/Research_and_Markets_Logo.jpg

SOURCE Research and Markets
Artificial Intelligence can revolutionize the world of energy drinks - it not only created what it considers the perfect recipe, but also tasted it.

BUDAPEST, Hungary, July 3, 2023 /PRNewswire/ -- The world's first energy drink entirely powered by A.I. has been developed by HELL ENERGY. Design, recipe, tasting and meticulous taste evaluation, predictive intelligence, security measures, marketing elements - every aspect has been expertly crafted by advanced A.I. (Artificial Intelligence) systems.

HELL A.I. energy drink (PRNewsfoto/HELL ENERGY)

The vast amount of information and knowledge available on the World Wide Web is utilized by A.I. It can process and uncover connections at a speed that is almost incomprehensible to humans. Additionally, it possesses comprehensive knowledge about energy drinks, encompassing their ingredients, sales results, health research, recommendations, and consumer feedback. Moreover, it can seamlessly integrate the latest trends and information into its analyses.

When HELL ENERGY commissioned A.I. to develop a new energy drink tailored to its needs, the artificial intelligence processed a vast amount of information and formulated what it deemed the best recipe. The A.I. not only considered consumer expectations from an energy drink but also prioritized the goal of creating a superior and more enjoyable beverage.

As the most intelligent entity in the world at present, A.I. deemed the recipe it formulated to be perfect. It enhanced the energy drink with vitamins, amino acids, and herbs while ensuring compliance with food industry legislation, including the optimization of EFSA (European Food Safety Authority) recommendations and adherence to the recommended daily allowance (RDA) standards.

The A.I. created three flavour variations for fine-tuning and digitized them using the technology of a New York-based company. After tasting [yes, tasting, not testing] all three drinks and analysing extensive data and statistics, the A.I. utilized predictive intelligence to select the winning flavour. Thus, the truly unique and refreshing Tutti-frutti & Berry-blast flavour was born. This ground-breaking development represents the first time artificial intelligence has carried out such a sophisticated product development process within the energy drink sector.

The recipe is kept strictly confidential, and in order to protect it, the A.I. provided recommendations. It is stored on a single computer in HELL ENERGY's Hungarian factory, equipped with advanced security elements. The design of the room housing the machine was also developed by artificial intelligence. However, recognizing the importance of backup measures, a copy of the recipe is kept securely in a vault in Switzerland.

After such extensive involvement, it would come as no surprise that the packaging of the new energy drink was also designed by A.I. The beverage can embodies the latest trends, exuding a youthful and cool vibe. While incorporating the colour scheme of HELL ENERGY, the A.I. also infused its own digital style into the design.

Since the new product, 'HELL A.I.,' is truly the result of an extraordinary and unique process unparalleled at a global level, the company's employees were eager to subject the new energy drink to testing under conventional conditions. As a result, it underwent rigorous quality control and blind tasting sessions. The success confirmed the A.I.'s capabilities!

The A.I. also represents a tremendous perspective in the field of product development, pushing beyond previously unimaginable boundaries and ushering in a new era for the food industry. With the A.I.'s capabilities, it can swiftly sort and analyse vast amounts of internet data in mere minutes or seconds, drastically reducing the product development cycle from 1-2 years (or at best, half a year) to as little as 1 month. This process is the result of coordinated efforts, as multiple A.I. systems, each excelling in different areas, collaborate on the development. With over a hundred A.I. systems already in existence worldwide, their collective operation ensures a high level of innovation.

The new product is produced in one of Europe's most advanced beverage production facilities and will be accessible in over 60 countries worldwide starting from the summer of 2023.

Photo - https://mma.prnewswire.com/media/2146071/HELL_ENERGY_AI_design.jpg

SOURCE HELL ENERGY
Elnur Enveroglu

A tragicomic scene has emerged between the Armenian authorities and the leaders of the so-called separatist states. Thus, the response of Armenian Parliament Speaker Alen Simonyan on his Facebook page to Metaxe Hakobyan, a kind of speaker of the so-called separatist regime in Karabakh, has aroused great interest. Hakobyan accused the other side of not supporting the separatist leaders since they were "blockaded" in Khankendi. In his answer, the Speaker of the Armenian Parliament denied this and stressed that he has been and is in constant contact with the separatists. The question arises, how is it that Armenia is constantly communicating with the separatists when it says in all meetings and statements that it does not have any connection with separatists in Karabakh and is not responsible for what happened in Karabakh?

First of all, let's remember that Pashinyan personally stated in one of his speeches that Yerevan bears no responsibility for armed groups of Armenians in Karabakh, some of which have been remaining since the 10 November agreement. This forms a logical reason that Azerbaijan can directly participate in the cleansing of those terrorist elements. And it was done in the last successful military operation. As a result, the bodies of 4 illegal Armenian terrorists, who turned weapons against Azerbaijani soldiers on the territory of Azerbaijan, were returned.

However, it is still questionable why Armenia is so worried about the part of the dead terrorist groups?

Another logical conclusion shows that there is no difference between the Armenian authorities and the so-called separatist regime operating illegally on the territory of Azerbaijan. The Republic of Armenia is responsible for the armed provocations committed against Azerbaijani military personnel, as well as the terrorist forces that attempted to enter the territory of Azerbaijan before and after the establishment of the Lachin border checkpoint. Not only the so-called separatist leaders, but also Pashinyan and all his supporters should be kept accountable for all the crimes that have occurred.

Alen Simonyan's confession can also be considered a kind of gaffe of the Armenian authorities. As the saying goes, lie has short legs. The speaker of the Armenian parliament suddenly loses himself in front of the shouts of the brazen separatist regime, and as a result, he exposes all the dirty deeds of Armenia unintendedly.

Armenia should understand unequivocally that no illegal measures related to its territories can remain hidden and out of Azerbaijans control, be it secret or open. Although Pashinyan tries to conduct the ostrich politics, official Baku sees all his flaws and is aware of every step he takes.

As for the separatist regime's noise about remaining in the blockade, the Republic of Azerbaijan will one day solve this problem by all possible means. And in a lavish manner, fully worthy of Metaxe Hakobyan, Arayik Harutunyan and Ruben Vardanyan. Time is the cure for all problems. Their problems will be solved in time. The main thing is that Yerevan should think about what to say when sitting opposite the Azerbaijani side at the table. Maybe they will find the words to talk, but the question remains how effective those words will be...
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Islamabad, July 3 : Three policemen and a paramilitary trooper were killed in simultaneous attacks on two checkposts in Pakistan's southwest Balochistan province, the Chief Minister of Balochistan confirmed.

In a statement on Sunday, Chief Minister Mir Abdul Quddus Bizenjo condemned the incidents in which terrorists hurled hand grenades and sprayed bullets at the checkposts in Zhob area of the province.

He also commended efforts of the security personnel who successfully thwarted the attacks and maintained the situation in the province, Xinhua news agency reported.

Zhob police told media that the attacks happened on Sunday morning when a group of militants attacked the checkposts with sophisticated weapons, and they fled after a retaliatory attack.

Several personnel of paramilitary troops' frontier corps were also injured in the attacks, and had been shifted to a nearby hospital, the police added.

A terrorist was killed in an exchange of fire.

No group has claimed responsibility for the attacks.

An extra contingent of police and paramilitary troops reached the sites, and an investigation into the incidents has been launched.
Tehran, July 3 : Iran has detained 66 suspects for attempting to smuggle 532 million litre of diesel in the southeastern province of Sistan and Baluchestan, media reported.

The forces of Iran's Intelligence Ministry and the Intelligence Organisation of the Islamic Revolution Guards Corps, which made the arrests, also seized the fuel, according to the report released on Sunday.

According to semi-official Fars news agency, the suspects were members of eight fuel smuggling networks that remain active in southeastern Iran. They were accused of "causing disruption in fuel distribution among power plants, industrial units and fishing vessels" in Sistan and Baluchestan province and have been handed over to the judicial authorities.

The report estimated the value of the seized fuel at $340 million, Xinhua news agency reported.

Fuel smuggling is a lucrative business in Iran due to government subsidies on fuel costs.
Tehran, July 3 : Iran's Foreign Ministry spokesman Nasser Kanaani has advised Iranian citizens against taking unnecessary trips to France amid the ongoing violence in the European state.

Kanaani made the remarks on Sunday in a statement published on the Ministry's website, commenting on the ongoing protests in France sparked by a policeman's fatal shooting of a teenager.

The spokesman also cautioned Iranians living in France against making unnecessary trips to or visiting conflict-ridden areas, noting that Tehran is closely monitoring the developments in France, Xinhua news agency reported.

On Tuesday last week, a French police officer opened fire and killed 17-year-old Nahel M, a French citizen of Algerian and Moroccan descent, while the latter refused to comply with the order to pull over his car.

The police officer who fired his gun later told investigators that he had acted for fear of the car causing a fatal accident.

The shooting has triggered violent protests throughout France, which have so far led to the arrest of hundreds of people by the French police in major cities.
Beirut, July 3 : Two men were shot dead in a disputed area in northern Lebanon, the Lebanese Army announced in a statement, confirming earlier media reports.

The two youth, Haitham Tawk and Malek Tok, were found shot dead in Qornet al-Sawda, a disputed area between Bcharre and Bkaasafrine in northern Lebanon, the state-run National News Agency reported on Saturday evening.

Seven other civilians were also wounded in the conflict, the L'Orient Today news website quoted locals in Bcharre as saying.

Security tension, commonly seen in this area, is often caused by conflicts between the residents over land and water dispute, according to local media.

Lebanese Caretaker Prime Minister Najib Mikati said he was monitoring the situation, Xinhua news agency reported.

"We condemn this incident and those responsible will be arrested, so that justice can be done," Mikati said in a statement issued by his press office.
Sitapur : , July 3 (IANS) Three policemen, including a Station House Officer (SHO), have been suspended and booked after a video of a woman allegedly being beaten inside Rampur Mathura police station in Uttar Pradesh's Sitapur went viral on social media, police said.

Sitapur Superintendent of Police (SP), Ghule Sushil Chandrabhan, also ordered an inquiry by an Assistant Superintendent of Police rank officer.According to the FIR, SHO Ram Awadh Chauhan, Head Constable Kamlesh Yadav and woman constable Rachna Chaudhary have been booked under the charges of sections 342 (wrongful confinement), 323 (voluntarily causing hurt), 506 (criminal intimidation) of the IPC on the complaint of Annapurna Devi.

On June 18, Nirankar Sharma and Omkar had gone to Rampur Mathura police station to file a complaint related to a family dispute.

When they did not return till evening, a group of women, led by Annapurna, reached the police station and asked the cops the reason for keeping them in custody.

"SHO Ram Awadh Chauhan called a lady constable and head constable, who locked us in a room and thrashed us brutally with a leather leash," said Annapurna, in her complaint to the police.

Later, the women were also booked by the police under section 151 of CrPC for breach of peace.

The aggrieved woman then complained about the matter to the District Magistrate and the SP.

SP Chandrabhan asked the Police Circle Officer Mahmudabad Ravi Shankar Prasad to conduct a probe.
Lucknow, July 3 : The Uttar Pradesh Anti-Terrorist Squad (ATS) has arrested two members of terror outfit Ansar Ghazwat-ul-Hind (AGuH), an auxiliary unit of al-Qaeda, following inputs from intel agencies, an official said.

Those arrested have been identified as Saddam Sheikh, 38, and Rizwan Khan, 23.

Special Director General of Police, Law and Order, Prashant Kumar, said that Saddam who is a native of Gonda, worked as a driver in a company named NTC in Bengaluru.

"During social media monitoring and electronic surveillance, it has surfaced that Saddam Sheikh was self-radicalised and in touch with militants in Pakistan through IMO, which is a proprietary audio/video calling and instant messaging software service," Kumar added.

Saddam also said that terrorists like Osama bin Laden, Zakir Musa, Riyaz Naikoo, Naved Jatt, Sameer Tiger were his idols and in his phone, photos and videos related to these terrorists have also been recovered, he said.

The other accused Rizwan Khan, a native of Poonch in Jammu and Kashmir, was spreading terrorist propaganda on social media platforms. He was currently working as a security guard in Bihar.
For centuries, Christians have leaned on the promise that Jesus is the same yesterday, today, and forever. No matter the worlds shifting tides, the gospel remains the same. How that gospel message is proclaimed and heard, however, changes depending on cultural context. If the modern age of Christianity has taught us anything, it is that an unchanging Jesus can meet Christians right where they are.

One of the ways a local church can meet people where they are is by keeping up with evolving technologies, something that became apparent as congregations adapted during the pandemic. While some congregations still pass an offering plate down the pew on Sunday mornings or distribute labeled envelopes for parishioners checks or cash, giving electronically has revolutionized the tithing experience for giver and clergy alike.

As congregations seek to make disciples and bless their communities in the years to come, ministry leaders can empower their congregants to give with confidence and purposewhich starts by first understanding some of the major trends affecting giving.

Trend #1: Users Increasingly Expect Digital Giving Options

Just a few years ago, whether a church offered an app, live streamed its services, or even had a functional website was a bit of a toss-up. While the pandemic pushed congregations online en masse, it simply accelerated a shift toward the digital that was already taking place. In 2018, 40 percent of millennials were already donating via a website.

A study of 2,200 churches revealed that online giving solutions are by far the most-used feature in churches mobile apps. Users love the simplicity of digital giving, as well as the ways it can prompt both immediate and recurring gifts.

When pastor Danny Anderson returned to his Indiana church after a trip to Haiti, he invited his congregation to partner with the orphanages he had visited. He pitched a $50,000 campaign to his congregation on Sunday morning. Within 24 hours, Emmanuel Church raised $24,000 through their online giving portal and text giving. They proceeded to more than double their goal in just a few weeks, raising $113,000. The right digital tools enabled the church to communicate and meet a need in record time.

In addition to empowering spontaneous giving, digital giving options also encourage and increase planned giving. Celebration Church, which has 11 American locations and one in Zimbabwe, increased their recurring givers by six times when they switched from a complicated website interface to a streamlined digital giving option.

Churches that want to cultivate generosity in their congregations in the coming years will find simple, well-designed online giving options to be an invaluable asset to their ministries.

Trend #2: Great Software Plays a Vital Role in Maintaining Church Financial Health

From increased cybersecurity to greater gift completion, the right digital tools can play a key part in assessing and ensuring financial health in congregations. Pastors and ministry leaders do not need to become technology experts in order to navigate the next era, but they do need to know the right questions to ask of a digital giving provider. Digital giving software that includes security measures like payment card information certification, machine-learning fraud protection, and independent annual audits can help churches maintain financial health.

In addition to greater gift security and completion, technology can empower consistency of giving throughout the year. While many churches report a summer slump when it comes to tithing, the right digital giving software and messaging can stop that downward trajectory. For example, Irving Bible Church in Irving, Texas, eliminated their typical seasonal dip in giving by regularly communicating with their congregants about text message giving options, which has increased their first-time givers, upped recurring donations, and helped the church maintain financial consistency throughout the year.

Asking the right questions about giving software can help church leaders determine how to best steward their churchs finances, reinforcing the congregations confidence and encouraging consistent giving.

Trend #3: Technology Empowers Church Leaders to Focus on Ministry

Pastors and ministers who are hesitant to implement new tech in their churches often cite the learning curve and the time it will take to maintain the software. Then there are glitches to consider, and the fact that many church leaders are already overwhelmed and overworked.

The right technology, though, reduces the burden many leaders experience when thinking about the breadth of their responsibilities. For example, set-and-forget live streaming technology like Resi can ensure that Sunday services run smoothly in the sanctuary and the living room.

Technology can also bridge the gap between the church and its donors desire to give through gift completion support. Instead of fielding calls from congregants whose credit cards wont process, or losing out on donations altogether because the giver gave up, the right software can reduce time spent on giving challenges and increase donations received. Pushpay, the leading payments and engagement solutions provider for mission-driven organizations, recently introduced Everygift TM, which reduces failed payments and increases payment reliability. Internal research shows that Everygifts combined features contributed to more than $213.5 million in additional church gifts in 2022.

As church leaders implement technology solutions that free their time, focus, and energy, they will find themselves better able to focus on their mission.

Face the Future with Confidence

Keeping up with the latest technology and trends can feel like an overwhelming prospect for church leaders. But it doesnt have to be. Pushpays suite of church technology toolsincluding Everygift, Resi, and Text Giving and morehelps churches keep up with current trends and contributes to overall satisfaction with the giving experience. Learn more about Pushpays technology solutions by downloading their ebook designed to help church leaders find the right tools for their congregations.
Paris, July 3 : The grandmother of a teenager shot dead during a police traffic stop in a Paris suburb pleaded for the rioting to stop on the sixth straight night of unrest, while authorities expressed outrage over the targeting of a Mayor's home with a burning car as his family was sleeping.

The grandmother of the 17-year-old, known publicly by his first name, Nahel, said in a telephone interview with French news broadcaster BFM TV, "Don't break windows, buses ... schools. We want to calm things down."

"I'm telling them [the rioters] to stop," said the grandmother, who was identified only as Nadia and spoke a day after the teen's funeral, CBC News reported.

"Nahel is dead. My daughter is lost ... she doesn't have alife anymore."

Protests have erupted across France since the teen, who was reportedly of north African descent, was shot Tuesday in the chest while driving away from a traffic stop in Nanterre, a working-class suburb 15 km from central Paris, CBC News reported.

Nahel's grandmother said she was angry at the officer who killed her grandson, but not at police in general, and expressed faith in the justice system as France faces its worst social upheaval in years.

The officer accused of killing Nahel was given a preliminary charge of voluntary homicide.

Thirteen people who didn't comply with traffic stops were fatally shot by French police last year, and three this year, prompting demands for more accountability.

On Sunday, Vincent Jeanbrun, Mayor of the southern suburb of L'Hay-les-Roses, said his wife and one of their children, aged five and seven, were injured as they fled their home in the early hours.

During the incident at his home, Jeanbrun, from the conservative Les Republicains party, was at the town hall monitoring the violence. The town hall has been the target of attacks for several nights since the shooting of Nahel, and has been protected with barbed wire and barricades.

Jeanbrunsaid the attack represented a new stage of "horror and ignominy" in the unrest, and he urged the government to impose a state of emergency.

The local prosecutor told reporters that an investigation into attempted murder had been opened. No suspects have been arrested, CBC News reported.

The prosecutor said the woman was injured as she fled through the backyard of the house.

In a less chic neighbourhood of northern Paris, protesters set off firecrackers and lit barricades on fire as police shot back with tear gas and stun grenades.

Skirmishes erupted in the Mediterranean city of Marseille but appeared less intense than the night before, according to the Interior Ministry. A bolstered police contingent arrested 55 people there, CBC News reported.

Across the country, arrests were lower than the night before. Interior Minister GArald Darmanin attributed that to "the resolute action of security forces". Police made 719 arrests by early Sunday.

Darmanin said the latest overnight riots had been less intense, after 45,000 police were deployed following Saturday's funeral of Nahel in the Paris suburb of Nanterre. Since he was shot on Tuesday, rioters have torched cars and looted stores, but they'vealso targeted state institutions a"town halls and police stations.

Amid the unrest, a Second World War monument in Nanterre commemorating Holocaust victims and members of the French resistance was vandalized on the sidelines of a silent march on Thursday to pay tribute to Nahel.

The slogans included "Don't forgive or forget" and "Police, rapists, assassins." The European Jewish Congress denounced the vandalism as a "shameful act of disrespect for the memory of the victims of the Holocaust."

More than 3,000 people have been detained overall since Nahel's death.

The mass police deployment has been welcomed by some frightened residents of targeted neighbourhoods and shop owners whose stores have been ransacked,but it has further frustrated those who see police behaviour as the core of France's current crisis.

President Emmanuel Macron was holding a special security meeting Sunday night, and it was not clear whether he would make public comments. Macron has delayed what would have been the first state visit to Germany by a French president in 23 years, starting Sunday evening.
Lucknow, July 3 : The Anti-Terrorist Squad (ATS) has arrested three men on charges of carrying out illegal conversions in Uttar Pradesh's Saharanpur.

The accused -- Nazim Hasan, Mohammad Sadiq, and Azhar Malik -- were arrested by the ATS from various locations in Saharanpur district on Sunday night.

According to the ATS, evidence collected from electronic surveillance proved that all three were involved in carrying out the conversion in the district.

Gaurav, a district resident, was trapped by Nazim Hasan, said the ATS.

Hasan first befriended Gaurav and thereafter, brainwashed him to convert to Islam.

In this modus operandi, one Reshma of Bengaluru was also involved. She contacted Gaurav through an online game and promised him to marry if he converted to Islam. Reshma is yet to be arrested.
San Francisco, July 3 : Elon Musk-own Tesla has announced that it produced nearly 4,80,000 vehicles and delivered over 4,66,000 cars in the second quarter (Q2) of this year.

Among 4,66,000 delivered vehicles, 19,225 were Model S/X, and 4,46,915 were Model 3/Y, the company said in a post on Sunday.

The automaker will post its financial results for Q2 2023 after market close on July 19. At that time, the company will also issue a brief advisory containing a link to the Q2 update, which will be available on Teslaas Investor Relations website.

"Tesla management will hold a live question and answer webcast that day at 4:30 p.m. Central Time (5:30 p.m. Eastern Time) to discuss the Companyas financial and business results and outlook," the automaker said.

Moreover, the net income and cash flow results will be announced along with the rest of the financial performance when the company announces Q2 earnings.

"Tesla vehicle deliveries represent only one measure of the companyas financial performance and should not be relied on as an indicator of quarterly financial results, which depend on a variety of factors, including the cost of sales, foreign exchange movements and mix of directly leased vehicles," the company added.

Meanwhile, last month, after hearing Prime Minister Narendra Modi's "Make in India" pitch, Tesla CEO Elon Musk announced a change of plans, saying that his electric vehicle and battery company will now come to India "as soon as it is humanly possible".
Rampur : , July 3 (IANS) A six-year-old boy was brutally killed by his 13-year-old neighbour who smashed his head with a brick.

The body was found with eyes gouged out at an under-construction site on Sunday.

Yug Yadav, the only son of engineer Yogendra Yadav, who looks after mobile tower installations in Rampur, had gone out to buy chocolates for his father on his birthday, but did not return.

After failing to find his son, Yadav lodged a police complaint and the body was later found.

The police detained a minor who lives in the same neighbourhood and is a drug addict.

ASP Rampur, Sansaar Singh, said, aBoth the murder weapon and the boy's missing clothes have been found. The accused is a school dropout and has confessed to have committed the crime under the influence of drugs. He also said that he killed Yug as the boy was making fun of him."

The accused lives with his mother and had stolen a bicycle recently to buy drugs. He had also attacked a few people with stones, and his mother had even lodged a complaint against him by calling the 112 police helpline, he added.

"We have booked him under IPC sections 302 (murder) and 201 (causing disappearance of evidence) and will send him to a juvenile home."
Bengaluru, July 3 : In a tragic incident, a police constable, who was inspecting a parked vehicle on Bengaluru International Airport Road, was killed after being hit by a speeding car.

The incident happened late on Sunday night. The deceased cop has been identified as Suresh, attached to Devanahalli police station.

According to police, Suresh went to check on a car which was broken on the highway. While he was inquiring, a speeding car hit the parked vehicle and the constable from behind killing him on the spot.

The driver of the vehicle, which had hit the parked vehicle on the highway, also suffered serious injuries in legs and hands.

The group of passengers who were travelling in the car, were in an inebriated state and included three girls.All suffered injuries in the incident.

The police said that Suresh was on night duty and was on rounds with police inspector Dharme Gowda.

Suresh was driving the police car when they noticed an Innova car parked on the highway. Suresh stopped the vehicle and went to check the vehicle. While he was talking to the driver of the Innova vehicle, the speeding Ascent car crashed into the vehicle and on him.

The inspector, who was with the constable, was answering a phone call and had just stepped away from the spot when the parked car was hit.

Further details are awaited

-- IANS

mka/dpb
Mumbai, July 3 : A day after the dust of the Maharashtra political quake hovers in the air, the Opposition Maha Vikas Aghadi got into a war-mode with Shiv Sena (UBT) MP and Chief Spokesperson Sanjay Raut predicting that the state will soon get a new Chief Minister, here on Monday.

Speaking to mediapersons, Raut said that the Shiv Sena CM Eknath Shinde's days are numbered and even its ally BJP has perceived this.

"At best, he is a 'temporary guest' ('kuchh dinon ka mehmaan'). The Speaker's verdict on the disqualification of 16 MLAs including Shinde has to come soon. The BJP has realised that Shinde has outlived his utility and the NCP split is to safeguard their position later," said Raut.

The Sena (UBT) leader added that Ajit Pawar has become Deputy CM for a record 5th time, "but his target is higher, the post of CM".

"After the Speaker's verdict, there will be a change of guard in the state and Ajit Pawar's deal is for the top post. The state will get a new CM soon," Raut reiterated.

He added how the BJP has been rattled by its May rout in Karnataka and all recent surveys indicating an even worse debacle for it in Maharashtra whenever the elections are held here.

"All this is being done to salvage their position in the state. First they broke the Shiv Sena and now they have split the NCP, but the people of the state are watching all this and will not spare them," he declared.

Pulling the government's ears, Raut lamented that Sunday (July 2), the bodies of the 25 (out of 26) victims of the Buldhana bus tragedy on early Saturday, who hailed from different parts of the state, were being given a mass cremation in Buldhana.

"As their pyres burnt, in Mumbai there was rejoicing, handshakes and hugs in Raj Bhavan where the new Deputy CM and Ministers were sworn-in This was improper, they should have at least waited for the cremation fires to extinguish before their celebrations," said Raut.
Chandigarh, July 3 : A war of words erupted between Punjab Chief Minister Bhagwant Mann and BJP leader Capt Amarinder Singh after the former asserted that the government will not pay Rs 55 lakh spent on the "lavish" stay of dreaded criminal Mukhtar Ansari in jails of the state.

The money, he added, will be recovered from Capt Amarinder Singh and former deputy chief Sukhjinder Randhawa.

Chief Minister Mann went to the extent of saying that if they failed to pay up the money, their pension and other benefits will be stopped to recover the money.

Responding to the statement, Capt Amarinder Singh asked Mann to learn the process of law and investigation before issuing such statements as it only exposes his ignorance about governance.

Capt Amarinder said he had served as the Chief Minister for nine-and-a-half years, while Mann has not even completed one-and-a-half years. He should better first learn and gain experience before making such ignorant statements about the processes of governance, the former Congress leader stated.

He said Ansari was brought to Punjab and detained here under due process of law for the investigation. "Where does the Chief Minister or for that matter the Jails' Minister (Sukhjinder Randhawa) come into the picture," he asked Mann, while advising him to brush up his knowledge of legal and investigative processes before making such funny statements which will only end up in his (Mann) cutting a sorry figure in the public.

Joining the political discourse, the Chief Minister said history is testimony to the fact that the self proclaimed 'wiseness' of the Patiala scion has ruined the state.

In a statement here, the Chief Minister said the entire Punjab knows that Captain (Amarinder Singh) had always been bothered about his chair rather than the state and its people.

By confining himself to palaces, the Captain has totally ignored the interests of the state during his days in power.

Mann said it is a fact that Captain has a lineage of backstabbing Punjab and Punjabis.

The Chief Minister was categorically clear in saying that no Punjabi can ever forget that forefathers of Captain had sided with Mughals and Britishers for their vested interests, adding they had committed countless atrocities on the patriots fighting for country's freedom during the British regime.

Toeing the line of his ancestors, Mann said, the former Chief Minister had hobnobbed with the Congress and Akalis whenever it suited his political interests.

Mann said now again he has decided to join hands with the anti-Punjab and anti-farmers BJP despite the fact that the saffron party is responsible for martyrdom of more than 700 farmers during agitation against draconian farm laws.

The Chief Minister said the 'power hungry' Captain had switched sides only for sake of power which is quite similar to what his ancestors did during the Jallianwala Bagh massacre in 1919 by siding with Britishers.

Meanwhile, Leader of the Opposition and Congress leader Partap Singh Bajwa ridiculed the Chief Minister by saying he has never remained silent on the issues concerning the interests of Punjab. On the contrary, it is the Aam Aadmi Party-led government that attempted to dilute Punjab's claim on the capital and river waters.

Bajwa said the AAP government had already surrendered Punjab's right over Chandigarh. Mann has yet to delete his July 9, 2022, tweet in which he demanded a piece of land in Chandigarh from the Centre for a separate Punjab Vidhan Sabha.

This means Mann still owns his statement in that tweet, which actually weakens Punjab's case, said Bajwa. "Besides this, the AAP government never presented the case of Punjab's rights on its river waters strongly enough. In a meeting with Union Home Minister Amit Shah in July 2022, the AAP government's cabinet ministers Harjot Singh Bains and Harpal Singh Cheema demanded a new tribunal for assessing the state's river water that weakened Punjab's rights on river waters.

"Punjab CM Bhagwant Mann never cited riparian law to claim Punjab's rights on river waters in meetings held lately," Bajwa added.

Unleashing a volley of questions at Mann, Bajwa said that he (Mann) must explain now what had he done so far to ensure that the state government was working on its own without the intervention from the 'pawns' sent by the AAP Delhi in Punjab.

"Punjab CM Bhagwant Mann, in reality, is nothing more than a rubber stamp. It is the Delhi CM Arvind Kejriwal who has been running the Punjab government through his close confidants," Bajwa added.

(Vishal Gulati can be contacted at gulatiians@gmail.com)
Bengaluru, July 3 : The National Investigation Agency (NIA) probing the BJP activist Praveen Kumar Nettaru murder case is all set to seize the properties of the main accused persons as they failed to surrender before the authorities, sources said on Monday.

The NIA had given a deadline till June 30 for the surrender of the accused persons.

The agency authorities had made the announcement in this regard in Sullia and Bellare towns through mikes. The notices were pasted on the residences of the accused and the family members were intimated.

The authorities had also made announcements of cash rewards for those who gave tips to the police about the accused persons.

Umar Farooq and Mustafa Paichar, both residents of Kallu Mutlu, the prime accused persons in Nettaru's murder case have remained elusive till date, though the NIA has launched an all out operation to nab them in Karnataka and Kerala states.

Sources said that NIA was collecting the details of movable and immovable assets of the accused persons from the Revenue department and other sources. They are also gathering inputs on the official bank accounts.

The NIA will submit the list of properties to the court and later they will be confiscated and handed over to the government.

The NIA has not been able to nab the two prime accused even 11 months after the incident.

The authorities have submitted the facts to the local NIA Special court and sought consent for stringent action against the accused persons.

The court honoring the submission of the NIA had given its consent and released the order of confiscation of the properties of the two prime accused if they do not surrender by June 30. The order was given on Wednesday.

NIA, which is probing Praveen Kumar Nettare murder case, has submitted a charge sheet against 20 accused persons to the NIA Special court in Bengaluru. They have arrested 14 persons and have launched a hunt for six others who are absconding.

The NIA had submitted 1,500 pages of the charge sheet, including statements of 240 witnesses.

The Socialist Democratic Party of India (SDPI) had announced a ticket for Shafi Bellare, an accused in the murder case for the recently held Assembly elections in Karnataka. The development had raised debate in the state and he contested from jail but lost his deposit.

Nettare was hacked to death at the height of the hijab crisis in the state on July 26, 2022. The incident had taken place in Bellare near Sullia in Dakshina Kannada district. The development had led to revenge killings and a series of stabbing incidents in the state.
Toronto, July 3 : Baltej Singh Dhillon, the first turbaned Sikh officer in the Royal Canadian Mounted Police (RCMP), has been appointed Chair of WorkSafeBC's board of directors, making him the first South Asian to hold the top post.

Dhillon, a member of the Board since 2017, was appointed for a three-year term effective June 30 after an announcement by Minister of Labour, Harry Bains, last week.

"Baltej was a veteran police officer who brings expertise in law enforcement and six years of experience as a director at WorkSafeBC. He will be committed to WorkSafeBC's role in investigating serious workplace incidents to prevent similar incidents from happening again," Bains said in his announcement.

The WorkSafeBC is a provincial agency dedicated to promoting safe and healthy workplaces across British Columbia.

Dhillon retired from the police force in 2019 after a three-decade-long career working in intelligence, special enforcement, protection services, and in investigations for the 1985 Air India bombing task force and the Pickton case.

He made history by being the first RCMP member to wear a turban as part of the uniform, and also received Queen Elizabeth II Golden and Diamond Jubilee medals for community service.

"I am excited to begin working as chair with my fellow board members and WorkSafeBC staff to continue making progress in improving the workers' compensation system to meet the needs of workers, employers and others throughout the province," Dhillon said.

Born and raised in Malaysia, Dhillon immigrated to British Columbia in 1983 at the age of 16.

Dhillon studied criminology and applied to the RCMP in 1988 where he refused to abide by the dress code of the time, which banned turbans and required clean-shaven faces.

In March 1990, after months of protests, the Progressive Conservative government of Prime Minister Brian Mulroney announced several changes to the RCMP dress code, which included freedom to keep beards and wear turbans for Sikhs.

The WorkSafeBC board of directors is appointed by the British Columbia minister of labour. The board members serve as stewards of WorkSafeBC and the workers' compensation system.
London, July 3 : England has resisted making sweeping changes by sticking with many of their regulars as they named a 15-man squad for the third Ashes Test in Headingley, starting from July 6, with Rehan Ahmed and Matty Potts dropping out.

The fitness of a pair of key players will be monitored in the lead-up to the third Ashes Test, with top-order batter Ollie Pope set to undergo scans on his troublesome shoulder and experienced spinner Moeen Ali still in some doubt with his finger problem.

Ahmed was added to England's squad for the Lord's Test as cover for Moeen, but the teenager drops out of the reckoning for the Headingley Test in what appears a good sign for Moeen's fitness.

Pope hurt his right shoulder during England's 43-run loss to Australia in the second Test at Lord's and selectors will be hoping the 25-year-old is fit to take on the tourists in the crucial third Test.

If Pope is ruled out then it is likely Dan Lawrence will earn a place in England's XI, with the right-hander the only spare batter in the squad that selectors named on Sunday.

The dropping of Potts suggests Mark Wood or Chris Woakes will come into the XI at Headingley. England are almost certain to rotate their attack to manage Jimmy Anderson's, Stuart Broad's and Ollie Robinson's workload, who have played in the first two Tests.

Australia have won the opening two matches of the five-Test series and England need to triumph in the remaining three contests to regain the urn and become just the second team to come from 2-0 down to claim an Ashes series victory.

England squad for third Test: Ben Stokes (c), Moeen Ali, James Anderson, Jonny Bairstow, Stuart Broad, Harry Brook, Zak Crawley, Ben Duckett, Dan Lawrence, Ollie Pope, Ollie Robinson, Joe Root, Josh Tongue, Chris Woakes, Mark Wood
President Xi Jinping spent his first term of office (2013  2018) in consolidating his power, escalating repression and testing policy mainly in his old stamping ground of Zhejiang. He was elected to a second term of office after the constitution was amended to remove presidential terms. He spent this second term establishing his authority, especially over Hong Kong.

Laws changed

In early 2019, Beijing made controversial changes to Hong Kongs Basic Law. This triggered protests, which in turn triggered a violent crackdown. For twelve months Hong Kong resembled a war zone. In February 2020, with the protests subdued, President Xi installed Xia Baolong as Director of the State Councils Hong Kong and Macau Affairs Office.

A ruthless enforcer and close ally of Xi, Xia Baolong gained infamy among Chinese Christians when he led the CCPs 2014-15 campaign to remove crosses and demolish churches in Zhejiang province.On 30 June 2020 Beijing passed national security legislation into Hong Kong (HK) law, bypassing HKs legislative council, effectively ending the one country, two systems era.

TheSinicisation of Christianity

On 18-19 May 2023, for the first time ever, a seminar on The Sinicisation of Christianity was held in Hong Kong. The event was jointly hosted by the China Christian Council (CCC, an official umbrella organisation for Chinas Protestant churches), the Three-Self Patriotic Movement (TSPM, the government-controlled Protestant body) and the Hong Kong Christian Council.

The Chinese delegation of 24 attenders included TSPM chairperson, Rev Xu Xiaohong, who presided over the seminar, CCC president, Rev Wu Wei, five TSPM academics and other clergy. Around 120 Protestant leaders from Hong Kong attended the seminar.

The CCP portrays sinicisation as Christianity with Chinese characteristics, and a positive step towards a healthy nationalism that rejects colonial impositions. In practice, however, sinicisation requires religion (Christianity and Islam) serve the State/CCP.

Indeed, the primary obligation of sinicised Christianity is to lead the people to love and obey the CCP. According to the high level CCC and TSMP officials who addressed the May seminar, sinicised Christianity is patriotic Christianity, and true Hong Kong Christian patriots will sinicise their churches  as occurs on the mainland.

The implication is that anyone who rejects the order to register with and function as a tool of the CCP will be branded unpatriotic and treated as a threat to national security  as occurs on the mainland.

The May seminar undoubtedly heralds the end of an era for Hong Kongs estimated 850,000 Christians (12.4 percent of the population), roughly 1500 churches, 35 Bible Colleges and multiple Christian media organisations. Five years after that TIME magazine article was published, Hong Kong is no longer in the freer world.

Beijing will now move to fully assimilate the Church in Hong Kong into the mainlands CCP-controlled Church. As on the mainland, the choice facing Hong Kongs Christian leaders is: (a) to submit and assimilate with the CCP-controlled Church to avoid persecution, OR (b) to move underground and assimilate with the mainlands unregistered (and therefore illegal), sorely persecuted Church. A very dark period of arrests and persecutions looms.



India  Manipur burns

On 3 May Hindus from Manipurs dominant Meitei tribe launched a pogrom against predominantly Christian ethnic Kukis in Churachandpur. The violence spread to the capital, Imphal, where it evolved into a sectarian pogrom with Hindus targeting all things Christian. Meitei Christian converts were severely victimised and are reportedly under immense pressure to reconvert [to Hinduism].

Hindu rioting in Manipur, in Indias Northeast, has left over 70 dead, some 230 wounded and more than 45,000 displaced  virtually all ethnic minority Christians. Around 100 churches and 1700 Christian-owned homes  along with thousands of cars  have been vandalised, looted and torched; many reduced to rubble and ash.

Christians insist the police did not intervene to protect them. By 12 May the situation was largely under control and thousands of mostly Kuki-Chin Christians had been evacuated to camps under military protection. The situation in the north-eastern BJP-led state remains volatile.

The situation is out of control, the RevdZuankamangDaimai of the Manipur Baptist Convention Centre told Catholic media on 4 May. Our people are in shock, praying for peace. The [dominant, mostly Hindu] Meitei group acts as if it is above the law while [the mostly Christian] minority groups are hiding for their lives. The violence has left Manipurs Christian community deeply shaken.

The ruling BJP has turned much of India into a tinderbox - one spark is all it takes to ignite a raging fire. Such violence is the natural consequence of years of Hindu nationalist propaganda. It is what happens when politicians incite religious hatred for political gain.

Please pray

For Hong Kong: May the Church in Hong Kong receive all the wisdom she will need to navigate the increasingly treacherous path ahead.

May God grant the Chinese Church patience and persistence in prayer, along with endurance and faithfulness in glorious hope as the Lord works out his eternal purposes concerning President Xi Jinping, the Chinese Communist Party, the nation of China, and the Chinese Church that will one day be free!

May Chinas long-persecuted house church movement be preparing, even now, to support the faithful Church in Hong Kong to endure the coming persecution.



For Manipur:May those who rampaged against their neighbours, fuelled by hatred fed them by Hindu nationalists, repent of their sin and pursue reconciliation. May ringleaders, arsonists and killers be arrested; may justice prevail.



May God comfort and heal Manipurs grieving, wounded and traumatised Christians. May God provide their every need: for enduring security, for the funds to rebuild, and for grace to forgive.



May God protect and help Meitei Christian converts  especially those in the Meitei- and Hindu-dominated Imphal Valley. May the Holy Spirit empower them to stand firm in their faith amidst threats, hostility and intense pressure to return to Hinduism. May the Naga and Kuki believers stand with them, to support them, advocate for them and bless them, in a powerful demonstration of the uniting power of the Gospel of Jesus Christ. May they all shine as lights in the world, holding fast to the word of life (from Philippians 2:12-18).
New Delhi, July 3 : The Commonwealth Hub for Business of Governments became a reality on July 1, when Daniel Chenok, Executive Director of the IBM Center for the Business of Government based in Washington, DC, signed an MoU with the Management Development Institute (MDI), represented by its Director, Prof. Sangeeta Bharadwaj.

This Hub represents a partnership between the Commonwealth Secretariat, IBM Center for the Business of Government and MDI. The agreement between IBM Center and MDI was signed on July 1, on the conclusion of a major two-day International Conference on Innovations in Public Performance Management  Lessons for Policy Makers held in Delhi on June 30 and July 1.

Organised by MDI in Delhi, this International Conference was attended by more than 150 national and international experts from academia and government.

The mission of Hub is to support Commonwealth governments to do their business better, faster, and cheaper for excellence in service delivery and timely achievement of the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). The Hub activities will span research, publications, training, and knowledge management and knowledge sharing through a Commonwealth-wide community of practice.

The intent will be to spark creativity in addressing critical public sector challenges and crafting new ways of improving government by identifying international trends, ideas, and best practices in public management that would assist governments in responding more effectively to their mission and management priorities. And to create and nurture a vibrant community of practice consisting of professionals interested in the aspects of the business of their respective governments.

In her inaugural speech at the International Conference, the Secretary-General of the Commonwealth, Patricia Scotland said, "India is ideally placed with its diverse expertise and experimentation in public system innovation to add value to many countries across the commonwealth countries"

Executive Director Daniel Chenok, IBM Center for the Business of Government, while sharing their experience of over three decades working with different governments, explained how they generate ideas and convert them into products for government to use. He referred to how the newly elected member of Parliament in the US are expected to read the Book 'Getting It Done' produced by IBM.

Prof. Prajapati Trivedi, Distinguished Professor and Special Envoy for Commonwealth Secretary-General, said that the Commonwealth Hub for the Business of Government "will combine the strengths of the three partners to create a unique institution to serve not only the 56 countries of the Commonwealth, but all members of the United Nations." Prof. Trivedi stressed the need for Hub to focus on "helping government with practical toolkits that work."

Prof. Sangeeta Shah Bhardwaj, Director, MDI, suggested that "for businesses to work efficiently, they need an efficient and capable partner." She emphasised that "good principles of management are transcendental."

Prof. Avanish Kumar, Dean School of Public Policy at MDI highlighted the need to produce demand-based knowledge creation that promotes partnership based on the mutual understanding and collaboration." The Chairman of the Board of Governors, MDI, Rajnish Kumar, a former Chairman of SBI, stated that the "hub can unleash the capacity to perform in the public system through innovation and transform the lives of millions not only in India but across the globe."

The MDI Hub is committed to making knowledge and its product accessible to all. Several experts expressed their willingness to collaborate and contribute to Hub. The proposed Hub envisages creating seamless access to knowledge and expertise across different levels of government worldwide. It will be the operation arm of the School of Public Policy, said Dean Avanish Kumar.
Hyderabad, July 3 : Afraid of being caught for stealing a diamond ring worth Rs 50 lakh, a woman working at a dental and skin clinic in Hyderabad flushed it a toilet.

The incident came to light after police in Hyderabad took up investigation into the theft of the ring at a dental clinic in posh Jubilee Hills.

According to police, the daughter-in-law of one Narendra Kumar Agarwal had visited the clinic for a check-up on June 27.

During the check-up, the woman took out her diamond ring from finger and kept it on the side table. She, however, forgot to take it after the check-up and left the clinic.

After returning home, the woman realized that she forgot to take her ring back and rushed to the clinic.

However, she could not find the ring and the inquiries with the staff at the clinic yielded no result.

Narendra Kumar subsequently lodged a complaint with Jubilee Hills police station.

As part of the investigation, police examined the CCTV footage and began questioning the staff.

One of the women working at the clinic told the investigators that someone had put the ring wrapped in a tissue paper in her purse and she flushed it in the commode.

The police with the help of a plumber recovered the ring from the pipeline connecting the commode.

Police have detained the woman and are questioning her.

It is suspected that she picked up the ring from the table but panicked when police started the investigation. Afraid of being caught, she threw it in the toilet and flushed it.

--IANS

ms/shb
Surat, July 3 : The Surat police arrested a 22-year-old woman from Chhattisgarh in connection with the murder of her two-year-old son, said police, adding that she was 'inspired' by movie 'Drishyam'.

The arrest comes after the woman had earlier filed a kidnapping complaint on June 27 at the Dindoli police station, claiming that her child had gone missing. The arrest took place on Saturday.

The arrested individual has been identified as Nayna Mandavi, hailing from Rajnandgaon in Chhattisgarh. The woman confessed to the police that she had been an avid viewer of crime thrillers, particularly mentioning the movie 'Drishyam'.

Drawing inspiration from the film, she believed that by concealing her child's body, she would evade the clutches of the law.

According to the ongoing police investigation, it has been revealed that the woman's paramour refused to marry her if she kept her child. Subsequently, in a chilling act, she killed her own child as a means to remove this obstacle, as confirmed by the authorities.

Throughout the week, the accused had maintained that her child had been kidnapped. However, investigators found no CCTV footage supporting this claim or any evidence of the child leaving the residential complex.

During intense interrogation, the woman eventually admitted to murdering her son and burying the body in an open area behind the colony. However, upon excavation, the police did not discover any remains at the indicated spot.

Further questioning led to a shocking revelation. The woman disclosed that she had strangled her child and disposed of the body by throwing it into the water-filled bottom of the elevator shaft.

The woman had previously entered into a marriage in her native village four years ago, but due to disputes and mistreatment by her husband, she sought refuge in Surat two years ago with her two-month-old son, Vir, to live with her mother. It was during her stay in Surat that she formed a friendship with Sanju, a labourer at the same construction project where she was employed, as detailed by the police.

The accused has been taken into custody, and further legal proceedings will be conducted, said police.
Thiruvananthapuram, July 3 : Leader of Opposition in Kerala Assembly V.D.Satheesan on Monday said like the BJP, the CPI(M) is also raking up the Uniform Civil Code ( UCC) issue for political gains.

Satheesan pointed out that the Law Commission appointed by the Modi government itself has expressed its reservations on UCC.

"The Congress also feels that the time is not ripe for it , but the Modi government is trying to make political gains ahead of the upcoming elections. Just like BJP, even the CPI(M) is also trying to make political gains," he said.

"Not long ago, during the peaceful protests the state against the CAA (Citizen Amendment Act ), the Pinarayi Vijayan government had registered cases against the protesters. When we raised the issue in the Assembly, Vijayan had assured of withdrawing all the cases, but till date nothing has been done," said Satheesan.

"The very fact that cases have not been withdrawn clearly shows that that Vijayan does not wish to displease anyone. The same attitude is now being displayed on UCC," added Satheesan.

--IANS

sg/shb
Bhopal, July 3 : In a bid to attract investors in Madhya Pradesh, the BJP government has decided to renew the license of industry and trade for a period of ten years.

The announcement was made by Chief Minister Shivraj Singh Chouhan while addressing the concluding session of 44th annual convention of Federation of MP Chambers of Commerce-and Industries in Bhopal on Sunday.

Chief Minister Chouhan also assured the business community there will be no shortage in promoting trade and industries in Madhya Pradesh and efforts would be made to generate employment.

"The industrial growth rate in the state is 24 per cent. The state government is trying to promote industries in every sector. Traders and industrialists should work together for the prosperity of the state. Keep participating in the development continuously," Chouhan said.

He further claimed the per capita income in the state has increased from Rs 11,000 to Rs 1,40,000.

"We are moving forward in every field including employment and skill, irrigation, development of cities, drinking water, panchayat, rural development, energy, forest. agricultural production has increased significantly. The production of electricity has increased from 2900 MW to 28000 MW," he added.
San Francisco, July 3 : Microsoft-backed OpenAI CEO Sam Altman on Monday asked the US government to reform high-skill immigration so that they can come and join innovation at scale.

Altman, who visited India last month and encouraged the AI startup ecosystem, said that this policy change will be a "hard-won gift" for the country.

"One of the easiest policy wins I can imagine for the US is to reform high-skill immigration," said Altman.

"The fact that many of the most talented people in the world want to be here is a hard-won gift; embracing them is the key to keeping it that way. Hard to get this back if we lose it," he emphasised in a Twitter post.

Several users, including Indian entrepreneurs, reacted to his post.

"Immigrants not only built the first microchips in Silicon Valley, but they built the tech titans they are known as today. After all, more than 50 of billion-dollar startups are founded by immigrants, and many of those startups were founded by immigrants on H-1B visas," said Amit Misra, Founder and CEO of Dazeinfo.

Gagan Sandhu, Co-founder and CEO of Xillion app said that Universities, VCs, accelerators, tech companies and the entire tech ecosystem "can come together and forge public-private partnership with the federal government to bring real change."

Last month, just days before Prime Minister Narendra Modi's state visit to the US, the Joe Biden administration eased green card eligibility norms for those planning to stay in the YS.

The State Department announced that a small number of Indians and other foreign workers on H-1B visas will now be able to renew those visas in the US, without having to travel abroad.

Every year, the US government issues 65,000 H-1B visas to corporations and Indians garner a major chunk of H-1B visa approvals every year.

Prafull Billore, a venture investor, wrote to Altman that for Indians who go to the US and excel (recent example being Ajay Banga at World Bank) at their jobs, "it is of utmost importance that the US continues to provide cushioning for talented immigrants and a supportive ecosystem".

--IANS

na/prw
New Delhi, July 3 : The Delhi High Court on Monday posted for July 27 a plea by a right-wing group challenging the certification granted to the film 'Adipurush' under the Cinematograph Act of 1952.

The movie, directed by Om Raut, released nationwide on June 16 and the plea filed as a PIL claims that the characters in the film deviate from the portrayal of these religious figures in the Hindu epic Ramayana.

A division bench of Justice Satish Chandra Sharma and Justice Sanjeev Narula adjourned the matter.

On June 21, the vacation bench of Justice Tara Vitasta Ganju and Justice Amit Mahajan had refused urgent hearing of the plea.

During the hearing, petitioner, Hindu Sena president Vishnu Gupta's counsel had sought for urgent listing.

"I am seeking the listing of the plea today or on Friday, because there are many controversial scenes in the movie," the counsel had said.

"When the teaser of the movie was released there was an outcry, the director promised to remove parts, but it wasn't removed, similarly when the trailer of the movie was released it happened again, they promised again. Currently, it hinges the international relations, even Nepal has banned the movie", the counsel had further contended.

However, the vacation bench had refused the urgent listing of the matter. "You are well aware in advance of the release of the film. If it has already released what are you restraining?" Justice Ganju had remarked orally.

The PIL had also sought directions for the removal or correction of alleged objectionable scenes. It is the petitioner's case that the movie "offends the sentiments" of the Hindu community by presenting the religious characters in "an inaccurate and inappropriate manner" that goes against the descriptions found in the works of authors like Maharishi Valmiki and Tulsidas.

The petition argues that the portrayal of characters such as Ravana (played by Saif Ali Khan) and Lord Hanuman in the film is completely divorced from Indian civilisation.

"The bearded look of Ravana's character played by Saif Ali Khan in the film is hurting the sentiments of Hindu community as the Hindu Brahmin Ravana is shown making a ghastly face in a wrong manner which is an absolute insult to Hindu civilisation, Hindu religious figures, idols, ideals, etc.," the plea alleges.

The petition also claims that the "inaccurate" depiction of Hindu religious characters has garnered criticism and resentment from across the country, including from actors who have portrayed these characters in Ramanand Sagar's 'Ramayana'.

"The hair style, beard, moustache and dressing manner, including appearances are well defined as per the image created in those epics. Any variation of these images by the film producers and directors and actors would certainly hurt the sentiments of worshipers, devotees and religious believers," the petition claims.

The movie stars Prabhas, Kriti Sanon, and Saif Ali Khan in the leading roles of Lord Ram, Sita, and Ravana, respectively.
Srinagar, July 3 : Jammu and Kashmir Lt. Governor Manoj Sinha said on Monday that after the G20 meet there has been an increase in the number of foreign tourist arrivals in Kashmir.

Addressing a media conference at the Raj Bhawan here, the Lt Governor said that the G20 meeting held here on May 22-24 has proved to be a game changer in the tourism sector of the UT.

"The participants of G20 meet have gone back to their countries with a positive message. After the G20 meet we have seen a significant increase in the foreign tourist arrivals in J&K. In the coming months, the number is expected to go up further.

"Srinagar is now emerging as a hub of international activities. For the first time, the Indian system of medicine, engineers' association, chartered accountants association and 18 Supreme Court judges participated in different meetings in Srinagar," he said.

Sinha made an important announcement during the media briefing, he said that after discussing the issue at the state administrative council, with the revenue and the rural development departments, it has been decided that 5 Marlas (1/4 of a Kanal) of land would be given to the landless families in of J&K.

"The Prime Minister, Narendra Modiji had announced the PM Awas Yojana and J&K couldn't lag behind.

"So far, 2711 landless families have been given land and more would be covered shortly.

"A total of 1,99,550 families have been identified and till June 21, 1,44,000 of these have been given sanction for land and the remaining would also be covered soon," the Lt. Governor said.

He did not clearly state whether the West Pakistan refugees would be covered under this scheme. He said that proper criteria is being followed and everybody fulfilling that criteria will get land under the scheme adding that there is no caste or religion being followed while allotting such land.

Answering a question on the Amarnath Yatra the Lt. Governor said that the Yatra is going on smoothly through both the Yatra routes. He, however, accepted that traffic management remains an issue since a pilgrim or a tourist coming here for the first time is not aware of the timings, etc., and sometimes gets stuck in the snarl.

He assured that traffic management would be streamlined in the next 2-3 days.

The Lt. Governor said that there is no restriction on the media for covering the Yatra.

About the Amarnath Yatra, he said that the pilgrimage is going on smoothly on both tracks amid proper security arrangements.
Hyderabad, July 3 : Bharat Rashtra Samithi (BRS) working president K. T. Rama Rao has hit back at Congress leader Rahul Gandhi after the latter's blistering attack on BRS at Khammam public rally on Sunday.

The BRS leader made a point to point rebuttal to the Congress MP's speech at 'Telangana Jana Garjana' rally. KTR took to Twitter to launch a counter attack through a stinging post in Telugu using rhyming words.

Responding to Rahul Gandhi dubbing BRS as 'BJP Rishtedar Samithi', the BRS leader called Congress a party of vultures.

KTR, who is the son of BRS president and Telangana Chief Minister K. Chandrasekhar Rao, dubbed All India Congress Committee (AICC) as All India Corruption Committee.

The BRS working president alleged that Congress is synonymous with corruption and incompetence. On Rahul Gandhi calling BRS BJP's B team, KTR said that BRS is neither B team of BJP nor C team of Congress.

He said that BRS is 'Dhee' (hit) team which can single handedly take on both BJP and Congress.

"Unable to take on BRS directly, are you conspiring to shoot us from BJP's shoulders?," he asked, adding that it will be Congress which will collapse in this misfiring.

Stating that the steering of cars (poll symbol of BRS) is in the hands of KCR, the BRS leader taunted Rahul Gandhi that he has lost control of Congress.

KTR said that Congress has already drowned in Bay of Bengal while BRS is close to the hearts of people.

He claimed that the nine-year rule of BRS is full of brightness while the 10-year rule of Congress was total darkness.

KTR also stated that people of Telangana know if they trust Congress, the state will slip into turmoil once again. He questioned why the Congress party was so rattled over expansion of BRS. "Is national politics your jagir," he asked.

On Congress leader's allegation of Rs.1 lakh crore corruption in Kaleshwaram project, KTR reminded him that even the cost of the project is not Rs.1 lakh crore. "How many times will you become a laughing stock in public by making such meaningless allegations," he asked.

Claiming that the Dharani portal introduced by the BRS government unravelled the complexities around land and land records, the BRS leader said the Telangana society will never forgive Rahul Gandhi for promising to scrap Dharani and bring back the rule of middlemen.

KTR also ridiculed Rahul Gandhi's promise to provide monthly pensions of Rs.4,000 to senior citizens, widows and others.

He asked 'who will believe this promise when you throw into Ganga 'Anna Bhagya' promise in Karnataka'. The BRS leader also claimed that in Karnataka, BJP was defeated by people and not Congress party.

"That result was because there was no alternative. It was not because of your competence," he said.

On Rahul Gandhi's announcement that if voted to power in Telangana, Congress will distribute Podu lands among farmers, KTR asked if he can't see the ongoing distribution of Podu lands in the state.

He advised the Congress MP to undergo eye check-up under 'Kanti Velugu', the free eye-screening programme of the state government.

Claiming that BRS is the party which always stands with the poor, KTR remarked that Congress always stands with brokers and encroachers.
Islamabad, July 3 : China has recently signed a nuclear energy deal with Pakistan worth $4.8 billion, accelerating its efforts towards civil nuclear cooperation, in a curios move to seek export customers in a market dictated by the West and Russia.

In June this year, China and Pakistan signed a nuclear energy deal worth 4.8 billion dollars, which experts believe is a prying move on part of Beijing, done at a time when it has already had a jarring ride on its investments in Pakistan's power business and has had to suffer to sapping cash crunch due to shortage of Islamabad's foreign exchange reserves and fears of an economic meltdown.

Experts believe that China's latest civil nuclear cooperation deal with Pakistan seems to be inclined towards more on strategic ambitions than economics.

"China wants to continue to build nuclear power plants in Pakistan to build up a track record for Chinese industry to enter other, perhaps more lucrative and less-captive nuclear power markets", said Mark Hibbs, a senior fellow for the Nuclear Policy Program at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace.

As per details of the nuclear deal, China will build a 1,200 megawatt plant at the Chashma nuclear power complex in central Pakistan, featuring it as Beijing's first indigenous civil nuclear reactor, the Hualong One. Hualong One is a third-generation pressurised water reactor, jointly developed by China National Nuclear Corporation and the China General Nuclear Power-Group, making it the fifth at the complex, which was built with Chinese assistance and currently produces 1,230 MW to the national grid.

While China is fact becoming one of the most prolific builder of nuclear plants; its exports plans for Pakistan are ambitious, stemming from recent official suggestions that by 2030, China could build at least 30 overseas reactors, spread across countries participating in its Belt and Road Initiative (BRI).

Pakistan Prime Minister Shehbaz Sharif has given pivotal significance and importance to its deal with China, terming it as a huge step towards diversifying the country's energy needs.

"This project is part of our energy security plan to diversify the energy mix with a focus on ensuring the provision of cheap electricity to the industry & relief to the common man," stated Prime Minister Shahbaz Sharif following the nuclear deal, saying the project "will be built with Chinese investment of $3.48 billion."

However, experts believe that China's ambitions are based on its efforts to showcase that it has indigenous technology for nuclear reactors that are safe, reliable and affordable, which in the longer run would serve Chinese interest to compete with other nuclear power exporters in the global markets.
Information is from police reports and may be incomplete depending on the status of an investigation. Phone numbers are nonemergency.
Chennai, July 3 : The effort of a woman engineer to change the name of the street where she resided from 'Adi Dravidar Theru' or 'Keezha Theru' or 'Paraya Theru' to 'Indira Nagar' has given her accolades and self-esteem to her village.

Anasuya Saravanamuthu (29), a Civil Engineer, was sore that her village road in Anandhavadi in Tamil Nadu's Ariyalur district, was named with caste taglines even as the street and locality was originally titled, 'Indira Nagar' in 1998 when it was formed.

Speaking to media persons, she said that even in government documents and ID cards like Aadhaar card, ration card and voter ID card the name of the street was mentioned as Adi Dravidar street, but the original name went into oblivion.

Anasuya herself was on the receiving end when in her new Aadhaar card she could find her street as 'Adi Dravidar Street' even as she had applied with the name 'Indira Nagar'. Determined to change this situation, she submitted a petition on August 8, 2022 to the collectorate along with signatures from other affected residents of the area.

She also submitted a petition to the Tamil Nadu Chief Minister's special cell on February 21, 2023 and later on July 1, 2023, the Anandhavadi panchayat installed a name board as 'Indira Nagar' in the street leading to her residence.

It may be noted that in the caste-ridden Tamil society, there are several streets that are named after the respective castes and caste Hindus generally used to call Dalits by names. This has often led to fights and even murders.

In 1978, the then Chief Minister of Tamil Nadu, M.G. Ramachandran had issued an order that directed removal of caste names from streets. The Dalit political party, VCK, office-bearers told IANS that the organisation would take up the matter to implement the decision taken by the late Chief Minister M.G. Ramachandran.
New Delhi, July 3 : A day after Sharad Pawar's nephew Ajit Pawar took oath as Maharashtra Deputy Chief Minister in Eknath Shinde government, Congress President Mallikarjun Kharge on Monday said that the Modi-led BJP government has all time to break political parties but has no time to fill in important vacancies in the Armed Forces as more than 2 lakh posts are lying vacant.

He also said that national security is not a priority for them, only betraying the mandate of the people is their priority.

In a tweet, Kharge charging the government said, "Modi government has all the time to break political parties, but it has no time to fill in important vacancies in the Armed Forces. Those who trumpet 'Nationalism' on a daily basis, have betrayed our Armed Forces like no other."

"Currently, there are more than 2 lakh vacancies in the Armed Forces and Central Armed Police Forces. Agnipath Scheme is the explicit admission that Modi government does not have funds for our soldiers. Modi government has betrayed the Defence community on OROP implementation and created a divide among our brave Jawans by inducing large scale anomalies in OROP-2. For Modi government and the BJP, National Security is not a National priority. Only betraying the mandate of the people is their priority," Kharge added.

His remarks came a day after Ajit Pawar split with the NCP, and took oath in the Maharashtra government, along with eight MLAs.
Kolkata, July 3 : West Bengal government on Monday submitted an application in the Supreme Court seeking withdrawal of its Second Special Leave Petition (SLP) challenging an earlier order of a single-judge bench of Calcutta High Court directing a central agency probe in the multi- crore municipal recruitment case in the state.

This is the second time that the state government has withdrawn its SLP at the apex court in the matter.

The order for a central probe in the case was originally given by Calcutta High Courtas single- judge bench of Justice Abhijit Gangopadhyay.

The state government first approached the Supreme Court challenging the decision.

However, the apex court referred the matter back to the Calcutta High Court. Thereafter, the state government approached Calcutta High Courtas single- judge bench of Justice Amrita Sinha, who upheld Justice Gangopadhyay's order and directed the central agencies to continue with their probe in the matter.

Thereafter, the state government challenged the order by Justice Sinha at a division bench of the Calcutta High Court and also submitted a parallel SLP at the Supreme Court in the matter.

However, a division bench of Justices Tapabrata Chakraborty and Partha Satathi Chatterjee, expressed anguish over the state government keeping multi-court options open in the matter. Being reprimanded by the Calcutta High Court, the state government withdrew the first SLP in the matter.

On June 15, Calcutta High Courtas division bench of Justices Chakraborty and Justice Chatterjee had upheld the earlier single-judge bench order for a central agency probe in municipalitiesa recruitment case.

Following which the state government had filed a second SLP at the apex court against the order of the division bench of the Calcutta High Court.

The state government on Monday gave an application for withdrawing the second SLP in the matter at the apex court.
Hyderabad, June 3 : Samajwadi Party leader Akhilesh Yadav called on Bharat Rashtra Samithi (BRS) president and Telangana Chief Minister K. Chandrasekhar Rao here on Monday.

The former chief minister of Uttar Pradesh, who reached Hyderabad by a special aircraft, was received by state minister T. Srinivas Yadav at Begumpet Airport.

He later reached Pragathi Bhavan, the official residence of the chief minister, where Chief Minister KCR welcomed him.

The two leaders were meeting over lunch.

Earlier, talking to reporters at the airport the SP leader said he would be able to comment only after meeting KCR.

He evaded all queries saying, "I will be able to comment after the meeting but all (parties) have one aim and it is to remove BJP from power.

"We all together want to remove BJP," he said.

"I have nothing to say at the moment. When you want to remove the BJP government at the Centre, you have to find a way," he said.

BRS had skipped the meeting of opposition parties held last month in Patna. The party leaders had said that they want people to unite and not parties.

BRS working president K. T. Rama Rao had said that their party doesn't subscribe to the view that Congress or BJP have to be at the centrestage of any alliance.

The SP leader's meeting with KCR comes a day after Congress leader Rahul Gandhi stated at a public meeting at Khammam that the Congress party had made it clear that it will not attend any meeting where BRS is invited.
Thiruvananthapuram, July 3 : Kerala Pradesh Congress Committee (KPCC) chief K.Sudhakaran on Monday claimed that he narrowly escaped six bids on his life by CPI(M) after assuming the post of Kannur district party president in 1992.

His claims come two days after former CPI(M) party organ 'Deshabhiman's' associate editor G.Sakthidharan alleged that a plot was hatched to eliminate the Congress leader.

"The accused managed to escape from the law as all those who plotted to eliminate me hold high positions either in their party or in government," said Sudhakaran.

On one occasion, the victim of the attack was his elder brother as he was using his car and the CPI(M) thought it was he who was the passenger in the car, he claimed.

On another occasion a CPI(M) worker alerted his office saying that he should not visit his former close aide's new residence. "To confirm if it was true, I sent a close aide of mine and was alarmed to find that en route to the new residence, there were people waiting to pounce on him and his aide called him from there asking me not to go there," said Sudhakaran.

Most of these incidents were plotted in and around Kannur district, the Congress leader said, adding that since he is a strong believer in God, the CPI(M) will never succeed and he also has the full support of his party workers.
New York, July 3 : A 72-year-old Indian-origin urologist from Florida has been accused of incorrectly performing the vasectomy procedure on his 51-year-old patient.

According to a complaint by the Florida Department of Health, Dilipkumar Patel performed the procedure on the right side of the patient instead of the left side, The Miami Herald reported.

The incident is the first complaint against Patel since being licensed in February 1982.

The complaint said that on June 10, 2022, Patel was supposed to perform a vasectomy on the left side of a man who had already had a vasectomy done on the right side by a different doctor.

aDuring the procedure, (Patel) conducted a vasectomy of the right side as opposed to the left side," the complaint read.

A few hours following the procedure, (Patel) noticed the error and told the patient that he had done a vasectomy of the right side instead of the left, The Herald reported, citing the complaint.

During a vasectomy, a small incision or puncture is made in the scrotum to access the vas deferens -- the tubes that are the highway for sperm between the testes and penis. The tubes are then cut, sealed, or blocked to prevent sperm from passing through. After the procedure, the incisions are typically closed with stitches or surgical adhesive.

Patel returned neither a phone message left with his office by a Herald reporter nor a response to the email address on his Florida Department of Health profile.

--IANS

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New Delhi, July 3 : Sentiments of investors are reinforced by positive domestic data and optimistic global cues, says Vinod Nair, Head of Research at Geojit Financial Services Global market was supported by resilient economic data, avoiding the possibility of a recession. India's stock market trend was broad-based, owing to the outperformance from energy, financial, metal, and FMCG sectors, he said.

Economic activities are gaining strength with PMI level enlarging to 57.8, indicating sustained demand for products, fostering a sense of confidence in the manufacturing prospects.

Domestic equities surged higher, continuing last week's positive sentiment amid healthy 12 per cent growth in GST collection at Rs1.61 lakh crore for the month of June. Nifty continued its upward momentum driven by buying seen in index heavyweights. The index finally ended the session with gains of 133 points (+0.7 per cent) at 19,323 levels, says Siddhartha Khemka, Head - Retail Research, Motilal Oswal Financial Services.

Sectorally it was a mixed bag with a rally seen in PSU bank a" up 3 per cent and Oil & Gas up 2 per cent. Metals stocks were in the limelight on the back of marginally better-than-expected China manufacturing PMI data. Markets would react to other macro data like Manufacturing PMI data from the US, India's Manufacturing & Service PMI data, and FOMC meeting minutes, which would be released this week.

The overall structure of the market remains positive with Nifty attaining new highs at a steady pace. We expect PSU Banks to remain in focus on the expectation of healthy Q1FY24 numbers. With the monsoon deficiency reducing to 10%, agri-related stocks are likely to be in focus, he added.

Risk in the stock market is high due to rich valuations and some presently unknown negative developments can trigger a sharp correction, analysts have cautioned.

V. K. Vijayakumar, Chief Investment Strategist at Geojit Financial Services said the ongoing rally in the market has made valuations very rich. Nifty is trading at above 20 times estimated FY 24 earnings. This is higher than the historical average.

"Momentum can take the market higher; but at high valuations risk is high. Some presently unknown negative developments can trigger a sharp correction. So, even while remaining invested in the market, investors have to be cautious," he said.

The BSE Sensex scaled 65,000 on Monday. Indian markets have been scaling new highs led by huge FII buying.
New Delhi, July 3 : Nestled on the Arabian Peninsula, Qatar, rapidly emerging as a leading destination for Meetings, Incentives, Conferences, and Exhibitions (MICE) events.

This enchanting country seamlessly blends modernity with rich cultural heritage, offering a unique and immersive experience for MICE travellers.

With its state-of-the-art infrastructure, world-class facilities, and a commitment to providing unmatched hospitality, Qatar beckons event organisers to explore its captivating landscape.

Manoj Kumar Tiwari, General Manager, Regency Travel and Tours explains why Qatar is increasingly becoming the preferred destination for events, holidays, and more for the international traveller market.

At the heart of Qatar's MICE offerings lies the mesmerizing city of Doha. This vibrant metropolis boasts an array of architectural marvels, such as the iconic Museum of Islamic Art and the awe-inspiring Doha Corniche, which provides a stunning waterfront backdrop for events. The city's opulent hotels and convention centers, including the world-renowned Qatar National Convention Centre, are tailor-made to meet the diverse requirements of MICE gatherings. Doha's gastronomic scene, infused with diverse international flavours, further enriches the experience for participants, ensuring an exquisite culinary journey.

Qatar takes immense pride in its cultural heritage that comes alive through its numerous museums, galleries, and cultural centers. The Katara Cultural Village, an embodiment of Qatar's commitment to the arts, is a captivating venue for conferences and exhibitions. Its stunning amphitheater and open-air spaces offer a unique blend of modernity and tradition. Moreover, MICE attendees can immerse themselves in the nation's past by exploring the charm of Souq Waqif, a bustling traditional market exuding authentic Qatari flavours and ambience.

As a global aviation hub, Qatar offers unparalleled connectivity, ensuring seamless travel experiences for MICE participants. Hamad International Airport, a world-class facility known for its cutting-edge technology and exquisite design, serves as a gateway to Qatar's numerous wonders. The airport's strategic location and excellent connectivity make it easily accessible for international travellers, facilitating hassle-free travel arrangements for event organisers and attendees.

The futuristic destination is also committed to luxury as it extends its impressive selection of accommodations, with a range of high-end hotels that cater to the discerning needs of MICE travellers. From luxurious international chains to exquisite boutique hotels, Qatar offers a diverse selection that combines opulence with warm Qatari hospitality. These accommodations are designed to provide an exceptional experience, ensuring that attendees can unwind in comfort after a day of productive conferences or exhilarating networking sessions.

More than the immersive MICE offerings, Qatar's allure extends beyond the confines of conference rooms, offering a multitude of engaging activities and experiences that enhance the travellers' MICE journey. Attendees can embark on thrilling desert safaris, indulge in exhilarating water sports, or savour the sights and sounds of traditional dhow cruises along the picturesque coastline. Additionally, cultural tours, where visitors can explore Qatar's heritage sites and witness the art of falconry, add a touch of authenticity to the overall experience.

What also makes Qatar a notable pick for event organisers is its undeterred commitment to safety and security. The nation consistently ranks among the safest countries in the world, offering a secure environment for events. Qatar's stringent health and safety protocols, coupled with its robust healthcare infrastructure, ensure peace of mind for attendees, allowing them to focus on the purpose of their visit and derive maximum value from their MICE experience.

Qatar's rise as a prominent MICE destination is bolstered by its government's unwavering commitment to developing the sector. The Qatar National Tourism Council actively promotes and supports MICE events, offering assistance to organisers at every stage. Additionally, Qatar Airways, the country's flagship carrier, plays a pivotal role in facilitating access to Qatar, providing convenient round-the-clock flight connections and flexible travel options to cater to the needs of MICE travellers from across the globe.

Corporates are increasingly seeing the infinite experiences that Qatar offers to their stakeholders and their families leading to creating mesmerising MICE memories. From India, automobile manufacturer Maruti Suzuki India recently organised their annual dealer conference in Qatar while hosting a whopping 1200 dealers and their families. Qatar has hence become a key MICE attraction for the burgeoning Indian traveller market. As Qatar continues to invest in its MICE sector and leverage its strategic advantages, event organisers can confidently explore Qatar's exquisite destinations, where luxury, culture, and innovation converge to create an unforgettable experience for participants.

(IANSlife can be contacted at ianslife@ians.in)
Ramallah, July 3 : The Israeli army on Monday launched a major air strike on the West Bank city of Jenin, one of biggest military operation in the Palestinian territory in years, according to eyewitnesses and the Israeli military.

Dozens of armoured vehicles backed by drones and helicopters stormed the city and the refugee camp, said Palestinian eyewitnesses, adding that airstrikes were carried out during the exchange of fire between Palestinian militants and Israeli soldiers.

The Israeli military said it struck a "joint operations center" which served as a command center for fighters from the Jenin Brigades, an armed unit comprised of fighters from different militant groups. It declined to specify whether Monday's strike also involved a drone.

At least five Palestinians were killed and 28 injured in the attack that began at about 1 a.m. on Monday, with the death toll likely to rise, the Palestinian health ministry said, The Guardian reported.

The incursion into Jenin is the first since the 2002 Battle of Jenin during the second intifada, when more than 50 Palestinians and 23 Israeli soldiers were killed in over a week of fighting, including 13 Israeli soldiers in a single incident.

Mondayas incident brought the death toll of Palestinians killed this year in the West Bank to 133, part of more than a year-long spike in violence that has resulted in some of the worst bloodshed in that area in nearly two decades, The Guardian reported.

Palestinian eyewitnesses said Israeli forces entered Jenin shortly after the airstrikes began, and armed clashes erupted between the soldiers and the Palestinian gunmen.

Israel Radio reported that Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, who held a meeting with Israeli security leaders on Sunday night, has been updated as the operation continued.

The Palestinian side on Sunday slammed Netanyahu for his policy of motivating Israeli settlers to commit more crimes against the Palestinians.

"Netanyahu's boast of killing large numbers of Palestinians since the formation of his government motivates settlers to commit more of their crimes against our people," said the Palestinian Foreign Ministry in a statement.
Patna July 3 : : Janata Dal-U national president Lalan Singh on Monday claimed that the opposition parties will become stronger. The second opposition unity meeting will take place very soon, he said. "I was listening to the speech of PM Narendra Modi a few days ago. He was saying that NCP leaders in Maharashtra are involved in Rs 7,000 crore scams. Now, the majority of them have entered into an alliance with the BJP and are part of the government. They went into the washing machine of the BJP and will become clean," Singh said.

"They had split the Shiv Sena earlier and made Eknath Shinde the chief minister of Maharashtra. The elections of the BMC and other municipal corporations in other cities are scheduled but they are not being allowed to take place. They know that if the elections take place, they will lose with big margins. They did the same in Madhya Pradesh. People are watching the unethical activities of the BJP and they will react to it appropriately at election time," Singh said.

When asked about the Maharashtra effect on Bihar, Lalan Singh said: "There will be no effect on Bihar. The government is running smoothly. Sushil Kumar Modi is not a serious politician. He used to comment against us. Actually, he wants to attract the attention of the Centre to get some post. Our good wishes for him but I want to point out that Sushil Modi was not present in the Lakhisarai rally when Union Home Minister Amit Shah came there on June 29. It reflects how he thinks about the BJP and what the BJP thinks about him," Singh said.
MRV Banks recently announced new employee Angel Bollinger has joined the personal banking team. Bollinger joins the bank with three years of banking industry experience.

MRV Banks has locations in Ste. Genevieve, Cape Girardeau, Festus, and its newest location in St. Charles.

Angel brings a relationship-focused approach to deliver results, said MRV Banks Senior Vice President and Market President Robbie Guard. We are very happy to welcome her knowing that our clients are in good hands.

Her responsibilities will include opening and maintaining accounts along with conducting teller transactions. Bollinger has also worked at Bank of Missouri and Regions Bank.

The most rewarding part of my job is knowing that when someone comes in and has a problem to solve, I can help them, said Bollinger. The customer may be having a bad day and I am able to empathize with them and make them a priority, solving their problem through listening and understanding. I love connecting with people on that level and being able to show empathy and understanding to others.

Bollinger is also pursuing a bachelors degree in psychology with a minor in childhood trauma. She is one of six kids and has several nieces and nephews she enjoys spending her time with. Bollinger is passionate about empathizing with others and helping others understand emotional and mental health. She enjoys volunteering, painting, drawing and creating art.

Founded in 2007, MRV Banks is one of the fastest-growing banks in Missouri. With more than $650 million dollars in assets, it is the 49th largest bank in the state of Missouri out of 215 state-chartered banks. MRV Banks has a reputation of delivering premium banking products and services to local consumers and small business customers throughout Missouri.
July 03 : Actress Akanksha Puri, who has been evicted from the Bigg Boss OTT Season 2, says she is surprised that Salman Khan apologized for a simple task, and still doesn't see anything wrong with the kiss.

On Bigg Boss OTT 2 Weekend Ka Vaar, Salman Khan apologized on television for Jad Hadid and Akanksha Puris kiss.

While interacting with Newshelpline after eviction we asked Akanksha Puri about the kiss and Salman Khans apologizing on television, she said, I am also surprised that Salman Khan apologized, perhaps its his take on things, but to be honest, I still dont see anything wrong about it. When Salman Khan asked me, I said the same thing, which I will say now, it was a task, just a task, I took it as a task. As an artist I took it as a scene, I am performing with a co-star, that is all I took it as. Beyond that, I dont think anything matters to me.

Despite playing a decent game, Akanksha Puri stated that she was presented with bad intentions and that is the reason for her eviction.

She said, I think, I was targeted from day one, I didnt get the chance to play my 100 percent game, I was in the house for a very little time, and I was presented with a narrative, such as she is fake, she is over prepared, she is overconfident and more, I think people were fed mis-information about me, and this show is not all that long for me to sort to clear pre-fed narrative

In reality shows, one must not be that real, and I think I presented a real game, maybe that is another reason why I am out of the house added Akanksha.

Further adding, Akanksha slammed the remaining contestants for being fake. Most of the people who are inside the house are fake, they are playing a fake game, hence they are inside, and I am outside. People are playing for the heck of it, they know it will look good on television, so they are presenting themselves and reacting in a certain way. One is vamp, one is Casanova, someone is gyaani, they all are playing characters added Puri.
New Delhi, July 3 : UK's International Trade Minister Nigel Huddleston on Monday kicked off a three-day visit to Kolkata and Dhaka with focus on unlocking more opportunities for British companies to grow trade in the region.

UK's bilateral trade with India has already topped 36 billion pounds, supporting half a million jobs across both countries. As part of its ambition to double the bilateral trade by 2030, the UK is continuing to negotiate a trade deal with India.

Huddleston said: "The UK has a strong and enduring relationship with India and Bangladesh. Our trade with both has grown significantly over the past year, which shows our partnerships are reaching new heights. I want to use my first official visit here to show the UK's eagerness to work with both countries on shared challenges like climate change, using our collective expertise to deepen our trading relationship, spark economic growth, and create jobs."

India has set strong targets to boost electric vehicles (EVs) and the UK is well-placed to support this ambition by providing knowledge exchange, access to finance and technology.

The minister will announce a new project that will see the UK and the government of West Bengal join forces on a pilot to develop electric two-wheelers, such as motorcycles or scooters.

British Deputy High Commissioner in Kolkata, Nick Low, said: "I'm delighted to welcome Nigel Huddleston, Minister of State for International Trade at the Department for Business and Trade, to Kolkata. Our Prime Ministers committed to double trade and investment and to safeguard our planet by building a sustainable future together in the 2030 Roadmap for India-UK Future Relations. My mission is to make that happen in Kolkata and across West Bengal."

Huddleston will also launch a centre to enhance opportunities in the EV sector by partnering Indian businesses with elite academic and industrial institutions in the UK.

West Bengal, the sixth largest state by economic value in India, with a GDP expected to reach 117 million pounds this year has set a target of developing one million electric vehicles in the next five years.

The UK minister will also facilitate the signing of a memorandum of understanding (MoU) between the Royal Institute of Chartered Surveyors (RICS) and government of West Bengal on skill development in sustainable and modern methods of construction.

Through these three initiatives, UK businesses will be well-placed to customise and market EV technology and sustainable construction for this burgeoning market in India.

Minister Huddleston will also visit a waste processing company in Kolkata using cutting-edge green technologies supplied by the UK business CDE Ireland to recycle construction waste into high quality, reusable sand.

At a business roundtable, the minister will speak to industry leaders on the deepening of the UK and India's economic ties -- emphasising the opportunities that have already been unlocked from the UK-India Enhanced Trade Partnership.

The minister will also discuss the economic benefits of a UK-India trade deal, currently being negotiated, that could cut red tape, reduce tariffs, and help UK and Indian companies do business.

--IANS

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Paris, July 3 : President Emmanuel Macron will meet the leaders of both houses of parliament as violent protests in France over the police shooting of teenager Nahel M appeared to be easing after five nights of unrest during which thousands of people have been arrested amid widespread destruction.

Police made 49 arrests nationwide on Sunday, French media reported, citing the interior ministry, down significantly from 719 arrests the day before, and 1,300 on Friday.

Macron will also meet on Tuesday with the mayors of 220 towns and cities affected by the protests, his office said, after a crisis meeting on Sunday night with government ministers, The Guardian reported.

The president had been due to fly to Germany on Sunday for a state visit that was cancelled due to the ongoing crisis.

Meanwhile, the interior minister, Gerald Darmanin, announced the death of a 24-year-old firefighter, who died tackling a blaze in an underground car park in the Paris suburb of Saint-Denis after several vehicles were set alight on Sunday evening.

On Saturday, rioters rammed a burning car into the home of Vincent Jeanbrun, the mayor of L'Hay-les-Roses, nine miles (15 km) south of Paris, at about 1.30 a.m. while his family were asleep. Jeanbrun was at the town hall at the time, but his wife and one of his two children, aged five and seven, were injured as they fled. Jeanbrun's wife sustained a broken leg.

The ebbing violence follows an appeal for calm from the grandmother of Nahel, the 17-year-old killed on Tuesday during a police traffic stop in a Paris suburb, the Guardian said.

"Stop rioting, stop destroying," the grandmother, named as Nadia, told BFMTV. "I say this to those who are rioting: do not smash windows, attack schools and buses. Stop. It's mothers who take those buses." The rioters, mostly minors, were "using Nahel as an excuse," she said. "We want things to calm down." Her grandson, identified by only his first name, was buried on Saturday.

More than 3,000 people have been detained since Tuesday, after the mass deployment of 45,000 police officers around the country. Over the weekend, Darmanin said the deployment would be unchanged, after protesters torched cars, looted shops, damaged infrastructure and clashed with police on Saturday night.

The Paris police chief said it was too early to say the unrest had been quashed, the Guardian reported. "There was evidently less damage, but we will remain mobilised in the coming days. We are very focused; nobody is claiming victory," Laurent Nunez said.
Mumbai, July 3 : Bollywood actress Vaani Kapoor, who is known for roles in films 'Shudh Desi Romance', 'Chandigarh Kare Aashiqi' and 'War', will be embarking on two global tours which includes a three week US trip and concerts in UK where she will be performing alongside Hrithik Roshan.

She said: "It has been a whirlwind year for me as I did my maiden USA tour early this year, I'm doing a UK tour with my co-star Hrithik Roshan now."

She further added: "I'm a proud member of the artiste community of India who constantly aspires to showcase the best of India to the world. So, I always look forward to doing global tours where I could take our loved Hindi films and its music to that audience."

Apart from her job as an actress, Vaani Kapoor is also a self-taught dancer who has cemented her position as one of the best dancers of Bollywood through her chart-busting songs like 'Ghungroo', 'Nashe Si Chadh Gayi', 'Ude Dil Befikre', among others.

Talking about her love of performing on stage she said: "I have always loved performing and entertaining audiences either through my movies or through my on stage performances. I want to always give my 100 per cent either on screen or on stage and I have been fortunate enough to receive a lot of love for my efforts."

The actress-dancer said that he has been fortunate to have had good songs in her career while adding that she feels her worldwide viral hits help her to connect with audiences quickly because many of her songs are hits among both the Indian and South Asian diaspora in general.

She said: "These songs had gone viral globally which is beneficial when you do international tours because the recall value of these songs is always bigger. It feels great when audiences join in to dance their hearts out from their seats."
New Delhi: The recent incident of burning a copy of the Holy Quran in Sweden has led to wider questions, whether such an act could be described as a hate crime or not; and what are the limits of Freedom of Expression, apart from why the culprit, a Muslim, committed such an act? Salwan Momika, 37, an Iraqi national living in Sweden for the last two years,

burned pages of the Holy Quran outside a Stockholm mosque on Wednesday (June 27), after placing apiece of bacon, considered impure by Muslims, and stomping on it.

Apparently he had posted a video online earlier, declaring his intention to burn the Holy Quran on the day of Eid-al Adha festival, and had even asked for donations and support from his family and friends in the video.

Further justifying his act, he said that he had received permission from the Stockholm Police to burn a copy of the Holy Quran and as reported by Al Arabiya, he intended to burn another copy of the Holy Quran within 10 days.

After being granted a permit to protest by Swedish police, Salwan stomped on the Islamic holy book and set several pages alight in front of the capital's largest mosque.

Obviously, the act sparked anger across and beyond the Middle East. On its part the United States condemned the incident but added that issuing the permit for the demonstration supported freedom of expression but it was not an endorsement of the action, thus tacitly supporting the Swedish authorities.

Meanwhile, NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg has stated that the incident was offensive and objectionable, but not illegal. The NATO chief, however, pushed for a deal on Sweden's NATO membership despite the event, adding another dimension to the incident.

Turkey condemned Swedish authorities' decision to approve the Quran-burning demonstration, a move that may risk Sweden's bid to join NATO before the bloc's key summit in July. Turkey's foreign minister has termed the protest a "heinous act".

Meanwhile, in its defence the Swedish Police said though it had granted Salwan a permit in line with free-speech protections, but now it has opened an investigation over "agitation against an ethnic group," noting that he had performed the burning so close to the mosque.

The police authorisation for the protest came two weeks after a Swedish appeals court rejected the police's decision to deny permits for two demonstrations in Stockholm, which were to include Quran burnings.

Police had at the time cited security concerns, following a burning of the Muslim holy book outside Turkey's embassy in January which led to weeks of protests, calls for a boycott of Swedish goods and further stalled Sweden's NATO membership bid - which is being blocked by Ankara.

The appeals court however in mid-June ruled that police were wrong to ban such demonstrations, saying the security concerns cited by the police were not sufficient to ban the events.

Apparently Sweden rarely condemns protests and public opinion. And, reportedly, a court there gave permission for Salwan's demonstration on Wednesday. Though the police claim that it refused to authorise the Quran burnings in Stockholm.

On his part, Salwan says his idea was to highlight the importance of freedom of speech as he was quoted in reports as saying, "This is democracy. It is in danger if they tell us we can't do this."

However, a more important question here emerges whether this act can be construed as an act of Hate Crime or not? In absence of any universally agreed definition of Hate Crime and Hate Speech, there are opinions on both side of the spectrum debating whether or not this act qualifies as a Hate Crime or not.

Salwan, speaking to Swedish newspaper Expressen, denied that his actions constituted a "hate crime" or "agitation towards any group.""The police have the right to investigate whether the burning is a hate crime. They could be right and they can be wrong," he told the newspaper, adding that it would be up to a court to decide in the end.

Thus, the whole episode leads us to the basic question whether the act was Hate Crime or not. In absence of any universally accepted definition of Hate Crime, and the manner in which crimes against the Muslim community in Europe and elsewhere are not dubbed Hate Crime, there is an urgent need to give a universally accepted definition of a Hate Crime.

Just like condemning Xenophobia in any form or shape, the western world needs to act unitedly against acts or words against the Islamic community. Otherwise the chasm between the western and the eastern world may increase further, and the so-called Islamic countries will continue to express only a muted response to such incidents, keeping their financial interests and ties with west, in mind.

At its level the UN had proclaimed 18 June as the International Day for Countering Hate Speech, building on the UN Strategy and Plan of Action on Hate Speech launched on 18 June 2019.

But as articulated by the UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres, at the launch on 18 June, "But we are far from powerless in the face of hate speech. We can and must raise awareness about its dangers, and work to prevent and end it in all its forms". We, by which, I mean the western nations first and other nations too, must act swiftly to put in place a universally accepted definition of Hate Crimes, encompassing all forms of Hate Speech and other acts inimical to the Muslim community, additionally also deciding what are the limits to Freedom of Expression, otherwise incidents like the Sweden one will continue to happen, agonising a vast global populace.
Bhopal, July 3 : The body of a tribal youth, detained for interrogation in connection with a case of tiger poaching in Madhya Pradesh's Betul, was found hanging from a tree, police said on Monday.

The deceased, identified as Anish Uike, a resident of Chopna village in Betul, was among five suspects who were interrogated on Saturday and they all were released on Sunday.

Uike was found dead hanging from a tree in a field located few metres away from his home.

Chandrapal Dhurve, in-charge of Chopna police station, said all five suspects, who were detained for interrogation, were relased on Sunday.

On June 25, a decomposed and headless body of an adult tiger was found in the Dabra Dev area of Churna forest range, around two km from the Satpura Tiger Reserve (STR) buffer.

Since then, the Tiger Strike Force and STR team were searching of the suspected killers.

A senior forest official associated with the STR told IANS that search were being conducted in Chhindwara and Betul districts.

During the search, five suspects were detained for questioning, and the deceased (Uike) was one of them.

"Prima facie, it seems a suicide case, however, nothing can be said until the postmortem report reveals the exact case of death. Statements of family persons and locals are being recorded. Our investigation is underway," Dhurve said.

Meanwhile, the Madhya Pradesh Forest Department has announced a reward of Rs. 25000 for information leading the arrest of the tiger poachers.

The Union Forest Ministry have also taken cognisance of the matter and has issued guidelines for each tiger reserve in Madhya Pradesh.

This year so far, (January 1 to June 30) a total 26 tiger deaths were reported in Madhya Pradesh.

--IANS

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New Delhi, July 3 : AAP MLA Durgesh Pathak on Monday said that BJP follows a specific Standard Operating Procedure (SOP) in which they first attempt to buy MLAs and if the MLAs cannot be bought they topple the government by threatening them with ED-CBI.

"BJP first attempts to create a rift among opposition parties to form the government. When they fail, they indulge in horse trading. An audio-clip had also surfaced in Karnataka, which was pertaining to buying the MLAs. Their third weapon is central agencies. They unleash CBI, ED, IT, NIA on MLAs," Pathak said.

He said that those who joined the BJP in Maharashtra were facing prosecution in the form of either CBI or ED. He said that the BJP blackmails leaders and then inducts them into the party.

"They tried everything in Delhi; they attempted to buy our MLAs. They also have lodged two of our ministers in jail with the help of CBI and ED, but our MLAs didn't give up. Their 'Operation Lotus' always fails in Delhi," Pathak said.
New Delhi, July 3 : As we cross the half-year mark, the Sensex stock market index reached an all-time high of 65,240.57 on the first day of market opening in July. All-time highs once again reiterate the Indian growth story and the resilience of the Indian economy. It is admirable to see how the 'leaders' of India's top 30 companies have delivered outstanding shareholder returns over the last five years.

The David vs Goliath fight between Sensex and other BSE stocks

But, one puzzle stares us straight in the face. While the Sensex has compounded at an annual growth rate of almost 13 per cent in the last five years, a look at the rest of the BSE stocks outside the Sensex that have been listed for the last five years shows an annual decline of 1.16 per cent.

In fact, beyond the top 1000 companies outside the Sensex, the annualised return over the last five years has been minus 3.67 per cent. This surprising revelation raises a clear question regarding its implications for both companies and investors.

The answer to the above is, in fact, the biggest opportunity for India's public companies. As India's economy grows further and emerges as the fastest-growing major economy in the world, opportunities abound for companies and investors alike. So, what is the single biggest reason for this Sensex versus BSE conundrum? The two-worded answer is 'capital allocation'. The stocks in the Sensex are far better capital allocators than the non-Sensex stocks.

In simple terms, by capital allocation, the focus is on generating a high return on invested capital by investing in growth that comes with high margins by investing in one's own business, investing via acquisitions to get into newer markets to access newer profit pools, paying down debt, repurchasing existing shares or paying dividends.

The companies in the Sensex are able to do so highly effectively. Whether it is Reliance Industries' bet on Retail and Jio or HDFC Banks' investment in other small finance banks and NBFCs, we see excellent capital allocation driving Sensex to all-time highs.

For companies' management, public institutional investors and private equity investors, we lay out the playbook to tap into the underperforming companies and turn them into multi-bagger winners, generating market-beating IRRs and creating value for all. There are essentially three types of underperforming businesses that exist.

Companies with steady cash flow and low returns on equity

A company with steady cash flow combined but low returns on equity must reinvest their cash flow into higher-yielding opportunities in adjacent industries, focus on improved operational efficiency and increase cost-costing measures. This space has some exciting plays in the two-wheeler and tyre industries. Essentially, businesses with tremendous potential need better capital allocation decisions, such as paying dividends instead of investing in high-growth areas, as their industry value chain goes through tectonic shifts away from hardware towards software.

Strong brands or franchises hindered by bad strategic decisions

Companies that have lost focus through over-diversification into disparate businesses need to spin off unrelated divisions or sell non-core, underutilised, or underperforming assets. Additionally, these companies need to focus on their core area of strength to create market space for themselves. As consumer tastes change rapidly, these companies, especially in the consumer brands space, have been left behind looking at the rearview mirror. The opportunity to focus and allocate capital well can lead to exceptional returns.

Weak corporate governance

The third list is of companies that are perceived to have poor corporate governance. Companies need to realise that Integrity and Honesty are the best policies. From an economic perspective, a high corporate governance company has a much lower cost of capital. There is significant value to be unlocked by creating highly compliant corporate structures that allow for increased transparency.

For India to achieve double-digit growth in the next 10 years, the focus needs to go beyond the SENSEX. The real drivers of growth for India will be the mid-cap and small-cap companies that can deliver high growth. This also offers a huge opportunity for institutional investors and private equity players looking to invest in India - The Growth Capital of the world. Thus, capital allocation will be the most critical factor for the next phase of India's growth.

(The views expressed are solely of the authors, Poornima Vardhan and Taponeel Mukherjee, who head AltG)
Warsaw, July 3 : Poland is deploying additional police personnel along its border with Belarus to strengthen security, Interior Minister Mariusz Kaminski said on Sunday.

Kaminski wrote on Twitter that "due to the tense situation on the border with Belarus I have decided to bolster our forces with 500 Polish police from preventive and counter-terrorism units," DW reported.

Their deployment will be in addition to 5000 border guards and 2000 soldiers monitoring the security of the border, he said.

Deputy Prime Minister Jaroslaw Kaczynski, who is also the leader of Poland's ruling Law and Justice Party (PiS), said last week he believed there were 8,000 Wagner troops already in Belarus, DW said.

Kaczynski had said that Poland would take both temporary and permanent steps to strengthen the border, including boosting the presence of security forces and increasing fortifications.

He said that Wagner's presence in Belarus could mean a "new phase of hybrid warfare, a phase much more difficult than the one we have dealt with so far."

Belarusian leader Alexander Lukashenko said last week that Wagner leader Yevgeny Prigozhin had arrived to his country, prompting concerns among NATO nations that border Belarus, namely Poland, Latvia and Lithuania.

Prigozhin had called on his troops to lead a march to Moscow last month before calling it off. Lukashenko was credited for helping to defuse the situation.

The march posed one of the most serious threats to Russian leader Vladimir Putin's leadership, which Prigozhin said was retaliation for a Russian attack that killed his mercenary forces.

Meanwhile, the Polish Border Guard on Sunday also said that 187 people tried to cross into Poland from Belarus illegally on Saturday.

Poland accuses Belarus of artificially creating a migrant crisis on the border by flying in people from the Middle East and Africa and attempting to push them across the frontier. However, Minsk has denied the accusation.
New Delhi, July 3 : The Economic Offences Wing (EOW) of Delhi Police has arrested a 49-year-old man, who was evading arrest since 2011 in connection with a case in which he allegedly used pirated version of the original videos under deceptive titles and sold the same in the open market, an official said on Monday.

The accused was identified as Raghunath Shahi, a resident of Kanpur district in Uttar Pradesh. A reward of Rs 50,000 was declared on information leading to his arrest.

According to police, in 2005, a case was registered in Preet Vihar police station on the complaint of Rajesh Bajaj in which it was alleged that Shahi used to create animation short stories and sold its rights to him on April 9, 2005 through his firm Bostan Software.

Bajaj claimed that he held exclusive copyright over the cinematographic films including the container box, its size, colour scheme, lettering style, layout and their respective catalogues. Bajaj further claimed that one Amit Sharma, proprietor of Interlude Technology, Janak Puri, New Delhi (the main accused in the case) had been deceiving and defrauding the general public by preparing/reproducing the pirated version of the original work under the deceptive titles.

Deputy Commissioner of Police (EOW), Vikram Porwal, said that during the investigation, Amit Sharma joined the investigation and submitted his agreement with Shahi prior to the agreement executed with Bajaj.

However, Shahi didn't join the investigation despite opportunities given to him and he was declared 'proclaimed offender' on January 24, 2011.

"Consistent efforts were made to arrest Shahi but he was so desperate to evade arrest that he changed his previous address and mobile number. However, after prolonged efforts and by mounting constant manual and technical surveillance, he was arrested from Kanpur, after several days of intense search in Muzaffarpur (Bihar) and Kanpur (UP)," said the DCP.

In Kanpur, Shahi was found working as a store in-charge at the site of a thermal power plant situated near Kanpur.

During interrogation, it was revealed that Shahi used to prepare pirated versions of the original work under deceptive titles and sold the same in the open market.
MONDAY, JULY 3

Monday Night Trivia with Brandon The Trivia Guy: 7 p.m., Prince Michel Vineyard and Winery and Tap 29 Brewery in Leon, (800) 800-WINE, no cover.

TUESDAY, JULY 4

Independence Day Celebration with music by Don't Look Up: Vision BBQ, Popitos Pizza and Sweet Janes Kitchen food trucks will be there, 6-9 p.m., Carter Mountain Orchard, $10, free if 12 or younger.

July 4 Music in the Mountains with Jimmy O: 1-4 p.m., DuCard Vineyards in Etlan, (540) 923-4206, no cover, reservations recommended.

July 4 Music in the Mountains with Laissez Foure: 5-8 p.m., DuCard Vineyards in Etlan, (540) 923-4206, no cover, reservations recommended.

Independence Day with music by South Canal Street: Music from 4 to 8 p.m., Fireworks at about 9 p.m., Graves' Mountain Farm & Lodges, free, Madison Volunteer Fire Co. will accept donations for parking.

Red, White, Blue in Greene with music by Southern Sky at 6 p.m. and Mark Wills at 8 p.m.: Fireworks will begin at about 9:35 p.m., Morris Field in Ruckersville. Parking is limited; carpooling is encouraged.

Independence Day Concert with music by Heifetz International Music Institute musicians: 2-4 p.m., Hilltop Pavilion at James Monroe's Highland, (434) 293-8000, free, picnics welcome.

61st annual Independence Day Celebration and Naturalization Ceremony and livestream: 9 a.m., includes presentation of colors by Boy Scouts of America Troop 75 and music by the Charlottesville Band, Charlottesville Opera, Old Line Fife and Drum Corps and Oratorio Society of Virginia, West Portico of Thomas Jefferson's Monticello, free, registration for shuttle rides required at monticello.org. Plan to arrive at Piedmont Virginia Community College at 8 a.m. and take the shuttle.

WEDNESDAY, JULY 5

Jacob Paul Allen in Summer Sunsets: 5:30-8 p.m., Blue Mountain Brewery, no cover.

James 3 Duo in Wind Down Wednesdays: 6-9 p.m., Two Brothers Southwestern Grill food truck will be there, Carter Mountain Orchard, (434) 977-1833, $5 ages 12 and older.

Charlottesville Opera's New Works Concert with composer Tom Cipullo and Ader Emerging Artists: 11 a.m., The Center at Belvedere, (434) 293-4500, free.

Charlottesville Band Presents: Summer at the Paramount: "Patriots and Princesses": 7:30 p.m., Paramount Theater, (434) 979-1333, free.

THURSDAY, JULY 6

Zuzu's Hot 5 in Thursday Evening Concert Series: 6-9 p.m., Good Waffles and Co. and Popitos Pizza food trucks will be there, Carter Mountain Orchard, (434) 977-1833, $10 ages 12 and older.

Pale Blue Dot with Studebaker Huck plus Sullivan Smith and Stray Lions: 8 p.m., doors open at 7:30 p.m., The Southern Cafe and Music Hall, (800) 594-8499, $15, $12 advance, $40 for ticket four-pack.

Tailgate Thursdays with music by Hungry Hard Luck Heroes: Oysters will be available, 6-9 p.m., Stinson Vineyards, (434) 823-7300, no cover, bring foods to grill.

FRIDAY, JULY 7

Full Nelson Friday with McHale & Justina: 5-9 p.m., Blue Mountain Brewery, no cover.

Max Mandu in Summer Sundown: 6-9 p.m., Chiswell Farm & Winery, (434) 252-2947, call for price.

"Cabaret" in Virginia Theatre Festival: 7:30 p.m., Culbreth Theatre at University of Virginia, (434) 924-3376, $35-$15. Contains mature content and sexual situations.

First Fridays: Grillin' & Chillin' with Ken Matthews: 5-8 p.m., DuCard Vineyards in Etlan, (540) 923-4206, no cover, reservations recommended.

Fridays After Five: BJP'z World of Music with Jordan Harmon & the Humble Brag: 5:30 p.m., Ting Pavilion, (434) 245-4910, free.

Festive Fridays I: Opening Night: "Wintergreen Swings  Big Band Style!" for Wintergreen Music Festival: 7:30 p.m., Dunlop Pavilion at Wintergreen Resort, (434) 361-0541, $39-$6, free if younger than 6.

SATURDAY, JULY 8

"Cabaret" in Virginia Theatre Festival: 7:30 p.m., Culbreth Theatre at University of Virginia, (434) 924-3376, $35-$15. Contains mature content and sexual situations.

Music in the Mountains with Matt Johnson: 2-5 p.m., DuCard Vineyards in Etlan, (540) 923-4206, no cover, reservations recommended.

Second Saturday Music in the Mountains with Joint Venture: Just A Bite food truck will be there, 5-8 p.m., DuCard Vineyards in Etlan, (540) 923-4206, no cover, reservations recommended.

Hard Swimmin' Fish: Salsa Street Grill food truck will be there, 5-8 p.m., Glass House Winery, (434) 975-0094, no cover.

Gimme Gimme Disco: A Dance Party Inspired by ABBA: 9 p.m., doors open at 8 p.m., Jefferson Theater, (800) 594-8499, $25, $20 advance (Tier 1), $18 advance (Tier 2), $15 early-bird general admission, must be 18 or older.

MountainTop Masterworks I: "Barber 'Violin Concerto' with Elisabeth Adkins" for Wintergreen Music Festival: Erin Freeman will conduct, 6 p.m., Dunlop Pavilion at Wintergreen Resort, (434) 361-0541, $39-$6, free if younger than 6.

SUNDAY, JULY 9

"Cabaret" in Virginia Theatre Festival: 2 p.m., Culbreth Theatre at University of Virginia, (434) 924-3376, $35-$15. Contains mature content and sexual situations.

Music in the Mountains with Spencer Hatcher & The Ol' Son Gang: 2-5 p.m., DuCard Vineyards in Etlan, (540) 923-4206, no cover, reservations recommended.

John Kelly: 5-8 p.m., Glass House Winery, (434) 975-0094, no cover, donations accepted.

MountainTop Masterworks I: "Barber 'Violin Concerto' with Elisabeth Adkins" for Wintergreen Music Festival: Erin Freeman will conduct, 3 p.m., Freeman presents pre-concert talk at 2 p.m., Dunlop Pavilion at Wintergreen Resort, (434) 361-0541, $39-$6, free if younger than 6.

MONDAY, JULY 10

Monday Night Trivia with Brandon The Trivia Guy: 7 p.m., Prince Michel Vineyard and Winery and Tap 29 Brewery in Leon, (800) 800-WINE, no cover.

 From staff reports
Imphal, July 3 : Mizoram government on Monday said that it is likely to raise funds from the government officials, staff and the public for relief and rehabilitation of people of Manipur who have migrated to the state following outbreak of violence.

"Donation would likely be sought from the government officials, employees and the people in general," a Home Department official said.

He said that a delegation from the state led by Tourism Minister Robert Romawia last month met officials of the Union Home Ministry including Home Secretary Ajay Kumar Bhalla and requested them to provide funds for the relief and shelter to the displaced people from Manipur.

He said that the response of the Home Ministry officials was positive, but the state has yet to receive any financial support.

Mizoram Chief Minister Zoramthanga has also written two letters to Prime Minister Narendra Modi on May 16 and May 23 and sought financial support of Rs 10 crore to provide relief to the displaced people from Manipur.

The tribals belonging to the Kuki-Zo-Zomi community started trickling in Mizoram soon after the ethnic violence broke out in Manipur on May 3.

Mizoram currently houses 12,000 displaced people from Manipur.

The displaced people took shelter in relief camps, rented and relatives houses, churches, community centers and other places in all the 11 districts of Mizoram.

Mizoram has been accommodating around 35,000 refugees from Myanmar due to the military coup in February 2021; over 1,000 refugees from Chittagong Hill Tracts of Bangladesh, where Army crackdown forced the tribals to leave their villages and to take shelter in Mizoram.

The mountainous Mizoram shares an unfenced 510 km border with Myanmar and 318 km international boundary with Bangladesh.

The Mizoram government has been asking the Centre to recognise the Myanmarese, sheltered in Mizoram, as refugees and grant funds to provide food and relief to all the people from Manipur, Myanmar and Bangladesh.

But the Central government is yet to provide any financial assistance for the displaced people from Manipur and the refugees from the neighbouring countries.
New Delhi, July 3 : Union Communications and Electronics & Information Technology Ashwini Vaishnaw on Monday unveiled the Bharat 6G Alliance, a new initiative to launch the next-generation technology in India after a successful roll-out of 5G.

Bharat 6G Alliance is an alliance of public sector, private sector and other departments and will work for the development of new telecom technology and 6G in the country.

"India has acquired over 200 patents for 6G technology. The forthcoming 6G technology will leverage the foundation laid by 5G and offer enhanced capabilities such as improved reliability, ultra-low latency, and affordable solutions," the minister said during an event here.

The government will also roll out the next set of telecom reforms in the coming few weeks. 6G is likely to provide speed nearly 100 times faster than 5G and enable the development of new communication applications.

The Bharat 6G Alliance will deliberate on various aspects of emerging telecom technologies and platforms in the next decade.

In March this year, Prime Minister Narendra Modi unveiled the 6G vision document.

According to Minister of State for Communications, Devusinh Chauhan, India witnessed one of the swiftest rollouts of 5G networks, with the establishment of 2.70 lakh 5G sites within nine months.

Prime Minister Modi has already emphasised that the 6G initiative will create new opportunities for innovators, industries and startups. In March, he released a vision document that details India's plans to develop and launch 6G telecom services in a few years.
Hong Kong, July 3 : China's BYD sold more than 2.5 lakh electric vehicles in June in China, beating its own record, as the EV market in China stablises, the media reported on Monday.

Backed by Warren Buffettas Berkshire Hathaway, BYD delivered 253,046 cars last month, a 5.3 per cent increase over the 239,092 cars delivered in May, it said in a filing to the Hong Kong stock exchange, reports the South China Morning Post.

BYD delivered 1.26 million vehicles to customers in the first quarter of 2023, almost double the figure a year ago.

In June, BYD delivered 128,196 pure electric cars, up 7.2 per cent from May. The company sold 123,489 plug-in hybrid cars, a 3.4 per cent monthly increase, the report mentioned.

On the other hand, Teslaas Gigafactory in Shanghai delivered 42,508 vehicles to customers in May, up by 6.4 per cent from the previous month.

One in every 7 cars sold during the first quarter this year was an electric vehicle, dominated by China's BYD at 21.1 per cent market share while Tesla was at second spot, with 16 per cent share.

In China, EV sales experienced a remarkable 29 per cent YoY growth, despite a 12 per cent decline in overall sales of passenger vehicles in the country.

The top 10 EV models accounted for 37 per cent of the total passenger EV sales.
Bhopal, July 3 : Madhya Pradesh Chief Minister Shivraj Singh Chouhan on Monday said that the Opposition in Maharashtra "is almost finished".

Chouhan made the remarks in wake of recent political developments in the neighbouring state. On Sunday, NCP's Ajit Pawar joined the Eknath Shinde-Devendra Fadnavis government as Deputy Chief Minister.

The Madhya Pradesh Chief Minister further said that the development indicates that "people are in support of Prime Minister Narendra Modi".

"...it is clear that the Opposition is almost finished in Maharashtra," he said, adding that "similar news might come from the other parts also".

Chouhan further said that "those indulged in corruption, fearing of arrest, are getting united. While the others, who believe in Prime Minister Modi's leadership, are supporting him.

--IANS

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Mumbai, July 3 : Actor Angad Bedi, who is garnering a lot of positive response for his streaming anthology 'Lust Stories 2', feels that for a successful marriage, lust also plays an important role along with love.

In his segment aMade For Each Othera, a young couple, played by Angad and Mrunal Thakur, is suggested to go on a atest drivea for sexual compatibility by Neena Gupta, who plays cool 'daadi' to Mrunal.

Angad feels sexual compatibility is a very important point that is hardly spoken about.

Talking about the same, the actor said, aFor a healthy marriage, along with love, it is also important to have healthy sexual compatibility. In todayas time and age, we still hesitate to speak about it, but there are so many marriages which have fallen apart because of sexual incompatibility."

He added, aIn our society, lust is a very misunderstood word, but it is an important part that strengthens the bond between husband and wife."

Angadas segment aMade For Each Othera is directed by R. Balki. The anthology is currently available to stream on Netflix.
Mumbai, July 3 : Actor Manoj Bajpayee said that he is also waiting for the shoot of 'Family Man 3' to start, adding that he will update his fans with the "good news very soon".

The actor, who made his OTT debut with Prime Video series 'The Family Man', attended an award ceremony in Mumbai recently where his film 'Gulmohar' was awarded. The actor spoke about his upcoming projects and much more.

Talking about 'The Family Man 3', he said: "Waiting for 'Family Man 3' shooting to start, will give good news to the fans very soon. Apart from this, my web series 'Soup' will come on Netflix but there is still time for its release".

The actor's film 'Sirf Ek Bandaa Kaafi Hai' became the first film to move from OTT to theatres, talking about the same, he said: "The film has got so much love from everyone, even we did not expect this. The film got great reviews in single theatres also. People are watching the film again and again and I am very grateful for all the love".

His upcoming series 'Soup' is loosely based on a true-life incident. It is the story of Swathi Shetty (Konkona Sen Sharma), an incompetent cook who dreams of having a restaurant of her own someday and her suspicious husband, Prabhakar (Manoj Bajpayee) who won't help with her aspirations and has doubts of his own. The series will stream on Netflix.
Mumbai, July 3 : Arjun Bijlani, who is counted among the most stylish actors of the television industry, is all geared up for his new show 'Pyaar ka Pehla Adhyaya: Shiv Shakti'.

The actor was seen attending an award ceremony in Mumbai, where he also spoke about his new show.

Talking about his show, he said: "We started shooting for the show in Varanasi on the day of Ganga Dussehra. It is a very auspicious day and my first shot was also dipping in the holy waters of River Ganga. I consider myself very lucky to be a part of all this".

"The promo of the show was loved by everyone. It was also shot very nicely and I was very happy with the results. We were overwhelmed with the comments received. Now we have fingers crossed for the show . I hope it does really well and people like it," he added.

Show 'Pyaar ka Pehla Adhyaya: Shiv Shakti' is a romantic drama which is a spin off series of 'Pyaar ka Pehla naam: Radha Mohan'. The show stars Arjun Bijlani and Nikki Sharma as Shiv and Shakti, respectively.

It will premiere on July 3 on ZeeTV and digitally stream on ZEE5.

Besides this, the actor is also making his Bollywood debut with Karan Johar's upcoming film 'Rocky aur Rani Kii Prem Kahaani' which is releasing on July 28.
Patna July 3 : In a bid to disturb the peace, unidentified men threw pieces of meat in three temples in Bihar's Aurangabad district, an official said on Monday.

The incident occurred in Haspura and Amjhar Sharif Panchayat in Haspura block on Sunday. The anti social elements also pasted a poster on a shop with slogans against a local mukhiya (Headman) and a political party (BJP).

Following the incident, villagers informed the district administration. The meat pieces were removed from the temple after which the premises were washed.

"As soon as we learnt about the incident, the area's SDM and SDPO reached the spot and took control of the situation. We have called both sides and appealed to them to avoid such provocations. The villagers are cooperating with us," said Suharsha Bhagat, District Magistrate of Aurangabad.

"We have deputed magistrates in the area and asked them to submit "Khairiyat reports" every two hours. We also held a flag march on Sunday evening to maintain peace," Bhagat said.

--IANS

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Mumbai, July 3 : The political drama in Maharashtra intensified on Monday with the rival camps of Nationalist Congress Party (NCP) sacking, or suspending each other's leaders or office-bearers.

Breakaway NCP's Working President Praful Patel has 'retained' NCP supremo Sharad Pawar as the national President but 'relieved' party's Maharashtra President Jayant Patil of his responsibilities and appointed MP Sunil Tatkare in his place with immediate effect.

He also appointed Ajit Pawar as the NCP Legislature Party Leader and continued Anil Patil as the Chief Whip, while initiating action against the NCP's move to name Dr. Jitendra Awhad as the new Leader of Opposition and Chief Whip.

"Nobody has the right to take action or disqualify any of the leaders who have taken the decision to join the Maharashtra government," said Patel.

Tatkare said that he had taken into confidence all the leaders of the party and has convened a meeting of all legislators and Zilla Parishad leaders on Wednesday.

Referring to the NCP appointment of Dr. Awhad, Ajit Pawar pointed out that only the Speaker has the authority to appoint the LoP on the basis of the majority strength of the opposition legislators.

"We are all in the NCP and the maximum number of legislators are with us So it (the appointments) don't make any sense," he claimed.

On the other hand, NCP President Sharad Pawar himself ordered the sacking of Patel and Tatkare from the primary membership of the party and their respective posts of Working President and National General Secretary for "anti-party activities" with immediate effect.

Besides, the party has also made changes at various other posts in the Mumbai organisation after the surprise revolt by Ajit Pawar and his group on Sunday followed by his swearing-in as the new and second Deputy Chief Minister in the ruling Shiv Sena-Bharatiya Janata Party government.

Earlier on Monday, NCP's sole Working President Supriya Sule had written a strong letter to Sharad Pawar demanding immediate action against Praful and Tatkare, both MPs.

"Patel and Tatkare, on July 2, 2023 acted in direct contravention of the Party Constitution and Rules, amounting to desertion and disqualification form the party membership. I request Pawar Saheb to take immediate action and file disqualification petitions under the 10th Schedule of the Constitution of India before the competent authority against the two MPs for engaging in anti-party activities," said Sule.
Bengaluru, July 3 : President Droupadi Murmu arrived in Bengaluru on Monday on the first leg of her five-day visit to Karnataka, Telangana, and Maharashtra.

Governor Thaawarchand Gehlot and Chief Minister Siddaramaiah extended her warm welcome at the airport.

Minister for Energy K.J. George was also present.

The President will attend the 2nd convocation of Sri Sathya Sai University for Human Excellence at Muddenahalli, Karnataka on Tuesday.

She will also interact with the members of PVTGs (Particularly Vulnerable Tribal Groups) at the Raj Bhavan.

The President will fly to Hyderabad on Tuesday itself.
Charlottesville is no stranger to cannabis. On the Downtown Mall alone, there are no less than five stores who wanted in on the retail market for hemp products  cannabinoids that are typically less potent than the still-illegal recreational marijuana but nevertheless intoxicating.

But starting Saturday, new amendments to Virginias industrial hemp laws will prohibit the sale of certain hemp-derived products, and restrict the sale of others.

The legislation has business owners pulling products off shelves and trying to sell them back to distributors, who may or may not buy them back. The bottom line for cannabis retailers? Its going to cost them.

Were basically here to stay, but were in for a long fight, tooth and nail, said Derek Crowther, co-owner of the Hidden Leaf, a cannabis retailer on the Downtown Mall. Its going to be a financial hurdle.

Virginias new legislation

The new legislation prohibits the sale of products containing a synthetic derivative of THC, which include delta-8 and delta-10 THC products. It also restricts the sale of delta-9 THC, which is naturally derived from hemp. Retailers may not sell products with more than 2 mg of total THC per package, unless the product contains a ratio of 25 parts CBD to one part THC.

The legislation will be enforced by the Virginia Department of Agricultural and Consumer Services, and retailers out of compliance with the law could face hefty fines.

The legislations intent was to close loopholes that existed in the Virginia Code which were permitting the sale of synthetic cannabinoids and unregulated THC, according to JM Pedini, executive director of Virginias chapter at the National Organization for the Reform of Marijuana Laws.

As originally passed, Virginia hemp laws were unintentionally allowing the sale of unregulated intoxicating products, Pedini told The Daily Progress.

That includes products that may contain harmful chemicals, and hemp products containing high doses of THC, federally illegal but allowed by unspecific language in Virginia code.

Navigating new hemp legislation

Most immediately, businesses will have to pull delta-8 products and those outside of the designated ratio off shelves. For Skooma, a boutique dispensary on Charlottesvilles Downtown Mall, thats the cherry-flavored delta-9 gummies, a popular item with 10 mg THC per 50 mg CBD: a prohibited 1-to-5 ratio.

Tracy Riffel, owner of Sweet ReLeaf in downtown Charlottesville, has been able to sell back some of her products to distributors, she has to look for new companies to buy from, whose products align with Virginia legislation.

Im kind of freaking out about it because its such a huge change, Riffel said. There are so many companies that I use that are not changing with the Virginia laws. Instead, Riffel is looking at other companies with products that fit the regulation, and in the meantime expanding her inventory to include crystals, tapestries and incense.

But business owners arent just frustrated. Theyre confused.

Business owners described parts of the legislation which give increased testing and labeling requirements vague. Some are considering consulting with attorneys as they attempt to figure out what is actually necessary to avoid a fine.

I think weve found a way to work with it based on their verbiage to be able to continue to sell, but it really is so overwhelmingly restrictive, Kenneth Townsend, manager at Skooma, told The Daily Progress.

The new legislation might also fan the flames of an already-existing illicit market for cannabinoids, said Brad Wynne, an executive board member at the Virginia Cannabis Association.

I think the black market is going to really explode. Its the kerosene, and this bills the match, Wynne said. What do you think is going to happen? People want it. People are gonna get it. As to where, Wynne mentioned pop-up shops or farmers market.

Others in the industry are upset about the ban on synthetic cannabis in the first place. Although delta-8 THC and delta-10 THC naturally occur in hemp plants in very small amounts, the form of delta-8 THC used in adult-use retail products is synthesized from CBD.

Delta-8 is naturally occurring, delta 10 can be naturally occurring. Theyre in small amounts, so they also can be converted from CBD through a simple process that doesnt have to be scary, said Jason Amatucci, president of the Virginia Hemp Coalition and founder of Anavii Market, a CBD and hemp retailer.

Theres a lot of synthetic products that we consume every day, Amatucci said. I mean, margarine is synthetic under these definitions.

What Amatucci would like to see is simple regulation to eliminate harmful chemicals in hemp products and crack down on companies that are cutting corners, he said.

Whats next?

Retailers share the same hope: that the sale of recreational marijuana will be made legal.

Im hoping that they just make marijuana legal and quit messing with the cannabinoids, Riffel said.

The General Assembly passed a bill in 2021 which intended to make marijuana legal for recreational retail sale by 2024. Yet a clause in the legislation withholds legalization until the General Assembly passes legislation regulating recreational sales, which has so far been unsuccessful for one main reason: Gov. Glenn Youngkins veto.

Wynne said the Virginia Cannabis Association is currently working on a bill to bring both Democrats and Republicans together on cannabis legislation that might gather enough support from the General Assembly to overturn a veto from the governor.

Virginians overwhelmingly support legalization, and the Youngkin administration should, too, Pedini said. It is through commonsense regulation allowing for the legal, licensed commercial production and sale of cannabis that states can best address adult consumers demand, while ensuring product safety and keeping marijuana largely out of the hands of young people.
Kolkata, July 3 : West Bengal Chief Minister Mamata Banerjee on Monday again made her stand clear on the Congress for the 2024 Lok Sabha polls as she accused it of adopting double standards at the national and state levels.

"In Delhi, the Congress is opposing the BJP. We are supporting them in the matter. But in Bengal, they are opposing Trinamool Congress. They are opposing me. They are maintaining twin strategies one for Delhi and another for West Bengal. This cannot go on," she said while virtually addressing a campaign rally of her Trinamool Congress at Birbhum for the forthcoming panchayat polls.

Banerjee, also the Trinamool President, also alleged that the BJP, the Congress, and the Left parties have joined hands in West Bengal against the her party.

"They are indirectly benefiting BJP in the state by opposing Trinamool Congress. This dual strategy cannot go on," she said.

The Chief Minister also accused the BJP, the Congress, and the Left Parties of jointly being responsible for the killing of six Trinamool workers since the polling dates were announced.

"All this are the joint handiwork of BJP, Congress and Left Parties. The opposition parties are doing whatever they want over the rural civic body polls," she said.

This is not the first time that the Chief Minister has fired salvos against the Congress. Earlier she had said that in West Bengal, Trinamool would not be able to support Congress because of the latter's understanding with the CPI-M in the state.

State Congress chief Adhir Ranjan Chowdhury too have said in as many words that there is no question for his party to align with Trinamool in West Bengal. He had even described the recent meeting of the opposition parties at Patna as a wedding invitation which the Congress had to honour.

--IANS

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Srinagar, July 3 : The Economic Offences Wing of the Crime Branch (Kashmir) on Monday carried out searches at multiple places here over criminal manipulation of electronic data.

A statement issued by the Crime Branch (Kashmir) said that the teams in the presence of the executive duty magistrate carried out searches at the residences and office premises of accused/suspect individuals allegedly involved in Case FIR No's. 27/2023 and 28/2023 of P/S EOW, Srinagar (CB-Kashmir).

"The cases pertain to the criminal manipulation/tampering of electronic and other data which enabled the perpetrators to fraudulently claim refund of Income tax shown to have been earlier deducted at source.

"These criminal acts have resulted in wrongful pecuniary gain running into crores of rupees to the accused individuals while causing a corresponding financial loss to the Income Tax Department, Government of India.

"These cases had been registered on 25-05-2023 upon receipt of a complaint from the office of the Principal Commissioner of Income Tax, Srinagar.

"The searches were carried out as part of the ongoing investigation of the cases. Due diligence and all procedures mandated by law were followed in conducting the searches.

"No arrests were made during the search operation. However, some incriminating documents, desktop & laptop computers etc. have been recovered and seized. These have been taken on record for examination and further analysis as probable evidence in the cases", the statement read.

"Investigation of the cases is progressing satisfactorily and further updates would be shared at an opportune time in the future".
Chennai, July 3 : Tamil Nadu Chief Minister M.K. Stalin on Monday called up NCP leader Sharad Pawar and expressed solidarity with him following the split in his party led by his nephew Ajit Pawar.

A group of NCP legislators led by Ajit Pawar had aligned with the BJP and he became the Deputy Chief Minister of Maharashtra.

A senior leader of the DMK told IANS that the party will be conducting a campaign across the state against the attempts by the BJP government at the Centre to break the opposition political parties.

The senior leader said that the BJP was trying to engineer defections in parties and was butchering democracy.

The DMK, according to sources , will conduct campaign in the state against this. This is considered as a political move by the DMK to activate party cadres in the run up to the 2024 Lok Sabha elections.

BJP's Tamil Nadu unit chief K. Annamalai had come out strongly against DMK leadership and the arrest of Minister Senthil Balaji by the Enforcement Directorate (ED) has put the DMK in a corner.

The party will be highlighting the action of Governor R.N. Ravi in unilaterally dismissing Balaji from the council of ministers but later revoking the decision. This has been taken up by the DMK as a major opportunity against the BJP.

The defection in NCP in Maharashtra is another issue that is being taken up by the DMK in its campaign in Tamil Nadu.

With these two major issues , the DMK is expecting to come out to regain the initiative after the arrest of Balaji and the possibilities of further arrests.

--IANS

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Hong Kong, July 3 : In a first, a drug discovered and designed using artificial intelligence (AI) for the treatment of idiopathic pulmonary fibrosis (IPF), a chronic disease that causes scarring in the lungs, has entered human clinical trials.

Hong Kong-based biotechnology company Insilico Medicine, in a statement, announced that the Phase II trial on oral dosage of INS018_055 is currently being conducted for over 12 weeks in China, and will later be expanded to test 60 people in the US and China.

Once successful, the company aims to study a larger cohort.

"With demonstrated potential against both fibrosis and inflammation, INS018_055 could offer another option for patients worldwide," said Feng Ren, co-CEO and Chief Scientific Officer of Insilico Medicine, in the statement.

"Initiating Phase II trials with this novel inhibitor for IPF represents a major milestone for deep generative reinforcement learning in drug discovery. We will explore the efficacy for patients of AI-discovered and designed treatments in clinical trials, which is a true validation of our generative AI platform," added Alex Zhavoronkov, Founder and co-CEO of Insilico Medicine.

Zhavoronkov said the discovery process for the new drug began in 2020, with hopes to create a "moonshot" medicine to overcome challenges with current treatments for the condition, which mostly focus on slowing progression and can cause uncomfortable side effects, CNBC reported.

He added that the company has two other drugs partially generated by AI in the clinical stage.

One is a Covid-19 drug in phase one clinical trials, and the other is a cancer drug, specifically a "USP1 inhibitor for the treatment of solid tumours", that recently received FDA approval to initiate clinical trials.

Zhavoronkov said he expects to have results from the current Phase II trial next year.

IPF affects the tissue surrounding the air sacs, or alveoli, in the lungs. It develops when that lung tissue becomes thick and stiff for unknown reasons. Over time, these changes can cause permanent scarring in the lungs, called fibrosis, that makes it progressively more difficult to breathe.

The condition worsens with age and if left untreated, can lead to death within two to five years.

--IANS

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Los Angeles, July 3 : Authorities in Vietnam have banned commercial screenings of Greta Gerwig's 'Barbie' because it contains a scene that depicts a map with the 'nine dash line', a representation of China's territorial claims in the South China Sea, reports 'Variety'.

Vietnam has maintained that the line violates its sovereignty. Vi Kien Thanh, director general of the Vietnam Cinema Department under the Ministry of Culture, Sports, and Tourism, said on Monday that the ban was decided by the National Film Evaluation Council.

"We do not grant a licence for the American movie 'Barbie' to release in Vietnam because it contains the offending image of the nine-dash line," said the state-run 'Tuoi Tre' newspaper, also citing Vi Kien Thanh, according to 'Variety'.

The Warner Bros. film starring Margot Robbie and Ryan Gosling, one of the most anticipated movies of the summer, was set to have been released in the country on July 21.

Many of Chinaas neighbours, including Vietnam, have competing and overlapping territorial claims and strongly dispute China's assertions, according to 'Variety'.

In 2016, a United Nations disputes resolution tribunal in The Hague ruled unanimously against the validity of the 'nine dash line'.

But, though the South China Sea arbitration ruling was final and binding, there are no clear mechanisms for its implementation and China has said it does not recognise the decision.
New Delhi, July 3 : Musavat, an online Azerbaijani newspaper, recently carried a story alleging that Armenia was luring fighters from India to help it fight Azerbaijan. Such a cock-and-bull story could only have been inspired by Pakistan's ISI.

Let us analyse what such stories intend to achieve and why they are being put out now. The article, (published on June 24) written by Elchin Khalidbayli, supposedly, a political expert with the "Yeni Musavat" Media Group, claims that Indians from poor provinces are being lured with money and sent to Armenia.

The report claims that Yerevan is creating armed mercenary groups with people brought to Armenia from various countries and India allegedly being one of those helping in the creation of armed mercenary groups.

The aim is to show that Armenia is supporting terrorist tactics against Azerbaijan and to allege that India is behind the supply of manpower.

There is no doubt that external actors are attempting to intervene in the processes in the South Caucasus, except that it is not India. Turkey and Pakistan are the players who have supported Azerbaijan. The only conclusion one can draw is that Pakistan is trying to prove that India is a "terrorist state" to try and wriggle out of the discomfort of having FATF and other international organisations brand them as global sponsors of terrorism.

India's military supplies to Armenia obviously make a difference and the other side is feeling the pinch, which is why the article claims that "these interventions are being conducted unequivocally only through Armenia".

Propoganda is the need of the hour and therefore, it is argued that the Armenian Army has lost its capability to fight and has formed small guerrilla units with mercenary troops. The logic used here is that Armenians don't have the will to fight and are unwilling to be recruited into the Army. This of course does not mean that the Armenian Army is incapable of fighting. It is technically correct that the Armenian Parliament adopted a law creating a legal basis for conscription of women into active military service.

Military service in Armenia iscompulsory for male citizens of the republic aged 18 to 27 for a period of two years. At present, women serve in the Armenian military only on a contract basis and accounted for 9.1 per cent of contract service members in 2019.

Armenia has undertaken to reform its military after the defeat in 2020 against Azerbaijan. An ambitious defence modernisation plan proposed by Prime Minister Nikol Pashinyan in 2021 has not taken off because of domestic political squabbles. The lack of progress can be attributed in part to the regular shakeups at the top of Armenia's defence establishment. Since then, both the Minister of Defence and Chief of the General Staff have been replaced three times.

The most dramatic moment was in February 2021, when the top army brass, led by the then-Chief of the General Staff Onik Gasapryan, joined the Opposition's demand for Pashinyan's resignation. This conflict was resolved by the dismissal of Gasparyan. Pashinyan then resigned andcalled a snap election, which his party won.

Steps were taken to rebuild the army on the Russian model, though enthusiasm for this has since waned given Russia's poor performance in Ukraine and Russia's rejection of requests to help its military ally Armenia amid incursions by Azerbaijan in fall 2022. Russia had earlier been a regular supplier of arms and weapons to Armenia.

Prime Minister Pashinyan publicly complained (September 29, 2022) about Armenia's failure to receive armaments from allies even after they were paid for. Though he did not name a specific state, it was clear he was referring to Russia, which is the largest supplier of weapons to the Armenian Army.

The Stockholm International Peace Research Institute (SIPRI) reports that 94 per cent of the weapons acquired by Armenia from 2015 to 2019 were produced in Russia.

As seen above, the Pashinyan government is trying to use the most diverse options to solve the problem of military modernisation. One of them is to import weapons and equipment from India.

Recently, the Indian Ambassador emphasised that her country was determined to provide all kinds of military and political support to Armenia. The Indian Ambassador also emphasised that Pakistan's strategic alliance with Azerbaijan is dangerous for her country. Therefore, she claimed that India provides active military and political support to Armenia.

The facts as explained by the Ambassador is no open secret and is known to all.

It is important to understand what India has supplied to Armenia as part of the $249 million deal. This includes the indigenously manufactured Pinaka MLRS, Swathi radars and 155 truck mounted artillery guns.

One wonders then how France comes into the picture? That is precisely what Khalidbayli does and claims, without proof that India has transferred weapons "jointly produced with French military companies" to Armenia. While Khalidbayil can be excused for not having done proper research for his article, his obvious bias, being driven by Pakistan becomes clear with his absurd allegation that India has deployed mercenaries from India to Armenia, a process he claims has intensified recently.

The further allegation is made that India and Armenia have signed a secret agreement whereby Indian citizens from "poor provinces" are being lured with money to Armenia. There can be only one rational reason for such an absurd and unfounded allegation. Pakistan through its friend Azerbaijan wants to brand India as a sponsor of terrorism. Therefore, it is reported that Indian mercenaries are being trained in India, and then sent to Armenia.

Officially, there are only around 3,000 Indians in Armenia, settled mostly in the capital Yeravan. There have been no reports of Indian citizens undergoing military training in Armenia in accordance with the "local conditions" as claimed by Musavat. The only thing stated to support this allegation is that mercenaries sent from India are registered as "labour force" in Armenia. It is therefore, concluded that Armenia "is trying to hide mercenary terrorists brought from India under the name of labour force".

How on earth is it possible to convince such writers that facts are facts, and one cannot obfuscate the issue by mixing them up. What else does one make of the assertion that Indians brought in "manpower" to take part in military exercises? Is the reference here to trainers? This is unlikely and it is more likely that "manpower" was made available to explain the functioning of Indian defence equipment to the Armenian military.

To stretch the argument to asset that Indians supposedly involved in construction, received military training to become terrorists is a fairy tale woven out of nowhere.

According to the article, Armenians don't want to do military service and therefore, the government is training Indians to act as mercenaries.

Recently, it was reported that two Indian citizens were injured by gunfire in the border regions. The official Armenian statement, posted on the Telegram messenger app by the Defence Ministry (14 June) said that two Indian nationals were involved in construction work at a metallurgical plant in Yeraskh, which is close to the border with Azerbaijan's Nakhchivan exclave.

Therefore, there is no question of Yerevan trying to cover up this information. On the contrary, the Armenian Prime Minister had earlier said that Pakistan had a role to play in the war raging across the Nagorno- Karabakh region.

In an exclusive conversation with an Indian news channel, he said: "We have information that armed fighters from Pakistan are participating in the war raging in the Karabakh region. We can see that Turkey is also involved in the war, mercenaries are being brought to the conflict zone by Ankara. It is a chaotic, confusing situation that we are seeing in Karabakh."

Last year, Pashinyan had also claimed that Pakistani Special Forces had fought alongside the Azerbaijani Army in the Nagorno-Karabakh region, in an interview with Russian news agency Rossiya Segodnya (October 15, 2022).

In October 2020, Pakistan's Prime Minister Imran Khan had boasted of having sent troops to Nagarno-Karabakh to fight alongside the Turkish military and the Azerbaijan Army. Subsequent reports indicated that Pakistani terrorists had also flocked to Azerbaijan to fight against Armenia.

All these provide clear evidence of Pakistani and Turkish forces fighting alongside Azerbaijani forces.

Pakistan needs to do its homework well. For a country that has nurtured and developed terrorist entities for several decades now, their efforts to blame India for terrorism sound amateurish. That India is helping Armenia in bolstering its defence machinery has more to do with regional geo-politics and business sense.

After all, if Turkey can sell its UAVs to Azerbaijan, what stops India from selling its home made Rustom II drones to Armenia. This is the primary narrative emerging from the conflict between Armenia and Azerbaijan.

For Pakistan and Azerbaijan to make false claims about India deserves a riposte. The time and place will be that of India's choosing.
Jaipur, July 3 : Rajasthan Chief Minister Ashok Gehlot on Monday praised the former chief minister Vasundhara Raje for implementing the Palanhar scheme in the state.

"Vasundhara Raje implemented the Palanhar scheme for orphan children. She did not increase any money after the scheme was implemented. I knew it was a good scheme and started working on it," Chief Minister Ashok Gehlot said during a program with the beneficiary children of Palanhar Yojana at the Chief Minister's House.

However, he also blamed the former chief minister saying that when the government changes in the state the former chief minister closes all the schemes implemented by his government.

"Whether it was the metro, refinery or announcing jobs for families of Badrinath, Kedarnath accident all were closed. The approach of BJP is very wrong," the Chief Minister said.

The government had organised a program for the beneficiaries associated with the Palanhar scheme and money was transferred to the accounts of the children associated with the scheme.

"Whether I hold any position or not or live anywhere, I assure the people of the state that I will always be ready to serve you," the Chief Minister said.

Gehlot, who recently hurt both his toes said, "I have hurt both my legs. This never happens even doctors are saying this is the first such case."

"I see God must have done it intentionally. For two months, I was touring continuously so He wanted me to take some rest. The doctors advised me to join via video conference but my friends advised me to meet the children," the Chief Minister said.

The Palanhar scheme provides financial assistance for schoolchildren. The scheme was implemented during former chief minister Vasundhara Raje's tenure.
Chennai, July 3 : One person died while 14 others suffered injuries after two Tamil Nadu State Road Transport buses collided with each other on Monday.

The two buses collided at Maduranthangam on the Tiruchy-Chennai National Highway. While one bus was travelling from Tirunelveli to Chennai with 48 passengers, the other was going from Tiruvannamalai to Chennai with 50 passengers on board.

The deceased has been identified as Ashok Kumar (45), who was on the bus from Tiruvannamalai to Chennai.The 14 persons who were injured in the accident have been admitted to government hospitals in Maduranthangam and Chengalpattu.

Traffic was affected for some time on the Tiruchi-Chennai highway due to the accident.
Kolkata, July 3 : The West Bengal State Election Commission (SEC) informed the Calcutta High Court on Monday that the Union Home Ministry has confirmed sending 485 additional companies of central armed forces for the July 8 panchayat elections.

With this confirmation, the total deployment of central forces for the rural civic body polls will be 822 companies, as directed by the Calcutta High Court. A total of 337 companies have already been deployed.

However, despite the confirmation from the Home Ministry, the commission is yet to specify whether it will be able to deploy central forces personnel in all the polling stations.

The SEC is expected to update the high court on the details of the forces deployment on Tuesday.

Meanwhile, all the opposition forces in the state continue to be vocal demanding deployment of central armed forces in each and every polling booth.

Although the commission has confirmed the presence of armed security personnel in each and every booth, it is yet to confirm whether they will be central forces or personnel from the state police or those from other states.

As per the update given by the commission to the court, there will be deployment of additional forces at the sensitive booths and around 95 per cent of the total booths will be kept under CCTV coverage. Videography will be done in 5 per cent of the booths.
Hyderabad, July 3 : In continuing friction with the Telangana government, Governor Tamilisai Soundararajan on Monday made a surprise visit to Osmania General Hospital.

During her visit to the government-run hospital, she visited all the hospital wards and interacted with the patients and the doctors and para-medical staff.

The Governor visited the century-old hospital a few days after she voiced concern over its condition. This had attracted criticism from Health Minister T. Harish Rao who alleged that she was speaking "like a BJP spokesperson".

Soundararajan voiced her concern regarding the quality of facilities and the issue of limited space. She mentioned that she has raised these concerns with the Chief Minister and the Health Department on multiple occasions.

She further shared that her first meeting upon assuming office as the Governor was with a delegation from the Osmania General Hospital. Since then, she has made regular appeals on the improvisation of hospital and communicated with the state government.

The Governor has received numerous appeals from both OGH medical students and the general public regarding the horrible condition of Osmania General Hospital. She also highlighted that the issue was raised during a recent OGH Alumni meeting.

Notably, the High Court has cleared the case, and she expressed appreciation for this decision.

Soundararajan urged the state government to make alternative arrangements before any further legal hurdles arise. Emphasising that the well-being of poor patients should be the government's highest priority, she acknowledged the exemplary work being done by the doctors despite the existing limitations.

She specifically mentioned the unhygienic conditions of the hospital toilets and washrooms, the roof ceiling in the old building, and the inadequate ventilation.

During her visit, the Governor observed the post-operative ward and general ward, both of which she described as being in not good state.

She clarified that her intention was not to engage in a blame game, but rather to ensure that the poor and needy patients receive the best possible treatment facilities as it is the only resort to them to get treatment.

As a resident of the state, she urged the government to improve hospital infrastructure and treatment facilities.

The Governor expects all concerned authorities to take her suggestions constructively and take appropriate measures. She emphasised her perspective as a doctor and reiterated that the well-being of patients will always be her top concern.

She stated that she wants the government to take immediate action in constructing a new building with 3,000 beds.

In case any legal obstacles arise due to the heritage building, she requested that alternative arrangements be made promptly.

Soundararajan finally stressed that patients should not suffer and their welfare must be prioritised by the people at the helm of affairs.

The Governor, through a tweet on June 28, had highlighted the alarming state of the government-run Osmania Hospital. She called for urgent action in commencing the construction of a new building for the hospital and urged the state government to fulfill its promise to build a new building.

The governor's tweet evoked a strong reaction from Health Minister Harish Rao, who said that the Governor's comments on Osmania Hospital are distressing.

Stating that there is clear politics in the comments, he said that it is unfortunate that the Governor, who holds constitutional office, is speaking like an official spokesperson of BJP.

Harish Rao recalled that Chief Minister KCR had taken a decision to construct the new building of Osmania General Hospital in 2015 but some people approached the court.

"This issue is currently pending in the court. We are ready to construct a new building," he said.

Meanwhile, he held a meeting with officials to review the conditions at Osmania Hospital.

--IANS

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Cuttack, July 3 : Chief Justice of Orissa High Court Justice S. Muralidhar on Monday virtually inaugurated 50 paperless courts in 23 districts of Odisha.

With the inauguration of 50 new paperless courts, the total number of paperless courts in the district judiciary of the state has now reached 84. District Ganjam has become the first district in Odisha to have all the courts paperless.

Earlier, on September 17, 2022, 34 paperless courts were inaugurated by the Chief Justice of India.

During the valedictory ceremony of the National Conference on Digitization, e-Initiatives and Paperless Courts held at Cuttack on 5th and 6th May, 2023, the High Court Chief Justice had pledged to open 100 paperless courts in the state within a period of three months.

Muralidhar said inauguration of 50 paperless courts in the second phase is yet another milestone crossed by the Odisha judiciary and this is a work in progress and the next 50 paperless courts will be made functional in a monthas time.

As preparatory to the paperless courts training has been imparted to judicial officers across the state by the master-trainer judicial officers and the technical team headed by the central project coordinator, he said.

The Chief Justice complimented the judiciary for taking the lead in adapting technology for functioning of courts. He said Covid-19 pandemic caused an acceleration of use of technology in the judiciary and technology would change the way Judicial Officers approach their work.

Muralidhar said that working in paperless court makes it much easier for the judge to access the relevant documents in digital case records which is far more difficult in voluminous physical records and it leaves a positive impact on the mindset of the judge.

Citing the problem of digital divide among the lawyers, he said free bookmarked softcopies of the paper books supplied by the lawyers would be provided to them which would be a great incentive for the younger lawyers to get on to the e-mode.

He emphasized on the impact of paperless court on the reconfiguration of space and the whole architecture of the Court.

All the measures of digitization, e-filing and paperless courts are to make access to justice more affordable, more efficient and more effective, Muralidhar said.

HC judge Justice S. Talapatra said the judiciary believes in the exercise of ethical expansion of technology in judiciary and stressed upon the need of using technology for benefit of the poor.

He said Odisha Judiciary has been harnessing technology to make justice accessible to the common citizens and this has received accolades from various quarters.
Patna July 3 : In a shocking incident, an unemployed engineer killed his mother and three-year-old nephew in Bihar's Buxar district on Monday.

The accused has been identified as Manoj Kumar, a resident of Mathia locality in the city.He recently lost his job and was unemployed since then. The police said he often got into quarrel with his mother and younger brother.

"Manoj was involved in a quarrel with his mother and brother over money. On Monday, his mother Janki Devi (62) had gone for puja along with her three-year-old grandson Rishabh. Manoj followed them and landed multiple blows on his mother with an iron rod until she died," said Manish Kumar, SP of Buxar.

The accused also threw Rishabh from a rooftop, who died on the spot. Manoj later tried to kill his younger brother and his wife too, but failed as they locked the door of the house.

When local residents learnt about the incident, they reached the spot and overpowered Manoj.

"The accused has confessed to his crime. We have arrested him for the double-murder," Kumar said.
Bengaluru, July 3 : The Karnataka High Court on Monday appointed the Chitradurga district Sessions Court judge as the administrator of the prominent Murugha Rajendra Bruhanmutt.

The court had also given directions to take charge of the mutt on Tuesday.

A division bench of Chief Justice P.B. Varale and M.J.S. Kamal had given the order while looking into the petition questioning the government's decision to withdraw the appointment of the administrator of the mutt.

H. Ekanath had made an appeal petition in this regard.

The bench stated that the administrator has been appointed temporarily and will look into the day today administration of Murugha mutt and the institutions which are run by it. But, there is no scope for forming policies in this regard.

The District Collector should extend necessary cooperation for the same, it said, adjourning the matterto July 18.

The pontiff of Murugha mutt Shivamurthy Murugha Sharanaru is under judicial custody in connection with the Pocso and SC/ST Act charges.

The previous BJP government had appointed retired IAS officer P.S. Vastrad as the administrator of the mutt in December 13, 2022.

Questioning the decision of the government, temporary pontiff Basavaprabhu swamiji and devotees had approached the High Court and maintained that appointment of administrator is unconstitutional according to the Article 162 of the Constitution. They had also submitted a petition questioning the prohibition imposed by the Chitradurga District and Session Court on the pontiff to carry out his powers.

Hearing both the petitions, the High Court bench had quashed the order of the government to appoint an administrator. The order of the lower court was also cancelled and the bench opined that the government should not interfere in the matters of religious mutt.

The Congress government had decided not to appeal the decision of the High Court bench's decision to withdraw the appointment of an administrator to the mutt.

Prominent Lingayat seer Shivamurthy Murugha seer was arrested amid high drama on September 1, 2022. He is presently lodged in Chitradurga district prison.

--IANS

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New Delhi, July 3 : The government is unlikely to bring a bill on a Uniform Civil Code (UCC) during the forthcoming Monsoon session of Parliament since the Law Commission is still collating comments from stakeholders on it, even as the Congress sought to question a Parliamentary panel's intention and timing behind discussing the code in its meeting on Monday.

According to sources aware of the developments, the Rajya Sabha Parliamentary Standing Committee on Personnel, Public Grievances, Law and Justice, which held its first meeting on the UCC, saw the Congress questioning the panel's timing behind discussing the contentious issue.

Congress Lok Sabha member Manickam Tagore sought to know from the committee, the real intent behind discussing the UCC at a time when several state assembly elections are lined up during the next few months.

Shiv Sena-UBT member Sanjay Raut, as per sources, kept a neutral stance on the UCC.

Overall, they added, the meeting was basically about understanding the concept of UCC as there is not much clarity on what exactly it actually entails, even among lawmakers.

The panel, which is led by BJP Rajya Sabha member Sushil Modi, had summoned officials from the Law Ministry and the Law Commission to hear their views on the public notice issued by the Commission on June 14 to seek views of various stakeholders on the UCC.

The 22nd Law Commission is learnt to have received 19 lakh suggestions from stakeholders since June 14 and sources pointed out that that the body has time till July 14 to seek views on UCC.

They further said that considering the fact that there is still time for the Law Commission to collate comments from stakeholders on UCC, it may take at least another couple of months to finalise its report on the matter.

Therefore the possibility of a bill on UCC being introduced by the government in the forthcoming monsoon session (which commences from July 20), seems unlikely.

All the three Trinamool Congress members incidentally were absent from the meeting. Both Rajya Sabha member Sukhendu Sekhar Ray and Lok Sabha member Kalyan Banerjee had written to the committee chairman Sushil Modi to reschedule the meeting as they won't be able to attend it due to coming panchayat elections in West Bengal.

--IANS

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Jaipur, July 3 : Rajasthan Chief Minister Ashok Gehlot on Monday transferred Rs 146.74 crore into the bank accounts of more than 5.91 lakh Palanhar beneficiaries through direct benefit transfer (DBT), including assistance of Rs 59.38 crore for June 2023 to 5,92,630 beneficiaries, and Rs 87.36 crore for July to 5,91,730 beneficiaries.

Addressing a state-level programme at his official residence, Gehlot said that assistance is being extended to the beneficiaries of nine categories. This will put an additional burden of approximately Rs 300 crore on the state exchequer with the increase in the assistance amount.

He said that instead of closing the Palanhar Yojana that was started by the previous government, "we have increased the assistance amount and the categories".

With this, complete care, protection and education of children is being ensured within the family, he said, adding that these children will play an important role in the progress of the state and the country in the future.

He said that this scheme is a unique initiative and it is being further strengthened.

"It is the responsibility of all of us that not even a single eligible child remains deprived of the benefits of the scheme. It is our responsibility to fulfill the dreams of the children," Gehlot said.

The Central government should also provide economic support to the needy by implementing a social security law across the country, Gehlot said, adding that the Rajasthan government has taken the responsibility of the health of the people of the state by introducing the Right to Health scheme which will be further strengthened.
New Delhi, July 3 : The Reserve Bank of India (RBI) on Monday said that as much as 76 per cent of the total number of Rs 2,000 notes in circulation have been returned to banks.

The central bank said in a statement that most of these notes have returned through deposits.

"According to the data received from the banks, the total value of Rs 2,000 bank notes received back from circulation after the announcement on May 19 is Rs 2.72 lakh crore up to June 30, 2023," it said.

Consequently, Rs 2,000 bank notes in circulation as at the close of business on June 30 stood at Rs 0.84 lakh crore.

Now, 76 per cent of the Rs 2,000 banknotes in circulation, as on May 19, have since been returned, the central bank added in the statement.

Data collected from major banks indicated that out of the total bank notes in Rs 2,000 denomination received back from circulation, about 87 per cent is in the form of deposits and the remaining around 13 per cent has been exchanged into other denomination bank notes.

--IANS

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New Delhi, July 3 : Four youth were arrested for stabbing a 20-year-old to death after a quarrel over Rs 300 in Delhi's Ranjit Nagar area, the police said on Monday.

The accused have been identified as Pramod (18), Rajnish (18), Amit Kumar (18) and Roshan Singh (19), all residents of Sangam Colony in Delhi.

Sharing the details, a senior police officer said that at about 4.15 p.m. on Sunday, a PCR call was received at Ranjeet Nagar police station informing that a person has been stabbed in Sangam Colony following which a police team was rushed to the spot.

On reaching the spot, the police team found that the injured youth was taken to Metro Hospital, where he was declared brought dead.

"The victim was identified as Abhishek, a resident of Sangam Colony," said the Deputy Commissioner of Police (Central), Snajay Kumar Sain.

On initial inquiry, it was revealed that at around 3:30 p.m. on Sunday, a person named Narender Paswan saw Abhishek being chased by 3-4 persons.

"Abhishek was caught by them and beaten up before a youth named Pramod took out a knife and stabbed on the chest and abdomen of the victim. Paswan ran to help the injured Abhishek, seeing which the assailants fled from the spot. With the help of others, Paswan shifted Abhishek to the hospital where he was declared brought dead," the DCP said.

Through local intelligence and technical mapping, the police succeeded in tracking down accused Rajnish, Amit and Roshan from Noida when they were about to escape to some unknown location to evade arrest.

"Pramod, the main culprit, was traced and nabbed from the Delhi-Lucknow highway," said the DCP.

On interrogation, Pramod disclosed that he and Abhishek were friends.

"On Sunday, they were playing cards at a park near the Railway Line, Sangam Colony. Abhishek lost Rs 300 to Pramod but later he started demanding back the said amount. There was a heated argument between them which consequently led to a fight," the DCP said.

"To teach him a lesson, he followed Abhishek with his friends Roshan, Amit and Rajnish. They caught hold of him near a meat shop in Sangam Colony and then in fit of anger, Pramod attacked him with a knife which led to his death," the officer said.
London, July 3 : World No.1 and four-time Grand Slam winner Iga Swiatek raced into the Ladies' Singles second round at Wimbledon here, starting her campaign for her maiden title in the grass-court major with a straight sets win on Monday.

The 22-year-old from Poland, whose best performance at Wimbledon is a fourth-round appearance in 2021, defeated China's Lin Zhu 6-1, 6-3 in 81 minutes at No.1 Court.

Two more top-10 players, Jessica Pegula of the United States, seeded fourth, and Caroline Garcia of France, the fifth seed, also reached the second round with contrasting wins. Pegula needed 2 hours and 20 minutes to overcome compatriot Lauren Davis 6-2, 6-7(8), 6-3 while Garcia beat another American player, Katie Volynets, 6-4, 6-3 on No.3 Court.

The two-time semifinalist Victoria Azarenka made a winning return to action with a hard-fought win against Yue Yuan of China. Belarusian Azarenka, who reached the last-four stage here in 2011 and 2012, had missed out on Wimbledon last year due to the ban on players from Russia and Belarus due to the war in Ukraine. On Monday, she advanced with a 6-4, 5-7,6-4 win over the 24-year-old Chinese.

Swiatek, who recently won her first grass court event at Queen's Club, lifted the most recent of her four Grand Slam trophies at Roland-Garros just over three weeks ago, adding to those she had already collected in Paris in 2020 and 2022.

The 22-year-old added to her Slam collection as last year's US Open champion.

Swiatek, who claimed the Wimbledon girlsa title in 2018, was impressive on Wimbledonas No.1 Court as she managed the danger that 29-year-old Zhu presented.

At world No.34, Zhu is the highest-ranked unseeded player in the ladiesa draw at Wimbledon, with her confidence growing this season after winning her first WTA singles title at Hua Hin in February. Earlier, shead reached the fourth round of a Grand Slam for the first time at the Australian Open.

It was all the more impressive then, as Swiatek dominated their first career match from the earliest stages. She struck 22 winners as compared to 7 by Zhu. Though there was nothing much difference in unforced errors as Swiatek had 16 while her Chinese opponent had 17, had 61% first serve in while Zhu made 57 per cent.

Swiatek now faces either Sara Sorribes Tormo or Martina Trevisan in the second round.
Imphal, July 3 : The unified security command in Manipur, in its first meeting chaired by Chief Minister N. Biren Singh, on Monday decided that the bunkers erected by militants anywhere in the state have to be destroyed.

The Chief Minister said that the Army would lead the operation in destroying the illegal bunkers and would also be joined by other Central paramilitary forces.

After the unified security command meeting, Biren Singh, who holds the Home portfolio, said that additional paramilitary and state security forces would be deployed in the vulnerable areas.

The meeting has also decided to provide security to the farmers who would restart the farming in the cropping season, he told the media.

"Chaired a meeting of the Combined Headquarters (CHQ) in my office today to discuss important security matters related to the prevailing situation in Manipur. Certain key decisions have been taken to ensure that the violence is stopped immediately in the state, especially at the foothills along the valley. The meeting was attended by senior officers of the state government, Indian Army and the Para Military forces," Singh later tweeted.

He said that for the agriculture purpose, the government has decided to give more security in five districts, including Kangpokpi and Churachandpur and adjoining areas.

In five districts -- Kangpokpi, Churachandpur, Imphal East, Imphal West and Kakching -- around 2,000 police personnel would be deployed additionally, the Chief Minister said.

He said that the government has decided to reopen the schools from Wednesday onwards from class 1 to 8. Classes from 9 to 12 would be started once the construction of prefabricated houses for the displaced people are completed and the displaced people taking shelters at different relief camps are relocated, he added.

After Union Home Minister Amit Shah's four day (May 29-June1) visit, it was decided to form a unified security command headed by retired IPS officer Kuldiep Singh.

After the ethnic violence broke out in Manipur on May 3, Singh, former Director General of the CRPF, was appointed as the Chief Security Advisor to the Manipur government.

The Chief Minister said that more security posts would be set up at hilltops for better control of the prevailing situation and added that drone surveys would also be conducted round the clock, with a central monitoring headquarters to monitor the situation and for reinforcement, if necessary.

Asserting that there is information on people with possession of illegal arms roaming around at both hill and valley areas, he informed that a mass frisking would be started soon. As the law and order situation is improving, he further appealed to the public to return the snatched arms and ammunition, before legal actions is taken.

The Chief Minister, accompanied by other ministers, while talking to the media, also appreciated the role of the civil society organisations of different communities towards bringing peace and harmony in the state. He also appreciated the contribution of womenfolk towards saving the integrity of the state and towards restoring peace.

Biren Singh appreciated the decision to lift the blockade from the Imphal-Dimapur National Highway (NH-2). Appealing to the public for further cooperation on the state government's effort to restore peace and tranquillity in the State, he expressed the need to make a better state for the future generations.

--IANS

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Hyderabad, June 3 : Amid the ongoing efforts for opposition unity and the war of words between Congress and the Bharat Rashtra Samithi (BRS), Samajwadi Party leader Akhilesh Yadav called on BRS President and Telangana Chief Minister K. Chandrasekhar Rao here on Monday.

After the luncheon meeting at Pragathi Bhavan, the official residence of the Chief Minister, the former Uttar Pradesh Chief Minister returned home.

There was no official word as to what transpired during the meeting. Both the leaders did not speak to the media after the meeting and the Chief Minister's Office (CMO) or the BRS also issued no statement.

It is believed that Akhilesh Yadav invited KCR, as Rao is popularly known, to join the efforts of the opposition parties to cobble together a united front against the BJP for 2024 Lok Sabha polls.

The SP leader, who reached Hyderabad by a special aircraft, had told reporters after his arrival at Begumpet Airport that he would be able to comment only after meeting KCR.

"I will be able to comment after the meeting but all (parties) have one aim and it is to remove the BJP from power. We all together want to remove the BJP," he said, evading reply to questions.

"I have nothing to say at the moment. When you want to remove the BJP government at the Centre you have to find a way," he said.

The BRS had skipped the meeting of opposition parties held in Patna on June 23. The party leaders had said that they want people to unite and not parties.

BRS Working President K. T. Rama Rao had said that their party doesn't subscribe to the view that the Congress or the BJP have to be at the centrestage of any alliance.

The SP leader's meeting with KCR comes a day after Congress leader Rahul Gandhi stated at a public meeting at Khammam that the Congress had made it clear that it will not attend any meeting where the BRS is invited. He described the BRS as the 'B team' of the BJP.

The BRS leader is understood to have conveyed his objection to the remarks made by Rahul Gandhi.

Meanwhile, BRS parliamentary party leader K. Keshava Rao slammed Rahul Gandhi for his remarks. "Can a leader say like that," he asked and remarked that he is unfit to lead a front against the BJP.

The MP told reporters that the BRS holds the view that the experiment of parties coming together to contest the election did not yield desired results in the past. Keshava Rao also said that since the regional parties are strong, the leadership of the front should go to them.

"In my personal view, KCR is the best leader to lead the front," he said.

The BRS MP said the parties have to collectively choose a leader looking at different aspects like language, acceptability, ability to take everybody along and vision.

Keshava Rao also took exception to Rahul Gandhi's remark that BRS supported controversial agriculture Bills in the Parliament. He clarified that BRS opposed the Bills and because of the opposition from BRS, the Centre withdrew the legislation.
Bhopal, July 3 : The Madhya Pradesh Police on Monday used water cannons to disperse the Congress workers and councillors in Indore, who were agitating against the "decision to hike taxes" by the civic body.

The Congress, led by Indore Municipal Corporation's (IMC) Leader of Opposition Chintu Chouksey, staged protest accusing the ruling BJP of levying taxes "through the back door".

It said that the "decision to hike taxes would increase the financial burden on the people of Indore".

"BJP has failed to fulfill the promises it had made during the municipal elections. The BJP in its manifesto during the civic polls last year had said that it will not levy new taxes or hike the existing ones. However, it has hiked taxes from 30 per cent to 60 per cent through the back door," Chouksey said.

The Congress will oppose the decision in and out of the Municipal Corporation until it is taken back, he added.

During the protest, the Congress workers burnt an effigy of Indore Mayor Pushyamitra Bhargava. Meanwhile, police said that the water cannons were used after they tried to cross the barricades placed outside the civic headquarters.

Youth Congress President Rameez Khan claimed that he suffered an eye injury while some other workers also sustained wounds.

--IANS

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Bhopal, July 3 : Members of right wing outfit Hindu Dharma Sena staged a protest at a police station in Madhya Pradesh's Jabalpur district opposing an FIR lodged against its head. In a video that surfaced on social media, the protesters could be seen accusing the police of being biased.

The protesters also raised slogans like "Love jihad karne walon ko, goli maro salon ko" and alleged that the FIR against Hindu Dharma Sena head Yogesh Agrawal was filed at the behest of some local politicians.

A couple of weeks back, Agrawal had posted a video message on social media, appealing Hindu community youths to marry Muslim girls. He also announced a reward of Rs 10,000 for those (Hindu) who marry Muslim girls.

A group of Muslim youths raised their apprehension and a case was registered against Agrwal at a police station in Jabalpur. Those who filed the FIR against Agrwal are said to be associated with Asaduddin Owasi's All India Majlis-e-Ittehadul Muslimeen (AIMIM).

Ganpat Maskole, in-charge of Jabalpur Cant police station, told IANS that a group of persons lodged the FIR against Agrawal based on a video message.

On the basis of the video, Agrwal was booked under Sections 153 and 504 of the IPC.

"On Monday, Hindu Dharma Sena members also submitted a memorandum at the police station. I have assured them that a detail investigation will be conducted into the matter and action will be taken accordingly," Maskole said.
New Delhi, July 3 : Senior advocate and DMK Rajya Sabha member P. Wilson on Monday wrote to the Chairman of the 22nd Law Commission, opposing the Uniform Civil Code (UCC), saying that it would infringe upon the freedom of religion guaranteed under Article 25 of the Constitution.

Justifying the opposition to UCC, Wilson said that it desecrates the holy sacraments like marriage, which should be within the domain of religious institutions when it comes to marriage between believers.

"Marriage is not just a civil union in most religions. In Christianity for example, marriage is a sacrament. It is a facet of religion, that is why it is called the sacrament of holy matrimony. It has to be consecrated by an ordained priest, in the presence of members of the Church, in a manner specified by the Catholic Church.

"Therefore, if the UCC provides for marriages to be registered before an authority like the Registrar, it denigrates and desecrates a holy sacrament. That apart, Christians have a practice of having marriage counselling before consecrating a marriage. A UCC will be the end of this practice. Ultimately therefore, the UCC targets religious practices and interferes with the free practice of one's religion," he wrote in the letter, a copy of which was also directed to the Parliament's Standing Committee on Personnel, Public Grievances, and Law and Justice Chairman Sushil Modi.

"Civil codes can be applied to atheists or inter-religious marriages as is already the case of the Special Marriages Act, 1954. While the idea of a Uniform Civil Code may seem appealing on the surface, it is crucial to consider the negative impact it could have on our diverse society," Wilson said in the letter.

Preserving religious freedom, respecting cultural diversity and avoiding unintended consequences should be considered, he said, adding that instead of thrusting a uniform code, we should focus on encouraging dialogue, understanding and gradual reforms within communities through social engineering to weed out undesirable practices.

The DMK MP said that uniformity in rights should be the aim, rather than in laws.

"We can always take steps to protect women's equality by amending personal laws. These are extremely prescient findings and suggestions already given by the 21st Law Commission of India and there was no reason to redo the entire exercise at the cost of state exchequer and wastage of time again by 22nd Law Commission," Wilson said.

Citing the public reaction on hijab ban judgement passed by the Karnataka High Court, the DMK MP emphasised upon drawing from that experience to understand that while dealing with deep-rooted religious faith, a cut and dry approach can't be adopted and instead, an approach laden with compassion, understanding and patience is needed.

He urged the Law Commission Chairman to furnish information about the expenditure incurred by the panel in consultations, meetings, publishing questionnaire etc. for the Consultation Paper dated August 31, 2018.

Wilson also sought the list of participants, respondents and consultants who participated in the consultation.

The 22nd Law Commission began seeking comments from the public on the UCC from June 14 onwards, and the last date for seeking views is till July 14.

The Rajya Sabha Parliamentary standing committee led by BJP MP Sushil Modi on Monday met representatives of the 22nd Law Commission and law ministry officials to seek their views on the UCC.

--IANS

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New Delhi, July 4 : Congress General Secretary Jairam Ramesh said on Monday that after the Bharat Jodo Yatra in Telangana last year, the grand old party is headed towards victory in the state like it did in Karnataka.

In a tweet, Ramesh said: "The Congress party in Telangana has already announced the Farmersa Declaration in Warangal and the Youth Declaration in Hyderabad, yesterday (on Sunday) Rahul Gandhiannounced a guaranteed pension of Rs. 4000 per month for senior citizens and widows. He also promised to return Podu land to adivasis if the Congress forms government.

"From the time of the Bharat Jodo Yatra that went through 8 districts of the state covering 405 kms and evoking a tremendous response from the people, it is clear that we are headed towards victory in Telangana as we did in Karnataka."

Ramesh, who is also the party's communication incharge, made the remarks a day after former Congress chief Rahul Gandhi announced in Telangana that if the party is voted to power, widows and senior citizens will get a monthly pension of Rs 4,000.

Rahul Gandhi made the announcementwhile addressing 'Jana Garjana' public meeting in Telangana's Khammam on Sunday. He also promised that if voted to power, the Congress will return Podu lands to tribals.

The former Congress President said that all those lands "taken away" by the KCR government from farmers and Dalits will also be returned to them.

The Assembly elections in Telangana are scheduled to be held later this year. While the Congress is pushing hard to win the polls, the Bharat Rashtra Samithi (BRS) led by Chief Minister K. Chandrasekhar Rao is also leaving no stone unturned to make a comeback for the third consecutive term in the state.
Gandhinagar, July 3 : SGX Nifty has been rebranded as GIFT NIFTY from Monday, with all derivative contracts worth $7.5 billion transitioning from Singapore to India. The official operation of GIFT NIFTY marks a step in shifting the base from the Singapore Exchange to the NSE International Exchange (NSE IX) located in Gandhinagar.

To commemorate this milestone, the NSE IX on Monday organised a bell-ringing ceremony for GIFT NIFTY, symbolising the commencement of trading activities. By 3:30 p.m., a staggering $1.3 billion worth of trading had already taken place.

On this occasion, Tapan Ray, MD and Group CEO of GIFT City, Ashishkumar Chauhan, MD and CEO, NSE, Injeti Srinivas, Chairman, IFSCA, and others came together in GIFT City for the bell-ringing ceremony.

GIFT City, the emerging financial hub in Gujarat, aims to rival global financial centres such as Dubai, Mauritius, and Singapore.

Tapan Ray emphasised the extended trading hours and the exclusive trading of US dollar-denominated Nifty derivatives on NSE International Exchange.

"This move is expected to attract global investors and accelerate economic growth, solidifying India's position as a vibrant financial powerhouse," he said.

Gujarat's Home Minister Harsh Sanghavi hailed the significance of this transformation on his social media, stating that it marked a "game-changing moment for GIFT City. The shift of the $7.5 billion trade to GIFT City, including the transfer of all pending orders, reflects a crucial milestone in the transition from the Singapore Exchange to NSE IX in Gandhinagar."

The GIFT NIFTY umbrella brand encompasses four products: GIFT Nifty 50, GIFT Nifty Bank, GIFT Nifty Financial Services, and GIFT Nifty IT derivative contracts. This development follows the resolution of a five-year-long feud between the National Stock Exchange of India Ltd, carrying immense importance for India's trading market and Gujarat's GIFT City.

In terms of trading hours, GIFT Nifty now operates for an extended period from 4 a.m. IST to 2 a.m. IST the following day, compared to SGX Nifty's current 16-hour trading window from 6:30 a.m. IST to 10:30 p.m. IST. Following this transition, all US dollar-denominated Nifty derivatives contracts will be exclusively traded on NSE IFSC, while SGX handles the clearing operations.
United Nations, July 4 : UN Security Council President Barbara Woodward has said that the pace of the Council reform process has been "very frustrating" and that her country backs moving on to text-based negotiations.

Woodward, who is Britain's permanent representative and assumed the rotating presidency for this month, said on Monday, "I recognise that it has been a very frustrating process."

"We too thought it would be useful actually to move to text-based negotiations, but I'm afraid we didn't," she said.

"There wasn't enough support for that to make immediate progress."

The reform process which is known as Intergovernmental Negotiations (IGN) ended its meetings for the current session with little progress and for the 25th time rolled over the negotiations to the next session.

One of the roadblocks to advancing the reforms is the failure to adopt a text on which to base the negotiations because of the opposition of a few countries as a way of preventing it from going ahead.

Woodward said that she had been in contact with IGN co-facilitators who led the reform process, Permanent Representatives Tareq AlBanai of Kuwait and Alexander Marschik of Austria, and "I know that they've tried very hard indeed but there is such a wide range of views that it seems very difficult indeed, to make progress".

"So I recognise the frustrations," she added.

Woodward reiterated Britain's support for making India, Brazil, Germany and Japan permanent members of the Council to reflect contemporary realities.

Asked about Britain's choice of the four countries, she said that it had to do with geographic balance and recognising their rising influence.

"Introducing India or Brazil would bring a wider geographical representation into the council, but (would serve) also to bring in countries that have more influence than they had when the original Security Council was put together in 1945, for obvious reasons."

"So there's a sort of combination of recognising the world as it is today, alongside geographical balance," she added.

While India was a founding member of the UN in 1945, it was still a British colony and was not considered a candidate for a permanent seat.

Britain also supports two permanent memberships for African nations who would themselves determine the countries for the seats and one of them could be an Arab- African country, Woodward said.

She referred to a foreign policy speech by Britain's Foreign Secretary James Cleverly announcing his country's "ambition to drive forward reform of the multilateral system".

"And our presidency in July marks the first step in that process," she added.

She said two items from the priorities he set out that Britain will take up at the UN are Council reforms because "it's high time the council entered the 2020s," and technology.

"On technology during our presidency, we'll be bringing artificial intelligence (AI) to the Security Council for the very first time with our signature event this month," she added.

"Humanity stands on the precipice of this gigantic, gigantic, technological leap forward" and "we want to encourage a multilateral approach to managing both the huge opportunities and the risks that artificial intelligence holds for all of us," she said.

The Council meeting on AI on July 18 under the agenda of maintenance of international peace and security will be a precursor to a summit that Britain's Prime Minister Rishi Sunak is convening to seek agreements on safety measures to evaluate and monitor AI's most significant risks, according to the British government.

It noted that leading experts have "warned about the potential for AI to endanger humanity in similar ways to pandemics or nuclear weapons".

(Arul Louis can be contacted atarul.l@ians.inand followed at @arulouis)
New Delhi, July 4 : Uttarakhand Chief Minister Pushkar Singh Dhami met Union Home Minister Amit Shah in New Delhi.

Sharing the photo of the meeting with Shah, Uttarakhand CM Dhami said that after meeting the Union Home and Cooperation Minister Amit Shah in New Delhi, he was informed about the preparations related to the beginning of the Kanwar Yatra, the rehabilitation work being done in Joshimath and the arrangements made by the state government to conduct the Char Dham Yatra smoothly and safely, which is breaking all records in terms of pilgrims visiting the holy shrine as compared to previous years.

Earlier on Monday evening, Dhami visited the BJP headquarters in the national capital and also met the party's national organisation General Secretary B.L. Santosh.

It is being told that during the meeting between the two leaders, Dhami also discussed the draft of the Uniform Civil Code Bill.
Duncan, the Heart of the Chisholm Trail, will have deals aplenty and treasures waiting to be discovered during the 38th Annual World's Largest Garage Sale this July.

An annual tradition in Duncan now in its 38th year, the World's Largest Garage Sale is a true community-wide event with multiple sales happening in Duncan's residential neighborhoods and sidewalk sales happening in the retail areas.

Residential sales begin as early as Thursday, July 13 with the majority of all sales being held Friday and Saturday, July 14-15. Hours will vary by location.

Check out the many unique boutique shops up and down Main from 7th to 10th Streets. Take time to stop by Elk Plaza Center, The Chisholm Mall and other businesses across Duncan as well.

Break time means remembering to visit Fuqua Park and see all things train-related at the 905 Train Depot and Museum, the interactive Rhythm and Routes Exhibit at the Stephens County Historical Museum celebrating Hoyt and Mae Axton, and, of course, enjoying all of Duncan's shops and restaurants.

While in Duncan, take the time to see the four Bob Palmer murals scattered around the city and check out the most recent, a tribute to the Oklahoma Music Trail that celebrates Duncan's own Hoyt Axton and his mother, Mae Boren Axton. The Rhythm and Routes mural can be found at the corner of 7th and Main Street on the east side of the historic Henderson building. And, of course, no visit would be complete without a stop to say howdy at the Chisholm Trail Heritage Center, located at 2150 Chisholm Trail Parkway.

The World's Largest Garage Sale is certain to have a treasure or three waiting to be found and Duncan's hospitality will make you come visit again and again.

For general information and overnight accommodations, please contact the Duncan Convention and Visitors Bureau at 580-252-2900 x 240 or http://www.visitduncan.org.
Providing world-class online programs to students and schools everywhere. This four-week teacher training program will take place from July 12 to August 8, 2023 and will be conducted entirely online. Chinese language teachers from all over the United States and around the world, are welcome.

To promote the global development of online Chinese language courses for high school students, nonprofit online learning provider VHS Learning and ChinesePlus will host a professional development opportunity for Chinese language teachers this summer. This four-week teacher training program will take place from July 12, 2023 to August 8, 2023 and will be conducted entirely online. Chinese language teachers from all over the United States and around the world, are welcome.

About the PD Offering

VHS Learning will provide its four-week Online Teaching Methodologies (OTM) course to interested teachers. OTM is a well-respected graduate-level teacher training program delivered as an asynchronous online course. OTM provides teachers with an opportunity to learn key online teaching methodologies, including online education concepts, pedagogy, online interaction with students, effective evaluation techniques, and more. Facilitators provided by VHS Learning are online teachers with extensive teaching experience. Participants will get the opportunity to view the online Chinese 1 course for high school students developed by VHS Learning. The training is conducted in English.

To supplement the OTM program, ChinesePlus has invited internationally renowned Chinese teaching experts to provide three webinars for Chinese language teachers taking part in the VHS Learning training program. Webinars are in Chinese.

Upon successful completion of the training, participants will receive:

1) An OTM certificate of completion.

2) A 45-hour continuing education PDP and training certificate recognized by the Massachusetts Department of Education. Teachers outside Massachusetts can use this training syllabus and certificate with the state department of education to apply for continuing teaching hours.

Teachers who hold a U.S. teaching certification and earn a grade of 80 or above can apply to Post University for one masters degree credit for $175.00 (USD). Certified teachers who successfully complete the training will also be invited to join the VHS Learning teaching pool and be considered for contracted teaching opportunities.

OTM and ChinesePlus Webinar Schedule:

The course schedule is as follows:



Week 1 (7/12  7/18) Why Online Learning (Asynchronous)

Week 2 (7/19  7/25) Learner Engagement and Communication (Asynchronous)

Week 3 (7 /26 - 8/1) Continuous Growth through Student Feedback (Asynchronous)

Week 4 (8/2 - 8/8) Meeting the Needs of all Learners (Asynchronous)

The webinar schedule (Zoom) is as follows:



Webinar 1: Teacher Hua Zhang, Director of Chinese Department at Andrew's School in Florida

Webinar 2: Doctor Baifeng Sun, Chinese Language Subject Matter Expert, VHS Learning

Webinar 3: Professor Wang Jinhong, Deputy General Manager of Continental Han Feng Network Technology (Beijing) Co., Ltd

Additional information about OTM:

This OTM professional development opportunity:



is asynchronous, meaning there are no set times to log in to complete your work,

is paced, meaning you will have mid-week and end-of-week deadlines to stay on track with the cohort,

requires daily participation Monday-Friday,

takes most participants between 10-12 hours a week to successfully complete 7-9 weekly assignments,

includes collaborative experiences,

runs for four weeks with each week beginning on Wednesday and ending on Tuesday, and

for teachers who hold a USA issued certification, this is an opportunity for us to learn about you and your professional skills, and for you to learn more about VHS Learning and our expectations and processes.

How to Sign Up for OTM:

OTM is $900 per person, but through this special summer program, ChinesePlus and VHS Learning will provide full scholarships for 90 teachers. Teachers who are interested in participating, should follow these instructions to apply.

There is no charge for the application nor the training. Free seats are limited, on a first-come, first-served basis. The registration deadline for this training is July 11, 2023. If you have any questions, please email: info@vhslearning.org.

About VHS Learning

VHS Learning is a nonprofit organization with 27 years of experience providing world-class online programs to students and schools everywhere. More than 600 schools around the world take advantage of VHS Learnings 300+ online high school courses  including 29 AP courses, credit recovery, and enrichment courses  to expand their programs of study. VHS Learning is accredited by Middle States Association Commission on Elementary and Secondary Schools (MSA-CESS) and the Accrediting Commission for Schools, Western Association of Schools and Colleges (ACS WASC). Courses are approved for initial eligibility by NCAA. For more information about VHS Learning please visit https://www.vhslearning.org/ and follow on Twitter at @VHSLearning.

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PLG hosts FREE backpack giveaway at Center Square in Towne West Square Mall on August 5th at 9AM We are honored to host a free backpack giveaway in Wichita to assist local families in need.

Patterson Legal Group is pleased to announce that its law firm will host a backpack giveaway on Saturday, August 5th at Center Square located in Towne West Square Mall; use the west entrance by the movie theater (4600 W Kellogg Dr, Wichita, KS 67209). During this free community event, backpacks stuffed with school supplies will be handed out from 9:00 a.m. through 10:00 a.m. As supplies are limited and will be given out on a first-come, first-served basis, the law firm advises families to arrive early for a better chance to get a backpack and supplies.

"At Patterson Legal Group, our team is committed to supporting our community during challenging times. We understand the financial strain that rising household costs can place on families, and we are honored to host a free backpack giveaway in Wichita to assist those in need. It is our sincere hope that this initiative helps struggling families prepare their children for a successful new school year filled with endless possibilities," shared Managing Partner, Gary Patterson.

For more information about Patterson Legal Groups third annual Wichita backpack giveaway, please contact Ella Reusser via email at ella@pattersonlegalgroup.com, or call (888) 687-2400. You can also contact the law firm by sending a direct message through its Facebook page.

More About Patterson Legal Group, L.C.

Patterson Legal Group is a personal injury law firm with offices located throughout Kansas and Missouri. Founded on the principle of helping injury victims pursue their legal rights, they are not afraid to take on large insurance companies or to hold negligent persons accountable for injuring a client. Their lawyers are champions of consumer rights with a strong track record for helping people suffering from personal injury or disability. Learn more about the specific legal services and community outreach activities of Patterson Legal Group at pattersonlegalgroup.com. You can also connect and socialize with their legal team through the law firms Facebook page (/PattersonLegalGroup/).

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Ugandan activists brought another legal case Tuesday against French oil giant TotalEnergies, seeking damages over alleged food and land rights violations in the companys East Africa operations.

The civil suit filed in Paris comes four months after the collapse of a similar case brought by activists who wanted to stop TotalEnergies pipeline project in Uganda and Tanzania, alleging environmental risks and an infringement of rights.

Campaigners who oppose a project they insist violates the Paris climate accord were disappointed when the case was dismissed on procedural grounds before going to trial.

The new litigation cites TotalEnergies alleged failure to comply with Frances duty of vigilance law and seeks compensation for the companys alleged violations of land and food rights over six years.

TotalEnergies has long denied the allegations.

Five French and and Ugandan civic groups, including the French branch of Friends of the Earth and the Uganda-based Africa Institute for Energy Governance, or AFIEGO, are plaintiffs in the case.

Community challenges stemming from TotalEnergies projects include under-compensation as well as the construction of small, inappropriate replacement housing that is not suitable to the family sizes of affected households, said Dickens Kamugisha, AFIEGOs chief executive.

TotalEnergies is the majority shareholder in the 897-mile (1,443-kilometer) East Africa Crude Oil Pipeline, which would carry oil from wells in western Uganda to Tanzanias Indian Ocean port of Tanga. Authorities have described it as the worlds longest heated oil pipeline.

Some oil wells are to be drilled within western Ugandas Murchison Falls National Park, where the Nile River plummets 130 feet (40 meters) through a 20-foot-wide (6-meter-wide) gap and the surrounding wilderness is home to hippos, egrets, giraffes and antelopes.

The pipeline would then pass through seven forest reserves and two game parks, running alongside Lake Victoria, a source of fresh water for 40 million people.

That routes ecological fragility is one reason why some activists oppose the project despite assurances from TotalEnergies that the pipelines state-of-the-art-design will ensure safety for decades.

Ugandan authorities see the oil drilling project and the pipeline as key to economic development, saying oil wealth could help lift millions out of poverty.

Uganda is estimated to have recoverable oil reserves of at least 1.4 billion barrels.
PLG hosts FREE backpack giveaway at Heritage Hall in Stormont Vail Events Center on August 3rd at 5:30PM Our team is honored to once again host a free backpack giveaway in Topeka that is aimed at supporting local families prepare for a successful new school year.

Patterson Legal Group is pleased to announce that its law firm will host a backpack giveaway on Thursday, August 3rd at Heritage Hall located in Stormont Vail Events Center (SW 17th St, Topeka, KS 66612). During this free event, their staff will give away backpacks stuffed with school supplies from 5:30 p.m. through 6:30 p.m., or while supplies last. The law firm decided to host the backpack giveaway as a means to help offset cost burdens often associated with preparing for a new school year.

As a business owner, I understand the challenges faced by families trying to navigate rising costs associated with back-to-school preparations. It is with heartfelt sincerity that our team is honored to once again host a free backpack giveaway in Topeka, aiming to support struggling families in their journey towards a successful new school year. We believe that every child deserves an equal opportunity to thrive, and we are committed to making a positive difference in our community, expressed Gary Patterson, Managing Partner.

For more information about the Patterson Legal Group Topeka backpack giveaway, please contact Ella Reusser with Patterson Legal Group at (888) 687-2400, or via email at ella@pattersonlegalgroup.com. You can also contact the law firm by sending a direct message through their Facebook page.

More About Patterson Legal Group, L.C.

Patterson Legal Group is a personal injury law firm with offices located throughout Kansas and Missouri. Founded on the principle of helping injury victims pursue their legal rights, they are not afraid to take on large insurance companies or to hold negligent persons accountable for injuring a client. Their lawyers are champions of consumer rights with a strong track record for helping people suffering from personal injury or disability. Learn more about the specific legal services and community outreach activities of Patterson Legal Group at pattersonlegalgroup.com. You can also connect and socialize with their legal team through the law firms Facebook page (/PattersonLegalGroup/).

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Rita Chang-Eppig sets her rollicking historical debut, Deep as the Sky, Red as the Sea, on the 19th-century South China Sea. After pirate captain Cheng Yat is killed during a botched raid, his wife, Shek Yeung, fears for her standing among her fellow outlaws. Cheung Po, Yats adopted son, is the fleets legal heir, and Yeung worries Po may take the opportunity to wrest control away from her. Meanwhile, the emperor works to extinguish the threat of piracy. What follows is a bold and bloody showdown between the government and the pirate queen. The prose is lyrical and the plot is clever and serpentine, exploring questions of power, violence, gender, and fate.

Whoever said "sugar and spice and everything nice, that's what little girls are made of" obviously didn't know many girls or women. Some of the most fascinating female characters in books, film/TV, and real life are the ones that shake us up and make us uncomfortable. We may not want to be their friends--but we can't deny the lasting hold they have on us. Here are 10 great works of fiction featuring morally questionable women.

1. We Have Always Lived in the Castle by Shirley Jackson It would be criminal for me not to begin with this classic by Shirley Jackson, a novel narrated by Merricat Blackwood, who lives isolated from the rest of the world with her cousin and uncle on their family estate. Why are they isolated? Because some years ago a terrible accident killed most of the family, and the people in the community suspect one of the surviving members. I realize that by giving even this much information I may already be spoiling the book a little, but in my defense, the book was published in 1962, so you've had ample time to read it.

2. Burning Your Boats by Angela Carter No one writes a luxuriant, gothic short story quite like Angela Carter (except for Mariana Enriquez; see below). Burning Your Boats collects all of Carter's short stories, which spin the tales of jealous countesses, vampire queens, and even Lizzie Borden herself. Entire dissertations have been written on the ways that Carter uses myth to interrogate gender norms, so I'll simply say that this is the ur-collection that spawned all the mythical retellings we're seeing these days.

3. The Dangers of Smoking in Bed by Mariana Enriquez It was hard to imagine a collection that could rival Enriquez's 2017 effort, Things We Lost in the Fire, but then Enriquez was like, "Hold my beer." In these stories, an exhausted ghost seeks to escape her ghosthood and fanatical teenage girls do the unthinkable out of love for their pop idol. Its an unforgettable collection thats not for the faint of heart (or the weak of stomach).

4. Circe by Madeline Miller Any retelling of the Circe myth that doesn't cast Circe as a morally questionable character would be missing the point entirely. Thank goodness (or badness?) that Miller didn't miss the point. The novel follows the sorceress's life from her lonely childhood to her eventual meeting with Odysseus, reframing the story that so many of us had to read in high school from a fascinating new perspective.

5. Fledgling by Octavia Butler Any novel about vampires that casts them as purely good would be missing the point, too. Fledgling follows the story of an amnesiac vampire who appears to be a child but is in fact quite old. Her bite has euphoric properties, so when she bites a human, shes essentially addicting them to herself. But hey, a girl's gotta eat. Butlers tale explores questions of consent and power in a way that few vampire novels do.

6. Pandora by Anne Rice As a teenager, I devoured Anne Rice novels, most of which feature male protagonists, so I was very excited when Pandora came out. The eponymous main character, a vampire, has been alive since the days of ancient Rome. Because of her advanced age, she doesn't technically need to feed, but she does so anyway, sometimes ripping the hearts out of her victims chests to squeeze from them the last drops of bloodas one does. At least she fills her victims' minds with comforting visions while she drinks. That counts for something, right?

7. Revenge by Yoko Ogawa Ogawa is best known for her novels The Memory Police and The Housekeeper and the Professor, but this delightfully twisted collection may be my favorite book of hers. A scorned woman visits a museum of torture instruments. Another develops an unhealthy attachment to her coworker. Here are stories about female obsession, suppressed rage, and of course, revenge.

8. The Hundred Thousand Kingdoms by N.K. Jemisin In this fantasy novel from Jemisin, a woman navigating both palace and celestial politics does what she needs to survive and root out the truth behind her mother's murder, at times breaking out the ol' "the ends justify the means" argument. What are the moral costs of survival, Jemisin asks, or of participating in a system built on domination and exploitation?

9. Maddalena and the Dark by Julia Fine Fine's third novel is a sumptuous and strange visit to the Venice of the 1700s, when a girl's future could be destroyed by her mothers misdeeds. The book alternates between the POVs of two girls: Maddalena, who is sent to a conservatory after her mother runs away with another man, and Luisa, an aspiring violinist yet to reach her full potential living at the same conservatory. The girls form an intense bond, made more intense by the magic of the waters of Venice. To get what she wants, Maddalena makes increasingly dangerous bargains with the sea.
Ukrainian novelist Victoria Amelina has died from injuries sustained from a Russian missile attack on the eastern city of Kramatorsk in Donetsk Oblast on June 27. She was 37.

At the time of the attack, Amelina was dining at a restaurant with fellow writers Hector Abad and Catalina Gomez, both from Colombia, who were also injured. The three have been active in war reporting and as peace activists. A total of 13 people, including Amelina, died in the attack, and a further 60 were wounded.

As PW reported on Friday, the three were visiting Kramatorsk after attending the Kiev Book Arsenal, Ukraine's main literary festival. All three writers were heavily involved in peace advocacy efforts. From the start of the war, Amelina had worked with Ukrainian non-governmental organizations, including Truth Hounds and the Center for Civil Liberties, as a field investigator of Russias war crimes in the liberated territories in eastern, southern, and northern Ukraine. During her investigations in Kapitolivka, near Izium, she found the diary of the writer Volodymyr Vakulenko, who was killed by Russians. She was killed before finishing a work in progress, a nonfiction book called Looking at Women Looking at War: War and Justice Diary.

Amelina is the author of the novels Doms Dream Kingdom and Fall Syndrome and several books of poetry. She won the Joseph Conrad Literature Prize for her prose, and was a finalist for the European Union Prize for Literature and the United Nations Women in Arts Award. She is also founder of the New York Literature Festival, which took place in a village called New York in the Bakhmut area of Ukraine. Excerpts of her work have been published in English by Arrowsmith Press. She expected to take up a position as writer-in-residence at the Paris location of Columbia University later this summer.

In May, Amelina attended the Prix Voltaire ceremony at the World Expression Forum in Lillehammer, Norway, to accept the IPA Prix Voltaire Special Award from the International Publishers Association on behalf of the aforementioned childrens author and poet Vakulenko. She had then brought the Special Award from Norway to Vakulenkos parents in Kapytolivka, Ukraine.

"I am a Ukrainian writer speaking on behalf of my colleague Volodymyr Vakulenko who, unlike me, didn't survive another attempt of the Russian Empire to erase Ukrainian identity," Amelina said in her speech, which is available to view on YouTube (starting at the 14-minute mark). "The Ukrainian literary community is grateful for the award. This award is unique, meaningful, and moving to us, partly because no one out of hundreds of other Ukrainian writers who, like Vakulenko, were murdered throughout Ukrainian history ever received such an international award posthumously. I am sure that Volodymyr Vakulenko would like to dedicate this award to them too."

Georgian publisher Gvantsa Jobava, v-p of the IPA, was with Amelina during her speech. "I met Victoria Amelina, the Ukrainian writer and activist, in Norway," Jobava wrote in a social media post on learning the news. "We spent a very nice evening together, we talked about everything, about Georgia and Ukraine, about war, victory and peace, about life and death, about her activism during the war. We became friends, she became very dear to me. We met each other again recently in Kyiv, at the Book Arsenal festival. I was so happy to meet her again, she was everywhere, taking part in different events and panel discussions. [] She cared about everything not only around Ukraine, but about Georgia as well. Then she hugged me and left. During all this days we were hoping that miracle will happen, but it didnt. [] Now I realized that by going to Ukraine I was given a chance to hug this talented, brave, dear woman one last time. My heart is totally broken."

In addition, Amelina spoke with Christopher Kenneally for the Copyright Clearance Center's Velocity of Content podcast last month. "When we spoke in May for an interview about the Prix Voltaire, I was left in awe of Victoria Amelina's quiet courage and fierce determination," Kenneally said. "As the worldwide outpouring of sympathy and grief online has shown, she was impressive in so many ways: a novelist and poet; a human rights activist; a Ukrainian patriot." A video excerpt of that conversation is available, in addition to the full audio interview and transcript.

"Ninety-percent of my friends are writers, artists and activists," Amelina said during the interview. Pointing out that they are targets of the Russian army, who are actively trying to destroy Ukrainian culture, Amelina remarked "This is quite an appalling thing to think about." Amelina went on to say that though she is a human rights activist, she wants the world to understand why the country is fighting so fiercely. "We cannot have any compromise. We cannot give up neither the Donetsk, Luhansk, nor Crimea, because we know what is going on there during the occupation. The occupation is something even worse than the war. This is where people like Volodymyr Vakulenko become helpless and be tortured and executed. To me, it is very important that the world hears us and understands this."
According to the Saudi Press Agency, Muslim leaders from the Organization of Islamic Cooperation held an emergency meeting on Sunday to address the recent act of "disgraceful" desecration of a Quran copy in Sweden, discussing appropriate measures in response.

The meeting is scheduled to discuss measures against these despicable acts to express a united position against the desecration of the Holy Quran, the statement said.

In response to an invitation from Saudi Arabia, the meeting will take place at the headquarters of the Organization of Islamic Cooperation (OIC) in Jeddah. The meeting was called as Saudi Arabia holds the chairmanship of both the Islamic Summit and the OIC's Executive Committee.

Read More: Learn More About the Procedure to Get The Iqama For New Expats

Expressing concern over the disrespect of the incident, the OIC emphasized that Sweden's decision to permit such an act undermines the principles of mutual respect and harmony between nations. The organization stated that this action contradicts global efforts to promote tolerance, moderation, and opposition to extremism.

It also called for the governments of the countries involved in the bloc to urgently take serious steps and measures to prevent the occurrence of similar incidents in the future.



The statement reaffirmed the commitment of all states that have undertaken under the UN Charter, to promote and foster human rights and fundamental freedoms for everyone, regardless of race, gender, language, or religion.
Katherine Watkins still thinks about the women she met years ago as a young psychiatrist working at a residential treatment center. They were fighting drug addictionsbut they were also struggling with serious mental health problems at the same time. They were some of the sickest patients she had ever met.

Watkins is now a senior physician policy researcher at RAND. She's leading an effort in New Mexico to transform the care of people like those women. If it's successfuland the early numbers look promisingit will provide a new model for helping patients who otherwise might disappear into cracks in the American health care system.

Their stories are just heart-wrenching, Watkins said. They get shut out from the mental health system because of their substance use disorders. The substance use system tells them, sorry, you've got a mental health disorder, we can't help you. The need is so great, and they so often have nowhere to turn.

It's hard to put a number on the problem; good statistics just don't exist. By one common estimate, at least 2 million people in the United States have an opioid use disorder, but the true number could be two or three times that. Studies suggest more than a quarter of them also have a serious mental illness, such as depression or posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD), that interferes with their daily lives. As a very rough estimate, that's more than half a million people.

Most do not get the care they need. And without it, they are much more likely to end up in a hospital or a jail, to slide into poverty or homelessness, to die by overdose or suicide. Watkins and her colleagues recognized that individual doctors working alone could not meet the depth of need these patients have. What they needed was a team.

They brought together primary care providers, therapists, and psychiatrists. Under their model, patients would still see a provider for front-line medical treatment. Team therapists would also work with patients who need mental health treatment. Behind the scenes, psychiatrists and other care team members would review their cases and make recommendations. Holding it all together would be a care coordinatorsomeone like Joey Acosta.

He's a single point of contact for around 20 patients at a time. It's his job to schedule appointments, call in refills, and provide updates to the team on a patient's progress. It's also his job to check in on patients, to see how they're doing and what they need, to be there for them in times of crisisand, when they don't answer, to call and call again. The training manual describes his job as the glue holding together patients and providers. He describes it as a way to protect people who often have no one else looking out for them.

Sometimes, you're the only person they talk to, and that means the world to them, he said. Everyone around them is stigmatizing themtheir families, their loved ones. They'll spend hours on the phone with you, because you're the only person calling in to check on them.

Many of the patients in the program are experiencing homelessness. They have an opioid use disorder and either clinical depression or PTSD. They are hard to reach, hard to treat, and hard to hold onto. Acosta had one patient who was in recovery, keeping up with her medication, going to therapyuntil an abusive boyfriend came back into her life. Then she just slipped away.

CLARO is operating in 17 health clinics in New Mexico, a state on a major heroin route from Mexico, with some of the highest overdose death rates in the nation. Share on Twitter

The program is called CLARO, a Spanish word often used to mean of course. It stands for Collaboration Leading to Addiction Treatment and Recovery from Other Stresses. It's currently operating in 17 health clinics in New Mexico, a state on a major heroin route from Mexico, with some of the highest overdose death rates in the nation. The researchers are also just beginning to test CLARO in Los Angeles County. If it can work in those two places, they reasoned, it should work anywhere.

They have so far enrolled nearly 750 patients. Care coordinators like Acosta have been able to reach 80 percent of those assigned to themwhich is truly amazing, Watkins said. More than half of those patients have started medications for their opioid use disorders and treatment for their mental health.

When all of the pieces are in place, the difference has been really quite beautiful to watch, said Seth Williams, a family nurse practitioner who helps lead the project at the University of New Mexico's Southeast Heights Clinic in Albuquerque. It hasn't always been easy, he said. Many of the patients are more focused on meeting basic needsfood, shelter, a daily fix for their addictionthan on answering a call from the clinic. Some have tried to get help before and are leery that this time will be any different.

One patient, for example, went silent for months, never answering the phone, never returning messages. The care coordinator kept tryinguntil one day, the patient called back. I heard all of your calls, I got all of your messages, Williams said the patient told the care coordinator. I really appreciated that you kept calling, that you didn't give up on me.

Watkins and her partners from RAND, the University of New Mexico Health Sciences Center, and Boston Medical Center plan to continue testing CLARO through next year. They have assigned an equal number of patients, chosen at random, to receive standard care. That will allow them to see whether CLARO really makes a difference for those who receive it. The National Institute of Mental Health is sponsoring the trial.

Funding could be a challenge when its grant money runs out. Medicare and Medicaid do pay for this kind of collaborative care, but states have to opt in by activating the right billing codes. New Mexico and several other states that might benefit from CLARO so far have not. There are a lot of next steps that need to happen before this gets into prime time, Watkins said.

It might not solve America's double crises of opioid addiction and mental health disorders, Acosta saidbut it is a step forward, and it saves lives. He sees it all the time in his clinic: Patients who were sick and struggling, who now wrap their arms around him and tell him how well they're doing.

We have the ability to do a lot for those willing to accept the help, he said. There's this huge problem our nation is facing, and I think this might be part of the answerprotecting people in these situations, these moments of their lives, and then watching them be successful.

He had just received a note about one of his patients. The woman with the abusive boyfriend, who had come so far and then fallen away, had resurfaced. She had just picked up a prescription for the medicine she needed to resume her fight against opioid addiction.

Doug Irving
In partnership with the UKs largest independent full-fibre platform CityFibre, toob promises Worthing, Brighton and Hove residents a faster, more reliable internet connection with 15x faster download and 68x faster upload speeds than the UK broadband average.As it does battle in the gigabit market against BT Openreach and Virgin Media O2, toob sees low price as its other key attraction. The company said the cost-of-living crisis has affected everyone, with prices rising faster than wages, many people are facing difficult choices around affordability and that was why it was offering its full-fibre broadband at an affordable rate. toob also stressed that it has a strict no in-contract price rise policy, so customers can be confident that their bills wont increase mid-contract. It also says that it is seeking to play an active role in the communities it operates in, with support to local charities and community organisations.We are delighted to be able to offer our service to Worthing, Brighton and Hove. We believe that fast and reliable broadband is a necessity that everyone should have , said toob CEO Nick Parbutt."We are committed to delivering the fastest and most reliable service, using the latest full-fibre technology, at an affordable price. Customers will benefit from speeds of 900Mbps for only 25 per month on an 18-month contract, with no in contract price rises; they can rely on toob to provide broadband that simply works.
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Price: $ 1,500 Seller State of Residence: California Type: Recreational, Acreage Zoning: Residential State/Province: California Location: 928**, Anaheim, California

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Price: $ 1,500 Seller State of Residence: California Type: Homesite, Lot Zoning: Residential State/Province: California Location: 928**, Anaheim, California

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1 ACRE IN NEW POLK CITYPOLK COUNTY, FLORIDA High bid wins! Cash sale!NEAR ORLANDO, FL ABOUT THE PROPERTY:Parcel Number: 26-26-19-000000-034070Size: 1 AcreUtilities - Not to lotProperty Type: Vacant ResidentialTaxes: Approx $20/yearHOA: NoneDocument Fee $299 Payment/Terms: Payment accepted via Zelle, Venmo, cashiers check, or wire transfer. We do not take Paypal, as they will no longer allow real estate transaction payments thru them. Payment must be made by the winning bidder within 48 hours ...

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Caelynn Miller-Keyes / Instagram

By Elizabeth Kwiatkowski, 07/03/2023



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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.

The Bachelor alum Caelynn Miller-Keyes has spilled some juicy details about her time on with Dean Unglert and also shared never-before-seen photos of the couple.Caelynn and Dean just celebrated their four-year dating anniversary with a romantic trip to Bali and will be getting married this September in Aspen, CO.Caelynn and Dean's relationship goes all the way back to 's Summer 2019 season, which featured the pair meeting for the first time.On 's sixth season, Dean broke up with Caelynn on her birthday and left the show alone because he didn't think he was ready to provide the commitment that Caelynn wanted.However, Dean returned for Caelynn later on and begged her to give him a second chance, and the pair left Paradise dating each other.During a recent Q&A session on Instagram, a fan asked Caelynn if Dean's exit -- and subsequent return -- to Paradise was scripted or totally authentic, according to BachelorNation.com.Caelynn replied, "Oh my gosh! No, not scripted AT ALL. I remember that moment so vividly."The former beauty pageant queen recalled of Dean, "He had a little note of things that he wanted to remember to say and I'm pretty sure I have that still somewhere. I saw it in his pocket and saved it."Caelynn also shared never-before-seen photos of the bride and groom-to-be, from when they had first started dating."Here's a video from the first month of us dating and when the van adventures began," Caelynn wrote, referring to how Dean had convinced Caelynn post-Paradise to live "the van life" in which they traveled together and didn't have a stable home base.And in another slide, Caelynn uploaded her "very first photo" with Dean, writing, "We took it on our flight home from Paradise. I was so blonde and still had a major baby face."In addition, Caelynn reportedly revealed in her Q&A what she's most excited about when it comes to her upcoming wedding."I'm super excited for the actual ceremony and to hear Dean's vows," Caelynn said."He is very romantic, which not a lot of people know, and he's so good with his words. That makes me a little less excited to read my vows because I know that I'm not that good at explaining my feelings and writing them pen to paper. But he's so good at it, he's so romantic."Caelynn proceeded to share, "I think the whole wedding weekend is just going to be so fun and special and unique. I can't wait! We're only 80ish days away!"The couple's dog Alastor will also be a part of their big day in some special way.When Dean and Caelynn tie the knot, they both plan to change their last names to "Bell" in honor of Dean's late mother, whose maiden name was Bell. Caelynn even got a tattoo of a bell pepper on her arm in honor of being "the future Bell."Caelynn celebrated her bridal shower and bachelorette party in May in Las Vegas. She called it "the best weekend ever" with her family and friends.Caelynn said in April that she had already ordered her two wedding gowns and that she and Dean had "everything planned." Dean surprised his fiancee with a new engagement ring -- her fourth one from Dean -- this past spring while they were exploring a bamboo forest in Kyoto, Japan.Dean had lost his original 4.5 carat diamond for Caelynn, and so he proposed in October 2022 with a temporary ring featuring a tiny diamond. Caelynn wore a temporary ring with a replica moissanite stone for a while, and then Caelynn's final ring is a real diamond.Dean and Caelynn, who will be signing a prenuptial agreement and plan to have kids of their own as well as adopt, began dating on Season 6 of , which aired in Summer 2019.Dean proposed marriage to Caelynn late last year following a grueling 22-mile hike to Hawaii's Kauai Island about three years after they started dating.Caelynn then popped the question to Dean in December 2022, which made their engagement even more "official." She forced him to conquer his fear of riding horses since he had pushed her out of her comfort zone with that brutal Hawaiian hike.Caelynn and Dean -- who previously admitted he'd prefer to just get married in a low-key courthouse ceremony -- initially planned to elope in Italy but then they realized Colorado would be a better wedding destination because all of their friends would be able to attend.Once Dean got "the van life" out of his system, he and Caelynn moved into a home together in Las Vegas in Spring 2021. Caelynn and Dean later relocated to Denver, CO.Back in June 2022, Dean revealed on his podcast that he had made a deal with Caelynn about getting engaged."I made a deal with [Caelynn]. I was like, 'I'll buy you a ring if you buy me a truck,'" Dean said, which sparked criticism from some fans that Dean didn't treat Caelynn very well.Dean also admitted at the time how he had thrown a "hissy fit" upon seeing the 4.5 karat ring Caelynn was hoping to have on her finger one day and the pair got into "a scuffle."Dean said getting engaged was simply "a touchy subject" in his relationship, adding, "Caelynn makes significantly more money than I do and here I am having to spend all this money on something I don't even want. Like, I want her to get what she wants, but she's the one who wants to get married."But then Caelynn came through and bought Dean a truck in August 2022.Back in April 2022, Caelynn recalled her reaction to Dean's request that she propose marriage to him."When Dean first said that, I thought, 'Okay, [it's] another thing Dean is saying to break the mold.' Sometimes he says things just for a reaction, and he'll admit that. I thought that's kind of what he was doing," Caelynn explained in a Q&A on YouTube."But the more I thought about it, the more I loved it, because traditionally, he would propose to me. That's something I've dreamt of for so long, and that's something that he doesn't get -- a day that's catered to him and this special moment where he's really thought of. That's when I was like, 'Oh my gosh, I love this.'"Caelynn pointed out how she and Dean have "a partnership" and so they both deserve to have a proposal day. She therefore got "really really into" the idea.Dean and Caelynn have been wearing wedding bands since 2020 to show they are committed to each other. Caelynn told Us Weekly last year that it "really frustrates" her when fans assume Dean isn't good to her."He is hilarious and he's very sarcastic and he's also the most romantic person I think I've ever met. He's so thoughtful," Caelynn boasted."So I think that's a big misconception -- that I'm, like, more invested in the relationship or he, like, doesn't treat me right. I'm like, 'No, he treats me exceptionally well and he's always going out of his way to just surprise me and do romantic things.'"Prior to meeting on Paradise, Caelynn competed for Colton Underwood 's heart on The Bachelor's 23rd season, and Dean had been on multiple The Bachelor spinoffs after initially appearing on Rachel Lindsay 's season of The Bachelorette.Dean previously gushed to Us his relationship with Caelynn is "monumentally different" from other women he's dated in the past. Dean was previously linked to Kristina Schulman Danielle Lombard and Lesley Murphy from The Bachelor world alone."She's very intelligent and compassionate. I am able to be myself around her and she's able to be herself and that's how we create synergy and build around each other," Dean explained of Caelynn."For the first time in my Bachelor franchise relationship history, I feel like I'm able to say what I want, do what I want, and allow my partner to build with me while I'm doing that."Dean, however, believed in late 2019 that marriage was "never going to happen" for them."She does joke around about us getting married all the time, and I always say, 'Sorry, it's not going to happen.' I don't know, I'm super unconventional and she obviously is a little more conventional," Dean told the magazine at the time."We joke around about it. Just try to keep expectations to a minimum, you know? Like I said on the show, underpromise, overdeliver."Interested in more The Bachelor news? Join our The Bachelor Facebook Group
Jamie Thompson / Instagram

By Elizabeth Kwiatkowski, 07/03/2023



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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.

alums Jamie Thompson and Elizabeth Bice are officially calling it quits and getting a divorce.Two months after announcing Elizabeth had left him and they were trying out a separation , Jamie filed for divorce from his Season 9 stranger spouse.Jamie, 39, revealed in a Friday, June 30 Instagram post that he filed the divorce paperwork on June 23."I did something I thought I would never have to do. Here I am, sitting in front of the Denver courthouse," Jamie captioned a selfie of himself looking glum on Instagram."After months of deliberation with Beth, we were just unable to find common ground. I had really hoped to resolve this, but it feels like we have reached the point of no return. So, I made the decision to go ahead and file for divorce for the sake of my own mental health and wellbeing."Jamie called filing for divorce "one of the hardest things" he's had to do "in a very long time."The alum continued in his post, "It saddens me a lot to be at this point. I was never sure if I would get married. But, I sure didn't want to get divorced either (even if it was an arranged marriage courtesy of Hollywood)."Jamie went on to thank the people who have shown him "love and support" amid his split from Elizabeth."Thank you so much to EVERYONE that has reached out to me... I am truly grateful for you all," Jamie concluded."I have really exciting life changes coming my way. Stay tuned for Jamie 2.0!"Many members of the family commented with encouraging and comforting words. Doug Hehner, for example, told Jamie that there are "better times to come," and Mark Maher said he'll always be available if Jamie needs anything.Jamie had announced in late April that he and Elizabeth were separating and he wasn't sure if their relationship would ever recover, and then about a month later, Elizabeth broke her silence and told her Instagram followers in a Q&A session that she wasn't in the best place to talk about her relationship."I'm not ignoring [your messages]," Elizabeth wrote in May. "[I'm] just not [quite] ready to open up. But I appreciate you supporting the journey."Elizabeth subsequently took to Instagram in mid-June with a video titled, "Let's talk Separation." Elizabeth wrote in the caption, "Okay, it's time to address this moment happening in my life... I think you all deserve some honesty. I am healing and finding my new path and really appreciate all of the love and support. It means the world to me!!!! Xxoo Beth."Elizabeth began the video by "getting the elephant out of the room" for her fans."I know everyone wants me to talk about my separation right now... And I don't want to gatekeep what's going on. Everyone who follows me has pretty much followed me because I was on the show where I married a stranger, and I totally welcome that. Welcome to my life! I'm not upset my relationship is in the public eye," Elizabeth said.She reasoned, however, "But come to find out, I'm a real human and I have these real emotions, and I'm just not ready to talk about some things in public yet. There are a lot of emotions that come with getting out of a long-term relationship, and when that time comes, I will talk about those.""But I can't even form sentences right now," she admitted, "because I can't even put my emotions together."Elizabeth proceeded to reveal that she was having an extremely difficult time post-split from Jamie."I still cry in the middle of the night right now, guys, okay?!" Elizabeth confessed."So that being said, I totally respect everyone's comments and concerns, and I love you for that -- I do. Just give me a little bit of time... because I can't!"But Elizabeth assured her fans that she'll get to the point of sharing eventually, adding, "So stick around and watch the show."Jamie revealed on April 22 that he and Elizabeth had already been living apart for a month. He claimed Elizabeth left him because their "fighting had gotten really bad" and he had said a lot of things he shouldn't have "out of anger and frustration."Jamie said while time away from Beth was "not easy" to deal with, he believed it was "necessary" to become a better version of himself.Jamie then revealed in a Q&A session that, although he had "made a lot of mistakes," he wasn't willing to accept all the blame for the falling out with his wife."I also haven't felt like I've had any reciprocation back of, like, how to fix this and how to move forward. So she's been gone for four weeks. I think at this point, it's better for me to focus on myself and trying to become a better version of myself, honestly. That's all I can say," Jamie explained.In terms of what happened or what went wrong, Jamie surprisingly disclosed, "Nothing. It's basically death by a thousand paper cuts, at this point.""I think the winter was really hard on us here in Colorado and we weren't ready for all that," Jamie elaborated. "And being stuck inside with sub-freezing temperatures daily and snow on the ground for weeks at a time -- and we're both active... people.""So I think we just pushed each other's buttons, honestly. And five months of doing that straight, here we are today."Jamie told his followers, "I say things I shouldn't say and I get more angry than I should get sometimes, but I've got to go take care of myself now... I've got to control myself. It's like Mental Health 101 -- focus on yourself, love yourself first before you try to love somebody else. So that's where I'm at today."Jamie also admitted that he and Beth felt "pressure" to create "an image of happiness" on social media, even though their relationship had been struggling for months."To me, that's not real. We took a lot of heat coming off the show. We were our most authentic selves, our most raw selves on that show, and I just want to be honest... A lot of people are invested in our life, and I feel like I owe you guys an explanation," Jamie said.When asked why he couldn't work on himself while continuing his marriage -- given the couple had made a vow to support and love each other through sickness and in health -- Jamie said he believes a healthy marriage is when "people grow and evolve together.""I don't think being apart and growing and evolving is always the best solution. I don't know, it's just my opinion. Why would you need to be apart to work on yourself?" Jamie shared, seemingly criticizing Beth's need for some space."It almost seems like maybe you shouldn't be in the marriage at that point... If you get to a point where things aren't evolving or getting better, then that's where I'm at today. I've got to step away and take care of myself."Jamie went on to admit that he wasn't sure if Elizabeth was going to be angry at him for speaking about their separation publicly."I don't know. I'm really trying to do this in a tactful way. I don't want to say anything bad about her. I'm not here to bash Beth and drag her out behind the woodshed, so to speak, as we say in the South," Jamie noted.Jamie said that prior to his April 22 separation announcement, he and Beth had talked about potentially going public with the news of their breakup in a united fashion."If we could've worked together to address this publicly, we probably could've worked together to work on our marriage," Jamie said.Jamie later insisted he was "absolutely not" ready to date again."I'm good on the dating streets. I think for me, right now, I just want to take some time to work on myself. Dating is not going to solve anything. Finding that perfect someone is not going to make life great all of a sudden," Jamie reasoned in his Q&A."It kind of sucks because I'm 39-years-old and I would like a family at some point, and I was hoping that was going to be possible with Beth. But I don't know after all this."He concluded, "If I'm 45 having my first kid, or 50, you know, medicine is great these days. What are you going to do?"Jamie said at the time that he and Elizabeth were both going to therapy and he planned to continue working on his anger management.Jamie acknowledged he and Elizabeth probably "should've been going to therapy" together and that they had swept a lot of their fights under the rug -- which resurfaced and worsened later on.But Jamie insisted on April 23 that he still loved Beth "a lot" and cared for her "tremendously.""We just can't seem to get to the point where we can have enough healthy conversation to start discussing what this looks like going forward," Jamie said."Initially, I wanted her to be here and work on things together when she left. I thought this was going to be a three or four-day thing... It hurts. It's not what I want."Jamie, however, said he recognized they both probably needed a little space from each other."And now I'm like, 'How do you keep reaching somebody who doesn't want to be reached?' She just wants her own space, and honestly, I've got to do what's best for me and take my own space too," Jamie said.Jamie admitted he definitely "lost" himself trying to please Beth in their marriage, although he wouldn't call her a "demanding" person. He said he really wanted their relationship to work."I started putting my hobbies, my goals, my own personal stuff aside trying to focus on this relationship, and that's just a piece of advice -- don't lose yourself. Be true to yourself. Know yourself," Jamie told his followers.He also said they got in "way over their heads" with moving around the country for Jamie's job -- including stops in San Francisco, Santa Barbara, North Carolina, and then Colorado.Jamie and Beth's split came as a surprise to fans given they had just celebrated their four-year anniversary in early April."I think we were both struggling to make each other happy... Why were we relying on each other to make our own selves happy vs. just being happy on our own?" Jamie noted.Elizabeth and Jamie chose to stay together on 's ninth season, which was based in Charlotte, NC, and aired in 2019.Back in May 2021, Elizabeth and Jamie talked about having kids together on a : Countdown to Decision Day special that aired on Lifetime."Are we waiting? What are we doing, babe?" Jamie asked Beth on the show."Speaking of babies," Elizabeth began, "Jamie and I are actually thinking to start towards the end of the year now. So, like, it's in the conversation... I am going to be a cool mom!"Elizabeth and Jamie hit it off right away when they met at the altar as strangers on four years ago.Elizabeth and Jamie were crazy about each other, as well as sexually attracted to one another, but their passion and tempers often resulted in explosive and volatile arguments.Elizabeth sometimes got overly emotional over things that bothered her and memorably flipped over their living-room table, while Jamie sometimes used his words as weapons and complained about their lack of physical intimacy. He even called Elizabeth "a materialistic c-nt" at one point.However, with the help of the 's experts, Elizabeth and Jamie managed to get through every rough patch and effectively communicate, resulting in what they thought would be a happy and long-lasting marriage.Both spouses recognized by "Decision Day" that they didn't want to live without the other.Interested in more news? Join our Married at First Sight Facebook Group or click here to view our newspage!And click here for more updates on former cast members and info on where they are now!
'Instead of ACs, the government should do something to increase our salary.'

Kindly note the image has only been published for representational purposes. Photograph: Sivaram V/Reuters

Truck operators are up in arms over the government's plan to make air-conditioned cabins mandatory for truck drivers by 2025.

If implemented, the move will not only increase the cost of trucks by up to Rs 50,000, but also lead to a spike in freight rates, they claim.

The ministry of road transport and highways recently announced its decision to make air-conditioned driver's cabins mandatory for trucks by 2025.

However, operators point out that this will raise fuel costs by as much as 25 per cent and maintenance costs by about 50 per cent.

Moreover, say industry insiders, in some models, original equipment manufacturers (OEMs) may have to make changes to the drive-train of vehicles to accommodate the AC cabin.

This is likely to increase truck prices by Rs 30,000-Rs 50,000.

That's not all. The higher maintenance and fuel costs will likely result in a rise in freight rates.

"If the government wants air conditioning to be mandatory in truck cabins, it should ensure free solar panels in every truck. This decision is going to increase our fuel cost by 25 per cent and maintenance cost by 50 per cent," said K Arul, secretary, Namakkal Taluk Lorry Owners Association.

Namakkal in Tamil Nadu is considered the transportation hub of south India, with more than 50,000 trucks in operation.

Arul says operators feel that these air-conditioned cabins will become a "halt and recreation room" for drivers even when the vehicle is not on the move, further driving up costs.

"Even at current mileage, the business is not viable for us," he said.

Truck drivers, though, have a different take on the government's proposed move.

Durai Swamy, a 27-year-old truck driver from Thiruvarur, said, "I am earning only around Rs 20,000-Rs 25,000 per month. With this money, I have to look after my family and my deteriorating health due to long 11-12 hour drives at a stretch. Instead of ACs, the government should do something to increase our salary."

Photograph: PTI Photo

Commercial Vehicle OEMs such as Tata Motors, VECV, and others have welcomed the move and said the demand for AC trucks is already going up.

A senior executive of an OEM says that in models where they have an AC option, the demand is around 50 per cent of the total volumes.

"Many fleet operators take cowls from us, but we don't know what percentage converts the cabin to AC. But for fully built units (FBUs), the demand for AC trucks is picking up when there is an option," he said.

Welcoming the move, Vinod Aggarwal, managing director, and chief executive officer, at Volvo Eicher Commercial Vehicles, said, "Implementing air-conditioned cabins may result in some additional costs, with estimates ranging from Rs 30,000 to Rs 50,000, depending on the size of the vehicle. In some models, particularly light commercial vehicles, OEMs may need to consider drive-train changes and increased engine power to accommodate AC cabins."

Volvo Eicher believes the government's decision reflects a progressive approach that will enhance driver ergonomics and comfort and facilitate improved road safety and efficient logistics.

A Tata Motors spokesperson also welcomed the move: "India's growing trucking industry is facing the challenge of attracting and retaining skilled truck drivers. This decision will benefit the health and safety of drivers and the long hours of driving will become more comfortable,' he said.

Tata Motor offers AC cabins as an option already and the company is confident of meeting the 2025 deadline. It too claims that it is witnessing a 'definite trend' towards AC-equipped vehicles.

Hemal N Thakkar, senior practice leader and drector, Crisil Market Intelligence and Analytics, is of the view that the move will be beneficial overall.

"The increase in truck prices may be about 1-2 per cent. Once AC is incorporated, mileage may see a drop of anywhere between 5-7 per cent. The operating costs may go up by about 3-3.5 per cent. However, the efficiency of drivers will also increase as fatigue will decrease." said Thakkar.

"This may not have a major impact on freight rates as the truck operator will have a fleet mix of AC and non-AC trucks," he added.

OEMs say while there will be an incremental cost of purchase, the driver productivity will increase manifold.

"Eicher offers one of the most advanced ranges of vehicles in the industry with a strong belief that driver comfort enhances truck productivity and thereby reduces the total cost of operation significantly," Aggarwal said.

Along with improvements in highway infrastructure, vehicle emissions and safety, he said this is another positive step towards transforming the trucking industry by addressing one of the most important stakeholders in the system -- truck drivers.

"It will also encourage more people to take up truck driving as a profession."

Feature Presentation: Rajesh Alva/Rediff.com
'Why is it that no other institutions are attacked? Why are only educational institutions run by Christians attacked?'

IMAGE: MPs Hibi Eden, third from left, and Daniel Kuriakose, second from right, at a school in Imphal. Photograph: Kind courtesy Hibi Eden

Hibi Eden, who represents Ernakulam in the Lok Sabha, recently visited relief camps in Manipur and also churches that were destroyed in the violence.

"People of the state -- MPs, MLAs, the political parties -- everybody has lost faith in the chief minister. Still, they are holding onto him," the Congress MP from Kerala, tells Rediff.com's Shobha Warrier in the concluding part of a two-part interview.

Part 1 of the Interview: 'All of them were worried how they would survive'

IMAGE: Members of the Assam Christian Forum and CRI-NEI organize a 'Solidarity Prayer' for Manipur, demanding peace and justice for the citizens of Manipur at the Don Bosco school playground in Guwahati, June 24, 2023. Photograph: ANI Photo

Did you get the feeling that the majority Hindu community is opposed to the minority Christian community in Manipur during your visit?

Absolutely. My question is simple: Why is it that only Christian institutions are attacked?

Why is it that no other institutions are attacked? Why are only educational institutions run by Christians attacked?

We are not talking politics or religion. Let's bring peace to the valley and the hills.

Why is it that the central government is not doing anything?

Why is the prime minister not even meeting BJP representatives from Manipur?

IMAGE: MPs Hibi Eden, left, and Daniel Kuriakose at a church that was attacked in Manipur. Photograph: Kind courtesy Hibi Eden

Why do you think the prime minister is silent about the violence in Manipur?

He has to answer the question.

When Manipur was burning, he was appreciating everybody across the country. But there was not a word on Manipur. He was totally silent on Manipur.

There is a clear agenda for this state and central governments of the BJP, and they have a critical role in what's happening in Manipur.

That's why they are not trying to bring back peace and order.

They have not even made a political statement regarding this. They have not made any efforts for peace talks.

IMAGE: Manipur Chief Minister N Biren Singh, wearing a helmet, inspects the on-ground situation in the hills adjoining Bishnupur-Churachandpur in view of the ongoing conflict in the state, July 2, 2023. Photograph: ANI Photo

People of the state -- MPs, MLAs, the political parties -- everybody has lost faith in the chief minister. Still, they are holding onto him.

When 4,000 arms and ammunitions were looted, why did the state police turn a blind eye? Why was no case filed?

Is there an intelligence department in the state? After one village gets burnt, people know which is the next target. But the state doesn't know.

I am not saying this, but the local people, the party say the same thing -- that both the state and central governments are supporting and providing arms and ammunition.

All those we have spoken to including BJP MLAs have expressed their anguish. They are not happy with what the chief minister is doing.

They are in Delhi to meet the prime minister, the tribal minister, the home minister, but they are not able to meet anybody.

IMAGE: Hibi Eden and Daniel Kuriakose with children at a relief camp in Manipur. Photograph: Kind courtesy Hibi Eden

The Kukis are asking for a separate hill council. Do you think that's a solution to the problem?

It is not at all a solution to the problem.

Unfortunately, if they want something from the administration, they have to come to the valley, which I don't think they like.

In Manipur, if one tribal loses a house, it is lost forever, unlike for example in Kerala, if a person loses his house in a calamity, the government compensates his loss.

In Manipur, there is nobody to question if someone takes away the land of a tribal.

The reason why they are asking for Separation Only Solution (SOS), Greater Nagaland, Greater Mizoram, etc is because they are not getting justice.

They are not able to go to the valley for their day-to-day work. They feel neglected by the state. That's why they are asking for a separate administration.

IMAGE: Police fire several rounds of tear gas to disperse a crowd gathered near the BJP office in Imphal, June 29, 2023. Photograph: ANI Photo

Experts warn that dividing a state on ethnic lines is a bad precedent...

Yes, you should never divide a state. But the state should be capable of maintaining law and order situation in the state.

What is the solution to this problem?

The state and central forces should act. They should take measures to bring law and order and peace in the valley and the hills.

First of all, the government should be impartial. They should have the political will and courage to act.

Even when an attack happens in the presence of the military forces, they don't do anything.

IMAGE: Congress leader Rahul Gandhi has lunch with children at a relief camp in Churachandpur, June 30, 2023, during his visit to violence-hit Manipur. Photograph: ANI Photo

Do you fear the violence spreading to other north eastern states?

An elected government should take decisions that would protect the identity of the state.

This is not the first time I have gone to Manipur. As a student leader, I have gone to Manipur University to organise student meetings, for them to interact with Rahul Gandhi.

It was such a beautiful and peace-loving state with its women empowered.

Those women are today carrying sticks and searching our vehicles!

Feature Presentation: Rajesh Alva/Rediff.com
'Although perhaps not with a greater majority, and maybe even a slightly reduced majority in the Lok Sabha.'

IMAGE: Prime Minister Narendra D Modi addresses the US-India Strategic Partnership Forum at the White House, June 23, 2023. Photograph: Press Information Bureau

For Dr Marshall M Bouton, president emeritus of the Chicago Council of Global Affairs, an international affairs think-tank with a special interest in the US-India relations, watching the White House eagerly roll out the red carpet for Prime Minister Narendra D Modi's State visit, was definitely history in the making.

He also mused to himself if it would be history America might regret.

Was it the 'real American dream about India'? Or could it crumble?

"I am deeply troubled by what's happening in India domestically. Deeply. And it just pains me as well as worries me," Dr Bouton tells Rediff.com's Vaihayasi Pande Daniel.

The final segment of a three-part Must Read interview:

How do you feel Prime Minister Modi is performing in the foreign policy arena? America's 'leaning over' to India is not necessarily Modi driven.

He happens to be the right person in the right place at the right time. Is he perceived as shrewd?

I would give him a lot of credit. There's a whole bunch of things I would not give him credit for, to the contrary.

But, for instance, the decision to come to the US, three or four months after he became prime minister, despite having been on the bad boy list for years, unable to come to the US.

That was a first indication that he was not going to let his personal grievances and (his) history prevent India from expanding the relationship.

I think where he was not shrewd was in his efforts to make Xi Jinping a friend. You will remember the first key Jinping visit to India in September 2014, while Modi was hosting him in Gujarat, meanwhile the Chinese are doing stuff on the border (in the Chumar sector in Ladakh).

The Chinese were attempting to send a signal, that we may sit down and get on the swing together in Ahmedabad, but be aware that we are the senior partner here.

I think he think he overplayed his hand with China. And laid himself open.

The other thing that he has done that is good is he has really reached out very widely.

And in this he continues, what was begun first by Atal Bihari Vajpayee and then under Manmohan Singh.

India has the confidence to reach out and Modi has followed up and is very, very, forcefully, very effectively, building stronger relationships in Europe and the rest of Asia.

And the guy works -- give him a lot of credit -- he works like crazy. He is seemingly tireless between his international commitments and he has got a lot riding on how the Indian public sees this.

Of course, this visit, as well as the G-20 presidency, are all, not coincidentally timed (laughs), to occur within the year before the election.

So, he can tell (Indians): 'See India is already the Vishwaguru. Even Biden wants us to be the guru. And I went to New York and we had thousands of people doing yoga. Everybody's looking to us for wisdom'.

He's got the salience of these issues much greater, at this stage, with the Indian public than I thought it would be.

He sensed that. These issues appeal -- not so much to the working class, for lack of a better term -- but to the Indian middle class which is more concerned about India's prestige in the world and India being respected by the big powers and all that.

IMAGE: Modi with US President Joe Biden at the arrival ceremony at the White House. Photograph: Press Information Bureau

What moment, even if it was optics, did you like best, or found interesting about this visit?

That's a hard one...

I liked the fact that he had to go in to be in front of a press conference.

For any reasonably observant person, the fact that he hasn't had a single open press conference since he became prime minister, nine years, the contrast was there (to see).

On top of that, was the (actual) question asked by (the Wall Street Journal journalist) Sabrina Siddiqui, which I thought was a very, very well framed question. She asked him specifically about communal issues.

And he evaded that and he said 'India's the mother of all democracies' or whatever he said.

The worst you can call it is hypocrisy, that evasion of the issue, which certainly observant people here, informed people here, know is not true.

India's reputation in the media and the think-tank world is more at risk today than it has been in the last 40 years because of what the BJP has done, and this is not just here in the United States, it's in Europe too.

(External Affairs Minister Subrahmanyam) Jaishankar is extremely quick, effective in shooting down these things with his nasty quips. But that's the reality.

And we deal with a lot of other countries.

Who have worse records sometimes, too?

Yes, absolutely. So, it's complicated. All in all, I've been an advocate for US relations for, oh golly...

Fifty years?

Sixty years. I first went to India in 1964.

This year is actually 59 years. And I have been a huge advocate, proponent and an active proponent and I had some influence in this relationship, for almost that whole time.

But I am deeply troubled by what's happening in India domestically. Deeply. And it just pains me as well as worries me.

I'm with Obama on this one -- countries that isolate, and tend to turn into second class citizens, 15 per cent of their population, usually wind up paying a price for that, at some point down the road.

And then, of course, there's 2026. And the whole federalism issue.

When people ask me where India is going over the next few years, I say, well, first Modi is almost certain to be re-elected, although perhaps not with a greater majority, and maybe even a slightly reduced majority in the Lok Sabha.

But he's got a big crisis, two years down the road from his re-election in his relationship with the South.

IMAGE: Dr Marshall M Bouton IMAGE: Dr Marshall M Bouton

Based on what you might know of Mr Biden, could you speculate on what happened when Mr Modi and Mr Biden were speaking privately together?

Biden was supposed to have brought up the human rights issues.

Do you think he would have been stronger in what he said to Mr Modi?

Somewhat stronger.

I mean, he's not a mild man?

He's also a very politically savvy man.

He's not going to -- having pulled out all the stops for the visit as a whole -- he's not likely to have lambasted Modi in private.

He might have said, 'Mr Prime Minister, in our country, there is concern about developments in India over the last several years and we have concern in our Congress, we have concern in our in our think-tanks and human rights organisations. Our media has grown increasingly critical of you. And I hope that those issues do not in some way impede the growing partnership between us'.

Something like that. That would my guess. It sure is just a guess.

Feature Presentation: Aslam Hunani/Rediff.com
The next meeting of opposition parties will be held in Bengaluru on July 17 and 18, the Congress announced on Monday, and asserted that their resolve to defeat the Bharatiya Janata Party has been strengthened by the "Mumbai operations" of the "BJP washing machine".

IMAGE: NCP president Sharad Pawar with party working president Praful Patel and senior leader Chhagan Bhujbal during the party's 25th Foundation Day celebrations, in New Delhi on June 10, 2023. Photograph: Mohd Zakir/ANI Photo

Announcing Opposition meeting dates on Twitter, Congress general secretary (organisation) K C Venugopal said "we are steadfast in our unwavering resolve to defeat the fascist and undemocratic forces".

"After a hugely successful all-opposition meeting in Patna, we will be holding the next meeting in Bengaluru on 17 and 18 July 2023. We are steadfast in our unwavering resolve to defeat the fascist and undemocratic forces and present a bold vision to take the country forward," Venugopal said.

Meanwhile, Congress general secretary (Communications) Jairam Ramesh took a dig at the BJP over the Nationalist Congress Party's Ajit Pawar and eight other leaders being inducted into the Eknath Shinde-led Maharashtra government.

"Yesterday when the BJP Washing Machine restarted in Mumbai with its ICE (Income tax, CBI, ED) detergent, BJP-inspired obituaries on Opposition unity were being planted. The obit writers will be disappointed. The next meeting of the parties that met at Patna on June 23rd will be held in Bengaluru on July 17th & 18th," he said.

"If anything the Mumbai operations have strengthened Opposition resolve," Ramesh said on Twitter.

In a swipe at Prime Minister Narendra Modi, Ramesh posted a meme of 'Modi Washing Powder' with the tagline 'saare daag chutkiyon mein dhule (removes all stains in a jiffy)'.

TMC's leader in Rajya Sabha Derek O'Brien also tagged Venugopal's tweet and said, "Bengaluru Summit. All For One. One For All."

Sources in the Opposition camp said the leaders will meet in the evening of July 17 in an informal setting apart from bilateral meetings followed by a more formal interaction the next day.

A senior leader said that the Bengaluru meeting will focus on issues of broad agreement among the parties and added that all future deliberations between the top opposition leaders will be called 'summits'.

Earlier, Nationalist Congress Party (NCP) chief Sharad Pawar had said the next opposition meeting will be held in Bengaluru on July 13-14. Those dates were said to be clashing with the Assembly sessions in a few states.

The first meeting of opposition parties was held in Bihar's Patna on June 23.

At that meeting, Opposition parties had resolved to take on the BJP unitedly in the 2024 Lok Sabha elections, even as fissures had emerged with the AAP asserting that it would be difficult for it to be part of any such gathering in the future till the Congress publicly supports it on the ordinance issue.

At a joint press conference after the Patna meeting, opposition parties had said they would fight the polls on a common agenda and state-wise strategy, setting aside their differences with a flexible approach.
A unique scenario is emerging for the first time after the last 51 years as the number of MLAs from various parties backing the Maharashtra government has prima facie reached 200, post the induction of Nationalist Congress Party leader Ajit Pawar in the state cabinet.

IMAGE: Maharashtra Governor Ramesh Bais with CM Eknath Shinde and deputy CM Devendra Fadnavis during the swearing-in ceremony of Nationalist Congress Party leader Ajit Pawar as the second deputy CM and eight MLAs as the state ministers, at Raj Bhavan, in Mumbai on Sunday, July 2, 2023. Photograph: ANI Photo

The last time when more than 200 MLAs were part of the state government was in 1972, but at that time all the 222 legislators belonged to Congress. Also, the strength of the House was 270 at that time, a former state legislature official said on Monday citing data.

The exact number of MLAs supporting Ajit Pawar, who took oath as deputy chief minister on Sunday, is not known yet.

However, Ajit Pawar's loyalist and MLC Amol Mitkari claimed the support of 36 (out of 53) MLAs.

"More MLAs are extending their support to Ajit Pawar. We are still part of the Nationalist Congress Party. We have not defected, Mitkari claimed.

If Mitkari's claim on the support of 36 legislators is to be taken at face value, the total number of MLAs, including those of Shiv Sena and BJP, supporting the state government goes up to 181.

In the 288-member House, the BJP has 105 MLAs and Shiv Sena led by Chief Minister Eknath Shinde 40. The Shinde-Devendra Fadnavis government is also supported by three MLAs of Bahujan Vikas Aghadi, two of Prahar JanShakti Party, 13 Independents, and one legislator each belonging to Rashtriya Samaj Party, and Jan Surajya Shakri.

Cumulatively, the number of MLAs supporting the government stands at 201.

"Since 1990, not a single political party has managed to win 145 seats (majority mark) in the 288-member Legislative Assembly. In 1972, the Congress won 222 seats when the total strength of the Lower House was 270," said the former principal secretary of Maharashtra Vidhan Bhavan Anant Kalse.

The strength of the House increased to 288 ahead of the 1978 assembly elections. In 1980, Congress won 186 seats and 161 in 1985.

After a long gap, the BJP came close to forming a government on its own strength when it won 122 seats in the 2014 Assembly elections. But the party couldn't repeat its performance in 2019 polls and settled at 105 seats.
The Uddhav Thackeray-led Shiv Sena-UBT on Monday claimed Nationalist Congress Party leader Ajit Pawar, who has been sworn in as the deputy chief minister of Maharashtra, would replace Chief Minister Eknath Shinde soon.

IMAGE: Maharashtra Chief Minister Eknath Shinde congratulates the newly sworn-in Deputy CM Ajit Pawar, at Raj Bhavan, in Mumbai on Sunday, July 02, 2023. Photograph: ANI Photo

Ajit Pawar on Sunday led a vertical split in the NCP to become the deputy chief minister, shocking his uncle Sharad Pawar, who founded the party 24 years ago.

Eight NCP leaders were also sworn in as ministers in the Shinde-Bharatiya Janata Party government.

An editorial in the Shiv Sena-Uddhav Balasaheb Thackeray mouthpiece Saamana claimed the BJP under Prime Minister Narendra Modi and Union Home Minister Amit Shah has not only 'muddied' politics of Maharashtra but also of the country.

'Ajit Pawar has a made a record of taking oath as deputy chief minister. This time the 'deal' is strong,' it said.

'Pawar has not gone there for the deputy CM's post. Chief Minister Eknath Shinde and rebel MLAs of the Sena would be disqualified soon and Pawar would be coronated,' it claimed.

'This new development will not go down well with the people of the state. The state had no such political tradition and it will never be supported by the people,' it said.

Ajit Pawar's somersault is actually dangerous for CM Shinde, the Marathi daily claimed.

It said when Shinde and other MLAs left the Shiv Sena (last year), they blamed the party president and (then) chief minister Uddhav Thackeray for not controlling then finance minister Ajit Pawar who had taken immense control over fund disbursement and sanctioning work orders.

'The primary reason according to the rebel MLAs was 'we left the Shiv Sena because of the NCP',' the editorial said.

'What will they do now? During the swearing-in ceremony (of Ajit Pawar on Sunday), the expressions on their faces (of Shinde bloc members) made it evident that their future is dark,' it claimed.

'Their so-called Hindutva is now over. The day is not very far when Shinde and his rebel colleagues will be disqualified, is the true meaning of Sunday's development,' the Marathi publication further claimed.

'Those who possess the arrogance of power and believe they can buy out their opposition are taking control of democracy. These people are not even ready to hold elections for 14 municipal corporations in the state, including Mumbai city,' it said.

'The (previous) Congress regime and the British rule were much better as one could fight with them on the street openly. Ajit Pawar has not taken the decision to support Shinde on any moral ground,' it added.

The editorial also hit out at BJP leader and Deputy CM Devendra Fadnavis, claiming he had said they will never join hands with NCP, 'the party of corrupts' and that Ajit Pawar was facing allegations in an irrigation scam worth Rs 70,000 crore.

'This swearing-in has exposed the BJP's true face,' it said.

Refusing to accept that Sunday's developments came as a surprise for everyone, the editorial claimed some people were already aware of this 'earthquake'.

'What happened to the Shiv Sena a year ago is now happening to the NCP. As NCP chief Sharad Pawar said, there will be a new day tomorrow,' the editorial said, adding it was not an earthquake but minor tremors.
Senior Congress leader Prithviraj Chavan on Monday claimed he has information that the Bharatiya Janata Party has promised Ajit Pawar the post of Maharashtra chief minister.

IMAGE: Maharashtra Governor Ramesh Bais with CM Eknath Shinde and Deputy CM Devendra Fadnavis during the swearing-in ceremony of NCP leader Ajit Pawar as the second deputy CM and eight MLAs as ministers, at Raj Bhavan, in Mumbai on Sunday. Photograph: ANI Photo

With Ajit Pawar's move to join the ruling Eknath Shinde-BJP coalition on Sunday changing political dynamics in Maharashtra, Shiv Sena-Uddhav Balasaheb Thackeray leader Sanjay Raut also claimed that Shinde will lose the CM's post.

On Sunday, Ajit Pawar led a vertical split in the Nationalist Congress Party to become the deputy chief minister, shocking his uncle Sharad Pawar, who founded the party 24 years ago.

Eight NCP leaders were also sworn in as ministers in the Eknath Shinde-BJP government.

To a query, Chavan while speaking to reporters in Karad said, "I had spoken about it (that Ajit Pawar may go with BJP) publicly but I faced criticism."

The Congress leader said he knew this was happening.

"Just bargaining was going on over what he (Ajit) should be getting. As per our information, he has been given a promise of chief minister's post by pushing Eknath Shinde aside with the help of Assembly speaker's decision (on disqualification of 16 Shiv Sena MLAs)," the former CM claimed.

Chavan was at 'Pritisangam', the memorial of Maharashtra's first CM Yashwantrao Chavan.

NCP chief visited the memorial in Karad and paid floral tributes to the late leader.

Prithviraj Chavan said, "He (Sharad Pawar) is one of the constituents of Maha Vikas Aghadi (MVA) and I am here to extend support to him."

"Pawar Saheb is standing strong behind the opposition unity at the national level and he is going to attend the opposition meet in Bengaluru," he added.

The Congress leader also told PTI that if the MVA had stayed united and strong, the BJP-Eknath Shinde alliance would have had no chance in elections due to the "sympathy factor" for former CM Uddhav Thackeray and the Congress and NCP coming together with him.

The Lok Sabha and Maharashtra Assembly elections are due next year.

"There would be all attempts to break us and that is what has happened," Prithviraj Chavan said referring to the move by Ajit Pawar and eight other senior NCP leaders to join the government.

He also said state Assembly Speaker Rahul Narwekar has to take a decision on the disqualification of 16 Shiv Sena MLAs, including CM Eknath Shinde, by August 11, failing which the MVA will move the Supreme Court.

Prithviraj Chavan also said Sunday's developments were like preparing the ground 'to save the government' if the 16 Sena MLAs are disqualified.

Talking to PTI, Shiv Sena-UBT leader Sanjay Raut claimed, "Shinde will surely lose the CM's post."

"Let the July 5 meeting of NCP called by Sharad Pawar take place, we will then sit together to chart the road ahead. Uddhav Thackeray has called a meeting of his supporters tomorrow. We will remain united," the Rajya Sabha member said.

Maharashtra Congress vice president Ratnakar Mahajan said the political climate in Maharashtra has for the first time become 'chaotic'.

Every body seems to be confused about what will happen in the future.

"One thing is certain that everyone wants power. In such a situation, neither issues nor values matter. For the general public it is disappointing," he said.

Against this backdrop, the outcome of elections due next year has become more unpredictable, he said.

"Many surprises will be seen in terms of coalitions, leaders involved and people's participation. Ultimately people suffer in the process," Mahajan said.

Speaking about his party, Mahajan said for the time being Congress is member of the MVA. "Future stand will depend on the situation that develops," he added.

However, state BJP vice president Madhav Bhandari said there is no chaos over two Shiv Sena factions and two NCPs.

"The people who thought they own the parties have been left out and are on one side, while the organisation and workers are on the other side. It is too early to speak about how the developments will play out in future. We have to wait and watch," he said.

Shiv Sena-UBT Lok Sabha member Vinayak Raut, while speaking to a TV channel, demanded that Uddhav Thackeray chart out a separate political path out of the MVA.

With the changing political dynamics in Maharashtra, Maharashtra is likely to see two Shiv Sena factions as well as two of the NCP battle it out for political space along with the Congress and BJP in the Lok Sabha and the state Assembly polls next year.

Maharashtra sends 48 MPs to the Lok Sabha, the second highest after Uttar Pradesh.

Despite the rebellion in the Shiv Sena last year, which result in the collapse of the MVA government, the three allies Congress, NCP and Shiv Sena-UBT had appeared to stand united and face the BJP at the hustings.

The alliance had even tasted success in the biennial elections to the Legislative Council and the Assembly bypoll in Kasba seat of Pune.
Upstock has launched in Australia promising to revolutionize the sector.

Led by Philip Fierlinger, Co-Founder of Xero, Upstock is a B2B marketplace for the hospitality and food service industry that connects suppliers with major buyers, streamlining processes and transforming wholesale ordering.

Upstock aims to transform the way suppliers in the hospitality and food service industry receive orders, especially for boutique labels in regional areas. While some platforms exist for digital ordering, many suppliers still rely on pen and paper or spreadsheets to protect their brand experience. Upstock plans to change this by offering user-friendly software that enhances efficiency for both buyers and suppliers, strengthening their trading relationships.

One notable innovation introduced by Upstock is an open marketplace that allows restaurants, bars, and cafes to order from any supplier, regardless of their current platform usage. This eliminates the need to place separate orders with each supplier, as multiple orders can be made simultaneously. Managers maintain control over team orders, preventing accidental purchases from the wrong suppliers.

For suppliers, Upstock provides access to a vast network of wholesale customers and digital tools to automate logistics, customer management, payments, and invoicing. What sets Upstock apart is its comprehensive approach, combining both marketplace and logistics solutions in a single platforman integration that traditionally operated separately in the industry.

Upstock stands out in the industry not only for its cutting-edge technology but also for its disruptive freemium pricing structure. Unlike other platforms, Upstock does not charge upfront setup fees or take commissions on orders from suppliers. It offers free order handling for both buyers and suppliers, with advanced order management functionality available for a minimal fee of $1 or less for suppliers. This pricing model ensures that suppliers retain their entire profits, without losing a significant portion to platform fees. Current Upstock users find this pricing approach highly attractive.

Leading Upstock as Co-CEOs are Philip Fierlinger and Duncan Ritchie. Fierlinger, renowned for his expertise in developing disruptive tech products, is best known as the Co-Founder of Xero, a global accounting software company established in 2006. Fierlinger expresses confidence in Upstocks ability to shake up the Australian hospitality and food service industry.

Considering the industrys challenges, including the impact of the pandemic and an economic slowdown, Upstock aims to support new and existing businesses by simplifying and streamlining operations for both buyers and suppliers. This approach enhances sustainability, profitability, and overall efficiency while providing a wider range of exceptional products to end consumers. Fierlinger believes that Upstock will contribute to the revitalization of Australias hospitality and food service economy.

Upstock has already attracted a notable roster of Australian hospitality and food service brands, including Prana Chai, White Whale Coffee, Sandys Sourdough, Frankies, Garlicious Grown, and Braidwood Food, among others. The platform has become an essential tool for suppliers, reducing their workloads and expanding their buyer networks. Users praise Upstock for its positive impact on their businesses.

Support from the Upstock team has been great. Getting set up was really seamless and super easy. On the day we went live with Upstock we immediately felt confident using it. says Kelly Melody, Managing Director of Automatic Bakery.

Weve gotten back at least half a day a week in sales admin, plus the time saved by our packing team who now dont have to sort out mis-picks. Also, I love having the confidence that its actually working and I dont have to think about it. I know all the stuff that we picked today has been sent out all over the country, I know theres been an invoice generated for it, and then Ill get paid for it. I dont have to go and double-check everything. Weve had zero customers come back with invoice queries since weve had Upstock  its seamless.

Well-known investors are backing Upstocks Australian entry including Icehouse Ventures, Possible Ventures, Sir Stephen TindallsK1W1, and NZVC, along with founders from marquee tech firms including Vend, Karbon, Campaign Monitor and Sharesies. Investors have been impressed with the rapid customer growth coupled with 4x revenue growth in 2022 and are excited to support the companys expansion into Australia as well as the U.S.

For more information on Upstock, please visit www.upstock.app.

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Bharatiya Janata Party president J P Nadda has appointed Union minister Mansukh Mandaviya and party general secretary Vinod Tawde as central observers for the election of the leader of opposition in the Karnataka assembly.

IMAGE: Karnataka BJP leaders. Photograph: ANI Photo

BJP chief spokesperson and Rajya Sabha MP Anil Baluni said the two central leaders will be visiting the state in a couple of days to oversee the election of the party's leader in the state assembly by its MLAs.

Following its loss to the Congress in the state polls, the BJP is yet to elect its leader in the assembly, with its central leaders weighing their options.

Former chief minister Basavaraj Bommai is one of the contenders as the BJP deliberates to decide whether it should stick to the old guard or put faith in a new leader while balancing the caste equation in the state.

Meanwhile, the BJP will attend the assembly session, starting on Monday, without the Legislative party leader.

The observers will gather the opinion of BJP legislators and submit a report to the party high command, former CM B S Yediyurappa told reporters in Delhi late on Sunday night after a meeting with Union Home Minister Amit Shah and BJP president J P Nadda.

He also said that based on the opinion gathered by the observer, the party will decide the Legislative party leader, who will be the leader of the opposition.

"This is what was discussed in the meeting. They said they will be sending an observer, who will gather opinion and let the party high command know. Afterwards, they will discuss with me," Yediyurappa, a BJP Parliamentary Board member, said.

When pointed out that the session was starting from today, he said he was only communicating whatever happened in the meeting.

"The party's decision will be final. They are sending observers on Monday. Based on the opinion gathered by the observer, the decision will be taken," the BJP leader added.

Regarding the appointment of a new BJP state president, Yediyurappa said it will be done based on the opinion of the party legislators.

Meanwhile, party sources said there will be a BJP Legislative Party meeting at 1 pm on Monday soon after Governor Thaawarchand Gehlot's address to the members of both Houses of the Karnataka Legislature.
A day after a vertical split in his Nationalist Congress Party (NCP), Sharad Pawar on Monday left from Pune for Karad to visit the memorial of Maharashtra's first chief minister Yashwantrao Chavan.

IMAGE: NCP chief Sharad Pawar addresses a press conference on party leader Ajit Pawar joining the NDA government and taking oath as Deputy Chief Minister of Maharashtra, in Pune on Sunday. Photograph: ANI Photo

The NCP chief was accompanied by his wife Pratibha Pawar, Rajya Sabha member Vandana Chavan, NCP spokesperson Ankush Kakde, party's Pune city unit president Prashant Jagtap and many other party workers.

Pawar left his residence in Pune in a convoy at around 8 am and was greeted en route by the party workers, who were waiting on roadsides.

After paying visit to the memorial of late Yashwantrao Chavan, Pawar is expected to attend an event in Satara.

On Sunday, Ajit Pawar led a vertical split in the NCP to become the deputy chief minister, shocking his uncle Sharad Pawar, who founded the party 24 years ago.

Eight NCP leaders were also sworn in as ministers in the Eknath Shinde-Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) government.

Sharad Pawar on Sunday said it was not the NCP's decision to align with the Bharatiya Janata Party-Shiv Sena government and said action would be taken against leaders who violated the party line.

He also took a swipe at the BJP saying this development was not a 'googly' but a 'robbery'.

Sharad Pawar also said he would build new leadership in the party and asserted he gets more energy to work when such situations come up.

The NCP chief also said he was the party's face for the future as well.
The Delhi high court on Monday dismissed the bail plea of Aam Aadmi Party leader Manish Sisodia, who was arrested for his alleged role in the money laundering case relating to alleged irregularities in the city government's excise policy.

IMAGE: Former Delhi Deputy Chief Minister Manish Sisodia. Photograph: ANI Photo

Justice Dinesh Kumar Sharma refused to grant relief to Sisodia, saying he is not entitled to bail at this stage.

Besides Sisodia, the high court also dismissed the bail pleas of businessmen Abhishek Boinpally, Benoy Babu and Vijay Nair, who are co-accused in the money laundering case lodged by the Enforcement Directorate (ED) arising from the alleged scam.

Sisodia, the former Delhi deputy chief minister and excise minister, was first arrested by the CBI on February 26 for his alleged role in the scam and has been in custody since then.

The high court has already denied him bail in the CBI case on May 30.

He was arrested on March 9 in the case lodged by the ED and is currently in judicial custody.

The Delhi government implemented the policy on November 17, 2021, but scrapped it at the end of September 2022 amid allegations of corruption.
Nationalist Congress Party chief Sharad Pawar on Monday rejected speculation that his nephew Ajit Pawar's rebellion has his blessings.

IMAGE: NCP president Sharad Pawar arrives to pay floral tribute to former Maharashtra CM Yashwantrao Chavan at Yashwantrao Chavan Samadhi in Karad, Maharashtra on Monday. Photograph: ANI Photo

Addressing a press conference in Satara, Sharad Pawar also said he has launched a statewide tour to strengthen the NCP and boost the confidence of party workers, unfazed by actions of a few leaders.

On Sunday, Ajit Pawar led a vertical split in the NCP to become the deputy chief minister.

Eight other NCP leaders were also sworn in as ministers in the Eknath Shinde-Bharatiya Janata Party government.

Asked whether Ajit Pawar's rebellion on Sunday had his blessings, the NCP chief said, "It is a mean thing to say. Only those with a mean and low intellect can say this."

"I have set out on a tour of the state and galvanize the cadre. They should not feel disillusioned with what some leaders have done," Sharad Pawar said.
In the event of the Maharashtra assembly speaker disqualifying chief minister Eknath Shinde and 15 MLAs, the Bharatiya Janata Party will still be able to retain power with the support of the rest of Shiv Sena legislators and loyalists backing Nationalist Congress Party leader Ajit Pawar, a former official said on Monday.

IMAGE: Maharashtra CM Eknath Shinde, State Deputy CM Devendra Fadnavis and newly sworn-in State Deputy Chief Minister Ajit Pawar meet Governor Ramesh Bais at Raj Bhavan, in Mumbai on Sunday, July 2, 2023. Photograph: ANI Photo

At least 40 MLAs of NCP are purportedly supporting Ajit Pawar, who took oath as deputy chief minister on Sunday while eight of his colleagues were sworn in as ministers.

Ajit Pawar has the support of more than 40 MLAs of the NCP, according to sources citing a letter submitted to Raj Bhavan.

The BJP's strength in the 288-member House is 105 while 40 legislators of Shiv Sena led by Shinde are also part of the government. At least 10 Independents are also backing the BJP.

At 145, the combined strength of BJP (105) and the 40 MLAs of NCP, believed to be backing Ajit, can ensure that the government survives without the support of the Shinde-led Shiv Sena.

The Congress has 45 MLAs and Shiv Sena-UBT 17. In the 2019 polls, the NCP won 54 seats.

Former principal secretary of Maharashtra Vidhan Sabha, Anant Kalse, said in the event of the disqualification of 16 MLAs, including CM Shinde, the BJP-Sena-NCP alliance can still retain power with the support of NCP MLAs.

"The Supreme Court ruled that the Maharashtra assembly speaker should decide on the disqualification of 16 MLAs including the chief minister. If Shinde is disqualified, the BJP-Sena-NCP alliance can still retain power with the support of NCP MLAs," he told PTI.

The apex court in May referred the matter of deciding on the disqualification of CM Eknath Shinde and the 15 MLAs of his faction to the speaker of the Maharashtra Assembly, Rahul Narvekar.

Meanwhile, senior Congress leader Prithviraj Chavan on Monday claimed to possess information that the Bharatiya Janata Party has promised Ajit Pawar the post of Maharashtra chief minister.

"I had spoken about it (that Ajit Pawar may go with BJP) publicly but I faced criticism. Only bargaining was going on over what position he (Ajit) would get. As per our information, he has been given a promise of chief minister's post by pushing Eknath Shinde aside with the help of the assembly speaker's decision (on disqualification of 16 Shiv Sena MLAs)," Chavan claimed on Monday.

Shiv Sena-UBT MP Sanjay Raut said the oath-taking ceremony of Ajit Pawar is the start of Eknath Shinde losing his chief minister's post.

"Shinde camp MLAs will be disqualified as members of the House. In order to continue being in power even after it, Ajit Pawar and the NCP MLAs have joined the government," Raut claimed.

With the induction of Ajit Pawar and eight others, the strength of the Maharashtra cabinet has gone up to 29, leaving 14 vacancies to be filled ahead of the much-awaited expansion of the council of ministers that can accommodate a maximum of 43 ministers.

The BJP and its ally Shiv Sena, led by CM Shinde, each have 10 cabinet ministers.
More than 500 scientists, academicians and students have written to the Bengaluru-based IISc expressing dismay over the cancellation of a discussion on anti-terror law UAPA that was to be led by student activists Natasha Narwal and Devangana Kalita.

IMAGE: Student activists Asif Iqbal Tanha, Devangana Kalita and Natasha Narwal outside Tihar jail after a court ordered their immediate release in the north-east Delhi riots conspiracy case, in New Delhi, June 17, 2021. Photograph: Kamal Singh/PTI Photo

In their letter, they said "regardless of one's perspective, such discussions are crucial in a functioning democracy", and the move has damaged the institution's reputation globally.

Besides students and academicians in the country, the signatories to the letter included some from foreign institutions such as Michigan State University, University of California, Cornell University, Imperial College London, University of Cambridge, Seoul National University and Princeton University.

The letter, however, clarifies that the institutional affiliations have been provided only for purposes of identification and the signatories do not reflect the views of these institutes. More than 100 signatories are students and postdoctoral fellows.

Narwal and Kalita had participated in protests against the Citizenship (Amendment) Act. In 2020, they were arrested under the Unlawful Activities Prevention Act (UAPA) for allegedly being part of a "larger conspiracy" in the Delhi riots case. They were released on bail by the Delhi high court.

"We believe that it is important for members of IISc to hear about Natasha and Devangana's experience and to reflect on the laws that were used to incarcerate them. Regardless of one's perspective, such discussions are crucial in a functioning democracy and IISc, as an academic institution, is ideally positioned to host them," the letter to Indian Institute of Science (IISc) Director Govindan Rangarajan read.

The discussion on "Unlawful Activities Prevention Act (UAPA), Prisons and the Criminal Justice System" was scheduled on June 28 but was cancelled a day before by the IISc administration.

"Conversely, if the institute is unwilling to permit peaceful discussions on constitutional questions, it is hard to see how it can foster a spirit of critical inquiry that is necessary for scientific work," the letter read.

The actions of the administration reflect poorly on its "commitment to upholding academic freedom and democratic values", it read.

"They have damaged IISc's reputation, both within the country and internationally. We hope that you will take urgent corrective measures and ensure that members of IISc remain free to express and discuss a range of ideas, both about science, and about the society that we live in," the letter read.

There was no reaction available from Rangarajan on the incident and the letter.

The signatories also included some from University of Washington, University of British Columbia, University of Toronto, University of Waterloo and University of Glasgow.

While releasing Narwal and Kalita on bail, the Delhi high court had noted that "in its anxiety to suppress dissent, the State has blurred the line between the constitutionally guaranteed 'right to protest' and 'terrorist activity'". "If such blurring gains traction, democracy would be in peril", the court had said.

Their bail was recently upheld by the Supreme Court.
The unexpected split in the Nationalist Congress Party set off a mini earthquake in not only Maharashtra politics but also sent aftershocks at a national level.

IMAGE: Maharashtra Governor Ramesh Bais meets with State CM Eknath Shinde, State Deputy CM Devendra Fadnavis and newly sworn-in State Deputy Chief Minister Ajit Pawar, at Raj Bhavan, in Mumbai on Sunday. Photograph: ANI Photo

Here are some key takeaways from Sunday's development:

Questions over opposition unity

Ajit Pawar leaving his uncle and NCP supremo Sharad Pawar high and dry to join the Eknath Shinde-led government has severely dented the opposition unity move of 15 parties, which took tentative steps with a meeting in Patna last month.

But even before Sunday's blow, the unity efforts were marred by differences among major players.

Among them are the open hostility between the Aam Aadmi Party and the Congress as well as the barbs exchanged between the Trinamool Congress and Congress in West Bengal.

In Kerala too, the Congress and the Communist Party of India-Marxist do not see eye to eye.

Ajit Pawar's move severely undercuts the unity efforts that opposition leaders hope will collectively pose a challenge to the Narender Modi-led Bharatiya Janata Party in the 2024 general elections.

BJP resurgence in Maharashtra

Ajit Pawar's decision to join hands with BJP and Shinde-led Shiv Sena ensures that BJP is once again in the driver's seat in Maharashtra, after being briefly sidelined.

It is now in a position to create a formidable alliance, which can boost its stranglehold over the state during the Lok Sabha elections.

The development also all but ends any edge that the MVA comprising Uddhav Thackery-led Shiv Sena-UBT, Sharad Pawar's NCP and the Congress had.

The new alliance represents a formidable electoral control over different regions of Maharashtra.

Congress isolated

According to sources, Ajit Pawar's supporters were irked by Sharad Pawar and Supriya Sule sharing the stage with Rahul Gandhi in Patna and their willingness to accept his apex role.

This, and the spat between the Congress and powerful regional parties, raises the question of whether popular regional leaders will accept Gandhi's leadership in the opposition coalition.

Diminished role of Sharad Pawar

Long considered a wily politician who never failed to pull a rabbit out of the hat, it appears that he was outsmarted by the political play crafted by the BJP with the help of Ajit Pawar.

This leaves him greatly weakened.

His strategy and views will become clearer on Monday when he is scheduled to speak in public.
Asserting that his government has done a lot of development work in its nine years, Prime Minister Narendra Modi on Monday asked his Council of Ministers to go all out over the next nine months to inform people about its successes and initiatives, sources said.

IMAGE: Prime Minister Narendra Modi chairs meeting of Council of Ministers at the newly built convention centre at Pragati Maidan in New Delhi. Photograph: @narendramodi/Twitter

The meeting was held at the newly built convention centre at Pragati Maidan, which will host the G20 summit in September.

The sources said that in the meeting, a presentation was also made on the vision for India's growth journey in a host of areas, ranging from infrastructure to budget size, till 2047 when it celebrates the centenary of its independence.

This will put India among the leading countries in the world, they said.

With the ruling BJP's leadership putting in place its strategy to retain power at the Centre in the 2024 Lok Sabha polls, Modi spoke at length about India's development journey in various sectors and his government's pro-poor measures since 2014.

Chairing the meeting, he asked his ministerial colleagues to make a determined effort to connect with the electorate across the country in the period till the polls.

Modi has described the era till 2047 as "Amrit Kaal" (golden era) for the country.

The sources said the prime minister noted the prevailing global challenges and lauded the country's growth and welfare for the poor.

A number of secretaries representing different ministries, including foreign and defence, made presentations during the meeting in which Modi's recent State Visit to the US was also highlighted for its unprecedented success.

It was noted that US President Joe Biden held talks with Modi on all three days of his stay in Washington DC, the sources said.

His visit to Egypt was also highlighted in the meeting which lasted for close to four and a half hours.

It was also discussed how to properly implement budgetary allocations, the sources said, noting that Modi underscored that the G20 meeting will be held at same venue where the ministers met.

He stressed on the significance of the meeting, which will be attended by world leaders, and asked ministers to give any suggestion to make improvements.

Prime Minister Modi tweeted, "A fruitful meeting with the Council of Ministers, where we exchanged views on diverse policy related issues."

Union minister Meenakshi Lekhi told reporters after the meeting that "vision 2047" and plans for a host of development activities in various sectors were discussed.

Lekhi added that Parliament's Monsoon Session, scheduled to begin from July 20, will start from the old building. It was also emphasised in the meeting that different ministries prepare their bills as there is not much time left, she said.

The meeting has come amid a heightened buzz about a likely Cabinet reshuffle following a series of meetings of the ruling BJP's top brass.

What has added to the reshuffle buzz is that the period before Parliament's Monsoon Session could be the last window for such an exercise.
Prime Minister Narendra Modi will chair a meeting of the Union Council of Ministers on Monday amid a heightened buzz about the likelihood of a Cabinet reshuffle following a series of meetings of the ruling Bharatiya Janata Party's top brass.

IMAGE: Newly sworn-in Maharashtra Deputy Chief Minister Ajit Pawar addresses a press conference with NCP Working President Praful Patel, in Mumbai on Sunday, July 02, 2023. Photograph: ANI Photo

The Monday meeting is expected to be held at the newly built convention centre at Pragati Maidan in New Delhi, which will host the G20 summit in September.

The political upheaval in Maharashtra on Sunday as NCP leader Ajit Pawar joined the BJP-Shiv Sena government along with several of his party legislators and a number of closed-door meetings involving the BJP's brain trust, including Home Minister Amit Shah and party president J P Nadda, have strengthened the view that a Cabinet reshuffle is on the cards.

Senior NCP MP and former Union minister Praful Patel, who ditched his longtime mentor Sharad Pawar to join hands with his nephew, is being seen as a probable contender among the likely new ministers in the central government.

With Ajit Pawar taking oath as deputy chief minister in Maharashtra, there is also speculation about Devendra Fadnavis, also a deputy chief minister and the key BJP leader in the state, being brought into the central government.

BJP sources have been indicating that allies will be given representation in the Cabinet whenever Modi decides to go in for a rejig in his Council of Ministers.

The fact that the period before Parliament's Monsoon Session, which begins from July 20, could be the last window for such an exercise have added to the reshuffle buzz.

The BJP's organisation, including in some states, may also see some changes as its top brass makes its choices for key positions with the campaign for the 2024 Lok Sabha polls intensifying, sources said.

Modi held a meeting with Shah and Nadda on June 28. This came after closed-door meetings involving Shah and Nadda, among others, to take stock of organisational and political affairs.

Any Cabinet rejig will factor in the upcoming assembly polls as well.

The BJP has been making hectic preparations for several state polls scheduled this year, with the Congress showing some bounce following its big win in Karnataka.

Elections are due in Rajasthan, Chhattisgarh, Madhya Pradesh, Telangana and Mizoram later this year, and the Congress will be the BJP's main challenger in the first three states.
Chairman of parliamentary panel on law and Bharatiya Janata Party MP Sushil Modi on Monday advocated keeping tribals, including those in the North East, out of the purview of any likely Uniform Civil Code (UCC) at a meeting while some opposition members questioned the Law Commission's timing of the move to begin consultations on the contentious issue, sources said.

Most opposition members, including those from the Congress and the Dravida Munnetra Kazhagam, linked the push for the UCC to the next year's Lok Sabha polls, sources said.

The meeting of the parliamentary standing committee, first after the law panel initiated the consultation process on the common civil code, was held to hear the views of representatives of the law panel and legal affairs and legislative departments of the law ministry on the consultation process.

Last month, the Law Commission issued a public notice inviting views from the various stakeholders on the UCC under the "Review of Personal Laws" subject.

According to sources, Shiv Sena's Sanjay Raut questioned the timing of the consultations while Congress MP Vivek Tankha and DMK MP P Wilson submitted separate written statements, asserting that there was no need to have fresh consultations on the emotive issue.

In his letter, Tankha also reiterated the view of the previous Law Commission that providing a uniform civil code was "neither necessary nor desirable at this stage". Questioning the intent behind the move, Tagore linked the law panel move to the polls.

The Law Commission was represented in the meeting by its member-secretary K Biswal.

Sources said the Law Commission representative also defended the fresh consultation exercise, noting that the preceding commission had brought out its suggestions in 2018 and its term had also come to an end. That is why they have begun a fresh initiative which is essentially "informational", they said.

Sushil Modi in his comments pitched for keeping tribals out of the ambit of any proposed UCC and noted that all laws have exceptions.

It was also pointed out in the meeting that the central laws are not applicable in some North Eastern states without their concurrence.

BJP's Mahesh Jethmalani made a strong defence for the implementation of UCC as he cited debates in the constituent assembly to assert that it was always considered imperative.

Meanwhile, sources indicated that the possibility of a bill on UCC is remote in the monsoon session of Parliament beginning July 20.

In a presentation during the meeting, Law Commission officials said 19 lakh suggestions have been received so far in response to its public notice on June 14. The exercise will continue till July 13.

Sources said 17 out of 31 members of the panel attended the meeting.

Uniform Civil Code is aimed at replacing personal laws based on religions, customs, and traditions with one common law for everyone irrespective of religion, caste, creed, sexual orientation, and gender. Personal laws and laws related to inheritance, adoption and succession are likely to be covered by a common code.

Implementation of a UCC has been part of BJP election manifestos and Prime Minister Narendra Modi while addressing BJP workers in Bhopal last month made a strong push for it, asking how can the country function with dual laws that govern personal matters, and accused the Opposition of using the UCC issue to "mislead and provoke" the Muslim community.

Uttarakhand is already in the process of implementing its common code.

Opposition parties, however, had attacked the prime minister for his comments on the UCC with the Congress saying he was making such remarks only to divert attention from real issues such as unemployment and the Manipur violence.

All India Majlis-e-Ittehadul Muslimeen leader Asaduddin Owaisi asked whether the country's pluralism would be "snatched away" in the name of UCC.

In its consultation paper issued on August 31, 2018, the 21st Law Commission headed by Justice B S Chauhan (retd) said while the diversity of Indian culture can and should be celebrated, specific groups or weaker sections of the society must not be "dis-privileged" in the process.

It said the commission dealt with laws that are discriminatory rather than providing a uniform civil code "which is neither necessary nor desirable at this stage".

The consultation paper noted that most countries are now moving towards recognition of difference, and the mere existence of difference does not imply discrimination but is indicative of a robust democracy.
Processed fruit and vegetable exports are likely to be worth US$1.2 billion from exporting processed this year, up from $1 billion last year, according to the Vietnam Fruit Association.

Their exports rose by 23% year-on-year to $356 million in the first four months of the year, Dang Phuc Nguyen, the associations general secretary, said.

While exact figures are not available yet for May and June exports grew strongly in the second quarter, he added.

But data is available for the combined exports of fresh and processed fruits and vegetables, and they surged by 63% to $2.8 billion in the first half, according to the association. They had been worth $3.4 billion last year, with 30% coming from processed items.

Workers at a canned fruit plant in the Mekong Delta city of Can Tho. Photo by VnExpress/Linh Dan

For years Vietnams fresh vegetable and fruit exports have largely been to China, which accounts for a 60% share. But exports to the U.S., EU and Japan have grown rapidly.

Nguyen called it "a good sign" as fruit and vegetable processors diversify into global markets and reduce their dependence on China.

A large volume of Vietnamese canned fruit products and bottled juices with a shelf life of up to two years has gone to the U.S., Japan and Europe this year.

According to the U.S. International Trade Commission, imports of Vietnamese processed fruits and vegetables have grown by 30-45% annually in the past three years.

Exports to the EU have increased by 10-20% a year. Leading exporter Westfood shipped large volumes of processed fruits and vegetables to the world market in the first five months of this year, with exports to Europe growing by 22%, its chairwoman, Nguyen Thi Minh Nguyet, said.

She said exports to China would increase dramatically this year, while South Korea, Japan, the Netherlands, and the EU (eh?) are increasing purchases.

According to the Ministry of Agriculture and Rural Development, the countrys annual output of fruits and vegetables is more than 31 million tons, but only 4.5 million tons, or 14%, are processed.

Most processing and preservation establishments are very small and run by households, and so their products often fail to meet export quality requirements.
'I want to warn Ajit dada and all those who have stabbed Pawar saheb by joining hands with the BJP.'

'Don't write saheb's obituaries so soon.'

IMAGE: Sharad Pawar, who stepped down as Nationalist Congress Party president on May 2, 2023, leaves the Y B Chavan Centre in Mumbai after speaking to party workers, May 4, 2023. Photograph: Sahil Salvi

What do you do, when you are all of 82, when you are not in the pink of your health and life throws one of the most formidable political challenges at you?

Well, if you are Sharadchandra Govindrao Pawar, then you decide to go back to the people and hit the streets running. And Pawar seems to be a man in hurry.

Just a day after his nephew Ajit Anantrao Pawar -- and the undeclared heir to his political legacy in Maharashtra just till the other day -- engineered a takeover of sorts of the legislative wing of the Nationalist Congress Party, which the incumbent national president built, nurtured and prospered over two-and-a-half decades, the unruffled octogenarian, in his indomitable style, announced that the party is built not on the strength of representatives but on the strength of those who elect these representatives for a term of five years.

Pawar said he would rather let the people of Maharashtra decide if he still has the political heft left to take on his political adversaries, which now includes his nephew, and the BJP, which he believes is responsible for the split in his party.

'Will go to people's court'

IMAGE: The famous photograph of Sharad Pawar addressing an election rally in pouring rain in Satara in October 2019 before the Maharashtra assembly election. Photograph: @PawarSpeaks/Twitter

In fact, Sharad Pawar, during a brief press conference -- dressed in a spotless white, half-sleeve shirt and with at least ten microphones tugged on to his shirt -- from his residence in Pune on Sunday evening, soon after Ajit Pawar was sworn in as deputy chief minister, had already expressed his readiness to accept the gauntlet thrown at him by his nephew and sounded the war bugle.

'I will begin my tour of Maharashtra from tomorrow by visiting the samadhi (memorial) of Yashwantrao Chavan (one of the state's tallest leaders and Maharashtra's first chief minister Yashvantrao Balwantrao Chavan, who Pawar regards as his political mentor) and seek his blessings for my resolve to rebuild the party.

'Soon after that I will be attending a meeting of Dalit organisations in Satara; after that I will tour across the country and Maharashtra as much as I can. This is going to be my only agenda from today,' Pawar said announcing his intention to take on his political opponents, primarily the BJP and its central leadership, against whom an array of Opposition leaders are trying to cobble up a united front.

Elaborating on Pawar's plan to visit Karad on Monday, July 3, morning, a party spokesperson says, "We plan to launch our meet-the-people programme from tomorrow. Pawar saheb will be travelling by road in a huge cavalcade followed by his supporters. On the way we will be meeting a lot of people."

Interestingly, a combative Pawar narrated how 52 of the 58 MLAs that were elected in 1980 under the banner of Congress-S -- the party Pawar had formed after a split in the Indian National Congress in 1978 -- deserted his party and he was left with just six MLAs including himself and how he rebuilt the party from scratch.

'I am not new to such political dramas,' he said pointing to his nephew's latest rebellion, the earlier ones being in November 2019 and most recently two months ago in May when Sharad Pawar offered to resign as the party chief to quell Ajit Pawar's rebellion and save his party from a split.

'In 1980, soon after the party I was heading got 58 MLAs elected, barring six, all of them left the party. From the leader of the Opposition of a party with 58 MLAs, I was reduced to just a leader of six MLAs including myself. With just five MLAs in the party I started touring Maharashtra to rebuild my party.

'When elections were held after five years our party won 69 MLAs. Except three to four MLAs who left us in 1980, all others lost the elections held in 1985,' he said.

'I will take all the issues to the people of Maharashtra. Let them decide which is the real NCP and who does the party belong to. I don't want to fight any court cases over these issues. I have full faith in the people's court and I will go to them,' he said in response to a query if the ownership of the NCP will also take the court route to decide the ownership just like what happened after Eknath Shinde's rebellion that vertically split the Shiv Sena.

Amidst some tense moments that he and his party has been subjected to since July 2 morning, the Maratha strongman, did show his softer side during the media briefing.

When asked who could be NCP's most trusted leader in the future given the turmoil the party has found itself in recent times, the bespectacled Pawar, his mobile, a paper and handkerchief in his left hand, immediately raised his right hand to say 'Sharad Pawar' even as the media contingent, party functionaries and Pawar himself burst out in laughter.

The video has since gone viral on social media with party spokesperson Clyde Crasto calling him 'Our Rockstar' (external link).

'Pawar's political subterfuge'

This is classic Pawar-speak," says a Congress MLA from Maharashtra who has seen the veteran's political career from close quarters since 1967 when he was first elected as the member of the Maharashtra assembly from Baramati as a 27 year old.

"Whenever he faces political doldrums he tries to create confusion among his opponents' ranks or whoever crosses the line. He tries to browbeat them into submission either by hook or crook. With whatever he said in today's press conference, he has sent a message to those NCP MLAs who are currently with Ajit Pawar, but who, Pawar thinks, can be persuaded to split ways with his nephew. He already did that once in 2019," reminds this Congress MLA alluding to how Ajit Pawar's early morning swearing-in of November 2019 turned into a political fiasco both for himself and the BJP.

"This is what Sharad Pawar is best at: Political subterfuge," says a political analyst from Maharashtra commenting on how Pawar sends subtle, yet powerful messages to those who cross swords with him.

'Thank you Prime Minister Modi'

IMAGE: Sharad Pawar meets Prime Minister Narendra D Modi in New Delhi in July 2021. Photograph: ANI

While Pawar chose to play safe with criticising his nephew -- some political observers believe Pawar still has hopes to do a 2019 encore and get his nephew back from the BJP's stables -- he did castigate Praful Patel and Sunil Tatkare, who were appointed as working president and national treasurer respectively by Pawar for not doing their jobs well.

Pawar threatened to take disciplinary action against Patel and Tatkare even as he named Ajit Pawar, Chhagan Bhujbal, Praful Patel and Hasan Mushrif (who was also sworn in as a minister in the Shinde-Fadnavis government and is under the radar of the Enforcement Directorate for an alleged sugar factory scam) as those against whom the ED has allegedly incriminating files.

From the word go, Pawar took on Prime Minister Narendra D Modi -- who only two days ago was vocal in criticising Rs 70,000 crore (Rs 700 billion) scams in which NCP leaders were involved -- for exonerating the NCP leaders by allowing their swearing in as ministers in a government that forms the backbone of the present Maharashtra government.

'I am grateful to the prime minister for giving a chance to some of my colleagues from the NCP to become ministers in his party's government. The prime minister, through his deeds, has proved that his charges of corruption against the NCP and my colleagues were false,' he said.

The NCP chief also revealed that some of the MLAs who were seen with Ajit Pawar during his swearing-in on July 2 had called him up to inform that they were unaware of Ajit Pawar's intention and when they met him as Leader of the Opposition on the morning of July 2, they were made to sign some papers.

'Some MLAs who were seen at the swearing-in called me and said that they were asked to sign certain documents and that they were still with me. But I will not disclose anything more now. Let these MLAs say what they told me over the phone before the people and only then will I trust them. If they don't say the same thing before the people then I will conclude that they have taken a different stance,' Pawar said in a bid to trap those MLAs who are still sitting on the fence.

Will 2023 be different from 2019?

IMAGE: Maharashtra Governor Ramesh Bais congratulates the newly sworn-in Deputy Chief Minister Ajit Pawar at Raj Bhavan, July 2, 2023. BJP leader Devendra Fadnavis, the other deputy chief minister, is also seen. Photograph: ANI Photo

Unlike the November 2019 swearing-in fiasco, when Ajit Pawar had joined hands with Fadnavis with just a handful of NCP MLAs in tow, this time round he managed to wrest some of Pawar's most trusted lieutenants and senior party leaders like Praful Patel, Sunil Tatkare, Chhagan Bhujbal and Dilip Walse Patil, who have fought many a political fights by his side to join his bandwagon which he has on July 2 hitched along with that of the Shiv Sena-Bharatiya Janata Party government.

Along with Ajit Pawar, who took the oath of office as the deputy chief minister -- Maharashtra will now have two deputy chief ministers including the BJP's Devendra Fadnavis -- eight other NCP MLAs were accommodated as ministers in a government, which has been dilly-dallying over its expansion and ignoring demands -- from many of the 39 Shiv Sena MLAs who had rebelled against Uddhav Thackeray under Eknath Shinde's leadership -- of an expansion since it came to power last June.

"While Pawar saheb had succeeded in scotching his nephew's political ambitions three years ago when on November 23, 2019 he, along with Fadnavis were sworn in as the deputy chief minister and chief minister in an early morning political coup (the government, though, lasted only three days till November 26 as all those who had promised to bolt along with Ajit Pawar turned tail after Sharad Pawar swung into action) this time it is different," says an NCP leader who still swears by the senior Pawar and has decided to stay away from his nephew's camp.

"This time Ajit dada has not only flew out of his uncle's nest, but he has also damaged the party by taking away Pawar saheb's close confidantes like Praful Patel and Bhujbal saheb; but just like 2019 Pawar saheb will not be sitting quiet," he adds.

'Don't write saheb's obituaries so soon'

IMAGE: Sharad Pawar with his nephew Ajit Pawar after announcing his resignation as NCP president in Mumbai, May 2, 2023. Photograph: ANI Photo

'From today my single-most important agenda will be to rebuild the NCP just like I did in 1980. I have immense faith in all sections of Maharashtra people, especially the youth. In 2019 (assembly elections when all the major political parties in the state fought elections separately) elections too I did the same thing. Went among the people and told them what we stood for, what our ideology stood for and people entrusted their faith in us. The same situation beckons today,' Pawar declared while answering to a query from the media.

'The whole country is today trying to build an opposition to the Modi government and leaders from across political parties have expressed their support for me. I am not at all worried about what happened today,' he added.

"I want to warn Ajit dada and all those who have stabbed Pawar saheb by joining hands with the BJP. Don't write saheb's obituaries so soon. There's still lot of political resolve burning within him," says an NCP MLA from the Sharad Pawar camp.

"You might think that age is catching up with him and he might retire from active politics. He surely will retire one day, but not without having a last laugh and certainly not before ensuring the defeat of the BJP's ideology of hatred and divisiveness, the NCP MLA added.

"Who knows this might be his last election where he plays an active role but he will ensure that it is forever remembered by the people of India."

"He carved his political legacy and attained his gigantic stature by winning the trust of Maharashtra's and India's youth, farmers, downtrodden, and minorities through his development programmes for all sections of the state and the country when he was a Union minister. You can't destroy that legacy by running away with some MLAs," says the NCP MLA.

"You can neither win people's hearts by such back-stabbing. Pawar saheb will show you what he is made of in the next 15-18 months."
A full-blown intra-party tussle broke out in the Nationalist Congress Party as rival factions went on a sacking spree on Monday to tighten their grip over the organisation and sought disqualification of lawmakers in each other's camps, a day after sudden induction of Ajit Pawar as deputy CM caused a political upheaval in Maharashtra.

Soon after NCP president Sharad Pawar removed party working president Praful Patel and general secretary Sunil Tatkare for engaging in "anti-party activities, the faction owing allegiance to Ajit Pawar hit back by sacking state unit president Jayant Patil and making new appointments.

Patel appointed Ajit Pawar as the leader of the NCP legislature party.

The tit for tat actions came a day after Ajit Pawar joined the Eknath Shinde-BJP government as deputy chief minister along with eight other NCP MLAs who were inducted as ministers.

Sharad Pawar, in a tweet, said, "I, as the National President, of Nationalist Congress Party hereby order the removal of the names of Shri Sunil Tatkare and Shri Praful Patel from the Register of Members of NCP Party for anti-party activities.

He tagged Patel, a Rajya Sabha MP who was appointed as NCP working president last month, and Tatkare in his tweet.

Later, the NCP supremo issued notices to Patel and Tatkare, who is also a Lok Sabha MP.

Accusing them of facilitating and spearheading defections of nine MLAs without his knowledge and consent, the senior Pawar, in his letter, said "Your action of supporting Shri Ajit Pawar and eight other MLAs who have sworn oath as ministers in violation of the party's direction and mandate amounts to anti-party activities".

"I remove your names from the membership register of the party in view of your actions," Sharad Pawar said.

The party is initiating appropriate action for formal disqualification of Patel and Tatkare as MPs under the 10th Schedule of the Constitution, the letter said.

It added that "misrepresentation of association with NCP henceforth will be illegal and unlawful" on the part of Patel and Tatkare.

Sharad Pawar's action came soon after NCP working president Supriya Sule, in a letter, demanded action against Patel and Tatkare, whose daughter is one of the new ministers in the Shinde cabinet.

The Ajit Pawar camp soon hit back by appointing Tatkare as the Maharashtra NCP president in place of Jayant Patil. It also asked the Maharashtra assembly speaker to disqualify Jayant Patil and Jitendra Awhad from membership of the House.

Praful Patel told a press conference he has appointed Ajit Pawar as the leader of the NCP legislature party, while Anil Bhaidas Patil, who took oath as a minister on Sunday, will continue to be the party whip in the assembly.

Patel said the decision to back the Eknath Shinde-led government and the leadership of Prime Minister Narendra Modi was a "collective" move by the NCP.

"Today (Monday) is Guru Purnima; we all wish that Sharad Pawar continues to bless us," said Patel.

Patel said instead of asking them how many MLAs are in the Ajit Pawar camp, the question should be put to the other side (rival group).

He said Anil Patil, who was among the ministers who joined the Eknath Shinde-BJP government on Sunday, will continue to be NCP's whip in the Maharashtra assembly.

Deputy Chief Minister Ajit Pawar, who was present at the press meet, said he enjoyed the support of "maximum" NCP legislators and said he has given a letter to the assembly speaker, seeking disqualification of party

MLAs Jayant Patil and Jitendra Awhad (who belong to rival group) from the House.

"A majority of NCP MLAs are with us, that is why I became deputy CM. We have requested the Maharashtra assembly speaker to disqualify Jayant Patil and Jitendra Awhad," he said.

Ajit Pawar said the party and MLAs were with him and the notice for disqualification against him and the eight newly sworn-in ministers was meaningless.

Asked whether he will expel anybody from the party, including NCP working president and his cousin Sule, Ajit Pawar shot back, "We are not here to expel anybody from our party."

The deputy CM said he had the party with him and also its symbol (clock).

"Whatever we are doing is in the interest of the party. We will strengthen our party further, " he said.

Asked who was the NCP's national head, Ajit Pawar said, "The party national president is Sharad Pawar. Have you forgotten?"

He said the Leader of Opposition in the assembly is appointed by the Speaker and not by a party functionary.

"Law will decide if we have rebelled. Only the Election Commission of India will decide to whom the party belongs," said Ajit Pawar and added the 'mahayuti' government (led by Chief Minister Eknath Shinde) in Maharashtra will work for welfare of the state and its people.

The deputy CM said, "We have given 'guru dakshina' (tradition of thanks-giving and acknowledging role of guru/teacher in one's life)" to the senior Pawar.

"We got the deputy chief minister's post and we will work for welfare of the state," said Ajit Pawar.

The deputy CM staked claim to the NCP and its symbol and said the Election Commission of India will decide whom the party belongs to.

The junior Pawar took a dim view of Jayant Patil appointing Awhad as the Leader of Opposition in the assembly.

"It is the prerogative of the Speaker and the Opposition party with highest number of seats gets the post," he said.

The deputy CM scoffed at notice of disqualification against him and eight newly sworn-in ministers and also sacking of Patel and Tatkare as well as office-bearers who attended Sunday's oath taking ceremony.

The Ajit Pawar camp has not yet announced the number of MLAs supporting them.

The NCP has 53 MLAs in the 288-member assembly.
Nationalist Congress Party chief Sharad Pawar on Monday targeted Praful Patel, who has been sacked from the party for siding with Ajit Pawar, saying he was fortunate unlike others as he used to get elected to Parliament without facing any elections just by filling the form.

IMAGE: Nationalist Congress Party leader Praful Patel addresses a press conference, at Sahyadri State Guest House, in Mumbai on Monday. Photograph: ANI Photo

After Ajit Pawar took oath as deputy chief minister on Sunday, the Pawar senior had singled out Patel and MP Sunil Tatkare for "abandoning" the guidelines of the party president and taking a "wrong path".

On Monday, Sharad Pawar sacked Patel, the working president of NCP, and general secretary Tatkare for engaging in "anti-party activities".

Addressing a press conference in Satara before announcing the decision to sack Patel and Tatkare, Pawar said, "All our MLAs and MPs (pointing at some of them flanking him) have done a lot of hard work to get elected. They go among people and work but Praful (Patel) is a fortunate colleague who by just filling out the form becomes an MP.

"These people (MLAs) do not have to go and cast their votes to elect him (Patel). He gets elected unopposed and no election-related expense is incurred".

Patel is "fortunate" as he gets the opportunity to become a member of Parliament easily, Pawar added.

When asked if Patel has expressed his wish to meet him but stuck to his stand, Pawar said Patel has the right to take any stand. "If he wants to offer some guidance, we will just listen and leave it," he added.

Pawar also asserted that he is the last authority in NCP and had fixed some responsibilities for Patel.

"If he (Patel) does something contrary to those responsibilities by breaking the line of the party, he has no right to remain in that position," he added.

Asked whether he was pained to see that leaders groomed by him are deserting him, Pawar replied in the negative.

"Not at all. My experience tells me that whenever such a situation emerges, the final decision is taken by people and common voters in elections. I have faith in them," he said.

Talking about his state-wide tour, which he launched from Karad city in western Maharashtra, the NCP patriarch said he wanted to reassure young cadres of NCP to not feel upset after the current happenings in the party.

"During my journey from Pune to Satara, I saw a large number of party workers, especially young people, waiting for me and extending support," he said.

Queried on Ajit Pawar's statement that if "NCP can go with Shiv Sena, it can also go with BJP", Pawar said such developments are not unprecedented in politics.

"After the Emergency, the only person in the country who supported the Emergency was Balasaheb Thackeray. In subsequent elections, Shiv Sena didn't field any candidate against the Congress," Pawar said.

"The leaders who took oath yesterday were also part of the erstwhile MVA government. But that time (when they took oath in 2019), they didn't look worried, so there is no need to assign any importance to what they are saying," he added.

Asked if the investigation by the Enforcement Directorate prompted some NCP leaders to join the BJP-Shiv Sena government, Pawar said he didn't have any information regarding this.

"I only heard what Prime Minister Narendra Modi had said recently said about corruption in NCP. Modi spoke about the Maharashtra State Cooperative Bank (scam) and purported irrigation scam while talking about NCP.

"But he didn't stop our main leaders from taking the oath. It shows that the allegations levelled by him were devoid of facts. In a nutshell, the leadership of the country has declared them (NCP leaders) innocent," Pawar quipped.

He recalled how MLAs had left him in the 1980s but he rebuild the organisation with the support of people.

Queried about NCP MP Amol Kolhe's tweet, the NCP chief said Ajit Pawar is also not someone who is an outsider.

A day earlier, Kolhe was seen with Ajit Pawar at Raj Bhavan in Mumbai but on Monday he declared his allegiance to Sharad Pawar.

"My daughter (Supriya Sule) had also gone there thrice (at the meeting convened earlier on Sunday by Ajit Pawar). There is nothing wrong," Pawar added.

He said the decision on disqualification of nine MLAs who have joined the Shiv Sena-BJP government will be taken by NCP state president Jayant Patil.

"Patil's decision will be supported," he added.

Pawar said several MLAs (of his party) had called him in view of the Sunday's development.

"They will declare their stand at the right moment," he added.

Maharashtra assembly speaker Rahul Narwekar has held a meeting with deputy chief ministers Devendra Fadnavis and Ajit Pawar at Fadnavis' bungalow in Mumbai.

When asked about this meeting, Pawar said the Speaker's post is an institution that is bound by rules, regulations, and protocol.

"The person chairing it should ensure the dignity of that institution," he added.
The Supreme Court on Monday directed the Manipur government to file an updated status report detailing steps taken for rehabilitation, improving the law and order situation and recovery of arms in the ethnic violence-hit state.

IMAGE: Police used several rounds of tear gas shells to stop and disperse a crowd gathered near the regional office of BJP, in Imphal on June 29, 2023. Photograph: ANI Photo

The state government, meanwhile, told the bench headed by Chief Justice D Y Chandrachud that though slowly, the situation is improving and now the curfew time has come down to five in 24 hours.

"Just tell us what steps have been taken with regard to rehabilitation camps, law and order and the recovery of arms," said the bench, also comprising justices P S Narasimha and Manoj Misra, while listing a batch of petitions on the issue for hearing on July 10.

Solicitor General Tushar Mehta, appearing for the Manipur government, termed as unfortunate the allegations levelled by senior advocate Colin Gonsalves, who represented minority Kuki organisations, that some militant groups were sponsored by the State and said he should avoid giving any 'communal angle'.

In a brief hearing, the top law officer gave details of the deployment of security forces and the recent status of the law and order situation.

Though slowly, the situation is improving in the state. Wherever there is a problem that is being tackled. Apart from civil police, there is a deployment of Indian Reserve battalions, Manipur rifles, commandos, 114 companies of CAPF and 184 columns of Army...355 relief camps are there, he said.

What I would request is that because I would not take an adversarial stand in this matter that my learned friend (Colin Gonsalves) may consider avoiding giving any communal angle Christians etc. That is not necessary. Human beings are dealt with by the law enforcement agencies, Mehta said.

On the other hand, Gonsalves said that attacks on Kukis have hugely increased after the state told this court that the incidents of violence have decreased.

Some people are going to news shows and saying that they are going to annihilate (Kukis). Their Facebook says that kill the Kukis and drive them from the hills. No FIR and no action taken... not a single person has been arrested..., the senior lawyer alleged, adding As long as these armed groups are not disbanded and are allowed to go and kill there will be an escalation in violence.

This is unfortunate. This will not solve the problem, said the solicitor general.

The court also took note of the submissions of a lawyer, representing a Meitei group in the state that some of the Kuki militants are having assault rifles and the central government must answer the issue. It asked the law officer to take instruction on this aspect as well.

I may or may not mention that in the (status) report... but I will take instruction and appraise the court on this...There cannot be a head count of militants, Mehta said.

The bench listed the plea on next Monday after the solicitor general submitted that the state government will file an updated status report setting out the measures which have been taken and indicating the present position.

On May 17, the CJI-led bench directed the Manipur government to take steps to foster confidence and ensure peace and tranquillity in the state torn by ethnic violence, asserting being the top-most court it can ensure that the political executive exercises its power and does not turn a blind eye to the situation.

Taking note of submissions on alleged provocative statements by Manipur Chief Minister N Biren Singh, the top court had asked the solicitor general to advise the constitutional functionary restraint.

On June 20, a vacation bench headed by Justice Surya Kant declined an urgent hearing on a plea filed by an NGO, Manipur Tribal Forum, seeking Army protection for the minority Kuki tribals in Manipur and prosecution of communal groups attacking them.

The court had said it was a law and order issue and that the administration should tackle it.

Gonsalves, appearing for the NGO, had submitted that 70 tribals have been killed in ethnic violence in the state notwithstanding the solemn assurances that nobody will die.

The solicitor general had opposed the request for an urgent hearing and said security agencies are on the ground and doing their best to stem the violence and restore normalcy.

He submitted that the main matter pertaining to the Manipur High Court's order for the grant of Scheduled Tribe status to the majority Meitei community, which set off a chain of violence in the northeastern state, has been posted for hearing on July 17 by the top court.

More than 120 people have lost their lives in clashes between the Meitei and Kuki communities. The clashes first broke out on May 3 after a Tribal Solidarity March was organised in the state's hill districts to protest the Meitei community's demand for ST status.

Meiteis account for about 53 per cent of Manipur's population and live mostly in the Imphal Valley. Tribal Nagas and Kukis constitute another 40 percent of the population and reside in the hill districts.

On March 27, the Manipur High Court order asked the state government to send a recommendation to the Centre within four weeks on the demand for ST status to the majority community.

The apex court is seized of a batch of pleas on the Manipur situation, including one by a ruling BJP MLA challenging the high court order on Scheduled Tribe status to the Meitei community, and a PIL by a tribal NGO for an SIT probe into the violence that has rocked the northeastern state.
The Supreme Court on Monday said it would hear on July 14 pleas, including the one filed by the sister of slain gangster-turned-politician Atiq Ahmad and Ashraf, seeking constitution of a commission chaired by a retired apex court judge to inquire into their "custodial" and "extra-judicial deaths".

Two separate pleas pertaining to Ahmad came up for hearing before a bench of Justices S R Bhat and Aravind Kumar.

Senior advocate Mukul Rohatgi, appearing for Uttar Pradesh, told the bench that the state has filed a status report in terms of the apex court's April 28 order that was passed while hearing a plea by advocate Vishal Tiwari, who has sought an independent probe into the killing of Ahmad and his brother.

Ahmad (60) and Ashraf were shot dead at point-blank range by three men posing as journalists in the middle of a media interaction while police personnel were escorting them to a medical college in Prayagraj on April 15.

"At the moment, we are not looking into individual issues. We are looking at the systemic problem," the bench observed during the hearing.

Tiwari, who in his plea has also sought an inquiry into the "183 police encounters" that have taken place in Uttar Pradesh since 2017, told the bench that he has prepared a brief rejoinder to the status report filed by the state.

He claimed there was "suppression of material fact" in the state's status report.

An advocate, appearing for the sister of Ahmad, said they have filed a separate petition and it was listed for hearing today.

The bench said it would hear these matters on July 14.

In its status report affidavit filed in the top court, the Uttar Pradesh government has said the state is "leaving no stone unturned in ensuring a thorough, impartial and timely investigation" into the deaths of Ahmad and Ashraf.

"Furthermore, the state is also inquiring into security lapses that may have led to the three attackers getting through the police cordon and firing at Ahmad and Ashraf. On the basis of prima facie reports from the relevant ACPs, four of the police officers present on the scene and the SHO of PS Shahganj, under whose jurisdiction the incident took place, have been suspended pending initiation of disciplinary proceedings. The inquiry in this regard is in progress," it said.

It said the status report deals with inquiry into the April 15 incident, steps taken in relation to deaths of Mohd Asad Khan, son of Ahmad, and Mohd Ghulam on April 13 and also the steps taken by state to implement the recommendations of Justice B S Chauhan Commission of Inquiry report.

Former apex court judge Justice Chauhan headed the commission that probed the encounter killing of gangster Vikas Dubey in 2020.

Dubey and his men had ambushed and killed eight policemen at his native Bikru village in Kanpur district in July 2020. He was arrested in Ujjain in Madhya Pradesh and was being brought back in Uttar Pradesh police custody when he allegedly tried to escape and was shot dead. Doubts were raised about the genuineness of the police encounter.

Regarding deaths of Mohd Asad Khan and Mohd Ghulam, the state has said in its status report that the incident took place in Jhansi on April 13 in "police retaliatory firing".

"During the course of investigation, the IO (investigating officer) took custody of the policemen's Glock pistols and sent them for forensic examination. Photographs of the crime scene, collection of evidence, weapons used by the accused, hollow and live cartridges, plain earth and blood-stained earth and gunshot residue of the accused were secured. The investigation continues to be in progress as on date," it said regarding the April 13 incident.

The status report also gave details about the steps taken to implement the recommendations of the Justice Chauhan's commission report, which had concluded that the police versions of the deaths of Dubey and his associates in police retaliatory firing could not be doubted.

"At the level of police reform, one of the commission's main concerns was the separation of the law and order and investigation wings of the state. It is submitted that the state is ensuring compliance regarding the separation of investigation police and law and order police in Uttar Pradesh Police," the status report said.

It said there has been an overhaul of manpower reform and a total of 10,877 posts of various cadres have been created in the police department from April 11, 2021 till date in the context of current allocation and creation of new posts, formation of special units, increase in manpower etc.

"Further, action on a requisitioning of 1,12,177 further posts of various cadres is also under progress," it said.

The status report said the police department has also undergone a modernisation rehaul and several things, including medium prison vans/drones, postmortem kits and various vehicles, have been purchased from the grant approved by the Government of India and the Uttar Pradesh government.

It said forensic science labs have increased from eight to 12 by adding Kannauj, Aligarh, Gonda and Bareilly and the process of establishing FSLs in six more cities -- Basti, Mirzapur, Azamgarh, Banda, Ayodhya and Saharanpur -- is also underway.

While hearing Tiwari's plea on April 28, the top court had questioned the Uttar Pradesh government why Ahmad and Ashraf, a former MLA, were paraded before media while being taken to a hospital for a medical checkup in police custody.

The counsel appearing for Uttar Pradesh had told the court the state has constituted a three-member commission of inquiry to probe the incident that was shown live on national television.

A special investigation team (SIT) of Uttar Pradesh Police is also investigating the case, the counsel had said.
Maharashtra Chief Minister Eknath Shinde on Monday spent time to ease the unrest among his Shiv Sena colleagues facing disqualification in connection with the rebellion against Uddhav Thackeray and the split in the party as well as the changed equations with the entry of nine Nationalist Congress Party MLAs in the government.

IMAGE: Maharashtra governor Ramesh Bais congratulates the newly sworn-in deputy chief minister Ajit Pawar during a ceremony, as State CM Eknath Shinde and State Deputy CM Devendra Fadnavis look on, at Raj Bhavan, in Mumbai. Photograph: ANI Photo

Incidentally, after the rebellion in June last year led to Shinde becoming chief minister, one of the reasons they gave for breaking away from Uddhav Thackeray was the dominance of the NCP in the Maha Vikas Agahdi government.

They had claimed Sena MLAs were not getting funds for their constituencies with most of the allocations being cornered by NCP legislators since Ajit Pawar was deputy CM holding the finance portfolio in the MVA dispensation.

Shinde combined his Guru Purnima event in Thane on Monday with a closed-door meeting involving his MLAs and party workers to discuss the new developments and offer solutions.

Several cabinet ministers were present in Thane where the CM paid tribute to his mentor Anand Dighe and Sena founder late Bal Thackeray.

"We have communicated our unrest and concerns to CM Shinde as NCP is joining the government. Going by the seniority of its leaders, they will mostly get plum portfolios, which is our concern as those leaders will favour their party workers and use the funds to benefit them," said a leader from Shinde's Shiv Sena.

"This was exactly the reason why we decided to go with Shinde and revolt against our leader Uddhav Thackeray a year ago. If similar treatment takes places this time also, some of us will struggle to get re-elected," he said.
The first five courtrooms of the Supreme Court have become WiFi-enabled, Chief Justice of India (CJI) D Y Chandrachud announced on Monday, in a significant step towards the digitisation of the top court.

IMAGE: Kindly note that this image has been posted for representational purposes only. Photograph: ANI Photo

The court has made facility available to all lawyers, litigants, media-persons, and other stakeholders visiting the premises.

The step was taken as part of the e-initiatives and the facility can be availed by logging in to "SCI WiFi".

"We have made courts 1 to 5 WiFi-enabled. The bar rooms are WiFi-enabled as well. All courtrooms will now be like that -- no books and papers -- which is not to say that we will not rely on books and papers at all," the CJI said at the outset of the day's proceedings in the refurbished courtroom.

"Please give me the feedback whether everything is working well," Justice Chandrachud said.

The top court reopened on Monday after the six-week summer vacation.

For using the wi-fi facility, one has to enter his mobile number, get a one-time password (OTP) and use it for authentication, an apex court official said.

In a circular, the court said, "As part of the e-initiatives in the Supreme Court of India, the facility of free Wi-Fi is made available for advocates, litigants, media persons and other stakeholders visiting the Supreme Court of India.

"For the present, this facility will be available at the Chief Justice's Court, Court Nos. 2 to 5, including corridor and plaza in front, both waiting areas in front of plaza canteen and press lounge-I and II, with effect from 03.07.2023."

Later, the top court, in a press statement, said that it has undertaken "futuristic upgrades" as part of green initiatives for optimum use of technology in justice delivery systems.

"A series of futuristic upgrades have been implemented in Court No. 1 to 3 at the Supreme Court of India under the dynamic vision of the Hon'ble the Chief Justice of India, Dr Dhananjaya Y Chandrachud to enhance the use of technology in judicial systems," it said.

The enhancements in the courtrooms include installation of "a state-of-the-art digital video conferencing (VC) system" to facilitate efficient communication and collaboration, it said.

"This system enables remote participation and virtual meetings, enhancing the accessibility and connectivity of the courtrooms. Cable cubbies have been integrated into these courtrooms to fulfil the diverse connectivity needs of modern technology.

"These cubbies are equipped with LAN connections, HDMI outputs, USB C&A ports along with power sockets. The use of these would help in integrated use of multimedia devices while ensuring a clutter-free environment," it said.

A futuristic LED video wall has also been installed in the courtrooms, serving as a high-resolution display for camera feeds and multimedia content, it said.

The impressive video wall enhances the visual impact of presentations, evidence, and video recordings, creating an immersive and engaging courtroom experience, it said.

"To ensure optimal audio quality and distribution in these courts, a comprehensive sound reinforcement system has been implemented. This system includes flush mount front of house (FOH) speakers, strategically positioned under table speakers, and suitable amplifiers. These enhancements deliver clear and balanced audio throughout the courtroom, ensuring that every voice and audio source is heard with exceptional clarity," it said.

A software has also been developed by the Supreme Court to facilitate the advocates to upload reference material and citations relating to the matter, it added.

A Constitution Bench hearing in September last year had witnessed the intent and commitment of the apex court to work towards paperless functioning, it said.

The top court is also working on a software to provide e-pass facility to the advocates and litigants to access courtrooms, it said.

Earlier also, the top court had taken various steps towards digitisation of various judicial processes, they included "launch of e-SCR (online free case records), advocate appearance portal, online RTI portal, implementation of e office module in the registry..."
Although the BRS is projecting supreme confidence, who will be able to tap anti-incumbency -- the BJP or Sharmila plus the Congress -- remains to be seen.

IMAGE: Congress leader Rahul Gandhi at a public meeting in Khammam, Telangana, July 2, 2023. Photograph: ANI Photo

On July 8, 2021, the birth anniversary of the late Y S Rajasekhara Reddy, the charismatic chief minister of undivided Andhra Pradesh, his daughter, Sharmila, launched a new party -- the YSR Telangana Party (YSRTP).

Her brother Jagan Mohan Reddy, chief minister of neighbouring Andhra Pradesh, was not present at the launch, signalling his disapproval of his sister's initiative. Their mother was by her daughter's side.

In interviews, Sharmila made it clear that for the moment, her political work was going to be limited to Telangana. In other words, she was not competing with her brother for turf.

Very likely on July 8, 2023, exactly 24 months later, her party will formally merge with the Congress.

Sharmila has already had a meeting with Karnataka Congress supremo D K Shivakumar.

With elections to the 119-seat Telangana assembly to take place later this year, this move is expected to create instability in the Congress.

The chief of the Telangana unit of the Congress, Revanth Reddy, and Sharmila have already exchanged barbs. Sharmila called Mr Reddy a 'leader on rent'.

'When YSR was alive, Revanth was in the TDP and, to appease his boss, Chandrababu Naidu, he used to abuse YSR,' Sharmila said publicly.

To this Mr Reddy has responded that Sharmila is from Andhra Pradesh, not Telangana, and she would never be allowed to head the state Congress.

The merger may mean nothing. Sharmila's capacity to add to the Congress vote share and/or seats is as yet untested.

In the 2018 assembly polls, the Telangana Rashtra Samithi (now the Bharat Rashtra Samithi), led by K Chandrashekar Rao, won 88 seats and formed the government in Telangana, defeating both the Bharatiya Janata Party and the Congress.

The BJP won one seat and its vote share was just 7 per cent. But in the 2019 Lok Sabha polls, the BJP managed to win four seats, including Nizamabad, where KCR's daughter K Kavitha was defeated.

It also pulled off a shock victory in the Dubbaka by-poll in November 2020, fanning its ambitions of becoming a significant player in Telangana.

Elections for the Greater Hyderabad Municipal Corporation a month later underlined this.

The Union home minister and the UP chief minister campaigned in this election, a municipal one.

The BJP's performance was spectacular. The Congress performed below par.

But between then and now, there's been a change. Despite all the welfare measures by the KCR government, anti-incumbency is on the rise.

The vein has been tapped by ministers who were dropped by KCR from the government and are now negotiating with the Congress.

The Karnataka assembly victory has added to the belief that the Congress may be down, but it is not out.

This is a big change. Between 2018 and 2021, 12 out of 19 Congress MLAs defected to join the BRS.

Now it is reverse migration.

Photograph: ANI Photo IMAGE: Balladeer Gaddar kisses Rahul at Sunday's meeting.

The central question is: What will Sharmila bring to the table? The powerful Reddy community of Telangana backed YSR unreservedly, especially his declaration that he would not allow the bifurcation of the state.

They lost and later, when the state was divided, many shifted to the BJP, especially from Mahbubnagar district.

G Kishan Reddy, a minister with cabinet rank in the central government, is an aspirant for caste leadership in Telangana. However, his hold is limited to some pockets in Hyderabad.

The BJP is led by Bandi Sanjay, MP from Karimnagar. But although the rank and cadre view him as a fiery leader, the entire state unit does not see him as a consensus-maker.

This has caused some BJP leaders to leave the party as well: With some going to the BRS, but many to the Congress.

IMAGE: The gathering at Rahul's meeting, July 2, 2023. Photograph: ANI Photo

Sharmila comes from a family of practising Christians. Her husband Anil is an evangelist.

However small, the Christian community in Telangana knows her and respects the family.

Although she has never fought an election, when her brother was in jail on corruption charges in 2013, it was Sharmila who held the fort and campaigned in his defence via padayatras.

When she launched her party two years ago, she may have felt she deserved a bigger public role, which had been organisational and behind the scenes.

Now it appears she has had her fill of that and is ready to cast her lot with a bigger party.

Whether this move will satisfy the ambition she nurtures is not clear.

As the BJP knows only too well, mergers are tricky and the party is banking on resultant discontent in the Congress.

The Congress leadership will want the party to pull in one direction.

And it doesn't have a leader tall enough who can address the ambitions of both Revanth and Sharmila.

In all, the situation in Telangana is fluid and needs to be watched. Although the BRS is projecting supreme confidence, who will be able to tap anti-incumbency -- the BJP or Sharmila plus the Congress -- remains to be seen.

Feature Presentation: Aslam Hunani/Rediff.com
The Vietnamese eat instant noodles more frequently than anyone in the world, with manufacturers eager to create new products to satisfy the countrys craving.

The country consumed 8.48 billion servings last year, according to the World Instant Noodles Association.

On average each Vietnamese ate 85 servings, or one every four days.

That is the highest frequency globally, followed by South Korea and Thailand.

In terms of total consumption, Vietnam ranked third last year behind China with 45 billion servings and Indonesia with 14.2 billion.

Noodle producers have been taking advantage of the large demand by introducing new products regularly to boost sales.

Acecook and Masan are the two leaders in the instant noodles market with a combined share of 33%, according to Euromonitor.

Acecook said it sold 3.3 billion servings last year.

Masan did not disclose its volume but in 2021 it said two of its noodles brands each fetched a revenue of over VND2 trillion.

Another competitor, Asia Foods, posted revenue of over VND5 trillion each year in 2017-2021.

Uniben saw revenue rise 12% to 3.4 trillion in 2021.

Kaneda Hiroki, Acecook Vietnam CEO, said that the company saw noodles sales rising 10% year-on-year in the first six months.

"We target to sell 3.5 billion servings in Vietnam this year, up 6% from 2022," Hiroki said.

The company is focusing on introducing new noodles products made from rice, to meet increasing demand.
Brattleboro, VT (05301)

Today

Light rain this morning with thunderstorms by evening. High 74F. Winds S at 5 to 10 mph. Chance of rain 100%. Locally heavy rainfall possible..

Tonight

Thunderstorms during the evening will give way to partly cloudy skies after midnight. Potential for heavy rainfall. Low near 60F. Winds light and variable. Chance of rain 80%.
Two whales were seen at sea in central Binh Dinh Province over the past few days, fascinating locals.

The whales, one adult and one juvenile, were seen hunting at the De Gi-Vung Boi sea region of Phu Cat District, about 1 km from the shore. Fishermen have reported seeing them since Friday.

Tran Van Tai, a local tour guide, used boats to ride to the location and took video of the whales hunting on Sunday. The whales could be seen going up and down to the waters surface to eat small fish, as birds flew above them.

Whales spotted hunting off central Vietnam coast Ca voi tro lai e Gi - Vung Boi Whales hunting at a sea region in Binh Dinh Province, July 2, 2023. Video by VnExpress/Ti Tai

In August last year, a pod of whales was also spotted in the De Gi-Vung Boi sea region, attracting tourists and photographers.

"They might be a pair of mother-child whales coming back to hunt. This year, the young whale is bigger and longer," Tai said. The adult whale seen this year spans around 15-16 m in length, while the juvenile one spans 10-12 m.

The Binh Dinh Department of Fisheries said large schools of fish gathered in the De Gi sea regions this year, which might explain why the whales came.

The Center for Biodiversity Conservation and Endangered Species said the whales, which appeared in Binh Dinh were Brydes whales, whose mother whales often pick peaceful sea regions with lots of food sources to rest and raise their young.

The fact that the whales chose the De Gi sea region as their hunting site is also a sign that the coastal environment of Binh Dinh has improved and can accommodate the whales needs, it said.
Jammu and Kashmir (J&K) Police along with Indian Army have detained a suspect for interrogation from Dabi Dharti area of Balakot sector of Mendhar Sub-division in Poonch. Security forces have recovered two mobile phones from his possession.

Sources informed Republic that an operation was launched by District Police, Poonch along with the Special Operations Group (SOG) and the local unit of the Indian Army in the Dabi Dharti area of the Balakot sector of Poonch. House-to-house searches were carried out based on intercept generated by agencies after which one suspect has been detained and taken to Poonch by security forces for questioning, he added.

On May 20, an infiltration bid from Pakistan in the same area was foiled when an intruder was shot dead by the Indian Army when he was trying to sneak into Indian territory. The killed intruder was carrying a high-powered IED along with narcotics while in a bid to enter India.

Past incidents in the area

The area has always been prone to mischief by the Pakistani side. Earlier on May 21, Security forces recovered a PIA- Pakistan International Airlines written balloon in the Balakot area and started an investigation.

Earlier this year, Security forces foiled a major narco terror bid in the same area when three terrorists who were planning IED strikes were arrested by security forces. Three Lashkar terrorists arrested from Poonch- Rajouri who were involved in multiple IED attacks conspiracy in Rajouri on January 18th and other days. Two were arrested from Rajouri, one from the Balakot area of Poonch, and have been identified as Majid Dar, Jabbar, and one other was arrested by Rajouri Police. They were working to carry out IED attacks in Rajouri on directions of terror handler Rafiq Nai sitting in Pakistan Occupied Jammu Kashmir (PoJK), Police informed.

The Pir Panjal region in Jammu has been the target of Pakistan-based terrorists with three major attacks in the region this year only. 7 civilians lost their lives in the Dhangri terror attack on January 1 and 2 when armed terrorists barged into the house of Hindus in the Rajouri district. The second attack happened on April 20th when the vehicle of the Indian Armys Rashtriya Rifles was attacked by terrorists hiding in an ambush which led to the martyrdom of five jawans of the Indian Army in the Bhimber Gali area of Poonch. The third and deadliest attack happened in the Kandi area of Rajouri when 5 jawans of the Indian Armys Special Forces attained martyrdom in a terror attack in the woods of Kalakote.
Former MLA Shishir Shinde on Monday joined the Shiv Sena led by Maharashtra Chief Minister Eknath Shinde along with his supporters from northeast Mumbai at a Guru Purnima event in neighbouring Thane.

Shishir Shinde, who was earlier with the undivided Shiv Sena and with Raj Thackeray's Maharashtra Nirman Sena (MNS), quit the Sena faction led by Uddhav Thackeray last month, citing that he has been waiting for work in the organisation for two years.

A firebrand Shiv Sena worker, Shinde shot to fame when he, along with some other party activists, dug up the pitch of the Wankhede stadium in Mumbai in 1991 to prevent an India-Pakistan match from taking place.

He said he was an active grassroot cadre and wanted to work with Eknath Shinde who was working for the development of the state.

The chief minister said Shishir Shinde will be the deputy leader of the Shiv Sena, adding that the latter has his own style of working and has been part of several agitations during Balasaheb Thackerays time.

During his visit to Thane, the CM paid tribute to his mentor late Anand Dighe on the occasion of 'Guru Purnima'.

CM Shinde and several cabinet colleagues visited Anand Ashram, the headquarters of the Shiv Sena in Thane from where Dighe, a hugely popular figure, ran the party in the region.

He also paid tribute to Shiv Sena founder later Bal Thackeray.

He was accompanied by cabinet colleagues Dada Bhuse, Shabhuraj Desai, Uday samant, Sandeepan Bhumre, Gulabrao Patil as well as Lok Sabha MP Rahul Shewale.

CM Shinde said the state government's 'shashan aapla dari' initiative to ensure people get welfare benefits at their doorstep was getting tremendous response from the public.

Several persons attached to the Marathi and Hindi film industries too joined the Shiv Sena on the occasion and the CM assured them of all help to give a boost to the sector. PTI MR COR ARU BNM BNM
China is positive towards providing further development assistance to Nepal, Deputy Prime Minister and Minister for Home Affairs Narayan Kaji Shrestha said on Sunday.

Talking to reporters here, Shrestha said he held extensive discussions with the Chinese leaders focusing on strengthening bilateral relations, promoting trade, investment and economic development.

Shrestha said he found Chinese officials positive towards assisting Nepal in its development endeavours.

"We asked China to increase its economic assistance to Nepal when we prioritize the goals for economic development and prosperity," Shrestha said at the Tribhuvan International Airport after arriving here from China following a five-day visit.

Chinese Vice Premier He Lifeng and Communist Party of China Sichuan Province Chief Wang Xiaohui assured that they would take Nepal's proposal seriously, Shrestha added.

During the meeting with the Chinese Vice-Premier, "discussions were held on promoting bilateral trade, tourism, investment, connectivity, scaling of China's assistance to Nepal among others," he said.

Shrestha said he thanked the government of China for its significant assistance to Nepal during the hour of crisis such as earthquake, and COVID-19 pandemic." He said his meetings with the Chinese leaders also focussed on the implementation of the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) project. The Chinese side was optimistic about Nepal's preparedness to take benefits from projects under the BRI, he said.

"In response, we briefed them about Nepal's plans and steps regarding the BRI," he added.

Shrestha also held talks with office bearers of Sichuan Airlines on operating flights from Chengdu to new airports in Nepal. The airline was positive about the matter, he informed.

"During the meeting, the Nepal side asked China to add Chengdu-Kathmandu flights, and commercially begin flights from Chengdu to Pokhara and Bhairahawa International Airports in Nepal," Shrestha said.

"We have urged them to run a Chengdu-Kathmandu flight daily. On the matter, they were positive. We have also asked them to start Chengdu-Pokhara and Chengdu-Bhairahawa direct commercial flights," he added.

During his visit, Shrestha also addressed the 19th Western China International Fair as the chief speaker.

On the occasion, he urged Chinese investors to invest in Nepal as the country has adopted a policy of encouraging, promoting and protecting foreign investments by carrying out reforms in its investment system.

Shrestha also inspected the Jinping Hydropower Project and Dujiangyan Irrigation System.
Whitney Jean Alim, a 27-year-old educator in Chicago, dreamed of buying a house sooner with the room in her budget from President Joe Bidens student loan cancellation plan. It would have cut in half the $40,000 she owes on loans taken out for college and a masters degree.

On Friday, the U.S. Supreme Court struck down the forgiveness plan, dashing the hopes of Alim and millions of other borrowers who were expecting their student debt would be reduced or wiped out entirely.

Literally this morning, I felt like: Damn, I just lost $20,000, said Alim, who learned of the decision from a reporter.

For borrowers around the country, the ruling brought bitterness and frustration, even for those who anticipated the plans rejection by the conservative justices. Some fought back feelings of despair.

The student loan forgiveness program would have eliminated $10,000 in debt for those making less than $125,000. Households earning less than $250,000 were also eligible. Pell Grant recipients would have had an additional $10,000 in relief. Forty-three million borrowers would have been eligible, the administration said.

Conservative opponents of the debt relief objected to the cost, estimated at $400 billion over 30 years, and said it was unfair to Americans who had already repaid their debt or did not go to college. Supporters of Bidens plan said it would boost the economy and narrow the racial wealth gap, given the disproportionate amount of student debt held by borrowers of color.

After the ruling, Biden announced a 12-month grace period to help borrowers who may struggle when payments restart. Biden, who promised debt forgiveness during his presidential campaign, also plans to pursue a new plan for cancellation, but with a different legal justification from the one struck down by the Supreme Court. Its not entirely clear yet how the plans will work.

Brittany Bell Surratt, of Washington, D.C., said she wasnt surprised at the courts ruling. But she said the news left her disheartened at the future for Black Americans like herself, especially coming a day after the court ruled against affirmative action in higher education.

We have been systemically discriminated against in so many ways, and this goes hand in hand with the affirmative action decision, she said. Thats a choice, and its intentional and deliberate and conscious.

Bell Surratt, 37, said she was not making payments while student loans were frozen during the pandemic because she was saving up for her 17-year-old son, who plans to attend college next year. Her student loans totaled about $47,000 originally, but currently she owes over $65,000, with interest. When payments resume Oct. 1, she expects to spend about $800 a month. Thats a mortgage in a lot of places.

Nicholas Richard-Thompson, a communications coordinator for the mayors office in Aurora, Illinois, was at his desk when he saw a student loans news alert flash across his phone. Although he was not surprised by the ruling, it left him feeling defeated.

To finance his education, Richard-Thompson now has nearly $100,000 of debt. As one of the youngest children of older parents, Richard-Thompson said he could not have pursued higher education without taking out loans.

Richard-Thompson said that the recent string of Supreme Court decisions rolling back progress for women, LGBTQ+ communities and people of color were a product of a Democratic Party that has been unwilling to take a bold stance on the issues.

These are consequences from their politics of the last 20 years, Richard-Thompson said. Unless they diverge greatly, its going to continue and get worse.

Alim said the degrees she and her peers financed with loans have not paid the dividends they had been led to expect.

I just think that education in America is not really worth it. Its not becoming worth it, she said.

When student loan repayments start again in the fall, shell have to find $500 a month to make payments on her loans. That money could have gone toward saving to buy a home, she said.

Elizabeth Shoby, a 33-year-old artist in New York City, says the courts decision deprives her family of financial relief that was much needed. Bidens plan would have canceled $10,000 of the $70,000 in debt she borrowed for a graduate degree in fine arts.

My husband and I have a pretty tight budget, Shoby said. Our incomes are quite maxed out in terms of our current debts, mortgage, payments, etcetera. And I think both of us know that another $400 a month payment is just  we cant really foresee right now where thats going to come from.

Kerrianne Troesch, a rising junior majoring in communications at Pennsylvania Western University, would have gotten nearly $10,000 in student loan debt cancelled from her freshman year of college alone. Troesch, 20, has already resigned herself to an expected $60,000 in student loan debt after she graduates.

Troesch, who is also an organizer with a nonprofit called Rise that advocates for affordable education options, considered not going to college at all, but felt then her only options would be minimum-wage jobs.

Damned if you do, damned if you dont, because youre going to be racking up debt no matter what, she said.
Cambodias Prime Minister Hun Sen, leader of the ruling Cambodian Peoples Party applauds after handing over the party's flag to his son Gen. Hun Manet during an election campaign rally in Phnom Penh, July 1, 2023.

A report from Human Rights Watch released Monday found numerous irregularities during the 2022 local commune elections that suggest widespread vote tampering and improper counting, raising concerns about whether Cambodia can hold a fair parliamentary election later this month.

The irregularities, which include vote tampering and improper vote counting and reporting, call into question the credibility of Cambodias National Election Committee, said Phil Robertson, deputy Asia director at Human Rights Watch.

While its already clear that the national election in July will be a mockery of the democratic process, a toothless and incompetent National Election Committee only makes matters worse, he said.

The report comes as Cambodias Constitutional Council approved  as expected  an amendment to the election law that prohibits those who dont vote in the July 23 election from running for office in future elections. It now goes to King Norodom Sihamoni for his signature.

The election change appears to be aimed at preventing a large-scale boycott of the vote by supporters of the main opposition Candlelight Party, the only one that could have mounted a serious challenge to Prime Minister Hun Sens ruling Cambodian Peoples Party.

Im Chhun Lim, President of the Constitutional Council of Cambodia, announces the election disqualification of the Candlelight Party for the upcoming election in May 2023. Credit: Cindy Liu/Reuters





A boycott would be a way of expressing public anger over the committees decision in May to ban the Candlelight Party from running in the election. The committee blamed inadequate paperwork, but opposition activists have said the decision was politically motivated.

Anyone who doesnt vote next month wont be able to run as a candidate in next years Senate, district and commune elections, and also wont be able to run in the next general election scheduled for 2028.

The amendment also allows for the prosecution of individuals and parties who discourage people from voting.

Human Rights Watchs report cites a joint statement issued last week by a coalition of civil society organizations, associations and trade unions that was critical of the amendments impact on free democracy, voter freedom of expression, voting rights, and to stand for candidates.

It said the amendment was made hastily and without consultation with stakeholders, including civil society organizations in keeping with democratic standards.

Fraud and tampering

Human Rights Watchs report also noted that the Candlelight Party reported widespread intimidation of its polling place observers in Phnom Penh during last years commune elections.

In at least five Phnom Penh polling places, officials counted votes behind closed doors, the organization said. Limiting observation of ballot counting wasnt widely seen or reported during the previous commune election in 2017, it said.

Election officials were required last year to submit a results form  called an 1102 form  after ballots were counted at each site.

A police officer casts his vote at a polling station during a general election in Phnom Penh, in 2018. Credit: Darren Whiteside/Reuters





Human Rights Watch said it looked at the Phnom Penh forms because the 2022 results in the capital were so different from previous elections.

In 2017, for example, the CPP won in 690 of 2,080 polling places, or 33 percent. But last year, the CPP won 99.9 percent  or all but one  of the 2,155 polling places in Phnom Penh for which Human Rights Watch examined the 1102 forms.

Additionally, vote numbers didnt correctly add up on the 1102 form in 19 percent of total stations, and corrections, correction fluid or crossed-out sections were found in key sections on 1102 forms in 15 percent of polling stations.

The irregularities in the 1102 forms are especially important because the commune elections are often seen as a testing ground for the national elections, Human Rights Watch said.

Translated by Sok Ry Sum. Edited by Matt Reed and Malcolm Foster.
It embraces ambiguity to the point it could be used to clamp down on any perceived threat, analysts say.

Flags flutter near the Chinese national emblem outside the Great Hall of the People in Beijing, China, Wednesday, March 7, 2012.

China has enacted a new foreign relations law that takes a broad view of what constitutes espionage in a move that may make China even harder to safely navigate for foreign journalists and businesspeople.

The law  which came into effect on Saturday  appears to be an effort to provide a legal basis for punishing any individuals or organizations that threaten Chinas interests, which may include any moves that suggest de-risking or decoupling, at least according to state media rhetoric over recent days.

The law has also been interpreted to be a move to provide a legal framework for Chinese President Xi Jinpings world view, as it embraces two of his signature foreign policy initiatives: The Global Security Initiative and the Global Civilization Initiative.

Experts concurred roundly that the legislations ambiguous language would be open to interpretation on a case-by-case basis and could threaten the activities of foreign journalists and businesspeople in China.

It expands the definition of espionage to constitute accessing documents, data, materials or items related to national security and interests, leading Cedric Alviani of Reporters Without Borders to comment that it covered, basically any type of information.

The law was approved by the standing committee of the National Peoples Congress last Wednesday, just days ahead of the Communist Partys 102nd founding anniversary, which was on Saturday.

The revisions to Chinas counterespionage law first came to light in late April this year, amid raids on foreign businesses in Shanghai and Beijing  notably, U.S. management consultancy firm Bain and Co. and U.S. due diligence company Mintz.

Mao Ning, spokesperson for Chinas Foreign Ministry, said at a news conference: There is no need to associate the counterespionage law with reporting activities of foreign journalists.

China always welcomes media outlets and journalists of all countries to conduct interviews and run stories in China in accordance with laws and regulations, and we will provide facilitation and assistance to them.

As long as one abides by laws and regulations, there is no need to worry, Mao added.

Commentators countered that so-called state secrets and activities that undermine social order were so poorly defined it was difficult to know how to avoid being accused of breaking the rules.

Legitimizing foreign policy

Some legal experts were less convinced that the new law would be used as a dragnet to sweep up anyone the Communist Party doesnt like or ban them from the country  given that China has regularly done so before the law was promulgated. Rather, they said that the law aims to provide a legitimizing framework for Chinas resistance to an international rules-based system that Beijing perceives as biased against Chinas development and rise.

Suisheng Zhao, a professor at the University of Denvers Josef Korbel School of International Studies, described the law as a broad legal legitimization of Chinese President Xi Jinpings stated goal of bringing about a post-Western, new world order.

Its a personalization of Chinese foreign policy through a legal process, making it clear that the party is in charge of foreign policy, and the foreign ministry and State Council is the implementing institution Zhao said.

In order to counter the Western containment, Xi tries to mobilize everything available to him  including so-called legal instruments, he added.

An editorial in state tabloid the Global Times said the new law would counteract frequent interference in Chinas internal affairs, unilateral sanctions, and long-arm jurisdiction by certain Western hegemonic countries using legal means.

Chinas top diplomat Wang Yi wrote in Chinese-language state media on Thursday that the law was a systematic integration of Chinas long-standing diplomatic policies and conceptual practices.



This legislation marks a new legal and institutional development stage in China's foreign relations, the Global Times added.

Worsening relations

An increasingly isolated Beijing has been seeking ways to strike back at U.S. sanctions, tariffs and export controls, as it struggles to juggle its aggressive wolf-warrior diplomacy and simultaneously project an open for business facade to the West.

On Friday, in a further blow to Chinas access to advanced chip technology, Dutch manufacturer ASML said in a statement that effective September 1, it will be necessary to apply for a license from The Hague to ship its most advanced chip-manufacturing lithography systems.

China has its own unreliable entity list but it has been largely ineffective in terms of pushing back on U.S. Defense contractors. Lockheed Martin Corp. and Raytheon Corp. have been named as entities but neither provides arms to China.

Beijing has put an effective ban on Micron Technology Inc., a U.S. manufacturer of memory chips, which was described as a cautious move because such chips can be locally sourced.

On Sunday, according to a U.S. Treasury Department press release, it was announced that Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen will travel to Beijing, from July 6-9 for meetings with senior Chinese officials, in a further effort to bolster Sino-U.S. relations, which are at their most fractious in decades.

The trip follows close on the heels of last months trip by U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken, during which both sides claimed to be satisfied that a first step had been made toward reestablishing communication between the two powers.

Edited by Mike Firn.
UPDATED AT 10:47 p.m. ET on 2023-07-03

Hong Kong police on Monday issued arrest warrants and offered bounties for eight activists and former lawmakers who have fled the city, saying they are wanted in connection with "serious crimes" under Hong Kong's national security law.

Police named former pro-democracy lawmakers Nathan Law, Ted Hui and Dennis Kwok, U.S.-based activist and political lobbyist Anna Kwok and legal scholar Kevin Yam among the wanted, and offered bounties of HK$1 million (US$127,700) for information that might lead to an arrest.

"We attach great importance to this case, and so we are offering rewards of 1 million Hong Kong dollars for each wanted person," Chief Superintendent Steve Li said.

He said many on the list had "advocated sanctions ... to destroy or intimidate Hong Kong officials" or advised foreign countries to attack Hong Kong's status as a financial center.

"We hope that the public will provide information on these people and their cases," he told a news conference in Hong Kong on Monday.

On Tuesday, Hong Kong chief executive John Lee followed up at a news conference by saying the activists would be "pursued for life," urging them to give themselves up as soon as possible."

The move is the latest example of Chinas long-arm law enforcement that has included police surveillance among Chinese and their relatives overseas, including through unapproved police service stations in many countries.

U.K-based activists Finn Lau and Mung Siu-tat and U.S.-based businessman Elmer Yuen are also on the wanted list.

Those named face a slew of charges including "collusion with foreign powers" and "inciting subversion and secession" under a draconian law imposed on Hong Kong by the Communist Party in the wake of the 2019 protest movement that effectively bans public dissent and peaceful political opposition.

Absolutely evil

Law, 29, a former student leader of the 2014 Umbrella Movement who at 23 was the youngest person to serve as a member of the city's Legislative Council following a landslide victory in the 2016 general election, is wanted on charges of "incitement to secession" and "collusion with foreign forces to endanger national security," national security police Superintendent Hung Ngan told reporters.

Law, who has been granted political asylum in the United Kingdom, said the news was "stressful," and that he would need to be more careful about where he chose to travel in future.

In comments posted to his Facebook page, he said the accusations against him were an abuse of national security terminology, a bid to suppress dissent, and denied receiving foreign funding of any kind.

"The right to work on any peaceful political initiative should be guaranteed in a civilized country," Law said. "The only conclusion is that the national security law is absolutely evil."

Chief Superintendent of Police (National Security) Li Kwai-wah speaks during a press conference to issue arrest warrants for eight activists and former lawmakers, in Hong Kong, July 3, 2023. Credit: Joyce Zhou/Reuters

Anna Kwok tweeted in response: "Just woke up to see I'm wanted with a $1M HKD bounty on my head. Our work at @hkdc_us continues, stronger and louder."

She called on U.S. President Joe Biden not to allow Hong Kong chief executive John Lee into the United States for an upcoming Asia Pacific Economic Cooperation meeting, or APEC, in San Francisco in November.

On Monday evening, the U.S. State Department condemned the Hong Kong Police Force for putting an international bounty on the pro-democracy activists.

The extraterritorial application of the Beijing-imposed National Security Law is a dangerous precedent that threatens the human rights and fundamental freedoms of people all over the world, spokesperson Matthew Miller said in a statement.

We call on the Hong Kong government to immediately withdraw this bounty, respect other countries sovereignty, and stop the international assertion of the National Security Law imposed by Beijing, the State Department said, adding that it continues to oppose transnational repression efforts, by the Peoples Republic of China and supports the rights of individuals to freedoms of expression and peaceful assembly.

Soft confrontation

Australia-based Ted Hui, 41, whose assets were frozen by HSBC in January 2021 after he fled the city, is wanted on the same charges in connection with "repeatedly advocating for independence" for Hong Kong and the democratic island of Taiwan on social media.

The move came after an article in the ruling Chinese Communist Party-backed Ta Kung Pao newspaper called on China to use the Interpol "red notice" system to try to apprehend people overseas for breaching the national security law, which applies to speech and acts all over the world without regard to a person's nationality.

Security chief Chris Tang, who was chief of police during the 2019 protest movement, also warned in an interview with the paper that anyone engaging in "soft confrontation," including online comments anywhere in the world, could be targeted by the authorities under the law.

"Endangering national security is a very serious offense," a Hong Kong government spokesman said on Monday. "The fugitives should not have any delusion that they could evade their legal liabilities by absconding from Hong Kong."

A police statement said anyone aiding, abetting or funding anyone accused under the law, including online, could also be targeted in future.

The arrest warrants were issued after protesters gathered in overseas cities at the weekend to mark the third anniversary of the law, implemented on July 1, 2020, and to mourn those who died during the 2019 protest movement against the erosion of Hong Kong's promised freedoms.

Memorial for those who died

Hong Kongers in Taipei held a memorial service for those who died in the protests, placing flowers before portraits of those who died.

A former protester who is now living in Taiwan said he only escaped the city because the national security law hadn't yet been implemented at the time of his arrest, meaning that he was granted bail  now very unusual under the law  and was able to flee.

"Once the national security law was passed ... there was no more justice  it's one-sidedly pro-government," the protester said. "It has destroyed fairness and the spirit of the rule of law."

Meanwhile, protesters gathered in London on Saturday to mark the death of Leung Kin-fai, who died after stabbing himself on July 1, 2021, after delivering a non-fatal stab wound to a police officer outside the Sogo department store in Causeway Bay.

"I don't want to talk about it, but I daren't forget it," one protester told Radio Free Asia at the scene, where many participants wore masks and hoods in an apparent bid to avoid reprisals against loved ones back home or attacks from supporters of Beijing on British soil.

A protester who gave only the nickname J told the crowd that the recent crackdown on dissent in Hong Kong had given the lie to Beijing's promises that the city would be allowed to retain its traditional freedoms under its "one country, two systems" framework following the 1997 handover to Chinese rule.

The handover anniversary was marked in Hong Kong by a celebratory mass of red flags throughout the downtown area and in busy thoroughfares.

Police have made more than 1,000 arrests under the law, with thousands more targeting former protesters under colonial-era public order and sedition laws.

Translated by Luisetta Mudie. Edited by Malcolm Foster.

Updated with comments from Hong Kong Chief Executive John Lee
They treated me like a terrorist, says Taiwanese professor who was turned away

Passengers walk at the Hong Kong International Airport in Hong Kong in 2022. The Hong Kong authorities have been denying entry to prominent democracy activists and rights campaigners for years, starting during the 2014 pro-democracy Umbrella Movement.

As a former resident and frequent traveler to Hong Kong, R had never considered himself a political threat under the city's national security law, which ushered in an ongoing crackdown on dissent when it was imposed three years ago.

Until he was ushered into a small, windowless room at Hong Kong International Airport at the beginning of this year on arrival from his native Taiwan, and subjected to questioning and a full body search by both uniformed and plainclothes police.

"Who do you know in Hong Kong?" his interrogators wanted to know. "Who have you worked for, either salaried or unpaid, during your time in Hong Kong?"

A sign on the wall seemed reassuring: "You have the right to contact friends and relatives, and you have the right to a lawyer, as long as it doesn't obstruct official duties."

But R, who was initially detained by immigration officers, wasn't allowed to use his phone.

Later, a couple of plainclothes officers showed up and took his personal documents, including his passport, Taiwanese ID card and even his staff lanyard from his Taiwanese university, away for photocopying.

R, who asked not to be named for fear of further reprisals, was denied entry to Hong Kong, then loaded into a prison van with bars on the windows, for deportation back to Taiwan.

"That was the first time in my life I'd been inside a prison van," he said. "There were nine of them in there with me, watching me closely."

"They treated me like a terrorist."

Denying entry

R once worked in a Hong Kong university, yet his research doesn't directly touch on the city or its politics, he said. He has traveled there frequently in recent years, however, regarding it as a kind of second home.

While he did go and observe some of the mass marches of the 2019 protest movement, he was never a direct participant.

Occasionally, he would repost news about political developments in the city on Facebook.

Travelers at Hong Kong International Airport in 2022. The Taiwanese government recently updated its travel advice for the city, warning its nationals not to run afoul of the national security law. Credit: Peter Parks/AFP





R was officially denied entry to Hong Kong because he had "failed to meet the qualifications following comprehensive assessment." He won't be trying again for a few years.

The Hong Kong authorities have been denying entry to prominent democracy activists and rights campaigners for years, starting during the 2014 pro-democracy Umbrella Movement.

R still can't figure out what he has done wrong, given that his research doesn't even involve Hong Kong.

The Taiwanese government recently updated its travel advice for the city, warning its nationals not to run afoul of the national security law.

Possible infractions include wearing the wrong kind of T-shirt, or singing the wrong song in public, or otherwise displaying slogans relating to the protest movement.

Cracking down

The national security law  imposed by Beijing on Hong Kong from July 1, 2020  ushered in a citywide crackdown on public dissent and criticism of the authorities that has seen senior journalists, pro-democracy media magnate Jimmy Lai and 47 former lawmakers and democracy activists charged with offenses from "collusion with a foreign power" to "subversion."

It applies to speech and acts committed anywhere in the world, and has been used to issue the leaders of a London-based rights group with a takedown order for its website.

Shouting or displaying protest slogans in a public place, including the banned "Free Hong Kong! Revolution Now!" or playing the British national anthem in public were also on the list of actions to avoid published by Taiwan's Mainland Affairs Council, an executive body in charge of the island's complicated relationship with China.

But the Council declined to comment on R's case when contacted by The Reporter recently, saying that it hadn't received any report of his treatment.

So who decides who gets onto the "blacklist" of people arriving in Hong Kong, and according to what criteria.

From around 2018

It's a murky area that Taiwan's officials were unable to shine a light on, aside from saying off the record that things started to get more risky for the island's nationals in Hong Kong in around 2018.

They have long been fair game for police in mainland China. Taiwanese political activist Lee Ming-cheh was detained and jailed for five years while on a trip there in 2017, with fellow activist Lee Meng-chu meeting a similar fate in 2019.

More recently, Chinese authorities arrested leading Taiwanese nationalist politician Yang Chih-yuan for 'secession' and detained Taiwan-based publisher Li Yanhe, known by his penname "Fucha," in Shanghai.

Pro-democracy protesters march in Hong Kong in 2019. Credit: Kin Cheung/AP





The recent charging of Yuen King-ting, 23, with sedition for posting banned Hong Kong protest slogans while she was studying in Japan has also heightened fears in Taiwan.

According to former Chinese University of Hong Kong anthropology professor Gordon Mathews, most foreign nationals are likely to be refused entry to Hong Kong if they are deemed suspect, unless they have been charged with a felony, rather than being detained and prosecuted.

But he doesn't expect there to be national security law-related issues for foreign nationals merely transiting at Hong Kong.

However, his advice specifically refers to people not born in China or Hong Kong, and who have never held citizenship in those territories. Foreign passport-holders who used to be Chinese citizens tend to have their foreign nationality disregarded, as in the case of Jimmy Lai, he said.

Arbitrary list?

It's not just academics from Taiwan who could be at risk. Foreign journalists working in Hong Kong could also be at risk -- it's just very hard to say how much, according to Reporters Without Borders' East Asia bureau chief Cedric Alviani.

That's because the Chinese government can always override its own guidelines and detain anyone arbitrarily.

Alviani also warned that journalists of Chinese descent holding foreign passports are particularly vulnerable to this kind of treatment, citing the cases of Cheng Lei, Yang Hengjun and Jimmy Lai.

Lin Thung-Hong, who directs the Center for Contemporary China Studies at Taiwan's National Tsinghua University, agreed that the blacklist can be an arbitrary thing.

"It's impossible and pretty meaningless to try to second-guess where Hong Kong's political red lines are drawn," Lin told The Reporter.

"An authoritarian government will never allow these lines to be clearly drawn, because [opacity] is the best way to spread fear and facilitate control," he said, adding that there are no rules of thumb for figuring out if you have been blacklisted or not.

But he said his university warns researchers traveling to both China and Hong Kong to go with empty phones and hard drives, and to use only custom-made alphanumeric passwords, not facial recognition or other identification factors.

If detained, stay calm, never admit to any crime, and don't mention anyone else's name or details, he said.

Translated by Luisetta Mudie. Edited by Malcolm Foster.

This is an edited version of a collaborative report by RFA's Mandarin Service and The Reporter, a Taiwan-based investigative magazine.
Song A, a North Korean girl, is featured in this vlog clip promoting the North Korean way of life that appeared on the Sally Parks YouTube channel.

In a posh British accent, the 11-year-old Korean girl in school uniform smiled for the camera and complained about the summer heat, saying she wanted to eat some flavored shaved ice, a delicious treat sold right in front of her school.

My favorite is the red bean and melon flavored ice, Song A says in the video, which clearly seems staged, as if she had memorized a script.

I like tomato and watermelon, says her friend sitting next to her in the sunshine.

The two friends get brain freezes, discuss Koreas delightful four seasons and tell viewers to tune in to the next edition of Song As vlog, or video log, where she takes the viewers along for a cool dip at the waterpark.

The innocent-looking vlogs, and others like them, are meant to promote North Korea and soften its image, experts and South Korean officials say.

Deemed a soft form of propaganda, the videos were blocked in South Korea starting June 5, at the request of the National Intelligence Service, which said they are part of North Koreas psychological warfare against South Korea."

Song As channel and the two others, Olivia Natasha-YuMi Space DPRK daily, and NEW DPRK, were censored in South Korea because it is obvious that they [were] unilaterally overly glorifying North Korea and using [the videos] as propaganda, a Ministry of Unification official told reporters last week.

YouTube changes position

Shortly after, YouTube followed suit and deleted the three channels, which can still be found elsewhere on the internet.

The channels apparently did not come across as propaganda to YouTubes parent company Google, which stated they did not violate its policies as late as December 2022.

But the change in Googles stance seems to have coincided with the South Korean governments decision to censor them there.

After review and finding the channels were not consistent with our policies, we terminated the three channels shared with us, a YouTube spokesperson told RFAs Korean Service.

Google is committed to compliance with applicable U.S. sanctions and trade compliance laws, including those related to North Korea, and enforces related policies under our Terms of Service.

Song As Sally Parks YouTube channel was blocked in South Korea at the request of the countrys National Intelligence Service. Credit: Sally Parks YouTube channel

Like Song As channel, the other two channels had young women or children introducing North Koreas major tourist facilities and sharing what appears to be a normal day in their lives, doing seemingly mundane things like visiting a well-known tourist site, introducing food, or giving a tour of the home.

In another video by Song A, she expresses her love for the Harry Potter series of books, while YuMi, speaking in almost American accented English, introduces a Pyongyang amusement park, and shows off her yoga class.

But the channels are a far cry from the hardship facing most ordinary North Koreans, most of whom will never set foot in Pyongyang and are struggling to survive and get food on their tables amid poor harvests and a nascent market economy still recovering from COVID-19 shutdowns.

Shift in strategy?

The vlog style of propaganda exhibited in the three channels indicate a shift in strategy for Pyongyang, Ko Yonghwan, a senior researcher at Korea Institute for Military Affairs, told RFA.

The first North Korean state sponsored channel, called Uriminzokkiri, or Among our race of people, emerged in 2010, but it was deleted in 2017.

Several more accounts under the same name were opened and again deleted in 2018, 2020 and 2022.

Other channels including DPRK Today, Red Star TV, and Echo of Truth were also created and deleted one after another.

Channels like Uriminzokkiri were not receiving much attention from viewers in other countries, and those who did see them criticized them for being overwhelmingly and obviously propaganda, said Ko.

This is why they changed the propaganda method [for Song A and Yu Mis channels] by introducing women and children to [try to] show that North Korea can be a happy place to live, she/he said.

They [attempt to] show that North Koreans have the internet, can upload YouTube videos, visit good restaurants like people in South Korea, and go to amusement parks.

The average person in North Korea, however, does not have access to the internet, and those fortunate enough to have devices capable of connecting can only access North Koreas closed intranet.

Because of this, it is important that South Korea conduct media literacy education rather than simply blocking the channels, Ha Seung-hee, a research professor of North Korea studies at South Koreas Dongguk University told RFA in a phone interview.

There is a need for [it] because that will allow the people to have a discerning perspective on North Korean content and to critically view the information  on their own, she said.

Following the deletion of Song As Sally Parks channel, a channel with the same name has reappeared on YouTube with nearly identical content.

A YouTube short video lamenting the deletion of Sally Parks and New DPRK is the latest uploaded content.

Translated by Claire Shinyoung Oh Lee. Edited by Eugene Whong and Malcolm Foster.
Observers say such sales abet junta war crimes and suppliers should be held accountable.

Myanmar junta soldiers march during a parade to commemorate the 78th Armed Forces Day in Naypyidaw in 2023.

Companies in India are supplying weapons to Myanmars junta while Prime Minister Narendra Modi expresses concern about the political crisis in Myanmar on the international stage, observers said Monday, highlighting the two-faced nature of the strategy.

Indian arms manufacturer Bharat Electronics Limited, or BEL, transferred military equipment worth more than US$5.1 million to Myanmars army or known Myanmar arms brokers Alliance Engineering Consultancy and Mega Hill General Trading over a period of six months from November 2022 to April 2023, the rights group Justice for Myanmar reported in June.

The military equipment included metallic sonar domes; transducers and gaskets for the domes to be used on frigates, warships or submarines; directing gear systems; technical documents; various items for radio transmission or radar equipment; and manpack radios for battlefield communication.

Justice for Myanmar called the shipments part of a pattern of Indian support for the Myanmar military and its domestic arms industry and called on Indias allies to use their leverage to pressure India to stop the supply of arms and dual use goods and technology to the regime, including during Modis state visits to the U.S. and France this year.

The weapons sales come even as Modi and U.S. President Joe Biden issued a joint statement following their meeting at the White House on June 22 expressing concern about the worsening rights situation in Myanmar and calling for the release of the countrys political prisoners.

A Hexacopter drone used in unmanned aerial surveillance manufactured by Bharat Electronics is displayed during a defense exhibition in Bangalore, Dec. 2021. Indian arms manufacturer Bharat Electronics Limited transferred military equipment worth more than US$5.1 million to Myanmars army over a period of six months from November 2022 to April 2023, the rights group Justice for Myanmar reported in June. Credit: Manjunath Kiran/AFP

Than Soe Naing, a political analyst, pointed out the hypocrisy of India selling weapons to the junta with one hand while saying it is concerned with the situation in Myanmar on the other.

He noted that India has stayed neutral amid the ongoing conflict in Myanmar and neglected or even arrested refugees who have fled fighting across its border.

But on the international arena, when making a statement as a democratic country, it uses the terms democracy and human rights, he told RFA. It doesnt make any sense. It is a government that is indirectly supporting the crimes committed by the Myanmar military by willfully ignoring them.

Justice for Myanmars report came on the heels of one released in May by U.N. Special Rapporteur on the situation of human rights in Myanmar Tom Andrews, who said the junta had imported at least US$1 billion in arms and raw materials to manufacture weapons between the Feb. 1, 2021, military coup detat and December 2022.

Rights groups say the junta is using such weapons against the people of Myanmar, including to attack the armed resistance and civilians who oppose its rule.

While Russia, China and Singapore were the major sources by far, the U.N. report found that Indian entities, including state-owned entities, had transferred US$51 million in arms and related materials to the junta over the same period. That followed Russias US$406 million, Chinas US$267 million, and Singapores US$254 million.

Selling weapons for war crimes

Ko Mike, a spokesman for the Blood Money Campaign, a collective of Myanmar activists campaigning to stop revenues reaching the junta, said that Indian companies selling weapons to Myanmar are abetting war crimes.

They are supporting killings by a terrorist group [the junta] that is committing the worst crimes in the world, he said. Sometime in the future, it will be necessary to do something internationally about accountability [for such entities].

Ye Tun, a political analyst, said that Modi appears to believe the junta is responsible for maintaining stability in Myanmar.

So if you [maintain stability] by using weapons, India will sell weapons to Myanmars military [to support such alleged efforts].

Prior to the sales detailed in Justice for Myanmars latest report, the group noted that Indian state-owned arms producer Yantra India Limited shipped multiple 122mm howitzer barrels to the junta in October 2022 in an apparent breach of international law.

A model of 'Akash' surface to air missile developed by Bharat Electronics is displayed during a defense exhibition in Bangalore, Dec. 2021. Credit: Manjunath Kiran/AFP

The Indian government has so far ignored calls by civil society organizations and the people of Myanmar, including the shadow National Unity Government, or NUG, and failed to comply with U.N. resolutions and its responsibilities under international law, said Justice For Myanmar spokesperson Yadana Maung.

Radio Free Asia attempted to contact the Indian Embassy in Myanmar by email for comment but received no response. Calls to junta Deputy Information Minister Major Gen. Zaw Min Tun, seeking comment on the claims, went unanswered Monday.

Regional stability at risk

Thein Tun Oo, the executive director of the Thayninga Institute for Strategic Studies, which is made up of former military officers, called it normal for India to assist its neighbor.

India can stand on its own two feet and cooperate with anyone it wants to, he said. India has taken Myanmar as a partner ... [because] Myanmar is the best country for India to cooperate with on the security of the Indian Ocean. So, it is normal for India to cooperate with Myanmar.

Myanmar juntas soldiers participate in a parade to mark Armed Forces Day in Naypyitaw in 2021.Indian arms sales to Myanmar are supporting the military regimes war crimes and the international community must act to stop them, rights activists and analysts said Monday, in response to a new report detailing weapons shipments to the junta in recent months. Credit: Reuters

But NUG spokesman Kyaw Zaw said that as the worlds largest democracy, India is expected to embrace democratic values and not prop up regimes that oppress their own people.

We hope that India will try to understand the will of the people of Myanmar and help them to fulfill that will, he said.

If India instead continues to support the junta, he said, there will be no resolution to the conflict in Myanmar and the stability of the region will be at risk.

Translated by Htin Aung Kyaw. Edited by Joshua Lipes and Malcolm Foster.
Health officials have taken steps to kill off mosquitos that carry the disease.

Rohingya gather near a drain blocked by garbage at the Jadimura camp in Teknaf, Bangladesh, July 3, 2023.

Bangladesh has seen a spike in dengue cases and deaths in less than a month, according to government health figures released on Monday that did not include infections in Rohingya refugee camps, where cases of the mosquito-borne disease have been climbing as well.

The government reported 9,193 cases and 56 deaths since the start of 2023, compared with 2,865 cases and 21 deaths on June 9.

Health officials in Coxs Bazar, a southeastern district that hosts about 1 million Rohingya refugees, reported 330 cases in June and 10 more during the first three days of July.

The officials estimated that about 96% of those infected were Rohingya Muslims living in the sprawling and densely populated camps by the border with Myanmar, from which members of the stateless group fled persecution.

Since Jan. 1, more than 1,500 Rohingya have been infected and three have died  numbers that are expected to climb during the monsoon season, which just began and runs through mid-August.

Rashid-e-Mahbub, president of Health Rights Movement, an NGO, said Rohingya camp leaders should act to combat mosquitoes responsible for the spread of the disease.

The living space in the Rohingya refugee camps in Coxs Bazar is very densely populated. If its management is not done effectively, the dengue situation can escalate, he told BenarNews, an RFA-affiliated news service.

Meanwhile, Medical Officer Fahim Ahmed Faisal of the Coxs Bazar Civil Surgeons Office, said 350,000 mosquito nets had been distributed in the camps.

A government official in Coxs Bazar said other steps were being taken to combat the spread of mosquitoes.

Our people regularly clean the drains, garbage bins and standing water points in the camps, Md. Mostafa Sadek told BenarNews, adding that fogger machines to kill adult mosquitos have been used in camps stricken with dengue outbreaks.

Of the 33 refugee camps in Coxs Bazar, dengue outbreaks have been most prevalent in four camps in Ukhia, a local sub-district.

Refugees collect water from a well next to a dirty drain in the Shalbon Rohingya camp in Teknaf, Bangladesh, July 3, 2023. Credit: Abdur Rahman/BenarNews

Abul Kalam, a resident of the Shalbon Rohingya camp in Teknaf, complained of poor sanitary conditions.

Because of unclean drains, mosquito infestation has increased  as a result, most children suffer from various diseases including dengue, he told BenarNews.

Another Shalbon resident expressed concern for family members who had become sick recently.

I have six children in my house. Two of them have had high fevers since yesterday, Nur Nahar told BenarNews on Monday.

Even after first aid, their health condition did not improve. I think they were infected with dengue, he said, adding that two family members were infected last year.

During a visit to the Shalbon camp on Monday, a BenarNews correspondent saw three people cleaning the camps drains while children sat nearby.

An entomologist blamed the refugee camps for contributing to the outbreak.

Dengue cases this year are much higher than in previous years, Jahangirnagar University professor and entomologist Kabirul Bashar told BenarNews.

In Rohingya refugee camps, due to the lack of sanitation and overcrowding, infection rates are much higher than in areas outside the camps, he said.

On Monday, the Directorate General of Health Services reported that four people had died in the previous 24 hours, bringing to 56 the years nationwide death toll from dengue. Data shows three deaths occurred in Dhaka city and one in Mymensingh.

In addition, at least 436 dengue patients were admitted to hospitals in the last day, including 174 in Dhaka city.

BenarNews is an RFA-affiliated news service.
Myanmars military is carrying on its campaign to seize control of townships in northern Sagaing region, torching buildings and forcing around 6,000 locals to flee Khin-U, residents told RFA on Monday.

An official of Khin-U townships Right Information Group told RFA that a total of 15 villages in the township were raided by two military columns.

The man, who requested anonymity for security reasons, said nearly 3,500 residents in the northeastern part and 2,500 in the southwestern part of Khin-U township abandoned their homes ahead of the military raids.

A resident of Khin-Us Ah Lel Sho village told RFA troops killed livestock and captured locals.

Four cows and two pigs were slaughtered, and five people were arrested. I think they have to carry the packs. Three people were in their 20s and two in their 60s, said the local who declined to be named for fear of reprisals.

Now, the junta troops are burning down Yauk Thwar Aing village to the south of Ah Lel Sho. I can see the smoke in the distance but I cant get close because of the troops.

Residents of Chan Thar Kone village said a 60-year-old man, Than Win, was shot and injured while he bumped into a military junta column on July 1.

Meanwhile, residents of neighboring Shwebo township said troops shot dead two local men. They said the bodies were discovered after a column of around 40 troops withdrew on Saturday.

Two people were shot dead near a rest tent in Kawt village in the eastern part of Shwebo. That was the route the junta took when it carried out its offensive, said a local who didn't want to be named for security reasons,

Its not yet known who they were or where they were from. The bodies were still there on Monday morning.

RFA called the junta spokesperson for Sagaing region, Saw Naing, on Sunday and Monday regarding the arson attacks and killings, but he did not answer.

More than 1.5 million civilians have fled their homes since the Feb. 1, 2021 coup, according to the United Nation Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (UNOCHA), It said around 765,200 were from Sagaing region.

Translated by RFA Burmese. Edited by Mike Firn.
Authorities begin to sell tickets to visitors, but Uyghurs not allowed to pray except for special days.

An elderly Uyghur walks outside the Id Kah Mosque in Kashgar, northwestern China's Xinjiang region, before prayers marking Eid al-Fitr, June 26, 2017.

Chinese authorities have begun selling tickets to tourists to visit the historic Id Kah Mosque in Kashgar  where they have prohibited Muslim Uyghurs from praying for years except for certain holy days and for propaganda purposes, officials in the ancient city in Xinjiang said.

The mosque has been mostly closed for worship since 2016 amid a severe crackdown by Chinese authorities on the religion and culture of the Uyghurs in Xinjiang in a bid to stamp out religious extremism China believed to be behind terrorist attacks.

Information about the issuance of tickets to visit the mosque first circulated last week on the Chinese short-video platform Duoyin and later on Facebook by Uyghurs. It also appeared in the marketing material of a travel agency based in the Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region, which said visitors had to pay 20-40 yuan (US$2.75-5.50) for tickets, based on their ages, and that entry was free for people 65 years of age and older.

Authorities allow small groups of elderly worshipers to pray during Ramadan and other Islamic holy days, or for propaganda purposes when arranging visits for dignitaries from other parts of the world to give an impression that Uyghurs are not prohibited from praying, sources say.

Those who saw the recent social media post about tickets being sold assumed that the Chinese had turned the Id Kah Mosque into a museum.

Kashgar police told Radio Free Asia that the mosque was open for visitors but not for worshipers, and suggested contacting local travel agencies for more information.

I am not sure how much money each visitor pays, but I am positive that people are allowed to enter the mosque, said an officer who declined to be named, per normal practice.

But no one is allowed to pray because the mosque sells tickets to visitors, he said. However, the government organizes people to pray inside the mosque. Only they can perform their prayers. It has been like this for five or six years.

Foreign envoys from 14 countries visit the Id Kah Mosque in Kashgar, northwestern China's Xinjiang region, at the invitation of China's Ministry of Foreign Affairs, April 24, 2023. Credit: Hu Huhu/Xinhua via Getty Images

Systematic campaign

Since about 2017, up to 16,000 mosques, or roughly 65%, of all mosques have been destroyed or damaged as a result of government policies, according to the Uyghur Human Rights Project, a U.S.-based activist group. Other mosques have been closed but left standing, and a few famous ones remain open but under surveillance.

The moves are part of a larger campaign of repression to erase Uyghur religious practices culture, along with the arbitrary detention of an estimated 1.8 million Uyghurs and other Turkic minorities in internment centers and prisons.

In May 2022, when Michelle Bachelet, former U.N. high commissioner for human rights, visited the mosque, the imam, Memet Jume, told her that the facility was open for normal religious activities, even though it was not.

When asked why there were so few worshipers in the mosque, he said that the faithful were busy with their work and that some had changed their viewpoints.

Residential committees paid Uyghurs to perform a dance outside the mosque in an apparent bid to show that all was well ahead of Bachelets visit.

Bachelets office issued a report in August 2022 documenting cases of torture, forced labor and other severe rights abuses against Uyghurs and other Turkic minorities.

For years now, foreign visitors have noticed the absence of prayers inside the Id Kah Mosque. One of them posted a travel blog on YouTube, showing thousands of worshippers praying in the mosque between 2011 and 2016, but then an empty holy place in 2019.

Turghunjan Alawudin, a vice chairman of the executive committee of the World Uyghur Congress, said under Islam, it was never permissible to take money from those who enter a mosque, including tourists.

If the tourists say they will donate to the mosque, they will, he told RFA. A mosque is only a place to worship Allah.

Therefore, it is completely fraudulent to say that we made half of the mosque a picnic ground and the other half a prayer ground, he added.

Translated by RFA Uyghur. Edited by Roseanne Gerin and Malcolm Foster.
His vision for Prosperous Vietnam Party was to eliminate power inequality under Communist Party

Vietnam on Monday sentenced activist Phan Son Tung to six years in prison for advocating the formation of an opposition to the ruling Communist Party of Vietnam, his lawyer told Radio Free Asia.

Tung, 39, was arrested in August 2022 on anti-state propaganda charges for calling for the formation of the Prosperous Vietnam Party, which would work toward eliminating inequality in political power by removing communist party leadership.

Also related to his charges were his demand for citizens to have the freedom to establish associations and political organizations, and his social media content, which authorities said was anti-state.

According to the indictment, Phan Son Tung created and managed three YouTube channels, namely For a prosperous Vietnam, Phan Son Tung and Son Tung TV, and a Facebook page under the name David Phan. He had posted around 1,000 video clips on these channels, generating more than 148 million views with 530,000 followers.

The indictment also accused him of creating and disseminating 16 video clips with fabricated and confusion-creating content, six of which contained information promoting psychological warfare. Another 17 pieces of content distorted, slandered or insulted the prestige of organizations or the honor and dignity of individuals.

The indictment also acknowledged that he had been remorseful, cooperative and sincere in his confessions, and had paid a fine of 27 million dong (US$1,149), the total revenue generated from advertising income and from selling merchandise emblazoned with the words For a Prosperous Vietnam.

Full of social evils

According to a Facebook post by attorney Le Van Luan, Tung used to work on the Project Management Board of Vietel Real Estate Firm but then moved out to establish his own company.

It was then that he learned that Vietnam is a society full of social evils, and he began to advocate for a stronger Vietnam with a clean government that is free of corruption, with each person playing their role.

During Mondays trial, which began at 8:30 a.m. and ended at noon, Tung acknowledged every action he was accused of. But he maintained that none of those were crimes, his lawyer Ngo Anh Tuan told RFAs Vietnamese Service.

"He reaffirmed that his acts were not unlawful and the defense lawyers also proved this, Tuan said. However, the prosecutors still stuck with their viewpoint.

Tuan said he was expecting a shorter sentence because during the trial the prosecution did not demonstrate how his actions deserved a greater sentence. But because he had multiple violations, the judge decided to hand down the minimum sentence proposed by the prosecution, said Tuan.

Tung has become the sixth activist charged with anti-state propaganda under Article 117 since January 2023.

Amnesty International has described the law as a means to suppress legitimate dissent and a favored tool of the authorities to arbitrarily imprison journalists, bloggers and others who express views that do not align with the interests of the communist party.

Translated by Anna Vu. Edited by Eugene Whong and Malcolm Foster


CIA head William Burns says he expects Russian President Vladimir Putin to bide his time and wait before seeking retribution against Wagner mercenary chief Yevgeny Prigozhin, following his aborted mutiny against Russia's military leadership last month.

Speaking at the Aspen Security Forum on July 20, Burns also said Prigozhins mutiny was the biggest challenge to Putin in his 23 years as Russias preeminent official, and he asserted that Russias elites, some already doubting the conduct of the Ukraine war, had increasing doubts about Putins leadership.

"What we are seeing is a very complicated dance," Burns said in what was billed by the forum as a fireside chat.

"Putin is the ultimate apostle of payback, he said.

So I would be surprised if Prigozhin escapes further retribution for this. So in that sense, the President (Joe) Biden is right. if I were Prigozhin, I wouldn't fire my food taster," Burns added, referring to a quip by Biden earlier this week that, if he were Prigozhin, "I'd be careful what I ate."

The stunning but short-lived mutiny by Prigozhin on June 24 saw Wagner fighters seize the southern city of Rostov-on-Don and march to within 200 kilometers of Moscow, shooting down Russian military aircraft and killing 13 air-force personnel along the way.

Putin immediately denounced the insurrection as a stab in the back and vowed to punish all "traitors" involved.

But Prigozhin does not appear to have been arrested or even detained, and the Kremlin said he met with Putin days after the mutiny.

Since then, the Wagner chiefs whereabouts have been shrouded in mystery, though he is believed to be moving between Russia and Belarus, where Wagner troops have been setting up camps to train Belarusian armed forces as part of a negotiated deal that helped end the mutiny.

The insurrection came on the heels of months of intense public infighting with Russias military leadership over the war strategy in Ukraine and ammunition supplies.

Burns claimed that U.S. intelligence had prior warning of the mutiny, and he said many of Russias elites were wondering about Putins response: `"whether the emperor had no clothes or at least why is it taking him so long to get dressed."

"I think what it resurrected was some deeper questions which again, you know, you've seen circulate within the Russian elite since the war in Ukraine began," said Burns, a longtime diplomat who also served as U.S. ambassador to Russia.

"I think Putin is already a little bit uneasy as he looks over his shoulder" he added.

On the battlefield, the CIA chief said it was not a surprise that gains from Ukraine's counteroffensive have been incremental.

Russian troops, he said, had months to prepare defenses before Kyiv's troops launched their campaign last month.

"I don't think it should come as a surprise to anyone that the counteroffensive is a hard slog. Offense is a lot harder than defense," Burns said.

"I am however, an optimist...Behind those considerable fixed defenses that the Russians have built in southern Ukraine...there still lie some pretty significant structural weaknesses, poor morale, uneven generalship to put it mildly on the Russian side...and the disarray... about the political and very senior military leadership," he added.
EU Commission President Ursula von der Leyen vowed to leave no stone unturned to hold Russian President Vladimir Putin and others responsible for alleged crimes committed during the Kremlins war against Ukraine as the international community opened a new office in The Hague to investigate and gather evidence for any future trials.

"We will leave no stone unturned to hold Putin and his henchmen accountable," von der Leyen said in a statement on July 3 marking the opening of the International Center For The Prosecution Of The Crime Of Aggression (ICPA).

"The new international prosecution center will play a key role in making sure that the perpetrators are brought to justice," she added.

The new center, at the offices of the EUs Eurojust justice agency, includes prosecutors from Ukraine, the EU, the United States, and the International Criminal Court (ICC), which is also located in The Hague.

The ICC has previously issued international arrest warrants for Putin on suspicion of war crimes, including the alleged deportation of children to Russia from Ukraine.

The new center looks to plug some gaps in the ICCs jurisdiction, which does not allow it to prosecute crimes of aggression -- a key charge leveled against the Kremlin in its unprovoked February 2022 attack on Ukraine.

The Eurojust agency has already established a database for evidence on war crimes, crimes against humanity, and genocide related to the war.

With the setup of the ICPA, the European Union reiterates its commitment to ensuring full accountability for the international crimes committed during Russias war against Ukraine, including the crime of aggression, European Commissioner for Justice Didier Reynders said.

He added that the ICPA is a clear signal to the world that the prohibition of the use of force continues to be the foundation of our international rule-based order and that those who violate it will be held accountable.

Ukraine Prosecutor General Andriy Kostin, speaking at the centers opening, said a special tribunal for Russian leadership was now "inevitable."

"We are gathered here on the occasion of a truly historic moment. I would say an epoch-defining moment," Kostin told reporters.

In an interview before the opening, Kostin said that "we need experts, we need forensics, we need additional information, including intelligence information, in order for this case to be strong, because we all know that the crime of aggression is the leadership crime."

Ukrainian officials have pressed for a special tribunal since the ass killings of civilians was discovered in the town of Bucha in April 2022 following the withdrawal of Russian troops.

Russia has denied it targets civilians, despite evidence and witnesses to the contrary. It has also labeled its invasion a "special military operation" and forbids the use of the word "war" among reports in Russia.

With reporting by AFP, dpa, and Reuters
Nawat Itsaragrisil, president of Miss Grand International, said Miss Grand International 2021 Nguyen Thuc Thuy Tien was immature for removing her title from her Instagram profile.

Tien and Itsaragrisil. Photo from Miss Grand Internationals Instagram

After unfollowing Tien on Instagram Friday, Itsaragrisil went on a livestream Saturday and called her "immature," though the Vietnamese beauty queen had put her title back on her account the previous day.

According to Itsaragrisil, Pham Kim Dung, the national director of the Miss Grand Vietnam, was surprised by Tiens move as the title brings many endorsements for the beauty queen.

Itsaragrisil said that he needed to voice his opinions to protect the name and the prestige of the pageant.

"I think this is a loss for Miss Grand International," Itsaragrisil said. "Tiens action caused many problems."

Tiens representative said the same day that Tien and Itsaragrisil were still on good terms, though refused to comment further.

Itsaragrisil had complimented Tien many times before the controversy. During the sash-giving ceremony in the 2022 Miss Grand International contest, Itsaragrisil said Tien was not the most beautiful contestant in the 2021 contest but was "definitely among the top five or 10."

He has also praised Tien for her hard work.

Tien, 25, was crowned the 2021 Miss Grand International in Bangkok, becoming the first Vietnamese to win the pageant. After the contest, she became known for her charity projects and other volunteer activities. It is estimated that Tien has earned between two to three million dollars since her coronation.
The return of the so-called morality police to the streets of major Iranian cities has brought back fear and stress for women who choose to ignore the requirement that they wear the hair-covering hijab. But it has also been met with resistance by men and women alike, while lawmakers have questioned the effectiveness of the hard-line approach to enforcing compliance.

Iranians who spoke to RFE/RL's Radio Farda said the presence of the morality police -- officially known as "guidance patrols" that usually include male officers and women wearing black chadors -- is not as visible as it was before the patrols were scaled back after nationwide protests first broke out against the hijab law last autumn.

I really don't know where they want to get with this method, but in my opinion, if they want to continue this way, confrontations will start again."

"Before, when we went on the street, they had a stationary vehicle, or a vehicle that was moving on the street," Leila Mirghaffari, a women's rights activist who lives in Tehran, told Radio Farda on July 17, a day after the return of the morality police was announced. "They haven't yet dared to encroach like before. But they are present, mostly in main squares."



Mirghaffari described the decision to redeploy the morality police, coming after the monthslong protests had largely wound down, as a distraction aimed at creating "fear and terror" among the population.



"It creates mental and emotional problems for us. It's stressful, and it occupies our thoughts and those of our families," Mirghaffari said. "When we want to leave home and come out to the street, at any moment we may travel a route where morality police patrol and are stationed to arrest people."



Nevertheless, Mirghaffari and others suggested, the patrols are largely ineffective and have even given new life to resistance against the authorities' efforts to enforce the countrys strict Islamic dress code.



Some Tehran residents who spoke to Radio Farda said that many women simply put on a hijab when they spot the morality police before quickly removing them once out of sight. And in some cases where women have been harassed or threatened by morality police, fellow citizens -- male and female alike -- have pushed back.



Almost immediately after the authorities announced on July 16 that the morality police patrols would resume, residents of the northern city of Rasht took to the streets to protest an attempt to arrest three women for allegedly violating the hijab requirement.

The situation reportedly escalated into clashes between demonstrators and police, who used tear gas to disperse protesters, some of whom were chanting against Iran's clerical establishment.



"I really don't know where they want to get with this method, but in my opinion, if they want to continue this way, confrontations will start again," said a male Tehran resident who requested anonymity while answering questions on WhatsApp.

"Personally, if I see them taking a girl into a van, I will step forward and shout so as not to let them take them. That's how things are, and I think most people now are like me. They don't want the Mahsa incident to happen again and for another innocent girl to be killed."



The death of 22-year-old Mahsa Amini in September, soon after she was arrested for allegedly violating the hijab law, sparked the nationwide protests that lasted months and prompted a crackdown that led to the deaths of more than 500 people. Amini's death became the cause celebre for thousands of women and men who took to the streets to show their opposition to the hijab law.

Amid the protests, there were reports that the authorities had disbanded the morality police, although other reports indicated that they never really went away in some cities. But the issue also prompted the clerical establishment, which views the hijab as key to its interpretation of Islam, to introduce revisions to the country's Chastity and Hijab Law that would introduce stiffer penalties for noncompliance, including up to three years in prison for repeat offenders.



While the hijab has been compulsory in public for women and girls over the age of 9 since 1981, shortly after the 1979 Islamic Revolution ushered in the clerical establishment, the requirement is often flouted, particularly in urban areas.



The Chastity and Hijab bill, which is awaiting parliamentary approval, has been fodder for intense debate -- with some lawmakers saying it does not go far enough to make women comply with the hijab requirement and others questioning the effectiveness of forcing women to comply.



Following the announcement that the morality police patrols would resume in many Iranian cities, lawmaker Vali Esmaili, who heads the parliament's social commission, said that the body would unlikely be involved in the effort.



He also said that before resuming the patrols, "we should first look at the state of society to see if such actions have been effective in the past 43 years."



The Chastity and Hijab bill also proposes penalties, including the confiscation of automobiles, against drivers or passengers of vehicles in which women are not in compliance with the hijab requirement.



"When I'm driving, I have to wear a hijab," a woman who resides in Tehran told Radio Farda following the redeployment of the morality police, explaining that she has had her vehicle impounded four times for failing to wear the hijab. "But when I get out and move away from the car, I take off my head scarf. Many times, I just put it in my bag. Sometimes, when I see that the conditions are bad, I keep it around my neck, but I am still without a hijab in the street."



The woman said that she has not personally seen any morality police since they returned to the streets of Tehran. But she has heard eyewitness accounts of the presence of marked morality police vehicles in the northern city of Shahriar, in Tehran Province, where she said most women wear head scarves and those who do not could be seen without a hijab not far from the morality police.

WATCH: Masses of demonstrators are turning out throughout Iran, where some are shouting down police enforcement of strict religious dress codes for women.



"There are the odd ones out who are without a hijab, and they were 100 or 200 meters away from the morality police," she recalled being told of the current situation.



She said that even before the morality police returned to the streets, her experience in dealing with them showed that they were reluctant to enforce the hijab requirement.



"It's pretty clear that they're tired of this matter, but it seems like they have orders from above," she said.



That is far from the norm, according to the activist Mirghaffari, who painted a dark picture of the morality police, whose involvement in human rights violations has led to Western sanctions.

"The morality police are truly violent. They are really repressive. They have no humanity," said Mirghaffari, who added that she has been arrested by the force several times. "The morality police are really trained for savagery and for causing distress to the point that someone like Mahsa Amini could be killed. And they have no fear at all."



Others who spoke to Radio Farda were incredulous that the authorities would reintroduce the morality police amid public frustration over Iran's dire economic situation.



"The issue is not the hijab. The real issue is the terrifying inflation and high prices," said the man who answered questions by WhatsApp. "But they are only fixated on the hijab. They are playing with everyone's nerves, whether man or woman, whether with a hijab or without, they are bothering everyone."



The renewed protests, which included women carrying placards bearing the "We won't go back!" slogan that became popular during anti-hijab demonstrations, suggests that efforts to force women into compliance will be met with continued resistance.



"Look, our girls are fighting and know that there is no way back for us and we are not going back, and our answer to them wanting to forcibly put a hijab on us is, 'No!'" said Mirghaffari. "This is a big step we have taken to reach our other desires and we will never go back."

Written by Michael Scollon based on reporting by Mehdi Tahbaz and other Radio Farda correspondents.
The United States has imposed new sanctions targeting 18 individuals and more than 120 entities based in Russia and Kyrgyzstan in a move aimed at inhibiting Moscows access to products and technology that support its war efforts.

The entities include several based in Kyrgyzstan that the U.S. Treasury Department on July 20 said have operated as intermediaries to provide foreign-made electronics and technologies to Russia.



At least six of these companies were featured in a recent investigation by RFE/RLs Kyrgyz Service into Kyrgyz and Kazakh companies that revealed how sanctioned Western electronics make their way to Russia via Central Asian firms.

The Treasurys Office of Foreign Assets Control (OFAC) said on July 20 that, in addition to curtailing Russia's ability to obtain technology, the sanctions aim to reduce its revenue from mining, degrade its access to the international financial system, and starve it of technology produced by the Group of Seven leading industrialized nations, particularly items needed in the aerospace and defense sectors.



The latest sanctions build on a wave of global actions imposed on Moscow.



Since Russia launched its full scale invasion of Ukraine, the United States, working with our allies and partners, has taken unprecedented steps to impose costs on Russia and promote accountability for the individuals and entities who support its illegal war, U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken said in a statement.



We will continue to stand with Ukraine for as long as it takes, he said.

Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy thanked the United States and the European Union, which on July 20 extended sanctions on Russia for another six months. He also thanked Canada for its recent moves to tighten sanctions against Russia.

"Hundreds of new sanctions objectives have been successfully implemented," Zelenskiy said in a video posted on Twitter. "Russia and everyone in this world who dares to help terrorists must feel the ever-increasing sanctions pressure -- whether they are individuals, companies, or countries."



The individuals designated for sanctions include former Russian Finance Minister Aleksei Kudrin, a longtime confidant of President Vladimir Putin. Kudrin headed the governments official watchdog, the Audit Chamber, until late last year when he joined Russian tech giant Yandex.



Kudrin joined Yandex during a restructuring as the Kremlin cracked down on independent news and reporting on the Ukraine war. Yandexs search engine and main news portal were among the leading sources for Russian-language content.



Yandex ultimately decided to sell its main news and entertainment portals and undertook an attempted restructuring that would essentially split the company into a wholly Russian unit and an overlapping, but independent, foreign unit.



But that deal, which Kudrin has been intimately involved in negotiating, has been contingent on finding deep-pocketed Russian buyers for the Russian unit. Until recently, a group of Kremlin-connected oligarchs, and state investment bank VTB, were reported to be in the running to take control of the new unit.



But, according to reports this week in Meduza and The Bell, Yandexs board has been wary of falling afoul of existing U.S. sanctions that had previously targeted some of the main contenders, and the board has been casting about for other options.



Its unclear how Kudrins sanctioning would affect his role at Yandex or the companys restructuring efforts.



A Yandex spokeswoman declined to comment on the Treasury announcement.



The six companies designated for sanctions by OFAC that were featured in the RFE/RL investigation are LLC RM Design and Development, Basis Trade Prosoft LLC, Region-Prof LLC, ZAO GTME Tekhnologii, OOO Radiotekhsnab (RTS), and Technologies Systems and Complexes Limited (TSC).



ZAO GTME Tekhnologii (GTME Tekhnologii) is a Kyrgyz-based entity established in June 2022.



It has made dozens of shipments of goods to Russia, including high-priority items such as tantalum capacitors and electronic integrated circuits, the RFE/RL investigation found. GTME Tekhnologiis primary customer has been Russia-based TSC, a vendor of electronic and digital equipment.



OFAC said LLC RM Design and Development, established in March last year, has been a "prolific shipper" of electronics such as semiconductors and integrated circuits to Russia, including to firms that have supplied electronics to Russian-based defense companies.



Earlier on July 20, Kyrgyzstan denied helping Moscow circumvent sanctions imposed over the Ukraine invasion, but did admit to "the "possible involvement of private companies" and said it was investigating the matter.

The other individuals targeted for helping to supply munitions to Russia include Russian and North Korean national Yong Hyok Rim, who is linked to Yevgeny Prigozhin, the mutinous leader of the Wagner mercenary organization.



Also designated are two other private Russian military companies, including Okhrana, owned by Kremlin-controlled energy giant Gazprom.



Sergei Korolev, first deputy director of Russia's Federal Security Service (FSB), and Smolensk regional Governor Vasily Anokhin also were targeted, the State Department said.



The sanctions freeze any property in U.S. jurisdictions owned by the individuals and entities named. They also bar U.S. citizens from any dealings with the people and entities.

With reporting by Reuters and AFP

NOTE: This article has been amended to clarify the circumstances surrounding Aleksei Kudrin's departure from the Russian Audit Chamber and his joining Yandex.
Fighting continues to be intense in parts of eastern and southern Ukraine, with Kyiv reporting small territorial gains as its counteroffensive meets strong resistance from entrenched Russian forces.

In a July 3 post on Twitter, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy wrote that "last week was difficult on the front line, but we are making progress."

We are moving forward, step by step, he added.

The remarks came after Deputy Defense Minister Hanna Malyar wrote in posts on Telegram on July 2 that 9 square kilometers had been liberated from Russian occupation in the Donetsk region over the past week, a change she said was "a result of improving the tactical position."

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 counteroffensive, 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 the south, Malyar wrote, over 28 square kilometers had been recaptured during the same period.

She added that "both offensive and defensive operations are ongoing in the east," with "heavy fighting going on there now."

The Russian military also reported intense fighting in the areas around the Donetsk region cities of Bakhmut, Lyman, Maryinka, and Avdiyivka.

RFE/RL cannot confirm claims of battlefield developments by either side in areas of heavy fighting.

NATOs top military official, Dutch Admiral Rob Bauer, told journalists in Brussels on July 3 that Kyiv's counteroffensive launched last month was "difficult" and not "an easy walkover."

Bauer compared the counteroffensive to the Allied D-Day landings in France in 1944.

"We saw in Normandy in the Second World War that it took seven, eight, nine weeks for all the allies to actually break through the defensive lines of the Germans," Bauer said. "So it is not a surprise that it is not going fast."

In its daily briefing on July 3, the Ukrainian General Staff reported 57 air strikes and around 60 rocket attacks against Ukrainian positions during the previous 24 hours.

Some 39 clashes were reported, as well.

Three cruise missiles and 13 Shahed attack drones had reportedly been shot down.

A Russian drone attack on July 3 killed one person and injured 16 local residents in Ukraine's northeastern city of Sumy. The regions military administration said four Iran-made Shahed kamikaze drones hit an administrative building and two multifloor residential buildings in the city center.

Dnipropetrovsk Governor Serhiy Lysak reported that enemy fire had struck the towns of Marhanets and Nikopol during the night of July 2-3, injuring one civilian and damaging several buildings and vehicles.

On July 2, Ukraine's PEN club announced that writer and activist Viktoria Amelina, 37, had died the previous day of injuries sustained on June 27 during a Russian rocket attack on a restaurant in Kramatorsk.

Since Russia's invasion in February 2022, Amelina had been documenting alleged crimes by Russian forces for the Truth Hounds human rights nongovernmental organization.

Thirteen people, including three children, were killed in the Kramatorsk strike, while about 60 people were injured.

Off the battlefield, Zelenskiy on July 3 spoke by phone with German Chancellor Olaf Scholz, the German leaders spokesperson said.

Among the issues was a call by the two leaders for the extension of a deal allowing safe export of grain and fertilizers from three Ukrainian Black Sea ports, something the Kremlin on the same day said is unlikely.

Moscow has threatened not to extend the deal beyond July 17, claiming international sanctions are impeding its own agricultural exports. Russia is demanding restored access to the SWIFT financial messaging system -- which was closed to Russian banks following Russias invasion -- along with access to farm-machinery supplies and the lifting of insurance restrictions.

Meanwhile, Russian Defense Minister Sergei Shoigu commented for the first time on last months failed armed rebellion by the leader of Wagner mercenary group, Yevgeny Prigozhin, calling the mutiny "a provocation."

"The provocation did not affect the activities of the armed forces" in Ukraine, he said in a statement, claiming Prigozhin's "plans failed mostly because the armed forces' personnel remained loyal to its oath and military duties."

The Wall Street Journal cited sources in Western intelligence as saying the major goal of Prigozhin's mutiny was to detain Shoigu and the chief of the Russian Armed Forces General Staff, Valery Gerasimov.

With reporting by Reuters
TBILISI -- Since 2008, when NATO promised both Georgia and Ukraine that they "will become members," their geopolitical fates have appeared to be tightly linked: post-Soviet Russian neighbors straining to join the West.

Now, though, with the transatlantic military alliance's members preparing for an annual summit in Vilnius on July 11-12, all the talk is about Ukraine and how to bring a country that's battling a full-scale Russian invasion more closely into the NATO fold.

Georgia, where the Ukraine war has spurred fears of another Russian invasion, is barely an afterthought.

"Georgia and Ukraine -- which since 2008 have been sort of a tandem, moving toward the alliance at different speeds but always mentioned in the same breath -- I think the Ukraine-Georgia tandem is broken, probably irrevocably," Bob Hamilton, a former U.S. defense attache in Tbilisi and now head of the Eurasia Program at the Foreign Policy Research Institute (FPRI), a U.S.-based think tank, said. "Whatever happens with Ukraine at the Vilnius summitno one is talking about a path to membership in NATO for Georgia."

While the war in Ukraine has accelerated Georgia's often uneven path toward EU candidacy, it has only slowed Tbilisi's advances toward joining NATO, Western analysts say. Georgia's ties with NATO are too cozy to avoid attracting Moscow's ire, they say, but not nearly close enough to ensure membership for the small state on Russia's southern border.

The strains were most recently reflected in Georgian Prime Minister Irakli Garibashvili's announcement last week of his decision to break with tradition by sending his foreign minister instead of attending NATO's Vilnius summit himself.

"We must tell the truth to our society and ourselves," Garibashvili told parliament on June 30, "acknowledging that we should not create unnecessary expectations."

Analysts say that key NATO allies including the United States remain unwilling to offer NATO membership -- and its cornerstone security guarantee, known as Article 5 -- to a weak country in what Moscow considers its sphere of influence.

Meanwhile, Garibashvili has called into question the kind of half-measures that the alliance has been offering in the absence of any guarantee of military protection against Russia.

"One of the main reasons was NATO, right? NATO enlargement," Garibashvili responded at a security conference in Bratislava on May 30 when a journalist asked him why he thought Russia invaded Ukraine. "One of the reasons was Ukraine's will and determination to become a member of NATO. And so, therefore, we see the consequences."

The Georgian prime minister's comments set off a political firestorm at home, with opposition figures accusing him of echoing Kremlin justifications for the war and seeking to steer Georgians eastward.

"[W]hile Ukraine will get something out of the Vilnius Summit, Georgia's momentum appears to be waning," Nata Koridze, managing editor of local news website Civil.ge and a former Georgian diplomat, wrote. "It is hard to imagine NATO embracing a country whose prime minister, echoing [Russian President Vladimir] Putin's rhetoric, blames the Alliance for the war in Ukraine."

Garibashvili's Georgian Dream colleague, parliament speaker Shalva Papuashvili, then penned an op-ed complaining that it was NATO that had let Georgia down, demanding much of the country while offering little in return.

Georgia joined NATO's Partnership for Peace in 1994 and declared its ambitions to join shortly after the Rose Revolution ousted the last of its Soviet-era leaders in 2003-04. The Bucharest declaration in 2008 included a pledge of eventual NATO membership, but a five-day war with Russian forces backing separatists in two Georgian republics four months later seemingly recast geopolitical calculations on all sides. By 2012, Georgian Dream was in power, and Ivanishvili, who made his fortune in Russia, was seemingly keen to reopen economic, cultural, and diplomatic ties with Russians.

"For all these years, Georgia did its best to become a member of NATO and get into the EU, despite the real and present danger of Russian reprisal for doing so. Despite becoming fully interoperable with NATO, developing democratic institutions beyond the Alliance's entry-level standards, and codifying European and Euro-Atlantic integration into its Constitution, Georgia has been left out in the cold," Papuashvili wrote. "We call on our partners, instead of directing undue criticism at us, to help us to overcome our security predicament and achieve well-deserved membership in NATO and the EU."

In fact, a Western diplomat in Tbilisi who requested anonymity to speak more freely told RFE/RL, Georgia's misgivings about NATO began to emerge before Russia's invasion of Ukraine. The start of that full-scale war in February 2022, the source said, merely deepened some Georgians' sense that it was too risky to move toward NATO without an iron-clad guarantee that the West would come to Georgia's defense if necessary.

"In years past, there was a feeling of frustration among Georgian officials that the process was going so slowly, that the lack of a security guarantee made them more vulnerable. I think today they feel that more than ever, that the lack of a security guarantee leaves them vulnerable," the diplomat said. "Where they used to view receiving a Membership Action Plan" -- a MAP, the alliance's formal procedure for gaining membership -- "as a positive step, the prime minister made it clear in Bratislava that maybe his perception is that steps short of actual security guarantees actually increase Georgia's vulnerability rather than increasing Georgia's deterrence."

Asked if that assessment was accurate, the diplomat said, "I think only Putin knows if that is truly accurate, but I don't think it's irrational."

In lieu of offering a MAP to Georgia, NATO spent years creating a series of programs aimed at deepening ties between Georgia and the alliance.

Those have largely been seen as "consolation prizes" for not getting the real thing, resulting in a growing "NATO fatigue," according to U.S. Army Lieutenant Colonel Walter Landgraf, a fellow at the FPRI's Eurasia Program.

Like Ukraine, Georgia has been "told for a very long time now, 15 years, if you keep working and keep working hard you will earn a Membership Action Plan," Landgraf said during a recent security conference in Tbilisi. "But instead of a Membership Action Plan other things are doled out by NATO."

Hamilton said that over time, NATO has become less willing to admit states on Russia's borders that aren't capable of protecting themselves. A move like bringing the Baltic states into NATO in 2004 "will not happen again," he said. "NATO is not going to admit countries that are military liabilities into the alliance. Georgia right now is a military liability to the alliance. Ukraine is not -- Ukraine has shown that it can defend itself, and very effectively."

Landgraf suggested the standards are less rigorous for countries farther from Russia. He noted that when North Macedonia was admitted in 2020, NATO acknowledged that country's military reform process was incomplete.

"North Macedonia doesn't border the Russian Federation. North Macedonia doesn't have territorial divisions," Landgraf said. "They are differing geopolitical contexts, but that is probably not comforting to ordinary Georgians."

Georgia's NATO aspirations also have suffered from the same political issues that have hampered its EU bid: a series of seemingly regressive policy decisions that have raised doubts among the country's Western partners about its democratic bona fides. NATO officials have increasingly raised those concerns.

NATO's liaison office in Tbilisi did not respond to queries from RFE/RL for this article.

Georgia's military cooperation with NATO has not suffered in the same way that its political ties have, the diplomatic source said. "At the technical level, whether it be military or civilian who are working to ensure Georgian interoperability -- especially on the military side -- that has not slowed at all," the diplomat said.

Despite any "NATO fatigue" among officers and policymakers, membership remains a popular goal among Georgians. A survey conducted in March by the National Democratic Institute found 73 percent of respondents in favor of NATO membership compared to just 13 percent against it.

Senior Georgian officials have said little publicly about what they hope to get from the upcoming NATO summit. The Defense Ministry did not respond to RFE/RL's request for comments for this article.

There have been proposals to remove a MAP as a formal requirement for Georgian accession, endorsed by opposition members of parliament. Such a move would "send the right signal to the Georgian people," Levan Dolidze, a former head of Georgia's mission to NATO, told RFE/RL.

Ukraine is unlikely to be granted a direct path to membership in Vilnius, either. But NATO members were reportedly working on a significant boost in military aid for Kyiv and a new NATO-Ukraine Council.

Meanwhile, Finland joined the alliance earlier this year and Sweden appears to be on the cusp of doing so, in accelerated processes that skipped the MAP step altogether. While neither is in direct conflict with Russia, their accelerated bids have raised questions about why such exceptions might not be allowed for Kyiv or Tbilisi.

"For many years, NATO has said to both Ukraine and Georgia that the Membership Action Plan is the next step on your direct way to membership. But NATO has also said that both countries already have the practical tools to prepare them for membership -- meaning that MAP is not a practical tool and holds mostly symbolic value," Landgraf said.

The result could be the unintentional specter of a double standard, he added, signaling "that there is one standard for countries like Finland and Sweden and then another standard for countries like Georgia and Ukraine."

If the polls are accurate, nearly three out of four Georgians hope that's not the case.
Welcome to Wider Europe, RFE/RL's new newsletter focusing on the key issues concerning the European Union, NATO, and other institutions and their relationships with the Western Balkans and Europe's Eastern neighborhoods.

I'm RFE/RL Europe Editor Rikard Jozwiak, and this week I'm drilling down on two major issues: the EUs reluctance to use its new anti-circumvention tool and the lessons learned from an EU summit two decades ago

Brief #1: The EU Creates A Sanctions Tool It Likely Won't Use

What You Need To Know: When EU member states finally approved the bloc's latest sanctions package against Russia on June 23, perhaps the most interesting feature was a new anti-circumvention framework aimed at third countries. Although this framework for the moment very much remains an empty canvas, it has now given Brussels the legal tools to do two things: Draw up a list of products made in the bloc that it believes are being sent to Russia via third countries, and another register in which third countries can be named and hence will no longer be able to import things from the EU.

This move will, in theory, bring the EU closer to the "secondary sanctions" that the United States is already applying around the globe -- a framework designed to prevent or restrict third countries from trading with countries subject to U.S. sanctions. And there is little doubt that the new EU tool might come in handy going forward.

Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, and Poland have all pointed out that, in 2022, exports of potential dual-use goods -- items that can be used for both civilian and military purposes -- to Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, and Uzbekistan grew more than 62 percent, 83 percent, and 30 percent, respectively, compared to the previous year.

The EUs sanctions implementation envoy, David O'Sullivan, has in recent months traveled extensively to both Central Asia and places such as Armenia and Georgia to hammer home the message that items, or parts of them, imported from the EU to other countries have been found in Russian military equipment and weapons used in its war against Ukraine. A senior EU official with knowledge of the matter, speaking under the condition of anonymity, noted that we are seeing circumvention. Look at the envoy and where he is traveling. There is evidence that something is happening.

Deep Background: The big question, however, is if the EU will ever use this instrument. The smart money is that it wont, and that the lists will remain empty. Pretty much all of the EU officials I have spoken to essentially say the same thing: It is a last-resort measure, only to be used when all other things have failed -- notably, more intense diplomacy.

I hear that this is a tool designed for OSullivan to threaten the countries he travels to with, but nothing more. And people familiar with the topic also explain to me that Brussels isnt at all keen to push countries into the arms of Russia and China. This is the sort of tool that would accomplish exactly that.

As evidence, they point to countries like Serbia and Georgia that, despite their refusal to align with EU sanctions on Moscow -- even to the point of allowing Russian flights to land on their soil -- still havent faced any negative consequences from Brussels for their actions.

Finally, there is the issue of unanimity, which is needed for any listing under this new framework. Right now, it is hard to see all 27 EU member states seeing eye to eye on this.

Drilling Down

One of the reasons for the skepticism is that Germany, backed notably by Italy, worked very hard to make the sanctions text on this issue longer and more complicated. Several EU officials familiar with the matter told me that Germany was even keen to remove the possibility of listing specific third countries, but that this was resisted by most other EU member states.

When the sanctions package with this proposal was first presented by the European Commission in early May, there were hopes in Brussels that it would be agreed on rather quickly, as it wasnt the most comprehensive measures ever proposed by the EU. Yet it took nearly two months to reach an agreement, largely due to Berlin continuously insisting on various clarifications of the anti-circumvention language.

Having seen both the original text, as proposed by the European Commission, and the final version agreed by member states, it is clear just how difficult it will be to do anything with this anti-circumvention instrument. And it is obvious that the EU will first exhaust all diplomatic tools available before any restrictive measures are proposed.

Both documents spell out that the [EU] recognizes the efforts made by national authorities in many third countries to stem the flow of goods, technology, and services that are covered by the restrictive measures adopted by the [EU] in response to Russias war of aggression against Ukraine. The [EU] should further support third countries in that endeavor -- interestingly, the final agreed text adds with all available means at the end.

The adopted text also outlines other steps that first must be taken before a third country is targeted, which includes that the EU's foreign policy chief and the European Commission must brief the member states on all technical details and outreach actions taken before any proposal for sanctioning is to be submitted.

It is also stated that such info must include available trade data demonstrating that the alternative measures taken have been ineffective, as well as information about the efforts carried out by the [EU] to address the matter with the third country in question, and a clear indication that such efforts were not successful.

But thats not all. Before a decision is taken, Brussels must also inform and actively seek the views of the government of that third country on the basis of the preliminary findings set out in the technical analysis by the [European] Commission and the [EU's] intended remedial action.

Finally, it is clearly stated that the EU member states should be informed of all steps of the engagement and of the outcome and that a final decision only can be taken unanimously after the final outreach to that third country has been concluded.

Brief #2: The Ghosts Of Thessaloniki

What You Need To Know: EU enlargement is back in vogue. EU ministers and officials are busy discussing what an EU of up to 35 member states would look like. People I speak to in Brussels excitedly point out that the portfolio of the EU enlargement commissioner, which will be vacant in 2024, is one of the most sought after, with several EU member states wanting their candidate to get the job.

The buzz is due to the way Ukraine has responded to the full-scale invasion by Russia last year. In historic speed, the country became an EU candidate country together with Moldova last year. Both have continued to reform in recent months, despite the political hardships they are facing, and all indicators point to the pair starting EU accession talks at the end of this year.

But there is a cautionary tale here that is worth revisiting. June 21 marked the 20th anniversary of the Thessaloniki summit. Now, the EU loves a summit. If there is one thing everyone in Brussels can agree on, it is that there are too many of them, with at least one gathering happening every month. But this summit, in Greeces second city two decades ago, was historic.

It was the first-ever EU-Western Balkans summit, and the outcome was that all countries emerging from the former Yugoslavia, plus Albania, would become EU members. Then, much like now, there was hope and excitement all around. Granted, the region had just come out of the devastating wars of the 1990s, but now they were all gathered, smiling and ready to cooperate.

And the EU itself was supercharged. Only a few months before, the treaty of Athens was signed, paving the way for eight Central and Eastern European countries, including the former Yugoslav republic of Slovenia, to join the bloc in 2004. And a year before, on January 1, 2002, the first euro notes and coins started circulating in 12 EU states. The future looked bright.

Deep Background: I recently reread the Thessaloniki declaration and watched the final press conference from that gathering. And it is palpable how much has changed. And how much hasnt.

Perhaps the key line in the declaration was that the EU reiterates its unequivocal support to the European perspective of the Western Balkan countries. The future of the Balkans is within the European Union. Back then, this was quite something. But perhaps the frustrating part is that there hasnt been much more movement in the last 20 years.

When EU leaders met in Brussels last week, they adopted summit conclusions stating recalling the EU-Western Balkans Thessaloniki Summit Declaration of 21 June 2003 and its previous conclusions, notably those of 23-24 June 2022, the European Council reiterates its full and unequivocal commitment to the EU membership perspective of the Western Balkans and its support for the acceleration of the accession process and the related reforms. Not really much of a difference.

Yes, not all has remained the same. Croatia became a member back in 2013, and all countries in the region, apart from Kosovo, which back in 2003 hadnt yet achieved independence, are now official EU candidate countries. But only two -- Montenegro and Serbia -- have started accession talks, and the last time any of them opened or closed any of the 30-plus policy chapters in the negotiations was two years ago. Simply put: No Western Balkan country will join the EU anytime soon.

Drilling Down

Part of the problem is the EU itself. Two years after Thessaloniki, French and Dutch voters rejected a new EU constitution, plunging the bloc into an institutional crisis. Then, problem after problem appeared. The eurozone almost imploded during the financial crisis that started in 2008; the migration crisis of 2015-16 nearly tore the bloc apart; Brexit; the pandemic; and the Russian invasion all made the EU focus elsewhere but on the Balkans.

To illustrate this, just go back to the Thessaloniki declaration. In the final paragraph it states that: We have agreed to meet periodically at our level, within the framework of an EU-Western Balkan forum, in order to discuss issues of common concern, to review progress of the countries of the region in their road to Europe, and to exchange views on major developments in the EU.

When did the next EU-Western Balkans summit take place? In Sofia, in 2018! Since then, the summits have happened almost on a regular basis, but they have been rather unhappy affairs. In one of them, in Slovenia in 2021, some western EU member states didnt even want to mention the word enlargement in the final communique.

Contrast that with the triumphant positivity back in 2003. The Greek foreign minister, Giorgios Papandreou, confidently noted that the countries will be part of our family and added: In the Balkans, people have lived through wars, they have live through times of hope that have been dashed. So, what we are providing them is a very secure road of getting there. The European Commission president at the time, Romano Prodi, was even more cocksure: There is no unknown future. There is a known future, a very well-known one -- they will be part of Europe. I fought for that.

But the optimism was apparent also among the Balkan politicians gathered at the press conference -- producing quotes that with hindsight look comical. The Bosnian foreign minister, Mladen Ivanic, for example, noted that the Balkans is the place where cooperation is normal, even though his own country over the last decade has been deadlocked due in large part to its two entities divided over ethnic lines.

And the president of Macedonia, Boris Trajkovski, said that the Western Balkans now is moving towards the EU, and it was necessary for the EU to move towards the Western Balkans. Nothing was mentioned of the naming issue between Skopje and Athens that made him represent the former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia in Thessaloniki and would be solved by renaming the country to North Macedonia first 15 years later.

But perhaps the biggest irony were the words of the EU's foreign policy chief at the time, Javier Solana, announcing at the final presser that Belgrade and Pristina clearly expressed the readiness to enter a practical dialogue on issues of mutual interest and that dialogue will begin shortly. Due to growing tensions and other developments, those talks didnt start until 2011.

And despite some deals between the pair, relations between Kosovo and Serbia are currently at an all-time low: At a recent EU-mediated crisis meeting in Brussels lasting four hours, the leaders didnt even meet; the EU is mulling whether to freeze some EU funds for Kosovo; and there are serious talks that an international conference is needed to solve the impasse.

After the meeting, almost 20 years to the day after Solanas hopeful announcement in Thessaloniki, the current EU foreign policy chief and fellow Spaniard, Josef Borrell, glumly told the Brussels press: We have called on Kosovo and Serbia many times to de-escalate tensions and to return to the process of normalization of relations, adding: Unfortunately, so far, all what we have been witnessing is just the opposite.

Looking Ahead

On July 6, NATO Secretary-General Jens Stoltenberg will invite the foreign ministers of Finland, Sweden, and Turkey, as well as the intelligence and security chiefs from the three countries, to Brussels in a last-ditch bid to get some sort of agreement on Swedens accession to the military alliance ahead of or during the Vilnius summit on July 11-12.

The prospects, however, look grim. Hungary, which also has not ratified Stockholms accession protocol, recently announced that its parliament wont vote on it until its autumn legislative session. Turkey has also demanded that Sweden do more, especially against various Kurdish groups that Ankara believes are engaged in terrorism. The burning of the Koran outside a Stockholm Mosque last week also incensed Ankara and is likely to further complicate the situation.

This week, I am in Tallinn to interview Estonian Prime Minister Kaja Kallas -- one of the most outspoken leaders in Europe -- whose name is often mentioned for various top positions in the EU and NATO. The interview will focus on the upcoming NATO summit, the ongoing war in Ukraine, the chances for Kyiv to join the alliance, and how she sees the future of Russia and Belarus in the wake of Wagner chief Yevgeny Prigozhin's recent mutiny.

Check out RFE/RL in the coming days for coverage on all of these issues.

That's all for this week. Feel free to reach out to me on any of these issues on Twitter @RikardJozwiak, or on e-mail at jozwiakr@rferl.org.

Until next time,

Richard Jozwiak

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The Roads and Transport Authority (RTA) has awarded the contract for Garn Al Sabkha - Street Sheikh Mohamed Bin Zayed Road Intersection Improvement Project, being developed at an investment of AED374 million ($102 million).

The project is part of RTA's masterplan to upgrade strategic road corridors to the East and the West such as Al Yalayis and Expo Roads, which it had completed a few years ago.

The scope of work includes construction of four bridges, spanning 3000 m capable of carrying 17,600 vehicles per hour, said RTA in a statement.

It will also see 7 km of roadwork being laid, enhancing surface intersections on the service road running parallel to Sheikh Mohamed Bin Zayed Road, as well as street lighting, traffic signals & systems, rainwater drainage networks, and irrigation system networks, it stated.

Mattar Al Tayer, the Director-General and Chairman of the Board of Executive Directors, RTA, said: "This project is part of a larger initiative to improve Garn Al Sabkha Street Corridor; that connects Sheikh Zayed and Sheikh Mohamed Bin Zayed Roads. Its goal is to guarantee that traffic flows smoothly between Sheikh Zayed Road, Sheikh Mohamed Bin Zayed Road, First Al Khail Street, and Al Asayel Street."

Once completed, the project will reduce transit distance and time by 40% for traffic heading from Garn Al Sabkha Street to Sheikh Mohamed Bin Zayed Road in the direction of Al Qusais and Sharjah, reducing peak hour journey time from 20 minutes to just 12 minutes.

"It will also reduce the journey time by 70 percent for vehicles from Sheikh Mohamed Bin Zayed Road rightward to Al Yalayis Road in the direction of Jebel Ali Port from 21 minutes to 7 minutes," he added.
At the recent United Nations Security Council Briefing on the Democratic Republic of the Congo, UN Assistant Secretary General for Africa Martha Pobee warned that the security situation in the DRC has deteriorated. In the last months alone, hundreds of people have been killed by armed groups.

Ms. Probee said MONUSCO, the UN peacekeeping force, continues to do everything possible to fulfill its mandate to protect civilians. MONUSCO has been in the DRC since 1999, and its mandate was renewed for a year last December with the goal of the forces eventual withdrawal from the DRC. In recent months, however, the DRC government has increased calls for MONUSCO to withdraw from the country after the elections planned for December 2023.

U.S. Alternative Representative for Special Political Affairs at the U.N Robert Wood expressed concern over those calls.

MONUSCO cannot  and should not - stay in the DRC indefinitely. But there is broad consensus that the DRC government will have not met the benchmarks it agreed upon as the minimum conditions for MONUSCOs drawdown by the end of 2023, he said. A precipitous withdrawal of MONUSCO would likely leave a security vacuum that state authorities are unable to fill, with devastating effects for the regions most vulnerable populations.

The humanitarian crisis, Ambassador Wood noted, is also worsening due to continued violence, resulting in one million internally displaced person, an appalling escalation in gender-based violence  including conflict-related sexual violence - and immense human suffering.

To address such a pressing and urgent situation, the DRC and Great Lakes Region need political will, a commitment to dialogue, and a willingness to make hard decisions and pursue much needed reform. They also need MONUSCO, he said.

Ambassador Wood emphasized that the United States is committed to ensuring MONUSCO can deliver on its mandate to protect civilians and assist the DRC strengthen key governance, justice, and security institutions. In order for the mission to succeed, it deserves this Councils support and that of the DRC government. The people of the DRC deserve peace, said Ambassador Wood. The United States stands with them in their pursuit of a better future.
Sixteen months after Russia invaded Ukraine, the killing, destruction and suffering continue unabated there, and the prospects for peace remain desperately dim, according to United Nations Under-Secretary General Rosemary DiCarlo.

Russias cruel and relentless attacks have left millions of homes in Ukraine without light, without heat, without water, said United States Representative at the United Nations, Linda Thomas-Greenfield. And recent strikes in Kherson have killed civilians, including aid workers delivering assistance to those fleeing flooding after the Kakhovka Dams destruction.

As we speak, Russia is blocking the UN from getting aid to people in the flooded areas. Thats unacceptable. Russia must immediately allow the UN to deliver desperately needed humanitarian assistance to occupied areas of Ukraine, she said. Humanitarian workers must have safe passage as they deliver aid and assistance to those in need. Full stop.

Moscow publicly feigns deep concern about attacks on critical infrastructure, said Ambassador Thomas-Greenfield. But Russias hypocrisy is on full display as we watch Russian missiles and drones reduce entire Ukrainian cities to rubble.

President Putin is hell-bent on beating a foreign country into submission. But the Ukrainian people will never, never give up their sovereignty, their democracy, their freedom. President Putin thought his forces would march into Ukraine with little to no resistance, she said.

But he was wrong. The Ukrainian people have demonstrated remarkable bravery and grit. President Putin thought he would face no consequences from the international community. Then, he hoped the international community would tire of his war and simply move on. But here, too, he was wrong.

More than 140 countries have repeatedly voted to condemn Russias war of choice. And more than 140 countries voted to support a comprehensive, just, and lasting peace in Ukraine based on UN principles, said Ambassador Thomas-Greenfield. Russia has demonstrated no meaningful interest in negotiating toward peace.

We must continue to hold Russia accountable for its crimes against the Ukrainian people. And we must continue to call on Russia to silence its guns and embrace diplomacy. Until it does so, the United States will continue to support Ukraine in its principled self-defense against Russias savage attacks.

Caving to Moscows aggression would endanger every single country  big and small, new and old, said Ambassador Thomas-Greenfield. We must never let war become a viable path for redrawing international borders  And we must continue to stand in solidarity with the Ukrainian people.
A MAN was shot in the leg outside a working mens club in Thrybergh on Friday evening.

Police were called to Hollings Lane at about 7.20pm to reports of a victim with gunshot wounds.

The incident is understood to have happened outside Thrybergh Working Mens Club, where the man was reportedly fired at by someone travelling in a white Range Rover Evoque.

The vehicle is understood to have left the scene but has since been located, South Yorkshire Police said.

Part of Hollings Lane was cordoned off on Friday night and the police helicopter was sent to the area.

The victim was taken to hospital for treatment but has since been released, a police spokesperson said.

An investigation is ongoing to determine the circumstances surrounding the incident and there has been an increased police presence in the community over the weekend.

Anyone with information or anyone with CCTV or dashcam footage that may help officers with their enquiries, should contact us online or by calling 101 quoting incident number 955 of June 30. You can email footage to enquiries@southyorks.pnn.police.uk quoting the same incident number in the subject line. Access our online services here: smartcontact.southyorkshire.police.uk.

Alternatively, if you prefer not to give your personal details, you can stay completely anonymous and pass on what you know by contacting the independent charity Crimestoppers.

Call their UK Contact Centre on freephone 0800 555 111 or complete a simple and secure anonymous online form at www.crimestoppers-uk.org.

A spokesperson for Thrybergh Working Mens Club said the incident was unrelated to the venue and had involved no-one from there.
The Bank of Japan will on Monday release its quarterly Tankan Survey of sentiment, highlighting a busy day for Asia-Pacific economic activity.

In the first quarter, large industry capex was seen higher by 3.2 percent, while small industry capex was seen higher by 1.4 percent. The large manufacturers index had a score of +1 with an outlook of +3, while the large non-manufacturers index had a score of +15 with an outlook of +20.

New Zealand will provide May figures for building consents; in April, consents were down 2.6 percent on month.

Australia will release May numbers for building permits and home loans. Approvals are expected to rise 2.0 percent on month after sinking 8.1 percent in April. Home loans were down 3.8 percent on month in April.

Hong Kong will provide May figures for retail sales; in April, sales were up 15.0 percent on year.

Indonesia will release June figures for consumer prices, with forecasts suggesting an increase of 0.24 percent on month and 3.64 percent on year after adding 009 percent on month and 4.00 percent on year in May. Core CPI is expected to add 2.64 percent on year, easing from 2.66 percent in the previous month

Finally, several of the regional nations will see June results for their respective manufacturing PMIs from S&P Global, including Australia (Judo), Indonesia, Japan (Jibun), Malaysia, the Philippines, South Korea, Taiwan, Thailand, Vietnam and China (Caixin).

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The Dutch manufacturing activity continued to shrink in June due to sustained declines in output and new orders, survey results from S&P Global showed on Monday.



The Nevi manufacturing Purchasing Managers' Index dropped to 43.8 in June from 44.2 in the previous month.

The index has remained below the neutral 50.0 mark for the tenth consecutive month, signaling contraction in the sector. Moreover, this was the lowest reading in over three years.

"The Nevi Netherlands Manufacturing PMI suggests that the downturn is far from over," ABN AMRO manufacturing sector economist Albert Jan Swart, said.

The survey showed that new orders logged a sustained and rapid reduction. Sales declined at one of the sharpest pace in the survey history. New export orders dropped for the eleventh consecutive month.

Declines in output and orders led to a fresh reduction in manufacturing employment. The fall in staffing levels was the first since October 2020.

Backlogs of work decreased for the fifth consecutive month, largely reflecting subdued order books. Due to weaker demand, manufacturers reduced input buying.

Further, the survey showed that suppliers' delivery times improved for a sixth straight month.

On the price front, data revealed that the fall in input prices was among the fastest on record. There was a back-to-back decrease in factory gate charges. Optimism among manufacturers moderated in June, to the weakest since last November.

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The European Space Agency's Euclid spacecraft lifted off on a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket from Cape Canaveral Space Force Station in Florida on a mission to study the nature of two mysterious components of the Universe: dark matter and dark energy, and to help answer the fundamental question: what is the Universe made of?

Astronomers use the term "dark energy" in reference to the unknown cause of this accelerated expansion.

ESA said that following launch and separation from the rocket, its European Space Operations Centre (ESOC) in Darmstadt, Germany, confirmed acquisition of signal from Euclid via the New Norcia ground station in Australia.

"The successful launch of Euclid marks the beginning of a new scientific endeavour to help us answer one of the most compelling questions of modern science," says ESA Director General Josef Aschbacher. "Euclid has been made possible by ESA's leadership, the effort and expertise of hundreds of European industrial and scientific institutions, and through collaboration with international partners. The quest to answer fundamental questions about our cosmos is what makes us human. And, often, it is what drives the progress of science and the development of powerful, far-reaching, new technologies. ESA is committed to expanding Europe's ambitions and successes in space for future generations."

Euclid will observe billions of galaxies out to 10 billion light-years to create the largest, most accurate 3D map of the Universe, with the third dimension representing time itself. This detailed chart of the shape, position and movement of galaxies will reveal how matter is distributed across immense distances and how the expansion of the Universe has evolved over cosmic history, enabling astronomers to infer the properties of dark energy and dark matter. This will help theorists to improve our understanding of the role of gravity and pin down the nature of these enigmatic entities.

NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Southern California delivered critical hardware for one of the Euclid spacecraft's instruments. In addition, NASA has established a U.S.-based Euclid science data center, and NASA-funded science teams will join other Euclid scientists in studying dark energy, galaxy evolution, and dark matter.

The U.S. space agency said its forthcoming Nancy Grace Roman mission will also study dark energy - in ways that are complementary to Euclid. Mission planners will use Euclid's findings to inform Roman's dark energy work.

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Apple's highly anticipated Vision Pro mixed reality headset is facing production challenges, leading to "drastic cuts" in its production forecasts, according to a report by the Financial Times.

The $3,500 headset, expected to be released early next year, has been met with speculation about the lengthy gap between its unveiling at WWDC in June and the official launch.

Analysts suggest that this delay may be attributed to supply chain difficulties rather than providing developers with ample time to create apps for the device.

The report indicates that Apple has been dissatisfied with the manufacturing partners responsible for supplying the micro-OLED displays for the wearer's eyes and the outward-facing curved lenticular lens. While Sony and TSMC are said to have provided the micro-OLED displays for prototypes, it remains unknown who will be the supplier at scale.

Due to these production challenges, Apple is reportedly expecting to produce fewer than 400,000 units in 2024, according to sources close to the company and Luxshare, the Chinese contract manufacturer initially tasked with assembling the device. In contrast, two Chinese component suppliers have allegedly been asked to provide materials for only 130,000 to 150,000 units in the first year.

The Financial Times notes that both production estimates represent a significant reduction from an earlier internal sales target of 1 million units within the first 12 months. Analysts and industry experts believe that Apple's conservative forecasts reflect a lack of confidence in scaling up production, following years of missed deadlines for the device's launch.

In the meantime, Apple has reportedly postponed plans to introduce a more affordable version of the headset targeting the mass market. The company has been collaborating with Korean display makers Samsung and LG for the second-generation headset, exploring the use of mini-LED to lower costs. However, sources indicate that Apple continues to insist on using micro-OLED displays, even for the non-Pro headset, despite suppliers failing to meet expectations.

Bloomberg's Mark Gurman previously reported that Apple intends to release a more affordable version of its Vision Pro headset by the end of 2025, potentially named "Apple Vision One" or simply "Apple Vision."

For comments and feedback contact: editorial@rttnews.com

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ELKO  The Nevada Center for Civic Engagement hosted a four-day workshop in Elko in June that included teachers from Elko, Clark, Washoe and White Pine counties.

The theme  Civics Empowers All Students  ran June 20 through 23 in all-day sessions at the High Tech Center.

Kathleen Dickinson, executive director of NVCCE, praised staff and mentors Denise Coverley Paxton, Christine Hull, Lisa Larson, Karleigh Goodale and Carol McGrew, who provided in depth pedagogy and content for our 22 engaged Nevada teachers. The teachers are excited that they will bring new teaching strategies back to their classrooms in August.

NVCCE opens the door to democracy by supporting teachers, empowering students and engaging the community for a more educated Nevada. The Nevada Center for Civic Engagement provides services directly to Nevada students and teachers.

Services provided include inquiry-based civics, history and community focused learning programs such as We the People, Project Citizen, National History Day in Nevada and Law Day.

During the workshop, National History Day in Nevada teachers presented on a variety of Turning Points in History topics, including the Japanese Internment Camps; Marie Antoinettes Fashion Impact on the French Revolution; the Influence of the Challenger Disaster on NASA; and Central High Schools Integration.

We all learned something new from all of them, Dickinson said. Everyone saw Doral Academy of Northern Nevada students present their Project Citizen Community Engagement in Public Policy research on School Bus transportation, and the We the People presentations were excellent. Another valuable point the participants appreciated was their empathy gained understanding their own students nervousness in gathering data, writing testimony and presenting. 

Dickinson explained that elementary, middle and high school teachers following the new We the People program are participating in the upcoming school year and are able to get textbooks because of your support.

She reported one participants response to the training seminar, who said they loved that the workshop was interactive and thought provoking. I also really appreciate the attention to diversity and inclusion and being honest about all of our history.

In addition to the workshops, the teachers  many of whom had not previously visited northeastern Nevada  toured the California Trail Interpretive Center, the Northeastern Nevada Museum, Lamoille Canyon and the Ruby Mountains during their stay.

Dickinson also gave a big thank you Sarah Negrete, the Director of Professional Learning for the Northeastern Nevada Regional Professional Development Program and Jennifer Puentes for their support in providing the use of the High Tech Center on the Great Basin Campus for our use during the workshop.
We continue our rare-earth series with praseodymium. Its sometimes called the green metal because it tarnishes so quickly that if you leave a small block of it on the shelf and come back a year later, you will find nothing but a pile of dense green oxide. To prevent this from happening, praseodymium, like sodium and potassium, is best kept under mineral oil.

You probably have not heard of this element although it is finding a great use in manufacturing batteries for electric vehicles and is starting to be used for fiber optic lines because its atomic f-orbitals allow for long excited electron lifetimes and high luminescence yields.

Looking in the periodic table we find praseodymium as a chemical element with the symbol Pr and the atomic number 59 situated as the third member of the lanthanide series (the group usually placed below the main chart) and is considered to be one of the rare-earth metals almost like the one we covered a few weeks ago, lanthanum.

Praseodymium is a soft, silvery, malleable metal almost like silver in mechanical properties. Valued for its magnetic, electrical, chemical, and optical properties it is too reactive to be found alone in nature and is always combined with another element. Its name, coming from Ancient Greek (prasinos), meaning leek-green and (didymos) from twin because it was often found mixed with another rare-earth metal, neodymium. Its discovery has an interesting story.

In 1751, the Swedish mineralogist Axel Fredrik Cronstedt not only discovered the metal nickel but in one of his trips to the copper mine at Bastnas, Sweden, he discovered a heavy mineral that was later named cerite. From it came the element cerium as mentioned several weeks ago in this column. But in 1839 cerium oxide was shown to be a mixture of oxides by the Swedish chemist Carl Gustaf Mosander when he separated out two other oxides, which he named lanthana and didymia. While lanthanum was found to be a pure element, didymium was not and turned out to be only a stew of other elements from praseodymium to europium. It was not until 1885 that Carl Auer von Welsbach separated didymium into praseodymium and neodymium, confirming the separation by spectroscopic analysis.

Praseodymium is one of the 19 elements (such as gold) that has only one stable and naturally occurring isotope, Pr-141, although thirty-eight other radioactive isotopes have been made artificially in nuclear reactors and most have half-lives under a day. One interesting fact is that Pr-141 is produced in stars through both the slow and rapid neutron capture process. Although called a rare-earth praseodymium is not particularly rare, making up 9.2 mg/kg of the Earths crust. This value is a little less than thorium (9.6 mg/kg) and makes praseodymium the fourth-most abundant of the lanthanides, behind cerium (66.5 mg/kg), and lanthanum (39 mg/kg).

Praseodymium is usually separated from the other lanthanides via ion-exchange chromatography and this makes the cost rather high, about $68 a pound compared to lanthanum of $9 a pound.

The applications of praseodymium started out as a glass coloring agent when Leo Moser of the Moser Glassworks in the Czech Republic, investigated its use in the late 1920s, yielding a yellow-green glass given the name Prasemit. However many other different elements could give a similar color at less expense so it really never took off as a product. The next commercial use of purified praseodymium which continues today, is in the form of a yellow-orange Praseodymium Yellow stain for painting ceramics.

In combination with neodymium, another rare-earth element that we will cover in the weeks to come, praseodymium is used to create high-power magnets notable for their strength and durability. Praseodymiumnickel intermetallic alloys (PrNi5) have such a strong magnetocaloric effect that it has allowed scientists to approach within one thousandth of a degree of absolute zero by simply placing a piece in a strong magnetic field. When the field is shut off the disordering of the magnetic domains uses thermal energy and the sample cools considerably. There are companies today looking at this concept to avoid the use of freon-like liquids within their system.

Praseodymium has also been used as an alloying agent with magnesium to create high-strength metals that are used in aircraft engines and praseodymium is a component of didymium glass, which is used to make certain types of welders and glass blowers goggles because it can filter out the certain wavelengths of light. The opposite is also utilized where praseodymium compounds are present in the core of carbon arc lights, which are used in the motion picture industry for studio lighting because it provides a number of spectral lines that are rich in the green region.
Weather Alert

...FLOOD WATCH IN EFFECT FROM FRIDAY AFTERNOON THROUGH LATE FRIDAY NIGHT... * WHAT...Flash flooding caused by excessive rainfall is possible. * WHERE...All of northern New York and Vermont. * WHEN...From Friday afternoon through late Friday night. * IMPACTS...Excessive runoff may result in flooding of rivers, creeks, streams, and other low-lying and flood-prone locations. Creeks and streams may rise out of their banks. Flooding may occur in poor drainage and urban areas. Storm drains and ditches may become clogged with debris. Area creeks and streams are running high and could flood with more heavy rain. * ADDITIONAL DETAILS... - Another round of heavy, scattered thunderstorms capable of producing heavy rainfall is expected. Rainfall may exceed 1.5 inches in an hour which would result in flash flooding. Saturated soil conditions will cause rainfall to runoff into creeks and streams, which remain high or near record levels. - 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. &&
On May 3, the Rancho Penasquitos Community Planning Board approved Merge 56, a new mixed-use residential and retail center off Camino Del Sur and SR-56.

Gary Levitt of Seabreeze Properties is seeking a community plan amendment from the city. He hopes to get the project before the San Diego Planning Commission and City Council this year for approval to potentially begin construction next year.

The site was originally part of the larger 147-acre Rhodes Crossing project approved by the city in 2004. Levitt purchased the 40-acre commercial portion of the property in 2013  it was originally approved as a big box self-storage and commercial center with a sea of parking; instead Levitt plans for a different type of project utilizing outstanding design.

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We want to create a town center, a place that people want to live near and go to, meet a friend for coffee or hang out, thats the essence of the project, said Levitt, who recently completed construction on the Merge mixed-use project on Carmel Country Road and Carmel Mountain Road and is also the owner of the Torrey Hills Shopping Center.

Merge 56 features anchor retail buildings around a walkable central green plaza. The projects 525,000 square feet of commercial and office space call for uses such as a movie theater, grocery store, fitness center and other retail. Instead of the large surface parking lot, there will be a parking structure hidden behind the buildings.

(The plaza) is what thrills me about this project, the landscaping and the dynamics going on within the spaces, said Thom Clark, the planning boards land use subcommittee chair.

The residential component of 242 dwellings includes a mix of two- to three-story townhomes, single-family units and affordable housing units.

The project includes an extension of Camino Del Sur and Carmel Mountain Road, providing much improved connections for area residents. While some residents wanted to see the roads expanded to four-lane roads, the developers believe the two-lane roads are the right size with less impact on the surrounding environment.

Merge 56 will also provide a missing trail link with a formal trail connection between the Del Mar Mesa Preserve and Darkwood Canyon. The developers will also replace low-quality vernal pools in the area with high-quality, sustainable vernal pools and contribute $30 million of Facilities Benefit Assessment fees to be used by the community.

The remaining acreage of the Rhodes Crossing property surrounding Merge 56 is planned to be developed as residential homes. Residents have expressed concerns about the density of the new residential element and the impacts on traffic and public safety.
Pakistan's President Dr. Arif Alvi recently visited the Prophet's Mosque in Madinah after he arrived in Jeddah last week with his family to perform Hajj.

Upon his arrival at this mosque, Dr. Alvi and his family were received by important Saudi officials. He performed his prayers there.

Last week, Pakistan's President was received at the King Abdulaziz International Airport in Jeddah by the Deputy Governor of Makkah Prince Badr bin Sultan bin Abdulaziz.

Dr. Alvi was in ihram upon his arrival in Jeddah and was accompanied by family members and his staff.

This year, the number of Hajj pilgrims returned to pre-pandemic numbers with more than 1.8 million pilgrims performing Hajj in Makkah.

Image source: @theholymosques Twitter page
"I think China has made a tremendous job during the past years and it will continue to make progress, especially at this critical moment that the world is witnessing, after the crisis of COVID-19 and the crisis of Russia-Ukraine."

Delegates from member nations of the UN Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) praised China's remarkable contributions to global food security, and expressed anticipation for closer collaboration in the fight against poverty and for zero hunger.

The remarks came after Qu Dongyu, incumbent FAO director-general, was re-elected earlier on Sunday during the ongoing 43rd session of the FAO Conference, the highest governing body of the Rome-based UN agency. His second term will run from Aug. 1, 2023, to July 31, 2027.

Founded in 1945 and headquartered in Rome, Italy, FAO is a specialized UN agency leading cooperation in food and agriculture. The organization plays a vital role in global food and agricultural policy exchanges, standard-setting, information gathering and statistics.

Qu, who was elected in June 2019 to head the UN agency and the first Chinese national to serve in the position, is expected to further boost China's cooperation with FAO and its member nations in the coming years, said delegates to the session on Sunday.

China's endeavors in eliminating poverty and ending hunger have greatly impressed many delegates, including Bassam Essam Rady Abdelhamid Rady, Egypt's permanent representative ambassador to FAO.

"I think China has made a tremendous job during the past years and it will continue to make progress, especially at this critical moment that the world is witnessing, after the crisis of COVID-19 and the crisis of Russia-Ukraine," said Rady.

Egypt, an active participator in FAO's South-South Cooperation (SSC) Program, appreciates China's "major and pivotal role" in this field, he noted.

Since the SSC was launched by FAO in 1996, China has always been actively involved and played a very important leading role in the SSC and has donated 130 million U.S. dollars to FAO since 2009, exclusively for South-South and triangular cooperation.

The Chinese government has also provided considerable agricultural technical assistance to developing countries. To date, China has dispatched more than 1,000 Chinese experts and technicians, through FAO, to Africa, Asia, the Caribbean and the South Pacific.

Egypt is honored to have a part in the China-proposed Belt and Road Initiative by aligning the initiative with Egypt's national projects in the seaports and Suez Canal, said Rady.

The collaboration serves not only the interests of the two countries, but also that of the world and all humanity, and is for the betterment of the job that FAO is doing, he added.

"Bangladesh and China enjoy extremely cordial bilateral relations, and we have a multi-faceted collaboration," said Shameem Ahsan, Bangladeshi permanent representative to FAO. "And I think both countries can immensely benefit by collaborating and even exploring other new areas of cooperation."

During the session, Chinese Minister of Agriculture and Rural Affairs Tang Renjian reaffirmed his country's international responsibilities as a major developing country for global food security.

China will firmly practice multilateralism, and work with other countries to ensure global food security, eradicate poverty, achieve zero hunger, and push to achieve the UN 2030 Sustainable Development Goals, said Tang.
Police are already using self-driving car footage as video evidence:

While security cameras are commonplace in American cities, self-driving cars represent a new level of access for law enforcement  and a new method for encroachment on privacy, advocates say. Crisscrossing the city on their routes, self-driving cars capture a wider swath of footage. And its easier for law enforcement to turn to one company with a large repository of videos and a dedicated response team than to reach out to all the businesses in a neighborhood with security systems.

Weve known for a long time that they are essentially surveillance cameras on wheels, said Chris Gilliard, a fellow at the Social Science Research Council. Were supposed to be able to go about our business in our day-to-day lives without being surveilled unless we are suspected of a crime, and each little bit of this technology strips away that ability.

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While self-driving services like Waymo and Cruise have yet to achieve the same level of market penetration as Ring, the wide range of video they capture while completing their routes presents other opportunities. In addition to the San Francisco homicide, Bloombergs review of court documents shows police have sought footage from Waymo and Cruise to help solve hit-and-runs, burglaries, aggravated assaults, a fatal collision and an attempted kidnapping.

In all cases reviewed by Bloomberg, court records show that police collected footage from Cruise and Waymo shortly after obtaining a warrant. In several cases, Bloomberg could not determine whether the recordings had been used in the resulting prosecutions; in a few of the cases, law enforcement and attorneys said the footage had not played a part, or was only a formality. However, video evidence has become a lynchpin of criminal cases, meaning its likely only a matter of time.
The Euclid spacecraft, built and operated by ESA, with contributions from NASA, lifted off from Cape Canaveral Space Force Station in Florida at 11:12 a.m. EDT (17:12 CEST) on July 1, 2023, beginning its mission to study why the Universe is expanding at an accelerating rate. Following launch and separation from the rocket, ESAs European Space Operations Centre confirmed acquisition of signal from Euclid via the New Norcia ground station in Australia at 11:57 a.m. EDT (17:57 CEST).

Euclid will observe billions of galaxies out to 10 billion light-years to create the largest, most accurate 3D map of the Universe, with the third dimension representing time itself.

This detailed chart of the shape, position and movement of galaxies will reveal how matter is distributed across immense distances and how the expansion of the Universe has evolved over cosmic history, enabling astronomers to infer the properties of dark energy and dark matter.

This will help theorists to improve our understanding of the role of gravity and pin down the nature of these enigmatic entities.

To achieve its ambitious scientific goal, Euclid is equipped with a 1.2-m reflecting telescope that feeds the two innovative scientific instruments: VIS, which takes very sharp images of galaxies over a large fraction of the sky, and NISP, which can analyse galaxies infrared light by wavelength to accurately establish their distance.

The spacecraft and communications will be controlled from ESAs European Space Operations Centre.

To cope with the vast amounts of data Euclid will acquire, ESAs Estrack network of deep space antennas has been upgraded.

The successful launch of Euclid marks the beginning of a new scientific endeavour to help us answer one of the most compelling questions of modern science, said ESA Director General Josef Aschbacher.

Euclid has been made possible by ESAs leadership, the effort and expertise of hundreds of European industrial and scientific institutions, and through collaboration with international partners.

The quest to answer fundamental questions about our cosmos is what makes us human.

And, often, it is what drives the progress of science and the development of powerful, far-reaching, new technologies.

ESA is committed to expanding Europes ambitions and successes in space for future generations.

The Euclid mission is the result of the passion and expertise of those who contributed to designing and building this sophisticated space telescope, the competence of our flight operations team, and the inquiring spirit of the science community, said Euclid project manager Giuseppe Racca, a researcher with ESA.

There have been many challenges during the project, but we have worked hard and now we have successfully reached this launch milestone together with our partners in the Euclid Consortium and NASA.

We are thrilled about the successful launch of ESAs Euclid mission and are eager to see the science it returns, said Nicola Fox, associate administrator for NASAs Science Mission Directorate.

By studying the dark side of our Universe, Euclid is not only paving the way for NASAs Roman Space Telescope, it is igniting a new golden age of survey astronomy that will help us understand our Universes history and structure in ways that were not possible before.

Today we celebrate the successful launch of a ground-breaking mission that places Europe at the forefront of cosmological studies, said Carole Mundell, ESAs Director of Science.

If we want to understand the Universe we live in, we need to uncover the nature of dark matter and dark energy and understand the role they played in shaping our cosmos.

To address these fundamental questions, Euclid will deliver the most detailed map of the extragalactic sky.

This inestimable wealth of data will also enable the scientific community to investigate many other aspects of astronomy, for many years to come.

This is a great moment for science, one that we have long been looking forward to: the launch of Euclid, on a mission to decipher the puzzle of dark matter and dark energy, said Euclid project scientist Rene Laureijs, a researcher with ESA.

The big mystery of the fundamental constituents of the Universe is staring us in the face, offering a formidable challenge.

Thanks to its advanced telescope and powerful scientific instrumentation, Euclid is poised to help us unravel this mystery.

In the next four weeks, Euclid will travel towards Sun-Earth Lagrange point 2, an equilibrium point of the Sun-Earth system located 1.5 million km from Earth (about four times the Earth-Moon distance) in the direction opposite from the Sun.

There, Euclid will be manoeuvred into orbit around this point and mission controllers will start the activities to verify all the functions of the spacecraft, check out the telescope and finally turn on the scientific instruments.

Scientists and engineers will then be engaged in an intense two-month phase of testing and calibrating Euclids scientific instruments and preparing for routine observations.

Over six years Euclid will survey one third of the sky with unprecedented accuracy and sensitivity.
Researchers have identified a strategy that can offset the random and unpredictable nature of weather conditions that threaten carbon emission reduction efforts in the shipping sector.

Erratic weather is a major source of concern for ship owners installing modern sails to reduce carbon emissions. However, new research from The University of Manchester highlights operational strategies that can reduce shipping emissions by up to a quarter, strengthening confidence in sails as a decarbonisation tool.

It is estimated that the international shipping sector contributes to 2-3% of global carbon emissions annually and its target to cut carbon by 50% relative to 2008 levels by 2050 falls short of the cuts required in the Paris Climate Agreement, meaning the shipping sector requires urgent global action.

The research, published in the journal Ocean Engineering, calculated carbon emissions from more than 1000 ship departures setting sail from three main shipping routes. The results found that combining modern sail technology with efficient routing systems could provide greater assurances of carbon savings by using the technique that reduces uncertainty from unpredictable weather patterns.

Dr James Mason, previously a postdoctoral researcher and now a visiting academic at the Tyndall Centre for Climate Change Research at The University of Manchester, said: "Current measures to reduce carbon emissions include fitting retrofit technologies, such as wind propulsion technology, where modern sails produce direct energy from the wind to reduce the power consumed by a ship's engine. Weather routing is also used as an efficient routing system to allow a ship to deviate from standard shipping routes to search for new routes with more favourable winds.

"Current academic methods assume a perfect foresight of future weather rather than accounting for unpredictable winds that are happening in real-time. This can detrimentally reduce the carbon savings from weather routing and could present a real challenge for the shipping sector when trying to meet its climate reduction goals."

Dr Alejandro Gallego Schmid, a Senior Lecturer at the Tyndall Centre for Climate Change Research, added: "This research provides an insight into which routes are most sensitive to changing weather forecasts when using wind propulsion and assesses a strategy that could help to mitigate the detrimental impact that unpredictable weather conditions can have."

The strategy mirrors existing routing methods in the sector by updating weather and wind every 12 hours to allow ships to adjust their routes based on the most accurate weather forecast available.

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To test the strategy, the study simulated 1080 ship departures across eastbound and westbound journeys in the North Sea, South Atlantic Ocean and North Atlantic Ocean, which have voyage times of up to 12 days.

The research found that the method successfully reduced the uncertainty from unpredictable weather and showed that sails and efficient routing can provide annual carbon savings of up to 25%.

However, while the method reduces the uncertainty from unpredictable weather, it does not remove it entirely. Wind propulsion and efficient routing can provide maximum carbon savings of up to 29% in ideal conditions and weather uncertainty reduces these savings by 10-20%. Further research is needed to understand how ships can achieve these maximum savings in practice.

Reducing shipping emissions by up to a quarter by using wind propulsion with efficient routing could provide profound benefits to the sector. The research offers a clearer understanding of the potential carbon savings achievable through wind propulsion decarbonisation strategies, without which, objectives in the Paris Climate Agreement may become out of sight.
A house destroyed by Tropical Cyclone Mocha at Ohn Taw Chay refugee camp in Sittwe, Myanmar, on May 16, 2023 (Photo: AFP/VNA)

The items, delivered to Yangon, include emergency shelter tool kits and a manual water filtration system worth 37,800 USD. They were transported from the Disaster Emergency Logistics System for ASEAN (DELSA) warehouse in Subang, Malaysia, by Indonesias military aircraft, according to the ASEAN Chairs statement released on June 30.



Earlier, two batches of DELSA relief items worth 393,400 USD had also been shipped to Yangon.



Moving forward, ASEAN stands ready to continue supporting Myanmar, including in the transition from emergency response to recovery phase. Modality of support may be developed, among others, from the final ASEAN Emergency Response and Assessment Team (ASEAN-ERAT) needs assessment report.



The ASEAN Secretary-General, in his capacity as the ASEAN Humanitarian Assistance Coordinator, will coordinate the bloc's response, the statement read.



Tropical Cyclone Mochas devastating impact has affected millions in Myanmar and severely damaging over 277,000 buildings including residential houses, schools, hospitals, and other public facilities.



To date, through ASEAN Coordinating Centre for Humanitarian Assistance on disaster management (AHA Centre), the ASEAN has mobilised 10 batches of humanitarian support for Myanmar with a total value of around 1.6 million USD. ASEAN member states have also responded individually by providing humanitarian assistance support in the forms of financial aid, logistics, and tools/equipment, the statement noted./.
Sa Dec city in Dong Thap province is among six coolest towns along Mekong river.

(Photo: The Sydney Morning Herald)

According to the Australian media outlet, most towns can be found set back a little from the ever-flooding Mekong river, although Cai Be district in Tien Giang province is an exception.

Its French colonial church appears to float on the waterlily-tangled water, and its market becomes mobile as locals take to rowboats piled with greens and tropical fruit, their wares advertised on the ends of long wooden poles, The Sydney Morning Herald noted.

Moving along the river, Sa Dec city in Dong Thap province is the next destination. If youre a fan of 20th-century, Vietnam-born French writer Marguerite Duras (and why wouldnt you be) youll want to visit Sa Dec where she lived and wrote The Lover, the article wrote.

Visitors to the area can enjoy Sa Decs crumbling waterside mansions and rickety temples, while surrounding flower farms are an Instagrammers delight, it added.

The newspaper also introduced visitors to Tan Chau town in An Giang which is located close to the Cambodian border and is famous for its silk manufacturing, with glorious lengths of shimmering silk emerging from rattling and clanking machines. The most coveted is black and dyed with a local berry and dried in the breeze.

The town is also devoted to mat weaving, slipper making and eel farming, whilst it is surrounded by rice fields and villages where monks snooze and kids show off by leaping into the Mekong from nearby bridges, it described.

The other three destinations to make the list are Phnom Penh, Koh Onha Tei, and Angkor Ban in Cambodia.

Khanh Hoa welcomes visitors on first charter flight from Uzbekistan

The Department of Tourism of Khanh Hoa, a province in south-central Vietnam, in collaboration with Pegas Misr Vietnam Travel Co. Ltd received the first charter flight on June 29 ringing travelers from Uzbekistan to the locality, reported VOV.

Khanh Hoa welcomes visitors on first charter flight from Uzbekistan. (Photo: Thesaigontimes.vn)

The flight departed from Tashkent International Airport (Uzbekistan) before touching down at Cam Ranh International Airport (Khanh Hoa) on June 29 morning, carrying onboard nearly 200 passengers, according to Nguyen Thi Le Thanh, director of the Khanh Hoa provincial Department of Tourism.

Among them are 30 people from Pegas Group, a travel agency in Uzbekistan, who came to explore the various tourism products on offer in the locality.

Uzbek tourists will stay at three or five-star hotels and resorts in Khanh Hoa during their stay of between 10 and 28 days.

This is the first charter flight from the new market exploited by Pegas Misr Vietnam Travel Co. Ltd., which specialises in Russian and Central Asian markets.

As of July, Khanh Hoa is set to receive a charter flight carrying tourists from Uzbekistan every week.

Since last October, Pegas Misr Vietnam Travel Co. Ltd has brought more than 20,000 travelers from Kazakhstan.

Colours of Vietnam exhibition attracts French public

A fine art exhibition themed Colours of Vietnam opened in Paris on June 28, attracting a large number of overseas Vietnamese living in France, as well as international friends who love Vietnamese paintings and culture, reported VNA.

Colours of Vietnam exhibition attracts French public (Photo: VNA)

The event is part of activities to mark 50 years of diplomatic relations between Vietnam and France (1973  2023) and 10 years of their strategic partnership (2013  2023).

Speaking at the opening ceremony, Florence Berthout, mayor of the fifth arrondissement of Paris, expected the exhibition would help French visitors and international friends gain an overview of the development of contemporary Vietnamese art.

Philippe Charlier, director of the Research and Education Department at the Museum of quai BranlyJacques Chirac, said that the artworks draw inspiration from Vietnamese people going about their daily lives.

Delegates at the opening ceremony (Photo: VNA)

Each drawing tells the story of the country and people, vividly expressed through an array of colours, he added, noting that the paintings blend Western art style with Eastern aesthetic elements, which are experimented on many different materials, such as silk, lacquer, scroll paper and oil.

He said along with the development of society, Vietnamese contemporary fine arts have created a strong vitality, with constant creative changes and a certain position in the international art scene.

Vietnamese Ambassador to France Dinh Toan Thang said more similar events will be held in the future on the occasion of the 50th anniversary of Vietnam-France diplomatic ties, bringing great "feasts" of Vienamese characteristics to the Vietnamese community in France, French visitors, and international friends.

The exhibition is scheduled to last through to July 15.

Vietnam named among 10 cheapest countries to work remotely

Canada-based magazine The Travel has revealed a list of the 10 cheapest countries to work remotely across the world, with Vietnam featured in the list, reported VOV.

A foreigner work remotely in a cafe in Hoi An City (Photo: VNA)

The country was placed seventh in the rankings.

According to The Travel, there is no place quite like Vietnam for global travelers who are seeking great food, surreal scenery, and lifetime friendship to enjoy.

It viewed the country as a hostel haven that attracts a huge number of budget travelers every year.

There are more than a few good reasons to visit Vietnam, especially since it is home to world-famous attractions like Ha Long Bay and exciting Vietnamese cities waiting to be explored, the magazine stressed.

The Travel confirmed that although prices are low, the Vietnamese travel sector doesn't compromise on service quality, with tourists being assured of top-notch hospitality nearly everywhere they go.

Rounding off the list of the top 10 cheapest countries to work remotely were the Czech Republic, Thailand, Portugal, Turkey, Mexico, India, Spain, Bulgaria, and Colombia./.
AFRICA

Central African Republic

Expected Council Action

In July, the Security Council is expected to extend the sanctions imposed on the Central African Republic (CAR), which expire at the end of the month, and renew the mandate of the Panel of Experts supporting the 2127 CAR Sanctions Committee, which expires on 31 August.

The mandate of the UN Multidimensional Integrated Stabilization Mission in the Central African Republic (MINUSCA) expires on 15 November.

Key Recent Developments

On 20 June, Special Representative of the Secretary-General for the CAR and head of MINUSCA Valentine Rugwabiza briefed the Council on efforts to advance the implementation of the 2019 Political Agreement for Peace and Reconciliation in the CAR, including the dissolution in April of two armed groups and factions of three other armed groups which are signatories to the peace agreement. She expressed concerns, however, about the deteriorating security situation on the countrys borders with Chad, South Sudan and Sudan and noted the influx of refugees into CAR as a result of the outbreak of conflict in neighbouring Sudan. Rugwabiza referred to the UNs recent decision to repatriate a unit of 60 MINUSCA military personnel and their commander over serious allegations of sexual exploitation and abuse and reiterated the Secretary-Generals zero-tolerance policy for such matters.

AU Commissioner for Political Affairs, Peace and Security Bankole Adeoye also briefed the Council, highlighting the impact of the outbreak of fighting in Sudan in exacerbating the difficult security situation in the CAR. He called for the complete lifting of the arms embargo imposed on the CAR to enable its armed forces (FACA) to defend the country and protect its citizens in line with a 13 June AU Peace and Security Council (AUPSC) communique following its meeting on the situation in the CAR the same day.

In a 30 May decree, President Faustin Touadera called for a referendum on a new constitution on 30 July, which was opposed by various CAR political and civil society actors. This is due to concerns that that new constitution would remove term limits, paving the way for the president to run for a third term, which is not permitted under the current constitution. At the 20 June meeting, some Council members expressed concern about the constitutional referendum and its implications for the countrys political stability while others noted it as an achievement in the CARs political process.

The ongoing preparations for local elections, which were expected to take place in the CAR for the first time since 1988, have been suspended until September, according to the Secretary-Generals latest report. This was partly due to a lack of funds but also the need to prepare for the constitutional referendum in July.

A coalition of opposition parties laid out conditions for participating in local elections, including calls for the president to abandon the constitutional referendum, stop the harassment of opposition leaders, and agree to a reform of the National Electoral Authority. At the 20 June meeting, some Council members noted the temporary suspension of local elections and called on the CAR authorities to work towards an inclusive, transparent, and peaceful electoral process that guarantees the full and effective participation of all voices, including women and youth.

Sanctions-Related Developments

On 15 May, the Secretary-General submitted his report on the progress achieved by the Central African authorities in the implementation of the key benchmarks set out in a 9 April 2019 presidential statement to review the arms embargo imposed on the CAR. These benchmarks include the reform of the security sector; the disarmament, demobilisation, reintegration and repatriation process; and the management of weapons and ammunition. The report noted that further efforts in support of the capacities of national authorities in demobilization, disarmament, reintegration and repatriation and in weapons and ammunition management will be paramount in reducing the availability, diversion and proliferation of weapons and ammunition fuelling violent conflict. The Panel of Experts final report (S/2023/360), published on 18 May, noted recent trends that have led the Coalition des patriotes pour le changement (CPC) forces, the main rebel coalition in CAR, to retreat towards the tri-border areas of CAR, Chad and Sudan. It described the regional security dynamics between the three countries in light of the activities of various armed groups across the tri-border areas. The report further indicated that armed groups were increasingly active in the southeast part of the CAR bordering the Democratic Republic of Congo and South Sudan, as well as in the west near the border with Cameroon. The report referred to the meeting hosted by the Angolan President and chair of the International Conference on the Great Lakes Region (ICGLR), Joao Lourenco, in Luanda on 9 February, which brought together CAR President Touadera and Chadian President Mahamat Idriss Deby Itno. The outcome of this meeting was a decision to move Francois Bozize, the sanctioned leader of the CPC based in Chad, to Guinea-Bissau. But the panel said that no exemption request was made to do so and noted violations of the travel ban with the movement of several other sanctioned individuals between CAR, Chad and Sudan. The report provided detailed accounts of the increasing attacks by armed groups targeting the strategic and economic interests of the FACA and the Wagner Group, a Russian private security company. Gold-mining sites have increasingly become targets of attacks, and the report referred to the 19 March incident in central CAR that claimed the lives of nine Chinese workers of the Gold Coast Group company. The panel mentioned the increase in diamond exports from CAR last year but noted the suspensions imposed by the Kimberley Process, a multilateral trade regime established in 2003 with the goal of preventing the flow of conflict diamonds that limited export volumes and their per-carat value. The suspension limits exports from production areas in the east and some parts in the west of the country, according to the panel. In this regard, the CAR government is campaigning for the lifting of the suspensions, as reflected in the remarks by Sylvie Valerie Baipo Temon, the CAR Minister for Foreign Affairs, Francophonie and Central Africans Abroad, at the 21 February Security Council meeting. On 26 April, the 2127 CAR Sanctions Committee held informal consultations to discuss the panels final report, which was due by 30 May. Committee chair Ambassador Harold Adlai Agyeman (Ghana), accompanied by Council experts, undertook a working visit to CAR from 6 to 9 June.

Human Rights-Related Developments

On 16 June, Yao Agbetse, the UN independent expert on the human rights situation in the CAR, issued a statement, noting that an upcoming constitutional referendum in the CAR could complicate the countrys human rights situation and urged authorities to prevent increased hate speech and violence before, during, and after the vote. In his statement, Agbetse urged the international community to remain vigilant about the situation in the CAR and urged the CAR authorities to use all means possible to ensure that the referendum does not result in further human rights violations.

Key Issues and Options

The arms embargo is likely to continue to be a key issue during the upcoming negotiations on renewing the 2127 CAR sanctions regime. The CAR government has continued to push for the lifting of the arms embargo, and the AUPSC reiterated this request in its 13 June communique. In the upcoming negotiations, CAR is likely to solicit the support of some Council members, including the three African members (Gabon, Ghana, and Mozambique), China and Russia, in pushing for a total lifting. Other members may oppose this move, however, arguing that the embargo does not prevent the CAR government from acquiring weapons.

One possible option is for France, the penholder on the CAR, to propose a further easing of the notification requirement to respond to the governments request, but this is unlikely to satisfy CAR and its supporters in the Council.

Council Dynamics

Council members are divided on the issue of the arms embargo. Although the Security Council took steps to further ease the embargo last year with the adoption of resolution 2648 of 29 July 2022, five Council members (China, Gabon, Ghana, Kenya, and Russia) abstained from the vote, supporting CARs request to lift the embargo. The decision by the Security Council to remove the notification requirement under the 1533 DRC sanctions regime seems to have been interpreted as a precedent for other sanctions regimes. For instance, during the negotiation on extending the 2206 South Sudan sanctions regime in May, the A3 made a similar proposal to advance their position on the lifting of the arms embargo imposed on South Sudan. The proposal faced opposition from other Council member states, which argued that the example of the DRC sanctions regime might not be appropriate for the South Sudan context. On 30 May, when the Council adopted resolution 2683 renewing the South Sudan sanctions regime for one year, it received ten votes in favour and abstentions from the A3, China and Russia. Resolution 2683 removed the requirement for the South Sudanese government to provide advance notification regarding the supply, sale, or transfer of non-lethal military equipment.

A similarly difficult discussion is likely to play out in the upcoming negotiation on the extension of the 2127 CAR sanctions regime. At the 20 June Security Council meeting on the situation in the CAR, Temon reiterated her countrys request to lift the arms embargo, and the A3, China and Russia supported this request in their statements. Other African countriesnamely Angola, Burundi, DRC, Equatorial Guinea, Republic of Congo, Rwanda, and South Sudan, which participated in the meeting under rule 37 of the Councils provisional rules of procedurealso expressed support and solidarity with the CAR. However, the US underscored the importance of the notification requirement in ensuring transparency and maintained that it does not prevent the CAR from securing the weapons it needs to confront armed groups.

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THEMATIC ISSUES

Children and Armed Conflict

Expected Council Action

In July, the Security Council will hold its annual open debate on children and armed conflict. Special Representative for Children and Armed Conflict Virginia Gamba is expected to present the Secretary-Generals annual report on children and armed conflict, which was made public on 27 June. Other speakers are likely to include UNICEF Deputy Executive Director for programmes Omar Abdi and a child civil society briefer.

The Working Group on Children and Armed Conflict is expected to conduct a field mission to Nigeria from 10 to 13 July, its first country visit since 2019, when working group members travelled to Mali.

Key Recent Developments

The Secretary-Generals annual report covers the period from January through December 2022 and provides information on the six grave violations against children in situations on the agenda of the Council, as well as in other situations of concern. The six grave violations are child recruitment and use; killing and maiming; abductions; rape and other forms of sexual violence; attacks on schools and hospitals; and the denial of humanitarian access. The report records 27,180 grave violations against children in 24 country situations and one regional situation (the Lake Chad Basin), which represents an increase from 2021 (23,982). It notes that the most violations took place in the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC), Israel and the Occupied Palestinian Territory (OPT), Somalia, Ukraine, and Syria.

The report highlights several worrying trends, such as a 112 percent increase in attacks on schools (1,163) and hospitals (647), mainly in Ukraine, Burkina Faso, Israel and the OPT, Myanmar, Mali, and Afghanistan. It also cites the use of explosive weaponsincluding those with a wide impact areain populated areas as among the factors that have had the most severe effect. While in previous years the majority of violations were attributed to non-state armed groups, in 2022 such actors accounted for half of the violations.

This years annual report adds Haiti and Niger as situations of concern with immediate effect. Information about violations committed against children in these country situations will be included in the Secretary-Generals future reports. It also removes India as a situation of concern, citing measures taken by the government to better protect children.

As in previous years, the annexes to the Secretary-Generals annual reportwhich list parties that have committed grave violations against childrenhave attracted substantial attention. Much of the discussion has centred on listings and omissions relating to Ukraine and Israel and the OPT.

The Secretary-General decided to list the Russian armed forces and affiliated armed groups for committing attacks on schools and hospitals (480) and the killing of children (136) in Ukraine. This marks the first time that a permanent member of the Security Council is listed in the annual reports annexes. He also expressed concern about the high number of children killed (80) and maimed (175) and attacks on schools and hospitals (212) by Ukrainian armed forces but did not list them in the reports annexes. The Secretary-General urged the Ukrainian armed forces immediately to implement measures to protect children and to prevent attacks on schools and hospitals, adding that he will be particularly attentive to this situation in the preparation of my next report.

Since Russias invasion of Ukraine in February 2022, allegations related to the transfer of Ukrainian children to Russia have created international controversy and have often been raised at the Security Council. In a 27 June press conference, Gamba noted that while the transfer of children does not constitute a grave violation, she has engaged with Russia on the matter, adding that Moscow has offered to share information with the UN about children displaced, including to facilitate reunification of children with their families. Gamba visited Moscow on 18 and 19 May to engage with Russian authorities on preventing and ending violations against children, during which she met with Russias Presidential Commissioner for Childrens Rights Maria Lvova-Belova. (On 17 March, the International Criminal Court issued an arrest warrant against Lvova-Belova and Russian President Vladimir Putin for allegedly committing the war crime of unlawful deportation and unlawful transfer of children from Ukraine to Russia.) The meeting was criticised by several interlocutors, including civil society organisations and member states, some of which apparently made demarches to the Secretary-General.

Several civil society organisations and member states have criticised the Secretary-General for failing to hold accountable Israeli security forces and Palestinian armed groups, neither of which were listed in the annual reports annexes. Several civil society organisations have called for Israels listing, with some also calling for the listing of Palestinian armed groups. According to the report, Israeli forces were responsible for killing 42 children and maiming 370 others, while 563 children required medical assistance after inhaling tear gas fired by Israeli forces. The Palestinian Islamic Jihad (PIJ) was responsible for killing nine children, while two others were killed by other Palestinian perpetrators. A total of 100 Palestinian children were maimed by the PIJ due to rockets fired in Gaza, while seven Israeli children were injured by Palestinian perpetrators.

In last years annual report, the Secretary-General documented a substantial number of airstrikes by Israeli armed forces, which resulted in a significant increase in the number of cases of violence against children. He warned that should the situation repeat itself in 2022, without meaningful improvement, Israel should be listed. The 2022 report also documented a substantial number of rocket strikes by Palestinian armed groups, which resulted in a significant increase in the number of cases of violence against children. The Secretary-General warned that if the high number of violations against children were to be repeated in 2022, without meaningful improvement, Palestinian armed groups, including Hamas al-Qassam Brigades and Palestinian Islamic Jihads al-Quds Brigades, should be listed.

In response to questions posed during the 27 June press conference, Gamba said that Israel and the Palestinian armed groups were not listed in this years annual report because the number of airstrikes and rocket strikes in 2022 decreased compared to 2021. She added that Israel, Hamas, and the PIJ have engaged with herincluding during her visit to Israel, the West Bank, and Gaza (12-15 December 2022)and that all parties have exchanged letters with her that identify measures aimed at preventing and ending violations against children. Prior to the publication of this years annual report, Israel had reportedly challenged the data presented in the report. In a 5 June interview, the Permanent Representative of Israel to the UN, Gilad Erdan, suggested that Israel may cease cooperation with some UN agencies if its forces were listed in the report.

Developments in the Working Group on Children and Armed Conflict

Since February, when Malta assumed the chairmanship of the Working Group on Children and Armed Conflict, the group has held three formal meetings and four informal meetings. On 27 June, it agreed on conclusions on the Secretary-Generals report on children and armed conflict in South Sudan. The working group is currently negotiating conclusions on the Secretary-Generals report on children and armed conflict in Mali.

Five sets of conclusions remain pending: on three Secretary-Generals reports that were presented in 2021 (Afghanistan, Myanmar, and Syria) and two that were presented in 2022 (Nigeria and Somalia). In line with the two-year reporting cycle, the Secretary-General is expected soon to present another report on Myanmar, as his latest report on the country covers the period from 1 September 2018 to 30 June 2020. Difficult dynamics on these country situations have prevented agreement on the conclusions, which require consensus.

Key Issues and Options

A key issue for the Council is to ensure the effectiveness of the tools that support the implementation of the children and armed conflict agenda. In this regard, the conclusions issued by the working group play an important role in promoting accountability and encouraging conflict parties to take concrete action aimed at preventing and ending violations against children. The working groups inability to adopt conclusions on some country situations for nearly two years is a matter of concern, as it hampers its ability to respond to developments on the ground in a timely manner.

Enhancing the transparency and visibility of the work carried out by the working group may assist in this regard. An option would be to request the chair to provide the Security Council a periodic report on developments related to the working group, similar to periodic briefings provided by chairs of sanctions committees. Such briefings could indicate which conclusions are pending agreement. The working group could also seek to keep the Security Council updated more regularly on developments in the children and armed conflict agenda, including through briefings by the chair following field visits or the adoption of conclusions. Members could also consider utilising suggestions from the 2006 toolkit, proposed by then-chair France, which provides options for the working group, such as convening press conferences to highlight specific issues related to the children and armed conflict agenda. Council members have often chosen to convene press conferences on other thematic issuessuch as women, peace and security (WPS) and climate and securityahead of Council meetings on various country files.

Concerns have been raised that if parties that commit a substantial number of violations are not listed or if parties that appear not to have stopped committing violations against children are nonetheless taken off the annexes, the credibility of the Secretary-Generals report may be called into question. Council members could call for the consistent and transparent application of the criteria for listing and de-listing parties, which were set out in the Secretary-Generals 2010 annual report. That report said that a party would be de-listed if the UN had verified that it has ceased commission of all the said grave violations for which it was listed.

Council Dynamics

There is strong support overall for the children and armed conflict agenda among Council members. However, political sensitivities in the Council are also evident at the subsidiary body level, resulting in protracted negotiations before consensus can be reached on some conclusions in the working group. It seems that in the past two years, agreement on some of the conclusions on African country situations has been delayed, including because of concerns raised by the African members of the Council (Gabon, Ghana, and former Council member Kenya) about references to the relevant countries governments. Mozambique, which succeeded Kenya in the African seat and is included as a situation of concern in the Secretary-Generals report, has also taken a strong position against the inclusion of such references.

The difficult dynamics on Ukraine have also coloured the Councils work on children and armed conflict. Council members have at times used Arria-formula meetings to promote differing narratives about the conflicts effects on children. On 5 April, Russia organised an Arria-formula meeting which featured a controversial briefing by Lvova-Belova. Representatives of several Council membersincluding Albania, Malta, the UK, and the USwalked out of the conference room when she took the floor. On 28 April, Albania, France, and the US, together with non-Council member Ukraine, convened an Arria-formula meeting on the abduction and deportation of children during armed conflict, which mainly focused on Ukraine. (For more, see our Whats in Blue stories of 4 April and 28 April.) It remains to be seen whether Russias listing in the annexes of Secretary-Generals report may increase Council divisiveness and further complicate the working groups ability to carry out its work.

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HCMC leaders call on Canadian businesses to invest in fields of human resources training

and waste treatment - Photo for illustration (Source: VNA)

The event had the participation of more than 100 delegates representing the government and businesses of the Canadian province of British Columbia, Vancouver and a number of other cities in the province.

This is one of the activities within the framework of the 50th anniversary of the establishment of diplomatic relations between Vietnam and Canada and aims to strengthen relations between HCMC and Vancouver, as well as with British Columbia.

Speaking at the event, Vice Chairman of HCMC People's Committee Vo Van Hoan said that the economic, trade and investment relations between HCMC and Canada have many strong developments but dont commensurate with the potential, especially in the context of Vietnam and Canada are both members of the Comprehensive and Progressive Agreement for Trans-Pacific Partnership (CPTPP).

HCMC is willing to work closely with British Columbia in green growth areas where the city has demand and the Canadian province has advantages such as human resources training and waste treatment, he said.

Canada currently ranks 22nd out of 117 countries and territories investing in HCMC with 113 projects worth about US$130 million.

According to the Vice Chairman, two-way trade turnover hit some $630 million in 2022, an annual increase of more than 30 percent.

Mr. Hoan expressed his hope to boost the citys collaboration with Canadian provinces, including British Columbia, particularly in commerce and investment.

For his part, Brar said the two localities had seen strong progress in their trade ties and informed his host on the upcoming opening of the British Columbia trade-investment office in HCMC.

Business representatives of HCMC and representatives of Canadian organizations and businesses discussed many topics at the forum such as: the demand to connect the market for businesses, specific measures to strengthen the business relationship between localities, business and investment relations between businesses of the two sides, especially in the field of seafood and wooden furniture; supply chain for Canadian restaurants; tourism potential, especially for young people./.
AMERICAS

Colombia

Expected Council Action

In July, the Security Council will hold its quarterly meeting on Colombia. Special Representative and head of the UN Verification Mission in Colombia Carlos Ruiz Massieu is expected to brief on the Secretary-Generals latest 90-day report on the mission, which covers the period from 27 March to 26 June. A woman civil society representative is also expected to brief.

The verification missions mandate expires on 31 October.

Key Recent Developments

The administration of Colombian President Gustavo Petro Urrego has continued to advance its policy of total peace, which entails the promotion of dialogue with armed groups operating in the country, as well as the implementation of the Final Agreement for Ending the Conflict and Building a Stable and Lasting Peace signed in 2016 between the government of Colombia and the former rebel group Fuerzas Armadas Revolucionarias de Colombia-Ejercito del Pueblo (FARC-EP).

The government has been pursuing peace talks with armed groups it deems as having a political agenda, while also discussing possible agreements with groups characterised as criminal, that focus on ceasing violence in exchange for judicial benefits. In a 14 February letter to the Security Council, Colombian Minister of Foreign Affairs Alvaro Leyva Duran referenced the governments dialogue efforts with five such armed groups and indicated the governments intention to request UN verification of these processes. (For more, see our April Forecast.) On 12 April, the Security Council sent a letter to the Secretary-General requesting him to submit recommendations on the possible role that the UN can play in this regard, including implications for the configuration of the verification mission.

The Secretary-General submitted his recommendations in a 13 June letter, in which he expressed hope that the Security Council will consider favourably an expansion of the verification missions mandate to participate in the monitoring and verification of ceasefires. The letter says that there are two most immediate opportunities for the Mission to add value through monitoring and verification, namely in the processes with the Ejercito de Liberacion Nacional (ELN) and the Estado Mayor Central Fuerzas Armadas Revolucionarias de Colombia-Ejercito del Pueblo (EMC FARC-EP), which mainly consists of former FARC-EP dissidents who did not sign the 2016 accord. (The government characterises both groups as political.) It adds that ceasefires with the other groups referenced in the governments 14 February letter are at either an embryonic stage or not currently in effect and therefore there is presently no role for the Mission to play in those ceasefires, although this could change as circumstances evolve.

From 2 May to 9 June, the Colombian government and the ELN held a third round of negotiations in Cuba. At the talks conclusion, the parties announced an agreement on a six-month national, bilateral ceasefire starting on 3 August, that will be subject to renewal based on the parties joint evaluation. The envisioned monitoring and verification mechanism will comprise representatives from the government, the ELN, the verification mission (subject to Security Council authorisation), and the Colombian Catholic Church.

In early 2023, the government and the EMC FARC-EP negotiated a ceasefire protocol that focuses on a halt to offensive actions between the group and government security forces. In April, the parties announced their representatives to the peace dialogue and the establishment of a ceasefire monitoring and verification mechanism similarly comprised of representatives of the government, EMC FARC-EP, the Colombian Catholic Church, and an international component that will include the verification mission, again subject to Security Council authorisation. The dialogue process experienced a setback in May following the killing of several indigenous youths in the southern department of Putumayo by the EMC FARC-EP, leading the government to announce the ceasefires suspension in four departments where it would resume offensive operations against the group. According to the Secretary-Generals 13 June letter, despite the ceasefires partial suspension, there has been no reported upsurge in fighting to date. The letter also notes that the government is seeking to reactivate the monitoring mechanism while maintaining contacts with the group aimed at establishing dialogue.

The Secretary-Generals 13 June letter presents two options for the possible expansion of the verification missions mandate, both of which will require additional personnel beyond the missions current ceiling of 120 observers.

The first option calls for a limited expansion authorising the missions participation in monitoring and verifying the governments anticipated ceasefires with the ELN and the EMC FARC-EP. The Security Council could consider additional authorisations to monitor and verify potential ceasefires with the other groups mentioned in the governments 14 February letter, based on the Secretary-Generals updates about the status of dialogue with these groups. This option would require 95 additional observers.

The second option would be a broad, one-time expansion authorising the missions participation in monitoring and verifying the governments ceasefires with all groups identified in the governments 14 February letter. The mission would first focus on the expected ceasefires with the ELN and the EMC FARC-EP and could then participate in other ceasefire mechanisms that may be established with other groups without requiring additional Council authorisation. This option would require 130 additional observers.

On 4 May, the Colombian Congress approved the governments National Development Plan for 2022-2026, which outlines public policy priorities and allocates funding for their implementation. According to the Secretary-Generals report, the plan includes obligations related to the implementation of the 2016 peace agreement in 50 of its 373 articles, on such issues as comprehensive rural reform (including through establishing mechanisms to accelerate the purchase of land), reintegration of former combatants, and transitional justice.

Violence continued to affect communities (including indigenous and Afro-Colombian communities), former FARC-EP members, human rights defenders, and social leaders. The verification mission verified the killing of 12 ex-combatants during the period covered by the Secretary-Generals report, compared to six killed during the previous reporting period. This brought to 375 the number of former FARC-EP members killed since the signing of the 2016 agreement. The Secretary-Generals report notes that the persistent violence continues to jeopardise the reintegration process of former combatants, as evidenced by the urgent relocation of the former territorial area for training and reintegration (TATR) in the Mesetas municipality in the Meta department. Following threats issued by the EMC FARC-EP to the TATRs residents in March, the government announced that it will facilitate the residents safe relocation to a new area. In June, the government purchased and handed over a 1,400-hectare productive plot to the former combatants from Mesetas. The Secretary-Generals report notes that five former TATRs in the Antioquia, Cauca, Meta, and Putumayo departments are also facing security risks and require urgent support.

During a 29 March visit to the Mesetas TATR, Petro announced that the government is working on mechanisms to expedite the implementation of the 2016 agreement, adding that an official will be appointed to oversee the implementation of the peace process with the former FARC-EP. At the time of writing, this official has yet to be named.

Human Rights-Related Developments On 31 May, Siobhan Mullally, the UN Special Rapporteur on trafficking in persons, especially women and children, issued a statement following her nine-day visit to Colombia. Warning that trafficking in persons, especially children, by non-state armed groups and criminal organisations continues to undermine peacebuilding in Colombia, Mullally urged the Colombian government to include the issue of trafficking in persons in Colombias total peace dialogues. Mullally commended the Colombian governments commitment to protecting victims rights and combatting impunity but underscored that this commitment should be implemented throughout Colombia, especially in rural areas. Women, Peace and Security From 22 to 26 May, Special Representative of the Secretary-General on Sexual Violence in Conflict Pramila Patten carried out her first visit to Colombia in this role. According to a 1 June statement, during Pattens visit, a number of interlocutors highlighted that sexual violence remains a prominent feature of the conflict, especially in territories under control of armed groups. The violence is disproportionately affecting indigenous and Afro-descendent communities, Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender, Intersex and Queer (LGBTIQ+) persons and women leaders. Patten also expressed concern about the sharp increase in the number of cases of trafficking of persons for the purposes of sexual exploitation by armed groups and criminal networks. During her visit, Patten met with Colombian authorities, UN officials, members of the diplomatic community, and civil society organisations. She also met with survivors of conflict-related sexual violence in Bogota and Cartagena, who highlighted the challenges that they have faced in accessing services, justice, protection, and reparations.

Key Issues and Options

A key issue for the Council is to consider the Colombian governments request for expanding the verification missions mandate to support dialogue efforts with armed groups operating in the country, including through the monitoring of ceasefires. During July, Council members are expected to begin negotiating a draft resolution on the matter. To inform their deliberations on the proposals presented in the Secretary-Generals 13 June letter, members may wish to interact with relevant Colombian stakeholders, such as Colombias High Commissioner for Peace, Danilo Rueda, who has been overseeing dialogues with armed groups operating in the country, and civil society organisations.

Council members are likely to be watching closely preparations for local elections that are set to take place in October, as electoral campaign periods in Colombia have historically been characterised by heightened violence. According to the Secretary-Generals report, the verification mission has already recorded the killing of six members of different political parties. Civil society organisations have warned of potential violence against candidates, including members of the former FARC-EP, 500 of whom are expected to run countrywide. The EMC FARC-EP, in apparent retaliation to the governments partial suspension of the ceasefire agreement, has threatened to prevent candidates from campaigning in the regions where the ceasefire has been suspended. Council members are expected to issue a press statement following next months meeting, as has been a common practice in connection with quarterly Colombia meetings. In their press statement, members may wish to call for greater institutional efforts to guarantee fair and secure participation in the electoral process, particularly of women former combatants.

The situation of children in conflict-affected areas in Colombia is another matter of concern. According to the Secretary-Generals annual report on children and armed conflict, published on 27 June, 130 children were recruited and used in 2022, including by former FARC-EP dissident groups (87) and the ELN (18). Council members can emphasise in their statement that measures relating to the protection of children can serve as an early confidence-building measure in peace negotiations and call on parties to include such considerations in their dialogues.

Council Dynamics

Council members are united in their support for the peace process in Colombia and for the verification missions work. Members are generally attentive to requests from the Colombian government and have often responded positively by expanding the missions mandate. However, deliberations on the governments recent request might prove more complicated.

Some members may feel that a cautious approach is needed regarding groups characterised as criminal and advocate a case-by-case analysis of a possible UN role in such dialogue efforts. These members may prefer the first option (limited mandate expansion) proposed by the Secretary-Generals 13 June letter. Members may also raise concerns about the potential risks to UN personnel in verifying ceasefires with armed groups operating in the country. Russia mentioned these issues during the Councils latest meeting on Colombia, held on 13 April. It said that the question of contacts between the United Nations and the recognized criminal groups involved in drug trafficking requires separate and serious analysis, including in consideration of the possible consequences for the Missions credibility.

Additionally, the possible budgetary implications of increasing the missions observer ceiling may be an issue for some Council members; China, for example, raised concerns about the matter during negotiations on previous expansions of the verification missions mandate.

Petro strongly condemned Russia following a 27 June missile attack on a restaurant in the city of Kramatorsk in Ukraine in which three Colombiansincluding Sergio Jaramillo, one of the 2016 peace agreements negotiatorswere injured. The president had taken a less critical stance over Russias aggression against Ukraine than his predecessor, Ivan Duque. The former presidents criticism of Russia has at times complicated the Councils work on the Colombia file. It remains to be seen whether this recent development will have a similar effect.

The UK is the penholder on Colombia.

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EUROPE

Cyprus

Expected Council Action

In July, Security Council members are expected to receive a briefing in consultations on the situation in Cyprus. Special Representative and head of the UN Peacekeeping Force in Cyprus (UNFICYP) Colin Stewart is expected to brief.

UNFICYPs mandate expires on 31 January 2024.

Key Recent Developments

Over the past six months, there has been no meaningful progress on the political front and no direct formal engagement between the Greek and Turkish Cypriot leaders in the context of unification talks, which have been stalled since the collapse of negotiations at Crans-Montana in July 2017. Efforts to reinvigorate the political process have failed to find common ground for the resumption of talks. The recently elected Greek Cypriot leader Nikos Christodoulides is firmly committed to a settlement based on a bi-communal, bi-zonal federation (BBF) with political equality, as stipulated in previous Security Council resolutions, while Turkish Cypriot leader Ersin Tatar insists on a two-state solution based on sovereign equality.

After winning the election in February, Christodoulides has intensified his efforts to break the deadlock in the peace talks, underscoring his campaign pledge to make a peace deal an overriding priority. In an informal 23 February meeting hosted by Stewart, Christodoulides tested the waters with Tatar about reviving the stalemated talks before Christodoulides took office on 1 March. The topics of the informal meeting included the earthquakes in Turkiye and Syria earlier in February, in which Turkish Cypriots were among those killed. The two leaders expressed their sympathy for the victims and their families. However, no other informal or formal meetings between the two are known to have happened since then. Tatar insists that negotiations between the two sides can only begin when sovereign equality and the equal international status of the Turkish Republic of Northern Cyprus are confirmed.

Christodoulides appears to be pushing for more active EU involvement in the negotiations, including a European envoy, as he believes the bloc can provide necessary incentives to create a win-win situation. According to media reports, European political leaders have responded positively to Christodoulides efforts. As a response to Christodoulides efforts, Tatar reiterated in a European Parliament speech on 13 June that the EU leadership must understand that efforts to involve other players besides the UN in the Cyprus conflict are futile. No one can interfere in a possible process if the Turkish Cypriot side does not consent.

From 15 to 18 March, Under-Secretary-General for Political and Peacebuilding Affairs Rosemary DiCarlo made her first trip to Cyprusa visit that had been scheduled last year. She had meetings with Christodoulides and Tatar, exchanging views on the Cyprus issue. She also reiterated the Secretary-Generals commitment to supporting the two leaders in their effort to find a mutually acceptable way forward.

During a phone call with Christodoulides on 15 June, Secretary-General Antonio Guterres reaffirmed his commitment to a settlement of the Cyprus dispute within the relevant Security Council resolutions. Christodoulides said he was ready to resume talks from where they left off at Crans-Montana. The Secretary-Generals report on good offices in Cyprus is expected to be released in early July before the consultations in the Council.

Appointing an envoy of the Secretary-General, an issue that remains deadlocked, also came up during the phone call. The Greek Cypriot leader underlined the added value of appointing an envoy of the Secretary-General, a position that has remained vacant since Jane Holl Lutes resignation in September 2021. At the time of writing, the Turkish Cypriot leadership has not released a statement or otherwise commented on the issue. In an informal 27 September 2021 meeting Guterres hosted for former Greek Cypriot leader Nicos Anastasiades and Tatar, however, Tatar objected to the appointment of a UN special envoy, preferring a personal envoy, according to media reports. (Special envoys are usually assigned to undertake special missions related to matters of which the Security Council or the General Assembly are seized, while personal envoys undertake missions at the Secretary-Generals initiative.) Tatar reportedly argued that a special envoy would be constrained by having to operate strictly within the framework of the BBF with political equality, but a personal envoy would have greater autonomy to explore new ideas, including his proposed two-state solution. This matter appears unlikely to be resolved quickly.

Tensions between the Republic of Cyprus and Turkiye resurfaced over reports that a Turkish aircraft overflew and photographed Deneia, one of the four villages in the UN buffer zonethe first time a flight of this type has happened. Christodoulides called the flight a violation of UN resolutions and decisions on Cyprus. This is one of the latest incidents in the buffer zone in recent years, which have included entry obstruction to buffer zones and construction at the Cetinkaya stadium, heightening tension between the two sides as they consider these activities to violate UN resolutions or to be unauthorised.

On 13 June, Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan visited the northern part of the island and reiterated his support for a two-state solution. If there is a return to the negotiation table, the way to do this is through recognition of the Turkish Republic of North Cyprus, he said. The visit marked his first trip abroad after winning re-election in May. Responding to Erdogan later that day, Christodoulides reiterated during a European Parliament debate his unwavering efforts to reunify Cyprus through a comprehensive settlement in line with international law, UN Security Council resolutions and EU law, values and principles.

On 17 May, US Ambassador to the UN Linda Thomas-Greenfield met with Christodoulides in Reykjavik, Iceland, on the margins of the Council of Europe Summit. Thomas-Greenfield reiterated the US commitment to deepening its bilateral relationship with the Republic of Cyprus. She expressed continued US support for a Cypriot-led, UN-facilitated effort to reunify the island as a BBF.

Human Rights-Related Developments At the 52nd session of the Human Rights Council, High Commissioner for Human Rights Volker Turk presented a report on 7 March about Cyprus (A/HRC/52/18) that provided an overview of human rights issues in Cyprus from 1 December 2021 to 30 November 2022. The report noted that because of the islands continued division, monitoring and reporting by international mechanisms on the human rights situation in the northern part of Cyprus have remained limited. In his statement, Turk observed that the division of Cyprus continues to affect the human rights of people across the island, particularly concerning missing persons and freedom of movement, expression, and religion, among others. The report also noted the negative socioeconomic impact of the pandemic and the war in Ukraine, affecting the economic and social rights of people in vulnerable situations.

Key Issues and Options

Since the collapse of the 2017 unification talks, the key issue for the Security Council has been the lack of meaningful progress on the political front and the diminishing prospects for reaching a political settlement of the Cyprus problem. In the consultations, Council members could reiterate their firm commitment to a peaceful settlement based on a framework of BBF with political equality as stipulated in previous Security Council resolutions.

Council members could urge the parties to reach an agreement regarding the Secretary-Generals proposal to appoint a UN envoy on Cyprus to succeed Lute, stressing that the envoy could provide critical support in the search for common ground with the goal of returning to formal negotiations, while reassuring the parties that the envoy will not be constrained in their search for common grounds for the resumption of talks.

Another issue for the Security Council is for both sides to promote and strengthen intercommunal contacts to improve the public atmosphere for negotiating a peaceful settlement, while providing platforms to address island-wide matters such as health, climate change, and migration. The Council may call on the leaders of both communities to further support the work of the twelve Technical Committees, established by the leaders of the Greek and Turkish Cypriot communities under the auspices of the UN, to build confidence and improve the daily lives of Cypriots. They may also call on the leadership of both sides as a matter of priority to support the Technical Committee on Gender Equality. In this regard, they may encourage the parties to implement recommendations under the action plan on womens full, equal and meaningful participation in the settlement process and to review the plans implementation every six months.

Another key issue for the Council is establishing a direct military contact mechanism between the parties, facilitated by UNFICYP. Council members may decide to encourage the parties to approach negotiations on the basis of engagement without recognition and undertake significant confidence-building measures, which could help facilitate the resumption of negotiations.

Some Council members may comment on recent developments on the ground since the last consultation on Cyprus, including heightened tension in the buffer zone and new developments related to the Turkish Cypriots efforts to reopen a part of the fenced-off area of Varosha.

Council Dynamics

Cyprus remains a low-intensity issue on the Councils agenda. Council members with a vested interest in Cyprus include France, Russia, and the UK, which also serves as the penholder on the issue.

While the Council is united in its support for the political process, members diverge on the conditions and timeframe for the unification talks. Some members have previously supported a comprehensive strategic review of the mission and timed benchmarks for an exit strategy tied to the political process. Russia remains adamant that there be no external interference or attempts to enforce solutions and schedules to influence the peace talks.

Council members will encourage the Secretary-General to continue working with the parties to find common ground for formal negotiations to resume.

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AMERICAS

Haiti

Expected Council Action

In July, the Security Council is expected to renew the mandate of the UN Integrated Office in Haiti (BINUH). The current mandate expires on 15 July.

In addition, Special Representative and head of BINUH Maria Isabel Salvador will brief the Council on recent developments in the country and the Secretary-Generals 90-day report on BINUH. The chair of the 2653 Haiti Sanctions Committee, Ambassador Michel Xavier Biang (Gabon), and a civil society representative are also expected to brief.

Key Recent Developments

Haitis protracted political impasse remains a key concern and a driver of the countrys deteriorating security and humanitarian situations. Following the assassination of Prime Minister Jovenel Moise in July 2021, opposing factions have been unable to agree on modalities for holding elections to restore constitutional order. In December 2022, Prime Minister Ariel Henrywho assumed office in an interim capacity after Moises assassinationsigned a document titled The National Consensus for an Inclusive Transition and Transparent Elections, along with representatives of some political parties, civil society organisations, and members of the private sector. The document outlines steps for holding general elections in the country, stipulating a 14-month transition period, with elections to be held by the end of 2023 and a new elected government to enter office in February 2024. To facilitate this process, the document calls for the establishment of a High Transitional Council (HTC) to promote dialogue among various factions on the political and security conditions required for elections to take place. On 6 February, Henry formally installed the HTC, comprising three members from the countrys political, business, and civil sectors.

The national consensus document remains contentious, however. In a 30 January statement, eight political organisations and the Montana Groupa civil society coalition that had previously put forward a separate transition plan seeking a transitional government under different interim leadershipconveyed their disagreement with the process surrounding the document, calling for Henrys departure and fresh negotiations for a more inclusive accord. These divisions continue to complicate efforts to organise elections with buy-in from all stakeholders.

To foster a broader agreement, the Caribbean Community (CARICOM) convened a meeting of Haitian political leaders and civil society activists in Kingston, Jamaica, from 11 to 13 June. Discussions were facilitated by CARICOMs eminent persons group on Haiti, comprising three former prime ministers in the region: Perry Christie of the Bahamas, Bruce Golding of Jamaica, and Kenny Anthony of St. Lucia. In a 15 June statement summarising the meeting, CARICOM said that Henry had agreed to work with stakeholders to put in place a government of national unity and to enlarge the HTC beyond the current three members in order to include representatives of a wider group of stakeholders. The statement also announced an upcoming visit to Haiti by the eminent persons group to continue its good offices.

While Haitis political gridlock persists, the countrys security situation continues to deteriorate amidst rampant gang violence. According to BINUHs latest quarterly human rights report, dated 9 May, the first quarter of 2023 saw a 28 percent increase in the number of people killed, injured, or kidnapped compared with the previous quarter, with a total of 1,634 cases reported. The Secretary-Generals most recent annual report on children in armed conflict, dated 5 June, lists Haiti for the first time as a situation of concern. In response to the escalating violencewhich the Haitian National Police (HNP) does not have sufficient resources to containa vigilante movement known as bwa kwale has emerged, reportedly resulting in the death of nearly 200 suspected gang members since April. While the movement has led to a decrease in gang-related crime, human rights activists and legal experts have expressed concern at the extrajudicial attacks.

The countrys humanitarian situation also remains dire. The most recent Integrated Food Security Phase Classification surveyconducted by a group of humanitarian organisations and inter-governmental institutionsprojected that approximately five million people (nearly half of the Haitian population) would experience acute food insecurity between March and June. Reflecting these worsening conditions, the most recent biannual report of the UN Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) and the UN World Food Programme (WFP) on acute food insecurity, forecasting trends from June to November, classified Haiti for the first time as a hunger hotspot of the highest concern. Additionally, Haiti was included as one of three countries (with Burkina Faso and the Democratic Republic of Congo) in OCHAs most recent white note on acute risks of conflict-induced famine, submitted to the Security Council per resolution 2417. Meanwhile, more than 165,000 people are internally displaced in Haiti because of gang violence, according to the International Office for Migration (IOM). Severe flooding following heavy rains and a 4.9 Richter scale earthquake on 6 June have further exacerbated this situation.

On 16 June, the UN Economic and Social Council (ECOSOC) convened a high-level special emergency meeting to address Haitis humanitarian and development needs. At the meeting, ECOSOC president Lachezara Stoeva (Bulgaria) noted that the UNs 2023 humanitarian response plan for Haitiwhich calls for $720 million, more than double last years amount and the highest since the 2010 earthquakewas only 22.6 percent funded. From 18 to 20 June, WFP Executive Director Cindy McCain and UNICEF Executive Director Catherine Russell visited Haiti to assess the countrys needs and UN-provided support.

In light of the countrys deepening crisis, the Secretary-Generals most recent report on Haiti, dated 14 April, reiterated the urgent need for the deployment of an international specialized armed force, as originally requested by the Haitian government in October 2022 and subsequently recommended by the Secretary-Generals special report to the Council outlining options to enhance security support for Haiti. The Secretary-Generals April report said that such a force remains crucial to the efforts of national authorities to stem the violence and human rights abuses committed against the Haitian people, restore the rule of law and create conditions conducive to credible elections. Salvador repeated this call during her Council briefing on 26 April.

On 8 May, Council members issued a press statement expressing deep concern about the deteriorating security and humanitarian situation in Haiti and condemning the increasing violence, criminal activities, and human rights abuses and violations. The statement said that Council members, mindful of the need for security support for the country, reaffirmed their call to all political actors to engage constructively in meaningful negotiations to allow the holding of elections and encouraged efforts to ensure wider participation in the political process. The Council still has not responded to Haitis request for an international specialised force, however, as efforts continue to identify a country to lead such a deployment. In a letter dated 7 June addressed to the Secretary-General, Henry reiterated the governments request for security support.

Human Rights-Related Developments

William ONeill, UN Expert on Human Rights in Haiti, began an official visit to Haiti on 19 June through 29 June. This is ONeills first official visit to Haiti since his designation as the UN Expert on Human Rights in Haiti, during which he is scheduled to meet Prime Minister Ariel Henry, UN Special Representative of the Secretary-General for Haiti, Maria Isabel Salvador, and representatives of human rights and civil society organisations.

On 10 May, a group of UN experts issued a statement expressing grave concern over increasing violence in Haiti, particularly sexual violence and gang exploitation against women and children. Noting that the armed gangs have, according to reports, seized control of urban areas and are engaged in killings, violence, rape, kidnapping and intimidation in order to expand their influence, the experts stressed that systematic violence against women and girls is being used as an instrument of power and as a means of exerting territorial control. The experts emphasised that it was difficult to quantify the number of victims, with most cases being either ignored or unreported.

On 9 May, the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights Volker Turk issued a statement warning against a never-ending cycle of violence in Haiti, reiterating his call to the international community to deploy a specialized and human-rights compliant support force, with a comprehensive action plan to assist Haitis institutions.

Key Issues and Options

The central task for the Security Council remains supporting Haitian authorities in addressing the countrys political impasse and security crisis. In this context, a key issue for the Security Council in July is renewing BINUHs mandate. Previous reporting had suggested that the USco-penholder with Ecuador on Haitiwas considering a more robust security posture for the mission as an alternative to the deployment of an international force. While this option apparently remains under consideration, it seems that the co-penholders are currently seeking only limited changes to the mandate, primarily addressing some logistical and security requests that the mission has made.

Meanwhile, Council discussions on the deployment of an international force continue. The UN Secretariat has apparently prepared a non-paper outlining possible parameters of such a deployment. The Secretary-General presented the non-paperdescribed as a discussion tool rather than a planning documentduring his monthly lunch with Council ambassadors on 12 June. The document was also the subject of an informal expert-level briefing that the co-penholders convened with Council members, regional countries, and other stakeholders on 14 June. As these discussions proceed, the US is continuing bilateral consultations to identify a country to lead the deployment.

Council Dynamics

Council members are united in their concern about the spiralling situation in Haiti and generally agree on the need for a multidimensional, Haitian-led political solution that addresses both security and socioeconomic challenges. Views on the appropriate Council response vary, however, and may complicate negotiations to renew BINUHs mandate.

Last years negotiations were challenging. This was in part because China, which had previously argued for scaling down UN support for the country in the absence of desired results on the ground, changed its stance and proposed the establishment of a multinational police force to assist the HNP. Other Council members were not opposed to this suggestion in principle but wanted more time to consider it. As a compromise, resolution 2645 renewing BINUHs mandate requested the Secretary-General to submit within 90 days of the resolutions adoption a report to the Security Council regarding possible options for enhanced security support for the HNPs efforts to combat high levels of gang violence. This resulted in the aforementioned special report of 10 October 2022, in which the Secretary-General recommended the deployment of an international specialised force to support the HNP.

As the Council has still not responded to the report, the issue may again influence mandate negotiations. The co-penholders seemingly intend to keep the two tracks separate, making limited changes to the mandate in the expectation that the Council will later authorise the deployment of an international force. This strategy could pave the way for relatively straightforward negotiations over the mandate.

The future deployment of an international force is not guaranteed, however. The continued absence of a lead country remains an obstacle and, even if identified, some Council members may still oppose the deployment. In Russias statement at the Councils April briefing, it criticised what it described as a tradition of outside political engineering in Haiti, while Chinas statement at the January briefing similarly underscored the importance of draw[ing] the appropriate lessons from failed external interventions so as to avoid repeating those mistakesan indication that it may be reverting to its previous non-interventionist stance on Haiti. Given these uncertainties, some Council members advocating for a more robust international response to Haitis crisis may consider BINUHs mandate renewal the best opportunity to strengthen international support for the country and therefore seek more substantial changes to the mandate.

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In Hindsight: Selecting Subsidiary Body Chairs

With the Security Council elections behind them, incoming Council membersAlgeria, Guyana, the Republic of Korea, Sierra Leone, and Sloveniaare now starting to discuss the allocation of the chairs and vice-chairs of the subsidiary bodies. For many years this process was shrouded in secrecy, with the permanent members deciding how to allocate these positions, often with minimal consultation. It has become more transparent, and with greater autonomy for the elected members, but difficulties in the last few years may suggest the need for further refinements.

Guidance and Practice in the Selection of the Subsidiary Body Chairs and Vice-Chairs

Elected members growing frustration with their limited say in choosing the subsidiary bodies they chair led to strong calls by many outgoing chairs for a change in the process. In July 2016, the Council issued a presidential note on transitional arrangements (S/2016/619), which set out a new process for the allocation of subsidiary body positions. It said that consultations should begin as soon as possible after the elections and be conducted in a balanced, transparent, efficient and inclusive way by two members of the Council working in full cooperation. The understanding was that these two members would be the chair of the Informal Working Group on Documentation and Other Procedural Questions (IWG) and the coordinator of the permanent members, a position that rotates quarterly. The transitional arrangements conveyed in the 2016 note were incorporated in the 2017 Note 507 on working methods.

Permanent members still hold significant sway over the distribution of the chairs. Once the incoming members have agreed on an initial list of subsidiary body chairs, the IWG chair conveys this to the P5 coordinator. Should any of the permanent members have a strong position on a particular elected member chairing a subsidiary body, their view is likely to prevail.

Issues during the Selection Process

One of the key elements of the 2016 note was a more defined timeline, with emphasis on inclusiveness in the selection of the chairs of subsidiary bodies. It called on Council members to make every effort to agree provisionally on the appointment of the chairs of the subsidiary organs for the following year no later than 1 October. This change coincided with Council elections being moved forward from October to June, allowing more time for incoming members to prepare. In spite of this, the 1 October deadline has yet to be met. The incoming members have made a concerted effort every year, and came closest in 2019, when they reached agreement on 11 October. In 2020, it took until mid-December for a final list to emerge, and in 2021, the process was only concluded in early January 2022.

Last year the prospects for a quick agreement looked promising. The incoming members (I5) for 2023-2024 started their discussions immediately after the elections in June 2022, and swiftly agreed on how the 2023 vacancies would be allocated. Then the process stalled: at least one permanent member was opposed to a footnote in the draft specifying that incoming member Japan would chair the IWG in 2024, when the current chair, Albania, leaves. This months-long impasse led to a discussion under any other business in the new year, on 27 January 2023, where IWG chair Albania read out a joint statement from the elected members (E10) voicing support for Japan as chair in 2024. Ecuador, as the coordinator of the E10 for January, transmitted a letter on behalf of the E10 (S/2023/68) reiterating their unanimous support for Japan assuming this position the following year. The letter also conveyed the expectation that the Council would take note of the positions of the current elected members and the new members that would join in 2024. The presidential note on the 2023 chairs and vice-chairs that was finally issued on 31 January did not include the footnote.

Footnotes in the note on subsidiary chairs and vice-chairs are a recent development. They first appeared in 2021, and were used again in 2022, to spell out how some positions will be filled in the future. They appear to have been used to mollify members who had failed to secure their preferred subsidiary body. For example, during the 2020 negotiations, India failed in its bid to chair the 1267/1989/2253 ISIL (Daesh) & Al-Qaida sanctions committee. The footnote to the 2021 note (S/2021/2) indicates that India would take up the position of chair of the 1373 CTC committee in 2022. Similarly, incoming member UAEs wish to chair the same committee, which was unavailable to them in 2022having already been allocated to Indialed to a footnote to the 2022 note (S/2022/2/Rev.4) signaling the UAE as the chair in 2023. The 2021 note also includes a footnote indicating that Mexico would be the vice-chair of the Working Group on Children and Armed Conflict in 2022. The permanent members had been cool to such footnotes, citing, among other reasons, the issue of slots not being available to the next batch of incoming members.

Getting agreement on the allocation of chairs is affected by the composition of incoming members, their level of interest in chairing particular bodies, and, of course, which subsidiary bodies are available. In some years, several of the five incoming members have competed intensively over protection files, such as children and armed conflict, women, peace and security, and climate, peace and security. Other files are perceived as unpopular because they are politically sensitive, such as the 1718 Democratic Peoples Republic of Korea sanctions committee and the 1970 Libya sanctions committee, or resource intensive, such as the counter-terrorism committees. Adding to the complications of finding a chair for these subsidiary bodies, the permanent members often have strong views about the suitability of particular members for certain committees.

Burden Sharing and a Fair Distribution of Work

The outcome of the selection process for chairs can mean some elected members have to devote extensive time and resources to subsidiary bodies. The calls for greater burden sharing, which began around 2016 as the number of subsidiary bodies increased, have grown louder. The presidential note adopted in December 2019 (S/2019/991) reaffirmed that the informal consultation process for the selection of chairs should take place in a balanced, transparent, efficient and inclusive way but also stressed that it should take into account the need for a shared responsibility and a fair distribution of work for the selection of the Chairs among all members of the Council, bearing in mind the capacities and resources of members.

While there have been suggestions that permanent members should also take on the chairing of subsidiary bodies, a role performed exclusively by elected members since 2009[1], members are aware of the potential drawbacks, including permanent members holding onto such positions for too long. Permanent members are vice-chairs of several committees, but this rarely proves a substantive role.

The issue of subsidiary body chairs is intimately linked to that of penholderships. (The penholder role is an informal one and refers to the member of the Council leading the negotiation and drafting of resolutions on a particular Council agenda item.) Most penholding remains in the hands of France, the UK, and the US (P3). It is usually the case, as well, that the elected member chairing a given sanctions committee is not the penholder on the corresponding country file. But there are signs that the P3 has become significantly more open to sharing the pen with elected members. In 2019-2020, Germany sharing the pen with the UK on Libya and Sudan sanctions appeared to be a one-off development. The past year has proven otherwise. In 2022, Mexico was co-pen with France on Ukraine humanitarian issues, with the US on Haiti and the UK on Colombia, as well as co-pen with France on Mali sanctionsa committee that it chaired. In 2023, Ecuador took over as co-pen on Haiti and on Ukraine humanitarian issues. Albania has been the co-pen on the Ukraine political file with the US in both 2022 and 2023. These developments have prompted elected members to explore the possibility of a more structured link between chairing a given subsidiary body and holding the pen on that issueas well as seeking other opportunities to take on penholderships.

Reflections on the Process

Newly-elected members now approach the discussion of subsidiary body chairs with a clear idea of how a particular subsidiary body matches their priorities and resources. While this is an indication of early preparation and strong interest in some issues, it can lead to inflexible positions. Early agreement on the list of chairs requires compromise and the willingness to accept reserve positions when a members first choice is not accommodated. Past practice has shown that leaving a gap in the list because of I5 disagreement has led to the permanent members making more changes to the list. The delay in getting agreement to the 2023 list meant that no subsidiary bodies were able to function until February. A system of ensuring that subsidiary bodies are able to continue to do their work pending agreement on the full list may need to be considered.

Since 2016, it has been harder to fill the combination of subsidiary bodies available in some years due to their heavy resource requirements, political sensitivity, or both. With this a recurring problem, it may be worth considering reallocating the chairs available in given years to create a more equitable distribution.

Incoming members may not arrive with full knowledge of the role of the chair and how it differs across subsidiary bodies. Early briefings from the Secretariat on the intricacies of how different subsidiary bodies operate might reduce some members anxiety over taking on a sanctions committee. The IWG in 2021, under the chairmanship of St Vincent and the Grenadines, discussed a note on capacity building to facilitate the process of appointment of subsidiary body chairs, but were unable to get agreement.

The unity of the incoming members and the support of the sitting elected members for each years proposed arrangements are integral to minimising changes from the P5. Keeping the current E10 members informed of how the consultative process is advancing will help maintain this solidarity as well as increasing the transparency of the process. In this context, it seems Albania, as the chair of the IWG, has suggested that the selection process be discussed in IWG meetings if there is no agreement on the list by 1 October. This measure, too, may support the incoming members in navigating what is their first post-electoral test of working together, namely agreeing on the distribution of available chairs.

Available Subsidiary Body Chair Positions in 2024

Of the fourteen active sanctions regimes, ten will be vacant in 2024. Of the six working groups that are part of the selection process, four will be vacant in 2024.

Subsidiary Body Current Chair Former Chairs (2010  2023) Security Council Committee established pursuant to resolution 1373 (2001) concerning counter-terrorism UAE Turkiye (2010), India (2011-2012), Morocco (2013), Lithuania (2014-2015), Egypt (2016-2017), Peru (2018-2019), Tunisia (2020-2021), India (2022). Security Council Committee established pursuant to resolution 1518 (2003) Albania Nigeria (2010-2011, 2015), Togo (2012-2013), Chad (2014), Egypt (2016-2017), Poland (2018-2019), Estonia (2020-2021), Albania (2022-present) Security Council Committee established pursuant to resolution 1533 (2004) concerning the Democratic Republic of the Congo Gabon Brazil (2010-2011), Azerbaijan (2012-2013), Jordan (2014-2015), Egypt (2016-2017), Kuwait (2018-2019), Niger (2020-2021), Gabon (2022-present) Security Council Committee established pursuant to resolution 1591 (2005) concerning the Sudan Ghana Austria (2010), Colombia (2011-2012), Argentina (2013-2014), Venezuela (2015-2016), Ukraine (2017), Poland (2018-2019), Estonia (2020-2021), Ghana (2022-present) Security Council Committee established pursuant to resolution 1636 (2005) concerning Lebanon Sanctions Albania Gabon (2010-2011), Togo (2012-2013), Chad (2014-2015), Japan (2016-2017), Equatorial Guinea (2018-2019), Viet Nam (2020-2021), Albania (2022-present) Security Council Committee established pursuant to resolution 2048 (2012) concerning Guinea-Bissau UAE Morocco (2012-2013), Nigeria (2014-2015), Uruguay (2016-2017), Equatorial Guinea (2018-2019), Tunisia (2020-2021), UAE (2022-present) Security Council Committee established pursuant to resolution 2127 (2013) concerning the Central African Republic Ghana Lithuania (2014-2015), Ukraine (2016-2017), Cote dIvoire (2018-2019), Niger (2020-2021), Ghana (2022-presennt) Security Council Committee established pursuant to resolution 2140 (2014) concerning Yemen Albania Lithuania (2014-2015), Japan (2016-2017), Peru (2018-2019), Saint Vincent and the Grenadines (2020-2021), Albania (2022-present) Security Council Committee established pursuant to resolution 2206 (2015) concerning South Sudan Gabon Chile (2015), Senegal (2016-2017), Poland (2018-2019), Viet Nam (2020-2021), Gabon (2022-present) Security Council Committee established pursuant to resolution 2653 (2022) concerning Haiti Gabon Working Group on Peacekeeping Operations Ghana Japan (2010), Nigeria (2011), Morocco (2012), Pakistan (2013), Rwanda (2014), Chad (2015), Senegal (2016-2017), Cote dIvoire (2018-2019), Tunisia (2020-2021), Ghana (2022-present) Working Group established pursuant to resolution 1566 (2004) UAE Turkiye (2010), India (2011-2012), Morocco (2013), Lithuania (2014-2015), Egypt (2016-2017), Peru (2018-2019), Niger (2020-2021), UAE (2022-present) Informal Working Group on Documentation and Other Procedural Questions Albania Japan (2010, 2016-2017), Bosnia and Herzegovina (2011), Portugal (2012), Argentina (2013-2014), Angola (2015), Kuwait (2018-2019), Saint Vincent and the Grenadines (2020-2021), Albania (2022-present) Informal Working Group on International Tribunals Gabon Austria (2010), Portugal (2011), Guatemala (2012-2013), Chile (2014-2015), Uruguay (2016-2017), Peru (2018-2019), Viet Nam (2020-2021), Gabon (2022-present)

Available Positions in Informal Subsidiary Bodies

These positions are not part of the list of chairs of subsidiary bodies as they are informal groups.

Informal Subsidiary Body Outgoing Co-Chairs Remaining Co-Chairs Informal Expert Group on Climate Change, Peace and Security UAE Switzerland and Mozambique 2242 Informal Expert Group on Women, Peace and Security UAE Switzerland

[1] The UK chaired the 1373 Counter-Terrorism Committee in 2001 and 2002 and Russia chaired it in 2004 and 2005. France was the first chair of the Working Group on Children and Armed Conflict, a position it held from 2005  2008.
MIDDLE EAST

Iran

Expected Council Action

In July, the Council is expected to convene a briefing on the Secretary-Generals biannual report on the implementation of resolution 2231 of 20 July 2015, which endorsed the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA) on Irans nuclear programme. The Council will also receive reports from the Joint Commission and the Councils 2231 facilitator, Ambassador Vanessa Frazier (Malta). The Joint Commission was established to oversee the implementation of the JCPOA and comprises the current parties to the agreement: China, France, Germany, Russia, the UK, and Iran. Frazier, Under-Secretary-General for Political and Peacebuilding Affairs Rosemary DiCarlo, and a representative of the EU in its capacity as coordinator of the Joint Commission are expected to brief the Council.

Key Recent Developments

Efforts to revive the JCPOA remain stalled following a breakdown in negotiations last year and subsequent political developments that led to a further deterioration in relations between the parties. In May 2018, then-US President Donald Trump announced that the US, which was originally a signatory of the JCPOA, was withdrawing from the agreement, and went on to impose unilateral sanctions on Iran. Although Iran formally remained in the JCPOA, it has subsequently taken several steps that directly contravene its terms, including enriching uranium to levels higher than JCPOA-mandated limits and removing cameras and monitoring equipment required by the agreement. In April 2021, following the election of current US President Joseph Biden, the US, Iran, and other parties to the JCPOA began talks in Vienna to revive the agreement.

Those discussions progressed until August 2022, when the EU circulated what it described as a final draft agreement. Iran reportedly insisted as a condition for accepting the deal that the IAEA close its investigation into traces of enriched uranium it discovered at three undeclared sites in Iran in 2019. The US and European parties to the JCPOA objected to this demand, which they viewed as a separate issue related to Irans obligations under the Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT). On 17 November 2022, the IAEA Board of Governors adopted a resolution rebuking Iran and directing it to comply with the IAEAs investigation. In response, Iran announced on 22 November 2022 that it had started enriching uranium to 60 percent purity at its Fordow nuclear facility, a level approaching that required to produce a nuclear weapon and well above the 3.67 percent limit imposed by the JCPOA.

In parallel to these developments, other events further strained diplomatic relations between the parties and entrenched the impasse in JCPOA negotiations. In September 2022, anti-government protests broke out in Iran following the death of Mahsa Amini in police custody, prompting a forceful response from Iranian security services that led to hundreds of deaths and thousands of arrests. Starting in late September 2022, Iran carried out several attacks against Kurdish-Iranian opposition groups in northeastern Iraq, which Iran accused of fomenting the protests. In October 2022, France, Germany, the UK, and the US accused Iran of transferring unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) to Russiaallegedly used to carry out attacks in Ukrainein a purported violation of resolution 2231. Since these incidents, the US has maintained that it still seeks a diplomatic solution to Irans nuclear program but that talks to revive the JCPOA are currently not a priority.

With negotiations stalled, Iran has increased its production of highly enriched uranium. In its February quarterly report, the IAEA said that Irans stockpile of 60-percent enriched uranium had grown by 25.2 kilograms to 87.5 kilograms over the previous three months. Notably, the report also said that the agency had detected traces of uranium enriched to 83.7 percentjust below the roughly 90-percent level considered weapons-gradeat Irans Fordow facility. At a US congressional hearing on 28 February, a senior defence official in the Biden administration said the US government estimated that Irans breakout capacitythe amount of time it would take to produce enough fissile material for one nuclear weaponwas about 12 days.

Iran claimed the enrichment to 83.7 percent was accidental and due to unintended fluctuations in enrichment levels. On 4 March, the IAEA and the Atomic Energy Organization of Iran released a joint statement under which Iran agreed to allow the IAEA to implement further appropriate verification and monitoring activities, including the installation of surveillance cameras and enrichment monitoring devices at certain nuclear facilities.

According to the IAEAs most recent report, dated 31 May, Irans stockpile of 60-percent enriched uranium has further increased to 114 kilograms over the past three months. The report said that the agency is no longer actively investigating the 83.7 percent enrichment, however, after Iran provided information that is not inconsistent with its explanation for the origin of these particles. Similarly, the report said that the agency had no further questions regarding the detection of depleted uranium at Irans Marivan facilityone of the three it began investigating in 2019after Iran provided the agency with a possible explanation for its presence. Regarding the agreement on new verification and monitoring measures announced in March, IAEA Director General Rafael Grossi said in his introductory statement at the IAEA Board of Governors meeting on 5 June that only a fraction of the envisioned measures had been implemented.

While JCPOA negotiations remain dormant, media reported in mid-June that Iran and the US were engaged in indirect talks in Oman regarding a more limited informal agreement aimed at easing diplomatic tensions. Under such a deal, the US might allow Iran to access some frozen assets abroad in exchange for a commitment by Iran to halt production of 60-percent enriched uranium and to cease attacks on American troops in Iraq and Syria through its proxies in the region. The deal could also involve the release of American citizens detained in Iran.

Key Issues and Options

With the prospects for a revival of the JCPOA remaining dim, at least in the near term, the key issue for the Security Council is how to prevent Iran from developing nuclear weapons. Analysts have suggested that the steps undertaken by Iran since the US withdrawal from the agreement, including its uranium-enrichment activities, are likely to make a return to the original terms of the agreement and full compliance with those terms difficult, particularly given the institutional knowledge acquired by Irans nuclear programme and the IAEAs diminished monitoring capabilities, which prevent it from establishing a new baseline against which to measure compliance with a future agreement. The Iranian governments violent repression of anti-government protests and apparent support for the Russian war effort in Ukraine have also made reviving the JCPOA politically difficult for the Biden administration.

Given Irans non-compliance with the terms of the JCPOA, Council members could initiate the snapback mechanism in resolution 2231 if they decide the agreement is no longer viable. This processwhich is not subject to the vetowould reinstate the UN sanctions that were in place before the JCPOA was agreed upon. Some analysts have suggested that the P3 (France, the UK, and the US) may initiate this option before the restrictions imposed by resolution 2231 on Irans ballistic program expire in October 2023. It does not appear that such a measure is imminent, however, as the indirect bilateral talks between Iran and the US continue and the P3 maintain that their red line for initiating the snapback remains the detection of weapons-grade uranium in Iran.

Council Dynamics

Council members are generally united in their support for the JCPOA, although a revival of the deal is unlikely given current political dynamics.

Some members, including the P3 and other like-minded states, remain concerned about Irans activities that contravene the JCPOA and its lack of cooperation with the IAEA. Some may criticise Iran for raising demands that are beyond the scope of the JCPOA during the Vienna talks and blame Iran for the failure to reach an agreement. The US and European members might reiterate the allegations that Iran has supplied UAVs to Russia for use in Ukraineas they did during the Councils most recent briefing on Ukraine held on 23 Juneand express concern at what they view as Irans destabilising behaviour in the region, including through its proxies in Iraq and Syria.

China and Russia are more supportive of Iran. Both states have previously blamed the US for the collapse of the JCPOA, criticising it for withdrawing from the deal and imposing unilateral sanctions on the Iranian regime. In February, Iranian President Ebrahim Raisi undertook a three-day visit to China, during which the countries issued a joint statement calling for the lifting of sanctions as an integral step towards reviving the JCPOA.

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MIDDLE EAST

Lebanon

Expected Council Action

In July, Council members expect to receive a briefing in consultations on the Secretary-Generals report on the implementation of resolution 1701. Adopted in 2006, resolution 1701 called for a cessation of hostilities between the Shia group Hezbollah and Israel. Briefings are expected from Special Coordinator for Lebanon Joanna Wronecka and Under-Secretary-General for Peacekeeping Operations Jean-Pierre Lacroix. The Secretary-Generals report, which is due on 12 July, will cover the period from 21 February to 20 June.

The mandate of the UN Interim Force in Lebanon (UNIFIL) expires on 31 August.

Key Recent Developments

Lebanon has been without a president since Michel Aouns term ended on 31 October 2022. On 14 June, the parliament failedfor the 12th timeto elect a president. According to Lebanons power-sharing set-up, the president must be a Maronite Christian. In the first round of voting, a candidate needs 86 votes to be elected president (a two-thirds majority of the elected parliamentarians), while 65 votes (a simple majority) are needed in subsequent rounds. However, a quorum of 86 members of parliament is also needed for a valid ballot, meaning that the election can be thwarted if enough parliamentarians do not attend the session. At the 14 June session, neither of the two candidatesJihad Azour and Suleiman Frangiehreceived the required votes to be elected in the first round of voting, after which parliamentarians from Hezbollah and the Amal Movement reportedly withdrew, preventing a second round from taking place owing to a lack of quorum.

Against the backdrop of a prolonged socioeconomic crisis in Lebanon, key international interlocutors have expressed frustration at the continuing presidential vacuum. In a 14 June post on Twitter, Wronecka said that [t]he prolonged vacuum undermines Lebanons democratic practices and further delays the long overdue reforms and solutions needed to steer the country back to a path of recovery. In a 16 June statement, the International Support Group for Lebanonwhich consists of the Arab League, the EU, the UN, China, France, Germany, Italy, Russia, the UK, and the USregretted the failed election and urged the political leadership and Members of Parliament to assume their responsibilities and prioritize the national interest by electing a new President without further delay.

On 7 June, French President Emmanuel Macron appointed Jean-Yves Le Drian as his personal envoy to Lebanon to facilitate a consensual and effective solution to the countrys political impasse. From 21 to 24 June, Le Drian was in Lebanon for his first visit to the country in this capacity. At the time of writing, it remains unclear whether the Lebanese parties will be able to agree on a compromise candidate.

The presidential crisis is compounded by the fact that, over one year since the 15 May 2022 legislative elections, Lebanons government remains in caretaker status. Further, amid concerns that funding for the May 2023 municipal elections had not been secured, the parliament voted in April to extend the term of local government officials until 31 May 2024, paving the way for a postponement of the elections for up to a year. (Municipal elections were originally supposed to take place in May 2022 but were initially postponed to May 2023 to avoid their coinciding with the May 2022 legislative elections.) In a recent article, the International Crisis Group stressed the importance of holding municipal elections promptly, arguing that their further postponement could seriously undermine local councils and administrators who have played a key role in keeping the country running during the ongoing socioeconomic and political crises.

An 11 May letter signed by Lebanese and international civil society organisations, including Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch, said that the Lebanese Armed Forces (LAF) have recently and summarily deported hundreds of Syrians back to Syria, where they are at risk of persecution or torture and that the deportations were carried out against the backdrop of an alarming surge in anti-refugee rhetoric in Lebanon and other coercive measures intended to pressure refugees to return. The letter called on Lebanon to halt summary deportations to Syria and on the international community to step up its assistance, particularly its resettlement and alternative pathways programmes.

On 14 and 15 June, the EU hosted the seventh Brussels Conference on Supporting the future of Syria and the region, which resulted in international pledges totalling 4.6 billion euros for 2023 and one billion euros for 2024 and beyond. Save the Children noted, however, that this amount is a drastic drop from last year, in the face of [the] sky rocketing needs of 6.8 million people displaced in Syria and the more than 5 million refugees in neighbouring countries such as Egypt, Lebanon, and Turkiye.

The situation in southern Lebanon has remained tense after the exchange of fire between Israel and armed groups in April, which saw the highest number of rockets fired from southern Lebanon towards Israel since 2006 in response to raids by the Israeli police on the Haram al-Sharif/Temple Mount site in Jerusalem. (For background, see the brief on Lebanon in our May Forecast). Recently, Lebanese and Israeli media have reported tensions across the Blue Linea border demarcation between Lebanon and Israelon several occasions. During the 8 June regular meeting of the tripartite mechanism, which consists of representatives of UNIFIL, the Israel Defense Forces and the LAF, UNIFIL Head of Mission and Force Commander Major General Aroldo Lazaro encouraged the two countries to continue to avail themselves of UNIFILs liaison and coordination mechanisms while avoiding unilateral actions. He also appealed to the parties to engage in talks on the demarcation of the Blue Line, stressing the need to get beyond the immediate incidents and looking to how we resolve them. There does not, however, appear to be any concrete movement in this direction from the parties.

On 1 June, a military court in Lebanon charged five men with the 14 December 2022 killing of an Irish peacekeeper following an attack on a UNIFIL convoy. Council members had condemned the attack in a 15 December 2022 press statement, calling on the Lebanese government to investigate the incident and bring the perpetrators to justice. The statement recalled the necessity for all parties to ensure that UNIFIL personnel are safe and secure.

On 12 June, a court in London ordered the UK-registered company Savaro Ltd., which is linked to the ammonium nitrate that exploded in the 4 August 2020 Beirut port blast, to pay compensation to some of the victims. The Lebanese inquiry into responsibility for the explosion remains stalled.

Human Rights-Related Developments

Data from the Lebanese authorities cited by Amnesty International shows that deaths in custody nearly doubled in 2022 compared to 2018, rising from 18 in 2018 to 34 in 2022. In a 7 June report, Amnesty International found that this sharp increase is linked to the economic crisis which began in 2019 and exacerbated longstanding structural problems in places of detention, such as overcrowding and poor sanitation. Nevertheless, the organisation also found shortcomings from prison and health authorities in providing adequate and timely medical care to people in prison, including in emergency cases and called on the Lebanese authorities promptly to investigate all deaths in custody, decrease prison overcrowding and, with the support of the international community, allocate additional resources to improving conditions and healthcare provision in places of detention.

Key Issues and Options

The peace and security situation in southern Lebanon remains in precarious balance. Key aspects of resolutions 1701 and 1559which in 2004 called for the withdrawal of foreign forces from Lebanon, the disarmament of all militias, and the extension of government control over the whole Lebanese territoryremain unimplemented. The substantial amount of weaponry held by Hezbollah and other non-state actors in Lebanon, as well as Israels violations of Lebanons territorial integrity and sovereignty, are ongoing issues. Against this backdrop, the risk that serious incidents across the Blue Line could trigger a chain reaction leading to a wider violent escalation cannot be discounted.

The swift election of a president, the formation of a government, and the implementation of reforms aimed at addressing the ongoing socioeconomic instability are further issues.

An option for Council members would be to consider issuing a presidential statement stressing the importance of the effective implementation of resolutions 1559 and 1701, urging the Lebanese Parliament to elect a president, and calling for the formation of a new government. The statement could also underscore the importance of reforms to promote socioeconomic stability and of respecting the principle of non-refoulement.

Council Dynamics

There is broad consensus among Council members in support of Lebanons sovereignty, territorial integrity, and security. Differences remain among Council members over Hezbollah. Some draw a distinction between Hezbollahs political and military wings and have designated only its military wing as a terrorist organisation. Other members, including the UK and the US, have listed the Shia group in its entirety as a terrorist organisation. In contrast, Russia sees Hezbollah as a legitimate sociopolitical force.

France is the penholder on Lebanon.

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Overview

In July, the UK will hold the presidency of the Security Council.

The UK plans to organise three signature events. The first signature event is a briefing on Artificial Intelligence: Opportunities and Risks for International Peace and Security. The UK Secretary of State for Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Affairs James Cleverly is expected to chair the meeting and Secretary-General Antonio Guterres is expected to brief. The UK intends for the meeting to build on the AI World Congress held in London on 28 and 29 June and to shed light on the opportunities and risks posed by artificial intelligence.

The second signature event is an open debate on sexual violence in conflict. The meeting will be chaired by Lord Ahmad of Wimbledon, the UK Minister of State for the Middle East, North Africa, South Asia, and the UN and Special Representative of the UK Prime Minister on Preventing Sexual Violence in Conflict. Special Representative of the Secretary-General on Sexual Violence in Conflict Pramila Patten and two civil society representatives are the anticipated briefers.

The third signature event is the annual open debate on children and armed conflict. Special Representative of the Secretary-General for Children and Armed Conflict Virginia Gamba, Deputy Executive Director for programmes at UNICEF Omar Abdi, and a civil society representative are expected to brief.

In July, the Security Council will also receive a briefing from force commanders of UN peacekeeping operations.

African issues on the programme of work in July are:

West Africa , briefing and consultations on the UN Office for West Africa and the Sahel (UNOWAS);

Central African Republic (CAR) , renewal of the CAR sanctions regime and of the mandate of the Panel of Experts assisting the 2127 CAR Sanctions Committee; and

Sudan , the semi-annual briefing by the Prosecutor of the International Criminal Court (ICC) on its Darfur-related activities.

Middle East issues on the programme include:

The Council is expected to meet on two European issues in July. There will be a briefing on Ukraine, which will be chaired by UK Foreign Secretary James Cleverly. The Council may hold additional meetings on Ukraine depending on developments. Council members will also hold consultations on Cyprus and the work of the UN Peacekeeping Force in Cyprus (UNFICYP).

On the Americas, there will be a briefing and consultations on Colombia. The Council is also expected to hold a meeting on the situation in Haiti and to renew the mandate of the UN Integrated Office in Haiti (BINUH).

Other issues could be raised in July depending on developments.
Status Update since our June Forecast

DPRK (North Korea)

On 2 June, the Council convened for an opening briefing on the Democratic Peoples Republic of Korea (DPRK) (S/PV.9336). Albania, Ecuador, France, Japan, Malta, the UK, and the US requested the meeting after the DPRK attempted to launch a military reconnaissance satellite on 31 May. Under-Secretary-General for Political and Peacebuilding Affairs Rosemary DiCarlo briefed and the Republic of Korea (ROK) participated in the meeting under rule 39 and 37 of the Councils provisional rules of procedure respectively.

UNOCA (Central Africa)

On 5 June, the Security Council held a briefing and consultations on the Secretary-Generals semi-annual report (S/2023/389) on the UN Regional Office for Central Africa (UNOCA) and the implementation of the UNs regional strategy to combat the Lords Resistance Army (LRA) (S/PV.9338). The Council was briefed by Special Representative of the Secretary-General and head of UNOCA Abdou Abarry, President of the Commission of the Economic Community of Central African States Gilberto da Piedade Verissimo, and Marie Tamoifo, Founder and Regional Coordinator of the Network of Young Leaders for Sustainable Management of Central African Forest Ecosystems.

Security Council Elections

On 6 June, the 77th session of the UN General Assembly held elections for membership of the Security Council. The five seats available for election in 2023, according to the regular distribution among regions, were: two seats for the African Group; one seat for the Group of Asia and the Pacific Small Island Developing States (Asia-Pacific Group); one seat for the Latin American and Caribbean Group (GRULAC); and one seat for the Eastern European Group. Among these, only the Eastern European Group had contested elections, with Belarus running against Slovenia. After the first round of voting, the following members were elected for the 2024-2025 term: Algeria, Guyana, the Republic of Korea, Sierra Leone and Slovenia.

Iraq (UNITAD)

On 7 June, the Security Council received a briefing (S/PV.9341) from Christian Ritscher, the Special Adviser and head of the UN Investigative Team to Promote Accountability for Crimes Committed by Daesh/ISIL in Iraq and the Levant (UNITAD). Iraq also participated in the meeting under rule 37 of the Councils provisional rules of procedure.

Cooperation between the UN and the League of Arab States

On 8 June, the Security Council convened a briefing on cooperation between the UN and the League of Arab States (LAS) (S/PV.9343). The meeting, which was one of the signature events of the June Council Presidency of the United Arab Emirates (UAE), was chaired by Khalifa Shaheen Almarar, Minister of State at the UAEs Ministry of Foreign Affairs and International Cooperation. The briefers were: Under-Secretary-General for Political and Peacebuilding Affairs Rosemary DiCarlo; LAS Secretary-General Ahmed Aboul Gheit; and Dr. Omnia El Omrani, who was the Youth Envoy for the President of the 27th Conference of the Parties to the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change (COP 27), held in Sharm El-Sheikh, Egypt in 2022.

International Criminal Tribunals

On 12 June, the Council held its semi-annual debate (S/PV.9344) on the International Residual Mechanism for Criminal Tribunals (IRMCT). The IRMCTs president, Judge Graciela Gatti Santana, and its chief prosecutor, Serge Brammertz, briefed. They met with the Informal Working Group on International Tribunals prior to the debate. Bosnia and Herzegovina, Croatia, Rwanda, and Serbia participated in the meeting under rule 37 of the Councils provisional rules of procedure.

Climate Change, Peace and Security

On 13 June, as one of the signature events of its presidency, the United Arab Emirates (UAE) convened a ministerial-level open debate on climate change, peace and security under the Threats to international peace and security agenda item (S/PV.9345). Mariam Almheiri, the UAEs Minister of Climate Change and Environment, chaired the meeting. The briefers were: Under-Secretary-General for Peace Operations Jean-Pierre Lacroix, Juan Manuel Santosformer President of Colombia, Nobel Peace Laureate, and a member of The Eldersand Salma Kadry, Climate, Peace and Security Expert at the Consortium of International Agricultural Research.

Human Fraternity in Promoting and Sustaining Peace

On 14 June, the United Arab Emirates (UAE) convened a high-level briefing on The Values of Human Fraternity in Promoting and Sustaining Peace (S/PV.9346). This was one of the signature events of the UAEs June presidency. UAE Minister of State Noura bint Mohammed Al Kaabi chaired the meeting, at which the briefers were: Secretary-General Antonio Guterres; Sheikh Ahmed Muhammed Ahmed Al-Tayyeb, the Grand Imam of al-Azhar and Chairman of the Muslim Council of Elders; Archbishop Paul Richard Gallagher, Secretary for Relations with States and International Organisations of the Holy See; and Latifa Ibn Ziaten, the Founder and President of Association IMAD pour la Jeunesse et la Paix.

Following the briefing, the Security Council adopted resolution 2686 on tolerance and international peace and security, which was co-authored by the UAE and the UK. Although the resolution was adopted unanimously, several Council members delivered explanations of vote (S/PV.9347). France, for instance, regretted that the resolution was selective and too weak on such issues as freedom of expression, human rights, womens rights, sexual orientation and gender identity, adding that it contained a conception of extremism which is potentially liberticide.

UNDOF (Golan)

Council members held consultations on the UN Disengagement Observer Force (UNDOF) on 15 June. Assistant Secretary-General for the Middle East, Asia and the Pacific Mohamed Khaled Khiari briefed. On 29 June, the Security Council adopted resolution 2689 renewing the UNDOF mandate for six months.

Libya

On 19 June, the Security Council held an open briefing (S/PV.9351) followed by closed consultations on Libya. Special Representative and head of the UN Support Mission in Libya (UNSMIL) Abdoulaye Bathily briefed the Council on the latest political, security, and humanitarian developments in the country. Dr. Abeir Imneina, Head of the Washm Center for Womens Studies in Libya, also briefed the Council on the challenges faced by Libyan civil society organisations, human rights defenders, and women. Additionally, the chair of the 1970 Libya Sanctions Committee, Ambassador Kimihiro Ishikane (Japan), presented the periodic report on the committees activities.

Mali

On 16 June, the Council held an open briefing, followed by closed consultations, on Mali (S/PV.9350). Special Representative of the Secretary-General for Mali and head of the UN Multidimensional Integrated Stabilization Mission in Mali (MINUSMA) El-Ghassim Wane briefed, presenting the Secretary-Generals 1 June report on Mali (S/2023/402). Speaking at the session, Malis Transitional Minister of Foreign Affairs and International Cooperation Abdoulaye Diop called for the withdrawal of MINUSMA without delay. On 30 June, the Council adopted resolution 2690, which terminated the mandate of the MINUSMA as of 30 June and requested the UN to immediately start on 1 July the transfer of its tasks and the orderly and safe drawdown and withdrawal of its personnel, with the objective of completing this process by 31 December.

Council members issued a press statement on 9 June condemning an attack against MINUSMA near Ber, in the region of Timbuktu, which killed one peacekeeper from Burkina Faso and injured seven others (SC/15316). (Several days later, a second peacekeeper died from his injuries.)

South Sudan

The Council held a briefing, followed by consultations, on the UN Mission in South Sudan (UNMISS) on 20 June (S/PV.9353). The briefers were: Special Representative of the Secretary-General for South Sudan and head of the UN Mission in South Sudan (UNMISS) Nicholas Haysom, Interim Chairperson of the Reconstituted Joint Monitoring and Evaluation Commission (RJMEC) Major General (Retired) Charles Tai Gituai, and Marc Impagliazzo, President of the Community of SantEgidio.

Afghanistan

On 21 June, the Council convened for an open briefing, followed by closed consultations, on Afghanistan (S/PV.9354). Special Representative of the Secretary-General and head of the UN Assistance Mission in Afghanistan (UNAMA) Roza Otunbayeva and Shabana Basij-Rasikh, the Co-Founder and President of the School of Leadership, Afghanistan, briefed. Head and Representative of OCHA in Geneva and Director of the Coordination Division Ramesh Rajasingham also briefed the Council via videoconference during the closed consultations. Rajasingham briefed on behalf of Under-Secretary-General for Humanitarian Affairs and Emergency Relief Coordinator Martin Griffiths pursuant to resolution 2615 of 22 December 2021, which established a humanitarian exception to the 1988 Afghanistan sanctions regime and requested that the Emergency Relief Coordinator brief the Council on the delivery of humanitarian assistance in Afghanistan every six months. Afghanistan, India, Iran, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Pakistan, Tajikistan, and Uzbekistan also participated in the meeting under rule 37 of the Councils provisional rules of procedure.

Gulf of Guinea Piracy

On 21 June, the Security Council convened for a briefing on maritime security in the Gulf of Guinea to mark the ten-year anniversary of the Yaounde Code of Conduct that created the Gulf of Guineas maritime security architecture (S/PV.9355). The Council heard briefings from Assistant Secretary-General for Africa in the Departments of Political and Peacebuilding Affairs and Peace Operations (DPPA-DPO) Martha Ama Akyaa Pobee, President of the Commission of the Economic Community of Central African States (ECCAS) Gilberto Da Piedade Verissimo, President of the Economic Community of West African States (ECOWAS) Commission Omar Alieu Touray, and Executive Secretary of the Gulf of Guinea Commission (GGC) Jose Mba Abeso.

Somalia

On 22 June, the Security Council held a briefing and consultations on the situation in Somalia (S/PV.9356). The UAEs Minister of State in the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, Sheikh Shakhboot Bin Nahyan Al Nahyan, chaired the meeting. The briefers were the Special Representative of the Secretary-General for Somalia and head of the UN Assistance Mission in Somalia (UNSOM), Catriona Laing; the Special Representative of the Chairperson of the AU Commission (SRCC) for Somalia and head of the AU Transition Mission in Somalia (ATMIS), Ambassador Mohamed El-Amine Souef; and Cindy McCain, the newly appointed Executive Director of WFP. Somali President Hassan Sheikh Mohamud attended the meeting and called for the lifting of the arms embargo imposed on his country under the 751 Al-Shabaab Sanctions regime. On 27 June, the Security Council adopted resolution 2687, extending the mandate of ATMIS for six months until 31 December.

Democratic Republic of the Congo

On 26 June, the Security Council held a briefing and closed consultations on the situation in the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC), including the work of the UN Organization Stabilization Mission in the DRC (MONUSCO) (S/PV.9358). Assistant Secretary-General for Africa in the Departments of Political and Peacebuilding Affairs and Peace Operations Martha Ama Akyaa Pobee briefed the Council on the latest developments in DRC and the activities of the mission. The DRC and Rwanda representatives participated in the meeting under rule 37 of the Councils provisional rules of procedure. On 27 June, the Security Council adopted resolution 2688, extending the 1533 DRC sanctions regime until 1 July 2024 and the mandate of the Group of Experts assisting the 1533 DRC Sanctions Committee until 1 August 2024.
AFRICA

Sudan

Expected Council Action

In July, the Security Council will receive the semi-annual briefing of ICC Prosecutor Karim Asad Ahmad Khan on the ICCs Darfur-related activities.

Background and Key Recent Developments

Sudan is not a state party to the Rome Statute of the ICC. The Security Council referred the situation in Darfur, Sudan, to the ICC through the adoption of resolution 1593 on 31 March 2005. (Algeria, Brazil, China, and the US abstained on the resolution.) The Council invited the ICC Prosecutor to update it every six months on actions taken pursuant to resolution 1593. The investigations regarding Darfur focus on allegations of genocide, war crimes and crimes against humanity committed in Darfur since 1 July 2002.

More than 17 years after the Councils ICC referral, the first trial opened on 5 April 2022 with the case of Prosecutor v. Ali Muhammad Ali Abd-Al-Rahman (Ali Kushayb), which is ongoing. Four ICC arrest warrants remain outstanding; these are against former President Omar Al Bashir, Ahmad Muhammad Harun, Abdel Raheem Muhammad Hussein, and Abdallah Banda Abakaer Nourain. Sudan remains under an obligation to surrender the four remaining suspects in the Darfur situation to the court, pursuant to resolution 1593 and the subsequent orders of ICC judges.

Khan last briefed the Council on 25 January. In his remarks, he noted that the trial of Ali Kushayb had made swift progress and that 50 witnesses had been heard by the ICC over the course of 78 working days. He added with regret that cooperation with the Sudanese government had deteriorated in recent months and that the government had failed to meet the requirements of cooperation as set out in resolution 1593. Among other issues, he noted that access to documentation and witnesses remained restricted, multiple entry visas had not been granted by the Sudanese government, and new administrative hurdles had been created, including the need to obtain internal travel permits. Khan said that a change of posture is needed by those charged with responsibility or those who have assumed responsibility in the Sudan.

Fighting erupted on the morning of 15 April in and around Khartoum between the Sudanese Armed Forces (SAF), headed by General Abdel Fattah al-Burhan, Sudans military leader and chairperson of the Transitional Sovereign Council, and the Rapid Support Forces (RSF), a paramilitary group led by General Mohamed Hamdan Dagalo (known as Hemeti), the Deputy Chairman of the Transitional Sovereign Council. In addition to heavy fighting in Khartoum, hostilities in Darfur have been severe, marked by significant inter-communal violence, with Arab militias supporting the RSF and targeting non-Arab groups in Darfur. The inter-ethnic component of the fighting has raised alarm among several Council members. Some members appear to be concerned about the potential for inter-communal fighting to spin out of control, recalling the conflict in Darfur in the 2000s that claimed the lives of some 300,000 people.

Despite several calls for a ceasefire from regional stakeholders and the broader international community, fighting entered its third month in June, causing a deep humanitarian crisis. According to the 22 June OCHA Situation Report, at least 1,081 people had reportedly been killed and over 11,714 injured across the country since 15 April. Moreover, according to the Office of the UN High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR), since the onset of fighting, approximately 2.153 million people have been displaced within Sudan, and over 583,426 people have fled the country as at 27 June.

Following the outbreak of the fighting, several incidents were reported of prisoners escaping or being released (prison officials contacted by UNITAMS estimated the number of inmates released from prisons in Khartoum to be about 12,000). According to the Secretary-Generals most recent report on UNITAMS, dated 16 May, in a 26 April statement, the SAF claimed that prior to the outbreak of fighting in April, Bashir and some other officials of the former regime had been moved to a military hospital on the recommendation of the medical staff of Kober prison.

Sudans humanitarian needs are significant and have evolved rapidly. On 17 May, OCHA released a revised 2023 Humanitarian Response Plan (HRP) for Sudan in light of the ongoing conflict. According to the plan, the estimated number of people in need increased from 15.8 million in November 2022 to 24.7 million in May. The plan calls for $817 million in additional funding, bringing the requirements for 2023 to $2.56 billion. At the time of writing, the HRP for Sudan was 17.4 percent funded.

Also on 17 May, UNHCR launched the Refugee Response Plan (RRP), which appeals for an estimated $470.4 million for an initial period from May to October. The RRP projected that the number of refugees, including Sudanese refugees, individuals from third countries, refugee returnees and migrant returnees, will reach approximately 1.1 million during this initial period. The plan outlines a multi-partner, multi-sector response strategy and the financial requirements of 140 partner agencies supporting the host governments of the Central African Republic (CAR), Chad, Egypt, Ethiopia, and South Sudan to provide protection services and urgent humanitarian assistance to refugees from Sudan.

Human Rights-Related Developments

On 9 June, the Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights (OHCHR) issued a statement emphasising its concern about the devastating impact of the fighting in Sudan on civilians. The statement called on the warring parties to ensure the protection of civilians and called on those responsible to be held accountable.

On 11 May, the Human Rights Council, in a special session, expanded the mandate of the UN expert on human rights in Sudan, Radhouane Nouicer, to monitor and report on all human rights violations and abuses committed during the ongoing conflict between the SAF and the RSF. In a 23 May statement, Nouicer noted that a full array of human rightseconomic, social and cultural as much as civil and politicalare being violated, and both parties have singularly failed to respect their obligations under international humanitarian law. He said that Sudan is facing a chronic shortage of food and drinking water and further pointed out the indiscriminate attacks in residential areas and widespread looting. He called on the warring parties to abide by their obligations under international humanitarian and human rights law to protect civilians from the effects of hostilities.

Key Issues and Options

An underlying key issue for the Council is how to promote justice and accountability for past atrocities committed in Sudan. Another key issue for the Council is how to enhance cooperation between the ICC prosecutor and the government of Sudan.

It remains to be seen how the recent fighting that erupted in Sudan on 15 April between the SAF and the RSF may hinder the ICCs cooperation with the Sudanese government.

A related issue for the Council is how to alleviate the growing humanitarian needs in Sudan and address the ongoing violations of international humanitarian law and human rights law by the Sudanese warring parties. According to local media reports, on 26 June, Hemeti acknowledged the human rights violations committed by his forces and announced the establishment of a court to combat these crimes.

In addition to receiving Khans briefing, Council members supportive of the ICCs work could consider holding an informal meeting with the prosecutor to facilitate a dialogue on ways in which his office could strengthen its cooperation with the Sudanese government and seek accountability for the atrocities committed in Sudan.

Council and Wider Dynamics

The Council is divided on the work of the ICC. Albania, Brazil, Ecuador, France, Gabon, Ghana, Japan, Malta, Switzerland, and the UK are state parties to the Rome Statute of the ICC. China, Mozambique, Russia, the United Arab Emirates, and the US are not. These distinctions, however, do not necessarily reflect how members view the courts work on Sudan. For example, the US has long supported the ICCs efforts with regard to Sudan. Among the wider membership of the UN, African countries have long expressed concerns about what they view as the courts disproportionate focus on Africa.

At the last semi-annual briefing on 25 January, wide-ranging views were expressed on the ICCs work in relation to Darfur. Many members welcomed the progress on Ali Kushaybs trial while calling on Sudan to cooperate more with the court, including providing access to key witnesses and allowing the court to establish a greater field presence. Russia was critical of the courts work and does not regard the case against Ali Kushayb as a breakthrough.

Russias already negative view of the ICC hardened following the courts announcement on 17 March that it had issued arrest warrants for Russian President Vladimir Putin and his commissioner for childrens rights, Maria Lvova-Belova, for allegedly committing the war crime of unlawful deportation and unlawful transfer of children from Ukraine to Russia. On 11 May, when the ICC prosecutor most recently briefed the Council on the courts work in Libya, the Russian representative expressed the view that the ICC has become a very obedient puppet of Western countries and is acting on the orders and in the political interests of Western countries adding that the prosecutors presence in our building is not only pointless, but it is also an insult to the Organization.

The UK is the penholder on Sudan, and the US is the penholder on Sudan sanctions.

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MIDDLE EAST

Syria

Expected Council Action

In July, the Council is expected to vote on a draft resolution extending the authorisation for the Syria cross-border aid mechanism, prior to its expiry on 10 July. The Security Council will also hold its monthly meetings on the political and humanitarian situations in Syria and on the use of chemical weapons in the country.

Key Recent Developments

Syria continues to grapple with the devastating humanitarian consequences of the 6 February earthquake and its aftershocks. In connection with the earthquake, approximately 6,000 people have died and more than 12,000 have been injured in Syria. An outbreak of cholera has compounded the already grim humanitarian situation in the country. According to the World Health Organizations (WHO) 18 June situation report on the cholera outbreak in Syria, 132,782 suspected cases, including 104 deaths attributed to the disease, were reported across the country between 25 August 2022 and 20 May.

Prior to the earthquake, humanitarian aid was delivered to northwest Syria from Turkiye through the Bab al-Hawa border crossing. (Resolution 2672 of 9 January extended the authorisation through this crossing for six months without requiring the consent of the Syrian government.) Following the earthquake, starting on 13 February, the Syrian government opened two additional crossing pointsBab al-Salam and Al Raeefrom Turkiye to northwest Syria for an initial period of three months for the delivery of humanitarian aid. In a 13 May post on Twitter, the Permanent Representative of Syria to the UN, Bassam Sabbagh, said that the Syrian government had decided to extend the authorisation for the two border crossings for another three months, ending on 13 August.

The opening of two additional border crossings in northwest Syria, Bab al-Salam and Al Raee, has allowed the UN and other humanitarian organisations to accelerate aid delivery. According to OCHA data, at the time of writing, a total of 3,260 trucks carrying humanitarian supplies from seven UN agencies have crossed to northwest Syria from Turkiye since 9 February through the three border crossings: Bab al-Hawa (2,748 trucks), Bab al-Salam (433 trucks), and Al Raee (79 trucks).

On 30 May, the Council convened its monthly meeting on the political and humanitarian situations in Syria. Special Envoy for Syria Geir O. Pedersen, OCHA Deputy Director of Operations and Advocacy Ghada Eltahir Mudawi and Middle East Regional Program Director of the Norwegian Refugee Council Morgane Aveline briefed. Mudawi provided an overview of the increasingly dire humanitarian situation in the country and described the recent efforts of the UN and other actors to deliver humanitarian aid in Syria. She called for a 12-month extension of the Security Council authorisation of the cross-border aid mechanism.

The EU-sponsored seventh Brussels Conference, titled Supporting the Future of Syria and the Region, was convened on 14-15 June. The conference aimed at mobilising the international community in support of a comprehensive and credible political solution to the Syria conflict in line with resolution 2254 and addressing critical humanitarian issues. Conference participants pledged 5.6 billion, including 4.6 billion for 2023 and 1 billion for 2024 and future years. The funding aims to support people in Syria and neighbouring countries hosting Syrian refugees. The amount pledged was less than last years annual Brussels conference, where participants pledged 6.4 billion for 2022 and future years.

At the time of writing, although the flash appeal for earthquake relief in Syria ($397.6 million) was fully funded, the humanitarian response plan for 2023 ($5.41 billion) was only 11.6 percent funded.

In his remarks at the Brussels conference, Pedersen called for ensuring adequate funding for addressing essential needs and noted that swift disbursements of the funding are needed to support the Syrian people as well as host communities in the wider region. He added that he is engaging with relevant parties in a renewed effort to reconvene the Constitutional Committee in Geneva as soon as possible. He emphasised the need for a 12-month extension of the Councils authorisation of the cross-border aid mechanism. In regard to the renewed political attention on Syria, he noted that if this opportunity is seized and if players coordinate and work together, I am convinced that it is possible to move forward. (For more on recent political developments in Syria, see our June Forecast.)

On 22 June, Security Council members held an informal interactive dialogue (IID), in accordance with resolution 2672 of 9 January, which encouraged Council members to convene IIDs every two months with participation of donors, interested regional parties and representatives of the international humanitarian agencies operating in Syria. This was the third IID held since the 6 February earthquake. The meeting featured a briefing by Edem Wosornu, OCHAs Director for Operations and Advocacy Division. Three other UN officialsUN Resident Coordinator and Humanitarian Coordinator for Syria Adam Abdelmoula, Regional Humanitarian Coordinator for the Syria Crisis Muhannad Ibrahim Ahmed Hadi, and Deputy Regional Humanitarian Coordinator for the Syria Crisis David Cardenwere also on hand to respond to questions. In addition to Council members and Syria, interested regional parties (Egypt, Iran, Iraq, Jordan, Lebanon, and Turkiye) and donors (Canada, Germany, Norway, Sweden, and the EU) participated in the meeting.

Pedersen has continued to engage with stakeholders through the step-for-step initiative. Through this initiative, Pedersen is asking the Syrian government, the opposition, regional states, and other stakeholders what concessions they are willing to make in exchange for reciprocal actions on matters such as abductees, detainees, and missing persons; humanitarian assistance and early recovery projects; and conditions for dignified, safe, and voluntary refugee returns.

In a 2 June Twitter post, the Special Envoys office noted that Pedersen engaged constructively with the Syrian Negotiations Commission (SNC) to discuss the latest developments and how to move the political process forward in line with resolution 2254. On 9 June, Pedersen met Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov for in-depth discussions on how to strengthen the Syrian political process in accordance with resolution 2254, considering recent international and regional developments. In the meeting, Pedersen also highlighted the need to reconvene the Constitutional Committee.

On 15 June, in an effort to advance the Syrian political process, Pedersen held discussions with numerous stakeholders, including Lebanese Foreign Minister Abdallah Rashid Bouhabib, German Minister of State in the Federal Foreign Office Tobias Lindner, Iraqi Foreign Minister Fuad Hussein, Jordanian Foreign Minister Ayman Safadi, and European Commissioner for Crisis Management Janez Lenarcic.

On 26 June, Under-Secretary-General for Humanitarian Affairs Martin Griffiths met Syrian President Bashar al-Assad. In a Twitter post, Griffiths said that the meeting focused on issues of humanitarian assistance in Syria and avenues to engage the wider region around early recovery priorities. On the same day, Griffiths met Syrian Foreign Minister Faisal Mekdad for a discussion on the humanitarian situation in the country.

Hostilities continue in some parts of Syria. On 25 June, Russian air strikes hit a market outside Jisr al-Shughour in Idlib governorate, killing at least 11 civilians, according to media reports. In a 26 June statement, Carden expressed deep concerns about an escalation of hostilities in northwest Syria, in light of the recent attacks in Idlib governorate. The statement called on all parties to the conflict to take all necessary measures to ensure that civilians and civilian infrastructure are protected, in accordance with international humanitarian law.

On 29 June, UN General Assembly adopted a resolution establishing an Independent Institution on Missing Persons in the Syrian Arab Republic, under the auspices of the UN. The mechanism aims to clarify the fate and whereabouts of all missing persons in the Syrian Arab Republic and to provide adequate support to victims, survivors and the families of those missing, in close cooperation and complementarity with all relevant actors. The resolution was adopted with 83 votes in favour, 11 against and 62 abstentions. Nine Council members voted in favour of the resolution (Albania, Brazil, Ecuador, France, Japan, Malta, Switzerland, UK and the US), whereas three abstained (Gabon, Ghana and the United Arab Emirates) and two voted against (China and Russia).

Human Rights-Related Developments

In a 19 June statement, several UN experts urged the General Assembly to establish a human rights body to address the issue of missing and forcibly disappeared persons in Syria. The statement noted that the proposed human rights body must be guided by a victim and survivor-centred approach and allow the families of those missing and disappeared to participate in all stages of the process, including in its establishment, design, implementation, evaluation, and decision-making. The experts emphasised the importance of a gender-sensitive approach in addressing enforced disappearances and further called for working towards accountability through the relevant mechanisms available at the national or international level.

Key Issues and Options

The key issue for the Council in July is the decision on the extension of the cross-border aid mechanism, which expires on 10 July. One option for the Council would be to adopt a resolution extending the mandate of the cross-border mechanism, allowing the humanitarian aid to continue flowing through the Bab al-Hawa border crossing for 12 months.

Other options for the Council would be to adopt a resolution extending the authorisation for the cross-border mechanism for a shorter period, with the opportunity for further extension, similar to resolution 2642. Council members could also consider extending the authorisation for additional border crossings in the same resolution.

Another important and ongoing issue is how to alleviate the growing humanitarian needs in Syria. Periodic briefings from OCHA have helped keep the Council informed of the humanitarian situation on the ground. Council members could also consider inviting representatives of Syrian humanitarian aid organisations to engage with them to explore avenues for improving aid delivery mechanisms in Syria.

Another key long-standing issue is finding a way to break the political impasse in Syria and to provide political support for the Special Envoys efforts in this regard. One option would be for the Council to hold a private meeting with Special Envoy Pedersen and other member states with influence over the parties in Syria to discuss recent developments in his step-for-step initiative. (A private meeting is a closed, formal meeting format; unlike closed consultations, non-Council member states are allowed to participate in this format.)

Council Dynamics

Syria remains a divisive file. China and Russia are supportive of the Syrian government, emphasising the need to respect the countrys sovereignty and territorial integrity and drawing connections between unilateral coercive measures on Syria and the challenging humanitarian situation in the country. In contrast, the P3 (France, the UK, and the US) and other like-minded members criticise the government for violating international humanitarian law and human rights law, arbitrarily detaining people, and not engaging meaningfully in political dialogue.

Most members emphasise that the cross-border aid mechanism is essential for saving lives in Syria and strongly support its continuation. Other members, such as China and Russia, tend to argue that cross-border deliveries are extraordinary measures that undermine Syrias sovereignty.

At the 30 May Council briefing, several Council members expressed support for the extension of the cross-border mechanisms authorisation, including Albania, Ecuador, France, Japan, Malta, the United Arab Emirates, the UK, and the US. In its statement, the US said that it will work with Syria humanitarian penholdersBrazil and Switzerlandto seek a 12-month authorisation for all three border crossingsBab al-Hawa, Bab al-Salam and Al Raee. It further noted that such a resolution will provide confidence, predictability and support for humanitarian workers, the UN, and the Syrians. On the other hand, Russia noted that it sees no reason at all to extend the cross-border mechanism. It added that, with coordination and contact with the Syrian government, the UN could work without a Council resolution.

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Huynh Thanh Dat, Minister of Science and Technology and Australian Ambassador to Vietnam Andrew Goledzinowski at the annual meeting of the Vietnam  Australia Innovation Partnership. (Photo: VGP)

The Aus4Innovation program is delivered through a tripartite partnership between the Australian Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade (DFAT), CSIRO - Australias national science agency, and Vietnams Ministry of Science and Technology (MoST). To date, the program has explored emerging areas of technology and digital transformation, trialled new models for partnerships between public and private sector institutions, and strengthened Vietnamese capability in digital foresight, scenario planning, science commercialisation, and innovation policy.

After five years in operation across 37 provinces in Vietnam, the program has delivered some notable achievements, including laying the foundation for 82 partnerships between Australian and Vietnamese universities, research agencies, high-tech businesses, and policy makers; establishing a pool of 875 trainers and experts through capacity building activities; demonstrating 12 innovative solutions to exemplify how innovation and technology can solve socioeconomic challenges; contributing to national policies on science, technology and innovation, as well as developed practical tools for innovation policy development to help contribute to a more enabling environment; and developing 8 platforms to enable collaboration in innovation across research institutes and businesses.

Speaking at the Australia-Vietnam Innovation Partnership Day, Mr Andrew Goledzinowski, Australias Ambassador to Vietnam, said: While Australia and Vietnam are at different stages of development, we share an ambition to base our future growth on science and technology, and the potential for increased international cooperation around innovation for global and regional solutions. Our innovation cooperation is substantial, efficient, and full of trust. It happens at all levels  individual, institution, and government, and proves to be enduring. As our two countries are working towards upgrading our relations to a Comprehensive Strategic Partnership, we will continue to deepen our cooperation in trade and investment, defence and security, and knowledge and innovation.

The partnership between CSIRO and MoST was formalised in 2018 with a Memorandum of Understanding to further science, technology and innovation collaboration. In June 2023, this collaboration has been being further enhanced through another Memorandum of Understanding between Australias Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade (DFAT) and MoST, which was inked during the official visit to Vietnam by Australian Prime Minister Anthony Albanese.

Im delighted that the partnership with Australia, through the Aus4Innovation program, has delivered tangible, significant results that are having substantial positive impact on the lives of the Vietnamese people. With the introduction of the Strategy for the development of science, technology and innovation (STI) in Vietnam until 2030, the Government of Vietnam has affirmed the pivotal role of STI in addressing emerging economic, societal and institutional challenges. Our Ministry is working hard to meet the goals set by the Strategy; and knowing that in this process, we will have the support of a trusted partner like Australia is encouraging. We will build on the accomplishments of today to achieve much more in the next five years, and beyond. Mr Huynh Thanh Dat, Minister of Science and Technology added.

CSIROs Executive Director of Growth, Mr Jonathan Law explained that the next phase of the Aus4Innovation program would build upon the solid foundations already established. I am deeply encouraged that the Australian Government, through DFAT decided to continue to support this program for another five years, broadening our opportunities to pursue our endeavour to bring technology and innovation to life. Over the next five years, the program will put a stronger focus on areas of Vietnams priorities, such as resilient agriculture and food, as well as introducing appropriate interventions for the digital era, including responsible artificial intelligence. Were also honoured to play a role in deepening research linkages and private sector connections between Australia and Vietnam."

Achievements of the Aus4Innovation program were exhibited in a showcase at the Australia-Vietnam Innovation Partnership Day at Vietnams Ministry of Science and Technology. Policymakers, donors, knowledge institutes and enterprises came together to celebrate the success and extension of the program. These achievements can also be found on the programs website.

With 2023 marking the 50th year of diplomatic relations between Australia and Vietnam, the enhanced investment into Aus4Innovation is a meaningful demonstration of Australias continued commitment for the sustainable and inclusive development of Vietnam./.
The Middle East, including the Palestinian Question

Expected Council Action

In July, the Security Council will hold its quarterly open debate on The situation in the Middle East, including the Palestinian question. Assistant Secretary-General for the Middle East, Asia and the Pacific Mohamed Khaled Khiari is the expected briefer.

Key Recent Developments

On 18 June, the Israeli government changed long-standing settlement planning and approval procedures to significantly expedite these processes, and on 26 June, it approved plans advancing more than 5,500 settlement units. These developments, which were met with expressions of concern by key international interlocutors, compound the Israeli governments other recent moves in this direction. In February, for instance, Israel approved plans advancing over 7,000 housing units in settlements across the West Bank, and in March, the Knesset (Israeli Parliament) repealed the provisions of the 2005 Disengagement Law pertaining to four northern West Bank settlementsincluding the Homesh outpostthat were evacuated concurrent with Israels disengagement from the Gaza Strip. On 18 May, the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) issued an order allowing Israelis to re-enter the area of the Homesh outpost.

Demolitions of Palestinian-owned structures are also on the rise, with OCHA reporting the demolition or seizure of 290 structures43 of which had been provided as humanitarian aidand the displacement of 413 people during the first three months of 2023. These figures represent, respectively, a 46 and 78 percent increase compared with the first quarter of 2022, which saw the highest number of demolitions since 2016.

Violence in the West Bank continues to escalate. Recent incidents have included the 19 June IDF raid and ensuing exchanges of fire in the Jenin refugee camp, during which five Palestinians were killed and two more later died of their wounds, and the 20 June shooting attack near the settlement of Eli, during which four Israelis were killed by two Palestinians. Following the 20 June shooting attack and through 25 June, Israeli settlers targeted several Palestinian towns and villages in the West Bank, causing extensive damage. A Palestinian man was shot and killed during the violence. (Following these developments, Council members held an extraordinary meeting on 23 June and, on 27 June, agreed on press elements. For more, see our Whats in Blue story of 23 June.)

At the 27 June Security Council meeting on The situation in the Middle East, including the Palestinian question, Wennesland said that these attacks followed a similar pattern, with large numbers of settlers, many armed, in some cases escorted by I[sraeli] S[ecurity] F[orces], setting fire to dozens of houses and vehicles, as well as fields owned by Palestinians, followed by confrontations, in many cases leading to casualties. He noted that, while some authorities condemned the attackswith, for instance, a joint statement by Israeli security forces referring to the settler attacks as nationalist terrorismothers delivered inflammatory statements. Wennesland referred in particular to a recent statement by Itamar Ben-Gvir, Israels National Security Minister and leader of the far-right Otzmah Yehudit party, who called for a widespread military campaign in the West Bank, urging Israeli security forces to blow up buildings [and] assassinate terrorists. Not one, or two, but dozens, hundreds, or if needed, thousands and called on settlers to run to the hilltops and establish additional outposts. Wennesland also noted that some Palestinian factions celebrated the 20 June shooting attack and called for additional attacks.

The compounding effects of settlement expansion, demolitions, and settler violence were particularly evident in the displacement in May of the Palestinian herding community of Ein Samiya in the West Bank. According to a 25 May statement by Acting Humanitarian Coordinator for the Occupied Palestinian Territory (OPT) Yvonne Helle, the Israeli authorities have repeatedly demolished homes and other structures [these families] own and have threatened to destroy their only school. At the same time, land available for the grazing of livestock has decreased due to settlement expansion and both children and adults have been subjected to settler violence, leaving no viable choice for this community than to leave.

International interlocutors have noted the reappearance of heavy weaponry during Israels operations in the West Bank as a concerning development. In a 23 June statement, UN High Commissioner for Human Rights Volker Turk said that the airstrikes conducted by the IDF during the 19 June raid in Jenin were a major intensification of the use of weaponry more generally associated with the conduct of armed hostilities rather than a law enforcement operation. (During the raid, Israel deployed helicopter gunships in the West Bank for the first time in about 20 years.) On 21 June, three Palestinians were killed in an Israeli drone strike on a car that the IDF said was carrying a terrorist cell that had carried out shooting attacks in the West Bank. According to media reports citing a statement by the IDF, this was the first such strike in the West Bank since 2006. In his statement, Turk said that the Israeli authorities are required to ensure that all operations are planned and implemented to minimize the use of lethal force.

The ceasefire, which halted the 9-13 May round of hostilities between Israel and the Palestinian Islamic Jihad (PIJ) in the Gaza Strip, has held. However, there is an ongoing risk that developments in the West Bank may have spillover effects in Gaza, leading to a new violent confrontation. (For more, see our Whats in Blue story of 10 May.)

On 27 June, the Secretary-General published his annual report on children and armed conflict, which documented 3,133 grave violations that were perpetrated against 1,139 Palestinian children and eight Israeli children in 2022. Several civil society organisations and member states have criticised the Secretary-General for failing to hold accountable Israeli security forces and Palestinian armed groups, neither of which were listed in the annual reports annexes. Several civil society organisations have called for Israels listing, with some also calling for the listing of Palestinian armed groups. (For more, see the Children and Armed Conflict brief in our July Forecast.)

Human Rights-Related Developments

On 8 June, the UN Human Rights Council (HRC) Independent International Commission of Inquiry on the OPT, including East Jerusalem and Israel, issued a report which found that freedom of association, expression and opinion, and the right to peaceful assembly, are being violated by the Government of Israel, the Government of the State of Palestine and the de facto authorities in Gaza (A/HRC/53/22). Introducing the report to the HRC on 20 June, Commissioner Navanethem Pillay said that the majority of violations are being committed by Israeli authorities. Among other issues, the report says that the commission concluded that the designations by Israeli authorities of six Palestinian non-governmental organisations (NGOs) as terrorist organisationswhich Council members discussed during several meetings in 2021 and 2022were unjustified, undertaken to silence civil society voices, and violate human rights, including freedom of association, freedom of expression and opinion, and the rights to peaceful assembly, to privacy and to fair trial. The report also says that the commission has documented several cases of sexual and gender-based violence by Palestinian security forces against Palestinian women human rights defenders. (The commission was established by HRC resolution S-30/1 adopted on 27 May 2021. While some UN member states oppose the commissions open-ended mandate, others support it.)

Key Issues and Options

The overarching issue for the Security Council remains to determine how it can support the resumption of political negotiations between Israelis and Palestinians to move towards a resolution of the conflict and achieve a two-state solution. The deteriorating security situation and violence against civilians remain important matters of concern for Council members. While the Council has met on The situation in the Middle East, including the Palestinian question twelve times in six months, it has been unable to put forward a shared strategy to prevent the further worsening of the situation.

Deterring developments that undermine the viability of the two-state solution and a peaceful resolution of the conflictsuch as the expansion of Israeli settlements, forced evictions and demolitions of Palestinian-owned structures, and the alteration of the status quo at the holy sites in Jerusalemis also a key issue. In a recent statement, former UN High Commissioner for Human Rights Mary Robinson and former Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon, respectively Chair and Deputy Chair of The Elders, warned that a one-state reality is now rapidly extinguishing the prospect of a two-state solution.

On 20 February, the Council adopted a presidential statement expressing deep concern and dismay about Israels announcements regarding expansion of settlement activity. One option for the Council would be to adopt a follow-up presidential statement reacting to recent announcements of further construction and expansion of settlements and to the decision of the Israeli government to alter settlement planning procedures. The statement could echo the 28 June statement by the Secretary-Generals spokesperson and previous Council outcomes, condemning the advancement of settlement activity and reiterating that settlements constitute a flagrant violation of international law and are a major obstacle to the realisation of a viable two-state solution and a just, lasting, and comprehensive peace. The statement could also call for immediate de-escalation, calm, and restraint.

If Council dynamics impede agreement on a presidential statement, different groupings of Council members could consider delivering their own statement to this effect. These groupings could also explore and spearhead further options and proposals to promote broader and more effective Council action on this file.

Council and Wider Dynamics

There is broad support among Council members for the two-state solution. With varying degrees of emphasis, members also routinely call for an end to settlement activity and demolitions and condemn violence against civilians, including acts of terror and settler-related violence.

Nevertheless, dynamics on this file remain difficult. China, for instance, proposed issuing press elements during the 10 May emergency consultations, which had been called to discuss the hostilities between Israel and the PIJ. However, consensus could not be achieved. In particular, it seems that the US opposed the proposal, arguing that an outcome would not be helpful at that stage, and that it was preferable to leave space for quiet diplomacy. On 27 June, Security Council members agreed on press elements on the 23 June closed consultations on The situation in the Middle East, including the Palestinian question after a failed attempt to do so on the day of the consultations. This was the first Council outcome, albeit an informal one, on this file since the 20 February presidential statement.

In recent Council meetings on The situation in the Middle East, including the Palestinian question, Russia has regularly accused the US of blocking the Councils adoption of any substantive decision on the Middle East peace process and the efforts of the Middle East Quartetwhich consists of the EU, Russia, the UN, and the US.

Many members have called for the implementation of the commitments agreed at the meetings of senior officials from Israel, the Palestinian Authority, the US, Egypt, and Jordan in Aqaba and Sharm El Sheikh. Although the joint communique issued after the 19 March Sharm El Sheik meeting strongly suggests that the five parties would reconvene in April, no such meeting has taken place. At press time, further meetings under this US-led format appear unlikely in the immediate future, with senior Palestinian Authority leaders stressing that it is not possible to continue holding these conferences if there is no actual and tangible positive development on the ground.

In June, Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas travelled to China, where on 14 June, he and Chinese President Xi Jinping announced the establishment of a strategic partnership.

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EUROPE

Ukraine

Expected Council Action

In July, the Security Council will hold a briefing on the situation in Ukraine. UK Foreign Secretary James Cleverly is expected to chair the meeting. The Council may hold additional meetings on the country, depending on developments on the ground.

Key Recent Developments

In early June, Ukraine launched a series of counteroffensive efforts focused primarily on the eastern Donetsk and southern Zaporizhzhia regions. Despite recapturing several villages, the counteroffensive has encountered strong resistance from Russian forces. In an 18 June intelligence update, the UKs Ministry of Defence noted that Russia was conducting relatively effective defensive operations in the south and that both sides were suffering high casualties. Ukrainian Prime Minister Denys Shmyhal suggested on 22 June that Ukraines counteroffensive would take time but emphasised that he remained optimistic about its eventual success. Shmyhals remarks came after Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy acknowledged in a 21 June interview that progress on the battlefield had been slower than desired.

On 6 June, the Kakhovka Dam located in the southern Kherson region of Ukraine was destroyed, leading to widespread flooding along the lower Dnieper River. Kyiv and Moscow have accused each other of destroying the dam. According to a 22 June OCHA humanitarian impact and response report, the incident has led to an unconfirmed number of civilians killed and injured and a worsened humanitarian situation in areas already facing the dire consequences of war. In addition to displacing more than 4,000 people in the southern Kherson and Mykolaiv regions, the incident and subsequent depletion of the Kakhovka reservoir has left hundreds of thousands of people without access to drinking water.

The Security Council held an emergency meeting on 6 June to discuss the incident at the request of Russia and Ukraine, supported by Albania and the US. During the meeting, Under-Secretary-General for Humanitarian Affairs Martin Griffiths characterised the dams destruction as one of the most significant incidents of damage to civilian infrastructure since the start of Russias invasion of Ukraine in February 2022.

The Council convened four subsequent meetings on Ukraine in June. At Russias request, Council members held two meetings under any other business on 15 June and 27 June to discuss developments related to the 26 September 2022 explosions that caused damage to the Nord Stream pipelines in the Baltic Sea. On 23 June, the Council convened for a briefing during which Under-Secretary-General for Political and Peacebuilding Affairs Rosemary DiCarlo provided an update on the security and humanitarian situation in Ukraine. (For more, see our Whats in Blue story of 22 June.) On 29 June, the Council held a briefing, at Russias request, on the issue of Western arms supplies to Ukraine and their implications for diplomatic efforts to resolve the Ukrainian crisis.

On 23 June, Yevgeny Prigozhin, head of the Russian private security company the Wagner Group, released a video accusing the Russian Ministry of Defence of orchestrating a missile strike on a Wagner Group outpost in eastern Ukraine. Prigozhin has frequently criticised the Russian military leadership for their insubstantial support to Wagner Group troops fighting in the city of Bakhmut in eastern Ukraine. Tensions escalated in early June, when Russian Defence Minister Sergei Shoigu ordered all volunteer detachments to formalise contracts with the ministry by 1 July, in an apparent attempt to consolidate the ministrys command over operations in Ukraine.

In several ensuing audio clips posted on Telegram on 23 June, Prigozhin dismissed the governments reasoning for invading Ukraine, asserting that the war had been waged to further the interests of a clan of oligarchs. Prigozhin also blamed Russias military leadership for the countrys shortcomings in Ukraine, as he declared that Wagner Group forces would lead a march for justice to Moscow to find out why there is such chaos in the country. Russias Federal Security Service (FSB) responded by opening a criminal probe into Prigozhin.

On 24 June, elements of the Wagner Group took control of the military command centre in the southern city of Rostov-on-Don, apparently encountering minimal resistance from the Russian military. Prigozhin subsequently ordered a few thousand Wagner troops to proceed to Moscow while he commanded the rebellion from Rostov-on-Don. In a televised address on the same day, Russian President Vladimir Putin promised to punish those involved in what he called an armed mutiny, accusing Prigozhin of committing treason because of inflated ambitions and personal interest.

Within a few hours, Wagner Group forces advanced within 200 kilometres of Moscow, establishing artillery positions south of the city, before ultimately pulling back. Belarusian President Aleksandr Lukashenko reportedly brokered a deal between Putin and Prigozhin, who agreed to call off the march in exchange for amnesty and Prigozhins exile to Belarus. Prigozhin conveyed that a demonstration of protest was enough, cautioning that a lot of Russian blood could be spilled if the Wagner Group were to advance further towards Moscow.

On 26 June, Prigozhin released another audio message on Telegram claiming that the march was not an attempted coup to overthrow the government but rather a protest against the Russian military leadership. On 25 June, the Kremlin confirmed that Wagner Group soldiers would still be offered military contracts with Russias Defence Ministry. In an interview with Russian media on 26 June, Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov said that the incident would not affect Russias military activities in Ukraine. He further emphasised that it would not create difficulties in Russias relations with its foreign partners and friends or disrupt Russias operations in Mali and the Central African Republic. In a call with US President Joe Biden, Zelenskyy described the incident as exposing the weakness of Putins regime.

The Secretary-General, in his annual report on children and armed conflict, published on 27 June, said that he is appalled by the high number of grave violations against children in Ukraine following the invasion of Ukraine by the Russian Federation. In the annexes to his report, he listed the Russian armed forces and affiliated armed groups for committing attacks on schools and hospitals (480 verified instances) and the killing of children (136 verified victims). The Secretary-General expressed concern about the high number of children killed (80) and maimed (175) and attacks on schools and hospitals (212) by Ukrainian armed forces but did not list them in the reports annexes. He urged the Ukrainian armed forces immediately to implement measures to protect children and to prevent attacks on schools and hospitals, adding that he will be particularly attentive to this situation in the preparation of my next report. (For more, see the Children and Armed Conflict brief in our July forecast.)

Human Rights-Related Developments

On 15 June, Alice Jill Edwards, the UN Special Rapporteur on Torture and Other Cruel, Inhuman or Degrading Treatment or Punishment, issued a statement expressing alarm at reports and testimonies which indicate that Russian military forces in Ukraine consistently and intentionally inflict severe physical and psychological pain and suffering on Ukrainian civilians and prisoners of war. Edwards, together with other independent UN experts, sent a letter to Russian authorities in which they emphasised that the consistency and methods of the alleged torture suggest coordination, planning, and organisation, as well as direct authorisation, deliberate policy or official tolerance from superior authorities. Edwards plans to visit Ukraine later this year to conduct a fact-finding inquiry as part of her mandate.

Key Issues and Options

The overarching priority for the Council is to promote a solution to the conflict in accordance with the principles of the UN Charter and to facilitate dialogue among the parties to that end. Council members may consider requesting the Secretary-General to employ his good offices to promote the start of talks between Russia and Ukraine in pursuit of a peace agreement, including by providing support and facilitating coordination among various diplomatic initiatives. While a negotiated settlement may appear distant, establishing diplomatic lines of communication between the parties may contribute to preventing further escalation of the conflict.

A key issue for the Council is ensuring the extension of the Black Sea Grain Initiative (BSGI), which is set to expire on 17 July. Russia has threatened not to renew the initiative, citing a lack of progress in implementing the memorandum of understanding (MoU) signed between Russia and the UN to facilitate unimpeded exports of Russian food and fertilisers to global markets. The Tolyatti-Odesa ammonia pipeline, which had been the subject of UN-led discussions between Russia, Turkiye, and Ukraine to facilitate the export of Russian ammonia fertiliser, sustained partial damage due to reported explosions on 7 June. Council members may wish to convene a meeting with UN Coordinator for the BSGI Abdullah Abdul Samad Dashti and UN Conference on Trade and Development (UNCTAD) Secretary-General Rebeca Grynspan. They may choose a closed, informal format, such as an informal interactive dialogue, to allow for a frank discussion about the challenges to the implementation of the BSGI and the MoU.

Council and Wider Dynamics

The Security Council remains starkly divided on the conflict in Ukraine and the appropriate framework for achieving a peaceful resolution. Ukraine and its allies have advocated for a just peace, conditioned on the withdrawal of Russian troops from Ukraines internationally recognised borders. Other member states have called for an immediate cessation of hostilities without any preconditions, which could freeze the front lines of the conflict, leaving Russia in control of a significant amount of territory in eastern and southern Ukraine.

Despite the prevailing divisions, several member states, including three from the BRICS blocwhich comprises Brazil, China, India, Russia, and South Africahave initiated diplomatic efforts aimed at promoting dialogue towards a political settlement of the war in Ukraine. So have other countries: at the Shangri-La Dialogue in Singapore on 3 June, Indonesian Defense Minister Prabowo Subianto presented a peace plan aimed at resolving the conflict in Ukraine. His proposal involved an immediate ceasefire and the withdrawal of both sides to 15 kilometres from their current positions, allowing for the establishment of a demilitarised zone to be monitored by UN peacekeepers. Subianto also suggested that a referendum, overseen by the UN, be conducted in Ukraines disputed territories. Kyiv and many of its Western allies dismissed the proposal, particularly objecting to the use of the term disputed territories.

On 16 and 17 June, a high-level delegation from Africacomprising representatives from Comoros, Egypt, Senegal, South Africa, the Republic of the Congo, Uganda, and Zambiavisited Ukraine and Russia in search of a negotiated settlement to the war. The delegation presented a ten-point proposal to the parties, emphasising a commitment to pursuing a peaceful resolution to the conflict through diplomatic means and based on the principles outlined in the UN Charter. The proposal also called for de-escalation and the consideration of security guarantees for both sides.

In a joint press conference following the meeting in Kyiv, Zelenskyy rejected peace talks with Moscow, arguing that Russia views negotiations as an opportunity to strengthen itself for further military action. He reiterated that any peace proposal must include the real withdrawal of Russian troops from Ukraine. In St. Petersburg, Putin dismissed the African delegations peace plan, challenging assumptions about Ukraines internationally recognised borders and the source of the global food security crisis. Putin maintained that Russia has never rejected any [peace] talks, suggesting that Kyiv chose to withdraw from negotiations in March 2022 under pressure from its Western allies.

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AFRICA

West Africa and the Sahel

Expected Council Action

In July, the Security Council will hold its biannual briefing on West Africa and the Sahel. The Special Representative and head of the UN Office for West Africa and the Sahel (UNOWAS), Leonardo Santos Simao, is expected to brief.

Key Recent Developments

The security situation in much of the subregion remains dire, especially in large parts of the Sahel, which endures continued attacks by al-Qaida and Islamic State-affiliated groups and inter-communal fighting. Terrorism from the Sahel increasingly threatens coastal West African countries, notably Benin, Cote dIvoire, and Togo.

Addressing the Security Council on 16 June, Malis Transitional Minister of Foreign Affairs Abdoulaye Diop called for the withdrawal of the UN Multidimensional Integrated Stabilisation Mission in Mali (MINUSMA) without delay. His demand came shortly after the Council had begun negotiations to renew the missions mandate and amid tensions between the UN peacekeeping operation and Malian authorities, who have restricted MINUSMAs movement and objected to its human rights reporting. At the time of writing, Council members were still negotiating how to proceed with MINUSMAs mandate, which was set to expire on 30 June.

In Burkina Faso, which is facing widespread terrorist violence that has spilled over from Mali, authorities said on 30 May that the government aimed to double the number of volunteers for the civil defence militia (known as the Volunteers for the Defense of the Homeland) to 100,000 as part of transitional President Ibrahim Traores pledge to recapture the territory that terrorist groups have seized since 2015, amounting to 40 percent of the country. Both Mali and Burkina Faso have committed to holding elections next year to restore constitutional order following military coups in 2020 and 2021 in Mali and in 2022 in Burkina, after years of worsening terrorist violence.

The scale of the crisis facing Burkina Faso was depicted in an 8 June OCHA white note to the Council about Burkina Faso, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, and Haiti, which was submitted in accordance with resolution 2417 from May 2018. The resolution requested the Secretary-General to report swiftly to the Council when the risk of conflict-induced famine and wide-spread food insecurity occurs. According to the white note, nearly 2.2 million people in Burkina Faso, or 10 percent of the population, are acutely food insecure, including 22,500 people facing the risk of starvation. Because of the lean season, these numbers could reach 3.35 million people and 42,700 people, respectively, by August. The white note said that nearly 940,000 people in Burkina are estimated to live in 27 population centres that are either besieged or partially besieged by armed groups, including Dijibo, the capital city of Soum Province, which had 61,000 residents in 2019 and now hosts nearly 270,000 displaced persons.

Nigeria held presidential and legislative elections on 25 February. The Independent National Electoral Commission declared the candidate of the ruling All Progressive Congress party, Bola Tinubu, the winner with 36 percent of the vote but the post-election period was marred by legal challenges to the results. Tinubu took office on 29 May, identifying security as his administrations top priority during his inauguration ceremony. Nigeria faces multiple security crisesthe insurgency by remnant groups of Boko Haram, including the Islamic State West Africa Province; banditry in the northwest and north-central regions; herder-farmer conflict; and separatist and other violence in its southeast.

Senegal has seen rising tensions over the potential run by President Macky Sall for a third term and his perceived intolerance towards challengers. On 1 June, a court found opposition leader Ousmane Sonko guilty of corrupting youth, though it acquitted him of the charge of rape. Sonko was sentenced to two years in prison, barring him from running in the 2024 presidential election. Protests led to 16 reported deaths during clashes between Sonkos supporters and the police.

Earlier this year, the Council renewed the mandate of UNOWAS for three years until 31 January 2026 through an exchange of letters with the Secretary-General. UNOWAS mandate remains organised around four objectives: monitoring political developments and good offices; enhancing regional and subregional partnerships to address cross-border and cross-cutting threats; supporting, through political advocacy and convening, implementation of the UNs Sahel Strategy; and promoting good governance, respect for the rule of law, human rights, and the integration of gender in conflict prevention, management and resolution.

On 2 May, Secretary-General Antonio Guterres appointed Leonardo Santos Simao of Mozambique as his new Special Representative for West Africa and the Sahel and head of UNOWAS, and Chairman of the Cameroon-Nigeria Mixed Commission. Santos replaces Annadif Khatir Mahamat Saleh, who ended his assignment on 19 October 2022 after being named foreign minister in the transitional government of Chad.

Peacebuilding Commission-Related Developments

Ahead of the Councils 10 January briefing on West Africa and the Sahel, the Peacebuilding Commission (PBC) submitted written advice to the Council. The PBC recalled, among other issues, the need to strengthen institutions of democracy and good governance in countries undergoing transitions; underscored the importance of inclusive political dialogue in the lead-up to elections that will be held across the region in 2023; and reiterated the need to address the adverse effects of climate change. The PBC also submitted written advice to the Council for its 16 May briefing on the Group of Five for the Sahel (G5 Sahel) Joint Force, created to combat terrorist groups in the Sahel. From 14 to 16 February, the Chair of the PBCs Guinea-Bissau country configuration, Ambassador Ronaldo Costa Filho (Brazil), visited Guinea-Bissau, accompanied by the Officer-in-Charge, Head of Mission and Deputy Special Representative of UNOWAS, Giovanie Biha, and Assistant Secretary-General for Peacebuilding Support Elizabeth Spehar. Costa debriefed members of the country configuration on 13 March about his visit, which largely focused on the forthcoming legislative elections in June for the National Assembly after its dissolution by President Umaro Sissoco Embalo in May 2022. On 25 April, the PBCs Liberia country configuration held a meeting focused on ensuring peaceful and inclusive legislative and presidential elections in Liberia, which are scheduled for 10 October 2023. On 28 April, the PBC discussed The Gambia at a session about transitional justice, which also considered situations in Colombia and Timor-Leste. On 23 June, the PBC convened for a meeting on the Sahel.

Key Issues and Options

The expanding terrorism threat and the evolving security landscape in West Africa and the Sahel is a key issue. The pending departure of MINUSMA risks hastening the spillover of violence and refugees from Mali to the region. The efforts of the Economic Community of West African States (ECOWAS), with UN support, to restore constitutional order to Burkina Faso, Guinea and Mali following the coups detat in these countries over the past three years are another key issue. An ECOWAS summit to be held in early July is likely to focus on these issues, which may guide Council members positions.

With MINUSMAs likely withdrawal, an emerging issue may be an enhanced role for UNOWAS to support the implementation of Malis 2015 Peace and Reconciliation Agreement and political transition. Members may consider and make sure that UNOWAS has the resources and capacities for the new demands placed on it over recent years.

Another prominent issue for Council members is how to address the regions structural conflict drivers, namely weak governance, under-development, and climate change. Such efforts are guided by, for example, the UNs Integrated Strategy for the Sahel (UNISS), the G5 Sahel Priority Investment Programme, and the Lake Chad Basin regional stabilisation strategy.

A future issue for the Council will be how to respond to the strategic assessment of the Sahel being conducted by the Independent High-Level Panel on Security and Development, led by former Nigerien President Mahamadou Issoufou on behalf of the UN, the AU, ECOWAS, and the G5 Sahel. (The G5 Sahel comprises Burkina Faso, Chad, Mauritania, and Niger; Mali withdrew from the group in May 2022). The Panels report is expected to take stock of the situation and efforts to address the security crisis and to include recommendations such as supporting the Secretary-Generals call for the deployment of an African peace support operation with an enforcement mandate to fight terrorism in the Sahel.

The Security Council may adopt a presidential statement, as is usually proposed by the UNOWAS penholders following these biannual meetings. Such a statement could underscore the importance of restoring constitutional order in regional countries under transition; welcome and encourage further cooperation between states of the region to address security challenges; and reaffirm the need for counter-terrorism efforts to respect international humanitarian and human rights law. A presidential statement could also reiterate calls for a comprehensive approach to tackle the regions security, peacebuilding, and development challenges.

Council Dynamics

Council members have long valued the good offices role of UNOWAS. Despite their support for the mission, however, members have not been able to agree for the past year and a half on what had been a customary presidential statement following UNOWAS briefings. Last year, elected member India blocked agreement on the text over its proposed climate security language. It seems that China and Russia have raised similar concerns during the first half of this year after negotiations resumed in January.

More broadly, Council discussion on the region has become increasingly polarised since the deployment of the Wagner Group, a Russian private security company, to Mali in late 2021, which the US and European countries strongly criticise. Ghana is a member of ECOWAS and the Accra Initiative, which was established in 2017 by several coastal West African countries and Burkina Faso to prevent the spillover of terrorism from the Sahel and to address transnational organised crime by strengthening security cooperation. In addition to its concerns about the expanding terrorism threat, Ghana has championed renewed Council engagement on maritime security in the Gulf of Guinea.

Ghana and Switzerland are the penholders on UNOWAS.

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THEMATIC ISSUES

Women, Peace and Security

Expected Council Action

On 14 July, the Security Council is scheduled to hold its annual open debate on conflict-related sexual violence (CRSV), which this year is titled Promoting Implementation of Security Council Resolutions on Conflict-Related Sexual Violence. The UK Minister of State for the Middle East, North Africa, South Asia and the UN and the UK Prime Ministers Special Representative for Preventing Sexual Violence in Conflict, Lord Ahmad of Wimbledon, will chair the meeting. One of the signature events of the UKs July presidency, the open debate is expected to focus on closing the gap in the implementation of the existing legal and normative framework on CRSV. Special Representative of the Secretary-General on Sexual Violence in Conflict Pramila Patten and two civil society representatives are the anticipated briefers.

No outcome is expected.

Key Recent Developments

Despite the existence of a comprehensive legal and normative framework on CRSV, awareness campaigns, research and advocacy, Patten has recently warned that the global trendlines of conflict-related sexual violence are worsening. In her 19 June remarks at the ninth commemoration of the International Day for the Elimination of Sexual Violence in Conflict, she identified [a]rms proliferation, increasing militarization, and shrinking civic space as factors that continue to exacerbate sexual violence and challenge safe reporting and response, while new threats from the largely ungoverned digital space are also emerging.

The Secretary-Generals annual reports define CRSV as rape, sexual slavery, forced prostitution, forced pregnancy, forced abortion, enforced sterilization, forced marriage, and any other form of sexual violence of comparable gravity perpetrated against women, men, girls or boys that is directly or indirectly linked to a conflict. The reports say that it also encompasses trafficking in persons for the purpose of sexual violence and/or exploitation, when committed in situations of conflict. This years report on CRSV will cover the period from January to December 2022 and will provide the basis for the July open debate. It appears that the annual report will include more than 20 countries where sexual violence was used as a tactic of war, torture, terror, and political repression, documenting more than 2,400 UN-verified cases of sexual violence while acknowledging that this figure does not reflect the full scale of CRSV in 2022 due to underreporting owing to issues including stigma and fear of retaliation.

There is a high incidence of CRSV in several situations on the Councils agenda. In Haiti, where the security situation continues to worsen, sexual violence and exploitation are being perpetrated by rival armed gangs in their drive to expand their territorial control in urban areas.

Regarding the war in Ukraine, OHCHR documented 109 cases of sexual violence perpetrated by Russian personnel between February 2022 and January 2023. While most of these incidents occurred in places of detention, [o]thers, including rape, were perpetrated in areas controlled by Russian forces, mostly against women. OHCHR also registered 24 cases of sexual violence committed by Ukrainian personnel between March and July 2022, which consisted mainly of threats of sexual violence during initial stages of detention, as well as forced public stripping.

In South Sudan, the UN verified 299 incidents of CRSV in 2022, compared with 194 in 2021. While most of these cases were attributed to non-state armed groups, 38 percent were attributed to the armed forces and five percent to the police. Reports of CRSV have also emerged in the context of the conflict between the Sudan Armed Forces and the Rapid Support Forces in Sudan.

In Colombia, despite improvements in the peace and security situation, CRSV remains a feature of the conflict, especially in territories under control of armed groups, disproportionately affecting indigenous and Afro-descendent communities, members of the LGBTIQ+ community and women leaders.

The Independent Investigative Mechanism for Myanmar has collected information relating to the commission of sexual and gender-based crimes in Myanmar, including crimes perpetrated by members of the security forces, since the military takeover on 1 February 2021.

CRSV also remains a major concern in the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC). In May, Patten visited the Bulengo internally displaced persons (IDP) camp in Goma. In a 25 May statement, she expressed concern about CRSV allegations in this area perpetrated by armed men, who have targeted women and girls attempting to return to their homes or as they carry out their daily livelihood activities, including collecting firewood, food or water, adding that humanitarian actors reported having provided assistance to over 600 survivors of conflict-related sexual violence in six IDP camps over the course of two weeks.

Other situations of concern likely to be detailed in the Secretary-Generals report include Council agenda items Afghanistan, the Central African Republic, Libya, and Somalia, as well as Ethiopia, which is not on the formal agenda but has been discussed several times by Council members in recent years.

As mandated by resolution 1960 adopted in 2010, this years report will again include an annex listing parties credibly suspected of committing or being responsible for patterns of rape or other forms of sexual violence in situations of armed conflict on the agenda of the Security Council. The 2022 annual report noted that more than 70 percent of the parties listed in the annex were persistent perpetrators, meaning that they had been listed in the annex for five or more years. National military and police forces listed in the annex are prohibited from contributing to UN peace operations.

A recent UN Institute for Disarmament Research report concluded that, while arms control and disarmament measures alone cannot prevent CRSV, they can play an important preventive role and contribute to both long-term structural prevention and short-term operational prevention. For instance, the report said that reducing the availability of small arms and light weapons through an enhanced implementation of arms control and disarmament instruments not only makes it harder for perpetrators to commit CRSV but may also help decrease a conflicts intensity and the conditions that lead to the normalization of sexual violence in conflict.

Sanctions-Related Developments

On 21 October 2022, the Security Council adopted resolution 2653, which established a sanctions regime on Haiti, including targeted assets freeze, travel ban and arms embargo measures, and designated one person under the regime. The resolution included the [p]lanning, directing or committing acts involving sexual and gender-based violence, including rape and sexual slavery, in Haiti as a standalone designation criterion.

The EU, the UK, and the US have recently designated a number of individuals involved in sexual and gender-based violence under their respective sanctions regimes.

Key Issues and Options

The main issue for the Security Council remains strengthening the substantive implementation of the women, peace and security (WPS) agenda. Regarding the topic of the open debate, the persistence of CRSV across conflict situations continues to be a key issue of concern.

Adopted in 2019, resolution 2467 recognised that CRSV occurs on a continuum of interrelated and recurring forms of violence against women and girls. To address CRSV from a structural perspective, including its political aspects and consequences, one option is to include in Council discussions of CRSV a focus on the theme of the continuum of violence and other intersecting forms of inequality that women and girls face both during conflict and in peacetime, as well as a focus on the nexus of protection and participation.

In line with the recommendations presented at the 22 December 2022 meeting with womens protection advisers of the Informal Experts Group (IEG) on WPS, Council members could support the deployment of womens protection advisers in peace operations, as well as in transition processes from peacekeeping operations to special political missions and country teams. In this regard, members may also support the maintenance of existing womens protection adviser positions in the context of the Fifth Committee and request the inclusion of enhanced capacity in contexts in which it is inadequate.

Patten was last invited to brief one of the Security Councils sanctions committees in December 2021the committee established pursuant to resolution 2140 on Yemen. Members may strengthen the gender and CRSV expertise informing the work of sanctions committees and invite Patten to share information with these committees and at relevant Council meetings.

In line with resolution 2242 and the 1 December 2021 Statement of Shared Commitments on WPS, members should continue to invite diverse women civil society representatives to brief the Council regularly and follow up on their information and recommendations. It is essential that members and the UN take all possible measures to keep briefers safe, in consultation with the briefer, including carrying out risk assessment, developing protection plans and responding to any reprisals.

Council Dynamics

While notable implementation gaps persist, Council members are generally supportive of the WPS agenda, and their views converge on the need to eradicate CRSV. Nevertheless, Council dynamics on WPS remain difficult. For instance, during the recent negotiations of resolution 2686 on tolerance and international peace and security, China and Russia opposed language on human rights, gender, and WPS. During the negotiations, some members considered strengthening the draft with language from resolution 2467. (This resolution is the most recent Council outcome on CRSV. It recognised the need for a survivor-centred approach and identified discrimination against women and girls, the under-representation of women in decision-making and leadership roles, and the lack of availability of services for survivors among the factors that exacerbate the disproportionate impact of CRSV on women and girls.) It seems that Russia opposed this proposal on the grounds that resolution 2467 had not been adopted by consensus, with China and Russia abstaining; as a result, the proposed language was not included in resolution 2686. (For background on resolution 2686, see our 14 June Whats in Blue story.) It further appears that Russia has objected to Patten briefing in sanctions committee meetings.

The UK is the penholder on WPS, and the US is the penholder on CRSV. The United Arab Emirates and Switzerland are the co-chairs of the IEG on WPS.

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MIDDLE EAST

Yemen

Expected Council Action

In July, the Security Council will hold its monthly briefing, followed by closed consultations, on Yemen with UN Special Envoy Hans Grundberg. A representative of OCHA and the UN Resident and Humanitarian Coordinator for Yemen David Gressly are also expected to brief. The head of the UN Mission to Support the Hodeidah Agreement (UNMHA), Major General Michael Beary, is expected to brief during the consultations. The Council is also expected to renew the mandate of UNMHA, which expires on 14 July.

Key Recent Developments

Grundberg has continued his shuttle diplomacy with the Yemeni government and the Houthi rebel group. His efforts are occurring in parallel with Omani-facilitated talks between the Houthis and Saudi Arabia that have helped maintain the longest lull in fighting in Yemens eight-year conflict, beginning with the start of the now-expired April 2022 truce.

On 4 June, Grundberg met in Riyadh with representatives of the Yemeni government, Saudi Arabias ambassador to Yemen, and the P5 ambassadors to Yemen (China, France, Russia, the UK, and the UK). The next day, he met in Muscat with senior Omani officials and Houthi chief negotiator Mohammed Abdulsalam. On 9 June, Yemenia Airways announced that it would increase to six the number of weekly flights between the Houthi-held capital of Sanaa and Amman, Jordan; the April 2022 truce agreement resumed commercial flights out of Sanaa airport for the first time since 2016. In a further sign of easing tensions between the Houthis and Saudis, on 17 June, the first flight from Sanaa to Saudi Arabia since 2016 carried 270 Yemeni citizens to Jeddah for the hajj, the pilgrimage to Mecca required once in a lifetime of every Muslim who can afford it and is physically able to undertake it. A second flight of Yemeni pilgrims on 20 June carried a Houthi delegation, which included, according to news reports, the head of the Houthi military committee for negotiations, General Yahya Ruzami.

Grundberg briefed Council members via videoconference from The Hague during closed consultations on 12 June. Under-Secretary-General for Humanitarian Affairs Martin Griffiths and General Beary briefed in person during the consultations.

Bearys rare in-person briefing occurred as Council members received the Secretary-Generals annual review of UNMHA before its mandate expires next month. The review, dated 12 June, details how the mission conducted visits over the past year to both sides of the new frontlines in southern Hodeidah governorate, which it had previously not been able to access, following government forces withdrawal from Hodeidah city in November 2021. It sets out UNMHAs increased civic engagement with local communities and efforts to support the UN country team. Still, UNMHA faced persistent restrictions by the Houthis on its freedom of movement, particularly in monitoring the civilian nature of the ports. The review further adds that daily ceasefire violations, though not amounting to major or sustained escalations, remain of concern.

From 16 to 18 June, the eighth meeting of the UN- and ICRC-chaired Supervisory Committee on the Implementation of the Detainees Exchange Agreement was held in Amman. This was the committees first meeting since the Yemeni government and the Houthis agreed at talks in March in Geneva to release nearly 900 detainees, who were released from 14 to 16 April. In a statement, the Office of the Special Envoy said that the government and the Houthis discussed the necessity of achieving tangible progress to reach a gradual release of [detainees] based on the all-for-all principle; all-for-all refers to the parties releasing all detainees as agreed to in the December 2018 Stockholm Agreement.

In developments indicating the disunity of the anti-Houthi forces, Saudi Arabia hosted talks between political and tribal representatives of Hadramawt governorate from 19 May to 21 June in Riyadh. At its conclusion, these representatives announced the formation of the Hadramawt National Council (HNC) and the approval of a political charter. The creation of the HNC for the governorate appeared to be an alternative to the separatist Southern Transitional Council (STC). In May, the STC organised in Aden a Southern National Consultative Meeting that adopted a political charter which reiterated the call for a separate southern state. The STC, which is supported by the United Arab Emirates (UAE), strengthened its military and political position when, on 9 May, it integrated into its leadership two members of Yemens eight-person Presidential Leadership Council (PLC).

Human Rights-Related Developments

On 9 June, the Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights issued a statement calling for the immediate release of a group of followers of the Bahai faith. The statement observed that a sermon by Shamseddin Sharafeddin, the Mufti in Sanaa, incited hatred against Bahai adherents and other religious groups, noting that it was a serious concern. The statement emphasised that the sermon starkly defies international law. Sharafeddin, who was appointed by the de facto authorities in Sanaa, accused the Bahai followers of apostasy and threatened them with death if they did not repent.

Sanctions-Related Developments

On 19 June, the 2140 Yemen Sanctions Committee held informal consultations to hear a briefing by Special Representative for Children and Armed Conflict Virginia Gamba.

Key Issues and Options

A key issue for the Council is how to support ongoing peace talks and efforts to establish a formal ceasefire and political process. Details of a potential deal in the Houthi-Saudi talks have not been made public, but according to news reports, they may include establishing a ceasefire and the payment of public employees in Houthi territory, possibly through revenues from Yemens oil and gas reserves, which the Yemeni government controls. Council members could reiterate the importance of an inclusive Yemeni political process under UN mediation for a sustainable resolution of the conflict.

Despite some positive signs in the peace process, Yemen continues to face massive humanitarian needs. An estimated 21.6 million people in Yemen require aid or protection. Access constraints and interference in relief include the Houthis enforcement of mahram, requiring women to be accompanied by male guardians, which has negatively affected aid operations. Support for Yemens economy is also critical to mitigating the humanitarian crisis. Landmines and explosive remnants of war have become an issue of greater concern in the truce and post-truce period, impeding the return of displaced people and hindering economic recovery.

Members may reiterate calls on all parties to facilitate the safe, rapid, and unimpeded passage of humanitarian relief to all civilians in need and to protect humanitarian personnel and assets in line with their obligations under international humanitarian law. In addition, they may urge donors to support the Yemen 2023 Humanitarian Response Plan (HRP), which calls for $4.3 billion but was only about 29 percent funded, as of 30 June.

Council members are also likely to continue closely monitoring progress in the FSO Safer salvage operation to prevent a massive oil spill in the Red Sea off the coast of Hodeidah governorate. On 19 June, the Office of the UN spokesperson said that the transfer of oil from the FSO Safer to the replacement vessel that the UN Development Programme has procured was expected to begin by the end of June.

Another key issue for the Council in July is to renew the mandate of UNMHA. The Council may extend the mandate for a further 12 months, which includes monitoring the 2018 Hodeidah ceasefire agreement.

Council Dynamics

Council members have welcomed the potential for the Houthi-Saudi talks to yield meaningful results. At the same time, members stress the ultimate importance of an inclusive Yemeni political process facilitated by UN mediation to achieve a sustainable resolution to the conflict. Joint meetings of the Riyadh-based ambassadors to Yemen of the Councils permanent members show the Councils general consensus on Yemen. Council members approach to mandate renewals this yearthe February renewal of the Yemen sanctions regime and now the upcoming renewal of UNMHAhas been to avoid significant changes that could disrupt ongoing diplomatic processes.

The UAE has been a leading member of the Saudi Arabia-led coalition and takes a strong interest in Council decisions on Yemen. Since 2021, the US has had a Special Envoy for Yemen, Timothy Lenderking, who has actively supported Grundbergs efforts to establish a political process and to resolve the threat posed by the FSO Safer. China helped mediate the Saudi-Iran agreement on 10 March to restore relations between those two countries, which, China has highlighted, could create conditions to improve the situation in Yemen.

The UK is the penholder on Yemen. Ambassador Ferit Hoxha (Albania) chairs the 2140 Yemen Sanctions Committee.

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Vietnamese State President Vo Van Thuong bids farewell to Vietnamese peacekeepers.

On June 30, 63 peacekeepers from the Vietnam Peoples Army (VPA) will depart Tan Son Nhat airport in Ho Chi Minh City on an ADF C-17A Globemaster bound for South Sudan. This same aircraft will return to Hanoi, Vietnam on 03 July 2023 with VPA Peacekeepers who have been operating the Level 2 Field Hospital providing medical support to the UN Mission in South Sudan for over a year. In addition to the Peacekeepers, the ADF will also transport over 20 tons of stores, medical equipment and pharmaceuticals to South Sudan to support the operation of the hospital.

A farewell ceremony for peacekeepers from the fifth rotation of the Level Two Field Hospital and the second rotation of the Engineering Company was held at Tan Son Nhat airport on June 29. This ceremony was hosted by State President Vo Van Thuong and attended by Deputy Minister for National Defence and Chief of General Staff Nguyen Tan Cuong, and Deputy Minister for National Defence Senior Lieutenant General Hoang Xuan Chien.

Australia and Vietnam share a growing and deepening defence relationship, working together through Peacekeeping to make an active contribution to international security. During a visit to Vietnam Department of Peacekeeping Operations earlier this year, Governor General of Australia and Commander-in-Chief of the Australian Defence Force General David Hurley, said, Australia is very proud to be able to work hand-in-hand with Vietnam, helping you to deploy your equipment, your people, and to bring you back safely."

The Governor Generals words at Vietnam Department of Peacekeeping Operations were played to the Vietnamese peacekeepers at the farewell ceremony in Tan Son Nhat: Thank you, Vietnam, for the quality of the men and the women that your armed forces produce to support peacekeeping efforts around the globe. It is truly commendable that in a very short time, the quality of your service, the quality of your results, and the dedication that you have exhibited has been able to be shown to the world.

In addition to providing strategic lift for the contingent, Australia delivers English language training for Vietnamese peacekeepers to enable them to operate their hospital effectively in the multinational UN mission. Australia also provides bespoke training for Vietnamese Peacekeepers in fields such as aeromedical evacuation, logistics and sustainment. The bilateral defence relationship also includes senior visits and dialogues, professional military and post-graduate education, military medicine cooperation and military skills exchanges.

The image of Vietnamese peacekeepers deploying on an Australian C-17A has become an enduring symbol of the deepening defence relationship. 2023 also marks the 50th anniversary of the Australia-Vietnam diplomatic relationship. This year, both countries look forward to elevating peacekeeping cooperation even further through the establishment of a Peacekeeping Partnership./.
A top delegation from Aluminium Bahrain (Alba) has witnessed first-hand at Mitsubishi Heavy Industries (MHI) the JAC Advanced Gas Turbine (GT) ready to be shipped to Bahrain for Albas Power Station 5 (PS5) Block 4 Project.

Albas PS5 Block 4 Expansion Project is the addition of a fourth Block of similar 1:1:1 configuration with 680.9 megawatts (MW) M701JAC Gas Turbine Combined Cycle, the first of its kind manufactured for a primary aluminium smelter, and includes integration into the existing 220kV Substation.

Once operational in Q4 2024, Block 4 will increase the nameplate capacity of PS5 Complex from 1,800 MW to 2,481 MW and reduce its overall GHG emissions intensity ratio by 0.5x, thus supporting the company in its race to decarbonisation.

Sustainable technologies

The Alba delegation led by its Chairman of the Board Shaikh Daij bin Salman bin Daij Al Khalifa also discussed matters of mutual interest including potential areas of collaboration such as sustainable technologies that are currently part of MHIs portfolios and its power solutions brand, Mitsubishi Power.

Shaikh Daij said: We are pleased with the on-schedule progress of the $265 million PS5 Block 4 Expansion Project, which once completed in Q4 2024, will be a turnaround in Albas ESG journey as it will reduce our overall GHG emissions, thus setting the benchmark in terms of sustainable and efficient power generation in the aluminium industry.

We are also proud to have achieved a Safety record of 712,790 safe-working hours without Lost Time Injury to date (as of July 2) on this Project.

The Alba delegation also comprising the Chief Executive Officer Ali Al Baqali and Chief Power Officer Amin Sultan took a field-tour of MHIs Takasago Machinery Works and Hydrogen Park, in Hyogo Prefecture Japan.

They met Toshiyuki Hashi, Executive Vice President, President and CEO, Energy Systems, Takashi Tozawa, Senior Fellow, Senior General Manager, GTCC Business Division of Energy Systems, and other GTCC business executives.

Latest advancements

Hashi said: "We are very honoured to welcome the distinguished senior Alba delegation to our headquarters in Tokyo and to our Takasago Machinery Works and Hydrogen Park site. As leaders in clean and hydrogen-ready power generation technology, MHI is proud to provide our latest advancements to support Alba's goals of ensuring a reliable and efficient power supply, while continuously enhancing its operational excellence and productivity.

Together, we are driving the industry forward to a decarbonised future with clean energy solutions that not only reduce environmental impact but also pave the way for a sustainable and prosperous tomorrow. This visit further strengthens our partnership and reinforces our commitment to support our industrial partners accelerate their energy transition, particularly in the hard-to-abate sectors.

MHIs Takasago Machinery Works is a one-of-a-kind facility for the manufacturing of Mitsubishi Powers cutting-edge gas turbines. To ensure the reliability and performance of advanced class gas turbines, they undergo rigorous, long-term testing and verification under the same conditions as that of an actual power plant at Mitsubishi Powers ultramodern, grid-connected T-Point 2 facility. The co-located Takasago Hydrogen Park is the worlds first centre for the validation of hydrogen-related technologies, from hydrogen production to power generation.-- TradeArabia News Service
At the event (Photo: VNA)

During the 2022-2023 dry season, team K72 of the provincial Military Command sent 42 officers and soldiers to the Cambodian provinces of Kratie and Kampong Thom to search and unearth remains since February 20.



A memorial and re-burial service for the remains will be held at the provincial martyrs' cemetery on the occasion of the 76th anniversary of War Invalids and Martyrs' Day (July 27).



Over the past two decades, the team has brought home nearly 2,800 sets of remains of Vietnamese voluntary soldiers and experts who laid down their lives in Cambodia./.
Uzbek tourists welcomed in Khanh Hoa province (Photo: hanoimoi.com.vn)

Ms. Nguyen Thi Le Thanh, Director of the Khanh Hoa provincial Tourism Department, said that the flight departed from Tashkent International Airport (Uzbekistan) and landed at Cam Ranh International Airport (Khanh Hoa), carrying onboard nearly 200 passengers.

Uzbek tourists will stay at three or five-star hotels and resorts in Khanh Hoa during their stay of between 10 and 28 days.

This is the first charter flight from the new market exploited by Pegas Misr Vietnam Travel Co. Ltd., which specialises in Russian and Central Asian markets.

As of July, flights will be conducted with a frequency of one round trip per week.

Previously, direct flights bringing tourists from Almaty and Astana cities of Kazakhstan to Cam Ranh had been conducted./.
The Thai Binh Provincial People's Committee and the German Chamber of Commerce and Industry in Vietnam sign a memorandum of understanding on investment cooperation at the seminar. (Photo: NDO)

Chairman of the Thai Binh Provincial People's Committee Nguyen Khac Than said that the presence of representatives of the German Chamber of Industry and Commerce in Vietnam; the Association of German Businesses in Vietnam; representative of the Ministry of Planning and Investment; the Department of Foreign Affairs and more than 60 German organizations and businesses at the seminar, showed the special interest from Germany in the cooperation and investment environment in Thai Binh province.

Thai Binh province always identifies internal resources as a decisive, fundamental and long-term factor and the external resources an important and breakthrough factor. Therefore, attracting investment into Thai Binh is a top task of local leaders, with the view that successful investors in the area are the driving force of the province's development.

At the seminar, leaders of the Provincial People's Committee briefly informed German investors about the potential and strengths of the locality. The province is giving priority to attracting investment in the processing and manufacturing industry; and electronics-semiconductors.

The provincial authority always accompanies businesses, has transparent institutions and preferential policies to encourage maximum investment. As of June 2023, Thai Binh attracted 121 valid FDI projects, with a total registered investment capital of more than USD2.08 billion, including 1 project worth USD620,000 from Germany.

At the seminar, representatives of the German Chamber of Commerce and Industry in Vietnam and the Association of German Businesses in Vietnam affirmed that Vietnam is currently the top priority investment destination of German businesses.

Through research, the German side found that Thai Binh has a lot of potential for cooperation such as vocational training, material supply chain, finance and renewable energy.

What German investors are interested in is a more open investment environment, and ensuring of energy security and environmental protection. It is necessary to simplify and digitize administrative procedures, especially in terms of customs and tax procedures, to create more attractiveness for investors.

At the end of the seminar, the Provincial People's Committee, the German Chamber of Commerce and Industry in Vietnam; Thai Binh Hung Thinh Joint Stock Company and Roding Mobility Company (Germany) agreed to sign a Memorandum of Understanding on investment cooperation./.
A painting displayed at the exhibition (Photo: VOV)

The event aims to mark 50 years of diplomatic relations between Vietnam and France (1973  2023) and 10 years of their strategic partnership (2013  2023).

Speaking at the opening ceremony, Mayor of the District 5 Florence Berthout expressed her hope that the exhibition would help French visitors and international friends more understand about the development of contemporary Vietnamese art.

Philippe Charlier, Director of the Research and Education Department at the Museum of quai BranlyJacques Chirac, said that the artworks draw inspiration from Vietnamese people going about their daily lives.

He added that each painting tells the story of the country and people, vividly expressed through an array of colours.

Vietnamese Ambassador to France Dinh Toan Thang expected that there would be more exhibitions held in France in the coming time to help the Vietnamese community in France, French visitors, and international friends gain more knowledge the Vietnamese traditional culture.

The exhibition will open until July 15./.
Yourgene Health surged on Monday after it agreed to be bought by Novacyt in a 16.7m deal.

Under the terms of the acquisition, Novacyt will pay 0.522p per share in cash. This is a premium of around 167.7% the closing Yourgene share price on Friday.

Yourgene chief executive Lyn Rees said: "The board of Yourgene welcome the offer from Novacyt UK. The prospect and scale of what the new enlarged group could bring to our customers, employees and other stakeholders is exciting given the complimentary fit of both businesses.

"Whilst the two companies work within the same molecular diagnostic space, they both bring distinctive strengths and are focused in different market segments, which opens up further opportunities for growth."

At 1245 BST, Yourgene shares were up 138% at 0.46p.
One of Thames Waters big shareholders has given its backing to the embattled water company, after the surprise departure of its chief executive and crisis talks with the government over its viability. Thames Water, which is buckling under a 14bn debt burden and has embarked on an eight-year turnaround plan, is owned by a series of pension funds and other governments sovereign wealth funds. The second-biggest shareholder is a UK pension fund for academics, the Universities Superannuation Scheme (USS), which holds about 20% and is the first investor to make public its support for the company.  Guardian

Rail passengers across Britain have been warned to expect disruption this week as train drivers stage fresh industrial action. The drivers union Aslef has called an overtime ban from Monday 3 July until the end of Saturday 8 July at 16 train operators around England, in a long-running dispute over pay and conditions on the railway.  Guardian

Banks are to be told by the Treasury that they must protect free speech amid an escalating row over the blacklisting of customers who hold controversial views. Jeremy Hunt, the Chancellor, is understood to be deeply concerned that overzealous lenders are closing down accounts because they disagree with customers opinions and has asked City minister Andrew Griffith to investigate the issue.  Telegraph

Property sellers are being forced to slash their asking prices in droves as the housing market struggles under the weight of surging borrowing costs. A third of all homes for sale in the fourth week of June were listed with discounts on their asking prices  up from 18pc in the same week a year earlier and even higher than during the Covid crisis, according to property website Rightmove.  Telegraph

A top-ten accountancy firm has become the first in the UK to win investment backing from private equity and retain its partnership structure, in a landmark move that could pave the way for an influx of capital into the professional services sector. Moore Kingston Smith (MKS) will receive an undisclosed amount from the Dutch private equity group Waterland, which will become a financial partner. It is the first time a UK limited liability partnership has attracted backing from international investors while maintaining its legal structure.  The Times

Manufacturers boosted jobs in six of the eight regions in England and Wales last year as the struggling sector battled with labour shortages. Figures from Make UK, an industry body, and the professional services firm BDO showed that there were still 74,000 unfilled vacancies in the sector, creating a 6.5 billion economic gap that needed filling despite overall employment increasing last year.  The Times
Google 's new quantum computer is capable of instantly making calculations that would take current supercomputers 47 years to complete. Such compouters, proponents argue, will be capable of battling climate change and creating breakthrough drugs. Their ability to break encryption systems now utilised on the other hand makes them a threat to national security. - The Sunday Telegraph

Marks & Spencer has gotten itself into hot water after telling shareholders at the weekend that they ought not to attend its annual meeting as it has now gone digital. What's more, the retailer has said that any shareholders who do choose to attend will not be allowed to talk to members of the company's board face-to-face. Nor will they be offered refreshments. In fact, they will be asked to join in via their phones or computers, despite being in attendance. - The Financial Mail on Sunday

Gerry Murphy has been chosen as Tesco's new chairman. Murphy, who is also chairman of Burberry and Tate&Lyle, will step down from his post at the latter on 1 September, when he is due to join the grocer. The appointment was first reported by Sky News. In previous roles, Murphy ran Carlton Communications, Kingfisher, logistics outfit Exel and Greencore. Murphy expressed his excitement about the strategic opportunities for Tesco to grow. - The Sunday Times

Tesla achieved record car deliveries over the three months to June amid the ongoing price war with rivals. The firm run by Elon Musk delivered 466,140 cars, mostly of its less expensive models. That compared to forecasts for 445,000 and 422,875 in the first quarter of 2023. The manufacturer's output ramped up alongside, from 440,808 to 479,700 cars. Analysts however had warned that the company's aggressive price-cutting might hit its profit margins. Yet others had argued that deals to allow rivals to use its charging stations might erode its market share. - The Financial Mail on Sunday
Water puppet performance of Vietnam (Photo: baovanhoa.vn)

The Vietnamese art troupe will perform water puppet on June 30 and July 1, with the show featuring the daily life of farmers and common aspects of Vietnamese spiritual life.

The art troupe is expected to introduce local folk art to the world, thus helping international friends to more understand about traditional Vietnamese culture.

The years festival, taking place from June 24 to July 8 in Croatia, encourages many ideas in various forms of art for children's creativity, including drama, puppetry, music-scenes, film, literary, and visual arts./.
The Commonwealth Hub for Business of Governments became a reality on July 1, when Daniel Chenok, Executive Director of the IBM Center for the Business of Government based in Washington, DC, signed an MoU with the Management Development Institute (MDI), represented by its Director, Prof. Sangeeta Bharadwaj. This Hub represents a partnership between the Commonwealth Secretariat, IBM Center for the Business of Government and MDI. The agreement between IBM Center and MDI was signed on July 1, on the conclusion of a major two-day International Conference on Innovations in Public Performance Management  Lessons for Policy Makers held in Delhi on June 30 and July 1.

Organized by MDI in Delhi, this International Conference was attended by more than 150 national and international experts from academia and government. The mission of Hub is to support Commonwealth governments to do their business better, faster, and cheaper for excellence in service delivery and timely achievement of the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). The Hub activities will span research, publications, training, and knowledge management and knowledge sharing through a Commonwealth-wide community of practice.

The intent will be to spark creativity in addressing critical public sector challenges and crafting new ways of improving government by identifying international trends, ideas, and best practices in public management that would assist governments in responding more effectively to their mission and management priorities. And to create and nurture a vibrant community of practice consisting of professionals interested in the aspects of the business of their respective governments.

In her inaugural speech at the International Conference, the Secretary-General of the Commonwealth, Patricia Scotland said, "India is ideally placed with its diverse expertise and experimentation in public system innovation to add value to many countries across the commonwealth countries Executive Director Daniel Chenok, IBM Center for the Business of Government, while sharing their experience of over three decades working with different governments, explained how they generate ideas and convert them into products for government to use. He referred to how the newly elected member of Parliament in the US are expected to read the Book 'Getting It Done' produced by IBM.

Prof. Prajapati Trivedi, Distinguished Professor and Special Envoy for Commonwealth Secretary-General, said that the Commonwealth Hub for the Business of Government will combine the strengths of the three partners to create a unique institution to serve not only the 56 countries of the Commonwealth, but all members of the United Nations. Prof. Trivedi stressed the need for Hub to focus on helping government with practical toolkits that work.

Prof. Sangeeta Shah Bhardwaj, Director, MDI, suggested that for businesses to work efficiently, they need an efficient and capable partner. She emphasised that good principles of management are transcendental.

Prof. Avanish Kumar, Dean School of Public Policy at MDI highlighted the need to produce demand-based knowledge creation that promotes partnership based on the mutual understanding and collaboration. The Chairman of the Board of Governors, MDI, Rajnish Kumar, a former Chairman of SBI, stated that the hub can unleash the capacity to perform in the public system through innovation and transform the lives of millions not only in India but across the globe.

The MDI Hub is committed to making knowledge and its product accessible to all. Several experts expressed their willingness to collaborate and contribute to Hub. The proposed Hub envisages creating seamless access to knowledge and expertise across different levels of government worldwide. It will be the operation arm of the School of Public Policy, said Dean Avanish Kumar.
This year, smartphones are the fifth highest exported product from India and have crossed Rs 1 lakh crore in our 'Techade' that will certainly see the country as a major player in global electronics in years to come, says Rajeev Chandrasekhar, Union Minister of State for Electronics and IT. The minister said that India is rising steadily as a trusted partner in the global electronics supply chains. "From having to import 82 percent of all smartphones in 2014 to today manufacturing almost 100 percent of all smartphones in the country, India's electronics sector has been transformed and reimagined under Prime Minister Narendra Modi," Chandrasekhar.

Post-Covid, said the minister, it is obvious that global supply chains are undergoing a major redrawing and India is certainly working hard to ensure it grows its share and presence. India in 2014 represented less than Rs 1 lakh crore of electronics manufacturing. "It is our target that by 2026, it will be Rs 24 lakh crore a 24 times increase in just over a decade under PM Modi. In 2014, India exported zero smartphones and this year, smartphones are the 5th highest exported product from India and have crossed Rs 1 lakh crore," informed the minister.

Buoyed by friendly government policies and production-linked incentive (PLI) scheme, India is set to cross Rs 1,20,000 crore in mobile exports in the current fiscal year (FY24), driven by tech giant Apple. The country surpassed a remarkable Rs 90,000 crore worth of smartphone exports in the fiscal year 2022-2023, according to the India Cellular and Electronics Association (ICEA). Chandrasekhar said that our ambitions and plan are described as "broadening and deepening" the electronics ecosystem and creating scale and volumes so that an ecosystem of components can also develop in India soon.

The production-linked incentive (PLI) scheme for IT hardware, with a budgetary outlay of Rs 17,000 crore, has also been announced recently that will help laptops, data centres, servers infrastructure be manufactured in India. "It is expected to lead to total production of about Rs 3.35 lakh crore, bring an additional investment of Rs 2,430 crore in electronics manufacturing and will lead to generation of 75,000 additional direct jobs," Chandrasekhar.

According to him, in tech, change is the only constant. "In recent years, the pace of innovation has increased and now disruptive technologies are the new normal. Digital economy as a percentage of our economy has gone from around 4 percent in 2014 to 10 percent today and is expected, due to the enterprise and energy of young Indians, to touch 20 per cent of our GDP by 2026," the minister emphasized. The digital economy is expected to generate around 60-65 million employment opportunities by 2025-26. "As someone who has seen tech for more than three decades, I am more than excited at where we are today and can only thank our PM for bringing us here and for giving us these opportunities," said Chandrasekhar.
The Top Line Up of 30+ Chief digital, Technology, Information, Security and Data Officers across the Industry forming the Speaker Panel were Major Highlights of the Conference.

The Diverse Insights from Cross functional Leaders and High Energy discussion stole the show.

The Theme based sessions grabbed the attention of the Tech Community attending the conference: The Panel focused on:

 People-Powered Digital Transformation

 Strategies for embedding Security into an Organization's DNA

 The Role of Technology in Building a Customer Experience (CX) First Culture

 Digital Transformation Tech Stack

The Attendees appreciated the Insights shared by some of the Top Tech Leaders on the Panel like Rohit Kilam, Chief Technology Officer, CMS Info Systems, Mridul Sharma, Chief Digital Officer(CDO), Kirloskar Limitless, Arpanarghya Saha, Chief Digital Officer, Nippon India Mutual Fund, Praveen Shrikhande, Chief Digital and Information Officer, Aditya Birla Fashion and Retail Ltd., Sunil Palrecha, Chief Digital Officer, Wissen Technology, Haryyaksha Ghosh, Chief Data Officer, Aadhar Housing Finance Ltd. Samit Datta, Global Chief Supply Chain & Technology Officer, PGP Glass Pvt. Ltd. Hasit Trivedi, CTO  Digital Technologies & Global Head  AI, Tech Mahindra and many more.

Highlight of the Year for the

Mr Sivakumar, Focused on how ChatGPT , AI and Chatbots are becoming the Best Buddy for some of the Top Tech Giants that sparked the room with conversations followed by Insightful Panel sessions .

The sessions were led with a great focus on "How Digital Transformation Leadership has been Evolving "

The Theme and Topics Curation was encouraged by the Senior Tech Fraternity forming the Audience profile.

Brands like Whatfix, Brahmarsive, Accel Limited, and Taskbench being the Major Partner for the conference.

A Special Thanks to Silicon India for the Extended Support @3rd Annual Digital Transformation Summit and Awards 2023
UK's International Trade Minister Nigel Huddleston on Monday kicked off a three-day visit to Kolkata and Dhaka with a focus on unlocking more opportunities for British companies to grow trade in the region. UK's bilateral trade with India has already topped 36 billion pounds, supporting half a million jobs across both countries. As part of its ambition to double the bilateral trade by 2030, the UK is continuing to negotiate a trade deal with India.

Huddleston said: The UK has a strong and enduring relationship with India and Bangladesh. Our trade with both has grown significantly over the past year, which shows our partnerships are reaching new heights. I want to use my first official visit here to show the UKs eagerness to work with both countries on shared challenges like climate change, using our collective expertise to deepen our trading relationship, spark economic growth, and create jobs.

India has set strong targets to boost electric vehicles (EVs) and the UK is well-placed to support this ambition by providing knowledge exchange and access to finance and technology. The minister will announce a new project that will see the UK and the government of West Bengal join forces on a pilot to develop electric two-wheelers, such as motorcycles or scooters. British Deputy High Commissioner in Kolkata, Nick Low, said: Im delighted to welcome Nigel Huddleston, Minister of State for International Trade at the Department for Business and Trade, to Kolkata. Our Prime Ministers are committed to double trade and investment and to safeguarding our planet by building a sustainable future together in the 2030 Roadmap for India-UK Future Relations. My mission is to make that happen in Kolkata and across West Bengal.

Huddleston will also launch a center to enhance opportunities in the EV sector by partnering Indian businesses with elite academic and industrial institutions in the UK. West Bengal, the sixth largest state by economic value in India, with a GDP expected to reach 117 million pounds this year has set a target of developing one million electric vehicles in the next five years.

The UK minister will also facilitate the signing of a memorandum of understanding (MoU) between the Royal Institute of Chartered Surveyors (RICS) and the government of West Bengal on skill development in sustainable and modern methods of construction.

Through these three initiatives, UK businesses will be well-placed to customize and market EV technology and sustainable construction for this burgeoning market in India. Minister Huddleston will also visit a waste processing company in Kolkata using cutting-edge green technologies supplied by the UK business CDE Ireland to recycle construction waste into high-quality, reusable sand. At a business roundtable, the minister will speak to industry leaders on the deepening of the UK and India's economic ties, emphasizing the opportunities that have already been unlocked from the UK-India Enhanced Trade Partnership. The minister will also discuss the economic benefits of a UK-India trade deal currently being negotiated that could cut red tape, reduce tariffs, and help UK and Indian companies do business.
The abandoned Rahway Valley Railroad tracks in Union County are one step closer to becoming a multi-use trail system with an infusion of $1.5 million from a federal program dedicated to non-traditional transportation projects.

The Union County Board of Commissioners announced in early June the state Department of Transportation had chosen its Rahway Valley Rails-to-Trails Project to receive funds through the Transportation Alternatives Set-Aside program.

The Rahway Valley Rails-to-Trails Project paves the way for a brighter future, where safe and accessible multi-use trails bring people together, boost local businesses, create jobs and unlock the beauty of Union County, Commissioner Chairman Sergio Granados said in a press release.

The plans include converting a section of the railroad tracks into hiking and biking trails from Kenilworth to neighboring Roselle Park. But advocates are also looking at creating a network of trails around the county using other abandoned rail lines.

The Transportation Alternatives federal program is administered by the state, in partnership with the North Jersey Transportation Planning Authority, the Delaware Valley Regional Planning Commission and the South Jersey Transportation Planning Organization.

The Rahway Valley Rails-to-Trails Project is a great example of how this program can be used to create multi-use trails that provide safe transportation options and connect people to jobs, boosting the local economy, North Jersey Transportation Planning Authority Executive Director David W. Behrend said in a statement.

The Rahway Valley Railroad operated in northern New Jersey from 1897 until it closed in 1992. At its height, the railroad was nearly 12 miles long, including the 7.1 mile long mainline and three branch lines, according to a historical account from the National Parks Service. The railroad traversed Roselle Park, Kenilworth, Union, Springfield, Summit and Maplewood.

The Rahway Valley Railroad Station on North 31st Street in Kenilworth served as a hub at the turn of the century. The station even served as a backdrop for numerous movies, according to the Kenilworth borough website.

However, traffic on the Rahway Valley Railroad was way down by the 1980s. The Delaware Otsego Corporation eventually abandoned the line in 1992. In 1995, the state Department of Transportation purchased the Rahway Valley Railroad with a plan for rehabilitating the line. However, decades went by without any change.

Today, most of the old Rahway Valley Railroad is overgrown. Some of its tracks are still visible beneath tall grass and weeds.

But the rail line was not completely forgotten. Residents and elected officials have been working to raise funds for a project that would transform the old rail line into a trail system that connects existing greenways and parks with the Watchung Reservation.

Theres all these other trails in other counties, why should I have to put bikes on the back of my car and go to another town to have safe trails? asked Michael Dury, president of Union County Connects, a nonprofit group advocating for a Union County trail system.

Trails come in many forms but the ones interesting to us were the ones hidden in plain sight, which were the old rail system, said Dury. A lot of them are not used anymore and that coincides with a big need that we have.

Union County is the third most-densely-populated county in the state with approximately 575,345 residents, according to the latest census data.

This is desperately needed in Union County, Dury said.

The Rahway Valley Rails-to-Trails Project aims to create safe multi-use trails from the abandoned Rahway Valley Railroad section that traverses the Kenilworth and neighboring Roselle Park. The new trails, designed for pedestrians and bicyclists, will connect communities, businesses, shopping and recreational opportunities.

This is a great way to keep active and promote healthy lifestyles, said Jay Robaina, a Roselle Park councilman and co-founder of Union County Rails-to-Trails, a group created to discuss transforming the inactive rail lines of Union County into a public trail system.

A project like this will provide transportation, create open space, access to parks, schools, businesses, transit hubs, Robaina said. And hopefully this is just the start.

Union County Connects and Union County Rails-to-Trails have their sights set on converting other abandoned rail lines in the county, including 3.5 miles of the inactive Central Railroad of New Jersey line. The rail corridor, extending from Elizabeth to Cranford, is currently owned by Conrail.

The abandoned North Shore branch of the Staten Island Rapid Transit Railroad, which also extends from Elizabeth to Cranford, is another line eyed for future trail use. The branch of the Staten Island Rapid Transit Railroad has been abandoned since the 1980s.

How fantastic would it be to turn that into something that could connect our families? asked Robaina.

The Rahway Valley Rails-to-Trails Project received $1.5 million in federal funds to go toward converting the old railroad into a multi-use trail for pedestrians and cyclists.

Thank you for relying on us to provide the local news you can trust. Please consider supporting NJ.com with a voluntary subscription.

Jackie Roman may be reached at jroman@njadvancemedia.com.
Luke Voit  after failing with the Milwaukee Brewers this season  is hoping for one last shot at the majors leagues, and MLB general managers have told him: Keep your shirt on.

Replied Voit: Shirt, sure. Sleeves, not so much.

TO BUY METS TICKETS, VISIT: VIVIDSEATS, TICKETNETWORK and STUBHUB

The former Yankees slugger and major league home run leader wore a sleeveless jersey that he nearly busted out of during Saturday nights minor-league game with the Syracuse Mets. And with nothing to restrict him, he belted a home run in an 8-3 loss to the Scranton/Wilkes-Barre Rail Riders, the Yankees Triple-A team.

Voits homer went 424 feet to deep left-center off a hanging breaking ball from Deivi Garcia.

Thatll bring Luke Voit to the plate for Syracuse annnnnnd hes not wearing a shirt. pic.twitter.com/FerrpzVnDf  Conor Foley (@RailRidersTT) July 1, 2023

Voit, 32, has five homers and 13 RBIs in 15 games for Syracuse, but is hitting just. 217 as he tries to get back to the big leagues.

After a torrid spring, Voit, 32, signed a one-year deal with the Milwaukee Brewers in late March but struggled and was released. In 22 games as a first baseman and designated hitter, he slashed .221/.284/.265 with no home runs, four RBI and four walks.

He spent time on the 10-day injured list with a strained neck before he was waived by the Brewers, but he believed he was close to getting his stroke back. Voit signed a minor-league deal with the Mets on June 12.

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Voit was with the Yankees from 2018 to 2021, and in the COVID-shortened 2020 season, he led the majors with 22 home runs and finished ninth in voting for American League MVP.

MORE: Ex-Yankees SS mocked for trying to bunt: Grown man, swing the bat!

He was traded to the Padres in March 2022 after a subpar 2021 season that began with a torn meniscus. He hit 11 homers in 68 games that year. Anthony Rizzo, obtained at the trade deadline, took over at first base, and DJ LeMahieu emerged as a backup at several infield positions, making Voit expendable.

He was traded by the Padres to the Nationals for Juan Soto, and when the Nationals non-tendered him in the off-season, Voit signed the minor-league deal with the Brewers.
A 325-foot rollercoaster at a North Carolina amusement park was scheduled for inspection by federal officials Monday, after a rider previously reported seeing a crack in a support pillar, CNN reported.

The Fury 325 at Carowinds in Charlotte was closed recently after the father informed the park and a local fire department about the alarming find.

Personnel with the state Department of Labors Elevator and Amusement Device Bureau were scheduled to visit the park Monday, a spokeswoman for the agency told the outlet.

A statement issued by the park, according to the Associated Press, said that all rides, including Fury 325, undergo daily inspections to ensure their proper functioning and structural integrity.

Safety is our top priority, the statement continued, and we appreciate the patience and understanding of our valued guests during this process.

Nearly 40,000 injuries were estimated last year on amusement attractions in the nation, including rides, waterslides and inflatables, according to data collected by the federal Consumer Product Safety Commission.

Last month, one person was killed and several others were injured when they plunged from a roller coaster in Sweden after it partially careened off its tracks, the New York Post reported.
STATEN ISLAND, N.Y. -- President Joe Bidens new student loan forgiveness backup plan, called SAVE, was designed to decrease most borrowers payments on federal undergraduate loans in good standing.

The move was in reaction to a Supreme Court ruling against the Biden Administrations attempt to reduce student loan debt, which would have canceled up to $20,000 in federal student loans for 43 million people.

While a direct application website will be launched later this summer, the White House says borrowers can get started now by enrolling in an existing Income-Driven Repayment (IDR) plan. Those enrolled in the IDR plan will automatically be enrolled into SAVE. Also, any borrower enrolled in REPAYE, a pay-as-you-earn program, will automatically be rolled into SAVE.

According to the White House, the SAVE plan calls for the following:

For undergraduate loans, cut in half the amount that borrowers have to pay each month from 10% to 5% of discretionary income.

A pause on payments for people who make less than 225% of the federal poverty level. This means you will not owe loan payments if you are a single borrower earning $32,800 or less or a family of four earning $67,500 or less in 2023.

People who make their regular monthly payments will not have to pay additional unpaid interest. This means that if $80 of interest accrues on your balance each month, but your payment is set at $60, you will not be charged the remaining $20.

Forgive loan balances after 10 years of payments, instead of 20 years, for borrowers with original loan balances of $12,000 or less. Its estimated that this will allow nearly all community college borrowers to be debt-free within 10 years.

The White House has touted the new plan will bring debt relief to millions. It will allow many borrowers to see their monthly payments cut in half, and those making less than $15 an hour will not have to make any payments.

However, the new student loan forgiveness plan will likely be scrutinized by both the political and legal authorities. The U.S. Department of Education will push for the debt forgiveness program under the Higher Education Act.

This new path is legally sound, said Biden on Friday. Its going to take longer, but, in my view, its the best path that remains to providing for as many borrowers as possible with debt relief.

To learn more about the new SAVE plan, visit the Department of Educations website.

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STATEN ISLAND, N.Y. - Governor Kathy Hochul approved a request from the New York State Police to raise the maximum age for trooper applicants from 29 to 34, she announced last week.

This requirement change reinforces Governor Hochuls commitment to expanding the New York State Police force. Earlier this year, Hochul announced more than $66 million in the budget to fund additional New York State Police Academy classes and increase the number of New York State troopers.

Public safety is my top priority, and the State Police are the tip of the spear in our efforts to combat gun violence and keep New Yorkers safe. By raising the maximum age of new recruits, we are widening the pool of people who can help us with this incredibly important work. After doubling the number of graduating classes from the New York State Police Academy starting next year, this new rule will help the state recruit more troopers and protect the people of New York, said Hochul.

Under the Governors plan, there will be two additional classes scheduled each year allowing for four unprecedented classes annually. This aims to accelerate the rebuilding of the force and expand the number of troopers dedicated to addressing violent crimes and quality of life issues by targeting the removal of illegal guns from the streets ,and combating the flow of drugs within some of the states most vulnerable neighborhoods.

This change will allow us to recruit the most diverse and skilled group of candidates possible. There are many qualified candidates from the military or other careers who decide that they want to transition to the State Police, but because of the previous age requirement, some were not eligible, Steven A. Nigrelli, acting New York State Police superintendent, said. These are individuals that have a wealth of knowledge and experience to bring to the job.

The redesigned recruitment program aims to reach more potential female and minority candidates. This includes actively meeting and engaging with leaders from underrepresented communities within law enforcement to establish positive, long-term connections. The State Police has also taken the 30X30 pledge and is committed to increasing female recruits to 30% by the year 2030.

Entrance exams for Troopers

The next Trooper Entrance exam will be held simultaneously with the application process from July 2023 through September 2023, and will be administered online at authorized testing centers to make the exam more accessible.

Individuals will be able to apply beginning July 1, and can schedule a time to take the exam as early as July 10.

Candidates can learn about becoming a New York State Trooper and sign up to take the exam at joinstatepolice.ny.gov.

A study guide for the exam is available here.

Minimum exam qualifications:

Must be a U.S. Citizen

Must be 20-34 years of age

Must have high school diploma or equivalent

Salary & benefits:
STATEN ISLAND, N.Y.  The terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001 took the lives of nearly 3,000 people that day, but went on to impact the lives of thousands more who lived and worked in the surrounding area.

Thats why on June 22 the New York Legislature unanimously passed the 9/11 Notice Act, which will authorize the state to establish a notification system for businesses and their current and past employees about their eligibility for the federal September Eleventh Victim Compensation Fund (VCF) and the World Trade Center Health Program.

State Sen. Brian Kavanagh (D-Manhattan), a former Staten Islander whose district includes the World Trade Center site, introduced the legislation in his chamber, and said the bill would enlist employers who had employees working in the eligible area between Sept. 11, 2001 and July 31, 2002 to notify each person of their potential benefits from the programs.

There are many workers, including first responders, retail employees, cleanup workers, office workers, and others who were in the vicinity of the World Trade Center during and after the horrific 9/11 terrorist attacks who may be experiencing WTC related illnesses and may be eligible for financial and healthcare benefits, but may not realize they are, he said. Our bill seeks to remedy this.

A federal law passed in 2019 fully funded and extended the VCF through 2090, but advocates say funding shortfalls remain for the World Trade Center Health Program.

To be eligible for compensation from the VCF, an individual must be able to prove they were present at one of the attack sites, in the exposure area, or along the routes of debris removal from the time of the attacks to May 30, 2002, and have a 9/11-related illness or injury certified by the World Trade Center (WTC) Health Program.

Michael Barasch, 9/11 legal advocate and managing partner of Barasch & McGarry, has represented countless people whose health has been impacted by the toxic air in Lower Manhattan after the terrorist attacks, including former NYPD officer James Zadroga, for whom the federal governments legislation creating the first health fund related to the attacks is named.

He said he hopes the new state legislation would help make civilians impacted by the terrorist attacks aware of the benefits available to them.

[During] the months after 9/11, the downtown office workers, residents, students and teachers were exposed to the same toxins as the firefighters and cops, Barasch said. Not surprisingly, they are being diagnosed with and dying from the same illnesses. Hopefully, this law will ensure that the civilian victims take advantage of the free health care to which they are entitled and that they receive compensation for all their certified 9/11 illnesses.

A spokesperson for Gov. Kathy Hochul said she will review the legislation.

MORE LEGISLATIVE NEWS

Under NY bill no conviction would ever be final, say state district attorneys

New state law takes effect Tuesday, aims to protect New Yorkers from gift card scams

NY commission to study possibility of state reparations for slavery

Proposed U.S. Tax Cut law would add guaranteed bonus deductions

Clean Slate law, which would seal many criminal records in NY, expected to pass
STATEN ISLAND, N.Y.  The spotted lanternfly has persevered through stomps, squishes and slaps.

The invasive pest, first found on Staten Island in 2020, has gained a foothold in New York State, and its population is only expected to grow this year. Early sightings of nymphs have been reported in the borough, and state experts say adults  known by their tell-tale black and red spotted wings  are soon to follow.

A line of black nymphs and red nymphs could be seen moving along a branch in Dongan Hills. The latter is the final nymph stage before the plant-hopper, which threatens agriculture and devastates crops and vineyards, becomes an adult.

Native to China and Southeast Asia, the pest can hatch as early as April before later becoming an adult during July, said the state Department of Environmental Conservation (DEC).

Residents are encouraged to smash lanternflies, and experts said a vacuum can also be used to suck up the flying nuisances.

New York City Parks Department officials said trees have not been negatively affected since the lanterflies arrival in the five boroughs.

However, the states annual yield of grapes and apples continues to face stark dangers, the DEC said.



RELATED COVERAGE: Spotted lanternflies

>> Spotted lanternfly population expected to grow on Staten Island this year, expert says

>> Do spotted lanternflies pose threat to NYC trees? Heres what Parks Dept. officials say.

>> Spotted lanternflies in NYC: Take these steps now to lessen infestation this summer
STATEN ISLAND, N.Y.  New Yorks ambitious alternative energy goals are beginning to take shape in the waters off the Atlantic coast.

Gov. Kathy Hochul last week announced South Fork Wind, the states first offshore wind farm, achieved its steel in the water milestone after the projects first monopile foundation was installed for the creation of its U.S.-built offshore substation.

That effort puts South Fork on pace to be the countrys first utility-scale offshore wind farm in federal waters with an anticipated completion date by the end of the year  advancing New Yorks Climate Leadership and Community Protection Act goal to develop 9,000 megawatts of offshore wind by 2035.

New York is leading offshore wind development and building a green economy that will support hundreds of good-paying jobs and benefit generations to come, said Hochul in a release. This progress on building the first utility-scale offshore wind project in the country cements New York as a national hub for the offshore wind industry.

New York State Energy Research and Development Authority map outlining the state's active offshore wind projects. (NYSERDA)

OFFSHORE WIND IN NEW YORK

Five projects, including South Fork Wind, are in active development for New York. The states current portfolio, once completed, will total more than 4,300 megawatts  strong enough to power well-over two million homes and expected to bring $12.1 billion in economic impact.

From manufacturing and installation to operations and maintenance, the offshore wind industry is predicted to create nearly 7,000 jobs within the state. Still, the deadline for the states lofty energy goal (which sits just over a decade away) would require thousands of more jobs while powering roughly 30% of New Yorks energy needs.

Supporting the creation of offshore wind farms requires a significant manufacturing force that is rapidly forming in ports across the state, including on Staten Island. Staten Islands offshore wind manufacturing sites were recently featured in multiple proposals for the states third offshore wind solicitation, which is expected to be concluded in the coming months.

Other sites, including the Port of Albany and the South Brooklyn Marine Terminal are poised to become pivotal pieces of New York accomplishing its alternative energy plans.

SOUTH FORK

South Fork Wind, a joint effort between the offshore wind development company rsted and the energy provider Eversource, is located about 35 miles east of Montauk Point off Long Island and is expected to create 120 megawatts of power.

The farm will have 12 turbines and generate enough clean energy to power 70,000 homes, offsetting tons of emissions annually, officials said. An offshore underground transmission line will deliver power to a local grid in East Hampton, New York, running under the beach and roads.

BEACON WIND

Beacon Wind will be located east of South Fork and roughly 60 miles east of Montauk Point. The project will be developed in two phases and provide generation capacity of 1,230 megawatts of renewable energy.

Equinor Wind US, the developer of Beacon Wind, is currently in the permitting process for the wind farm with an anticipated power-up date in the late 2020s. Construction at the site is not expected to begin until after 2025, according to an Equinor fact sheet.

When completed, Beacon Wind is expected to connect to New Yorks grid through a substation in Astoria, Queens. Its maintenance and operations base, meanwhile, will be located at the South Brooklyn Marine Terminal in Sunset Park, Brooklyn.

EMPIRE WIND 1

Empire Wind 1 is currently the closest offshore wind farm to Staten Island, located around 14 miles from Jones Beach State Park.

The project is designed to create 816 megawatts of energy and has an expected commercial operation date of 2026, according to the New York State Energy Research and Development Authority (NYSERDA).

Officials said the site will connect to the states energy grid at the Gowanus Substation in Brooklyn and will share the South Brooklyn Marine Terminal as its maintenance and operations center.

EMPIRE WIND 2

Empire Wind 2, a 1,260 megawatt project, is forecasted to begin its operations one year later, in 2027, said NYSERDA.

Also an Equinor project, it sits slightly southeast of Empire Wind 1 and will similarly be run out of the South Brooklyn Marine Terminal for its operations and maintenance.

Its on-land connection will be Barrett Substation in Oceanside in Nassau County, officials said.

SUNRISE WIND

Developed by Sunrise Wind LLC, Sunrise Wind will be located more than 30 miles off the east coast of Long Island  just south of South Fork.

The project has the capacity for 924 megawatts of energy and will connect on land to the Holbrook Substation in central Long Island. It is expected to have a commercial operations date of 2025.

Key components for its foundations will be created in the states capital region.



RELATED COVERAGE: Staten Island and offshore wind

>> Heres how College of Staten Island is preparing for offshore wind boom: Plans include a 7-ft turbine in lab

>> Whats next for Staten Island offshore wind? Here are 4 developments were eyeing in 2023

>> NYC signs on to offshore wind vision for LNG site, but long road ahead

>> Offshore wind energy explained: How it works and what it could mean for Staten Island and NYC

>> Summer of Offshore Wind on Staten Island: Events will teach about growing industry
San Mateo, CA (94402)

Today

Some clouds this morning will give way to generally sunny skies for the afternoon. High 76F. Winds WNW at 10 to 20 mph..

Tonight

Mainly clear. Low 53F. Winds W at 10 to 15 mph.
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A key associate of a global investment scheme that has embroiled potentially thousands of investors has been issued a life-long ban from providing any financial services after being on the corporate regulators radar for years.

On Monday, the Australian Securities and Investments Commission (ASIC) announced it banned Sydney-based director David Henty Sutton from involvement in financial services including any function involved in the carrying on of a financial services business and controlling an entity that carries on a financial services business.

David Sutton has been banned from providing any financial services.

The ban comes after an investigation by this masthead uncovered a number of Australian financial advisers who used their trusted positions to convince clients to buy dubious investments in an investment scheme supposedly backed by billions of dollars in assets.

Stephen Helberg, an auditor of 40 years and a former employee of Aus Streaming  a company directed by Sutton  who quit when he peeled back its inner workings and became suspicious, said ASIC was way too late in taking action.
Call them the Departing Dozen  they are the partners that PwCs investigation has implicated in having an involvement in the firms tax-leak affair or its cover-up.

They include the former chief executive, Tom Seymour; the ex-chairman; the chief risk officer; and the firms head of government. Its quite a haul.

Four had been singled out a few weeks ago and a further eight followed on Monday.

An additional eight PwC partners have exited the firm. Credit: Martin Ollman

Had PwC taken this action six months ago, having weeded out the partners who used confidential government plans in order to help PwC clients sidestep Treasury moves against tax avoidance, the situation could have played out differently.
Australians caused a minor diplomatic incident in London over the weekend. And, no, were not talking about Alex Careys perfectly legitimate dismissal of Jonny Bairstow at Lords.

Instead, the Australian high commission to the United Kingdoms decision to cancel its much-loved annual pride party, which would have been held during last weekends festivities in the British capital, has ruffled plenty of feathers.

Credit: Shakespeare

The Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade didnt respond to our questions about why the event was canned, but it just happens to follow a change of the guard, with Rudd-Gillard era minister Stephen Smiths taking over as high commissioner in January. When it comes to celebratory soirees, the Albanese government has erred on the side of joyless sobriety, just in case people get the wrong idea. Maybe that memo reached London.

Theres also speculation the decision is about optics in the midst of a cost of living crisis, although the high commission has the budget set aside for the event.
International student Chesca Solis doesnt know what shes going to do with herself now she cant work seven days a week.

Solis has worked two jobs and excelled at her course since arriving in Melbourne from Manila 14 months ago.

I would work five days at the hotel, two days at the [travel] tour company and I would go to uni, she said. It was very manageable. I still got high distinctions for my research units.

During the COVID-19 pandemic, the government allowed international students to work as many hours as they liked to help fill skill shortages in areas such as aged care, hospitality and fruit picking.
The federal government is set to relax onerous visa rules for Indonesians who want to travel to Australia when Indonesian President Joko Widodo meets Prime Minister Anthony Albanese in Sydney.

Concessions from Australia on visas would be a major victory for Widodo, who has long argued that the tough Australian rules for Indonesian travellers were unfair and holding back crucial people-to-people connections between the neighbouring nations.

Prime Minister Anthony Albanese and Indonesian President Joko Widodo will meet in Sydney on Tuesday. Credit: Alex Ellinghausen

While Australians can apply on arrival in Indonesia for tourist visas, Indonesian travellers to Australia must fill out a lengthy application that costs $140 and requires a medical examination and proof of income.

In interviews before his departure with The Sydney Morning Herald, The Age and The Australian Financial Review, Widodo said he planned to raise the very important issue of visa barriers with Albanese during his visit.
Recently in these pages, journalist Nick Bryant sounded the alarm that rhetorical and campaign devices used by American conservatives were being deployed to derail the campaign to establish an Indigenous Voice to the Australian parliament. Bryant was right to highlight the many parallels between the No campaigns key messages and the exaggerated, inapposite and polarising rhetoric of US conservatives, but he understated the threat they pose to establishing the Voice.

The No campaign is undoubtedly propagating Trumpist misinformation designed to scare voters, but it is also garnering crucial support by using the same strategies that have most recently destroyed affirmative action measures in American colleges and universities. Unless those imported strategies are directly confronted and repudiated, it is likely the Voice referendum will fail.

Opposition Leader Peter Dutton has opposed the Indigenous Voice to parliament. Credit: AAP

Last Thursday, the increasingly conservative US Supreme Court overruled long-standing precedent by ruling in a 6-3 majority decision that affirmative action measures designed to reduce racial inequality by ensuring that more students from minority racial backgrounds were admitted to universities were unconstitutional.

For more than 40 years, under such measures, universities were able to consider race or ethnic background together with scholastic achievement and other criteria in determining whether students were admitted. Since 1978, the US Supreme Court has repeatedly found that affirmative action policies for students from under-represented racial and ethnic backgrounds promoted beneficial educational pluralism.
Amid the relatively recent outbreak of excitement about the transformative potential of artificial intelligence, the United States, with some help from its allies, is doing everything it can to limit Chinas access to the cutting-edge technologies needed to exploit it.

On Friday, the Dutch government announced a new set of restrictions on exports of semiconductor equipment after reaching an agreement with the US and Japan that requires companies making advanced chip-making machinery to obtain export licences.

The Dutch company, ASML, is the worlds leader in building the manufacturing equipment for the most advanced semiconductors. While  with a lot of urging from the US  it hasnt sold its most advanced machines to China, the new restrictions mean that it wont be able to export even its older and less advanced models without a licence.

President Joe Biden speaking about the Chips and Science Act: US industry policy is largely run with national security in mind. Credit: AP

ASML is the only manufacturer in the world able to produce the extreme ultraviolet lithography devices needed to produce seven nanometres or smaller chips. With, apparently, three of ASMLs four immersion lithography systems covered by the new restrictions, China would lose access to the machinery needed to produce chips smaller than 28 nanometres.
The global energy transition is galvanising one of the mightiest investment booms in history. EVs are one part of that transformative wave. Loading Carmakers and battery manufacturers plan to invest $US860 billion  more than a trillion Australian dollars  over the rest of this decade into making EVs and their batteries, according to an Atlas Public Policy compilation of company announcements. Governments worldwide are in frantic competition to get a share of this cash. Australia is one of the great losers so far. The tragedy is that its uniquely well stocked with all the raw ingredients for EV batteries, including lithium, copper nickel, cobalt and magnesium. We would have been fine if wed started a decade ago, says Jafari. Unfortunately, its a bit of a legacy of the former government that we did nothing.

Today, Indonesias President Joko Widodo  universally known as Jokowi  is offering Australia a new chance. The Indonesian leader says he hopes to clinch a landmark deal this week with Australia on electric vehicles that he believes can make the countries major players in a mega-industry dominated by China, as my colleague Chris Barrett reported on Monday from his interview with Jokowi. I will focus on this, Jokowi said. Indonesia and Australia have a great potential for integration. Indonesia has the worlds largest nickel reserves, Australia [is] the worlds largest main lithium producer. I think this will be a great global effort to promote green transportation for a greener world future. Indonesias President Joko Widodo says he hopes to clinch a landmark deal with Australia on electric vehicles. Credit: AP He will meet Anthony Albanese in Sydney today; the Australian prime minister will accept the opportunity. The leaders are set to sign a memorandum of understanding to co-operate. Albanese sees it as a chance for Australia to get involved in advanced manufacturing of EV batteries. The happenstance of raw mineral endowments are an essential part of the picture, but while they are necessary, they are insufficient.

Jokowi is very keen to make this happen, he wants to establish a manufacturing hub in Indonesia, explains Greg Fealy, an ANU authority on Indonesia. There are so many countries vying with Indonesia for this, its highly competitive. Hes looking longingly at our lithium  they have nickel, but they dont have lithium, says Fealy. This is the Achilles heel of Jokowis plan. Australia has the worlds greatest known reserves of lithium. Credit: Bloomberg Jokowi is using Indonesias nickel reserves to win foreign manufacturers investment dollars  not by attracting them so much as coercing them. He has banned the export of unprocessed nickel. To get their hands on the nickel they need for their EV batteries, foreign firms must invest in processing it in Indonesia. When this policy was first introduced, it was roundly condemned in international business circles. But its working: Its raised the price of nickel, so Indonesia gets a higher return, theres been a lot of Chinese investment and Indonesia is getting value added from the nickel processed in Indonesia, summarises Fealy. Its turned out not to be a bad thing for Indonesia.

Jafari agrees: Australia can learn a bit of a lesson from Indonesia. Australia has the worlds greatest known reserves of lithium, it currently sells most of it to China as a raw commodity. Chinas manufacturers process it into batteries for EVs, capturing the added value. Loading Australia makes nothing in the value added chain. And even has difficulty attracting imports to satisfy demand here. The Australian market is treated as a dumping ground for their oldest tech at the moment, says Jafari, whose council is the peak lobby for the EV industry in Australia. Its hard to talk to foreign companies about investing in Australia when other countries have good, strong emissions standards for their vehicles, and we have none. This is the starting point for attracting investment, he says. The Albanese government is in the process of setting new standards, expected by the end of the year. But can Australia generate the investment to add any value to its raw minerals? We can continue to allow major off-takes of our lithium and remain a resource country, or become a manufacturer at some level, says Jafari. For Australia to make a regional play into EV batteries should be seen as low-hanging fruit.
London: An alleged sex assault victim of Kevin Spacey said the slippery Hollywood actor had tried to groom him, and the repeated groping assaults had left him feeling physically sick, a London court has heard.

Spacey, 63, is on trial at Southwark Crown Court accused of a dozen allegations of historical sex offences committed against four men, then aged in their 20s and 30s, which are said to have taken place between 2001 and 2013.

Actor Kevin Spacey leaves Southwark Crown Court in London. Credit: AP

He has denied all the charges and his lawyer Patrick Gibbs said last week at the start of the trial the jury were going to hear some damned lies.

The court was shown a recorded police interview with the first of the alleged victims. The man said the actor had assaulted him on up to 12 occasions over a period of about four years in the early 2000s, grabbing his private areas when they were alone, such as in a car or an elevator.
PHILIPSBURG:--- The St. Maarten Tourism Bureau will continue marketing campaigns with Expedia, which will be launching June 30, 2023, in the United States and Canada until March 31, 2024. Many travelers turn to OTAs (Online Travel Agents) throughout their purchasing journey for trip inspiration, planning, or booking. The objective of the campaign is to promote the destination to the United States and Canada markets with the aim to continue to inspire, engage, and convert travel consumers to book a trip to the island by leveraging Expedias extensive product portfolio. The marketing campaign is conducted online, consisting of search results banners, homepage native ads, and display banner ads on Expedias platform. The methodology is used to maximize traffic to the dedicated destination landing page, providing travel consumers with the opportunity to book their trip, as well as view inspiring content about places to stay and things to do while on the island.

Bookings to St. Maarten from Expedia grew by up to 15% during the campaign period (September 22nd, 2022, to March 31st, 2023) compared to the same period the previous year.

"Sint Maarten remains one of the top destinations in the Caribbean for North American travelers, and with rising travel intent, lengthening search windows and a lift in international searches, things are shaping up to be a year of sustained growth. As one of the world's leading travel platforms, we are thrilled to continue our partnership with St. Maarten Tourism Bureau, helping connect the island's tourism industry to millions of travelers in Expedia Groups worldwide network," Jennifer Andre, Vice President, Expedia Group Media Solutions.

Some of the private sector stakeholders are also running campaigns simultaneously with the destination campaign. According to Ricardo Perez, General Manager of the Oyster Bay Beach Resort: Having this destination kickoff once again will hopefully support the efforts of individual properties. For example, at Oyster Bay Beach Resort we launched our campaign at the end of March and will run it up until September 30, 2023. Having the destination investing at the same time should boost the summer business and beyond. Holland House Beach Hotel General Manager Paul Boetekees adds: We have been contributing and running our own Expedia campaign, offering great value to our guests, and we were recently awarded a 4-star status and are part of the VIP program, which I believe will enhance the destination campaign and position St. Maarten better in the market.

The St. Maarten Tourism Bureau will continue to collaborate with OTAs, tour operators, and airlines in addition to carrying out other marketing activities to further increase destination awareness and stimulate bookings that may result in positive economic value for the island.

We believe that ongoing campaigns with Expedia and other OTAs, will continue to give St. Maarten the best ROI and growth in bookings, says Director of Tourism, May-Ling Chun. The objective is to continue growing our public private partnership, as we feel that this will result in an increase of awareness to the destination.
PHILIPSBURG:--- Posh Productions (POSH) proudly announces the crowning of the first King and Queen of the Mr. and Miss POSH Interscholastic pageant. Luis Florentino from Milton Peters College (MPC) and Shiloh Williams from The Methodist Agogic Center (MAC) High School emerged as the winners of this prestigious title.

The Mr. and Miss POSH Interscholastic pageant served as the national pageant, showcasing the talented delegates representing MAC High, St. Maarten Academy, and MPC. Each school crowned a King and Queen to participate in this grand event. There is nothing more important to this nations future than investing in our young people stated POSHs President Cassandra Jeffers-Weekes quoting Michele Obama

Representing MAC High School, Shiloh William competed as Contestant number one among the females, while Ijaelen Sanderson represented the school as Contestant number two among the males. For Milton Peters College, Rayeesha Boirard represented the females as Contestant number two and Luis Florentino represented the males as Contestant number one, respectively. Finally, Imani Telford and Kevin Omeus represented St. Maarten Academy as Contestant number three for both females and males.

Under the platform of POSH, the Mr. and Miss POSH Interscholastic pageant aimed to highlight talent and intellect, showcasing the winners from the participating schools. The pageant commenced with a lively opening number, featuring the delegates dressed in cheerleading attire which captured a very school spirit theme. Following the opening, the delegates introduced themselves through speeches.

Miss Williams, Contestant number one, portrayed an aspiring stylist and shared her aspirations to become the youngest designer to put Sint Maarten on the international fashion map. Miss Boirard, Contestant number two, delivered an explosive speech announcing her determination to become Sint Maarten's first forensic pathologist. Contestant number three Miss Telford expressed her aspiration to become a gynecologist, emphasizing her dedication to delivering and saving lives.

The pageant then transitioned to the male speech segment, where delegate number one Mr. Florentino representing MPC shared his vision of becoming a pilot and owning a fleet of aircraft to provide exceptional service to and from SXM. Contestant number two from MAC High School Mr. Sanderson delivered a compelling skit and speech in both English and Japanese,

expressing his ambitions of becoming Sint Maarten's first Japanese-speaking ambassador in Japan. Lastly, Contestant number three Mr Omeus from St. Maarten Academy captivated the audience with his performance and speech about his pursuit of becoming a marine biologist.

The talent segment followed, starting with the female contestants vying for the crown of Ms. POSH Interscholastic. Miss Williams, Contestant number one, delivered a dramatic dance and spoken word performance to raise awareness about mental illness. Miss Boirard, Contestant number two, presented a skit highlighting the importance of preventing teenage pregnancy and called for an educational program focusing on healthcare for young girls. Contestant number three, Miss Telford representing SXM Academy, delivered a powerful skit and dance advocating for children's rights.

The male contestants were up next to showcase their talent through various performances. Contestant number one Mr. Florentino presented a court-based skit that placed the education system on trial that it fails to evolve, lacks creativity, and fair compensation for teachers. Contestant number two, Mr. Sanderson representing MAC High, delivered a captivating spoken word performance centered around the battle against mental illness. Finally, Contestant number three Mr. Omeus from SXM Academy combined dance and skit to shed light on the effects of judgment and bullying.

In the creative attire category, the judges evaluated the contestants' unique outfits. Miss Williams of MAC High's attire captured the essence of Girl Scouts and honored the iconic Mrs. Meyers-Hazel. Contestant number two Miss Boirard from MAC High showcased a creative piece made from various school supplies, featuring an enlarged logo of the school. Contestant number three Miss Telford appeared in an ensemble crafted from pieces of uniform fabric from all high schools on Dutch Sint Maarten, accented with laptop fragments.

The male contestants showcased their creativity in the next segment. Contestant number one, Mr. Florentino from MPC, wore a map-themed suit symbolizing his desire to explore the world. Contestant number two Mr. Sanderson from MAC High paid tribute to Tata, Sint Maarten's beloved school bus driver known for his strict rules and discipline. Contestant number three Mr. Omeus from SXM Academy wore a suit made of sticky notes, with colors resembling the ocean's coral, representing his affinity for marine life.

The evening concluded with the Prom wear segment. Miss Williams from MAC High graced the stage in a radiant pink and green floral gown, while Contestant number two Miss Boirard from MPC made a grand entrance via a chariot, revealing a stunning pink semi-sequined slim-fit dress.

Contestant number three, Miss Telford from Academy appeared in a pink and gold sequined dress.

Among the male contestants, Contestant number one Mr. Florentino from MPC arrived in a green and gold tuxedo, following a "Coming to America" theme. Contestant number two Mr. Sanderson from MAC High donned a green suit with purple accents and a maroon tie. Lastly, Contestant number three Mr. Omeus from Sint Maarten Academy wore a turquoise suit with African print elements.

The following winning scores illustrate the placement of the winners and Runner Up positions for each participant of the first annual Mr. and Miss POSH Interscholastic Pageant; Queen Williams won the Miss POSH Interscholastic title with a score of 934, Boirard was the 1st Runner-Up among the females with a score of 928, Telford secured the 2nd Runner Up position among the females with a score of 781. King Florentino won the Mr.POSH Interscholastic title with a score of 947.50, Mr. Omeus secured the 1st Runner-Up position among the males with a score of 946 and Mr. Sanderson was the 2nd Runner-Up among the males with a score of 870.

The Mr. and Miss POSH Interscholastic pageant organized by POSH Productions celebrated the talent, intelligence, and creativity of the delegates from MAC High, Sint Maarten Academy, and Milton Peters College. It served as a platform for the youth of Sint Maarten to showcase their aspirations and contribute to the island's growth.

Posh Production would like to thank the Judges who participated in the full production of this pageant namely Head judge Ms. Rita Gumbs, Valerie Damaseau, Miguel Angel Alexander, Glenicia Mitchel, Norrisa Anatol, Melisa Boasman, Naima Hodge, Aishira Cicilia, Valya Pantophlet. A special thank you to the moderator of the debate, Mrs. Shanice Powell-Hodge, and the host of the main pageant event, Mrs. Stacy-Ann Violenes.

POSH would like to extend thanks and much appreciation to our sponsors Carrefour, Mr.Papayas, Sugar Mill, TV15, All Access with Audrey Jack, My 88.3, Anna E. Richardson

First Caribbean International Bank, Arts from the Heart, Opoe's Bread, Consider it Solved

Divi Little Bay Beach Resort, Belair Beach Hotel, SXM AirWays, ALEEZE Convention Center & Hall, Principal Accounting & Consulting Services, Emily Construction, Print Express & Sign,

Angelic Touch Day Spa, Beauty, and Beyond Salon, Oh-So Fit, Soaps by Zoe, Modern Homes, Inspired Selfie, BTP, Iglot.

Thank you to everyone who attended the shows and filled every seat!

For further inquiries or media contact, please reach out to:




Santo Domingo:--- The Dominican Institute for Quality (INDOCAL) has announced the release of a Technical Standard for Medical Tourism, aimed at establishing quality criteria for the entire value chain of the sector. The standard aims to ensure the best practices and safety of patients and their families while promoting protocols and standards that enhance confidence in the Dominican Republic as a destination for health services.

Lorenzo Ramirez, the general director of INDOCAL, stated that the NORDOM ISO 22525:2020 standard, approved by the Dominican Council for Quality (CODOCA), takes a comprehensive approach to medical care throughout the patients journey.

Ramirez further explained that this standard, in line with national development goals, was developed through an extensive consultation process involving the INDOCAL Technical Tourism Committee. The committee consisted of experts from the Ministry of Tourism (MITUR), the Ministry of Public Health (MSP), the Dominican Association of Health Tourism (ADTS), the Association of Hotels and Tourism (ASONAHORES), and other entities. They reached a consensus to promote the standard in order to enhance the security of this thriving market niche.

Dr. Alejandro Cambiaso, president of the ADTS, praised the NORDOM ISO 22525 standard for medical tourism. He highlighted that it incorporates compliance with local licensing and accreditation standards of the Ministry of Public Health, regulatory standards of the Ministry of Tourism, and specialized ISO international standards for medical tourism. These international standards have been validated by numerous countries, representing a significant step forward.

Cambiaso emphasized that this regulation does not replace international accreditations but rather complements and strengthens them. It allows the country to aspire to the development of a culture of quality and compliance in the healthcare sector.

The adopted ISO standard can be applied to various organizations involved in medical tourism, including healthcare providers, plastic surgery centers, dentistry clinics, tour operators, medical facilitators, hotels, and specialized recovery centers.
Grand Cayman, Cayman Islands, July 3, 2023.

The European Union continues to provide support to CCRIF SPC as a means of subsidizing premiums on the parametric insurance policies of its Caribbean members. This policy year, which started on June 1, 2023, the EU provided CCRIF with US$4.7 million in support of the 12 ODA-eligible Caribbean members of CCRIF1 to subsidize premiums for tropical cyclone and excess rainfall. CCRIFs parametric insurance helps countries to financially protect their economies from devastating natural disasters such as hurricanes and excess rainfall.

Provided through a programme administered by the World Bank, the EU funds enabled CCRIF to provide discounts of approximately 14 per cent on the gross premium of members tropical cyclone and excess rainfall policies. The EU funds also enable technical assistance oriented towards ensuring the sustainability of climate and disaster risk insurance in the years to come.

This current support is a continuation of the EUs efforts to assist Caribbean countries in maintaining climate and disaster risk protection during hard economic times. Over the period 2007-2023, the European Union has been one of CCRIFs main development partners. In total, since the establishment of CCRIF in 2007, the EUs contribution to CCRIF is equivalent to more than 45 million. The EU contributed to the initial capitalization of CCRIF, the entry of new countries, and the development of new parametric insurance products through technical assistance as well as support to respond to the significant disruption of Caribbean economies as a consequence of the COVID-19 pandemic.

During 2020-2022, the EU support was managed in coordination with the EU Caribbean Regional Resilience Building Facility administered by the World Banks Global Facility for Disaster Reduction and Recovery (GFDRR). This support provided each Caribbean CCRIF member country with premium discounts or increases in policy coverage. During the past three years (2020/21 to 2022/23) several CCRIF member countries used this funding to increase tropical cyclone and/or excess rainfall coverage.

CCRIF CEO, Isaac Anthony, thanked the EU for its continuous support and reiterated the importance of contributions of the donor community. He remarked, The success of CCRIF is undoubtedly due in part to the support  both technical and financial  that we receive from our development partners. This support from the EU continues to be key to allowing us to meet the needs of our current and potential members. It allows us to make available more affordable insurance coverage to our members, to improve the long-term sustainability of CCRIF, and to develop new products for additional perils and sectors.

1 Antigua and Barbuda, Barbados, Belize, Dominica, Grenada, Haiti, Jamaica, St. Kitts & Nevis, Saint Lucia, St. Vincent & the Grenadines, The Bahamas, and Trinidad and Tobago

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Head of the EU Delegation to Barbados, the Eastern Caribbean States, the OECS and CARICOM/CARIFORUM, Malgorzata Wasilewska, said: The renewal of countries catastrophe risk insurance policies at this time signals the growing strategic importance placed on disaster risk financing as key to advancing sustainable development prospects in the context of shrinking fiscal space. We are proud to say that the EU contribution supported important milestones in this regard.

She also added that Recent and past support from the EU to CCRIF was adequate to ease payment of member countries premiums and improve their risk coverage against natural hazards. However, the global context calls for constant search for innovative solutions to allow the successful facility to grow accordingly. The EU is partnering with CCRIF to focus on self-sustainable mechanisms allowing for progress in the region, while keeping this valuable tool at the service of the countries.

CCRIF currently offers five parametric insurance products  earthquake, based on modelled losses due to ground shaking; tropical cyclone, based on modelled losses due to wind and storm surge; excess rainfall, based on modelled losses due to the amount of rainfall; the Caribbean Ocean and Aquaculture Sustainability FaciliTy (COAST) product for the fisheries sector, based on rain, waves, wind and storm surge; and a product for electric utilities, based on losses due to wind for their transmission and distribution lines. CCRIF is continuing the rollout of the COAST product, and also the electric utilities product, in collaboration with the Caribbean Electric Utility Services Corporation (CARILEC). Additionally, the Facility will launch a product this year for water utility companies in partnership with the Inter-American Development Bank and a product for rainfall runoff, initially for Guyana and Suriname, which will be offered to Central American and larger Caribbean countries in subsequent years.

Since the inception of CCRIF in 2007, the Facility has made 59 payouts totalling US$261.4 million to 16 of its member governments  all within 14 days of the triggering of an event. CCRIF payouts were not designed to cover all losses on the ground but to provide an injection of quick liquidity immediately following a natural catastrophe to allow governments to quickly begin recovery, including supporting the most vulnerable in their populations. A rough assessment of the beneficiaries of CCRIFs payouts shows that over 3.5 million persons in the Caribbean and Central America have benefitted directly or indirectly from these payouts. Uses of payouts over the years have included providing food, shelter, and medicine for affected persons; stabilizing drinking water plants; providing building materials for persons to repair their homes; and repairing critical infrastructure such as roads and bridges as a means of enabling movement and access in and out of communities, among others. Governments have also used payouts to support key sectors such as agriculture, tourism, and education.

About CCRIF SPC:

CCRIF SPC is a segregated portfolio company, owned, operated, and registered in the Caribbean. It limits the financial impact of catastrophic hurricanes, earthquakes, and excess rainfall events to Caribbean and Central American governments by quickly providing short-term liquidity when a parametric insurance policy is triggered. It is the worlds first regional fund utilizing parametric insurance, giving member governments the unique opportunity to purchase earthquake, hurricane and excess rainfall catastrophe coverage with lowest possible pricing. CCRIF was developed under

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the technical leadership of the World Bank and with a grant from the Government of Japan. It was capitalized through contributions to a Multi-Donor Trust Fund (MDTF) by the Government of Canada, the European Union, the World Bank, the governments of the UK and France, the Caribbean Development Bank and the governments of Ireland and Bermuda, as well as through membership fees paid by participating governments. In 2014, a second MDTF was established by the World Bank to support the development of CCRIF SPCs new products for current and potential members and facilitate the entry of Central American countries and additional Caribbean countries. The MDTF currently channels funds from various donors, including: Canada, through Global Affairs Canada; the United States, through the Department of the Treasury; the European Union, through the European Commission, and Germany, through the Federal Ministry for Economic Cooperation and Development (BMZ) and KfW. Additional financing has been provided by the Caribbean Development Bank, with resources provided by Mexico; the Government of Ireland; and the European Union through its Regional Resilience Building Facility managed by the Global Facility for Disaster Reduction and Recovery (GFDRR) and the World Bank.

For more information about CCRIF SPC: Website: www.ccrif.org | Email: This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it. |

#ccrifspc #EU #europeanunion #EUinBarbados #EUPartnerships #catastropheriskinsurance #disasterriskfinancing #parametricinsurance #caribbean #closingtheprotectiongap

#DisasterRiskReduction #LatAm #WorldBank
~ Official complaint filed with authorities as relatives seek information on the missing persons~

MARIGOT:--- Nine Indian nationals have gone missing at sea since February 3rd, 2023. The nine persons whose names are listed below entered a boat on the island of Dominica destined for Saint Martin.

Relatives of the missing had contact with the nine people around 6 pm the same day however they were in the seas close to Guadeloupe.

A relative of the missing persons has filed an official complaint with the Gendarmerie as they seek information in finding the missing persons. Since that last phone contact, there has not been any more contact with the nine people. There seem to be no signs of life, and their telephone numbers have remained inaccessible.

An investigation conducted by CROSS Antilles Guyane has since revealed that no distress calls were received by the organization however, the investigations with the CROSS ANTIILES Guyane proved futile, no distress call having been received by this organization, whose response, dated March 20, 2023, is as follows:

In this case, we can only confirm that we have been contacted by the Patel family about a concern about their loved ones. We have therefore carried out all the actions and research within our competence as MRCC in order to clarify this concern. However, no new element allows us to continue these actions, nothing allowing us to affirm that these people have actually taken to the sea.

After more than 50 days without news, the concern of the family of the displays is at its height and no explanation has been given for this mysterious affair. The worst is to be feared.

Alpesh Patel a relative of the nine missing persons are asking anyone who may have encountered the missing persons at sea or may have any information on their missing relatives to contact him at @+1 97336101896

According to the complaint filed the missing persons are:

1.Ankitkumar Kantibhai PATEL, male born on June 2nd 1990 at NARDIPUR KALOL, Gujarat (India.)

2. Kirankumar Tulasibhai PATEL, male born on March 5th, 1982 at AHMEDABAD Gujarat (INDIA)

3. Avaniben Jitendrakumar PATEL, female, born on June 29th 1991at SARDHAV GANDHINAGAR, Gujarat (INDIA.)

4. Sudhirkumar Hasmukhbhai PATEL, male, born on 25th April 1994 a HEDUVA, Gujarat (INDIA)

5. Pratikbhai Hemantkumar PATEL, male, born on March 18th, 1995, at UTTARSANDA, Gujarat (INDIA Telephone +91 93289 03576

6. Nikhilkumar Prahladbhai PATEL, male on le November 9th 1999 a SIPOR MEHSANA, Gujarat (INDIA). Telephone +919898841218

7. Bharatbhai Babarbhai RABARI, sexe male, born on June 25th, 1986 Bharatbhai Babarbhai RABARI, VAGHPUR SABARKANTHA, Gujarat (INDIA)

8. Champabahen Fatesinhbhai VASAVA, female born on 1st July 1981 female, at DEVGIRI, Gujarat INDIA.

9. Dhruvrajsinh Balvantsinh VAGHELA male, born on May 19th 2003 a NARDIPUR GANDHINAGAR, Gujarat (INDIA
A Ukrainian writer, who had suffered injuries incompatible with life as a result of Russia's missile strike on a cafe in Kramatorsk on July 27, died at the Dnipro-based Mechnikov Hospital on July 1. Thus, the number of victims of the attack rose to 13, according to PEN Ukraine.

"It is with great pain that we inform you that on July 1, the heart of the writer Viktoria Amelina stopped beating at the Mechnikov Hospital in Dnipro. Her life was cut short due to a wound incompatible with life caused by a missile attack by Russian invaders on a restaurant in Kramatorsk on June 27, 2023," it said.

The organization said that they issued the statement upon consent of Victoria's family.
Communi5 and Orange announce strategic partnership

The development of small and medium sized businesses in the Middle East and Africa will now be supported by state-of-the-art cloud-based unified communication solutions through a partnership between Orange and Communi5. This partnership is an important milestone in Orange mission to drive growth and digital transformation in these regions. By leveraging Communi5\-s expertise and innovative UCaaS solution, Orange aims to provide businesses with the best possible communications support, thereby contributing to the overall development of the economy.

Especially in these regions, companies face the challenge of implementing modern communication tools despite infrastructure and budget constraints. Orange aims to address this challenge by bridging the digital divide and providing affordable, scalable cloud telephony solutions.

To achieve this, after an intensive selection process, the clear choice was to partner with Communi5. Its cloud telephony solutions, designed specifically for this size of business, are currently being deployed in three countries in the region. \Partnering with Communi5 will enable small and medium enterprises to increase their competitiveness, improve customer experience and drive innovation,\ said Madjid Babaci, ICT Marketing at Orange Business.

\For many years, we have been convincing with a flexible business model and our solutions are always at the cutting edge of technology. The option to install in the Orange subsidiary\-s private cloud guarantees compliance with regional regulations and restrictions. This includes, for example, the requirement that all data and calls must be processed in the respective country. We are proud to be part of this Orange initiative,\ said Werner Schimek, Sales Director MENA at Communi5.

The cloud telephony solutions offered by Communi5 are available in a public cloud hosted by the provider as well as in a local variant hosted by the Orange subsidiary. Key benefits of Orange choosing Communi5 include:

A flexible and scalable multi-tenant communications systems

Advanced call management including Call Center capabilities

A unified communications experience that integrates voice, video, messaging as well as collaboration tools

An excellent mobility solution for increased flexibility and productivity

A seamless marketing, sales and technical delivery support are completing this new offering.

Orange serves 287 million customers, individuals, professionals and large enterprises, and is one of the world\-s leading telecommunications operators for multinational companies under the Orange brand. The philosophy that telecom networks are now more than ever central to the way we do business, to environmental change and to society in general, has strengthened the resolve to support in particular regions whose path to modern communications is more challenging.

Communi5 provides a platform for much more than traditional services in the cloud era. The solution is multi-tenant and highly scalable, and implementations are supported by a highly skilled team. Nearly twenty years of experience in this market ensures that Communi5\-s professionals not only have a high level of technical knowledge, but also a deep understanding of the market and opportunities. In recent years, Communi5 has helped telephone operators around the world become true communications providers, turning opportunities into successes.
The Armed Forces of Ukraine (AFU) continue their offensive in the Bakhmut, Melitopol and Berdiansk directions, there are successes, while the enemy is trying to resist, moreover, it has doubled the number of shelling attacks in the east, Deputy Defense Minister of Ukraine Hanna Maliar has said.

"In the east, both offensive and defensive operations continue. We are moving in the Bakhmut direction, and the enemy continues to attack in Lyman, Avdiyivka and Maryinka directions. The enemy is trying to force our troops out of their positions, but receives a worthy rebuff," she said on the Telegram channel on Monday morning.

The official noted that heavy fighting continues in these directions.

"Over the past week, as a result of the improvement of the operational (tactical) situation and the alignment of the front line, the liberated area has been increased by 9 square kilometers," she said.

The deputy minister also noted that the number of enemy shelling attacks in the east doubled over the past week from 6,457 to 11,753 attacks.

Meanwhile, the AFU continue offensive operations in Melitopol and Berdiansk directions.

"We saw success there," Maliar said.

In the south, 28.4 square kilometers of territory was liberated over the past week.

In total, the cleared area in the south is 158.4 square kilometers.
President of the European Commission Ursula von der Leyen has announced the start of work of the International Centre for the Prosecution of the Crime of Aggression (ICPA) on Monday.

"Today the International Centre for the Prosecution of the Crime of Aggression starts its work. Collecting evidence and documenting Russias crimes so the perpetrators can be brought to justice. First step towards a tribunal for the crime of aggression," she said on Twitter.

As reported on the website of the European Commission, the International Centre for the Prosecution of the Crime of Aggression against Ukraine (ICPA) started its operations in the Hague, hosted by the European Union Agency for Criminal Justice Cooperation (Eurojust). The newly established Centre will be key to investigate Russia's crime of aggression against Ukraine and facilitate case building for future trials. It will provide a structure to support and enhance ongoing and future investigations into the crime of aggression and contribute to the exchange and analysis of evidence gathered since the start of the Russian aggression, the message reads.

The Centre, set up with the Commission's support, is composed of selected national prosecutors that are already participating in the Joint Investigation Team, to which the Centre is linked in its operations. Eurojust will provide operational, legal, financial, and logistical support, including for preserving, storing, and analysing evidence. This work is essential to prepare for future trials, be it before national or international courts, including a possible tribunal for the crime of aggression or the International Criminal Court (ICC) for crimes within its jurisdiction, the European Commission said.

The Commission noted that the International Criminal Court (ICC) is competent to prosecute the gravest international crimes (genocide, crimes against humanity and war crimes and the crime of aggression). However, at the moment, the ICC cannot prosecute Russia for the crime of aggression, since Russia is not a State party to the ICC. The evidence collected by the Centre could be used before other jurisdictions, including national and international courts, including a possible tribunal for the crime of aggression or the International Criminal Court (ICC) for crimes within its jurisdiction.

Evidence of countless international crimes committed by Russia is piling up. The new international prosecution centre will play a key role in making sure that the perpetrators are brought to justice, including for the crime of aggression. We will leave no stone unturned to hold Putin and his henchmen accountable, von der Leyyen said.

According to the website of the Prosecutor Generals Office of Ukraine, the opening ceremony of the JIT was attended by Prosecutor General Andriy Kostin, President of Eurojust Ladislav Hamran, EU Commissioner for Justice Didier Reynders, ICC Prosecutor Karim Khan, as well as prosecutors General of the JIT member states.

"This is the beginning of the end of impunity for the crime of aggression. From today, Ukrainian prosecutors will work in The Hague. JIT representatives from Lithuania, Latvia, Estonia, Poland and Romania will join the IPA work together at the start stage. The U.S. Special Prosecutor for the Crime of Aggression will support the activities of the Center. Other countries and institutions will be able to join in the coming months ... I firmly believe that together we can restore justice. This means the inevitable punishment of the aggressor  Russia," Kostin said.

He added that the ICPA is of particular importance for Ukraine  it is a clear signal that the world is united and adamant to ensure the responsibility of the Russian regime for all its atrocities: the crime of aggression, genocide and war crimes. Kostin noted that there is a gap in the architecture of international criminal justice on responsibility for the crime of aggression, and the ICPA will be one of the elements that will strengthen the legal mechanisms for prohibiting aggression, complement and strengthen this architecture.

With todays launch of the international prosecution centre, the European Union reaffirms its resolve to ensure full accountability for the international crimes committed during Russias war against Ukraine. This includes the crime of aggression, committed by the highest political and military leadership. Today we send a clear signal to the world that the prohibition of the use of force continues to be the fundament of our international rules-based order and that those who violate it will be held accountable, Reynders said.

According to Kenneth Polite Jr., Assistant Attorney General of the Criminal Division of the U.S. Department of Justice, Jessica Kim, Special Prosecutor of the U.S. Department of Justice for the Crime of Aggression, will represent the USA in the ICPA. She will also have access to a significant amount of the results of examinations and resources collected by the U.S. Department of Justice after the Russian aggression against Ukraine.

On June 27, at the 5th Slynn Foundation Open Forum dedicated to the problem of impunity of the Russian Federation, Kostin announced the start of the ICPA in The Hague "next week". "I hope that this will eliminate the gaps in the mechanisms for bringing the aggressor to justice  Ukraine's position is clear: we must put an end to the impunity of Russia, both the state and specific individuals involved in the planning and commission of crimes. This is critically important for the security of the whole world," he stressed.
The 8th Opec International Seminar will be hosted at the Imperial Hofburg Palace in Vienna, Austria, on July 5 and 6 under the theme Towards a Sustainable and Inclusive Energy Transition.

The Opec International Seminar is one of the major events in the international energy calendar and is expected to help reshape the future of the global energy industry and its fair transition towards sustainability and addressing consequences of climate change.

The event is being convened amidst increasing geopolitical developments around the world, and a state of global economic uncertainty and growing demand for energy.

It underscores the Vienna-based organisation's efforts in achieving sustainable development and conserving the environment by steering the oil industry towards sustainability, innovation and deployment of modern technology, said a Wam news agency report.

This year's seminar will feature a slate of high-level roundtables, ministerial sessions, and exhibitions.

Opec member countries, oil-producing and consuming nations oil and energy companies, academics, and other industry experts will also be present in the two-day seminar.

Seminar participants customarily include ministers from Opec member countries, and other energy-producing and energy-consuming nations, as well as heads of intergovernmental organisations, chief executives of national and international oil companies, in addition to other industry leaders, academics, energy experts and the media.

Participants will address key issues and challenges facing the oil and energy industry, including energy transition, energy poverty alleviation, energy security, climate change policies, investment, technology, and innovation.

The Emirates News Agency (Wam) has recently signed an agreement with the Organisation of the Petroleum Exporting Countries (Opec), under which Wam will be a media partner for the seminar.

According to the agreement, Wam will provide local, regional and international media coverage during the event and the Seminar Exhibition in a variety of languages.
The National Energy and Utilities Regulatory Commission of Ukraine (NEURC) has cancelled its decision dated June 29, 2023 to adjust tariffs on central water supply and drainage system services.

The decision was made at an extraordinary meeting of the regulator on Monday.

"The regulator starts consultations with the Cabinet of Ministers of Ukraine and all interested parties to find a fair social solution that can provide additional financial resources from the public budget or other compensatory mechanisms to cover the costs of water supply companies," the national commission said on its website.

Head of the NEURC Kostiantyn Uschapovsky explained that the reason for canceling the previous decision taken by the regulator is the position of the Supreme Commander-in-Chief, who spoke out against it during martial law. In addition, he referred to the instruction of the Prime Minister to hold consultations on such a decision.

As reported, earlier the regulator decided to increase tariffs for 34 water supply companies by 32% on average from July 1, 2023.

President of Ukraine Volodymyr Zelenskyy said that the decision of the National Energy and Utilities Regulatory Commission to increase water supply tariffs was "shameful and unprofessional."
B arclays is reportedly the latest banking giant to look at cutting ties with scandal-hit Odey Asset Management following sexual misconduct allegations against the hedge funds founder.

The lender  Odey Asset Managements corporate bank  is following the lead of JPMorgan, Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley in moving to end its relationship with the investment firm, according to the Financial Times.

It comes as Odey Asset Management (OAM) is battling to contain the fallout after the FT published a series of allegations of sexual harassment or misconduct against Crispin Odey, which he denies.

OAM has since parted ways with Mr Odey and announced plans to rebrand the partnership, which will see his name removed from the hedge fund.

But the crisis engulfing the business has intensified, leaving it battling to keep afloat, with the group last week announcing that it is restructuring one of its oldest funds and revealing that one of its star fund managers is in talks to move his portfolio to a rival investment company.

Barclays is said to have informed the City watchdog, the Financial Conduct Authority (FCA), that it wants to cut its relationship with OAM, but such a process is likely to need to be carefully managed, as the bank administers the partnerships payrolls, among other vital services.

OAM declined to comment, while Barclays was not immediately available to comment.

OAM  which had around 4.4 billion US dollars (5.3 billion) in assets under management before the crisis erupted  has already seen customers rushing to remove their money from the funds it manages.

It revealed last month that it is effectively being broken up after confirming talks to offload some of its activities and staff to other asset managers, but stopped short of saying it is being wound down.

The partnership had already moved to halt withdrawals from two of its funds and closed another amid the investor exodus.

It is also the subject of a two-year investigation launched by the FCA into corporate governance and other issues at the firm.

The Treasury Committee is set to quiz the FCA over how it has handled allegations of sexual misconduct against Mr Odey and what action it has taken, with the regulator reported to have been privately investigating the business prior to the FTs report.

The watchdog was allegedly given a report of Mr Odeys conduct in early 2021 after the firm took disciplinary action against him and has been asked by the committee to confirm if this is true.

Mr Odey has denied the claims published in the FT last month, telling the paper they were rubbish.

The newspaper  together with Tortoise Media  said it had spoken to 13 women who claimed they were abused or harassed by the 64-year-old fund manager.

The alleged incidents happened between 1998 and 2021 and involved women who had either worked for OAM or had professional dealings with Mr Odey.

It was not the first time that people had made claims about Mr Odeys behaviour.

In 2021 he was found not guilty in a court case in which he was accused of an indecent assault which allegedly happened in 1998.
T he UKs energy watchdog has urged suppliers to retain profits to protect consumers rather than dish it out to investors, as the energy crisis begins to ease.

In a letter to household energy suppliers, Ofgem warned that it would step in and take action if it finds that any companies are abusing its pricing rules.

It comes as wholesale energy prices have begun to ease and domestic suppliers are expected to return to profit after five years of losses.

But companies must learn the lessons of the energy crisis, where households and businesses across the UK faced soaring gas and electricity bills and people are set to face extreme financial difficulty this winter, the watchdog stressed.

It asked firms rebuilding their profits to be responsible and focus on maintaining financial resilience, rather than immediately paying out dividends to shareholders.

I expect no return to paying out dividends before a supplier has met those essential capital requirements

Jonathan Brearley, the chief executive of Ofgem, told suppliers: An energy sector where companies can make a reasonable profit is important to create a sustainable and competitive market for consumers.

However, a return to the practices we saw before the energy crisis isnt on the table  suppliers must reciprocate the support the sector was given by consumers and taxpayers when wholesale prices increased by behaving responsibly as prices fall and profits return.

The energy market has changed. Ofgem has introduced major changes to the market, and we need suppliers to learn the lessons of the energy crisis and play their part by making sure theyre financially robust, can absorb potential losses and are meeting our new capital requirements.

I expect no return to paying out dividends before a supplier has met those essential capital requirements.

Mr Brearley said the regulator was closely monitoring suppliers to make sure that prices remain competitive and vulnerable customers are being protected.

After a meeting last week, the Chancellor agreed with utility watchdogs that suppliers must bring down prices in line with falling input costs.

Ofgem said it is working closely with suppliers to help businesses struggling with high energy costs, and monitoring whether this support is being felt on the ground.

While we are observing some good practice, we are also finding evidence that some suppliers may have breached our pricing rules, which we are investigating further and will take action if we find abuse, Mr Brearley warned in his letter.

The move comes after reports that Thames Water could be facing collapse, as the water sector has amassed billions of pounds worth of debt.

Nevertheless, around 1.4 billion was paid out in dividends by private water and sewage companies in 2022, according to analysis by the Financial Times in May.
S cotlands First Minister will chair a meeting of ministers and health officials to plan contingencies for expected junior doctor strikes this month.

The British Medical Association (BMA) announced last month that junior doctors in Scotland would reject a 14.5% pay increase over two years and strike between July 12 and 15.

Dr Chris Smith, the chair of the BMAs Scottish junior doctors committee, said taking strike action was an absolute last resort and those walking out were standing up for the future of the NHS.

But the First Minister said on Monday there was likely to be major disruption as a result of the action.

A junior doctors strike will cause major disruption and result in the significant cancellation of treatment, surgery and care the NHS is able to provide

On Monday, Humza Yousaf will chair a meeting of the Scottish Government Resilience Room (SGoRR)  the equivalent of the UK Governments Cobra meeting  to plan contingencies.

Speaking ahead of the meeting, the First Minister said: Junior doctors make an extremely important contribution to NHS Scotland  which is why we have offered a fair and progressive rise which will mean a cumulative pay increase of 14.5% over two years, the best offer on the table in the UK.

We have been clear to the BMA that we are willing to match the pay uplift we have given to nurses, midwives, and other Agenda for Change staff, for junior doctors.

This is the biggest investment in junior doctor pay for the last 20 years and a step forward to modernising pay bargaining, restoring confidence among junior doctors and ensuring their contribution to our healthcare system is appropriately recognised.

While I am disappointed that BMA Scotland members are proceeding with plans for industrial action, the Scottish Government will continue to work with NHS Scotland to make sure appropriate contingency plans are in place in order to minimise any potential disruption to services.

However, we have to be upfront with the public  a junior doctors strike will cause major disruption and result in the significant cancellation of treatment, surgery and care the NHS is able to provide.

Deputy First Minister Shona Robison, Health Secretary Michael Matheson, the chief medical officer Dr Sir Gregor Smith and NHS officials will also be in attendance.

On Monday, Dr Smith said: Junior doctors in Scotland have consistently and strongly made clear that the pay offers made so far by the Scottish Government are not yet sufficient to demonstrate a commitment to reverse the years of pay erosion we have suffered, which has seen pay reduced by 28.5% since 2008.

No-one can seriously argue a junior doctor today is worth that much less than a counterpart 15 years ago. Indeed, our members rejected the Scottish Governments latest offer decisively.

Unless we act now and invest in the future of the workforce, we will go on losing doctors to places they are valued properly, compromising the care we can provide to the people of Scotland now and in the future.

It is on that basis we have reluctantly been pushed to announce strike dates for later this month  and in doing so we gave extra time for health boards and the Scottish Government to prepare.

It is good to see this time being used effectively  and the seriousness with which planning is being taken shows just how crucial a role junior doctors play.

Given the level of disruption we accept a strike will cause, it is crucial that the active negotiations we are still engaging in with the Scottish Government produce the improved offer that we know is needed.
President of Ukraine Volodymyr Zelenskyy has said that the war will not end as long as Crimea remains under Russian occupation.

We cannot imagine Ukraine without Crimea. And while Crimea is under the Russian occupation, it means only one thing: the war is not over yet, he said in an interview with CNN published on Monday.

When Asked whether there was any scenario under which there could be peace without Crimea, Zelenskyy said: It will not be victory then.

Zelenskyy called Putin's reaction to Yevgeny Prigozhin's rebellion "weak." We see Putins reaction. Its weak, he said.

Zelenskyy also told CNN he was surprised to see his meeting with Burns reported in the media. My communication with the CIA chief should always be behind the scenes, he said. We discuss important things  what Ukraine needs and how Ukraine is prepared to act, the president explained.

We dont have any secrets from CIA, because we have good relations, and our intelligence services talk with each other, Zelenskyy said.

The situation is pretty straightforward. We have good relations with the CIA chief and we are talking. I told him about all the important things related to the battlefield which we need, the CNN quoted him as saying.
I nvestors have launched more environmental campaigns than ever before this year, as more companies are coming under pressures from a wave of shareholder activism, a new report has found.

The UK is a top target for activist investors as major firms like Shell, BP, HSBC and The Restaurant Group have faced shareholder rebellions this year.

The number of activist campaigns has grown steadily each month since January, resulting in 25 launched across Europe in May, according to professional services firm Alvarez & Marsal (A&M).

The growing momentum bucks the trend of previous years where new campaigns dipped after annual general meeting (AGM) season, typically and March and April.

Environmental campaigns have become more prominent as activists ramp up calls for corporations to commit to stronger climate policies. They accounted for 12% of all activist campaigns in 2023, compared to just 4% in 2019.

As uncertainty in the market eases in the second half of the year and into 2024, we predict that a wave of activism will sweep across Europe

Energy giants BP and Shell are among the big UK businesses to have faced shareholder revolts as more ethically-conscious investors used activism to drive change.

Investors and large pension funds demanded that Shell strengthen its goals for reducing greenhouse gas emissions at its AGM in May, while BP faced a rival climate proposal from activist group Follow This.

Meanwhile, a group of investors and pension funds coordinated by ShareAction put pressure on banking giant Barclays to stop financing new oil and gas fields this year.

For the first time, there are more than 100 major funds using activist tactics across the continent, A&Ms analysis found.

Furthermore, while there has been fewer mergers and takeovers this year, activists have turned their attention to corporate transformation campaigns.

HSBC was embroiled in a dispute with its top shareholder, Ping An Asset Management, over demands to split up the bank and spin off its Asia business, which it wanted to improve performance and growth opportunities in the continent.

The plan to break up the bank was rejected at its AGM, but HSBC has since unveiled plans to bolster revenues in Asia amid the pressure.

Elsewhere this year, Wagamama and Frankie & Bennys owner The Restaurant Group was hit by a shareholder revolt over the 792,000 pay package handed to chief executive Andy Hornby. Activist fund manager Oasis Management protested against the unpalatable pay after four years of deep losses.

The flurry of activism is likely to continue throughout the year and into 2024, A&M said.

The firm said there are at least 140 European companies at higher risk of shareholder revolts unless they urgently address their own performance.

Malcolm McKenzie, a managing director at A&M, said: As uncertainty in the market eases in the second half of the year and into 2024, we predict that a wave of activism will sweep across Europe.

Management teams should expect significantly increased levels of shareholder scrutiny in the coming months and, with even more funds taking activist positions, anticipate demands from multiple activists at a time.
O ld Street tech founder Christian Owens has a hybrid American-Australian-Englishaccent, but tells me hes from Corby.

Wheres the accent from, then, I wonder? Family from overseas? A childhood abroad? Nope, Im solidly from the Midlands, he laughs.

Perhaps the mid-Atlantic twang was picked up from YouTube, for Owens was partly schooled by the video website, which helped teach him to code at 13. The accent is not YouTubes only legacy.

Now 29, Owens has spent a decade at the helm of Paddle, a payments infrastructure site he set up with co-founder Harrison Rose which has unicorn status with a $1.4 billion valuation.

Turnover exceeded 26 million last year. Paddle is not Owenss first row into entrepreneurial waters: he was paid to build websites (selling relatives wooden furniture and featuring local restaurants menus) as a teen, then set up a software promotion business helping companies offer their apps in discounted bundles.

It really took off: it was turning over 4 million a year and I was making enough money to convince my parents that I could leave school after GCSEs  I was captivated by being able to build stuff on the internet. By comparison, anything at school felt boring.

Owens met Rose chatting online  and they worked together from their respective parents homes for two years before meeting face to face.

We were selling individual invoicing software to hundreds of thousands of individual SMEs all over the world, but we were wasting so much time on taking payments, form-filling and dealing with currency fees. Then we started getting VAT demands from all over the world and had to spend all our time hiring local accountants to file tax returns I thought, there must be an easier way!

That way was Paddle  the duo decided to build a company specifically for others who were selling their digital products, to take away the burden of having to do all this boring stuff so they can focus on building a killer product.

There were hiccups: when the pair moved to London (when Owens was 18, in 2012) to launch, the first piece of post at their new Shad Thames HQ was a legal notice informing Paddle it was being sued over the name.

The pair had spent $120,000 on the Paddle.com domain  so the first thing we did as a new business was spending 200,000 acquiring this company just for its trademarked name. It was extremely scary at the time but now its turned out OK.

OK might be an understatement: from an initial 150,000 backing from MyVoucherCodes founder Mark Pearson (we met on Twitter), plus self-funding from Owenss previous businesses, Paddle has raised $293 million from investors including KKR, Kindred Capital, FTV Capital, Notion and 83North.

It didnt take long for us to start getting sign-ups. While [rivals] like Stripe and Chargebee can handle your payments or your billing needs, were the only platform that offers such a holistic set of tools for SaaS businesses: payments, invoicing, billing, tax, compliance, localisation, metrics and more.

Owens promoted (or demoted?) himself from CEO to executive chairman in May  I wanted someone else to help run the operations, so I can focus more on products, engineering teams and spending time with customers.

Has he ever felt at a disadvantage having left school at 16?

No  the challenge is to surround yourself with people with the same hunger for learning and the ability to develop, he says. That ability is not related to formal education or qualifications: having left school after our GCSEs and A-levels respectively, Harrison and I were technically the least qualified people within the business.

Last year saw Paddles $200 million acquisition of US software firm ProfitWell  sealing the deal was an intense and risky process  we had to go out and raise the cash beforehand amid an economic downturn  but were incredibly happy with how [it] turned out.

Now Paddle has 320 staff across offices in London, New York, Boston, Salt Lake City and Rosario. What is Owens ambition for the business? He points out his new CEO took his previous company from 100 people and 100 million revenue to 4000 people and $4 billion revenue as well as an IPO.

Hed like more of the same, then?

I want to create a quite-large, independent company, he says  atypical to hear such restraint in an American accent, but Owens is keeping it Corby.
E id is like Christmas for Muslims - but we celebrate it twice a year! That was the best way I could describe Eid to my friends when I was growing up. With the advent of interfaith iftars, the evening meal to close the fast, being held across London from the Natural History Museum to the Tower of London, Eid al-Fitr which celebrates the end of the Muslim month of fasting, Ramadan, has ensured the first Eid has now become a permanent fixture in the national calendar. One that is celebrated annually through the Mayor of Londons Eid in the Square festival.

The second Eid, Eid al-Adha, for most people has always been the lesser known of the two Eids. The preceding ten days are sacred for Muslims. Many of whom fasted, and some British Muslims performed the Hajj  the pilgrimage to Mecca. This year, Eid al-Adha finally became mainstream when over a hundred thousand people in an open field at the Pyramid Stage, Glastonbury, in chorus with the legend Yusuf Islam / Cat Stevens gave an Eid blessing, saying, peace be with you.

Interestingly the prophetic tradition encourages Muslims to perform Eid prayers in an open field and not in their usual place of worship, their local Mosque. As the Eids move each year, as the date is based on the lunar rather Gregorian calendar, this has meant Eid can be celebrated outdoors in the summer sun, for at least the next few years, despite the unpredictable British weather.

Eid is no longer a celebration for Muslims alone, and this was clear by the number of Eid in the Park events held across London. This has never been more important for British Muslim communities, enabling first-time parents like me to take their young children to these events, which include a place to pray, fairground rides and food stalls.

The experiences in early childhood are often the root cause of todays hardest social challenges and the need for young Muslims to identify with their faith in a positive and inclusive way provides happy memories on which to build confident, integrated British Muslims.

For many young Muslim parents, seeing local families from all faiths and none joining them at these events makes the occasion even more enriching, as we are celebrating as one community, the same way Muslim families visit the lights on Regent Street at Christmas.Eid al-Adha not only celebrates the end of the Hajj, but rather focuses on the sacrifices made by Prophet Abraham. This is symbolised by those who can afford to give a donation of meat, called Qurbani, to their family and people in need. This Eid al-Adha, Islamic Relief, a UK Muslim charity partnered with North Paddington Foodbank to provide Qurbani meat to over two hundred of the most vulnerable households in Westminster.

The importance of sacrifice and supporting your vulnerable neighbours is a key part of Eid al-Adha and another example, how for many British Muslims, charity starts at home.

Harris Bokhari is the founder of youth charity the Patchwork Foundation
A nother young life lost, another family in grief, another neighbourhood in shock. Police have named 15-year-old Leonard Reid as one victim of a double stabbing in Archway, north London. Another victim, agd 23, has not been named. The news comes days after Victor Lee, 17, was found dead in a west London section of the Grand Union Canal, after suffering from stab wounds.

London does not appear to be on course for a repeat of 2021, which broke the record for the most teen homicides in a single year. Nevertheless, these deaths are a shocking reminder of a familiar violence impacting our city.

The Evening Standard supports the judicious and intelligence-led use of stop-and-search, as one of the key tools police possess to prevent stabbings once someone has decided to carry a knife. This newspaper has also long called for a public health approach to knife crime, since adopted by the Mayor, as a way of tackling the underlying causes. But this will require a whole-city effort.

Violence, and the pervasive anxiety that surrounds it, has seeped into our city and this ought to be a top-tier issue in next years mayoral election. Londoners want to know what Sadiq Khan, or any of his rivals, will do to address this senseless loss of life.

Back our young people

The Standards Step Up Expo has been hailed as a huge success. Thousands of teenagers packed London Olympia to speak with colleges and employers to help them navigate the minefield of school choices, apprenticeships and career options.

More than 100 organisations exhibited at the event, including top higher education institutions University College London and City University, as well as employers such as British Airways, the London Ambulance Service and the Met Police shared their expertise.

There is so much potential in our young people  this event is one small but concrete way the Standard is making a big difference to them and to our city.

Were lost in music

From Nineties pop stars and rockers all the way to South Korean phenomenoms, there was something for practically every music fan in London this weekend.

The capital played host to acts from Take That to Pulp, Def Leppard and Blackpink among other great performers and there are reviews aplenty in this newspaper. With more to come this month, has there ever been a better time to be a music fan?
B ritish rock band The Darkness have just announced a 2023 UK and Ireland tour to celebrate 20 years since the release of their debut album.

You have all been very patient. We are VERY EXCITED to announce the dates for our Permission to Land 20th Anniversary UK & Ireland Tour! said The Darkness on Twitter.

We cant wait to celebrate this very important birthday with you. See you all soon!

The tour, which will see The Darkness stop off at nine cities across the UK and Ireland in December, is to celebrate two decades since the release of Permission To Land  the bands first album. Permission To Land was released by Atlantic, and includes hits such as I Believe in a Thing Called Love and Love Is Only a Feeling.

Their lack of subtlety, sophistication or sense has got up noses, said The Guardian in its 2003 review of the album. Its not as if theyll be impinging on our consciousness for longer than a few seasons, anyway...

Defying the critics, Permission To Land was nominated for a Mercury Prize that same year, and although the album didnt win, it did peak at number one in the UK album charts, and at number 36 on the US Billboard 200.

In 2004, Permission to Land won British Album of the Year at the BRIT awards, and the band won an Ivor Novello Songwriter Of The Year award the same year.

The Darkness went on to release six more albums, the most recent being 2021s Motorheart, which went to number one in the UK Rock & Metal Albums charts and number 16 in the UK album charts.

The band supported Guns N Roses at BST Hyde Park on June 30, sharing a bill with the Pretenders, Larkin Poe, Dirty Honey and Bad Nerves.

Next up the band, which is made up of members Frankie Poullain, Rufus Tiger Taylor and brothers Justin and Dan Hawkins, will be playing alongside Kiss in Norway as part of Kiss End of the Road World Tour  the American bands final ever tour.

After this, The Darkness will be playing at venues across America, before their first date in Belfast.

The Darkness UK and Ireland tour dates

December 2  Belfast, Telegraph Building

December 3  Dublin, 3Olympia Theatre

December 8  Norwich, Nick Rayns LCR

December 9  London, Roundhouse

December 11  Glasgow, Barrowland

December 12  Manchester, New Century Hall

December 14  Bristol, Beacon

December 15  Nottingham, Rock City

December 16  Wolverhampton, Wulfrun Hall

The Darkness UK and Ireland tour, December 2-16; thedarknesslive.com/tour-dates
If ever there was a brand synonymous with pink, its Barbie. As such, theres no surprise that Margot Robbie, who plays the doll in the forthcoming eponymous movie directed by Greta Gerwig, has embraced the shade at every stage of the global press tour. With the help of her stylist Andrew Mukamal, the Australian actress has taken inspiration, and in some cases custom pieces, from some iconic designers including Valentino, Versace and Chanel.

Last night in London at the films UK premiere the actress brought to life 1960 Enchanted Evening Barbie (later reproduced in the mid-90s), alongside championing leading British label, Vivienne Westwood. Tapping the brand to create a custom-made corseted dress, in blush-pink satin, styled with a Marilyn Monroe-style white stole.

One of the few departures from pink in Robbies tour-drobe, was at the Barbie world premiere at the Shrine Auditorium and Expo Hall in downtown Los Angeles last weekend, with the 33-year-old wearing black as she recreated the original Barbie Solo in the Spotlight doll from the same year (1960). The sparkling strapless gown, which was custom Schiaparelli, included a trumpet tulle hemline complete with a red rose, while Robbie accessorised with long black opera gloves and a Lorraine Schwartz diamond choker.

Margot Robbie arrives for the UK premiere / Ian West/PA Wire

Her earliest promo event for Barbie was in April, at CinemaCon in Las Vegas. Robbie clearly started as she meant to go on in a pink and white gingham Prada cropped bustier and wrap miniskirt set with her hair swept into a side parting. She wore the Me Dolly Louboutin peep-toes in pink (and not for the last time). A peep-toe pump from Christian Louboutin or Manolo Blahnik is fast becoming a footwear staple on the press tour.

Margot Robbie wears Prada at a Barbie promo event at CinemaCon in Las Vegas / Getty Images

Robbie has been ambassador for Chanel since 2018, while Mukamal is a celebrity stylist and former staffer for the fashion desk at Seventeen magazine. He has worked with the likes of Zoe Kravitz, Kaia Gerber and Lily-Rose Depp. His Instagram is testament to his versatility as a stylist, from denim basics on Hailey Bieber for a Levis sitting, to classic red-carpet glamour for Carey Mulligan. His work with Robbie for Barbie is meticulously observed, consistently on point, and packed with historical references.

There are no days off, with Robbie channelling Barbiecore even in transit

The LA press call for Barbie, for example, saw Robbie in a bespoke pink and white polka dot dress with a crossover bodice made bespoke by Valentino; a look inspired by 2015s Pink & Fabulous doll. She carried a Valentino rockstud shoulder bag and wore white Blahnik stilettos. However, the best accessory was surely her pink and white open-top Chevrolet.

The car was also the backdrop to another flawless ensemble  a two-piece custom-set featuring a pleated mini and bralette, a small, woven tote by Bottega Veneta and Blahnik peep toes.

Through the tour, its clear Robbie is keen to celebrate Barbie in every era. The dolls 1959 origin look was replicated in Sydney on the Australian leg of the press tour, with a custom-made black and white striped bandeau dress by Herve Leger. Robbies hair was swept off her face ahe she accessorised with black peep-toe Blahnik pumps and white cat eye Jacques Marie Mage sunglasses.

She served up more 50s on Bondi Beach in a Moschino halter neck, belted minidress with a juicy strawberry motif pattern from Jeremy Scotts 2019 collection, completed with white sunglasses, bag and peep-toe Louboutins.

Margot Robbie poses for photos with fans during a Barbie fan event on June 30, 2023 in Sydney / Getty Images

Then the 1990s came calling and Robbie answered via Versace, in a look first showcased by supermodel Christy Turlington some 30 years ago. This consisted of a cropped, rollneck woollen sweater, bright pink socks and white patent loafers.

She leant further into Versaces archives and wore a dazzling pale pink couture dress from the autumn/winter 1994 collection with a fitted corset and flared skater-style skirt.

At the Seoul press conference, Robbie wore an acid bright Moschino suit from the brands spring/summer 2015 collection complete with a super-kitsch, heart-shaped bag and pillbox hat. Then, at the films Seoul premiere, Robbie transformed into business Barbie, borrowing the look from one of the 1980s most iconic dolls. In a pencil skirt and blazer, clutching a glittery brick mobile phone, it was corporate, but make it Barbie.

The Mexico City photocall saw Robbie in a printed Emilio Pucci minidress with Chanel earrings and handbag in different shades of pink. Her hair was loose with waves: the entire look was a clear ode to the 1992 Totally Hair Barbie.

Later, for the Mexico City premiere, Robbie wore a bodycon Balmain mini dress made from leather and mesh with a silver belt detail and star motif earrings. The look was inspired by another 1990s doll the Earring Magic Barbie.

Robbie  and Mukamal  have not only understood the assignment, but they are also consistently overdelivering in the run up to the films release. There are no days off, with Robbie channeling Barbiecore even in transit. She has been seen wheeling baby pink luggage through the airport in Sydney and, on another occasion, embracing a more relaxed travel aesthetic in an oversized pink Gucci x Adidas sweatshirt and stacked platform sliders.

The best thing about all of this pink, peep-toe promotion is that it lets us know exactly what sartorial delights we can expect in the film itself. Watch this space.

Barbie is released in UK cinemas on July 21
A former master at Eton College has admitted to killing his elderly mother at her home in the Cotswolds.

Matthew Corry, 46, plead guilty to the manslaughter of Beatrice Corry, 84, after previously denying his mothers murder.

He appeared before a judge at Bristol Crown Court on Monday.

Mrs Corry died on January 6 in her home in Chipping Campden, Gloucestershire.

Officers were called to a property on the High Street where Mrs Corry was found with head injuries.

Corry, who was also understood to be living at his mothers home, appeared via videolink from custody and spoke only to confirm his name and enter his plea.

Prosecutor Anna Vigars KC said the plea was acceptable to the Crown.

Judge Peter Blair KC, The Recorder of Bristol, said two psychiatrists had already prepared reports on Corry and the court would be considering imposing hospital orders with restrictions when he is sentenced.

Corry was remanded into custody to be sentenced on July 10.

The judge told him: Matthew Corry you will need to cooperate with arrangements for you to be transported to Bristol Crown Court next Monday.

In terms of your remand status you will continue to be remanded into custody, albeit you have been transferred to hospital where you currently are.

Corry had been a master at Eton College until 2008, the Telegraph reported in January. The school was attended by Prince William and Prince Harry, along with notable names including Boris Johnson, David Cameron, Eddie Redmayne and Ian Fleming.

He held a number of teaching positions at a string of prestigious schools, including his last post at west Londons independent girls school Godolphin and Latymer School.

It is understood he left the role in April 2020, according to the Telegraph.

Mrs Corry is said to have been a keen historian, an Agatha Christie aficionado, and a member of organisation the University of the Third Age (u3a) which promotes non-formal learning.

Fellow member David Pegg reportedly told MailOnline Mrs Corry was a lovely, selfless woman who did a lot of volunteering.

Beatrice was extremely well-known. She had a wonderful apartment in the town and she was still very active considering her age, he added.

Before she took over from me as Chairman of the history group, she used to sort out the tea and coffee for everybody.

Mrs Corry is understood to have volunteered at charity shop Campden Home Nursing - in aid of a charitable trust providing home care for terminally ill people - for three years.

The trusts CEO Helen Makaritis desribed Mrs Corry to MailOnline as an incredible lady with so much energy.
A n alleged victim of Oscar-winning actor Kevin Spacey told a police officer the Hollywood stars sexual advances were like he thought he could groom me, a court has been told.

Jurors at Southwark Crown Court were shown footage of the interview, in which the man, who cannot be named for legal reasons, described Spacey as a slippery, snaky, difficult person.

The 63-year-old defendant has been described by the prosecution as a sexual bully as he stands trial accused of sex offences against four men between 2001 and 2013.

On Monday, one complainant said he was disgusted with the alleged sex assaults, saying: He would try to grope me and try to grab me and make me feel very uncomfortable.

The man said Spacey told him he could introduce him to A-list stars, and said when he tried to fight back against one of the alleged assaults, the actor replied: Thats such a turn on to me. Youre such a man.

Outlining his allegations against the defendant, the man said: He grabbed me in private areas and then tried to get my hands on him.

The alleged victim said he tried to blank out what happened.

He told the officer about an incident in which he drove Spacey to a lavish showbiz party in the early 2000s.

Describing what he said happened to him, the man said: He grabbed me so hard I almost came off the road.

He grabbed me really hard and it really hurt.

I pushed him against the door and said, Dont do that again or I will knock you out.

Its like he thought he could groom me

Continuing to talk about the incident, one of Spaceys alleged victims told the police officer: I was disgusted that he had done that.

The court heard the alleged victim describe the actor as very touchy feely.

He told the police officer: Obviously being a mans man and a professional I found it quite eerie and just awkward. He made me feel so awkward and uneasy.

The man said the actor became very friendly and started to grab him on several occasions, and the alleged victim told him to stop.

He added: He sort of left me and didnt say anything. He would just laugh it off and change the subject.

The man could be seen describing Spacey as a slippery, snaky, difficult person and a very mixed-up individual.

He would squeeze my bum and would rub my legs

He continued: He grabbed me. He grabbed me a good few times.

He would squeeze my bum and would rub my legs.

The man said he could now no longer watch any of his films or TV programmes, including Netflix show House of Cards.

He said in his police interview: I cant stand watching the man. It makes me feel sick.

The man told the officer Spacey was pretending to be nice but was a predator who was aggressive.

He added: He was obviously very messed up with his sexuality.

It wasn't naughty, it was disgusting

After the interview was played to the jury, Spaceys lawyer Patrick Gibbs KC asked the alleged victim what his initial reaction was.

The complainant said: The first time that he touched me was, yes, just a massive shock, just a massive shock to me.

Asked if he was amused by the actors behaviour, he replied: No, not at all. The opposite of amused. You will probably know the word for that.

He said: It makes me feel angry, it makes me feel angry, you certainly wouldnt feel amused by it.

Asked by Mr Gibbs if he thought the actors advances were naughty, the complainant said: It wasnt naughty, it was disgusting.

And also nice? asked Mr Gibbs.

Not nice at all, the witness replied.

Spacey 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.

The two-time Academy Award winner also previously denied four further charges of sexual assault and one count of causing a person to engage in penetrative sexual activity without consent.

The trial continues.
O ne of Kevin Spaceys accusers says he is a creepy Hollywood star who regularly groped him before laughing about the abuse, a court heard.

The man told police he was sexually assaulted around 12 times by Spacey at times when they were alone together, dubbing the star a predator and suggesting he had tried to groom me.

He said the touchy feely star regularly rubbed his neck when he was driving, and sometimes reached across to grab his leg and crotch.

In his police interview, he described Spacey as slippery, snakey, and said the incidents left him unable to watch Spaceys films and hit TV series House of Cards.

I cant watch anything with him in, he told police. I cant stand watching the man. It makes me feel sick to even think about him now.

He also referenced Spaceys turn as a serial killer in the film Seven, saying: The character in that, hes a bit like that, a bit creepy. Maybe not quite as bad.

The man, who cannot be identified, says the Oscar-winning actor smacked his backside in one alleged incident, and once forced the mans hand on to Spaceys genitals when they took a lift together.

He twice suggested Spacey had attempted to groom him with his behaviour, and said others knew of the actors behaviour.

If a new apprentice had come in - a good-looking boy - they would say you better be careful. It was well-known he was up to no good, he said.

Recalling the first alleged incident, the man said he felt shock and horror when he was groped.

I think the first time he touched me was just a massive shock, he said.

I immediately pushed his hand off me.

In his police interview, he recalled an incident on a drive to a party hosted by Sir Elton John when he says Spacey grabbed his genitals so hard that he almost crashed the car.

He grabbed me so hard I almost came off the road, he said. He hit me right in the nuts - it took my breath away.

He said Spacey was laughing, giggling afterwards, in an incident which left him disgusted and threatening Spacey that he would knock you out if he did it again.

The man said the incidents with Spacey were very strange and made me feel so awkward, so uneasy.

He suggested the star was angry inside and completely messed up with his own sexuality.

And he added that the actor offered to introduce him to A-list stars after some of the alleged abuse.

Speaking to police, the man said: I would like to report to the police the incidents which happened with Kevin Spacey.

He said there were multiple occasions, up to 12 times, he assaulted me when I was with him, in his company.

He grabbed me in private areas, and then tried to get my hands on him, just at different times, in the car, in lifts.

Every time we became alone over the years, on multiple occasions, he would try and grope me, grab me, and make me feel very very uncomfortable.

He added: You dont forget incidents like that - I can remember it as clear as day.

He told police he believed Spacey was grooming me to try and get information on me, to see if I might swing a bit, if I was a little bit gay. I would say thats what was in his head at the time.

Calling Spacey a predator, the man said his heart used to sink whenever he came across the actor.

He also told police he kept shtum about the abuse at the time, partly out of embarrassment, but has come forward now to report incidents of alleged abuse years ago after hearing about allegations about Spacey in the US.

Patrick Gibbs KC, defending Spacey, questioned whether the incidents in the car had felt naughty and exciting to the man.

As Ive said to the jury, Im a mans man. I had a beautiful woman at home at the time, he replied.

It wasnt naughty, it was disgusting. Not nice at all.

He told the court he is not a confused type of person, and insisted Spaceys then-secret homosexuality was not a factor in his reaction.

What happened in the car between you and Mr Spacey was something you were ashamed of, said Mr Gibbs, suggesting the man didnt always snatch your hand back and didnt always tell him to stop.

Denying that was true, the man said: I certainly wasnt aroused. The opposite. Potentially he was aroused. Why else would someone do that if it wasnt to get arousal.

He added: I still feel shame about it now.

The man challenged Mr Gibbs line of questioning, saying: You are making it out that there was something going on. 100 per cent, one million per cent, it werent. In his mind, maybe.

He was also asked whether he had considered suing Spacey over his claims of sexual abuse, and said he came forward after hearing Spacey had been charged by the UK police.

It was a big part of coming forward. Strength in numbers, isnt it?

Asked how much compensation he would seek, the man replied: Whatever it would be, it probably wont be enough, for someone who has been assaulted and abused.

Asked if he saw a bandwagon coming along and decided to hop on board, he replied: That is not true at all. I could really do without all of this stress.

He continued: It was the fact that it was in the news and it was all coming back to me.

It made me have those feelings that I had then, thinking actually some others have been brave enough to come forward. It was time to step up and tell the truth as well.

It is just to tell the truth.

Spacey faces 12 charges of sexual misconduct against four men between 2001 and 2013.

One says he was groped at a charity event, a young actor has accused Spacey of performing oral sex on him while he was asleep, and another man says the star grabbed hold of his genitals at a holiday home in the Cotswolds.

Prosecutor Christine Agnew KC called Spacey a sexual bully and predator as she opened the case to the jury on Friday.

He isa man who does not respect personal boundaries or space, a man who it would seem de-lights in making others feel powerless and uncomfortable, she said.

Spacey denies all the charges, and through his barrister told the court that the allegations are a mixture of half-truths, deliberate exaggerations and damned lies.

In police interview, Spacey said he was baffled and deeply hurt by allegations made by the driver. He accused the man of seeking money and having reimagining their time together.

Spacey was charged in May 2022 following an investigation by the Metropolitan Police.

He has pleaded not guilty to three counts of indecent assault, seven counts of sexual assault, one count of causing a person to engage in sexual activity without consent, and one allegation of causing a person to engage in penetrative sexual activity without consent.

The trial, at Southwark Crown Court, continues.
A police officer was rushed to hospital with a broken arm after being struck with a hammer while treating a stab victim in Hounslow.

Officers were called to High Street in Cranford following reports of an attack at 8.15pm on Saturday.

A 31-year-old was found at the scene with a slash wound. While treating the man, officers were attacked by a large group of people.

One officer was rushed to hospital where he was treated for a broken arm. He has since been discharged.

The stabbed victim was taken to a central London hospital for treatment.

His condition was assessed as non life-threatening.

There have been no arrests and enquiries are ongoing.
Ukraine will ratify the Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court (ICC), the only question is when the parliament will be ready for this vote, Ukrainian Prosecutor General Andriy Kostin believes.

"My position is absolutely firm: Ukraine will ratify the Rome Statute and become part of the family of members of the Rome Statute of the ICC. I hope it will be ratified as soon as possible. In practice, our country is ready to do this, the only question is when the parliament will be ready to vote," Kostin said during a press conference in The Hague dedicated to the opening of the ICPA (International Centre for the Prosecution of the Crime of Aggression against Ukraine) on Monday.

According to him, in the context of future membership in the European Union, the ratification of the Rome Statute will become an integral component.

On the other hand, as the Prosecutor General noted, Ukraine has already implemented a full package of national legislation, which gives the ICC Prosecutor's Office and the ICC powers to investigate international crimes committed by the Russian Federation in Ukraine.

"The opening of the ICC Prosecutor's Office in Ukraine, which is already being finalized ... is another evidence of the full cooperation of the Ukrainian authorities and the ICC Prosecutor's Office," Kostin stressed.

The Prosecutor General noted that the warrant for the arrest of the President of the Russian Federation issued by the ICC is also one of the elements of this cooperation.
A teenager has been arrested on suspicion of murder after a man was stabbed to death in a south London park.

A 19-year-old is in police custody while detectives continue investigating the fatal stabbing of Usmaan Mahmood, 20, in Thornton Heath Recreation Ground on June 13.

The arrest was made on Monday, Metropolitan Police said, as officers continue their appeal for anyone with information about the stabbing.

Mr Mahmoods family has been notified of the arrest as they continue to be supported by specially trained officers.

The 20-year-old died from sharp force trauma on June 14, a post-mortem examination confirmed.

Detective Chief Inspector Mike Nolan from the Mets Specialist Crime Unit, who is leading the investigation, said: My officers are continuing to provide support to Usmaans family at this unimaginably difficult time for them. Getting justice for them and for Usmaan continues to be our priority.

This morning we made an arrest in connection with Usmaans murder. However, I still need to hear from anyone who may have information about what happened.

A young man has lost his life and it is imperative we identify those responsible. Londoners dont want violent criminals in their communities and we must work together to remove them from our streets.

We believe Usmaan was stabbed inside Thornton Heath Recreation Ground and we are appealing for anyone who may have been at the park at the time of the incident to come forward with any information.

Please do the right thing and call us with anything that could assist our investigation and bring his killer to justice.

At 4.16pm on Tuesday June 13, officers on patrol in Thornton Heath were made aware of a man who was injured at the junction of Melfort Road and Sandfield Road.

Mr Mahmood was found with stab injuries. He was taken to hospital but sadly died there in the early hours of Wednesday June 14.

Any witnesses or anyone who can assist the investigation are asked to call 101 or tweet @MetCC quoting CAD 5777/13Jun. To remain anonymous contact the independent charity Crimestoppers on 0800 555 111.

Alternatively information can be submitted at https://mipp.police.uk/operation/01MPS23V26-PO1.
A Virgin company has begun a High Court fight with an American train operator which pulled out of a deal after alleging that the Virgin brand had stopped being a brand of international high repute.

Lawyers representing Virgin Enterprises told a judge at a High Court hearing in London that Brightline Holdings allegation was cynical and spurious.

The deal meant that Brightline would rebrand its rail services in the United States as Virgin Trains USA, Judge Mark Pelling heard.

Very soon after concluding the (agreement), it appears that Brightline had second thoughts about the deal it had struck and began looking for a way to extricate itself from it as soon as possible and without paying the contractually agreed exit fee

Virgin Enterprises says Brightline is in breach of a trademark licence agreement and wants around 200 million damages, the judge was told.

Brightline says Virgin Enterprises claim should be dismissed.

Judge Pelling has begun overseeing a trial, at the Rolls Building in central London, which is due to last three weeks.

He heard that Virgin Enterprises was part of the Virgin Group, founded by businessman Sir Richard Branson, and managed intellectual property relating to the Virgin brand.

Brightline sought to terminate the (agreement) on the basis of a cynical and spurious allegation that the Virgin brand had ceased to be a brand of international high repute

This dispute arises out of a trademark licence agreement dated November 15 2018 between (Virgin Enterprises) and (Brightline) pursuant to which Virgin Enterprises agreed to license the Virgin brand to Brightline such that Brightline would rebrand its rail services in the USA as Virgin Trains USA, Daniel Toledano KC, Emma Himsworth KC, and Maximilian Schlote told the judge in a written case outline.

The term of the (agreement) was for an initial 20 years, which was extendable.

They said a clause in the agreement allowed Brightline to terminate the agreement, after giving written notice, if the Virgin brand had ceased to be a brand of international high repute  and told the judge that an exit fee had been agreed.

Very soon after concluding the (agreement), it appears that Brightline had second thoughts about the deal it had struck and began looking for a way to extricate itself from it as soon as possible and without paying the contractually agreed exit fee, they added.

At the height of the first wave of the Covid-19 global pandemic, Brightline sought to terminate the (agreement), on the basis of a cynical and spurious allegation that the Virgin brand had ceased to be a brand of international high repute.

Lawyers representing Brightline told the judge that the claim should be dismissed.

This is a claim brought by (Virgin Enterprises) against Brightline for very substantial sums  in excess of 250 million US dollars  said to be due as damages for breach of a trademark licence agreement between the parties dated November 15 2018, they said.

Brightline terminated the (agreement) on July 29 2020.

(Virgin Enterprises) claims that this was a renunciatory breach of the (agreement).

The lawyers said the liability issue the judge had to decide was, simply stated, was Brightline entitled to terminate the agreement.

They added: The claim should be dismissed.

Lawyers representing Brightline outlined concerns about Virgins train and airline businesses.

They said by the end of 2019, Brightline was becoming concerned about the reputation of the Virgin brand.

In April 2019, Virgin Trains was disqualified from bidding for a renewal of the West Coast mainline train franchise; it operated no trains in the UK after 7 December 2019, they said.

Not long after the announcement that Virgin Trains had been disqualified, investors started to express concerns about Brightlines links with Virgin.

They said a Virgin Trains UK video, released in November 2019 and called The Final Whistle, was not universally acclaimed.

One newspaper described the footage as a Bizarre farewell to Virgin Trains video featuring Richard Branson and Mr Blobby.

Lawyers said: Brightline regarded the video as an embarrassment

They added: The Covid-19 pandemic had a major impact on both Brightline and Virgin.

In March 2020, Virgin Atlantic attracted widespread criticism with its request to staff to take unpaid leave, followed by its request for a substantial financial support package from the UK Government (or bailout).

There was an ensuing wave of negative publicity.

This was noted internally by Virgin, which recognised the need to do something.

They told the judge that the response on social media was summarised in a social listening report, prepared for Virgin, which said: People are angry and frustrated that a billionaire would take taxpayer money to bail out his airline when he has ample money to fund it himself.

Lawyers representing Virgin Enterprises said Brightline had operated a train line in Florida, between Miami and West Palm Beach.

They said Brightline had explained that it entered into the agreement to increase brand awareness and to take advantage of cross-selling opportunities.

Virgin was hit by a spike in negative press in the UK in the spring of 2020, in particular in relation to Virgin Atlantics request for government support, they said.

However, the picture was different in other Virgin markets.

They added: There was no notable negative press about any Virgin-related stories in the USA.

Lawyers said, nonetheless, the challenges the wider group of Virgin companies and the Virgin brand was facing at that time in the UK caused internal concern and were taken very seriously and were addressed.

The press surrounding Virgin Atlantic and, relatedly, Sir Richard, also did not cause the Virgin Masterbrand to cease to be of international high repute, they said.

Virgin Atlantics request for government support should be seen in the context of the pandemic and in light of the fact US and other airlines received huge government support.

Nigel Tozzi KC, who led Brightlines legal team, told the judge on Monday that Sir Richards reputation had taken a hammering.

He said Sir Richard had used the word trashed.
F ilm and theatre star Frances de la Tour has joined the fight against plans for an Ocado depot three metres from a north London school.

The three-time Olivier Award winner said the online supermarkets scheme to build a distribution hub next to Yerbury Primary School in Tufnell Park was absolutely terrible, and that she would rather see the land used for social housing.

Ocado has been battling for permission to build the 24/7 facility since 2019 - and was told by Islington Council earlier this year, for the third time, that it could not go ahead with it.

The retailer has now launched an appeal with the Planning Inspectorate to try and get the councils refusal overturned, but a group of local parents, children and residents, known as the NOcado campaign, are raising funds for legal representation in that appeal.

Ms De la Tour, who has been a local resident for more than 30 years and has a grandchild at the school, urged support for their fundraising efforts, saying: It affects everybody, the whole neighbourhood

It has such a knock-on effect for so many other situations like this, where theres a space like this... next to houses or schools, which should be used for social housing - but instead its these superstores.

The actor - known for her roles in TV sitcom Rising Damp, Alan Bennetts play The History Boys, and the Harry Potter film franchise - warned that the project would involve a continual stream of vans driving night and day.

Ocado has said it would commit to using a 100 per cent electric van fleet, but Ms De la Tour said the proposal would still be disruptive to the community.

It doesnt matter if its electric vehicles, she said.

Its noise, its car doors shutting, its people - and right in the middle of an incredibly close-knit [area]... It would be absolutely terrible.

The NOcado campaign is trying to raise 17,000 in order to have its own legal representation considered as part of the appeal, and has so far raised some 14,500.

Anybody who wants to donate can go to www.nocado.org to donate People dont have to give their name if they dont want to, said Ms De la Tour.

She added that she was concerned about the plans potential to kill off a lot of the local shops, saying: Many local shops around here are struggling, of course, and their livelihoods will go to the wind.

Responding to Ocados claim that a distribution hub in the area is necessary to meet local demand for their deliveries, Ms De la Tour said another location should be sought.

They can easily sort something else out, she said.

There are areas all around London even in our area, where there are spaces where theyre not right next to a school.

Approached for comment, a spokeswoman for Ocado said: Ocado is committed to having a positive impact on the local community.

This would be the greenest and quietest grocery facility in the UK, and we would commit to using a 100 per cent electric van fleet  replacing the vans that currently deliver in the area  and install a green living wall along the boundary (with the school). It would also create around 300 new jobs for the local economy.

Children at Yerbury Primary School - some not born when the saga began in 2019 - celebrated the latest refusal of permission for an Ocado depot next to their school earlier this year / @NOcado

The company argues that the industrial estate next to the school was previously used for a similar purpose between 1992 and 2002 - and that permission should therefore be granted for it to be used in that way again.

But planning officers at the council said in their latest decision earlier this year that evidence provided by Ocado in support of that argument was unclear, confused, internally inconsistent and inconsistent with the limited independent material available.

NOcado member Fenella Grey, a parent at the school, said the prolonged battle over the project had been really exhausting and it would be a huge relief to see the matter settled.
A n investigation is under way after three flats in a three-storey building were destroyed by fire overnight in north-west London.

More than 120 firefighters rushed to the building engulfed in flames on Newsholme Drive in Southgate at 9.30pm on Sunday.

Around 50 people had already fled the burning building and there were no reports of injuries.

Three flats in the loft space of a three-storey building that has been converted into flats were destroyed by fire, the London Fire Brigade (LFB) said.

Half of the buildings roof was also damaged.

More than 120 firefighters tackled the blaze on Newsholme Drive / via London Fire Brigade

Firefighters worked tirelessly to douse the blaze for more than four hours. It was brought under control just before 2am.

The brigades drone team provided an aerial view to help the incident commander tackle the fire while a 32-metre turntable ladder was used to extinguish the flames, LFB said on Monday.

Crews wearing breathing apparatus spent a number of hours working to bring the fire under control before dampening down to ensure the scene was safe.

via London Fire Brigade

The Brigade was called at 2130 and the fire was brought under control by 0151. Crews from Southgate, Edmonton, Enfield, Tottenham, Hornsey, Finchley and surrounding fire stations are at the scene.

The cause of the fire is under investigation.
I llegal levels of toxic air have been recorded in areas of outer London that will be targeted by the Ulez expansion, according to latest data.

It came as Sadiq Khan compared dirty air with the scandal of water companies releasing raw sewage into rivers  and ahead of a High Court challenge which threatens to derail the mayors Ulez plans.

You would not accept dirty water making you and your family sick, he said. Why do you accept dirty air?

Five Tory councils  Harrow, Hillingdon, Bexley, Bromley and Surrey county council - have asked the court to rule that the way Mr Khan has proposed to extend the ultra-low emission zone to the Greater London boundary, from August 29, is illegal.

The hearing, which starts on Tuesday, is expected to last two days  with judgement not expected for several weeks.

The research, by sustainability consultancy Ricardo for the the Clean Cities Campaign, found that annual nitrogen dioxide levels in a third of London boroughs breached the UK Governments maximum permitted level (of 40g/m3) last year.

A total of 13 of 76 air pollution monitors detected illegal NO2 levels. These included Hangar Lane gyratory in Ealing and at Ikea in Brent  both just outside the current Ulez boundary  and Wallington in Sutton and Cromwell Road in Kingston.

This compared with 15 out of 73 monitors in 2021, though direct comparisons are difficult because of the impact of the pandemic on traffic levels, and differences in monitoring sites.

Other sites already inside the Ulez where NO2 limits were breached included Brixton Road in Lambeth, Euston Road in Camden and Marylebone Road in Westminster.

Campaigners said it highlighted the need to ditch diesel vehicles from the capital by 2030.

Oliver Lord, head of strategy at the Clean Cities Campaign, said, Sadly the same siren is sounding again and Im hoping this time that politicians will listen. Air pollution in London is breaching legal limits that were meant to be met 13 years ago, and when that eventually happens, they are still four times the World Health Organizations guidelines to protect public health.

Dr Jonathan Hudson, a cardiology registrar at Kingston hospital, said: Toxic air in London is costing lives and makes people sicker. Air pollution gets deep into the bloodstream and increases the risk of developing heart and circulatory diseases. Diesel fumes, in particular, have been proven to be among the most dangerous for us to breathe.

Mr Khan was accused at the State of London debate last week of not listening to Londoners opposed to the Ulez expansion  and was warned that this is going to be your Poll Tax. Hundreds of newly erected Ulez enforcement cameras have been targeted by vandals.

Mr Khan said the greatest number of Londoners with respiratory issues lived in outer London  but pledged to review the impact of the expansion.

He said: In a years time, we will look at the policy to see if its effective. The evidence from both central and inner [London Ulez schemes] were that they were both effective.

If in a years time the Ulez expansion is shown not to work, that would be a failure.
T he co-leaders of the Scottish Greens have rejected an invitation to a service of thanksgiving for the King in Edinburgh this week with one of them due to speak at an anti-monarchy rally.

Patrick Harvie and Lorna Slater  two of the most outspoken republican MSPs in Holyrood and Scottish Government ministers  announced their intentions on Tuesday.

The special service to mark the Kings coronation will take place at St Giles Cathedral on the Royal Mile on Wednesday, where he will be presented with the Honours of Scotland  the countrys crown jewels.

Mr Harvie will instead speak at a rally outside Holyrood organised by the anti-monarchy group Our Republic.

Ms Slater said: In 21st century Scotland, the monarchy is nothing to celebrate.

It is an out-of-date and undemocratic institution.

How can we justify a system that allows one family to enjoy so much unearned wealth and privilege at a time when millions of people have so little?

Scotland can be a modern and democratic republic with an elected and accountable head of state.

I want every child in Scotland to know they live in a genuine democracy and that they can achieve the highest office, regardless of which family they come from.

While Mr Harvie added: There are many people in Scotland who regard the monarchy as a tiresome spectacle and a symbol of values we dont hold.

I will be proud to speak at the Our Republic rally and to stand with others who want to build a more democratic society where power and wealth belongs to the people rather than being passed down as an inheritance.

That is just one reason why I support Scottish independence. It will give us the opportunity to ask the big questions about how we are ruled and to build a fairer and more equal society.

But Scottish Tory constitution spokesman Donald Cameron said the decision was akin to student politics, and Mr Harvies choice to speak at the rally instead was predictably infantile.

If he wants to ask big questions, he should start with how he conducts himself as a government minister, he said.

The Greens may have failed to deliver a deposit return scheme, but they can definitely recycle tedious anti-monarchy rants.

As on so many issues, the extremist Greens are out of touch with the majority of Scots, who see the coronation and the Kings commitment to Scotland as something to celebrate.
T he Foreign Secretary will hail the close and friendly co-operation between London and Brussels in a speech to EU parliamentarians.

James Cleverly is expected to meet top EU figures on Monday, with his speech likely to look ahead to better and more mature post-Brexit relations.

This is a new chapter in the UK-EU relationship.

We stand together in our support of Ukraine, and we want to maximise the opportunities of our trade deal, he said ahead of his trip to Brussels.

We dont have to agree on everything  a mature relationship can deal with differences

But we dont have to agree on everything  a mature relationship can deal with differences.

The speech to the UK-EU Parliamentary Partnership Assembly, a body created as part of the post-Brexit trade deal, comes as Rishi Sunaks Government seeks better relations with the bloc.

Mr Cleverly is also expected to stress the importance of continued support for Ukraine as part of the visit.

European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen was in London last month, as part of the UK-hosted Ukraine Recovery Conference.

The Prime Minister earlier this year brokered the Windsor Framework deal with the EU, designed to address concerns over the operation of post-Brexit arrangements in Northern Ireland.

While the deal did not lead to the return of powersharing at Stormont, which the Democratic Unionist Party continues to boycott, it did usher in hopes of a new foundation for UK-EU ties.

The Foreign Secretary will co-chair the Withdrawal Agreement Joint Committee alongside the EUs Maros Sefcovic and is also expected to meet European Parliament President Roberta Metsola as part of the trip.

Citizens rights and illegal migration are among the topics that could be on the agenda at the committee meeting.

Mr Cleverly will also hold talks with Nato secretary-general Jens Stoltenberg, ahead of a crunch summit in Vilnius, Lithuania.

It comes as Labours shadow foreign secretary David Lammy is expected to be in Paris for meetings with French Foreign Minister Catherine Colonna, as well as Transport Minister Clement Beaune.

It is understood that Mr Lammy is keen for discussions on his partys proposals for a UK-EU security pact, efforts to tackle smuggler gangs, as well as possible improvements to the Brexit trade deal.
S tate schools in England have paid recruitment agencies more than 8 billion in fees since 2010, Labour has said.

It came as Sir Keir Starmers party promised that its plan to address growing concerns over the retention and recruitment of teachers would save taxpayers billions of pounds.

Labour has said it would introduce a new retention payment when teachers complete the two-year early career framework in order to tackle new teachers leaving the job.

It also pledged to reinstate the requirement for new teachers to have or to be working towards qualified teacher status, amid a raft of proposals designed to keep staff in the profession.

Shadow education secretary Bridget Phillipson, who submitted parliamentary questions on agency fees, said 1.98 billion was spent on fees by local authority-maintained schools between April 2017 and March 2022.

Around 4.5 billion was spent between 2010 and 2017, with academies and academy trusts also spending 1.75 billion on fees between 2016 and 2021.

A good retention plan is the best recruitment plan

She accused the Conservatives of overseeing a perfect storm in teaching.

Sir Keir will later this week set out the partys plans on schools and education.

Ms Phillipson said it will only be possible to have rising standards in our classrooms if we get a grip on the perfect storm in our teaching profession, which is seeing an exodus of experienced teachers and costing taxpayers over the odds to fill vacancies.

Only Labour has the vision to re-establish teaching as a profession that is respected and valued as a skilled job which delivers for our country, she said.

A good retention plan is the best recruitment plan. That is why Labours measures to keep teachers in our classrooms will deliver world-class teachers in every classroom and reduce the costly payments to recruitment agencies clobbering taxpayers.
P rotests across France sparked by the police shooting of a 17-year-old last Tuesday have been described as like a mini civil war by a British national living in Marseille.

Six nights of violent unrest, which appeared to be easing overnight into Monday, were driven by a backlash against a French state that many young people with immigrant roots say routinely discriminates against them.

Riots have affected several areas of the country, including the Paris suburb of Nanterre, where the teenager  identified only by his first name, Nahel  was killed in his hometown.

On Monday, crowds of people gathered at town halls across France to show solidarity with the local governments that had been targeted  according to the interior ministry, 99 town halls have been attacked in the riots, along with other public buildings.

Benjamin Klene, 33, from Oxford, who lives near the train station, the Gare St Charles, in Marseille, has described the riots and police presence as disturbing and very tense.

Mr Klene was driving home after celebrating a friends birthday on Friday night when he noticed a disturbing number of police on the streets.

Residents were told not to dispose of rubbish over the weekend for fear it would be used to start fires, and public transport across Frances second-largest city ground to a halt after 7pm, he said.

Mr Klene, who works in sales, told the PA news agency: I was driving home on Thursday night and saw unmarked vans full of tactical, special unit police in assault gear.

It was like a mini civil war had suddenly broken out.

All of the public transport has been stopped at night for four nights in a row and weve been told not to put rubbish out as bins are being used to start fires to block off roads.

All of the restaurants and bars around my place have now been shut for the past three evenings because of the riots.

On Friday morning, we were told by police to leave the city centre and stay with friends or relatives if possible for the weekend.

There were police in riot gear all over the city and the atmosphere was very tense.

By Monday afternoon, the unrest appeared to be easing, and Peter Pam, 26, who was on holiday in central Paris with his girlfriend, said they had had zero negative encounters from the riots.

We have been here almost a week now and we have had zero negative encounters, Mr Pam, from California, told the PA news agency.

We are about a 10-minute walk away from the Eiffel Tower.

I didnt even know France was in trouble or having any riots until my friends and family from America messaged me yesterday asking if I was okay.

Mr Pam, who proposed to his girlfriend on the second day of their trip, added that everything looks peaceful and all businesses are open.

We have walked early in the morning, all day, and night, even took public transport and honestly it made us fall in love with the city, he said.

I didnt hear any locals talking about it or preparing for it.

People are walking their dogs and most look happy.

All businesses are open and grocery stores are full.
C onversion therapy must be banned completely with no carve-outs, campaigners have said five years after the Government first promised to end the practice.

Lives have been ruined by attempts to cure LGBT (lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender) people of being themselves, Stonewall said.

The Government, then led by Theresa May, first vowed to ban conversion practices in July 2018.

It has no place in modern Britain

At the time the then-prime minister described conversion therapy as abhorrent and something she was shocked to find out still went on.

She said: I think it has no place in modern Britain.

Since then there have been years of delays and U-turns, with the Government saying in January that it would shortly publish a draft Bill.

At that stage it pledged to ban conversion therapy for everyone, including transgender people.

When the Government initially announced its consultation into the conversion therapy ban, its universal proposals were intended to protect all LGBT+ people.

But in March 2022, then-prime minister Boris Johnson dramatically dropped plans for legislation, later defending a decision not to include trans people by saying there were complexities and sensitivities to be worked through.

In January this year, Michelle Donelan, then-secretary of state for digital, culture, media and sport, said ministers recognised the strength of feeling on the issue of harmful conversion practices, adding that it was right the issue was tackled through a dedicated and tailored legislative approach.

Conversion 'therapy' isnt therapy, its abuse. And we need the UK Government to hold up their promise

She described it as a complex area, adding that the legislation must not, through a lack of clarity, harm the growing number of children and young adults experiencing gender-related distress, through inadvertently criminalising or chilling legitimate conversations parents or clinicians may have with their children.

On Monday, marking the five-year anniversary of the Governments promise on the ban, campaigners have called for urgent action.

Jayne Ozanne, from the Ban Conversion Therapy Coalition, accused the Government of having tried every trick in the book to delay and frustrate bringing forward this life-saving legislation.

She added: One can only conclude that they do not want to protect LGBT+ people and that they are only interested in stoking manufactured culture wars at the expense of vulnerable peoples lives. It is all an absolute disgrace, which the British public will find hard to forgive.

Sasha Misra, associate director of communications Stonewall, said: Monday 3 July marks half a decade since the UK Government first promised to ban conversion therapy.

Five years and four prime ministers later and we are still waiting for this ban to come to fruition. In the meantime, lives have continued to be ruined while these damaging attempts to cure LGBTQ+ of being themselves remain legal.

Even now, we are hearing worrying whispers that would leave LGBTQ+ people open to abuse. The ban must not contain loopholes that would enable abuse to continue through the back door, whether it be via the idea that people can consent to abuse, exemptions for medical settings, or any other carve-outs.

Conversion therapy isnt therapy, its abuse. And we need the UK Government to hold up their promise. Were calling on the UK Government to publish the draft Bill immediately and bring forward the final Bill by the Kings Speech in November.

A spokesperson for the Governments equality hub said: This Government is committed to protecting people at risk from conversion practices.

As part of this we will publish a draft Bill setting out our approach, which will be scrutinised by a Joint Committee of both Houses in this parliamentary session. This will allow for in-depth analysis and challenge to test the policy and drafting and ensure we address any risk of unintended impacts.
Eurojust head on ICPA operation: Much evidence should be proved as Russias aggression, to be linked to its leadership

The International Centre for the Prosecution of the Crime of Aggression against Ukraine (ICPA), which began work in The Hague on Monday, faces the task of collecting the entire huge array of evidence, classifying them as aggression and linking them directly to the highest military and political leadership of the aggressor country, head of Eurojust Ladislav Hamran said.

At a press conference dedicated to the opening of the ICPA in The Hague on Monday, Hamran noted that the opening of the center is a unique, unprecedented international platform for cooperation in legal history.

He said that ICPA would support the national investigation and prosecutors from Ukraine, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania and Poland who investigate crimes of aggression.

According to the head of Eurojust, the main task of ICPA is to provide key evidence, to start building a case on aggression.

Hamran said they don't want to wait for the end of the conflict and decided that they will support the partners who have launched their national investigations, and will centralize the already available evidence, analyze it.

The head of Eurojust stressed said that today there is a huge amount of evidence that is available in various jurisdictions, adding that never in history they had so much evidence of aggression as today. Its about various videos, photos from places, GPS, data from mobile phones, etc.

According to Hamran, firstly, aggression must be proved, for example, through evidence of bombing, attacks by armed forces on the ground, at sea and in the air.

At the same time, as the head of Eurojust noted, these proofs are not enough in themselves. He believes that its also necessary to link all these attacks to specific people who hold leadership positions  political and military leaders. According to Hamran, this will be another big challenge for them, since they must be sure that they have admissible evidence, that all elements of the crime are correctly documented. He said they would evaluate all the evidence, translate it into two languages and prepare this international document either for a national court, or an international one that already exists or will exist in the future.

Hamran added that, in his opinion, the issue of the form and location of the future tribunal is not of key importance at the moment, as negotiations on its creation are still ongoing.

The head of Eurojust expressed confidence that through those united international efforts, the ICPA will become a symbol of unwavering commitment to respect the rule of law and will eventually lead to punishment.
L ocal councils who are at crisis point have warned that thousands of Afghan families facing eviction from bridging hotels by the Government will be left homeless amid a housing shortage.

The Local Government Association (LGA) is warning it will be extremely challenging to rehouse Afghan refugees across the country as their notice period comes to an end next month.

The UK promised a safe haven for thousands of people who fled Afghanistan as the Taliban swept back into power in 2021  but many have lived in hotels since arriving.

Around 8,000 Afghan individuals and families - housed at 59 temporary bridging hotels across the country  have been served notice by the Home Office to leave by the end of August and provided details of available support for them to find their own settled accommodation.

But the LGA is calling for a radical reset to the Governments asylum and resettlement schemes amid an acute shortage of housing available across the UK and long waiting lists.

New LGA chair, councillor Shaun Davies, said at the annual conference in Bournemouth on Monday: Combined pressures from Government asylum and resettlement schemes are growing on councils.

We are at crisis point.

We want to work with the Government to get this right. Not just in a way that best supports the people arriving in the UK but also tackles the unsustainable pressures on our local services and on our communities.

The LGA said finding secure appropriate accommodation for all Afghan families in bridging hotels is extremely challenging with the deadline looming.

LGA said: Councils are increasingly concerned that many will end up needing homelessness support if families - some of whom are vulnerable and include children - fail to find properties or refuse the offer they receive.

There must be better engagement with councils and the Home Office must take proper account of local concerns and impacts.

The LGA said councils are also growing frustrated about a lack of recognition of existing local pressures, and a Government failure to adequately engage with councils on the ground.

The Home Office continues to house to house asylum seekers in hotels with little improvement on notice given to councils about where and when they will be stood up, LGA said, while flagging concerns about the increased use of room sharing and rapid rise of new arrivals exceeding agreed limits.

These hotels continue to also be used to accommodate unaccompanied asylum-seeking children...the Home Office oes not appear to take any account at all of the impact on the local councils ability to carry out its statutory duties in relation to those children, it added.

Last week protesters in Brighton supported the councils plan to launch legal action against the Home Office for reopening a hotel where more than 100 unaccompanied asylum-seeking children went missing.

Some 35 million of new funding will help councils provide increased support to help people move from hotels into accommodation across England, while the local authority housing fund will be expanded by 250 million, with most of the cash going to house Afghans and the rest easing homelessness pressures.

The Home Office said the process of moving Afghans out of hotels will be staggered, with people being notified at different times to make sure there is not a disproportionate demand for housing in one area.
H olidaymakers face a challenging summer in Europe this year as air traffic control grapples with a surge in flights amid a post-pandemic travel boom, according to reports.

Eurocontrol, the European air traffic management organisation, estimates around 33,000 flights will jet off per day between July and mid-August.

Traffic on Fridays will likely exceed 34,000 flights, Eurocontrol predicted.

That is more than a seven per cent rise on flights compared with the same period last year, Aviation Week reports.

Speaking at an industry conference ahead of the summer rush, Eurocontrol director general Raul Medina said: This summer in Europe is challenging as we have less available airspace because of the war in Ukraine and the military needs. To be successful over the summer, we need everyone to play their part.

Airports need to be well staffedit is vital that [air navigation service providers] provide enough capacity and that airlines stick to their schedules.

Mr Medina said that increased military activity in Europe has reduced the amount of airspace available by up to 20 per cent, with some regions handling much more traffic because of rerouted flights, Aviation Week reports.

Eurocontrol said air traffic control would experience high overloads of traffic on most days, including Reims and Marseilles in France, as well as Athens and Budapest.

It issued similar warnings for London, Barcelona, Brussels, Budapest, Nicosia, Warsaw and Zagreb on peak days, especially Fridays and over the summer weekends, according to The Times.

Overloads can result in delays and aircraft being forced to fly longer routes to avoid constricted areas.

Despite the warnings, Mr Medina said the aviation industry is clearly in a better situation than last year because many of the causes of last years delays have been rectified.

When we are asked if aviation is ready to cope with this increase of traffic, our answer is yes, Mr Medina said.

Willie Walsh, head of the International Air Transport Association, warned last month that airlines had serious concerns about air traffic control and that disruption in June was well beyond what is normal for the time of year.

He warned that air traffic control strikes by staff in France caused disruption right across Europe, because it forces airlines to reroute to other countries.

A 34-hour strike by the French air traffic controllers ended on June 30. It was the 60th day of industrial action following President Emmanuel Macrons controversial pension reforms.

Ryanair chief executive Michael OLeary said the walkouts prompted cancellations of around 12 per cent of its planned flights - including 400 flights on one day last month.
E mployers should hire more ex-offenders to help fill Britains 1.1 million job vacancies, a new report argues.

ReGenerates Good Jobs Project, set to launch on Monday, is lobbying to get those from marginalised groups, such as young people in or leaving care and the invisibly disabled, into work to address the vacancy crisis and help people.

The initiative is backed by businesses including bakery chain Greggs and shoe repair and key-cutting firm Timpson, whose bosses worked with the charity on its report called The Purpose-Driven Business Solution to the UKs Labour Shortage.

The year-long study found that the UK is facing one of the worst labour shortages in its history and argues the best solution is for bosses to target the vast numbers of people that are commonly overlooked for jobs.

The solution to the UKs record labour shortage is hiding in plain sight.

These groups also include people who are currently or have recently been homeless, refugees, those with mental health problems and over 50s, it notes.

The foreword to the report states: Over the last year the UK has experienced record-breaking vacancies, which currently stand at 1.1 million, which many businesses are struggling to fill.

As ever, UK businesses are innovating to remain successful, but are operating in a very complex environment.

Simultaneously, there are millions of individuals from communities that have been historically excluded, including people with disabilities, prison leavers, and single parents who face difficulties in finding flexible employment opportunities.

The report highlights that many employers take a blanket ban approach to hiring people with criminal records, excluding potentially suitable candidates.

Only 17% of ex-offenders each year are in work within 12 months of leaving prison and half of employers would not consider recruiting an applicant with a criminal record, it notes, citing Government data.

The report argues that this type of recruitment is good for business and philanthropic.

Ed Boyd, chief executive of ReGenerate, said The solution to the UKs record labour shortage is hiding in plain sight.

There are millions of potential workers who are rarely given a chance because they may have disabilities, criminal records or are neurodivergent.

Yet these people could make great employees, and make a major contribution to making companies more successful.

It is a real win-win.

It is too easy for talented people to be held at arm's length because they may have a criminal record.

ReGenerate has developed a range of proposed reforms, including giving employers a 12-month holiday from paying employer national insurance contributions for taking on some marginalised people.

Roisin Currie, chief executive of Greggs, said: Were passionate about people and believe that everyone deserves the chance to thrive in employment.

By not overlooking potential employees  be that because of their past or disability  we can select the right person and develop them to their full potential.

Weve been working with people leaving prison for a number of years through our dedicated Fresh Start programme.

The passion and energy for work that comes from people who are given an opportunity to kick-start their careers, or to turn their lives around is clear for all to see and as a business, we feel extremely motivated to do all we can to give these people a fresh start.

James Timpson, chief executive of Timpson, said: It is too easy for talented people to be held at arms length because they may have a criminal record, are neurodivergent or have a physical disability.

I have seen first hand how looking past such issues, and hiring on talent and character alone, not only benefits society by giving people a second chance, but helps businesses thrive too.
T he King met queen Scotland as he arrived for his first public engagement in Scotland since his coronation.

Charles was welcomed by crowds as he arrived at Kinneil House in Boness, Falkirk  the historic home of the dukes of Hamilton  wearing a kilt.

Among those he greeted was Boness Fair Queen, Lexi Scotland, who was wearing her ceremonial robes and a crown.

The pair shook hands as the King congratulated Lexi on her achievement, while Lexi and the crowd welcomed him to Kinneil House.

Lexi said it is exciting to have been crowned the newest Boness queen, adding she enjoyed meeting the King and his entourage.

She said: I was quite nervous, but I was also excited to meet him.

Lexi was joined by May Garrow, 99, who was crowned the Boness Queen in 1936.

The occasion marked Mays first time meeting the King.

She said: Ive never actually shook hands with him before. Ill not wash that hand anymore.

Charles asked May if she still owns her dress from when she was crowned the Boness Queen.

May told reporters: Ive still got the dress. Mind you, it was white but its a dark creamy colour now. I dont think Id get into it now!

May turns 100 on February 24, and is excited to receive her message from the King.

May commented that it was a nice day, adding she enjoyed the Kings company and said: He makes things easy for you to talk.

Speaking of Lexi, she added: Shes had a nice day, and when shes my age shell come back too.

Maria Ford plays a vital role in organising the fair, and says they have tried for a royal visit for many years.

She said: We pushed and pushed for a royal visit but we just never managed, but now everythings came together and its like the last piece of the jigsaw.

The King later met with Sustainable Thinking Scotland (STS), which operates from Kinneil House.

The organisation grows sustainable food which in turn is given for food parcels.

Co-director Steve McQueen said the King told him the cherries they had grown were the biggest hed ever seen.

Sean Kerr, also a director, said: I think the king sees the community benefit from all that were doing, whether its growing food, environmental or community work.

It was great to be able to talk to him about everything and hopefully we can take it further.

He added: Its really great to be able to highlight all the amazing work that all the groups we work with do we do.

For me its just a thrill to be able to showcase the people we work with that do such a great job in Falkirk, and were glad to be a part of it.

During his visit, the King viewed the cylinder of the engine erected by the famed Scottish engineer, James Watt.

The house and nearby James Watt Cottage were the setting for the engineers secret development work on the prototype steam engine in 1765-73.

The King also planted a tree to commemorate the centenary of the estate becoming a public park and meet charity representatives and beneficiaries.

The visit is the first of a series of engagements in Scotland, marking the first Holyrood Week since his coronation.

There will be a special ceremony of thanksgiving at St Giles Cathedral on Wednesday, where Charles will be presented with the Honours of Scotland  the nations crown jewels.

Each year, the monarch traditionally spends a week based at the Palace of Holyroodhouse in Edinburgh, known as Holyrood Week or Royal Week in Scotland.

The King and Queen will be accompanied by William and Catherine, whose Scottish titles are the Duke and Duchess of Rothesay.

Later on Monday, the King took part in the Ceremony of the Keys on the palace forecourt where he is presented with the keys to the city.

Charles and Camilla are also expected to visit the Great Tapestry of Scotland, seeing a newly stitched panel dedicated to the couple.

Wednesday will be a key day during the visit with a series of events to mark the coronation.

Before the service at St Giles, there will be both a royal procession and a peoples procession along the Royal Mile.

Anti-monarchy campaign group Republic will be staging a protest along the route and said it expects a large turnout.

The organisation will also be collaborating with Scottish republican group Our Republic, which will be staging a rally outside the Scottish Parliament.

Graham Smith, Republics chief executive officer, said: Everyone in the UK should have the right to choose our head of state  not be told it will be Charles.

Charles does not represent the people of Scotland any more than he represents the rest of the UK.

The peoples procession will consist of about 100 people representing different aspects of Scottish life.

At the head of the column will be the Shetland pony Corporal Cruachan IV  mascot of the Royal Regiment of Scotland.

The Stone of Destiny will be present at the ceremony in St Giles Cathedral, where the King will be presented with the Honours of Scotland.

Afterwards, there will be a gun salute at Edinburgh Castle and a flypast by the Red Arrows.
S evere delays were caused on a major motorway after a tanker overturned, spilling its load of milk over the carriageway.

The male driver and a female passenger were taken to hospital for treatment following the accident on the M6 between J31 and J33 at Preston on Sunday morning.

The operation to right the tanker and clear the milk and diesel from the carriageway continued for much of the day with police announcing at 4.52pm that the motorway was fully reopened.

Lancashire Police posted on Twitter: Around 7am this morning (Sunday, July 2) a milk tanker travelling northbound collided with the central reservation, entering the southbound carriageway before overturning on to its side across the carriageway.

The force also posted: A large quantity of milk and diesel has spilled onto the carriageway causing it to be closed.

A man and woman, the driver and passenger, have been taken to hospital for treatment.

Due to the nature of the spillage, the motorway is expected to be closed for some time.

National Highways: North-West advised that severe delays were being experienced in both directions.

It posted: The milk tanker has now been righted and removed from the central reservation barrier.

Clear up works have begun on the northbound carriageway.

There are severe delays in both directions.

At just before 5pm, Lancashire Police posted: Were pleased to advise the earlier M6 motorway closure following an overturned milk tanker has now been reopened. Traffic is expected to be slow moving and congested for some time so please avoid the area where possible.
O rkney Islands Council is set to explore its Nordic connections as it discusses alternative forms of governance which could see the islands legal status change.

Council leader James Stockan has put forward a motion which says it is time for Orkney to consider other forms of governance which could provide more economic opportunity.

It suggests this could include looking at crown dependencies such as Guernsey, Jersey and the Isle of Man.

Nordic connections are also suggested, with a report going before a council meeting this week mentioning the Faroe Islands  a self-governing territory of Denmark in the North Sea.

The council leaders motion does not commit the council to any of these options and the officials report notes that any constitutional change would likely require a combination of petitions, referenda and legislation at Holyrood and Westminster.

Mr Stockan told the BBC he felt that Orkney is being failed dreadfully by Governments in both Edinburgh and London.

Funding is less per head than Shetland and the Western Isles receive, he said.

Orkney was under Norwegian and Danish control until 1472 when the islands were given to Scotland as part of Margaret of Denmarks wedding dowry to King James III of Scotland.

Mr Stockan told the BBC: We were part of the Norse kingdom for much longer than we were part of the United Kingdom.

On the street in Orkney, people come up and say to me when are we going to pay back the dowry, when are we going back to Norway.

There is a huge affinity and a huge deep cultural relationship there. This is exactly the moment to explore what is possible.

The Scottish Lib Dem MSP for Orkney, Liam McArthur, said he supported empowering island communities but warned there are dangers in putting up barriers.

He said: I am due to meet local councillors on Monday and will be interested to learn more about what is envisaged.

There were similar proposals considered by OIC around the time of the last independence referendum and I am keen to understand how these would differ.

Locally, I think islanders will also want to be reassured that this exercise wont result in council resources being taken away from the day-to-day running of services at a time when these are under real pressure.
T he record hot weather in June helped cause a dramatic spike in fish deaths, environmental groups have warned.

The UK experienced its hottest June on record last month after temperatures exceeded the previous high of 14.9C set in 1940 and 1976.

The sweltering heatwave in the early weeks of June led to heat-health alerts, water shortages and caused an unprecedented number of fish deaths in rivers.

The reports of the number of fish death incidents in rivers for this time of year has been unprecedented. I would normally expect rivers to be affected later in the summer when its hotter and drier, Mark Owen, from the Angling Trust, told BBC News.

In one incident, hundreds of dead fish were found floating on the surface of the River Cam near Ditton Meadows in Cambridge.

High temperatures lead to algal blooms which cause low oxygen levels, killing fish as a result. The Environment Agency received more reports of dead fish than the same time last year.

Ali Morse, from the Wildlife Trusts, said the scorching temperatures caused plants to wilt, which restricted the food supply for insects that feed on nectar and pollen.

Every month seems to be the hottest, the driest, the wettest, or whichever record-breaking event it is. If we have a one-off pollution event or a wildfire, then there is normally time for nature to bounce back, but now it seems to be continually pounded by extreme weather, she added.

Meanwhile, drought plans have been stepped up in England after water demand shot up during the hot weather.

Simon Hawkins, chair of the National Drought Group, said: The recent heatwave has served as a reminder that we need to prepare for weather extremes and act now to ensure resilient water supplies.

The Environment Agency, water companies and partners are working collaboratively to handle drought risk across the country; with our staff managing abstraction licences to balance need, ensuring water companies implement their drought plans, working with farmers to manage resources, and rescuing fish in areas where river levels are extremely low.

South West Water customers in Cornwall have been subject to a hosepipe ban since August last year, which has since been extended to others in Devon.

Along with parts of East Anglia, the region has not left drought status since the extreme heat last summer, which saw 40C bring destructive grassfires and more than 3,000 excess deaths during the heatwaves.

The Enviornment Agency has been contacted for comment.
A t least eight Palestinians were killed and 29 injured after Israel launched drone strikes on a militant stronghold in the occupied West Bank city of Jenin.

The Palestinian health ministry confirmed that several people died following the raid on a compound just after 1am on Monday.

Israeli troops were later engaged in massive gunbattles with militants on the streets of Jenin at midday following the launch of a wide-scale military operation. Palestinian youths could be seen running for cover behind parked cars amid fierce skirmishes.

The Israeli military said its forces struck a building that served as a command centre for fighters from the Jenin Brigades as part of a counter-terrorism operation in the West Bank.

Palestinian militants fire at Israeli armoured vehicles / AFP via Getty Images

Israeli military vehicles advance during an operation in Jenin city / AFP via Getty Images

They said the targeted building functioned as an advanced observation and reconnaissance centre and a weapons and explosives site, as well as a coordination and communications hub for the militant fighters.

Lt. Col. Richard Hecht, an army spokesman, said the operation began just after 1am with an airstrike on a building used by militants for planning attacks. He said the goal of the operation was to destroy and confiscate weapons.

Were not planning to hold ground, he said. Were acting against specific targets.

He said that a brigade-sized force  roughly 2,000 soldiers  was taking part in the operation, and that military drones had carried out a series of strikes to clear the way for the ground forces

Until last month, when it carried out a strike on June 21 near Jenin, the Israeli military had not used drone strikes in the West Bank since 2006.

But the growing scale of the violence and the pressure on ground forces meant such tactics may continue, a military spokesman said.

Were really stretched, he told journalists. Its because of the scale. And again, from our perception, this will minimise friction, he said, saying the strikes were based on precise intelligence.

Israeli Defence Minister Yoav Gallant said his forces were closely monitoring the conduct of our enemies.

The defence establishment is ready for all scenarios, he added.

In a separate incident, a 21-year-old Palestinian was killed by Israeli fire near the West Bank city of Ramallah.

The Jenin camp and an adjacent town of the same name have been a flashpoint as Israeli-Palestinian violence escalated since the spring of 2022.

Jenin has long been a bastion for armed struggle against Israel and was a major friction point in the last Palestinian uprising.

Mondays raid came two weeks after another violent confrontation in Jenin and after the military said a rocket was fired from the area last week, which landed in the West Bank.
Commander-in-Chief of the Armed Forces of Ukraine General Valeriy Zaluzhny, Chief of the General Staff of the Armed Forces of Ukraine Lieutenant-General Serhiy Shaptala, together with President of Energoatom Petro Kotin and Director of the Rivne NPP Pavlo Kovtoniuk, worked out the issues of information exchange between the army and power engineers to plan probable scenarios for the development of events at the Zaporizhia nuclear power plant.

"The Commander-in-Chief of the Armed Forces of Ukraine, General Valeriy Zaluzhny, and the Chief of the General Staff, Lieutenant-General Serhiy Shaptala, together with the President of Energoatom, Petro Kotin, and the Director of the Rivne Nuclear Power Plant, Pavlo Kovtoniuk, worked out the issues of information exchange between the army and power engineers in order to analyze, plan and predict possible scenarios for the development of events at the Zaporizhia nuclear power plant. We agreed on close cooperation in order to take timely measures to respond to certain situations," the General Staff of the Armed Forces of Ukraine said in a message on the Telegram channel.
U kraine said on Monday its forces had gained ground along eastern and southern fronts in the past week in heavy fighting with Russian troops, reclaiming 14 square miles of territory.

President Volodymyr Zelensky tweeted:  Last week was difficult on the frontline. But we are making progress.

We are moving forward, step by step! I thank everyone who is defending Ukraine, everyone who is leading this war to Ukraines victory!

Ukrainian forces were advancing in the Bakhmut direction, Deputy Defence Minister Hanna Maliar said, adding that Russian forces were attacking in the Lyman, Avdiivka and Mariinka directions in the Donetsk region.

Heavy fighting is going on there now, Ms Maliar said on the Telegram messaging app.

Ukraine had reclaimed nine square kilometres (3.5 square miles) over the past week along the eastern front as a result of improving the operational (tactical) position and aligning the front line, she added.

In the south, Ukraine has regained 28.4 kilometres (11 square miles) of territory, bringing the total area of re-captured territory along that front to 158.4 kilometres (61 square miles), Ms Maliar added.

Over the weekend, Russia said its forces had repelled Ukrainian attacks near villages ringing Bakhmut and in areas further south, particularly near the hilltop town of Vuhledar. They also reported success in containing Ukrainian troops in the northeast.

The battlefield claims and counter-claims could not independent verified.

Meanwhile, Volodymyr Zelensky warned Russias navy on Monday that it is not safe around annexed Crimea from Ukraines fleet of drones.

In his overnight address, Ukraines president told of a new report from Ukraines Navy Commander, Vice Admiral Oleksiy Neizhpapa, and Commander of the Odesa operational and strategic group of troops, General Moskalov.

They spoke about the current security situation and the strategic tasks for our fleet, for the new direction - the fleet of naval drones - and for our coastal defence. We will implement everything! I am sure of it! he said.

The enemy will definitely not dictate the conditions in the Black Sea, and the occupiers will have to be as afraid of approaching our Ukrainian Crimea and our Azov Sea coast as Russian ships are already afraid of approaching our Black Sea coast.

Moscow annexed Crimea in 2014, in a move widely condemned as illegal.

Meanwhile, Russias envoy to the United Nations in Geneva said there were no grounds to maintain the status quo of the Black Sea grain deal that is set to expire on July 18, the Russian news outlet Izvestia reported on Monday.

In a wide ranging interview, envoy Gennady Gatilov told the outlet that the implementation of Russias conditions for the extensions of the agreement was stalling.

Those conditions included, among others, the reconnection of the Russian Agricultural Bank (Rosselkhozbank) to the SWIFT banking payment system.

Russia has repeatedly extended the deal in the hope of positive changes, Mr Gatilov told Izvestia. However, what we are seeing now does not give us grounds to agree to maintaining the status quo.

The Black Sea deal, brokered between Russia and Ukraine by the United Nations and Turkey in July 2022, aimed to prevent a global food crisis by allowing Ukrainian grain trapped by Russia's invasion to be safely exported from Black Sea ports.

Last week, the United Nations said it was concerned no new ships had been registered under the Black Sea deal since June 26 - despite applications being made by 29 vessels.
A n award-winning Ukrainian writer has died from her injuries after a Russian missile hit a pizza restaurant in the eastern city of Kramatorsk.

Victoria Amelina, 37, a war crimes researcher, became the 13th person to die from the attack on Tuesday.

She had been dining with a delegation of Colombian journalists and writers in the citys popular Ria Lounge when the missile hit.

Around 60 others were injured in the attack, while others to die included twin sisters Anna and Yuliia Aksenchenko.

Human rights activists have branded the attack a war crime.

The aftermath of a Russian missile attack in Kramatorsk / via REUTERS

Ms Amelina was rushed to hospital in Dnipro, but succumbed to her injuries on Saturday, PEN Ukraine said.

It is with great pain that we inform you that the heart of the writer Victoria Amelina stopped beating on 1 July, the group said in a statement.

In the last days of Victorias life, her family and friends were by her side.

Amelina was one of Ukraines most celebrated young writers who started documenting war crimes after Russias full-scale invasion last year. She also started working with children near the frontline.

Last year she unearthed the diary of childrens writer Volodymyr Vakulenko, who was abducted and killed by Russian troops in the city of Izyum soon after the invasion.

Her first non-fiction book in English, War and Justice Diary: Looking at Women Looking at War, is due to be published.

A post pinned to her Twitter profile shows Amelina taking a photo of a bombed building in Ukraine.

Its me in this picture, the post reads.

Im a Ukrainian writer. I have portraits of great Ukrainian poets on my bag. I look like I should be taking pictures of books, art, and my little son. But I document Russias war crimes and listen to the sound of shelling, not poems. Why?
U kraines president Volodymyr Zelensky has said Putins power is crumbling, in a new televised interview.

Speaking to US news channel CNN in an interview filmed in Odesa, Ukraine, on Sunday, Mr Zelensky slammed his Russian counterparts reaction to a recent uprising by the mercenary Wagner group.

The apparent uprising last weekend saw the group, led by boss Yevgeny Prigozhin, take control of the Russian city of Rostov before heading to Moscow on a march for justice, intended to remove corrupt and incompetent Russian commanders.

The situation was swiftly defused and a deal was struck that has reportedly seen Mr Prigozhin move to Belarus, and charges against him and other Wagner group members dropped.

Critics have said that although the uprising was unsuccessful, it revealed cracks in Putins power - a sentiment echoed by Mr Zelensky on Sunday.

We see Putins reaction. Its weak, Mr Zelensky told CNNs Erin Burnett.

Firstly, we see he doesnt control everything.

Wagners moving deep into Russia and taking certain regions shows how easy it is to do. Putin doesnt control the situation in the regions.

All that vertical of power he used to have is just crumbling down.

Mr Zelensky also said in the interview that he ultimately hoped to free Crimea - a peninsula Russia annexed nine years ago.

We cannot imagine Ukraine without Crimea, he told CNNs Erin Burnett. And while Crimea is under the Russian occupation, it means only one thing: the war is not over yet.

He said that without reclaiming Crimea, it will not be victory.

It comes as Ukraine said on Monday its forces had gained ground along eastern and southern fronts in the past week in heavy fighting with Russian troops, reclaiming 14 square miles of territory.

President Zelensky tweeted: Last week was difficult on the frontline. But we are making progress.

We are moving forward, step by step! I thank everyone who is defending Ukraine, everyone who is leading this war to Ukraines victory!

Ukrainian forces were advancing in the Bakhmut direction, Deputy Defence Minister Hanna Maliar said, adding that Russian forces were attacking in the Lyman, Avdiivka and Mariinka directions in the Donetsk region.

Over the weekend, Russia said its forces had repelled Ukrainian attacks near villages ringing Bakhmut and in areas further south, particularly near the hilltop town of Vuhledar. They also reported success in containing Ukrainian troops in the northeast.

The battlefield claims and counter-claims could not independent verified.
P ulp drummer Nick Banks has criticised Finsbury Park gig organisers after fans were forced to queue more than an hour for a drink.

The Brit Pop legends returned to the London venue for the first time in 25 years on Saturday, entertaining a 45,000-strong crowd in what The Standard described as one of the sharpest, tightest and most ecstatically received reunion parties.

Despite the groups stellar performance, the event was hampered by long bar queues that spanned hundreds of metres, with one concert-goer telling us they were dumbstruck" having to wait 75 minutes for a drink.

Mike, from Plumstead Common in south-east London, said: The queue for the bar was insane. Ive been to countless music festivals over the years and Ive never seen anything like it. One woman told me shed had to wait an hour and a quarter for a drink.

I was dumbstruck when we went to get some beers for me and my friends. Fans shouldnt be treated like this. To be required to spend hours queueing for a drink, on a warm summers day, when you just want to be enjoying the day, is a bit insulting really.

Its just as well Pulp were awesome, but I well be thinking twice about going back to another gig at Finsbury Park.

Following the gig, the bands drummer, Nick Banks, acknowledged fans frustrations and tweeted: Sorry to hear long queues to get a drink - no idea why the organisers of such dont put in place more staff and outlets.

Its in their financial interests to do so I would say.

His tweet encouraged fans to share their experience at the site, many of whom were less than impressed at the lack of bar outlets.

One gig-goer wrote: Couldnt fault the performance, absolutely superb, but the venue let things down. Not just the queues but it was the quietest gig Ive been to.

Couldnt hear Jarvis in between songs. Been to many outdoor concerts before but Finsbury Park was by far the worst.

Referencing Liam Gallaghers 2017 concert, another replied: They havent learned their lesson from LG years back.

Literally spent my whole early evening queuing Id never go back to a gig hosted there unfortunately.

A third compared Finsbury Parks facilities to that of BST Hyde Park, which is also running, and said the latter was streets ahead in terms of organisation.

They wrote: I was at Hyde Park on Friday for Guns n Roses and Finsbury Park last night. Hyde Park was streets ahead in terms of organisation and general just being able to move around and find people.

The Standard has contacted organisers Festival Republic for comment.
R obert De Niro says he is deeply distressed following the death of his grandson Leandro De Niro Rodriguez at the age of 19.

The Goodfellas actor, 79, said he and his family were greatly appreciative of condolences and asked for privacy.

Im deeply distressed by the passing of my beloved grandson Leo, De Niro said, in a statement shared with the PA news agency.

Were greatly appreciative of the condolences from everyone. We ask that we please be given privacy to grieve our loss of Leo.

The death of Leandro De Niro Rodriguez was announced on Monday by his mother Drena De Niro, 51, the eldest of the actors seven children.

Announcing the news in an Instagram post, she wrote: My beautiful sweet angel. I have loved you beyond words or description from the moment I felt you in my belly.

You have been my joy my heart and all that was ever pure and real in my life. I wish I was with you right now. I wish I was with you.

I dont know how to live without you but Ill try to go on and spread the love and light that you so made me feel in getting to be your mama, she continued.

You were so deeply loved and appreciated and I wish that love alone could have saved you. Im so sorry my baby. Rest in Peace and Eternal Paradise my darling boy.

Several stars, including Questlove and Rosie Perez, shared their condolences underneath the post.

Meanwhile, the teens father, artist Carlos Mare, commented under Drenas post: Words arent enough to express the joy he gave us or the loss we now endure with our families and friends.

He is Gods child now. On this full moon his spirit luminates what could not be seen in the dark.

You cant spell LOVE without LEO.

He also acknowledged his sons tragic passing by posting a blacked out image on his Instagram page.

Drena had also shared her last post about her son when he was alive was on US Mothers Day.

Alongside a snap of them together smiling and another of them with his father, she wrote on May 15: Mothers Day - A Lil bit of Leo Lil bit of Mare... Lots of memories of my soulmate, fur baby Daisy. Today was a good day.#happymothersday."

Leandro had followed in his mother and grandfathers acting footsteps. He notably appeared alongside his mother Drena in 2018s A Star is Born, playing the son of Dave Chapelles character, George Noodles Stone.

His other acting credits included 2005s The Collection, and 2018s Cabaret Maxime.

De Niro adopted Drena, 51, after marrying his first wife, American actor Diahnne Abbott. The former couple also share son Raphael, 46.

Then in 1995, he welcomed twin sons Julian and Aaron, 27, with his former girlfriend, model Toukie Smith.

The Oscar winner also has two children, son Elliot, 25, and daughter Helen Grace, 11, with ex-wife Grace Hightower.

The Taxi Driver actor most recently welcomed his seventh child, Gia, in April 2023 with his girlfriend Tiffany Chen.
S tanley Tucci has voiced his opinion in the ongoing debate surrounding straight actors playing gay roles.

The 62-year-old previously played gay roles including fashion magazine art director Nigel in The Devil Wears Prada and starred opposite fellow straight actor Colin Firth as gay lovers in the 2020 romance movie Supernova.

Now in a new interview on Radio 4s Desert Island Discs, The Hunger Games actor hit back at criticism he received for being cast in Supernova.

He shared: Obviously, I believe thats fine, and I am always very flattered when gay men come up to me and talk to me about The Devil Wears Prada or Supernova, and say, You did it the right way. Because often its not done the right way.

Tucci played fashion magazine art director Nigel in The Devil Wears Prada / 20th Century Studios

But I really do believe that an actor is an actor is an actor  that youre supposed to play different people. You just are. Thats the whole point of it.

Recently, Ben Whishaw, who is gay, admitted he sometimes disbelieves straight actors performances in queer roles.

He told The Guardian: Im critical if I dont think the performance is, from my subjective experience, accurate. I might think, I dont believe you! And even a small moment of hesitation or inauthenticity will block my engagement with the whole story. So I understand these questions.

I just feel that we can end up arguing over these black-and-white things and get extremely polarised over these questions when I dont think it needs to be that way. Have a discussion! There can be disagreement! There can be different points of view!

Although, Whishaw, who starred in the Danish Girl about transgender artist Lili Elbe opposite straight actor Eddie Redmayne, said the Oscar winner did a beautiful job, adding that he doesnt believe a performers sexuality should limit what characters they play.

He did also acknowledge why some people might have an issue.

Previously, Doctor Who showrunner Russell T Davies sparked discussion in 2021 when he said he had only cast gay actors in his award-winning drama Its A Sin as he wanted them to play a part, not to act gay.

Prior to the recent discussion, former Glee star Darren Criss said that he was becoming more cautious about playing gay roles back in 2018.

The actor, who starred as gay schoolboy Blaine in Glee and murderer Andrew Cunanan in The Assassination of Gianni Versace: American Crime Story, said he would no longer take on queer roles.

He told Bustle: There are certain [queer] roles that Ill see that are just wonderful but I want to make sure I wont be another straight boy taking a gay mans role.
A n Apple Vision Pro may be harder to come by than initially thought.

Apple reckons the $3,500 (2,763) mixed-reality headset will be its next must-have device, but the Vision Pro has been beset by manufacturing problems from the outset, which are only expected to get worse.

After seven years in development, Apple unveiled the headset last month, but doesnt plan to release it till next year due to manufacturing delays.

Now, the company is reportedly scaling back production to fewer than 400,000 units, two people close to the company and its Chinese manufacturing contractor told The Financial Times.

To make matters worse, Apple is reportedly procuring components for 130,000 to 150,000 Vision Pro units in the first year from two separate Chinese suppliers.

On the whole, the numbers are far lower than Apples 1 million internal sales target for the first 12 months. Ultimately, that implies that the headset could be hard to find during its initial release, especially if it gets snapped up by Apple loyalists and early adopters.

But, its scarcity could be a blessing for Apple if it helps to drum up interest in a luxury product that is out of reach for many consumers.

Apples headset allows you to experience digital games and apps in your real-world surroundings - or what the company refers to as spatial computing. This is achieved using an array of cameras and two micro-OLED displays that deliver 4K TV-style visuals for each eye.

Its these high-resolution screens - which pack more detail than any other virtual reality headset on the market - that are believed to be the cause of the manufacturing issues.

The micro-OLEDs used in the demo products Apple unveiled in June were reportedly supplied by Sony and Taiwanese chipmaker TSMC.

Sony recently said that it wasnt keen on ramping up production due to the untested nature of the mixed-reality headset market. Micro-OLEDs are the most costly component used in the high-end gadget, and partly why it costs significantly more than rivals, including Metas upcoming 500 Quest 3 headset.

Apple is reportedly unhappy with the pace at which defect-free displays are being manufactured. The supply hiccups are also said to be hampering the affordable version of the headset, with Apple pushing back plans for the device, which is expected in late 2025. Apple has tapped Korean display giants Samsung and LG for the headset, but has reportedly been reluctant to switch to cheaper mini-LEDs even in the face of delays.

The follow-up headset could determine whether it is a true successor to the iPhone or another niche VR device.
T he heads of three major messaging apps have exclusively told The Standard that the Online Safety Bill, which is facing one of its final votes this week, will lead to the mass surveillance of every private online message and will destroy Londons reputation as a place to do business if the bill passes into law.

WhatsApp, Signal, and Element also say Prime Minister Rishi Sunak can forget about the UK becoming a technology superpower if that happens, as tech firms will leave London and no-one will want to start a business here.

If the Online Safety Bill does not amend the vague language that currently opens the door for mass surveillance and the nullification of end-to-end encryption, then it will not only create a significant vulnerability that will be exploited by hackers, hostile nation states, and those wishing to do harm, but effectively salt the earth for any tech development in London and the UK at large, Meredith Whittaker, president of not-for-profit secure messaging app Signal told The Standard.

Passing the bill as-is sends the clear message that the UK Government would rather make law based on magical thinking, than honour longstanding expert consensus when it comes to issues of complex technology.

The messaging app firms warning comes ahead of the report stage of the Online Safety Bill by the House of Lords on Thursday, July 6, which the tech firms fear brings the bill close to being passed into law.

A survey of 2,000 UK citizens carried out by Chiswick-based secure messaging app Element, which is popularly used by governments, has found that 70 per cent of the public do not believe that scanning all online messages will stop criminal activity, while almost half of respondents believe it will make the UK more vulnerable to cyberattacks from nation states like Russia and China.

A third of Londoners said they believed their messages will no longer be private from the Government if the Online Safety Bill is passed.

Its going to be an incredibly chilling effect on the whole London tech scene. If Im going to start a company, Im not going to do it in London any more

A Government spokeswoman said: We are unambiguously pro-innovation and pro-privacy, however, we have made clear that companies should only implement end-to-end encryption if they can simultaneously prevent abhorrent child sexual abuse on their platforms.

The Online Safety Bill does not give Ofcom or the Government any powers to monitor users private messages. As a last resort, and only when stringent privacy safeguards have been met, the Online Safety Bill will enable Ofcom to direct companies to either use, or make best efforts to develop or source, technology to identify and remove illegal child sexual abuse content.

The Standard understands that some tech firms are holding meetings with Downing Street this week.

WhatsApp, Signal, and Element all say that if they are forced by Ofcom to install third-party software to scan users messages or to do it themselves, they will refuse to comply.

No-one, including WhatsApp, should have the power to read your personal messages, Will Cathcart, head of WhatsApp at Meta told The Standard.

Signal said it will build proxy servers to enable UK citizens to continue to communicate safely, the way women in Iran do, since encrypted messaging apps are banned there, while Elements said its open-source protocols will likely lead to citizens making their own alternative apps.

Last week, Wikipedia published an open letter asking the Government and Parliament to exempt public interest projects  such as Wikipedia  from the proposed Online Safety Bill.

The three messaging apps all told The Standard that the language relating to mass surveillance powers for identifying and removing child sexual abuse material (CSAM) was only added to the Online Safety Bill in September, but it is much more vague than the Investigatory Powers Act 2016, which at least contains checks and balances to protect the publics privacy and security when it comes to combating terrorism.

Do you really want your private messages spied on?

WhatsApp has been heavily promoting end-to-end encryption this week on the full-motion screens at Tottenham Court Road Tube station / Evening Standard

The Government and childrens charities claim paedophiles are using private messaging apps to groom children and share illegal content, completely unnoticed by service providers.

The tech industry, on the other hand, says protecting users privacy is key and that firms shouldnt be able to scan private messages sent by the public. They use a cybersecurity technology called end-to-end encryption in their messaging apps, which prevents anyone outside of the parties receiving messages from viewing them.

Ms Whittaker, a former US Federal Trade Commission (FTC) executive, took part in a debate on Channel 4 with former tech minister Damian Collins on Monday afternoon and said that she was troubled by the Governments confusing stance on breaking encryption.

Damian agreed that we cannot break encryption. He even admitted he uses Signal but, when I pressed him on changing the text in the bill, he said no, we cant do that  you just have to trust, she said.

It makes me believe that some of the people putting the provisions in the bill are actually aiming to undermine safety, security, and encryption, because otherwise theres a simple solution... just clarify that this provision will never be used to create a backdoor that would be used to threaten the UKs core infrastructure and set a precedent that will be copied by regimes across the world.

The Online Safety Bill concerns only online messages sent by UK citizens and residents, but not anything sent on messaging apps by law enforcement, the public sector, or emergency responders.

This is handy, given that The Standard understands that up to half of Government communications are still being sent over consumer apps like WhatsApp.

Signal says it is unimpressed by the Governments claim to be placing childrens safety at the heart of its need for mass surveillance of online messages. It cites a study by the Max-Plank Institute for the Study of Crime on a German law from 2008-2010, where the German government implemented mass scanning of all citizen data online and tracked IP addresses in a bid to help identify more suspects.

While this law was found to be unlawful, the statistics collected by German police found that having access to that huge amount of data for two years did not have a deterrent effect, did not assist in clearing up crimes, and did not increase convictions.

The UK has slashed early-intervention programmes by 50 per cent in the last decade. The UKs own investigatory review of child social care estimated that to fully fund child social care, you would need 2.6bn over the next four years. The Government chose to fund seven per cent of that, said Ms Whittaker.

You hear a lot of noise from politicians claiming that protecting children is most important to them but, if we look at evidence-based reports on protecting children, it is often absent or severely limited.

While Element chief executive and chief of technology Matthew Hodgson told The Standard, The Online Safety Bill is effectively giving the Government the remit to put a CCTV camera in everybody's bedrooms, and the way people use their WhatsApp today is pretty personal  people use messaging apps more than they communicate with people in person.

Element provides its encrypted run-your-own secure communications app solution to 30 government agencies around the world, including France, Germany, Luxemberg, as well as the US Department of Defense, the UKs Ministry of Defence, the US Navy, Nato, and Ukraines defence ministry.

Chilling effect on the whole London tech scene

Matthew Hodgson, the boss of UK encrypted messaging app Element, says the same open-source technology governments price in his app means citizens can easily make their own encrypted private messaging apps / Element

You would think that a British tech firm that works with governments wouldnt mind if private messages are scanned, but Mr Hodgson actually wishes he and others in the UK tech industry had spoken up sooner.

You cannot turn scanning on and off in an app or set certain degrees without introducing a mechanism that breaks end-to-end encryption: an attacker will simply find a way to turn on the scanning and exploit it, he explained.

God, I wish we had been a lot more vociferous. The legislation sounded so outlandish that I thought surely someone else would step up and shoot it down. We clearly should have been in the room but there was no-one in the UK tech industry represented on the security side.

Mr Hodgson says that the Government has not consulted with UK tech firms, only with huge multinational corporations and companies that want to sell software that scans messages, who are unsurprisingly telling lawmakers that it is possible to scan messages without breaking encryption. This is widely thought to be untrue.

The secure messaging app bosses believe that the Online Safety Bill started out as a way to target the likes of Facebook and others for failing to moderate their platforms and protect users, but the proposed legislation has turned into a monster that will have long-lasting negative impacts on the UK in ways that the lawmakers just dont understand.

Last week, the Government proposed a series of new amendments to the Online Safety Bill, which include the possibility of criminal liability for senior technology executives.

Its going to be an incredibly chilling effect on the whole London tech scene, Mr Hodgson told The Standard.

If Im going to start a company, Im not going to do it in London any more  Ill go somewhere else because theyre not going to lock me up if someone decides to do something horrible to someone else on my platform.

He says this is similar to Brazil, where officials have Facebook executives arrested every time they ignore a request from the authorities for information.

We need to preserve privacy and encryption. If the Online Safety Bill undermines that, the UK will become a laughing stock, a technology backwater. Half the world will point and laugh, and the other half will use it as a reason to undermine citizens privacy.
Head of the NATO military committee, Admiral Rob Bauer, is convinced that the actions of the Ukrainian military command regarding the counteroffensive deserve praise, and calls for refraining from comments in the spirit of disappointment in the pace of advance of Ukrainian troops.

So, at the request of the Interfax-Ukraine agency, at a briefing in Brussels on Monday, he commented on the situation on the battlefield.

This is a real war, where people die on a daily basis. It is difficult when you are in that to see your friends, your colleagues die, it is difficult to be shot with that intensity. And I think it is never easy, so we should support continue to support Ukraine because it is very difficult time for them, the head of the NATO military committee said.

We should not comment on Ukraine like they should go faster or its disaaponting they are not going fast. It is extremely difficult. This type of operation, and the way they do it is commendable. And I think they are for good reasons in some places cautious because you can burn a lot of forces if you wanna go through, so you need to find out the weak spots, what is the best position to try to get through, he added.

Bauer stated that a counteroffensive is always a difficult operation, and 90% of the personnel of the Russian army are located directly in Ukraine.

People should never think that this is an easy walk over [the barrier line], and it will never be. There is a considerable number of Russians in Ukraine, there are considerable defensive obstacles, sometimes its a couple of kilometers, sometimes its thirty kilometers deep, with mine fields, and serious obstacles, and there is a third line. So, to get through all of that, to reach basically the drain where there is no more defenses, in terms of infrastructure and mines, is a difficult-difficult operation for the Ukrainians, the admiral is convinced.

We saw in Normandy [France] in the second world war that it took to nine weeks for the allies to actually break through the defensive lines of the Germans. So, it is not a surprise that its not going fast, people should not talk about it like that, Bauer added.

The head of the NATO military committee also stated that it is very difficult to predict a war, because it involves two nations with thinking people, making plans, the other nation responding to those actions of that first nations, and that in two directions.

War is never easy to predict. What we see is the heroic fighting by the Ukrainians. I think the mental component in warfare, we knew it from the past, and see it in Ukraine, is extremely important. Ukrainians know what they are fighting for. The Russians dont have a clue what they are fighting for. That difference you can actually see on the battlefield when it comes to courage, persistence, when it comes to creativity, and the will to fight, he stressed.

Bauer also believes that 50 states are providing great assistance to Ukraine in this war with a significant amount of Western weapons and Western training.

If Ukraine losses this war, and this is not the end of instability, that is the start of more instability. As we know Russia want to get back to the 1997 borders, which includes three Baltic states, Poland, Slovakia, Hungary, Slovenia, and Bulgaria. That is unacceptable for us, And therefore, we have to realize that this war is not only about Ukraine, this is about much more, and we have to continue to support Ukraine for as long as necessary because we cannot let Russia win there, the admiral said.

In addition, the head of the NATO military committee noted that the allies are convinced that "the Russians will reconstitute." Therefore, the [defensive] plans [of NATO] are built not on the actual status of the Russian army, but on the status of the Russian army before they attacked Ukraine. And they will learn lessons from that war as well. So, we will continue to look at them as a serious threat, Bauer said.

We should never underestimate the Russians and their ability to bounce back as they have shown in history a couple of times. Yes, they will need some time to reconstitute and that is one of the reasons why , I think, it is acceptable for us to take a number of years to get where we need to go without changed posture and without changed capabilities, he said.

At the same time, Bauer expressed conviction that the most important thing for Ukraine is that we continue to support them for as long as necessary.
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The leadership of the "Ambulanta" National Trade Union Federation of Romania announces the continuation of the national protest started in November 2022 in the public ambulance services, without affecting the work of providing emergency medical assistance.

"The National Council of the 'Ambulanta' National Trade Union Federation in Romania has decided to continue the national protest that has been going on for more than seven months, for the following reasons: the refusal and disregard of former Prime Minister Nicolae-Ionel Ciuca for the national protest triggered for solving the problems the public ambulance services are confronted with, and his failure to meet with FNSAR representatives in order to solve the problems; the urgency of the meeting with the current Prime Minister Marcel Ciolacu, a request made by the FNSAR leadership after taking office as Prime Minister," says a press release the trade union organisation sent to AGERPRES on Monday.

The FNSAR mentions that the problems submitted to the Prime Minister are related to organisation, development, equipment and, last but not least, rights corresponding to the specific activity of the staff of the public ambulance services.

"The decision to continue with further trade union actions or to cease trade union actions in the public ambulance services will be taken depending on the results of the meeting with the Prime Minister of Romania, Marcel Ciolacu, and the members of the Government," the release also says.
Ukraine to receive several dozens of Leopard 1 tanks from Germany, Denmark in coming weeks  Pistorius

German Defense Minister Boris Pistorius has announced the transfer of another batch of Leopard 1 tanks to Ukraine soon as well as the supply of additional IRIS-T air defense systems.

In the coming weeks, Ukraine will receive dozens of Leopard 1 A5 battle tanks from Germany and Denmark. In addition, in May alone a new EUR 2.7-billion package of assistance was prepared that includes additional urgently needed weapons such as new IRIS-T SLM air defense systems, he said in an interview with Rzeczpospolita.

The minister also noted that Germany currently provides second largest military assistance to Ukraine, financial support within the EU, and trains Ukrainian military.
The Minister of Education, Ligia Deca, met with the Secretary of State in the Tunisian Ministry of Foreign Affairs, Mounir Ben Rjiba, and the ambassador of this country in Romania, Raja Jhinaoui Ben Ali, with whom he discussed the reform of the education system and strengthening the partnership between the two states.

"The Tunisian authorities are extremely pleased with the quality of the educational act in Romania, as a result multiple partnerships were concluded at the level of higher education. A sign of appreciation is also represented by the more than 700 young people from Tunisia who study in our country, biomedical sciences, medicine and dentistry being the fields most accessed by them", Deca wrote on Facebook.

During the meeting, the strengthening of the partnership between the two states was highlighted, so that the exchange of practices would be successful, and the young people from the two countries would benefit from the best international experiences. AGERPRES
The Schengen area will be stronger when Romania will be a full member thereof, Romanian Foreign Minister Luminita Odobescu said on Monday.

She attended, at the Representation of the European Commission in Bucharest, a news conference marking the taking over by Spain of the rotating presidency of the EU Council for the second half of the year.

She thanked the representatives of Spain for their clear commitment to the Schengen file, adding that the enlargement of the Schengen Area should remain a key element of their schedule.

She also spoke of a joint assessment with the European Parliament and the European Commission, saying that the Schengen area will be stronger when Romania will be a full member thereof.

Romania, said Odobescu, is working with the Spanish presidency, having already discussed in detail both with the ambassador and with her counterpart and other ministers how to progress with this essential file in the coming months.

The minister added that she does not want to give a clear term, because it is about unanimity and Romania's objective is obviously to succeed in reaching a consensus, after winning the support of the European Commission, European Parliament and a majority of the EU member states

Odobescu added that Romania has achieved its objectives and is meeting all the criteria required for the accession process.

Additionally, she said, Romania has been working with the European Commission to show once again what is actually recognised that Romania is a security provider, that it protects not only its border, but also the European Union's, having worked with the European Commission to show examples of good practices.

About the dialogue with Austria, who voted against Romania's accession to the Schengen area, the Romanian minister mentioned an action plan to prove what is actually very clear, that Romania is a credible partner, a supplier of security and an active partner in the protection of the external borders of the European Union.

In his turn, Spanish ambassador in Bucharest Jose Antonio Hernandez Perez-Solorzano said that the subject of Romania and Bulgaria's accession to Schengen area will be placed on the agenda of the Justice and Home Affairs (JHA) council meeting most likely this fall.

He said the inclusion of Romania and Bulgaria into the Schengen area is a priority of the Spanish presidency of the European Council, adding that Spain is acting like an honest mediator.

Spain, he added, has to bring the member states to a common denominator, with support from the European Commission, especially within the Justice and Home Affairs (JHA)council. He said that the subject could feature on the agenda of the JHA council meeting this October, but October is not a deadline. Spain, he said, will intensify dialogue in order to reach a consensus before that date.
Four lorries carrying 51 tonnes of waste were denied entry into Romania at the Bors II and Nadlac II border checkpoints.

"Border police officers from the Bors II and Nadlac II border crossing points, together with the Bihor and Arad County National Environmental Guard and the Arad National Consumer Protection Authority, did not allow entry into Romania of four lorries loaded with over 51 tonnes of waste, for which the drivers could not present the required importation papers," the Border Police report.

Bihor and Arad border police officers checked the four lorries driven by Romanian citizens, June 30 - July 1.

According to the cargo manifests, they were shipping used tyres and computers, plastic materials, various cargo from commercial companies in Hungary and the UK to companies in Romania.

"There being suspicions about the legality of the shipments, the border police requested authorised support from the representatives of the Bihor and Arad County National Environmental Guard and the representatives of the Bihor and Arad National Consumer Protection Authority. The checks revealed that the trucks were loaded with 51,160 kilograms of waste, for which the drivers did not present the necessary importation papers."

Consequently, the four lorries were denied entry into Romania.
The Ministry of Finance (MF) borrowed, on Monday, 380 million RON from the banks, through an issue of benchmark state bonds, with a residual maturity of 47 months and an average yield of 6.68% per year, according to data published by the National Bank of Romania (BNR).

The nominal value of Monday's issue was 500 million RON, and the banks subscribed 460 million RON.

An additional auction is scheduled for Tuesday, through which the state wants to attract another 75 million RON at the yield set on Monday for the bonds.

The Ministry of Finance (MF) planned, in July 2023, loans from commercial banks in the amount of 4 billion RON, to which the amount of 600 million RON can be added through additional sessions of non-competitive offers, related to bond auctions.

The total amount, of 4.6 billion RON, is 1.88 billion RON less than the one that was scheduled in June, of 6.48 billion RON, and will be intended for refinancing the public debt and financing the budget deficit.AGERPRES
Romania might join the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) in three to four years, as the required accession time depends on the speed whereby it will adopt the recommendations of the international organization, Secretary of State with the Foreign Affairs Ministry responsible for Romania's OECD accession process Luca Niculescu declared on Monday.

"Romania's OECD accession process has already started. In June next year we will start negotiations. (...) When will Romania effectively join the OECD depends on the recommendations the organization will make, on the speed whereby Romania will adopt certain recommendations. There are European countries that joined in three years, such as Lithuania. I think we will join somewhere in three to four years. This process is a catalyst for the changes we need to make. For example, we all want a better administration in the country. Then, other reforms are needed in other areas too," Niculescu told the Franco-Romanian Business Forum organized by the Chamber of Commerce and Industry of France in Romania (CCIFER).

The senior official also emphasized that the governance of state-owned companies is key in the accession process.

"State-owned companies must be transparent and managed by competent people. The tools the OECD provides are related to the environment. The environment will definitely be another strong chapter. Other files too could be more complex, such as capital flows, the capital market," Niculescu explained, noting that various expert evaluation committees must also have their say on the matter.

Luca Niculescu mentioned that Romania must set up a select parliamentary committee made up of representatives of all the political parties in Parliament, tasked with speeding up the accession process.

"We have a roadmap defined, an action sheet, and we will travel this way in the best - and hopefully fastest - possible manner. We are sure that our efforts will be taken into account at their fair value by evaluators. Let each country join according to its own merits," the Secretary of State pointed out.
The projects and programs carried out by the Hunedoara County Council (CJ) for the protection and promotion of historical monuments in the county, included in the UNESCO heritage, were presented on Monday to several volunteers, from eight countries, including Romania, enrolled in the International School for Heritage, Culture and Art Constantin Brancusi, organized under the patronage of the National Commission of Romania for UNESCO.

The 31 young people, between the ages of 18 and 32, visited the UNESCO sites in the county for three days, and on Monday they met with the leadership of the Hunedoara District Court.

The UNESCO heritage of Hunedoara was included, this year, in the UNESCO international campaign dedicated to volunteers interested in protecting and promoting the historical values of the world. Starting from Saturday, July 1, the volunteers got familiar with the objectives of Hunedoara County, registered on the UNESCO world heritage list, during the research and documentation workshops, as well as the field visits scheduled by the organizers.

"The meeting with the organizers, with the representatives of the National Institute of Heritage and with the young volunteers was beneficial to both parties. I spoke to them about the importance of the heritage we own, about the achievements and projects so far in terms of protecting the Dacian citadels registered on the UNESCO list, about the intentions we have regarding their enhancement, as well as about the care we take for all the historical monuments we own on the territory of Hunedoara County. I also believe that following this working visit, the young volunteers will - they have charged the positive energy of these places and will become real promoters of the rich historical heritage that we have in Hunedoara county," declared the chairman of Hunedoara County Council (CJ), Laurentiu Nistor.

The young volunteers present in this program were selected by the Maria Foundation for UNESCO to participate in the seminars and field visits that are taking place for the second time in Romania and include, for the first time, the county of Hunedoara.

The most important monuments in Hunedoara county included in the UNESCO List are the Dacian fortresses in the Orastie Mountains, among them the former capital of Dacia, Sarmizegetusa Regia. A conservation, restoration and enhancement project of the UNESCO archaeological site is underway here, the value of the funding obtained by CJ Hunedoara through Romania's National Recovery and Resilience Plan (PNRR) being 11.2 million RON.AGERPRES
CHICAGO  A 1 a.m. shooting at a party in downtown St. Louis kills one and injures nearly a dozen. Gunmen open fire during a fight near Florida's Hollywood Beach, injuring nine, including a 1-year-old. Bursts of gunfire at a Sweet 16 party in Dadeville, Alabama, kill four and wound more than 30.

What these and other recent mass shootings share in common is they all involve suspects in their teens, highlighting what can be a deadly mix of teenage bravado and impulsiveness with access to guns.

The days when many teens opted to fight out disagreements with fists seem quaint by comparison.

"I remember when I was a child and we had fights  somebody got a black eye or a broken nose and (they) lived to tell about it," St. Louis Mayor Tishaura Jones told reporters after the June 18 shooting.

Reaching for a gun is the default these days for some teens who are as quick to take offense as to pull a trigger, agreed Rodney Phillips, a 50-year-old former Chicago Black Disciples leader who works with gang members nationwide to tamp down festering beefs.

"Now, the first thing out of their mouths is, 'I'm gonna kill you.' It's the brazenness of (the shootings), the reckless abandon, doing it in public places," Phillips said. "It wasn't like that when I came up."

The aunt of 17-year-old Makao Moore, who died in the St. Louis shooting, said teens too often express anger with a gun.

"If we don't figure it out, it's going to continue to happen," Sharonda Moore told the St. Louis Post-Dispatch.

Among the solutions to reducing teen violence, Jones said, was to keep expanding programs offering young people activities in safe spaces, including movie and music nights.

More firearms, and even more powerful firearms, have enabled teens, or anyone wielding a gun, to maim and kill more people in single incidents.

A handgun fired at the April Sweet 16 party  in a dance studio crammed with up to 60 people  was altered to shoot more rapidly, Alabama Special Agent Jess Thornton told a court hearing.

"Witnesses said it sounded like a machine gun," the investigator said. Afterward, 89 bullet casings littered the scene and there was "blood everywhere."

Bullets riddled walls and shattered glass at the shooting in a fifth-floor office in St. Louis. Police released photos of two young men clutching apparent AK-style rifles. One detained suspect was 17.

In many cities, illegal guns are never too far out of reach.

In areas with high gang activity, some guns are stolen from homes, gun stores or trains. To lower the risk of being stopped by police while in possession of guns, gang members typically hide them nearby, tucking the weapons into walls and inside tire rims, he said.

Powerful firearms became more readily available starting in the 1980s, before which knives and low-caliber pistols were often the weapons of choice by teens who killed, said James Alan Fox, a professor of criminology, law and public policy at Northeastern University in Boston.

"With guns, teenagers tend to be trigger happy," he said. "They'll pull the trigger without fully thinking about the consequences."

According to FBI data, about 90% of homicides in 2019 by teens 15 to 17 involved firearms, up from around 60% in 1980. Fox, though, said the rise in homicides by teens hasn't correlated directly with the rising numbers of guns.

Just how many guns are around and available to teens is impossible to know. The Switzerland-based Small Arms Survey estimated in 2018 that there were some 390 million guns held by civilians in the U.S., more than those held by civilians in the other top 25 countries combined.

Investigators in St. Louis, Alabama and Florida didn't immediately suggest motives for the respective shootings. But indications are tensions rose suddenly in each.
Commander of the Ground Forces of Ukraine, Colonel-General Oleksandr Syrsky has announced the advancement of Ukrainian defenders on the flanks in Bakhmut direction.

"Bakhmut direction. There is advancement of our forces on the flanks and effective destruction of the Russian forces. Here is an example of work on an enemy tank using self-propelled howitzer M-109 from the 17th Separate Tank Brigade. Also, the fighters of this brigade effectively attacked a Russian mortar. Glory to Ukraine! We continue to destroy the Russian forces," he said on the Telegram channel and attached a video recording of work of the Ukrainian defenders.
Tony-nominated playwright Neil LaBute has a reputation for pushing cultural buttons. His latest provocation, Safe Space, will have its world premiere at the ninth annual LaBute New Theater Festival, to which he has not only lent his name but also contributes a new work each year.

Presented by St. Louis Actors Studio, the festival running July 7-23 at the Gaslight Theater showcases one-act plays by emerging professional and high school playwrights. The lineup, selected from hundreds of submissions worldwide, also includes Craig Baileys The Mockingbirds Nest, JB Heaps One Night in the Many Deaths of Sonny Liston, Amy Toftes Da Vincis Cockroach and Bryn McLaughlins The Blind Hem.

William Roth, founder and artistic director of St. Louis Actors Studio, began discussing LaButes contribution and how it might take shape in January.

Neil is something else, Roth says. You never know what youre going to get from him.

Safe Space involves an encounter between an African American man and a white woman in a theater thats hosting a blackout night intended mostly for Black patrons. As the two wait for the play to begin, they argue about whether she should be in the audience as the door opens to other racially sensitive topics.

LaBute, who is perhaps best known for the play The Shape of Things and the film In the Company of Men, says he was intrigued by the idea of blackout nights and how characters participating in such an event might interact.

It makes for an interesting dramatic conflict, he says. To have two people who are actually in the space, talking about it. And so I started just playing around with it.

Writer McLaughlin, who has acted in several Actors Studio productions, including the recent Uncle Vanya, says The Blind Hem is her first play. The play involves a professor and his relationship with a former student.

Actually, when I first started writing, I did model the college student after myself, she says. Anybody who knows me would probably see a lot of her characteristics and recognize that they come from me. But one of the things that Ive done over time is, Ive gone back and tried to separate myself from her.

Any similarities to David Mamets Oleanna, which also focuses on a professor and a student, are coincidental, McLaughlin says.

I havent read Oleanna, actually, she said. So I dont know it.

Although McLaughlin hasnt taken any formal playwriting classes, I really like the communication that happens between a playwright and an actor, she says. I went through a huge Tennessee Williams phase for a while, and I think you can see that in some of the writing in The Blind Hem, as far as I wanted it to feel sort of dreamlike.

LaBute says that although there are no plans to produce Safe Space beyond the festival, thats definitely a possibility. Particularly because, as a screenwriter, he has been impacted by the ongoing Writers Guild of America strike.

The one thing about these strikes is, thats a great time to write plays, he says. So maybe well get the benefit of that and see a bunch of new plays.

What LaBute New Theater Festival  When July 7-23; performances at 8 p.m. Thursday-Saturday, 3 p.m. Sunday  Where Gaslight Theater, 358 North Boyle Avenue  How much $25-$30  More info stlas.org
ST. LOUIS  Two teenage boys escaped early Monday morning from a state juvenile detention facility in the Old North St. Louis neighborhood, police said.

A police spokesman, Sgt. Charles Wall, said a window was damaged and no injuries were reported in the incident at the Hogan Street Regional Youth Center, 1839 Hogan Street. He said the escapees were ages 16 and 17.

Wall said the incident took place shortly before 12:30 a.m. Police did not release further details. The state Division of Youth Services, which operates the facility, did not respond to a request for comment.

The incident followed eight escapes or attempted escapes at the facility between January 2020 and last November.
RIVERVIEW  More than half the officers of a north St. Louis County village police department resigned after officials cut their pay, leaving residents concerned and confused about their public safety services.

Six police officers quit, saying Mayor Mike Cornell and village trustees in May cut $8,000 from officers pay without notice. The officers say the move violated state labor laws and shows a lack of respect for police.

This is an unfortunate situation that has been going on for months, the group said in a prepared statement. As police officers, we want to protect the community that we love dearly. But the Mayor and the Board of Trustees have created a hostile work environment and do not value us as police officers which is therefore putting our community in danger.

Cornell, the village mayor, said the previous village board had approved an $8,000 raise shortly before leaving office. When the new board came in, they determined it was not appropriate, he said.

Cornell added that three of the officers were under investigation, including one who refused to wear a bulletproof police vest and another who threatened a 12-year-old child by pulling his gun halfway out of its holster and cursing at the boy.

The mayor said he is trying to clean up corruption in the village police department. Weapons and money have been stolen from the evidence locker, he said, and a vehicle and trailer were taken from a resident. The trailer is still parked in the village lot, he said, with a Village of Riverview license plate now on it.

Three of the villages police officers did not resign, Cornell said. He hopes to hire two more on Monday, and, if I predict this correctly, within two weeks we will have a full police force heading forward.

Residents of Riverview, a hilly village of roughly 2,400 overlooking the Mississippi River, were disappointed about the resignations. One resident, 70-year-old Merle Dickerson, blamed the mayor.

Its a damn shame they dont want to pay police right, said Dickerson, who has lived in Riverview since 2004.

Pamela Jackson, 63, hadnt heard about the resignations. She feels safe in her home when she sees Riverview officers patrolling her neighborhood, and was concerned about safety.
In the midst of the storms that punished St. Louis Saturday afternoon and night, a woman sat in her car that had been crushed by a tree. She was dying.

Neighbors tried calling 911. They called for 30 minutes, they said, but could not get through. The 33-year-old woman, who had recently moved to a new apartment in The Grove district, died in her parked car behind the apartment building.

On Monday, police identified the victim as Katherine Coen of the 4100 block of Manchester.

This is not a new problem. This has been going on for years. When you call 911, you almost never get through. You either get a busy signal or you get put on hold, said Helen Petty, who owns the Chopshop hair salon on the other side of the alley.

Petty said her employees called her around 4:10 p.m. Saturday to say water was coming in and that they had lost power at the shop, which faces Manchester Avenue. The tree that took out the stores power was also the one that hit the womans car, Petty said.

By the time Petty arrived at 4:45 p.m., the fire department was working to get the woman out of the car. But neighbors told her they had tried frantically to reach the emergency number for a half-hour before that, to no avail.

One man who runs a neighboring restaurant told her that the victim was responsive when he and others began calling 911. That man was not available for comment Saturday or Sunday.

The city has had problems with its 911 system for years.

Police records obtained by the Post-Dispatch in 2021 revealed that the St. Louis police departments 911 dispatchers were delayed in responding to nearly one-third of all emergency calls made in the city in 2020. Staffing shortages were blamed, and interviews with former and current employees showed they believed the department did not act on memos calling for the hiring and retention of workers to be prioritized.

Since then, the problems have only worsened.

In 2021, St. Louis Mayor Tishaura O. Jones pledged to reduce 911 delays in the city. But in 2022, 40% of callers were put on hold for at least 10 seconds, and some waited 10 minutes or more.

The minimum industry standard, as established by the National Emergency Number Association is for 90% of 911 calls to be answered within 10 seconds.

The last time I checked, it was close to 50% of the 911 calls were put on hold, said Alderwoman Cara Spencer. Its truly, truly terrifying.

Theyve been kicking the can on this issue for far too long.

Officials in the mayors office and the Department of Public Safety did not answer requests for comment.

Spencer said the city should combine 911 systems for police, fire and emergency medical services, so that all three types of calls can go into the same system in the same central office. And the office needs to be fully staffed, she said.

There are times when you have one or two dispatchers for entire half of the city, and that is truly inadequate, she said.

It is nothing short of terrifying when you call 911 and you get a recorded message saying All operators are busy, please stay on the line. Someone will be with you shortly, she said. I know it by heart.

Spencer said she has nothing but sympathy for the 911 dispatchers who work in a very stressful environment. They do the best they can, she said, but the work can be overwhelming.

Petty said, I place the blame with our governor who just signed a line item veto to fund the 911 system in our area.

On Friday, Missouri Gov. Mike Parson cut $23 million from the state budget that would have paid for new police and 911 facilities in St. Louis.

With this budget, our administration has done the right thing  the conservative thing  to make strategic investments and maintain responsible spending, he said at the time.
JEFFERSON CITY  Gov. Mike Parsons administration wants to open child care facilities for the kids of state employees who work overnight shifts.

The move is aimed at shoring up job vacancies within state government by removing potential barriers to parents who might choose other jobs when their children are young.

Under a request for proposals from potential nighttime operators, the governors Office of Administration is looking to establish a list of potential contractors who can provide secure child care services between 5:30 p.m. and 5:30 a.m. Monday through Saturday.

The provider would be located near state facilities that operate overnight shifts, including state prisons, mental health facilities and youth detention facilities.

Coverage would be for infants to age 12.

Included in the plan is the possibility that a state agency could assist with startup costs. An overall cost estimate was not available.

The service is among a number of steps being taken by the Parson administration to address a state government workforce plagued by vacant positions.

Workers have seen wage increases of more than 15% over the past two years in an attempt to address high turnover, particularly in residential care facilities, prisons and mental health treatment centers. In some divisions, turnover was as high as 40%, compared to an industry standard of around 10%.

Child care has been a priority for Parson this year.

In February, the governor announced a program aimed at expanding the number of child care providers in the state.

Access to quality child care for Missouri families is critical to achieving our workforce development goals, Parson said at the time.

A major part of the problem stems from the closure of many child care facilities during the pandemic.

The Missouri Department of Elementary and Secondary Education said prior to the pandemic there were over 4,400 regulated child care programs in the state. At the peak of the pandemic there were only 3,300 providers.

The number has since increased, but there is still a need for child care in many areas of the state, DESE officials said.

According to the Missouri Chamber of Commerce, the states economy lost out on $1.3 billion last year due to a lack of child care.

A December 2022 national survey of working parents by the business group ReadyNation found that about two-thirds of parents of infants and toddlers reported being late to work or having to leave work early because of inadequate child care. And 85% of parents surveyed said problems with child care hurt their work effort or their time available for work.

In January, Parson asked lawmakers to approve three new child care tax credit programs for providers and businesses. The tax credits were to help providers improve facilities, support employers who support their workers with child care assistance and allow more child care workers to receive a pay increase.

The Legislature closed out its session in May without having approved the proposal.

But, they did sign off on a plan that will ask voters next year if lawmakers should be allowed to zero out personal and real property taxes for child care centers.

Placing the proposed constitutional amendment on the ballot represented a small win for those pushing to address child care staffing shortages, waiting lists and high prices in Missouri.

Chris Moreland, spokesman for the Office of Administration, said the agency did not have an estimate of how many workers might use the overnight services.
ST. LOUIS  One of the states highest security lockups for juveniles and young adults has doubled the number of residents it serves but continues to fall short of full capacity, which child welfare leaders have said is needed for best outcomes.

Hogan Street Regional Youth Center is supposed to be based on the so-called Missouri model of care, which has people committed to state custody live together in small, community-based cottages instead of prison settings. The model prioritizes therapy over punishment.

A recent in-depth Post-Dispatch report signaled that the Division of Youth Services, or DYS, wasnt meeting the basic goals of the award-winning model at some of its facilities like Hogan Street in Old North St. Louis. Residents said they hadnt been outside in months, if not longer. Former employees, including one who was badly beaten, said the facility was out of control.

At or near full staff, Hogan Street is supposed to operate with three groups of about 10 people living together in separate dorms. They are supposed to hold each other accountable with minimal assistance from encouraging staff. But Hogan Street operations were particularly hit hard by staff shortages during and after the COVID-19 pandemic. Program operations fell to just one group, restricting the ability to move residents around if they needed to be separated.

In its latest budget request, DYS said annual turnover at the agency was 48% statewide. Officials last week said Hogan Street now has two groups of residents living at the facility and going to school there, thanks to better hiring.

DYS is continuing to make progress, Baylee Watts, a spokeswoman for the agency, said by email.

She said state pay increases for front-line staff helped. She said theyve also been able to fill vacant positions through the agencys website and with recruitment assistance from Better Family Life. She said DYS has been attending community events and visiting several St. Louis area colleges.

We are very satisfied with our improved ability to recruit/hire, and feel good about the current trajectory, Watts added. The influx of staff generates a lot of positive energy for the program.

Hogan Street, which had several escapes in recent years, is still far from being back to full capacity. One of three youth supervisor positions is filled, as well as 22 of 34 youth service worker positions and two of six education specialist positions.

Experienced staff are not being brought in from other regions of Missouri to help bolster the St. Louis program and train new employees because of staffing challenges statewide and the higher security level at Hogan.

Watts said Hogan Street management and seasoned team members have been alternating shifts to train new staff on site. She said there is also regional training for new employees.

Asked what programming is being offered in the next month, Watts said several community activities have been scheduled or taken place since spring, including recreation and group discussions with representatives of Fathers and Families Support, as well as events with Prison Performing Arts, The Rotary Club, St. Louis County Libraries and New Roots Urban Farm.

She said DYS also encourages family members to participate in biweekly visits at the facility and phone calls twice a week.

On Friday, Missouri Gov. Mike Parson, a Republican, signed off on a state budget that includes $7.2 million in new spending to replace Hogan Street, which has hunkered inside the former St. Liborius Catholic Church school since 1974.

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Following the end of the federal public health emergency, around 26,000 Missourians receiving food assistance are once again subject to work requirements to maintain their benefits.

If the state does not receive the proper paperwork from participants, many could lose benefits beginning in October for the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, commonly known as food stamps.

The federal government partially suspended a rule in March 2020 that sets a limit on the time adults without children can receive SNAP benefits, unless they meet work requirements or qualify for an exemption.

But those time limits were reinstated as of July 1 for all states that do not have a waiver with the federal government allowing them to keep suspending the rule. Missouri did not apply for a waiver.

Without proof of work, training or an exemption, those adults can only receive SNAP benefits for three months out of every three years.

If the proof is not sent to (Family Support Division) by September 30, 2023, you could lose your SNAP benefit, according to Missouri Department of Social Services website.

Gina Plata-Nino, deputy director for SNAP at the Washington, D.C.-based Food Research & Action Center, said she is incredibly concerned about the effects nationwide of the time-limit reinstatement  including for participants who cannot consistently secure 20 hours of work per week, or struggle to amass and submit the proper paperwork to prove they do.

Time limits dont increase economic development or the workforce, but instead are more harmful, Plata-Nino said, because these individuals are still struggling to meet those 20 hours (of work per week).

The only difference is that now they dont have SNAP benefits.

Burden on participants to provide proof of work

The group of SNAP recipients affected is able-bodied adults between 18 to 49 years old who do not have dependents  around 28,000 people, according to the Department of Social Services.

They will need to prove that they work or participate in qualifying training activities for 80 hours a month, or meet an exemption, which includes disability, pregnancy and illness.

The time limit rule has been in place since the federal government enacted sweeping welfare changes in the mid-1990s, which were framed as helping move participants from government aid to work and encouraging self-sufficiency. The rule was suspended during the 2008 Great Recession and during COVID-19 public health emergency.

The public health emergency ended in May, and July is the first month the time limits for those adults on SNAP will be reinstated.

Missouri initially tried to reinstate the time limit much sooner  in the summer of 2020.

But state officials walked that back after concern about possible penalties from the federal government for resuming the rules before the end of the public health emergency, said Adam Crumbliss, DSS deputy director.

Now, 14 states and Washington, D.C., have waivers with the federal government allowing them to continue suspending the requirements, said a spokesperson for Food and Nutrition Services  but Missouri is not among them.

DSS mailed letters to qualifying adults on SNAP in April and June of this year, Crumbliss said, notifying them of the reinstated time limit.

Some of those adults who fall under the restrictions may have joined the program since March 2020 and never dealt with the process.

Those who enrolled in the SNAP  programs during that time are likely to be unfamiliar with these requirements, Jennifer Tidball, then-acting director of the social services department, said in the 2020 press release.

SNAP participants in the affected group will need to contact the Department of Social Services to provide proof they are meeting the work requirements  online, in person, by fax or mail  or to prove they meet an exemption.

Bureaucratic barriers

Individuals who believe they qualify for an exemption can call the state or go in-person to a resource center, Crumbliss said.

An applicant calling the social services call center, though  for instance, a disabled SNAP recipient seeking an exemption  could wait hours to connect with a representative.

The average time for a caller to be connected to an agent, Crumbliss said, was just under two hours in May and June for the tier that includes general SNAP-related questions. (The wait times were 1 hour 48 minutes in May and 1 hour and 55 minutes in June, up to June 27, Crumbliss said.)

Securing an exemption can be difficult, said Plata-Nino, because it requires substantial verification  potentially leaving some of the most vulnerable populations, such as disabled individuals, without benefits.

Weve seen time and time again, that many disabled individuals, particularly those who have mental or cognitive disabilities, she said, have a difficult time proving their disabilities or speaking to the agency to say Im struggling with this.

Participants need to gather all the relevant information, such as doctors notes, and submit it by a deadline, or risk losing benefits and needing to reapply.

Other SNAP participants not seeking exemptions could still lose benefits for administrative reasons.

Some low-wage workers may not have consistent hours. Some work, like fee-for-service construction work or gig economy jobs like Uber driving, may not have clearly quantified hours easy to prove to a state agency.

Participants can receive three months of benefits without meeting the requirements during the period July 2023 to June 2026.

That means Missourians currently enrolled in SNAP unable to prove their work or training 20 hours per week, or exemption, could lose benefits beginning in October.

The last time SNAP work requirements were reinstated after a pause, in 2016 in Missouri, research found that SNAP participation fell while employment rates did not substantially change.

A study from the DC-based think tank Urban Institute in 2021 examined reinstatement of the rules after the recession, including using Missouri as a case study.

Researchers found the time limit does not substantially increase employment, but does substantially reduce SNAP participation. Four months after the limit was reinstated in Missouri, the Urban Institute found, SNAP participation in the cohort of those subject to the restrictions had fallen by 39 percentage points. There was no statistically significant effect on employment.

A study from earlier this year, in the American Economic Journal, found that instating work requirements reduces SNAP participation among that group of adults by 53% in the 18 months after being instated.

Unlike the large effects on program participation, those researchers found, effects on employment are limited.

In other social services realms, participants dont always know of new work requirements: After Arkansas adopted work requirements for Medicaid in 2018, the majority did not report qualifying activities to the state and thousands were kicked off.

Age for time limits to be raised to 54

Other work requirements tweaks are on the horizon nationally. Later this year, a SNAP-related provision of the federal debt ceiling agreement will go into effect. Phased in over several years, that provision will raise the age of adults subject to the work requirements from 49 up to 54.

The Center for Budget and Policy Priorities estimated around 11,000 could be affected in Missouri. The Department of Social Services did not provide their own estimate and said they are working with the federal government to implement the new rule.

The debt ceiling agreement also added new exemptions  for veterans, people experiencing homelessness, and adults transitioning from foster care. But advocates worry the difficulty of navigating through the red tape to secure an exemption will continue to prove overly burdensome, or insurmountable, for those who may need the food assistance most.

Doubling down on the existing, failed SNAP work-reporting requirement for adults aged 18-49 without children, CBPP president Sharon Parrott said in a statement, this provision ignores the strong evidence that it takes food assistance away from large numbers of people without increasing employment or earnings.
DirecTV removed TV station owner Nexstar Media Groups network and local community programming from its satellite, cable and streaming systems as they failed to reach a new distribution agreement, the companies said on Sunday.

Nexstar, the largest local TV station owner in the U.S., said in a statement that satellite provider DirecTV rejected its offer to extend the current distribution agreement to Oct. 31, adding that their Los Angeles, Chicago, Philadelphia, San Francisco and Denver markets have been affected.

In the St. Louis market, Nexstar owns KTVI (Channel 2) and KPLR (Channel 11). Both are currently unavailable on DirecTV.

DirecTV in a separate statement said Nexstar demanded more than double the current viewer fees from them for the same content, leading it to losing rights to offer Nexstars network partners ABC, CBS, NBC, FOX and CW stations in select markets, as well as the cable news service NewsNation.

Nexstar continues to manipulate loopholes to exceed the 39% national ownership cap, and has made public statements lauding its 68% reach across all U.S. TV households, DirecTV said.

Both companies added that they are in discussions to return Nexstar programming to DirecTV and are hopeful for a quick resolution.

DirecTV, which is 70% owned by AT&T, had sued the Irving, Texas based Nexstar in March, claiming it violated antitrust law by scheming to drive up retransmission fees for stations broadcasting the four major networks.

The lawsuit sought an order blocking Nexstar from allegedly colluding with Mission Broadcasting Inc. and White Knight Broadcasting Inc. in fee negotiations with DirecTV.
WICHITA, Kan.  A Florissant man has been arrested in connection with a shooting that left 11 people injured early Sunday in Wichita, Kansas.

The 31-year-old man, not yet named because he has not been charged, was arrested on suspicion of aggravated criminal battery.

Police say he was one of several shooters who opened fire just before 1 a.m. Sunday inside the City Nightz club in downtown Wichita, according to police. Seven people were initially listed as injured by gunfire, and two others were trampled in the rush to escape.

Two additional shooting victims arrived at hospitals later Sunday with minor injuries, Officer Juan Rebolledo said. All of the victims are expected to survive, he said.

Shots were fired from at least four guns inside the club, police said. Four guns were recovered and police were working to determine if they were the weapons used by the shooters.

The gunshot victims  seven men and two women  ranged in age from 22 to 34, police said. The two people trampled were a 30-year-old woman and a 31-year-old male.

Detective Chris Merceau said at a news conference Sunday morning that police have been called about a dozen times this year to the nightclub, including for a report of aggravated battery and a drive-by shooting on May 21.

He said police met with the clubs owner after the May shooting and discussed the importance of using electronic wands to detect weapons on patrons and surveillance cameras. He said investigators will work to determine if any of those recommendations were followed.

The club has not returned messages left by The Associated Press.

Wichita is a city of nearly 400,000 people about 200 miles southwest of Kansas City, Missouri.
President of Ukraine Volodymyr Zelenskyy has ordered the Foreign Ministry of Ukraine to call the Georgian ambassador to Kyiv and express protest to him in connection with the ongoing imprisonment of former President of Georgia Mikheil Saakashvili.

The Ukrainian president also instructed the Foreign Ministry to invite the ambassador to leave Ukraine within 48 hours for consultations.

"Right now, Russia is killing Ukrainian citizen Mikheil Saakashvili with the hands of the Georgian authorities. We have repeatedly called on official Tbilisi to stop this mockery and agree on the return of Saakashvili to Ukraine. Our partners in coordination with Ukraine also offered various rescue options. Today I instructed the Foreign Ministry to call the Georgian ambassador to Ukraine, express a strong protest to him and offer him to leave Ukraine within 48 hours for consultations with his capital," the head of state said on the Telegram channel on Monday.

"Once again I urge the Georgian authorities to transfer Ukrainian citizen Mikheil Saakashvili to Ukraine for the necessary treatment and care. And I urge our partners to turn, not to ignore this situation and save this person. No authorities in Europe have the right to execute people, life is a basic European value," he said.

Earlier on Monday, a video of Saakashvili's interrogation was published on which it can be seen that he has lost much weight.
JEFFERSON CITY  Holes at the bottom of concrete highway barriers could help small animals find safer passage across Missouri roadways.

State road crews have already installed the 7.5 inch by 15 inch openings on one section of a Missouri highway: along the newly constructed Interstate 49 in southwest Missouri, which contains 70 modified barriers across 5 miles of road.

But more barrier openings are possible. State officials believe the modifications reduce environmental impacts in a cost-effective way.

The barriers cost about $30 each to install, adding $2,100 in cost to the $59 million Interstate 49 project, according to a department presentation.

Melissa Scheperle, environmental and historic preservation manager for MoDOT, said the modified barriers are being considered where current barriers are being replaced.

Scheperle said there are no sites in the St. Louis area under consideration for the modified barriers, but said the department is considering the crossings in the Springfield area along Interstate 44 and on U.S. 65.

The initiative comes as other states and the federal government increasingly emphasize wildlife crossings as a way to reduce vehicle-animal collisions and better protect animal populations.

Missouri is considered a high-risk state for vehicle-animal collisions, with an estimated 1 in 76 chance of an animal-involved claim, according to an analysis by State Farm.

Scheperle said the crossings are a way for Missouri to create safer passages for small animals. Other states have examined crossings over or under highways for larger animals.

It was a way for MoDOT to look at wildlife crossings on a Missouri scale, Scheperle said. We really dont have in Missouri large wildlife that have known migratory patterns like they do out West.

She said in addition to helping small animals, we also see a safety benefit for the traveling public.

The Bipartisan Infrastructure Law, approved by Congress in 2021, designates $350 million through the 2026 fiscal year for the Wildlife Crossings Pilot Program.

State and local governments can seek grants for projects or research seeking to protect the public and wildlife by reducing collisions and better connecting habitats.

In addition to construction projects, grants can also fund research into hot spots for wildlife-vehicle collisions.

Theres things we could do with that grant program, Scheperle said, adding grant money could help identify collision hot spots and determine if certain areas are better suited than others for crossings. I think were open to putting in for a grant like that.

One situation playing out along a roadway in West Alton illustrates the human danger to small animals.

The Missouri Department of Conservation recently urged drivers to slow down on Highway 367 near the Mississippi River as box turtles migrated onto the highway recently, likely females in search of nesting areas, KTVI (Channel 2) reported last month.

The news station counted 30-40 carcasses lining the shoulders of the construction zone in the area, with new barricades possibly making it more difficult for female turtles to cross.
BISMARCK, N.D.  When North Dakota restricted which bathrooms transgender students can use in public schools and universities this year, the school district in the state's largest city promised to ignore the new rules. A Republican legislator then called for confiscating its state funding, but the law doesn't include that possibility.

The defiance in Fargo shows that it's not exactly clear how bathroom laws will play out in local communities after being enacted in at least 10 states with Republican-controlled legislatures.

In Kansas, GOP state Attorney General Kris Kobach said that his state's new law, which takes effect Saturday, gives schools a legal defense if transgender students argue that it's discriminatory not to let them use facilities in line with their gender identity. Parents and students will be able to sue one another, he said, but the law does not create a right to sue schools.

Even Florida's law, allowing the state to threaten the licenses of educators who don't comply, says a transgender student or staffer must first be asked to leave a restroom and refuse.

Some schools already have gender-neutral bathrooms and changing spaces or allow trans students to use staff restrooms. In others, trans students try to make it through the day without using a restroom.

Advocates for transgender people worry that bullying will increase.

"Especially in smaller towns where, say, that bullying could be really bad because transgender individuals are really misunderstood," said Caedmon Marx, outreach chair for LGBTQ+ advocacy group Dakota OutRight and a 23-year-old nonbinary Bismarck State University student.

While the laws focus mostly on transgender students, critics believe they also encourage harassment of trans adults at work and while they're shopping and eating out  and even harassment of cisgender people, or those whose gender identity matches the sex they were assigned at birth.

"By men, I get harassed for going into a women's restroom because people think that  the way I look, the way I dress, they way my hair is  that I'm a man," Kansas state Rep. Susan Ruiz, a Kansas Cityarea Democrat and a lesbian, said during a debate over the Kansas bathroom measure. "This is going to just open up the doors for that."

North Carolina Republicans enacted a bathroom law in 2016 but rolled it back following protests and economic boycotts. A new wave of anti-LGBTQ+ measures began building in 2020, when Idaho enacted the nation's first law barring transgender athletes from girls and women's sports. State lawmakers across the U.S. considered hundreds of proposals this year.

Supporters argue that bathroom laws protect the privacy of cisgender women and girls. They've also pitched the laws as safety measures, without citing evidence of threats or assaults by transgender people against cisgender women or girls.

In North Dakota, Republican state Rep. Robin Weisz, chair of a committee that handled bathroom legislation, said some lawmakers worried about "being taken over by a radical agenda" on gender identity.

A GOP colleague, state Rep. Bill Tveit, said: "Our whole society is catering to it and encouraging it, and I don't think that that's where we're at, nor should be."

States' laws vary in their sweep. Florida and North Dakota are applying their restrictions to state universities and prisons. Arkansas is making it a misdemeanor for transgender adults to be in any public changing room associated with their gender identities if a minor is present and the purpose is "arousing or gratifying a sexual desire." Kansas' law applies not just to restrooms and locker rooms, but to rape crisis centers, domestic violence shelters, prisons and other detention centers.

State laws also differ in what they say about enforcement.

If an Oklahoma school violates that state's 2022 law, its district can lose 5% of its state funding, though none have so far.

Florida schools and universities must have policies for punishing students who don't comply, and educators who flout the law could risk losing their state licenses. Starting in July 2024, the state attorney general can sue schools that don't comply.

Arkansas mandates a minimum fine of $1,000 for defiant educators, and Iowa residents can file complaints with the state's attorney general. Arkansas, Idaho, Oklahoma and Tennessee allow private lawsuits against schools.

But laws in Alabama, Kansas, Kentucky and North Dakota don't spell out any enforcement regime.

Transgender, nonbinary and gender-nonconforming people and LGBTQ+ rights advocates predict that states will rely on "vigilante" enforcement by private individuals. Sarah Warbelow, legal director for the Human Rights Campaign, expects lawsuits from people "dedicated to making life impossible for transgender people."

All the laws permit schools and other institutions to make special accommodations for trans students, such as providing gender-neutral bathrooms, so long as they aren't allowed into facilities associated with their gender identities.

In Kansas' largest school district in Wichita, schools already have worked with individual students and their parents to make accommodations. In northeastern Iowa, the Decorah school district sought guidance on what the signs outside its single-use restrooms should say.

"We're following the law," Superintendent Tim Cronin said. "We're not trying to editorialize on any of this."

In Des Moines, Iowa, the school district already had been preparing for a bathroom law for several years, and "the facilities were in place" when the state's law was enacted, spokesperson Phil Roeder said. The Shawnee Mission district in the affluent Kansas suburbs of Kansas City is adding gender-neutral restrooms, too, with most of the work completed.

But in Tulsa, Oklahoma, Al Stone-Gebhardt, an 18-year-old transgender man, recently graduated from a high school that didn't have gender-neutral restrooms. After using the girls restroom during his junior year, he planned to use the nurse's but was turned away the first day of his senior year.

His mother, Erika DuBose, acknowledged "flipping out" when her son texted her about it. She sent an email to school staff that demanded, "HOW DARE YOU DENY MY CHILD THEIR BIOLOGICAL NEEDS?" To avoid using any restroom at school, her son was wasn't eating or drinking much.

The school became more accommodating, they said.

"It is literally putting trans students at risk," StoneGebhardt said. "Having to choose between being hydrated and being outed is extremely traumatic and inherently problematic, as well."

Warbelow said states can expect some "civil disobedience."

In the liberal community of Lawrence in northeastern Kansas, the home of the University of Kansas' main campus, the local district attorney declared that she wouldn't prosecute violations of the new state law. Kobach dismissed those comments as meaningless, saying the Kansas law doesn't call for criminal prosecutions.

In Fargo, one of North Dakota's rare politically blue places, the school board backed Superintendent Rupak Gandhi's public statement that, "We will not participate in anything that we think is going to subject students to further discrimination or increase their self-harm."
Gov. Mike Parson and the Republican-controlled Missouri Legislature would not have to address a physician shortage if they had given some thought to the downstream effects of laws passed during the last few sessions. ("Missouri lawmakers address physician shortage with new grant program," June 22). Legislators who have no medical background insist on threatening doctors with jail time, license revocation and fines. They want to tell doctors how to care or not care for patients. What did they think was going to happen? Who would want to work under that kind of ill-conceived oversight?

It's the same thing with teachers: teach this, don't teach that; say this, don't say that, or we'll pull your teaching certificate. It's the same thing with the police: no sensible gun laws, and working with the feds could result in at jail time. And now there is a critical shortage in all of these fields.

Product boycotts may last a few months and then are forgotten, but when professionals make life decisions about where to work and where to live, those decisions have much-longer repercussions. Things will get worse before they get better.

Good luck waving a few dollars at medical residents in an effort to keep them in state. How about reducing the oppressive working conditions for which Missouri has become infamous and make this state a place people want to live and work?

Margaret Ferguson Arrigo  Moscow Mills
JEFFERSON CITY  Holes at the bottom of concrete highway barriers could help small animals fi nd safer passage across Missouri roadways.

State road crews have already installed the 7.5 inch by 15 inch openings on one section of a Missouri highway: along the newly constructed Interstate 49 in southwest Missouri, which contains 70 modified barriers across 5 miles of road.

But more barrier openings are possible. State officials believe the modifications reduce environmental impacts in a cost-effective way.

The barriers cost about $30 each to install, adding $2,100 in cost to the $59 million Interstate 49 project, according to a department presentation.

Melissa Scheperle, environmental and historic preservation manager for MoDOT, said the modified barriers are being considered where current barriers are being replaced.

Scheperle said there are no sites in the St. Louis area under consideration for the modified barriers, but said the department is considering the crossings in the Springfield area along Interstate 44 and on U.S. 65.

The initiative comes as other states and the federal government increasingly emphasize wildlife crossings as a way to reduce vehicle-animal collisions and better protect animal populations.

Missouri is considered a high risk state for vehicle-animal collisions, with an estimated 1 in 76 chance of an animal-involved claim, according to an analysis by State Farm.

Scheperle said the crossings are a way for Missouri to create safer passages for small animals. Other states have examined crossings over or under highways for larger animals.

"It was a way for MoDOT to look at wildlife crossings on a Missouri scale," Scheperle said. "We really don't have in Missouri large wildlife that have known migratory patterns like they do out West."

She said in addition to helping small animals, "we also see a safety benefit for the traveling public."

The Bipartisan Infrastructure Law, approved by Congress in 2021, designates $350 million through the 2026 fiscal year for the Wildlife Crossings Pilot Program.

State and local governments can seek grants for projects or research seeking to protect the public and wildlife by reducing collisions and better connecting habitats.

In addition to construction projects, grants can also fund research into hot spots for wildlife-vehicle collisions.

"There's things we could do with that grant program," Scheperle said, adding grant money could help identify collision hot spots and determine if certain areas are better suited than others for crossings. "I think we're open to putting in for a grant like that."

One situation playing out along a roadway in West Alton illustrates the human danger to small animals.

The Missouri Department of Conservation recently urged drivers to slow down on Highway 367 near the Mississippi River as box turtles migrated onto the highway recently, likely females in search of nesting areas, KTVI (Channel 2) reported last month.

The news station counted 30-40 carcasses lining the shoulders of the construction zone in the area, with new barricades possibly making it more difficult for female turtles to cross.

Jack Suntrup  573-556-6186 @JackSuntrup on Twitter jsuntrup@post-dispatch.com
North Korea is very poor and cannot afford modern air defense systems. There is also an international arms embargo on North Korea which prevents North Korea from buying new weapons even if it had the money. North Korea has to improvise and does this by (sort of) keeping older weapons and aircraft in service. North Korea has a lot of elderly air defense artillery and SAM (Surface to Air Missile) systems and puts most of this round the capital and some key military installations. This may improve North Korean morale but any potential attackers, like South Korea or the United States plan to use guided missiles against these targets. Anti-aircraft guns and obsolete SAMs can do little against this sort of thing.

North Korea also has hundreds of nominally operational Russian aircraft. Only a few dozen MiG-29 and Su-27 aircraft, which entered service in the 1980s, are available. Most (about 600) of the North Korea jet fighters are 1950s designs. This includes nearly 500 MiG-15s and 17s plus about a hundred MiG-21s and 23s. North Korea manages to keep these aircraft operational by only letting pilots fly them one or two hours a month. That means pilot skills are as limited as the effectiveness of these elderly jet fighters.

While North Korea has been unable to afford new jet fighters, UAVs are another matter. North Korea has been able to obtain several hundred of these from China and Russia. Many of them are over 20 years old and many have a range of over 400 kilometers, but few can carry weapons. North Korea has sent some of these into South Korea on reconnaissance missions but the South Koreans learned how to spot them and shot them down using jet fighters, armed helicopters and ground fire. As UAV losses increased, North Korea halted the cross border flights. South Korea is prepared to do the same to any North Korea jet fighters or bombers. North Korea has about 80 Cold War era Il-28 Russian bombers. North Korea is the only country still operating these 21-ton two-engine bombers. The Il-28 was the first Russian jet bomber, over 6,000 were built in the 1950s, and most were retired in the 1960s because faster and more capable jet bombers became available. Russian exported the IL-28 to dozens of countries, including North Korea. The Il-28 has a crew of three and carries up to three tons of bombs. Top speed of the IL-28 is 900 kilometers an hour but the more economic cruising speed is 770 kilometers an hour. At that speed the IL-28 has a max range of about 2,000 kilometers. Most countries with IL-28s retired them in the 1970s and 80s. North Korea kept theirs because it was the only jet bomber they could get.

One elderly Russian military aircraft that remains very useful is the AN-2 biplane transport. North Korea has several hundred of these and they are to be used in wartime to sneak North Korean commandos into South Korea. An AN-2 can carry ten of these troops at slow (under 60 kilometers an hour) and low altitudes that modern radars cannot detect. South Korea modified some of its air defense radars to detect AN-2s and shoot them down before they can deliver their commandos. Those commandos that do reach South Korea are supposed to create as much havoc and confusion as possible. AN-2s can also carry two tons of cargo or bombs. The bombs would simply be armed and pushed out the cargo door by a second crew member. Normally the AN-2 is flown by a single pilot.

Over 18,000 AN-2s were built and production continues in some countries. For North Korea, the AN-2 is the only really effective military aircraft they have.
CINCINNATI--(BUSINESS WIRE)-- American Financial Group, Inc. (NYSE: AFG) and American International Group, Inc. (NYSE: AIG) announced today that AFG completed the purchase of Crop Risk Services (CRS) from AIG.

This press release features multimedia. View the full release here: https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20230703714254/en/

CRS is a primary crop insurance general agent based in Decatur, Illinois, and the seventh largest provider of multi-peril crop insurance in the United States, based on 2022 premiums. American Financial Groups Great American Insurance Group has been providing crop-hail coverage since 1915 and began writing multi-peril crop insurance in 1980 after Congress authorized the program. Great Americans Crop Division generated gross written premiums of approximately $1.8 billion in 2022 and is the fifth largest provider of multi-peril crop insurance in the United States. Following the transaction, Great American will remain the #5 ranked writer of U.S. crop insurance and the largest U.S.-owned participant in the United States multi-peril crop insurance program.

Skadden, Arps, Slate, Meagher & Flom LLP acted as legal counsel for AFG. Evercore Group L.L.C. and Sidley Austin LLP acted as financial advisor and legal counsel, respectively, for AIG.

About American Financial Group, Inc.

American Financial Group is an insurance holding company, based in Cincinnati, Ohio. Through the operations of Great American Insurance Group, AFG is engaged primarily in property and casualty insurance, focusing on specialized commercial products for businesses. Great American Insurance Groups roots go back to 1872 with the founding of its flagship company, Great American Insurance Company.

About AIG

American International Group, Inc. (AIG) is a leading global insurance organization. AIG member companies offer insurance solutions that help businesses and individuals in approximately 70 countries and jurisdictions protect their assets and manage risks. AIG common stock is listed on the New York Stock Exchange.

Additional information about AIG can be found at www.aig.com | YouTube: www.youtube.com/aig | Twitter: @AIGinsurance www.twitter.com/AIGinsurance | LinkedIn: www.linkedin.com/company/aig. These references with additional information about AIG have been provided as a convenience, and the information contained on such websites is not incorporated by reference into this press release.

AIG is the marketing name for the worldwide property-casualty, life and retirement and general insurance operations of American International Group, Inc. For additional information, please visit our website at www.aig.com. All products and services are written or provided by subsidiaries or affiliates of American International Group, Inc. Products or services may not be available in all countries and jurisdictions, and coverage is subject to underwriting requirements and actual policy language. Non-insurance products and services may be provided by independent third parties. Certain property-casualty coverages may be provided by a surplus lines insurer. Surplus lines insurers do not generally participate in state guaranty funds, and insureds are therefore not protected by such funds.

View source version on businesswire.com: https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20230703714254/en/

AFG Contact:

Diane P. Weidner, IRC

Vice President  Investor & Media Relations

[email protected]

(513) 369-5713



AIG Contacts:

Quentin McMillan (Investors)

[email protected]



Dana Ripley (Media)

[email protected]



Websites:

www.AFGinc.com

www.GreatAmericanInsuranceGroup.com

www.AIG.com

Source: American Financial Group, Inc.
Funding will be used to scale operations and continue development of its pioneering DNA synthesis platform, gSynth

Funding round led by Mercia

Camena has also strengthened the Board of Directors with key appointments

CAMBRIDGE, England--(BUSINESS WIRE)-- Camena Bioscience, a synthetic biology company providing genes to the pharmaceutical and biotechnology industries, today announced it has closed a $10m Series A financing round, led by Mercia. The new funding will be used to scale operations and continue development of its pioneering DNA synthesis platform, gSynth.

Camena is the first company to offer this unique and highly accurate enzyme-based DNA synthesis technology. It has already signed commercial agreements with leading consumers of synthetic genes, securing a multi-million-pound revenue stream over the previous year.

Synthetic genes are widely used by researchers to understand the mechanisms of disease, and in the drug discovery process to combat them. However, the cost, time and accuracy of traditional DNA synthesis methods developed in the 1980s remains problematic, particularly when creating long or complex sequences of genes. Camenas technology overcomes these limitations by using a wholly novel enzymatic technology to accurately produce synthetic DNA.

Camenas CEO and co-founder is Steve Harvey, PhD, a leader in genomics research, and the CSO and co-founder is Derek Stemple, PhD, a world-renowned molecular biologist and previously a co-founder of TwistDX which was acquired by Alere (now a part of Abbott) in 2010.

Steve Harvey, CEO, Camena Bioscience, commented: We are delighted to have closed this latest round of funding with Mercia, which provides further validation of Camenas approach. The ability to read, write and manipulate DNA is the foundation of the synthetic biology value chain, yet developments in DNA synthesis have not kept pace with DNA sequencing and editing capabilities. Camenas gSynth platform is revolutionising the DNA synthesis market by unlocking access to genes and accelerating discovery pipelines.

As the focus on sustainability and supply-chain security become more acute, Camena is leading the way with a green synthesis technology and is already well positioned to serve this burgeoning market. The invention of next-generation DNA sequencing technologies transformed our ability to read DNA. Our goal is to enable our customers to write DNA with the same confidence and ease.

Board appointments

Lee Lindley, a member of Mercias investment team, has joined Camenas Board as part of the financing. Lee has nearly 10 years of corporate financing experience; he also holds a BA in Natural Sciences from the University of Cambridge and a Masters in Research Methods from the University of Manchester.

Additionally, Aditya Rajagopal has joined Camenas Board. Aditya is the founder and CTO of ChromaCode, Inc., a commercial stage diagnostics company focused on developing highly scalable and affordable cancer tests. He is also the co-founder and Executive Chairman of Esperto Medical, a venture-backed company building non-invasive vital sign monitors.

Lee Lindley, Investment Manager, Mercia, commented: The market for synthetic genes is growing rapidly but much of the demand is for complex genes which are extremely difficult to produce accurately. Camenas technology is a game changer that could unlock a much bigger global market. Were excited to support Camena on its next stage of growth.

ENDS

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Zyme Communications

Katie Odgaard

Tel: +44(0) 7787 502 947

Email: [email protected]

Source: Camena Bioscience
BANGKOK--(BUSINESS WIRE)-- Dataxet Limited (dataxet:infoquest) underscored its position as the leading provider of 360-degree media intelligence services by attending the Marketing Insight & Technology Conference as an exhibitor. The Marketing Insight & Technology Conference is part of Creative Talk Conference 2023 (CTC2023) which was held at the Bangkok International Trade & Exhibition Centre (BITEC), Bangkok on June 22-24, 2023.

At the event, Dataxet showcased the MarTech platforms built to enhance efficiency of planning public relations and marketing strategies in the digital era. NCX is a comprehensive, 360-degree media monitoring service that aggregates news and content from online, mainstream media, and social media. DXT360 is a powerful social listening and insight platform, allowing users to gain valuable insight into new and popular business trends on social media, which will help create actionable business plans. Lastly, EVO is a framework designed to elevate the power and impact of brand communication.

Moreover, Dataxet is fully prepared to provide assistance and convenience to businesses interested in tapping into the market domestically and internationally. This is achieved through the press release distribution service to target media channels, both locally and internationally, as well professional content production tailored for the business's promotional channels.

We know how important media data and MarTech platforms are in helping businesses in Thailand improve the efficiency of their marketing strategies, PR campaigns and organizational communications. We have offered our clients different media intelligence tools to support their marketing and corporate communication plans whether theyre meant for strategic management, brand building, or communication with target audience, said David Liu, Founder & CEO of Dataxet.

Dataxet is fully capable of catering to the needs of the Thai market with experienced local professionals. We apply our world-class technology and knowledge, which have been implemented in SE Asia, and tailor them to the specific needs of clients in Thailand, Liu added.

About Dataxet Limited

Dataxet Limited (dataxet:infoquest), formerly known as InfoQuest Limited, is a leading media intelligence and news agency in Thailand. It is a part of Dataxet Pte Ltd. (Dataxet), the fastest growing media intelligence group in Southeast Asia with its headquarters in Singapore and subsidiaries in Malaysia, Indonesia and Thailand.

dataxet:infoquest offers robust media intelligence platforms with comprehensive coverage of social, online and mainstream media news, content, trends and issues. The EVO framework turns platform data into high value audience insights and actionable communication strategies. The synergy between Dataxets global capabilities and dataxet:infoquests local expertise provides clients with exceptional service and support that helps them achieve their business goals.

Thailand website: www.dataxet.co

Group website: www.dataxet.com

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Dataxet Limited (dataxet:infoquest), [email protected]

Source: Dataxet Limited
First Phase III results for AstraZeneca and Daiichi Sankyos TROP2-directed antibody drug conjugate demonstrated statistically significant improvement in progression-free survival vs. standard chemotherapy in previously treated locally advanced or metastatic disease

Trial will continue to assess the dual primary endpoint of overall survival

WILMINGTON, Del.--(BUSINESS WIRE)-- Positive high-level results from the TROPION-Lung01 Phase III trial showed datopotamab deruxtecan (Dato-DXd) demonstrated a statistically significant improvement for the dual primary endpoint of progression-free survival (PFS) compared to docetaxel, the current standard of care chemotherapy, in patients with locally advanced or metastatic non-small cell lung cancer (NSCLC) treated with at least one prior therapy.

For the dual primary endpoint of overall survival (OS), the data were not mature and an early trend was observed in favor of datopotamab deruxtecan versus docetaxel that did not meet the prespecified threshold for statistical significance at this interim analysis. The trial will continue as planned to assess OS with greater maturity. The investigators and participants will remain blinded to the results.

The safety profile of datopotamab deruxtecan was consistent with previous clinical trials with no new safety signals identified. All grade interstitial lung disease was generally consistent with prior clinical trials, with the majority being low grade. Some Grade 5 events were observed.

Datopotamab deruxtecan is a specifically engineered TROP2-directed DXd antibody drug conjugate (ADC) being jointly developed by AstraZeneca and Daiichi Sankyo.

Susan Galbraith, Executive Vice President, Oncology R&D, AstraZeneca, said: With TROPION-Lung01, we met the dual primary endpoint of progression-free survival, challenging the entrenched standard of care in a previously treated and unselected patient population that has long deserved an alternative to chemotherapy. These first Phase III trial results from the datopotamab deruxtecan clinical program provide compelling evidence for the potential role this TROP2-directed antibody drug conjugate can play in treating patients with lung cancer.

Ken Takeshita, MD, Global Head, Oncology R&D, Daiichi Sankyo, said: We are encouraged by the statistically significant results of the dual primary endpoint of progression-free survival seen with datopotamab deruxtecan and look forward to the final overall survival analysis. We plan to share these data with regulatory authorities to discuss next steps.

More than one million people worldwide are diagnosed with advanced NSCLC each year.1,2 While immunotherapy and targeted therapies have improved outcomes in the 1st-line metastatic setting, most patients eventually experience disease progression and receive chemotherapy.3-5 For decades, chemotherapy has been the last treatment available for patients with advanced NSCLC in the absence of other treatment options and despite limited effectiveness and known side effects.3-5 TROP2 is a protein highly expressed in a large majority of lung cancers. There are currently no TROP2-directed ADCs approved for the treatment of patients with lung cancer.6-8

TROPION-Lung01 enrolled patients with and without actionable genomic alterations, such as EGFR and ALK. Patients with actionable genomic alterations were previously treated with platinum-based chemotherapy and an approved targeted therapy. Patients without actionable genomic alterations were previously treated, concurrently or sequentially, with platinum-based chemotherapy and a PD-1 or PD-L1 inhibitor.

The data will be presented at a forthcoming medical meeting and shared with health authorities.

Notes

Non-small cell lung cancer

More than one million people worldwide are diagnosed with advanced NSCLC each year.1,2 While immunotherapy and targeted therapies have improved outcomes in the 1st-line metastatic setting, most patients eventually experience disease progression and receive chemotherapy.3-5 For decades, chemotherapy has been the last treatment available for patients with advanced NSCLC in the absence of other treatment options and despite limited effectiveness and known side effects.3-5

TROP2 is a protein highly expressed in a large majority of lung cancers.6 There are currently no TROP2-directed ADCs approved for the treatment of patients with lung cancer.7,8

TROPION-Lung01

TROPION-Lung01 is a global, randomized, multicenter, open-label Phase III trial evaluating the efficacy and safety of datopotamab deruxtecan (6.0 mg/kg) versus docetaxel (75 mg/m2) in patients with locally advanced or metastatic NSCLC, with or without actionable genomic alterations, treated with at least one prior therapy. Patients without actionable genomic alterations were previously treated, concurrently or sequentially, with platinum-based chemotherapy and a prior PD-1 or PD-L1 inhibitor. Patients with actionable genomic alterations were previously treated with platinum-based chemotherapy and targeted therapy as approved for their detected genomic alteration.

The dual primary endpoints of TROPION-Lung01 are PFS as assessed by blinded independent central review (BICR) and OS. Key secondary endpoints include investigator-assessed PFS, objective response rate, duration of response, time to response and disease control rate as assessed by both BICR and investigator, and safety.

TROPION-Lung01 enrolled approximately 600 patients at sites in Asia, Europe, North America and South America. For more information visit ClinicalTrials.gov.

Datopotamab deruxtecan (Dato-DXd)

Datopotamab deruxtecan (Dato-DXd) is an investigational TROP2-directed ADC. Designed using Daiichi Sankyos proprietary DXd ADC technology, datopotamab deruxtecan is one of five lead ADCs in the oncology pipeline of Daiichi Sankyo, and one of the most advanced programs in AstraZenecas ADC scientific platform. Datopotamab deruxtecan is comprised of a humanized anti-TROP2 IgG1 monoclonal antibody, developed in collaboration with Sapporo Medical University, attached to a number of topoisomerase I inhibitor payloads, an exatecan derivative, via tetrapeptide-based cleavable linkers.

A comprehensive development program is underway globally with more than 12 trials evaluating the efficacy and safety of datopotamab deruxtecan across multiple TROP2-targetable tumors, including NSCLC, triple-negative breast cancer and hormone receptor-positive, HER2-low or negative breast cancer. Beyond the TROPION program, datopotamab deruxtecan is also being evaluated in novel combinations in several ongoing trials.

In NSCLC, the TROPION-Lung07, TROPION-Lung08 and AVANZAR Phase III trials are evaluating datopotamab deruxtecan and immune checkpoint inhibitor combinations as potential 1st-line treatment options for patients with advanced or metastatic disease, a strategy informed by the results of two early trials. AstraZeneca is also researching a potential diagnostic test to help identify patients most likely to benefit from treatment with datopotamab deruxtecan.

AstraZeneca and Daiichi Sankyo collaboration

AstraZeneca and Daiichi Sankyo entered into a global collaboration to jointly develop and commercialize fam-trastuzumab deruxtecan-nxki in March 2019 and datopotamab deruxtecan in July 2020, except in Japan where Daiichi Sankyo maintains exclusive rights for each ADC. Daiichi Sankyo is responsible for the manufacturing and supply of fam-trastuzumab deruxtecan-nxki and datopotamab deruxtecan.

AstraZeneca in lung cancer

AstraZeneca is working to bring patients with lung cancer closer to cure through the detection and treatment of early-stage disease, while also pushing the boundaries of science to improve outcomes in the resistant and advanced settings. By defining new therapeutic targets and investigating innovative approaches, the Company aims to match medicines to the patients who can benefit most.

The Companys comprehensive portfolio includes leading lung cancer medicines and the next wave of innovations, including osimertinib and gefitinib; durvalumab and tremelimumab; fam-trastuzumab deruxtecan-nxki and datopotamab deruxtecan in collaboration with Daiichi Sankyo; savolitinib in collaboration with HUTCHMED; as well as a pipeline of potential new medicines and combinations across diverse mechanisms of action.

AstraZeneca is a founding member of the Lung Ambition Alliance, a global coalition working to accelerate innovation and deliver meaningful improvements for people with lung cancer, including and beyond treatment.

AstraZeneca in oncology

AstraZeneca is leading a revolution in oncology with the ambition to provide cures for cancer in every form, following the science to understand cancer and all its complexities to discover, develop and deliver life-changing medicines to patients.

The Companys focus is on some of the most challenging cancers. It is through persistent innovation that AstraZeneca has built one of the most diverse portfolios and pipelines in the industry, with the potential to catalyze changes in the practice of medicine and transform the patient experience.

AstraZeneca has the vision to redefine cancer care and, one day, eliminate cancer as a cause of death.

AstraZeneca

AstraZeneca is a global, science-led biopharmaceutical company that focuses on the discovery, development and commercialization of prescription medicines in Oncology, Rare Diseases and BioPharmaceuticals, including Cardiovascular, Renal & Metabolism, and Respiratory & Immunology. Based in Cambridge, UK, AstraZeneca operates in over 100 countries, and its innovative medicines are used by millions of patients worldwide. For more information, please visit www.astrazeneca-us.com and follow us on Twitter @AstraZenecaUS.

References

Siegel R, et al. Cancer Statistics, 2021. CA Cancer J Clin. 2021;71:7-33. World Health Organization. International Agency for Research on Cancer. Lung Fact Sheet. Available at: https://gco.iarc.fr/today/data/factsheets/cancers/15-Lung-fact-sheet.pdf. Accessed May 2023. Chen R, et al. Emerging therapeutic agents for advanced non-small cell lung cancer. J Hematol Oncol. 2020;13(1):58. Majeed U, et al. Targeted therapy in advanced non-small cell lung cancer: current advances and future trends. J Hematol Oncol. 2021;14(1):108. Pircher, A, et al. Docetaxel in the Treatment of Non-small Cell Lung Cancer (NSCLC)  An Observational Study Focusing on Symptom Improvement. Anticancer Research. 2013;33(9):3831-3836. Mito R, et al. Clinical impact of TROP2 in nonsmall lung cancers and its correlation with abnormal p53 nuclear accumulation. Pathol Int. 2020;70(5):287-294. Rodriguez-Abreau D et al. Pemetrexed plus platinum with or without pembrolizumab in patients with previously untreated metastatic nonsquamous NSCLC: protocol-specified final analysis from KEYNOTE-189. Ann Onc. 2021 Jul;32(7): 881-895. American Cancer Society. Targeted Drug Therapy for Non-Small Cell Lung Cancer. Available at: https://www.cancer.org/cancer/types/lung-cancer/treating-non-small-cell/targeted-therapies.html. Accessed May 2023.

US-77561 Last Updated 07/23

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Media Inquiries

Brendan McEvoy +1 302 885 2677

Chelsea Ford +1 302 885 2677

Source: AstraZeneca
OSLO, Norway--(BUSINESS WIRE)-- Elliptic Labs (OSE: ELABS), a global AI software company and the world leader in AI Virtual Smart Sensors currently deployed in over 500 million devices, has signed a new large expansion of its software license agreement with a current PC customer. This expansion of the existing agreement is to use Elliptic Labs software-only AI Virtual Presence Sensor on many more laptop models in the future.

"This new expansion contract with one of our current PC customers solidifies the strong pull from the PC industry to add game-changing innovation through our AI-based software-only approach," says Laila Danielsen, CEO of Elliptic Labs. "Our AI Virtual Smart Sensor Platform is redefining the user experience with our technological leadership in AI, ultrasound, and sensor fusion. The fact that we enable the largest PC makers in the world to make devices smarter, greener, and more human friendly is why we continue to grow our PC business."

AI Virtual Smart Sensor, AI Virtual Human Presence Sensor, and AI Virtual Smart Sensor Platform are trademarks of Elliptic Labs.

All other trademarks or service markets are the responsibility of their respective organizations.

Elliptic Labs' AI Virtual Human Presence Sensor

Elliptic Labs AI Virtual Human Presence Sensor detects when a user is present in front of a PC/laptop system. This allows the device to sleep when a user is absent, conserving battery life and electricity and safeguarding it from unpermitted access. Human presence detection is becoming a core capability in the PC/laptop industry, but it is currently featured only in high-end devices due to the cost, risk, and design limitations associated with a dedicated hardware presence sensor. Elliptic Labs' software-only AI Virtual Human Presence Sensor delivers robust human-presence detection that allows OEMs to easily and affordably incorporate human presence detection across a wide range of devices.

About Elliptic Labs

Elliptic Labs is a global enterprise targeting the smartphone, laptop, IoT, and automotive markets. Founded in 2006 as a research spin-off from Norways Oslo University, the companys patented software uses AI, ultrasound and sensor fusion to deliver intuitive 3D gesture, proximity-, presence-, breathing- and heartbeat-detection experiences. Its scalable AI Virtual Smart Sensor Platform creates software-only sensors that are sustainable, human-friendly and already deployed in hundreds of millions of devices around the world. Elliptic Labs is the only software company that has delivered detection capabilities using AI software, ultrasound, and sensor fusion deployed at scale. The company joined the Oslo Brs main listing in March 2022.

Elliptic Labs is headquartered in Norway with presence in the USA, China, South Korea, Taiwan, and Japan. Its technology and IP are developed in Norway and are solely owned by the company.

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PR Contacts:

Patrick Tsui

[email protected]

Investor Relations:

Lars Holmy

[email protected]

Source: Elliptic Labs
President of Ukraine Volodymyr Zelenskyy has held a phone conversation with German Chancellor Olaf Scholz on Monday.

"We coordinated positions on the eve of the NATO Summit in Vilnius and discussed the formats of future security guarantees for Ukraine," the head of state said on the Telegram channel.

"I briefed him on the situation on the battlefield. We shared our assessments of the latest developments in Russia and Belarus and discussed the current state of the grain deal and the importance of its continuation," he said.

Zelenskyy also expressed gratitude "for the important signals of support for Ukraine at the London Recovery Conference and the European Council meeting" and "for the active implementation of the previous EUR 2.7 billion defense package and for the EUR 8.8 billion multi-year defense support plan for Ukraine."

"The meeting at the level of advisors in Copenhagen is an important step towards the implementation of the Peace Formula. We agreed to continue active work in this direction," he said.
$130,000 worth of U.S. EE Savings Bonds at maturity awarded to eCYBERMISSION 6th Grade, 7th Grade, 8th Grade, and 9th Grade National-Winning Teams

HUNT VALLEY, Md.--(BUSINESS WIRE)-- The U.S. Army Educational Outreach Program (AEOP) announced that teams MISSing Monarchs (6th grade), H2O Bros (7th grade), Cardio for Chemo (8th grade), and Urica (9th grade) are the National Winners for their respective grade levels at the 21st annual eCYBERMISSION National Judging & Educational Event (NJ&EE). Each team member will now receive $10,000 in U.S. EE Savings Bonds at maturity.

The four-day event, which took place June 26  29 at the Delta Hotels Baltimore Hunt Valley in Hunt Valley, Maryland, saw five National Finalist teams per grade level from across the country compete for the National Winner title. Teams presented their eCYBERMISSION projects to a panel of senior Scientist and Engineer judges from the Department of Defense, the National Science Teaching Association (NSTA), and the eCYBERMISSION Team Advisor of the Year, who then unanimously selected the National Winner for each grade level. Winners were announced at the National Awards Ceremony, which took place June 29. This years National Winners are:

MISSing Monarchs  6th Grade

MISSing Monarchs raised awareness of the decline of the monarch butterfly population in their community and provided new efforts to sustain the population. They distributed 421 packets of milkweed seeds, spoke with local mayors about how to increase the monarch population, and established 16 registered butterfly waystations. The team is comprised of students Annie Wei, April Yao, Elizabeth Moody, and Olivia Kim and led by Team Advisor Richard Gash. They hail from Bay Sea Scouts in Bay Village, Ohio.

H2O Bros  7th Grade

H2O Bros investigated the use of centrifuge technology and distillation to clean the produced and flowback water that comes to the surface during fracking extraction. The water they purified was used in germination experiments where 95% of seeds grew successfully following the teams treatment. The team is comprised of students Brex Stephens, Lucas Higgins, Lincoln Dooley, and Jaxson Ferran and led by Team Advisor Laura Stary. They hail from Southcrest Christian School in Lubbock, Texas.

Cardio for Chemo  8th Grade

Cardio for Chemo designed a personalized app for cancer patients that can help alleviate symptoms with the use of exercise. The team created digital wireframes from hand-drawn wireframes and used an app building platform, Thunkable, to code the app and test it. The team is comprised of students Elizabeth Vetzev and Rebecca John and led by Team Advisor Kelly McDonald. They hail from West Middle School in Andover, Massachusetts.

Urica  9th Grade

Urica sought to develop a preventative solution for hyperuricemia using plants with antioxidant, anti-inflammatory, and diuretic properties. After designing prototypes, conducting experiments, and analyzing their results, they created a product that is safe to consume, effective, natural, affordable, and easily accessible while preventing uric acid build up. The team is comprised of students Nidhi Sagaram, Samil Sharma, and Viraj Vyas and led by Team Advisor Bhavna Sharma. They hail from Metea Valley and Neuqua Valley High Schools in Naperville, Illinois.

The Army Educational Outreach Programs vision is to foster a nation of STEM-inspired change makers, problem solvers, and innovators, said Christina Weber, AEOP Cooperative Agreement Manager. The initiative of these National Winners, and of all eCYBERMISSION students, to use STEM to address real problems in their communities is a testament to that vision. I offer my sincere congratulations to this years National Winners.

Congratulations to the eCYBERMISSION National Winners. I am so inspired by these students, their unique and diverse perspectives, and innovative ideas to solve problems in their communities and the world at large by using science and engineering, said Erika Shugart, Ph.D., NSTA Executive Director and CEO. I cannot wait to see where their dedication and innovative thinking will lead them and the rest of us as well.

In addition to the National Winner title, two other awards were given at this years NJ&EE. Team Cardio for Chemo (8th grade, Massachusetts) received the Army Values Award for best embodying the U.S. Army values throughout the week of NJ&EE. Team Soundsations (9th grade, Maryland) received the Peoples Choice Award, which was decided by the popular vote of at-home viewers after all teams presented their projects at the livestreamed National Showcase.

Registration for the 2023-2024 eCYBERMISSION competition opens in the fall. To learn more about eCYBERMISSION, please visit www.ecybermission.com.

About eCYBERMISSION

eCYBERMISSION is a free, virtual science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) competition for students in grades six to nine that promotes teamwork, self-discovery, and the real-life applications of STEM. Students work in teams, with the help of an adult Team Advisor, and select a problem in their community to explore with science or solve with engineering. With eCYBERMISSION, students experience STEM firsthand and learn how they can use it to change the world while interacting with STEM professionals and competing for state, regional, and national awards. eCYBERMISSION students have applied for and received patents, expanded their projects into businesses, and achieved further national recognition, including the first ever TIMEs Kid of the Year. eCYBERMISSION is part of the Army Educational Outreach Program (AEOP) and is administered by NSTA.

About the Army Educational Outreach Program (AEOP)

The United States Army has long recognized that a scientifically and technologically literate citizenry is our nations best hope for a secure, rewarding, and successful future. For over 50 years, the U.S. Army has supported a wide range of educational opportunities in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) for our youth, college, and graduate students, as well as our valued teachers. Through AEOP, the U.S. Army continues its long tradition and strong commitment to the advancement of STEM education and literacy. Leveraging its most valuable assets  world-class scientists and engineers and research facilities  AEOP offers our nations youth and teachers a collaborative, cohesive portfolio of opportunities that effectively engage future workforce generations in meaningful, real-world STEM experiences, competitions, and paid internships. For more information about AEOP, please visit www.usaeop.com.

About the National Science Teaching Association (NSTA)

The National Science Teaching Association (NSTA) is a vibrant community of 40,000 science educators and professionals committed to best practices in teaching science and its impact on student learning. NSTA offers high quality science resources and continuous learning so that science educators grow professionally and excel in their career. For new and experienced teachers alike, the NSTA community offers the opportunity to network with like-minded peers at the national level, connect with mentors and leading researchers, and learn from the best in the field. For more information, visit www.nsta.org, or follow NSTA on Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, YouTube, and LinkedIn.

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Faith Benner

703-312-9277

[email protected]

Source: National Science Teaching Association
PARIS--(BUSINESS WIRE)-- Regulatory News:

Philippe Knoche, Orano's Chief Executive Officer, has informed the Board of Directors that he will be stepping down from his position at the beginning of October to take up another professional project.

In a message addressed to the Group's 17,000 employees, he thanked them for "having worked together to restructure the Group, improve its performance, enabling it to secure an "Investment grade" rating for its financing. Orano has thus been able to overcome the multiple crises it has had to face. We have nurtured with success this proud cornerstone of France's industrial heritage, built up over several decades, which has now returned to the path of profitable growth".

Claude Imauven, Chairman of the Board, will work with the French government, the majority shareholder, to ensure that the succession process runs smoothly.

About Orano

As a recognized international operator in the field of nuclear materials, Orano delivers solutions to address present and future global energy and health challenges.

Its expertise and mastery of cutting-edge technologies enable Orano to offer its customers high value-added products and services throughout the entire fuel cycle.

Every day, the Orano groups 17,000 employees draw on their skills, unwavering dedication to safety and constant quest for innovation, with the commitment to develop know-how in the transformation and control of nuclear materials, for the climate and for a healthy and resource-efficient world, now and tomorrow.

Orano, giving nuclear energy its full value.

www.orano.group

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Press Office

+33 (0)1 34 96 12 15

[email protected]

Investor relations

Marc Quesnoy

[email protected]

Source: Orano
PARIS--(BUSINESS WIRE)-- Technip Energies (Paris: TE) (ISIN:NL0014559478) announces the acquisition of Processium, an expert company in process development, equipped with laboratory and piloting facilities located in Lyon, France.

Processium is an industrial development partner designing and developing next-generation processes to support the energy transition and enhance manufacturing competitiveness in the field of sustainable chemicals.

With this acquisition, Technip Energies will pursue its strategic objective of accelerating the development of new processes and technologies to meet the pressing needs of a fast-growing market, driven by sustainability goals. Technip Energies will strengthen its R&D portfolio and enlarge its service offer, taking benefit from the highly skilled workforce of Processium with specific competencies in reactor design and scale-up, as well as downstream purification and processing know-how.

The modern and reputable innovation center provides process development services that accelerate and de-risk new technology introduction for clients ranging from startups to large industrial companies. The integration with Technip Energies will create unique offerings for its clients to support new process development and generate added value for both companies.

Wei Cai, Chief Technology Officer of Technip Energies, commented: We are very excited by this opportunity to leverage talent and expertise from Processium. In close collaboration with our existing technology centers, this acquisition will enhance our capabilities to develop proprietary technologies in the dynamic sustainable chemicals industry.

Pascal Rousseaux, Founder and Chief Executive Officer of Processium, commented: We share the same vision of market needs and the combination of our respective strengths will provide new offerings to support our customers at all stages from concept to industrial solution. Being part of the Technip Energies group will bring a lot of value to our customers. We are very pleased and excited about the possibilities of collaboration with Technip Energies R&D teams.

About Technip Energies

Technip Energies is a leading Engineering & Technology company for the energy transition, with leadership positions in Liquefied Natural Gas (LNG), hydrogen and ethylene as well as growing market positions in blue and green hydrogen, sustainable chemistry and CO2 management. The company benefits from its robust project delivery model supported by extensive technology, products and services offering.

Operating in 35 countries, our 15,000 people are fully committed to bringing our clients innovative projects to life, breaking boundaries to accelerate the energy transition for a better tomorrow.

Technip Energies is listed on Euronext Paris with American depositary receipts (ADRs) trading over-the-counter in the United States.

For further information: www.technipenergies.com.

Important Information for Investors and Securityholders

Forward-Looking Statement

This Press Release contains forward-looking statements that reflect Technip Energies (the Company) intentions, beliefs or current expectations and projections about the Company's future results of operations, anticipated revenues, earnings, cashflows, financial condition, liquidity, performance, prospects, anticipated growth, strategies and opportunities and the markets in which the Company operates. Forward-looking statements are often identified by the words believe, expect, anticipate, plan, intend, foresee, should, would, could, may, estimate, outlook, and similar expressions, including the negative thereof. The absence of these words, however, does not mean that the statements are not forward-looking. These forward-looking statements are based on the Companys current expectations, beliefs and assumptions concerning future developments and business conditions and their potential effect on the Company. While the Company believes that these forward-looking statements are reasonable as and when made, there can be no assurance that future developments affecting the Company will be those that the Company anticipates.

All of the Companys forward-looking statements involve risks and uncertainties, some of which are significant or beyond the Companys control, and assumptions that could cause actual results to differ materially from the Companys historical experience and the Companys present expectations or projections. Should one or more of these risks or uncertainties materialize, or should underlying assumptions prove incorrect, actual results may vary materially from those set forth in the forward-looking statements.

For information regarding known material factors that could cause actual results to differ from projected results, please see the Companys risk factors set forth in the Companys 2022 Annual Financial report filed on March 10, 2023, with the Dutch Authority for the Financial

Markets (AFM) and the French Autorite des Marches Financiers which include a discussion of factors that could affect the Company's future performance and the markets in which the Company operates.

Forward-looking statements involve inherent risks and uncertainties and speak only as of the date they are made. The Company undertakes no duty to and will not necessarily update any of the forward-looking statements in light of new information or future events, except to the extent required by applicable law.

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Investor relations

Phil Lindsay

Vice-President Investor Relations

Tel: +44 20 7585 5051

Email: Phillip Lindsay

Media relations

Stella Fumey

Director Press Relations & Digital Communications

Tel: +33 (1) 85 67 40 95

Email: Stella Fumey

Jason Hyonne

Press Relations & Social Media Lead

Tel: +33 1 47 78 22 89

Email: Jason Hyonne

Source: Technip Energies
(WASHINGTON, D.C.), July 03, 2023 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- With hurricane season underway, students and faculty from The Catholic Universitys School of Architecture and Planning are partnering with the Smithsonians National Museum of American History to recreate North Americas first large-span, self-supporting geodesic dome, illustrating the significance of dome architecture in an age of extreme weather. By the nature of their geometry, geodesic domes can support more load and have higher wind resistance than any other shelters of comparable size and weight.

The students, faculty, and museum staff will build the historic dome live as part of the exhibit in the museums Flag Hall from July 5 to 7. Reconstructing Weatherbreak: Geodesic Domes in an Age of Extreme Weather will be on view through July 27.

The dome, which is made of almost 1,000 aluminum struts and sprits, did not come with an instruction booklet but only a single page of color-coded strut lengths  which left a mystery for the students enrolled in an architectural history course over the past year, to figure out. An initial surprise was discovering the pieces came in 16 different lengths. Students developed models, worked on the fabrication of missing parts, planned the reconstruction, and undertook two test builds on campus in preparation for the live build.

About Weatherbreak

Inspired by the theories of inventor and futurist Buckminster Fuller, architect Jeffrey Lindsay designed Weatherbreak as a lightweight, stable structure that could resist extreme environmental impacts. This geodesic dome was first built in the winter of 1950 in Montreal and was designed to withstand snow and winds up to 200 miles per hour. It was later reconstructed in the early 1960s in the Hollywood Hills as a mid-century modern home for architect Bernard Judge.

Coined the Bubble House by the Los Angeles Times, the dome home was covered with transparent Mylar and shaded by white glass-reinforced neoprene with a silver coating to better reflect the sun. The geodesic dome came to the Smithsonian in the early 1970s. This will be the first time in more than 50 years that the structure is reassembled and the first time it is on exhibit inside the museum.

The public will be able to walk beneath the lattice framework once it is fully assembled. The dome, 25 feet high and 49 feet wide  at 2,000 square feet, nearly the size of the average American home  invites visitors to explore its history and future role in an era of climate change.

We are proud to partner with the Smithsonians National Museum of American History on this groundbreaking project, said Dr. Peter K. Kilpatrick, President of The Catholic University of America. This collaboration not only showcases the expertise of our students, but also fosters a critical conversation about the utility of geodesic domes in the face of extreme weather challenges.

Weatherbreak was the first large-span geodesic dome built in North America and the first dome home in the world, said Abeer Saha, Merrill Family Secretarial Scholar and Curator in the museums Division of Work and Industry. Decades later, the nation and planet are focused on sustainability as it relates to climate change. This living exhibition adds to such urgent dialogue by reconstructing and contextualizing the dome for contemporary audiences in an age of extreme weather.

Visitors will be able to experience one of the most significant architectural innovations of the 20th century and contemplate how history can inform todays search for sustainable shelters in an era of climate change. Today, millions of people around the world are displaced annually by extreme weather events, and mega-storms such as Hurricanes Katrina (2005), Maria (2017), and Ian (2022) have shown how communities can be severely affected.

Students working on this once-in-a-lifetime, hands-on project are part of an architecture history class under the direction of Tonya Ohnstad, assistant professor of architecture at Catholic University and faculty member Lorenzo Cardim DeAlmeida. These professors previously led the Universitys efforts in constructing a full-size replica of a truss from the Cathedral of Notre-Dame de Paris.

Sections of Weatherbreak, including the bottom support rungs and the top of the dome, are being reconstructed using replica parts. The museum will retain some of these replica parts, and Catholic University will have a full set of replica components for future teaching purposes.

The Weatherbreak reconstruction and companion exhibition are made possible with the support and in-kind contributions of faculty and students of Washington University in St. Louis under the leadership of professor Wyly Brown; Architectural Systems Inc., which fabricated missing components; Norsk Hydro, which donated the material for the parts; DSI Spaceframes; and Consigli Construction Co. Inc.

About The Catholic University of America: The Catholic University of America is the national university of the Catholic Church and the only higher education institution founded by the U.S. bishops. Established in 1887 as a papally chartered graduate and research center, the university comprises 12 schools and 31 research facilities and is home to 2,929 undergraduate and 2,130 graduate students.

About the National Museum of American History: Through incomparable collections, rigorous research and dynamic public outreach, the National Museum of American History seeks to empower people to create a more just and compassionate future by examining, preserving and sharing the complexity of our past. The museum, located on Constitution Avenue N.W., between 12th and 14th streets, is open daily except Dec. 25, between 10 a.m. and 5:30 p.m. Admission is free. The doors of the museum are always open online and the virtual museum continues to expand its offerings, including online exhibitions, PK12 educational materials and programs. For more information, go to https://americanhistory.si.edu.

Nicole Germain The Catholic University of America 202-319-5786 [email protected] edu

Source: The Catholic University of America
WASHINGTON, DC, July 03, 2023 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- AmeriCorps, the federal agency for national service and volunteerism, announced more than $7 million in investments to strengthen Nevada communities at Opportunity Village in Las Vegas June 29. The funding includes grants from AmeriCorps State and National, VISTA, Volunteer Generation Fund, and state commission resources.

Twelve local Nevada organizations were awarded funds focused on a wide range of community-based solutions. This funding supports AmeriCorps members and volunteers as they tackle some of the states toughest challenges, including environmental issues, educational learning services and enrichment, reading programs, job skills, nutrition and food security services, opioid and drug abuse prevention, and more.

Im proud to continue this tradition by awarding a Presidential Service Award  a true testament to the culture of service and civic engagement here in Nevada. On behalf of President Biden and the Biden-Harris Administration, Im honored to present todays Presidential Volunteer Service Award to Tranae Phillips, said Michael D. Smith, AmeriCorps CEO. Tranae not only has a heart for servicebut also a talent for connecting with young students to help them build the confidence and skills they need to be strong readers.

Following the announcement, Smith participated in a roundtable discussion at Opportunity Village with Randy Robinson, City of Las Vegas, director of government and community affairs; Jaret Reyes, national service alumni, Reinvent Schools Las Vegas AmeriCorps and AmeriCorps members and volunteers.

Smith also presented AmeriCorps member Tranae Phillips with a Presidents Volunteer Service Award from President Biden. Phillips has served more than 3,600 hours with AmeriCorps, volunteering with United Way of Northern Nevada and the Sierra and Washoe County School District Volunteer Services.

Tranae is a natural leader in our program, said Krystal Nevada, program director, AmeriCorps. She has volunteered to be the member that other members turn to when they are facing adversity or just need someone to talk to. She also invites other members to observe her sessions with students to help improve their mentoring skills. Teachers at her school have shared student success stories with me and they all appreciate her services at the school greatly.

Last year, more than 1,400 Americans served at more than 100 locations across Nevada, including schools, food banks, homeless shelters, health clinics, veterans' facilities, nonprofit organizations and more. AmeriCorps invested more than $6.9 million in federal funding to support cost-effective, community-based solutions in Nevada. In Las Vegas, AmeriCorps members and AmeriCorps Seniors volunteers served in more than 48 locations, part of more than $1.6 million in federal funding to support community-based solutions.

Awardees

Walker Basin Conservancy, $606,723

Truckee Meadows Parks Foundation, $690,302

Truckee Meadows Parks Foundation, $287,963

The Great Basin Institute, $1,316,736

City of Las Vegas, $872,180

United Way of Northern Nevada and the Sierra, $414,710

Opportunity Village, $245,555

Nevada Outdoor School, $426,239

City of Henderson, $244,782

Healthy Communities Coalition, $244,174

Nevada System of Higher Education, $371,808

Nevada Volunteers, $1,286,103

###

AmeriCorps, the federal agency for national service and volunteerism, provides opportunities for Americans to serve their country domestically, address the nations most pressing challenges, improve lives and communities, and strengthen civic engagement. Each year, the agency places more than 200,000 AmeriCorps members and AmeriCorps Seniors volunteers in intensive service roles; and empowers millions more to serve as long-term, short-term, or one-time volunteers. Learn more at AmeriCorps.gov.

AmeriCorps offers opportunities for individuals of all backgrounds to be a part of the national service community, grow personally and professionally, and receive benefits for their service. Learn how to get involved at AmeriCorps.gov/serve.

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National Service Press Office AmeriCorps [email protected]

Source: AmeriCorps
Royal Unibrew A/S has today signed an agreement to acquire Vrumona from Heineken. Vrumona is the second largest soft drinks player in the Dutch market carrying a range of strong own brands and partner brands. The company and production site is located near Utrecht and has more than 300 employees.



Lars Jensen, CEO of Royal Unibrew A/S, states that we are happy to have signed an agreement with Heineken to acquire Vrumona. Vrumona is a leading soft drinks manufacturer, and it comes with a strong local organization, which makes it a strategic very strong fit for Royal Unibrew. Vrumona will become a new growth platform for Royal Unibrew in continental Europe and is expected to drive organic earnings growth in the coming years.

Transaction overview

At completion, Royal Unibrew A/S will acquire 100% of Vrumona in consideration of EUR 300 million on a debt free basis. Vrumonas net revenue was in 2022 EUR 200 million whereas normalized EBITDA in 2022 was EUR 25 million, resulting in an acquisition multiple of (EV/EBITDA) of 12 times.

The acquisition of Vrumona is expected to be EPS accretive already in 2024, and ROIC on the acquisition is expected to exceed WACC within 3 years.

The transaction is dependent on one regulatory approval in a small Royal Unibrew export market as well as a customary works council process on the sellers side of the transaction. Closing of the transaction is expected to happen in either September or October this year and will be financed by committed extended financing facilities with existing banks.

Strategic rationale

With a strong position in both On- and Off-Trade, Vrumona is the second largest player in the Dutch soft drinks market with an established range of strong own brands like Royal Club, Sisi, Sourcy, Sourcy Vitamin Water and partner brands like 7 Up, Pepsi and Rivella. With its strong local organization, Vrumona fits very well into Royal Unibrew A/S operating model of strong local businesses with strong local brands.

The majority of the product portfolio is within the no/low sugar and calories segment, as Vrumona has been a frontrunner in healthy and functional innovations with a clear focus on wellness, healthier products and sustainability combined with a comprehensive portfolio of winning brands.

With the acquisition of Vrumona we also expand our long-standing partnership with PepsiCo, as Vrumona is operating the full beverage portfolio from PepsiCo on a license agreement in a partnership dating back to 1949.

Vrumona operates seven production lines at the facility with a current annual output of around 3.1 million hectolitres. The acquisition of Vrumona establishes a new market platform for Royal Unibrew A/S in The Netherlands. It is the plan to invest in further production capabilities to grow the existing business, but also use spare capacity to support Royal Unibrew A/S global production footprint.

Vrumona has a portfolio of strong local Dutch brands and a strong operational footprint in The Netherlands. The company offers a broad product portfolio of both own brands and third-party brands produced under license. Vrumona has a strong position within the no/low calorie segment, as it has been a focus area for several years.

The production facility is of high quality and high maintenance level, however additional long-term investments are needed to replace an outdated filling line and to improve efficiencies, capacities and capabilities. It is therefore expected that it will take a couple of years before the platform will be able to exploit its full organic growth potential.

Outlook for 2023

The outlook for 2023 will be updated at closing.

There will be an information call, today, Monday July 3, 2023, at 14:00pm CEST. Participants need to register ([email protected]) to receive a link for the call.

About Vrumona

The soft drinks company from Bunnik, where around 325 people work, has been a wholly owned subsidiary of Heineken since 1968. Today, Vrumona has a strong position in both retail and Horeca. It is the second-largest player in the Dutch soft drink market and a frontrunner in healthier soft drinks with a range of established brands such as Royal Club, Sisi, Sourcy, Vitamin Water, and licensed brands such as 7 Up, Pepsi, and Rivella.

About Royal Unibrew A/S

Royal Unibrew is a leading regional multi-beverage company with strong local brand portfolios in its main markets in the Nordic region, the Baltic countries, Italy, France and Canada. In addition, its products are sold in more than 70 countries in the rest of the world. Royal Unibrew wants to be THE PREFERRED CHOICE as local beverage partner that challenge the status quo by doing better every day in a fun, agile and sustainable way.

For further information on this announcement:

Investor Relations: Jonas Guldborg Hansen, tel (+45) 20 10 12 45

Media Relations: Michelle Nrrelykke Hindkjr, tel (+45) 25 64 34 31

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Acquisition catalyzes disruptive real time B2B credit risk management solutions

Enhances Sidetrades offer with the most advanced solution and responds to booming B2B e-commerce market

Sidetrade strengthens position in North America

Accretive acquisition

Sidetrade (Euronext Growth: ALBFR.PA), the global leader in AI-powered Order-to-Cash solutions, has announced that it has finalized an agreement to acquire the entire business of CreditPoint Software , a leading provider of real time B2B credit risk management solutions.

Two years on from the Amalto takeover, Sidetrade gains a stronger foothold in North America with the acquisition of CreditPoint Software activities.

Olivier Novasque, CEO of Sidetrade, said: "By acquiring CreditPoint Software, Sidetrade has undoubtedly enhanced its solution for B2B credit risk management and we are in pole position to take advantage of the boom in B2B e-commerce. After placing artificial intelligence at the core of our Collection, Disputes and CashApps solutions, we are now shaping the future of B2B credit risk management together with CreditPoint Software's teams as we build on the analysis from our Data Lake of over $4.6 billion worth of B2B transactions. Our technological advantage in AI over our competitors will only continue to assert itself and become even more evident. Working in tandem, the talents and technologies of both groups will enable Sidetrade to cement its global leadership position in Order-to-Cash.

Introducing CreditPoint Software and its state-of-the-art platform for instant credit risk management

Founded in 2006 in the city of Tulsa, Oklahoma, CreditPoint Software is an American software company specializing in comprehensive B2B credit risk management solutions.

Following a decade of substantial R&D investment, CreditPoint Software has developed one of the world-leading cloud-based platforms that leverages real time connection and monitoring for over 20 credit rating agencies worldwide including Dun & BradstreetTM, CreditsafeTM, ExperianTM, EquifaxTM, TransUnionTM as well as S&P and MoodysTM. By standardizing external data from multiple sources within a single repository, CreditPoint Software makes it possible for companies to combine this information with their internal financial and customer data on credit risk exposure. This enables Credit Management teams to automate and streamline decision-making, thanks to the platform's unlimited configuration options, resulting in the ability to auto decide up to 100% of initial, increase and renewal decisions. The CreditPoint suite of products also includes highly configurable personalized credit application templates.

Supported by customizable business rules and data points, the decision engine within CreditPoint Software secures compliance with internal credit delegations based on delegation of authority. CreditPoint Software also schedules regular reviews of current credit limits for existing clientele, while providing the option for sales teams and organizations to be made aware of credit availability so they may potentially generate additional sales. The end result: selling more to the best customers and pricing risk into the customers that may not be as healthy financially as others.

What's more, CreditPoint Software's "Onboarding Credit Application" facilitates the initial process for customers to apply for a credit line, irrespective of whether the B2B purchasing experience is delivered offline or online. In an increasingly digitalized landscape, where digital transformation is key, providing real-time credit approval during the onboarding process of new customers becomes an essential competitive advantage for all businesses.

To date, CreditPoint Software has an active portfolio of around 30 customers in North America and serves multinationals such as Nutrien, BP, Edelman and Caterpillar.

In the fiscal year 2023, CreditPoint Software expects to break even, with revenue topping the $2 million mark.

John C. Powers, CEO of CreditPoint Software, commented:

"This deal with Sidetrade is a major step forward in our commitment to providing leading-edge solutions for B2B credit risk management. In today's uncertain economic environment, companies seek efficient solutions that anticipate risks and automate decisions to secure and increase their revenue streams. By leveraging Sidetrade's Data Lake with its predictive payment intelligence map of 21 million companies worldwide, we will deploy artificial intelligence in all our decisioning to provide companies with the risk management solution of the future. Propelled by Sidetrade's sales force and implementation resources, we will further expand this new offering throughout the United States and bring it to the European market for the first time."

Contextualizing CreditPoint Software, the solution designed for the B2B e-commerce boom

While McKinsey & Company estimated that the majority of B2B corporations had next to no e-commerce capabilities at the start of the pandemic, the past two years have seen a rapid trend reversal. In its 2021 B2B Pulse Report , the US consulting firm found that 65% of B2B companies across all sectors offer e-commerce capabilities.

A DHL study also reported that by 2025, 80% of all B2B sales interactions between suppliers and professional buyers will take place digitally, representing a giant and unprecedented leap forward. And in its 2022 report, Statista expects total B2B e-commerce purchases to exceed $4.6 trillion in 2025. Clearly, e-commerce is no longer just a trendy new channel for B2B companies to discover, but instead an essential effective and strategic sales tool.

Compared to B2C e-commerce, B2B e-commerce places more importance on credit and payment terms. A series of checks must be performed in real time to validate an order. However, managing such procedures instantly requires a step-by-step process. The latter involves identifying the company, integrating external financial data, decision-making and delegating approval based on the total order amount.

Nevertheless, across the globe, very few companies can implement a solution to overcome the limitations of B2B e-commerce and offer a customer experience to match the B2C shopping experience.

"The boom in e-commerce has revolutionized sales and consumption patterns. In B2B, the growth of e-commerce requires companies to find the right solution for the right emerging expectation. You need to determine an acceptable payment delay to minimize risk and instantly maximize sales." commented Olivier Novasque, CEO of Sidetrade. "For B2B companies that want to continue leading the way in their sectors, e-commerce is no longer just a nice to have, but an essential requirement. We will support them by utilizing our teams and the technology of CreditPoint Software. No matter the sector, it is a pressing need."





Focusing on the accretive acquisition of CreditPoint Software asset

This acquisition will be made in cash for an estimated 3 million and paid in part on the signing of the agreement with the rest scheduled for end-2023, which is subject to certain customer renewals. The amount includes an earn out based on the sales achieved by Sidetrade for CreditPoint Software's solution over the next three years.

Sidetrade is financing the transaction through its cash position, which totaled 36 million (12 million in treasury shares) as of June 30, 2023.

The transaction is part of the Group's Fusion 100 strategic plan which targets Annual Recurring Revenue ("ARR") of $100 million by end-2025. Not only is it a catalyst for Sidetrade's product strategy, but also its target revenue for North America of close to $14 million in 2023 which will bolster the Group's presence in the United States.

Sidetrade Contacts

Investor Relations Christelle Dhrif 00 33 6 10 46 72 00 [email protected]

Media Relations Rebecca Parlby +44 7824 5055 84 [email protected]

About Sidetrade ( www.sidetrade.com )

Sidetrade (Euronext Growth: ALBFR.PA) provides a SaaS platform dedicated to securing and accelerating cash flow. Sidetrades next-generation AI, nicknamed Aimie, analyzes $4.6 trillion worth of B2B payment transactions daily in the Sidetrade Cloud to predict customer payment behavior and the attrition risk of more than 21 million companies worldwide. Aimie recommends the best cash collection strategies, intelligently automates actions on the Order-to-Cash process, and dematerializes customer transactions to enhance productivity, performance and working capital management.

Sidetrade has a global reach, with 300 talented employees based in Paris, London, Birmingham, Dublin, Houston, and Calgary, serving global businesses in more than 85 countries. Amongst them: Tech Data, KPMG, Nespresso, Hearst, Expedia, Criteo, Manpower, Securitas, Randstad, Engie, Veolia, Inmarsat, and Bidfood.

Sidetrade is a participant of the United Nations Global Compact and adheres to its principles-based approach to responsible business.

For further information, visit us at www.sidetrade.com and follow us on Twitter @Sidetrade.

About CreditPoint Software ( www.creditpointsoftware.com )

CreditPoint Software was founded in 2006, by a former credit professional, who realized there was a better way to help companies manage their credit and collections processes. From small and medium-sized companies, all the way up to Fortune 50, CreditPoint Software serves a myriad of business types and sizes. With 20+ years of experience, CreditPoint Software works with B2B companies to minimize risk and reduce DSO by streamlining the credit risk management process from decisioning to monitoring and collections.

CreditPoint Software has helped businesses across industries increase workflow efficiency, gain transparency, and ultimately save millions in bad debt reduction and productivity increases

In the event of any discrepancy between the French and English versions of this press release, only the French version is to be taken into account.

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Qingdao, China--(Newsfile Corp. - July 2, 2023) - On June 30th Beijing time, Qilu Pharmaceutical Group, located in Shandong Province, China, will export more than 45000 cisplatin injections produced to the United States. This is the second batch of drugs supplied by this well-known Chinese pharmaceutical company to the United States, following the first batch of 18000 cisplatin injections exported to the United States.





Chinese company Qilu Pharmaceutical is supplying the anti-cancer drug cisplatin injection to the United States again



To view an enhanced version of this graphic, please visit:

https://images.newsfilecorp.com/files/8247/172145_d37568b1041379e9_001full.jpg

In March of this year, Qilu Pharmaceutical Group received an urgent email from the FDA inquiring about the availability of the anticancer drug cisplatin injection due to a shortage in the US market. Qilu Pharmaceutical Group responded quickly and had multiple rounds of communication and negotiations with the FDA. The product was declared and successfully approved in just one and a half months. On May 31st Beijing time, Qilu Pharmaceutical Group shipped 18000 bottles of cisplatin injection to the United States without affecting domestic product supply.

The FDA temporarily licensed the import of Qilu Pharmaceutical's cisplatin injection after only 1.5 months, mainly focusing on Qilu Pharmaceutical Group's comprehensive quality management system. As early as the 1990s, this company established a joint venture with a well-known Italian pharmaceutical company in Jinan. The pharmaceutical concept was the first to align with international standards, establishing a globally unified quality management and control system that meets different needs according to the requirements of different countries and regions, and achieving high-quality products throughout the production process, achieving full lifecycle management of products. Moreover, this enterprise is at the forefront of automation, intelligence, and digitization, with the world's highest quality and high-end production and testing equipment, ensuring that every product has world-class quality.

In addition, the FDA's rapid licensing of Qilu Pharmaceutical's cisplatin injection for export to the United States is related to the company's years of deep cultivation in the world's largest pharmaceutical market - the United States market. As early as 2016, Qilu Pharmaceutical Group's products entered the US market. On May 3, Beijing time, their first-line targeted specific drug Gefitinib tablets for the treatment of non-small cell lung cancer also successfully went on sale in the United States market. With the shipment of cisplatin injection to the United States, this is already the 24th formulation product of Qilu Pharmaceutical Group to achieve commercial sales in the United States.

Sun Ke

[email protected]

https://www.qilu-pharma.com/

To view the source version of this press release, please visit https://www.newsfilecorp.com/release/172145
Complementing recent news of the opening of its Shanghai data center campus and introducing a new leadership team, Chayora continues to invest in the people and facilities necessary to grow a premium data center platform serving China

HONG KONG , July 3, 2023 /PRNewswire/ -- Chayora Limited, a leading developer and operator of hyperscale data center campuses in China , reinforces its market commitment with the opening of a new Beijing office to further support its continued business growth in region. Located in the central business district, the new office at Prosper Center has tripled in size, offering partners and customers convenient access.

2023 has already seen Chayora open its newest data center campus in Shanghai and introduce a new leadership team. With this additional investment in China's capital city, Chayora is strongly positioned to meet growing regional customer demand for critical IT infrastructure that can support latency sensitive content, large scale cloud, or high-density AI deployments.

China is the world's fastest-growing data center market, valued at $13 billion in 2020 and expected to reach $36 billion by 2026. As one of China's largest cities with a population of 22 million, Beijing's financial, business, and technological development have made it one of Asia's important economic, commercial, and communications centers of China .

"Chayora remains focused on and committed to the China Market, working to create a limitless and sustainable digital future for our customers. Enterprises and tech companies in China , especially the large internet and content providers, demand reliable and scalable data center infrastructure to fuel their customers' demands. Our significant growth sets the stage for the next critical phase of Chayora's regional development and fuels further customer expansions. Chayora is also uniquely focused to help businesses across China capitalize on opportunities arising from innovations such as Artificial Intelligence and quantum computing." - James Wei , CEO of Chayora.

As a trusted data center infrastructure services company and strategic partner of EdgeConneX, coupled with the ability to expand into other leading Chinese markets, Chayora offers appealing low-risk China growth options. Currently operating two hyperscale carrier-neutral facilities with expansion potential, Chayora provides considerable advantages to customers as it is fully licensed to operate and connect its data centers.

Chayora's data center campus in Tianjin serves the tri-province area  Beijing , Tianjin and Heibei and is the first Northern China data center awarded both Uptime's Institute Tier III Certificate of Design Documents and a Tier III Certification of Constructed Facility. It is also the first data center facility in China having achieved OCP Ready certification. The Shanghai data center campus is fully customizable for build-to-suit customers and wholesale colocation requirements. It enables multi-national corporations to develop global standard data centers to support their enterprise and cloud requirements. The two facilities can jointly scale to over 200MW IT load to meet the hefty demands of high-density computing with access to 100% renewable energy.

To book a virtual tour of the Tianjin or Shanghai data center campuses, please visit: https://chayora.com/about-chayora/chayora-book-a-virtual-tour/

For more information on building a customized data center solution to meet your unique requirements, please contact [email protected].

About Chayora

Chayora develops and operates world-leading hyperscale data center campuses in China . Our wholesale colocation and custom-built data centers are highly reliable and efficient, powering the most demanding high density applications of today and tomorrow. For more information, visit http://www.chayora.com

Media Contact: Tina Tsui , [email protected]com

View original content to download multimedia:https://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/chayora-unveils-new-beijing-office-as-it-continues-to-invest-and-expand-its-presence-in-china-301868661.html

SOURCE Chayora
"News Provided by Technology Magazine "

" ServiceNow's Creator Workflows low code App Engine allows companies to build apps and workflows quicker, smarter, and much more cost effectively.

LONDON , July 3, 2023 /PRNewswire/ --

ServiceNow has been featured in the July issue of Technology Magazine.

In this exclusive interview, Gregg Aldana , Global Area Vice President, discusses how ServiceNow's Creator Workflows allows quicker, smarter, and much more cost effective app development.

Gregg states that "Process optimisation, including citizen driven low-code app dev, is going to become a very ubiquitous skill that everybody in the workforce will be expected to have."

He adds that "The productivity gains of low code are game changing. It's changing the mission of some companies and their ability to do business."

About Technology Magazine

Technology Magazine connects the world's largest technology brands and their most senior executives with the latest trends, industry insights, and influential projects as the world embraces technology and digital transformation.

Technology Magazine is an established, trusted, and leading voice on all things technology  engaging with a highly targeted audience of global executives. We provide the perfect platform for you to showcase your products and services, share your achievements, and enhance your reputation in the industry.

About BizClik

BizClik is a UK -based media company with a global portfolio of leading industry, business and lifestyle digital communities.

BizClik's portfolio includes Technology & AI, Finance & Insurance, Manufacturing & Supply Chain, Energy & Mining, Construction, Healthcare, Mobile & Data Centre. For further information, please visit https://www.bizclikmedia.com/

View original content:https://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/faster-more-cost-effective-app-development-with-servicenow-301868273.html

SOURCE Technology Magazine
Two Vietnamese killed in Cambodia nightclub fire

Two Vietnamese were among eight found dead in a devastating night club fire in downtown capital Phnom Penh, Cambodia, last weekend.









The nightclub fire in downtown Phnom Penh on July 1 has killed eight people, inclluding six Chinese nationals and two Vietnamese people. (Photo Khmer Times).



The fire started at around 5pm on July 1 on the fifth floor of the 6969 nightclub in Sangkat Phsar Depot 1, Khan Toul Kork, Phnom Penh, Khmer Times reported.



The blaze killed eight people, including six Chinese nationals and two Vietnamese people. Local police said the fire was caused by a short circuit in the electrical wiring.



Phnom Penh Municipal Police spokesman San Sok Seiha said the victims were construction workers who were renovating the interior of the building when the fire broke out. They died of suffocation.



The police have launched investigations into the accident and arrested four people, San Sok Seiha said.
Heathrow Airport has appointed Thomas Woldbye, currently the boss of Copenhagen Airport, as the person to replace John Holland-Kaye when he steps down later this year after nearly 10 years in the CEO post.



Following an extensive recruitment process, Thomas emerged as the standout candidate among a pool of exceptional contenders both internally and from across the world.



Having served as the CEO of Copenhagen Airport since 2011, Thomas brings with him a wealth of experience and a proven track record as a CEO of a major airport championing passenger service, sustainability and growth. His experience means that he is ideally placed to oversee the airports future strategy following an 11bn private investment programme by Heathrows shareholders that has transformed the UKs hub into the modern, top-rated airport it is today.



During his tenure at Copenhagen Airport, Thomas put customers and colleagues at the heart of the airport's transformation, turning it into the powerhouse transport hub of northern Europe with an award-winning passenger service ranking. His ability to navigate complex stakeholder relationships has been a key factor in his success. Thomas forged strong links with the Danish Government, who are part owners of Copenhagen Airport, and fostered partnerships with airlines to drive investment and development, including significant recent expansions in terminal capacity at the airport.



Prior to his role at Copenhagen Airport, he spent 27 years at Mller-Mrsk, leading the global shipping and ferry divisions, working in several different countries around the world and delivering significant success in complex operating environments while building up expertise in process efficiency.



John will remain in post keeping the airport focussed on delivering excellent passenger service over the summer getaway until Thomas officially starts later in the year.



Commenting on the appointment, Heathrow Chairman Lord Paul Deighton said: After an extensive and rigorous review of candidates, the Heathrow Board is delighted to appoint Thomas Woldbye as the next Heathrow CEO. Leading Britains hub airport is one of the most important jobs in global aviation and the vacancy attracted the best calibre talent from across the world. Thomass achievements at Copenhagen not only mirror Heathrows long-term strategy, but his track record in successfully running a major airport and working closely with stakeholders to secure consensus and deliver positive results stood out in the selection process.



The Board would like to pay tribute to John. He set a strong example in his unyielding dedication to his colleagues and will leave behind a legacy of having transformed Heathrow into a premier global hub, developed the plan for Heathrow expansion that secured overwhelming Parliamentary approval, navigated the business through the extremely challenging times during the Covid 19 pandemic, overcame the unprecedented challenges of the post-pandemic recovery in demand and led the industry towards a net zero future.



Current Heathrow CEO John Holland-Kaye said: An airport is more than just runways and terminal buildings  its the people who come to work every day to deliver excellent service to our passengers. Its been the privilege of my lifetime to lead our fantastic team. Ive worked with Thomas over recent years and am a great admirer of his leadership on diversity and sustainability and his championing of the needs of passengers. Im confident that the Heathrow team will be the cornerstone of his success in delivering the best airport service in the world.



Incoming Heathrow CEO Thomas Woldbye said: I am naturally excited and proud, as well as humbled, to have been chosen to lead what is arguably the most famous airport in the world on its future journey.



I have personally experienced how the excellent team at Heathrow has successfully improved both the infrastructure and the service to passengers over the past years to create a strong platform for further success. Heathrow is an important engine for the British economy and inextricably linked to the success of London and the wider UK. I look forward to being part of charting the path for this iconic company. My ambition will be to make the airport even better for passengers, for airlines, the community and every part of the UK.  TradeArabia News Service
BAKU, Azerbaijan, July 3. Azerbaijan procured 30,915 tons of liquid fuel for industrial use from Turkmenistan through imports from January through April, 2023, Trend reports.

Based on the provided information by the State Statistics Committee of Azerbaijan, the value of Azerbaijan's imports of liquid fuel for industrial use from Turkmenistan exceeded $11.8 million, which exceeds the figure of the first four months of 2022 by 3.2 times.

Azerbaijan imported more than 4,622 tons of liquid fuel for industrial use in the first 4 months of 2022 for an amount exceeding $3.6 million.

Furthermore, Azerbaijan imported a total of more than 90,379 tons of liquid fuel for industrial purposes from January through April this year in the amount of $35.79 million.

Turkmenistan ranks among the world's leading countries in terms of oil and gas reserves. The country pays great attention to the construction of oil and gas processing plants and the export of energy resources to world markets.

Meanwhile, the trade turnover between Azerbaijan and Turkmenistan from January through April this year amounted to $296.51 million, which is 4.3 times more than compared to the same period last year ($68.85 million).
CHARLOTTE, N.C. , July 2, 2023 /PRNewswire/ -- JELD-WEN Holding, Inc. (NYSE: JELD), a leading global manufacturer of building products, today announced that it has completed the previously announced sale of its Australasia business to Platinum Equity, a global investment firm.

"The closing of this transaction represents a significant milestone in our strategy to simplify and streamline the company while maximizing shareholder value," said JELD-WEN Chief Executive Officer William J. Christensen . "The sale of the Australasia business enables us to focus on our two largest and core regions, North America and Europe , and to strengthen our balance sheet."

The transaction generated net proceeds of approximately $446 million for JELD-WEN and the company plans to use the funds to repay debt. Excluding the Australasia business, JELD-WEN's 2022 net revenue was $4.5 billion , and the North America and Europe segments contributed 72% and 28% respectively.

Advisers

Macquarie Capital served as financial adviser to JELD-WEN, and Herbert Smith Freehills served as legal counsel. Gresham Advisory Partners served as financial adviser to Platinum Equity, and Allens served as legal counsel.

About JELD-WEN Holding, Inc.

JELD-WEN is a leading global designer, manufacturer and distributor of high-performance interior and exterior doors, windows, and related building products serving the new construction and repair and remodeling sectors. Headquartered in Charlotte, N.C. , the company operates facilities in 16 countries in North America and Europe and employs approximately 18,000 people. Since 1960, the JELD-WEN team has been committed to making quality products that create safe and sustainable environments for customers, associates and local communities. The JELD-WEN family of brands includes JELD-WEN worldwide; LaCantina and VPI in North America ; and Swedoor and DANA in Europe . For more information, visit jeld-wen.com.

Forward Looking Statements

This press release contains forward-looking statements within the meaning of the Private Securities Litigation Reform Act of 1995. These forward-looking statements are generally identified by the use of forward-looking terminology, including the terms "anticipate," "believe," "continue," "could," "estimate," "expect," "intend," "likely," "may," "plan," "possible," "potential," "predict," "project," "should," "target," "will," "would" and, in each case, their negative or other various or comparable terminology. All statements other than statements of historical facts are forward-looking statements, including statements regarding our business strategies and ability to execute on our plans, market potential, future financial performance, customer demand, the potential of our categories, brands and innovations, the impact of our footprint rationalization and modernization program, the impact of acquisitions and divestitures on our business and our ability to maximize value and integrate operations, our pipeline of productivity projects, the estimated impact of tax reform on our results, litigation outcomes, and our expectations, beliefs, plans, objectives, prospects, assumptions, or other future events, all of which involve risks and uncertainties that could cause actual results to differ materially. For a discussion of these risks and uncertainties, please refer to our Annual Report on Form 10-K for the year ended December 31, 2022 and our other filings with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission.

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SOURCE JELD-WEN Holding, Inc.
BOSTON, MA , July 3, 2023 /PRNewswire/ - The John Hancock closed-end funds listed below declared their monthly distributions today as follows:

Declaration Date: July 3, 2023 Ex Date: July 12, 2023 Record Date: July 13, 2023 Payment Date: July 31, 2023

Ticker Fund Name Distribution

Per Share Change From Previous

Distribution Market Price as of

6/30/2023 Annualized Current

Distribution Rate at

Market HPI Preferred Income Fund $0.1235 - $15.23 9.73 % HPF Preferred Income Fund II $0.1235 - $15.09 9.82 % HPS Preferred Income Fund III $0.1100 - $14.01 9.42 % HTD Tax-Advantaged Dividend

Income Fund $0.1380 - $20.40 8.12 %



John Hancock Tax-Advantaged Dividend Income Fund

Tax-Advantaged Dividend Income Fund (the "Fund") declared its monthly distribution pursuant to the Fund's managed distribution plan (the "HTD Plan"). Under the HTD Plan, the Fund makes monthly distributions of an amount equal to $0.1380 per share. This amount will be paid monthly until further notice.

Distributions under the HTD Plan may consist of net investment income, net realized long-term capital gains, net realized short-term capital gains and, to the extent necessary, return of capital.

The Fund may also make additional distributions (i) for purposes of not incurring federal income tax on investment company taxable income and net capital gain of the Fund, if any, not included in such regular distributions and (ii) for purposes of not incurring federal excise tax on ordinary income and capital gain net income, if any, not included in such regular monthly distributions.

The Board may amend the terms of the HTD Plan or terminate the HTD Plan at any time.

A portion of a Fund's current distribution may include sources other than net investment income, including a return of capital. Investors should understand that a return of capital is not a distribution from income or gains of a Fund. As required under the Investment Company Act of 1940, a notice with the estimated components of the distribution will be sent to shareholders at the time of payment if it does not consist solely of net investment income. Such notice will also be posted to the Funds' website at www.jhinvestments.com . The notice should not be used to prepare tax returns as the estimates indicated in the notice may differ from the ultimate federal income tax characterization of distributions. After the end of each calendar year, investors will be sent a Form 1099-DIV informing them how to report distributions received during that year for federal income tax purposes.

Statements in this press release that are not historical facts are forward-looking statements as defined by the United States securities laws. You should exercise caution in interpreting and relying on forward-looking statements because they are subject to uncertainties and other factors which are, in some cases, beyond the Fund's control and could cause actual results to differ materially from those set forth in the forward-looking statements.

An investor should consider a Fund's investment objectives, risks, charges and expenses carefully before investing.

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 18 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.

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SOURCE John Hancock Investment Management
MILWAUKEE , July 3, 2023 /PRNewswire/ -- ManpowerGroup (NYSE: MAN), the world leader in innovative workforce solutions, today announced that it plans to release 2nd quarter earnings results before the market opens on Thursday, July 20, 2023 . Management will discuss the results the same day in a live webcast at 7:30 a.m. Central Time ( 8:30 a.m. Eastern Time ), which can be accessed on the company's website.

The webcast will be available for replay at the same URL beginning at 10:30 a.m. Central Time ( 11:30 a.m. Eastern Time ) on July 20, 2023 . The replay will remain available for 30 days in this location. Supplemental financial information referenced in the webcast and the text of the 2nd quarter press release can be found on the company's website, in the section titled "Financial Information," after 7:30 a.m. Central Time on July 20, 2023 .

About ManpowerGroup

ManpowerGroup (NYSE: MAN), the leading global workforce solutions company, helps organizations transform in a fast-changing world of work by sourcing, assessing, developing, and managing the talent that enables them to win. We develop innovative solutions for hundreds of thousands of organizations every year, providing them with skilled talent while finding meaningful, sustainable employment for millions of people across a wide range of industries and skills. Our expert family of brands  Manpower, Experis, and Talent Solutions  creates substantially more value for candidates and clients across more than 70 countries and territories and has done so for 75 years. We are recognized consistently for our diversity  as a best place to work for Women, Inclusion, Equality, and Disability, and in 2023 ManpowerGroup was named one of the World's Most Ethical Companies for the 14th time  all confirming our position as the brand of choice for in-demand talent. For more information, visit www.manpowergroup.com.

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SOURCE ManpowerGroup
BOSTON , July 3, 2023 /PRNewswire/ -- STAG Industrial, Inc. (the "Company") (NYSE: STAG) today announced that the Company will release its second quarter 2023 operating and financial results after market close on Wednesday, July 26, 2023 . The Company will host its quarterly earnings conference call on Thursday, July 27, 2023 , at 10:00 a.m. Eastern Time .

The call can be accessed live over the phone toll-free by dialing (877) 407-4018, or for international callers, (201) 689-8471. A replay will be available shortly after the call and can be accessed by dialing (844) 512-2921, or for international callers, (412) 317-6671. The passcode for the replay is 13739628.

Interested parties also may listen to a simultaneous webcast of the conference call by visiting the Investor Relations section of the Company's website at www.stagindustrial.com, or by clicking on the following link:

http://ir.stagindustrial.com/CorporateProfile

About STAG Industrial, Inc.

STAG Industrial, Inc. is a real estate investment trust focused on the acquisition, ownership, and operation of industrial properties throughout the United States . As of March 31, 2023 , the Company's portfolio consists of 561 buildings in 41 states with approximately 111.6 million rentable square feet.

For additional information, please visit the Company's website at www.stagindustrial.com.

Forward-Looking Statements

This press release, together with other statements and information publicly disseminated by the Company, contains certain 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. The Company intends such forward-looking statements to be covered by the safe harbor provisions for forward-looking statements contained in the Private Securities Litigation Reform Act of 1995 and includes this statement for purposes of complying with these safe harbor provisions. Forward-looking statements, which are based on certain assumptions and describe the Company's future plans, strategies and expectations, are generally identifiable by use of the words "believe," "will," "expect," "intend," "anticipate," "estimate," "should," "project" or similar expressions. You should not rely on forward-looking statements since they involve known and unknown risks, uncertainties and other factors that are, in some cases, beyond the Company's control and which could materially affect actual results, performances or achievements. Factors that may cause actual results to differ materially from current expectations include, but are not limited to, the risk factors discussed in the Company's annual report on Form 10-K for the year ended December 31, 2022 , as updated by the Company's quarterly reports on Form 10-Q. Accordingly, there is no assurance that the Company's expectations will be realized. Except as otherwise required by the federal securities laws, the Company disclaims any obligation or undertaking to publicly release any updates or revisions to any forward-looking statement contained herein (or elsewhere) to reflect any change in the Company's expectations with regard thereto or any change in events, conditions, or circumstances on which any such statement is based.

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SOURCE STAG Industrial, Inc.
FILE PHOTO: China's Premier Li Qiang and New Zealand Prime Minister Chris Hipkins inspect the guard of honour during a welcoming ceremony at the Great Hall of the People in Beijing on June 28, 2023. JADE GAO/Pool via REUTERS/File Photo

By Lucy Craymer

WELLINGTON (Reuters) - New Zealand Prime Minister Chris Hipkins trod a careful line on his first trip to China last week as leader, focusing on trade and economic opportunities but avoiding contentious issues such as human rights abuses in Xinjiang or security concerns.

Barely three months out from what looks likely to be a tight election and with the economy already technically in recession, analysts say Hipkins is seeking to step out of the shadow of high-profile former leader Jacinda Ardern and show he is the person to run the country for a further three years.

One angle Hipkins is focusing on is assuring voters that Labour is the party to bring back prosperity  and that means avoiding disputes with the countrys largest trading partner, which could damage New Zealand exports.

This was a big visit for Hipkins who is cementing his profile as a new prime minister in an election year, said Robert Ayson, professor of strategic studies at Victoria University.

Hipkins pulled his punches on anything controversial. We were back, for a moment at least, where New Zealand admits it does not see eye to eye with China on some big matters without actually naming them."

New Zealand has long been seen as the most conciliatory towards China among the Five Eyes security grouping, which includes Australia, the U.S., Britain and Canada.

But the countrys Foreign Minister Nanaia Mahuta and Ardern in recent meetings with counterparts noted the situation in Xinjiang and the erosion of democracy in Hong Kong, while raising concerns about potential militarisation in the Pacific and tensions in the Taiwan Strait.

The statement after Hipkins's meeting with Chinese President Xi Jinping mentioned none of these issues.

(Hipkins's) visit certainly gave China a tick in the international legitimacy box and Beijing has gained at least as much from Hipkins' visit as New Zealand exporters, Victoria University's Ayson said.

New Zealand exporters were prominent in the visit with a delegation of 29 businesses travelling with the prime minister to China.

Business is not a traditional supporter base of the Labour Party, but Hipkins has been focused on winning this sector over since he took office  his first full day in the job in January he spent talking to business leaders in Auckland.

My sense is that there's a significant aspect of domestic politics here in an election year, and that Hipkins wants to be seen as a sort of good steward of the China relationship, said David Capie, Director of the Centre for Strategic Studies at Victoria University.

The most recent polls from late May put a coalition of opposition parties National and Act ahead of a Labour-Green party coalition. Neither coalition, however, may have a clear majority.

Derek J. Grossman, a senior defence analyst at RAND Corp in the United States said the trade-focused visit is unlikely to have any negative blow back on New Zealands relationship with other partners as many countries are aware of the delicate balancing act Wellington is playing.

In addition, and as the Biden administration has shown with India on its Russia ties, so long as partners agree to cooperate on the Indo-Pacific strategy to counter China, then Washington is willing to tolerate quite a bit of behaviour that does not align with its interests or even values."

(Reporting by Lucy Craymer; Editing by Lincoln Feast.)
COPENHAGEN (Reuters) - The deaths of a Polish woman and her 7-year-old son last week following their plunge from a Baltic Sea ferry travelling from Sweden to Poland was not an accident, a preliminary investigation by Danish authorities has found.

The case was being investigated as a possible murder, Swedish prosecutors said on Friday.

The case had been handed over to the police, the public prosecutor and the Danish Maritime Authority for further investigation. Danish authorities are investigating the case because the ferry Stena Spirit was sailing under the Danish flag.

"Our investigation showed quite clearly that it was not an accident," Oessur Jarleivson Hilduberg, head of the Danish Maritime Accident Investigation Board, told Reuters on Monday.

The preliminary investigation had collected data from video footage, pictures and witnesses, Hilduberg said.

The ferry was in the Baltic midway through its journey to Gdynia in Poland from Karlskrona in Sweden when the child had fallen off the vessel. The mother jumped overboard in an attempted rescue.

The two were later winched to a helicopter and taken to a Swedish hospital, but later died.

(Reporting by Jacob Gronholt-Pedersen; Editing by Devika Syamnath)
FILE PHOTO: NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg and Charles Michel, the President of the European Council, speak to the media as they attend the European Union leaders summit in Brussels, Belgium June 29, 2023. REUTERS/Johanna Geron/File Photo

BRUSSELS (Reuters) - NATO members are expected to agree on Tuesday to extend the term of Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg for a further year, according to four diplomats.

The decision has been widely signaled in recent weeks but ambassadors to NATO are expected to formally approve the extension during a meeting on Tuesday, said the diplomats, who spoke on Monday on condition of anonymity.

Stoltenberg has guided the North Atlantic Treaty Organization through a series of crises since taking charge in 2014, most recently rallying NATO members in support of Ukraine while seeking to prevent the war there from escalating into a direct conflict between NATO and Russia.

Stoltenberg, 64, is a former prime minister of Norway. He was due to complete his term as the top civilian at the transatlantic security alliance at the end of September but is now likely to stay on for a further 12 months.

Stoltenberg said in February he was not seeking an extension to his contract. But NATO members asked him to accept one after failing to reach consensus on a successor.

Among those discussed as contenders were British Defence Secretary Ben Wallace - who openly said he would like the job - and Danish Prime Minister Mette Frederiksen, who insisted publicly she was not a candidate for the post.

(Reporting by Andrew Gray in Brussels; Editing by Matthew Lewis)
FILE PHOTO-A man goes through a revolving door at the POSCO headquarters in Seoul August 30, 2010. REUTERS/Jo Yong-Hak

SEOUL (Reuters) - South Korean steelmaking and materials conglomerate POSCO Group, headed by POSCO Holdings, said on Monday it plans to invest 121 trillion won ($93 billion) by 2030 for growth in core businesses such as steel, battery materials and hydrogen.

POSCO said in a statement it plans to invest 72 trillion won, or more than 60% of the total amount in South Korea, creating an estimated 330,000 jobs, as it seeks to become a leader in environmentally-friendly materials. The rest will be invested overseas.

POSCO Group has been expanding into new businesses for diversification, including minerals used in electric vehicle batteries such as lithium.

Last month, General Motors Co and group affiliate POSCO Future M said they will expand the production capacity at their chemical battery materials facility in Canada, taking their estimated total investment to over $1 billion.

In 2020, POSCO announced a plan to become net-zero by 2050, including a 10% reduction in carbon emissions by 2030 versus the 2017-2019 average.

($1 = 1,307.1200 won)

(Reporting by Joyce Lee, editing by David Evans)
FILE PHOTO: Britain's Foreign Secretary James Cleverly speaks during the Economic Transformation: Transparency And Reform For Private Sector-Led Growth session on the first day of the Ukraine Recovery Conference in London, Britain, June 21, 2023.Kirsty Wi

LONDON (Reuters) - British foreign minister James Cleverly criticised a Hong Kong police decision to issue arrest warrants for eight overseas activists and said his government would not tolerate any attempts by China to intimidate individuals.

"The decision to issue arrest warrants for 8 activists, some of whom are in the UK, is a further example of the authoritarian reach of China's extraterritorial law," he said on Twitter.

In a statement released by the country's foreign ministry, he also said: "We will not tolerate any attempts by China to intimidate and silence individuals in the UK and overseas. The UK will always defend the universal right to freedom of expression and stand up for those who are targeted."

(Reporting by Muvija M)
CAMP ZAMA, Japan  A U.S. Army watercraft unit equipped with more than a dozen transport vessels will be homeported in Japan, the commander of U.S. Army Pacific told soldiers during a recent visit to this base in Kanagawa prefecture.

We have a composite watercraft company with 13 ships and 285 Army mariners permanently coming to Japan, Gen. Charles Flynn said at Camp Zama, 26 miles southwest of central Tokyo, on June 20. Flynn revealed the move while presiding over a ceremony that saw Maj. Gen. Joel JB Vowell relinquish command of U.S. Army Japan to Maj. Gen. David Womack.

U.S. Army Japan declined a request to photograph the watercraft or interview soldiers about the vessels and referred questions about the unit to U.S. Army Japan and U.S. Forces Japan. USFJ didnt respond to emailed questions last week and U.S. Army Pacific couldnt be reached over the long holiday weekend.

A composite watercraft company includes five landing craft utility vessels, two tugboats, four maneuver support vessels and a harbormaster operations detachment to provide maintenance, according to an Army news release from May 24, 2021.

Japanese troops toured an Army landing craft utility vessel  the USAV Calaboza  at Yokohama North Dock in January, the Army announced in a news release at the time.

LCUs  used for getting personnel, gear and supplies to shore  are small but boast the same payload capacity as seven C-17 Globemaster III aircraft, according to release. One LCU can carry up to five M1 Abrams tanks, 24 double-stacked shipping containers or 400 combat-equipped troops.

Japans army doesnt have watercraft and relies on its Maritime Self-Defense Force and civilian ships to transport troops and equipment by sea, according to the January release.

Todays visit is kind of a lesson learned for us, Col. Motokazu Suzuki, operations chief for Japans Central Army, who toured the vessel, said in the release. Japans army is considering acquiring watercraft, he added.

The U.S. Army operated 127,000 watercraft during World War II, according to the 2021 news release, which stated that the total force in the Indo-Pacific had since declined to six operational watercraft and 35 pre-positioned stock vessels.

In recent years, Army watercraft have been involved in training in Japan, Guam and Australia, transporting equipment such as the High Mobility Artillery Rocket System, or HIMARS, according to the release.

Army watercraft are useful boats for moving people, equipment, and supplies between scattered islands  especially in fairly close together archipelagoes, said Grant Newsham, a senior researcher with the Japan Forum for Strategic Studies in Tokyo.

They aren't very big so they can get into places and operate closer to the shore  if not right up on the shore  than can bigger more 'conventional' transports, he told Stars and Stripes in an email June 27. Also, they don't attract so much attention since they are small and non-descript.

Such vessels could meet the Marine Corps requirement to transport small units to far-flung islands in a conflict, Newsham added.

But the Army doesn't want to share or give up its resources, he said. That's not surprising, since the US Army is angling big-time for a role in a future fight in the Pacific. And they don't mind, and some would say are trying, to displace the US Marine Corps and its role in the Pacific.
BAKU, Azerbaijan, July 3. Issues of reintegration of Armenian minority of Karabakh into Azerbaijani society were discussed in the release of the "Dialogue with Tofiq Abbasov" analytical video project on the Baku Network expert platform, Trend reports.

The guest of the program was Chairman of the Board of the Union of Architects of Azerbaijan, Honored Architect, Professor Elbay Gasimzade.

Speaking about the reintegration of the Armenians of Karabakh, Gasimzade noted that Baku made them a very good offer - to stay and to live within the law of Azerbaijan.

All this will take place in accordance with the laws of Azerbaijan. Let them think again, if not about themselves, then about the fate of the young generation. They must think about the future, and see the real alignment of forces, he added.
WASHINGTON  The Navy has halted a staffing change that would have required thousands of recruiters to work an extra day each week  a move that was intended to maximize enlistment efforts as the service faces a shortage of new sailors for 2023.

The Navys goal is to sign up almost 38,000 new sailors before the fiscal year ends Sept. 30, but officials expect to miss that target. To get as close as possible, Navy Recruiting Command ordered last week that its recruiters would begin working six-day weeks on July 8.

That change is now on hold.

The office of Vice Adm. Rick Cheeseman, the chief of naval personnel, said he paused the plan, which was intended to extend outreach opportunities to potential recruits, because the Navy is committed to providing a work-life balance for our personnel.

We will continue to do everything to support our recruiters, adjust policy when we see an opportunity and remain focused on ensuring we have a force ready to fight, Cheeseman said.

The Navy has close to 4,000 recruiters and the decision forcing them to work an extra day was met by some criticism on social media when it was announced last week. One post from someone who identified as a Navy veteran called it the most serious misstep I've seen from the Navy in quite some time, and wrote the move could have blown up its relationship with recruiters.

Rear Adm. Alexis Walker, who leads Navy Recruiting Command, informed recruiters of the change in an email that leaked online. In that email, he called the increased workload a warfighting imperative because its expected the Navy will be as many as 7,000 recruits short of its 2023 target. Adm. Lisa Franchetti, vice chief of naval operations, gave lawmakers roughly the same figure at a House hearing in April.

The reality is we have a projected shortfall, need a healthy pipeline of people enlisting and need to grow our Delayed Entry Program, Cheeseman said. Our recruiters are the people who make that happen.

The Delayed Entry Program is one that allows recruits to sign up to serve at a future date. During the time between signing up and shipping out to basic training, the recruits can graduate high school, go to college or get various affairs in order. To meet its recruiting target last year, the Navy had to tap into its delayed-entry pool and bring new sailors aboard sooner.

After a similarly difficult recruiting year in 2022, the Navy has explored numerous incentives to attract new sailors. This month, the service said it is offering new members enlistment bonuses as high as $75,000 if they pursue certain nuclear-related jobs. Last year, the Navy announced $115,000 in new enlistment bonuses and student loan repayments. At the time, the service said the incentives were intended to attract the highest quality of recruits.

The quality of recruits joining the fleet is one of our top priorities, Lt. Cmdr. Richard Parker, a spokesman for Navy Recruiting Command, said Thursday when detailing the temporary change to a longer work week.
The oldest U.S. aircraft carrier still in service is back home in Washington state after a 7-month deployment.

The USS Nimitz, flagship for Carrier Strike Group 11, returned to its homeport in Bremerton on Sunday. During its deployment to the 3rd and 7th Fleet areas of operations, Nimitz conducted multinational exercises, long-range maritime strike exercises, anti-submarine warfare and other exercises, sailing more than 65,000 nautical miles and completing more than 14,500 aircraft launches and recoveries, a Navy news release said.

The carrier made port calls in Guam; Singapore; Busan, South Korea; Laem Chabang, Thailand; Sasebo, Japan; and Pearl Harbor, Hawaii; and hosted two formal big top receptions in South Korea and Thailand, the release said.

Before returning home, Nimitz dropped off the embarked air wing of Carrier Air Wing 17 at Naval Air Station Coronado in California on June 28.

Every day of the deployment, our sailors were relentless in the safe execution of operations, said Capt. Craig Sicola, commanding officer of Nimitz during the deployment. Sicola formally took over command of the carrier from Capt. Douglas Graber during a change of command ceremony in San Diego on June 29, the release said. I especially want to thank all our Nimitz families who supported and encouraged our sailors throughout these seven months.

While deployed, Nimitz made history when it completed its 350,000th arrested aircraft landing April 22 while sailing in the South China Sea. An arrested landing  also known as a trap  is one where a landing plane contacts the aircraft carrier and its tailhook snags one of four cables that are laid across the deck, Stars and Stripes previously reported. By catching one of the cables, the tailhook immediately decelerates the fighter jets speed so that it can safely stop.
SAN ANTONIO, Texas  The Space Forces 71 newest guardians marched in two flights across a heat-scorched parade field Thursday morning, bringing yet another first to the youngest branch of the military  the first boot camp graduates to train under a unique, Space Force-centric curriculum.

The guardians stood among more than 700 new airmen. While they all wore the same dress blue uniforms, the guardians were distinguished by the Space Force patches on their sleeves, and the new flags that designated their training flights.

After raising their right hands for oath of enlistment, the new guardians increased Space Forces total number of active-duty service members to 7,227, said Gen. John Raymond, chief of space operations. Space Force aims to have 8,400 guardians by the end of the year.

It's critical to the service that you build your own people, and you develop your force. Every domain is unique, whether it's the ground domain, air domain, sea domain or the space domain, Raymond said. Having an opportunity to grow these young guardians from day one with the core values and with the skill sets needed to be successful in this domain called space is really important to the service.

The first enlisted guardians began arriving at Lackland Air Force Base for basic training in October 2021, with seven graduating at the end of that year. Those early troops attended the same 7.5-week training as Air Force recruits.

Since then, about 800 guardians have entered Space Force through basic training, said Chief Master Sergeant of the Space Force Roger Towberman, who attended Thursdays ceremony along with Raymond. Other troops came to the service by transitioning from other service branches.

Moving forward, Lackland will receive a new class of guardians every eight weeks, but Towberman said itll take about a year to determine whether roughly 70 students every rotation is the right amount for the service.

What we do at basic training impacts what happens in recruiting, and it impacts what happens in tech schools and it impacts what we call absorption rate into the operational force, he said. Weve been playing with different models, and well keep playing with different models.

Like the recruits to graduate Thursday, future Space Force trainees will live in a Space Force-only dorm and participate in about 35 hours of space-specific curriculum taught by guardians. For the rest of their training, they will merge with Air Force trainees.

The new curriculum is centered on the Space Forces four core values  commitment, courage, character and connection, said Col. Jeffrey Pixley, commander of the Air Forces 737th Training Group, which oversees basic training for the Air Force and Space Force.

The instructors leading the training are former airmen who switched to the Space Force, he said.

One day well have Space Force [military training instructors] who went through Space Force [basic military training], he said. What we're doing right now is purposely and unintentionally infusing the Air Force culture into the Space Force. Because as their parent service, they grew out from that connection. I think is important and it's always going to be there.

Master Sgt. Phillip Lowery, a former Air Force basic training instructor who moved to the Space Force, helped shape the curriculum now used for the services basic training. Once the working group identified what they saw as missing from the Air Force curriculum, they focused on how to get the information to guardians. That included a class on guardian values and an entry level class into space and cyber, both meant to help new troops once they get to their next phase of training.

If we can give them a different perspective on space operations, when they get to their technical training, maybe their learning curve is a little less, said Lowery, who now serves as the senior enlisted leader for the 1st Delta Operations Squadron at Vandenberg Space Force Base, Calif.

Space Force has only five distinct career fields: operations, acquisition, engineering, intelligence and cyber. After graduation from basic, the 71 new guardians will move on to their technical training, which is focused on the career field they chose. Its taught at Vandenberg Space Force Base, Keesler Air Force Base, Miss., and Goodfellow Air Force Base, Texas, Raymond said.

While recruits coming in are excited for the mission  Space Force remains highly selective, with a board choosing who makes the cut  Raymond said the service is still challenged with helping the American people understand the Space Force mission.

It's really hard to have a connection with something that's orbiting overhead, he said.

However, space is responsible for making a smart phone operate, delivering weather reports, providing directions through GPS and allowing people to pay for gas at the pump instead of walking inside, Raymond said.

The way you understand space is if it ever went out and you lose those capabilities. Our goal is to make sure that that never happens, he said.

As the Space Force continues to hit new milestones in its path toward full operations, Towberman and Raymond said they are in no hurry to separate from the Air Force when it comes to basic training. Instead, they are focused on keeping the force small, agile and able to adapt to the rapidly changing technology related to space operations.

Were new and we can do things differently, Raymond said. We've purposely built ourselves to be small so we can be fast.
CAPE CANAVERAL, Fla.  The uniforms resemble costumes from the television series Battlestar Galactica, and the logo is right out of Star Trek. Even the name given its members, guardians, seems born of science fiction. But three years after it was established as the sixth branch of the U.S. Armed Forces, the U.S. Space Force is very much a reality.

It has a motto, Semper Supra or Always Above, fitting for an agency whose future is outside Earths atmosphere. It has an official song, a short, melodic anthem about guardians boldly reaching into space thats not as catchy as The Army Goes Rolling Along. It has a budget ($26 billion last year, similar to NASA), bases across the country and a mission to transform the militarys relationship to the cosmos at a time when space has moved from being a peaceful commons to a crucial front in military conflict.

We are very much clearly in the next chapter of the Space Force, Gen. David Thompson, the vice chief of space operations, said during a recent event hosted by the Mitchell Institute for Aerospace Studies. The mission of the Space Force now is to become an enterprise that really makes sure that were ready to deliver warfighting capabilities.

What that means in practice is still unclear: The Space Force remains one of the least understood arms of the federal government. Its culture and identity are still being molded, as its leaders push to set the department apart from the Air Force, Navy and Army by arguing that as a new, smaller service it is free to do things differently. While the Air Force has more than 300,000 service members, there are only 13,000 guardians.

Internally, Space Force officials are still debating its priorities, analysts say: Is it to support warfighters on the ground? Or should it focus primarily on protecting assets in space? Or both? And despite all the talk of starting fresh and moving nimbly, the Space Force still exists within the rigid walls of the Pentagon, the worlds largest bureaucracy, which is often faulted for resisting change.

When Space Force Gen. Chance Saltzman, chief of space operations, introduced tenets to guide the force, he labeled them A theory of success, rather than a doctrine because he wants them to continue to evolve.

Im proposing this theory so that people will debate with me, he said during an event earlier this year at the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington. So well get better at figuring out what are the nuances that matter, what are the details that we to continue to refine.

A glimpse of what the Space Force has become, and aspires to, can be seen on the Florida Space Coast, where the Space Age was born in the United States and where a new space era, driven largely by a growth in the private space industry, is taking hold.

Propelled largely by Elon Musks SpaceX, the number of launches here has not only increased, but the topography of the place has changed. Landing pads for SpaceXs reusable rockets and historic launch sites  like pad 39A that launched the Apollo astronauts to the moon  are now in private hands.

New companies, such as Jeff Bezos Blue Origin, are taking over launchpads that had sat vacant for decades, trying to get their rockets into orbit as well. (Bezos owns The Washington Post.) Even the official name has changed: It is now Cape Canaveral Space Force Station.

The growth is remarkable. In 2021, 31 rockets blasted off from the facilities run by NASA and the Space Force. Last year, the number jumped to 57, and this year its expected to exceed 90.

With some thinking that number will eventually exceed 200, 300 or even more, a top Space Force general decided he needed help managing the traffic. So last spring, Maj. Gen. Stephen Purdy, the commander of the 45th Space Wing, which oversees the base, arranged a meeting for a couple dozen of his staff at a place where many loathe to go but that is used to sending large numbers of vehicles into the sky at a regular cadence: Orlando International Airport.

During the visit to the Orlando airport, our folks got a lot of good ideas, he said in an interview in his office at Patrick Space Force Base. Because these are people they dont normally talk to. So they do things in a different way. They think a different way.

What Purdy  and the Space Force as a whole  is trying to do is far more than just create airline-like operations. They are focused on redefining how the military uses space, and attempting to transform it into a domain where the U.S. can exert the kind of tactical dominance it now displays on land, air and sea.

That is easier said than done. Much of the militarys infrastructure in space was developed at a time when space was considered a peaceful place. Satellites, for example, were built to be big and robust and last for years, even decades, without interference. But then China and Russia showed such fat targets were sitting ducks. China blasted a dead satellite with a missile strike in 2007, and Russia did it in 2021  shows of force that shook the U.S. military leadership and polluted Earth orbit with dangerous debris for decades to come.

So the Space Force is pivoting, relying on constellations of small satellites that can be easily replaced and, to an increasing degree, maneuver.

Thats just one example of how the Space Force intends to ensure the U.S. maintains space superiority, as its leaders often say, to protect the satellites the Defense Department relies on for warnings of incoming missiles, steering precision-guided munitions and surveilling both friendly and hostile forces. It also could deter conflict in space  why strike a satellite if there are backups that would easily carry on the mission?

In the interview, Purdy gave a tour of some of the roles the Space Force could play, offering a glimpse into its future.

Soldiers and Marines already pre-position supplies and equipment on the ground, he said. Could the Space Force start storing supplies in space and then fly them to hot spots on Earth as well?

In theory, we could have huge racks of stuff in orbit and then somebody can call those in, saying. I need X, Y, Z delivered to me now on this random island. And then, boom, they shoot out and they parachute in and they land with GPS assistance, he said. Its a fascinating thought exercise for emergency response  you know if a type of tidal wave or tsunami comes in and wipes out a whole area.

The military is also working to harness solar energy in space, and then beam it to ground stations. Could the Space Force use that technology to beam power to remote areas to support soldiers on the ground?

Another idea: If the cadence of launches really does double or triple and the costs continue to come down, could the Space Force start using rockets to deliver cargo across the globe at a moments notice?

Soon there could be commercial space stations floating around in orbit. Can we lease a room? Purdy said. Can we lease a module?

The idea is to use space as if it were any other theater of war, with supply lines, logistical oversight and tactical awareness of whats happening day in and day out. But all of that is more difficult in a weightless vacuum that extends well beyond the largest oceans.

In no other military domain would you take a tank, or an aircraft or a jeep or a ship and gas it up and then say . . . Okay you will never refuel it again, Purdy had said earlier this year in an interview with the Aerospace Corporation. The military also has the ability to repair tanks and jets. But the vehicles the Space Force depends on  satellites  are different. Refueling and servicing them are difficult and so every movement has to be considered carefully. Am I going to need this fuel 10 years from now? he said in the Aerospace Corporation interview.

Some of these concepts may become real. Some may not. But Purdy at least feels free to pursue new ideas because were not bound by years of tradition within the Space Force or the previous Air Force command, he said. It didnt exist. And so we can define our own concepts of how operations will work.

Two years ago we werent thinking of any of this stuff, none of it, he added. The on-orbit space storage of logistics, we werent thinking of six months ago. And so weve been able to think rapidly, get with industry and rapidly move the ball forward on all those pieces.

The fact that the idea of the Space Force is still somewhat in flux is to be expected, said Douglas Loverro, the former deputy assistant secretary of defense for space policy.

After it was founded in 1947, it took the Air Force 25 years to figure out their mission, he said. We shouldnt expect that the Space Force is going to be able to figure it out the day after we stand them up. Its going to take a little while, and thats okay.

When it was established by President Donald Trump at the end of 2019, the Space Force was widely mocked  derided as a political ploy for a politician desperately trying to project strength and the butt of alien jokes for late-night comedians.

But as it has taken form, the culture of the Space Force is building, and I think thats good, retired Air Force general John Hyten, the former vice chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, said in an interview. We just have to change the process along with the culture because you can have a new culture and the old process, and you still run into a brick wall.

In Congress, Rep. Mike D. Rogers (R-Ala.) and former congressman Jim Cooper (D-Tenn.) advocated for the establishment of a Space Corps as part of the Air Force, the way the Marine Corps exists under the Navy. The effort was driven by a desire to make space a priority for the Pentagon at a time when other nations, particularly China, were catching up.

We have lost a dramatic lead in space that we should have never let get away from us. So thats what gave us the sense of urgency to get after this, Rogers said in 2019.

Since then, the threat has only grown.

In its annual Space Threat Assessment report, the Center for Strategic and International Studies recently reported that China continues to make progress toward its goal of becoming the world leader in space. Over the past year, China has continued to grow its space and counterspace assets, maintaining its status as the second-most-capable space nation after the United States.

In April, The Post reported that space would likely be a key part of a Chinese invasion of Taiwan. China would seek to jam communications and intelligence satellites as well as destroy ballistic missile early warning satellites, as part of a military strike on Taiwan, according to documents allegedly leaked to a Discord chatroom by Jack Teixeira, a member of the Massachusetts Air National Guard. China is now able to hold key U.S. and Allied space assets at risk, according to the documents, which were obtained by The Post.

In March, Saltzman gave a speech titled Guardians in the Fight in which he unveiled a plan he called competitive endurance that is designed to compete over the long-term with China and other actors. The goal is initially to deter any conflict from reaching space, but if necessary to achieve space superiority.

As part of the plan, the Space Force would work to ensure that the United States avoids operational surprise, by keeping track of other countries satellites and movements in space while also being able to identify behaviors that become irresponsible or even hostile.

But he acknowledged the difficulties of operating in an area hundreds of miles off the surface of the Earth. On the ground, battle lines can be drawn, delineating zones of conflict. Our domain is a little different, he said. In space, you cannot leave the war zone. There is also no way, he added, to physically separate civil, commercial, military satellites from one another because the laws that govern orbits are immutable. And low Earth orbit also is polluted with debris, traveling at 5 miles per second, so fast that even a small piece, a bolt or even a fleck of paint, can cause enormous damage.

While the Navy patrols vast oceans, the Space Forces area of responsibility is defined as 100 kilometers above sea level extending outward, indefinitely, Lt. Gen. John Shaw, the deputy commander of the U.S. Space Command, said during a recent talk with the Secure World Foundation. So, a huge AOR. Do the math.

Another problem, Hyten said, is that so much of what the Space Force does remains classified. And because its overclassified, its very difficult to talk about specifics, Hyten said. And when you cant talk about specifics that makes it one of the most misunderstood elements of our government. ... We fundamentally need to normalize the classification, so we can have a conversation with the public, with the American people.
When New York-based snack content creator MuchwithDes found boba milk tea jelly beans at Chicago's Sweets and Snacks Expo, the largest candy event in North America, she posted a 15-second video to TikTok. The clip, which came out in late May, got more than 540,000 views and almost 57,000 likes and is one of her all-time best-performing videos.

"I swear everything is coming out with boba flavors," a commenter posted.

The sweet-tea tapioca-pearl-studded drink, also known as bubble tea, has been popular in its birthplace of Taiwan and across Asia for decades. In the past few years, its purveyors have become almost as ubiquitous in the U.S. as Starbucks stores - seven major urban areas in the U.S., from Chicago to the New York metro area and Los Angeles/Southern California, saw a 60%-plus jump in the number of bubble tea shops from 2019 to 2022. The U.S. market for boba, which has its own dedicated emoji, is expected to jump from $640 million in 2023 to $2.2 billion in 2033.

Now the drink is moving into the snack-food category to become the flavor of choice for popcorn, protein bars, ice cream, cookies and more.

In July, Jelly Belly Candy, which created the confections MuchwithDes, will officially release a collection in boba milk flavors such as mango, taro and matcha. "I make the distinction between it being a trend and being trendy," says Robert Swaigen, vice president of global marketing at Jelly Belly. "There's lots of evidence that this is here to stay. So we're not chasing a Pet Rock." In fact, Jelly Belly has been developing boba milk tea jelly beans since August 2021 while keeping an eye on its popularity. "That's also one of the criteria that we have for launching a new line - it has some longevity from everything we can tell," he adds. "This is a kind of lifestyle choice for the Gen Z crowd especially."

In New York in late June at the 2023 Summer Fancy Food Show, North America's largest specialty-food show, there were plenty of new snack brands embracing boba flavors. Tochi, a snack brand founded in 2019 by three Asian Americans who are veterans of the finance industry, introduced black-milk-tea-accented popcorn to their lineup.

"With the pervasiveness of bubble tea, we felt like it was a perfect flavor to kind of blend a unique product into something that was ubiquitous, which is a popcorn, super timeless as a nostalgic snack," says Tochi co-founder Dina Shi, who worked as an investment banker at Merrill for five years. "We felt like it was the perfect vehicle to deliver something that was traditionally from Asia but is being more adopted mainstream in the U.S."

Boba-flavored products aren't brand new. In 2020, Tiger Sugar, a bubble tea chain that originated in Taichung, Taiwan, launched black sugar popcorn. Kung Fu Tea, the U.S.' largest bubble tea chain, with more than 350 locations nationwide, introduced Dragon Pop, a gluten-free popcorn including brown sugar milk tea flavor, in 2022. Even within the U.S., boba products have been available in options such as protein powder and brown sugar ice cream bars at Costco.

But the trend is now peaking as a flavoring in the snack-food aisle. Molly Bz, a gourmet cookie brand, introduced its newest product, a snickerdoodle cookie with mini strawberry boba, at the Fancy Food Show. "I follow the trends, and boba is on trend," says founder Molly Blakeley. She plans to do five different kinds of boba in the near future.

Boba has even come full circle -- to be a tea flavor. Pinky Up Tea, a brand created in 2016 in Seattle, introduced four kinds of boba tea sachets filled with various tea and real tapioca pearls in January. The line, which sells 12 wrapped pyramid sachets for $10, claims that it's product, in flavors including brown sugar, mango guava and mochi ice cream, deliver a boba experience without extra sugar or calories.

"Boba flavors are 100% a huge trend," says Karen Baker, who was offering samples of Pinky Up at the Fancy Food Show. Pinky Up Tea's first shipping was "completely sold out, and we were out of stock for three months, and we just got it back in. That's how bad it is," she says jokingly about the demand she's seeing for boba.
China imposed restrictions on exporting two metals that are crucial to parts of the semiconductor, telecommunications and electric-vehicle industries in an escalation of the country's tit-for-tat trade war on technology with the U.S. and Europe.

Gallium and germanium, along with their chemical compounds, will be subject to export controls meant to protect Chinese national security starting Aug. 1, China's Ministry of Commerce said in a statement Monday. Exporters for the two metals will need to apply for licenses from the commerce ministry if they want to start or continue to ship them out of the country, and will be required to report details of the overseas buyers and their applications, it said.

China is battling for technological dominance in everything from quantum computing to artificial intelligence and chip manufacturing. The U.S. has taken increasingly aggressive measures to keep China from gaining the upper-hand and has called upon allies in Europe and Asia to do the same, with some success. The export limits also are coming at a time when nations around the world are working to rid their supply chains of dependencies on overseas equipment.

Impact on the tech industry "depends on the stockpile of equipment on hand," said Roger Entner, an analyst with Recon Analytics. "It's more of a muscle flexing for the next year or so. If it drags on, prices will go up."

China is the dominant global producer of both metals that have applications for electric vehicle makers, the defense industry and displays. Gallium and germanium play a role in producing a number of compound semiconductors, which combine multiple elements to improve transmission speed and efficiency. China accounts for about 94% of the world's gallium production, according to the U.K. Critical Minerals Intelligence Centre.

Still, the metals aren't particularly rare or difficult to find, though China's kept them cheap and they can be relatively high-cost to extract. Both metals are byproducts from processing other commodities such as coal and bauxite, the base for aluminum production. With restricted supply, higher prices could draw out production from elsewhere.

"When they stop suppressing the price, it suddenly becomes more viable to extract these metals in the West, then China again has an own-goal," said Christopher Ecclestone, principal at Hallgarten. "For a short while they get a higher price, but then China's market dominance gets lost  the same thing has happened before in other things like antimony, tungsten and rare earths."

Other countries that produce gallium include Japan, South Korea, Russia and Ukraine, according to the CRU Group, a metals industry intelligence provider. Germanium is also produced in Canada, Belgium, the U.S. and Russia.

Shares of companies that make compound semiconductors, such as Wolfspeed and NXP, were little changed or traded higher when U.S. exchanges opened on Monday. A representative for Wolfspeed didn't immediately respond to requests for comment. A spokesperson for NXP had no immediate comment.

China's move comes after the U.S. and its allies stepped up rhetoric against the country in recent weeks. President Joe Biden's administration is planning to block sales of some chips used to run artificial-intelligence programs, people familiar with the matter said last week. The Chinese government earlier this year banned U.S. chipmaker Micron's products from some of its critical sectors after saying it found "relatively serious" risks in a cybersecurity review.

The Dutch government announced on Friday measures that will prevent ASML  a company with a near-monopoly on the machines needed to make the most advanced semiconductors  from selling some of its machines to China.

Bloomberg's Debby Wu, Thomas Seal, Clara Hernanz Lizarraga, Benoit Berthelot and Scott Moritz contributed to this report.
CAMP HUMPHREYS, South Korea  South Korea is calling on the North to provide notice before discharging its dam water to prepare for possible flooding near the border.

The Souths Ministry of Unification urges the North to take sincere measures to prevent damage, the agency announced in a news release Friday. It also pointed out that it is not technically difficult for Pyongyang to contact Seoul if it decides to release any water.

The ministry said it was making its position known through the news release due to poor communication with Pyongyang. North Korea has been unresponsive in its communication channels with the South since April, according to the ministry.

The North last released water without warning in August from the Hwanggang Dam on the Imjin River. No damage was reported by the South Korean government, Yonhap News Agency reported at the time.

Six South Koreans were killed when water was released from the dam in 2019. That year, the North signed an agreement with the South about notifying Seoul before discharging any water. Pyongyang has notified Seoul about water releases three times since the agreement, the ministry said Friday.

South Korea expects to see the years heaviest rainfall this summer, an estimate of 12 inches this month and next, according to the Korea Meteorological Administrations website.

On Friday, a landslide in Yeongju triggered by heavy rainfall caused a house to collapse, killing a 14-month-old baby, according to the Dong-A Ilbo newspaper.

Record rainfall in the South last year killed at least 28 people and caused nearly $440 million in property damage, according to data provided Monday by the Ministry of Interior and Safety.

South Koreas notice came one day before the North warned its people to prepare for extreme weather conditions and called for the government to maintain high vigilance" in areas prone to flooding and typhoons.

The State Committee for Emergency and Disaster Management is preparing for unexpected effects of the heavy rain season this summer and fall, according to the state-run Pyongyang Times.

One of these measures is to ensure the committees emergency notification systems are working to warn citizens about flash floods and give first responders ample time to react to emergencies, according to the report.

The most important in minimizing the damage from natural disasters caused by extreme weather is to prevent the loss of lives, committee deputy director Pak Yong Sik said in the report. We give top priority to the safety-first principle to prevent the loss of lives and ensure the personal safety of the people.
PUTRAJAYA, Malaysia, July 3. Malaysian Foreign Minister Zambry Abdul Kadir will visit Azerbaijan to attend a meeting of the Coordinating Bureau of the Non-Aligned Movement at the level of foreign ministers, Trend reports.

According to him, this event will give the ministers of foreign affairs of the Non-Aligned Movement an opportunity to discuss issues related to the activities of the organization.

Malaysian FM will make a statement on the "The Non-Aligned Movement: unity and steadfastness in confronting new challenges" theme.

"I will also hold several bilateral meetings with my colleagues to discuss measures to strengthen bilateral relations and exchange views on international issues," he said.

Meanwhile, a ministerial meeting of the Coordinating Bureau of the Non-Aligned Movement will be held in Baku on July 5-6.
A Russian general who's been questioned over the failed mutiny by Wagner mercenaries was conspicuously absent at a meeting of top army chiefs where Defense Minister Sergei Shoigu denounced the rebellion.

Sergei Surovikin, 56, a career military officer dubbed "General Armageddon" for his ruthless tactics in Syria, hasn't been seen since the short-lived rebellion ended on June 24. He was quizzed over his links to Wagner leader Yevgeny Prigozhin over several days last week at an undisclosed location, according to a person with knowledge of the matter.

The "attempt to destabilize the situation in Russia" failed because the armed forces "remained true to their oath," Shoigu told officers at the Defense Ministry meeting broadcast Monday on state TV, in his first public comments on the uprising. "The provocation didn't affect" Russia's military operations in Ukraine, he said.

The insurrection by the onetime ally of President Vladimir Putin spiraled into the biggest threat to the Russian leader's 24-year rule and has left unanswered questions about the extent to which elements in the military may have known in advance about Prigozhin's plans. Wagner forces came within 124 miles of Moscow facing little opposition before halting their advance after Belarus President Alexander Lukashenko brokered a deal to end the crisis.

Under that agreement, Putin pledged to allow Prigozhin to move to Belarus, as well as any Wagner fighters who wanted to join him. Criminal investigations into Wagner on accusations of armed uprising were also closed.

A June 26-30 survey of 1,599 people conducted by the Russian Field polling agency showed the proportion of Russians holding a favorable opinion of Prigozhin's role in the war in Ukraine plunged to 29% from 55% in a similar poll just before the rebellion. The number viewing him negatively rose to 39% from 14% in the June 16-19 poll.

While Lukashenko said last week that Prigozhin had arrived in Belarus, the Wagner founder hasn't been seen since late on June 24 and his social media channels have all gone silent.

A Telegram channel linked to Wagner posted a brief audio recording on Monday that it said was from Prigozhin, saying the rebellion had aimed to mobilize Russian society against traitors and appealing to listeners for support. It couldn't be independently authenticated.

Shoigu made no mention of the number of Wagner fighters who'd agreed to sign contracts with the Defense Ministry by a July 1 deadline that was a spark for the mutiny. Prigozhin had accused Shoigu of attempting to "destroy" Wagner, whose troops have played a key role in Russia's war in Ukraine, particularly in fighting over the eastern city of Bakhmut.

There are other signs that Prigozhin's legacy in Russia is being dismantled. His Russian media operations are being wound up and websites belonging to his "Patriot" group have been blocked by regulators, the Izvestia newspaper reported Friday.

Ukraine's military is continuing to press its counteroffensive aimed at retaking parts of southern and eastern Ukraine occupied by Russian forces. Putin announced Russia was annexing four regions of Ukraine in September even as his troops don't fully control the territories.

The president held a televised meeting Monday with the head of Russia's central election committee, Ella Pamfilova, who told him plans were in place to hold regional elections in occupied regions of Ukraine in September, though the votes could be postponed if the situation deteriorated.
The U.S. militarys top appeals court has ruled that unanimous verdicts are unnecessary for criminal convictions, marking the latest twist in a flurry of cases that challenge the long-standing acceptance of split jury verdicts at courts-martial.

The U.S. Court of Appeals for the Armed Forces on Thursday rejected the claim of an airman seeking to have his 2020 conviction on charges of attempted sexual abuse tossed out.

Lawyers for Master Sgt. Anthony Anderson argued that he has a constitutional right to unanimous verdict by a military jury.

The ruling upheld the Air Force Court of Criminal Appeals finding that provisions of the Constitution related to due process, equal protection and unanimous jury verdicts dont invalidate split verdicts in military courts.

Nonunanimous verdicts have been a feature of American courts-martial since the founding of our nations military justice system, the highest military appellate court wrote in its 5-0 decision.

The Uniform Code of Military Justice expressly authorizes conviction with at least three-fourths of the jury members present when the vote is taken, the court said.

Anderson was convicted on two specifications of attempted sexual abuse of a child during a court-martial at Ramstein Air Base in Germany.

The charges stemmed from online communications he had with a fictitious 13-year-old girl.

Anderson was sentenced to 12 months in prison, demotion to E-1 and a dishonorable discharge.

In deciding Andersons case, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Armed Forces reinforced a position recently taken by other military tribunals, including the Army Court of Criminal Appeals.

In June 2022, the Army court rejected a trial judges ruling that a unanimous verdict was required to convict Lt. Col. Andrew Dial, who was charged with sexual assault.

Col. Charles Pritchard, an Army judge in Kaiserslautern, Germany, sided with the defense in saying that allowing a split verdict would violate Dials constitutional rights.

Prosecutors challenged the ruling, arguing that it was based on faulty reasoning. The Army appeals court concurred with that view.

A factor in Pritchards decision was an April 2020 U.S. Supreme Court ruling that banned nonunanimous verdicts in state criminal cases. Oregon was the last state to allow split jury verdicts.

The 6-3 decision in Ramos v. Louisiana said state courts are also bound by the long-standing requirement in federal courts that all jurors must be in agreement for a defendant to be convicted.

But the Supreme Court decision made no mention of the applicable standard in military courts. Civilian judges have repeatedly found that the Constitution gives Congress power to make rules for the government and regulation of the land and naval forces.

Those rulings treated the military justice system as a congressional matter, so courts previously held that some protections for civilian defendants dont apply to service members.

However, Ramos v. Louisiana led to a series of challenges by military defense lawyers looking to have aspects of the ruling applied within the UCMJ.
Prime Minister Shehbaz Sharif on Monday calling the IMF agreement a breather and a moment of concern urged all the national institutions to make concerted efforts to rid the country of loans and put it on the course to progress.

The prime minister, in his remarks at the meeting of the federal cabinet chaired by him, said while keeping in their respective jurisdictions, the institutions should make a united efforts for at least next 15 years to address the countrys economic woes.

He said the countrys deliverance from loans required a vision, unity, hard work and sacrifice by the affluent people.

If we opt this course, no one can stop Pakistan from achieving progress, he remarked.

The prime minister thanked all of his cabinet members, particularly Finance Minister Ishaq Dar and his team, Foreign Minister Bilawal Bhutto Zardari, Managing Director of IMF for their respective roles to make Pakistan achieve the nine-month stand-by agreement of $3 billion.

I pray that this is the last IMF deal. But this is easier said than done, he commented and mentioned that the state-owned enterprises like Steel Mills, PIA and others were eating up around Rs600 billion annually.

He said under the IMF deal, Pakistan would receive first installment of $1.1 billion in July.

He also thanked the UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres for his role in the IMF agreement and offering his further role in the process, if needed.

The prime minister spoke high of Chinese support during last three months by rolling over $5 billion of sovereign and commercial banks loans which was unprecedented.

He said the situation would have been different, if China had not made this rollover. The people of Pakistan should never forget this, he remarked.

Similarly, the prime minister also thanked Saudi Arabia, UAE and Islamic Development Bank for committing $2 billion, and $1 billion each respectively for Pakistan.

Calling it a teamwork, he particularly appreciated the role of Chief of the Army Staff General Asim Munir for his efforts to bring in the support of a total $3 billion from Saudi Arabia and the UAE.

Prime Minister Shehbaz said that during the remaining 40-42 days of the governments term, the cabinet members should make efforts to leave behind a policy framework providing a roadmap and a vision for future development.

The prime minister said the whole Muslim Ummah including the government and people of Pakistan strongly condemned another incident of burning a copy of Holy Quran in Sweden.

We demand immediate action against the perpetrator. Unfortunately, this is not the first time as a similar

incident had also taken place in the past, he remarked.

He also demanded of the Swedish government to take notice of Islamophobic and hateful narrative against the Muslim population in their country.

Prime Minister Shehbaz appreciated the Organisation of Islamic Cooperation for convening an urgent meeting on the issue and said that Pakistan endorsed their meeting and decision, with a hope that such Islamophobic incidents did not recur in the future.
Airline settles case for 10,000 as court hears boy had nightmares after event

The court heard the schoolboy had nightmares after the Ryanair flight lost cabin pressure.

An 11-year-old Co Kildare schoolboy who suffered nightmares following the emergency descent and landing of a Ryanair aircraft after inflight loss of cabin pressure has settled a personal injuries claim against the airline for 10,000.

Barrister Ciaran Mandal told Judge John OConnor in the Circuit Civil Court today that the incident had occurred on a flight from Dublin to Zadar Airport in July 2018 when Stefan Kokic, now aged 17, was travelling with his parents to Croatia.

Stefan was involved in an undoubtedly terrifying ordeal, said Mr Mandal, who appeared with Rose Sweeney of Coleman Legal Solicitors.

The teenager had sued Ryanair through his mother Nikolina Kokic of The Meadows, Cornelscourt, Newbridge, Co Kildare, who in an affidavit said her son had suffered emotional upset as a result of the accident but had dealt well with the experience.

Mr Mandal told the court that the aircraft sustained a sudden inflight depressurisation which had resulted in the necessity for an emergency descent into Frankfurt Hahn airport before the family were able to continue their flight to Zadar.

Counsel said the claim had been brought under the Montreal Convention under which, in order to recover damages, the event that occurred had to be an accident and the complainant had to have suffered bodily injury.

Mr Mandal said that although Ryanair had put both matters in issue in their defence they had belatedly conceded the event was indeed an accident. Stefan had subsequently been diagnosed with a degree of stress secondary to the incident as well as headaches.

Stefan had twice attended his GP, Dr Hugh Brady of The Bridge Medical Centre, Newbridge, and his counsel recommended the courts approval of a 10,000 settlement offer by Ryanair on the basis of outstanding issues.

Judge OConnor approved the offer and told Mr Mandal he had done very well on Stefans behalf.
Eric Molly hurled abuse at cabin crew when they tried to stop him drinking his own whiskey

A Drunken airplane passenger became aggressive and hurled abuse at cabin crew when they tried to stop him drinking his own whiskey on the flight.

Eric Molly was flying from New York to Romania for a friends baptism when the plane had to be diverted to Dublin over his disgraceful behaviour on board.

Molly, a public affairs consultant, intimidated flight attendants by trying to bite them during the mid-flight disturbance, Dublin District Court heard.

Judge Ciaran Liddy said the accused had been completely out of order but spared him a criminal record after he made a 1,000 charity donation. Molly (37) pleaded guilty to intoxication on board an aircraft, threatening, abusive and insulting behaviour, and conduct likely to cause serious offence on June 16, 2023.

Garda Sergeant Niall Murphy told the court the accused was drinking his own whiskey on the plane and became intoxicated.

When staff tried to take it from him, he became abusive and aggressive.

He made an attempt to bite staff, but the sergeant said this was to intimidate. He also soiled his seat, the court heard.

The accused had no previous convictions.

His behaviour on the flight was absolutely disgraceful, intimidating and aggressive, and it was just completely out of order, its not acceptable, the judge said.

I just want to apologise to the court for doing this, Molly said. This is not in my nature, I have never done anything like this. To the people on the airline, I just want to say Im sorry.

Defence solicitor Damien Coffey said the accused would make a charity donation.

The accused was admitted to bail to get the charity donation and later paid it.

The case was adjourned and when the court heard the payment was made, the charges were dismissed.

The charges against Molly were under the Air Navigation and Transport Act.
details added, first published at 09:58

BAKU, Azerbaijan, July 3. The trial of Armenian saboteurs who violated the state border of Azerbaijan kicks off today, Trend reports.

A preparatory hearing will be held in the Sumgait Court on Grave Crimes under the chairmanship of Judge Fahmin Gumbatov.

The preliminary investigation found that Armenian citizens, servicemen Arut Khovakimyan and Karen Gazaryan, intending to commit a terrorist attack on the territory of Azerbaijan, illegally crossed the protected state border of Azerbaijan, using force with firearms against servicemen of the Zangilan border detachment of the State Border Service on May 26, 2023, at about 19:00 (GMT+4).

There are solid suspicions to believe that they carried firearms and ammunition with them, they opened fire on military personnel of a military unit in the village of Razdara of the Zangilan district.

During the arrest of members of the Armenian sabotage group who tried to escape, one AKM brand firearm and a clip with 10 5.45 mm caliber cartridges were seized from Arut Khovakimyan.

Arut Khovakimyan and Karen Gazaryan were charged under the articles 206.3.2 (smuggling of firearms and ammunition by a group of persons by prior agreement), 214.2.1, 214.2.3 (terrorism committed by a group of persons by prior agreement, using firearms), 228.2.1 (illegal acquisition, carrying, possession of firearms by a group of persons in collusion), 283.2.1 (incitement of ethnic hatred and enmity with the use of violence) and 318.2 (illegal crossing of the state border of the Republic of Azerbaijan by a group of persons by prior conspiracy or an organized group) of the Criminal Code.

The criminal case was sent to the Court on Grave Crimes for consideration on June 21.
I am going to sit outside your gaff until I see one of yous, you are actually a dead man

A man who supplied drugs to another man on tick and then threatened him that he was a dead man when he didnt pay back the money he owed has been given a suspended sentence.

Ross Maher (26) was contacted by the man and initially agreed to get him 200 worth of cocaine, with the man paying him by Revolut. He continued to provide drugs to the man in this way until he ultimately began to provide the drugs on tick, which led to the man building up a debt of 2,200.

Maher, of Poolbeg Quay, Ringsend, Dublin 4, pleaded guilty at Dublin Circuit Criminal Court to making threats to kill or cause serious harm on May 31, 2022.

Detective Garda Joe Walsh told Kate Egan BL, prosecuting, that Maher was never charged with drug dealing and never came to garda attention in that regard.

He said the man began to receive text messages from Maher asking for the money back, sometimes up to four messages a day. He began to pay off the debt in small amounts but Maher messaged asking for his f*****g money and the man began to receive aggressive phone calls from Maher.

He sent Maher a screenshot of an email he received from work which stated that he was due a certain amount of money by May 31 and the man said he would pay him then. He subsequently messaged Maher to say that he would have the money for him on June 4.

Det Gda Walsh said Maher replied back: No I wont be waiting til Saturday. I dont know who you think you are  I am going to stand all over your head you little rat. I am going to sit outside your gaff until I see one of yous, you are actually a dead man I am telling you now!

The man began to take screenshots of the messages he received and provided those to gardai when he later reported Maher.

He later got a message saying that he was going to be left in a hospital bed and a message from Maher saying: Getting the police involved  good man.

The following Sunday, a man he didnt know called to the victims house. He forwarded the footage recorded of that visit on his Ring doorbell to the gardai.

Maher was arrested and made admissions. He accepted he had been supplying drugs to the victim and said the man was not paying him the money he owed. He claimed the messages were heat of the moment stuff because he felt he was being made a fool of.

Maher said he was out of pocket after he bought the drugs for this man from someone with his own money.

A victim impact statement was handed into the court in which the man said that he felt the whole scenario was extremely stressful and he was afraid to leave the house. He concluded the statement however, by suggesting that Maher not be punished.

Det Gda Walsh accepted that Maher apologised during garda interview and was easy to deal with. He further accepted that the lead garda in the case and the Director of Public Prosecutions had recommended that the case be dealt with in the District Court but the judge there refused jurisdiction.

Judge Pauline Codd said the offence had been aggravated by the fact that it was rooted in criminality owing to the fact that Maher had been providing drugs to the man.

She said that this made the threats he issued more believable because of the hierarchy in the drug culture and the notoriety of beatings in that culture.

It didnt just come out of the blue. The comments escalated and involved him calling to the victims house. The entire culture is murky and he should have known better than to involve himself in this world, Judge Codd continued.

She said to describe the victims attitude as generous was an overstatement but accepted that Maher has a good work history and is the bread winner for his young family. Judge Codd imposed a sentence of 12 months which she suspended in full on strict conditions.
Police have confirmed they held the 30-year-old man after rushing to a hotel in the Costa Dorada resort of Salou 70 miles south of Barcelona and finding her lying lifeless in a corridor.

An Irish tourist has been arrested on suspicion of murder after a woman believed to be his partner was strangled to death at a hotel in a Spanish holiday resort.

Police have confirmed they held the 30-year-old man after rushing to a hotel in the Costa Dorada resort of Salou 70 miles south of Barcelona and finding her lying lifeless in a corridor.

Her alleged killer, discovered beside her with a self-inflicted wrist wound, was taken to hospital where he remained under police guard this morning.

Sources close to the investigation have confirmed the arrested tourist is Irish like the 36-year-old woman he is suspected of strangling to death.

The same sources also indicated the pair, thought to be from Dublin although this has not been confirmed by officials, were understood to be partners and were sharing the same hotel room.

The suspect allegedly used a cord to strangle the woman.

A hotel worker is said to have found the victim in one of the corridors trying to escape her suspected killer, according to one of the reports.

Staff at the adult-only four-star Magnolia Hotel in Salou where the horror incident occurred said they were unable to make any comment.

The alarm was raised around 9.30pm on Sunday night. Salou is part of the Catalan province of Tarragona.

A spokesman for the regional Mossos dEsquadra police force said: Officers from the Mossos d'Esquadras Criminal Investigation Decision in Tarragona have arrested a man allegedly related to the violent death of a woman in Salou last night.

The events occurred around half past nine when the Mossos received a warning from a hotel in Salou saying a woman was seriously injured.

When they arrived at the scene, the officers found a woman lying on the floor and a man next to her with a self-inflicted wound.

Although emergency medical responders tried to revive the woman, they were finally only able to certify her death.

Officers arrested the man as the alleged perpetrator of the death.

The murder suspect is under police guard at Juan XXIII Hospital in the city of Tarragona, the capital of the province of the same name.

He is understood to have caused his wrist wound by punching or hitting a pane of glass. Well-placed sources said his injuries were not life-threatening.

The suspected killer has been transferred to a police station after being treated in hospital for his wounds, police confirmed just before midday on Monday.

One unconfirmed report said he had severed a tendon in his right wrist.

A spokesman for the Mossos dEsquadra said: He is currently at a police station and the expectation is that he will be handed over to the courts later today.

His court appearance will take place behind closed-doors, as is normal in Spain where only trials take place in public.

He is expected to be remanded in custody on the orders of a judge while the criminal investigation continues.

Charges would be laid at a later stage if the judge feels there is sufficient evidence against him.

He will be asked at his first court hearing if he wishes to answer questions but has the right to remain silent.

Police have not officially said yet whether they are treating the incident as a domestic violence killing.

However a spokesman for the Department of Equality and Feminisms of the Catalan regional government called the Generalitat has already condemned the crime and is referring to it as a femicide.

The department said in a tweet: We are keeping tabs on the femicide in Salou. We are working with the town hall and making our services available to the family and close friends of the victim who need maximum privacy at these difficult moments.

Tania Verge, the Generalitats head of Equality and Feminisms, added: Devastated by a new femicide. All our support to the victims family.

Machismo doesnt have holidays. On the contrary when couples spend more time together the risk of suffering violence increases.

Salou Town Hall will hold a minutes silence for the Irish woman killed last night at the four-star Magnolia Hotel.

It has already put up a banner with a black ribbon on its HQ.

The town hall said in a tweet: Salou Town Hall condemns last nights gender violence incident.

We urge society to participate in an act of rebuke this evening at 7pm in front of the town hall.

The 72-room Magnolia Hotel, which is one street back from the seafront, describes itself as a Four Star Superior hotel on its website.

It says: Magnolia Hotel Salou is a specialised establishment offering an Adults Only or Child Free experience, meaning it is a hotel designed exclusively for adults.

Our hotel in Salou is committed to offering a place where relaxation, peace and quiet are the most important values. So, both the hotel activities and facilities are geared towards the needs of adults travelling without children.

Magnolia Hotel is a cosmopolitan, modern Adults Only establishment with carefully designed interiors that aims to offer guests a chic experience away from the hustle and bustle and noise of other types of hotels.
Tayyab Salah Uddin (31) has one previous conviction from the UK in 2014 for sexual assault

A sex offender who raped a woman who had become isolated after a night out and who attempted to lure a second woman into his car the following night has been jailed for 10 years.

Tayyab Salah Uddin (31) acted in predatory manner towards the two women who were alone and intoxicated in a town centre after becoming separated from their friends.

The Central Criminal Court heard that the first woman had quickly reported being taken in the mans car and raped, so gardai were able to spot Uddins car on surveillance cameras the next day as he interacted with the second woman.

Patrol cars rushed to the scene to prevent her from being put into the car.

The second woman described in her victim impact statement her immense gratitude towards the first woman in reporting the rape and describing the car, enabling the gardai to intercept Uddin.

I am so grateful to her for contacting the gardai, she told the court. I feel she saved me.

Uddin pleaded guilty to rape of the first woman at a location in Co Sligo on September 15, 2018 and false imprisonment of the second woman on September 16, 2018.

Uddin, who has been in custody since being brought back to Ireland earlier this year after he left the jurisdiction, has a previous addresses at Carnbeg Hotel, Armagh Road, Dundalk, Co Louth.

Uddin has one previous conviction from the UK in 2014 for sexual assault, for which he received a conditional discharge for three years. He has no convictions in Ireland.

The court heard the native of Pakistan sought asylum in this country due to his appearance as a result of ocular albinism which set him apart and caused him to be bullied and ostracised.

Passing sentence today, Mr Justice Paul McDermott said Uddin had been acting in a predatory manner looking for woman who were isolated, alone and in a vulnerable condition.

He said he had subjected the first woman to a terrifying ordeal and raped her with some violence before brazenly returning to the town centre the following night looking, in his view, for another vulnerable woman to lure into his car.

Mr Justice McDermott said it was an aggravating feature that Uddin sought to trap the two women in this way while presenting himself as someone who just wanted to help.

He noted Uddin had a number of difficulties in life including his ocular albinism and was certified as legally blind. He noted however that Uddin was still able to move around and able to drive on this occasion. Uddin came to Ireland from the UK in 2018 and was granted refugee status here.

The judge noted Uddin said he was sorry for his behaviour but maintains that he was misunderstood in these matters. He has been assessed as high risk of reoffending.

Mr Justice McDermott noted in mitigation Uddins guilty plea, his lack of contacts in this country and the difficult history of oppression and opprobrium he suffered in his native country.

He imposed consecutive sentences totalling 10 years and ordered post-release supervision. He ordered three years post-release supervision, noting that Uddin continues to show no understanding of the wrongful nature of his actions and remains a threats to others.
In January James 'Jake' Boles was sentenced to two years' imprisonment, fully suspended

The fully suspended sentence handed down to a man who dragged his partner by the hair, slammed her head, pushed his fist into her face and screamed abuse at her while subjecting her to "appalling" coercive control was too lenient, the State has told the Court of Appeal.

At Trim Circuit Court in January of this year, James 'Jake' Boles was sentenced to two years' imprisonment, fully suspended, by Judge Orla Crowe for one charge of coercive control and five assaults causing harm to his then partner at two addresses in Ratoath, Co Meath, between January 1, 2019 and April 5, 2019.

His victim (22) waived her anonymity so that Boles (24) of Rathborne Avenue, Ashtown, Dublin 15, can be named.

At the Court of Appeal today, Carl Hanahoe BL, for the State, submitted that the sentence was unduly lenient due to the level of physical violence involved, the period over which the offences occurred, the nature and frequency of the violence, the restraint and humiliation of the complainant and the impact the offending had on her.

Mr Hanahoe said that an "excessive discount" had been applied by the trial judge for the mitigating factors in the case and that she had erred in nominating an "actual sentence" of two years' imprisonment, which was then fully suspended.

James 'Jake' Boles

Boles' sentence hearing was told that he and his former partner began seeing each other when she was 17 and he was 19. They broke up in 2018 but when they subsequently got back together he became "physically and emotionally abusive" to her.

The sentencing hearing was told that his assaults included dragging the complainant by the hair along the floor, putting his hand over her mouth while violently screaming abuse in her ear and pushing his fist into her face, causing bruising.

The sentencing court heard that he also pinned her against a wardrobe while smothering her face in his then bedroom at Mill Tree Park in Ratoath, before pushing her down the stairs.

On another occasion he went to her house in Ratoath and smashed a mirror before verbally abusing her and slamming her head against a headboard.

At the three-judge court today, Mr Hanahoe said that "violence is not necessarily a component of the offence of coercion but it is submitted that it constitutes a significant aggravating factor" in the offending.

Mr Hanahoe said that the trial judge identified three years' imprisonment as a headline figure before applying a one-year discount for Boles' guilty pleas and for his previous good character.

Mr Hanahoe said there was "evidence in regard of the physical element that was far more frequent than the convictions for assault would suggest".

Counsel said the complainant was subject to "physical abuse on a weekly basis", which was a "dominant feature" in the relationship.

Ms Justice Una Ni Raifeartaigh, sitting at the Court of Appeal, noted that a weekly assault occurring over four months brought the case into a "very serious category".

Mr Justice John Edwards said the cumulative nature of the assaults and coercion were "appalling" and "very damaging" to the complainant.

Mr Hanahoe said the "pattern of behaviour" should have aggravated the penalty imposed by the trial judge. "It is dominion over another on a persistent basis," he said.

Mr Justice Edwards noted that some of the abuse occurred within the complainant's home, which was constitutionally protected.

Mr Justice Edwards also noted that the woman's victim impact statement was "both poignant and horrendous".

David Staunton BL, for Boles, said punishment can be applied in "many different guises" but that he would not seek to "deprecate the severity" of the offending.

Mr Staunton said the question for the Court of Appeal was whether or not the trial judge acted outside her margin of appreciation when coming to a "fork in the road" over deciding on suspending the sentence.

Mr Staunton said the sentence was not a "binary" one that prioritised rehabilitation over punishment as the sentence was suspended until 2027 with "onerous" conditions.

Counsel said the trial judge had held his client's "feet to the fire" in her sentencing while also attending to rehabilitation.

Counsel said the trial judge acted "impeccably", within her margin for discretion and that while the sentence was lenient it was not unduly lenient.

Mr Staunton said he accepted that cocaine had been a factor in the offending but submitted that his client was negative in urinalysis testing and said the guilty pleas had been "hugely valuable" to the court.

Counsel said that his client had since been "publicly shamed" which he said was a "significant penalty" in addition to losing his job as a security guard because of the convictions.

Mr Justice Patrick McCarthy said the purpose of anonymity "is to protect the victim, not your client".

Mr Justice Edwards said the court would reserve judgement in the case until Friday, July 21.
Dermot McManus (53) pleaded guilty to three charges relating to money laundering offences

A "trusted confidant" of Limerick crime boss Christy Keane has admitted to laundering tens of thousands in crime cash after his arrest as part of a major garda operation in Limerick, while his partner has seen charges against her dropped.

Before the Special Criminal Court today, Dermot McManus (53), Keating Park, Killalee, Co Limerick, pleaded guilty to three charges relating to money laundering offences.

On June 17, 2020, he handled sums of cash worth 28,550 and 11,795, knowing or believing or being reckless as to whether this was the proceeds of criminal conduct.

Between January 1, 2018, and June 17, 2020, he handled or used money credited to an account in his own name at the Limerick and District Credit Union, knowing or believing or being reckless as to whether it was the proceeds of criminal conduct. He also pleaded guilty to handling a white Mercedes Sprinter van between June 2, 2020, and May 23, 2021.

The matter has been adjourned to October 16 next for sentencing, while a previous bail condition that McManus observe a curfew between 10pm and 7am has been lifted.

McManus partner, Terese Halpin (50), of the same address, was charged with possession of the same cash sums and allowing a Permanent TSB account to be used for handling the proceeds of crime.

Dominic McGinn SC, on behalf of the State, said that a nolle prosequi could be entered on these matters, and the charges against Ms Halpin were dropped.

During a previous bail hearing it was alleged that Dermot McManus is an associate of the Keane crime gang who were described as one of Ireland's "most vicious and ruthless" gangs.

Det Gda John Sheahan told Fiona Murphy SC, prosecuting, that the accused is a known close associate of Christy Keane, who was described as a leader of the Keane organised crime group (OCG) in Limerick.

Det Gda Sheahan said the Keane OCG are involved in the distribution of drugs and firearms on both a national and international level.

The detective said this gang were traditionally based in St Mary's Park but are now located in the Garryowen area of the city.

The court heard they were once associated with members of the Collopy gang but are now separate entities although no dispute occurred between them.

The three judges were told this gang was involved in a feud with the McCarthy/Dundon crime group since 2000, with feud related incidents dating as far back as 1993.

The offences linked to this feud included 19 murders, 15 attempted murders, 38 firearm seizures, 35 explosives recovered as well as over 2,000 rounds of ammunition being seized, the court heard.

The detective also described the accused as a "trusted confidant" of Christy Keane.

The detective said he had no doubt that the accused is a trusted associate of the Keane OCG, which he described as "one of the most vicious and ruthless crime groups in the State" who utilise many individuals to do their bidding.

Det Gda Sheahan said that at the time of his arrest the accused asked a family member present to ring Christy Keane and inform him of his arrest.

McManus arrest followed what gardai described as a significant development in Operation Coronation, which targeted organised crime in Co Limerick.

Detective Garda John Sheahan gave evidence that after a search warrant was obtained for Keating Park in June 2020, 28,550 was found in socks on top of a wardrobe while an amount of cash in sterling was discovered in a jacket pocket.

Det Gda Sheahan said Manus told gardai he had bought the Mercedes Sprinter in Northern Ireland but that the accused's only regular income was a disability payment and that he had never filed a revenue return or paid income tax.

In September 2021, gardai carried out 65 raids in the county as part of the same operation, involving soldiers, detectives, customs officers and over 300 local gardai, with 12 people arrested.
Gangster Foley admits threatening behaviour after heavy claimed he would slit mans throat over unpaid rent debt

Foley, who was a member of the gang led by Martin the General Cahill, has had his life under threat

Veteran gangster Martin the Viper Foley has pleaded guilty to engaging in threatening and abusive behaviour during an incident in which a heavy for Viper Debt Recovery threatened to slit a mans throat over a 4,000 debt.

The 68-year-old, widely regarded as one of Irelands most notorious gangland criminals, faces a maximum sentence of three months in prison after taking the stand at Wexford District Court on Tuesday and entering the plea.

State prosecutor Sinead Gleeson confirmed to Judge James McCourt the State would not be proceeding with a separate charge against Foley alleging he too had made a threat to kill tenant Nigel Doolin on the day of the incident.

Details of the charge on which Foley was being arraigned were read to him after he entered the dock.

The count alleged that Foley, on June 17, 2020 at 20 Holly Walk, Cromwellsfort Grove, Wexford engaged in threatening, abusive or insulting words or behaviour with an intent to provoke a breach of the peace or being reckless as to whether such a breach of the peace occurred.

In reply to the charge, Foley responded: Guilty.

Foley set up Viper Debt Recovery Services in 2004

Ms Gleeson told the court that sentencing in the matter would take a relatively short period of time as Foleys co-accused Alan Nulty had already pleaded guilty to making a threat to kill and had been sentenced for that offence.

During Nultys sentencing hearing in January last year, the court heard how he had been working for Viper Debt Recovery  a company founded by Martin Foley  when on June 17, 2020 he threatened tenant Mr Doolin he would have his throat slit while he walked his dog if he didnt come up with 4,000 in rent arrears.

Nulty uttered the threat, and another that he would get someone to smash your head with a hammer while attempting to collect the debt in rent arrears from Wexford man Doolin.

Nulty dodged a jail sentence over the threats, which carry a maximum sentence of up to 10 years in prison, after the court heard he had no intention of carrying out the threats.

Nultys sentencing hearing heard how Garda Emer OReilly was called to the house on that date.

On arriving at the property, she spoke to landlord David Allen, who claimed that he was owed 4,000 in rent by his tenant Nigel Doolin.

He also said that he had called in the debt recovery agency run by Martin Foley.

The accused, Alan Nulty, was present too and he stated that he was there to recover property to cover the debt.

The garda heard a recording of a man with a Dublin accent, who turned out to be Nulty. The recording was made through the door of the house by Doolin.

As well as the hammer threat, the recording also picked up a warning that the tenant would have his throat slit while he was out walking his dog.

The garda witness described the tone of the threats made by the defendant as persuasive. The court was told that the debt recovery agency was due to take 20 per cent of whatever was recovered.

Foley, who was a member of the gang led by Martin the General Cahill, has had his life under threat

Nulty told the garda that he had no intention of carrying out any of the threats he made. A qualified electrician and father of three, he had been working for a security firm in recent years.

However, his ability to work had been affected by an arm injury sustained in a motorcycle accident four years earlier.

Defending counsel accepted that what happened at Holly Walk was totally unacceptable, describing it as a spectacular once off lapse of judgement.

The judge described the incident at Cromwellsfort as an insidious crime with disturbing aspects to it and he decided to take a couple of days to formulate his decision.

When the case was re-called, the judge remarked that the tenant had been threatened in a very serious way.

Alan Nulty

What Nulty said was delivered in such a way as to make it believable and Doolin was rightly terrified. It was noted that no actual violence occurred.

The seriousness of the incident was marked by the recording of a three-year jail term. However, this sentence was suspended in full once Nulty agreed to raise 5,000 to be offered to the man he attempted to intimidate.

Martin Foleys sentencing for the offence of engaging in threatening and abusive behaviour during the incident was this week adjourned to a later court date.

Foley set up Viper Debt Recovery on November 18, 2004, at which time his profession was described in company documents as a sale rep.

The company identified its purpose as the provision of debt recovery and repossession services and to carry out all activities in relation to the aforementioned business.

He resigned as a director of the company on November 17, 2014.

Foleys wife Sonia, who was present in court with him on Tuesday, was appointed as a director of the company in October 2018 and retains this position.

Nicknamed The Viper, Foley has more than 40 convictions for offences including assault, robbery and possession of threatening weapons.

In 2020, he was ordered to pay 738,449 in tax, interest and penalties after losing a Supreme Court appeal against a Criminal Assets Bureau tax bill.

Foley had taken the case to the Supreme Court, claiming that CAB had delayed for years in pursuing him for the principal sum, interest and penalties and that the total sum owed dwarfed the original judgment against him.

The interest and penalties incurred over the unpaid tax bill more than trebled the amount initially owed.

Foley came to prominence in the 1980s when he was a member of the gang which was led by slain mobster Martin The General Cahill and as a spokesman for a gang which clashed with the Concerned Parents anti drug movement.

He was kidnapped by the IRA in 1984 but was freed after a shoot-out between the terrorists and gardai in Phoenix Park.

Foleys life has been under threat since the late 1980s with different criminal enterprises intent on murdering him.

In the last major attack on his life, he was shot numerous times in broad daylight in Dublin in January 2008 by the Kinahan cartel.

Although the attacker escaped in a white Ford van, Foley whispered his name to the first garda who arrived on the scene.
Company secretary Patrick Maher who scammed five people out of thousands, escapes being sent to prison

Patrick Maher was collected from court by John Steadmond, the man identified by RTE Investigates as the fake solicitor involved in the Careysfort swindle

Patrick Maher was collected from court by John Steadmond, the man identified by RTE Investigates as the fake solicitor involved in the Careysfort swindle

Patrick Maher, who pretended he had a contact in NAMA while claiming to be a mortgage broker, pictured using a walker outside court this week

A secretary at Catriona Careys Careysfort Asset Estates who carried out a spree of frauds over a two-year period lied that his wife had been killed in a tragic accident and instructed victims to deposit money in his Little Jockey Paddy Paddy Power account.

Conman Paddy Maher dodged jail again this week after he was given a two-year suspended sentence on five counts of fraud  wholly separate from his role with Careys company.

During an hour-long sentencing, shocking details of Mahers frauds emerged, including how:

He falsely claimed to victims he was a mortgage broker;

Pretended to have a contact in NAMA who could get him properties at a quarter of their value;

Lied to one victim that his wife had died in a tragic accident in the Philippines;

Blew the hard-earned cash of the desperate mortgage applicants on alcohol and cocaine.

Our exclusive images show the diminutive fraudster, now walking with the aid of a frame, being picked up outside Wexford courthouse by John Steadmond  the man identified by RTE Investigates as the fake solicitor involved in the Careysfort swindle.

Maher, who was recently quizzed by gardai over the Careysfort scam, is alleged by Catriona Carey to have been the mastermind behind the alleged 800,000 fraud on financially troubled home-owners  a claim he has repeatedly denied.

Outlining the charges to which Maher pleaded guilty and was appearing in court for sentencing this week, State prosecutor Sinead Gleeson told Judge James McCourt the 55-year-old defrauded five separate individuals.

Maher conned four of these by falsely claiming he could facilitate mortgage applications while a further victim was deceived out of 4,400 and a 09 Toyota Avensis in a trade for a BMW jeep Maher did not own.

Detective Garda Martin Brauders of Enniscorthy Garda station told how victim Isabel Butler called to him on January 22, 2019 saying she suspected she was the victim of a fraud.

She had given Maher 3,800 for his services as a mortgage broker between November 2017 and June 2018.

She had tried to access mortgages and banks and had no luck, Det Brauders said.

Det Brauders said Ms Butler gave Maher 3,300 in cash and a further 500 in cash as a loan.

Patrick Maher was collected from court by John Steadmond, the man identified by RTE Investigates as the fake solicitor involved in the Careysfort swindle

No mortgage application form ever materialised and, when Ms Butler sought the return of her money by phone and text, she received excuse after excuse.

Ms Butler has had 2,000 returned to her since alerting gardai.

Ms Butlers son-in-law Barry Byrne was another victim  paying Maher the sum of 1,220 in fees. A father-of-three living in rented accommodation who was due to marry his long-term partner, Mr Byrne was targeted by Maher during September and October 2017.

Maher claimed he could obtain a mortgage of 180,000 for Mr Byrne to purchase an identified house, a car and fund any necessary renovations to the property.

Det Brauders said the application fee in this case was 1,100 and Maher had even taken Mr Byrne to visit a house as part of the ruse.

At this meeting, an unnamed associate of Mahers with an involvement in the window and door business presented to discuss the necessary renovations.

Again, no mortgage application was ever forthcoming but a further 120 was asked for and given to Maher several months later.

When Mr Byrne sought the return of his cash, Maher said he was having a difficult time and sent him images of his deceased brother-in-law in his coffin.

A third victim named in court was Elizabeth Ann McKay.

She struck a deal with Maher that she would exchange her 09 Avensis and 4,400 for a BMW jeep  which it subsequently emerged was owned by BMW Ireland.

Gardai recovered her Avensis during a search of Mahers rented property at Castletalbot Stud in Wexford but she remains at the loss of 4,400.

Convicted fraudster Catriona Carey

On February 26, 2019 a fourth victim, Alan OBrien, contacted gardai in relation to his dealings with Maher. He was planning on opening a soft play area for children in Enniscorthy.

In May 2018, Maher offered to get Mr OBrien the necessary mortgage and a further 100,000 to help set up the business. The fee on this occasion was 1,700.

During a meeting with Mr OBrien, Maher claimed he had a contact in Nama and could get property at a quarter of its value.

On two occasions, Mr OBrien handed over sums of 500 while Maher instructed him to lodge the remainder to a Paddy Power account in the name of Little Jockey Paddy.

When Mr OBrien started to suspect Maher, the fraudster fobbed him off with a number of tall stories  including that his wife had died in a tragic accident in the Philippines.

After going to the gardai, Mr OBrien secured the return of 1,000 of his money.

A fifth victim, Raphael Al Halazi, complained to Det Brauders that in August 2018 he gave Maher 2,825 to organise a mortgage for 90,000.

Some of this money was again lodged to the Little Jockey Paddy account.

Mr Al Halazi has not had any of his money returned.

Maher was subsequently arrested by gardai and interviewed on two occasions during which, Det Brauders said, he insisted: All of these transactions were legitimate.

The court heard Maher has two previous convictions for theft dating from November 2020 when a charge of unlawful possession of a firearm was also taken into consideration. In this case, the son of an injured party was in danger of having his house repossessed.

Maher falsely convinced him he could prevent this happening and money and a boat was handed over. Maher received a two-year suspended sentence for those offences.

Barrister Jordan Fletcher, appearing for Maher, said all of the offences, including those covered by his previous convictions, had occurred within what could be considered a spree of offending. He said Maher had addictions to alcohol and cocaine and was doing this to fund his alcohol and cocaine addiction.

Sentencing Maher, Judge McCourt said the appropriate sentence on this, the low to middle end of deception, is two years.

But he said, when he balanced the mitigating and aggravating factors, he was going to suspend the entirely of the sentence.

He said he was doing this on strict terms that Maher maintain sober habits, maintain his connection with his helpers in Merchants Quay Ireland and the Cornmarket Project in Wexford, and must address his mental health issues.

If you dont fully engage with all these services, he warned, you can rest assured this court will have no hesitation in lifting the entirety of the sentence.
A garda spokesperson confirmed a body had been recovered from the water and that the inquiry into an alleged assault in the area last weekend was continuing.

The body was found at Slieve League in Co Donegal (Alamy)

The body of a man has been recovered by emergency search and rescue teams in Donegal.

Unconfirmed reports from the south west of the county, suggest it may be the body of a man who went missing in the Killybegs area last weekend.

And it is understood that early this morning, garda officers accompanied a hearse to a remote area - near the picturesque tourist area of Sliabh Liag  near the fishing port of Killybegs.

This morning a garda spokesperson confirmed a body had been recovered from the water and that the inquiry into an alleged assault in the area last weekend was continuing.

A statement continued: The body has since been removed from the scene and taken to Letterkenny University Hospital. The State Pathologist has been notified and a post mortem will take place in due course.

An incident room has been established at Ballyshannon Garda Station under the direction of a Senior Investigating Officer.

Investigating gardai are appealing to any persons travelling in the vicinity of Killybegs/Sliabh Liag between the afternoon of Saturday, June 24, 2023 and the evening of Sunday, June 25, 2023, who observed any activity which drew their attention to come forward.

Any road users travelling in these areas at these times, who may also have camera footage (including dash-cam) are asked to make this available to gardai.

Anyone with information is asked to contact Ballyshannon Garda Station on 071 985 8530 or the Garda Confidential Line on 1800 666 111 using the ref:PR119876/2023."

Following the arrest of a man in his 30s and a woman in her 20s in Fintown last Sunday, a full scale manhunt swung into operation.

The pair were later removed to two separate garda stations in Ballyshannon and Letterkenny, for questioning. A house on the outskirts of Killybegs was also became the focus of a detailed search by gardai.

A car believed to belong to the man was seized for forensic analysis. And it is understood samples of blood recovered from the vehicle were sent off for scientific testing.

Gardai applied to the Letterkenny Court for more time to question the male, but later both were released without charge.

But the multi-agency search - which initially concentrated on the Sliabh Liag cliffs area outside Killybegs, continued.

It involved An Garda Siochana, the Irish Coast Guard, and the Donegal Mountain Rescue Team, assisted by an 118 Rescue Helicopter.

All tourist access to the well-known beauty spot was denied for three days as a detailed search was carried out.

The focus of the operation then switched to nearby Teelin Harbour, where divers wearing breathing apparatus scoured the depths.

But then on Saturday afternoon, it was believed what looked like human remains were located on rocks near Sliabh Liag.

It is understood the missing man - believed to be in his 60s and originally from Northern Ireland - visited Killiybegs last weekend and he was seen socialising in local pubs.

Until now, gardai had been treating the investigation as one of a missing person, but it is expected this may now change to a murder inquiry.
Gardai are investigating after a male passenger (20s) died following a fatal collision in Fermoy, Co Cork.

The collision involved two cars and occurred at McCurtain Street on Saturday 1st July, 2023 at 8.40pm.

A male driver, aged in his late 30s, was arrested at the scene of the road traffic collision and was detained under Section 4 of the Criminal Justice Act, 1984 at a Cork garda station.

The arrested man has since been charged in relation to the fatal collision and is due to appear before Mallow District Court tomorrow morning, Monday 3rd July, 2023 at 10.30am.

Gardai continue to appeal for any witnesses to this collision to come forward.

Any road users who may have camera footage (including dash-cam) and were travelling in the McCurtain Street area between 8:30pm and 9pm are asked to make this footage available to Gardai.

Anyone with any information is asked to contact Fermoy Garda station on 025 82100, the Garda Confidential Line on 1800 666 111 or any garda station.

Investigations ongoing.
The country has seen violent protests after police killed a teenager on Tuesday.

Police officers take position during riots following the death of Nahel, a 17-year-old teenager killed by a French police officer in Nanterre during a traffic stop, at Champs Elysees in Paris, France, July 1, 2023. REUTERS/Nacho Doce

The Department of Foreign Affairs has advised Irish people travelling to and from France to exercise caution following days of riots.

The country has seen violent protests after police killed a teenager on Tuesday.

Earlier this week, the Department of Foreign Affairs took to Twitter to advise those entering France to take care and avoid areas where disturbances or riots are taking place.

A spokesperson for the Irish Embassy in Paris tweeted: The Embassy is aware of ongoing and significant public disturbances across France.

Irish citizens should exercise caution and avoid areas of confrontation. Keep an eye on updates from your transport provider; trams and busses in Paris will stop service early this evening.

The warning comes following a spate of protests over the death of 17-year-old Nahel M, who was shot by police at point-blank range during a traffic stop.

Officials said that around 45,000 French police were deployed on Saturday to control the riots, with more than 700 arrests across the country.

Read more Rioters ram car into French mayors house while family sleep

And more than 800 fires were lit by rioters during the night, although Saturday resulted in fewer arrests overall than in previous days.

Protestors in L'Hay-les-Roses, south of Paris, also tried to set fire to Mayor Vincent Jeanbruns home before launching rockets at his fleeing wife and children.

Mr Jeanbrun was not at home at the time but his wife suffered a broken leg and one of their children was also hurt as a result of the shocking incident.

Mr Jeanbrun said he had been in his office overseeing the riots when the attack on his home took place at 1.30am on Saturday.

In a statement, the mayor said that attackers used a car to break through the gates of their home before setting the vehicle on fire so that the blaze would spread to his home.

He said the incident was "a murder attempt of unspeakable cowardice".

"A line has been crossed," he said.

"If my priority today is to take care of my family, my determination to protect and serve the Republic is greater than before," he added.
BAKU, Azerbaijan, July 3. Members of illegal Armenian armed formations in Azerbaijan's territory, where Russian peacekeepers are temporarily stationed [in accordance with the trilateral statement of November 10, 2020 signed by Azerbaijani, Armenian and Russian leaders following the second Karabakh war], using small arms, have several times subjected the positions of Azerbaijani Army in the Aghdam direction to fire on July 3 from 10:40 to 11:40 (GMT+4), the Defense Ministry of Azerbaijan told Trend.

According to the ministry, units of the Azerbaijani army took adequate response measures in the above direction.

Besides, members of the illegal Armenian armed groups made an attempt to establish permanent fortifications opposite the positions of the Azerbaijani army in the Aghdam direction.

As a result of urgent measures taken by the units of the Azerbaijani army, the installation of fortifications was immediately suspended.
The Black Watch soldier died in 2015 and went to his grave never having to face justice for the cowardly killing

This is the psychopath soldier who literally got away with murder, a court concluded this week.

A coroner concluded that Lance Corporal John Ross MacKay had shot dead entirely innocent teenager Leo Norney in 1975.

At a fresh inquest, Coroner Patrick McGurgan also ruled the shooting was a deliberate act, that MacKay had been on a mission to waste someone that night and that fellow soldiers made false claims of being attacked to cover up what MacKay had done.

But the Black Watch soldier died in 2015 and went to his grave never having to face justice for the cowardly killing of Leo.

It emerged MacKay posed a risk to the public, according to the coroner, because he had served time in prison for a violent offence before he shot Leo Norney dead.

Most importantly, the coroner confirmed what the family of Leo Norney have always known  that the 17-year-old from Turf Lodge was entirely innocent.

Leo Norney

But the ruling also confirms a letter sent by a squaddie pal of MacKay to the sister of Leo Norney was true.

The letter was sent to Alice Moore in 2016  a year after the killer soldier passed away  and claimed to be from a former Black Watch colleague of John MacKays.

In that letter, postmarked as being sent from Edinburgh, the soldier spoke of being plagued by Leos death and of having known who the alleged gunman was for four decades.

He wrote that man he names as John Jackie MacKay was a drunken psychopath who was clearly out to get someone on the night Leo was shot.

The anonymous soldier also claimed the patrols assertion they had come under attack was a lie.

All of this was confirmed by the coroner on Friday at Leo Norneys second inquest, after the first one in 1975 had recorded an open verdict.

In the anonymous soldiers letter, he says that the Black Watch fired shots into the sky in order to simulate incoming gunfire, giving the patrol free reign to attack.

The soldier also reveals the incredible coincidence that MacKay, died on September 13 2015  precisely 40 years to the day after hed murdered Leo.

The ex-squaddie went on to paint a picture, in shocking detail, of how MacKay had just arrived back from Scotland drunk after R&R before Leo died.

He alleged that MacKay had been drinking on his way back to Fort Monagh in west Belfast, where the writer says he was stationed with MacKay, and demanded to go on patrol.

This was against Army regulations, but the soldier says the other squaddies in the barracks gave MacKay a wide berth and for good reason.

The section lived in fear of Cpl MacKay and if he said jump  they jumped, he wrote.

He would have had to stand down whoever was tasked to lead that patrol in his place.

Thats when alarm bells should have been ringing. Leo was shot and killed only hours after Cpl MacKay returned from his R&R.

On Friday the coroner said the other soldiers with MacKay shot into a Mini car and gave false accounts of what happened out of fear of him to cover up what happened.

He was also critical of the Ministry of Defence, saying Mr MacKay had been convicted of a violent offence and served time in prison prior to the killing of Mr Norney, adding the soldier posed a risk to the public.

I am satisfied that the deceased Leo Norney was an innocent young man who happened to find himself in the wrong place at the wrong time walking home from a night out and was shot dead by Lance Corporal MacKay, who planned to waste someone that very evening and expressed his thought to others in the patrol, he said.

Linda Norney speaks to the media

Counsel for the Norney family, Fiona Doherty KC, described the findings as devastating and thanked the coroner.

In a statement read after the coroner made his ruling on Friday, Linda Norney, the victims niece, said the family welcomed the inquests findings.

She added the Armys narrative of the night Mr Norney was killed has been exposed as deceit and lies.

Leo was only a boy of 17, she said. Leo was not armed. He did not pose a threat to anyone. He was shot in cold blood and his shooting is unjustified.

However, the British Army did not just kill Leo. They also murdered his good name.

Later that night, after the soldiers returned to their base, they concocted a false story which blackened Leos name for almost 50 years. They said that Leo was a gunman and that Leo had opened fire on them.

MacKay was a notorious rogue soldier who was later convicted and jailed for planting ammunition in cars in a brazen attempt to falsely incriminate innocent people.
The former RTE star took to Twitter on Sunday to announce that he had been contacted by a journalist about how much he is paid for hosting his Classic Hits show every Saturday.

The former RTE star took to Twitter on Sunday to announce that he had been contacted by a journalist about how much he is paid for hosting his Classic Hits show every Saturday.

Breaking down his earnings, he shared his thoughts on the ongoing controversy after it was revealed that Ryan Tubridy took home 345,000 more than was publicly declared during his time as Late Late Show host.

A journalist called me last night asking what I earn for my radio show on a Saturday @ClassicHitsRdio' the broadcaster began, he wrote.

I told him I am paid 250 by the company before PAYE tax. After my expenses and PAYE, (travel) to and from the Dublin based studio from where I live here in Cork, I earn less than 120.

Gareth worked for RTE for 17 years between 1988 and 2005 and went on to criticise RTE bosses such as director general Dee Forbes, who last week was suspended and later resigned, in a series of further tweets.

He explained that he witnessed the national broadcasters toxic culture firsthand after a round of interviews for the position of RTEs Managing Director of Radio back in 1998.

He wrote: The reason I went for the position was not because I wanted the job, but because it gave me a chance in a lifetime to sit in front of the five most powerful and influential people in Irish broadcasting at that time. It was a formidable experience.

Five genuine people watching as I explained why I felt I would be the right person for the job. Needless to say, after weeks of preparing proposals for cost cutting, and taking RTE into the future, I knew I was way out of my depth.

But sitting there that day for an hour's grilling, I realised that RTE could never change. These five people were committed to all that was good and positive. They genuinely wanted to change the organisation, and so did I.

But that would never happen. I could not see a change. And I still can't see any change. That was a long time ago.

Now change has to happen if RTE is to survive. The toxic culture has to be removed like a beehive that has survived for decades. It can't change from the bottom up, as I explained during my interview that day 25 years ago, it has to happen from the top down.

That was when I appeared to shock the panel. Looking back, that seemed to be what they didn't want to hear. The top branches have to go, in order to allow the grass roots to grow. I think they all felt I was wasting their time that day 25 years ago. I left the interview smiling.

He added: RTE is financially corrupt to its core. The organisation has an abundance of incoming money all the time, money that is spent every week of every year without anyone asking questions. No one needs to be accountable. It's money that is just there for spending. Until now. Get real!

Gareth was met with an outpouring of support following his rant, although he also received some backlash from followers.

He shared a nasty message from one angry person, which read: Ill gladly p**s of (sic) you miserable self serving f****r. Been supporting you through all your car crash and jobs etc.

Youve let your mask slip you cankerous old g*t. Still p*****g and moaning about the past. No wonder they f****d you out. Not a shred of dignity left. Unfollowed and blocked.

Gareth responded: This is what life throws up. Good luck with your future. Nastiness gets you nowhere. Change your profile and, no doubt, you'll be back.

He added that he didnt hold any resentment towards RTE but was instead unimpressed by the stations dishonesty when it came to salaries and spending.

It's unfortunate that some people here think I'm a bitter man with an axe to grind. I haven't a bitter bone in my body. I never had. Bitterness and resentment only serve to make you very ill. What I dislike hugely is dishonesty and fudging. I've see too much of it in my lifetime, he tweeted.
A group of Glenholme residents fear a draft housing strategy for Rotorua will push issues associated with the homeless further into their suburb and claim a consultation document on the proposal is 'misleading.

The Rotorua Lakes Council has defended the consultation document but has acknowledged some errors and says the work needed to prepare the strategy is complex.

Save Glenholme Group opposes the potential intensification of the neighbourhood and says residents' quality of life would be impacted if high-intensity housing was to be built in the suburb, where many elderly lived.

Hozumi Daiya, a group member, had written to neighbours imploring them to make submissions on the Rotorua Lakes Council's draft Future Development Strategy documents, which are out for consultation until July 14.

The strategy pinpoints which areas were likely to see growth and includes potential high-density buildings in the next 30 years in Glenholme.

In the letter, Daiya said the group believed once high-density buildings began, the entire suburb would be 'targeted.

She also believed there was a lack of clarity on where high-density housing could go, with errors in maps showing different locations.

Daiya said she did not think the city needed high- or medium-density housing.

She told Local Democracy Reporting, that in her view, aspects of the strategy were 'misleading and her examples included that the council's long-term future growth predictions varied from Government statistics, and Daiya believed it was able to access the last two years of population data but excluded it. These years saw negative growth, with 300 people estimated to have left Rotorua.

If this had been factored in, she believed the growth percentage each year from 2013 to 2022 would be 1.14 per cent, instead of the 1.8 per cent the council listed in the consultation document for the 2013 to 2020 period.

Stats NZ last December released population predictions for 2018 to 2048, and under a medium-growth model, it estimated 7400 more people in Rotorua.

The council strategy documents said 14,400 more people were predicted in the next 30 years, which came from a 2021 report informed by Infometrics using a medium-growth model.

It was also misleading, in her view, that the document included an artist impression of what looked like three-storey housing on Fenton St placed next to information on high density, which could be built up to six storeys.

Artist impression of potential development of Fenton St. Image / Rotorua Lakes Council.

Maps in the strategy documents were also inconsistent. One showed potential high-density housing reaching south to Devon St, while another Holland St, three blocks closer to the city.

The online version of this had been updated to the Holland St version.

Potential high-density areas in eastern suburbs were also inconsistently mapped: the full draft showed streets in Lynmore earmarked for this, but in the consultation document it was shown as being centred on Vaughan Rd in Owhata. The council said this would be updated to the latter.

Group member Judith Lewis said a letter drop encouraging residents to make submissions aimed to give a voice to the 'predominantly retired and elderly residents of Glenholme.

'For the past three years, they have had to endure increased crime and anti-social behaviour as a result of nearby motels housing the homeless.

There had been improvement, she said, but the suburb was still not as safe as it once was, and 'the residents of Glenholme don't want to live in fear and uncertainty any more.

'There will still be genuine hardworking people who need a step-up, like first-home buyers, but are they going to be the people who want to rent in a building like that surrounded possibly by people who do not necessarily have the same aims in life?

Council district development deputy chief executive Jean Paul Gaston said the topic was an important conversation for the future of the community and encouraged people to have a say.

'What's proposed reflects what we know from data projections provided in 2020. We expect that over the 30-year life of the [strategy] those projections and the needs of the community will change, and the three-yearly reviews will ensure the plan accurately reflects those changes.

Acting mayor Sandra Kai Fong said the strategy would ensure that as the city grew it did so in a planned and considered way, in the right places.

'It is important to understand the draft is just a proposal at this stage and, once adopted, it will be reviewed every three years to ensure it remains aligned with growth projections as they evolve.

'It's great to see our community participating in consultation on the draft strategy  feedback is really important to help us in our decision-making and whether you agree or disagree with the draft or parts of it, we want to hear from you.

The physical draft Rotorua Future Development Strategy 2023 consultation document showed potential high density housing, in dark brown, reaching to Devon St in Glenholme. Source / Rotorua Lakes Council.

The council also provided information about the strategy, including how central government required it to prepare a strategy every six years and update it every three years.

It also required bottom lines for development capacity to be set, including competitive margins. The council also needed to enable higher-density development in places with good accessibility and high amenity, such as being close to the CBD, with good transport and existing infrastructure.

Areas marked as potential growth spots would need to be rezoned and require interest from landowners as well as a District Plan change process.

It also depended on the market and what landowners and developers wanted and were able to do. Zoning did not guarantee that height limits would be developed to their maximum.

The council also noted the errors in the maps.

As for the growth projections, the council said it employed professional companies using expert advice. It said 'determining future population projections is complex, and it did not use a single stream of data such as year-on-year Stats NZ population data.

The Infometics and Stats NZ data had been compared for its 2021 report.

'Stats NZ provides a good baseline but does not take into account the nuance that Infometrics have built into their projection methodology.

The short-term projections varied to a 'limited extent, and it would rely on both sources of data for the strategy reviews.

'It is important to note that this is a long-term strategy that responded to data trends that are estimated over periods of time.

'It is not best practice to modify a strategy based on yearly changes as global/national events can trigger short-term changes in the economy, migration, and population while trends show consistent long-term movement in data whether that is up or down.

It also said it was more prudent to prepare for what it might need and reduce capacity if that growth was not seen.

- Public Interest Journalism funded through NZ on Air.
A lot changed over the weekend. Not only did the fuel excise tax cut come to an end on July 1, but a raft of other changes took effect, some of which you might feel in your wallet.

End of fuel excise tax cut

This was the most obvious one and it caused a rush at the pumps, as the 25c tax cut and 4c worth of GST was reintroduced to petrol prices at midnight on June 30.

These increases appear to have been passed on immediately.

At a Caltex in Auckland on Newton Rd in central Auckland, regular 91 increased from $2.39 per litre on Friday to $2.67 per litre on Saturday  a 28c per litre increase.

The 36 per cent road user charges discount was also removed.

Public transport back to full price

While fuel and road user charges were discounted, so was public transport.

But half-price fares came to an end on Saturday for those aged over 25.

SuperGold cardholders and those with Community Services Cards can still qualify for a discount.

Prescription charges gone

On Saturday, the $5 prescription fee was scrapped.

It was announced as part of the Government's 2023 Budget and is set to save about 3 million people a year money, and in particular 770,000 people aged over 65.

It will make most prescriptions in New Zealand free.

The scheme will cost $618.6 million over four years.

The Pharmacy Guild of New Zealand welcomed the government's removal of the $5 prescription charge. Chief executive Andrew Gaudin said removing it would ensure that all New Zealanders, regardless of where they lived, could access medicines without having to worry about cost.

Parental leave and child support changes

Parental leave payments increased by 7.7 per cent to reflect the rise in the country's average wage.

Eligible parents will have their parental leave payment increase from $661.12 per week to $712.17 per week, before tax.

A new law that enables sole parents on a benefit to receive child support payments also came into effect on July 1.

Under the Child Support (Pass On) Acts Amendment Act, child support collected by Inland Revenue will be passed on directly to people on a sole parent rate of main benefit. The first payments will be passed on from August 22.

Plastic produce bags gone

The single-use produce bags we've been using to put our fruit and veges in at the supermarket are now banned.

Instead, paper bags are on offer at some supermarkets but shoppers are being encouraged to bring their own reusable ones.

Plastic bowls, cutlery, straws and produce labels are also banned.

Clean car discount changed

Some of the rebates and fees for the Clean Car Discount have changed.

For new vehicles, the maximum rebate decreased, and the maximum fee increased.

The threshold at which vehicles will be subject to fees also reduces from 192 grams of CO2 per kilometre to 150g.

A special rebate for new and used low-emission disability vehicles was also introduced.

Alcohol tax up

Alcohol excise rates, which apply to domestically produced alcohol as well as duty on imported beer, wine and spirits increased by 6.6%.

This means half the price of a 12-pack of beer is now tax.

Working holiday visas extended

Young Brits will be able to stay and work longer in New Zealand, thanks to the extension of the UK working holiday visa.

The eligible age has been increased to 35 and the length of stay and work extended to three years.

Young New Zealanders are also able to stay and work for an extra year in the UK, and can depart later for their OE.

Mail prices up

The cost to send a letter or parcel is now higher as NZ Post struggles to maintain its postal services due to low volume.

Standard mail letter prices across New Zealand will increased by 30c, bulk mail customers received a price increase of about 30% and the price of sending a parcel overseas increased by three per cent.

Australian citizenship boost

New Zealand citizens living in Australia for more than four years can now apply directly for Australian citizenship, rather than getting a permanent visa first.

-Brianna Mcilraith/Stuff.
A severe weather watch issued for strong winds remains in force for the Bay of Plenty.

Severe west to southwest gales flow is affecting parts of New Zealand.

"A cold west to southwest flow affects New Zealand, bringing strong winds to many areas," says the latest update from the MetService.

"Strong wind warnings and watches remain in force.

"Please keep up to date with the latest forecasts in case any changes are made."

Strong Wind Watch

Area: Coromandel Peninsula and Bay of Plenty west of Whakatane, including Rotorua

Valid: 10 hours from 3pm Tue 4 Jul to 1am Wed 5 Jul

Forecast: West to southwest winds may approach severe gale in exposed places.



Area: Taupo, Taihape about and east of Mount Ruapehu and Hawke's Bay about and south of State Highway 5

Valid: 24 hours from 9am Tue 4 Jul to 9am Wed 5 Jul

Forecast: West to southwest winds may approach severe gale in exposed places.



Area: Marlborough south of Blenheim and Kaikoura District

Valid: 9 hours from 9am Tue 4 Jul to 60pm Tue 4 Jul

Forecast: West to southwest winds may approach severe gale in exposed places.



Area: Tasman District and Nelson City

Valid: 11 hours from 9am Tue 4 Jul to 8pm Tue 4 Jul

Forecast: West to southwest winds may approach severe gale in exposed places.



Area: Southland southeast of Riversdale, including Stewart Island

Valid: 4 hours from 9am Tue 4 Jul to 1pm Tue 4 Jul

Forecast: West to southwest winds may approach severe gale in exposed places.




Ikea announces date for opening of new Granada store The establishment in Nevada Shopping has required an investment of 11.3 million euros and will employ 80 people

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A date has been announced for the much anticipated opening of the new Ikea store in the Nevada Shopping centre in Granada: Thursday 27th July, the firm has told IDEAL.

The Swedish furniture and decoration multinational has invested 11.3 million euros in what will be its first city store in Andalucia. The Nevada Shopping Ikea will open its doors with a staff of 80 people, most of them newly recruited, and, according to the company, in this shop they have opted "for diversity, inclusion and equal opportunities at all levels".

The new Ikea store in Granada will cover 7,300 square metres, of which half - more than 3,700 - will be for display and inspiration. It will also have a warehouse of almost 1,800 square metres, "large enough to ensure stock at all times and delivery times as tight as possible". In fact, it will be larger than those of the city stores in Madrid located in Calle Goya and Las Rozas.

Visitors will have up to 2,120 items available to buy and take away on the spot and will be able to access the full range online or order from the store, according to the company. Orders will be delivered the next day to the home or can be picked up at the collection point in the shopping centre itself.

"To make the experience more complete, the new centre will also have a restaurant area, called Swedish Deli, offering Swedish cuisine to eat in or take away, as part of the Ikea Food experience adapted to this retail format," said company sources.

The opening in Granada, together with that of a more traditional store in Almeria at the beginning of July, is part of "Ikea's commitment to national accessibility and expansion strategy, in which the Andalusian market, together with Madrid and Catalonia, is a priority focus".

In fact, of the 300 million euros that Ikea plans to invest in expansion projects until 2025, doubling the initial forecast it had made for this type of project, 116 million euros will go to Andalucia, which means that four out of every ten million that the company invests will go to the region.

"In recent years Ikea has launched different physical formats to reach new areas and, therefore, reach more consumers and be closer to them in a much more functional and specialised way," they added.

This growth is also reflected in employment: so far this year more than 230 people have joined the Ikea ranks in Andalucia and there are now almost 2,000 people working in the 13 stores they currently have in the region.
BAKU, Azerbaijan, July 3. A preparatory meeting of senior officials is being held in Azerbaijan on the eve of the ministerial meeting of the Coordinating Bureau of the Non-Aligned Movement (NAM), which will be held on July 5-6, Trend reports.

According to the Azerbaijani Foreign Ministry, at the preparatory meeting over the next two days, the draft final document of the NAM will be considered.

Will be updated
BAKU, Azerbaijan, July 3. Pakistans Federal Minister of Education Rana Tanveer Hussain will visit Azerbaijan to attend the meeting of the Coordinating Bureau of the Non-Aligned Movement at the ministerial level, a diplomatic source told Trend.

He is expected to lead Pakistans delegation to the NAM Ministerial meeting along with officials from Ministry of Foreign Affairs.

The event will take place on July 5-6.

Azerbaijan has been chairing the Non-Aligned Movement since 2019. Despite the fact that the period of the country's chairmanship in the organization fell at the height of the pandemic, Baku successfully fulfilled its presidential mission and received the right to lead the movement for another 1 year.

---

Follow the author on Twitter: @Lyaman_Zeyn
Syracuse, N.Y.  Thanks to Sarah Simiele and her over-the-top wisdom of cheese, Central New York will now have access to some of the hardest-to-get curds.

Simiele owns the Curd Nerd, a quaint fromagerie at the corner of James Street and Collingwood Avenue in Syracuses Eastwood section. Last week she won the annual Cheesemonger Invitational in Brooklyn, pretty much the largest whos who of the cheese industry. She competed against 37 other cheese purveyors from throughout the country before edging out a Colorado shop owner in a rind-biting tiebreaker to claim the gold-colored trophy with a cow on top.

People are clamoring to get their cheese here now, she said while wrapping a .17-pound wedge of Pleasant Ridge Reserve for a customer. Well now get cheeses that are allocated, cheeses you cant get in most places. When I opened this shop (in March 2022), if you told me I was ever going to get allocated cheese, I wouldve told you that you were crazy. This is so cool.

She earned the right to sell such exclusive dairy.

Over eight hours last Sunday, she and her fellow cheese dealers completed a battery of cheese-mongering speed-tests. It started with a 30-question multiple-choice exam. (She earned the highest score.) They blindly tasted cheese and guessed the country of origin, the name, style and the milk type (cow, sheep, goat or buffalo). They had 45 seconds to neatly wrap two wedges in cheesepaper. They had 45 seconds to re-wrap a quarter-wheel and a half-wheel in plastic. They had to guess six aromas, from apples to freshly cut grass.

Then came the salesmanship round staged at a table loaded with 19 different cheeses. Each contender was presented with a unique scenario and had to pick a cheese and sell the judge on that wedge. A judge told Simiele he had just been diagnosed with a cow-milk allergy and needed to pick up some cheese for a party. She recommended a drunken goat cheese, a smooth, creamy goats milk cheese from Spain thats aged and immersed in wine for at least 72 hours. Itll keep for two weeks, and it wont offend your digestive tract.

Sarah Simiele competes in the Cheesemonger Invitational in Brooklyn last weekend. (Photo courtesy of Matthew Simiele)

Judges trimmed the field to six finalists and let a sold-out crowd of 800 cheese lovers into the Brooklyn Steel event center. Here, the competitors attempted to cut a perfect pound of cheese from a giant slab without using a scale. They then were assigned to cleanly wrap five oddly-shaped cheeses in paper. They each then answered the one question they mutually despise: Whats your favorite cheese?

Customers ask those cheese sellers the same question multiple times a day. Simiele usually says her favorite is the last cheese she ate. She couldnt do that on the national stage.

She picked LAmuse Signature Gouda, a Dutch cheese made from pasteurized cows milk that boasts roasted hazelnut and burnt caramel flavors.

When I moved here, I missed cheeses like LAmuse Signature, and I hoped local places would bring them in, but was told there wasnt a market for fancy cheeses, she said. I opened my shop to be able to showcase cheeses like LAmuse Signature.

After a round of cheese trivia, some more cheese cutting, more wrapping and recipe-creating, the contest ended in a tie. Two first time contestants  Simiele and Hanna Lee of Boulder, Colorado  were the last cheesemongers standing.

The final challenge was to sell a piece of cheese in 3 minutes to Adam Moskowitz, an international food importer whos the founder and host of the Cheesemonger Invitational. She picked KM 39, an aged alpine cheese from Spain. The Curd Nerd had mistakenly received a wheel delivered to James Street three weeks before. Simiele liked it so much that she taught a class on it to a group of Syracuse cheese lovers.

The KM 39 is the cheese Sarah Simiele used in the tie-breaker at the national Cheesemonger Invitational this week. She won the tie-breaker by "selling" this to the judges. (Charlie Miller | cmiller@syracuse.com)

I didnt say it was an award-winning cheese or anything like that. I just talked about whats so special about it, she said. Its a chameleon of cheese. It changes flavor depending on where you bite it. Itll taste like toasted nuts with grassy notes, and then itll taste like toasted pineapple. It takes you on a journey.

While convincing Moskowitz the KM 39 is worth the $29 per pound price, she cut it to the perfect party-size wedge, tightly wrapped it in brown paper and handed it to him with a smile.

Being named the top cheesemonger in the country wins Simiele a trip to Europe, $1,000 worth of meats for her store and the honor of serving on future Cheesemonger Invitational judging juries.

She just put a flag in the ground in the world map of cheese, Moskowitz said. Its kind of a big deal. I didnt know her shop existed. Since when has Syracuse, New York, been a hotbed of artisan cheese? Well, guess what. It is now.

****

Charlie Miller finds the best in food, drink and fun across Central New York. Contact him at (315) 382-1984, or by email at cmiller@syracuse.com. You can also find him under @HoosierCuse on Twitter and on Instagram. Sign up for his free weekly Where Syracuse Eats newsletter here.

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Syracuse, N.Y.  Emmaus Ministry got its start 14 years ago when a handful of volunteers decided to make sandwiches for homeless men in Syracuse.

Since then it has mushroomed into a nonprofit that serves nearly 70,000 meals and distributes more than 700 bags of groceries annually to people in need on Syracuses South Side. It also gives them free haircuts, laundry service, counseling and dental care.

This month it began offering free medical care at its St. Marianne Cope Health Services clinic at 4335 S. Salina St. to all takers, no questions asked.

We just ask people what their need is and get them scheduled, said Sheila Austin, executive director of Emmaus.

The volunteers aim to do more than add basic medical care to their growing menu of services. They hope they can start to steer patients, who often dont have insurance or a primary doctor, from their clinic into more regular treatment in the health care system.

The medical clinic is opening nearly a year after the group opened a free dental clinic in the same space.

Since opening in August, volunteer dentists and hygienists have served more than 80 people by providing tooth extractions, fillings, cleanings and other services. Fourteen Syracuse area dentists have volunteered to take turns working in the clinic.

Emmaus is in the 13205 ZIP code where 30% of the overall population lives below the poverty line and about 42% of children are living in poverty, according to the U.S. Census.

The medical and dental clinics do not accept health insurance or even ask patients if they are insured. (Find out how to make an appointment below.)

Many of those served by Emmaus dont own cars or have easy access to other free dental and medical clinics three to four miles away in the downtown area.

So we just thought, Wouldnt it be awesome if we had a clinic close by for them?

That sort of thinking has guided the evolution of Emmaus over the past 14 years.

It started with sandwiches

The group began its work in 2009.

It started when the Rev. John Manno, former pastor of St. James Catholic Church at 4845 S. Salina St. in the Valley neighborhood, challenged Austin and other parishioners to reach out and help people in need on the South Side who dont go to their church.

That was a foreign concept to me, said Austin, a retired nurse. She was unfamiliar with the South Side and the challenges some of its residents face.

But Austin and other parishioners gradually stepped outside of their comfort zones.

They began by making sandwiches for men at the former Oxford Inn homeless shelter off Midland Avenue. They visited the men and brought them hot meals, socks and shampoo.

That experience gave Austin a new understanding of how addiction, mental illness and poverty lead to homelessness.

We created the ministry by being present, finding out what people need, then filling that need, Austin said.

In 2016 Emmaus split off from the church and became an independent tax-exempt nonprofit 501(c)(3) organization to improve its fundraising ability.

Even though its no longer a church ministry, Emmaus is still rooted in the teachings of the Catholic church, according to Austin.

But Emmaus does not do any proselytizing.

When youre doing Gods work by caring for people, feeding them and walking with them, you dont have to say anything else, she said.

Its no longer focused solely on homeless people. It helps anyone in need, no questions asked.

More services, more needs

Emmaus now has seven paid employees and nearly 100 volunteers, including doctors, nurses, dentists, dental hygienists and others who help prepare meals, bag and distribute groceries, stock the food pantry and do other work.

Austin also is a volunteer who doesnt get paid.

The nonprofit is funded entirely by grants from foundations and individual donors. It has an annual budget of about $700,000.

Shortly after becoming independent, Emmaus rented the building it now uses for the clinic. The building originally housed a kitchen, dining room, bathrooms and a shower and laundry facility for Emmaus guests.

Emmaus quickly outgrew the space and moved to a larger building around the corner at 127 E. Glen Ave. donated by the International Union Operating Engineers Local 545. It renovated that building and moved in in 2019.

Last year it provided 67,000 meals and distributed more than 700 bags of groceries.

Emmaus has a social worker who helps guests find housing, apply for food stamps, health insurance and navigate other crises. A volunteer comes in once a month to give haircuts. A representative of Aurora of Central New York stops by once a month to provide free vision and hearing screenings.

The owner of the vacant Purcells Wallpaper & Paint store at 4400 S. Salina St. recently donated that building to Emmaus.

Austins goal for that building is to turn it into what she calls an empowerment center to provide adults with job search assistance and youngsters with educational support to help them improve their reading skills.

We can get a lot more done without red tape, Austin said. We just ask people what their need is and get them scheduled.

Hand-holding and saving lives

The dental clinic attracts South Siders as well as people from throughout the Syracuse area.

One man who rides his bike to Emmaus regularly for meals came to the dental clinic recently complaining of a toothache.

An examination showed he had a mouth full of rotted teeth and a suspicious, painful lump under his tongue.

The clinic got the man an appointment at Upstate University Hospital to get the lump examined. Volunteers accompanied him.

We did a lot of hand-holding, Austin said.

The lump turned out to be cancerous and the man had to have part of his tongue removed. He also needed radiation treatment.

Before he could begin treatment, the man had to get 12 teeth removed. Dr. Stephen Streiff, director of the dental clinic, did all those extractions in one visit.

Well walk people through whatever they need, Austin said.

Alexis Georgiade, of Clay, had such a toothache she could only eat soft foods like Jell-o and mashed potatoes before she went to the dental clinic earlier this year.

She had a tooth pulled at the clinic, got two fillings and needs three more.

Georgiade, who works as a bartender, said her dental insurance provides limited coverage and she could not afford the out-of-pocket costs. A dentist she knows who volunteers at the clinic recommended she go there.

The clinic is fabulous and Im very thankful they have it here, Georgiade said.

The dental clinic has also cared for 20 Ukrainian refugees who needed extensive work because their teeth were in such bad shape, Austin said.

Medical clinic opens

The medical clinic will focus primarily on wellness exams designed to stop health problems before they occur or address issues like high blood pressure before they get worse, said Dr. David Mason, the director of emergency medicine at Crouse Hospital who volunteers at the clinic.

If a patient come in with serious conditions like chest pain or asthma attacks, the clinic will call 911 and support the patient until an ambulance arrives to take them to a hospital emergency room, Austin said.

Rev. John Manno, now pastor of Holy Family Church in Camillus, said he never expected Emmaus to grow so big from such humble beginnings.

Its just amazing to see how volunteers and benefactors have responded to make Emmaus a special place for so many people who otherwise wouldnt have access to those services, Manno said.

Dr. Stephen Streif, the dental clinic director, attributes the nonprofits growth to Austins compassion for the people Emmaus serves.

Shes changing lives, Streif said. Not only the patients, but shes inspiring the volunteers who see her love for the people and want to copy that.

Emmaus recommends people call (315) 961-3067 for appointments for dental and medical care at its St. Marianne Cope Health Services clinic at 4335 S. Salina St., Syracuse. The clinic sometimes accommodates walk-ins depending on its schedule.

Dental services are available Mondays, 1 p.m. to 4 pm., and Fridays, 10 a.m. to 4 p.m.

Medical services are available Tuesdays and Thursdays, 10 a.m. to 2 p.m.
Dave Matthews Band will take their 2023 tour to Upstate New York. The band will spend two nights at the Saratoga Performing Arts Center (SPAC) in Saratoga Springs on July 14-15.

The shows will promote a new Dave Matthews Band album, Walk Around the Moon, which featured 12 original songs. It will be the Dave Matthews-led groups 10th studio album and the follow-up to 2018s Come Tomorrow.

Tickets are available on LiveNation starting at $65.20 for lawn seating for all three shows. However, resale sites like StubHub, Vividseats, SeatGeek, and more have tickets available, sometimes at a cheaper price with a cheaper seat. Check out the prices below.

Summer concerts in Upstate NY: 60 cant-miss shows in 2023 (tickets, more info)Summer concerts in Upstate NY: 60 cant-miss shows in 2023 (tickets, more info)

StubHub:



(Friday, July 14) Saratoga Performing Arts Center (SPAC): Lawn tickets start at $50. Section seats start at $202



(Saturday, July 15) Saratoga Performing Arts Center (SPAC): Lawn tickets start at $50. Section seats start at $267



VividSeats:



(Friday, July 14) Saratoga Performing Arts Center (SPAC): Lawn tickets start at $57. Section seats start at $243



(Saturday, July 15) Saratoga Performing Arts Center (SPAC): Lawn tickets start at $62. Section seats start at $227

SeatGeek:



(Friday, July 14) Saratoga Performing Arts Center (SPAC): Lawn tickets start at $55. Section seats start at $320



TicketNetwork:



(Friday, July 14) Saratoga Performing Arts Center (SPAC): Lawn tickets start at $64. Section seats start at $303



(Saturday, July 15) Saratoga Performing Arts Center (SPAC): Lawn tickets start at $73. Section seats start at $320



MegaSeats:



(Friday, July 14) Saratoga Performing Arts Center (SPAC): Lawn tickets start at $66. Section seats start at $254



(Saturday, July 15) Saratoga Performing Arts Center (SPAC): Lawn tickets start at $76. Section seats start at $332

More concerts

Thomas Rhett Buffalo concert: Where to get cheap seats to KeyBank Center show

Kane Brown heading to Upstate NY this summer: Where to get tickets to show

Let it go: Keyshia Coles concert in Syracuse is canceled

AJR cancels tour dates, including CMAC concert, due to family illness


The Eras Tour is one of this years most popular tours and if you havent gotten your ticket to see Miss Americana singing live, wipe those tears off your guitar because theres still time to score seats.

Taylor Swift is heading to Kansas City, Missouri this weekend for a two-day concert from July 7 to July 8. The Eras Tour begins at 6:30 at the GEHA Field at Arrowhead Stadium. Tickets are sold out through Ticketmaster but resale sites like VividSeats, MegaSeats, StubHub, and more have tickets to spare, sometimes at a better price and with a better seat.

VividSeats:

(Friday, July 7) GEHA Field at Arrowhead Stadium - Kansas City, MO: Tickets start at $1266

(Saturday, July 8) GEHA Field at Arrowhead Stadium - Kansas City, MO: Tickets start at $1117

Stubhub:

(Friday, July 7) GEHA Field at Arrowhead Stadium - Kansas City, MO: Tickets start at $1112

(Saturday, July 8) GEHA Field at Arrowhead Stadium - Kansas City, MO: Tickets start at $1112

TicketNetwork:

(Friday, July 7) GEHA Field at Arrowhead Stadium - Kansas City, MO: Tickets start at $1650

(Saturday, July 8) GEHA Field at Arrowhead Stadium - Kansas City, MO: Tickets start at $1485

MegaSeats:

(Friday, July 7) GEHA Field at Arrowhead Stadium - Kansas City, MO: Tickets start at $1709

(Saturday, July 8) GEHA Field at Arrowhead Stadium - Kansas City, MO: Tickets start at $1539

Taylor Swift made huge announcements since shes been on tour. During her Nashville show, Swift announced that her Speak Now version will be released on July 7th. Fans can pre-order her 3LP vinyl, CDs, and other merch in her shop. More recently, Swift announced that she will re-release her Lover album with new From The Vault songs, with Cruel Summer being the single.

Summer concerts in Upstate NY: 60 cant-miss shows in 2023 (tickets, more info)
Syracuse, N.Y.  When Syracuse schools open next fall, there should be a retired police officer at each of the districts K-8 and middle schools.

The police department will begin recruiting up to 20 retired cops to provide security in the schools under an agreement approved today by the city council.
A disgraced former Congressman from Western New York is planning to run for office again  in another state.

Former U.S. Rep. Chris Collins told WGRZ that he is assembling a team for a campaign in Floridas 19th Congressional District if and when fellow Republican U.S. Rep. Byron Donalds steps aside to run for governor of Florida. Donalds is reportedly considering a gubernatorial run if Gov. Ron DeSantis is elected president in 2024, though Donalds has endorsed former President Donald Trump for the GOP nomination.

The FL-19 district, which has been staunchly Republican for more than a decade, includes Cape Coral, Fort Myers, Sanibel, Bonita Springs, Naples, and Marco Island along the Gulf Coast. Donalds, also a former New Yorker, has represented the district since 2021.

If Collins, who currently lives in Florida, is elected to Congress he would be the first member to represent two different states in the past 55 years, according to WGRZ.

Collins, 73, resigned from office in 2019 before pleading guilty to charges he leaked confidential information about a pharmaceutical companys failed drug trial to avoid $800,000 in stock market losses. He held the seat in the 27th congressional district, located near Buffalo, from 2013 to 2019; he won reelection in 2018 even after being arrested on felony insider trading charges.

Collins was sentenced to serve 26 months in prison beginning in March 2020, but lawyers successfully argued for a delay multiple times, citing Covid-19 health risks due to his age. WIVB reports he began serving time in a federal prison in Florida in October 2020, but was pardoned by Trump and released two months later.

Collins, a longtime supporter of Trump and the first member of Congress to endorse him for president, was attending the Congressional Picnic at the White House in 2017 when he received an email from the companys chief executive saying that a drug developed to treat multiple sclerosis had proven to be a clinical failure. Collins admitted illegally tipping his son while standing on the White House lawn, calling Cameron Collins and telling him to sell their shares in the company before the news was made public and its stock price plunged 92 percent.
A New York police officer has been arrested for allegedly sending herself mean text messages and claiming her co-workers sent them.

The New York Post reports Emily Hirshowitz, a 36-year-old cop at the Ossining Police Department, was charged Wednesday at the Westchester District Attorneys Office with four counts of third-degree falsely reporting an incident, along with three felony counts of first-degree filing a false instrument.

The D.A.s office said Hirshowitz filed a report in May 2022, claiming she was receiving menacing text messages from multiple numbers. She said a fellow police officer or multiple police officers at my department are involved, according to court documents.

She complained again in July and August, saying she received texts urging her to commit suicide; calling her useless, a dumb [expletive], and a reject; and other increasingly threatening content. The Post reports Hirshowitz later sought to drop the complaint, but the police department still asked the D.A. to investigate and Ossining Police Chief Kevin Sylvester called a department-wide meeting to discuss the messages.

Investigators soon discovered Hirshowitz controlled several of the phone numbers where the messages had come from and said she likely sent them herself. Another police officer, Louis Rinaldi, was brought up as a possible accomplice; he resigned in the spring over separate disciplinary charges, the Journal News reported.

Hirshowitz, who joined the police force in 2016, has been suspended with pay. She is scheduled to appear in White Plains City Court on July 12.
BAKU, Azerbaijan, July 3. The US believes that the Armenian residents of Karabakh will be able to live safely within Azerbaijan, US Ambassador to Armenia Kristina Kvien said, Trend reports.

"The US believes that any kind of negotiations is a positive trend. The US is a supporter of peace in the South Caucasus We propose to focus on transport links. A developed transport network will benefit Armenia and reduce its dependence on 2-3 markets," she said.

According to her, the US wants the end result of the negotiations between Armenia and Azerbaijan to be a lasting peace in the interests of the parties.
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Rector of Baku Higher Oil School of SOCAR (BHOS) Elmar Gasimov held meetings with Rector of Istanbul University-Cerrahpasa Prof. Nuri Aydn, Rector of Bogazici University Prof. Mehmet Naci Inci, President of Eurasian Universities Union (EURAS), Rector of Istanbul Aydin University Mustafa Aydin, and the leadership of Koc University.

During the meeting with Rector of Istanbul University-Cerrahpasa, various areas of cooperation with Baku Higher Oil School were discussed, and a Cooperation Agreement was signed between the two higher education institutions.

During the meeting with Rector of Bogazici University Mehmet Naci Inci, a discussion was held on the possibility of early implementation of the joint MBA program. Elmar Gasimov also informed Mehmet Naci Inci about the successful continuation of the "Leadership Academy" project, intended for SOCAR's management team, which is being carried out with the program support of Bogazici University.

During the meeting with Rector of Istanbul Aydin University, a preliminary agreement was reached on the expansion of cooperation between the universities on more diverse platforms, as well as on holding a conference dedicated to the 100th anniversary of the Turkish Republic in Baku with the participation of EURAS members within the framework of the Union's activities and with the support of Baku Higher Oil School. In addition, the current activities of the EURAS Executive Committee was analyzed, and there was an exchange of opinions on future activities and prospective projects.

During the meeting with the leadership of Koc University, the potential of implementing joint projects and programs in common directions by the two educational institutions was discussed. Additionally, an agreement was reached on the implementation of joint teaching and research activities in the fields of computer engineering and chemical engineering.
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Cape Cod Bay, known for its scenic beaches and thriving marine ecosystem, has become an unintentional refuge for sea turtles facing a dire threat from our ever-warming oceans.

CBS News reports that the Gulf of Maine, including Cape Cod Bay, has experienced one of the fastest global increases in ocean water temperature, forcing sea turtles to linger in these northern waters for longer than they can withstand.

By mid-November, the temperature drops too quickly for these cold-blooded reptiles to adapt, and volunteers find an increasing number of them washed ashore in a hypothermic state.

This phenomenon, known as cold-stunning, is taking a devastating toll on these majestic creatures, particularly the critically endangered Kemp's Ridley turtles.

More Cold-Stunned Turtles Washing Ashore

According to biologist Bob Prescott, director emeritus of the Massachusetts Audubon Wildlife Sanctuary, the number of cold-stunned sea turtles in Cape Cod Bay has skyrocketed over the years.

In the 1970s, only a few dozen Kemp's Ridley turtles were found stranded on the bay's shores annually. Today, that number has soared to a staggering 750 to 760 turtles each year.

The Kemp's Ridley turtles unwittingly migrate from their nesting grounds thousands of miles away along the warm beaches of the Gulf of Mexico, where conservation efforts are underway to protect their fragile populations.

Donna Shaver, head of the Turtle Rescue Group at Padre Island National Seashore in Texas, highlights the multitude of threats they face, including oil spills, boat strikes, red tides, and entanglement in debris. These challenges make urgent care and rehabilitation efforts crucial for the survival of these unique species.

Read Also: Archaeologists Launch Quest to Find Burial Site of Fabled 19th-Century Elephant

Rescue Efforts Gaining Impressive Results

One key facility dedicated to rescuing and rehabilitating cold-stunned sea turtles is the Animal Care Center for the New England Aquarium, located outside Boston.

Equipped with state-of-the-art facilities, the center has achieved an impressive 80% success rate in bringing these turtles back from the brink.

According to WECT, the rescue group traveled from Massachusetts to Fort Fisher in April to release 24 turtles.

Biologist Adam Kennedy, who works at the facility, emphasizes the turtles' resilience and the extensive treatment required to nurse them back to health, which can last up to two years.

However, due to the increasing number of stranded turtles, additional rehab facilities and hospitals are necessary to provide adequate care for these four-flippered patients.

Turtles Fly Too

An extraordinary non-profit organization called Turtles Fly Too has emerged to address the overwhelming demand for rehabilitation.

Founded by Ken Andrews, the organization relies on the voluntary efforts of hundreds of pilots who donate their time, planes, and fuel to transport sick sea turtles to rehab facilities across the country.

Describing their mission as a "life fight" and a "med-evac flight," Andrews emphasizes the urgent need for funding to support their noble cause. Currently, the pilots themselves contribute approximately $1 million annually to keep the operation running.

The collaborative efforts between rescuers, biologists, veterinarians, volunteers, and pilots have yielded encouraging results. Around 90% of the turtles transported to rehab facilities eventually return to the ocean.

These successful rehabilitation stories provide a glimmer of hope for the future of these endangered creatures.

Stay posted here at Tech Times.

Related Article: [VIRAL] Divers Uncover Mysterious Massive Creature Lurking Beneath Vietnamese Waters

 2023 TECHTIMES.com All rights reserved. Do not reproduce without permission.
When it comes to Apple products, it's not a new thing that they are being taken by other companies and given a luxurious spin. The same thing is happening with the Apple Vision Pro, as a Dubai-based company is wrapping the headset in 18K gold.

The New Apple Vision Pro Caviar Edition Comes as a Luxurious Take on Apple's New Headset

According to the story by GSM Arena, Caviar, a business based in Dubai, is well known for making custom luxury-class devices. With the recent announcement of the Apple Vision Pro, the company has also decided to release a luxury version of the device.

It was noted that the device being customized was the Apple Vision Pro Caviar Edition. This particular device can also be known as the CVR edition, a luxurious take on what was described as Apple's "spatial computer" device.

Caviar reportedly commented on the new luxurious version of the device, saying that the idea behind the CVR Edition was to be able to turn the spatial computer into what they described as a "work of designer art." It was noted that they took inspiration from Tom Ford's flip-up glasses along with the ski masks from Gucci.

The Luxurious Version of the Device Will Come with Over 1.5kg of 18K Gold Being Used

They noted that for the Apple Vision Pro Caviar Edition, they took inspiration from the two other luxury devices to create what they called a "pinnacle of both technology and style." It was noted that the device was decorated with over 1.5kg of 18K gold, as also detailed in an article by 9to5Mac.

Aside from the gold covering the Apple Vision Pro Caviar Edition, it was also noted that the headband was designed from Connolly leather. This was to guarantee a comfortable but still indulgent experience for the owner.

Connolly leather was reportedly also used by the British Royal Court and Rolls-Royce. The article by GSM Arena also notes how those that knew about the Vision Pro also know that they use EyeSight, making the devices feel transparent by showing the user's eyes whenever another person near them is wearing the product.

Read Also: Apple To Revolutionize AirPods With Health Features

The Apple Vision Pro CVR Edition Will Use Privacy Mode to Avoid User's Eyes Being Displayed

The addition of the EyeSight feature provides users with visual cues for them to be able to help others or tell them that they user is busy when they're immersed in a certain environment. They can also give users a heads-up if another user uses an app.

So far, Caviar has decided to provide a new privacy option on the CVR Edition. This would allow users to hide their eyes on the external screen. This was due to the company knowing that not everyone would be okay with their eyes displayed on the screen.

While Apple's basic Vision Pro already costs $3,499, the Caviar Version of the VisionPro starts at $39,900. The company will reportedly only make 24 units of the Apple Vision Pro Caviar Edition, as seen further in a video by Caviar Global.

Related Article: Apple to Shut Down My Photo Stream Album Permanently; Here's How to Save Uploaded Photos

 2023 TECHTIMES.com All rights reserved. Do not reproduce without permission.
Last week gave the world a trove of discoveries and updates to certain cases, but this Tech Times Weekly Wrap presents stories for you to catch up with, starting with NASA Ingenuity Space Helicopter's return. After a two-month silence, the remote-controlled drone has sent back a message to the team, alongside Google's changes on Android Auto's restrictions.

Not to mention the massively-viral video of a Ukrainian soldier that leaked, showing how they used a shoulder-fire missile to bring down a Russian Su-25 plane out of the sky.

NASA Ingenuity Space Helicopter Contacts the Team after 2 Months

(Photo : PATRICK T. FALLON/AFP via Getty Images)

Last April 26 was when the last mission of the Ingenuity Space Helicopter took place, and after that, the spacecraft went dark after losing communications with the team. However, fast forward to more than two months later, the Ingenuity made contact again, and it was a successful one at that.

The team from NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) over in South California established contact via the Perseverance rover back on June 28 after clearing a hill to get to Ingenuity's last known location. As the Perseverance went to the other side of it, the rover worked as a relay that allowed the team to contact Ingenuity again.

Flight 52 was the last mission which Ingenuity flew, covering as much as 1,191 feet (363 meters), and was set in rugged terrains which made it difficult for the team to establish a stable communication connection from the helicopter.

Read Also: Twitter Is No Longer Showing Tweets Unless You're Logged In - Is This a New Privacy Feature?

Google Reportedly Removed Android Auto's Restrictions

Connecting to Android Auto before was frustrating as the feature would mirror the display on the car's infotainment system but no longer allow the smartphone's screen to be accessible when using Google Maps. This made smartphone access when connected to Android Auto difficult, but Google recently lifted the restriction to ease users' frustrations.

(Photo : Android via YouTube Screenshot)

According to CNET, Google dropped this restriction and allowed users to access Google Maps on their smartphones whenever they feel like it, and not leave it entirely for the infotainment system to display.

This would help those who want to get more in-depth with their navigation by accessing the smartphone and plotting the way right on their hands.

Ukrainian Soldier Shot Down Russia's Su-25 Plane

(Photo : Thomas Lohnes/Getty Images)

A viral video that came from the Ukrainian 10th Mountain Assault Brigade was a massive topic last week, showing how a Ukrainian soldier fired a missile from a shoulder-mounted weapon and fired against a Russian Su-25 plane.

The video highly signifies that tension between Ukraine and Russia is still high, with both countries still at war with each other and showing aggression toward their enemy.

It also showed how the rocket hit the flying Su-25 plane and exploded in the far distance from where it was shot.

The Russian plane, also codenamed by NATO as Frogfoot, is best known for its close air support, ground assaults, and air interdiction operations.

Related Article: Apple to Shut Down My Photo Stream Album Permanently; Here's How to Save Uploaded Photos

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A new discovery was obtained by a group of researchers regarding ticks transferring to pets and people. Ticks can now be propelled across air gaps by static electricity, allowing them to make contact with hosts that are beyond the reach of their legs.

(Photo : BERTRAND GUAY/AFP via Getty Images)

A picture taken at the French National Institute of Agricultural Research (INRA) in Maison-Alfort, on July 20, 2016 shows a tick, whose bite can transmit the Lyme disease.

New Discovery Regarding Ticks

Researchers from the University of Bristol have newly discovered that ticks can transfer to people and pets through air gaps that are much larger than their bodies through static electricity. According to a report from Interesting Engineering, this will allow ticks to make contact with hosts beyond the reach of their legs which can potentially bring diseases.

Ticks do not have the ability to jump, making this way the only mechanism why they would be able to make contact with hosts beyond their tiny legs. Bristol's School of Biological Sciences Lead Author Sam England stated, "They can now actually end up latching onto hosts that don't make direct contact with them."

Through testing castor bean ticks, researchers obtained information that when they charred up electrodes and placed them near young ticks, they would whiz through the air to land on those electrodes. Researchers first used previous measurements of the typical charged by animals to mathematically predict the strength of the electric field between the grass and the animal before passing.

After this, ticks were placed underneath an electrode with an air gap in between. They were able to determine the minimum electric field strength at which the ticks could be attracted, which supports the idea of ticks' attraction to static electricity.

As of now, the research team is hoping that will lead to new technology to help minimize tick bites in humans, pets, and farm animals. It remains unclear regarding the benefits for the animals from static electricity but this idea will open more doors and new ideas as to how many forces like this could be helping animals and plants live their lives.

Levels of Static

Associated Press reported that a normal level of static will be able to charge fur, feathers, scales, or clothes of hosts that will pick up with movement. This could also pul the critters across gaps of a fraction of an inch for a few millimeters or centimeters. England stated that despite the distance being small, a tiny tick represents a whole nation.

Also Read: Kentucky Man Chris Prater Shocked To Find Tiny Tick Embedded In His Eye

Wider implications and potential applicants were also obtained by the researchers through these studies, like parasitic species really want to make contact and attach, including mites, fleas, and onto each other. After this, the same team wants to investigate the capability of sensing the approaching electrostatic charge if it could help them.

Phys reported that ticks usually carry a lot of diseases, including Lyme Disease. These diseases make many pets and people's lives miserable, which can eventually cause death. Discovering this may be a huge social and economic benefit to try to decrease the ability of ticks to attach to people.

Related Article: US Experts Now Concern About Ticks as They Carry New Deadly Diseases! Here's How To Avoid Them

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After announcing the newest restriction access to Twitter, owner Elon Musk announced that this drastic and immediate action was done to fight companies that run artificial intelligence, preventing them from stealing data.

(Photo : OLIVIER DOULIERY/AFP via Getty Images)

In this photo illustration, a phone screen displays the Twitter logo on a Twitter page background, in Washington, DC, on April 26, 2022. Billionaire Elon Musk is capturing a social media prize with his deal to buy Twitter.

Blaming AI for New Restriction

Twitter issued a lot of updates recently, including the requirement to sign up to view tweets and restricting tweet previews when links were shared with others. But according to a report from The Verge, the platform will also now temporarily limit how many tweets users can read per day in an effort to address data scraping and system manipulation.

Owner Elon Musk continuously blames AI companies training large language models for this aggressive scrapping of Twitter data, including ChatGPT, Microsoft Bing, and Google Bard. This will make sure that the platform will not be at risk of becoming hellscapes with some still don't have an authentication process.

As an immediate reaction, the platform had to fire backup servers to cope with the increased traffic on site. He added, "It is rather galling to have to bring large numbers of servers online on an emergency basis just to facilitate some AI startup's outrageous valuation." This decision was also met with confusion as to how sudden the happening was.

Limiting Users for Tweet Viewing

Business Insider reported that Twitter will now limit people from viewing tweets to a certain number. Unverified users will only be able to see 600 posts per day while new unverified users will see 300 posts in a day.

Meanwhile, verified users will still be able to continue reading tweets with a maximum of 6,000 posts per day through a Twitter Blue subscription, granted through an organization, or verification from Musk himself like what he did to Stephen King, LeBron James, and anyone with more than a million followers.

It all remains unclear for Twitter on how they will count a post as read whether it will mean just scrolling past a tweet or actually interacting with the tweet. Despite these changes, all of the outcomes will cause users from the platform to have problems seeing new tweets on their feeds.

As per The Sun, no timeline was also given by Musk or other employees regarding how long the measures would be in place.

Also Read: Twitter Fleets to Make a Return? Elon Musk Responds to User's Request

When Epic Games Chief Executive Office Tim Sweeny stated in his tweet the platform was walled and that browsing the site feels horrible, Musk responded asking him what should we do to stop that, and is open to ideas.

The internet feels increasingly broken. News sites are paywalled or account walled, Reddit is nag walled, Google search spams ads and SEO to the point of uselessness, and now Twitter is account walled. Web browsing feels horrible now.  Tim Sweeney (@TimSweeneyEpic) June 30, 2023

As a suggestion, Sweeny states that scrapping Twitter's terms of service and taking legal action against companies is the perfect response.

Related Article: Elon Musk Says Twitter Will Pay Verified Content Creators for Ads in Replies

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Australia's top telecommunications company Telstra Group announced on Monday that it will partner with Elon Musk-owned company Starlink in an effort to provide the country with fixed broadband and much improve voice services.

(Photo : CHANDAN KHANNA/AFP via Getty Images)

People look at the launch of a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket carrying 21 second-generation Starlink satellites from Space Launch Complex 40 at NASA's Kennedy Space Center, in Cocoa Beach, Florida, on February 27, 2023.

Partnering with Starlink

Telstra announced that it will be partnering with a huge corporation outside Australia, Accordion to the released statement from the company, Telstra signed the deal to use Elon Musk's low-Earth orbit-satellite constellation called Starlink, providing a much better experience when it comes to broadband and voice services for every Australians in the country.

The agreement between the two companies will be providing connectivity options for business customers, bringing mobile connectivity in areas without fixed. The business offer of the company will be available to purchase from Telstra both locally and in select countries overseas.

Currently, Telstra only uses a mix of technologies to provide a better experience for voice and broadband services in both rural and remote areas of Australia. This will include NBN fixed broadband, mobile networks, and older copper radio networks available.

Through this partnership, Starlink will provide an additional connectivity option for people and businesses in rural and remote locations where signals are hard to reach, making it difficult to provide quality connectivity with existing terrestrial networks.

Better Connection to Rural Areas

Starlink stated through the proximity of these satellites, will reduce latency which makes them a great and more consistent option for services where low latency is needed, such as voice and video calls.

"We truly believe in improving connectivity for all Australians, regardless of where you live work and play. Adding LEO satellites as an option both for customers and to bolster our connectivity options in regional areas brings us a big leap closer to closing this digital divide," the company added.

This is all possible because of the LEO satellites that are much close than the geostationary satellites to Earth and multiple satellites as part of the constellation, allowing them to send and receive signals much faster.

Based on a report from Reuters, Starlink is a company from the United States, operated by founder and Chief Executive Officer Elon Musk. While Telstra expects to be able to offer the new service options for both customers and businesses in the country by the end of the year, the company promised to offer higher download speeds compared to copper-based Asummetrcic Digital Subscriber Lines.

Also Read: Telstra Outage: Australians Struggle to Make Phone Calls

Starlink constellation is the only alternative to NBN's Sky Muster satellites, which Australians have for satellite internet. The Sydney Morning Herald reported that Sky Muster uses a very high Earth orbit with 36,000 kilometers. This means it will only have two satellites to achieve wide coverage. However, speeds are low while latency is high.

Related Article: Telstra Acquires Digicel Pacific, South Pacific's Number One Mobile Operator

 2023 TECHTIMES.com All rights reserved. Do not reproduce without permission.
Do you want your home to be smarter and cozier to enhance your home life experience? The ELEGRP Smart Dimmer Switch is a versatile device that adds more comfort to homes. It can personalize your home's lighting feature to achieve the perfect lighting anytime and in any room.

Furthermore, the smart light switch is convenient to use. With your smartphone, you can switch the lights off or on, dim them, set schedules or groups, etc. Thus, the smart switch by ELEGRP makes your life much easier and improves its quality.

In this article, you will discover more about the WiFi-compatible dimmer switch. You will also learn why you need to replace your existing light switch with this optimal lighting solution.

As the market-leading manufacturer of intelligent electrical and electromechanical equipment, ELEGRP started its operations in 2000.

ELEGRP launched its brand-new smart home series of home devices exhibited at the Las Vegas, Nevada home-building exhibition, the largest in North America.

What Are the Outstanding Features of the ELEGRP Smart Dimmer Switch?

As a homeowner, you will find many advantages in ELEGRP's WiFi-compatible dimmer switch. The product's design is based on its manufacturer's mission of delivering friendly solutions.

ELEGRP serves homeowners by adopting an efficient and consumer-centric problem-solving approach.

As for ELEGRP's smart dimmer switch, it comes in two models: The touch panel model and the push-button model. In this article, you will discover more about the touch panel model.

You will find the following attributes of the smart WiFi dimmer switch with the touch panel feature suitable for your home and family's needs:

Exterior impression

The smart dimmer switch is a white, minimalistic device. This elegantly designed unit also has a matte surface. Its ultra-slim profile provides room in the electrical box, which facilitates easy wiring.

Moreover, ELEGRP's WiFi-compatible dimmer switch is a 120-Volt lighting solution that works by having it mounted on the wall.





Its design adds elegance to your home. Furthermore, the smart dimmer switch has a skin-like matte and delicate radiant exterior.

The exceptionally silent rocker appearance adds beauty and a high-tech look to your room.

Installation

You will not have a hard time installing the WiFi-compatible dimmer switch. When you receive the package, you will find step-by-step instructions for setting up the device.

This manual will help you complete the wiring process fast and efficiently. The smart light switch works in a single-pole or 3-way wiring application.

With a neutral, usually white wire, the device will connect and start functioning.

You should remember that you do not need a hub for the smart dimmer light switch featuring a single-pole setup. It works with 120-Volt input power and an alternating current of 60 Hertz.

It is recommended that you ask help from your technician to assist you in the setup process. The technical terms will also be understandable for you.

App connecting feature

ELEGRP's smart dimmer switch works with a WiFi connection. Remember that it supports a 2.4-GigaHertz (GHz) WiFi network only. The switch is not compatible with a 5-GHz WiFi network.

With the ELEGRP Home App, which you can download on your smartphone, you can customize the smart dimmer light switch.

Additionally, you can control your room's light, which is easy since you can do it anywhere, anytime.

Voice control

You will agree that a WiFi-compatible dimmer switch is convenient for controlling your home's lights. After all, its voice control feature is compatible with Amazon Alexa and Google Assistant.

This hands-free convenience permits you to adjust your room's lighting levels with your voice. Thus, you do not have to get up to dim the lights.

You can simply remark, "Hi Alexa! Set the brightness of the bedroom light to 60%." Then, the AI assistant will respond and obey your command.

The smart light switch can also brighten your room's lighting feature when you are busy doing different activities such as reading, working, gaming, etc.

Touch control

This smart dimmer light switch features a sensitive touch panel. You can tap the switch to turn your lights on.

Moreover, you can slide your finger on this portion to adjust the light's brightness. Do you want to dim your light fast? Just do the Long Press. Press and hold the switch for 1 second for maximum brightness.

Additionally, you can tailor your room's lighting phases for any activity. The Smart Brightness control is a feature you can change before you take a nap, when doing leisure hobbies in your room, etc.

Other smart features

The WiFi smart dimmer switch has a Smart Scenes feature. You can make personalized adjustments to your room's light automatically.

Furthermore, the Smart Scheduling feature lets you control the light based on your preferences and schedule.

ELEGRP's switch lets you sync off and on times to sunset and sunrise. Your porch lights will greet you every time you get home late.

Do you want to enjoy good, uninterrupted sleep at night? ELEGRP's smart switch has a brightness indicator. This feature temporarily shows the light level when you adjust the light or bulb's brightness.

When the load is turned off, you will find the LED locator light glowing. This feature intends to help you locate the switch in the dark.

Additionally, the brightness indicator's 1 to 100% range is adjustable. Its vanishing design makes it look more elegant and simpler.

Using the ELEGRP switch in your child's bedroom is ideal as the device has the Fade On/Off features. You can use the "Gentle Off" option to fade off the lights in the bedroom as your son or daughter drifts to sleep.

This feature also gives you time to exit a room in your home without bumping into an object as you move in the dark.

The dimmer switch's Fade On/Off features enable your eyes to adjust to new lighting levels. Plus, the bulbs and dimmer's service life gets prolonged as these benefits reduce the electric current at the moment of switching the lights on.

The WiFi-compatible dimmer switch supports dimmable LED bulbs of up to 150 Watts. It is also applicable to incandescent bulbs of up to 450 Watts.

Remember that the single-pole/3-way smart dimmer switch is not recommended for use with lights without a dimmer function or with non-dimming bulbs.

Final Thoughts

ELEGRP's smart dimmer light switch adds more comfort to your home by lighting up areas instantly for any event.

Thanks to the smart WiFi dimmer switch's Home Application that you can download on your smartphone, you can remotely control your lights wherever and whenever you are.

With the ELEGRP smart dimmer switch's convenient features, you now have a favorable option to replace the conventional switches in your living room, hallway, or stairways. It makes your home more livable and enjoyable for your family.

If you are decided to buy the switch today, visit ELEGRP's Amazon store for more details.

 2023 TECHTIMES.com All rights reserved. Do not reproduce without permission.
The first supermoon of the year is about to emerge on Monday, July 1. Australian viewers can enjoy watching this lunar activity from afar.

It's only of the four supermoons that are expected to rise in 2023. If you miss watching it later, you still have three chances to add the supermoons to your astronomy viewing wishlist.

When is the Australian Supermoon Rising?

In an early report by News.com.au, the upcoming full moon known as "Buck Moon" will be 100% full at around 9:39 AEST.

For those unfamiliar with the term "buck moon," you don't have to stress out further since it's just the US counterpart of a full moon.

According to an astrophysicist from Australian National University, Brad Tucker, the Aussie sky gazers can have the best viewing time of the supermoon when it is at sunset.

"As the sun is setting in the west, the moon will be rising in the east, as it does it will look its biggest and brightest on the horizon," Tucker told 9News in an interview.

The Challenge in Supermoon Viewing

The full moon will be 26,000 kilometers closer than it's ever been. By Monday night, it will appear to be five percent bigger than its actual size even though it's roughly 380,000 kilometers away from the planet.

While it does sound good to know that it will be closer this time, it does not mean that it would pave an easier channel for viewing.

According to SkyNews, Australians can experience difficulty in looking for the best angle to view the supermoon because of the cloudy skies.

The viewers might be able to witness its glimmering body throughout the night. However, if it is covered completely by the clouds, it would turn out to be a "disappointment" only.

Tucker said that during the supermoon phase, the tides will be bigger because of the stronger gravitational pull.

Related Article: July Supermoon 2023: Here's How to See the First One of the Year and Take Photos

What Are the Upcoming Supermoons For the Remainder of 2023?

While it's fascinating to have a once-in-a-lifetime moment with a supermoon, it does not end up here. In fact, there will be three more supermoons that are arriving this year.

By next month, there will be a blue moon. It is anticipated that the final supermoon will be peaking on September 29.

If you're interested in supermoon viewing, check Farmer's Almanac's list of the upcoming full moons and their expected date of appearance.

August 1: Sturgeon moon

August 30: Blue moon

September 29: Harvest moon

October 28: Hunter's moon

November 27: Beaver moon

December 26: Cold moon

Meanwhile, those residents in North, South, and Central America can feast their eyes on the annular solar eclipse which will be visible on October 14.

As advised by the experts, viewing a solar eclipse can harm a person's eyes. Because of this, it's recommended to wear glasses designed for such activity.

Read Also: Euclid Mission: UK Space Agency Now Ready to Explore Dark Matter, Other Mysteries

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Blue Origin, an American aerospace firm founded by former Amazon head Jeff Bezos, is planning to expand its operations outside the United States.

The company has revealed its plans to take its services to Europe and other regions.

Blue Origin to Build International Launch Sites Outside the US

Blue Origin has already built its facilities in Alabama, Florida, Texas, and Washington, but for the company, it still needs to make connections with other nations.

According to a report by Financial Times, the Washington-based launch service provider wants to seek partnerships outside North America in the field of software and manufacturing.

While the specific site has not been chosen yet, expanding its reach beyond US borders reflects the company's ambition to extend its global presence.

By establishing a presence in "Europe and beyond", Blue Origin aims to enhance its capabilities and expand its customer base.

Furthermore, to better serve its customers and accelerate its roadmap, Blue Origin is actively pursuing acquisitions and partnerships. It's open to acquiring businesses of any size that can complement its operations and help scale up its services.

The strategic acquisitions would place Blue Origin on top of the industry so it could stay competitive in the rapidly evolving space race with other billionaire-owned firms such as Virgin Galactic and SpaceX.

Related Article: Blue Origin Will Send an All-Female Crew to Suborbital Space Led by Jeff Bezos' Girlfriend

Scaling Up Space Business

In a report by Engadget, Blue Origin's acquisition of New York-based Honeybee Robotics back in 2022 has proven fruitful.

The space-based robotics company, along with other teams helped NASA secure a contract worth $3.4 billion. The agreement was all about creating a lunar rover as part of the third Artemis exploration.

In the past, Blue Origin achieved an amazing feat of launching and reusing a rocket. However, it did go well in the long run as its rivals took advantage to provide a more powerful footprint for it.

The company encountered several delays on its way to building the launchers. Blue Origin lagged behind SpaceX and it slowed down the company's progress to catch up with the aerospace titan.

Blue Origin' New Glenn rocket will reportedly be used for Amazon Project Kuiper's upcoming global broadband project beginning in 2024.

Elsewhere, Gizmodo reported last month that the NASA collaboration would include an ongoing Blue Origin crewed spacecraft.

Aside from Blue Origin, NASA included the other six US-based companies to join the exploration. These include Northrop Grumman, Sierra Space, Space Exploration Technologies, SpaceX, Vast Space, and Think Orbital.

If you're interested to know more about space, astronomy, lunar mission, and everything in between, refresh this link to find out the latest stories on the go.

Read Also: Supermoon Australia 2023: How to Watch, Best Viewing Time, and More!

 2023 TECHTIMES.com All rights reserved. Do not reproduce without permission.
BAKU, Azerbaijan, July 3. In Azerbaijan, two individuals have been detained on accusations of high treason, Trend reports.

The detained individuals are Fidan Aliyeva and Tarlan Abbasov, both citizens of Azerbaijan. They have been charged under Article 274 of the Criminal Code; however, the specific details of the charges have not been disclosed.

Following the completion of the investigation by the State Security Service, the criminal case against both individuals has been forwarded to the Baku Court for Grave Crimes.

The case of Fidan Aliyeva will be presided over by Judge Eldar Ismailov, while the case of Tarlan Abbasov will be under the jurisdiction of Judge Leyla Asgarova-Mammadova.
Scientists recently found out that some mosquitoes in Australia may carry flesh-eating bacteria from possums.

Mycobacterium ulcerans, which causes the disfiguring skin condition Buruli ulcer, is common in many parts of Australia and Africa. Australian possums, especially the common ringtail, develop sores and shed the bacteria in their feces.

Experts have long thought that contact between sick possums and mosquitoes may contribute to the spread of the bacterium to humans, Science News reported. Health authorities find it challenging to manage the spread of Mycobacterium ulcerans since there isn't a clear connection between possums, mosquitoes, and human infection. However, new studies in southeast Australia have provided further information on this association.

At the ASM Microbe 2023 conference, molecular microbiologist Timothy Stinear reported that a few mosquitoes have lately taken in on possums and humans. Additionally, genetic studies by Stinear and his colleagues, described in a preliminary paper on bioRxiv.org, showed that M. ulcerans bacteria from possums, mosquitoes, and people have the same DNA, which supports the transmission cycle between these three species.

Jennifer Guthrie, a microbiologist, and epidemiologist at Western University in Canada, called the findings "pretty compelling" evidence of mosquitoes spreading the illness in Australia.

How Does It Spread?

The sluggish development of M. ulcerans, which delays the start of symptoms in people by two to nine months, makes it difficult to pinpoint the transmission of Buruli ulcers. Nevertheless, Stinear and his colleagues managed to trap nearly 72,000 mosquitoes from Melbourne's Mornington Peninsula, where the illness is common.

Most of the 18,000 people tested for M. ulcerans belonged to the type of day-biting mosquito known as Aedes notoscriptus. Thirteen mosquitoes of this species recently consumed a ringtail possum and a human. Additionally, the researchers identified places where bacteria-contaminated possum feces, infected mosquitoes, and human cases of Buruli ulcer coincided. Although the specific method is unknown, M. ulcerans is transmitted from animals to people via mosquitoes.

Read Also: Apple To Revolutionize AirPods With Health Features



One theory is that A. notoscriptus mosquitoes that feed on possum ulcers physically transfer the bacterium. However, The researchers noted that other mosquito species fed on possums did not pick up Mycobacterium ulcerans.

Another possibility is that the possum feces that sometimes find their way into the tiny artificial containers that A. notoscriptus like to use for laying eggs might pollute the water and harm the developing insects.

Facts About Buruli Ulcer

M. ulcerans is a bacterium that produces a toxin that leads to the disease known as Buruli ulcer, which causes skin damage. Untreated, the disease may impede long-term. The microorganisms are related to leprosy and TB, according to the World Health Organization.



A common first symptom of the infection is painless edema, induration, or inflammation on the face, arms, or legs. Within four weeks, ulceration may develop even when there is no pain or fever. Deformities may also be caused by conditions that damage the bone.



Surgery and antibiotics are often used in the treatment of Buruli ulcers. Skin loss and damage may be reduced with early diagnosis and rapid treatment. People with worrisome skin lesions in Buruli ulcer-endemic regions should contact a doctor immediately, per an Ecomist article.



There are no first-line treatments to prevent Buruli ulcers at this time. The immunization against Bacillus Calmette-Guerin (BCG) may provide just a minimal level of protection.

Related Article: Supermoon Australia 2023: How to Watch, Best Viewing Time, and More!

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The world's two top-selling clean automobile manufacturers, Tesla and BYD, both produce electric vehicles (EVs) and hit outstanding sales milestones in the second quarter.

With 466,140 international deliveries, Tesla, led by Elon Musk, outperformed Wall Street expectations.

Meanwhile, BYD, the largest automaker in China, reported its best-ever quarterly sales results with 700,244 new-energy vehicles, with half being fully electric and the other half plug-in hybrids, according to Bloomberg.



As seen by Tesla's delivery figures, Elon Musk, the company's CEO, has successfully increased volume by lowering pricing. Tesla's actual result is a considerable improvement above analysts' expectations of 448,350 vehicles shipped by the firm for the quarter.



Tesla has reduced car pricing to increase sales. The corporation has also offered three months of free US fast-charging and Chinese insurance subsidies.



Deliveries for the Texas-based firm increased by 83% compared to the prior year, despite the difficulties brought on by the COVID-19 lockdowns in China, per Japan Times.



Due to these sales-boosting tactics, analysts expect Tesla price cuts to continue throughout the following year.



Additionally, Tesla's production and delivery deficit shrank, with manufacturing just 13,560 vehicles short of sales in the most recent quarter as opposed to roughly 18,000 in the prior one.

Read Also: Tesla Delivers Record Number of EVs Last Quarter; Model Y and Model 3 Are Its Best-Selling Vehicles

BYD Sales Surge

BYD, financed by Warren Buffett, established a new quarterly record by selling over 700,000 cars in the second quarter, almost tripling its sales from last year and demonstrating its supremacy in the Chinese industry, per CNN.



The EV manufacturer, known for its Qin and Han sedans, sold 253,046 new energy cars in June alone, an 89% increase from the previous month. Both battery-powered electric cars and plug-in hybrids are considered New Energy vehicles, and BYD's steady expansion underlines the company's significant market share in China.

According to Joanna Chen, an EV batteries analyst, June sales indicate that market demand for New Energy vehicles "remains pretty strong."

While Tesla continues to be the leading EV manufacturer in the United States, other international firms, like BYD, with more recent product lines, provide it with intense competition in the industry.

BYD's outstanding success in China helped it become the top EV brand in the nation. Regarding worldwide sales of pure EVs, Tesla still outsells BYD. However, BYD has overtaken its rival in the Chinese market.

Related Article: China Achieves 10x Satellite Speed with Lasers: Reached 10 Gbps with Space-to-Ground Connection

 2023 TECHTIMES.com All rights reserved. Do not reproduce without permission.
Israeli forces initiated drone assaults on Jenin on Monday, the largest operation in the region in 20 years and a significant increase in casualties.

The drone strikes killed at least eight Palestinians and sparked deadly clashes between Israeli forces and the terrorist Jenin Brigades, a group based in the city's densely populated refugee camp, per Reuters.

According to Palestinian ambulance driver Khaled Alahmad, shooting and explosions could be heard throughout the day as Israeli soldiers, and the Jenin Brigades engaged in combat.

The situation in Jenin resembled an actual battle as the camp was the attack's primary target, covering less than half a square kilometer and housing around 14,000 people. At least six drones circled the city and the nearby camp at various times.

Jenin's scenario is representative of the broader West Bank upsurge in violence, which has alarmed both Washington and the Arab world. Despite this, it has yet to open the door to restarting protracted political talks.

In addition to frequent army operations in towns like Jenin, fatal Palestinian assaults against Israelis, and destructive Jewish settler mob activities against Palestinian communities, the last year has seen several other incidents.

The Palestinian health ministry recorded 50 injuries and eight deaths in Jenin. A Ramallah checkpoint shooting killed another person overnight.

An Israeli military raid on the Jenin refugee camp in the West Bank, involving drone strikes and gun battles in the streets, has left at least eight people dead.



Israel says the camp is a militant stronghold used to launch attacks. pic.twitter.com/DWL8UPBYwc  DW News (@dwnews) July 3, 2023

Read Also: Real-Life 'Transformer:' M4 Robot Can Crawl, Roll, Fly

Israel Forces Want Camp Destroyed

The Israeli military confirmed that the Jenin Brigades' command center was the objective of the attacks. The Israeli army used accurate drone attacks with tiny payloads to damage infrastructure and prevent the terrorists from using the refugee camp as a base in what they described as a massive counter-terrorism operation.

Israeli armored bulldozers smashed down the camp's roadways during the operation to find hidden IEDs, which disrupted the water and power supplies.

Israel Defense Forces spokesperson Lt. Col. Richard Hecht said the operation will continue until they destroy the alleged camp of the terrorists.

The major attack earned condemnation from Jordan, Egypt, and the Organization of Islamic Cooperation. The action violated international humanitarian law and Israeli occupation commitments, according to Jordanian Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Sinan al-Majali.

UN representative Tor Wennesland appealed for the safety of civilians and urged all sides to de-escalate the situation as he voiced his grave worry about the potential escalation, according to Axios.

Israel Has Sophisticated Military Drones

West Bank and Gaza-based Palestinian factions pledged to help Jenin. Israel's drone strikes on West Bank terrorists entered an intensity not seen since the early 2000s during the second Palestinian revolt, although they were less pervasive than in Gaza, as per The New York Times. Recent violence, particularly in Jenin, has generated worries of retaliation.

Israeli military drones are stealthy and accurate. They use gravity bombs, which fall softly and without smoke and are challenging to foresee or avoid. According to the Royal United Services Institute, the country has emerged as a top Middle Eastern drone operator with considerable capabilities and exports of drone technology.

Related Article: Apple's Vision Pro AR Headset Facing Production Troubles Before Release: Report

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CAPA India, a leading aviation advisory, research, knowledge and transaction advisory practice, has been named today the official Knowledge Partner for the upcoming Air Expo India next December in New Delhi.



CAPA India will be responsible for the conference program for the First GA & Business Aviation Exhibition that will be held at Delhi International Airport in December 2023 to share their expertise and insights on topics such as the demand outlook, fleet management, aircraft acquisition, financing options, regulatory challenges, and market trends in the Indian and global aviation industry.



This partnership aims to unite key stakeholders and decision-makers in the general and business aviation sector to exchange ideas, network, and explore potential business opportunities. CAPA India's extensive knowledge and experience in the aviation industry will ensure a comprehensive and relevant conference program that addresses the specific needs and interests of the participants.



"We are thrilled to have CAPA India as our official Knowledge Partner for the First GA & Business Aviation Exhibition," said Didier Mary, CEO of Adone Events.



"Their expertise and industry connections will greatly enhance the conference program and provide valuable insights to the attendees. We believe that this partnership will contribute to the event's success and further promote the growth of the Indian aviation industry," Didier Mary added.



CAPA India is a leading aviation consulting firm with a strong presence in the Indian market. They specialise in providing strategic advisory, business planning, and research and advisory services for the aviation sector. Their team of experts has a deep understanding of the Indian aviation landscape and can provide valuable insights into the challenges and opportunities in the industry.



"We are delighted to collaborate with Air Expo and be the Knowledge Partner for this prestigious event," said Kapil Kaul, CEO & Director of CAPA India. "India is a rapidly growing market for general and business aviation, and this exhibition provides an excellent platform for industry professionals to come together and exchange knowledge. We look forward to curating an engaging conference program that addresses the current issues and trends in the industry."



The First GA & Business Aviation Exhibition is set to be a major event in the 2023s Indian aviation calendar, attracting industry leaders, professionals, and enthusiasts worldwide. The partnership with CAPA India as the official Knowledge Partner will add value to the event and ensure a successful and informative conference program.  TradeArabia News Service
Details added: first version posted on 10:16

BAKU, Azerbaijan, July 3. Liquidation commission for Azerbaijan's Gunay Insurance OJSC has been established, Trend reports.

In this regard, the commission's chairman, lawyer Akram Hasanov appealed to the company's clients and creditors.

"The commission will complete the liquidation process of Gunay Insurance within one year. All obligations to creditors will be fully and timely implemented. There are enough funds for this," Hasanov said. "It means that Gunay Insurance is not bankrupt (otherwise voluntary liquidation would be impossible). So, liquid assets companies amount to 9.31 million manat ($5.48 million), and liabilities - 7.5 million manat ($4.4 million)."

Thus, according to him, the total market value of assets exceeds its liabilities by 1.81 million manat ($1.06 million).

"Therefore, there is no reason for concern in terms of the interests of clients and creditors. The liquidation process will be carried out transparently and in accordance with the law," the commission's chairman added.

Previously, on June 24, the Central Bank of Azerbaijan revoked the license of Gunay Insurance OJSC on the basis of a voluntary appeal in accordance with the law "On insurance activities".
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BAKU, Azerbaijan, July 3. Canadian consulting company Arton Capital has published the World Passport Index, Trend reports.

According to the ranking, Azerbaijan has secured the 61st position. Citizens of the republic can visit 33 countries visa-free, obtain visas upon arrival in another 48 countries, and require a pre-arranged visa for 117 countries (Azerbaijan held the 62nd position in the ranking as of the end of 2022).

The UAE passport topped the ranking, allowing its holders to visit 125 countries visa-free, obtain visas upon arrival in 55 countries, and require a pre-arranged visa for only 18 countries. Germany, Sweden, Finland, Spain, Luxembourg, France, Italy, the Netherlands, Austria, Switzerland, and South Korea shared the second position. Holders of these passports need to obtain a visa in advance for visiting 23 countries. Denmark, Belgium, Portugal, Norway, Poland, Ireland, the UK, and New Zealand occupied the third place (mandatory visas are required for 24 countries).

The ranking is based on the number of countries where passport holders can visit visa-free or obtain visas upon arrival.
MILANO, Italy, July 3. The Trans Adriatic Pipeline (TAP) met 15 percent of Italys gas consumption in 2022, Luca Schieppati, TAP managing director said, Trend reports.

Addressing the Sustainable Future Forum, he noted that TAP can expand its capacity in stages up to 20 billion cubic meters.

We have already activated a first level of expansion with 1.2 billion cubic meters of additional gas available from 2026. The strategic importance of the Southern Gas Corridor and of TAP has been recognized in the REPowerEU plan which foresees the intensification of cooperation with Azerbaijan and the enhancement of TAP's capacity. With TAP we have demonstrated that strategic energy infrastructures can be built in full respect of the characteristics of the territories crossed, he said.

The managing director noted that TAP's capacity expansion can help facilitate the realization of Italy's and Europe's energy and climate ambitions, allowing it to transport new volumes of hydrogen and other renewable gases blended with natural gas.

Since the beginning of commercial operations, TAP has transported over 25 billion cubic meyers of gas to Europe, of which over 21 billion to Italy, helping to strengthen the security of supply, Luca Schieppati added.

The Trans Adriatic Pipeline functions as a channel for transporting natural gas from the extensive Shah Deniz field situated in the Azerbaijani portion of the Caspian Sea to Europe. Extending over a distance of 878 kilometers, the pipeline connects with the Trans Anatolian Pipeline (TANAP) at the border between Turkey and Greece in Kipoi. It then passes through Greece and Albania, crosses the Adriatic Sea, and ultimately reaches the southern shores of Italy.

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Follow the author on Twitter: @Lyaman_Zeyn
Anthony Bourdain tasted South African dishes like kudu antelope, mopane worms, and chakalaka in his show Parts Unknown in 2013.

Anthony Bourdain was a famous chef and travel writer who visited South Africa in his show Parts Unknown in 2013. He explored Johannesburg, Soweto, and the countryside, and tasted dishes like kudu antelope, mopane worms, and chakalaka. Learn of the highlights of his journey and what he learned about the culture, history, and cuisine of South Africa and tips on how to travel like Bourdain and experience the country in an authentic and respectful way.

Johannesburg

Bourdain started his trip in Johannesburg, the largest city in South Africa and a hub of commerce, art, and diversity. He met with local journalists, musicians, and activists who showed him the vibrant and creative side of the city, as well as the challenges and inequalities that still persist. He visited places like Constitution Hill, a former prison that now houses the Constitutional Court; Maboneng Precinct, a regenerated area with galleries, cafes, and street art; and Yeoville Market, a bustling spot where he sampled food from different African countries.

Soweto

From Johannesburg, Bourdain headed to Soweto, a township that was once the epicenter of the anti-apartheid struggle. He met with Nelson Mandela's former bodyguard, who took him to Mandela's old house and shared stories of his life and legacy. He also joined a group of bikers who rode through the streets of Soweto, waving at locals and stopping at landmarks like the Hector Pieterson Memorial and the Orlando Towers. He ended his day with a braai or barbecue at a local shebeen aka pub, where he enjoyed meat, beer, and music with his new friends.

Countryside

Bourdain's final destination was the countryside of South Africa, where he explored the natural beauty and rural traditions of the land. He visited a game reserve where he saw lions, elephants, giraffes, and other wildlife. He also met with a family of Afrikaners who invited him to their farm for a feast of kudu antelope, mopane worms, chakalaka a spicy vegetable relish, and melktert custard tart. He learned about their history and culture as descendants of Dutch settlers who have lived in South Africa for centuries.

Kudu antelope is a type of game meat that is widely hunted and consumed in South Africa and other parts of southern Africa. It is lean, tender, and rich in protein and iron. Bourdain described it as delicious and very mild when he tried it at a restaurant in Johannesburg. Kudu antelope can be prepared in various ways, such as grilled, roasted, stewed, or dried into biltong, a type of jerky.

Mopane worms are not actually worms, but caterpillars of the emperor moth Gonimbrasia belina. They feed on the leaves of the mopane tree, which gives them their name. Mopane worms are considered a delicacy and a source of protein for many people in southern Africa, especially in rural areas where other sources of animal protein are scarce or expensive. Bourdain was brave enough to try some raw mopane worms at a market in Soweto, and he said they tasted like "gritty, corny sawdust". However, most people prefer to cook them by boiling, frying, or smoking them. They can also be dried and stored for later use.

Chakalaka is a spicy vegetable relish that is popular in South African cuisine. It is usually made with tomatoes, onions, peppers, carrots, beans, and curry powder, but there are many variations depending on the region and personal preference. Chakalaka can be served hot or cold, as a side dish or a main course. Bourdain enjoyed it with pap, a type of maize porridge, and boerewors, a type of sausage at a barbecue in Pretoria. He said it was "very good" and "very spicy".

These are just some of the foods that Anthony Bourdain tried during his trip to South Africa. They reflect the diversity and richness of the culture and history of the country and its people. If you ever get a chance to visit South Africa, I encourage you to try them too. You might be surprised by how much you like them.

Travel Tips

Bourdain's trip to South Africa was an eye-opening and inspiring experience that showed him the diversity, complexity, and resilience of the country. If you want to travel like Bourdain and discover South Africa for yourself, here are some tips to follow:

Be curious and open-minded. South Africa is a country with many different cultures, languages, religions, and histories. Don't be afraid to ask questions and learn from the people you meet. Respect their opinions and perspectives, even if they differ from yours.

Be adventurous and adventurous. South Africa has a lot to offer in terms of food, music, art, and nature. Try new things and taste new flavors. You might be surprised by what you like or dislike. Don't be afraid to get out of your comfort zone and explore beyond the tourist attractions.

Be aware and responsible. South Africa is also a country with many challenges and problems. Poverty, crime, corruption, racism, and violence are still realities for many people. Be aware of your surroundings and follow safety precautions. Don't flaunt your wealth or take advantage of others. Support local businesses and organizations that are making a positive difference in their communities.

Mopane worms are a traditional delicacy

How to Cook the Fried Mopane Worms Recipe Anthony Bourdain Sampled.

Fried Mopane worms are a traditional delicacy in various African countries, particularly in Southern Africa. These edible caterpillars are known for their high protein content and nutty flavor. It's important to purchase dried Mopane worms from a reputable source to ensure they are safe for consumption and properly processed.

Ingredients:

1 cup dried Mopane worms

Vegetable oil for frying

Salt or seasoning of your choice

Directions:

Begin by rehydrating the dried Mopane worms. Place them in a bowl and cover them with boiling water. Let them soak for about 10 minutes until they soften. Drain the water from the worms and pat them dry using a paper towel.

Heat vegetable oil in a deep frying pan or skillet over medium-high heat. The oil should be deep enough to fully submerge the worms. Once the oil is hot, carefully add the Mopane worms to the pan. Be cautious as the moisture from the worms may cause the oil to splatter.

Fry the worms for approximately 5-7 minutes or until they turn golden brown and become crispy. Stir them occasionally to ensure even frying. Using a slotted spoon or tongs, remove the fried worms from the oil and transfer them to a paper towel-lined plate to drain excess oil.

Season the fried Mopane worms with salt or your preferred seasoning, such as chili powder, garlic powder, or a spice blend, for added flavor. Allow the worms to cool slightly before serving. They are typically enjoyed as a snack or side dish.

While fried Mopane worms may be an acquired taste, they offer a unique culinary experience that allows you to explore the diverse flavors and traditions of African cuisine. If you're feeling adventurous, give this traditional dish a try and embrace the cultural significance it holds in certain African communities.




An influential figure in African cinema, Akin Omotoso contributes to the representation of African stories, challenging stereotypes and offering authentic portrayals of African cultures.

Akin Omotoso, born in 1974, is a filmmaker and director from Nigeria living in Los Angeles California. He graduated from the University of Cape Town, South Africa, with a Bachelor of Arts degree in Theatre and Performance. Omotoso is renowned for his distinctive storytelling approach, which artfully mixes drama, horror, suspense, and social commentary. Omotoso is pronounced as oh-moh-TOH-soh.

Akin Omotoso's films have been screened and recognized at international film festivals, including the Toronto International Film Festival and the Cannes Film Festival. Some of his works have also been available on streaming platforms like BET, Showmax and Netflix, allowing a broader audience to appreciate his unique storytelling.

"I believe in the power of storytelling to challenge stereotypes and showcase the diverse realities of African cultures. Through my films, I aim to offer authentic portrayals and create a space for dialogue and understanding."- Akin Omotoso

Omotoso draws inspiration from Africa and The United States of America, including literature, films, and personal experiences. He has mentioned that he finds inspiration in the works of renowned authors such as Chinua Achebe and Wole Soyinka, who have captured the complexities of African society and culture. Additionally, he has expressed admiration for USA filmmakers like Spike Lee, Martin Scorsese, and Quentin Tarantino, who have influenced his approach to storytelling and cinematic techniques.

With a passion for exploring African narratives, Omotoso's first feature film, God is African, in 2003, brought a fresh perspective to filmmaking by incorporating cultural and societal themes specific to the African context. His versatility and ability to create engaging narratives have garnered him critical acclaim and accolades within Africa and internationally.

Through his work, Akin Omotoso showcases the diversity of African cinema and contributes to the growing recognition of African filmmakers in the global film industry. His unique storytelling approach and commitment to exploring the horror genre with an African lens make him an influential figure in African cinema. Akin Omotoso is a filmmaker who has played a significant role in representing African stories and narratives in mainstream cinema. Through his films, he challenges stereotypes and offers authentic portrayals of African cultures, shedding light on diverse aspects of the continent that are often overlooked or misunderstood.

"Film has the power to transcend borders and connect people from different backgrounds. Through my work, I strive to bridge the gap and create stories that resonate with a global audience while staying true to the African context." - Akin Omotoso

One way Omotoso contributes to the representation of authentic African stories is by exploring the complexities and nuances of African identities. His films delve into the experiences of African individuals and communities, presenting multidimensional characters with their own aspirations, struggles, and triumphs. By humanizing his characters, he counters one-dimensional stereotypes that may be perpetuated in Western media.

Omotoso's films also challenge preconceived notions about Africa. The dominant narratives in Western media often focus on poverty, conflict, or wildlife, overlooking the vibrant cultural diversity and modern developments across the continent. Through his work, Omotoso showcases the rich tapestry of African cultures, highlighting traditions, customs, and contemporary issues that are relevant to African societies.

"I am passionate about exploring African narratives and showcasing the vibrant cultural tapestry of the continent. By challenging preconceived notions, I hope to contribute to a more nuanced and accurate representation of Africa in mainstream cinema." - Akin Omotoso

Akin Omotoso's most popular films.

The movie God is African portrays a hypothetical conflict that took place in 1995 between South African college students and Nigerian students who were visiting and protesting against the execution of their country's prominent author-activist, Ken Saro Wiwa. The film delves into various themes such as identity, politics, culture, and media in post-apartheid South Africa. Additionally, the movie has a soundtrack influenced by hip-hop, which has gained popularity in South Africa.





Man on Ground 2011. In this drama, Omotoso explores the complex social and political issues surrounding xenophobia in South Africa. The film follows the parallel lives of two Nigerian brothers living in Johannesburg, one of whom goes missing during a violent outbreak of xenophobic attacks. Through their stories, the film delves into themes of identity, belonging, and the tensions between different communities in a rapidly changing society.



Tell Me Sweet Something 2015. In this romantic comedy, Akin Omotoso tells the story of a quirky bookstore owner, Moratiwa, and a popular model, Nat. Set in Johannesburg, the film captures the vibrant spirit of the city as Moratiwa and Nat navigate their unconventional romance. Against the backdrop of a bustling urban environment, the film explores themes of love, self-discovery, and pursuing one's dreams.



Vaya 2016. Vaga weaves together interconnected stories of three strangers who journey to Johannesburg for a better life. The film delves into their personal struggles, dreams, and aspirations as they navigate the challenges and opportunities in the city.



A Hotel Called Memory 2017. Set in Lagos, Nigeria and Cape Town South Africa the film follows the symbolic spiritual and mentally arousing journey of Lola, a woman on a mission to find her lost lover after asking for a divorce from a cheating husband. As Lola finds her lover, and his lover she encounters many characters and explores the layers of memory and loves within the two countries. The silent film (music only) offers a poetic and introspective exploration of the beach, loss, relationships and memory.



The Ghost and the House of Truth 2019. This film is one of his notable works which delves into The sensitive subject of missing children, accusations of rape, and supernatural elements intertwined with a gripping mystery. The film, shot in Makoko, an informal settlement on the coast of mainland Lagos, Nigeria, uses local talent in the film and explores themes of grief, trauma, and the supernatural as a woman confronts her past and attempts to unravel the truth behind her daughter's disappearance. It is important to note the use of positive female role models on the police force was an important role to cast for Omotoso.



Rise 2022. Rise is a sports drama produced by Disney and directed by Akin Omotoso that tells the true story of NBA All-Star Giannis "Greek Freak" Antetokounmpo and his families struggle against peoples perception of immigrants, social justice, homelessness and poverty but more importantly unity, strength, and family love. Antetokounmpo was very hands-on with the film stated Omotoso because he wanted the portrayal of himself to reflect the sacrifices of his family. He wanted the audience to understand he did not become an NBA All-Star player by himself. The Ghost and the House of Truth 2019.

God is African 1995.
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Review Eating outChippendale The Hartsyard team go full coastal at new Chippendale restaurant Longshore, but does it make waves? Longshore has landed at the site that once housed Automata with a coastal vibe and a focus on seafood. Terry Durack July 4, 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 / 13 Linen, coiled ropes, banquettes and lamps help soften the dining room at Longshore. James Brickwood. 2 / 13 Party pie filled with glazed greenlip abalone and served with mushroom ketchup. Edwina Pickles 3 / 13 The go-to dish: Salt-and-pepperberry fried whole John dory with XO butter. Edwina Pickles 4 / 13 Aromatic leaves provide the wrapper for the Skull Island prawn taco. Edwina Pickles 5 / 13 Margra lamb rump with glazed belly, pumpkin miso and black garlic. Edwina Pickles 6 / 13 Rockmelon panna cotta with caramelised melon, shiso and sobacha (buckwheat tea). Edwina Pickles 7 / 13 Pickled Jervis Bay mussels. Jason Loucas 8 / 13 Thinly sliced Abrolhos Island scallop with mandarin koshu and makrut lime. Jason Loucas 9 / 13 Longshores open-plan kitchen is front and centre like a stage. Edwina Pickles 10 / 13 Seagrass matting and coiled ropes warm the formerly brutal space. James Brickwood 11 / 13 Head chef Ryan Perry (left) and executive chef Jarrod Walsh team up in the kitchen. Edwina Pickles 12 / 13 Dot Lee and Jarrod Walsh at Longshore. Jason Loucas 13 / 13 The bar makes cocktails using ingredients that might otherwise be wasted. James Brickwood Previous Slide Next Slide Good Food hat 15 / 20 How we score Seafood$$$ The former restaurant on this site, Automata, had one of the strongest design attitudes in Sydney. Steely, monochromatic and industrial, it said, quite brutally, If you dont like it, lump it. I loved it. Former Hartsyarders Jarrod Walsh and Dot Lee have de-brutalised the space for their new venture Longshore. Sydney-based interior designers Guru Projects have softened and warmed the bones with linen, coiled ropes, cushioned banquettes, golden-hued lamps and pearl tiles. The open-plan kitchen range, now terrazzo, is still front and centre like a performers stage, but feels more inviting. Just as much thought seems to have gone into the dining experience, with three different menus: an a la carte, a five-course tasting menu ($150 a head), and a 10-course snack flight ($80 a head) presented in two stages, hot and cold.

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I find all this a bit confusing (Is the snack flight only taken upstairs? Can I just have the hot snacks?) so decide to go free-range (a la carte) instead. This means a starter of Skull Island prawn taco ($15), the whole prawn reclining on a bed of verdant green leaves  shiso, sesame, wasabi and briny toasted laver, with a dollop of well-rounded habanero chilli sambal. Wrap and roll and bite and burn. Skull Island prawn taco served on aromatic leaves with chilli sambal. Edwina Pickles Theres a party pie of glazed greenlip abalone ($18), hot from the oven, with a little bowl of smooth, rich, pine mushroom ketchup. The puff pastry collapses at the touch of a knife, revealing a mincy veloute that tells me garlicky snails would also make a great party pie, if anyone wants to take me up on that. Abrolhos Island scallops ($23) are sliced and composed with mandarin koshu, makrut lime leaves and mandarin. Pretty as a picture, although the scallop likes to cling to the plate.

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Its hard to know whether one large course is sufficient to share, so I hedge bets with two. A fat little John dory is fried and served whole with XO butter ($68), gently cooked so the pearl-white flesh just leaves the bone. Its a privilege to eat such premium fish whole, and requires deft filleting skills  surely a class that should be taught in schools. Roasted Margra lamb rump is served with crisped belly, pumpkin miso and black garlic. Edwina Pickles The micro-marbled meat of Western Australias Margra lamb is making inroads onto top menus in NSW, although too often it comes to the table with a challenging chew. Not so here, where the rump ($56) is dry-aged, roasted and rested  the velvety, well-seasoned meat fringed with fat and glazed with native tamarind. Its quite luxurious, further refined by spoonfuls of pumpkin miso and black garlic and a line-up of crisp-grilled lamb belly. The museum release 2015 Yangarra Grenache from McLaren Vale ($100) is just as complex and elegant. A green salad ($15) isnt a token order, but something that gets completely devoured; the mix of strong leaves and herbs from Newcastle Greens sharply, deliciously dressed. A shimmering rockmelon panna cotta ($17) is loosely set and tastes of, well, cream; even with its strands of preserved melon, shiso and sobacha, or buckwheat tea. Longshore conforms to pretty much every theme common to the current textbook modern Australian restaurant. There are coastal influences, premium produce, a focus on seafood and serious snacks. Asian ingredients (miso, makrut lime, pomelo) share the billing with native Australian ingredients (muntries, finger lime, kangaroo). Cocktails utilise leftover ingredients from the kitchen. Whats more, the title of head sommelier is shared by Isobel McFadden and Elly Webb, and the young owners are attentive enough to social change to aim for an equal mix of male and female winemakers on the list.

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Lee and Walsh clearly take hospitality seriously and are in it for the long term. They may be trying to cram too many ideas and formats into one restaurant, rather than allowing some room in which to evolve, but the experience is genuine and refreshing. The low-down Vibe: Coastal, contemporary and caring Go-to dish: Salt-and-pepperberry fried whole John dory, XO butter, $68 Drinks: Expert cocktails, local beers and a wine focus on sustainability and diversity

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There was a time, before the Kardashians and naked dresses, when the raciest thing in fashion was French Connections famous fcuk logo.

But times change, and the Australian company that has held the distribution rights for the British brand for 25 years is taking it in a new direction, relaunching the label as Unison, a nod to its open-minded approach to gendered clothing.

Models in the campaign for the launch of Unison, the successor to French Connection in Australia.

The architects of the brand  the Peter Lew-owned Brandbank Group  say Unison, which launches in August, will offer the same core staples as French Connection, as well as a real premium fashion flavour.

Establishing a new brand in place of French Connection means we can be more responsive to the Australian customer ... [and offer] a superior product range, says Peter Halkett, who started as Brandbank Groups chief executive last week.
BAKU, Azerbaijan, July 3. Top executives from several subsidiary companies of Kazakhstan's KazMunayGas national energy company, as well as key stakeholders in the country's subsoil sector have evaluated the future prospects for oil and gas industry amidst global transformations, the company told Trend.

As the company revealed, KMG's Chairman of the Board, Magzum Mirzagaliyev, in his opening address, highlighted the pressing issues facing KMG's fields, particularly the development of hard-to-recover reserves. The majority of these reserves are concentrated in high-viscosity oil fields with low-permeability and carbonate reservoirs. The impact of global trends on Kazakhstan's oil sector has necessitated the adoption of new rules of engagement.

During the session, participants emphasized the urgent need for standardization in the implementation and monitoring of pilot-industrial tests (PIT) for new technologies. This approach would facilitate the identification and deployment of optimal techniques to enhance oil recovery across KMG's fields, as well as their replication in similar fields worldwide.

Looking towards the future, Mirzagaliyev emphasized the paramount importance of adhering to a comprehensive roadmap aimed at increasing the oil recovery factor (ORF) of KMG's fields. Leveraging the experience gained from applying innovative technologies in analogous fields globally will be crucial in achieving their objectives over the next five years.

To provide a comprehensive assessment, participants were presented with a unified Diagnostic Map encompassing the top 12 KMG fields, boasting a total of 70 fields with substantial remaining recoverable oil reserves. Evaluation criteria covered five key aspects, including geology, development, production, drilling, and infrastructure. Additionally, 14 technological parameters were examined, ranging from replenishment and depletion of reserves to well trajectory compliance and infrastructure limitations.

The session concluded with participants offering valuable recommendations to further streamline the standardization of parameters and criteria for the technological evaluation of fields and PIT of new technologies. As a result, a well-defined roadmap has been charted out to address the technological challenges in intensifying oil production until 2028.
Australians caused a minor diplomatic incident in London over the weekend. And no, were not talking about Alex Careys perfectly legitimate dismissal of Jonny Bairstow at Lords.

George Brandis is out, and Stephen Smith is in. Credit: John Shakespeare

Instead, the Australian high commission to the UKs decision to cancel its much-loved annual Pride party, which wouldve been held during last weekends festivities in the British capital, has ruffled plenty of feathers.

No comment on why the event was canned, but it just happens to be Rudd-Gillard-era minister Stephen Smiths first year in the gig. When it comes to celebratory soirees, the Albanese government has erred on the side of joyless sobriety, just in case people get the wrong idea. Maybe that memo reached London.

Which is a damn shame because, especially during former attorney-general George Brandis reign as high commissioner, the Australia House Pride party garnered a reputation as the diplomatic event of the year in London.
Taxpayers will pay Macquarie Group bankers nearly $30 million to help state bureaucrats set up an outfit to oversee the management and construction of a metro rail line from central Sydney to Parramatta.

Tender documents show Macquarie Groups investment banking unit was awarded a two-year contract late last year worth an estimated $29.7 million to provide financial structuring services to Sydney Metro about setting up an entity to oversee the Metro West rail line.

The Metro West rail line will run underground from central Sydney to Parramatta and Westmead. Credit: Nick Moir

Under the plans for the so-called Metro West Partnership, contractors and other companies associated with the 24-kilometre rail line will buy a stake in the special purpose vehicle in which the government will hold a majority share.

With the hallmarks of a public-private partnership, it would have similarities to the corporation set up to deliver the WestConnex toll road project. If it is established, the proposed outfit for Metro West is likely to have to hire executives for a senior leadership team.
An organised crime syndicate used portable power tools to steal copper worth more than $780,000 from telecommunications infrastructure, police allege.

Detectives have for months tried to track down the culprits behind at least 50 copper heists in Melbournes north.

The theft of copper causes significant damage to critical infrastructure, police say. Credit: Bloomberg

Officers seized copper worth about $95,000 during raids last week and on Friday announced they had arrested six people over the thefts.

Victoria Police allege that between January and June, the organised crime syndicate used portable power tools to cut cables at telecommunications pits and access the huge amounts of copper.
Hanoi: Vietnam has banned Warner Bros highly anticipated film Barbie from domestic distribution over a scene featuring a map that shows Chinas unilaterally claimed territory in the South China Sea, state media reported on Monday.

The U-shaped nine-dash line is used on Chinese maps to illustrate its claims over vast areas of the South China Sea, including swathes of what Vietnam considers its continental shelf, where it has awarded oil concessions.

Margot Robbie poses for photos during a Barbie fan event at Westfield Sydney last week. Credit: Getty Images

Barbie is the latest movie to be banned in Vietnam for depicting Chinas controversial nine-dash line, which was repudiated in an international arbitration ruling by a court in The Hague in 2016. China refuses to recognise the ruling.

In 2019, the Vietnamese government pulled DreamWorks animated film Abominable and last year it banned Sonys action movie Unchartered for the same reason. Netflix also removed an Australian spy drama Pine Gap in 2021.
Orkney is to consider leaving the UK and becoming a territory of Norway after islanders claimed they were sick of being mistreated by both Edinburgh and London.

A motion is to go before the Orkney Council, calling for an investigation of alternative forms of government, which will include re-establishing historic Nordic connections.

A motion is going before Orkney Council calling for an investigation into alternative forms of government. Credit: Suppled

The islands, which are geographically closer to Oslo than to London, were under Norwegian and Danish control for hundreds of years until 1472, when they became part of Scotland in a royal marriage pact.

James Stockan, the council leader, said the islands did not get their fair share of funding under current governance arrangements and were therefore entitled to consider alternative models.
HIGH SCHOOLERS TAKE OFF JULY 16 FOR 2023 SOLAR CAR CHALLENGE







They'll take 1,400-mile trek from Texas to California in cars they designed and built

FORT WORTH, Texas - More than 20 teams of high school students from across the United States are preparing to set off on a 1,400-mile trek from Fort Worth, Texas, to Palmdale, California, driving cars they designed, engineered and built powered by solar energy. Teams will depart Fort Worth in the 30th anniversary Solar Car Challenge on July 16, arriving in Palmdale on July 23.

The Solar Car Challenge, established in 1993 by former teacher Dr. Lehman Marks, is designed to help motivate students in the fields of science, technology and alternative energy. Preparations for this year's race began with educational workshops last September, though it can take teams two to three years to see their ideas come to fruition. Students built the cars using their own ideas and starting from scratch. Before they set off on their journey, their cars will face "scrutineering" - evaluation by a panel of judges - at Texas Motor Speedway in Fort Worth from July 13-15.

During the race, car breakdowns, weather conditions, road construction and team experience will limit the number of miles a team can drive each day. The team driving the most miles accumulated over the journey will be declared the winner.

Along the way, the teams will stop in Snyder, Texas; Carlsbad, New Mexico; El Paso, Texas; Florence, Arizona; Wickenburg, Arizona and Twentynine Palms, California. Students will have opportunities to showcase their cars before the public in El Paso, Phoenix and Florence.

"Students who take part in the Solar Car Challenge have a 23% greater chance of going into a STEM career than students participating in other STEM programs. This is the top project-based STEM program in the country," Marks said. "We teach the kids how to build a plan, come up with a budget, fundraise, how to engineer the car and manage the project, all while they're learning about how to harness energy from the sun to make a car go down the road."

This year's Solar Car Challenge will feature teams from Arkansas, California, Kentucky, Maryland, Michigan, Oregon, Texas, Washington and Wisconsin. There are teams in various stages of development in 39 states, Canada, Mexico, Costa Rica, Puerto Rico, Bahamas, Spain and Singapore. The cross-country version of the race occurs biannually, with alternating years showcasing cars on the track at Texas Motor Speedway.

"The cross-country race requires teams to develop really strong logistics and contingency plans," explained Marks. "Each team will not only have their solar car driving this route, but a lead car and two chase vehicles."

Marks hopes the more than 200,000 people who will see and visit the cars during their eight-day trek are inspired by the accomplishments of these students.

"My favorite moments in each race are when we interact with children in the towns we visit," Marks said. "Watching them see themselves in these roles and seeing the spark of innovation in their eyes is why we come back year after year."

For more information on the Solar Car Challenge, visit https://www.solarcarchallenge.org/challenge/media.shtml.

ABOUT THE SOLAR CAR CHALLENGE The Solar Car Challenge & Education Program is designed to help motivate students in Science, Engineering, and Alternative Energy. We teach high school students how to plan, design, engineer, build, race, and evaluate roadworthy solar cars. Students demonstrate that green technology can create a better world. The Solar Car Challenge has 261 ongoing high school solar car projects located in 39 states, Canada, Mexico, Puerto Rico, Costa Rica, the Bahamas, Spain and Singapore. These teams are in the process of designing, engineering and building roadworthy solar cars in anticipation of an upcoming solar racing event. The Challenge's Education Program provides support for schools seeking to be a part of this top project-based STEM Initiative. The Solar Car Challenge's Education Program has served the educational community for 26 national events. More than 65,000 students have directly benefited from this program.
ASTANA, Kazakhstan, July 3. In a recent global passport index ranking compiled by Arton Capital, Kazakhstan has emerged as the leading country among Central Asian nations, Trend reports.

Kazakhstan has secured the 53rd position out of 97 in the global passport index ranking, which assesses the visa-free travel opportunities for citizens of different countries.

According to the ranking, Kazakhstan has visa-free travel agreements with 39 countries. Furthermore, Kazakh citizens have the opportunity to obtain visas on arrival in 52 more countries. However, 107 countries still require visas for entry. Kazakhstan shares its spot with Nauru, a small island country in the Pacific Ocean.

Looking at other Central Asian countries, Kyrgyzstan secured the 67th position, Uzbekistan the 73rd, Tajikistan the 72nd, and Turkmenistan the 79th spot in the ranking.

At the top of the list is the UAE, which has established visa-free arrangements with an impressive 125 countries. UAE citizens only need to apply for visas when traveling to 18 countries.

The rating is closed by Afghanistan, whose citizens can travel without a visa to only five countries worldwide.
BAKU, Azerbaijan, July 3. Russian Gazprombank forecasted the growth of the economy of Kazakhstan to 4.6 percent in 2023, which is close to the upper bound of the National Bank of Kazakhstan's updated forecast range of 4-4.5 percent, Deputy Head of Research, Chief CIS economist at Gazprombank Gulnara Khaidarshina told Trend.

Khaidarshina noted that in 2024, the growth should normalize at four percent.

"Economic growth in 2023-2024 will still be mainly fueled by the raw materials sector. Kazakhstan is one of the key beneficiaries from rising commodity prices (oil, gas, metals and uranium)," she said.

Khaidarshina also noted that Kazakhstan has launched economic reforms and institutional transformation.

"Economic growth will be supported by transportation and construction amid Kazakhstan's increasing importance as a Eurasian logistics hub. The role of key GDP components  trade, construction and transport  will continue to grow," Khaidarshina added.

In 2022, GDP of Kazakhstan in current prices amounted to $220.5 billion, which is growth of 3.2 percent.
TASHKENT, Uzbekistan, July 3. Uzbekistan ratified the border demarcation agreement with Kazakhstan, Trend reports.

In this regard, President of Uzbekistan Shavkat Mirziyoyev signed the law "On ratification of the Agreement between the Republic of Uzbekistan and the Republic of Kazakhstan on the demarcation of the Uzbekistan-Kazakhstan State border".

The document was signed during the visit of President of Kazakhstan Kassym-Jomart Tokayev to Uzbekistan in December 2022.

According to the agreement, the demarcated line of the State border between the Republic of Uzbekistan and the Republic of Kazakhstan spans over 2,356 kilometers. This agreement marks the completion of the process to define the Uzbekistan-Kazakhstan State border, establishing crucial conditions for its security and inviolability.

In Kazakhstan, the agreement was ratified in March of this year.
Avallen appoints new Australian distribution partner

Avallen Calvados has appointed a new Australian distribution partner, which is set to maximise the companys exposure across the country. The partnership with Noble Spirits is hoped to secure the brands place in the Australian market.

Avallen pinpointed Australia as an important market due to its booming bar scene and willingness to be experimental with drinks and cocktails. The countrys consciousness in regards to climate change is also a big factor.

Avallens Calvados is described as climate-positive and has had listings in some of the worlds most sustainable bars.

Tim Etheringon-Judge, Avallens co-founder, commented on the new partnership: Noble Spirits are an ideal partner for Avallen, given that were matched on so many values, but most particularly on our ethos of sustainable drinking. We know that Australian citizens are deeply concerned about climate change. We know that the bar scene out there is keen to embrace disruptive brands. And we know just how much good were doing and how great-tasting our Calvados is. I think this is the start of something truly great for us.

Noble Spirits is an Australian spirits distributor which actively encourages spirits selection based on conscious living. Its founder Gregoire Bertaud added: I have personally been following Avallen for quite some time and Ive been amazed about the quality of their Calvados, their vision and what they have achieved so far.

Since our launch in 2014, Noble Spirits have been proud to represent beverage brands with a strong ethos and sustainability has been one of our core values. Having a delicious Calvados that gives bees a boost AND is genuinely sustainable is a perfect addition to our portfolio. We are very excited to partner up with Tim and Stephanie and cant wait to hit the road with Avallen.

More information can be found at the Avallen Spirits website.

3 July 2023 - Bradley Weir
1 Month On, Kyivs Counter-Attack No Easy Walkover, Western Officials Admit

A still image from a video shows what are said to be destroyed armored vehicles of the Ukrainian armed forces, in the course of the Russia-Ukraine conflict in an unidentified location in the southern Donetsk region in Ukraine, in this image taken from a handout footage released on June 10, 2023. (Russian Defense Ministry via Reuters)

Almost one month since Kyiv launched a long-awaited counter-offensive aimed at retaking Russian-held territory, Ukrainian forces have yet to register significant gains, according to both Western and Ukrainian officials.

The counter-offensive  is difficult, Admiral Rob Bauer, a Dutch naval officer who also serves as chairman of NATOs military committee, said on July 3.

People should never think that this [counter-offensive] is an easy walkover, he told reporters at the alliances Brussels headquarters.

For months, Kyiv and its Western allies had promised a robust counter-attack aimed at liberating territory previously captured by Russia.

Drone footage shows armored vehicles on the move in an unidentified location after the Defence Ministry in Moscow said that Russian forces have thwarted a major Ukrainian offensive in Donetsk, released on June 5, 2023. (Russian Defence Ministry/Handout via Reuters)

But since the counter-offensive began early last month, Ukrainian forces have only managed to retake some 50 square miles in the Donetsk and Zaporizhzhia regions, according to officials in Kyiv.

This is only a tiny fraction of the total territory captured by Russia, which last September effectively annexed Donetsk and Zaporizhzhia, along with the neighboring regions of Luhansk and Kherson.

Last week, top U.S. army general Mark Milley, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, said that Kyivs counter-offensive was advancing steadily, deliberately  500 meters a day, 1,000 meters a day, 2,000 meters a day.

But he also warned against expectations of any dramatic breakthroughsat least in the short term.

This is going to take six, eight, 10 weeks; its going to be very difficult, Milley told the National Press Club in Washington on June 30.

Its going to be very long, and its going to be very, very bloody, he added. No one should have any illusions about any of that.

Like NATOs Bauer, Milley attributed the counter-offensives slow pace to deeply-entrenched Russian lines of defense, which include minefields, trenches, and a host of other fortifications and barriers.

On June 30, Hanna Maliar, Ukraines deputy defense minister, insisted that the counter-offensive was proceeding according to plan.

We have seized the strategic initiative and are advancing in all directions, she said in televised comments.

But even Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyyknown for his rosy battlefield assessmentshas recently admitted that Kyivs vaunted counter-offensive was moving slower than desired.

Suicidal Offensive

Moscow, meanwhile, says that Kyivs limited gains are being exaggerated and that Ukrainian forces are taking massive losses in terms of both men and equipment.

On July 3, Russian Defense Minister Sergey Shoigu asserted that Kyiv had failed to achieve its goals in any sector along the roughly 620-mile frontline.

The enemy has not achieved its objectives in any of the frontline sectors, he said during a conference call with Russian field commanders, according to Russias TASS news agency.

Shoigu attributed Kyivs alleged failures to the skill of our fighters and the clearly exaggerated expectations from much-touted Western weapons.

Since the counter-offensive began one month ago, 15 Ukrainian aircraft, three helicopters, and 920 pieces of offensive equipment had been destroyed in Donetsk and Zaporizhzhia alone, Shoigu claimed.

He added that all 16 German-made Leopard tanksrecently given to Ukraine by Poland and Portugalhad been neutralized by Russian drones and artillery.

A Ukrainian tank rolls on a road near Bakhmut, in the Donetsk region, on Nov. 30, 2022, amid the Russian invasion of Ukraine. (Anatolii Stepanov/AFP via Getty Images)

The Epoch Times was unable to verify Shoigus assertions, which echoed earlier claims by top Russian officials.

Speaking before the UN Security Council late last month, Vasily Nebenzya, Moscows envoy to the world body, described Kyivs ongoing counter-offensive as suicidal.

It has already cost them [the Ukrainians] tens of thousands of mobilized men and several hundred pieces of armored hardware, Nebenzya said on June 23.

He compared the ongoing counter-offensive to the months-long fight for Bakhmut, where, he alleged, Kyiv had sent Ukrainian soldiers to their deaths  just to prove to Western arms suppliers that Ukraine could defeat Russia.

A key transport hub in Donetsk, Bakhmut (Artyomovsk in Russian) was captured in May by Russian forces following nine months of bloody ground fighting.

NATO Bid in Doubt

Kyiv, meanwhile, is hard-pressed to register gains on the battlefield before an upcoming NATO summit scheduled for next week.

At the event, which will be held in Vilnius, Lithuania, on July 11 and July 12, Ukraine hopes it will be formally invited to join the 31-member military alliance.

Ukraine officially applied for full-fledged NATO membership on Sept. 30 of last yearthe same day that Moscow announced its controversial annexations.

This application is now on the tables of the leaders of NATO allies, Ihor Zhovkva, Zelenskyys chief diplomatic adviser, said on June 29.

The Vilnius summit, Zhovkva added, would be a very good start to respond to this application. And by respond, we mean an invitation for membership.

But some Western leadersfearing the potential for wider conflictsay Ukraine cannot join the alliance as long as it remains in a state of war.

On July 3, Peter Szijjarto, Hungarys foreign minister, said the notion of Ukraine being invited to join NATO at the Vilnius summit was out of the question.

Membership [in NATO] for a country at war cannot be discussed, he was quoted as saying by TASS. This issue cannot be included on the [summits] agenda.

Szijjarto went on to assert that many of his European counterparts felt the same way and say the same thing in private.

Reuters contributed to this report.
After Several Turbulent Days, Flight Disruptions Ease Despite Worries About 5G Signals

Airline passengers who have endured tens of thousands of weather-related flight delays this week got a welcome respite from the headaches Saturday, despite concerns about possible disruptions caused by new wireless 5G systems rolling out near major airports.

The number of flight delays and cancellations declined from the spikes recorded earlier in the week, according to data compiled by tracking service FlightAware. As of 10 p.m. ET, there had been at least 850 flight cancellations and more than 28,000 delayed flights Saturday. During the June 2830 period, an average of 1,751 flights were canceled and more then 32,600 flights delayed, according to the FlightAware data.

The cancellation rate worked out to about 1 percent in the United States as of Saturday afternoon, according to Flightradar24, another tracking service. Flightradar24 spokesperson Ian Petchenik described Saturdays conditions as smooth sailing in an email to The Associated Press, while adding inclement weather could cause problems at East Coast airports later in the day.

Heading into Saturday, one of the biggest concerns had been whether 5G signals would interfere with aircraft equipment, especially devices using radio waves to measure distance above the ground that are critical when planes land in low visibility.

Predictions that interference would cause massive flight groundings failed to come true last year, when telecom companies began rolling out the new service. They then agreed to limit the power of the signals around busy airports, giving airlines an extra year to upgrade their planes.

The leader of the nations largest pilots union said crews will be able to handle the impact of 5G, but he criticized the way the wireless licenses were granted, saying it had added unnecessary risk to aviation.

Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg recently told airlines that flights could be disrupted because a small portion of the nations fleet has not been upgraded to protect against radio interference.

But the worst fears about 5G hadnt cropped up by mid-afternoon Saturday, prompting Transportation Department spokesperson Kerry Arndt to describe flight travel as being at near-normal levels. But Arrndt also stressed that the Federal Aviation Administration is working very closely with airlines to monitor summer pop-up storms, wildfire smoke, and any 5G issues.

Most of the major U.S. airlines had made the changes needed to adapt to 5G. American, Southwest, Alaska, Frontier, and United say all of their planes have height-measuring devices, called radio altimeters, that are protected against 5G interference.

The big exception is Delta Air Lines. Delta says it has 190 planes, including most of its smaller ones, that still lack upgraded altimeters because its supplier has been unable to provide them fast enough.

The airline does not expect to cancel any flights because of the issue, Delta said Friday. The airline plans to route the 190 planes carefully to limit the risk of canceling flights or forcing planes to divert away from airports where visibility is low because of fog or low clouds. FlightAware listed nine Delta flight cancellations Saturday. None of them were tied to 5G issues, according to the airline.

The Delta planes that have not been retrofitted include several models of Airbus jets: all of its A220s, most of its A319s and A320s, and some of its A321s. The airlines Boeing jets have upgraded altimeters, as do all Delta Connection planes, which are operated by Endeavor Air, Republic Airways, and SkyWest Airlines, according to the airline.

JetBlue did not respond to requests for comment but told The Wall Street Journal it expected to retrofit 17 smaller Airbus jets by October, with possible limited impact some days in Boston.

Wireless carriers including Verizon and AT&T use a part of the radio spectrum called C-Band, which is close to frequencies used by radio altimeters, for their new 5G service. The Federal Communications Commission granted them licenses for the C-Band spectrum and dismissed any risk of interference, saying there was ample buffer between C-Band and altimeter frequencies.

When the Federal Aviation Administration sided with airlines and objected, the wireless companies pushed back the rollout of their new service. In a compromise brokered by the Biden administration, the wireless carriers then agreed not to power up 5G signals near about 50 busy airports. That postponement ends Saturday.

AT&T declined to comment. Verizon did not immediately respond to a question about its plans.

Buttigieg reminded the head of trade group Airlines for America about the deadline in a letter last week, warning that only planes with retrofitted altimeters would be allowed to land under low-visibility conditions. He said more than 80 percent of the U.S. fleet had been retrofitted, but a significant number of planes, including many operated by foreign airlines, have not been upgraded.

This means on bad-weather, low-visibility days in particular, there could be increased delays and cancellations, Buttigieg wrote. He said airlines with planes awaiting retrofitting should adjust their schedules to avoid stranding passengers.

Travelers walk through crowds after arriving at the Salt Lake City International Airport in Salt Lake City on June 30, 2023. (Rick Bowmer/AP Photo)

Airlines say the FAA was slow to approve standards for upgrading the radio altimeters and supply-chain problems have made it difficult for manufacturers to produce enough of the devices. Nicholas Calio, head of the Airlines for America, complained about a rush to modify planes amid pressure from the telecommunications companies.

Jason Ambrosi, a Delta pilot and president of the Air Line Pilots Association, accused the FCC of granting 5G licenses without consulting aviation interests, which he said has left the safest aviation system in the world at increased risk. But, he said, Ultimately, we will be able to address the impacts of 5G.
All About Prigozhin

Commentary

Theres no doubt that the brief, but significant armed mutiny by Wagner group leader Yevgeny Prigozhin damaged Vladimir Putin. Indeed the Moscow Times described Putin as being seen as weakened. Russia Today asked the question, Was it a one-off or an ominous sign? And the Russia Post headline identified The Prigozhin Mutiny as a Moment of Truth for the Putin Regime.

These three stories are just a small sample of the stories in Russian media highlighting the significance of the Prigozhin revolt and how poorly it reflects on Putin. Of course, as is the case in the West, whats being proclaimed by Russias major media may not be reflective of what the average Russian citizen believes, but at a minimum, the mutiny punctured Putins air of invincibility. More generally, it highlighted the dangerous downside of employing semi-private, semi-autonomous military operations like the Wagner group to execute major military operations.

The whole mutiny was bizarre, with Prigozhin going out of his way to make it clear he wasnt rebelling against Putin, but was instead aiming to remove the corrupt and incompetent military leadership that he had been vociferously criticizing over the last six-plus months.

As reported in The Guardian, Rob Lee, a U.S.-based expert on Russia, stated:

I dont think that this was an attempt to replace Putin. I think basically this was a factional dispute between two important Russian figures that became a challenge to Putin, which is the abnormal part of this.

Prigozhins Rebellion Was All About Prigozhin

Many reasons have been suggested for Prigozhins actions, but the precipitating event is almost certainly the June 10 Russian Defense Ministry order requiring that all volunteer detachments sign military contracts with the regular Russian military by July 1. This official government action radically reduced Prigozhins personal power and influence, and he refused to have his troops sign it.

As reported in the Wall Street Journal, Prigozhin was driven to this by his understanding he was being driven into a corner, said Ruslan Pukhov, director of the Moscow-based Center for Analysis of Strategies and Technologies, a military think tank. He simply didnt want to sink into oblivion.

To put himself in a position to negotiate his way to maintaining relevancy, he slapped together a rebellion consisting of about 8,500 enlisted Wagner troops, with some observers claiming no Wagner group officers participated. Regardless of the level of officer participation, this is about a quarter to a fifth of the Wagner groups total troops. Then he made some wild claims and statements and embarked on his rebellion.

Of course, the rebellion never stood a chance of achieving its stated claim of purging Russias senior military leadership. But the troops were heavily armed, including a few armored vehicles and tanks. And while Russia had more than enough reserve troops to defeat Prigozhins rebel force without pulling any troops from the Ukrainian fronts, actively engaging Prigozhins forces would have cost many lives, and from the Russian perspective, would have been a propaganda windfall for the West.

And depending on how it played out, it could have done serious damage to Putins popularity with the Russian people. Prigozhin understood this, and of course, President Vladimir Putin also understood this. Consequently, the rebellion did accomplish Prigozhins unstated goal of putting himself in a very strong negotiating position.

So, given that the rebellion was first and foremost about Prigozhin, it was successful, as it gave him the leverage he needed to extract himself from Russia without being arrested, all while being able to proclaim the rebellion, hes now calling an armed protest, had some higher purpose than himself.

The long-term impact of this 22-hour rebellion by Prigozhin will have on Putin will not be known for some time. However, there was a silver lining for Putin and Russia that most of the Western media missed or has chosen to downplaythat being that once Prigozhin embarked on his adventure, he found himself immediately isolated. No Russian military or civilian leaders came out in support of the mutiny, and while there were predictably some crowds waving encouragement at the Wagner group troops, they were conspicuously small.

That no one rallied to Prigozhin and his Wagner group forces strongly suggests Putins high approval rating and the Russian peoples support for the war is real. And it throws cold water on the idea that victory over Russia via regime change is going to happen anytime in the foreseeable future.

Views expressed in this article are the opinions of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of The Epoch Times.
America the Beautiful Festival Celebrates Meaning of Freedom

Danny Griego performs at the America the Beautiful Festival in Deerpark, N.Y., on July 2, 2023. (Mark Zou/The Epoch Times)

DEERPARK, N.Y.Loads of fun were to be had in downstate New York on Independence Day weekend at the America the Beautiful Festivalthe first of whats expected to be an annual celebration of freedom and patriotism.

Spanning two afternoons and evenings, the family-friendly festival featured a main stage lineup of classic rock, folk, and most of all, country performers, including Danny Griego, Keith Anderson, Julie Roberts, and Allen Mack Myers Moore.

Enhancing the atmosphere were Revolutionary War-era musket and sword demonstrations, which included the town crier announcing, The regulars are coming.

Despite the threat of forecasted thunderstorms and a haze of smoke from Canadian forest fires, the event went off without a hitch. Serendipitously, dark rain clouds parted over the venue on Sunday afternoon, granting the attendees a chance to fully enjoy the holiday weekend.

As a final act, vocalist Mika Hale performed a soul-stirring rendition of America the Beautiful. Just as the audience erupted in applause, a magnificent fireworks display lit up the sky.

More than just a pleasant family outing, the festival offered a deeper meaning of togetherness, family values, and the importance of freedom.

Freedom means everything to me, said Griego, whose heartfelt songs have made him a Billboard Top 10 recording artist.

I think that freedom is overlooked by Americans in this country, by people who were born here, he said, comparing the attitude to the appreciation for freedom hes seen in people whove fled oppression under socialism or communism.

You cant get much worse than that, right? Those things were a war on God.

Our country was set up on the foundations and principles of Christianity, and the Constitution is everything because it protects our individual liberties and our freedoms. And if we lose those, in this country, not only will America fall, the world would fall.

Griegos appreciation for Americas core values blossomed through hardship. When he was in college, working his way toward a law degree, his interests were rather materialistic, he said. Youre out there doing your own thing and trying to get ahead.

His perspective changed after he was struck by lightning during a camping trip in Arizona. It stopped my heart, and then when I came to, the end result was a few things: I had a paralyzed right arm, and I had to rehab my hands to get my motor skills back, he said. It gets you reaching out and looking up and wondering why youre here. And it changed everything.

To help Griegos rehabilitation, his neurosurgeon recommended that he learn guitar. And so he did. Soon, he was coming up with song ideas, and he discovered music as both a career and a calling.

My music, you know, its to heal peoples hearts with music, he said.

Griegos special passion is to help veterans. He runs a charity that provides equine therapy to veterans with post-traumatic stress disorder as well as children with special needs.

For those who may feel down about the current state of the country, he stressed faith and efforts to overcome differences.

This is the United States of America because were supposed to stand united. Eagles need both wings to fly straight. They need a right wing and a left wing. So if we hold together and stand fast, and not get sucked into some of the propaganda out there and the fakeness that you watch on your mainstream television, and you follow your heart and your God, and you stay together and love your brother, we will not fall in this country, he said.

Anderson shared some of the same sentiments.

I just grew up with an amazing mom and dad, and strong Christian faith, he said. They just always taught me to tell the truth, be honest, and, you know, dont hate, just love.

Political views never played much of a role, Anderson recalled. The only solid beliefs we had was what the Bible taught uslove, peace, faith, understandingthose kinds of things.

Throughout his successful career, hes found honesty key to songwriting.

I found out quickly that you can write any song you want, but if youre not writing from the place that youve lived, a place of honesty, a place of truth, writing things you know about, then youre not going to fool anybody, he said. You can sing all you want, but if youre not writing the song that you know, then theres no need to write it.

Anderson appreciates that America gives him the freedom to choose his faith.

There are a lot of places, if you dont live in America, you dont have a choice, you have to believe what they tell you to believe, he said.

One thing I love about America is Im afforded the opportunity to choose whatever I want, choose the path that I want to do as a career, choose the religion I wantChristianitychoose my beliefs and stand strong on them, and nobodys going to take it away from me.

Roberts said that she learned to love her country from her late father, a U.S. Air Force veteran. It just was a natural, ingrained thing to me because I was around it. And I saw himhow proud he was.

Music can play a role in bridging some divides between Americans, Roberts said. I think music connects us all.

She said that what draws her to country music in particular is its authenticity. Its about life. Its real stories.

Griego seconded that opinion. Its the story of the people, he said.

For Zach Myers, of the bands Allen Mack Myers Moore and Shinedown, freedom isnt just about having a choice.

Freedom is a state of mind also, Myers said.

People need to disentangle themselves from many of the outside manipulations, often coming through our electronic devices and sources of information, he said. There are so many owned sources that can twist it and bend it however they want. So, news is a weird word now.

This country can weather the storm, he said, if Americans place greater trust in each other rather than in politicians and politics.

I think America as an idea is a great thing. And weve gone in other ways at times, but I think the idea of this country is still one of the greatest ideas ever, he said.

The America the Beautiful Festival was presented by The Epoch Times and New Century Festivals.

Mika Hale sings The Star-Spangled Banner at the America the Beautiful Festival in Deerpark, N.Y., on July 1, 2023. (Larry Dye/The Epoch Times)

The America the Beautiful Festival in Deerpark, N.Y., on July 1, 2023. (Larry Dye/The Epoch Times)

George Washington and Benjamin Franklin reenactors at the America the Beautiful Festival in Deerpark, N.Y., on July 2, 2023. (Samira Bouaou/The Epoch Times)

The America the Beautiful Festival in Deerpark, N.Y., on July 2, 2023. (Samira Bouaou/The Epoch Times)

Danny Griego performs at the America the Beautiful Festival in Deerpark, N.Y., on July 2, 2023. (Samira Bouaou/The Epoch Times)

The America the Beautiful Festival in Deerpark, N.Y., on July 1, 2023. (Mark Zou/The Epoch Times)

The band Allen Mack Myers Moore performs at the America the Beautiful Festival in Deerpark, N.Y., on July 2, 2023. (Samira Bouaou/The Epoch Times)

The America the Beautiful Festival in Deerpark, N.Y., on July 2, 2023. (Samira Bouaou/The Epoch Times)

Mika Hale sings America the Beautiful at the America the Beautiful Festival in Deerpark, N.Y., on July 2, 2023. (Samira Bouaou/The Epoch Times)

Fireworks at the America the Beautiful Festival in Deerpark, N.Y., on July 2, 2023. (Samira Bouaou/The Epoch Times)

The America the Beautiful Festival in Deerpark, N.Y., on July 2, 2023. (Mark Zou/The Epoch Times)
Nuclear Plant Explosion Fears Follow Tense Month in RussiaChinaUS Relations

World powers are gambling with increased risk of major conflict, say experts

The Zaporizhzhia Nuclear Power Plant outside Enerhodar in the Zaporizhzhia region, Russian-controlled Ukraine, on March 29, 2023. (Alexander Ermochenko/Reuters)

Global headlines this weekend warned of a possible, Russia-provoked explosion at Ukraines Zaporizhzhia nuclear power plant.

Citing Ukrainian intelligence, Ukraine president Volodymyr Zelenskyy spoke of a serious threat at the Russian-occupied nuclear plant. Ukraine has been holding drills to prepare for a potential radioactive disaster should Russia blow up the plant.

The tense situation follows weeks of high-level diplomatic moves involving Russia, China, and the United States. Analysts warn that the international situation is at a critical juncture and that there is a very real risk of military conflict between the three major powers.

Former vice president and presidential hopeful Mike Pence, speaking to CBS News Face the Nation Sunday, connected China and the Ukraine conflict. Theres no more effective way to send a deafening message to communist China, to check their military ambitions in the Asia Pacific, than by giving Ukraine what they need to repel the Russian invasion. I know Chinas watching, Pence said.

Earlier in the month, U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken visited China, the first visit to Beijing by a U.S. secretary of state since 2018.

Blinken ended his visit to China on June 19, saying that ChinaU.S. military communication has not yet been restored.

Its a process, he said.

Lack of open channels between both nations has prompted international jitters, with Beijings reluctance to engage in regular military-to-military talks with Washington alarming Chinas neighbors.

Regarding the Ukraine conflict, Blinken said on June 19 that while the United States had seen no indication that the Chinese regime was providing lethal assistance to Russia, there were concerns that private Chinese companies would provide the Russian military with material and technology that could be used in the war.

A Deep-Rooted Diplomatic and Political Game

The Russia-Ukraine war has thrown the relationship between Russia, the United States, and China into high relief, drawing international attention.

Blinkens visit to China coincided with a visit by Chinese Premier Li Qiang to Germany and France, his first trip overseas since taking office in March.

Shortly after the secretary of states visit to China, the White House effusively welcomed Indian prime minister Narendra Modi. Modi was just the third world leader to be honored by a state visit under President Joe Biden.

The visit was widely seen as a silent message to China about countering Beijings dominance in the Indo-Pacific region.

Secretary of State Antony Blinken (L) shakes hands with Chinas President Xi Jinping in the Great Hall of the People in Beijing on June 19, 2023. (Leah Millis/Pool/AFP via Getty Images)

The visit of Blinken to China took place against the backdrop of the Russia-Ukraine war and the critical point in Sino-US relations, current affairs commentator Li Yanming told The Epoch Times on June 22.

It is obvious that there is a deep-rooted diplomatic and political game between China, the United States, and Russia behind Blinkens visit to China, Li said.

The day before Modis visit, China hit back after Biden referred to communist leader Xi Jinping as a dictator, saying the remarks were absurd and a provocation, an unexpected flare-up following attempts by both sides to reduce friction.

Nuclear Fears

On June 16, Russian President Vladimir Putin confirmed that Russia had delivered the first batch of tactical nuclear weapons to Belarus.

This is the first part. But by the end of the summer, by the end of the year, we will complete this work, Putin said at the St. Petersburg International Economic Forum.

The Russian leader also said the deployment of shorter-range nuclear weapons in Belarus was intended to warn Western countries against providing military and other support to Ukraine. This is the first time Russia has deployed nuclear weapons outside Russian territory since the collapse of the Soviet Union.

Belarusian president Alexander Lukashenko said on June 13 that he would have no hesitation in using Russian nuclear weapons if Belarus was attacked.

At a June 19 meeting with political donors in California, Biden said the threat of Putin using nuclear weapons is real.

Russias President Vladimir Putin delivers a video address on June 24, 2023. (Gavriil Grigorov/Sputnik/AFP via Getty Images)

Let Them Fight: Russian FM

On the Ukrainian side, North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) secretary general Jens Stoltenberg pledged to further help Ukraine modernize its military at a NATO summit in Lithuania in July.

At a NATO press conference on June 16, Stoltenberg outlined a multi-year program to help Ukraine move from Soviet-era standards, doctrines, equipment, to NATO standards, doctrine and equipment, and to be fully interoperable with NATO.

We all want this war to end. But a just peace cannot be freezing the conflict and accepting a deal dictated by Russia, he said on June 19 at a joint press conference with German Chancellor Olaf Scholz.

In response, Russias foreign minister Sergey Lavrov said on June 20, If NATO once again uses Stoltenberg to declare that it is against freezing, as they say, the conflict in Ukraine, then that means they want to fight. So let them fight. Lavrov stressed that Russia is prepared.

Anxiety Over ChinaCuba Relationship

Meanwhile, U.S. officials disclosed that China is negotiating with Cuba to set up a new joint military training facility in the northern part of the country, which could allow China to maintain a permanent military presence in Cuba and expand espionage.

The talks are at an advanced stage but have not been completed, according to Wall Street Journal report.

Blinken said on June 20 that the United States would have deep concerns about Chinese military activities in Cuba.

There is growing anxiety in Washington over Beijings ambitions in the Caribbean and Latin America, complicating the administrations desire to ease broader tensions with the communist regime.

Chinese military ships moor at the port of Havana in Cuba on Nov. 10, 2015. (Yamil Lage/AFP via Getty Images)

China: Prepare for Worst-Case Scenarios

On June 7, during an inspection in Inner Mongolia, Xi warned that Chinas dual circulation strategy is necessary to ensure that the national economy can operate normally under extreme circumstances.

Extreme circumstances can be interpreted as the danger of war, according to Jin Canrong, a Chinese foreign policy expert.

Dual circulation is a Chinese strategy defined by The Economist as keeping China open to the world (the great international circulation) while reinforcing its own market (the great domestic circulation). It involves openness to foreign companies in order to make them dependent on China, which in turn would give China a geopolitical advantage.

In an interview with NBC News on June 29, Taiwanese foreign minister Joseph Wu said, I think China might be repeating what we saw as the origin of the Second World War, and we have to be careful.

The recent diplomatic activities of China, the United States, and Russia are likely to be the result of a mapping and showdown of sensitive international geopolitical risks such as the war between Russia and Ukraine, the Taiwan Strait issue, and Sino-U.S. relations, Li said.

According to Lis analysis, with Putins Ukraine difficulties, Xis economic challenges heightened by U.S. pressure, and Biden facing an upcoming presidential election, the international situation has reached a boiling point.

Reuters contributed to this report.
ANALYSIS: UK Population in Decline

Camilla, then-Duchess of Cornwall, tickles a baby's feet as she greets well-wishers during the royal visit to Salisbury, England, on June 22, 2018. (Toby Melville/WPA Pool/Getty Images)

News Analysis

As Pope Francis calls on young Italians to have fewer pets and more children, the issue of a declining fertility rate has also been brought to the fore in the UK.

Backbench MP Miriam Cates declared the approach of a population collapse at the UKs first National Conservatism conference. Charity Population Matters, which campaigns against population growth, has dismissed such warnings as a phantom menace and a quite fringe opinion.

But statistics show that unless theres a rebound in the fertility rate, the UK will soon join the growing number of countries with an ageing and declining population, facing significant economic and societal challenges.

Impending Decline

Official estimates suggest that the UKs natural population may have already started decreasing, and immigration may only be able to push the overall population decline back by around 33 years.

For half a century, the total fertility rate in the UK, or the average number of children a woman has during her lifetime, has remained below the replacement level of 2.1the minimum number needed for a population with a long life expectancy to naturally sustain its size.

However, the population has kept growing so far owing to longer life expectancy and the explosion of immigration.

But according to the Office for National Statistics (ONS), in 2020, deaths surpassed births for the first time since 1976. Migration, which has been the main contributor to population growth since the 1990s, is about to become the sole driver for growth, projections show.

Compared to countries that have had an even lower fertility rate for longer, the UKs current situation is serious but its not a collapse, its going from a bad position to a worse position, demography author Paul Morland told The Epoch Times.

The UKs total fertility rate in 2021 was 1.56. In South Korea and Japan, which fertility rates are among the lowest in the world (1.26 in Japan and 0.78 in Korea in 2022), the same level was last seen in the 1990s.

Statistics published by the Japanese government (pdf) show twice as many people died in 2022 than those who were born. According to projections by the United Nations, by the end of the century, South Koreas population may decrease by half, or between one-third and two-thirds.

Morland said he suspects fertility in the UK is also going to go a lot lower as Generation Z appears to hold values that correlate with much lower fertility.

Whats happened in the last few years  is weve had almost a collapse of birth among the under-25s. So I very much doubt that will be compensated for by those people having children later [in their lives], I think its a real value shift, he said.

Old-Age Dependency

With a lower fertility rate and longer life expectancy comes population ageing.

According to ONS figures, in 2020, there was one pensioner in the UK for every 3.6 working-age people. By 2041, a pensioner will only be supported by around 2.8 working-aged people.

The World Bank, which measures the ratio using slightly different age brackets, has put the UKs old-age dependency rate at around 32.3 percent in 2019. By 2075, the old-age dependency ratio is projected to rise to 53 percent, similar to the current level in Japan.

Stephen Shaw, data scientist, demographer, and documentary filmmaker, characterised the UK as having a high severity of birthgapthe number of areas where there are more 51-year-olds than newborns.

With an increased percentage of pensioners, fewer workers will either have to become more productive or pay higher taxes to sustain the increased demand for pensions and health care.

Japan has increasingly turned to robots to help look after the young and the old. The productivity of the country has also been rising, but it doesnt seem to be enough to solve the problem.

Prime Minister Fumio Kishida in January told Parliament the country was standing on the verge of whether it could continue to function as a society.

Shaws documentary, The Birthgap, paints a bleak picture of closed schools, deserted shops, and lonely elderly people. In one of the Japanese towns he visited, a resident spoke of lone elderly people either throwing themselves from the roofs or being found dead on a weekly basis, Shaw said.

Japans government debt to GDP ratio was also the highest globally.

Population Matters argues that humans have the tools to solve the problems without turning to pronatalism, saying each extra person on the planet exacerbates the environmental crises were facing.

It proposes measures such as more automation, migration, pension reform, increasing productivity and labour force participation, and encouraging pensioners to contribute to communities.

Immigration Not Long-Term Solution

While immigration generally boosts a countrys economy, high levels of immigration can cause their own tensions. However, even if immigration is supported by the electorate, it doesnt appear to be a sustainable solution either.

Asked if the UK can sustain its size by relying on immigration, Morland said he doesnt believe its moral to endlessly rely on someone else to do our breeding for us, and if it is considered moral, with declining fertility across the globe, there wont be enough immigrants.

According to the United Nations (pdf), two-thirds of the global population now live in a country or area where fertility is below 2.1 births per woman, and migration will be the sole driver of population growth in many high-income countries over the next few decades.

However, net migration is expected to flatline as the global fertility rate keeps dropping. The U.N.s median projections suggest the UKs population may begin to decrease from 2056, and the world population may peak in 2086 at around 10.43 billion.

In the shorter term, immigration still wont do much to slow the population from ageing as their fertility tends to assimilate to the same low levels.

Writing in The Telegraph last month, economist Philip Pilkington said Italy and Japans median age moved in lockstep between 2000 and 2013, despite the fact that Italy had twice as much net migration.

Population Matters said immigration has been shown to reduce the dependency ratio, but it has also warned that the long-term implications of immigration must be carefully considered.

Difficult Puzzle to Solve

The reason for the decline in fertility can be complicated. Shaws research led him to believe theres an epidemic of unplanned childlessness where people who put off having children, or havent been with the right partner during their fertile years, are no longer able to have children.

In Japan, he believes the crisis was first triggered by the global oil shock in 1973.

The cost of housing and childcare in the UK have also often been blamed as hurdles for young couples to take the plunge.

But Morland said hes dubious that theres a fundamentally economic calculus going on as lower income countries have higher fertility rates than higher income countries.

I think there is an economics  in the sense that people have priorities. And if they have constrained economic situations as most of us have, then they choose to prioritize other things over having children.

So its about values, I think. And its partly also about a green agenda.

In a YouGov poll published in January 2020, nearly a quarter of the 344 childless adults surveyed in Britain said they were too old to raise a child.

Some 14 percent didnt want to become parents because they either believed children would accelerate climate change or the world is overpopulated. Thirteen percent blamed the high cost of child-rearing or didnt believe they could provide a good quality of life, 10 percent preferred to maintain their own lifestyle, while 19 percent just didnt like children or didnt like having them.

Various governments have attempted to boost fertility with economic or other incentives, but with little or limited success.

In religious Georgia, widely respected Patriarch Ilia II of the Georgian Orthodox Church managed to help create a baby boom by personally baptizing and becoming godfather to any third or further children of Orthodox couples. The countrys fertility has bounced back to the replacement rate since 2015 but has fluctuated after that.

It remains to be seen if people will continue to have an average of more than two children.

Israel is the one outlier in developed countries, which has a total fertility rate of three.

Morland said besides the countrys religiosity, being surrounded by hostile neighbours also seems to have created a sort of national culture which encourages children.

Asked which countries the UK should learn from if it wants to encourage fertility, he listed four examples including Israel, traditional Catholics, and some countries in sub-Saharan Africa, which have higher fertility rates, and Indonesia, which had three decades in the Goldilocks zone, or between two and three children per woman, although hes yet to understand what lessons to learn from these cases.

And the silver lining?

I dont think well go extinct as a species, as there will always be people who want to have children, Morland said.

Views expressed in this article are the opinions of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of The Epoch Times.
Teacher Alleges Toronto Catholic School Asked Grade 6 Students to Destroy Books

New children's books just added to the library collection are displayed in a public library in a file photo. (Nanette Holt/The Epoch Times)

An anonymous individual claiming to be a Canadian teacher alleges that an elementary school in Toronto asked students to dispose of popular childrens books.

In the June 30 edition of the Woke Watch Canada newsletter, N. Invictus, self-identified as an anonymous Canadian teacher, wrote an essay stating that the incident took place at a kindergarten-to-grade-six French Catholic school in Toronto, where library staff asked a few grade six students to help them in the school library.

Naturally, the book loversthose passionate about readingjumped on this opportunity and volunteered to help. However, they were assigned the deplorable task of disposing of books instead! wrote the writer, who said many of the selected books were my own childrens favourites.

The children were allegedly presented with a pile of books set to be thrown out. Some of them were childrens favourite stories and even classics such as Caillou, Franklin the Turtle, Scooby-Doo, Geronimo Stilton, Magic Schoolbus, Magic Treehouse, and Clifford the Red Dog.

The idea of taking them home or sharing them with family and friends was appealing, so they asked if they could keep the books instead of throwing them out. They wanted to save the books, preserve them, and thereby protect their newly founded heritage, the essay said.

However, The answer they received was a resounding NO.'

According to the anonymous teacher, the children were told the books contained inappropriate content and false information.

Tearing off Book Covers

The children were allegedly told to tear the covers off the books.

The students, who were avid readers, who loved libraries, and who grew up with books while being raised to respect them, who cherished each and every one of their favourite childhood classics sat there and took a book out of the pile, one at a time, reluctantly tearing off the covers feeling as if their hearts were being ripped out in the process, wrote the teacher.

When one of the children picked up a book that appeared to be the Bible, the child refused to tear off the cover. According to the teacher, the next child also refused.

The book was then passed on to another child, and each of them cringed at the sight of the book they considered to be Holy and refused to tear off its cover. They had had enough, said the teacher.

One child apparently went home and informed his or her parents, who, according to the teacher, became livid at the thought of a Catholic school instructing its students to tear off the cover of the Bible.

The parent went to the school and confronted the schools administrator in person.

The administrator allegedly showed the parent the book and said it was not the Bible, but rather a commentary on the Bible, and said the school was following an order from the school board and the Ontario Education Ministry to dispose of certain books from a list with no specific publication year and books published prior to 1985.

The Epoch Times contacted the Toronto Catholic District School Board for comment but did not hear back by press time.

The Ontario Ministry of Education was also contacted to inquire about any list or instructions regarding the disposal of books, but it also did not reply by press time.

Not Isolated Incident

According to the anonymous teacher, the school administrator apologized to the parent and admitted that asking the children to destroy books was a mistake. The administrator also allegedly then said there was not a list but rather a set of criteria used by a board librarian to determine which books should be donated and which should be recycled.

The teacher went on to say that this is not an isolated incident.

The banning and later rewording of Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, challenging the Little House on the Prairie book, the accusation that Dr. Seusss books are hurtful, and the attack on Tintin books are just a few examples, the teacher wrote.

The teacher claims that in January 2021, at our staff meeting, an administrator told the teachers that we need to control which books and materials students should or should not read.

To be clear, this administrator was not concerned about the age appropriateness of the books for high school students, rather the emphasis was implicitly on top-down political and ideological topics, wrote the teacher.

We have fallen so low that even our Catholic schools deem a commentary book on the Bible inappropriate! Regardless, no rationale can justify getting the children to do the dirty work of ripping books and censorship at our schools and in our libraries, the teacher added.

War on Our Values

The teacher called on parents to form coalitions, write to the Ministry of Education, bombard the ministers office with letters, write tweets, and attend school board meetings to voice their concerns.

The war on our values and freedom is on and out in the open. The opponent has no mercy; they are targeting children and that alone should tell you something! the anonymous teacher wrote.

Loading the libraries with sexually explicit books akin to pornography, promoting self-hate and supporting all sorts of so-called family-friendly storytimes while propagating historical self-hate, mediocrity, and inculcating learned helplessness, thus draining the essence from childhood.
Atlanta Police Motorcycles Burned in Fire Started by Incendiary Devices, Officials Say

ATLANTAAtlanta Police Department motorcycles were damaged in an intentional fire caused by devices set inside a training facility early Saturday, officials said.

The Atlanta Fire and Rescue Department responded to reports of a multi-vehicle fire around 2:20 a.m. and found multiple motorcycles on fire, WANF-TV reported.

Firefighters at the scene found incendiary devices used to start the fire, officials said. The location of the fire Saturday on Southside Industrial Parkway was not the same as the planned Atlanta Public Safety Training Center that has drawn protests from opponents, WANF reported.

The fire department was investigating but there was no immediate information about any arrests or whether the fire was classified as arson, WANF reported.

An Atlanta Police spokesperson told The Associated Press on Sunday morning that the fire is under investigation but did not offer more information on the number or type of devices found.

Georgia Gov. Brian Kemp said in a written statement that the fire was an outrageous and completely inexcusable planned destruction of property that put lives and community assets in danger.

Those are the tactics of organized criminals, not protestors, and their supporters should ask themselves if they truly want to be associated with such radical and violent people, Kemp said. Working with state, local, and federal law enforcement partners, we will find these criminals and bring them to justice.

Kemps statement posted on social media did not offer specifics about any groups or individuals who might be the focus of an investigation.

Opponents of the $90 million training center hope to force a referendum on the building of the contested project, which they say will lead to greater police militarization while its construction will exacerbate environmental damage in a poor, majority-Black area.

Atlanta Mayor Andre Dickens and others say the center would replace inadequate training facilities and help address difficulties in hiring and retaining officers that worsened after nationwide protests against police brutality and racial injustice three years ago.

More than 40 people have been charged with domestic terrorism in connection with protests at the site, where authorities fatally shot an environmental activist in January while clearing a camp being used by activists. The Georgia Bureau of Investigation is investigating the case in which city officials say officers fired in self-defense after the protester shot a trooper.
TASHKENT, Uzbekistan, July 3. Uzbekistan is eager to contribute to the financial development of the Turkic Investment Fund, Trend reports.

As Bakhtiyor Sayidov, Minister of Foreign Affairs of Uzbekistan, has met with Baghdad Amreyev, President of the Turkic Investment Fund and former Secretary General of the Organization of Turkic States (OTS), the sides discussed the current state of cooperation development within the fund.

"We exchanged thoughts on how to build more substantial financial ties and investment cooperation among OTS member states," Sayidov wrote in his Telegram channel.

The decision on establishment of the Turkic Investment Fund was signed during OTS summit in Samarkand on November 11, 2022.
Biden Administration Aims to Make AI Technology Woke, Warns Watchdog

President Joe Biden (L) and California Gov. Gavin Newsom take part in an event discussing the opportunities and risks of artificial intelligence, at the Fairmont Hotel in San Francisco, Calif., on June 20, 2023. (Andrew Caballero-Reynolds/AFP via Getty Images)

The Biden administration is pushing to transform artificial intelligence (AI) to promote a woke agenda led by left-wing activists and censor conservatives, warned a conservative watchdog group.

The American Accountability Foundation (AAF) reviewed the White Houses plans for AI and posted a warning on Twitter that top government officials are seeking to infuse dangerous ideologies into AI systems.

AAF president Tom Jones told Fox News Digital that under the guise of fighting algorithmic discrimination and harmful bias, the Biden administration is trying to rig AI to follow the woke lefts rules.

Biden is being advised on technology policy not by scientists but by racially obsessed social academics and activists. Were already seen the biggest tech firms in the world, like Google under Eric Schmidt, use their power to push the lefts agenda. This would take the tech/woke alliance to a whole new, truly terrifying level, explained Jones.

White House Plans to Weaponize AI Against Conservatives

The Biden administrations efforts [to] make AI woke is absolutely terrifying. The prospect of AI being rigged by the left is truly Orwellian, Jones told the New York Post.

This is just another example of how the woke never miss an opportunity to seize power. All Americans need to know about what Biden and his cronies are up to.

The AAF memo cited four recent Democratic documents as evidence of the Biden administrations plot to wokeify AI technology.

One document is the Blueprint for an AI Bill of Rights, which was released by the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP) last October.

The document warned of algorithmic discrimination in which AI systems could treat people differently based on their race, sex, or other characteristics.

The paper called for data used as part of system development or assessment to be reviewed for bias based on the historical and societal context of the data and recommended proactive equity assessments as part of the system design, along with other actions.

Speaking at the Summit for Democracy in March, Arati Prabhakar, director of OSTP, praised Bidens February executive order for promoting data equity and directing agencies to fight algorithmic discrimination so AI can advance and equitable agenda.

Biden Officials Issue Steps to Wokeify AI Technology

President Joe Biden first issued an executive order in February to continuously embed equity into all aspects of federal decision-making.

The order instructed federal bureaucrats to ensure that all AI systems in the United States are programmed to comply with the global woke agenda.

When designing, developing, acquiring, and using artificial intelligence and automated systems in the federal government, agencies shall do so, consistent with applicable law, in a manner that advances equity, said the order.

It also instructs federal agencies to ensure that their respective civil rights offices are consulted on any decisions regarding the use of AI in order to root out bias in the design and use of new technologies, such as artificial intelligence and combat algorithmic discrimination.

On May 23, the White Houses Select Committee on Artificial Intelligence, which is also run by Prabhakar, released the National Artificial Intelligence Research and Development Strategic Plan .

This calls for additional resources to fight harmful biases and warns AI systems are prone to hallucinate and recapitulate biases derived from the unfiltered data from the internet used to train them.

The memo says that understanding how AI can reduce inequities stemming from systemic, structural, and individual bias is an important area of research.

The OSTP announced another directive titled, New Steps to Advance Responsible Artificial Intelligence Research, Development, and Deployment.

These steps included an updated roadmap to focus federal investments [i.e., taxpayer dollars] in AI research and development, along with an advice questionnaire called Request for Information National Priorities for Artificial Intelligence.

The White House has also hosted so-called listening sessions with workers on future AI policy with a left-wing political bent, which is devoted to influencing elections against conservative candidates.

The committee that produced the report is part of the National Science and Technology Council, which is led by Vice President Kamala Harris, Bidens AI Czar.

Biden put Harris, who has been critical about alleged racial bias in AI, in charge of the administrations plan to promote responsible AI innovation that protects Americans rights and safety.

When we look at  issues like AI and machine learning, there is a real need to be very concerned about how being built into it is racial bias, said Harris in 2019, as a senator from California.

Its a real issue, and its happening in real time. And the thing about racial bias in technology is that, unlike the racial bias that you can pretty easily [detect] when you get stopped in a department store or while youre driving, the bias that is built into technology will not be very easy to detect.

Administrations AI Agenda in Line With WEFs Davos Policies

The AAF is also concerned about the appointment of Miriam Vogel to chair the National AI Advisory Committee, which advises the president on AI technology.

Vogel is the president and CEO of EqualAI, a left-wing organization partnered with the World Economic Forum (WEF), which is dedicated to reducing unconscious bias in our AI and promote responsible AI governance.

In 2021, the WEF and EqualAI launched the EqualAI Badge Program, which trains and certifies senior executives at companies developing or using AI to ensure their brand is known for its responsible and inclusive practices.

EqualAI said on its website that AI programs and particularly customer-facing systems should be checked for bias on a routine basis, adding that AI learns new patterns as it is fed new data and can adopt new biases.

The National AI Advisory Committee released a report in May stating that the president had clearly articulated his interest in ending discrimination and bias (including algorithmic discrimination and bias).

The report defined trustworthy AI in part as valid and reliable  and fair with harmful bias managed.

Conservatives and Free Speech Advocates Wary of Democrats Motives

The debate over AI has become heavily politicized since the AI tool ChatGPT was released last November.

Dan Schneider, vice president for Free Speech America, told NewsBusters that the Biden administration said the quiet part out loud. Using AI to interfere in elections is one of the key tactics the left intends to use to hold onto the White House.

AI is already being used to figure out how to manipulate and control what people think. We have a short window to stop this attack on our rights.

Twitter ownder Elon Musk has been sounding the alarm about the potential for AI to go rogue and of the risks of weaponizing it to push a woke political agenda.

The danger of training AI to be wokein other words, lieis deadly, Musk wrote in a tweet in December.

Last week, President Biden hosted a roundtable in California with critics over Silicon Valleys role in developing AI technology.

Senate majority leader Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.) recently rolled out a bill for regulating AI to stop what he calls disinformation.

His SAFE Innovation Framework bill warns that AI has the potential for supercharged disinformation and the amplification of bias.

According to AAF, its research about the Biden administration is part one of what it described as an investigation into woke AI.

Stay tuned for more, the AFF tweeted. What we have found will shock you.

The Epoch Times reached out to the White House and AFF for comment.
Cabinet Office Probe Finds Sue Gray Broke Civil Service Code by Discussing Job With Labour

Partygate investigator Sue Gray broke civil service rules as a result of the undeclared contact between her and the Labour Party, a Cabinet Office investigation has found.

Graywho led an investigation into allegations of parties being held in Downing Street in breach of the COVID-19 lockdown rulesaccepted a job offer from Labour leader Sir Keir Starmer soon after she resigned from the civil service in March.

The move prompted claims from former Prime Minister Boris Johnson and Conservative MPs that she was politically biased and her Partygate report was tarnished.

On Friday, the Advisory Committee on Business Appointments (ACOBA), Whitehalls appointments watchdog, cleared her to start the job in September.

But a separate Cabinet Office inquiry found that Gray, who refused to give evidence to the government probe, broke the civil service code due to her contact with Labour ahead of her resignation.

Labour leader Sir Keir Starmer at the launch of the Labour Partys mission on cheaper green power, setting out policies on clean energy, at Nova Innovation, Edinburgh, on June 19, 2023. (Jane Barlow/PA Wire)

Political Stunt

In a written ministerial statement on Monday, Cabinet Office minister Jeremy Quin said that the investigation found that the civil service code was prima facie broken as a result of the undeclared contact between Ms. Gray and the leader of the opposition.

He added: The rules and guidance that govern the conduct of civil servants are clear and transparent. It is deeply unfortunate that events have transpired in this way.

Responding to the conclusion, a Labour Party spokesman said: All rules were complied with. The ACOBA process makes that clear.

He called the Cabinet Office statement a political stunt by a Tory government, which spent weeks wasting time on this Mickey Mouse nonsense while refusing to investigate the serious allegations of sexual assault against their London mayoral hopeful Daniel Korski.

Korski, a former Downing Street adviser during David Camerons premiership, pulled out of the race last week to be the Tory candidate to take on Sadiq Khan in the capital after it was alleged he groped a TV producer in No. 10 a decade ago.

The Cabinet Office has ruled out investigating the claims, which Korski categorically denies.

Concerns Over Impartiality

Gray said Starmer raised the possibility of joining his team when he called her in late October 2022, according to the ACOBA investigation.

She said she might be open to such a possibility if she were to leave the civil service, it added.

But she told the team there was no formal job offer until March 2, which was the day she resigned.

Government departments flagged that the unprecedented circumstances under which Ms. Gray left her role had led to commentary in public and in Parliament which questions the impartiality and integrity of the Civil Service.

The departments told ACOBA: The proposed employment risks lowering public trust in the Civil Service.

To that end, in order to ensure that the currency of any government information held has degraded by the time the applicant takes up the role, and to create a clean break between government and political service, we recommend a waiting period of 12 months.

ACOBA said on Friday that it shared some of the concerns raised by government departments, but said it had seen no evidence that her decision-making or impartiality was impaired while serving in Whitehall.

ACOBA said a waiting period of six months until Gray takes up her position as Labours chief of staff would be proportionate to mitigate potential risks.

In its advice, the watchdog said: Given the lack of commercial risk, and the limited scope for undue influence, the committee determined that twice the standard waiting period would be proportionate to mitigate the risks identified, providing a clear break of six months before Ms. Gray takes up the role.

PA Media contributed to this report.
California Woman Gets 90 Days in Jail for False Report of Kidnapping Attempt

A California woman and Instagram mom influencer has been sentenced to 90 days in jail after lying to authorities about a Latino couple allegedly trying to kidnap her children, according to the Sonoma County District Attorneys Office.

Kathleen Sorensen, 31, was sentenced to jail on June 29 for a single count of knowingly making a false report of a crime. She was taken into custody immediately after sentencing.

Sorensen was convicted in April of filing a false criminal report in which she claimed a woman named Sadie Martinez and her husband tried to kidnap Sorensens two children in the parking lot of a Michaels craft store in Petaluma, California, on Dec. 7, 2020.

She later posted viral videos on Instagram that detailed how she avoided the kidnapping attempt.

I definitely felt the heebie-jeebies, Sorensen told her viewers, according to a later NBC News report. I didnt feel good, but I thought I was judging a book by its cover. They were not kind, that sounds bad, but they werent clean-cut individuals.

Sorensen went on to say she was paralyzed with fear by the couple, who she alleged followed her and her children outside to their car. She alleged that she screamed for help, which caused the couple to leave the parking lot.

The district attorneys office said the videos added significant details that had not been disclosed to the Petaluma Police Department. Those posts on her Instagram account have since been deleted.

Police Involvement

In a follow-up interview with police, Sorensen identified the couple from the store video as the individuals who tried to kidnap her children, the district attorneys office said. The couple denied the allegations and explained that they visited the craft store to buy a nativity scene and other decorations for a Christmas display.

Police closed the investigation, saying Sorensens report proved to be false and was resoundingly contradicted by the accused couple as well as store video that was obtained, the district attorneys office said. The accused couple were cleared by authorities of any wrongdoing.

Martinez, who is Latina, suspected the incident was racially motivated.

I couldnt believe it. Its like were literally guilty of being brown while shopping, she said in a news conference in December 2020.

Sorensen will serve 90 days in jail and will be allowed to serve in a work release program for 60 of those days, according to a news release.

Sonoma County District Attorney Carla Rodriguez said the sentence was fair.

Our hope is that this measure of accountability will help provide some closure to the couple that was falsely accused of having attempted to kidnap two young children, Rodriguez said in a statement.

The judge also placed Sorensen on 12 months of informal probation. During this time, she was ordered to have no social media presence, submit to warrantless search and seizure of her electronic devices, complete a four-hour implicit bias training, and pay various fines and fees, the district attorneys office said.
CBP Defends Footage of Border Patrol Agent Cutting Razor Wire to Let in Illegal Border Crossers

Texas National Guard soldiers close a section of razor wire surrounding a makeshift migrant camp as an immigrant tries to return with food for his family in El Paso, Texas, on May 11, 2023. (John Moore/Getty Images)

A spokesperson for U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP) defended video footage of a U.S. Border Patrol agent cutting open a section of razor wire for an illegal immigrant family, saying that it was a necessary action to apprehend them.

On Friday, Fox News reporter Bill Melugin shared a Twitter post showing the unidentified Border Patrol agent taking wire cutters to a spiraling line of razor wire and then pulling the wire aside to allow at least a dozen illegal immigrants to walk through.

In his Twitter post caption, Melugin reported that the razor wire fence was laid out on private property by the Texas Department of Public Safety (Texas DPS) with the permission of the property owner. Texas DPS officials and National Guard troops from a variety of states have been spreading razor wire and manning sections of the Texas border in an effort to physically block illegal border crossings as part of an effort known as Operation Lone Star.

This is the first time [Texas DPS officials] know of this happening, and that its being looked into for potential destruction of [Texas] property, Melugin said in his Twitter post. The federal governments position is that once migrants are on U.S. soil, under U.S. law, they need to be processed, and cannot be repelled or turned away. Texas is taking a much different approach, and has been physically blocking migrants under orders from [Gov. Greg Abbott.]

In a statement shared with Melugin, a CBP spokesperson asserted the federal government maintains jurisdiction over the border and U.S. immigration laws. The CBP spokesperson further stated Border Patrol agents had to let the illegal immigrants through in order to process them according to U.S. immigration law. The group of illegal immigrants included several children and Melugin said federal border officials were concerned about getting them out of the summer heat.

It is a federal responsibility to enforce U.S. immigration laws. U.S. Border Patrol continues to enforce U.S. immigration laws. The individuals had already crossed the Rio Grande from Mexico, were on U.S. soil, and are subject to U.S. immigration laws, a CBP spokesperson said. Individuals who cross unlawfully will be subject to the lawful pathways rule, which places common-sense conditions on asylum eligibility, with certain exceptions. Those who do not establish a legal basis to remain in the United States will be removed.

The Circumvention of Lawful Pathways Final Rule or lawful pathways rule stipulates that migrants who try to enter the U.S. at any point other than a designated point of entry face a presumption of ineligibility for entry into the United States. This presumption of ineligibility is rebuttable, but those who fail to make their case and are ordered removed are barred from reentry into the U.S. for at least five years.

Conflicting Border Enforcement Efforts

The move by Border Patrol agents to cut through Texas DPS razor wire lines could add to the friction between President Joe Bidens administration and Republican state governors who have criticized his border policies.

Abbott launched Operation Lone Star in the Spring of 2021, citing a crisis at our southern border exacerbated by Biden Administration policies that refuse to secure the border and invite illegal immigration. Abbott has invited other Republican governors to assist with Operation Lone Star and several have deployed state police and National Guard troops to the Texas border to help block off sections of the Rio Grande, which separates Texas from Mexico.

The Operation Lone Star border control efforts ramped up as the Biden administration phased out Title 42 immigration policies and instead implemented its revised entry protocols like the lawful pathways rule. In May, just ahead of the end of Title 42, Texas National Guard troops were seen manning a section of razor wire fence, blocking a line of people from attempting to illegally cross the Rio Grande into the United States.

NTD News reached out to Texas DPS and Abbotts office for comment about Border Patrols decision to cut through Texas DPS razor wire lines, but they did not respond by the time this article was published.

From NTD News
CBSA Closes Main Border Crossing Between Montreal and New York

A Canada Border Services Agency (CBSA) patch is seen on a CBSA officers uniform in Calgary, Alberta, on Aug. 1, 2019. (Jeff Mcintosh/The Canadian Press)

MONTREALThe Canada Border Services Agency says one of the countrys busiest border crossings is closed.

The CBSA said in a post on Twitter that all lanes are closed at the SaintBernarddeLacolle border crossing because of a broken roadway.

The agency says commercial operations are continuing at the crossing.

SaintBernarddeLacolle is the primary border crossing between Montreal and the United States, connecting major highways that run from Montreal to New York City.

CBSA says travelers can use the port of entry in StArmand, Que. to enter Canada from the U.S. state of Vermont.

The agency did not say when it expects the border to reopen.
Chinese Regime Fears Repeating the Collapse of Former Soviet Union, Expert Says

At a recent meeting of the Central Commission for Discipline Inspection, Chinese Communist Party leader Xi Jinping stressed that anti-corruption efforts need to target both "flies" and "tigers," referring to lower and senior level officials. (Ed Jones-Pool/Getty images)

The Chinese Communist Party (CCP) propaganda magazine Qiushi Theory reprinted party leader Xi Jinpings talk to cadres of Central Party School in March 2022.

The talk, reprinted on July 1which the party claimed to be its founding day in 1921was filled with Xis concern that the party is at the brink of collapse if cadres fail to adhere to Marxism and communism.

Xi said that if cadres do not believe in Marxism, communism, and fail to recognize the CCPs socialism, China will repeat tragedies such as the collapse of the former Soviet Union.

Song Guo-cheng, a researcher at National Chengchi Universitys Institute of International Relations, believes the talk showed Xi in a state of extreme sense of crisis.

Song said the CCP is in the most dangerous situation since its founding: constant and turbulent international relations, a stagnant economy after three years of pandemic, a surging unemployment rate, and the exodus of Chinese people and companies could all combine to shake the red power.

It reflects that Xi Jinping is very anxious, Song told The Epoch Times.

In the talk, Xi also emphasized that leading cadres with motives for fame and fortune, lacking ideals and beliefs, will lose the spirit to fight for communism.

Li Yuanhua, a historian in Australia, said Xi is clearly aware of the fact that cadres ideals and beliefs, as well as the rhetoric, have long collapsed.

Those who followed Xi and touted the red Chinese dreams are only interested in the gains from joining the corrupt officials and their deeds, he said.

Xi also stressed the serious issue of corruption within the party in the talk.

In fact, as early as when Xi first came to power in November 2012, he recognized that corruption will ultimately lead to the demise of the Party and the ruling regime, Xi said in his first talk as the CCP leader at the Politburo, the supreme policy-making body of the regime.

Xis anti-corruption campaign has continued for a decade since it started in 2013. However, as a party magazine Theory and Reform pointed out last year, the corruption has taken a hidden and cunning form like a virus thats constantly mutating.

Haizhong Ning and Luo Ya contributed to this report.
Church in Northern Alberta Badly Damaged by Fire

St. Andrews Anglican Church in Lac La Biche was badly damaged by fire on Canada Day. (Courtesy of RCMP)

Another church has burned in northern Alberta.

St. Andrews Anglican Church in Lac La Biche was gutted by fire early in the morning of July 1. The call came in around 6:30 a.m. on Canada Day.

Lac La Biche RCMP said in a news release that the church sustained significant damage inside and out.

While police have not released the cause of the fire, they are asking anyone in the area to check their security cameras.

Lac La Biche RCMP are asking anyone who resides in the 101 to 103 block of Churchill Drive to check their security footage to look for any suspicious activity during the early morning hours, said the release.

According to the bishop for the Anglican Diocese of Athabasca, St. Andrews church has been around since 1932.

It is a sadness in the sense that that is a cherished sacred place in the community, and it has been for many long years, said Rt. Rev. David Greenwood.

However, he pointed out there are also things to be thankful for.

Gratitude that nobody appears to have been harmed, he told The Epoch Times. And gratitude that the first responders were able to come so quickly and extinguish it so that there is still some of the church standing.

Greenwood said while the congregation was small, the church was open for services every Sunday. And members were also involved in charity work in the community.

Theyre quite active in the community, working with a group called Stone Soup [Stone Soup Food Centre], and other things in town, he said.

At this point, it is not clear if the church can be rebuilt. An RCMP photo shows extensive damage to the interior, and Greenwood said the damage is currently being evaluated.

Were still where the evaluation is happening right now to see what is salvageable and what is not. So, gratitude for all those people that are involved with that.

He said the possibility of the fire being arson is a concern, but if true, also a symptom of bigger problems.

Theres a sadness if it was human-caused, he said. We dont know that for sure  [but] whatever that reason may have been, I think that is a symptom of the illness and hurt in our wider society and that is something we all need to pray about and work with God to try and heal.

If it was deliberately set, it will not be the first.

In May, St. Bernard Catholic Church in Grouard, Alberta, was gutted by fire, and two people were charged with arson.

And on May 19, a man set a fire at St. Marys Cathedral in Calgary. Police say the call came in around 2:30 in the morning. They said besides setting a fire, the man also attempted to force his way into the building. Two church staff members managed to close the back door and get to safety while the man continued to try to gain entry.

The fire was put out by the Calgary Fire Department.

A series of churches in Canada have been damaged or destroyed by arson in the last two years.

On May 27, 2021, the Tkemlups te Secwepemc First Nation announced ground-penetrating radar had located possible burial sites of 215 children at the former Kamloops Indian Residential School. So far, the possible sites have not been excavated.

Shortly after that, a number of churches were damaged or destroyed by arson across Alberta, B.C., Saskatchewan, and Ontario.

Earlier this year, The Epoch Times contacted police forces across the country to learn the status of the investigations into church burnings. Most have not resulted in charges or convictions, although in a few cases people have been charged, with at least one conviction.

The Epoch Times found some cases remain officially open, while others have closed but could reopen if new evidence comes to light.

Greenwood said regardless of the cause of this latest fire, they are hoping for the best.

Our prayers are with them  and for the community as a whole, he said.

Lac La Biche is about 220 kilometres northeast of Edmonton.
COVID-19 May Bring Back Competition Between the States

Members of the public wave the Australian flag as they watch the ANZAC Day March in Sydney, Australia, on April 25, 2023. (AAP Image/Bianca De Marchi)

Commentary

Australia is a federation, although for decades now it has been hard to notice.

But COVID-19 may have changed everything.

In a functioning federation, like the United States, states revel in competition and distinguishing themselves from each other.

While California appears to be going woke and broke at the moment, Florida is where woke goes to die and where increasing numbers of California migrants go to live. This state competition is a consequence of legal structures, but just as importantly, mental attitudes.

COVID is the greatest disruption, short of war, in anyones lifetime. One of its consequences might be to change the mindset of Australian premiers so that real federalism becomes reborn.

There are a few green shoots, such as the pitch to Victorian businesses from South Australias Treasurer Stephen Mullighan to vacate the high-taxing, sclerotic Victoria to his own state.

Or the bid by Queensland to retain its share of its Commonwealth Grants even though it has massively increased its revenue by increasing coal royalties.

Then you have Victoria increasing its tax levels rather than wind in expenditure, while the new New South Wales administration foreshadows economic prudence, paring expenses, and cancelling plans to borrow.

This divergence was more or less unprecedented pre-COVID-19.

During COVID, premiers did the previously unthinkable and closed borders (or in the case of the island state of Tasmania, pulled up the gangplank) and implemented quite distinct policies.

Suddenly there were our people, who lived in our state, and other Australians who were treated like aliens.

This was exemplified in the statement of Queensland Premier Annastacia Palaszczuk that Queensland hospitals were for our people only, as she compelled a pregnant woman to fly 610 kilometres (379 miles) to Sydney for a difficult birth rather than allowing her to drive the 88 kilometres from Ballina near the state border to the Gold Coast.

This sense of autonomy was heightened by the ad hoc National Cabinet where the premiers dictated to the prime minister, reversing the previous order.

Queensland Premier Annastacia Palaszczuk looks on at a press conference at Parliament house in Brisbane, Australia, on April 1, 2021. (Jono Searle/Getty Images)

How the Federal Structure Was Gradually Eroded

Originally, Australia had a functional federation comprised of six independent colonies, which each raised enough taxes and charges to support themselves.

To ensure a national economy, states surrendered the power to levy customs and excise to the federal government, along with the power of the pre-eminent right to make legislation in a number of areas listed under Section 51 of the Constitution.

The economies did continue as before with the states levying income taxes, and also charging for services, transfers of assets, and taxing land.

It didnt take long for the financial strengths of the states, however, to migrate to the Commonwealth, along with the power to levy income tax.

Over the next century, this led to a gradual shuffling and reshuffling of taxes between levels of government and the complete abandonment of income tax by the states. The situation now sees half of a states budget come from the Commonwealth.

Why the Current System Needs a Revamp

Federations work well, particularly in large, decentralised countries. They should work better than unitary systems for a number of reasons.

First, decisions are made closer to the people directly affected who also have access to the best on-the-ground information.

Second, those who raise the money are responsible for spending it, encouraging thrift and efficiency.

Third, they allow for experimentation and quick transfer of lessons learned.

And fourth, they provide redundancy so that a failure in a part of the country does not become a catastrophic failure by being a failure of the whole. (To understand this point, imagine if Daniel Andrews was responsible for the lockdown policy of Australia, instead of Victoria, during the pandemic.)

Premier of Victoria Daniel Andrews speaks during a press conference in Melbourne, Australia on Sept. 23, 2021. (Asanka Ratnayake/Getty Images)

These are undoubtedly some of the secrets of success to the worlds dominant economythe United States of America.

But with rare exceptions, Australians to date have never been keen on full-blooded federalism, although there have been exceptions.

One was in the 1970s and 1980s when Queensland and Tasmania vehemently argued against federal intervention in how they managed their environmental resources which included the Great Barrier Reef and Fraser Island in Queensland, and the Gordon-below-Franklin River in Tasmania.

Queensland also led the way in reducing state tax to attract interstate migration when it abolished estate or death duties.

At the same time, it spurred whole new industries like coal mining and aluminium smelting and moved Queensland from hillbilly status to Australias fastest-growing state.

Western Australia has always been partial to states rights and was only a reluctant member of the original federation. This is partly explained by its isolation from the rest of the continentPerth is closer to Singapore and Jakarta than to any other Australian capital city.

There have also been attempts by the Commonwealth government to return some of the taxing power to the states.

Both of our Malcolm prime ministersFraser and Turnbulloffered to return some proportion of income tax to the states. The premiers declined, preferring to have the option of blaming Canberra when budgets wouldnt stretch to meet unrealistic electoral expectations.

A general view of the roads around the Parliament House building in Canberra, Australia on Aug. 13, 2021. (Jamila Toderas/AFP via Getty Images)

Change How GST Is Distributed for Long Term Prosperity

But now there has been a COVID-induced paradigm switch and with fortunes diverging, it is time for the states to revert to a functioning federalism.

This should be encouraged by the federal treasurer because it is part of the puzzle to improving productivity.

While premiers are unlikely to take back income-taxing powers there is one simple measure that would encourage competitive federalismabolish the way the Commonwealth Grants Commission allocates the proceeds of the 10 percent GST charged on Australian goods and services (circa 25 percent of state budgets).

Now the Commission acts like a handicapper, giving less to the most economically successful states so it can give more to the less successfula perverse reflection of Aussie mateship, or maybe just the fact Australians are equalitarians (which might explain why two premier sporting events, the Melbourne Cup and the Stawell Gift, are also handicapped).

A simple change such as distributing the GST on a per capita basis would be a carrot for the better-run states, such as Western Australia, Queensland, and New South Wales, and a stick for South Australia, Victoria, and Tasmania.

And if it leads to an exodus of the best citizens from the worst-run state, Victoria, to the rest of the country, that would be a net benefit to everyone.

COVIDs changed the mindset. Release economic responsibility and the federation to do the rest.

Views expressed in this article are the opinions of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of The Epoch Times.
Death Knell: New Regulations Could Spell End of Natural Health Products Industry, Advocate Says

A non-profit that works to protect access to natural health products (NHPs) is warning that provisions in the 2023 federal budget affecting these products will be the death knell of the industry unless some portions are repealed.

Bill C-47, the Budget Implementation Act, which received royal assent June 22, amends the Food and Drugs Act to extend measures regarding therapeutic products to natural health productssuch as vitamins, herbal remedies, and homeopathic and traditional medicinesomething the act previously explicitly excluded.

While the bill says the amendment, whose effective date is yet to be determined, is to strengthen safety oversight, the Natural Health Products Protection Association (NHPPA) takes a vastly different view.

All the things that we didnt want to have happen to the natural health product industry are now happeningall at once, the NHPPA says in a discussion paper on 2023 Health Canada initiatives.

The paper explains some ways in which the changes will impact the industry, which are part of the framework for self-care products being implemented by Health Canada.

It says significant new fees and regulations will drive many NHP businesses and practitioners out of business, prices will increase, censorship of NHP health information will occur, and Health Canada will have dramatic new powers over the industry including the ability to impose hefty fines.

The paper says more self-care framework changes will soon be implemented. Traditional use evidence will no longer be adequate to support efficacy and safety claims, and clinical studies will be required. The ability to compound ingredients in a single package is also in jeopardy.

And the changes would restrict NHP health claims to minor conditions, where someone wouldnt need to seek advice from a licensed health-care practitioner, such as a naturopathic doctor or nutritionist, thus further reducing the number of products available.

The budget proposes amending the Food and Drug Act to extend regulatory powers to NHPs under the Protecting Canadians from Unsafe Drugs Act, also known as Vanessas Law.

These changes would protect the health of Canadians by enabling regulators to take stronger action when health or safety issues are identified with natural health products on the market, the budget states.

Battle With Industry

In an interview with The Epoch Times, NHPPA president Shawn Buckley said the NHP industry has been in a continual battle with the government for decades.

What happens is Health Canada tries to over-regulate natural products to take them away, and then citizens rebel and they have to back off. And then Health Canada waits until that simmers down and then they try again. And were just now on the third major [attempt] in my career, he said.

A separate NHPPA report outlines how the self-care products framework came about.

Regulations set to come into effect in 1998 prompted a legal challenge and public revolt that led to the then-Liberal government backing off. Following a consultation, the Natural Health Product Regulations came into force in 2004.

In 2008, then-Conservative health minister Tony Clement introduced Bill C-51 to unite drug and NHP regulations under a scheme similar to the one currently proposed. However, public backlash again made the government back off. The powers proposed in 2008 reappeared in 2013 under Bill C-17, or Vanessas Law, which only applied to drugs and medical devices, other than natural health products.

In 2016, then-Liberal health minister Jane Philipott confirmed her support for extending the self-care framework to NHPs, and Health Canada instructed its Natural and Non-Prescription Health Products Directorate to implement the policy.

Mom and Pop Industry

Buckley, who formerly did legal work for Health Canada, said the agencys model appears to be one where it ensures were all funnelled into the chemical drug model.

He believes an expensive and rigorous burden of proof is appropriate for prospective drugs, but neither the need nor the economics makes it appropriate for NHPs.

Drug companies pay for site licensing, fees and product placement, yearly fees for the rights to sell their products, and the natural health product industry has never been subjected to those, he said.

Its more of a mom and pop industry. A medium-sized manufacturer, they manufacture and they package and label and distribute, and now youre asking them to pay $60,000 a year for that privilege that they never paid before.

Buckley says those fees will simply go into Health Canadas pocket as cost recovery for the enforcement arm of the strict regulations theyve just created.

Most of the natural products industry is still relatively small and they just simply wont survive. And then [the government] is going to limit the types of uses to literally over-the-counter uses, he says.

The NHPPAs discussion paper calls the regulations the death knell of the industry, noting that if the amendments are implemented, it will be functionally illegal to treat anything but the most minor of conditions with natural products.

Many Canadians are only alive because of natural health products. Many more solve or manage serious health conditions with them. We cannot pretend that taking away treatments people rely upon for their lives and/or well-being will not lead to death or suffering, it states.

Health Canada: Modernized Approach

In response to a query from The Epoch Times, Health Canada said by email that it is modernizing its oversight of the NHP industry.

While natural health products (NHPs) are considered lower-risk health products, it does not mean they are without risk, the department said. Health Canada has seen evidence of industry non-compliance with the Natural Health Products Regulations, resulting in health and safety risks to Canadians. Examples include product contamination due to non-adherence with Good Manufacturing Practices and the presence of ingredients not listed on labels.

The department said its efforts align with recommendations made in an audit of the NHP program in April 2021 by the Commissioner of the Environment and Sustainable Development, highlighting the need for a modernized approach.

The audit made a number of recommendations, including the need to strengthen the post-market oversight of NHPs, Health Canada said. These legislative amendments provide the Department with stronger tools to manage serious health and safety risks when products present a serious or imminent risk of injury to health, in line with the recommendations of the audit.

Pushback

The NHPPA previously held a postcard campaign to call on MPs to amend the Budget Implementation Act to exclude the NHPs regulatory changes. That has now changed to calling for the concerning sections to be repealed. The organization also wants the self-care framework stopped and a charter of health freedom enacted for Canadians.

Lana Van Dijk, owner of Body Fuel Organics in Regina, told The Epoch Times she is deeply concerned about the impact the regulations will have on the NHP industry. She said her industry was not consulted, and some in it remain unaware of the threat the changes represent.

Theyve now revised the definition of therapeutic products to include natural health supplements. There was no debate; there was no option for debate, she said.

It has blindsided the industry.

Health Canada is holding consultations until Aug. 10 on proposed fees to cover part of the costs of its activities to regulate NHPs, similar to those for drugs and medical devices. The fees are slated to come into effect April 1, 2025.
Delaying South Australias Voice Aimed at Protecting Proposed Change to Australias Constitution: Think Tank

South Australias decision to delay its Voice to Parliament is a cynical ploy to stop the public from understanding the full implications of changing the countrys Constitution, says the Institute of Public Affairs.

The free-market think tanks comments come after South Australias Labor government announced it would delay elections for its state-level First Nations Voice until March 16, 2024, to avoid confusion with the federal proposal. The original date for voting was set on Sept. 9, 2023.

The clear advice Ive received from both the Electoral Commissioner and the Commissioner for First Nations Voice is that the work being done in South Australia is being overshadowed by the debate occurring at a national level around both the Yes and the No referendum campaigns, said SAs Aboriginal Affairs Minister Kyam Maher, in a statement.

By allowing for more time, were giving Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people living in South Australia the opportunity to fully understand how they can get involved and take the time to campaign, with distance from the discussion about the national Voice, he added.

SA has pushed ahead with its own version of The Voice in February, but its latest decision comes as public polling for the national Voice reveals declining support for the proposal, which will see the Australian Constitution changed to embed a special Indigenous advisory body into the Parliament.

Big crowds are seen outside South Australias parliament in Adelaide, Australia, on March 26, 2023. (AAP Image/Matt Turner)

Hiding the Massive Scope of The Voice: Think Tank

Daniel Wild, executive director of the Institute of Public Affairs, said the move was not about avoiding confusion but to hide the massive scope and operation of an Indigenous Voice from public scrutiny.

How can Australians have any faith in the Canberra Voice to Parliament proposal when even state governments are taking extraordinary measures, including delaying the commencement of laws, to prevent them from witnessing the consequences of such ideas? Wild said in a statement to The Epoch Times.

There is a clear tension between the local state Voice, which is in legislation only, and the Canberra-based national voice, which would be permanently embedded in the Constitution and therefore cannot be changed or removed.

He said the think tank had undertaken further research that pointed to ongoing concerns that The Voice proposals will do little to improve the lives of Indigenous communities.

Later this year, Australians will go to the polls to vote for a national referendum to decide whether to alter the Constitution to change its preamble to recognise Indigenous peoples and to also set up an advisory body to Parliament.

Walpiri community members wait to meet coroner Elisabeth Armitage at the local police station in the outback community of Yuendumu, northwest of Alice Springs, Australia, on Nov. 15, 2022. (AAP Image/Aaron Bunch)

This almost-permanent advisory body would have the power to make representations to the executive and legislative arms of government on all matters deemed relevant to Aboriginals and Torres Strait Islanders.

Advocates see The Voice as the latest advancement in reconciliation and dealing with chronic issues in Indigenous communities, such as unemployment, domestic violence, alcoholism, youth crime, and welfare dependency.

SA Model Reveals Issues With The Voice

Under the SA model, the state will be divided into a number of regionscurrently six, but this can be changed by the governmentto elect a Local First Nations Voice. These bodies are capable of being sued, holding property, and are independent of the government.

Indigenous individuals in each Local First Nations Voice must elect two presiding members (of differing genders). Together, all local members will sit on a State First Nations Voice.

The state-level body will have the power to present the views of Indigenous people to the South Australian Parliament and the South Australian Government and other bodies.

Further, at the discretion of the State First Nations Voice, the body can engage with and provide advice to other levels of government on policies that relate to matters of interest to First Nations people.

Yet Senator Price pointed to loopholes that draft legislation for the SA model revealed.

I think it is utterly ridiculous that it has been left open for individuals to declare their Aboriginality. Just based on that, the fact that a citizen of South Australia can write a statutory declaration and claim to be Indigenous is deeply concerning, she told reporters.

You will see in South Australia a dramatic increase in the number of Indigenous people within its population, no doubt because of that particular model.

The federal version of The Voice has managed to avoid such scrutiny so far because the Labor government will decide on the exact model only after Australians vote nationally on whether to go ahead with the proposala situation that has been the focus of criticism from the opposition and No advocates.

The legal uncertainty and ambiguity here are quite remarkable, and to change the Constitution this way is without precedent, Opposition Leader Peter Dutton told reporters.
BAKU, Azerbaijan, July 3. Iran continues to hold discussions on its nuclear program in order to fully satisfy its national interests, Spokesman for the Iranian Ministry of Foreign Affairs Nasser Kanaani said at a press conference in Tehran, Trend reports.

The official noted that Iran has clearly announced its position on the nuclear talks to the other involved parties. As he said, of late, Iran has been observing the opposite side to move away from unrealistic and non-constructive conditions, whereas, it does not ring enough for Iran, and Iran is committed to holding discussions.

Kanaani added that as a responsible member of the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA), Iran takes further measures based on the steps of the other parties. Iran reacts to the actions of the other parties within the JCPOA and the mechanisms mentioned in the plan. So, Iran took alternative steps in connection with the withdrawal of the US from the JCPOA.

Iran is ready for any situation in the future, including the conclusion of the discussions and other issues. Iran continues its balanced foreign policy without delving into the process and results of the negotiations, he said.

On January 2016, Iran's nuclear program triggered the creation of JCPOA between Iran and the P5+1 group (US, Russia, China, UK, France, and Germany). In May 2018, the US announced its withdrawal from the deal and imposed sanctions on Iran in November of the same year. To preserve the agreements reached as part of the JCPOA, the European signatories of the deal started in January 2019 and a financial mechanism for maintaining trade with Iran called INSTEX was formed.

On May 8, 2019, Iran announced ceasing to fulfill its commitments regarding the sale of over 300 kilograms of uranium, as stated in the deal, basing its decision on the other signatories that have not fulfilled their obligations. On July 7, Iran announced that it will not be fulfilling its commitments regarding the enrichment of uranium at 3.67 percent and the reconstruction of the Arak Heavy Water Reactor Facility as stated in the deal.

On September 5 of the same year, Iran announced its commitment to enrich uranium using next-generation centrifuges and not to mix it with the enriched uranium residues as part of the third step of reducing commitments in JCPOA. On November 5, 2019, Iran announced to have taking the fourth step in connection with reducing its commitments to the nuclear agreement. So, uranium gas is being pumped to the centrifuges at the Fordow Fuel Enrichment Plant.

On Jan.2020, Iran took the last fifth step in reducing the number of its commitments within JCPOA.

On May 8, 2018, the US announced its withdrawal from the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA) between Iran and the 5+1 group, and imposed new sanctions against Iran as of November 2018.

Over the past period, the sanctions affected Iranian oil exports, ranging from above 700 banks, companies, to individuals. The sanctions have led to the freezing of Iranian assets abroad.

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Follow the author on Twitter:@BaghishovElnur
Ex-Pfizer Employee Faces Insider-Trading Charges on COVID-19 Drug Trial

The Department of Justice has accused a former Pfizer employee and his friend and business partner in participating in an insider-trading scheme based on confidential information about the results of clinical trials of a medicine used to treat COVID-19.

Prosecutors in New York have accused 44-year-old Amit Dagar, of Hillsborough, New Jersey, of buying call options in Pfizer stock after learning that the COVID-19 drug Paxlovid performed favorably a day before the drug trial results were made public.

Dagar, a former senior statistical program lead for the Paxlovid drug trial, also allegedly tipped off a friend, Atul Bhiwapurkar, who also purchased short-dated Pfizer stock options, all before the trial results were announced.

Prosecutors said that the day after the pair bought the securities, Pfizer announced the results of the study, sending its stock soaring. The trades made the two accused individuals a total of $350,000 in illicit profits, prosecutors said.

Both have been arrested, with Dagar facing four counts of securities fraud and Bhiwapurkar charged with two counts of securities fraud. Both of them have also been charged with conspiracy, with the fraud charges carrying a maximum sentence of 20 years behind bars.

Insider trading is not a quick buck, U.S. attorney Damian Williams said in a statement. Its cheating. Its a bad bet. Its a ticket to prison.

The trades amounted to one-day investment returns of 2,458 percent for Dagar and 791 percent for Bhiwapurkar, according to the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC), which has separately charged the pair with violations of the Securities Exchange Act.

As alleged in our complaint, Amit Dagar misused his access to confidential clinical trial results to enrich himself and his friend, Atul Bhiwapurkar, Joseph Sansone, chief of the market abuse unit at the SEC, in a statement.

Dagar and Bhiwapurkar allegedly leveraged this information by trading out-of-the-money call options to generate massive one-day returns. Thanks to our surveillance, the defendants must now face the consequences of their greed, Sansone added.

Pfizer did not immediately respond to a request for comment from The Epoch Times, but a spokesperson for the company told Reuters that the charges relate to the personal conduct of a former Pfizer employee in violation of the companys policies. The Pfizer spokesperson also told the outlet that the company is cooperating with the investigation.

Patrick Smith, an attorney who represents Dagar, told Reuters that his client denies the allegations.

The charges against Dagar and Bhiwapurkar are part of four separate insider-trading cases brought forward by the DOJ against 10 defendants who collectively stand accused of generating over $30 million from illegal securities trading based on confidential information.

Three Charged in Relation to Trump Media SPAC Deal

The DOJ has accused three Florida men of insider trading in Digital World Acquisition Corp. (DWAC) based on confidential information obtained before the special purpose acquisition company (SPAC) publicly announced plans to merge with former president Donald Trumps social media company.

Michael Shvartsman, his brother Gerald Shvartsman, and Bruce Garelick made over $22 million in illegal profits in late 2021 based on their access to confidential information about DWACs planned merger with Trump Media & Technology Group (Trump Media), prosecutors alleged on June 29.

Neither Trump nor his company, which operates the Truth Social app, face any charges in relation to the allegations against the trio.

Trump, who is the Republican frontrunner in the 2024 presidential race, faces a number of civil and criminal investigations, which he has denounced as a plot meant to thwart his White House run.

The planned merger between DWAC, a SPAC, and Trump Media has not been finalized.

Each of the three defendants in the DWAC-related insider-trading case faces five to seven conspiracy and fraud charges that could result in decades behind bars.

Exploited Confidential Information

Prosecutors said Thursday that the three accused sophisticated investors had been invited to invest in DWAC, and after signing non-disclosure agreements (NDA), they were provided with confidential information that one of the acquisition targets was Trump Media.

Among the terms of the NDA was that they couldnt use any so-called material, non-public information (MNPI) to buy or sell securities on the open market, per the Justice Department.

After the three individuals made initial investments in DWAC through its initial public-offering process, Garelick was given a seat on the board of directors of DWAC, which provided him with access to valuable information about the planned merger with Trumps social media company.

After learning MNPI [material non-public information] through his role on DWACs board, [Garelick] provided updates to his alleged co-conspiratorswhich he called intelligenceabout the status of the merger negotiations and the timing of a public merger announcement, prosecutors alleged.

Based on this confidential information, the three defendants then allegedly bought millions of dollars of DWAC securities on the open market before news of the planned merger with Trump Media became public.

After the merger was announced publicly, the defendants stock and warrant holdings in DWAC rose in value substantially, at which point they sold them for significant profit, prosecutors said.

All three were arrested in Florida last week.

Reuters contributed to this report.
EXCLUSIVE: Covenant Shooters Former Schoolmates Recall Past Culture of Bullying at School

Audrey Hale during a morning chapel service while she attended The Covenant School in the early 2000s. (Photo provided to The Epoch Times)

Editors Note: Former Covenant School students, Mary and Dorothy, along with their parents, spoke about their experiences with The Covenant School and Covenant Presbyterian Church in the early 2000s.

They agreed to speak about their experience to The Epoch Times on the condition of anonymity, out of fear of reprisal and damage to their reputation by speaking out. For clarity, these sources have been given pseudonyms.

The identities of the sources used in this article have been verified by The Epoch Times and their experiences were shared in a series of interviews over the course of May and June.

NASHVILLEIn 2001, a starter school began with a small student body in Green Hills, a wealthy neighborhood on the south side of downtown Nashville, Tennessee. The school sits atop a prominent hill next to a church on a property that is today valued at over $30 million.

Back then, it would have been impossible to imagine that one of the first students at the school would go on a rampage 22 years later, killing six people, including three children.

The Covenant School at its beginning had only a few dozen students as a ministry of Covenant Presbyterian Church. One of those first students at the school was a girl known by those who interacted with her as a tomboy who leaned on the quiet, if not socially awkward side.

Her name is now synonymous with the worst day in the history of the church, school, and Nashville. On March 27, former student Audrey Hale, 28, returned to the place where she spent years of her childhood in a fit of rage, leaving six innocent people dead in her trail, including three 9-year-old children.

Chief Believed Shooter May Have Carried Resentment

The Metro Nashville Police Department has not yet released writings left behind by Hale or provided a motive, leaving the public in the dark as to what motivated her to commit such an atrocity.

MNPD Chief John Drake said in the days surrounding the shooting that Hale left behind a manifesto, which has since been consistently referred to as a series of writings and journals.

Chief of Police John Drake delivers a press briefing at the entrance of The Covenant School in Nashville, Tenn., on March 28, 2023. (Seth Herald/Getty Images)

We have belief, or we feel very strongly, that she went  to that actual school and so theres some belief that there was some resentment for having to go to that school, Drake said in an interview with NBCs Lester Holt on the evening of the shooting. I dont have all the details of that just yet  and thats why this incident occurred.

He said in a follow-up to Holt that the writings pointed investigators to a motive and was unsure at the time if Halewho reportedly identified as a transgender man using the name Aidenwas influenced by her gender identity.

Asking Why

Now approaching 14 weeks after the assault, the public has the same level of information as to why Hale committed such an atrocity as was known on those first few days.

While the public does not know why Hale took on her fit of rageher reasons for doing so, whatever they may have been, do not justify such evil as the brutal murder of innocent children and staffa horror extended to hundreds of Covenant children, their families, and an entire community.

In the two decades since Columbine, anti-bullying campaigns have become prevalent in schools across the nation, as a way to prevent such atrocities from recurring.

It is not possible to speak with Hale or view her writings at this time to gain insight into her brutal murder spree and to possibly prevent future tragedies.

However, accounts from students who attended the school at the same time as Hale, backed by their parents, reveal some students had a less than ideal experience with Covenant School during the several years Hale attended.

Covenants Early Students Reflect

It is no surprise to me that Covenant was someones villain origin story, Mary, a former schoolmate of the March 27 shooter, told The Epoch Times.

Mary said her time at Covenant was the worst of her school career, marred by bullying, a culture of favoritism, and disregard for students who were perceived as different.

A balloon with names of the victims is seen at a memorial at the entrance to The Covenant School, in Nashville, Tenn., on March 29, 2023. (Wade Payne/AP Photo)

Her comparison of her time at Covenant to her remaining elementary and secondary school career paints a stark contrast in educational environments.

I went to four schools and looking back, this was the worst school experience I had growing up, she said. It was a very abusive environment, and the most severe bullying Ive ever encountered in school went completely unchecked.

Mary perceived a hierarchy within the elementary school, where the status and influence of a students parents seemed to determine their treatment.

From the outset, she said she felt marked as different and at-risk which in her opinion led her to be subjected to intense scrutiny and emotionally damaging punishment.

Mary described various instances where a school leader would scream at her and other children in a way that was blood-curdling.

I remember being yanked by my arm and forcefully led into rooms by teachers, she said. Even if I was a difficult child that still would have been really inappropriate, but I wasnt, so it makes it even worse.

She also recounted being the target of relentless bullying by a church leaders child and their friends, which she said went unaddressed by the teachers, creating an environment where the bullies appeared above the law due to their parents status.

Isolation of a child

Toward the end of her enrollment, Mary experienced incidents of isolation and punishment that led to a distrust of authority into her adulthood.

In one incident, she recalls being made to lie down on a blanket on the floor while staff discussed her in a negative light in her presence. Additionally, she remembers being pulled out of class repeatedly for interviews with school administrators about her home life, without her familys knowledge or consent.

Mary maintains that these experiences led her to distrust of authority from older women in particular, and a fear of being chastised by authority figures resulting in embarrassment.

More Claims of Favoritism

Dorothy, another former schoolmate of Hale, recounts a similarly complex dynamic within the school environment, where special treatment, harsh discipline, and bullying were perceived.

Dorothy recalled one bullying incident where a boy was punched in the face, bloodied, and terrified to report the bullying to school authorities. The boy was new to the school and did not keep attending, according to her recollection.

Dorothy said the atmosphere within the school seemed to foster an us versus them mentality, wherein certain students were considered troublemakers and treated harshly, while a blind eye was turned to true troublemakers.

The home of the Nashville Christian School shooter sits quietly in its south Nashville neighborhood on March 31, 2023, days after police agencies raided the home following the shooting. (Chase Smith/The Epoch Times)

Dorothy alleges that she observed teachers treating other schoolmates differently, such as Mary, subjecting them to embarrassment in front of their peers and disproportionate punishments.

Some teachers had a really short temper, she said. Looking back on it is dark. I would never say some of the stuff that was said to us to a child. It was very religious and strict, in my opinion.

Former Schoolmates Paint Shooter as Tomboy, Shy

Though Dorothy and Mary said they were not particularly close to Hale, they remember Hale as sometimes being excluded.

Dorothy said she remembers Hale as someone who was a bit of an outcast in school, falling into a group of girls she tried to help feel included during playtime when different grades would interact.

Hales unconventional attire and inclination to participate in activities traditionally associated with boys made her stand out, leading to further scrutiny and exclusion.

Mary said she believes she could defend herself when she was bullied, but does not recall the same conclusion about Hale, acknowledging the challenges others such as autistic children may have faced in defending themselves.

Reflecting on her time at the school, Dorothy stated that Hale was intelligent and gentle, but socially awkward. Dorothy surmised that the institution was ill-equipped to handle students with mental challenges or learning disabilities.

Dorothy believes that children on the autism spectrumwhich it is believed Hale was on according to her recollection and The Daily Beastor those with ADHD, might not have received the support and understanding they needed.

Instead, she believes, these students were labeled as problematic and subjected to punishment rather than receiving the appropriate accommodations.

In recent times, Dorothys mother saw Hale and was struck by her thin appearance. She mentioned seeing Hale two years ago and noticing a forlorn and depressed demeanor, reminiscent of a young person feeling wounded and lost.

Tragedy Comes

The mothers of Dorothy and Mary said they are heartbroken and praying for the families of The Covenant School.

A young girl moves toward the items left in front of the photo of Hallie Scruggs, one of three nine-year-olds killed along with school staff at The Covenant School shooting in Nashville on March 27. (Chase Smith/The Epoch Times)

Mary also expressed heartbreak upon learning about the brutal murders and the involvement of a former schoolmate in such a dark way.

I was heartbroken to hear that children and faculty had been murdered, Mary said. And I was heartbroken to see that a schoolmate of mine had gone on such a dark path, particularly a schoolmate I remember as being a really sweet kid. My first thought was that I wasnt surprised because of the level of abuse I perceived. It made sense to me that Covenant could be someones villain origin story, especially if someone already had mental issues.

Marys Call to Action

Mary, in particular, said it is important for parents to take an active role in their childrens lives, ensuring they are neither victims nor perpetrators of bullying, as children rarely have the words to articulate their experiences or recognize right from wrong at a young age.

Letting bullying go unchecked is something that the average American can fight against, Mary said. It can literally save lives. A lot of people respond to bullying with either violence or suicide. This is a very common thing, and no one can combat bullying better than the parent of a bully.

Church and School Choose Not to Respond

The Epoch Times reached out to the public relations firm representing the church and school for comment on the lived experiences of former students. They chose not to respond to a series of questions, instead issuing a brief statement.

Covenant continues to focus on caring for students, families, teachers and staff through this incredibly difficult time for the community, a spokesperson said. Not even three months removed from unspeakable tragedy, the school is in the midst of the grieving and healing process. Responding to conjecture and recollections from 20-plus years ago is not appropriate at this time.

The Epoch Times also reached out to the attorney representing Hales parents in ongoing legal battles over the release of their daughters writings, but did not receive a comment prior to publication.
Expert Taskforce to Tackle Growing Scamdemic in Australia

A woman checks her mobile phone at her house in Cali, Colombia on Sept. 22, 2019. (Luis Robayo/AFP via Getty Images)

Australia will launch a temporary task force known as a fusion cell to combat the growing issue of investment scams.

Led by the competition watchdog, the Australian Competition and Consumer Commission (ACCC), and the financial services regulator, the Australian Securities and Investments Commission (ASIC), the fusion cell will draw experts from both public and private sectors to minimise losses.

These include specialists from banks, the telecommunications industry, and digital platforms.

The first fusion cell will focus on investment scams as Australians lose over $1 billion (US$670 million) annually to fraud. Overall, Australia lost a record $3.1 billion to scams in 2022. This was an 80 percent increase from 2021.

Investment scams lead to the highest level of reported individual losses and cause emotional devastation for victims, ACCC Deputy Chair Catriona Lowe said.

This additional level of co-ordination and focus across government and relevant industries will target investment scam activity more effectively and help prevent further losses to these scams.

Launching the National Anti-Scams Centre (NASC), Assistant Treasurer Stephen Jones said the fusion cell targeting investment scams will run for an initial six months and publicly report its outcomes.

There is a scamdemic, Jones said.

The top priority of our new National Anti-Scams Centre is to detect and disrupt scammers before they can reach Australians.

The centre will build capability and data sharing technology to centralise scam report information, then distribute and analyse the obtained information.

So over the next few months, well be working to put in place tough new codes of practice to ensure that in the area of banks, for example, everybody understands their obligations, he said at a press conference.

These standards will also apply to social media platforms, which have been identified as the primary channels that scammers use to target Australians.

Weve got to ensure that platforms are doing their bit to ensure that this dangerous and criminal activity, particularly in the area of investment scams, is being attacked at source, he said, highlighting that text messages were a major channel.

This photo shows a scam text message impersonating the National Australia Bank in Melbourne, Australia, on March 11, 2023. (The Epoch Times)

Jones said the government was currently blocking about nine million scam text messages every six months, a number that he hoped to improve.

So the work that Im doing with my colleague [MP] Michelle Rowland to ensure that there is a new SMS registry to ensure that we know and are able to block those damaging SMS messages that are coming through attacking victims, he said.

We know that the vast majority of attacks at the moment are coming through SMS messagesthose annoying scam messages that are driving Australians nuts.

This signified that the Albanese government was taking the fight up to the scammers.

Big Four Banks Called Out

The Australian Banking Association (ABA) welcomed the launch of the NASC and the banking sectors participation, calling it a timely reminder to remain vigilant against scams.

As scammers get increasingly sophisticated and scams more complex, this cross-sector approach highlights that an ecosystem approach to disrupting scams is essential, and all sectors have a key role to play in the continued fight against scamsthis includes government, banks, telcos, social media, crypto platforms and individuals, ABA Deputy CEO Vanessa Beggs said.

It comes after ASIC called for all Australian financial institutions, in particular, the Big FourCommonwealth, Westpac, ANZ, and NABto improve their approach to handling scams.

In April, an ASIC analysis revealed that scam losses affected 31,700 major bank customers, losing more than $550 million in the last financial year.

ASIC Deputy Chair Sarah Court said corporate Australia needed to work cohesively to stop scams at the source.

The report revealed that collectively, banks detected and stopped 13 percent of scam payments made by their customers.

Meanwhile, it has been revealed that compensation was paid to victims in only two to five percent of incidents, with proactive customers who made a complaint more likely to receive reimbursement.

Wed like to see the banks take steps to evolve their scam management practices, including how they inform and educate customers and help them through what is a distressing time, Court said.
Explosions Hit DC Businesses as Bombing Suspect Remains on the Loose

Authorities in Washington, D.C. are seeking public assistance in locating the suspects behind three bombing attacks on Sunday morning.

Bombs hit a bank, a retail outlet, and a grocery store within 15 minutes on July 2, causing damage.

Three stores in Northeast Washington reported attacks with explosive devices, according to a statement from the Metropolitan Police Departments (MPD) Criminal Investigations Division and the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives Washington Field Division.

Bombing Suspect Still at Large

The first explosive went off at about 4:30 a.m. near Washington Place outside a Truist Bank ATM, before the suspect drove off, said authorities.

Another device was detonated outside a Nike store on H Street, north of Capitol Hill, at 4:36 a.m., just six minutes after the first blast.

The suspect later tossed a Molotov cocktail at a Safeway on 40th Street at around 4:45 a.m. before speeding off again, police said.

No injuries were reported, according to the MPD.

All three establishments were closed at the time, but each reported damage to their buildings, including shattered windows.

Police said they believed that the suspect was targeting commercial establishments and not members of the public.

Each of the targeted businesses was at least a mile from Capitol Hill.

Police said there may be more than one suspect in the case and released a surveillance image of a suspect and a car matching the description of the one used in the attacks.

The car is a gold- or champagne-colored Acura TL with a Maryland plate of 17971CK.

Police are offering a reward of up to $10,000 to anyone who provides information that leads to the arrest and conviction of those involved, while the ATF is also offering a $10,000 reward, bringing the total possible amount to $20,000.

In each of these offenses, it appears the suspect targeted commercial establishments and it does not appear the suspect was targeting any members of the public. The establishments were closed at the time of the offenses, MPD said in its news release.

Nations Capital Hit by Wave of Violent Crime

Violent crime in the nations capital is up 10 percent from the same time last year, including a 15 percent rise in homicides, according to data released May 8 by the MPD.

Statistics also show sex abuse cases up 48 percent and robberies up 12 percent, since the start of the crime wave.

Washingtons Mayor Murial Bowser told DC News Now that one solution could be to hire more police officers.

MPD is at a historic low in terms of staffing, Bowser said, adding we continue to do everything possible as it relates to recruiting the best of the best to serve at MPD.

The MPD currently has 3,350 police officers, outgoing chief Robert Contee told DC News, but said that 200 planned to leave by the end of fiscal year 2024.

Biden Prosecutor Fails to Charge Most Suspects Committing Crimes

Contee also indirectly blamed the U.S. Attorney for the District of Columbia for declining to prosecute the vast majority of arrests made in the capital, for the latest surge in crime.

U.S. Attorney Matthew Graves, a President Joe Biden appointee, declined to prosecute 67 percent of those arrested in the city in 2021, according to a new report.

I can promise you, its not MPD holding the bag on this. Thats B.S., Contee told The Washington Post.

Of course we are concerned. We believe every person we arrest should be off the streets.

The outgoing police chief has expressed frustration with the lack of prosecution for crimes in the city this year.

In March, Contee said that the only way to keep the number of homicides down in Washington was to keep violent people in jail.
Former Australian Deputy PM Alleges New Anti-Corruption Watchdog Subject to Political Weaponisation

Australia's Deputy Prime Minister Barnaby Joyce during Question Time in the House of Representatives at Parliament House in Canberra, Australia, on June 23, 2021. (Sam Mooy/Getty Images)

As the new independent federal anti-corruption commission begins operation in Australia, there are already claims that political parties are weaponising the watchdog to further their goals.

In an interview with Sevens Sunrise program, Nationals MP and former deputy prime minister Barnaby Joyce alleged that the Australian Greens party had politicised the commission after one of its senators made an immediate referral on July 1.

The Greens have already started politicising it, he said, pointing to Greens senator Barbara Pocock referring consultancy firm PwC to the NACC following its federal document leak scandal.

The National Anti-Corruption Commission (NACC), which is headed by Paul Breretona former judge and senior army officerofficially became operational on July 1.

The commission is tasked with detecting, investigating and reporting on corrupt conduct in Australias public service sector involving federal officials, public servants, and government contractors. It also has a role of educating the sector and the community about corruption risks and how to prevent them.

By law, the NACC can receive referrals from anyone, but it will decide whether or not to investigate them. Furthermore, the commission can determine what to investigate on its own without a referral.

Greens Allegedly Weaponised NACC From Day 1

Joyce also compared the Greens referral to the allegation that Labor weaponised Brittany Higgins rape case.

The thing I would be really careful about would be weaponising things before elections like the Brittany Higgins case, he said.

On February 2021, Higgins, a former Liberal junior staffer, publicly alleged that she was raped in March 2019 by fellow staffer Bruce Lehrmann inside the office of then-coalition minister Linda Reynolds.

The allegation was reported widely by media outlets and caused significant damage to the reputation of the then-Coalition government at the time.

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)

Recently, The Australian newspaper revealed text messages between Higgins and her partner, David Sharaz, that suggested Labor Senator Katy Gallagher was involved in strategising with the pair how the rape allegation would be used by Labor after it was made public.

It was also reported that Higgins had received a secret compensation payment of up to $3 million (US$2 million) from the Labor government.

Opposition Leader Peter Dutton has indicated that he would back Higgins former boss to refer the compensation payment to the NACC for investigation.

Response from the Greens

Meanwhile, Pocock denied she was politicising the NACC, saying there was a need for transparency in the PwC case.

Our public standard of transparency of the spending of public money has fallen a lot in the last ten years, she told ABC radio.

What Ive done is listen to a lot of Australians who want their money spent on the things that need to be funded. They want corruption and poor behaviour in the government called out.

Putting in this request to the NACC to investigate corruption within PwC, I think, is a very straightforward thing.

The Greens senator also said that several other issues should be referred to the NACC, including the Robodebt program launched by the former Coalition government to recover welfare overpayments.

The program was later found to issue incorrect notices to a large number of welfare recipients and unlawfully raise almost $1.73 billion.

The former Coalition government agreed to settle the case with $1.2 billion in 2020, and the program was abolished in May 2020.

In addition, Pocock nominated the contract links to former Liberal minister Stuart Robert and a lobbying firm, Synergy 360, as a potential investigation target for the NACC.

There are too many of them, unfortunately. They all deserve close attention, she said.

As of July 3, the NACC has received over 40 referrals from politicians and the public.

Nina Nguyen contributed to this article.
Some older adults should receive the new respiratory syncytial virus (RSV) vaccine, the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) has concluded, while acknowledging that the risks of the shots may outweigh the benefits for some of the population.

The CDCs director on June 29 endorsed advice from the CDCs vaccine advisory panel, known as ACIP, for the new vaccines, which are manufactured by Pfizer and GlaxoSmithKline (GSK).

That means people aged 60 and older can receive one of the vaccines.

But the CDC made clear that people should consult with their doctors before receiving a dose.

People 60 and older may receive a single dose of the vaccine based on discussions with their healthcare provider about whether RSV vaccination is right for them, the CDC said in a statement.

The stance, which the CDC refers to as shared clinical decision-making, differs from the other three levels of recommendations, which begin from the default that people in a certain population should get vaccinated.

For shared clinical decision-making recommendations, there is no default, the CDC said.

Advisers had recommended that stance after examining data from clinical trials that showed worrying signs of possible side effects and hearing from the CDC that the known and potential risks may outweigh the known and potential benefits for people aged 60 to 64.

There was also concern about the trials not including people at high risk for disease, hospitalization, and death.

RSV is a respiratory virus that typically causes mild symptoms such as a runny nose, but can cause severe illness, particularly in young children and older adults.

Trial Data

Pfizer and GSK ran randomized, placebo-controlled phase 3 trials for their vaccines.

Pfizers trial had 34,284 participants, about half of whom received a placebo. GSKs had 24,966 participants, about half of whom received a placebo.

The efficacy of Pfizers shot in preventing laboratory-confirmed lower respiratory tract illness (LRTI) due to RSV with two or more symptoms was pegged at 66.7 percent, with 11 cases in the vaccinated arm and 33 in the placebo arm.

A subgroup analysis found the efficacy was just 57.9 percent in people aged 60 to 69, while being at least 77.8 efficacious in those 70 and older.

LRTI was defined as at least two signs or symptoms, such as new or increased shortness of breath, lasting more than one day and laboratory-confirmed RSV infection within seven days of symptom onset.

The efficacy of GSKs shot in preventing lower respiratory tract disease (LRTD) caused by RSV was estimated as 82.6 percent.

LRTD was defined as having at least two lower respiratory symptoms, such as a new or increased cough, or signs, for at least 24 hours, including at least one sign, such as a need for oxygen supplementation, or at least three symptoms for at least 24 hours.

Similar to the COVID-19 vaccine trials, the trials only monitored for cases from day 14 or day 15 after vaccination. That could mean the actual efficacy of the vaccines is lower.

Data was not available to show the duration of effectiveness, effectiveness in people who are immunocompromised or frail, effectiveness in preventing severe cases, and whether its safe to administer the RSV vaccines at the same time as non-influenza vaccines.

Modeling (pdf) indicates that the efficacy will drop to zero after about two years.

The CDC estimates that RSV causes 60,000 to 160,000 hospitalizations and 6,000 to 10,000 deaths among older adults each year.

A sign for Pfizer is displayed in New York in a file photograph. (Timothy A. Clary/AFP via Getty Images)

Cost

The FDA approved the vaccines earlier this year. They are the worlds first RSV vaccines for elderly people.

Regulators made the decisions after concluding the data showed the vaccines are safe and effective.

The vaccines are expected to be available starting in the fall.

Pfizers vaccine is projected to cost $180 to $270 per dose. GSKs is projected to cost $200 to $295 per dose.

The companies have said they expect the vaccines to eventually rake in billions of dollars.

We are grateful to the ACIP and CDC for recognising the potential of Arexvy and look forward to partnering with public health officials, healthcare professionals and payers to make it available for eligible older adults in the US before this years RSV season begins, Tom Wood, chief scientific officer at GSK, said in a statement.

Pfizer officials previously said that its vaccine will address a need to help protect older adults against the potentially serious consequences of RSV disease.

The headquarters of pharmaceutical company GlaxoSmithKline in west London on July 29, 2013. (Ben Stansall/AFP/Getty Images)

Maternal Vaccine

U.S. officials are also weighing whether to approve and recommend RSV vaccines for pregnant women.

FDA advisers in May offered support, in a divided vote, for Pfizers maternal vaccine.

The vaccine was estimated to be effective against severe lower respiratory tract illness due to RSV.

There were concerns about the vaccine causing premature births, an issue that prompted GSK to stop testing on its maternal vaccine in 2022.

Pfizer officials said that real-world testing, if the vaccine is approved, would help determine whether the vaccine causes premature births.

Jessie Zhang contributed to this report.

What topics would you like to read about? Please let us know at health@epochtimes.nyc
Parkinsons disease is a movement disorder caused by the loss of nerve cells in certain parts of the brain. According to the American Parkinsons Disease Association, more than 10 million people worldwide live with Parkinsons, including about 1 million in the United States. Parkinsons disease is especially common in people over 50. These patients often fall while walking, which may cause serious injuries. It is essential to improve the environments of Parkinsons disease patients and provide them with ways to reduce fall risks. Studies have shown that practicing tai chi can reduce the number of falls patients suffer.

Why are Parkinsons disease patients prone to falls? High muscle tension in the front torso causes the person to lean forward, throwing off balance. Parkinsonian gait, as it is called, makes a person take small and unsteady steps. In turn, patients speed up their pace, thus making them easier to fall. Moreover, people with Parkinsons disease often have eyesight problems, with double or blurred vision that makes it difficult to see the path in front of them. As the disease progresses, their bodys physical activities decrease, and their muscle strength weakens.

Apart from slowed movement, the patients brain also declines in regulating the autonomic nerves, resulting in abrupt changes in blood pressure. In addition, taking anti-Parkinsons drugs can also cause blood pressure to drop, easily causing fainting during sudden changes in posture.

How to prevent patients from falling? You can start by changing the environment and learning self-training strategies.

Environmental Aspects

Certain environments can be particularly challenging for people with Parkinsons disease. Before you can practice exercises to reduce the chances of falls, you must set yourself up for success by adjusting your environment to suit your needs.

The living environment should be bright with sufficient lighting. Rearrange the layout of furniture and facilities to avoid them getting in your way. Put objects that could trip someone, such as childrens toys, away. The floors texture should not be slippery, and always clean up spills or slick surfaces. Wear well-fitted, flat, non-slip shoes. Install anti-slip mats and handrails in bathrooms and toilets. Avoid excessive bed rails or obstacles that pose challenges for individuals with limited mobility.

Self-Training

The following steps can help you or your loved ones with Parkinsons disease reduce the risks of falls.

Exercise to keep muscles and joints flexible. Even if a patient cannot move easily, it is important to assist them in moving their joints through external force or passive range of motion exercises. This helps prevent joint stiffness and contractures, which can occur when the joints remain immobile for extended periods. Practice mindful walking. Devote your full attention to the task of walking. While walking, keep your body upright, look forward, and take controlled steps. Be aware of the size of each step, and be consistent. Be focused and avoid thinking about other things while walking. Utilize a mirror while walking to assist in self-correction. If you or the patient starts leaning to one side and does not lift the foot high enough, it will be visible in the mirror and can be promptly corrected. Keep all movements slow and steady when changing body position, such as from sitting to standing or standing to lying down. If needed, get assistance with crutches, a walker, or a wheelchair. During the early stages of Parkinsons disease, while the symptoms are milder, practicing tai chi can help train your body to maintain a better balance.

A randomized controlled clinical trial published in The New England Journal of Medicine in 2012 found that practicing tai chi can reduce patients risk of falls with initial to mid-stage Parkinsons disease. The study randomly divided 195 patients into three groups: One group practiced tai chi, one received load-bearing resistance training, and the third performed stretching exercises. Twenty-four weeks later, practicing tai chi resulted in patients having more solid postures and improved mobility and balance.

TCMs Take on Parkinsons

The cause of Parkinsons disease is not well understood. It can be caused by cerebrovascular disease, carbon monoxide poisoning, lack of essential nutrients in the brain, and other environmental or genetic factors.

From traditional Chinese medicines (TCM) perspective, the viscera are an interconnected system, and Parkinsons syndrome is closely related to the liver and kidneys. You can seek help from an experienced TCM physician to receive long-term care using Chinese medicine or acupuncture. Clinical studies have found that patients with Parkinsons disease who receive acupuncture combined with Western medicine treatments can significantly improve their symptoms compared to those who only receive Western medicine treatments.

In addition, many drugs for treating Parkinsons disease have side effects, and the interactions between different drugs can be complicated. You should consult a doctor about reducing the number of prescriptions or altering dosages.

What topics would you like to read about? Please let us know at health@epochtimes.nyc
Hong Kong Students to Study Poorly Presented National Security Questions During Summer Vacation

Student protests in Hong Kong in September this year rejected an education program devised in communist China for Hong Kong students. The students have again rebuffed an attempted friendship, or united front, overture, from China's communist cadres. (Song Xianglong/The Epoch Times)

Commentary

In early June, Hong Kongs Education Bureau (EDB) issued a circular to the primary and secondary schools about the third anniversary of the national security law. Apart from recommending relevant online games and teaching resources, it advises the use of a summer self-learning kit so that students can make good use of the summer vacation to enhance their understanding of national conditions and national security.

The kit contains 62 multiple-choice (MC) questions, and students are advised to do one a day. But does the vacation last that long? And are the questions so difficult that they can only complete one a day? I find the advice a bit weird.

I have been in the assessment field for more than 20 years, and I am naturally interested in these MC questions, as it is the first time since the opening of Hong Kong 180 years ago that students are assigned national security-related homework during their summer vacation.

Given the current situation of Maoist-styled redness over professionalism, no one will expect high-standard teaching materials from the Bureau. But it is still a shock when one confronts such jaw-dropping questions.

1. The questions contain too many trivial and unfamiliar names and facts. UNESCO heritage sites in China, the nickname of the Marco Polo Bridge, the bronze chariot found in the tomb of Emperor Qin Shi Huangfounder of the first unified Chinese empireand transferred to a new museum: how can they be related to Chinas national security?

2. The kit is a sloppy production. There are two questions on the Treaty of Nanjing, which ceded Hong Kong to Britain, with identical options. One question is set on the Greater Bay Area, which as a conception was not proposed until 2015, but asks about the 1980s. The most jaw-dropping are two questions that contain a statement and four options but without giving any valid questions.

3. Some questions are based on unsound facts. For example, one is set on the invasion of Taiwan during the reign of the Qing Emperor Kangxi for the sake of unification. However, according to the same source that EDB has quoted, Taiwan was considered a barbarian foreign territory that had remained beyond Chinese sovereignty. This question obviously adopts an interpretation that favours Chinas territorial claims.

4. The kit contains ethical problems. It is established custom that particular caution is required when setting questions on massive death and massacres to avoid stirring up unnecessary emotions. However, the kit contains the following question, On August 6, 1945, the United States dropped an atomic bomb on _____ (the answer is Hiroshima) in Japan to hasten the end of the Second World War. The War left a casualty of more than 35 million Chinese soldiers and civilians dead and property loss reaching US$600 billion.

The two atomic bombs, one in Hiroshima and one in Nagasaki, led to a death toll of 200,000, most of which were civilians. The phrasing of this question is tantamount to informing students that a massacre was necessary to effectively end the War, and Japans death toll was nothing when compared with Chinas. For a question about a human tragedy that nobody wanted, the Education Bureau masked the casualty using a vague expression dropped an atomic bomb and proceeded immediately to talk about the casualties of China, not that of Japan. I have never seen a history question more cold-blooded than this, though this question is perfectly understandable against the backdrop of Hong Kongs present patriotic discourse that hatred towards Japan is to be actively promoted, using historical issues such as the Second World War and current issues such as the Fukushima nuclear wastewater.

All-embracing, vague in expression, wrong in fact and context, and even unethicaldont think that this is a question of standard. Rather, national security is hopefully achieved by fragmentation of knowledge and fear to question problematic facts, at the sacrifice of independent and critical thinking of the next generations.

A young man from Hong Kong, who has now settled in the UK, attained excellence in History in the Hong Kong Diploma of Education Examination, Hong Kongs university admission exam. He got in touch with me through Instagram. When we chatted recently, he wrote, The liberation of Taiwan is a historical necessity. I was taken aback, as liberation (jiefang) is a communist term for invasion to achieve national unification. When asked where he learned this phrase, he said that his Chinese History textbook at Form Three (equivalent to Grade 9 in the USA) said so.

The words one learns shape ones mind. Hong Kong students have to be particularly cautious during this national security summer vacation.

Views expressed in this article are the opinions of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of The Epoch Times.
Illinois Businessman Convicted of Price-Gouging N95 Masks During Early Weeks of Pandemic

A surgical mask and an N95 mask hang on display for sale at a pharmacy during the novel coronavirus crisis in Berlin on April 22, 2020. (Sean Gallup/Getty Images)

CHICAGOA Illinois businessman has been convicted of price-gouging in connection with the sale of N95 masks during the early weeks of the COVID-19 pandemic.

Krikor Topouzian, 62, of Winnetka, was convicted Thursday in federal court in Chicago following a bench trial, the Chicago Sun-Times reported. He could face up to a year in prison when hes sentenced Oct. 10.

Topouzian owned a health supply company in Skokie, Illinois, according to prosecutors. He purchased about 80,000 N95 masks in March and April of 2020 for about $5 per mask and then sold them for about $20 per mask, prosecutors said. He boasted about making as much as $80,000 per day and $1 million in a matter of weeks, prosecutors said.

The masks has been labeled scarce materials during the pandemic as part of the Defense Production Act.

Topouzians attorneys, listed in online court records as Thomas More Leinenweber and Matthew John McQuaid, didnt immediately respond to an email Sunday seeking comment on the case.
IN-DEPTH: Attendees at Moms for Liberty Event Rank 5 Republican Presidential Candidates

Two attendees at the Moms for Liberty national summit in Philadelphia pose for photos on July 2, 2023. (Beth Brelje/The Epoch Times)

PHILADELPHIARepublican and Democrat presidential candidates were all invited to speak at the Moms for Liberty national summit in Philadelphia, organizers say, and five Republicans said yes.

The summit took place June 29 through July 2 at the Philadelphia Marriott Downtown, and the candidates who spoke were, in order of appearance, Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, former U.S. Ambassador Nikki Haley, and former President Donald Trump on June 30, and former Arkansas Gov. Asa Hutchinson and entrepreneur Vivek Ramaswamy on July 1.

The rare opportunity to see so many candidates in person, so close together, gave attendees a chance to compare them and get a feel for who they would support in the primary.

Gathered around a table, seven people who attended the conference talked politics the evening of July 1, assessing what they had seen and how they believe the Republican primary may play out.

The Epoch Times asked them to rank the five candidates from 1 to 5, with one being the candidate they are most likely to vote for if the primary were held today, then ranking their second choice and continuing down the line.

It is not a scientific poll, nor the official word from the Moms for Liberty organization, but the ranking drove an interesting conversation as participants explained their rationale.

Old School Hutchinson

While they did not agree on the top pick, six of the seven agreed on their least favored candidate of the weekend: Hutchinson.

David Warner at the Moms for Liberty national summit in Philadelphia on July 1, 2023. (Beth Brelje/The Epoch Times)

Hes too old school and he didnt have the energy others had, said one participant, a 60-year-old woman who didnt share her name for fear of losing her job. She said she didnt know Hutchinson was running until he appeared on the speaker list for the event.

Several others in the group said they had not been aware of him either, are not sure why he is running, and that he should save his money and drop out.

Hutchinson vetoed a transgender treatment bill that would have banned hormone treatment and surgery on minors, said David Warner, 36, Moms for Liberty chapter chair in Horry County, South Carolina. Gender ideology was a top topic throughout the summit. Many joined the movement because of the explosion of gender transition, sexual content, and grooming happening at schools.

Im sick and tired of the indoctrination of our children, said David Zook, 20, legislative chair of the Moms for Liberty chapter in Northumberland County, Pennsylvania. I see my generation being destroyed by todays woke culture. When you have school counselors telling kids that they are born in the wrong in body, they need to be fired and kicked out.

David Zook at the Moms for Liberty national summit in Philadelphia on July 1, 2023. (Beth Brelje/The Epoch Times)

Zook is not yet a parent, but said he is thinking of the future.

When Hutchinson, spoke with the press after his speech at the summit, he said he does have supporters and he is trying to meet the Republican National Committees Aug. 23 debate requirements of having donations from at least 40,000 unique national contributors, with at least 200 unique donors per state or territory in more than 20 states or territories.

Candidates must routinely poll above 1 percent in three national polls or two national polls and a state poll. Meeting debate requirements was one reason he attended the Moms for Liberty Summit, Hutchinson said.

Haley Says to Send a Woman

With Hutchinson ranking fifth for those around the table, former South Carolina Gov. Nikki Haley, who served as U.S. ambassador to the United Nations under Trump, was ranked fourth.

The daughter of Indian immigrants, Haley often mentions she is a brown woman who has broken some glass ceilings.

Leslie Sabamovich at the Moms for Liberty national summit in Philadelphia on July 1, 2023. (Beth Brelje/The Epoch Times)

Were not an affirmative action party, dont come to us with Im the first woman of color, said Leslie Sabamovich, 35, chair of the Moms for Liberty chapter in Shasta County, California.

While some said they appreciated Haleys work in the United Nations and that she is a good speaker, she is running with Trumps policies, such as returning to the Remain in Mexico border policy.

We have to have a new generation of leaders. We cant go back. Weve got to move forward. Weve got new problems and new solutions, Haley said in her speech at the summit. Dont complain when we get to the general election if you dont play in this primary. And personally, I think to save the country, we need to send a bad-ass Republican woman to the presidency.

The comment got enthusiastic applause, but that doesnt necessarily translate to support.

Nikki did not make herself available in our county, Warner said. The personal touch is really important.

The Top Three

The top three candidates in the table discussion were DeSantis, Trump, and Ramaswamy, in that order, but with DeSantis edging Trump out by just one ranking point.

Some had a hard time deciding who to put on top. Others were certain.

Katie Gorman at the Moms for Liberty national summit in Philadelphia on July 1, 2023. (Beth Brelje/The Epoch Times)

Katie Gorman, 40, of the Moms for Liberty chapter in Shasta County, California, believes these three will be the last three standing after the August debate, and other candidates will quickly fall away. Some may be running just to be considered for cabinet positions, she said.

Most at the table ranked Ramaswamy as their No. 3 pick, with Trump or DeSantis ranked above him.

But Betty Lopez, 75, and Allison Shipp, 41, mother and daughter from Cumberland County, Pennsylvania, ranked Ramaswamy No. 1, and they say seeing him speak in person made a difference.

He moved up for me because of his common sense and solutions, Shipp said. Hes talking about what he is going to do and how he is going to do it. He is being transparent, and if he is not, we can hold him accountable. Hes more my personality. Trump is a little rough around the edges for me.

Shipp appreciated that Ramaswamy not only said he would dissolve the U.S. Department of Education, but that he described how he would do it.

Allison Shipp at the Moms for Liberty national summit in Philadelphia on July 1, 2023. (Beth Brelje/The Epoch Times)

Ramaswamy is unproven, said the anonymous woman at the table. She ranked Trump at No. 1 and Ramaswamy at No. 4.

Id like to see Ramaswamy maybe 12 years from now, Sabamovich said. But not now. We need someone with more guts. Thats why its Trump over DeSantis.

Ramaswamy, 37, said in his speech that he and his wife thought about waiting 20 years to run, when their children are grown up.

I dont think we have 20 years. Thats the reality. If Im elected president, I will leave the office in January of 2033, Ramaswamy said. These kids will be entering high school around that time, and Ill tell you this, if we havent fixed our country by then, I think theres a grave risk that we dont have a country left. And so when we think about our responsibility as parents, it is to create the country that allows us to live our version of the American dream. This may be our last, and only chance, to pass that on to this next generation.

Just two at the table ranked Trump as their top pick. One ranked him third the rest ranked him second.

Three people ranked DeSantis for top pick, three ranked him as No. 2 with the remaining person picking DeSantis as third.

They agreed that any of the top three would be acceptable.

Betty Lopez at the Moms for Liberty national summit in Philadelphia on July 1, 2023. (Beth Brelje/The Epoch Times)

Then the table had a brief discussion that has been heard around many Republican tables.

Wouldnt it be great if Trump and DeSantis were running mates? someone said, and for a moment, folks sat and savored the thought.

Yeah. But it will never happen, came the consensus. Both candidates seem so strong that it is hard to imagine either one taking the second slot as vice president.

It will come down to if the Republicans can get their act together and pick the right candidate at the right time, Lopez said. And if one of those candidates goes independent, it is going to kill the whole process and the Democrats will win.
KAMPALA, Uganda, July 3. Eco-activists from Uganda demand compensation from France for the environmental disaster and oppose the colonial policy of this country, Trend reports.

Thus, five non-governmental organizations in France and Uganda, including the French branch of Friends of the Earth and the Uganda-based African Institute for Energy Management (AFIEGO) filed a second lawsuit against the French TotalEnergies company in connection with the construction of an oil pipeline from Uganda to Tanzania.

The subject of the claim is a violation of the rights to food and land in the territories where this infrastructure is. The company is required to pay damages as a result of these offenses, which have been going on for six years.

Moreover, the first lawsuit was filed on the subject of environmental risks and violations of the rights of those living in these territories, which was eventually rejected by the court.

TotalEnergies, which is a major shareholder in the pipeline project, denies these accusations.
ANALYSIS: Squeezed by EastWest Tension, Sequoia Capital Splits

Experts say scrutiny from Washington, distrust from Beijing led to investment giant's split

Sequoia Capital China founder Neil Shen speaks at an event of tech incubator Hong Kong X in Hong Kong on Sept. 11, 2017. (Bobby Yip/Reuters)

Americas pre-eminent investment firm is employing a member of the Chinese government.

That comment, made by tech executive Brian Costello on Steve Bannons War Room podcast on June 27, reflects the ongoing attention surrounding the recent Sequoia Capital split, following scrutiny of the firms ties to the Chinese Communist Party (CCP).

The venture-capital giant announced on June 6 that it will separate into American, Chinese, and Indian businesses. Experts believe geopolitical tension between China and the United States, as well as internal tensions over the national security issue, contributed to the firms decision.

Further, Sequoia Capital may be at the forefront of a trend.

I think that major multinational and diverse capital firms will all split, said U.S.-based economist Davy J. Wong, referring to the effect of tightened regulations as U.S.China relations continue to chill.

A Threefold Split

Sequoia Capital announced it will split into three geographic entities. The Chinese arm will be known as HongShan, the mandarin word for Redwood. The Indian and Southeast Asian unit will be known as Peak XV Partners, and the U.S. and European unit will remain as Sequoia Capital, according to a statement issued to the companys limited partners and shared on Twitter.

The firm stated that the key to the success of each regional unit was its founder-focused, local-first approach, based on its decision to establish teams with intimate understandings of their local networks and industries.

However, the statement continued, It has become increasingly complex to run a decentralized global investment business.

Sequoia Capital said it had decided to fully embrace its local-first approach. We will move to completely independent partnerships and become distinct firms with separate brands no later than March 31, 2024, it said.

Geopolitics: A One-Vote Veto

As geographical tensions have escalated, investments in Chinese private assets have dropped. According to a report by The Economist, funds that focus on such bets raised just $25 billion last year worldwide, down by 77 percent from the year before. Moreover, greater Chinas share of fundraising relative to the rest of Asia has fallen to a 15-year low, it noted.

Wong explained that investors used to ponder the impact of local policies, regulations, and protections on their investments. Now they are more focused on the relationship between China, the United States, and the EU, he said. Geopolitics is pretty much a one-vote veto.

He anticipates that multinational businesses will re-organize by seeking new balance points, or take sides in order to survive and develop between the worlds first and second economies.

According to a recent Financial Times report, fund managers are encountering requests for ex-China products. That includes the possibility of Asian allies funds that would invest in U.S.-friendly markets and provide clear insulation from Beijing-related geopolitical risk in the region.

A security guard near the front gate of the Shanghai Stock Exchange building in Shanghai, on Feb. 3, 2020. (Yifan Ding/Getty Images)

U.S.-based China commentator Zheng Xuguang told The Epoch Times that when Warren Buffett shifted his Asian portfolio from China and increased his investments in Japan, it sent a powerful message. Due to tensions over Taiwan in particular, Buffett considers Japan to be a much safer political environment than China.

Warning Signs

Li Hengqing, a China expert at the Washington-based Institute of Information and Strategy, believes geopolitical tension is not the only reason investors are withdrawing from China. He is not optimistic about Chinas economy. It has been bad, and it could last for years or even longer, he said.

While investors typically look to big companies as weathervanes, Li advised them to be on the lookout for warning signs. As an example, he cited the May visit to China of JPMorgan Chase president Jamie Dimon.

Dimon was very serious about investment in China when he was interviewed in China, but he talked about the threat of China after he returned to Washington, Li pointed out that such talk can be deceiving.

Investors should be wary of the real danger of investing in China, he said. Once the money goes in, its easily stuck.

Speaking of the investment environment in China under the CCPs rule, Zheng said Its completely subjective, theres no law, and the boundaries are very difficult to grasp.

Sequoias Shen

According to the Hurun Research Institutes September 2022 report, Sequoia Capital was the worlds most successful unicorn and gazelle investor, investing in 328 of the worlds top startups.

Co-founded by Neil Shen and Sequoia Capital in 2005, Sequoia China currently manages a scale of funds exceeding $41.4 billion, involving more than 900 investment projects and focusing on the three major areas of science and technology, consumption, and health care.

Shen is a mysterious figure whom Tencent CEO Pony Ma once praised as the most successful investor in the Chinese venture capital industry.

After working as an investment banker, the Yale-educated Shen made his entrepreneurial mark with the founding of online travel company Trip.com in 1999, followed by Chinese hotel chain Home Inns in 2002.

Like most successful Chinese businessmen, Shen has had close political ties to the CCP. He worked closely with CCP officials and in 2018 was made a member of a top CCP advisory committee, the Chinese Peoples Political Consultative Conference (CPPCC).

Banknotes of Hong Kong, the UK, China, the United States, Japan, and the EU are seen in this illustration on Jan. 21, 2016. (Jason Lee/Illustration/Reuters)

The grandson of former Chinese leader Jiang Zemin, Alvin Jiang, has been one of Shens close collaborators; Sequoia China and Jiangs Boyu Capital more than once led investments in the same Chinese start-ups.

As tensions between the United States and China ratcheted up, Sequoiaand Shenbecame the object of U.S. government scrutiny for funding Chinese technology competitors.

The situation came to a head last summer. At a time when Chinas economy was reeling from three years of zero-COVID policies, Sequoia China was able to secure a whopping $8.5 billion to fund promising Chinese companies. It tapped American investors for what The Information called possibly the biggest pool of capital ever raised by a single venture capital firm to bet on Chinese technology startups.

American investors growing district of Sequoia China was expressed in a post from independent Chinese journalist Chan Fu.

The CCP launched a financially unrestricted war against the United States through Sequoia Capital more than ten years ago, Chan said, commenting that Shen and others infiltrated the United States in a well-organized strategy, through legal circles, the military, intelligence, and Capitol Hill.

Trust Issues

A Wall Street Journal report on June 27 detailed the scrutiny from Washington that led to Sequoias split.

However, its worth noting that Sequoia Chinas Shen was also drawing unwanted attention from CCP authorities.

This January, Shen lost his CPPCC delegate seat, raising questions about his relationship with the Chinese government, according to a report in The Information.

Then, on March 17, the Shanghai Stock Exchange announced its restructured sci-tech advisory committee, under the guidance of the China Securities Regulatory Commission. Three big names in the venture capital circle, Neil Shen, Zhang Lei, and Bao Fan, were missing from the committee member list.

Around the same time, it was confirmed that investment banker Bao Fan, whose February disappearance sent a chill through the financial community, had been detained by authorities in connection with a corruption investigation.

Shen was clearly feeling the squeeze from both East and West.

Wong said Beijings investigation of its venture capital stars is to be expected. Distrust is bound to escalate when countries are in a high-tension state.

Moreover, Zheng noted, CCP leader Xi Jinping has always had trust issues with capitalism.

The Epoch Times contacted Sequoia for comment.

Song Tang, Yi Ru, and Reuters contributed to this report.
Profiles in History: An ongoing series of lesser known but significant figures who shaped our world

James Montgomery Flagg (18771960) was one of those rare naturally gifted artists who seemed to be practically born with a pencil or paintbrush as an appendage.

By the time he was 12 years old, he had sold his first illustrationnot to a family member or friendly neighborbut to Scribners St. Nicholas magazine. By the age of 14, he was regularly contributing illustrations to Life magazine. He was a staff member of Life magazines primary rival, Judge, at 16.

He was born about 10 miles northeast of Midtown Manhattan, created illustrations for various magazines, and soon perfected his craft by studying at the Art Students League of New York from 1894 to 1898, as well as art schools in London and Paris from 1898 to 1900. In 1904, he made his home in New York City, opening a freelance art studio. The demand for his work was consistent and lucrative.

One of his first works upon his return to America was the comic strip Nervy Nat, which illustrated his ability for humor and satire.

James Montgomery Flagg in 1915. United States Library of Congresss Prints and Photographs division. (Public Domain)

Flagg lived the bohemian lifestyle so typical of artists at the turn of the century. His love of fast cars and beautiful women was far more genuine than cliche, as both of those subjects found their way into many of his illustrations. His fast-moving New York City lifestyle placed him in contact with countless celebrities and socialites, such as the actor John Barrymore, the cartoonist Ham Fisher, and fellow illustrator Charles Dana Gibson, who was most known for his illustrations of beautiful women.

Among the influential, were the powerful, and possibly none more powerful than the publishing mogul William Randolph Hearst. Flagg quickly became one of Hearsts favorite illustrators.

Uncle Sam

Flaggs star continued to rise until it reached its peak in 1917 when America entered World War I. Though past the age to join the fight overseas, he and the Society of Illustrators in New York City decided to use their skills to promote the war effort. At President Woodrow Wilsons urging and Gibsons leadership, the group created the Division of Pictorial Publicity (DPP), which became part of Wilsons Committee on Public Information.

The I WANT YOU! U.S. Army poster by James Montgomery Flagg in 1917. Library of Congress.

The DPP grew to more than 300 artists, ranging from painters to cartoonists, and resulted in more than 700 war propaganda posters. Flagg himself created 46 illustrations, but one would become the most popular and memorable of the more than 700.

Using himself as the model, Flagg applied makeup, a white goatee, and a top hat to his already alluring facial features to create his poster. What resulted was the finger-pointing Uncle Sam in red, white and blue garb, stating I WANT YOU! The poster quickly became a patriotic fixture during the war years. From the summer of 1917 till November 1918, the poster was reproduced more than 4 million times. When World War II broke out two decades later, it was reproduced millions more times.

Although Flagg is hardly remembered among Americans today, his I WANT YOU! poster continues to remain an integral part of our national consciousness.
Japan Spots Chinese Amphibious Assault Ship in Western Pacific

China's sole operational aircraft carrier, the Liaoning (front), sailing with other ships during a drill at sea in this file photo. (AFP via Getty Images)

Chinas People Liberation Army Navy (PLAN) reportedly sent its amphibious assault ship to the straits between the islands of Japan on June 29, the first known instance of the warship being spotted in the Western Pacific.

Japans Ministry of Defense said that two PLAN shipsthe Type 075 amphibious assault ship Guangxi and the Type 052 destroyer Baotouwere spotted sailing through the Osumi Strait and into the Western Pacific waters on June 29.

The military detected two more PLAN ships, the Type 054A frigate Anyang and the Type 902 support ship Chaohu, sailing through Japans Amami islands into the Western Pacific waters later that day.

Japans military responded by deploying reconnaissance and fighter aircraft, as well as naval vessels, to monitor the PLAN ships movement, Taiwan News reported.

This followed the militarys previous claims that two Russian Steregushchy-class frigates were spotted sailing off the waters near Taiwan and Japans Okinawa islands between June 27 and June 30.

Taiwans Defense Ministry also reported spotting two Russian frigates near the eastern coast of Taiwan on June 27, but it did not specify the ships names or distance from Taiwans coast.

These reports came amid communist Chinas increasing assertiveness in the South China Sea, which it claims almost entirely, and growing concerns over a possible escalation in Taiwan, which the Chinese regime views as its own and has vowed to conquer by force if necessary.

Russia, which has backed Beijings stance on Taiwan, has been boosting Moscows defenses in its vast far-eastern regions bordering the Asia-Pacific, accusing the United States of expanding its presence there.

Japan Think Tank Invites Taiwan

Meanwhile, the Japan Forum for Strategic Studies has invited Taiwanese military experts to take part in tabletop war games simulating a Chinese blockade of Taiwan and a large-scale assault in the Taiwan Strait, Taiwanese news agency CNA reported.

The military simulation is expected to take place in Tokyo from July 15 to July 23. The inclusion of Taiwanese scholars in the simulation is attributed to the islands strategic location along key supply routes for Japan, according to CNA.

The USS Chung-Hoon observes a Chinese navy ship conduct what it called an unsafe Chinese maneuver in the Taiwan Strait, on June 3, 2023. The Chinese navy ship cut sharply across the path of the American destroyer, forcing the U.S. ship to slow to avoid a collision. (Mass Communication Specialist 1st Class Andre T. Richard/U.S. Navy via AP)

Japan has previously raised concerns over Chinas military threat toward Taiwan. Last year, the ministry devoted 10 pages of its annual defense report (pdf) to Taiwan, double the pages of the previous years edition, giving an extensive overview of the security situation there.

The 2022 defense report stated that conflict between the United States and China is becoming prominent over Taiwan, with Washington increasing warship transits through the Taiwan Straits while China increases its military presence near Taiwan.

Japan considers the stability surrounding Taiwan to be of paramount importance for its national security and emphasizes the need for close monitoring with a sense of urgency.

United States Must Lead

Both the United States and Japan have said they will defend Taiwan in the event of a Chinese attack. However, they havent specified how they will address the immediate internal challenges facing the Taiwanese and Japanese militaries. Those challenges include policies, capacities, and war preparedness.

Despite the threat facing them, Japan and Taiwan have not yet made sufficient efforts to collectively reinforce deterrence and improve their ability to contribute to the common defense.

Geo-strategists believe the impending situation cannot be resolved without America taking the lead in this regard.

The U.S. needs to fight against China in the front line. If the U.S. stays at the back  and asks Japan and Taiwan to fight, theyll not fight, Satoru Nagao, a non-resident research fellow with the Washington-based Hudson Institute, told The Epoch Times. For leadership to be effective, the leader fights in the front, Nagao said.

According to the current plan, Nagao said, Japan will increase its defense budget by 56 percent over the next five years. However, China has increased [its budget] more, he said. Without cooperation with other countries, Japan alone cannot prepare enough budget to counter the Chinese threat.

Venus Upadhayaya and Reuters contributed to this report.
John Robson: What Would George Washington Say About the Current State of Affairs?

Commentary

What would George Washington say? I can ask, even about modern politics, this July 4 because Americas first president was a man of such studious self-control that his answer, though furiously indignant, would be printable.

As a Canadian I should also ask what Sir John A. Macdonald would say about our southern neighbour pondering a rematch between Donald Trump and Joe Biden, and our own squalid politics. But as hes been cancelled and thrown into the Kichi Zibi, he would just gurgle. (Which some days he did anyway.)

I could ask about the Duke of Wellington since we have yet to erase Wellington Street, possibly due to ignorance of its origins. Even I only recently discovered the Iron Dukes striking combination of profundity and wit, including Being born in a stable does not make one a horse, a splendid maxim for a land of opportunity.

Which Canada once famously was, like America, before we substituted identity politics for individual merit. Wellington also cautioned, Wise people learn when they can; fools learn when they must, and when some chump greeted him with Mr. Jones, I believe, retorted, If you will believe that you will believe anything. But I gress.

A file photo of Canadas first prime minister, John A. Macdonald. (NFB/National Archives of Canada)

The victor at Waterloo was a genuine hero of staunch conservative beliefs appalled by the prospect of mob rule. (And to prove him right, a mob trashed his house over his opposition to the Reform Bill of 1832.) Were he shown the sorry state of modern politics and governance, I suspect he would claim vindication. Ditto Washington. And yes, Sir John A.

Do not suppose such people were born marble and never spat or swore. On the contrary, young Washington strove manfully to cultivate virtue, including copying out maxims like Bedew no mans face with your spittle. Its still good advice, and wed be better off governed by people who spontaneously used bedew rather than babbling, As Canadians, the principles of diversity, inclusivity, and equality is at the fabric of our values.

Washington also left an eggnog recipe that, Ive mentioned before, would have you throwing two silver dollars across both Rappahannocks while tumbling in. Cheers, Sir John. And of course, we remember Washington and Macdonald because they were exceptional. Many politicians from their eras, as any other, lack statues because it would have been an egregious waste of sandstone let alone marble. And many got statues that were.

The French writer Andre Maurois once said that In literature as in love, we are astonished at what is chosen by others. And sometimes, I might add, by ourselves. As Id also add that its true of politics too and always was. For every Washington theres a circus parade of popular windbags, mediocrities, and scoundrels.

Indeed if Washington were to drop by briefly today to favour us with his wisdom, he would warn first and foremost against electing persons of doubtful character. And then the baneful influence of partisanship. Before asking for what purpose the Revolution was fought given our current surrender of all liberties to a bloated, arbitrary state and all virtues to the pursuit of pleasure.

Wellington would say the same and so, believe it or not, would Sir John A. Though noted for the well-lubricated nature of his political manoeuvrings, he was also a devotee of limited government of a sort that gets called far-right today. But who am I to speak for Washington, you ask?

One who has read his Farewell Address, including its sentiment that no current crisis required him to cling to power by any means possible, as baffling to any modern statesperson as bedew or specious. As in resist with care the spirit of innovation upon its [Constitutional] principles, however specious the pretexts.

Likewise, he conceded that political parties in free countries are useful checks upon the administration of the Government, and serve to keep alive the spirit of Liberty. But the spirit of party  demands a uniform vigilance to prevent its bursting into a flame, lest, instead of warming, it should consume. Can Democrats who wink at Hunter Biden, or Republicans who excuse Trump, (or Canadians who cheer Trudeau, Singh, or Poilievre) look even a portrait of Washington in the face?

If so, its because they also forgot this piece of hate speech: Of all the dispositions and habits, which lead to political prosperity, Religion and Morality are indispensable supports. In vain would that man claim the tribute of Patriotism, who should labor to subvert these great pillars of human happiness  Where is the security for property, for reputation, for life, if the sense of religious obligation desert the oaths, which are the instruments of investigation in Courts of Justice? And let us with caution indulge the supposition, that morality can be maintained without religion.

So um Happy July 4, sir. Sorry about the mess.

Views expressed in this article are the opinions of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of The Epoch Times.
Leandro de Niro Rodriguez, Grandson of Robert de Niro, Dies at 19

Robert DiNiro speaks on stage during The Canva Director's Brunch at City Winery in New York on June 12, 2023. (Mike Coppola/Getty Images for 2023 Tribeca Festival)

NEW YORKLeandro De Niro Rodriguez, a grandson of Robert De Niro, has died at 19.

His mother, Drena De Niro, announced the news Monday in an Instagram post.

I dont know how to live without you but Ill try to go on and spread the love and light that you so made me feel in getting to be your mama, she wrote. You were so deeply loved and appreciated and I wish that love alone could have saved you.

Drena De Niro shared Leandro with artist Carlos Mare, who posted black squares sans caption on his Instagram accounts.

Im deeply distressed by the passing of my beloved grandson Leo. Were greatly appreciative of the condolences from everyone. We ask that we please be given privacy to grieve our loss of Leo, Robert De Niro said in a statement.

Further details were not immediately available. Messages to a representative for Drena De Niro was not immediately returned.

In response to a request to confirm a TMZ report that Leandro was found in a New York apartment, New York City police wrote that an 18-year-old male was found unconscious, unresponsive, and was pronounced deceased by EMS on scene at a Wall Street address that houses the Cipriani Club Residences. Leandro only recently turned 19, news outlets report.

The medical examiners office will determine the cause of death.

Drena De Niro, 51, is the oldest of Robert De Niros now seven children (the 79-year-old welcomed a baby earlier this year.) The actor adopted her when he married her mother, Diahnne Abbott, his first wife. Drena De Niro is also an actor, with roles in Joy, The Intern and Mozart in the Jungle, among a long list of credits.

Leandro also had acting credits to his name, with roles in three projects also featuring his mother: 2005s The Collection, and 2018s Cabaret Maxime, and A Star Is Born. In Bradley Coopers remake, the mother and son played mother and sonwife and child to Dave Chappelles character.
Mark Sidwell: The Western Experiment is the Most Exciting Adventure in Human History

Marc Sidwell, director of research at the Henry Jackson Society and senior fellow at the New Culture Forum, speaks to NTD's "British Thought Leaders" programme. (NTD)

The so-called Western experiment is the most exciting adventure in human history, a British author has claimed.

Marc Sidwell, senior fellow at The New Culture Forum, spoke to NTDs British Thought Leaders (BTL) programme about his documentary series The West: the genius of Western Civilization.

He argued that with all of its flaws, the Wests individualistic spirit has fostered innovation, democracy, and the rule of law, unlocking human potential in ways that nothing else can.

He also contended that detractors of the Wests history and culture often dont understand the Western roots of their values, and therefore are sawing at the branch that they are sitting on.

Sidwells six-part series traced the Wests libertarian tendencies to the fall of the Western Roman Empire, after which free-spirited barbarian tribes, influenced by Christianity and Greek philosophy, created a culture thats individualistic and geared towards change.

If we think about traditional civilization, were perhaps thinking about something that values stability and continuity above everything else. It might often be imperial that tends towards centralized control, Sidwell told BTL.

The West was very different, it was really born out of the fall of the Roman Empire, out of its collapse into many pieces. And so the West is somewhere that never really fell under centralized control. Its a place where ideas are debated when nations fight with one another. Its fractious and competitive, he said.

Sidwell said Christianity also cultivated in the West a deep respect for the individual rather than one central figure, moving the culture to a direction of equality and the rule of law, which in turn made it tremendously innovative [and] inventive in every area of life including science, culture, and art.

In many ways. The West has become  this great adventure in human history. And yet somehow, its now become impossible to talk about, or if its talked about, its only in apologetic terms, he said.

Social Justice Warriors Very Western

Sidwells series included an interview that disputed the claims Western countries such as Britain is systemically racist; its wealth was built upon exploitation, oppression, and slavery; and that Western citizens should feel nothing but shame for who we are.

It detailed how slavery had been a well-established practice across the ancient world, including in Africa and the Arab world, before the notorious transatlantic slave trade, during which African slaves were shipped to Europe and the New World of America and the justification of slavery became increasingly racialised.

Nigel Biggar, a theologian and Oxford University professor whose most recent book deals with the morality of colonialism, said in the documentary that while slavery made a contribution to the British economy, its false to suggest its the driving force behind the empires wealth and prosperity.

He also noted that the British Empire, which was the first to abolish slavery, had later spent a great amount of its wealth, deploying the Royal Navy to patrol the west coast of Africa to stop slave trading, successfully forcing the Ottoman Empire to ban both the Black Sea and African slave trade.

Sidwell said the so-called social justice warriors, who complain about the West, dont understand how Western they are because theyre very individualistic, theyre out being a warrior for a cause. But this is a very Western way of being.

By tearing down the Western institutions, they are sawing at the branch that they are sitting on that is very, very high up the tree in remarkable ways, he said.

A Real Danger

Speaking of forces against the Western culture, Sidwell said while the West is facing external rivals such as Russia and China, the attempt to tear it down from within is the real danger.

The battles between Western democracies and authoritarian regimes can become battles of will, he said.

Once you start to lose that confidence in yourself,  if you start to lose that battle for will, then you may start losing the larger battle for control of the world.

He also said its dangerous because internal struggles can make enemies underestimate the Wests strength, emboldening them to initiate fights.

Sidwell said the making of the series and the Wests determination to support Ukraines fight against Russian invasion convinced him that the West would win if a battle ensues.

The West is actually very strong. It has this tremendous capacity to reinvent itself. Its militarily strong, its economically strong. In a moment of test, it comes together, he said.

However, such victories would be hollow if there are fights you dont have to have, and we only have to have them if we dont project confidence and strength through an understanding that the Western experiment is the most exciting adventure in human history.
Metropolitan Police Says Dress Code has not Changed and Thin Blue Line Badge Unapproved

But Essex Police chief says symbol is allowed in his force

People take part in the Pride in London parade in Piccadilly Circus, central London on July 1, 2023. (PA)

The Metropolitan Police has confirmed the Thin Blue Line badgea monochrome union jack with a blue line running through the middle, worn to commemorate those officers who have been killed in the line of dutywas not on a list of approved insignia for police officers in London.

It comes after the Mail on Sunday reported a commander told officers policing the Pride event in central London the badges were specifically banned because of alleged links to far-right groups in the United States.

The paper said the commander told officers policing Pridean annual event attended by thousands of members of the LGBT communitythe Thin Blue Line badges and patches were not to be worn and added: These have been linked to far-right and anti-trans groups in the United States and this years Pride is focusing very much on the trans community. This is non-negotiable and supervisors are expected to ensure this is adhered to.

Chris Hobbs, a retired Metropolitan Police officer, told The Epoch Times: In my view, this was a poor decision and, having been there observing what was a brilliant event, I really dont think the wearing of the patch would even have been noticed by the revellers.

He said: If the bosses still believed it was an issue, then they should have stressed that this was a one-off or, as the storm clouds gathered, issued a clarification.

Concern ban Could Become Permanent

Even now there will be concerns that this ban could become permanent which would be another huge blow to whats left of morale, Hobbs added.

The chief constable of Essex Police, B. J. Harrington, posted a photograph of a Thin Blue Line patch on his uniform and wrote on Twitter: This is the front of my tac vest so if people want to wear it in Essex Police it is allowed. Shows pride in our nation and remembrance of those in policing who have made the ultimate sacrifice protecting and serving communities.

The former home secretary, Priti Patel, wrote on Twitter: The police deserve our gratitude and respect, rather than this nonsense  from vested interest groups imposing their false narratives and ludicrous demands on our hard-working officers.

In a statement sent by email, the Metropolitan Police spokesman told The Epoch Times: The Mets dress code policy sets out the official uniform police officers must adhere to whilst serving the public without fear or favour. The policy has not changed. The policy makes exceptions for the work of the National Police Memorial Day Trust, Help for Heroes and the Royal British Legion charities and permits officers to wear their insignia whilst on duty.

A demonstrator holds a Thin Blue Line flag in support of law enforcement at a protest in St. Paul, Minn., on June 27, 2020. (Stephen Maturen/Getty Images)

The term thin blue line refers to the idea there is a thin line between law and order and anarchy, according to former Los Angeles Police Chief Bill Parker.

In the United States, the countrys flag is turned black and white and the blue line represents one of the stripes, while in Canada the badge is a white maple leaf on a black background, with a blue line running through it.

The flag is generally viewed as pro-police but when the Black Lives Matter (BLM) protests began in 2020 it was perceived by some BLM activists as being more than just supporting law enforcement.

Symbol Banned in Los Angeles and Vancouver

In January the chief of police in Los Angeles, Michel Moore, ordered the removal of a Thin Blue Line flag from a police station lobby because of concerns about extremist groups allegedly co-opting the flags.

A week later, after an official review prompted by a complaint, the Vancouver Police Board determined the Thin Blue Line patch cannot be worn by uniformed, on-duty police officers in the Canadian city, after hearing some members of the public associated the symbol with racism and colonialism.

In November 2022, the mayor of Londons spokesperson said the Metropolitan Police Service Uniform and Appearance Board was reviewing the wearing of the badge.

They said the Thin Blue Line badge was commonly accepted as demonstrating camaraderie among police officers.

PA Media contributed to this report.
Most Americans Agree With Supreme Court Rulings on Race-Based Admissions, Debt Cancellation: Poll

Activists from the Asian American Coalition for Education protest against affirmative action outside the U.S. Supreme Court building in Washington, on June 29, 2023. (Anna Moneymaker/Getty Images)

A recent ABC News/Ipsos poll found most Americans agreed with the Supreme Courts recent rulings in three high-profile cases.

The majority of Americans, 52 percent, approved of the decision against race-based admissions in higher education, while 32 percent disapproved.

The courts ban on affirmative action-based admissions was the result of its hearing two casesoriginally filed in 2014that were brought by Students for Fair Admissions (SFFA), with the first against Harvard College, and the second against the University of North Carolina (UNC) Chapel Hill.

In the Harvard case, a points-based system was found to have been used in the admissions process where race was a specific factor, and the schools capping of the number of Asian applicants was deemed impermissible. In the UNC case, the school was found to have disadvantaged white applicants in favor of black applicants.

The majority of poll respondents believed students of all races had a fair chance of getting into the college of their choice.

When it came to white students, 67 percent of Americans believed they had a fair chance, while 22 percent believed they had an unfair advantage and 9 percent believed they had a disadvantage. Regarding black students, 47 percent thought they had a fair chance while 15 percent thought they had an unfair advantage, with 36 percent believing they had an unfair disadvantage.

Half of respondents said Hispanic students had a fair chance, while 12 percent thought they had an unfair advantage and 37 percent an unfair disadvantage. Sixty-five percent of respondents thought Asian students had a fair chance, while 11 percent thought they had an unfair advantage and 22 percent thought they had an unfair disadvantage.

Narrow Margin of Approval

When it came to Americans approval of the courts rulings on two other cases, the margins were narrower.

Forty-five percent approved of the courts decision to strike down the Biden administrations student loan debt cancellation plan, while 40 percent disapproved.

The ruling in a forced speech case that allowed a Christian website designer to refuse to provide services for a same-sex wedding website had the narrowest margin, with 43 percent approving and 42 percent disapproving.

Accusations of Partisan Politics

The courts 6-3 rulings have drawn considerable attention.

Nine justices comprise the nations highest court, with Chief Justice John Roberts and Justices Samuel Alito, Amy Coney Barrett, Neil Gorsuch, Brett Kavanaugh, and Clarence Thomas appointed by Republican presidents, and Justices Ketanji Brown Jackson, Elena Kagan, and Sonia Sotomayor appointed by Democratic presidents.

The majority of Americanssome 53 percentbelieved that, in their recent decisions, the justices were ruling on the basis of their partisan political views rather than on the basis of the law, at 33 percent.

This was an increase of 10 points from when the same question was asked in an ABC News/Ipsos poll conducted in January, 2022. Pollsters noted that respondents who agreed with the rulings were not equally split down partisan lines: the debt cancellation plan ruling received approval from 71 percent of respondents who vote Republican, and just 17 percent of those voting for Democrats.

Lawmakersand justiceshave expressed similar views.

Federal legislators have been sharply divided on the recent Supreme Court rulingsright down partisan lines. Republicans have applauded the conservative-majority courts decisions, while Democrats have accused the justices of overreach.

A Fair Chance at College Admissions, Regardless of Race

On race-based admissions, or affirmative action, Republicans referenced the equal protection clause under the 14th amendment, with some going a step further by describing the rulings as victories.

The Supreme Court made the right decision today. Colleges should not be able to discriminate against applicants based on the color of their skin, wrote Sen. Thom Tillis (R-N.C.) in a Twitter post.

Rep. Young Kim (R-Calif.) also took to Twitter, writing that Todays decision is a huge victory for students of all backgrounds. All students should be able to achieve their American dream. Race-based education policies divide our nation, undermine global competitiveness, and prevent students from reaching their full potential.

On student loan debts, Republicans broadly commended the courts decision. Democrats, however, urged President Joe Biden to use executive action to ensure student loan debt cancellation in the wake of the courts decision.

The President of the United States cannot hijack twenty-year-old emergency powers to pad the pockets of his high-earning base and make suckers out of working families who choose not to take on student debt, said Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.). The Courts decision today deals a heavy blow to Democrats distorted and outsized view of executive power.

Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) disagreed with her Republican colleague. This fight isnt over. The President has additional legal tools to cancel student debtand he should use them. This Supreme Court needs to follow the law, not make policy decisions, Warren wrote on Twitter.

Just hours after the decision, Biden announced a new student debt relief plan. The original plan had been proposed under the HEROES Actan action the court deemed beyond the scope of the executive branchs legal authority. The president said his new plan would be based on the Higher Education Act, though he did not offer specifics on Friday.

Some Supreme Court justices also made reference to partisan politics in their recent opinions, accusing their colleagues of voting in line with political preferences rather than legal interpretation.

In Chief Justice Robertss opinion on the student debt relief case, he said that reading such accusations from Supreme Court justices was disturbing.

It has become a disturbing feature of some recent opinions to criticize the decisions with which they disagree as going beyond the proper role of the judiciary, he wrote. It is important that the public not be misled either. Any such misperception would be harmful to this institution and our country.
New Cardboard Envelope Tax Scam Is Targeting Taxpayers: IRS

The Internal Revenue Service (IRS) has issued a warning to taxpayers about a new scam mail scheme that attempts to trick people into believing the government owes them money.

The new scheme involves a mailing coming in a cardboard envelope from a delivery service, the IRS said in a statement on July 3.

Inside the cardboard envelope is a letter on IRS masthead while fraudulently claiming that the notice is in relation to your unclaimed refund.

While dangling the prospect of obtaining unclaimed tax refund dollars, the letter asks taxpayers to provide sensitive personal information, including detailed photographs of drivers licenses. The data that the scammers are trying to obtain can be used by thieves to try and obtain a tax refund or other sensitive financial information.

This is just the latest in the long string of attempts by identity thieves posing as the IRS in hopes of tricking people into providing valuable personal information to steal identities and money, including tax refunds, IRS Commissioner Danny Werfel said in a statement.

Warning Signs

The letter sent out as part of the brand new scam features several telltale signs that the mailing is fraudulent.

One unusual feature, according to the IRS, is that it tries to trick people to email very detailed personal information and tells recipients the need to provide filing information for their tax refunds.

The scam letter includes a variety of warning signs, including strange punctuation and a mixture of different fonts, with some requests being awkwardly worded, such as: A Clear Phone of Your Drivers License That Clearly Displays All Four (4) Angles, Taken in a Place with Good Lighting.

The fraudulent notification then asks for additional information that is sensitive, with the wording of the request also awkward.

Youll Need to Get This to Get Your Refunds After Filing. These Must Be Given to a Filing Agent Who Will Help You Submit Your Unclaimed Property Claim. Once You Send All The Information Please Try to Be Checking Your Email for Response From The Agents Thanks, the letter reads, per the IRS.

The letter also includes some inaccurate information. Specifically, it claims that the deadline for filing tax refunds for those who have an extension to file is Oct. 17, 2023, while the correct deadline is actually Oct. 16.

These scams can come in through email, text or even in special mailings. People should be careful to watch out for red flags that clearly mark these as IRS scams, Werfel said.

In Mondays alert, the IRS also cautioned taxpayers to exercise caution when getting messages that may seem to be from acquaintances or loved ones, as these could potentially be sent from hijacked or compromised email or text accounts.

Such deceptive tactics continue to be widely used to deceive individuals and tax preparers through various fraudulent schemes. In order to avoid getting scammed, the IRS urged people to confirm the senders identity by employing an alternative means of communication.

For example, they should consider dialing a phone number they independently know to be accurate instead of using the number provided in the suspicious email or text message.

Prior Warnings

Every year, the IRS puts out a compilation of tax scams it calls the Dirty Dozen list as a warning to taxpayers. These scams target individuals and tax professionals, aiming to deceive and defraud unsuspecting victims.

One common scam on the list involves fraudulent claims for the Employee Retention Credit (ERC), where scammers target individuals by promoting large refunds associated with this credit. These promoters use misleading advertisements on the radio and the internet, providing inaccurate information about eligibility and computation of the credit. Some of these schemes are designed solely to collect personal information for the purpose of identity theft.

Another prevalent scam is phishing and smishing, where individuals receive fake communications posing as legitimate tax and financial organizations such as the IRS and state agencies. Unsolicited text messages (smishing) and emails (phishing) are used to trick recipients into divulging valuable personal and financial information, putting them at risk of identity theft. The IRS says taxpayers should note that the agency mostly communicates through regular mail and never initiates contact via email, text, or social media regarding tax bills or refunds.

Additionally, scammers try to deceive taxpayers by posing as helpful third parties offering assistance in creating IRS Online Accounts. In reality, these offers are fraudulent, as taxpayers can establish their own online accounts directly through the official IRS website. Falling victim to these scams can expose individuals to potential identity theft and other fraudulent activities.

People should be wary and avoid sharing sensitive personal data over the phone, email or social media to avoid getting caught up in these scams. And people should always remember to be wary if a tax deal sounds too good to be true, Werfel said in a statement.

The IRS says that the scams on the Dirty Dozen list highlight the importance of remaining vigilant and exercising caution when dealing with tax-related matters.

The agency urged taxpayers to verify the authenticity of any communication they receive and seek official information directly from the IRS.
The U.S. government is looking into the concept of partly blocking out the sun. Congress mandated the White House to provide a research plan for solar and other rapid climate interventions. This is according to an official White House release, congressional reports, scientific documents, and open proposals tied to scientific organizations, the World Economic Forum, and billionaire Bill Gates.

Well discuss this story and others in this episode of Crossroads.
ANKARA, Turkiye, July 3. During a meeting of Turkiye's Cabinet of Ministers, President Recep Tayyip Erdogan commented on the ongoing events in France, stating that colonialism lies at the core of these incidents, Trend reports.

Erdogan urged the French authorities to reflect upon the situation and draw lessons from it.

He expressed his hope that the events in France would not escalate into a new wave of violence, while also expressing concerns about potential injustices against the Muslim community.

Riots in France erupted following the tragic killing of a 17-year-old Algerian youth by a police officer.
Ottawa Protest Organizer Previously Met With United Front Official in China

Zhang Jian (8th L) was seen among the key organizers of a protest on Parliament Hill in Ottawa on June 24, 2023. Zhang is a director of the "Commission of Marking the 100th Anniversary of Chinese Exclusion Act" that held the protest. (The Epoch Times)

One of the directors of an organization that recently held a protest in Ottawa previously met with an official of Chinas lead agency in charge of foreign influence, the United Front Work Department (UFWD). Key organizers of the protest have rallied some people in local Chinese Canadian communities to oppose the proposed creation of a foreign agent registry in Canada.

The group behind the June 24 protest on Parliament Hill, the Commission of Marking the 100th Anniversary of Chinese Exclusion Act, is a federally incorporated not-for-profit created on May 1.

A day earlier, Zhang Jian, one of its directors, had attended a meeting of the Council of Newcomer Organizations where he encouraged the Chinese community to participate in the June 24 rally. He also attended a Zoom meeting on May 10, titled in Chinese, From the 100th Anniversary of the Chinese Exclusion Act to the e-4395 petition, to promote the parliamentary petition (e-4395) that opposes Canadas proposed foreign agent registry.

The Chinese Exclusion Act, officially called the Chinese Immigration Act, led to the prohibition of Chinese immigrants at the time.

Zhangs close contact with UFWD-linked organizations can be seen from various reports by Chinese state-run media.

The UFWD is the regimes primary foreign interference tool, according to a June 9, 2020, study by the Australian Strategic Policy Institute (ASPI). Public Safety Canada cited the study, saying that Beijing uses the UFWD to stifle criticism, infiltrate foreign political parties, diaspora communities, universities and multinational corporations.

Briefed on United Front Work

In the media reports, Zhang is often identified as president of the Xuzhou Association of Canada (XAC). The association was established in April 2019 with Zhang as founding president.

On Oct. 11, 2019, Zhang travelled to China and met with Wu Bin, then executive deputy minister of the Xuzhou municipal committee of the UFWD, according to an article posted on WeChat by the Xuzhou municipal UFWD.

The Epoch Times contacted Zhang for comment but didnt hear back.

Promoting the Communist Party

Shortly after Zhangs meeting with Wu in China, the COVID-19 pandemic broke out. Zhang quickly organized a large-scale campaign to send personal protective equipment (PPE) from Canada to China.

In what appears to be a cellphone screenshot, the XAC urged Chinese diasporas in Canada to donate to Xuzhou via e-transfer to the organizations Royal Bank of Canada account. The screenshot was included in an article posted on WeChat by the Xuzhou municipal-level branch of the Jiangsu Federation of Returned Overseas Chinese (JFROC).

The JFROC in turn is the provincial-level branch of the national All-China Federation of Returned Overseas Chinese (ACFROC), whose charter says the ACFROC is dedicated to promoting the ideologies and image of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) overseas.

The ACFROC is a UFWD agency, according to the 2020 study by ASPI.

An empty shelf in a local pharmacy that used to be stocked with masks that are now sold out, as people scramble to protect against the spread of the coronavirus that causes COVID-19, in Los Angeles, Calif., on Jan. 22, 2020. (Mark Ralston/AFP via Getty Images)

In March 2020, Zhang established an overseas Chinese community pandemic prevention mutual assistance group with the provincial JFROCs support. In a video posted on WeChat, Zhang praised the CCP, saying, Under the leadership of the Party and government, we will definitely be able to overcome this epidemic and restore our peaceful lives.

Opposing Foreign Agent Registry

Sen. Victor Oh worked with Zhangs Commission of Marking the 100th Anniversary of Chinese Exclusion Act to organize the June 24 protest on Parliament Hill. The organizers have also been making use of the occasion to promote opposition to a foreign agent registry in Canada.

Oh told the audience at a Montreal event on June 12 that he views the proposed foreign registry act as a disguised Chinese Exclusion Act and said it would be used to suppress Chinese-Canadians. He urged the attendees to sign the e-4395 petition to oppose the registry.

Shortly after The Epoch Times published a report on some residents in the Toronto Chinese community being offered a free bus ride and a $15 lunch subsidy to join the protest in Ottawa, the organizers issued instructions to the participants asking them to say that they wouldnt support or sign the petition.

One of the buses taking participants to Ottawa for a protest on Parliament Hill, preparing to leave from the Richmond Hill, Ont., area on the morning of June 24, 2023. (The Epoch Times)

At the protest, a group of demonstrators who appeared to be senior citizens were seen parading in military style on Wellington Street in front of Parliament Hill. Playing in the background was the Chinese armys military anthem, March of the Peoples Liberation Army.

The proposed foreign agent registry aims to increase transparency on those working in Canada to advance the interests of a foreign entity. In February 2022, Sen. Leo Housakos introduced Bill S-237, legislation that would establish a foreign influence registry in Canada. The bill is currently in second reading in the Senate. However, it hasnt received government support. A similar bill, C-282, was introduced in the House by former Conservative MP Kenny Chiu in April 2021.

Chiu told The Epoch Times in a previous interview that neither his nor Housakoss proposed legislation mentions China or Chinese, since a foreign influence registry isnt meant to target specific countries but to comprehensively address interference attempts by all authoritarian regimes.

Chinese Consulate

Apart from his roles at the XAC and the organization that orchestrated the Ottawa protest, Zhang is also president of the Canadian Association of Chinese Performing Arts (CACPA), a group that says it focuses on promoting Chinese culture.

Since 2018, CACPA has been hosting the annual Toronto Dragon Festival, a cultural event held in downtown Toronto.

The Chinese Consulate in Toronto is seen on April 25, 2023. (Andrew Chen/The Epoch Times)

At the 2019 festival, Chinas consul general in Toronto, Han Tao, gave a speech at the grand opening. Several other Chinese diplomats attended, including vice consul general Zhuang Yaodong and overseas Chinese affairs consul Yang Baohua. Notably, Zhuang allegedly handled security files out of the Toronto consulate, according to a February Globe and Mail report.

A few days after the festival, Zhang and his team were invited to Hans official residence for an appreciation ceremony.

In 2022, the Toronto Dragon Festival was praised as a bright and beautiful business card exhibiting Chinese culture in an article on Qiaowang, a website run by the Chinese regimes Overseas Chinese Affairs Office (OCAO).

The OCAO is part of the UFWD, according to a 2019 article published by the Jamestown Foundation on the growing role of the CCPs United Front Work. The office is believed to be engaged in espionage activities that are contrary to Canadas interests, stated a January 2022 Federal Court ruling.

The Dragon Festivals WeChat channel has posted a number of articles to promote the Ottawa protest and the e-4395 petition against the foreign agent registry. The festival is partly funded by the federal government, according to its website.
Pence Says Trump Would Have Kept US Troops in Afghanistan, Rejects Blame for Chaotic Withdrawal

President Donald Trump, (R), and Vice President Mike Pence wait on the rooftop of the Operational Building at NASA before the launch of the SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket in Cape Canaveral, Fla., on May 30, 2020. (Saul Martinez/Getty Images)

Former President Donald Trump would have kept at least a couple thousand U.S. troops in Afghanistan despite his 2020 peace agreement with the Taliban, according to former Vice President Mike Pence.

In February 2020, the Trump Administration reached a deal (pdf) with the Taliban to withdraw all U.S. troops from Afghanistan within 14 months, so long as the Taliban kept its commitment not to attack the United States or its allies.

In an interview with CBS News Face the Nation on Sunday, host Margaret Brennan noted a new assessment (pdf) by the U.S. State Department under President Joe Bidens administration, which assigned blame to both Biden and Trump for the chaotic U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan in 2021. Citing the State Department report, Brennan asked Pence to assess whether the Trump administration should accept some of the blame. Pence suggested the Trump administration would have kept troops in the country and altered course if they were still in charge during the final months of the Afghanistan withdrawal.

The blame for what happened here falls squarely on the current commander-in-chief, and under our administration I promise you that while it was the intention of the president, the former president, to pull our troops out, when the Taliban broke the deal and moved into Mazar-i-Sharif and Joe Biden did nothing, that set into motion the catastrophe that became Afghanistan, Pence replied.

Are you saying there that you would have kept the troops beyond the 2020 deal? Is that what youre saying? Brennan asked.

Look, candidly, it was always my belief that it would be prudent to keep a couple of thousand American forces there to support our efforts against terrorist elements, both in Afghanistan and in the region, and I think we ultimately would have done that, Pence said.

The United States had less than 10,000 troops in Afghanistan at the time the Trump administration struck the peace deal with the Taliban. By Trumps final days in office, official U.S. troop levels in Afghanistan fell to about 2,500. Under Trumps original timeline, the total U.S. troop withdrawal could have concluded by May 2021, but in April, Biden pushed the final withdrawal date back to Sept. 11, 2021.

Pence suggested that if the Trump administration had remained in office, the U.S. mission in Afghanistan might have played out similarly to Trumps 2019 effort to withdraw U.S. troops from Syria. As Trump attempted to wind down the U.S. military mission in Syria, fighting broke out between U.S.-allied Kurds and Turkey, which is a member of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) alliance. Pence helped broker a ceasefire between the Turkish and Kurdish forces and retained some U.S. troops in the country rather than completing a full withdrawal.

Just as the former president announced we were pulling troops out of Syria, you remember, I was sent to Turkey to negotiate a ceasefire and ultimately theres still American forces in Syria today. I think we would have landed in that place, Pence said Sunday. I will tell you with deep conviction that that disastrous withdrawal from Afghanistan would never have happened under our administration because we would have held the Taliban to the deal.

Trump and Pence Show Differing Attitudes on War

Trump has rejected blame for the outcome of the U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan. In April, a Biden administration report largely blamed the 2020 U.S.-Taliban peace deal for constraining Biden. Trump responded to that April assessment by calling Biden administration officials morons and faulted them for taking out many U.S. military forces first before reversing course and redeploying troops to assist with civilian evacuation efforts.

The 45th president has not said whether he would have kept U.S. troops in Afghanistan, but has criticized endless wars throughout his 2024 presidential campaign. In February, Trump said he would mass fire warmongers within the Deep State, the Pentagon, the state department, and the National Security industrial complex if he is reelected.

The Russia-Ukraine war has been another point of focus for Trump, who has said he wants it seen to that people on both sides of the conflict stop dying and has said he could negotiate a peace agreement between the two sides within 24 hours.

Pence, who is challenging Trump for the 2024 Republican presidential nomination, has exhibited a different attitude toward war than his former running mate. During his interview with Face the Nation, Pence said, Its absolutely essential that the United States continues to provide military support to the Ukrainian military.

Pence also faulted Biden for being too slow in providing U.S. military support for Ukraine.

[The Biden administration] promised 33 Abrams tanks back in January, now theyre telling them itll be September at the earliest, Pence said. Were still dragging our feet on giving them [F-16 fighter jets] and they were actually told that itd be January before the U.S. would approve those aircraft being released.

Biden says, Were there as long as it takes,' he added. It shouldnt take that long.

From NTD News
Pentagon to Cut Off Filmmakers Who Kowtow to China

Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin speaks to reporters at the Pentagon on Aug. 18, 2021. (Olivier Douliery/AFP via Getty Images)

The Department of Defense recently updated a media production document, declaring that it wont work with film studios that tailor their movies to meet Chinas demands.

The [Department of Defense] will not provide production assistance when there is demonstrable evidence that the production has complied or is likely to comply with a demand from the Government of the Peoples Republic of China, the Chinese Communist Party, or an entity under the direction of the Peoples Republic of China or the Chinese Communist Party to censor the content of the project in a material manner to advance the national interest of the Peoples Republic of China, a document shared with The Epoch Times (pdf) reads.

According to the document, affected media productions include feature motion pictures, episodic television programs, documentaries, and electronic games.

The update is made in accordance with a provision (Section 1257) in the Fiscal Year 2023 National Defense Authorization Act (pdf), the massive defense spending bill that President Joe Biden signed into law in December 2022.

In response to an inquiry from The Epoch Times, the Pentagon stated that the new regulation is currently in effect after the document was updated on June 28.

For decades, Hollywood and the U.S. military have had a mutually beneficial relationship, with movies being allowed to be filmed on military bases, planes, and ships, while the military gets positive portrayals of its soldierssometimes evening leading to a recruitment boom.

However, in recent years, the Chinese regime has increasingly been using the allure of its massive film market to get Hollywood studios to censor or alter movies, a trend that jeopardizes free speech while sacrificing U.S. values and principles.

Tom Cruise attends the Royal Film Performance and UK premiere of Top Gun: Maverick at Leicester Square in London on May 19, 2022. (Eamonn M. McCormack/Getty Images for Paramount Pictures)

The issue of Chinese censorship came under scrutiny with the release of Top Gun: Maverick in 2022. In the original Top Gun film, Tom Cruises character, Pete Maverick Mitchell, wears a bomber jacket with Taiwanese and Japanese flag patches. However, a trailer for the second installment showed both flags removed and replaced with emblems, drawing speculation that the move was aimed at appeasing Beijing. Eventually, the flags were reinstated in the final version of the movie.

Also in 2022, the movie Minions: The Rise of Gru got an alternate ending in China that supported the Chinese Communist Partys (CCPs) policies.

A Great Step Forward

Rep. Mark Green (R-Tenn.), chairman of the Committee on Homeland Security, issued a statement on June 30 applauding the Pentagon for its decision.

I am glad to see the Pentagon stand up against the CCPs attempt to censor and control American films. Studios that bow to an adversarial nations political agenda do not deserve support from our defense agencies, Mr. Green wrote.

American filmmaking should be about free expression and American values. It should not be used as a vehicle for CCP propaganda. The Pentagons new rule is a great step forward, but we need protections against CCP propaganda written in law.

Committee Chairman Rep. Mark Green (R-Tenn.) speaks during a House Homeland Security Committee about the U.S.Mexico border on Capitol Hill on Feb. 28, 2023. (Drew Angerer/Getty Images)

In March, Mr. Green reintroduced the Stopping Communist Regimes from Engaging in Edits Now Act (SCREEN Act) to discourage Hollywood from bowing to Beijing censorship. The Tennessee lawmaker first introduced the bill in February 2022 during the previous session of Congress.

If enacted, the legislation would prevent the federal government from helping Hollywood studios with the production of a film if the film is co-produced by a Chinese company.

It would also require Hollywood studios to provide written statements promising to not censor their films at the CCPs request before they receive any assistance from the Department of State.

Since I introduced the SCREEN Act in the 117th Congress, the Communist Chinese Party (CCP) escalated attempts to censor free speech in the United States. The CCP will not make our film industry an arm of its propaganda machine, Mr. Green wrote in a statement accompanying his legislation.

Many high budget films rely on help from the U.S. government for filming and technical assistance; with my legislation, this assistance will no longer be available if these studios kowtow to Beijing. My SCREEN Act counters the CCPs blatant attack on our values by demanding transparency and accountability.
Potential Third-Party Candidate Could Swing 2024 Election in Trumps Favor

Republican presidential candidate and former U.S. President Donald Trump speaks during the Moms for Liberty Joyful Warriors National Summit at the Philadelphia Marriott Downtown in Philadelphia on June 30, 2023. (Michael M. Santiago/Getty Images)

A nonprofit political organization with anonymous backers is seeking to field a third-party candidate for the 2024 presidential election.

This could help swing results in former President Donald Trumps favor, despite outward suggestions that the group is against the former president winning a second term.

The organization, called No Labels, is a 13-year-old nonprofit group that is establishing the groundwork to run an alternative candidate for the 2024 presidential race if the election turns into a rematch between Trump and Biden.

The organizations leadership is composed of both Republicans and Democrats.

We are preparing for the possibility of nominating a candidate. We have not yet committed to do so. We will run ONLY under the proper environmental conditions, which must be met for us to proceed, the group said on its website.

As to what those conditions are, No Labels has given a few hints.

In an interview with NBC News, Benjamin Chavis, former executive director of the NAACP and a national co-chair of No Labels, said the group will end its effort for an alternative candidate if, by next spring, polling shows that President Joe Biden is way, way out ahead of Trump.

No Labels also told Politico that it will exit the presidential race if the GOP nominates any candidate other than Trump.

The names of donors to No Labels are kept a secret, with the organization insisting that revealing the names would subject funders to potential scrutiny and intimidation, according to The Wall Street Journal. By law, No Labels is not obliged to publicly reveal its donors. The nonprofit reportedly has a budget of $70 million.

Possible Spoiler Campaign

Despite No Labels being against the former president, a candidate from the group could swing the presidential race in critical areas, potentially in favor of Trump.

The No Labels candidate could also end up creating a situation where no presidential candidate is able to secure 270 electoral votes. This would allow state delegations of the House to choose the winner of the presidential election, potentially favoring the GOP nominee.

Chavis insisted in his NBC interview that No Labels is not and will not be a spoiler in favor of Donald Trump in 2024.

A recent Harvard CAPS-Harris Poll reported by The Hill revealed that 45 percent of respondents said they would vote for Trump if the 2024 election were held at the time of the poll, a 6-point lead over the 39 percent who said they would support Biden.

Historically, third-party presidential candidates have not performed well. However, there have been occasions when such candidates were cited as having taken away votes from a popular candidate. For instance, Green Party candidate Ralph Nader is seen as having cost Democrat Al Gore his 2000 presidential election.

In the 2024 election, a name popping up as a potential presidential candidate for No Labels is Democrat Sen. Joe Manchin from West Virginia, who has said he is open to considering a run for the White House.

A third-party centrist candidate like Manchin could potentially take away considerable votes from Biden.

Groups Activity So Far

No Labels has qualified for ballots in Utah, Arizona, Colorado, and Alaska, The Wall Street Journal reported. The group intends to be qualified in 20 states by the end of the year.

Democrat supporters are wary of growing voter interest in third-party candidates because of the impact of such candidates in the 2016 and the 2020 presidential races.

In the 2016 election, 6 percent of voters cast their votes for third-party candidates, a share that fell to just 2 percent in 2020, per an analysis by NBC News. Trumps vote share remained almost the same in 2016 and 2020. However, Biden was able to secure 2 to 3 percent more votes in the 2020 election when the voting share for third-party candidates fell.

The Democrat Party is already taking steps to counter No Labels. In Arizona, the states Democrat Party filed a complaint in the Maricopa County Superior Court to protect Arizona voters from dark money interests like No Labels, whom they accuse of engaging in a shadowy strategy to gain ballot access, according to a March 20 statement.

No Labels founding chairman is former Sen. Joe Lieberman, who began his political career as a Democrat but later became an independent.

It has three national co-chairs: former Maryland Gov. Larry Hogan, a Republican; former North Carolina Gov. Pat McCrory, also a Republican; and Chavis.
Restoring the Meaning of Independence

The United States flag at the dome of the U.S. Capitol building in Washington on May 12, 2023. (Madalina Vasiliu/The Epoch Times)

Commentary

In light of the United Kingdoms 2020 decision to withdraw from the dysfunctional European Union, we might reflect on the historical context of our Independence Day and why we celebrate it.

Two hundred and forty-seven years ago, the American Colonies severed the bonds with Britain, and our forefathers crafted a visionary document they called the Declaration of Independence. The Revolutionary War was already underway, and the future of the thirteen fledgling states was precarious.

Regardless of this risky enterprise, the signatories of this great document were willing to sacrifice their fortunes, lives, and sacred honor in order to make a clean break from the abusive tyranny of King George III. After several years of fighting under the leadership of Gen. George Washington, the colonists restored their freedom by defeating the British in 1783.

A few years later in 1788, the principles of individual liberty and the rule of law were ratified in the farsighted Constitution and Bill of Rights. America was now free to chart its own course as it forged relations with other nations. The principles of inherent liberty and self-governance have helped the USA become a truly unique republic.

However, in recent years, the federal government has strayed so far from the Founders vision that at times it seems barely recognizable. Washington D.C. is being mismanaged by a class of pompous professional politicians who are more interested in the next election than they are in protecting liberty and the national interest. Deficit spending and the colossal national debt threaten the liberties, prosperity, and security that so many brave Americans have fought and died for.

In recent years, the welfare state has grown to epic proportions, thus encouraging dependency rather than individual empowerment and initiative. Trillions of dollars spent on social programs have done little to alleviate persistent economic and social problems.

Moreover, excessive regulations and high tax rates have distorted the free markets and impeded economic recovery. Workers must labor for nearly five months just to pay their yearly taxes.

Too many presidents have bypassed laws with executive orders without the consent of Congress and the courts. Yet the courts are sometimes activated to restrict our constitutional rights instead of firmly defending responsible liberty. This pattern can be puzzling to our allies who expect America to be a firewall against anarchy and tyranny.

Does this sound familiar? Although the current state of the Union might not be as perilous as the colonies were in 1776, we still face a great challenge. Do we want the government to micromanage our lives as a master, or should it serve the people who sustain its existence?

The founders ideals of civic virtues, free enterprise, limited government, personal responsibility, and the rule of law are under attack from the regulatory state. With confidence in the political elites at historic lows, perhaps Americans can tear themselves away from the ever-intrusive bureaucratic state.

If we cede too much power to the government, our pluralist democracy could be in danger. Ronald Reagan once observed, Freedom is never more than one generation away from extinction, and Thomas Jefferson noted that, The price of freedom is eternal vigilance. We must all be assertive in preserving core American values and the right of self-governance.

Indeed, the primary roles of the federal government are to protect our God-given liberties and maintain a strong national defense, period. Other functions can be administered by local and state governments, while most social problems can be resolved by businesses, families, and humanitarian organizations. We ought to bear in mind that the people make America exceptional, not the government.

To reclaim our American principles, it is crucial to study the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution. Indeed, the Declaration and Constitution ought to be required reading for politicians at all levels, especially those who represent the people in Washington, D.C.

They will find pearls of wisdom on how our founding ideals and respect for the rule of law can enhance liberty, prosperity, and national security. Happy July 4, 2023!

Views expressed in this article are the opinions of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of The Epoch Times.
Russias Medvedev Says Standoff With West to Last Decades, Ukraine Conflict Permanent

Russia's Deputy head of the Security Council Dmitry Medvedev inspects arms production as he visits the Aleksinsky Experimental Mechanical Plant in the town of Aleksin in the Tula region, Russia, on June 15, 2023. (Sputnik/Yekaterina Shtukina/Pool via Reuters)

LONDONDmitry Medvedev, Russias former president, has warned that Moscows confrontation with the West will last decades and that its conflict with Ukraine could become permanent.

In an article for the governments Rossiiskaya Gazeta newspaper, Medvedev said tensions between Russia and the West were much worse than during the 1962 Cuban missile crisis when the world teetered on the edge of a nuclear conflagration.

A nuclear war was quite probable but was unlikely to have any winners, said Medvedev, who has repeatedly said Western support for Ukraine increases the chances of nuclear conflict.

He cited sharp differences over Ukraine, the direction of humankind, and the way the world order was structured.

One thing that politicians of all stripes do not like to admit: such an Apocalypse is not only possible, but also quite probable, wrote Medvedev.

The United States, Ukraines biggest financial and military backer, has said it does not want to engage in a direct conflict with Russia to avoid the risk of a nuclear war.

Medvedev said Moscow was still committed to stopping Ukraine join NATO.

Our goal is simpleto eliminate the threat of Ukraines membership in NATO. And we will achieve it. One way or another, he said.

Given NATOs rule about not admitting countries entangled in territorial conflicts, he said the conflict with Ukraine could become permanent given its existential nature for Moscow.

The only way to de-escalate tensions between Russia and the West was to enter into tough negotiations, he said.

The confrontation will be very long and it is too late to tame the recalcitrants (i.e. us), said Medvedev. The confrontation will last for decades.
SCOTUS Affirmative Action Ruling Shows Americans Should Be Treated Based on Character and Personal Responsibility, Not Race: Advocates

The U.S. Supreme Courts recent ruling to strike down race-based admissions policies at U.S. collegesalso referred to as affirmative action policiesshows that Americans should be treated based on their character and their personal responsibility, not their race, according to two advocates who praised the decision.

Im elated. Theres no other way of saying it, its a big decision, Kenny Xu, a board member of Students for Fair Admissions, told American Thought Leaders in a recent interview.

This means that Americans can rest easy knowing that they will be treated based on the content of their character, not the color of their skin at a critical time of their life, which is college admissions, Xu said.

At least they will know that their race cannot play a factor for or against them, which is something they cant control.

Students for Fair Admissions is the plaintiff that the Supreme Court ruled in favor of in the cases against Harvard and the University of North Carolina. According to its website, the nonprofit group is comprised of people who believe that racial classifications and preferences in college admissions are unfair, unnecessary, and unconstitutional.

Kenny Xu, author of An Inconvenient Minority, in Princeton, New Jersey, on July 18, 2021. (Bao Qiu/The Epoch Times)

Response to Harvards Statement

When asked about Harvards statement, which said it would comply with the high courts rulingincluding that colleges and universities may consider in admissions decisions an applicants discussion of how race affected his or her life, be it through discrimination, inspiration, or otherwise'Xu said he believes Harvards statement is totally arrogant and is based on a misreading of the text.

If you actually look at the decision, Justice John Roberts specifically wrote [that] colleges cannot use race directly or indirectly in their decision [to admit students], Xu said. [Roberts] even said [that] an individual can write about his or her race or her experience with racial discrimination, but a college cannot use that experience as a justification for preferential treatment over another person who chose not to bring about the racial discrimination  So whatever Harvard chooses to do, they have to comply with the courts ruling.

Xu added: [Justice] Roberts ruled that you have to judge a persons experience as a individual. That means that [if] they write about the racial discrimination, fine, but you have to judge it on the quality of their writing. You cannot say, They wrote about the racial discrimination, therefore, Im going to give them a bonus; you cannot do that. If Harvard tries to do that, theyre in the wrong, and they should be sued for that.

The entrance to Harvard Law School in Cambridge, Massachusetts, on June 29, 2023. (Joseph Prezioso/AFP via Getty Images)

Ruling Ends Presumption that Black Americans Are Intellectually Inferior: Former Civil Rights Activist

Bob Woodsona former civil rights activist and the founder and president of the Woodson Center, a nonprofit dedicated to help residents of low-income neighborhoodsshared with American Thought Leaders about why he felt absolutely delighted with the courts ruling.

[The ruling] ends the presumption that black America is intellectually inferior, and therefore can only achieve and advance if special privileges are extended to us, he said. Im really glad that it ends this presumption of incompetence and it will go back to the whole issue of equality of opportunity.

Affirmative action is part of the whole race grievance narrative. The assumption is that in order for blacks to achieve, then we must dumb down the entry standards, he said.

Contrary to the intention that affirmative action would help black Americans, it has generally achieved the opposite, Woodson said. Whenever you generalize about a group and then try to apply remedies to that group, it always helps those at the top at the expense of those at the bottom, he said.

Historically, set-aside government programs, which require an allocation of positions to be reserved for underrepresented groups, have taken the place of discipline and hard work, which has harmed black communities, Woodson said.

Bob Woodson, the founder and president of the Woodson Center, in Washington, on Feb. 18, 2020. (Samira Bouaou/Epoch Times)

Personal Responsibility

When asked about how universities now appear to suggest they may try to work around the courts ruling to still apply affirmative action policies, Woodson said doing so would be akin to continuing to injure with the helping hand.

I think old fashioned bigotry is healthier than a patronizing hand of whites who think they can help blacks, by doing things for them that they refuse to do for themselves, he said.

I would rather be hated than patronized. Bigotry is external, patronization is internal. There are two ways that you can prevent someone from competing. The first one is to deny them by law, which we used to do under Jim Crow. The latter is much more insidious, is to tell people because of your history, you dont have to compete, all you got to do is show up, you dont have to work hard. In fact, we are not permitted to discuss personal responsibility.

Oh, youre blaming the victimbut it was personal responsibility, hard work, our religious faith, our commitment to the nuclear family; all of these serve to protect the black community during the times of slavery, and Jim Crow, Woodson said.

And yet, in the last 50 years, weve got more blacks killing other blacks in one year than the Klan killed in 50 years. Tell me how affirmative action and these kinds of patronizing programs are going to address that crisis?

In place of affirmative action policies, Woodson shared examples of community groups that have been working to provide disadvantaged Americans, including black Americans, with mentoring and opportunities, and suggested that universities and colleges could look into supporting or starting similar initiatives to help build resilience and perseverance for those who are disadvantaged.

People walk on the campus of the University of North Carolina Chapel Hill in Chapel Hill, North Carolina, on June 29, 2023. The U.S. Supreme Court ruled that race-based admission policies used by Harvard and the University of North Carolina violate the Constitution. (Eros Hoagland/Getty Images)

Meritocracy

Xu said he opposes both affirmative action as well as legacy admissions, which is the practice of favoring applicants with family ties to alumni. I oppose any kind of process or system that tries to degrade us from the principle of merit that our country was built upon, were founded upon excellence.

Thats what the American dream is. Many immigrants come to this country believing that they will not be judged based on their background but on the content of their character, not the color of their skinthat is a universal Maxim with which we should be striving to.

Based on data from the Students for Fair Admissions, an Asian American has to score 273 points higher on the SATs to have a similar chance of admission as a black person, which means that the standard has been lowered for black applicants, Xu said.

The Supreme Courts ruling will help black students, he added. I think people are really up in arms about this: Its going to lower the percentage of black kids at Harvard. Okay, so you go to a school in which youre better matched academically, where you can actually graduate at the top 25 percent, or you dont have to worry about being called an affirmative action graduate.

Sometimes thats a better fit  affirmative action, all it does is it mismatches kids into places where[as] they could thrive in another school. Its not about the prestige of your school. Most educators, even on the left, know that its about what you do with it.

Xu spoke in strong favor of meritocracy. Meritocracy is an idea that the left inherently dislikes because it implies unequal outcomes are justified, but its the way humanity and human nature works.

Asians choose to focus on academics, some people choose to focus on sports, some people choose to focus on art, some people choose to focus on business. But you should allow people to receive the rewards in their efforts wherever it goes. Thats what meritocracy is, he said.
SCOTUS Wakes Up

Activists from the Asian American Coalition for Education protest against affirmative action outside the U.S. Supreme Court building in Washington on June 29, 2023. (Anna Moneymaker/Getty Images)

Commentary

The Supreme Court of the United States (SCOTUS) hasnt given conservatives a straight flush.

Chief Justice John Roberts and Justice Brett Kavanaugh broke ranks with their conservative confreres in the so-called voter rights case in Alabama.

I say so-called voter rights case because, in fact, it had nothing to do with the law, which stipulates that everyone, black or white, be granted free access to the ballot.

No, that was a mere cover for the real purpose of the case, which was to find a way to create more Democratic districts.

The court stated that there had to be more black districts constructed.

But a black district is, as a matter of fact, a Democratic one. QED.

Lets draw a veil over that unfortunate decision and celebrate two more recent ones: the (pardon) so-called affirmative action case and the student loan case.

Lets take the second one first.

The easiest way to understand what just happened is to begin by understanding what the word loan means.

To do that, you also have to understand what the word debt means.

This is a harder one for Americans because it has been some years since they have had to come face to face with a real, live debt.

What I mean is this: In the real world, when someone lends you money, you incur a debt.

The cheerful, pink-unicorn aspect of that event comes at the beginning.

The money you snag looks exactly like unencumbered cash.

You can do whatever you like with it: buy a car, take a trip, go to college.

Theres one important difference between debt and cash, however.

If you happen to have a sock full of cash, you can spend it however you like and thats the end of the story.

Loans come with a concluding chapter, which is often more melancholy than the opening chapters.

Because with a loan, in the end, you have to pay it back.

This used to be widely understood.

At some point along the way to utopia, general appreciation of this unpleasant fact failed.

There are doubtless deep cultural reasons for this failure, but in the present context, the relevant issue is that thousands upon thousands of young people incurred debts that they didnt want to pay.

They wanted you, the taxpayer, to pay instead.

President Joe Biden thought this was a good idea.

Free money is always a vote-getter, even if it unfairly penalizes taxpayers.

But SCOTUS didnt think that the president had the authority to shift the burden of $1 trillion in indebtedness from one part of the population to another.

(You keep hearing about debt cancellation and student loan forgiveness, but the burden of debt isnt canceled, its merely shifted.)

This decision is good in about 57 different ways.

Its fair to all those who took out student loans and acted like responsible adults by paying them back.

More generally, its a small nudge in the direction of fiscal responsibility.

Perhaps itll even prompt more people to ask why the federal government should be in the business of providing or subsidizing student loans at all.

That last thought is a big one that we can leave for another day.

For now, lets return to my second so-called, so-called affirmative action.

What it really is, as any honest observer will admit, is racial and sexual discrimination proceeding under the cover of a merely rhetorical anti-discrimination.

Indeed, the history of affirmative action is a history of great ingenuity expended to evade the announced purpose of the practice: fostering equality.

Time and again, the rhetoric of equality is deployed as a smokescreen to pursue ends that are patently inequitable.

In the beginning, affirmative action was undertaken in the name of equality.

But, as always seems to happen, it soon fell prey to the Orwellian logic by which the principle that all animals are equal gives birth to the transformative if contradictory codicil: but some animals are more equal than others.

Affirmative action is Orwellian in a linguistic sense, too, since what announces itself as an initiative to promote equality winds up enforcing discrimination precisely on the grounds that it was meant to overcome.

Thus, were treated to the delicious, although alarming, contradiction of college applications that declare their commitment to evaluate candidates without regard to race, gender, religion, ethnicity, or national origin on page one and then helpfully inform you on page two that its to your advantage to mention if you belong to any of the following designated victim groups.

The whole history of affirmative action is instinct with that irony.

The original effort to redress legitimate grievancesgrievances embodied, for instance, in the discriminatory practices of Jim Crowhas mutated into new forms of discrimination.

In 1941, President Franklin Roosevelt established the Fair Employment Practice Committee because blacks were openly barred from wartime factory jobs.

But what began as President John F. Kennedys executive order in 1961 directing government contractors to take affirmative action to assure that people be hired without regard for sex, race, creed, color, and so forth has resulted in the creation of vast bureaucracies dedicated to discovering, hiring, and advancing people chiefly on the basis of those qualities.

White is black, freedom is slavery, without regard comes to mean with regard for little else.

Moreover, its worth stressing, the inequities are double-sided.

Not only are blacks and Hispanics given preferential treatment, but also whites and (especially) Americans of Asian descent are actively discriminated against.

At Harvard, as John Yoo and Wen Fa showed in a recent essay, Asian American applicants have lower acceptance rates than white students at nearly every academic decile.

Think about this: An Asian American applicant in the fourth-lowest decile has less than a 1 percent chance of being admitted. But an African American applicant in the fourth-lowest decile has a 12.8 percent chance of being admitted.

Why? Because theyre Asian American. Theres no other reason.

In this respect, Asians are the new Jews, excluded on account of their ethnicity and subject to unofficial quotas wherever official quotas are banned.

In some ways, our situation is a cautionary tale about the dangers of ingenious legal hermeneutics fueled by progressive sentimentality and expansionist government bureaucracy (is there any other kind?).

After all, the Leviathan of affirmative action and what has been aptly called the racial spoils system and the diversity conglomerate it supports have emerged from a small cluster of legal imperatives.

The 14th and 15th Amendments to the Constitution provide for due process and equal protection and stipulate that one is equal under the law and entitled to vote regardless of ones skin color.

The Civil Rights and Voting Rights Acts from the 1960s are essentially glosses or restatements or extensions of those amendments.

The road from those noble and straightforward desideratadont discriminate against people because of their race or national originto such monstrosities as the smorgasbord of Minority-Serving Institutions programs is clear and direct.

The covert, or semi-covert, political agenda is only too obvious.

Blacks vote overwhelminglymore than 90 percentfor Democrats.

Hence, as I mentioned above, the effort to gerrymander on the basis of race is simply to use the imperatives of the Voting Rights Act as a cover for creating Democrat-controlled fiefdoms.

The Supreme Court just knocked a hole in this.

Naturally, the left is screaming, vowing that itll find ways around the law.

I have no doubt that theyll be at least partly successful.

But people keep telling me that the pendulum of racial grievance-mongering must eventually start to swing back toward normality.

The Court has just given it a big push in that direction.

Views expressed in this article are the opinions of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of The Epoch Times.
State Senate Republicans Try to Force Vote on Election Chiefs Appointment

News Analysis

While Democrats were still celebrating the success of their parliamentary move to keep embattled Wisconsin Elections Commission (WEC) Administrator Meagan Wolfe on the job, the GOP-controlled Senate did some maneuvering of its own to get rid of her.

The WEC called a special meeting for June 27 for the sole purpose of reappointing Wolfe to another four-year term, which would keep her in office during the 2024 presidential election.

At the meeting, all but one of the six-member commission, composed of three Republicans and three Democrats, praised Wolfe for the job she had done running Wisconsin elections since she was appointed in 2018. The five said they wanted her to stay on.

Yet when it came time to vote on a motion to reappoint her, only the three Republican members voted aye while the three Democrats abstained. The motion failed because four affirmative votes were required to nominate Wolfe.

Relying on a quirk in Wisconsin law, the Democrat commissioners refused to vote for Wolfe for fear her appointment would not be approved in a Senate controlled by Republicans 22 to 11.

For nearly three years, senators have been bombarded with citizen complaints about the WECs administration of the 2020 and 2022 elections under Wolfes leadership.

A number of senators and representatives have publicly voiced their opposition to reappointing Wolfe, with some, like State Rep. Janel Brandtjen (R-Menomonee Falls), flat-out declaring that she doesnt have the votes to be reappointed.

Wolfes critics maintain that her past decisions and actions have consistently favored Democrats and played a role in Joe Biden defeating Donald Trump by about one percent in 2020.

The abstainers on the commission contend that, even though Wolfes term would expire on July 1, if no action was taken by the WEC to appoint her or even somebody else, there would be no vacancy to fill, and therefore they did not have the authority to vote on the motion.

The reasoning behind the three abstainers parliamentary ploy is, if there is no vacancy, there can be no appointment by WEC. If there is no appointee for the Senate to confirm or not confirm, Wolfe stays in place.

After the meeting adjourned, Commissioner Ann Jacobs, a Democrat, said in an online posting, Delighted to report that Wisc. Elections Administrator Meagan Wolfe will retain her position as administrator as we go into the 2024 election cycle. Wisconsin will be well-served by her professionalism and expertise!

Democrats Want Wolfe to Run Next Presidential Election

By the WECs Democrat members choosing not to vote to fill the position, they believe they ensured Wolfe remains in office, while the Republican members voting for her effectively greased the skids for her rejection and departure.

The Democrats said their tactic was based on a 2022 Wisconsin Supreme Court decision, Kaul v. Prehn, in which the Court held that, in the case of a gubernatorial appointee, the expiration of the incumbents term does not constitute a vacancy.

The ruling said the incumbent could legally stay on, or hold over, in the position until an appointee is confirmed by the Senate.

By preventing the Senate from holding a confirmation vote, Wolfe could theoretically remain in office indefinitelya prospect many Republicans oppose, saying the convoluted process is undemocratic and undermines the will of the people as expressed through their elected representatives.

The administrator of the Wisconsin Elections Commission is not appointed by the governor but is appointed by the commission with the advice and consent of the Senate.

GOP Senators Play Hardball

In a surprise parliamentary maneuver designed to reinforce the advice and consent prerogatives of the Senate, near the close of the days session on June 28, Senate Majority Leader Devin LeMahieu (R-Oostburg) put forward a resolution considering Wolfe as officially nominated.

Senate Resolution 3 of 2023 states that pursuant to Senate Rule 22(3), all nominations for appointees, if they have not otherwise been submitted to the Senate, shall be considered to have been submitted to the Senate on the 5th day after the individual is nominated for appointment.

The resolution points out that back in 2018, Wolfe was in fact unanimously nominated by the WEC and confirmed by the Senate in 2019 to serve a four-year term expiring on July 1, 2023.

The Republican theory goes that since Wolfe was once duly nominated and confirmed, and she remains a hold-over incumbent because the expiration of her term does not create a vacancy, she is regarded as the de facto nominee.

By passing the resolution, Senate Republicans declared that Wolfes nomination is before the body for consideration.

A general view of the Wisconsin State Capitol in Madison, Wis., on March 6, 2011. (Justin Sullivan/Getty Images)

Legislative Precedent

The Wisconsin State Senate has been down this road before with the WEC, as the resolution notes in pertinent part:

And whereas the Wisconsin Elections Commission has a history of not submitting the nomination of its administrator to the Senate, having failed in 2016 to notify the Senate of the nomination of Michael Haas as administrator, which eventually required the Senate to deem Michael Haas nominated in 2018, and vote to reject his nomination; and

Whereas the Wisconsin Elections Commission has not submitted to the Senate the nomination of Meagan Wolfe to serve as administrator for a term of office expiring on July 1, 2027, even though a unanimous number of commissioners voting voted on June 27, 2023, to renominate her as administrator 

The Wisconsin state Senate considers Meagan Wolfe to have been nominated by the Wisconsin Elections Commission to serve as administrator for a term of office expiring on July 1, 2027.

The resolution mandates the president of the Senate to refer Wolfes nomination to the appropriate standing committee.

The committee must then conduct a public hearing, take a vote, and then refer the matter to the full Senate, which is expected to reject her nomination.

The resolution passed without a single Democrat vote. No date has been set for the hearing.

If Wolfes nomination is turned down by the Senate, the WEC would have 45 days to select a new nominee. If a new appointee is not recommended by the commission within that time, the Republican-controlled Senate Committee on Legislative Organization would appoint an interim administrator who would serve for no more than one year; after which, the twisted process would start all over again.
Supreme Court Wont Disturb Ruling Recognizing Gender Dysphoria Under Disability Law

(L-R) Supreme Court associate justices Elena Kagan, Clarence Thomas, Samuel Alito and Chief Justice John Roberts arrive for services for former President George H.W. Bush at the U.S. Capitol in Washington, on Dec. 3, 2018. (Pablo Martinez Monsivais/AP Photo)

Over the objections of two conservative justices, the Supreme Court decided last week not to take up a case about whether individuals suffering from gender dysphoria are protected by the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA).

The June 30 decision to deny the petition for certiorari, or review, in Kincaid v. Williams (court file 22-633), is important because it is being interpreted as a victory for the transgender rights movement.

The order came the same day the court issued the last of 58 opinions in cases argued in the term that began in October 2022. Its new term begins with oral arguments on the first Monday in October.

For a case to move forward, at least four of the nine justices have to vote to grant the petition. In the new unsigned order in the case the court indicated the petition was dismissed but did not disclose the results of the vote taken by the justices.

In an opinion (pdf) dissenting from the denial of the petition, Justice Samuel Alito wrote that the nations highest court should have accepted the case to resolve an issue of great national importance that calls out for prompt review. Justice Clarence Thomas joined Alitos dissent.

The new order leaves in place a U.S. Court of Appeals for the 4th Circuit ruling in favor of Kesha Williams, a former detainee in Fairfax County, Virginia, who was born male and now identifies as female. Williamss lawsuit against the county is still ongoing.

The 4th Circuit ruling covers only the states in that circuit: Maryland, North Carolina, South Carolina, West Virginia, and Virginia.

Williams suffers from gender dysphoria, which can be defined as the intense discomfort or distress experienced by a person whose sex at birth is at odds with the persons so-called gender identity.

Williams claimed he was mistreated and discriminated against while in the custody of the county, which failed to take his wish to have his purported female identity recognized.

In 2020, the Supreme Court embraced the concept of gender identity, which critics say is a social malaise that has been politicized, with solutions that havent been based on rigorous science. The court ruled 63 in Bostock v. Clayton County that employees cannot be fired from their jobs because of discrimination over their gender identity or sexual orientation.

Gender Identity Disorder

The story of Williams, the respondent, goes back to 2018 when he was incarcerated for six months by Fairfax County in facilities overseen by the petitioner, Sheriff Stacey Kincaid, a Democrat.

In the beginning, Williams was placed in womens housing but was later moved to mens housing. Williams had reportedly been taking hormone treatments for 15 years but hadnt had genital surgery.

Williams claimed his prescription hormone medication was taken away and that he was transferred to mens housing after staffers refused to go along with his wish to be treated as a woman. He claimed his medical treatment was delayed and that he was harassed by fellow inmates and guards. Williams also claimed his requests to shower in private and have body searches performed by female deputies were denied, a SCOTUSblog summary stated.

A divided 4th Circuit found that the definition of gender identity disorder in use when the ADA was enacted has since been removed from the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders by the American Psychiatric Association.

The appeals court held that the statute should be interpreted to cover gender dysphoria in order to avoid a serious constitutional question that would arise if the law were read to discriminate against transgender people as a class, implicating the Equal Protection Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment.

Circuit Judge Marvin Quattlebaum, who was appointed by then-President Donald Trump, dissented in part, writing that gender dysphoria was covered under the phrase gender identity disorders in the act. To hold otherwise would give groups such as the American Psychiatric Association the power to effectively modify statutes passed by Congress and signed into law by the President. That cannot be right.

In his dissent, Alito wrote that he found several aspects of the lower courts reasoning troubling.

The case raises a host of important and sensitive questions regarding such matters as participation in womens and girls sports, access to single-sex restrooms and housing, the use of traditional pronouns, and the administration of sex reassignment therapy (both the performance of surgery and the administration of hormones) by physicians and at hospitals that object to such treatment on religious or moral grounds, the justice wrote.

Without full briefing and argument, I would not take a firm view on the proper interpretation of the ADA, let alone on the merits of Williamss particular case. But several aspects of the Fourth Circuits reasoning are troubling.

For example, the circuit courts narrow focus on the phrase gender dysphoria does not engage with the broad brush used by Congress, which barred application of the ADA not only to transsexualism and gender identity disorders not resulting from physical impairments, but also to other sexual behavior disorders.

Kincaids attorney, Alexander Francuzenko of Cook Craig and Francuzenko in Fairfax, Virginia; and Williamss attorney, Katherine Lynn Herrmann of the Erlich Law Office in Arlington, Virginia, both failed to respond by press time to a request by The Epoch Times for comment.

But Herrmann told The Associated Press that she was pleased that her clients litigation will continue.

Alitos dissent understates the seriousness of gender dysphoria and the importance of ensuring the protections of the ADA apply equally to everyone, regardless of their gender identity.
The Geneva Watch Tour describes the citys horological roots and explains how the city achieved its current unrivaled role on the watchmaking planet

The tour takes visitors past Geneva's historic watchmaking monuments and the hundreds of watch boutiques that make the world's watch capital tick. The Geneva Watch Tour describes the citys horological roots and provides a better understanding of how the city achieved its current unrivaled role on the watchmaking planet. The concept of the Geneva Watch Tour has been taken up by the City of Geneva and many other entities promoting watchmaking in Geneva. As partners of GMT and the Geneva Watch Tour, these hotels offer an ideal starting point for discovering the city.

Hotel de la Cigogne

On Place Longemalle, the Hotel de la Cigogne offers an elegant terrace in the heart of the city. Whether its for a lunch break or a moment of relaxation under the shade of a parasol, or for a delightful gourmet evening in the sweetness of a summer night, the menu offers a selection of refined dishes to accompany with a cocktail or a glass of champagne, not to mention the delicious wines recommended by the sommelier. The Hotel de la Cigogne terrace is the must-visit place for a peaceful break, an after-work drink, a gathering with friends, or a romantic tete-a-tete.

Hotel Longemalle

A chic and exclusive boutique hotel, the Hotel Longemalle is carefully furnished in a welcoming designer style, making for a vibrant environment. Within this blend of noble materials, Art Deco lighting and contemporary paintings, special attention has been paid to each detail, resulting in wonderful and trendy spaces bathed in natural light. Watch collectors naturally fall for its lively colors, contemporary furnishings, its chic and relaxed spirit, as well as its soothing atmosphere. Following its complete renovation in 2019, come and discover the elegant Hotel Longemalle. The hotel offers guests the chance to experience something new in a remarkable setting next to the famous Flower Clock.

Hotel Ritz-Carlton Hotel de la Paix

Located on the iconic shores of Lake Geneva, against the timeless backdrop of Mont Blanc, The Ritz-Carlton Hotel de la Paix, Geneva, enjoys a prestigious heritage spanning over 150 years. Renowned for its bespoke service, uncompromising elegance and rich culinary tradition, the hotel has undergone thoughtful renovations to embark on a new chapter in its ever-evolving story.

Deeply embedded in Geneva's cultural and social fabric, Hotel de la Paix has witnessed numerous historic world events since its opening in 1865. With just 74 guestrooms, its boutique size and its prime lakeside location just steps away from the Old Town, it has played host to unforgettable gatherings  from the Alabama Claims dinner in 1872 to a constant stream of distinguished guests through the 19th, 20th and 21st centuries.

Hotel Metropole Geneve and its Winter Met Rooftop

Modern winter decor and delicious, refined tapas are an invitation to rediscover the MET Rooftop Lounge during the winter season. On the fifth floor of the Hotel Metropole, sheltered by the wood-pellet-heated pergola, the polar-white decor immerses guests in a unique atmosphere. The view is dazzling: the immensity of the lake and the Jet d'eau unfold before you, while the city lights accentuate the magic of this place. The menu features mixologists' creations, gins from around the world and winter classics such as the deliciously regressive house-signature hot chocolate.

InterContinental Hotel

With a guestbook signed by the likes of Sophia Loren, Martin Luther King and Joe Biden, and an exceptional location overlooking Geneva, the InterContinental has stood the test of time as a unique and timeless establishment, committed to preserving its memory and soul. It is set in an oasis of calm and greenery, overlooking Genevas diplomatic district. The 18-storey contemporary building features 333 thoughtfully decorated rooms, including 56 elegant suites designed by Tony Chi, a Spa Cinq Mondes and an iconic outdoor swimming pool  the largest of any five-star hotel in the city.
Ten Years After Megantic, Experts Say Stricter Rules, Tougher Enforcement Needed

The downtown core of Lac Megantic, Quebec is shown on June 22, 2023. (The canadian Press/Christinne Muschi)

Kathy Fox still remembers the looks on the faces of the grieving family members on the morning in August 2014, as she tried to explain how the Lac-Megantic rail disaster had happened.

You can imagine the grief, the shock, the anger, all the emotions, Fox recalled.

It was a hard day.

The Transportation Safety Board chair was in the school auditorium to deliver the agencys report on the tragedyand the failures that allowed an unattended train carrying 72 tankers full of crude oil to careen off the rails at over 100 km/h, bursting into flames in the heart of the lakeside community on July 6, 2013.

Forty-seven people were killed in the inferno, creating the worst rail accident in modern Canadian history.

The fire, which burned for two days before finally being quelled by the efforts of some thousand firefighters, wiped out much of the centre of the 6,000-person town.

A slew of investigations, court cases, reports and regulatory changes followed over the succeeding decade.

The government banned one-person crews on trains hauling hazardous cargo and set new standards to make tank cars carrying flammable liquids sturdier. It also established stricter accident liability rules, imposed lower speed limits in rural and urban areas and gave Transport Canada stronger enforcement powers.

The department boosted the number of rail safety inspectors to 155 in 2022 from 107 in 2013, said Nadine Ramadan, the transport ministers spokeswoman, in an email. It has also quadrupled the tally of inspectors of dangerous goods to 188 from 30.

The safety record

Despite new penalties and tougher rules around safety management, experts say the current regime is far from sufficient to ensure railways steer clear of another catastrophe.

Have they made the improvements necessary to prevent another Megantic? My answer to that is no, said Bruce Campbell, an adjunct professor in environmental studies at Torontos York University and author of The Lac-Megantic Rail Disaster: Public Betrayal, Justice Denied.

Safety statistics dont paint an especially reassuring picture.

Incidents involving uncontrolled movement of rail equipment, which is what caused the crash in Lac-Megantic, more than doubled to 78 between 2010 and 2019 before dropping off due to a pandemic-related dip in traffic, Fox said.

Collisions and derailments on main trackswhich the TSB notes can have the highest severity of all rail accidentshit three accidents per million train-miles last year.

Thats 25 percent higher than the 10-year average, Fox said.

Meanwhile, the volume of dangerous goods on the tracks rose 70 percent between 2011 and 2019, according to the governments rail traffic database.

Bigger numbers mean greater risk, said Mark Fleming, CN professor of safety culture at Saint Marys University in Halifax.

He pointed to a 2020 audit by the federal environmental and sustainable development commissioner, which found that Transport Canada still had shortcomings in its oversight of dangerous goods, despite having made some progress.

Self-regulation

Much of the ongoing concerns around danger on the tracks boils down to oversight, technical standards and the sheer size of trains and hazardous freight shipped.

After Lac-Megantic, Transport Canada launched an overhaul of safety management systemsa form of self-regulation where the government audits reports submitted by railways. But nearly a decade later, companies are not yet effectively identifying hazards and mitigating risks, the safety board determined last year.

If you give the railways too free a hand, sometimes they make really poor decisions, and theyre not penalized for it, said Ian Naish, a rail safety consultant who served as the TSBs director of rail and pipeline investigations between 1998 and 2009.

Not putting together a proper safety management plan, and getting away with it year after year, and not doing proper risk analyses when theyre changing operationsId like that to change.

The Railway Association of Canada said the two biggest operatorsCanadian National Railway Co. and Canadian Pacific Kansas City Ltd., both of which are categorized as Class 1 due to their sizehave the best safety records in North America.

For every railway and every railroader, safety is job one. Canadian Class 1s are industry leaders in safety and have lower train accident frequencies than their U.S. counterparts, CEO Marc Brazeau said in an emailed statement.

Brazeau said the accident rate for both freight rail and dangerous goods has improved markedly over the past decade.

Nonetheless, safety deficiencies played a role in the disaster near Field, B.C., in February 2019, the safety board found. At -28 C temperatures, compressed air leaked out of the air brake system while the train was parked on a steep grade, causing the Canadian Pacific cars to creep forward after midnight before hurtling down a mountain and careening off a bridge into the Kicking Horse River, killing three workers.

The government should require automatic parking brakes and further upgrades to braking systems, said Campbell, even after stricter rules around brake use came into force after 2013 for railways.

Theyre still relying so heavily on 19th-century braking systems. Electro-pneumatic braking systems would impose a cost, but they would have prevented Lac-Megantic, Campbell said.

The slowest pace of change has arguably been around rail signallingthe trackside lights that authorize various train movements.

If a crew member misses a signal, we still dont have an automated train control system in Canada that will slow or stop a train if a crew doesnt do it, Fox said, noting the U.S. has had a form of it in place since 2020. Transport Canada has pledged to implement something similar by 2030.

Other factors

The growing length of trains, which can run well over four kilometres long with hundreds of cars weighing more than 25,000 tonnes in total, poses another concern.

Derailments involving longer, heavier trains mean a worse pile up, said Naish.

Fatigue also remains an issue, even after new rules came into effect on May 25 that cap freight workers maximum shift length at 12 hoursdown from 16while raising the minimum rest period between shifts to 10 hours at home and 12 hours when away from home, versus the previous six hours and eight hours, respectively.

But unheeded rules are of little use, Naish notes. On June 6, a Federal Court judge found CPKC guilty of contempt of court for employees working excessively long hours in 2018 and 2019. CPKC has vowed to appeal.

Transport Canada, whos the regulator, should use its teeth a little bit more than they do, Naish said. Theyre just a little bit too gentle with the railways.

Risks, spills and other accidents remain alarmingly high, he continued.

On April 15, a Canadian Pacific freight train derailed due to a track washout in rural Maine. It spilled diesel fuel and four lumber cars caught fire, on the same line and about 90 kilometres east of where the Lac-Megantic accident unfolded.

You stand back and say, are things getting better? Naish asked. If they are, I havent noticed it.

Fox, who stepped into the role of safety board chair in 2014two days after that briefing to hundreds of grievers, including some of the 27 orphaned childrenkeeps on her desk a constant reference to the need to keep improving safety.

Its a photograph of the streetscape of Lac-Megantic from before the accident. In view are the Musi-Cafewhere 30 of the victims were killed when the fireball erupted at about 1:15 a.m.and, in the distance, the local church.

It is a daily reminder of what happened, Fox said by phone from her office in Ottawa. We dont ever, ever want to see another Lac-Megantic.
Advocates of Changing Australias Constitution Should Heed the US Supreme Courts Race Ruling

Commentary

The United States Supreme Court has rendered an important decision on race-based admissions to colleges and universities which, at least indirectly, is relevant to Australias debate on the proposed entrenchment of The Voice in the Constitution and necessitates a reflection on Australias university admission policies.

On June 29, the Supreme Court decisively banned race-based admission processes. It decided that racial preferences in the admission of students are unconstitutional as it violates the equal protection clause of the 14th Amendment, according to which no state shall deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws.

Chief Justice, John Roberts, wrote that the student must be treated based on his or her experiences as an individualnot on the basis of race. Many universities have for too long done just the opposite. And in doing so, they have concluded, wrongly, that the touchstone of an individuals identity is not challenges bested, skills built, or lessons learned, but the color of their skin.

However, the U.S. Constitution thus requires society to be colour-blind, and burdens and benefits should not be distributed based on a group characteristic, such as race.

The American journey to a colour-blind society had a long and sometimes troubled history.

Chief Justice of the U.S. Supreme Court, John Roberts, attends the State of the Union address on Feb. 7, 2023, in the House Chamber of the U.S. Capitol. (Jacquelyn Martin/Pool/Getty Images)

In an educational context, this history focused on the achievement of diversity in institutions of higher learning.

In two cases, Regents of the University of California v. Bakke and Grutter v. Bollinger, the Supreme Court had viewed the achievement of a diverse student body as a compelling state interest.

In the Bakke case, the Supreme Court opined that a diverse student body improves the educational experiences of all students. Justice Powell said that the attainment of a diverse student body  clearly is a constitutionally permissible goal of an institution of higher education and that even at the graduate level, our tradition and experience lend support to the view that the contribution of diversity is substantial.

The American dispute focused on the question of whether diversity should be achieved simply by having a race-based admissions policy.

If race is treated as a group characteristic, then such a policy may well be functionally indistinguishable from a numerical racial quota, especially if educational institutions seek to have a critical mass of minority students.

This momentous decision represents a firm commitment by the U.S. Supreme Court to the development society where burdens and benefits are not distributed on the basis of a persons race, an involuntary characteristic over which people have no control.

The Voice Is a Race-Based Policy

I have argued before that, in Australia, The Voice proposal, if successful, will create a society where a persons entitlements are determined by membership in a racial group. Several reasons support this view.

First, the distribution of societal benefits and burdens on the ground of a persons race makes a mockery of reassurances to create a society where a persons race is irrelevant.

It also defeats the result of the 1967 referendum, which allows the parliament to make laws concerning the people of any race who need governmental assistance.

Second, the proposed advisory body will consist of 24 members who may make representations to the parliament and executive on all laws affecting Indigenous Australians. It is expected that The Voice body will need to be consulted when proposing to adopt laws.

This consultation requirement raises the question of whether it must actually give advice. If so, and the adoption of legislation was delayed until The Voice provides its advice, it could effectively adopt the convenient device of not giving an opinion at all, thereby arrogating to itself a veto power and paralysing the machinery of government.

In such a case, The Voice would effectively function as a third chamber in addition to the House of Representatives and the Senate.

The Senate chamber at Parliament House in Canberra, Australia, on March 23, 2020. (Mick Tsikas/Pool/Getty Images)

Third, the determination of the composition, functions, powers, and procedures of The Voice would require the parliament to draft detailed rules on establishing group membership.

This would lead to intractable problems associated with attempts to prove membership in a racial group.

Alternatively, if membership were to be determined by self-identification, then this would likely result in an over-inclusive extension of the concept of Indigenous Australians.

There is utter confusion as to who is to be regarded as Indigenous, how the members of The Voice will be chosen, and what the powers of that advisory body will be.

Indeed, in Australia, Aboriginality seems to have developed into an amorphous, undefinable concept that has steadily been expanded to cover cultural traits that are different from the mainstream population.

If membership of The Voice were to be determined, not on the basis of strict guidelines that define Aboriginality, the proposed body could be used even more to drive a wedge between people rather than bringing them together.

Time for Australia to End Affirmative Action

The U.S. Supreme Court decision is also hugely relevant for the Australian higher education sector.

In Australia, most universities administer schemes that offer priority entry for Indigenous students. Other programmes provide pathways for entry into undergraduate study programmes.

To that purpose, student administrations have designed forms that facilitate university admission of Aboriginal and/or Torres Strait Islander students.

By ticking the box, students become eligible for specialist Indigenous services, priority admission to universities, and Indigenous-specific scholarships, among other benefits.

A university graduate is seen outside Parliament House in Canberra, Australia, on Oct. 1, 2015. (AAP Image/Lukas Coch)

In the United States, such schemes and programmes are covered by the Supreme Courts decision and would be illegal as violating the equal protection clause of the Constitution.

Yet, in Australia, these programmes, the benefits of which are determined by a persons membership in a racial group, fly under the radar and are firmly embedded in the practices of universities.

Although these programmes attract little criticisma consequence of the servile nature of much of the Australian politythey are nevertheless controversial benefits because they remain only available to members of preferred racial groups, thus violating the principle of political equality.

The message communicated by the United States Supreme Court decision is that race, taken as a group characteristic, should be an irrelevant factor in the distribution of burdens and benefits.

It should be heard in Australia and adopted for the purpose of advancing a free society where people are treated equally.

A free society implements the principle of political equalitya colour-blind society where burdens and benefits are distributed on the basis of individual characteristics, not group-based characteristics.

Indeed, Australia has a lot to learn from this decision of the American Supreme Court.

Views expressed in this article are the opinions of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of The Epoch Times.
Former President Donald Trump spoke at the Faith & Freedom Coalitions Road to Majority Policy Conference in Washington on June 24. During the speech, he pledged to deny entry of all communists and Marxists into the United States.
Trump Shows Tough Stance on Chinese Spy Base in Cuba: Id Give Them 48 Hours to Get Out

Former President Donald J. Trump speaks during the Faith and Freedom Road to Majority conference at Hilton in Washington on June 24, 2023. (Madalina Vasiliu/The Epoch Times)

Former U.S. president and 2024 presidential candidate Donald Trump showed his tough attitude toward China in an interview, saying that if he were reelected, he would give Beijing 48 hours to shut down its spy base in Cuba, threatening severe tariffs on Chinese goods.

However, when asked whether the United States would support Taiwan militarily if Chinas communist regime invaded, Trump remained reluctant to answer directly.

Trump said in an interview with Reuters on June 29: Id give them 48 hours to get out. And if they didnt get out, Id charge them a 100 percent tariff on everything they sell to the United States, and theyd be gone within two days. Theyd be gone within one hour.

Beijing and Havana are negotiating to build a joint military base in northern Cuba. This could allow Chinese troops to be stationed 100 miles from the United States, according to a Wall Street Journal report.

China and Cuba have jointly operated four eavesdropping stations in Cuba, and this eavesdropping network underwent a major upgrade around 2019.

Furthermore, both countries have agreed to establish a new electronic tapping facility in the island nation. The facility allows China to intercept electronic communications, including emails, phone calls, and satellite transmissions.

Sailors prepare material recovered in the Atlantic Ocean from a China-claimed high-altitude balloon for transport to federal agents at Joint Expeditionary Base Little Creek on Feb. 10, 2023. (Ryan Seelbach/U.S. Navy via Getty Images)

The Pentagon initially denied it, but a Biden administration official later told The Associated Press that China had been operating a spy base in Cuba since 2019 as part of its global effort to upgrade its intelligence-gathering capabilities.

A spokesperson of Chinas foreign ministry said on June 20 that he was unaware of the situation.

U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken said on June 25 that the United States has made its concerns clear to Beijing and Havana and has had some success in efforts to prevent China from building military bases overseas.

In a letter to President Joe Biden, Sen. Bob Menendez (D-N.J.) and Rep. Michael McCaul (R-Texas), the two chairmen of foreign affairs committees in the House and Senate, wrote: The American public needs to be assured that their government unequivocally condemns this escalation, and is working to do everything in its power to counter it.

While we understand the sensitive nature of this matter, Congress also requires greater transparency and clarity about these developments.

The two chairmen asked the U.S. State Department and the CIA to provide their committees with a classified briefing on the matter by July 14.

Project 141

The spy base in Cuba is part of the Chinese regimes overseas base project. According to a Washington Post report, Beijing plans to build at least five overseas military bases and 10 logistics support bases by 2030. This plan is called Project 141 by the Chinese military.

From the Chinese Communist Partys (CCP) overseas bases Project 141, we can clearly see that the CCPs ambition is not limited to annex Taiwan, but to occupy the world in the future, said U.S.-based current affairs commentator Qin Peng in his show Qin Peng Observing on NTD, the sister media outlet of The Epoch Times.

The USS Chung-Hoon observes a Chinese navy ship conduct what it called an unsafe Chinese maneuver in the Taiwan Strait on June 3, 2023. The Chinese navy ship cut sharply across the path of the American destroyer, forcing the U.S. ship to slow to avoid a collision. (Mass Communication Specialist 1st Class Andre T. Richard/U.S. Navy via AP)

Taiwan Issue

When asked whether the United States would support Taiwan militarily if China invaded the self-ruled island nation in the interview with Reuters, Trump refused to answer directly, saying: I dont talk about that. And the reason I dont is because it would hurt my negotiating position, he said. All I can tell you is for four years, there was no threat. And it wouldnt happen if I were president.

Trump had a tough stance on imposing tariffs on Chinese goods during his last tenure as president but also claimed that he had a good relationship with CCP leader Xi Jinping.
UK Rights Advocates Condemn Hong Kong National Security Police Over Bounties for Pro-Democracy Activists

Chief Superintendent of Police (National Security) Li Kwai-wah speaks during a press conference to issue arrest warrants for eight activists in Hong Kong on July 3, 2023. (Joyce Zhou/Reuters)

Human rights advocates in the UK condemned Hong Kongs national security police on Monday after the force issued arrest warrants and bounties against eight exiled pro-democracy activists in the UK, the United States, and Australia.

Benedict Rogers, chief executive of Hong Kong Watch (HKW), and Mark Sabah, UK and EU Director of the Committee for Freedom in Hong Kong Foundation, both condemned the targeting of activists and said it was no coincidence that the announcement came two days after the third anniversary of the imposition of the National Security Law in Hong Kong by Beijing.

Lord Alton of Liverpool has submitted a question to Foreign Secretary James Cleverly, asking him to respond to the situation.

The National Security Department of the Hong Kong Police Force on Monday issued a wanted list of former legislative councillors Dennis Kwok, Ted Hui, and Nathan Law; pro-democracy activists Anna Kwok, Mung Siu-tat, Finn Lau; lawyer Kevin Yam; and businessman Elmer Yuen.

Law, Lau, and Mung currently reside in the UK. Yuen, Dennis Kwok and Anna Kwok are in the United States. Yam and Hui have moved to Australia.

Steve Li, chief superintendent of the national security police, told reporters the individuals committed serious violations of national security offences, allegedly advocating for the sanctioning of Hong Kong officials and advising foreign countries on undermining Hong Kongs status as a financial hub.

Photos of eight activists who have been issued arrest warrants over national security are displayed during a press conference in Hong Kong on July 3, 2023. (Joyce Zhou/Reuters)

Li cited sections 37 and 38 of the National Security Law, which expands its application to non-Hong Kong residents outside of Hong Kong, and announced a bounty of 1 million Hong Kong dollars (100,641 or $127,654) for each individual.

He also called on the individuals to turn themselves in.

HKW said its the first time that arrest warrants and bounties have been issued in relation to overseas activity related to the National Security Law.

In a statement, Rogers urged the governments in the UK, the United States, and Australia to issue statements guaranteeing the safety of those activists named and the wider Hong Kong community living overseas, and urged likeminded governments to suspend the remaining extradition treaties with the Peoples Republic of China and Hong Kong, and for coordinated action to introduce an Interpol early warning system to protect pro-democracy activists overseas.

Campaigner Benedict Rogers speaks at a rally for democracy in Hong Kong at Trafalgar Square in London on June 12, 2021. (Laurel Chor/Getty Images)

Lord Alton: Bounty Hunting Is Illegal

In an email to The Epoch Times, Alton said anyone who gets involved in bounty hunting must be prosecuted.

Bounty hunting is illegal in the UK and anyone who becomes involved in it must be prosecuted. Putting a price on the head of people who sought and have received sanctuary in countries like the UK is outrageous, he said.

Bounty hunting smacks of the rough justice associated with the Wild West, Billy the Kid, dead or alive posters and hired guns. It should have no place in any civilised system of justice.

Alton said the bounty shows contempt of basic principles of law and of due process and will undoubtedly put at risk highly respected lawmakers whose only crime is to believe in democracy.

I hope that those judges and lawyers who continue to lend respectability to Hong Kongs discredited legal system will finally withdraw from its administration and denounce Hong Kongs National Security Law and the many excesses which accompany it, he said.

Activists: Wont Be Stopped by Another Warrant

Law was accused of allegedly inciting secession and undermining national security by colluding with foreign forces.

He dismissed the accusation, saying the charge is another typical case of abusing the concept of national security to silence dissent.

The right to undertake any peaceful political advocacy should be protected, Law wrote in a statement on Facebook. Those on the list have all been advocating for Hongkongers right to democracy, freedom, and basic rights, if these are seen as violations of the national security law, we can only conclude that the law is absolutely evil.

Former Hong Kong Legislative Council member Nathan Law spoke at a rally in London. (Shan Lam/The Epoch Times)

He challenged Li to publish evidence of his alleged collusion with the so-called foreign forces, saying he had never accepted any foreign funding, worked for, or taken orders from a foreign government.

Law said he would exercise caution to avoid risks and hopes others would remain safe, and called on Hongkongers not to be complicit in the attempt to arrest activists. We shouldnt censor or restrict ourselves, submit to intimidation or extortion, and live our lives in fear, he said.

In 2021, it was revealed that bounties of 10,000 were offered on the Chinese-owned instant messaging app WeChat to anyone who could provide Laws address or workplace or the information of another Hong Kong community leader, Simon Cheng.

Simon Cheng (front left) and Finn Lau (center) in a March commemorating the second anniversary of Hong Kongs pro-democracy movement in London on June 12, 2021. (Yanning Qi/The Epoch Times)

In reaction to the press conference on Facebook, Lau said the Chinese Communist Party staged the high-profile drama because theres little it can do overseas, particularly after 2020 when democracies in Europe and North America suspended their extradition treaties with Hong Kong.

Lau, who was previously arrested by police in Hong Kong and brutally assaulted in the UK by unidentified men, said while the risk of danger may be dramatically increased, he has nothing left to fear.
Union Calls to End Limits on Paramedics in Regional NSW

Ambulance attendants wearing full protective clothing prepare a gurney to transport residents to hospital at the Wyoming Nursing Home on August 2, 2021 in Sydney, Australia. The Wyoming Nursing Home in Sydney's inner west, run by Hardi Aged Care, has reported 18 Covid-19 cases in residents and a further two in staff, sending the remainder of the home's top floor residents to hospital as a precaution. Covid-19 lockdown restrictions in hot spot local government areas have increased with masks required outdoors at all times and residents limited to movement within a 5 kilometre radius of their homes. Greater Sydney is in lockdown through August 28th to contain the highly contagious Covid-19 delta variant. (Photo by Sean Foster/Getty Images)

A shortage of specialist paramedics in regional New South Wales (NSW) and location limits that bar front-line responders from retaining their qualifications, if transferred regionally, are bringing the hospital system to breaking point, their union says.

The Australian Paramedics Association of NSW said the governments rejection of a recommendation to expand specialist paramedics across the state would mean many communities were unable to receive critical care, increasing avoidable hospitalisations.

Last week the NSW government revealed it either fully or partially supports 10 of 12 recommendations made by a parliamentary inquiry into emergency departments.

But it did not support allowing extended and intensive care paramedics to retain their qualifications if they transfer to a regional location, arguing not all locations have sufficient workload or activity to ensure paramedics can maintain specialist accreditation.

Union chief Chris Kastelan said specialist paramedics were critical for preventing avoidable hospitalisations by treating many injuries on-site, easing overcrowding.

There are not enough extended care paramedics outside of the Sydney, Wollongong and Newcastle areas, he said on Monday.

Not because there arent enough willing paramedics, but because of NSW Ambulance restrictive practices, he said.

Location limits actively block vast swathes of the state from receiving the kind of specialised care that can be vital in saving lives and reducing pressure on the hospital system.

Kastelan described the restrictions as utterly unnecessary.

For the government to reject this recommendation is to condemn communities across the state to further bed block delays in response times and backflip on their election promise to expand specialist coverage, he said.

Recent BHI data showed rates of ambulance to emergency department transfer within target times are worse than a decade ago, with one in five patients waiting for almost an hour to receive hospital care after arriving by ambulance.

The government will roll out urgent care clinics and virtual consultation services across the state to help ease pressure on over-crowded emergency departments.

It has also committed $175 million to recruit an additional 1200 nurses by 2027.
Union Warns Against Ottawa Interfering in BC Port Workers Strike as Talks Continue

International Longshore and Warehouse Union workers picket outside of the BC Maritime Employers Association Dispatch Centre after a 72 hour strike notice and no agreement made on the bargaining table in Vancouver, on July 1, 2023. (The Canadian Press/Ethan Cairns)

The union representing thousands of striking British Columbia port workers is asking the federal government to not interfere after business groups called for back-to-work legislation.

The International Longshore and Warehouse Union Canadas president, Rob Ashton, held a news conference Sunday afternoon after 7,400 members walked off the job Saturday morning.

For the last 30 years, weve had labour peace in this province. Its been almost 30 years since our union has been on strike, Ashton said Sunday.

If the (BC Maritime Employers Association) gets their way, and their way is to let the government make this collective agreement for them, there will never be labour peace on the waterfront.

Ashton said federally mediated talks with the association are ongoing, and will continue all day, all night to try and get longshore workers back on the job.

This deal must be reached at the collective bargaining table, he said.

Business groups across Canada have sounded the alarm about the potential economic impact of the strike, which affects thousands of cargo loaders and 49 of the provinces waterfront employers at more than 30 ports across the province.

In response to calls for back-to-work legislation, a spokesman for Labour Minister Seamus ORegan said in a statement that the federal government is not looking past the bargaining table because the best deals are made there.

Federal mediators continue to support the parties in their negotiations, he said.

Ashton didnt take questions on Sunday afternoon, holding a brief press conference flanked by members of the unions bargaining committee outside the Federal Mediation and Conciliation Services office in downtown Vancouver.

We do not plan to leave the bargaining table. We expect the BCMEA here all day, all night until a deal is done so our people can go back to work with a fair negotiated deal for all of us, he said. Because thats where we belong, is back to work.

Elsewhere in B.C., small communities such as Prince Rupert are feeling the effects of the strike as local officials wait and see whats in store should the dispute stretch on.

Prince Rupert Mayor Herb Pond told The Canadian Press Sunday that its hard to overstate the significance of port operations for his community of just more than 12,000 residents.

When the port terminal opened there about 16 years ago, Pond said the city was reeling from the closure of a pulp mill, as well as a downturn in the local fishing industry.

When the container terminal opened, it literally was us turning a corner in our economy, he said. The ensuing 16 years has has been incredibly remarkable not only for our little community but for Canada.

Pond said the terminal has become one of the countrys busiest and most important trade hubs, and the people it employs have a significant presence throughout Prince Rupert.

Theres nobody in town that doesnt know, live beside, work with, play with somebody thats involved in this, he said. It saved the community for sure and made the difference between us being a very remote small community to being this critical hub for for the Canadian economy.

Pond said the port terminal has plans to expand, and CN Rail has also made investments in railway infrastructure that have the potential to open up a lot of future opportunities in Prince Rupert, though he has to wait and see as the strike continues.

If it gets protracted for any great length of time, its going be hard on families, its going be hard on the community, and not good for the Canadian economy, he said. We move a lot of goods.

The union has previously said contracting out, port automation and cost of living are key issues in the dispute.
US Government Issues Level 3 Warning Over China Travel Due to Risk of Wrongful Detention

Paramilitary police officers stand guard near a Starbucks coffee in Beijing Railway Station in Beijing on Feb. 2, 2019. (Greg Baker/AFP via Getty Images)

The U.S. government has warned Americans against traveling to China due to the arbitrary enforcement of laws by the Chinese communist regime that can result in people getting jailed without even being aware of their alleged crimes.

The Peoples Republic of China (PRC) government arbitrarily enforces local laws, including issuing exit bans on U.S. citizens and citizens of other countries, without fair and transparent process under the law, a June 30 travel advisory issued by the U.S. State Department said. U.S. citizens traveling or residing in the PRC may be detained without access to U.S. consular services or information about their alleged crime.

According to the advisory, China is classified a Level 3, meaning that prospective visitors should reconsider travel to the Asian nation. It is the second-highest of the four levels of travel advisories issued by the State Department.

The advisory stated that foreign government personnel, academics, journalists, and business people, among others, have been interrogated and detained by Chinese officials for allegedly violating national security laws.

PRC authorities appear to have broad discretion to deem a wide range of documents, data, statistics, or materials as state secrets and to detain and prosecute foreign nationals for alleged espionage.

The advisory comes after Chinese authorities sentenced a 78-year-old U.S. citizen, John Shing-Wan Leung, to life in prison on spying charges in May. The city of Suzhous intermediate court announced the sentencing in a brief statement through social media but did not provide any details.

Such trials are usually conducted behind closed doors and typically do not yield any information to the public. China also recently passed laws threatening strict action against foreign individuals and entities deemed a risk to the Chinese regime.

In a July 1 tweet, Daren Nair, host of the podcast Pod Hostage Diplomacy, criticized the American government for going soft on China. Why is China at a Level 3 when Iran, Venezuela, and Russia are all at Level 4? Are our economic ties with China the reason why China is getting treated differently?

A guard looks through the window of a hallway inside the No.1 Detention Center during a government-guided tour in Beijing on Oct. 25, 2012. (Ed Jones/AFP via Getty Images)

Exit Bans

The travel advisory warned that officials in China could detain U.S. citizens for conducting research, accessing publicly available material, and sending private electronic messages critical of the Chinese regime.

In addition, Beijing has used restrictions on travel and departure, also known as exit bans, to force foreign individuals to take part in government investigations, pressure their family members abroad to return to China, resolve civil disputes in favor of Chinese citizens, and gain leverage over other nations, the advisory stated.

U.S. citizens might only become aware of an exit ban when they attempt to depart the PRC, and there may be no available legal process to contest an exit ban in a court of law. Relatives, including minor children, of those under investigation in the PRC may become subject to an exit ban.

In a July 3 tweet, Mike Abramowitz, president of pro-democracy organization Freedom House, called the travel advisory a chilling one for Americans thinking of visiting China.

Chinas Espionage Laws

On July 1, Chinas Foreign Relations Law came into effect. The law authorizes the Chinese regime to take necessary countermeasures against acts deemed a threat to the security and interests of the country.

Chinas newly revised anti-espionage law also came into effect on July 1. The revision expanded the definition of espionage, making it vaguer and broader. Human rights activists believe the updated laws will give Beijing the power to ramp up the oppression of its citizens while also allowing it to target foreign individuals and companies.

In an interview with The Epoch Times, Zheng Xuguang, a U.S.-based Chinese commentator and economist, slammed the Chinese regime for using a vague definition of security and national interests in the revised law.

In the past, obtaining so-called classified national secrets was considered espionage. Now, anything that hinders national security is deemed espionage, he said.

According to this law, conducting industry research is considered a threat to economic security, and investigating the backgrounds of officials can be seen as a matter of national security.

Sophia Lam contributed to this report.
US Military Cant Afford to Fool Around With Feel-Good Green Initiatives

USS John C. Stennis (CVN 74) participates in a replenishment-at-sea with the fast combat support ship USNS Rainier (T-AOE 7) and the guided-missile cruiser USS Mobile Bay (CG 53) on March 4, 2016. Mobile Bay is receiving an advanced biofuel mixture from Rainier. (U.S. Navy/Mass Communication Specialist 2nd Class Andrew P. Holmes)

Commentary

The U.S. military is in decline and now faces a peer competitor, China, that vastly outmatches the United States in terms of militaryindustrial capacity. And in research, China has a stunning lead over the United States in 37 of 44 critical and emerging technologies, many of which are directly defense-related.

Yet our military is spending an increasing percentage of its time, money, and mindshare on so-called green initiatives. One of the latest of these initiatives is the U.S. Armys plan to run a series of field tests on a multiton, wheeled battery pack as part of its efforts to reduce reliance on fossil fuels.

This initiative is just one recent example of the myriad green initiatives that are seeing our military services spending more and more to fight climate change. Under the assumption that climate change is a clear and immediate danger, the Department of Defense and the military service have plans and initiatives in place that between now and 2050 will divert billions of dollars away from programs that have the potential to improve our militarys ability to protect our country and toward programs that will actually reduce our militarys overall capabilities.

And given the proliferation of these programs and their scope, over the next 25 years, the tens of billions of dollars could grow into hundreds of billions of dollars as its revealed that the cost of these programs was underestimatedby a lot. And while theres no doubt that the judicious incorporation of hybrid and even all-electric technology into our militarys vehicles, ships, and maybe even planes could improve capabilities, many of the so-called green initiatives will actually reduce our militarys capabilities and wont be all that green.

Of course, theres nothing wrong with being environmentally responsible, but when were talking about organizations responsible for protecting the country from harm, up to and including attacks by weapons of mass destruction, green initiatives should meet some basic criteria before being funded. After all, money spent on green initiatives will be money not spent elsewhere. Consequently, any green imitative being pursued by our military services shouldnt reduce our countrys military capabilities. This means that pulling resources away from weapons systems and programs that improve our militarys ability to fight to fund greener less-effective weapons systems and programs should be off the table. And a green initiative should be able to demonstrate measurable, immediate positive environmental benefits.

If a green initiative can both save money and have a positive environmental impact while delivering the same or superior capabilities, then it should be pursued post haste. But such programs are few and far between. Instead, green initiatives that reduce our military capabilities while costing more than alternatives that actually improve capability appear to be more the norm.

One such initiative that stands out is the $420 million Obama-era Navy initiative to run our naval ships on a 50:50 mix of biofuel and fossil fuels. The end result was a biofuel being mixed with petroleum-based marine diesel fuel to produce a fuel mix costing about four times as much as standard fuel. So a naval exercise for which fuel should have cost around $3 million ended up costing almost $14 million.

This large premium to produce and use a fuel that isnt really all that green prompted then Rep. Mike Conaway (R-Texas) to say that its not about proving the technology. Its [Navy Secretary Ray] Mabus wanting to waste money  on a publicity stunt for his green fleet. 

Unfortunately, the U.S. Navy has continued to use biofuel that costs much more than fossil fuels that are of arguable benefit to the environment, especially when changes in land use are taken into effect. By increasing operational costs, this particular green initiative diminishes the U.S. security posture by increasing our operating costs while providing no additional capability.

Another major green initiative that the U.S. military and many in Congress seem eager to spend billions of dollars on is replacing and or converting 170,000 nontactical vehicles (NTV) into an all-electric fleet. Indeed, The U.S. Army is committed to a plan to establish an all-electric light duty, non-tactical fleet by 2027 and an all-electric non-tactical vehicle fleet by 2035. These ambitious goals will divert billions of dollars from programs that might actually improve the U.S. Armys ability to do its job into a program that will weaken its capabilities.

But even these goals arent ambitious enough, as Secretary of Energy Jennifer Granholm recently said she supports the Biden administrations move to require the U.S. military to implement an all-electric vehicle fleet by 2030.

Currently, the Department of Defense has about 170,000 NTVs that are used on military bases. These vehicles move supplies, fuel, and personnel and perform maintenance, and so forth around the bases and between the bases. In the case of a national emergency, say, for example, an attack on our electric grid, these NTVs would play a crucial role in helping to respond to the emergency. Obviously, a petroleum-powered fleet is vastly more capable in this situation. But even in the event of a national emergency in which the grid stays up, gas-powered vehicles, with their ability to quickly refuel, can maintain a much higher operational tempo and perform much more work over an extended period of time than an all-electric fleet. So even if we assume the move to electric could be done for no cost, we end up with a less capable military. But of course, theres a huge cost.

And not only does the Army want to spend billions of dollars on less capable, less flexible, heavier electric cars, but it also wants to spend billions more on creating microgrids for each of its 130 major military bases. The idea is to make our Army bases independent should the civilian power grid go down. Not necessarily a bad idea. But rather than going with the most cost-effective reliable power generation systems, such as a gas turbine power generation plant or even a combined cycle gas steam turbine power plant, the military will be trying to achieve civilian grid independence via the most expensive route possiblerenewable energy sources such as solar panels and wind power in combination with massive battery systems.

By going down this very expensive path, the Army hopes to make its contingency bases carbon neutral by 2050. U.S. Army Secretary Christine Wormuth justifies going this very expensive route by claiming that the effects of climate change have taken a toll on supply chains, damaged our infrastructure, and increased risks to Army soldiers and families due to natural disasters and extreme weather.

Of course, theres no evidence that these claims are true, and its little more than virtue signaling. Nonetheless, all of the services seem to have adopted policies that pay homage to this extreme mindset and are rearranging their spending priorities accordingly.

Our national defense is too important to be given over to virtue-signaling-driven spending on green initiatives of dubious environmental value that accelerate the rate of decline of our military. These policies, and the shaky premises being used to advance them, must be challenged.

Views expressed in this article are the opinions of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of The Epoch Times.
US Special Envoy for Iran on Leave; Security Clearance Under Review

The U.S. Department of State building in Washington on July 22, 2019. (Alastair Pike/AFP via Getty Images)

U.S. special envoy for Iran Robert Malley has been on leave due to his security clearance being under review.

Malley told multiple outlets on June 29 that he was informed that my security clearance is under review. I have not been provided any further information, but I expect the investigation to be resolved favorably and soon. In the meantime, I am on leave.

State Department spokesperson Matthew Miller said on June 29 that Malley was on leave, but did not give a reason.

Abram Paley is serving as acting Special Envoy for Iran and leading the departments work in this area, Miller told numerous outlets.

According to reports, Malley allegedly may have mishandled classified information, apparently leading to his being put on leave. Earlier this year, his access to classified information was reportedly cut off for the time being and, therefore, he was able to report to work but without access to such material.

Malley had been tasked with getting the United States back into the 2015 Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA), colloquially known as the Iran nuclear deal. Those talks were indefinitely suspended last year but reportedly have resumed with the United States and Iran engaging in discussions through a third party.

Matthew Brodsky, a senior fellow at the Gold Institute for International Strategy, told The Epoch Times that the deal currently under consideration by Malley and Team Biden would recognize Iran as a nuclear weapons threshold state and essentially bribe the regime with billions of US dollars to not become a full nuclear weapons power during the Biden administration.

It is a political agreement for Bidens domestic political gain.

Brodsky noted that the deal will be called something other than a deal or agreementprobably an understandingbecause that will avoid the need to present the new Iran deal for congressional approval.

The United States withdrew from the JCPOA in 2018 and reimposed sanctions lifted under the plan along with enacting fresh sanctions in what the Trump administration dubbed a maximum pressure campaign on Iran.

Jason Brodsky, policy director at United Against Nuclear Iran (no relation to Matthew Brodsky), explained the significance of Malleys being on leave.

He told The Epoch Times the reports were concerning, but we need to let all the facts come out and then we will be able to come to an informed conclusion.

Brodsky called for Congress to engage in robust oversight of the Biden administrations Iran policy and noted that the [House Foreign Affairs Committee] has not held a single Iran-focused oversight hearing since 2020.

Nonetheless, the committees chairman, Rep. Michael McCaul (R-Texas) sent a letter on June 30 to Secretary of State Antony Blinken seeking answers about Malleys being put on leave.

These reports raise serious concernsboth regarding Malleys conduct and whether the State Department misled Congress and the American public, wrote McCaul.

This news follows the troubling recent revelation that the Biden Administration held indirect proximity talks with the Iranian regime in May 2023, underscoring the importance of congressional oversight on Iran negotiations and policy, and for transparency and accountability on the part of the Department and the rest of the Biden Administration, he added.

McCaul noted that the House Foreign Affairs Committee has sought Malleys testimony since April 11.

Senior State Department officials informed the Committee that Special Envoy Malley was unable to testify or brief because he was on personal leave due to the illness of a close family member, for which my staff expressed sympathy, he wrote. At no point did the department indicate that Special Envoy Malleys security clearance was suspended or under review, or that he was being investigated for potential misconduct.

McCaul asked Blinken to respond by July 11 with answers, documentation, and communications relevant to Malleys security clearance issue.

Despite Malleys absence, expect U.S. policy on Iran to stay the same, said Brodsky.

In fact, the White House has been running the negotiations in recent months, he said. But it may further complicate the politics surrounding diplomacy with Iran and that could have an impact on policy.

It depends on where the investigation leads.
Skipper Marie Tabarly has inherited her fathers love of the sea as well as the Breitling he wore. She has also chosen Breitling as a partner

When Marie Tabarly went looking for a partner so that she could put together a crew to compete in the Ocean Globe Race - a round-the-world race with crews spending more than eight months at sea - she immediately thought of Breitling.

I never saw my father wear anything other than his Breitling 80770, a 1980s model, she says. I inherited it three years ago when I became the skipper of Pen Duick VI. It means a lot to me. Sometimes I wear it at sea.

Edouard dArbaumont, Managing Director Southern Europe, had no hesitation about welcoming Marie into the Breitling France Squad: We are delighted to welcome Marie Tabarly into the Breitling family. With Marie as an ambassador we can look forward to travelling the world and will accompany her in her dreams of victory. Marie is someone who dares and who never gives up. Her values are a perfect match for Breitlings own values. Shes an experienced sailor and very much in tune with nature and the environment.

For competitions, and especially the round-the-world-race currently in preparation, Marie Tabarly has chosen a 44mm SuperOcean Heritage II in steel on a rubber strap. She considers this authentic dive watch as a vital piece of equipment. I need a watch I can rely on 100 percent. When youre using celestial navigation, an error of one second means your position will be out by four nautical miles. If I miscalculate by three seconds, thats an error of 12 nautical miles. At that rate, youre quickly off course.

In five months time, Marie Tabarly will be at the start line of the Ocean Globe Race with a Breitling on her wrist. Maybe a SuperOcean, or possibly a watch designed especially for her and this extraordinary adventure onboard Pen Duick VI. Built exactly 50 years ago, this giant has a displacement of 32 tons, a length overall of 73 feet (22.25 m) and the mainmast is 82 feet (25 m) high. It is one of the most powerful boats of its generation.

This association with Breitling has special resonance for Marie Tabarly whose father, Eric Tabarly, was a partner to the brand for a number of years. In the early 1980s he even gave his name to a collection which he launched in collaboration with Ernest Schneider, then owner of Breitling. Now collectors items, the inscription on their caseback reads Designed and tested with Eric Tabarly. A family affair.
Veterans and the Power of Positive Thought

Commentary

In 2019, I basked in the darkness and dined with my demons. They poured my favorite whiskey and my forever place at their dark dining table was set to welcome another fractured veteran. My cozy reservation at this somber dinner party was within grasp. When squared-up and standing face-to-face, I gave a subtle nod and chilled whisper to the grim welcoming party. With a cracked, soft voice, I uttered, Not today, fellas. My story aint over yet. Drastic actions were taken because I needed drastically different results. An experiment ensued where valuable new lessons learned were poured over my fractured frame, like molasses filling a void. While the door to that dark dining party is locked-tight behind me, I stashed away those valuable lessons learned for future emergency use. My eyes are focused forward, now armed with the power of positive thought.

Everything in the universe operates on cycles of rise and fall. From a third-party perspective, I can see, with crystal clarity, the wild yaw and pitch of our stress-injured combat veterans. Ive found they tend to experience higher highs and lower lows than our civilian counterparts. Patterns of birth, death and rebuild represent the framework infrastructure that describes our predictable universe. From the right perspective, its a simple wave pattern.

A deep-rooted understanding of the mathematical equations that rule the laws of physics, coupled with a wide lens for patterns, was the elixir I needed to curb my rhythmic descent into darkness. I discovered the tools to detour this dark roller coaster of peaks and valleys that plague 22 fractured veterans every day. Its my aim to share these tools with you today.

Enough word foreplay, lets get down to business. What are these illusive tools? I already told you. Its the power of positive thought. Words have power. Even subtle actions have a gravitational force that can alter the future with drastic outcomes. See chaos theory. Mathematics shows me how a simple flap of a butterflys wings could have been the source energy that originally created Hurricane Ian. If true, the devastation Hurricane Ian brought to southwest Florida also brought me to you today. From the point of view of the butterfly, simple words can cause you to shift your rigid reality and see new solutions. Its just math.

Youre probably thinking, What the hell is this hippy dude talking about? Ill bring it back down to Earth and give you two real-world examples of how the power of positive thought curbed my recent descent into darkness.

During the month of October 2022, I worked as the overnight contract-security team leader for displaced residents in the wake of Hurricane Ian. I worked at a filthy FEMA camp, located in a decrepit, abandoned Publix grocery store. I was saturated in stress because I was forced to fix a dangerous security mess while ascending a near-vertical learning curve. It was a contract filled with surreal, horrific, and heartfelt stories that Ill soon immortalize through the power of words, but first, I want to tell you about my Haitian laundry-lady friend named Louise.

Ive been living this security-nomad lifestyle since 2001. Its become a fun game to try and pack as lite as possible when I travel. Sine laundry was a drop-off service, Id visit Louise in the laundry pod twice a day and swap out my dirty clothes for fresh clean ones. Like a Swiss timepiece, I rotated the same two shirts and the same two pants for 30 days. It was masterful efficiency for the ultra-lite contract security aficionados.

It was a high-stress contract where I solved complex, and often dangerous, security challenges throughout a long, 12-hour night shift. My time off was minuscule. Food was scarce and living in a dry, coffin-sized, FEMA trailer added complexities to daily personal hygiene.

Enter my subtle smirk, I thrived in this fight-or-flight high-risk lifestyle. I was in my comfort zone while dancing with danger, while a side of stress was tugging at my tail. I relished the challenge it took to steer multiple timelines toward positive outcomes. Its a dangerous balancing act for a sheepdog to mingle with the sheep while treading a razor wire. My senses were heightened while my patience was thin.

Sometime in the first week, the laundry lady lost a fancyand expensiveanti-microbial towel I had deployed with. When questioned, the laundry manager shrugged his shoulders, waved his hand away then mumbled something in Creole. Ive been conditioned to view my personal gear as my operational lifeline. I had muscle failure and a slip of sharp words fell out of my mouth because my mission was now disrupted.

I strive to exhibit a friendly demeanor, especially to those who wait on me or serve me. It scrambles my mind when someone is obtuse, rude, or disrespectful. Service is a tough industry. I know because security is a service industry wrought with ugly challenges from an ungrateful public.

Louise was an innocent victim, folding laundry behind her boss when I finally had time to corner the laundry manager and attempt to extract solutions for my missing gear. The rage began to spill out when he offered no solutions, dismissed me, then waved me away. Sometimes the nearest exit is behind you. I left that cramped, humid, laundry pod when I saw the walls begin to vibrate from an incoming rage storm. I felt my logic center awaken and exclaim, Its a $50 towel, get over it, Scott. I felt sharp words were imminent. I chose to walk away, shift my perspective, and deploy a lifeline.

In 2019, I confided to a friend that, I just wanted to go one single day without yelling at someone. Drastic actions were taken to remedy that frame of mind. This pleasant, peaceful veneer was earned through heavy self-reflection, meditation, and drastic actions.

What kind of drastic action? The next day I started learning Creole. I never saw the laundry manager again, but every day Id greet Louise in her native Haitian-village languageCreole. My elementary attempts at her language plastered a pure smile upon her face, which, in turn, fueled my covert experiment. I felt an immediate shift in my perspective take place. I grew up in South Florida, a region with a vibrant Haitian population. Ive never taken notice of how beautiful their language sounded.

Her English was poor, but I weaved through every broken word while I was enthralled by our short daily energy exchanges. Over the next few weeks, she explained the interesting history of her lace-infused language while I attempted to mimic her twisted sounds. For one minute a day, I was enchanted by my new friend Louise.

Creole is a slang-French that sounds like ruby red crimson cursive wafting through the air. I found it adorable when shed giggle after I fumbled over a new Creole word. She reminded me of a departed aunt who I miss dearly. We would laugh exchange longer greetings / goodbyes day after day. Louise brightened my entire day and cast much-needed, positive energy into my darkness. Whats so profound about Louise and our friendly banter?

Heres the positive message and the point of the story. I flooded her with positive energy to curb my anger. I fed off her friendliness on purpose. I used her positive energy as a safety apparatus to pull me out of anger and separate me from negativity. She became a beacon guiding me back to the shore. She was an oasis for the stress of my nightly high-stakes security duties. My interaction with her gave my energy the much-needed balance. She was the Yin to my Yang. It was a deliberate effort to choose a positive timeline versus remaining on my negative self-destructive path.

When I finally fumbled through my Creole final exam goodbye, I didnt have the heart to tell Louise she shrunk all my darn pants! Ill wear these high-water pants and think of you, St. Louise!

The second example where I used the power of positive thought to delay my demons is still a throbbing wound. Ill paint a moment of context before I dive into the tough stuff. After the FEMA shelter job with Louise ended, I was invited to work closer to the beachside ground zero of destruction. Id soon face a dark tribulation.

While working on this post-apocalyptic peaceful beachside security contract, I fell into a deep-down cycle of darkness. Emotions aside for an interlude of context, it was an interesting new contract with professional leadership. I wont mention the company name for confidentiality reasons, but I worked for a tip-top stand-up crew. I was happy with the job and kept my reputation intact, despite drowning in real-time before their eyes. My mask was tied double tight this time because this aint my first rodeo.

These are the heavy masks our forgotten warfighters wear to hold the irradiated pieces of themselves together, day after day. Its a sad state of our society when its nations warriors struggle to release the pressure of that suffocating mask and stare at the stranger in the mirror. This is me without that sultry, stifling mask.

Last month, while at the new job site, one of my closest friends passed away unexpectedly. Combined with my current outside stressors, I now began to slip. Josh was a former PJ [Pararescue] and OGA [Other Governmental Agency] Ground Branch medic who suffered a fatal pulmonary embolism in his home, while he was alone with his young children. Hes seen more combat than anyone Ive ever known. His fractures oozed radioactive pieces of himself while he struggled with his combat stress injuries. My stumble slip would soon turn into a terminal velocity free-fall.

I felt my plunge and then deployed time-tested balancing tactics. On the 12th month of 22, I found myself meditating on the roof of the 12th floor during the hallowed winter solstice, happening on the 21st. I sat facing the descending sun, with the intent to calm my mind. It was a band-aid for my fractured soul. A mere stopgap.

A week after Josh passed away was the 3-year anniversary of my sisters death. I was soon on a rocket ship downwards. Over the past 20 years, Ive been away from my family for most holidays. Low-dose holiday blues are a common occurrence that Im always able to deflect. Since my sister passed away on Christmas morning, combined with the recent passing of my best friend, the holidays exposed the paper-thin spots in my dilapidated armor.

Nowadays, more of my friends seem to be dead than there are alive. I made the mistake of drafting a list of the departed, then felt the loss of gravity. I called a close friend and warned him I was slipping. He asked what I needed. After that, I drifted away into a familiar robotic fog.

Im tired of watching my friends die. As a close-knit community of shattered warriors, we must pick up our individual broken pieces, collect them in our tattered pack, and continue living the best life we can. That pack is getting heavy and those shattered pieces of ourselves never quite fit together the same way again.

I once carried my best friends casket, wrote, then delivered his eulogy. I also once sat sobbing at another brothers funeral while my written words were a razor slashed across my ear drums. Its a sharp surprise to hear my tangible, raw emotions read back to me without warning in Ryans eulogy. I also sat in a hideaway spot on the roof of a high-rise building in Santa Monica while I tasted my tears and crumbled to pieces over another brother lost. And more, and more  Enough.

Joshs passing highlighted something new about myself that terrified me. I felt nothing. There was silence. I was numb. I remember speaking to the love of Joshs life as if I was writing down a mundane police report. She was a slobbering somber mess while I was a ridged mechanical robot. I understand everyone grieves in their own way, but Joshs passing jarred something loose in my psyche, and it eventually affected my work.

An unexpected variable in the form of a rogue wave of negativity disrupted my delicate positive energy tightrope balance. I had an altercation with a drunken, baby-boomer, client employee who festered a misguided notion of self-importance. A man beneath me in all forms of stature, class, and honor. There are consequences for bad behavior, and he chose the wrong Ranger on the wrong day.

While balancing in the darkest corner of my downward cycle, my mask was drawn tight until an intoxicated property manager lit my fuse and opened the floodgate to release a rogue wave of negativity that demolished my fragile, safe harbor.

Until this moment, I was able to slow drip my descent by meditating, remaining positive, and maintaining a sharp focus on the beauty that abounds. Focus on the light and dont feed the night was my mantra. I often disassociate and view myself from a third party perspective, a handy tool for a creative author. Its a sobering feat in self-awareness that has been instrumental for personal growth.

A birds eye view of this ugly event showed a tidal wave collapse my fragile house of cards and push me over the edgeinto a dark abyss. I was working at the front gate of a secure facility when this inflated jagoff almost killed me with his caron purpose. When I saw the open container in his center console, I unleashed a title wave of rage over this minuscule man. He hopped out of the car, slammed the door behind him, then charged at me with wild in his eyes. He was red-faced with anger when we met, chest to chest. Those double-tight strings holding my brittle mask gave way. A rose-colored curtain of rage noted the next act of this ugly play. Be kind to those around you, because you never know the hidden struggles concealed underneath a worn-out mask noted by a forced smile.

My logic and reason gatekeepers smashed on the brakes while simultaneously pulling the emergency stop handle. My rage overpowered logic. It oozed out between intermittent periods of quiet professionalism. A rare outburst event for a wire-tight, disciplined Army Ranger. I let go of the fractured pieces and basked in the rage that poured out of my mouth. Hello, old friend.

I was mortified after I exposed innocent bystanders to my dark travel companion, fury. After the incident, the contract program manager removed me from the bustling job site, full of human interactions, to work at an isolated overnight location. I was alone on an empty islandliterally and figuratively. Its dangerous to be isolated when youre spiraling in the dark. I took notice of the darkness inbound and deployed an emergency lifeline. I administered a tool I discovered in 2019 when I previously dined with my demons.

I believe human beings have the capacity to heal themselves. Nicola Tesla once said, If you want to find the secrets of the universe, think in terms of energy, frequency, and vibration. I needed to change my vibrations and realign with a higher frequency, to bump me off this dark path. After all, its just simple math.

I took deliberate actions and did something Id never done before. I chose to perform a generous act with the intent to trigger an overwhelmingly positive reaction, that Id use as a lifeline to pull me out of the dark. Lets call this tactic, Piggyback off the Positive. Its silly once you see how simple it is.

What, pray tell, did I do?

I gave my Waffle House server a $100 tip and drove away. A selfless act to begin filling a reservoir of positive energy. Thats it. I planted a seed of positivity. Quantum mechanics tells me I created a new potential future timeline, one which I believed had a high probability of becoming true. It was a deliberate effort to push vibrating (positive) energy into a beautiful light-bearing soul in a desperate attempt to rebalance my turbulence. It took me two tries before this experiment was a success. The first experiment, at an Italian restaurant, failed on Christmas Eve because I anticipated immediate results.

The day after my second experimental lifeline was deployed, I visited the same Waffle House to hopefully, reap the benefits of the positive energy seed I had planted the previous day. I had a touch of anxiety because I longed to be alone while standing defenseless outside of my comfort zone. My vibrations were so low that simple conversation was difficult, especially with a stranger. The world turned into a monochrome silent film around me. I needed this experiment to work because the walls were closing in and I was drifting out to sea.

This is the good part of the story. Meet my Waffle House server, Kelli. The moment she smiled when I walked through the door, I knew she was the battery source I needed to achieve my much-needed, harmonious balance. Her smile said hello, but her eyes welcomed me.

Kelli is a young Haitian mother whose boyfriend is a former U.S. Infantrymen soldier. I was the only customer seated on that slow, Florida-hot, December afternoon, I invited her to join me, at my crowded table. A classy, gentlemanly gesture, in spite of the dark dining dignitaries who had a firm grasp around my throat. I offered a gentle hand motion, next a head tilt with a smile, and then a polite stand before she seated. I uttered, with all my might, yet as faint as a dove could whisper, Please, have a seat.

Kelli was a pure soul of radiant delight. Her charisma and positive energy knocked the ice off my heart the moment I heard her infectious laughter. There it was. The elusive sparkling bronze ladder needed to climb out of this crevasse. This is the part of the story where we make bold connections across space-time. I spoke the Creole words I learned from Louise with a deliberate effort to be used as a bonding agent to ride the wave of Kellis positive energy. Positive begets positive. Upwards we went, together.

When I spoke the few Creole words I remembered from Louise, I felt, then observed Kellis energy shift to a higher frequency. Her positive energy now blinded me while I sat in that ice-cold Waffle House. We set our masks on the table and connected through the lost art of conversation. Her positive energy and overpowering light gave me whiplash as I approached the speed of light on my ascent out of the cold. I was back. I felt as if I emerged from a heavy fog.

An important scientific observation. During our 45-minute, mask-less conversation, I never mentioned the dark dining party, who were quietly sitting on my flanks. I gave them no attention. They vanished the moment I connected to Kellis positive higher frequency.

The air was still in that Waffle House while the sun streaked across the table, bringing color, music, and love back into clear focus. Her smile, purity, and gratitude changed my perspective back to positivity. I climbed my way out, and so can you.

We were clusters of chance particles swimming through the Universe that collided at a lonely Waffle House one afternoon. A particle collision brought on by the flap of a butterflys wings and the hurricane it brought to southwest Florida.

Dark became light the moment I chose to focus on positive energy. Positive energy breeds positivity. After I made this mystic connection and thanked the Universe for this precious new perspective, The Havok Journal invited me to become a featured author in their veteran-theme publication. I told The Havok Havok Im humbled for the invite. Ive had a muzzled life with a sustained fight. But know this, I have not yet begun to write.

I restored the positive energy balance and my writing soared. Join me to discover faint whispers of enlightenment gleaned by a shift in ones perspective. Remaining positive is a daily decision. Every single day were given the opportunity to grow, evolve, and break out of the mold weve dug for ourselves. If you need different results, if youre stagnant, or if youre sinking, then I suggest you do something youve never done before. Enjoy your life because every moment on this beautiful planet is a gift.

Views expressed in this article are the opinions of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of The Epoch Times.
Woman Killed in Alleged DUI Crash on San Diego Highway

VISTA, Calif.An Oceanside resident was killed in a two-vehicle crash on State Route 78, and the driver of the other vehicle was arrested on suspicion of DUI, authorities said July 2.

The accident occurred around 9:30 p.m. Saturday on the westbound highway, west of Melrose Drive, according to Fox5 and the San Diego Union-Tribune, which both cited the California Highway Patrol (CHP).

According to the reports, a 22-year-old man was driving a Toyota Corolla along with his 18-year-old passenger when the car crashed into the back of a Kia Spectra driven by a female of unknown age.

Both vehicles then collided into the wall of the right shoulder, with the victims car rolling over. The CHP and Vista Fire Department responded and the Kia driver was pronounced dead at the scene.

The driver of the Toyota and his passenger were taken to a hospital with non-life-threatening injuries, according to the highway patrol.

Alcohol and drugs were suspected to be a factor contributing to the accident, authorities said. After receiving medical attention, the driver was arrested on suspicion of driving under the influence and gross vehicular manslaughter while intoxicated, CHP officials confirmed.

The driver was identified as Nicholas Gordon of Vista. The identity of the female victim has not been released.

Authorities say an investigation into the matter is ongoing, and anyone with information about the crash was asked to contact the Oceanside-area CHP office at 760-643-3400.
Yellen Set to Visit China This Week in Bid to Deepen Communication

U.S. Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen is traveling to China this week for talks with senior Chinese officials, the Treasury Department said on Sunday. Yellen will be the second highest-ranking U.S. official to visit China in weeks as the United States attempts to improve ties with Chinas ruling communist party.

Yellen will travel to Beijing from July 6 to July 9 as part of the Biden administrations efforts to deepen communication with the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) on the global macroeconomy and financial developments, the Treasury Department said in a statement.

Yellen is expected to speak on the need for the worlds two largest economies to responsibly manage our relationship, communicate directly about areas of concern, and work together to address global challenges, the department added.

This came just weeks after State Secretary Antony Blinken visited Beijing and met with Chinese Foreign Minister Qin Gang and top Chinese diplomat Wang Yi. Blinken also met with Chinese leader Xi Jinping and agreed to stabilize the tense relations between the two powers.

Chinese leader Xi Jinping (R) receives U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken prior to their meeting at the Great Hall of the People in Beijing on June 19, 2023. (Leah Millis/POOL/AFP via Getty Images)

Xi pronounced himself satisfied with the progress made during the talks between Blinken and Chinese diplomats. However, Blinken told reporters that China refused to resume bilateral exchanges at the military level.

While the Treasury Department did not specify which Chinese officials Yellen will be meeting during her trip, it noted that her discussions will build on remarks she made at the John Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies in April.

US Wont Decouple Economy With China

In her speech, Yellen said the United States seeks a healthy relationship with China and called for cooperation on the urgent global challenges of our day, such as climate change and debt distress.

Both countries can benefit from healthy competition in the economic sphere. But healthy economic competitionwhere both sides benefitis only sustainable if that competition is fair. We will continue to partner with our allies to respond to Chinas unfair economic practices, she remarked.

Yellen emphasized that the United States has no intention of decoupling its economy from Chinas, noting that such a move would be disastrous for both countries and destabilizing for the rest of the world.

We know that the health of the Chinese and U.S. economies is closely linked. A growing China that plays by the rules can be beneficial for the United States. For instance, it can mean rising demand for U.S. products and services and more dynamic U.S. industries, she added.

Meanwhile, in a speech delivered at a global economic forum in April, Yellen described the current state of U.S.-China relations as being at a tense moment and emphasized the need for a productive approach towards bolstering economic ties with China.

My goal is to be clear and honest, to cut through the noise and speak to this essential relationship based on sober realities, she remarked.

Yellen emphasized the importance of addressing critical issues such as intellectual property protection, market access, and technology transfer, which have been points of contention in U.S.-China trade negotiations.

She noted that while progress has been made, there is still work to be done to ensure a mutually beneficial economic relationship that promotes global economic stability and prosperity.

Liam Cosgrove contributed to this report.
Atiq Ahmed killing: Uttar Pradesh files status report in SC





NEW DELHI,

THE Uttar Pradesh Government filed a status report in the Supreme Court in connection with Atiq Ahmeds death case and apprised the top court that police reforms and modernisation measures are underway and handcuffing instructions issued to prevent the easy escape of hardened criminals. The state of Uttar Pradesh has informed the Supreme Court that its police department has undergone a comprehensive modernization process. This includes the acquisition of medium-sized prison vans, drones, body-worn cameras, post-mortem kits, full-body protectors for women, radio equipment, security equipment, ATS-related equipment, and various vehicles. These acquisitions have been made possible through grants approved by both the Government of India and the Government of Uttar Pradesh. The status report has been filed by Uttar Pradesh pursuant to SCs order on a petition filed by advocate Vishal Tiwari seeking to constitute an Independent Expert Committee under the Chairmanship of a Former Supreme Court judge to inquire into the killing of Atiq and Ashraf amid police presence.

The State informed the apex court that a chargesheet has been filed in connection with the matter concerned. The state govt has given instructions to follow the witness protection scheme. Handcuffing instructions have also been issued to prevent the easy escape of hardened criminals, the State govt informed the top court. UP Government also informed the SC that the state is taking all steps to implement the letter and spirit of Justice (Retd.) BS Chauhans recommendations in the Commission of Inquiry Report. It also said that the Government is looking into security lapses, leaving no stone unturned. The State in the report that it is also inquiring into security lapses that may have led to the 3 attackers getting through the police cordon and firing at Atiq Ahmed and Ashraf. On the basis of prima facie reports from the relevant ACPS, 4 of the police officers present on the scene and the SHO of PS Shahganj, under whose jurisdiction the incident took place, have been suspended pending initiation of disciplinary proceedings.

The State Government submitted that it is leaving no stone unturned in ensuring a thorough, impartial and timely investigation into the deaths of Atiq Ahmed and his brother Khalid Azim alias Ashraf on April 15. UP Govt has also invited suggestions from the media, police authorities, medical experts etc, to make recommendations to prevent the recurrence of such incidents. The State Govt also apprised the court about the incident and said that as soon as the police team had taken a few steps into the hospital premises, the crowd of media personnel broke through the security cordon and accosted the team to get statements of the accused.
Bullet train project work progresses in Gujarat





AHMEDABAD,

OFFICIALS overseeing the Mumbai-Ahmedabad High Speed Rail Corridor, popularly called the bullet train project, said work was progressing swiftly and cited the construction of three river bridges in one month in Gujarat. Officials of the National High Speed Rail Corridor, which is constructing the high speed corridor, said four out of the 24 bridges have been built in the past six months. Of these four, we have managed to build three bridges, situated between Bilimora and Surat stations on the HSR route, in Navsari district in one month. There are 24 river bridges on the corridor, 20 of which are in Gujarat and the rest in Maharashtra, the NHSRCL said in a release.

The first bridge was completed on Purna river, the second on Mindhola rover and the third on Ambika river. The MAHSR corridor has made significant progress as three river bridges have been completed in the last one month, said the NHSRCL, a wholly owned subsidiary of the Indian Railways. The longest river bridge in Gujarat is 1.2 kilometres long and is being constructed on Narmada river, while the longest bridge in Maharashtra is a 2.28 kilometre one being built on Vaitarna river, the NHSRCL said.
Devpt of N-E States to create more jobs





By Ashis Biswas

IMPROVED bilateral road and rail connectivity has helped the growth of Indo-Bangladesh import/export trade, during the past decade. In particular Tripura Chief Minister Manik Saha, while welcoming the robust trend of bilateral trade, is hopeful of increasing exports from the State. However, India Government sources are concerned over the growing trade gap between the two countries in terms of business volumes and earnings in Indo-Bangladesh trade conducted in the North-East region. Over the years, Bangladesh has increased its exports to the N-E region and beyond substantially, but exports from the region have not kept pace. The outcome of increasing bilateral trade/business for Bangladesh being strongly positive, Bangladesh authorities are naturally pleased. They have called for greater trade with N-E states, a demand that has drawn a positive response from Meghalaya and the Barak Valley area of Assam. As for India, while authorities have kept track of present trends, there has been no negative over-reaction. In the context of overall Indo-Bangla trade, the country exports far more to Bangladesh than it imports.

India is the second biggest trading partner for Bangladesh, which accounts for a considerable 12% of aggregate Indian exports. The size of bilateral trade in 2021-22 was $18.2 billion. Bangladesh has been consistently seeking specific tariff and other concessions to narrow down the existing gap and has won some relief from India in recent years. Economists feel that once the Agartala-Akhaura rail link becomes commercially operational and to-and-fro bulk cargo movement begins via the new Padma bridge, the volume of Indian exports made through the N-E region would increase majorly. The long awaited route connecting Kolkata with Agartala running through Bangladesh territory, would reduce the travel time from around 32 hours to 8/10 hours on average. Export of perishable goods especially to Bangladesh from the mainland India can be speeded up using the new route. At present, the NE component of total Indian exports to Bangladesh remains small. Nonetheless, Chief Minister Saha is happy that bilateral trade/business volume in the NE region has increased from Rs 390.68 crore in 2017-18 to Rs 758.9 crore in 2022-23. Belying its comparatively small size territorially, Tripura exported items worth Rs 121 crore to the neighbouring country -- no mean feat.

Considering that Bangladesh buys mostly agricultural and food items from Tripura, including tea, fruits, processed fruit items, rubber goods, bamboo products and related handicrafts, species and medicinal plants from Tripura, the trade gap is understandable. Tripura mostly imports machinery, machine parts, raw jute and related items, frozen fish and other value-added goods from Bangladesh. Trade/business circles and economists in both countries are hopeful that if the present rate of growth in the export/import trade in the region is maintained, the area could emerge as a significant business hub in the medium term. A slow and steady development of primary level infrastructure, involving the growth of transport, banking, shopping areas and medical facilities etc, has already become noticeable on both sides of the Tripura/Bangladesh border. This should lead to further economic expansion, better road building, job creation and a gradual upskilling of local labour.

Already, the increased export earnings of Tripura have made a difference to Tripuras economic prospects. The states GSDP (Gross State Domestic Product) is scheduled to grow by 8.9% by 2023-24, by present indications. It is expected to touch 8.8% by end 2022-23. Both figures are higher than the projected GSDP growth figure for the country as a whole, estimated at around 7% at present. This has been happening at a time when Tripura has been desperately seeking central financial assistance to maintain its growth momentum in crucial sectors of its economy. The state has long been a victim of inaccessibility in terms of transportation facilities and linkages, a difficult hilly terrain in many places, with its share of malaria and other diseases in the wooded interior and its proneness to flash floods.

Quite apart from benefiting from the improved connectivity, Tripura seeks to set up in a big way the export of rubber and rubber-based items to Bangladesh and beyond in the coming years. It is the second largest rubber growing State in India after Kerala. As for air connectivity, the Agartala airport will soon be linked with the Chittagong airport in Bangladesh, giving it an international status. This has been a long standing demand from the State Government as Tripura expects tourism to expand considerably with increasing tourist traffic from Bangladesh, Myanmar and other areas. As with most States in the N-E region, recent positive trends by way of economic development has been the major driver of peace and (by and large) political stability in the region, experts feel. Development, they insist, is the best answer to the threat of insurgency and political unrest -- peace cannot be ensured by stringent legislation alone.
Five youths drown in Zilpi Lake





Staff Reporter

A picnic party turned into a tragedy when five youths drowned to death in Zilpi Lake under the jurisdiction of Hingna Police Station on Sunday evening. Quicksand at the base proved fatal for the youths who were indulging in fun and frolic. However, in a flash, the situation at the serene location turned tragic as the youths started drowning in a bid to save each other. The deceased have been identified as Rishikesh Anil Parade (21), Rahul Arun Meshram (21), Shantanu Armarkar (22), Vaibhav Vaidya (24) and Nitin Kumbhare (21), all residents of Wathoda and Pardi areas. According to the police, a group of six friends arrived at the lake on four motorcycles to revel in the serene beauty of the surroundings. Their picnic began with a stroll along the banks of the lake. However, their plans took a ghastly turn when they decided to venture into the water to escape the pesky heat, said Dr Prajaktam Lende, a resident of Tiranga Square, while narrating the sequence of events while talking to The Hitavada.

He too had gone to the lake in his Tata Harrier SUV to drop his driver Rishikesh Parade who wanted to join his friends in the picnic. As the hand brake of the SUV malfunctioned, Dr Lende also joined the youths. At around 5 pm, the youths waded into the water. During enjoyment, one of the youth found himself in distress and began to drown. In a desperate bid to save their friend, others rushed to his aid, plunging towards him. The rescue operation turned fatal which resulted in the drowning of all five individuals, said police. Dr Lende was lucky as fishermen present at the lake saved him in nick of time.

Realising the gravity of the situation, the remaining three members of the group, who had refrained from entering the water, immediately alerted the police. The Hingna police led by Police Inspector Vishal Kale rushed to the spot and launched a search operation with the help of local divers. The bodies of the victims were recovered from the depths of Zilpi lake before 10 pm. Devastated family members and friends gathered at the scene after the news of drowning. Hingna police have registered a case of accidental death in connection with the incident. The bodies were sent to Government Medical College and Hospital (GMC&H) where a post-mortem will be performed on Monday. It may be worth mentioning that the Zilpi lake, a famous picnic spot, is slowly turning into a death trap for the visitors as many incidents of drowning have been reported in the past 10 years. Exercising caution and adhering to safety guidelines while visiting the lake is the most important factor, said a police official.
Monsoon covers entire country 6 days early: IMD







NEW DELHI,

THE southwest monsoon on Sunday covered the entire country six days before the normal date, as it advanced in the remaining parts of Rajasthan, Punjab and Haryana, the India Meteorological Department (IMD) said. On Friday, the IMD had said the monsoon is expected to be normal in July across the country, barring parts of eastern Uttar Pradesh and south Bihar. The weather office said the monsoon covered the entire country on Sunday, against the normal date of July 8. As many as 16 States and Union Territories received deficient rainfall in June, with Bihar and Kerala reporting large deficits at 69 per cent and 60 per cent below normal, respectively. Some other States such as Uttar Pradesh, Maharashtra, Karnataka, Jharkhand, Andhra Pradesh and Telangana also received less rainfall than what is normal for June, the first month of the southwest monsoon season.

The monthly rainfall averaged over the country as a whole during July 2023 is most likely to be normal (94 to 106 per cent of LPA) and most probably within the positive side of the normal, IMD Director General Mrutyunjay Mohapatra had said on Friday. The long period average (LPA) of rainfall over the country during July based on the data of 1971-2020 is about 280.4 mm. The phenomenon of warming of the equatorial Pacific Ocean, called the El Nino conditions, are expected to develop in July. El Nino is known to suppress monsoon rainfall. Mohapatra said during most of the recent El Nino years, June rainfall has been within the normal range.
NCP city unit to go with Deshmukh, some may go with Ajit Pawar





Staff Reporter

With senior leader of Nationalist Congress Party (NCP) Ajit Pawar-led group joining Shinde-Fadnavis Government in Maharashtra, partys Nagpur city unit has decided to follow former Home Minister Anil Deshmukh. Deshmukh has not joined Ajit Pawar group. But the State office-bearers of the party in city are likely to go with Ajit Pawar. The discussion about Ajit Pawar joining present Shinde-Fadnavis Government was going on since the last two months. But he kept saying that he would not join the Government. His reservations during various NCP meetings, programmes organised by the party were visible. During his Nagpur visit, Ajit Pawar, in a private talk, had said that he would join Government when the discussions about it would stop. Despite his refusal publicly to join the Government, his body language was giving different indications. But Sundays development shocked everyone in the party and outside it. After the development that was watched by everybody, the district units in State are giving cautious reactions. In Nagpur too, nobody is speaking openly on the issue. At present, it seems, the opinion of Anil Deshmukh remains predominant. He did not contact any party leader in city but immediately reached Mumbai. Anil Deshmukh was with former Finance Minister Jayant Patil when the latter addressed mediapersons. It indicated that Deshmukh was with NCP Supremo Sharad Pawar.

Meanwhile Duneshwar Pethe, President of City Unit has convened a meeting of the party office-bearers on Tuesday, July 4 at 11 am at Ganeshpeth office to chalk out future plans. Pethe said, The decision was an unexpected move but we will keep doing efforts to strengthen the party in this part of the State. Shekhar Sawarbandhe, a seasoned politician, made it clear that the party in Nagpur is following the moves of Anil Deshmukh. Contact with Anil Deshmukh and Abha Pandey could not be made. Pravin Kute, State Spokeperson. gave clear indication through his tweet that he would follow Jayant Patil, the State NCP President. State Office-bearers in city like Abha Pandey, Anil Ahirkar, Shrikant Shivankar, Dinanath Padole may join Ajjit Pawar, but nobody confirmed it. Santosh Singh, the city Spokesperson commented, The party office-bearers did not get any message from Anil Deshmukh yet. Role of Anil Deshmukh will make all the difference.
This unique piece created for Only Watch represents a rather unexpected marriage: Frederique Constants manufacture tourbillon and Van der Klaauws planetarium

Although he prefers to stay out of the limelight, Pim Koeslag has always been pleasant and attentive, even when you catch him at a bustling and chaotic watch fair. Pim Koeslag is the brains behind the manufacture movements of Frederique Constant, and he also worked for Atelier de Monaco. Like Aletta and Peter Stas, founders of the brand to which he remained faithful for over a quarter of a century, Pim Koeslag is from the Netherlands. And he recently returned to his native country, taking over as head of Christiaan van der Klaauw (CVDK), probably the worlds premier specialist in astronomical complications.

Why the long introduction? Because, for a brief moment, Pim Koeslag had one foot in CVDK and the other still in Geneva, with Frederique Constant. And during this transition period, he came up with something of a crazy idea: to combine the savoir-faire of both maisons in one single, unique piece, to be auctioned off at Only Watch. The result is the Classics Planetarium Tourbillon Manufacture.

Best of both worlds

The name gives a clue to whats inside the case, but it doesnt give everything away. For Only Watch, both brands ventured outside their respective comfort zones, signing off on a number of firsts engineered to attract collectors  and higher bids.

At first sight, the watch seems like a good fit for the Frederique Constant Classics collection  but only at first glance. The recently revised aesthetic codes are present, with a slimmed-down case, a reworked profile and more modern hour markers. But the diameter is unusual: 42 mm is not part of Frederique Constants horological vernacular. Nor is the case material: solid platinum. Even before you look at the complications, the watch is sending out some strong signals.

100% hand-finished movement

A cursory glance at the movement confirms the high-end impression: it is entirely hand-finished. This is not something weve come to expect from Frederique Constant, which has always focused on accessible Swiss Made watchmaking luxury. And yet this is clearly a step towards the kind of excellence we would find at an independent workshop. Using traditional tools, two watchmakers spent weeks meticulously finishing each component: a cabron file for bevelling, a hammer and punch for hammering, and 9-micron abrasive paper for the bridge and base of the tourbillon cage. A bridge alone requires two to three days work.

The circular graining is executed manually, the sides are brushed by hand, and all the components are decorated on both sides  even in places where the decoration is unlikely ever to be seen. The polished screws, worked with diamond paste to produce a high mirror finish, stand out against the zinc plate, appearing silvery or black as they catch the light. The movement contains about forty of these screws, each of which requires approximately 40 minutes to be polished and bevelled by hand.

The planetarium

The FC-988 calibre is a worthy recipient of this high-quality treatment. It drives two main features: the Frederique Constant manufacture tourbillon at 6 oclock, and the CVDK planetarium at 12 oclock. Pim Koeslag is the undisputed master of this complication, having produced his first more than 40 years ago, in 1982, for a clock. In 1999 he miniaturised it for a wristwatch, and has continued to refine his design ever since.

The heliocentric planetarium comprises six mobile discs in the same plane, each bearing a planet that rotates at the astronomically correct rate: 88 days for Mercury, 225 days for Venus, 365 days for Earth, 687 days for Mars, 12 years for Jupiter and 29 years for Saturn. This tour de force of realism means that some of the discs move incredibly slowly. Youll have to wait nearly 30 years, for example, to see Saturn, the farthest planet from the sun in this recreation, perform one full rotation around the dial.

A constellation of firsts

This watch is Frederique Constants first to feature an aventurine dial, the first to have a planetarium, and the first to display days and months using hands on a dedicated subdial. And Van der Klaauw has never before paired a planetarium with a tourbillon. Its safe to say that the planets really have aligned for this stellar creation.
People feel safe under PM Modi as terrorists would often launch attacks during UPA Govt: Amit Shah





LUCKNOW,

UNION Home Minister Amit Shah on Sunday said during the previous UPA Government at the Centre, Pakistan-based terrorists would often cross over to Indian territory and launch attacks, while asserting that the people of the country now feel safe under Prime Minister Narendra Modi. Shah said this while addressing a function here to mark the 74th birth anniversary of late Kurmi (a backward caste) leader Sonelal Patel, the father of Union Minister Anupriya Patel, which was celebrated as Jan Swabhiman Divas.

Launching a scathing attack on the previous Congress-led United Progressive Alliance (UPA) Government, Shah said, There was the UPA Government, the Government of Sonia-Manmohan, when almost every day, terrorists would cross over to India from Pakistan, explode bombs, kill our jawans and go back. After Modiji became the Prime Minister, Pakistans audacity was again on display when there were terror attacks in Uri and Pulwama. However, this time, they had forgotten that the rule is not of Maunibaba Manmohan Singh, (but) of Narendra Modi and that of the NDA, he said.
PM to meet Council of Ministers today amid reshuffle buzz





NEW DELHI,

PRIME Minister Narendra Modi will chair a meeting of the Union Council of Ministers on Monday amid a heightened buzz about the likelihood of a Cabinet reshuffle following a series of meetings of the ruling BJPs top brass. The Monday meeting is expected to be held at the newly built convention centre at Pragati Maidan here, which will host the G20 summit in September. The political upheaval in Maharashtra on Sunday as NCP leader Ajit Pawar joined the BJP-Shiv Sena government along with several of his party legislators and a number of closed-door meetings involving the BJPs brain trust, including Home Minister Amit Shah and party president J P Nadda, have strengthened the view that a Cabinet reshuffle is on the cards.

Senior NCP MP and former Union Minister Praful Patel, who ditched his longtime mentor Sharad Pawar to join hands with his nephew, is being seen as a probable contender among the likely new Ministers in the Central Government.

With Ajit Pawar taking oath as Deputy Chief Minister in Maharashtra, there is also speculation about Devendra Fadnavis, also a Deputy Chief Minister and the key BJP leader in the State, being brought into the Central Government. BJP sources have been indicating that allies will be given representation in the Cabinet whenever Modi decides to go in for a rejig in his Council of Ministers. The BJPs organisation, including in some States, may also see some changes as its top brass makes its choices for key positions with the campaign for the 2024 Lok Sabha polls intensifying, sources said. Modi held a meeting with Shah and Nadda on June 28. Any Cabinet rejig will factor in the upcoming assembly polls as well.
Removal of Rs 100 cr entry cap for new players in insurance biz opposed





Business Bureau

Commenting on the proposed Insurance Laws Amendment Bill 2023, Pradeep Dharamthok, President, General Insurance Employees Union (West Zone) said that the amendment of lowering the capital base to set up an insurance business below the minimum limit of Rs 100 crore will not be feasible. At present minimum limit of Rs 100 crore capital is required to start an insurance company. If this new proposal is introduced and if Insurance Regulatory and Development Authority of India (IRDAI) gets the power to decide this limit then it will create many problems in the market and the situation may became like the pre-nationalisation era. Many companies may come in market with limited capital base who will not be able to give guarantee to settle the insurance claim or if any big claim arises. They will not be able to build the proper infrastructure and thus this amendment is not feasible, Dharamthok said.

He recalled the historic movement when in 1956 LICs 254 companies were nationalised and again in 1971, 107 general insurance companies were nationalised. Both, till date are maintaining their identity and doing well as public sector companies. Similarly, the proposal for issuance of Composite Licence will only help the private companies and also confuse the public, he pointed out. The Governments intention is to pave a way to snatch the premium from the customers of public sector insurance companies, so that the public sector companies can be privatised. The only reason for this is to increase the penetratation of the insurance. However, the fact remains that until and unless the purchaseing power of the people is not increased, they can not purchase the insurance. As we know, insurance in a need based product and not a necesscity like food, Dharamthok said.

However, the proposed Risk Based Pricing is required, because at present general insurance companies are not making underwriting profit. Giving an example: In Medi-Claim the claim ratio is more than 119%. It means companies are earning Rs 100 and paying Rs 119 and it is the same case with motor insurance. But to implement this type of mechanism there must be regulatory to control and regulate the price. Otherwise, there will be rat race among the companies, Dharamthok added. Another well-known expert in the field of insurance, Milind Khasnis, Director of Khasnis Prime Wealth said that the proposed lowering of the capital base to set up an insurance company below Rs 100 crore will not be able to provide adequate security to the policyholders and also they will create unnecessary competition in the market. Apart from this, the small players will have to maintain provisions for the solvency margin. An insurance company has to be financially very strong or they will not be able to survive in market.
The recent power outages in the country were caused by increased consumption triggered by the ongoing intense heatwave, said Egyptian Prime Minister Mostafa Madbouly on Wednesday, in an answer to complaints from citizens about why the lights went out last week.
Millions suffered through intense heat Wednesday as fires raged, health worries mounted and the world appeared headed for its hottest month of July on record.
Aareal Bank (OTCMKTS:AAALF  Free Report) is one of 282 public companies in the BanksRegional industry, but how does it contrast to its rivals? We will compare Aareal Bank to related businesses based on the strength of its valuation, institutional ownership, analyst recommendations, earnings, profitability, risk and dividends.

Valuation & Earnings

This table compares Aareal Bank and its rivals revenue, earnings per share (EPS) and valuation.

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Gross Revenue Net Income Price/Earnings Ratio Aareal Bank N/A N/A 6.22 Aareal Bank Competitors $444.65 billion $805.49 million 245.23

Aareal Banks rivals have higher revenue and earnings than Aareal Bank. Aareal Bank 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.

Institutional & Insider Ownership

Profitability

40.3% of Aareal Bank shares are held by institutional investors. Comparatively, 35.3% of shares of all BanksRegional companies are held by institutional investors. 15.4% of shares of all BanksRegional companies are held by company insiders. Strong institutional ownership is an indication that endowments, hedge funds and large money managers believe a stock will outperform the market over the long term.

This table compares Aareal Bank and its rivals net margins, return on equity and return on assets.

Net Margins Return on Equity Return on Assets Aareal Bank N/A N/A N/A Aareal Bank Competitors 32.81% 10.51% 0.92%

Analyst Ratings

This is a breakdown of current ratings and price targets for Aareal Bank and its rivals, as provided by MarketBeat.

Sell Ratings Hold Ratings Buy Ratings Strong Buy Ratings Rating Score Aareal Bank 0 0 0 0 N/A Aareal Bank Competitors 1115 3519 3325 38 2.29

As a group, BanksRegional companies have a potential upside of 317.31%. Given Aareal Banks rivals higher probable upside, analysts clearly believe Aareal Bank has less favorable growth aspects than its rivals.

Dividends

Aareal Bank pays an annual dividend of $0.56 per share and has a dividend yield of 1.8%. Aareal Bank pays out 10.9% of its earnings in the form of a dividend. As a group, BanksRegional companies pay a dividend yield of 13.1% and pay out 18.8% of their earnings in the form of a dividend.

Summary

Aareal Bank rivals beat Aareal Bank on 8 of the 10 factors compared.

Aareal Bank Company Profile

(Free Report)

Aareal Bank AG, together with its subsidiaries, provides financing, software products, digital solutions, and payment transaction applications for the property sector and related industries in Germany, North America, Asia Pacific, and rest of Europe. It operates through three segments: Structured Property Financing, Banking & Digital solutions, and Aareon. The Structured Property Financing segment offers property financing and refinancing solutions for office buildings, hotels, and shopping centers, as well as retail, logistics, residential properties, and student housing. This segment also provides deposits, registered and bearer Pfandbriefe, promissory note loans, medium-term notes, debt securities, private placements, other bonds and subordinated issues, mortgage Pfandbriefe, and public sector Pfandbriefe. The Banking & Digital solutions segment offers various services and products for the residential and commercial property, and energy and waste disposal industries. Its services include specialized banking, payment systems, and optimized business processes. The Aareon segment provides IT systems consultancy and related advisory services, enterprise resource planning systems, software solutions, hosting and software as a service, and in-house services. The company was founded in 1923 and is headquartered in Wiesbaden, Germany.

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VeraBank N.A. lowered its holdings in shares of Aflac Incorporated (NYSE:AFL  Free Report) by 13.0% in the first quarter, Holdings Channel reports. The firm owned 13,712 shares of the financial services providers stock after selling 2,050 shares during the quarter. VeraBank N.A.s holdings in Aflac were worth $885,000 as of its most recent filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC).

Other large investors have also recently bought and sold shares of the company. Toronto Dominion Bank raised its position in Aflac by 12.3% during the 4th quarter. Toronto Dominion Bank now owns 338,581 shares of the financial services providers stock worth $24,343,000 after buying an additional 37,174 shares during the last quarter. Cassaday & Co Wealth Management LLC acquired a new stake in shares of Aflac in the 4th quarter worth $260,000. Fifth Third Bancorp lifted its stake in shares of Aflac by 0.4% in the 4th quarter. Fifth Third Bancorp now owns 91,843 shares of the financial services providers stock worth $6,607,000 after acquiring an additional 396 shares during the period. Clearstead Advisors LLC lifted its stake in shares of Aflac by 3.4% in the 3rd quarter. Clearstead Advisors LLC now owns 6,843 shares of the financial services providers stock worth $385,000 after acquiring an additional 223 shares during the period. Finally, Profund Advisors LLC lifted its stake in shares of Aflac by 11.9% in the 4th quarter. Profund Advisors LLC now owns 6,949 shares of the financial services providers stock worth $500,000 after acquiring an additional 740 shares during the period. Institutional investors and hedge funds own 66.56% of the companys stock.

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Analyst Ratings Changes

Several analysts have recently commented on AFL shares. Morgan Stanley reduced their target price 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. 888 reiterated a reiterates rating on shares of Aflac in a research note on Friday, June 9th. Wells Fargo & Company started coverage on shares of Aflac in a research note on Tuesday, April 25th. They issued an equal weight rating and a $73.00 price objective for the company. Bank of America started coverage on shares of Aflac in a research note on Monday, June 5th. They issued a buy rating for the company. Finally, Citigroup reduced their price objective on shares of Aflac from $73.00 to $69.00 in a research note on Thursday, April 27th. Six investment analysts have rated the stock with a hold rating and four have assigned a buy rating to the companys stock. Based on data from MarketBeat.com, the stock currently has a consensus rating of Hold and an average target price of $71.22.

Aflac Stock Performance

Shares of NYSE AFL opened at $69.61 on Monday. Aflac Incorporated has a 12 month low of $53.04 and a 12 month high of $74.01. The company has a 50-day simple moving average of $67.28 and a 200-day simple moving average of $68.01. The company has a market cap of $42.06 billion, a PE ratio of 10.07, a price-to-earnings-growth ratio of 2.56 and a beta of 0.94. The company has a debt-to-equity ratio of 0.38, a current ratio of 0.05 and a quick ratio of 0.05.

Aflac (NYSE:AFL  Free Report) last released its earnings results on Thursday, April 27th. The financial services provider reported $1.55 earnings per share (EPS) for the quarter, beating analysts consensus estimates of $1.40 by $0.15. Aflac had a net margin of 22.90% and a return on equity of 15.25%. The firm had revenue of $4.80 billion during the quarter, compared to the consensus estimate of $4.61 billion. During the same period in the previous year, the firm earned $1.42 earnings per share. Aflacs revenue was down 7.2% compared to the same quarter last year. On average, equities analysts anticipate that Aflac Incorporated will post 5.81 earnings per share for the current year.

Aflac Announces Dividend

The firm also recently disclosed 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. The ex-dividend date of this dividend was Tuesday, May 16th. This represents a $1.68 annualized dividend and a yield of 2.41%. Aflacs dividend payout ratio is currently 24.24%.

Insiders Place Their Bets

In other Aflac news, COO Frederick John Crawford sold 59,053 shares of the businesss stock in a transaction that occurred on Tuesday, May 2nd. The shares were sold at an average price of $68.43, for a total transaction of $4,040,996.79. Following the completion of the sale, the chief operating officer now directly owns 321,367 shares in the company, valued at $21,991,143.81. The transaction was disclosed in a legal filing with the SEC, which is available through this link. In other 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 transaction of $4,040,996.79. Following the transaction, the chief operating officer now directly owns 321,367 shares of the companys stock, valued at $21,991,143.81. The transaction was disclosed in a filing with the SEC, which is available at the SEC website. Also, Director Barbara K. Rimer sold 18,210 shares of the businesss stock in a transaction on Tuesday, May 2nd. The stock was sold at an average price of $68.18, for a total transaction of $1,241,557.80. Following the transaction, the director now directly owns 35,813 shares in the company, valued at $2,441,730.34. The disclosure for this sale can be found here. Insiders sold a total of 112,082 shares of company stock worth $7,614,967 over the last ninety days. 0.90% of the stock is owned by company insiders.

Aflac Company Profile

(Free Report)

Aflac Incorporated, through its subsidiaries, provides supplemental health and life insurance products. It operates in two segments, Aflac Japan and Aflac U.S. The Aflac Japan segment offers cancer, medical, nursing care, work leave, GIFT, and whole and term life insurance products, as well as WAYS and child endowment plans under saving type insurance products in Japan.

Further Reading

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AFS Financial Group LLC decreased its stake in shares of Oracle Co. (NYSE:ORCL  Free Report) by 7.5% in the 1st quarter, according to its most recent 13F filing with the SEC. The firm owned 4,451 shares of the enterprise software providers stock after selling 359 shares during the period. AFS Financial Group LLCs holdings in Oracle were worth $414,000 as of its most recent filing with the SEC.

Other hedge funds and other institutional investors have also modified their holdings of the company. Clear Investment Research LLC acquired a new position in shares of Oracle in the 4th quarter valued at approximately $25,000. Steward Financial Group LLC acquired a new position in shares of Oracle in the 4th quarter valued at approximately $27,000. WFA of San Diego LLC acquired a new position in shares of Oracle in the 4th quarter valued at approximately $29,000. Trifecta Capital Advisors LLC acquired a new position in shares of Oracle in the 4th quarter valued at approximately $30,000. Finally, Tanglewood Legacy Advisors LLC acquired a new position in shares of Oracle in the 4th quarter valued at approximately $35,000. Institutional investors own 43.43% of the companys stock.

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Oracle Trading Down 1.6 %

Shares of NYSE:ORCL traded down $1.88 during trading on Monday, reaching $117.21. The stock had a trading volume of 2,732,447 shares, compared to its average volume of 8,686,407. The firms fifty day moving average is $106.21 and its 200 day moving average is $94.37. The company has a debt-to-equity ratio of 55.54, a quick ratio of 0.91 and a current ratio of 0.91. Oracle Co. has a 52 week low of $60.78 and a 52 week high of $127.54. The stock has a market cap of $318.14 billion, a price-to-earnings ratio of 38.84, a P/E/G ratio of 3.31 and a beta of 1.01.

Oracle Dividend Announcement

Oracle ( NYSE:ORCL Free Report ) last posted its quarterly earnings data on Monday, June 12th. The enterprise software provider reported $1.67 EPS for the quarter, beating analysts consensus estimates of $1.58 by $0.09. Oracle had a net margin of 17.02% and a negative return on equity of 470.73%. The company had revenue of $13.84 billion for the quarter, compared to analyst estimates of $13.74 billion. During the same period in the prior year, the firm posted $1.31 EPS. The companys quarterly revenue was up 16.9% on a year-over-year basis. As a group, equities analysts forecast that Oracle Co. will post 4.5 EPS for the current fiscal year.

The company also recently disclosed a quarterly dividend, which will be paid on Wednesday, July 26th. Stockholders of record on Wednesday, July 12th will be paid a $0.40 dividend. This represents a $1.60 dividend on an annualized basis and a dividend yield of 1.37%. The ex-dividend date is Tuesday, July 11th. Oracles dividend payout ratio is currently 52.29%.

Insider Activity

In other news, CEO Safra Catz sold 1,837,101 shares of the companys stock in a transaction on Tuesday, April 11th. The shares were sold at an average price of $93.86, for a total value of $172,430,299.86. Following the sale, the chief executive officer now directly owns 1,118,592 shares of the companys stock, valued at approximately $104,991,045.12. The transaction was disclosed in a legal filing with the SEC, which is available at the SEC website. In related news, Director Michael J. Boskin sold 90,000 shares of the stock in a transaction on Friday, June 23rd. The shares were sold at an average price of $118.83, for a total transaction of $10,694,700.00. Following the transaction, the director now directly owns 87,473 shares of the companys stock, valued at $10,394,416.59. The sale was disclosed in a legal filing with the SEC, which can be accessed through this hyperlink. Also, CEO Safra Catz sold 1,837,101 shares of the stock in a transaction on Tuesday, April 11th. The stock was sold at an average price of $93.86, for a total transaction of $172,430,299.86. Following the transaction, the chief executive officer now directly owns 1,118,592 shares in the company, valued at $104,991,045.12. The disclosure for this sale can be found here. In the last three months, insiders have sold 6,007,544 shares of company stock valued at $682,511,547. 43.70% of the stock is currently owned by insiders.

Analyst Ratings Changes

ORCL has been the subject of several analyst reports. StockNews.com cut shares of Oracle from a buy rating to a hold rating in a research report on Saturday, May 27th. Bank of America boosted their target price on shares of Oracle from $112.00 to $132.00 in a research report on Tuesday, June 13th. Credit Suisse Group set a $115.00 price objective on shares of Oracle and gave the stock an outperform rating in a research report on Wednesday, March 15th. Stifel Nicolaus upped their price objective on shares of Oracle from $84.00 to $120.00 in a research report on Tuesday, June 13th. Finally, DA Davidson upped their price objective on shares of Oracle from $85.00 to $115.00 in a research report on Tuesday, June 13th. Twelve investment analysts have rated the stock with a hold rating and twelve have issued a buy rating to the companys stock. According to MarketBeat, the stock has a consensus rating of Moderate Buy and an average target price of $118.15.

About Oracle

(Free Report)

Oracle Corporation offers products and services that address enterprise information technology environments worldwide. Its Oracle cloud software as a service offering include various cloud software applications, including Oracle Fusion cloud enterprise resource planning (ERP), Oracle Fusion cloud enterprise performance management, Oracle Fusion cloud supply chain and manufacturing management, Oracle Fusion cloud human capital management, Oracle Advertising, and NetSuite applications suite, as well as Oracle Fusion Sales, Service, and Marketing.

Read More

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Calian Group (OTCMKTS:CLNFF  Free Report) and Teleperformance (OTCMKTS:TLPFY  Free Report) are both industrials companies, but which is the better business? We will compare the two companies based on the strength of their dividends, risk, institutional ownership, profitability, valuation, earnings and analyst recommendations.

Valuation & Earnings

This table compares Calian Group and Teleperformances gross revenue, earnings per share (EPS) and valuation.

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Gross Revenue Price/Sales Ratio Net Income Earnings Per Share Price/Earnings Ratio Calian Group N/A N/A N/A $1.44 30.05 Teleperformance N/A N/A N/A $1.15 73.01

Calian Group is trading at a lower price-to-earnings ratio than Teleperformance, indicating that it is currently the more affordable of the two stocks.

Analyst Recommendations

Sell Ratings Hold Ratings Buy Ratings Strong Buy Ratings Rating Score Calian Group 0 0 1 0 3.00 Teleperformance 0 2 5 0 2.71

This is a summary of recent ratings for Calian Group and Teleperformance, as provided by MarketBeat.com.

Calian Group currently has a consensus target price of $82.50, indicating a potential upside of 90.68%. Teleperformance has a consensus target price of $376.67, indicating a potential upside of 347.24%. Given Teleperformances higher possible upside, analysts plainly believe Teleperformance is more favorable than Calian Group.

Dividends

Calian Group pays an annual dividend of $1.12 per share and has a dividend yield of 2.6%. Teleperformance pays an annual dividend of $0.30 per share and has a dividend yield of 0.4%. Calian Group pays out 77.8% of its earnings in the form of a dividend, suggesting it may not have sufficient earnings to cover its dividend payment in the future. Teleperformance pays out 26.0% of its earnings in the form of a dividend.

Insider and Institutional Ownership

45.6% of Calian Group shares are owned by institutional investors. Strong institutional ownership is an indication that large money managers, endowments and hedge funds believe a stock will outperform the market over the long term.

Profitability

This table compares Calian Group and Teleperformances net margins, return on equity and return on assets.

Net Margins Return on Equity Return on Assets Calian Group N/A N/A N/A Teleperformance N/A N/A N/A

About Calian Group

(Free Report)

Calian Group Ltd. provides business services and solutions in the areas of health, learning, advanced technology, and IT and Cyber Solutions (ITCS) in Canada and internationally. The company's Advanced Technologies segment offers developed products and engineering solutions for the space, defence, and terrestrial sectors; software and product development, custom manufacturing, full life-cycle support, studies, requirements analysis, project management, multi-discipline engineered system solutions, and training services; systems engineering, integration design, and embedded design solutions; operational management and lifecycle support, modelling and simulation-enabled design, and research and development services; nuclear and environmental services, including environmental protection, radiation protection, decommissioning and waste management, regulatory affairs and licensing, and emergency preparedness and training; electronic design and manufacturing; satellite communication products, aerospace and defence electronics, and engineering and technical services; wired and terrestrial wireless products, GNSS antennas and receivers, asset management, agriculture technology, nuclear and environment, and composites designs and products. The company's Learning segment provides consulting services in emergency management, training and advanced training technologies, and digital learning solutions. Its Health segment offers primary care and occupational health services; clinic management and healthcare practitioner support; and psychological assessment, nursing, contract research organization, and pandemic services, as well as care coordination and virtual care solutions. The company's ITCS segment provides consulting services, cyber security solutions, and IT support services. The company was formerly known as Calian Technologies Ltd. and changed its name to Calian Group Ltd. in April 2016. The company was incorporated in 1982 and is headquartered in Ottawa, Canada.

About Teleperformance

(Free Report)

Teleperformance SE, together with its subsidiaries, engages in the provision of outsourced customer and citizen experience management, and related services in France and internationally. The company operates in two segments, Core Services and Digital Integrated Business Services, and Specialized Services. The Core Services and Digital Integrated Business Services segment offers customer and citizen care; customer relationship operations; technical support; and technical assistance and customer acquisition services, as well as back-office solutions and integrated services, including social media content moderation services and data labeling for automation solutions; and knowledge services in the field of analytics solutions, automated systems, and artificial intelligence. The company also manages business processes, as well as provides digital platform, consulting, and data analysis services; and business process outsourcing services for government agencies. The Specialized Services segment provides on-line interpretation, visa application management, health management services, and accounts receivable credit management services. It also offers digital recruitment process outsourcing; consumer health management business services and related digital solutions integration; translation and interpreting services; and business process outsourcing services for government agencies in the United States. The company serves automotive, energy and utilities, insurance, public sector, technology, travel and hospitality, and banking and financial services, as well as healthcare, media, retail and e-commerce, crypto, cargo, telecom, and video games industries. Teleperformance SE was incorporated in 1989 and is headquartered in Paris, France.

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StockNews.com upgraded shares of Canadian Imperial Bank of Commerce (NYSE:CM  Free Report) (TSE:CM) from a sell rating to a hold rating in a report issued on Thursday.

Several other brokerages also recently issued reports on CM. CIBC raised shares of Canadian Imperial Bank of Commerce from a hold rating to a buy rating in a research report on Tuesday, May 9th. Canaccord Genuity Group upgraded Canadian Imperial Bank of Commerce from a hold rating to a buy rating in a report on Wednesday, May 10th. One research analyst has rated the stock with a sell rating, six have given a hold rating and two have assigned a buy rating to the stock. According to data from MarketBeat.com, the company presently has a consensus rating of Hold and an average target price of $70.40.

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Canadian Imperial Bank of Commerce Stock Performance

CM stock opened at $42.68 on Thursday. Canadian Imperial Bank of Commerce has a 1-year low of $39.40 and a 1-year high of $53.36. The businesss 50-day moving average price is $42.09 and its two-hundred day moving average price is $42.85. The firm has a market cap of $39.18 billion, a PE ratio of 10.78, a P/E/G ratio of 1.66 and a beta of 1.01. The company has a current ratio of 1.06, a quick ratio of 1.06 and a debt-to-equity ratio of 0.14.

Canadian Imperial Bank of Commerce Increases Dividend

Canadian Imperial Bank of Commerce ( NYSE:CM Free Report ) (TSE:CM) last released its quarterly earnings data on Thursday, May 25th. The bank reported $1.25 earnings per share for the quarter, beating the consensus estimate of $1.20 by $0.05. Canadian Imperial Bank of Commerce had a return on equity of 14.13% and a net margin of 11.14%. The business had revenue of $4.21 billion for the quarter, compared to analysts expectations of $4.15 billion. As a group, research analysts forecast that Canadian Imperial Bank of Commerce will post 5.12 earnings per share for the current year.

The business also recently disclosed a quarterly dividend, which will be paid on Friday, July 28th. Stockholders of record on Wednesday, June 28th will be issued a $0.642 dividend. This is a boost from Canadian Imperial Bank of Commerces previous quarterly dividend of $0.64. The ex-dividend date of this dividend is Tuesday, June 27th. This represents a $2.57 annualized dividend and a dividend yield of 6.02%. Canadian Imperial Bank of Commerces dividend payout ratio (DPR) is presently 64.65%.

Institutional Investors Weigh In On Canadian Imperial Bank of Commerce

A number of institutional investors and hedge funds have recently made changes to their positions in CM. Macquarie Group Ltd. bought a new stake in shares of Canadian Imperial Bank of Commerce in the 1st quarter valued at about $148,000. Raleigh Capital Management Inc. raised its stake in Canadian Imperial Bank of Commerce by 42.2% in the first quarter. Raleigh Capital Management Inc. now owns 23,115 shares of the banks stock valued at $981,000 after buying an additional 6,863 shares during the period. Ameriprise Financial Inc. lifted its position in shares of Canadian Imperial Bank of Commerce by 22.8% in the first quarter. Ameriprise Financial Inc. now owns 96,086 shares of the banks stock valued at $5,132,000 after buying an additional 17,836 shares during the last quarter. Power Corp of Canada boosted its stake in shares of Canadian Imperial Bank of Commerce by 123.9% during the 1st quarter. Power Corp of Canada now owns 90,363 shares of the banks stock worth $3,786,000 after acquiring an additional 49,999 shares during the period. Finally, JPMorgan Chase & Co. increased its holdings in shares of Canadian Imperial Bank of Commerce by 9.9% during the 1st quarter. JPMorgan Chase & Co. now owns 5,252,884 shares of the banks stock worth $222,828,000 after acquiring an additional 471,370 shares during the last quarter. Institutional investors own 37.70% of the companys stock.

About Canadian Imperial Bank of Commerce

(Free Report)

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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YouGov (OTCMKTS:YUGVF  Free Report) is one of 78 public companies in the Advertising Agencies industry, but how does it contrast to its peers? We will compare YouGov to related businesses based on the strength of its profitability, institutional ownership, dividends, valuation, analyst recommendations, risk and earnings.

Earnings and Valuation

This table compares YouGov and its peers gross revenue, earnings per share and valuation.

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Gross Revenue Net Income Price/Earnings Ratio YouGov N/A N/A 2,678.75 YouGov Competitors $1.94 billion $98.83 million 1,084.09

YouGovs peers have higher revenue and earnings than YouGov. YouGov is trading at a higher price-to-earnings ratio than its peers, indicating that it is currently more expensive than other companies in its industry.

Institutional and Insider Ownership

Analyst Ratings

38.5% of YouGov shares are held by institutional investors. Comparatively, 49.0% of shares of all Advertising Agencies companies are held by institutional investors. 23.7% of shares of all Advertising Agencies companies are held by insiders. Strong institutional ownership is an indication that large money managers, hedge funds and endowments believe a stock will outperform the market over the long term.

This is a summary of current recommendations for YouGov and its peers, as provided by MarketBeat.

Sell Ratings Hold Ratings Buy Ratings Strong Buy Ratings Rating Score YouGov 0 0 1 0 3.00 YouGov Competitors 264 1517 2487 35 2.53

As a group, Advertising Agencies companies have a potential upside of 121.99%. Given YouGovs peers higher probable upside, analysts plainly believe YouGov has less favorable growth aspects than its peers.

Profitability

This table compares YouGov and its peers net margins, return on equity and return on assets.

Net Margins Return on Equity Return on Assets YouGov N/A N/A N/A YouGov Competitors -8.78% -9.99% -0.88%

Dividends

YouGov pays an annual dividend of $0.01 per share and has a dividend yield of 0.1%. YouGov pays out 150.0% of its earnings in the form of a dividend, suggesting it may not have sufficient earnings to cover its dividend payment in the future. As a group, Advertising Agencies companies pay a dividend yield of 2.4% and pay out 545.7% of their earnings in the form of a dividend.

Summary

YouGov beats its peers on 7 of the 13 factors compared.

About YouGov

(Free Report)

YouGov plc provides online market research services in the United Kingdom, the United States, Germany, the Nordic countries, the Middle East, Mainland Europe, and the Asia Pacific. It operates through three divisions: Data Products, Data Services, and Custom Research. The Data Products division offers syndicated data products, which are available to clients on a subscription basis. The Data Services division provides clients with fast-turnaround services. The Custom Research division offers a range of quantitative and qualitative research services. It is also involved in the software development. YouGov plc was incorporated in 1998 and is headquartered in London, the United Kingdom.

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Swedish-Swiss tech solutions multinational corporation ABB is expanding its investments in the Egyptian market, Sherif Ismail, ABB Egypts vice president and the electrification commercial leader Egypt and Central Africa, told Ahram Online.
Enel Chile S.A. (NYSE:ENIC  Free Report) saw a significant decrease in short interest in June. As of June 15th, there was short interest totalling 628,200 shares, a decrease of 47.7% from the May 31st total of 1,200,000 shares. Based on an average daily volume of 1,060,000 shares, the short-interest ratio is currently 0.6 days.

Analyst Upgrades and Downgrades

Separately, StockNews.com upgraded shares of Enel Chile from a buy rating to a strong-buy rating in a report on Thursday, May 11th.

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Institutional Investors Weigh In On Enel Chile

Several large investors have recently bought and sold shares of the company. Citigroup Inc. bought a new stake in shares of Enel Chile during the first quarter worth $100,000. Natixis Advisors L.P. increased its position in shares of Enel Chile by 97.7% during the first quarter. Natixis Advisors L.P. now owns 387,161 shares of the utilities providers stock worth $612,000 after acquiring an additional 191,335 shares in the last quarter. Bank of Montreal Can increased its position in shares of Enel Chile by 45.9% during the first quarter. Bank of Montreal Can now owns 236,674 shares of the utilities providers stock worth $400,000 after acquiring an additional 74,470 shares in the last quarter. Cibc World Market Inc. bought a new stake in shares of Enel Chile during the first quarter worth $37,000. Finally, Cetera Investment Advisers increased its position in shares of Enel Chile by 14.5% during the first quarter. Cetera Investment Advisers now owns 68,387 shares of the utilities providers stock worth $108,000 after acquiring an additional 8,659 shares in the last quarter. Institutional investors own 2.18% of the companys stock.

Enel Chile Price Performance

NYSE ENIC remained flat at $3.33 during trading hours on Friday. 1,154,977 shares of the company traded hands, compared to its average volume of 1,434,393. The stock has a fifty day moving average of $3.03 and a two-hundred day moving average of $2.56. Enel Chile has a fifty-two week low of $0.98 and a fifty-two week high of $3.48. The firm has a market cap of $4.61 billion, a price-to-earnings ratio of 3.14 and a beta of 1.05. The company has a quick ratio of 0.94, a current ratio of 0.97 and a debt-to-equity ratio of 0.05.

Enel Chile (NYSE:ENIC  Free Report) last issued its earnings results on Thursday, April 27th. The utilities provider reported $0.12 EPS for the quarter. Enel Chile had a net margin of 24.73% and a return on equity of 122.04%. The firm had revenue of $1.41 billion during the quarter.

Enel Chile Increases Dividend

The company also recently announced a semi-annual dividend, which was paid on Thursday, May 18th. Shareholders of record on Friday, January 1st were paid a $0.3076 dividend. This represents a yield of 10.5%. The ex-dividend date was Thursday, May 18th. This is an increase from Enel Chiles previous semi-annual dividend of $0.01. Enel Chiles dividend payout ratio is presently 27.36%.

About Enel Chile

(Free Report)

Enel Chile SA, an electricity utility company, engages in the generation, transmission, and distribution of electricity in Chile. The company operates through Generation, and Distribution and Networks Segments. It generates electricity through various sources, such as hydroelectric, thermal, wind, solar, and geothermal power plants.

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Farmers and Merchants Bancshares (OTCMKTS:FMFG  Free Report) is one of 265 public companies in the BanksRegional industry, but how does it weigh in compared to its rivals? We will compare Farmers and Merchants Bancshares to similar businesses based on the strength of its profitability, institutional ownership, dividends, valuation, earnings, analyst recommendations and risk.

Profitability

This table compares Farmers and Merchants Bancshares and its rivals net margins, return on equity and return on assets.

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Net Margins Return on Equity Return on Assets Farmers and Merchants Bancshares N/A N/A N/A Farmers and Merchants Bancshares Competitors 36.40% 9.68% 0.86%

Dividends

Farmers and Merchants Bancshares pays an annual dividend of $0.47 per share and has a dividend yield of 2.2%. Farmers and Merchants Bancshares pays out 41.2% of its earnings in the form of a dividend. As a group, BanksRegional companies pay a dividend yield of 13.2% and pay out 18.7% of their earnings in the form of a dividend. Farmers and Merchants Bancshares lags its rivals as a dividend stock, given its lower dividend yield and higher payout ratio.

Institutional and Insider Ownership

Earnings and Valuation

0.2% of Farmers and Merchants Bancshares shares are owned by institutional investors. Comparatively, 33.0% of shares of all BanksRegional companies are owned by institutional investors. 16.2% of shares of all BanksRegional companies are owned by company insiders. Strong institutional ownership is an indication that endowments, large money managers and hedge funds believe a company is poised for long-term growth.

This table compares Farmers and Merchants Bancshares and its rivals revenue, earnings per share and valuation.

Gross Revenue Net Income Price/Earnings Ratio Farmers and Merchants Bancshares N/A N/A 19.02 Farmers and Merchants Bancshares Competitors $2.93 billion $812.48 million 276.30

Farmers and Merchants Bancshares rivals have higher revenue and earnings than Farmers and Merchants Bancshares. Farmers and Merchants Bancshares 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.

Analyst Recommendations

This is a breakdown of recent ratings and target prices for Farmers and Merchants Bancshares and its rivals, as provided by MarketBeat.

Sell Ratings Hold Ratings Buy Ratings Strong Buy Ratings Rating Score Farmers and Merchants Bancshares 0 0 0 0 N/A Farmers and Merchants Bancshares Competitors 1058 3143 3048 7 2.28

As a group, BanksRegional companies have a potential upside of 330.54%. Given Farmers and Merchants Bancshares rivals higher possible upside, analysts plainly believe Farmers and Merchants Bancshares has less favorable growth aspects than its rivals.

Summary

Farmers and Merchants Bancshares rivals beat Farmers and Merchants Bancshares on 10 of the 10 factors compared.

Farmers and Merchants Bancshares Company Profile

(Free Report)

Farmers and Merchants Bancshares, Inc., through its subsidiary, Farmers and Merchants Bank, provides commercial and retail banking services to individuals and businesses in Baltimore and Carroll counties in Maryland, and surrounding areas of northern Maryland. It offers checking, savings, money market, individual retirement, and sweep accounts, as well as certificates of deposit, remote check deposits, and repurchase agreements. The company also provides credit for residential mortgages, including federal housing administration and veterans affairs loans; construction loans; home equity lines; personal installment loans; and other consumer financing, as well as finances commerce and industry by providing credit and deposit services for small to medium size businesses and the agricultural community. In addition, it offers commercial lending, which includes commercial mortgages, land acquisition and development loans, lines of credit, accounts receivable financing, and term loans for fixed asset purchases, as well as loans guaranteed by the Small Business Administration and the United States Department of Agriculture. Further, the company provides automated teller machine, internet, mobile banking, and automated telephone services, as well as debit and credit cards. It serves customers through its office located in Upperco, Maryland; branches located in Hampstead, Greenmount, Reisterstown, Owings Mills, Eldersburg, and Westminster, Maryland; and a satellite branch located in Westminster, Maryland. Farmers and Merchants Bancshares, Inc. was founded in 1919 and is headquartered in Hampstead, Maryland.

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Grimes & Company Inc. decreased its holdings in shares of Novo Nordisk A/S (NYSE:NVO  Free Report) by 33.2% in the first quarter, according to the company in its most recent 13F filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC). The firm owned 53,236 shares of the companys stock after selling 26,426 shares during the period. Grimes & Company Inc.s holdings in Novo Nordisk A/S were worth $8,472,000 as of its most recent filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC).

A number of other hedge funds have also recently modified their holdings of the business. Perfromance Wealth Partners LLC grew its position in shares of Novo Nordisk A/S by 0.5% during the 1st quarter. Perfromance Wealth Partners LLC now owns 18,831 shares of the companys stock valued at $2,997,000 after acquiring an additional 100 shares during the period. Stonegate Investment Group LLC grew its position in shares of Novo Nordisk A/S by 24.4% during the 1st quarter. Stonegate Investment Group LLC now owns 10,387 shares of the companys stock valued at $1,653,000 after acquiring an additional 2,037 shares during the period. Beacon Capital Management LLC grew its position in shares of Novo Nordisk A/S by 9.0% during the 1st quarter. Beacon Capital Management LLC now owns 948 shares of the companys stock valued at $151,000 after acquiring an additional 78 shares during the period. Cabot Wealth Management Inc. grew its position in shares of Novo Nordisk A/S by 0.9% during the 1st quarter. Cabot Wealth Management Inc. now owns 76,849 shares of the companys stock valued at $12,230,000 after acquiring an additional 679 shares during the period. Finally, Segment Wealth Management LLC bought a new stake in shares of Novo Nordisk A/S during the 1st quarter valued at $11,545,000. Institutional investors own 6.30% of the companys stock.

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Novo Nordisk A/S Stock Down 0.8 %

NVO opened at $160.49 on Monday. The firm has a 50-day simple moving average of $163.14 and a two-hundred day simple moving average of $150.84. Novo Nordisk A/S has a 52 week low of $95.02 and a 52 week high of $172.97. The company has a market capitalization of $360.10 billion, a PE ratio of 42.59, a price-to-earnings-growth ratio of 1.54 and a beta of 0.47. The company has a quick ratio of 0.67, a current ratio of 0.86 and a debt-to-equity ratio of 0.30.

Analysts Set New Price Targets

Novo Nordisk A/S ( NYSE:NVO Free Report ) last released its quarterly earnings data on Thursday, May 4th. The company reported $1.27 EPS for the quarter, meeting the consensus estimate of $1.27. Novo Nordisk A/S had a net margin of 32.53% and a return on equity of 77.39%. The business had revenue of $7.69 billion during the quarter, compared to the consensus estimate of $7.86 billion. Analysts forecast that Novo Nordisk A/S will post 5.06 earnings per share for the current fiscal year.

Several research analysts recently weighed in on the stock. StockNews.com assumed coverage on shares of Novo Nordisk A/S in a report on Thursday, May 18th. They issued a strong-buy rating for the company. Credit Suisse Group raised shares of Novo Nordisk A/S from a neutral rating to an outperform rating in a report on Thursday, April 13th.

About Novo Nordisk A/S

(Free Report)

Novo Nordisk A/S, a healthcare company, engages in the research, development, manufacture, and marketing of pharmaceutical products worldwide. It operates in two segments, Diabetes and Obesity care, and Rare Disease. The Diabetes and Obesity care segment provides products in the areas of insulins, GLP-1 and related delivery systems, oral antidiabetic products, obesity, glucagon, needles, and other chronic diseases.

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Handelsbanken upgraded shares of Tobii Dynavox AB (publ) (OTCMKTS:TDVXF  Free Report) from a market perform rating to an outperform rating in a research note issued to investors on Thursday morning, The Fly reports.

Tobii Dynavox AB (publ) Stock Up 9.5 %

Shares of OTCMKTS TDVXF opened at $2.41 on Thursday. Tobii Dynavox AB has a 1-year low of $0.50 and a 1-year high of $2.88.

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Tobii Dynavox AB (publ) Company Profile

(Free Report)

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Tobii Dynavox AB (Publ) develops and sells assistive technology products for communication in Sweden and internationally. The company provides technology and solutions for augmentative and alternative communication for people with disabilities. It also offers speech generating devices and eye trackers; software and apps for communication, computer access, special education, and analysis; accessories, including keyguards, chargers, mounts, and cases; games; and books.

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Tortoise Midstream Energy Fund (NYSE:NTG  Free Report) is one of 1,204 public companies in the Asset Management industry, but how does it compare to its rivals? We will compare Tortoise Midstream Energy Fund to similar businesses based on the strength of its institutional ownership, earnings, analyst recommendations, valuation, profitability, risk and dividends.

Earnings & Valuation

This table compares Tortoise Midstream Energy Fund and its rivals gross revenue, earnings per share and valuation.

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Gross Revenue Net Income Price/Earnings Ratio Tortoise Midstream Energy Fund $67.46 million N/A -1,162.07 Tortoise Midstream Energy Fund Competitors $240.64 million $5.71 million -4.67

Tortoise Midstream Energy Funds rivals have higher revenue and earnings than Tortoise Midstream Energy Fund. Tortoise Midstream Energy Fund 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.

Institutional & Insider Ownership

Analyst Recommendations

32.4% of shares of all Asset Management companies are held by institutional investors. 18.1% of shares of all Asset Management companies are held by company insiders. Strong institutional ownership is an indication that endowments, hedge funds and large money managers believe a stock will outperform the market over the long term.

This is a summary of recent ratings and recommmendations for Tortoise Midstream Energy Fund and its rivals, as reported by MarketBeat.com.

Sell Ratings Hold Ratings Buy Ratings Strong Buy Ratings Rating Score Tortoise Midstream Energy Fund 0 0 0 0 N/A Tortoise Midstream Energy Fund Competitors 1053 4624 5987 83 2.43

As a group, Asset Management companies have a potential upside of 90.50%. Given Tortoise Midstream Energy Funds rivals higher probable upside, analysts plainly believe Tortoise Midstream Energy Fund has less favorable growth aspects than its rivals.

Profitability

This table compares Tortoise Midstream Energy Fund and its rivals net margins, return on equity and return on assets.

Net Margins Return on Equity Return on Assets Tortoise Midstream Energy Fund N/A N/A N/A Tortoise Midstream Energy Fund Competitors 374.59% 7.95% 4.97%

Dividends

Tortoise Midstream Energy Fund pays an annual dividend of $3.08 per share and has a dividend yield of 8.9%. Tortoise Midstream Energy Fund pays out -10,341.5% of its earnings in the form of a dividend. As a group, Asset Management companies pay a dividend yield of 7.8% and pay out 1,361.4% of their earnings in the form of a dividend. Tortoise Midstream Energy Fund has raised its dividend for 2 consecutive years. Tortoise Midstream Energy Fund is clearly a better dividend stock than its rivals, given its higher yield and lower payout ratio.

Summary

Tortoise Midstream Energy Fund rivals beat Tortoise Midstream Energy Fund on 8 of the 10 factors compared.

About Tortoise Midstream Energy Fund

(Free Report)

Tortoise MLP Fund, Inc. is a close ended equity mutual fund launched and managed by Tortoise Capital Advisors L.L.C. It invests in public equity markets. The fund primarily invests in equity securities of MLPs and their affiliates, with an emphasis on natural gas infrastructure Master Limited Partnerships. It employs a fundamental analysis with a bottom up stock picking approach with focus on factors like quantitative, qualitative, and relative value factors to create its portfolio. Tortoise MLP Fund, Inc. was formed on July 27, 2010 is domiciled in United States.

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Himalaya Technologies (OTCMKTS:HMLA  Free Report) and ENI (NYSE:E  Free Report) are both finance companies, but which is the superior stock? We will compare the two companies based on the strength of their earnings, analyst recommendations, valuation, dividends, risk, profitability and institutional ownership.

Profitability

This table compares Himalaya Technologies and ENIs net margins, return on equity and return on assets.

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Net Margins Return on Equity Return on Assets Himalaya Technologies N/A N/A -210.78% ENI 9.82% 23.35% 8.12%

Institutional & Insider Ownership

5.4% of Himalaya Technologies shares are held by institutional investors. Comparatively, 1.4% of ENI shares are held by institutional investors. 0.0% of ENI shares are held by company insiders. Strong institutional ownership is an indication that hedge funds, large money managers and endowments believe a stock will outperform the market over the long term.

Risk & Volatility

Analyst Recommendations

Himalaya Technologies has a beta of -1.19, suggesting that its share price is 219% less volatile than the S&P 500. Comparatively, ENI has a beta of 1.04, suggesting that its share price is 4% more volatile than the S&P 500.

This is a breakdown of recent ratings for Himalaya Technologies and ENI, as provided by MarketBeat.

Sell Ratings Hold Ratings Buy Ratings Strong Buy Ratings Rating Score Himalaya Technologies 0 0 0 0 N/A ENI 0 6 6 0 2.50

ENI has a consensus target price of $16.83, indicating a potential downside of 41.53%. Given ENIs higher possible upside, analysts clearly believe ENI is more favorable than Himalaya Technologies.

Earnings and Valuation

This table compares Himalaya Technologies and ENIs revenue, earnings per share and valuation.

Gross Revenue Price/Sales Ratio Net Income Earnings Per Share Price/Earnings Ratio Himalaya Technologies N/A N/A -$200,000.00 N/A N/A ENI $140.59 billion 0.37 $14.63 billion $7.54 3.82

ENI has higher revenue and earnings than Himalaya Technologies.

Summary

ENI beats Himalaya Technologies on 9 of the 10 factors compared between the two stocks.

About Himalaya Technologies

(Free Report)

Himalaya Technologies, Inc., a development stage company, provides information services for the cannabis industry. It operates Kanab.Club, a social site for health and wellness products and services in the cannabis market. The company was formerly known as Homeland Resources Ltd. Himalaya Technologies, Inc. was incorporated in 2003 and is headquartered in Chicago, Illinois.

About ENI

(Free Report)

Eni S.p.A. operates as an integrated energy company worldwide. It engages in exploration, development, extracting, manufacturing, and marketing crude oil and natural gas, oil-based fuels, chemical products, and gas-fired power, as well as energy products from renewable sources. The company operates through Exploration & Production; Global Gas & LNG Portfolio (GGP); Refining & Marketing and Chemicals; Plenitude & Power; and Corporate and Other Activities segments. The Exploration & Production segment engages in research, development, and production of oil, condensates, and natural gas; and forestry conservation and CO2 capture and storage projects. The GGP segment is involved in the supply and sale of wholesale natural gas through pipeline; and international transport, and purchase and marketing of liquefied natural gas. The Refining & Marketing and Chemicals segment supplies, processes, distributes, and markets fuels and chemicals. The Plenitude & Power segment engages in the retail sale of gas, electricity, and related services; production and wholesale sale of electricity from thermoelectric and renewable plants; and provision of services for E-mobility. The Corporate and Other Activities segment is involved in the research and development, new technologies, business digitalization, and environmental activities. The company was founded in 1953 and is headquartered in Rome, Italy.

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Ethos Financial Group LLC lowered its position in Illinois Tool Works Inc. (NYSE:ITW  Free Report) by 3.9% during the first quarter, according to the company in its most recent 13F filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC). The firm owned 1,610 shares of the industrial products companys stock after selling 65 shares during the period. Ethos Financial Group LLCs holdings in Illinois Tool Works were worth $394,000 as of its most recent SEC filing.

Other institutional investors and hedge funds have also modified their holdings of the company. Vanguard Group Inc. lifted its stake in shares of Illinois Tool Works by 0.8% during the 3rd quarter. Vanguard Group Inc. now owns 25,609,537 shares of the industrial products companys stock worth $4,626,363,000 after purchasing an additional 215,823 shares during the period. Moneta Group Investment Advisors LLC lifted its stake in shares of Illinois Tool Works by 106,553.0% during the 4th quarter. Moneta Group Investment Advisors LLC now owns 7,185,211 shares of the industrial products companys stock worth $1,582,902,000 after purchasing an additional 7,178,474 shares during the period. Charles Schwab Investment Management Inc. lifted its stake in shares of Illinois Tool Works by 8.5% during the 4th quarter. Charles Schwab Investment Management Inc. now owns 7,005,137 shares of the industrial products companys stock worth $1,531,936,000 after purchasing an additional 545,904 shares during the period. Geode Capital Management LLC lifted its stake in shares of Illinois Tool Works by 1.7% during the 4th quarter. Geode Capital Management LLC now owns 5,004,410 shares of the industrial products companys stock worth $1,100,917,000 after purchasing an additional 85,640 shares during the period. Finally, Morgan Stanley raised its position in shares of Illinois Tool Works by 59.2% in the 4th quarter. Morgan Stanley now owns 4,591,278 shares of the industrial products companys stock worth $1,011,459,000 after buying an additional 1,707,780 shares during the period. Institutional investors and hedge funds own 79.37% of the companys stock.

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Illinois Tool Works Stock Down 0.1 %

Shares of Illinois Tool Works stock traded down $0.33 during trading hours on Monday, hitting $249.83. 209,691 shares of the companys stock traded hands, compared to its average volume of 1,087,678. The stock has a 50 day simple moving average of $234.57 and a 200-day simple moving average of $232.57. The company has a quick ratio of 0.84, a current ratio of 1.20 and a debt-to-equity ratio of 1.78. The company has a market cap of $75.92 billion, a PE ratio of 25.02, a PEG ratio of 3.77 and a beta of 1.13. Illinois Tool Works Inc. has a twelve month low of $173.52 and a twelve month high of $253.37.

Illinois Tool Works Dividend Announcement

Illinois Tool Works ( NYSE:ITW Free Report ) last posted its quarterly earnings results on Tuesday, May 2nd. The industrial products company reported $2.33 EPS for the quarter, topping analysts consensus estimates of $2.23 by $0.10. The business had revenue of $4.02 billion during the quarter, compared to the consensus estimate of $3.98 billion. Illinois Tool Works had a return on equity of 92.13% and a net margin of 19.27%. The companys revenue for the quarter was up 2.0% compared to the same quarter last year. During the same period last year, the firm earned $2.11 earnings per share. Equities research analysts anticipate that Illinois Tool Works Inc. will post 9.65 earnings per share for the current fiscal year.

The company also recently declared a quarterly dividend, which will be paid on Thursday, July 13th. Investors of record on Friday, June 30th will be paid a $1.31 dividend. The ex-dividend date is Thursday, June 29th. This represents a $5.24 dividend on an annualized basis and a yield of 2.10%. Illinois Tool Workss dividend payout ratio (DPR) is 52.40%.

Insider Buying and Selling

In related news, CAO Randall J. Scheuneman sold 5,425 shares of Illinois Tool Works stock in a transaction dated Monday, June 12th. The stock was sold at an average price of $239.23, for a total value of $1,297,822.75. Following the completion of the transaction, the chief accounting officer now directly owns 8,870 shares in the company, valued at $2,121,970.10. The transaction was disclosed in a legal filing with the Securities & Exchange Commission, which can be accessed through the SEC website. Insiders own 0.78% of the companys stock.

Wall Street Analyst Weigh In

Several research analysts recently weighed in on ITW shares. 3M reaffirmed a maintains rating on shares of Illinois Tool Works in a research report on Wednesday, May 3rd. StockNews.com lowered Illinois Tool Works from a buy rating to a hold rating in a research report on Thursday, June 22nd. Wells Fargo & Company cut their target price on Illinois Tool Works from $250.00 to $227.00 and set an equal weight rating on the stock in a research report on Thursday, April 13th. Barclays cut their target price on Illinois Tool Works from $205.00 to $203.00 in a research report on Wednesday, May 3rd. Finally, Deutsche Bank Aktiengesellschaft cut their price objective on Illinois Tool Works from $183.00 to $181.00 and set a sell rating on the stock in a research report on Wednesday, April 12th. Three equities research analysts have rated the stock with a sell rating, nine have issued a hold rating and two have given a buy rating to the companys stock. Based on data from MarketBeat.com, the stock presently has an average rating of Hold and an average target price of $228.21.

About Illinois Tool Works

(Free Report)

Illinois Tool Works Inc manufactures and sells industrial products and equipment worldwide. It operates through seven segments: Automotive OEM; Food Equipment; Test & Measurement and Electronics; Welding; Polymers & Fluids; Construction Products; and Specialty Products. The Automotive OEM segment offers plastic and metal components, fasteners, and assemblies for automobiles, light trucks, and other industrial uses.

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Want to see what other hedge funds are holding ITW? Visit HoldingsChannel.com to get the latest 13F filings and insider trades for Illinois Tool Works Inc. (NYSE:ITW  Free Report).

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AutoNation (NYSE:AN  Free Report) and Imperial Logistics (OTCMKTS:IHLDY  Free Report) are both retail/wholesale companies, but which is the better investment? We will contrast the two businesses based on the strength of their risk, dividends, valuation, profitability, institutional ownership, earnings and analyst recommendations.

Insider and Institutional Ownership

70.5% of AutoNation shares are owned by institutional investors. 0.7% of AutoNation shares are owned by company insiders. Strong institutional ownership is an indication that large money managers, hedge funds and endowments believe a company will outperform the market over the long term.

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Profitability

This table compares AutoNation and Imperial Logistics net margins, return on equity and return on assets.

Net Margins Return on Equity Return on Assets AutoNation 4.90% 61.01% 13.48% Imperial Logistics N/A N/A N/A

Earnings and Valuation

Gross Revenue Price/Sales Ratio Net Income Earnings Per Share Price/Earnings Ratio AutoNation $26.99 billion 0.28 $1.38 billion $24.58 6.70 Imperial Logistics N/A N/A N/A N/A N/A

This table compares AutoNation and Imperial Logistics gross revenue, earnings per share and valuation.

AutoNation has higher revenue and earnings than Imperial Logistics.

Analyst Ratings

This is a breakdown of current ratings and target prices for AutoNation and Imperial Logistics, as reported by MarketBeat.com.

Sell Ratings Hold Ratings Buy Ratings Strong Buy Ratings Rating Score AutoNation 2 1 4 0 2.29 Imperial Logistics 0 0 0 0 N/A

AutoNation currently has a consensus price target of $153.14, suggesting a potential downside of 6.97%. Given AutoNations higher possible upside, equities analysts clearly believe AutoNation is more favorable than Imperial Logistics.

Summary

AutoNation beats Imperial Logistics on 8 of the 8 factors compared between the two stocks.

About AutoNation

(Free Report)

AutoNation, Inc., through its subsidiaries, operates as an automotive retailer in the United States. The company operates through three segments: Domestic, Import, and Premium Luxury. It offers a range of automotive products and services, including new and used vehicles; and parts and services, such as automotive repair and maintenance, and wholesale parts and collision services. The company also provides automotive finance and insurance products comprising vehicle services and other protection products, as well as arranges finance for vehicle purchases through third-party finance sources. It owns and operates 343 new vehicle franchises from 247 stores located primarily in metropolitan markets in the Sunbelt region, as well as 55 AutoNation-branded collision centers, 13 AutoNation USA used vehicle stores, 4 AutoNation-branded automotive auction operations, and 3 parts distribution centers. AutoNation, Inc. was incorporated in 1991 and is headquartered in Fort Lauderdale, Florida.

About Imperial Logistics

(Free Report)

Imperial Logistics Limited provides integrated market access and logistics solutions in Africa, Europe, and Internationally. It offers outsourced integrated freight management services, such as road, air, and ocean freight management services; contract logistics services, including warehousing, distribution, and synchronization management; and sourcing, warehousing, distribution, synchronisation, and transportation management services. The company also operates as the lead logistics provider. It serves primarily healthcare, consumer, automotive, chemicals, and industrial markets. The company was formerly known as Imperial Holdings Limited and changed its name to Imperial Logistics Limited in December 2018. The company is headquartered in Bedfordview, South Africa. As of March 14, 2022, Imperial Logistics Limited operates as a subsidiary of DP World Limited.

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Inchcape plc (OTCMKTS:IHCPF  Free Report) was the target of a significant drop in short interest in June. As of June 15th, there was short interest totalling 61,700 shares, a drop of 45.5% from the May 31st total of 113,300 shares. Based on an average daily volume of 0 shares, the short-interest ratio is presently  days.

Inchcape Stock Performance

IHCPF stock remained flat at C$9.49 during midday trading on Monday. 1 shares of the companys stock were exchanged, compared to its average volume of 1,367. Inchcape has a 1 year low of C$9.49 and a 1 year high of C$9.90. The stocks 50 day moving average price is C$9.64 and its 200-day moving average price is C$9.85.

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About Inchcape

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Inchcape plc operates as an automotive distributor and retailer. It engages in the distribution, sales, and marketing of new and used cars, and parts. The company also provides aftersales service and body shop repairs; and finance and insurance products and services. It operates in the Asia Pacific, the United Kingdom, rest of Europe, the Americas, and Africa.

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Altfest L J & Co. Inc. lifted its stake in shares of Invesco MSCI Sustainable Future ETF (NYSEARCA:ERTH  Free Report) by 1.2% during the first quarter, according to the company in its most recent filing with the Securities & Exchange Commission. The firm owned 20,653 shares of the companys stock after purchasing an additional 247 shares during the quarter. Altfest L J & Co. Inc. owned about 0.33% of Invesco MSCI Sustainable Future ETF worth $1,014,000 at the end of the most recent quarter.

A number of other institutional investors and hedge funds have also made changes to their positions in ERTH. Bank of Montreal Can grew its stake in Invesco MSCI Sustainable Future ETF by 96.7% in the 1st quarter. Bank of Montreal Can now owns 8,791 shares of the companys stock valued at $547,000 after acquiring an additional 4,322 shares during the last quarter. KCM Investment Advisors LLC grew its stake in Invesco MSCI Sustainable Future ETF by 1.8% in the 1st quarter. KCM Investment Advisors LLC now owns 149,841 shares of the companys stock valued at $9,206,000 after acquiring an additional 2,711 shares during the last quarter. First Republic Investment Management Inc. boosted its stake in shares of Invesco MSCI Sustainable Future ETF by 16.8% during the 1st quarter. First Republic Investment Management Inc. now owns 5,231 shares of the companys stock worth $321,000 after purchasing an additional 751 shares during the last quarter. Jane Street Group LLC lifted its holdings in shares of Invesco MSCI Sustainable Future ETF by 2.0% during the 1st quarter. Jane Street Group LLC now owns 45,844 shares of the companys stock worth $2,817,000 after acquiring an additional 895 shares during the period. Finally, FMR LLC purchased a new position in shares of Invesco MSCI Sustainable Future ETF during the 2nd quarter worth about $61,000.

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Invesco MSCI Sustainable Future ETF Price Performance

Shares of ERTH stock opened at $50.13 on Monday. The firm has a market cap of $300.78 million, a P/E ratio of 31.61 and a beta of 1.15. Invesco MSCI Sustainable Future ETF has a 1-year low of $44.64 and a 1-year high of $60.91. The firms 50-day simple moving average is $47.40 and its 200-day simple moving average is $48.65.

About Invesco MSCI Sustainable Future ETF

The Invesco MSCI Sustainable Future ETF (ERTH) is an exchange-traded fund that is based on the MSCI Global Environment Select index. The fund tracks an index of global companies focusing on contributing to a more environmentally sustainable economy. ERTH was launched on Oct 24, 2006 and is managed by Invesco.

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Want to see what other hedge funds are holding ERTH? Visit HoldingsChannel.com to get the latest 13F filings and insider trades for Invesco MSCI Sustainable Future ETF (NYSEARCA:ERTH  Free Report).

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Israel carried out air strikes in Syria near the government-held city of Homs, Syrian state media reported on Sunday, and the Israeli army later said it had responded to rocket fire.

During more than a decade of war in Syria, Israel has launched hundreds of air strikes on Syrian territory, primarily targeting Iran-backed forces and Lebanese Hezbollah fighters as well as Syrian army positions.

"The Israeli enemy carried out air strikes coming from the northeast of Beirut, targeting some points in the vicinity of the city of Homs," which is about 20 kilometres (12 miles) from Lebanon, Syrian state-run news agency SANA said, quoting a military source.

In a statement several hours later on Sunday morning, the Israeli military confirmed it had conducted strikes. It said they targeted "an anti-aircraft battery in Syria, as a response to the launch of an anti-aircraft rocket from Syria into Israeli territory".

It added that Israeli jets had also "struck additional targets in the area", and that the Syrian anti-aircraft rocket had "exploded in the air" and no injuries were reported.

SANA had reported that Syrian air defences intercepted some missiles, and that there had been some "material" losses.

The Syrian Observatory for Human Rights war monitor said the targeted area in the northeastern Homs countryside was a Hezbollah stronghold housing arms depots belonging to the Iran-backed group.

Israel rarely comments on the strikes it carries out on Syria, but it has repeatedly said it will not allow its arch foe Iran to expand its footprint there.

On June 14, Israel carried out air strikes near Damascus wounding a soldier, according to SANA.

The Observatory, based in Britain, said at the time that the strikes had targeted arms depots belonging to pro-Iran fighters.

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Hennion & Walsh Asset Management Inc. raised its holdings in shares of iShares Investment Grade Bond Factor ETF (BATS:IGEB  Free Report) by 14.5% in the first quarter, according to the company in its most recent filing with the Securities & Exchange Commission. The institutional investor owned 658,572 shares of the companys stock after purchasing an additional 83,243 shares during the quarter. iShares Investment Grade Bond Factor ETF accounts for 1.8% of Hennion & Walsh Asset Management Inc.s portfolio, making the stock its 5th largest position. Hennion & Walsh Asset Management Inc. owned 12.08% of iShares Investment Grade Bond Factor ETF worth $29,444,000 as of its most recent SEC filing.

A number of other hedge funds have also recently bought and sold shares of the business. National Bank of Canada FI lifted its holdings in iShares Investment Grade Bond Factor ETF by 36.2% during the 1st quarter. National Bank of Canada FI now owns 9,112 shares of the companys stock worth $357,000 after buying an additional 2,422 shares during the last quarter. Mercer Global Advisors Inc. ADV bought a new stake in shares of iShares Investment Grade Bond Factor ETF in the 4th quarter worth approximately $807,000. Lion Street Advisors LLC lifted its holdings in shares of iShares Investment Grade Bond Factor ETF by 71.8% in the 1st quarter. Lion Street Advisors LLC now owns 18,146 shares of the companys stock worth $811,000 after purchasing an additional 7,585 shares during the last quarter. Citadel Advisors LLC bought a new stake in shares of iShares Investment Grade Bond Factor ETF in the 2nd quarter worth approximately $1,509,000. Finally, AdvisorNet Financial Inc lifted its holdings in shares of iShares Investment Grade Bond Factor ETF by 5.3% in the 4th quarter. AdvisorNet Financial Inc now owns 169,219 shares of the companys stock worth $7,329,000 after purchasing an additional 8,450 shares during the last quarter.

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iShares Investment Grade Bond Factor ETF Trading Up 0.5 %

Shares of BATS IGEB traded up $0.24 during mid-day trading on Monday, hitting $44.19. The company had a trading volume of 107,302 shares. iShares Investment Grade Bond Factor ETF has a 12 month low of $48.61 and a 12 month high of $50.95. The firms 50 day simple moving average is $44.11 and its two-hundred day simple moving average is $44.25.

iShares Investment Grade Bond Factor ETF Announces Dividend

iShares Investment Grade Bond Factor ETF Profile

The firm also recently announced a dividend, which will be paid on Monday, July 10th. Shareholders of record on Wednesday, July 5th will be paid a dividend of $0.18 per share. The ex-dividend date of this dividend is Monday, July 3rd.

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The iShares Investment Grade Bond Factor ETF (IGEB) is an exchange-traded fund that mostly invests in investment grade fixed income. The fund tracks a broad-maturity, multi-factor, investment-grade bond index. The index selects and weights bonds based on default probability, default-adjusted spreads, and volatility.

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John Hancock Investors Trust (NYSE:JHI  Free Report) was the target of a large decline in short interest in June. As of June 15th, there was short interest totalling 12,800 shares, a decline of 48.6% from the May 31st total of 24,900 shares. Based on an average daily volume of 14,500 shares, the days-to-cover ratio is presently 0.9 days.

John Hancock Investors Trust Price Performance

JHI traded up $0.04 on Monday, hitting $12.68. The company had a trading volume of 23,497 shares, compared to its average volume of 16,460. The stock has a fifty day moving average price of $12.60 and a 200-day moving average price of $12.76. John Hancock Investors Trust has a 12-month low of $11.80 and a 12-month high of $14.88.

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John Hancock Investors Trust Increases Dividend

The firm also recently disclosed a quarterly dividend, which was paid on Friday, June 30th. Stockholders of record on Monday, June 12th were given a $0.2152 dividend. This is a boost from John Hancock Investors Trusts previous quarterly dividend of $0.19. The ex-dividend date was Friday, June 9th. This represents a $0.86 dividend on an annualized basis and a dividend yield of 6.79%.

Hedge Funds Weigh In On John Hancock Investors Trust

About John Hancock Investors Trust

Hedge funds and other institutional investors have recently modified their holdings of the stock. Shaker Financial Services LLC boosted its holdings in John Hancock Investors Trust by 140.1% during the first quarter. Shaker Financial Services LLC now owns 138,083 shares of the financial services providers stock worth $1,752,000 after buying an additional 80,578 shares in the last quarter. Ameriprise Financial Inc. increased its stake in shares of John Hancock Investors Trust by 99.2% in the 1st quarter. Ameriprise Financial Inc. now owns 83,302 shares of the financial services providers stock valued at $1,057,000 after purchasing an additional 41,484 shares in the last quarter. Wolverine Asset Management LLC raised its holdings in John Hancock Investors Trust by 74.5% in the 1st quarter. Wolverine Asset Management LLC now owns 57,811 shares of the financial services providers stock worth $734,000 after purchasing an additional 24,674 shares during the period. Bank of America Corp DE lifted its position in shares of John Hancock Investors Trust by 46.5% during the 4th quarter. Bank of America Corp DE now owns 72,627 shares of the financial services providers stock valued at $911,000 after buying an additional 23,059 shares in the last quarter. Finally, Allspring Global Investments Holdings LLC acquired a new stake in John Hancock Investors Trust in the 1st quarter valued at $273,000. 12.77% of the stock is owned by hedge funds and other institutional investors.

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John Hancock Investors Trust is a closed-ended fixed income mutual fund launched and managed by John Hancock Investment Management LLC. It is co-managed by John Hancock Asset Management. It invests in the fixed income markets across the globe. The fund primarily invests in a diversified portfolio of corporate and government bonds, debt securities.

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Shares of Katoro Gold plc (LON:KAT  Free Report) hit a new 52-week low on Monday . The company traded as low as GBX 0.08 ($0.00) and last traded at GBX 0.09 ($0.00), with a volume of 0 shares trading hands. The stock had previously closed at GBX 0.09 ($0.00).

Katoro Gold Price Performance

The firm has a market cap of 602,550.00, a PE ratio of -0.42 and a beta of 0.58. The business has a fifty day moving average price of GBX 0.10 and a two-hundred day moving average price of GBX 0.12.

Katoro Gold Company Profile

(Free Report)

Katoro Gold plc operates as a gold and nickel exploration and development company in the United Kingdom, Cyprus, South Africa, and Tanzania. The company primarily explores for nickel, platinum group metals, copper, and gold deposits. It holds 65% interest in the Haneti project covering an area of approximately 5,000 square kilometers located in central Tanzania; and Blyvoor Tailings project located in South Africa.

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Keywords Studios (LON:KWS  Free Report) had its price target reduced by Deutsche Bank Aktiengesellschaft from GBX 2,700 ($34.33) to GBX 2,000 ($25.43) in a research report issued on Monday, Digital Look reports. The brokerage presently has a hold rating on the stock. Deutsche Bank Aktiengesellschafts price target would suggest a potential upside of 11.73% from the companys current price.

Several other research firms have also issued reports on KWS. Shore Capital reissued a buy rating on shares of Keywords Studios in a report on Wednesday, June 21st. Citigroup reissued a neutral rating on shares of Keywords Studios in a report on Wednesday, June 21st. Finally, Barclays reduced their target price on Keywords Studios from GBX 3,250 ($41.32) to GBX 2,250 ($28.61) and set an overweight rating on the stock in a report on Monday. Two analysts have rated the stock with a hold rating and four have issued a buy rating to the stock. According to data from MarketBeat.com, the company presently has an average rating of Moderate Buy and a consensus target price of GBX 2,745 ($34.90).

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Keywords Studios Stock Performance

LON KWS traded down GBX 20 ($0.25) on Monday, reaching GBX 1,790 ($22.76). The stock had a trading volume of 722,038 shares, compared to its average volume of 233,216. The company has a market cap of 1.42 billion, a P/E ratio of 3,509.80, a price-to-earnings-growth ratio of 2.97 and a beta of 1.04. Keywords Studios has a 1-year low of GBX 1,729 ($21.98) and a 1-year high of GBX 3,056 ($38.86). The company has a debt-to-equity ratio of 7.64, a current ratio of 1.22 and a quick ratio of 1.70. The firm has a fifty day moving average of GBX 2,123.55 and a two-hundred day moving average of GBX 2,542.78.

Insider Buying and Selling

Keywords Studios Company Profile

In other news, insider Don Robert bought 110 shares of the companys stock in a transaction on Friday, May 5th. The stock was purchased at an average cost of GBX 2,254 ($28.66) per share, for a total transaction of 2,479.40 ($3,152.45). In other news, insider Marion Sears acquired 1,000 shares of Keywords Studios stock in a transaction on Wednesday, May 24th. The stock was purchased at an average price of GBX 2,133 ($27.12) per share, with a total value of 21,330 ($27,120.15). Also, insider Don Robert acquired 110 shares of Keywords Studios stock in a transaction on Friday, May 5th. The stock was purchased at an average cost of GBX 2,254 ($28.66) per share, with a total value of 2,479.40 ($3,152.45). Insiders acquired a total of 3,812 shares of company stock worth $7,379,640 in the last ninety days. 2.96% of the stock is owned by insiders.

(Free Report)

Keywords Studios plc provides creative and technical services to the video game industry worldwide. The company offers art creation services related to the production of graphical art assets for inclusion in the video game, including concept art creation, as well as 2D and 3D art asset production and animation.

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Kovack Advisors Inc. grew its position in shares of VAALCO Energy, Inc. (NYSE:EGY  Free Report) by 3.7% during the first quarter, according to its most recent filing with the SEC. The firm owned 385,050 shares of the energy companys stock after acquiring an additional 13,650 shares during the period. Kovack Advisors Inc. owned about 0.36% of VAALCO Energy worth $1,744,000 at the end of the most recent quarter.

A number of other hedge funds and other institutional investors have also recently made changes to their positions in the company. Redwood Wealth Management Group LLC purchased a new stake in shares of VAALCO Energy in the 1st quarter worth approximately $197,000. Morgan Dempsey Capital Management LLC lifted its holdings in shares of VAALCO Energy by 21.6% during the 1st quarter. Morgan Dempsey Capital Management LLC now owns 52,064 shares of the energy companys stock valued at $236,000 after buying an additional 9,255 shares during the period. Raymond James Financial Services Advisors Inc. lifted its holdings in shares of VAALCO Energy by 51.9% during the 1st quarter. Raymond James Financial Services Advisors Inc. now owns 16,093 shares of the energy companys stock valued at $73,000 after buying an additional 5,502 shares during the period. Allspring Global Investments Holdings LLC raised its holdings in VAALCO Energy by 283.7% in the 1st quarter. Allspring Global Investments Holdings LLC now owns 10,374 shares of the energy companys stock worth $47,000 after purchasing an additional 7,670 shares during the period. Finally, SummerHaven Investment Management LLC raised its holdings in VAALCO Energy by 2.9% in the 1st quarter. SummerHaven Investment Management LLC now owns 129,953 shares of the energy companys stock worth $589,000 after purchasing an additional 3,666 shares during the period. Hedge funds and other institutional investors own 52.14% of the companys stock.

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Analyst Ratings Changes

A number of equities analysts recently commented on EGY shares. Roth Capital reaffirmed a buy rating on shares of VAALCO Energy in a report on Monday, March 6th. StockNews.com cut VAALCO Energy from a hold rating to a sell rating in a report on Saturday, May 27th.

Insider Activity

VAALCO Energy Price Performance

In other news, CEO George W.M. Maxwell acquired 10,000 shares of the businesss stock in a transaction dated Monday, May 15th. The stock was purchased at an average price of $3.70 per share, for a total transaction of $37,000.00. Following the completion of the transaction, the chief executive officer now directly owns 143,840 shares in the company, valued at approximately $532,208. The acquisition was disclosed in a filing with the SEC, which is available through this link . Insiders bought a total of 25,764 shares of company stock worth $96,519 over the last 90 days. Corporate insiders own 1.00% of the companys stock.

NYSE:EGY traded up $0.08 on Monday, reaching $3.84. 242,347 shares of the companys stock traded hands, compared to its average volume of 1,401,167. The company has a quick ratio of 1.13, a current ratio of 1.21 and a debt-to-equity ratio of 0.18. The stock has a 50-day simple moving average of $3.98 and a 200-day simple moving average of $4.34. The firm has a market cap of $410.00 million, a PE ratio of 6.71 and a beta of 1.45. VAALCO Energy, Inc. has a 12 month low of $3.51 and a 12 month high of $6.77.

VAALCO Energy (NYSE:EGY  Free Report) last posted its quarterly earnings results on Tuesday, May 9th. The energy company reported $0.07 EPS for the quarter, missing analysts consensus estimates of $0.49 by ($0.42). The business had revenue of $80.40 million for the quarter, compared to the consensus estimate of $140.29 million. VAALCO Energy had a net margin of 11.80% and a return on equity of 28.65%. Equities research analysts forecast that VAALCO Energy, Inc. will post 0.88 earnings per share for the current year.

VAALCO Energy Increases Dividend

The company also recently disclosed a quarterly dividend, which was paid on Friday, June 23rd. Stockholders of record on Wednesday, May 24th were given a dividend of $0.063 per share. This is a positive change from VAALCO Energys previous quarterly dividend of $0.06. The ex-dividend date was Tuesday, May 23rd. This represents a $0.25 dividend on an annualized basis and a dividend yield of 6.56%. VAALCO Energys dividend payout ratio (DPR) is presently 44.64%.

VAALCO Energy Company Profile

(Free Report)

VAALCO Energy, Inc, an independent energy company, acquires, explores for, develops, and produces crude oil, natural gas, and natural gas liquids. The company holds Etame production sharing contract related to the Etame Marin block located offshore in the Republic of Gabon in West Africa. It also owns interests in an undeveloped block offshore Equatorial Guinea, West Africa.

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McKesson (NYSE:MCK  Free Report)s stock had its maintains rating reissued by investment analysts at SpectralCast in a research note issued on Thursday, Benzinga reports.

Several other analysts have also recently issued reports on MCK. Mizuho increased their price target on shares of McKesson from $376.00 to $390.00 in a research report on Tuesday, May 9th. Bank of America increased their price target on shares of McKesson from $450.00 to $470.00 in a research report on Tuesday, May 9th. Citigroup started coverage on shares of McKesson in a research report on Friday, March 31st. They set a buy rating and a $420.00 price target on the stock. Barclays increased their price target on shares of McKesson from $415.00 to $420.00 in a research report on Tuesday, May 9th. Finally, StockNews.com initiated coverage on shares of McKesson in a research report on Thursday, May 18th. They set a strong-buy rating on the stock. Two investment analysts have rated the stock with a hold rating, six have given a buy rating and one has given a strong buy rating to the company. According to MarketBeat.com, the company currently has an average rating of Moderate Buy and an average price target of $431.83.

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McKesson Stock Down 1.6 %

Shares of McKesson stock traded down $6.67 during trading hours on Thursday, reaching $420.64. 162,208 shares of the companys stock were exchanged, compared to its average volume of 947,965. McKesson has a 1 year low of $315.78 and a 1 year high of $429.75. The company has a market capitalization of $57.00 billion, a P/E ratio of 16.75, a price-to-earnings-growth ratio of 1.49 and a beta of 0.60. The business has a fifty day moving average of $390.60 and a two-hundred day moving average of $373.54.

Insider Buying and Selling at McKesson

McKesson ( NYSE:MCK Free Report ) last announced its quarterly earnings results on Monday, May 8th. The company reported $7.19 earnings per share for the quarter, beating the consensus estimate of $7.16 by $0.03. The firm had revenue of $68.91 billion for the quarter, compared to analysts expectations of $67.94 billion. McKesson had a net margin of 1.29% and a negative return on equity of 234.22%. The companys revenue was up 4.2% compared to the same quarter last year. During the same quarter in the previous year, the company posted $5.83 EPS. As a group, research analysts predict that McKesson will post 26.51 EPS for the current year.

In other McKesson news, CEO Brian S. Tyler sold 3,471 shares of the firms stock in a transaction on Thursday, June 29th. The stock was sold at an average price of $420.00, for a total value of $1,457,820.00. Following the completion of the sale, the chief executive officer now owns 129,714 shares of the companys stock, valued at $54,479,880. The transaction was disclosed in a filing with the SEC, which is available through this hyperlink. In other news, EVP Thomas L. Rodgers sold 645 shares of McKesson stock in a transaction on Tuesday, June 6th. The stock was sold at an average price of $395.70, for a total transaction of $255,226.50. Following the completion of the transaction, the executive vice president now owns 2,544 shares of the companys stock, valued at approximately $1,006,660.80. The transaction was disclosed in a filing with the Securities & Exchange Commission, which is available at this link. Also, CEO Brian S. Tyler sold 3,471 shares of McKesson stock in a transaction on Thursday, June 29th. The stock was sold at an average price of $420.00, for a total value of $1,457,820.00. Following the transaction, the chief executive officer now directly owns 129,714 shares of the companys stock, valued at approximately $54,479,880. The disclosure for this sale can be found here. Over the last quarter, insiders sold 32,138 shares of company stock valued at $12,581,657. 0.21% of the stock is owned by company insiders.

Institutional Inflows and Outflows

Several institutional investors have recently added to or reduced their stakes in the company. Maryland State Retirement & Pension System acquired a new position in shares of McKesson during the 4th quarter valued at about $4,192,000. Foundations Investment Advisors LLC increased its stake in shares of McKesson by 44.5% during the 4th quarter. Foundations Investment Advisors LLC now owns 1,672 shares of the companys stock valued at $627,000 after acquiring an additional 515 shares during the last quarter. Janney Montgomery Scott LLC increased its stake in shares of McKesson by 2.9% during the 4th quarter. Janney Montgomery Scott LLC now owns 28,207 shares of the companys stock valued at $10,581,000 after acquiring an additional 803 shares during the last quarter. PDS Planning Inc acquired a new position in shares of McKesson during the 4th quarter valued at about $205,000. Finally, Cyndeo Wealth Partners LLC acquired a new position in shares of McKesson during the 4th quarter valued at about $2,238,000. Institutional investors and hedge funds own 83.77% of the companys stock.

About McKesson

(Free Report)

McKesson Corporation provides healthcare services in the United States and internationally. It operates through four segments: U.S. Pharmaceutical, Prescription Technology Solutions (RxTS), Medical-Surgical Solutions, and International. The U.S. Pharmaceutical segment distributes branded, generic, specialty, biosimilar and over-the-counter pharmaceutical drugs, and other healthcare-related products.

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Mid-America Apartment Communities (NYSE:MAA  Free Report) and CoreCivic (NYSE:CXW  Free Report) are both finance companies, but which is the superior business? We will contrast the two businesses based on the strength of their analyst recommendations, earnings, institutional ownership, valuation, dividends, risk and profitability.

Institutional and Insider Ownership

93.6% of Mid-America Apartment Communities shares are held by institutional investors. Comparatively, 79.6% of CoreCivic shares are held by institutional investors. 1.3% of Mid-America Apartment Communities shares are held by company insiders. Comparatively, 1.9% of CoreCivic shares are held 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.

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Volatility & Risk

Mid-America Apartment Communities has a beta of 0.77, suggesting that its stock price is 23% less volatile than the S&P 500. Comparatively, CoreCivic has a beta of 0.95, suggesting that its stock price is 5% less volatile than the S&P 500.

Analyst Recommendations

Sell Ratings Hold Ratings Buy Ratings Strong Buy Ratings Rating Score Mid-America Apartment Communities 3 5 7 0 2.27 CoreCivic 0 0 1 0 3.00

This is a breakdown of current recommendations for Mid-America Apartment Communities and CoreCivic, as provided by MarketBeat.

Mid-America Apartment Communities currently has a consensus price target of $168.57, suggesting a potential upside of 11.00%. CoreCivic has a consensus price target of $10.50, suggesting a potential upside of 11.58%. Given CoreCivics stronger consensus rating and higher probable upside, analysts clearly believe CoreCivic is more favorable than Mid-America Apartment Communities.

Valuation & Earnings

This table compares Mid-America Apartment Communities and CoreCivics gross revenue, earnings per share (EPS) and valuation.

Gross Revenue Price/Sales Ratio Net Income Earnings Per Share Price/Earnings Ratio Mid-America Apartment Communities $2.02 billion 8.77 $637.44 million $5.70 26.64 CoreCivic $1.85 billion 0.58 $122.32 million $0.99 9.51

Mid-America Apartment Communities has higher revenue and earnings than CoreCivic. CoreCivic is trading at a lower price-to-earnings ratio than Mid-America Apartment Communities, indicating that it is currently the more affordable of the two stocks.

Profitability

This table compares Mid-America Apartment Communities and CoreCivics net margins, return on equity and return on assets.

Net Margins Return on Equity Return on Assets Mid-America Apartment Communities 31.92% 11.01% 6.06% CoreCivic 6.25% 4.51% 1.97%

Summary

Mid-America Apartment Communities beats CoreCivic on 10 of the 14 factors compared between the two stocks.

About Mid-America Apartment Communities

(Free Report)

MAA, an S&P 500 company, is a real estate investment trust (REIT) focused on delivering full-cycle and superior investment performance for shareholders through the ownership, management, acquisition, development and redevelopment of quality apartment communities primarily in the Southeast, Southwest and Mid-Atlantic regions of the United States. As of September 30, 2022, MAA had ownership interest in 101,769 apartment units, including communities currently in development, across 16 states and the District of Columbia.

About CoreCivic

(Free Report)

CoreCivic, Inc. owns and operates partnership correctional, detention, and residential reentry facilities in the United States. It operates through three segments: CoreCivic Safety, CoreCivic Community, and CoreCivic Properties. The company provides a range of solutions to government partners that serve the public good through corrections and detention management, a network of residential reentry centers to help address America's recidivism crisis, and government real estate solutions. Its correctional, detention, and residential reentry facilities offer rehabilitation and educational programs, including basic education, faith-based services, life skills and employment training, and substance abuse treatment. As of December 31, 2022, the company owned and operated 44 correctional and detention facilities, 23 residential reentry centers, and 8 properties for lease. The company was founded in 1983 and is based in Brentwood, Tennessee.

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Nuveen Quality Municipal Income Fund (NYSE:NAD  Free Report) was the recipient of a large decline in short interest during the month of June. As of June 15th, there was short interest totalling 26,000 shares, a decline of 48.1% from the May 31st total of 50,100 shares. Based on an average daily volume of 489,500 shares, the days-to-cover ratio is presently 0.1 days.

Nuveen Quality Municipal Income Fund Stock Performance

Shares of NYSE NAD traded up $0.05 during trading hours on Friday, hitting $11.27. 550,262 shares of the company traded hands, compared to its average volume of 563,478. The companys 50 day moving average price is $11.20 and its 200 day moving average price is $11.42. Nuveen Quality Municipal Income Fund has a 12 month low of $10.55 and a 12 month high of $13.35.

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Nuveen Quality Municipal Income Fund Dividend Announcement

The firm also recently disclosed a monthly dividend, which will be paid on Monday, July 3rd. Investors of record on Thursday, June 15th will be issued a dividend of $0.038 per share. This represents a $0.46 dividend on an annualized basis and a yield of 4.05%. The ex-dividend date is Wednesday, June 14th.

Hedge Funds Weigh In On Nuveen Quality Municipal Income Fund

Nuveen Quality Municipal Income Fund Company Profile

Large investors have recently bought and sold shares of the business. Concord Wealth Partners purchased a new stake in shares of Nuveen Quality Municipal Income Fund in the 4th quarter worth $26,000. BNP Paribas Arbitrage SNC purchased a new stake in shares of Nuveen Quality Municipal Income Fund during the 3rd quarter worth $26,000. Webster Bank N. A. lifted its stake in shares of Nuveen Quality Municipal Income Fund by 57.5% during the 1st quarter. Webster Bank N. A. now owns 2,661 shares of the financial services providers stock worth $31,000 after purchasing an additional 972 shares during the last quarter. BDO Wealth Advisors LLC purchased a new stake in shares of Nuveen Quality Municipal Income Fund during the 1st quarter worth $32,000. Finally, Bessemer Group Inc. purchased a new stake in shares of Nuveen Quality Municipal Income Fund during the 1st quarter worth $34,000.

(Free Report)

Nuveen Quality Municipal Income Fund is a closed-ended fixed income mutual fund launched by Nuveen Investments, Inc The fund is co-managed by Nuveen Fund Advisors LLC and Nuveen Asset Management, LLC. It invests in the fixed income markets of the United States. The fund invests in undervalued municipal securities and other related investments, the income from which is exempt from regular federal income taxes.

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Physician Wealth Advisors Inc. boosted its stake in shares of Union Pacific Co. (NYSE:UNP  Free Report) by 4.1% in the 1st quarter, according to its most recent filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC). The firm owned 6,622 shares of the railroad operators stock after acquiring an additional 258 shares during the quarter. Physician Wealth Advisors Inc.s holdings in Union Pacific were worth $1,338,000 as of its most recent filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC).

Several other institutional investors also recently bought and sold shares of UNP. Vanguard Group Inc. raised its position in Union Pacific by 1.0% during the 3rd quarter. Vanguard Group Inc. now owns 54,349,188 shares of the railroad operators stock valued at $10,588,308,000 after purchasing an additional 511,696 shares during the last quarter. Moneta Group Investment Advisors LLC raised its position in Union Pacific by 90,390.6% during the 4th quarter. Moneta Group Investment Advisors LLC now owns 13,697,556 shares of the railroad operators stock valued at $2,836,353,000 after purchasing an additional 13,682,419 shares during the last quarter. Geode Capital Management LLC raised its position in Union Pacific by 0.7% during the 4th quarter. Geode Capital Management LLC now owns 10,940,938 shares of the railroad operators stock valued at $2,261,886,000 after purchasing an additional 78,511 shares during the last quarter. Morgan Stanley raised its position in Union Pacific by 10.9% during the 4th quarter. Morgan Stanley now owns 8,983,932 shares of the railroad operators stock valued at $1,860,303,000 after purchasing an additional 883,963 shares during the last quarter. Finally, Norges Bank bought a new position in Union Pacific during the 4th quarter valued at approximately $1,276,498,000. 84.04% of the stock is currently owned by hedge funds and other institutional investors.

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Analysts Set New Price Targets

A number of research firms have commented on UNP. TD Cowen lowered their price target on Union Pacific from $222.00 to $218.00 and set an outperform rating for the company in a research report on Friday, April 21st. Credit Suisse Group decreased their target price on Union Pacific from $237.00 to $235.00 and set an outperform rating for the company in a research report on Friday, April 21st. Bank of America increased their target price on Union Pacific from $241.00 to $247.00 and gave the stock a buy rating in a research report on Friday, April 21st. Raymond James increased their target price on Union Pacific from $225.00 to $230.00 and gave the stock a strong-buy rating in a research report on Friday, April 21st. Finally, UBS Group increased their target price on Union Pacific from $210.00 to $212.00 and gave the stock a neutral rating in a research report on Friday, April 21st. Thirteen investment analysts have rated the stock with a hold rating, twelve have assigned a buy rating and one has assigned a strong buy rating to the company. According to MarketBeat, the company presently has an average rating of Moderate Buy and a consensus price target of $217.41.

Union Pacific Stock Up 0.3 %

UNP traded up $0.53 during trading on Monday, hitting $205.15. 230,468 shares of the companys stock traded hands, compared to its average volume of 3,033,271. The companys 50 day simple moving average is $198.78 and its two-hundred day simple moving average is $201.50. The company has a current ratio of 0.65, a quick ratio of 0.54 and a debt-to-equity ratio of 2.50. Union Pacific Co. has a 12-month low of $183.69 and a 12-month high of $242.35. The stock has a market capitalization of $125.19 billion, a price-to-earnings ratio of 18.08, a PEG ratio of 1.81 and a beta of 1.10.

Union Pacific (NYSE:UNP  Free Report) last issued its earnings results on Thursday, April 20th. The railroad operator reported $2.67 EPS for the quarter, beating the consensus estimate of $2.57 by $0.10. Union Pacific had a return on equity of 57.75% and a net margin of 27.91%. The business had revenue of $6.06 billion for the quarter, compared to the consensus estimate of $6.03 billion. During the same period last year, the business posted $2.57 EPS. The companys revenue was up 3.3% compared to the same quarter last year. Analysts predict that Union Pacific Co. will post 11.31 earnings per share for the current fiscal year.

Union Pacific Dividend Announcement

The company also recently declared a quarterly dividend, which was paid on Friday, June 30th. Stockholders of record on Wednesday, May 31st were paid a $1.30 dividend. The ex-dividend date was Tuesday, May 30th. This represents a $5.20 dividend on an annualized basis and a dividend yield of 2.53%. Union Pacifics dividend payout ratio (DPR) is currently 45.94%.

Union Pacific Company Profile

(Free Report)

Union Pacific Corporation, through its subsidiary, Union Pacific Railroad Company, operates in the railroad business in the United States. The company offers transportation services for grain and grain products, fertilizers, food and refrigerated products, and coal and renewables to grain processors, animal feeders, ethanol producers, and other agricultural users; petroleum, and liquid petroleum gases; and construction products, industrial chemicals, plastics, forest products, specialized products, metals and ores, soda ash, and sand, as well as finished automobiles, automotive parts, and merchandise in intermodal containers.

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Want to see what other hedge funds are holding UNP? Visit HoldingsChannel.com to get the latest 13F filings and insider trades for Union Pacific Co. (NYSE:UNP  Free Report).

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Lenovo Group Limited (OTCMKTS:LNVGF  Free Report) was the target of a significant growth in short interest during the month of June. As of June 15th, there was short interest totalling 22,589,600 shares, a growth of 59.3% from the May 31st total of 14,182,000 shares. Based on an average trading volume of 710,500 shares, the short-interest ratio is currently 31.8 days.

Lenovo Group Stock Performance

Shares of LNVGF stock remained flat at $1.07 during trading hours on Monday. Lenovo Group has a 12-month low of $0.66 and a 12-month high of $1.12. The companys 50-day moving average price is $1.00 and its two-hundred day moving average price is $0.93.

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Lenovo Group Company Profile

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Lenovo Group Limited, an investment holding company, develops, manufactures, and markets technology products and services. It operates through Intelligent Devices Group, Infrastructure Solutions Group, and Solutions and Services Group segments. The company offers commercial and consumer personal computers, as well as servers and workstations; and a family of mobile Internet devices, including tablets and smartphones.

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Palestinian sources reported that Jewish settlers stormed the Al-Aqsa Mosque Sunday from the Mughrabi Gate under heavy security from the Israeli occupation forces, according to DPA.

The Palestinian News and Information Agency (Wafa) quoted the sources as saying that "dozens of settlers stormed Al-Aqsa Mosque, organized provocative tours in its courtyards, and performed Talmudic rituals."

According to Wafa, "Al-Aqsa Mosque witnesses daily series of violations and incursions by settlers - except for Fridays and Saturdays - under the protection of the occupation police, in an attempt to impose full control over the mosque, and divide it temporally and spatially."

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Nippon Telegraph and Telephone Co. (OTCMKTS:NTTYY  Free Report) was the target of a significant decrease in short interest in June. As of June 15th, there was short interest totalling 38,100 shares, a decrease of 48.4% from the May 31st total of 73,900 shares. Based on an average trading volume of 239,100 shares, the short-interest ratio is currently 0.2 days.

Nippon Telegraph and Telephone Stock Performance

NTTYY traded up $0.04 during trading on Monday, reaching $29.51. 84,100 shares of the stock were exchanged, compared to its average volume of 119,459. The stock has a market cap of $106.07 billion, a P/E ratio of 10.25 and a beta of 0.19. The stocks 50 day moving average price is $29.83 and its two-hundred day moving average price is $29.51. Nippon Telegraph and Telephone has a twelve month low of $25.72 and a twelve month high of $31.77.

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Wall Street Analysts Forecast Growth

Separately, Citigroup downgraded Nippon Telegraph and Telephone from a buy rating to a neutral rating in a research note on Tuesday, May 23rd.

Nippon Telegraph and Telephone Company Profile

Nippon Telegraph and Telephone Corporation provides fixed voice-related, mobile voice-related, IP/packet communications, and system integration services in Japan and internationally. The company's Integrated ICT Business segment offers mobile communications services and smart life area services; provision of inter-prefectural communications services, international communications services, and internet-related services; and provision of internet connection and video distribution services, as well as engages in the development, production, operation, and maintenance of information communications systems and software.

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CompX International (NYSE:CIX  Free Report) and Simpson Manufacturing (NYSE:SSD  Free Report) are both industrial products companies, but which is the better investment? We will compare the two companies based on the strength of their earnings, valuation, institutional ownership, risk, profitability, analyst recommendations and dividends.

Dividends

CompX International pays an annual dividend of $1.00 per share and has a dividend yield of 4.6%. Simpson Manufacturing pays an annual dividend of $1.04 per share and has a dividend yield of 0.8%. CompX International pays out 56.2% of its earnings in the form of a dividend. Simpson Manufacturing pays out 13.6% 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. CompX International has increased its dividend for 2 consecutive years and Simpson Manufacturing has increased its dividend for 3 consecutive years.

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Insider & Institutional Ownership

8.0% of CompX International shares are owned by institutional investors. Comparatively, 90.0% of Simpson Manufacturing shares are owned by institutional investors. 0.4% of CompX International shares are owned by insiders. Comparatively, 0.7% of Simpson Manufacturing shares are owned by insiders. Strong institutional ownership is an indication that endowments, large money managers and hedge funds believe a stock is poised for long-term growth.

Earnings & Valuation

Gross Revenue Price/Sales Ratio Net Income Earnings Per Share Price/Earnings Ratio CompX International $166.60 million 1.61 $20.87 million $1.78 12.25 Simpson Manufacturing $2.12 billion 2.79 $333.99 million $7.62 18.18

This table compares CompX International and Simpson Manufacturings top-line revenue, earnings per share and valuation.

Simpson Manufacturing has higher revenue and earnings than CompX International. CompX International is trading at a lower price-to-earnings ratio than Simpson Manufacturing, indicating that it is currently the more affordable of the two stocks.

Risk & Volatility

CompX International has a beta of 0.61, meaning that its share price is 39% less volatile than the S&P 500. Comparatively, Simpson Manufacturing has a beta of 1.22, meaning that its share price is 22% more volatile than the S&P 500.

Profitability

This table compares CompX International and Simpson Manufacturings net margins, return on equity and return on assets.

Net Margins Return on Equity Return on Assets CompX International 13.28% 13.48% 12.13% Simpson Manufacturing 15.18% 23.71% 13.03%

Analyst Recommendations

This is a summary of current ratings and target prices for CompX International and Simpson Manufacturing, as provided by MarketBeat.

Sell Ratings Hold Ratings Buy Ratings Strong Buy Ratings Rating Score CompX International 0 0 0 0 N/A Simpson Manufacturing 0 1 1 0 2.50

Simpson Manufacturing has a consensus target price of $137.50, suggesting a potential downside of 0.72%. Given Simpson Manufacturings higher possible upside, analysts clearly believe Simpson Manufacturing is more favorable than CompX International.

Summary

Simpson Manufacturing beats CompX International on 15 of the 16 factors compared between the two stocks.

About CompX International

(Free Report)

CompX International Inc. manufactures and sells security products and recreational marine components primarily in North America. It operates in two segments, Security Products and Marine Components. The Security Products segment manufactures mechanical and electrical cabinet locks, and other locking mechanisms used in various applications, including ignition systems, mailboxes, file cabinets, desk drawers, tool storage cabinets, high security medical cabinetry, integrated inventory and access control secured narcotics boxes, electrical circuit panels, storage compartments, gas station security, and vending and cash containment machines. This segment serves recreational transportation, postal, office and institutional furniture, cabinetry, tool storage, healthcare, and other industries. The Marine Components segment manufactures and distributes stainless steel exhaust headers, exhaust pipes, mufflers, and other exhaust components; gauges, such as GPS speedometers and tachometers; mechanical and electronic controls and throttles; wake enhancement systems, trim tabs, steering wheels, and billet aluminum accessories; dash panels, LED indicators, and wire harnesses; and grab handles, pin cleats, and related hardware and accessories primarily for performance and ski/wakeboard boats for the recreational marine and other industries. The company sells its products directly to original equipment manufacturers, as well as through distributors. The company was incorporated in 1993 and is based in Dallas, Texas. CompX International Inc. is a subsidiary of NL Industries, Inc.

About Simpson Manufacturing

(Free Report)

Simpson Manufacturing Co., Inc., through its subsidiaries, designs, engineers, manufactures, and sells wood and concrete construction products. The company offers wood construction products, including connectors, truss plates, fastening systems, fasteners and shearwalls, and pre-fabricated lateral systems for use in light-frame construction; and concrete construction products comprising adhesives, specialty chemicals, mechanical anchors, carbide drill bits, powder actuated tools, fiber-reinforced materials, and other repair products for use in concrete, masonry, and steel construction, as well as grouts, coatings, sealers, mortars, fiberglass and fiber-reinforced polymer systems, and asphalt products for use in concrete construction repair, and strengthening and protection products. It also provides connectors and lateral products for wood framing, timber and offsite construction, structural steel construction, and cold-formed steel applications; and mechanical and adhesive anchors for concrete and masonry construction applications. In addition, the company offers engineering and design services, as well as software solutions that facilitate the specification, selection, and use of its products. It markets its products to the residential construction, light industrial and commercial construction, remodeling, and do-it-yourself markets in the United States, Canada, France, the United Kingdom, Germany, Denmark, Switzerland, Portugal, Poland, the Netherlands, Belgium, Spain, Sweden, Norway, Australia, New Zealand, China, Taiwan, and Vietnam. The company was founded in 1956 and is headquartered in Pleasanton, California.

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StockNews.com assumed coverage on shares of NovaBay Pharmaceuticals (NYSEAMERICAN:NBY  Free Report) in a report released on Friday. The firm issued a hold rating on the biopharmaceutical companys stock.

NovaBay Pharmaceuticals Stock Down 2.3 %

Shares of NovaBay Pharmaceuticals stock opened at $0.75 on Friday. NovaBay Pharmaceuticals has a 12-month low of $0.48 and a 12-month high of $12.64. The stock has a market capitalization of $1.41 million, a P/E ratio of -0.13 and a beta of 2.69. The stock has a 50 day moving average price of $0.85 and a two-hundred day moving average price of $1.59.

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NovaBay Pharmaceuticals (NYSEAMERICAN:NBY  Free Report) last issued its earnings results on Thursday, March 30th. The biopharmaceutical company reported ($4.33) EPS for the quarter. NovaBay Pharmaceuticals had a negative return on equity of 18.62% and a negative net margin of 21.09%. The firm had revenue of $3.64 million during the quarter.

Institutional Trading of NovaBay Pharmaceuticals

About NovaBay Pharmaceuticals

A number of hedge funds and other institutional investors have recently made changes to their positions in NBY. Renaissance Technologies LLC increased its position in NovaBay Pharmaceuticals by 57.5% in the first quarter. Renaissance Technologies LLC now owns 201,222 shares of the biopharmaceutical companys stock worth $60,000 after purchasing an additional 73,500 shares during the period. Virtu Financial LLC boosted its position in NovaBay Pharmaceuticals by 260.4% during the 1st quarter. Virtu Financial LLC now owns 163,451 shares of the biopharmaceutical companys stock worth $48,000 after acquiring an additional 118,099 shares during the last quarter. Finally, Armistice Capital LLC bought a new stake in shares of NovaBay Pharmaceuticals during the 4th quarter worth approximately $289,000.

(Free Report)

NovaBay Pharmaceuticals, Inc, a biopharmaceutical company, develops and sells eyecare, skincare, and wound care products in the United States and internationally. It offers Avenova Spray, a solution for removing foreign materials, including microorganisms and debris from skin around the eye, such as the eyelid; and wound care products, which are used for cleansing and irrigation as part of surgical procedures, as well as treating certain wounds, burns, ulcers, and other injuries under the NeutroPhase and PhaseOne brands.

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StockNews.com assumed coverage on shares of Chicago Rivet & Machine (NYSEAMERICAN:CVR  Free Report) in a research note issued to investors on Thursday. The firm issued a sell rating on the stock.

Separately, TheStreet cut Chicago Rivet & Machine from a b- rating to a c+ rating in a report on Tuesday, June 6th.

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Chicago Rivet & Machine Price Performance

NYSEAMERICAN:CVR opened at $25.72 on Thursday. Chicago Rivet & Machine has a 12-month low of $23.65 and a 12-month high of $32.94. The stock has a market cap of $24.95 million and a P/E ratio of 8.66.

Chicago Rivet & Machine Announces Dividend

Chicago Rivet & Machine ( NYSEAMERICAN:CVR Free Report ) last released its quarterly earnings results on Monday, May 8th. The company reported ($0.60) earnings per share for the quarter. The firm had revenue of $8.73 million for the quarter. Chicago Rivet & Machine had a net margin of 8.52% and a return on equity of 9.41%.

The business also recently announced a quarterly dividend, which was paid on Tuesday, June 20th. Stockholders of record on Monday, June 5th were issued a $0.22 dividend. This represents a $0.88 dividend on an annualized basis and a dividend yield of 3.42%. The ex-dividend date of this dividend was Friday, June 2nd. Chicago Rivet & Machines dividend payout ratio (DPR) is 29.63%.

Hedge Funds Weigh In On Chicago Rivet & Machine

A number of institutional investors and hedge funds have recently modified their holdings of CVR. Vanguard Group Inc. boosted its holdings in shares of Chicago Rivet & Machine by 91.7% in the 1st quarter. Vanguard Group Inc. now owns 28,479 shares of the companys stock worth $746,000 after purchasing an additional 13,626 shares during the period. Cannell Capital LLC lifted its stake in shares of Chicago Rivet & Machine by 16.2% during the 4th quarter. Cannell Capital LLC now owns 11,486 shares of the companys stock worth $329,000 after acquiring an additional 1,600 shares during the last quarter. Advisor Group Holdings Inc. bought a new stake in shares of Chicago Rivet & Machine during the 4th quarter worth approximately $43,000. Captrust Financial Advisors bought a new stake in shares of Chicago Rivet & Machine during the 2nd quarter worth approximately $41,000. Finally, Morgan Stanley lifted its stake in shares of Chicago Rivet & Machine by 8.6% during the 4th quarter. Morgan Stanley now owns 12,696 shares of the companys stock worth $363,000 after acquiring an additional 1,005 shares during the last quarter. Hedge funds and other institutional investors own 22.36% of the companys stock.

Chicago Rivet & Machine Company Profile

(Free Report)

Chicago Rivet & Machine Co operates in the fastener industry in North America. The company operates in two segments, Fasteners and Assembly Equipment. The Fastener segment manufactures and sells rivets, cold-formed fasteners and parts, and screw machine products. The Assembly Equipment segment manufactures and sells automatic rivet setting machines and assembly equipment, as well as parts and tools for related machines.

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Sumitomo Mitsui Financial Group, Inc. (NYSE:SMFG  Free Report) was the recipient of a large increase in short interest in June. As of June 15th, there was short interest totalling 3,540,000 shares, an increase of 34.1% from the May 31st total of 2,640,000 shares. Currently, 0.1% of the companys shares are sold short. Based on an average daily volume of 2,420,000 shares, the days-to-cover ratio is currently 1.5 days.

Institutional Inflows and Outflows

Several institutional investors and hedge funds have recently made changes to their positions in the company. UMB Bank n.a. lifted its holdings in Sumitomo Mitsui Financial Group by 335.5% in the 1st quarter. UMB Bank n.a. now owns 3,205 shares of the banks stock worth $26,000 after buying an additional 2,469 shares in the last quarter. International Assets Investment Management LLC purchased a new position in Sumitomo Mitsui Financial Group in the first quarter valued at about $31,000. Fortis Capital Advisors LLC acquired a new stake in Sumitomo Mitsui Financial Group during the 4th quarter valued at approximately $37,000. Glassman Wealth Services grew its stake in Sumitomo Mitsui Financial Group by 38.5% during the 1st quarter. Glassman Wealth Services now owns 5,036 shares of the banks stock valued at $40,000 after purchasing an additional 1,399 shares in the last quarter. Finally, Neuberger Berman Group LLC purchased a new stake in Sumitomo Mitsui Financial Group during the 3rd quarter worth approximately $55,000. 1.59% of the stock is currently owned by hedge funds and other institutional investors.

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Sumitomo Mitsui Financial Group Stock Up 0.4 %

NYSE SMFG traded up $0.04 during trading hours on Monday, hitting $8.64. The company had a trading volume of 1,143,539 shares, compared to its average volume of 3,111,661. Sumitomo Mitsui Financial Group has a fifty-two week low of $5.39 and a fifty-two week high of $9.18. The firms 50 day moving average is $8.26 and its 200 day moving average is $8.30. The company has a debt-to-equity ratio of 2.02, a current ratio of 1.07 and a quick ratio of 1.07. The company has a market capitalization of $57.73 billion, a price-to-earnings ratio of 9.93, a P/E/G ratio of 1.51 and a beta of 0.68.

Analysts Set New Price Targets

Sumitomo Mitsui Financial Group ( NYSE:SMFG Free Report ) last released its quarterly earnings results on Monday, May 15th. The bank reported $0.12 EPS for the quarter. Sumitomo Mitsui Financial Group had a return on equity of 6.81% and a net margin of 13.05%. The firm had revenue of $13.32 billion for the quarter. Sell-side analysts anticipate that Sumitomo Mitsui Financial Group will post 0.91 earnings per share for the current fiscal year.

Separately, StockNews.com assumed coverage on shares of Sumitomo Mitsui Financial Group in a research report on Thursday, May 18th. They set a hold rating on the stock.

About Sumitomo Mitsui Financial Group

(Free Report)

Sumitomo Mitsui Financial Group, Inc, together with its subsidiaries, provides banking, leasing, securities, credit card, and consumer finance services. It operates through four segments: Wholesale Business Unit, Retail Business Unit, Global Business Unit, and Global Markets Business Unit. Sumitomo Mitsui Financial Group, Inc was incorporated in 2002 and is headquartered in Tokyo, Japan.

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Suncor Energy (TSE:SU  Free Report) (NYSE:SU) had its target price lowered by National Bank Financial from C$60.00 to C$57.00 in a report released on Thursday, The Fly reports.

Other equities analysts also recently issued reports about the stock. Morgan Stanley reduced their price objective on shares of Suncor Energy from C$61.00 to C$58.00 in a report on Monday, March 27th. BMO Capital Markets dropped their price target on shares of Suncor Energy from C$54.00 to C$52.00 in a research note on Monday, April 17th. National Bankshares dropped their price target on shares of Suncor Energy from C$60.00 to C$57.00 in a research note on Thursday. Royal Bank of Canada lowered their target price on shares of Suncor Energy from C$52.00 to C$51.00 and set an outperform rating for the company in a research note on Monday, May 29th. Finally, CSFB lowered their price objective on shares of Suncor Energy from C$60.00 to C$56.00 in a research report on Thursday, April 6th. Four investment analysts have rated the stock with a hold rating and five have assigned a buy rating to the company. According to data from MarketBeat, the company has a consensus rating of Moderate Buy and an average price target of C$53.07.

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Suncor Energy Trading Up 0.6 %

Suncor Energy stock opened at C$38.86 on Thursday. The firm has a 50 day simple moving average of C$39.35 and a 200-day simple moving average of C$42.06. The company has a debt-to-equity ratio of 42.16, a current ratio of 1.11 and a quick ratio of 0.83. The stock has a market capitalization of C$50.91 billion, a PE ratio of 6.47, a price-to-earnings-growth ratio of 0.15 and a beta of 1.67. Suncor Energy has a 12-month low of C$36.38 and a 12-month high of C$50.37.

Suncor Energy Announces Dividend

Suncor Energy ( TSE:SU Free Report ) (NYSE:SU) last released its earnings results on Monday, May 8th. The company reported C$1.36 earnings per share (EPS) for the quarter, topping analysts consensus estimates of C$1.26 by C$0.10. Suncor Energy had a net margin of 14.37% and a return on equity of 20.92%. The company had revenue of C$12.26 billion during the quarter, compared to the consensus estimate of C$10.57 billion. As a group, equities research analysts expect that Suncor Energy will post 6.7615658 EPS for the current fiscal year.

The business also recently declared a quarterly dividend, which was paid on Monday, June 26th. Stockholders of record on Monday, June 26th were issued a dividend of $0.52 per share. The ex-dividend date of this dividend was Friday, June 2nd. This represents a $2.08 annualized dividend and a dividend yield of 5.35%. Suncor Energys payout ratio is presently 34.61%.

Suncor Energy Company Profile

(Free Report)

Suncor Energy Inc operates as an integrated energy company in Canada and internationally. It operates through Oil Sands; Exploration and Production; and Refining and Marketing segments. The Oil Sands segment explores, develops, and produces bitumen, synthetic crude oil, and related products. This segment also engages in syncrude oil sands mining and upgrading operations; and marketing, supply, transportation, and risk management of crude oil, natural gas, power, and byproducts.

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StockNews.com assumed coverage on shares of Superior Industries International (NYSE:SUP  Free Report) in a report issued on Friday. The firm issued a strong-buy rating on the auto parts companys stock.

Superior Industries International Stock Performance

Shares of SUP stock opened at $3.60 on Friday. Superior Industries International has a 1 year low of $2.88 and a 1 year high of $7.38. The stocks 50-day moving average is $3.79 and its two-hundred day moving average is $4.74. The firm has a market cap of $100.48 million, a price-to-earnings ratio of -6.92 and a beta of 3.89.

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Superior Industries International (NYSE:SUP  Free Report) last announced its quarterly earnings data on Thursday, May 4th. The auto parts company reported ($0.07) earnings per share for the quarter. Superior Industries International had a net margin of 1.41% and a negative return on equity of 76.52%. The business had revenue of $381.00 million during the quarter, compared to analysts expectations of $404.51 million.

Insider Activity

Institutional Inflows and Outflows

In other Superior Industries International news, CFO Timothy Trenary sold 8,130 shares of the businesss stock in a transaction on Wednesday, June 28th. The shares were sold at an average price of $3.52, for a total value of $28,617.60. Following the transaction, the chief financial officer now owns 239,465 shares in the company, valued at approximately $842,916.80. The sale was disclosed in a document filed with the Securities & Exchange Commission, which is accessible through this link . In other news, CFO Timothy Trenary sold 8,130 shares of the stock in a transaction that occurred on Wednesday, June 28th. The shares were sold at an average price of $3.52, for a total value of $28,617.60. Following the completion of the transaction, the chief financial officer now directly owns 239,465 shares in the company, valued at $842,916.80. The transaction was disclosed in a legal filing with the Securities & Exchange Commission, which is available at this hyperlink . Also, major shareholder Mill Road Capital Iii, L.P. purchased 66,300 shares of Superior Industries International stock in a transaction that occurred on Friday, April 21st. The stock was purchased at an average price of $5.00 per share, with a total value of $331,500.00. Following the transaction, the insider now owns 4,196,870 shares in the company, valued at approximately $20,984,350. The disclosure for this purchase can be found here . Insiders sold 40,376 shares of company stock valued at $142,573 in the last ninety days. Company insiders own 8.90% of the companys stock.

Several institutional investors and hedge funds have recently made changes to their positions in the stock. Marshall Wace LLP acquired a new stake in Superior Industries International in the third quarter valued at $32,000. Tower Research Capital LLC TRC increased its holdings in Superior Industries International by 868.0% in the 1st quarter. Tower Research Capital LLC TRC now owns 10,222 shares of the auto parts companys stock valued at $51,000 after buying an additional 9,166 shares during the period. SG Americas Securities LLC bought a new position in Superior Industries International in the 4th quarter valued at about $52,000. Atria Wealth Solutions Inc. bought a new stake in shares of Superior Industries International during the 1st quarter valued at approximately $52,000. Finally, Moneta Group Investment Advisors LLC acquired a new stake in Superior Industries International during the 1st quarter worth approximately $69,000. Institutional investors and hedge funds own 45.00% of the companys stock.

Superior Industries International Company Profile

(Free Report)

Superior Industries International, Inc, together with its subsidiaries, designs, manufactures, and sells aluminum wheels to the original equipment manufacturers and aftermarket distributors in North America and Europe. It offers its products under the ATS, RIAL, ALUTEC, and ANZIO brand names. The company was founded in 1957 and is headquartered in Southfield, Michigan.

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The Toronto-Dominion Bank (NYSE:TD  Free Report) (TSE:TD) was the recipient of a large increase in short interest in the month of June. As of June 15th, there was short interest totalling 15,880,000 shares, an increase of 40.7% from the May 31st total of 11,290,000 shares. Based on an average trading volume of 2,340,000 shares, the days-to-cover ratio is presently 6.8 days. Approximately 0.9% of the companys stock are sold short.

Toronto-Dominion Bank Trading Up 1.3 %

Shares of NYSE:TD traded up $0.78 during midday trading on Monday, reaching $62.79. The company had a trading volume of 527,164 shares, compared to its average volume of 2,301,116. The company has a debt-to-equity ratio of 0.11, a quick ratio of 0.99 and a current ratio of 0.99. Toronto-Dominion Bank has a 1-year low of $55.43 and a 1-year high of $70.67. The firm has a market cap of $115.51 billion, a price-to-earnings ratio of 10.40, a price-to-earnings-growth ratio of 1.64 and a beta of 0.90. The company has a fifty day simple moving average of $59.96 and a two-hundred day simple moving average of $62.59.

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Toronto-Dominion Bank (NYSE:TD  Free Report) (TSE:TD) last announced its quarterly earnings data on Thursday, May 25th. The bank reported $1.43 EPS for the quarter, missing analysts consensus estimates of $1.52 by ($0.09). Toronto-Dominion Bank had a return on equity of 15.51% and a net margin of 17.72%. The business had revenue of $9.12 billion for the quarter, compared to analyst estimates of $9.10 billion. Research analysts predict that Toronto-Dominion Bank will post 6.08 earnings per share for the current year.

Toronto-Dominion Bank Cuts Dividend

Analysts Set New Price Targets

The company also recently declared a quarterly dividend, which will be paid on Monday, July 31st. Stockholders of record on Monday, July 10th will be issued a dividend of $0.709 per share. The ex-dividend date is Friday, July 7th. This represents a $2.84 annualized dividend and a dividend yield of 4.52%. Toronto-Dominion Banks dividend payout ratio is 47.65%.

Several research firms have recently commented on TD. Credit Suisse Group upgraded Toronto-Dominion Bank from a neutral rating to an outperform rating in a research note on Thursday, June 8th. CIBC upgraded Toronto-Dominion Bank from a neutral rating to a sector outperform rating in a research note on Monday, April 17th. Barclays cut Toronto-Dominion Bank from an overweight rating to an equal weight rating in a research note on Tuesday, May 9th. Finally, StockNews.com raised Toronto-Dominion Bank from a sell rating to a hold rating in a research report on Thursday, June 22nd. Two analysts have rated the stock with a hold rating and seven have given a buy rating to the companys stock. According to data from MarketBeat, the company presently has an average rating of Moderate Buy and an average target price of $100.57.

Institutional Investors Weigh In On Toronto-Dominion Bank

Several institutional investors have recently made changes to their positions in TD. Annapolis Financial Services LLC lifted its holdings in shares of Toronto-Dominion Bank by 83.3% during the 1st quarter. Annapolis Financial Services LLC now owns 429 shares of the banks stock valued at $26,000 after buying an additional 195 shares during the last quarter. Fairfield Bush & CO. bought a new position in shares of Toronto-Dominion Bank in the 1st quarter valued at approximately $26,000. Fortis Capital Advisors LLC bought a new position in shares of Toronto-Dominion Bank in the 4th quarter valued at approximately $26,000. U.S. Capital Wealth Advisors LLC bought a new position in shares of Toronto-Dominion Bank in the 4th quarter valued at approximately $39,000. Finally, McElhenny Sheffield Capital Management LLC bought a new position in shares of Toronto-Dominion Bank in the 4th quarter valued at approximately $40,000. 44.92% of the stock is currently owned by institutional investors and hedge funds.

About Toronto-Dominion Bank

(Free Report)

The Toronto-Dominion Bank, together with its subsidiaries, provides various financial products and services in Canada, the United States, and internationally. It operates through three segments: Canadian Retail, U.S. Retail, and Wholesale Banking. The company offers personal deposits, such as chequing, savings, and investment products; financing, investment, cash management, international trade, and day-to-day banking services to businesses; and financing options to customers at point of sale for automotive and recreational vehicle purchases.

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Triangle Securities Wealth Management reduced its holdings in shares of Salesforce, Inc. (NYSE:CRM  Free Report) by 11.0% during the 1st quarter, according to the company in its most recent 13F filing with the Securities & Exchange Commission. The firm owned 9,340 shares of the CRM providers stock after selling 1,159 shares during the period. Triangle Securities Wealth Managements holdings in Salesforce were worth $1,866,000 at the end of the most recent quarter.

Several other large investors have also recently added to or reduced their stakes in CRM. Norges Bank purchased a new stake in Salesforce during the 4th quarter worth approximately $1,420,381,000. Moneta Group Investment Advisors LLC grew its holdings in Salesforce by 125,717.4% during the 4th quarter. Moneta Group Investment Advisors LLC now owns 10,260,412 shares of the CRM providers stock worth $1,360,428,000 after acquiring an additional 10,252,257 shares in the last quarter. Parnassus Investments LLC acquired a new position in Salesforce during the 4th quarter worth approximately $797,956,000. Starboard Value LP acquired a new position in Salesforce during the 4th quarter worth approximately $401,215,000. Finally, Inclusive Capital Partners L.P. acquired a new position in Salesforce during the 4th quarter worth approximately $216,769,000. 81.13% of the stock is owned by hedge funds and other institutional investors.

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Insider Transactions at Salesforce

In other news, CFO Amy E. Weaver sold 510 shares of Salesforce stock in a transaction dated Monday, April 24th. The shares were sold at an average price of $196.33, for a total transaction of $100,128.30. Following the completion of the sale, the chief financial officer now directly owns 36,680 shares in the company, valued at $7,201,384.40. The sale was disclosed in a legal filing with the SEC, which is accessible through this link. In related news, insider Parker Harris sold 1,250 shares of the businesss stock in a transaction that occurred on Tuesday, June 27th. The shares were sold at an average price of $208.48, for a total value of $260,600.00. Following the completion of the sale, the insider now directly owns 101,236 shares in the company, valued at $21,105,681.28. The transaction was disclosed in a legal filing with the SEC, which is available through the SEC website. Also, CFO Amy E. Weaver sold 510 shares of the businesss stock in a transaction that occurred on Monday, April 24th. The shares were sold at an average price of $196.33, for a total transaction of $100,128.30. Following the completion of the sale, the chief financial officer now owns 36,680 shares of the companys stock, valued at $7,201,384.40. The disclosure for this sale can be found here. Insiders sold a total of 771,961 shares of company stock worth $161,808,116 over the last ninety days. 3.70% of the stock is currently owned by corporate insiders.

Analyst Upgrades and Downgrades

Salesforce Price Performance

Several research analysts have commented on CRM shares. Oppenheimer boosted their price target on shares of Salesforce from $225.00 to $235.00 in a report on Thursday, June 1st. Raymond James upped their target price on shares of Salesforce from $240.00 to $260.00 in a report on Thursday, June 1st. Robert W. Baird increased their price target on shares of Salesforce from $200.00 to $210.00 in a research note on Thursday, June 1st. Citigroup increased their price target on shares of Salesforce from $229.00 to $230.00 in a research note on Thursday, June 1st. Finally, Roth Capital reiterated a buy rating on shares of Salesforce in a research note on Thursday, June 1st. One investment analyst has rated the stock with a sell rating, thirteen have assigned a hold rating, twenty-four have issued a buy rating and two have assigned a strong buy rating to the company. According to MarketBeat.com, the stock has an average rating of Moderate Buy and a consensus price target of $220.97.

CRM traded down $0.16 during midday trading on Monday, reaching $211.10. 594,049 shares of the companys stock were exchanged, compared to its average volume of 7,794,576. The company has a debt-to-equity ratio of 0.16, a current ratio of 1.02 and a quick ratio of 1.02. The stock has a market capitalization of $205.61 billion, a PE ratio of 555.96, a P/E/G ratio of 2.08 and a beta of 1.20. The businesss 50-day moving average price is $207.05 and its 200 day moving average price is $181.38. Salesforce, Inc. has a 1-year low of $126.34 and a 1-year high of $225.00.

Salesforce (NYSE:CRM  Free Report) last announced its earnings results on Wednesday, May 31st. The CRM provider reported $1.69 earnings per share (EPS) for the quarter, topping analysts consensus estimates of $1.61 by $0.08. The company had revenue of $8.25 billion during the quarter, compared to analysts expectations of $8.17 billion. Salesforce had a net margin of 1.18% and a return on equity of 5.75%. During the same quarter in the previous year, the business posted $0.41 earnings per share. As a group, equities analysts anticipate that Salesforce, Inc. will post 5.26 EPS for the current fiscal year.

Salesforce Profile

(Free Report)

Salesforce, Inc provides Customer Relationship Management (CRM) technology that brings companies and customers together worldwide. The company's service includes sales to store data, monitor leads and progress, forecast opportunities, gain insights through analytics and relationship intelligence, and deliver quotes, contracts, and invoices; and service that enables companies to deliver trusted and highly personalized customer service and support at scale.

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Valmont Industries, Inc. (NYSE:VMI  Free Report) was the recipient of a large increase in short interest in June. As of June 15th, there was short interest totalling 220,100 shares, an increase of 33.0% from the May 31st total of 165,500 shares. Approximately 1.1% of the companys shares are sold short. Based on an average daily volume of 146,800 shares, the short-interest ratio is presently 1.5 days.

Valmont Industries Stock Performance

Shares of NYSE VMI traded up $1.11 during mid-day trading on Monday, hitting $292.16. The company had a trading volume of 30,305 shares, compared to its average volume of 139,428. Valmont Industries has a 12 month low of $213.27 and a 12 month high of $353.36. The firm has a market cap of $6.15 billion, a P/E ratio of 23.86, a PEG ratio of 1.58 and a beta of 1.08. The businesss 50-day simple moving average is $285.44 and its 200-day simple moving average is $306.44. The company has a debt-to-equity ratio of 0.62, a current ratio of 2.32 and a quick ratio of 1.40.

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Valmont Industries (NYSE:VMI  Free Report) last announced its quarterly earnings data on Thursday, April 20th. The industrial products company reported $3.54 EPS for the quarter, topping analysts consensus estimates of $3.23 by $0.31. The company had revenue of $1.06 billion during the quarter, compared to the consensus estimate of $1.02 billion. Valmont Industries had a return on equity of 19.08% and a net margin of 5.94%. As a group, analysts predict that Valmont Industries will post 15.37 earnings per share for the current fiscal year.

Valmont Industries Announces Dividend

Analysts Set New Price Targets

The firm also recently declared a quarterly dividend, which will be paid on Friday, July 14th. Shareholders of record on Friday, June 30th will be issued a $0.60 dividend. This represents a $2.40 annualized dividend and a yield of 0.82%. The ex-dividend date of this dividend is Thursday, June 29th. Valmont Industriess dividend payout ratio (DPR) is presently 19.67%.

VMI has been the subject of several recent analyst reports. Stifel Nicolaus decreased their price target on Valmont Industries from $389.00 to $352.00 and set a buy rating for the company in a research note on Monday, April 17th. StockNews.com began coverage on Valmont Industries in a research note on Thursday, May 18th. They issued a buy rating on the stock. One research analyst has rated the stock with a hold rating and three have issued a buy rating to the companys stock. According to data from MarketBeat, the stock has a consensus rating of Moderate Buy and an average price target of $320.67.

Insiders Place Their Bets

In other news, Director Theodor Werner Freye sold 549 shares of the companys stock in a transaction dated Tuesday, May 2nd. The stock was sold at an average price of $293.00, for a total value of $160,857.00. Following the transaction, the director now owns 5,749 shares in the company, valued at approximately $1,684,457. The sale was disclosed in a filing with the Securities & Exchange Commission, which is available through the SEC website. Corporate insiders own 2.00% of the companys stock.

Hedge Funds Weigh In On Valmont Industries

A number of hedge funds and other institutional investors have recently made changes to their positions in the business. Belpointe Asset Management LLC raised its position in Valmont Industries by 7.6% in the first quarter. Belpointe Asset Management LLC now owns 607 shares of the industrial products companys stock worth $194,000 after purchasing an additional 43 shares in the last quarter. Janney Montgomery Scott LLC grew its stake in shares of Valmont Industries by 2.4% in the 4th quarter. Janney Montgomery Scott LLC now owns 1,890 shares of the industrial products companys stock valued at $625,000 after purchasing an additional 45 shares during the period. Fifth Third Bancorp raised its holdings in shares of Valmont Industries by 16.3% in the 1st quarter. Fifth Third Bancorp now owns 350 shares of the industrial products companys stock worth $112,000 after buying an additional 49 shares in the last quarter. Xponance Inc. lifted its position in shares of Valmont Industries by 1.7% during the 1st quarter. Xponance Inc. now owns 3,132 shares of the industrial products companys stock worth $1,000,000 after buying an additional 51 shares during the period. Finally, Treasurer of the State of North Carolina boosted its stake in Valmont Industries by 0.7% in the 1st quarter. Treasurer of the State of North Carolina now owns 9,180 shares of the industrial products companys stock valued at $2,931,000 after buying an additional 60 shares in the last quarter. 85.39% of the stock is owned by institutional investors.

Valmont Industries Company Profile

(Free Report)

Valmont Industries, Inc produces and sells metal products in the United States, Australia, Brazil, Denmark, and internationally. The company operates through two segments: Infrastructure and Agriculture. It manufactures and distributes steel, pre-stressed concrete, composite, and hybrid structures for lighting, transportation, and telecommunications equipment, as well as electrical transmission, distribution, substations, and renewable energy generation equipment; and provides coatings services to preserve metal products.

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Egypt strongly condemned on Monday Israeli forces' attack on Jenin city in the occupied West Bank which resulted in the death of five and the injury of 27 Palestinians thus far.

Related Major Israeli military operation kills eight in West Bank

In a statement by the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, Egypt emphasized its complete rejection of Israels repeated attacks and raids on Palestinian cities, resulting in civilian deaths and the violation of international law and legitimacy, particularly international humanitarian law.

Egypt also warned against the risks of the ongoing Israeli escalation against the Palestinians. The attacks fuel tension, exacerbate the suffering of the Palestinian people, and undermine the efforts made by Egypt and regional and international partners to reduce tensions in the occupied territories.

Moreover, Egypt called on active and influential international parties to intervene to put an end to these violations and to provide protection to the Palestinian people who are suffering day by day.

Earlier on Monday, Israeli forces invaded Jenin Camp in the occupied West Bank, which resulted in clashes between the Israeli forces and Palestinian residents.

The Israeli forces used live ammunition, rubber bullets, and tear gas against the Palestinians.

The Jenin camp and an adjacent town of the same name have been a source of conflict in the escalating Israeli-Palestinian violence since last year. The latest raid, which occurred on Monday, took place two weeks after another violent incident in Jenin.

Mondays deaths bring the death toll of Palestinians killed this year in the West Bank to 131, part of more than a year-long spike in violence that has seen some of the worst bloodsheds in that area in nearly two decades.

The outburst of violence escalated last year after a spate of Palestinian attacks prompted Israel to step up its raids in the West Bank.

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ZTO Express (Cayman) (NYSE:ZTO  Free Report) was downgraded by research analysts at StockNews.com from a buy rating to a hold rating in a report released on Saturday.

A number of other equities research analysts have also recently weighed in on the company. The Goldman Sachs Group upgraded ZTO Express (Cayman) from a neutral rating to a buy rating and boosted their price objective for the company from $37.00 to $42.00 in a research note on Monday, April 24th. HSBC boosted their price objective on ZTO Express (Cayman) from $33.00 to $36.00 and gave the company a buy rating in a research note on Friday, March 17th. Finally, Bank of America boosted their price objective on ZTO Express (Cayman) from $36.00 to $39.00 in a research note on Thursday, May 18th. One research analyst has rated the stock with a hold rating and four have issued a buy rating to the stock. According to data from MarketBeat, the stock presently has a consensus rating of Moderate Buy and a consensus target price of $36.96.

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ZTO Express (Cayman) Stock Performance

Shares of ZTO Express (Cayman) stock opened at $25.08 on Friday. ZTO Express has a one year low of $16.27 and a one year high of $30.05. The company has a market cap of $15.32 billion, a PE ratio of 18.72, a P/E/G ratio of 1.07 and a beta of 0.02. The company has a debt-to-equity ratio of 0.13, a quick ratio of 1.32 and a current ratio of 1.32. The business has a 50-day simple moving average of $27.21 and a 200-day simple moving average of $27.35.

Institutional Trading of ZTO Express (Cayman)

ZTO Express (Cayman) ( NYSE:ZTO Free Report ) last announced its quarterly earnings data on Wednesday, May 17th. The transportation company reported $0.30 EPS for the quarter, topping analysts consensus estimates of $0.23 by $0.07. ZTO Express (Cayman) had a return on equity of 14.25% and a net margin of 20.76%. The business had revenue of $1.31 billion during the quarter, compared to the consensus estimate of $1.38 billion. On average, equities research analysts forecast that ZTO Express will post 1.43 EPS for the current fiscal year.

Large investors have recently made changes to their positions in the stock. Ronald Blue Trust Inc. raised its holdings in shares of ZTO Express (Cayman) by 420.1% during the 4th quarter. Ronald Blue Trust Inc. now owns 1,165 shares of the transportation companys stock valued at $28,000 after buying an additional 941 shares during the period. Captrust Financial Advisors purchased a new stake in shares of ZTO Express (Cayman) during the 2nd quarter valued at about $36,000. China Universal Asset Management Co. Ltd. purchased a new stake in shares of ZTO Express (Cayman) during the 4th quarter valued at about $43,000. Advisor Group Holdings Inc. raised its holdings in shares of ZTO Express (Cayman) by 26.2% during the 4th quarter. Advisor Group Holdings Inc. now owns 2,248 shares of the transportation companys stock valued at $61,000 after buying an additional 466 shares during the period. Finally, CI Investments Inc. grew its stake in ZTO Express (Cayman) by 529.2% during the 4th quarter. CI Investments Inc. now owns 3,278 shares of the transportation companys stock valued at $88,000 after purchasing an additional 2,757 shares in the last quarter. Institutional investors and hedge funds own 42.86% of the companys stock.

About ZTO Express (Cayman)

(Free Report)

ZTO Express (Cayman) Inc provides express delivery and other value-added logistics services in the People's Republic of China. It offers freight forwarding services; and delivery services for e-commerce and traditional merchants, and other express service users. The company was founded in 2002 and is headquartered in Shanghai, the People's Republic of China.

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Remarks By Mr. Oseloka H. Obaze, Politician, Diplomat, Policy and Governance Expert, At the Launch of The Nigeria Dream by Dr. Moses Paul, Merit House, Abuja, Sunday 2 July 2023

I am elated to be here today; first as a writer who is supporting a literary work and the author and secondly, as a member of Nigerias attentive public. The heavy lifting today has been assigned to the eggheads. So my task is made a lot easier.

The other reason why Im here today is that as the author stated in the foreword, Nigeria is at a cross roads, undergoing a profound transformation that includes politics, government, governance, leadership, and all other spheres of society. And as Leon Trotsky admonished us: You may not care about politics but politics cares about you. That for me is a compelling reason for our presence.

Finally, Im here because our host and the author of The Nigerian Dream, Dr. Moses Paul, have dared us to dream. Like many Nigerians, I am a dreamer.

For me, contemplating the romantic but non utopist notion of The Nigerian Dream was too attractive to be passed up. Certainly, not in the context of the past year and the intrusion of the Obidient Movement into our national psyche; and certainly, not with the prevailing climate that is counterfactual to every sense of nationhood and nation building. As the author surmised, A new Nigeria is Emerging; we must embrace the Promise of that Dream. And indeed, I am A Nigerian.

It was George Santayana, I believe, who said that Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it. As such, though I have been thoroughly immersed in partisan national politics over the past year, I have still found time to read some political books in order to understand where we went wrong.

These books include How Democracies Fail by Steve Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt; How to Think Politically, by Graeme Garrard, and Surrounded by Idiots, by Thomas Erikson.

The last book is very important in the Nigeria context, since its subplot is: How to Understand Those Who Cannot be Understood. You will agree with me that in the present day Nigeria, there are many leaders and people whom we can no longer understand.

As a student and practitioner of diplomacy, politics, and policymaking, one of my favorite books is a 1987 book titled, Thinking in Time: The Uses of History for Decision Makers, by Richard E. Neustadt, and Ernest R. May. The core value of the book, which Dr. Mo adopts and adapts to, is to ask questions during the decision-making process rather than ask questions after the fact, only to posit: How could we have been mistaken?

It is for this reason and its underpinning import that I have titled my remarks: Dr. Mos Thinking in Time. As you might have guessed, my task is not to review Dr. Mos book, but to place it in its proper context apropos Nigerias realpolitik.

I can affirm that The Nigerian Dream, which in its Eight Chapters grapples with issues germane to Nigeria, passed the required litmus test and more: after all, good books about governance and politics should have certain core nuggets; essentially, they should be down-to-earth and sometimes hilarious demythologizing of people and events. Dr. Mo toes that line well, thus buttressing the essence of our shaping our historical and nation-building narrative by documenting events as they unfold.

Paradoxically, in The Nigerian Dream, there is a nugget of nostalgia embedded in the modicum of hope held out for a non-performing, laggardly and polarized Nigeria. If not, how does one countenance the suggestion that Its time to revive the good old days?

The upshot is that despite Nigeria tending towards a failed state and with all the vital development indices on a nosedive; a new Nigeria is possible and it must be predicated on the concrete and cogent realities of the past  basically the lessons learned and missed opportunities.

Any discourse of Nigeria that glosses over corruption, weak institutions, lack of accountability, state capture, and glaring inequalities in power and resource sharing, would be essentially shambolic. The Nigerian Dream does not.

This proves that true democracy encompasses the freedom to choose, starting with respect for the rule of law, the people selecting a leader of their choice and that choice being respected, and the institutionalization of all other freedoms.

Which way Nigeria? is an overused cliche and a popular 1970s song by Sonny Okoson. Perhaps, the answer lays in The Nigerian Dream. But what is the question? What is wrong with Nigeria? Often, we blame leadership! But we the followers are equally culpable.

As expert opinion contends, What is even so bad about the contemporary state of governance and its human security component in the country is the fact that a culture of impunity, a lack of empathy, pervasive corruption, and the inability of serial governments since 1966 to foster unity, integration, and national cohesion, etc., have combined to render the country incapable of assuming its role in the comity of nations.

And what is the solution? Simply, it is the realization of the Nigeria Dream. It should be self-evident, but that is not always the case, that Nigeria is hobbled by lack of elite consensus. Nigeria is in crisis because past leaders have collectively not done well. Our past leaders allowed governance to become transactional and primordial in its entire ramification. Despite some flashes of good leadership, we have lacked consistency.

This is why we need an ethical and purposeful leader, who is development-oriented, can think disruptively and has a transformative mindset. Ethical and purposeful Leadership is akin to the Rotarian values- it must be selfless and aimed at common or collective good. This means maintaining the rule of law at all times; with high ethical standards in one's business, one's profession, and in one's personal life.

The purpose of government is the wellbeing of the people. Citizens rights deriving from the Constitution must be sacrosanct. A purposeful leader has the task of ensuring that government meets her responsibility to protect the common man. He must serve in accordance with the Constitution, but also protect peoples rights and ordered liberties.

Governments conduct, pronouncements and policies will be underpinned by creatively managing our national diversity and ensuring that the myriad constitutional provisions on the federal character principle, offers opportunities to all Nigerians to serve in any capacity in the public sectors.

Endpoint: A society which debases the power of ideas while exalting the idea of power is not only short-sighted but foolish in the extreme. Nigerians are not foolish people; our leaders are just plain greedy and selfish. It is that selfishness that has delayed The Nigeria Dream. So Thinking in Time, its time to seize the moment. A New Nigeria is indeed Possible. The time is now!

Thank You.


At his inaugural speech, President Bola Tinubu disclosed that monetary policy will need a thorough checking. Since then, Godwin Emefiele has been suspended as the governor of the Central Bank of Nigeria (CBN) and the FX market is undergoing rapid changes for the better.

Although, these initiatives have gathered applause from both local and international investors, it is not enough. One major critical area that remains unaddressed is the failure to uphold the rule of law at the Central Bank.

According to a correspondent, One such instrument through which the CBN has acted against institutions and individuals is the post no debit (PND) instruction. The instrument allows the CBN to stop customers from operating their bank accounts, with the permission of the courts. However, without such permission, the CBN closed customer accounts without court orders. The CBN only later sought an ex-parte order after account closures. When customers contest this through the courts and are absolved of wrongdoings, the commercial banks fail to lift restrictions until the CBN grants permission, which can be delayed for an extended time. With a regulator as CBN with sweeping powers, it is understandable that banks would easily be co-opted into this unlawful abuse of power. The use of PND has been popular and thoroughly abused by the CBN over the past nine years.

Referencing to exporters, it was unreasonable to repatriate their dollar earnings to be sold at the exchange rate of N461/$ in the I&E FX window which was 62 per cent lower than what could be obtained in the parallel market at N750/$. Realising its mistake, the CBN introduced a scheme that now compensated exporters N25/$ for every dollar they repatriate.

Similarly in the financial sector, FinTechs, BDCs and even commercial banks have been constantly harassed by the CBN. Bureaux de change (BDCs) are quite easily scapegoated by the CBN for an FX crisis of their creation. When parallel market rates drift significantly away from the official market, the players in the space, including the BDCs, come under heavy fire from the CBN for acting in their interest. At some point, over 30 BDCs had PNDs placed in their bank account under the guise of illicit financing until it was later reviewed. One would think that such accusations would be fully prosecuted by the CBN, but that rarely happened.

He also noted that this abuse of power harms the entire economy by destroying commerce and employment. The consequences of these sudden and unlawful sanctions on the accounts of individuals and businesses are devastating. Many struggles to go about their everyday business and meet obligations. Some companies could not pay salaries to staff and settle invoices to suppliers as and when due.

"It is not enough to suspend Governor Emefiele, it is essential that upholding the rule of law must be one of the reforms prioritised at the Central Bank of Nigeria. The entire system around the use of PNDs against customers in the banking system should be thoroughly audited and cleaned up. This would also prevent the CBN from creating and implementing policies that are now being reformed," he said.
Many cities in the state of Iowa allow residents to keep chickens in their backyards for noncommercial purposes only. Keeping backyard chickens can bring a variety of benefits. First and foremost, fresh eggs are a major perk. They are richer in nutrients and taste better than store-bought eggs. However, the number and type of chickens you are allowed to own in Iowa depends on where you live, as each municipality in the Hawkeye State has its own rules and regulations. In many Iowa cities, the number of backyard chickens you can own depends on the size of your property.





In the city of Waukee, for example, a maximum of 6 chickens (hens only) are allowed on lands of one-half acre or less, with 6 additional hens for each additional one-half acre up to a maximum of 30 hens.





In others places, a maximum of six female chickens are allowed per property. In most Iowa municipalities, a permit is required to keep chickens. Listed in this article are some Iowa cities that allow the keeping of backyard chickens.









Des Moines, IA

In the city of Des Moines, residences are limited to two chickens, which must at all times be maintained in a pen or coop. The pen, coop, or hutch is required to be kept in a clean and sanitary condition. Additionally, chicken coops or pens must be located in the rear yard only and at least 25 feet from neighboring dwellings, according to Des Moines' Code of Ordinances





Cedar Rapids, IA

Residents must obtain a $25 annual urban chicken permit to keep backyard chickens in the City of Cedar Rapids. To obtain the permit, all applicants must notify residents of all immediately adjacent dwellings and subsequently complete an approved class about raising chickens in an urban setting at the Indian Creek Nature Center. Cedar Rapids Code limits each tract of land, regardless of how many dwelling units are on the tract, to six chickens, but roosters are not allowed. For identification purposes, all hens in Cedar Rapids are required to be tagged.





Davenport, IA

In the City of Davenport, each tract of land is limited to a maximum of 6 backyard hens. Roosters are not allowed within the city limits of Davenport, IA. The City Code requires that chickens be at all times kept in an enclosure or fenced area. The enclosure must not be located in the front yard and must be at all times kept in a clean, dry, odor-free, neat and sanitary condition. In addition, The City Code requires that all chicken enclosures be located at least 10 feet from the property line and 25 feet from any principal structure.





Sioux City, IA

Sioux City Code requires that residents obtain a permit from the inspection services division before keeping any chickens within the city limits. No more than four chickens may be kept on any premises within the city. Sioux City residents are prohibited from keeping roosters that are over four months old. Chicken coops are required to be located at least 45 feet from your own dwelling and 125 feet from neighboring dwellings.





Iowa City, IA

Iowa City allows up to four backyard chickens (roosters are prohibited) per single-family home. However, residents must obtain a permit and meet all requirements of the Urban Chicken Policy before keeping any chickens. No Iowa City resident will be issued a permit without the written consent of all neighboring property owners. The slaughtering of chickens is prohibited in Iowa City, as well as the selling of eggs and chicken. The City Code requires that chicken coops provide at least 4 square feet of space per chicken kept therein.





Ames, IA

In the city of Ames, the keeping of backyard chickens is allowed and the number of chickens a resident can own is not restricted. However, the City Code requires that all chickens be confined to a secure coop, which must be maintained in a clean and sanitary condition.





Waterloo, IA

In the City of Waterloo, residents are allowed to keep chickens, geese, ducks, and turkeys in their backyards. The number of chickens a resident can keep in his or her backyard in Waterloo is not restricted. However, Waterloo Code prohibits owners from allowing their birds to run at large within the city and creating a nuisance.





Council Bluffs, IA

In Council Bluffs, Pottawattamie County, Iowa, a $150 Farm Animal Permit , which lasts for 3 years, is required to keep backyard chickens. Under the permit, you can keep a maximum of 10 chickens in your backyard. In addition to chickens, you can also keep 4 ducks, 2 turkeys, and 2 geese. However, the total number of birds in your backyard must not exceed 10, according to Council Bluffs Municipal Code





Dubuque, IA

The City of Dubuque allows residents to keep backyard chickens for egg production only. However, only female chickens (hens) are allowed to be kept, male chickens (roosters) are prohibited. Dubuque ordinance does not place a limit on the number of backyard hens a resident can have, but there are some legal requirements for keeping hens in the city. All chicken coops are required to be located in the backyard and hens are required to be provided with adequate shelter to protect them from the elements.





Other Iowa Cities
GRIP IT Coastal Cleanup Fiesta targets Karon

GRIP IT, a charitable organisation based in the south of Phuket that consists of friends from around the world who want to do good for the community, will hold their Coastal Cleanup Fiesta at Karon beach today (July 3), from 3:30pm to 6pm.

CommunityEnvironment

By The Phuket News

Monday 3 July 2023 11:47 AM

Image: GRIP IT

The Coastal Cleanup Fiesta: Clean & Spin is a unique initiative organised by GRIP IT, a renowned local foundation dedicated to promoting sustainable practices and preserving the natural beauty of Phukets coastline. We believe that by joining forces and taking action, we can make a significant difference in our environment and create a lasting impact for future Generations, said GRIP ITs Nurama Ji Taleh.

Together, we will roll up our sleeves and engage in a beach clean-up, removing litter and debris that pose a threat to our precious marine life. By actively participating in this event, you will play an essential role in maintaining the pristine beauty of our beloved beach.

But thats not all! As a token of our gratitude for your valuable contribution, we have prepared an exciting spin the wheel game, filled with delightful surprises and rewards. After the clean-up activity, take a spin and see what fate has in store for you. Its our way of saying "thank you" for your dedication and commitment to creating a sustainable future, she added.

The event is open to all local residents and tourists visiting Phuket. No prior experience is necessary to participate, as all the necessary materials and instructions for the beach clean-up will be provided.

Just bring your enthusiasm, drinking water, energy, and a desire to make a positive impact on our environment, Ji said.

Together, we can create a cleaner, healthier, and more sustainable Phuket, she added.

To participate in the Coastal Cleanup Fiesta: Spin & Clean, simply go to the Dragon Statue at Karon Beach (here) and look for the GRIP IT registration booth on the beach. Remember to stay hydrated and wear comfortable clothing suitable for beach activities.

GRIP IT is a non-profit organisation based in Phuket, Thailand, committed to support and improve local communities including environmental preservation, community empowerment, and sustainable development. Through various projects and initiatives, GRIP IT aims to create a positive impact on society, foster a sense of environmental responsibility, and inspire individuals to become agents of change.

GRIP IT launched its campaign to have clean drinking water at schools late last year. The community organisation earlier this month had its third clean drinking water facility installed at a school in Phuket  this time at Laem Panwa School.

The school had an old system which was no longer up to standard for drinking. With the help of Chalong Water Filter, we made sure that the water filter is clean and safe for the children.

GRIP IT would like to give a big THANK YOU to Lynnea and Beverly from Canada, who donated the water filter system to this school. Youve made a huge difference to the childrens lives!

People wanting to support the project were invited to contact GRIP IT through their Facebook page.
Neglected elephant boards jumbo flight home to Thailand

COLOMBO: An elephant gifted to Sri Lanka two decades ago was flown back to Thailand yesterday (July 2) after a diplomatic spat over the animals alleged mistreatment.

animalshealthSafetywildlife

By AFP

Monday 3 July 2023 07:37 AM

Sri Lankan keepers lead elephant Muthu Raja inside a cage before departure from the Dehiwala Zoo in Colombo on Saturday (July 1). Photo: AFP

Authorities had gifted the 29-year-old Muthu Raja - also known back in its birthplace as Sak Surin - to Sri Lanka in 2001.

But they demanded it back last year after allegations it was tortured and neglected while housed at a Buddhist temple in the island nations south.

The 4,000kg mammal flew out from Colombo airport yesterday morning on a one-way commercial flight for a repatriation that Thai officials said had cost $700,000 (B24 million).

The Ilyushin IL-76 cargo plane carrying Muthu Raja took off around 7:40am (9:10am in Thailand), the airport manager said.

After touching down in Chiang Mai the elephant will be quarantined at a nearby nature reserve.

It was taken from its temporary home at a zoo in Colombo before dawn in a special steel cage the size of a shipping container.

Four Thai handlers alongside a Sri Lankan keeper are accompanying the elephant on the flight and two CCTV cameras will monitor its health in transit.

The chief veterinarian at the Dehiwala Zoo, Madusha Perera, told AFP that Muthu Raja was in pain and covered in abscesses when it was rescued from its previous abode last year.

Animal welfare groups said the elephant had been forced to work with a logging crew and its wounds - some allegedly inflicted by its handler - had been neglected.

The elephant will undergo hydrotherapy to treat a remaining injury on its front left leg when it returns, Mr Perera said.

Return opposed

Elephants are considered sacred in Sri Lanka and they are protected by law.

The organisation Rally for Animal Rights and Environment (RARE), which led a campaign to rescue Muthu Raja from the temple, has expressed its unhappiness over the animals departure.

RARE organised a Buddhist blessing for the elephant on Friday ahead of the journey and the group is now petitioning the authorities to prosecute those it says are responsible for neglecting the animal.

A nationalist group staged a demonstration outside the Thai embassy in Colombo on Thursday demanding the animal remain in Sri Lanka for another six months.

We did not know about the plight of the elephant, the groups leader Dan Priyasad told AFP.

We can nurse it back to health in six months and if we fail, they can take the animal back.

Wildlife minister Pavithra Wanniarachchi said the Thai goverment had been adamant in its demands for the elephants return.

Prime Minister Dinesh Gunawardena told parliament in June that he had personally conveyed Sri Lankas regrets to His Majesty the King over the elephants condition.

Environment minister Varawut Silpa-archa would not be drawn last month on whether Muthu Raja had been mistreated but noted that the government had stopped sending elephants abroad.

Bangkoks diplomatic missions were now checking the condition of those already sent overseas, he said.
The Council of the League of Arab States will hold an emergency meeting on Tuesday, at the level of permanent delegates, to discuss the latest developments in the city of Jenin in the occupied West Bank, according to Al-Ahram Arabic gate.

The meeting comes upon a request from Palestine in coordination with Egypt and Jordan, said the Permanent Representative of Palestine to the AL Ambassador Muhannad Al-Aklouk.

It comes in light of the continuing brutal Israeli aggression against the Palestinian people throughout the cities, camps and villages, Al-Aklouk added.

Israeli forces attacked the city of Jenin earlier on Monday, killing five Palestinians and injuring 27.

Al-Aklouk noted that the meeting is set to discuss effective means to stop Israeli aggression, hold the perpetrators accountable, and request international protection for the Palestinian people.

For his part, Palestinian Prime Minister Mohammed Ishtaye accused Monday the Israeli occupation army of committing what he termed as "war crimes" against the Palestinians in the northern West Bank city of Jenin.

"Israel is attempting to wipe out the Jenin refugee camp," Ishtaye told the meeting, adding that "the Palestinian people will not surrender to this aggression, but they will resist it until the end of the criminal occupation."

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Van driver charged for threatening tourist

PHUKET: The passenger van driver wanted for intimidating and verbally abusing a tourist in Phuket Town yesterday has presented himself to Phuket City Police and charged with frightening others by use of threat.

tourismtransportSafetypolice

By Eakkapop Thongtub

Monday 3 July 2023 05:56 PM

Phuket City Police Station today. By police instruction, reporters today were not permitted to take any photographs of the van driver charged, Poramet Soraket, 47, while he was at the police station. Photo: Eakkapop Thongtub

The driver, Poramet Soraket, 47, presented himself at Phuket City Police Station at about 2pm today (July 3), confirmed Phuket City Police Chief Pol Col Pratuang Pholmana.

Poramet was wanted by police after a video was posted online showing him verbally abusing a tourist, later identified as 35-year-old Singaporean national Fariz Bin Abdulkardir Bashar Ahil, on the footpath in front of the Coffee Talk shop on Ratsada Rd in Phuket Town yesterday.

Bystanders and people who saw the video online believed that Poramet was brandishing an iron bar while he was verbally abusing the tourist.

Col Pratuang today told reporters that police had questioned Poramet about the item he had in his hand.

We asked him whether the weapon he held was like an iron bar or a water pipe. He said that this thing was like a small rubber band [sic, presumably a rubber belt]. If you try to compare them in the picture in the clip, they look similar, Col Pratuang said.

Col Pratuang did not clarify why Poramet had the rubber belt in his hand while he was verbally accosting the tourist.

Regarding the incident, Col Pratuang explained that Poramet worked for a company based in Krabi that provided non-scheduled van trips between Phuket and Krabi.

The issue began after Poramet had removed Mr Farizs luggage from the back of the van and set it down heavily.

Mr Fariz commented on how heavily his suitcases were unloaded, Col Pratuang said.

Poramet became angry when Mr Fariz commented and took a photo of Poramet, he added.

The driver [Poramet] was dissatisfied that the passenger took his photograph, and there was a raised hand to express dissatisfaction. Thats all, Col Pratuang said.

Col Pratuang emphasised that the charge against Poramet was one of threatening a person. It was not a violent crime, he said.

He even praised Poramet, the van driver, for not making the incident worse. Thanks to the driver of this van there was no assault. He did not cause further escalation. When contacted to come to be questioned about the incident today, the driver came to see me and asked about where to go, Col Pratuang continued.

Today, the accused will be presented in court on the charge of using a threat to frighten others, which is a district court offence, he said.

In accordance with the policy of the Commander of the Region 8 Police and the Commander of Phuket City Police, in all cases of this kind of crime we will not issue any fines at the police station, Col Pratuang noted.

We must submit our case to the court. We must have a court order. Whether to impose a fine or sentence any imprisonment is at the discretion of the court. We have measures that must be taken every time, Col Prathuang assured.

The van driver [Poramet] said that the luggage was heavy. He apologised for the incident, but today the two sides did not meet, Col Pratuang said.

Col Pratuang made no mention of whether Poramets version of the incident matched the description of events given by the tourist, Mr Fariz.

Of note, by police instruction reporters today were not permitted to take any photographs of Poramet while he was at the police station.
Van driver sought for intimidating tourist with iron bar

PHUKET: Phuket Tourist Police last night (July 2) confirmed they were investigating an incident in Phuket Town yesterday (July 2) in which a passenger van driver verbally abused a tourist standing on the side of the street.

tourismtransportcrimepolice

By The Phuket News

Monday 3 July 2023 10:30 AM

UPDATE: The van driver has been identified as Poramet Soraket, 47, who drives for a company based in Krabi. Phuket City Police are now tracking him down.

Police identified the tourist as 35-year-old Singaporean national Fariz Bin Abdulkardir Bashar Ahil.

See updated story: Van driver charged for threatening tourist

The van driver was caught on video holding an iron bar while intimidating the tourist.

A video of the incident was posted online, showing the driver, wearing a red polo shirt and black long jeans, walking from the van parked by the side of the road up to the tourist, who was waiting on the footpath with his two suitcases.

The van driver, with an iron bar in hand, speaks harshly with the tourist, then walks away. He then returns to continue his verbal tirade.

The incident happened in front of the Coffee Talk shop on Ratsada Rd, and was recorded on video by a person in the shop. The video clip is 52 seconds long. However what was said cannot be heard due to the large glass window.

Phuket City Police arrived at the scene at about 5:30pm, reported the Phuket branch of the Public Relations Department (PR Phuket).

Due to the nature of the incident, Phuket City Deputy Police Chief Pol Lt Col Kamala Niyomkhet joined patrol officers at the scene, noted the report.

From the video, the vans licence plates cannot be seen in the video, by the company logo on the side of the van was described as not registered.

A post online showing the video marked that the company logo VS was emblazoned on the side of the van.

The tourist tried walking away but the driver prevented him from leaving while he continued to accost him, PR Phuket reported.

Phuket Tourist Police last night confirmed they had found and questioned the tourist accosted in the incident and were continuing their investigation into what had happened with the intent of pressing charges.


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Pope Tawadros II of Alexandria, head of the Coptic Orthodox Church, arrived at the papal headquarters at the Coptic Orthodox Cathedral in Cairo's Abbasiya on Sunday evening after recovering from Bells palsy.

At the cathedral, 78 bishops and metropolitans received the pope who was arriving from the papal seat of Alexandria's King Mariout, a statement by the Coptic Orthodox Church read.

Pope Tawadros, 70, developed Bells (7th cranial nerve) palsy, a neurological disorder that causes temporary weakness or paralysis on one side of the face, around a month ago.

The pope said he was keen to strictly adhere to the treatment programme, which contributed to his speedy recovery.

Pope Tawadros had earlier attributed his illness to a busy and eventful schedule in May, which included numerous meetings and visits to various locations, exposure to heat and air conditioning during meetings, and high levels of stress.

The pope stated that his condition necessitated medical evaluation, medication, daily physical therapy sessions, and complete rest.

Pope Tawadros is the 118th pope of Alexandria and patriarch of the See of St Mark. He took office in 2012.

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Egypts Minister of Emigration, Soha Gendy, announced on Monday the agenda of the 4th edition of the Egyptians Abroad conference, which is slated for 31 July.



The conference will be attended by a large group of Egyptians from different communities worldwide and by representatives of ministries and bodies who will be available to answer queries and listen to suggestions from Egyptian expats, according to the Emigration Ministrys statement.

The conference aims to boost the national identity of children of Egyptian expats and provide them with all the necessary support since they constitute an important element of Egypts soft power, Gendy explained.

She noted that the conferences agenda includes the discussion of three axes: the economic axis, the educational and political axis, and the social and services axis.

The opening session of the conference, which the minister will head, will review the ministrys current efforts to meet the needs of Egyptian expats. It will also assess the progress in implementing the recommendations and achieving the outcomes of last years conference.

The conferences first session is dedicated to the economic axis, shedding light on Egypts economy in the past few years and the countrys efforts to reduce the effect of the global economic crisis. The session will also focus on the financial policies that the government adopted and the tools it used to increase hard currency cash transfers for Egyptians abroad.

The second session addresses the political and educational axis by discussing the importance of the participation of Egyptian expats in the national dialogue to exchange views on important issues.

The third session, which discusses the social and services axis, will focus on ways to coordinate with the Ministry of Social Solidarity to establish the Egyptians Abroad Fund and foster solidarity among Egyptian expatriates and immigrants.

It will also discuss providing them with health and insurance services. Furthermore, the session will address the issue of transferring the bodies of those who die abroad to Egypt and medical evacuation in cases of emergency.

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Saudi Arabia has summoned Sweden's ambassador to denounce a Koran burning outside a Stockholm mosque that sparked a diplomatic backlash across the Muslim world, state media reported early Monday.



The kingdom -- home to the holiest sites in Islam, in Mecca and Medina -- had already condemned Wednesday's incident in which an Iraqi citizen living in Sweden, Salwan Momika, 37, stomped on the Muslim holy book and set several pages alight.

The foreign ministry summoned the ambassador on Sunday to urge Sweden "to stop all actions that directly contradict international efforts seeking to spread the values of tolerance, moderation and rejection of extremism, and undermine the necessary mutual respect for relations between peoples and states", the official Saudi Press Agency reported.

Momika's Koran burning coincided with the start of the Eid al-Adha holiday and the end of the annual hajj pilgrimage in Saudi Arabia, triggering widespread anger.

Countries including Iraq, Kuwait, the United Arab Emirates and Morocco have also summoned Swedish ambassadors in protest.

Iran said on Sunday it was holding off on sending its new ambassador to Sweden because of the incident.

At an extraordinary meeting on Sunday at its Jeddah headquarters, the Saudi-based Organisation of Islamic Cooperation called for collective measures to avoid future Koran burnings.

Swedish police had granted Momika a permit in line with free speech protections, but authorities later said they had opened an investigation over "agitation against an ethnic group", noting that Momika had burnt pages from the Islamic holy book very close to the mosque.

Sweden's government condemned Momika's actions on Sunday, calling them "Islamophobic".

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An AFP correspondent in Jenin said troops were inside the camp and also around the city. There were gun battles, explosions, and Palestinians threw rocks at Israeli troops, the correspondent reported.

Israel had already stepped up operations in the northern West Bank, home to Jenin city and its adjacent refugee camp, which is a stronghold of Palestinian armed groups and where there has been a spate of attacks on Israelis as well as attacks by Jewish settlers on Palestinian communities.

The Palestinian health ministry said that in Monday's operation eight people were killed -- exceeding the toll of seven from an Israeli army raid in Jenin refugee camp two weeks ago which saw rare use of helicopter missile fire.

Fifty others were injured including 10 who were in serious condition, the ministry said.

"There is bombing from the air and an invasion from the ground," Mahmoud al-Saadi, director of the Palestinian Red Crescent in Jenin, told AFP.

"Several houses and sites have been bombed... smoke is rising from everywhere."

The Israeli army said its forces had struck a "joint operations center", which served as a command post for the "Jenin Brigade", a local militant group.

The area is nominally under the control of president Mahmud Abbas's Palestinian Authority, which has partial administrative control in the West Bank.

The army said it targeted an "observation and reconnaissance" site, as well as a weapons storage facility and a hideout for those alleged to have carried out attacks on Israeli targets in recent months.

"We are striking the terrorism hub (of Jenin) with great strength," Israeli Foreign Minister Eli Cohen told reporters in Jerusalem.

Violence in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict has worsened since early last year, including under the latest administration of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu which took power in December, a coalition between his Likud party and extreme-right and ultra-Orthodox Jewish allies.

Netanyahu's coalition contains hardline West Bank settlers, including extreme-right National Security Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir.

Caught 'by surprise'

"People were aware that we were probably going in", army spokesman Richard Hecht told reporters, "but the method of striking from the air", with a target in the core of the camp, "basically caught them by surprise,"

He said troops remained inside the camp but were after "specific targets" and "not trying to hold ground."

"We are still seizing weapons and ammunitions" and "infrastructure", Hecht said, adding the focus was on Jenin camp and that there was no specific timeline for ending the operation.

It involved "brigade-level" troop numbers, he said.

An army statement said that one soldier was lightly injured" by Israeli army grenade shrapnel.

Israel has occupied the West Bank since the Six-Day War of 1967.

Excluding annexed east Jerusalem, the territory is now home to around 490,000 Israelis who live in settlements considered illegal under international law.

The Palestinians, who seek their own independent state, want Israel to withdraw from all land it occupied in the Six-Day War and to dismantle all Jewish settlements.

However, Netanyahu has pledged to "strengthen settlements" and has expressed no interest in reviving peace talks, which have been moribund since 2014.

In a separate incident a Palestinian youth was killed by Israeli fire near the West Bank city of Ramallah, the Palestinian health ministry said.

The Palestinian militant group Islamic Jihad said in a statement that "all options are open to strike the enemy (Israel) in response to its aggression in Jenin".

In neighbouring Jordan, Ministry of Foreign Affairs spokesman Sinan Majali emphasised "that the ongoing escalation constitutes a clear violation of international humanitarian law, as well as Israel's obligations as the occupying power."

Following Israel's raid in Jenin last month, four Israelis were killed when two Palestinian gunmen attacked a petrol station near the West bank settlement of Eli. The assailants were shot dead.

In another rare action that same week, the Israeli military said it carried out a drone strike to kill three members of a "terrorist cell" in the West Bank.

In response, Netanyahu's office said his government would fast-track settlement expansion at Eli.

Since the start of the year at least 185 Palestinians, 25 Israelis, a Ukrainian and an Italian have been killed, according to an AFP tally compiled from official sources from both sides.

They include, on the Palestinian side, combatants and civilians, and on the Israeli side, mostly civilians and three members of the Arab minority.
Fifteen have been shot dead; over 100 killed; over 300 wounded; more than 25 churches burnt; many houses vandalized and several thousand people relocated. And the anger still burns.

Welcome to todays Manipur, a place known for its peaceloving people, nature-loving tribals, green forests, beautiful landscapes and a history and culture filled with the richness. Weeks have passed. But it seems the Central and state governments have failed to bring the place back to normalcy.

Peace still seems distant. Only certain ad hoc measures have been taken, maybe to ensure temporary calm, however uneasy it maybe. The big question here is whether the system of governance, backed by its own intelligence, have helped prevent the burning of a state?

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Why was preventive machinery conspicuous by its absence? The other question is if a government, with a strong will and better reflexes, could have controlled the situation and put out the fire that kept flaring. These questions need answers, whether one finds them in the conscience of politics or in the premises of the judiciary.

The Chief Minister of Manipur, N Biren Singh stated that the riots were instigated by prevailing misunderstanding between two communities and appealed for restoration of normality.

That, at the outset, looked more like a pious hope than a serious concern to find solutions. Sashi Tharoor, a member of parliament of the opposition Congress called for Presidents rule and blamed the BJP-led government, saying it had failed to govern the state. This again is nothing more than a formal statement an opposition party would make.

There were no solutions on offer. Peter Machado, the Metropolitan Archbishop of Bangalore, expressed concerns that the Christian community was being made to feel insecure, highlighting that seventeen churches are either vandalized, desecrated or defiled.

He too did his job of representing the voice of his community without taking any proactive steps to make leaders sit, discuss and sort out the issues amicably. Olympic medalist, the native queen Mary Kom seemed to restrict her role to a tweet where she made an appeal seeking help for her home state. It may have been better if she had come out, formed a womens group and toured the troubled areas to appeal for calm and better fraternal ties.

Perhaps, such a move may have worked when officious interventions failed. My point is to ask if we are in the habit of first taking a wait and watch approach, or just play a routine role, and then look for ways to blame others when things spill out of control? Is it a kind of play-safe approach we follow without coming to action mode and facilitating quick solutions?

Had there been genuine intent followed by real action, things may have gone a different way. We need a new solutions mechanism to problems like this in our diverse nation if we want India to stay peaceful and grow fully.

Though the Centre employed over 10,000 army and para military men and women to tackle the situation, it worked superficially, because the root factor of the conflict was not handled in time. Today the situation is such that there is no reassuring ray of hope.

This state of affairs may prove to be dangerously detrimental not just for the security of the state but for the hope of the whole nation to stay united and peaceful. Internal conflicts and threats apart, the possibility of external interventions and trouble making from across the border cannot be ruled out. The nature and character of Northeastern states ~ called seven sisters ~ is such that turmoil in one state may spill over to another. After all, troublemakers exist everywhere and seek opportunities to spread disharmony and disturbances. Manipurs history is marked by a struggle for self-determination and a desire for greater autonomy.

Home to a rich and diverse range of tribes and ethnic groups, the population comprises several distinct communities, each with its own unique culture, language, traditions, and social structures. These include the Meiteis, Nagas, Kukis, Chins, Manipuri Muslims, Aimol, Kom, Anal, and others. The Manipuri people have a strong sense of identity and have been striving to protect their culture and rights within the Indian federal system. The political and geographic divide between the Meiteis and other ethnic groups is sharply evident. Although anger over the grant of ST status to the Meiteis triggered the recent violence, tensions between these groups have been simmering for years due to various complex issues, such as land rights and the suppression of minority communities. The Meiteis hold significant positions within the state government and have enjoyed more economic and infrastructural progress compared to the other ethnic groups. Has there been no insightful study of the evolving situation and the need for solutions on the part of successive governments? Has party politics been given more importance than the overall harmony and well being of the state?

Many questions arise that need reasonable answers. The Meities, residing mainly in the geographically smaller but more developed Imphal Valley, are distinct from the Naga and Kuki groups who predominantly inhabit larger, agriculturally rich, and protected hill districts. The Naga and Kuki communities are concerned that changes in their protected status could lead to their gradual displacement from territories they have occupied for decades, making them vulnerable to exploitation. Has anyone seriously tried to understand their fears and assuage their apprehensions? The presence of numerous insurgent groups in Manipur has also contributed significantly to the violence. These groups have emerged due to a variety of factors, including historical grievances, economic marginalization, and perceived neglect by the central government.

Some insurgent groups have resorted to armed struggle, seeking to establish an independent state or greater autonomy for their respective communities. The proliferation of weapons and the involvement of armed groups in extortion, drug trafficking and other illicit activities have created a vicious cycle of violence in the region. The armed groups often clash with each other, as well as with security forces, leading to a volatile security situation. The violence in Manipur has had a profound impact on the lives of its residents, particularly in terms of human rights abuses. Reports of extra-judicial killings, enforced disappearances, and arbitrary detentions by security forces have raised serious concerns.

The Armed Forces (Special Powers) Act (AFSPA), which grants extensive powers to the armed forces, has been a subject of controversy, with allegations of its misuse and human rights violations. Efforts should also focus on balanced socioeconomic development of all communities, infrastructure improvement, and addressing the concerns of marginalized communities on a regular basis so as to ensure their emotional security.

Greater investments in education, healthcare, and employment opportunities can help alleviate grievances and provide a sense of hope for the future too. Additionally, a review of the AFSPA and its impact on human rights is crucial. Balancing security concerns with the protection of civil liberties is essential for building trust between the people and the authorities. And also to give a message to the world at large about the model way of governance in the largest democracy of the world.

Political parties should not visit Manipur just to score political points and criticize state and central government for political advantage. The visit of Rahul Gandhi and other leaders of the Congress to Manipur after 45 days is a welcome step, but they must address their concerns and suggestions confidentially to the government, rather than criticizing the government through press conferences and public speeches. The BJP on the other hand should stop blaming Nehru or the Congress for Manipurs problems.

Nehru left the world 60 years ago, the Congress has not been in power for the last 10 years. It is high time that the BJP takes responsibility and addresses the problem rather than blaming Nehru and the Congress. The Central and state governments must show the will to bring Manipur back to normalcy. If the opposition parties of the nation do not want to lag behind they should come out with full cooperation for all the desirable solutions that Manipur deserves.

PRAVESH JAIN The writer is Chairman and Managing Trustee, Paras Foundation. He can be reached at praveshjain@parasdyes.com
The predicament in which former Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro finds himself in after Brazils election judges banned him from running for public office for the next eight years is largely of his own making. Having patterned himself on his idol, former American President Donald Trump, and having wielded power with a similar casual disdain for institutions, Mr Bolsonaro has been held guilty of abusing his powers and of spouting immoral and appalling lies during last years election.

The decision was based on his decision last July to summon foreign ambassadors to his residence and tell them that Brazils electronic voting system was deeply flawed, and to thus spread politically motivated disinformation as one of the five judges who ruled against him put it. Accused of making his country appear to the world as a little banana republic, Mr. Bolsonaro will now be eligible for public office only in 2030, by when he would have turned 75. Another of the judges accused the former President of having told appalling lies and of having indulged in a deceitful monologue with a view to arouse a state of collective paranoia among voters. In the build-up to the election,

Mr. Bolsonaro had repeatedly said he would reject the result if he thought the vote was unfair; the harangue on what he termed faulty electronic voting machines and a flawed electoral process led, after he had lost the election, to his supporters attacking government buildings in a bid to overturn the result. Federal investigators have found considerable evidence to show that Mr. Bolsonaro and his supporters had drawn up elaborate plans to overthrow Mr.

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Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva, the man who won the election, through the intervention of the military. The ruling of the election court may well mark the end of the controversial Mr. Bolsonaros political career, at least for the foreseeable future, but it leaves important questions unanswered. While Mr. Lula won the election, the margin of victory was small. Thus while Mr. Lula won a little over 60 million votes, Mr. Bolsonaro had the support of 58 million Brazilians who endorsed his right-of-centre policies. This large constituency of Brazilians will need a leader, one who can match Mr. Bolsonaros charisma in translating their vision of how the country should be administered. While there are several contenders, including members of the former Presidents family, it is clear Mr. Bolsonaros preference will be for a person amenable to his instruction for it is clear that he has several challenges ahead, not the least of which are prosecutions for orchestrating the attacks on institutions in January, faking coronavirus certificates and an attempt to appropriate expensive jewellery gifted officially by Saudi Arabia.

Mr. Bolsonaro has reacted to the decision with characteristic bravado, comparing it to an attempt to assassinate him in 2018. He said that he had then been stabbed in the belly, while today I was stabbed in the back.
Chief minister Miss Mamata Banerjee will virtually address a public meeting for the three-tier panchayat elections at Dubrajpur in Birbhum. The panchayat polls will be held after five days and for the first time since coming to power the TMC is contesting a election without its strongman Anubrata Mondal, who is at present lodged in Tihar Jail in Delhi. Mondal was arrested by the CBI almost a year ago from his house in Nichupatti in Bolpur in connection with the cross border cattle smuggling case. In his absence, chief minister Miss Mamata Banerjee who is also the Trinamul chairperson has announced that she will look after the party in Birbhum district during her last visit here.

She has formed a core committee for running the organisation in Mondals absence. After she suffered an injury after her helicopter made an emergency landing while returning from North Bengal, Miss Banerjee is unable to visit Birbhum to address her party workers physically but tomorrow she will try to send a strong message to the TMC workers barely few days before the panchayat polls to boost their morale, sources said.

The party observer of Birbhum district and state minister Firhad Hakim will be physically present at the meeting in Dubrajpur tomorrow where the CM will address the meeting virtually. In the absence of heavyweight Anubrata Mondal, retaining all the seats in Birbhum district will be a challenge to the Trinamul Congress in the panchayat polls. In the 2018 panchayat elections, TMC has won most of the seats uncontested from Birbhum district. But the BJP has managed to win a seat in the 2021 assembly polls in Birbhum district. This time the Opposition parties have been able to file nomination papers in the absence of Anubrata Mondal.

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One person was killed and another severely injured in an explosion while setting up a bomb. The incident took place in Suripukur area of Shalipur village panchayat in Haroa, North 24 Parganas. According to local sources, the deceaseds name is Paritosh Mandal, who was a local leader of the Trinamool Congress.

His mutilated body was recovered from a pond in the area on Monday morning. Local people reported that Shalipur was shaken by the loud explosion early in the morning. With this incident, the death toll has reached 14 people in West Bengal in the last 24 days.

Upon receiving the information, the police reached the spot, recovered the body, and sent it for the post-mortem examination. According to police sources, the incident is currently under investigation. The family claims that Paritosh was murdered.

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According to local sources, Paritosh was a resident of Kuchemora in the Sonapukur-Shankarpur area of Haroa police station. Local residents claim that he died in the explosion while assembling the bomb.

On Sunday night, there was a sudden explosion while packing the bomb, resulting in Paritoshs hands being blown away. He died due to bomb splinters, and several splinters were found in different parts of his body. Neighbors claimed that four more people were injured in the blast.

No complaints have been lodged with the police regarding the deceased and injured persons in the bomb blast incident. Initial speculation suggests that the bomb was allegedly being made in preparation for the upcoming panchayat polls to spread unrest.

However, the deceaseds wife claims that her husband was a Trinamool worker, and opposition parties had been attempting to kill him for a long time. My husband did not pack bombs; he used to play music. Who dies in a bomb blast? The back of his head was hit and cracked, she said.

On Sunday night, a Trinamool MLA was accused of firing at a Congress candidate in Murshidabad. The ruling party denied the allegations. The Congress worker was shot in Tinpakuria, Samsherganj, and has been admitted to the hospital.

However, the ruling party denied the attack, and the MLA accused the Congress candidate of retaliating with fire. Around 8:30 pm on Sunday night, Anarul Haque, the Congress candidate for Zilla Parishad seat No. 4 in Murshidabad, was returning home after campaigning when Trinamool MLA Amirul Islam entered the area by car from the opposite direction.

Allegedly, the MLA fired at the Congress candidate without any provocation, narrowly missing the target. A Congress worker was shot and was subsequently rescued, first taken to a private nursing home in Dhulian, and later shifted to Jangipur Subdivision Hospital as his condition deteriorated.

According to hospital sources, the Congress workers condition is critical. Last night, Congress workers and supporters surrounded the Samsherganj police station demanding the MLAs arrest. A large police force was present at the scene.
The Kolkata Municipal Corporation has taken up comprehensive measures to combat the spread of Dengue and sought cooperation of people to check spread of the disease. The health department of Kolkata Municipal Corporation (KMC) has stopped the age old practice of fogging in Dengue prevention.

The initiative to stop fogging was taken by the deputy Mayor Atin Ghosh in 2019-19 and stressed upon source reduction by involving all concerned. Debashis Biswas, OSD and Chief Vector Control officer of KMC in an article published in an international journal called International Journal for Multidisciplinary Research has discussed at length the futility of fogging. However, in most of the states in the country fogging is still used to prevent mosquito borne diseases.

The KMC has prepared a year-long plan to combat spread of Dengue involving various state and central government departments. These departments are CPWD, Railways, PWD, state Irrigation and Waterways department, Sewerage and Drainage department, West Bengal Transport Corporation, Police, Army, Post and Telegraph among others. Teams comprising officials and employees of the above mentioned departments visit government establishments both run by the state government and central government and if mosquito larvae is found notices are given to the offices requesting them to take measures to destroy the mosquito breeding ground.

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The civic authorities have requested the authorities of institutional buildings to remove broken furniture from the roof tops and not to throw used plastic tea cups in the open as they are potential grounds for the breeding of mosquitoes. KMC teams are visiting every household and apartments to see whether garbage inside the campus is cleared regularly and whether the overhead tanks and underground reservoirs are properly covered. The KMC has served 3,000 notices on the house owners in case of individual houses and the committees managing the apartments where mosquito larvae was found. Fifty five cases have been registered against the errant house owners.

The Municipal Court can fine upto Rs 1 lakh on the errant house owners. Mr Biswas said public awareness is required to combat spread of the disease. He regretted that in many apartments, civic employees are not allowed to check whether the overhead water tank is properly covered or not. He hoped that all the Urban Local Bodies will stop fogging and go for destruction of larvae at source to combat spread of the disease.
In a tit-for-tat move, Trinamool Congress spokesman Kunal Ghosh has tweeted a picture of a Border Security Force (BSF) personnel holding an umbrella for a BJP MLA while the latter was addressing a rally for the July 8 panchayat elections in West Bengal.

While posting the picture showing the BSF jawan holding the umbrella for BJP Durgapur (West) MLA Lakshman Chandra Ghorui, the Trinamool spokesman posed a question for Leader of Opposition in Assembly Suvendu Adhikari whether it is the duty of a central armed forces jawan holding umbrella for a BJP legislators.

Ghoshs post is perceived to be a counter to a similar Twitter post made by Adhikari last week questioning the levels of morality of the police forces in the state. He had posted a video of a policeman in uniform holding an umbrella for a local Trinamool Congress while the latter was addressing a campaign rally for the forthcoming panchayat elections.

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Look at the video, a policeman is holding an umbrella when Pravat Chatterjee; a TMC Trade Union leader of the Kanksa Block Paschim Bardhaman district, is delivering a political speech on stage. This happens when the Model Code of Conduct is in force, and we expect the Asansol Durgapur Police Commissionerate & the rest of WB Police Force to conduct a free & fair Election!!! Adhikari said in his Twitter message.

Meanwhile, responding to the tweet, Lakshman Chandra Ghorui accused the ruling party of unnecessarily politicising the issue. The rain started while the meeting was one. The central forces personnel had held the umbrella for him and not for him. I was in front of him so it appeared as if he was holding the umbrella for me. Trinamool Congress has become politically bankrupt and hence they are raising such baseless issues, Ghorui said.
The State Election Commissioner, Rajiva Sinha, held a meeting with state chief secretary Harikrishna Dwivedi, state police DG Manoj Malaviya, and ADG on Sunday morning to discuss how the Central forces and state police would be used for the panchayat polls.

With six days left for the polls, the State Election Commission (SEC) has yet to make a final decision on the use of central forces in the panchayat polls. Therefore, the commission held another meeting with senior officials of the state government to address security issues. According to commission sources, this meeting primarily focused on determining where the state police will be deployed.

The issue of a shortage of central forces was also discussed, and there were discussions about bringing in police from other states. As per the Calcutta High Courts order, a total of 822 companies of security personnel are expected to be deployed for the states oneround panchayat polls. The Election Commission plans to deploy 22 companies in the first phase and 315 companies in the second phase.

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These forces have already begun entering the state. However, there is confusion regarding the remaining 485 companies of security forces, as neither the Commission nor the Union Home Ministry has made a final decision on their deployment. Based on the questions asked by the Central governments lawyer in the High Court, many speculate that the remaining 485 companies may not be available, resulting in only 337 companies being available for the Panchayat polls.

Meanwhile, an organisation of teachers and education workers has written to the Chief Justice of the Supreme Court, Dhananjaya Yeshwant Chandrachud, demanding the deployment of central forces. The letter includes a complaint against the State Election Commission and the Union Home Ministry, alleging that the SEC is not taking sufficient steps to deploy central forces in accordance with the orders of the Calcutta High Court and Supreme Court.

In the letter to the Chief Justice of India, the Secondary Teachers and Education Workers Association claimed that violence is occurring in almost every district of the state in connection with the Panchayat polls. They argued that the SEC is not implementing the courts order regarding the deployment of Central forces, which would create a lack of security during voting.

They appealed to the CJI seeking the intervention of the Supreme Court to ensure compliance with the courts orders for free and peaceful elections.
Jiyarul Molla, a Youth Trinamul Congress leader, was shot dead in Basanti, South 24-Parganas district. With this casualty, the total number of pre-poll deaths has risen to 12 since the polling dates for the forthcoming elections for the three-tier panchayat system in West Bengal were announced on 8 June. The maximum number of casualties has been reported from South 24-Parganas district, with four deaths.

Bhangar, within the district, has reported the highest number of casualties, with three deaths. Initial investigations have revealed that Mollas murder is a result of internal infighting within the ruling Trinamul Congress, which has been evident in the Canning and Basanti areas of South 24 Parganas district since the polling dates were announced.

Since Saturday evening, pockets of Fulmalancha area in Basanti have witnessed sporadic clashes between supporters of two factions of the ruling party. It is reported that when Molla was returning home late Saturday night, he was suddenly surrounded by four to five miscreants on motorcycles. He was shot from close range, and the assailants escaped from the spot. Local residents rushed Molla to Canning sub-division hospital, where he was pronounced dead.

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According to Trinamul Congress Canning (East) MLA Saokat Molla, Jiyarul was killed by four unknown assassins. It is not yet known who they were. But I demand that these assassins be identified and action taken against them, he said. Trinamul Congress MLA Shyamal Mondal from Basanti stated that the murder had no political links.

Meanwhile, around 10 people from both the Indian Secular Front (ISF) and Trinamul Congress were injured in a fight involving sticks and bricks at Krishnapur area of Chandrakona in West Midnapore. Five of them, stated to be critical, are undergoing treatment at Chandrakona Hospital.

The police force arrived at the scene to handle the situation. The Trinamul Congress alleged that the ISF attacked them without any provocation, and that the incident was fueled by the CPI-M. The ISF and CPI-M made countercharges against the ruling party
Are the other streams of engineering like mechanical engineering, civil, electronics and electrical getting relegated to measly existence due to Computer Science?

Well, thats what the trend seems to be if one goes by the choices made by engineering students based on how they are later placed. This year, out of the top 100 IIT rankers, 89 went to IIT Bombay and the preference of most of them was CS, a short form for Computer Science. A professor at IIT Delhi explains why this is happening increasingly. Unwillingly to get named a professor of the Applied Mechanics Department at the Indian Institute of Technology, Delhi said largely the motivation is the attractive combination of financial stability and job prospects.

Money makes the mare go. He added, Between a civil engineer or a mechanical engineer and a computer engineer whos doing an IT-related job, the salary differential is huge. Thats why CS and jobs in the IT industry look very lucrative to fresh graduates.

To delve deeper into the matter, we conducted interviews with civil and mechanical engineering alumni of IITs who have transitioned into the fields of CS and IT. These graduates shed light on the reason behind their career shift.

Sharib Tasneem, a 2021 civil engineering graduate from the prestigious Indian Institute of Technology, Guwahati,

currently working in the IT sector said, There are primarily two reasons behind my decision to switch from civil engineering to IT jobs. Firstly, the salary prospects in CS (computer science) jobs are significantly higher as compared to other branches like mechanical, electronic, and civil. Secondly, there are very few companies that recruit civil engineers. During our placement season, only one company, Larsen & Toubro, visited the civil department of IIT Guwahati. Out of the total 80 students in the 2017-2021 batch, only 20-30 pursued

careers in civil engineering.

He said There are numerous job opportunities in fields like data science and data analysis, which are not directly associated with computer science but fall under the realm of information technology. These roles dont require extensive expertise. They need basic programming skills, which are taught in the first year irrespective of the departmentbe it civil, mechanical, or electronic engineering.

Another M. Tech student Rishabh Mishra, from 2019-21 batch of the mechanical branch of the Indian Institute of Technology, Delhi (IITD) currently working with HCL Technologies said With fewer opportunities in core industries and non-core companies offering more lucrative salaries, I switched

from mechanical to computer science. The field of computer science presents better prospects for future research and technological advancements.

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Hours after Ajit Pawar and some other Nationalist Congress Party (NCP) leaders joined the Eknath Shinde-Devendra Fadnavis Maharashtra government, NCP working president and MP Supriya Sule on Sunday took a dig at the BJP saying that it welcomed her party leaders despite calling her party corrupt.

BJP is 247 in election moodBJP, which called the NCP a corrupt party, are now welcoming our leaders. How? I dont want to comment on who will be the candidates of BJP. I will concentrate on my work rather than peeking inside others lifeI am always with NCP and truth, I face these types of challenges every day. This one (Ajit Pawars revolt) is a new challenge for me,  said Supriya Sule while addressing a press conference. Hinting at central agency pressure on the NCP leaders, Sule said, We call them ICE (Income tax, CBI and ED). Most of the time they (National agencies) conduct inquiries of opposition leaders. I never blame those officers who are working there but it was happening from the other side, I call these things ICE.

According to Sule, Ajit Pawars thoughts were different to that of her and the remaining NCP leaders.

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Thoughts and hate are different things, NCP never had hate inside the party or any misunderstanding. Ajit Pawar had different thoughts and we have different ones. We respect our all MLAs. I always speak with party workers and leaders, I spoke with them yesterday also and tomorrow also I will speak with them (Party leaders and members), said the NCP MP.

However, she said that Ajit Pawar joining the Eknath Shinde-Devendra Fadnavis Maharashtra Government is painful but her relationship with him would remain the same.

My relationship with Ajit Pawar will not change, he will always remain my elder brother. We will rebuild the party, said NCP MP Supriya Sule.

Whatever happened is painful. Sharad Pawar treated everyone like a family and he is our senior leader, I dont think speaking after his statement will be correct, Sule added.

Sharad Pawar responded, We live in a democratic country where everyone has the right to speak for themselves and keep their points. Ajit Pawars move is his own decision and point of view.

Ajit Pawar took oath as Deputy Chief Minister. Eight other NCP leaders took oath as ministers.
The International Buddhist Confederation (IBC), under the aegis of the Ministry of Culture, Government of India, will celebrate Ashadha Purnima on July 3, as the Dharma Chakra Pravartana Divas at the National Museum, Janpath, New Delhi, stated Ministry of Culture in an official release.

It is the annual flagship event of the IBC and the second most sacred day for Buddhists after the Buddha Purnima or the Vaishakha Purnima. A video address by President Droupadi Murmu will be presented at the programme. The programme highlight will be the screening of the film on IBCs special project in Lumbini (Nepal)  India International Centre for Buddhist Culture and Heritage, said the press release.

Prime Minister Narendra Modi laid the foundation stone of the centre at Lumbini in Nepal last year on Buddh Purnima, it further added.

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The programme will include a Dhamma talk on the significance of Ashadha Purnima by His Holiness 12th Chamgon Kenting Tai Situpa and a Special Address by Minister of Culture and External Affairs Meenakashi Lekhi, it said.

Many other dignitaries and Patriarchs of Buddhist Sanghas, eminent Masters, Scholars, and diplomatic representatives based in New Delhi will be participating in the event, it stated.

In keeping with the historical legacy of India, the land of Buddhas enlightenment, his turning of the wheels of Dhamma, and Mahaparinirvana, IBC is hosting the Ashadha Purnima celebrations at the National Museum, Janpath, where Sakhyamunis Holy relic is enshrined, said the press release.

It was at Sarnath that Buddha gave his first sermon and set the wheel of dharma in motion. The auspicious day of Ashadha Purnima, which falls on the full moon day of the month of Ashadha as per the Indian lunar calendar, is also known as Esala Poya in Sri Lanka and Asanha Bucha in Thailand. The day marks Buddhas first teaching after attaining Enlightenment to the first five ascetic disciples (pancavargiya) on the full-moon day of Ashadha at Deer Park, Risipatana Mrigadaya in the present day Sarnath, near Varanasi, India, said the press release.

The Rainy Season retreat (Varsha Vassa) for the Monks and Nuns also starts with this day, lasting for three lunar months from July to October, during which they remain in a single place, generally in their temples dedicated to intensive meditation. The day is also observed as Guru Purnima by both Buddhists and Hindus as a day to mark reverence for their Gurus, stated the release.
India has asked countries like Canada, the United Kingdom and Australia not to give space to Khalistan elements as their radical extremist ideologies are not good for bilateral relationships, External Affairs Minister S Jaishankar said today.

We have requested our partner countries, like Canada, UK, Australia and the US, that they should not give space to these Khalistanis. These radical extremist ideologies arent good for us, them, or our ties. (We) will raise the issue of these posters, he said.

Jaishankars remarks came after the reports of posters being circulated in Canada informing pro-Khalistan residents of a rally. These posters have caused concerns in New Delhi as they threatened the Indian ambassador and consulate general in Toronto.

In March this year, Khalistan supporters protested outside the Indian Embassy in Canada. They raised pro-Khalistan slogans and allegedly assaulted Indian-origin journalists present on the spot.

Last month, a tableau parade was organised in Ontario celebrating the assassination of former Prime Minister Indira Gandhi, which drew a sharp reaction from New Delhi. Last month also, Jaishankar reacted to the rise of Khalistani activities in Canada.

While speaking at a town hall meeting at the India International Centre here in the national capital, the minister said that Ottawa was apparently driven by vote-bank politics and this has also impacted the ties between the two countries lately.

How Canada has dealt with the Khalistani issue is a longstanding issue for us, because very frankly, they seem to be driven by vote bank politics. Their responses have been constrained by what they regard as vote bank compulsions. We made it very clear that if there are activities which are permitted from Canada that impinge on our sovereignty, territorial integrity and our security, then we will have to respond, he said.

The Minister went on to say: It is something which is a continuing conversation with Canada, not always satisfactory, but something on which we have been very clear. And over the last few years, you can see that this has impacted our ties in many ways.
The State Crime Branch, Haryana, has busted an inter-state racket involved in duping individuals aspiring for government jobs and arrested five persons in this connection.

The racket targeted job seekers across multiple states, promising them positions in various government departments including the Food Corporation of India (FCI), Army, Indo Tibetan Border Police (ITBP),Border Security Force (BSF), Central Public Works Department (CPWD), among others.

The gang used to issue fake appointment letters, conduct bogus training programs and provide fabricated government department identity cards to job seekers.

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A Haryana Police spokesperson said that three residents of Bhiwani, Ravindra, Vikram, and Pradeep, had lodged a complaint with the district police. They had applied for the position of godown attendant in the FCI and were deceived into providing a security deposit in order to secure the job. The accused had obtained Rs 5.5 lakh rupees from each complainant, amounting to a total of Rs 16.5 lakh.

According to the complainant, the victims were issued fake appointment letters, identity cards and underwent training in Ferozepur, Punjab. They were made to work under the guise of training for a duration of three months, with promises of prompt job placement. No salary was, however, provided to the complainants during this period.

After several days passed without any job postings or salary disbursements, the victims reported the incident to the police and the State Crime Branch was entrusted with the responsibility of investigating the matter in February 2023. Of the five persons arrested in this case, two are from Uttar Pradesh, two from Delhi, and one from Haryana.

The police spokesperson said the primary masterminds behind the operation are Deepak Rathi, a resident of Muzaffarnagar, Uttar Pradesh, and Vishnu Chauhan, a resident of Katesara, Rohtak, Haryana.

The third accused Rahul, a resident of Sitapur in Uttar Pradeshs Noida, used to act as a broker and prepare counterfeit documents. The two other accused arrested by the SIT include Vimal Kumar, a resident of New Delhi and Mohammad Shoaib, a resident of Shastri Nagar, Delhi.

The spokesperson said the accused have a history of committing fraud by promising government jobs in multiple states including Bihar, Jharkhand, Uttar Pradesh, Haryana, and Punjab. Fake stamps, paid letters, and forged signatures were found stored in a pen drive and a computer recovered from the accused which were instrumental in convincing the victims they had secured a job.

The accused also had access to a link and an email ID associated with a website resembling the official portal of the Food Corporation of India. Through this platform, they would send counterfeit appointment letters to their victims, the spokesperson said.

The ADGP, State Crime Branch, OP Singh advised government sector job aspirants to be cautious and avoid paying anyone for job opportunities.
Heavy rainfall accompanied by thunderstorm activity is expected to hit at least 16 districts of Tamil Nadu, including Chennai, over the next two days. The Regional Meteorological Centre (RMC) has attributed this weather phenomenon to a cyclonic circulation prevailing over the Bay of Bengal. As a result, the maximum temperature in coastal districts of Tamil Nadu is anticipated to drop below normal levels.

The cyclonic circulation, located over the central parts of the South Bay of Bengal and adjoining Central Bay of Bengal, has shifted towards the central parts of the Southwest Bay of Bengal. This atmospheric disturbance is positioned between 4.5 km and 5.8 km above mean sea level. Additionally, there are light to moderate westerlies prevailing in the lower tropospheric levels of the region.

The RMC official noted, In light of these weather conditions, heavy rain is predicted, and a yellow warning has been issued for Chennai, Chengalpattu, Kancheepuram, Thiruvallur, Vellore, Ranipet, Tiruvannamalai, Tirupattur, Virudhunagar, Cuddalore, Tiruppur, Theni, Tenkasi, Viluppuram, Tirunelveli, Dindigul, and Kanyakumari districts of Tamil Nadu for the next two days.

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The weather department has issued an orange alert for three districtsThe Nilgiris, Coimbatore, and Thenipredicting heavy to very heavy rain along with thunderstorm activity for the next 48 hours. The remaining parts of the state are expected to receive light to moderate rainfall.

After experiencing intense heat in recent days, various districts of Tamil Nadu will now witness a decrease in maximum temperatures, especially along the coastal areas. In Chennai and neighboring regions, the maximum temperature is projected to be around 33 degrees Celsius, while the minimum temperature is expected to hover around 26 degrees Celsius for the next two days.

In light of the weather conditions, the central government has issued a warning to fishermen in Tamil Nadu, advising them not to venture into the sea until June 6. Squally winds with speeds ranging from 45 kmph to 55 kmph, gusting up to 65 kmph, are prevailing over the northern and southern coastal regions of Tamil Nadu, as well as the adjoining Comorin area and Gulf of Mannar.
The Supreme Court on Monday adjourned for July 14 pleas challenging the Tamil Nadu governments decision to construct 134 feet tall Pen monument in honour of ex-Chief Minister and Dravida Munnetra Kazhagam (DMK) supremo M Karunanidhi at the Marina Beach near the Muthamil Kalaignar Karunanidhi memorial.

A bench headed by Justice Sanjay Kishan Kaul posted the matter for hearing to next Friday. A number of petitions were filed against the Tamil Nadu governments decision to construct 134 feet tall Pen monument in honour of Karunanidhi.

One of the pleas filed by Madurai resident K K Ramesh has sought the top courts direction to the Tamil Nadu government and the Ministry of Environment to withdraw the decision as it could damage the ecosystem.

The plea alleged that while violating environmental laws, all departments of the state government gave clearance certificates for the proposed monument in haste.

Uncontrolled construction activities in these areas would have devastating effect on the natural water flow that may ultimately result in severe natural calamities, the plea has added.

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The plea sought direction to protect the coastal regions of all States from the raising sea-levels/erosion. Prohibit any construction work or alternative work or any development work in the coastal regions of all states of India, it sought.

It further sought to prohibit the burial of any mortal remains in all coastal areas of all States in India and plantation of suitable trees to protect the coastal regions of all States from the raising sea-level in the interest of nation.

The plea stated, The expert opinions suggest that the devastating floods faced in recent years in Tamil Nadu are the immediate result of uncontrolled construction activities on sea shores and unscrupulous trespass into the natural path of backwaters.

The monument, estimated to be built at a cost of Rs 80 crore, could further affect the coastline and will impact the fish population since Marina Beach is an area which has a high-accretion rate (accumulation of sand).

It has also sought directions to protect the coastal regions of all states from the rising sea-levels and a ban on any construction work there.

Earlier, some residents of the State had also approached the apex court and sought direction that Tamil Nadu government and Ministry of Environment be directed to cancel the decision to construct Pen statue inside the Marina beach and not damage the ecosystem, marine life of Marina beach.

The DMK had earlier defended the proposal to build the Pen Monument, saying it is the most befitting move to honour the literary genius who was also a political colossus.

Apart from being a politician, Karunanidhi was an accomplished writer and he wrote almost daily for the DMKs newspaper Murasoli.
In a heartwarming yet controversial video making rounds on social media, a woman took a bold step and proposed to her partner on bended knee at the revered Kedarnath temple in Uttarakhand. The couple, adorned in matching yellow attire, embarked on a pilgrimage to the temple, where the woman, accompanied by a cameraperson, handed a box containing an engagement ring to her partner. With a mixture of surprise and joy, the man accepted the proposal, and they embraced in a tender moment.

Proposing to someone requires careful planning and capturing those precious memories on camera to cherish for a lifetime. Its evident that the woman in the video spared no effort in orchestrating a memorable proposal.

However, not everyone was pleased with the video, as it sparked a wave of criticism among netizens. Many expressed their discontent over the presence of mobile phones within the temple premises, while others bemoaned the perceived influence of western culture on traditional Indian customs. Some even dismissed the proposal as a mere publicity stunt or an attention-seeking endeavor.

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https://twitter.com/RetardedHurt/status/1675055010126901248

Nevertheless, amidst the backlash, there were users who showered the couple with love and well wishes, emphasizing the importance of pursuing happiness and celebrating love. Do anything that makes you happy, commented one user, while another expressed that any act rooted in love is a positive thing.

Unfortunately, the identity of the couple remains unknown, adding an air of mystery to their enchanting proposal at the Kedarnath temple.
50-year-old Abhijit Beej Das, was arrested last week in connection with a scheme to swindle a business-to-business supply company based in India of millions of dollars, and using client funds for business and personal expenses, including the purchase of a $2.7 million home in Florida.

Abhijit is an Indian-American lawyer who once ran for a seat in the US House of Representatives and has been indicted by a federal jury in Boston for cheating clients of more than $5 million in escrow funds.

Das was indicted on 10 counts of wire fraud. He was on pretrial release for charges of federal Campaign Act violations and making false statements in 2021. Das was the principal manager of a boutique law and advisory firm called Troca Global Advisors with offices in Boston and New York, as per a statement released by Justice Department. At the beginning of 2020, Das started providing legal articulation and escrow services to two twin brothers and their logistical supply company in India that was harmonizing large cargoes of Personal Protective Equipment (PPE) during the pandemic.

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The indictment alleged that Das hindered more than $5 million in escrow funds from his clients accounts to other accounts and used the funds for personal expenditures. This comprised payments for his law firm, a vessel owned by one of his hotels, as well as $2.7 million for his Boca Raton home in Florida.

He allegedly influenced his clients to transfer funds to accounts he controlled in multi-step, layered transactions under the guise of legal advice about the risk of potential litigation and provided clients with fraudulent and forged account statements to conceal the scheme.

The charges of wire fraud each provide for a sentence of up to 20 years in prison, three years of supervised release, and a fine of $250,000, or twice the gross gain or loss, whichever is greater.
There is some good news for Punjabis, as Baltej Singh Dhillon, the first turbaned Sikh gentleman in the Royal Canadian Mounted Police (RCMP), has been made the Chair of WorkSafeBCs board of directors. Well, this makes him the first South Asian to hold the top post.

Dhillon was the first RCMP member to wear a turban while being in uniform. A recipient of Queen Elizabeth II Golden and Diamond Jubilee medals for community service he is widely known to be a committed police officer and has a reputed name.

Dhillon has been a member of the Board since 2017. He has been appointed for a three-year term beginning June 30 after an announcement by Minister of Labour, Harry Bains, last week.

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Harry Bains also said that Baltej is a veteran police officer and he brings with him expertise in law enforcement and years of experience as a director at WorkSafeBC.

Bains added he has committed to WorkSafeBCs role in investigating serious workplace incidents to prevent similar incidents from happening again. The WorkSafeBC is a provincial agency that is devoted to providing safety and healthy workplaces practising across British Columbia.

Dhillon superannuated from the police force in 2019 after a three-decade-long career. He was working in intelligence, protection services, special enforcement. He was also investigating the 1985 Air India bombing task force and the Pickton case.

He said, I am excited to begin working as chair with my fellow board members and WorkSafeBC staff to continue making progress in improving the workers compensation system to meet the needs of workers, employers and others throughout the province.

More about Dhillon

Born and brought up in Malaysia, Dhillon immigrated to British Columbia in 1983 when he was 16. Dhillon studied criminology and applied to the RCMP in 1988. Thats when he refused to abide by the dress code of the time, which banned turbans and required clean-shaven faces.

In March 1990, the Progressive Conservative government of Prime Minister Brian Mulroney announced changes to the RCMP dress code. This also included freedom to keep beards and wear turbans.
With the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) leader Captain Amarinder Singh ridiculing Punjab Chief Minister Bhagwant Manns statement that his government will recover the money paid to supreme court lawyers in connection with the detention of Uttar Pradesh gangster Mukhtar Ansari in Punjab, the latter has hit back, questioning the loyalty of the former CM.

Mann has announced to recover Rs 55 lakh spent on cozy stay of Ansari in state jail from then CM Captain Amarinder Singh and jail minister Sukhjinder Singh Randhawa. He said Amarinder and Randhawa will have to pay this money from their own pocket else their pensions and other benefits will be stopped to recover this money.

Reacting to this statement, the former CM, Captain Amarinder Singh asked Mann to learn the process of law and investigation before issuing such statements that only expose his ignorance about the process of governance.

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Captain Amarinder said he had remained the Chief Minister of the state for nine and a half years, while Mann has not completed one and a half years even and he should better first learn and gain experience before making such ignorant statements about the processes of governance.

He said Ansari was brought to Punjab and detained in Punjab under due process of law for the investigation. Where does the Chief Minister or for that matter the Jail Minister come into the picture, Amarinder asked Mann, while advising him to brush up his knowledge of legal and investigative processes before making such funny statements which will only end up in his (Mann) cutting a sorry figure in the public.

Hitting back to this, in a tweet the Punjab CM defended his move and questioned Amarinders loyalty, Captain Saheb I am protecting the money of the people of Punjab ..you are calling me ignorant ..Captain Saheb you were with Mughals during Mughal rule ..during British rule you were with British ..during Congress rule you was with Congress ..During Akalis rule you were with Akalis ..Now during BJP rule you are with BJP .. Few wise people have wrecked the ship of Punjab.., Mann said in a roughly translated tweet in Punjabi.

The Punjab CM has earlier today alleged both Captain Amarinder Singh and Randhawa extended largesse to notorious gangster for his comfortable stay in jails of Punjab.

Mann said for reasons best known to the previous regimes, this notorious criminal was kept in Ropar jail with full comfort. He said apart from ensuring comfortable stay, the state government ensured that this hardcore criminal does not face any sort of difficulty within the jail and escapes the legal action against him.

In April this year, Mann returned the file to make payment worth Rs 55 lakh from state exchequer to the senior advocate Dushyant Dave who represented the Punjab government in the Supreme Court in 2021 when the Uttar Pradesh government had sought Ansaris transfer to UP awaiting clearance from the Punjab government which had opposed the transfer.

The Aam Aadmi Party (AAP) state government had early this year marked a probe into the allegations related to Ansaris stay in Punjab which pointed out glaring lapses by the jail department in arranging the stay.The inquiry report alleged Ansari had connections with some state and national Congress leaders.

Ansari was in Ropar jail in connection with an extortion case from January 2019 to April 2021 during the tenure of the previous Congress government led by Captain Amarinder Singh. Congress leader Sukhjinder Singh Randhawa was the minister of jails during the time.
Musavat, an online Azerbaijani newspaper, recently carried a story alleging that Armenia was luring fighters from India to help it fight Azerbaijan. Such a cock-and-bull story could only have been inspired by Pakistans ISI.

Let us analyse what such stories intend to achieve and why they are being put out now. The article, (published on June 24) written by Elchin Khalidbayli, supposedly, a political expert with the Yeni Musavat Media Group, claims that Indians from poor provinces are being lured with money and sent to Armenia.

The report claims that Yerevan is creating armed mercenary groups with people brought to Armenia from various countries and India allegedly being one of those helping in the creation of armed mercenary groups.

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The aim is to show that Armenia is supporting terrorist tactics against Azerbaijan and to allege that India is behind the supply of manpower.

There is no doubt that external actors are attempting to intervene in the processes in the South Caucasus, except that it is not India. Turkey and Pakistan are the players who have supported Azerbaijan. The only conclusion one can draw is that Pakistan is trying to prove that India is a terrorist state to try and wriggle out of the discomfort of having FATF and other international organisations brand them as global sponsors of terrorism.

Indias military supplies to Armenia obviously make a difference and the other side is feeling the pinch, which is why the article claims that these interventions are being conducted unequivocally only through Armenia.

Propoganda is the need of the hour and therefore, it is argued that the Armenian Army has lost its capability to fight and has formed small guerrilla units with mercenary troops. The logic used here is that Armenians dont have the will to fight and are unwilling to be recruited into the Army. This of course does not mean that the Armenian Army is incapable of fighting. It is technically correct that the Armenian Parliament adopted a law creating a legal basis for conscription of women into active military service.

Military service in Armenia is compulsory for male citizens of the republic aged 18 to 27 for a period of two years. At present, women serve in the Armenian military only on a contract basis and accounted for 9.1 per cent of contract service members in 2019.

Armenia has undertaken to reform its military after the defeat in 2020 against Azerbaijan. An ambitious defence modernisation plan proposed by Prime Minister Nikol Pashinyan in 2021 has not taken off because of domestic political squabbles. The lack of progress can be attributed in part to the regular shakeups at the top of Armenias defence establishment. Since then, both the Minister of Defence and Chief of the General Staff have been replaced three times.

The most dramatic moment was in February 2021, when the top army brass, led by the then-Chief of the General Staff Onik Gasapryan, joined the Oppositions demand for Pashinyans resignation. This conflict was resolved by the dismissal of Gasparyan. Pashinyan then resigned and called a snap election, which his party won.

Steps were taken to rebuild the army on the Russian model, though enthusiasm for this has since waned given Russias poor performance in Ukraine and Russias rejection of requests to help its military ally Armenia amid incursions by Azerbaijan in fall 2022. Russia had earlier been a regular supplier of arms and weapons to Armenia.

Prime Minister Pashinyan publicly complained (September 29, 2022) about Armenias failure to receive armaments from allies even after they were paid for. Though he did not name a specific state, it was clear he was referring to Russia, which is the largest supplier of weapons to the Armenian Army.

The Stockholm International Peace Research Institute (SIPRI) reports that 94 per cent of the weapons acquired by Armenia from 2015 to 2019 were produced in Russia.

As seen above, the Pashinyan government is trying to use the most diverse options to solve the problem of military modernisation. One of them is to import weapons and equipment from India.

Recently, the Indian Ambassador emphasised that her country was determined to provide all kinds of military and political support to Armenia. The Indian Ambassador also emphasised that Pakistans strategic alliance with Azerbaijan is dangerous for her country. Therefore, she claimed that India provides active military and political support to Armenia.

The facts as explained by the Ambassador is no open secret and is known to all.

It is important to understand what India has supplied to Armenia as part of the $249 million deal. This includes the indigenously manufactured Pinaka MLRS, Swathi radars and 155 truck mounted artillery guns.

One wonders then how France comes into the picture? That is precisely what Khalidbayli does and claims, without proof that India has transferred weapons jointly produced with French military companies to Armenia. While Khalidbayil can be excused for not having done proper research for his article, his obvious bias, being driven by Pakistan becomes clear with his absurd allegation that India has deployed mercenaries from India to Armenia, a process he claims has intensified recently.

The further allegation is made that India and Armenia have signed a secret agreement whereby Indian citizens from poor provinces are being lured with money to Armenia. There can be only one rational reason for such an absurd and unfounded allegation. Pakistan through its friend Azerbaijan wants to brand India as a sponsor of terrorism. Therefore, it is reported that Indian mercenaries are being trained in India, and then sent to Armenia.

Officially, there are only around 3,000 Indians in Armenia, settled mostly in the capital Yeravan. There have been no reports of Indian citizens undergoing military training in Armenia in accordance with the local conditions as claimed by Musavat. The only thing stated to support this allegation is that mercenaries sent from India are registered as labour force in Armenia. It is therefore, concluded that Armenia is trying to hide mercenary terrorists brought from India under the name of labour force.

How on earth is it possible to convince such writers that facts are facts, and one cannot obfuscate the issue by mixing them up. What else does one make of the assertion that Indians brought in manpower to take part in military exercises? Is the reference here to trainers? This is unlikely and it is more likely that manpower was made available to explain the functioning of Indian defence equipment to the Armenian military.

To stretch the argument to asset that Indians supposedly involved in construction, received military training to become terrorists is a fairy tale woven out of nowhere.

According to the article, Armenians dont want to do military service and therefore, the government is training Indians to act as mercenaries.

Recently, it was reported that two Indian citizens were injured by gunfire in the border regions. The official Armenian statement, posted on the Telegram messenger app by the Defence Ministry (14 June) said that two Indian nationals were involved in construction work at a metallurgical plant in Yeraskh, which is close to the border with Azerbaijans Nakhchivan exclave.

Therefore, there is no question of Yerevan trying to cover up this information. On the contrary, the Armenian Prime Minister had earlier said that Pakistan had a role to play in the war raging across the Nagorno- Karabakh region.

In an exclusive conversation with an Indian news channel, he said: We have information that armed fighters from Pakistan are participating in the war raging in the Karabakh region. We can see that Turkey is also involved in the war, mercenaries are being brought to the conflict zone by Ankara. It is a chaotic, confusing situation that we are seeing in Karabakh.

Last year, Pashinyan had also claimed that Pakistani Special Forces had fought alongside the Azerbaijani Army in the Nagorno-Karabakh region, in an interview with Russian news agency Rossiya Segodnya (October 15, 2022).

In October 2020, Pakistans Prime Minister Imran Khan had boasted of having sent troops to Nagarno-Karabakh to fight alongside the Turkish military and the Azerbaijan Army. Subsequent reports indicated that Pakistani terrorists had also flocked to Azerbaijan to fight against Armenia.

All these provide clear evidence of Pakistani and Turkish forces fighting alongside Azerbaijani forces.

Pakistan needs to do its homework well. For a country that has nurtured and developed terrorist entities for several decades now, their efforts to blame India for terrorism sound amateurish. That India is helping Armenia in bolstering its defence machinery has more to do with regional geo-politics and business sense.

After all, if Turkey can sell its UAVs to Azerbaijan, what stops India from selling its home made Rustom II drones to Armenia. This is the primary narrative emerging from the conflict between Armenia and Azerbaijan.

For Pakistan and Azerbaijan to make false claims about India deserves a riposte. The time and place will be that of Indias choosing.
The Nationalist Congress Party (NCP) supremo Sharad Pawar on Monday addressed a public meeting in Karad and said that people of Maharasthra will not succumb to undemocratic forces.

He also pointed out that a rift was being created among people in the State and the country by some groups in the name of caste and religion.

Addressing a public meeting at the Yashwant Chavan Samadhi in Karad, the NCP chief said, We were serving Maharashtra under Uddhav Thackeray but our government was toppled by some people. The same happened in some other parts of the country too in Delhi, Punjab and West Bengal where the governments are working democratically, are being attacked.

Without naming his nephew Ajit Pawar who joined the Eknath Shinde-led government with eight other MLAs, the NCP chief further said the people of Maharashtra will not succumb to undemocratic forces.

Today, in Maharashtra and the country, a rift is being created in the society in the name of caste and religion by some groups. We tried to stand against the BJP, but unfortunately, some of us went fell prey to it. With the support of the public, we will be strengthened again. Nevertheless, the people of Maharashtra will not succumb to these undemocratic forces. Maharashtra again will go on the path of progress, Sharad Pawar said.

Before his public address, Pawar visited the Preeti-Sangam memorial of his political mentor and the first chief minister of Maharashtra Yashwantrao Chavan and paid floral tribute to him.

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Y B Chavan always believed that common citizens should be included in the democratic process of this country. He created a new team and took a young team with him. He ensured that this team leads to the development of the country. Though he is not with us, his thoughts are with us, the NCP chief said.

Meanwhile, NCPs Maharashtra president Jayant Patil said, We have sent a petition to the Assembly speaker last night. We requested him to hear us. Our partys strength in the Assembly is 53, of which 9 have defected, the rest all are with us. We will give them a fair chance to come back but will take action against those who do not come back.

The Nationalist Congress Party experienced an internal division as senior leader Ajit Pawar joined the BJP-led National Democratic Alliance (NDA) along with a group of MLAs.

Ajit Pawar took oath as Maharashtra Deputy Chief Minister with eight other party legislators also joining the National Democratic Alliance government in the State.

On Sunday Ajit Pawar claimed that all MLAs are with him and they have joined the Shiv Sena-BJP government as a party.

We have all the numbers. All MLAs are with me. We are here as a party. We have informed all seniors also. The majority is given importance in a democracy. Our party is 24 years old and young leadership should come forward, Ajit Pawar said after taking oath as Deputy Chief Minister of Maharashtra.
Ukraine mourns the tragic loss of esteemed novelist Victoria Amelina, who passed away in a heartbreaking incident. Victorias life was cut short due to injuries she sustained during a devastating missile attack on a restaurant in Kramatorsk on June 27th, 2023, an act of aggression perpetrated by Russian forces.

This unfortunate event serves as a stark reminder of the ongoing assaults on innocent civilians in Ukraine, leading to countless displaced individuals within the country and across borders. The conflict has already uprooted more than 8 million refugees, further contributing to the staggering global number of 31.7 million refugees and asylum seekers.

On that fateful day, Victoria Amelina, alongside a group of Colombian writers and journalists, was in Kramatorsk, documenting Russian war crimes as part of the human rights initiative Truth Hounds. While enjoying a meal at the Ria Lounge restaurant, the establishment was targeted by Russian missiles.

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Victoria sustained severe injuries and despite the valiant efforts of medical professionals in Kramatorsk and Dnipro, her wounds proved fatal and incompatible with life. Throughout her final days, she was surrounded by loved ones and close friends.

Since the start of Russias full-scale invasion of Ukraine, Victoria Amelina had dedicated herself beyond the realm of literature. In 2022, she joined the human rights organization Truth Hounds, actively documenting Russian war crimes in various regions of Ukraine, including Kapytolivka near Izyum, where she discovered the diary of Volodymyr Vakulenko, a Ukrainian writer who fell victim to the Russians.

Victorias literary contributions began in 2014 with her debut novel, The November Syndrom or Homo Compatiens, which earned a place in the top 10 prose books list according to LitAktsent, a Ukrainian literature website. The following year, the book was republished and became a finalist for the Valeriy Shevchuk Prize.

Her impactful writing transcended borders, with translations of Victoria Amelinas texts available in Polish, Czech, German, Dutch, and English. More recently, Doms Dream Kingdom was translated into Spanish, expanding her international reach.

Born on January 1st, 1986, in Lviv, Victoria Amelina spent part of her early life in Canada with her father before ultimately choosing to return to Ukraine. In 2007, she achieved academic excellence, graduating with a masters degree in computer technology with honors from Lviv Polytechnic University.
Severe thunderstorms are possible in the Montreal region through midnight. More showers and storms are forecast on Sunday as the muggy weather persists, however the storms should be lower in coverage and intensity.
Palestinian Prime Minister Mohammed Ishtaye on Monday accused the Israeli occupation army of committing what he termed as "war crimes" against the Palestinians in the northern West Bank city of Jenin.

An official statement said that Ishtaye condemned the Israeli military offensive on the city and its refugee camp on Monday, which has claimed the lives of at least eight Palestinians and injured 100 others.

Ishtaye made the remarks during a weekly meeting of the Palestinian Authority cabinet held in the West Bank city of Ramallah, according to the statement.

"Israel is attempting to wipe out the Jenin refugee camp," Ishtaye told the meeting, adding that "the Palestinian people will not surrender to this aggression, but they will resist it until the demise of the criminal occupation."

Ishtaye called for an immediate stop of the aggression in Jenin and demanded that Israel be punished.

An Israeli army bulldozer drives through Jenin in the occupied West Bank during a military operation on July 3, 2023. AFP



Palestinian eyewitnesses and security sources said that Israeli army forces, backed by armored jeeps and bulldozers, stormed the city of Jenin and launched more than 10 airstrikes from manned drones and helicopters at several buildings in the area.

The Palestinian Ministry of Health said in a press statement that eight Palestinians were killed, including three who were killed in the airstrikes, and 100 others were injured, 10 of whom were in critical conditions.

Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas has called for an urgent meeting of the Palestinian leadership to discuss the ongoing Israeli military assault on Jenin and its refugee camp, the official Palestinian news agency WAFA reported.

Since January, 24 people, most of them Israelis, have been killed in a series of attacks carried out by Palestinians, and more than 180 Palestinians, including children and women, were killed by Israeli soldiers and settlers, according to official figures.

In Gaza, Palestinian militant groups, mainly Hamas and Islamic Jihad, warned on Monday that Israel's continued military offensive against Jenin and its refugee camp would lead to a wider escalation of tension.

"We are following up on the barbaric aggression against Jenin," the chamber of joint military operations, which comprises nine factions in the Gaza Strip, said in a statement.

The militant groups vowed they would respond to the raid in an "appropriate way and place."

"The armed resistance in all arenas will not allow the enemy to encroach on our people in Jenin," said the statement.

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Saint-Laurent, CA (H4T1V6)

Today

Showers and thunderstorms. High 72F. Winds SSE at 10 to 15 mph. Chance of rain 100%. Locally heavy rainfall possible..

Tonight

Showers and thundershowers early, then mainly cloudy after midnight with light rain possible. Low 64F. Winds SSW at 5 to 10 mph. Chance of rain 80%.
A year of fighting between Israel and the Palestinians just escalated. Is this an uprising?

Israels latest large-scale military raid into the Jenin refugee camp in the occupied West Bank had undeniable similarities with the second Palestinian uprising of the early 2000s
A civil rights legal group is challenging legacy admissions at Harvard University, saying the practice discriminates against students of color by giving an unfair boost to the mostly white children of alumni
Police in Baltimore say two people were killed and 28 wounded in a mass shooting, including three people who are in critical condition
Witnesses report seeing globs of asphalt binder that spilled into Montana's Yellowstone River during a bridge collapse and train derailment on islands and the riverbanks a week after the spill
Kuwait reinvited Iran on Monday to talks on their sea borders after Tehran said it was ready to start drilling in a disputed gas field in the resource-rich Gulf.

Kuwait insisted it held "exclusive rights" to the maritime field along with Saudi Arabia, after the neighbouring countries agreed to jointly develop it last year.

The field, known as Arash in Iran and Dorra in Kuwait and Saudi Arabia, is also claimed by Tehran in a dispute which dates back several decades.

"The State of Kuwait and the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia... alone have exclusive rights to the natural wealth in the Al-Dorra field," a Kuwaiti foreign ministry statement said.

"The State of Kuwait renews its invitation to the Iranian side to start negotiations on the demarcation of the maritime borders," it added.

Last year, Kuwait and Saudi Arabia signed an agreement to develop the field, despite objections from Tehran which branded the deal as "illegal".

Mohsen Khojsteh Mehr, managing director of the National Iranian Oil Company, said last week that "there is full preparation to start drilling in the joint Arash oil field".

"Considerable resources have been allocated to the board of directors of the National Iranian Oil Company for the implementation of the development plan for this field," he said in remarks carried by Iranian state media.

His comments came as Saudi Arabia and Tehran boost cooperation after a shock decision to resume ties, announced in March, ended seven years of enmity between the major Gulf powers.

Kuwait's oil minister, Saad Al-Barrak, said he was "surprised" by the Iranian plans which he claimed "contravene the basic principles of international relations".

"We categorically and totally reject Iran's planned activities around the premises of the Dorra offshore gas field," Barrak added, according to official news agency KUNA.

The row over the Dorra field stretches back to the 1960s, when Iran and Kuwait each awarded an offshore concession, one to the Anglo-Iranian Oil Company, the forerunner to BP, and one to Royal Dutch Shell.

The two concessions overlapped in the northern part of the field, whose recoverable reserves are estimated at some 220 billion cubic metres (seven trillion cubic feet).

Iran and Kuwait have held unsuccessful talks for many years over their disputed maritime border area, which is rich in natural gas.

Saudi Arabia is also a part of the dispute since it shares with Kuwait maritime gas and oil resources in the area.

Iranian drilling of the field in 2001 spurred Kuwait and Saudi Arabia to agree on a maritime border deal which stipulated that they jointly develop the offshore zone.

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Thousands of hotel workers in Southern California are on strike, demanding better pay and benefits

Thousands of hotel workers in Southern California walked off the job Sunday, demanding higher pay and better benefits in what the union is calling the largest strike in its history
FILE - A police officer keeps watch in Westminster, in London, on March 28, 2012. New and expanded powers for British police took effect on Sunday, July 2, 2023, including measures targeting activists who stop traffic and major building works with protests. Authorities have repeatedly condemned environmental protest groups, including Just Stop Oil and Extinction Rebellion, which have sought to raise awareness about the urgency of climate change by staging multiple high-profile protests at the busiest highways and roads. Their protests in recent years often caused serious disruption for motorists.
Bill Gouveia is a Sun Chronicle columnist and longtime Norton official. Reach him at billsinsidelook@gmail.com and follow him on Twitter, @Billinsidelook .
In Their Opinion: Let's now focus on income and legacy
The Palestinian leadership decided on Monday to suspend all contacts and meetings with the Israeli side and remain opposed to any security coordination.

Related Palestinian PM strongly condemns Israeli deadly raid on West Bank city of Jenin

This came in a statement issued following the emergency meeting of the Palestinian leadership. The President of the State of Palestine, Mahmoud Abbas, headed the meeting, which was held at the presidential headquarters in Ramallah to discuss the ongoing Israeli aggression against the city of Jenin and its camp.

Eight Palestinians have so far been killed, and 70 were injured -- many of them critically -- in the ongoing large-scale Israeli air and land assault on Jenin.

Israeli occupation army launched a major assault on Jenin since dawn today, starting with airstrikes before dozens of military vehicles and several hundred soldiers raided the city, concentrating on its refugee camp.

Abbas called on the international community to provide urgent international protection for the Palestinian people, impose sanctions on Israel, and condemn the ongoing terrorist aggression against Jenin and its refugee camp, WAFA news agency reported.

According to the statement read by the official spokesman for the presidency, Nabil Abu Rudeineh, the heads of the Palestinian political factions are invited to an emergency meeting to discuss and agree on a comprehensive national vision and unite the ranks to confront Israeli aggression.

The leadership reaffirmed the right of the Palestinian people to defend themselves against aggression, stressing that the Palestinian Authority's (PA) mission is to protect the people and use all its resources to achieve that goal while adhering to international legitimacy and international law.

Abu Rudeineh said that in light of the Israeli lack of commitment to the Aqaba and Sharm el-Sheikh understandings, the leadership declares that these understandings are null and void.

Abbas also decided to immediately go to the UN Security Council to implement Resolution 2334 and the resolution on international protection for the Palestinian people. He will also call on the council to halt unilateral Israeli measures, impose sanctions on Israel, and condemn the ongoing terrorist aggression against Jenin and its refugee camp, WAFA news agency reported.

According to the statement published by WAFA, these are the resolutions adopted by the Palestinian leadership following its emergency meeting:

1. To cease all contact with the Israeli side.

3. To maintain the cessation of security coordination.

4. To maintain the activities of the popular committees in defending cities, villages and camps. All Palestinian departments are to uphold their role in protecting the Palestinian people.

5. Adhering to the Palestinian national constants and the Palestine Liberation Organization as the sole and legitimate representative of the Palestinian people. In addition, the Palestinian leadership should continue to seek full membership status of the State of Palestine in the United Nations and secure more international recognition.

6. To call on the International Criminal Court to expedite the proceedings on referred cases.

7. To support Palestinian families in lodging cases before the International Criminal Court (ICC) against the Israeli occupation forces for the massacres and killings they carried out against innocent civilians.

8. To demand the revocation of Israel's membership in the United Nations due to its failure to implement Resolutions 181 and 194.

9. To lodge cases against the occupying state for the committed crimes for which it bears responsibility throughout its occupation.

10. To file cases against Israel for the massacres it committed, the destruction of villages and the displacement of the Palestinian people during the Nakba period.

11. To launch an immediate call for the ongoing international commission of inquiry in the Human Rights Council to investigate and refer its findings, regarding the responsibility of the occupation for these massacres and acts of terrorism, to the International Criminal Court and the UN Security Council.

12. To resume accession to the remaining UN conventions and international organizations.

13. To submit cases against the US and Britain because of the Balfour Declaration and demand recognition, apology and compensation.

14. To limit the relationship with the US administration.

15. To act on the Arab, Islamic and international levels to support the Palestinian stance.

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Crowds gathered at town halls across France Monday to show solidarity with local governments targeted in six nights of violence touched off by the fatal police shooting of a 17-year-old in suburban Paris.

The unrest, which appeared to be easing on Sunday night, was driven by a mainly teenage backlash in the suburbs and urban housing projects against a French state that many young people with immigrant roots say routinely discriminates against them.

In all, 99 town halls have been attacked in the violence, the Interior Ministry said, including a weekend attempt to ram the home of one mayor with an explosives-laden car.

There has been little in the way of organized protests beyond a march last week for Nahel, the 17-year-old of Algerian descent who was killed on Tuesday in the Paris suburb of Nanterre.

Instead, the anger has manifested in young people targeting police, with both sides using increasingly aggressive tactics.

The average age of the 3,354 people arrested over the past week was 17, the interior minister said. But the problem of discrimination strikes all ages, according to Ahmed Djamai, a 58-year-old born in Nanterre who attended Monday's solidarity gathering at the town hall.

Djamai said police stopped him not long ago and demanded a residence permit, even though he neither has nor needs one as a French citizen. He said the problem won't go away even as the violence subsides.

Our second, third and fourth-generation children face the same problem when they go out to get a job, when they go to prestigious universities, he said. "Theyre not accepted. So even now, the problem is social, but its also one of identity. It goes much deeper than that.

French President Emmanuel Macron was meeting Tuesday with mayors of 220 towns from across the country.

Across France, 34 buildings, many of them linked to the government, were attacked from Sunday into Monday, along with 297 vehicles.

Macron last week blamed social media for the spread of the unrest and called on parents to take responsibility for their teenagers.

Justice Minister Eric Dupond-Moretti told France Inter radio that parents who abdicated that responsibility, either through disinterest or deliberately, would be prosecuted.

The anger has descended into attacks against symbols of the state, widespread arson and nighttime looting. About 45,000 officers were deployed nationwide overnight.

We know all too well that this violence penalizes first and foremost the children, the people and the families of our neighborhoods and all of the residents of our city, said Nanterre Mayor Patrick Jarry.

We want justice to be done for Nahel and for the appeal by the family and notably by his grandmother for an end to the violence and destruction to be heard and respected.

A car packed with explosives struck the home of the mayor of the Paris suburb of LHay-les-Roses over the weekend, an unusually personal attack that authorities said would be prosecuted as an attempted homicide.

The attack prompted an outpouring of support for local governments in many towns where the city hall is often literally central to public life.

LHay-les-Roses Mayor Vincent Jeanbrun said his wife and one of his children were injured and criticized the government for doing too little, too late, and said blaming social media or parents was papering over a bigger problem.

The base ingredients are still there. For several years now, all summer long, explosives go off that keep people from sleeping, that make them crazy, he told BFM television on Monday. We are powerless summer after summer.

In all, according to the Interior Ministry, there were 157 arrests overnight out of a total of 3,354 since last Tuesday, and two law enforcement stations were attacked, among other damage.

The interior minister said children as young as 12 or 13 had been detained for attacking law enforcement and setting fires.

In the Paris suburb of Clichy-sous-Bois, where a fire also struck the town hall, residents over the weekend said anger had simmered for years and many said the government had done little to help them.

Young people are afraid to die by the hands of police. They are hopeless. They are bored and they need something to distract them so they don't hang out in the streets, said Samba Seck, 39.

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Job Title: Finance Intern (No Experience Job Vacancies)

Organisation: Uganda Christian University (UCU)

Duty Station: Mukono, Uganda

About US:

Uganda Christian University (UCU) is an authentic Christian institution established by the Church of Uganda in 1997 in response to a call for quality university education with a Christian perspective. Uganda Christian University replaced the historic Bishop Tucker Theological College which trained clergy and educators during its 84-year history from 1913-1997. The local chief, Hamu Mukasa, granted land for the college to operate in Mukono.

Key Duties and Responsibilities:

Assist in the Clearance of students for registration, exams and graduation

Assist in Posting payments into the ledger

Assist in Posting of petty cash

Preparing of weekly cash flow report

Assist in following up and filing accountabilities for all funds advanced to University Staff for official work

Perform any other official duties as may be assigned by the Supervisor









Qualifications, Skills and Experience:

The applicant must hold a Bachelors degree in Business Administration (Accounting and Finance) or Bachelor of Science in Accounting and Finance, at least 2:1 from Uganda Christian University.

Must have knowledge of working in a computerized environment i.e, use of Ms excel, Ms Word, Power point and internet

Must have good interpersonal skills especially when dealing with students, staff and visitors

Must be a person of high integrity with excellent working ethic

Must be a committed and practicing Christian

How to Apply:

All candidates should send;

Two (2) copies of an application letter together with an updated Curriculum Vitae and three references (Academic, Pastoral & Leadership)

Two (2) copies of Certified academic certificates and transcripts from a recognized institution of higher learning

Please Note: Applications sent online should have all the attachments as ONE PDF document otherwise they will not be considered.

Send to:

The Director, Human Resource & Administration,

Uganda Christian University,

Pilkington Building

P.O. Box 4, Mukono. Uganda

OR

Email to jobs@ucu.ac.ug

All the attachments should be in ONE PDF document.

Deadline: 14th July 2023 by 5:00 p.m

NB: Only shortlisted candidates will be contacted.

For more of the latest jobs, please visit https://www.theugandanjobline.com or find us on our facebook page https://www.facebook.com/UgandanJobline
It is a hot and dry day at the huge campus of IIT Gandhinagar in Gujarat. The temperature is so high that it is becoming difficult to walk from one block to another. In the hot weather, I come across a group of students who are unperturbed by the heat and are judiciously working inside an AC hall. Their aim is to invent something useful. All of them are young inventors from different IITs, NITs and BITs from across the country.

They are here for a six-week Invention Factory summer programme run by the Maker Bhavan Foundation to foster creative engineering skills among Indias extraordinary STEM students. The broader aim of the students is to get a first-hand feel of inventing something useful, develop a prototype and then file for a provisional patent in India as well as the US. Through Invention Factorys earlier editions, 87 students from 15 IITs have filed 44 patent disclosures in India and the US.

The students are full of enthusiasm. Take the case of Priya Sharma and Prabhnoor Singh, both third year mechanical engineering students from IIT Jammu. After doing an analysis, they found that majority of two-wheeler riders across the world have severe injuries in the neck despite wearing helmets. This, in turn, affects their spinal cord and back. We are trying to invent a device that can fit with the helmet and act as a cushioning around their neck in order to prevent neck injuries for two-wheeler riders during road accidents. We are trying to invent a product that will act as a cushioning around a rider's neck to help in reducing the impact during accidents, Sharma told THE WEEK.

Similarly, Anirvan Krishna, a student of Department of Electronics Engineering at IIT Kharagpur, and Pratham Vishwakarma, who is pursuing mechanical engineering from IIT Kharagpur, want to help senior citizens with their invention and are working on inventing an assistive device which can help monitor the vitals of senior citizens and render them physical support during emergencies. We have done thorough research and found that most of the senior citizens above 70 years of age fall in the toilet. It is not due to a fall but when they go for urinating their blood pressure drops and due to this they feel dizzy and tend to fall in the toilet. A drop in their blood pressure leads to weakness and ailments. We feel that our device can help in alerting them in case there is a possibility of a fall, said Krishna.

I also come across the team comprising Trishul from IIT Madras and Priyam Bhavsar from IIT Guwahati. Both found that eating food on the go is a challenge for many especially those who are travelling and do not have proper seating facility. Hence both of them are aiming to develop a storage bag which can be converted into a flat surface so that people can eat on the go without having to search for a proper table while travelling.

Ishika Raj from IIT Gandhinagar and Madhvi Dubey from IIT Kharagpur were perturbed by the issues faced by lactating mothers in breastfeeding a child. This is especially for working mothers who cannot remain with their newborn children for a long time. Many of the working places do not have a fridge. So, we are thinking that there should be a device which can be attached to the bra and also can act as a storage device for milk, said Dubey.

Kunj Shah from NIT Surat and Manush Patel from NIT Trichy wanted to solve the issues relating to brick masons and their struggle while layering the bricks. They felt that many of the masons have back problems as they have to bend to lay bricks. This team's aim is to develop a machine that can do the layering work so that the masons' work is made more efficient and easy.

Arshita Mishra from NIT Rourkela and Jyothiraditya from IIT Kharagpur were deeply concerned with the problem of bed sores with ill patients who have to lie down on the bed for a longer duration. We think that it is better to prevent than to cure and are looking at a device that can help in the detection of bed sores even before they form, Mishra told THE WEEK.

Interestingly, the Invention Factory programme originated in the US, and Professors Alan Wolf and Eric Lima, the founders of the Invention Factory programme in the US, act as mentors, in addition to other academic experts. The journey began in 2013 when Prof Wolf was an acting dean of the School of Engineering at Cooper Union in the United States. One of the alumnus of the engineering college gifted $100,000. It was a discretionary gift and being the dean, I was told that I could spend it on anything but it had to do with innovation. Then I called Prof Eric Lima and decided to figure out a way to spend this gift. In a couple of hours we created the programme almost as it is done today. The person who gave us this gift was himself a very creative person. He was thrilled that the students could have the opportunity to invent things and own them themselves, Wolf told THE WEEK.

Wolf further says that after the end of their six-week programme, students can file a provisional patent. It is not a full patent but is a one-year protection of their invention. During this one year, they can decide whether they want to pursue a full patent or not. A full patent is expensive and time-consuming. A full patent allows you to sue people who infringe on you. On the other hand, the provisional patent helps you to show your invention to companies and investors and just because you have filed the patent, it is very hard for them to steal it from you. Only the full patent allows you to protect your invention completely. Most of these provisional patents do not do anything but at the end of the six weeks, I hear from students that they are proud of their work and they could do this again. They can find a significant problem and can design a solution and could prototype it. It gives them the confidence that they can be a serial inventor, added Wolf.

He says that the programme has grown organically and when guest evaluators come and see the programme, they say that they want this programme in their university, too. It has happened in two universities in the US namely Syracuse and Cooper Union and now many IITs in India, said Wolf.

It is Hemant Kanakia - the Founder of the Maker Bhavan Foundation in the US - who brought that programme to India and started with the first edition at IIT Bombay and IIT Gandhinagar in 2018. Kanakia, an alumnus from IIT Bombay, feels that the Indian education system is geared towards collecting knowledge and most of the times it is theoretical knowledge. Once I went abroad for higher studies, I observed, especially at places such as Stanford University, that they combined a lot of theoretical knowledge with practical stuff. This made them better suited to be a better engineer. I also heard from a lot of people abroad that Indian students are very brilliant but they are not very inventive, said Kanakia.

He explained that in the universities in the US, they learn to be a lot more inventive. I came across the two professors from Cooper Union Alan Wolf and Eric Lima, who had been running an Invention Factory course in their institution in the US for a long time. It sounded suitable to what we are doing here in India. Hence, we started thinking about bringing them here and running a course in India for the first time. Over a period of time, we are thinking of being independent of them. Right from the beginning, we had the local faculty members involved in the country. Now, the local faculty is running the course on their own at different IITs.

Kanakia says that instead of giving ideas to the students, the aim is to help them develop their own inventions. He says that the Invention Factory is not an incubation or a startup facility, but it is aimed at teaching students how to be inventive. The aim is also to become confident that they can do such a thing in a particular time frame. Developing that confidence can go a long way in the future.

He says that every year since the programme began in India, he has seen many students coming up with many interesting ideas, and final prototypes being developed due to their involvement in this programme. This, on the basis of patent disclosures both in India and in the US. These are patent disclosures and the Maker Bhavan Foundation pays for that. Many of them have gone up to develop the idea further and industries have approached them to license the ideas further. The uniqueness is that we do not have any financial stake in whatever they do, unlike an accelerator. We are teaching them how to go about their invention. Many of the past attendees have stated that they have learned a lot from the Invention Factory programme.

Kanakia further says that at Maker Bhavan, they are giving back to the country that gave them the engineering education. We usually do not gain anything other than giving back to the students. The aim is to inculcate a habit of learning by doing things, he said. Maker Bhavan Foundation has several programmes and works with the top institutions in India such as IIT Bombay and IIT Gandhinagar. We also work with private engineering colleges such as BITS Pilani. It started the Invention Factory programme with IIT Gandhinagar and IIT Bombay and are having it at IIT Jammu this year for the first time.

I also get to meet the director of IIT Gandhinagar, who greets us at his vibrant office in the campus. He agrees that our education system right from the school is largely theory-driven or problem-solving driven and is not thinking-oriented. With the Invention Factory, we aim to give the students an opportunity so that their imagination and ideas can be put together into a doable thing. Some ideas may succeed, some may not and even if they fail in this, there is a huge amount of learning. If we have systems where people might learn by doing things, the aim is to first do the things, implement, build something and then learn the theory behind it and correlate the same with the practical aspects. Most western universities, and the western world, are focused on impact-driven learning. In a western approach, the aim is to first build something and then learn on that, whereas, in India, we first learn something and then build on it. We, at IIT Gandhinagar, have a lot of practical aspects and Invention Factory is one example. We also have a lot of lab-oriented learning and the idea is to build things first and experience the actual phenomenon first and then education, Prof Rajat Moona, director of IIT Gandhinagar, told THE WEEK.

We also get to meet Nithin George, associate professor at IIT Gandhinagar, who has been supervising the Invention Factory since it started in 2018. He says that it is not an entrepreneurship programme, but a programme on patenting and teaching students how to invent. By being part of this programme, students have learnt the process of inventing; in the future, if one is interested in inventing something, they would know what is the process. We cannot measure the success of the Invention Factory by seeing that the product is successful or not, whether the product has been bought by people or not. Broadly, this is a training programme for the students on how to invent and how to patent, said George.

He further explains that there are conditions, thoughit cannot be a software product and has to be a hardware product, so one cannot just develop an app. A hardware has to be developed and a prototype has to be there and work. A student also needs to learn and pitch one's idea to several people including those who do not know about the product. All through the years, different products have been invented by first year and second year BTech students from different IITs, just to know the process of invention and how to file patents. Many of them have not gone ahead and scaled the product further as the aim of these students was just to develop a prototype. The success cannot be measured on the fact that whether the product is in the market or not. It is not a product development programme but a student training programme. The programme is unique because it brings in people from different IITs to work together. This time, we also have NIT students as well. The selection is very tough and it is not an easy process. This year, we had around 200 applications from different institutes; 100 were shortlisted, of which 40 were waitlisted and 60 were selected. Submitting an application is also a challenging process, as one has to make a video etc. In the final selection, judges from all over are invited - mainly people who have never interacted with any of the students, explained George.

During the programme, I also get to meet Suryash Patidar, an alumnus of IIT Gandhinagar, who was part of the first Invention Factory in 2018. He says that it was a life-changing experience for him. This programme made me bold and confident as well. The greatest skill I acquired was observation, as I was able to observe the problem very minutely and solve the problem, His team's invention was a mobile portable toilet for bedridden patients, which had a wheel that helped in the movement of the toilet. Our observation was that majority of falls for elderly patients were in the bathroom. So, we designed it as a mobile toilet for hospitals, old age homes as they find it difficult to go to the toilets. We filed an Indian and a US patent for this invention. It was very cost-effective but it required changing the overall system, so we could not scale up to our expectations. When I visited the Invention Factory, it was like a pool of minds from different IITs and different course backgrounds. When we got stuck, they helped us and when they got stuck, we helped them. They tried to criticise our designs and we also tried to suggest upon their designs, said Patidar.

He says that he is currently thinking of incorporating robotics because it also helps in the incorporation of design and manufacturing. It is at the back of my mind that I have to start something on my own sometime later. It helped me with my observation skills. In this programme, we get only a few weeks time to design something and I have realised that given the paucity of time we tend to think faster and come out with a better result.
When Vistaras flight UK 819 left boarding gate 39A at Delhi airports Terminal 3 Monday afternoon headed for Bengaluru, it had on board a very special passenger  the airlines 50 millionth passenger.

A moment of celebration for an airline that is checking all the boxes, winning best airline awards as well as high ratings from passengers online and off  and yet could cease to exist in a few months time.

For this sunset airline, as some are vaunt to describe it, future is, at best, uncertain  since the takeover of state-run airline Air India by its bosses, the Tatas, it was announced late last year that Vistara will be merged into Air India to become the Tata groups flagship full-service carrier, a process that is set to be complete within coming March.

However, a notice issued by the Competition Commission of India (CCI, Indias anti-monopoly body) this weekend could pour cold water over Bombay Houses plans  according to reports, CCI has issued a show cause notice to the Tata Group to respond within 30 days on why an investigation into the proposed merger not be conducted.

The CCI has a point  the dominance of low-cost carrier Indigo on one side (it presently controls more than 60 per cent of the domestic aviation market) and the Tata bouquet of four airlines (Air India and Vistara which are to be merged; Air India Express and AirAsia India which are to be merged, respectively) on the other side is perhaps not really good news for the domestic flyer whos been lamenting sky rocketing air fares for some time now. In May, Air India had a 9.4 per cent market share to Vistara's 9 per cent.

In addition, Air India and Vistara are the only two full-service domestic carriers in the country right now, and their merger would mean there would be essentially one single, monopoly carrier as far as full-fledged domestic airlines are considered, with Jet Airways revival still remaining postponed and seemingly uncertain for the time being.

There is also the question of Singapore Airlines (SIA), Tatas 49 per cent joint venture partner in Vistara. As per the terms of the merger made public, SIA will have a 26 per cent stake in the new merged-entity.

While the uncertainty over the airlines future persists, the top brass at its Gurugram headquarters seem to believe in partying like its the last night of their lives. Vinod Kannan, CEO, remained gung-ho and future-focussed when he said on Monday, As we continue our journey, we are resolute in our commitment to deliver exceptional service and memorable experience to our customers. The airline has, in recent weeks, announced additional codeshares with the likes of Lufthansa, which adds 12 European destinations to its flight plan. It also plans to introduce flights to Bali from Delhi from next month onward.

Meanwhile, the awards it has notched up keep on piling up, even as Air Indias cup of woes run over, from peeing incidents to defecation and what not. Last fortnight, Vistara moved up four notches to No.16 in the Skytrax list of the worlds best airlines  and the only Indian airline in the top 20. Will all this glory be gone too soon?
The CBI on Monday filed a charge sheet against Bihar Deputy Chief Minister Tejashwi Yadav, his father and former railway minister Lalu Prasad, and mother and former chief minister Rabri Devi in connection with the land-for-jobs scam, officials said.

Though this is the second charge sheet filed by the Central Bureau of Investigation (CBI) in the case before a special court, it is the first time that Tejashwi Yadav has been named as an accused.

Apart from the three members of the Yadav family, the federal agency has named 14 individuals and entities in the charge sheet.

The accused have been charged under Indian Penal Code sections related to criminal conspiracy, cheating and others in addition to provisions of the Prevention of Corruption Act.

This comes days after over a dozen opposition parties, including Lalu Prasad's RJD, resolved to take on the BJP unitedly in the 2024 Lok Sabha elections at a crucial meeting in Patna.

The case pertains to Group-D appointments for 'substitutes' done in Western Central Zone based in Jabalpur, Madhya Pradesh when Lalu Prasad was the railway minister between 2004 and 2009 in return for land parcels gifted or transferred by the recruits in the name of Yadav's family or associates, according to officials.

A probe into similar recruitment in other railway zones is going on and will be part of future charge sheets, the officials said.

The CBI had filed the first charge sheet in October last year against Lalu Prasad, Rabri Devi and others pertaining to the appointments in the Central Zone of Railways based in Mumbai.

During the probe, the agency had claimed to have found a hard disc from 10 Circular Road, Patna, which was used by Lalu Prasad as his camp office, containing a list of 1,458 candidates who were engaged in the Railways during his tenure.

The CBI has alleged that as the railway minister, Lalu Prasad entered into a criminal conspiracy with his family members and associates to grab the land of various people who aspired to have Group D employment as 'substitutes' in the Railways and be regularised later.

The agency has alleged that Lalu Prasad, with the help of his associates, identified land parcels and devised an "indirect plan" wherein candidates were first engaged as 'substitutes' and later regularised in the Railways when their family members gifted their land parcels to the family members or associates of Lalu Prasad at throwaway prices.

In its charge sheet filed on Monday, the CBI alleged that in order to hide any links between the jobs provided and land purchase, some land parcels were bought in the name of A K Infosystems.

The ownership of the company was transferred in the name of Tejashwi Yadav and Rabri Devi through share purchase at Rs 1 lakh, whereas the company had land parcels worth Rs 1.77 crore that had a much higher market value, it said.

The CBI alleged that Lalu Prasad took personal interest in following up the recruitment process with the general managers of the zones.

The payments for the land parcels were mostly shown to be made in cash, while there were also instances of transfer of land through gift deeds, the agency alleged.

The candidates were allegedly appointed as 'substitutes' in Group D positions within three days of applying in "undue haste" by railway officials and were later regularised when the "individuals themselves or their family members transferred their land", it said.

The CBI also alleged that a 1.05 lakh square feet plot in Patna was acquired by Lalu Prasad's family members by making payments to the sellers in cash.
All biggies will come. Prime Minister Narendra Modi will be together with Russian President Vladimir Putin, Chinese President Xi Jinping, and Pakistan Prime Minister Shehbaz Shariffor the first timealbeit, virtually. And there are no fireworks expected. The Shanghai Cooperation leaders' meeting will be held on Tuesday. On the agenda will be connectivity.

Unlike the Goa SCO foreign ministers summit, which was hijacked by the India-Pakistan dynamics as Bilawal Bhutto became the first Pakistani foreign minister to visit India in more than a decadethe virtual format will ensure that the focus will remain multilateral.

The Summit's title is "Towards a SECURE SCO". The acronym stands for Security; Economy and Trade; Connectivity; Unity; Respect for Sovereignty and Territorial Integrity; and Environment. Afghanistan will certainly be an important subject to discuss as well as the conflict in Ukraine.

The meeting comes at a time when India has certainly been perceived to be tilting West. It comes on the heels of Modis big America visit. The much-hyped deal of the jet engine co-production apart, Modis trip to America was underlined by the growing concern both India and the US share over China. "The dark clouds of coercion and confrontation are casting their shadow in the Indo Pacific," Modi said in his joint address of Congress. "The stability of the region has become one of the central concerns of our partnership." The freedom of navigation and the importance of international law, too, found a place in the joint statement.

The virtual format ensures that this prickly subject remains in the background. The meeting, which was planned to be physical, was moved to the virtual format just last month.

It is also significant that the SCO summit takes place after the visit of Filipino secretary for foreign affairs Enrique A. Manalo last week. In the joint statement of the fifth Joint Commission on bilateral cooperation, India has shifted its position with the dispute the Philippines has with China. The statement underlined the need for peaceful settlement of disputes and for adherence to international law, especially the UNCLOS and the 2016 Arbitral Award on the South China Sea in this regard. China refuses to recognise the award. India in 2016 had only noted the award.

The SCO, one of the largest multilateral groupings, which is free from the denomination of the West. The eight member states are China, India, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Russia, Pakistan, Tajikistan and Uzbekistan. There are also four observer states interested in acceding to full membershipAfghanistan, Belarus, Iran, and Mongolia. The format allows for essential areas of cooperation such as environment and connectivityimportant ingredients for this region to be explored. Iran, Belarus, and Mongolia have also been invited to the 23rd Meeting of the SCO Council as observer states.

It is interesting that India is holding this conference after attending the Ukraine Peace Conference that has taken an anti-Russia stand. For India, the SCO where Ukraine will come up, will be an act of balance, especially as the rest of the members are very much on the pro-Russian side. Yet, India has managed to keep the tightrope walk going.

Particular attention was paid to the interaction within the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation and the G20, in which India currently holds the presidency as well as the BROCSs format, read the Kremlin read out of the conversation between Putin and Modi last week. The situation around Ukraine was also touched upon as well.
Taiwan kicked off a two-day missile live-firing test on Monday ahead of its largest annual military exercises as the island ramps up preparations against an increasingly assertive China.

The 23 million Taiwanese people live under constant threat of invasion by Beijing, which views the island democracy as part of its territory to be seized one day.

Soldiers fired US-made TOW 2A anti-tank missiles in southern Pingtung county on Monday in an exercise aimed at "enhancing defence operations based on practicality", defence ministry spokesman Sun Li-fang said.

"So our soldiers could have the confidence and capability at wartime, and execute their responsibility to defend the country," he told reporters.

The missile firings come as relations between Taipei and Beijing are increasingly strained, with China conducting two major military exercises around Taiwan in the past year.

The latest was in April, when Beijing simulated targeted strikes on Taiwan and encirclement of the island. State media also reported dozens of planes practising an "aerial blockade".

Those war games were in response to President Tsai Ing-wen's meeting with US House Speaker Kevin McCarthy in California that month.

Monday's and Tuesday's missile tests come against the backdrop of aerial and naval manoeuvres by Beijing in and around the Taiwan Strait, a 180-kilometre-wide (122-mile-wide) passage between the island and mainland China.

Eight Chinese warplanes approached Taiwan's contiguous zone, the band of sea within 24 nautical miles (44 kilometres) of its coast, last month.

In May, China's Shandong aircraft carrier group sailed through the Taiwan Strait in a rare voyage.

Relations have not fared better in the diplomatic sphere. Since the election of Tsai, who rejects China's claim to Taiwan, Beijing has refused to speak with her government.

Taiwan's immigration department announced last week it had rejected applications by Chinese tourism officials to visit the island for a mid-July international travel fair.

Citing the "overall cross-strait situation", the immigration agency said there were doubts about the "necessity, urgency and irreplaceability" of the participation of Chinese tourism officials. Only tourism operators from China had their visas approved.

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The NCP has submitted a petition asking for the disqualification of nine legislators who took ministerial oath on Sunday to join the Eknath Shinde-Devendra Fadnavis government in Maharashtra.

Partys state president Jayant Patil said that a legislator of the NCP, whom he did not name, had complained to the partys disciplinary committee that the nine legislators led by Ajit Pawar had taken their course of action which is contradictory to the partys ideological position and hence action should be initiated against them. After the complaint was received, the party sent via email a petition to Maharashtra Legislative Assembly Speaker Rahul Narvekar urging him to disqualify the nine legislators who took the oath of office on Sunday afternoon.

The NCP leaders who were inducted as ministers in the Shinde-Fadnavis government include Ajit Pawar, Chhagan Bhujbal, Dilip Walse Patil, Aditi Tatkare, Dhananjay Munde, Dharmarao Atram, Anil Patil, Sunil Bansod and Hasan Mushriff.

"Similar petition has been sent to the Speaker of the Assembly on WhatsApp and iMessage. We have urged him that he should hold the disqualification hearing at the earliest. The election commission also has been informed," said Jayant Patil.

Patil further said that party activists and office-bearers across districts are with Sharad Pawar who has declared his intention to fight the battle in the court of the people. "Nine legislators do not constitute a party. They have engaged in anti-party activity and we will take strict action against them."

The move to include Ajit Pawar and the NCP in Maharashtra government was finalised last week in a meeting between union home minister Amit Shah, chief minister Eknath Shinde and deputy chief minister Devendra Fadnavis. Ajit Pawar will now be the second deputy chief minister in the government.

This meeting took place on June 29 night and Shinde-Fadnavis returned to Mumbai late that night after the Union home minister gave the go-ahead. After returning to Mumbai, both Shinde and Fadnavis spoke about cabinet expansion. Political circles in Maharashtra, including legislators of the BJP and Shinde-led Shiv Sena, perceived this expansion as the inclusion of more MLAs from their side into the state cabinet. Hardly anyone expected that the inclusion meant splitting of the NCP and Ajit Pawar joining the government with eight other senior NCP leaders.

NCP has now appointed former minister Jitendra Awhad as Leader of the Opposition and also chief whip of the party. Awhad, a loyal Pawar lieutenant, is also from Thane city, CM Shindes bastion. However, it remains to be seen as to how long will he be the Leader of Opposition as Ajit Pawar camp has claimed the support of 40 out of 52 NCP legislators who have signed a letter of support to Ajit. If all these 40 legislators remain loyal to Ajit Pawar, not only will this be a massive blow to Sharad Pawar but this will also mean that Congress becomes the largest opposition party in Maharashtra and thus could stake claim for the post of Leader of Opposition.

Awhad dismissed the talks that NCP has split. "Sharad Pawar saheb is still president of the NCP and for all of us, he is our leader, not Ajit Pawar. Pawar saheb has still not started dialling the phone numbers of each legislator who are supposedly supporting Ajit Pawar. All of us have seen what happened in 2019 when Pawar saheb swung into action (after the first rebellion by Ajit when he took oath with Devendra Fadnavis) and how the rebels returned to our side," said Awhad.

Ajits rebellion also means a body blow to the Opposition Unity project in Maharashtra. Already Rahul Gandhi and West Bengal chief minister Mamata Banerjee have called Pawar senior and held discussions with him to discuss the prospects of the MVA in Maharashtra after another revolt by Ajit Pawar.
In his first public address since Nationalist Congress Party (NCP) split, party president Sharad Pawar exhorted his supporters to fight forces creating a communal divide in Maharashtra and the country.

Addressing party workers at Satara a day after NCP leader and nephew Ajit Pawar joined the BJP-Shinde Shiv Sena govt in Maharashtra with eight MLAs, Sharad Pawar said "some of our people fell prey to BJP's tactics to break other parties."



"Attempts are being made to create communal divide in Maharashtra and the country. We need to fight forces that create fear among peace-loving citizens," he said, adding that they needed to protect democracy in the country.



Pawar made the speech after visiting the memorial of his mentor and Maharashtra's first chief minister Yashwantrao Chavan in Karad on the occasion of Guru Purnima. The 82-year-old leader was greeted by hundreds of supporters who lined up on roadsides, in what turned out to be a show of strength.



On Sunday, Pawar reacted to his nephew's move by lashing out at BJP, calling the development a "robbery" and not a "googly". Pawar also took a swipe at Prime Minister Narendra Modi saying the "credit" for the NCP split went to the PM as some leaders in NCP became restless days after the PM made a statement about corruption.



Pawar said he was clueless about what happened at a meeting of NCP leaders and claimed some MLAs called him to inform him they were invited (to Mumbai) and their signatures were taken. "They said their stand as (MLAS) of NCP is different," he added.



Pawar said it seems the Prime Minister has "exonerated" the NCP and all those against whom he had levelled allegations. "I am happy today that he gave cabinet berths to some colleagues from NCP. It shows the allegations against corruption were not factual. I am thankful to the PM for this," Pawar said.



He said some leaders of NCP were nervous about the investigation by the Enforcement Directorate and named Ajit Pawar, Chhagan Bhujbal, Dilip Walse-Patil, Hasan Mushrif. "There was restlessness due to ED cases. After the PM made that statement, the restlessness increased and they (BJP) got the benefit. But the real credit for this so-called success goes to the PM," he said tauntingly.



"Prima facie, this development is the result of the PM's allegations...the kind of action and the use of agencies. We need to see when these people (who took oath) get relief from the ED probe and what sort of understanding was there (between them). I am waiting to know that," the NCP chief said.


A day after the Nationalist Congress Party's (NCP) split, the meeting of the opposition parties that was slated for July 13-14 in Bengaluru has been postponed. The meet was postponed to July 17-18, said Congress.

Congress General Secretary K.C Venugopal in his latest tweet said that After a hugely successful All-Opposition meeting in Patna, we will be holding the next meeting in Bengaluru on 17 and 18 July, 2023.

After a hugely successful All-Opposition meeting in Patna, we will be holding the next meeting in Bengaluru on 17 and 18 July, 2023.



We are steadfast in our unwavering resolve to defeat the fascist and undemocratic forces and present a bold vision to take the country forward.  K C Venugopal (@kcvenugopalmp) July 3, 2023

We are steadfast in our unwavering resolve to defeat the fascist and undemocratic forces and present a bold vision to take the country forward, he added.

Earlier, reports said that the postponement was due to the monsoon sessions of the Bihar and Karnataka Assembly.

The monsoon session of the Bihar Assembly is slated for 10-24 July.

JD(U)'s Nitish Kumar, reportedly, asked Congress president Mallikarjun Kharge to postpone the meeting as he and Tejashwi Yadav would be busy in the assembly session.

Among others, the recent NCP split, rift widening between the Congress and Aam Aadmi Party (AAP) questions the strength of the opposition unity.
In the wake of the ongoing unrest, the Supreme Court on Monday directed the Manipur government to submit an updated and detailed status report on the ethnic clashes in the violence-hit state.

The court will hear the matter next on July 10.

The bench comprising Chief Justice of India D.Y. Chandrachud, Justices P.S. Narasimha and Manoj Misra was hearing the petitions filed by Manipur Tribal Forum Delhi and Chairman of the Hill Areas Committee (HAC) of the Manipur Legislative Assembly.

Manipur Tribal Forum Delhi had sought for the protection of the Kuki tribe by the Indian Army, while the other petition was challenging the direction of the Manipur HC's decision to consider the inclusion of Meitei community in the Scheduled Tribe list.

Solicitor General Tushar Mehta, appearing for the Centre and Manipur government, told the SC that the situation is improving in the state slowly.

The SC had directed the government to submit the detailed report including measures taken to curb violence, rehabilitation camps details for those affected by the clashes, and deployment of forces.

Meanwhile, fresh violence was reported on Sunday, with three 'village volunteers' loosing their lives and five injured in Bishnupur district.

According to the police, the incident took place in Khoijumantabi village. 'Village volunteers' are those guarding the area in a makeshift bunker.

Chief Minister N. Biren Singh visited the spot and took stock of the situation.

Also, the national highway, which was blocked for nearly two months, was lifted on Sunday by the United Peoples' Front (UPF) and Kuki National Organisation (KNO).

The two organisations, former militant groups, in a joint statement said that the blockade on the highway has been lifted with immediate effect, following an appeal by Union Home Minister Amit Shah.

Shah had expressed his deep concern over the violence in the state.

Manipur has two national highways -- NH-2 (Imphal-Dimapur) and NH-37 (Imphal-Jiribam).The NH-2 has been blocked by Kuki organisations since May 3. It was temporarily opened for Shah's visit in late May.

The two groups have taken the decision to lift the blockade following a recent meeting of the UPF, KNO and other Kuki groups with Assam Chief Minister Himanta Biswa Sarma in Guwahati, reported PTI.

Over 100 people have so far lost their lives in ethnic clashes that broke out between the Meitei and Kuki communities in Manipur on May 3.
The Nationalist Congress Party (NCP), which suffered a vertical split on Sunday after Ajit Pawar's surprise revolt, has since then witnessed a series of sackings and appointments with both the factions claiming support of majority of the MLAs.

On Monday, NCP supremo Sharad Pawar expelled party working president Praful Patel and general secretary Sunil Tatkare who had sided with his nephew in the rebellion. The veteran leader also expelled Mumbai divisional NCP chief Narendra Rathod, Akola city district chief Vijay Deshmukh and state minister Shivajirao Garje from the party for attending the swearing in of Ajit on Sunday.

However, shortly after Pawar's announcement, the Ajit group hit back, by sacking state unit president Jayant Patil and making new appointments.

At a press conference, Praful Patel announced the appointment of Tatkare as the new state president of the NCP and Ajit as the leader of NCP legislature party. We request Sharad Pawar to accept the decision of majority in the party. We want his blessings," Patel said.

In a surprise political coup on Sunday, Ajit joined the ruling dispensation in Maharashtra and also claimed to have the support of majority of the MLAs. The NCP leader took oath as the deputy chief minister in the Eknath Shinde government while his eight loyal MLAs were inducted as ministers.

Earlier in the day, Pawar had issued notices to Ajit and his supporting MLAs asking them to refrain from misrepresenting before any forum the fact that they have any association with the NCP. The party has already moved a petition before Maharashtra Assembly Speaker Rahul Narwekar seeking disqualification of the nine MLAs.

In the afternoon, Pawar announced the sacking of both Patel and Tatkare for anti-party activities.

"I, as the National President, of Nationalist Congress Party hereby order the removal of the names of Shri Sunil Tatkare and Shri Praful Patel from the Register of Members of NCP Party for anti-party activities, Pawar said in a tweet. He tagged Patel, a Rajya Sabha MP who was appointed as NCP working president last month, and Tatkare in his tweet.

Accusing them of facilitating and spearheading defections of nine MLAs without his knowledge and consent, the senior Pawar, in his letter, said, "Your action of supporting Shri Ajit Pawar and eight other MLAs who have sworn oath as ministers in violation of the party's direction and mandate amounts to anti-party activities".

"I remove your names from the membership register of the party in view of your actions," Pawar said. The party is initiating appropriate action for formal disqualification of Patel and Tatkare as MPs under the 10th Schedule of the Constitution, the letter said.

Pawar's daughter and NCP working president Supriya Sule had earlier sought the disqualification of Tatkare and Patel for indulging in "anti-party activities".

In a letter addressed to Pawar, Baramati Lok Sabha MP Sule said, "I write with great urgency to inform you that two Members of Parliament of Nationalist namely Praful Patel and Sunil Tatkare, have acted in violation of our constitution, rules of our party and have also indulged in anti-party activities by facilitating and spearheading swearing of the oath of nine MLAs as cabinet ministers of government of Maharashtra."

Patel, addressing the press conference, said the decision to back the Eknath Shinde-led government and the leadership of Prime Minister Narendra Modi was a "collective" move by the NCP.

"Today (Monday) is Guru Purnima; we all wish that Sharad Pawar continues to bless us," said Patel.

He also said Anil Patil, who was among the ministers who joined the Eknath Shinde-BJP government on Sunday, will continue to be NCP's whip in the Maharashtra Assembly.

The NCP has 53 MLAs in the 288-member Assembly.
Even after being a space scientist throughout my career, I would like to accord my views on the semiconductor pact first, since it hopefully brings an end to our four decades-long run behind the bus.



The US-headquartered Micron has come forward to invest $825 million in India. Micron will be setting up a new Assembly and Testing Facility in Gujarat. The construction of the new Assembly and Test Facility is likely to begin in two phases in 2023. The first phase of the project with 50,000 sqft will become operational in late 2024. This will lead to a creation of 5,000 direct jobs and 500 new high-end engineering jobs.

Coupled with this news, an investment of $400 million by the US semiconductor company, 'Applied Materials' over the next four years in starting an Engineering Centre in Bangalore is expected to bring in the much required impetus to the countrys semiconductor dreams.

To understand the importance of this pact we need to travel back in history a little. Semiconductor fabrication remained an unfinished agenda post-independence for the last four decades for every government. As long as we are not independent in the fabrication of semiconductors, we will be more vulnerable to international pressures. So the semiconductor mission of 2022 is very much laudable.

It all started in 2007, with the declaration of Special Incentive Package (SIP) by GOI. But it did not yield any response. Then came the modified SIP in 2012. Two consortia got the nod from the cabinet: Jayaprakash Associates with IBM and Towerjazz an Israeli company while the second one was Hindustan Semiconductor Manufacturing Corporation aligning with ST microelectronics. Even though GOI offered heavy incentives in the form of cash and tax reliefs, both the JVs failed to mobilise the resources of $10 billion required.

With miniaturisation advancing at an exponential rate, investment in semiconductor fabrication has become one of the most risky sector. Huge investment has to be recovered before the technology becomes obsolete. This calls for substantial production volumes for economic break-even, demanding volumes that are adequate to meet global demand. So it becomes difficult to conceive a fab keeping in mind domestic market only. Above all, it is a difficult art and technology and yields are dangerously low. All these marks the importance of the Micron pact signed.

Easing out of H1-B visa renewal for the skilled workforce of India and opening of the 5th US consulate in India at Bangalore (Apart from the existing Mumbai, Kolkata, Chennai and Hyderabad Consulates) are going to be a great relief for all the ever-increasing number of US aspirants from India.

In another significant outcome, the American multinational corporation General Electric(GE) signed an agreement with India state-owned Hindustan Aeronautics Ltd (HAL) to make fighter jet engines for Indian Air Force (IAF). The landmark agreement will facilitate the transfer of critical jet engine technologies to HAL.

GE.s F414 military aircraft engine powers state-of-the-art fighters like Boeing Super Hornet and Saab Gripen. The pact to build them in India for the LCA Tejas Mk2 marks the end of the Technology Denial Regime and heralds a new era and key milestone in the Indo-US ties. The Tejas Mk2 is expected to be ready by 2025.

The current pact will have 80 per cent technology transfer compared to 58 per cent in the Engine Development Agreement of 2012 between HAL and GE for the F414 engines. Around 200 Tejas Mk2 fighters will be built. The aircraft will feature indigenous components including advanced radar systems, avionics and weapons.

India has traditionally struggled to manufacture an advanced jet engine domestically, as demonstrated by the underperformance of its Kaveri engine. Currently, only a select few countries like the US, the UK, Russia and France are fully capable of manufacturing advanced jet engines.

And of course, in space, my domain, India became the 27th nation to sign the Artemis Accord to send humans to the moon by 2025, demonstrating its commitment to sustainable and transparent space activities.

The signatories of the accord commit to take all reasonable efforts to render necessary assistance to personnel in outer space, who are in distress, and acknowledge their obligations under the agreement on the rescue of Astronauts, the return of Astronauts and the return of objects launched into outer space. This will be a logical next step to take forward the upcoming Moon Landing (Chandrayan 3) mission and Human in Space ( Gaganyaan) mission outcomes into future space endeavours.

These outcomes usher a new era of International Cooperation for the betterment of mankind.

The author is a distinguished scientist and Former Director of Capacity Building Programme Office of ISRO headquarters, Bangalore.
At least two Pakistan Army soldiers, including a Major rank officer, were killed when militants opened fire on security forces in the restive Balochistan province.



The encounter took place in the Balor region of the province on Sunday when the security forces received credible intelligence on the movement of a terrorist group, the Inter-Services Public Relations (ISPR), the media wing of the Pakistani military, said in a statement.

The terrorists were linked with many firing incidents on security forces and civilians besides planting Improvised Explosive Devices in the Hoshab area, the statement said.

A Major rank officer and a junior officer were killed while another soldier was injured in the incident, the statement said.

"Security Forces, in step with the nation, remain determined to thwart such attempts at sabotaging peace, stability and progress of Balochistan," the statement said.

It said a follow-up operation to nab the perpetrators of the attack was on in the region.

There was no immediate claim of responsibility for Sunday's attack, but Tehreek-e-Taliban Pakistan and small separatist groups have been found to be involved in such incidents in the past.

Small separatist groups in the resource-rich Balochistan have waged a low-level insurgency for more than two decades.

Baloch nationalists initially wanted a bigger share of the provincial resources, but later their insurgency morphed into a fight for independence.

Three policemen and a soldier were killed on Saturday in militant attacks in Balochistan where terrorists from the banned outfit have a strong presence.
Mumbai, Jul 3 (PTI) Hinduja group-owned IndusInd International Holdings (IIHL), the promoter of IndusInd Bank, on Monday announced a USD 1.5-billion capital raising plan to fund the proposed acquisition of Reliance Capital and increase its stake in the lender.

The board of the Mauritius-registered IIHL also decided to increase its holding in the fourth-largest private sector lender to 26 per cent from the present 15 per cent, a statement issued from Port Louis said.

It can be noted that on June 29, the lenders to the crippled Reliance Capital accepted the revised Rs 9,661 crore bid by IndusInd Bank.

IIHL had made the highest cash offer of Rs 9,661 crore in the auctions and secured as much as 99 per cent of the lenders' votes. The bid also includes the Rs 500-crore cash balance with RCap going to the lenders, taking the overall recovery to Rs 10,200 crore or about 65 per cent of Rs 16,000 crore principal secured debt the crippled company owed to lenders.

"The decision to raise UDS 1.5 billion opens boundless opportunities to expand our business horizon in the country and also other global geographies, in the BFSI sector. Our aspirations will not be capital constrained as raising capital is not an issue at all for us," chairman of IIHL Ashok P Hinduja was quoted as saying in the statement.

The board also approved increasing its shareholding in IndusInd Bank to 26 per cent from the current 15 per cent.

The first objective of the capital raising is to increase its promoter shareholding in IndusInd Bank from the current 15 per cent to 26 per cent. Accordingly, the IIHL board has resolved to undertake capital raising in a phased manner to mobilise the required funds for infusion, the statement added.

The second objective of the capital raising is towards equity participation for the acquisition of Reliance Capital through the NLCT process, the statement said, adding today, the administrator has issued the duly signed letter of intent.

The statement claimed that global sovereign funds and private equity funds have expressed interest in participating in the fundraising/bank's growth story.

The statement further said the group is likely to take IIHL public next year.

It can be noted that IIHL recently acquired a majority holding in a bank in the Commonwealth of The Bahamas and had also received in-principle approval for a banking licence in Mauritius. The company said the licence would be used to set up an all-new bank or consider an acquisition.

The company is also in the process of acquiring asset management and wealth management businesses to complete its para banking suite, the statement said.

The board also announced a special interim dividend of 10 per cent to shareholders, most of whom have stayed with the company for the past three decades.

The board also approved a buyback scheme for partial dilution for its original shareholders at USD 20.

RCap administrator is likely to file the IIHL resolution plan in the NCLT Mumbai this week as the deadline of July 15 to file is approaching. Operating companies under Reliance Capital are into insurance (life, general and health), asset reconstruction and broking.

The Reserve Bank on November 29, 2021, superseded the board of Reliance Capital in view of payment defaults and serious governance issues and had appointed Nageswara Rao as the administrator.
London, Jul 3 (PTI) The US on Monday became the only country to halt the adoption of a draft MEPC resolution on biofuel put forward by India on Monday at the MEPC session here, demanding further discussions on the matter prior to recommending it to a working group on air pollution and energy efficiency to finalise the resolution/circular.

Sources told PTI that the US came up with the suggestion on Monday morning at the 80th session of the Marine Environment Protection Committee (MEPC) without raising it in earlier deliberations when the vast majority of the group considered it an immediate requirement and to be considered further by the Intersessional Working Group on Air Pollution and Energy Efficiency

Sources said the opposition raised by the US could be due to the fact that promoting bio-fuel as a drop in fuel could negatively impact the promotion of other green fuels such as Ammonia and Hydrogen, the fuels that the US is putting money on.

India's draft MEPC resolution put forward a biofuel that is certified by the International Certification Scheme to confirm the sustainability aspects in the Life Cycle Assessment guidelines are being assigned a CO2 emission conversion factor as zero.

This draft resolution aimed at facilitating the uptake of biofuels and reduction of the GHG emissions.

"The Intersessional Working Group discussed the same and a vast majority of the group considered that it was an immediate requirement and to be considered further by the Working Group on air pollution & energy efficiency," an Indian delegation representative said.

But the draft resolution could not be submitted to the Working Group as the US demanded further discussions.

"We are certainly not against the biofuels. We wanted to hear more people's observations on it in the plenary before submitting it to the Intersessional Working Group. We have no other agenda," a delegate representing the US told
Mumbai, Jul 3 (PTI) The Mumbai underworld has always fascinated filmmakers and when Ram Gopal Varma decided to capture the normal life of gangsters in "Satya", empathy was at the core of the story, says writer-actor Saurabh Shukla.

Considered a milestone in contemporary Indian cinema, "Satya", which clocked 25 years on Monday, was the product of Varma's extensive research on gangsters and the underworld. He eventually roped in first-time writers - Anurag Kashyap and Shukla to pen the screenplay.

The film explored the underbelly of the world of crime through well-etched characters of Satya (J D Chakravarthy), Bhiku Mhatre (Manoj Bajpayee) and Kallu Mama (Shukla).

Shukla said they aimed at showing these "misunderstood bad guys" without being judgemental.

"The whole approach was to look at the characters as human beings and not by their profession and not try to be judgmental about what they do... They have some good parts, some bad parts. It's a mixed bag of things, which is a normal life. They can be in any profession, they could be on the side of law or can be outlaws.

"But, as a film, you always focus on the character and you see the journey. It is actually empathy towards which all scriptwriters and filmmakers work. There is no blanket rejection or acceptance. When anything happens in that journey, audiences connect with the character. They go along with it and feel for it," the veteran actor told PTI in an interview.

Kashyap was already part of the film as one of the writers when he brought Shukla on board primarily as a writer, he recalled.

The 60-year-old, who back then was trying to make a mark in the film industry as an actor after moving to Mumbai from Delhi, said even though he wasn't very interested in writing for "Satya", he couldn't resist the bonus opportunity to play Kallu Mama.

"When Ramu (Varma) said he needed another writer, a fresh perspective in the film, Anurag suggested my name. Ramu told me he wants me to write it and if I didn't write it, then I was not going to be a part of the film as Kallu Mama... That's how I came into the writing team," Shukla recounted.

Creating characters on paper, however, was more challenging than playing the role of the alcoholic yet affable gangster Kallu Mama, said the actor-writer.

"It's always difficult because you are entering a world which you're going to build. There is an idea but a lot is unknown. You don't know whether you will be able to capture the world correctly, or in this case, the director's mind because Ramu had a vision. We were trying to work around that. I would say, it was a great time for us. We were excited as writers and actors," he said.

Shukla and Kashyap are officially credited as writers on "Satya", but the former said the film was a joint effort by the whole team, including Varma and the cast.

"When people ask me how many people wrote 'Satya'? I always say four... Anurag Kashyap and Saurabh Shukla, then director Ram Gopal Varma, and the actors," Shukla said, adding that he and Kashyap were always present on set as the actors improvised a lot during the shoot.

He also acknowledged Varma for being "porus" and approachable throughout the film's making.

"He chose the best, so he had a very tender personality during 'Satya'. After that, I have not worked with him. But we kept talking."

In 2018, Shukla and the director celebrated 20 years of "Satya" over dinner, the actor said.

"Five years ago, Ramu called and said, 'Would you join me for dinner? Let's celebrate 20 years'. So, it was just me, my wife, Ramu and Makrand Deshpande. The four of us just sat down and we reminisced... 'Satya' was great, we had a memorable time making it. Ramu was absolutely great in that film," he said.

"Satya" also starred Urmila Matondkar, Shefali Shah, Paresh Rawal, Govind Namdeo and Aditya Srivastav. The soundtrack of the film was composed by Vishal Bhardwaj, with lyrics by Gulzar.

Matondar, who played the demure Vidya opposite Chakravarthy's unpredictable Satya, shared a few stills from the movie on Twitter to mark the 25th anniversary.

"Twenty-five years of 'Satya' and of playing simple naive chawl girl Vidya at the peak of a scintillating glamorous career. But no what did that have to do with 'acting'.. so no awards and not even nominations. So sit down and don't talk to me about favouritism and nepotism," she wrote.

Bajpayee and Shah, the fan-favourite couple of Bhiku and Pyaari, posted clips from the film on Twitter.

"Satya" proved to be a career breakthrough for most of the people associated with the film, including Shukla.

"Whatever you see today, 'Satya' has a lot to do with it... People started looking (at me) in a different way. They never called me just for a laugh, they started calling me for characters which were substantial, had depth, or more possibility to perform," the veteran actor said.
Explosions again rocked Sudan's capital Khartoum on Monday as the army rallied civilians to take up arms against a renewed onslaught by its paramilitary foes.

The sound of artillery fire shook the dawn in northwest Khartoum and progressed towards the centre and east of the city, witnesses told AFP.

The fighting "began at 4:00 am and is still going," one resident said.

The war-torn capital barely saw a few hours of respite after heavy clashes on Sunday between Sudanese army forces (SAF) lead by chief Abdel Fattah al-Burhan and the paramilitary Rapid Support Forces (RSF).

The army announced Monday it was ready to "receive and prepare" volunteer fighters, after Burhan last week urged Sudanese "youth and all those able to defend" to join the military.

War-weary civilians have largely rejected the call, pleading for an end to the relentless war between Burhan and his former deputy, RSF commander Mohamed Hamdan Daglo.

Apart from Khartoum, some of the worst fighting has been in the vast western region of Darfur, where late on Sunday RSF forces "attacked the military base" in Nyala, the capital of South Darfur.

Since April 15, nearly 3,000 people have been killed in the violence. However, medics warn the death toll is likely to be much higher, with about two-thirds of health facilities in combat areas still "out of service".

A further 2.2 million people have been displaced within the country, with another 645,000 fleeing across borders, according to the International Organization for Migration.

Darfur is home to a quarter of Sudan's population and is still scarred by a two-decade war. Residents there as well as the United Nations, United States and others, say civilians have been targeted and killed for their ethnicity by the RSF and allied Arab militias.

Field Trials

The RSF has been accused of intentionally targeting civilians in Darfur, including by shooting people fleeing towards the Chadian border.

The paramilitaries have also been identified as the main perpetrators of conflict-related sexual assault by survivors in both Darfur and Khartoum.

According to the governmental Combating Violence Against Women and Children Unit, most of the 42 survivors in Khartoum, and all of the 46 survivors in the Darfur cities of Nyala and El Geneina, said they were assaulted by RSF fighters.

Late on Sunday, the RSF announced it was cracking down on "looting and vandalism, particularly the theft of civilian cars".

Since the conflict began, RSF fighters, highly mobile and embedded in densely populated neighbourhoods, have been accused of widespread break-ins and looting.

Residents have been forcibly evicted from their homes, had their vehicles stolen or learned after fleeing Khartoum that their homes were being used as bases.

The force, which traces its origins to the notorious Janjaweed militia recruited in the early 2000s to crush a rebellion by ethnic minority groups in Darfur, announced last week it had begun to try some of its "undisciplined" members.

Children Fleeing

More than half of Sudan's population is now in need of aid and protection, according to UN figures.

The situation has been especially horrific in Darfur, a region the size of France where entire neighbourhoods have been razed to the ground, cities besieged and bodies left to rot on the streets.

Barely any humanitarian assistance has reached desperate civilians, as aid groups report their teams standing by in neighbouring Chad, waiting for humanitarian corridors to open.

Since April, more than 170,000 people have fled Darfur across the Chadian border, according to the UN refugee agency.

"Thousands of families with children are fleeing the violence in West Darfur," according to Mandeep O'Brien, country representative for UNICEF which has reported hundreds of children killed in the fighting.

The UN agency estimates that more than 13 million children are in "dire need" of humanitarian assistance.

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Mumbai, Jul 3 (PTI) Actor Sonam Kapoor has been invited by iconic luxury design house Dior to attend its autumn-winter show at the Paris Fashion Week on Monday, her official spokesperson confirmed.

The Indian actor will attend the fashion event alongside Academy Award winner Natalie Portman among the who's who of the fashion world, a press release said.

Dior, founded by legendary fashion designer Christian Dior, will showcase its latest haute couture collection at the fashion week.

Sonam was also part of the guest list for Dior's first fashion show in India since 1962, held in March at the Gateway of India in Mumbai, the release added.

She last attended the Paris Fashion Week as a showstopper for designer label Ralph & Russo in 2017.

On the acting front, Sonam will be seen in the upcoming film "Blind".
Mumbai, Jul 3 (PTI) Rajkummar Rao and Janhvi Kapoor-starrer Mr And Mrs Mahi is set to release theatrically next year in March, the makers announced Monday.

The upcoming drama is directed by Sharan Sharma, who helmed Gunjan Saxena: The Kargil Girl featuring Janhvi. It is produced by Karan Johar, Zee Studios, Hiroo Yash Johar and Apoorva Mehta.

Dharma Productions and Zee Studios shared the release date of the movie on their official social media handle.

"One dream, chased by two hearts! #MrAndMrsMahi is arriving on the pitch on 15th March, 2024 in cinemas near you!, the tweet read.

Mr And Mrs Mahi marks the second collaboration between Rajkummar and Janhvi after the 2021 horror comedy Roohi. The actors also shared the upcoming film's release date on their respective Instagram Stories.
London, Jul 3 (PTI) Police in the UK have launched an investigation after shots were fired at a wedding party of more than 100 guests at the Gujarati Association at Wolverhampton in the West Midlands region of England.

Wolverhampton Police said they received calls about the incident on Saturday night and believed that a car was driven up to the back of the venue before someone got out of the vehicle and fired a number of shots at another car parked at the venue.

It's then believed a gun was fired back towards the attacker from the direction of the wedding party by another person.

No injuries have been reported, but a vehicle was damaged and is being forensically examined, the police said as its officers carried out forensic and CCTV enquiries over the weekend.

"This was a totally reckless attack and it's by luck rather than by design that no one was seriously injured or killed, said Paul Southern, Chief Inspector of Wolverhampton Police.

"We believe there were more than 100 people at this event and it is vital that we speak to anyone who was there and who saw or recorded what happened so that we can bring those involved to justice. The community will be understandably shocked and worried by what happened and we'll be carrying out extra patrols to offer reassurance," he said.

The police have asked anyone with information to contact them to assist with the ongoing investigation.
Kyiv, Jul 3 (AP) After a relative lull, Russia launched a drone attack early Sunday on Ukraine's capital, Kyiv, officials said. It was the first such attack of the war in 12 days.

All of the Iranian-made Shahed exploding drones were detected and shot down, according to Serhii Popko, the head of the Kyiv city administration. In addition to the city itself, the surrounding Kyiv region was targeted. Kyiv regional Gov. Ruslan Kravchenko reported that one person was wounded by falling debris from a destroyed drone.

Officials in the Ukrainian capital didn't provide an exact number of drones that attacked the city. But Ukraine's air force said that across the country, eight Shaheds and three Kalibr cruise missiles were launched by the Russians.

Further south, a 13-year-old boy was wounded in overnight shelling of Ukraine's partially occupied southern Kherson province, said Oleksandr Tolokonnikov, spokesman for the Ukrainian administration of the province.

The child was wounded when the Russian army shelled the village of Mylove on the banks of the Dnieper River in the Beryslav district, Tolokonnikov said.

The child was hospitalized, there is no threat to his life, Tolokonnikov added, he said on state TV.

Shelling of Kherson province continued Sunday morning, wounding four people in the regional capital, also called Kherson. The regional prosecutor's office said that a residential area of the city was targeted by Russian troops operating in the Russia-occupied part of the Kherson province. 

"At least four citizens were wounded, two of them due to a targeted strike on a high-rise building, the office wrote on Telegram.

Meanwhile, Ukraine's military reported that the most intense fighting continued in Ukraine's industrial east, with attacks focused around Bakhmut, Marinka and Lyman in the country's Donetsk province, where 46 combat clashes took place.

Ukrainian forces were advancing amid a massive offensive on the southern and northern flanks of the destroyed city of Bakhmut, Ukraine's Eastern Group of Forces spokesman Serhii Cherevaty told Ukrainian state television.

But he didn't mention how much progress they made. The details, he said, would be disclosed once Ukrainian forces had analysed the situation and consolidated their positions.

In its regular update Sunday morning, the General Staff said that over the previous 24 hours, Russia had carried out 27 airstrikes, one missile strike and around 80 attacks from multiple rocket launchers, targeting regions in the north, northeast, east and south of the country.

Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy visited the Black Sea port city of Odesa on Sunday  the day the country honors its navy  to hear a report from the navy commander, discuss prospects for the development of a naval drone and missile program, as well as present awards to service members.

In Russia, local officials reported that air defense systems shot down a drone over the Belgorod region, which borders Ukraine, while the neighbouring Kursk region faced shelling attacks. No casualties or damage were reported.

Following the drama of Wagner chief Yevgeny Prigozhin's rebellion last week, Russian authorities remained defiant. Vyacheslav Volodin, speaker of Russia's lower house of parliament, the State Duma, said Sunday that Russian President Vladimir Putin came out of this situation having strengthened his position even more both in the country and in the world.

Russian society, he said, having passed this test, has shown its maturity. According to Volodin, there was not a single example of someone supporting the rebellion.

But Gen. Sergei Surovikin, the deputy commander of the Russian group of forces fighting in Ukraine, was believed to have been detained days after the mutiny. It's not clear whether Surovikin, who has longtime links to Prigozhin, faces any charges or where he is being held, reflecting the opaque world of the Kremlin's politics and uncertainty after the revolt.

Writing on Telegram, Volodin said that the Russian president did everything to prevent bloodshed and confusion, including explaining to Wagner fighters the real state of affairs. (Putin) suggested that those who want to defend Russia continue their service with weapons in their hands. As far as I know, many of them agreed to this, Volodin said.

In addition, the speaker of the State Duma said that he had analyzed the challenges Russia faced in the past, affirming that if someone like Putin had been leading the country in 1917 and 1991, there wouldn't have been a revolution in Russia, and the USSR wouldn't have collapsed.

But independent observers and analysts say that Putin may come out politically weakened after first announcing that Wagner would face harsh repercussions, only to later say that the group's forces wouldn't face prosecution. Prigozhin was also allowed to leave Russia for Belarus.

Polish Interior Minister Mariusz Kaminski said Sunday that Poland would send 500 police officers to join 5,000 border guards and 2,000 soldiers already on the country's border with Belarus. It follows an announcement earlier this week that Poland would strengthen defenses on its eastern border after the relocation of Wagner fighters to Belarus. (AP) MRJ

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Kyiv, Jul 3 (AP) Prize-winning Ukrainian writer Victoria Amelina was among those killed by a deadly Russian missile attack on a popular restaurant frequented by journalists and aid workers in eastern Ukraine, PEN America announced in a statement.

Amelina, 37, who had turned her attention from literature to document Russian war crimes after the invasion, died from her injuries after the strike in the city of Kramatorsk on June 27, the literature and human rights organisation said Sunday. At least 11 others were killed and 61 were wounded in the attack which occurred around dinnertime, when the restaurant was usually busy.

Ukrainian authorities arrested a man a day later, accusing him of helping Russia direct the strike.

The attack and others across Ukraine that evening suggested that the Kremlin is not easing its aerial onslaught over Ukraine, despite political and military turmoil at home after a short-lived armed uprising in Russia last week.

PEN Ukraine announced Amelina's death after her family was informed of her passing. Amelina was in Kramatorsk with a delegation of Colombian writers and journalists at the time of the strike. She had been documenting Russian war crimes with the human rights organisation Truth Hounds.

Victoria Amelina was a celebrated Ukrainian author who turned her distinct and powerful voice to investigate and expose war crimes after the full scale military invasion of Ukraine in February 2022," said Polina Sadovskaya, Eurasia director at PEN America. She brought a literary sensibility to her work and her elegant prose described, with forensic precision, the devastating impact of these human rights violations on the lives of Ukrainians.

Amelina was born on January 1, 1986, in Lviv. In 2014 she published her first novel, The November Syndrom, or Homo Compatiens, which was shortlisted for the Ukranian Valeriy Shevchuk Prize.

She went on to pen two prize-winning children's books, Somebody, or Waterheart and another novel, Storie-e-es of Eka the Excavator. In 2017, her novel, Dom's Dream Kingdom, received a slew of national and international accolades  including the UNESCO City of Literature Prize and the European Union Prize for Literature.

Since the start of Russia's full-scale invasion, Amelina devoted herself to documenting Russian war crimes in Ukraine's east. In Kapytolivka near Izium, she discovered the diary of Volodymyr Vakulenko, a Ukrainian writer killed by the Russians.

She also began working on her first work of English nonfiction shortly before her death. In War and Justice Diary: Looking at Women Looking at War, Amelina recounts stories of Ukrainian women collecting evidence of Russian war crimes. It is expected to be published soon, according to PEN Ukraine. (AP)



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Jerusalem, Jul 3 (AP) Israel used drones to strike targets in a militant stronghold in the occupied West Bank early Monday and deployed hundreds of troops in the area, in an incursion that resembled the wide-scale military operations carried out during the second Palestinian uprising two decades ago. Palestinian health officials said at least seven Palestinians were killed.

Troops remained inside the Jenin refugee camp at midday Monday, pushing ahead with the largest operation in the area during more than a year of fighting. It came at a time of growing domestic pressure for a tough response to a series of attacks on Israeli settlers, including a shooting attack last week that killed four Israelis.

Black smoke rose from the crowded streets of the camp and the buzzing of drones could be heard overhead as the military pressed on. Residents said electricity was cut off in some parts and military bulldozers were plowing through narrow streets, damaging buildings as they cleared the way for Israeli forces in another reminder of the last uprising. The Palestinians and neighbouring Jordan condemned the violence.

Lt Col Richard Hecht, an army spokesperson, said the operation began just after 1 a.m. with an airstrike on a building used by militants to plan attacks. He said the goal of the operation was to destroy and confiscate weapons.

We're not planning to hold ground, he said. We're acting against specific targets.

He said that a brigade-size force  roughly 2,000 soldiers  was taking part in the operation, and that military drones had carried out a series of strikes to clear the way for the ground forces. Although Israel has carried out isolated airstrikes in the West Bank in recent weeks, Hecht said Monday's series of strikes was an escalation unseen since 2006  the end of the Palestinian uprising.

While Israel described the attack as a pinpoint operation, smoke billowed from within the crowded camp, with mosque minarets nearby. Ambulances raced toward a hospital where the wounded were brought in on stretchers.

According to the official Palestinian news agency Wafa, the military blocked roads within the camp, took over houses and buildings and set up snipers on rooftops.

The Palestinian Health Ministry said at least seven Palestinians were killed and over two dozen injured Monday, three of them critically.

In a separate incident, a 21-year-old Palestinian was killed by Israeli fire near the West Bank city of Ramallah, the ministry said.

Our Palestinian people will not kneel, will not surrender, will not raise the white flag, and will remain steadfast on their land in the face of this brutal aggression, Nabil Abu Rudeineh, a spokesperson for the Palestinian president, said in a statement.

Jordan called for Israel to halt its raids into the West Bank.

The Jenin camp and an adjacent town of the same name have been a flashpoint as Israeli-Palestinian violence escalated since spring 2022.

Israel's foreign minister, Eli Cohen, praised the efforts of the military during an address to foreign journalists and accused archenemy Iran of being behind the violence by funding Palestinian militant groups.

Due to the funds they receive from Iran, the Jenin camp has become a center for terrorist activity, he said, adding that the operation would be conducted in a targeted manner to avoid civilian casualties.

Palestinians reject such claims, saying the violence is a natural response to 56 years of occupation since Israel captured the West Bank in the 1967 Mideast war.

Jenin has long been a bastion for armed struggle against Israel and was a major friction point in the last Palestinian uprising.

In 2002, days after a Palestinian suicide bombing during a large Passover gathering killed 30 people, Israeli troops launched a massive operation in the Jenin camp. For eight days and nights they fought militants street by street, using armored bulldozers to destroy rows of homes, many of which had been booby-trapped.

Retired Brig. Gen. Amir Avivi, who served as a battalion commander in the northern West Bank in 2002, described Monday's operation as a raid in which the army moves in and then withdraws.

But Avivi, who is president and founder of the Israel Defense and Security Forum, a hawkish group of former military commanders, said the size of the force indicated the operation could last for a longer period of time, not just a few hours, but maybe a few days.

Monday's raid came two weeks after another violent confrontation in Jenin and after the military said a pair of rockets were fired from the area last week which landed in the West Bank. The rockets exploded shortly after launch, causing no damage in Israel, but marked an escalation that has raised concerns in Israel.

"There has been a dynamic here around Jenin for the last year, Hecht said, defending Monday's tactics. It's been intensifying all the time.

But there also may have been political considerations at play. Leading members of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu's far-right government, which is dominated by West Bank settlers and their supporters, have been calling for a broader military response to the ongoing violence in the area.

Proud of our heroes on all fronts and this morning especially of our soldiers operating in Jenin, tweeted National Security Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir, an ultranationalist who recently called for Israel to kill thousands of militants if necessary. Praying for their success.

More than 130 Palestinians have been killed this year in the West Bank, part of more than a yearlong spike in violence that has seen some of the worst bloodshed in the area in nearly two decades.

The outburst of violence escalated last year after a spate of Palestinian attacks prompted Israel to step up its raids in the West Bank.

Israel says the raids are meant to beat back militants. The Palestinians say such violence is inevitable in the absence of any political process with Israel and increased West Bank settlement construction and violence by extremist settlers. They see the intensifying Israeli military presence in the area as an entrenchment of Israel's occupation of the territory.

Israel says most of those killed have been militants, but stone-throwing youths protesting the incursions and also people not involved in the confrontations have also been killed.

Palestinian attacks against Israelis since the start of this year have killed 24 people.

Israel captured the West Bank, east Jerusalem and the Gaza Strip in the 1967 Mideast war. The Palestinians seek those territories for their hoped-for independent state. (AP)

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Lahore, Jul 3 (PTI) Pakistan's ousted prime minister Imran Khan on Monday resumed political activities by launching his party's flag hoisting campaign, urging his supporters' full participation in the face of the "fascist" government's oppressive tactics against it.

This is the Pakistan Tehreek-e-Insaf (PTI) party's first political activity after the violent May 9 riots broke out in the country following Khan's arrest in a corruption case. The PTI chief was later released and has been on bail in over 140 cases of terrorism, violence, blasphemy, corruption and murder.

Taking to Twitter, Khan said, "The more they have tried to suppress Pakistan's biggest and the only Federal party, the more people of Pakistan stand with it."

"Let's show the fascists by putting up the PTI flag that nothing will stop us from our mission of Haqeeqi Azadi (real freedom)," Khan tweeted.

The PTI party's official Twitter handle also posted videos showing people "actively participating in the drive."

The federal government led by Prime Minister Shehbaz Sharif of the Pakistan Muslim League-Nawaz (PML-N) has vowed to punish those involved in the anti-government protests under the stringent Army Act.

Although the PTI is anticipating police action against those hoisting its flag, it is ready to face it as well, a party leader told PTI.

"Through this campaign, we will try to break the environment of fear the fascist government and its handlers (establishment) have instilled among the people on the pretext of the May 9 incidents," he said.

More or less, all PTI activists and leaders have gone underground, fearing police and military establishment action and the party anticipates a police crackdown on those hoisting its flag.

Thousands of party workers, including leaders and women, are in jails, mainly in Punjab and Khyber Pakhtunkhwa provinces, for their alleged involvement in vandalising dozens of military and state buildings during the May 9 violence.

The Pakistan Army is currently trying 102 PTI activists under military laws. Khan has been under a kind of house arrest at his Lahore residence, as police do not allow anyone to see him.

Widespread violence erupted in Pakistan after the former premier was arrested by paramilitary personnel inside the Islamabad High Court on May 9. He was later released on bail.

Over 20 military installations and state buildings, including military headquarters in Rawalpindi, were damaged or torched in the violent protests that followed Khan's arrest.

Khan, 70, was ousted from power in April last year after losing a no-confidence vote in his leadership, which he alleged was part of a US-led conspiracy targeting him because of his independent foreign policy decisions on Russia, China and Afghanistan.
Baltimore, Jul 2 (AP) Gunfire erupted at a block party in Baltimore on Sunday  killing two people, wounding 28 and leaving an extensive crime scene that marred the US holiday weekend, police said. Three of the wounded were in critical condition.

Baltimore Police Department Acting Commissioner Richard Worley told reporters there were a total of 30 victims during a press conference at the scene.

The shooting took place just after 12:30 am at a block party in the Brooklyn Homes area in the southern part of the city, Worley said.

The shooting comes amid gatherings around the country leading up to the July Fourth holiday. Elsewhere, a shooting in Kansas left seven people with gunshot wounds and two more victims hospitalized after being trampled as people rushed out of a nightclub early Sunday morning, police there said.

In Baltimore, nine victims were transported by ambulance and 20 victims walked into area hospitals with injuries from the shooting, Worley said.

Nineteen of those victims were treated in the emergency department at MedStar Harbor Hospital, according to hospital spokesperson Debra Schindler. Nine of the critically injured patients were stabilised and transferred to Baltimore trauma centers. All but one of the 19 victims sent to MedStar have been released.

As is protocol following any walk-in victim of violence, the hospital went on immediate lock-down to secure the campus and ensure the safety of all patients and associates," Schindler said in a statement. "Multiple critically injured patients were evaluated and triaged simultaneously by clinical staff, while hospital security managed the throng of family members that gathered in and outside of the emergency department.

Meanwhile, a dozen victims were sent to be treated at R Adams Cowley Shock Trauma Center and four others were sent to the University of Maryland Medical Center's Pediatric Emergency Department, according to University of Maryland Medical System spokesman Michael Schwartzberg.

An 18-year-old woman was found dead at the scene and a 20-year-old man was pronounced dead at a hospital shortly after, police said.

I want those who are responsible to hear me, and hear me very clearly, Mayor Brandon Scott said at the scene.

We will not stop until we find you, and we will find you. Until then, I hope that every single breath you take, that you think about the lives that you took, think about the lives that you impacted here tonight.

No arrests were made immediately after the shooting. Scott asked anyone with information to come forward to assist investigators locate the cowards who were responsible for the shooting.

Gov. Wes Moore said his heart breaks for these victims, their families, and the Baltimore community that is coping with the loss.

Maryland has had enough of watching gun violence continue to ravage our state and our nation, Moore said in a statement. The fact that these horrific shootings continue to take place is abominable. We as a state will continue to do everything we can to prevent senseless acts of violence like the one we saw last night.

Authorities said the crime scene was extensive and that it will take some time for detectives to work it.

Treat this as if it were your family, Scott said. How you would want people to treat it if you were mourning, if this was your neighborhood, if this was an event in your community that this happened at. We want you to treat it that way because that's how we have to treat each other as Baltimoreans.

Hours after the shooting, a number of officers remained on the scene, working behind police tape amid densely packed two-story housing blocks. Folding tables and plastic cups were scattered around the scene, apparently left behind when people ran from the gunshots.

Lakell Nelson said there had been several false alarms of people mistaking the sounds of fireworks for gunfire earlier in the night while she was at the block party. However, by the time she was getting to her car, the actual shooting began.

The shots were just going on and on and on, she said.

That's when two young women approached her and said they'd been shot, with one woman showing how a bullet had gone through her shorts.

Nelson said she told the women to get in the car and she sped through red lights to get to the nearest hospital.

When I pulled up to the door of the hospital, my car was almost getting ready to be inside the hospital, because I was determined to get those babies in that hospital, Nelson said.

The violence comes as federal prosecutors in Baltimore this week touted their efforts to reduce violent crime in the city. Police have reported nearly 130 homicides and close to 300 shootings so far this year, though that's down from the same time last year. Authorities have vowed to crack down aggressively on repeat violent offenders.

A police union official said in an email Sunday there were no officers specifically assigned to the gathering.

There were only three officers assigned to the Brooklyn area of Baltimore City's Southern District. This is a large area, and to police it safely and effectively you need about seven to eight officers per shift, said Mike Mancuso, president of the Baltimore City Fraternal Order of Police Lodge 3.

Mancuso said about 2,800 officers are needed to effectively police the city, but staffing is down to about 2,100.(AP) RUP

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London, Jul 3 (AP) Sick of being ignored by far-away politicians, officials on Scotland's remote Orkney Islands are mulling a drastic solution: rejoining Norway, the Scandinavian country that gave them away as a royal wedding dowry more than 550 years ago.

Orkney Islands Council is due to debate options for alternative models of governance on Tuesday, including exploring the Nordic connections of the archipelago, which lies about 10 miles (16 kilometers) north of the Scottish mainland.

Council leader James Stockan said the islands have been failed by both the Scottish government, 300 miles (480 kilometers) to the south in Edinburgh, and the UK government in the even more distant London.

On the street in Orkney, people come up and say to me, When are we going to pay back the dowry, when are we going back to Norway?' There is a huge affinity and a huge deep cultural relationship there, Stockan told the BBC. This is exactly the moment to explore what is possible.

Long an impoverished area dependent on the unpredictable fishing industry, Orkney prospered after large reserves of oil were discovered offshore in the 1960s. The islands, with a population of about 22,000, also have a burgeoning wind-power industry and a growing tourism sector.

But Stockan said Orkney gets less support from the Scottish government than other island communities in Shetland or the Hebrides, and is desperately in need of new ferries to keep its many islands connected.

Every time we've been denied. We've been asked to wait, we have been asked to do another study, he said.

We do look with envy at the communities in Norway," he added, "where there's a completely different approach to the remote and rural areas.

A report accompanying Stockan's motion suggests Orkney should investigate options including a status like the Faroe Islands, a self-governing dependency of Denmark that lies between Scotland and Iceland.

Another option is emulating Britain's Crown Dependencies such as the Channel Islands, which are largely self-governing tax havens.

The report acknowledges that any constitutional change is a long way off, and would likely require a combination of petitions, referenda and legislation by the Scottish and UK governments.

Along with the Shetland islands even further to the north, Orkney was under Norwegian and Danish control for centuries until 1472 when the islands were taken by the Scottish crown as part of Margaret of Denmark's wedding dowry to King James III of Scotland.

In a place where we have 5,000-year-old houses on the landscape, that's pretty recent history for us, said Leslie Burgher, an architect who serves as Norway's honorary consul in Orkney.

Burgher said there are still strong cultural and personal connections between Norway and Orkney, where a parade every May 17 marks Norwegian Constitution Day. The Norse influence is widely evident, from place names and personal names to St. Magnus Cathedral, a fabulous piece of medieval architecture built in Norse times.

But the British government poured cold water on the idea of letting Orkney forge new links with Norway. Prime Minister Rishi Sunak's spokesman, Max Blain, said there was no mechanism to change the status of Orkney.

Fundamentally we are stronger as one United Kingdom. We have no plans to change that, he said. (AP) PY

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Beijing, Jul 3 (AP) The European Union's climate chief on Monday expressed concern over the expansion of China's coal industry, with the building of new coal-fired plants.

At a conference in Beijing, Frans Timmermans said that while China is forging ahead with plans to expand its use of renewable resources such as wind and solar energy, the country has also been constructing an ever-growing number of coal-fired plants in the past few years.

And that seems to be in a contradiction and it is in contradiction, said Timmermans. But at the same time, I do understand the anxiety caused by potential blackouts.

China is the world's biggest and fastest-growing producer of renewable energy. It aims to turn one-third of its total power supply renewable by 2025.

As more cities are experiencing sweltering temperatures this summer, the country may face power shortages and challenges to electricity grids, similar to what happened last year. At the same time, water shortages have led to reductions in hydropower generation.

China's climate envoy Xie Zhenhua attended the conference and presented a commemorative plate to Timmermans, who is on a two-day visit to China for the EU-China High-level Environment and Climate Dialogue.

Official plans called for boosting coal production capacity by 300 million tons last year, at least the third consecutive year of growth.

Although China is one of the biggest investors in wind and solar, anxious leaders called for more coal-fired power after economic growth plunged and shortages caused blackouts and factory shutdowns. Russia's attack on Ukraine added to the anxiety that foreign oil and coal supplies might be disrupted.

China is the top producer and consumer of coal. Global trends hinge on what Beijing does.

The Communist Party has rejected binding emissions commitments, citing its economic development needs. Beijing has avoided joining governments that promised to phase out the use of coal-fired power.

China has said carbon emissions will peak by 2030 and the country will become carbon neutral by 2060 by planting trees and through other offsets.

Some European and American officials have called on China to adopt more ambitious targets. China accounts for 26.1 per cent of global emissions, more than double the US share of 12.8 per cent. (AP) PY

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Saudi Arabia announced on Monday it was extending a voluntary oil production cut of one million barrels per day, in a bid to prop up slumping prices.

The cut which first took effect for July will continue in August and "can be extended", the official Saudi Press Agency (SPA) reported, citing an energy ministry source.

"The source confirmed that this additional voluntary cut comes to reinforce the precautionary efforts made by OPEC+ countries with the aim of supporting the stability and balance of oil markets," SPA said.

The move leaves daily production by the world's biggest oil exporter at approximately nine million bpd.

Announcing the cut following last month's meeting of oil producers, Saudi Energy Minister Prince Abdulaziz bin Salman noted that it was potentially "extendable".

It followed a decision in April by several OPEC+ members to slash production voluntarily by more than one million bpd -- a surprise move that briefly buttressed prices but failed to bring about lasting recovery.

Saudi Arabia is counting on high oil prices to fund an ambitious reform agenda that could shift its economy away from fossil fuels.

Analysts say the kingdom needs oil to be priced at $80 per barrel to balance its budget, which is well above recent averages.

Meanwhile, Russia, which is part of the OPEC+ alliance of oil producers with Riyadh, said Monday that Moscow will voluntarily cut oil exports by 500,000 barrels per day, building on previously announced production cuts.

"As part of efforts to ensure that the oil market remains balanced, Russia will voluntarily reduce its oil supply in the month of August by 500,000 barrels per day, by cutting its exports by that quantity to global markets," Alexander Novak, the Russian deputy prime minister responsible for energy policy, said in comments carried by Russian news agencies.

Novak's announcement Monday comes on the back of cuts to Russian oil production this year by the same volume as part of Moscow's response to Western sanctions levied over the conflict in Ukraine.

Oil producers are grappling with falling prices and high market volatility, continued fallout from the Russian invasion of Ukraine and China's faltering economic recovery.

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London, Jul 3 (AP) Sick of being ignored by far-away politicians, officials on Scotland's remote Orkney Islands are mulling a drastic solution: rejoining Norway, the Scandinavian country that gave them away as a royal wedding dowry more than 550 years ago.

Orkney Islands Council is due to debate options for alternative models of governance on Tuesday, including exploring the Nordic connections of the archipelago, which lies about 10 miles (16 kilometers) north of the Scottish mainland.

Council leader James Stockan said the islands had been failed by both the Scottish government, 300 miles (480 kilometers) to the south in Edinburgh, and the UK government in even more distant London.

On the street in Orkney, people come up and say to me, When are we going to pay back the dowry? When are we going back to Norway?' There is a huge affinity and a huge deep cultural relationship there, Stockan told the BBC. This is exactly the moment to explore what is possible.

Norway kept a diplomatic distance from the debate.

This is a domestic and constitutional British matter, the Norwegian Foreign Ministry said in a statement to The Associated Press. We have no view regarding this motion.

Long an impoverished area dependent on the unpredictable fishing industry, Orkney prospered after large reserves of oil were discovered offshore in the 1960s. The islands, with a population of about 22,000, also have a burgeoning wind-power industry and a growing tourism sector.

But Stockan said Orkney gets less support from the Scottish government than other island communities in Shetland or the Hebrides, and is desperately in need of new ferries to keep its many islands connected.

Every time we've been denied. We've been asked to wait, we have been asked to do another study, he said.

We do look with envy at the communities in Norway," he added, "where there's a completely different approach to the remote and rural areas.

A report accompanying Stockan's motion suggests Orkney should investigate options including a status like the Faroe Islands, a self-governing dependency of Denmark that lies between Scotland and Iceland.

Another option is emulating Britain's Crown Dependencies such as the Channel Islands, which are largely self-governing tax havens.

The report acknowledges that any constitutional change is a long way off, and would likely require a combination of petitions, referendums and legislation by the Scottish and UK governments.

The governments in Edinburgh and London are themselves at loggerheads over the Scottish administration's ambition to make Scotland an independent country outside the United Kingdom.

Along with the Shetland islands even further to the north, Orkney was under Norwegian and Danish control for centuries until 1472 when the islands were taken by the Scottish crown as part of Margaret of Denmark's wedding dowry to King James III of Scotland.

In a place where we have 5,000-year-old houses on the landscape, that's pretty recent history for us, said Leslie Burgher, an architect who serves as Norway's honorary consul in Orkney.

Burgher said there were still strong cultural and personal connections between Norway and Orkney, where a parade every May 17 marks Norwegian Constitution Day. He said the Norse influence was widely evident, from place names and personal names to St. Magnus Cathedral, a fabulous piece of medieval architecture built in Norse times.

Norwegian Crown Prince Haakon and Crown Princess Mette-Marit paid an official visit to the Orkney Islands in 2017.

The British government poured cold water on the idea of letting Orkney forge new links with Norway. Prime Minister Rishi Sunak's spokesman, Max Blain, said there was no mechanism to change the status of Orkney.

Fundamentally we are stronger as one United Kingdom. We have no plans to change that, he said. (AP) PY

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Nanterre, Jul 3 (AP) Crowds gathered at town halls across France on Monday to show solidarity with local governments targeted in six nights of violence touched off by the fatal police shooting of a 17-year-old in suburban Paris.

The unrest, which appeared to be easing on Sunday night, was driven by a mainly teenage backlash in the suburbs and urban housing projects against a French state that many young people with immigrant roots say routinely discriminates against them.

In all, 99 town halls have been attacked in the violence, the Interior Ministry said, including a weekend attempt to ram the home of one mayor with an explosives-laden car.

There has been little in the way of organized protests beyond a march last week for Nahel, the 17-year-old of Algerian descent who was killed on Tuesday in the Paris suburb of Nanterre. Instead, the anger has manifested in young people targeting police, with both sides using increasingly aggressive tactics.

The average age of the 3,354 people arrested over the past week was 17, the interior minister said. But the problem of discrimination strikes all ages, according to Ahmed Djamai, a 58-year-old born in Nanterre who attended Monday's solidarity gathering at the town hall.

Djamai said police stopped him not long ago and demanded a residence permit, even though he neither has nor needs one as a French citizen. He said the problem won't go away even as the violence subsides.

Our second, third and fourth-generation children face the same problem when they go out to get a job, when they go to prestigious universities, he said.

"They're not accepted. So even now, the problem is social, but it's also one of identity. It goes much deeper than that.

French President Emmanuel Macron was meeting Tuesday with mayors of 220 towns from across the country. Across France, 34 buildings  many of them linked to the government  were attacked from Sunday into Monday, along with 297 vehicles.

Macron last week blamed social media for the spread of the unrest and called on parents to take responsibility for their teenagers. Justice Minister Eric Dupond-Moretti told France Inter radio that parents who abdicated that responsibility, either through disinterest or deliberately, would be prosecuted.

The anger has descended into attacks against symbols of the state, widespread arson and nighttime looting. About 45,000 officers were deployed nationwide overnight.

We know all too well that this violence penalizes first and foremost the children, the people and the families of our neighbourhoods and all of the residents of our city, said Nanterre Mayor Patrick Jarry.

We want justice to be done for Nahel and for the appeal by the family and notably by his grandmother for an end to the violence and destruction to be heard and respected.

A car packed with explosives struck the home of the mayor of the Paris suburb of L'Hay-les-Roses over the weekend, an unusually personal attack that authorities said would be prosecuted as an attempted homicide. The attack prompted an outpouring of support for local governments in many towns where the city hall is often literally central to public life.

L'Hay-les-Roses Mayor Vincent Jeanbrun said his wife and one of his children were injured and criticized the government for doing too little, too late  and said blaming social media or parents was papering over a bigger problem.

The base ingredients are still there. For several years now, all summer long, explosives go off that keep people from sleeping, that make them crazy, he told BFM television on Monday. We are powerless summer after summer.

In all, according to the Interior Ministry, there were 157 arrests overnight out of a total of 3,354 since last Tuesday, and two law enforcement stations were attacked, among other damage.

The interior minister said children as young as 12 or 13 had been detained for attacking law enforcement and setting fires.

In the Paris suburb of Clichy-sous-Bois, where a fire also struck the town hall, residents over the weekend said anger had simmered for years and many said the government had done little to help them.

Young people are afraid to die by the hands of police. They are hopeless. They are bored and they need something to distract them so they don't hang out in the streets, said Samba Seck, 39.(AP) RUP

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Mumbai, Jul 3 (PTI) The Directorate of Revenue Intelligence (DRI) seized 500 grams of cocaine worth Rs 5 crore from the consignment of wooden showpieces that had arrived from Costa Rica at the courier terminal in Mumbai and arrested two persons, including a woman, an official said on Monday.

The consignment was seized by the DRI's Mumbai zonal unit on June 28 and a probe found it was imported on a vague address and had a mobile number, the official said.

"Small pouches containing cocaine were concealed in the base of the wooden articles to avoid detection by Customs. There were 56 pouches cumulatively containing 500 grams of cocaine worth Rs 5 crore," he said.

"The DRI team called the mobile number and it was answered by a girl who claimed she was not aware of any such parcel. The team then checked KYC documents and got another mobile number. The person who answered it accepted he was the consignee," the official said.

He was held when he came to collect the consignment and his questioning led to the arrest of his woman associate, the official added.

Incriminating evidence has been found in the mobile phone data of the two accused and both have been remanded in DRI custody, the official informed.
Satara, Jul 3 (PTI) Nationalist Congress Party (NCP) chief Sharad Pawar on Monday rejected speculation that his nephew Ajit Pawar's rebellion has his blessings.

Addressing a press conference here, Sharad Pawar also said he has launched a statewide tour to strengthen the NCP and boost the confidence of party workers, unfazed by actions of a few leaders.

On Sunday, Ajit Pawar led a vertical split in the NCP to become the deputy chief minister. Eight other NCP leaders were also sworn in as ministers in the Eknath Shinde-BJP government.

Asked whether Ajit Pawar's rebellion on Sunday had his blessings, the NCP chief said, "It is a mean thing to say. Only those with a mean and low intellect can say this."

"I have set out on a tour of the state and galvanize the cadre. They should not feel disillusioned with what some leaders have done," Sharad Pawar said.
Bhopal, Jul 3 (PTI) The political developments in Maharashtra have almost finished the opposition in that state, Madhya Pradesh Chief Minister Shivraj Singh Chouhan said on Monday.

On Sunday, Ajit Pawar led a vertical split in the Nationalist Congress Party and joined the Shiv Sena-Bharatiya Janata Party government in the neighbouring state.

Ajit Pawar was made deputy chief minister, while the other eight MLAs were sworn in as ministers in the Eknath Shinde government.

"It is the result of one's own deeds and acts. The opposition is almost over in Maharashtra. After Shiv Sena, the NCP too has gone and the country has stood behind Modi ji. Let's see what happens at other places," Chouhan told reporters.

He also pointed to Bihar and said the coming together of opposition parties was a "thagbandhan" (group of wrongdoers) and comprised those who were huddling together as they fear getting caught.

He said "good people" in such alliances become restless and leave in the national interest.
Kolkata, Jul 3 (PTI) A section of academics of West Bengal on Monday voiced concern over the current state of affairs in several universities and called upon the state government and Raj Bhavan to amicably resolve the impasse in the interest of the students and guardians.

Pro-VC of Kalyani University, Prof Goutam Paul, said the WB College and University Administration Rules 2019 envisage that communication from the office of the governor to the VC or vice-versa should be routed through the higher education department.

"Due to the absence of full-term VCs in any of the 31 state universities, the interest of lakhs of students are affected. It is detrimental to the growth of education and research in the higher educational institutions," Paul told a press conference.

Governor CV Ananda Bose, who is also the chancellor, recently appointed senior teachers to look after the affairs of 13 state-run universities.

"It is unfortunate that none of these varsities have even interim VCs as the hon'ble Chancellor has authorised some senior professors to exercise the power and function of VCs in 13 universities" and this has been contested by the state higher education department, Jadavpur University professor Omprakash Mishra said.

Mishra, a former VC of North Bengal University, said it is not clear when the search committee would be formed for appointment of the vice-chancellors of the 31 varsities.

Paul said he felt as an academician that the final decision on a bill passed by the West Bengal Assembly to make the chief minister the chancellor of state universities should be cleared by the governor in the interest of smooth functioning of the universities.

Meanwhile, in another press meet, several organisations of college and university teachers claimed that there have been attacks on the autonomy of universities since the Trinamool Congress came to power in the state and that led to such a situation.

WBCUTA President Subhoday Dasgupta claimed that the process of recruiting permanent VCs has been stalled in the past decade and VCs are not being appointed as per UGC regulations in state varsities any more.

He said a joint movement by all "fraternal university teacher bodies" will be launched soon as the functioning of state universities has been affected, as two constitutional bodies (the government and the Raj Bhavan) seem to be in conflict.

Jadavpur University Teachers Association General Secretary Partha Pratim Roy said while the state has recommended implementing the four-year honours course at the UG level from this year, the stalemate is seriously harming students.

"We wonder if this could be a conspiracy to privatize education," he added.

To fill up the vacancies in the post of permanent VCs in 31 state universities, where the term of VCs had expired in April-May, the governors office in early June issued a list appointing interim VCs in 11 varsities.

Education Minister Bratya Basu had then said the Raj Bhavans decision is unilateral and violative of the law. He had also urged the professors appointed as interim VCs not to take charge as asked by the governor creating an unprecedented situation.
New Delhi, Jul 3 (PTI) The CBI has filed a charge sheet against Bihar Deputy Chief Minister Tejashwi Yadav, his father and former railways minister Lalu Prasad and mother and former chief minister Rabri Devi in connection with the land for jobs scam case, officials said Monday.

The charge sheet, which also names 14 others, is the second charge sheet in the case. It has been filed on the basis of documents and evidence that surfaced after the first charge sheet was submitted in the case, they said.

Besides members of the Yadav clan, the CBI has also named AK Infosystems and several middlemen in the case, they said.

The charge sheet was filed in a special CBI court.

The officials said the second charge sheet was filed as the alleged roles of the accused could not be completed by the time the initial report was filed.

The CBI has alleged that favourite candidates were appointed in the railways in violation of norms and procedures, without any advertisement or public notice. during Lalu Prasad's tenure as minister in the UPA government from 2004 to 2009,

The agency claims that substitutes from Patna were appointed in various zonal railways located in Mumbai, Jabalpur, Kolkata, Jaipur and Hazipur.

As a quid pro quo, the candidates, either directly or through their immediate family members, allegedly sold land to Lalu Prasad's family members at highly-discounted rates.
New Delhi, Jul 3 (PTI) Lt Governor V K Saxena has terminated the services of around 400 'specialists' appointed by the AAP government in different departments, officials said on Monday, a decision that could trigger a fresh round of confrontation between the ruling party and the LG.

They were engaged in a "non-transparent manner" and without the mandatory approvals of the competent authority, the LG office said in a statement while alleging several irregularities in the recruitment process.

The appointments also did not follow the mandatory reservation policy for SC, ST and OBC candidates prescribed by the Department of Personnel and Training, it added.

No immediate reaction was available from the Kejriwal government.

"Delhi LG, VK Saxena has agreed to the proposal of the Services department to immediately terminate the services of about 400 private persons engaged as Fellows/Associate Fellows/Advisors / Dy Advisors/Specialists/Senior Research Officers/Consultants, etc by Delhi government in its various departments and agencies," the LG office statement said.

The Services department found that several of such engaged private persons did not even fulfil the educational and work eligibility criteria as laid down in the advertisements issued for the recruitment on the posts, it said.

The administrative departments concerned also "did not verify" the veracity of work experience certificates submitted by these private persons, which were found to be "fudged and manipulated" in many cases, charged the statement.

The LG accepted the proposal of the Services department that all Delhi government departments, Corporations, Boards, Societies and other autonomous bodies will immediately terminate the engagement of these private persons which was done without seeking approval of the Lt Governor who is the competent authority in the matter, it said.

However, if any administrative department finds it appropriate to continue such engagements, it may propose detailed cases with proper justification and forward them to the Services Department for submission to the LG for consideration and approval, it said.

It was found by the Services department that some departments like Environment, Archaeology, Delhi Archives, Women and Child Development and Industries did not obtain approval of the competent authority before engaging private persons, it said.

The Services department had compiled the information received from 23 departments and agencies of the Delhi government that engaged private persons as "specialists".

During the scrutiny by the Services department, it was found that 69 persons were engaged in five departments of Archaeology, Environment, Delhi Archives, Women and Child Development and Industries without the approval of the competent authority.

Also, 13 Boards, autonomous bodies which engaged 155 persons, also did not take the necessary approval and no information was provided to the Services department about the engagements of 187 persons in Delhi Assembly Research Centre (DARC), Dialogue and Development Commission of Delhi (DDCD) and Department of Planning, about the issue of approval of the competent authority, the statement said.

Eleven persons were engaged in 4 departments - Health and Family Welfare, Food Safety, Indira Gandhi Hospital and Transport- with the approval of the Lieutenant Governor.

Saxena has also noted that the Cabinet note pertaining to the Chief Minister Urban Leader Fellowship Programme, whereby 36 fellows and 14 associate fellows were engaged, was approved in 2018 and in 2021 by the competent authority.

The Lieutenant Governor directed that all concerned should comply with the Services departments instructions failing which action including departmental proceedings may be initiated against the administrative secretary concerned, added the statement.
New Delhi, Jul 3 (PTI) The Delhi Traffic Police on Monday issued an advisory stating that elaborate arrangements have been made in view of upcoming Kanwar Yatra and cautioned that congestion is expected at several places due to the movement of Kanwarias.

The Kanwar Yatra will commence on Tuesday. It will culminate on August 15 as holy Ganga water will be offered to Lord Shiva. A large number of Kanwariyas reach Delhi every year and some of them go to Haryana and Rajasthan via Delhi borders. This year the number is expected to be around 15 to 20 lakh, the advisory stated.

The devotees carrying kanwars will pass through several routes, it said.

"The Delhi Traffic Police has made elaborate arrangements to segregate the movement of Kanwarias and other road users and to minimise inconvenience to the general public and devotees.

"The devotees and road users are advised to follow the traffic rules and obey the directions of policemen on duty. During this period of Kanwarias movement, traffic violations will be checked by on-the-spot prosecution and by photography/videography of violations which will be followed by prosecution," the advisory said.

Heavy transport vehicles (HTV) will be diverted by the UP Police from Mohan Nagar towards NH-24 and no such traffic will be allowed towards Wazirabad Road via Bhopura and/or towards GT Road via Apsara Border. The HTVs except city buses will not be allowed on GT Road towards Shahdara and Wazirabad Road, it said.

Heavy commercial transport vehicles, except city buses, coming from GT Karnal Road at Outer Ring Road will be diverted straight towards NH-24 and will not be allowed to move on Wazirabad Road and GT Road towards Shahdara. Such vehicles coming from Loni Road (Shahdara side) will be diverted on Wazirabad Road to exit from Outer Ring Road, the advisory stated.

During these days, due to the movement of Kanwarias and setting up of Kanwar camps on road sides, traffic congestion/obstruction is experienced at several places. Generally heavy traffic congestion occurs on Rani Jhansi Road from Baraf Khana Chowk to fire station, Boulevard Road and at Azad Market Chowk, Gokalpuri Flyover, 66 Foota Road, Maujpur Chowk, Badarpur T- Point, Mathura Road, it said.

Similarly, traffic congestion is experienced on NH8 from Dhaula Kuan Metro Station up to Rajokri Border. Due to diversion of vehicular traffic bound for Apsara Border and Maharajpur Border to Ghazipur, by UP Police, there will be congestion on NH24 as well, the advisory said.

"In view of the upcoming #KanwarYatra2023, a meeting with stakeholders, civil administration & organizers was held in North-East District, wherein they were briefed about their role, security measures, do's & don'ts and for better coordination," DCP northeast district tweeted.
Jodhpur, Jul 3 (PTI) Following repeated complaints of rats gnawing feet of patients in the psychiatry department of the MDM Hospital here, the administration on Monday set up an inquiry committee to look into the matter.

The family members of at least four mentally ill patients complained about similar incidents in the past week, prompting the Mathura Das Mathur (MDM) Hospital administration to intervene.

We have constituted a committee, which will first ascertain if the injuries sustained by the patients in the psychiatry department have been caused by rats or due to any other reason, Dilip Kachhwaha, Principal and Controller of SN Medical College and associated group of hospitals in Jodhpur, said.

Even as necessary steps will be taken based on the report, the hospital administration has been directed to initiate action against Rajasthan Pest Control, the agency responsible for pest control in the hospital, Kachhwaha said.

Stating that there are risks involved in pesticide spray in the psychiatry ward considering the medical condition of the patients, the administration said it has decided to evacuate the ward.

The MDM hospital, which is Jodhpur division's largest government hospital, has become a home to rats with ongoing construction work and food waste littered on the floor providing a conducive habitat to the rodents.

Owing to the unhygienic conditions and open pits and craters, the population of rats at the hospital has been constantly increasing but there has been no action by the pest control agency, nor the administration, hospital sources said.

Referring to the latest incident, the head of the psychiatry department said he had warned the administration about the issue of the increasing rat population in the ward.
Egyptian-Scottish classical duo the Ayoub Sisters are scheduled to perform at King Charles III's coronation in Edinburgh on Wednesday.

We are delighted to share that we have been invited by HM King Charles III to perform at his coronation in Edinburgh next week, wrote the Ayoub Sisters on Facebook on Saturday.

The ceremony is part of Royal Week, with the King and Queen undertaking several engagements in Scotland, and will be broadcast live on BBC One. Tune in on Wednesday 5th July at 1:30pm to watch the celebration unfold, they added.

The Ayoub Sisters have taken the international music scene by storm since their debut at the Royal Albert Hall in 2016. Laura Ayoub plays the violin  performing on an 1810 J. Gagliano  and Sarah Ayoub masters the cello. Both play the piano.

The internationally renowned duo were discovered by producer Mark Ronson.

Their young, albeit sparkling, career has led them to sign a contract with Decca Records, one of the UKs biggest record labels playing at the BRITS and the BAFTAs. Their album topped the Official Classical Artist Albums Chart.

The duo explore many musical genres, starting from classical music to Scottish traditional repertoire, topping it with captivating arrangements of pop, funk, and world music.

Their virtuosity and creativity have taken them to many prestigious halls in the UK (the Royal Albert Hall, Royal Festival Hall, London Palladium) and the rest of Europe, the Middle East, and Asia.

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New Delhi, Jul 3 (PTI) The Supreme Court on Monday sought response of the Delhi Police on a plea of AAP MLA Amanatullah Khan challenging a decision of the city police to declare him as a "bad character".

A bench of Justices Surya Kant and Dipankar Dutta issued notice on the plea of Khan in which he has challenged the order of the Delhi High Court dismissing his plea against the decision of the city police.

The counsel appearing for Khan termed it as an illegal action of history sheeting the petitioner and labelling him as a bad character.

On January 19, the high court had dismissed a plea of Khan against the decision of the city police to declare him as a "bad character".

The high court had, however, granted liberty to make a representation before the authorities concerned to remove the bad character tag.

The Delhi Police had declared Khan, the Aam Aadmi Party MLA from Okhla, a bad character last year.

Khan's lawyer had contended before the high court that the authorities have "acted in absolutely malafide manner" and claimed the replica of the history sheet, which is a confidential document, was shared on social media by a spokesperson for a rival political party to "malign" his image.

The Delhi Police had argued that due procedure was followed by the competent authorities to arrive at the decision.

They had contended "sufficient material" was not placed before the court to prove malafide on their part.

Police said applicable rules were duly followed by the authorities and the decision was arrived at in view of the material on record and after application of mind.

The proposal for declaring Khan as a bad character was sent on March 28, last year by the Jamia Nagar police station in Southeast district and approved on March 30, 2022.

A total of 18 FIRs have been registered against Khan, the document had stated.

According to police, a person who is involved in multiple criminal cases, including murder and attempt to murder, and can disturb peace in an area, can be designated a bad character.
New Delhi, Jul 3 (PTI) The Supreme Court on Monday slammed the Delhi government for expressing its inability to contribute funds for construction of the Regional Rapid Transit System (RRTS) project and directed it to furnish details of funds spent on advertisements in the last three financial years.

The funds were meant for construction of the RRTS stretch that will connect the national capital with Rajasthan and Haryana.

A bench comprising Justice S K Kaul and Justice Sudhanshu Dhulia directed the AAP government to file an affidavit enumerating details of funds within two weeks.

The direction came after the counsel for the Delhi government told the bench that there was paucity of funds and expressed inability to provide monetary assistance.

"You want us to get into what funds you are spending where. All funds for advertisement shall be diverted for this project. You want this kind of order? You are asking for it," the court said.

"The Delhi government has expressed its inability to contribute funds for common project. Since paucity of funds is an impediment in this project, we call upon the NCT of Delhi to file an affidavit setting forth the funds utilised for advertisement as the project is of national importance. Details may be furnished for last financial years," the bench said.
New Delhi, Jul 3 (PTI) A special judge here on Monday gave AAP MLAs Akhilesh Pati Tripathi and Sanjeev Jha the nominal sentence of 'till rising of the court' for being part of a mob that attacked policemen at Burari police station in north Delhi in 2015.

A given the Rising of the court sentence is not allowed to leave the court till it concludes for the day.

Special Judge Geetanjli Goel passed the directions while upholding a magisterial court order which convicted both the politicians in September 7, 2022.

The judge, however, modified the six-month jail term awarded to Tripathi and three months to Jha.

The Metropolitan Magistrate had awarded the jail term on January 5, 2023.

While modifying the jail term, the court also imposed a fine of Rs 10,000 on each in the case.

"Considering the facts and circumstances of the case and the totality of the facts, it would be appropriate that the appellants are sentenced to imprisonment till the rising of the court for the offence under Section 332 (voluntarily causing hurt) of IPC, read with Section 149 (every member of unlawful assembly guilty of offence committed in prosecution of common object) of IPC, the judge said.

Akhilesh Pati Tripathi is the MLA from Model Town while Sanjeev Jha represents Burari.

The metropolitan magistrate had also convicted 15 others in a case of rioting and causing hurt to police personnel at a police station.

They were found guilty of offences under Sections 147 (rioting), 186 (obstructing public servant in discharge of public functions), 332 (voluntarily causing hurt to deter public servant from his duty), and 149 (every member of unlawful assembly guilty of offence committed in the prosecution of common object) of IPC.

According to the prosecution, the incident took place on the night of February 20, 2015, when a mob attacked the police personnel at Burari police station and damaged property.

The mob was demanding the custody of two men "allegedly to beat them up" arrested and brought to the police station.

The police had tried to pacify the crowd but the MLAs joined the mob and attacked them and resorted to stone pelting, the prosecutor had told the court.
(This story has not been edited by THE WEEK and is auto-generated from PTI)
Bhopal, Jul 3 (PTI) With less then 6 months left for the Assembly polls in Madhya Pradesh, the Opposition Congress on Monday held a strategy meeting here where it drew up a plan to take on the BJP government and make corruption a key election plank.

Congress general secretary KC Venugopal, Madhya Pradesh Congress chief Kamal Nath and AICC in-charge of MP Jai Prakash Agrawal chaired the meeting of state's political affairs committee which lasted for two hours.

During the meeting, party leaders primarily focused on making corruption a key election issue to take on the Shivraj Singh Chouhan-led BJP government, Congress sources said.

Senior party leaders of the state attended the meeting.

According to the sources, the Congress is going to raise corruption, price rise and state's rising debt, among other issues, vociferously in run-up to the elections likely to be held by the year-end.

Corruption is going to be our major poll plank, a senior Congress leader told PTI.

Emerging from the meeting held at Nath's official bungalow, Venugopal expressed confidence his party would form the next government in MP.

Giving details of the gathering, Congress MLA and former state minister Jitu Patwari told reporters that party leaders resolved to work unitedly to unseat the "corrupt" BJP government in Madhya Pradesh.

Patwari claimed the BJP government, which assumed office in March 2020 after the collapse of the Kamal Nath-led Congress dispensation, had "failed" on all counts and people are eagerly waiting to vote it out.

The last Assembly polls held on November 28, 2018, threw up a hung Assembly, with the Congress emerging as the single largest party with 114 seats in the 230-member House. The BJP won 109 seats.

The Congress, after 15 years in Opposition, formed a coalition government under Kamal Nath, but it fell in March 2020 after several MLAs loyal to Union minister Jyotiraditya Scindia resigned and joined the BJP, paving the way for Shivraj Singh Chouhan to return as chief minister.
Baghpat (UP), Jul 3 (PTI) Rashtriya Lok Dal (RLD) president Jayant Chaudhary on Monday said any discussion on a Uniform Civil Code (UCC) now is "wrong" as its "structure" is not known yet, but asserted that men and women should get equal rights.

RLD's alliance partner Samajwadi Party has slammed the government over UCC.

"As of now, I do not know its 'swaroop' (structure). Discussing it now is wrong. In modern India, everyone should be given equal rights. Men and women should get equal rights. How the government does this job, this has to be seen," the RLD chief told reporters here when asked to comment on UCC.

Chaudhary has made his remarks on UCC for the first time, said RLD's UP unit chief Ramashis Rai.

A fresh debate on UCC has been ignited after the Law Commission initiated a public consultation process on June 14 by inviting views from all stakeholders, including people and recognised religious organisations, on the politically sensitive issue.

Implementation of a UCC has been part of BJP election manifestos and Prime Minister Narendra Modi while addressing BJP workers in Bhopal last month made a strong push for it, asking how can the country function with dual laws that govern personal matters, and accused the Opposition of using the issue to "mislead and provoke" the Muslim community.

Slamming the Central government over the UCC, Samajwadi Party chief Akhilesh Yadav has said the UCC is being widely talked about since the BJP government has nothing to say on demonetisation and withdrawal of Rs 2000 currency notes from circulation.

The SP-headed opposition alliance in UP that comprises RLD and some other small parties came during the 2022 assembly elections and Yadav has already said they would fight together the general elections next year. PTI CORR NAV SNS

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Cloudy early, then thunderstorms developing this afternoon. High 76F. Winds SE at 5 to 10 mph. Chance of rain 60%..

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Thunderstorms this evening, then skies turning partly cloudy after midnight. Potential for heavy rainfall. Low 66F. Winds SSW at 5 to 10 mph. Chance of rain 80%.




In a last-ditch effort to force an immediate prison sentence on Rabbi Osher Eisemann, prosecutors have asked the New Jersey Supreme Court to take the case of the SCHI founder, hoping they can overturn the now-affirmed ruling that granted him a new trial.

As first reported by Lakewood Alerts, the New Jersey Appellate Division a month ago ruled unanimously that a trial judge was right to toss the convictions and order a new trial, based on newly discovered evidence and the prosecutors violation of the Brady Act. But prosecutors are now asking the states highest court to accept the case and to correct fatal flaws that they say the appellate panel made.

As has been their modus operandi in previous appeals briefs, the states AGs spun a narrative of deceit, shamelessly omitting critical details of the case in order to paint the appellate decision as being ridiculous. For example, the prosecutors wrote that the defense should have spoken to the bookkeeper themselves before trial, and therefore the evidence should not be considered newly discovered. However, they neglected to share the critical point in the judges ruling: that the prosecutors only revealed during the trial which entry was the allegedly criminal one, and thus it was too late for the defense to start tracking down who made that entry. The judge wrote that finding the bookkeeper in the short time period demanded a Herculean effort, something that the prosecutors completely left out of their narrative.

Prosecutors also implied that the defense shouldve guessed which entry they were referring to, something that four judges considered implausible. As the trial judge pointed out, there were 342 ledgers with the same exact prefix to the one that held the allegedly criminal entry, so it was not possible to track it down until the prosecutors revealed it after the onset of the trial.

The defense can now submit a response brief to the prosecutors motion, to argue why the case does not warrant review from the states highest court.

The court only takes about five percent off all cases presented to them each year.

A personal message from Rabbi Osher Eisemann on the seventh anniversary of the Attorney Generals raid of SCHI

June 29, 2016 remains in my memory. On that day, exactly seven years ago, approximately 200 heavily armed agents burst into the SCHI school, as well as my home in Lakewood, setting into motion a saga of ups and downs throughout the years.

I would like to publicly thank Hakadosh Boruch Hu for giving me the strength and siyata dishmaya throughout this time. I would also like to take this opportunity to express my deepest appreciation to the thousands of supporters that stand by me, through davening, good deeds, and monetarily.

Now, seven years later, as the prosecution continues to be relentless and is appealing the enormous win that we bH had in the courts, I would like to channel all the anguish and frustration into something positive that will be a tremendous zechus for me. As you may know, aside from the work at SCHI, I have undertaken a special program during the summer months to help special needs children and their families. Families of special needs children are constantly consumed by the care of their children, and there is a crucial need of respite during the summer months to rejuvenate. As many of you already know, Camp SCHI is currently expanding and is in urgent need of funds.

I am greatly indebted to all those that can help in this colossal undertaking. To join and to see more about Camp SCHI visit causematch.com/rabbieisemann




Israel informed the Biden administration a week ago that it was carrying out a limited operation in Jenin to attack terror nests, Yisrael Hayom reported on Monday.

Israel promised that it would do everything it can to avoid harming innocent civilians.

Due to the heads up, the US hasnt responded yet to the operation.

The report added that due to the operations limited scope, Netanyahu and senior defense officials were able to approve the operation without the approval of the political-security cabinet.

(YWN Israel Desk  Jerusalem)
Chinese investors are snapping up expensive apartments in Busan's upscale Haeundae district as well as Gangnam, Yongsan and Seongsu in Seoul.

The number of foreigners who buy apartments in Korea has surged and Chinese make up by far the biggest group. Some of them show up at realtor's offices with suitcases full of cash, and there are fears that their willingness to splurge could distort market prices.

There appears to have been some kind of viral spur to buying Korean real estate in China. On China's question-and-answer website Zihu, many comments recommend buying apartments in Korea as an ideal investment. They cite the low risk of price falls and ease of management due to proximity.

Amid the current uncontrollable price spiral, some Chinese investors have made a lot of money buying apartments and reselling them.

Korea has seen a 16-fold surge in apartment purchases by Chinese investors over the past decade. According to Supreme Court registry data, the number of high-rise and low-rise apartments and studios sold to Chinese increased from 648 in 2011 to 10,559 last year. Over the same period, the number of residential property being registered in foreigners names surged sixfold from 3,238 to 19,371.

But overall the Chinese only account for 0.6 percent of all homebuyers here.






Crowds gathered at town halls across France Monday to show solidarity with local governments targeted in six nights of violence touched off by the fatal police shooting of a 17-year-old in suburban Paris.

The unrest, which appeared to be easing on Sunday night, was driven by a mainly teenage backlash in the suburbs and urban housing projects against a French state that many young people with immigrant roots say routinely discriminates against them. In all, 99 town halls have been attacked in the violence, the Interior Ministry said, including a weekend attempt to ram the home of one mayor with an explosives-laden car.

There has been little in the way of organized protests beyond a march last week for Nahel, the 17-year-old of Algerian descent who was killed on Tuesday in the Paris suburb of Nanterre. Instead, the anger has manifested in young people targeting police, with both sides using increasingly aggressive tactics.

The average age of the 3,354 people arrested over the past week was 17, the interior minister said. But the problem of discrimination strikes all ages, according to Ahmed Djamai, a 58-year-old born in Nanterre who attended Mondays solidarity gathering at the town hall.

Djamai said police stopped him not long ago and demanded a residence permit, even though he neither has nor needs one as a French citizen. He said the problem wont go away even as the violence subsides.

Our second, third and fourth-generation children face the same problem when they go out to get a job, when they go to prestigious universities, he said. Theyre not accepted. So even now, the problem is social, but its also one of identity. It goes much deeper than that.

French President Emmanuel Macron was meeting Tuesday with mayors of 220 towns from across the country. Across France, 34 buildings  many of them linked to the government  were attacked from Sunday into Monday, along with 297 vehicles.

Macron last week blamed social media for the spread of the unrest and called on parents to take responsibility for their teenagers. Justice Minister Eric Dupond-Moretti told France Inter radio that parents who abdicated that responsibility, either through disinterest or deliberately, would be prosecuted.

The anger has descended into attacks against symbols of the state, widespread arson and nighttime looting. About 45,000 officers were deployed nationwide overnight.

We know all too well that this violence penalizes first and foremost the children, the people and the families of our neighborhoods and all of the residents of our city, said Nanterre Mayor Patrick Jarry. We want justice to be done for Nahel and for the appeal by the family and notably by his grandmother for an end to the violence and destruction to be heard and respected.

A car packed with explosives struck the home of the mayor of the Paris suburb of LHay-les-Roses over the weekend, an unusually personal attack that authorities said would be prosecuted as an attempted homicide. The attack prompted an outpouring of support for local governments in many towns where the city hall is often literally central to public life.

LHay-les-Roses Mayor Vincent Jeanbrun said his wife and one of his children were injured and criticized the government for doing too little, too late  and said blaming social media or parents was papering over a bigger problem.

The base ingredients are still there. For several years now, all summer long, explosives go off that keep people from sleeping, that make them crazy, he told BFM television on Monday. We are powerless summer after summer.

In all, according to the Interior Ministry, there were 157 arrests overnight out of a total of 3,354 since last Tuesday, and two law enforcement stations were attacked, among other damage.

The interior minister said children as young as 12 or 13 had been detained for attacking law enforcement and setting fires.

In the Paris suburb of Clichy-sous-Bois, where a fire also struck the town hall, residents over the weekend said anger had simmered for years and many said the government had done little to help them.

Young people are afraid to die by the hands of police. They are hopeless. They are bored and they need something to distract them so they dont hang out in the streets, said Samba Seck, 39.

(AP)




The head of the Hezbollah party in the Lebanese parliament told Arabic media that Israel should shut up or declare war about the outpost the terror group established inside Israeli territory.

Muhammad Raad told the media that Hezbollah refuses to remove the outpost. The enemy is demanding the removal of the two tents and prefers that the resistance do it because it doesnt want to enter into an undesirable war, he said.

If you dont want war, shut up and retract the demand, he threatened.

He continued by mocking Israels abilities: The days when you could bomb the nuclear reactor in Iraq and not be afraid of anyone are gone. Now you cant move two tents because of the resistance.

Israeli authorities want to avoid escalating the situation on the border by bombing the outpost and have been making efforts via the United States and France to solve the situation via diplomatic means.

Although the UNIFIL peacekeeping force has confirmed that the Hezbollah outpost is in Israeli territory, violating UN Resolution 1701, it lacks the wherewithal to force the terror group to dismantle the outpost and leave Israeli territory.

(YWN Israel Desk  Jerusalem)




An Arab teen terrorist carried out a stabbing attack in the Kiryat Herzog neighborhood of Bnei Brak early Monday evening.

The victim, a 28-year-old Chareidi avreich, was evacuated to Mayanei Hayeshua Hospital in light condition. BChasdei Hashem, he managed to grab the knife as the Arab accosted him, avoiding serious injury.

The terrorist, a 14-year-old resident of Jenin, tried to flee the scene but was caught and arrested by the police.

During his interrogation, he admitted to carrying out the attack as revenge for the IDF operation in Jenin that was launched in the early hours of Monday morning.

       pic.twitter.com/2klhdfL0t6   news (@1717Bazz) July 3, 2023

(YWN Israel Desk  Jerusalem)




Clashes broke out between Israel Police officers and anarchists at a protest at Ben-Gurion airport on Monday afternoon.

Hundreds of protesters created chaos at Terminal 3 and refused police orders to leave the area. Police officers began evacuating protesters by force and clashes between the police and the protesters ensued. Four protesters were arrested.

A source at the airport said that they received information that the anarchists purchased discounted plane tickets and came to the airport with luggage in order to create chaos at the boarding gates.

(YWN Israel Desk  Jerusalem)




At least eight terrorists have been killed and 27 were injured after an extensive counterterrorism operation in Jenin was launched by the IDF early Monday morning.

IAF forces first struck Jenin from the air in the early hours of the morning, with IDF soldiers then entering the city in dozens of armored vehicles from several directions. At least 15 airstrikes were carried out by noon on Monday and 20 terror suspects were arrested.

The purpose of the operation, unofficially dubbed Operation Bayit VGan (House and Garden) which has been planned for months and has been delayed twice, is to restore deterrence in the northern Shomron, especially in Jenin, a hotbed of terrorism. According to a senior government official, the operations will last for as long as it needs to.

The IDF reported that one IDF soldier was lightly wounded after being hit by shrapnel by a friendly grenade.

Terror command centers and weapons depots have been struck, including an operational terror command center for the Jenin Brigade located near two UNRWA schools and a medical clinic.

Israel is preparing for the possibility that the operation will trigger the firing of rockets from Gaza.

ICYMI: 52 innocent people were murdered in terrorist attacks between June 2022 and June 2023. 15 people were murdered by the hands of terrorists from Jenin. Israel has a responsibility to protect its citizens. No country would sit idly by in the face of such threat. pic.twitter.com/4IBEQco3o4  Tammy Rahamimoff-Honig (@RahamimoffTamar) July 3, 2023

(YWN Israel Desk  Jerusalem)
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As the sun began its descent on Friday evening, marking the commencement of Shabbat, I felt a sense of anticipation and tranquility shared a public high school student observing his first Shabbos.

The regular mispallelim at Rabbi Weinfelds shul in Flatbush on Avenue L looked on in awe as over 50 public high school seniors joined them for a rousing Carlebach Kabbolos Shabbos (led by one of the renowned BJX chazanim). Local students, from Edward R. Murrow, James Madison, Midwood, Brooklyn Tech, Lincoln, and Fort Hamilton were keeping their very first Shabbos! It may have been the longest Shabbos of the year- but lodging was arranged by the BJX staff for all the students, and they were challenged to be fully Shomer Shabbos and disconnect from all technology. How would a very large group of public high school teens react? Would this epic challenge -on the longest Shabbos of the year- succeed?

The davening was leibidik and heartfelt. The BJX staff and students danced around the shul. Rav Fingerer shared an inspiring vort on the Parsha and Achdus, and thanked Rav Weinfeld and the shul for hosting.

Thank you for allowing us to host BJX for Kabbolos Shabbos. Seeing all these young adults experiencing Shabbos for the first time was beyond inspiring. The singing and dancing were memorable as was Rabbis Fingerers infectious enthusiasm. It was evident that their Kiruv work is a true labor of love. May Hashem assist all the young unaffiliated young men and women to become Torah Jews. Thank you for giving us the opportunity to see close-up the kiruv work you do, said Yossi Brecher, the esteemed Gabbai of Rav Weinfelds shul.

Over 50 local public high school seniors kept their First Shabbos with Brooklyns Premier Kiruv organization, BJX. Watch their reaction!

Can secular-raised public high school students, with no background, change their lives and be mekabel Torah and Mitzvos?

Rabbi Moshe Fingerer, the indefatigable leader of BJX, shared an astounding fact about the success of their outreach programs: A number of former public high school students today daven in Landaus shul. They look indistinguishable from any Flatbush yeshiva boy. A graduate of Edward Murrow public high school and of several BJX programs, currently attending Brooklyn College, couldnt be located on Shabbos afternoon. Where was he? He was off to the side, being mavir sedrah, learning Chumash with Rashi. Some of these students are now learning Gemara.

BJX runs successful college programs for unaffiliated students as well as innovative young professional programs. Simultaneously, BJX has a track for young men and women from Frum homes who left the fold. They even have a helpline dedicated specifically to guiding parents as they navigate this murky area with their at-risk teenage children. A particular focus of BJX is a special division for public high schools in Flatbush (and throughout Brooklyn) that are teeming with Jewish students. The Morah DAsra of BJX, R Yitzchok Fingerer relates: My childhood home was in close proximity to Murrow. I saw countless Jewish students who had never had the opportunity to feel a part of Klal Yisroel or experience the beauty of Yiddishkeit. It pained me. Why should these children of Avrohom, Yitzchok, and Yaakov be deprived? I pledged to try make a difference.

Today, we are witnessing the fulfillment of that pledge from years ago. Myriads of public high school students souls are being kindled; their Neshamos ignited.

One of the Madrichim for the BJX public high school program is Shuie Sokol, a native of Cleveland, now learning in Yeshivas Beis Yosef in Flatbush. He expressed his sentiments after his first foray into Kiruv: It was surprising to see how little these Yidden know about Judaism, especially since they live their whole lives in some of the most densely Frum neighborhoods in the world. It made me realize the significance as well as the importance of what the amazing people at BJX do every day.

Public high school students shteiging with BJX!

Another Madrich, Yitzy Konig, originally from London and an alumnus of Chevron Yeshiva said, Words cannot really do justice in expressing the influx of overwhelming positive feelings that possessed me this past Shabbos spent with the BJX family. From the unequivocal devotion portrayed by both Rabbi Fingerers to the unmatched selflessness of all of our hosts in opening their homes and hearts to us. Not to mention the uplifting davening, motivational speeches and personable BJX counselors. The unity felt, most certainly resonated with what we all experienced at Har Sinai. We will surely carry this with us on our future journeys.

What was it like for the actual students who left their secular parents and spent the weekend, for the first time, with devoutly religious families? What was it like for them to unplug from their iPhones and detach themselves from their comfortable surroundings? Was it a culture shock? Was it frightening?

David said, Admittedly, many of us were anxious. What will it be like to lodge with total strangers? Will religious people be accepting of us? I personally thank the Rabbis for a Shabbat that exceeded all our expectations. My Shabbat experience was nothing short of extraordinary. It was a day filled with joy, gratitude, and inspiration. I found myself on a transformative journey of personal growth and spiritual fulfillment. We were welcomed as family by the community. This sacred day provided me with invaluable lessons and a renewed sense of purpose.

My first Shabbat experience was extremely eye opening. The rabbis planned one of the most organized and inspirational events Ive ever attended- one that will echo in the chambers of my memory for a lifetime, shared Steven.

Mr. Neil Kerman, a revered member of the BJX family, joined the Shabbaton for Shabbos morning davening. He found the environment extremely uplifting and inspirational. Davening in BJX this Shabbos morning was extremely inspiring. BJX was filled with public high school students and community members. As the boys stood around the Bimah during Krias HaTorah, I witnessed their deep desire for Torah growth and their excitement for all aspects of Yiddishkeit, he said.

It was surprising to hear at the Shalosh Seudos how far the students have come on their journey and how much theyve grown from the program. To hear some of the boys and girls saying that they previously identified as non-Jewish but now consider themselves Jewish because of their BJX experience, was very inspiring and truly moving, said Yossi Morgenstern, a Madrich and an alumnus of the Mir.

BJX does phenomenal work. Words cant express how grateful I feel for having the honor of hosting the students of BJX. Watching them, at the conclusion of Shabbos, now so proud to identify with their Jewish heritage was extremely moving. The dedication that Rabbis Fingerer have for each student is exceptional, said Mrs. Effie Kleinman.

As I carry the memories of this remarkable Shabbat forward, I am grateful for the opportunity to learn, grow, and celebrate lifes blessings in the company of a loving community, said David.

Hopefully we can all come together soon and share another Shabbat with each other, said Cameron from Edward R. Murrow.

Flatbush stands united with its local Kiruv organization that is changing the face of Klal Yisroel.
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For many in smaller communities, Taharas Hamishpacha presents many challenges, a key issue being the lack of a qualified Rov to rule on practical questions. However, a way to obtain the necessary training and expertise to pasken these shaylos was never available beyond the largest Jewish communities.

Finally, Lemaan Yilmedu has created a program to cover every aspect of Hilchos Taharah with a focus on practical psak and shimush, taught by Crown Heights Rov, Rabbi Tuvia Kasimov, a well-known expert in this field and author of the noted sefer Divrei Tohar.

The course will take 18 months to complete the text-based segment of the course, followed by practical shimush on ones own schedule and availability.

Participants will schedule in-person sessions with Rabbi Kasimov when they are visiting New York to complete their training in paskening maros.

In addition to the halachos studies, there will also be a series of 10 practical lectures on how to apply them to real-life scenarios from leading Rabbonim in the field and other experts.

Successful graduates who pass the tests will be certified by: Rabbi Gedalia Oberlander, Rav of Heichal Menachem, Monsey, Rabbi Yosef Yeshaya Braun, Mara Deasra and Member of the Crown Heights Beis Din, Rabbi Shaul Yechezkel Schwartz, The Debretziner Dayan, Boro Park, and Rabbi Mordechai Farkash, Author of Seder Chupa Vkidushin.

I joined a Lemman Yilmedu class in Shevat, and Im thoroughly enjoying it. Says Rabbi Moshe Gourarie from Toms River, NJ and a participant of the Hilchos Niddah course. Every Tuesday night is like a mini-vacation, when I put everything else aside and delve into learning Halacha. Its a Kevius Bizman and a Kevius Bnefesh.

Rabbi Kasimovs knowledge is extensive, his Shiurim and presentation are excellent, and his focus on the practical and Halacha Lmaaseh makes it all relevant and enjoyable.

I would encourage any rav that wants to expand his knowledge in Torah and Halacha, to utilize this incredible resource, where you could learn from the comfort of your office, with professional materials and outstanding Shiurim. This is the opportunity you have been waiting for.

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Thematic investing has been around a long time but the appetite for funds seeking to make money from 'big picture' global trends has increased in recent years.

Simply put, thematic investing is a strategy that identifies changes believed to be disrupting established markets and industries - for example, artificial intelligence or electric vehicles.

Sustainable and climate-related themes have also attracted a lot of investor interest due to the money being piled into combating this global emergency.

Many investors believe that these themes have the potential to generate outsized market returns in the future.

Crystal ball gazing: Thematic investing is a strategy where investors identify global trends with the potential to disrupt existing industries and make them money

Some firms, like Newton Investment Management and Pictet, have embraced thematic investing as core to their approach as a result.

Last year Charles Schwab also launched thematic stock lists for investors who want to invest in companies aligned with their personal interests and values.

Jason Hollands, a director of Bestinvest, explains: It is all about trying to identify major themes  sometimes referred to as megatrends - in society and the economy that will play out over the coming years and then trying to identify companies that stand to benefit.

You would be forgiven for questioning whether thematic investing is just sector investing dressed up.

But investment firm BlackRock believes thematic funds and sector funds are very different propositions.

A BlackRock spokesperson says: 'Themes are focused on structural growth or disruption and look to capture a one-off shift that will have a lasting impact on the current economic environment.

Sectors on the other hand are cyclical in nature with investment allocations often driven by short to medium-term views on the business cycle.

'One rationale for investing in themes is to focus on groups of disruptive companies that are going to become much larger proportions of global equity markets in future.

Hollands adds: When you adopt a thematic mindset, it can make the process of investing quite exciting because rather than focusing solely on the nuts and bolts of profits, valuations and dividends, you are thinking about the really big picture stuff.'

What are the limitations of thematic investing

When adopting thematic investing as a strategy, effectively you are trying to look into a crystal ball and imagine what the world could look like over the coming decades.

But this presents difficulties as the future is unpredictable, and the world doesnt always develop in the direction that is most widely expected.

Hollands says: It wasnt that long ago when the end of the Cold War was expected to usher in a peace dividend and the rise of globalisation seemed unstoppable.

'Now we have Russia fighting a war in Europe, a deterioration in relations between the west and China, and the high point of globalisation has passed, with increased consideration of supply chain security.'

Some investment themes can also turn out to be passing fads and fizzle out.

Kenneth Lamont, senior analyst at Morningstar, says: 'There is a risk that the theme won't play out as you hope it will.

'There are themes, such as 3D printing, which may yet go on to change our lives but haven't played out quite as dramatically as we might have expected. Had we believed all the headlines we might already be expecting to print our own McDonalds burgers at home by now.'

Once a major theme gains recognition, it can sometimes mean a herd of investors stampeding to invest in it, with AI being a current example.

Hollands warns: This can sometimes mean that thematic investors can become prone to being exposed to investment bubbles, where exuberance about the theme drives up valuations to extreme levels leading to an eventual burst. This isnt always the case, but it is something to be careful about.'

Investors should also be wary of 'themewashing' when it comes to thematic investing.

In some cases, thematic funds end up being dominated by large tech giants who have small exposures to many themes.

Lamont says: 'This raises very real concerns about themewashing - investors should not just be wowed by a strong narrative and really understand whether the fund offers adequate exposure to the desired theme.'

AI megatrend: There is a risk of investors being exposed to big theme bubbles which can burst

What are the 'megatrends' likely to dominate the future

Megatrends are the themes that investors identify as most likely to drive change on a global scale.

These can include aging populations causing shifting consumption patterns or a growing population requiring more efficient use of resources.

Bestinvest identified shifting demographics as one megatrend. Hollands says: 'The global population has grown 80 per cent over the last 40 years and this is partly down to improved life expectancy, but the patterns differ significantly across countries.

'For example, in Japan the median age is 48.6 years old and the population is declining, with China set to follow this trend as a result of its disastrous former "one child" per family policy.

'Countries with ageing populations face economic challenges, but the investment opportunities include demand for healthcare, greater use of automation to address shortages of labour and increased demand for leisure to service growing numbers of retirees.'

The transition to a low carbon economy and away from fossil fuels is another megatrend. The journey to 'Net Zero' carbon emissions is shaking up demand for resources required for clean energy infrastructure and electric vehicles, such as copper, nickel, lithium, cobalt, graphite, and rare earth metals.

What funds can you invest in?

Aubrey Global Emerging Market Opportunities is one fund which focuses entirely on the theme of the rising power of emerging market consumers and their demand for goods and services.

Hollands says: 'ETFs mean it is now increasingly possible to concentrate on very specifics themes, such as Artificial Intelligence (Legal & General Artificial Intelligence UCITS ETF), robotics (iShares Automation & Robotics UCITS ETF), or demand for metals important for future technologies like use in electric cars and smart phones (Global X Lithium & Battery Tech ETF).'

Fidelity's flagship thematic fund is Global Thematic Opportunities, which invests in a range of themes including global demographics, technology, health care, climate solutions and clean energy.
Floats on the London Stock Exchange plunged by a third in the first six months of 2023.

Eighteen firms listed during this time, compared with 26 in the same period of last year.

It was also much lower than in 2021, when 49 companies went public. Middle Eastern luxury property group Dar Global was one of the few to list early in 2023, with a 480m float back in March.

Slump: Companies pulled floats and mergers in 2020 at the height of the pandemic

The slump comes after a bruising start to the year when a slew of big-name firms said they would ditch their London listings for New York. Among them were microchip company ARM despite a campaign by ministers.

Within days several other firms also said they were looking across the Atlantic, with building materials group CRH later moving its shares to New York.

The LSE took another hit earlier this month when WE Soda, the world's largest producer of natural soda ash, U-turned on London two weeks after unveiling its plans for a 6billion listing.

The Turkish company blamed 'extreme investor caution' in the UK.

Companies pulled floats and mergers in 2020 at the height of the pandemic. In 2021 there was a flood of listings as markets rebounded  but there has been a dearth of new joiners for the past 18 months.
Calls for change: Mulberry has also joined criticism of the tourist tax

European countries are reaping the rewards of tax-free shopping schemes for tourists while the UK misses out, new statistics have revealed  re-igniting calls for Chancellor Jeremy Hunt to take urgent action.

London is floundering thanks to its tourist tax while rival cities in France, Portugal and Italy have seen their pandemic recoveries buoyed by visitors flocking back to buy luxury goods.

European sales via refund schemes are getting closer to a pre-pandemic peak, after increasing 10 per cent in May from the previous month, according to data from retail tech firm Planet.

It means tax-free sales in Europe are just 14 per cent below where they were in May 2019.

This represents the best month for retailers on the continent since the end of the pandemic.

And the UK is set to score an own goal this summer as American and Chinese tourists return to the continent with cash to spend on pricey goods abroad.

There was a 27 per cent uptick in the amount US tourists spent with European retailers in May compared with April, as the summer tourism season gets into full swing.

This means sales to US customers are now 71 per cent above pre-pandemic levels and 83 per cent higher for the year to date  but they are taking their custom to other countries and shunning the UK.

Tax-free sales of luxury products to international visitors surpassed pre-Covid levels in France last month, with Portugal also enjoying a recovery to its 2019 levels.

'While European retailers look forward to the prospect of further summer growth  as US and Chinese visitors continue to spend across the continent  UK retailers continue to be disadvantaged by the lack of a Tax-Free shopping scheme which means they are not competing on a level playing field,' Luca Cassina, president of retail at Planet, claimed.

It comes as London risks losing its status as a premier destination for tourists to shop, endangering a wider ecosystem of hotels, restaurants and cultural gems.

More than 300 business leaders have backed The Mail's 'Scrap The Tourist Tax' campaign, which was launched to echo industry pleas for the Government to change its stance.

Thierry Andretta, the boss of Mulberry, has also joined criticism of the levy, saying last week there was 'no doubt' the tourist tax had dragged down UK sales while stores in European capitals were flourishing.

It came after the company sounded alarm bells over the policy when it announced it was closing its flagship store on Bond St in February, which had seen a 'dramatic drop' in trade since the tax was introduced.

Critics say that  far from the Treasury's claim that scrapping the tourist tax would cost 2billion a year  there would be a net gain of around 350m.

A Treasury spokesman said: 'We are backing high street retailers by slashing business rates bills by 75 per cent and effectively cutting corporation tax by 27billion through full-expensing.'
The head of the UN's Food and Agriculture Organization, Qu Dongyu, was re-elected Sunday for a second term as head of the UN agency.

He was the only candidate standing for the role of FAO director-general and received 168 out of 182 votes in a ballot in Rome on Sunday.

Qu, a former Chinese government minister who was nominated for the post by Beijing, will serve a new four-year term from Aug. 1.

His appointment is seen as a part of a drive by Beijing to get more Chinese figures into senior jobs at international bodies.
Hidden stash of 20 Ferraris that had a Florida barn collapse on them during a hurricane heads to auction Here's how much they could go for
Ministers are poised to order new action to tackle rip-off fuel with a price comparison site, as a watchdog raises concerns about competition in the sector.

The Competition and Markets Authority (CMA) has highlighted the wide discrepancy in forecourt prices when in a long-awaited report published Monday.

It found that increased supermarket profit margins led to drivers paying an extra 6p per litre for fuel last year.

Energy Secretary Grant Shapps is now expected to back the idea of a new 'Pump Watch' site to give the public better information and allow the Government to monitor the sector.

The Competition and Markets Authority (CMA) is expected to highlight the wide discrepancy in forecourt prices when it publishes its long-awaited report

A Government source said Mr Shapps was prepared to change the law to force the retailers to hand over real time information about prices at every forecourt in the country.

'Northern Ireland has a voluntary system, which has had some impact, but if the CMA recommends a comprehensive scheme then we may have to change the law,' the source said.

'At the moment there is no way to compel the retailers to hand over the data you would need, but we are prepared to change the law if necessary.'

The report has been fast-tracked following a meeting last week between Jeremy Hunt and the regulators.

The Chancellor said he was 'committed to getting a fair deal for motorists'.

'I met with watchdogs this week to work out how to reduce everyday costs,' he said. 'They have my 100 per cent backing to crack down on any unfair treatment.'

Ministers first ordered an inquiry into forecourt pricing last year following concern that a 5p cut in fuel duty was not being passed on in full. In an interim report in December, the CMA said that prices 'vary widely between local areas', adding; 'Prices are likely to be higher at petrol stations where there are few (or no) competitors nearby.'

The Fuel Finder would be backed by a new Fuel Monitor that would monitor prices and margins on an ongoing basis and recommend further action if competition continues to weaken in the market.



Read more: https://t.co/aC6Jcmt5hb  Competition & Markets Authority (@CMAgovUK) July 3, 2023

The watchdog also found that retailer margins were increasing, with forecourt operators pocketing 3-4p per litre more than they had five years previously.

And the CMA said it had found 'evidence of 'rocket and feather' behaviour emerging' in the wake of the global energy crisis.

The phrase refers to claims that garages push up costs to the public like a rocket when the global price of oil is rising, but let them fall more slowly like a feather when the global price recedes, pocketing the difference.

The inquiry also found that an increase in margins on diesel across all fuel retailers cost drivers an extra 13p per litre during the first five months of this year.

The CMA recommended that the Government introduces legislation to enable a fuel finder open data scheme to be created.

This would allow drivers to compare pump prices at different sites through apps or sat-navs.

The investigation also highlighted that supermarkets tend to be the cheapest retailers but warned that 'at least one supermarkets has significantly increased its forward-looking margins'.

Additionally, the CMA revealed that supermarket giant Asda has been fined 60,000 by for failing to provide relevant information in a timely manner to the watchdog.

'The AA noted this behaviour as far back as 2005 when, following Hurricane Katrina in the August, pump prices shot up 5p a litre in matter of days but a 4p drop in wholesale costs soon after took more than two months to be reflected at the pump,' reacted Luke Bosdet, the AA's spokesman on pump prices.

'Sadly, it has taken more than 15 years for a government and competition watchdog to recognise this and do something about it.

'However, action that is better late than never is greatly appreciated by motorists across the UK.'

Energy Secretary Grant Shapps will back the idea of a new 'Pump Watch' site to give the public better information and allow the Government to monitor the sector

The report has been fast-tracked following a meeting last week between Jeremy Hunt and the regulators

Fair Fuel UK, which has long campaigned for a 'Pump Watch' regulator, estimates that petrol prices remain 10p per litre higher than they should be, adding more than 5 to the cost of a typical tank of fuel.

The announcement is part of a wider move by ministers to ensure that falls in global prices are passed on to consumers.

Commenting on the report's findings. Gordon Balmer, executive director at the Petrol Retailers Association (PRA), said it will 'support any sensible steps taken to help motorists find the best deal available to them'.

He added: 'We will continue to engage with officials to ensure that this scheme is rolled out efficiently. The logistics surrounding fuel pricing are complicated and it is vital that the Government consult with industry to ensure a smooth implementation.

'Independent forecourts represented by the PRA comprise 65 percent of the fuel network, with the CMA report noting an increase in the extent to which individual non-supermarket retailers are pricing more cheaply than the supermarket national average price. These smaller, independent forecourts operate as a crucial part of local communities, often knowing customers personally.

'If motorists want to compare fuel prices online before the Governments scheme is rolled out, I would recommend checking pre-existing market alternatives, such as petrolprices.com.'

Balmer concluded: 'We will continue to work with the CMA and provide any evidence they may need concerning their investigation. We are committed to advocate for independent retailers and to ensure fuel market transparency.'

Simon Williams, the RAC's fuel price spokesperson, described the CMA's recommendation for a fuel finder open data scheme as a 'landmark day when it comes to fuel prices in the UK'.

He added: The fact that drivers appear to have lost out to the tune of nearly 1billion as a result of increased retailer margins on fuel is nothing short of astounding in a cost-of-living crisis and confirms what we've been saying for many years that supermarkets haven't been treating drivers fairly at the pumps.

'It's all about action now and we very much hope the Government follows through with both of the CMA's recommendation.

'While forcing retailers to publish pump prices is a positive step for drivers, what's of far more significance is the creation of a fuel monitor function within government which, we very much hope, actively monitors wholesale prices to ensure forecourts don't overcharge when the cost they pay to buy fuel drops.

'Without this, we fear drivers will continue to get a raw deal.'

Bosdet from the AA added: 'The push towards an open data fuel finder scheme is a huge leap forward in fair pricing at the pump and needs to be in place by the end of the year.

'Drivers will be drawn to the cheaper fuel stations and that will pressure other forecourts to bring down their prices, thus stimulating the level of competition that has been missing for the past three years.'

The AA is also calling for a 'road fuel regulator' to be setup, though admits it could take some time to be set up: 'Drivers can ill afford to wait any longer for effective pump-price competition, given that the summer getaway is about to start and motorists must run the gauntlet of over-priced motorway fuel.

'They will read stories of small independent fuel stations charging rock-bottom prices for fuel but find it very difficult to locate them on their holiday routes. Pump price transparency will hopefully solve that.
Analysts at StockNews.com assumed coverage on shares of WidePoint (NYSEAMERICAN:WYY  Free Report) in a report issued on Saturday. The brokerage set a sell rating on the technology companys stock.

WidePoint Stock Performance

Shares of WYY opened at $1.86 on Friday. The firm has a market capitalization of $16.25 million, a P/E ratio of -1.07 and a beta of 1.04. The stocks fifty day simple moving average is $1.83 and its 200 day simple moving average is $1.93. WidePoint has a twelve month low of $1.70 and a twelve month high of $3.06.

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WidePoint (NYSEAMERICAN:WYY  Free Report) last issued its earnings results on Monday, May 15th. The technology company reported ($0.11) earnings per share for the quarter. WidePoint had a positive return on equity of 2.98% and a negative net margin of 16.03%. The firm had revenue of $25.27 million during the quarter.

Institutional Investors Weigh In On WidePoint

About WidePoint

Several hedge funds and other institutional investors have recently added to or reduced their stakes in WYY. Citadel Advisors LLC grew its position in WidePoint by 121.1% during the 3rd quarter. Citadel Advisors LLC now owns 13,577 shares of the technology companys stock worth $29,000 after purchasing an additional 7,437 shares in the last quarter. UBS Group AG purchased a new position in WidePoint during the 1st quarter worth approximately $29,000. Dimensional Fund Advisors LP grew its position in WidePoint by 27.5% during the 4th quarter. Dimensional Fund Advisors LP now owns 43,483 shares of the technology companys stock worth $79,000 after purchasing an additional 9,377 shares in the last quarter. Susquehanna International Group LLP purchased a new position in WidePoint during the 1st quarter worth approximately $25,000. Finally, Renaissance Technologies LLC purchased a new position in WidePoint during the 2nd quarter worth approximately $37,000. Institutional investors own 11.85% of the companys stock.

(Free Report)

WidePoint Corporation provides technology management as a service (TMaaS) to the government and business enterprises in North America and Europe. The company offers TMaaS solutions through a secure federal government certified proprietary portal and secure enterprise portal that provides ability to manage, analyze, and protect communications assets, as well as deploy identity management solutions that provide secured virtual and physical access to restricted environments.

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White Mountains Insurance Group (NYSE:WTM  Free Report) and PICC Property and Casualty (OTCMKTS:PPCCY  Free Report) are both financial services companies, but which is the better business? We will compare the two businesses based on the strength of their earnings, valuation, dividends, profitability, analyst recommendations, institutional ownership and risk.

Profitability

This table compares White Mountains Insurance Group and PICC Property and Casualtys net margins, return on equity and return on assets.

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Net Margins Return on Equity Return on Assets White Mountains Insurance Group 65.68% -0.70% -0.35% PICC Property and Casualty N/A N/A N/A

Valuation and Earnings

This table compares White Mountains Insurance Group and PICC Property and Casualtys top-line revenue, earnings per share (EPS) and valuation.

Gross Revenue Price/Sales Ratio Net Income Earnings Per Share Price/Earnings Ratio White Mountains Insurance Group $1.16 billion 3.07 $792.80 million $335.65 4.14 PICC Property and Casualty N/A N/A N/A $19.70 1.43

Insider and Institutional Ownership

White Mountains Insurance Group has higher revenue and earnings than PICC Property and Casualty. PICC Property and Casualty is trading at a lower price-to-earnings ratio than White Mountains Insurance Group, indicating that it is currently the more affordable of the two stocks.

86.0% of White Mountains Insurance Group shares are held by institutional investors. 2.6% of White Mountains Insurance Group shares 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.

Analyst Ratings

This is a summary of current ratings and price targets for White Mountains Insurance Group and PICC Property and Casualty, as reported by MarketBeat.com.

Sell Ratings Hold Ratings Buy Ratings Strong Buy Ratings Rating Score White Mountains Insurance Group 0 0 0 0 N/A PICC Property and Casualty 0 0 0 0 N/A

Dividends

White Mountains Insurance Group pays an annual dividend of $1.00 per share and has a dividend yield of 0.1%. PICC Property and Casualty pays an annual dividend of $9.84 per share and has a dividend yield of 35.0%. White Mountains Insurance Group pays out 0.3% of its earnings in the form of a dividend. PICC Property and Casualty pays out 49.9% 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

White Mountains Insurance Group beats PICC Property and Casualty on 7 of the 10 factors compared between the two stocks.

About White Mountains Insurance Group

(Free Report)

White Mountains Insurance Group, Ltd., through its subsidiaries, provides insurance and other financial services in the United States. The company operates through five segments: HG Global/BAM, Ark, NSM, Kudu, and Other Operations. The HG Global/BAM segment provides insurance on municipal bonds issued to finance public purposes, such as schools, utilities, and transportation facilities, as well as reinsurance protection services. The Ark segment writes a portfolio of reinsurance and insurance, including property, marine and energy, accident and health, casualty, and specialty products. The NSM segment operates as a managing general agent and program administrator for specialty property and casualty insurance to various sectors comprising specialty transportation, real estate, social services, and pet. The Kudu segment provides capital solutions to boutique asset and wealth managers for generational ownership transfers, management buyouts, acquisitions and growth finances, and legacy partner liquidity, as well as strategic assistance to investees. The Other Operations segment offers insurance solutions to travel industry through broker channel and on a direct-to-consumer basis; and manages separate accounts and pooled investment vehicles for insurance-linked securities sectors, including catastrophe bonds, collateralized reinsurance investments, and industry loss warranties of third-party clients. White Mountains Insurance Group, Ltd. was incorporated in 1980 and is headquartered in Hamilton, Bermuda.

About PICC Property and Casualty

(Free Report)

PICC Property and Casualty Company Limited, together with its subsidiaries, operates as a property and casualty insurance company in the People's Republic of China. The company operates through Motor Vehicle; Commercial Property; Cargo; Liability; Accidental Injury and Health; Agriculture; Credit and Surety; and Others segments. It also offers accidental injury and medical expenses, short-term health, homeowners, special risk, marine hull, construction, and other insurance products. In addition, the company provides reinsurance, investment and funds application, insurance and claim handling agency, training, information technology and business, and property management services. The company was incorporated in 2003 and is based in Beijing, China. PICC Property and Casualty Company Limited is a subsidiary of The People's Insurance Company (Group) of China Limited.

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Community Bank N.A. bought a new position in shares of iShares MSCI Eurozone ETF (BATS:EZU  Free Report) during the first quarter, according to the company in its most recent filing with the Securities & Exchange Commission. The firm bought 2,245 shares of the companys stock, valued at approximately $101,000.

Several other hedge funds have also added to or reduced their stakes in EZU. WFA of San Diego LLC bought a new position in iShares MSCI Eurozone ETF during the 4th quarter worth $29,000. Roble Belko & Company Inc acquired a new stake in iShares MSCI Eurozone ETF in the 4th quarter worth about $29,000. Farmers & Merchants Investments Inc. bought a new stake in iShares MSCI Eurozone ETF in the 4th quarter valued at about $30,000. Belpointe Asset Management LLC bought a new stake in iShares MSCI Eurozone ETF in the 4th quarter valued at about $39,000. Finally, Lakewood Asset Management LLC acquired a new position in shares of iShares MSCI Eurozone ETF during the 4th quarter worth approximately $55,000.

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iShares MSCI Eurozone ETF Trading Up 1.5 %

BATS EZU opened at $45.82 on Monday. The company has a market cap of $7.80 billion, a price-to-earnings ratio of 11.52 and a beta of 1.03. The company has a 50 day moving average of $45.45 and a 200-day moving average of $44.15. iShares MSCI Eurozone ETF has a 1-year low of $36.77 and a 1-year high of $47.13.

iShares MSCI Eurozone ETF Company Profile

iShares MSCI EMU ETF, formerly iShares MSCI EMU Index Fund (the Fund), is an exchange-traded fund. The Fund seeks to provide investment results that correspond generally to the price and yield performance, before fees and expenses, of publicly traded securities in the European Monetary Union (EMU) markets, as measured by the MSCI EMU Index (the Index).

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Community Bank N.A. decreased its holdings in shares of State Street Co. (NYSE:STT  Free Report) by 12.4% in the 1st quarter, according to the company in its most recent disclosure with the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC). The fund owned 1,415 shares of the asset managers stock after selling 200 shares during the period. Community Bank N.A.s holdings in State Street were worth $107,000 as of its most recent SEC filing.

A number of other institutional investors and hedge funds also recently modified their holdings of the business. Banque Cantonale Vaudoise grew its position in shares of State Street by 754.4% during the 1st quarter. Banque Cantonale Vaudoise now owns 22,198 shares of the asset managers stock valued at $1,680,000 after buying an additional 19,600 shares during the last quarter. Ritholtz Wealth Management bought a new position in shares of State Street during the first quarter valued at approximately $390,000. International Assets Investment Management LLC acquired a new stake in shares of State Street during the 1st quarter worth approximately $34,000. Proficio Capital Partners LLC bought a new stake in shares of State Street in the 1st quarter worth approximately $172,000. Finally, HM Payson & Co. boosted its position in State Street by 0.6% during the 1st quarter. HM Payson & Co. now owns 26,130 shares of the asset managers stock valued at $1,978,000 after purchasing an additional 151 shares during the period. 89.39% of the stock is owned by institutional investors and hedge funds.

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Analyst Ratings Changes

Several equities research analysts have weighed in on the company. Royal Bank of Canada dropped their target price on State Street from $85.00 to $80.00 in a research report on Friday, March 24th. Evercore ISI cut their price objective on shares of State Street from $80.00 to $75.00 in a research report on Friday, May 12th. Barclays dropped their price target on shares of State Street from $102.00 to $100.00 in a research note on Tuesday, April 18th. Wells Fargo & Company reduced their price objective on State Street from $97.00 to $90.00 in a research report on Tuesday, April 18th. Finally, StockNews.com began coverage on State Street in a research report on Thursday, May 18th. They issued a hold rating on the stock. Seven investment analysts have rated the stock with a hold rating and four have issued a buy rating to the stock. According to MarketBeat, the stock presently has an average rating of Hold and a consensus target price of $82.86.

Insider Buying and Selling

State Street Trading Up 0.1 %

In other news, EVP Michael L. Richards sold 1,814 shares of the companys stock in a transaction on Thursday, May 18th. The stock was 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 of the companys stock, valued at $2,263,039.49. The sale was disclosed in a document filed with the SEC, which is available at the SEC website . In other news, CFO Eric W. Aboaf sold 11,899 shares of the firms stock in a transaction on Friday, May 19th. The stock was sold at an average price of $68.28, for a total value of $812,463.72. Following the completion of the sale, the chief financial officer now owns 157,860 shares of the companys stock, valued at $10,778,680.80. The sale was disclosed in a legal filing with the SEC, which is accessible through this link . Also, EVP Michael L. Richards sold 1,814 shares of State Street stock in a transaction on Thursday, May 18th. The shares were sold at an average price of $68.17, for a total value of $123,660.38. Following the transaction, the executive vice president now owns 33,197 shares in the company, valued at approximately $2,263,039.49. The disclosure for this sale can be found here . Insiders own 0.34% of the companys stock.

Shares of State Street stock opened at $73.18 on Monday. The business has a fifty day simple moving average of $70.67 and a 200-day simple moving average of $78.05. The firm has a market cap of $24.46 billion, a price-to-earnings ratio of 10.25, a price-to-earnings-growth ratio of 1.38 and a beta of 1.56. State Street Co. has a fifty-two week low of $58.62 and a fifty-two week high of $94.74. The company has a quick ratio of 0.52, a current ratio of 0.52 and a debt-to-equity ratio of 0.72.

State Street (NYSE:STT  Free Report) last announced its quarterly earnings data on Monday, April 17th. The asset manager reported $1.52 earnings per share (EPS) for the quarter, missing the consensus estimate of $1.64 by ($0.12). The business had revenue of $3.10 billion during the quarter, compared to analyst estimates of $3.13 billion. State Street had a return on equity of 11.96% and a net margin of 18.73%. The businesss revenue for the quarter was up .6% on a year-over-year basis. During the same period in the prior year, the firm earned $1.59 EPS. On average, equities analysts forecast that State Street Co. will post 7.76 EPS for the current fiscal year.

State Street Dividend Announcement

The business also recently disclosed a quarterly dividend, which will be paid on Thursday, July 13th. Stockholders of record on Monday, July 3rd will be paid a dividend of $0.63 per share. This represents a $2.52 annualized dividend and a dividend yield of 3.44%. The ex-dividend date is Friday, June 30th. State Streets dividend payout ratio is presently 35.29%.

State Street Company Profile

(Free Report)

State Street Corporation, through its subsidiaries, provides a range of financial products and services to institutional investors worldwide. The company offers investment servicing products and services, including custody, accounting, regulatory reporting, investor, and performance and analytics; middle office products, such as IBOR, transaction management, loans, cash, derivatives and collateral, record keeping, and client reporting and investment analytics; foreign exchange, and brokerage and other trading services; securities finance and enhanced custody products; deposit and short-term investment facilities; loans and lease financing; investment manager and alternative investment manager operations outsourcing; performance, risk, and compliance analytics; and financial data management to support institutional investors.

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Community Bank N.A. trimmed its holdings in Toyota Motor Co. (NYSE:TM  Free Report) by 25.0% during the first quarter, HoldingsChannel.com reports. The fund owned 600 shares of the companys stock after selling 200 shares during the period. Community Bank N.A.s holdings in Toyota Motor were worth $85,000 as of its most recent filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC).

Several other institutional investors and hedge funds have also recently bought and sold shares of the business. D.A. Davidson & CO. increased its stake in Toyota Motor by 15.6% in the first quarter. D.A. Davidson & CO. now owns 1,448 shares of the companys stock valued at $261,000 after purchasing an additional 195 shares during the period. Cibc World Market Inc. increased its position in Toyota Motor by 34.0% in the 1st quarter. Cibc World Market Inc. now owns 25,609 shares of the companys stock valued at $4,616,000 after acquiring an additional 6,493 shares during the period. Blair William & Co. IL purchased a new stake in Toyota Motor during the 1st quarter valued at approximately $234,000. Sequoia Financial Advisors LLC lifted its position in Toyota Motor by 9.1% during the 1st quarter. Sequoia Financial Advisors LLC now owns 3,740 shares of the companys stock worth $674,000 after acquiring an additional 311 shares during the period. Finally, First Trust Advisors LP grew its stake in shares of Toyota Motor by 6.6% in the 1st quarter. First Trust Advisors LP now owns 356,505 shares of the companys stock valued at $64,260,000 after purchasing an additional 22,142 shares during the last quarter.

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Analysts Set New Price Targets

TM has been the subject of several recent research reports. Citigroup raised Toyota Motor from a neutral rating to a buy rating in a report on Thursday. StockNews.com raised shares of Toyota Motor from a hold rating to a buy rating in a report on Friday, May 12th. Three equities research 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, the stock currently has an average rating of Hold and a consensus price target of $1,239.71.

Toyota Motor Price Performance

Toyota Motor stock opened at $160.75 on Monday. The stocks 50 day moving average price is $145.96 and its 200 day moving average price is $141.91. The company has a debt-to-equity ratio of 0.58, a quick ratio of 0.93 and a current ratio of 1.10. Toyota Motor Co. has a 1-year low of $130.07 and a 1-year high of $169.07.

Toyota Motor (NYSE:TM  Free Report) last issued its earnings results on Wednesday, May 10th. The company reported $3.07 EPS for the quarter, topping the consensus estimate of $2.83 by $0.24. The company had revenue of $73.28 billion for the quarter, compared to analyst estimates of $68.77 billion. Toyota Motor had a net margin of 6.61% and a return on equity of 8.60%. Equities analysts anticipate that Toyota Motor Co. will post 16.38 EPS for the current year.

About Toyota Motor

(Free Report)

Toyota Motor Corporation designs, manufactures, assembles, and sells passenger vehicles, minivans and commercial vehicles, and related parts and accessories. It operates in Automotive, Financial Services, and All Other segments. The company offers hybrid cars under the Prius name, fuel cell vehicles under the MIRAI name; and conventional engine vehicles, including subcompact and compact cars under the Corolla and Raize names.

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Fortress Wealth Management Inc. lowered its holdings in iShares MSCI EAFE Value ETF (BATS:EFV  Free Report) by 3.5% during the 1st quarter, according to the company in its most recent disclosure with the Securities and Exchange Commission. The fund owned 46,933 shares of the companys stock after selling 1,678 shares during the period. iShares MSCI EAFE Value ETF comprises 1.6% of Fortress Wealth Management Inc.s holdings, making the stock its 20th largest position. Fortress Wealth Management Inc.s holdings in iShares MSCI EAFE Value ETF were worth $2,278,000 as of its most recent SEC filing.

Several other hedge funds and other institutional investors have also bought and sold shares of EFV. Cibc World Market Inc. boosted its position in iShares MSCI EAFE Value ETF by 5.8% in the first quarter. Cibc World Market Inc. now owns 41,773 shares of the companys stock worth $2,100,000 after purchasing an additional 2,299 shares during the last quarter. Vontobel Holding Ltd. raised its stake in shares of iShares MSCI EAFE Value ETF by 12.3% in the first quarter. Vontobel Holding Ltd. now owns 15,000 shares of the companys stock valued at $754,000 after buying an additional 1,640 shares during the period. Blair William & Co. IL raised its stake in shares of iShares MSCI EAFE Value ETF by 78.1% in the first quarter. Blair William & Co. IL now owns 38,808 shares of the companys stock valued at $1,951,000 after buying an additional 17,015 shares during the period. Mackenzie Financial Corp bought a new stake in shares of iShares MSCI EAFE Value ETF in the first quarter valued at $16,807,000. Finally, Prudential Financial Inc. raised its stake in shares of iShares MSCI EAFE Value ETF by 13.9% in the first quarter. Prudential Financial Inc. now owns 450,991 shares of the companys stock valued at $22,667,000 after buying an additional 55,103 shares during the period.

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iShares MSCI EAFE Value ETF Price Performance

Shares of EFV opened at $48.94 on Monday. The firm has a market cap of $15.17 billion, a PE ratio of 9.51 and a beta of 0.84. The stocks fifty day moving average price is $49.12 and its two-hundred day moving average price is $48.54. iShares MSCI EAFE Value ETF has a 1 year low of $49.15 and a 1 year high of $59.57.

iShares MSCI EAFE Value ETF Company Profile

iShares MSCI EAFE Value ETF (the Fund), formerly iShares MSCI EAFE Value Index Fund, is an exchange-traded fund (ETF). The Fund seeks to provide investment results that correspond generally to the price and yield performance, before fees and expenses, of the MSCI EAFE Value Index. The Index is a subset of the MSCI EAFE Index and constituents of the Index include securities from Europe, Australasia (Australia and Asia), and the Far East.

Further Reading

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Mount Vernon Associates Inc. MD trimmed its stake in Bristol-Myers Squibb (NYSE:BMY  Free Report) by 2.0% in the first quarter, according to the company in its most recent disclosure with the Securities & Exchange Commission. The fund owned 26,794 shares of the biopharmaceutical companys stock after selling 550 shares during the quarter. Bristol-Myers Squibb makes up 2.2% of Mount Vernon Associates Inc. MDs portfolio, making the stock its 16th biggest holding. Mount Vernon Associates Inc. MDs holdings in Bristol-Myers Squibb were worth $1,857,000 as of its most recent filing with the Securities & Exchange Commission.

A number of other institutional investors also recently made changes to their positions in the stock. Demars Financial Group LLC raised its holdings in shares of Bristol-Myers Squibb by 13.9% in the first quarter. Demars Financial Group LLC now owns 70,551 shares of the biopharmaceutical companys stock worth $4,890,000 after acquiring an additional 8,628 shares during the last quarter. Jmac Enterprises LLC grew its position in shares of Bristol-Myers Squibb by 9.9% in the first quarter. Jmac Enterprises LLC now owns 9,645 shares of the biopharmaceutical companys stock valued at $668,000 after purchasing an additional 872 shares during the period. SevenBridge Financial Group LLC grew its position in shares of Bristol-Myers Squibb by 0.7% in the first quarter. SevenBridge Financial Group LLC now owns 48,315 shares of the biopharmaceutical companys stock valued at $3,349,000 after purchasing an additional 347 shares during the period. Wells Trecaso Financial Group LLC grew its position in shares of Bristol-Myers Squibb by 1.3% in the first quarter. Wells Trecaso Financial Group LLC now owns 65,190 shares of the biopharmaceutical companys stock valued at $4,518,000 after purchasing an additional 851 shares during the period. Finally, Mayfair Advisory Group LLC purchased a new stake in shares of Bristol-Myers Squibb in the first quarter valued at $202,000. 74.57% of the stock is owned by institutional investors and hedge funds.

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Bristol-Myers Squibb Trading Down 0.1 %

NYSE:BMY opened at $63.95 on Monday. The company has a debt-to-equity ratio of 1.10, a quick ratio of 1.28 and a current ratio of 1.42. Bristol-Myers Squibb has a one year low of $62.88 and a one year high of $81.43. The businesss 50-day simple moving average is $66.12 and its 200 day simple moving average is $69.17. The stock has a market cap of $134.35 billion, a price-to-earnings ratio of 18.64, a price-to-earnings-growth ratio of 1.31 and a beta of 0.43.

Bristol-Myers Squibb Dividend Announcement

Bristol-Myers Squibb ( NYSE:BMY Free Report ) last released its quarterly earnings results on Thursday, April 27th. The biopharmaceutical company reported $2.05 EPS for the quarter, topping the consensus estimate of $1.98 by $0.07. Bristol-Myers Squibb had a return on equity of 51.75% and a net margin of 15.95%. The business had revenue of $11.34 billion for the quarter, compared to analysts expectations of $11.50 billion. During the same quarter in the previous year, the firm posted $1.96 earnings per share. The companys revenue was down 2.7% compared to the same quarter last year. As a group, sell-side analysts predict that Bristol-Myers Squibb will post 8.07 earnings per share for the current fiscal year.

The company also recently disclosed a quarterly dividend, which will be paid on Tuesday, August 1st. Shareholders of record on Friday, July 7th will be paid a dividend of $0.57 per share. This represents a $2.28 annualized dividend and a yield of 3.57%. The ex-dividend date is Thursday, July 6th. Bristol-Myers Squibbs payout ratio is currently 66.47%.

Wall Street Analysts Forecast Growth

A number of equities research analysts have recently commented on the company. Daiwa Capital Markets assumed coverage on Bristol-Myers Squibb in a research report on Wednesday, June 28th. They issued an outperform rating and a $70.00 price objective for the company. StockNews.com started coverage on Bristol-Myers Squibb in a research report on Thursday, May 18th. They set a strong-buy rating for the company. Credit Suisse Group lowered their price target on Bristol-Myers Squibb from $78.00 to $72.00 in a research report on Friday, April 28th. 51job reissued a maintains rating on shares of Bristol-Myers Squibb in a research report on Friday, April 28th. Finally, Jefferies Financial Group started coverage on Bristol-Myers Squibb in a research report on Monday, March 6th. They set a hold rating and a $62.00 price target for the company. One analyst has rated the stock with a sell rating, six have issued a hold rating, seven have assigned a buy rating and one has given a strong buy rating to the stock. According to data from MarketBeat, the stock presently has a consensus rating of Moderate Buy and an average target price of $78.00.

Insider Buying and Selling at Bristol-Myers Squibb

In other Bristol-Myers Squibb news, EVP Rupert Vessey sold 50,385 shares of the companys stock in a transaction that occurred on Wednesday, May 3rd. The stock was sold at an average price of $67.06, for a total transaction of $3,378,818.10. Following the sale, the executive vice president now owns 47,751 shares in the company, valued at $3,202,182.06. The sale was disclosed in a legal filing with the Securities & Exchange Commission, which is available at this link. 0.08% of the stock is currently owned by insiders.

About Bristol-Myers Squibb

(Free Report)

Bristol-Myers Squibb Company discovers, develops, licenses, manufactures, markets, distributes, and sells biopharmaceutical products worldwide. It offers products for hematology, oncology, cardiovascular, immunology, fibrotic, and neuroscience diseases. The company's products include Eliquis, an oral inhibitor for reduction in risk of stroke/systemic embolism in NVAF, and for the treatment of DVT/PE; Opdivo for anti-cancer indications; Pomalyst/Imnovid indicated for patients with multiple myeloma; Orencia for adult patients with active RA and psoriatic arthritis; and Sprycel for the treatment of Philadelphia chromosome-positive chronic myeloid leukemia.

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Institute for Wealth Management LLC. cut its stake in shares of iShares MSCI USA Min Vol Factor ETF (BATS:USMV  Free Report) by 75.7% in the first quarter, according to the company in its most recent disclosure with the SEC. The firm owned 13,015 shares of the companys stock after selling 40,650 shares during the quarter. Institute for Wealth Management LLC.s holdings in iShares MSCI USA Min Vol Factor ETF were worth $947,000 as of its most recent filing with the SEC.

Several other institutional investors and hedge funds also recently made changes to their positions in the company. Moneta Group Investment Advisors LLC raised its position in iShares MSCI USA Min Vol Factor ETF by 140,054.1% in the 4th quarter. Moneta Group Investment Advisors LLC now owns 10,961,456 shares of the companys stock valued at $790,321,000 after purchasing an additional 10,953,635 shares during the last quarter. Allstate Investment Management Co. acquired a new position in iShares MSCI USA Min Vol Factor ETF during the 4th quarter worth about $308,588,000. Captrust Financial Advisors grew its holdings in iShares MSCI USA Min Vol Factor ETF by 844.3% during the 3rd quarter. Captrust Financial Advisors now owns 3,858,878 shares of the companys stock worth $255,072,000 after acquiring an additional 3,450,227 shares during the last quarter. Alaska Permanent Fund Corp acquired a new stake in iShares MSCI USA Min Vol Factor ETF in the 4th quarter valued at about $234,835,000. Finally, BlackRock Inc. lifted its position in shares of iShares MSCI USA Min Vol Factor ETF by 17.3% during the third quarter. BlackRock Inc. now owns 12,988,250 shares of the companys stock worth $858,523,000 after purchasing an additional 1,917,457 shares in the last quarter.

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iShares MSCI USA Min Vol Factor ETF Price Performance

USMV opened at $74.33 on Monday. The stock has a market capitalization of $29.63 billion, a P/E ratio of 20.17 and a beta of 0.75. The companys 50 day simple moving average is $72.93 and its 200-day simple moving average is $72.47. iShares MSCI USA Min Vol Factor ETF has a one year low of $47.44 and a one year high of $55.45.

iShares MSCI USA Min Vol Factor ETF Company Profile

The iShares MSCI USA Min Vol Factor ETF (USMV) is an exchange-traded fund that is based on the MSCI USA Minimum Volatility (USD) index. The fund tracks an index of US-listed firms selected and weighted to create a low-volatility portfolio subject to various constraints. USMV was launched on Oct 18, 2011 and is managed by BlackRock.

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Thousands of people rallied Sunday in Australia to back a campaign to recognize the country's Indigenous people in the constitution ahead of a referendum later this year, after a recent dip in support for the change.

The referendum, likely to be held between October and December, seeks to amend the constitution and establish an advisory body -- the Indigenous Voice to Parliament -- to give Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people a direct say in policies that impact them.

Prime Minister Anthony Albanese's center-left Labor government backs the change, while the opposition Liberal-National conservatives urge a "No" vote.

On Sunday, an Australian Council of Social Service tweet showed Sydney rally attendees in T-shirts with the words "Vote Yes" and caps with the words "The Uluru Statement," referring to a key document that calls for an Indigenous Voice.
International Assets Investment Management LLC boosted its stake in shares of Public Service Enterprise Group Incorporated (NYSE:PEG  Free Report) by 15.4% in the first quarter, according to its most recent filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC). The firm owned 7,971 shares of the utilities providers stock after purchasing an additional 1,061 shares during the quarter. International Assets Investment Management LLCs holdings in Public Service Enterprise Group were worth $498,000 at the end of the most recent reporting period.

Other hedge funds and other institutional investors have also added to or reduced their stakes in the company. AE Wealth Management LLC boosted its position in Public Service Enterprise Group by 33.4% during the 4th quarter. AE Wealth Management LLC now owns 228,045 shares of the utilities providers stock worth $13,972,000 after acquiring an additional 57,095 shares during the period. Louisiana State Employees Retirement System boosted its position in Public Service Enterprise Group by 0.9% during the 4th quarter. Louisiana State Employees Retirement System now owns 32,200 shares of the utilities providers stock worth $1,973,000 after acquiring an additional 300 shares during the period. FLC Capital Advisors acquired a new position in Public Service Enterprise Group during the 4th quarter worth $208,000. Cassaday & Co Wealth Management LLC acquired a new position in Public Service Enterprise Group during the 4th quarter worth $350,000. Finally, Accurate Wealth Management LLC boosted its position in Public Service Enterprise Group by 14.3% during the 1st quarter. Accurate Wealth Management LLC now owns 3,477 shares of the utilities providers stock worth $220,000 after acquiring an additional 436 shares during the period. Institutional investors and hedge funds own 70.37% of the companys stock.

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Wall Street Analyst Weigh In

A number of analysts have recently commented on the company. LADENBURG THALM/SH SH assumed coverage on Public Service Enterprise Group in a research note on Monday, April 3rd. They issued a neutral rating and a $60.50 price objective on the stock. Mizuho dropped their price objective on Public Service Enterprise Group from $66.00 to $60.00 and set a buy rating on the stock in a research note on Monday, March 13th. StockNews.com initiated coverage on Public Service Enterprise Group in a research note on Thursday, May 18th. They issued a hold rating on the stock. The Goldman Sachs Group initiated coverage on Public Service Enterprise Group in a research report on Wednesday, June 7th. They set a neutral rating and a $64.00 target price on the stock. Finally, Morgan Stanley boosted their target price on Public Service Enterprise Group from $64.00 to $70.00 and gave the stock an overweight rating in a research report on Thursday, April 20th. Six research analysts have rated the stock with a hold rating and four have assigned a buy rating to the companys stock. According to MarketBeat, Public Service Enterprise Group has an average rating of Hold and a consensus price target of $66.14.

Public Service Enterprise Group Stock Up 1.2 %

NYSE:PEG opened at $62.61 on Monday. The firm has a market capitalization of $31.24 billion, a price-to-earnings ratio of 13.49, a PEG ratio of 4.20 and a beta of 0.57. Public Service Enterprise Group Incorporated has a 1-year low of $52.51 and a 1-year high of $69.94. The company has a current ratio of 0.79, a quick ratio of 0.66 and a debt-to-equity ratio of 1.16. The businesss fifty day moving average price is $62.13 and its 200 day moving average price is $61.44.

Public Service Enterprise Group (NYSE:PEG  Free Report) last issued its earnings results on Tuesday, May 2nd. The utilities provider reported $1.39 EPS for the quarter, beating analysts consensus estimates of $1.21 by $0.18. Public Service Enterprise Group had a return on equity of 12.78% and a net margin of 20.64%. The firm had revenue of $3.76 billion for the quarter, compared to the consensus estimate of $2.89 billion. During the same quarter in the previous year, the company posted $1.33 earnings per share. The businesss quarterly revenue was up 62.3% compared to the same quarter last year. On average, sell-side analysts forecast that Public Service Enterprise Group Incorporated will post 3.44 earnings per share for the current fiscal year.

Public Service Enterprise Group Dividend Announcement

The firm also recently announced a quarterly dividend, which was paid on Friday, June 30th. Investors of record on Friday, June 9th were paid a dividend of $0.57 per share. The ex-dividend date was Thursday, June 8th. This represents a $2.28 annualized dividend and a yield of 3.64%. Public Service Enterprise Groups payout ratio is 49.14%.

About Public Service Enterprise Group

(Free Report)

Public Service Enterprise Group Incorporated, through its subsidiaries, operates as an energy company primarily in Mid-Atlantic United States. The company operates through PSE&G and PSEG Power. The PSE&G segment transmits electricity; distributes electricity and gas to residential, commercial, and industrial customers, as well as invests in solar generation projects, and energy efficiency and related programs; and offers appliance services and repairs.

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The Gabelli Equity Trust Inc. (NYSE:GAB  Free Report) was the target of a significant increase in short interest in June. As of June 15th, there was short interest totalling 299,800 shares, an increase of 43.2% from the May 31st total of 209,400 shares. Based on an average daily trading volume, of 428,700 shares, the days-to-cover ratio is currently 0.7 days.

Institutional Inflows and Outflows

A number of hedge funds have recently made changes to their positions in GAB. ICA Group Wealth Management LLC increased its position in shares of The Gabelli Equity Trust by 674.7% in the first quarter. ICA Group Wealth Management LLC now owns 5,167 shares of the financial services providers stock valued at $30,000 after buying an additional 4,500 shares in the last quarter. HBK Sorce Advisory LLC increased its position in The Gabelli Equity Trust by 100.0% during the 4th quarter. HBK Sorce Advisory LLC now owns 30,000 shares of the financial services providers stock worth $32,000 after purchasing an additional 15,000 shares in the last quarter. Resurgent Financial Advisors LLC purchased a new stake in The Gabelli Equity Trust during the 4th quarter worth about $36,000. JPMorgan Chase & Co. increased its position in The Gabelli Equity Trust by 46.1% during the 1st quarter. JPMorgan Chase & Co. now owns 6,573 shares of the financial services providers stock worth $38,000 after purchasing an additional 2,073 shares in the last quarter. Finally, Salem Investment Counselors Inc. increased its position in The Gabelli Equity Trust by 79.9% during the 1st quarter. Salem Investment Counselors Inc. now owns 5,826 shares of the financial services providers stock worth $40,000 after purchasing an additional 2,588 shares in the last quarter. Hedge funds and other institutional investors own 6.74% of the companys stock.

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The Gabelli Equity Trust Stock Performance

Shares of GAB stock opened at $5.80 on Monday. The Gabelli Equity Trust has a fifty-two week low of $4.84 and a fifty-two week high of $6.59. The business has a fifty day simple moving average of $5.57 and a 200-day simple moving average of $5.65.

The Gabelli Equity Trust Announces Dividend

The Gabelli Equity Trust Company Profile

The company also recently declared a quarterly dividend, which was paid on Friday, June 23rd. Stockholders of record on Thursday, June 15th were given a $0.15 dividend. This represents a $0.60 dividend on an annualized basis and a dividend yield of 10.34%. The ex-dividend date of this dividend was Wednesday, June 14th.

(Free Report)

The Gabelli Equity Trust Inc is a closed ended equity mutual fund launched by GAMCO Investors, Inc The fund is managed by Gabelli Funds, LLC. It invests in public equity markets of the United States. The fund seeks to invest in stocks of companies operating across diversified sectors. It invests in preferred stock, convertible or exchangeable securities, and warrants and rights.

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Clicks Group Limited (OTCMKTS:CLCGY  Free Report) saw a significant drop in short interest in the month of June. As of June 15th, there was short interest totalling 700 shares, a drop of 30.0% from the May 31st total of 1,000 shares. Based on an average daily volume of 2,100 shares, the short-interest ratio is presently 0.3 days.

Clicks Group Trading Up 3.5 %

CLCGY opened at $28.95 on Monday. The firms fifty day moving average is $27.79 and its two-hundred day moving average is $29.58. Clicks Group has a twelve month low of $24.10 and a twelve month high of $37.18.

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Clicks Group Cuts Dividend

The business also recently disclosed a dividend, which will be paid on Wednesday, July 12th. Stockholders of record on Friday, June 30th will be given a dividend of $0.1353 per share. This represents a dividend yield of 1.73%. The ex-dividend date is Thursday, June 29th. Clicks Groups dividend payout ratio is 38.29%.

About Clicks Group

Clicks Group Limited, together with its subsidiaries, operates as a health, wellness, and beauty retailer, and pharmaceutical distributor and wholesaler in South Africa. The company operates in two segments, Retail and Distribution. It retails pharmacy, health, and beauty through approximately 837 stores, and 673 in-store pharmacies for the middle to upper income markets under the Clicks name.

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Rainsberger Wealth Advisors Inc. raised its stake in Rio Tinto Group (NYSE:RIO  Free Report) by 8.7% during the first quarter, according to its most recent filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC). The fund owned 24,137 shares of the mining companys stock after buying an additional 1,927 shares during the period. Rainsberger Wealth Advisors Inc.s holdings in Rio Tinto Group were worth $1,656,000 at the end of the most recent quarter.

A number of other institutional investors have also recently made changes to their positions in the stock. Arrowstreet Capital Limited Partnership grew its holdings in shares of Rio Tinto Group by 58.9% during the 1st quarter. Arrowstreet Capital Limited Partnership now owns 12,899,694 shares of the mining companys stock valued at $1,037,135,000 after purchasing an additional 4,783,488 shares during the last quarter. Cowa LLC bought a new position in shares of Rio Tinto Group during the 1st quarter valued at $26,000. Pendal Group Ltd bought a new position in shares of Rio Tinto Group during the 4th quarter valued at $183,849,000. Wellington Management Group LLP grew its holdings in shares of Rio Tinto Group by 26.9% during the 1st quarter. Wellington Management Group LLP now owns 5,475,787 shares of the mining companys stock valued at $440,253,000 after purchasing an additional 1,161,737 shares during the last quarter. Finally, Neuberger Berman Group LLC grew its holdings in shares of Rio Tinto Group by 14.4% during the 4th quarter. Neuberger Berman Group LLC now owns 6,247,953 shares of the mining companys stock valued at $444,853,000 after purchasing an additional 787,650 shares during the last quarter. Institutional investors own 10.44% of the companys stock.

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Rio Tinto Group Trading Up 0.1 %

RIO opened at $63.84 on Monday. The company has a debt-to-equity ratio of 0.21, a current ratio of 1.64 and a quick ratio of 1.10. The companys 50 day moving average is $63.22 and its 200 day moving average is $68.66. Rio Tinto Group has a 12-month low of $50.92 and a 12-month high of $80.51.

Analyst Ratings Changes

About Rio Tinto Group

Several equities analysts recently commented on RIO shares. StockNews.com assumed coverage on shares of Rio Tinto Group in a report on Thursday, May 18th. They set a buy rating on the stock. Citigroup raised shares of Rio Tinto Group from a neutral rating to a buy rating in a research report on Thursday, June 8th. CLSA raised shares of Rio Tinto Group from an underperform rating to an outperform rating in a research report on Monday, March 13th. Morgan Stanley upgraded shares of Rio Tinto Group from an equal weight rating to an overweight rating in a research note on Friday, May 26th. Finally, JPMorgan Chase & Co. upgraded shares of Rio Tinto Group from an underweight rating to a neutral rating in a research note on Monday, May 15th. One analyst has rated the stock with a sell rating, four have given a hold rating, eight have given a buy rating and one has assigned a strong buy rating to the stock. According to MarketBeat.com, the stock currently has an average rating of Moderate Buy and a consensus target price of $4,360.50.

(Free Report)

Rio Tinto Group engages in exploring, mining, and processing mineral resources worldwide. The company operates through Iron Ore, Aluminium, Copper, and Minerals Segments. It offers aluminum, copper, iron ore, diamonds, gold, borates, titanium dioxide, salt, silver, molybdenum, and lithium. The company also owns and operates open pit and underground mines, refineries, smelters, and concentrator facilities, as well as power stations, research, and service facilities.

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Stonegate Investment Group LLC lowered its position in shares of The Travelers Companies, Inc. (NYSE:TRV  Free Report) by 21.6% in the first quarter, according to the company in its most recent disclosure with the Securities & Exchange Commission. The fund owned 14,802 shares of the insurance providers stock after selling 4,067 shares during the quarter. Stonegate Investment Group LLCs holdings in Travelers Companies were worth $2,537,000 at the end of the most recent reporting period.

Several other large investors have also made changes to their positions in the company. Fairfield Bush & CO. bought a new stake in Travelers Companies during the 1st quarter worth about $160,000. Cibc World Market Inc. raised its stake in shares of Travelers Companies by 28.8% during the first quarter. Cibc World Market Inc. now owns 5,934 shares of the insurance providers stock worth $1,084,000 after buying an additional 1,327 shares during the last quarter. Vontobel Holding Ltd. raised its stake in shares of 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 buying an additional 115 shares during the last quarter. Blair William & Co. IL lifted its holdings in Travelers Companies by 40.6% in the first quarter. Blair William & Co. IL now owns 51,551 shares of the insurance providers stock valued at $9,420,000 after buying an additional 14,873 shares during the period. Finally, Sei Investments Co. boosted its stake in Travelers Companies by 5.0% in the first quarter. Sei Investments Co. now owns 27,212 shares of the insurance providers stock valued at $4,952,000 after acquiring an additional 1,286 shares during the last quarter. Institutional investors and hedge funds own 81.06% of the companys stock.

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Travelers Companies Trading Up 1.6 %

NYSE:TRV opened at $173.66 on Monday. The company has a quick ratio of 0.33, a current ratio of 0.33 and a debt-to-equity ratio of 0.32. The Travelers Companies, Inc. has a twelve month low of $149.65 and a twelve month high of $194.51. The company has a market cap of $40.11 billion, a P/E ratio of 14.80, a price-to-earnings-growth ratio of 2.41 and a beta of 0.60. The business has a 50 day moving average price of $177.11 and a two-hundred day moving average price of $179.89.

Travelers Companies Increases Dividend

Travelers Companies ( NYSE:TRV Free Report ) last announced its earnings results on Wednesday, April 19th. The insurance provider reported $4.11 EPS for the quarter, topping the consensus estimate of $3.64 by $0.47. Travelers Companies had a net margin of 7.41% and a return on equity of 13.41%. The business had revenue of $9.70 billion during the quarter, compared to analysts expectations of $8.98 billion. During the same quarter in the prior year, the company posted $4.22 earnings per share. The firms revenue was up 10.2% on a year-over-year basis. As a group, analysts expect that The Travelers Companies, Inc. will post 14.39 EPS for the current fiscal year.

The business also recently announced a quarterly dividend, which was paid on Friday, June 30th. Investors of record on Friday, June 9th were issued a dividend of $1.00 per share. This represents a $4.00 annualized dividend and a yield of 2.30%. The ex-dividend date was Thursday, June 8th. This is a positive change from Travelers Companiess previous quarterly dividend of $0.93. Travelers Companiess dividend payout ratio is presently 34.10%.

Travelers Companies declared that its Board of Directors has authorized a stock buyback plan on Wednesday, April 19th that authorizes the company to repurchase $5.00 billion in outstanding shares. This repurchase authorization authorizes the insurance provider to purchase up to 12.2% of its shares through open market purchases. Shares repurchase plans are usually a sign that the companys board of directors believes its shares are undervalued.

Analyst Ratings Changes

TRV has been the topic of a number of analyst reports. Roth Capital reissued a buy rating on shares of Travelers Companies in a research note on Friday, April 21st. Piper Sandler raised their target price on Travelers Companies from $196.00 to $204.00 and gave the stock a neutral rating in a report on Tuesday, April 4th. Morgan Stanley initiated coverage on Travelers Companies in a research note on Tuesday, June 20th. They issued an equal weight rating and a $185.00 price target for the company. Barclays lifted their price objective on shares of Travelers Companies from $179.00 to $185.00 in a research note on Thursday, April 20th. Finally, Wells Fargo & Company upped their target price on shares of 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 analysts have rated the stock with a hold rating, five have given a buy rating and one has issued a strong buy rating to the stock. Based on data from MarketBeat, Travelers Companies currently has an average rating of Hold and an average target price of $195.77.

Insider Activity at Travelers Companies

In other Travelers Companies news, CFO Daniel S. Frey sold 37,316 shares of the businesss stock in a transaction that occurred on Friday, April 21st. The stock was sold at an average price of $179.08, for a total transaction of $6,682,549.28. Following the transaction, the chief financial officer now owns 11,703 shares of the companys stock, valued at approximately $2,095,773.24. The transaction was disclosed in a legal filing with the Securities & Exchange Commission, which can be accessed through the SEC website. In other news, CFO Daniel S. Frey sold 37,316 shares of the businesss stock in a transaction dated Friday, April 21st. The shares were sold at an average price of $179.08, for a total transaction of $6,682,549.28. Following the transaction, the chief financial officer now directly owns 11,703 shares in the company, valued at approximately $2,095,773.24. The transaction was disclosed in a document filed with the Securities & Exchange Commission, which can be accessed through the SEC website. Also, EVP Andy F. Bessette sold 11,572 shares of the firms stock in a transaction dated Tuesday, April 25th. The shares were sold at an average price of $178.14, for a total transaction of $2,061,436.08. Following the completion of the sale, the executive vice president now owns 17,361 shares of the companys stock, valued at $3,092,688.54. The disclosure for this sale can be found here. Over the last ninety days, insiders sold 59,134 shares of company stock valued at $10,617,466. Insiders own 1.29% of the companys stock.

Travelers Companies Company Profile

(Free Report)

The Travelers Companies, Inc, through its subsidiaries, provides a range of commercial and personal property, and casualty insurance products and services to businesses, government units, associations, and individuals in the United States and internationally. It operates through three segments: Business Insurance, Bond & Specialty Insurance, and Personal Insurance.

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Lafayette Investments Inc. decreased its holdings in shares of Wells Fargo & Company (NYSE:WFC  Free Report) by 3.9% during the first quarter, according to its most recent Form 13F filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission. The institutional investor owned 19,645 shares of the financial services providers stock after selling 800 shares during the quarter. Lafayette Investments Inc.s holdings in Wells Fargo & Company were worth $734,000 as of its most recent filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission.

Several other large investors have also recently bought and sold shares of the business. Norges Bank purchased a new position in Wells Fargo & Company during the 4th quarter valued at about $2,049,693,000. Moneta Group Investment Advisors LLC boosted its stake in shares of Wells Fargo & Company by 129,312.1% during the 4th quarter. Moneta Group Investment Advisors LLC now owns 26,287,479 shares of the financial services providers stock valued at $1,085,410,000 after buying an additional 26,267,166 shares during the period. Price T Rowe Associates Inc. MD grew its holdings in shares of Wells Fargo & Company by 20.9% during the 3rd quarter. Price T Rowe Associates Inc. MD now owns 105,621,983 shares of the financial services providers stock valued at $4,248,626,000 after acquiring an additional 18,252,701 shares in the last quarter. Renaissance Technologies LLC increased its stake in shares of Wells Fargo & Company by 1,478.6% in the first quarter. Renaissance Technologies LLC now owns 8,390,611 shares of the financial services providers stock worth $406,609,000 after acquiring an additional 7,859,100 shares during the last quarter. Finally, Ontario Teachers Pension Plan Board acquired a new position in shares of Wells Fargo & Company in the first quarter worth $345,861,000. 72.11% of the stock is owned by institutional investors and hedge funds.

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Analyst Upgrades and Downgrades

A number of brokerages have commented on WFC. Odeon Capital Group downgraded Wells Fargo & Company from a buy rating to a hold rating and set a $44.60 target price on the stock. in a research note on Wednesday, June 7th. The Goldman Sachs Group increased their price objective on Wells Fargo & Company from $46.00 to $49.00 in a report on Friday, April 14th. Morgan Stanley reduced their target price on shares of Wells Fargo & Company from $47.00 to $46.00 and set an overweight rating for the company in a research note on Monday, April 17th. Citigroup dropped their price target on shares of Wells Fargo & Company from $52.00 to $50.00 and set a buy rating on the stock in a research note on Monday, April 17th. Finally, Keefe, Bruyette & Woods lifted their price objective on shares of Wells Fargo & Company from $44.00 to $46.00 and gave the company an outperform rating in a research note on Monday, April 17th. Seven analysts have rated the stock with a hold rating, eight have assigned a buy rating and one has issued a strong buy rating to the company. According to data from MarketBeat, Wells Fargo & Company presently has a consensus rating of Moderate Buy and an average target price of $48.71.

Wells Fargo & Company Stock Up 0.5 %

Shares of WFC stock opened at $42.68 on Monday. Wells Fargo & Company has a 12 month low of $35.25 and a 12 month high of $48.84. The company has a quick ratio of 0.83, a current ratio of 0.83 and a debt-to-equity ratio of 1.06. The firm has a market cap of $160.14 billion, a PE ratio of 12.23, a price-to-earnings-growth ratio of 0.90 and a beta of 1.12. The stock has a 50 day moving average of $40.50 and a 200-day moving average of $41.87.

Wells Fargo & Company (NYSE:WFC  Free Report) last released its earnings results on Friday, April 14th. The financial services provider reported $1.23 earnings per share for the quarter, beating the consensus estimate of $1.15 by $0.08. Wells Fargo & Company had a net margin of 15.93% and a return on equity of 10.07%. The business had revenue of $20.73 billion during the quarter, compared to analysts expectations of $20.06 billion. During the same quarter last year, the company earned $0.88 earnings per share. The firms revenue was up 16.9% on a year-over-year basis. On average, equities analysts predict that Wells Fargo & Company will post 4.66 EPS for the current year.

Wells Fargo & Company Announces Dividend

The company also recently announced a quarterly dividend, which was paid on Thursday, June 1st. Investors of record on Friday, May 5th were paid a $0.30 dividend. The ex-dividend date of this dividend was Thursday, May 4th. This represents a $1.20 dividend on an annualized basis and a dividend yield of 2.81%. Wells Fargo & Companys payout ratio is 34.38%.

Wells Fargo & Company Company Profile

(Free Report)

Wells Fargo & Company, a diversified financial services company, provides banking, investment, mortgage, and consumer and commercial finance products and services in the United States and internationally. It operates through four segments: Consumer Banking and Lending; Commercial Banking; Corporate and Investment Banking; and Wealth and Investment Management.

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High Net Worth Advisory Group LLC grew its holdings in Bank of America Co. (NYSE:BAC  Free Report) by 7.3% during the first quarter, according to its most recent 13F filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC). The firm owned 23,835 shares of the financial services providers stock after purchasing an additional 1,623 shares during the quarter. High Net Worth Advisory Group LLCs holdings in Bank of America were worth $682,000 as of its most recent filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC).

A number of other hedge funds and other institutional investors also recently made changes to their positions in BAC. B. Riley Wealth Advisors Inc. lifted its position in shares of Bank of America by 18.8% during the 3rd quarter. B. Riley Wealth Advisors Inc. now owns 221,443 shares of the financial services providers stock valued at $6,690,000 after acquiring an additional 35,107 shares during the period. Cyndeo Wealth Partners LLC acquired a new position in Bank of America during the 4th quarter worth approximately $641,000. Plimoth Trust Co. LLC raised its stake in Bank of America by 7.0% during the 4th quarter. Plimoth Trust Co. LLC now owns 82,856 shares of the financial services providers stock worth $2,744,000 after buying an additional 5,432 shares during the period. Atlas Wealth LLC acquired a new position in Bank of America during the 4th quarter worth approximately $207,000. Finally, James Hambro & Partners acquired a new position in Bank of America during the 4th quarter worth approximately $542,000. 67.34% of the stock is owned by institutional investors and hedge funds.

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Analysts Set New Price Targets

A number of research analysts recently weighed in on BAC shares. Royal Bank of Canada upped their price target on Bank of America from $34.00 to $35.00 and gave the stock an outperform rating in a research note on Wednesday, April 19th. StockNews.com initiated coverage on shares of Bank of America in a report on Thursday, May 18th. They set a hold rating on the stock. UBS Group upped their price objective on shares of Bank of America from $34.00 to $36.00 and gave the stock a buy rating in a report on Wednesday, April 19th. Odeon Capital Group downgraded Bank of America from a buy rating to a hold rating and set a $35.20 price objective for the company. in a research note on Wednesday, March 8th. Finally, The Goldman Sachs Group dropped their target price on Bank of America from $39.00 to $35.00 and set a buy rating on the stock in a report on Monday, April 3rd. Two analysts have rated the stock with a sell rating, seven have given a hold rating and ten have assigned a buy rating to the stock. According to data from MarketBeat, Bank of America currently has a consensus rating of Hold and an average price target of $36.77.

Bank of America Stock Up 0.1 %

Bank of America stock opened at $28.69 on Monday. Bank of America Co. has a twelve month low of $26.32 and a twelve month high of $38.60. The firm has a 50 day moving average price of $28.41 and a 200-day moving average price of $30.94. The company has a market capitalization of $228.63 billion, a P/E ratio of 8.62, a P/E/G ratio of 1.21 and a beta of 1.37. The company has a quick ratio of 0.82, a current ratio of 0.82 and a debt-to-equity ratio of 1.13.

Bank of America (NYSE:BAC  Free Report) last posted its quarterly earnings results on Tuesday, April 18th. The financial services provider reported $0.94 earnings per share for the quarter, topping the consensus estimate of $0.83 by $0.11. Bank of America had a return on equity of 11.72% and a net margin of 21.85%. The company had revenue of $26.26 billion during the quarter, compared to the consensus estimate of $25.28 billion. During the same quarter in the prior year, the company earned $0.80 EPS. The firms quarterly revenue was up 13.0% compared to the same quarter last year. As a group, equities analysts predict that Bank of America Co. will post 3.4 EPS for the current year.

Bank of America Announces Dividend

The firm also recently declared a quarterly dividend, which was paid on Friday, June 30th. Stockholders of record on Friday, June 2nd were given a dividend of $0.22 per share. The ex-dividend date of this dividend was Thursday, June 1st. This represents a $0.88 dividend on an annualized basis and a dividend yield of 3.07%. Bank of Americas dividend payout ratio (DPR) is presently 26.43%.

Bank of America Profile

(Free Report)

Bank of America Corporation, through its subsidiaries, provides banking and financial products and services for individual consumers, small and middle-market businesses, institutional investors, large corporations, and governments worldwide. Its Consumer Banking segment offers traditional and money market savings accounts, certificates of deposit and IRAs, noninterest-and interest-bearing checking accounts, and investment accounts and products; and credit and debit cards, residential mortgages, and home equity loans, as well as direct and indirect loans, such as automotive, recreational vehicle, and consumer personal loans.

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Lafayette Investments Inc. trimmed its stake in Ford Motor (NYSE:F  Free Report) by 24.0% during the 1st quarter, according to the company in its most recent disclosure with the Securities and Exchange Commission. The fund owned 12,700 shares of the auto manufacturers stock after selling 4,000 shares during the period. Lafayette Investments Inc.s holdings in Ford Motor were worth $160,000 as of its most recent SEC filing.

A number of other institutional investors and hedge funds have also bought and sold shares of the stock. Bay Colony Advisory Group Inc d b a Bay Colony Advisors raised its holdings in shares of Ford Motor by 6.7% during the 4th quarter. Bay Colony Advisory Group Inc d b a Bay Colony Advisors now owns 11,817 shares of the auto manufacturers stock valued at $137,000 after buying an additional 737 shares in the last quarter. Newbridge Financial Services Group Inc. grew its position in Ford Motor by 1.7% during the first quarter. Newbridge Financial Services Group Inc. now owns 46,430 shares of the auto manufacturers stock valued at $585,000 after acquiring an additional 790 shares during the last quarter. AJ Wealth Strategies LLC raised its stake in shares of Ford Motor by 2.7% during the first quarter. AJ Wealth Strategies LLC now owns 31,374 shares of the auto manufacturers stock worth $531,000 after acquiring an additional 820 shares in the last quarter. Gleason Group Inc. lifted its holdings in shares of Ford Motor by 5.4% in the 1st quarter. Gleason Group Inc. now owns 15,918 shares of the auto manufacturers stock worth $201,000 after acquiring an additional 822 shares during the last quarter. Finally, Associated Banc Corp boosted its stake in shares of Ford Motor by 4.8% in the 4th quarter. Associated Banc Corp now owns 18,519 shares of the auto manufacturers stock valued at $215,000 after purchasing an additional 842 shares in the last quarter. 53.20% of the stock is owned by hedge funds and other institutional investors.

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Analyst Ratings Changes

Several analysts have weighed in on F shares. Benchmark boosted their price target on shares of Ford Motor from $19.00 to $20.00 in a research note on Wednesday, May 3rd. Daiwa Capital Markets upgraded Ford Motor from an underperform rating to a neutral rating and set a $12.00 target price for the company in a report on Thursday, May 25th. StockNews.com initiated coverage on Ford Motor in a research note on Thursday, May 18th. They issued a hold rating on the stock. TheStreet raised Ford Motor from a c+ rating to a b rating in a research note on Tuesday, May 2nd. Finally, Citigroup raised shares of Ford Motor from a neutral rating to a buy rating and lifted their target price for the stock from $12.80 to $16.00 in a research note on Monday, June 5th. Three investment analysts have rated the stock with a sell rating, six have issued a hold rating and six have given a buy rating to the companys stock. According to data from MarketBeat, the company currently has an average rating of Hold and an average price target of $14.78.

Ford Motor Price Performance

Shares of NYSE F opened at $15.13 on Monday. The company has a 50 day simple moving average of $12.72 and a two-hundred day simple moving average of $12.51. Ford Motor has a fifty-two week low of $10.61 and a fifty-two week high of $16.68. The company has a market capitalization of $60.53 billion, a price-to-earnings ratio of 21.31, a P/E/G ratio of 1.40 and a beta of 1.59. The company has a debt-to-equity ratio of 2.16, a quick ratio of 1.03 and a current ratio of 1.20.

Ford Motor (NYSE:F  Free Report) last posted its quarterly earnings data on Tuesday, May 2nd. The auto manufacturer reported $0.63 earnings per share for the quarter, beating analysts consensus estimates of $0.36 by $0.27. Ford Motor had a return on equity of 19.99% and a net margin of 1.75%. The company had revenue of $39.09 billion during the quarter, compared to analyst estimates of $37.42 billion. During the same quarter last year, the company earned $0.38 EPS. The firms revenue for the quarter was up 21.4% on a year-over-year basis. Analysts expect that Ford Motor will post 1.74 EPS for the current fiscal year.

Ford Motor Announces Dividend

The company also recently disclosed a quarterly dividend, which was paid on Thursday, June 15th. Shareholders of record on Wednesday, April 26th were paid a dividend of $0.15 per share. The ex-dividend date of this dividend was Tuesday, April 25th. This represents a $0.60 dividend on an annualized basis and a yield of 3.97%. Ford Motors dividend payout ratio is currently 84.51%.

Ford Motor Profile

(Free Report)

Ford Motor Company develops, delivers, and services a range of Ford trucks, commercial cars and vans, sport utility vehicles, and Lincoln luxury vehicles worldwide. It operates through Ford Blue, Ford Model e, and Ford Pro; Ford Next; and Ford Credit segments. The company sells Ford and Lincoln vehicles, service parts, and accessories through distributors and dealers, as well as through dealerships to commercial fleet customers, daily rental car companies, and governments.

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Oak Harvest Investment Services cut its holdings in Eli Lilly and Company (NYSE:LLY  Free Report) by 15.9% during the first quarter, according to the company in its most recent Form 13F filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC). The institutional investor owned 8,641 shares of the companys stock after selling 1,629 shares during the period. Oak Harvest Investment Services holdings in Eli Lilly and Company were worth $2,967,000 as of its most recent SEC filing.

A number of other hedge funds and other institutional investors also recently bought and sold shares of the business. WBH Advisory Inc. acquired a new stake in Eli Lilly and Company in the first quarter valued at $4,051,000. Stonegate Investment Group LLC increased its position in shares of Eli Lilly and Company by 1,794.8% during the first quarter. Stonegate Investment Group LLC now owns 67,056 shares of the companys stock worth $23,029,000 after purchasing an additional 63,517 shares in the last quarter. Howard Capital Management Group LLC lifted its holdings in shares of Eli Lilly and Company by 20.7% in the 1st quarter. Howard Capital Management Group LLC now owns 1,144 shares of the companys stock valued at $393,000 after purchasing an additional 196 shares during the last quarter. Patriot Financial Group Insurance Agency LLC purchased a new stake in shares of Eli Lilly and Company in the 1st quarter valued at about $245,000. Finally, Strategic Wealth Investment Group LLC lifted its holdings in shares of Eli Lilly and Company by 43.3% in the 1st quarter. Strategic Wealth Investment Group LLC now owns 5,298 shares of the companys stock valued at $1,218,000 after purchasing an additional 1,600 shares during the last quarter. 87.25% of the stock is currently owned by institutional investors and hedge funds.

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Eli Lilly and Company Price Performance

Shares of NYSE:LLY opened at $468.98 on Monday. Eli Lilly and Company has a 12 month low of $296.32 and a 12 month high of $469.87. The stock has a market cap of $445.19 billion, a price-to-earnings ratio of 74.56, a PEG ratio of 2.15 and a beta of 0.38. The stocks 50 day moving average price is $434.32 and its 200 day moving average price is $377.31. The company has a debt-to-equity ratio of 1.67, a current ratio of 1.30 and a quick ratio of 1.02.

Eli Lilly and Company Announces Dividend

Eli Lilly and Company ( NYSE:LLY Free Report ) last posted its quarterly earnings results on Thursday, April 27th. The company reported $1.62 EPS for the quarter, missing the consensus estimate of $1.73 by ($0.11). Eli Lilly and Company had a net margin of 20.54% and a return on equity of 61.42%. The company had revenue of $6.96 billion for the quarter, compared to analysts expectations of $6.87 billion. During the same quarter in the prior year, the firm earned $2.62 earnings per share. The companys revenue was down 10.9% on a year-over-year basis. Equities research analysts anticipate that Eli Lilly and Company will post 8.78 earnings per share for the current fiscal year.

The company also recently announced a quarterly dividend, which will be paid on Tuesday, August 15th. Shareholders of record on Friday, September 8th will be given a dividend of $1.13 per share. This represents a $4.52 dividend on an annualized basis and a yield of 0.96%. The ex-dividend date of this dividend is Monday, August 14th. Eli Lilly and Companys dividend payout ratio is 71.86%.

Analysts Set New Price Targets

Several analysts have recently weighed in on the company. SVB Securities boosted their target price on Eli Lilly and Company from $410.00 to $458.00 in a report on Monday, May 1st. 3M reissued a maintains rating on shares of Eli Lilly and Company in a report on Friday, April 28th. Morgan Stanley boosted their target price on Eli Lilly and Company from $478.00 to $507.00 in a report on Monday, May 15th. Credit Suisse Group boosted their target price on Eli Lilly and Company from $420.00 to $490.00 in a report on Thursday, May 4th. Finally, StockNews.com downgraded Eli Lilly and Company from a strong-buy rating to a buy rating in a research note on Monday, June 12th. One investment analyst has rated the stock with a sell rating, two have given a hold rating and thirteen have issued a buy rating to the companys stock. Based on data from MarketBeat.com, Eli Lilly and Company currently has a consensus rating of Moderate Buy and a consensus target price of $437.90.

Insiders Place Their Bets

In other news, major shareholder Lilly Endowment Inc sold 11,760 shares of the businesss stock in a transaction dated Wednesday, June 28th. The shares were sold at an average price of $465.41, for a total transaction of $5,473,221.60. Following the transaction, the insider now owns 101,237,050 shares in the company, valued at approximately $47,116,735,440.50. The transaction was disclosed in a legal filing with the SEC, which is accessible through the SEC website. In related news, major shareholder Lilly Endowment Inc sold 11,760 shares of the companys stock in a transaction dated Wednesday, June 28th. The shares were sold at an average price of $465.41, for a total value of $5,473,221.60. Following the sale, the insider now owns 101,237,050 shares of the companys stock, valued at $47,116,735,440.50. The transaction was disclosed in a legal filing with the SEC, which is accessible through this hyperlink. Also, EVP Patrik Jonsson sold 6,000 shares of the companys stock in a transaction dated Thursday, June 1st. The shares were sold at an average price of $429.46, for a total transaction of $2,576,760.00. Following the completion of the sale, the executive vice president now directly owns 36,941 shares in the company, valued at approximately $15,864,681.86. The disclosure for this sale can be found here. Insiders sold a total of 876,543 shares of company stock valued at $372,308,236 in the last quarter. Insiders own 0.13% of the companys stock.

Eli Lilly and Company Profile

(Free Report)

Eli Lilly and Company discovers, develops, and markets human pharmaceuticals worldwide. It offers Basaglar, Humalog, Humalog Mix 75/25, Humalog U-100, Humalog U-200, Humalog Mix 50/50, insulin lispro, insulin lispro protamine, insulin lispro mix 75/25, Humulin, Humulin 70/30, Humulin N, Humulin R, and Humulin U-500 for diabetes; and Jardiance, Trajenta, and Trulicity for type 2 diabetes.

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Shikiar Asset Management Inc. purchased a new position in shares of Laboratory Co. of America Holdings (NYSE:LH  Free Report) in the first quarter, Holdings Channel reports. The fund purchased 15,465 shares of the medical research companys stock, valued at approximately $3,548,000. Laboratory Co. of America makes up about 1.3% of Shikiar Asset Management Inc.s investment portfolio, making the stock its 26th biggest holding.

A number of other institutional investors also recently bought and sold shares of LH. Eagle Bay Advisors LLC purchased a new position in shares of Laboratory Co. of America during the 2nd quarter valued at approximately $29,000. Zions Bancorporation N.A. increased its holdings in shares of Laboratory Co. of America by 45.6% during the 4th quarter. Zions Bancorporation N.A. now owns 131 shares of the medical research companys stock valued at $31,000 after purchasing an additional 41 shares in the last quarter. Compagnie Lombard Odier SCmA purchased a new position in shares of Laboratory Co. of America during the 4th quarter valued at approximately $33,000. WFA of San Diego LLC purchased a new position in shares of Laboratory Co. of America during the 4th quarter valued at approximately $33,000. Finally, Quent Capital LLC increased its holdings in shares of Laboratory Co. of America by 186.3% during the 4th quarter. Quent Capital LLC now owns 146 shares of the medical research companys stock valued at $34,000 after purchasing an additional 95 shares in the last quarter. 87.75% of the stock is owned by hedge funds and other institutional investors.

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Laboratory Co. of America Trading Up 0.4 %

Shares of LH opened at $241.33 on Monday. Laboratory Co. of America Holdings has a 52-week low of $200.32 and a 52-week high of $263.13. The company has a quick ratio of 1.46, a current ratio of 1.63 and a debt-to-equity ratio of 0.50. The firms fifty day moving average is $224.18 and its two-hundred day moving average is $232.75. The stock has a market cap of $21.38 billion, a PE ratio of 21.90 and a beta of 1.06.

Laboratory Co. of America Dividend Announcement

Laboratory Co. of America ( NYSE:LH Free Report ) last announced its earnings results on Tuesday, April 25th. The medical research company reported $3.82 earnings per share (EPS) for the quarter, missing the consensus estimate of $3.99 by ($0.17). Laboratory Co. of America had a return on equity of 15.56% and a net margin of 6.78%. The business had revenue of $3.78 billion for the quarter, compared to analyst estimates of $3.70 billion. During the same period last year, the firm earned $6.11 EPS. The companys revenue for the quarter was down 3.1% compared to the same quarter last year. Research analysts forecast that Laboratory Co. of America Holdings will post 16.83 earnings per share for the current fiscal year.

The company also recently declared a quarterly dividend, which was paid on Thursday, June 8th. Stockholders of record on Thursday, May 18th were given a dividend of $0.72 per share. The ex-dividend date was Wednesday, May 17th. This represents a $2.88 annualized dividend and a dividend yield of 1.19%. Laboratory Co. of Americas payout ratio is 26.13%.

Wall Street Analysts Forecast Growth

Several equities analysts have recently weighed in on LH shares. Mizuho cut their target price on shares of Laboratory Co. of America from $277.00 to $257.00 in a report on Tuesday, May 16th. Truist Financial cut their target price on shares of Laboratory Co. of America from $285.00 to $275.00 in a report on Monday, May 1st. Citigroup dropped their price target on shares of Laboratory Co. of America from $260.00 to $235.00 in a research note on Wednesday, April 26th. Credit Suisse Group dropped their price target on shares of Laboratory Co. of America from $304.00 to $288.00 and set an outperform rating on the stock in a research note on Monday, March 13th. Finally, StockNews.com initiated coverage on shares of Laboratory Co. of America in a research note on Friday. They issued a buy rating on the stock. Two analysts have rated the stock with a hold rating and eight have issued a buy rating to the company. According to MarketBeat.com, Laboratory Co. of America presently has an average rating of Moderate Buy and an average target price of $273.50.

Insider Activity

In other news, COO Mark S. Schroeder sold 1,500 shares of the businesss stock in a transaction dated Thursday, May 18th. The shares were sold at an average price of $216.77, for a total transaction of $325,155.00. Following the transaction, the chief operating officer now owns 6,687 shares of the companys stock, valued at approximately $1,449,540.99. The sale was disclosed in a filing with the SEC, which is available at this hyperlink. In other Laboratory Co. of America news, COO Mark S. Schroeder sold 1,500 shares of the businesss stock in a transaction dated Thursday, May 18th. The shares were sold at an average price of $216.77, for a total transaction of $325,155.00. Following the sale, the chief operating officer now directly owns 6,687 shares in the company, valued at $1,449,540.99. The sale was disclosed in a legal filing with the Securities & Exchange Commission, which can be accessed through the SEC website. Also, CEO Paul R. Kirchgraber sold 4,300 shares of the businesss stock in a transaction dated Friday, May 19th. The stock was sold at an average price of $216.91, for a total transaction of $932,713.00. Following the sale, the chief executive officer now owns 12,946 shares in the company, valued at $2,808,116.86. The disclosure for this sale can be found here. Corporate insiders own 0.65% of the companys stock.

About Laboratory Co. of America

(Free Report)

Laboratory Corporation of America Holdings operates as a life sciences company that provides vital information to help doctors, hospitals, pharmaceutical companies, researchers, and patients make clear and confident decisions. It operates in two segments, Labcorp Diagnostics and Labcorp Drug Development.

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In May, a 78-year-old U.S. citizen was sentenced to life in prison on spying charges.

Originally released for public comment in December 2022, the revisions were formally approved by China's top legislative body in April. Chinese law already meted out harsh punishment for those involved in alleged espionage, from life in prison to execution in extreme cases.

The United States government, analysts, and lawyers say that the revisions to Beijing's anti-espionage law are vague and will give authorities more leeway in implementing already opaque national security legislation.

A revised law dramatically expanding China's definition of espionage came into force Saturday, giving Beijing more power than ever to punish what it deems threats to national security.

Under the revised law, "relying on espionage organizations and their agents" as well as the unauthorized obtaining of "documents, data, materials, and items related to national security and interests" can constitute a spying offense.

Beijing insists it has the right to "safeguard its national security through legislation" and says it will "uphold the rule of law." But experts have warned that the changes could sweep up those with even tenuous links to organizations accused of spying.

They come in the face of an already tense environment for foreign businesses in China, following raids on and questioning of staff at due diligence company Mintz Group and consulting giant Bain and Company this year.

The new law embodies a "whole-of-society approach to dealing with anything that is a risk to this broad definition of national security," Jeremy Daum, senior research fellow at Yale's Paul Tsai China Center, told AFP. Daum said the law builds on a broader trend of tightening control since 2014, after President Xi Jinping took power.

But its vague definition of espionage and national security gives authorities a wider berth, he added, and will likely have a "chilling effect on Chinese citizens who have contact with foreigners and foreign organizations." The new revisions have ruffled feathers among the business community, with companies fearing even tighter scrutiny.

The changes "have raised legitimate concerns about conducting certain routine business activities, which now risk being considered espionage," Craig Allen, president of the US-China Business Council, wrote in a recent blog. "Confidence in China's market will suffer further if the law is applied frequently and without a clear, narrow and direct link to activities universally recognized as espionage," wrote Allen.

Diplomatic officials from several countries have also sounded alarm bells ahead of the legal changes, urging citizens in China to be vigilant.

The U.S. State Department said the law will "greatly expand the scope of what [Beijing] considers espionage activities." Deputy spokesperson Vedant Patel said Washington would "continue to speak out for human rights and rule of law issues and promote accountability for [China's] repressive activities, which this of course would be one."

And the U.S. National Counterintelligence and Security Center (NCSC) warned Friday that the law gives Beijing "expanded legal grounds for accessing and controlling data held by U.S. firms in China."
Patriot Financial Group Insurance Agency LLC grew its stake in shares of Boston Scientific Co. (NYSE:BSX  Free Report) by 3.8% during the 1st quarter, according to the company in its most recent disclosure with the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC). The institutional investor owned 12,089 shares of the medical equipment providers stock after acquiring an additional 448 shares during the period. Patriot Financial Group Insurance Agency LLCs holdings in Boston Scientific were worth $605,000 at the end of the most recent reporting period.

Several other institutional investors have also recently made changes to their positions in BSX. International Assets Investment Management LLC purchased a new stake in shares of Boston Scientific during the first quarter worth $54,000. Acadian Asset Management LLC purchased a new stake in shares of Boston Scientific in the first quarter worth $35,000. Prudential PLC purchased a new stake in shares of Boston Scientific in the first quarter worth $1,076,000. Cetera Investment Advisers raised its position in shares of Boston Scientific by 24.0% in the first quarter. Cetera Investment Advisers now owns 28,793 shares of the medical equipment providers stock worth $1,275,000 after buying an additional 5,581 shares in the last quarter. Finally, Sequoia Financial Advisors LLC purchased a new stake in shares of Boston Scientific in the first quarter worth $230,000. Hedge funds and other institutional investors own 92.20% of the companys stock.

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Boston Scientific Stock Performance

Boston Scientific stock opened at $54.09 on Monday. The company has a current ratio of 1.40, a quick ratio of 0.89 and a debt-to-equity ratio of 0.47. The firm has a 50-day moving average of $52.55 and a 200-day moving average of $49.35. The firm has a market cap of $75.73 billion, a P/E ratio of 91.68, a P/E/G ratio of 2.42 and a beta of 0.80. Boston Scientific Co. has a 1-year low of $36.15 and a 1-year high of $54.74.

Insiders Place Their Bets

Boston Scientific ( NYSE:BSX Free Report ) last posted its earnings results on Wednesday, April 26th. The medical equipment provider reported $0.47 earnings per share for the quarter, topping analysts consensus estimates of $0.43 by $0.04. Boston Scientific had a net margin of 6.91% and a return on equity of 14.57%. The company had revenue of $3.39 billion during the quarter, compared to analyst estimates of $3.16 billion. During the same period in the prior year, the business posted $0.39 earnings per share. Boston Scientifics revenue for the quarter was up 12.0% on a year-over-year basis. Sell-side analysts expect that Boston Scientific Co. will post 1.95 EPS for the current year.

In other news, EVP Jeffrey B. Mirviss sold 4,903 shares of Boston Scientific stock in a transaction that occurred on Wednesday, April 5th. The shares were sold at an average price of $50.40, for a total transaction of $247,111.20. Following the completion of the transaction, the executive vice president now directly owns 78,673 shares in the company, valued at $3,965,119.20. The transaction was disclosed in a document filed with the Securities & Exchange Commission, which is available through the SEC website. In related news, EVP Jeffrey B. Mirviss sold 4,903 shares of the firms stock in a transaction that occurred on Wednesday, April 5th. The shares were sold at an average price of $50.40, for a total transaction of $247,111.20. Following the completion of the sale, the executive vice president now owns 78,673 shares of the companys stock, valued at $3,965,119.20. The sale was disclosed in a legal filing with the Securities & Exchange Commission, which is available through this hyperlink. Also, EVP Wendy Carruthers sold 11,671 shares of Boston Scientific stock in a transaction that occurred on Monday, April 17th. The stock was sold at an average price of $51.96, for a total transaction of $606,425.16. Following the completion of the sale, the executive vice president now directly owns 83,373 shares of the companys stock, valued at approximately $4,332,061.08. The disclosure for this sale can be found here. Insiders sold 181,682 shares of company stock worth $9,607,888 over the last three months. Company insiders own 0.53% of the companys stock.

Wall Street Analyst Weigh In

A number of brokerages recently issued reports on BSX. Morgan Stanley began coverage on Boston Scientific in a research report on Tuesday, May 30th. They issued an overweight rating and a $58.00 price objective on the stock. Truist Financial increased their price objective on Boston Scientific from $54.00 to $59.00 and gave the stock a buy rating in a research report on Monday, April 17th. Raymond James increased their target price on Boston Scientific from $56.00 to $60.00 and gave the company a strong-buy rating in a research note on Monday, April 17th. Barclays increased their target price on Boston Scientific from $53.00 to $56.00 in a research note on Thursday, April 27th. Finally, StockNews.com began coverage on Boston Scientific in a research note on Thursday, May 18th. They issued a buy rating on the stock. One investment analyst has rated the stock with a hold rating, fourteen have given a buy rating and one has issued a strong buy rating to the company. According to data from MarketBeat.com, Boston Scientific currently has an average rating of Buy and a consensus price target of $55.11.

About Boston Scientific

(Free Report)

Boston Scientific Corporation develops, manufactures, and markets medical devices for use in various interventional medical specialties worldwide. It operates through MedSurg and Cardiovascular segments. The company offers devices to diagnose and treat gastrointestinal and pulmonary conditions; devices to treat various urological and pelvic conditions; implantable cardioverter and implantable cardiac resynchronization therapy defibrillators; pacemakers and implantable cardiac resynchronization therapy pacemakers; and remote patient management systems.

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Community Bank N.A. lowered its stake in Vanguard Real Estate ETF (NYSEARCA:VNQ  Free Report) by 14.9% in the first quarter, according to the company in its most recent disclosure with the SEC. The institutional investor owned 11,596 shares of the exchange traded funds stock after selling 2,029 shares during the quarter. Community Bank N.A.s holdings in Vanguard Real Estate ETF were worth $963,000 as of its most recent filing with the SEC.

Other large investors have also modified their holdings of the company. Eagle Bay Advisors LLC acquired a new stake in Vanguard Real Estate ETF during the 2nd quarter valued at approximately $30,000. Silicon Valley Capital Partners acquired a new position in shares of Vanguard Real Estate ETF in the 4th quarter worth approximately $27,000. Retirement Financial Solutions LLC acquired a new position in shares of Vanguard Real Estate ETF in the 4th quarter worth approximately $28,000. Kathleen S. Wright Associates Inc. grew its position in shares of Vanguard Real Estate ETF by 300.0% in the 4th quarter. Kathleen S. Wright Associates Inc. now owns 400 shares of the exchange traded funds stock worth $33,000 after acquiring an additional 300 shares in the last quarter. Finally, Resurgent Financial Advisors LLC acquired a new position in shares of Vanguard Real Estate ETF in the 4th quarter worth approximately $38,000.

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Vanguard Real Estate ETF Trading Up 0.6 %

Shares of VNQ opened at $83.56 on Monday. The firm has a market cap of $32.87 billion, a price-to-earnings ratio of 28.40 and a beta of 0.91. The stock has a 50 day moving average of $81.76 and a 200-day moving average of $83.86. Vanguard Real Estate ETF has a 52 week low of $74.66 and a 52 week high of $102.37.

Vanguard Real Estate ETF Company Profile

Vanguard REIT ETF (the Fund) is an open-end investment company. The Fund invests in stocks issued by real estate investment trusts (REITs), companies that purchase office buildings, hotels, and other real property. It tracks the return of the MSCI US RIT Index, a gauge of real estate stocks. The Vanguard Group, Inc provides investment advisory services to the Fund.

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Clear Creek Financial Management LLC raised its position in The Southern Company (NYSE:SO  Free Report) by 7.9% during the first quarter, according to its most recent filing with the SEC. The institutional investor owned 6,896 shares of the utilities providers stock after purchasing an additional 506 shares during the period. Clear Creek Financial Management LLCs holdings in Southern were worth $480,000 at the end of the most recent quarter.

A number of other hedge funds and other institutional investors also recently added to or reduced their stakes in SO. Prudential PLC raised its holdings in shares of Southern by 23.4% during the 1st quarter. Prudential PLC now owns 19,438 shares of the utilities providers stock worth $1,409,000 after acquiring an additional 3,689 shares during the period. Parkside Financial Bank & Trust raised its holdings in shares of Southern by 33.5% during the 1st quarter. Parkside Financial Bank & Trust now owns 1,727 shares of the utilities providers stock worth $126,000 after acquiring an additional 433 shares during the period. Covestor Ltd raised its holdings in shares of Southern by 63.0% during the 1st quarter. Covestor Ltd now owns 1,902 shares of the utilities providers stock worth $138,000 after acquiring an additional 735 shares during the period. NewEdge Advisors LLC raised its holdings in shares of Southern by 0.4% during the 1st quarter. NewEdge Advisors LLC now owns 49,925 shares of the utilities providers stock worth $3,621,000 after acquiring an additional 221 shares during the period. Finally, Mackenzie Financial Corp raised its holdings in shares of Southern by 35.8% during the 1st quarter. Mackenzie Financial Corp now owns 907,132 shares of the utilities providers stock worth $65,776,000 after acquiring an additional 239,325 shares during the period. Hedge funds and other institutional investors own 63.25% of the companys stock.

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Analyst Ratings Changes

Several research firms have recently commented on SO. JPMorgan Chase & Co. reduced their price target on Southern from $73.00 to $69.00 in a report on Thursday, June 8th. StockNews.com raised Southern from a sell rating to a hold rating in a research report on Wednesday, May 17th. Mizuho cut their price objective on Southern from $77.00 to $76.00 in a research report on Tuesday, May 16th. Guggenheim raised their price objective on Southern from $73.00 to $79.00 in a research report on Monday, April 24th. Finally, VNET Group reissued a maintains rating on shares of Southern in a research report on Friday, April 28th. Four equities research analysts have rated the stock with a sell rating, three have assigned a hold rating and eight have assigned a buy rating to the company. Based on data from MarketBeat, the stock currently has an average rating of Hold and an average price target of $74.07.

Insider Buying and Selling

Southern Price Performance

In related news, EVP Bryan D. Anderson sold 9,491 shares of the stock in a transaction on Monday, May 8th. The stock was sold at an average price of $75.03, for a total transaction of $712,109.73. Following the completion of the sale, the executive vice president now directly owns 36,119 shares of the companys stock, valued at $2,710,008.57. The sale was disclosed in a filing with the SEC, which is available through the SEC website . In other news, EVP Martin Bernard Davis sold 1,435 shares of the firms stock in a transaction on Thursday, June 1st. The stock was sold at an average price of $69.99, for a total value of $100,435.65. Following the completion of the transaction, the executive vice president now owns 74,246 shares in the company, valued at $5,196,477.54. The sale was disclosed in a document filed with the SEC, which is available at this link . Also, EVP Bryan D. Anderson sold 9,491 shares of the firms stock in a transaction on Monday, May 8th. The shares were sold at an average price of $75.03, for a total value of $712,109.73. Following the completion of the transaction, the executive vice president now owns 36,119 shares of the companys stock, valued at approximately $2,710,008.57. The disclosure for this sale can be found here . Insiders sold a total of 205,678 shares of company stock valued at $14,888,271 over the last three months. 0.37% of the stock is currently owned by company insiders.

SO stock opened at $70.25 on Monday. The company has a market capitalization of $76.60 billion, a P/E ratio of 22.66, a PEG ratio of 4.87 and a beta of 0.50. The Southern Company has a twelve month low of $58.85 and a twelve month high of $80.57. The business has a 50 day simple moving average of $71.61 and a 200-day simple moving average of $69.67. The company has a current ratio of 0.69, a quick ratio of 0.51 and a debt-to-equity ratio of 1.51.

Southern (NYSE:SO  Free Report) last posted its quarterly earnings data on Thursday, April 27th. The utilities provider reported $0.79 earnings per share for the quarter, beating the consensus estimate of $0.71 by $0.08. Southern had a return on equity of 10.78% and a net margin of 11.53%. The business had revenue of $6.48 billion during the quarter, compared to the consensus estimate of $6.14 billion. During the same period in the prior year, the company earned $0.97 earnings per share. The companys revenue was down 2.5% compared to the same quarter last year. As a group, equities analysts anticipate that The Southern Company will post 3.61 EPS for the current year.

Southern Increases Dividend

The business also recently declared a quarterly dividend, which was paid on Tuesday, June 6th. Investors of record on Monday, May 15th were issued a dividend of $0.70 per share. The ex-dividend date was Friday, May 12th. This is an increase from Southerns previous quarterly dividend of $0.68. This represents a $2.80 annualized dividend and a dividend yield of 3.99%. Southerns dividend payout ratio (DPR) is currently 90.32%.

Southern Company Profile

(Free Report)

The Southern Company, through its subsidiaries, engages in the generation, transmission, and distribution of electricity. It operates through three segments: Gas Distribution Operations, Gas Pipeline Investments, and Gas Marketing Services. The company also develops, constructs, acquires, owns, and manages power generation assets, including renewable energy projects and sells electricity in the wholesale market; and distributes natural gas in Illinois, Georgia, Virginia, and Tennessee, as well as provides gas marketing services, gas distribution operations, and gas pipeline investments operations.

Further Reading

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Rainsberger Wealth Advisors Inc. boosted its stake in W. P. Carey Inc. (NYSE:WPC  Free Report) by 16.6% in the first quarter, HoldingsChannel reports. The institutional investor owned 9,990 shares of the real estate investment trusts stock after buying an additional 1,423 shares during the quarter. Rainsberger Wealth Advisors Inc.s holdings in W. P. Carey were worth $774,000 as of its most recent SEC filing.

Other institutional investors and hedge funds have also bought and sold shares of the company. Quent Capital LLC raised its position in W. P. Carey by 40.4% in the 4th quarter. Quent Capital LLC now owns 775 shares of the real estate investment trusts stock valued at $61,000 after buying an additional 223 shares during the last quarter. Tobam raised its position in W. P. Carey by 54.4% in the 4th quarter. Tobam now owns 1,223 shares of the real estate investment trusts stock valued at $96,000 after buying an additional 431 shares during the last quarter. Utah Retirement Systems raised its position in W. P. Carey by 1.8% in the 3rd quarter. Utah Retirement Systems now owns 34,276 shares of the real estate investment trusts stock valued at $2,392,000 after buying an additional 600 shares during the last quarter. Ameritas Advisory Services LLC increased its position in shares of W. P. Carey by 111.1% during the 4th quarter. Ameritas Advisory Services LLC now owns 12,184 shares of the real estate investment trusts stock valued at $952,000 after purchasing an additional 6,413 shares during the last quarter. Finally, Credit Suisse AG increased its position in shares of W. P. Carey by 31.5% during the 4th quarter. Credit Suisse AG now owns 424,698 shares of the real estate investment trusts stock valued at $33,190,000 after purchasing an additional 101,666 shares during the last quarter. 63.11% of the stock is owned by hedge funds and other institutional investors.

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Analyst Ratings Changes

Several equities research analysts have recently issued reports on WPC shares. StockNews.com started coverage on W. P. Carey in a research report on Thursday, May 18th. They set a hold rating for the company. JMP Securities decreased their target price on W. P. Carey from $86.00 to $80.00 in a research report on Friday, June 23rd. 92 Resources reaffirmed a maintains rating on shares of W. P. Carey in a research report on Monday, May 1st. Finally, BNP Paribas began coverage on W. P. Carey in a research report on Wednesday, June 14th. They set an underperform rating and a $74.00 target price for the company. One research analyst has rated the stock with a sell rating, one has issued a hold rating and four have given a buy rating to the stock. Based on data from MarketBeat.com, the company has an average rating of Moderate Buy and an average target price of $82.80.

W. P. Carey Trading Up 0.0 %

Shares of WPC opened at $67.56 on Monday. The business has a 50-day moving average of $70.23 and a 200 day moving average of $76.44. W. P. Carey Inc. has a fifty-two week low of $66.10 and a fifty-two week high of $89.63. The firm has a market cap of $14.45 billion, a P/E ratio of 18.98, a price-to-earnings-growth ratio of 8.42 and a beta of 0.76. The company has a debt-to-equity ratio of 0.81, a quick ratio of 0.11 and a current ratio of 0.11.

W. P. Carey (NYSE:WPC  Free Report) last announced its quarterly earnings data on Friday, April 28th. The real estate investment trust reported $1.39 earnings per share for the quarter, topping the consensus estimate of $1.27 by $0.12. W. P. Carey had a return on equity of 8.47% and a net margin of 47.26%. The company had revenue of $427.80 million during the quarter, compared to analyst estimates of $406.24 million. During the same quarter last year, the firm posted $1.35 EPS. The firms revenue for the quarter was up 24.3% on a year-over-year basis. As a group, research analysts forecast that W. P. Carey Inc. will post 5.21 EPS for the current year.

W. P. Carey Increases Dividend

The business also recently announced a quarterly dividend, which will be paid on Friday, July 14th. Shareholders of record on Friday, June 30th will be paid a $1.069 dividend. The ex-dividend date is Thursday, June 29th. This represents a $4.28 annualized dividend and a yield of 6.33%. This is an increase from W. P. Careys previous quarterly dividend of $1.07. W. P. Careys dividend payout ratio (DPR) is currently 120.23%.

Insiders Place Their Bets

In related news, Director Mark A. Alexander bought 1,000 shares of the businesss stock in a transaction on Tuesday, May 2nd. The stock was acquired at an average price of $72.48 per share, for a total transaction of $72,480.00. Following the purchase, the director now directly owns 26,118 shares in the company, valued at $1,893,032.64. The purchase was disclosed in a legal filing with the Securities & Exchange Commission, which is available through the SEC website. 1.11% of the stock is owned by corporate insiders.

W. P. Carey Profile

(Free Report)

Celebrating its 50th anniversary, W. P. Carey ranks among the largest net lease REITs with an enterprise value of approximately $24 billion and a well-diversified portfolio of high-quality, operationally critical commercial real estate, which includes 1,449 net lease properties covering approximately 176 million square feet and a portfolio of 84 self-storage operating properties, as of December 31, 2022.

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Stonegate Investment Group LLC increased its stake in shares of EOG Resources, Inc. (NYSE:EOG  Free Report) by 4.6% in the first quarter, according to its most recent 13F filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC). The fund owned 76,310 shares of the energy exploration companys stock after purchasing an additional 3,386 shares during the quarter. Stonegate Investment Group LLCs holdings in EOG Resources were worth $8,747,000 as of its most recent SEC filing.

A number of other institutional investors also recently added to or reduced their stakes in the stock. Demars Financial Group LLC raised its holdings in EOG Resources by 4.1% in the first quarter. Demars Financial Group LLC now owns 33,589 shares of the energy exploration companys stock worth $3,850,000 after purchasing an additional 1,310 shares in the last quarter. SevenBridge Financial Group LLC raised its stake in shares of EOG Resources by 424.8% during the 1st quarter. SevenBridge Financial Group LLC now owns 13,262 shares of the energy exploration companys stock worth $1,520,000 after acquiring an additional 10,735 shares in the last quarter. DnB Asset Management AS lifted its position in EOG Resources by 2.8% during the first quarter. DnB Asset Management AS now owns 137,253 shares of the energy exploration companys stock valued at $15,733,000 after acquiring an additional 3,687 shares during the last quarter. Community Bank N.A. boosted its stake in EOG Resources by 50.7% in the first quarter. Community Bank N.A. now owns 5,039 shares of the energy exploration companys stock valued at $578,000 after acquiring an additional 1,695 shares in the last quarter. Finally, MEAG MUNICH ERGO Kapitalanlagegesellschaft mbH purchased a new position in EOG Resources in the first quarter worth $43,686,000. Institutional investors own 89.58% of the companys stock.

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EOG Resources Stock Performance

NYSE EOG opened at $114.44 on Monday. The company has a current ratio of 2.17, a quick ratio of 1.90 and a debt-to-equity ratio of 0.15. EOG Resources, Inc. has a twelve month low of $92.16 and a twelve month high of $150.88. The stock has a 50-day moving average of $112.42 and a 200 day moving average of $118.71. The stock has a market capitalization of $66.93 billion, a price-to-earnings ratio of 7.16, a PEG ratio of 0.35 and a beta of 1.53.

EOG Resources Announces Dividend

EOG Resources ( NYSE:EOG Free Report ) last announced its earnings results on Friday, May 5th. The energy exploration company reported $2.69 earnings per share (EPS) for the quarter, beating analysts consensus estimates of $2.42 by $0.27. The firm had revenue of $6.04 billion for the quarter, compared to analyst estimates of $5.28 billion. EOG Resources had a return on equity of 30.34% and a net margin of 33.83%. The businesss revenue was up 51.7% on a year-over-year basis. During the same quarter last year, the firm posted $4.00 EPS. Sell-side analysts anticipate that EOG Resources, Inc. will post 11.34 EPS for the current fiscal year.

The business also recently declared a quarterly dividend, which will be paid on Monday, July 31st. Investors of record on Monday, July 17th will be given a dividend of $0.825 per share. The ex-dividend date of this dividend is Friday, July 14th. This represents a $3.30 annualized dividend and a dividend yield of 2.88%. EOG Resourcess dividend payout ratio (DPR) is presently 20.64%.

Wall Street Analysts Forecast Growth

Several research analysts recently weighed in on EOG shares. Mizuho upgraded EOG Resources from a neutral rating to a buy rating and dropped their target price for the stock from $150.00 to $146.00 in a research note on Friday, May 19th. Truist Financial upped their price objective on shares of EOG Resources from $146.00 to $152.00 and gave the company a buy rating in a report on Tuesday, April 11th. Citigroup lowered their target price on shares of EOG Resources from $160.00 to $122.00 in a research note on Friday, March 17th. StockNews.com started coverage on shares of EOG Resources in a research note on Thursday, May 18th. They set a hold rating on the stock. Finally, TD Securities lowered their price objective on shares of EOG Resources from $150.00 to $145.00 and set a hold rating for the company in a research note on Wednesday, March 8th. Five investment analysts have rated the stock with a hold rating, eighteen have issued a buy rating and one has given a strong buy rating to the stock. Based on data from MarketBeat.com, the company currently has a consensus rating of Moderate Buy and an average price target of $148.17.

Insider Activity at EOG Resources

In other EOG Resources news, COO Lloyd W. Helms, Jr. sold 5,000 shares of the stock in a transaction that occurred on Wednesday, June 7th. The stock was sold at an average price of $115.87, for a total transaction of $579,350.00. Following the completion of the transaction, the chief operating officer now owns 149,689 shares of the companys stock, valued at $17,344,464.43. The sale was disclosed in a legal filing with the Securities & Exchange Commission, which is available through this hyperlink. 0.40% of the stock is currently owned by corporate insiders.

EOG Resources Profile

(Free Report)

EOG Resources, Inc, together with its subsidiaries, explores for, develops, produces, and markets crude oil, and natural gas and natural gas liquids. Its principal producing areas are in New Mexico and Texas in the United States; and the Republic of Trinidad and Tobago. The company was formerly known as Enron Oil & Gas Company.

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Patriot Financial Group Insurance Agency LLC lifted its position in shares of ConocoPhillips (NYSE:COP  Free Report) by 10.5% during the 1st quarter, according to its most recent disclosure with the SEC. The firm owned 6,611 shares of the energy producers stock after buying an additional 630 shares during the period. Patriot Financial Group Insurance Agency LLCs holdings in ConocoPhillips were worth $656,000 as of its most recent SEC filing.

A number of other hedge funds have also recently bought and sold shares of COP. Fairfield Bush & CO. purchased a new position in shares of ConocoPhillips during the 1st quarter worth about $31,000. Cetera Investment Advisers boosted its holdings in shares of ConocoPhillips by 4.0% in the 1st quarter. Cetera Investment Advisers now owns 25,399 shares of the energy producers stock valued at $2,540,000 after purchasing an additional 968 shares during the last quarter. Baird Financial Group Inc. grew its stake 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 buying an additional 9,313 shares during the period. Zions Bancorporation N.A. increased its holdings 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 worth $181,000 after buying an additional 672 shares during the last quarter. Finally, Brown Brothers Harriman & Co. boosted its holdings in ConocoPhillips by 21.3% in the first 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 80.20% of the companys stock.

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Insider Buying and Selling at ConocoPhillips

In other news, Director Caroline Maury Devine sold 1,000 shares of ConocoPhillips stock in a transaction dated Monday, May 8th. The shares were sold at an average price of $102.08, for a total value of $102,080.00. Following the completion of the transaction, the director now directly owns 849 shares of the companys stock, valued at approximately $86,665.92. The transaction was disclosed in a document filed with the Securities & Exchange Commission, which is available at this link. 0.37% of the stock is owned by insiders.

Analysts Set New Price Targets

ConocoPhillips Stock Performance

A number of equities analysts have recently commented on COP shares. Societe Generale upgraded ConocoPhillips from a sell rating to a hold rating and set a $105.00 price objective on the stock in a report on Wednesday, April 5th. UBS Group assumed coverage on shares of ConocoPhillips in a research report on Wednesday, April 19th. They set a buy rating and a $139.00 price target on the stock. Raymond James increased their price objective on shares of ConocoPhillips from $135.00 to $142.00 and gave the stock a strong-buy rating in a research report on Friday, April 21st. StockNews.com started coverage on shares of ConocoPhillips in a report on Thursday, May 18th. They set a hold rating on the stock. Finally, Barclays lowered their price target on ConocoPhillips from $160.00 to $141.00 in a report on Thursday, March 23rd. Six research analysts have rated the stock with a hold rating, fifteen have assigned a buy rating and one has issued a strong buy rating to the stock. According to MarketBeat, the company has a consensus rating of Moderate Buy and a consensus price target of $136.32.

Shares of COP stock opened at $103.61 on Monday. The stock has a market capitalization of $125.37 billion, a price-to-earnings ratio of 8.29, a PEG ratio of 0.60 and a beta of 1.29. ConocoPhillips has a one year low of $78.30 and a one year high of $138.49. The companys 50-day simple moving average is $101.78 and its 200-day simple moving average is $106.96. The company has a debt-to-equity ratio of 0.32, a quick ratio of 1.29 and a current ratio of 1.39.

ConocoPhillips (NYSE:COP  Free Report) last released its earnings results on Thursday, May 4th. The energy producer reported $2.38 EPS for the quarter, topping analysts consensus estimates of $2.02 by $0.36. The company had revenue of $15.52 billion for the quarter, compared to the consensus estimate of $16.06 billion. ConocoPhillips had a return on equity of 32.75% and a net margin of 20.21%. ConocoPhillipss quarterly revenue was down 19.6% compared to the same quarter last year. During the same quarter last year, the business posted $3.27 EPS. Equities analysts anticipate that ConocoPhillips will post 9.56 earnings per share for the current fiscal year.

ConocoPhillips Announces Dividend

The firm also recently disclosed a quarterly dividend, which was paid on Thursday, June 1st. Shareholders of record on Tuesday, May 16th were issued a $0.51 dividend. This represents a $2.04 dividend on an annualized basis and a yield of 1.97%. The ex-dividend date was Monday, June 26th. ConocoPhillipss dividend payout ratio is presently 16.32%.

ConocoPhillips Profile

(Free Report)

ConocoPhillips explores for, produces, transports, and markets crude oil, bitumen, natural gas, liquefied natural gas (LNG), and natural gas liquids in the United States and internationally. The company's portfolio includes unconventional plays in North America; conventional assets in North America, Europe, Asia, and Australia; various LNG developments; oil sands assets in Canada; and an inventory of global exploration prospects.

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Oak Harvest Investment Services purchased a new position in shares of Abbott Laboratories (NYSE:ABT  Free Report) in the first quarter, according to the company in its most recent 13F filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC). The firm purchased 26,016 shares of the healthcare product makers stock, valued at approximately $2,634,000.

Other hedge funds and other institutional investors have also recently added to or reduced their stakes in the company. Vanguard Group Inc. raised its stake in shares of Abbott Laboratories by 1.3% in the third quarter. Vanguard Group Inc. now owns 154,563,421 shares of the healthcare product makers stock valued at $14,955,557,000 after acquiring an additional 2,011,683 shares during the last quarter. State Street Corp grew its holdings in Abbott Laboratories by 0.5% during the 3rd quarter. State Street Corp now owns 74,138,862 shares of the healthcare product makers stock worth $7,173,676,000 after acquiring an additional 351,136 shares during the period. Morgan Stanley grew its holdings in Abbott Laboratories by 14.3% during the 4th quarter. Morgan Stanley now owns 38,966,499 shares of the healthcare product makers stock worth $4,278,132,000 after acquiring an additional 4,886,954 shares during the period. Geode Capital Management LLC grew its holdings in Abbott Laboratories by 1.8% during the 4th quarter. Geode Capital Management LLC now owns 30,598,624 shares of the healthcare product makers stock worth $3,352,840,000 after acquiring an additional 537,808 shares during the period. Finally, Moneta Group Investment Advisors LLC grew its holdings in Abbott Laboratories by 104,649.4% during the 4th quarter. Moneta Group Investment Advisors LLC now owns 30,247,436 shares of the healthcare product makers stock worth $3,320,866,000 after acquiring an additional 30,218,560 shares during the period. Institutional investors own 73.08% of the companys stock.

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Analyst Upgrades and Downgrades

Several equities analysts have recently issued reports on the stock. JPMorgan Chase & Co. boosted their price target on shares of Abbott Laboratories from $118.00 to $122.00 and gave the company an overweight rating in a report on Thursday, April 20th. Morgan Stanley lowered shares of Abbott Laboratories from an overweight rating to an equal weight rating and set a $112.00 price target on the stock. in a research note on Tuesday, May 30th. Wolfe Research decreased their target price on shares of Abbott Laboratories from $107.00 to $103.00 and set an underperform rating on the stock in a research report on Thursday, April 20th. Raymond James increased their target price on shares of Abbott Laboratories from $116.00 to $123.00 in a research report on Thursday, April 20th. Finally, StockNews.com started coverage on shares of Abbott Laboratories in a research report on Thursday, May 18th. They set a buy rating on the stock. One equities research analyst has rated the stock with a sell rating, five have assigned a hold rating and eleven have assigned a buy rating to the companys stock. According to data from MarketBeat.com, the company currently has a consensus rating of Moderate Buy and a consensus price target of $121.26.

Abbott Laboratories Stock Up 1.3 %

ABT opened at $109.02 on Monday. The company has a quick ratio of 1.22, a current ratio of 1.68 and a debt-to-equity ratio of 0.39. The stock has a market cap of $189.58 billion, a price-to-earnings ratio of 33.14, a PEG ratio of 4.88 and a beta of 0.68. Abbott Laboratories has a twelve month low of $93.25 and a twelve month high of $115.69. The companys 50-day moving average price is $106.89 and its two-hundred day moving average price is $106.32.

Abbott Laboratories (NYSE:ABT  Free Report) last released its earnings results on Wednesday, April 19th. The healthcare product maker reported $1.03 earnings per share for the quarter, beating analysts consensus estimates of $0.98 by $0.05. The firm had revenue of $9.75 billion for the quarter, compared to analysts expectations of $9.64 billion. Abbott Laboratories had a net margin of 13.98% and a return on equity of 22.36%. The companys quarterly revenue was down 18.1% on a year-over-year basis. During the same period in the previous year, the company earned $1.73 earnings per share. As a group, equities analysts expect that Abbott Laboratories will post 4.39 earnings per share for the current year.

Abbott Laboratories Announces Dividend

The firm also recently declared a quarterly dividend, which will be paid on Tuesday, August 15th. Investors of record on Friday, July 14th will be paid a dividend of $0.51 per share. This represents a $2.04 dividend on an annualized basis and a dividend yield of 1.87%. The ex-dividend date of this dividend is Thursday, July 13th. Abbott Laboratoriess payout ratio is currently 62.01%.

Insider Activity at Abbott Laboratories

In related news, EVP Andrea F. Wainer sold 8,226 shares of the companys stock in a transaction that occurred on Tuesday, May 2nd. The shares were sold at an average price of $110.56, for a total transaction of $909,466.56. Following the sale, the executive vice president now directly owns 70,427 shares in the company, valued at approximately $7,786,409.12. The sale was disclosed in a filing with the Securities & Exchange Commission, which is accessible through this link. In other news, Director Daniel J. Starks sold 50,000 shares of the stock in a transaction on Tuesday, May 2nd. The shares were sold at an average price of $111.02, for a total value of $5,551,000.00. Following the transaction, the director now owns 6,825,316 shares of the companys stock, valued at approximately $757,746,582.32. The sale was disclosed in a legal filing with the Securities & Exchange Commission, which is available through this link. Also, EVP Andrea F. Wainer sold 8,226 shares of the stock in a transaction on Tuesday, May 2nd. The shares were sold at an average price of $110.56, for a total transaction of $909,466.56. Following the transaction, the executive vice president now directly owns 70,427 shares in the company, valued at approximately $7,786,409.12. The disclosure for this sale can be found here. 1.10% of the stock is currently owned by corporate insiders.

Abbott Laboratories Company Profile

(Free Report)

Abbott Laboratories, together with its subsidiaries, discovers, develops, manufactures, and sells health care products worldwide. It operates in four segments: Established Pharmaceutical Products, Diagnostic Products, Nutritional Products, and Medical Devices. The Established Pharmaceutical Products segment provides generic pharmaceuticals for the treatment of pancreatic exocrine insufficiency, irritable bowel syndrome or biliary spasm, intrahepatic cholestasis or depressive symptoms, gynecological disorder, hormone replacement therapy, dyslipidemia, hypertension, hypothyroidism, Meniere's disease and vestibular vertigo, pain, fever, inflammation, and migraine, as well as provides anti-infective clarithromycin, influenza vaccine, and products to regulate physiological rhythm of the colon.

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Stonegate Investment Group LLC raised its holdings in The Southern Company (NYSE:SO  Free Report) by 35.6% in the 1st quarter, Holdings Channel reports. The institutional investor owned 1,029,649 shares of the utilities providers stock after acquiring an additional 270,560 shares during the period. Southern makes up approximately 2.7% of Stonegate Investment Group LLCs portfolio, making the stock its 12th biggest position. Stonegate Investment Group LLCs holdings in Southern were worth $71,643,000 as of its most recent filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC).

Other hedge funds and other institutional investors also recently added to or reduced their stakes in the company. Prudential PLC grew its stake in shares of Southern by 23.4% during the 1st quarter. Prudential PLC now owns 19,438 shares of the utilities providers stock valued at $1,409,000 after buying an additional 3,689 shares during the period. Parkside Financial Bank & Trust increased its position in Southern by 33.5% during the 1st quarter. Parkside Financial Bank & Trust now owns 1,727 shares of the utilities providers stock worth $126,000 after purchasing an additional 433 shares in the last quarter. Covestor Ltd raised its holdings in Southern by 63.0% in the first quarter. Covestor Ltd now owns 1,902 shares of the utilities providers stock valued at $138,000 after buying an additional 735 shares during the period. NewEdge Advisors LLC lifted its position in Southern by 0.4% during the first quarter. NewEdge Advisors LLC now owns 49,925 shares of the utilities providers stock valued at $3,621,000 after buying an additional 221 shares in the last quarter. Finally, Mackenzie Financial Corp increased its position in shares of Southern by 35.8% in the first quarter. Mackenzie Financial Corp now owns 907,132 shares of the utilities providers stock worth $65,776,000 after acquiring an additional 239,325 shares in the last quarter. Hedge funds and other institutional investors own 63.25% of the companys stock.

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Southern Stock Up 1.6 %

Shares of Southern stock opened at $70.25 on Monday. The company has a quick ratio of 0.51, a current ratio of 0.69 and a debt-to-equity ratio of 1.51. The firm has a market cap of $76.60 billion, a P/E ratio of 22.66, a P/E/G ratio of 4.87 and a beta of 0.50. The Southern Company has a fifty-two week low of $58.85 and a fifty-two week high of $80.57. The business has a 50-day moving average price of $71.61 and a 200 day moving average price of $69.67.

Southern Increases Dividend

Southern ( NYSE:SO Free Report ) last issued its earnings results on Thursday, April 27th. The utilities provider reported $0.79 earnings per share for the quarter, topping analysts consensus estimates of $0.71 by $0.08. Southern had a net margin of 11.53% and a return on equity of 10.78%. The company had revenue of $6.48 billion for the quarter, compared to analysts expectations of $6.14 billion. During the same period in the prior year, the company earned $0.97 earnings per share. The firms revenue was down 2.5% compared to the same quarter last year. On average, sell-side analysts forecast that The Southern Company will post 3.61 earnings per share for the current fiscal year.

The business also recently announced a quarterly dividend, which was paid on Tuesday, June 6th. Stockholders of record on Monday, May 15th were issued a dividend of $0.70 per share. The ex-dividend date of this dividend was Friday, May 12th. This is a positive change from Southerns previous quarterly dividend of $0.68. This represents a $2.80 annualized dividend and a dividend yield of 3.99%. Southerns dividend payout ratio is 90.32%.

Analyst Ratings Changes

Several equities analysts recently weighed in on the stock. Guggenheim lifted their target price on shares of Southern from $73.00 to $79.00 in a report on Monday, April 24th. JPMorgan Chase & Co. lowered their target price on Southern from $73.00 to $69.00 in a research note on Thursday, June 8th. The Goldman Sachs Group raised Southern from a buy rating to a conviction-buy rating in a research report on Monday. VNET Group reaffirmed a maintains rating on shares of Southern in a research report on Friday, April 28th. Finally, Mizuho reduced their target price on shares of Southern from $77.00 to $76.00 in a research report on Tuesday, May 16th. Four analysts have rated the stock with a sell rating, three have assigned a hold rating, seven have given a buy rating and one has assigned a strong buy rating to the companys stock. According to MarketBeat.com, the company currently has an average rating of Hold and an average target price of $74.07.

Insider Transactions at Southern

In related news, EVP Bryan D. Anderson sold 9,491 shares of the firms stock in a transaction that occurred on Monday, May 8th. The stock was sold at an average price of $75.03, for a total value of $712,109.73. Following the sale, the executive vice president now owns 36,119 shares of the companys stock, valued at approximately $2,710,008.57. The sale was disclosed in a document filed with the SEC, which is available at the SEC website. In related news, EVP Bryan D. Anderson sold 9,491 shares of Southern stock in a transaction dated Monday, May 8th. The shares were sold at an average price of $75.03, for a total value of $712,109.73. Following the sale, the executive vice president now directly owns 36,119 shares in the company, valued at approximately $2,710,008.57. The sale was disclosed in a legal filing with the SEC, which is available at the SEC website. Also, CEO Thomas A. Fanning sold 50,000 shares of Southern stock in a transaction dated Wednesday, May 10th. The shares were sold at an average price of $75.16, for a total transaction of $3,758,000.00. Following the completion of the sale, the chief executive officer now owns 847,592 shares in the company, valued at $63,705,014.72. The disclosure for this sale can be found here. In the last ninety days, insiders have sold 205,678 shares of company stock worth $14,888,271. 0.37% of the stock is currently owned by company insiders.

Southern Profile

(Free Report)

The Southern Company, through its subsidiaries, engages in the generation, transmission, and distribution of electricity. It operates through three segments: Gas Distribution Operations, Gas Pipeline Investments, and Gas Marketing Services. The company also develops, constructs, acquires, owns, and manages power generation assets, including renewable energy projects and sells electricity in the wholesale market; and distributes natural gas in Illinois, Georgia, Virginia, and Tennessee, as well as provides gas marketing services, gas distribution operations, and gas pipeline investments operations.

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Demars Financial Group LLC grew its holdings in Bristol-Myers Squibb (NYSE:BMY  Free Report) by 13.9% during the 1st quarter, according to its most recent filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC). The fund owned 70,551 shares of the biopharmaceutical companys stock after acquiring an additional 8,628 shares during the period. Bristol-Myers Squibb comprises 2.7% of Demars Financial Group LLCs holdings, making the stock its 8th biggest position. Demars Financial Group LLCs holdings in Bristol-Myers Squibb were worth $4,890,000 as of its most recent SEC filing.

Several other large investors have also made changes to their positions in BMY. Norges Bank purchased a new stake in shares of Bristol-Myers Squibb in the 4th quarter valued at $1,873,696,000. Moneta Group Investment Advisors LLC boosted its holdings in shares of Bristol-Myers Squibb by 114,228.7% in the 4th quarter. Moneta Group Investment Advisors LLC now owns 21,469,785 shares of the biopharmaceutical companys stock valued at $1,544,751,000 after acquiring an additional 21,451,006 shares during the last quarter. Boston Partners lifted its stake in shares of Bristol-Myers Squibb by 35.7% in the 4th quarter. Boston Partners now owns 13,794,089 shares of the biopharmaceutical companys stock valued at $992,048,000 after purchasing an additional 3,627,705 shares during the period. Edmp Inc. lifted its stake in shares of Bristol-Myers Squibb by 6,884.3% in the 4th quarter. Edmp Inc. now owns 3,343,588 shares of the biopharmaceutical companys stock valued at $46,471,000 after purchasing an additional 3,295,715 shares during the period. Finally, Vanguard Group Inc. lifted its stake in shares of Bristol-Myers Squibb by 1.6% in the 3rd quarter. Vanguard Group Inc. now owns 199,886,585 shares of the biopharmaceutical companys stock valued at $14,209,937,000 after purchasing an additional 3,058,491 shares during the period. 74.57% of the stock is owned by hedge funds and other institutional investors.

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Bristol-Myers Squibb Stock Down 0.1 %

Shares of BMY opened at $63.95 on Monday. The stock has a market capitalization of $134.35 billion, a PE ratio of 18.64, a P/E/G ratio of 1.31 and a beta of 0.43. Bristol-Myers Squibb has a 1 year low of $62.88 and a 1 year high of $81.43. The company has a debt-to-equity ratio of 1.10, a quick ratio of 1.28 and a current ratio of 1.42. The companys 50-day simple moving average is $66.12 and its 200-day simple moving average is $69.17.

Bristol-Myers Squibb Dividend Announcement

Bristol-Myers Squibb ( NYSE:BMY Free Report ) last issued its quarterly earnings results on Thursday, April 27th. The biopharmaceutical company reported $2.05 earnings per share (EPS) for the quarter, topping the consensus estimate of $1.98 by $0.07. The business had revenue of $11.34 billion for the quarter, compared to analysts expectations of $11.50 billion. Bristol-Myers Squibb had a net margin of 15.95% and a return on equity of 51.75%. The businesss quarterly revenue was down 2.7% on a year-over-year basis. During the same quarter in the prior year, the company earned $1.96 earnings per share. Analysts forecast that Bristol-Myers Squibb will post 8.07 earnings per share for the current fiscal year.

The firm also recently declared a quarterly dividend, which will be paid on Tuesday, August 1st. Stockholders of record on Friday, July 7th will be given a dividend of $0.57 per share. The ex-dividend date is Thursday, July 6th. This represents a $2.28 annualized dividend and a dividend yield of 3.57%. Bristol-Myers Squibbs dividend payout ratio is presently 66.47%.

Insider Transactions at Bristol-Myers Squibb

In related news, EVP Rupert Vessey sold 50,385 shares of the firms stock in a transaction that occurred on Wednesday, May 3rd. The shares were sold at an average price of $67.06, for a total value of $3,378,818.10. Following the sale, the executive vice president now owns 47,751 shares of the companys stock, valued at $3,202,182.06. The sale was disclosed in a filing with the SEC, which can be accessed through this hyperlink. Corporate insiders own 0.08% of the companys stock.

Wall Street Analyst Weigh In

Several equities analysts recently issued reports on the stock. Daiwa Capital Markets assumed coverage on shares of Bristol-Myers Squibb in a research note on Wednesday, June 28th. They issued an outperform rating and a $70.00 target price for the company. Jefferies Financial Group initiated coverage on shares of Bristol-Myers Squibb in a research report on Monday, March 6th. They set a hold rating and a $62.00 price objective for the company. StockNews.com initiated coverage on shares of Bristol-Myers Squibb in a research report on Thursday, May 18th. They issued a strong-buy rating for the company. Bank of America increased their target price on shares of Bristol-Myers Squibb from $82.00 to $85.00 and gave the company a buy rating in a research report on Friday, April 21st. Finally, 51job reissued a maintains rating on shares of Bristol-Myers Squibb in a report on Friday, April 28th. One research analyst has rated the stock with a sell rating, six have given a hold rating, seven have issued a buy rating and one has issued a strong buy rating to the stock. According to data from MarketBeat, Bristol-Myers Squibb presently has an average rating of Moderate Buy and a consensus price target of $78.00.

About Bristol-Myers Squibb

(Free Report)

Bristol-Myers Squibb Company discovers, develops, licenses, manufactures, markets, distributes, and sells biopharmaceutical products worldwide. It offers products for hematology, oncology, cardiovascular, immunology, fibrotic, and neuroscience diseases. The company's products include Eliquis, an oral inhibitor for reduction in risk of stroke/systemic embolism in NVAF, and for the treatment of DVT/PE; Opdivo for anti-cancer indications; Pomalyst/Imnovid indicated for patients with multiple myeloma; Orencia for adult patients with active RA and psoriatic arthritis; and Sprycel for the treatment of Philadelphia chromosome-positive chronic myeloid leukemia.

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Hyundai's Ioniq 6 sedan has the third-longest range among electric cars sold in the U.S., according to the U.S. auto magazine Car and Driver.

The Ioniq 6 can travel up to 581 km on a single charge, following Lucid Motors' Lucid Air Grand Touring (830 km) and Tesla's Model S (652 km).

"With a choice of two battery packs and rear- or all-wheel drive, the Ioniq 6 allows you to prioritize range, price, and performance. It's the rear-wheel-drive SE trim, fitted with the larger 77.4-kWh battery, that provides an EPA-rated 361 miles of range," the magazine said.
President Yoon Suk-yeol on Sunday said the Unification Ministry has must stops serving as an agency representing North Korea's interests.

"The Unification Ministry is not the ministry of supporting North Korea," Yoon was quoted as saying by presidential spokeswoman Kim Eun-hye. His comments came in response to criticism of Yoon's nominee for unification minister, an academic known for his hardline stance on the North.

The comments were also viewed as a directive to the ministry, which has been criticized by conservatives as being trapped in the pro-North Korean mindset of the Moon Jae-in administration and its doomed campaign to pacify Pyongyang.

Yoon named Sungshin Women's University political scientist Kim Yung-ho as the next unification minister and also appointed an outsider as vice minister. "From now on, the reunification we aim for must be based on the basic order of freedom and democracy, and the Unification Ministry must play its given role according to the Constitution," Yoon said. "The reunification we must strive to achieve must ensure a better life for all Koreans."

A source at the presidential office said, "The ministry will now focus more on matters related to North Korean human rights and analyzing and responding to political trends there."

Meanwhile, the chairwoman of the Hyundai Group, a splinter conglomerate that played a leading role in cross-border tourism, has scrapped plans to visit North Korea on the 20th anniversary of the death of her husband, former chairman Chung Mong-hun, on Aug. 4.

North Korea's Foreign Ministry said in a statement on Saturday, "We make it clear that we have neither been informed about any South Korean personage's willingness for a visit nor known about it and that we have no intention to examine it."

It is unusual for the North Korean Foreign Ministry rather than the General Reconnaissance Bureau or some such body to comment on inter-Korean issues.

Chung jumped to his death in 2003 when he came under scrutiny for his role in funneling under-the-table payments from the Kim Dae-jung administration to the North Korean regime to facilitate the first inter-Korean summit. His widow has frequently traveled to the North to mark anniversaries of his death, often attended by senior North Korean functionaries.
Police investigating the whereabouts of thousands of babies who went missing after birth said a total of nine have been found dead across the country.

Earlier the Board of Audit and Inspection identified 2,236 babies whose birth was reported at hospitals but whose parents never registered them. Police were urgently asked to investigate the whereabouts of 96 of them.

The whereabouts of 13 been verified, and nine of them were found dead, either murdered or abandoned by their parents.

Police are having a tough time finding the others because their parents seem to have concealed their existence and a considerable time has elapsed since their births.

Police believe there are many cases where mothers abandoned their babies directly after birth, and of illegal immigrants who gave birth here and have since left. Some parents may escape punishment because the seven-year statute of limitations has expired.

The investigation intensified after the arrest on June 21 of a woman in her 30s in Suwon south of Seoul who admitted killing two of her babies and keeping them in the freezer.

The BAI discovered that 2,236 babies born from 2015 to 2022 were never registered, and the government has now initiated a search for all of them.
The heavy, humid air in the swampy plain between Texas and Louisiana invites laziness, an impossible sin in Port Arthur, one of the main enclaves in this ground zero of US energy. The town conveys a new frontier city atmosphere: bulldozers here, cranes there, entire brand new neighborhoods, schools to be built, infrastructure on its way. The job offer is insatiable: not all the positions on offer are covered. The influx of new workers has exhausted available housing, and prefabricated homes are the order of the day. A modern gold rush has shaken this energy center: the one unleashed by liquefied natural gas (LNG), the latest manna for the hydrocarbons sector.

LNG is an extremely important pillar of our economy, said District Judge Jeff Brannick. With the expansion of its plants and others, our chemical industry now has 36 brands that supply products to virtually the entire US consumer sector.

Until ten years ago, this industry was almost non-existent in the United States. Only when technological advances allowed it to tap its abundant shale gas reserves in Texas did it become a producer. It now has seven large liquefaction plants, which export 13 billion cubic feet a day. This year it will overtake Australia and Qatar to become the worlds largest supplier. And, with a whole series of new projects in the pipeline, it plans to establish itself at the forefront, with an ever-growing advantage over the rest.

The LNG business, a modality that freezes natural gas to liquefy it and allow its transport by ship, has exploded across the planet. Last year, with sky-high prices, 409 million tons were imported, compared to 386.5 million in 2021. The war in Ukraine was the main factor: deprived of the cheap Russian gas to which it had become accustomed, Europe began buying this product left and right to fill its reserves. It became the worlds main importer: 40% of the gas it consumed in 2022 was of this type, which travels by ship in a frozen state.

It is an expensive commodity, logistically complicated and harmful to the environment. But its defenders argue that its distribution is less subject to geopolitical fluctuations, at least for the West: US President Joe Biden guaranteed supplies to the EU and the UK, while countries like Bangladesh and Pakistan saw their contracts canceled in favor of Europe last year. Furthermore, its supporters argue, gas is a good wild card as the long road to energy change and carbon neutrality is undertaken.

Its the perfect solution because its clean and its availability can be scaled up or down quickly as needed, something weather-dependent renewables cant do as easily, boasts Corey Grindal, COO of Cheniere, the main American producer.

The demand for this product, experts predict, will continue to grow, encouraged by more moderate prices this year, a Europe that still needs this source of energy and an Asia whose economic activity is recovering.

US ambitions are evident in and around Port Arthur, one of the largest US LNG production hubs and a key location for US leadership aspirations in the sector. GoldenPass, a US-Qatari joint venture that will produce 18 million tons of gas a year starting next year, when it expects to come online, has already settled there.

Just a few miles away, Sabine Pass is a hive of activity. A ship, Pavillion Aranda, fills its tanks with liquefied gas. Another, the Esther Spirit, descends towards the sea with as much cargo as the depth of the channel allows. Upon its entry into the deep waters of the Gulf, it will supply itself with the rest. A third freighter climbs north, empty, to wait its turn. Every year, 1,830 ships with LNG pass through this canal, according to figures from the port authority. Each of these vessels can meet the heating needs of 43,000 US homes for a year, according to the Department of Energy.

Growing investments

Sabine Pass, which connects Sabine Lake with the Gulf of Mexico, is home to the largest LNG production plant in the United States and the second largest in the world. A behemoth of four gas pipelines and six liquefaction trains, each the size of a small airport terminal and producing a total of 30 million cubic tons of gas per year. It promises to grow: Cheniere, its owner, plans an expansion, now in its last phases of preparation, that will increase manufacturing to fifty million tons in 2029.

Chenieres is just one of the large expansion projects that the sector is planning in the US. Sempra Energy aspires to build another plant in Port Arthur. Venture Global has given the green light for the first phase of its facility in Plaquemines, Louisiana, and is moving forward with preparations for the second for a 20 million tonne per year project. Since last year, projects with a total value of $40,000 million have entered the final investment phase. By 2027, production could add an additional 125 million tons per year. It would be a 70% jump from today and roughly a quarter of EU consumption in 2022.

All that glitters is not gold, though. Some voices ask for caution: not all the projects proposed will end up becoming a reality. A fundamental part of the process involves obtaining the long-term gas sales contracts 15 to 20 years minimum necessary to guarantee the viability of the new facilities and receive financing.

Its an easier goal for large companies than for start-ups. Cheniere announced last week the signing of an agreement with the Norwegian Equinor for the supply of 1.75 million tons per year for 15 years, one more step towards the expansion of Sabine Pass. By contrast, Tellurian, founded by the father of US LNG, Charif Shoukri, has been forced to put land up for sale after losing several contracts.

Unknown future demand

It is also possible that the demand will grow below the gigantic supply that is on the way. In addition to the US, Australia, Qatar and other countries also foresee huge investments and brand new facilities. By 2027, an additional 80 million metric tons per year will be produced worldwide, according to the Institute for Energy Economics and Financial Analysis (IEEFA). There are significant reasons to think that the global market simply cannot absorb so much supply so quickly, the IEEFA notes.

The think tank has pointed out that Europes excessive appetite for LNG may fall in the coming years, given its roadmap for the energy transition, which forces it to reduce its gas consumption. In Asia, fluctuations in prices and changes in contracts have led emerging countries such as Pakistan and Bangladesh to announce new electricity generation projects using coal, a much more polluting fuel.

Others are more skeptical about these forecasts. Perhaps European demand will fall in 10, 15 or 20 years, as other power generation projects come online. But in the short term, the demand for US LNG in Europe will be quite similar to what it has been in the last 18 months, predicts Selby Bush Lilley, regional vice president of Sempra Infrastructure, operator, among others, of the Port Arthur LNG plant.

The city of Houston itself, a two-hour drive from Port Arthur, offers a counter-example. After six major floods in five years, the energy sector hub launched an action plan in 2020 to promote the use of renewable energy and reduce its carbon footprint by 40% by 2030. All municipal buildings are now powered by renewable energy.

If it can be done in Houston, the energy capital of the world, it can be done anywhere, the citys mayor, Sylvester Turner, told a group of foreign journalists last week. It has not been easy, but sometimes Mother Nature has ways of convincing even those who do not want to see things, he stressed, alluding to those floods.

The future, in Asia

The industry, for its part, replies that the sector still has a long way to go, while renewables reach maturity. The future of LNG, they say, is not in Europe, but in an Asia where half of humanity resides and whose energy needs will continue to increase for the foreseeable future.

Natural gas will probably continue to be in the energy system for decades, says Kenneth III of Rice University in Houston. While new technologies offer competitive options for the services that natural gas provides, time is needed to develop the supply chains and infrastructure needed to displace natural gas from its current uses. In addition, if the demand for natural gas is reduced, its prices will be lowered, which will discourage a rapid decrease in demand.

In Port Arthur, meanwhile, the feverish activity continues. We will continue producing. You cant switch away from fossil fuels overnight. It will depend on the market and, obviously, federal policies will have an impact on how fast the energy transition is made. But to maintain the economic vitality of the United States and to continue supplying other countries, we are going to have to continue doing what we have been doing for a long time, says Judge Brannick.

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IRELAND'S former Taoiseach, Brian Cowen, opens up about his health, politics and his future in an exclusive interview with Midlands 103.

Once an active member of Irish politics, disaster struck in 2019 when he suffered a stroke which required a 12 month stay in the hospital. The politician reassured interviewer Will Faulkner that he is now "doing great."

Praising hospital staff, medics, speech therapists, and physios at St Vincents Hospital and Royal Hospital Donnybrook, the former Minister for Finance said that soon his conversation came back. Before his rehabilitation he said, "I would be held up in conversation, but thankfully that has dissipated."

Mastering his speech again, the Clara native now walks with the aid of a cane. Admitting his physical side is slower to recover, he says, "paralysis on the right side has not left me." Most recovery starts after six to nine months, he reiterates, and is based on "constant repetition," to ensure progress. "I'm not totally 100% but were getting there".

Having discussed sport, hobbies, and keeping his mental health well, the former Fianna Fail politician says if he had the opportunity to repeat his career, he would venture into politics all over again. Still politically active, he says "Im interested in what goes on in my country, who runs my country, who gets support to do the job that needs to be done."

Regarding social media and both its positives and negatives, he adds, "theres always a view on [politics] and its fair enough," but he also thinks, "its almost hip to be negative," and finds social media an easy way of expressing personal opinions on a public platform.

While no longer active in Dail Eireann, the former Laois-Offaly politician discussed the housing crisis at length, saying he often seriously thinks to himself, "what can I do about it?" Currently on the board of Midlands Simon community, Mr Cowan and the other members work with Sophia Housing Association, and he says being proactive with the issues is the only way to make progress.

For those seeking accommodation and dealing with the growing costs which go hand in hand, he adds that it is "hard" to meet payments in the current economic crisis. Speaking with Mr Faulkner, he says that housing capacity is a problem at the moment, but believes that to address the issue and help to solve the problem requires "making a contribution."

"We know what the problems are, you've got to work with others to help solve the problem".

Looking to the future, Mr Cowan vows to keep undertaking projects in a voluntary capacity. With a family occasion on the horizon, his eldest daughter's wedding, he says, "I hope to discharge the paternal functions well on that day," noting that bringing his physical health up enough to walk her down the aisle is his main goal this year.
Verizon Business Boosts Fixed-Wireless with Enhanced Portal and Security

Verizon Business announced it is enhancing its fixed-wireless business internet service, introducing advanced security features and a cloud-based router management dashboard. The latest move means customers can manage performance, security, and visibility from a centralized location, enjoying remote self-service capabilities. The enhancements are available to businesses of all sizes without the need for additional installations or specialized IT support.

The Verizon Business Internet Portal is accessible from virtually anywhere via verizon.com and using a customers existing My Business credentials. Using the portal, businesses have access to a range of features. These include performance monitoring and diagnostics for routers, critical network management capabilities, advanced settings, and bulk configuration management for businesses with multiple Verizon Business Internet lines. Its also possible to better manage equipment for hybrid and distributed work environments.

To offer much needed security and protection, Verizon Business also provides enhanced security options through its Business Internet Portal. These features come in two tiers and can be added to LTE or 5G Business Internet plans. The Verizon Business Internet Security Plus tier provides essential security features like ransomware protection, phishing prevention, and malicious website blocking, along with security insights and reporting. The Verizon Business Internet Security Preferred tier includes all the Plus features and additional customizable protections such as content filtering, URL and IP address blocking, and advanced security configuration options.

With security measures at the Internet gateway, potential threats are intercepted and prevented from reaching end devices. The Portal also offers detailed logs and reports on blocked threats, allowing businesses to monitor the effectiveness of their security solutions in real time.

With these enhancements, Verizon Business' fixed-wireless offering has never been more compelling or more distinguished in the marketplace. The Verizon Business Internet Portal and Verizon Business Internet Security make management and cybersecurity simple, easy to use and accessible for our business customers. There's no installation, no IT support, and no headaches, and users gain more control and better visibility into the security and performance of their connections and devices, all on one dashboard, said Debika Bhattacharya, Chief Product Officer, Verizon Business.

Verizon Business Internet Security can benefit companies of any size. Large enterprises can secure vast deployments of equipment with an embedded layer of defense that can be activated immediately and seamlessly. But these solutions are especially beneficial for small and medium-sized businesses, which dont always have the resources or internal expertise to manage their security, said Bhattacharya.

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[July 03, 2023] AIS and ZTE announce Thailand's first 5G mmWave SA showcase at 26GHz Tweet

AIS has partnered with Qualcomm Technologies and ZTE to successfully complete the 5G mmWave SA (5G Standalone Architecture) technology trial at the AZ center in Bangkok

The trial of 5G mmWave SA technology yielded remarkable results, with latency of under 4 milliseconds, impressive uplink speeds of 2.12Gbps under DSUUU frame structure, and incredible downlink speeds of 7.04Gbps under DDDSU frame structure BANGKOK, July 3, 2023 /PRNewswire/ -- ZTE Corporation (0763.HK / 000063.SZ), a global leading provider of information and communication technology solutions, has partnered with AIS, Thailand's leading mobile operator, and Qualcomm Technologies, Inc. to successfully complete the trial of mmWave SA (5G Standalone Architecture) technology at the AZ center in Bangkok. This achievement not only positions Thailand as a leader in the ASEAN region regarding mmWave explorations, but also marks a significant step towards commercializing mmWave in the country, meeting the diverse requirements of consumers and industries. During the trial, 5G mmWave SA technology showcased unparalleled downlink speeds of 7.04Gbps under DDDSU frame structure, impressive uplink speeds of 2.12Gbps under DSUUU frame structure, and end-to-end latency of less than 4ms. These exceptional results were achieved using a single CPE prototype powered by Snapdragon X65 5G Modem-RF System from Qualcomm Technologies, along with ZTE's latest mmWave AAU network infrastructure equipment. The high throughput and minimal data transmission delay offered by this cutting-edge technology enable users to experience immediate responses during critical applications such as online gaming, virtual reality, and autonomous vehicles. With seamless connectivity between users and their devices, this advancement opens up a world of possibilities for both businesses and consumers. In comparison to EN-DC or NR-DC, mmWave SA was implemented using four 200MHz carriers in the downlink and two 200MHz carriers in the uplink all operating solely at 26GHz. This approach significantly simplifies the network architecture and eliminates the need for "anchoring" cells in EN-DC or NR-DC, thereby avoiding additional CAPEX expenditure. The mmWave SA showcase is considered a catalyst for the rapid commercial advancement of 5G mmWave technology in Thailand. AIS, Qualcomm Technologies and ZTE are committed to accelerating and expanding the capabilities of 5G, improving efficiency, and pushing the boundaries of applications in personal, enterprise, and industrial settings. This commitment aims to enhance overall conectivity and productivity, opening up new possibilities for users and industries alike.



Wasit Watansap, Head of Nationwide Operations and Support Business Unit AIS, stated, "In line with our goals and plans to elevate the quality of service towards becoming a Cognitive Tech-Co or a provider of intelligent telecommunications technology, we are working collaboratively with global partners such as ZTE and Qualcomm to enhance the potential of 5G, enabling it to accommodate customer behavior and support the growth of the digital economy, which relies on the robustness of digital technology infrastructure. Furthermore, the success achieved in the testing of mmWave SA technology, with latency below 4 milliseconds, uplink speed of 2.12 Gbps, and downlink speed of 7.04 Gbps, will empower the 5G network with capabilities and intelligence that will lead to various solutions, such as controlling machinery in factories and manufacturing, autonomous driving, remote surgeries, and even high-speed, reliable, low-latency, responsive, and real-time Mobile Cloud Gaming, benefiting businesses, industries, and the Thai people, without a doubt." "It is an honor to have been a continued partner of AIS and ZTE in achieving this significant milestone which serves as an integral step towards the full deployment of 5G mmWave in Thailand. We remain committed to advancing the development of 5G mmWave as this will further enable an intelligently connected world benefitting not only enterprises, but also everyday experiences of end users," said ST Liew Vice President, QUALCOMM CDMA Technologies Asia-Pacific Pte. Ltd. and President, Qualcomm Taiwan, South East Asia, Australia and New Zealand.

"We're pleased to work with AIS and Qualcomm Technologies to achieve this milestone, which lays a technology validation foundation for 5G mmWave commercialization," said Mei Zhonghua, Senior Vice President of ZTE Corporation. "With broader 5G opportunities enabled by mmWave, we will join hands with partners to continuously drive mmWave development, create ultimate experiences, and usher in a wonderful 5G era." ABOUT AIS: Advanced Info Service Public Company Limited (AIS) is the 5G Digital Service Provider with the most spectra to provide service, totalling 1420MHz . The company has the most subscribers in Thailand, counting over 46 million in December 2022. AIS is ready to power Thailand with 5G technology which currently covers 77 provinces through 3 core businesses: mobile phones, high-speed home broadband through AIS Fibre, and Digital Services in 5 aspects of video, the Cloud, digital payments, the Internet of Things (IoT) and services provided jointly with partners. The company is also expanding into AIS eSports and AIS Insurance Service. All of this is to proceed with the vision of becoming a Cognitive Tech-Co, to support a robust digital infrastructure for the country, boost the industrial sector's competitive potential and upgrade quality of life for all Thais. Find us at www.ais.th ABOUT QUALCOMM: Snapdragon and Qualcomm branded products are products of Qualcomm Technologies, Inc. and/or its subsidiaries. Qualcomm patented technologies are licensed by Qualcomm Incorporated. Qualcomm and Snapdragon are trademarks or registered trademarks of Qualcomm Incorporated. ABOUT ZTE: ZTE helps to connect the world with continuous innovation for a better future. The company provides innovative technologies and integrated solutions, its portfolio spans all series of wireless, wireline, devices and professional telecommunications services. Serving over a quarter of the global population, ZTE is dedicated to creating a digital and intelligent ecosystem, and enabling connectivity and trust everywhere. ZTE is listed on both the Hong Kong and Shenzhen Stock Exchanges. www.zte.com.cn/global FOLLOW US: Facebook www.facebook.com/ZTECorp

Twitter www.twitter.com/ZTEPress

LinkedIn www.linkedin.com/company/zte

YouTube www.youtube.com/@ZTECorporation MEDIA INQUIRIES: ZTE Corporation

Communications

Email: [email protected] View original content:https://www.prnewswire.com/apac/news-releases/ais-and-zte-announce-thailands-first-5g-mmwave-sa-showcase-at-26ghz-301868774.html SOURCE ZTE Corporation

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[July 02, 2023] Yodaplus: Accelerating Indian Startup Boom with Groundbreaking Tech Enablement Tweet

Mumbai-based technology company Yodaplus is accelerating the expansion of the Indian startup landscape through strategic and innovative tech enablement MUMBAI, India, July 3, 2023 /PRNewswire/ -- With a comprehensive suite of services that help startups scale and thrive globally, Yodaplus is at the forefront of India's tech startup boom. India is fast emerging as the Silicon Valley of Asia with its booming startup ecosystem fostering innovation, driving economic growth, and creating new-age job opportunities. Catalyzing this growth and making India a hotbed of innovation are companies like Yodaplus. By providing comprehensive digital transformation services, Yodaplus offers startups the much-needed technological edge to survive, scale, and thrive in a competitive marketplace. The company assists startups from the ground up, from fundraising to scaling. Catalyzing Startup Success The Indian startup ecosystem has been growing exponentially over the last five years. The number of startups in India increased from 445 in 2016 to a staggering 86,713 in 2022, as per a report by the government of India. Companies like Yodalus are becoming the support structure for these budding startups that usually begin with lean resources. They provide the support and leverage needed to survive in a competitive market and reach their potential.



"A quote I heard many years ago really stuck with me as I positioned Yodaplus to be a startup accelerator - an idea is only as good as its execution. Many startups in India have the right idea and vision but struggle to acquire the resources needed for full-scale execution. We supplement their operational and technological needs so they can execute as boldly and successfully as they ideate," says founder Vishrut Srivastava. Nutrify Today, a nutraceutical tech startup, is a fine example of how a technological pillar like Yodaplus can help a budding startup. Partnering with Yodaplus to build a robust digital platform, Nutrify Today raised seed funds of $500,000 from investor Dr Anand Swaroop. The platform now engages over 18,000 industry networks and aims to cross 450,000 by 2025.

TeamNest, an HR SaaS platform, is another such success story. Yodaplus's technical expertise was crucial in building the HRMS platform from scratch. Financial services firm InCred Capital recognized the platform's value, acquiring a 20% stake in TeamNest in a series A round and enabling it to expand its reach and enhance product offerings. Notably, Yodaplus's MD, Vishrut Srivastava, is an investor in the startup. Yodaplus also played a pivotal role in the success of IsEqualTo, an inclusive learning platform. Yodaplus not only assisted IsEqualTo in raising angel investment but also helped gain recognition through mentions in PM Narendra Modi's esteemed Mann Ki Baat program. These are a few of the many startups that reached their full potential because of the backing of a technological partner. Yodaplus harnesses its experience and expertise to pave the way for startups to compete effectively in the digital age. About Yodaplus Yodaplus is a Mumbai-based IT services company that assists startups with the technical prowess needed to grow. Their client roster includes multilateral development banks, retail giants, blockchain companies, health tech startups, EdTech startups, and HRMS providers among others. Although based in Mumbai, Yodaplus caters to a global clientele. With a strong foothold across India, Yodaplus is solidifying its presence in the US, UK, UAE and Singapore . MD Vishrut Srivastava brings a wealth of experience to the firm, his expertise instrumental in the growth and development of startups across various sectors. For more information, visit yodaplus.com . Media Contact:

Amit Pareek

Senior Manager - Marketing, Yodaplus Technologies Pvt Ltd

[email protected] View original content:https://www.prnewswire.com/apac/news-releases/yodaplus-accelerating-indian-startup-boom-with-groundbreaking-tech-enablement-301867945.html SOURCE Yodaplus Technologies

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[July 02, 2023] New Survey Reveals Insights on Singapore Workers' Preparedness for Digital Transformation Tweet

Study sheds light on perceptions, behaviours and changes towards digitalisation in the aftermath of the COVID-19 pandemic SINGAPORE, July 3, 2023 /PRNewswire/ -- Reeracoen, a leading provider of human resource services in Singapore, has released its latest report titled "Employee Attitudes Towards Digitalisation in a Post-pandemic World", providing valuable insights into the impact of COVID-19 on Singapore workers and their readiness for digital transformation. In collaboration with Rakuten Insight Global, the study analysed 308 responses from three age groups to better understand Singapore workers' evolving attitudes and behaviours towards digitalisation. The report looks to bridge the gap in understanding and/or expectations between workers and employers, educating both parties with the aim of creating a better environment to nurture local talents for the future. Specifically, the survey assessed the effects of the COVID-19 pandemic on Singapore workers and their ability to adapt to the rapid digital transformation that's underway in Singapore and other countries worldwide. As businesses were compelled to accelerate their digitalisation efforts in the past few years, Reeracoen sought to determine whether Singapore's workers felt adequately equipped to embrace significant changes to the way they live and work. The report captured responses from both full-time and part-time workers, offering a comprehensive perspective across different work arrangements. Additionally, it explores workers' perceptions of their companies' readiness for digitalisation, any perceived upskilling gaps and opportunities, as well as the levels of digital preparedness among different employment types. Digitalisation attitudes varies from generation to generation Reeracoen commissioned the survey to understand employee attitudes towards digitalisation in a post-pandemic world across three demographics: Gen Z (23%), Gen Y (38%) and Gen X (39%). The results showed that Singapore full-time workers feel that the responsibility of Digitalization falls under: IT (34%) Govt (26%) Everyon (19%) HR (15%) Mine (6%)



survey results also revealed several insights between respondent groups: Less than half of the respondents have heard of Digitalization.

Most respondents feel that their company is ready for Digitalization.

Most full-time workers feel equipped to embrace "Digitalization", whereas most part-time workers feel ill-equipped to take on digital transformation.

Most full-time workers feel supported by their company in terms of upskilling, whereas most part-time workers do not.

Both full-time and part-time workers would most like their companies to roll out "Time off to upgrade/upskill", followed by "External training" and "Sponsored scholarships".

The most popular upskilling platform both full-time and part-time workers are familiar with is SkillsFuture. "As the world continues to digitalise, there will be an ever-increasing demand for different ways of working - and this is a trend that will likely continue in 2023 and beyond," says Mr. Kenji Naito, Reeracoen's Group CEO. "To deal with this demand, Singapore based companies must evolve by first understanding their local talent pool, otherwise, they will have to compete globally for talents, which would be expensive and unsustainable. We believe that by providing insights into the changing trends as well as the evolving preferences of workers, we empower employers to attract and retain top talent effectively."

In a landscape transformed by the pandemic and digitalisation, the report gives an insight into workers' perceptions, support systems, and perceived upskilling opportunities, which are all valuable intelligence for the planning and resourcing of any organisation. Combined with their continued dedication to serve as a bridge between the companies and candidates that they represent, Reeracoen has continued to fortify its position as a trusted partner for both companies and job-seekers Singapore wide. About Reeracoen Singapore Pte Ltd Reeracoen Singapore Pte Ltd is one of Singapore's leading recruitment agencies. Our extensive network allows us to source and match high-calibre talent to opportunities. Our clients enjoy peace of mind knowing that as part of the Neo-career group, Reeracoen is committed to delivering the same Japanese professionalism and service quality across our 10 offices in 6 Asian countries. For more information, visit https://www.reeracoen.sg/ . About Rakuten Insight Global, Inc. Rakuten Insight Global, Inc. ("Rakuten Insight") is a wholly-owned online market research subsidiary of Rakuten Group, Inc., a global leader in internet services headquartered in Tokyo. Rakuten Insight, established in 1997, has offices in 61 countries and regions, providing market research to over 500 leading companies worldwide. For more information, visit https://insight.rakuten.com/ . View original content to download multimedia:https://www.prnewswire.com/apac/news-releases/new-survey-reveals-insights-on-singapore-workers-preparedness-for-digital-transformation-301867791.html SOURCE Reeracoen Singapore

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[July 02, 2023] Sosei Heptares Doses First Subject in Phase I Trial with HTL0048149, a First-in-Class GPR52 Agonist for Schizophrenia Tweet

HTL149 has been designed as a once-daily oral treatment to address positive and negative symptoms and cognitive impairment in schizophrenia patients without the adverse effects typically associated with existing antipsychotic drugs



Tokyo, Japan and Cambridge, UK, 3 July 2023  Sosei Group Corporation (the Company; TSE: 4565), the world leader in G protein-coupled receptor (GPCR) focused structure-based drug design (SBDD) and development, announces it has dosed the first subject in a Phase I trial evaluating HTL0048149 (HTL149), a first-in-class GPR52 agonist, which represents a novel mechanism of action for the treatment of schizophrenia and related neurological diseases. HTL149 was developed, leveraging insights generated from Sosei Heptares StaR technology and SBDD platform, as a once-daily, orally available small molecule drug with an antipsychotic and pro-cognitive profile and to avoid the adverse effects typically associated with existing antipsychotic drugs. HTL149 achieves this profile through selectively targeting the orphan GPR52 receptor in the brain to address positive symptoms (e.g. psychosis, delusions, hallucinations), negative symptoms (e.g. social withdrawal) and cognitive impairment (e.g. attention, working memory and executive function) associated with schizophrenia. Through this novel mechanism of action, HTL149 aims to address the significant proportion of schizophrenia patients who do not respond to or suffer side effects leading to compliance issues from using existing antipsychotics. Furthermore, current antipsychotic drugs do not effectively treat the negative or cognitive symptoms of disease. The Phase I trial is a two-part, randomized, double-blind, placebo-controlled, single- and multiple-ascending dose study to assess the safety, pharmacokinetics, and pharmacodynamics of oral HTL149 in healthy volunteers aged 18-55 years. The trial will be conducted in the UK and is expected to read-out initial data in 12-18 months. Matt Barnes, President of Heptares Therapeutics and Head of UK R&D, said: The progression of this wholly owned, first-in-class asset into clinical trials is a very important milestone for Sosei Heptares. It is the culmination of a rigorous internal program that began with the selection of GPR52 as the right taret to address the significant unmet needs of schizophrenia patients and the subsequent design of a novel and potentially first-in-class agonist molecule with the right therapeutic profile. Progression of HTL149 from discovery into clinical trials is a great example of the power of our StaR/SBDD platform to generate high-quality candidates utilizing the combined expertise of our platform, discovery and translational medicine teams.



-ENDS- About Sosei Heptares

Sosei Heptares mission is to make lifechanging medicines using worldleading science and our vision is to become one of Japans global biopharmaceutical champions.

We are a science and technologyled company focused on the discovery and early development of new medicines originating from our proprietary GPCRtargeted StaR technology and structure-based drug design platform. We are advancing a broad and deep pipeline of novel medicines across multiple therapeutic areas, including neurology, immunology, gastroenterology, and inflammatory diseases. We have established partnerships with some of the worlds leading biopharmaceutical companies and multiple emerging technology companies, including AbbVie, AstraZeneca, Genentech (Roche), GSK, Kallyope, Lilly, Neurocrine Biosciences, Novartis, Pfizer, Sanofi, Takeda and Verily. Sosei Heptares is headquartered in Tokyo, Japan with corporate and R&D facilities in Cambridge, UK. Sosei Heptares is the corporate brand and trademark of Sosei Group Corporation, which is listed on the Tokyo Stock Exchange (ticker: 4565). Sosei, Heptares, the logo and StaR are trademarks of Sosei Group companies. For more information, please visit https://soseiheptares.com/

LinkedIn: @soseiheptaresco | Twitter: @soseiheptaresco | YouTube: @soseiheptaresco Enquiries: Sosei Heptares  Media and Investor Relations

Hironoshin Nomura, Chief Financial Officer

Shinichiro Nishishita, VP Investor Relations, Head of Regulatory Disclosures

Maya Bennison, Communications Manager

+81 (0)3 5210 3399 | +44 (0)1223 949390 | [email protected] MEDiSTRAVA Consulting (for International Media)

Mark Swallow, Frazer Hall, Eleanor Perkin

+44 (0)203 928 6900 | [email protected] Forward-looking statements

This press release contains forward-looking statements, including statements about the discovery, development, and commercialization of products. Various risks may cause Sosei Group Corporations actual results to differ materially from those expressed or implied by the forward-looking statements, including: adverse results in clinical development programs; failure to obtain patent protection for inventions; commercial limitations imposed by patents owned or controlled by third parties; dependence upon strategic alliance partners to develop and commercialize products and services; difficulties or delays in obtaining regulatory approvals to market products and services resulting from development efforts; the requirement for substantial funding to conduct research and development and to expand commercialization activities; and product initiatives by competitors. As a result of these factors, prospective investors are cautioned not to rely on any forward-looking statements. We disclaim any intention or obligation to update or revise any forward-looking statements, whether as a result of new information, future events or otherwise.



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[July 03, 2023] Kanazawa University research: Experiments provide insights into the molecular mechanism for memory and learning Tweet

KANAZAWA, Japan, July 3, 2023 /PRNewswire/ -- Researchers at Kanazawa University report in Science Advances high-speed atomic force microscopy experiments that show the structural and chemical changes in an enzyme thought to play a vital role in modulating the strength of neural connections. Synapses connect neurons allowing the transmission of signals around the neural network. The strength of these connections varies  for instance strengthening or weakening depending on the signals received and how. This synaptic 'plasticity' underlies learning and memory, and the Ca2+/calmodulin-dependent protein kinase II (CaMKII) is known to play a key role. Previous studies have provided some clues to the mechanisms of CaMKII protein activity in these functions but no one had seen these proteins in action. Now, Hideji Murakoshi at the Graduate University of Advanced Studies and the National Institute for Physiological Sciences and Mikihiro Shibata at Kanazawa University and their colleagues have used high speed atomic force microscopy (HS-AFM) to observe the structural dynamics of these proteins for the first time, not only in various states but in three different species. CaMKII is common to a vast range of species from mammals like rats to older, non-mammalian species like the roundworms (C. elegans) and hydra. In particular, certain structural features of the protein are particularly well preserved, including the kinase domain, the regulatory segment that inhibits the activity of the kinase domain and the hub domain. In addition, the protein has binding sites, phosphorylation sites and linker regions; however, the linker region shows a little more variability suggesting that its function and activation mechanisms are more bespoke for the different species. Previous studies had suggested that the regulatory segment's inhibition of the kinase domain is released when Ca2+/calmodulin binds to the regulatory segment. The activated kinase domains then phosphorylate each other, activity that persists even after the Ca2+/calmodulin becomes dissociated, which has been 'hypothesized to be a form of molecular memory', as the researchers describe in their report. Murakoshi, Shibata and their colleagues studied the protein using atomic force microscopy, which feels topologies using a nanoscale tip, like a needle reading a vinyl record, raster scanning the image plane to build up a picture of the sample structure. With HS-AFM, these images are collected quickly enough to record movies of how these structures change. The researchers noted various measures of the proteins size and motion  the gyrus of rotation  as well as reactions such as kinase domain oligomerization (that is, where there is a limited level of polymerization to join molecules into chains) and phosphorylation  the addition of a phosphoryl group (PO 3 ), which can activate enzymes like kinase. They found that the kinase domain was quite mobile, although this decreased with Ca2+/calmodulin binding. The researchers explain this in terms of the binding stabilizing the protein into a particular helical structure called an a helix. They also note that the binding causes the protein to extend 3nm from the hub assembly, which they suggest ma be what dissociates the regulatory segment from the active site in the kinase domain. The mobility then increases again with phosphorylation, which the researchers attribute to the protein losing some of the order of the helical structure.



Of the three species investigated  the rat, roundworm and hydra  Murakoshi, Shibata and their colleagues found that the kinase domain only oligomerized in the rat. In addition, in the rat, the protein was more resilient to phosphatase, which removes phosphate groups (PO 4 ) from proteins. "In conclusion," they report, "Our findings provide a basis for a deeper understanding of the molecular mechanisms of CaMKIIa activation."

Related image

https://onl.tw/nmZ9ei3 Caption

High-speed atomic force microscopy image of calmodulin-dependent protein kinase II. This image was taken at 3.3 frames/second.  2023 Tsujioka, et al., Science Advances. Glossary High-speed atomic force microscope Atomic force microscopy (AFM) 'feels' the topography of surfaces by the increase and decrease of surface forces tugging on a nanoscale tip as changes in surface height change the distance between the tip and the surface. The tip is mounted on a cantilever so that the tiny changes in the force can be read out by the resulting deflection in the cantilever. AFM can resolve structures with subnanometre scale resolution. It has particular advantages for biological studies because it does not require conducting substrates or a current, which are requirements for other primary microscopes with comparable resolutions, such as the scanning tunnelling microscope. For a long time AFM was limited by the time it takes to capture an image of the surface, but this changed when Toshio Ando at Kanazawa University revealed how the tool could be upgraded to high-speed AFM using various modifications to the scanning, deflection detection and other electronic devices, as well as specifications for the cantilever. With high-speed AFM it became possible to capture dynamics at the nanoscale for the first time. Ca2+/calmodulin-dependent protein kinase II Protein kinases are enzymes. They use phosphate sourced from ATP to phosphorylate specific amino acids on target proteins, which leads to changes in the protein's conformation that regulate its biological activity. Ca2+/calmodulin-dependent protein kinase II (CaMK II) is a serine/threonine specific protein kinase, which means it phosphorylates the OH groups on the serine or threonine amino acid residues. It is modulated by Ca2+/calmodulin where calmodulin is simply an abbreviation for calcium modulated protein. The type two Ca2+/calmodulin-dependent protein kinases are multifunctional and are involved in neurotransmitter secretion, transcription factor regulation, and glycogen metabolism. Reference Shotaro Tsujioka, Ayumi Sumino, Yutaro Nagasawa, Takashi Sumikama, Holger Flechsig, Leonardo Puppulin, Takuya Tomita, Yudai Baba, Takahiro Kakuta, Tomoki Ogoshi, Kenichi Umeda, Noriyuki Kodera, Hideji Murakoshi, Mikihiro Shibata. Imaging single CaMKII holoenzymes at work by high-speed atomic force microscopy, Science Advances June 2023. DOI: 10.1126/sciadv.adh1069 URL: https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/sciadv.adh1069 Contact

Hiroe Yoneda

Senior Specialist in Project Planning and Outreach

NanoLSI Administrative Office

WPI Nano Life Science Institute (WPI-NanoLSI)

Kanazawa University

Kakuma-machi, Kanazawa 920-1192, Japan

Email: [email protected]

Tel: +81 (76) 234-4550 About Nano Life Science Institute (WPI-NanoLSI) https://nanolsi.kanazawa-u.ac.jp/en/ Nano Life Science Institute (NanoLSI), Kanazawa University is a research center established in 2017 as part of the World Premier International Research Center Initiative of the Ministry of Education, Culture, Sports, Science and Technology. The objective of this initiative is to form world-tier research centers. NanoLSI combines the foremost knowledge of bio-scanning probe microscopy to establish 'nano-endoscopic techniques' to directly image, analyze, and manipulate biomolecules for insights into mechanisms governing life phenomena such as diseases. About Kanazawa University http://www.kanazawa-u.ac.jp/e/ As the leading comprehensive university on the Sea of Japan coast, Kanazawa University has contributed greatly to higher education and academic research in Japan since it was founded in 1949. The University has three colleges and 17 schools offering courses in subjects that include medicine, computer engineering, and humanities. The University is located on the coast of the Sea of Japan in Kanazawa  a city rich in history and culture. The city of Kanazawa has a highly respected intellectual profile since the time of the fiefdom (1598-1867). Kanazawa University is divided into two main campuses: Kakuma and Takaramachi for its approximately 10,200 students including 600 from overseas. View original content:https://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/kanazawa-university-research-experiments-provide-insights-into-the-molecular-mechanism-for-memory-and-learning-301868680.html SOURCE Kanazawa University

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[July 03, 2023] Uber for Business's exclusive partnership with Xoxoday: Now spreading delight together in over 60 countries Tweet

BENGALURU, India, July 3, 2023 /PRNewswire/ -- Xoxoday, the digital rewards, incentive & payout partner for companies worldwide, announced an exclusive global partnership with Uber's b2b vertical - Uber for Business. Uber and Uber Eats will now be available to Xoxoday clients as digital gift cards in more than 60 countries on their marketplace. This collaboration marks a significant milestone for Xoxoday as it becomes the first reward company worldwide to forge such an exclusive alliance with Uber for Business. Being one of the world's most cutting-edge platforms, providing seamless transportation and food delivery in 70 countries, and accepting 52 different payment methods, the addition of Uber's global network of services to Xoxoday's reward catalog will offer users the convenience and flexibility of accessing Uber's services as part of their rewards and incentives program. "At Uber for Business, we brng the best of Uber to companies, their teams and their clients. With this partnership, we are happy to provide Xoxoday our digital gift card solution, a new acquisition and loyalty lever to enhance their customer satisfaction," explained Franck Monsauret, General Manager, Uber for Business France.



This exclusive partnership between Xoxoday and Uber for Business reinforces both companies' commitment to customer-centricity and signifies their shared vision of helping companies delight their employees and customers. Uber's user-friendly and innovative platform has revolutionized the way people travel and order food, making it a preferred choice for millions of individuals worldwide. By offering Xoxoday users access to its unparalleled services, this collaboration drives convenience, choice, and global reach in the rewards industry. "We are extremely proud to collaborate with Uber, the world's most popular ridesharing and delivery platform, and bring their exceptional services to our platform," said Harish Ramasamy, Associate Vice President of Category & Product, Xoxoday. "By integrating Uber and Uber Eats gift cards into Xoxoday's offerings, we are expanding our users' access to reliable transportation and delightful food delivery experiences. This partnership reinforces our commitment to providing innovative solutions that empower businesses to create meaningful connections and drive engagement."

For more information, visit Xoxoday.com or connect with us on social media:

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/xoxoday. Photo: https://mma.prnewswire.com/media/2145132/Xoxoday_Uber_for_Business.jpg

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Smartwatches carry a series of sensors that allow you to record physical activity, heart rate and sleep quality. Nastasic (Getty Images)

Before the onset of Parkinsons disease becomes apparent, patients begin to write with smaller and smaller letters. Even before they themselves realize it, they hold down the cellphone keys longer when they send a message. And several years before the diagnosis, the first movement disorders occur. By the time the doctor diagnoses Parkinsons, 60% or more of the neurons that produce dopamine have stopped doing so, making tremors, muscle stiffness, depression tremendously evident. Now, an investigation of thousands of people who wore smartwatches has been able to anticipate who will have Parkinsons long before it becomes evident.

Since 2006, a study has been underway in which the U.K. health authorities have been monitoring the health of half a million people over the age of 40 (UK Biobank). A decade later, 103,712 of them were given smartwatches to record their activity for a week. These data have allowed a group of scientists to investigate something that science is eager to find: an objective marker of Parkinsons that can be used for early detection. When they put the watches on, 273 of the participants had a clinical diagnosis of Parkinsons. And since then, another 196 have been diagnosed. The data from these two groups have been key to detecting the abnormal signals that indicates that something is wrong in the substantia nigra, the part of the brain that degenerates as the disease progresses.

Parkinsons is a neurodegenerative movement disorder characterized by slow disease progression, recalls Cynthia Sandor, a researcher at Cardiff University in the United Kingdom and co-author of the study. Affected people experience motor symptoms such as slow movement, stiffness, coordination difficulties and tremors, she adds. All these prodromes  signs that precede the disease  appear long before its diagnosis. They can present subtle motor or non-motor symptoms that often go unnoticed by the person themselves. But the accelerometers, magnetometers and gyros that are found in movement-tracking devices and smartwatches are able to pick them up. In theory, cellphones also have this technology, but as they are not always carried by a person, the records would be invalid.

More information New technique opens the brain to unprecedented neurological treatments

In the study, the researchers relied on the data offered by a smartwatchs accelerometer. This sensor registers the acceleration, the beginning of each movement, and is represented in a three-dimensional system that changes with each second. To distinguish distinctive patterns in the thousands and thousands of resulting graphs, the scientists used an artificial intelligence system. The results of the study, which have just been published in the scientific journal Nature Medicine, show a decrease in mobility between 7 a.m. and 12 p.m. in people diagnosed with Parkinsons when they put on the smartwatches. Artificial intelligence was able to differentiate this pattern from the more than 40,000 people in the control group.

With that training, the researchers went further, also identifying nearly 200 people who were diagnosed an average of 4.33 years after their movements were recorded. In some cases, detection occurred up to seven years earlier. We show that a single week of captured data can predict events up to seven years in advance. With these results, we could develop a valuable tool to help in the early detection of Parkinsons disease, says Sandor, who is also the head of the Institute for Dementia Research in the United Kingdom. Data from smartwatches is easily accessible and, in the U.K., a third of the population already uses the device. A platform would have to be set up to centralize the data, and the researchers were aware that this poses a technological challenge and also has legal and privacy implications. But there is no cure for Parkinsons and all the treatment to stop its progress have failed.

Francisco Grandas, a Parkinsons expert at the Gregorio Maranon Hospital in Madrid, points out that all the treatments available are symptomatic: they improve the patients condition, but do not prevent its progression. He also says that there are several trials of drugs in the experimental phase, which are intended to slow down the diseases progress, but so far have not succeeded. In addition to problems such as the one posed by the blood-brain barrier [the membrane that protects brain tissue], we suspect that it may be because the moment has already passed, because the disease is already in an advanced phase, Grandas explains. Thats why he is optimistic about the new research. Other markers are being investigated, such as brain imaging, lifestyle, blood biochemistry... Non-motor symptoms appear years before, but now we are beginning to learn that there are also subtle motor signs and systems for analyzing these movements could detect them, he says. This would open the possibility of using experimental treatments in the prodromal phase of the disease.

Sirwan Darweesh, from the Department of Neurology at the Eramus University School of Medicine in Rotterdam (The Netherlands) has spent years studying the onset and evolution of Parkinsons. In 1990, researchers from the university began a very ambitious study to follow the health of all the inhabitants over 55 years of age in Ommord, a neighborhood in the Dutch city. Within this work, Darwesh focused on a hundred people who ended up being diagnosed with Parkinsons. Based on his research, Darwesh can say that the pathology of the disease begins more than two decades before a clinical diagnosis can be made. The first symptoms usually appear 10 years before diagnosis. Darwesh agrees with Grandas that Parkinsons is being diagnosed too late: Disease-modifying therapies are ineffective in the clinical phase of Parkinsons. The likely reason is that the pathology of the disease is already too advanced at that stage, as more than 60% of the key dopaminergic brain cells have already been depleted by the time the diagnosis is made.

One of the weaknesses of the new research is that the smartwatches only recorded activity for a week, but if it were applied in a real environment, the collection of data over time could refine the warning signals. Before Sandors current work, a group of scientists in the United States used artificial intelligence to detect patterns in data from smartwatches. They also used the sample from the UK Biobank, but they started with the data of patients who had already diagnosed with Parkinsons. One of the authors of this research is neurologist Karl Friedl. For him, a full week of sampling movement patterns is enough to be able to detect someone who is going to have Parkinsons. From a broader point of view, we can help people discover many important characteristics of their health and well-being through the way they move, adds Friedl. If we add to it all the other prodromal features that are emerging related to Parkinsons [anosmia, REM sleep disturbance, depression], the predictive algorithms in our new AI world will become very powerful, he concludes.

Indeed, the smartwatch study also obtained data on sleep patterns, in this case using a sample of 65,000 people. Again, artificial intelligence was able to detect a decrease in the duration and quality of sleep, both in those diagnosed with Parkinsons when their activity was recorded and in those who were diagnosis years later. The smartwatches tell us that people wake up more frequently at night and experience longer sleep duration several years before a Parkinsons diagnosis, says Sandor. Combined with daytime and nighttime data, the accelerometers could give doctors time to try to curb the disease.

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[July 03, 2023] PAAMC HK's Fund Once Again Awarded ESG Fixed Income Fund of the Year (Asia) by Environmental Finance Tweet

HONG KONG, July 3, 2023 /PRNewswire/ -- Ping An of China Asset Management (Hong Kong) Company Limited ("PAAMC HK") the offshore asset management platform of Ping An Group, is delighted to announce that Ping An of China Asset Management Fund - China Green Bond Fund (the "Fund"), has been honored once again with "ESG Fixed Income Fund of the Year (Asia)[1]" at Environmental Finance's Sustainable Investment Awards 2023. Launched in 2019, the Fund is one of the few Asia-focused green bond funds that has a track record longer than three years. PAAMC HK has maintained a consistent partnership with Climate Bonds Initiative ("CBI") since fund inception and has applied their rigorous set of green taxonomy standards - in line with the International Capital Markets Association (ICMA) Green Bond Principles[2] - in the evaluation and selection of green bonds. At least 80% of the Fund is fixed income instruments that CBI has deemed "eligible green". The remainder are bonds that are being reviewed or have been classified green under other standards. The Fund also received the same award in 2021, making this year's win a testament to its continued excellence. It tracks environmental data from issuers at the project level rather than at the company level to better target green projects that will deliver greater impact. According to the judging panel, it was this focus on impact that helped it win the award. At the fund level, PAAMC HK collects and tracks environmental data meticulously. The results are published in the annual green impact report of the Fund, which has been available since 2021[3]. Mr. Albert Wang, Head of Capital Markets and CIO of PAAMC HK, commented, "We are honored to receive this award again, which recognizes our unwavering commitment to ESG investing, and our dedication to selecting the best-quality green bonds with both favorable yields and solid fundamentals. Particularly, Chinese green bonds provide the much-desired diversification to global bond portfolios. We believe that investing in green projects is not only good for our planet but also makes good business sense." Ping An Group has been a pioneer in ESG investing in China. In 2019, it became the first China asset owner to sign the United Nations Principles for Responsible Investment (UNPRI) and the first financial institution in China to disclose environmental information in accordance with the framework proposed by the Taskforce on Climate-Related Financial Disclosure (TCFD) of the G20 Financial Stability Board (FSB) [4]. The 2023 Sustainable Investment Awards, organized by Environmental Finance, are global and seek to recognize asset managers, analysts and data providers incorporating ESG across all asset classes - fixed income, listed and private equity, debt funds, multi asset funds, infrastructure funds and fund of funds.







[1] Source: https://www.environmental-finance.com/content/awards/sustainable-investment-awards-2023/winners/fixed-income-fund-of-the-year-asia-ping-ans-china-green-bond-fund.html [2] Source: https://www.icmagroup.org/sustainable-finance/the-principles-guidelines-and-handbooks/green-bond-principles-gbp/ [3] Source: Ping An of China Asset Management Fund- China Green Bond Fund Annual Green Impact Report 2021-2022( https://asset.pingan.com.hk/en/PACAMF-CGBF/Annual-Green-Impact-Report-EN.pdf) [4] Source: Ping An Group 2022 Annual Report (https://group.pingan.com/resource/pingan/IR-Docs/2023/pingan-ar22-report.pdf)

View original content:https://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/paamc-hks-fund-once-again-awarded-esg-fixed-income-fund-of-the-year-asia-by-environmental-finance-301868674.html SOURCE Ping An of China Asset Management (Hong Kong) Company Limited

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[July 03, 2023] LONGi calls for actions to actively respond to global climate change at Summer Davos Forum Tweet

TIANJIN, China, July 3, 2023 /CNW/ -- The World Economic Forum (WEF)'s 14th Annual Meeting of the New Champions, also known as the "Summer Davos Forum", was held in Tianjin from June 27 to 29. Zhong Baoshen, Chairman of LONGi, was invited to the forum where he delivered speeches at the "Net-Zero Hero? The Decarbonization of Industry Clusters" and the "China Energy Transition Roundtable". The theme of this year's forum was "Entrepreneurship: The Driving Force of the Global Economy." It was attended by over 1500 global leaders and innovators politics, business, academia, social organizations, and international organizations. Since the first Summer Davos in 2007, the forum has been successfully held 13 times and has become an important platform for communication between China and the world. During his speech at the forum, Zhong proudly announced that LONGi, as the world's largest solar technology company, is projected to achieve a remarkable shipment volume of 85GW of cells and modules, along with 130GW of silicon wafers in 2023. He went on to add that it can generate about 150 billion tons of green electricity and significantly reduce carbon emissions. LONGi has successively joined RE100, EP100, and EV100 initiatives and also participated in the Scientific Carbon Target (SBTi), becoming the earliest Chinese enterprise to simultaneously join the four international initiatives. In 2021, LONGi kicked off the construction of the first "Zero-Carbon Factory" in the photovoltaic industry in Baoshan, Yunnan. Currently, the proportion of green electricity usage has reached 99.09%, reflecting the company's determination and confidence in actively practicing green development. According to Zhong, the integration of photovoltaics with vrious applications is a groundbreaking direction for LONGi, representing an innovative approach. "In the past, large-scale power facilities required massive capital. Today, the installation of power generation facilities to address simple problems can be achieved at just $100. In arid areas that solely rely on the weather, solar energy can be used to run water pumps to increase soil. "



At present, climate change is a major global issue facing human society. Zhong believes that in the face of common challenges, everyone is on the same boat, and it is necessary for every individual, every country, and every region to take concrete action because timely action is more important than anything else. As the global consensus on 'carbon neutrality' strengthens, the world is poised for transformative changes, with carbon reduction trends and global action capabilities surpassing our expectations in terms of speed and intensity. On June 27, the WEF also officially released the "Green Hydrogen in China: A Roadmap for Progress" during the summer's Davos Forum. The report was jointly published by the World Economic Forum, Accenture and the China Hydrogen Energy Alliance.

The report points out the challenges faced by China's green hydrogen industry and identifies six major obstacles and goals related to costs, infrastructure, market demand, industry standards and certification, technology, development evolution, and cooperation. In order to overcome these challenges, the report lists 35 support measures and recommends implementing them in three stages from now to 2030. As a leading global provider of large-scale green hydrogen equipment and solutions, LONGi Hydrogen participated in the joint compilation of this report. It is understood that China's annual carbon dioxide emissions surpass 10 billion tons, with the power system accounting for over 40%. "Deep decarbonization in the non-electric field requires the introduction of green hydrogen." said Li Zhenguo, Founder and President of LONGi. "We use optimized unit hydrogen production costs to create safe, reliable, and large-scale green hydrogen equipment and solutions, create value for global customers with technological progress, and actively promote the application and development of green hydrogen", he added. At present, photovoltaic power generation has emerged as the world's most cost-effective clean energy source. The integrated advancement of photovoltaics and hydrogen production signifies the harmonious development of green electricity and green hydrogen. The two will promote each other and develop in synergy. As photovoltaic costs continue to decline and the prices of hydrogen production system equipment experience rapid reductions, the feasibility of synergistic and complementary development between these two technologies has been firmly established. In the future, LONGi will leverage its green power experience in the photovoltaic field to comprehensively enhance the global promotion and application of the "Green Power+ Green Hydrogen" solution, and work together with partners to build a "Greener World". View original content to download multimedia:https://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/longi-calls-for-actions-to-actively-respond-to-global-climate-change-at-summer-davos-forum-301868684.html SOURCE LONGi

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[July 03, 2023] AI and Security: Ensuring That Opportunities Outweigh the Threats, Reports IDTechEx Tweet

BOSTON, July 3, 2023 /PRNewswire/ -- Anyone with access to social media platforms will likely have heard of ChatGPT by now. Created by OpenAI and released in November 2022, the generative AI tool had 100 million registered users as of three months after release, with it  the world's most advanced chatbot  being used to answer simple queries, write songs, and draft press releases, all with varying degrees of success. While in the creative domain, ChatGPT is not (yet) a match for the human mind, its capabilities are nothing less than staggering, with the potential to transform entire workflows. Yet, along with the opportunities afforded by generative AI, there are risks. In IDTechEx's recent "AI Chips 2023-2033" report, IDTechEx forecast that the global AI chips market will grow to exceed US$250 billion by 2033, with the IT & Telecoms, BFSI (Banking, Financial Services and Industrial), and Consumer Electronics industry verticals leading the way in terms of revenue generated up to 2033. This growth is made possible by the growing complexities and functionalities of machine learning models, representing significant opportunities for both businesses and consumers. However, improper use of AI tools represents threats to the aforementioned groups. Measures must be taken to ensure that the opportunities afforded by advanced AI greatly outweigh the threats. Questions of Ownership and Culpability ChatGPT, DALL-E 2, and Siri are all examples of generative AI tools. These are systems capable of generating text, images, or other media in response to prompts, where the data produced is based on the training data sets employed to create and refine the models used. Current intellectual property (IP) laws are not particularly well-suited to account for the legal ownership of intangible assets such as those that AI tools such as these can generate. Patent law generally considers the inventor as the first owner of the invention. In the case of AI, who invents? The human creates the (initial) prompt, but it is the AI tool that creates the output. An AI may also be used to prompt other AI tools, and so AI can act as both the prompt and the creator. But granting an AI tool IP ownership status  as it currently stands  necessarily gives the AI the same status extended to a legal person. Therein is the question of culpability and ethics; if the AI is the legal owner of a piece of work, then the human that deployed, commissioned, or used the AI tool is exempt from culpability. This could be considered unethical, as the human user should bear some responsibility for the ethical ramifications of using such an AI tool (particularly in the case of unlawful AI use, such as assistance with writing a script for malware). A possible way around this is to grant the AI the same legal status as a hild, wherein the human user would be analogous to a child's guardian, and so bear some responsibility, while the AI would still retain ownership. While this ensures that the human user bears responsibilities for the AI tool's actions, it does not adequately address autonomous AI, where no human prompting is necessary. In addition, there may be some discomfort from legislators around bestowing legal status onto machines.



Other parties that should be considered are the developers of the AI tool, as well as the owners of the data that comprise the dataset used to train the AI tool (a key component of the reasoning behind Italy's ban of ChatGPT in March 2023). The answer to ownership is one that will be sought more urgently as AI tools and their outputs grow, as they surely will over the coming years. Malpractice

Where AI can be used for good intentions  such as assisting with the appropriate syntax for computer script writing and detecting fraudulent financial transactions  it can also be used for ill, ranging from the deceptive to the illegal. Given that generative AI tools can be used to assist with script writing, it does not particularly matter to the tool what type of script is being written. As such, generative AI can be used to assist with the writing of malware (malicious software). The AI tool used has, of course, not intentionally created a piece of malware, but this potential mistreatment of a nominally apathetic system needs to be addressed. Generative AI is very effective for streamlining certain work functions, such as advertising copy and marketing materials. And yet, the question remains of ownership and culpability. From marketing to consumers (where companies will ultimately still be liable for ambiguous or defamatory language) to academic institutions (where the use of a language tool by a student to write a part of their thesis calls into question the legitimacy of their conferred degree), clear guidelines  regulatory and legal  need to be given for fair use of such tools. Ultimately, we are still a long way off from the types of existential threats posed by AI that are central to seminal works of science fiction, such as 2001: A Space Odyssey and The Terminator. And yet, even as AI technology advances towards Artificial General Intelligence, clear practices and codes of conduct are needed to ensure that risks are appropriately mitigated, such that AI transforms industries for the better. Opportunities across the three aforementioned industry verticals and others are discussed in the new IDTechEx report, "AI Chips 2023-2033". Report Coverage IDTechEx forecasts that the global AI chips market will grow to US$257.6 billion by 2033. The report covers the global AI Chips market across eight industry verticals, with 10-year granular forecasts in seven categories (such as by geography, chip architecture, and application). In addition to the revenue forecasts for AI chips, costs at each stage of the supply chain (design, manufacture, assembly, test & packaging, and operation) are quantified for a leading-edge AI chip. Rigorous calculations are provided, along with a customizable template for customer use, and analyses of comparative costs between leading and trailing edge node chips. IDTechEx's latest report, "AI Chips 2023-2033", answers the major questions, challenges and opportunities faced by the AI chip value chain. For further understanding of the markets, players, technologies, opportunities, and challenges, please visit www.IDTechEx.com/AIChips. About IDTechEx IDTechEx guides your strategic business decisions through its Research, Subscription and Consultancy products, helping you profit from emerging technologies. For more information, contact [email protected] or visit www.IDTechEx.com. Images download:

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[July 03, 2023] Naval Communication Market worth $4.3 billion by 2028 - Exclusive Report by MarketsandMarkets Tweet

CHICAGO, July 3, 2023 /PRNewswire/ -- The global market for naval communication market is estimated to be USD 3.3 billion in 2023 and expected to reach USD 4.3 billion by 2028 at a CAGR of 5.3% from 2023 to 2028 according to a new report by MarketsandMarkets. One major driver of the naval communication market is the increasing focus on maritime security and the need for advanced communication capabilities to support naval operations. Download PDF Brochure: https://www.marketsandmarkets.com/pdfdownloadNew.asp?id=169952427 Browse in-depth TOC on "Naval Communication Market"

200  Tables

55  Figures

210  Pages Naval Communication Market Report Scope:







Report Coverage Details Market Revenue in 2023 $3.3 billion Estimated Value by 2028 $4.3 billion Growth Rate Poised to grow at a CAGR of 5.3% Market Size Available for 20192028 Forecast Period 20232028 Forecast Units Value (USD Million/Billion) Report Coverage Revenue Forecast, Competitive Landscape, Growth Factors, and Trends Segments Covered By Platform, System Technology, Application and Region Geographies Covered North America, Europe, Asia Pacific, and Rest of World Key Market Challenge Cybersecurity risks Key Market Opportunities Adoption of 5G technology Key Market Drivers Increasing geopolitical tensions and defense budgets



The rising geopolitical tensions, territorial disputes, and evolving security threats drive the demand for robust communication systems that enhance situational awareness, interoperability, and command and control capabilities. Additionally, the growing emphasis on naval modernization programs and the deployment of advanced sensor systems and unmanned platforms further fuel the demand for integrated communication solutions. Technological advancements, Defense budgets of nations, and the pursuit of naval power projection also contribute to driving the market forward. The naval satcom systems segment is projected to witness the highest CAGR during the forecast period. The naval satcom system is anticipated to experience the highest CAGR in the naval communication industry. Naval forces rely on satcom systems for secure and reliable communication, data exchange, and real-time information sharing. The increasing demand for maritime surveillance, remote sensing, and intelligence gathering drives the need for enhanced satcom capabilities. The ability to establish long-range and beyond-line-of-sight communication links using satellites is crucial for naval operations in remote or geographically dispersed areas. The ships segment is projected to dominate the naval communication market by platform. The ships segment is expected to witness a highest CAGR in the naval communication market. Ships serve as vital platforms for naval operations, necessitating robust communication systems. The increasing focus on maritime security, naval modernization programs, and the need for enhanced operational capabilities drive the demand for advanced communication solutions in the ships segment. Ships require reliable and seamless communication for coordination, command, and control purposes. With the deployment of advanced sensor systems, unmanned platforms, and surveillance equipment on naval ships, there is a growing requirement for integrated communication solutions that support efficient information exchange. These factors contribute to the anticipated high CAGR in the ships segment of the naval communication market. The command-and-control segment of the naval communication market by application is projected to dominate the market. Command and control systems are crucial for effective coordination, situational awareness, and decision-making in naval operations. As the complexity of naval missions increases, there is a growing demand for advanced command and control solutions. Naval forces require integrated communication systems that can handle diverse data, voice communication, and video feeds from multiple platforms and sensors. Command and control systems enable centralized command centres to monitor and manage the battlefield, disseminate critical information, and provide actionable intelligence to operational units. Inquiry Before Buying: https://www.marketsandmarkets.com/Enquiry_Before_BuyingNew.asp?id=169952427 North America is expected to account for the largest share in 2023. The naval communication market industry has been studied in North America, Europe, Asia Pacific, and Rest of the World. North America is poised to have the largest market share in the naval communication market. The region's dominance can be attributed to several factors, including the presence of major Defense contractors, advanced naval capabilities, and significant Defense budgets. The United States, in particular, holds a strong position in the market, driven by its robust naval force and technological advancements in the Defense sector. The country allocates substantial resources to naval modernization programs and the development of advanced communication systems for its naval fleet. Companies such as General Dynamics and Lockheed Martin, headquartered in North America, contribute to the region's market leadership. Major players operating in the naval communication companies are Honeywell International Inc. (US), General Dynamics Corporation (US), Lockheed Martin Corporation (US), BAE Systems plc (UK), and Elbit Systems Ltd. (Israel) among others are some of the market players. Get 10% Free Customization on this Report: https://www.marketsandmarkets.com/requestCustomizationNew.asp?id=169952427 Browse Adjacent Market: Aerospace and Defence Market Research Reports &Consulting Related Reports: Tactical Communication Market Size, Share & Industry Growth Analysis Report by Application (Command & Control, ISR, Communication, Combat), Platform (Ground, Airborne, Naval, Unmanned Systems), Type (Soldier Radios, Manpacks, VIC, HCDR), Frequency, Technology, Point of Sale, Region - Forecast to 2027 Military Radars Market by Component (Transmitter, Digital Signal Processor), Platform (Land, Naval, Airborne, Space), Technology (SDR, Quantum, Conventional), Waveform (FMCW, Doppler), Application, Type, Frequency Band & Region - Global Forecast to 2027 Military Antenna Market by Component (Reflectors, Feed Horn, Feed Networks, Low Noise Block Converter (LNB)), Frequency Band (HF, VHF, UHF SHF, AND EHF), End Use (OEM and Aftermarket), Type, Application, Platform and Region (2021-2026) C4ISR Market by Platform (Airborne, Land, Naval, Space), Solution (Hardware, Application Software, Services), Application, End User (Defense & Space, Homeland Security, Commercial), Installation and Region - Global Forecast to 2028 Surveillance Radars Market by Application (Commercial, National Security, Defense & Space), Platform (Land, Airborne, Naval, Space), Frequency Band (HF, UHF & VHF; L; S; C; X; Ku; Ka; Multi-bands), Dimension, Component, Region (2020-2025) About MarketsandMarkets MarketsandMarkets is a blue ocean alternative in growth consulting and program management, leveraging a man-machine offering to drive supernormal growth for progressive organizations in the B2B space. We have the widest lens on emerging technologies, making us proficient in co-creating supernormal growth for clients. 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. To find out more, visit www.MarketsandMarkets.com or follow us on Twitter, LinkedIn and Facebook. Contact:

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[July 03, 2023] Information and Communications Technology Industry Support Expands with Launch of BICSI India Tweet

TAMPA, Fla., July 3, 2023 /PRNewswire/ -- Support for the expansion of the telecommunications infrastructure and technology industry in India continues with the launch of BICSI India, a new BICSI affiliate, effective 1 July 2023. BICSI, a global professional association supporting the advancement of the Information and Communications Technology (ICT) industry, has finalized an affiliate agreement with Infinios Business Solutions India Pvt Ltd., leading to the creation of BICSI India. One of three BICSI affiliates (along with BICSI Japan and BICSI South Pacific), BICSI India will have access to more opportunities for growth and will be able to provide more resources to BICSI members across India, as well as host ICT industry-leading events. Both BICSI and BICSI India aim to collaboratively advance the ICT industry and support ICT professionals through membership, standards, education, training, certifications, networking, and other means. The establishment of the new affiliate can be attributed in part to BICSI's success in India. BICSI's presence in ndia grew over the past decade thanks to the BICSI members and credential holders within the country who organized local activities.



"We are thrilled to announce the launch of our newest affiliate in India, marking an important milestone in our global mission," says John H. Daniels, Chief Executive Officer for BICSI. "This collaboration represents our commitment to serving the vibrant Indian market and harnessing its immense potential by meeting the unique and evolving needs of local ICT professionals. We look forward to advancing the ICT profession and delivering exceptional value as we embark on this exciting journey together." BICSI India furthers an expanding connectivity movement in Bangalore and the country of India as a whole, becoming part of a burgeoning ICT industry with long-standing historic roots in the region.

"It is a significant step taken towards building a more vibrant future for the Information and Communications Technology profession and community in India," says Mr. Nandakumar K S, Founder & Managing Director, Infinios Business Solutions India Pvt Ltd. "I thank the BICSI leadership for appointing Infinios as an affiliate in India. As a BICSI Affiliate, our approach will be agile, progressive, and member centric. Infinios will elevate awareness about BICSI in the Information and Communications Technology community, intensifying the engagement between the stakeholders such as end users, OEMs, ancillaries, consultants, and technicians, which will result in a greater participation across the Indian ICT community. I am confident of a prolific and overarching collaboration between BICSI and Infinios in advancing ICT in the ever-evolving communications industry in the territory." Previously, BICSI's presence in India was orchestrated through BICSI volunteers in the country. The creation of BICSI India gives the affiliate increased agency with the exclusive right to operate within the country, promote BICSI's mission, and provide localized BICSI support for members and other ICT stakeholders. About BICSI: BICSI is a professional association supporting the advancement of the information and communications technology (ICT) profession and currently serves more than 26,000 members and credential holders. BICSI is the preeminent resource for the Connected World. Headquartered in Tampa, Florida, USA, BICSI membership spans nearly 100 countries. About Infinios: Infinios is a well-established Marketing Process Outsourcing (MPO) company and promoter of ICT brands, products, and solutions across India, through its core market competencies of Market Research, Lead Generation, Audience Generation, Promotional Corporate Events, and Triangulations. Infinios, a Bangalore-based organization with PAN India operations, is led by a team of seasoned professionals with decades of experience in comprehensive marketing deliverables from ideation through the implementation of programs. Infinios has an unparalleled understanding of the ICT market and has been recurrently collaborating with leading ICT brands as well as strengthening their Marketing Operations as the mainstay of their Revenue Operations in India. View original content to download multimedia:https://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/information-and-communications-technology-industry-support-expands-with-launch-of-bicsi-india-301868540.html SOURCE BICSI

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Cyble Revolutionizes Cybersecurity Collaboration with launch of its Global Partner Program "Cyble Partner Network"

Cyble, the leading AI-powered global cyber threat intelligence provider, is excited to announce the launch of the Cyble Partner Network (CPN).

CPN aims to foster collaboration, expand market reach, and provide comprehensive cybersecurity solutions. By joining the network, businesses gain access to cutting-edge threat intelligence, enabling knowledge exchange, innovation, and empowerment to stay ahead in the cybersecurity landscape.

CPN (https://partnernetwork.cyble.com/ ) comprises the following programs:

MSSP Program: Gives Managed Security Service Providers access to Cyble's threat intelligence platform, enhancing their cybersecurity services.

TAP Program: Empowers partners to deliver comprehensive cybersecurity solutions by integrating their platforms with Cyble's threat intelligence & darkweb monitoring SaaS, Cyble Vision.

Reseller Program/b>: Enhances businesses' product portfolio with cutting-edge threat intelligence solutions and provides comprehensive support and guidance from Cyble.







Referral Program: Offers businesses a lucrative opportunity to recommend Cyble's cybersecurity solutions, earning rewards with extensive marketing resources.

"CPN is a major milestone in our mission to revolutionize cybersecurity collaboration," said Beenu Arora, Co-founder and CEO of Cyble. "This network represents our commitment to empowering organizations with advanced tools and expertise to combat cyber threats."

Dipesh Ranjan, Chief Partner Officer & SVP Global Growth, added, "Let's embrace collaboration and shared success on this transformative journey to save the govt & enterprises from Cyber threats. With CPN, we unlock new horizons of growth and redefine partnership. Welcome to CPN, a new era of collaboration."

As a Cyble Partner, companies gain exclusive advantages, including competitive pricing, comprehensive technical support, marketing assistance, flexible licensing, and access to a dedicated partner portal. These offerings empower partners to drive growth, enhance customer satisfaction, and achieve success in the evolving cybersecurity landscape.

About Cyble:

Cyble is a prominent global leader in AI-powered cyber threat intelligence specializing in Deepweb, Darkweb, and Surface Web, based in Atlanta, Georgia. Cyble's commitment to excellence and innovation has earned it prestigious accolades, including recognition as one of America's Best Startup Employers by Forbes and multiple wins at the Global InfoSec Awards 2023. It has also been honored as one of the Fastest-growing Cybersecurity Companies 2023 in North America by the Cybersecurity Excellence Awards. With a strong emphasis on workplace satisfaction, Cyble has been named one of the Most Preferred Workplaces 2023-2024 by Team Marksmen.

For more information on this press release & CPN, please contact:

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[July 03, 2023] 13th Annual Cyber Week Conference Wraps Up with Global Leaders and Experts Discussing Cybersecurity Challenges and Opportunities Tweet

With over 11,000 attendees from 99 countries, Israel's annual Cyber Week conference convened top government officials, leading private companies, startups, entrepreneurs, VCs, academic experts, the military, and AI professionals. They addressed challenges posed by cybercrime projected to cost a staggering $10.5 trillion annually by 2025, and foster collaboration to combat this growing threat. TEL AVIV, Israel, July 3, 2023 /PRNewswire/ -- Cyber Week, the annual cybersecurity event, successfully concluded its 13th conference, bringing together prominent figures from industry, government, military, and academia. The event was jointly organized by the Blavatnik Interdisciplinary Cyber Research Center (ICRC), the Yuval Ne'eman Workshop for Science, Technology, and Security at Tel Aviv University, and the Israeli National Cyber Directorate under the Prime Minister's Office along with the Ministry of Economy and Ministry of Foreign Affairs. Participants showcased the latest developments, challenges, and opportunities in the field of cybersecurity. The conference featured esteemed speakers from around the world, including leading Israeli government officials such as Gaby Portnoy, Director General of the Israel National Cyber Directorate (INCD), and Ronen Bar, Director of the Israel Security Agency (Shin Bet). Maj. Gen. (Ret.) Prof. Isaac Ben-Israel, widely recognized as the "father" of the Israeli Cyber industry, led the conference. Distinguished global cyber officials also made significant contributions, including Kemba Eneas Walden, Acting National Cyber Director in the Office of the National Cyber Director; Nathaniel C. Fick, Ambassador at Large for Cyberspace and Digital Policy at the U.S. Department of State; Minister Audrey Tang, Ministry of Digital Affairs Taiwan; Sami Khoury, Head of the Canadian Centre for Cyber Security; H.E. Dr. Mohamed Al Kuaiti, Head of Cyber Security for the United Arab Emirates Government; Craig Jones, Cybercrime Director at INTERPOL; and Ann Dunkin, Chief Information Officer of the U.S. Department of Energy. The conference also welcomed renowned private sector leaders, such as Eric Doerr, VP of Engineering and Cloud Security at Google Cloud; Gil Shwed, Founder & CEO of Check Point; Aviv Cohen, CMO of Pentera; Bret Arsenault, Corporate Vice President, and Chief Information Security Officer of Microsoft; Udi Mokady, Founder and Executive Chairman of CyberArk; Chris Roberts, CISO of Boom Supersonic; Lane Bess, CEO of Deep Instinct and many more. This diverse lineup of speakers provided invaluable insights into the current cybersecurity landscape.



The 13th Annual Cyber Week Conference took place amidst the backdrop of rapid AI development, Russia's ongoing war on Ukraine, and an alarming rise in cybercrime and cyber-related damages, which are projected to reach an annual cost of $10.5 trillion by 2025. While concerns about the impact of AI across sectors, including cybersecurity, were discussed, speakers also expressed optimism about the transformative potential of this technology in addressing cybersecurity challenges. H.E. Dr. Mohamed Al Kuwaiti, Head of Cyber Security, United Arab Emirates Government, discussed the importance of allies, detailing how Israel recently helped the UAE fend off a serious DDoS cyberattack. "Thank God for the Abraham Accords... Cybersecurity is an important aspect for us all. "The UAE is going through great digital transformation across all sectors: aviation, education, healthcare, oil and gas, transportation. And as a matter of fact, we need to ensure a safe and secure digital transformation." Dr. Al Kuwaiti continued, describing how the UAE plugs into the Start-Up Nation's many companies to build and extend his country's "cyber dome" to defend against cyberattacks.

Ronen Bar, Director of the Israel Security Agency (Shin Bet/ISA), spoke about how the Shin Bet is harnessing AI: "AI technology has been incorporated quite naturally into the Shin Bet's interdiction machine." He describes how "an alarming number of [cybersecurity cases] have a strong basis on the web  posts, inspiration, knowledge, or social groups. The trend is clear. Traditional security organizations must adapt to the new situation, where any angry person with access to the Internet may become a threat. Already today, with AI, we have identified a significant number of threats," he said. "Since we have understood we can't fight this war with sticks and stones, we recognize the threats but also see opportunities of using AI." The importance of global collaborations was made clear. Craig Jones, the Cybercrime Director of INTERPOL, commented on the legal challenges of cybersecurity: "When people say cybercrime is borderless, that really infuriates me because, as law enforcement officials, we are totally constricted by the countries and the legislation." To address the problem, Interpol has teams based around the world, providing "a framework for those countries and with secure platforms for communications." Ann Dunkin, CIO of the US Department of Energy, spoke on the importance of employing "a collective defense approach to cybersecurity." She said: "We must cooperate with like-minded international partners, focusing on innovation and cybersecurity capacity-building measures, cybersecurity for industrial control systems, the sharing of best practices, as well as workforce development strategies and training." About Cyber Week: Cyber Week is a leading international cybersecurity event that provides a unique opportunity for experts from industry, government, military, and academia to share their knowledge about the challenges and opportunities in the field. Cyber Week is hosted by the Blavatnik Interdisciplinary Cyber Research Center and the Yuval Ne'eman Workshop for Science, Technology, and Security at Tel Aviv University, headed by Major Gen. (Ret.) Prof. Isaac Ben-Israel, together with the Israel National Cyber Directorate at the Prime Minister's Office, The Ministry of Economy and Industry, and the Ministry of Foreign Affairs. For more information about Cyber Week, please visit www.cyberweek.tau.ac.il . View original content:https://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/13th-annual-cyber-week-conference-wraps-up-with-global-leaders-and-experts-discussing-cybersecurity-challenges-and-opportunities-301868994.html SOURCE Cyber Week

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[July 03, 2023] Fidelis Insurance Holdings Limited Announces Closing of Initial Public Offering Tweet

Fidelis Insurance Holdings Limited, a global (re)insurance company, headquartered in Bermuda with offices in Ireland and the United Kingdom (the "Company"), announced today the closing of its initial public offering of an aggregate of 15,000,000 common shares, including 7,142,857 common shares sold by the Company and 7,857,143 common shares sold by certain selling shareholders, at a price to the public of $14.00 per share. The common shares began trading on the New York Stock Exchange on June 29, 2023 under the ticker symbol "FIHL". The net proceeds from the offering to the Company, after deducting underwriting discounts and commissions and estimated offering expenses payable by the Company, were approximately $89,400,000. The Company intends to use the net proceeds it receives from the offering to make capital contributions to its insurance operating subsidiaries, which, together with other sources of liquidity, should enable the Company to take advantage of the ongoing rate hardening in the key markets in which it participates by writing more business under its planned strategy. The Company did not receive any of the proceeds from the sale of its common shares by the selling shareholders. In addition, the underwriters have been granted a 30-day option to buy up to an additional 2,250,000 common shares from the selling shareholders at the initial public offering price, less underwriting discounts and commissions. J.P. Morgan, Barclays and Jefferies acted as Joint Lead Bookrunning Managers for the offering. Keefe, Bruyette & Woods, a Stifel company, BMO Capital Markets, Citigroup and UBS Investment Bank acted as Joint Bookrunning Managers for the offering. JMP Securities, A Citizens Company and Dowling & Partners Securities acted as co-managers for the offering. The offering of the Company's common shares were made only by means of a prospectus. Copies of the final prospectus relating to the offering may be obtained from: J.P. Morgan Securities LLC, Attention: Brodridge Financial Solutions, 1155 Long Island Avenue, Edgewood, New York 11717, by telephone at 1-866-471-2526 or by email at [email protected]; Barclays Capital Inc. c/o Broadridge Financial Solutions, 1155 Long Island Avenue Edgewood, NY 11717, by telephone at (888) 603-5847 or by email at [email protected]; and Jefferies LLC, Attention: Equity Syndicate Prospectus Department, 520 Madison Avenue, New York, NY 10022, by telephone at (877) 821-7388 or by email at [email protected].



A registration statement relating to these securities was declared effective by the Securities and Exchange Commission on June 28, 2023. This press release does not constitute an offer to sell or the solicitation of an offer to buy the common shares, and shall not constitute an offer, solicitation or sale in any state or jurisdiction in which such offer, solicitation or sale would be unlawful prior to registration or qualification under the securities laws of that state or jurisdiction. About Fidelis

Fidelis Insurance Group ("FIHL") is a global (re)insurance company, headquartered in Bermuda with offices in Ireland and the United Kingdom. Our business focuses on three pillars: Specialty, Bespoke, and Reinsurance. We manage volatility through our balanced and diversified portfolio. Our strong capital position provides us with the flexibility to engage in attractive underwriting opportunities.

Forward-Looking Statements

This press release may include forward-looking statements. The words "expect", "intends", "should," and similar expressions (or their negative) identify certain of these forward-looking statements. These forward-looking statements are statements regarding the Company's intentions, beliefs or current expectations concerning, among other things, the Company's results of operations, financial condition, liquidity, prospects, growth, strategies and the industry in which the Company operates. The forward-looking statements in this press release are based on numerous assumptions regarding the Company's present and future business strategies and the environment in which the Company will operate in the future. Forward-looking statements involve inherent known and unknown risks, uncertainties and contingencies because they relate to events and depend on circumstances that may or may not occur in the future and may cause the actual results, performance or achievements of the Company to be materially different from those expressed or implied by such forward looking statements. Many of these risks and uncertainties relate to factors that are beyond the Company's ability to control or estimate precisely, such as future market conditions, currency fluctuations, the behavior of other market participants, the actions of regulators and other factors such as the Company's ability to continue to obtain financing to meet its liquidity needs, changes in the political, social and regulatory framework in which the Company operates or in economic or technological trends or conditions. Readers should therefore not place undue reliance on these statements, particularly not in connection with any contract or investment decision. Except as required by law, the company assumes no obligation to update any such forward-looking statements. View source version on businesswire.com: https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20230703521492/en/

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[July 03, 2023] $10K Grant from FHLB Dallas and Arvest Bank Helps National Guard Veteran Tweet

U.S. military veteran Tracy Hayes can move around her Hensley, Arkansas, home more easily thanks to a $10,000 Housing Assistance for Veterans (HAVEN) grant from the Federal Home Loan Bank of Dallas (FHLB Dallas) through its member, Arvest Bank (Arvest). This press release features multimedia. View the full release here: https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20230703574632/en/ A retired National Guard veteran is now able to move around her home more freely, thanks to a $10,000 HAVEN grant from Arvest Bank and the Federal Home Loan Bank of Dallas. (Photo: Business Wire) HAVEN provides grants to veterans and active-duty, reserve or National Guard service members who have been disabled in the line of duty since August 2, 1990. In addition, the funds may be used to assist Gold Star Families that were impacted during this time frame. The funds for Ms. Hayes were used to replace her flooring and stairs and install a reinforced railing to help her get up and down the stairs. It's given her more mobility and peace of mind. "It's brought me so much joy," she said. "It's so much easier to get up and down the stairs." Ms. Hayes, now 52, served in the National Guard for 27 years. She says being in the military is a family tradition that goes back several generations. She was a logistics specialist and served two tours in Iraq. Today, she an her husband are involved with an outreach ministry that provides food and clothing to those in need.



Ms. Hayes heard about the HAVEN program from a contractor and fellow military veteran. Arvest staff walked her through every step of the process. "I'm so grateful that this program exists," she said. "I would recommend it to any veteran. I know I speak for others when I say I am so appreciative."

FHLB Dallas has set aside $300,000 for HAVEN this year. Funds are awarded through member institutions, like Arvest Bank. "It's so rewarding to be a part of this program," said Trisha Scott, executive assistant in Group Compliance CRA at Arvest, "You can see how it greatly improves the quality of life for those who served our country." Arvest Bank has helped 20 veterans through the HAVEN program. "Helping disabled veterans become more independent and comfortable in their homes is one of the most gratifying experiences," said Greg Hettrick, senior vice president and director of Community Investment at FHLB Dallas. Learn more at fhlb.com/HAVEN. About Arvest Bank With more than $26 billion in assets, Arvest Bank is a community-based financial institution serving more than 110 communities in Arkansas, Kansas, Missouri and Oklahoma. Established in 1961, Arvest Bank is committed to meeting the needs of its more than 830,000 retail and business customer households by continually investing in the digital tools and services customers expect. Its extensive network of more than 200 banking locations provides loans, deposits, treasury management, credit cards, mortgage loans and mortgage servicing as a part of its growing list of digital services. Arvest is known for its commitment to the communities it serves and to attracting, hiring and retaining a diverse group of talented people. Arvest is an Equal Housing Lender and Member FDIC. To learn more please visit www.arvest.com. 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, is a member-owned cooperative that supports housing and community development by providing competitively priced loans and other credit products to approximately 800 members and associated institutions in Arkansas, Louisiana, Mississippi, New Mexico and Texas. For more information, visit our website at fhlb.com. View source version on businesswire.com: https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20230703574632/en/

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Whenever possible . . . Our blog community attempts to inform the local conversation by sharing data.

Just a quick bit of number crunching on this town's worsening crisis . . .

Last year around this time KCMO homicides numbered only 73.

Today's spate of deadly gunfire brings us to 99.

That's a 35% increase in killing year to date.

Remember that in 2020, in the midst of pandemic lockdowns and social justice rioting/uprising -- Homicides had only numbered 93 -- And that was the deadliest year in Kansas City, Missouri history.

Tragically, it is very likely that we'll cross the century mark ahead of July 4th.

Here's today's report . . .

20th and Oakley Homicide



On 7/2/2023 just before 5 pm, officers were dispatched to the 2000 block of Oakley on a reported shooting.



Upon arrival, officers located an adult male lying out front of a residence unresponsive and suffering from an apparent gunshot wound. EMS arrived on scene and declared the victim deceased.



Detectives have a person of interest still at large. There is not an immediate threat to the public at this time. The circumstances surrounding the homicide appear to be the result of an argument.



Homicide detectives and Crime Scene Personnel have responded to the scene. They will be processing the scene to recover any evidence and speaking to any potential witnesses.



Anyone with information is asked to call homicide detectives at 816-234-5043. Or if you wish to remain anonymous you can do so by calling the TIPS Hotline at 816-474-TIPS.



There is a reward of up to $25,000 for information provided to TIPS which leads to an arrest in the case.



We are working with Partners for Peace in all our homicide investigations to monitor risks for retaliation and provide social services to affected residents.

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Read more via www.TonysKansasCity.com links . . .

KCPD investigating homicide near 20th, Oakley The Kansas City, Missouri, Police Department is investigating a homicide in the area of 20th and Oakley.

Man found dead from gunshot wound outside residence near 20th Street and Oakley Ave. in Kansas City Officers were dispatched to the scene just before 5 p.m. on Sunday June 2, 2023

Developing . . .
A prefabricated-looking case has allowed the conservative majority of the U.S. Supreme Court to deal a blow to the LGBTQ+ community. The ruling handed down last Friday in favor of a Colorado designer who refuses to make websites for same-sex couples is, according to the dissenting vote of the three liberal judges, a license to discriminate  the first ever of granted by the U.S. high court. Whats more, judges, civil rights organizations and LGBTQ+ activists fear that it could lead to many more cases of discrimination.

The graphic designer Lorie Smith has never made wedding websites. Nor has she ever been hired by a same-sex couple to make one. But Smith says she wants to make wedding websites in the future, as long as she can refuse to provide that service for same-sex couples. More still, she doesnt just want to turn down requests from same-sex couples, she wants to publicly announce on the company website her intention to discriminate. With the legal support of the conservative organization Alliance Defending Freedom, Supreme Court justices sided with her on the grounds of freedom of expression.

The United States has a long history of discrimination, particularly against the Black population. Almost all states have laws that require public establishments to serve customers regardless of their race, gender and beliefs. The Supreme Court has been consecrating the right to equal treatment throughout its history. Until the sentence last Friday.

More information Biden stands up to the conservative revolution of the US Supreme Court

In this pivotal moment, the Court had an opportunity to reaffirm its commitment to equality on behalf of all members of society, including LGBT people. It does not do so, Supreme Court Justice Sonia Sotomayor wrote in her dissenting opinion, which was supported by fellow liberal justices Elena Kagan and Kentanji Brown Jackson.

Sotomayors dissenting vote is a strong amendment to the sentence handed down by the conservative majority: Today is a sad day in American constitutional law and in the lives of LGBT people. The Supreme Court of the United States declares that a particular kind of business, though open to the public, has a constitutional right to refuse to serve members of a protected class. The Court does so for the first time in its history, she wrote.

By issuing this new license to discriminate in a case brought by a company that seeks to deny same-sex couples the full and equal enjoyment of its services, the immediate, symbolic effect of the decision is to mark gays and lesbians for second-class status. In this way, the decision itself inflicts a kind of stigmatic harm, on top of any harm caused by denials of service. The opinion of the Court is, quite literally, a notice that reads: Some services may be denied to same-sex couples, she argued.

The liberal judges justices argue that the case cannot be understood outside the context in which it has arisen. This year alone, more than 525 anti-LGBTQ+ bills have been introduced in 41 states, and more than 75 have become law, according to data from the Human Rights Campaign (HRC), the nations largest civil rights organization. We are living in a state of emergency, warned HRC.

One of the dangers of the sentence is that it does not make it clear when the right to freedom of expression can be invoked as the grounds to discriminate against someone. In the case of a same-sex wedding, can the photographer refuse to provide their services? Or the florist? Or caterer? This ambiguity is the breeding ground for future conflicts.

U.S. President Joe Biden, who stated no person should face discrimination simply because of who they are or who they love, warned of these risks. While the courts decision only addresses expressive original designs, Im deeply concerned that the decision could invite more discrimination against LGBTQI+ Americans, he said. More broadly, todays decision weakens long-standing laws that protect all Americans against discrimination in public accommodations  including people of color, people with disabilities, people of faith, and women.

Biden is openly challenging the Supreme Court which, with a 6-3 conservative majority achieved during the presidency of Donald Trump, is undertaking far-reaching changes. In the courts conservative revolution, it has repealed the federal right to abortion, strengthened the right to bear firearms, hindered the fight against climate change, dealt a fatal blow to affirmative action in college admissions, and taken other decisions that impact the lives of Americans.

In Fridays case, the conservative justices sided with the designer, arguing that Colorado could not force her to say something with which she does not agree. The liberals replied that no one was forcing her, that she can offer websites that include biblical quotes and say that the only true marriage is between a man and a woman, but what she should not be able to do, if she wants to have a business open to the public, is to deny to work for clients on the basis of their sexual orientation.

Lorie Smith, in her office in Littleton, Colorado, in November 2022. David Zalubowski (AP)

In the dissenting vote, Judge Sotomayor argues that the sentence reminds LGBT people of a painful feeling that they know all too well: There are some public places where they can be themselves, and some where they cannot. She continued: Ask any LGBT person, and you will learn just how often they are forced to navigate life in this way. They must ask themselves: If I reveal my identity to this co-worker, or to this shopkeeper, will they treat me the same way? If I hold the hand of my partner in this setting, will someone stare at me, harass me, or even hurt me? It is an awful way to live. Freedom from this way of life is the very object of a law that declares: All members of the public are entitled to inhabit public spaces on equal terms.

This decision by the Supreme Court is a dangerous step backward, giving some businesses the power to discriminate against people simply because of who we are, added HRC president Kelley Robinson. In addition to highlighting the risks of the sentence, HRC also pointed out that federal laws still protect the LGBTQ+ community. Despite our opponents claiming this is a major victory, this ruling does not give unfettered power to discriminate. This decision does not mean that any LGBTQ+ person can be discriminated against in housing, employment or banking  those protections remain enshrined with federal law, said Robinson.

The headquarters of Smiths design company Creative 303 is in Colorado, which is governor by Jared Polis, who in 2018 became the first gay man elected governor in the United States. Unfortunately, Americans have seen the Supreme Court become increasingly obsessed with taking away freedoms, said Polis in a statement following the verdict. These rulings run counter to Colorado values and we will continue to fight against bigotry and discrimination in all their ugly forms.

The liberal Supreme Court judges point out that the ruling threatens to balkanize the market and allow the exclusion of other groups from many services. For example, a web designer might refuse to create a wedding website for an interracial couple. How quickly we forget that opposition to interracial marriage was often because Almighty God... did not intend for the races to mix, Sotomayor argued in the dissenting opinion.

Whats more, the grounds for discrimination do not even need to have a religious basis, since the case was won on the grounds of freedom of expression. A stationer could refuse to sell a birth announcement for a disabled couple because she opposes their having a child. A large retail store could reserve its family portrait services for traditional families. And so on, explained Sotomayor.

Neil Gorsuch, who penned the ruling for the conservative majority, criticized these examples: The dissent spends much of its time adrift on a sea of hypotheticals about photographers, stationers, and others, asking if they too provide expressive services covered by the First Amendment. But those cases are not this case, he wrote.

HCR, however, reminded Gorsuch that this very case is based on a hypothesis. No same-sex couple had asked Smith for a website for their wedding, it is built on assumptions: Make no mistake, this case was manufactured by the Alliance for Defending Freedom to create a new license to discriminate against LGBTQ+ people, said Robinson.

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Community meeting blame game imagined KCMO culpability for the rising influx of homeless.

However . . .

These noobs don't really know how the system works and they're operating in an old-fashioned considerations of the destitute.

In KCMO politicos, social service providers and non-profits have garnered EPIC FUNDING because of rising homeless numbers.

Real talk . . . KC doesn't want our hobos going anywhere.

Meanwhile . . . Small towns in Missouri don't seem quite as savvy in securing funding and GOP lawmakers clearly don't know the rules to this game.

Accordingly . . . Conspiracy theories abound until this part of the state catches up.

The bad news . . . There are just going to be more homeless for KC and all of Missouri in the very near future.

Here's the word . . .



The community is incorrectly focused on Kansas City and its shelters as being mostly responsible.



The city of Kansas City said its not busing homeless at all and never would.



We care about people here. We have a whole program were working with our partner organizations to find solutions and one solution is not sending people out of the city and paying for bus tickets, Sherae Honeycutt, Kansas City press secretary, said.

Read more via www.TonysKansasCity.com link . . .
Here's the latest beach water quality report from Toronto Public Health as of July 21 at 7 a.m.
Nova is the bright new star among resorts in the Maldives, as it believes in a greater calling than simply a lifestyle holiday destination. Its where people can live in the moment and immerse themselves into the spirit of the Maldives and the vibrant Nova community.



(TRAVPR.COM) MALDIVES - July 3rd, 2023 - Nova, the bright new star resort in the Maldives, is thrilled to announce an extraordinary collaboration with renowned visiting practitioner and Kung Fu Master, Master Sifu Aniket. From 3rd July to 19th July, 2023, Nova guests will embark on a transformative wellbeing journey like no other.

Master Sifu Aniket is an internationally acclaimed spiritual guide with a remarkable background. His path began with intense yogic austerities in the mountain ranges of Sahyadris and Himalayas in India. He then embarked on a profound spiritual expedition in Chinas Songshan and Wudang mountain, immersing himself in Shaolin Kung Fu and Tai Chi under the tutelage of Shaolin Monk and Taoist Masters.

During his residency on the soulful island Nova, Master Sifu Aniket will offer a range of signature holistic treatments, including Crystal Reiki healing and Kundalini Yoga. Nova guests will have the opportunity to discover the authentic art of healing and restore their bodys energy through a thoughtfully curated selection of practices. With ancient healing forms such as the 18 Hands of Buddha Qigong, originated by Bodhidharma nearly 1500 years ago, and the transformative Six Healing Sounds Qigong, guests will strengthen their body, mind and soul, embracing inner peace and radiant energy.

At Eskape Spa, Master Sifu Aniket will also provide sound vibrational massages and sound baths, utilising Tibetan singing bowls to create harmonious sounds and gentle vibrations that introduce deep healing relaxation. Guests will release worries and anxieties, finding inspiration in new solutions and personal growth. Furthermore, complimentary workshops will be offered, focusing on meditation and achieving balance in body, mind and soul. Master Sifu Aniket promises an authentic holistic journey rooted in mindfulness and self-discovery.

Nova is renowned as a sanctuary for the soul, where guests can explore countless ways to spark the joy. Recently, Nova announced its recognition as winner of the prestigious 2023 Travelers Choice Award by Tripadvisor.

We are immensely proud to receive this valuable award, which serves as a testament of our unwavering commitment to providing our guests with outstanding and soulful experiences. Our dedicated soulmates continuously strive to ensure utmost satisfaction of every guest, and it is both an honour and a motivating force to be recognised by our valued guests. We extend our heartfelt gratitude to all those who have supported and trusted us, says Abdulla Aboobakuru, General Manager of Nova Maldives.

To discover more, please visit: https://nova-maldives.com/

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The Rodin Map aims to provide tourists with a comprehensive and user-friendly tool to navigate city and explore its diverse offerings. Whether it's historical landmarks, cultural sites, or hidden gems, the map will serve as an invaluable resource, ensuring that visitors can make the most of their time in the city



(TRAVPR.COM) TURKEY - June 30th, 2023 - [Istanbul, June 27, 2023]  Rodin, a leading tourism company, is proud to announce the release of its revolutionary tourist map, aptly named the "Rodin Map," designed to enhance the travel experience of visitors in Istanbul and other cities where Rodin operates. The inaugural publication is set to begin in July 2023, with 10,000 copies being distributed each month to various tourist destinations throughout the city.

The Rodin Map aims to provide tourists with a comprehensive and user-friendly tool to navigate city and explore its diverse offerings. Whether it's historical landmarks, cultural sites, or hidden gems, the map will serve as an invaluable resource, ensuring that visitors can make the most of their time in the city.

One of the standout features of the Rodin Map is its curated recommendations for cafes, restaurants, bars, and other popular hangout spots. By partnering with local establishments, Rodin aims to showcase the city's vibrant culinary scene and create memorable experiences for travelers. Moreover, the Rodin Map will also feature exclusive discounts and offers, allowing tourists to enjoy the best that Istanbul has to offer while saving money.

"We are thrilled to introduce the Rodin Map to the city of Istanbul," said Hakan, CEO of Rodin Istanbul. "Our team has worked tirelessly to create a tourist map that goes beyond the conventional, providing visitors with insider tips and personalized recommendations. We believe this map will be an indispensable companion for anyone exploring Istanbul and other cities where Rodin operates."

Leading the development and implementation of the Rodin Map are Sam, the Managing Director, CMO, and CTO of Rodin Istanbul. Sam and the team have been at the forefront of innovation, leveraging technology and local expertise to craft a map that caters to the unique needs and interests of travelers.

Rodin Istanbul invites members of the press, travel bloggers, and influencers to reach out to Sam, the designated press contact, for further information, interviews, or to request a complimentary copy of the Rodin Map. Sam can be reached via email at sam@rodinistanbul.com.

About Rodin:

Rodin is a prominent tourism and short-term accommodation company specializing in providing unparalleled travel experiences to visitors in various cities. With a focus on customer satisfaction and curated recommendations, Rodin aims to redefine the way tourists explore and immerse themselves in new destinations. With the launch of the Rodin Map, the company continues to innovate and enhance the travel experience for individuals from all walks of life.

For more information about Rodin and its services, please visit www.rodinmap.site

Media Contact:

Sam

Rodin Istanbul

Email: sam@rodinistanbul.com

###
KYODO NEWS - Jul 3, 2023 - 20:22 | All, Japan

Japanese police in August will begin testing a pilot scheme for compiling data on possibly dangerous persons to prevent future attacks by lone actors like that seen in the fatal shooting of former Prime Minister Shinzo Abe, the National Police Agency said Monday.

The trial follows a series of high-profile attacks against politicians, seemingly devised and carried out by "lone offenders," or people who commit crimes without links to known groups. In addition to Abe's assassination last July, Prime Minister Fumio Kishida was also the target of an attack by a lone individual in April.

Given the difficulties in detecting such individuals before they carry out their attacks, the police aim to speed up their ability to respond by gathering and analyzing information on potential future threats to the public.

Under the pilot scheme, officers at some police headquarters will gather information on individuals deemed particularly dangerous during questioning or other investigative activities and pass the data on to public security officials, who will then assess their threat level.

Depending on the trial's results, the police will consider rolling out the scheme across other headquarters.

The new initiative is among a series of changes introduced in guidelines drawn up by the NPA ahead of the first anniversary of Abe's death. On July 8 last year, he was fatally shot while giving an election stump speech in western Japan's Nara Prefecture.

Kishida was also targeted but left unhurt in a separate incident when an explosive device was thrown at him as he was about to give a speech in Wakayama Prefecture.

An NPA probe of the Abe case said in August last year that the absence of adequate protection in an area behind the former leader had been a factor in the attack taking place.

In response to the incident, the police are continuing to make organizational changes and review their working processes, including through the new guidelines.

The changes include assigning more personnel to protect important persons and prevent cybercrimes, as well as increasing cooperation between departments. They will also crack down further on fraud and other crimes committed by groups that recruit people online, a practice that has been on the rise in recent years.

At a nationwide meeting of police chiefs in Tokyo on Monday, NPA Commissioner General Yasuhiro Tsuyuki said the new guidelines, including those on lone actors, are "aimed at making the police as effective an organization as possible by looking closely at changing circumstances and our present state" following Abe's attack.
An amendment to the Public Procurement and Disposal of Public Property Amendment and Validation Bill was made during the committee stage of the House of Representatives sitting on Wednesday night.

The mover of the bill says the amendment would ensure the Finance Minister would not have absolute discretion to amend the regulations.
KYODO NEWS - Jul 3, 2023 - 21:16 | World, All, Japan

A Japanese delegation led by former House of Representatives speaker Yohei Kono began a four-day visit to China on Monday, with Okinawa Gov. Denny Tamaki and business representatives among the group's 80-some members.

Members of the Japanese Association for the Promotion of International Trade mission, sent to China for the first time since April 2019, are expected to hold talks with senior Chinese officials during their stay.

The dispatch of the delegation is aimed at helping stabilize bilateral relations that remain strained over China's detention of a Japanese businessman in March and Japan's plan to shortly begin releasing treated radioactive water into the sea from the crippled Fukushima nuclear power plant.

Tamaki is separately scheduled to visit southeastern China's Fujian Province, which maintains friendly ties with Okinawa Prefecture based on the history of exchanges spanning more than 600 years, including the period of the Ryukyu Kingdom that lasted until the 19th century.

The governor told reporters in June that he expects Japan and China to foster "mutually beneficial relations" by building trust through the delegation's visit.

Referring to the severe security environment surrounding Okinawa amid intensifying U.S.-China rivalry and Beijing's military pressure on Taiwan, Tamaki said he intends to "maintain connections with various countries rather than being concerned about increased tensions."

Okinawa is home to the bulk of the U.S. military presence in Japan and is located close to Taiwan, with the remote Okinawan island of Yonaguni only some 110 kilometers away from the self-ruled democratic island that Beijing regards as its own.

In an interview with The Global Times, a tabloid affiliated with China's ruling Communist Party, Tamaki called on both Japan and the United States to "make efforts to ease tensions" over Taiwan, "establish trust through peaceful diplomacy and dialogue, and take necessary measures to prevent any unforeseen incidents."

The governor also said in the interview published Monday, "We cannot allow Okinawa to become an easier target for attack simply because U.S. military bases are concentrated here," adding local residents believe "Okinawa must never again become a battlefield."

The southern Japanese island was a fierce World War II battleground where a quarter of the local civilian population was killed.

Chinese President Xi Jinping, who formerly served as a Fujian governor, made a rare remark in June on past exchanges between China and the Ryukyu Kingdom, which had tributary relations with both China and Japan.

His reference to the kingdom has triggered speculation that Beijing might cast doubt on Okinawa's status as a Japanese territory as a warning to Japan regarding its involvement in matters related to Taiwan.
Dubai Customs collaborated with Japanese authorities to foil an attempt to smuggle methamphetamine worth $310 million into Japan, the customs authority reported on Sunday, Jul. 2.

The officers from both countries seized the drugs after receiving information that a significant amount had been stashed in a cargo ship heading towards Japan.

This joint operation was the second biggest drug bust in Japan as the team seized 700 kg of methamphetamine in Tokyo.

This operation marks an important milestone in Dubai's contribution to the global campaign against drug trafficking.

Dubai Customs has been working diligently to work closely with customs authorities around the world to combat the drug trade.
The enemy will not dictate the conditions in the Black Sea, and the occupiers will have to be as afraid of approaching Ukraines Crimea and Azov Sea coast as Russian ships are already afraid of approaching Ukraines Black Sea coast.

The relevant statement was made by Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky in his video address, an Ukrinform correspondent reports.

The full text of the speech is provided below:

Good health to you, fellow Ukrainians!

Today I am in Odesa, first and foremost, to congratulate our warriors of the Ukrainian Navy on their professional day. To congratulate them and thank them for their courage, heroism, and the extraordinary results they have achieved and are achieving for Ukraine.

It is enough to recall what ambitions Russia had at the beginning of the full-scale aggression and what ambitions are now at the bottom of the Black Sea.

I thank every warrior of the Ukrainian Navy - all sailors, all marines, all commanders of our Navy, artillerymen, naval aviators, drone operators, I thank the warriors of the river flotilla, river divisions... I thank you all!

Today, I had the honor to award the best, and congratulated the cadets of the Institute of Naval Forces of our Odesa Maritime Academy. I visited the wounded warriors in the hospital. I wish everyone a speedy recovery. It was a special honor for me to leave my wishes on the copy of Kobzar that has been accompanying our warriors in battles since 2014.

Today I also heard the report by our Navy Commander, Vice Admiral Oleksiy Neizhpapa, and Commander of the Odesa operational and strategic group of troops, General Moskalov. They spoke about the current security situation and the strategic tasks for our fleet, for the new direction - the fleet of naval drones - and for our coastal defense. We will implement everything! I am sure of it!

The enemy will definitely not dictate the conditions in the Black Sea, and the occupiers will have to be as afraid of approaching our Ukrainian Crimea and our Azov Sea coast as Russian ships are already afraid of approaching our Black Sea coast.

Today I also congratulate all civilian workers of the Ukrainian sea and river fleet, all those who ensure the security and operation of our ports, our ability to give life to the Ukrainian economy and connect our Ukraine with global markets despite the Russian blockade of the Black Sea. I thank all the sailors, port workers, ship repairers, businesses, employees and, of course, every soldier who protects the security of Ukrainian ports, Ukrainian cities, and Ukrainian shores.

We will win together! Ukrainian shores will never tolerate the occupier.

Glory to all our defenders!

I thank you, Odesa, for this day!

Glory to Ukraine!

Photo, video: Office of the President of Ukraine
Ukraine will get dozens of Leopard 1 tanks from Germany and Denmark "in the coming weeks."

"In the coming weeks, dozens of Leopard 1 A5 battle tanks provided by Germany and Denmark will be delivered to Ukraine," German Defense Minister Boris Pistorius told Rzeczpospolita media outlet in an interview.

He noted that the German government approved in May a new EUR 2.7 billion security assistance package for Ukraine, which provides for Ukraine's immediate needs in armaments, in particular, IRIS-T SLM air defense systems.

As reported, acting Minister of Defense of Denmark Troels Lund Poulsen said in May that Germany and Denmark would soon hand over 80 Leopard 1 A5 tanks to Ukraine.
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky has said that Ukraine does not yet have a sufficient number of air defense systems to protect its entire territory and shoot down all enemy targets, and the enemy is taking advantage of this.

He said this in his daily video address, Ukrinform reports.

"Unfortunately, our state does not yet have enough high-quality air defense systems to protect our entire territory and shoot down all enemy targets. The enemy is taking advantage of this, as it did today, when it launched another terrorist attack on the city of Sumy with an Iranian drone, hitting residential buildings and the building of the Security Service of Ukraine. As a result of these strikes, there are wounded and killed... My condolences!" Zelensky said.

He also added that Ukraine would "do everything possible and impossible to make our air defense system the most powerful."

"Today, General Oleshchuk, the commander of the Air Force, reported to me on our actions to strengthen air defenses. The goal is for the Ukrainian sky shield to be able to protect our entire territory from Russian terror, and in the future, to become the basis for the European sky shield. This is absolutely necessary and absolutely possible," Zelensky said.

Ukrinform offers the full text of the president's address.

I wish you health, dear Ukrainians!

First of all, I congratulate our anti-aircraft warriors - the warriors of the anti-aircraft missile troops of the Ukrainian Air Force, who are celebrating their holiday today.

I thank you for every target you have shot down, warriors! More than three thousand targets have been shot down: more than 180 aircraft, more than 130 helicopters, nearly 40 ballistic and more than a thousand cruise missiles, more than 1,600 drones of various types... All this means thousands and thousands of lives saved by you, hundreds of critical infrastructure facilities that you have protected.

During this war, eight anti-aircraft missile brigades received the honorary award "For Courage and Bravery". More than 1,100 anti-aircraft warriors received state awards, and eight of them were awarded the highest title - Hero of Ukraine. They are Colonel Serhiy Yaremenko, Lieutenant Colonels Volodymyr Vesnin, Andriy Kruhlov, Serhiy Poberezhets, Artem Sharkov, Dmytro Shumakov, Major Yaroslav Melnyk and Senior Lieutenant Artem Slisarchuk, who was posthumously awarded the title of Hero of Ukraine.

Unfortunately, our state does not yet have enough high-quality air defense systems to protect our entire territory and shoot down all enemy targets. The enemy is taking advantage of this, as it did today, when it launched another terrorist attack on the city of Sumy with an Iranian drone, hitting residential buildings and the building of the Security Service of Ukraine. As a result of these strikes, there are wounded and killed... My condolences! We will do everything possible and impossible to make our air defense system the most powerful. Today, General Oleshchuk, the commander of the Air Force, reported to me on our actions to strengthen air defense. The goal is for the Ukrainian sky shield to be able to protect our entire territory from Russian terror, and in the future, to become the basis for the European sky shield. This is absolutely necessary and absolutely possible.

By the way, I spoke with Mr. Chancellor Scholz today. Germany has helped Ukraine with air defense in a very powerful way. The brilliant German IRIS-T systems have proved to be very effective in protecting our skies. We also have very effective American Patriots, which were given to us by Germany. Ukraine is grateful for them, as well as for the rest of the vital assistance!

In today's conversation with Mr. Chancellor, we focused, of course, on further defense cooperation, as well as on strategic issues of protecting our Europe - a Europe that can only be peaceful if peace is guaranteed by full security certainty. Europe cannot have a deficit of security certainty that will provoke Russian tyranny and aggression. Russia will try to take a bite out of Europe only when it sees any kind of security uncertainty. When everything is certain and obvious, Russian tyranny does not dare to violate security.

It is obvious that Europe can be protected from any aggression only together with Ukraine and only together with Ukraine in NATO. That is why we must achieve security certainty about our future in the Alliance. Then Russia will have to refocus on its own statehood - to finally take care of itself, not some expansions.

We are preparing for the Summit very actively, and we expect our partners to be as determined as this historic moment requires.

And, of course, our active actions. The frontline.

The heroic 35th and 36th separate marine brigades - thank you, warriors! The 47th separate mechanized brigade "Magura" - thank you! The glorious 55th separate artillery brigade "Zaporizhzhia Sich" - thank you, warriors! The 128th separate brigade of the Territorial Defense Forces - thank you!

Today, it is worth mentioning Junior Lieutenant Oleksandr Pavlov, platoon commander of the 36th marine brigade. His confident and powerful actions, skillful command in combat bring good results to the state. Thank you!

The crew of the T-80 tank under the command of Junior Sergeant Andriy Marchuk - thank you for your accuracy and bravery! This is the 36th marine brigade.

And from the 35th brigade, I would like to mention the tank commander, Junior Sergeant Artem Obrazko, for his true Ukrainian courage and skill in liberating Makarivka. Thank you, Artem!

Senior Soldier Yevhen Piddubnyi, a sapper from the 47th mechanized brigade. He operates in a very hot area and performs his tasks very effectively. Thank you, Yevhen!

Captain Ivan Ohurtsov. Operating in the Avdiivka sector, our artillery fire groups under his command are very effective in destroying enemy positions and depots. Thank you, warrior!

Maryinka direction... The artillery division under the command of Lieutenant Colonel Pavlo Lukyanov does not give the occupiers a single minute of rest. Your combat results are really significant! Thank you!

I thank everyone who is now in combat, at combat posts and in positions! Thank you to everyone who helps!

And one more thing.

Today, the world once again saw how the Kremlin - unfortunately, at the hands of the current Georgian government - is killing Ukrainian citizen Mykhailo Saakashvili. Human life is the highest value, and we cannot allow Mykhailo to be simply killed. Ukraine has repeatedly called on the Georgian authorities to stop this demonstrative execution. Both we and our partners have offered various options to save Mykhailo. Today, I have instructed the Minister of Foreign Affairs of Ukraine to summon the Ambassador of Georgia to Ukraine, to express our protest and to offer him to leave Ukraine within the next 48 hours to hold consultations with his capital. Once again, I call on the Georgian authorities to transfer Ukrainian citizen Mykhailo Saakashvili to Ukraine for the necessary treatment and care. And I urge our partners to address this situation, not to ignore it and save this man. No government in Europe has the right to execute people, life is a basic European value.

Glory to Ukraine!
Switzerland will allocate an additional 5.5 million Swiss francs (about EUR 5.6 million) to renovate and refurbish 30 schools in Ukraine affected by hostilities.

That's according to a statement posted on the website of the Federal Council of Switzerland, Ukrinform reports.

Federal Councillor Ignazio Cassis has increased Switzerland's support for the 'Decentralization for Improved Democratic Education' (DECIDE) project by CHF 5.5 million in order to rehabilitate around 30 schools in the regions directly affected by the fighting in Chernihiv, Odesa and Poltava.

The project involves the installation of secure multi-purpose classrooms to ensure uninterrupted learning, even during air raid warnings.

The rehabilitation and upgrading of schools in municipalities that have long-standing partnerships with the SDC will provide pupils with a safe and appropriate environment for face-to-face classroom learning. This initiative will not only strengthen local public services but also bolster the education system's resilience in crisis situations. The continuation of face-to-face teaching will also contribute to the integration of displaced children and their families into host communities.

This additional Swiss contribution will also enable the DECIDE project to provide technical and pedagogical support for online education for displaced children and children living in areas particularly vulnerable to hostilities where in-person teaching is unfeasible.

"The aim is to ensure that nearly 15,000 schoolchildren have access to a decent and safe education," the Federal Council said.

It added that Russian military aggression had dealt a severe blow to Ukraine's education sector. Thousands of schools across the country have been damaged or destroyed, and many teachers have fled the conflict zones, thereby disrupting the education of millions of students.

The Federal Council also emphasized that Switzerland's support for schools is part of the CHF 140 million aid plan for Ukraine announced by the Federal Council in February and approved by Parliament.
Lithuanian Foreign Minister Gabrielius Landsbergis has said that the invitation for Ukraine to join NATO must be clear and irrevocable.

He said this after a meeting with Lithuania's top-ranking officials, Ukrinform reports, citing LRT.

"Our position does not change. We fully support Ukraine's aspiration and we support them, we support their position. [Lithuanian wording would be] to commit in such a way that the invitation [for Ukraine to NATO] is clear and irrevocable," Landsbergis said.

According to the report, preparations for the July summit were discussed during the meeting. The meeting was also attended by President Gitanas Nauseda, Prime Minister Ingrida Simonyte, Speaker of the Seimas Viktorija Cmilyte-Nielsen, Minister of National Defense Arvydas Anusauskas, Commander of the Army Lieutenant General Valdemaras Rupsys and Chairman of the Seimas Committee on Foreign Affairs Zygymantas Pavilionis.

The NATO summit will be held in Vilnius on July 11-12.
Georgia's ambassador to Ukraine will be summoned to the Ukrainian Foreign Ministry on July 4 for a tough conversation because of the attitude of the Georgian authorities towards Mikheil Saakashvili.

The ministry said this in a post on Telegram, Ukrinform reports.

"The Georgian authorities deserve a tough reaction from Ukraine because of their attitude towards Mikheil Saakashvili. Tomorrow morning, the Georgian ambassador will be at the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, there will be a tough conversation with him, he will go to Georgia. We believe that Georgia should stop abusing Mikheil Saakashvili and return him to us, as he is a citizen of Ukraine," the Ukrainian Foreign Ministry quoted Kuleba as saying.

On Monday, July 3, Saakashvili attended a court session via video link. He showed how much weight he lost during his hospital stay.

Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky expressed his indignation at the condition of the imprisoned ex-president of Georgia, Mikheil Saakashvili, and announced that because of this, Ukraine is asking the Georgian ambassador to return to Tbilisi.
KYODO NEWS - Jul 3, 2023 - 20:00 | World, All, Japan

South Korea's Foreign Ministry on Monday announced the start of a process to deposit funds with a court for plaintiffs who won lawsuits over wartime labor during Japan's colonial rule but have refused to receive compensation from a government-backed fund.

Depositing the money is said to have the same legal effect as plaintiffs receiving compensation, a government source said. The development could result in another legal flare-up at a time when the South Korean and Japanese governments are trying to mend bilateral ties that have soured over the wartime labor issue.

In March, propelled by South Korean President Yoon Suk Yeol's determination to improve ties with Japan, the government decided to compensate former Korean laborers through a government-backed fund without requiring direct payments from involved Japanese companies.

Out of 15 surviving victims and the bereaved, who won against Japanese firms, Mitsubishi Heavy Industries Ltd. and Nippon Steel Corp., at South Korea's Supreme Court in 2018, 11 have agreed to accept the money, while four have maintained their stance not to accept it.

According to the ministry, the Foundation for Victims of Forced Mobilization by Imperial Japan started the process to deposit the compensation for two victims and families of two victims, which can be received at any time they want.

"What is important is that (the ministry) will continue to contact the victims and explain to them (about the solution) even after the deposit process takes effect," a ministry official said.

Victims and supporting civic groups held a press conference in front of the ministry to strongly protest against the announcement, calling it "legally wrong and politically unfair," while demanding Japan's apology and direct compensation from the Japanese companies.
KYODO NEWS - Jul 3, 2023 - 20:48 | All, Japan, World

Japan and the European Union are considering issuing a joint statement announcing their intention to enhance maritime, cyberspace and supply chain security cooperation after their leaders meet next week, diplomatic sources said Monday.

European Council President Charles Michel and European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen are expected to hold a regular summit with Japanese Prime Minister Fumio Kishida in Brussels on July 13.

In the statement, Japan and the EU are likely to pledge to bolster their joint drills in the Indo-Pacific region and help beef up the maritime defense capabilities of Southeast Asian countries, apparently with China in mind, the sources said.

Japan and several members of the Association of Southeast Asian Nations have become increasingly wary of Beijing, which has been showing its military and economic clout in the region, including the East and South China seas.

EU leaders issued a communique following their two-day summit through Friday, saying the East and South China seas are "of strategic importance for regional and global prosperity and security" and expressing concern about growing tensions in the Taiwan Strait.

China, which views Taiwan as part of its territory to be brought under its control by force if necessary, has been intensifying its military activities around the self-ruled democratic island.

The statement also said the EU leaders confirmed the significance of the trade and economic partnership between the EU and China, but committed to reducing reliance on the country, particularly in the area of supply chains.

In the realm of economic security, Kishida and the EU chiefs are set to agree to work together on the research and development of next-generation semiconductors and strengthening supply chains for chips and other key industrial materials, the sources said.

In a related development, Japan and the EU will sign a memorandum of understanding on Tuesday to bolster cooperation on semiconductor supply chains, ministers from both sides responsible for overseeing digitalization policies told a news conference after a meeting in Tokyo on Monday.

Last year, Japan designated products and resources such as semiconductors, batteries and rare earths as critical goods and materials which must be secured stably, even in times of emergency, and has been trying to enhance cooperation with allies and like-minded partners.

The planned agreement is primarily aimed at developing a mechanism for information sharing to prevent a potential supply shortage of chips and related products in the event of a crisis, the sources said.

Kishida is scheduled to visit Belgium for a meeting with the EU leaders after attending a two-day NATO summit from July 11 in Lithuania.

Related coverage:

EU to lift post-Fukushima import restrictions on Japan food products

Japan, EU to boost economic security ties, with China, Russia in mind

Japan PM to visit Europe for NATO, EU summits, Middle East in July
Remarks:

Notification on the deorbit of OWLID000221 (international designator 2021-060C)
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Khyber Pakhtunkhwa Minister for Industries, Trade and Technical Education Mohammad Adnan Jalil has invited domestic and foreign industrial and business communities to make investment in the province

PESHAWAR, (UrduPoint / Pakistan Point News - 3rd Jul, 2023 ) :Khyber Pakhtunkhwa Minister for Industries, Trade and Technical Education Mohammad Adnan Jalil has invited domestic and foreign industrial and business communities to make investment in the province.

He expressed these views in Pakhtunkhwa Radio's programme, Pakhtunkhwa Online here on Monday.

Prof Dr. Abasin Yousafzai hosted the programme.

He said our province is also feasible for investment and industrialization and investors can benefit from it at national and global level.

Similarly, he revealed that the provincial government is making all the affairs of Industry and Commerce department online as he said so far out of 45000, 15000 files have been scanned and soon the entire system will be computerized after which citizens can use their mobile application to avail our services and facilities.

Adnan Jalil said that they are connecting the industry and business activities with the Central Asia states, wherein the employment and economic prospects will reach new heights. He said that providing facilities to domestic and small-scale entrepreneurs is the need of the hour for strengthening the economy, while continuous supply of electricity, gas and other facilities is also indispensable for increasing industrial production, to which our government is paying full attention.

He said that new customer services are being established for new investors in the province. He said the establishment of new and advanced technology based industries in Rashkai Economic Zone will increase employment opportunities.

He said that in order to encourage investment in the province, steps are being taken to provide one-window facilities and other incentives including security to businessmen.

The provincial minister said that for the promotion of business in the province, institutions like FPCCI have been taken on board in addition to the Federal Chamber of Industry and Commerce.

In response to a question, the caretaker minister said that nature has enriched our province with abundant natural resources and there is also the most capable manpower available, so we will make full use of our resources through these intelligent people.

Adnan Jalil said that the continuity of policies is necessary for the promotion of investment, while it is not possible to achieve our goals without political stability.

For this purpose, he said, all political parties and other stakeholders should be on the same page. In response to a question, he said that the Technical Education & Vocational Training Authority (TEVTA) is training the people going for employment in the Gulf countries, but now modernization has to be brought here as well.

To promote business in the province, he further revealed, SIDB is going to launch a project under which entrepreneurs will get easy loans and lease plots where they can set up their businesses.

For this purpose, the government will provide electricity and gas supply along with other necessary facilities here. In response to a question, he said that steps are also being taken to attract businessmen of the province in the Swat tax free zone.

Similarly, in order to attract all the youth towards technical education, facilities are being provided in technical educational institutions according to the requirements of the modern age.
The total liquid foreign reserves of Pakistan stood at US$ 9,340.8 million while reserves held by the central bank reached at US$ 4,069.9 million

KARACHI, (UrduPoint / Pakistan Point News - 3rd Jul, 2023 ):The total liquid foreign reserves of Pakistan stood at US$ 9,340.8 million while reserves held by the central bank reached at US$ 4,069.9 million.

The State Bank of Pakistan, in a statement issued here on Monday, informed that foreign reserves of the central bank reserves increased by US$ 533 million to US$ 4,069.9 million as of June 23, 2023.

Meanwhile, net foreign reserves held by commercial banks stood at US$ 5,270.9 million, it added.

The rise in SBP's foreign exchange reserves was mainly attributed to realisation of US$ 300 million proceeds of GoP commercial loan, it added.

According to SBP spokesperson the central bank had received US$ 300 million proceeds of GoP commercial loan during the previous week but those inflows were incorporated in the latest reserves position report as of June 23, 2023.

In the previous week ending on June 16, 2023, total liquid foreign reserves hold by the country was US$ 8,863.8 million.

Among them foreign reserves held by the central bank were US$ 3,536.9 million while net foreign reserves held by commercial banks were US$ 5,326.9 million.
At least two Palestinians died and another 10 were injured in the city of Jenin in the West Bank during the operation of Israeli security forces that began overnight, the Palestinian Health Ministry informs

GAZA (UrduPoint News / Sputnik - 03rd July, 2023) At least two Palestinians died and another 10 were injured in the city of Jenin in the West Bank during the operation of Israeli security forces that began overnight, the Palestinian Health Ministry informs.

The Israel Defense Forces (IDF) said on the night from Sunday to Monday that they were "striking terrorist infrastructure in the Jenin area."

The Palestinian health ministry said later in the night that two Palestinians were killed and another 10 were injured during Israel's operation in Jenin.

The IDF said that Israeli security forces attacked the headquarters used by local militants in Jenin for planning terrorist attacks against Israel. The headquarters also housed a warehouse for the storage of weapons and explosives, the IDF said.

The Palestinian health ministry said that one Palestinian was killed and another local resident was injured during an Israeli airstrike on Jenin that preceded the start of Israel's operation.
Paris, July 3 (UrduPoint / Pakistan Point News - 3rd Jul, 2023 ) :As 50 Cent heads out on a world tour marking the 20th anniversary of hip-hop classic "Get Rich or Die Tryin'", he told AFP it's probably his last on this scale.

"I won't be able to tour like this again. My film and tv production stuff doesn't allow me," said the rapper, who will soon be seen alongside Sylvester Stallone in "Expendables 4".

He took "a huge pay cut" to shift from music to TV a decade ago -- most notably with hit show "Power" -- but saw it as a strategic business decision.

"My audience is older. With my film and TV work I'm speaking to my core audience directly. I don't want to lose them... They made me a success." 50 Cent, real name Curtis Jackson, turns 48 this week as he prepares to embark on the "Final Lap" tour across North America, Europe and Australasia, with more dates due to be added in Asia and beyond.

It has already sold more than 600,000 tickets, which the ever-modest "Fiddy" says with a chuckle "would be impressive for other guys, but I'm 50 Cent".

The one thing that could lure him back after this would be if his old mentors -- Eminem and Dr Dre -- came with him.

"If I could get Em and Dre out the house, that would get me back touring but I don't think that'll happen," he said.

- 'Wouldn't stop growing' - Launched in February 2003, his debut was one of the fastest selling records of all time, boosted by a colourful backstory of true-life gangsterism, including time in prison and an attempted assassination in which he was shot nine times.

Debut single "In Da Club" is still a huge hit thanks to its evergreen refrain, "Hey, Shorty, it's your birthday".

And the rapper is still 114th on Spotify's worldwide rankings despite not releasing a studio album since 2014.

There was debate over which single to launch at the time, with Dr Dre pushing for "If I Can't".

"But I thought, no, we gotta go with 'Go Shorty, it's your birthday'. Coz every day is someone's birthday and makes the song relevant again," said Jackson.

"And the shit wouldn't stop growing. I got a plaque now because it's been played a billion times on Spotify. We weren't even listening to shit on Spotify back then." He remembers the moment, sitting on a tour bus heading for Washington DC, when he heard that the album had gone past 800,000 sales in the first week.

"At the time I thought if I could pray for just one thing, it was for that record to be a success. But one thing I learned about myself is I just want more wishes," he said, laughing.

"There was so much success and energy it started to feel like I could have whatever I want. The album was called 'Get Rich or Die Tryin' and I was, like, 'No, let me die later. This feels great.'"All the adulation and partying went to his head, of course.

"If they had clinically tested me at the time, they would have said I was crazy."
KYODO NEWS - Jul 3, 2023 - 17:21 | World, All, Japan

North Korea and Japan held working-level meetings multiple times last month over Pyongyang's past abductions of Japanese nationals, a South Korean newspaper reported Monday citing informed sources, although Tokyo swiftly denied the claim.

The report by Dong-A Ilbo said the officials met at least twice in third countries such as China and Singapore. While North Korea maintained that it considers the matter resolved, the report said that if talks continue, Pyongyang and Tokyo could hold higher-level meetings in the future.

Japan notified the United States of the working-level meetings in advance, according to the report.

The news about the meetings came as Japanese Prime Minister Fumio Kishida pledged in late May to set up high-level bilateral negotiations and arrange a summit with North Korean leader Kim Jong Un, prompting Pyongyang's vice foreign minister to say that there is "no reason" for the two countries "not to meet."

In Tokyo, Japan's top government spokesman Hirokazu Matsuno denied the report's assertions, saying at a news conference, "There are no such facts."

Matsuno, the chief Cabinet secretary, refrained from commenting on whether Japan and North Korea have been engaged in talks, citing the possible negative impact doing so could have on future negotiations related to the abduction issue.

Since five abductees were brought back to Japan in 2002, Tokyo has called for the return of 12 others officially recognized as having been abducted by North Korea in the 1970s and 1980s.

The report also said North Korea seems to have judged that having a dialogue with Tokyo could drive a wedge between South Korea, Japan and the United States, citing the sources.

Koo Byoung Sam, a spokesman of South Korea's Unification Ministry, said at a regular briefing on Monday that there is nothing to confirm from the South Korean side regarding the meetings.

Related coverage:

FOCUS: Japan PM's attempt to realize North Korea summit unlikely to bear fruits

Japan urges North Korea to realize summit to resolve abduction issue
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Johannesburg, July 3 (UrduPoint / Pakistan Point News - 4th Jul, 2023 ) :The Zulu king, head of South Africa's most influential traditional monarchy, said on Monday he was "fit and sound," and denied rumours he had been poisoned.

"I'm very well, I'm very fit and sound," Misuzulu Zulu told AFP in a phone interview from the neighbouring country of Eswatini, where he is undergoing a medical check-up.

The 48-year-old king ascended the throne last year after the death of his father, Goodwill Zwelithini, after a bitter feud over the royal succession.

Over the weekend, the influential Zulu prime minister, Prince Mangosuthu Buthelezi, said that the monarch had been hospitalised in Eswatini after falling ill.

Buthelezi said there were "suspicions that he was poisoned," after the unexpected death of one of his close advisers, believed to have ingested a toxic substance.

But asked by AFP if he was ever in a hospital the king said "never".

"It was a procedural routine check-up that I do every three months, sometimes every six months," he said in a terse interview.

The royal spokesman, Prince Africa Zulu, told AFP on Monday that the Zulu king had spent the day working, including meeting a Chinese delegation, but gave no further details.

The spokesman later shared a video in which the king said he had suffered "no poisoning whatsoever." He also said it was not confirmed that his aide had been poisoned.

The king said he needed to be away from home to process the loss of his "right-hand man" and he chose Eswatini, where his uncle King Mswati III reigns. The timing of the trip also coincided with his regular health checkups.

"It's not because I'm poisoned, I'm well, I feel 100 percent (well)... everything is well functioning, there's nothing wrong with me," he said in the video clip.

He also said he would launch an investigation into the weekend reports about his health.

Buthelezi had claimed that the current king preferred treatment in Eswatini because "his parents had both received treatment in South Africa and subsequently died".

Last September, another counsellor of the Zulu king was shot dead in mysterious circumstances on the sidelines of a traditional ceremony.

Although the title of king of the Zulu nation does not bestow executive power, the monarch wields great moral influence over more than 11 million Zulus, who make up nearly a fifth of South Africa's population of 60 million people.

King Zwelithini, who died after more than 50 years in charge, left six wives and at least 28 children.

Misuzulu is the first son of Zwelithini's third wife, who he designated as regent in his will.

The queen however died suddenly a month after Zwelithini, leaving a will naming Misuzulu as the next king -- a development that did not go down well with other family members.
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ISLAMABAD, (UrduPoint / Pakistan Point News - 3rd Jul, 2023 ) :Pakistan and Japan on Monday agreed to further deepen and enhance their mutually beneficial bilateral cooperation in multiple areas including trade, investment, human resource development and exchange, IT, tourism and agriculture sectors.

"We have also jointly agreed to explore the possibility of working together on targeted programs with higher impact in the domains of solarization, desalination and water purification and housing and infrastructure rebuilding in the floods affected areas in Pakistan, Foreign Minister Bilawal Bhutto Zardari said in a joint press statement along with his Japanese counterpart Yoshimasa Hayashi in Tokyo.

Earlier the two ministers held a meeting in a cordial environment. Both Ministers appreciated the free bilateral relations while expressing readiness to engage further.

In addition, the two sides have agreed to conduct language skill assessment tests for the Japanese language in Pakistan to facilitate the movement of the skilled workforce.

FM Bilawal said the two sides also identified the import of young Pakistani skilled human resources to Japan and their language training to be a prime area of cooperation.

"We also deliberated on investments and joint ventures by Japanese enterprises in Pakistan." During his visit, he said he would also interact with the private sector, local media as well as think-tanks to further broaden our engagement. I believe that both sides need to stay engaged at all levels to further positive dialogue and continue exploring more avenues of cooperation.

The foreign minister also invited his Japanese counterpart to visit Pakistan at your convenience to further our discussions.

He said Pakistan and Japan were longstanding friends and share a special bond based on deep-rooted linkages that go far in history and time.

The people of Pakistan carry a deep sentiment of warmth and affection for Japan and the Japanese people. We have always stood with each other in times of need, he said.

Bilawal Bhutto Zardari said last year, they had seen new energy and vigour in the relationship through continued high-level exchanges. "I also had the honour to meet Minister Hayashi at Phnom Penh, Cambodia on 4 August 2022 on the sidelines of the 29th Ministerial Meeting of ASEAN Regional Forum (ARF). Today we continued our discussions from that meeting," he added.
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ISLAMABAD, (UrduPoint / Pakistan Point News - 3rd Jul, 2023 ) :Two security personnel including one officer were martyred while one officer was injured in an exchange of fire with terrorists in the Balor area of ??Balochistan.

According to ISPR, a combat patrol of security forces was initiated in general areas of Balor, after credible intelligence with respect to the move of a group of terrorists in the Hoshab area.

The group was linked with firing incidents on security forces and civilians besides planting improvised explosive devices While the establishment of blocking positions to cut the escape routes was underway, a party of terrorists tried to ambush the closing-in patrol and opened fire on security forces.

As a result of the heavy exchange of fire, two brave sons of the nation Major Saqib Hussain and Naik Baqir Ali embraced martyrdom while another soldier was injured.

The security forces were determined to work with the nation to thwart such attempts to sabotage the peace, stability and development of Balochistan.

As a result, a follow-up operation was underway in the area to nab those responsible for the attack.
The European Union is looking into the possibility of reconnecting the Russian Agricultural Bank to the SWIFT international payment system through the creation of a subsidiary to safeguard the Black Sea Grain Initiative, which is due to expire on July 17, the Financial Times newspaper reported on Monday, citing sources

MOSCOW (UrduPoint News / Sputnik - 03rd July, 2023) The European Union is looking into the possibility of reconnecting the Russian Agricultural Bank to the SWIFT international payment system through the creation of a subsidiary to safeguard the Black Sea Grain Initiative, which is due to expire on July 17, the Financial Times newspaper reported on Monday, citing sources.

The plan, proposed by Moscow at the UN-brokered negotiations, would allow the Russian Agricultural Bank to set up a subsidiary for payments related to grain exports via SWIFT, with the move being assessed by EU officials for its legality and feasibility, the newspaper reported.

The report said that the proposal had been discussed by EU leaders at a summit in Brussels last week and was seen as the "least worst option" for extending the deal.

Russia, Ukraine, Turkey and the United Nations reached an agreement on July 22, 2022 to provide a humanitarian maritime corridor for ships carrying food and fertilizer exports from Ukrainian Black Sea ports. On May 18, 2023, Russia extended the grain deal for 60 days, until July 17.

The deal is an integral part of a package agreement. The second part  the Russia-UN memorandum, designed for three years  envisions the unblocking of Russian exports of food and fertilizers, the reconnection of the Russian Agricultural Bank to SWIFT, the resumption of supplies of agricultural machinery, spare parts and services, the restoration of the Tolyatti-Odesa ammonia pipeline and a number of other measures. Moscow says this part of the package agreement has not yet been implemented.
DOHA (UrduPoint News / Sputnik - 03rd July, 2023) The son of the late Libyan leader Muammar Gaddafi has been hospitalized in critical condition due to his hunger strike at the prison of the Lebanese internal security forces, Al-Hadath tv reports citing informed sources.

Last month, Gaddafi's son Hannibal went on a hunger strike to protest his incarceration in Lebanon since 2015.

Al-Hadath TV reported on Sunday that Hannibal suffered a sharp drop in his blood sugar level because of the hunger strike and was hospitalized in critical condition.

Hannibal Gaddafi was captured on the Syrian-Lebanese border after he and his family received political asylum in Syria following the assassination of Muammar Gaddafi in Libya in 2011.
MOSCOW (UrduPoint News / Sputnik - 03rd July, 2023) Iran has filed charges against three female journalists for violating national security and spreading propaganda against the state, a prominent human rights organization said on Monday, adding that the journalists could face up to five years in prison.

"The trial of the journalists - Saeideh Shafiei, Mehrnoush Zarei Henzaki, and Nasim Sultan Beigi - is scheduled for July 3 ... Under articles 500 and 610 of the Islamic Penal Code of Iran, each of these charges carries a sentence of up to five years in prison," Human Rights Watch (HRW) said in a statement, adding that the articles criminalize "propaganda against the state" and "assembly and collusion to commit acts against national security."

The charges against the journalists relate to their news articles about increasing poverty and the government's management of energy subsidies and resources, as well as their alleged collaboration with foreign media, the statement added.

HRW noted that one of the journalists refused to cooperate during questioning and also called on Iranian women to stop wearing the hijab.

This comes several months after anti-government protests swept Iran in connection with the death of a young woman last fall. In September 2022, Mahsa Amini, 22, died under suspicious circumstances after being detained by the Guidance Patrol, which acts as morality police, for not wearing a hijab according to national standards. Protesters accused the authorities of causing Amini's death by fatally injuring her during her arrest, and women massively posted videos of themselves cutting their hair and burning their hijabs. The Iranian government has accused Western countries of supporting the protesters.
UNITED NATIONS (UrduPoint News / Sputnik - 04th July, 2023) The United Nations Secretary-General Antonio Guterres is worried about the situation in Jenin, Israel and calls for military operations to abide by international humanitarian law, the UN Spokesperson Farhan Hag said on Monday.

"The Secretary-General is deeply concerned about the developments in Jenin. He affirms that all military operations must be conducted with full respect for international humanitarian law," the statement said.
Wyoming Business Hall of Fame Award nominations are now being accepted for an outstanding leader in Wyomings business community who has demonstrated excellence in business. Nominations are due Tuesday, Aug. 15.

The Wyoming Business Hall of Fame Award is a joint venture among the Daniels Fund, the University of Wyoming College of Business, the Wyoming Business Council and the Wyoming Business Alliance/Wyoming Heritage Foundation.

The awards recipient will be recognized at the Governors Business Forum -- Wyomings premier business event -- Nov. 13-15 at UW. To nominate an individual for the award, download the nomination form at www.wyomingbusinessalliance.com, and email the completed form to micheleh@wyoba.com. For questions or for information, email Kent Noble, UW Daniels Fund Ethics Initiative Faculty Fellow, at knoble@uwyo.edu.

To be considered as a Hall of Fame inductee, an individuals business achievement should reflect the same qualities demonstrated by Bill Daniels, a cable-television pioneer who began his business career in Wyoming. Those qualities include business excellence; entrepreneurial spirit; courageous thinking and action; inspiring leadership; community impact; enduring accomplishments; and an unwavering commitment to ethical leadership principles. Recipients can be honored posthumously.

The two categories for awards are:

-- Contemporary/visionary: For an up-and-coming emerging businessperson or entrepreneur who has a vision for Wyomings future.

-- Legacy: Someone who has made historic and significant long-term contributions to the business community.

Nominees of the award can either be born in Wyoming or out of state, have attended UW or have business interests within the state. Consideration will be given to nominees who fulfill one or more of the requirements. Additionally, nominees may have started and built businesses or have led established businesses to significantly greater achievements.

A group of individuals who will evaluate the nominees business career, achievement record and ethical conduct will lead the selection process.
A program that provides technical and business assistance to manufacturing companies across Wyoming has reached a new level of excellence based on its impact on clients.

Manufacturing Works, a partnership among the University of Wyoming, the Wyoming Business Council and the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST), has achieved a score of 100 on its NIST impact metrics report. This is based upon statistics including the number of manufacturing companies served; jobs created and retained; new and retained sales; and cost savings and investments made by the companies as a result of Manufacturing Works services.

This is a great accomplishment for our Manufacturing Works team, says Steve Farkas, UWs associate vice president for economic development. Weve come a long way in a fairly short period of time, and this score is a reflection of the teams leadership and dedication to Wyomings manufacturing community.

Manufacturing Works is part of the Manufacturing Extension Partnership (MEP) National Network, which has centers in all 50 states and Puerto Rico. MEP is administered by NIST, which is part of the U.S. Department of Commerce.

According to the impact metrics report, Manufacturing Works served 52 clients across Wyoming in the past year. Because of those services, the companies reported creating or retaining a total of 471 jobs; generating $64.3 million in new sales; and retaining $30.5 million in sales. Additionally, the companies made a total of $10.8 million in new investments in machinery and other items, while saving $6.7 million in costs.

Were excited at the tremendous progress weve made in serving Wyoming manufacturers, says Rocky Case, center director for Manufacturing Works. These numbers represent real impacts on Wyoming companies and the states manufacturing industry.

Here are some specific examples of Manufacturing Works impact:

-- Electrichlor LLC, based in Laramie, provides water treatment, cathodic protection, field engineering and manufacturing in the on-site hypochlorite generation industry for water treatment. In particular, Electrichlor has had tremendous success in producing systems focused on the cleansing of ballast systems for ocean-going vessels. To continue growing, the company aimed to diversify into a water cleansing system for municipalities.

Manufacturing Works researched that potential new market and helped the company find a UW chemical engineering intern to further explore the opportunity, including securing an internship grant from the state Department of Workforce Services.

Manufacturing Works has been a huge asset to the success of Electrichlor in the past several years, says Darwin Keeney, the companys sales and operations manager. The intern has helped us test a new endeavor that we were able to start and finish ahead of schedule. Without the help of Manufacturing Works, my job would have been a lot more difficult with finding the right person and securing the funding to bring them on board, as Electrichlor is a small company.

-- L&H Industrial, with headquarters in Gillette, is a leader in technology innovations, custom manufacturing and comprehensive services for heavy industrial machinery used in mining, oil and gas, railways and other industries. Since securing initial work for NASA in 2015, L&H had tried to get more work in the space industry as well as with U.S. Department of Defense prime contractors. To do so, L&H needed to complete a NIST 800-171 self-assessment and submit a system security plan to the supplier performance risk system.

Upon assessment of L&Hs cyber needs, Manufacturing Works linked the company with 4th State Communications, a Wyoming-based cyber expert, so that L&H could document and solidify its internal cyber standards. And Manufacturing Works assisted in the timely submission of L&Hs self-assessment.

We were thankful to receive that help from Manufacturing Works, L&H Engineering Manager Bill Schroyer says. In parallel with the cyber training, L&H had signed up with the Defense Logistics Agency (DLA), which was a requirement for doing business with the Department of Defense. After a short grace period, the agency sent correspondence saying we needed to submit (required paperwork) within two weeks or risk having DLA access shut off. Manufacturing Works helped us get through that hurdle as well.

-- Moser Engine Service Inc., based in Casper, is an industry leader in power generation and industrial engine innovation and reliability. Mosers natural gas generators and diesel generators are designed and built to perform reliably in all situations, from urban environments to the oil fields harsh conditions. Due to rapid business growth, the company needed to expand its engineering change management (ECM) system and capacity.

After assessing Mosers engineering department and systems, Manufacturing Works proposed actions including implementing Microsoft ECM documenting internal processes and using UW engineering and MBA students to cost-effectively make updates.

Thank you to the Manufacturing Works team for its invaluable support in assisting Moser Energy in establishing our engineering change management project. This will go a long way toward positioning Moser as a state-of-the-art engineering company, enabling us to better engage our corporate goals, says Darrin Moorman, the companys senior vice president of engineering and innovation. The experience has been so successful that we recently hired one of the UW interns who participated in the project. He has quickly distinguished himself as a key contributor and future leader of our engineering team. It is very satisfying to see talented individuals stay close to home and help advance our company and the state of Wyoming into emerging and high-tech markets.

-- Based in Powell, Wyoming Completion Technologies Inc. is an oil tool manufacturing and design firm with customers across the world and a design team of licensed professional engineers. The company aimed to seek ISO 9001 certification as a means of achieving greater sustainability and acquiring new contracts.

Manufacturing Works connected the company with a vendor and worked with the Wyoming Business Council to secure a cost-share grant from the state. As a result, Wyoming Completion Technologies achieved ISO 9001 certification and has experienced a boost in attention and visibility, resulting in new contracts and expanded opportunities in international business.

Assistance from Manufacturing Works enabled Wyoming Completion Technologies to achieve its goal of ISO 9000 certification, owner Scott Hecht says. After helping to select a consultant, they worked with us until the project was complete and then followed up. This has opened many opportunities.

About Manufacturing Works

Manufacturing Works provides technical and business assistance to manufacturing companies across the state. It is part of the Wyoming Business Resource Network, with offices in Afton, Casper, Cheyenne, Laramie and Sheridan. Manufacturing Works promotes innovation, manufacturing and industrial competitiveness to build a stronger and more prosperous Wyoming through enhanced economic security and improved quality of life. Services to manufacturers include broad technical assistance, engineering solutions, general business assistance, marketing assistance and financial counseling.
KYODO NEWS - Jul 3, 2023 - 08:06 | All, Japan

The head of Komeito, the junior coalition partner of Japan's ruling Liberal Democratic Party, said Sunday the government should not start the release into the sea of treated radioactive water from the Fukushima nuclear power plant during the swimming season amid concerns over the safety of the plan.

Natsuo Yamaguchi made the comment at a time when the government is stepping up efforts to dispel or ease fears from neighboring countries and local fishermen that the water could pose a risk to the marine environment, food safety and human health.

The government and the plant's operator Tokyo Electric Power Company Holdings Inc. aim to begin releasing the water "around the summer."

"It is preferable to avoid the imminent swimming season," Yamaguchi told reporters in Fukushima. "We want the government not to rush to explain everything so as not to cause bad rumors."

International Atomic Energy Agency Director General Rafael Grossi is scheduled to visit Japan from Tuesday with the agency's safety review findings on the country's plan to discharge the water from the crippled plant, which was devastated by a natural disaster in 2011.

The government hopes the IAEA's safety assessment will help ease worries about the plan.

Related coverage:

EU to lift post-Fukushima import restrictions on Japan food products

IAEA chief to visit Japan ahead of Fukushima wastewater release

South Korea begins briefings to ease anxiety over Fukushima water
PHNOM PENH / WASHINGTON  Prime Minister Hun Sen is sending different signals about the future of Facebook in Cambodia after he apparently shut down his own account in the face of a potential suspension from the platform.



The oversight board that advises Meta, Facebooks parent company, recommended the prime minister be suspended due to a video he posted threatening violence against the opposition.



Hun Sen apparently preemptively took down his own page before Meta made a decision on whether to act on the non-binding recommendation.



In a speech on Friday, he criticized the platform, which is hugely popular in Cambodia and has become one of his main communication channels over the past decade. And he said he would communicate through other platforms, such as Telegram and TikTok.



Dont insult Hun Sens strategy. I destroyed 14 million [Facebook likes], but I can connect with people at all times via Telegram and now I also use Tik Tok, he said at a gathering with garment workers in Pursat province.



He warned members of the opposition overseas  who also use Facebook as their main communication channel and platform for daily media broadcasts  not to give him a reason to shut down Facebook inside the country.



I will cut your legs if you are impudent. I will order to shut down Facebook temporarily or forever, but I dont want to do that, which will affect people, he said.



The prime minister advised people to download other social media apps just in case.



However, hours later he released an audio message appearing to soften his threat, and suggested Facebook would not be shut down.



I would like to reaffirm that I will not be stupid to kill peoples economic activity, he said in his newly-established Telegram account, which has more than 850,000 subscribers.



Earlier this week, the Meta Oversight Board overturned Facebooks decision to leave up a video of Hun Sen threatening the opposition, and further recommended the platform suspend his account for six months.



A Meta spokesperson confirmed to VOA Khmer that it did not shut down Hun Sens account.



In its recommendation, the oversight board cited the severity of the violation, Hun Sens history of committing human rights violations and intimidating political opponents, as well as his strategic use of social media to amplify such threats.



In the video, he calls on political opponents to choose between the legal system and a bat, and says should they choose the latter, he will gather CPP people to protest and beat you up. He also mentions sending gangsters to [your] house.



The oversight board said three Facebook users reported the video five times during a two-week stretch in January. The company initially decided to leave the video up due to its news value  a factor it takes into account with prominent public figures.



The warnings from Hun Sen come just weeks before the national elections, which take place every five years and will decide the prime minister.



The ruling Cambodian Peoples Party is expected to win nearly every seat in parliament  if not all of 125 of them  after the main opposition Candlelight Party was barred from competing due to missing paperwork.



Human rights groups who have long criticized Hun Sen and the CPP cheered the oversight boards decision this week.



Cambodia PM Hun Sen is finally being called out for using social media to incite violence against his opponents, and he apparently doesnt like it one bit. Thats the real story about why hes running away from Facebook, said Phil Robertson, deputy Asia director at Human Rights Watch.



The stakes are high because plenty of real world harm is caused when an authoritarian uses social media to incite violence  as we have already seen far too many times in Cambodia.



The International Commission of Jurists also welcomed the decision.



This decision sends a clear message that political leaders do not enjoy higher protections for any incitement to violence by virtue of their status alone, as the same rules must apply to all users, said Daron Tan, ICJ associate international legal adviser, in a statement.



The Cambodian governments response to the decision has not been limited to Hun Sens speech.



The Telecommunication Ministry on Friday issued a directive banning Facebook representatives from the country and ceasing public-private partnerships with the company. It cited issues including fake accounts, data privacy risk, and political interference.



Kem Monovithya, an official with the banned opposition Cambodia National Rescue Party, called Hun Sens response classic bullying.



Remember: Cambodia population rely on Facebook for everyday life, notably the platform gives a huge boom to e-commerce uplifting many local biz, she wrote on Twitter. A shutdown would be extremely problematic for the regime.
WASHINGTON  The United States and European Union may have waning leverage over Cambodia as it slides further into Chinas orbit, however Cambodian-Americans fear that upcoming elections could prompt further erosion of Phnom Penhs relations with the West.



And the fallout is likely to hurt ordinary Cambodians rather than the ruling party elites who Western officials blame for backsliding on democracy and human rights in recent years, a number of political engaged U.S. Cambodians told VOA Khmer.



The most controversial aspect of Julys national election is the decision last month to bar the main opposition Candlelight Party from participating. Cambodias most prominent opposition leaders also remain under house arrest and in exile, while dissidents of all stripes have been jailed or intimidated into silence.



"I can clearly see that the outcome of that election is invalid, said Larry Seng, who lives near Seattle, Wash. and supports the opposition, noting that while other parties are registered for the election, none represent serious competition to the ruling Cambodian Peoples Party.



He worried that the main tools available to the U.S. and E.U.  withholding or restricting trade benefits  risk compounding the economic struggles of working-class Cambodians, while inflicting minimal pain on Cambodias leaders.



"The international pressure is nothing more than economic pressure, and that economic pressure is affecting Cambodians, the poor, the less resourceful, making life even more miserable," said Seng.



He said the CPP do not care about the suffering of the people, as long as the members of that party live comfortably, thanks to the continued support of communist countries such as Vietnam and China.

Since 2017, when the CPP began its crackdown on the opposition and passed a series of election reforms, the U.S. and E.U. have urged the government to reopen democratic space and respect basic political rights.



The main stick has been the threat to withdraw their respective Everything But Arms (EBA) and Generalized System of Preferences (GSP) trade preferences for lower-income countries, which account for hundreds of millions of dollars every year to Cambodias export sector.



And to some extent, they have already made good on those threats, after the opposition Cambodia National Rescue Party was dissolved and the CPP effectively returned to one-party rule following the 2018 national election.



The E.U. officially suspended trade privileges for 20 percent of Cambodian exports, affecting the garment, footwear, travel goods, and sugar sectors  which together employ some 1 million workers.



The U.S. preferences, meanwhile, expired in December 2020 and have not been renewed, meaning Cambodia is losing out on billions in duty-free or low-duty exports (though America remains its largest export market).



The E.U. Parliament in March passed a new resolution threatening to further restrict EBA privileges for Cambodia if the 2023 elections deviate from international standards or violations of human rights continue.



However, Prime Minister Hun Sen thumbed his nose at the threat in a speech to factory workers in June, noting that the entire trade scheme is expected to wind down in the coming years.



And the EBA is going to end in 2027 anyways. So, if Cambodia loses it, its not a problem. We do our best, dont use someones oxygen too much so when they pull out the oxygen, we can no longer breath, he said.



Un Sokhom, a Lowell, Mass. resident and a former opposition party official, said the CPPs reliance on China was the reason Hun Sen could brush off the loss of trade benefits.



"It does not affect the government, but more importantly, it affects the people, he said.



Many opposition supporters are calling on Western democracies to refuse to recognize the Cambodian government unless it agrees to concessions including allowing Candlelight party to participate in the election.



I firmly believe that it is not just me, that many of us Cambodians have the same beliefs as me, and that the international community is well aware of the current situation, said Larry Seng. I do not think they will legitimize the election.
Iran's foreign ministry lambasted France on Monday for hosting a meeting of an exiled Iranian opposition group that Tehran considers a "terrorist" organization.

On Saturday, the Albania-based People's Mujahedin of Iran, or Mujahedeen-e-Khalq (MEK), held a meeting outside Paris as thousands of the group's supporters held a rally in the center of the French capital.

Former U.S. Vice President Mike Pence and British ex-Prime Minister Liz Truss attended the meeting which French police had initially banned.

Iranian Foreign Ministry spokesman Nasser Kanani "strongly condemned" the decision by the French government to host the meeting, in a tweet Monday.

"Instead of compensating for the gross mistakes of the past in supporting the murderers of the Iranian people ... the French statesmen are providing the arena for the gathering of the terrorists," Kanani said in a separate statement.

He urged the French government "to heed the demands" of its own people instead of "supporting terrorist groups."

France has been gripped by a wave of violent street protests sparked by the fatal police shooting Tuesday of a 17-year-old of Algerian origin, identified only as Nahel M., in the Paris suburb of Nanterre.

The MEK has been exiled from Iran since the early 1980s. It is held in deep suspicion by many Iranians, including in the diaspora and those opposed to the clerical authorities.

In 2013, Albania agreed to take in members of the group at the request of Washington and the United Nations, with thousands settling there over the past decade.

Last month, Albanian authorities raided a MEK camp amid allegations that the group was suspected of orchestrating cyber-attacks against foreign institutions.

The MEK said Albanian police had seized 200 of their computers during the raid, which was hailed by Iran as "commendable."

The head of the Iranian government's information council, Sepehr Khalaji, said Monday that Iran had received some of the hard drives confiscated by Albania and that work on data recovery is currently "underway."

The MEK backed Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini in the 1979 Islamic revolution that ousted the western-backed shah before they fell out with the new authorities and have since sought to overthrow the government.

The group later fled to Iraq and sided with former President Saddam Hussein in the 1980-1988 Iran-Iraq war.
KYODO NEWS - Jul 3, 2023 - 17:26 | World, All, Japan

China on Monday called for enhancing communication and exchanges with Japan and South Korea to build momentum for a trilateral summit and other high-level meetings in a friendly overture to the two neighbors who have been boosting ties with the United States.

China's top diplomat, Wang Yi, said at the opening of a forum meeting on trilateral cooperation held in the eastern port city of Qingdao that the three countries should "create an atmosphere for the early resumption of leaders' meetings" and "move forward hand in hand" to "make greater contributions to the revitalization of Asia."

Amid intensifying China-U.S. rivalry, Wang said the three countries must "oppose the introduction of geopolitical conflicts and bloc confrontations into the region."

The three Asian neighbors have been aiming to hold a three-way summit possibly later this year for the first time since December 2019. Trilateral leaders' meetings have not been held in recent years amid the COVID-19 pandemic and strained Japan-South Korea ties over a wartime labor dispute.

Commenting on Japan's plan to shortly start releasing treated radioactive water into the sea from the crippled Fukushima nuclear power plant, Wang said it "must be handled carefully with in-depth coordination with neighboring countries," as it concerns the marine ecological environment and the safety of people's lives.

Japanese Foreign Minister Yoshimasa Hayashi said in a video message to the forum that he hopes the meeting will lead to deeper trilateral cooperation.

South Korean Foreign Minister Park Jin said online that Seoul is ready to work toward revitalizing intergovernmental talks between the three countries.
Nearly two years after the chaotic American military withdrawal from Afghanistan, President Joe Bidens statement that the Taliban is helping the U.S. push out al-Qaida from the war-torn country is reigniting controversy about the presence of terror groups there and the deal that ended the Afghan war.

Remember what I said about Afghanistan? I said al-Qaida would not be there. I said it wouldnt be there. I said wed get help from the Taliban," Biden said Friday. "Whats happening now? Whats going on? Read your press. I was right.

The president made the comments in response to a question about a recent State Department report that highlighted shortcomings of the Trump and Biden administrations as key contributors to the frenzied U.S. military withdrawal in August 2021.

Bidens remarks sparked immediate controversy. A former Afghan intelligence chief cited them to reiterate long-standing criticisms of the 2020 peace deal between the then-Trump administration and the Taliban that ended the war.

Rahmatullah Nabil served as head of Afghanistans National Directorate of Security from 2010 to 2012. In a Saturday tweet, he mocked Bidens remarks, joking that they made the Taliban look like a U.S. paramilitary partner, similar to Russias Wagner mercenaries. He said Biden has made a groundbreaking revelation by exposing the hidden annexes of the Doha deal, shedding light on the true nature of the Taliban as the Wagner Group of the United States in this region.

Under the Doha agreement, in return for Washington withdrawing its troops from Afghanistan, the Taliban agreed to prevent the country from becoming a haven for terrorists and to stop attacking U.S. service members.

Bidens claims that al-Qaida has retreated from Afghanistan also contradict a February United Nations report that concluded terrorist groups including al-Qaida enjoy greater freedom of movement in Afghanistan owing to the absence of an effective Taliban security strategy, and are making good use of this.

Ending the U.S.s longest war

Asked to clarify Bidens comments, White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre said the president had to make a tough decision to end the nations longest war.

And he also wanted to  and this is part of what he said at the end, which is he wanted to make sure that we remain vigilant against terrorism, she said during her press briefing Friday.

A U.S. official who spoke to VOA on condition of anonymity in order to discuss intelligence matters said that in referencing the Talibans help, the president was referring to the Taliban operation in April that killed a leader of ISIS-K, also known as Islamic State Khorasan, an affiliate of the terrorist group in Afghanistan. The National Security Council has claimed that the individual planned the deadly 2021 suicide bombing at the Kabul international airports Abbey Gate that killed 13 U.S. service members and at least 160 Afghans.

Bidens assessment of al-Qaida in Afghanistan highlighted the division between Washington and the United Nations on the presence of terror groups in Afghanistan and the threat they pose to the region.

A U.N. report released earlier this year concluded that the group is expected to remain in Afghanistan for the near future, keeping the country as the primary source of terrorist threat for Central and South Asia.

Ties between Al-Qaida and the Taliban remain close, said the report by the U.N. Analytical Support and Sanctions Monitoring Team, based on member states intelligence.

The administration has dismissed the U.N. report since its release, emphasizing that al-Qaida in Afghanistan is not a threat to the homeland as Washington has relied on over-the-horizon capability since the withdrawal. The term is a euphemism for drone strikes and other actions by special operations forces.

The U.S. official said that the administration assesses the terrorist group does not have a capability to launch attacks against the U.S. or its interests abroad from Afghanistan.

We have no indication that al-Qaida in Afghanistan individuals are involved in external attack plotting, the official said. Of course, we will continue to monitor closely.

The Talibans foreign ministry spokesperson, Abdul Qahar Balkhi, welcomed Bidens remarks as an acknowledgment of reality that no terrorist entities operated in Afghanistan under the groups rule.

Michael Kugelman, deputy director of the South Asia Program at the Wilson Center, is skeptical of such claims.

The Taliban have gone after their bitter rival, ISIS-K, but have done little to curb the presence of al-Qaida and most other terror groups in Afghanistan, he told VOA.

The Taliban isn't known to turn on its militant allies, so I have no reason to think it's trying to remove al-Qaida-or what's left of it from Afghan soil, Kugelman said.

Republican criticism

Republicans including former Vice President Mike Pence, who has announced he is running for president in 2024, have piled criticism on Biden following the State Department report.

The blame for what happened here falls squarely on the current commander-in-chief, said Pence during a television interview with the CBS television network Sunday. He said the disastrous withdrawal would never have happened under the Trump administration.

The report, however, laid the blame on both Biden and his immediate predecessor, Donald Trump. It highlighted how poor planning by officials in both administrations contributed to the chaotic and deadly withdrawal.

The report concluded that decisions by both Biden and Trump on ending the U.S. military mission in Afghanistan had serious consequences for the viability of the Afghan government and its security.

Those decisions are beyond the scope of this review, but the AAR (After Action Review) team found that during both administrations there was insufficient senior-level consideration of worst-case scenarios and how quickly those might follow, it said.

The report also noted that the State Department, "confronted a task of unprecedented scale and complexity," in implementing an evacuation with a scope and scale that was "highly unusual, with no comparable situation since the U.S. departure from Vietnam in 1975."

Following the rapid takeover of the Afghan capital, Kabul, by the Taliban, the United States evacuated about 125,000 people - including nearly 6,000 U.S. citizens from the city's Hamid Karzai International Airport.
Officials in Cameroon say plastic bag pollution in the country has doubled in the past four years to 600,000 tons, harming the environment and animal and human health. The central African country in 2012 banned the production, sale, and use of non-biodegradable plastic bags, but huge quantities are smuggled in from neighboring Nigeria.

A woman using a bullhorn tells civilians at Mfoundi market in Yaounde that plastic bags constitute a serious menace to the environment.

She said diseases and floods will decrease when civilians return to the old practice of packaging and storing food in plantain, banana and other plant leaves.

Cameron's ministries of trade and the environment say caravans were dispatched to markets in the central African state as part of activities marking International Plastic Bag Free Day celebrated annually on July 3.

Florence Tumasang is a doctor with the Cameroon Baptist Conventions health services agency.

She said plant leaves are biodegradable, and enriched with antioxidants, whereas plastic bags are dangerous to health and the environment.

"I don't know how we are going to stop our people from tying hot food in plastic bags because the heat helps those plastic bags produce biotoxins. These biotoxins infiltrate our food and they are cancerogenous. We have to go back to using leaves which are natural to tie our hot food," said Tumasang.

Many people in Cameroon use paper bags as well, but some argue that paper bags are not as good at conserving cooked food.

In 2012, Cameroon banned the use of non-biodegradable plastic packaging on the grounds they clog waterways, spoil the landscape, and take a thousand years to break down. When they do degrade, they break into particles that pollute the soil and water.

After dropping for several years, non-biodegradable plastic bag pollution has doubled since 2019 to 600,000 tons per year, according to the government.

Abel Foncha Ghogomu is the highest government trade official in Cameroon's Northwest region. He said it is not easy to stop what he calls the huge quantities of plastic bags illegally smuggled from Nigeria on a daily basis.

"We actually have not been able to stop the plastics from entering from the neighboring countries. The porous nature of the region has been the problem we are facing," said Ghogomu.

Millions of additional bags are produced illegally each year in Cameroon.

Civilians using the bags say the government did not start producing other types of biodegradable food packaging materials in partnership with private companies as it had promised.

The government acknowledges the packaging materials it is producing do not meet national needs yet and is encouraging civilians to use leaves.

International Plastic Bag Free Day is marked on July 3 every year to increase awareness of the damaging effects that single-use plastic bags cause on the environment.
Diamond industry experts are hailing the signing of a 10-year diamond sales agreement between the De Beers Group and Botswana, Africa's largest diamond producer. Under the deal, Botswana will progress from receiving 30% to half of all diamonds that De Beers mines in the southern African country.

The deal was signed at the 11th hour following tense negotiations, as Botswana pushed for an increased allocation of rough diamonds from the 54-year-old partnership.

The signing of a new agreement on Saturday has been welcomed by industry experts.

Edward Asscher, the World Diamond Council immediate past president, told VOA the deal will ease anxiety within the diamond industry.



First of all, that is a guarantee of stable supply of rough diamonds and we have all been waiting for this. Dont forget that De Beers is the leader in the rough diamond industry, but it also provides stability in the market and its the only company in the diamond industry that is investing in the growth and marketing of natural polished diamonds, said Asscher.

Belgium-based researcher on diamond mining Hans Merket said the new deal gives Botswana a greater chance to enjoy the proceeds of diamond mining.



The current deal builds on the achievements of the past to now expand Botswanas own room of maneuver in generating lasting benefits from the exploitation of its natural resources. The potential is definitely there but it remains to be seen how all this plays out, Merket said.

He, however said while there is need for transparency from the two parties on the deal, a concern recently raised by some legislators in Botswanas National Assembly.



What has been released so far (about the deal), there are many unknowns and conditionality. The past few years have shown that ill-informed public debates can breed mistrust between the two parties, or between the company and public at large. So, it will be important to invest in transparency and awareness raising to avoid this. The ideal way to achieve this will be to join the Extractive Industry Transparency Initiative.

The Extractive Industry Transparency Initiative is a global standard aimed at ensuring the good governance of oil and mineral resources.

Meanwhile, De Beers chief executive Al Cook, speaking during the signing of the agreement in Gaborone Saturday, said the company is excited to continue its partnership with Botswana.



We at De Beers will never forget that it is a privilege to be the partners of the government of this great country. It is a privilege, it is not a right. We will always remember that it is a privilege.

In recent years, Botswana has received about $5 billion per year from De Beers.

During negotiations, Botswana President Mokgweetsi Masisi repeatedly indicated his country was prepared to walk away from negotiations if a more favorable deal were not reached.

Minerals Minister Lefhoko Moagi said the new deal represents the aspirations of the people of Botswana.

I am very happy today that we are here and it is all to do with people. Everything else comes second. It is about our people and it will continue to be about our people. We will continue to do that for the betterment of the people of Botswana and all our partners, Moagi said.

Botswana sells its allocation of the rough stones from De Beers through state entity, the Okavango Diamond Company.

The two parties also agreed to extend the mining licenses by 25 years. The licenses will now run until 2054.
Hong Kong police on Monday accused eight self-exiled pro-democracy activists of violating the territory's harsh National Security Law and offered rewards of 1 million Hong Kong dollars ($127,600) each for information leading to their arrests.

The rewards are the first for suspects accused of violating the Beijing-imposed legislation since it took effect in June 2020. It outlaws subversion, secession, collusion with foreign forces and terrorism.

The eight activists are former pro-democracy lawmakers Nathan Law, Ted Hui and Dennis Kwok, lawyer Kevin Yam, unionist Mung Siu-tat and activists Finn Lau, Anna Kwok and Elmer Yuen, police announced at a news conference.

They are currently living in the U.S., Britain, Canada and Australia after some were earlier accused of various other offenses.

Steven Li, chief superintendent of the police's National Security Department, said arrest warrants have been issued for the eight under the National Security Law. He acknowledged that police will not be able to arrest them if remain overseas but urged them to return to Hong Kong and surrender for a reduction in their sentences.

Li said the new charges and rewards are not intended to spread fear but are merely "enforcing the law."

He cited articles of the security law which state that police have extraterritorial jurisdiction, and said they would pursue people overseas who endanger Hong Kong's national security.

The news conference came less than two weeks after the state-owned Ta Kung Pao newspaper issued an editorial stating that the National Security Law applies to people outside Hong Kong, and that China, as a member of Interpol, could request assistance from other countries in arresting fugitives.

Hong Kong, a semi-autonomous Chinese city, has come under increasingly tight scrutiny by Beijing following months of political strife in 2019. Authorities have cracked down on dissent with over 260 people, including many pro-democracy figures, arrested under the National Security Law.

Hong Kong's political system has also undergone a major overhaul to ensure that only "patriots" loyal to Beijing can hold office.

The police force said it has evidence that the eight violated the National Security Law.

According to the warrants, lawyer Yam, former legislator Dennis Kwok and activists Yuen, Lau and Anna Kwok are accused of foreign collusion for allegedly calling for sanctions against Hong Kong officials.

Former lawmaker Hui is accused of inciting secession, subversion and foreign collusion for allegedly calling for Hong Kong and Taiwan's independence on social media, as well as for sanctions against city officials.

Law, who is currently living in Britain, is also accused of foreign collusion and inciting secession for allegedly calling for sanctions and the city's separation from China in meetings with foreign officials and in open letters, petitions, social media posts and media interviews.

Unionist Mung is accused of inciting secession for allegedly advocating Hong Kong's separation from the mainland.

The New York-based group Human Rights Watch condemned the targeting of overseas pro-democracy activists.

"These arrest warrants are not an indictment of these activists, but of Hong Kong's once well-regarded law enforcement and judiciary," said Sophie Richardson, the group's China director. "Democracies should not only flatly reject the warrants, which authorities want upheld internationally, but they should also increase protections to those threatened by Beijing, consider imposing new sanctions, and face the reality that no mainland or Hong Kong authority will respect international legal obligations."
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As the nation prepares to celebrate 247 years of the countrys independence, smaller U.S. towns are marking holiday with their own traditions. VOAs Saqib Ul Islam takes us to one small Virginia town that celebrated ahead of the July Fourth holiday.
Israel launched drone strikes on a militant stronghold in the occupied West Bank early Monday, with Palestinian health officials saying that at least eight Palestinians were killed and another 50 wounded.

Israels military said it conducted the middle-of-the-night raid on the Jenin refugee camp, striking what it called a unified command center for militants. Israeli troops remained at the camp at midday in its largest operation in the West Bank in more than a year.

Black smoke rose from the crowded streets of the camp, with exchanges of gunfire ringing out and drones flying overhead. Residents said electricity was cut in some parts, and military bulldozers plowed through narrow streets, damaging buildings as they cleared the way for Israeli forces.

The Palestinians, neighboring Jordan and Egypt and the 57-nation Organization of Islamic Cooperation condemned the violence.

Video by Linda Gradstein

In Washington, the U.S. State Department said it was closely monitoring the conflict and that it was imperative to take all possible precautions to prevent the loss of civilian lives. It said the fighting underscored the need for Israeli and Palestinian security forces to work together to restore peace.

The Jenin attack came as Israeli officials faced growing pressure for a tough response to a string of attacks on Israelis in the region, one of which killed four people last month. Jenin has been a flashpoint of Israeli-Palestinian violence since the spring of 2022.

Israeli Defense Minister Yoav Gallant said the operation was "proceeding as planned," but did not say when it would end.

Lieutenant Colonel Richard Hecht, an army spokesman, said a brigade-size force  roughly 2,000 soldiers  was taking part in the operation, the biggest since a Palestinian uprising ended in 2006.

Were not planning to hold ground, he said. Were acting against specific targets.

National Security Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir, an ultranationalist who recently called for Israel to kill "thousands" of militants, if necessary, tweeted, "Proud of our heroes on all fronts and this morning especially of our soldiers operating in Jenin. Praying for their success."

The official Palestinian news agency Wafa said the Israeli military blocked roads within the camp, took over houses and buildings and set up snipers on rooftops. The tactics signaled the operation could drag on for some time.

Palestinian presidential spokesman Nabil Abu Rudeineh said, "Our Palestinian people will not kneel, will not surrender, will not raise the white flag, and will remain steadfast on their land in the face of this brutal aggression."

Israeli Foreign Minister Eli Cohen accused archenemy Iran of being behind the violence by funding Palestinian militant groups.

"Due to the funds they receive from Iran, the Jenin camp has become a center for terrorist activity," he told foreign journalists. He said the operation would be conducted in a "targeted manner" to avoid civilian casualties.

Palestinians reject such claims, saying the violence is a natural response to 56 years of occupation since Israel captured the West Bank in the 1967 Middle East war.

Lynn Hastings, the United Nations humanitarian coordinator in the Palestinian areas, said on Twitter that she was "alarmed by scale of Israeli forces operation." She said the U.N. was mobilizing humanitarian aid.

Last week, the U.N. Security Council urged restraint and called on Israelis and Palestinians to refrain from unilateral actions that further inflame tensions.

Some information for this story came from The Associated Press, Agence France-Presse and Reuters.
CAEN, FRANCE  The last surviving Frenchman to participate in the Allied invasion of Normandy in 1944 died Monday at age 100, local authorities said.

Leon Gautier was among 177 Frenchmen who participated in the landings on June 6, 1944, which marked the start of a rollback of Nazi Germany's domination of western Europe.

He belonged to the Kieffer commando, made up of French fighters who continued to battle the Nazis alongside the United States, Britain and other Allied forces even after the French government surrendered to Germany in 1940.

He died in hospital in Caen early Monday, the mayor of nearby Ouistreham Romain Bail said, close to the Normandy beaches where the fierce battles are commemorated every year.

The landings on June 6, 1944, known as D-Day, were the largest amphibious wartime operation ever.

The assault was led by U.S., British and Canadian troops, with a smaller participation of Australian, Belgian, Czech, Dutch, French, Greek, New Zealand, Norwegian, Rhodesian and Polish troops.

Some 18,000 paratroopers were dropped into the invasion area, and Allied air forces provided air support for thousands of naval vessels carrying more than 130,000 ground troops in the landings.

Over 4,000 Allied troops died on the first day of the invasion, which eventually provided the attackers with a foothold in western France to push back the Germans.

Gautier  who had lived in Ouistreham since the 1990s  joined the Free France movement in London, headed by Charles de Gaulle, in 1940.

He went to fight in Congo, Syria and Lebanon before joining the Normandy assault.

After the war, he became a campaigner for peace, pointing to his wartime experiences.

"You kill people on the other side who never did anything to you, who have families, and children. For what?" he said during a celebration for his 100th birthday last year.

"Ouistreham is very sad today. The loss of this father, this grandfather, has orphaned us," said Bail, calling Gautier "a local hero whom everybody knew" and "an ardent defender of freedom."
Zelenskyy made these comments as NATO leaders are preparing for their two-day summit in Vilnius, Lithuania, on July 11 and 12.

It is obvious that Europe can be protected from any aggression only together with Ukraine and only together with Ukraine in NATO. That is why we must achieve security certainty about our future in the Alliance, he said.

In his nightly video address Monday, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy touted Ukraine as a significant asset for NATO, stating that his country is an important safeguard in Europes security against Russian aggression.

The summit arrives at a critical juncture for NATO and European security with the Kyiv counteroffensive and political upheaval in Moscow.

Ukraine formally applied to join NATO last year, but all member states have now agreed that Ukraine will not join the alliance before the war there ends.

During a Monday news conference in Brussels, NATO's top military official, Admiral Rob Bauer, acknowledged that Ukraines road to victory will be difficult and lengthy.

"The counteroffensive, it is difficult," he said, adding that Ukrainian forces are right to proceed cautiously. "People should never think that this is an easy walkover. It will never be," he said, noting that the Russian defense lines are sometimes up to 30 kilometers (18.5 miles) deep, and Ukrainian forces face landmines and other obstacles.

Bauer drew a comparison between breaking through these obstacles and fighting in Normandy during World War II.

"We saw in Normandy in the Second World War that it took seven, eight, nine weeks for the allies to actually break through the defensive lines of the Germans. And so, it is not a surprise that it is not going fast," he said.

Satellite images reviewed by Reuters in April showed Russia had built extensive fortifications, trenches, anti-vehicle barriers and other obstacles to slow any Ukrainian advance.

Bauer also cautioned that Russias armed forces are bruised but by no means beaten in the Ukraine fighting.

They might not be 11 feet tall, but they are certainly not two feet tall, he told reporters. So, we should never underestimate the Russians and their ability to bounce back.

Heavy fighting

At least two people were killed and 19 others were injured by a Russian drone attack on the northern Ukrainian city of Sumy on Monday.

According to Sumy's regional administration, four drones struck an official building and two residential ones.

Ukraines state emergency service posted images from the attack showing mangled buildings. Debris was strewn on courtyards while rescue workers tried to put out a fire.

Several hours after the morning strike, another air raid alert sounded in the Sumy region that more drones could be on the way.

Earlier Monday, Kyiv's military reported shooting down 13 of 17 Iranian-made Shahed drones launched by Moscow overnight on several parts of the Ukraine.

Ukraine said Monday its forces had retaken 37-square kilometers (23 square miles) of territory in eastern and southern Ukraine during the past week.

Deputy Defense Minister Hanna Maliar said on Telegram that Ukrainian troops were advancing in the Bakhmut area in the east, while Russia was attacking in Lyman, Avdiivka and Mariinka.

Maliar said there was heavy fighting going on in those areas.



Zelenskyy noted that the situation on the front line has been difficult, but that we are making progress, he tweeted. We are moving forward, step by step!

Ukrainian children deportations

Russia has brought some 700,000 Ukrainian children fleeing the bombing and shelling from the conflict zones in Ukraine to Russian territory, Grigory Karasin, head of the international committee in the Federation Council, Russia's upper house of parliament, said on his Telegram messaging channel late Sunday.

Moscow claims its program of bringing children from Ukrainian to Russian territory aims to protect orphans and children abandoned in the conflict zone.

Ukraine says many children have been illegally deported. In July 2022, the United States estimated that Russia forcibly deported 260,000 children. Ukraines Ministry of Integration of Occupied Territories says 19,492 Ukrainian children are currently considered illegally deported.

EU-Ukraine

During a Monday speech before the European Union Commissioners meeting in Madrid, European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen said the European Union should address the issue of its enlargement as soon as possible to include countries such as Ukraine and Moldova to guarantee they do not fall under Russian or Chinese spheres of influence.

Continued support for Ukraine in its war with Russia was high on the agenda at the meeting and a priority for the Spanish presidency.

Von der Leyen remarked that the commission is proposing 50 billion euros ($55 billion) in budget and rebuilding support until 2027.

EU officials estimate that the blocs institutions and 27 member states have provided around 75 billion euros ($81.6 billion) in aid, arms and ammunition since the war began in February 2022. The EU provides 1.8 billion euros each month to help Ukraines economy.

Some information for this story came from The Associated Press, Agence France-Presse and Reuters.
Officials in Pakistan said Monday that insurgents had ambushed a military convoy in a southwestern region and killed two security personnel, including an army major. The deadly overnight assault occurred in Balor in the turbulent Baluchistan province. The armys media wing said troops were on a counterterrorism search mission in the area and trying to block escape routes when a group of terrorists ambushed them. The ensuing heavy exchange of fire killed two army officers and injured another, it added. No group claimed responsibility for Sundays deadly ambush in Baluchistan, where several ethnic Baluch insurgent groups and the outlawed Tehrik-i-Taliban Pakistan, or TTP, routinely target security forces. Sundays attack came just hours after heavily armed militants in another part of the province assaulted a security post with rocket-propelled grenades and assault rifles, killing three police officers and a soldier. Provincial authorities said police and paramilitary forces were jointly operating the post in the Shirani district. Prime Minister Shehbaz Sharif, in a statement Monday, said that "the entire nation, including me, are saddened over the martyrdom of six security personnel" in the Baluchistan attacks on Sunday.

Militant attacks, including suicide bombings, have dramatically risen in Pakistan in 2023. The violence has reportedly killed around 390 people, including security forces, and injured more than 650 others during the first six months of the current year.



The Islamabad-based Pakistan Institute for Conflict and Security Studies documented the casualties in a report local media published Monday. It said that most of the deaths, 266, occurred in northwestern Khyber Pakhtunkhwa province.



The report noted an almost 80% increase in militant attacks nationwide compared to the same period last year. It added that Pakistan witnessed 13 suicide attacks this year, which resulted in 142 deaths, noting that only five suicide bombings had taken place during the first six months of 2022, causing around 80 fatalities.



The Pakistani military said last week that it had killed or captured nearly 1,200 terrorists in thousands of nationwide anti-terrorism operations. However, the claims could not be ascertained independently.



Army spokesman Major-General Ahmed Sharif Chaudhry shared the details at a news conference, saying that 95 military officers and soldiers were also killed during these operations.
Acting Police Commissioner Richard Worley said at least two people opened fire, but police are not sure if the shooters were targeting people or shooting indiscriminately.

Three of the wounded are in critical condition.

While some of the remaining 28 were transported to hospitals, many of them walked to nearby hospitals. Most of the wounded are teenagers.

Two of the victims  an 18-year-old woman and a 20-year-old man  died.

Thirty people were shot as a block party was winding down early Sunday in Baltimore, in the eastern U.S. state of Maryland.

SEE ALSO: 30 Shot at Baltimore Block Party The Baltimore Sun newspaper reports the incident is likely the largest shooting in Baltimore history.

Maryland Governor Wes Moore said in a statement, Maryland has had enough of watching gun violence continue to ravage our state and our nation. The fact that these horrific shootings continue to take place is abominable. We as a state will continue to do everything we can to prevent senseless acts of violence . . ..

Police began receiving calls about the shootings shortly after midnight Sunday.

Hours earlier, Brooklyn Homes neighbors had come together for the block party where hot dogs and hamburgers were grilled and served, while children enjoyed getting their faces painted and participated in other activities typical of a summer Saturday get together.

In the evening, the shots rang out. Terry Brown, who lives nearby, told The Sun, It was so many kids. It was chaos.
STOCKHOLM, SWEDEN  Sweden on Monday ordered four companies to stop using a Google tool that measures and analyzes web traffic, as doing so transfers personal data to the United States. One company was fined the equivalent of more than $1.1 million.

Sweden's privacy protection agency, the IMY, said it had examined the use of Google Analytics by the firms following a complaint by the Austrian data privacy group NOYB (none of your business), which has filed dozens of complaints against Google across Europe.

NOYB asserted that the use of Google Analytics for web statistics by the companies resulted in the transfer of European data to the United States in violation of the EU's data protection regulation, the GDPR.

The GDPR allows the transfer of data to third countries only if the European Commission has determined they offer at least the same level of privacy protection as the EU. A 2020 EU Court of Justice ruling struck down an EU-U.S. data transfer deal as being insufficient.

The IMY said it considers the data sent to Google Analytics in the United States by the four companies to be personal data and that "the technical security measures that the companies have taken are not sufficient to ensure a level of protection that essentially corresponds to that guaranteed within the EU."

It fined telecommunications firm Tele2 $1.1 million and online marketplace CDON $27,700.

Grocery store chain Coop and Dagens Industri newspaper had taken more measures to protect the data being transferred and were not fined.

Tele2 had stopped using Google Analytics of its own volition, and the IMY ordered the other companies to stop using it.

IMY legal adviser Sandra Arvidsson, who led the investigation, said the agency has the rulings "made clear what requirements are placed on technical security measures and other measures when transferring personal data to a third country, in this case the United States.'

NYOB welcomed the IMY's ruling.

"Although many other European authorities (e.g., Austria, France and Italy) already found that the use of Google Analytics violates the GDPR, this is the first financial penalty imposed on companies for using Google Analytics," it said in a statement.

At the end of May, the European Commission said it hoped to conclude by the end of the summer a new legal framework for data transfers between the EU and the United States.

The RGPD, in place since 2018, can lead to penalties of up to $21.8 million, or 4% of a company's global revenue.
Thailands king opened the new session of parliament Monday as the kingdom enters a crucial fortnight to decide if the big winners of the May election, the Move Forward Party, can form a pro-democracy coalition government or if new political turmoil lies ahead.

Move Forward took 151 seats in a shocking May 14 election victory, as millions of Thais swung behind their agenda of removing the army from politics, tackling the economic dominance of monopolies and amending the royal defamation law, which protects the monarchy from criticism.

But the partys agenda is seen as dangerously radical by many in the conservative royalist establishment, including caretaker Prime Minister Prayuth Chan-ocha, a former army general who led a 2014 coup and ran the country for nearly a decade until his party was soundly beaten in the polls.

All 750 members of the two chambers the 250 senators appointed by Prayuths military-dominated government and the 500 elected lawmakers  stood in neat lines in white civil servant uniforms in front of King Maha Vajiralongkorn on Monday as he inaugurated parliament.

Among them was Pita Limjaroenrat, leader of the Move Forward Party, who says he has the popular mandate to be the next prime minister, albeit at the head of a shaky pro-democracy coalition.

For unity we must compromise and sacrifice in order to reach a more important goal that is forwarding myself as the next premier, he told reporters late Monday.

First, the 42-year-old Pita must gain a majority of 376 in a vote for the premiership of both houses, to be held within two weeks.

His pro-democracy, eight-party coalition has 311 votes so far, including 141 from Pheu Thai, the party of the Shinawatra political clan, which was the flag carrier of Thailands democracy cause, until the stunning poll result knocked them into second place.

Yet the Senate is unlikely to back Move Forwards candidate for premier, mainly for his stance on reforming the royal defamation law, leaving Pita potentially dozens of votes short.

Our job is to vote for the right candidate whos able to form a government that would not lead the country towards violence, Senator Somchai Sawangkarn told VOA.

Any candidate who wants to touch the monarchy I will 100 percent not vote for, he added.

If Pitas progress is blocked, Pheu Thai leaders are expected to nominate a candidate more likely to pass the threshold of 376 to become premier.

That candidate could be Srettha Thavisin, a property mogul who advises Pheu Thai, or Paetongtarn Shinawatra, the 36-year-old daughter of family patriarch and former Prime Minister Thaksin Shinawatra.

Pheu Thai and its former parties were taken out of government by coups in 2006 and 2014. Yet after Move Forwards emergence, it is potentially more acceptable to the Senate and other conservative parties.

Pheu Thai does not support reforming the royal defamation law and has a slate of old-style handout policies to the poor, but steps back from calls to reform the entire power structure of the country.

Conservative candidates likely to vie for the premiership include Prayuth, fellow former General Prawit Wongsuwon and Anutin Charnvirakul, a billionaire royalist who liberalized Thailands cannabis laws.

The fact that unelected senators are essential to forming a government shows the problem of Thai democracy, said Khemthong Tonsakulrungruang, a constitutional scholar at Chulalongkorn University in Bangkok.

He said the change moment represented by the May election is being held back by the constitution written specifically by the army and its allies for this purpose.

Thailand has been hit by repeated rounds of violent street protests involving rival political factions over the last two decades.

Move Forwards predecessor, the Future Forward Party, was dissolved by a court ruling after a 2019 election saw it soak up millions of youth votes.

That prompted more then 18 months of major rallies which targeted Prayuths government  but for the first time in Thai history also openly called out the role of the powerful monarchy, which the army supports.

Scores of young protesters have been charged with defaming the monarchy since then.

Pitas fate is also clouded by several legal cases brought within days of his stunning poll win by royalist petitioners.

The most serious could see him banned from politics and jailed over an alleged illegal share in a media company. Thai politicians are prohibited from holding such financial assets in media organizations.

Khemthong warned that defying the popular vote or Move Forwards victory after nine years of army-backed government could push Thailand down a dangerous path.

In the six weeks since the election, Move Forward and Pheu Thai have squabbled over which partys candidate should get the post of House Speaker, a key position which sets the parliamentary agenda.

Ahead of the Tuesday vote for the speakers job, the parties appeared to break the deadlock.

They agreed to nominate veteran politician Wan Muhamad Noor Matha, 79, from the Prachachat Party  which is a member of the eight-party coalition  as a compromise candidate for speaker.
The United States will add eight new fields of study for international students looking to acquire practical work experience in the country, the Department of Homeland Security announced last week.

The eight new fields of study include: landscape architecture; institutional research; mechatronics, robotics and automation engineering technology/technician; composite materials technology/technician; linguistics and computer science; developmental and adolescent psychology; geospatial intelligence; and demography and population studies.

The new fields will all be added to the science, technology, engineering, mathematics Optional Practical Training, or STEM OPT, program. Announced in a July 12 Federal Register notice, the additions will provide international students with more opportunities to temporarily work in the United States.

This is the latest move intended to attract more foreign STEM students to the United States.

Early last year, the Biden administration added 22 fields of study to the STEM OPT program.

STEM innovation allows us to solve the complex challenges we face today and make a difference in how we secure and protect our country, Department of Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas said in announcing the 2022 expansion. Through STEM education and training opportunities, DHS is expanding the number and diversity of students who excel in STEM education and contribute to the U.S. economy.

DHS received nominations for 120 fields, from which eight were selected and announced last week.

Through OPT, international students on an F-1 visa can gain experience in their area of study during or following the completion of their degree.

More than 200,000 international students used the program to gain work experience in the United States during the 2020-21 academic year.

The program usually lets students work for up to one year, but certain STEM students can extend that for an additional two years.

Boundless, a firm that helps people immigrate to the U.S., hailed the latest STEM expansion.

As the world becomes increasingly interconnected, initiatives like STEM OPT play a crucial role in promoting innovation, economic growth and cultural exchange, the Seattle-based company said in a recent statement. By expanding access to practical training, the U.S. signals a commitment to fostering a diverse and globally connected workforce.
Yellen's visit follows Secretary of State Antony Blinken's trip to China last month in which he and President Xi Jinping agreed to stabilize U.S.-China relations and ensure that areas of disagreement do not turn into conflict.

A senior Treasury Department official told reporters Sunday that the United States wants a healthy economic relationship with China and that fully halting trade and investment "would be destabilizing for both our countries and the global economy."

"While in Beijing, Secretary Yellen will discuss with [Chinese] officials the importance for our countries  as the world's two largest economies  to responsibly manage our relationship, communicate directly about areas of concern, and work together to address global challenges," the statement said.

The Treasury Department said in a statement earlier this week that Yellen's visit would occur through Sunday and follows a directive from President Joe Biden to deepen communications on various issues, including financial developments and the global macroeconomy.

U.S. Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen is set to travel Thursday to China to meet with senior officials in the latest effort to address strained relations between the two countries.

But some U.S. analysts are skeptical of any U.S.-Chinese advances stemming from Yellen's trip to Beijing, citing China's decision in recent days to restrict the export of two metals used in semiconductors and solar panels.

Thomas Duesterberg, a senior fellow at the Hudson Institute, a Washington think tank, told VOA's Mandarin Service, "The new Chinese export restrictions are a violation of [World Trade Organization] commitments and a serious escalation of tensions at a time when Xi's charm offensive is trying to win back American investment and trade opportunities."

He added, "The restrictions on these rare earths will hurt not only the semiconductor industry, but also the laser technology and LED industries in the West."

The United States and China are the world's two largest economies and set new bilateral trade records in 2022. However tensions over trade and security remain significant. The United States has placed export controls on high-tech products and imposed economic sanctions against senior Chinese officials accused of abuses. Last week, China announced a new counterespionage law that could pose threats to foreign businesses.

William Yu, an economist at the University of California in Los Angeles, told VOA "China would like to persuade the U.S. to abandon its past policies, but of course, Yellen will not accept it. So, I think the chance of achieving specific results that both sides can agree on may not be high."

"China's economy is currently facing significant challenges," he said, "and there is a strong desire in China for Western countries to reinvest in China, engage in business activities, and resume purchasing Chinese products as they did in the past. Ideally, the removal of all sanctions would be preferable."

A senior Treasury official said Yellen plans to discuss U.S. concerns about a new Chinese counter-espionage law.

"We have concerns with the new measure, and how it might apply, that it could expand the scope of what is considered by the authorities in China to be espionage activity," the official told Reuters, citing possible spillovers to the broader investment climate and the economic relationship.

Yellen addressed U.S.-China relations during an April speech at Johns Hopkins University, saying it would be healthy to have a relationship that fosters growth and innovation in both countries.

"A growing China that plays by international rules is good for the United States and the world," Yellen said. "Both countries can benefit from healthy competition in the economic sphere. But healthy economic competition  where both sides benefit  is only sustainable if that competition is fair."

Yellen also said that for the sake of global stability, the United States and China should cooperate "on the urgent global challenges of our day."

VOA's John Xie and VOA's China Branch contributed to this report. Some information for this story came from The Associated Press, Agence France-Presse and Reuters.
HANOI, July 3 (Reuters) - Vietnam has banned Warner Bros' highly anticipated film "Barbie" from domestic distribution over a scene featuring a map that shows China's unilaterally claimed territory in the South China Sea, state media reported on Monday.

The U-shaped "nine-dash line" is used on Chinese maps to illustrate its claims over vast areas of the South China Sea, including swathes of what Vietnam considers its continental shelf, where it has awarded oil concessions.

"Barbie" is the latest movie to be banned in Vietnam for depicting China's controversial nine-dash line, which was repudiated in an international arbitration ruling by a court in The Hague in 2016. China refuses to recognize the ruling.

In 2019, the Vietnamese government pulled DreamWorks' animated film "Abominable"and last year it banned Sony's action movie "Unchartered" for the same reason. Netflix also removed an Australian spy drama "Pine Gap" in 2021.

"Barbie," starring Margot Robbie and Ryan Gosling, was originally slated to open in Vietnam on July 21, the same date as in the United States, according to state-run Tuoi Tre newspaper.

"We do not grant license for the American movie 'Barbie' to release in Vietnam because it contains the offending image of the nine-dash line," the paper reported, citing Vi Kien Thanh, head of the Department of Cinema, a government body in charge of licensing and censoring foreign films.

Warner Bros. did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen said Monday it was imperative for the European Union to address the issue of its enlargement as soon as possible to include countries such as Ukraine and Moldova to guarantee they do not fall under the influence of Russia or China.

Speaking in Madrid, von der Leyen said the bloc must look forward four years and imagine what the union should be like.

Can we imagine the European Union will be without Ukraine, without Moldova, without the Western Balkans? And those parts of Europe are under the influence of Russia or China? Impossible, she said.

So, the direction of travel is clear. And therefore, now we have to start to think about how are we making sure that Europe is whole, that those countries are part of the European Union. Video report by Ricardo Marquina (narration Marcus Harton)

Von der Leyen said the enlargement issue must be addressed as soon as possible because it will take us time to come to a conclusion.

Continued support for Ukraine in its war with Russia was high on the agenda at the meeting and a priority for the Spanish presidency.

We must double down on our support for Ukraine. It has now been almost 500 days since Russias brutal invasion, von der Leyen said, praising the impressive resistance of the Ukrainian people.

Now it is our duty to match that endurance, and that perseverance. This includes reliable and regular financial support, she said, recalling that the commission is proposing 50 billion euros ($55 billion) in budget and rebuilding support until 2027. EU officials estimate that the blocs institutions and 27 member states have provided around 75 billion euros in aid, arms and ammunition since the war began in February 2022. The EU provides 1.8 billion euros each month to help Ukraine keep its economy afloat.

SEE ALSO: 3 Dead, 17 Injured by Russian Attacks as Spain Underscores EU Support for Kyiv Sanchez started the presidency Saturday with a quick visit to Kyiv to underline the blocs support of Ukraine in the face of the Russian invasion.

Sanchez was adamant about keeping up that support in aid and arms.

Europe and Ukraine together until victory and freedom, he said Monday.

Von der Leyen and her team arrived Monday for the one-day meeting in Madrid, the first major event of the Spanish presidency, which ends Dec. 31. The meeting was held in the new Royal Collections Gallery museum.

In addition to Ukraine, a migration pact, EU relations with Latin America and the reindustrialization of Europe are among Spains presidency priorities.

Von der Leyen and Sanchez expressed confidence that the EU will finalize a controversial pact on migration despite lingering differences within the 27-nation group with Poland and Hungary.

Earlier this month, EU countries made a breakthrough on asylum law reform, sealing an agreement on a plan to share responsibility for migrants entering Europe without authorization. Only Poland and Hungary voted against it.

EU lawmakers have warned that this may be the last chance to solve the issue before EU-wide elections in a years time, when migration is likely to be a hot-button issue once again.

The visit by the Commission College was initially scheduled for July 6-7, but was brought forward so as not to take place in the middle of the campaign for Spains general election on July 23.

Von der Leyen said she was confident the election results would not have an impact on the objectives or agenda of the presidency.

Polls show the vote could oust Sanchezs leftist coalition government and replace it with a conservative administration, or even a coalition with the extreme right, following a trend in much of Europe.

Von der Leyen and Sanchez also expressed confidence that accords on rebuilding intra-European supply chains to avoid shortages and guarantee energy sovereignty would be reached during the presidency, as well as agreements on establishing European dominance in the fields of artificial intelligence and digital security.

The two also highlighted the importance of an EU-Latin America summit set for July 17-18 in Brussels, the first in eight years, and the need to move forward on a trade agreement that was reached between the EU and the Mercosur states  Argentina, Brazil, Paraguay and Uruguay.

Sanchez also promised progress on an EU green transition and electricity market reform.
Streamliner At your service. Ballers and Six Feet Under are two of the HBO shows in talks to stream on Netflix. Photo-Illustration: Vulture; Photos: Everette

Update July 3: And so it has come to pass. Insecure officially landed on Netflix, with HBO Original branding over the title and everything. According to Deadline, Six Feet Under, Ballers, Band of Brothers and The Pacific also have their tickets punched for the licensing train. Outside of the U.S., True Blood will also soon appear on Netflix.

Original story follows.

These are strange times for HBO: You cant watch its shows on a streaming service called HBO anymore, and now the execs at its parent company, Warner Bros. Discovery, are going so far as to send some of those shows out to the competition. Industry insiders confirmed reports that HBO and Netflix are closing in on a deal for the streamer to take Insecure  and very likely several other fan-favorite library titles  in a new licensing agreement that was first reported by Deadline. In addition, Vulture has learned that the additional titles currently being discussed for the possible deal are Dwayne The Rock Johnsons comedy Ballers, the iconic early aughts drama Six Feet Under (which aired its last episode in 2005), and a pair of Steven Spielberg/Tom Hanks produced miniseries, Band of Brothers and The Pacific. But because the negotiations between Netflix and HBO are still so fluid, its quite possible that all of the titles being talked about wont end up being licensed by Netflix. Whatever the final shape of a deal, it is expected the agreement would be non-exclusive, allowing titles to appear on both Netflix and WBDs Max. Nothings finalized yet, and both Netflix and WBD declined to comment, but it would be the latest in a series of licensing moves under WBD CEO David Zaslav.

This new Netflix licensing deal  if it does go through  has been reported as a financial decision from WBD corporate, one that HBO execs arent happy about but have limited options to stop. But its not the first of its kind. True Blood was made available on Hulu in late 2022, becoming accessible to Hulu users without an HBO Max subscription. The Netflix deal also follows the decision earlier this year to send edited versions of Insecure to the WBD-owned basic cable channel OWN, True Blood to TNT, Silicon Valley to TBS, and other recent licensing plays, like axing and kicking pricey titles like Westworld to ad-supported channels named WBTV on Roku and Tubi.

Of course, HBO shows had traveled around before; in the 2000s, you could catch edited versions of Band of Brothers on the History Channel, Sex and the City on TBS and E!, and The Sopranos on A&E. And in 2014  while HBO Go was in operation but before HBO Now launched  the company struck a licensing deal with Amazon that endured until the rollout of HBO Max in 2020, and under Zaslavs leadership, the HBO Max app was put back on the Prime Video Channels store in late 2022.

So the news that HBO titles could be sent to a direct streaming competitor in 2023 isnt that surprising  and it could even mean more residual opportunities that otherwise wouldnt have existed for writers or other creatives had their shows simply lingered on Max. Ironically, it puts Netflix in the position of buying from HBO after spending years trying to compete with HBOs prestige programming. On the other hand, for those at HBO, it might sound ominous that Zaslav is selling these shows to the arch-rivals at Netflix. This deal comes less than a month after WBD made a show of pivoting HBO Max to Just Max (with a shiny HBO section up top) and less than 24 hours after the old guard running HBOs venerable corporate sibling Turner Classic Movies, which is now practically buried on Maxs interface, announced their departure. And while Netflix has featured a few WBD titles recently, like the animated series The Batman and Justice League Unlimited, Insecure is not an animated show originally targeted at kids: Its HBO. As streaming companies rent more titles out to one another, or consolidate into fewer and fewer streaming companies, the fear is that distinctions like that will stop mattering to its corporate overlords.

This story has been updated.
John Woo and Tom Cruise on the set of Mission: Impossible 2 (2000). Photo: Jasin Boland/Paramount/Kobal/Shutterstock

More than three decades ago, John Woo reinvented the action movie. He did so not just with his deliriously choreographed action scenes, but with his unabashedly melodramatic tales of violent men who bonded with their adversaries. His revolutionary Hong Kong heroic bloodshed films  A Better Tomorrow (1986), The Killer (1989), and Hard-Boiled (1992) being the best known  broke through in the West in the early 1990s, influencing everyone from James Cameron to Quentin Tarantino. Right around then, Woo himself came to the U.S., making his Hollywood debut with the Jean-Claude Van Damme-starring Hard Target (1993), a modest hit that has, over the years, come to be regarded as a classic.

At their best, Woos American pictures showcased his ability to blend mind-melting action scenes with a kind of romanticism and emotionality genre films often looked down on; in that sense, Face/Off (1997) remains unmatched. The mixture worked financially as well: Broken Arrow (1996), Face/Off, and Mission: Impossible 2 (2000) were all big hits. But then, Woos style of filmmaking seemed to vanish, as the world of action divided itself into gritty, self-important shakycam on one side and elaborate, VFX-infused fantasy and sci-fi on the other.

Now, its fair to say that we are undergoing a revival and re-appreciation of Woos work. The Criterion Collection recently released his 1979 film Last Hurrah for Chivalry. A Face/Off 4K comes out next month. (One for Hard Target came out a couple of years ago.) Most importantly, Woo has finished shooting a new film, Silent Night, starring Joel Kinnaman, his first American feature since 2003s (underrated) Ben Affleck-starring Paycheck, and hes preparing to shoot another. When he pops up on the Zoom window, the first thing I notice is an enormous poster of Jean-Pierre Melvilles Magnet of Doom (1963) on the wall behind him.

I see the Jean-Pierre Melville poster in the background.

Yeah. He was my hero. I loved his movies. I stole from two of his movies, Le Samourai and The Red Circle, when I made The Killer. He was the biggest influence on me.

When were you first exposed to his films?

We didnt have any kind of film school in Hong Kong, so we had to learn from movies and foreign film critics. We studied them in the library. We had a community, a group of young people who would get together and make experimental films. We watched great movies at the Italian, French, and British embassies. Art films were showing in commercial theaters back then. That was how we learned the movies. I learned so much from European films in my 20s.

How did you get into the film industry?

It was tough for film-crazy young people like us to get into the business. If you didnt have a relationship with anyone in the business, youd never get a chance to work. I was lucky. In 1968, there was a film-studio manager who was the first one to study movies in Italy and had an open mind. When he came back to finish up as chairman of one of the biggest studios in Hong Kong, he hired young people like us into the business. My first job was script supervisor for a film. Later I changed to another studio, Shaw Brothers, where I worked with one of my favorite directors, Chang Cheh, as a script supervisor and assistant director. I worked for him for almost two years, then I got the opportunity to direct my first film when I was 27.

Probably the best-known film from your early period is 1979s Last Hurrah for Chivalry, which just came out as part of the Criterion Collection. How did you develop the action scenes in the film?

I learned so much from my great master, Chang Cheh  especially how he worked with his stunt coordinator and the way he used camera movement. When he passed away, the people who followed him for decades, like the stunt team, were all out of work. So I grouped them together again and made Last Hurrah for Chivalry as a tribute. I tried to pay tribute to Akira Kurosawa. I really liked the Chinese swordsmen in ancient times, who had the true spirit of chivalry. I was fascinated with four very famous assassins in ancient China and their code of honor. I used their story as a base, then created my kind of hero.

In Hong Kong back then, there was a lot of competition. While rewatching other movies, if we saw something we liked  a new fight technique or concept  we wanted to improve on it. Ive never learned kung fu. Ive never learned any sword-fighting. But Im crazy about dancing and musicals. I wanted the action to look beautiful, exciting, and elegant. And I went with my instincts. Like, the character of the drunken swordsman [in Last Hurrah for Chivalry] was me! When I was young, I was a drunkard. But I believed I had a code of honor. I wanted to do good and defend justice.

I feel I was a little too ambitious. I was too young. I hadnt learned enough. I think the dialogue is a little too cheesy.

In my movie, at the end, the two men have to work together, and the emotion  the love, hate, and everything  its all there in the fight. But I wanted to show some kind of humanity. In the film, the drunken swordsman sacrifices himself for a friend. That always moves me. Even when I was making gun-battle movies, like Hard Boiled or The Killer, they had that kind of spirit. Thats my philosophy of life. Life is beautiful as long as you have real friends.

How do you see Last Hurrah for Chivalry now?

I still love the movie, but I feel I was a little too ambitious. I was too young. I hadnt learned enough. I think the dialogue is a little too cheesy. When you understand Chinese, the dialogue is too modern. It doesnt sound like a classic movie. Many of the dialogue scenes looked like they were shot in a police station  like youre watching a play, not a movie. But in general, I still love the movie. Before Last Hurrah for Chivalry, Id always wanted to make a movie like Le Samourai. But the studio always said, You just started. Its too early to make that kind of movie. Those kinds of movies are poison. Nobody wants to watch them. At the time, the most popular movies were what we called fist and pillow movies. The fist was kung-fu, martial-arts fighting. And the pillow was a sex film. So I was frustrated. All I could do was make some kind of kung-fu film and a comedy. I like comedy, but I dont have that kind of passion. I made eight of them, but they didnt look like comedies, because my films had so much anger.

Where did that anger come from?

I had so much anger about society. Rich people were getting richer, and poor people were getting poorer. The criminals were nearly untouchable, and good people never got true justice. The studio still didnt let me make the real movies I wanted to make. So I put all of my anger into the comedies. When people came to watch my movies, they didnt know if they should laugh, cry, or be angry. But I dont regret it, because I feel, as a filmmaker, youve got a duty to serve the truth inside your heart. No matter if its a comedy, action, or a love story, Ive got to bring my true feelings into the film. I dont want to hide and be happy. If Im not happy, I dont want to do something to try to please anybody.

Later, I met my good friend Tsui Hark, a brilliant, talented filmmaker. I recommended him to a new studio. Then, in 1985, because I had helped him start his career, he returned the favor and supported me to make A Better Tomorrow. I put all of the French elements into the film. At last, I really could do whatever I wanted.

That period from A Better Tomorrow and Bullet in the Head to The Killer and Hard Boiled was a pivotal time for you  when you developed this revolutionary style. How did that come about?

Well, in the late 70s, with the Hong Kong New Wave coming up, all of a sudden, the whole business changed. The fist and pillow movies didnt work anymore. There was a young audience, a new generation, and they wanted something new. We had some open-minded financiers and producers who trusted us, which gave us a lot of creative freedom. And we knew our audience, because the market is so small: only Hong Kong, Taiwan, and some Chinatown theaters in foreign countries.

But for me, it was hard. I came from the old-time movies like the French New Wave. It was hard to talk to the crew about Federico Fellini, Francois Truffaut, Jean-Pierre Melville. It was hard to let people know what I was really thinking. Thats why I feel like a lot of our movies shot without a script. Like The Killer. There was no script. It was all in my mind. But this was a good thing as well, because I could control everything myself  like Stanley Kubrick. The studio gave me a reasonable budget, and I told them how many days for the shoot and what the story is about, then I could totally control the budget, crew, and everything. I love to shoot on soundstages. Every day, I just shut the door and made my own film. The financial people never came to the set, never asked anything. And the audience loved it.

Chow Yun-fat in Hard Boiled (1992). Photo: Rim/Courtesy Everett Collection

What was it about Chow Yun-fat that first drew you to him?

Hes a great actor, but we also have a lot of things in common. We both came from very poor families, and we struggled by ourselves. When I was writing A Better Tomorrow, all of the dialogue came from my heart and life experiences. When he read the dialogue, he said, Hey, its my dialogue! I have these same kinds of feelings. He had been a failure for three years. People had been laughing at him. Every one of his movies was a flop, and I was in the same situation. People were laughing at me. So he thought my dialogue was speaking from his heart. Then, when I gave him a raincoat and sunglasses, he looked like Alain Delon or Ken Takakura. My two idols! Hed never fired a real gun, and he hadnt learned any martial arts. He had never punched a guy before.

You guys were thinking of working together again for a while. Do you think that could happen?

Its hard. The hardest thing is to get the right script. And we got old. I would still like to do something like Clint Eastwood. Like, a main character thats going back to the old days.

As I understand it, when you made Hard Boiled, you were often making the story up as you went along. But you were dealing with such elaborate action set pieces. How do you get through something like that when its not all planned out?

Well, there were two reasons I wanted to make Hard Boiled. At that time, in 1990, Hong Kong gangsters were out of control. They had firearms, weapons much more powerful than the police force. They were robbing banks and shooting people on the street. It made me want to create a Hong Kong Dirty Harry  a person who had the guts and the power to go against all of those criminals.

Originally, it was a story about a serial killer, a psychopath, who was murdering babies. This was really happening in Japan. I read news about people who would sneak into the supermarket and put poison in baby food. I was so upset and angry. Where was the justice? So I created a story about a Dirty Harry to try to catch a psychopath who was murdering babies. But after I started shooting, I thought, Oh wait, maybe this is not a good influence for the audience. Some people might learn from the movies! So I changed my mind. Tony Leung was supposed to play that role, the psychopath. I changed my idea, made him an undercover cop. I gave up the idea of shooting babies.

Then, after that, the Gulf War happened. The war in Kuwait. This made me very angry and made me change the story. The second half is pretty much a war movie. It wasnt like the usual criminal or gangster film. I put the biggest gun-battle scene in a hospital, which was being attacked by a huge army. Theyre stuck in a war zone  like in Hanoi.

First of all, Face/Off was a sci-fi movie. The movie was set about 200 years from now.

The action sequences were all sort of by instinct. The opening action scene in the teahouse  we shot that before we had a story or script. The real location was gonna be torn down in two weeks. The teahouse was a memorable building. It was historic. Everybody in Hong Kong knew it. So I had to shoot it before they tore it down. I made up a scene  Okay, Chow Yun-fat is a cop, a Dirty Harry, and these guys ambush him. Then when I walked into the location, saw the bannister, the stairs, I thought itd be nice to see our hero sliding down the bannister, then shooting the others. It looked great, you know? I made up the rest of the story afterward. It was fun to make that movie. It wasnt fun for the financier. It took 150 shooting days, and we went way over budget. But it made money.

Tell me about how your first American film, Hard Target, came to be. By this point, a lot of people in the West had seen your films and were interested in you. Why Hard Target?

Before that, I had never dreamed of coming to Hollywood. In 1991, when I had just started shooting Hard Boiled, all of a sudden, I got a phone call from Oliver Stone. He and A. Kitman Ho had a production company, and they offered me a very interesting script. It was kind of like a martial-arts movie but with a lot of great philosophy. Oliver Stone loved A Better Tomorrow. And I liked him. When I came to his office, I said, My English is pretty poor. So he told everybody, Read his mind. With a smile. Everybody was excited. And I wanted to try something new. But Warner Bros. wanted to give me even less money than what I got in Hong Kong, so the deal didnt work out.

Then later, I got a phone call from Universal. Jean-Claude Van Damme, producer Jim Jacks, and the writers all flew to Hong Kong to meet me and ask me to make Hard Target. In American films, every kind of movie had its own audience. The action fans only watched action movies. The comedies were only for the family. The melodrama was for whatever intellectual audience. What they liked about my movies was that they felt like I put all kinds of elements into an action film. My films had good action scenes and were very emotional  with a lot of humanity and a sense of humor. So they wanted me to make Hard Target more like a Hong Kong film with all of these elements. It was maybe not a good idea. We had a test screening, and it was horrible. After 15 minutes, some people left the theater. People couldnt stand the violent shots, then when they saw some of the slow-motion stuff, they felt, Oh, its a commercial! I realized some would never get used to that kind of style. So, uh, anyway, it was nice to learn something. Im really surprised and grateful that people still remember Hard Target, and so many people now love it.

How do you like it?

I like it. I like the original cut, which was never released by the studio. The version that people see had been cut by the studio.

For a while, there was a much longer cut circulating on bootleg VHS. Is that your preferred cut  the original?

Yeah, maybe!

John Woo and Jean-Claude Van Damme on the set of Hard Target. Photo: Universal/Kobal/Shutterstock

What was it like working with Van Damme?

Uh  well  he  I think he liked movies, and he liked to do a good job. He was, you know, quite popular at that time and a little too busy. He got so many phone calls! Whenever we were shooting or eating, he was always talking on the phone with the other studio, talking about his next pictures deal and about money. On the set, we had to spend some time waiting for him after he talked on the phone. Anyway, I think hes very serious about his work, and hes smart. He can fight, hes charming, and hes kind of a romantic. He was willing to try new things. Even if an action scene looked pretty dangerous, he still wanted to go for it. And he loved my movies. He loved Hard Boiled. He loved The Killer. He always wanted to be better than Chow Yun-fat.

Is it true that he wanted a camera focused on his muscles?

Yeah! He was so concerned about his hairstyle and good-looking angles and liked to have an extra camera to shoot his muscles. He was like a big kid. My specialty is: I know how to make my actors look great. I know how to find the proper angle to make them look beautiful. Because I love my actors. I respect my actors. The actors in my films are everything. Every actor, I try to find a different angle or some special lighting to make them look great. And I like to stand beside a camera to watch their performance. At that moment, I dont care about the background, the color, or the lighting. I just want to look at the eyes. And Im so happy when they do something unexpected. I tried so hard to make Van Damme look great, and he knows it. Even Tom Cruise  he understands it. John Travolta, Nicolas Cage, Chow Yun-fat, everyone in my movies  I try to make them look great.

Tell me about Wilford Brimley. He gives a delightful performance in Hard Target, and that shot of him riding away from the exploding house  I saw the movie in theaters the day it opened, and we all cheered when we saw that shot.

I didnt really know him before we worked together. He was highly recommended by my stunt coordinator Billy Burton, who was a good friend of his. I didnt know he was a big star. He was a funny guy and a very respectful person, and he had a great sense of humor. He tried to make everybody happy. I was so young. I didnt know how to talk to him. When I tried to talk to him, I felt so small, even though he was pretty short. I didnt know how to tell him what to do. But he was just, Haha, dont worry, son. I can do this and that and that. He was so humble and never got mad. Then for the explosion shot, he asked to do it himself. He wanted to do the running through the house, then the big explosion. He wasnt afraid. The whole performance came from him. I learned so much from him. He liked to talk about the old times, a lot about movies, a lot about life.

Face/Off might be your most popular American film. You were talking just now about trying to put actors in the best possible light, and one of the things I find so fascinating about Face/Off is youre not afraid to let Cage and Travolta go totally over the top.

First of all, it was a sci-fi movie. The movie was set about 200 years from now. I took out 99 percent of the special effects and changed it to ten years from now to try to make it more realistic. In the meantime, I started to make it like a comedy. Or a comedylike movie, not a real comedy. Im a big fan of MAD magazine. The characters in my movies sometimes feel like characters from there. The whole thing is so ridiculous. People who can change their faces  its so unreal. But I had to make it a believable story, so thats why I let my actors be carefree and do whatever they wanted. Before we started filming, Sherry Lansing, the chair of Paramount Pictures, had a meeting and gathered all of the producers and important people from the studio and said, All I want is a John Woo movie, and nobody needs to give him any notes. I was so shocked and surprised. I got to have so much creative freedom.

In the meantime, I was inspired by Travolta. He was just like his character, Sean Archer. He always came to me  John, dont feel upset or anything. Its only a movie. Lets enjoy life. We used that kind of attitude to make the film, and the two actors worked together so well. They spent about two or three weeks rehearsing with each other. They were imitating each other, walking and talking  even the laughs, the crying, everything. They made it a lot of fun. The freedom. Thats why I make a film.

On the set of Face/Off (1997). Photo: Paramount/Courtesy Everett Collection

The boat chase at the end of Face/Off is spectacular, and one of the things I love about it is that you can see the stunt doubles faces. Its not Travolta or Cage. That actually enhances the scene for me, because that tells us its not being faked.

Yeah, I never like to hide it. The audience understands that the most dangerous action is usually played by the stunt guy. Tom Cruise likes to do all kinds of risky action scenes, but there are not many people like him. And I didnt want to do digital faces. I just tried to maintain the beauty of the action. If a shot looks beautiful and stunning, I want to keep it. Its about the film language. You can see, in my action scenes, I never like to do the quick cut or second camera.

One reason I like to keep making action movies is because I have a high respect for stunt people all over the world. I think they have a true spirit and great professional honor. If something is memorable, beautiful, or challenging, they love to do it. In some way, I feel they have the same qualities as a ballet dancer.

It sounds like you didnt get that kind of creative freedom again, even though Face/Off was a huge hit.

The others, theyre all right. Even if they gave me notes, they still let me make the last decision. The only thing they were concerned about was the violence  usually. Oh, for the Hong Kong movie, you can shoot as much as you want, but in this country, can you cut it down a little bit? Not more than five shots instead of a hundred bullets in your film. I understood, and I sympathized. I mean, in this country, there were some Asian gangsters robbing a jewelry store in an Asian area. When they caught them and asked them why they did that, they said, We learned from John Woo movies. They learned it from Bullet in the Head. This was many, many years ago, but I still feel pretty bad. So when the studio said it didnt want to give any bad influences to younger people, I calmed down a little.

I didnt feel I got old or anything like that. I just didnt like the new changes.

Is there a film from your American period that you wish people would take another look at?

Windtalkers. There were not many people who really understood that movie or liked it. It was not good timing. The movie had to be released in 2001. Then 9/11 happened, so they had to push it. They were so afraid audiences wouldnt want to watch a war movie at that time. I had a conflict with the writers. I said, My kind of movie is usually about friendship, respect, and honor. But the writers didnt feel good about that. They said, The enemy is the enemy. The enemy has to be destroyed. I tried to make it a human story. The audience didnt expect a movie about friendship. But Im still proud of that movie.

Your style of action filmmaking was so influential in the 90s and 2000s, but then, in the mid-2000s or so, there was a move toward a harder, realistic handheld aesthetic. Did you sense that at the time? Thats when you went to China and did Red Cliff.

Yeah, I sensed it. I didnt like it. At the time, I couldnt stand to see everyone doing the same thing and using the shaky camera and fast cuts. Even the drama movies were always using a handheld camera. I couldnt read the actors faces. I couldnt hear what they were saying. I couldnt pay attention to their performances. I had a problem with that kind of style. Whenever I watched that kind of movie, whether in a theater or on DVD, whenever I saw the camera shake, I stepped out. I left the theater. I couldnt stand it. I think its not a real movie. The reason I went to shoot a Chinese movie is because I had been asked to help Chinese movies have more of a world market. I didnt feel I got old or anything like that. I just didnt like the new changes.

You just shot another movie, Silent Night, is that correct?

Yeah. Very interesting movie. The whole movie is without dialogue. It allowed me to use visuals to tell the story, to tell how the character feels. We are using music instead of language. And the movie is all about sight and sound. The budget was a little tight, and the schedule was tight, but it made me change my working style. Usually, for a big movie, a studio movie, we shoot a lot of coverage, then leave it to the cutting room. But in this movie, I tried to combine things without doing any coverage shots. I had to force myself to use a new kind of technique. Some scenes were about two or three pages, but I did it all in one shot.

Its almost like youre finally doing a musical.

Yeah. Yeah. [Laughs]

How do you view your American period now? Is there anything you would have done differently if you had to do it all over again?

Ive learned a lot of things. I learned how to shoot an action scene with CGI and other technical things. I think all of us, including the actors, no matter if theyre American or Chinese  we all have the same kind of emotion and humanity. But in Hollywood, it feels safer, because everybody is so professional. In Hong Kong, they just shoot the movie even without a script. But Im still learning. Every movie is a learning process for me. This is a great world. Everybody deserves to learn.

This interview has been edited and condensed for clarity.
KYODO NEWS - Jul 3, 2023 - 19:52 | World, All, Japan

A group of Japanese opposition lawmakers met with Taiwan leader Tsai Ing-wen on Monday and expressed their support for the island's bid to participate in the World Health Organization, her office said.

Former Japanese Foreign Minister Seiji Maehara, who leads the delegation of some 10 lawmakers, said Taiwan's inability to participate in the WHO is a "great loss" to the international community, noting how the island performed "very well" in responding to the COVID-19 pandemic.

Members of the group are from the Constitutional Democratic Party of Japan, the Japan Innovation Party and the Democratic Party for the People, of which Maehara is a senior official.

Taiwan is excluded from most international organizations due to opposition from Beijing, which regards the island as one of its provinces and not a country.

Maehara said Taiwan is a very important friend of Japan, and Tokyo will fully support the Taiwanese people's desire to maintain the status quo and oppose unilateral change by force.

Tsai said Japan has always been an important democratic ally of Taiwan in the face of various challenges and thanked the country for supporting Taiwan on the international stage.

Noting that Taiwanese people have made over 1 million visits to Japan since the start of this year, the president expressed hope that Taiwan-Japan relations can be even closer.
PwC Australias government business will become a new company called Scyne Advisory after the embattled consulting giant offloaded it to private equity firm Allegro Funds in a $1 fire sale, seeking to move on from its damaging tax leaks scandal.

Scyne is set to be fully independent of the scandal-rocked consulting firm and will take on 1750 PwC employees, Allegro said in a statement on Tuesday morning confirming the binding deal. The private equity fund said it expected to invest more than $100 million to support the business in the future.

PwC has offloaded its scandal-damaged government business. Credit: Martin Ollman

To boost corporate governance standards, Scyne will have an independent board of directors. Former Federal Court judge Andrew Greenwood will join as non-executive director, and candidates for an independent chair, a CEO and more non-executive directors are still being interviewed, the statement said.

In the interim, 12 senior leaders of PwCs Government Health Infrastructure and Defence (GHID) and Trust and Risk (T&R) divisions, which together make up the new company, will lead the business to minimise interruption to client work.
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 Theres a question that niggles throughout Hijack, Apple TVs new series about, well, a plane hijack. In the show, Idris Elba plays Sam Nelson, a high-end corporate deal-sealer who by chance finds himself in the middle of a major crisis situation on a flight back from Dubai to London, and winds up playing negotiator with the hijackers. Which is all well and good but why, you wonder, doesnt Idris Elba just go full Idris Elba on their sorry hijacker asses? When will the human colossus from Thor and the Avengers, or the one-man vengeance mission from Luther, or even the gangland kingpin from The Wire, or better still the pro kickboxer from the reality series Idris Elba: Fighter, unleash himself, end the hijack and get back to his loving family, Die Hard-style? The worst plane ride of your life: Idris Elba in Hijack. Credit: Apple TV+ This, it turns out, was all part of the plan. I was keen not to play the version that we all expect, Elba says, speaking in London. That was a theme for us all throughout. We said, Lets call it Hijack [he does a big Hollywood announcer voice] and then show people something else. Subvert all the tropes, including the leading character, the great negotiator, being this tough guy. Later, he says, well see that Sam cant really fight, even though hes big. Hes not this action hero who just headbutts everyone. Hes not even that good a negotiator. Hes just desperate to get home. The set-up for hijack is that Sam is on his way back from a job in Dubai with only a fancy necklace and a ream of apologies as hand-luggage. Hes on his way to try and win back his estranged wife (Christine Adams) although if the charisma and persuasiveness he exhibits on the plane, essentially, his Idris Elba-ness, is anything to go by that shouldnt be a problem.

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When we meet Sam hes vulnerable, says Elba. Hes not going to be this action hero with big muscles who can just hit everyone because hes not built that way. Hes just going to try and talk himself in to this, to then try and get himself out of it. Hijack plays out in realtime  a seven-hour flight from Dubai to London translates as seven hour-long episodes that are as seat-gripping, holiday cancelling and relentlessly more-ish as youd expect. Archie Panjabi (The Good Wife) plays a counter-terrorism officer on the ground in London trying to second-guess the hijackers next move. Max Beesley (Suits) is the UK police detective tasked with tracking down their enablers and puppetmasters. But basically, Hijack is the worst plane ride of your life made bearable only by the presence of Idris Elba for company, and for Elba that meant a lot of screentime spent in the confines of an aeroplane. They built the whole plane, he says, 360 degrees, a real plane just in a studio, no sides taken off to fit the cameras like normal. So that as an audience you watch it and say, Ive been in that, Ive seen that seat, that aisle, that kitchen area. The claustrophobia bleeds in to you. It becomes a really interesting balance between a documentary and a drama. Meeting Elba in the flesh you quickly realise that six months filming inside a plane fuselage cant have been easy: today, wearing a dark green linen shorts and shirt combo (with Gucci sliders) it couldnt be more apparent that theres a lot of him. Hes six foot two, broad, precisely the kind of guy who would happily pay for extra legroom just to make a flight bearable. (Although, as he points out, his character Sam, luckily enough, is seated in the first-class cabin and so gets to stretch out a bit.) It made the logistics of filming Hijack a challenge. There was this one moment where Sam has to get from one place to the other, right, and hes got to sneak about and hes got to run down the aisle and then hide. It didnt work: one of the extras kept saying, Er, I can see you! I said, Of course you can, Im f---ing massive. It was a problem. What would you do on a plane if you couldnt hide? How would you get around  look at the size of me. I ended up having to crawl, creeping past peoples feet and Jim [Field Smith, director and executive producer] having to get under the seats to film otherwise people would be like, Er, look  theres an elephant running down the aisle.

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Whatever they did, it works. Hijack wraps a still, taut performance from Elba in a tense, occasionally frenzied thriller; even among some barmy plotting it sustains that tension right across the piece. Elba plays a one-man vengeance mission in Luther. Credit: John Wilson/Netflix I ask Elba if hes ever been in a similarly tense situation requiring some Sam Nelson-style Zen arbitration. Im expecting him to tell me about cutting some major studio deal or arranging a product promotion, but instead he launches in to a story about nearly getting himself killed. I was in a situation one time a bit like Sam where I nearly lost me f---ing life. It was at a party in America actually. It was a guy at the back of this club wailing on his missus, screaming in her face, Ill f---ing kill you, and so on. I, drunkenly, was taking a piss around the corner and I came round and I go, Whoa, whoa, whoa! Look how beautiful she is. Why would you talk to this beautiful princess like that? He pulled out a gun, stuck it right in my face. Goes, You talking about my girl? Are you f---ing talking about my girl? Elba says that his line of reasoning was that paying the man a compliment about his girlfriend would make him see sense and stop screaming at her. He got that one wrong. No, he thought I was trying to hit on her. I just remember thinking, Dont play negotiations like that where youre doing one thing and trying to make something else happen. Consequences, man. The presence of Elba in front of me shows that there were no consequences to his clubland near-miss. Luckily. On Hijack, its safe to say that the consequences of Sams actions, at least for Sam, are similarly positive, as you dont kill off your major star (and executive producer) if you can possibly help it. But its important, Elba says, to keep the audience guessing.

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University students enrolled in arts degrees are shunning traditional English and history majors as the number of undergraduates taking those subjects tumbles to a 10-year low.

National data showed the number of arts students choosing history majors plunged by a third in the past decade, while enrolments in literature had fallen by more than a quarter.

English honours student Abeni Termytelen, who is studying at the University of Sydney. Credit: Louise Kennerley

Almost 4500 fewer undergraduate arts students were enrolled in 2021 across both subjects when compared with 2011, a downturn academics said was a result of a shift to job-ready, skills-based courses, humanities fee hikes and the influence of technology.

The change in our attention spans and move to visual storytelling has put huge pressure on us, said Jesper Gulddal, an English lecturer at the University of Newcastle.
On a grey winters day at Sydneys Taronga Zoo, Prime Minister Anthony Albanese and Indonesian President Joko Widodo formally met to announce an agreement to relax onerous visa rules for Indonesians who want to travel to Australia.

Indonesians will gain access to an extended business visa for up to five years, and will be eligible for quicker transit through Australian passport control through smart gate machines at 10 Australian airports. They will also be eligible for frequent traveller visas.

Prime Minister Anthony Albanese and Indonesian President Joko Widodo at Taronga Zoo today. Credit: James Brickwood

This offers a 10-year visa validity, making an enormous difference and removing bureaucratic impediments to our closer relationship, Albanese said. Today our relationship shifts up another gear, our countries continue to choose to draw closer together.

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Widodo thanked Albanese for the warm welcome and his commitments, saying there had been many positive developments since Albaneses visit to the presidential palace in Bangor last year, when the pair rode bamboo bicycles around the palace grounds.

On this visit, Widodo and Albanese also discussed climate funding initiatives, education partnerships, and developing batteries for electric vehicles.

We want the Indo-Pacific to become a stable and peaceful region that focuses on collaboration and concrete cooperation, Widodo said.
Coalition frontbencher Jacinta Nampijinpa Price has left open the door to working with One Nation leader Pauline Hanson on the written No case to be published in the official Voice referendum pamphlet, after they met in Parliament House last month to discuss Hansons potential contribution.

Hanson wants the No pamphlet to include the claim that the Voice will override the supremacy of parliament, which has been widely rejected by constitutional law experts, as well as unfounded assertions that it could pave the way for a separate Indigenous state and racially exclusive seats in parliament.

Coalition frontbencher Jacinta Nampijinpa Price and Liberal senator Paul Scarr met with One National leader Pauline Hanson to discuss the No pamphlet last month. Credit: Alex Ellinghausen

She has outlined her case against the Voice in a 2138-word essay, which she says she handed to Queensland Liberal National senator Paul Scarr, who also attended the meeting in Prices parliamentary office, during the final sitting week in June before parliament rose for the winter recess.

Price is chairing the Coalition committee that will formulate the No camps written case while Scarr is deputy chair. Their document will form the opposing half of the official Yes/No referendum pamphlet that the Australian Electoral Commission is required to distribute to every Australian household at least 14 days before the vote. There is no legal requirement for the pamphlet to be truthful or accurate.
I have had the immense privilege of knowing three of my great-grandparents. One of them  known as Nana Smith to the great-grandchildren  taught me how to knit, and could thoroughly beat me in Scrabble.

Because I knew so many of my grand and great-grandparents, I have also been a regular visitor to several aged care facilities.

Older Australians should pay more for aged care. Credit: Dominic Lorrimer

Nana Smith spent her ninth decade in a relatively nice establishment, but the facilities my other grandparents lived in were more basic. One was particularly grim.

It was the grim state of many aged care facilities around the country that eventually led to the aged care royal commission. The final, 2800-page report, titled Neglect, highlighted just how bad the system was and made nearly 150 recommendations to fix it.
Ukrainians watched with glee as Russia flirted with civil war on June 24. They had hoped that Yevgeny Prigozhins march on Moscow would tie up Russian troops and destabilise Vladimir Putins regime. Alas, the insurrection proved short-lived. In recent days Ukraines army has made modest advances in the east. But a counteroffensive that began on June 4 shows little sign of breaking through Russian lines in force any time soon, making some Western officials nervous.

Still, Ukraine has made some hay with the disarray next door. Its army made striking progress in the eastern town of Bakhmut, which Prigozhins Wagner Group had captured only last month after almost a year of fighting. Ukrainian forces now threaten to encircle Russian defenders from the north and south. Volodymyr Zelensky, Ukraines president, hailed a happy day after visiting front lines on June 26. Russia responded with a dinner-time missile strike on a popular restaurant in Kramatorsk on June 27, 30 kilometres from the front line. It killed at least eight people, including three children.

Ukrainian servicemen fire mortar towards Russian positions at the frontline near Bakhmut, Credit: AP

The aim of Ukraines offensive towards Bakhmut appears less to enter the city than to surround it. We can now hit any point in the city and on the approaches  We are working to cut off their logistics, says Denys Yaroslavksy, a special-forces officer fighting to the north of Bakhmut. Serhiy Cherevaty, a military spokesman, confirmed that a number of brigades advanced around Bakhmut by about two kilometres on the day of Prigozhins mutiny.

The front lines shifted elsewhere, too. Ukraines capture of territory in the western suburbs of Donetsk city was especially telling: troops crossed into territory which Russia had captured in 2015, during its first invasion of Ukraine. Farther west, in the Kherson region, Ukrainian forces established small bridgeheads above and below the partially destroyed Kakhovka dam. Some officials suggest that Ukraine may be able to conduct a more serious crossing of the rapidly desiccating Kakhovka reservoir in the weeks to come.
Pickens, South Carolina: Former President Donald Trump marked a return to the large-scale rallies of his previous presidential campaigns on Saturday, speaking to thousands gathered in the streets of a small South Carolina city on a blazing day ahead of the July 4 holiday.

Former US President Donald Trump delivers remarks at his Make America Great Again rally in Pickens, South Carolina on Saturday. Credit: Reuters

Theres nowhere else Id rather be to kick off the Fourth of July weekend than right here on Main Street, with thousands of hardworking South Carolina patriots who believe in God, family and country, Trump said to a roaring crowd standing on asphalt as temperatures climbed into the 30s.

It wasnt immediately clear how many people had gathered in the streets of downtown Pickens, a small city in South Carolinas conservative Upstate of about 3400 residents. Law enforcement officials told some media outlets that about 15,000 people had gathered by 11am, two hours before Trumps remarks.
KYODO NEWS - Jul 3, 2023 - 12:46 | All, World

U.S. Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen will make a four-day visit to Beijing from Thursday for meetings with senior officials as the United States and China seek to increase high-level communication, despite disagreements on a host of political and economic issues.

The Treasury Department, which announced Yellen's trip to China on Sunday, said her discussions with Chinese officials will focus on ways to "responsibly manage" bilateral ties, communicate directly about areas of concern and work together to deal with global challenges.

Yellen's meetings will take place about two weeks after U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken traveled to Beijing and agreed to stabilize the complex relationship between the world's two largest economies.

Blinken's trip was the first Cabinet-level visit since the administration of Joe Biden began in January 2021.

After the long-awaited visit, Biden, however, called Chinese President Xi Jinping a "dictator" during a fundraising event in California and his remark triggered a strong reaction from Beijing.

Biden later suggested he would not retract the comment. "The idea of my choosing and avoiding saying what I think is the facts with regard to the relationship with...China is just not something I'm going to change very much," Biden said, adding he expects to meet with Xi "sometime in the future, in the near term."

A senior Treasury official, who briefed reporters on the upcoming visit, said it is important for the two countries that collectively represent about 40 percent of global output to "understand each other's actions and to cooperate where possible."

"So even where we disagree, it's vital to maintain communication to prevent misinterpretations and unintended consequences," the official said, while stressing the United States seeks "healthy economic competition" with Beijing and has no intention of pursuing economic decoupling.

At the same time, the official said there are concerns regarding a number of Chinese actions, such as its non-market economic practices and revised counterespionage law, so the U.S. government does not expect "significant breakthroughs" stemming from the first trip by Yellen.

Whereas Blinken met with Xi, the official said Yellen is unlikely to have a chance to converse with the Chinese leader on her visit through Sunday, noting that historically it is not typical for a U.S. Treasury secretary to do so.

The Treasury official, who spoke on condition of anonymity, said a major purpose of the visit is to engage with the new Chinese economic team formed in March.

The official did not disclose with whom Yellen will hold talks, but one of her counterparts is likely to be Vice Premier He Lifeng, who is in charge of economic and financial affairs.

During the visit, Yellen is also due to directly engage with leading U.S. companies doing business in China, as well as Chinese citizens.

Related coverage:

U.S. to expand semiconductor export controls on China

Blinken says U.S. agrees with China on stabilizing ties

China sharply reacts to Biden's labeling of Xi as "dictator"
In most Western countries, the ideals of our societies are works in progress, to put it as nicely as possible, and of course many of those over the centuries who have wound up on the wrong side of the ledger dont think the niceness is necessary. We may be at the cusp of a new era where this reality is ignored  and progress reversed.

The US Supreme Court made plain its status as a coldly atavistic force in the countrys social landscape last week. It did it by turning away from, by refusing to give notice to, the vulnerable and victimised. Thats not what the phrase justice is blind is supposed to mean.

Same old story ... context is everything. Black Americans carry signs for equal rights, integrated schools, decent housing, and an end to bias in the early 1960s. Credit: Buyenlarge

The most far-reaching of the several rulings it released effectively outlaws affirmative action at universities in America. The case, brought against Harvard and the University of North Carolina, brought to an end the measures institutions of higher learning take to diversify their student bodies. (To be blunt, thats a euphemism for admit more African-American students than their strict admissions standards would otherwise permit.) The court, in an opinion written by Chief Justice John Roberts, flatly outlawed race as a consideration in university admissions.

Ive seen the admissions debate over my whole life. I can offer some insight into how this radical overturning of a core societal precept was allowed to happen. It began in 1978 when a prospective medical student named Allan Bakke, who was white, sued the University of California (which I attended), arguing that he was excluded by less-qualified black students.
On 14 June 2023, the 3rd Meeting of the General Aviation Working Group (GAWG) was held at the World Customs Organization (WCO) Headquarters in Brussels, Belgium. The meeting aimed to discuss matters related to combating organized crime activities in the general aviation sector.

This event was a collaborative effort by the EU-funded COLIBRI Project (WCO) and the Monitoring and Support Project for the Global Illicit Flows Programme (MASIF). It provided an opportunity to appreciate the value of employing a multi-agency and multi-country approach in the complex domain of General Aviation.

The GAWG was established as a platform to facilitate interactions among practitioners, enabling them to discuss challenges associated with General Aviation threats and identify common areas of interest and possible synergies. The Group aims to foster the exchange of experiences and good practices among specialists and explore ways to enhance joint operational work and deepen inter-agency collaboration.

The Meeting took place in a hybrid format and was moderated by representatives of the WCO, MASIF and the Maritime Analysis and Operations Centre  Narcotics (MAOC-N). It brought together representatives from various European law enforcement administrations. The participants attended either in person or online, representing a wide range of aviation and law enforcement activities, thus bringing together complementary expertise.

During the 3rd GAWG Meeting, participants exchanged views on: (a) the functioning and objectives of the Working Group; (b) the challenges and latest trends identified in the use of General Aviation as a vector for criminal activities; and (c) good practices from Europe, Latin America and Africa.

There was also a discussion on the availability of open-source information and data to law enforcement agencies, and their utilization in General Aviation surveillance. The COLIBRI Project team introduced the topic by showcasing various analyses that could complement the data collected by the agencies. This led to interesting exchanges among the participants.

The Meeting concluded with a discussion on next steps and recommendations for the Working Groups 4th Meeting, scheduled for December 2023. The positive interactions and momentum within the Group confirmed the importance and added value of bringing together practitioners from different backgrounds.

As we continue to address the challenges in the field of General Aviation, we look forward to further strengthening our collective efforts to enhance inter-agency coordination and make significant progress in achieving our mission.

For more information or any queries, please contact the COLIBRI team at colibri@wcoomd.org.
Staff members work on the fiberglass production line of Jushi Egypt in Suez, Egypt, June 26, 2023.(Xinhua/Wang Dongzhen)

by Xinhua writer Shen Danlin

CAIRO, June 30 (Xinhua) -- "Here, a young man with great ambitions finally had his dream come true after 11 years of hard work," Ahmed Soliman, the deputy general manager of Jushi Egypt, told Xinhua when he recalled his journey to career success in the Chinese fiberglass giant.

Soliman's adventure began 11 years ago when, fresh out of university at the age of 23, he secured a position as a technician in the roving workshop at Jushi Egypt's factory in the country's northern Suez Governorate.

Back in 2012, fiberglass manufacturing was uncharted territory for the North African country. "For me and most Egyptians and even people in other Middle Eastern countries, fiberglass manufacturing is an entirely unfamiliar term," Soliman said.

After doing a quick research on the internet, Soliman realized that joining Jushi Egypt is "a great opportunity not easy to meet again," and did his best to get the job. "Today I can say I am proud to join this Chinese company," beamed the 34-year-old executive, one of the two most senior Egyptian employees at Jushi Egypt.

The success story of Soliman is only a small chapter of Jushi Egypt's saga in the most populous Arab country. Since entering China-Egypt TEDA Suez Economic and Trade Cooperation Zone in January 2012, Jushi Egypt has established the Egyptian fiberglass industry from scratch. At present, the company's fiberglass manufacturing base has an annual production capacity of 340,000 tonnes, making Egypt the largest fiberglass producer in Africa and the fourth largest producer in the world.

As a subsidiary company controlled by China's Jushi Group, the world's largest fiberglass manufacturer, Jushi Egypt has created more than 2,000 jobs, generated over 40 million U.S. dollars in tax revenue, and brought in more than 1 billion dollars in foreign exchange income for Egypt. The company's success is a mutually beneficial outcome of the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI), a global economic cooperation framework launched by China in 2013.

While contributing to Egypt's economic development, Jushi Egypt has become one of the leading enterprises in the Suez Canal Economic Zone and the largest Chinese investment project in the Egyptian manufacturing sector.

Furthermore, the China-Egypt TEDA Suez Economic and Trade Cooperation Zone, where Jushi Egypt is located, has flourished through the deepening collaboration between the two countries. It is one of the leading industrial parks in Egypt and boasts the largest investment and the highest unit output, attracting more than 130 Chinese companies and providing over 50,000 direct and indirect job opportunities.

Guided by the ancient Chinese proverb, "Give a man a fish and you feed him for a day; teach a man to fish and you feed him for a lifetime," Jushi Egypt has been committed to teaching young Egyptian talents "to fish."

Besides frequently asking Chinese experts to Egypt to train local technical and management teams, Jushi has also sent a significant number of Egyptian employees to its headquarters in China to learn advanced production and management models. Soliman went to the headquarters for training three times in 2012, 2016, and 2023.

According to Karim Rabea, head of the human resources department at Jushi Egypt, the company treats Chinese and Egyptian employees equally in terms of recruitment and promotion. More than 98 percent of the employees and 78 percent of middle management in Jushi Egypt are Egyptians.

Dina Mahmoud, deputy manager of the planning and logistics department, is an experienced employee who has worked at Jushi Egypt for 10 years, and the only woman in the middle management. Recalling her hard work in the past decade, Dina was deeply touched by the achievements made by herself and the company.

"Through the years, the production output has been increasing. Since the first production line started in 2013, the monthly output has more than quadrupled which was a big challenge to all of us," Dina said.

Dina also found her true love at Jushi Egypt.

"The first time I met my husband Abdallah was in Jushi. He was the deputy manager of the felting workshop. He helped me a lot during work and made me understand many technical details of the production process," said Dina, who could not hide her smile when speaking of her family.

At the stone storage yard at Jushi Egypt, hills of different stones there will turn into snow-white, steel-hard and paper-light fiberglass through the advanced manufacturing process brought by Jushi, earning much-needed foreign exchange incomes for Egypt and tapping Egypt's rich mineral and human resources efficiently.

Like the BRI connecting China and Egypt, the fiberglass produced by Jushi has not only helped achieve mutual benefit and common development between the two countries but also brought closer the friendship between the two peoples.

Although there is only one general manager who ranks higher than him at Jushi Egypt, Soliman does not think his career at Jushi will stop there. "With our company becoming more international, integrated, and green, I will double my efforts to meet the higher requirements of the company. I believe I will be better in the future than I am now," he said.

"The potential is unlimited. I believe we will always be the best," Soliman told Xinhua. 

This photo taken on June 26, 2023 shows an exterior view of a workshop of Jushi Egypt in Suez, Egypt.(Xinhua/Wang Dongzhen)

This photo taken on June 26, 2023 shows an exterior view of a workshop of Jushi Egypt in Suez, Egypt.(Xinhua/Wang Dongzhen)

A staff member works on the fiberglass production line of Jushi Egypt in Suez, Egypt, June 26, 2023.(Xinhua/Wang Dongzhen)

This photo taken on June 26, 2023 shows an exterior view of a workshop of Jushi Egypt in Suez, Egypt.(Xinhua/Wang Dongzhen)

Dina Mahmoud, deputy manager of the planning and logistics department, poses for a photo with her husband Abdallah, deputy manager of the felting workshop, at Jushi Egypt in Suez, Egypt, June 26, 2023.(Xinhua/Wang Dongzhen)

Staff members work on the fiberglass production line of Jushi Egypt in Suez, Egypt, June 26, 2023.(Xinhua/Wang Dongzhen)

This aerial photo taken on Jan. 6, 2023 shows a view of Jushi Egypt in Suez, Egypt.(Jushi Egypt/Handout via Xinhua)

Ahmed Soliman (R), the deputy general manager of Jushi Egypt, talks with a staff member at a workshop of Jushi Egypt in Suez, Egypt, June 26, 2023.(Xinhua/Wang Dongzhen)

This photo taken on June 26, 2023 shows fiberglass products of Jushi Egypt in Suez, Egypt.(Xinhua/Wang Dongzhen)

This photo taken on June 26, 2023 shows a packaging workshop of Jushi Egypt in Suez, Egypt.(Xinhua/Wang Dongzhen)

A staff member works on the fiberglass production line of Jushi Egypt in Suez, Egypt, June 26, 2023.(Xinhua/Wang Dongzhen)

This photo taken on Sept. 7, 2022 shows an office building of the China-Egypt TEDA Suez Economic and Trade Cooperation Zone in Suez, Egypt.(Xinhua/Wang Dongzhen)

Ahmed Soliman (R), the deputy general manager of Jushi Egypt, talks with a staff member at a workshop of Jushi Egypt in Suez, Egypt, June 26, 2023.(Xinhua/Wang Dongzhen)

A staff member works on the fiberglass production line of Jushi Egypt in Suez, Egypt, June 26, 2023.(Xinhua/Wang Dongzhen)

This photo taken on June 26, 2023 shows fiberglass products of Jushi Egypt in Suez, Egypt.(Xinhua/Wang Dongzhen)




ROME, July 2 (Xinhua) -- Qu Dongyu was re-elected as director-general of the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) on Sunday during the ongoing 43rd session of the FAO Conference in Rome.

Qu was first elected in June 2019 to head the UN agency and is the first Chinese national to serve in the position.

Since assuming office, Qu has actively led the FAO to address the challenges concerning global food security and contribute to the food and agricultural development of all countries, especially developing countries. His efforts have been extensively recognized by FAO member nations.

Founded in 1945 and headquartered in Rome, Italy, FAO is a specialized UN agency leading cooperation in food and agriculture. The organization plays a vital role in global food and agricultural policy exchanges, standard-setting, information gathering and statistics.





Produced by Xinhua Global Service




KUTZTOWN, Pa.  The Kutztown Folk Festival is always looking to give people good old-fashioned Pennsylvania Dutch experiences while adding new and interesting attractions. This year, GoggleWorks Center for the Arts is on site as part of a new partnership.

"We felt it was a very natural collaboration, because we are a community-focused art center," said Maggie Gallen, GoggleWorks' programs director. "It felt like aligned with our mission and our goal."

GoggleWorks has a variety of activities to do, demonstrations to see and, of course, things to buy.

"We're doing a block-printing tote bag station that a lot of people are gravitating towards," Gallen said.

"I went up to the kid section and I made a bag there with little prints with ink," said 8-year-old Allison, who was visiting from New Jersey with her family.

From modern trends to old-fashioned activities, there is something for everyone.

"The Pennsylvania Dutch apple butter, which is pretty much an apple sauce that you cook for about 20 hours," said Matt Esser, a Kutztown local who has been working at the folk festival for the past 25 years. "Every hour, you add a gallon of cider to it and evaporate the waters off of it and leave behind those natural sugars."

The festival will run through Sunday. Admission costs $16 for adults and $6 for children between the ages of 13 and 17. Children 12 and under are admitted free of charge. A weekly pass is available to purchase for $40. Parking is free.
WYOMISSING, Pa.  The inaugural "Berks County Field of Honor" is ready to honor heroes, just in time for July Fourth.

"We're setting up all of these United States Flags that have been dedicated to honor various heroes in our area," said Gail Landis, director of public relations for the West Reading-Wyomissing Rotary Club.

Each flag was raised as a "thank you."

"We're honoring veterans as well as law enforcement," said Ed Ogden, co-chair of the Berks County Field of Honor.

The flags are waving high at Stone House Pond with the help of the West Reading-Wyomissing Rotary Club.

The display is representing those who have sacrificed their lives for the freedoms we have every day.

"We thought it was very appropriate to coordinate a way to honor them, particularly on the Fourth of July," Ogden said.

The flags were dedicated by Wyomissing locals and businesses for everyone to see.

"All week they will be up," Landis said.

"For each on of the flags, there will be a medallion that hangs on it so when you come out to the field, you can check out the medallion," said Carolyne Jordan, co-chair of the Berks County Field of Honor.

As the Fourth of July approaches, it's a way to say "thank you" to those who helped us get where we are today.

"People should remember what was done to preserve our flag and what is currently done," said Ogden.
BETHLEHEM, Pa.  Richard Szulborski was a realtor by profession, but he was a man of many interests, a man who found joy in service and faith.

Szulborski, who died last week at age 74, was known to all as "Bucky." He was a two-time Northampton Country controller, and he served on Bethlehem City Council for 12 years. He was active with many Bethlehem organizations, including the Sun Inn Preservation Association and his church, Incarnation of Our Lord Parish, in South Bethlehem.

He loved the city of Bethlehem. He knew its history, but it was never stuffy to Szulborski. He tried to bring a spirit of fun to everything he did, whether he was at Plaza Realty, in government or in church.

Szulborski was all business when presenting financial reports to Northampton County, but before meetings started, he was known for kidding around. That carried over to all his activities.

"Bucky was a long-time faithful parishioner and servant of the community," said Father Andrew Gehringer, pastor of Incarnation parish. Szulborski was a member of the parish's finance council and pastoral council. Those are serious positions, but Szulborski found a way to mix humor with service.

"He had a fun-loving spirit and loved to make people laugh. Just last Sunday (June 25), over coffee and doughnuts after mass, he mentioned how his doctor told him he should not eat doughnuts. But he retorted quickly to his doctor that 'doughnuts were a celebration of the Holy Eucharist, which made it OK,'" Gehringer recalled.

"He will be missed dearly by the Incarnation parish family," the pastor said.

Northampton County Executive Lamont McClure said Szulborski brought that same attitude to his role as county controller, an important but not exactly glamorous post. The controller is the independent fiscal watchdog of county finances, carrying out audits and reviewing spending.

"Richard 'Bucky' Szulborski brought enthusiasm and joy to his time as county controller," McClure said. "He stepped up for the people of Northampton County twice to ensure that the controller's office had a sure and steady hand when the office became vacant."

When Stephen J. Barron Jr. resigned as controller in 2018 to serve as director of fiscal affairs in McClure's administration, Szulborski took over as an appointee. He returned in 2021 after the death of Tony Bassil.

"The passing of Tony Bassil was a devastating personal and professional loss to us," McClure said. "The passing of Bucky only magnifies the grief we feel and highlights the tremendous value both gentlemen brought to the Office of Northampton County Controller."

Szulborski was also a tie to "old school" Bethlehem politics. He served on City Council from 1984 to 1996, alongside Dolores Caskey, Jack Lawrence, James Delgrosso, Otto Ehrsam Jr., George Karabin and Michael Loupos, among others.

The city was changing, and by the end of Szulborski's final term, Bethlehem Steel Corp. was fading away and new faces were moving into government. Democrat Paul Marcincin was mayor when Szulborski joined council, and by the time he left, Republican Ken Smith was in charge of the city. The next two elected mayors, Don Cunningham and John Callahan, were part of a new generation of leadership.

His return to office as controller reflected Szulborski's belief in service, Northampton County Council member Lori Vargo Heffner said.

"He stepped up every time he was asked," she said. "He did it without any opportunistic motive. He only wanted the opportunity to serve." Szulborski was one of the "good guys" of politics and "he will be very much missed," she said.

Richard "Bucky" Szulborski was born Feb. 1, 1949 in Bethlehem, according to his obituary, posted by the Cantelmi Long Funeral Homes. He died June 30.

Szulborski earned a Bachelor of Business Administration degree from Drake College of Florida, Fort Lauderdale. He worked as head of the finance department for the Lehigh Valley Railroad and as a real estate agent, in addition to his two terms as interim County Controller and 12 years on Bethlehem City Council.

His community activities included the Christmas City Fair, Camelot for Children, South Bethlehem Historical Society, past president of the Miss Pennsylvania Scholarship Organization, Sun Inn Preservation Association, Regular Fellows.

Services will be private. Contributions may be made in his memory to Incarnation of Our Lord Parish, 617 Pierce St., Bethlehem PA 18015.
FORKS TWP., Pa. - Police have issued an arrest warrant for a woman who victims say assaulted and robbed them on Saturday afternoon.

The woman, Taylor Marie Llorens, allegedly assaulted and took the cell phones of two residents in the first block of Saratoga Court in Forks Township around 1:40 p.m. Saturday, police said. Llorens fled the scene and was thought to be heading to New York City, police said.

Llorens, 30, is described as a white woman with black hair and brown eyes. She stands 5-foot-6 and weighs 129 pounds, police said.

According to Forks police, Llorens is charged with two counts of harassment, as well as one count each of robbery, assault, and unauthorized use of an automobile.

Police ask anyone with information on Llorens' whereabouts to call 610-759-2200.
ALTOONA, Pa.  Sheetz announced it will celebrate Independence Day by reducing its gas prices to $1.776 a gallon on July Fourth.

The limited-time promotion will begin at 12:01 a.m. on Tuesday, July 4, and will last all day, or while promotional gallons last. The reduced pricing commemorates the year when the Declaration of Independence was signed.

The discounted price will apply to regular, E85 (flex fuel), unleaded 88, mid-grade and premium fuel grades at all Sheetz locations in Pennsylvania, Maryland, Ohio, North Carolina, Virginia and West Virginia. It will not apply to any diesel or ethanol free (E0) fuel offerings.

"We hope this discount helps our customers keep a little more change in their wallets as they travel to celebrate the 4th of July with friends and family, with an obvious nod to our nation's birthday," said Travis Sheetz, the company's president and CEO.

Customers can check if their local Sheetz sells a particular grade through the Sheetz mobile app or website.
JENIN, West Bank (AP)  Israel on Monday launched its most intense military operation in the occupied West Bank in nearly two decades, carrying out a series of drone strikes and sending hundreds of troops on an open-ended mission into a militant stronghold. At least eight Palestinians were killed and dozens wounded.

The crackdown was reminiscent of Israeli military tactics during the second Palestinian uprising in the early 2000s and came at a time of growing domestic pressure for a tough response to recent attacks on Israeli settlers, including a shooting last month that killed four Israelis.

The operation took place in the Jenin refugee camp  an area in the northern West Bank that has long been known as a bastion of militants. The fighting, which began shortly after midnight, continued past nightfall.

Throughout the day, black smoke rose from the crowded streets of the camp, a densely populated neighborhood that is home to some 14,000 people, while exchanges of fire rang out and drones could be heard buzzing overhead. Military bulldozers plowed through narrow streets, damaging buildings as they cleared the way for Israeli forces.

There are bulldozers destroying the streets, snipers are inside and on roofs of houses, drones are hitting houses and Palestinians are killed in the streets, said Jamal Huweil, a political activist in the camp, predicting the operation would fail.

The military blocked traffic in and out of Jenin, and the city resembled a ghost town. Streets were empty as armored Israeli vehicles patrolled. Piles of burning tires and garbage containers littered traffic circles. Power and water supplies were knocked out in the camp.

Palestinian youths occasionally threw stones at army vehicles before darting away.

With the sound of shooting and explosions in the background, at least 10 ambulances rushed to the overwhelmed local hospital as relatives checked to see if loved ones were inside. One ambulance arrived with a bullet hole in front.

The Palestinians and three Arab countries with normalized ties with Israel  Jordan, Egypt and the United Arab Emirates  condemned the incursion, as did the 57-nation Organization of Islamic Cooperation.

Late Monday, the Palestinian leadership in the West Bank held an emergency meeting and said it was halting its already limited contacts with Israel. Leaders said a freeze on security coordination would remain in place, and they vowed to step up activity against Israel in the United Nations and international bodies. They also planned to minimize contacts with the United States.

Israels prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, was unswayed.

In recent months, Jenin has turned into a safe haven for terrorism. We are putting an end to this, he said. He said the troops were destroying militant command centers and confiscating weapons supplies and factories. He claimed the operation was taking place with minimum harm to civilians.

Rear Adm. Daniel Hagari, the chief military spokesman, said there were a total of about 10 airstrikes  most of them aimed at keeping gunmen away from ground troops. He accused militants of operating next to a United Nations building and storing weapons inside of a mosque.

He said Israel launched the operation because some 50 attacks over the past year had emanated from Jenin.

Neither the prime minister nor Hagari gave any indication when the operation would end.

U.N. Mideast envoy Tor Wennesland warned that the escalation in the West Bank was very dangerous. Asked about the Israeli drone attacks on residential areas, U.N. spokesman Farhan Haq said: "Attacks on heavily populated areas are violations of international humanitarian law."

Lynn Hastings, the U.N. humanitarian coordinator in the Palestinian areas, said on Twitter that she was alarmed by scale of Israeli forces operation" and noted the airstrikes in a densely populated refugee camp. She said the U.N. was mobilizing humanitarian aid.

UNRWA, the U.N. agency for Palestinian refugees, said many camp residents were in need of food, drinking water and milk powder.

Late Monday, hundreds of Palestinians left the camp to flee the fighting. The Israeli army said it was allowing people who wanted to leave to do so. The Palestinian Red Crescent rescue service said as many as 3,000 people had left by midnight, and they expected the exodus to continue.

The Palestinian Health Ministry said at least eight Palestinians were killed and 50 people were wounded  10 critically. The dead were identified as young men and Palestinian youths, including a 16-year-old boy and two 17-year-olds.

Separately, a 21-year-old Palestinian was killed by Israeli fire near the West Bank city of Ramallah, the ministry said.

The Jenin camp and an adjacent town of the same name have been a flashpoint since Israeli-Palestinian violence began escalating in spring 2022.

Israel says it has stepped up activity because the Palestinian Authority is too weak to maintain quiet. It also accuses its archenemy Iran of funding militant groups involved in the fighting.

Palestinians reject such claims, saying the violence is a natural response to 56 years of occupation, including stepped-up settlement construction by Israel's government and increased violence by Jewish settlers.

Jenin was a major friction point in the last Palestinian uprising.

In 2002, days after a Palestinian suicide bombing during a large Passover gathering killed 30 people, Israeli troops launched a massive operation in the camp. For eight days and nights, they fought militants street by street, using armored bulldozers to destroy rows of homes, many of which had been booby-trapped.

Mondays raid came two weeks after another violent confrontation in Jenin that included the shooting death of a 15-year-old girl and after the military said a pair of rockets were fired from the area last week.

But there also may have been political considerations at play. Leading members of Netanyahus far-right government, which is dominated by West Bank settlers and their supporters, have called for a broader military response to the ongoing violence in the area, particularly after the June 20 shooting that killed four people in the Jewish settlement of Eli.

Proud of our heroes on all fronts and this morning especially of our soldiers operating in Jenin, tweeted National Security Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir, an ultranationalist who recently called for Israel to kill thousands of militants if necessary. Praying for their success.

Israeli military experts said they expected the operation to wrap up within a day or two. Prolonged violence and heavy casualties would risk attracting increased international criticism and drawing militants from the Gaza Strip or even Lebanon into the fighting.

Islamic Jihad, a militant group with a large presence in Jenin, threatened to launch attacks from its Gaza Strip stronghold if the fighting dragged on. Lebanons militant Hezbollah group also made threats, saying the Palestinians have many alternatives and means that will make the enemy regret its acts. Hezbollah fought a monthlong war against Israel in 2006.

More than 130 Palestinians have been killed this year in the West Bank, part of more than a yearlong spike in violence that has seen some of the worst bloodshed in the area in nearly two decades.

Israel says the raids are meant to beat back militants. The Palestinians say such violence is inevitable in the absence of any political process with Israel and increased West Bank settlement construction and violence by extremist settlers.

Israel says most of those killed have been militants, but stone-throwing youths protesting the incursions and people uninvolved in confrontations have also died.

Israel captured the West Bank, east Jerusalem and the Gaza Strip in the 1967 Mideast war. The Palestinians seek those territories for their hoped-for independent state.




CHENGDU, July 2 (Xinhua) -- Exhibitors attending the 19th Western China International Fair in Chengdu, China's Sichuan Province, expressed optimism about the business opportunities in western China.

The expo, which is being held from June 29 to July 3, showcased the Belt and Road cooperation, the development of the western regions, the digital economy and hydrogen industry.

Organizers plan to hold 50 activities, including over 30 investment promotion events.







Produced by Xinhua Global Service
StockNews.com upgraded shares of B2Gold (NYSEAMERICAN:BTG  Free Report) (TSE:BTO) from a buy rating to a strong-buy rating in a research report released on Friday.

BTG has been the topic of a number of other research reports. National Bank Financial raised their target price on shares of B2Gold from C$7.25 to C$7.75 in a research report on Friday, May 12th. BMO Capital Markets initiated coverage on shares of B2Gold in a report on Thursday, April 20th. They issued an outperform rating on the stock. Scotiabank raised their price target on shares of B2Gold from C$7.50 to C$8.00 in a report on Wednesday, April 12th. Royal Bank of Canada restated a sector perform rating and issued a $4.25 price target on shares of B2Gold in a report on Wednesday, March 8th. Finally, TheStreet cut shares of B2Gold from a b- rating to a c+ rating in a report on Friday, June 16th. Two research analysts have rated the stock with a hold rating, two have issued a buy rating and one has assigned a strong buy rating to the stock. According to MarketBeat.com, B2Gold has an average rating of Moderate Buy and an average price target of $6.46.

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B2Gold Price Performance

BTG stock opened at $3.57 on Friday. B2Gold has a 52 week low of $2.81 and a 52 week high of $4.40. The company has a quick ratio of 2.69, a current ratio of 4.00 and a debt-to-equity ratio of 0.01. The company has a fifty day simple moving average of $3.85 and a two-hundred day simple moving average of $3.51. The firm has a market capitalization of $4.62 billion, a P/E ratio of 14.28 and a beta of 0.96.

B2Gold Dividend Announcement

B2Gold ( NYSEAMERICAN:BTG Free Report ) (TSE:BTO) last posted its earnings results on Tuesday, May 9th. The basic materials company reported $0.10 EPS for the quarter, beating analysts consensus estimates of $0.07 by $0.03. The business had revenue of $473.56 million for the quarter, compared to the consensus estimate of $416.00 million. B2Gold had a net margin of 14.02% and a return on equity of 9.94%. Analysts anticipate that B2Gold will post 0.32 earnings per share for the current fiscal year.

The company also recently announced a quarterly dividend, which was paid on Tuesday, June 27th. Investors of record on Friday, June 16th were issued a $0.04 dividend. The ex-dividend date was Thursday, June 15th. This represents a $0.16 annualized dividend and a yield of 4.48%. B2Golds dividend payout ratio (DPR) is 64.00%.

Institutional Trading of B2Gold

A number of hedge funds and other institutional investors have recently added to or reduced their stakes in BTG. Global Retirement Partners LLC grew its position in shares of B2Gold by 48.3% during the first quarter. Global Retirement Partners LLC now owns 9,015 shares of the basic materials companys stock worth $36,000 after acquiring an additional 2,935 shares during the last quarter. Peapack Gladstone Financial Corp raised its stake in shares of B2Gold by 13.0% during the 1st quarter. Peapack Gladstone Financial Corp now owns 26,023 shares of the basic materials companys stock worth $103,000 after buying an additional 3,000 shares during the last quarter. Commonwealth Equity Services LLC raised its stake in shares of B2Gold by 10.4% during the 3rd quarter. Commonwealth Equity Services LLC now owns 38,054 shares of the basic materials companys stock worth $122,000 after buying an additional 3,600 shares during the last quarter. Signaturefd LLC raised its stake in shares of B2Gold by 140.1% during the 1st quarter. Signaturefd LLC now owns 6,406 shares of the basic materials companys stock worth $25,000 after buying an additional 3,738 shares during the last quarter. Finally, LPL Financial LLC raised its stake in B2Gold by 4.5% in the 4th quarter. LPL Financial LLC now owns 87,895 shares of the basic materials companys stock valued at $314,000 after purchasing an additional 3,800 shares during the last quarter. Institutional investors and hedge funds own 44.97% of the companys stock.

About B2Gold

(Free Report)

B2Gold Corp. operates as a gold producer with three operating mines in Mali, the Philippines, and Namibia. It operates the Fekola Mine in Mali, the Masbate Mine in the Philippines, and the Otjikoto Mine in Namibia. The company also has an 25% interest in the Calibre Mining Corp.; and approximately 19% interest in BeMetals Corp.

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Barclays initiated coverage on shares of Banco Latinoamericano de Comercio Exterior, S. A. (NYSE:BLX  Free Report) in a research report sent to investors on Thursday, The Fly reports. The firm issued an overweight rating and a $32.00 price target on the banks stock.

Separately, StockNews.com started coverage on shares of Banco Latinoamericano de Comercio Exterior, S. A. in a research note on Thursday, May 18th. They set a hold rating on the stock.

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Banco Latinoamericano de Comercio Exterior, S. A. Trading Up 1.7 %

Banco Latinoamericano de Comercio Exterior, S. A. stock opened at $22.06 on Thursday. The firm has a 50-day moving average of $19.63 and a 200-day moving average of $17.94. The firm has a market cap of $801.44 million, a P/E ratio of 6.81 and a beta of 1.15. Banco Latinoamericano de Comercio Exterior, S. A. has a 1-year low of $13.00 and a 1-year high of $22.11.

Banco Latinoamericano de Comercio Exterior, S. A. Announces Dividend

Banco Latinoamericano de Comercio Exterior, S. A. ( NYSE:BLX Free Report ) last issued its quarterly earnings data on Tuesday, April 18th. The bank reported $1.02 EPS for the quarter. Banco Latinoamericano de Comercio Exterior, S. A. had a net margin of 26.11% and a return on equity of 11.15%. The business had revenue of $59.20 million during the quarter.

The company also recently declared a quarterly dividend, which was paid on Wednesday, May 17th. Investors of record on Thursday, May 4th were issued a dividend of $0.25 per share. The ex-dividend date of this dividend was Wednesday, May 3rd. This represents a $1.00 annualized dividend and a yield of 4.53%. Banco Latinoamericano de Comercio Exterior, S. A.s payout ratio is 30.86%.

Hedge Funds Weigh In On Banco Latinoamericano de Comercio Exterior, S. A.

Hedge funds have recently added to or reduced their stakes in the company. Rhumbline Advisers grew its stake in Banco Latinoamericano de Comercio Exterior, S. A. by 2.3% in the 1st quarter. Rhumbline Advisers now owns 42,209 shares of the banks stock worth $734,000 after acquiring an additional 957 shares in the last quarter. Thomas White International Ltd. lifted its position in shares of Banco Latinoamericano de Comercio Exterior, S. A. by 0.3% in the 1st quarter. Thomas White International Ltd. now owns 353,718 shares of the banks stock worth $5,510,000 after purchasing an additional 1,021 shares during the period. LSV Asset Management lifted its position in shares of Banco Latinoamericano de Comercio Exterior, S. A. by 1.7% in the 4th quarter. LSV Asset Management now owns 972,198 shares of the banks stock worth $15,750,000 after purchasing an additional 15,990 shares during the period. Finally, Uniplan Investment Counsel Inc. lifted its position in shares of Banco Latinoamericano de Comercio Exterior, S. A. by 13.0% in the 1st quarter. Uniplan Investment Counsel Inc. now owns 307,465 shares of the banks stock worth $5,343,000 after purchasing an additional 35,410 shares during the period. 6.92% of the stock is currently owned by institutional investors.

About Banco Latinoamericano de Comercio Exterior, S. A.

(Free Report)

Banco Latinoamericano de Comercio Exterior, S. A., a multinational bank, primarily engages in the financing of foreign trade in Latin America and the Caribbean. The company operates through two segments, Commercial and Treasury. It also offers bilateral loans; structured loans including syndicated and clubbed, such as acquisition and pre-export financing, A/B loan financing, bridge loans, and liability management; and project financing.

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HARBIN, July 2 (Xinhua) -- "Haitun 1," China's first intelligent research vessel equipped with digital twin system, set out on its maiden voyage on Friday in Penglai City, east China's Shandong Province.

Heading for Qingdao, the vessel will conduct a series of experiments along the way using the latest technologies including panoramic lidar, 360-degree panoramic infrared vision system, and sound signal recognition system.

The vessel, developed by Harbin Engineering University, is 25 meters long with a displacement of about 100 tons.

It can accurately detect tiny targets 0.5 meters above the water surface within a distance of two nautical miles.

The successful development of "Haitun 1" is expected to promote the practical application and frontier exploration of digital twin technology in China's shipbuilding field.

Produced by Xinhua Global Service
Bancolombia S.A. (NYSE:CIB  Free Report) was the target of a large drop in short interest in June. As of June 15th, there was short interest totalling 632,200 shares, a drop of 44.1% from the May 31st total of 1,130,000 shares. Based on an average daily volume of 358,600 shares, the short-interest ratio is currently 1.8 days. Approximately 0.6% of the shares of the stock are short sold.

Institutional Trading of Bancolombia

Hedge funds and other institutional investors have recently bought and sold shares of the company. CWM LLC boosted its holdings in shares of Bancolombia by 86.8% in the 1st quarter. CWM LLC now owns 1,263 shares of the banks stock valued at $32,000 after purchasing an additional 587 shares during the last quarter. PNC Financial Services Group Inc. boosted its holdings in shares of Bancolombia by 13.7% in the 1st quarter. PNC Financial Services Group Inc. now owns 2,719 shares of the banks stock valued at $117,000 after purchasing an additional 327 shares during the last quarter. BNP Paribas Arbitrage SNC boosted its holdings in shares of Bancolombia by 74.1% in the 3rd quarter. BNP Paribas Arbitrage SNC now owns 4,922 shares of the banks stock valued at $120,000 after purchasing an additional 2,095 shares during the last quarter. Advisors Asset Management Inc. acquired a new position in shares of Bancolombia in the 4th quarter valued at $141,000. Finally, Campbell & CO Investment Adviser LLC acquired a new position in shares of Bancolombia in the 4th quarter valued at $206,000.

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Wall Street Analyst Weigh In

A number of research analysts have recently weighed in on the stock. TheStreet raised shares of Bancolombia from a c+ rating to a b- rating in a research note on Friday, April 14th. Bank of America cut shares of Bancolombia from a buy rating to a neutral rating in a research note on Thursday, April 27th. Two analysts have rated the stock with a hold rating and two have assigned a buy rating to the company. According to MarketBeat, the company presently has a consensus rating of Moderate Buy and a consensus price target of $31.00.

Bancolombia Trading Up 0.3 %

CIB stock traded up $0.07 during midday trading on Friday, hitting $26.68. The stock had a trading volume of 212,139 shares, compared to its average volume of 314,709. The firm has a market cap of $6.42 billion, a PE ratio of 4.29 and a beta of 1.16. The company has a debt-to-equity ratio of 0.50, a current ratio of 1.02 and a quick ratio of 1.02. Bancolombia has a 12-month low of $21.55 and a 12-month high of $33.23. The companys 50-day moving average price is $25.69 and its 200 day moving average price is $26.62.

Bancolombia (NYSE:CIB  Free Report) last released its earnings results on Wednesday, May 10th. The bank reported $1.54 EPS for the quarter, topping the consensus estimate of $1.46 by $0.08. The firm had revenue of $1.54 billion during the quarter, compared to analysts expectations of $1.41 billion. Bancolombia had a net margin of 18.25% and a return on equity of 17.92%. On average, equities research analysts predict that Bancolombia will post 5.14 earnings per share for the current fiscal year.

Bancolombia Cuts Dividend

The company also recently announced a quarterly dividend, which will be paid on Friday, July 14th. Shareholders of record on Friday, June 30th will be paid a $0.6959 dividend. The ex-dividend date is Thursday, June 29th. This represents a $2.78 annualized dividend and a yield of 10.43%. Bancolombias payout ratio is currently 54.66%.

About Bancolombia

(Free Report)

Bancolombia SA provides banking products and services in Colombia, Panama, Puerto Rico, El Salvador, Bermuda, and Guatemala. The company operates through nine segments: Banking Colombia, Banking Panama, Banking El Salvador, Banking Guatemala, Trust, Investment Banking, Brokerage, International Banking, and All Other.

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BlackRock Enhanced Government Fund, Inc. (NYSE:EGF  Free Report) saw a large decline in short interest in the month of June. As of June 15th, there was short interest totalling 1,300 shares, a decline of 43.5% from the May 31st total of 2,300 shares. Based on an average daily trading volume, of 6,200 shares, the days-to-cover ratio is currently 0.2 days.

BlackRock Enhanced Government Fund Price Performance

EGF remained flat at $9.55 during midday trading on Friday. The companys stock had a trading volume of 8,610 shares, compared to its average volume of 5,728. The firm has a 50-day simple moving average of $9.88 and a 200-day simple moving average of $9.87. BlackRock Enhanced Government Fund has a 52 week low of $9.24 and a 52 week high of $10.87.

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BlackRock Enhanced Government Fund Announces Dividend

The firm also recently declared a monthly dividend, which was paid on Friday, June 30th. Shareholders of record on Thursday, June 15th were issued a $0.041 dividend. This represents a $0.49 annualized dividend and a yield of 5.15%. The ex-dividend date of this dividend was Wednesday, June 14th.

Institutional Trading of BlackRock Enhanced Government Fund

BlackRock Enhanced Government Fund Company Profile

Several hedge funds and other institutional investors have recently added to or reduced their stakes in the business. Fiera Capital Corp grew its holdings in BlackRock Enhanced Government Fund by 5.7% in the 4th quarter. Fiera Capital Corp now owns 116,280 shares of the companys stock valued at $1,126,000 after buying an additional 6,242 shares during the period. Transform Wealth LLC purchased a new stake in shares of BlackRock Enhanced Government Fund during the 1st quarter worth about $243,000. Calton & Associates Inc. purchased a new stake in shares of BlackRock Enhanced Government Fund during the 1st quarter worth about $127,000. Finally, Morgan Stanley grew its holdings in shares of BlackRock Enhanced Government Fund by 53.4% during the 4th quarter. Morgan Stanley now owns 5,744 shares of the companys stock worth $56,000 after purchasing an additional 2,000 shares during the period.

(Free Report)

BlackRock Enhanced Government Fund, Inc is a closed-ended fixed income mutual fund launched by BlackRock, Inc It is managed by BlackRock Advisors, LLC. The fund invests in fixed income markets. It primarily invests in a portfolio of United States government and government agency securities, including the U.S.

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Blue Zone Wealth Advisors LLC bought a new stake in Shopify Inc. (NYSE:SHOP  Free Report) (TSE:SHOP) during the first quarter, according to the company in its most recent Form 13F filing with the Securities & Exchange Commission. The fund bought 4,550 shares of the software makers stock, valued at approximately $218,000.

Other institutional investors have also modified their holdings of the company. Industrial Alliance Investment Management Inc. increased its holdings in shares of Shopify by 292.9% in the first quarter. Industrial Alliance Investment Management Inc. now owns 110 shares of the software makers stock valued at $74,000 after purchasing an additional 82 shares during the period. Turim 21 Investimentos Ltda. purchased a new stake in shares of Shopify in the first quarter valued at approximately $148,000. Fairfield Bush & CO. purchased a new stake in shares of Shopify in the first quarter valued at approximately $169,000. First Manhattan Co. boosted its stake in shares of Shopify by 317.5% in the first quarter. First Manhattan Co. now owns 263 shares of the software makers stock valued at $177,000 after buying an additional 200 shares in the last quarter. Finally, Stonebridge Capital Advisors LLC boosted its stake in shares of Shopify by 508.2% in the first quarter. Stonebridge Capital Advisors LLC now owns 298 shares of the software makers stock valued at $201,000 after buying an additional 249 shares in the last quarter. Institutional investors and hedge funds own 58.14% of the companys stock.

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Shopify Trading Up 1.3 %

Shares of Shopify stock traded up $0.86 during trading hours on Monday, reaching $65.46. The stock had a trading volume of 4,777,953 shares, compared to its average volume of 17,561,680. The company has a current ratio of 6.71, a quick ratio of 6.71 and a debt-to-equity ratio of 0.11. Shopify Inc. has a 1 year low of $23.63 and a 1 year high of $67.36. The firm has a market capitalization of $83.57 billion, a price-to-earnings ratio of -42.78 and a beta of 2.03. The firm has a 50 day simple moving average of $59.43 and a two-hundred day simple moving average of $48.85.

Wall Street Analyst Weigh In

Shopify ( NYSE:SHOP Free Report ) (TSE:SHOP) last posted its earnings results on Thursday, May 4th. The software maker reported ($0.08) earnings per share (EPS) for the quarter, beating analysts consensus estimates of ($0.16) by $0.08. Shopify had a negative return on equity of 6.02% and a negative net margin of 32.49%. The business had revenue of $1.51 billion during the quarter, compared to analyst estimates of $1.44 billion. As a group, equities research analysts anticipate that Shopify Inc. will post -0.14 earnings per share for the current year.

SHOP has been the topic of a number of analyst reports. Mizuho lifted their price target on Shopify from $40.00 to $55.00 in a research note on Friday, May 5th. 1-800-FLOWERS.COM restated a maintains rating on shares of Shopify in a research note on Friday, May 5th. Robert W. Baird boosted their target price on Shopify from $55.00 to $65.00 in a research report on Friday, May 5th. DA Davidson boosted their target price on Shopify from $50.00 to $67.00 in a research report on Friday, May 5th. Finally, DZ Bank downgraded Shopify from a hold rating to a sell rating and boosted their target price for the stock from $47.00 to $55.00 in a research report on Tuesday, May 9th. Two research analysts have rated the stock with a sell rating, twenty-three have assigned a hold rating and thirteen have issued a buy rating to the stock. According to data from MarketBeat.com, the stock presently has an average rating of Hold and an average price target of $56.20.

Shopify Profile

(Free Report)

Shopify Inc, a commerce company, provides a commerce platform and services in Canada, the United States, Europe, the Middle East, Africa, the Asia Pacific, and Latin America. The company's platform enables merchants to displays, manages, markets, and sells its products through various sales channels, including web and mobile storefronts, physical retail locations, pop-up shops, social media storefronts, native mobile apps, buy buttons, and marketplaces; and enables to manage products and inventory, process orders and payments, fulfill and ship orders, new buyers and build customer relationships, source products, leverage analytics and reporting, manage cash, payments and transactions, and access financing.

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Shares of NiSource Inc. (NYSE:NI  Free Report) have received an average recommendation of Buy from the six brokerages that are covering the firm, Marketbeat reports. Six equities research analysts have rated the stock with a buy recommendation. The average 1 year price target among analysts that have issued ratings on the stock in the last year is $29.88.

Several equities research analysts recently commented on the company. Bank of America dropped their target price on NiSource from $32.00 to $31.00 in a report on Thursday, June 22nd. Evercore ISI reduced their target price on shares of NiSource from $31.00 to $30.00 in a report on Wednesday, June 21st. UBS Group upgraded shares of NiSource from a neutral rating to a buy rating and set a $31.00 target price for the company in a report on Tuesday, June 6th. BMO Capital Markets reduced their target price on shares of NiSource from $31.00 to $30.00 in a report on Wednesday, June 21st. Finally, StockNews.com assumed coverage on NiSource in a report on Thursday, May 18th. They set a hold rating for the company.

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Insider Buying and Selling at NiSource

In other NiSource news, SVP Kimberly S. Cuccia sold 11,157 shares of the businesss stock in a transaction dated Monday, May 8th. The stock was sold at an average price of $28.54, for a total value of $318,420.78. Following the transaction, the senior vice president now owns 20,329 shares in the company, valued at $580,189.66. The sale was disclosed in a filing with the Securities & Exchange Commission, which is accessible through the SEC website. Company insiders own 0.24% of the companys stock.

Institutional Trading of NiSource

NiSource Price Performance

Institutional investors have recently added to or reduced their stakes in the business. Private Advisor Group LLC grew its holdings in NiSource by 16.3% during the first quarter. Private Advisor Group LLC now owns 18,625 shares of the utilities providers stock valued at $593,000 after purchasing an additional 2,614 shares during the last quarter. MetLife Investment Management LLC boosted its holdings in NiSource by 23.1% during the first quarter. MetLife Investment Management LLC now owns 106,827 shares of the utilities providers stock valued at $3,397,000 after acquiring an additional 20,064 shares during the period. Cibc World Market Inc. boosted its holdings in NiSource by 66.2% during the first quarter. Cibc World Market Inc. now owns 146,548 shares of the utilities providers stock valued at $4,660,000 after acquiring an additional 58,398 shares during the period. Dimensional Fund Advisors LP boosted its holdings in NiSource by 29.7% during the first quarter. Dimensional Fund Advisors LP now owns 1,952,676 shares of the utilities providers stock valued at $62,093,000 after acquiring an additional 447,102 shares during the period. Finally, Vontobel Holding Ltd. acquired a new position in shares of NiSource during the first quarter worth approximately $472,000. 93.18% of the stock is currently owned by institutional investors and hedge funds.

Shares of NYSE NI opened at $27.35 on Wednesday. NiSource has a twelve month low of $23.78 and a twelve month high of $31.87. The company has a current ratio of 0.60, a quick ratio of 0.50 and a debt-to-equity ratio of 1.59. The company has a market capitalization of $11.30 billion, a price-to-earnings ratio of 18.61, a price-to-earnings-growth ratio of 2.43 and a beta of 0.48. The business has a 50 day simple moving average of $27.55 and a 200-day simple moving average of $27.55.

NiSource (NYSE:NI  Free Report) last announced its quarterly earnings results on Wednesday, May 3rd. The utilities provider reported $0.77 earnings per share (EPS) for the quarter, hitting the consensus estimate of $0.77. NiSource had a return on equity of 11.14% and a net margin of 11.72%. The business had revenue of $1.97 billion for the quarter, compared to the consensus estimate of $1.94 billion. During the same quarter last year, the business posted $0.75 EPS. As a group, equities research analysts expect that NiSource will post 1.6 earnings per share for the current year.

NiSource Announces Dividend

The firm also recently disclosed a quarterly dividend, which will be paid on Friday, August 18th. Investors of record on Monday, July 31st will be paid a $0.25 dividend. This represents a $1.00 annualized dividend and a yield of 3.66%. The ex-dividend date is Friday, July 28th. NiSources dividend payout ratio is currently 68.03%.

NiSource Company Profile

(Free Report

NiSource Inc, an energy holding company, operates as a regulated natural gas and electric utility company in the United States. It operates through two segments, Gas Distribution Operations and Electric Operations. The company distributes natural gas to approximately 859,000 customers in northern Indiana, as well as approximately 2.4 million residential, commercial, and industrial customers in Ohio, Pennsylvania, Virginia, Kentucky, and Maryland.

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Piper Sandler assumed coverage on shares of Burlington Stores (NYSE:BURL  Free Report) in a research report sent to investors on Thursday, The Fly reports. The brokerage issued a neutral rating and a $155.00 target price on the stock.

Several other research firms have also recently weighed in on BURL. Credit Suisse Group increased their price objective on Burlington Stores from $205.00 to $245.00 and gave the stock an outperform rating in a research report on Friday, March 3rd. Jefferies Financial Group reduced their target price on Burlington Stores from $260.00 to $225.00 in a report on Tuesday, May 9th. Sanford C. Bernstein reduced their target price on Burlington Stores from $230.00 to $200.00 in a report on Friday, May 26th. UBS Group lowered Burlington Stores from a neutral rating to a sell rating in a report on Wednesday, March 29th. Finally, Deutsche Bank Aktiengesellschaft raised their price objective on Burlington Stores from $214.00 to $235.00 and gave the company a buy rating in a research note on Friday, March 3rd. One investment analyst has rated the stock with a sell rating, four have assigned a hold rating and fifteen have assigned a buy rating to the stock. According to MarketBeat.com, the stock currently has an average rating of Moderate Buy and a consensus target price of $216.68.

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Burlington Stores Stock Up 2.5 %

Shares of NYSE BURL opened at $157.39 on Thursday. The stock has a market cap of $10.21 billion, a PE ratio of 41.75, a PEG ratio of 0.78 and a beta of 1.10. The business has a fifty day moving average of $164.74 and a two-hundred day moving average of $195.11. Burlington Stores has a 52-week low of $106.47 and a 52-week high of $239.94. The company has a debt-to-equity ratio of 1.68, a quick ratio of 0.44 and a current ratio of 1.16.

Hedge Funds Weigh In On Burlington Stores

Burlington Stores ( NYSE:BURL Free Report ) last announced its quarterly earnings data on Thursday, May 25th. The company reported $0.84 EPS for the quarter, missing analysts consensus estimates of $0.93 by ($0.09). Burlington Stores had a return on equity of 41.79% and a net margin of 2.77%. The firm had revenue of $2.13 billion during the quarter, compared to analyst estimates of $2.18 billion. During the same quarter in the previous year, the business earned $0.54 earnings per share. Burlington Storess revenue for the quarter was up 10.8% compared to the same quarter last year. As a group, equities research analysts expect that Burlington Stores will post 5.86 earnings per share for the current fiscal year.

Hedge funds and other institutional investors have recently modified their holdings of the company. Bank of Montreal Can raised its position in shares of Burlington Stores by 5.8% in the 1st quarter. Bank of Montreal Can now owns 6,412 shares of the companys stock worth $1,222,000 after acquiring an additional 349 shares in the last quarter. Healthcare of Ontario Pension Plan Trust Fund bought a new stake in Burlington Stores during the first quarter valued at about $246,000. MetLife Investment Management LLC bought a new stake in Burlington Stores during the first quarter valued at about $751,000. Yousif Capital Management LLC raised its holdings in Burlington Stores by 8.5% during the first quarter. Yousif Capital Management LLC now owns 1,538 shares of the companys stock valued at $280,000 after acquiring an additional 120 shares during the period. Finally, Raymond James Trust N.A. raised its holdings in Burlington Stores by 14.9% during the first quarter. Raymond James Trust N.A. now owns 1,471 shares of the companys stock valued at $268,000 after acquiring an additional 191 shares during the period.

Burlington Stores Company Profile

(Free Report)

Burlington Stores, Inc operates as a retailer of branded apparel products in the United States. The company provides fashion-focused merchandise, including women's ready-to-wear apparel, menswear, youth apparel, footwear, accessories, toys, gifts, and coats, as well as baby, home, and beauty products.

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Canadian Natural Resources (TSE:CNQ  Free Report) (NYSE:CNQ) had its price objective trimmed by National Bank Financial from C$105.00 to C$93.00 in a research note released on Thursday morning, The Fly reports.

Other equities research analysts also recently issued reports about the company. Wells Fargo & Company boosted their target price on Canadian Natural Resources from C$76.00 to C$82.00 in a research report on Friday, March 3rd. JPMorgan Chase & Co. upped their price objective on Canadian Natural Resources from C$92.00 to C$94.00 in a research report on Tuesday, March 14th. ATB Capital decreased their price objective on Canadian Natural Resources from C$94.00 to C$90.00 in a research report on Monday, April 17th. National Bankshares reduced their target price on Canadian Natural Resources from C$105.00 to C$93.00 in a research note on Thursday. Finally, Scotiabank lifted their price target on shares of Canadian Natural Resources from C$86.00 to C$87.00 in a research note on Thursday, April 13th. Three equities research analysts have rated the stock with a hold rating and five have issued a buy rating to the company. Based on data from MarketBeat, the stock currently has a consensus rating of Moderate Buy and a consensus price target of C$89.71.

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Canadian Natural Resources Price Performance

Shares of CNQ stock opened at C$74.48 on Thursday. The company has a debt-to-equity ratio of 35.14, a quick ratio of 0.54 and a current ratio of 0.83. Canadian Natural Resources has a fifty-two week low of C$58.75 and a fifty-two week high of C$84.25. The firm has a market cap of C$81.18 billion, a P/E ratio of 8.75, a P/E/G ratio of 0.53 and a beta of 2.05. The businesss 50 day moving average price is C$75.44 and its 200-day moving average price is C$76.38.

Canadian Natural Resources Announces Dividend

Canadian Natural Resources ( TSE:CNQ Free Report ) (NYSE:CNQ) last issued its quarterly earnings data on Thursday, May 4th. The company reported C$1.69 EPS for the quarter, topping the consensus estimate of C$1.62 by C$0.07. Canadian Natural Resources had a return on equity of 25.00% and a net margin of 23.94%. The company had revenue of C$8.63 billion during the quarter, compared to analyst estimates of C$8.48 billion. On average, equities research analysts anticipate that Canadian Natural Resources will post 7.9403315 earnings per share for the current year.

The firm also recently declared a quarterly dividend, which will be paid on Wednesday, July 5th. Investors of record on Friday, June 16th will be paid a dividend of $0.90 per share. This represents a $3.60 dividend on an annualized basis and a yield of 4.83%. The ex-dividend date of this dividend is Thursday, June 15th. Canadian Natural Resourcess dividend payout ratio is currently 42.30%.

Insiders Place Their Bets

In related news, Director Stephen W. Laut sold 60,000 shares of the stock in a transaction dated Thursday, May 25th. The shares were sold at an average price of C$75.46, for a total value of C$4,527,600.00. 2.22% of the stock is owned by insiders.

Canadian Natural Resources Company Profile

(Free Report)

Canadian Natural Resources Limited acquires, explores for, develops, produces, markets, and sells crude oil, natural gas, and natural gas liquids (NGLs). The company offers light and medium crude oil, primary heavy crude oil, Pelican Lake heavy crude oil, bitumen (thermal oil), and synthetic crude oil (SCO).

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The Sage Group (OTCMKTS:SGGEF  Free Report) is one of 290 public companies in the SoftwareApplication industry, but how does it weigh in compared to its rivals? We will compare The Sage Group to related companies based on the strength of its risk, profitability, valuation, dividends, analyst recommendations, earnings and institutional ownership.

Dividends

The Sage Group pays an annual dividend of $0.12 per share and has a dividend yield of 1.1%. The Sage Group pays out 67.8% of its earnings in the form of a dividend. As a group, SoftwareApplication companies pay a dividend yield of 1.8% and pay out 70.9% of their earnings in the form of a dividend.

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Analyst Recommendations

This is a breakdown of recent ratings and price targets for The Sage Group and its rivals, as provided by MarketBeat.com.

Sell Ratings Hold Ratings Buy Ratings Strong Buy Ratings Rating Score The Sage Group 0 0 0 0 N/A The Sage Group Competitors 388 1743 3721 39 2.58

Profitability

As a group, SoftwareApplication companies have a potential upside of 28.88%. Given The Sage Groups rivals higher probable upside, analysts clearly believe The Sage Group has less favorable growth aspects than its rivals.

This table compares The Sage Group and its rivals net margins, return on equity and return on assets.

Net Margins Return on Equity Return on Assets The Sage Group N/A N/A N/A The Sage Group Competitors -28.92% -244.69% -6.80%

Earnings & Valuation

This table compares The Sage Group and its rivals gross revenue, earnings per share and valuation.

Gross Revenue Net Income Price/Earnings Ratio The Sage Group N/A N/A 63.67 The Sage Group Competitors $456.29 million -$16.02 million 620.67

The Sage Groups rivals have higher revenue, but lower earnings than The Sage Group. The Sage Group 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.

Institutional & Insider Ownership

54.7% of The Sage Group shares are owned by institutional investors. Comparatively, 32.8% of shares of all SoftwareApplication companies are owned by institutional investors. 29.7% of shares of all SoftwareApplication companies are owned by insiders. Strong institutional ownership is an indication that endowments, hedge funds and large money managers believe a stock will outperform the market over the long term.

About The Sage Group

(Free Report)

The Sage Group plc, together with its subsidiaries, provides technology solutions and services for small and medium businesses in North America, Northern Europe, and internationally. It offers cloud native solutions, such as Sage Intacct, a cloud accounting software products and financial management software; Sage People, a HR and people management solution; Sage 200, a finance and business management solution; Sage X3, a business management solution; Sage Accounting, a solution for small businesses, accountants, and bookkeepers to manage customer data, accounts, and people; Sage Payroll for small businesses manage their payroll; and Sage HR for small and mid-sized businesses for record management, leave management, staff scheduling, and expenses services. The company also provides Sage 50cloud and Sage 200cloud that provides a range of cloud connected accounting solutions. The company was founded in 1981 and is based in Newcastle upon Tyne, the United Kingdom.

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Urbana (OTCMKTS:UBAAF  Free Report) is one of 1,204 public companies in the Asset Management industry, but how does it contrast to its peers? We will compare Urbana to related companies based on the strength of its dividends, analyst recommendations, risk, valuation, profitability, earnings and institutional ownership.

Institutional & Insider Ownership

12.4% of Urbana shares are held by institutional investors. Comparatively, 32.4% of shares of all Asset Management companies are held by institutional investors. 18.1% of shares of all Asset Management companies are held by insiders. Strong institutional ownership is an indication that endowments, large money managers and hedge funds believe a stock will outperform the market over the long term.

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Analyst Ratings

This is a breakdown of recent recommendations for Urbana and its peers, as provided by MarketBeat.

Sell Ratings Hold Ratings Buy Ratings Strong Buy Ratings Rating Score Urbana 0 0 0 0 N/A Urbana Competitors 1053 4624 5987 83 2.43

Profitability

As a group, Asset Management companies have a potential upside of 90.50%. Given Urbanas peers higher probable upside, analysts clearly believe Urbana has less favorable growth aspects than its peers.

This table compares Urbana and its peers net margins, return on equity and return on assets.

Net Margins Return on Equity Return on Assets Urbana N/A N/A N/A Urbana Competitors 374.59% 7.95% 4.97%

Dividends

Urbana pays an annual dividend of $0.05 per share and has a dividend yield of 1.7%. Urbana pays out 17.3% of its earnings in the form of a dividend. As a group, Asset Management companies pay a dividend yield of 7.8% and pay out 1,361.4% of their earnings in the form of a dividend.

Earnings & Valuation

This table compares Urbana and its peers gross revenue, earnings per share and valuation.

Gross Revenue Net Income Price/Earnings Ratio Urbana N/A N/A 9.87 Urbana Competitors $240.64 million $5.71 million -4.67

Urbanas peers have higher revenue and earnings than Urbana. Urbana is trading at a higher price-to-earnings ratio than its peers, indicating that it is currently more expensive than other companies in its industry.

Summary

Urbana peers beat Urbana on 8 of the 10 factors compared.

About Urbana

(Free Report)

Urbana Corporation is an investment fund launched and managed by Caldwell Investment Management Ltd. For its equity investment the fund primarily invests in public equity markets of United States and Canada. The fund primarily focuses on U.S. financial companies and Canadian resource companies for equity investments. The fund also focuses on private equity investments. It was formerly known as Macho River Gold Mines Limited. Urbana Corporation is domiciled in Canada.

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Citigroup began coverage on shares of Dell Technologies (NYSE:DELL  Free Report) in a report released on Thursday, The Fly reports. The brokerage issued a buy rating and a $60.00 price target on the technology companys stock.

A number of other brokerages have also recently issued reports on DELL. JPMorgan Chase & Co. cut Dell Technologies from an overweight rating to a neutral rating and set a $47.00 price objective on the stock. in a research note on Monday, April 17th. Morgan Stanley raised their price objective on shares of Dell Technologies from $55.00 to $56.00 in a report on Friday, June 2nd. Raymond James raised their price objective on shares of Dell Technologies from $45.00 to $50.00 in a report on Friday, June 2nd. The Goldman Sachs Group started coverage on shares of Dell Technologies in a research report on Monday, March 20th. They set a buy rating and a $43.00 price target for the company. Finally, Evercore ISI lifted their price target on shares of Dell Technologies from $50.00 to $55.00 and gave the stock an outperform rating in a research note on Friday, May 19th. Five analysts have rated the stock with a hold rating and eleven have given a buy rating to the stock. Based on data from MarketBeat.com, Dell Technologies presently has an average rating of Moderate Buy and a consensus target price of $50.75.

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Dell Technologies Stock Up 1.9 %

DELL stock opened at $54.11 on Thursday. The firm has a market cap of $39.35 billion, a PE ratio of 20.50, a P/E/G ratio of 0.96 and a beta of 1.02. The business has a 50 day moving average of $47.17 and a 200-day moving average of $42.84. Dell Technologies has a 12-month low of $32.90 and a 12-month high of $54.61.

Dell Technologies Dividend Announcement

Dell Technologies ( NYSE:DELL Free Report ) last announced its quarterly earnings data on Thursday, June 1st. The technology company reported $1.31 earnings per share (EPS) for the quarter, beating analysts consensus estimates of $0.86 by $0.45. Dell Technologies had a negative return on equity of 149.49% and a net margin of 2.01%. The firm had revenue of $20.92 billion for the quarter, compared to analysts expectations of $20.27 billion. During the same period last year, the firm earned $1.64 earnings per share. The companys revenue for the quarter was down 19.9% compared to the same quarter last year. On average, research analysts expect that Dell Technologies will post 4.59 earnings per share for the current year.

The business also recently declared a quarterly dividend, which will be paid on Friday, August 4th. Shareholders of record on Tuesday, July 25th will be paid a dividend of $0.37 per share. The ex-dividend date is Monday, July 24th. This represents a $1.48 dividend on an annualized basis and a yield of 2.74%. Dell Technologiess payout ratio is 56.06%.

Insider Buying and Selling at Dell Technologies

In other Dell Technologies news, CAO Brunilda Rios sold 22,042 shares of the companys stock in a transaction that occurred on Monday, April 17th. The shares were sold at an average price of $43.78, for a total transaction of $964,998.76. Following the transaction, the chief accounting officer now owns 18,647 shares in the company, valued at approximately $816,365.66. The sale was disclosed in a document filed with the Securities & Exchange Commission, which is available at the SEC website. In other Dell Technologies news, General Counsel Richard J. Rothberg sold 200,958 shares of Dell Technologies stock in a transaction on Tuesday, April 18th. The shares were sold at an average price of $45.36, for a total value of $9,115,454.88. Following the completion of the transaction, the general counsel now owns 149,379 shares of the companys stock, valued at $6,775,831.44. The transaction was disclosed in a filing with the Securities & Exchange Commission, which can be accessed through this link. Also, CAO Brunilda Rios sold 22,042 shares of Dell Technologies stock in a transaction on Monday, April 17th. The shares were sold at an average price of $43.78, for a total transaction of $964,998.76. Following the completion of the transaction, the chief accounting officer now directly owns 18,647 shares of the companys stock, valued at approximately $816,365.66. The disclosure for this sale can be found here. 48.60% of the stock is currently owned by company insiders.

Institutional Inflows and Outflows

A number of institutional investors and hedge funds have recently added to or reduced their stakes in the company. Arrowstreet Capital Limited Partnership boosted its position in Dell Technologies by 655.7% during the first quarter. Arrowstreet Capital Limited Partnership now owns 4,534,968 shares of the technology companys stock worth $182,351,000 after acquiring an additional 3,934,878 shares during the last quarter. Norges Bank acquired a new position in shares of Dell Technologies in the 4th quarter valued at $111,100,000. Goldman Sachs Group Inc. boosted its stake in Dell Technologies by 80.7% during the 1st quarter. Goldman Sachs Group Inc. now owns 4,976,265 shares of the technology companys stock worth $249,759,000 after purchasing an additional 2,222,995 shares during the period. Alyeska Investment Group L.P. increased its holdings in shares of Dell Technologies by 220.4% in the 1st quarter. Alyeska Investment Group L.P. now owns 2,826,108 shares of the technology companys stock valued at $113,638,000 after purchasing an additional 1,943,992 shares in the last quarter. Finally, FMR LLC increased its holdings in Dell Technologies by 68.4% during the 1st quarter. FMR LLC now owns 4,722,119 shares of the technology companys stock valued at $189,876,000 after acquiring an additional 1,917,286 shares in the last quarter. Hedge funds and other institutional investors own 25.05% of the companys stock.

Dell Technologies Company Profile

(Free Report)

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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Shares of Dominion Energy, Inc. (NYSE:D  Free Report) have earned a consensus rating of Hold from the fourteen research firms that are currently covering the firm, Marketbeat reports. One equities research analyst has rated the stock with a sell recommendation, eleven have assigned a hold recommendation and two have given a buy recommendation to the company. The average twelve-month price objective among analysts that have issued ratings on the stock in the last year is $62.55.

Several equities analysts have recently weighed in on the company. Bank of America decreased their price objective on Dominion Energy from $54.00 to $52.00 in a report on Tuesday, May 16th. UBS Group decreased their price objective on Dominion Energy from $60.00 to $57.00 and set a neutral rating for the company in a report on Tuesday, March 7th. Morgan Stanley raised their price objective on Dominion Energy from $58.00 to $63.00 and gave the company an equal weight rating in a report on Thursday, April 20th. The Goldman Sachs Group assumed coverage on Dominion Energy in a report on Wednesday, June 7th. They issued a neutral rating for the company. Finally, 51job restated a maintains rating on shares of Dominion Energy in a report on Friday, June 9th.

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Insider Buying and Selling

In related news, COO Diane Leopold sold 6,250 shares of the businesss stock in a transaction on Thursday, June 1st. The shares were sold at an average price of $49.16, for a total value of $307,250.00. Following the transaction, the chief operating officer now owns 100,115 shares in the company, valued at $4,921,653.40. The transaction was disclosed in a document filed with the SEC, which is available through this link. 0.14% of the stock is currently owned by insiders.

Hedge Funds Weigh In On Dominion Energy

Dominion Energy Stock Performance

Several institutional investors have recently made changes to their positions in the stock. Tucker Asset Management LLC acquired a new stake in shares of Dominion Energy in the 1st quarter worth about $25,000. Pacific Center for Financial Services acquired a new stake in shares of Dominion Energy in the 1st quarter worth about $28,000. Retirement Financial Solutions LLC acquired a new stake in shares of Dominion Energy in the 4th quarter worth about $29,000. AXS Investments LLC acquired a new stake in shares of Dominion Energy in the 4th quarter worth about $30,000. Finally, Core Alternative Capital raised its holdings in shares of Dominion Energy by 63.0% in the 1st quarter. Core Alternative Capital now owns 533 shares of the utilities providers stock worth $30,000 after acquiring an additional 206 shares during the last quarter. Institutional investors and hedge funds own 69.58% of the companys stock.

Shares of Dominion Energy stock opened at $51.79 on Wednesday. The firm has a fifty day moving average of $53.35 and a two-hundred day moving average of $56.81. The stock has a market capitalization of $43.29 billion, a price-to-earnings ratio of 36.22, a PEG ratio of 0.69 and a beta of 0.44. Dominion Energy has a 52 week low of $48.47 and a 52 week high of $86.28. The company has a debt-to-equity ratio of 1.50, a quick ratio of 0.62 and a current ratio of 0.75.

Dominion Energy (NYSE:D  Free Report) last announced its quarterly earnings results on Friday, May 5th. The utilities provider reported $0.99 earnings per share (EPS) for the quarter, beating the consensus estimate of $0.98 by $0.01. Dominion Energy had a net margin of 7.05% and a return on equity of 12.67%. The company had revenue of $5.25 billion during the quarter, compared to analyst estimates of $4.46 billion. During the same quarter in the previous year, the business earned $1.18 EPS. The firms revenue was up 22.7% on a year-over-year basis. As a group, equities research analysts predict that Dominion Energy will post 3.74 EPS for the current year.

Dominion Energy Dividend Announcement

The firm also recently disclosed a quarterly dividend, which was paid on Tuesday, June 20th. Investors of record on Friday, June 2nd were paid a $0.6675 dividend. The ex-dividend date was Thursday, June 1st. This represents a $2.67 annualized dividend and a dividend yield of 5.16%. Dominion Energys dividend payout ratio is 186.71%.

About Dominion Energy

(Free Report

Dominion Energy, Inc engages in the production and distribution of energy. It operates through following business segments: Dominion Energy Virginia, Gas Distribution, Dominion Energy South Carolina, Contracted Assets, and Corporate and Other. The Corporate and Other segment focuses on corporate, service company, non-controlling interest in Dominion privatization, and non-regulated retail energy marketing operations.

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A Kenyan expert has said that the Communist Party of China (CPC) is the soul of the Chinese nation and highlighted its role in serving the interests of its people.

Stephen Ndegwa, an international relations lecturer at the United States International University-Africa (USIU-Africa), made the remarks on the occasion of the CPC marking its 102nd founding anniversary on Saturday.

Speaking of China's democracy, Ndegwa pointed out that Chinese officials are carefully selected based on their demonstrated commitment to the people.





Produced by Xinhua Global Service




Eli Lilly and Company (NYSE:LLY  Free Report) major shareholder Lilly Endowment Inc sold 164,125 shares of the companys stock in a transaction on Friday, June 30th. The stock was sold at an average price of $467.60, for a total value of $76,744,850.00. Following the transaction, the insider now directly owns 101,028,810 shares in the company, valued at approximately $47,241,071,556. The sale was disclosed in a filing with the Securities & Exchange Commission, which is available through the SEC website. Large shareholders that own more than 10% of a companys stock are required to disclose their sales and purchases with the SEC.

Lilly Endowment Inc also recently made the following trade(s):

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On Wednesday, June 28th, Lilly Endowment Inc sold 11,760 shares of Eli Lilly and Company stock. The stock was sold at an average price of $465.41, for a total value of $5,473,221.60.

On Thursday, June 22nd, Lilly Endowment Inc sold 107,022 shares of Eli Lilly and Company stock. The stock was sold at an average price of $459.28, for a total value of $49,153,064.16.

On Tuesday, June 20th, Lilly Endowment Inc sold 34,156 shares of Eli Lilly and Company stock. The stock was sold at an average price of $454.08, for a total value of $15,509,556.48.

On Thursday, June 15th, Lilly Endowment Inc sold 27,353 shares of Eli Lilly and Company stock. The stock was sold at an average price of $454.15, for a total value of $12,422,364.95.

On Friday, May 19th, Lilly Endowment Inc sold 194,354 shares of Eli Lilly and Company stock. The stock was sold at an average price of $442.62, for a total value of $86,024,967.48.

On Friday, May 12th, Lilly Endowment Inc sold 20,646 shares of Eli Lilly and Company stock. The shares were sold at an average price of $442.77, for a total value of $9,141,429.42.

On Wednesday, May 3rd, Lilly Endowment Inc sold 178,302 shares of Eli Lilly and Company stock. The shares were sold at an average price of $426.40, for a total value of $76,027,972.80.

On Friday, April 28th, Lilly Endowment Inc sold 225,000 shares of Eli Lilly and Company stock. The shares were sold at an average price of $398.48, for a total value of $89,658,000.00.

On Wednesday, April 5th, Lilly Endowment Inc sold 69,703 shares of Eli Lilly and Company stock. The shares were sold at an average price of $363.37, for a total value of $25,327,979.11.

Eli Lilly and Company Stock Down 1.6 %

LLY stock traded down $7.56 during midday trading on Monday, hitting $461.42. 2,112,150 shares of the companys stock were exchanged, compared to its average volume of 3,103,616. The company has a current ratio of 1.30, a quick ratio of 1.02 and a debt-to-equity ratio of 1.67. Eli Lilly and Company has a 12-month low of $296.32 and a 12-month high of $469.87. The firm has a 50 day moving average price of $434.32 and a 200-day moving average price of $377.31. The stock has a market capitalization of $438.01 billion, a price-to-earnings ratio of 74.56, a price-to-earnings-growth ratio of 2.15 and a beta of 0.38.

Eli Lilly and Company Dividend Announcement

Eli Lilly and Company ( NYSE:LLY Free Report ) last posted its quarterly earnings data on Thursday, April 27th. The company reported $1.62 earnings per share (EPS) for the quarter, missing the consensus estimate of $1.73 by ($0.11). Eli Lilly and Company had a return on equity of 61.42% and a net margin of 20.54%. The business had revenue of $6.96 billion for the quarter, compared to analysts expectations of $6.87 billion. During the same quarter in the prior year, the firm earned $2.62 earnings per share. Eli Lilly and Companys revenue for the quarter was down 10.9% compared to the same quarter last year. On average, analysts anticipate that Eli Lilly and Company will post 8.78 EPS for the current year.

The company also recently announced a quarterly dividend, which will be paid on Tuesday, August 15th. Stockholders of record on Friday, September 8th will be given a $1.13 dividend. The ex-dividend date is Monday, August 14th. This represents a $4.52 annualized dividend and a dividend yield of 0.98%. Eli Lilly and Companys payout ratio is 71.86%.

Analysts Set New Price Targets

Several analysts have recently issued reports on LLY shares. BMO Capital Markets upped their price objective on Eli Lilly and Company from $430.00 to $505.00 in a research report on Thursday, May 4th. JPMorgan Chase & Co. increased their target price on Eli Lilly and Company from $430.00 to $475.00 in a research report on Thursday, May 4th. Credit Suisse Group increased their target price on Eli Lilly and Company from $420.00 to $490.00 in a research report on Thursday, May 4th. UBS Group upped their price target on Eli Lilly and Company from $447.00 to $498.00 and gave the stock a buy rating in a research note on Wednesday, May 24th. Finally, Berenberg Bank upped their price target on Eli Lilly and Company from $375.00 to $500.00 in a research note on Tuesday, June 20th. One research analyst has rated the stock with a sell rating, two have given a hold rating and thirteen have given a buy rating to the stock. According to data from MarketBeat.com, the stock has an average rating of Moderate Buy and a consensus target price of $437.90.

Institutional Inflows and Outflows

Several hedge funds have recently made changes to their positions in the company. Oxler Private Wealth LLC grew its position in shares of Eli Lilly and Company by 0.4% in the 1st quarter. Oxler Private Wealth LLC now owns 6,050 shares of the companys stock worth $2,078,000 after acquiring an additional 24 shares in the last quarter. Missouri Trust & Investment Co grew its position in shares of Eli Lilly and Company by 3.2% in the 1st quarter. Missouri Trust & Investment Co now owns 774 shares of the companys stock worth $266,000 after acquiring an additional 24 shares in the last quarter. Silvercrest Asset Management Group LLC grew its position in shares of Eli Lilly and Company by 0.6% in the 1st quarter. Silvercrest Asset Management Group LLC now owns 4,331 shares of the companys stock worth $1,487,000 after acquiring an additional 25 shares in the last quarter. Cora Capital Advisors LLC grew its position in shares of Eli Lilly and Company by 2.8% in the 1st quarter. Cora Capital Advisors LLC now owns 956 shares of the companys stock worth $328,000 after acquiring an additional 26 shares in the last quarter. Finally, Sittner & Nelson LLC grew its position in shares of Eli Lilly and Company by 2.7% in the 1st quarter. Sittner & Nelson LLC now owns 1,003 shares of the companys stock worth $344,000 after acquiring an additional 26 shares in the last quarter. Institutional investors and hedge funds own 87.25% of the companys stock.

About Eli Lilly and Company

(Free Report)

Eli Lilly and Company discovers, develops, and markets human pharmaceuticals worldwide. It offers Basaglar, Humalog, Humalog Mix 75/25, Humalog U-100, Humalog U-200, Humalog Mix 50/50, insulin lispro, insulin lispro protamine, insulin lispro mix 75/25, Humulin, Humulin 70/30, Humulin N, Humulin R, and Humulin U-500 for diabetes; and Jardiance, Trajenta, and Trulicity for type 2 diabetes.

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HH&L Acquisition (NYSE:HHLA  Free Report) and Laboratory Co. of America (NYSE:LH  Free Report) are both medical companies, but which is the superior investment? We will compare the two businesses based on the strength of their analyst recommendations, risk, institutional ownership, profitability, earnings, dividends and valuation.

Profitability

This table compares HH&L Acquisition and Laboratory Co. of Americas net margins, return on equity and return on assets.

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Net Margins Return on Equity Return on Assets HH&L Acquisition N/A -55.99% 2.76% Laboratory Co. of America 6.78% 15.56% 7.90%

Volatility & Risk

HH&L Acquisition has a beta of -0.01, suggesting that its share price is 101% less volatile than the S&P 500. Comparatively, Laboratory Co. of America has a beta of 1.06, suggesting that its share price is 6% more volatile than the S&P 500.

Institutional and Insider Ownership

Analyst Ratings

49.9% of HH&L Acquisition shares are owned by institutional investors. Comparatively, 87.8% of Laboratory Co. of America shares are owned by institutional investors. 0.4% of HH&L Acquisition shares are owned by insiders. Comparatively, 0.7% of Laboratory Co. of America shares are owned by insiders. Strong institutional ownership is an indication that large money managers, endowments and hedge funds believe a stock will outperform the market over the long term.

This is a breakdown of recent recommendations for HH&L Acquisition and Laboratory Co. of America, as provided by MarketBeat.com.

Sell Ratings Hold Ratings Buy Ratings Strong Buy Ratings Rating Score HH&L Acquisition 0 0 0 0 N/A Laboratory Co. of America 0 2 7 0 2.78

Laboratory Co. of America has a consensus target price of $273.50, suggesting a potential upside of 13.33%. Given Laboratory Co. of Americas higher probable upside, analysts plainly believe Laboratory Co. of America is more favorable than HH&L Acquisition.

Earnings & Valuation

This table compares HH&L Acquisition and Laboratory Co. of Americas top-line revenue, earnings per share and valuation.

Gross Revenue Price/Sales Ratio Net Income Earnings Per Share Price/Earnings Ratio HH&L Acquisition N/A N/A $17.69 million $0.19 55.16 Laboratory Co. of America $14.88 billion 1.44 $1.28 billion $11.02 21.90

Laboratory Co. of America has higher revenue and earnings than HH&L Acquisition. Laboratory Co. of America is trading at a lower price-to-earnings ratio than HH&L Acquisition, indicating that it is currently the more affordable of the two stocks.

Summary

Laboratory Co. of America beats HH&L Acquisition on 11 of the 12 factors compared between the two stocks.

About HH&L Acquisition

(Free Report)

HH&L Acquisition Co. does not have significant operations. It focuses on effecting a merger, share exchange, asset acquisition, share purchase, reorganization, or similar business combination with one or more businesses. The company intends to focus on healthcare or healthcare-related companies in Asian markets. HH&L Acquisition Co. was incorporated in 2020 and is based in Central, Hong Kong.

About Laboratory Co. of America

(Free Report)

Laboratory Corporation of America Holdings operates as a life sciences company that provides vital information to help doctors, hospitals, pharmaceutical companies, researchers, and patients make clear and confident decisions. It operates in two segments, Labcorp Diagnostics and Labcorp Drug Development. The company offers various tests, such as blood chemistry analyses, urinalyses, blood cell counts, thyroid tests, PAP tests, hemoglobin A1C and vitamin D, prostate-specific antigens, tests for sexually transmitted diseases, hepatitis C tests, microbiology cultures and procedures, and alcohol and other substance-abuse tests. It also provides specialty testing services comprising gene-based and esoteric testing; advanced tests target specific diseases, including anatomic pathology/oncology, cardiovascular disease, coagulation, diagnostic genetics, endocrinology, infectious disease, women's health, pharmacogenetics, and parentage and donor testing; occupational testing services, medical drug monitoring services, chronic disease programs, and kidney stone prevention tests; and health and wellness services to employers and managed care organizations (MCOs), including health fairs, on-site and at-home testing, vaccinations, and health screenings. In addition, the company offers online and mobile applications to enable patients to check test results; and online applications for MCOs and accountable care organizations; and end-to-end drug development, medical device, and companion diagnostic development solutions from early-stage research to clinical development and commercial market access. It serves MCOs, pharmaceutical, biotechnology, medical device and diagnostics companies, governmental agencies, physicians and other healthcare providers, hospitals and health systems, employers, patients and consumers, contract research organizations, and independent clinical laboratories. The company was incorporated in 1994 and is headquartered in Burlington, North Carolina.

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First Trust Energy Income and Growth Fund (NYSEAMERICAN:FEN  Free Report) was the target of a significant decrease in short interest in the month of June. As of June 15th, there was short interest totalling 9,100 shares, a decrease of 49.2% from the May 31st total of 17,900 shares. Based on an average trading volume of 60,200 shares, the days-to-cover ratio is currently 0.2 days.

First Trust Energy Income and Growth Fund Price Performance

Shares of FEN traded up $0.32 during midday trading on Friday, hitting $13.93. The stock had a trading volume of 88,826 shares, compared to its average volume of 65,982. First Trust Energy Income and Growth Fund has a 1 year low of $12.03 and a 1 year high of $16.46.

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First Trust Energy Income and Growth Fund Announces Dividend

The company also recently announced a quarterly dividend, which was paid on Friday, April 28th. Stockholders of record on Monday, April 24th were paid a $0.30 dividend. This represents a $1.20 annualized dividend and a dividend yield of 8.61%. The ex-dividend date of this dividend was Friday, April 21st.

Institutional Investors Weigh In On First Trust Energy Income and Growth Fund

First Trust Energy Income and Growth Fund Company Profile

Hedge funds and other institutional investors have recently made changes to their positions in the company. HighTower Advisors LLC grew its holdings in shares of First Trust Energy Income and Growth Fund by 5.7% in the first quarter. HighTower Advisors LLC now owns 20,277 shares of the companys stock worth $329,000 after purchasing an additional 1,089 shares during the last quarter. Cetera Advisor Networks LLC bought a new position in shares of First Trust Energy Income and Growth Fund in the first quarter worth about $194,000. Private Advisor Group LLC bought a new position in shares of First Trust Energy Income and Growth Fund in the first quarter worth about $193,000. PNC Financial Services Group Inc. grew its holdings in shares of First Trust Energy Income and Growth Fund by 153.8% in the first quarter. PNC Financial Services Group Inc. now owns 1,650 shares of the companys stock worth $27,000 after purchasing an additional 1,000 shares during the last quarter. Finally, Bank of Montreal Can bought a new position in shares of First Trust Energy Income and Growth Fund in the first quarter worth about $250,000.

(Free Report)

First Trust Energy Income and Growth Fund is a closed-ended equity mutual fund launched and managed by First Trust Advisors L.P. It is co-managed by Energy Income Partners, LLC. The fund invests in the public equity markets of the United States. It seeks to invest in stocks of companies operating in the energy sector, including companies in the business of transporting, processing, storing, distributing, or marketing natural gas, natural gas liquids (including propane), crude oil, refined petroleum products, coal or electricity, or exploring, developing, managing or producing such commodities or products, or in supplying energy-related products and services.

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Grupo Aeroportuario del Pacifico, S.A.B. de C.V. (NYSE:PAC  Free Report) announced a  dividend on Monday, July 3rd, Wall Street Journal reports. Stockholders of record on Wednesday, July 12th will be given a dividend of 2.1661 per share by the transportation company on Monday, July 24th. This represents a dividend yield of 3.8%. The ex-dividend date of this dividend is Tuesday, July 11th.

Grupo Aeroportuario del Pacifico has a dividend payout ratio of 36.6% indicating that its dividend is sufficiently covered by earnings. Research analysts expect Grupo Aeroportuario del Pacifico to earn $10.19 per share next year, which means the company should continue to be able to cover its $4.33 annual dividend with an expected future payout ratio of 42.5%.

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Grupo Aeroportuario del Pacifico Stock Up 4.7 %

Shares of NYSE PAC traded up $8.41 during trading hours on Monday, hitting $187.13. The stock had a trading volume of 37,713 shares, compared to its average volume of 69,068. The firms 50-day moving average price is $180.11 and its two-hundred day moving average price is $179.03. Grupo Aeroportuario del Pacifico has a 52 week low of $126.01 and a 52 week high of $200.85. The company has a market capitalization of $9.46 billion, a P/E ratio of 20.13, a P/E/G ratio of 1.59 and a beta of 1.27. The company has a debt-to-equity ratio of 1.62, a quick ratio of 2.24 and a current ratio of 2.24.

Hedge Funds Weigh In On Grupo Aeroportuario del Pacifico

Analyst Ratings Changes

Hedge funds have recently made changes to their positions in the business. Advisor Group Holdings Inc. boosted its position in shares of Grupo Aeroportuario del Pacifico by 12.7% during the 1st quarter. Advisor Group Holdings Inc. now owns 1,268 shares of the transportation companys stock valued at $204,000 after acquiring an additional 143 shares in the last quarter. American Century Companies Inc. boosted its holdings in Grupo Aeroportuario del Pacifico by 7.9% during the first quarter. American Century Companies Inc. now owns 6,769 shares of the transportation companys stock valued at $1,091,000 after purchasing an additional 493 shares in the last quarter. Cambridge Investment Research Advisors Inc. bought a new stake in shares of Grupo Aeroportuario del Pacifico in the 1st quarter valued at approximately $231,000. Citigroup Inc. raised its holdings in shares of Grupo Aeroportuario del Pacifico by 64.4% in the 1st quarter. Citigroup Inc. now owns 1,274 shares of the transportation companys stock worth $205,000 after buying an additional 499 shares in the last quarter. Finally, Bank of Montreal Can lifted its position in shares of Grupo Aeroportuario del Pacifico by 2.3% during the 1st quarter. Bank of Montreal Can now owns 12,494 shares of the transportation companys stock worth $1,969,000 after buying an additional 278 shares during the period. Institutional investors and hedge funds own 12.84% of the companys stock.

Several analysts have commented on the stock. HSBC raised shares of Grupo Aeroportuario del Pacifico from a hold rating to a buy rating in a research report on Monday, May 8th. StockNews.com began coverage on shares of Grupo Aeroportuario del Pacifico in a research report on Thursday, May 18th. They set a hold rating on the stock. One analyst has rated the stock with a sell rating, three have given a hold rating and one has issued a buy rating to the company. According to MarketBeat, the stock currently has an average rating of Hold and an average target price of $150.50.

Grupo Aeroportuario del Pacifico Company Profile

(Free Report)

Grupo Aeroportuario del Pacifico, SAB. de C.V., together with its subsidiaries, manages, operates, and develops airports primarily in Mexico's Pacific region. The company operates 12 airports in Guadalajara, Puerto Vallarta, Tijuana, San Jose del Cabo, Guanajuato (Bajio), Hermosillo, Mexicali, Los Mochis, La Paz, Manzanillo, Morelia, and Aguascalientes.

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Healthcare Realty Trust Incorporated (NYSE:HR  Free Report) has earned a consensus recommendation of Hold from the seven brokerages that are currently covering the stock, Marketbeat.com reports. Four research analysts have rated the stock with a hold rating and three have given a buy rating to the company. The average 12 month target price among analysts that have updated their coverage on the stock in the last year is $23.80.

HR has been the subject of a number of research analyst reports. Barclays raised their price target on Healthcare Realty Trust from $24.00 to $25.00 in a research note on Thursday, May 11th. Credit Suisse Group lowered Healthcare Realty Trust from an outperform rating to a neutral rating and decreased their target price for the company from $23.00 to $20.00 in a research report on Monday, March 6th. Finally, Wells Fargo & Company assumed coverage on Healthcare Realty Trust in a research report on Wednesday, April 19th. They set an equal weight rating for the company.

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Healthcare Realty Trust Stock Performance

Shares of HR stock opened at $18.86 on Wednesday. Healthcare Realty Trust has a 52-week low of $17.67 and a 52-week high of $30.07. The firm has a market capitalization of $7.18 billion, a P/E ratio of -94.30 and a beta of 0.77. The stock has a 50 day moving average price of $19.21 and a 200 day moving average price of $19.66.

Healthcare Realty Trust Dividend Announcement

Institutional Trading of Healthcare Realty Trust

The firm also recently announced a quarterly dividend, which was paid on Friday, June 2nd. Investors of record on Tuesday, May 16th were paid a dividend of $0.31 per share. The ex-dividend date of this dividend was Monday, May 15th. This represents a $1.24 annualized dividend and a yield of 6.57%. Healthcare Realty Trusts dividend payout ratio (DPR) is -620.00%.

Several large investors have recently added to or reduced their stakes in HR. Advisor Group Holdings Inc. boosted its stake in shares of Healthcare Realty Trust by 20.7% in the first quarter. Advisor Group Holdings Inc. now owns 9,544 shares of the real estate investment trusts stock worth $263,000 after buying an additional 1,640 shares during the last quarter. PNC Financial Services Group Inc. boosted its stake in shares of Healthcare Realty Trust by 161.4% in the first quarter. PNC Financial Services Group Inc. now owns 20,705 shares of the real estate investment trusts stock worth $569,000 after buying an additional 12,783 shares during the last quarter. Commonwealth of Pennsylvania Public School Empls Retrmt SYS boosted its stake in shares of Healthcare Realty Trust by 10.5% in the first quarter. Commonwealth of Pennsylvania Public School Empls Retrmt SYS now owns 54,073 shares of the real estate investment trusts stock worth $1,486,000 after buying an additional 5,156 shares during the last quarter. Great West Life Assurance Co. Can boosted its position in Healthcare Realty Trust by 5.6% during the first quarter. Great West Life Assurance Co. Can now owns 202,034 shares of the real estate investment trusts stock worth $5,738,000 after purchasing an additional 10,717 shares in the last quarter. Finally, Raymond James Trust N.A. purchased a new position in Healthcare Realty Trust during the first quarter worth approximately $229,000. Hedge funds and other institutional investors own 98.54% of the companys stock.

About Healthcare Realty Trust

(Free Report

Healthcare Realty Trust is a real estate investment trust that integrates owning, managing, financing and developing income-producing real estate properties associated primarily with the delivery of outpatient healthcare services throughout the United States. As of March 31, 2023, the Company was invested in over 700 real estate properties totaling more than 40 million square feet and provided leasing and property management services to over 35 million square feet nationwide.

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Grimes & Company Inc. increased its stake in John Hancock Multifactor Large Cap ETF (NYSEARCA:JHML  Free Report) by 0.2% in the first quarter, Holdings Channel reports. The firm owned 1,628,815 shares of the companys stock after purchasing an additional 3,109 shares during the period. John Hancock Multifactor Large Cap ETF comprises 3.5% of Grimes & Company Inc.s holdings, making the stock its 6th largest position. Grimes & Company Inc. owned 0.12% of John Hancock Multifactor Large Cap ETF worth $84,356,000 as of its most recent filing with the Securities & Exchange Commission.

A number of other institutional investors also recently bought and sold shares of the stock. Money Concepts Capital Corp purchased a new position in John Hancock Multifactor Large Cap ETF during the 4th quarter worth approximately $27,000. Allworth Financial LP purchased a new position in John Hancock Multifactor Large Cap ETF during the 1st quarter worth approximately $41,000. FMR LLC increased its holdings in shares of John Hancock Multifactor Large Cap ETF by 34.8% during the 2nd quarter. FMR LLC now owns 1,341 shares of the companys stock valued at $64,000 after purchasing an additional 346 shares in the last quarter. McClarren Financial Advisors Inc. purchased a new position in shares of John Hancock Multifactor Large Cap ETF during the 4th quarter valued at approximately $129,000. Finally, JPMorgan Chase & Co. purchased a new position in shares of John Hancock Multifactor Large Cap ETF during the 4th quarter valued at approximately $201,000.

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John Hancock Multifactor Large Cap ETF Price Performance

NYSEARCA:JHML opened at $54.89 on Monday. The firm has a market cap of $757.48 million, a price-to-earnings ratio of 17.58 and a beta of 1.01. The company has a 50 day moving average price of $52.64 and a 200-day moving average price of $51.58. John Hancock Multifactor Large Cap ETF has a 1-year low of $44.55 and a 1-year high of $55.13.

John Hancock Multifactor Large Cap ETF Dividend Announcement

About John Hancock Multifactor Large Cap ETF

The company also recently announced a dividend, which was paid on Friday, June 30th. Stockholders of record on Wednesday, June 28th were issued a dividend of $0.3519 per share. The ex-dividend date was Tuesday, June 27th.

(Free Report)

The John Hancock Multifactor Large Cap ETF (JHML) is an exchange-traded fund that is based on the John Hancock Dimensional Large Cap index. The fund tracks an index of largest 800 US firms, weighted by multiple factors relative to their sector peers. JHML was launched on Sep 28, 2015 and is managed by John Hancock.

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Want to see what other hedge funds are holding JHML? Visit HoldingsChannel.com to get the latest 13F filings and insider trades for John Hancock Multifactor Large Cap ETF (NYSEARCA:JHML  Free Report).

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Webster Financial (NYSE:WBS  Free Report) had its target price lifted by JPMorgan Chase & Co. from $42.00 to $46.00 in a report released on Thursday, The Fly reports.

Several other equities analysts have also recently issued reports on the stock. StockNews.com assumed coverage on shares of Webster Financial in a research note on Thursday, May 18th. They issued a sell rating on the stock. Deutsche Bank Aktiengesellschaft assumed coverage on shares of Webster Financial in a research note on Thursday, May 25th. They issued a buy rating and a $47.00 price objective on the stock. Wells Fargo & Company lowered their price objective on shares of Webster Financial from $55.00 to $50.00 and set an equal weight rating on the stock in a research note on Friday, April 21st. UBS Group assumed coverage on shares of Webster Financial in a research report on Wednesday, March 15th. They issued a buy rating and a $56.00 target price on the stock. Finally, Keefe, Bruyette & Woods dropped their target price on shares of Webster Financial from $75.00 to $63.00 and set an outperform rating on the stock in a research report on Thursday, April 6th. One analyst has rated the stock with a sell rating, three have assigned a hold rating and six have given a buy rating to the companys stock. According to MarketBeat, the company has an average rating of Moderate Buy and an average price target of $54.92.

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Webster Financial Stock Down 0.7 %

Webster Financial stock opened at $37.75 on Thursday. The stock has a market cap of $6.60 billion, a price-to-earnings ratio of 7.66 and a beta of 1.24. The company has a current ratio of 0.96, a quick ratio of 0.95 and a debt-to-equity ratio of 1.20. The companys 50-day moving average price is $36.66 and its two-hundred day moving average price is $42.83. Webster Financial has a 52 week low of $31.03 and a 52 week high of $56.46.

Webster Financial Announces Dividend

Webster Financial ( NYSE:WBS Free Report ) last released its earnings results on Thursday, April 20th. The financial services provider reported $1.49 EPS for the quarter, missing the consensus estimate of $1.56 by ($0.07). The company had revenue of $666.00 million for the quarter, compared to analyst estimates of $708.96 million. Webster Financial had a net margin of 28.33% and a return on equity of 13.39%. The firms quarterly revenue was up 33.7% on a year-over-year basis. During the same period in the previous year, the business posted $1.24 EPS. On average, analysts expect that Webster Financial will post 5.99 EPS for the current fiscal year.

The business also recently declared a quarterly dividend, which was paid on Monday, May 22nd. Investors of record on Monday, May 8th were issued a dividend of $0.40 per share. This represents a $1.60 annualized dividend and a dividend yield of 4.24%. The ex-dividend date of this dividend was Friday, May 5th. Webster Financials dividend payout ratio is currently 32.45%.

Insider Buying and Selling

In related news, COO Luis Massiani sold 16,000 shares of the firms stock in a transaction that occurred on Tuesday, June 6th. The shares were sold at an average price of $37.27, for a total transaction of $596,320.00. Following the completion of the sale, the chief operating officer now directly owns 115,153 shares in the company, valued at $4,291,752.31. The transaction was disclosed in a filing with the SEC, which is accessible through the SEC website. 0.88% of the stock is currently owned by corporate insiders.

Institutional Trading of Webster Financial

A number of institutional investors have recently added to or reduced their stakes in WBS. US Bancorp DE lifted its stake in shares of Webster Financial by 217.7% in the first quarter. US Bancorp DE now owns 6,646 shares of the financial services providers stock worth $372,000 after buying an additional 4,554 shares during the last quarter. Cambridge Investment Research Advisors Inc. acquired a new stake in shares of Webster Financial in the first quarter worth $480,000. Cetera Advisor Networks LLC acquired a new stake in shares of Webster Financial in the first quarter worth $410,000. Private Advisor Group LLC lifted its stake in shares of Webster Financial by 78.6% in the first quarter. Private Advisor Group LLC now owns 11,359 shares of the financial services providers stock worth $637,000 after buying an additional 4,999 shares during the last quarter. Finally, PNC Financial Services Group Inc. lifted its stake in shares of Webster Financial by 78.5% in the first quarter. PNC Financial Services Group Inc. now owns 18,398 shares of the financial services providers stock worth $1,032,000 after buying an additional 8,091 shares during the last quarter. 85.34% of the stock is currently owned by institutional investors and hedge funds.

Webster Financial Company Profile

(Free Report)

Webster Financial Corporation operates as the bank holding company for Webster Bank, National Association that provides a range of financial services to individuals, families, and businesses in the United States. It operates through three segments: Commercial Banking, HSA Bank, and Consumer Banking. The Commercial Banking segment provides commercial real estate and equipment financing, business banking, asset-based lending, and commercial services; public sector finance; mortgage warehouse financing; treasury management services; credit, deposit, and cash flow management services; and wealth management solutions to business owners and operators, including trust, asset management, financial planning, insurance, retirement, and investment products, as well as derivative, treasury, accounts payable, accounts receivable, and trade products and services.

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MYT Netherlands Parent B.V. (NYSE:MYTE  Free Report) had its price objective cut by Bank of America from $14.00 to $8.00 in a research note released on Thursday morning, The Fly reports.

A number of other equities research analysts have also issued reports on the company. TD Cowen lowered MYT Netherlands Parent B.V. from an outperform rating to a market perform rating and reduced their target price for the company from $13.00 to $7.00 in a research note on Thursday, March 16th. Jefferies Financial Group lowered MYT Netherlands Parent B.V. from a buy rating to a hold rating and reduced their target price for the company from $19.00 to $4.00 in a research note on Wednesday, June 14th. Morgan Stanley reduced their target price on MYT Netherlands Parent B.V. from $9.00 to $6.00 and set an equal weight rating on the stock in a research note on Thursday, April 20th. JPMorgan Chase & Co. lowered MYT Netherlands Parent B.V. from an overweight rating to a neutral rating and reduced their target price for the company from $9.00 to $7.00 in a research note on Wednesday, April 19th. Finally, UBS Group cut their price target on MYT Netherlands Parent B.V. from $14.00 to $10.00 and set a buy rating for the company in a report on Thursday, April 6th. Five equities research analysts have rated the stock with a hold rating and four have issued a buy rating to the company. According to data from MarketBeat.com, MYT Netherlands Parent B.V. currently has an average rating of Hold and an average target price of $9.80.

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MYT Netherlands Parent B.V. Price Performance

Shares of NYSE:MYTE opened at $4.00 on Thursday. The businesss 50 day simple moving average is $4.14 and its 200-day simple moving average is $7.11. The firm has a market capitalization of $339.52 million, a price-to-earnings ratio of -44.44 and a beta of 1.05. The company has a debt-to-equity ratio of 0.11, a current ratio of 2.84 and a quick ratio of 0.45. MYT Netherlands Parent B.V. has a 12 month low of $3.47 and a 12 month high of $15.90.

Institutional Trading of MYT Netherlands Parent B.V.

MYT Netherlands Parent B.V. ( NYSE:MYTE Free Report ) last announced its quarterly earnings results on Wednesday, May 10th. The company reported ($0.05) EPS for the quarter, missing the consensus estimate of $0.04 by ($0.09). The firm had revenue of $213.37 million for the quarter, compared to analysts expectations of $236.00 million. MYT Netherlands Parent B.V. had a positive return on equity of 5.34% and a negative net margin of 1.05%. As a group, equities analysts forecast that MYT Netherlands Parent B.V. will post 0.25 earnings per share for the current fiscal year.

A number of institutional investors and hedge funds have recently made changes to their positions in MYTE. Natixis acquired a new stake in MYT Netherlands Parent B.V. in the 4th quarter valued at $37,000. Quantbot Technologies LP acquired a new stake in MYT Netherlands Parent B.V. in the 1st quarter valued at $56,000. Tower Research Capital LLC TRC increased its holdings in MYT Netherlands Parent B.V. by 1,945.0% in the 3rd quarter. Tower Research Capital LLC TRC now owns 5,685 shares of the companys stock valued at $65,000 after purchasing an additional 5,407 shares in the last quarter. UBS Group AG increased its holdings in MYT Netherlands Parent B.V. by 19.6% in the 3rd quarter. UBS Group AG now owns 8,555 shares of the companys stock valued at $99,000 after purchasing an additional 1,403 shares in the last quarter. Finally, Trexquant Investment LP increased its holdings in MYT Netherlands Parent B.V. by 24.4% in the 3rd quarter. Trexquant Investment LP now owns 12,965 shares of the companys stock valued at $149,000 after purchasing an additional 2,545 shares in the last quarter. 15.29% of the stock is currently owned by institutional investors and hedge funds.

MYT Netherlands Parent B.V. Company Profile

(Free Report)

MYT Netherlands Parent B.V., through its subsidiary, Mytheresa Group GmbH, operates a luxury e-commerce platform for fashion consumers in Germany, the United States, rest of Europe, and internationally. It offers womenswear, menswear, kids wear, and lifestyle products. The company sells clothes, bags, shoes, accessories, and fine jewelry through online and retail stores.

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StockNews.com initiated coverage on shares of Navios Maritime (NYSE:NM  Free Report) in a research report sent to investors on Friday morning. The brokerage issued a buy rating on the shipping companys stock.

Navios Maritime Stock Down 1.8 %

NM stock opened at $1.64 on Friday. The stock has a market capitalization of $37.44 million, a P/E ratio of 0.59 and a beta of 1.63. The company has a current ratio of 1.36, a quick ratio of 1.22 and a debt-to-equity ratio of 4.10. Navios Maritime has a 12 month low of $1.53 and a 12 month high of $2.97. The firm has a 50-day moving average price of $1.75 and a 200-day moving average price of $1.90.

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Navios Maritime (NYSE:NM  Free Report) last issued its quarterly earnings data on Wednesday, May 24th. The shipping company reported $0.25 earnings per share (EPS) for the quarter. The business had revenue of $65.41 million during the quarter. Navios Maritime had a net margin of 31.38% and a return on equity of 97.48%.

Institutional Inflows and Outflows

About Navios Maritime

A number of large investors have recently added to or reduced their stakes in the business. Rockefeller Capital Management L.P. increased its position in Navios Maritime by 36.8% during the 4th quarter. Rockefeller Capital Management L.P. now owns 20,437 shares of the shipping companys stock valued at $35,000 after purchasing an additional 5,500 shares during the period. Acadian Asset Management LLC grew its position in shares of Navios Maritime by 73.4% during the 1st quarter. Acadian Asset Management LLC now owns 24,850 shares of the shipping companys stock worth $43,000 after buying an additional 10,518 shares during the period. Walleye Capital LLC acquired a new stake in shares of Navios Maritime during the 1st quarter worth approximately $65,000. Jane Street Group LLC acquired a new stake in shares of Navios Maritime during the 1st quarter worth approximately $53,000. Finally, Goldman Sachs Group Inc. acquired a new stake in shares of Navios Maritime during the 1st quarter worth approximately $109,000. Institutional investors own 12.62% of the companys stock.

(Free Report)

Navios Maritime Holdings Inc operates as a seaborne shipping and logistics company in North America, Australia, Europe, Asia, South America, and internationally. It focuses on the transportation and transshipment of dry bulk commodities, including iron ores, coal, and grains. The company operates in two segments, Dry Bulk Vessel Operations and Logistics Business.

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Nuveen S&P 500 Dynamic Overwrite Fund (NYSE:SPXX  Free Report) was the recipient of a significant increase in short interest in June. As of June 15th, there was short interest totalling 11,300 shares, an increase of 34.5% from the May 31st total of 8,400 shares. Based on an average daily volume of 37,200 shares, the days-to-cover ratio is presently 0.3 days.

Nuveen S&P 500 Dynamic Overwrite Fund Price Performance

Nuveen S&P 500 Dynamic Overwrite Fund stock traded up $0.07 during mid-day trading on Monday, reaching $15.75. 48,583 shares of the companys stock traded hands, compared to its average volume of 43,021. Nuveen S&P 500 Dynamic Overwrite Fund has a 12-month low of $14.68 and a 12-month high of $18.02. The stock has a 50 day moving average of $15.41 and a two-hundred day moving average of $15.62.

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Nuveen S&P 500 Dynamic Overwrite Fund Dividend Announcement

The firm also recently announced a quarterly dividend, which will be paid on Monday, July 3rd. Stockholders of record on Thursday, June 15th will be given a dividend of $0.294 per share. This represents a $1.18 annualized dividend and a dividend yield of 7.47%. The ex-dividend date is Wednesday, June 14th.

Institutional Inflows and Outflows

About Nuveen S&P 500 Dynamic Overwrite Fund

A number of institutional investors have recently made changes to their positions in SPXX. Wells Fargo & Company MN increased its stake in Nuveen S&P 500 Dynamic Overwrite Fund by 2.8% during the second quarter. Wells Fargo & Company MN now owns 512,238 shares of the investment management companys stock worth $8,022,000 after acquiring an additional 13,889 shares during the last quarter. UBS Group AG increased its position in shares of Nuveen S&P 500 Dynamic Overwrite Fund by 7.1% during the 4th quarter. UBS Group AG now owns 462,770 shares of the investment management companys stock valued at $7,460,000 after purchasing an additional 30,686 shares during the last quarter. LPL Financial LLC raised its holdings in Nuveen S&P 500 Dynamic Overwrite Fund by 38.5% during the 2nd quarter. LPL Financial LLC now owns 170,800 shares of the investment management companys stock valued at $2,675,000 after buying an additional 47,500 shares during the period. Advisors Asset Management Inc. lifted its position in Nuveen S&P 500 Dynamic Overwrite Fund by 145.8% in the first quarter. Advisors Asset Management Inc. now owns 141,236 shares of the investment management companys stock worth $2,538,000 after buying an additional 83,766 shares during the last quarter. Finally, Aviance Capital Partners LLC boosted its stake in Nuveen S&P 500 Dynamic Overwrite Fund by 2.8% during the first quarter. Aviance Capital Partners LLC now owns 98,799 shares of the investment management companys stock worth $1,539,000 after buying an additional 2,678 shares during the period.

(Free Report)

Nuveen S&P 500 Dynamic Overwrite Fund is a closed-ended equity indexed mutual fund launched by Nuveen Investments, Inc The fund is co-managed by Nuveen Fund Advisors LLC and Nuveen Asset Management, LLC. It invests in the public equity markets of the United States. The fund seeks to invest in stocks of companies operating across diversified sectors.

Further Reading

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An Afghan political analyst has said the Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO) is expected to proactively assist Afghanistan in achieving peace, stability and development, considering most of its members neighbor Afghanistan and possess a better understanding of the country.

Jalal Bazwan, a lecturer of the Kabul-based Kardan University, made the remarks before the 23rd meeting of the Council of Heads of State of the SCO to be held on July 4.

Bazwan also highlighted the importance of diplomatic engagement and intelligence sharing between the SCO members and Afghanistan to fight terrorism.

Referring to a document titled China's Position on the Afghan Issue published in April, the analyst stressed the vital role of China in helping solve Afghanistan's woes.

The document stated China's support for moderate and prudent governance, as well as peace and reconstruction in Afghanistan.





Produced by Xinhua Global Service
HAL Trust (OTC:HALFF  Free Report) is one of 1,204 public companies in the Asset Management industry, but how does it weigh in compared to its rivals? We will compare HAL Trust to related businesses based on the strength of its risk, institutional ownership, dividends, profitability, earnings, analyst recommendations and valuation.

Valuation and Earnings

This table compares HAL Trust and its rivals top-line revenue, earnings per share (EPS) and valuation.

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Gross Revenue Net Income Price/Earnings Ratio HAL Trust N/A N/A 17.45 HAL Trust Competitors $240.64 million $5.71 million 2.11

HAL Trusts rivals have higher revenue and earnings than HAL Trust. HAL Trust is trading at a higher price-to-earnings ratio than its rivals, indicating that it is currently more expensive than other companies in its industry.

Insider & Institutional Ownership

Dividends

1.0% of HAL Trust shares are owned by institutional investors. Comparatively, 32.4% of shares of all Asset Management companies are owned by institutional investors. 18.1% of shares of all Asset Management companies are owned by company insiders. Strong institutional ownership is an indication that hedge funds, endowments and large money managers believe a company is poised for long-term growth.

HAL Trust pays an annual dividend of $4.10 per share and has a dividend yield of 3.2%. HAL Trust pays out 56.0% of its earnings in the form of a dividend. As a group, Asset Management companies pay a dividend yield of 8.1% and pay out 2,133.5% of their earnings in the form of a dividend.

Analyst Recommendations

This is a breakdown of current ratings and recommmendations for HAL Trust and its rivals, as reported by MarketBeat.com.

Sell Ratings Hold Ratings Buy Ratings Strong Buy Ratings Rating Score HAL Trust 0 0 1 0 3.00 HAL Trust Competitors 1053 4624 5987 83 2.43

HAL Trust presently has a consensus target price of $150.00, indicating a potential upside of 17.42%. As a group, Asset Management companies have a potential upside of 90.94%. Given HAL Trusts rivals higher probable upside, analysts plainly believe HAL Trust has less favorable growth aspects than its rivals.

Profitability

This table compares HAL Trust and its rivals net margins, return on equity and return on assets.

Net Margins Return on Equity Return on Assets HAL Trust N/A N/A N/A HAL Trust Competitors 374.59% 7.95% 4.97%

Summary

HAL Trust rivals beat HAL Trust on 9 of the 13 factors compared.

HAL Trust Company Profile

(Free Report)

HAL Trust, together with its subsidiaries, operates through multi-sectors in Europe, the United States, Canada, Asia, and internationally. The company operates through Unquoted, Quoted Minority Interests, Real Estates, and Liquid Portfolio segments. It engages in production of composite panels; residential construction, utility construction, project development, and renovation activities; supply of timber products and building materials; and develop, distributes, and e-commerce computer gaming equipment. The company also provides furniture and fit-out services; sells medical and hearing aid products; offers shipping, greenhouse construction, information and data, credit management, and factoring services; and operates temporary staffing agency, optical retail chain, mortgage funding, and greenhouse projects, as well as offers certification and benchmarking human resource polices. In addition, it manufactures and distributes optical frames and sunglasses; design, builds, installs, and operates offshore floating facilities, as well as provides tank storage services; publishes financial newspaper Het Financieele Dagblad; operates the radio station BNR Nieuwsradio; and offers the information and data services provider Company.info. Further, the company engages in the development and rental of retail centers, multi-family properties, and office buildings; investment in grade bonds; and provision of financial assets, including marketable securities and cash-equivalent instruments. Additionally, it invests in GHG reduction projects; and offers financial services, building materials, orthopedic devices, and tank terminal services. The company was founded in 1873 and is based in Willemstad, Curacao.

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WESCO International, Inc. (NYSE:WCC  Free Report) EVP Nelson John Squires III sold 3,491 shares of WESCO International stock in a transaction dated Wednesday, June 28th. The shares were sold at an average price of $175.00, for a total transaction of $610,925.00. Following the completion of the sale, the executive vice president now owns 69,587 shares in the company, valued at $12,177,725. The sale was disclosed in a document filed with the SEC, which can be accessed through this hyperlink.

WESCO International Stock Performance

Shares of WCC opened at $179.06 on Monday. The firms 50 day moving average is $147.81 and its 200-day moving average is $145.60. The stock has a market capitalization of $9.18 billion, a P/E ratio of 11.46, a P/E/G ratio of 1.01 and a beta of 1.96. The company has a debt-to-equity ratio of 1.22, a current ratio of 2.39 and a quick ratio of 1.33. WESCO International, Inc. has a 12-month low of $99.00 and a 12-month high of $180.07.

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WESCO International (NYSE:WCC  Free Report) last released its earnings results on Thursday, May 4th. The technology company reported $3.75 earnings per share for the quarter, topping the consensus estimate of $3.61 by $0.14. The business had revenue of $5.52 billion for the quarter, compared to the consensus estimate of $5.45 billion. WESCO International had a net margin of 3.98% and a return on equity of 21.33%. The firms quarterly revenue was up 12.0% compared to the same quarter last year. During the same period last year, the firm posted $3.63 earnings per share. Equities research analysts anticipate that WESCO International, Inc. will post 17.41 EPS for the current fiscal year.

WESCO International Announces Dividend

Analyst Upgrades and Downgrades

The company also recently announced a quarterly dividend, which was paid on Friday, June 30th. Stockholders of record on Thursday, June 15th were given a $0.375 dividend. This represents a $1.50 annualized dividend and a dividend yield of 0.84%. The ex-dividend date of this dividend was Wednesday, June 14th. WESCO Internationals dividend payout ratio (DPR) is currently 9.60%.

Several research firms have commented on WCC. Royal Bank of Canada reissued an outperform rating and set a $215.00 target price on shares of WESCO International in a research note on Thursday, March 30th. Robert W. Baird raised shares of WESCO International from a neutral rating to an outperform rating and set a $180.00 target price on the stock in a research note on Friday, May 5th. Loop Capital raised their target price on shares of WESCO International from $170.00 to $210.00 in a research note on Wednesday, June 21st. Oppenheimer raised their target price on shares of WESCO International from $180.00 to $190.00 in a research note on Friday, May 26th. Finally, StockNews.com began coverage on shares of WESCO International in a research note on Thursday, May 18th. They issued a hold rating on the stock. One equities research analyst has rated the stock with a hold rating, five have assigned a buy rating and one has given a strong buy rating to the companys stock. According to MarketBeat.com, the stock currently has an average rating of Buy and a consensus price target of $191.43.

Institutional Inflows and Outflows

Several institutional investors have recently made changes to their positions in the company. Geode Capital Management LLC increased its position in shares of WESCO International by 3.8% in the first quarter. Geode Capital Management LLC now owns 615,883 shares of the technology companys stock worth $95,179,000 after acquiring an additional 22,340 shares in the last quarter. Eagle Asset Management Inc. boosted its holdings in shares of WESCO International by 28.9% during the first quarter. Eagle Asset Management Inc. now owns 244,975 shares of the technology companys stock worth $37,858,000 after purchasing an additional 54,875 shares during the period. Farmers & Merchants Investments Inc. boosted its holdings in shares of WESCO International by 1.1% during the first quarter. Farmers & Merchants Investments Inc. now owns 189,580 shares of the technology companys stock worth $29,298,000 after purchasing an additional 2,147 shares during the period. Braun Stacey Associates Inc. boosted its holdings in shares of WESCO International by 89.2% during the first quarter. Braun Stacey Associates Inc. now owns 151,224 shares of the technology companys stock worth $23,370,000 after purchasing an additional 71,289 shares during the period. Finally, J. L. Bainbridge & Co. Inc. boosted its holdings in shares of WESCO International by 48.5% during the first quarter. J. L. Bainbridge & Co. Inc. now owns 125,269 shares of the technology companys stock worth $19,359,000 after purchasing an additional 40,925 shares during the period. 92.78% of the stock is owned by hedge funds and other institutional investors.

WESCO International Company Profile

(Free Report)

WESCO International, Inc provides business-to-business distribution, logistics services, and supply chain solutions in the United States, Canada, and internationally. It operates through three segments: Electrical & Electronic Solutions (EES), Communications & Security Solutions (CSS), and Utility and Broadband Solutions (UBS).

Further Reading

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Based on new data from national property broker Redfin, a record one-quarter (25.4%) of homebuyers nationwide are looking to move to a different metro area. That is up from 23% a year ago and less than 20% before the pandemic.

A record share of homebuyers are relocating because high mortgage rates have made housing more expensive than ever, making relatively affordable areas more attractive.

Phoenix, Las Vegas and Miami--where the typical home is much less expensive than coastal cities like San Francisco and New York--are the most popular metros for homebuyers moving to a different part of the country. That's in spite of those places facing ever-worsening climate risks like heat, drought and flooding.

But that doesn't mean more homebuyers are looking to relocate. In fact, the number of homebuyers moving to a new metro is down 7% from a year ago, the biggest decline on record, as elevated mortgage rates push many Americans out of the homebuying game altogether. Still, out-of-town moves are holding up better than in-town moves: The number of homebuyers looking to move within their current hometown is down a record 18%.

In other words, the overall homebuying pie has shrunk, but buyers moving to a new metro make up the biggest piece of that pie on record.

Out-of-town homebuyers move to Phoenix, Florida despite high risk of drought and flooding

Phoenix is the most popular destination for homebuyers looking to move to a different part of the country, followed by Las Vegas and several Florida metros. Popularity is determined by net inflow, a measure of how many more Redfin.com users looked to move into an area than leave.

Sun Belt metros are popular among relocating homebuyers because many of them are affordable compared to other parts of the U.S. The typical home in Phoenix, for instance, sells for $450,000. That's up significantly from before the pandemic because remote work made the area explode in popularity, but is about half the $800,000 cost of the typical home in Seattle, the most common origin of people moving to Phoenix.

Even though the flow of homebuyers moving into Phoenix has slowed as high mortgage rates have cooled the housing market, it's still attracting more out-of-towners than anywhere else in the U.S. That's in spite of Phoenix facing worsening drought and heat risk. Arizona recently said it will stop issuing homebuilding permits in some parts of the Phoenix desert, partly because migration to the area and extensive development is straining water resources. That will cap the number of new communities in the Phoenix area and could eventually increase the cost of housing.

Most of the other popular destinations for homebuyers also face extreme climate risks; for instance, parts of the Sacramento area face high wildfire danger and many Florida metros are very susceptible to flooding. Some insurance companies have even stopped providing coverage to homeowners in California and Florida due to high risk of damage by natural disasters.

"Climate risks haven't yet stopped many homebuyers from moving into areas that don't have enough water, like Phoenix, and places that could eventually be underwater, like coastal Florida," said Redfin Chief Economist Daryl Fairweather. "That's because even though Sun Belt home prices soared during the pandemic, those metros remain a bargain for people relocating from expensive coastal cities. Arizona's recent limit on new construction isn't likely to deplete inventory enough--or push prices up enough--to change that calculus much in the short term."



Buyers are leaving Washington, D.C. and Boston for small beach towns

More homebuyers are looking to move away from San Francisco, New York and Los Angeles than any other metro in the country. That's based on net outflow, a measure of how many more Redfin.com users are looking to leave a metro than move in.

Even before the remote-work boom that allowed scores of people to move away from expensive coastal job hubs, a lot of homebuyers left these areas in favor of more affordable housing markets. The most popular destinations are less expensive, sunny parts of the country such as Las Vegas and Miami.

But notably, smaller vacation hotspots now top the list of most popular destinations for people leaving two pricey coastal hubs: Washington, D.C. and Boston. Homebuyers leaving Boston are most commonly going to Portland, ME, a popular summer tourist spot. And buyers moving away from the nation's capital are most commonly moving to the Salisbury, MD metro area, home to popular beach towns like Bethany Beach, DE and Ocean City, MD.

Those places are popular with homebuyers--especially remote workers--not just because of their vacation vibes, but because of their relative affordability. The typical Salisbury home, for instance, sells for $245,000, compared with $560,000 in Washington, D.C.

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Illinois will plug, cap and reclaim up to 20% of orphaned oil and gas wells statewide.
BEIJING, July 3 (Xinhua) -- China's meteorological authorities on Monday renewed a blue alert for rainstorms in parts of the country.

From 2 p.m. Monday to 2 p.m. Tuesday, heavy rain or rainstorms are forecast to hit parts of Sichuan, Yunnan, Chongqing, Guizhou, Hubei, Henan, Shandong, Anhui, Jiangsu and other regions. Heavy downpours of up to 160 mm may lash parts of these regions, according to the National Meteorological Center.

Some of these regions will experience heavy rainfall marked by 20 mm to over 60 mm of hourly precipitation, as well as severe convective weather conditions such as thunderstorms and gales, the center said.

It has advised local governments and residents to take appropriate precautions. Schools and kindergartens have been asked to ensure the safety of students and children, while drivers have been advised to be cautious about road waterlogging and traffic jams.

China has a four-tier weather warning system, with red representing the most severe warning, followed by orange, yellow and blue. 
Woman dies after tree falls on her car during Saturdays severe weather in St. Louis
UAW president Shawn Fain (left) and Teamsters president Sean O'Brien (center) at the Teamsters headquarters in Washington, D.C. April 26, 2023. [Photo: Teamsters]

Half a million workers at United Parcel Service (UPS) and the Detroit Three auto corporations face major battles this summer with their labor agreements expiring on July 31 at UPS and September 14 at GM, Ford and Stellantis.

These struggles pit workers not only against the employers but the Teamsters and the United Auto Workers bureaucracies. Despite their militant-sounding rhetoric, the so-called reform factions, led by IBT President Sean OBrien and UAW President Shawn Fain, are just as committed as their predecessors to beating back the resistance of workers to another round of pro-company contracts.

OBrien and Fain have the closest relations to the Biden administration and the Democratic Party, which are determined to block strikes by these powerful sections of the working class and prevent any disruption to their expanding military confrontations with Russia and China.

To conceal this conspiracy from rank-and-file workers, a concerted propaganda campaign has been carried out in the media, and particularly publications aligned with the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA) and other pseudo-left supporters of the union bureaucracy and the Democratic Party, to present OBrien and Fain as insurgent militants.

One example of this mythmaking is the June 27 column in the Nation magazine, titled, Contract talks by Teamsters and the UAW have the potential to change our politics. It is written by Nation columnist Jane McAlevey, a former executive board member of the Service Employees International Union (SEIU), currently a Senior Policy Fellow at the University of California-Berkeleys Institute for Research on Labor and Employment.

According to McAlevey, the momentous struggle that the two unions are supposedly waging against corporate America can also save American democracy from the threat of Trump and fascism. Aware of the popular anger in the working class against Bidens pro-business and pro-war policies, McAlevey omits any mention of the Democratic president and his party, but she makes it clear what she has in mind.

[The] nationwide negotiations by the International Brotherhood of Teamsters and the United Auto Workers (UAW) have the potential to provide swing-state voters with their own political education in the lead-up to the 2024 election.

She adds that the IBT and UAW have a chance to educate American voters about who is to blame for the pain in their lives  by making contract negotiations a classroom that exposes the corporate elites destructive agenda and shows how to build a better, fairer, and more just countrystarting in the workplace, concluding:

With major UPS hubs located in battleground states including Georgia, Pennsylvania, Arizona, and Wisconsin, and auto plants clustered in Michigan and Ohio, these negotiationswhich include the potential for big strikes like those waged by the teachers unionscould reset the working-class vote in 2024.

That is, McAlevey sees the reform bureaucracies as critical in bolstering the Democratic Party in the coming election and beyond.

If McAlevey were to be honest about who is to blame for the pain in workers lives, she would point the finger at her friends in the union bureaucracy and the Democratic Party, who have spent decades colluding in the destruction of workers jobs, living standards and social programs, even as trillions were funneled to the corporate and financial elite.

The betrayals of the union bureaucracyincluding by the teachers unionsand the anti-working class character of the Democratic Party have allowed Trump and the fascistic Republicans to grotesquely palm themselves off as champions of the working class.

It should not be forgotten that the Obama administrationwith then Vice President Bidenimposed historic concessions on autoworkers, including the two-tier wage system and the abolition of cost-of-living raises, during the 2009 bankruptcy restructuring of GM and Chrysler. This was done with the full collusion of the UAW bureaucracy, including Shawn Fain. Bidens push to slash jobs and wages for electric vehicle production will mean further devastation for Detroit, Cleveland, Toledo and other cities that have suffered decades of deindustrialization.

In the last year alone, the Democratic Socialists of America members of Congress have endorsed the US/NATO proxy war against Russia in Ukraine, the outlawing of last years railroad strike and the imposition of a pro-company contract that railroad workers had previously rejected.

While Trump and the Republicans demand the deportation of socialists and Marxists, Biden and the Democratic Party rely on the anti-communist thugs in the AFL-CIO bureaucracy to suppress the class struggle and defend capitalist rule. If it fails to do so, the Democrats will resort to state repression and authoritarian methods against a threat by a politically radicalized working class.

Since taking office, Biden has only strengthened the fascistic coup-plotters in the Republican Party, as part of his efforts to maintain bipartisan unity for the war against Russia and the coming military confrontation with China. At the same time, Biden, the self-proclaimed most pro-union president in US history, has further integrated the union bureaucracy into the capitalist state structure, to block strikes in decisive industries like the oil industry, the railroads and the docks and impose the labor discipline and austerity measures necessary for the conversion of the US to a wartime economy.

Trade union bureaucrats like OBrien and Fain are the chief front men of the Democratic Party in the unions. OBrien has been a frequent visitor to the White House while Fain is pitching the UAW bureaucracy as the only force Biden can rely on to impose the job and wage-cutting necessary for US automakers to compete with China in the electric vehicle market.

McAlevey and the upper-middle-class stratum in the union bureaucracy and the Democratic Party that she speaks for fear an insurgent movement of the working class far more than the danger of fascism. They are keenly aware of that last years campaign by Will Lehman, a Mack Trucks worker and socialist candidate for UAW president, won 5,000 votes even though the UAW bureaucracy did everything to disenfranchise UAW members. Since then, workers have increasingly taken up Lehmans call for the formation of new centers of working class power and decision-making in the factories, through the expansion of the autoworkers network of rank-and-file committees, under the direction of the International Workers Alliance of Rank-and-File Committees.

There is no doubt that a powerful movement of the working class, uniting black and white, native born and immigrant workers, would pull the rug from underneath the fascist demagogy of Trump, DeSantis and other reactionary Republicans. Such a movement cannot be politically subordinated to the Democratic Party, a party of Wall Street, the Pentagon and the affluent upper-middle class that provide the personnel to the union bureaucracy and its acolytes. For the working class the defense of democratic rights is inseparable from the fight against capitalism and war, and the struggle for workers power and socialism.
The Baltimore police reported a mass shooting overnight Saturday at a block party in the Brooklyn neighborhood of South Baltimore. Two people were killed and 28 were injured, with three in critical condition. The suspects have not been found as of this writing.

The incident is the largest mass shooting in the city in over a decade, according to the Gun Violence Archive. The police say the two people killed were an 18-year-old woman and a 20-year-old man. Victims reportedly ranged from 21 to 34 years old.

Me and Aaron were waiting for him to be seen when the first car came pulling in and we ended up helping get him in the ER, said a local resident on social media about the scene at the hospital. The next thing you know, car after car, kid after kid just kept pulling in and jumping out, all got shot somewhere on their body. The resident noted that a car pulled right up to the door bringing two girls that were shot its crazy and so sad they were all babies!!

The mass shooting is the fifth the city has seen in 2023, with the police reporting nearly 130 homicides and almost 300 shootings so far this year. It occurred around 12:30 AM at a block party associated with the neighborhoods annual Brooklyn Day festivities.

A person looks out the front door of a home as police tape surrounds the area in the Southern District of Baltimore, Sunday, July 2, 2023. Police say two people were killed and dozens were wounded in a mass shooting that took place during a block party just after midnight. [AP Photo/Julio Cortez]

Nineteen victims were sent to MedStar Harbor Hospital, all of whom were suffering varying degrees of injury from gunshot wounds, according to hospital spokespeople.

One resident told the Baltimore Sun that not a day goes by we dont hear shots.

In January 2022 the Democratic mayor launched a pilot program called Group Violence Reduction Strategy (GVRS) in the Western District, which historically is the most impoverished and violent part of the city. The 2015 police murder of 25-year old Freddie Gray occurred in the Western District.

Homicides and nonfatal shootings in the district declined by 34 percent in 2022 due to the GVRS program, although they have started to increase again this year.

Theres nothing to do around here, theres no pools, no movie theaters; [nothing] that a kid on summer break would want to do, a 20-year resident of the neighborhood told the World Socialist Web Site. My heart hurts for those families, she said, adding that she was doing all she could to get my babies out of here.

The 2020 US Census reports that the city has a 20.3 percent poverty rate, with a per capita income of $34,378. These statistics persist even as Baltimores unemployment rates have dropped to historic lows, with the Bureau of Labor Statistics reporting last month that unemployment in the city was less than two percent.

In Baltimore City as a whole, there were 4,845 violent crimes, a 7.2 percent decrease compared to the same time last year, but with property crimes up by 34.47 percent this year.

Shootings tend to accelerate during the summer. Nationwide there have been a total of 21,500 deaths due to gun violence, including homicides and suicides, and 338 mass shootings so far this year, according to the Gun Violence Archive.
The interim report of the Australian Labor governments cost-cutting review into the National Disability Insurance Scheme (NDIS) was released last Friday. It provides no details whatsoever of how the government plans to slice $74 billion off its funding for critically-needed disability services over the next decade, as declared by Labors May 9 federal budget.

Bill Shorten addressing Department of Social Services senior staff [Photo: Bill Shorten]

Nevertheless, the report sounds an ominous note. The NDIS is an uncapped, needs-based scheme, it states. However, the NDIS must also be sustainable and its costs predictable for governments and the public.

This sends a clear message that, as the corporate elite and media are demanding, moves are being prepared to impose new caps and eligibility restrictions on NDIS programs. This will inflict even greater difficulties and hardships on the estimated 2.4 million people aged under 65 years who have disabilities, including children and their parents.

As the WSWS warned from the outset, when the previous Gillard Labor government introduced the NDIS in 2013, it was a pro-business blueprint designed to shut down state-run disability services, shift people into a voucher-based disability market based on profiteering corporate providers and strip away Disability Support Pension (DSP) entitlements.

In 2011, the Gillard government had already announced the largest crackdown on DSP eligibility in Australian history by introducing harsher impairment tables used to judge those applying. By 2020, the number of DSP recipients aged 1664 had declined from around 802,000 in 2012 to 660,000, an 18 percent cut.

The overall result has been a disaster for most people with disabilities. A 2021 survey of people with disabilities conducted by the Melbourne Disability Institute, in partnership with the Brotherhood of St. Laurence and Baptcare, published in June 2022, reported that 90 percent of respondents said the support and services they received were inadequate to meet their needs.

Now the Albanese Labor government is trying to politically exploit the predictable failures, cruelties and crisis produced by this privatisation in order to initiate an even more damaging cutback and restructuring.

There was another telling warning sign last week when NDIS Minister Bill Shorten quickly back-tracked on a media interview in which he had suggested that it wasnt the end of the world if the government did not meet its budget target of slashing the NDIS spending growth rate from 14 percent to 8 percent annually to meet the $74 billion goal.

Rest assured the Albanese government is absolutely committed to scheme growth targets of 8 per cent, Shorten said.

Treasurer Jim Chalmers also weighed in to recommit the government to delivering on that target, reassuring the financial markets of Labors fiscal responsibility and its capacity to hold the line in the face of mounting working-class discontent over the worsening cost of living and social crisis, including on disability services.

The NDIS was one of the biggest targets of the May 9 budget, which also inflicted substantial cuts to funding for public health, schools, tertiary education and housing. At the same time, it allocated hundreds of billions of dollars for income tax cuts for the wealthy and purchases of AUKUS submarines and other weaponry to prepare to join a US war against China.

Yet the budget said nothing about how the huge NDIS cutback would be achieved, seeking to keep the public in the dark as much as possible. Last month, equally deceptively, Shorten laid out plans to cut $15.3 billion off NDIS funding over the next four years, supposedly without affecting the quality or availability of services.

Implausibly, Shorten claimed that most of the savings could come by putting participants on longer-term assistance plans and streamlining application response times in an effort to reduce the high numbers of complaints and legal appeals from people denied eligibility or adequate help.

Clearly, however, these measureseven if implementedwill not satisfy the government-corporate demands for much more fundamental cuts.

Commissioned by Shorten and the government last October, the NDIS review panel was, above all, charged with making recommendations about how to make the scheme fiscally sustainable.

The panel consists of Lisa Paul, a former federal public service chief, and Professor Bruce Bonyhady, one of the NDISs original architects. For now, instead of making recommendations, their interim report poses five revealing questions, asking for submissions.

Question one is Why is the NDIS an oasis in a desert? That is a muffled reference to the fact nearly all other disability services, once provided by state, territory and local governments, and by learning difficulty programs in government schools, have been eliminated over the past decade, as intended by the Gillard government.

There were 592,059 participants in the NDIS as of Marchonly about a quarter of all those with disabilities. Data collated last November by the Per Capita think tank showed a precipitous decline in disability service funding in all states and territories, from over $7 billion a year in 2015-16, before the full NDIS rollout, to less than $1 billion in 2020-21. There has also been a sharp decline in local government spending, in real terms, on related services.

At the same time, the Per Capita report found that NDIS Tier 2 programsmeant to be provided to people classified as less seriously disabled, and therefore denied care packagesconstituted less than 1 percent of NDIS spending. It said this funding appeared to be lower than aggregate state-level spending on Tier 2-type activities that predated the NDIS.

Question two is: What does reasonable and necessary mean? That is the test for the level of assistance offered to NDIS participants. According to the report, the test is poorly defined, adding: This unresolved issue is the cause of many of the schemes challengesincluding stressful, time-consuming and poor planning experiences, inconsistent and inequitable decisions about funding and disputes between participants and the Agency.

While the report requests suggestions as to how to tackle this issue, the governments clear thrust is to define the test to further restrict access to care packages. The report itself states: The NDIS was never designed to support all people with disability.

Question three is: Why are there many more children in the NDIS than expected? In particular, about 54 percent of NDIS participants under the age of 18 have autism, and 21 percent have developmental delay. Eleven percent of boys aged between five and seven are NDIS participants; 5 percent of girls in this age bracket are on the scheme.

While the causes of this are no doubt complex, and demand further probing, the report concedes that this reliance on the NDIS reflects a lack of supports for children with disability, outside the NDIS, in mainstream settings. It comments: With so few supports outside the NDIS, it is not surprising that parents are fighting to get their children with developmental concerns, delays and disabilities into the NDIS.

Even more revealing is question four: Why arent NDIS markets working? The report states: The markets in the NDIS have not worked as originally imagined. Competition has not produced improved quality, innovation or diversity of services for all participants in all locations.

The truth is that the markets are working exactly as the WSWS warned. People with a disability have become individual clients. They must negotiate contracts for support plans delivered by businesses that compete in the disability service industry, including by price-gouging, while slashing costs and the training, wages and conditions of disability support workers.

Far from proposing any reversal of this disastrous privatisation, the report proposes the impossiblemaking the profit-driven markets serve working people. It asks: What needs to be done to ensure NDIS markets serve the interests of people with disability, rather than the other way round?

Finally, question five cuts to the chase: How do we ensure that the NDIS is sustainable? The report asks for proposals to ensure that the NDIS can contribute to the new sustainability framework foreshadowed by National Cabinet. That is the cost-cutting demanded by this Labor government-dominated cabal of federal, state and territory government leaders.

One of the most cynical claims made by the government and big business backers of the NDIS is that it boosts the economy by equipping participants to enter the workforce. The Per Capita think tank, for example, calculated in 2021 that every dollar spent on the NDIS injected $2.25 back into the economy.

Essentially this means providing employers with a new source of cheap, government-subsidised labour. Under the governments Supported Wage System (SWS), people with disabilities can be paid as little as $102 a weekless than an eighth of national minimum wage of $882.80 per week! According to the governments SWS web site: Under SWS, special workplace arrangements are created so that employers can pay wages to a person with disability based on how productive they are in their job.

None of this is enough for the financial oligarchs and their media outlets. A June 30 editorial in the Australian called for harsher eligibility restrictions, as well as means testing and co-payments to compel people with disabilities to pay for services. The NDIS required tough love to survive, it insisted.

Such is the ruling classs contempt for working-class lives. Many NDIS participants have complex needs, including for personal help with daily living, respite care, travel assistance, specialised equipment, home modifications and disability accommodation.

Free and guaranteed access to high-quality healthcare for all, including disability services, is a basic social right. The provision of care for those with a disability cannot be left in the hands of the financial elite and its political representatives, whether Labor or Liberal-National. It requires a fight to overturn the capitalist profit system itself.
Clashes between protesters and police continued throughout France over the weekend, following the police murder of 17-year-old Nahel M. in the Parisian suburb of Nanterre last Tuesday. On Sunday evening, President Emmanuel Macron held an emergency cabinet meeting in response to the ongoing crisis.

Police officers patrol in front of the Arc de Triomphe on the Champs Elysees in Paris, Saturday, July 1, 2023. [AP Photo/Christophe Ena]

Not only the killing but also the attempt of officers involved to cover up the murder as self-defencebefore a video of the incident showed they shot the youth at point-blank range under no threat to their lifehas led to a massive outpouring of anger across France and internationally.

On Saturday, Nahels funeral was held in Nanterre attended by thousands of peaceful protesters.

Violent clashes across France saw 1,300 people arrested on Friday night and then a further 719 on Saturday night. This crackdown follows the arrest of thousands by the French police during Macrons anti-democratic implementation of his pension cut this spring.

Major French cities have been besieged by a heavily armed police force equipped with helicopters, armoured cars, and anti-riot firearms. On Friday, Saturday and Sunday night 45,000 police were mobilized nationally with an additional 7,000 sent to Paris each night as reinforcements.

Over the weekend specialized RAID units, which occupy neighbourhoods with armoured cars, were deployed to Marseille and Lyon. The infamous BRAV-M units which provoked and terrorized demonstrators in Paris in April during the protests against Macrons pension reform were also deployed.

Despite the Macron governments efforts to censor evidence of police violence on social media, videos show violent police charges against mostly defenceless protesters. Other videos show police efforts to prevent journalists from recording the clashes.

Pitched battles between cops and mostly youthful protesters occurred in many French cities. Police stations were set on fire in the towns of Nemours, Pau and Combs-la-Ville. Public buildings throughout Paris, Marseille, and Lille were set ablaze. In the northern Parisian suburb of Aubervilliers, a bus station burned down with 12 buses destroyed. Groups in Lyon raided a police vehicle carrying weapons and live ammunition which has not yet been retrieved.

On Friday and Saturday night the tram and bus services throughout France were cancelled from 9 p.m. onwards on the order of Interior Minister Gerald Darmanin. This was expanded to the Paris Metro service on Sunday. Over the weekend, in Lille, Marseille and Lyon, public transport was cancelled and meeting in groups was banned from the late afternoon onwards. Similar measures were taken in smaller towns throughout the territory that saw clashes earlier in the week.

Anger against police repression and social conditions spread to Belgium and Switzerland. In the Swiss city of Lausanne seven people were arrested on Saturday night. The French overseas territories of Reunion and French Guyana also saw significant clashes. Reflecting international nervousness over the situation in France, German Chancellor Olaf Scholz stated he was watching with concern.

One incident that gives an insight into the popular hatred of Frances capitalist politicians came in the small town of LHay-Les-Roses where a burning car was pushed into the driveway of a local mayor, a member of the right-wing Les Republicains political party. French Prime Minister Elisabeth Borne rushed to the scene and publicly assured officials that the government and police would protect them from their constituents.

There has been a significant effort by the Macron government to deny the overtly political nature of these protests, which follow directly from the pension cut struggle. On Saturday Macron stated, Weve seen violent gatherings organized on several [social media platforms]but also a kind of mimicry of violence living the video games that have intoxicated them.

This echoes Macrons statement during the Yellow Vest protests when he blamed Facebook for the massive opposition to his presidency.

Government spokesperson Olivier Veran later attempted to portray the protests as the work of apolitical and hardened criminals: There is no political message here. When you loot a Foot Locker, Lacoste or Sephora store, there is no political message. Its looting.

If youth in France feel they must resort to violence to express their dissatisfaction it is not due to social media or video games, but the horrific social conditions in which they live and the lack of political alternatives offered by the established political parties. In the suburbs of Paris, Lyon and Marseille where the most violent clashes have been concentrated, poverty and unemployment are endemic.

The reality facing youth in working-class areas is one with no jobs, no access to quality education, and under continuous harassmentif not deadly threat as in the case of Nahelat the hands of the cops. As was shown in their treacherous role in the struggle against the pension reform, the pseudo-left parties and the union bureaucracies which claim to oppose Macron offer no real opposition to the capitalist system which has condemned these young men and women to lives of poverty.

The mass arrests over the weekend came after the fascistic joint statement of the police unions published Friday declaring, we are at war and threatening to put those we arrest out of action. The joint communique continued, Faced with these savage hordes, asking for calm is no longer enough, we must impose it.  [it is time] for combat against these vermin.

Significant sections of the French political class have fully solidarized themselves with the polices war against vermin and demanded an even harsher response. In a video address on Sunday far-right leader Marine Le Pen lambasted the anarchy in France and called on authorities to declare a state of emergency or curfew. Leader of the conservative Les Republicains Eric Ciotti stated, I support the police with all my force, the gendarmes and those that command them.

Both denounced Jean Luc Melenchon, leader of the pseudo-left NUPES alliance. Ciotti called him a danger to the republic because Melenchon had described the police as uncontrolled, a huge understatement following months of violent repression against peaceful protests and the attempt to cover up the brutal killing of a 17-year-old boy.

Melenchon is anything but a danger to the capitalist Fifth Republic, which he propped up through the 2022 election crisis and the struggle against Macrons pension reform. He represents a wing of the bourgeoisie fearful of the social reaction that the brazen criminality of the police and their political sponsors may provoke, while remaining organically hostile to the social aspirations of the working class.

His response to the crisis has not been to call for the bringing down of the Macron government and its police state, but to produce a toothless emergency declaration whose principal demands are better training for the police and the formation of a series of independent oversight commissions. The absurd notion that an ultra-violent force of police officers who declare themselves at war with vermin can be reformed is another example of the political bankruptcy of the French pseudo-left.

The aftermath of the George Floyd protests, where the US Democratic Party solidarized themselves with anti-police violence protesters only to massively increase the funding and militarization of the police after Biden came to office, should be a warning to the French population that neither Melenchon nor any other bourgeois politician will launch a struggle against the police or the capitalist system they defend.

The Parti de legalite socialiste calls for the construction of rank-and-file committees independent of the pseudo-left parties and the pro-Macron union bureaucracies. Only a mass mobilization of the French and European working class can defend workers and youth from police violence and bring down the hated Macron government.
The Socialist Equality Party (SEP) and the Plantation Workers Action Committee (PWAC) in Sri Lanka have received reliable information that Alton Estate management is conspiring with local Ceylon Workers Congress (CWC) leaders to stop the PWAC/SEP campaign to defend the 22 victimised workers and two youth.

SEP member winning support for victimised Alton Estate workers from Colombo harbour workers, 23 June 2023.

The SEP has been told that management convened a meeting with its local stooges and trade union officials in early June. The estate bosses told those in attendance that the PWAC/SEP work would disrupt the companys tea sales on the world market and that this could badly impact on workers. Estate management sought support from the participants to block the campaign.

Managements intervention is in response to a PWAC petition launched on May 30 with the support of the SEP and the World Socialist Web Site. Directed to the Sri Lankan attorney general, it demands the withdrawal of trumped-up charges and reinstatement of 34 Alton workers, including those facing court, who were sacked by the Horana Plantation Company which controls the estate.

Several recent incidents indicate that the police are supporting the joint management and union attempts to block the petition campaign.

* On June 4, Sandanan Palaniyandi, also known as Shanmuganadan, who works in the estate dispensary, attempted to disrupt a June 4 petition campaign by PWAC-SEP members. He introduced himself as a member of an Alton Estate police vigilante committee and claimed that estate management and the police had blamed him for allowing the petition campaign to proceed.

* On June 20, Pittchamuttu, a CWC Maskeliya area leader and T. Thanaraj, a CWC Alton Estate branch leader, met SEP member K. Kandipan in the Glenugie Estate where he lives and denounced him for criticising CWC activities and other unions.

* On June 22, Pittchamuttu visited the home of one of the female workers facing bogus court action and warned her not to participate in any PWAC discussions. The previous evening, and following a court hearing, she and nine other victimised workers attended an action committee discussion and agreed to strengthen its campaign.

* On June 25, SEP membersK. Kandipan and M. Thevarajahwere told by M. Shanthakumar, a CWC trade union branch official not to meet with PWAC members at the Alton Estate and not to criticise the trade unions. Shanthakumars warnings were issued after they had visited the estate.



* On June 30, Maskeliya police summoned Kandipan about a complaint made by Sandanan Palaniyandi also known as Shanmuganadan. He falsely alleged that Kandipan had pasted up a poster in the estate abusing him. Contrary to his claim, Kandipan had posted a June 12 World Socialist Web Site statement entitled, Oppose attempt to disrupt defence for witch-hunted Sri Lankan plantation workers.



During the police inquiry, Kandipan and Thevarajah confronted Palaniyandi over his claims. He admitted that his complaint against Kandipan was incorrect and said he would not ask police to take any action.

The SEP will not be daunted. It insists: Hands off PWAC and our fight to defend these employees witch-hunted by the company! At the same time, we urge workers and youth in other plantations and workplaces to support our petition for the withdrawal of the frame-up court action and for the reinstatement of all workers.

Jaffna university students signing the petition 23 June 2023 to demand to withdrawal of trumped up charges against Alton Estate workers

The joint efforts of estate management, the unions and the police to undermine our campaign is in response to the enthusiastic support it is winning from workers in Sri Lanka and internationally. Published online and in printed format, the petition is being endorsed by workers in key industry sectors, such as the ports, Telecom and the railways, and students in the universities.

The 22 workers and two youth from Alton Estate were arrested by police after management falsely accused them of assaulting the estate manager and assistant manager and damaging the managers house during a protest on February 17, 2021. They were later released under harsh bail conditions.

The CWC participated in this witch hunt, providing the police with the names of the workers allegedly involved. The National Workers Union and the Up-country Peoples Front, the two other trade unions in the estate, have not raised a finger against this blatant victimisation.

The February 17 protest was part of a work stoppage by some 500 Alton Estate workers which began two weeks earlier on February 2. They were demanding a 1,000-rupee ($US3.13) daily wage. On February 5 they joined national strike action called by the CWC, involving hundreds of thousands of estate workers over the same demand.

Determined to punish the striking workers, the Horana Plantation Company summarily sacked 34 workers on April 21, 2021, without any investigation into the accusations.

Following these sackings, the police filed a court case at Hatton Magistrates Court against the arrested 24. The case has been constantly postponed and three years later, has still not been heard. Last listed for June 21, it was postponed yet again until September 20.

In response, the SEP campaign has intensified its campaign to defend these victimised workers. Several party statements and many articles have been published on the World Socialist Web Site explaining the political meaning of this attack and the sordid role of trade unions as industrial police for the government and the companies.

The plantation companies and the trade unions are acutely nervous about the support being won by the PWAC and SEP from broader layers of plantation workers.

The SEP opposes the increased workloads demanded by the plantation companies and is conducting a fight for decent wages and an improved pension system, housing, health and education facilities. The PWAC has also defended Velioya and Katukelle estate workers whose struggles in 2021 were suppressed by these companies and who sacked dozens of workers.

The escalating witch-hunt against Alton Estate workers is a warning to all Sri Lankan workers and part of the savage attacks by government and big business on their wages, living conditions, jobs and basis democratic rights.

Young plantation estate residents in Hatton sign petition supporting victimised Alton Estate workers, 23 June, 2023.

The plantation companies, the Wickremesinghe government and the trade unions are acutely aware that estate workers joined the mass movement in April and July last year that brought down the President Gotabaya Rajapakse and his government.

They also know that this growing radicalisation will increase in line with growing opposition to the privatisation or restructuring of plantations and other state-owned enterprises as demanded by the International Monetary Fund. While Sri Lankan plantations are held by big business under 99-year leases, it appears that the government is seeking to sell the estates.

On June 20, the Daily News reported that State Minister of Plantation Industries Lohan Ratwatte declared that steps would be taken to stop violence in some of the estates and maintain law and order. Tough disciplinary action would be taken against offenders, he said.

The witch-hunting of plantation workers is in line with similar repression in other industry sectors. In revenge for a strike by Ceylon Petroleum Corporation workers against privatisation in March, 20 union leaders and its activists have been interdicted. The government responded to anti-privatisation strikes and protests by Sri Lanka Insurance Corporation workers by issuing warning letters to fifty employees and imposing forced transfers on two union officials.

The PWAC/SEP will intensify its defence campaign of all witch-hunted workers and against all of Wickremesinghe governments anti-democratic measures. The SEP urges all estate workers and workplaces in every other sector to form their own action committees, independent of trade unions, to fight to defend their jobs, wages and working conditions against the governments IMF-dictated austerity policies and employers attacks. The SEPs perspective is based on socialist policies and the mobilisation of the working class for a workers and peasants government as part of the struggle for socialist internationalism.

We urge workers and youth to attend our public meeting this week on July 6 to discuss these vital political questions. Entitled Oppose the Sri Lankan governments privatisation of state enterprises! Build workers action committees to fight for jobs and wages! the meeting will be held at Public Library Auditorium in Colombo.
The faculty of justice of the Humboldt University is pictured in Berlin, Germany. (AP Photo/Michael Sohn) [AP Photo]

The International Youth and Students for Social Equality (IYSSE) is running in the student parliament (StuPa) elections at Humboldt University to build a socialist movement against militarism and war, social inequality and the rise of the far-right. We want to prevent the universities from being transformed into state-run propaganda centres for right-wing and militaristic ideology, as they were before both world wars.

In recent weeks, our election campaign has come under a massive attack. Our election posters were systematically torn down or destroyed, making it difficult for students to find out about the IYSSE program or attend our events. The basis for a free and equal election hardly exists.

The sabotage of our election campaign is directed against all those who oppose militarism and war, which is the vast majority of students. This is also why the campaign against us is so aggressive. We will not be intimidated by this and will intensify our anti-war campaign in the coming days. Register here for our election campaign and become a member of the IYSSE to stop the right-wing and militaristic activities at our university.

The campaign against us is a deliberate and orchestrated political action. For example, the well-connected, Ukrainian nationalist activist Elisabeth Bauer bragged to the IYSSE about regularly destroying the posters. Bauer writes for the Christian Democratic Union-affiliated Konrad-Adenauer-Stiftung, for the Green-aligned taz newspaper and other pro-war publications. She is a student assistant in the Chair of East Slavic Literatures and Cultures at Humboldt University.

In recent days, a self-proclaimed Ukrainian Society HU Berlin, which has never appeared before, has also begun to post over and destroy our posters. It accuses the IYSSE of Russian imperialist propaganda and calls for a no vote for the IYSSE.

The accusation is obviously absurd. The IYSSE has strongly condemned Putins reactionary invasion of Ukraine in its flyers and at its events. However, we show that the war is the result of the systematic encirclement of Russia by the NATO powers and that they continue to escalate the war in order to assert their geostrategic interests in Ukraine and Russia. In doing so, they accept the risk of the nuclear annihilation of mankind. In Germany, the greatest rearmament since Hitler is taking place and every area of social life is subordinated to the logic of militarism.

The Ukrainian Society therefore accuses us on its leaflets of treating Ukraine only as an object and not as a subject of politics. In fact, it is the imperialist powers that see the Ukrainian population as a pure object and, even worse, as cannon fodder. Hundreds of thousands of young men are being slaughtered on both sides for the interests of the NATO powers and Russian and Ukrainian oligarchs. That is why the opposition to the escalation of war is also growing in Ukraine itself.

Together with our groups in Ukraine, Russia and around the world, we are building an international movement of youth and workers against this madness. When the Ukrainian Society raves about an alleged will of the Ukrainian people, which apparently consists in destroying an entire generation so that the country can join NATO, it has nothing to do with the catastrophic situation facing the people in Ukraine. Rather, it is a repetition of the German governments war propaganda, which is intended to obscure its own geostrategic interests in the war.

The Ukrainian Societys tract is directly linked to the far-right and militaristic propaganda before the two world wars, which accused every opponent of enemy propaganda in order to suppress the enormous opposition to the war. Karl Liebknecht was thrown into prison for calling for the end of the First World War through an international movement of the working class, which in each country must oppose its own warmongers.

The fact that this perspective of international socialism is being combated once again is not simply the work of a small group of whipped-up nationalists. It is the official policy of the government and, here at our university, the result of the university leaderships systematic policy of endorsing right-wing attacks on left-wing students. This has created a climate of intimidation.

Three years ago, the right-wing extremist professor Jorg Baberowski systematically destroyed IYSSE posters on the boards provided specifically for election advertising. When our StuPa deputy Sven Wurm caught him, Baberowski struck the student from his own institute and threatened: Should I punch you in the face? The president of the HU refused to condemn these crimes and even defended them as understandable from a human point of view.

In this way, the university management not only participated in the intimidation of critical students, it also effectively endorsed the violent professors political arguments. Baberowski is a central figure in the return of German militarism. He beats the drum for brutal wars, fuels nationalism and trivializes the crimes of the Nazis. He described Hitler as not vicious and declared that the Holocaust was essentially the same thing as shootings in the Russian civil war.

The IYSSE has exposed and criticized this major falsification of history and the militaristic positions of other professors at HU and has been elected to the StuPa for eight consecutive years with up to 7 percent of the vote. Since then, the right-wing cliques have been increasingly aggressive against us with the backing of university management. This has now culminated in an attempt to sabotage our election campaign.

While the university is being placed more and more directly at the service of German militarism, students are to be prohibited from criticizing these positions. At the same university where the Nazi war of extermination was prepared and planned, and where the first book burnings took place, opponents of war are again being prevented from hanging up posters, conducting their election campaign and promoting events.

This is a serious warning. All the evils of the past are returning. In Ukraine, German imperialism cooperates with the heirs of the Nazi collaborators and sends masses of German tanks to impose a military defeat on the nuclear-armed power Russia. With the veneration of the fascist and anti-Semite Stepan Bandera in Germany and Ukraine, the whole importance of the trivialization of Hitler at the Humboldt University also becomes clear. The crimes of German imperialism are whitewashed in order to commit new crimes. The Bandera statues in Ukraine will be followed by the erection of statues in honor of Goring and Hitler in Germany.

We will not tolerate this and will expand our fight against fascism and war. We made an official complaint to the university management and asked them to exercise their legal oversight over the elections and to condemn Baberowskis and Bauers actions and hold them accountable. We call on all readers to support this complaint by sending e-mails to the Presidium (praesidentin@hu-Berlin.de, CC to iysse@gleichheit.de). Support our election campaign and vote next Tuesday IYSSE, list 4! Come on Monday to our last election event on The Growing Strike Movement in Europe and the Perspective of International Socialism and become a member of the IYSSE.
25 years ago: Puerto Rico general strike

On July 7-8, 1998, an estimated half million workers in Puerto Rico participated in a general strike, the largest work stoppage in the islands history. The strike was called by a coalition of 60 unions led by telephone workers.

Strike supporters briefly blocked access to the main airport in San Juan. There were also sporadic shutdowns of water and electric service. On the second day of the strike workers blocked the gates to the plant of Eli Lilly and Co., an Indianapolis-based pharmaceutical company, in the town of Carolina. Strikers also blocked the entrance to San Juans second largest airport at Isla Grande.

Workers at the state-owned Puerto Rico Telephone Company had been on strike since June 18 over the governments privatization plans. Puerto Rico Governor Pedro Rossello wanted to sell the telephone company to a group of investors led by GTE and the Banco Popular de Puerto Rico. In the lead-up to the strike, police beatings of strikers generated an outpouring of popular support.

The advertisement published in the New York Times by Puerto Rican business interests. [Photo: New York Times]

While opinion polls showed island residents opposed privatization by a margin of two to one, an ad placed in the July 12, 1998 edition of the New York Times read: The recent 48-hour strike in Puerto Rico instigated by some labor groups who oppose the Governments decision to modernize the telephone company through privatization, despite widespread media coverage, had very little island-wide support and did not materially affect the islands robust economy.

The eruption of class struggle in Puerto Rico was a manifestation of a historic crisis of the islands economic development and its political subordination to US colonialism. In the beginning of the postwar period, the US sought to industrialize the island, inaugurating the so-called Operation Bootstrap as a means of exploiting relatively cheap Puerto Rican labor. This strategy was followed by the imposition of the Section 936 tax codes, an attempt to encourage investment by allowing corporations what amounted to a tax holiday on the island.

While US-based capital profited from each of those initiatives, none of them brought about a significant change in Puerto Ricos structural unemployment, nor did they change conditions that left more than 60 percent of the population below the official poverty line.

50 years ago: Military coup in Rwanda brings Juvenal Habyarimana to power

On July 5, 1973, the president of Rwanda, Gregoire Kayibanda, was overthrown in a military coup by then Minister of Defense Juvenal Habyarimana. Kayibanda had been the first president of Rwanda as leader of the Parmehutu political party, which conducted a struggle for Rwandan independence on a program calling for the abolition of the monarchy, the right of the Hutu majority to rule the country, and anti-communism.

Under colonial rule first by Germany and then Belgium following World War I, the two main ethnic groups, the majority Hutus and minority Tutsis, were deliberately divided and set against one another in a strict caste system. Tutsis were given privileges that included better access to education, jobs, and administrative positions in the colonial government, and continuation of the Tutsi-dominated Rwandan monarchy

The monarchy was abolished in 1962 when Kayibanda and the Parmehutu party came to power after winning over 77 percent of the vote in the countrys first elections. As president, Kayibanda transformed Rwanda into a one-party state with himself at the head. He pursued policies that replaced Tutsi domination of political life with that of Hutu domination. In particular, Kayibanda granted favor to his closest allies from his own region of the country, in the south.

Under Kayibanda a number of Hutus became wealthy and made their way into elite society, but the vast majority remained in conditions of impoverishment. In 1973, the GDP per capita of Rwanda was just $63 USD, making it the 15th poorest country in the world. Kayibandas regional favoritism angered members of the Hutu elite from other regions. This included Habyarimana who was from northern Rwanda.

Minister of Defense Juvenal Habyarimana [Photo: US Department of Defense]

Habyarimana had ascended the ranks of the military having initially been educated and trained by the Belgian colonial regime, graduating as an officer just as the Paremehutu party was coming into power. As a Hutu under the new regime, he quickly climbed the ranks and by 1973 had been appointed to be the Chief of Staff of the Army and the Minister of Defense.

When Habyarimana launched his coup on July 5 he enjoyed support from the army and encountered little resistance. He was able to take control of the government without any deaths and making only 56 arrests, which included Kayibanda and other leaders of Paremehutu, which was subsequently disbanded. However, all 56 of those arrested would later be killed in prison years later, some reportedly from starvation.

As president, Habyarimana replaced Paremehutu with his own one-party regime, the National Revolutionary Movement for Development (MRND), which had the backing of French imperialism. He pursued a more aggressive Hutu supremacist policy which encouraged anti-Tutsi pogroms. In response, Tutsi rebels who had fled to Uganda formed the Rwandan Patriotic Front (RPF) and began long preparations for military action against MRND.

Habyarimana would rule Rwanda for over 20 years. In 1990 the RPF invaded Rwanda and began the Rwandan civil war. In 1994 Habyarimana was assassinated, triggering an uprising of Hutu extremists both inside and outside of the government who carried out the Rwandan genocide, killing at least 800,000 Tutsi.

75 years ago: British Labor government establishes National Health Service

On July 5, 1948, the British National Health Service (NHS) was created, an entity that remains to this day, though in an ever more weakened form due to gross under-funding and deliberate efforts at privatization. The establishment of the NHS was a high point of the social reforms instituted in the post-World War II period, in Britain and internationally.

Calls for a universal medical service, accessible to all, had been raised within the Labour Party years before. The partys 1934 conference, held amid the social crisis of the depression, had passed a resolution for the establishment of such a state-run health system. That came amid growing anger over the situation where the wealthy elite and sections of the middle class could access medical care, based upon their financial resources, while the healthcare conditions of workers and the poor remained in many respects similar to those of the Victorian period.

The impact of the war had added additional weight to those demands. Britain, though not in the front rank of Allied casualties, had suffered significant injuries and deaths in the conflict with the Nazi regime. The impact of air raids, coming on top of those in World War I, had added to the immediacy of the losses and the dangers.

The key turning point, however, was the post-war electoral rout of the Tories. After a protracted national unity coalition, maintained by Labour during the war years, the general election held in July 1945 had delivered a massive defeat for the Tories and an unprecedented swing to Labour. Sir Winston Churchill, hailed in the media as a hero of the war, was unceremoniously repudiated, amid a developing radicalization of the working class in Britain and internationally.

The Labour government of Prime Minister Clement Attlee embarked upon a cautious program of social reform. This included nationalizing certain industries, including sections of the mines and finance, and establishing what would become the welfare state.

Prime Minister Clement Attlee

In an indication of the broad groundswell of support for universal healthcare, even the Tories were not able to oppose it directly. Instead, they instituted amendments to the Labour governments bill, directed against centralized state control of the healthcare system, on the pretext of ensuring local autonomy.

A clear indication of the class character and ultimate purpose of the Labour governments policyto shore up the capitalist profit systemwas underscored by the coincidence between the establishment of the NHS and an assault on London dockworkers.

The very week before the NHS measures were instituted into law, Labour had declared a state of emergency over dock strikes directed against the withholding of bonuses for dangerous and dirty work. That declaration, backed by the right-wing trade union bureaucracy, paved the way for the effective deployment of the military against the workers as state-sanctioned strikebreakers.

100 years ago: British force abdication of Indian nationalist prince

On July 7, 1923, The British colonial authorities in India forced the abdication of Maharaja Ripudaman Singh, of the nominally independent Sikh princely state of Nabha in Punjab. Two days later he was arrested and charged with kidnapping officials of a neighboring, pro-British state.

In 1911 on the death of his father, Ripudaman Singh became the maharaja of Nabha, one of the hundreds of princely states in India that were not ruled directly by British imperialism. He refused to be crowned by the British Viceroy of India, as was then the norm for rulers of his status. During World War I, he refused to send troops to fight with the British.

Maharaja Ripudaman Singh

He is said to have supported the Akalis, an anti-colonial movement among Sikhs that sought to free Sikh gurdwaras (places of worship) from rule by conservative, pro-British clergy. Ripudaman Singh also supported progressive legislation for women.

His alienation from the British became even deeper after the 1919 Jallianwala Bagh massacre, in which the British shot down hundreds of Indians at a market near Amritsar, site of the Sikh Golden Temple, one of the religions most holy sites.

Ripudaman Singh was close to Lala Lajpat Rai, the president of the Indian National Congress after 1920, himself brutally beaten to death by the British superintendent of police in Lahore in 1928.

After his abdication, the British placed Ripudaman Singhs three-year-old son on the throne of Nabha, with a British administrator serving as a regent, and exiled the former maharaja. His removal sparked mass protests in Nabha, which failed to restore him to power.
This photo shows Chinese naval hospital ship "Peace Ark" at a port in Zhoushan, east China's Zhejiang Province, July 3, 2023. (Photo by Li Yu/Xinhua)

HANGZHOU, July 3 (Xinhua) -- Chinese naval hospital ship "Peace Ark" set sail on Monday for a humanitarian medical mission in Kiribati, Tonga, Vanuatu, Solomon Islands and East Timor.

This is the first time a Chinese naval vessel will visit Kiribati and Solomon Islands, and carry out humanitarian medical services there.

According to the plan, the hospital ship will dock at one port in each country, providing week-long medical services free of charge for local people, personnel from Chinese institutions and overseas Chinese.

Exchanges and professional seminars with relevant countries will also be conducted as part of this mission.

The hospital ship has 126 medical staffers, and boasts 26 clinical departments and 7 auxiliary departments. It is capable of carrying out more than 40 kinds of examinations, treatments, and operations in general surgery, orthopedics, obstetrics and gynecology and other disciplines.

"Peace Ark" is the first standard ocean-going maritime hospital independently designed and built by China. Since its entry into service in 2008, the hospital ship has visited 43 countries and regions, provided medical services for more than 250,000 patients and performed more than 1,500 surgeries on voyages covering over 260,000 nautical miles. 

Chinese naval hospital ship "Peace Ark" sets sail at a port in Zhoushan, east China's Zhejiang Province, July 3, 2023. (Photo by Han Lin/Xinhua)

This aerial photo shows Chinese naval hospital ship "Peace Ark" preparing to set sail at a port in Zhoushan, east China's Zhejiang Province, July 3, 2023. (Photo by Gui Jiangbo/Xinhua)

Soldiers stand at attention on Chinese naval hospital ship "Peace Ark" at a port in Zhoushan, east China's Zhejiang Province, July 3, 2023. (Photo by Li Yu/Xinhua)

Soldiers stand at attention on Chinese naval hospital ship "Peace Ark" at a port in Zhoushan, east China's Zhejiang Province, July 3, 2023. (Photo by Li Yu/Xinhua)

Soldiers wave goodbye on Chinese naval hospital ship "Peace Ark" at a port in Zhoushan, east China's Zhejiang Province, July 3, 2023. (Photo by Zhang Ling/Xinhua)
Members of the Supreme Court sit for a group portrait following the addition of Associate Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson, at the Supreme Court building in Washington, Octobert 7, 2022. [AP Photo/J. Scott Applewhite]

Since the US Supreme Courts Dobbs decision 13 months ago, which overturned Roe v. Wade and deprived women of the constitutional right to access abortion, the ultra-right majority on the court has engaged in a rampage against basic democratic rights and the social rights of the working class.

This culminated Friday in two decisions with the same 6-3 split among the justices: to declare unconstitutional the Biden administrations limited reduction of student loan debt owed to the US government; and to endorse the right of a commercial web designer to refuse to create materials for the wedding of a gay couple.

The class character of the first decision is obvious: an executive action by the federal government to bail out wealthy bank depositors is constitutional, but not a limited action to help debt-burdened students. The second decision destroys a constitutional right to be free of discrimination, while paying lip service to the First Amendment. The court declares that the web designer can justify her bigotry on the basis of freedom of religion.

The vast majority of the American people support both debt relief for college students and equal rights for gays and lesbiansas well as abortion rights. These perverse and reactionary decisions are the product of a profoundly undemocratic political structure in which popular feeling is systematically overridden in favor of the interests of a tiny ruling elite.

Amid the massive surge in military spending to pay for the war with Russia in Ukraine and the escalating military buildup in the Pacific against China, the institutions of American capitalism are dropping any pretense of either addressing the economic needs of the population or representing the views of the majority of the public.

The high court, far from being a neutral political arbiter or an impartial interpreter of constitutional norms, has revealed itself as the spearhead of political reaction.

This is not just a matter of the personal corruption of the individuals on the court. Many of the justices have the closest ties to wealthy sponsors, who shower them with bribes in return for judicial favors. In the recent period, both Clarence Thomas and Samuel Alito were revealed to have taken lavish vacations and other financial perks from billionaire friends.

The Supreme Court as an institution is profoundly undemocratic. The nine justices are unelected and appointed for life terms. They are not subject to any code of ethics or independent monitoring, and are effectively unremovable. No Supreme Court justice has ever been impeached.

Of the six justices who make up the right-wing majority, five were appointed by presidents who themselves were not elected by the people. Both George W. Bush, who appointed John Roberts and Samuel Alito, and Donald Trump, who appointed Neil Gorsuch, Brett Kavanaugh and Amy Coney Barrett, lost the popular vote and became president only thanks to another undemocratic institution, the Electoral College. In the case of Bush, the Supreme Court directly intervened to stop the recounting of ballots in Florida to hand him the presidency in 2000.

The Electoral College is itself based on an even more undemocratic institution, the United States Senate, in which each of the 50 states has two senators, regardless of population. A state like California, with 39 million people, has the same representation as Wyoming or Vermont, which have 583,000 and 647,000 people, respectively. Such small states can be easily controlled by the most right-wing corporate interests.

It is in the presidency itself that the anti-democratic character of the political system stands out most sharply. Bush, Obama, Trump and Biden all moved quickly to bail out Wall Street in the financial crises of 2008-2009, 2020 and 2023, making hundreds of billions, and even trillions, available to the financial oligarchy.

Even more glaring is the role of the military-intelligence apparatus, which constitutes the vast bulk of the federal government. Every president for the last 78 years has waged war without the declaration by Congress required by the Constitution. In many instances, there was not even the fig leaf of a congressional resolution authorizing the use of military force.

The two capitalist parties share responsibility for these actions, as Democrats and Republicans alike, in both the White House and Congress, have conducted or supported illegal wars, subverted governments, sponsored military coups and engaged in massive spying, not only all over the world, but within the United States as well.

Today, the leading candidates for president in 2024 are Republican ex-president Donald Trump, who led a conspiracy to overturn the 2020 election and shred the Constitution, and Democratic President Joe Biden, who has launched and systematically escalated a war against Russia in Ukraine that he himself has admitted could lead to nuclear Armageddon.

The two-party system is itself one of the main anti-democratic institutions used by corporate America to strangle any challenge to its power and wealth. The entire political system, including a media that functions as an instrument of the state and intelligence agencies, is designed to exclude any challenge to the Democrats and Republicans, the two parties of the ruling elite.

The state, as Marxists have long explained, is an instrument of class rule. The essential objective factors underlying the collapse of democratic forms of rule in the United States are: 1) endless war abroad, which now has entered the sphere of total war against nuclear-armed powers, and 2) staggering levels of social inequality.

Any effort to reform this array of institutionsrestructuring the Court, eliminating the Electoral College, ending the tyranny of small states in Senate, curbing the near-absolute power of the commander in chiefposes immediately the necessity for a mass mobilization of the working class against the corporate and financial interests that these institutions serve.

That is, defending basic democratic rights is a revolutionary question, requiring the mobilization of the working class in political struggle and the establishment of new, genuinely democratic forms of working class power as the necessary foundation for breaking the dictatorship of the financial elite and reorganizing society on the basis of equality and socialism.
The national strike of Romanian teachers was broken up on Monday, June 12, in a blatant act of betrayal and collusion with the authorities by the union bureaucracy. The strike involved hundreds of thousands of education workers, many of whom participated in rallies and demonstrations throughout the country for several weeks.

Striking Romanian teachers march in Bucharest

The teachers strike has formed part of a surge in industrial actions in the country, with workers in healthcare, on the railways and subways, and miners all engaged in some form of industrial action. Under these conditions the teachers union has been working hand in glove with the government to end the strike.

One major objective underlay this reactionary move. The union bureaucracy is fearful of a broader movement of the working class which would threaten its control over the workers and undermine the pro-capitalist and militarist agenda of the government which the union supports.

The Romanian ruling class is attempting to use the crisis created by the pandemic and the drive to war against Russia to bolster its position as one of imperialisms main client states in the Balkans and Black Sea region.

The ambitions of the Romanian oligarchy were spelled out by NATO vice president and Romanian PSD politician Mircea Geoana. Geoana spoke of a historical opportunity for the Romanian bourgeoisie:

[..] I will say one thing: the entire modern history of Romania is made up of chances taken by the Romanian elites, in moments of geopolitical shocks. This is how Little Romania [Old Kingdom] was born. Little Romania was born after the Crimean war, Greater Romania was born after the First World War and Western Romania was born after the fall of Communism. [..] For the first time in the history of this country, called Romania, we will no longer be a frontier country, but the new center of gravity of Europe. It is important, beyond this war, because Europe is being reconfigured.

A vast expansion of military spending and acquisitions is accompanied by EU-wide deficit reduction and austerity measures. The teachers main demands, for an end to poverty wages and for the allocation of 6 percent of GDP to education, were seen as incompatible with the governments fundamental aims.

The government has broken its own laws in order to impose as much as possible of the cost of the war and economic crisis on the workers. It has postponed for the past 12 years the law that requires the allocation of 6 percent of GDP to education. It also refused to apply the salary law dating from 2017 which provided for annual pay increase for state employees. The 2017 law, which did not account for the explosive increase in prices in recent years, was never applied by the authorities for many categories of workers, including teachers and healthcare workers.

Negotiations were conducted in bad faith by the government, which never had any intention of giving an inch to the teachers, lest it encourage other sections of workers to demand increases. From the first days of the strike, the government issued ultimatums to the teachers. Its offer centered on the application of the 2017 law and a scheme for yearly bonuses of around 300 euros.

Teachers repeatedly rejected these ultimatums, despite the union leaderships attempts to ram them through.

On June 10 at night, union executives and government officials told teachers they had until June 11 at 9am to accept the latest offer. Teachers protested against this obvious provocation, made worse by the fact that it was composed of different packages, and obscured by formulas and different indices. The unions not only did not explain the offer to the membership, they did not carry out even formal consultations. Teachers were forced to employ their own juridical and economic experts.

On June 12, after a morning meeting with the government, union bosses suspended the strike until the government passes legislation that includes Saturday nights offer. Teachers were caught unawares, only learning about the betrayal from television. Protests were held in Suceava county, with educators storming the offices of county unions. Others denounced the betrayal on social media.

The offer for which the union had broken up the strike was presented to the public as a 25% increase in wages, yearly bonuses and a 50% increase from 1st of January 2024.

This is a complete fraud. The government passed two emergency laws on June 12. One of them required the government to apply the 2017 salary law, at the level of 2022, as well as an additional raise equal to 50 percent of the difference between the base salary and the expected base salary on January 1, 2024. Additionally, auxiliary teaching staff will receive 260 euros before taxes, and non-teaching staff will receive 80 euros, starting from June.

The second emergency law refers to a teaching career bonus sum of 400 euros for teachers and 100 euros for non-teaching staff, to be paid in the month of October. This payment, that the government called a national measure to support educational activity, is set to take place annually until 2027 and is tied to work-related expenditure.

The unions have made much of the governments inclusion of the principle that the salary of debutante teachers will be calculated based off the median base salary in the country, starting from 2024. But as teachers have stated, the government has proven that it will not honor its own laws, let alone any future principles.

The actual wage increase for all the workers is close to zero, especially when considering lost wages and benefits for the duration of the strike. Romanian teachers earn between 500 and 850 euros, depending on seniority.

Workers must draw the necessary lessons of this bitter experience. The teachers strike has shown the power of the working class. But in order for these struggles to move forward, it is necessary to break from the outmoded trade unions and organize independent rank-and-file Committees that establish connections to workers in other sectors and countries across Europe and internationally.

The struggles of Romanian workers are part an international resurgence of the class struggle. Workers all over the world are rising up against massive attacks on living standards and on democratic rights as every aspect of society is subordinated to the war effort. The objective conditions exist for a powerful joint offensive by the international working class against social inequality and war. But this requires the construction of new organizations of struggle and a socialist orientation and perspective.
Royal Mail workers in Shropshire, England have voted for local industrial action against revisions that have hiked up workloads and led to systematic failures of the USO. But a postal worker has told the World Socialist Web Site that the Communication Workers Union (CWU) is stalling their action.

Members of the CWU at Tweedale delivery office voted unanimously for industrial action on June 23 under rule 13 of the unions constitution.

A Royal Mail building in England

Under rule 13, local branches have the power to authorise, endorse, call or take industrial action, including strike action. The rule further states, Where a Branch decides to take action to protect immediate local interests, the General Secretary and NEC must be informed.

But a CWU rep told members they would have to wait for any decision on their vote until after the ballot on the unions sellout national agreement with Royal Mail. CWU leaders Dave Ward and Andy Furey are trying to ram through their pro-company deal through anti-democratic methods, with the ballot closing on July 11.

The vote at Tweedale follows similar action by Royal Mail workers in Glasgow and Northern Ireland. In May, the CWU blacked-out news of a walkout in Glasgow against imposed revisions. Since February, the unions postal executive has blocked a unanimous strike vote under rule 13 to demand the reinstatement of two victimised reps at Craigavon Delivery Office in Northern Ireland.

How many similar votes are being suppressed by the CWU postal executive? Royal Mail workers delivered a 96 percent renewed strike mandate in February, which the CWU suppressed to conduct closed-door talks with the company. Ward and the postal executive have been firefighting ever since, desperate to prevent any coordinated challenge to their pro-company agreement.

Do you have any information to share? We invite postal workers to get in touch using the online form below. Your anonymity will be protected.

Report from Tweedale Delivery Office

We voted for action under Rule 13 against the revision made at our Delivery Office a few months ago, since then the workloads have become impossible, and we have had enough.

There are around 80 employed at the Delivery Office. Weve seen around 20 leave in the past three or four months and they have not been replaced, agency staff are brought in on-and-off.

The revision up until now has only affected around a quarter of the workforce but things are already bad enough. We are talking delivery rounds increased from 580 to 1,000 delivery points which is impossible to complete in four and a half hours. Mail is failing daily but the managers only care about tracked parcels because this affects their bonuses.

They like agency staff because they dont get paid for meals breaks, but they are wanting Royal Mail staff to work for free, no meal breaks, and coming in early unpaid to complete the preppingsome are doing this because they feel it will make their jobs secure.

Everyone is hacked off. It is all totally unachievable. Royal Mail just lies, recently blaming us for failures of the USO, saying it was because of industrial action and sickness absence. We are treated as if we are overpaid and work-shy by managers who dont know the first thing about the job and are not interested in providing a public service, just making further cost-efficiencies on behalf of the Area Managers.

Nothing has changed. The CWU is just telling lies about a review of revisions and maintaining the USO [universal service obligation]. We decided something had to be done about this keep your mouth shut and get on with your work regime of bullying.

We had heard about the walk-out in Glasgow and the vote for rule 13 action at Craigavon, Northern Ireland, but not through the CWU. It was via the internet, social media and the World Socialist Web Site.

We would have moved to this type of action anyway as the job has been going down-hill for a long time. We are in a high growth area here in Shropshire, with new build houses. The solution of Royal Mail is just to increase our workload, not employ extra staff.

There was a good turnout for the meeting of around 50, off work premises. Not a single worker failed to raise their hand. It was unanimous for Rule 13.

The meeting was put back several times. When we took the vote, the CWU rep told us we would have to wait until after the ballot on the deal. This should not affect our action as it is on local matters. They are kicking it into the long grass.

No one is voting Yes for the agreement at our place. It does not resolve any of the issues of suffering and problems we face over the constant demands for efficiency. Its all lies from the CWU. They want us to work for freeno meal breaks and unpaid work. The pay and cuts to sick entitlements are bad, but its about the physicality of the job, the workloads are backbreaking and impossible. They dont care about the welfare or health and safety of anyone.

The vote on the deal was put back twice to avoid a rejection. It has nothing to do with reviewing revisions or protecting the USO, everything is being ploughed through.

We have been lied to by both sides Royal Mail and the CWU and sold down the river.

All this talk about the financial difficulties of the business by the CWUthey might as well be Royal Mail. They had money for the shareholders. If they go for administration, it is just their way of seeking a bailout. Make it fail so the government can take over the letters, while they siphon off the more profitable parcels and run it like a courier service.

Ward and Furey have no idea about what we face, its like chalk and cheese. I agree we should get rid of these three clowns including Chris Webb [CWU Head of Communications] that would be a start. The union does not stand up for us, it has the back of Royal Mail. I hear things are bad at Parcelforce [part of Royal Mail Group] and BT Group.

You see what the government are doing over pushing up the retirement age and MOTs on the over 50s. It is all driven by greed and money. It will take a big movement to change anything from the standpoint of the working class.
Talks continued between UPS and the International Brotherhood of Teamsters this weekend, in spite of statements from the union declaring a strike by August 1 inevitable and demanding the companys last, best and final offer by last Friday. Now, the Teamsters are calling for the contract to be settled by July 5.

This is the latest in a series of maneuvers by the union designed to head off strike action by 340,000 workers and impose a sellout contract at the largest unionized private employer in the United States. They are using such bluster to frame the sellout which they are working out behind closed doors as the product of tough negotiating. The bureaucracy has also pledged greater transparency in the contract talks, but it signed a non-disclosure agreement at the outset in order to prevent workers from learning the real content of the talks.

To prevent a sellout, rank-and-file workers must organize themselves independently to prepare for a struggle against both the company and the pro-corporate bureaucracy, and behind both of them, the White House and both big business parties, which banned a rail strike late last year and imposed a company contract workers had preveiously rejected.

Fridays deadline was the latest ultimatum which was then quickly abandoned by the union. However, it is likely that the union will be pushing as hard as possible to meet its new deadline of this Wednesday in order to give itself time to ram through the new contract in advance of their self-declared August 1 strike deadline, when the current contract expires.

At the start of talks, the Teamsters bureaucracy declared they would not begin talks on the national agreement until tentative agreements had been reached for all 44 supplemental deals at the local and regional levels. However, the Teamsters quickly reversed themselves. The last local deal was only struck Sunday night, for 7,000 workers at Local 710 in Chicago. No details whatsoever were released by the union on the content of that agreement, which is technically a separate, local-specific contract rather than a supplemental rider to the national contract. The deal covers all non-economic issues for Chicago-area UPS workers.

On Saturday, with the negotiating committee lined up behind him, General President Sean OBrien held a short nine-minute press conference which provided no new information to workers. OBrien boasted of 54 changes to the contract and zero concessions since negotiations started, without identifying what those changes were or substantiating this claim. UPS came back to the table [last week] knowing were serious, made some movement, so we made a commitment to resume negotiations, he declared. UPSball is in their court. We have to come to an agreement by July 5 in order to get that thing ratified by the expiration date [August 1].

OBrien combined blustering threats to walk out on August 1 with groveling appeals to UPS to be responsible and not to stay loyal to Wall Street and forget about Main Street, as though the interests of workers and the profit interests the capitalists could be reconciled through a fair agreement. If they do that, they are making a choice. A choice to strike themselves  UPS will be responsible for stopping supply chains through this country, he declared. Instead, he called on UPS to be the model of what it means to be a good employer.

OBrien boasted that UPS workers have remained on the job throughout the pandemic. The one thing that was constant was our Teamsters going to work every single day, making certain the supply chain kept flowing through this country. We have part-timers going to work in these warehouses, with total disregard for themselves and their families. Putting themselves at risk, putting their families at risk. We have members that died because they went to work to provide these services. The net result, OBrien said, was that the companys profits doubled during the pandemic.

But this deplorable sacrifice of workers lives for profit is entirely the fault of the Teamsters bureaucracy, which forced workers to stay on the job in these death traps. They reprised that role over the last month as the Canadian wildfires have poured dangerous levels of smoke into cities across the Midwest and Northeastern US, forcing workers to work through dangerous smoke which was making them sick.

We were heroes during the pandemic, a UPS worker in Pennsylvania told the WSWS. When that started I went from part-time to full-time working at UPS, he said. However, he ended up taking a pay cut at his facility because of a Market Rate Adjustment (MRA) at his warehouse which bumped up the pay of part-time workers only. I ended up going backward in pay when I went full-time, he said.

I was a package carrier during the pandemic. We were delivering to sometimes 200 stops in a day. No hazard pay. The 6-foot rule didnt exist [during the first years of Covid]. My facility still has us on overtime.

They just want to pay us less, he said. Currently, the company is getting rid of part-time workers and working us in-progression full-time people the most because we are paid less, he explained. The worker said under the new offer being proposed by the company, his top rate would be cut by over $12, essentially wiping out his progress to the pay of a full-time worker.

Teamsters hail bogus concession on second-tier drivers

On Saturday night, the Teamsters claimed they had scored a huge victory by reaching an agreement with the company to eliminate second-tier hybrid drivers, also known as 22.4s after the clause in the contract. These drivers make lower pay than regular drivers, and split their time between making deliveries and working inside warehouses. They also claimed the company agreed to make Martin Luther King Jr.s birthday a paid holiday and end forced overtime on workers days off.

The extraordinary gains, a union statement declared, were made possible by the an aggressive public warning  that UPS was running out of time to reach a deal.

Gains made by the Teamsters at the national table  cannot be overstated, OBrien was quoted as saying. With enough persistence, grit & intestinal fortitude, the Teamsters can and will eliminate inequality at UPS, Fred Zuckerman, the unions general secretary-treasurer, declared.

There is just one problem with this statement: eliminating 22.4s was initially offered by UPS in their regressive economics proposal. Sources who spoke with the WSWS say the move was widely expected and that UPS had not saved as much money as they had hoped from the hybrid position. But UPS is also demanding that 22.4s be replaced with a third tier consisting of all delivery drivers hired after August 1, with top pay even lower than that for 22.4s. The Teamsters did not even mention this in their statement, or whether they have already agreed to this.

In other words, the Teamsters bureaucracy is hailing as a huge victory the terms of UPSs own proposal. This is more evidence that the Teamsters strategy is to use angry-sounding statements to frame whatever pro-company contract they are cooking up as an historic deal produced by the bureaucracys tough negotiating, in order to ram through the deal and keep rank-and-file opposition under control.

Teamsters for a Democratic Union covers for the bureaucracy

The bureaucracy is perpetrating a massive fraud on UPS workers. While they have carried out one sellout after another for decades, the particular methods which are being employed are a continuation of those used in OBriens own election campaign for general president in 2021. A thuggish ally of former president James P. Hoffa and one of the unions top negotiators in the 2013 sellout at UPS, he suddenly recast himself as a hard-nosed militant leader of the rank and file.

He received and still receives crucial assistance from pseudo-left groups like Teamsters for a Democratic Union and Labor Notes. TDU, which once claimed it was fighting to democratize the union by changing the officials occupying the top seats, has now effectively been integrated with the bureaucracy.

On Friday, the Teamsters held practice pickets around the countryoutside of normal working hours, meaning no operations were affectedwhich TDU had been promoting for weeks. Of course, many workers participated in these practices because they want to carry out a real fight. But from the bureaucracys standpoint, the purpose was to create the false optics of the bureaucracy mobilizing the membership for a strike while doing the exact opposite.

Significantly, TDU has quietly dropped its $25 per hour starting wage demand for part-timers from its online presence, replacing it with vague calls for major wage increases. This is a sign that the group is trying to ratchet back workers expectations in advance of a tentative agreement which falls far below what workers are demanding.

Left: Promotional material formerly used by Teamsters for a Democratic Union/Teamsters United. Right: Promotional material currently on the Teamsters United website. Note the demand for "part-time starting wages of $25/hour" has been replaced with "major increase of part-time starting pay." [Photo: Teamsters United]

TDU has held regular online meetings in recent months to stump for the union bureaucracy. In one meeting on June 10, TDU National Organizer David Levin claimed that O Brien represented new leadership, a completely different day.

In response to workers who were angry over the conduct of last months strike authorization vote, which was slapped together last-minute in order to suppress voter turnout, Levin advised them to not stir up negativity. Instead, he said, fill out a strike action form and get involved with the Make UPS Feel the Heat campaign.

At points, the meeting bordered on the farcical. While it lasted less than an hour, TDU officials spent several minutes hawking their apparel and $100 yearly TDU memberships. Levin ended the meeting by declaring they would be passing out whistles to workers so that they can blow the whistle on corporate greed.

The meeting held June 24 was even shorter than the previous one. The TDU again ignored many questions asked by rank-and-file workers from the floor while promoting practice picketing, declaring that this would show the UPS corporation that the Teamsters were serious about getting an honorable contract. Rob Atkinson, a 35-year Teamsters steward, articulated the perspective of the TDU officials: We stand united behind Sean and Fred [Zuckerman]. Atkinson claimed that after decades of contract givebacks under Hoffa, we are on the verge of victory right now.

The bureaucracy cannot be reformed from within. Instead, workers must develop an alternative power structure which they control, by forming rank-and-file committees at hubs across the country. These committees must expose the maneuvers of the apparatus to their coworkers, distribute information which is being kept from them and fight to transfer control of the contract talks from the unaccountable apparatus to workers.

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Work at USPS? Tell us what you think about the impact of RRECS and the proposed cuts under Delivering for America. All submissions will be kept anonymous.

More than 90,000 rural letter carriers for the United States Postal Service (USPS) are battling changes to their compensation which have led to massive pay cuts and longer workweeks.

The replacement of the pre-existing method of calculating rural carriers hours and wages has resulted in wage cuts as high as $20,000 a year in some cases. Rural carriers attempts to challenge and prove any discrepancies between their actual work and what is calculated by the new system have been derailed by the USPSs refusal to disclose the year-long electronic collection of data used by the system which they alone control.

One rural carrier told the World Socialist Web Site, The [post office] should be punished criminally for stealing from people, because I know my evaluation isnt correct but, like everyone else, I am unable to prove it because they wont give me the information.

The new system has lowered compensation for 66 percent of the rural carrier workforce by reducing the statutory time it takes for them to cover their routes. To add insult to injury, the 28 percent whose hours were increased are finding that glitches in the system are preventing them from getting paid the raises that the new system says they are owed. A rural carrier in Eastern Washington the WSWS spoke with stated her hours increased from 43 to 48 on a five day a week, or K, route, but her postmaster claimed a glitch was preventing her from getting that increase.

The new modern engineered Rural Route Evaluation Compensation System (RRECS) is part of a massive 10-year cost-cutting plan known as Delivering for America being carried out by Postmaster General Louis DeJoy, a Trump appointee. It was negotiated into the rural letter carriers contract by the union, the National Rural Letter Carriers Association (NRLCA), a year ago.

Additionally, the NRLCA and USPS have signed a Memorandum of Understanding (MOU) creating, in parallel to the existing grievance system, an alternative Dispute Resolution Process that foists responsibility for challenging lost hours and days off entirely onto the individual carriers. This was signed into existence on May 15.

The role of the NRLCA has been to deprive carriers of any way to fight these attacks. Rank-and-file rural carriers need to form Rank-and-File committees at every workplace to expose the impact of the RRECS and organize a fight against it, as well as the union apparatus who worked with USPS to perpetrate this gigantic fraud.

In a further effort to cut expenses, the USPS has been preparing a round of layoff notices. Workers will be given the opportunity to find another USPS job at the same or lower level by September 8 in order to avoid being laid off on September 9. Most of the jobs targeted so far are white collar workers in management departments, like the logistics division, according to USPS Labor Relations Director James Lloyd. But other targeted job classifications were listed in a USPS letter to the National Association of Postal Supervisors. They included operations and industrial engineers, transportation managers, operations support specialists and network specialists.

DeJoy has told the four postal unions that his Delivering for America plan is intended to re-make USPS in the image of UPS, Fedex, or Amazon. Behind the scenes, its ultimate goal is the privatization of the post office, the biggest mail and package delivery service on the continent, leading inevitably to further degradation of service.

The postal unions are perfectly willing to go along, provided that they are at the table in designing the transformation of their members jobs to lower paid, less secure work under worse working conditions. The postal unions were informed about this at least a year ago, and have kept this a little known secret and away from the membership.

The new plan will result in the loss of 50,000 jobs, DeJoy has said. The 280,000 rural and city letter carriers will have their lives substantially disrupted through route changes, affecting 100,000 letter carriers to start with.

USPS management is then planning to transform the postal sort and delivery systemnow based in city, town and municipal post offices, supplemented by hundreds of larger distribution centers scattered around the country according to population needsinto a spoke and wheel operation. A year ago, DeJoy said this meant the consolidated and potential closing of 10,000 post offices. Later he reduced that to a still-substantial 6,000 or 7,000 post offices.

DeJoy described his newest timetable for some of these events in his keynote address to the May 24 Postal Forum. He confirmed, The biggest initiative, and one that will address a condition that has driven high cost and restricted performance, is the redesign of our national processing network and the operating practices we deploy to use it.

He criticized, This process [that] created a national processing network of over 425 facilities randomly plopped together over the last 15 years. And I did use a technical term plopped! DeJoy stated, they are ready to roll with over 30 facility openings in the coming year.

Our network will include 60 Regional Processing and Distribution Centers of adequate size and capacity to handle all volume transported into and out of each specified region. Approximately 45 of these facilities will be in existing postal facilities  We plan 15 new facilities in areas of the country that have experienced expansive growth.

DeJoy went on: We will combine randomly deployed annexes, and some outsourced functions, into these Regional Centers to achieve maximum efficiency and effectiveness. These Regional Processing Centers will connect to approximately 220 Local Processing Centers (or LPCs) strategically located within each RPDC territory. These Local Processing Centers are postal facilities that already exist. They too will be redesigned to focus on the destinating operating requirements for mail processing and will serve as transfer hubs to our delivery centers.

In total, this will be a reduction of approximately 200 small and wasteful accessorial functional locations in our system. This is not a consolidation! It is an aggregation of randomly deployed functionality spread out across a local area because of ill-planned deployment.

In justifying the need for cost cutting against the rural and city letter carriers, he said, The United States Postal Service ... operates over 250,000 carrier routes reaching 165 million delivery points 6 days a week. We connect planes to sleds in Alaska. We connect trucks to donkeys in Arizona and we connect boats to bicycles in Florida, to perform our service to the American people. While this delivery system is spectacular, it is also the costliest part of our business, making up over 50 percent of our operating budget.

He concluded with the ominous statement, Like our national network, our Retail and Delivery network requires change. Rapidly!

Totally indifferent to the brutal and deep pay cuts under RRECS which were already well advanced by the time he was keynoting the Postal Forum, DeJoy launched a full-scale attack on letter carriers, implying that they are being overpaid for major delivery work reductions that have occurred on their unadjusted routes. DeJoy ranted, We have carrier routes that have not been adjusted in years, even though significant changes in mail volume, mail profile and residential development have been incessant. We have maintained our old mail only delivery strategies, diluting our magnificence by dividing up our carrier routes to over 19,000 locations.

The attack on US postal workers is part of a broader attack on workers in logistics and supply chains in general, being carried out with the critical support of the trade union bureaucracy.

On the US railroads, in the name of efficiency, management has implemented precision scheduled railroading which has led to massive levels of overwork and driven the physical infrastructure of the rails to the brink of collapse, while also surging profits to record levels. When workers voted last year to strike against this, the response of the rail unions was to try to ram through a pro-company contract brokered by the White House. When this failed, they stalled for time in order to enable Washington to pass an anti-strike law.

At UPS, the largest unionized private employer in the US with 340,000 workers, the Teamsters are concealing behind public bluster the massive concessions being worked out with the company, which is demanding the creation of new tiers and continuing poverty wages for part-time warehouse workers.

This is also taking place around the world. After a series of limited strikes in Britain last year at Royal Mail, the Communication Workers Union has announced a sellout contract. It has subjected voting to months of delays in order to try to bleed off workers momentum against the contract.

But this is also producing a response from workers, who are organizing resistance to the bureaucracy through rank-and-file committees. Committees around the world are united with each other through the International Workers Alliance of Rank-and-File Committees. USPS workers must form a rank-and-file committee of their own to fight against massive job and wage cuts, to unite different sections of the workforce separated into different mail unions and to open up lines of communication with postal workers in Britain and other countries.
On Saturday, ex-president Donald Trump held a large outdoor campaign rally in tiny Pickens, South Carolina. Despite the sweltering heat, which resulted in over 50 hospitalizations, an estimated 50,000 people descended on the town to listen to Trump deliver a 90-minute fascist diatribe.



While Trump, unsurprisingly, dominated over Joe Biden in South Carolina in the 2020 election, besting him by roughly 12 percentage points, Trumps victory was even wider in Pickens County. Out of the roughly 66,000 votes tallied for president in the county, Trump beat Biden by a margin of over 50 percentage points, 74 to 23.



Pickens, with a population of just over 3,200, is roughly 45 times smaller that Waco, Texas, where Trump held his first campaign rally. Yet the crowd at Saturdays event was significantly larger than the estimated 15,000 who attended the Waco rally, a result of thousands of Trump supporters traveling from out of state, including Texas, Oklahoma, Nebraska, Indiana and Florida, per the Greenville News.

Former President Donald Trump speaks during a rally, Saturday, July 1, 2023, in Pickens, South Carolina. [AP Photo/Chris Carlson]

Shortly after the event ended, a violent thunderstorm ripped through the town causing widespread power outages. More than 24 hours later, Duke Energy estimated that nearly 1,700 customers in Pickens were still without power.



Due to the sweltering heat and stale comments, thousands of attendees filtered out of the rally after Trump began his rote, grievance-filled speech, focused mainly on his ongoing legal troubles. These, he claimed, were the fault of Marxists who want to take away my freedom because I will never let them take away your freedom.



Trump continues to dominate his Republican rivals in the primary field and appears to be on his way to locking up a majority of endorsements for the partys nomination well before the South Carolina primary is held next February.



During his speech, Trump repeated many of the same phrases and anecdotes he has been expounding for years, including attacks on immigrants and transgender persons. He reiterated his campaign stump claim that the biggest enemy of America is not China or Russia, but the sick people from within, the communists, the Marxists



Trump again promised to deny entry to all Communists and Marxists, but went on to say that the bigger problem was the communists, Marxists and fascists that have been here for a long time, declaring, We got to get them the hell out too.



In opening the Pickens rally, Georgia Republican Representative and QAnon fascist Marjorie Taylor Greene boasted that she had filed articles of impeachment against Biden and attacked his disgusting son Hunter. Whipping up the crowd, Greene claimed Biden and Hillary Clinton held onto classified documents, but, unlike Trump, were not prosecuted. This fueled chants of lock him up and lock her up.



Echoing Trumps lies and calling for the Republican Party to back him in the 2024 election, Greene said Trump was innocent from the beginning. She called for both of his impeachments to be expunged and erased from history, and ended her speech with a fascistic attack on LGBTQ persons. All last month was Pride month, she said, adding that what started under the guise of equality is now targeting our children.



Following Greene, South Carolina Representatives Russell Fry and William Timmons, state Treasurer Curtis Loftis, South Carolina Senator Lindsey Graham, Lieutenant Governor Pamela Evette and Governor Henry McMaster delivered short speeches praising Trump and pledging their fealty in the 2024 election.



In contrast to every other politician who spoke, Senator Graham, a native Pickens County resident, was booed by the crowd throughout his entire speech, with several in the crowd calling him a traitor. While Graham is backing Trump now, following the ex-presidents failed coup of January 6, 2021, he made a few critical statements, including that Trump bore responsibility for the attack.



Seeking to placate the crowd, Graham noted that as a member of the Senate Judiciary Committee he helped elevate Trumps three right-wing Supreme Court justices. When that didnt mollify the crowd, he effusively praised Trump, declaring, Ive come to like President Trump, and he likes himself, and we got that in common. And Im going to help him become president of the United States.



Politico reported it was Graham who urged the Trump campaign to reach out to local Pickens officials weeks ago to begin preparing for the rally. The date was chosen to coincide with a local Independence Day festival and follow Trumps appearance in Philadelphia the previous night at the Moms for Liberty (MFL) conference, dubbed the Joyful Warriors National Summit.



Both events featured dozens of Republican politicians and both were of an extreme right character, reflecting the fascistic trajectory of the Republican Party. Speakers at the Philadelphia event included Florida Governor Ron DeSantis, former South Carolina Governor Nikki Haley, Republican presidential candidate Vivek Ramaswamy, former Arkansas Governor Asa Hutchinson, North Carolina Lieutenant Governor Mark Robinson and Florida Representative Byron Donalds.



Prior to the Moms for Liberty conference, the Hamilton County, Indiana chapter of the organization drew nationwide headlines after it was revealed that the group had sent out its Parent Brigade newsletter with a featured quote from Adolf Hitler on its front cover. The quote read: He alone who OWNS the youth, GAINS the future, Adolf Hitler.



After the IndyStar published an article featuring the newsletter, MFL released an updated version that still featured the Hitler quote, but with additional context, namely that said the quote should put parents on alert... We The People must be vigilant and protect children from an overreaching government.

The following morning the group removed the quote and issued a statement saying, We should not have quoted him in our newsletter and express our deepest apology.



Democratic presidential candidate Robert F. Kennedy Jr. was originally slated to speak at the MFL event as well, but he pulled out just days before. At a recent town hall, Kennedy claimed that he was unaware of the fascistic politics of MFL when he originally agreed to appear.



Moms for Liberty was established in 2021 by Tiffany Justice and Tina Descovich and grew quickly due to heavy promotion on Fox News, backing by billionaires, and Republican Party support. It is a nationwide organization that claims chapters in 45 states and a membership of over 100,000. Members of the group have frequently attended school board meetings, where, backed by Proud Boys, they have threatened to kill librarians and teachers.



Last month, the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC) designated the group as an anti-government extremist organization (the same designation the SPLC has given to the Proud Boys and Oath Keepers), in part due its web of political allies, including white nationalists, election deniers and participants in January 6th events. The SPLC noted that a major reason MFL was able to donate to far-right candidates in the 2022 midterms was a $50,000 donation from billionaire Publix grocery store heiress Julie Fancelli, who also bankrolled one of the Stop the Steal rallies outside the US Capitol on January 6.
A statement posted on Facebook on June 28 by the Macquarie Socialists club at Sydneys Macquarie University has exposed the fraudulent character of university managements claim that the International Youth and Students for Social Equality (IYSSE) shares the same aims and purpose as the pseudo-left club affiliated with Socialist Alternative. This false assertion has been used by management to reject the reaffiliation of the IYSSE club at Macquarie University.

Macquarie University Chancellery building. [Photo by mq.edu.au

In their Facebook post, the Macquarie Socialists write that they reject the claim that we share the same aim and purpose as IYSSE.

On May 29, the Student Engagement, Inclusion & Belonging division sent the Macquarie IYSSE club executive an email stating that the club would not be affiliated despite the IYSSE meeting all requirements to affiliate a club. The sole reason cited was that the IYSSE shared the same aims with the Macquarie Socialists. The IYSSE had been an affiliated club from 2010 to 2022, before being deregistered in a bureaucratic purge that resulted in widespread disaffiliations.

On June 17, the IYSSE contacted Macquarie Socialists requesting information as to whether or not management had been in contact with them about the IYSSEs affiliation and calling on the Macquarie Socialists to publicly defend the IYSSEs right to form a club on the basis of an understanding that the two organisations do not have the same aims.

Macquarie Socialists published a statement on Facebook nearly two weeks later. Its concluding paragraph said:

Macquarie Socialists reject the claim that we share the same aim and purpose as IYSSE. Fundamentally, we reject the premise that left-wing political organisations should not have the right to independent clubs on campus. There are substantial political differences between the IYSSE and our own club, and under no circumstances do we accept that our affiliation as an independent club should impact on theirs or any other club's attempt at affiliation.

The bulk of the brief statement, however, is given over to intensely hostile comments denouncing the IYSSE. These include significant falsifications.

That is the antithesis of a principled approach to the defence of democratic rights. There is a long history in the socialist and left-wing movement of unconditionally opposing such attacks regardless of differences with the organisation being targeted.

The IYSSE and its parent organisation, the Socialist Equality Party (SEP), have repeatedly defended Socialist Alternative when it has been attacked by state and corporate forces. For instance, when two of its student members were suspended by the University of Sydney earlier this year for their participation in a protest, an IYSSE/SEP statement declared:

The Socialist Equality Party (SEP) has irreconcilable and well-documented political differences with Socialist Alternative. This, however, is a basic question of democratic rights. The SEP unequivocally condemns the suspensions of Godwin and Clarke and demands that university management reinstate their right to study immediately.

Above all, the statement highlighted the fact that the suspensions were an attack on the democratic rights of the student body. And it made the logical conclusion that this demonstrated the need for all students, regardless of political differences, to demand the reinstatement of the suspended students.

The Macquarie Socialists statement is very different. The phrases democratic rights and civil liberties do not appear. Nor is there any call for students to defend the right of the IYSSE.

Instead, the bulk of the 229-word statement is composed of dishonest attacks on the IYSSE.

Under conditions in which the IYSSE is under attack from university management, the Macquarie Socialists attempt to slander the IYSSE. The aim is to discourage students from taking up a fight to defend the IYSSE, and the outcome is to provide management with new grounds for the IYSSEs censorship.

Macquarie Socialists refer in their statement to the SEP as a political sect, implying that the SEP stands outside and is hostile to the interests of broader sections of the population. This sectarian approach, they claim, includes routine denunciation of other organisations.

The IYSSE and SEP provide a political analysis on our website, the WSWS, of the program and orientation of different political organisations. At no point have Socialist Alternative elaborated where the characterisations of other political tendencies have been incorrect.

They say that the IYSSE and SEP argue for political positions which they deem unacceptable. The inference is that it would be permissible to accept the censorship of the IYSSEs unacceptable positions.

Among these positions is the claim that the IYSSE and SEP engage in abstention from and denunciations of trade union work.

This is demonstrably false. In fact the IYSSE and SEP are constantly intervening within the trade unions. We fight among rank-and-file workers for a rebellion against the bureaucratic leaderships that have enforced decades of cuts to pay and conditions.

The role of the pseudo-left in the unions is to provide political cover for the union apparatus, which acts as the industrial police for management, strangling and suppressing workers struggles.

Also, in their statement, Macquarie Socialists refer to the IYSSE and SEPs defence of high profile figures accused of sexual assault and description of #MeToo as a witch-hunt as repulsive.

The IYSSE defends the right of an accused party to a fair trial. #MeToo campaigners openly attack the presumption of innocence and the right to a trial before a jury of ones peers. In place of these legal norms, #MeToo aims to whip up a lynch mob or witch-hunt atmosphere. The IYSSEs opposition to #MeToo is based on its defence of fundamental democratic rights.

While the falsifications of the IYSSEs positions on the unions and #MeToo presented in the Macquarie Socialists statement are revealing, what is perhaps even more telling is what is left out.

That Macquarie Socialists are silent on the major question of the day, the issue of war is not accidental.

The IYSSE opposes imperialist war, including the US-NATO imperialist proxy war against Russia in Ukraine, which threatens global nuclear catastrophe. It also opposes the bankrupt and reckless invasion by Russia in February 2022, which has served to confuse and divide the Ukrainian and Russian working class.

On April 4, the IYSSE held a successful anti-war meeting at Macquarie University as part of an international series. At the event, the IYSSE advanced the fight to build an international anti-war movement based on a unified struggle of Russian and Ukrainian workers as part of an international movement directed against the source of war: the capitalist nation-state system.

For this anti-imperialist stand, the IYSSE at Macquarie University came under attack by far-right Ukrainian nationalists who contacted university management in a bid to shut the IYSSEs meeting down before it took place. Rather than defend the IYSSEs inalienable right to hold its meeting, management presented the solitary email sent by a Ukrainian far-right sympathiser calling for the meeting to be cancelled as legitimate.

This attack by the pro-Ukrainian far right has not just been levelled against the IYSSE in Sydney. IYSSE events in New Zealand, Germany, the US and Canada have also come under threat from organisations linked with the Ukrainian far right who campaigned for the events to be cancelled and attended them to stage provocations.

Macquarie Socialists silence on this plays into the hands of the far right and management, who do not want an anti-war presence on campus. This is because Socialist Alternative themselves support the US-led imperialist war in Ukraine and are among the chief propagandists for it along with the pseudo-left internationally.

Socialist Alternative publication Red Flag enthusiastically supported NATO weaponry being sent to Ukraine as part of its supposed self-defence in July last year. It stated that Russias invasion cannot be defeated by pacifist methods. Western military supplies went some way to preventing a rapid Russian military victory and the imposition of a puppet government in the early stages of the war.

The war in Ukraine has nothing to do with the defence of the Ukrainian people. The US and European powers have shown shocking indifference to the lives of ordinary Ukrainians who have been sent into slaughter by their thousands in the interests of imperialist geostrategy.

The fundamental political differences between the Macquarie Socialists and IYSSE are borne out of diametrically opposed class and political tendencies.

Socialist Alternative represents the interests of a privileged stratum of the upper middle class preoccupied with advancing its own material interests within the framework of the profit system.

The pseudo-left is deeply hostile to an independent and united movement of the working class. They seek to disorient and railroad workers behind the corrupt trade unions, and reactionary and divisive identity politics based on race, gender, ethnicity and sexual orientation.

As the youth and student arm of the world Trotskyist movement, the IYSSE is fighting to build an international socialist revolutionary movement of the working class against the capitalist system.

In the IYSSEs 12 years of club affiliation at Macquarie University, it has held numerous meetings on many topics, including the threat of nuclear war, the COVID-19 pandemic, the political crisis in every country and the resurgence of the class struggle.

The fight for the IYSSEs right to affiliate at Macquarie University is key to the defence of all democratic rights on campus and more broadly. If the university managements decision is allowed to stand, it would set a precedent for silencing anti-war and left-wing voices on campuses across the country. Defenders of civil liberties should join the IYSSEs fight against this anti-democratic assault.

Macquarie Socialists have made clear that they are not among such principled fighters for democratic rights.

Get in touch with the IYSSE to find out how you can be involved:

Email: iysseaus@gmail.com

Facebook: facebook.com/IYSSEaustralia

Twitter: @IysseA

Instagram: @iysse.aus
Last week, New Zealand Prime Minister Chris Hipkins carried out a six-day visit to China, aimed at strengthening trade and economic ties. He was accompanied by Trade Minister Damien OConnor, Tourism Minister Peeni Henare and 29 business leaders.

China's Premier Li Qiang, right, and New Zealand Prime Minister Chris Hipkins shake hands at signing ceremony at the Great Hall of the People in Beijing on Wednesday, June 28, 2023. [AP Photo]

Hipkins visit to China was the first by a New Zealand PM since 2019. It took place against a backdrop of escalating anti-China provocations from the United States and the raging US-NATO war against Russia in Ukraine, which US imperialism views as a first step towards war with China.

Washington is determined to maintain its status as the worlds hegemonic power, even if that means plunging the world into a war involving nuclear-armed countries. New Zealand and Australia, minor imperialist powers in the Pacific region, are viewed as important junior partners in the US war plans.

Summing up the conundrum facing New Zealands ruling elite, Radio NZ said increasingly, the country is being asked to choose between its number one trading partner, China, and its traditional Western security allies. Its no easy decision, considering China accounts for nearly 30 percent of this countrys total exports of goods and services.

In a press release, Hipkins described the main aim of his China visit as boosting New Zealands exports of agricultural and other products, and to promote tourism and international education. In addition to trade, China was New Zealands second-largest source of tourists and is a significant source of international students, so its a critical part of our economic recovery, Hipkins said. The New Zealand economy recently entered a recession and is highly exposed to the global downturn.

In a statement which made international headlines, Hipkins told reporters on June 22 that he disagreed with Joe Bidens comment branding Chinese president Xi Jinping a dictator. Hipkins said: the form of government that China has is a matter for the Chinese people.

Hipkins described his meeting with Xi last Tuesday as warm and constructive conversation and at no point adversarial. Xi, for his part, told a media conference that China viewed New Zealand as a friend and a partner and praised Hipkins for making clear that you value Chinese-New Zealand relations and will continue to strengthen cooperation with China. The countries relationship had contributed to regional peace and stability and prosperity, he said.

The New Zealand PM also received positive coverage in the Chinese media. The Global Times declared: While some Western countries [are] following the US in containing China, New Zealand continues to strengthen stable economic and trade cooperation with China.

Significantly, New Zealands main opposition National Party leader Chris Luxon told Radio NZ there was strong bipartisan alignment on foreign policy and he praised Hipkins visit to China as very constructive. He agreed with Hipkins decision not to call Xi a dictator.

The visit will be viewed with concern in Washington. Both Australia and the US are placing pressure on New Zealand to fall more decisively in line with war preparations which includes the AUKUS military pact, which will supply Australia with nuclear-powered attack submarines.

Anne-Marie Brady, a prominent US-aligned academic in New Zealand, told Radio NZ: It really is very unsatisfactory that we have, still, such dependence on the China market, or perceived dependence, when we know theres a really serious political risk.

At the same time, however, Brady noted that New Zealand is showing, with its actions, what its policy priorities are on security. She said it was highly significant that Wellington hosted a two-day meeting of the US-led Five Eyes intelligence-sharing network, which coincided with Hipkins meeting with Xi.

According to a joint statement from the Five Eyes, ministers from Australia, Canada, New Zealand, the UK, and the United States committed to further collaborate on policy, regulatory, intelligence, operational and enforcement responses, to build our collective resilience against the hostile actions of state actors. Although China was not named, it is clearly the target of such measures along with Russia. New Zealands spy agency, as part of the Five Eyes, has carried out surveillance against China and across Asia and the Pacific.

Hipkins next trip will be to the NATO summit in Lithuania on July 11, which will discuss the next escalation in the war against Russia. New Zealand soldiers are stationed in Britain where they are assisting in training Ukrainian forces for the war.

South Korea, Australia and Japan will also send representatives to the Lithuania summit, as the military alliance deepens its presence in the Indo-Pacific region. In May, the Chinese government sharply criticised a plan to open a NATO office in Japan, saying it would destroy regional peace and stability. NATO leader Jens Stoltenberg has repeatedly lashed out at China for its alleged support of Russia.

As New Zealand approaches an election on October 14, pressure will undoubtedly be brought to bear on both major parties to take a more overt anti-China stance. In the lead-up to the 2017 election, Brady played a major role in attacking the then-National Party governments business ties with China. When the election failed to produce a clear winner, US ambassador Scott Brown publicly indicated that Washington wanted a change of government, after which the far-right, anti-Chinese NZ First Party chose to form a coalition with Labour instead of National.

While the New Zealand ruling class clearly remains anxious to maintain good relations with China in order to prevent a disastrous economic collapse, the fact remains that New Zealand is deeply integrated in US-led war plans on a global scale.

There is no anti-war faction in any of the parliamentary parties, which all fully support the war against Russia. Successive governments have sent troops to join in the imperialist wars against Iraq and Afghanistan. The current Labour government has committed to major spending increases on the military, while it starves health, education and other vital public services.

The headlong rush towards a catastrophic Third World War to redivide the worlds markets and resources can only be stopped through the mobilisation of the international working class. The new anti-war movement must base itself on the understanding that the source of war is the capitalist and nation-state system, which must be overthrown and replaced by a workers government and socialist planned world economy.
On Saturday, Spains acting Prime Minister Pedro Sanchez began Madrids six-month presidency of the European Union with a bellicose visit to Kiev to underline the blocs commitment to NATOs war against Russia in the Ukraine.

In this photo provided by the Ukrainian Presidential Press Office, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy, right, and Spain's Prime Minister Pedro Sanchez greet each other in Kyiv, Ukraine, Saturday, July 1, 2023. [AP Photo/Ukrainian Presidential Office]

Sanchezs third visit to Kiev since the war began in February 2022 takes place a week after the failed coup in Russia and as the US and European powers move toward sending more and more escalatory weapons to Ukraine. It is part of a campaign to massively intensify their involvement in the conflict, the main focus of the upcoming July 11-12 NATO summit in Vilnius, Lithuania.

During the meeting with Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelensky, Sanchez made clear that the EU was fully aligned on NATO plans for a staggering escalation against Russia. Sanchez promised the EUs support for Ukraine as long as it takes and regardless of the price that has to be paid, laying out a programme leading to total war with Russia, a major nuclear-armed state.

The warmongering statement was followed by Sanchezs promises to support Ukraines bid to become a NATO member. Spain supports the strengthening of Ukraines political participation through the creation of a NATO-Ukraine Council, where Ukraine will no longer be an invited party, but a full member. We are also in favor of strengthening practical cooperation, continuing the adaptation of your defense sector to NATO standards, said Sanchez.

If NATO admitted Ukraine, Kiev could then invoke Article 5 of the NATO treaty to demand that all the NATO countriesincluding Spaingo to war with Russia. Such a war between the worlds leading nuclear powers, and waged by the NATO powers as a war to dismember and demilitarize Russia, would lead inexorably, unless stopped by the independent intervention of the working class, to the use of nuclear weapons.

Sanchez also reiterated his support for Ukraines candidacy to join the EU, which will be among the priorities of its presidency. The European Commission, said Sanchez, had recently issued an interim update on the status of Ukraines candidacy which showed significant progress in implementing the recommendations ahead of membership talks. A written report would be released in the autumn which would outline the basis for further steps and decisions.

Ukraine applied for EU membership five days after Russias invasion and received candidacy status several months later on June 23 last year.

The integration of Ukraine into the EU would make a mockery of the EUs claim that only states with stable institutions guaranteeing democracy, the rule of law, human rights and respect for and protection of minorities can be members.

Over the past 16 months of the war, Ukraine has ever more evolved into far-right regime. Zelensky has banned 11 political parties on allegations of having links with Russia; strengthened the Secret Service of Ukraine, the SBU, an organisation that is notorious for its close ties to Ukraines neo-Nazi scene; the use of torture and rape as methods of interrogation; passed labor laws which allow companies to set wages and conditions, impose longer hours, bar strikes and protests and give companies the power to fire workers without notice; and destroyed what remained of an independent judiciary. Minority rights dont even exist on paper, and laws have been passed to erase the Russian language and culture from Ukrainian society.

The further integration of Ukraine into the EU is not only exploding the official propaganda about European values and democracy. It would be seized by the European ruling classes to further implement the far-right policies that Kiev is already implementing against the Ukrainian working class, to suppress mounting mass strikes, protests and riots that are erupting across Europe against soaring prices, low wages and police violence.

In Kyiv, Sanchez also made clear that peace would only come under NATOs conditions, which means Moscows total capitulation, including renouncing Crimea, now held by Russian forces against the pro-NATO regime in Kiev for nearly a decade.

In an unveiled attack on Chinas peace proposal, Sanchez thanked those countries that are proposing a just and lasting peace, but stressed that these proposals cannot be accepted because this is an aggressive war with an aggressor and a victim and illegal and unjustified Russian aggression against Ukraine.

This is the usual pro-NATO mantra repeated incessantly since the beginning of the war. In fact, it is the imperialist powers, not Moscow, who are the main aggressors in Ukraine and Eastern Europe. With its systematic military encirclement of Russia, NATO deliberately provoked the reactionary intervention of the Putin regime. Since then, it has continued to fuel the conflict.

Sanchez also spoke of the much-vaunted counteroffensive and committed more military aid. Today, Ukraine is in the middle of a counteroffensive against Russia, an enemy that is showing signs of weakness, said Sanchez, referring to the failed coup attempt by the Wagner Group leader Evgeny Prigozhin against Russian President Vladimir Putin.

The truth is that Ukraines vaunted counteroffensive continues to falter as tens of thousands of soldiers are sent to their death despite billions of dollars in weapons and training. Estimates indicate that well over 10,000 Ukrainian soldiers have already been slaughtered in the past three weeks during the counter-offensive to retake slightly over 110 square kilometers of territory. These deaths come on top of 200,000 Ukrainians, who were estimated to have been killed so far.

The EU leaders are committed to fuel the bloodbath in order to defeat Russia militarily. At the EU summit last week German Chancellor Olaf Scholz called for a long-term strategy on how to support Ukraine and boasted: Germany, as you all know, is Ukraines second-largest supporter after the US. And we will continue to do that (...) and that ties in with what I can report from talking to them (the US) and the British Prime Minister, the French President, also from talking to the Polish Prime Minister.

Last week the German government announced plans to increase howitzer ammunition production for Ukraine and to station 4,000 combat troops permanently in Lithuania. Spain will provide Ukraine with an additional aid package worth 55 million euros. Madrid will also send four more Leopard tanks, in addition to the six already sent two months ago, and armoured personnel carriers and a portable field hospital with surgical equipment.

Within Spain, it is yet to be seen, however, whether Sanchez will remain in power to lead the EUs presidency after he called snap elections for July 23 following his electoral debacle in the local and regional elections in May.

As the WSWS has explained, the PSOE and Podemos are terrified of massive working class opposition to war, austerity and police-state repression erupting uncontrollably on its left flank. To pre-empt this development, it has called these elections to hand over power to the right-wing Popular Party (PP) and the fascistic Vox party, to escalate war abroad and at home, as strikes erupt across Spain and mass protests in France following the police murder of a 17-year-old youth.

Revealing the unanimity within the ruling class for the war policy, the PP has already announced it agrees with Sanchezs EU priorities, which, besides Ukraine, includes advanced plans for EUs remilitarization and attacks on the working class.

Spain will seek to bolster cooperation with Latin America, an area that was brutally colonized and plundered by that country for centuries. Madrid wants to turn Latin America into a strategic partner of the EU. EU powers are concerned they have lost ground to the US and China in recent years and are seeking the region to supply it with strategic raw materials, such as coal, copper, natural gas, oil, uranium and lithium.

The new EU presidency will also oversee savage austerity against the working class to pay for the war. Under EU rules, states are required to keep budget deficits under 3 percent of annual GDP. This was temporarily suspended during the Covid-19 pandemic, and was later extended until 2024 following the breakout of the war in the Ukraine. Now, Brussels is demanding that EU states cut at least 45 billion next year, with exceptions to be made for defence spending.

Madrid will also preside over savage attacks on migrants. The EU will finalize its draconian Migration and Asylum Pact, which was approved earlier this month. Under its terms, the EU has effectively abandoned the right of asylum for refugees. Refugees are to be interned in detention camps at the EUs external borders in the future, their asylum applications to be decided in a fast-track procedure and then deported to almost any third country.

Sanchez has already shown his readiness to implement this brutal policy. Two weeks ago, the PSOE-Podemos government allowed a boat with 61 migrants to sink off the coast of the Canary Islands, claiming 37 lives. This happened just weeks after the Greek Coast Guard capsized a fishing boat with 750 refugees aboard, of which only 104 were found alive.
MAHMUD-E-RAQI, Afghanistan, July 3 (Xinhua) -- A clash over water between two families in Afghanistan's eastern Kapisa province has left six persons injured, said a statement of provincial police department released here on Monday.

The incident took place Sunday evening when the two families quarreled over water distribution in Police District 2 of provincial capital Mahmud-e-Raqi city. In the clash, four persons from one family and two from the other side were injured, the statement said without providing more details.

Several provinces of Afghanistan including Kapisa and the national capital Kabul city have suffered drought as the local underground water level has receded over the past couple of years.

Continued drought, according to farmers, has also affected agricultural production in parts of the war-ravaged Afghanistan. 
In her opening remarks, DG Okonjo-Iweala said: The future of trade is services, digital and green  and it must be inclusive. This new publication translates that conviction into a call for action. It documents how services trade has become a key ingredient in our members' growth and development strategies  including by helping countries diversify and expand their export baskets, making them more resilient to external shocks.

The single best way to drive a nail into the coffin of poverty is by giving people a job, said Mr Banga. And in todays world  and in tomorrows economy  delivering jobs means a very sharp focus on services. We need to build the tracks for the services train to run on, to run smoothly, quickly and at scale.

While heavily affected by the COVID-19 pandemic, services trade remains the most dynamic component of world trade. Digitally delivered services have grown at the fastest pace, well ahead of the growth of trade in goods. Services also generate more than two-thirds of GDP globally and represent 50 per cent of the worlds workforce in 2021. In value added terms, services account for 50 per cent of world trade.

The publication  entitled Trade in Services for Development  looks at how developing economies can fully share in the benefits that services trade brings to their economies and step up their development prospects.

The need to deepen international cooperation on services trade, including at the WTO, to reduce the costs of trade and to facilitate and expand developing economies' trade and investment in services are among the key messages from the publication. In the broader context of a Trade in Services for Development initiative, an Aid-for-Trade package could help strengthen the participation of developing and least-developed economies in services trade, the publication notes. Scaled-up resources are needed to boost the capacities of developing economies to diversify and expand exports, design and implement services trade reforms and supply competitive services to global markets.

Reviving international cooperation could help to bolster the effective participation of all WTO members in services trade negotiations and increase the transparency and predictability of services trade policies.

The publication also highlights that effective access to traded services  ranging from health and education to finance, transport and logistics services  will be key to advancing the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals.

Also participating in the launch event were the United Kingdom's Secretary of State for Business and Trade, Kemi Badenoch, Jamaica's Minister of Foreign Affairs and Foreign Trade, Kamina Johnson Smith, and Rwanda's Minister of Trade and Industry, Dr Jean Chrysostome Ngabitsinze, alongside a panel of private sector representatives. DDG Anabel Gonzalez and the Chair of the Special Session of the Council for Trade in Services, Ambassador Zhanar Aitzhan of Kazakhstan, also took part in the event.

The full list of speakers can be found here.

The full report is available here.

The video recording of the launch event can be viewed here.
BEIJING, July 3 (Xinhua) -- Chinese authorities on Monday issued a yellow alert for possible geological disasters triggered by rain in parts of Henan, Hubei, Chongqing, Sichuan, Guizhou, Yunnan and Shaanxi.

The Ministry of Natural Resources and the China Meteorological Administration warned of risks of rain-triggered geological disasters in those regions from 8 p.m. Monday to 8 p.m. Tuesday.

Residents have been advised to take precautions, especially in areas with hidden dangers.

China has a four-tier, color-coded weather warning system for geological disasters, with red representing the most severe warning, followed by orange, yellow and blue.

China will face multiple natural disasters in July, including floods, severe convection weather, typhoons and high temperatures, authorities warned. 
CHANGSHA, July 3 (Xinhua) -- A ship carrying exports including 564 cars and some auto parts departed on Monday from Chenglingji Port, in the city of Yueyang, Hunan Province, bound for the Russian port of Vladivostok, marking the launch of Hunan's first direct shipping route to Russia.

The new route is also the province's second direct shipping route for the import and export of goods. The outbound voyage takes about 10 days while the return journey takes 12 days, saving about five days and 40 percent of the cost each trip, compared to previous trips that involved transfers at Shanghai Port.

With abundant import and export demand, the new shipping service is expected to post an annual cargo throughput of 50,000 tonnes, while further promoting Hunan's economic and trade exchanges with countries along the Belt and Road, said the operating company behind the maiden voyage. 
Arizona Attorney General Kris Mayes

Colorado has a law on the books that says, in simple terms, a business open to the public cant discriminate against gay people.

The radical right-wing majority of the U.S. Supreme Court issued a ruling last week saying that, yes, it can.

The court took the side of a web designer in Colorado who said it was her First Amendment right to refuse to design wedding websites for same-sex couples.

Arizona has a law much like Colorados.

Arizona Attorney General Kris Mayes announced in no uncertain terms that her office is determined to enforce it.

The Supreme Court be damned.

Mayes calls ruling 'woefully misguided'

After the court announced its decision in the Colorado case, Mayes issued a statement that read in part, Today, a woefully misguided majority of the United States Supreme Court has decided that businesses open to the public may, in certain circumstances, discriminate against LGBTQ+ Americans.

While my office is still reviewing the decision to determine its effects, I agree with Justice Sotomayor  the idea that the Constitution gives businesses the right to discriminate is profoundly wrong. 

Mayes is referring to a dissenting opinion by Justice Sonia Sotomayor, who wrote in part, Today, the Court, for the first time in its history, grants a business open to the public a constitutional right to refuse to serve members of a protected class.

Another view: Mayes goes extreme because GOP lets her

She added, By issuing this new license to discriminate  the immediate, symbolic effect of the decision is to mark gays and lesbians for second-class status.

Not in Arizona, according to Mayes.

She will 'continue to enforce' Arizona's law

She said in her statement, Despite todays ruling, Arizona law prohibits discrimination in places of public accommodation, including discrimination because of sexual orientation and gender identity.

If any Arizonan believes that they have been the victim of discrimination on the basis of race, color, religion, sex (including sexual orientation and gender identity), national origin, or ancestry in a place of public accommodation, they should file a complaint with my office. I will continue to enforce Arizonas public accommodation law to its fullest extent.

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The extremist majority of the Supreme Court appears willing to nudge the country into a modern day Jim Crow era.

For now, however, members of the LGBTQ community in Arizona do not have to sit in the back of the bus.

Reach Montini at ed.montini@arizonarepublic.com.

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This article originally appeared on Arizona Republic: Attorney General Kris Mayes tells Supreme Court to shove it
[Source]

The armed man who threatened Rep. Pramila Jayapal (D, WA-7) outside her home in West Seattle last year has pleaded guilty to a misdemeanor stalking charge.

Key details: Brett Forsell, 49, has been sentenced to 364 days in King County Jail on Thursday, which will be followed by a 24-month probation.

Additional conditions: Forsell must undergo substance abuse, alcohol abuse and mental health evaluations and agree to an anti-stalking order that also comes with a firearm possession prohibition of eight years.

He was also ordered to avoid criminal law violations.

More from NextShark: 100-million-year-old dinosaur footprints discovered at restaurant in China

What happened: Forsell hurled obscenities outside Jayapals home on July 9, 2022, and yelled threatening remarks at the U.S. representative, telling her, Go back to India, Im going to kill you, according to a neighbor.

A police report noted that Forsell was in possession of a .40 caliber Glock semi-automatic at the time and court records reportedly revealed that his gun had a live round in its chamber.

Arrested, released and charged: Forsell was arrested at the scene after police arrived on malicious harassment charges, but he was eventually released from jail. Later that month, however, he was charged with felony stalking.

More from NextShark: 2 Men Found Guilty of Killing 39 Vietnamese Migrants Trafficked into the UK

Speaking to the FBI, Forsell admitted that he had driven past Jayapals house more than once and yelled expletives outside her home.

He reportedly claimed that he was drinking on the night of the incident and was struggling with mental illness. He also said his actions toward the Democratic representative were a "manifestation of a manic episode."

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Jack Ma is NOT Missing But 'Laying Low', Sources Say
A few days before the Fourth of July, the Supreme Court struck twin blows to equality in education  and to the history we try to teach. (Jacquelyn Martin / Associated Press)

A few days shy of the Fourth of July, six Supreme Court justices dealt heavy blows to the independence of millions of poor and underrepresented Americans. With twin 6-3 rulings against race-conscious college admissions and student loan debt relief, the justices sent a loud and clear message that two systemic problems, racism and debt, do not exist. The first decision, deeming the affirmative-action practices of Harvard and the University of North Carolina unlawful, reflects a central paradox of progress in the United States: A nation founded on the premise of race must use race to mitigate systemic racism.

The comments of justices Clarence Thomas and Sonia Sotomayor illustrate opposing forces creating this tension. This is not 1958 or 1968, Thomas said during an oral concurrence, a rare break from his usual courtroom silence. Todays youth do not shoulder moral debts of their ancestors. Sotomayor disagreed in her dissent: Entrenched racial inequality remains a reality today.  What was true in the 1860s, and again in 1954, is true today: Equality requires acknowledgment of inequality.

Read more: Opinion: The Supreme Court's ultimate 'judicial activism': striking down affirmative action in college admissions

As if imposing more obstacles for people of color in college admissions were not enough, the Supreme Court then struck the death knell for the Biden-Harris administrations student loan debt relief program.

This time, the remarks of Chief Justice John Roberts and Justice Elena Kagan reflected the opposing positions. Roberts scolded the executive branch, demanding that Congress speak clearly before a Department Secretary can unilaterally alter large sections of the American economy. Kagan in turn scolded the judiciary: The result here is that the Court substitutes itself for Congress and the Executive Branch in making national policy about student-loan forgiveness.

President Biden immediately resolved to use a different avenue to advance debt relief that would drastically improve the lives of some 40 million Americans.

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What does all of this add up to? On the one hand, only time will tell. What is certain is that the Supreme Court has re-introduced profound uncertainty for socio-economically and racially disadvantaged families on the cusp of a very important, very difficult decision: whether or not to attend college at all. Without the promise of student loan relief, poor and even middle-class families will have an even tougher time reconciling the benefits of attending college with the long-term debt it begets. It is a dilemma I know all too well.

The news of the decisions immediately sent me back to summer 1999. Like many young adults, I couldnt afford to make the college decision lightly. I knew it was a tall financial order my family could not meet without assistance, along with a wing and a prayer. I used all the grants and loans available to ease the burden. I spent the summer before attending Columbia University picking up shifts as a cashier at Pathmark, my local supermarket.

Despite my best efforts, I arrived at Columbias upper Manhattan campus that fall owing the university around $5,000. When my parent's attempts at securing additional loan support failed because of impossible credit score thresholds, I found innovative ways to put off the outstanding balance. Each subsequent school year, the balance would await me, accruing interest and at times even blocking my ability to register for classes.

Read more: Commentary: I fought for Black studies at UCLA. The College Board just erased U.S. history

After I graduated, that balance followed me into my first years as a high-school English teacher. Managing and eliminating this debt is difficult and demoralizing, often leading many to punish themselves for deciding to attend college and persuading others to skip higher education altogether. This is why upending a federal program that aims to eliminate $20,000 for eligible loans not only devastates many borrowers but also stifles the next generation  cutting off a path to advancement before the question of affirmative action even presents itself.

Unfortunately, beneficiaries of the New Deal and civil rights laws, including Roberts and Thomas, have determined that future generations do not deserve or need the benefits theyve been afforded. And theres no reason to believe theyre done. These consequential decisions signal that the current Supreme Court majority is prepared to block a number of private, public, local and federal programs to ameliorate systemic racism and debt.

In response, some have pointed to the courts potential design flaws  a nine-member, largely homogeneous body without term limits making consequential decisions about an ever-more diverse population of 336 million people. Others have declared these actions the outcome of an influential decades-long right-wing agenda to roll back rights of every kind. While all of this may be true, something more profound is clear: This courts reading of where we are today is ahistorical.

A nation without an official history is vulnerable to interpretations that upend meaningful attempts to repair and transform systemic inequality. Without an official national record of atrocities, of the enslavement at the root of systemic racism and poverty, programs designed to redress any kind of inequality through education will not withstand attacks  or the test of time.

Read more: How one author uncovered the fact that California was  and remains  a slave state

What we need is a federal truth commission, something like the Truth, Racial Healing, and Transformation Commission proposed in 2021 by U.S. Rep. Barbara Lee (D-Oakland) . The commission would prevent continued denials of American history by establishing a publicly available ledger documenting and memorializing the harms permitted and authorized by the federal government. Similar commissions that followed the Holocaust and apartheid drew together historical evidence, testimony and scholarship, creating an indisputable record of governmental accountability in Germany and South Africa, respectively.

Although Justice Thomas argues that youth should not be subject to the moral failings of past generations, the pressing and continuing gap in achievement by race and socio-economic status proves the plain fact that systemic inequality impedes the pursuit of happiness. It is a moral failing we all bear, a problem we all must fix. But first we must all acknowledge it  and continue to do so.

Rather than simply feeling defeated by these decisions, let them also serve as a potent reminder that the collective work to achieve equity is still before us. May we all be reinvigorated to unite to compel elected officials to remedy systemic racism and inequity. Equality of both outcome and opportunity requires equity in every realm, and thats the truth to which we should all be reconciled.

Hunter is a professor of sociology and the inaugural chair of African American studies at UCLA, the coiner of #BlackLivesMatter and the author of four books.

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This story originally appeared in Los Angeles Times.
Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO) Director-General Qu Dongyu (C, Front) prepares to plant a medicinal seedling during a tour of Karura forest on the outskirts of Nairobi, Kenya, on Feb. 19, 2023. (Photo by Charles Onyango/Xinhua)

"I think China has made a tremendous job during the past years and it will continue to make progress, especially at this critical moment that the world is witnessing, after the crisis of COVID-19 and the crisis of Russia-Ukraine."



ROME, July 3 (Xinhua) -- Delegates from member nations of the UN Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) praised China's remarkable contributions to global food security, and expressed anticipation for closer collaboration in the fight against poverty and for zero hunger.

The remarks came after Qu Dongyu, incumbent FAO director-general, was re-elected earlier on Sunday during the ongoing 43rd session of the FAO Conference, the highest governing body of the Rome-based UN agency. His second term will run from Aug. 1, 2023, to July 31, 2027.

Founded in 1945 and headquartered in Rome, Italy, FAO is a specialized UN agency leading cooperation in food and agriculture. The organization plays a vital role in global food and agricultural policy exchanges, standard-setting, information gathering and statistics.

Qu, who was elected in June 2019 to head the UN agency and the first Chinese national to serve in the position, is expected to further boost China's cooperation with FAO and its member nations in the coming years, said delegates to the session on Sunday.

Qu Dongyu delivers a speech after being re-elected as director-general of the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) in Rome, Italy, July 2, 2023. (Xinhua/Jin Mamengni)

China's endeavors in eliminating poverty and ending hunger have greatly impressed many delegates, including Bassam Essam Rady Abdelhamid Rady, Egypt's permanent representative ambassador to FAO.

"I think China has made a tremendous job during the past years and it will continue to make progress, especially at this critical moment that the world is witnessing, after the crisis of COVID-19 and the crisis of Russia-Ukraine," said Rady.

Egypt, an active participator in FAO's South-South Cooperation (SSC) Program, appreciates China's "major and pivotal role" in this field, he noted.

Since the SSC was launched by FAO in 1996, China has always been actively involved and played a very important leading role in the SSC and has donated 130 million U.S. dollars to FAO since 2009, exclusively for South-South and triangular cooperation.

The Chinese government has also provided considerable agricultural technical assistance to developing countries. To date, China has dispatched more than 1,000 Chinese experts and technicians, through FAO, to Africa, Asia, the Caribbean and the South Pacific.

Egypt is honored to have a part in the China-proposed Belt and Road Initiative by aligning the initiative with Egypt's national projects in the seaports and Suez Canal, said Rady.

The collaboration serves not only the interests of the two countries, but also that of the world and all humanity, and is for the betterment of the job that FAO is doing, he added.

"Bangladesh and China enjoy extremely cordial bilateral relations, and we have a multi-faceted collaboration," said Shameem Ahsan, Bangladeshi permanent representative to FAO. "And I think both countries can immensely benefit by collaborating and even exploring other new areas of cooperation."

During the session, Chinese Minister of Agriculture and Rural Affairs Tang Renjian reaffirmed his country's international responsibilities as a major developing country for global food security.

China will firmly practice multilateralism, and work with other countries to ensure global food security, eradicate poverty, achieve zero hunger, and push to achieve the UN 2030 Sustainable Development Goals, said Tang.
Ezra Miller attends the Los Angeles premiere of The Flash at on June 12, 2023 in Hollywood. (Photo: Axelle/Bauer-Griffin/FilmMagic)

Ezra Miller issued a rare statement over the weekend after a temporary harassment order issued against them was lifted. While it's a personal victory for the 30-year-old, professionally, the actor's would-be blockbuster The Flash has become one of the year's biggest disappointments, putting the future of Miller's portrayal of Barry Allen in doubt.

Last year, Miller was accused of acting inappropriately around a woman and her 12-year-old child. The court granted the family a harassment prevention order. On Friday, a judge ruled that the order, originally set to expire July 1, was lifted.

"I'm encouraged by today's outcome and very grateful at this moment to everyone who has stood by me and sought to ensure this egregious misuses of the protective order system was halted," Miller wrote on social media.

"Protective orders are meant to provide safety for individuals, families and children who are in danger," the actor continued. "They are not meant to be used as weapons by those seeking attention or fleeting tabloid fame or some sort of personal vengeance when there are people in true and dire need of these services."

Miller, who is nonbinary, said they "have been unjustly and directly targeted by an individual who the facts have shown has a history of such manipulative and destructive actions."

The Daily Beast reported in June 2022 that a mother in Massachusetts took out a protective order for her child. She claimed Miller pestered the nonbinary minor with compliments and accused the Justice League star of acting erratically. Miller did not publicly address the situation at the time, but a lawyer for the actor refuted the allegations and claimed Miller was "never alone with the child and never interacted with the child outside of two brief encounters which occurred in the presence of several other adults."

"I implore those members of the media who have recklessly spread false claims and failed to accurately report the truth and context of this story, to hold themselves to a higher standard and take the time to find the facts, rather than chasing the clicks," Miller continued in Saturday's statement. "On a personal note, I want everyone to know that I am continuing to do my best to preserve my own wellness and what I can to reverse the collateral damage this ordeal has brought upon me and those close to me."

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Miller concluded by thanking fans for support.

The news comes three weeks after The Flash arrived in theaters with a thud  and the trend continued over the weekend. The DC flick fell to No. 8 in its third weekend of release, raking in only $5 million. It's a massive 67% drop from last week. The film has grossed $245 million worldwide and is on track to lose money for Warner Bros. Prior to The Flash's lackluster debut, director Andy Muschietti said that Miller would not be recast in any potential sequels.

"I don't think there's anyone that can play that character as well as they did," the director said on The Discourse podcast.

Miller did no press for highly anticipated superhero film, aside from attending the world premiere, amid their ongoing legal and personal troubles. A sequel for the film has yet to be announced, but Variety reported the studio already has a finished script.
"The personal is political!" is a well-known rallying cry, originally used by left-leaning activists, including feminists, to emphasize the role of government in personal lives and systemic oppression.

It seems that now, it could be equally popular among right-wing politicians and their followers to communicate the idea that "everything is political."

President George Washington warned about the potentially malign influence of political parties on democracy. This painting of Washington by artist Gilbert Stuart from 1796, at the National Portrait Gallery in Washington.

Nowhere is this more evident than in the case of former President Donald Trump's recent indictment by the Department of Justice. Trump supporters say that the decision to charge Trump was "political." If the department hadn't charged Trump, that decision would likely have been seen by others as "political."

In both cases, the critics would have meant that the prosecutors' decision was influenced by partisan bias, based on whether the decision was good or bad for the Republican or Democratic party. U.S. Supreme Court decisions are often criticized as "political." So are actions taken by election officials, scientific findings, and even topics taught in school.

As a professor of political philosophy, I worry that when both elected officials and citizens use the word "political" to accuse others of partisan bias, it means people no longer understand the distinctions between political and partisan, or public and private, which are vital to liberal democracy.

The preservation of such distinctions is crucial to rejecting less democratic and more authoritarian forms of government  including fascism.

What is liberal democracy?

In political philosophy terms, the United States is a liberal democracy.

Liberal democracy comes in multiple forms ranging from constitutional monarchies  such as the United Kingdom  to republics, such as the United States.

Although no democracy achieves the ideals of liberalism perfectly, under liberal democratic governments, citizens have rights and private lives protected from the actions of government. For example, in the U.S. it is inappropriate for legislation to be crafted based on a religious belief, even if some particular belief or sect is privately endorsed by a majority of citizens.

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One way to view the purpose of a liberal democracy is to preserve and nurture the right of every citizen to have a private life independent of the government. In that private life, citizens pursue their own goals and develop connections, associations and activities that are of personal value.

Separate from that private life is the public arena, in which citizens come together to discuss and decide issues of common concern, such as national defense, economic policy and other issues that affect everyone. This is the world of elections, of legislatures, courts and officials.

People with divergent, or even very similar, personal lives could have different views on how to handle matters of public concern. But they can work together to rise above their differences to arrive at solutions to collective problems that benefit society as a whole.

A good example of this is the institution and funding of public educational systems, civil services and public parks, to help ensure every citizen has at least a minimum level of access to goods and services necessary for a healthy private and civic life.

The rise of politics

The philosopher Aristotle described humans as political animals, meaning that we depend upon the formation of cooperative political structures in order to flourish as human beings.

This human need for support networks that allow for mutual cooperation over time is the genesis of politics. In this sense, the concept of politics transcends more narrow partisan affiliations.

When partisanship gains momentum, people begin to advocate for legislation defining marriage, reproductive rights and other issues in ways that reflect narrow private and religious values. In this file photo, people walk to the Idaho Capitol Building carrying anti-abortion signs for the Boise March for Life rally, Saturday, June 21, 2023. A rural hospital in Sandpoint, Idaho, will stop delivering babies, citing recently passed state laws criminalizing medical care, among other reasons.

Political parties are just one aspect of political development  one, in fact, that George Washington warned against in his farewell address  that begins to blur the line between the public good of politics and narrower group interests.

Some of my own work pertains to how people's commitments to partisan identity undermine their ability to understand scientific issues of public concern, such as human-caused climate change, and influence the spread of disinformation.

Lurking fascism

As partisanship gains momentum, citizens and elected representatives alike become less likely to constructively engage with those they disagree with. People who differ on issues come to see each other as threats to their own private values.

Government power begins to be used not in service to the citizenry at large, but as a tool of narrow interest groups. This is where people begin to advocate for legislation defining marriage, reproductive rights and other issues in ways that reflect narrow private and religious values.

Whereas "the personal is the political" was originally meant to flag ways in which government decisions unfairly affect and define personal lives, the mindset that "everything is political" creates a situation of perpetual conflict between divergent groups.

That's the opposite of what politics is for and what a liberal democracy does: A liberal democracy specifically guards against using government power to further the agendas of distinctive groups. It seeks to prevent government encroachment into the private lives of individuals, and vice versa, in order to constrain the worst impulses of politicians and citizens alike.

Fascism, by contrast, seeks to make government power an aspect of every dimension of its citizens' lives. Nazi apologist Carl Schmitt conceptualized politics as an all-consuming and literal life and death struggle between friends and enemies.

Partisan dysfunction

The current state of polarization in the U.S. highlights the problems that arise when liberal democracy's division between private and public realms disappears.

Trump has posed many challenges for the United States' constitutional democracy  not least the Jan. 6, 2021, insurrection. His current situation is another. There is no constitutional obstacle preventing him from running, or serving, as president even if he is found guilty of some of the charges against him, not even if he is sentenced to prison.

Violent insurrectionists loyal to President Donald Trump storm the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, in Washington.

Nevertheless, the practical obstacles to serving as president while in a prison are obvious. Even someone who agrees with Trump's views on key issues can recognize the challenges an incarcerated president would face.

If the nation were less polarized, less focused on winning or losing the power to impose regulations on Americans' private lives, lawmakers and the public might equally prioritize avoiding such an obvious problem. They'd seek to preserve the rule of law in a way that would benefit the nation as a whole.

But they haven't. Instead, Trump supporters will dismiss his indictments as "political" maneuvers intended to influence the balance of power in the U.S. government, rather than as necessary checks on abuses of that power.

And if Trump is eventually cleared of the charges, or avoids a prison term if convicted, I believe his critics will view those developments as a product of politics, of the struggle for power, rather than the operation of a deliberative justice system.

Shifting perspectives

As political partisanship takes hold, citizens come to trust only those institutions that are run by members of their favored party. They no longer engage in the work of democracy and do not seek to ensure that independent, democracy-wide systems and institutions are protected from partisanship.

Rather than a means to living together peacefully, politics is treated as a contest between combatants. Government institutions meant to serve all are treated as if they are inevitably capable of only serving a particular few  and the struggle begins over which few they are to serve.

I don't know what the full solution to this problem is, but I believe one step in the right direction is for people to identify themselves more as supporters of liberal democracy itself than as members of, or backers of, any particular partisan political party.

Lawrence Torcello is an associate professor of philosophy at the Rochester Institute of Technology. This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license.

This article originally appeared on Erie Times-News: Fascism lurks as polarization erodes liberal democracy in U.S.
Noah Galvin and Ben Platt

All of us are upset about the recent Supreme Court ruling that says a Colorado web designer can refuse to make a wedding website for LGBTQ+ couples, but one couple got to air their grievances out loud.

On the most recent Just for Variety Podcast with Marc Malkin, recently engaged actors Ben Plett and Noah Galvin were able to share their thoughts on the ruling. And they didnt mince words.

I think its a distraction from things that are actually important, like the planet melting, Platt said. I also think its the people who are losing clout, its like the last rafegul fiery, This is not how it should be! before they go away forever.

Its my only hope, he continued. Thats the only way to stay any kind of optimistic about it because otherwise its just fully going back in time and harming people for no reason. It feels so backwards, so directly backwards.

Galvin said that the next generation of queer people gives him hope and pointed to one of the young actors in his and Platts upcoming comedy Theater Camp as an example. He said that when he saw 16-year-old actor Luke Islam attend the Sundance premiere of the film in full makeup with the most fabulous outfit, he was beyond impressed.

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I dont think Ive ever felt the confidence in my own self to show up as authentically as Luke did at our premiere, he said. It just filled me with joy and made me so, so proud of Luke and also of this next generation of kids who dont really give a f*ck  and that is amazing.

Theater Camp was written by Galvin and Platt, along with their friends Molly Gordon and Nick Leiberman, who directed the movie together. Platt and Gordon star as Amos and Rebecca-Diane  lifelong best friends and drama instructors at a rundown camp in upstate New York. When clueless tech bro Troy (Jimmy Tatro) arrives to run the property (into the ground), Amos, Rebecca-Dianne, and production manager Glenn (Noah Galvin) band together with the staff and students, staging a masterpiece to keep their beloved summer camp afloat.

Theater Camp premieres July 14 in theaters.
Americans are celebrating the biggest holiday of the year on Tuesday, Fourth of July, marking the 247th anniversary of the founding of the United States.

The Fourth of July, celebrates the Second Continental Congress unanimous adoption of the Declaration of Independence, which occured on 4 July 1776. The document marked the colonies official separation from Great Britain and the establishment of the United States as a sovereign nation.

All around the country, Americans are gearing up for their annual plans, which typically includes the customary barbecues, picnics, town parades and fireworks displays.

As these festivities are about to begin, heres everything you need to know about the holidays historical significance and traditions, and why Americans celebrate it.

What is the Fourth of July and the history behind it?

The occasion honours the signing of the Declaration of Independence by the Founding Fathers on 4 July 1776. In putting quill to parchment, these 56 statesmen, who included Thomas Jefferson and Benjamin Franklin, renounced the British Empire and pronounced the North American colonies free states.

Prior to this signing, the British Empire had built a commanding presence in the New World since Sir Walter Raleigh led the first attempts to establish settlements on the East Coast in the late Elizabethan era.

By the 18th century, North America was governed from London and comprised of the Thirteen Colonies, consisting of Delaware, Pennsylvania, New Jersey, Georgia, Connecticut, Massachusetts Bay, Maryland, South Carolina, New Hampshire, Virginia, New York, North Carolina and Rhode Island and the Providence Plantations.

While relations between settlers and the Crown were initially amicable, tensions began to escalate under King George III, due to the imposition of British laws and taxes on American colonies, also known as the Stamp Act. By 1765, Americans began to demand an end to taxation without representation, calling for their voices to be heard in the Houses of Parliament. Acts of dissent followed, notably the Boston Tea Party in 1773.

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Two Continental Congresses were staged, bringing together delegates from the Thirteen Colonies to coordinate the resistance. At the second meeting in Philadelphia in 1775, the Declaration of Independence was signed, and the American War of Independence declared, with open combat erupting in Concord, Massachusetts, that April. The conflict would rage for eight years, until the signing of the Treaty of Paris in 1783.

The declaration was drafted by the Committee of Five  Jefferson, Franklin, John Adams, Roger Sherman and Robert Livingston  and established citizens unalienable rights, observing that all men are created equal and enshrining the individuals entitlement to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.

The draft was submitted to Congress on 28 June 1776, voted into law on 2 July and formally ratified on 4 July, a date that has been celebrated by patriotic Americans ever since.

How has it been celebrated throughout history?

The first readings of the Declaration were made in Philadelphia squares and met with bonfires and the ringing of bells. In Bristol, Rhode Island, a salute of 13 gunshots in the morning and evening marked the day in 1777, the countrys first formal Fourth of July celebration and a point of pride in the town to this day, which has held an annual parade since 1785.

In 1778, George Washington, who was a general in the revolutionary army at the time, issued his troops with a double rum ration to cheer the day. The first recorded music commemorating independence was the Psalm of Joy, written by Johann Friedrich Peter in Salem, North Carolina, in 1783.

Congress made the day an unpaid national holiday for federal workers in 1870 but it has been a paid vacation since 1938.

How has it been celebrated today?

Firework displays and parties are the most well-known activities associated with Independence Day. As a national holiday, it also serves as an occasion for reunions and vacations.

Over the last two decades, American consumers have continued to purchase more fireworks to celebrate federal holidays. The American Pyrotechnics Association found that in the year 2000, American consumers spent $407m on fireworks. In 2022, there was a significant rise in sales, as consumers spent $2.3bn on fireworks during that year.

Back in the 18th century, Founding Father John Adams predicted that fireworks would become a big part of Fourth of July. In a letter to his wife, Abigail, dated July 3, 1776, Adams wrote that commemoration of Americas independence ought to be solemnized with Pomp and Parade, with Shews, Games, Sports, Guns, Bells, Bonfires and Illuminations from one End of this Continent to the other from this Time forward forever more.

Despite its widespread popularity on 4 July, fireworks can be quite dangerous. The U.S. Consumer Product Safety Commission reports that in 2022, 10,200 people were treated at emergency rooms and 11 deaths were blamed on fireworks. 73 per cent of the injuries occured in the weeks before or after 4 July.

The organisation gave some safety tips for celebrating the holiday, which includes keeping children away from all fireworks, including sparklers, and keeping a bucket of water nearby incase of a fire. The agency also urges Americans to make sure fireworks are legal in their areas before buying or using them.

Which US President refused to celebrate the Fourth of July?

While many presidents throughout US history have honoured the Declaration of Independence on 4 July, there was one President who opted not to: John Adams.

In a letter to his wife, he wrote that he refused to celebrate the holiday on July 4 because he felt July 2 was the real Independence Day. On 2 July, 1776, the Continental Congress voted in favour of the resolution for independence, though the Declaration of Independence wasnt formally adopted until two days later. Adams was quite adamant about his rule, as he even turned down invitations to Fourth of July festivals while serving as the nations second president.

Unfortunately, Adams and Thomas Jefferson, the primary author of the Declaration of Independence, both died on the 50th anniversary of the documents formal adoption, 4 July, 1826. The fifth president of the US, James Monroe, also died on 4 July, but in the year 1831.
Frank Field, a longtime meteorologist and health reporter at NBCs New York station WNBC-TV, has died. He was 100.

Field died Saturday in Florida, according to WNBC, where he spent 25 years of his career.

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Field attended Brown University and MIT, where he learned meteorology, and later served as an Army Air Force meteorology officer in the European theater during World War II.

Additionally, he earned a degree in geology at Brooklyn College, a bachelors degree in optometry at Columbia University and a doctorate on the faculty of Albert Einstein College of Medicine.

Field began his meteorology career at WNBC in 1958. There, he gained national attention when, according to WNBC, Johnny Carson decided needling NBCs crack meteorologist would be good fun and he became a regular guest on The Tonight Show. Field matched wits with the popular comedian, somehow managing to maintain his dignity and air of authority.

Field also had fun taking jabs back at Carson during his 11 p.m. news broadcast, including skewering a cut-out figure of the host with his prop pointer during his weather report.

He may have given NBC management ulcers, but the viewers loved it, WNBC noted. (Watch some of his Tonight Show appearances at the end of this story.)

At WNBC, Field also put his medical background to use, adding health and science reporting to his duties. In 1983, he garnered attention by covering an entire kidney transplant live  from first incision to final suture  during a news broadcast.

Additionally, Field is credited with publicizing the Heimlich maneuver before it was widely embraced by the medical community.

According to The New York Times, Field was once dining with a friend, CBS sportscaster Warner Wolf, when a piece of meat became stuck in his throat. Wolf saved Field by using the Heimlich maneuver after having seen Field demonstrate it on TV.

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After leaving WNBC, Field joined rival New York station WCBS and ended his television career at WWOR in 2004.

Al Roker, longtime meteorologist at NBCs Today, posted a tribute to Field on Instagram, crediting him for being an influence in his career.

Our thoughts and prayers are with the Field family who lost their legendary dad, Dr. Frank Field, Roker wrote. He was at WNBC when I started doing weekend weather, teaching me the ropes and the lay of the land. Gone at 100, I hope he and Willard are sharing a weather map, a laugh and some bourbon, he added, referring to Willard Scott, the longtime NBC meteorologist who died in 2021.

He spent his post-TV career campaigning for fire safety.

Fields wife, Joan Kaplan Field, died this year. The couple, married for 75 years, had three children: son Storm and daughters Allison and Pamela. Storm and Allison followed in their fathers footsteps, becoming TV meteorologists themselves. Survivors also include seven grandchildren and six great-grandchildren.

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Kaleb and Lexi Hobgood's plans for their Fourth of July vacation weekend imploded when they lost power in Thursday's storm, along with more than 81,000 Indianapolis residents.

"It went from a relaxing weekend to a nightmare," Kaleb Hobgood told IndyStar.

The nightmare continued Monday as the couple were among the 3,964 AES Indiana customers still without power as of midday for four days and counting amid a restoration effort by the utility company. An additional 3,342 customers were experiencing outages as of Monday midday from the weekend's storms, according to AES Indiana.

As temperatures in the Hobgoods' home soared to a sweltering 90 degrees Friday, they worried their four dogs, who were already panting in their thick fur coats, would overheat and they moved to an air mattress in a friend's home. They haven't been able to sleep in their home since Thursday.

"It was very frustrating," Hobgood said, adding that it had been impossible to get in touch with AES Indiana to know when power will be restored. Before power was restored late Monday afternoon, he said he feared flooding from the weekend's torrential rain because the sump pump in his home's crawl space hasn't been able to run.

Across Indianapolis, the damage has been widespread and lasting. Fridges full of groceries spoiled, holiday plans were canceled, and some residents even reported risk to critical medicines that require refrigeration.

Many businesses and agencies, from libraries to grocery stores to restaurants, faced power outages that have shuttered their doors. Stoplights have gone dark, leaving drivers to negotiate busy intersections the way you would a four-way stop sign.

More: Yes, Indianapolis was hit by a 'derecho' Thursday. Here's what that means.

Derecho's impact widespread

The widespread impact, with more than 2,600 separate incidents of damage to AES Indiana equipment, was the result of a uniquely devastating storm Thursday compounded by more wind and rainstorms through the weekend that power restoration crews had to battle, AES Indiana spokesperson Kelly Young said.

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"We haven't experienced anything like this for a while"  possibly since the 1990s, Young said. Thursday's storm has been classified as a derecho, which is a storm that has "the force of a hurricane and the mass of a tornado," Young said.

"Unprecedented" is the word many residents who spoke with IndyStar used to describe the long power outage they've been experiencing.

Bill and Barbara Conlin look at a paper given to them about tree trimming and emergency work Monday, July 3, 2023. Meade (out of Chicago) and Wright Tree Service work on areas without power on Camelback Drive and the area behind the Conlin home. The companies are contracted by AES. The Conlins have been without power since Thursday night.

In the 31 years that Jeffrey S. McQuary has lived downtown, he said, hes never experienced anything like the 36-hours-and-counting power outage that hes been dealing with since Sunday.

"It seems to be a sign of declining infrastructure," he said Monday from a Mass Ave. pub where he was taking refuge from the heat in his condo. "Thats something that needs to be addressed."

AES had more than 600 crew members working at the peak of restoration efforts around the clock, including crews that traveled from Illinois, Tennessee and Ohio. Most of the damage was from high winds knocking down trees and downing power lines, along with some damage to equipment, AES Indiana CEO Kristina Lund said Friday.

The crews must move the trees, saw them up and reconnect the power lines. AES Indiana advised customers not to touch downed trees or power lines and to report outages to the company.

Young said she expected customers who lost power Thursday to regain it by the end of Monday but added that it's difficult to provide exact estimates because of how widespread the damage is.

Leslie Flowers said tears sprang to her eyes when the power came back in her Broad Ripple condo on Monday after four days without power.

"You just never realize how dependent you are on something," she said. She had been waiting to welcome her daughter home from college when the storm hit. They relied on flashlights and candles for 4 nights, navigating up the stairs in the dark to get her daughter's two cats settled in. The Hubbard and Cravens coffee shop became their pitstop for charging devices and working remotely.

She said she's glad the issue was resolved, but has concerns about how vulnerable Indianapolis is to prolonged outages.

"I really believe (AES Indiana) were responding as quickly as they could but it makes you wonder how vulnerable our power grid is with lines above ground, it's really easy for this to happen," Flowers said.

AES in midst of replacing old equipment

The utility company is in the middle of a seven-year, $1.2 billion plan, called Smart Grid, to upgrade aging equipment including utility poles. The company started the updates in 2020. Lund said Friday newly updated poles held up well in the storm compared to older ones.

Across the country, power outages will likely increase with climate change, an aging electrical grid and increased energy demand, an April research paper published in Nature Communications stated. Long outages can have severe public health consequences, the researchers wrote, including health hazards for people using electricity-dependent medical equipment, such as oxygen concentrators, as well as hypothermia and heatstroke in aging and poorly insulated housing stock.

Indiana has been uniquely susceptible to outages, research found.

Bill Conlin talks to a Meade employee about work behind his home Monday, July 3, 2023. Meade (out of Chicago) and Wright Tree Service work on areas without power on Camelback Drive and the area behind the Conlin home. The companies are contracted by AES.

In Indiana between 2017 to 2019, counties experienced a median of three power outages lasting more than eight hours per year, according to Joan Casey, an environmental epidemiologist at the University of Washington. This is higher than the nationwide median of two lengthy outages.

AES Indiana is working on restoring power to homes and businesses affected, Young said, and has been prioritizing critical community needs such as hospitals, police and fire stations, water pumping and sewer lift stations, and nursing homes, followed by outages serving neighborhoods with the greatest number of customers. Finally, she said, they will work on outages that affect fewer homes and businesses.

Restaurants, fire stations, libraries among sites affected

Thursday's storm caused destruction and loss of property to numerous businesses. Even Indianapolis' fire stations were not unscathed, with three stations without power Friday.

Joe Smerdel, the general manager of Meridian Restaurant & Bar in Indianapolis, said the restaurants power resurfaced around noon Monday but had been out since Thursday. The business is typically open seven days a week, so the business has been closed for about four and a half days.

Meade (out of Chicago) and Wright Tree Service work on areas without power on Camelback Drive, Monday, July 3, 2023 and the area. The companies are contracted by AES.

Due to the outage, the restaurant took some produce and dairy losses, and the walk-in storage will have to be checked for mold.

In addition, he said, it will take several hours to get the freezer back down to the correct temperature. Luckily, some of the more expensive products, like proteins and other items, were able to be moved to a sister restaurant to avoid spoiling, he said. The business should reopen after the July 4th holiday.

Mary Barr, director of communications for the Indianapolis Public Library, said the Beech Grove library branch has been without power since Friday and was closed Monday.

Barr said the library building has not taken any damage due to the severe weather. She said staff continue to monitor both the power and weather for any threats to public safety, informing their decisions about whether to close the branch.

Safety is always a top concern in any decisions that we make, she said.

Contact the reporter at 317-903-7071 or kcheang@indystar.com

This article originally appeared on Indianapolis Star: AES power outages persist days after storms in Indianapolis
Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny is the latest big Hollywood movie to bomb in China, earning just $2.3 million over its opening weekend. It comes on the heels of The Flash earning just $25 million since opening three weekends ago as well as The Little Mermaid earning just $3.7 million after a month in theaters.

Like Solo: A Star Wars Story in 2018, it would appear that Indiana Jones 5 was a domestic-skewing IP sell, especially with the brand mostly dormant since Kingdom of the Crystal Skull in 2008, with a less-than-hoped overseas appeal. None of the previous Indiana Jones films played in China, which means theres no generational nostalgia for the brand or Harrison Fords marquee character.

Its one more costly example of how Chinese audiences are showing a preference for homegrown movies over Hollywood tentpoles, a conundrum for studios that spent the 2010s counting on China as a growth market.

Also Read:

Indiana Jones 5 Dials Down to $60 Million Box Office Opening

Even Fast X earned $139 million, well below the $391 million totals of Furious 7 and Fate of the Furious as well as noticeably below the $200 million-plus totals of Hobbs and Shaw and F9. Rise of the Beasts has earned $85 million, far below the $171 million gross of Bumblebee, the $228 million total for Transformers: The Last Knight and the trendsetting $300 million total for Transformers: Age of Extinction.

The only franchise flicks of late getting anywhere near pre-COVID predecessors are Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 3. ($88 million versus $99 million for the sequel in 2017) and Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse which has earned $50 million compared to $62 million for Into the Spider-Verse in 2018.

Meanwhile, Chinas own Lost in the Stars is soaring. The homegrown romantic myster thriller earned almost as much in China in its second weekend of release ($117 million) as Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny earned ($130 million) in its global opening weekend. That Fri-Sun gross is up 67% from the films $70 million Fri-Sun debut and a record in China for a non-opening weekend.

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The Chinese adaptation of Russian filmmaker Alexey Korenevs 1990 film A Trap for the Lonely Man, which was itself adapted from the Robert Thomas stage play, follows a woman (Janice Man) who disappears while on an overseas holiday with her husband (Zhu Yilong) only to reappear just as the search is nearing its grim end. However, the husband refuses to accept that his wife has returned and argues that the woman is an imposter.

It has now earned $317 million in just under two weeks, already passing the global total of The Flash. The picture earned $37 million on Sunday, and at this rate, it could join Chinas Wandering Earth 2 and Full River Red in the $600 million club. There have been just four Hollywood titles to reach that benchmark in 2023, The Super Mario Bros. Movie, Guardians Vol. 3, Fast X and Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse, with Mission: Impossible  Dead Reckoning Part One likely to be the fifth.

Ironically, give or take Oppenheimer or Barbie overperforming, the next likely candidate will be The Meg 2: The Trench, which is a Chinese/Hollywood co-production that stars both Jason Statham and Wandering Earth and Wolf Warrior II star Wu Jing. The Meg earned $155 million in both North America and China on the way to a $530 million global total in the summer of 2018. If the sequel plays anything like a Chinese blockbuster in China, its going to have a major leg up on its Hollywood rivals.

Also Read:

Its Barbie Marketing Mania at Warner Bros. and Even Competitors Are in Awe
(Photo by Stefano Guidi/GC Images)

As the trial of Kevin Spacey continues in the United Kingdom, the actor has been compared to his serial killer character in Se7en by an alleged victim.

According to reporting from the court by Variety, an unidentified man detailed allegations made against him by Spacey in a pre-recorded police interview. In the interview, which was played for the court in London, the accused Spacey of groping him a good dozen times, including touching him on his inner thighs and genitals over his clothes.

His character in Se7en, hes a bit like that. A bit creepy. Maybe not quite as bad, said the man, referencing Spaceys iconic role as a serial killer who kills based on the seven deadly sins.

The man went on to describe further encounters with Spacey, including one particular car ride in which Spacey tried to grab him so suddenly that he almost crashed the car he was driving.

His hand hit me quite hard on the inside thigh then moved up, real thud, hit me right in the nuts basically, the alleged victim said in the pre-recorded video. It took my breath away.

According to the man, he didnt come forward initially due to embarrassment and fear of any professional consequences he might face.

What is Kevin Spacey facing in court?

In total, Spacey has 12 charges against him, including sexual assault and indecent assault, with different charges alleged to have occurred in a range from 2001 all the way through 2013.

While Spacey has denied all allegations, he also said that, due to the charges, he thinks people are afraid to support him.

Last year, a New York jury found that Spacey did not sexually assault actor Antony Rapp, who first came forward against Spacey in 2017. Spacey says the results in London should be similar to those in New York.

The moment scrutiny is applied, these things fall apart, Spacey said. Thats what happened in the Rapp trial, and thats what will happen in this case.

Once heralded as a legendary actor, Spaceys career came to a screeching halt in 2017 when he was accused of making sexual advances on then-14-year-old Anthony Rapp (who appeared in a Broadway show with Spacey) in 1986. More allegations came forward following that, leading to Netflix cutting ties with Spacey on their planned film Gore, as well as removing him from the final season of the series House of Cards.

The post Kevin Spacey Compared to Se7en Character During Ongoing Trial appeared first on ComingSoon.net - Movie Trailers, TV & Streaming News, and More.
New Mexico Mom Looking for Love Is Found in Desert Weeks after Disappearing from Her Home

New Mexico nurse Dawn Sandoval longed for the love of a lifetime. But her quest to find love again after two failed marriages, and a devastating betrayal would cost the mom of four boys the ultimate price.

On May 5, 2018, Sandovals charred body was discovered partially buried in the New Mexico desert by a passing motorcyclist, according to Killer Relationship with Faith Jenkins. It was the heartbreaking conclusion to her familys desperate search to find the missing mom.

It would also be one of the final pieces of the puzzle investigators would need to take down her killer.

My friend was gone. Her boys werent going to have her anymore, her mom wasnt going to have her anymore, friend Lisa Herrera said of the discovery. It was very heartbreaking.

RELATED: Texas Pharmacy Tech Disappears After Leaving Strange Messages Saying She Had Met A New Man

In life, Sandoval had been known for her vibrant and encouraging personality, strong work ethic, and dedication to her boys.

Dawn was an absolute positive person, friend Thomas Trujillo remembered. She loved to have fun and she loved to be with her friends.

She grew up in Las Vegas, New Mexico. It was there, according to Herrera, that she met the first love of her life Rick.

The high school sweethearts got married shortly after graduation and Rick joined the National Guard. Before long, the couple had welcomed three boys of their own, but tragedy struck when their youngest son, Jonathan, died at 10 months old. He had been stuck between the mattress and the railing of the crib.

After Jonathan passed it drove a huge wedge between her and Rick, Trujillo recalled. Things were not in a good space.

The grief of losing his youngest child, combined with trauma experienced while fighting in the Gulf War, was too much for Rick, who openly struggled with his personal demons. The stress eventually tore the couple apart five years after they married.

But by the summer of 1999, Dawn was ready to give love another shot. When she was introduced by a friend to electrician Mike Encinias, she found herself drawn to his captivating blue eyes and solid work ethic. Mike was definitely smitten with her, definitely, friend Krista Sena Gold recalled.

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They married the next year and had a set of twin boys of their own.

It seemed like Dawn was finally getting what she deserved, a good man for her kids, a good man for her. It was like a perfect relationship, Hererra said.

A photo of Dawn Sandoval, featured on Killer Relationship With Faith Jenkins 206

Dawn Sandoval, featured on Killer Relationship With Faith Jenkins 206 Photo: Oxygen

But cracks in the relationship were exposed when, nine years into their marriage, Dawn learned that Encinias was having an affair.

Although devastated, she agreed to forgive him and give the marriage another shot, but it wasnt the end of his roving eye. In 2017, on Sandovals 46th birthday, Encinias told her he was leaving her for a much younger woman hed met at a casino.

Within a few months, Sandoval was divorced and ready to find love again.

She was going out, she was having fun, she was dating, Gold said.

Sandoval began using dating sites, despite the cautions from her friends. She had registered on some dating websites. We would tell her, you better be careful, you go on these dates, you dont know who youre going to meet up with, friend Tom Gonzales recalled.

Sandoval met Billy, a captain at a sheriffs office about 80 miles away who friends say she was smitten with. Plus, there was another man named Anthony.

It seemed like life was finally turning around for Sandoval. But on the morning of April 16, 2018, her twin boys woke up to find she was nowhere in the home. When they returned home from school later that day and still couldnt find their mother  who had left behind both of her cars and cell phone  they called their aunt Anita Sandoval, who placed a call to 911.

This is not like her. Both her cars are here, her purse is here, Anita told Rio Rancho Police officers after theyd arrived, according to body cam footage. Weve talked to everybody that she talks to and nobody has seen her.

Investigators began by looking into the men in Sandovals life and learned that in addition to the two men shed met online, Sandoval had also been toying with the idea of getting back together with Encinias.

The couples twins told police the pair had spent the entire weekend together before they went up to Sandovals room around 10 p.m. or 10:30 p.m. the night of April 15, 2018. The next day, both were gone.

Encinias admitted the couple had been together that night, but said he left the home around midnight, after Sandoval told him that she wanted to take any possible reconciliation slowly. He told police he texted her as soon as he got home.

RELATED: Man Kills Wife On Birthday Trip To Las Vegas In Disturbingly Evil Plot to Take Her Life

Dawn, I had a great time with you, he texted her at 12:29 a.m. I hope we can work things out. I love you.

Police also looked into the two other men in Sandovals life, but Billy  who told police he had been at home 80 miles away  and Anthony both said that while Sandoval had wanted to pursue a deeper relationship, neither man had wanted a more serious commitment with her.

Anthony told her good luck to you, which was substantiated by her texts, said Aaron Brown, a former detective with the Rio Rancho Police Department.

Authorities turned their focus back to Encinias and learned that just four days before she disappeared, Sandoval had called 911 to report his girlfriend Stephanie was driving their twin sons after smoking marijuana.

Stephanie had been pulled over, arrested for driving under the influence, and sent to jail on some unrelated outstanding misdemeanor warrants. She was still behind bars at the time of the disappearance, but authorities looked into whether it could have been a motive for her disappearance.

They also set out to check Encinias' alibi for the night his ex-wife disappeared and made an interesting discovery. Although surveillance footage in his neighborhood did show him returning to his home around 12:40 a.m. that night, it also revealed he left eight minutes later. He didnt return until 2:51 a.m.

His phone was at home, but his truck and he are out, Brown said.

Then on May 5, 2018, a biker noticed an arm with a sleeve of tattoos protruding from the ground in an isolated stretch of desert west of Rio Rancho. The body  which was later confirmed to belong to Sandoval  had been set on fire.

The discovery gave police enough evidence to obtain probable cause warrants to search Encinias truck, as well as his DNA and fingerprints.

While examining his truck they discovered a small nickel size blood stain that would later be linked to Sandoval.

Six months after she disappeared, authorities took the case to a grand jury and got an indictment.

That night at Dawns house, Mike was attempting to push their relationship back to what he had before and she rebuffed him and something snapped, Lt. Frank Tomlinson said of authorities theory of the crime.

Investigators believe Encinias smothered Sandoval in a moment of passion with some pillows in her bedroom, then wrapped her up in the bed sheets, remade the bed by pulling the comforter up and then loaded her into the car. He briefly returned home to leave his cell phone, then dumped her body in the desert and set it on fire, Brown said.

Its one thing for somebody to take somebodys life, but to go to the extreme to set that person on fire, that was a different type of evil that we had never seen before, Brown said.

Encinias was convicted of second degree murder in August 2019 and was sentenced to 18 years behind bars.

Killer Relationship with Faith Jenkins airs Sundays at 7/6c on Oxygen.

Editors Note: An earlier version of this article incorrectly stated, in one reference, that Aaron Brown, not Mike Encinias, was convicted of second-degree murder. Brown worked as an investigator on the case. The story has been updated.
"She walked pretty much right into [her parents'] arms," Canadian police sergeant Keith Schendel said of the 16-year-old hiker

Getty Images Golden Ears Park in British Columbia, Canada.

A teen who went missing in a Canadian park for two days has been found.

The 16-year-old hiker, Esther Wang, got lost on a trail in at Golden Ears Park in British Columbia on Tuesday, June 27, but is now safe, according to a news release from the Royal Canadian Mounted Police.

She is healthy, she is happy and she is with family, RCMP Superintendent Wendy Mehat wrote in the statement.

The Canadian teen was part of a hiking group in the British Columbia park when she peeled off around 3 p.m., per the release. Members of the group attempted to contact Wang with no success. The group then contacted park officials, who then reached out to RCMP.

The Canadian police said that they immediately activated Ridge Meadows Search and Rescue.

Related: Police Concerned About Health and Wellbeing of Missing Mass. Woman Last Seen Near Local Pond

On the night of Thursday, June 29, around 9:30 p.m., Wang walked out of the East Canyon trail on her own, the release states. By the time she exited the mountain path  which was the same one she was hiking on when she became separated from her group  about 54 hours had passed since she first went missing.

Wang was reunited with her family the same evening, following a health assessment.

RCMP Sergeant Keith Schendel told CityNews that Wang had no serious injuries.

Shes fine, just extremely fatigued and sore, bitten by mosquitoes, he told the outlet. So shes going to be taking some time to rest.

Getty Images Golden Ears Park in British Columbia, Canada.

Related: Friends Speak Out After 5 Teens Die in Florida Crash: 'They Had The Most Beautiful Souls'

Her parents had still been there from the days rescue efforts  theyve been up there fairly continuously for the last couple of days  and she walked pretty much right into their arms, Schendel said.

The teen hiker took a wrong turn going down the mountain, according to the sergeant.

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She came down the mountain and followed a waterway out to the path, Schendel told CityNews, adding that Wang made it out of the wilderness thanks to enough food and water to last her two nights.

Never miss a story  sign up for PEOPLE's free daily newsletter to stay up-to-date on the best of what PEOPLE has to offer, from celebrity news to compelling human interest stories.

In RCMPs news release, Mehat added that Wangs family has expressed sincere gratitude to the first responders and search groups who worked to find the 16-year-old hiker.

They are very thankful for this outcome and request privacy at this time, the superintendent wrote.

Related: Hiker with 'Extensive Background in Survival' Disappears After Summiting Colorado Mountain

Ryan Smith, a member of the committee that led the 16-team search for Wang, said that the team is elated at the outcome of the search.

Esther being returned to her family is what our objective was, Smith added.

"We used as many resources as we could, Smith continued in the release. Id like to thank our partner organizations, the RCMP, other first responders, the helicopter companies that assisted us in this exhaustive search.

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Read the original article on People.
BEIJING, July 3 (Xinhua) -- The financial governance mechanism of the BRICS-led New Development Bank (NDB) is "very fair," Dilma Rousseff, the bank's president, has said.

The former Brazilian president said at the 11th World Peace Forum that no member has more financial resources than others in the BRICS bank. She explained that since the establishment of the bank, the shares of the five BRICS nations have been the same, about 19 percent each, and when new countries join, shares of all countries will be equally reduced.

Rousseff said that "each country's share in the BRICS bank is absolutely fair," denying claims that the bank has been controlled or influenced by some countries at the Q&A session.

She said the rotation mechanism ensures fairness. Currently Brazil holds the rotating presidency of the NDB, and another member country will take over in July 2025.

When asked about the BRICS membership expanding at the upcoming summit in South Africa, she refused to give names of new applicant countries, saying the BRICS mechanism is different from that of the NDB.

Headquartered in Shanghai, the NDB was established in 2015 by the BRICS nations, namely Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa. The bank started expanding its membership in 2021 with Bangladesh, the United Arab Emirates, Uruguay and Egypt as new members, marking substantial progress in the bank's membership expansion and beginning to move towards the direction of a global multilateral development bank.

The 11th World Peace Forum is being held at Tsinghua University with this year's theme being "Stabilizing an Unstable World through Consensus and Cooperation. More than 400 delegates, including former foreign political dignitaries, diplomatic envoys from various countries in China, experts, and scholars attended the event. 
Back in 2017, Business Insider named Culvers the most popular fast food restaurant in Kansas, but there were none in Wichita.

Now, one is scheduled to open on the west side by late this year or early in 2024.

Topeka, Kansas, is currently the farthest west Culvers in the state of Kansas, Nick Campe said.

Hes been the general manager of that restaurant but now is moving to Wichita as the Culvers franchisee for this area.

We have big dreams and aspirations to fill Wichita up with Culvers.

The first will open at 3210 N. Maize Road, which is near IHOP just north of 29th and Maize Road.

We are famous for our fresh, never frozen butter burgers made with Midwest beef served on a lightly toasted buttered bun, Campe said. That is our trademark.

What is a ButterBurger? Fast-food chain to bring these signature menu items to Wichita

The chain also makes fresh frozen custard about every hour throughout the day.

That may sound an awful lot like Wichitas Freddys Frozen Custard & Steakburgers.

Its similar but completely different because we have a much broader menu, Campe said.

Culvers also offers fish and chicken dishes and soups and salads among other things.

Its actually (been) one of my favorite restaurants even before I got in the business, Campe said.

He said he knew the hamburgers always would be hot and fresh cooked.

Thats how it was every time.

The west-side Culvers will be able to seat about 120, which includes a small patio with four tables, and will have a drive-through.

Without any construction delays, late October is the best-case scenario for the restaurant opening. If things dont go as planned, it could be as late as early next year.

Franchisee Nick Campe will open a Culvers fast-food restaurant on the west side possibly yet this year, and he plans more later.

Campe is a St. Louis native who spent time in Wisconsin, where Culvers started in 1984.

Today, the chain has more than 900 restaurants, including nine currently in Kansas.

Campe said hes always been interested in owning his own business so he could be a leader and a mentor.

He said the Topeka Culvers has done well even though it opened during the pandemic.

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The community blessed us and still showed up.

Brad Saville, CEO and founder of Landmark Commercial Real Estate, and Christian Ablah, co-owner of Classic Real Estate, handled the transaction for the Maize Road Culvers.

They developed the 9-acre project that also includes IHOP and Life.Church. The Culvers property was the last remaining site within the project.

Campe said hell eye the east side of Wichita for the citys second Culvers site.

I would say within three years well get over there.
Robert De Niro's daughter, Drena, announced the death of her son, Leandro, on social media. Photo by Richard Shotwell/Invision/AP, File

Robert De Niro's grandson Leandro De Niro was found dead Sunday in New York City.

NYPD responded to 55 Wall Street just after 2:30 p.m. and found the teen unresponsive.

The building  Cipriani Wall Street  features apartments, hotel rooms, and an exclusive social club.

Robert De Niro's grandson Leandro De Niro was found dead at an iconic lower Manhattan building on Sunday afternoon, authorities said.

A spokesperson for the New York Police Department told Insider that officers found a male unconscious and unresponsive when responding to a 911 call at 55 Wall Street just before 2:30 p.m. on Sunday.

The 19-year-old teen was later identified as Leandro.

De Niro was pronounced dead by EMS on the scene, according to the NYPD. The Office of the Chief Medical Examiner has set to determine his cause of death.

Leandro was the son of De Niro's elder daughter, Drena, and the artist Carlos Rodriguez.

Robert De Niro's eldest son, Raphael De Niro, is a real-estate broker who has sold apartments at Cipriani Wall Street, The Real Deal reported in 2009.

"I have loved you beyond words or description from the moment I felt you in my belly," Drena De Niro wrote in an Instagram caption announcing Leandro's death. "You have been my joy my heart and all that was ever pure and real in my life. I wish I was with you right now. I wish I was with you."

The NYPD didn't say where at 55 Wall Street the teen was found. The building, known as Cipriani Wall Street, is home to luxury apartments, hotel rooms, event space, and Casa Cipriani, a $4,000 a year exclusive old-money-inspired social club. It was formerly the National City Bank Building, and at one time it housed the New York Stock Exchange, according to the Cipriani's website.

The building's management office and the Office of the Chief Medical Examiner did not respond to requests for comment.

In a statement to USA Today, Robert De Niro asked that his family be given privacy as they "grieve our loss of Leo."

Leandro De Niro acted alongside his mother in "A Star is Born."

Read the original article on Insider
Benedict F. Lessing, Jr. is president/CEO of Community Care Alliance.

We are barely six months away from the kind of inclement weather that creates dangerous circumstances for people living outside. What we know is that the number of people living outside, or as the Coalition to End Homelessness characterizes are living in places unfit for human habitation, continues to rise.

Recently, the Boston Globe reported that Massachusetts Gov. Maura Healey approved erecting over 400 temporary shelters sometimes referred to as pallet houses ranging in size from 64 to 100 square feet on public land. The Massachusetts Division of Capital Asset Management and Maintenance, also known as DCAMM, in lieu of the numbers of individuals struggling with homelessness, mental health and addiction, endorses the plan as well as the Executive Office of Health and Human Services. In other words, there is cohesion across state government, a big vision and all hands are on deck.

More: Report finds 15% increase in RIers experiencing homelessness. Here are the numbers.

Rhode Island has encampments all over the state and what is the response? A number of municipalities simply want the unhoused to go away. To where? The crux of this humanitarian crisis is the lack of a coherent vision, plan, coordination and leadership. Blaming the problem on the victims does not make a plan.

Massachusetts is not perfect, there will be public debate and plenty of pushback. The difference however is that state and local governments are taking the problem on. There is recognition that homelessness is a public health crisis, overwhelming hospitals, emergency medical services and public safety. In Rhode Island, we seem to be about optics and false narratives.

A homeless encampment on the State House courtyard last December.

Adding to the complexity, there is a growing number of families with children becoming homeless, often living in cars or worse. At present, the DCYF is pouring resources into sheltering 100+ families working with their thinly stretched community-based providers. This is important to keep families out of the system, particularly foster care placements. However, the stopgap of using hotel rooms to provide shelter is just that. We need better solutions which may require a combination of subsidies and more specialized shelters where families receive stabilization services to prepare them for permanent housing.

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In addition to families with children, there are increasing numbers of elderly people that are being squeezed out of housing due to rents they cannot afford as well as individuals with serious health conditions such as COPD, diabetes and cancer. Owing to the dearth of solutions, community-based outreach staff are burned out. They know better than anyone else that compassion only goes so far without resources.

More: Recently closed Charlesgate nursing home will become a homeless shelter for up to 57 families

More: State has new plan for 10 homeless families  here's where they would go

In 2011, the General Assembly passed a statute called the Interagency Council on Homelessness whose mission was specifically to assist this population. The council is supposed to be composed of a spectrum of state agencies whose mandate was to take this problem on. Whereas the newly created Department of Housing is a key player, particularly where emergency shelter and future affordable housing is concerned, it is not sufficient to address the complexity of the problem.

Such a council should be looking at multiple solutions including but not limited to emergency shelter options and low barrier programming, specialized behavioral health facilities cheaper than hospitals but longer term and providing detox as well as substance use and psychiatric stabilization and finally, supported housing. Municipalities must be at the table and provide constructive assistance. The objective should be permanent housing for everyone. The last time the council met was 2014.

We must ask ourselves whether this is the system we want. Is this what human beings deserve? Charity is not the answer, this is a problem we have created, we need to fix it.

This article originally appeared on The Providence Journal: Blaming the problem on the victims does not make a plan.
First responders attempted life-saving measures at the scene, but the victim died from his injuries

Lake Gladewater Facebook Lake Gladewater

A man has died after making a dive off a 40-foot embankment into a shallow section of a lake in eastern Texas, according to police.

The incident occurred on Saturday at Gladewater Lake, 20 miles west of Longview, Texas, a news release from the Gladewater Police Department said.

After receiving a 911 call about an unresponsive male in the area, emergency services were dispatched to the scene, where at least seven witnesses stated that the man, 34, "dove headfirst from an embankment approximately 40 feet high into a pool of water that was approximately 4 feet deep."

Related: High School Senior Found Dead After Swimming in N.J. Lake Was on 'Scavenger Hunt That Went Astray

People who observed the mans dive helped pull him out of the water and tried rendering aid, Gladewater Police said. First responders attempted to resuscitate the victim when they arrived but he died from his injuries.

Never miss a story  sign up for PEOPLE's free daily newsletter to stay up-to-date on the best of what PEOPLE has to offer, from juicy celebrity news to compelling human interest stories.

Police said an initial investigation indicates that alcohol may have been a contributing factor in the incident. The tragedy occurred off the main part of the lake in an area "surrounded by tall embankments, shallow water and [with] a rocky bottom," say police.



The investigation is ongoing.

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Read the original article on People.
Photographer Dawn Gagye poses for a portrait in her studio at the District V building in Sutton.

Dawn Gagye is the creative mind behind Portrait Couture, a Central Massachusetts photography studio that specializes in documenting women who have undergone significant obstacles and come out on the other side, stronger and more resilient than ever before.

Based out of a refurbished barn in Princeton, Gagye is quickly developing a reputation as one of the areas premier portrait photographers. Her work is grounded in the ethos that simply existing as a woman is, in and of itself, an act of bravery. Unlike her contemporaries, many of Gagyes clients are unaccustomed to having professional photos taken.

A lot of the women I work with are terrified of being seen, she explained. I try to help them along in their journeys to a resurrection phase, like a phoenix rising.

Gagyes style is reminiscent of world-famous photographer Sue Bryce, with whom she trained whilst honing her craft. The two share an ethereal elegance characterized by rich, warm colors and soft lighting. Like Bryce, Gagye is skilled at posing her subjects to emphasize their most flattering features and uses her composition expertise to evoke drama and romance. The results are as timeless as they are captivating.

For Gagye, the process of photographing her subjects is about more than just creating stunning images. She promises a thoughtful, intentional and custom process for every client, and sees each session as an opportunity to lift women up, empower them and help them feel appreciated. In Gagyes experience, a lot of women are very skilled at masking their inner struggles - her portraiture aims to showcase the natural beauty that comes along with grit and perseverance.

All Portrait Couture clients begin by engaging in a discovery chat before the session to agree upon a shared vision. On the day of the photoshoot, Gagye does everything in her power to create a safe and supportive environment where participants can showcase their truest selves. Her Portrait Couture team provides guided posing along with salon services and refreshments throughout the session. Finally, a reveal is scheduled to unveil the gorgeous results with proper fanfare.

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Gagye's unique approach includes providing a designer wardrobe for her clients to help them feel courageous and proud in their own skin. There are not many women who don't enjoy wearing beautiful articles of clothing, she said. It makes them want to push their shoulders back, pick their chests up and be seen. Her team includes hair and makeup artists as well as a number of skilled assistants who are fully committed to her mission of strengthening women and fostering a sense of community and support.

Dawn Gagye's Portrait Couture is a Central Massachusetts photography studio that specializes in documenting women who have undergone significant obstacles and come out on the other side, stronger and more resilient than ever before.

There's something about a bunch of women feeling committed to this crusade together, whether it's the actual person being photographed or the women around her, said Gagye. When you get us all in one space to support one another from a creative standpoint and an emotional standpoint, there's magic and healing."

Portrait Couture Studio has welcomed survivors of narcissistic abuse, financial loss, breast cancer, depression, body dysmorphia, grief and numerous other challenges. It is therefore no wonder that Gagye draws influence from her former instructor, renowned photojournalist John Isaac. Isaac has worked with the United Nations for more than two decades, capturing the human experience, particularly in moments of crisis and intensity. Like Isaac, Gagyes images convey a sense of intimacy, empathy and compassion toward her subjects as she seeks to tell their stories. Most importantly, Gagye emulates Isaacs use of light to enhance the emotional impact of her photographs.

Lately, Portrait Couture Studio has hosted a growing number of women who are celebrating milestone birthdays. According to Gagye, they find themselves grappling with the difficult questions of aging: Do I go gray now? Do I keep covering it up? And if I keep covering up, am I covering who I am authentically? With her compassionate and empathetic approach, Gagye helps women of all ages find their confidence in front of the camera.

"I want to be the type of woman who straightens another woman's crown, she said. That's a big part of this process for me."

Gagye has also grown fond of bringing women together for intergenerational photo shoots. Recently, I had four generations of women who spent an entire day in the studio with me trying on gowns, eating and drinking, and getting their hair and makeup done, she said. I just kept thinking to myself, This is what we're here for. Gagye gleaned great inspiration from the 92-year-old matriarch who had booked the shoot as a birthday gift to herself, recalling, She was absolutely glowing from within.

For Dawn Gagye, the process of photographing her subjects is about more than just creating stunning images. She promises a thoughtful, intentional and custom process for every client, and sees each session as an opportunity to lift women up, empower them and help them feel appreciated.

The mission of Portrait Couture Studio serves as a reminder of the healing power of art and community. By creating a caring, safe and creative space, said Gagye, in some small way, I believe we are helping to move the needle and make the world a better place.

This summer, the Portrait Couture Studio is especially excited to host mother and child sessions. Prospective clients can inquire about touring the Portrait Couture Studio in Princeton and booking future sessions at its website: www.portraitcouturestudio.coom.

This article originally appeared on Telegram & Gazette: Portrait Couture Studio: Empowering Women to Rise Above
Former Trump administration press secretary Stephanie Grisham has claimed that she saw Donald Trump showing off documents to guests at Mar-a-Lago, as she slammed his lack of respect for the nations secrets.

I watched him show documents to people at Mar-a-Lago on the dining room patio, Ms Grisham told MSNBC.

He has no respect for classified information [and] never did.

Her comments come after the former president was charged with 37 felonies last month over his handling of classified documents on leaving the White House.

While his legal troubles are heating up, a conservative billionaire network is reportedly working to ensure he doesnt win the 2024 Republican primary, according to a new report.

Americans for Prosperity Action, a network of political organisations created by Charles and David Koch, will spend money for the first time on the Republican presidential primary. It has already raised more than $70million to fund races that officials hope will help the Republican party move past Mr Trump, according to The New York Times.

Key Points

Ex-Trump press secretary says she watched him show documents to guests at Mar-a-Lago

09:40 , Rachel Sharp

Former Trump administration press secretary Stephanie Grisham has claimed that she saw Donald Trump showing off documents to guests at Mar-a-Lago, as she slammed his lack of respect for the nations secrets.

I watched him show documents to people at Mar-a-Lago on the dining room patio, Ms Grisham told MSNBC.

He has no respect for classified information [and] never did.

Story continues

Her comments come after the former president was charged with 37 felonies last month over his handling of classified documents on leaving the White House.

.@glennkirschner2 .@CheriJacobus .@BadBradRSR .@PamKeithFL .@MalcolmNance Do you think it's plausible that Trump showed classified docs to unauthorized people? "The short answer is yes, he never had respect for classified information." - Stephanie Grisham pic.twitter.com/71Ui7EoOxG  ChattJazz     (@ChattJazz) July 1, 2023

Weird apocalyptic campaign video earns Trump more mockery

08:30 , Oliver O'Connell

Donald Trump has been mocked for a bizarre, black and white campaign video where he gives a weird apocalyptic message about taking the country back in 2024.

Click through to watch:

Trump mocked for weird apocalyptic campaign video

Ex-Trump aide reportedly joins Giuliani in cooperating with special counsel

06:15 , Oliver O'Connell

A former Trump campaign aide has joined Rudy Guiliani in cooperating with the special counsel in the Department of Justices2020 election probe, according to a new report.

Mike Roman, a senior adviser on Donald Trumps 2020 campaign in charge of Election Day operations, is cooperating with federal prosecutors working for special counsel Jack Smith in the criminal investigation reviewing the efforts to overturn the 2020 election, according to CNN.

Gustaf Kilander reports.

Ex-Trump aide joins Giuliani in cooperating with special counsel in election probe

Trump loses bid to throw out E Jean Carroll defamation lawsuit

03:45 , Oliver O'Connell

Donald Trump has lost his bid to throw out the first defamation lawsuit brought against him by E Jean Carroll.

On Thursday, US district judge Lewis Kaplan in Manhattan rejected the former presidents claims that he had absolute presidential immunity from the civil case, paving the way for the magazine columnist to pursue around $10m in damages from him.

Rachel Sharp reports.

Trump loses bid to throw out E Jean Carroll lawsuit

Angry onlookers shout dog killer at George Santos

01:45 , Oliver O'Connell

Angry protesters called congressman George Santos a dog killer on Friday as the Republican made an appearance at a Long Island federal court house, his first hearing since pleading not guilty last month to a 13-count indictment related to fraud and money laundering charges.

Josh Marcus reports.

Onlookers shout dog killer at George Santos as he arrives for fraud hearing

ICYMI: SCOTUS strikes down Bidens plan to cancel student loan debts

Sunday 2 July 2023 23:45 , Oliver O'Connell

The US Supreme Court has struck down President Joe Bidens plan to cancel student loan debts for millions of Americans, reversing his campaign-trail promise as borrowers prepare to resume payments this summer.

Chief Justice John Roberts delivered the 6-3 decision from the courts conservative majority on 30 June.

Alex Woodward filed this report:

Supreme Court strikes down Bidens plan to cancel student loan debts

DeSantis hits back at Trump disloyalty claim

Sunday 2 July 2023 21:45 , Oliver O'Connell

Florida Governor Ron DeSantis on Thursday hit back at former president Donald Trumps allegation that the Sunshine State executive is betraying him by mounting a presidential campaign of his own during an appearance on Fox News.

Mr DeSantis, who currently trails the twice-impeached, twice-indicted ex-president by a wide margin in most polls of likely GOP primary voters, told Fox host Jesse Watters that no politician  even a former president such as Mr Trump  is entitled to support from anyone after Watters raised Mr Trumps criticisms during a televised interview.

Andrew Feinberg reports.

DeSantis hits back at Trump disloyalty claim: Politicians have to earn support

The fake gay marriage case in the middle of the Supreme Courts latest threat to LGBT+ rights

Sunday 2 July 2023 19:45 , Oliver O'Connell

Alex Woodward writes about how a crucial piece of evidence in the case appears to have been fabricated.

A man who is named throughout the case, and whose phone number and email address were attached in court filings, claims he has nothing to do with it.

The fake gay marriage case in the Supreme Courts latest threat to LGBT+ rights

Republicans are planning a national abortion ban says senator who once worked at a Planned Parenthood warns

Sunday 2 July 2023 17:45 , Oliver O'Connell

When a draft of the Supreme Courts Dobbs v Jackson opinion that would overturn Roe v Wade leaked in May of last year, US Senator Tina Smith had only three words.

This is bulls***, the Minnesota Democrat tweeted. She had similar words when Walgreens announced in March of this year it would not dispense abortion pills in states where abortion remained legal.

She spoke with Eric Garcia of The Independent.

Senator who worked at Planned Parenthood warns of an abortion ban if the GOP wins

Koch to fund Trumps primary opponents

Sunday 2 July 2023 15:55 , Graig Graziosi

The network of political organisations established by brothers Charles and David Koch will continue to fund conservative causes  so long as they arent backing Donald Trump.

The Kochs network, Americans for Prosperity Action, is reportedly funding candidates that will help the Republican party move past Mr Trump, a spokesperson told The New York Times.

The network has already raised more than $70m.

This will be the first year the network will take on a primary race, with the groups intent reportedly aimed at stopping Mr Trump  the clear Republican front-runner  from winning the primary. The Times reports that a top official in the network, Emily Seidel, wrote to the groups donors that it was time to have a president in 2025 who represents a new chapter.

Despite recent rulings, Biden says it would be a mistake to expand Supreme Court

Sunday 2 July 2023 15:45 , Oliver O'Connell

President Joe Biden has said it would be a mistake to expand the Supreme Court, despite its recent rulings against affirmative action in higher education, LGBT+ rights, and student loan debt forgiveness.

The high court overturned decades of policies when it ruled this week that race-based admissions were not constitutional, preventing universities from considering race as a factor in student applications.

Read more...

Biden says expanding Supreme Court would be mistake, despite recent rulings

RFK Jr says he is proud to have Trumps praise

Sunday 2 July 2023 13:45 , Oliver O'Connell

Yes, hes running as a Democrat...

Robert F Kennedy Jr says he is proud to have Trumps praise

SCOTUS allows Colorado designer to deny LGBT+ customers

Sunday 2 July 2023 11:15 , Oliver O'Connell

A wedding website designer may refuse to create work for people in the LGBT+ community if it conflicts with their religious beliefs, the Supreme Court ruled on Friday.

In a 6-3 decision, the conservative majority of the court ruled in favour of Lorie Smith, a Colorado-based website creator, who wanted to refuse service to same-sex couples but couldnt as it was a violation of a public accommodation law.

Read more...

Supreme Court allows Colorado designer to deny LGBT+ customers in ruling

Even as indictment loomed, Trump demanded to get my boxes back from feds

Sunday 2 July 2023 08:15 , Oliver O'Connell

As Donald Trumps lawyers began preparing for a federal indictment, the ex-president was allegedly still hoping to get the documents and boxes seized from Mar-a-Lago back, according to a report.

Mr Trump referred to the classified material as my boxes and my documents and asked his lawyers to retrieve the material, sources with direct knowledge of the matter told Rolling Stone.

Read more...

Trump demanded to get my boxes back from feds as indictment loomed

'Oh God, I try not to think about that

Sunday 2 July 2023 05:15 , Oliver O'Connell

President Joe Biden summed up perhaps most foreign policy experts thoughts when asked if he thought Mr Trump would have tipped off Russian President Vladimir Putin to the abortive coup attempt waged by Wagner Group leader Yevgeny Prigozhin over last weekend.

Oh God, I try not to think about that, Mr Biden said.

Biden groans when asked if Trump would have tipped Putin off to coup attempt

Did DeSantis break the law with Texas border trip?

Sunday 2 July 2023 02:15 , Oliver O'Connell

The presidential campaign of Florida Governor Ron DeSantis has been accused of breaking the law after the team shared an image on Twitter of the candidate exiting a helicopter that records show is owned by the Texas Department of Public Safety.

Gustaf Kilander explains why that might be an issue.

DeSantis accused of breaking the law with Texas border trip

Pence meets with Zelensky in Ukraine

Saturday 1 July 2023 23:15 , Oliver O'Connell

Former vice president Mike Pence visited with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky in a sign of solidarity with Ukraine even as many Republicans sour on support for Ukraine, CNN first reported.

Read more...

Mike Pence meets with Zelensky in Ukraine

Trump celebrates Supreme Court decision on affirmative action

Saturday 1 July 2023 21:15 , Oliver O'Connell

Former President Donald Trump celebrated the Supreme Courts decision to reject affirmative action programmes at US colleges and universities on Wednesday morning, calling it a a great day for America.

In a post on Truth Social, Mr Trump said that the ruling was amazing.

Trump celebrates Supreme Court ruling on affirmative action: The way it should be!

DeSantis earnings jump due to book advance

Saturday 1 July 2023 15:41

Republican presidential hopeful and Florida Governor Ron DeSantis saw his earnings spike this year from a book deal.

He earned $1.25million as an advance for the memoir he released earlier this year, according to an annual financial disclosure form, significantly boosting his net worth.

The book titled The Courage to be Free was published by HarperCollins in February and made the New York Times bestsellers list the following month.

House GOP expand their Hunter Biden investigation

Saturday 1 July 2023 15:15 , Oliver O'Connell

House Republicans on Thursday requested voluntary testimony from nearly a dozen Justice Department officials involved in the investigation of President Joe Bidens son Hunter as GOP lawmakers widen their scrutiny into what they claim is improper interference by the agency.

Read more...

Republicans expand their Hunter Biden investigation by seeking an interview with the lead prosecutor

Three investors charged in $22m Trump Media insider trading case

Saturday 1 July 2023 13:15 , Oliver O'Connell

Three investors in the special purpose acquisition company (SPAC) that took Trump Media public have been indicted for insider trading concerning the deal, making $22m in alleged illegal trades.

Read more...

Trump Media investors charged in $22m insider trading case

Christie says McCarthy spoke correctly about Trump the first time

Saturday 1 July 2023 10:15 , Oliver O'Connell

Former New Jersey governor and presidential Republican presidential candidate Chris Christie told CNN that House Speaker Kevin McCarthy was right in his initial assessment about whether former president Donald Trump was the strongest candidate to beat Joe Biden in a general election contest.

Earlier this week, Mr McCarthy said he was not sure that Mr Trump was the strongest candidate to beat Mr Biden.

Eric Garcia reports.

Chris Christie says McCarthy spoke correctly about Trump the first time

DeSantis says if elected he would abolish education, energy and IRS agencies

Saturday 1 July 2023 08:45 , Oliver O'Connell

Gov Ron DeSantis of Florida said in an interview on Fox News on Wednesday morning that he supports eliminating multiple federal government agencies including the Internal Revenue Service (IRS).

To fight woke ideology...

DeSantis says he would abolish education and energy departments and IRS

Trumps GOP support dips slightly after second indictment

Saturday 1 July 2023 05:45 , Oliver O'Connell

Former President Donald Trumps criminal indictment on charges of mishandling government secrets appears to have dented his popularity among Republicans  but only slightly - according to a new poll from The Associated Press-NORC Center for Public Affairs Research.

Read more...

Trump's GOP support dips slightly after his indictment over classified documents, AP-NORC poll finds

Voices: Kevin McCarthy knows he crossed the line with Donald Trump

Saturday 1 July 2023 03:45 , Oliver O'Connell

Few people embody Republicans relationship and acquiescence to Donald Trump more than House Speaker Kevin McCarthy.

Eric Garcia charts the latest developments in their relationship.

Kevin McCarthy knows he crossed the line with Donald Trump

New DeSantis-backed laws in Florida address immigration, guns and more

Saturday 1 July 2023 01:45 , Oliver O'Connell

Employers who hire immigrants in the country illegally will face tough punishments and gun owners will have more freedoms when more than 200 new Florida laws take effect Saturday, many of which Gov. Ron DeSantis will highlight as he seeks the Republican presidential nomination.

Read more:

Florida's new DeSantis-backed laws address immigration, guns and more

Biden blames GOP for student loan ruling

Saturday 1 July 2023 00:45 , Oliver O'Connell

President Joe Biden insisted Friday that this fight is not over after the Supreme Court struck down his $400 billion student loan forgiveness plan. Biden blamed Republicans opposition, aiming to direct the ire of millions of borrowers toward them rather than his own party in next years elections.

The president planned an afternoon address to lay out a series of actions to provide continued relief to 43 million student loan borrowers, and in the meantime tried to stay on the political offensive against the GOP.

Biden blames GOP for student loan ruling as 2024 political consequences loom

Biden: It would be a mistake to expand Supreme Court

Friday 30 June 2023 23:45 , Oliver O'Connell

President Joe Biden has said it would be a mistake to expand the Supreme Court, despite its recent rulings against affirmative action in higher education, LGBT+ rights, and student loan debt forgiveness.

Read more...

Biden says expanding Supreme Court would be mistake, despite recent rulings

Voices: The Supreme Court just made me a second-class citizen

Friday 30 June 2023 22:45 , Oliver O'Connell

Skylar Baker-Jordan reacts to todays Supreme Court ruling.

The Supreme Court just made me a second-class citizen

Trump: They got me on nothing

Friday 30 June 2023 22:40 , Oliver O'Connell

Donald Trump: "It turns out with me I did nothing wrong...They got me on nothing. Got me on nothing and all of the things that they do have. It's like the pundits are saying, 'Wow, that's nothing.'" pic.twitter.com/3YIo38pJpz  Republican Accountability (@AccountableGOP) June 30, 2023

Watch: Trump receives a warm welcome in Philadelphia

Friday 30 June 2023 22:26 , Oliver O'Connell

"F**k you traitor!" - screams heard as Donald Trump arrived at #MomsForLiberty conference in Philadelphia



Video by Olga Fe Desk@freedomnews.tv to license pic.twitter.com/UZFi7WZfly  Oliya Scootercaster  (@ScooterCasterNY) June 30, 2023

Republicans are planning a national abortion ban, warns senator who once worked at a Planned Parenthood

Friday 30 June 2023 22:15 , Oliver O'Connell

When a draft of the Supreme Courts Dobbs v Jackson opinion that would overturn Roe v Wade leaked in May of last year, US Senator Tina Smith had only three words.

This is bulls***, the Minnesota Democrat tweeted. She had similar words when Walgreens announced in March of this year it would not dispense abortion pills in states where abortion remained legal.

Eric Garcia spoke with Ms Smith for The Independent.

Senator who worked at Planned Parenthood warns of an abortion ban if the GOP wins

Full story: Biden reveals new path to student debt relief

Friday 30 June 2023 21:55 , Oliver O'Connell

President Biden on Friday hit out at the Republican state officials and legislators who supported the lawsuit which enabled the Supreme Court to strike down his student debt forgiveness initiative, accusing many of them of hypocrisy for taking money from pandemic-era relief programmes while opposing relatively meager relief for student loan borrowers.

Some of the same elected Republicans, members of Congress who strongly opposed relief for students, got hundreds of thousands of dollars themselves ... several members of Congress got over a million dollars  all those loans are forgiven, he said.

The hypocrisy is stunning, he said.

Andrew Feinberg in Washington, DC, and Alex Woodward in New York filed this report.

Biden reveals new path to student debt relief

Trump makes Georgia probe prediction in latest grievance-laden rant

Friday 30 June 2023 21:35 , Oliver O'Connell

Heres what the twice-indicted, twice-impeached former president posted to Truth Social at lunchtime today:

I predict that the Racist District Attorney in Atlanta, with the per capita WORST crime record in the Country, Fani Willis, where murderers get away with murder, and are seldom charged and almost never prosecuted, will be dropping all charges against me for lack of a case. I made a PERFECTLY LEGAL PHONE CALL, AS PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED STATES, ABOUT AN ELECTION THAT I STRONGLY FEEL WAS RIGGED AND STOLLEN. NONE of the MANY LAWYERS on the call minded my words, or even hinted at wrongdoing. SCAM!

Lawyer Ron Filipkowski noted the odd timing of the prediction:

This makes me think that he, or his lawyers, were told something. Maybe not, but this seems rather random for him to make this prediction today. pic.twitter.com/VakCVDFnVD  Ron Filipkowski (@RonFilipkowski) June 30, 2023

Friday 30 June 2023 21:30 , Oliver O'Connell

Watch live: Karine Jean-Pierre holds White House briefing

Watch: Biden announces new path for student debt relief

Friday 30 June 2023 21:14 , Oliver O'Connell

Biden: I'm announcing today a new path consistent with today's ruling to provide student debt relief to as many borrowers as possible as quickly as possible. We will ground this new approach in a different law than my original plan with the higher education act. pic.twitter.com/d70zEDIPf4  Acyn (@Acyn) June 30, 2023

Biden outlines new path to student loan forgiveness after SCOTUS decision

Friday 30 June 2023 21:10 , Oliver O'Connell

BREAKING: President Biden announces he will seek student loan forgiveness through an alterative legal authority -- the Higher Education Act of 1965 -- after the SCOTUS defeated his plan today.  Joey Garrison (@joeygarrison) June 30, 2023

Latest Trump campaign video mocked for weird apocalyptic tone

Friday 30 June 2023 20:45 , Oliver O'Connell

While the footage was posted on Mr Trumps own Truth Social site, it was later posted on Twitter where it was roundly ridiculed by social media users.

Rachel Sharp reports.

Trump mocked for weird apocalyptic campaign video

Three charged in $22m Trump Media insider trading case

Friday 30 June 2023 20:15 , Oliver O'Connell

Three investors in the special purpose acquisition company (SPAC) that took Trump Media public have been indicted for insider trading concerning the deal, making $22m in alleged lillegal trades.

Michael Shvartsman, Gerald Shvartsman and Bruce Garelick were named in a federal indictment unsealed on Thursday (29 June) in Manhattan federal court.

All three were charged with trading in securities of Digital World Acquisition Corporation (DWAC) based on non-public information about the companys planned business combination with Trump Media & Technology Group  founded by former President Donald Trump  the parent company of social media platform Truth Social.

They were arrested on Thursday morning in Florida.

Trump Media investors charged in $22m insider trading case

DeSantis hits back at Trump disloyalty claim

Friday 30 June 2023 20:00 , Oliver O'Connell

Florida Governor Ron DeSantis on Thursday hit back at former president Donald Trumps allegation that the Sunshine State executive is betraying him by mounting a presidential campaign of his own during an appearance on Fox News.

Mr DeSantis, who currently trails the twice-impeached, twice-indicted ex-president by a wide margin in most polls of likely GOP primary voters, told Fox host Jesse Watters that no politician  even a former president such as Mr Trump  is entitled to support from anyone after Watters raised Mr Trumps criticisms during a televised interview.

Andrew Feinberg reports on the rest of the Florida governors remarks.

DeSantis hits back at Trump disloyalty claim: Politicians have to earn support

Fox reaches $12m settlement with former producer Abby Grossberg

Friday 30 June 2023 19:53 , Oliver O'Connell

Fox Corporation has reached a $12m settlement in a lawsuit from a former Fox New producer who alleged a culture of misogyny at the network and accused Fox lawyers of pressuring her into making misleading statements in a blockbuster defamation case from a voting machines company.

Alex Woodward has the latest.

Fox reaches $12m settlement over toxic workplace lawsuit from former producer

DeSantis slammed for backing use of radioactive waste in road study

Friday 30 June 2023 19:45 , Oliver O'Connell

Republican presidential hopeful Ron DeSantis is under fire after giving the go-ahead to the study of radioactive mining waste in the use of road-building projects.

On Thursday, the Florida governor greenlit a bill adding phosphogypsum, which has been linked to cancer, to a list of materials that can be studied by the Florida Department of Transportation and used in road construction in the state.

Gustaf Kilander reports.

DeSantis slammed after backing use of radioactive waste in road study

Angry onlookers shout dog killer at George Santos

Friday 30 June 2023 19:35 , Oliver O'Connell

Angry protesters called congressman George Santos a dog killer on Friday as the Republican made an appearance at a Long Island federal court house, his first hearing since pleading not guilty last month to a13-count indictment related to fraud and money laundering charges.

Onlookers shout dog killer at George Santos as he arrives for fraud hearing

Trump makes Georgia probe prediction in latest grievance-laden rant

Friday 30 June 2023 19:30 , Oliver O'Connell

Heres what the twice-indicted, twice-impeached former president posted to Truth Social at lunchtime today:

I predict that the Racist District Attorney in Atlanta, with the per capita WORST crime record in the Country, Fani Willis, where murderers get away with murder, and are seldom charged and almost never prosecuted, will be dropping all charges against me for lack of a case. I made a PERFECTLY LEGAL PHONE CALL, AS PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED STATES, ABOUT AN ELECTION THAT I STRONGLY FEEL WAS RIGGED AND STOLLEN. NONE of the MANY LAWYERS on the call minded my words, or even hinted at wrongdoing. SCAM!

Lawyer Ron Filipkowski noted the odd timing of the prediction:

This makes me think that he, or his lawyers, were told something. Maybe not, but this seems rather random for him to make this prediction today. pic.twitter.com/VakCVDFnVD  Ron Filipkowski (@RonFilipkowski) June 30, 2023

Watch: SCOTUS decisions activates young people to speak out and vote, says Psaki

Friday 30 June 2023 19:25 , Oliver O'Connell

"All of this is going to have a huge impact I suspect on the courts and popularity of the courts. These type of decisions are something that activates young people. Activates them to speak out, to vote, to have their voice heard."@jrpsaki on SCOTUS decisions w/ @mitchellreports pic.twitter.com/2qeO83ubNY  Inside with Jen Psaki (@InsideWithPsaki) June 30, 2023

Sources: Prosecutors are prepared to hit Trump and his allies with new charges

Friday 30 June 2023 20:20 , Oliver O'Connell

The Department of Justice is prepared to seek indictments against multiple figures in former president Donald Trumps orbit and may yet bring additional charges against the ex-president in the coming weeks, The Independent has learned.

Andrew Feinberg filed this exclusive report for The Independent.

Prosecutors are prepared to hit Trump and his allies with new charges, sources say

Geraldo Rivera praises affirmative action in final Fox News appearance

Friday 30 June 2023 18:45 , Oliver O'Connell

Geraldo Rivera used his final appearance on Fox News to praise affirmative action amid the Supreme Court ruling against colleges considering race in their admissions process.

The Fox News host revealed on Thursday that he was quitting the network after he claimed that he had been fired from The Five.

Gustaf Kilander and Shweta Sharma have the story.

Geraldo Rivera praises affirmative action in final Fox News appearance

Watch: LAAD president slams SCOTUS ruling in favour of a Christian web designer who opposed same-sex weddings

Friday 30 June 2023 18:25 , Oliver O'Connell

I think that this is an open license to discriminate against LGBTQ people in America. https://t.co/Ebc8JosA0A  The Recount (@therecount) June 30, 2023

Supreme Court deals major blow to LGBT+ rights

Friday 30 June 2023 18:15 , Oliver O'Connell

A wedding website designer may refuse to create work for people in the LGBT+ community if it conflicts with their religious beliefs, the Supreme Court ruled on Friday.

In a 6-3 decision, the conservative majority of the Court ruled in favor of Lorie Smith, a Colorado-based website creator, who wanted to refuse service to same-sex couples but couldnt as it was a violation of a public accommodation law.

The Court argued that the public accommodation law in Colorado impedes Ms Smiths First Amendment right to deny conveying messages she disagrees with.

Ariana Baio reports on todays decision.

Supreme Court allows Colorado designer to deny LGBT+ customers in ruling

Christie says McCarthy spoke correctly about Trump the first time

Friday 30 June 2023 17:45 , Oliver O'Connell

Former New Jersey governor and presidential Republican presidential candidate Chris Christie told CNN that House Speaker Kevin McCarthy was right in his initial assessment about whether former president Donald Trump was the strongest candidate to beat Joe Biden in a general election contest.

Earlier this week, Mr McCarthy said he was not sure that Mr Trump was the strongest candidate to beat Mr Biden.

Eric Garcia reports.

Chris Christie says McCarthy spoke correctly about Trump the first time

Report: Top Trump aide revealed as individual he allegedly showed classified map

Friday 30 June 2023 20:18 , Oliver O'Connell

The identity of an aide to Donald Trump whose voice was heard in an audio recording wherein the former president can be heard brandishing a paper he explicitly claims is classified has been revealed.

Read more...

Top Trump aide revealed as individual he allegedly showed classified map, report says

Hours before arrest, Jan 6 fugitive shared Trump post revealing Obamas address

Friday 30 June 2023 16:55 , Oliver O'Connell

A January 6 rioter on the run from the law who was arrested outside the Washington DC home of former President Barack Obama shared a social media post by ex-president Donald Trump revealing his predecessors address hours before he was detained.

Taylor Taranto, 37, was arrested on Thursday on charges stemming from his activities during the Capitol riot in early 2021. But he was also discovered to have several firearms and the materials needed to make a Molotov cocktail in the neighbourhood of the US capital where the Obamas live.

The matter is being reviewed by the FBIs Joint Terrorism Task Force.

Gustaf Kilander has the story.

Jan 6 fugitive shared Trump post revealing Obamas address hours before arrest

RFK Jr says he is proud to have Trumps praise

Friday 30 June 2023 16:45 , Oliver O'Connell

Robert F Kennedy Jr., the longshot presidential candidate and latest scion of the storied Kennedy political dynasty, appears to be leaning in to the Democrat in name only label that is beginning to follow his campaign.

John Bowden explains.

Robert F Kennedy Jr says he is proud to have Trumps praise

US envoy for Iran has security clearance suspended

Friday 30 June 2023 16:15 , Oliver O'Connell

The US special envoy for Iran, Rob Malley, had his security clearance suspended pending a review of allegations he may have mishandled classified information, said US officials.

Namita Singh has the details.

US envoy for Iran has security clearance suspended amid probe

Trump demanded get my boxes back from feds

Friday 30 June 2023 15:45 , Oliver O'Connell

As Donald Trumps lawyers began preparing for a federal indictment, the ex-president was allegedly still hoping to get the documents and boxes seized from Mar-a-Lago back, according to a report.

Mr Trump referred to the classified material as my boxes and my documents and asked his lawyers to retrieve the material, sources with direct knowledge of the matter told Rolling Stone.

Ariana Baio reports.

Trump demanded to get my boxes back from feds as indictment loomed

Biden groans when asked if Trump would have tipped Putin off to coup attempt

Friday 30 June 2023 15:15 , Oliver O'Connell

President Biden on Thursday said he tries not to consider the national security issues that wouldve been in play had Donald Trump defeated him in the 2020 election and remained in the White House during Russias war on Ukraine.

Andrew Feinberg reports.

Biden groans when asked if Trump would have tipped Putin off to coup attempt

Ex-Trump aide reportedly joins Giuliani in cooperating with special counsel

Friday 30 June 2023 15:08 , Oliver O'Connell

A former Trump campaign aide has joined Rudy Guiliani in cooperating with the special counsel in the Department of Justices2020 election probe, according to a new report.

Mike Roman, a senior adviser on Donald Trumps 2020 campaign in charge of Election Day operations, is cooperating with federal prosecutors working for special counsel Jack Smith in the criminal investigation reviewing the efforts to overturn the 2020 election, according to CNN.

Gustaf Kilander has the details.

Ex-Trump aide joins Giuliani in cooperating with special counsel in election probe

Trump loses bid to throw out E Jean Carroll defamation lawsuit

Friday 30 June 2023 15:00 , Oliver O'Connell

Donald Trump has lost his bid to throw out the first defamation lawsuit brought against him by E Jean Carroll.

On Thursday, US district judge Lewis Kaplan in Manhattan rejected the former presidents claims that he had absolute presidential immunity from the civil case, paving the way for the magazine columnist to pursue around $10m in damages from him.

The former president had claimed that he had absolute presidential immunity from the lawsuit and that many of his statements about the magazine columnist were protected under free speech rights because they were his opinion.

Read the full story here:

Trump loses bid to throw out E Jean Carroll lawsuit

Trump deadline to respond to trial date set for 10 July

Friday 30 June 2023 14:58 , Oliver O'Connell

A Florida federal judge is giving Donald Trumps defence team until 10 July to respond to special counsel Jack Smiths request to delay his federal criminal trial until December.

New: Trump deadline to respond to DOJ request to have trial starting in December pushed back to July 10 after Trump valet Walt Nauta had his arraignment postponed until next Thursday, per minute order from Judge Cannon  delays already starting to add up on this docket.  Hugo Lowell (@hugolowell) June 30, 2023

Watch: Ron DeSantis talks about his war on woke text books

Friday 30 June 2023 14:47 , Oliver O'Connell

Gov. Ron DeSantis (R-FL) on "woke" textbooks at Moms for Liberty summit:



We've been actively involved in rejecting textbooks that have ideological indoctrination  And guess what happens, because were an 800-pound gorilla, they make the appropriate changes to the textbooks. pic.twitter.com/Q5ph34zy0U  The Recount (@therecount) June 30, 2023

Moms for Liberty gathering draws Trump, DeSantis

Friday 30 June 2023 14:45 , Oliver O'Connell

Former President Donald Trump and Florida Governor Ron DeSantis, the main rivals for the Republican presidential nomination, are speaking today at the annual gathering of Moms for Liberty, a two-year-old group that has fiercely opposed instruction related to race and gender identity in the nations classroom.

Trump, DeSantis among 2024 GOP hopefuls set to appear at Moms for Liberty gathering

Exclusive: Prosecutors are prepared to hit Trump and his allies with new charges, sources say

Friday 30 June 2023 14:15 , Oliver O'Connell

The Department of Justice is prepared to seek indictments against multiple figures in former president Donald Trumps orbit and may yet bring additional charges against the ex-president in the coming weeks, The Independent has learned.

According to sources familiar with the matter, the department has made preparations to bring what is known as a superseding indictment  a second set of charges against an already-indicted defendant that could include more serious crimes  against the ex-president, and could do so in a number of different venues, depending on how prosecutors feel the case they have brought against him in a Florida federal court is proceeding.

Andrew Feinberg reports for The Independent.

Prosecutors are prepared to hit Trump and his allies with new charges, sources say

ICYMI: Paul Ryan says former president is only GOP candidate who would lose to Biden

Friday 30 June 2023 13:45 , Oliver O'Connell

Former House Speaker Paul Ryan says he believes any 2024 Republican presidential candidate could beat incumbent president Joe Biden provided they are not named Donald Trump, but that it will be a disaster if we nominate Trump.

Mr Ryan, a Trump adversary and member of the board of Fox Newss parent company, made the remarks in an appearance on CNBCs Squawk Box on Wednesday morning.

Read more...

Paul Ryan says Trump is only Republican candidate who would lose to Biden in 2024

Were electing idiots: Cheney lays out damning problem with US politics

Friday 30 June 2023 13:15 , Oliver O'Connell

Former Rep Liz Cheney of Wyoming took aim at the state of American politics, telling a crowd at the 92nd Street Y in New York that the country is electing idiots.

Look, I think that the country right now faces hugely challenging and fundamentally important issues, Ms Cheney said during an appearance at the community center, in quotes reported by The Hill. What weve done in our politics is create a situation where were electing idiots.

Abe Asher reports on what else the former representative had to say.

Liz Cheney lays out damning problem with US politics: Were electing idiots

Ron DeSantis hits back at Trump claims hes disloyal: Politicians have to earn support

Friday 30 June 2023 12:45 , Rachel Sharp

DeSantis on Trump claims that hes disloyal: Politicians have to earn support. Theyre not entitled to it. No more excuses on the issues Americans care about, Im here to get stuff done. pic.twitter.com/Eji1cuY26i  Jesse Watters (@JesseBWatters) June 30, 2023

Report says top Trump aide revealed as individual he allegedly showed classified map

Friday 30 June 2023 12:15 , Oliver O'Connell

The identity of an aide to Donald Trump whose voice was heard in an audio recording wherein the former president can be heard brandishing a paper he explicity claims is classified has been revealed.

John Bowden reports on the aides identity.

Top Trump aide revealed as individual he allegedly showed classified map, report says

Trump loses bid to throw out E Jean Carroll case

Friday 30 June 2023 11:45 , Rachel Sharp

Donald Trump has lost his bid to throw out the first lawsuit brought against him by E Jean Carroll.

The former president had claimed that he had absolute presidential immunity from the lawsuit and that many of his statements about the magazine columnist were protected because they were his opinion.

He argued that Ms Carroll consented to his statements by purposely waiting decades to go public, until he was in the White House, leaving him no choice but to defend himself.

Ultimately, he said the case should be thrown out.

On Thursday, US district judge Lewis Kaplan in Manhattan rejected this claim saying there was no merit to his argument.

Joe Biden gives emphatic response to question on Hunter Biden texts

Friday 30 June 2023 11:15 , Oliver O'Connell

President Joe Biden is facing increasing pressure to answer questions  in detail  about his son Hunter Biden and a concerning text message that has been unearthed as the questions surrounding the latters business activities are growing more serious.

And on Wednesday, the president bristled at a reporter who asked him about it, just days after Karine Jean-Pierre, his press secretary, was inundated with questions on the topic at her daily news briefing.

Mr Biden was boarding Marine One as he began a trip to Chicago to tout his administrations economic record when a reporter questioned him about one message in which the younger Biden appears to directly put pressure on an individual named Henry Zhao to resolve an unknown matter  while explicitly naming his father as an interested party.

John Bowden has the story.

Biden gives emphatic response to question about troubling Hunter text

WATCH: Trump releases bizarre apocalyptic campaign video

Friday 30 June 2023 10:45 , Rachel Sharp

Weird apocalyptic video posted by Trump on Truth Social tonight: This is the final battle  pic.twitter.com/lBzgqCRYz3  Ron Filipkowski (@RonFilipkowski) June 30, 2023

Top Democrat says GOP had evidence disproving Biden bribery claims in 2019

Friday 30 June 2023 10:15 , Oliver O'Connell

The top Democrat on the House Oversight Committee has released evidence that casts significant doubt on GOP claims that the FBI ignored evidence that President Joe Biden accepted a bribe from a Ukrainian energy mogul during his time as vice president.

In a letter to House Oversight Committee chair James Comer, Maryland Representative Jamie Raskin reminded his GOP counterpart that Congress has had evidence that directly contradicts the allegations levied against Mr Biden in an FBI form which Republicans have claimed to be proof of alleged corruption on the part of the president.

Andrew Feinberg has the details.

GOP had evidence disproving Biden bribery claims in 2019, top Democrat says

Ex-Trump official joins Guiliani in cooperating in 2020 election probe

Friday 30 June 2023 09:45 , Rachel Sharp

Donald Trumps legal troubles appear to be heating up, with his former campaign official Mike Roman reportedly cooperating with investigators probing the former presidents efforts to overturn the 2020 election.

Two sources told CNN on Thursday that Mr Roman has taken a proffer agreement to cooperate with special counsel Jack Smiths office in its investigation.

Mr Roman was involved in Mr Trumps scheme to put forward fake electors to certify the election in his favour in states that President Joe Biden had won.

This revelation comes after it was reported that Rudy Guiliani had also taken such an agreement.

Under a proffer agreement, an individual shares information with investigators on the agreement that that information cannot be used against them in court.

House GOP expand their Hunter Biden investigation by seeking an interview with the lead prosecutor

Friday 30 June 2023 08:15 , Oliver O'Connell

House Republicans on Thursday requested voluntary testimony from nearly a dozen Justice Department officials involved in the investigation of President Joe Bidens son Hunter as GOP lawmakers widen their scrutiny into what they claim is improper interference by the agency.

Read more...

Republicans expand their Hunter Biden investigation by seeking an interview with the lead prosecutor

Pence meets with Zelensky in Ukraine

Friday 30 June 2023 06:15 , Oliver O'Connell

Former vice president Mike Pence visited with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky in a sign of solidarity with Ukraine even as many Republicans sour on support for Ukraine, CNN reported.

Eric Garcia reports on the 2024 candidates visit.

Mike Pence meets with Zelensky in Ukraine

Did DeSantis break the law with Texas border trip?

Friday 30 June 2023 04:15 , Oliver O'Connell

Gustaf Kilander reports.

DeSantis accused of breaking the law with Texas border trip

Three charged with insider trading in Trump Media deal

Friday 30 June 2023 03:15 , Oliver O'Connell

Three investors in the special purpose acquisition company (SPAC) that took Trump Media public have been indicted for insider trading concerning the deal, making $22m in alleged lillegal trades.

Michael Shvartsman, Gerald Shvartsman and Bruce Garelick were named in a federal indictment unsealed on Thursday (29 June) in Manhattan federal court.

All three were charged with trading in securities of Digital World Acquisition Corporation (DWAC) based on non-public information about the companys planned business combination with Trump Media & Technology Group  founded by former President Donald Trump  the parent company of social media platform Truth Social.

They were arrested on Thursday morning in Florida.

Trump Media investors charged in $22m insider trading case

Christie says McCarthy spoke correctly about Trump the first time

Friday 30 June 2023 02:15 , Oliver O'Connell

Former New Jersey governor and presidential Republican presidential candidate Chris Christie told CNN that House Speaker Kevin McCarthy was right in his initial assessment about whether former president Donald Trump was the strongest candidate to beat Joe Biden in a general election contest.

Earlier this week, Mr McCarthy said he was not sure that Mr Trump was the strongest candidate to beat Mr Biden.

Eric Garcia reports.

Chris Christie says McCarthy spoke correctly about Trump the first time

Trumps GOP support dips slightly after his indictment, poll finds

Friday 30 June 2023 01:15 , Oliver O'Connell

Former President Donald Trumps criminal indictment on charges of mishandling government secrets appears to have dented his popularity among Republicans  but only slightly - according to a new poll from The Associated Press-NORC Center for Public Affairs Research.

Sixty percent of Republicans now have a favorable view of Trump, down slightly from April, when 68% of Republicans said they had a favorable view of the 2024 GOP presidential front-runner. The poll found 38% of Republicans have an unfavorable view of Trump, an uptick from 30% in April.

Read more...

Trump's GOP support dips slightly after his indictment over classified documents, AP-NORC poll finds

Exclusive: Prosecutors are prepared to hit Trump and his allies with new charges, sources say

Friday 30 June 2023 00:15 , Oliver O'Connell

The Department of Justice is prepared to seek indictments against multiple figures in former president Donald Trumps orbit and may yet bring additional charges against the ex-president in the coming weeks, The Independent has learned.

According to sources familiar with the matter, the department has made preparations to bring what is known as a superseding indictment  a second set of charges against an already-indicted defendant that could include more serious crimes  against the ex-president in the Southern District of Florida.

But prosecutors may also choose to bring additional charges against Mr Trump in a different venue, depending on how they feel the case they have brought against him in is proceeding.

Andrew Feinberg reports for The Independent.

Prosecutors are prepared to hit Trump and his allies with new charges, sources say

Biden is wrapping a campaign fundraising blitz aimed at making a bold early statement

Thursday 29 June 2023 23:15 , Oliver O'Connell

President Joe Biden has cozied up to high-dollar donors at posh Upper East Side penthouses and on West Coast decks gussied up with floral arrangements and flags in recent weeks. He has two more fundraisers in New York on Thursday that will close out an end-of-quarter campaign blitz his team believes will put him on strong financial footing for a contest they expect to set new spending records.

Fridays events will be Bidens 9th and 10th fundraising receptions of the past two weeks, numbers that have been matched by Vice President Kamala Harris, first lady Jill Biden, and second gentleman Doug Emhoff. The Biden campaign has been mum on how much he has raised at the often free-wheeling events, but it is broadcasting confidence in the size of the haul ahead of the July 15 reporting date.

Read more...

Biden is wrapping a campaign fundraising blitz aimed at making a bold early statement

Trump celebrates Supreme Court decision on affirmative action

Thursday 29 June 2023 22:45 , Oliver O'Connell

Former President Donald Trump celebrated the Supreme Courts decision to reject affirmative action programmes at US colleges and universities on Wednesday morning, calling it a a great day for America.

In a post on Truth Social, Mr Trump said that the ruling was amazing.

Abe Asher has the story.

Trump celebrates Supreme Court ruling on affirmative action: The way it should be!

Biden groans when asked if Trump would have tipped Putin off to coup attempt

Thursday 29 June 2023 22:30 , Oliver O'Connell

President Biden on Thursday said he tries not to consider the national security issues that wouldve been in play had Donald Trump defeated him in the 2020 election and remained in the White House during Russias war on Ukraine.

Specifically, Mr Biden told MSNBCs Nicolle Wallace that he actively attempts to keep such thoughts out of his head when Wallace asked if he thought Mr Trump would have tipped off Russian President Vladimir Putin to the abortive coup attempt waged by Wagner Group leader Yevgeny Prigozhin over the weekend.

Andrew Feinberg reports.

Biden groans when asked if Trump would have tipped Putin off to coup attempt

Trump says DeSantis campaign like a rock heading to Hell

Thursday 29 June 2023 22:15 , Oliver O'Connell

Another day, another potshot at Ron DeSantiss 2024 campaign. Heres what former president Donald Trump had to say today:

The DeSanctimonious campaign is DEAD! His polls are dropping like a rock heading to Hell, and the DOJ/FBI are continuing their illegal and outrageous weaponization against me only because I am leading Biden by so much. Its called ELECTION INTERFERENCE, and they have NO FEAR against DeSanctus - Hes the one that they are dying to run against, dispute their DISINFORMATION CAMPAIGN!

Watch: Biden says theres still a lot of really good Republicans'

Thursday 29 June 2023 22:00 , Oliver O'Connell

President Biden: "By the way, there's still a lot of really good Republicans."@NicolleDWallace: "Out in the country?"



Biden: "No, and in the Senate!" pic.twitter.com/YrSSgVWxED  The Recount (@therecount) June 29, 2023

Report: Top Trump aide revealed as individual he allegedly showed classified map

Thursday 29 June 2023 21:45 , Oliver O'Connell

The identity of an aide to Donald Trump whose voice was heard in an audio recording wherein the former president can be heard brandishing a paper he explicity claims is classified has been revealed.

John Bowden has the story.

Top Trump aide revealed as individual he allegedly showed classified map, report says

Watch: Biden defends poll numbers

Thursday 29 June 2023 21:28 , Oliver O'Connell

"I know the polling numbers are not good, but they were the same way when I ran and won  everybody thought I was gonna get clobbered in the primary; I got 80 million votes in the last election."



 President Biden to @NicolleDWallace pic.twitter.com/TIYTHZMnbp  The Recount (@therecount) June 29, 2023

Trump to deliver remarks in Iowa on 7 July

Thursday 29 June 2023 21:15 , Oliver O'Connell

Former President Donald Trump will deliver remarks at an event in Council Bluffs, Iowa on 7 July.

45th President of the United States Donald J. Trump to Deliver Remarks in Council Bluffs, Iowahttps://t.co/BFZes2AzgF pic.twitter.com/GJ5FuxNaVC  Liz Harrington (@realLizUSA) June 29, 2023

Lev Parnas reacts to Raskin evidence

Thursday 29 June 2023 20:50 , Oliver O'Connell

Lev Parnas took to Twitter in reaction to Rep Jamie Raskins release of evidence that casts doubt on Republican claims that the FBI ignored evidence the President Biden accepted a bribe from a Ukrainian energy mogul.

He wrote:

Ranking Member Jamie Raskin introduces evidence that I provided to the @OversightDems that debunks the lies and conspiracy theories that Rudy Giuliani, @RepMTG, @RepJamesComer and their corrupt cohorts in the @GOP have been pushing on the American people.

@RepRaskin - Despite being interviewed as part of a campaign by Mr. Giuliani and his proxies in 2019 and 2020 to procure damaging information about the Biden family, Mr. Zlochevsky explicitly and unequivocally denied those allegations. Specifically, Mr. Zlochevsky denied (1) that anyone at Burisma had any contacts with then former Vice President Biden or his representatives while Hunter Biden served on the Burisma board, and (2) that former Vice President Biden or his staff in any way assisted Mr. Zlochevsky or Burisma,.

Ranking Member Jamie Raskin introduces evidence that I provided to the @OversightDems that debunks the lies and conspiracy theories that Rudy Giuliani, @RepMTG, @RepJamesComer and their corrupt cohorts in the @GOP have been pushing on the American people. @RepRaskin - Despite  Lev Parnas (@levparnas) June 29, 2023

Raskin: GOP had evidence disproving Biden bribery claims in 2019

Thursday 29 June 2023 20:30 , Oliver O'Connell

The top Democrat on the House Oversight Committee has released evidence that casts significant doubt on GOP claims that the FBI ignored evidence that President Joe Biden accepted a bribe from a Ukrainian energy mogul during his time as vice president.

In a letter to House Oversight Committee chair James Comer, Maryland Representative Jamie Raskin reminded his GOP counterpart that Congress has had evidence that directly contradicts the allegations levied against Mr Biden in an FBI form which Republicans have claimed to be proof of alleged corruption on the part of the president.

Andrew Feinberg reports.

GOP had evidence disproving Biden bribery claims in 2019, top Democrat says

Watch: Bannon rages at Comer over Fox interview

Thursday 29 June 2023 20:00 , Oliver O'Connell

Steve Bannon is fuming after another feckless interview this morning on Fox by James Comer, who looked like a fool again trying to answer questions on the Hunter Biden investigation: Your staff has to have you ready! Youre not serious. Its all performative. pic.twitter.com/63lDJyl9eZ  Ron Filipkowski (@RonFilipkowski) June 29, 2023

DeSantis mocked for apparently photoshopped campaign photo

Thursday 29 June 2023 19:45 , Oliver O'Connell

Presidential hopeful Ron DeSantis has been ridiculed for a seemingly photoshopped campaign photograph that has resurfaced as the Republican presidential primary begins to take shape.

The image was taken for Mr DeSantiss brief campaign for Senate in 2015 ahead of the 2016 election when incumbent Florida Senator Marco Rubio was running for president before campaigning for re-election to the upper chamber.

Read on...

DeSantis mocked for apparently photoshopped resurfaced campaign photo

EXCLUSIVE: Prosecutors are prepared to hit Trump and his allies with new charges, sources say

Thursday 29 June 2023 19:18 , Oliver O'Connell

The Department of Justice is prepared to seek indictments against multiple figures in former president Donald Trumps orbit and may yet bring additional charges against the ex-president in the coming weeks, The Independent has learned.

According to sources familiar with the matter, the department has made preparations to bring what is known as a superseding indictment  a second set of charges against an already-indicted defendant that could include more serious crimes  against the ex-president, and could do so in a number of different venues, depending on how prosecutors feel the case they have brought against him in a Florida federal court is proceeding.

Read the full story by The Independents Andrew Feinberg in Washington, DC.

Prosecutors are prepared to hit Trump and his allies with new charges, sources say

Federal grand jury still investigating aspects of classified documents case, report says

Thursday 29 June 2023 19:00 , Oliver O'Connell

Three weeks after Donald Trump was indicted on charges of illegally retaining classified national security documents and obstructing the governments efforts to reclaim them, a federal grand jury in Miami is still investigating aspects of the case, The New York Times reports, citing people familiar with the matter.

Per the Times:

In recent days, the grand jury has issued subpoenas to a handful of people who are connected to the inquiry, those familiar with it said. While it remains unclear who received the subpoenas and the kind of information prosecutors were seeking to obtain, it is clear that the grand jury has stayed active and that investigators are digging even after a 38-count indictment was issued this month against Mr. Trump and a co-defendant, Walt Nauta, one of his personal aides.

Prosecutors often continue investigating strands of a criminal case after charges have been brought, and sometimes their efforts go nowhere. But at other times post-indictment investigations result in additional charges against people who have already been accused of crimes in the case. The investigations can also be used to bring new charges against new defendants.

Watch: Would Chris Christie pardon Donald Trump?

Thursday 29 June 2023 18:40 , Oliver O'Connell

The former New Jersey governor weighs in on the power of the president to pardon people and whether it would apply to Donald Trump were he convicted of the various crimes of which he is accused.

'I don't think I would pardon him,' says Chris Christie, one of Donald Trump's most outspoken critics in the 2024 GOP primary field, in regards to Trump's ongoing prosecution over the DOJ's classified documents probe pic.twitter.com/NGaq9xXxLY  NowThis (@nowthisnews) June 29, 2023

Joe Biden gives emphatic response to question about troubling Hunter text

Thursday 29 June 2023 18:20 , Oliver O'Connell

President Joe Biden is facing increasing pressure to answer questions  in detail  about his son Hunter Biden and a concerning text message that has been unearthed as the questions surrounding the latters business activities are growing more serious.

And on Wednesday, the president bristled at a reporter who asked him about it, just days after Karine Jean-Pierre, his press secretary, was inundated with questions on the topic at her daily news briefing.

John Bowden in Washington, DC, reports on what the president has said so far.

Insider trading: Trump Media investors charged in $22m case

Thursday 29 June 2023 18:05 , Oliver O'Connell

Three investors in the special purpose acquisition company (SPAC) that took Trump Media public have been indicted for insider trading concerning the deal, making $22m in alleged lillegal trades.

Michael Shvartsman, Gerald Shvartsman and Bruce Garelick were named in a federal indictment unsealed on Thursday (29 June) in Manhattan federal court.

All three were charged with trading in securities of Digital World Acquisition Corporation (DWAC) based on non-public information about the companys planned business combination with Trump Media & Technology Group  founded by former President Donald Trump  the parent company of social media platform Truth Social.

They were arrested on Thursday morning in Florida.

Full story here:

Trump Media investors charged in $22m insider trading case

Trump hails Supreme Court decision on affirmative action

Thursday 29 June 2023 17:45 , Oliver O'Connell

Donald Trump hails Supreme Court decision on affirmative action as a great day for America.

The former president posted on Truth Social:

This is a great day for America. People with extraordinary ability and everything else necessary for success, including future greatness for our Country, are finally being rewarded. This is the ruling everyone was waiting and hoping for and the result was amazing. It will also keep us competitive with the rest of the world. Our greatest minds must be cherished and thats what this wonderful day has brought. Were going back to all merit-basedand thats the way it should be!

Heres our coverage of the ruling:

Supreme Court bans colleges from considering race in admissions

Did DeSantis break the law with Texas border trip?

Thursday 29 June 2023 17:30 , Oliver O'Connell

The presidential campaign of Florida Governor Ron DeSantis has been accused of breaking the law after the team shared an image on Twitter of the candidate exiting a helicopter that records show is owned by the Texas Department of Public Safety.

Mr DeSantis was in Eagle Pass, Texas on Monday to visit the US-Mexico border when the campaign shared the photo with the caption MISSION: Stop the invasion STATUS: Critical LEAD: @RonDeSantis.

Legal experts now say that the use of Texas government resources in a political ad is a campaign finance violation.

Gustaf Kilander reports.

DeSantis accused of breaking the law with Texas border trip

Pence meets with Zelensky in Ukraine

Thursday 29 June 2023 17:15 , Oliver O'Connell

Former vice president Mike Pence visited with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky in a sign of solidarity with Ukraine even as many Republicans sour on support for Ukraine, CNN reported.

Eric Garcia has the latest:

Mike Pence meets with Zelensky in Ukraine

Is Rudy Giuliani negotiating a plea deal over efforts to overturn 2020 election?

Thursday 29 June 2023 16:55 , Oliver O'Connell

Slate has followed up on reporting by CNN and The New York Times this week that Rudy Giuliani, former Mayor of New York and Donald Trumps personal attorney during his administration, has voluntarily met with investigators from Special Counsel Jack Smiths office as part of a proffer agreement.

This raises the possibility that he might flip against his former boss ex-president Trump.

Per Robert Katzberg, former federal prosecutor who has defended high-profile white-collar criminal cases for more than four decades, writing in Slate:

While the Times was not specific about what Giulianis voluntary interview means, such proffer sessions are almost always the final step towards a plea deal. If one is consummated in Smiths investigation of Trumps efforts to overturn the 2020 electionwhich were spearheaded by Giulianiit would both be a deeply ironic end for one of the countrys most bulldog former prosecutors and also a devastating blow to the former president.

As someone deeply enmeshed in the New York City white collar criminal defense world during Giulianis tenure as US Attorney for the Southern District of New York, reports that he sat for an extensive proffer session with prosecutors investigating the events surrounding the Jan 6 riot boggles the mind.

He further explains the process:

Once counsel concludes the client has something valuable to offer prosecutors and that the client can be an effective witness, the next step can be taken. Counsel contacts the prosecutors and arranges an attorneys proffer, in which the lawyer, without the client, meets prosecutors to outline the general contours of what the client can provide. If the contours are unacceptable, say the client wants an agreement he will not be prosecuted for providing evidence against a lesser target, the session ends quickly. If, however, both sides see the prospect for getting something they want without giving up too much, the session gets more and more specific. It is only if the attorneys factual representations offer enough for prosecutors to offer sufficiently reduced criminal exposure, and thus, a realistic deal may be available, that the next to last step, the client proffer, is taken. Giuliani has reportedly now taken that step.

You can read the full piece here.

Christie says McCarthy spoke correctly about Trump the first time

Thursday 29 June 2023 16:45 , Oliver O'Connell

Former New Jersey governor and presidential Republican presidential candidate Chris Christie told CNN that House Speaker Kevin McCarthy was right in his initial assessment about whether former president Donald Trump was the strongest candidate to beat Joe Biden in a general election contest.

Earlier this week, Mr McCarthy said he was not sure that Mr Trump was the strongest candidate to beat Mr Biden.

Eric Garcia reports from Washington, DC.

Chris Christie says McCarthy spoke correctly about Trump the first time

Click here to read the full blog on The Independent's website
FILE - The University of Georgia Arch on North Campus. UGA recently earned a high rating in a Money magazine report ranking U.S. universities.

The University of Georgia continues to earn national accolades for its academic accomplishments, with the latest honor coming from Money magazine.

UGA recently was named one of the best colleges in the country in the magazines annual Best Colleges in America list.

According to a UGA news release, Money magazine this year altered its analysis from a numbered ranking system to a star rating, handing out one to five stars based on a variety of criteria, including affordability and student outcomes. Noting a specific emphasis on high graduation rates and scholarship support, the magazine gave Georgia 4.5 stars in the new ranking system.

Georgia's favorite flowers: UGA experts explain how to keep them healthy and beautiful

Big bucks: USG Board of Regents finalizes $10.71 billion budget. See how much UGA is getting.

The universitys 85% graduation rate is well above average, and 89% of students get grants to help fund their education, the publication noted. The university has an impressive number of students and faculty who earn national awards each year, including Rhodes, Fulbright and Marshall scholars.

In the 2022-23 academic year, UGA had 11 Fulbright scholars, two Marshall scholars (Natalie Moss and Lauren Wilkes) and one Rhodes scholar (Natalie Navarrete).

UGAs four-year completion rate increased to a record 75.1%; the six-year completion rate rose to 88.1%. With a retention rate of 94.3%, UGAs success surpasses the average completion and retention rates of peer institutions.

With its graduation rate of 85%, UGA trailed only a dozen other public institutions  Virginia (94%), California-Berkeley (93%), Michigan (93%), UCLA (92%), North Carolina-Chapel Hill (90%), William & Mary (90%), Georgia Tech (89%), California-Davis (88%), Wisconsin-Madison (87%), Florida (87%), Illinois (86%) and California-Irvine (86%).

During the academic year, UGA was ranked No. 16 in best public universities in the nation by U.S. News and World Report, with several graduate and professional programs earning top 10 placements in U.S. News rankings. Also, Niche named UGA the No. 10 public university and the No. 2 college with the best student life in America.

This article originally appeared on Athens Banner-Herald: Money magazine gives UGA a high ranking among nation's universities
Sundays Wichita nightclub shootout that sent 11 people to the hospital has prompted the same old predictable hand-wringing from the leftists of our community.

Why do they hate freedom?

They hadnt even mopped up the bloodstains at the City Nightz club before Wichita Mayor Brandon Whipple was on Twitter trying to paint random bar shootings as somehow being a bad thing.

We will not tolerate gun violence in our city, the mayor said in a tweet quoted by Fox News, so you know its true. We must advocate for safer communities and continue proactive measures to prevent such tragedies, while fostering a culture of peace, empathy, and understanding.

Thats wussy talk.

Whipple and his ilk should be thanking whatever gods they worship that we are fortunate enough to live in a state where our legislators are smart enough to recognize that the solution to gun violence is more guns, carried by everyone, everywhere, all the time.

What happened at 1 a.m. Sunday at the City Nightz club  where several people opened fire, nine were shot and two trampled in the crowd running away  is being called a mass shooting by the leftist media. You wont find those biased journalists calling it what it is, Constitution-loving patriots exercising their God-given right to shoot people who annoy them.

Police have arrested 31-year-old Brandon Young of Florissant, Missouri, in connection with the spontaneous outburst of Second Amendment patriotism inside this humble mom-and-pop drinking establishment downtown.

I shudder to think of what this will do to our local tourism industry. Why would anybody ever want to come to Wichita if they cant even shoot at us without getting arrested?

Its kind of hard to believe these days, but there was a time not too long ago in Kansas when you couldnt carry a concealed weapon at all without a permit issued by big guvment.

A misguided alliance of leftist Democrats and Republicans in Name Only, AKA RINOs, liked it that way because it allowed them to control the population and stifle freedom-loving patriots.

Story continues

The road to the liberty we now enjoy has been long and hard.

It started in 2006, when the Legislature overrode a veto by the quasi-Marxist Democrat Gov. Kathleen Sebelius to pass the Personal and Family Protection Act and establish concealed carry in the state.

But for some inexplicable reason, that law banned concealed carrying of guns in bars  and who among us can say that theyve never needed a gun to protect their family in a bar?

Legislators cleaned that up the next year to allow concealed carriers to take their guns with them to have a few drinks. But the law still required a permit, which you could only get after eight hours of gun training.

It was to be another seven long years before the Legislature and Gov. Sam Brownback passed constitutional carry, which finally allowed Kansans to carry their weapons as the Founding Fathers and the Good Lord intended  no permits, no training, no questions asked.

At the time, Kansans could carry guns openly, but we all owe a debt of gratitude to then-Kansas State Rifle Association President Patricia Stoneking for putting the hardship of that in perspective from the female point of view.

If Im dressed in an evening gown, which I was recently, and I want to carry a gun, I should be able to slip it in my bag, Stoneking said at the time. I shouldnt have to try to figure out how to put on a belt and holster.

You go girl! Thank God our 70% male Legislature can understand and solve the problems faced by todays modern woman.

The Legislature and Brownback also banned cities and counties from any misguided attempt to establish gun laws of their own. Because as we all know, gun laws that work in a rural community of 400 people will work equally well in an urban city of 400,000. Its simple multiplication.

So on this Independence Day, exercise your 2A rights and strap up before you head out to celebrate at your favorite local night spot. You never know who you might encounter that needs shooting.

Until were all packing heat, can any of us really be safe?

Dion Lefler: 316-268-6527, @DionKansas
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky said the Wagner Group rebellion last month shows Russian President Vladimir Putin is weak and unable to defend his country, saying the security situation in Russia was crumbling.

In a Sunday interview with CNNs Erin Burnett in Ukraine, Zelensky said Putins reaction to the attempted insurrection shows he doesnt control everything in Russia.

Wagners moving deep into Russia and taking certain regions show how easy it is to do, the Ukrainian leader said. Putin doesnt control the situation in the regions, he doesnt control the security situation. All of us understand his whole army is in Ukraine.

Zelensky has repeatedly said the Wagner rebellion is a good sign for Ukraine.

When news first broke of Wagner Group founder Yevgeny Prigozhins march, Zelensky quickly asserted everyone who chooses the path of evil destroys himself, joining other Ukrainian officials online in assessing that Russia was exposed as fragile by the rebellion.

At a news conference Saturday, he also said the insurrection greatly affected Russian power on the battlefield, according to CNN.

Ukraine is hoping to capitalize on the battlefield from the aborted rebellion.

Kyiv is amid a major counteroffensive in the east, where forces hope to push Russian troops out of its occupied territories in the Donetsk and Zaporizhzhia regions. Ukrainian troops are still moving slowly through entrenched Russian lines.

The uprising in Russia last month saw Prigozhin march on Moscow with thousands of mercenary troops behind his back.

Prigozhin halted his advance after reaching a deal with Putin that Belarusian leader Aleksander Lukashenko brokered.

Terrorism charges were dropped in exchange for safety guarantees for Prigozhin, who is now exiled in Belarus with the future of his mercenary group uncertain.

Story continues

Putin is moving to crack down on the military, interviewing soldiers and officers to assess how much support Prigozhin may have had in the armed forces.

Zelensky told CNN on Sunday that Putin does not control the entire military, especially the middle layer and the lower rank of the armed forces.

All that vertical of power he used to have, he said, is just crumbling down.

For the latest news, weather, sports, and streaming video, head to The Hill.
RAMALLAH, July 3 (Xinhua) -- The construction of Israeli settlements is witnessing an unprecedented acceleration all over the West Bank, said a senior Palestinian official on Sunday.

"Israel has been carrying out settlement construction in the West Bank since 1967, but now it is unprecedentedly accelerating," said Mahmoud Al-Aloul, deputy chairman of the Fatah movement. "The current Israeli government is legalizing settlements that are not existing."

Al-Aloul referred to the return of Israeli settlers to two settlements that were evacuated in 2005 in the northern West Bank, noting that this was accompanied by intensive construction in settlements on Palestinian lands.

Last week, Israel's Supreme Planning Council approved the construction of 5,700 new housing units in settlements in the West Bank, according to Israeli media.

The approval came days after the Israeli government passed a bill to cancel the need for the approval of the political leadership on construction procedures in Israeli settlements in the West Bank.

The United States was "deeply troubled" by the move, U.S. State Department spokesperson Matthew Miller told reporters in Washington, adding that U.S. officials had made clear publicly and privately to Israel their opposition to moves that advance settlements.

The Israeli settlement is one of the most prominent issues of dispute between the Palestinians and Israel, which was the main reason for halting the U.S.-sponsored direct peace negotiations between the two sides in 2014. 
Left: Carla post-surgery. Right: Carla enjoying her holiday after she got the all clear. Carla Mitchell

A woman, 36, was diagnosed with bowel cancer after developing anemia symptoms.

Carla Mitchell later learned she had a genetic condition that predisposed her to some cancers.

Rates of bowel cancer among younger people are steadily rising.

A 36-year-old woman discovered she had bowel cancer after an anemia diagnosis led to further testing.

In January 2021, when Carla Mitchell, from the UK, was experiencing a rapid heartbeat, achy legs, and became short of breath after climbing a flight of stairs, she initially assumed she was entering menopause, she told the charity Bowel Cancer UK. The early stages of menopause can begin as early as your 30s but most people notice changes in their early 40s.

Although it turned out she was anemic, both Mitchell and her doctor believed there was no reason to worry as she was young. But the results of a cautionary colonoscopy, a test where a camera goes through the anus, rectum, and colon, led to her being diagnosed with bowel cancer. Anemia is found in up to 75% of bowel cancer patients.

Banishing the stigma around bowel cancer being for older people

In April 2022, Mitchell learned that she had Lynch syndrome after consulting with a genetic counselor. The inherited condition increases a person's risk of getting certain types of cancer, including bowel, womb, and ovarian cancers.

She now feels passionate about educating people on Lynch syndrome, as well as recognizing the signs of bowel cancer.

"It's about banishing the stigma around bowel cancer being an older person's disease," she told Insider via email.

Carla on holiday a year after her cancer treatment. Carla Mitchell

Bowel cancer is becoming more common in young people

Bowel cancer, also known as colorectal cancer, is the second most common cause of cancer-related deaths in the US, according to the American Cancer Society.

The disease is typically associated with older people, but cases in younger people have been steadily rising for decades. One in five new cases are in people in their early 50s or younger, the ACS's latest figures show.

Story continues

Changes in bowel movements like constipation or diarrhea, as well as abdominal pain, unexplained weight loss, fatigue, and blood in stools, can all be early signs of bowel cancer. Although it is also common to show no symptoms until the cancer has grown or spread, making screening a crucial part of preventing the disease, per the ACS.

Catching the cancer early makes it more treatable and according to Bowel Cancer UK, almost everyone diagnosed at the earliest stage survives.

Bowel cancer treatment can include keyhole surgery

Carla before a round of chemotherapy. Carla Mitchell

After she was diagnosed with bowel cancer, Mitchell had keyhole surgery that lasted just over four hours, she told Insider.

During the procedure, known as a hemicolectomy, doctors removed the tumor and surrounding lymph nodes. Around a third of her intestine was removed and the ends were joined together.

Prior to this, Mitchell thought that her cancer was stage one, which means it has not spread outside the bowel wall and is easier to treat. But after the removed lymph nodes were biopsied, she was told that it had progressed to stage three, which means the cancer has spread to nearby lymph nodes. This led to her needing three rounds of chemotherapy.

Mitchell's treatment was successful and she is now in remission. She will have regular blood tests and CT scans for the next five years and yearly colonoscopies for the rest of her life due to her Lynch syndrome.

Read the original article on Insider
Kelsey Merritt was photographed by Ben Watts in Hollywood, Fla. Ben Watts/Sports Illustrated

Kelsey Merritt posed for the SI Swimsuit Issue three years in a row, starting with her rookie year in 2019, when she was photographed by Laretta Houston in the Bahamas. When she returned to the fold the following year, Merritt traveled to the Dominican Republic where she worked with visual artist Kate Powers. Her most recent magazine feature took place in 21, and the Filipino-American model posed for Ben Watts in Hollywood., Fla.

In addition to SI Swimsuit, the 26-year-old is known for her work with Victorias Secret. Shes also collaborated with notable brands like Calvin Klein and Philipp Plein. Merritt previously told the magazine shes proud to collaborate with a brand like SI Swimsuit that promotes beauty in its various forms while creating a safe space for younger women.

I wish I wouldve seen that, because when I was younger, I would see all of these beautiful girls [in media] and I was like, Theyre so perfect, theyre perfect, like theres nothing wrong with them, and to see these girls [today] show that [they] have the same things as you is pretty important and has to be talked about more, she stated.

Below are eight of our favorite photos from Merritts photo shoot in Florida that perfectly encapsulate the carefree, laid-back vibes of summer.

Ben Watts/Sports Illustrated

Ben Watts/Sports Illustrated

Ben Watts/Sports Illustrated

Ben Watts/Sports Illustrated

Ben Watts/Sports Illustrated

Ben Watts/Sports Illustrated

Ben Watts/Sports Illustrated
Bridget Bennett/AFP via Getty

The upcoming Barbie movie starring Margot Robbie and Ryan Gosling has been banned from domestic distribution in Vietnam, the countrys state media reported Monday, because the film includes a scene featuring a map showing Chinas unilaterally claimed territory in the South China Sea.

The so-called nine-dash line is used in Chinese maps to depict a huge U-shaped area in the seaamong the most economically and geostrategically important bodies of water in the worldwhich it claims as its own in contravention of international law. China has continued to uphold its historic rights claim on the area, which partly falls in what Vietnam considers its own coastal shelf, despite an international arbitration ruling by a court in The Hague in 2016 finding that China has no legal basis to its rights claim on the vast resources in the area.

The Barbie Trailer Doles Out Pink-Hued Parody Brilliance

We do not grant license for the American movie Barbie to release in Vietnam because it contains the offending image of the nine-dash line, Vietnams state-run Tuoi Tre newspaper reported, citing Vi Kien Thanh, the head of a government body in charge of licensing and censoring foreign films.

The Greta Gerwig-directed comedy, which is set to release on July 21, is just the latest movie to run afoul of Vietnamese censors for showing the nine-dash line. The 2019 DreamWorks Animation film Abominable was banned for the same reason, as was the 2022 film adaptation of the Uncharted video game series. Netflix pulled the Pine Gap spy drama from Vietnam in 2021 over two episodes showing maps which Hanoi officials said were a misrepresentation of Vietnams sovereignty and had angered and hurt the feelings of the entire people of Vietnam.

After the Second World War, Chinas then Nationalist government produced a Location Map of South Sea Islands which originally featured 11 dashes demarcating what it claimed as its own territory within the region based on centuries-old naval explorations. Later, in the 1950s, Chairman Mao gave up the claim to the Gulf of Tonkin to Vietnam, removing two of the dashes, though retaining most of its ancient sovereignty claim over the sea.

Story continues

Today, the South China Sea is one of the most crucial waterways on the planet owing to its rich natural resources of oil and gas, abundant fisheries, and significance as a vital trading route to the markets of Southeast Asia. In 2009, China sparked a major international dispute by submitting a map including the nine-dash line to the U.N. as part of a dispute with Vietnam.

Under the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea (UNCLOS), a treaty adopted by 168 countriesincluding Chinacoastal nations are granted a 200 nautical mile exclusive economic zone (EEZ) where they retain rights over all natural resources. In 2013, the Philippines started arbitration proceedings against China arguing that its nine-dash line violated UNCLOS, with the tribunal three years later ruling in the Philippines favor and concluding that Chinas historic rights claim was unlawful.

China has rejected the ruling and its coast guard vessels continue to patrol in the outer reaches of its nine-dash line some 700 nautical miles from the Chinese coastline. Competing claims in the South China Sea still remain among other countries including Taiwan, Malaysia, and Brunei.

Its not yet clear how the offending nine-dash line map made its way into the Barbie movie.

Read more at The Daily Beast.

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The shores of New England become a boundless playground each summer, made all the more sweet by the fact that the fun only lasts from June through September. Traveling north, the coastline unfolds like a series of postcards: Great blue globes of hydrangeas and clapboard cottages clad in rose-covered trellises. Quaint Quaker whaling towns with cobblestone streets and impressive Federal style architecture. Old captains houses with widow walks, seagulls balanced atop wharf pilings, and calm harbors reflecting the shimmering masts of myriad sailboats. Undulating dunes clad in seagrass give way to endless beaches and the ocean. It seems like theres a lighthouse around every corner, or a tiny, well-worn fishing village where generations of the same families have been pulling up lobsters and fish for centuries. It never gets old  but for those who have experienced it before, heres a look at a spate of newer, under-the-radar things to do in New England this summer.

Maine

Aragosta at Goose Cove

Given its 3,500 miles of coastline, its not surprising that New Englands northernmost state has a lot going on. In Kennebunkport, the new mens shop Dannah gives the chicest Soho boutiques a run for their money, with accessories ranging from wallets, watches, belts, sunglasses, and hats to bespoke apparel. Further north in Portland, the brand-new Fore Points Marina can accommodate yachts of all sizes and has a busy calendar of festive events and live music. Its also conveniently located within walking distance of the Old Port and its vibrant culinary scene and superb shopping. Located in the absurdly picturesque town of Camden is the Gilded Age mansion-turned-inn The Norumbega, a neo-Gothic gem that was purchased last year by noted New York architect William Tims and his partner, Brett Haynie, who are currently working their magic and updating the historic property. Further up, in Downeast Maine, the picturesque hamlet of Castine is home to Dennetts Wharf, a new offering from the powerhouse team behind Olmsted in Brooklyn. Owner Max Katzenberg and chef Taylor Hester (formerly of Husk in Charleston) will start catering dockside for diners who wish to remain aboard their boats. Meanwhile, Aragosta at Goose Cove has been open for five years but is yet to be discovered by the tourist hordes. Both a destination restaurant and luxury cottages on 21 acres, its one of Downeasts best-kept secrets. Finally, the Claremont Hotel in Southeast Harbor has everything the discerning vacationer could hope for: luxury guest rooms, cottages, and cabins and larger houses to rent, with numerous decks and porches from which to enjoy views of Somes Sound and Cadillac Mountain, and private charters on both sail and power boats. Best of all, its conveniently located to everything Acadia National Park has to offer.

More from Robb Report

Nantucket

Greydon House

After checking into the islands chicest new boutique hotel, The Greydon House on Broad Street, plot your plan of attack on all the new dining options available on New Englands biggest foodie island. Downstairs at the inn is the charming Venetian taverna Via Mare, but other new offerings abound. Over on Harbour Square, chef Gabriel Frasca of Straight Wharf is adding a fish market and 62-seat clam shack to his popular eatery. In homage to the ice cream shop that formerly occupied the space, Frasca will also offer soft-serve. The Gray Ladys newly refurbished grande dame, the White Elephant Inn, is hosting a pop-up by elevated Boston-based chop house Grill 23 and Bar; to mark its centennial, the property has undergone a complete refurb, stem to stern, from renowned Boston design firm Elkus Manfredi on interiors and custom, artisan-crafted outdoor furnishings from Arhaus. Meanwhile, the landmark Boarding House and Pearl restaurantsclosed since owners Angela and Seth Raynor sold them in 2021are being resurrected by the high-flying Blue Flag Group. The force behind the charming B&B Life House and upscale inn Faraway, the investors will retain the names of the landmark properties, with The Pearl specializing in fine dining employing French and Japanese cooking techniques. Plans for the Boarding House remain undisclosed, though presumably it will return to being the rowdy pre- and post-dinner hotspot its always been.

Newport

Stone Acre Picnics

Arguably Americas yachting capital (and the place where the Americas Cup was born), Newport is now home to the three-year-old Brenton Hotel, which sits across from the Long Wharf Marina on Americas Cup Way. The boutique propertys sleek contemporary interiors are reminiscent of a classic wooden sailboat; the lively restaurant, The Living Room, hosts a pajama brunch on weekends, while the popular rooftop bar offers panoramic views of the harbor and downtown. However, the propertys most impressive amenity is the Brenton One, a 36-foot Hinckley picnic boat, available for hire to watch the sunset from the water. Meanwhile, Stone Acre Picnics has crafted one of the most unique and memorable outings in Newport: elegant al fresco luncheons at historic Gilded Age mansions including The Elms, Marble House, and The Breakers, as well as several of Newports beautiful parks and beaches. Youll get a fully loaded picnic hamper, a low table set with linens and china, and comfortable cushions for seating; the Luxe Spread includes added touches like caviar service. Best of all: When youre done, simply pack up the picnic basket, toss your napkin on the table, and swan away like Gatsby and Daisy.

Marthas Vineyard

The Homeport

Excellent news for anyone on a boat in Vineyard Sound. On Cuttyhunkthe smallest of the Elizabeth Islands, and the only one open to the publicthe Raw Bar on the islands popular marina serves chowder, stuffed quahogs, and all the greatest hits, including oysters from Cuttyhunk Shellfish Farm. For those who prefer to remain cradled on the waves, they also operate the nightly floating Harbor Raw Bar, with a boat that circulates, serving locally grown bivalves shucked to order. Meanwhile, over in Menemsha, a Vineyard institution has risen like a Phoenix from the ashes. The long defunct but dearly missed restaurant The Homeport has been reborn, thanks to Boston chef and Vineyard summer resident Seth Woods. In addition to all of the New England clambake classics, they serve the best salade nicoise this side of the Cote dAzur; and for those choosing to skip the unparalleled views of Menemshas famous west-coast sunsets from the newly refurbished deck, The Back Door offers everything to-gofrom smash burgers to a full lobster bake.

Cape Cod

Chatham Bars Inn

The Capes most elegant hotel, the Chatham Bars Inn, continues to innovate this summer, with a number of offerings to add to an activity roster that already includes their wildly popular whale watch and white shark charters. At the inns eight-acre farm in nearby Brewster, guests can enjoy an al fresco farm-to-table dinner on Wednesdays through October 4. For those keen on reeling in their daily catch, guests can avail themselves of the only Orvis saltwater fly-fishing school in Massachusetts, which offers one- or two-day instruction. The inn has also paired up with Lexus for the Ultimate Beach Drive Experience. As the Capes only hotel to procure the required permits for guests to drive on nearby beaches, the luxurious offering employs the GX460 over-sand-vehicle and includes beach gear and games, surfcasting equipment, and a picnic lunch, with the option to add on a private clambake and campfire pit manned by staff from the inn.

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Four bills and a decade of emotional clashes later, Gov. Ron DeSantis signed a new Florida law that will overhaul the states alimony laws, including ending what is known as permanent alimony.

DeSantis signed the new measure, SB 1416, into law on Friday, a year after he vetoed a similar bill that would have also eliminated permanent alimony while also setting up a formula for alimony amounts based on the length of the marriage.

SB 1416 is the fourth bill of its kind that aimed to kill permanent alimony in the past decade. Along with the 2022 version DeSantis vetoed last year, former Gov. Rick Scott vetoed two other bills.

New Florida laws: Concealed carry, immigration, bathrooms: 8 controversial Florida laws go into effect July 1

Floridas new alimony law went into effect Saturday and not only does away with permanent alimony, but it also sets a five-year limit on what is known as rehabilitative alimony, allows alimony payers to seek modifications under certain conditions and more. Heres what you need to know.

Florida SB 1416 ends permanent alimony

The first section of SB 1416 introduces new language to Florida Statutes 61.08 that outlines alimony as temporary and striking references to its former permanent nature.

It will allow judges to reduce or terminate alimony, support or maintenance payments after considering several factors, such as the age and health of the person who makes payments; the customary retirement age of that persons occupation; the economic impact a reduction in alimony would have on the recipient of the payments; and the motivation for retirement and likelihood of returning to work for the person making the payments.

The four types of alimony the state now recognizes are temporary, bridge-the-gap, rehabilitative (now capped at 5 years) and durational.

The party seeking alimony must provide burden of proof

The second section of SB 1416 states that parties seeking support, maintenance or alimony now has the burden of proving their need for support, and the other partys ability to pay.

Story continues

What is permanent alimony?

Permanent alimony is what its name suggests  a permanent form of alimony that is paid until the spouse receiving the benefit dies, remarries or enters a supportive relationship.

Before the new law went into effect on Saturday, Florida was one of only seven other states that allow permanent alimony. Other states that allow it include Connecticut, New Jersey, North Carolina, Oregon, Vermont and West Virginia.

SB 1416 adds new considerations for alimony awards

Floridas SB 1416 adds several new considerations courts must now factor when determining whether or not to award alimony. Courts must lay out findings of fact for the type of alimony awarded and to serve as the basis for the length of time any reward is due.

It codifies many aspects of the law, including the burden of proof, but also the payors ability to pay and outlines special circumstances that must be met to secure alimony with life insurance.

The new bill also requires courts to anticipate the needs and necessities after the divorce, not just the lifestyle during the marriage, mental health, the permanent or temporary status of a partys mental health condition, a partys ability to obtain skills or education to contribute to survival, the economic repercussions of adultery and more.

Legal hurdles: New Florida laws go into effect July 1 but a handful have already met legal hurdles

Durational alimony

The new law caps durational alimony to three years or less, and those terms are limited based on the duration of the marriage, with certain exceptions, and may not exceed the lesser of the obligees reasonable need or 35 percent of the difference between the parties net incomes.

Changes to retirement

Ex-spouses making alimony payments will now have a process where they can seek modifications to alimony agreements when they want to retire.

What will happen to existing alimony agreements?

Senate bill sponsor Joe Gruters, R-Sarasota, has stated that the new law would not unconstitutionally affect existing alimony settlements.

So what you can do right now, under case law, we now codify all those laws and make that the rule of law. So we basically just solidify that. So from a retroactivity standpoint, no, because if anything could be modifiable before, its still modifiable. If its a non-modifiable agreement, you still cant modify that agreement, Gruters told a Senate committee in April.

This article originally appeared on Pensacola News Journal: DeSantis signs new Florida bill killing permanent alimony. What is it?
Tour de France stage 2: Race leader Adam Yates leads out teammate Tadej Pogacar for the time bonus sprint on Jaizkibel

Two days in, the 2023 Tour de France is already going swimmingly for UAE Team Emirates, with Adam Yates enjoying his first day in the yellow jersey having won the opener in Bilbao, and team leader Tadej Pogacar gaining time on GC rival Jonas Vingegaard on both stages so far.

The second day, another day in the hills over 209km to San Sebastian, saw Yates work for Pogacar on the final climb of the day, the Jaizkibel, setting up the Slovenian to attack for the bonus seconds atop the famous climb.

He did just that, putting another three seconds into Vingegaard in addition to a further four at the finish line with third place.

Yates, meanwhile, came in with the main group to maintain a reduced six-second lead over Pogacar and his brother Simon, with the prospect of at least two further days in yellow lying ahead as sprint stages in Bayonne and Nogaro loom.

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The current GC standings at the 2023 Tour de France

"It was a good day," Yates said of his first day in the maillot jaune this July. "We controlled pretty much all day with no one to help us, which wasn't a surprise.

"The final got a little bit messy. We tried to set Tadej up for the bonus seconds. Then I found it pretty difficult to do a lead out on a pan-flat stage as a 58kg rider. I stayed behind him to block riders from behind on his wheel, and that was it. A good day."

Yates was at the head of the peloton as it thinned out heading up the second-category Jaizkibel, well-known to the peloton for those who race the Donostia San Sebastian Klasikoa, which Yates won back in 2015.

His brother Simon, second to him in Bilbao, launched an attack on the way up, but he and UAE kept control before Pogacar and Vingegaard blasted off to contest the top of the climb alone before they were caught back on the descent.

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"I was doing the lead-out, so I was already going pretty much full gas," Yates said. "It's actually quite hard to gauge your effort because you can see 1km to go but after that, there are no signs.

"I know the back of the climb a little bit but I know the opposite direction more, so I knew roughly where I was. It's hard to gauge the effort but I think we did a good job and Tadej took the bonus seconds, so a job well done."

Pogacar's seconds at the top and another four for third place at the line bring him to 16 in total for the Tour de France to Vingegaard's five.

After Saturday's opening stage, the Dane said that the Tour probably won't be decided by the four seconds Pogacar had taken on him, but the more they add up, the larger the effect they'll have on the GC standings of the 2023 Tour de France. At least that's what Yates and UAE are hoping.

"He's super quick and it's quite easy for him to just pick up a few seconds here and there," he said of Pogacar. "If we do this over three weeks it adds up quite quickly. So for sure, we'll keep doing this every time there's an opportunity and then yeah, hopefully, we'll have enough time in Paris."

Yates also praised his team leader's attitude. He admitted on Saturday that Pogacar is the number one at the squad, despite general manager Mauro Gianetti's insistence before the Tour that he and Yates were co-leaders. Yates said that Pogacar elevates everyone's level at the squad.

"Having someone like this as a leader brings the level of the whole team up," Yates said. "He's motivated all the time and it makes everyone else motivated all the time.

"He's definitely easy to work with. Like I said yesterday  over the next three weeks we can do better things and we'll see what happens."
[Source]

Hong Kong police are offering a reward of 1 million Hong Kong dollars (approximately $127,600) for information leading to each arrest of eight self-exiled pro-democracy activists.

Pro-democracy activists: The activists are former pro-democracy lawmakers Nathan Law, Ted Hui and Dennis Kwok, unionist Mung Siu-tat, lawyer Kevin Yam and activists Finn Lau, Anna Kwok and Elmer Yuen, reported the Associated Press.

The activists  seven men and one woman  are currently living abroad in the U.S., Britain, Canada and Australia, all of which have have suspended their extradition treaties with Hong Kong.

Accusations: According to police, the eight activists have violated the territory's National Security Law, with offenses ranging from collusion with foreign forces to inciting secession. The police have obtained arrest warrants from the court for the activists, who continue to remain vocal against Beijings crackdown on dissent.

More from NextShark: Singaporean OnlyFans creator Titus Low opens Only Creamery cafe on 6/9

About the law: The bounties reportedly mark the first time police have issued rewards for information on suspects accused of violating the legislation since it was introduced in 2020 to prohibit sedition, secession and subversion against Beijing. There have since been over 260 people arrested under the National Security Law.

Enforcing the law: Steven Li, chief superintendent of the police's National Security Department, noted that police have extraterritorial jurisdiction to pursue suspects overseas who threaten the city's national security.

However, they cannot arrest them if they remain overseas.

More from NextShark: Chilling Facebook Live video shows final moments inside Nepal plane before deadly crash

Were absolutely not staging any show or spreading terror. Were enforcing the law, Li said, urging the activists to return and surrender for a reduction in their sentences.

Freedom in Britain: Law, who currently resides in Britain, believes that the charges are an attempt to suppress their voices.

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I am just a Hongkonger who speaks out for Hongkongers, Law tweeted. I hope that all friends on the list are well, and I ask Hongkongers not to cooperate with any related pursuit or bounty actions. We should not limit ourselves, self-censor, be intimidated or live in fear.

More from NextShark: Meet Yui Susaki, the 24-year-old Japanese female wrestler with 12 gold medals and a 72-0 record

British Security Minister Tom Tugendhat also tweeted his support for the activists.

Hong Kongers in the UK enjoy exactly the same freedoms as the rest of us, he wrote. These warrants are trying to interfere with our internal affairs. [Law] and his fellow pro-democracy activists are under our protection, and enjoy our full support.

More from NextShark: Chinatown in Pittsburgh officially recognized as historic landmark after four attempts over 12 years
The sale is running until July 7.

Sigga Ella/Getty Images

Low-cost Icelandic airline Play is making the dream of a trip to Europe a reality with 35 percent off flights to popular destinations across the continent this fall.

As part of the sale, travelers can book flights at a major discount for travel from Sept. 1 through either Oct. 31 or Dec. 15, depending on the destination, Play shared with Travel + Leisure. The sale is valid to book from July 3 through midnight Eastern Time on July 7.

To book, vacationers must use the promo code PLAY4JULY.

Travelers can fly from any of the United States airports that Play flies out of, including the Baltimore/Washington International Thurgood Marshall Airport, Boston Logan International Airport, New York Stewart International Airport, and Washington Dulles International Airport.

The sale is valid on travel to Iceland, Copenhagen, London, Dublin, and Amsterdam through Dec. 15, and to Glasgow, Dusseldorf, and Hamburg through Oct. 31, according to the airline. The flight prices include all taxes, fees, and carrier charges.

Play first started operating flights in Europe in 2021 before launching its first flight from the U.S. in 2022. The airline operates a "hub-and-spoke model" in which all flights connect through Reykjavik before heading on to other European destinations or back to the U.S.

Play is a low-cost carrier and charges per flight leg for everything from checked bags to food and drinks, but offers a package that includes both carry-on bags and priority boarding.

The sale is a welcome reprieve since international travel has become extremely expensive this summer, especially to Europe where airfare is the highest it has been in at least five years.

Still, there are ways to save money on a European vacation once travelers arrive by opting for a more affordable hotel, utilizing public transportation (like Europes extensive train network), and even considering a cruise.

For more Travel & Leisure news, make sure to sign up for our newsletter!

Read the original article on Travel & Leisure.
Churchill Downs Inc. announced Monday that it is extending its track suspension of trainer Bob Baffert through the calendar year 2024.

After Medina Spirit tested positive for a banned substance following finishing first in the 2021 Kentucky Derby, the track suspended the six-time Derby winning trainer for two years, through the 2023 Derby.

In a press release Monday, Churchill said it is extending the suspension based on continued concerns regarding the threat to the safety and integrity of racing he poses to CDI-owned racetracks.

Baffert will not be allowed to enter any horses at Churchill-owned tracks through 2024.

Mr. Baffert continues to peddle a false narrative concerning the failed drug test of Medina Spirit at the 147th Kentucky Derby from which his horse was disqualified by the Kentucky Horse Racing Commission in accordance with Kentucky law and regulations, CDI said in its statement. Prior to that race, Mr. Baffert signed an agreement with Churchill Downs which stated that he was responsible for understanding the rules of racing in Kentucky and that he would abide by them. The results of the tests clearly show that he did not comply, and his ongoing conduct reveals his continued disregard for the rules and regulations that ensure horse and jockey safety, as well as the integrity and fairness of the races conducted at our facilities. A trainer who is unwilling to accept responsibility for multiple drug test failures in our highest-profile races cannot be trusted to avoid future misconduct. Mr. Baffert will remain suspended from entering horses at all racetracks owned by CDI through 2024. After such time, we will re-evaluate his status.

Baffert fought the original suspension unsuccessfully in the courts, blaming the ointment Otomax for the betamethasone found to be in Medina Spirits blood sample. Otomax was used to treat Medina Spirits skin rash in the days before the race.

When a United States District Court in May upheld Churchills two-year suspension of Baffert, CDI released a statement that included the possibility it could extend the suspension.

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As we stated when we suspended Mr. Baffert in June 2021, we reserve the right to extend his suspension and will communicate our decision at the conclusion of the initial two-year suspension period, CDI said. This U.S. District Court ruling in our favor is a victory in our ongoing actions and steadfast commitment to protecting the safety of our equine and human athletes.

In addition to Churchill Downs, the ban on Baffert extends to Colonial Downs in Virginia, Ellis Park in Henderson, Fair Grounds in Louisiana, Presque Isle Downs in Pennsylvania and Turfway Park in Florence, all properties owned by Churchill Downs Inc.

Baffert attorney Clark Brewster told Thoroughbred Daily News on Monday:

This has nothing to do with anything that Bob has done or said. Bob simply has come forward and said he used this particular topical and that the rules permitted it. He felt that the rules dealing with betamethasone involved with injecting a horse within 14 days of the race. Hes been open and transparent and hasnt been in any way accusatory. The words in this release are shocking and dont deal with the reality in any way.

Baffert has won the Kentucky Derby with Silver Charm (1997), Real Quiet (1998), War Emblem (2002), American Pharoah (2015), Justify (2018) and Authentic (2020).

The 70-year-old Baffert won the 2023 Preakness Stakes on May 20 with National Treasure. It was first start in a Triple Crown race since Medina Spirit was allowed to race in the 2021 Preakness.

On that same afternoon at Pimlico, the Baffert-trained Havnameltdown was euthanized after breaking down in a race at the Baltimore track.

Bafferts original two-year suspension ended at the conclusion of Churchill Downs spring meet. After 12 equine fatalities during the first month of the spring meet, CDI moved the remainder of the meet to Ellis Park in Henderson. Racing there concluded Monday.

Medina Spirit died after a Dec. 6, 2021, workout at Santa Anita. A necropsy failed to find a definitive cause of death.

Gaming halls with HHR machines are booming in Kentucky. Now comes sports gambling.

Like it or not, Preakness win proves Bob Baffert isnt going away

Bob Baffert can run in the 2024 Kentucky Derby. What did his suspension accomplish?

There is a way to stop the insanity that is the current state of horse racing

Churchill Downs announces new racing safety measures after outbreak of horse deaths
Jaime Lee - Getty Images

The aircon instantly cools my skin as I walk through the doors  respite from the 30-degree heat outside. Im at the new Acibadem Atasehir Hospital, one of ten Acibadem plastic surgery-focussed sites in Istanbul, Turkey  and Im far from the first young woman to enter, keen to learn more about having a cosmetic procedure abroad. If the bandaged heads and nose braces at the airport are anything to go by, I won't be the last either.

For 24 years now, the Acibadem group has claimed to offer "premium healthcare", encouraging people to travel overseas for 'affordable' surgery (be it for cosmetic reasons or otherwise). They're just one of numerous private clinics operating out of the country, catering to a growing market of so-called medical tourists.

Last year, Turkey made an estimated $3bn from cosmetic medical tourism, a figure predicted to soar to $20bn in 2023  in spite of reports expressing concern that reckless surgeries are being dished out in the country left, right and centre. This cheap surgery boom has been so popular that some Turkish clinics are now even trying to expand across Europe and into the UK.

Aside from bargain prices and the appeal of a poolside recovery, it's easy to wonder if any of these clinics actually offer a positive experience for patients. Sure, quick and easy cosmetic surgery tacked onto the end of a holiday might sound appealing in an increasingly superficial era of TikTok filters and skinny jabs, but horror stories about botched ops and even death following surgery aren't uncommon either  so why are numbers rapidly rising? And should we be worried about potential expansion?



Hospital or high-end hotel?

Acibadem, which made $120m in revenue last year, is one of the clinics plotting to set up home on British soil. It proudly advertises its status as a leading plastic surgery provider in Turkey and four (but not all) of its hospitals are accredited by the Joint Commission International (an independent authority for patient safety). Each of the four sites I visit on my guided tour are spotless, resembling high-end hotels rather than hospitals.

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Each department, from oncology to dentistry, has top-of-the-range equipment too. At the Maslak hospital in Acibadem I meet Associate Professor Erdem Guven, an aesthetic and plastic surgery specialist. We speak  in a clunky manner, due to a slight language barrier  about his speciality (breast augmentations) and how he believes that Turkey is the best place in the world for medical tourism. Dr Guven credits this with the "good education" he believes doctors and surgeons receive and speaks fervently of the importance of an in-depth pre-operative consultation to manage expectations (which includes going through possible complications).

But I'm alarmed when Dr Guvem adds that he has "little time for in-person chats'' and that these pre-operative consultations are done online. How then, I ask, can he really gain a sense of the patient's needs, body-makeup, size, and overall health?



Jaime Lee - Getty Images

"I can make recommendations for a patient that wants to send images or videos," he explains. "But if they want to ask something, it doesn't work for me because it takes a lot of time. Everybody wants to know about something."

In contrast, however, a clinic spokesperson told Cosmopolitan UK that this was a misunderstanding and that "he simply meant an arrangement needs to be made in advance for a face-to-face consultation, because whilst other, smaller clinics may promise patients a consultation within hours of an enquiry being made, as a busy surgeon he cannot offer the same".

Still, this uncertainty around in-person assessments is worrying  and at odds with the expectations around private medical care. A face-to-face consultation is a legal requirement before any kind of surgery in the UK. In fact, multiple in-person consultations are often put in place before having a cosmetic procedure here, so that patients can give fully informed consent. Seeing your body in the flesh also means a doctor can confirm they are able to safely do the surgery.

Acibadem's Professor Dr Mehmet Veli Karaaltn, shares that even under his 'premium' care, it's normal for the process to feel anything but smooth for the patient. "I'm a little bit crazy," he says, "So, sometimes I can change all the plans and the patient looks like [pulls a shocked face]. I might add something [hinting at a procedure] and then the guys who [price the procedure] say 'Doctor, we didn't tell these numbers to her'." The doctor then laughs: "That's not my problem."

When Cosmopolitan UK contacted Acibadem to follow up on these comments, a spokesperson said the doctor was "clearly joking" and that "the costs and treatment plan do not change without a patient being aware". They also wanted to highlight Professor Dr Mehmet Veli Karaalt's past work, which includes successfully leading a team that separated conjoined twins and carrying out a pioneering face transplant. "The financial side is not in the professor's remit," they added. "It is recommending the correct treatment with patient safety being paramount."



It's clear that Acibadem looks the part, but the disparity in what we consider to be standard pre-operative care does nothing but ring alarm bells  and the language barriers could pose issues for patients.

Later in my visit, I'm invited up to the swanky top-floor offices to watch a presentation on Acibadems plans to better establish themselves in western healthcare markets. "In 2017, our first western market hospital opened in Amsterdam," a spokesperson says, explaining they've already become the largest private healthcare provider in Bulgaria.

"We would like to understand the [UK] system, adds Rasim Topuz, the medical group's chief executive officer and general manager. During the presentation they explain that over the past 3 to 4 years they have "learnt a lot" about the European market, from the regulations, to the different needs and cultures  and their bidding to enter the UK market has already started, with the opening of a new 'contact centre' in London, where prospective patients can ask questions about possible nips and tucks overseas.

David Rowland, Director of the independent, non-party affiliated think tank, Centre for Health and the Public Interest (CHPI), tells Cosmopolitan UK that any new private clinic would have to be licensed and registered to provide services in the UK. "It's a legal requirement. They couldn't dodge that," he continues, "But, there are quite a number of legal loopholes, particularly around non-surgical cosmetic interventions..."



Medical tourism: a well-oiled marketing machine

Once upon a time, this idea of shopping for a new image was for the rich and famous alone, but in recent years, cosmetic surgery has become both more accessible and normalised. TikTok is awash with influencers and celebrities with newly curved behinds, shrunken noses, flattened stomachs and the hashtag #TurkeyTeeth now has over 273m views. The price difference between domestic surgery and surgery abroad really is staggering (for context: a nose job in the UK costs between 4,000 and 7,000, but in Turkey starts at 1,800).

While Turkish regulations prevent direct-to-customer marketing in the private healthcare sector, indirect (i.e. via influencers) is permitted, incidentally making this normalisation of surgery more insidious and covert than we're led to believe, and, when we do see the bad side (e.g. BBLs gone wrong), our brain's natural optimism bias makes us think it will never happen to us, creating a perfect storm.



This acceptance along with the commodification of medical tourism means that, today, were at risk of treating procedures like fast fashion  and theyre being marketed to us in much the same way too, as though drastically changing our bodies is a simple cure-all self-esteem boost.

In essence, medical tourism is a fast-paced, well-oiled marketing machine that knows exactly how to convert 'patient enquiry' (as offered in the new Acibadem London hub) into paying customer at pace. Anecdotally, theres also evidence that many offer lightning speed, easy booking methods too, with plenty of correspondence conducted over the ever-so-casual platform of WhatsApp (yep, you don't even need to call to lock in a boob job).

This is creating concern among psychologists, explains Stelios Kiosses, MS GMBPsS BACP reg. psychotherapist and instructor at Harvard University. "It is crucial to understand that plastic surgery does not solve or act as a substitute for dealing with underlying emotional or psychological issues," he tells Cosmopolitan UK. "I would advise seeking therapy or counselling if you are struggling with body image concerns."

Kiosses adds that this sort of cheap surgery is especially dangerous for those with Body Dysmorphic Disorder (BDD, believed to impact 2% of the population), as exposure to this kind of messaging will exasperate vulnerabilities and for some, could lead to plastic surgery addiction.

It's something that Charlotte*, a 35-year-old hair extension specialist from Ayrshire, Beith, knows about all too well. For years, the word 'ugly' chipped away at her self-esteem, rattling around her head on loop thanks to BDD. Charlotte knew surgery in the UK wasn't financially possible, but registering for a new credit card and travelling abroad for it was. Before she knew it, Charlotte had booked her surgery through WhatsApp (not with Acibadem), and was on a plane to Turkey.

Charlotte's impulsive approach to these cheap nip and tucks, which she attributes to her ADHD, led her to have multiple procedures in the country. And, soon enough, she discovered their true cost when she collapsed on her kitchen floor following severe reactions to prescription painkillers after a botched breast augmentation. She describes screaming through the wall, hoping her neighbours would hear and rush her to A&E. Thankfully, they did. But less than a year later, Charlotte was back on the plane to Turkey, for a 'final' facelift.

This time, she was on high alert. "I knew something wasn't right from the minute I met the surgeon," she says. But, once the money had been exchanged, Charlotte felt she couldn't turn back. They don't offer refunds, after all. Even when persuaded into changing her procedure from a nose job and a facelift, to a skin lift (less expensive than what she had been booked in for), Charlotte didn't feel empowered enough to say no.



Jaime Lee - Getty Images

The NHS can't always pick up the pieces

In 2018, The Mirror reported that the NHS had been left with a 30m bill, thanks to complications following overseas cosmetic surgery. A year later, research raised concerns about the lack of regulation regarding cosmetic procedures abroad too, and more recent reports of people dying from elective procedures (such as Brazilian Butt Lifts) in Turkey are becoming ever-frequent. So much so, the BAAP (The British Association of Aesthetic Plastic Surgeons) has warned of a 44% increase in complications from cosmetic surgery abroad (100% of which came from Turkey).

The ship-off and shut-up approach is a worrying one. Particularly if it means that patient-doctor relationships morph into consumer-service provider. Commodifying healthcare leads to intensified pressure across the entire healthcare system, leading to higher and preventable patient deaths.

Rowland tells Cosmopolitan UK that, thanks to underfunding over the past decade, a damaging two-tier healthcare system is already emerging in the UK. He explains that underfunding causes unfairness in the system.

"You have people who are waiting for a very long time, and can afford to pay," he says, "It's unfair on them because they've paid their taxes and they shouldn't be having to pay for care. But it's also unfair on those people who can't afford to jump the queue."

But this two-tier disparity has a wider knock-on effect. "There's a small proportion of that, which is feeding the kind of medical tourism industry. That is a problem for the NHS," Rowland says.



In many cases the NHS can help alleviate patients suffering because of medical tourism's failings, but it's not a one-stop-shop for corrective cosmetic surgery and, as we all know, is experiencing unprecedented difficulties with staffing, wait times and funding. So, if the outcome of the surgery doesn't pose a threat to life (from physical or mental injury), or you haven't developed an infection, it's unlikely your local hospital will be able to intervene.

Some people may also feel too ashamed to seek medical attention, because of the consumer-based nature of the surgery. For those willing to give their original surgeon a second chance (Acibadem stress that "in cases where there's a medical complication, [we] always guarantee revisional treatment in [our] facilities"), flying back to Turkey carries risks of clotting complications and exposure to infection. The only other option is to suck it up and pay for corrective surgery in your home country.

Cheaper can sometimes prove far more expensive in the long run, says Dr Paul Banwell, a UK-based plastic and cosmetic surgeon, who has performed numerous corrective surgeries. "There are, of course, a plethora of first-class surgeons abroad, who will do an excellent job, but that isn't the point," he says, "It's about the recovery period. Complications can occur with any surgery, the issue is how to manage them. If you are abroad, they cannot be managed properly.

This concern is shared with Rowland, who explains that our exit from the EU has put more people seeking surgery abroad at risk, because we're no longer protected by the laws designed to help keep us safe. "You don't know who the providers are; you don't know how well trained they are. You don't know what happens when something goes wrong," he says.



Risk aside, for some people going abroad is a last resort and their only hope. Lorna, 31, a Senior Graphic Designer from Suffolk, says she found herself drowning after trying to address weight-related health issues in the UK. Lorna says that she felt trapped in her body after years of trying everything at her disposal, including seeking a UK-based referral for bariatric surgery (a group of weight-loss surgery operations that change your digestive system). Unable to afford private UK healthcare, she decided to take out a small loan and travel to Turkey instead, for keyhole gastric sleeve surgery at VM Medical Park Hospital (which did not respond to a request for comment), in Mersin, Adana.

After months of research I contacted a hospital, who gave me a consultant based in the UK, who I then WhatsApped, she explains, I had a phone call with her which took about an hour and a half, going through every single question I could possibly dream of. From there, all I had to do was arrange my flights. Despite having to speak through Google Translate to her medical team, Lorna says with regards to my quality of life, it's just a no-brainer  I would do it again in a heartbeat.

But Lorna hasnt heard a word from her surgeon, or the hospital she visited (not Acibadem), since  meaning aftercare has been placed firmly in the hands of her local GP.



A week after my own trip to Turkey, Charlotte shows me her latest botched surgery scar, an open wound behind her ear, as we sit with our tea on Zoom. Even now, after her collapse, she tells me she couldn't shake the feeling that if she just nipped and tucked one more time, she'd finally be happy with herself. It's hard to hear. And harder still is that Charlotte is also facing legal action from the hospital she visited, after speaking out on TikTok  but is unable to find legal representation because of clauses in her contract with the hospital that state she's unable to speak about the clinic negatively on social media. Sadly, her story isn't an isolated incident. Findings by the OECD (Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development) report a disquieting trend of patients unsuccessfully prosecuting for negligence abroad, thanks to sneaky clauses.

I went to Turkey hoping to find accountability for the continued failures that the medical tourism industry inflicts on desperate people. Instead, I found red flags galore and a disconcerting truth: behind the flashy veneer of Turkey's medical tourism industry, and its picture perfect 'before and afters', is a money driven machine with woeful shortcomings, targeting vulnerable people. And it's looking for permanent residence on UK soil. All we can do is hope that doesn't happen.



* Name has been changed

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CAIRO, July 3 (Xinhua) -- The United States is to blame for destabilizing the Middle East, an Egyptian expert has said.

The United States has pursued hostile behavior and discrimination based on exploitation, imposing a fait accompli policy and igniting the region with wars and military aggressions in Iraq, Libya, Syria, Yemen, Sudan, Iran, Afghanistan, and other countries, Abu Bakr al-Deeb, advisor to the Cairo-based Arab Center for Research and Studies and an Egyptian researcher in political economy, told Xinhua.

"The United States has also destabilized the region and pursued what the U.S. administration called the creative chaos policy, which reached its climax in what was known as the Arab Spring in 2011, whose effects are still extending now," al-Deeb said.

He also stressed that the U.S. behavior in the region contributed to creating an atmosphere that rejects the United States and its aggressive, arrogant policies of exploiting the wealth of the region.

"The United States worked to ignite conflicts to sell and test its weapons at the expense of lives, blood, capabilities, rights, present and future of the peoples in the region," he said. 
Ron DeSantis

Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis at one point seemed to represent a new generation of Republican leadership.

During his first year as Governor of Florida, he visited the Pulse memorial and told gay lawmakers like Carlos Guillermo Smith and shooting survivors they would have no problem with his governance of LGBTQ+ issues, whatever other differences they had. Yet as he runs for president, DeSantis has rapidly built up a robust anti-LGBTQ record, including signing a bathroom segregation bill into law.

Hes also restricted access to trans health care, threatened business licenses for venues allowing minors into drag performances, and enacted an infamous dont say gay law that forbids classroom instruction about gender identity and sexual orientation.

As DeSantis ramps up homophobic rhetoric in his quest for the GOP nomination, hes now attacked Trump for, of all things, promising in 2016 to protect LGBTQ+ Americans from terrorist attacks like the Pulse shooting. A video distributed by the DeSantis campaign attacks Donald Trump for allowing transgender contestants into beauty pageants and allowing Caitlin Jenner into the womens room at Trump Tower. Moreover, it revels in the scorn from the LGBTQ community that DeSantis has drawn the past two years.

Nearly a decade after the U.S. Supreme Court affirmed marriage equality, the rush to the far right raises a shocking question. Is this how the 2024 Republican nomination for president will be decided?

The latest video promoted by the DeSantis team seems to have unleashed a public debate on the right over whether homophobia remains a value to which conservatives must cling.

I spent the last 7 years of my life working with Trump to make the GOP a more welcoming place for gays WHILE ALSO being anti-groomer, anti-woke and pro religious liberty, tweeted out conservative activist David Leatherman. Ive even worked WITH DeSantis on this agenda. This ad is a slap in the face, and makes any LGBT person supporting DeSantis look like an absolute idiot.

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Of note, the ad was originally distributed by the Twitter account @ProudElephantUS, an unabashedly pro-DeSantis account that in recent days attacked actor Christopher Moltisanti for criticizing a Supreme Court decision allowing service providers to discriminate against LGBTQ+ people.

The post releasing the video makes clear a desire for DeSantis to attack LGBTQ+ people on all matters.

The left FEARS Ron DeSantis because he actually follows through with his promises, reads the post with the controversial video. He will destroy WOKE ideology and stop the groomers right in their tracks. Why settle for Trump when we can have a much MORE conservative and much MORE electable candidate in Ron DeSantis?

Other conservative consultants make clear they badly want to make limits on LGBTQ+ rights a central plank of the presidential election. Spence Rogers of Go Right Strategies tweeted a wish list of anti-queer policies he wants the GOP to champion.

The fight is over who will stop the grooming by fixing it at the source, he posted. -Bring back traditional marriage -Repeal no fault divorce -Bring Christ back in school

-Ban gay adoption -Ban drag queen story hour -Ban grooming in schools -Death penalty for pedos -Ban corporate grooming

But other Republicans see room for tolerance of queer rights  to an extent. Rod Thomson, a Republican communications consultant in Florida, said there needs to be a delineation between gay and lesbian rights and what he sees as a trans agenda.

LG is one thing and big tent for the GOP, he posted on Twitter. But T has become atrocious, preying on children and parents, and must be stopped. I know a lot of gay Republicans, and every one is opposed to the trans agenda, which it sounds like you are. So let's not lose sight of the ultimate goal.

Even some of the targets of the ad like Jenner have come out against allowing trans women in womens sports, even defending a law DeSantis signed in Florida. But Jenner, who is supporting Trump, felt the video distributed by the campaign went too far.

DeSantis has hit a new low. But hes so desperate hell do anything to get ahead - thats been the theme of his campaign, she tweeted. You cant win a general, let alone 2028 by going after people that are integral parts of the conservative movement!

Trump, of note, has boasted about how much traction he found attacking transgender people this year. But supporters have stressed he won the White House in a 2016 upset in part by growing the GOP coalition.

Some LGBTQ allies of DeSantis questioned parts of the recent video but stuck by the candidate overall. Gays Against Groomers founder Jaimee Michell put up an extensive post weighing the pros (slamming Trumps record on trans bathroom access) and cons (attacking trans conservative Lady MAGAs mere existence) of the messaging strategy.

I do think this video is a bit of a slap in the face to myself and other rational gays who not only dont have a home on the left due to the democrats destructive policies, but who have worked hard to show that the Republican Party is for everyone. I also dont believe this video is attacking us directly, Michell posted.

Overall as a right wing lesbian, do I love the video? No, I dont. Do I understand why they put it out? Mhm. Do I think it will alienate younger voters? Yes, but Im not sure if that matters right now. Caving to and appeasing them is how we have become the party of losers that we are today. Am I a single issue voter that will now overlook all Trumps failures and baggage and run back to him over it? Also no. Im still voting for the only Republican that can beat Biden in the general, and has done more than any politician to eviscerate the lefts agenda during his time in office.

But many gay Republicans now wonder if the DeSantis strategy attacking all things Pride will damage the entire GOP brand.

Team DeSantis is now using gays and lesbians as a wedge issue to divide the Republican Party, Leatherman wrote. And smearing Trump for being the most pro gay Republican in history. Apparently its no longer about protecting children, its going after gays.
How AI will transform fashion  as well as pretty much every other sector  is a matter of great discussion worldwide. But executives at the Johannesburgs Sandton City Shopping Center in South Africa are exploring just that with a new tech-driven ad campaign.

The digital campaign plays off last years City of Icons campaign, which highlighted tried-and-true wardrobe staples like the Little Black Dress, sunglasses, trenchcoat, denim, hoodie, suit, shoes, sunglasses handbags and lipstick. This time around there are AI-generated iterations of these items and other styles meant to magnify the campaigns futurism theme.

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The images juxtapose a model wearing a specific item such as a hoodie with one created using a Midjourney Bot on Discord. This a generative artificial intelligence program is essentially text-to-image AI. By submitting a text prompt, the bot then generates what is described as a beautiful piece of art within 60 seconds.

The campaign is meant to encourage Sandton City shoppers to envision not only potential yet-to-be incarnations of the garments, but also to buy existing versions in the shopping centers many stores. The images and an explanatory video play up the power of possibilities when technology and classics collide.

The retail, office and leisure space houses more than 300 international and local brands. Visitors will find the AI-powered campaign on screens throughout the complexs shopping center, which is the first six-star green-star shopping mall in the African continent to receive that rating by the Green Building Council of South Africa.

To further spread the word vis social media, Sandton City has recruited friends of the brand such as foodie, fashion and lifestyle specialist Naqiyah Mayat; actor Kyle Clark; fashion and beauty content creator Zoe Msutwana, and Victoria Duckitt. Other personalities with some sway in fashion, beauty, accessories and technology are also pitching in  Nafisa Akabor, Angie Detsikas, Europa Art Groups director and buyer Melina Lambrakis, and Dior South Africas general manager Armine Anders.

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The Little Black Dress is reimagined in the new campaign.

Consumers can see the imagined staples and also learn how the project was brought to a life in a behind-the-scenes six-part series that explains how the AI was leveraged by tuning in on Sandton Citys social media. There, they will also be clued in to how the shopping centers retailers are using AI to improve and personalize their retail offerings.

In keeping with the forward-spinning outlook, an AI model, ChatGPT, was leveraged to script Sandton Citys social media component of the campaign, and an AI text to speech generator enhanced the voiceover recorded for the videos. By leveraging this iconic technology, the ambition is to enhance its relationships with visitors to the centre, and play a role in the future of their imagination.

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Click here to read the full article.
A motorcyclist was killed Sunday afternoon on Interstate 95 in southern Brevard County, the third traffic-related death  and the second to involve a motorcyclist  to occur in the county in 48 hours as the long Independence Day weekend got underway.

The latest crash happened about 1:30 p.m. Sunday in the southbound lanes of Interstate 95 near mile marker 163. close to Micco Road in southern Brevard County. Traffic near the site was backed up along the southbound lanes as investigators combed over the crash site.

A traffic fatality was under investigation on Interstate 95 near the Micco Road exit.

Florida Highway Patrol. troopers said the unidentified motorcyclist, a man whose age and hometown were not available Sunday afternoon, was traveling southbound on the interstate when he attempted to change lanes. He lost control, veered off the road and struck a tree, troopers reported. The motorcyclist was pronounced dead at the scene.

The deadly incident follows a crash near Viera on Saturday afternoon that left a Rockledge motorcyclist dead. Earlier that day, at about 12:32 a.m., a pedestrian in his early 50s was struck and killed after being hit by a northbound vehicle in the 200 block of State Road A1A, Cocoa Beach police reported.

More: Brevard beachgoers reminded to stay near lifeguards, think safety over holiday weekend

Police did not release the names of any of the accident victims.

Authorities are reminding motorists to be vigilant about traffic over the holiday.

At least 2.8 million Floridians will take at least one trip of 50 miles or more through Tuesday, according to AAA, the auto travel and insurance company that monitors holiday traffic.

J.D. Gallop is a criminal justice/breaking news reporter at FLORIDA TODAY. Contact Gallop at 321-917-4641 or jdgallop@floridatoday.com. Twitter: @JDGallop.

This article originally appeared on Florida Today: Third traffic fatal reported in Brevard as July Fourth weekend begins
THOMAS SAMSON - Getty Images

Stage 4 - Dax to Nogaro (181.8km) - Tuesday, July 4

Stage 4 of the 2023 Tour de France should offer another opportunity for the sprinters to take center stage. The day begins in Dax, not far from the home of French legend Andre Derrigarde, who won 22 stages at the Tour between 1953 and 1964.

Its a pretty straightforward stage with a lumpy profile but only one categorized climb (the Category 4 Cote de Demu) coming with about 27.4km to go. It could shed a few sprinters if they havent recovered well enough from the Tours first three stages, but given how few chances they have this week, we think their teams will do whatever it takes to keep them in the leading peloton.



The finish takes place outside of Nogaro on the Circuit Paul Armagnac, a motorsport track outside the town. The riders will complete about half of the circuit inside the final 3km, with several wide sweeping corners as the race winds its way around the circuit and toward the finish line. Things could get dicey, as teams arent as used to racing on circuits like theseas much as the track is designed for racing its high speeds, its not something the riders themselves are accustomed to.

Its the Fourth of July, but with two hard days in the Pyrenees up next, we dont expect any changes on the Tours General Classification, with Great Britains Adam Yates (UAE Team Emirates) most likely enjoying another trouble-free day in yellow. Instead, the real fireworks should come at the finish, as the Tours fast men look to make the most of one of only a handful of days for sprinters in this years Tour.

The weather shouldnt pose any issues for the riders, with cloudy skies and warm temperatures expected throughout the day.



Riders to watch

This is the last chance for Great Britains Mark Cavendish (Astana) to break the record for the most stage wins in Tour history before the race heads into the Pyrenees. Hell have the usual suspects to contend with including Belgiums Stage 3 Jasper Philipsen (Alpecin-Deceuninck), Dutchman Fabio Jakobsen (Soudal-Quick Step) and Dylan Groenewegen (Team Jayco AlUla), and Australias Caleb Ewan (Destny Lotto). Belgiums Wout van Aert (Jumbo-Visma) will continue his attempt to try and win a stage, but he might find it hard on such a flat finish.







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When to Watch

Its a holiday, so feel free to tune-in late while prepping for your afternoon festivities. If youve got the time you can tune-in around 10:25 a.m. EDT to see the riders tackle the Category 4 Cote de Demu and the run-in to the finish in Nogaro. But if thats too much of a commitment, tune-in as late as you can: the stage is expected to finish around 11:20 a.m. EDT.



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On its surface, a bunch of young women baking, folding laundry, and modeling cottagecore fashion on social media wouldnt appear to have much to do with the rise of global authoritarianism. But these influencers, many of whom post using the hashtag #tradwife, short for traditional wife, are stealthily political. In addition to sharing sourdough cookie recipes and tips for how to achieve a retro hair flip, influencers model what they believe a good Christian wife should be: one who submits to her husband. With hundreds of thousands of followers, tradwives are becoming a cultural force, marketing a lifestyle and an ideology to young people online. And the nostalgic vision that they offer for how society can be better is the same one evoked by a vast right-wing political movement working to erode democratic institutions, values, and norms.

In the most recent season of my podcast, White Picket Fence, we examine the connections between the rise of authoritarianism  globally and within the U.S.  and cultural trends like the tradwives. Two places illustrate how these political and cultural forces intersect: Hungary, which under the rule of Prime Minister Viktor Orban, has become ground zero for right-wing authoritarianism, and Florida, where Governor Ron DeSantis and his supermajority Republican state legislature have passed a spate of laws that closely resemble Hungarys.

Under Orbans leadership, Hungary has prioritized reversing the countrys lagging birth rate, enacting a number of policies that encourage heterosexual marriage and childbearing. Many, at face value, sound relatively innocuous. Women in Hungary with multiple children receive, depending on the number of kids, lifetime waivers on income taxes, as well as loans and subsidies to help pay for larger cars and housing. But Orban is not merely encouraging the kind of motherhood that the tradwives perform. He is framing such traditional families as under attack  by Muslim immigrants, LGBTQ people, even Hungarian-born Jewish financier George Soros  and taking aim at these perceived threats. In 2020, Hungary passed legislation that ended legal recognition for transgender people. That same year, Orban and the Fidesz party-controlled parliament amended the constitution, defining marriage as between a man and a woman, banning adoption by same-sex couples, and stating that the country protects childrens rights [only] to the gender identity that they were assigned at birth.

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Hungarys erosion of rights doesnt stop there. As Andrea Peto, a professor of gender studies at Central European University, told me on the podcast, Orban is also working to replac[e] women as agents of change [by positioning] mothers as the only acceptable and desirable position of women in the society. As evidence, she cited a report issued by the Hungarian state audit office that cautioned against pink education (i.e., the overrepresentation of women in higher education). The report claimed that women with college degrees were responsible for Hungarys demographic decline. By framing traditional motherhood as uniquely moral and patriotic, Peto said, Orban provides a values-based rationale for keeping women away from the labor market[and] create[s] an alternative vocabulary to the language of rights.

Many American conservatives have been fanboying over Orban for years (former Fox News host Tucker Carlson broadcast from Hungary in 2021; in 2022, Orban was a featured speaker at the Conservative Political Action Conference in Dallas, Texas). But Ron DeSantis has taken the conservative embrace of Hungarian-style illiberalism to the next level, leaning into the culture wars that Orban has deployed to great effect. Floridas Dont Say Gay Act bears a striking resemblance to Hungarian legislation that banned any mention of anything LGBTQ-related in K-12 educational materials. This past March, Florida Republicans introduced a bill that would ban instruction on gender studies, intersectionality, and critical race theory in public colleges and universities  an effort that closely resembled Orbans 2018 ban of gender studies in Hungarian universities. DeSantis has even taken a page out of Orbans book when it comes to the press. Hes currently brainstorming ways to pass legislation that would limit free speech protections and make it easier for people to win defamation lawsuits against the media.

Its not that all tradwives are on TikTok explicitly stating their support for such policies (although some are certainly fans of DeSantiss work). But many women  and mothers, specifically  do play a critical role in these efforts. It is why conservative advocacy groups like Moms for Liberty have been such indispensable partners to DeSantis, providing the veneer of popular support from moms who claim that this agenda benefits them and their kids. And its why the tradwives movement is such a complementary cultural force. As Eviane Leidig, Ph.D., author of The Women of the Far Right Social Media Influencers and Online Radicalization, told me on the podcast, some tradwives have explicit connections to right-wing groups, with some influencers permitting their images to be used in far-right propaganda. But even those that eschew overt references to politics mainstream the kind of family values that are frequently used to advance extremism in a way that feels like a choice  at least for now.

If we are to stop the growing threat of illiberalism from taking hold in the U.S., then we must reject the false nostalgia that is being aggressively marketed to us, whether it comes from angry men in MAGA hats or attractive tradwives in well-kept homes. Make no mistake: the #tradwives are not a harmless social media trend. Through their cultivated depictions of domestic bliss, they are building demand for a set of policies that encourage  or even conscript  women to assume traditional roles. And they are distracting their audience from the politicians who are dismantling democracy and eroding rights and freedoms in service of that vision.

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Originally Appeared on Teen Vogue

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UPS union workers scored a major victory in their labor battle that could get them closer to averting a strike on Aug. 1. The shipping giant agreed to end its two-tier wage system Saturday in its ongoing contract negotiations with the International Brotherhood of Teamsters, the union that represents more than 340,000 UPS workers.

Despite the triumph, the sometimes-acrimonious labor negotiations continue ahead of the current contracts expiration of July 31. UPS has pledged to reach a contract agreement for covered workers by no later than July 5.

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The Teamsters were able to get two more big wins at the negotiating table, establishing Martin Luther King Day as a full holiday for the first time, and ending forced overtime on drivers days off.

Gains made by the Teamsters at the national table with UPS today cannot be overstated. From the jump, UPS knew we demanded an end to forced overtime, the respect to take MLK Day as a real holiday, and the complete destruction of the unfair 22.4 wage system, said Sean OBrien, general president of the Teamsters, in a statement.

The 22.4 wage classification has been unpopular with union workers since it was established in 2018.

Under the current contract, UPS drivers are divided into the two separate tiers of full-time and hybrid drivers. Full-time drivers are called regular package car drivers (RPCD), work Monday through Friday and make roughly $42 in hourly wages, at least double that of the 22.4 hybrid drivers, who split their time between deliveries and working in the warehouses.

The Teamsters argue that UPS uses this tiered system to get lower-paid junior workers to deliver packages on weekends and cut delivery costs. The union alleges that these drivers are doing the same amount of work as higher-paid drivers who work on the weekdays, and should therefore earn the same pay and benefits.

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Eliminating the classification moves the 22.4 drivers to full-time seniority status and adjusts their pay to the appropriate RPCD rate.

While OBrien applauded these critical victories, he is not taking his eye off the ball, with negotiations from Sunday into Monday.

Make no mistakewe are not done, OBrien said. UPS knows we must reach full agreement on other economic issues, including higher wages, within the next few days. As we continue to reinforce, the #Teamsters demand that a historic new contract is in place by Aug. 1.

On Sunday, the Teamsters also notched their final supplemental contract agreement with UPS, the 44th region-specific deal in total. Teamsters Local 710, representing 7,000 full- and part-time UPS employees in the Chicago area, reached a tentative agreement with UPS on a new five-year deal.

The tentative agreement was unanimously approved by the Local 710 UPS Bargaining Committee and resolves all non-economic issues for the local UPS membership. Economic issues are addressed under the ongoing national negotiations.

ILWU Canada head tells government to stay out of our business

Elsewhere in the North American supply chain, there isnt much confidence that the recent dockworker strike at Canadian West Coast ports will reach a quick conclusion.

Approximately 7,400 dockworkers representing the International Longshore and Warehouse Union (ILWU) went on strike Saturday after negotiations with their employers, the British Columbia Maritime Employers Association (BCMEA), failed to reach an agreement.

In a press briefing held outside the Federal Mediation and Conciliation Services office in Vancouver, ILWU Canada president Rob Ashton had one warning for the Canadian government: butt out.

The federal government must stay out of our business, Ashton told reporters on Sunday. If the BCMEA gets their way, and their way is to let the government make this collective agreement for them, there will never be labor peace on the waterfront.

Ashton shared some of the frustrations among the unions employees, highlighting that longshore workers were called heroes when dealing with the unsafe conditions of Covid-19 while employers gorged themselves on record profits.

He also criticized the BCMEA negotiations, accusing them of being slow to act while the union reacted in record time.

Over the last few weeks before we issued strike notice, the employers would give us a proposal and we would respond that day, Ashton said. They then would take seven-to-10 days to respond to our proposal up until June 25, when they refused to respond to our proposal. They refused to meet with us. Thats when this union decided to take strike action.

After 33 consecutive hours of negotiations, the talks between the two parties temporarily paused on Sunday evening, and the talks were set to resume on Monday, according to the BCMEA.

Click here to read the full article.
Seaford, Delaware updated its charter in April to give businesses a vote in local elections. iStock/Getty Images

Seaford, Delaware is seeking to give business entities the right to vote in local elections.

It's not the first town in Delaware, an already business-friendly state, to enact this policy.

Some activists oppose the law, saying it "puts the idea that corporations are people on steroids."

Just 340 people voted in Seaford, Delaware's latest election, according to CBS. For a small town of about 8,500 people, that's a voter turnout of only 4%.

A new bill now being considered in the small town, however, could help increase those numbers.

Seaford's town leaders want to give corporations based there the right to vote.

In April, Seaford Mayor David Grenshaw cast the tie-breaking city council vote to amend the city's charter, giving business entities  ranging from small businesses to large corporations  the right to vote in local elections. The bill must still pass through the state's legislature. On June 30, it passed the House and will appear before the Senate in the next legislative session, CNN reported.

Grenshaw said he hoped that giving businesses the right to vote would revitalize the Seaford community after the closure of a local factory led to years of economic gloom, according to CNN.

"These are the people we're trying to attract to our community, that we're asking to invest, to hire," Grenshaw told WRDE, a local news station. "Why wouldn't we want to give them a right to vote? I find it hard to believe, who wouldn't want that to happen?"

Despite Grenshaw's confidence, residents and voting rights activists worried about corporate influence in politics are skeptical.

Claire Snyder-Hall, executive director of Common Cause Delaware, a voting rights watchdog group, told CNN the law "puts the idea that corporations are people on steroids."

Under the 14th Amendment, corporations are considered people, and throughout US history courts have continued to grant them constitutional protections. In the 2010 Citizens United case, the Supreme Court ruled that corporations can spend unlimited funds on campaigns  as long as they are not formally coordinating with the campaign itself. The ruling led to the creation of super PACs that have the ability to receive unlimited funds and independently campaign for candidates, which has raised concerns about the potentially outsized impact of wealthy donors on election outcomes.

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Seaford isn't the first municipality in Delaware to pass this kind of law. Delaware is already one of the most business-friendly states in the country. It has no sales tax, no tax on intellectual property, and no corporate income tax. Corporations all over the country register and keep addresses in Delaware for these reasons. The state, which has a population of just over 1 million, will likely soon be home to more than 2 million registered businesses.

In places outside of Seaford, where similar laws have been approved, it hasn't always gone smoothly. In Newark, Delaware, one property manager in charge of several LLCs voted 31 times in a single election, according to CBS, forcing the town to revise the law.

Read the original article on Business Insider
After a decade-plus freeze-out, Uzbekistan is not only back on the cotton-sourcing map but it also has some of the industrys biggest names supporting its return.

Earlier this month, Better Cotton unveiled its so-called Roadmap of Sustainability Developments, which it devised with the Central Asian nations key stakeholders to maintain the momentum of extensive government-led reformsthe same ones that led both the International Labour Organization and the Cotton Campaign to declare a breakthrough in the elimination of systematic child and forced labor in 2022.

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Because Uzbekistan is the worlds sixth-largest cotton grower, operations there are intrinsic to Better Cottons goals of mainstreaming more sustainable cotton production. The programs goals are to build effective management systems, raise farmers awareness of sustainability best practices and promote decent working conditions for laborers.

Better Cotton sees its work in Uzbekistan as an opportunity to create value and drive improvements for the environment, producers, and workers in the countrys cotton sector, and to bring us closer to our vision of a world where all cotton is more sustainable, said Rachel Beckett, senior program manager at the Geneva- and London-headquartered organization.

Shortly after, the International Labour Organization (ILO) and the World Banks International Finance Corporation (IFC) touted a new Better Work program designed to uplift working conditions and boost competitiveness in Uzbekistans textile and garment sector. For the next two years, they said, Better Work will serve as an industry convener, collaborating with the countrys tripartite constituentsmeaning government, employers and workers organizationsto monitor and improve labor standards through compliance assessments, training and advisory services.

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The program will support the sustainable growth of textile and garment manufacturing, which has the potential to create thousands of new, decent jobs for mostly women garment workers in rural areas across the country, said Conor Boyle, officer-in-charge at Better Work.

The European Bank for Reconstruction and Development (EBRD) is supplying the programs initial funding.

The international financial institution has poured money into dozens of projects in Uzbekistan before, including $60 million into an IFC-backed pilot program for growing cotton in Uzbekistan based on the Better Cotton approach. Indorama Agro, the agricultural enterprise it featured, has attracted scrutiny by civil society groups, which accuse it of land grabbing and other human rights violations. Indorama, which remains a Better Cotton partner, has vehemently denied the allegations.

The IFC, too, is a longstanding investor in Uzbekistan, with contributions going back to 2016. The ILO has been monitoring the cotton harvest in Uzbekistan under an agreement with the World Bank since 2015, when it estimated that one in eight people of working age in Uzbekistan participated in what it dubbed the worlds largest recruitment effort. Seven years later, the agency concluded that reforms had progressed to the point that the cotton sector was now free of child and forced labor.

But Allison Gill, forced labor program director at the Global Labor Justice-International Labor Rights Forum, the Washington, D.C. nonprofit that coordinates and hosts the Cotton Campaign, told Sourcing Journal that the most important thing that Uzbek authorities can do to open its textile industry to new markets is to allow freedom of association and real organizing and bargaining rights for workers.

The Cotton Campaign, whose members include the American Apparel & Footwear Association, Anti-Slavery International and Human Rights Watch, recently urged German businesses, consultancies and multi-stakeholder groups to jettison ties with Turkmenistans textile industry to avoid profiting from the same state-sanctioned forced labor that was endemic in its Uzbek neighbor.

The German co-hosts of this Investment Forum have failed to conduct even the most basic human rights due diligence in their selection of partners, Raluca Dumitrescu, coordinator of the Cotton Campaign, said of an event in Dusseldorf that promoted German investments in Turkmenistan earlier this month. Encouraging sourcing of textiles from Turkmenistan, as long as Turkmen cotton continues to be produced with state-imposed forced labor, defies national laws governing human rights due diligence and supply chains that bind global brands and retailers, including the Supply Chain Act in Germany.

Gill noted that Uzbekistan, while much changed from 12 years ago, still harbors key risks. These include the lack of independent and credible monitoring, grievance and remedy mechanisms for workers; major restrictions on association, expression and assembly; and a dearth of independent trade unions.

Tackling these will help create an enabling environment in which labor rights can be monitored and reported on by workers themselves and improved through collective bargaining, Gill said. This is good for workers and good for business; it ensures rights are respected and allows problems to be resolved so business can flow without interruption.

International developmental and financial organizations have a role to play, too, she said.

The most important thing development banks and donor agencies can do to support the industry is to make real investments in freedom of association and other fundamental labor rights, Gill said. There really is no substitute. Brands looking to source from Uzbekistan need real guarantees that labor rights in their specific supply chains are respected.

Better Cotton and Better Works initiatives are separate programs, though they plan to partner with the same pool of vertically integrated cotton clusters to ensure social and environmental compliance across the entire value chain. There are roughly 130 clusters, according to a panel at the Global Fashion Summit in Copenhagen last week.

In practice, it means that in the same cluster, Better Cotton will cover the cotton production part to support cotton farmers to adopt more sustainable production practices including social and labor aspects in line with our [Better Cotton] standard, a Better Cotton spokesperson said. On the yarn and fabric production as well as processing stages, Better Work will focus on improving labor standards.

Even so, Gill said guaranteeing human rights remains a challenge where independent human and labor rights organizations arent allowed to register and freedom of speech is under attack. She said that the only democratically elected union in the country, which is operating at Indorama, has been crushed with impunity by both the company and the authorities.

Programs like Better Work have a role to play in capacity building and promoting labor standards, but are no substitute for the fundamental labor rights that are vital not only for workers but also to give brands confidence, Gill added.

Click here to read the full article.
Image of an Air Force pilot saluting

One of the blessings of social media is that we can share and view inspiring, once-in-a-lifetime moments that we would never have heard of otherwise. In one such case, an unexpected moment between a pilot and a passenger touched the hearts of thousands of people online.

While boarding his flight, a veteran had a chance encounter with the pilot who flew him out of Afghanistan almost ten years ago.

The Facebook page A Fly Guy's Cabin Crew Lounge, which shares airline-related posts, recently uploaded the story of a chance encounter that neither party could have ever anticipated. When veteran Todd Love boarded his flight to Portland, he was approached by the pilot, who had noticed him as he was getting on the plane. The pilot asked Love if he had been in the military, and if he had been in Afghanistan in 2010.

RELATED: 'Veteran' At The Airport Called Out For His 'Stolen Valor' And Shows His Driver License As Proof Instead Of Military ID

To Loves surprise, the pilot told him that he recognized him. He was the pilot who had flown him out of Afghanistan.

He recognized me, my injuries, and my face, the Facebook post read. He told me he never knew if I survived or not. Love learned that the pilots name is Marc Vincequere, who now flies with United Airlines. Crazy small world, Love wrote.

RELATED: Kind Florida Man Spends Free Time Taking Kids Without Dads Fishing To Build Memories & Teach Lessons

Both of the men involved in the meeting shared more of each of their stories online.

According to an interview with the Worcester Telegram, Lt. Col. Vincequere served in the Air Force for 21 years and had flown commercially for United for 13 years as of 2018. He and Love were both deployed to Afghanistan in 2010.

Love elaborated on his experience in a story he submitted to Love What Matters. During his deployment, he lost the lower half of his body after stepping on an IED and was rescued by helicopter from an active battlefield. He was then flown from Afghanistan to DC, a flight he later described as the most painful time in [his] life. I feel like living each moment at that point was a choice and I was desperately hanging in as best I could, Love said.

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Love shared that gratitude helped him deal with the severity of his injuries, and that he had always wanted to meet everyone involved from the moment [he] stepped on that IED to the moment [he] was back [on] US soil.

RELATED: My Son Left For 13 Weeks Of Basic Training & The Depth Of My Grief Surprised Me

He wrote, Its humbling to know that these people are from many walks of life, each practicing their profession, from different nationalities, skin tones, and belief systems as well. All I know is I owe them my life.

When Love came across Vincequere, he was on his way to Oregon to meet with his former platoon. They were training for a fundraiser for the Force Reconnaissance Foundation where the others would carry him up Mt. Baker to raise money for members of the Reconnaissance Community of the United States Marine Corps.

Comments on the Facebook post thanked both men for their service and were glad to have read such an amazing story. Amazing how small our world is and yet we can touch so many. Thank you for your service, said one commenter.

RELATED: Military Dad's Kids Find A Way To Tell Him 'I Love You' Everyday While He's Deployed

Jessica Bracken is a writer living in Davis, California. She covers entertainment and news for YourTango.

This article originally appeared on YourTango
Lian Xinming (L) and his student Wang Zihan use a drone to monitor an overnight habitat of Tibetan antelopes during their migration near the Qumar River Bridge along the Qinghai-Tibet Highway in Hoh Xil, a natural reserve in northwest China's Qinghai Province, on the early hours of June 16, 2023.

Lian Xinming, a researcher at the Northwest Institute of Plateau Biology under the Chinese Academy of Sciences, has dedicated more than 20 years of research to Tibetan antelopes since he first set foot on Hoh Xil in 2002.

"Tibetan antelope protection stands as a successful example of human involvement in rescuing endangered animals," said Lian. "Using advanced technology to gain insights into what lies behind the migration of a species can also inspire the research and conservation efforts for other species."

According to the Sanjiangyuan National Park Administration, the population of Tibetan antelopes in the Hoh Xil national natural reserve has recovered from less than 20,000 during the initial stages of protection to more than 70,000. (Xinhua/Zhang Cheng)

Lian Xinming and his team members monitor an overnight habitat of Tibetan antelopes during their migration near the Qumar River Bridge along the Qinghai-Tibet Highway in Hoh Xil, a natural reserve in northwest China's Qinghai Province, on the early hours of June 16, 2023.

Lian Xinming, a researcher at the Northwest Institute of Plateau Biology under the Chinese Academy of Sciences, has dedicated more than 20 years of research to Tibetan antelopes since he first set foot on Hoh Xil in 2002.

"Tibetan antelope protection stands as a successful example of human involvement in rescuing endangered animals," said Lian. "Using advanced technology to gain insights into what lies behind the migration of a species can also inspire the research and conservation efforts for other species."

According to the Sanjiangyuan National Park Administration, the population of Tibetan antelopes in the Hoh Xil national natural reserve has recovered from less than 20,000 during the initial stages of protection to more than 70,000. (Xinhua/Zhang Cheng)

Lian Xinming (L) and his student Wang Dong store the feces of Tibetan antelopes in a nitrogen tank in Hoh Xil, a natural reserve in northwest China's Qinghai Province, June 15, 2023.

Lian Xinming, a researcher at the Northwest Institute of Plateau Biology under the Chinese Academy of Sciences, has dedicated more than 20 years of research to Tibetan antelopes since he first set foot on Hoh Xil in 2002.

"Tibetan antelope protection stands as a successful example of human involvement in rescuing endangered animals," said Lian. "Using advanced technology to gain insights into what lies behind the migration of a species can also inspire the research and conservation efforts for other species."

According to the Sanjiangyuan National Park Administration, the population of Tibetan antelopes in the Hoh Xil national natural reserve has recovered from less than 20,000 during the initial stages of protection to more than 70,000. (Xinhua/Jin Liwang)

Lian Xinming and his team members use a drone to monitor an overnight habitat of Tibetan antelopes during their migration near the Qumar River Bridge along the Qinghai-Tibet Highway in Hoh Xil, a natural reserve in northwest China's Qinghai Province, on the early hours of June 16, 2023.

Lian Xinming, a researcher at the Northwest Institute of Plateau Biology under the Chinese Academy of Sciences, has dedicated more than 20 years of research to Tibetan antelopes since he first set foot on Hoh Xil in 2002.

"Tibetan antelope protection stands as a successful example of human involvement in rescuing endangered animals," said Lian. "Using advanced technology to gain insights into what lies behind the migration of a species can also inspire the research and conservation efforts for other species."

According to the Sanjiangyuan National Park Administration, the population of Tibetan antelopes in the Hoh Xil national natural reserve has recovered from less than 20,000 during the initial stages of protection to more than 70,000. (Xinhua/Jin Liwang)

Lian Xinming and his team members drive to an overnight habitat of Tibetan antelopes during their migration near the Qumar River Bridge along the Qinghai-Tibet Highway in Hoh Xil, a natural reserve in northwest China's Qinghai Province, on the early hours of June 16, 2023.

Lian Xinming, a researcher at the Northwest Institute of Plateau Biology under the Chinese Academy of Sciences, has dedicated more than 20 years of research to Tibetan antelopes since he first set foot on Hoh Xil in 2002.

"Tibetan antelope protection stands as a successful example of human involvement in rescuing endangered animals," said Lian. "Using advanced technology to gain insights into what lies behind the migration of a species can also inspire the research and conservation efforts for other species."

According to the Sanjiangyuan National Park Administration, the population of Tibetan antelopes in the Hoh Xil national natural reserve has recovered from less than 20,000 during the initial stages of protection to more than 70,000. (Xinhua/Jin Liwang)

Lian Xinming poses for a photo in Hoh Xil, a natural reserve in northwest China's Qinghai Province, June 15, 2023.

Lian Xinming, a researcher at the Northwest Institute of Plateau Biology under the Chinese Academy of Sciences, has dedicated more than 20 years of research to Tibetan antelopes since he first set foot on Hoh Xil in 2002.

"Tibetan antelope protection stands as a successful example of human involvement in rescuing endangered animals," said Lian. "Using advanced technology to gain insights into what lies behind the migration of a species can also inspire the research and conservation efforts for other species."

According to the Sanjiangyuan National Park Administration, the population of Tibetan antelopes in the Hoh Xil national natural reserve has recovered from less than 20,000 during the initial stages of protection to more than 70,000. (Xinhua/Jin Liwang)

Tibetan antelopes are pictured in Hoh Xil, a natural reserve in northwest China's Qinghai Province, June 15, 2023.

Lian Xinming, a researcher at the Northwest Institute of Plateau Biology under the Chinese Academy of Sciences, has dedicated more than 20 years of research to Tibetan antelopes since he first set foot on Hoh Xil in 2002.

"Tibetan antelope protection stands as a successful example of human involvement in rescuing endangered animals," said Lian. "Using advanced technology to gain insights into what lies behind the migration of a species can also inspire the research and conservation efforts for other species."

According to the Sanjiangyuan National Park Administration, the population of Tibetan antelopes in the Hoh Xil national natural reserve has recovered from less than 20,000 during the initial stages of protection to more than 70,000. (Xinhua/Zhang Cheng)

This file photo taken in March 2019 shows Lian Xinming (R, front) collecting samples in the Sanjiangyuan area in northwest China's Qinghai Province.

Lian Xinming, a researcher at the Northwest Institute of Plateau Biology under the Chinese Academy of Sciences, has dedicated more than 20 years of research to Tibetan antelopes since he first set foot on Hoh Xil in 2002.

"Tibetan antelope protection stands as a successful example of human involvement in rescuing endangered animals," said Lian. "Using advanced technology to gain insights into what lies behind the migration of a species can also inspire the research and conservation efforts for other species."

According to the Sanjiangyuan National Park Administration, the population of Tibetan antelopes in the Hoh Xil national natural reserve has recovered from less than 20,000 during the initial stages of protection to more than 70,000. (Xinhua)

Lian Xinming collects the feces of Tibetan antelopes for research in Hoh Xil, a natural reserve in northwest China's Qinghai Province, June 15, 2023.

Lian Xinming, a researcher at the Northwest Institute of Plateau Biology under the Chinese Academy of Sciences, has dedicated more than 20 years of research to Tibetan antelopes since he first set foot on Hoh Xil in 2002.

"Tibetan antelope protection stands as a successful example of human involvement in rescuing endangered animals," said Lian. "Using advanced technology to gain insights into what lies behind the migration of a species can also inspire the research and conservation efforts for other species."

According to the Sanjiangyuan National Park Administration, the population of Tibetan antelopes in the Hoh Xil national natural reserve has recovered from less than 20,000 during the initial stages of protection to more than 70,000. (Xinhua/Jin Liwang)

Lian Xinming looks up at the drone he uses to monitor an overnight habitat of Tibetan antelopes during their migration near the Qumar River Bridge along the Qinghai-Tibet Highway in Hoh Xil, a natural reserve in northwest China's Qinghai Province, on the early hours of June 16, 2023.

Lian Xinming, a researcher at the Northwest Institute of Plateau Biology under the Chinese Academy of Sciences, has dedicated more than 20 years of research to Tibetan antelopes since he first set foot on Hoh Xil in 2002.

"Tibetan antelope protection stands as a successful example of human involvement in rescuing endangered animals," said Lian. "Using advanced technology to gain insights into what lies behind the migration of a species can also inspire the research and conservation efforts for other species."

According to the Sanjiangyuan National Park Administration, the population of Tibetan antelopes in the Hoh Xil national natural reserve has recovered from less than 20,000 during the initial stages of protection to more than 70,000. (Xinhua/Zhang Cheng)

Lian Xinming (L) and his student Wang Zihan use a drone to monitor an overnight habitat of Tibetan antelopes during their migration near the Qumar River Bridge along the Qinghai-Tibet Highway in Hoh Xil, a natural reserve in northwest China's Qinghai Province, on the early hours of June 16, 2023.

Lian Xinming, a researcher at the Northwest Institute of Plateau Biology under the Chinese Academy of Sciences, has dedicated more than 20 years of research to Tibetan antelopes since he first set foot on Hoh Xil in 2002.

"Tibetan antelope protection stands as a successful example of human involvement in rescuing endangered animals," said Lian. "Using advanced technology to gain insights into what lies behind the migration of a species can also inspire the research and conservation efforts for other species."

According to the Sanjiangyuan National Park Administration, the population of Tibetan antelopes in the Hoh Xil national natural reserve has recovered from less than 20,000 during the initial stages of protection to more than 70,000. (Xinhua/Jin Liwang)

Lian Xinming shows the feces of Tibetan antelopes he collected for research in Hoh Xil, a natural reserve in northwest China's Qinghai Province, June 15, 2023.

Lian Xinming, a researcher at the Northwest Institute of Plateau Biology under the Chinese Academy of Sciences, has dedicated more than 20 years of research to Tibetan antelopes since he first set foot on Hoh Xil in 2002.

"Tibetan antelope protection stands as a successful example of human involvement in rescuing endangered animals," said Lian. "Using advanced technology to gain insights into what lies behind the migration of a species can also inspire the research and conservation efforts for other species."

According to the Sanjiangyuan National Park Administration, the population of Tibetan antelopes in the Hoh Xil national natural reserve has recovered from less than 20,000 during the initial stages of protection to more than 70,000. (Xinhua/Jin Liwang)

Lian Xinming (R) and his student Wang Dong collect the feces of Tibetan antelopes for research in Hoh Xil, a natural reserve in northwest China's Qinghai Province, June 15, 2023.

Lian Xinming, a researcher at the Northwest Institute of Plateau Biology under the Chinese Academy of Sciences, has dedicated more than 20 years of research to Tibetan antelopes since he first set foot on Hoh Xil in 2002.

"Tibetan antelope protection stands as a successful example of human involvement in rescuing endangered animals," said Lian. "Using advanced technology to gain insights into what lies behind the migration of a species can also inspire the research and conservation efforts for other species."

According to the Sanjiangyuan National Park Administration, the population of Tibetan antelopes in the Hoh Xil national natural reserve has recovered from less than 20,000 during the initial stages of protection to more than 70,000. (Xinhua/Jin Liwang)

Lian Xinming (R) and his student Wang Dong use binocles to observe the migration of Tibetan antelopes in Hoh Xil, a natural reserve in northwest China's Qinghai Province, June 15, 2023.

Lian Xinming, a researcher at the Northwest Institute of Plateau Biology under the Chinese Academy of Sciences, has dedicated more than 20 years of research to Tibetan antelopes since he first set foot on Hoh Xil in 2002.

"Tibetan antelope protection stands as a successful example of human involvement in rescuing endangered animals," said Lian. "Using advanced technology to gain insights into what lies behind the migration of a species can also inspire the research and conservation efforts for other species."

According to the Sanjiangyuan National Park Administration, the population of Tibetan antelopes in the Hoh Xil national natural reserve has recovered from less than 20,000 during the initial stages of protection to more than 70,000. (Xinhua/Jin Liwang)

Lian Xinming and his team members prepare to use a drone to monitor an overnight habitat of Tibetan antelopes during their migration near the Qumar River Bridge along the Qinghai-Tibet Highway in Hoh Xil, a natural reserve in northwest China's Qinghai Province, on the early hours of June 16, 2023.

Lian Xinming, a researcher at the Northwest Institute of Plateau Biology under the Chinese Academy of Sciences, has dedicated more than 20 years of research to Tibetan antelopes since he first set foot on Hoh Xil in 2002.

"Tibetan antelope protection stands as a successful example of human involvement in rescuing endangered animals," said Lian. "Using advanced technology to gain insights into what lies behind the migration of a species can also inspire the research and conservation efforts for other species."

According to the Sanjiangyuan National Park Administration, the population of Tibetan antelopes in the Hoh Xil national natural reserve has recovered from less than 20,000 during the initial stages of protection to more than 70,000. (Xinhua/Jin Liwang)
Veterinarian debunks myth on why dogs are afraid of fireworks as he reveals how to comfort your pet on July 4

A veterinarian has debunked a myth about why dogs are afraid of fireworks, as he explained how to help your pets when they hear fireworks on the Fourth of July.

On his TikTok, Ben, who goes by the username @ben.the.vet, frequently shares videos with tips on how to care for animals. In a video shared last October, he did a duet of another clip, which showed a dog looking out of the window of a home and barking at fireworks outside. The initial video also claimed that dogs are scared of fireworks because they only hear banging.

However, according to Ben, theres a different reason why dogs get nervous around fireworks.

I think dogs are scared of fireworks because theyre really loud, and they sound threatening, he said. If your dogs are frightened of fireworks, dont just expose them to [fireworks] straight off, because theyre probably going to be traumatised, and itll be counterproductive.

According to The Humane Society of the United States, many animals have been so frightened by fireworks on the Fourth of July that they run from otherwise familiar environments and people, and sadly become lost. Dogs could also suffer devastating or even fatal health effects from the stress.

In his video, Ben continued by explaining the best way to help pets with their fear of fireworks: Desensitising them slowly to fireworks noises. The veterinarian noted that this strategy could be done by playing recordings of fireworks as background noises, with the volume changing over time.

Do it several times everyday and start off really quietly, he said. And gradually increase the volume as the days go on.

Ben noted that if your pets get scared by sounds of fireworks, then you should stop playing them. However, if they become nice and calm when hearing the background noises, he recommended owners give them a reward, in order to create a positive association with the sounds.

He then explained different ways to help dogs during fireworks season. For example, Ben noted thatcould tire pets out by taking them on a really long walk before the fireworks starts . He also noted that people could use blankets or a crate to make a den for their dogs.

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This way they have somewhere to go and hide if theyre scared, he said. He encouraged viewers to close all their curtains and blinds during fireworks and turn the TV volume up, in order to help mask some of the banging noises from pets.

Ben noted that while you can give a dog a toy as a distraction, dont fuss over your pets too much, because then theyll feel like they have something to worry about. He then encouraged people to stay calm during fireworks, since dogs are exceptionally good at sensing our emotional state.

If youre stressed your dog will be stressed, he said, before noting that there are medications that you can get for dogs if theyre feeling anxious.

Use them in conjunction with some of the other measures Ive described, theyre certainly not a solution on their own, he claimed about the medications. In some cases, it might be necessary for your dog to be prescribed some medication to reduce their anxiety by your vet.

The Independent has contacted Ben for comment.

Along with medications and keeping them away from fireworks, The Humane Society of the United States has recommended other ways to protect pets during Fourth of July festivities. For example, even when kept inside, dogs should always wear collars with ID tags.

Indoor-only pets can become so frightened during fireworks displays that they may take desperate measures to escape the noise, including breaking through windows or door screens, the organisation explained.

In addition, the Humane Society of the US recommended that your pets are microchipped and that the chip is properly registered with your current contact information.
Sioux Falls' art scene is about to have some of its youngest professionals take center stage for the Fourth of July, some who are as young as 10 years old, some who are math fanatics and some who speak multiple languages.

Aftermath will be our youngest band collective to perform on the Levitt stage to date, and we are thrilled to have them, said Rose Ann Hofland, the Levitt at the Falls Director of Communications and Community Engagement.

More: Fourth of July events, fireworks displays in southeastern South Dakota and Sioux Falls

The youngest band member Eleanor Baumgarten, 10, from Sonia Sotomayor Spanish Immersion Elementary School, and her siblings and friends aged 12 to 17 will boost their performance track record opening at 7 p.m. for Six String Soldiers on Tuesday at Levitt at the Falls.

Despite their young age, the band has already built an impressive resume of regional performances, having been a top contender for multiple years in the South Dakota Rock and Roll Hall of Fame's Battle of Bands program, said Hofland.

From left to right, Eileen Baumgarten, 15, Max Baumgarten, 13, Baumgarten and Henderson Hegg, 12, Quintin Hernes, 16, make up the Sioux Falls band Aftermath. They're seen preparing for practice the week of June 30, 2023.

Taking on Jimi Hendrix's style at 13

Max Baumgarten, 13, Edison Middle School, will kick off the performance, soloing with the national anthem, "The Star-Spangled Banner," Jimi Hendrix style.

For a 13-year-old boy to be able to walk out and do that, that kind of confidence, and even if you're really scared inside to walk on like you're not scared and do that is just an amazing gift that you can use, no matter what you do on your life, his mother Sara Baumgarten said.

The band got its name because they all went to accelerated math enrichment after school, they said. And then after they did extra math, they would practice music together in Baumgartens basement.

Most of the children in the band started taking lessons with legendary South Dakota guitar player Geoff Gunderson at a young age.

Their mother said she decided to start with classical guitar first because it is a beautiful and portable instrument to give her children an opportunity she never had growing up.

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I didn't have the opportunity, and I always admired musicians, Sara Baumgarten said.

A few years later, the children wanted to learn some fun songs as well, and their mother heard about Andrew Rogers, the owner of Up Tempo Music Lessons.

More: Possible storms predicted for Sioux Falls during Fourth of July, according to NWS

Rogers said in his practice he puts the bands together for the students to experience playing that environment. Although some of those practice bands come back together for performances, only Aftermath has continued to perform persistently, Rogers said.

Rogers now continues to help Aftermath learn how to run the sound, gear the equipment and talk to production companies.

He said playing in bands though high school and college, he and his friends never had this kind of guidance, and they definitely made a lot of mistakes on their way.

Taking those experiences and passing them to my students, and kind of giving them the insight of what I've experienced over the years, and helping them is really rewarding, Rogers said.

Andrew Rogers, the owner of Up Tempo Music Lessons, adjusts sound levels for Aftermath during band practice the week of June 30, 2023.

Getting more agency over their music

Over time, Rogers said the kids themselves are starting to take up the ownership of their music they are clearly passionate about.

Although the band now mostly does covers, Eileen Baumgarten, 15, Lincoln High School, composes music and writes lyrics for the band's original songs, in addition to vocals and playing electric guitar, harmonica and ukulele.

The band has also gone through some of the challenges other professional bands often face. With time, the band also had to change a couple of people from in its original lineup.

After its oldest participant Champ Baumgarten, 17, Jefferson High School, received a scholarship from the National Security Agency to study in Taiwan, the band needed to replace a drummer. They invited Henderson Hegg, 12, from the Harrisburg School District, who lived nearby and had the drumming experience.

The band also added a bassist because that was the only musical thing the Baumgarten siblings could not do. That was how Quintin Hernes, a bass player at the orchestra in Lincoln High School, 16, joined the group.

Now we have our awesome band, Sara Baumgarten said.

Eileen Baumgarten, 15, at the band rehearsal as part of the band Aftermath during the week of June 30, 2023.

Champ, who came back from Taiwan about a month ago and practiced every day since then, will join the band at their Levitt performance, too, for one or two songs not to be left out, she said.

They got a lot better, Champ said, referring to how the band progressed during his absence.

Eileen said she gets a little nervous at first when performing, but generally she loves being able to express herself through music. Eleanor, the youngest of the band participants, said she loves performing and seeing how everybody else likes hearing the music.

Hernes said he loves the memories created in the process and the opportunities to be on stage and express himself. Max said although he did not want to be in the band at first, later he liked hanging out with the band members.

It's really fun, he said.

More: From road closures to parade routes, Fourth of July will be busy in downtown Sioux Falls

Positive personal outcomes

Hegg, who when he was first invited to the band, doubted he wanted to be part of it because of his stage fright. Now he enjoys being on stage. His mother Ronette Hegg said the band helped bring her sons drum performance to a whole new level, and he also learned how to be part of a team.

Being able to change things on the fly, and handle things that pop up in the middle of a performance, or even in practice, has given him some life skills that will help him for a very, very long time, she said.

As their careers continue, some of the children said they were planning on continuing to perform music professionally, with an array of the talents. Either way, they'll find success in a variety of industries wherever they end up, parents said.

All these kids have amazing discipline, Sara Baumgarten said. They work harder than most adults.

This article originally appeared on Sioux Falls Argus Leader: Aftermath becomes the youngest band to perform at Levitt at the Falls
NEW BEDFORD - A New Bedford man connected to the Monday morning homicide of 20-year-old Lorenzo Gomes has been arrested as the active investigation into the slaying continues, District Attorney Thomas M. Quinn III announced Tuesday.

On Monday evening, Sterling Robinson, 24, of New Bedford, was located and apprehended in Fall River by members of the Massachusetts State Police Violent Fugitive Apprehension Section, according to a press release. An arrest warrant sought by Quinn's office had been issued for the defendant earlier in the day.

Robinson is currently charged with accessory to murder-after the fact. He is being held in jail through the holiday and will be arraigned Wednesday morning in New Bedford District Court.

Massachusetts State Police detectives assigned to the district attorney's office, New Bedford Police and Homicide Unit prosecutors are actively investigating the homicide, which occurred early Monday morning in New Bedford.

At around 12:11 am Monday, New Bedford Police received a 911 call regarding shots fired in the area of Tallman and North Front streets.

Responding officers were approached by witnesses who reported hearing loud bangs that sounded like gun shots. Several officers searched the surrounding area and eventually located the victim inside his vehicle on Belleville Avenue.

The victim, later identified as Lorenzo Gomes, 20, of New Bedford, appears to have attempted to drive to the hospital before losing consciousness in his vehicle. EMS rushed him to Saint Luke's Hospital, where he was later pronounced deceased.

The investigation into the homicide is extremely active at this time and no further information can be released, according to the DA's Office.

This article originally appeared on Standard-Times: UPDATE: Man arrested in connection to New Bedford homicide
Then-White House Press Secretary Stephanie Grisham listens during a signing of a "safe third country" agreement in the White House on July 26, 2019. Alex Wong/Getty Images

Stephanie Grisham said she saw Trump show classified documents to individuals at Mar-a-Lago.

"I watched him show documents to people at Mar-a-Lago on the dining room patio," she told MSNBC.

Last month, Trump was indicted on 37 federal counts over his handling of classified documents.

Former White House press secretary Stephanie Grisham on Sunday said that she saw former President Donald Trump show classified documents to individuals at his Mar-a-Lago club in Florida.

Grisham, who also served as the chief of staff and press secretary to former first lady Melania Trump, made the revelation to MSNBC's Alex Witt while discussing the former president's indictment over his handling of top-secret documents that were found at his mansion.

When Witt asked Grisham if it was believable that Trump was showing classified documents to individuals in private meetings, Grisham replied in the affirmative.

"The short answer is yes," Grisham said. "I watched him show documents to people at Mar-a-Lago on the dining room patio. So he has no respect for classified information. Never did."

Grisham then stated that she was upset after hearing an earlier clip on MSNBC where Trump was recorded speaking freely about documents that he "could have declassified" when he was in the White House.

"He talks specifically that he should have declassified it, but he didn't. So there, I think, is proof. I believe also there's a portion of that audio where he says, you know, this is off the record," Grisham said. "And I know Donald Trump knows the rules of reporters, and he knows if it needs to be off the record that they can't talk about it. So I think he was covering himself in that regard."

"I just want to say to your viewers, I don't think people understand how hard it is to get your classified permission. I remember when I was going through it to get all of mine. I got held up because of a $13 KinderCare bill that I did not know about, and so I couldn't get it," she continued. "They go through everything about it. It's very difficult to get a security clearance, and I think people miss that in the weeds, obviously. But to be showing it to people who haven't gone through the extreme vetting that you go through to get a clearance, it's a disservice to the country, but it also puts people in danger potentially."

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When Witt asked Grisham asked if it was "offensive" that Trump allegedly showed documents to people without the necessary regard to their sensitivity, the longtime Republican aide agreed.

"It is," she replied. "And it's offensive to me. Sure. But again, there are sources and methods out there that could be put in danger."

"I can't stress enough how by being so loose with this stuff, he's potentially putting people in danger," she continued. "And yeah, I had a top security clearance and it's very, very hard to obtain. So it's very important and it's vital to our country and our national security. The only people with these clearances have access to any of these documents."

Last month, Grisham needled Trump over his handling of classified documents during a CNN interview.

"Why didn't he give them back? It's because he thinks those are his," she said at the time. "He's like a child holding on to his little toy train and nobody is going to take it from him."

Grisham resigned as the chief of staff and press secretary to Melania Trump after the January 6, 2021 riot at the US Capitol.

She has since been a vocal critic of Trump, and in October 2021 released her bombshell memoir, "I'll Take Your Questions Now," where she gave a damning indictment of the former president's administration.

Read the original article on Business Insider
New Mexico Sen. Gay Kernan (R-42) said she was stepping down from the post effective Aug. 1 and could be replaced by a member of the State House of Representatives also from Hobbs.

Kernan, who served in the Legislature for 21 years since she was appointed by former Gov. Gary Johnson in 2002, represented portions of Eddy, Lea and Chaves counties during her time in office.

She was most recently ranking member of the Senate Tax, Business and Transportation Committee and a member of the Senate Education Committee during the last legislative session.

More: City of Carlsbad passes 2024 $81M spending plan

New Mexico Sen. Gay Kernan during a panel discussion on oil and gas wastewater, July 14, 2021 at New Mexico State University Carlsbad.

She denied her resignation was due to any medical issues, and said she started considering leaving the post after the last session which concluded in March, planning to focus more on her family and avoid long drives up to Santa Fe to convene with other lawmakers.

Ive been considering this for a while now. Its time for me to focus more on my family priorities, Kernan said in an interview with the Carlsbad Current-Argus. Its time for me to be a little closer to home. Traveling has become a little more challenging for me.

Shes stepping down with about a year left in her term, after being reelected in 2020.

More: State lawmakers seek long-term fix for lost tax revenue for City of Carlsbad

But she said the gap will give the senator chosen as Kernans successor a chance to attend interim meetings and get up to speed ahead of the 2024 session.

In New Mexico, legislative vacancies are filled via recommendations from the county commissions represented by the district and ultimately chosen by the governor.

This will mean Kernans home Lea County, along with Eddy and Chaves counties will all have a voice in her replacement.

More: Oilfield lawmakers claim success in killing bills aimed at energy pollution in New Mexico

It gives the new person the ability to attend interim meetings and be really ready for the session, Kernan said. They go in really prepared.

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State Rep. Larry Scott (R-62) introduced legislation in the 2023 New Mexico Legislature to provide a long-term fix for lost tax revenue in Carlsbad and Hobbs.

That person could be New Mexico Rep. Larry Scott (R-62), who said he was officially applying for consideration for the post and planning to meet with the three county commissions that will make the recommendation.

Co-founder of Lynx Petroleum Consultants, Scott said his experience in the oil and gas industry, which he said was a primary source of state funding, was needed in the Senate, along with knowledge and representation of southeast New Mexico.

More: A look at what bills impacting Carlsbad passed and died in 2023 legislative session

Oil and gas was credited with up to half, about $7 billion, in revenue for the New Mexicos General Fund in a recent State financial analysis, and Scott said he planned to educate lawmakers from other parts of the state on the importance of fossil fuels, if chosen for the Senate.

I think, given the importance of these industries, there needs to be more experience in both houses. I think its lacking in the Senate, he said. I think I can bring practical, on-the-ground experience, and make a difference to those senators who seem so opposed to our oil and gas industry.

Scott said he decided to apply for the recommendation following Kernans announced resignation, and that he would not seek her seat if she remained in office.

More: Bill fixing lost tax revenue in Carlsbad passes NM House waits for governor's signature

I have a great deal of respect for her, Scott said of Kernan. She was a calm voice in the Senate. Ive been a reliable conservative voice on all issues that came before me in the House. The progressives are pushing too far on these issues.

He said his priority in office would be to support the oil and gas industry and defend it from extreme environmental regulations pushed by Democrats in recent years.

The state currently floats on an ocean of oil and gas money, Scott said. I would like to see us trust in that a little more.

More: Higher oil and gas fees could next go to New Mexico Senate despite industry concerns

In stepping down from her post, Kernan joined southeast New Mexican Sen. Cliff Pirtle (R-32) leaving the chamber after Pirtle said he would not seek another term earlier this spring. Rep. Candy Spence Ezzell (R-58) signaled she would run to succeed Pirtle in the 2024 election.

This would maintain Republicans stronghold in New Mexicos southeast region, despite the resignations, and Sen. David Gallegos (R-41) said he hoped the GOP could take the fight to the opposing majority party and its administration in Santa Fe.

We need a team player and someone willing to stand up to state government, Gallegos said of Kernans successor. I think we have a really good chance to pick up some seats (in the next election), he said. People are really tired of whats been going on in Santa Fe.

Adrian Hedden can be reached at 575-628-5516, achedden@currentargus.com or @AdrianHedden on Twitter.

This article originally appeared on Carlsbad Current-Argus: Gay Kernan to resign from New Mexico Senate after 21 years in office
A judge in Hancock County was publicly reprimanded Monday after a commission investigating judicial misconduct determined he used profanity "unbecoming of a judicial officer" during a police investigation involving his son.

The Indiana Commission on Judicial Qualifications issued its public admonition Monday against Judge Donald Jack D.J. Davis, who oversees Hancock County Superior Court 1.

Davis apologized for his behavior and acknowledged he violated the Code of Judicial Conduct during a Greenfield Police Department investigation, according to a news release.

Deadly collision: Car that fatally struck Indiana trooper stolen days earlier, driver held without bond

On June 21, 2022, police officers were dispatched to a home to supervise the removal of personal property from the home by the sons wife. Davis arrived at the residence after his wife telephoned to request his presence, a news release stated.

Standing on the front lawn of his son's home, in an area where others could overhear his remarks, Davis used expletives in responding to comments made by a third party concerning his sons marriage.

Specifically, Judge Davis said, among other things, ... you dont know what the f-- is going on here... You dont know whats going on, shut up. You dont have a clue. Davis' words were captured on police body cameras, according to the release.

Judge told commission he took prescribed narcotics before interaction

Before arriving at his son's residence, Davis told the commission he had taken several prescribed narcotics to manage pain resulting from his second back surgery in three weeks and that his usual judgment was affected as a result, the release stated.

In recovery: Hamilton County Prosecutor Greg Garrison suffers heart attack

Davis acknowledged he violated a rule that requires judges to act, at all times, in a manner that promotes the publics confidence in the integrity of the judiciary and to avoid the appearance of impropriety.

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Davis expressed remorse for his behavior to the commission, who noted that judges need to be cautious about appearing at emotionally charged scenes, especially if there are any challenges to their maintaining appropriate demeanor.

The commission decided while formal disciplinary charges were warranted against Davis, he would not be formally charged with ethical misconduct and instead be publicly admonished.

This article originally appeared on Indianapolis Star: Profanity earns Hancock County Judge public admonishment
Befriend a unicorn. Live on a pineapple farm in Mexico. Survive an alien invasion.

But be careful what ice cream cone you order.

The possibilities to journey to a new world, while staying right here in Detroit, are endless. Just pick up a book. Summer is a great time to strengthen a child's relationship with reading, without the pressure of school assignments or deadlines, Michigan librarians say.

This summer is the first since the pandemic that most Detroit Public Library branches will host in-person summer reading programs across the city, said Vernadette McAllister, interim children and teen services librarian at the Detroit Public Library. The library is out in force with programming this year: With everything from reading challenges to partnerships with Lego and the Michigan Science Center to craft time for kids and teens of all ages.

Pictured is an activity at a Detroit Public Library summer reading event. This summer is the first since the pandemic that most branches have launched in-person summer reading activities.

McAllister said she is thrilled to see in-person programs back at public library branches. Just recently, she attended a puppet show at the Redford branch  an energetic one, she said.

"A lot of times we think in order for kids to be engaged and to be excited about something, it has to be something that's on the screen, and this was not," she said.

More: Detroit police have 'widespread' problem of not turning on body cameras, commissioner says

More: State again monitoring Wayne County juvenile jail around the clock

Here's what's happening at the library this summer, according to McAllister:

The library is focusing on its Beanstack summer reading program in particular, which starts July 1 and goes through August. It challenges children of all ages who can read independently to track the minutes they're reading. As they track, they can participate in raffles for prizes and earn badges by visiting their local library branch.

In a partnership with Lego and the Michigan Science Center called Build the Change, the library, in different events throughout the summer, will introduce kids to three pressing world issues: protecting native species, eliminating waste and rewilding bees.

Kids will also be encouraged to use Legos at events to build an idea that would help solve a world problem.

With Detroit Public TV, the library is passing out literacy activity booklets to encourage kids to engage with reading.

With the Detroit Housing Commission, the library will visit children living in public housing, passing out books to keep and encouraging library card signups.

The library has partnered with Huron Clinton Metroparks for different library events for children about native animals and plants.

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You can find the library's schedule of events and other Kids Zone activities here.

Contact Lily Altavena: laltavena@freepress.com.

This article originally appeared on Detroit Free Press: Detroit libraries: In-person summer reading programs are back
An Austin, Texax-based oil and gas company was fined about $42 million by the State of New Mexico for alleged air pollution violations at facilities in the southeast region of the state.

The New Mexico Environment Department (NMED) and the Energy, Minerals and Natural Resources Department (EMNRD) issued dual fines Thursday accusing Ameredev Operating of illegal natural gas emissions and failure to report emissions.

NMEDs fines, totaling about $40.3 million stemmed from alleged violations at five facilities near Jal in Lea County, where the agency said five regulated air pollutants were excessively emitted.

More: Could oil and gas tax collections in Eddy County exceed $100M at the end of FY '23?

The Departments order in addition to the civil penalty called on Ameredev to cease all excess emissions from its facilities in the state, seek adequate permits for the emissions, hire and NMED-approve independent auditor to assess all of the companys sites in the state and take action to mitigate future emissions.

Ameredev did not respond to a request for comment from the Carlsbad Current-Argus.

It must respond to NMEDs notice and pay the penalty within 30 days or request a hearing.

An unauthorized flare at a facility owned by Ameredev, Dec. 31, 2019 in Lea County.

More: $4.7B spent by Denver oil and gas company in 2 sales to enter booming Permian Basin

NMED said Ameredev extracted oil and gas from the five facilities without a plan to transport resulting gas to a midstream operation from processing or transmission as required by law.

Without such a path for the gas, the company burned off about 3.2 million cubic feet of natural, NMED charged, emitting 7.5 million pounds of hydrogen sulfide, sulfur dioxide, nitrogen oxides, carbon monoxide and volatile organic compounds.

NMED Cabinet Secretary James Kenney said the company exploited New Mexico for profit by skirting the states air pollution rules, actions that could cause health problems, create smog and contribute to climate change.

More: New Mexico leaders fear nuclear waste could endanger oil and gas in the Permian Basin

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The violations were discovered when residents of Lea County contacted NMED with concerns about excessive flaring, read the announcement, and state inspectors found equipment lacking proper permits at each of the five sites, and more emissions than were reported by the company.

Complaints about excessive flaring from the local community dated back to at least 2019, records show.

Ameredev is a Texas-based exploration and production company that exploited public health for profit, Kenney said. Ameredevs management team have shown blatant disregard for our right to breathe clean air and now they must be held accountable.

More: Oilfield wastewater used to grow hemp? New Mexico working toward alternatives to disposal

Cindy Hollenberg, compliance and enforcement section chief with NMEDs Air Quality Bureau said the fines issued by NMED should serve as a warning to the broader oil and gas industry to follow state law.

This action sends a strong message to this company and to the oil and gas industry as a whole that we take compliance seriously, she said.

Meanwhile, EMNRDs Oil Conservation Division (OCD) issued another $2.4 million fine to Ameredev for multiple violations of OCD rules at one of its wells in Lea County, alleging in that case that the company failed to report natural gas production or waste as required by OCD regulations.

More: More funding could be on the way to clean up New Mexico's abandoned oil and gas wells

The reports are used to determine if operators are within state law regarding emissions, OCD said, as part of New Mexicos climate policy.

The OCD ordered Ameredev to correct the problems, begin an audit of its other facilities and pay the fine.

The Division was also considering revoking the companys authority to transport natural gas due to its alleged noncompliance.

More: Oil and gas growth slows in the Permian Basin as region leads US in fossil fuels

OCD Director Dylan Fuge said most of Ameredevs facilities were relatively new in New Mexico, as records showed the well in question was approved by the agency in 2021, and planned a more thorough review of its operations in the state.

We are very concerned with the pattern and practice we are seeing in Ameredevs operation given the fact that the operator and its facilities are relatively new in New Mexico, Fuge said. OCD will conduct a more detailed review of the remainder of Ameredevs operations.

Ameredev is backed by Houston-based firm EnCap Investments that provides capital for U.S. oil companies.

More: Heinrich, Lujan call for tougher federal rules on oil and gas methane pollution

In a letter to EnCap, the agencies detailed eight violations found by NMED at Ameredevs facilities and called on the investment firm to audit all of the operators in its portfolio for potential environmental violations.

While Ameredev is directly responsible for responding to the allegations, it is critical for EnCap Investments, as its owner, to be apprised of the gravity of Ameredevs compliance issues, the letter read.

At this time, both NMED and EMNRD recommend EnCap Investments notify all oil and natural gas operators in its portfolio of Ameredevs compliance issues and that you encourage such operators to conduct regulatory self-audits and disclose any potential violations to our agencies.

Adrian Hedden can be reached at 575-628-5516, achedden@currentargus.com or @AdrianHedden on Twitter.

This article originally appeared on Carlsbad Current-Argus: New Mexico fines Permian oil driller Ameredev $42M for air pollution
Prime Video

Jack Ryan season 4 spoilers follow.

Marvel star Michael Pena has opened up about his "nerve-racking" role in Jack Ryan season 4.

Pena is joining the Prime Video series as Domingo 'Ding' Chavez  a CIA agent who recurs in both the Jack Ryan novels and Tom Clancy's Rainbow Six universe.

While Pena has some experience playing franchise characters  he played Scott Lang's pal Luis in the Ant-Man movies and DEA agent Kiki Camarena in Netflix's Narcos: Mexico  he admitted to Digital Spy that he had trepidations about playing Ding.

"I mean, you watch the show, and it's a great show. And John is fantastic in it," he said. "And I've binged it in two days, the first season, and I thoroughly enjoyed it. So to be honest with you, you just kind of don't want to mess it up."

Roy Rochlin - Getty Images

The actor went on: "You don't want to mess up something that's like a successful train. So you study up as best as you can, and then you have to let it go. But sometimes that letting go can be a little bit difficult.

"But you know, that took about a couple of weeks. And then I was, you know, I felt like I was like, kind of in the rhythm of the show. And from what I've seen, it's it, you know, it's good, I think people are gonna like it."

Prime Video

A spin-off for Ding, and possibly all of Rainbow Six, was previously announced but there has been no movement yet on making the project a reality.



The new season of Jack Ryan also brings back Abbie Cornish, from the first season, as Cathy Mueller  and she has recently discussed what it was like returning to the fold after a few years away.

Jack Ryan seasons 1-4 are streaming now on Prime Video.

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[Source]

An elephant gifted to Sri Lanka by Thailand more than 20 years ago was safely returned to Thailand for medical treatment and rehabilitation following accusations of mistreatment.

Safe return: The male elephant, known in Sri Lanka as Muthu Raja (Pearly King) and Sak Surin (Mighty Surin) in Thailand, arrived in Chiang Mai on Sunday aboard a Russian Ilyushin IL-76 cargo plane, a six-hour trip that reportedly cost the Thai government 19 million baht (approximately $543,000).

Sak Surins possible return to Sri Lanka after receiving medical treatment reportedly has yet to be discussed.

Where will he go next: After arriving in Chiang Mai, Sak Surin will reportedly be transported to the Thai Elephant Conservation Center in Lampang province, where he will spend at least 30 days in quarantine followed by rehabilitation.

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One report noted that Sak Surin would undergo hydrotherapy as part of his medical treatment.

A special gift: Sak Surin was one of three elephants given to Sri Lanka by the Thai royal family in 2001, when he was around 10 years old, to be trained as a carrier of religious relics.

Abuse accusation: Sri Lanka-based animal rights group Rally for Animal Rights and Environment alleged in 2020 that Sak Surin, who was reportedly in bad health after years of hard labor and abuse, was in dire need of medical assistance.

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The group eventually launched a petition calling for the return of the elephant to Thailand after the Sri Lankan government allegedly ignored their complaints.

In need of help: The Thai Embassy in Sri Lanka conducted its preliminary investigation on Aug. 24, 2022, and concluded that Sak Surin was not in good health and was in poor living conditions, the Thai Foreign Affairs Ministry wrote in a statement in November 2022.

A report noted that Sak Surin, who was underweight, also had rough skin and difficulty walking or standing due to his stiff left foreleg. He also has abscesses on both hips and thinning foot pads.

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Pacific Arts Movement Founder Speaks Up Against Xenophobia Toward Asian Americans Because of Coronavirus
BEIJING, July 3 (Xinhua) -- Chinese State Councilor and Minister of National Defense Li Shangfu met with Commander-in-Chief of the Russian Navy Nikolay Yevmenov in Beijing on Monday, calling for maintaining regional peace and stability.

Li said the two heads of state have drawn up blueprints for China-Russia relations and their cooperation in various fields. He called for efforts to advance and deepen relations between the two militaries, strengthening navy communications and expanding cooperation in professional fields.

For his part, Yevmenov said Russia attaches great importance to enhancing military cooperation with China, and is willing to maintain close coordination with China to advance the relations between the two countries and two militaries to a new level. 
The 2024 battle for the Senate started with a bang earlier this year and has not let up, as candidates in top races continue to roll out their campaigns and incumbents scratch and claw to win reelection. Their efforts will determine who will control the upper chamber for the next two years.

Democrats are trying to play defense in a number of red-leaning states to hold on to their one-seat majority, while Republicans fight recruiting battles in several states to give them the best shot at winning a majority.

While it is too early to tell which sides maneuvering will pay off, heres a midsummer rundown of the five Senate seats most likely to flip next year.

West Virginia

The top spot in these rankings remains unchanged as Sen. Joe Manchin (D-W.Va.) faces a true uphill battle to retain his seat and secure a third full term in the Senate.

Republicans have been licking their chops at the possibility of unseating Manchin and, unlike in 2018, they seem to have their best candidate in place to do just that in West Virginia Gov. Jim Justice (R). An East Carolina University (ECU) survey released in late May shows Justice leading the incumbent centrist Democrat by more than 20 percentage points.

In order for Justice to make it that far, he must overcome a potentially tricky challenge against Rep. Alex Mooney (R-W.Va.), who is backed by conservative forces. The ECU poll also shows Justice with a 40-point lead over Mooney, though some of that advantage is owed to his massive name ID.

Facing political challenges back home, Manchin has been on an offensive against President Bidens spate of nominations in recent months, having said that he will oppose all his Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) nominees and voted against multiple judicial selections in recent weeks. He also opposed Bidens choice of top economic adviser and is likely to oppose Julie Sus nomination to lead the Department of Labor, if she ever comes up for a vote on the floor.

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Allies, however, say this isnt anything unusual and that its just how he operates.

The recent opposition is just who he normally is. He reviews all nominees the same way, said Jon Kott, a former Manchin spokesperson, who noted what Manchin used to tell him about how he considers nominees. Hed say, I look at them and say: Are they good for the state of West Virginia and the good of the country?

I just think its getting more scrutiny because its the political season, Kott added.

Of course, Manchin has yet to announce whether hell even seek reelection, with a decision expected in December or shortly before the January filing deadline, as he continues to flirt with a third-party presidential bid.

Montana

It was a big week in Big Sky as Tim Sheehy, a retired Navy SEAL turned businessman, threw his hat into the ring and gave Republicans their best hope to finally defeat Sen. Jon Tester (D-Mont.) next year.

Sheehy is among the top recruits this cycle for Sen. Steve Daines (R-Mont.), the chairman of the National Republican Senatorial Committee, who badly wants to topple the three-term Montana Democrat. The newly minted GOP candidate has a lot of things going for him, headlined by his business background, military service and bank account largesse  a trio that Republicans argue is sterling.

Strategists argue that while he looks great on paper, first-time, millionaire candidates can have trouble resonating with voters. This was seen last cycle when David McCormick in Pennsylvania was unable to escape the primary and has since lamented that he didnt find his sea legs until it was too late. Ironically, he, too, is atop Daines wish list this year.

But for now, Republicans are flying high over Sheehy.

Its been proven that Tester is tough and if were serious about winning the seat, we need to put forward our best candidate, one national GOP strategist told The Hill. Its pretty clear he doesnt want to run against Sheehy, and that should tell you all you need to know.

Sheehy will likely have to prevail over Rep. Matt Rosendale (R-Mont.) in a primary, with Democrats itching for a Tester-Rosendale rematch after the incumbent senator defeated him by 3.5 percentage points. Rosendale has a pocket of right-wing support and name ID after multiple statewide runs, but he has numerous issues  including lackluster fundraising and a Maryland accent that caused him issues during his last Senate bid, to name a few.

Ohio

Rounding out the trio of the seats Republicans are most hopeful to flip is the Buckeye State, where they likely have their best chance to beat Sen. Sherrod Brown (D-Ohio).

Brown has proven to be a difficult out for Republicans in each of his reelection fights, which he won by 6 and 6 percentage points, respectively. However, Ohio has moved further to the right in that time, with former President Trump carrying the state by 8 percentage points in 2020, despite losing the election. Put simply, the swingiest of swing states has gotten redder than ever, but whether that will be enough to take down Brown remains to be seen.

For now, only two top-tier Republicans  state Sen. Matt Dolan and Bernie Moreno  have announced bids, with another likely to come from Ohio Secretary of State Frank LaRose (R). LaRose is expected to jump in the race in July, one Ohio GOP source told The Hill, creating a tough three-way contest that will have a number of balls in the air.

Asked to forecast a three-way primary, the Ohio GOP source said that Moreno will likely win Trumps endorsement and that LaRose could have fundraising issues, especially given that hes the only one of the group who cant self-fund, as hes noted.

Moreno is the favorite, but as a first-time candidate, he will likely make some mistakes, the source said. The question is: is that enough of an opening for either of the two others?

Arizona

Of the states on this list, perhaps no race has changed less than the battle in Arizona, as Rep. Ruben Gallego (D-Ariz.) remains the top choice of Democrats, Kari Lake is the likely option for Republicans even though she has yet to announce a bid, and Sen. Kyrsten Sinema (I-Ariz.) has yet to tip her hand and say whether she will seek reelection next year as an independent.

Gallego announced his bid in late January and has put himself in as good of a spot as a Democrat can at this point in time. The Arizona Democrat posted a strong $3.7 million haul in the first quarter, outraising Sinema by $1.6 million during that stretch and giving Democrats hope that they can retain the seat next year. He also received a boost on the left last week, as former Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) endorsed his bid.

He seems to be doing what he needs to be doing. Head down. Building his brand, one Democratic operative with Arizona ties told The Hill, noting that Gallego has so far avoided a bruising primary with Rep. Greg Stanton (D-Ariz.) declining to run.

On the GOP side, all signs still point to Lake, who has effectively frozen the field until she decides whether to take the Senate plunge as she falsely argues that she is the lawful governor of Arizona after her loss to Gov. Katie Hobbs (D) in November.

However, Lake has taken steps toward a possible bid, having met with more than a handful of GOP senators during a mid-May visit to Washington. Pinal County Sheriff Mark Lamb has also entered the GOP primary.

Meanwhile, the wait is on for Sinema, who filed paperwork for a bid but has stayed mum when asked in various interviews about her 2024 plans. Her impact on the race remains a massive unknown as a three-way general election battle opens up doors not previously seen in races in the state.

Its hard to say one way or another, the Democratic operative said about a three-way race.

Wisconsin

Finally, Wisconsin is the lone new entrant on the list as Sen. Tammy Baldwin (D-Wis.) tries to secure a third term and Republicans try to figure out who will be their best candidate to deny her six more years in office.

Just like the other Democratic incumbents mentioned above, Baldwin has proven to be a real challenge for Republicans in each of her Senate bids. After defeating former Wisconsin Gov. Tommy Thompson (R) to win her seat in 2012, she followed that up with an impressive double-digit win in 2018, giving Democrats another battle-tested member to lean on in what could be a tough cycle.

What makes Baldwin incredibly hard to beat is that she puts in the work and shes got 15 winning campaigns to show for it, said Joshua Karp, a Democratic operative who advised Wisconsin Lt. Gov. Mandela Barnes (D) campaign last year. Wisconsins a state where people expect to have a personal relationship with their leaders and Baldwin puts in the personal touch and it shows.

Republicans have been wading through possible options. However, they were dealt a blow in recent weeks as Rep. Mike Gallagher (R-Wis.) announced he would seek reelection in the House and focus on his work atop the newly created Select Committee on China.

Now, they are looking at a pair of self-funders to take Baldwin on.

Eric Hovde, a former hedge fund manager who narrowly lost the 2012 Senate primary to Thompson, is considered the leading figure, as he would be buoyed by a massive war chest and experience running a statewide campaign. One Wisconsin GOP operative noted recently that Hovde has floated spending at least $20 million of his own money.

The second self-funder looking at a run is businessman Scott Mayer, who will likely make a decision post-Labor Day. The downside: He has nearly zero name ID in the state. Sen. Ron Johnson (R-Wis.) recently acknowledged that he doesnt know Mayer very well, either.

Rep. Tom Tiffany (R-Wis.) is also considered an option, though hed have to give up his ruby-red seat to jump in the race.

What will be the key to Republicans ousting Baldwin, though, will be external forces. What will Bidens standing be in the state next year? And will the GOP nominate Trump, Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis (R) or someone else next year? Those are questions that will weigh heavily on the Senate race.

According to a new Marquette University Law Poll, DeSantis is deadlocked with Trump and would fare better in a one-on-one matchup against the president. That would give Republicans a better shot at holding the seat.

For the latest news, weather, sports, and streaming video, head to The Hill.
The front drive of 26 and 31 Ridout Road. (SCREENSHOT: Google Maps)

SINGAPORE  Law and Home Affairs Minister K. Shanmugam told Parliament that he had rented the bungalow at 26 Ridout Road after making the decision to sell his previous family home in 2018.

In his ministerial speech on Monday (3 July) following investigations ordered by Prime Minister Lee Hsien Loong on the rentals of black-and-white colonial bungalows by him and Foreign Affairs Minister Vivian Balakrishnan, Shanmugam clarified the refurbishment expenses and rental arrangement for the 26 Ridout Road property.

He stated that he spent over $500,000 on refurbishing the property and emphasised that he is not profiting by renting out his family home and living at the Ridout Road bungalow.

Financial motives and decision to rent and sell family home

To clear any doubts about his financial motives, Shanmugam clarified that he was using his previous lawyer's income to cover the rental expenses of 26 Ridout Road, which come to $26,500 per month.

"I am, in essence, using my previous lawyer's income to pay for the rental for 26 Ridout Road," he said. "I pay for the rental of 26 Ridout Road, mostly from renting out my family home. But taking into account property tax, because the family home is now non-owner-occupied, and two, income tax on the rental proceeds, there is a net deficit. I top up the deficit."

The decision to rent out his family home and put it up for sale came after a personal financial review. "I had decided to put my family home up for sale in 2018, after reviewing my finances in 2016  as I was approaching my 60s  and realised too much of my savings were tied up in my family home," Shanmugam explained.

He emphasised that this decision was not driven by financial need but rather the prudence of diversifying his assets, considering his age and position.

Furthermore, Shanmugam clarified that his choice to sell his family home did not stem from regret or financial necessity, stating, "It is a privilege to be in public service. And if I am asked, I will make the same choice again."

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Regarding the expenses incurred for the property, Shanmugam disclosed that extensive renovation work was needed, and he estimated spending over $500,000 on improvements.

He acknowledged that these investments would not benefit him after the lease expires, as the funds would be returned to the State, in keeping with the terms of renting a black-and-white bungalow.

In response to potential conflicts of interest, Shanmugam said that he recused himself from the dealings with the Singapore Land Authority (SLA), ensuring that there was no actual, potential or perceived conflict. He reaffirmed that he told his agent that everything had to be done strictly in accordance with the rules.

Minister Shanmugam defends himself and his son against false allegations, questioning the credibility of the claims and emphasising the thorough investigation conducted by the Corrupt Practices Investigation Bureau (CPIB). (PHOTO: Google Screenshot/MCIYouTubeScreengrab)

Refuted allegations on son's company

Shanmugam also vehemently refuted online allegations suggesting that a company led by his son had received preferential treatment in being awarded a contract for renovation works at his Ridout Road rental property. He condemned these claims as "utterly false and defamatory."

Addressing those responsible for the allegations, he added, "I say to these people: You want to come after me, you come after me. I'm perfectly capable of defending myself and they will find out that I will defend myself. But leave my family alone."

The matter was raised by Member of Parliament Nadia Ahmad Samdin, who inquired about the processes used by the SLA in awarding contracts for the restoration and maintenance of properties, specifically referencing the online allegations regarding home interior and renovation company Livspace, of which Shamugam's son Ravindran is listed as its Southeast Asian chief executive officer.

Second Minister for Law Edwin Tong categorically dismissed the accusations, labelling them as "completely scurrilous and unwarranted."

He clarified in his ministerial statement that Livspace had no transactions with the SLA and emphasised that the works carried out on the Ridout Road properties resulted from an open tender process, with a separate contractor appointed to perform the necessary tasks.

Shanmugam acknowledged the circulation of falsehoods surrounding the rental of the Ridout Road properties, expressing that it was "inevitable".

Dismissing the allegations, he posed a rhetorical question, asking, "Do these people really believe that CPIB (the Corrupt Practices Investigation Bureau) would not have found this out if it were true?"

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.
New deans will assume their duties this summer at the University of Alabama's Honors College, the nursing school and the law school.

Tiffany Sippial will begin her tenure as dean of UA's Honors College on July 5, while William S. Brewbaker III will start as dean of UA's School of Law on July 10.

More: Steven Hood named vice president of student life at University of Alabama

Julie Sanford will begin as dean of UA's Capstone College of Nursing on Aug. 1.

Here's a closer look at the new deans:

Tiffany Sippial

Sippial comes to UA from Auburn University, where she served five years as director of the Honors College. She also served as a professor of history.

She earned bachelor of arts degrees in Spanish and art history from Southwestern University, and then went on to earn a master of arts in Latin American studies and a doctorate in Latin American history from the University of New Mexico.

Tiffany Sippial will begin her tenure as dean of the University of Alabama's Honors College on July 5.

Sippials research has focused on the experience of women in Latin America and she's written two books about Cuba. She's described as a strong advocate for international student experiences, in a UA news release.

I am honored and humbled to serve as dean of the University of Alabamas nationally ranked and widely celebrated Honors College, Sippial said in the news release. This is truly a dream opportunity to support and empower people, foster new initiatives, and guide growth in a college already considered a leader in honors education.

William S. Brewbaker III

Brewbaker was the William Alfred Rose Professor of Law at UA's School of Law before being named dean.

He's a graduate of Vanderbilt University and the University of Virginia School of Law. He practiced law in Birmingham from 1986 to 1992, before leaving law practice to pursue a master of laws degree in health care law at Duke University.

William S. Brewbaker III was recently named the new dean for the University of Alabama School of Law. He'll begin the new duties July 10.

Brewbaker became a full-time faculty member with the UA School of Law in 1993 and has taught courses in health care law, property law, antitrust and jurisprudence, as well as seminars in bioethics, law and economics, and Christian legal thought. His research interests include health care law and legal philosophy. He also had a stint as interim dean at UA's law school in 2013-14.

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Our goal will be to continue and improve upon our rich tradition of excellence in research, teaching and service to our profession, the state of Alabama and our nation," Brewbaker said in a UA news release. "We want to provide an outstanding educational experience for every one of our students while they are in law school and great professional opportunities when they graduate. Im looking forward to seeing what we can accomplish together.

Julie Sanford

Sanford comes to UA after serving four years as dean and professor with the School of Nursing at the University of Mississippi Medical Center in Jackson, Mississippi.

She earned a bachelor of science degree in nursing from UA, a master of science in Nursing in adult health nursing and nursing education at the University of South Alabama and a doctor of nursing science degree from Louisiana State University.

Julie Sanford will begin her tenure as dean of the University of Alabama's Capstone College of Nursing on Aug. 1.

In academic nursing since 1993, Sanford has served as director of the James Madison University School of Nursing and in other academic roles at Spring Hill College and the University of Southern Mississippi. She also worked as an emergency department nurse and progressed to professor at the University of South Alabama. Sanfords scholarly interests include the health status of informal caregivers, program development, decision-making, patient safety and the scholarship of teaching and learning.

Our world is changing, and we have the opportunity in academic nursing to shape our future and prepare nurses who are patient-centered and practice-ready. The next three to five years will be a time of transformation in nursing education with the transition to competency-based education, Sanford said in a UA news release.

Reach Ken Roberts at ken.roberts@tuscaloosanews.com.

This article originally appeared on The Tuscaloosa News: New deans named at UA's law school, nursing school and Honors College
President Joe Biden wants to establish a new economic world order that focuses less on serving U.S. consumers  the norm for decades  and more on protecting American workers.

For his chief trade ambassador, Katherine Tai, the policy shift has been a tough sell.

When she goes to Capitol Hill, Tai is harangued by lawmakers who complain the administrations trade agenda is unambitious and inadequate to compete globally. In her travels around the country, she hears from business owners who grouse that the administration is not opening more markets to exports. Overseas, she faces outrage from foreign officials about Bidens efforts to goose domestic industry. Even progressive advocates, who share the administrations skepticism of free trade, have staged protests against negotiations they fear will weaken labor and environmental standards.

The response underscores the depths of resistance that Biden and his team face as they try to abandon key tenets of globalization that presidents of both parties have embraced for decades. Tai is among the leading voices in the Biden administration contending the change is necessary to help U.S. workers, combat supply chain disruptions and counter an increasingly assertive China.

Shes under increasing pressure to sell this shift as Biden launches his reelection bid, where its critical he shows his trade agenda delivers for U.S. workers in the ways he has promised. The countrys economic outlook will be front of mind for voters and a top target for his Republican challenger  potentially former President Donald Trump, whose criticism of free trade helped propel him to the White House in 2016.



Bidens trade pivot includes shunning the sprawling free trade agreements pushed by his predecessors  from Bill Clintons NAFTA to Barack Obamas Trans-Pacific Partnership. Instead, the administration is refusing to cut tariffs on imports and trying to craft regional agreements in Latin America and the Indo-Pacific that do not require congressional approval, as well as trade and investment partnerships with Kenya and Taiwan.

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As the face of this gambit, Tai has been making the pitch to workers in Texas, Illinois and the Carolinas, to policymakers on Capitol Hill and to foreign leaders around the globe. In those meetings, Tai argues that traditional free trade agreements have largely helped corporations to chase cheap labor and expand global exports, making them wealthy at the expense of domestic workers and national security. Whats needed instead, she tells them, are new kinds of agreements focused on raising global labor and environmental standards, and making more essential goods in the U.S. or allied nations.

If we want different outcomes, we've got to be willing to try new things, Tai said earlier this month following a speech outlining the Biden administrations new trade approach. I don't know that every single one of them is going to work.

In the crosshairs

Tai, a longtime House trade staffer who previously worked on China trade issues at USTR, was confirmed to her Cabinet post in March 2021 on a 98-0 vote in the Senate, with lawmakers praising her reputation of working across party lines to advance legislation. Her appointment generated a slew of favorable headlines, including one from this publication that declared "Everyone likes Katherine Tai."

She receives a decidedly different reception today. While there is still a deep well of personal respect and even affection for Tai, her role as a key architect and promoter of the administrations new trade policy has made her a target of its many critics. At those congressional hearings, business meetings and global summits, Tai has been the one to defend the administrations actions on trade and its economic vision for the future.

This job is one that constantly puts you in the crosshairs of forces that are pulling you in different directions, Tai said in an interview with POLITICO. Different sectors of your economy, foreign policy versus domestic economics, Congress versus the executive. You're constantly being pulled in different directions.

That dynamic makes it impossible to please everyone.

We cannot afford to sit on the sidelines while our competitors push ahead, Rep. Adrian Smith (R-Neb.), chair of the House Ways and Means trade subcommittee, complained to Tai at a hearing this spring. Endless dialogues and frameworks are no substitute for trade agreements that open markets for American products.

Meet me with the recognition around the kind of world we're living in right now  where we are as an economy, where we are strong, where we are vulnerable, Tai said at the same Ways and Means hearing. Meet me on the terms that we need to do things differently.

Tais policy proposals have resonated most with labor organizers and progressives who have long railed against free trade. Congressional Progressive Caucus Vice Chair Rep. Mark Takano (D-Calif.) said in an interview that Tai understands the progressive heart of the Democratic caucus, and Barry Lynn, head of the anti-monopoly group Open Markets Institute, introduced Tai before her big policy address this month as a mold-breaking trade representative who has more fans in more places almost than Taylor Swift.



But even left-of-center activists and lawmakers have expressed reservations about some of the administrations trade initiatives, such as a deal to facilitate critical minerals imports from Japan, which they criticized as too light on labor and environmental protections.

And theres growing concern that ongoing negotiations over the Indo-Pacific Economic Framework, Bidens signature economic initiative in the Asia-Pacific, wont yield an agreement that meets their expectations, either. The administration is aiming to convince the 13 other participating countries to commit to new rules on labor rights, supply chains, clean energy and more without instilling the incentives or enforcement measures found in more traditional agreements.

Whether or not Bidens trade experiment succeeds will depend on the buy-in of those skeptics. The coming months will be a crucial test as the administration hustles to conclude negotiations over a green steel and aluminum deal with Europe by October and the Indo-Pacific Economic Framework by November.

Im glad Ambassador Tai and her team are thinking outside the box, Senate Finance Chair Ron Wyden (D-Ore.) said at a hearing in March. But whats needed here are real answers on how her proposals will work in practice.

Rebuilding trust in trade

The roots of Bidens trade strategy can be traced to the 2016 presidential election.

Trump used decades of trade policy, crafted in large part by Republicans, to pummel his Democratic opponent Hillary Clinton and deliver a winning message to heartland voters that free trade amounted to a giveaway of American jobs. Against that backdrop, the Biden administration appears determined not to give Trump, or whoever emerges as the GOPs 2024 nominee, the same opportunity.

If you want to understand my perspective: I neither believe in pure free trade nor pure protectionism, Tai said in an interview. It's about what we need to do for our economy, for our growth potential, for our place in the world.

Tai has been Bidens foremost evangelist for what she dubs worker-centered trade, recasting her agencys mission with a greater focus on countering the negative effects of trade at home. She requested a first-of-its-kind report from the U.S. International Trade Commission that determined people of color and low-wage workers have been disproportionately harmed by global trade  findings she has vowed to incorporate into future policy decisions.

She has also put a greater emphasis on USTRs role in fighting forced labor and other workers rights violations, garnering praise from unions in the process  including the formidable AFL-CIO, which earlier this month announced support for Bidens reelection. Tai has courted labor groups more heavily than most others, a reflection of their deep skepticism of free trade and their significance to Bidens political future.

I think the notion that she has advocated is the right notion, which is you have to build trust in trade, U.S. Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack, who has worked closely with Tai on agriculture export issues, said in an interview. You have to rebuild among folks the belief that there is indeed a benefit that the country receives in a trading relationship with other countries.

A hard change

Capitol Hill is a different story. Congress has plenty of vocal trade defenders and lawmakers of both parties, who have been prodding Tai to return to negotiating traditional free trade agreements. The European Union, U.K. and Canada, among other U.S. allies, are forging new binding trade agreements around the globe, they note. So is China  extending its economic and political influence in the process.

What the administration proposes as a trade negotiation and enforcement agenda is strikingly limited, Sen. Mike Crapo (R-Idaho), the top Republican on the Senate Finance Committee, told Tai at a hearing earlier this year. We can do better and we must do better.

Tensions with Congress have only continued to grow. Simmering frustrations over what lawmakers say has been a lack of transparency and consultation from the administration boiled over when USTR signed the critical minerals agreement with Japan without their approval.



And in May, the announcement that the U.S. had negotiated and would soon sign the first portion of a trade initiative with Taiwan compelled lawmakers to retaliate  with the House unanimously passing a bill in June that gives Congress more authority over the talks with Taipei. A similar bill is being pursued in the Senate.

The Taiwan bill is a clear indicator of bipartisan concerns about the administrations approach to trade, said Smith, the House trade subcommittee chair. Unless the administration changes course, I anticipate this will not be the last legislative action taken to assert congressional authority over trade matters.

Companies that have felt slighted under the Biden administrations new trade policy are also pushing back.

In a letter to Tai and U.S. Commerce Secretary Gina Raimondo in late May, a coalition of business and agriculture groups wrote that the Indo-Pacific Economic Framework talks risk not only failing to deliver meaningful strategic and commercial outcomes but also endangering U.S. trade and economic interests in the Indo-Pacific region and beyond. Many of those same groups have been pushing the administration to pursue more comprehensive trade deals with the U.K., Kenya and others.

Ambassador Tai has been approachable and open to discussions on tough issues, said Myron Brilliant, who retired earlier this year as the long-time head of the U.S. Chamber of Commerces international division. But its fair to say that many in the business community are eager for more tangible progress.

Key foreign trade partners have their doubts about the policy shift as well. Longtime allies like Australia, Canada and Japan want the U.S. to eventually return to traditional free trade agreements, and emerging partners like Malaysia and the Philippines question whether Bidens efforts to boost U.S. workers will come at the expense of their own.

When we talk about strengthening middle-class workers in the United States, we also have to bear in mind we must do this concurrently  we must build a strong middle class in Southeast Asia, Liew Chin Tong, Malaysias deputy trade minister, said in an interview.

Tai has remained resolute in the face of the criticism.

Look, change is hard. Change is really hard, Tai said at the event earlier this month. There's a sort of comfort to hanging on to the old structures and the old ways because they're comfortable, but complacency really isn't an option.

There's so much that's just changing around us, whether we want it to or not, she continued. The challenge for us is, how do we keep pace with the change?

Part of an occasional POLITICO series: The Changing Landscape of Global Trade
As federal and state officials prepare to renegotiate the rules governing the Colorado River, the regions tribal nations are demanding seats at the table  seats that could make or break the basins future.

The Biden administration recently announced the official launch of the process to revamp the rivers long-term operational guidelines, which are set to expire at the end of 2026.

Since the Bureau of Reclamation and the seven basin states agreed to those guidelines in 2007, megadrought conditions coupled with overconsumption have endangered the Colorado Rivers two key reservoirs: Lake Powell and Lake Mead.

With so much at stake for the entire system and for the indigenous populations that have long relied on this resource, the regions 30 federally recognized tribes  who collectively have rights to about a quarter of the basins waters  are pushing for equal footing in determining the rivers future.

Tribes must be involved, they have to be involved, at the very beginning. At the very beginning  not after decisions have been made, and those decisions being forced upon tribes, Gov. Stephen Roe Lewis of the Gila River Indian Community told The Hill.

Tribes have substantial water supplies that are essential to a successful conclusion of the guideline process, Lewis added.

Of the 30 tribes in the basin, 22 have recognized rights to consume 3.2 million acre-feet of system water annually, according to a policy brief from the Water & Tribes Initiative in the Colorado River Basin.

That total is equivalent to 22 to 26 percent of the basins average water supply, per the policy brief, written with the support of the University of Colorado Law Schools Getches-Wilkinson Center for Natural Resources, Energy, and the Environment.

The over-tapped Colorado River Basin  which serves 40 million people  is split into a lower and an upper basin, which respectively include California, Arizona and Nevada, and Colorado, Wyoming, Utah and New Mexico. Many of the 30 tribes cross state lines.

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A 1922 compact granted annual water allocations of 7.5 million acre-feet to each basin, while a 1944 treaty then gave an additional 1.5 million acre-feet to Mexico. For reference, a typical suburban U.S. household uses about an acre-foot of water each year.

Within these broader allocations is a water rights system  often referred to as first in time, first in right  that stems from the mid-19th century homesteading and gold rush era. Farmers and miners were able to secure and divert water in the order of their arrival in a region, rather than according to their proximity to a given river.

Tribal nations were only recognized as a part of this system when a 1908 Supreme Court case, Winters v. United States, established that the priority date for water rights on Native American reservations took precedence over those of most existing users.

And even after that recognition, it wasnt until almost a century later that tribes began recovering these rights. Through settlements with state and federal officials, some tribes have in the past few decades obtained annual water allocations  although not necessarily from the original river to which their rights applied.

As it stands today, 11 of the 30 tribes in the Colorado River region still have unresolved water rights claims, which, if resolved, could increase their collective share to about 24 to 29 percent of the basins annual water supply, the Water & Tribes Initiative policy brief found.

That remains this untold story of how tribal water has helped prop up the system for at least a decade or so, said Daryl Vigil, co-director of the initiatives Water & Tribes in the Colorado River Basin program and water administrator for the Jicarilla Apache Nation.

Striving for parity of sovereignty at the negotiating table

What the tribal nations are seeking ahead of the post-2026 talks is a sovereigns approach, in which the negotiations table includes 38 sovereigns: seven basin states, 30 tribes and one federal government, Lewis explained.

The Gila River governor expressed cautious optimism about the prospects of such an arrangement, as Department of Interior Secretary Deb Haaland in March 2022 committed to including tribes at the table in developing the post-2026 guidelines.

Vigil offered a mix of hope and skepticism, noting that Indigenous people are often propped up for lots of hope but end up disappointed. Nonetheless, he is continuing to steer federal officials toward accepting a structured framework that would recognize parity of sovereignty among the seven states and 30 tribes.

Theres a whole lot of forward movement, Vigil said. But Ill celebrate the day that thats structuralized.

There are certain big picture principles on which the tribes leaders tend to agree, according to Jason Hauter, a tribal rights attorney and member of the Gila River Indian Community. But he stressed that tribes are not this monolithic thing.

The nature of each tribes water rights is different, as is their physical proximity to water resources and infrastructural capacity, noted Hauter, a partner at the law firm Akin Gump Strauss Hauer & Feld, which serves as outside counsel for the Community.

The biggest benefit of having a seat at the table is understanding whats being discussed among the basin states, United States, earlier in the process rather than as a kind of afterthought, he said.

The Gila River Indian Community has extensive experience engaging with both federal and state officials. That engagement led Congress to pass the Arizona Water Settlements Act in 2004, under which the tribe gained the single largest entitlement to water from the Central Arizona Project, a massive conduit that transports water from the Colorado River across Arizona each year.

A judicious participant in regional water management, the Community in 2010 launched a strategic initiative to sell a portion to neighboring users, while also unveiling a network of underground storage sites to maintain a stable supply at home.

Cementing their influence in the basin, Gila River leaders played a key role in formulating Arizonas 2019 drought contingency plan. In exchange for storing water in Lake Mead through 2026, the Community receives money from the Arizona Water Bank and the Bureau of Reclamation.

Hauter recalled a planning process in which the Community had to be very engaged due to the threat of cuts and real costs to high-priority water users.

Our water was going to be the first to be cut, Lewis said, noting that tribal leaders therefore pushed their federal trustee  the U.S. government  to act in their best interest.

Because of the significance of our water settlement, and the amount of water in our settlement, we use that as a leverage point, Lewis said.

This past April, the Community agreed to leave more water in Lake Mead over the next three years, in return for up to $150 million from the federal government. The Interior Department also invested $83 million in a Community pipeline project that seeks to expand water reuse.

Touting the benefits of basinwide collaboration, Lewis said he hopes federal officials will recognize that tribes can bring very innovative, very thought out, sophisticated approaches.

Negotiating a resource amid uncertainty over rights

Partnership among Colorado River stakeholders, according to the experts, will be essential to the negotiations process that the Interior Department launched in June. The talks will specifically focus on drafting new rules to replace the outdated 2007 Colorado River Interim Guidelines for Lower Basin Shortages and the Coordinated Operations for Lake Powell and Lake Mead.

The Interior Departments announcement came just weeks after the seven Colorado River Basin states resolved a year of conflict over short-term water consumption cutbacks, submitting a proposal to the Bureau of Reclamation offering to conserve about 13 percent of their total river allocations by the end of 2026.

The Bureau of Reclamation has yet to officially approve the plans, which would provide temporary stabilization for the basin until the post-2026 terms materialize.

As those long-term discussions begin, the Interior Department said regulators will start gathering feedback, including new strategies to account for the current and projected hydrology of the Colorado River system.

But to make accurate hydrological projections, Michael Kotutwa Johnson, a University of Arizona indigenous resilience expert, said he believes all the outstanding cases concerning tribal water rights need to first be adjudicated.

Then we can move on to a more sustainable future because we know what each party has, added Johnson, who is also a member of the Hopi Tribe. We know that the tribes have reserved water rights, but we dont know how much their reserved water rights are.

Seventeen tribes have recognized water rights in the Lower Basin, with the biggest shares held by the Colorado River Indian Tribes and the Gila River Indian Community: 662,400 acre-feet from Arizona and 56,846 acre-feet from California for the former, and 653,500 acre-feet from Arizona for the latter, per the policy brief.

In the Upper Basin, five tribes currently have recognized water rights, with the largest allocation belonging to the Navajo Nation: 606,660 acre-feet from New Mexico and 81,500 acre-feet from Utah.

The Navajo Nation is also one of 11 tribes that has unresolved claims  and its path toward realizing its rights in Arizona may have become more difficult.

The Supreme Court ruled last month that the U.S. does not have a trust duty to take affirmative steps toward securing water for the Navajo Nation, whose population is struggling to access clean water.

Even tribes with recognized rights often lack the infrastructure necessary to make the most of them, the Water & Tribes Initiative found.

Eric Edwards, an assistant professor of agricultural and resource economics at North Carolina State University, and his colleagues recently published a study showing that tribal nations are likely only using a fraction of their entitlements  and are thereby sacrificing hundreds of millions of dollars in revenue each year.

But as basinwide demand has begun to surpass reliable supply, other users have grown anxious about what further development of tribal rights could mean for them, according to the Water & Tribes Initiative.

The idea that states would suffer tremendously from an expanded recognition of tribal claims may be a red herring, however, as many users simply dont want to cut back on their development, Johnson said.

The tribes can also bring a different value system too  the whole value of what water really is, added Johnson, who himself practices traditional Hopi dry farming.

While it might be ideal to settle all the outstanding water rights settlement cases before embarking on negotiations, Hauter said he believes it would be impossible to settle all of the cases immediately and that the result of the talks isnt going to change the ability of tribes to ultimately reach settlement.

Vigil agreed that settling the claims is important, as these resolutions will determine access to basic infrastructure and the ability to build economies. But he also stressed that the choice to move forward is up to each individual tribe.

Edwards, the North Carolina economist, agreed that settling the remaining cases now would be advantageous, but said that such a scenario is unlikely.

Negotiations are going to have to go forward, and 2026 is kind of a long ways off, maybe, in the political cycle, he said. But in terms of tribal water negotiations, thats like a blink of the eye.

Stewards of the land and the water

If the 30 tribes do assume their seats at the table, there wont be a one-size-fits-all approach to the development of individual tribal water rights and conservation strategies, the experts agreed.

But for many communities, such tactics could include pivoting toward more durable infrastructure, boosting operational efficiency in agriculture and improving access to clean water, according to Hauter.

An additional option for certain tribes could involve taking bigger sums of financial resources in lieu of larger allocations of water, Vigil said.

Other creative possibilities include leasing water to neighbors or leaving water in Lake Mead in exchange for payment, similar to the Gila River Indian Communitys approach to its allocations from the Central Arizona Project, added Edwards.

Were in a new age of Colorado River water allocations, he said. There may be the opportunity to view the tribes water rights differently.

Tribes could potentially keep full autonomy over their water rights while engaging in agreements that honor that autonomy and also free up some water, Edwards added.

What will be most critical, however, is the promotion of a consensus-based approach in which tribes are at the table, as equal partners, according to Lewis, the governor of the Gila River Indian Community.

Yet at the same time, Lewis stressed that theres no silver bullet thats going to address all the needs and concerns of every tribe.

Looking toward the upcoming talks, Vigil said he remains absolutely hopeful that we get to that proverbial table, expressing pride in the fact that the tribes have built their stature themselves.

Hauter, meanwhile, said he perceives a willingness for shared sacrifice, while noting that the details of how thats shared is really where the conversations get difficult.

Looking back at the journey thus far and toward what lies ahead, Lewis said he had previously thought of himself as a water protector but now also sees himself as a water diplomat.

There are traditional indigenous value systems about protecting the water, the governor continued. Were just translating what we call our Ootham Himdag  were translating that into a present day and future approach of being caretakers and stewards of the land and the water.

Thats whats important to our people. Thats what we want to show as an example, he added.

For the latest news, weather, sports, and streaming video, head to The Hill.
Ukraine seems to be claiming it downed Russian aircraft inside Russia with a Patriot battery.

The Ukrainian Air Force on Monday released a video that appeared to include a tacit claim that one of its donated Patriot air defense systems downed several Russian aircraft on May 13, a day when Moscow lost at least four and possibly five aircraft within its own borders.

The video was released in conjunction with the celebration of the Anti-Aircraft Missile Forces of the Armed Forces of Ukraine Day, one of many such honors Ukraine holds for its troops. In one shot, there are images of two Russian fighters and three Russian helicopters emblazoned on the side of a Patriot battery. The three helicopters and two jets have the date May 13 inscribed underneath.

https://twitter.com/feher_junior/status/1675768372070436864?s=12\u0026t=BQRSNakUKt7_8ssZiGBW-A

A screen capture of the Ukrainian Air Force video shows images of three Russian helicopters and two Russian fighters painted on the side of a Patriot air defense battery. The three helicopter and two jet images bear the date May 13. (Defense Industry of Ukraine image)

As we reported at the time, Russia lost two Mi-8 Hip helicopters, a Su-34 Fullback strike fighter, and a Su-35 Flanker-E, with no survivors on May 13. All four aircraft came down in Russias Bryansk Oblast, opposite northeast Ukraines Chernihiv Oblast.

As news of that incident emerged, Ukrainian Air Force spokesman Col. Yuri Ignat suggested that there was actually a third helicopter downed, but that the Russians themselves accidentally took down their own aircraft.

https://twitter.com/Gerashchenko_en/status/1657691793121501184

Video on that day showed one of the Mi-8s breaking up after what looks as if a missile hits it near the town of Klintsy, about 50 kilometers north of the Ukrainian border.

https://twitter.com/JimmySecUK/status/1657327751957815303

Video also emerged of the downing of a Russian fighter that day.

https://twitter.com/bayraktar_1love/status/1657337179545247746

While we raised the possibility in our story at the time that one of Ukraines donated air defense systems could have been involved in downing those aircraft, we also noted that such a move inside Russian territory could jeopardize future arms supplies. U.S. and allied officials have repeatedly said that such arms are only meant for use inside Ukrainian territory.

Story continues

Shortly after the aircraft were downed, speculation floated about the possibility that a Patriot system might have been involved.

It is unclear why Ukraine waited until now to indicate that a Patriot battery might have been used, if Kyiv has any concern that such a use might cause consternation of allies or if this is just another information operation.

During a press conference today, Ukrainian Air Force spokesman Col. Yuri Ignat made no mention of such a claim nor was he asked about it.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a94WrbJ06ls

We've reached out to the Pentagon and to Ignat and will update this story with any information provided.

At least one of the helicopters was said to be hit in a location about 160 miles from Kyiv, the presumed location of Ukraine's two existing existing Patriot batteries. While it is theoretically possible for a Patriot interceptor to hit a target that far away, such a shot has a low probability of hitting a target, one expert told us.

The longer the distance, the less likely a Patriot is to hit a target, David Shank, a retired Army colonel and former commandant of the Army Air Defense Artillery School at Ft. Sill, Oklahoma, told The War Zone Monday afternoon.

It would be a wasted shot in my opinion, he said. I say that based on mission requirements. Patriot systems are deployed to defend critical assets, meaning not take pot shots at long range targets who may be planning to strike elsewhere.

Given that, four, or even five kills from that distance would be a significant feat.

It is also possible, Shank noted, that Ukraine could have set up remote site launchers to engage targets further out. It's also possible, he said, that the Patriot's radar was able to detect and track targets that far and relay information to an air defense system much closer.

Maybe there is another tactic or capability in play that we are not aware of. Or the whole thing could be a propaganda ploy to confuse the Russians. We just don't know at this point.

We'll update this story when more information becomes available.

Before we head into the latest from Ukraine, The War Zone readers can catch up on our previous rolling coverage here.

The Latest

On the battlefield, Ukraine appears to be expanding its bridgehead across the Dnipro River in the occupied portion of Kherson Oblast. Russian occupation official Vladimir Rogov complained on his Telegram channel Sunday that contrary to Russian Defense Ministry reports, Ukrainian troops have not been ousted yet.

https://twitter.com/noelreports/status/1675463236156547073?s=12\u0026t=BQRSNakUKt7_8ssZiGBW-A

Ukrainian Deputy Defense Minister said that her forces are continuing to make gains across the eastern and southern portions of the front lines while Russia is attempting to "continue to advance in the directions of Lyman, Avdiiv, and Marin. The enemy is trying to dislodge our troops from their positions, but receives a decent rebuff. Heavy fighting is going on there now."

https://twitter.com/NOELreports/status/1675742332325449731

Russian Defense Minister Sergei Shoigu - who has apparently survived Wagner boss Yevgeny Prigozhins mutiny aimed in large measure at ousting him - has made some more bold claims, albeit as usual without proof.

Speaking during a special teleconference on Monday, Shoigu said Russian forces have destroyed 15 airplanes, three helicopters, and 920 pieces of armored hardware, including 16 Leopard tanks, in the South Donetsk, Zaporizhzhia, and Donetsk directions alone, where Ukrainian troops are making futile attacks.

The loss of the Leopards, said Shoigu, represented nearly all of the tanks of this type that Poland and Portugal provided to Ukraine.

According to the latest figures from the Oryx open-source tracking group, there is no mention of any Polish- or Portuguese-donated Leopards being lost. But Oryx does indicate that Ukraine has seen eight German-donated Leopard 2 tanks taken off the battlefield.

There was one 2A4 variant destroyed and two damaged, and two Leopard 2A6 tanks destroyed, two damaged and one damaged and abandoned.

The real number is likely higher because Oryx only tabulates vehicles for which is has visual confirmation.

https://twitter.com/UAWeapons/status/1675811000002461696?s=20

But he didnt stop there. Shoigu claimed that over the past month, Russian air defense units have shot down 158 HIMARS rockets, 25 Storm Shadow cruise missiles, and 386 unmanned aerial vehicles.

You can read more about how difficult it really is for Russian air defense to shoot down the U.K.-donated Storm Shadow air-launched, conventionally armed cruise missiles in our story here.

As for Prigozhins putative putsch, Shoigu said it failed mainly because the Armed Forces personnel were loyal to the military oath and their military duty.

The mutinous march on Moscow did not have any impact on actions of the Groups of Forces, he added. I thank the Russian servicemen for their faithful service.

One big issue Shoigu didn't address was the fate of Russian Gen. Sergie Surovikin, the head of the Russian Aerospace Forces who was detained last week over his role in Prigozhin's mutiny attempt. His status remains murky.

https://twitter.com/Gerashchenko_en/status/1675828467202416642

Speaking of Prigozhin, new imagery has been released showing the damage that was caused when a Russian helicopter attacked a fuel facility in Voronezh in an attempt to slow down his march. You can see the incident in this video below.

https://twitter.com/Osinttechnical/status/1672542492250480642?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw%7Ctwcamp%5Etweetembed%7Ctwterm%5E1672542492250480642%7Ctwgr%5E0516f2f0ccfcc4aeae161b42f1e68a3a777c77df%7Ctwcon%5Es1_\u0026ref_url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.thedrive.com%2Fthe-war-zone%2Fwagner-boss-declares-war-on-russian-defense-ministry

The satellite imagery, released Monday by Maxar Technologies, appears to show at least two of the storage tanks were damaged during that attack.

https://twitter.com/bradyafr/status/1675898648499044352?s=20

While Shoigu proclaimed his claimed Storm Shadow kills, German Chancellor Olaf Scholz on Sunday said he did not want to provide Ukraine with the air-launched, conventionally armed Taurus KEPD 350 cruise missile out of concern that Kyiv would use them on Russian territory.

We carefully check all the requests we receive," Scholz told German ARD TV. "But for us there is a principle that I share with the U.S. president  we do not want the weapons we supply to be used to attack Russian territories."

Taurus - the product of a joint venture between MBDA Deutschland of Germany and Saab Dynamics of Sweden - reportedly has a range of more than 300 miles. You can read more about what it would bring to the table for Ukraine here.

https://twitter.com/ryankakiuchan/status/1675658911607844864?s=20

The battle for Neskuchne in Donetsk Oblast last month was the first victory for Ukraine in its now nearly month-old counteroffensive. But as The New York Times reported Sunday about the fight for this tiny village along the Mokri Yaly River, it was tougher than expected and in many ways emblematic of the slow-but-steadily moving counteroffensive that is chewing up small pieces of territory at a heavy cost.

"The Russian defeat, on June 9, was Ukraines first win in a prolonged counteroffensive that is well into its fourth week but moving at a slower pace than expected. In that respect, the battle for Neskuchne served as an early warning that Kyivs and the Western allies hopes for a quick victory were unrealistic and that every mile of their drive into Russian-occupied territory would be grueling and contested."

After Neskuchne was cleared, which was announced on June 10, "Ukrainian forces have managed to retake several villages farther south. But since that early string of victories, Ukraines offensive has been slow. Ukrainian forces have been mired by staunch Russian defenses, mounting casualties and field after field of land mines.

https://twitter.com/nytimesworld/status/1675507640435081216

Ahead of next week's NATO summit in Vilnius, Lithuania, The Economist took a deep dive into the challenges facing the alliance both in the current fight in Ukraine in which it is not directly involved, as well as any future fight in which it might be.

"A senior NATO official points to five immediate priorities: combat-capable ground forces, particularly heavy armored brigades; integrated air and missile defense systems capable of protecting units on the move; long-range firepower such as artillery and rocket launchers; digital networks that allow data to move around the battlefield and back to headquarters quickly and securely; and logistics to shunt large armies across Europe while keeping them supplied," The Economist wrote.

"This list largely reflects needs that have been identified while observing the war in Ukraine: old-fashioned artillery has inflicted the majority of casualties; maneuvering without armor has proven extremely costly. The problem is that the majority of European armies fare woefully on most of these measures (notwithstanding pockets of excellence, such as Finlands artillery-rich army of conscripts).

https://twitter.com/shashj/status/1675563809677664256?s=20

In January, France announced with great fanfare that it was donating AMX-10 RC infantry fighting vehicles to Ukraine.

Over the weekend, however, a Ukrainian commander complained to the French AFP news outlet that AMX-10s  highly-mobile armored vehicles with a tank-like main gun  are "impractical" for front-line attacks.

https://twitter.com/clashreport/status/1675499783232929792?s=20

A 34-year-old battalion commander within the 37th Marine Brigade, who uses the call sign 'Spartanets,' said the tanks' "thin armor" means they can be used as fire support, but not in front-line assaults.

Spartanets claimed one four-man crew has already died because of the vehicle's thin armor.

"There was artillery shelling and a shell exploded near the vehicle, the fragments pierced the armor and the ammunition set detonated."

He added that the French AMX-10 also had issues with gear boxes breaking down, possibly due to their use on dirt roads.

"Just sending out the (AMX-10) vehicles (into combat) so they get destroyed, I consider it is impractical and unnecessary because it's primarily a risk for the crew," Spartanets said.

https://twitter.com/ArthurM40330824/status/1675752287233269762

He did not specify how many AMX-10s the elite combat formation has, and declined to show them to AFP reporters in the field.

On the positive side, Spartanets said that the AMX-10s guns are good, the observation devices are very good.

In its most recent tally, Oryx counted three abandoned AMX-10s.

What may be the first image of a Slovakian MiG-29 Fulcrum jet donated to Ukraine has emerged. The first four of them were delivered to Ukraine in March. You can read more about the history of these aircraft here. Based on its false canopy and the shape of a pattern on the right vertical stabilizer, researcher Matej Rafael Risko identified it as potentially Bort No. 0921.

https://twitter.com/MatejRisko/status/1675890197651652609

Russia, meanwhile, appears to have some new aircraft in its fleet. This video below shows the delivery to the Russian Defense Ministry of a new batch of SU-30SM2 Flanker multirole fighters.

Today we delivered to the Russian Defense Ministry another batch of new modernized Su-30SM2 fighters," said Vladimir Artyakov, first deputy general director of Rostec State Corporation. "Aircraft of this type have proven their high efficiency over the years of operation and are very important for our countrys defense capabilities. Production of aviation equipment under the state defense order at the UAC Irkutsk aircraft plant is proceeding according to schedule. All aircraft scheduled for delivery this year are already in the final assembly shop or flight test unit.

Artyakov did not say how many Flankers were delivered in this batch.

https://twitter.com/mrfrantarelli/status/1675795124008235009?s=12\u0026t=BQRSNakUKt7_8ssZiGBW-A

It's bad enough when you hit an enemy mine, but there is something ignominious about hitting your own, as this Russian T-62 tank apparently did.

https://twitter.com/clashreport/status/1675781742668521476?s=20

New video shows a Russian tank surviving at least one attack by a Ukrainian First Person Video (FPV) drone. After the first strike, the tank keeps rumbling down the road, until it stops to fire at a Ukrainian target. It appears to be hit again, but it is unclear how much damage was caused.

https://twitter.com/clashreport/status/1675848494500675584?s=20

The Russian soldier atop this armored vehicle may not have fared quite as well during this Ukrainian FPV attack.

https://twitter.com/666_mancer/status/1675773153220370432?s=20

A small group of Russian soldiers managed to survive a Ukrainian drone attack in the occupied city of Oleskny near the Dnipro River. The troops here were apparently wounded, just a few meters from a graveyard.

https://twitter.com/NOELreports/status/1675415158938640384?s=20

As drones have created problems for both sides in this conflict, each has tried to devise ways to defeat them using so-called cope cages or improvised netting as well. The results - as you can see in this video below of a Ukrainian radar system being attacked by a Russian Lancet drone - are often not so good.

https://twitter.com/clashreport/status/1675540591587803136?s=20

Speaking of wartime improvisation, another Mad Maxian Ukrainian vehicle has made an appearance, this one a sport utility kitted out with ballistic plates use for body armor.

https://twitter.com/666_mancer/status/1675391288621801474?s=20

More video of intense combat has emerged on social media. At one point, a Ukrainian soldier is almost killed when a captured Russian detonates a grenade.

https://twitter.com/wartranslated/status/1675838727141113857?s=20

Sometimes the spoils of this war are antiques, like this old bolt-action rifle Ukrainian forces captured along with another Russian trench.

https://twitter.com/NOELreports/status/1675451415609634816?s=20

And finally, we write frequently about tanks and jets and artillery and ammunition, but let's spend a moment to remember the shovel, a handy piece of kit.

You can use it to dig trenches and foxholes, create a latrine or, in the case of this Ukrainian mortar man, clear a round stuck in a tube.

https://twitter.com/Seveerity/status/1675869542231293957

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
More than 15 years ago, a group of nature lovers were on their way to the Thungyai Naresuan Wildlife Sanctuary in Thailand when something strange caught their eye: a rock-licking fish with a bright red tail.

After arriving at their camp, the visitors went diving and discovered the fish, which was determined to be a new species and was named the Garra Red tail  because it is a member of the diverse Garra genus and because of its coloring, according to a post from the Facebook page Freshwater Fishes of Thailand by Dr. Nonn Panitvong.

This is the sixth species of Garra discovered in the area, according to the study.

Since then, the fish has been known throughout the aquarium trade as the Redtail Garra. Now, for the first time, experts have scientifically identified the creature as an official new species.

Co-authors Weerapongse Tangjitjaroen, Zachary S. Randall, Sampan Tongnunui, David A. Boyd and Lawrence M. Page, describe the fish and identify it as Garra panitvongi in a new study published June 30 in Zootaxa.

Heres what to know about the creature.

Garra: a diverse genus

Researchers said they collected samples of the new species from the Salween River basin in southeastern Myanmar and western Thailand. The discovery of Garra panitvongi marks the sixth species of Garra discovered in the river basin, according to the study.

There are 189 species of Garra  making it one of the most diverse genera of fish in the world  ranging from western Africa to China, north to Turkey and Afghanistan, and south to Borneo, researchers said. Five of those species have been previously identified in the Salween river basin.

The samples were specifically collected from Kasat River in the Kayin State of Myanmar and the Kanchanaburi Province of Thailand.

A distinctive appearance

The newest species of Garra is distinguished by its vibrant coloring and uniquely shaped proboscis, experts said.





The fishs caudal fin, or tail, and the back quarter of its body is a red-orange color, photos show.

The creatures distinctive red-orange tail made it stand out from other similar species, experts said.

Researchers also noted its pointy proboscis, which is a long and thin tube positioned at about the same height as the fishs eye. The proboscis is also significant because of the blue stripe that originates at its tip and extends in a V-shape towards the creatures eye.

Story continues

Researchers also noted the unique blue, v-shaped stripes on the creatures proboscis.

Aside from its brightly colored tail, the fish has a dark greenish body and head, the study said. It has six to seven black stripes on its sides before it transitions to its red-orange coloration.

Experts said the fish lacks black spots on its proboscis and bands on its tail that other similar species in the area have.





The fish are an average of about 3.6 inches long, the study said.

Google Translate was used to translate the Facebook post from Freshwater Fishes of Thailand by Dr. Nonn Panitvong.

Deep-sea creature  a new species with eye-catching snout  discovered near Madagascar

New striped creature  with orange groin and unique mating call  found in Australia

Dark purple creature hidden beneath rocks on Thai island discovered as new species
A Washington County man ended up with a shorter sentence after reaching a plea deal in his appeal of animal cruelty convictions last fall involving a horse.

Joseph Alexander Bowers Jr., 49, of the Beaver Creek area, pleaded guilty Wednesday in Washington County Circuit Court to two counts of misdemeanor animal cruelty for failing to provide the horse with necessary sustenance and necessary veterinary care, according to court records.

Judge Andrew F. Wilkinson sentenced Bowers to 180 days incarceration, with almost 80 days of that suspended, according to court records. Bowers had time-served credit for 101 days.

What can be done?: Crowd of 100 complain about reckless driving, low enforcement on Md. 67 near Boonsboro

The case involves an Appaloosa mare named Iris that partially delivered a stillborn foal. According to court records and testimony during a November trial, Bowers told a field service officer for the Humane Society of Washington County that he used ratchet straps for 2 to 2 1/2 hours to pull the dead foal from the mare on May 18, 2021. The horse was not able to stand on its own for about two days and did not receive veterinary care until the humane society got a tip about the horse on May 25 and seized it that night.

Retired Judge M. Kenneth Long, who conducted the November bench trial in Washington County District Court, said at the time that the horse was in "great distress" for a week until it was seized and even after as it had to be sedated and receive pain medication and treatment. It was "abject failure" on Bowers' part and became a willful, intentional act, Long said of the lack of attention to the horse's needs.

Iris, the Appaloosa mare second from the left, was the subject of an animal cruelty case in Washington County. In this picture submitted last November, Iris was "fat and happy" at her new home, a Clear Spring-area farm, according to Kim Martin, who adopted the horse. Iris has put on weight and has become best friends with Martin's pony, Midnight, second from the right.

Long found Bowers guilty of six counts of animal cruelty and, for purposes of sentencing, merged them into three counts. Long sentenced Bowers to 180 days, or six months, in the Washington County Detention Center and suspended a third 90-day sentence on the third count.

Story continues

A jury trial in Bowers' appeal of the District Court case was scheduled to begin on Wednesday, when Bowers agreed to a plea deal, Assistant State's Attorney Danielle Lackovic confirmed Thursday in a phone interview.

The Washington County Public Defender's Office had no comment on Bowers' plea, according to an email from Assistant Public Defender Daniel Tait, who represented Bowers.

Lackovic also had no comment on the plea deal.

The air we breathe: Canadian wildfire smoke could linger on-and-off over Washington County until October

Crystal Mowery, field services director for the humane society, said Thursday in a phone interview, "Were pleased that once again Mr. Bowers was found guilty and is being held accountable for his actions."

Bowers is on supervised probation for five years and is not to own any animals during that time, according to his probation order.

Wilkinson also ordered Bowers to surrender any animals he owns to the humane society within 10 days of the Wednesday hearing.

Mowery said if anyone knows the location of any animals owned by Bowers, they can call the humane society's field service department at 301-733-2060, ext. 203.

Horse in animal cruelty case found new home

Several months after the Appaloosa received medical care through the humane society, she was adopted by Karen Martin. Martin was the person who reported the neglect.

The animal cruelty case came to the humane society's attention on May 25, 2021, after Martin visited a farm near the Pennsylvania state line with a friend to assess a horse her friend was considering buying, Martin testified at the November trial. They went through a separate paddock and Martin said she noticed an Appaloosa mare that looked like she had recently given birth and was swaying while standing.

Martin testified the horse appeared to have scalding from urine, that she could "smell infection from several feet away," that the horse was "very thin," and there were "things protruding" from the horse's back end that were not normal.

Martin said she asked the man in charge of the farm what the horse's story was and was told the man's buddy, Joe, owned the horse.

Martin, after the November sentencing, said Iris was "happy on a private farm" in the Clear Spring area with Martin's four other horses, a donkey, and a pony with whom Iris had become best friends.

This article originally appeared on The Herald-Mail: Washington County man pleads in his appeal of horse cruelty case
FILE - Ukrainian air defense intercepts a Shahed drone mid-air in the third Russia aerial attack on the capital in the last 24 hours in Kyiv, Ukraine, on May 30, 2023. When Russia invaded Ukraine in February 2022, Ukraines military was largely reliant on Soviet-era weaponry. While that arsenal helped Ukraine fend off an assault on the capital of Kyiv and prevent a total rout in the early weeks of the war, billions of dollars in military assistance has , since poured into the country, including more modern Western-made weapons.
Kendrick Yallup-Littlebull appears via Zoom in Yakima County Superior Court for his sentencing June 29, 2023. Yallup-Littlebull pleaded guilty earlier to conspiracy to commit first-degree child molestation in connection with his arrest in an online child-sex sting.
JUBA, July 3 (Xinhua) -- South Sudan's health authorities in Rubkona County of Unity State on Monday declared a measles outbreak among returnees displaced by conflict in neighboring Sudan.

Jal Kuol Malow, Rubkona County health director, told Xinhua in an interview that they have so far confirmed 86 cases of measles among returnees in Rotriah Payam health facility and Bentiu Internally Displaced Persons Camp.

"We have confirmed 86 cases of measles outbreak in greater Rubkona, and most of these cases are among returnee children aged 4-6," he said.

Malow said the affected children were not vaccinated against measles while they were in war-torn Sudan.

"The Ministry of Health and humanitarian partners conducted a measles vaccination campaign in Rotriah Payam for returnees, and a similar measles vaccination campaign will take place this week in Rubkona town and Bentiu Internally Displaced Persons Camp," he said.

South Sudan now hosts more than 138,000 returnees, including refugees who fled fighting in Sudan across the 12 border crossing points, according to the United Nations.

Brutal fighting erupted in the Sudanese capital of Khartoum on April 15 and swiftly escalated in different parts of the country. The ongoing fighting is pitting the Sudanese Armed Forces against the paramilitary Rapid Support Forces. Both sides have accused each other of initiating the conflict. 
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What we know about the WA man arrested near Obama's home with hundreds of rounds of ammo
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Smoke billows from a refugee camp during an Israeli strike in the West Bank city of Jenin on July 3, 2023. The Israeli army launched a large-scale military strike early on Monday on the northern West Bank city of Jenin, according to eyewitnesses and the Israeli military. Dozens of armored vehicles backed by drones and helicopters stormed the city and the refugee camp, said Palestinian eyewitnesses, adding that airstrikes were carried out during the exchange of fire between Palestinian militants and Israeli soldiers. (Photo by Ayman Nobani/Xinhua)

RAMALLAH, July 3 (Xinhua) -- The Israeli army launched a large-scale military strike early on Monday on the northern West Bank city of Jenin, according to eyewitnesses and the Israeli military.

Dozens of armored vehicles backed by drones and helicopters stormed the city and the refugee camp, said Palestinian eyewitnesses, adding that airstrikes were carried out during the exchange of fire between Palestinian militants and Israeli soldiers.

The Israeli military said it struck a "joint operations center" which served as a command center for fighters from the Jenin Brigades, an armed unit comprised of fighters from different militant groups. It declined to specify whether Monday's strike also involved a drone.

Palestinian eyewitnesses said Israeli forces entered Jenin shortly after the airstrikes began, and armed clashes erupted between the soldiers and the Palestinian gunmen.

Israel Radio reported that Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, who held a meeting with Israeli security leaders on Sunday night, has been updated as the operation continued.

The Palestinian side on Sunday slammed Netanyahu for his policy of motivating Israeli settlers to commit more crimes against the Palestinians.

"Netanyahu's boast of killing large numbers of Palestinians since the formation of his government motivates settlers to commit more of their crimes against our people," said the Palestinian Foreign Ministry in a statement.

Since January, 24 people, most of them Israelis, have been killed in a series of attacks carried out by Palestinians, and more than 175 Palestinians, including children and women, were killed by Israeli soldiers and settlers, according to official figures. 

Smoke billows from a refugee camp during an Israeli strike in the West Bank city of Jenin on July 3, 2023. The Israeli army launched a large-scale military strike early on Monday on the northern West Bank city of Jenin, according to eyewitnesses and the Israeli military. Dozens of armored vehicles backed by drones and helicopters stormed the city and the refugee camp, said Palestinian eyewitnesses, adding that airstrikes were carried out during the exchange of fire between Palestinian militants and Israeli soldiers. (Photo by Ayman Nobani/Xinhua)

Israeli military vehicles drive through a refugee camp in the West Bank city of Jenin on July 3, 2023. The Israeli army launched a large-scale military strike early on Monday on the northern West Bank city of Jenin, according to eyewitnesses and the Israeli military. Dozens of armored vehicles backed by drones and helicopters stormed the city and the refugee camp, said Palestinian eyewitnesses, adding that airstrikes were carried out during the exchange of fire between Palestinian militants and Israeli soldiers. (Photo by Ayman Nobani/Xinhua)

Palestinian medics transport an injured man into a hospital in the West Bank city of Jenin on July 3, 2023. The Israeli army launched a large-scale military strike early on Monday on the northern West Bank city of Jenin, according to eyewitnesses and the Israeli military. Dozens of armored vehicles backed by drones and helicopters stormed the city and the refugee camp, said Palestinian eyewitnesses, adding that airstrikes were carried out during the exchange of fire between Palestinian militants and Israeli soldiers. (Photo by Ayman Nobani/Xinhua)

Israeli military vehicles are pictured at a refugee camp in the West Bank city of Jenin on July 3, 2023. The Israeli army launched a large-scale military strike early on Monday on the northern West Bank city of Jenin, according to eyewitnesses and the Israeli military. Dozens of armored vehicles backed by drones and helicopters stormed the city and the refugee camp, said Palestinian eyewitnesses, adding that airstrikes were carried out during the exchange of fire between Palestinian militants and Israeli soldiers. (Photo by Ayman Nobani/Xinhua)
NAIROBI, July 3 (Xinhua) -- Africa's vast forest cover, estimated at 636,639 million hectares or 16 percent of the world's total, if harnessed sustainably, will catalyze the continent's drive to achieve carbon neutrality, scientists said on Monday.

Speaking at a forum in the Kenyan capital of Nairobi, the scientists acknowledged Africa's escalating climate crisis, adding that the continent's tropical forests hold the key to a green and resilient future for local communities.

Convened by the Nairobi-based African Forest Forum, the five-day pan-African forum starting on Monday has brought together policymakers, scientists, botanists, and green campaigners to discuss the role of forests and tree-based ecosystems in advancing the continent's green agenda.

Godwin Kowero, executive secretary of the African Forest Forum, said by protecting the continent's indigenous forests, grassroots communities will benefit from climate resilience and transformed livelihoods.

"The sustainable management of forest resources will be key to boosting our resilience to climatic shocks, providing income to rural communities, and stabilizing the environment," Kowero said.

According to Kowero, the contribution of the forest ecosystem to Africa's response to climate change is recognized by multilateral environment agreements and the continent's long-term growth and transformation blueprint.

He said despite contributing less than 4 percent to global greenhouse gas emissions, Africa remains the epicenter of climate disasters, including droughts, floods, wildfires, and tropical storms.

Kowero called for policy reforms, enforcement of legislation, and engagement of the private sector and communities to reverse forest degradation, worsened by climate change, population pressure, and lax policing.

Joshua Cheboiwo, director of the Kenya Forestry Research Institute, stressed that sustainable utilization of tropical forests, mangrove swamps, and savannah grasslands will aid Africa's quest to achieve net-zero targets.

Cheboiwo said the continent should leverage its forest resources to tackle rural poverty and food insecurity, and spur local manufacturing and cross-border trade in natural products. 
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Shooting in France shows US is not alone in struggles with racism, police brutality

The events in France following the death of a 17-year-old shot by police in a Paris suburb are drawing parallels to the racial reckoning in the U.S. that began in 2020 with the killing of George Floyd
Cum a scapat cantareata Raluka de acnee: Nu aveti incredere in toate produsele care sunt pe piata

Acneea este un subiect sensibil pentru Raluka, dupa ce s-a confruntat mai multi ani cu ea si cu bullyingul din cauza ei. Artista povesteste ca a avut perioade in care se izola [citeste mai departe]
At least 719 people were arrested overnight from Saturday to Sunday in France, the fifth night of nationwide violence sparked by the killing of a teen by a police officer, France's Interior Ministry said on Sunday.

According to the ministry, 45 police officers and gendarmes were injured, while 577 vehicles and 74 buildings were burnt.

French Interior Minister Gerald Darmanin said that Saturday night was "calmer" than Friday night when 1,311 people were arrested and 1,350 vehicles burnt.





Produced by Xinhua Global Service
A Hungarian and a Portuguese ballet talent have won their categorys first prize at the international ballet competition organised for the first time for young dancers in Veszprem, Europes Capital of Culture in 2023, the organisers said.

The Youth Grand Prix going with a 2,000 euro cash award has been won by Cecilia Porkolab, a student of the Hungarian National Ballet Institute.



The Junior Grand Prix going with 1,000 euros has been fetched by Marta Barbeiro, a young dancer of Portugals Conservatorio Internacional de Ballet e Danca, they said in a statement.



The Future Talent special award has been given to Adel Palfi and Arina Kurbatova and the Best Male Dancer award has gone to Viacheslav Hosachynskyi.



The first Hungarian Ballet Grand Prix was called in the 7-18 age group for professional and amateur dancers in classical ballet and modern dance. Entries were made by 150 applicants from 20 countries.



The eight-member jury of eminent Hungarian and international professionals was headed by Tamas Solymosi.



A guest of honour at the competition was Kateryna Kukhar, prima ballerina of the National Opera of Ukraine who was also a member of the jury.



Click here to know more about the competition
The illegal cigarette market in the European Union continued to grow last year, with France leading the consumption list of counterfeit products. However, illicit cigarette traffic also increased in Hungary, according to KPMG's annual study, writes profitline.hu.

Despite declining cigarette consumption in Hungary, the illegal market grew by three percentage points, which meant roughly 500 million cigarettes were consumed in 2022, which is 7.2% of the total consumption.



Despite the decline experienced in recent years, the share of the illegal market at home has reached the level of 2019 again, mainly due to products manufactured explicitly for contraband and, to a lesser extent, counterfeit tobacco products, according to KPMG.



Illegal tobacco products with a designation of origin arrive in Hungary mainly from Ukraine, it wrote.



According to KPMG's calculations, the Hungarian budget lost about HUF 31 billion in excise tax revenue last year due to tobacco products from illegal sources.
More than 500 GP practices are vacant across Hungary, according to hrportal.hu.

There are settlements where there has been no family doctor since 2005.



"There is no such thing as taking time off in primary care," pediatric family physician Gyorgy Pota told RTL Hirado.



For years, many people have only been able to go to rest for a few days because they are unable to arrange a replacement. Pediatricians, for example, can only be replaced by a qualified pediatrician.



As an entrepreneur, the general practitioner must also pay the deputy's salary. According to RTL, this could be as much as HUF 50,000 per day.



The average age of family pediatricians is 60 years old, and based on this, Pota believes that within a few years, there will be areas where family medicine will simply cease to exist.
Of all the impressive landmarks in Budapest, few make as immediate an impact as the Hungarian Parliament Building, set on a graceful curve on the banks of the Danube. In our continuing series of stories behind the main sights in Budapest, we visit Parliament, Orszaghaz to Hungarians.

What is the Hungarian Parliament Building in Budapest?

The seat of the countrys National Assembly, Parliament is the largest building in Hungary. Its dramatic facade in Gothic Revival style reflected in the waters of the Danube, the Hungarian Parliament covers a floor area of 18,000 square metres, making it one of the largest seats of government in the world.



Within the 16-sided Dome Hall, soldiers armed with sabres guard the Hungarian Crown Jewels, centrepieced by the Crown of St Stephen, a composite of the one gifted to the founder of the Hungarian nation by the Pope in 1000.







Top tips for the Hungarian Parliament Building in Budapest

While the actual business of parliament only takes up around 12% of the space within the building, its well worth going on the guided tour to get a sense of the enormity of the place, built when Hungary was at the height of its powers in the 1890s.



The tour lasts 45 minutes, with audio or actual tour guides available in 15 languages.



As well as the Crown Jewels, popular stops include the row of numbered cigar holders in brass, which MPs would avail themselves of when called to the debating chamber, so they could resume their smoke afterwards.







Why was the Hungarian Parliament Building created?

Hungary had long needed a suitable meeting place for its national assembly, particularly after 1867, when the country gained semi-autonomy, and after 1873, when the separate communities of Buda, Pest and Obuda merged to create the single national capital of Budapest.



Until then, the lower house had met at quite a modest and unsuitable building on Brody Sandor utca, today the Italian Cultural Institute, while the upper house convened in the National Museum opposite.



Behind it, many ministers  mainly landed gentry with country estates  had a pied-a-terre in Pest, these ornate residences later becoming known as the Palace Quarter.



A prime site was chosen, on a gentle curve in the Danube, between the only two bridges that existed at the time, Chain Bridge and Margaret Bridge. A completion date was set to align with the millennial celebrations of Hungarians setting in this part of the Carpathian Basin.







When was the Hungarian Parliament Building created?

After architect Imre Steindl won the international tender to build Parliament, work began in 1885. The aim was to have the building ready by 1896, the year of the millennial celebrations in Hungary, its last two figures echoed in the height of the building at its tallest point, 96 meters.



While Parliament was inaugurated during the year in question, it still required another six to be completed, by which time Steindl had gone blind. The keys werent handed over until 1904, by which time the architect had died.







Where in Budapest is the Hungarian Parliament Building?

The Parliament building creates an elegant tableau on the Danube waterfront, integral to one of the most beautiful cityscapes in the world. It stands on Kossuth Lajos ter, the square named after the renowned Hungarian statesman of the later 1800s, and faces what was originally the Palace of Justice, later the Museum of Ethnography.



Kossuth Lajos ter has its own stop on the red M2 metro line, while tram 2 glides all the way around the Parliament building on its journey along the Pest embankment.



Around the Parliament building are several statues, including one of Hungarian poet Attila Jozsef, the setting a reference to his famous poem By the Danube, composed a year before his suicide in 1937.



Further along the waterfront, you find the Shoes on the Danube installation, a row of bronze shoes representing Jewish victims beaten and drowned by Fascist forces towards the end of World War II.







What else should I know about the Hungarian Parliament Building in Budapest?

The Hungarian Crown Jewels have not always been safely guarded beneath the Dome Hall in Parliament. Following the Hungarian Uprising of 1848-49 and subsequent Habsburg backlash, the Crown of St Stephen was hidden away for several years in damp greenery and painstakingly repaired.



When the Communist authorities took over after World War II, the crown was spirited away for safekeeping in America, where it was held in Fort Knox. It was returned to Budapest by President Carter in 1978, nearly 30 years after its secret flit.







Why visit the Hungarian Parliament Building in Budapest?

As a work of architecture, the Hungarian Parliament Building is a must-see on any visit to the Hungarian capital. A guided tour also allows you to appreciate the splendour of Budapest when it was twin capital of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, and when Hungary itself was at its height.





Words by Peterjon Cresswell for Xpatloop.com

Peterjon has been researching the byways of Budapest for 30 years, extending his expertise across Europe to produce guidebooks for Time Out and his own website liberoguide.com
The price growth of newly built homes in Budapest slowed considerably in the second quarter, after double-digit growth in previous quarters, real estate broker Otthon Centrum said in a report.

The average price of a new home in the city rose by 1.3% from the preceding quarter to Ft 1,582,000 per square metre and was up 12.2% on an annual basis.



There has never been such a big difference in prices between districts, chief analyst Gabor Sooki-Toth observed.



The average price per square metre varies from Ft 932,000 to Ft 3,081,000.



Otthon Centrums June survey found that there are 26,700 new homes being built in Budapest under 338 housing projects.



The average price asked by developers is Ft 1.6 million per square metre, which is practically unchanged from the previous quarter.



New home prices in Budapest were highest in the Fifth District, at Ft 3.08 million per square metre, followed by the Second District, at Ft 2.99 million.



The average price per square metre was lowest in the 15th District, at just below Ft 1,000,000.
The opposition Momentum Movement is turning to the European Unions anti-graft body (OLAF), asking for measures to stop the sale of state-owned, revamped Hungarian castles to private buyers.

Momentum politician Janos Stummer told a press conference on Friday that Fidesz had submitted a proposal to parliament that would give the Fidesz elite the opportunity to acquire revamped castles in Hungary free of charge.



Momentum earlier organised a series of petitions and demonstrations to save castles nationwide, Stummer said.



Those buildings should be kept and operated by the state, in projects benefitting taxpayers, he said. David Benko, Momentums deputy parliamentary group leader, noted that 12 castles had been reconstructed using EU funds as well as government support.



The EU contracts for such funding bar the government from privatising the buildings in question, and so Momentum is asking OLAF to review the draft legislation and help us prevent this marauders privatisation, he said.



Photo: Kinizsi Castle
David is a successful poet who has gained recognition through competitions, TV appearances, and radio interviews. He has written a book of poetry and his work has been used in various contexts, including funerals and church masses.

David's poem for President Joe Biden received media attention in his hometown. He has also won a certificate for poets from the 14th century and had his romantic Valentine's Day poem featured on live TV.



David's prayers have been used in different countries and his poems have been published in multiple languages. He is known for his kind and passionate nature, especially in helping the sick and elderly in Hungary, Ireland, and globally.



Articles about him have appeared in newspapers in various countries. David is resilient, with a strong physical and mental demeanor. He cherishes his faith, family, and friends, and holds dear the memories of loved ones who have passed away.



He also has a beloved dog named Max who accompanies him everywhere.



1. When did you arrive in Hungary and what brought you here?

In 2004 I arrived in Hungary. I'm from Ireland and my parents fell in love with Hungary and bought a house.



2. Have you ever been an expatriate elsewhere?

No I've only lived in Ireland and Hungary.



3. What surprised you most about Hungary?

Hungary is a country full of surprises and fascinating stories.



4. Friends are in Budapest for a weekend - what must they absolutely see and do?

A romantic meal with her and read her love poems I wrote and we fall in love in Budapest, and kissing under the Moonlight.



5. What is your favourite Hungarian food?

Chicken paprikash is my favorite meal everytime I'm in Hungary I love it.



6. What is never missing from your refrigerator?

Cheese I love all types of cheese I can't get enough of cheese.



7. What is your favourite Hungarian word?

Tenyleg gyonyoru vagy.I love telling women there Truly beautiful watching them smile is the best part knowing they know I'm romantic.



8. What do you miss most from home?

Nothing really I'm a happy person and always fill my heart up with peace happiness and never ending love I'm always smiling.



9. What career other than yours would you love to pursue?

I'd love to write in Hollywood I was offered a music contract and to write for several Newspaper companies around the world.



10. What's a job you would definitely never want?

Working in the morgue because it would break my heart seen loved ones who are in your Heart forever layed out dead so sad R.I.P to all our loved ones who have sadly passed away.



11. Where did you spend your last vacation?

My last holiday was in Italy so beautiful so warm kind caring loving people are so respectful and always have time for the old people like myself helping old people in and around Hungary I wrote a love poem for a couple getting married everyone loved it.



12. Where do you hope to spend your next holiday?

In a few weeks time I'll be visiting my Auntie Mrs Carroll she's 102 in County Wicklow Ireland and I love her so much.



13. Apart of temptation what can't you resist?

I love cream cakes what do you love? Cream cakes who loves cream cakes I do I do I do I recently had a check up and the nurse she was in stitches laughing I told her cream cakes are my weakness I love them.



14. What was your favourite band, film, or hobby as a teen?

The Rolling Stones I move like Jagger on the dance floor and sing like Elton John and John Lennon I truly love them.



15. Red wine or white?

Red wine from Bordeaux.Chateau Haut Gleon Cuvee Notre Dame Chateau Beaumont wine so beautiful to enjoy with pasta while I'm writing a Romantic Poem.



16. Book or movie?

I read history books I've a degree in History and Geography I've a Romeo And Juliet certificate I won for Poetry I love good films as well horror scary romantic ones and sci-fi movies.



17. Which social issue do you feel most strongly about?

Poverty is breaks my heart to see people who Are homeless sleeping rough it's just sad and I feel there pain deep inside my heart.



Every morning I'm always happy I always check in on several old people drop a cake on there door steps and continue to walk the dog on the way back home the amount of people who thank me for being so good to there elderly mother or father or grandparents at night I enjoy a hot chocolate some popcorn and a good film.



18. Buda or Pest side?

Buda Definitely the classier and more residential side of the city I find it more peaceful and quiet.



19. Morning or night person?

I love the mornings getting up early to walk my dog Max.



20. What would you say is your personal motto?

Smile from the heart and the whole world will smile to respect and love each other especially the old people in life because life is to short and the amount of good people who have sadly passed away.



Never forgotten in our hearts forever and God bless you all peace and love to everyone around the world love David P Carroll Poet.
As the third largest economy in the world, Japan is a vital trade partner of the United States, especially agriculture producers in Nebraskas Third District. According to the Nebraska Department of Agriculture, more than half of Nebraskas pork exports and more than a quarter of our states beef exports were purchased by Japan last year, totaling $156 million and $405 million respectively. Japan is Nebraskas largest export market for pork and eggs, our second largest market for beef, and our third largest market for corn and overall ag exports.

The mutual benefit of a strong trade relationship for Third District producers and Japanese consumers is extraordinary. Sales of Nebraska beef to Japan have increased exponentially over the last two decades, as our producers have worked hard to meet demand for high-quality meat prized by Japanese consumers. Expanding cooperation and market access for Nebraskas top-notch products continues to hold even greater promise for the future. As Chairman of the Ways and Means Committees Subcommittee on Trade and co-chair of the U.S.-Japan Caucus, I am working to build on our historic partnership.

While progress on trade with Japan has been significant in the 21st century, Congress can and must do more to address both tariff and non-tariff barriers to trade. An agreement signed by President Trump in 2019 reduced tariffs on an estimated 90 percent of food and agriculture products exported to Japan; however, there are additional opportunities to expand our partnership with Japan. Congressionally-approved trade agreements are the strongest way to support American producers and consumers, and a comprehensive agreement should be the next step to maximize cooperation and growth between our nations.

This week, I joined several of my Ways and Means colleagues on a visit to Japan where we met with Prime Minister Fumio Kishida, Foreign Affairs Minister Yoshimasa Hayashi, and other Japanese officials to discuss the importance of our countries ties and mutual economic opportunity. Japan is not only an important economic partner but also a critical ally for security in the region. I was grateful for the chance to join these leaders in looking to the future and am optimistic about what we can accomplish as we continue to work together.

As China and North Korea continue to posture aggressively, it is as important as ever for the United States to strengthen our bonds with and reaffirm our support for those who share our values.

Taiwan is another significant ally in the Indo-Pacific region, and last week, with my support, the House passed United States-Taiwan Initiative on 21st-Century Trade First Agreement Implementation Act. This bill expresses congressional support for the initial agreement on trade with Taiwan and imposes requirements for congressional consultation of any further negotiations between the United States and Taiwan.

Additionally, I have introduced a resolution calling for a bilateral trade agreement to avoid double taxation between the U.S. and Taiwan. While the United States and Taiwan cannot enter a formal treaty addressing the tax treatment of international investment, similar tax treatment can be achieved through legislation passed by each country.

Advancing the long-term economic stability American businesses and our trusted allies need to invest for the future and combat the influence of bad actors are among my top priorities in Congress. Any time we can increase opportunity to sell our top-notch products to eager consumers in Japan is a win for Third District farmers and ranchers. I will continue to work to expand markets for Nebraska products while advancing American interests abroad.
Union Minister Of Road Transport and Highways Nitin Gadkari said that around 70 per cent construction work on the ambitious India-Myanmar-Thailand Trilateral Highway has been completed. "Around 70 per cent work of the project is completed," the minister of Road Transport & Highways told PTI in reply to a question on the progress of the project. All the three countries - India, Thailand and Myanmar - are working on the highway that will connect Moreh in Manipur, India with Mae Sot in Thailand via Myanmar.

The India-Thailand-Myanmar highway is a 1,400-km-long road project that would directly link the countries with each other and also the Southeast Asia by land and give a boost to trade, business, health, education and tourism ties among the three countries.

While the strategic highway project has been delayed, Nitin Gadkari did not provide details on the timeline for completion and operationalisation of the trilateral highway. Earlier, the government was aiming to make the highway operational by December 2019.



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During Myanmar President U. Htin Kyaws state visit to India in August 2016, an MoU was signed with the Government of India. Under the MoU, India will fund the construction of 69 bridges, including approach roads in the Tamu-Kyigone-Kalewa section (149.70 km).

India also provided funding for the renovation of 73 bridges along the route in Myanmar that were originally built during World War II.
DHAKA, July 3 (Xinhua) -- Bangladesh's foreign exchange reserves have soared past 31 billion U.S. dollars, helped by robust growth in the inflow of Eid remittances, a central bank spokesman said Sunday.

Zakir Hossain Chowdhury, executive director of Bangladesh Bank (BB), told Xinhua that the country's foreign exchange reserves stood at 31,127.79 million dollars on June 27 compared with 29,873.9 million dollars at the end of May this year.

He attributed the robust rise in foreign currency reserves to the steady remittance growth ahead of the Muslim festival of Eid-al-Adha, which was celebrated here on June 29.

According to the official, this is the highest level of forex reserves Bangladesh has held in recent months.

Owing to the foreign exchange market volatility, Bangladesh's foreign currency reserves dropped below 30 billion dollars for the first time in almost seven years in the first week of May after the government paid off 1.1 billion dollars in import bills to the Asian Clearing Union (ACU) for March and April.

Bangladesh's foreign exchange reserves hit an all-time high of 48 billion dollars in August 2021.

In a bid to boost shrinking forex reserves, the central bank has taken various measures, including relaxed rules, to woo more remittances from millions of Bangladeshi people living and working abroad in recent months.

Millions of Bangladeshis, living and working abroad, sent home 2.2 billion dollars last month, the highest remittance in nearly three years, to help their families celebrate Eid-al-Adha.

Despite the rise of reserves, experts said the current level is not good enough to support Bangladesh's resilience to external odds, as well as to maintain macroeconomic stability.

For a growing economy like Bangladesh, forex reserves equivalent to six months' import bills are considered adequate.

With the existing reserves, however, BB officials said Bangladesh is in a position to pay over five months of import bills.

According to the central bank data, the country's import payment was 64.76 billion dollars, down 14.11 percent, in the first 11 months of the last fiscal year, while earnings from exports stood at 47.60 billion dollars, up 6.77 percent, during the same period. 
Vistara, a joint venture of the Tata Group and Singapore Airlines, achieved the milestone of flying 50 million customers in just eight years of operations. To celebrate this milestone, Vistara upgraded the 50 millionth passenger who was flying on Flight UK819 from Delhi-Bengaluru from Economy to Business Class. The name of the passenger is Sanjana Singhal and she also received a special ride to the airport. Moreover, the passenger received a Club Vistara Gold membership and a reserved seat on the flight as well.

Vistara operates over 280 flights daily, with a fleet of 61 aircraft, connecting 32 airports across India and 15 international destinations. Vistara, a full service provider is often lauded for offering many industry first features in its aircrafts, including wi-fi among many other services. The airline will merge with Air India, under its parent brand Tata Group as part of consolidation and will become the second biggest airline once the merger is completed.

Reserved for our special customer. See you in the skies!#50MillionFeelings pic.twitter.com/2n9NLqoRLf  Vistara (@airvistara) July 3, 2023

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Vistara is Indias highest-rated airline on Skytrax and TripAdvisor, and it has been the winner of several Best Airline awards, besides being lauded for world-class cabin cleanliness and upholding high safety standards. The only Indian carrier to feature amongst Worlds Top 20 Airlines, Vistara has been named 16th Best Airline globally while also being recognised as the Best Airline in India and South Asia for the third time in a row, Best Airline Staff in India and South Asia for the fifth consecutive year, Best Cabin Crew in India and South Asia for the third time in a row and Best Business Class Airline in India and South Asia for the second time in a row at the World Airline Awards 2023 by Skytrax.

Vinod Kannan, Chief Executive Officer, Vistara said, "We are filled with gratitude and joy as we celebrate this remarkable feat of serving over 50 million customers. This milestone stands as a testament to the trust and confidence reposed in us by millions of customers. In a short span of time, we have also emerged as the 16th Best Airline globally, and this extraordinary success is credited to the passion and dedication of our employees reflecting in every aspect of their work, regardless of the challenges they faced.

We would like to thank our valued customers for their continued support and patronage over the years which has played a vital role in establishing us as a world-class airline. As we continue our journey, we are resolute in our commitment to deliver exceptional service and memorable experience to our customers."
CHANDIGARH: A war of words erupted between Punjab Chief Minister Bhagwant Mann and BJP leader Capt Amarinder Singh after the former asserted that the government will not pay Rs 55 lakh spent on the "lavish" stay of dreaded criminal Mukhtar Ansari in jails of the state. The money, he added, will be recovered from Capt Amarinder Singh and former deputy chief Sukhjinder Randhawa. Chief Minister Mann went to the extent of saying that if they failed to pay up the money, their pension and other benefits will be stopped to recover the money.

Responding to the statement, Capt Amarinder Singh asked Mann to learn the process of law and investigation before issuing such statements as it only exposes his ignorance about governance. Capt Amarinder said he had served as the Chief Minister for nine-and-a-half years, while Mann has not even completed one-and-a-half years. He should better first learn and gain experience before making such ignorant statements about the processes of governance, the former Congress leader stated.

He said Ansari was brought to Punjab and detained here under due process of law for the investigation. Where does the Chief Minister or for that matter the Jails' Minister (Sukhjinder Randhawa) come into the picture, he asked Mann, while advising him to brush up his knowledge of legal and investigative processes before making such funny statements which will only end up in his (Mann) cutting a sorry figure in the public.



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Joining the political discourse, the Chief Minister said history is testimony to the fact that the self proclaimed 'wiseness' of the Patiala scion has ruined the state. In a statement here, the Chief Minister said the entire Punjab knows that Captain (Amarinder Singh) had always been bothered about his chair rather than the state and its people. By confining himself to palaces, the Captain has totally ignored the interests of the state during his days in power.

Mann said it is a fact that Captain has a lineage of backstabbing Punjab and Punjabis. The Chief Minister was categorically clear in saying that no Punjabi can ever forget that forefathers of Captain had sided with Mughals and Britishers for their vested interests, adding they had committed countless atrocities on the patriots fighting for country's freedom during the British regime. Toeing the line of his ancestors, Mann said, the former Chief Minister had hobnobbed with the Congress and Akalis whenever it suited his political interests.

Mann said now again he has decided to join hands with the anti-Punjab and anti-farmers BJP despite the fact that the saffron party is responsible for martyrdom of more than 700 farmers during agitation against draconian farm laws. The Chief Minister said the 'power hungry' Captain had switched sides only for sake of power which is quite similar to what his ancestors did during the Jallianwala Bagh massacre in 1919 by siding with Britishers.

Meanwhile, Leader of the Opposition and Congress leader Partap Singh Bajwa ridiculed the Chief Minister by saying he has never remained silent on the issues concerning the interests of Punjab. On the contrary, it is the Aam Aadmi Party-led government that attempted to dilute Punjab's claim on the capital and river waters. Bajwa said the AAP government had already surrendered Punjab's right over Chandigarh. Mann has yet to delete his July 9, 2022, tweet in which he demanded a piece of land in Chandigarh from the Centre for a separate Punjab Vidhan Sabha.

This means Mann still owns his statement in that tweet, which actually weakens Punjab's case, said Bajwa. Besides this, the AAP government never presented the case of Punjab's rights on its river waters strongly enough. In a meeting with Union Home Minister Amit Shah in July 2022, the AAP government's cabinet ministers Harjot Singh Bains and Harpal Singh Cheema demanded a new tribunal for assessing the state's river water that weakened Punjab's rights on river waters.

Punjab CM Bhagwant Mann never cited riparian law to claim Punjab's rights on river waters in meetings held lately, Bajwa added. Unleashing a volley of questions at Mann, Bajwa said that he (Mann) must explain now what had he done so far to ensure that the state government was working on its own without the intervention from the 'pawns' sent by the AAP Delhi in Punjab.

Punjab CM Bhagwant Mann, in reality, is nothing more than a rubber stamp. It is the Delhi CM Arvind Kejriwal who has been running the Punjab government through his close confidants, Bajwa added.
New Delhi: Nationalist Congress Party (NCP) supremo Sharad Pawar on Monday rejected suggestions the rebellion by his nephew Ajit Pawar, now a deputy chief minister in Maharashtra's Eknath Shinde-led government, had his blessings as he displayed a show of strength to assert authority over the party that is battling its worst crisis since inception. A day after a rebellion in the NCP, Sharad Pawar sacked the party's working president Praful Patel and general secretary and treasurer Sunil Tatkare, who have sided with Ajit Pawar in his revolt, for engaging in "anti-party" activities.

The former Union agriculture minister, in a tweet, said, "I, as the National President, of Nationalist Congress Party hereby order the removal of the names of Shri Sunil Tatkare and Shri Praful Patel from the Register of Members of NCP Party for anti-party activities."

He tagged Patel, a Rajya Sabha MP who was appointed as NCP working president last month, and Tatkare in his tweet.



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I, as the National President, Nationalist Congress Party hereby order removal of the names of Shri Sunil Tatkare and Shri Praful Patel from the Register of Members of NCP Party for anti-party activities.@praful_patel @SunilTatkare  Sharad Pawar (@PawarSpeaks) July 3, 2023

Later, the NCP supremo issued notices to Patel and Tatkare, who is also a Lok Sabha MP.

Accusing them of facilitating and spearheading defections of nine MLAs without his knowledge and consent, the senior Pawar, in his letter, said "Your action of supporting Shri Ajit Pawar and eight other MLAs who have sworn oath as ministers in violation of the party's direction and mandate amounts to anti-party activities".

"I remove your names from the membership register of the party in view of your actions," Sharad Pawar said.

The party is initiating appropriate action for formal disqualification of Patel and Tatkare as MPs under the 10th Schedule of the Constitution, the letter said. It added that "misrepresentation of association with NCP henceforth will be illegal and unlawful" on the part of Patel and Tatkare.

Sharad Pawar's action came soon after NCP working president Supriya Sule, in a letter, demanded action against Patel and Tatkare, whose daughter is one of the new ministers in the Shinde cabinet.

Ajit Pawar camp hit back

The Ajit Pawar camp soon hit back by appointing Tatkare as the Maharashtra NCP president in place of Jayant Patil. It also asked the Maharashtra Assembly Speaker to disqualify Jayant Patil and Jitendra Awhad from membership of the House.

Praful Patel told a press conference in Mumbai he has appointed Tatkare as the Maharashtra NCP president and Ajit Pawar as the leader of the NCP legislature party, while Anil Bhaidas Patil, who took oath as a minister on Sunday, will continue to be the party whip in the Assembly.

Patel said the decision to back the Eknath Shinde-led government and the leadership of Prime Minister Narendra Modi was a "collective" move by the NCP.

"Today (Monday) is Guru Purnima; we all wish that Sharad Pawar continues to bless us," said Patel.

Patel said instead of asking them how many MLAs are in the Ajit Pawar camp, the question should be put to the other side (rival group).

Deputy Chief Minister Ajit Pawar, who was present at the press meet, said he enjoyed the support of "maximum" NCP legislators and said he has given a letter to the Assembly Speaker, seeking the disqualification of party MLAs Jayant Patil and Jitendra Awhad (who belong to the rival group) from the House.

"A majority of NCP MLAs are with us, that is why I became deputy CM. We have requested the Maharashtra Assembly Speaker to disqualify Jayant Patil and Jitendra Awhad," he said.

The junior Pawar, however, did not reveal the number of NCP MLAs supporting him.

Ajit Pawar said the party and MLAs were with him and the notice for disqualification against him and the eight newly sworn-in ministers was meaningless.

Asked whether he will expel anybody from the party, including the NCP working president and his cousin Sule, Ajit Pawar shot back, "We are not here to expel anybody from our party."

The deputy CM said he had the party with him and also its symbol (clock). "Whatever we are doing is in the interest of the party. We will strengthen our party further, " he said.

Asked who was the NCP's national head, Ajit Pawar said, "The party's national president is Sharad Pawar. Have you forgotten?"

He said the Leader of the Opposition in the Assembly is appointed by the Speaker and not by a party functionary.

"Law will decide if we have rebelled. Only the Election Commission of India will decide to whom the party belongs," said Ajit Pawar and added the 'mahayuti' government (led by Chief Minister Eknath Shinde) in Maharashtra will work for welfare of the state and its people.

"We got the deputy chief minister's post and we will work for welfare of the state," said Ajit Pawar.

The junior Pawar took a dim view of Jayant Patil appointing Awhad as the Leader of Opposition in the Assembly.

"It is the prerogative of the Assembly Speaker and the Opposition party with highest number of seats gets the post," he said.

The deputy CM scoffed at notice of disqualification against him and eight newly sworn-in ministers and also sacking of Patel and Tatkare as well as office-bearers who attended Sunday's oath-taking ceremony. The NCP has 53 MLAs in the 288-member Assembly.

Addressing a press conference in western Maharashtra's Satara district, Sharad Pawar said he has launched a statewide tour to strengthen the NCP and boost the confidence of its workers, unfazed by actions of a few leaders.

Asked whether Ajit Pawar's rebellion had his blessings, the NCP chief said, "It is a mean thing to say. Only those with a mean and low intellect can say this. I have set out on a tour of the state and galvanize the cadre. They should not feel disillusioned with what some leaders have done."

Separately addressing NCP workers and supporters at Karad in Satara district, the 82-year-old politician maintained there was a need to fight forces creating communal divide in Maharashtra and the country.

The former Union minister, who co-founded the NCP in 1999 after leaving the Congress, rued defections in his outfit, saying "some of our people fell prey to BJP's tactics to break other parties."

"Attempts are being made to create communal divide in Maharashtra and the country. We need to fight forces that create fear among peace-loving citizens. We need to protect democracy in the country," he added.

Before addressing the gathering, the NCP president visited the memorial of his mentor and Maharashtra's first CM Yashwantrao Chavan in Karad and paid floral tributes to him.
New Delhi: Country's largest lender State Bank of India (SBI) on Sunday launched its enhanced digital banking application, 'YONO for Every Indian' and Interoperable Cardless Cash Withdrawal (ICCW) facilities.

The facility was launched by SBI as part of the 68th Bank Day celebrations. With 'YONO for Every Indian', bank customers will have access to UPI features like Scan and Pay, Pay by contacts, Request money, among others on YONO's new avatar.

"This milestone upgrade further expands SBI's commitment to providing inclusive and customer-centric digital banking services to every Indian citizen," a statement issued by SBI said.



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In 2022-23 itself, 64 per cent or 78.60 lakh savings accounts were acquired digitally through YONO. The upgraded version of the YONO app will empower customers of other banks to embark on the YONO journey, thereby encouraging them to become a part of the ever-growing SBI family, the statement added.

"With the rollout of the Interoperable Cardless Cash Withdrawal facility, both the customers of SBI and other banks can withdraw cash seamlessly from ICCW-enabled ATMs of any bank by using the 'UPI QR Cash' functionality. The transaction will be facilitated through a single-use dynamic QR code displayed on the ATM screen," the statement said.

"Users can conveniently withdraw cash by employing the Scan and Pay feature available on their UPI application. While the groundbreaking facility simplifies the cash withdrawal process, it also ensures enhanced security for customers," it added.

By eliminating the need to enter a PIN or physically handle a debit card, the ICCW facility minimises the risks associated with shoulder surfing or card cloning, the bank said.

SBI chairman Dinesh Khara said, "SBI is dedicated to offering cutting-edge digital banking solutions that empower every Indian with financial independence and convenience. The YONO app has been revamped, keeping in mind the expectations of our customers for a seamless and pleasant digital experience. This will further fulfill our goal of making the 'YONO for Every Indian' mission a reality."
Officials overseeing the Mumbai-Ahmedabad High Speed Rail Corridor, popularly called the bullet train project, said work was progressing swiftly and cited the construction of three river bridges in one month in Gujarat. Officials of the National High Speed Rail Corridor, which is constructing the high speed corridor, said four out of the 24 bridges have been built in the past six months. "Of these four, we have managed to build three bridges, situated between Bilimora and Surat stations on the HSR route, in Navsari district in one month. There are 24 river bridges on the corridor, 20 of which are in Gujarat and the rest in Maharashtra," the NHSRCL said in a release.

"The first bridge was completed on Purna river, the second on Mindhola rover and the third on Ambika river. The MAHSR corridor has made significant progress as three river bridges have been completed in the last one month," said the NHSRCL, a wholly owned subsidiary of the Indian Railways. The longest river bridge in Gujarat is 1.2 kilometres long and is being constructed on Narmada river, while the longest bridge in Maharashtra is a 2.28 kilometre one being built on Vaitarna river, the NHSRCL said.

Expediting advancements on the Mumbai-Ahmedabad High Speed Rail (MAHSR) Project. pic.twitter.com/aZk2g3INR8  Ministry of Railways (@RailMinIndia) July 2, 2023

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Rajendra Prasad, Managing Director, NHSRCL said meticulous planning is required for the construction of bridges over rivers. "During the construction of bridges over Mindhola and Purna rivers, the tides of the Arabian Sea were closely monitored. Our engineers worked at a height of 26 metres for the construction of a bridge over Ambika river, he said.

The bridge on Purna river is 360 meters long and required continuous monitoring of high and low tides of Arabian Sea during its construction, the NHSRCL said, adding that foundation work was challenging as water level in the river was rising five to six metres during high tides.

"For the 240-metre long bridge on Mindhola river, continuous monitoring of high and low tides from Arabian sea was done. For the third bridge of 200-metre length on Ambika river, the steep slope of the river bank posed a challenge," it said.

Work on eight HSR stations in Gujarat, namely Vapi, Bilimora, Surat, Bharuch, Vadodara, Anand, Ahmedabad and Sabarmati, are under various stages of construction. The NHSRCL said the first phase of the bullet train project is expected to be launched in 2026.
Kyiv: Ukraine's deputy defense minister on Sunday said Russian forces have gained some ground near the eastern Ukrainian town of Svatove, CNN reported.

The defence official Hanna Maliar in a Telegram post said: "Fierce fighting is taking place there. The enemy is attacking Bilohorivka and Serebrianka." She was referring to two smaller villages south of Svatove.

The eastern town, which is located in the Luhansk region, has long been regarded as a key target for Ukrainian forces. It is situated along key Russian supply routes, so any eventual recapture of the town would have important strategic implications for Ukraine, as per CNN.



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"Heavy fighting" continues along the entire eastern front line, with Russia attacking in several directions. The cities of Avdiivka, Marinka and Lyman are among them, Maliar said, echoing a report from the Ukrainian military Saturday.

Maliar said that while Ukrainian fighters are moving forward along the southern flank in the Bakhmut area, having "partial success," Russia has moved two air assault regiments to the northern flank and the fighting continues.

Meanwhile, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy has said he's afraid to lose bipartisan support from the United States, following what he called "dangerous messages coming from some Republicans", CNN reported.

Zelenskyy in a news conference with Spanish media in Kyiv on Saturday, said: "Mike Pence has visited us, and he supports Ukraine. First of all, as an American, and then as a Republican."

"We have bipartisan support. However, there are different messages in their circles regarding support for Ukraine. There are messages coming from some Republicans, sometimes dangerous messages, that there may be less support," he said.
Magical Journey Of Harry Potter: If you haven't been living under a rock, then I'm pretty confident that most of you have heard of the Harry Potter series. The majority of you, though, may not be familiar with Joanne Rowling or J.K. Rowling. If you're curious about who she is, allow me to introduce you to the author of the most popular bestseller series in history. This amazing woman is extraordinary and inspirational in every way. Despite being one of the most fascinating success stories, things weren't always perfect for Rowling. Few people are aware of the specific circumstances surrounding her ascent to fame. Many people are unaware of the obstacles she had to overcome before becoming famous. Her journey from nearly living in poverty to Forbes' designation as the first billionaire author in the world is incredibly motivating.

JK Rowling: Background

JK Rowling, who is currently 58 years old, was born at the Cottage Hospital in Yate on July 31, 1965, a date that is particularly significant to Potterheads. She was the older sister of Dianne, who was two years younger than her, and came from a very typical middle-class family. She had always dreamed of being a writer, but she was compelled to major in French Classics at the University of Exeter even though she preferred to write. At the Manchester Chamber of Commerce, she had previously worked as a bilingual secretary.



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Failures, Chaotic Personal Life

Real success, so the saying goes, follows a string of failures. With Rowling, that is exactly what transpired. She had a chaotic personal life, which made every day difficult for her. She created the entire story from an idea while travelling from Manchester to London on a train one fine morning in 1990. It was during that voyage that she began to conceive the Harry Potter story. Sadly, her mother passed away later that year, which caused her writing to be put on hold for a while. She travelled to Portugal in 1992 to teach English as a foreign language, but her life had other intentions. She married the man she met, they had a daughter. She separated from her husband of the time one year later, filing for divorce in 1993.

Jobless And Single Mother

Three chapters of Harry Potter were packed in her bag when she and her infant daughter relocated to Edinburgh, Scotland, to be close to her sister. This was the pivotal moment in her life. The time in Rowling's life when she was divorced, jobless, and a single parent of a baby was the most traumatic. Despite having significant depression episodes, she persisted. She persevered through the hardships life would bring her even when it was dark and dreary, always looking for the light at the end of the tunnel.

Harry Potter Manuscript: Rejected 12 Times

Rowling finished the first draught of her book's manuscript in 1995, but she lacked the funds to self-publish it. She contacted 12 prominent publications, but they all turned down her Harry Potter manuscript. She persisted in pursuing additional publications nonetheless and didn't give up. Her efforts paid off when a small publication agreed to publish 1000 copies of Harry Potter.

A Billion-Dollar Success Story

After the book received significant prizes, including the Nestle Smarties Book Prize and the British Book Award for Children's Book of the Year, things quickly began to change. The seven-volume book was released between 1997 and 2007. In 80 different languages, 500 million copies of Harry Potter had been sold as of 2013. And finally, a movie series based on the novel, making it a billion-dollar franchise. The Casual Vacancy, written by J.K. Rowling, was released as her first book for adults in 2012. Additionally, she is the creator of the popular crime fiction series Cormoran Strike.She has also consistently been listed as one of the highest-paid authors in the world.

The most important lesson to be learned from J.K. Rowling's life is to never give up on your aspirations. And you will achieve it one day, whether your goal is to become a successful entrepreneur or a book author. All you have to do is keep working hard and believing in your dreams. Success cannot be attained quickly. The only way to get there is through perseverance. It instills in us self-control, commitment, and tenacity. Getting back up after 100 falls.
Hyundai Motor India Ltd. (HMIL), registered a total sales of 65 601 units in June 2023. Total sales in the month of June 2023 include domestic sales of 50,001 units and export of 15,600 units. Commenting on the June 2023 sales, Mr. Tarun Garg, COO, Hyundai Motor India Ltd. said, "We are delighted to announce that HMI has achieved a domestic sales volume of 50,000 plus units in the month of June23. There is a positive customer traction for all our products and Hyundai VERNA, CRETA, and TUCSON have attained leadership positions in their respective segments in the first half of CY 23. The growing excitement amongst our valued customers for our upcoming SUV Hyundai EXTER is truly exhilarating and we look forward to introducing this benchmark SUV in India soon."

The company is now preparing to launch the Exter SUV in the Indian market. The launch is slated for July 10, and the carmaker has already started production of the Exter at its Chennai-based manufacturing facility.





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Hyundai Exter: Design

The Exter dons a chunky rear skid plate, much like the Maruti Suzuki Fronx. The tail lamps on the Exter are squarish; they get a dumbbell-like glow pattern. A similar theme is used for the front LED DRLs as well. Strongly holding the place in between these tail lamps is a piano-black strip. The front end is boxy with dumb-bells-like LED DRLs. The bonnet is set high and flat, making the face look masculine. The headlamps are vertically-split units but sit rather high up the bonnet. Another chunky piece of design element on the front end is the silver scuff plate and bold EXTER badging. Sideways, it is upright. Reminds of the Fiat Panda and for obvious reasons - WagonR.

Hyundai Exter: Interior

The Exter gets a host of best-in-class claims. The Exter is equipped with a connected type 20.32 cm (8) HD touchscreen and advanced digital cluster with 10.67 cm (4.2) colour TFT MID and Hyundai Bluelink, offering over 60 connected features. The infotainment unit features in-built navigation and Smartphone connectivity with Android Auto and Apple CarPlay, while the advanced digital cluster with 10.67 cm (4.2) colour TFT MID displays a host of information related to drive statistics, TPMS (highline), Parking Distance, Door Open, Sunroof Open, 10 Regional + 2 Global languages as well as seatbelt reminder display for all seats.

Hyundai Exter: Specs

Well, as of now, Hyundai has confirmed to sell it with the famous 1.2L NA petrol engine that is used on the Aura, Grand i10 Nios, and i20. It puts out 83 PS against 113.8 Nm in petrol avatar and 69 PS against 95.2 Nm when used with CNG. Also, the motor will get the option of both 5-speed MT and 5-speed AMT. The micro-SUV could feature the much-anticipated 1.0L turbo-petrol motor in the top-spec trims with full-blown 120 PS and 172 Nm of max output. The gearbox option could be restricted to just a 6-speed MT.
An Air France passenger took to Twitter to describe his distressing experience while he was on a flight from Paris to Toronto. Describing his story, he said he witnessed a blood-soaked carpet on the aircraft and had to clean up his belonging which later got soaked in the blood. He also said that during his flight, he kept smelling something "gross" but was not able to find a source of the odour. Furthermore, he noticed big stains across the entire carpet on the aircraft's floor, and the surface was wet.

Battah also said when he complained about the problem to the Air France staff, the "attendant shrugged and me some wipes." Adding to his problems, he discovered it was blood when he attempted to clean the stain with wipes.

Also read: Vistara Airline Achieves Milestone Of Flying 50 Million Customers In 8 Years Of Operations

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In his Twitter thread, he said, "I took out my backpack from under the seat, and the strap was soaked in blood too. I got on my hands and knees and cleaned for half an hour. The (Air France) staff gave me gloves and more wipes. Then they casually noted a passenger had hemorrhaged on a flight before ours."

I've seen a few things in my life, but the horrific blood-soaked carpet on my @airfrance plane yesterday was another level! An hour into the transatlantic flight from Paris to Toronto, I kept smelling something gross and couldn't figure it out. Until I got up and looked down...(1 pic.twitter.com/if919aLlO8  Habib Battah (@habib_b) July 1, 2023

He adds, "Here I am trying to get the blood off my luggage that it absorbed from the airplane carpet. The @airfrance staff crowded around, shocked because they claimed a cleaning crew had removed the seats after the sick passenger incident, but apparently not cleaned the floor."

Habib also expressed concerns for the sick passenger who had lost so much blood. He said, "I just kept wondering what happened to this poor passenger that lost this much blood and how did it happen. One Air France staff member mentioned internal bleeding and infection. What if it was a disease-would I or any other passengers be exposed?"

Addressing the incident, Air France said, "Hi @habib_b, this particular matter is being taken into account, and you will be contacted by our teams as soon as possible. Once again, we apologize for any inconvenience caused. Thank you."

After the story went viral, many social media users came forward to express their views on the same. One of the social media users said, "Omg @airfrance this is absolutely horrific." Another person said, "Thats horrible !!!"
New Delhi: Actors Kartik Aaryan and Kiara Advani, on Sunday, surprised the audience as the duo arrived at a theatre in Mumbai during the screening of their recently released film 'Satyaprem Ki Katha'.

Taking to Instagram, Kiara shared a video which she captioned, "When the audience gives us a standing ovation, that's when you realise magic has been created. A moment to cherish forever. All I want to say is Thank You from the entire team of #SatyapremKiKatha."





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In the video, the on-screen pair could be seen entering the theatre just after the film ended. Seeing Sattu and Katha in real life, the excited audience gave them a standing ovation for their performance in the film.

Kartik also dropped a video and captioned it, "This Standing Ovation isn't just for Sattu and Katha but for the entire team that worked tirelessly towards this result. Gratitude."

The duo folded their hands and thanked the audience at the theatre. The film has been getting a positive response from the audience. Soon after the duo dropped the videos, fans flooded the comment section with red heart emoticons. "Hats off .. Beautiful movie, powerful performance," a fan commented.

Helmed by Sameer Vidwans, the film also stars Supriya Pathak Kapur, Gajraj Rao, Siddharth Randheria, Anooradha Patel, Rajpal Yadav, Nirrmite Saawaant and Shikha Talsania. The film introduced Kartik as SatyaPrem and Kiara as Katha. Kartik is seen pursuing Kiara for marriage as he tries to impress her. The duo gets married. After that, Kiara and Kartik have many difficult experiences together.

Kartik will be next seen in director Hansal Mehta's next 'Captain India' and Kabir Khan's next and in Anurag Basu's 'Aashiqui 3'.

Kiara will be next seen in director Shankar's 'Game Changer' opposite Ram Charan.
RAMALLAH/GAZA, July 3 (Xinhua) -- Palestinian Prime Minister Mohammed Ishtaye on Monday accused the Israeli army of committing what he termed as "war crimes" against the Palestinians in the northern West Bank city of Jenin.

An official statement said that Ishtaye condemned the Israeli military offensive on the city and its refugee camp on Monday, which has claimed the lives of at least eight Palestinians and injured 100 others.

Ishtaye made the remarks during a weekly meeting of the Palestinian Authority cabinet held in the West Bank city of Ramallah, according to the statement.

"Israel is attempting to wipe out the Jenin refugee camp," Ishtaye told the meeting, adding that "the Palestinian people will not surrender to this aggression, but they will resist it until the demise of the criminal occupation."

Ishtaye called for an immediate stop of the aggression in Jenin and demanded that Israel be punished.

Palestinian eyewitnesses and security sources said that Israeli army forces, backed by armored jeeps and bulldozers, stormed the city of Jenin and launched more than 10 airstrikes from manned drones and helicopters at several buildings in the area.

The Palestinian Ministry of Health said in a press statement that eight Palestinians were killed, including three who were killed in the airstrikes, and 100 others were injured, 10 of whom were in critical conditions.

Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas has called for an urgent meeting of the Palestinian leadership to discuss the ongoing Israeli military assault on Jenin and its refugee camp, the official Palestinian news agency WAFA reported.

Since January, 24 people, most of them Israelis, have been killed in a series of attacks carried out by Palestinians, and more than 180 Palestinians, including children and women, were killed by Israeli soldiers and settlers, according to official figures.

In Gaza, Palestinian militant groups, mainly Hamas and Islamic Jihad, warned on Monday that Israel's continued military offensive against Jenin and its refugee camp would lead to a wider escalation of tension.

"We are following up on the barbaric aggression against Jenin," the chamber of joint military operations, which comprises nine factions in the Gaza Strip, said in a statement.

The militant groups vowed they would respond to the raid in an "appropriate way and place."

"The armed resistance in all arenas will not allow the enemy to encroach on our people in Jenin," said the statement. 
ICAI CA Final, Inter Result 2023: The Institute of Chartered Accountants of India, ICAI, will soon release the CA Intermediate and Final Results. According to a tweet from ICAI official Dhiraj Khandelwal, both results are expected in the coming week, although candidates are urged to wait for an official announcement to be posted on the official website -icai.org.

Students who took the ICAI CA Final and Intermediate Exams this year will be able to see their results once they are made available on the official website. According to an ICAI official, he believes it would be available on July 5 or 6, but has advised waiting for an official announcement from the Institute.

ICAI CA Final, Inter Result 2023: Steps to download scorecard here

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Visit the official website of ICAI - icai.org

Click on the CA Intermediate result option.

Login using your ICAI registration number/pin and roll number.

Enter the captcha code and hit the submit button.

CA Inter result May 2023 will appear on your screen.

Candidates can check their marks and download the CA Intermediate result for June session.

Take a printout of the result of CA Intermediate 2023 for future reference

The ICAI CA Intermediate Exam was divided into two groups, with Group 1 taking place on May 3, 6, 8, and 10, 2023, and Group 2 taking place on May 12, 14, 16, and 18, 2023. CA Final Exam was also held in two groups, with group 1 taking place on May 2, 4, 7, and 9, 2023, and group 2 taking place on May 11, 13, 15, and 17, 2023. The results will be available soon.

On June 24, 26, 28, and 30, 2023, the ICAI held the CA Foundation June 2023 Exam. The foundation course results will be announced in due course.
The Joint Seat Allocation Authority (JoSAA) has released the cutoff for the first round on the official website josaa.nic.in. After each round of JoSAA counselling, the authority announces the cutoff scores. The JoSAA cutoff announced by the authority are used to do ranks for the students who qualified the Joint Entrance Examination (JEE) Advanced. Through this exam, the students can get admitted into Indian Institute Technology (IITs), National Institute of Technology (NITs) and Indian Institute of Information Technology (IIITs) along with other government funded institutions.

The JEE Advanced score 2023, the choices made, and the seat availability all factor into the JoSAA counselling allotment list. On July 6, the JoSAA round 2 seat allocation for 2023 will be made public. From July 7 through July 11, you can withdraw and leave the round 2 seat allocation process. The round 3 allotment outcome will then be made public on July 12 after that.

Also read: TS Inter Supplementary Results 2023: TSBIE 1st, 2nd Year Result To Be Released Soon At tsbie.cgg.gov.in, Manabadi- Check Details Here



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For famous universities like the IITs, NITs, IIITs, and others, the cutoff ranks have already been made public. For instance, the final rank for the Computer Science programme at IIT Bombay is AIR 291, while the final rank for the Computer Science programme at IIT Delhi is AIR 115. The closing rank for the computer science programme at IIT Delhi for female-only (including Supernumerary) applicants is 419.

The cutoff for the Computer Science programme at NIT Tiruchirappalli is AIR 4661 for applicants from their home states and 1147 for candidates from other states. Finally, the Computer Science programme at NIT Warangal concluded at AIR 2075 for students from other states and 2971 for candidates from other states.
ICAI CA Final, Inter Result 2023 Live Updates: The CA Intermediate and Final Results will be released soon by the Institute of Chartered Accountants of India, ICAI. Both results are liekly to be declared on the official website icai.nic.in on July 5, 2023.

"Important Announcement-The results of the Chartered Accountants Final & Intermediate Examination held in May 2023 are likely to be declared on Wednesday, 5th July 2023 & the same can be accessed by candidates on the website http://icai.nic.in," stated ICAI.

Stay tuned to Zee News for all the latest and live updates on ICAI CA Inter, Final Results 2023.

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In a study that tracked almost 2,000 community-dwelling older people for eight years, researchers at Johns Hopkins Medicine claim they have significant new evidence of a connection between the diminished sense of smell and risk of developing late-life depression.

Their findings, published in Journal of Gerontology: Medical Sciences, do not demonstrate that loss of smell causes depression" depression, but suggests that it may serve as a potent indicator of overall health and well-being. "We've seen repeatedly that a poor sense of smell can be an early warning sign of neurodegenerative diseases such as Alzheimer's disease and Parkinson's disease, as well as a mortality risk. This study underscores its association with depressive symptoms," says Vidya Kamath, Ph.D., associate professor of psychiatry and behavioral sciences at the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine.

"Additionally, this study explores factors that might influence the relationship between olfaction and depression" depression, including poor cognition and inflammation."



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The study used data gathered from 2,125 participants in a federal government study known as the Health, Aging and Body Composition Study (Health ABC). This cohort was composed of a group of healthy older adults ages 70-73 at the start of the eight-year study period in 1997-98. Participants showed no difficulties in walking 0.25 miles, climbing 10 steps or performing normal activities at the start of the study, and were assessed in person annually and by phone every six months. Tests included those for the ability to detect certain odors, depression" depression and mobility assessments.

In 1999, when smell was first measured, 48% of participants displayed a normal sense of smell, 28% showed a decreased sense of smell, known as hyposmia, and 24% had a profound loss of the sense, known as anosmia. Participants with a better sense of smell tended to be younger than those reporting significant loss or hyposmia.

Over follow-up, 25% of participants developed significant depressive symptoms. When analyzed further, researchers found that individuals with decreased or significant loss of smell had increased risk of developing significant depressive symptoms at longitudinal follow-up than those in the normal olfaction group. Participants with a better sense of smell tended to be younger than those reporting significant loss or hyposomia.

Researchers also identified three depressive symptom "trajectories" in the study group: stable low, stable moderate and stable high depressive symptoms. Poorer sense of smell was associated with an increased chance of a participant falling into the moderate or high depressive symptoms groups, meaning that the worse a person's sense of smell, the higher their depressive symptoms. These findings persisted after adjusting for age, income, lifestyle, health factors and use of antidepressant medication.

"Losing your sense of smell influences many aspects of our health and behavior, such as sensing spoiled food or noxious gas, and eating enjoyment. Now we can see that it may also be an important vulnerability indicator of something in your health gone awry," says Kamath. "Smell is an important way to engage with the world around us, and this study shows it may be a warning sign for late-life depression" depression."

Humans' sense of smell is one of two chemical senses. It works through specialized sensory cells, called olfactory neurons, which are found in the nose. These neurons have one odor receptor; it picks up molecules released by substances around us, which are then relayed to the brain for interpretation. The higher the concentration of these smell molecules the stronger the smell, and different combinations of molecules result in different sensations.

Smell is processed in the brain's olfactory bulb, which is believed to interact closely with the amygdala, hippocampus and other brain structures that regulate and enable memory, decision-making and emotional responses.

The Johns Hopkins researchers say their study suggests that olfaction and depression" depression may be linked through both biological (e.g., altered serotonin levels, brain volume changes) and behavioral (e.g., reduced social function and appetite) mechanisms.

The researchers plan to replicate their findings from this study in more groups of older adults, and examine changes to individuals' olfactory bulbs to determine if this system is in fact altered in those diagnosed with depression">depression. They also plan to examine if smell can be used in intervention strategies to mitigate risk of late-life depression" depression.

Other scientists who contributed to this research are Kening Jiang, Danielle Powell, Frank Lin and Jennifer Deal of the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine and Bloomberg School of Public Health; Kevin Manning of the University of Connecticut; R. Scott Mackin, Willa Brenowitz and Kristine Yaffe of the University of California, San Francisco; Keenan Walker and Eleanor Simonsick of the National Institute on Aging; and Honglei Chen of Michigan State University.

No authors declared conflicts of interest related to this research under Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine policies.

This work was supported by the National Institute on Aging, the National Institute of Nursing Research and the Intramural Research Program of the National Institutes of Health: National Institute on Aging.
MUMBAI: Maharashtra NCP president Jayant Patil on Sunday said his party has moved a disqualification petition against Ajit Pawar and eight others who took oath as ministers in the Eknath Shinde-led state government. Addressing a press conference late Sunday, Patil said the disqualification petition has been sent to Speaker Rahul Narvekar. He said an e-mail has also been sent to the Election Commission of India informing that the rank and file of the NCP is with party chief Sharad Pawar.

The party founded by Sharad Pawar in 1999 suffered a vertical split during the day after his nephew Ajit Pawar broke ranks and joined the Shiv Sena-BJP government as deputy chief minister. Patil said these MLAs of the NCP "cannot be called traitors as their betrayal has not yet been proved". "Many are in touch with us", he said.

Nationalist Congress Party chief Sharad Pawar on Sunday said he would build new leadership in the party and asserted he gets more energy to work when such situations come up. Pawar also asserted he was the face of the party for the future as well. The party founded by Pawar in 1999 suffered a vertical split during the day after his nephew Ajit Pawar broke ranks and joined the Eknath Shinde government as deputy chief minister.



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Eight other NCP MLAs, including staunch Sharad Pawar loyalists like Chhagan Bhujbal and Dilip Walse Patil, were made ministers. Slamming those who left for praising the leadership of Prime Minister Narendra Modi, Pawar said he could not understand what changed in the last four years (since the 2019 Assembly polls).

"Four years ago, when we faced elections, our target was Modi, and we were Modi's target. Now, after opposing (him) for four years, what suddenly happened today? The real thing is they wanted to go as they needed power," he said. Pawar said he would go to the masses and show that the developments of the day have not been liked by people.

He also made light of Maharashtra Navnirman Sena chief Raj Thackeray's tweet that the NCP's "second team" was also ready to join hands with the BJP. "Let us see which team is left now with NCP. Those who wanted to go, they have already gone. Those who did not want to go, they have stayed back. So there is no question of second team or third team," Pawar asserted.

Asserting that people will soon see new teams of the NCP everywhere, Pawar brushed aside suggestions of taking a well-earned rest at his age and said he "got more energy to work, to create new leadership when such things happen". "It is not appropriate to say this, but check the details of those who became ministers today. See how they started, and who ( helped ) them in the start. (I) can create new leadership," he said.

Pawar said he was confident of creating leadership that will think about the state. Asked whether Assembly Speaker Rahul Narwekar will now take a decision on disqualifying 16 Shiv Sena MLAs, including Chief Minister Eknath Shinde, under anti-defection laws, Pawar said soon the tenure of the House will be over so he didn't expect a decision on it. Asked about who will be the prominent face of the party for the future, he emphatically replied "Sharad Pawar".
While opposition unity is the toast of the town, the political parties are hardly showing any signs of sacrifice or adjustment. The fresh example on display is from Maharashtra where Ajit Pawar's rebellion has put Nationalist Congress Party on backfoot. While the state is yet to get a clear picture of NCP MLAs supporting Ajit Pawar, a tussle has started over the post of Leader of Opposition in the Maharashtra assembly. The Maharashtra assembly is yet to get a speaker after the Shiv Sena-BJP alliance returned to power in the state.

"Full picture is not yet clear...but why would be an LoP from NCP? Now, Congress has 45 MLAs with them and Ajit Pawar has said that he has 40 MLAs with him, then NCP will have only 13 MLAs left with them," said Maharashtra Congress spokesperson Atul Londhe.

Maharashtra Congress leader Balasaheb Thorat said that the Leader of the Opposition will be from the party which has the maximum number of MLAs. "Congress has maximum numbers. We will hold a meeting tomorrow on the current political situation in the state," said Thorat.



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The BJP was quick to take a dig at the fresh rift between the NCP and the Congress. "Opposition unity??? Now within hours of NCP coming with BJP, Congress has started demanding LoP position for itself in Maharashtra! Some snub for Sharad Pawar ji by Congress. What happened to PDA? MVA? Moment Congress got a chance it has demanded its share! This is their true face..matlab ke yaar. Only position, no mission," said BJP spokesperson Shehzad Poonawala.

Opposition unity ??? Now within hours of NCP coming with BJP, Congress has started demanding LoP position for itself in Maharashtra! Some snub for Sharad Pawar ji by Congress



What happened to PDA ? MVA?



Moment Congress got a chance it has demanded its share! This is their pic.twitter.com/Sjzz7nJluh  Shehzad Jai Hind (@Shehzad_Ind) July 3, 2023

On the other hand, NCP's Maharashtra president Jayant Patil today said that the party has sent a petition to the Assembly speaker seeking disqualification of rebel MLAs. "We requested him to hear us. Our party's strength in the Assembly is 53, of which 9 have defected, the rest all are with us. We will give them a fair chance to come back but will take action against those who do not come back," said Patil, hinting that NCP still has 44 MLAs. Even if it holds true, the Congress has one MLA more than NCP.
New Delhi: The CBI has filed a charge sheet against Bihar Deputy Chief Minister Tejashwi Yadav, his father and former railways minister Lalu Prasad and mother and former chief minister Rabri Devi in connection with the land for jobs scam case, officials said Monday. The charge sheet, which also names 14 others, is the second charge sheet in the case. It has been filed on the basis of documents and evidence that surfaced after the first charge sheet was submitted in the case, they said.

Besides members of the Yadav clan, the CBI has also named AK Infosystems and several middlemen in the case, they said.

The charge sheet was filed in a special CBI court.

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The officials said the second charge sheet was filed as the alleged roles of the accused could not be completed by the time the initial report was filed.

The CBI has alleged that favourite candidates were appointed in the railways in violation of norms and procedures, without any advertisement or public notice. During Lalu Prasad's tenure as minister in the UPA government from 2004 to 2009,

The agency claims that substitutes from Patna were appointed in various zonal railways located in Mumbai, Jabalpur, Kolkata, Jaipur and Hazipur.

As a quid pro quo, the candidates, either directly or through their immediate family members, allegedly sold land to Lalu Prasad's family members at highly-discounted rates.
PATNA: The Congress has come out in support of the Bihar government's decision to withdraw the domicile policy for fresh recruitment of school teachers in the state. The Nitish Kumar cabinet had on June 27 made the announcement, drawing flak from the opposition BJP as well as Left parties. Shakeel Ahmad Khan, Congress Legislature Party (CLP) leader in the state assembly, told PTI, "The state government must have taken the decision after due consideration. It's a complex issue and it must be understood in totality."

Khan, whose Congress party is part of the Grand alliance government and has two ministers in the state cabinet, said, "There is nothing wrong in the government's decision to withdraw the domicile requirement. If we don't do it, we have no moral right to condemn instances of attacks on job aspirants from Bihar in other states." "We are all citizens of India. Where does the question of domicile arise? We must appreciate the decision of the state government," he said.

The Congress leader, however, said the state government must initiate a dialogue with those protesting the decision and address their apprehensions. Hundreds of youths hit the streets of Patna on Saturday against the decision of the Bihar government to allow residents of other states to compete for teachers' jobs, leading to a police crackdown.



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However, the state government's decision to rescind the domicile policy for teachers' job has irked Left parties, which support the Mahagathbandhan government from the outside. Left parties have announced that they will raise the issue in the upcoming assembly session starting on July 10. The Left comprising CPI(ML) Liberation, CPI(M) and CPI have 16 members in the state assembly.

"This decision is not in the interest of those who are preparing for teachers' jobs in the state. We strongly oppose it. When several states are not allowing students from Bihar to apply for government jobs there, then why did the Bihar government withdraw the domicile policy here?" CPI(ML) Liberation MLA from Paliganj assembly seat told PTI.

The state government must withdraw this decision, he added. Echoing a similar view, CPI(M) MLA Ajay Kumar said, "This decision of the state government is sheer injustice to the job aspirants in the state who are preparing for teachers job. We will not allow this to happen." Earlier, defending the government decision, Bihar Education Minister and senior RJD leader Chandrashekhar had stated that a number of posts of headmasters in state schools remain vacant because of a lack of qualified candidates in these subjects.

He had further pointed out that against 6,000 posts of headmasters, only 369 candidates could be selected. Hence, the state will get qualified candidates if the youths from other states are allowed to apply and join the schools in Bihar. The quality of school education will improve if talented youths from all over the country were allowed to apply, he had asserted.

However, senior BJP leader and former deputy chief minister Sushil Kumar Modi took strong exception to the decision and demanded its immediate withdrawal. He had said that the decision is an insult to the state's talented youths as they are being deprived of their well-deserved jobs.
A day after Ajit Pawar led a rebellion against Sharad Pawar and joined the Eknath Shinde government in Maharashtra, Shiv Sena (UBT) leader and Rajya Sabha MP Sanjay Raut has made a stunning claim indicating more turmoil in the state's political circles. Talking to ANI, Raut claimed that CM Shinde is all set to lose his post. Ajit Pawar and eight NCP MLAs yesterday joined the ruling Sena-BJP alliance in Maharashtra.

"Today I am saying this in front of the camera, the Chief Minister of Maharashtra is going to change. Maharashtra will get a new Chief Minister. Eknath Shinde is being removed. In the disqualification case that is going on, Eknath Shinde and the 16 MLAs, are going to be disqualified and that is why they have haphazardly inducted Ajit Pawar into their fold. Ajit Pawar will be the next chief minister," said Raut.

Meanwhile, NCP president Jayant Patil has also moved a disqualification petition against Ajit Pawar and eight other MLAs who took oath as ministers in the Eknath Shinde-led state government.



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#WATCH | Uddhav Thackeray faction leader and MP Sanjay Raut, says "Today I am saying this in front of the camera, the Chief Minister of Maharashtra is going to change. Eknath Shinde is being removed. Eknath Shinde and the 16 MLAs are going to be disqualified" pic.twitter.com/R0YI0MwQwR July 3, 2023

Raut claimed that the BJP is doing politics of intimidation and pressure. "BJP is resorting to politics of intimidation and pressure. BJP is breaking Shiv Sena, NCP and Congress but this will not benefit them at all. The people of Maharashtra are angry. In Maharashtra, we will fight unitedly. It is shocking that PM Modi had said in his Bhopal rally that the leaders of NCP are involved in corruption and now those leaders have taken oath in Raj Bhawan. People cannot be fooled. BJP was running a campaign against those who took oath yesterday," he said.

Shiv Sena (UBT), Congress and Sharad Pawar-led NCP are in the opposition in Maharashtra following the collpase of the Maha Vikas Aghadi government due to the rebellion by Eknath Shinde.
KHAMAMM: Sounding a poll Bugle in Telangana, Congress leader Rahul Gandhi on Sunday announced the 'Cheyutha' scheme which guarantees a monthly pension of Rs 4000 for the elderly, single women, widows and the differently-abled if it comes to power in the state. "We are bringing about a historic scheme called Cheyutha. This will guarantee a Rs 40, 000 monthly pension for women, senior citizens in Telangana. We also promise to give Pothu land to the adivasis," Rahul Gandhi said while addressing a public meeting at Khammam. Telangana elections are scheduled to be held later this year and Congress is leaving no stone unturned to woo voters.

In a dig at the Bharat Rashtra Samithi (BRS), Rahul Gandhi proposed a new name for the party, calling it the "BJP Rishtedar Samiti," drawing a comparison between the BRS and the BJP government at the national level. Rahul Gandhi criticized the BRS chief and Telangana Chief Minister K Chandrashekhar Rao, accusing him of shattering the dreams of farmers, laborers, and the oppressed in the state.

"TRS has changed its came to BRS, the BJP Rishtedar Samiti," Rahul Gandhi said speaking at the Telangana Janagarjana Sabha at Khamamm. Gandhi said, "Telangana was a dream, a dream of farmers, labourers and the oppressed. But in the last nine years, the BRS has shattered that dream. The CM thinks he is the king of Telangana. CM KCR thinks that he is the king and owns Telangana." Rahul Gandhi also highlighted alleged "corruption and land appropriation by the BRS, asserting that the Congress party would return the land to its rightful owners once in power".

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Rahul also promised "Podu land for tribals" if the Congress is elected to power in Telangana. Podu is a traditional system of cultivation used by tribes in India, whereby different areas of jungle forest are cleared by burning each year to provide land for crops. He also pledged to "provide land to adivasis and extend the scheme to include handloom workers, beedi workers, AIDS survivors, Filaria and Dialysis patients.

He attacked the BRS for aligning with the BJP, claiming that the TRS had become the BJP's "B team" by supporting the Farmers Bill in Parliament. Rahul Gandhi vowed to defeat the BJP's B team in Telangana, just as they had defeated the BJP in Karnataka. Speaking at the Telangana Janagarjana Sabha in Khammam, he emphasized the party's commitment to uniting the country and its opposition to hatred and violence. Rahul Gandhi expressed gratitude for the support received from the people of Khammam, stating that Congress is deeply rooted in their hearts and blood.

Rahul Gandhi said, "TRS is taking back the land sanctioned by Congress to the tribal people. The land belongs to you not to the CM. Your CM (KCR) has left no stone unturned when it comes to corruption. He has stolen from every sector of the society." Highlighting how the BRS has paired up with the BJP, he said, "In the Parliament, Congress stood against BJP, but TRS and CM KCR became BJP's B team. TRS extended its support to BJP for the Farmers Bill. PM Modi has CM KCR's remote control, therefore he does whatever is asked from him."

Rahul Gandhi promised that he will hand over the land taken by the BRS to its rightful owner when it comes to power in the state. "In Telangana, it is a fight between the Congress and BJP's B team BRS. Just like we defeated BJP in Karnataka, similarly we will defeat their B team in Telangana. During the opposition meeting in Delhi, we made it clear to the opposition that Congress will not join the meeting if TRS is part of it...We can never make a settlement with BJP's B team," he said while pointing that Congress will not join any bloc where BRS is involved.

"We spoke about uniting the country during the Bharat Jodo Yatra. The entire country supported the Yatra showing that they do not support the spread of hatred and violence but uniting the country. Khammam is Congress' stronghold and the people have always shown their support. The people here understand our ideology. Congress is in your heart and blood," he said. Rahul's Khammam public meeting comes after a meeting of the Telangana Congress leaders, attended by Congress Chief Malliakarjun Kharge and Rahul Gandhi, at the All India Congress Committee office in New Delhi on Thursday. As per the reports, the meeting was called to discuss poll preparedness in Telangana due later this year.

The meeting came after former Telangana minister Jupally Krishna Rao and several Bharat Rashtra Samithi (BRS) leaders joined Congress on Monday in the presence of party president Mallikarjun Kharge and Rahul Gandhi at the AICC headquarters in Delhi. Earlier, the Congress said that former AP and Telangana minister Jupally Krishna Rao, Ex-MP Ponguleti Srinivasa, former MLA Gurnath Reddy, Serving Zila Parishad Chairman Koram Kanakaiah, Ex MLA Payam Venkateshwarlu, DCCB Ex-Chairman Muvament Vijaya Baby, Pidamarthi Ravi, DCCB Chairman Thulluri Bramhaiah, Markfed State Vice Chairperson Borra Rajshekhar, Warya Municipal Chairperson S. Jaipal have joined the party recently.
Hezhe people wearing traditional costumes perform during the 11th Wurigong Festival of the Hezhe ethnic group in Fuyuan, northeast China's Heilongjiang Province, July 2, 2023. (Xinhua/Zhang Tao)

HARBIN, July 3 (Xinhua) -- Dressed in festive attire, including deer-antler headgear, members of China's Hezhe ethnic group gathered Sunday in Fuyuan, northeast China's Heilongjiang Province, to celebrate the 11th Wurigong Festival.

Banging on Shaman drums painted with sun, deer and fish motifs, and dancing to vibrant rhythms, they were enacting cultural traditions that have been passed down the centuries.

The Hezhe are one of the less populous ethnic groups in China, residing along the Heilongjiang, Songhuajiang and Wusuli rivers. Due to their location in the east, they are known as the "sun watchers."

"Wurigong" means joy and celebration in the language of the Hezhe ethnic group. The festival serves as a grand showcase of Hezhe culture, combining traditional music, dance, narrative art and sports.

From a mere 300 people before the establishment of the People's Republic of China to over 5,000 today, the Hezhe ethnic group celebrates Wurigong, protecting and passing on their culture as they move toward a better life.

At the festival, shamans banged their drums, leading the tribe in a mysterious yet fervent traditional dance. There were also performances of the Yimakan narrative art, a form of rhythmic story-telling that conveys traditional tales. Finally, 20 Hezhe performers in fish-skin costumes delighted the audience with their spirited and lively dances to the accompaniment of folk songs.

Hezhe people wearing fish-skin costumes perform during the 11th Wurigong Festival of the Hezhe ethnic group in Fuyuan, northeast China's Heilongjiang Province, July 2, 2023. (Xinhua/Zhang Tao)

Zhang Xin, a performer from the Hongguang Hezhe Village in Fuyuan, said that his costume is made from the skin of the chum salmon. Such costumes take between one and two months to make, at least.

You Wenfeng, 71, is an inheritor of the Hezhe fish-skin craft, a form of national intangible cultural heritage. She brought eight sets of Hezhe fish skin costumes to the festival, three of which were specially made for the occasion.

"Our Hezhe people have lived generation after generation as fishing and hunting communities, following the tradition of wearing fish skins in summer and roe deer skins in winter," said You. "By showcasing these fish-skin costumes at the festival, we encourage the children to properly inherit this craft."

Wu Baochen, a Yimakan master, served as a judge for the artistic competitions. Yimakan is a narrative art form created by the Hezhe through their long history of fishing and hunting. As the Hezhe have no written language, this oral tradition was once at risk of disappearing.

"Nowadays, there are textbooks and audio-visual materials for learning Yimakan, which makes it much easier," said Wu. "The enthusiasm for preserving Hezhe culture among young people is greater now, with more and more people beginning to learn and sing Yimakan."

Hezhe people wearing traditional costumes perform during the 11th Wurigong Festival of the Hezhe ethnic group in Fuyuan, northeast China's Heilongjiang Province, July 2, 2023. (Xinhua/Zhang Tao)

Other events like ball games, wrestling, fish forking, archery and rabbit hunting were also held, characterizing the fishing and hunting heritage of the Hezhe ethnic group.

Wu Yu, from the city of Tongjiang in Heilongjiang, along with his wife and six-year-old son, attended the festival dressed in traditional Hezhe attire.

"We intentionally brought our child to the festival, hoping that he would experience the cultural traditions of our ethnic group," he said. "The Wurigong Festival is not just a holiday. It's a platform where the Hezhe people gather to pass down their language and culture." 
MUMBAI: A day after joining the Eknath Shinde-led Maharashtra government, Deputy Chief Minister Ajit Pawar and state minister Chhagan Bhujbal on Monday went to meet Deputy CM Devendra Fadnavis to discuss allocation of portfolios in the cabinet, sources said. On Sunday, Ajit Pawar led a vertical split in the Nationalist Congress Party (NCP) to become the deputy chief minister. Eight other NCP leaders were also sworn in as ministers in the Eknath Shinde-Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) government.

Ajit Pawar, Chhagan Bhujbal and a few other NCP leaders have reached Meghdoot bungalow (official residence of Fadnavis). They will discuss the distribution of cabinet portfolios," a source close to Ajit Pawar said. In the past, Ajit Pawar held portfolios such as water resources department, power and finance. Currently, all the three portfolios are with Fadnavis, who also holds charge of the state home department.

Nationalist Congress Party (NCP) chief Sharad Pawar on Monday said there was a need to fight forces creating communal divide in Maharashtra and the country. Addressing NCP workers and supporters in Karad a day after Ajit Pawar led a vertical split in the party to become the deputy chief minister in the Eknath Shinde-led government, Sharad Pawar also said "some of our people fell prey to BJP's tactics to break other parties."



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#WATCH | Maharashtra Deputy CM Ajit Pawar along with NCP leaders Praful Patel, Chhagan Bhujbal and Lok Sabha MP Sunil Tatkare met Dy CM Devendra Fadnavis in Mumbai today



NCP leader Sunil Tatkare's daughter & MLA, Aditi Tatkare was inducted into the Shinde-BJP cabinet yesterday pic.twitter.com/TU8dYP6rqD  ANI (@ANI) July 3, 2023

"Attempts are being made to create communal divide in Maharashtra and the country. We need to fight forces that create fear among peace-loving citizens," he said. "We need to protect democracy in the country," he added. Sharad Pawar visited the memorial of his mentor and Maharashtra's first chief minister Yashwantrao Chavan in Karad and paid floral tributes to him.

The 82-year-old leader's visit to late Chavan's memorial 'Pritisangam' on the occasion of Guru Purnima is being seen as a show of strength by him, a day after his nephew Ajit Pawar led a vertical split in the NCP. Sharad Pawar left from Pune for Karad on Monday morning and stopped along the way to meet supporters who lined up on roadsides to greet him and extend support to him.

In Karad, he was welcomed by thousands of supporters and local NCP MLA Balasaheb Patil. Senior Congress leader Prithviraj Chavan, who hails from Karad, was also present.
It was November 23, 2019 and the intervening night of November 22 and November 22 was one of the busiest nights in Maharashtra's political circles. Though the state had voted in favour of the BJP-Shiv Sena alliance, the two parties had failed to reach a consensus on the face of the next chief minister and both were looking for alternatives to form the government. The BJP, somehow, believed that it had the backing of Ajit Pawar and the Nationalist Congress Party MLAs. Therefore, President's Rule in the state was revoked overnight and in an early morning ceremony, Devendra Fadnavis was sworn-in as the CM and Ajit as his deputy. What next followed proved that the BJP underestimated Sharad Pawar's grip on the NCP. Despite Ajit Pawar's move, no NCP MLA dared to ditch senior Pawar and the BJP-Ajit Pawar alliance fell on its face, handing over an undeniable humiliation to the saffron party.

Post that, the Shiv Sena, NCP and the Congress joined hands to form the Maha Vikas Aghadi government with Ajit Pawar again getting the Deputy CM post. Fast forward to 2023, it was Ajit Pawar once again who rebelled against Sharad Pawar, but this time, some prominent faces including Praful Patel and Chhagan Bhujbal followed him in the mutiny.

Ajit Pawar's fresh rebellion comes on the heels of a prolonged intra-party clash in the NCP. Earlier, Sharad Pawar had resigned from the party president's post and was later forced to take back the decision. He then rejigged the party posts snubbing Ajit Pawar while appointing Supriya Sule and Praful Patel as new working presidents. There have been reports of Ajit missing from many meetings of the party and speculations have long been in the air of him joining the BJP, which ultimately proved true on July 2 when he joined the Eknath Shinde government as Deputy CM.



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In 2021, the country witnessed the division of the Lok Janshakti Party into two factions- one led by Chirag Paswan and the other led by his uncle Pashupati Paras. Maharashtra has recently seen Shiv Sena getting split into two factions after Shinde's rebellion. Since the Ajit Pawar-led NCP faction claims to have the support of 40 MLAs (or at least 29), the rebellion has shifted focus on Sharad Pawar and his command over the party. While NCP has moved a disqualification plea against the nine rebel MLAs, it will be interesting to see the next move by both sides. The development is also significant as it comes ahead of the crucial Lok Sabha elections and state assembly elections to be held next year. The question is - Can Sharad Pawar stop NCP's division into two parts? Whatever be the results, the development is surely bound to shape the politics of Maharashtra and the country.
New Delhi: The Supreme Court on Monday directed the Manipur government to file an updated status report detailing the steps taken to ensure rehabilitation and improve the law and order situation in the ethnic violence-hit state. A bench comprising Chief Justice D Y Chandrachud and Justices P S Narasimha and Manoj Misra listed the batch of petitions on the issue for hearing on July 10.

Asking Solicitor General Tushar Mehta, appearing for the state government, to file an updated status report, the bench said, "It should have details like rehabilitation camps, law and order and recovery of arms. In a brief hearing, the top law officer gave details of the deployment of security forces and the recent status of the law and order situation and said curfew in the state has now been reduced to five hours from 24 hours.

According to Mehta, civil police, Indian reserve battalions and 114 companies of CAPFs are also deployed in the state. He said senior advocate Colin Gonsalves, appearing for Kuki groups, should not give the case a communal angle" and added that "real human beings are being dealt with.

Gonsalves argued that militants came on a news programme and said they will annihilate the Kukis but no action was taken against them. He alleged that the violence against Kukis was sponsored by the state.

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The apex court is seized of a batch of pleas on the Manipur situation, including one by a ruling BJP MLA challenging the high court order on Scheduled Tribe status to the Meitei community, and a PIL by a tribal NGO for an SIT probe into the violence that has rocked the northeastern state.

One of the NGOs, Manipur Tribal Forum, has moved the top court seeking Army protection for the minority Kuki tribals in Manipur and prosecution of communal groups attacking them.

On June 20, a vacation bench headed by Justice Surya Kant declined urgent hearing on the plea, saying it's a law and order issue the administration should tackle.

Gonsalves, appearing for the NGO, submitted that 70 tribals have been killed in ethnic violence in the state notwithstanding the solemn assurances that nobody will die.

The solicitor general had opposed the request for an urgent hearing, and said security agencies are on the ground and doing their best to stem the violence and restore normalcy. He submitted that the main matter pertaining to the Manipur High Court's order for grant of Scheduled Tribe status to the majority Meitei community, which set off a chain of violence in the northeastern state, has been posted for hearing on July 17 by the top court.

More than 120 people have lost their lives in clashes between the Meitei and Kuki communities. The clashes first broke out on May 3 after a Tribal Solidarity March was organised in the state's hill districts to protest the Meitei community's demand for ST status. Meiteis account for about 53 per cent of Manipur's population and live mostly in the Imphal Valley. Tribal Nagas and Kukis constitute another 40 per cent of the population and reside in the hill districts.

On March 27, the Manipur High Court order asked the state government to send a recommendation to the Centre within four weeks on the demand for ST status to the majority community.
New Delhi: The high court here on Monday dismissed the bail plea of AAP leader Manish Sisodia who was arrested on March 9 by the Enforcement Directorate in connection with a money laundering case related to alleged irregularities in the Delhi government's excise policy. Justice Dinesh Kumar Sharma refused to grant relief to the former deputy chief minister of Delhi, saying he has not been able to pass the triple test for bail in which the court has to see whether an accused is likely to flee from justice, tamper with evidence or influence witnesses.

Besides rejecting Sisodia's plea, the Delhi High Court also refused bail to businessmen Abhishek Boinpally, Benoy Babu and Vijay Nair, who are co-accused in the money laundering case lodged by the Enforcement Directorate (ED) arising from the alleged scam.

Detailed orders are awaited.



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While pronouncing the order on Sisodia's bail plea, the high court said it has gone through the order of a special court which had earlier dismissed his bail plea and that it does not find any infirmity or illegality in the decision.

"The petitioner (Sisodia) is not entitled to bail and the petition is accordingly dismissed," it said.

The special court has passed reasoned order on the basis of material available on record, Justice Sharma said.

Sisodia, the former Delhi deputy chief minister and excise minister, was first arrested by the CBI on February 26 for his alleged role in the scam and has been in custody since then. He resigned from the Delhi Cabinet on February 28.

The high court has already denied him bail in the CBI case on May 30.

He was arrested on March 9 in the case lodged by the ED and is currently in judicial custody.

The high court had on June 2 reserved its order on the bail plea of Sisodia, who has sought bail on various grounds including the deteriorating health of his wife who is suffering from multiple sclerosis.

The ED has opposed the bail plea of Sisodia as well as of other accused.

According to the CBI and ED, which are probing the cases against Sisodia, irregularities were committed while modifying the excise policy and undue favours were extended to licence holders.

Sisodia had challenged the March 31 order of the trial court, which had dismissed his bail plea saying he was prima facie the "architect" of the alleged scam.

The court had stated that he played the "most important and vital role" in the criminal conspiracy related to the alleged payment of advance kickbacks of Rs 90-100 crore meant for him and his colleagues in the Delhi government.

The Delhi government implemented the policy on November 17, 2021 but scrapped it at the end of September 2022 amid allegations of corruption.

On May 30, the court dismissed the bail plea of Sisodia in the excise policy scam being probed by the CBI, saying he is an influential person who could influence witnesses, who are mostly public servants, and the allegations against him are very serious in nature.
New Delhi: Nationalist Congress Party (NCP) supremo Sharad Pawar on Monday rejected speculation that his nephew Ajit Pawar's rebellion has his blessings. During a press conference in Maharashtra's Satara, the veteran leader was asked whether Ajit Pawar's rebellion on Sunday had his blessings, to which he replied, "It is a mean thing to say. Only those with a mean and low intellect can say this."

"I have set out on a tour of the state and galvanize the cadre. They should not feel disillusioned with what some leaders have done," Sharad Pawar said.

The veteran leader also said that he has launched a statewide tour to strengthen the NCP and boost the confidence of party workers, unfazed by actions of a few leaders.



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His reaction came a day after Ajit Pawar led a vertical split in the NCP to become the deputy chief minister of Maharashtra. Eight other NCP leaders were also sworn in as ministers in the Eknath Shinde-led government.

Some of our people fell prey to BJP's tactics: Sharad Pawar

Earlier in the day, Sharad Pawar addressed NCP workers and supporters in Karad and said that 'some of our people fell prey to BJP's tactics to break other parties'.

"Attempts are being made to create communal divide in Maharashtra and the country. We need to fight forces that create fear among peace-loving citizens," he said.

"We need to protect democracy in the country," he added.

The NCP chief also said a 'wrong kind of tendency' was rearing its head and the same tendency attempted to break the party in the state which was working on democratic principles.

"The objective behind this is to take the country's affairs ahead with the help of these communal ideologies, and the same tendency took the same approach to turn things upside down in the state. Unfortunately, some of our colleagues fell prey to these tactics," he said.

The common man from Maharashtra, the land of Shahu Maharaj, Phule and Ambedkar, will show the tendencies, which are instrumental in breaking the other parties, their right place, he said.

"In the next few months, we will get an opportunity to go to the people and with their help, we will push these tendencies aside and once again we will create a system that will work in the interest of the common people," he added.

The NCP has taken a decision to create a consensus in the state and the start of that mission has started from Karad, where the memorial of Yashwantrao Chavan is located, on the occasion of Guru Purnima, he said.

Sharad Pawar said there was a time when they came together as Maha Vikas Aghadi (MVA) under the leadership of Uddhav Thackeray and formed government, but some people, by 'hook or crook', toppled the government.

"It is not just happening in Maharashtra, but they are doing it in other states also. The Madhya Pradesh government, led by (Congress leader) Kamalnath, was toppled in a similar manner and the government, which encouraged communalism came into existence," he said.

He also visited the memorial of his mentor and Maharashtra's first chief minister Yashwantrao Chavan in Karad and paid floral tributes to him. The 82-year-old leader's visit to late

Chavan's memorial 'Pritisangam' on the occasion of Guru Purnima is being seen as a show of strength by him, a day after his nephew Ajit Pawar led a vertical split in the NCP.
Noida: Police have detained a Pakistani woman and her four children who were illegally staying in Greater Noida, where they were allegedly sheltered by a local man who met her through the online game PUBG, officials said on Monday. The police have also detained the man, a Greater Noida resident, who allegedly housed them in his rented accommodation, they said.

"The Pakistani woman and the local man have been detained. The woman's four children are also in police custody," Deputy Commissioner of Police (Greater Noida) Saad Miya Khan told PTI.

The Pakistani woman, who is in her late 20s, and the local man had gotten in touch over online game PUBG, which led to a friendship between them, the police officer said.



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"The man and the woman are being questioned right now. Further details and facts would be shared once the questioning is over," Khan said.

According to a local police official, the woman had allegedly entered India with her children via Nepal last month before entering Uttar Pradesh and reaching Greater Noida by a bus.

The woman and her children were staying in the rented accommodation of the man, who lives in the Rabupura area of Greater Noida, the official claimed.
NEW DELHI: An unidentified flying object suspected to be a drone was reportedly spotted over the official residence of Prime Minister Narendra Modi here in the national capital on Monday early morning, Police said. According to the Delhi police, they received information at 5:30 am from the Special Protection Group (SPG) that an unidentified flying object was seen over the PM's residence at Lok Kalyan Marg area. The area comes under 'no-fly' zone, officials said.

"An information was received at NDD control room regarding an unidentified flying objet near the Prime Minister's residence was received. SPG contacted the police at 5:30 am," the Delhi police said. "Thorough searches were made in nearby areas but no such object has been detected so far," they said.

Air traffic control room (ATC) has also been contacted, and they didn't detect any such flying object near PM residence. "At present, due to the sensitive area, the police are investigating. Things will be clear only after verifying the facts," officials added.



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New Delhi: Iconic luxury design house Dior, founded by the fashion designer Christian Dior, has invited Sonam Kapoor to its Autumn-Winter show at the Paris Fashion Week on 3rd July. Along with Sonam, the Academy award winner Natalie Portman will be gracing the event.

A global fashion icon, Sonam enjoys the reputation of the cultural ambassador of India to the West. According to the reports, Sonam Kapoor is the only Indian actor to have been invited for the event. At the event, Dior will be displaying their autumn-winter 2023-2024 haute couture collection at the fashion week.

Recently, Sonam attended the Paris Fashion Week as a showstopper for Ralph and Russo. Interestingly, Sonam had also graced Diors first fashion show in India since 1962 which was held in March 2023 at the Gateway of India in Mumbai.



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On the work front, Sonam will be seen in two tentpole projects starting next year, details of which are awaited.
The Delhi Metro Rail Corporation (DMRC) has announced to rename the HUDA City Centre Metro station, the last metro station on the Yellow Line as the Gurugram City Centre. The HUDA City Centre is one of the busiest and biggest metro stations of the Delhi Metro. As per a report on PTI, a request to rename the station had come from both the Centre and the Haryana government.

A decision has been taken to rename the HUDA City Centre Metro station on Yellow Line as Gurugram City Centre. Accordingly, the process of changing the name in all official documents, signage, announcements etc has been initiated and shall be changed gradually.  Delhi Metro Rail Corporation    (@OfficialDMRC) July 3, 2023

"A decision has been taken to rename the HUDA City Centre Metro station on Yellow Line as Gurugram City Centre. Accordingly, the process of changing the name in all official documents, signage, announcements etc has been initiated and shall be changed gradually," said Delhi Metro Rail Corporation on Twitter.



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The Yellow Line (Line 2) consists of 37 stations and travels between Samaypur Badli in Delhi to HUDA City Centre in the city of Gurgaon in Haryana. The line with a length of 49.02 kilometers and is mostly underground. The Yellow line is the second line of Delhi Metro to become operational after the Red line and is also the 3rd longest metro line on the Delhi Metro network.

The Line also connects with the Airport Express Line at New Delhi metro station.
CAIRO, July 3 (Xinhua) -- Arab League Secretary-General Ahmed Aboul-Gheit on Monday condemned the Israeli military raid on the northern West Bank city of Jenin and called on peace advocates across the world to intervene immediately and stop the Israeli "ominous and criminal" operation.

"The ongoing brutal Israeli military operation in Jenin is categorically slammed," Aboul-Gheit tweeted.

He noted that raiding cities and camps under air support as well as razing houses and roads are collective punishment and revenge that will only lead to further escalation of tension.

Dozens of Israeli armored vehicles backed by drones and helicopters stormed Jenin and a refugee camp early on Monday, Palestinian eyewitnesses said, adding that Israeli military also launched airstrikes during the exchange of fire between its soldiers and Palestinian militants.

At least eight Palestinians have so far been killed and 50 others injured in the raid, according to the latest figures released by the Palestinian Health Ministry.

Since January, 24 people, most of them Israelis, have been killed in a series of attacks carried out by Palestinians, and more than 180 Palestinians, including children and women, were killed by Israeli soldiers and settlers, according to official figures. 
New Delhi: Meta-owned WhatsApp banned more than 65 lakh bad accounts in India in the month of May, in compliance with the new IT Rules 2021, the company said on Sunday.

Between May 1 and May 31, 6,508,000 WhatsApp accounts were banned and 2,420,700 of these accounts were proactively banned, before any reports from users in the country.

In the month of April, WhatsApp, which has more than 500 million users in India, had banned a record over 74 lakh bad accounts.



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The most popular messaging platform also received 3,912 grievance reports like "ban appeals" in May in the country, and the records "actioned" were 297.

Accounts Actioned" denotes reports where WhatsApp took remedial action based on the report and taking action denotes either banning an account or a previously banned account being restored as a result.

"This user-safety report contains details of the user complaints received and the corresponding action taken by WhatsApp, as well as WhatsApp's own preventive actions to combat abuse on our platform," according to the company.

In a bid to empower millions of Indian social media users, the Centre recently launched the Grievance Appellate Committee (GAC) that will look into their concerns regarding content and other issues.

The newly-formed panel, a move to strengthen the country's digital laws to tame the Big Tech companies, will look into appeals by users against decisions of social media platforms.

In a major push towards an open, safe, trusted and accountable Internet, the Ministry of Electronics and IT has notified some amendments aimed at protecting the rights of 'Digital Nagriks.
Two seniors interact with a therapy dog at a nursing home in Xiamen, southeast China's Fujian Province, March 12, 2023. (Xinhua)

SHANGHAI, July 3 (Xinhua) -- When you enjoy the companionship of pets at home, have you ever thought about the more meaningful things they can do? Wu Qi, a pet trainer in his 30s, have demonstrated their immense potential, as his team has trained over 300 dogs, most of which are pets, to help humans in need.

In a support center for the elderly with cognitive disorders in Shanghai's Fengxian District, the seniors warmly greeted the adorable therapy dogs upon their arrival.

Assisted by dedicated volunteers, the dogs participated in a range of interaction and activity-based rehabilitation training. These sessions include exercises tailored to aid the elderly in muscle recovery, with some focused on enhancing communication skills and self-expression.

The elderly citizens experienced the gentle affection of the meek dogs as they rested their little heads on their palms while embracing these adorable furry companions with their arms.

"My fear of dogs has all gone. They are so cute. I've just petted and caressed a white puppy, and it even allows me to hug it," said Qi Yinfang, a 67-year-old patient suffering from mild cognitive impairment. The introduction of animal-assisted therapy services by Wu's team has had a profound impact, illuminating the spirits of people like Qi, according to the support center.

Autistic children, senior citizens with cognitive disorders, people with disabilities, or even those with mental health problems are all target clients of Wu's therapy dog team.

Over the past decade since Wu initiated the program "Paws For Heal" in 2012, such services have benefited nearly 100,000 people in major Chinese cities like Shanghai, Beijing and Nanjing.

Animal-assisted therapy (AAT) is nothing new overseas. According to a market survey conducted by Wu's team in 2018, there were already over 50,000 therapy dogs in the United States alone. However, such a therapy was still in its infancy in China at that time and Wu only had 20 professionally trained therapy dogs at his base.

Therefore, he decided to train home pets to help more people in need instead of relying merely on existing professional therapy dogs.

According to a report on China's booming pet industry released by China Pet Industry Association and Beijing Pethadoop Technology Co., Ltd. in February, last year alone, Chinese urbanites had more than 50 million pet dogs.

"I hope to reach out to the vast population of pet owners and encourage them to participate in our initiative. Their pet dogs have immense potential in making a difference and helping others," Wu said.

His team has now prepared a set of comprehensive training courses designed to enhance the pets' sociability, obedience and interactive skills, while also mitigating potential overreactions.

Many pet keepers are willing to extend their helping hand, or more accurately their "pets' chubby paws," for those in need.

Jin Pei, a 75 granny from Shanghai, is among the generous pet lovers. Her dog Biubiu is now a frequent visitor to local nursing institutions for the elderly, rehabilitation organizations for children with developmental disabilities, as well as hospitals.

"On a Christmas night, I welcomed Biubiu, a stray dog, into my home, and since then, she has become an integral part of my family. The dog healed me with its all-time companionship and support, and so I would like her to become a therapy dog and cure more people," Jin said. 

A therapy dog interacts with a volunteer in Shanghai, east China, April 15, 2023. (Xinhua)

(230703) -- A pet trainer trains a dog in Shanghai, east China, May 28, 2023. (Xinhua)

A girl interacts with a therapy dog under the guidance of a volunteer in Shanghai, east China, April 15, 2023. (Xinhua)

Jin Pei is seen with her therapy dog Biubiu at a support center for the elderly with cognitive disorders in Shanghai, east China, April 25, 2023. (Xinhua)

Seniors interact with a therapy dog at a support center for the elderly with cognitive disorders in Shanghai, east China, April 25, 2023. (Xinhua)
CARACAS, July 2 (Xinhua) -- The pilot of a fighter jet belonging to Venezuela's Bolivarian National Armed Forces (FANB) was killed on Sunday during military exercises, local media reported.

The aircraft, a Sukhoi 30 Mk2 Flanker, crashed in the central state of Miranda, in the municipality of Guaicaipuro, during exercises in preparation for a military parade marking Venezuela's Independence Day.

"I regret to inform you that during the practice maneuvers on the occasion of the commemorative acts of our independence, a Bolivarian military aviation aircraft crashed to the ground, causing the death of the distinguished pilot Col. Paulino Jose Millan Sabino. My heartfelt condolences to his relatives, friends and our FANB," Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro said on social media.

The co-pilot, Lt. Col. Sergio Hernandez, survived and is being treated by military specialists, Maduro said, adding that he ordered a probe into the accident.

Both the pilot and the co-pilot managed to eject from the aircraft before it crashed. 
Wang Yi, director of the Office of the Foreign Affairs Commission of the Communist Party of China (CPC) Central Committee, also a member of the Political Bureau of the CPC Central Committee, attends and addresses the opening ceremony of International Forum for Trilateral Cooperation 2023, in Qingdao, east China's Shandong Province, July 3, 2023. (Xinhua/Li Ziheng)

QINGDAO, July 3 (Xinhua) -- Wang Yi, director of the Office of the Foreign Affairs Commission of the Communist Party of China (CPC) Central Committee, said on Monday that China, Japan and the Republic of Korea (ROK) should relaunch their cooperation efforts.

Wang, also a member of the Political Bureau of the CPC Central Committee, made the comments in a speech at the opening ceremony of International Forum for Trilateral Cooperation 2023, in Qingdao.

Wang said that over the past 20 years and more, China-Japan-ROK trilateral cooperation has grown from scratch to the most influential sub-regional cooperation mechanism in Asia, providing an important driving force for the modernization of the three countries and Asia.

Wang stressed that, as they stand at a crossroads in history, China, Japan and the ROK should grasp the trend of the time, acquire wisdom from the past, and firmly maintain the right direction of trilateral cooperation.

"We should respect each other and live in harmony, adhere to openness and inclusiveness to achieve mutual success, adhere to independence, unity and self-improvement," said Wang.

Wang pointed out that peace, prosperity and revitalization in Asia require the joint efforts of the three parties.

He made a five-point proposal, including strengthening mutual trust, mutual benefit, connectivity, mutual assistance, and exchanges and mutual learning. He also called for collaborating to safeguard regional peace and stability, to create driving forces for economic growth, to advance regional economic integration, to meet common challenges and to foster public support.

Before the opening ceremony, Wang met with the major guests attending the forum and said that China, Japan and the ROK should learn from history, promote consensus between governments through the people, promote political relationships through economic ties, promote communication between the central governments through local exchanges, and promote bilateral cooperation through multilateralism.

China, Japan and the ROK should eliminate interference, work together, activate the trilateral cooperation and exchange mechanism, and restart trilateral cooperation, so as to jointly revitalize Asia and benefit the world, said Wang. 
Hemit Turhan assigns tasks to staff members at the Horgos railway port in Horgos, northwest China's Xinjiang Uygur Autonomous Region, May 14, 2023. (Xinhua/Zhao Ge)

URUMQI, July 3 (Xinhua) -- With a long whistle, a train chugs into the Horgos railway port, where Hemit Turhan directs a gantry crane to prepare to unload the cargo.

The 34-year-old man from northwest China's Xinjiang Uygur Autonomous Region has been working at the port, which borders Kazakhstan, for about 10 years, during which time he has witnessed the great changes brought by cross-border trains.

"Since May, I have felt the frequency of China-Europe freight trains is increasing," he said.

The drive from Hemit Turhan's hometown of Yining City to Horgos is about an hour and a half. He graduated from Lanzhou Jiaotong University in 2013, the same year that the Belt and Road Initiative was proposed. Knowing that more talent would be needed, he applied for a job at the port.

He had worked as cargo courier and dispatcher before being placed in charge of loading and unloading cross-border freight.

While busy working in the rain, Hemit Turhan told Xinhua that safety is paramount at the port. Every day he walks as many as 40,000 steps on his inspections.

"In the past decade, the goods carried by the trains have changed," he said, noting that imports from Central Asian countries used to be mainly industrial products, but now they are snacks like cookies and candies, which are becoming increasingly popular among locals.

As of the end of April, the China-Europe freight train services depart from 109 domestic cities, providing links to 211 cities in 25 European countries.

The number of China-Europe freight train trips increased by 17 percent year on year to 5,611 in the first four months of 2023, according to the China State Railway Group Co., Ltd in May. During this period, the Horgos railway port handled 2,485 China-Europe freight trains, up 14.8 percent.

In 2016, Horgos saw a daily average of less than two China-Europe freight train trips. That number has grown to 20 today.

And workers at the port have benefitted in the process.

Each day, crane driver Tohmedhe and his colleagues can handle more than 1,000 containers, compared with a few hundred a couple of years ago.

"Now I can earn more than 10,000 yuan (about 1,386 U.S. dollars) a month, up from just a few thousand in the past," the 29-year-old man said. "I am sure that the cross-border trade will increase further."

But Hemit Turhan, who has had a similar experience, said that the money was not the only reason he loved his job.

"Seeing the railway becoming busier and busier, and the trains carrying products from different countries to various destinations, I feel really, really proud," he said. 

Hemit Turhan patrols along the Horgos railway port in Horgos, northwest China's Xinjiang Uygur Autonomous Region, May 14, 2023. (Xinhua/Hao Zhao)
Palestinian protesters hold flags during a protest against the killing of Palestinians near the fence of the Gaza-Israel border, east of Gaza City, on July 3, 2023. (Photo by Rizek Abdeljawad/Xinhua)

JERUSALEM, July 3 (Xinhua) -- Israel's airstrikes and ground raids in the West Bank on Monday have drawn criticism from the United Nations, the Arab League, and regional countries, as the death toll from the large-scale military operation continues to mount.

At least eight Palestinians were killed and dozens were injured in the northern West Bank city of Jenin during the Israeli operation launched from midnight throughout the day, said the Palestinian Health Ministry.

Palestinian medics transfer an injured man to a hospital in the West Bank city of Jenin, on July 3, 2023. (Photo by Ayman Nobani/Xinhua)

The Israeli army said the operation aimed to launch "an extensive counterterrorism effort." According to Israeli military spokesman Daniel Hagari, the raid was focused on the Jenin refugee camp, and was "not against the Palestinian Authority but against the terror groups in Jenin."

On Monday, UN Special Coordinator for the Middle East Peace Process Tor Wennesland tweeted that the current escalation in the occupied West Bank "is very dangerous" following months of mounting tensions.

The operation "once again reminds us of the extremely volatile and unpredictable situation across the occupied West Bank," he tweeted, urging that all must ensure the civilian population is protected.

UN Resident and Humanitarian Coordinator in Palestine Lynn Hastings expressed "alarm" in a tweet and stressed that "access to all injured must be ensured."

Arab League Secretary-General Ahmed Aboul-Gheit on Monday condemned the Israeli military raid on Jenin and called on peace advocates across the world to intervene immediately and stop the Israeli "ominous and criminal" operation.

"The ongoing brutal Israeli military operation in Jenin is categorically slammed," Aboul-Gheit tweeted, noting that raiding cities and camps under air support as well as razing houses and roads are collective punishment and revenge that will only lead to further escalation of tension.

Smoke rises during clashes between Palestinians and Israeli forces in the West Bank city of Jenin, on July 3, 2023. (Photo by Ayman Nobani/Xinhua)

The Ministry of Foreign Affairs of the United Arab Emirates on Monday also expressed strong condemnation against the Israeli forces.

In a statement, it called for an immediate halt to repeated and escalating campaigns against the Palestinian people, urging Israeli authorities to reduce escalation and avoid steps that "exacerbate tension and violence in the occupied Palestinian territories and lead to a deterioration of the situation and perpetuation of the cycle of violence."

In a statement, the Egyptian Foreign Ministry condemned on Monday "in the strongest terms" the Israeli raid, voicing opposition to the repeated Israeli raids and incursions into Palestinian cities that killed civilians.

Describing the Israeli attacks as a "flagrant violation of international laws and legitimacy," the ministry warned against the serious impacts of the ongoing escalation which it said would exacerbate the Palestinians' sufferings and undermine Egyptian, regional, and international efforts to de-escalate tensions in the occupied territories.

Jordan on Monday warned of the catastrophic consequences of the Israeli raid on Jenin, calling for the international community's intervention to stop Israel's military operations.

Turkiye also strongly condemned the Israeli military operation, urging Israel to act with common sense and stop such actions.

Palestinians run to take cover during clashes between Palestinians and Israeli forces in the West Bank city of Jenin, on July 3, 2023. (Photo by Ayman Nobani/Xinhua)

The Lebanese Ministry of Foreign Affairs and Emigrants on Monday condemned the Israeli aggression, which it said "targets the entire population without distinction between civilians and combatants or between young people, children and the elderly."

The ministry called on the international community to pressure the "aggressor" to stop assaults and protect defenseless civilians. 


BEIJING, July 3 (Xinhua) -- A working team has been dispatched to central China's Henan Province to guide flood relief efforts, according to China's State Flood Control and Drought Relief Headquarters.

Henan issued red alerts for rainstorms on Monday after heavy rain hit parts of the province, including the cities of Xinxiang, Hebi, Zhumadian and Nanyang.

China has a four-tier, color-coded weather warning system, with red representing the most severe warning.

The headquarters has instructed Henan authorities to conduct close monitoring, step up forecasts and alerts, and ward off flooding, geological disasters, and other salient disaster risks. 
MAPUTO, July 3 (Xinhua) -- The Mozambican government will take further action to fight against crime and corruption as the country has confiscated assets worth more than 1 billion meticais (about 16 million U.S. dollars) over the past year, a senior official said Monday.

The seized assets were acquired by the suspects through criminal means, said Helena Kida, minister of Justice, Constitutional and Religious Affairs of the southern African country.

It is urgent to create mechanisms and introduce laws to confiscate illicit assets, she said at a meeting held Monday in Maputo, the capital of Mozambique, where judiciary authorities and experts discussed strategies for fighting against corruption.

Even though the criminals were penalized, their assets remained in their hands, Kida said. The minister said that the identification and recovery of these assets, before the sentence of the criminals, continues to be one of the challenges for the organs of justice.

The criminals often commit crimes without having the assets in their name, and the law has to allow the authorities to pick up these assets, Kida said, adding that the seized assets will be placed under the management of various sectors of the country pending the decision of the court. 
TUNIS, July 3 (Xinhua) -- Tunisia on Monday "strongly" condemned an Israeli military raid against the Palestinians in the northern West Bank city of Jenin.

"Tunisia strongly condemns the military operations and the repeated attacks carried out by the occupying entity in the Palestinian territories, in particular in the northern West Bank city of Jenin, which have caused numerous deaths and injured dozens of unarmed Palestinians," said a statement released by the Tunisian foreign ministry.

This is "a flagrant violation of the resolutions of international legitimacy, and of all international norms and human rights charters," the ministry statement added, calling on the international community to put an end to the "dangerous escalation."

In the ministry statement, Tunisia also reiterated its support for the Palestinian people's struggle for the establishment of an independent sovereign state.

Earlier on Monday, the Israeli army launched a large-scale military strike on Jenin and the refugee camp, killing at least eight Palestinians and injuring about 80 others, according to figures issued by the Palestinian health ministry. 
CANBERRA, July 3 (Xinhua) -- The Australian government launched an anti-scam center on Monday to prevent financial losses and support victims.

Assistant Treasurer and Minister for Financial Services Stephen Jones said that the new National Anti-Scams Center (NASC) would bring together experts from government agencies, law enforcement and the financial sector to disrupt scammers.

A report published by the Australian Competition and Consumer Commission (ACCC) in April revealed that Australians lost 3.1 billion Australian dollars (2.06 billion U.S. dollars) to scams last year, an 80-percent increase in total losses recorded in 2021.

Fake investment scams were the most damaging, accounting for almost half the total loss, with people aged 65 and over the most vulnerable.

"There is a scamdemic. No one is safe. Scammers are getting more sophisticated and costing Australians billions of dollars," Jones told the Australian Broadcasting Corporation.

"The top priority of our new National Anti-Scams Center is to detect and disrupt scammers before they can reach Australians."

To coincide with its establishment, the NASC launched a task force to address high-profile and damaging investment scams with a focus on early intervention to disrupt scams and removing scam websites.

Headed up by the ACCC and Australian Securities and Investments Commission, the task force will operate for six months, after which its outcomes will be publicly reported.

The NASC will also take on the role of linking scam victims with support services.

At the time of releasing April's report, ACCC Deputy Chair Catriona Lowe said it was clear that a coordinated national response was needed to tackle scams. 
Report on CPC's "Second Integration" theory unlocks understanding of China

08:02, July 03, 2023 By Zhang Yunlong ( Xinhua

This aerial photo taken on Jan. 28, 2023 shows a night view of the Datang Everbright City scenic area in Xi'an, northwest China's Shaanxi Province. (Xinhua/Liu Xiao)

* Understanding China requires grasping the "cultural and civilizational soil" in which the CPC is firmly rooted.

* The "Second Integration" provides insight into Chinese modernization and a new model for human advancement.

* The integration serves as China's new statecraft in the new era, answering "Why China is China" based on its history and culture.

BEIJING, July 2 (Xinhua) -- A new research report from Xinhua News Agency's think tank delves into the Communist Party of China (CPC) concept of integrating the basic tenets of Marxism with fine traditional Chinese culture, known as the "Second Integration."

The report by the New China Research analyzes the connotation and global significance of the "Second Integration," saying the integration opens a new frontier in adapting Marxism to the Chinese context and the needs of the times.

The "Second Integration" serves as a key to unlocking the understanding of China in the new era, providing insight into Chinese modernization and a new model for human advancement, according to the report. It also offers a valuable perspective for observing the relationship between China and the world.

The concept was introduced by President Xi Jinping, also general secretary of the CPC Central Committee and chairman of the Central Military Commission, in his speech commemorating the CPC's 100th anniversary on July 1, 2021.

It builds on the CPC's "First Integration" theoretical synthesis -- integrating the basic tenets of Marxism with China's specific realities -- which was summarized in the 1940s and has successfully guided China.

Experts in CPC history and traditional Chinese culture have acclaimed the release of the report titled "The 'Second Integration' that Transforms China -- Theoretical Innovation and Practice in Building the Modern Civilization of the Chinese Nation."

The report helps explain to the world why China possesses such strong governance and vitality, and why it is a crucial force in maintaining world peace and development, says Zang Fengyu, dean of School of Philosophy, Renmin University of China.

TWO MIRACLES

Under the CPC's leadership, China has achieved rapid growth and stability for over seven decades -- feats widely referred to as "two miracles." The report says understanding China requires grasping the "cultural and civilizational soil" in which the CPC is firmly rooted.

The report describes China's "two miracles" as truly remarkable, featuring "security, stability, development, and advancement" alongside 10,000 years of culture and more than 5,000 years of civilization that continues to thrive today.

"Without China's 5,000-year-old civilization, where would the unique characteristics of China come from? And without the unique characteristics of China, where would our successful socialist path with Chinese characteristics be today?" said Xi during a March 2021 visit to a memorial hall dedicated to Zhu Xi, a Chinese philosopher of the 12th century.

The report says understanding China today hinges on understanding the CPC, which in turn requires understanding the "cultural and civilizational soil" in which the Party grew.

The report describes the "Second Integration" synthesis as a significant advance in the CPC's theory.

It says the synthesis fully captures the current landscape, aligns with the Chinese national rejuvenation goals, and symbolizes Chinese leaders guiding people to reconstruct historical perspectives, reinterpret their civilization, and elucidate China's governance.

People visit the Liangzhu Museum in Yuhang District of Hangzhou, capital of east China's Zhejiang Province, March 4, 2023. (Xinhua/Xu Yu)

CONNOTATION

The report says integrating the basic tenets of Marxism with fine traditional Chinese culture enriches China's socialist path with the "bloodline and civilization" of the Chinese nation.

It says this integration combines communist and socialist beliefs with the millennia-old ideals of the Chinese people -- Xiaokang (a well-off society), common prosperity, and world harmony.

While adhering to historical materialism, the report says, the CPC creatively borrows the "reasonable kernel" of China's people-oriented ideology spanning 5,000 years of history.

The result has been a people-centered development philosophy that elevates ancient Chinese people-oriented thinking to a new level, the report adds.

The integration also features combining core socialist values with the traditional values of the Chinese nation, creating a source of spiritual values for the nation, the report says.

China's fine traditional culture has always embodied the spirit of pursuing the right path with righteousness, it notes.

The report says that the integration also combines the vision of a community with a shared future for humanity proposed by Xi with a traditional Chinese diplomatic approach centered on harmony among nations.

GLOBAL INSPIRATIONS

The report says the "Second Integration" serves as China's new statecraft in the new era, answering "Why China is China" based on its history and culture.

A nation's culture defines its soul, and China's confidence lies in its over 5,000 years of heritage, the report says. It stresses accurately positioning China's fine traditional culture, which nurtured core socialist values and withstands global cultural influences.

The report points out that the new theory "goes beyond Western centrism and China's outdated notions since modern times, reconstructing Chinese people's historical awareness of their own country."

The "Second Integration" can effectively explain today's reality of China's success, further enabling the Chinese people to grasp the historical initiative and spiritual initiative, it says.

"Through the theory, Chinese leaders have reshaped the country's cultural identity and public consensus, thereby strengthening national identity and political identity," reads the report.

The report says the integration helps China reinterpret its civilization and promote civilizational exchanges.

China emphasizes allowing cultural exchanges to transcend estrangement, mutual learning to transcend clashes, and coexistence to transcend feelings of superiority, the report adds.

Additionally, the report notes that China's tradition of pursuing harmony with the world and the CPC's global vision differs from the Western worldview that treats the world as an object to conquer.

"China in the new era approaches the world with an attitude of interconnection, interdependence, win-win cooperation, and harmonious coexistence," it says.

(Web editor: Zhang Kaiwei, Liang Jun)
SAN FRANCISCO, July 2 (Xinhua) -- The U.S. electric carmaker Tesla delivered 466,140 vehicles in the second quarter of 2023, up 83 percent year on year, said the company's report Sunday.

About 96 percent of the deliveries were those of its Model Y crossover and Model 3 entry-level sedan, it said.

Meanwhile, Tesla said it produced 479,700 vehicles in the second quarter, up from 258,580 a year earlier, beating analysts' expectations. 
Gaunt Saakashvili appears online at court hearing 3 July, 08:34 PM Mikheil Saakashvili at a court hearing on July 3, 2023 (Photo:Daryna Chyzh / Facebook)

Mikheil Saakashvili, former Georgian president and current Ukrainian citizen, made a remote appearance in a court hearing for the first time in several months, revealing a noticeable deterioration in his health, Saakashvilis former spokeswoman, Daryna Chyzh, wrote on Facebook on July 3.

I may be physically weak, but Im very strong inside, Im very strong! I didnt commit a crime against Georgia, Chyzh quoted Saakashvili as saying in court.

Mtavari, an independent Georgian TV station, aired footage of Saakashvili's statement from the Vivamed clinic in Tbilisi, Georgia.

Saakashvili reacted to the statements of the speaker of the Georgian parliament, Shalva Papuashvili, who had previously claimed that the European supporters of the former president should apologize to the Georgian people.

Video of day

Papuashvili said that Georgia was sacrificed by Mikheil Saakashvilis Georgian and foreign friends to organize riots.

It turns out that the European Parliament should apologize for demanding my release, Saakashvili said, in reference to Papuashvili.

I want to tell the so-called speaker of the parliament that you should apologize for bringing me to such a condition, you should apologize to the members of the European Parliament, to my family, to me, to the Ukrainian state and to all Georgians for the fact that the founder of the Georgian state is in such a condition."

Papuashvili, look at me carefully, he said in court and lifted his T-shirt up, showing his skinny and cadaverous body.

Saakashvili has been incarcerated since his return to Georgia in autumn 2021, prior to the local elections. It was his first return since the end of his second presidential term in 2013. He has been sentenced to six years in prison following several cases opened against him by the Georgian government.

Read also: Saakashvili slams Georgia for refusal to return missile systems to Ukraine

The politician has undertaken several hunger strikes in protest of what he deems politically motivated arrest. Saakashvili's legal team, family, and supporters assert that he requires overseas treatment due to his grave health condition, attributed to his hunger strikes and maltreatment.

Saakashvili's attorney, Shalva Khachapuridze, announced in November 2022 that his client had been diagnosed with dementia and tuberculosis. Saakashvili has suggested that he may have been poisoned by Russian agents.

Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy said in February 2023 that the Georgian government was killing Saakashvili and called for his release to Ukraine or elsewhere.

The European Parliament passed a resolution calling for Saakashvili to be released for treatment abroad.

Will you support Ukraines free press? Dear reader, as all news organizations, we must balance the pressures of delivering timely, accurate, and relevant stories with requirements to fund our business operations. As a Ukrainian-based media, we also have another responsibility  to amplify Ukraines voice to the world during the crucial moment of its existence as a political nation. Its the support of our readers that lets us continue doing our job. We keep our essential reporting free because we believe in our ultimate purpose: an independent, democratic Ukraine. If youre willing to support Ukraine, consider subscribing to our Patreon starting from 5$ per month. We are immensely grateful.

Please help us continue fighting Russian propaganda. Truth can be hard to tell from fiction these days. Every viewpoint has its audience of backers and supporters, no matter how absurd. If conscious disinformation is reinforced by state propaganda apparatus and budget, its outcomes may become deadly. There is no solution to this, other than independent, honest, and accurate reporting. We remain committed to empowering the Ukrainian voice to push against the muck. If youre willing to stand up for the truth  consider supporting us on Patreon starting from 5$ per month. Thank you very much.

Will you help tell Ukraines story to the world? Twenty years ago, most people hadnt even heard of Ukraine. Today, the country is on everyones lips and everyones headlines. War pushed us on the front page. But there are many other things we do that we are proud of  from music and culture to technology. We need your help to tell the world Ukrainian story of resilience, joy, and survival. If youre willing to back our effort, consider supporting us on Patreon starting from 5$ per month. We are immensely grateful.

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Poland deploys 500 more police officers to bolster security at Belarus border 3 July, 11:42 AM Poland continues to strengthen its border with Belarus (Photo:Video screenshot Straz Graniczna / YouTube)

Another 500 police officers will be sent to the Polish-Belarusian border to boost Polish border security amid growing tension between two countries, Interior Minister of Poland Mariusz Kaminski wrote on Twitter on July 2.

"Due to the tense situation on the border with Belarus I have decided to bolster our forces with 500 Polish police officers from preventive and counter-terrorism units," the minister wrote.

These officers will reinforce the 5,000 border guards and 2,000 soldiers already deployed along the border.

Tension between Poland and Bealrus has been high for several years. Polish forces at the border were fired on from Belarusian territory on June 14, 2021.

Video of day

Belarusian dictator Alexander Lukashenko claimed in 2021 that he would not stop illegal migrants from crossing into the European Union from Belarusian territory.

Migrants testified that Belarus helped them to cut through border fences with the EU by providing them with wire cutters and axes, sparking protests against migration at the border. In response, Lithuania and Poland began to construct walls along their borders with Belarus.

A set of fortifications in Belarus's Brest Oblast, referred to as the "Khrenin Line," has provided Polish authorities with another reason for concern.

On June 26, the Polish military reported the completion of construction of a defense line on the countrys borders with Russias Kaliningrad Oblast exclave.

On June 27, Polish President Andrzej Duda stated that the Wagner mercenary company's presence in Belarus could be a potential danger for his country. Deputy Prime Minister Jarosaw Kaczynski said on June 29 that Poland will reinforce its eastern border due to that threat.

Will you support Ukraines free press? Dear reader, as all news organizations, we must balance the pressures of delivering timely, accurate, and relevant stories with requirements to fund our business operations. As a Ukrainian-based media, we also have another responsibility  to amplify Ukraines voice to the world during the crucial moment of its existence as a political nation. Its the support of our readers that lets us continue doing our job. We keep our essential reporting free because we believe in our ultimate purpose: an independent, democratic Ukraine. If youre willing to support Ukraine, consider subscribing to our Patreon starting from 5$ per month. We are immensely grateful.

Please help us continue fighting Russian propaganda. Truth can be hard to tell from fiction these days. Every viewpoint has its audience of backers and supporters, no matter how absurd. If conscious disinformation is reinforced by state propaganda apparatus and budget, its outcomes may become deadly. There is no solution to this, other than independent, honest, and accurate reporting. We remain committed to empowering the Ukrainian voice to push against the muck. If youre willing to stand up for the truth  consider supporting us on Patreon starting from 5$ per month. Thank you very much.

Will you help tell Ukraines story to the world? Twenty years ago, most people hadnt even heard of Ukraine. Today, the country is on everyones lips and everyones headlines. War pushed us on the front page. But there are many other things we do that we are proud of  from music and culture to technology. We need your help to tell the world Ukrainian story of resilience, joy, and survival. If youre willing to back our effort, consider supporting us on Patreon starting from 5$ per month. We are immensely grateful.

Follow us on Twitter, Facebook and Google News
Vancouver, British Columbia--(Newsfile Corp. - June 30, 2023) - Surge Battery Metals Inc. (TSXV: NILI) ("NILI" or the "Company") is pleased to announce that it has engaged Braden Jensen, C.A., as Chief Financial Officer (CFO), while Robert Guanzon has tendered his resignation as CFO, effective June 30th, 2023.

Mr. Jensen obtained his formal training with KPMG LLP. Before transitioning to the resource industry, he worked in the public practice sector for 6 years, concentrating in commodities-based accounting and tax. He was then employed at Wellgreen Platinum Ltd. and was involved in mineral exploration, construction, and operations reporting, prior to joining Copper Fox Metals Inc. as its Chief Financial Officer. Mr. Jensen is currently the Chief Financial Officer of District Copper Corp.

The Company would like to thank Mr. Guanzon for his contributions to the Company and wish him the best with his future endeavours.

To find out more about Surge Battery Metals Inc. please contact Investor Relations at (604) 662-8184 or email at info@surgebatterymetals.com.

SURGE BATTERY METALS INC.

"Greg Reimer"

CEO, Director

Neither the TSX Venture Exchange nor its Regulation Services Provider (as that term is defined in the policies of the TSX Venture Exchange) accepts responsibility for the adequacy or accuracy of this release.

This news release may contain certain "Forward-Looking Statements" within the meaning of the United States Private Securities Litigation Reform Act of 1995 and applicable Canadian securities laws. When used in this news release, the words "anticipate", "believe", "estimate", "expect", "target, "plan", "forecast", "intend", "may", "schedule" and similar words or expressions identify forward-looking statements or information. These forward-looking statements or information may relate to future prices of commodities, accuracy of mineral or resource exploration activity, reserves or resources, regulatory or government requirements or approvals including approvals of title and mining rights or licenses and environmental, local community or indigenous community approvals, the reliability of third party information, continued access to mineral properties or infrastructure, changes in laws, rules and regulations in Gabon or any other jurisdiction which may impact upon the Company or its properties or the commercial exploitation of those properties, currency risks including the exchange rate of USD$ for Cdn$ or other currencies, fluctuations in the market for gold/silver and potash or potash related products, changes in exploration costs and government royalties, export policies or taxes in Gabon or any other jurisdiction and other factors or information. The Company's current plans, expectations and intentions with respect to development of its business and of the Banio Potash Project may be impacted by economic uncertainties arising out of Covid-19 pandemic or by the impact of current financial and other market conditions on its ability to secure further financing or funding of the Banio Potash Project. Such statements represent the Company's current views with respect to future events and are necessarily based upon a number of assumptions and estimates that, while considered reasonable by the Company, are inherently subject to significant business, economic, competitive, political, environmental and social risks, contingencies and uncertainties. Many factors, both known and unknown, could cause results, performance or achievements to be materially different from the results, performance or achievements that are or may be expressed or implied by such forward-looking statements. The Company does not intend, and does not assume any obligation, to update these forward-looking statements or information to reflect changes in assumptions or changes in circumstances or any other events affections such statements and information other than as required by applicable laws, rules and regulations

To view the source version of this press release, please visit https://www.newsfilecorp.com/release/172045
Alex Saka was in the middle of a career change two years ago when he decided to rent his home in West Long Branch for the summer in hopes of generating some extra income.

There was so much demand that he found his new career: real estate agent.

"I rented it right away," said Saka, 37, an agent at Avenue Realty in Ocean Township. "As soon as I got my license, I was already producing a high volume of sales."

Saka's timing turned out to be perfect. The average price of a home sold in West Long Branch jumped from $534,618 in 2020 to $916,131 in 2022, or 71.4%, an Asbury Park Press analysis has found. It marked the biggest increase among towns at the Shore with more than 25 homes sold.

West Long Branch saw the biggest increase in average home prices at the Shore from 2020 to 2022, data shows. This home was on the market for nearly $1.7 million.

Real estate dreams: Monmouth, Ocean housing market stays hot. If you have $25M, these can be yours

Like most towns in Monmouth and Ocean counties during the pandemic, West Long Branch benefited from a wave of New Yorkers who took advantage of record low mortgage rates and moved to town in search of more space to live and work.

But Saka and other observers said West Long Branch's housing market got an extra boost in demand from the Sephardic Jewish community, who increasingly are finding the town offers key assets: It is more affordable than New York, it is close to the beach, and it is in walking distance to synagogues.

"A lot of Manhattanites came down, and after COVID some people went back, but some people liked it and stayed," said Joy Betesh, an Ocean Township resident who publishes the Kosher Connection Pocket Guide, a business directory. "People felt you get more for your money here, even though prices here are crazy."

The Asbury Park Press analyzed home sales for towns in Monmouth and Ocean counties from 2020 to 2022 using data from the New Jersey Division of Taxation. Fifty-three towns in the two counties had at least 25 sales.

Home prices and Hollywood: Netflix at Fort Monmouth drives home price boom

Those towns during the two years when the pandemic raged saw their average sales price climb from $534,623 to $700,212, or 31%, according to the data.

The towns with the biggest gains seem to have different demographic forces at work. In Manchester, where nearly half of the population is 65 or older, average prices for its relatively affordable stable of homes rose 57%. Surf City, with seaside properties on Long Beach Island that attracted second-home owners, saw its prices rise 53%, the data found.

Price of living near the water: Jersey Shore waterfront home price rises will make your eyes pop

One commonality: Demand for homes far exceeded supply.

West Long Branch, home to Monmouth University, saw its inventory of homes for sale fall from 35 a month in 2019, the year before the pandemic began, to 18 in 2021, before ticking up to 21 in 2022, according to the Monmouth Ocean Regional Realtors, a trade group.

Where did all the NJ homes for sale go? Real estate agents get clever to find new ones

Real estate agents say the frenzied pace of home sales during the pandemic has cooled in part because of higher mortgage rates. The average 30-year fixed-rate mortgage has increased from 2.67% at the end of 2020 to 6.67% in mid-June of this year.

But the housing market in West Long Branch remains strong. Saka said he recently listed a home on Fulton Street for $1.25 million. It didn't fetch its listing price, but it got multiple offers and sold after spending just 10 days on the market.

The market "is still very hot," Saka said. "Any property that hits the market in West Long Branch is moving quickly."

What towns saw the biggest leaps in home prices at the Shore? Here's a look.

1. West Long Branch

West Long Branch saw the biggest jump in home prices at the Shore from 2020 to 2022, data shows.

2020: $534,618

2022: $916,131

Percent change: 71.4%

Presidential history: Long Branch was once crawling with U.S. presidents. See the marks they left behind

2. Seaside Park

2020: $523,988

2022: $840,933

Percent change: 60.5%

3. Manchester

The sun shines through snow-covered pine trees in the New Jersey Pinelands in Manchester, N.J. on Dec. 11, 2013. (AP Photo/Wayne Parry)

2020: $206,756

2022: $324,572

Percent change: 57.0%

House hunters: Buyers in hot NJ housing market send 'love letters' to sellers, but are they legal?

4. Seaside Heights

2020: $253,2882022: $396,739Percent change: 56.6%

5. Surf City

2020: $804,332

2022: $1.23 million

Percent change: 53.0%

What needs to change: Where did all the affordable NJ middle-class homes go?

6. Long Beach Township

One of the hottest housing markets on the Jersey Shore is Long Beach Township on Long Beach Island as seen on August 4, 2021.

2020: $1.06 million

2022: $1.58 million

Percent change: 49.2%

7. Toms River

Summer rentals available include this house located on 9th Avenue in Ortley Beach, where one week costs upwards of $13,000. Ortley Beach, NJWednesday, April 5, 2023

2020: $360,932

2022: $537,950

Percent change: 49%

Retirement communities: Why did NJ age-restricted houses go from senior bargains to luxuries?

8. Ocean Gate

Ocean Gate is a small waterfront community that offers a boardwalk, beaches, wildlife, and a downtown area among many other delights. Ocean Gate, NJThursday, June 24, 2021

2020: $223,860

2022: $314,350

Percent change: 47.6%

9. Little Egg Harbor

Osborn Island, one of Little Egg Harbor's lagoon communities, at the end of Radio Road.

2020: $214,811

2022: $314,350

Percent change: 46.3%

10. Ocean Township (Monmouth)

Ocean Township saw average home prices climb 44.6% from 2020 to 2022, state data shows.

2020: $570,343

2022: $824,924

Percent change: 44.6%

Michael L. Diamond is a business reporter who has been writing about the New Jersey economy and health care industry for more than 20 years. He can be reached at mdiamond@gannettnj.com.

This article originally appeared on Asbury Park Press: 10 Monmouth and Ocean County towns with biggest home price increases
In this article, we will take a look at the 12 best cities to retire in Central America. If you wish to skip our detailed analysis on the financial state of retirees and retiring in Central America, you may go to 5 Best Cities to Retire in Central America.

The Financial State of Retirees

Are you afraid of outliving your assets? 70% of Americans today feel financially stressed, reports CNBC. They are working longer, spending less, increasing their stock exposure, and delaying claim on social security benefits. While these endeavors may be well-intentioned, without planning, they are merely blind attempts. As such, failure to adequately plan is a significant retirement blunder by retirees, leading them to save insufficiently for their golden years.

As a result, millions of Americans today are nearing their golden years financially unprepared. The US Census Bureau data notes that 50% of women, and 47% of men between ages 55 and 66, have no retirement savings at all. While saving for retirement is a must, AARP highlights that nearly 57 million Americans work for employers without a retirement savings plan.

Only 14 US states today have state-facilitated payroll deduction retirement savings or "Work & Save" programs for their employees. Such retirement savings plans are a convenient way for individuals to save for retirement. Savings ensure retirees have additional resources beyond their social security. It must be noted here that average social security benefits are only $1,600 a month, while average monthly expenditures for those 65 or older easily hover around $4,345. The grave disparities between income and expenditure have led many seniors to live below poverty line in the USA. The latest US Census Bureau data highlights that poverty among Americans aged 65 or older has increased from 8.9% in 2020 to 10.3% in 2021.

In order to retire comfortably, corporations such as Morgan Stanley (NYSE:MS), The Charles Schwab Corporation (NYSE:SCHW), and BlackRock, Inc. (NYSE:BLK) can help retirees take the right steps. Retirement solutions at Morgan Stanley (NYSE:MS) help individuals, families, and institutions reach their financial goals. Similarly, The Charles Schwab Corporation (NYSE:SCHW) and BlackRock, Inc. (NYSE:BLK) can help employees open Individual Retirement Accounts, or IRAs, for funding retirement years.

All three corporations, Morgan Stanley (NYSE:MS), The Charles Schwab Corporation (NYSE:SCHW), and BlackRock, Inc. (NYSE:BLK), are also good stocks to invest in, considering the aging baby boomer population being one of the factors for rising demand of financial services.

Retiring in Central and South Americas

Considering the lack of retirement funds and the graying demographics in parts of the USA, many retirees are considering relocation to cheaper areas such as the South. Apart from the South, there are plenty of affordable places to retire on the East Coast. For those looking to move away from the US, another possible option on many retirees radars is Central America. Moving to Central America has many advantages for retirees. For starters, the cost of living is lower compared to many Western nations. The climate is pleasant and warm throughout the year too.

Moreover, many countries, such as Panama and Costa Rica, have reputable healthcare systems. The process for obtaining residency is easy, and there are ample opportunities to explore the outdoors. International Living rates Panama as the cheapest and safest place to live in Central America. Retiring in Panama can also help individuals stretch their dollar incomes, with the cost of living as affordable as $1,200 a month.

While Central America is one of the cheapest places for retirement, South America can also be a good place to consider for affordable living. Some of the best places in South America to live include Buenos Aires, Argentina; Lima, Peru; Quito, Ecuador; Rio de Janeiro, Brazil; and Florianopolis, Brazil. However, amidst all these places, Bolivia ranks as South America's cheapest place to retire. Living in Bolivia is as cheap as $20 a day.

12 Best Cities to Retire in Central America

Pixabay/Public Domain

Methodology

In order to compile the list of best cities to retire in Central America, we used 4 (1,2,3,4) sources. We also gathered opinions from expat retirees on the best cities for retirement in Central America on forums such as Reddit and Quora. After gathering the cities recommended, we ranked them based on their monthly cost of living (for the individual) sourced from LivingCost.org, amongst others. Next, cities are ranked in descending order from the highest to the lowest cost of living expenses.

Here are the 12 best cities to retire in Central America:

12. Coronado, Panama

Cost of living: $2,500

Coronado, Panama, is one of the best cities for retirees and expats in Central America. The popular beach town is located on the Western Coast of Panama, 90 minutes away from Panama City. It has pristine beaches, a warm coastal climate, and plentiful beachfront properties. Coronado, Panama, has undergone a remarkable transformation, thanks to a thriving expat community.

Moreover, it has evolved into a sophisticated and upscale beach resort. The city is often regarded as the epicenter of beach life, with affordable properties and developed infrastructures in place.

The cost of living is affordable and costs a maximum of $2,000. A one-bedroom apartment can range between $500-$800, while nicer rentals will range between $1,000-$1,800. Plenty of hospitals and clinics are spread throughout the city, and the quality of medical care is comparable to the United States. Overall, it is one of Panama's safest and cheapest places to retire.

11. Antigua, Guatemala

Cost of living: $1,550

One of the most beautiful cities to retire in Guatemala is Antigua. An ideal year-round climate, picturesque scenery, and affordable living costs make it a desirable retirement destination for expats. Antigua has been fairly successful in preserving its colonial architecture, which grants it a unique allure, along with its cobbled streets and beautiful landscapes.

Antigua, Guatemala, is also considered a safe destination for retirees. Valleys, mountains, and hills surround the beautiful valley. Moreover, even though the city is expensive compared to Guatemala's standards, it is cheaper compared to the United States'. The average cost of living is only $1,550, with retirees affording luxuries far more easily than they could have in the States.

10. Corozal, Belize

Cost of living: $1,500

Retirees wishing to escape the hustle and bustle of big cities can choose to retire in Corozal, Belize. The city offers a laid-back lifestyle, an affordable cost of living, and a wide array of outdoor activities to enjoy. Residents like to spend time on the Corozal Bay, engaged in activities such as swimming, fishing, and snorkeling. The cost of living in Corozal, Belize, is inexpensive, and expats can easily afford to live in the city for under $1,500 a month.

Renting an apartment costs between $200-$500, while meals cost $5 to $10 on average. Buying a house is also affordable, with two-bedroom homes costing between $50,000 to $100,000. However, the city offers limited access to quality healthcare facilities and shopping choices. That said, just a half-hour away, across the border in Chetumal City, Mexico, you'll find an abundance of modern hospitals and a wide range of shopping options.

9. Chitre, Panama

Cost of living: $1,500

Several reasons bring Chitre, Panama, on our list of best cities for retirement in Central America. For starters, the bustling town emits a lively ambiance that is hard to resist. There are ample supermarkets, restaurants, pharmacies, car rentals, and a multi-level shopping mall for residents. Costs of living, housing, and healthcare are all pretty affordable for retirees, another plus for moving to the city.

Retirees can expect to live comfortably under $1,500. The cost of living includes rent, groceries, food, utilities, and also transportation. Two-bedroom homes cost about $350 a month, meals cost as low as $4, and utilities are also very reasonable. The city has two public and private hospitals each, as well as labs, medical and dental clinics. Overall, it is a safe and cheap city to retire.

8. Roatan, Honduras

Cost of living: $1,500

The vibrant culture, affordable living costs, and plentiful recreational opportunities make Roatan one of Central America's most desirable locations to retire. Expats cite "feeling safe, and at home" living here. The people are warm and friendly, the food scene is amazing, and residents love it for its original and fascinating culture.

The cost of living is low, with expats living comfortably on as low as $1,500. The city also boasts good private healthcare facilities with qualified physicians, most of whom have studied in the US. Overall, its a tropical paradise lined with white, sandy beaches, natural areas, beach and market towns alike.

7. Tamarindo, Costa Rica

Cost of living: $1,405

Tamarindo, Costa Rica, is a bustling beach hub offering miles of golden sand and a picturesque palm tree-lined beach. Beyond the palms, residents find themselves in the hustle and bustle of its charming main road. The beachfront in Tamarindo is decked with an array of establishments, including vibrant bars, exquisite restaurants, relaxing spas, reputable real estate offices, and charming souvenir stores. Together, they create an enchanting paradise-like atmosphere that captivates visitors and locals alike.

Nestled on the picturesque Nicoya Peninsula, this location offers residents a unique advantage - access to Nicoyan water, renowned for its abundant calcium content. With this natural elixir at their disposal, residents can fortify their bones and potentially reduce their risk of heart disease, making it an ideal place for a healthy and vibrant lifestyle.

6. Placencia, Belize

Cost of living: $1,350

Placencia, Belize, has made it to our list of Central America's best cities to retire in, and it's no wonder why. With its near-perfect weather, idyllic surroundings, and laid-back lifestyle, the allure of this coastal gem is irresistible to those seeking a peaceful retirement experience. The best thing about retiring to this town is that retirees can live as cheaply as they desire. On average, an expat retiree's cost of living is $1,350.

Click to continue reading and see the 5 Best Cities to Retire in Central America.

Suggested Articles:

Disclosure: none. 12 Best Cities to Retire in Central America is originally published on Insider Monkey.
To find a multi-bagger stock, what are the underlying trends we should look for in a business? Typically, we'll want to notice a trend of growing return on capital employed (ROCE) and alongside that, an expanding base of capital employed. Ultimately, this demonstrates that it's a business that is reinvesting profits at increasing rates of return. So when we looked at Abbott Laboratories (NYSE:ABT) and its trend of ROCE, we really liked what we saw.

What Is Return On Capital Employed (ROCE)?

Just to clarify if you're unsure, ROCE is a metric for evaluating how much pre-tax income (in percentage terms) a company earns on the capital invested in its business. Analysts use this formula to calculate it for Abbott Laboratories:

Return on Capital Employed = Earnings Before Interest and Tax (EBIT)  (Total Assets - Current Liabilities)

0.13 = US$7.5b  (US$74b - US$15b) (Based on the trailing twelve months to March 2023).

Therefore, Abbott Laboratories has an ROCE of 13%. On its own, that's a standard return, however it's much better than the 8.9% generated by the Medical Equipment industry.

View our latest analysis for Abbott Laboratories

roce

In the above chart we have measured Abbott Laboratories' prior ROCE against its prior performance, but the future is arguably more important. If you'd like, you can check out the forecasts from the analysts covering Abbott Laboratories here for free.

What Can We Tell From Abbott Laboratories' ROCE Trend?

Abbott Laboratories has not disappointed with their ROCE growth. More specifically, while the company has kept capital employed relatively flat over the last five years, the ROCE has climbed 160% in that same time. Basically the business is generating higher returns from the same amount of capital and that is proof that there are improvements in the company's efficiencies. It's worth looking deeper into this though because while it's great that the business is more efficient, it might also mean that going forward the areas to invest internally for the organic growth are lacking.

The Bottom Line On Abbott Laboratories' ROCE

As discussed above, Abbott Laboratories appears to be getting more proficient at generating returns since capital employed has remained flat but earnings (before interest and tax) are up. And with a respectable 90% awarded to those who held the stock over the last five years, you could argue that these developments are starting to get the attention they deserve. With that being said, we still think the promising fundamentals mean the company deserves some further due diligence.

Abbott Laboratories does have some risks though, and we've spotted 1 warning sign for Abbott Laboratories that you might be interested in.

While Abbott Laboratories isn't earning the highest return, check out this free list of companies that are earning high returns on equity with solid balance sheets.

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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By Jody Godoy

(Reuters) -Elon Musk's move to temporarily cap how many posts Twitter users can read on the social media site could undermine efforts by new CEO Linda Yaccarino to attract advertisers, marketing industry professionals said.

Musk announced Saturday that Twitter would limit how many tweets per day various accounts can read, to discourage "extreme levels" of data scraping and system manipulation.

Users posted screenshots in reply, showing they were unable to see any tweets, including tweets on the pages of corporate advertisers, after hitting the limit.

Ad industry veterans said the move creates an obstacle for Yaccarino, the former NBCUniversal advertising chief who started last month as Twitter's CEO.

Yaccarino has sought to repair relationships with advertisers who pulled away from the site after Musk bought it last year, the Financial Times reported last week.

The limits are "remarkably bad" for users and advertisers already shaken by the "chaos" Musk has brought to the platform, Mike Proulx, research director at Forrester, said on Sunday.

"The advertiser trust deficit that Linda Yaccarino needs to reverse just got even bigger. And it cannot be reversed based on her industry credibility alone," he said.

Lou Paskalis, the founder of advertising consultancy AJL Advisory and former marketing boss at Bank of America, said Yaccarino is Musk's "last best hope" to salvage ad revenue and the company's value.

"This move signals to the marketplace that he's not capable of empowering her to save him from himself," he said.

Under the new cap, unverified accounts were initially limited to 600 posts a day with new unverified accounts limited to 300. Verified accounts could read 6,000 posts a day, Musk said in a post on the site.

Hours later, he said the cap was raised to 10,000 posts per day for verified users, 1,000 per day for unverified and 500 posts per day for new unverified users.

A Twitter spokesperson did not reply to requests for comment and inquiries about how long the restrictions will last on Sunday.

Capping how much users can view could be "catastrophic" for the platform's ad business, said Jasmine Enberg, principal analyst at Insider Intelligence.

"This certainly isn't going to make it any easier to convince advertisers to return. It's a hard sell already to bring advertisers back," she said.

Olivia Wedderburn, an executive at creative agency TMW Unlimited, said she was advising her clients to "stop investing in Twitter immediately," because the platform was turning away heavily engaged users, which she said is the "sole reason" to advertise on Twitter.

The limit came soon after Twitter began requiring users to log into an account on the social media platform to view tweets, which Musk called a "temporary emergency measure" to combat data scraping.

Musk had earlier expressed displeasure with artificial intelligence firms like OpenAI, the owner of ChatGPT, for using Twitter's data to train their large language models.

Platforms including Reddit and major news media organizations have complained about AI companies using their information to train AI models as some have sought fees.

Kai-Cheng Yang, researcher at Indiana University in Bloomington, said that the limits appeared to be effective in blocking third parties, including search engines, from scraping Twitter data like before.

"It might still be possible, but the methods would be much more sophisticated and much less efficient," he said.

(Reporting by Jody Godoy in New York, Sheila Dang in Dallas, Akash Sriram in Bengaluru and Martin Coulter in London; editing by Burton Frierson, Nick Zieminski and Marguerita Choy)
Balchug Capital

Pulkovo Sky business center and Metropolis shopping center acquired

Assets of Balchug Capital are now $2 billion

Further plans to invest in high-quality real estate



YEREVAN, Armenia, July 03, 2023 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- The Armenian investment fund Balchug Capital has confirmed the acquisition of two landmark commercial real estate assets in Russia. It has purchased Pulkovo Sky, one of the largest Class A office buildings in St Petersburg, and Metropolis shopping center, one of the largest such malls in Moscow.



Both acquisitions were made by international investors who were divesting from Russia and were entirely legal under local and international law.

Pulkovo Sky business center, near Pulkovo airport in St. Petersburg, is 76,000 sq.m in size. It was purchased from Finnish investors EKE and Vicus. Metropolis shopping center in Moscow is 241,000 sq.m in size. It was acquired from leading American investors and is one of the most modern and popular shopping centers in the capital.

In neither case does Balchug Capital disclose the sum or the particulars of the transaction. However, analysts of the Russian market have stated that both are landmark transactions with Metropolis being the larger of the two. The moves have raised Balchug Capitals assets to $2 billion.

David Amaryan, founder and CEO of Balchug Capital, said: Many international investors who hold Russian assets and must divest from them face significant difficulties in doing so. This creates significant opportunities for investors in other countries who are legally able to purchase these assets. We are building a portfolio of the highest quality commercial real estate assets and plan to grow our assets to $3 billion by the end of the year.

About Balchug Capital:

Balchug Capital is an investment fund headquartered in Yerevan, Armenia. It was founded in 2010 by David Amaryan, who serves as CEO and oversees all investment activity.

Media contact:

For further information please contact:

Tatevik Simonyan, Spring: tsimonyan@spring.am








Key Insights

Given the large stake in the stock by institutions, Ashtead Technology Holdings' stock price might be vulnerable to their trading decisions

52% of the business is held by the top 10 shareholders

Using data from analyst forecasts alongside ownership research, one can better assess the future performance of a company

Every investor in Ashtead Technology Holdings Plc (LON:AT.) should be aware of the most powerful shareholder groups. With 77% stake, institutions possess the maximum shares in the company. Put another way, the group faces the maximum upside potential (or downside risk).

Because institutional owners have a huge pool of resources and liquidity, their investing decisions tend to carry a great deal 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 Ashtead Technology Holdings.

View our latest analysis for Ashtead Technology Holdings

What Does The Institutional Ownership Tell Us About Ashtead Technology Holdings?

Institutional investors commonly compare their own returns to the returns of a commonly followed index. So they generally do consider buying larger companies that are included in the relevant benchmark index.

Ashtead Technology Holdings already has institutions on the share registry. Indeed, they own a respectable stake in the company. 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. 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 Ashtead Technology Holdings, (below). Of course, keep in mind that there are other factors to consider, too.

Investors should note that institutions actually own more than half the company, so they can collectively wield significant power. Ashtead Technology Holdings is not owned by hedge funds. Our data shows that FMR LLC is the largest shareholder with 9.8% of shares outstanding. abrdn plc is the second largest shareholder owning 6.3% of common stock, and Columbia Management Investment Advisers, LLC holds about 6.0% of the company stock. Additionally, the company's CEO Allan Pirie directly holds 2.7% of the total shares outstanding.

We also observed that the top 10 shareholders account for more than half of the share register, with a few smaller shareholders to balance the interests of the larger ones to a certain extent.

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 plenty of analysts covering the stock, so it might be worth seeing what they are forecasting, too.

Insider Ownership Of Ashtead Technology Holdings

The definition of an insider can differ slightly between different countries, but members of the board of directors always count. Company management run the business, but the CEO will answer to the board, even if he or she is a member of it.

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.

We can report that insiders do own shares in Ashtead Technology Holdings Plc. In their own names, insiders own UK10m worth of stock in the UK304m company. It is good to see some investment by insiders, but it might be worth checking if those insiders have been buying.

General Public Ownership

With a 11% ownership, the general public, mostly comprising of individual investors, have some degree of sway over Ashtead Technology Holdings. This size of ownership, while considerable, may not be enough to change company policy if the decision is not in sync with other large shareholders.

Private Equity Ownership

With an ownership of 5.1%, 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.

I always like to check for a history of revenue growth. You can too, by accessing this free chart of historic revenue and earnings in this detailed graph.

Ultimately the future is most important. You can access this free report on analyst forecasts for the company.

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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(Bloomberg) -- Daiichi Sankyo Co. and partner AstraZeneca Plc shares fell the most in years after a study of their highly-anticipated lung cancer medicine raised questions about its safety and effectiveness.

Most Read from Bloomberg

While the drug significantly slowed progression of the most common form of lung cancer more than standard chemotherapy, it hasnt yet improved overall survival rates, Daiichi and AstraZeneca said in a statement late Monday. There were also some adverse reactions that led to patient deaths, the companies said, using the technical term of Grade 5 events. No further details were given.

Daiichi fell 15% in Tokyo trading Tuesday, its biggest drop since 2008, while Astra declined 8% in London on Monday, the most since March 2020.

Investors anticipated a clearer statement on the success of the trial, which has a dual goal of proving the drugs ability to fight cancer and reducing the risk of dying from it. AstraZenecas description of the results suggests the benefit is less pronounced than expected, Jefferies analysts wrote in a note.

The study remains underway after the interim analysis, and more mature results could show the treatments effect increases over time.

Precision Chemotherapy

Scientists and doctors have been trying to develop a precise way to deliver chemotherapy for decades, allowing them to avoid the current approach that involves blasting the whole body and killing good cells as well as bad. Astras drug  known as datopotamab deruxtecan, or Dato-DXd  ferries a powerful chemotherapy directly to tainted cells to kill the cancer, while sparing their healthy counterparts.

The two companies previously developed a cancer treatment that works similarly and became the star of the class of drugs called antibody drug conjugates, or ADCs. The medicine Enhertu extends the lives of breast cancer patients with few treatment options and is on track to generated more than $10 billion annually. The results of a study examining whether Enhertu can safely replace chemotherapy as the first line of treatment for breast cancer is due by September.

Astra agreed to pay as much as $6 billion for the right to develop both cancer therapies with Daiichi Sankyo as part of a broader bet to revive growth a decade ago by building a pipeline of oncology drugs. Dato-DXd could garner as much as $18 billion in sales, while Enhertu may generate $12.5 billion, Jefferies analysts have estimated.

What Bloomberg Intelligence Says:

AstraZenecas reported successful outcome for Dato-DXd in the Tropion-Lung01 study comes with limited details and is concerning due to reports of some Grade 5 toxicity events (IE deaths), in particular given that this drug dose apparently saw no such issues in the Phase 1 Tropion-PanTumor01 trial. Also, though progression-free survival benefit was reported as statistically significant, the lack of numerical detail  a minimum 2-3 month benefit was targeted  will lead to questions regarding clinical significance. Given peak sales estimates of $10 billion, Astra shares could be under pressure today.  John Murphy, BI pharma analyst

Safety Concerns Arise Amid Positive Astra Dato-DXd Data: React

AstraZeneca was expected to say the data were clinically meaningful, to give a sense that the drug was giving patients several more months of survival, according to Emily Field, an analyst at Barclays.

Instead, it said the data showed an early trend that signaled a survival benefit, though it didnt meet the threshold for statistical significance at this time.

Companies rarely provide detailed results in press releases. Astra said the finding of the latest trial will be shared with health authorities and presented at a forthcoming medical meeting.

Not everyone agreed on the significance of the study.

Dato-DXd will probably still be approved by regulators, but the results may open the door to a rival treatment from Gilead Sciences Inc., said Hiroshi Wada, an analyst at SMBC Nikko Securities Inc., in a note Monday. That medicine, known as Torodelvy, could win approval first and take market share, he said.

Hidemaru Yamaguchi, an analyst at Citigroup Global Markets Japan Inc., says the results are positive and Daiichi stock is oversold.

Theres still a chance for the companies to show statistical significance when the analysis is completed, he said.

Still, the lack of robust early signs of improved survival could be a setback for efforts to fine-tune the use of chemotherapy for treating lung cancer, the second-most common cancer worldwide. More than 2.2 million new cases were recorded in 2020, according to the World Cancer Research Fund.

--With assistance from Suzi Ring and Grace Huang.

(Updates share price in third paragraph.)

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2023 Bloomberg L.P.
Just because a business does not make any money, does not mean that the stock will go down. For example, biotech and mining exploration companies often lose money for years before finding success with a new treatment or mineral discovery. But the harsh reality is that very many loss making companies burn through all their cash and go bankrupt.

Given this risk, we thought we'd take a look at whether Aura Energy (ASX:AEE) shareholders should be worried about its cash burn. For the purposes of this article, cash burn is the annual rate at which an unprofitable company spends cash to fund its growth; its negative free cash flow. We'll start by comparing its cash burn with its cash reserves in order to calculate its cash runway.

Check out our latest analysis for Aura Energy

Does Aura Energy Have A Long Cash Runway?

You can calculate a company's cash runway by dividing the amount of cash it has by the rate at which it is spending that cash. When Aura Energy last reported its balance sheet in December 2022, it had zero debt and cash worth AU$6.2m. Looking at the last year, the company burnt through AU$8.5m. That means it had a cash runway of around 9 months as of December 2022. Notably, analysts forecast that Aura Energy will break even (at a free cash flow level) in about 5 years. That means unless the company reduces its cash burn quickly, it may well look to raise more cash. You can see how its cash balance has changed over time in the image below.

How Is Aura Energy's Cash Burn Changing Over Time?

Because Aura Energy isn't currently generating revenue, we consider it an early-stage business. So while we can't look to sales to understand growth, we can look at how the cash burn is changing to understand how expenditure is trending over time. In fact, it ramped its spending strongly over the last year, increasing cash burn by 127%. It's fair to say that sort of rate of increase cannot be maintained for very long, without putting pressure on the balance sheet. While the past is always worth studying, it is the future that matters most of all. For that reason, it makes a lot of sense to take a look at our analyst forecasts for the company.

Can Aura Energy Raise More Cash Easily?

Since its cash burn is moving in the wrong direction, Aura Energy shareholders may wish to think ahead to when the company may need to raise more cash. Issuing new shares, or taking on debt, are the most common ways for a listed company to raise more money for its business. Many companies end up issuing new shares to fund future growth. By comparing a company's annual cash burn to its total market capitalisation, we can estimate roughly how many shares it would have to issue in order to run the company for another year (at the same burn rate).

Aura Energy has a market capitalisation of AU$126m and burnt through AU$8.5m last year, which is 6.7% of the company's market value. Given that is a rather small percentage, it would probably be really easy for the company to fund another year's growth by issuing some new shares to investors, or even by taking out a loan.

Is Aura Energy's Cash Burn A Worry?

On this analysis of Aura Energy's cash burn, we think its cash burn relative to its market cap was reassuring, while its increasing cash burn has us a bit worried. Shareholders can take heart from the fact that analysts are forecasting it will reach breakeven. Summing up, we think the Aura Energy's cash burn is a risk, based on the factors we mentioned in this article. Taking a deeper dive, we've spotted 5 warning signs for Aura Energy you should be aware of, and 2 of them don't sit too well with us.

Of course Aura Energy may not be the best stock to buy. So you may wish to see this free collection of companies boasting high return on equity, or this list of stocks that insiders are buying.

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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SINGAPORE, July 3, 2023 /PRNewswire/ -- AZ Asia-Pacific today announced it has partnered with Absolute Software to equip businesses in Asia Pacific to strengthen cyber resiliency against the escalating threat of ransomware and malicious attacks.

Embedded in more than 600 million devices, Absolute is the only platform offering a permanent digital connection that intelligently and dynamically applies visibility, control and self-healing capabilities to endpoints, applications, and network connections. With the company's unique Application Resilience technology, IT and security personnel can monitor the health of mission-critical applications; detect if they are missing, corrupted, or not working effectively; and automatically repair or re-install components when necessary  without requiring human intervention.

According to IDC's latest Worldwide Semiannual Security Spending Guide: "Spending on security hardware, services and software in Asia/Pacific* is expected to reach USD 36 billion in 2023, an increase of 16.7% over the previous year. Security investments will remain resilient in 2023 and the forecasted years despite the economic slowdown and uncertainty risksSecurity services will be followed by the security software, led by endpoint security, information and data security software, and identity and digital trust software, accounting for more than half of the overall security software spend in 2023."

"As organizations grow, they tend to accumulate more endpoints as systems expand in size to accommodate the increase in the number of users. As a result, it increases the attack surface of an organization while providing attackers with increasing entry points to a system. In line with the market's demand, the strategic partnership with Absolute Software will put AZ Asia-Pacific in a better position to develop a more comprehensive portfolio of industry-leading products and solutions to offer to businesses," said Seth Ho, Chief Revenue Officer of AZ Asia-Pacific.

"In today's work-from-anywhere environments, there is a critical need for resilient security controls capable of protecting distributed devices and sensitive data," said Mark Grace, Chief Revenue Officer at Absolute. "Through this partnership with AZ Asia-Pacific, we are empowering more organizations in the region to leverage Absolute's intelligent, self-healing solutions to strengthen their security defenses."

About AZ Asia-Pacific

AZ Asia-Pacific is a full-fledged distributor that works with the best breed of industry system integrators and service providers across the APJ region to re-invent solutions and services delivery in order to meet and exceed enterprises' technology challenges and requirements  Cloud, Network and Security. AZ Asia-Pacific is privately held, headquartered in Singapore, with offices and operations in Malaysia, Thailand, Philippines, Indonesia, China, Hong Kong, Australia, Vietnam & South Asia.

Cision

View original content to download multimedia:https://www.prnewswire.com/apac/news-releases/az-asia-pacific-partners-with-absolute-software-to-support-businesses-in-boosting-endpoint-security-301862928.html

SOURCE AZ Asia-Pacific
Bitcoin fell and Ether rose during Monday afternoon trading in Hong Kong, while most of the top 10 non-stablecoin cryptocurrencies by market capitalization strengthened. Investor sentiment remained strong after the wave of institutional interest in crypto from a raft of Bitcoin spot exchange-traded fund (ETF) applications in the final weeks of June.

See related article: Weekly Market Wrap: Bitcoin breaches US$31,195 following Fidelitys spot Bitcoin ETF application

Bitcoin slips, Ether inches up, top 10 cryptos in the green

Bitcoin inched down 0.31% from 6:30 a.m. to 4:30 p.m. in Hong Kong to US$30,632. Ether gained 0.4% in the same period to trade at US$1,963, floating above US$1,900 since Sunday.

Crypto investors remained optimistic after numerous spot Bitcoin ETF applications in June. Among the latest institutional players to join the race, asset management giant Fidelity filed a spot Bitcoin ETF application last week.

The U.S. regulator that approves ETFs, the Securities and Exchange Commission, on Friday indicated it was unimpressed by the Bitcoin ETF applications by financial heavyweights such as Blackrock and Fidelity Investments, according to a report by the Wall Street Journal.

It is obvious that a race is currently underway among institutional firms to get a Bitcoin ETF approved. Whether such an ETF will be approved soon and which one will be the first is known only to Mr Gensler, but it is safe to say that news of an approved ETF will have a positive impact on the Bitcoin price in both the short and long term, Jonas Betz, crypto market analyst and founder of consultancy firm Betz Crypto, told Forkast.

An ETF will significantly lower the barriers to exposure to Bitcoin by providing an easily accessible investment vehicle and thus boosting demand for Bitcoin.

Polkadots Dot token was the days biggest gainer in the top 10, rising 4.48% to US$5.50, followed by Ether that increased 2.43% in the past 24 hours. The XRP token was the only one in the red, inching down 0.02% to US$0.4824.

The total crypto market capitalization over the past 24 hours rose 1.18% to US$1.21 trillion and market volume increased 20.72% to US$31.55 billion, according to CoinMarketCap data.

Bitcoin NFT sales fall, Ethereum NFT sales gain

The Forkast 500 NFT index fell 1.16% to 2,761.68 points in the 24 hours to 4:30 p.m. in Hong Kong and dropped 5.11% during the week.

Bitcoins 24-hour non-fungible token sales fell 15.56% to US$2.57 million, as sales for Uncategorized Ordinals fell 34.38% to US$1.25 million.

Ethereums 24-hour NFT sales rose 7.54% to US$24.96 million, as sales for the largest Ethereum-native NFT collection, the Bored Ape Yacht Club, rose 1.76% to US$5.35 million, while Mutant Ape Yacht Club sales inched up 1.69% to US$2.4 million.

Azuki sales decreased 19.19% to US$1.89 million, after the new Azuki Elementals collection was criticized for being too similar to the original.

Brutal weekend for NFTs, said Yehudah Petscher, NFT Strategist at Forkast Labs, the parent company of Forkast.News. It might be easy to point to Azukis Elementals mint as the catalyst still, but lowering average sales and floor prices in top collections prior to Elementals mint showed that we were on the cusp of another free fall.

The Azuki Elementals collection began minting last Tuesday and sold out in 15 minutes, but left collectors disappointed as the latest collection looked almost the same as the original.

Among the Forkast Labs NFT indexes, the Forkast CAR NFT Composite was the only one in the green, inching up 0.84% to 967.02 points.

Asian equities, U.S. stock futures rise on signs of easing U.S.-China tension

Image: elements.envato

Major Asian equities strengthened as of 4:30 p.m. in Hong Kong ahead of U.S. Treasury Secretary Janet Yellens trip to Beijing Wednesday to deepen communication between the two biggest global economies.

Japans Nikkei 225 rose 1.7% and the Shenzhen Component Index inched up 0.59%. Hong Kongs Hang Seng Index rose 2.06% and the Shanghai Composite strengthened 1.31%.

Investor sentiment was bolstered by comments from Bank of America CEO Brian Moynihan, who told CNN on Tuesday that U.S. inflation could fall to the Feds 2% target by 2025. But he also cautioned of a higher probability of a mild recession.

Most U.S. stock futures strengthened during Monday afternoon trading in Hong Kong, after falling U.S. inflation bolstered hopes of a less hawkish stance from the Federal Reserve. The S&P 500 futures index inched up 0.061%, the tech-heavy Nasdaq-100 futures strengthened 0.29% but the Dow Jones Industrial Average futures fell 0.11%.

Investors now await the release of the ISM Manufacturing Purchasing Managers Index and S&P Global Manufacturing Purchasing Managers Index for June, scheduled for Monday.

Investors are expecting more interest rate hikes this year in the U.S. following reiterated warnings from Fed Chair Jerome Powell in speeches last week in Europe that inflation has yet to be brought under control.

U.S. interest rates are now between 5% and 5.25%, the highest since 2006. The CME FedWatch Tool predicts an 87.4% chance for a 25-basis-point rate hike at the Feds next meeting on July 26 and predicts only a 12.6% chance the Fed will leave rates unchanged.

See related article: EU publishes draft bill for digital euro and cash payments

Updates with equities section
BUSINESS PEOPLE: Center For Sight optometrists named to 'America's Best Eye Doctors'

Drs. Joseph Sowka and Lori Vollmer, of Center for Sight, in Venice.

Two Center For Sight optometric physicians, Joseph Sowka and Lori Vollmer, have again been named to Newsweek magazines Americas Best Eye Doctors list for 2023.

The husband-and-wife duo care for patients at the Jacaranda Boulevard office of Center For Sight in Venice.

Of the 200 optometrists recognized on the list, and out of approximately 40,000 nationwide, Sowka topped the list at No. 1.

Newsweek annually compiles a list of doctors who have been nominated based on clinical excellence, continuity of care and the quality of technology used in their practices.

Sowka received a bachelors degree with distinction from Cornell University and a Doctor of Optometry degree from the Pennsylvania College of Optometry at Salus University.

Prior to joining Center For Sight, he was a professor at Nova Southeastern Universitys College of Optometry for 28 years.

Vollmer earned an undergraduate degree from the University of South Florida and a Doctor of Optometry degree from Nova Southeastern University College of Optometry, graduating with honors and distinction.

She then worked as a professor at Nova Southeastern University for 17 years. Currently, Vollmer leads the residency program at Center For Sight.

Jerome

James Jerome brings more than two decades of experience in community banking and finance to his new position as commercial banker at Englewood Bank & Trust, part of the Crews Banking Family.

He is based at the Englewood Bank & Trust Gulf Cove branch, in Port Charlotte.

In this position, Jerome is responsible for developing new business and client relationships, producing a variety of commercial loans and generating and managing a portfolio of business and corresponding relationships.

He moved to this area in 1993. A graduate of Venice High School, Jerome holds a bachelors degree in computer science from the University of Phoenix.

Prior to joining the Crews Banking Family, Jerome held a variety of banking positions, including branch manager, business banker and mortgage lender. He also served in the Marine Corps.

Jared Motzenbecker, director of Wealth Services for Gulfside Wealth, a full-service wealth management group affiliated with Gulfside Bank, was recently awarded the coveted Five Star Wealth Manager Award for the second consecutive year.

Five Star Professional employs a rigorous research process to identify Five Star Wealth Manager award winners in cities across the U.S.

Award-winning professionals were carefully selected from among thousands of wealth managers for their knowledge, service and experience. Winners represent some of the most dedicated financial professionals, each committed to pursuing professional excellence and providing exceptional service to their clients.

Gulfside Wealth is in Sarasota.

This article originally appeared on Sarasota Herald-Tribune: Optometrist couple at Center For Sight make best eye doctors list
PARIS and TORONTO, July 3, 2023 /CNW/ - Today CACEIS, subsidiary of the Credit Agricole group and Santander, and Royal Bank of Canada (RBC) announced completion of the sale by RBC and purchase by CACEIS of the European asset servicing activities of RBC Investor Services and its associated Malaysian centre of excellence.

RBC Logo (CNW Group/RBC Investor & Treasury Services)

This transaction, which has received all required regulatory and antitrust approvals, combines two strong asset servicing operations in Europe.

With this transaction, CACEIS gains broader international coverage and an expanded offering for all its clients. Covering the entire value chain, CACEIS is strengthening its leading position in European asset servicing.

CACEIS' acquisition of the business of the UK branch of RBC Investor Services Trust and RBC Investor Services business in Jersey is expected to take place in the coming months, subject to the receipt of the necessary regulatory approvals.

The results of the sold operations have a de minimis impact to RBC's common equity Tier 1 (CET1) ratio and earnings per share (EPS).

The transaction excludes RBC Investor Services' Canadian operations.

Jean-Pierre Michalowski, CEO of CACEIS, commented: "This deal further strengthens CACEIS' leadership position as a front-running asset servicing player. I believe that the staff who are joining us are proud to be part of our group. Together we will construct the benchmark for the sector in Europe. With motivated individuals all working collectively to serve our clients, we are on the right track."

Francis Jackson, CEO of RBC Investor Services, added: "We are incredibly proud of the business we have built in Europe and pleased that both clients and employees of our business will benefit from being part of what is expected to become one of the largest asset servicing providers in Europe. We believe the complementary services, combined scale and joint expertise of RBC's Investor Services' European business and CACEIS will bring more opportunity for employees and greater value for clients."

About CACEIS

CACEIS is the asset servicing banking group of Credit Agricole S.A. and Santander dedicated to asset managers, insurance companies, pension funds, banks, private equity and real estate funds, brokers and corporate clients. Through offices across Europe, North and South America, and Asia, CACEIS offers a broad range of services covering execution, clearing, forex, securities lending, custody, depositary and fund administration, transfer agency, fund distribution support, middle office outsourcing and issuer services. With assets under custody of 4.1 trillion and assets under administration of 2.2 trillion, CACEIS is a European leader in asset servicing and one of the major players worldwide (figures as of 31 December 2022).

www.caceis.com

About RBC

Royal Bank of Canada is a global financial institution with a purpose-driven, principles-led approach to delivering leading performance. Our success comes from the 98,000+ employees who leverage their imaginations and insights to bring our vision, values and strategy to life so we can help our clients thrive and communities prosper. As Canada's biggest bank and one of the largest in the world, based on market capitalization, we have a diversified business model with a focus on innovation and providing exceptional experiences to our 17 million clients in Canada, the U.S. and 27 other countries. Learn more at rbc.com.

We are proud to support a broad range of community initiatives through donations, community investments and employee volunteer activities. See how at rbc.com/community-social-impact.

Caution Regarding Forward-Looking Statements

This press release contains forward-looking statements within the meaning of certain securities laws, including the "safe harbour" provisions of the United States Private Securities Litigation Reform Act of 1995 and any applicable Canadian securities legislation, with respect to RBC's and CACEIS' financial performance, beliefs, plans and expectations. Forward-looking statements in this press release may include, but are not limited to, statements with respect to plans for the combined operations of CACEIS and RBC Investor Services, the anticipated timing of CACEIS' acquisition of the business of the UK branch of RBC Investor Services Trust and RBC Investor Services business in Jersey, the financial, operational and capital impacts of the transaction, our strategies or future actions, and our objectives and commitments. The forward-looking information contained in this press release is presented for the purpose of assisting the holders of our securities and financial analysts in understanding the transaction and may not be appropriate for other purposes. Forward looking statements are typically identified by words such as "believe", "expect", "foresee", "forecast", "anticipate", "intend", "estimate", "goal", "commit", "target", "objective", "plan" and "project" and similar expressions of future or conditional verbs such as "will", "may", "might", "should", "could" or "would".

By their very nature, forward-looking statements require us to make assumptions and are subject to inherent risks and uncertainties, which give rise to the possibility that our predictions, forecasts, projections, expectations or conclusions will not prove to be accurate, that our assumptions may not be correct and that our actual results may differ materially from such predictions, forecasts, projections, expectations or conclusions.

We caution readers not to place undue reliance on these statements as a number of risk factors could cause our actual results to differ materially from the expectations expressed in such forward-looking statements. These factors  many of which are beyond our control and the effects of which can be difficult to predict  include, but are not limited to: the possibility that the anticipated benefits from the transaction, such as delivering scale and covering the entire value chain, are not realized in the time frame anticipated or at all as a result of changes in general economic and market conditions, interest and exchange rates, monetary policy, laws and regulations (including changes to capital requirements) and their enforcement, and the degree of competition in the geographic and business areas in which RBC Investor Services and CACEIS currently operate; the risk that any announcements relating to the combination could have adverse effects on the market price of the common stock of RBC; the possibility that the business of RBC Investor Services and CACEIS may not perform as expected or in a manner consistent with historical performance; the ability to promptly and effectively integrate RBC Investor Services; our ability to achieve our capital targets; our ability to cross-sell more products to customers; reputational risks and the reaction of RBC Investor Services' customers and employees to the transaction; diversion of management time on integration-related issues; increased exposure to exchange rate fluctuations; material adverse changes in economic and industry conditions; general competitive, economic, political and market conditions; and other risks discussed in the risk sections of RBC's 2022 Annual Report and the Risk management section of RBC's Q2 2023 Report to Shareholders, all of which outline certain key factors and risks that may affect our future results and our ability to anticipate and effectively manage risks arising from all of the foregoing factors.

We caution that the foregoing list of risk factors is not exhaustive and other factors could also adversely affect our results. When relying on our forward-looking statements to make decisions with respect to us, investors and others should carefully consider the foregoing factors and other uncertainties and potential events. Material economic assumptions underlying the forward-looking statements contained in this press release are set out in the Economic, market and regulatory review and outlook section and for each business segment under the Strategic priorities and Outlook sections in RBC's 2022 Annual Report, as updated by the Economic, market and regulatory review and outlook section of RBC's Q2 2023 Report to Shareholders.

Any forward-looking statements contained in this document represent the views of RBC and CACEIS only as of the date hereof. Except as required by law, neither RBC nor CACEIS undertakes to update any forward-looking statement, whether written or oral, that may be made from time to time by us or on our behalf.

CACEIS Investor Services Logo (CNW Group/RBC Investor & Treasury Services)

SOURCE RBC Investor & Treasury Services

Cision

View original content to download multimedia: http://www.newswire.ca/en/releases/archive/July2023/03/c5393.html
Key Insights

Using the 2 Stage Free Cash Flow to Equity, Baby Bunting Group fair value estimate is AU$1.34

Current share price of AU$1.38 suggests Baby Bunting Group is potentially trading close to its fair value

Our fair value estimate is 28% lower than Baby Bunting Group's analyst price target of AU$1.87

Today we'll do a simple run through of a valuation method used to estimate the attractiveness of Baby Bunting Group Limited (ASX:BBN) as an investment opportunity by projecting its future cash flows and then discounting them to today's value. We will take advantage of the Discounted Cash Flow (DCF) model for this purpose. Models like these may appear beyond the comprehension of a lay person, but they're fairly easy to follow.

We would caution that there are many ways of valuing a company and, like the DCF, each technique has advantages and disadvantages in certain scenarios. Anyone interested in learning a bit more about intrinsic value should have a read of the Simply Wall St analysis model.

See our latest analysis for Baby Bunting Group

The Calculation

We're using the 2-stage growth model, which simply means we take in account two stages of company's growth. In the initial period the company may have a higher growth rate and the second stage is usually assumed to have a stable growth rate. In the first stage we need to estimate the cash flows to the business over the next ten years. Where possible we use analyst estimates, but when these aren't available we extrapolate the previous free cash flow (FCF) from the last estimate or reported value. We assume companies with shrinking free cash flow will slow their rate of shrinkage, and that companies with growing free cash flow will see their growth rate slow, over this period. We do this to reflect that growth tends to slow more in the early years than it does in later years.

A DCF is all about the idea that a dollar in the future is less valuable than a dollar today, and so the sum of these future cash flows is then discounted to today's value:

10-year free cash flow (FCF) estimate

2024 2025 2026 2027 2028 2029 2030 2031 2032 2033 Levered FCF (A$, Millions) AU$16.0m AU$22.0m AU$19.6m AU$18.2m AU$17.4m AU$17.0m AU$16.8m AU$16.8m AU$16.8m AU$17.0m Growth Rate Estimate Source Analyst x1 Analyst x1 Est @ -10.94% Est @ -7.07% Est @ -4.36% Est @ -2.47% Est @ -1.14% Est @ -0.21% Est @ 0.44% Est @ 0.90% Present Value (A$, Millions) Discounted @ 11% AU$14.5 AU$18.0 AU$14.5 AU$12.2 AU$10.5 AU$9.3 AU$8.3 AU$7.5 AU$6.8 AU$6.2

("Est" = FCF growth rate estimated by Simply Wall St)

Present Value of 10-year Cash Flow (PVCF) = AU$108m

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 2.0%. We discount the terminal cash flows to today's value at a cost of equity of 11%.

Terminal Value (TV)= FCF 2033  (1 + g)  (r  g) = AU$17m (1 + 2.0%)  (11% 2.0%) = AU$201m

Present Value of Terminal Value (PVTV)= TV / (1 + r)10= AU$201m ( 1 + 11%)10= AU$73m

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 AU$181m. To get the intrinsic value per share, we divide this by the total number of shares outstanding. Relative to the current share price of AU$1.4, the company appears around fair value at the time of writing. Remember though, that this is just an approximate valuation, and like any complex formula - garbage in, garbage out.

dcf

The Assumptions

Now the most important inputs to a discounted cash flow are the discount rate, and of course, the actual cash flows. If you don't agree with these result, have a go at the calculation yourself and play with the assumptions. The DCF also does not consider the possible cyclicality of an industry, or a company's future capital requirements, so it does not give a full picture of a company's potential performance. Given that we are looking at Baby Bunting Group 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 11%, which is based on a levered beta of 1.453. 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 Baby Bunting Group

Strength

Debt is not viewed as a risk.

Dividend is in the top 25% of dividend payers in the market.

Weakness

Earnings declined over the past year.

Opportunity

Annual earnings are forecast to grow faster than the Australian market.

Good value based on P/E ratio compared to estimated Fair P/E ratio.

Threat

Dividends are not covered by earnings.

Revenue is forecast to grow slower than 20% per year.

Moving On:

Whilst important, the DCF calculation ideally won't be the sole piece of analysis you scrutinize 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 Baby Bunting Group, we've put together three relevant items you should assess:

Risks: You should be aware of the 1 warning sign for Baby Bunting Group we've uncovered before considering an investment in the company. Future Earnings: How does BBN'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 Solid Businesses: Low debt, high returns on equity and good past performance are fundamental to a strong business. Why not explore our interactive list of stocks with solid business fundamentals to see if there are other companies you may not have considered!

PS. The Simply Wall St app conducts a discounted cash flow valuation for every stock on the ASX every day. If you want to find the calculation for other stocks 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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Key Insights

Using the 2 Stage Free Cash Flow to Equity, Techbond Group Berhad fair value estimate is RM0.41

Current share price of RM0.38 suggests Techbond Group Berhad is potentially trading close to its fair value

Techbond Group Berhad's peers are currently trading at a premium of 30% on average

In this article we are going to estimate the intrinsic value of Techbond Group Berhad (KLSE:TECHBND) by projecting its future cash flows and then discounting them to today's value. One way to achieve this is by employing the Discounted Cash Flow (DCF) model. Believe it or not, it's not too difficult to follow, as you'll see from our example!

We generally believe that a company's value is the present value of all of the cash it will generate in the future. However, a DCF is just one valuation metric among many, and it is not without flaws. If you want to learn more about discounted cash flow, the rationale behind this calculation can be read in detail in the Simply Wall St analysis model.

Check out our latest analysis for Techbond Group Berhad

Step By Step Through The Calculation

We use what is known as a 2-stage model, which simply means we have two different periods of growth rates for the company's cash flows. Generally the first stage is higher growth, and the second stage is a lower growth phase. To begin with, we have to get estimates of the next ten years of cash flows. Where possible we use analyst estimates, but when these aren't available we extrapolate the previous free cash flow (FCF) from the last estimate or reported value. We assume companies with shrinking free cash flow will slow their rate of shrinkage, and that companies with growing free cash flow will see their growth rate slow, over this period. We do this to reflect that growth tends to slow more in the early years than it does in later years.

Generally we assume that a dollar today is more valuable than a dollar in the future, so we discount the value of these future cash flows to their estimated value in today's dollars:

10-year free cash flow (FCF) estimate

2024 2025 2026 2027 2028 2029 2030 2031 2032 2033 Levered FCF (MYR, Millions) RM8.50m RM17.6m RM18.6m RM19.5m RM20.4m RM21.3m RM22.1m RM23.0m RM23.9m RM24.8m Growth Rate Estimate Source Analyst x1 Analyst x1 Est @ 5.59% Est @ 4.99% Est @ 4.56% Est @ 4.26% Est @ 4.06% Est @ 3.91% Est @ 3.81% Est @ 3.74% Present Value (MYR, Millions) Discounted @ 11% RM7.6 RM14.2 RM13.4 RM12.6 RM11.9 RM11.1 RM10.4 RM9.7 RM9.0 RM8.4

("Est" = FCF growth rate estimated by Simply Wall St)

Present Value of 10-year Cash Flow (PVCF) = RM108m

The second stage is also known as Terminal Value, this is the business's cash flow after 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 11%.

Terminal Value (TV)= FCF 2033  (1 + g)  (r  g) = RM25m (1 + 3.6%)  (11% 3.6%) = RM326m

Present Value of Terminal Value (PVTV)= TV / (1 + r)10= RM326m ( 1 + 11%)10= RM110m

The total value, or equity value, is then the sum of the present value of the future cash flows, which in this case is RM219m. In the final step we divide the equity value by the number of shares outstanding. Compared to the current share price of RM0.4, the company appears about fair value at a 9.2% discount to where the stock price trades currently. The assumptions in any calculation have a big impact on the valuation, so it is better to view this as a rough estimate, not precise down to the last cent.

dcf

Important Assumptions

Now the most important inputs to a discounted cash flow are the discount rate, and of course, the actual cash flows. 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 Techbond Group 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 11%, which is based on a levered beta of 0.983. 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 Techbond Group Berhad

Strength

Earnings growth over the past year exceeded the industry.

Debt is not viewed as a risk.

Dividends are covered by earnings and cash flows.

Weakness

Dividend is low compared to the top 25% of dividend payers in the Chemicals market.

Opportunity

Annual earnings are forecast to grow faster than the Malaysian market.

Good value based on P/E ratio and estimated fair value.

Threat

No apparent threats visible for TECHBND.

Next Steps:

Valuation is only one side of the coin in terms of building your investment thesis, and it 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. Rather it should be seen as a guide to "what assumptions need to be true for this stock to be under/overvalued?" For instance, if the terminal value growth rate is adjusted slightly, it can dramatically alter the overall result. For Techbond Group Berhad, there are three further items you should explore:

Risks: For example, we've discovered 1 warning sign for Techbond Group Berhad that you should be aware of before investing here. Future Earnings: How does TECHBND'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 Solid Businesses: Low debt, high returns on equity and good past performance are fundamental to a strong business. Why not explore our interactive list of stocks with solid business fundamentals to see if there are other companies you may not have considered!

PS. The Simply Wall St app conducts a discounted cash flow valuation for every stock on the KLSE every day. If you want to find the calculation for other stocks 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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Chase Buchanan

Global wealth advisory firm, Chase Buchanan, has published a complimentary downloadable guide about the impacts of the recent removal of the UK Lifetime Allowance (LTA)

Chase Buchanan LTA Specialist, Malcolm McDowell, Publishes Advisory Guide in Wake of Changing UK Legislation

Global wealth advisory firm, Chase Buchanan, has published a complimentary downloadable guide about the impacts of the recent removal of the UK Lifetime Allowance (LTA)

Paphos, Cyprus, July 03, 2023 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) --

Chase Buchanan LTA Specialist, Malcolm McDowell, Publishes Advisory Guide in Wake of Changing UK Legislation



Chase Buchanan LTA Specialist, Malcolm McDowell, Publishes Advisory Guide in Wake of Changing UK Legislation





The global wealth advisory firm, Chase Buchanan Wealth Management, has published a complimentary downloadable guide to provide insights and important information about the impacts of the recent removal of the UK Lifetime Allowance (LTA), a threshold previously applied to pension products, above which holders would attract additional taxation.

In the March budget, Chancellor Hunt announced a series of pension tax reforms, including the immediate removal of the LTA and higher annual pension contribution allowances, primarily to address shortages in the medical profession and to introduce pension simplicity to avoid higher earners from ceasing pension contributions to avoid triggering LTA tax charges.

Malcolm McDowell, pensions specialist and Chase Buchanan's LTA lead, advises that this apparently beneficial reform adds significant complexity to tax planning and should not be taken as an indication that those with higher pension values now need to take no further action to protect their retirement wealth.

Changes to UK Pension Tax Rules Introduced in the 2023 Spring Budget

The main changes included within the new pension tax rules are as follows:

The LTA, the maximum cumulative value pension holders can save over their lifetime, over which taxation applies and previously set at 1.073 million, has been removed.

Annual pension allowances, which indicate the maximum contributions an individual can make to their pension savings without an additional tax liability, have increased from 40,000 to 60,000.

Adjusted income levels, which taper the annual pension allowances available to higher earners, have risen from 240,000 to 260,000.

Additional reforms apply to the annual money purchase allowance, or MPAA, which states the maximum value of pension savings a fund owner can deposit who has previously used pension freedoms to access their pension, again without attracting a tax charge.

Importantly, these adjustments do not affect the restrictions placed on tax-free lump sum withdrawals. While the LTA is not now in force, pension drawdowns remain capped at 25% of the previous LTA, so an individual cannot draw more than 268,275, regardless of the fund value, without an additional tax liability.

Reportedly, this cap has been retained to avoid allowing individuals to draw 25% of an unlimited fund value on retirement - although those with LTA protection features within their pension products may keep this right.

The effective tax rate applied to individuals who exceed these limits and thresholds may be complex; for example, those who exceed the annual allowance, or their adjusted allowance following tapering provisions, is based on their marginal income tax rate and applied to the excess.

How LTA Reforms Affect Pension Risk Profiles

Malcolm explains that, although the LTA removal may initially seem positive, it is essential that pension holders, advisers, and those with retirement funds of 800,000 or above consider their plans carefully, with multiple possible caveats.

He adds: An early perspective on the announcement that no individual would incur a tax charge based on the LTA from April 2023 is positive. Expanding on pension freedoms introduced in 2015 should mean more people can contribute their hard-earned savings to tax-efficient pension schemes, with the assurance that their retirement wealth will not be subject to heavy tax liabilities.

However, multiple factors require consideration, from the likelihood that a change of government at the next general election would see the LTA reinstated to the possibility of pension wealth being netted into the scope of inheritance taxation in future reforms.

Those with higher-value pensions and with the income to benefit from the increased annual allowance may also find that tapered relief mitigates the real-world value of the higher allowance and should be mindful that, regardless of whether the LTA is reinstated, their tax-free lump sum access will continue to be limited as long as any fund is held within a scheme exposed to UK taxation.

Our newly published guide explains these elements in greater detail, laying out some of the risks of non-action and demonstrating why swift, decisive decision-making may be crucial to take full advantage of current tax treatments, which seem likely to be available for a limited window of opportunity.

Chase Buchanans 2023 Guide to the Revised UK Lifetime Allowance and Pension Taxation Reforms is available to download now, free of charge, and from any location.

Anticipated Adjustments to UK Pension Tax Legislation

Currently, the LTA is excluded in pension tax computations, but changes announced in the Spring Budget have yet to be formalised into tax legislation. When the government introduces a tax reform, it can instruct HMRC to update its policies immediately, but this does not ratify the change or integrate it into official tax law.

Those changes around the LTA, annual allowances and lump sum drawdown taxation will need to be passed through a Finance Bill, not expected to be formalised or confirmed for some months to come.

Technical changes are possible when any tax reform is being applied in practice but has yet to be included as a verified update to tax legislation, and the abolishment of the LTA will not be confirmed until April 2024.

Removing the LTA is one of several measures announced as part of the Spring Budget 2023 but that were not incorporated into the Spring Finance Bill 2023, and the government has stated that it intends to publish new announcements related to tax administration later in the year, which it does not expect to require legislation.

The Value of Financial Guidance in Long-Term Pension Planning

Specialist financial assistance has always been an important aspect of pension planning, since the vast majority of people rely on their retirement savings to cover their living costs and provide for a comfortable retirement over an increasing number of years.

The LTA, since being introduced in 2006, adds a layer of complexity for pension holders who often select strategies such as transferring a pension fund to an alternative jurisdiction or investment scheme before hitting the applicable limit or to protect themselves from future tax exposure and changes to UK tax treatments as their pension fund grows.

With these recent reforms, all pension holders may benefit from advice tailored to their pension assets and overall wealth portfolio, with independent advice mandatory in many circumstances as dictated by the Financial Conduct Authority (FCA).

Read more about Chase Buchanan - Why The Removal Of The UK Pension Lifetime Allowance May Be More Complex Than Appears

About Malcolm McDowell

Malcolm McDowell is an authority in pensions-related financial planning and provides comprehensive support to his clients as a portfolio manager with a robust range of accreditations, certifications and qualifications, including CySEC Advanced credentials. Malcolm has launched the new LTA advisory service and free downloadable lifetime allowance guide for pension savers who potentially benefit the most from tactical pension planning to maximise the LTA limit removal.

About Chase Buchanan Private Wealth Management

Chase Buchanan is a highly regulated wealth management company who specialises in providing global finance solutions for those with a global lifestyle. We are global financial advisers, supporting expatriates around the world from our regulated European headquarters, and local offices across Belgium, Canada, Canary Islands, Cyprus, Malta, Portugal, Spain, UK and the USA.

Chase Buchanan Ltd is authorised and regulated by the Cyprus Securities and Exchange Commission with CIF Licence 287/15.

Media Contact:

Malcolm McDowell

Chase Buchanan Ltd

+44 (0) 1252852045









***

Source Company - https://chasebuchanan.com/

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(Bloomberg) -- Chinese electric-car juggernaut BYD Co. is deploying an engineering team as part of a project to start processing lithium in Chile, home to the worlds biggest reserves of the metal thats a key component in EV batteries.

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The move is part of plans by BYD, already the worlds second-largest battery maker, to build a $290 million lithium cathode factory in northern Chile. Most of the companys processing has been concentrated in China, so moving into the South American country will allow it more strategic access to the lithium reserves.

BYD in April was granted access to preferential prices for lithium carbonate in the country. The Chilean government awarded the special status specifically because of the plans to build the plant, which is set to begin making lithium iron phosphate for cathodes by the end of 2025.

Now we are sending the engineering team to do the feasibility study and to choose the site, Executive Vice President Stella Li said in an interview from Bloombergs offices in Sao Paulo.

Makers of EVs and rechargeable batteries are reaping the benefits of surging demand in the shift away from fossil fuels. But theyre also facing tight markets for raw materials. In a bid to lock in future supplies, theyve started to fund more mining and processing projects.

In Chile, BYD is completing final contracts for its project at a time when the countrys government is adopting a new model for lithium extraction that will give the state a stake in new endeavors. At the same time, the government is stepping up efforts to encourage downstream investments.

Read More: Worlds Hottest EV Maker Sees Bidens Climate Law as a Barrier

BYD is willing to work with Chilean authorities, including offering its technology to the government, Li said.

Thanks to being granted the status of specialized lithium producer, BYD will be able to access preferential prices for 11,244 metric tons a year of battery-grade lithium carbonate until 2030 from Chiles SQM, the worlds No. 2 lithium producer.

--With assistance from Vanessa Dezem.

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(Bloomberg) -- Mainland China remained the worlds busiest spot for initial public offerings during the first half of the year, but slowing economic growth is expected to increasingly drag on domestic activity.

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Proceeds raised in Shanghai, Shenzhen and Beijing totaled $35 billion, about half of all what was amassed globally in the six months through June. While China kept the top position for the most listings with 176 newcomers, the amount priced was 14% lower than a year earlier, and activity has been slowing month-by-month.

The demand thats kept mostly Chinese bankers busy during the past two years is seen cooling as companies take a wait-and-see stance for potential measures to drive the economy. In Hong Kong, a traditional venue for Chinese firms seeking exposure to a wider pool of investors, the prospects of a market revival mostly relies on spin offs from tech giants and listings from artificial intelligence or automotive startups.

For offerings by Chinese firms to pick up, overall market sentiment needs to improve. Investors view on the Chinese economic outlook is also a pre-condition, said Peihao Huang, co-head for Asia ex-Japan ECM at JPMorgan Chase and Co. in Hong Kong. We are relatively optimistic regarding the second half of the year, even with the reopening momentum seeming to have slowed. Some good news will boost confidence and we hope to see some of that in the next few months.

The year started on a strong note for both mainland and Hong Kong-based Chinese issuers amid upbeat sentiment as the country reopened after ending its Covid Zero policy. March saw the highest amount raised by IPOs domestically this year, with proceeds almost double those amassed in February.

During the first quarter, authorities ended reviews of IPO and merger policies, lifting limits on the size or price of IPOs. The changes, widely flagged before being announced, were well-received. Chinas securities regulator also cleared rules for companies seeking listings abroad, particularly for those that deal with data deemed as sensitive.

Still, momentum in the countrys economy failed to build over the second quarter, hurting domestic and offshore fundraising plans. Proceeds raised in the onshore market dropped each month between March and June, Bloomberg-compiled data show. The average size for IPOs in mainland China so far this year stands at $183 million, versus $230 million in the first six months of 2022. In Hong Kong, there hasnt been any listing larger than $700 million this year.

As China-related offerings are expected to slow, listings from other regions could see a good opportunity to tap investors looking to allocate in Asia, said Selina Cheung, co-head of Asia equity capital markets at UBS AG in Hong Kong. She highlighted markets such as Japan, South Korea, Southeast Asia and India as being active in upcoming months.

A widely expected offering in mainland China by Syngenta Group during the second half could help the country keep its ranking among top IPO venues in 2023 amid the slower activity. The firm last month got Shanghai stock exchange approval for a 65 billion yuan ($8.96 million) listing thats been in the works since 2019 and could potentially be one of the worlds largest this year.

In coming months, Chinese IPOs are going be divided between security sensitive and non-sensitive technologies, and anything thats been identified as strategic by the Chinese, said Drew Bernstein, co-chairman of Marcum Asia in New York, adding that most offerings will be onshore as getting approval to trade abroad will most likely be hard to get. Things like AI, semiconductors, maybe quantum computing, theyll probably have to IPO on the A-share market.

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FILE PHOTO: FILE PHOTO: FILE PHOTO: People enter a Cineworld cinema following the outbreak of the coronavirus disease (COVID-19) near Manchester

(Reuters) - Cineworld Group is looking at Eduardo Acuna, who runs the Americas operations of Mexico's Cinepolis, as a potential candidate to take the helm at the embattled British cinema chain operator when it emerges from bankruptcy proceedings, Sky News reported on Monday.

It is not clear whether Acuna was formally in the frame to take the job or how quickly Cineworld's new owners were seeking to make an appointment, the report said.

Cineworld declined to comment on the Sky News report, while Cinepolis did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

The Financial Times said in June that Cineworld CEO Mooky Greidinger as well as his top management team will be paid up to $35 million combined to leave the company after it emerges from Chapter 11 proceedings.

The cinema chain operator, which appointed former Pepsi executive Eric Foss as its new chairman last week, said it is filing for administration in Britain and suspend trading on the London Stock Exchange as part of a restructuring plan to reduce its massive debt.

Cineworld had its debt restructuring plan approved in the United States as well, which involves the release of about $4.53 billion of the group's debt, a rights offering to raise gross proceeds of $800 million and the provision of $1.46 billion in new debt financing.

(Reporting by Rishabh Jaiswal in Bengaluru; Editing by Shailesh Kuber)
Gov. Tate Reeves of Mississippi, which claims that its educational policies produced a miraculous gain in reading scores. (Rogelio V. Solis / Associated Press)

The term has been shooting around the education field and news reports lately with increasing frequency: "the Mississippi miracle."

The reference is to that benighted state's surprising success in improving reading scores for its fourth-graders through a focused program of literacy instruction for teachers and pupils alike. It's now 10 years old, an anniversary that may have inspired the most recent assessments.

Statistics show that Mississippi's children have gone from having almost the worst scores on the standardized national reading test for fourth-graders in 2013 to narrowly exceeding the national average in the most recent test, administered last year.

Perhaps unsurprisingly, health outcomes in Mississippi are abysmal for both women and children.

Justices Breyer, Kagan and Sotomayor point to why Mississippi's kids can't read

The Associated Press was quick to use the M-word in describing Mississippi's achievement in a May 17 article.

The turnaround there (and smaller gains in Louisiana and Alabama, which enacted similar literacy programs) "has grabbed the attention of educators nationally, showing rapid progress is possible anywhere, even in areas that have struggled for decades with poverty and dismal literacy rates."

Education writers and the New York Times jumped on the bandwagon. ("Mississippi Is Offering Lessons for America on Education," was the latter's headline.)

As an old journalism adage has it, the story is "interesting, if true."

A close examination of the numbers suggests that it's not true. Bob Somerby and Kevin Drum, two of the most adept myth busters in the blogosphere, have done yeomen's work deconstructing the statistics. Their conclusion is that Mississippi's program isn't nearly as successful as its fans assert and may not have produced any improvement at all in fourth-grade reading scores. The apparent gains may be a statistical illusion.

There is a lesson here, however. It's not about how to effectively teach kids to read, but how difficult it is to teach journalists how to scrutinize statistical claims.

We'll get to the specifics in a moment. First, it's important to consider the social and political landscape in Mississippi.

Read more: Column: If Mississippi is a 'laboratory of democracy,' we're in trouble

Given Mississippi's record on social issues, anyone claiming that its education policies have produced a miracle should check their skepticism meter for a possible malfunction. The state hasn't been a black hole only in educational achievement but in many other respects.

It should not be overlooked that the 2022 case the Supreme Court's right-wing majority used to overturn five decades of progress in women's reproductive healthcare rights, Dobbs vs. Jackson Women's Health Organization, originated as a challenge to Mississippi's draconian antiabortion law.

As I observed when the court handed down the Dobbs decision, justices Elena Kagan, Sonia Sotomayor and Stephen G. Breyer were scathing about the healthcare context of abortion bans in Mississippi and elsewhere. States with the most restrictive abortion policies also continue to invest the least in womens and childrens health, they wrote in their dissent.

More specifically, they draped Mississippi with the mantle of shame. Perhaps unsurprisingly, they noted, health outcomes in Mississippi are abysmal for both women and children. The states infant mortality rate is the highest in the country, they wrote, amid some of the highest rates for preterm birth, low birthweight, cesarean section, and maternal death.

Mississippi (designated "MS" in this chart) has the worst healthcare system of any state in the nation. Should we trust its statistics on reading scores? (Commonwealth Fund)

After Dobbs, Mississippi's Republican governor, Tate Reeves, promised to do right by his state's mothers and children. The next phase of the pro-life movement is focusing on helping those moms that maybe have an unexpected and unwanted pregnancy," he said, "making sure that those babies, once born, have a productive life.

He was plainly blowing smoke. As the Dobbs dissent observed, Mississippi has strict eligibility requirements for Medicaid and nutrition assistance, leaving many women and families without basic medical care or enough food.

In fact, Mississippi's rules are among the strictest in the country: As an amicus brief filed in the Dobbs case pointed out, families of three lost their eligibility for Mississippi Medicaid in 2021 if their annual income exceeded $5,490.

Mississippi is one of 10 states that never implemented Medicaid expansion under the Affordable Care Act (all under the thumb of Republican legislatures or governors, or both). In his State of the State speech in February, Reeves ascribed pressure to expand Medicaid to the "liberal media." Actually, the pressure was coming from the state's hospitals, which have been warning of "catastrophic" hospital closings, especially in rural areas, under Reeves' policy.

Read more: The shame of Mississippi, where racism and stupidity killed Obamacare

Last year, Reeves returned $130 million to the federal government that had been earmarked for temporary rental assistance, calling the program a socialist experiment.

Returning to the reading issue, Mississippi implemented what appeared to be an aggressive attack on its literacy shortcomings in 2013. Its Literacy-Based Promotion Act (LBPA) required that pupils who failed to pass a reading test at the end of their third-grade year be held back.

While repeating third grade, they were to receive intensified instruction. Funds were appropriated for "summer reading camps" for poorly performing kids. New teachers were required to show proficiency in literacy education before receiving their certifications. The educational system was reoriented toward the "science of reading." That includes phonics, a method that teaches reading by breaking words up into sound bites of one letter or more, and showing students how to link them together into words.

The raw NAEP figures showed Mississippi's fourth-graders narrowly besting the national figures overall in the 2022 test, as Somerby correctly noted. Even when broken down by subgrouping the state's kids outscored their national peers  white Mississippians beat the national average for white kids, Black kids beat the national average for Black kids, Hispanic kids beat all Hispanic kids, and lower-income kids of all races outscored lower-income kids nationwide.

Truly a miracle.

However...

Some statistical readings should have raised questions among the miracle claimants. One is that Mississippi's Black and Hispanic fourth-graders still scored much lower than white children  and the gap had not changed over the 10 years of the new regime.

In fact, it widened to 28 percentage points in 2022 from 25 points in 2013. The same thing happened with Hispanic pupils, who fell short of white kids' achievement by 22 points in 2022 versus 21 in 2013.

Fourth-grade reading scores in Mississippi seemed to catch up with national averages in 2022. Or did they? (National Assessment of Educational Progress)

Moreover, whatever gains had shown up in Mississippi's fourth-grade scores had vanished by the eighth grade, when all students notched exactly the same scores in 2022 as they had in 2013. A teaching program whose gains evaporate over a four-year span doesn't much warrant the label "miracle."

What's the real story? Drum and Somerby focused on the so-called "third-grade gate" implemented by the literacy program  the requirement that third-grade underachievers repeat third grade. In Mississippi, almost 10% of third-graders have been getting held back, a higher proportion than in any other state. (Some may have been held back more than once.)

The statistical result of this policy should be obvious. If you throw the lowest-ranking 10% out of a statistical pool, the remaining pool inevitably looks better. Drum went so far as to add those dropped pupils back into the calculation. He found that the gains from 2013 to 2022 completely disappeared. "In other words," he remarked, "the 2013 reforms had all but no effect."

It's proper to note that educators have been casting a questioning eye on Mississippi's results ever since the state implemented its literacy program. Some noticed the potential for skewing the statistics through the third-grade gate early on.

Black pupils (light blue line) and Hispanic pupils (medium blue) seemed to be catching up to whites (dark blue) in fourth-grade reading by 2019, but they've fallen further behind since then. (NAEP)

It's also the case that in education, as in many other professional fields, theoretical fashions come and go. It wasn't very long ago that studies were showing that whole-language instruction  the antithesis of phonics  was associated with improvements in reading scores.

The debate about how to teach reading has been going on in this country for at least seven decades, since the publication of Rudolf Flesch's 1955 bestseller "Why Johnny Can't Read." (Flesch was a phonics advocate.)

No one has come up with a foolproof solution, but the problem may be the focus on instructional technique. The factors that seem to correlate most closely with reading skills are all found elsewhere. Education expert Paul L. Thomas has identified the key factors as "food and work security, healthcare, [and] class size." Those get neglected in the literacy debate, he observed, "even though these conditions combined would dwarf any measurable impact of teacher quality or program/standards quality." (Emphasis his.)

Those conditions are utterly ignored by Mississippi. Its minimum wage of $7.25 an hour, shared with 19 other states, is the lowest in the nation. It's a "right to work" state, which discourages union organizing that might enable workers to bargain for better pay and job security. Its healthcare system is the worst in the country.

A state with the nation's "highest rates for preterm birth, low birthweight, caesarean section, and maternal death," as the Dobbs dissenters outlined, imposes almost insurmountable obstacles in the way of educational attainment for its children.

As long as Mississippi's social and economic conditions, especially for Black and Latino residents, remain mired just this side of medieval, its isolated effort to improve reading scores will be doomed to failure, and its statistical gains will look not much better than window-dressing. Journalists, take note.

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This story originally appeared in Los Angeles Times.
(Bloomberg) -- A shakeup at Chinas central bank has poured cold water on speculation that the nation may be about to loosen a ban on digital-asset trading.

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Industry executives including Circle Internet Financial Ltd. Chief Executive Jeremy Allaire have seized on Beijings quiet backing of Hong Kongs push to become a crypto hub to argue that the mainland may reverse its policy. They got a reminder about the risks of such extrapolations when Pan Gongsheng was named the top Communist Party official at the Peoples Bank of China.

The move potentially puts Pan in the running for PBOC governor and was viewed as a signal of policy continuity at the institution, which in 2021 declared all crypto-related transactions illegal. The appointment Saturday also surfaced some historic but unusually colorful comments for a Chinese bureaucrat, which Pan made in the midst of an earlier clampdown on crypto.

Read more: Xis Central Bank Shakeup Prioritizes Continuity Over Change

If you sit by the river and watch, one day the corpse of Bitcoin will float in front of you, he said at an event in 2017, citing an analysis by Kedge Business School professor Eric Pichet, local media reported. Pan back then also defended regulatory action against crypto and professed to being a little scared to contemplate what would have happened if China hadnt curbed digital assets.

The Peoples Bank of China didnt immediately respond to a request for comment about Pans views on crypto and the outlook for Chinas digital-asset ban.

Based on my knowledge, no PBOC governor would support Bitcoin, said David Qu, China economist at Bloomberg Economics, who has eight years experience of working at the central bank. What happens in Hong Kong is irrelevant, as the China mainland usually views Hong Kong as an overseas market.

Senior officials outside the central bank are also critical of Bitcoin and the government is instead focused on developing the digital yuan, Qu added.

Crypto Narratives

Crypto is notorious for building up narratives that skeptics reject as overblown  a tension has been evident in projections for both Hong Kong and China.

Industry mogul Justin Sun, an adviser at the Huobi digital-asset exchange, has suggested Hong Kongs pro-crypto pivot presages an easing of Chinas ban. Cameron Winklevoss, co-founder of the Gemini platform, earlier this year said his working thesis is the next bull run is going to start in the East.

Changpeng CZ Zhao, founder of the biggest crypto exchange Binance, in a May tweet flagged the interesting timing of a white paper related to digital assets that emerged in Beijing a little before Hong Kongs new crypto regime went live on June 1.

Crypto entrepreneurs like Winklevoss and Zhao have been hit by aggressive US curbs in the wake of last years digital-asset rout and bankruptcies such as the FTX exchange. The US position contrasts with a shift toward friendlier regimes in jurisdictions including Hong Kong, Dubai and parts of Europe.

With the stance shift happening in so many countries, China is unlikely to stay insusceptible  it will gradually come to accept crypto, said Vanessa Cao, founder of venture-capital firm BTX Capital.

Beijings Concerns

Beijing clamped down on crypto over concerns about money laundering, the environmental impact of Bitcoin mining and currency outflows. Pan is currently the head of the State Administration of Foreign Exchange, the agency that oversees foreign-exchange rules, as well as a PBOC deputy governor.

While there are signs that some of Chinas 1.4 billion people flout the digital-asset prohibition as they hunt for alternatives to struggling investments like property and stocks, mainland crypto activity is far lower than at earlier peaks.

Its typical for Chinese officials to have an anti-Bitcoin stance, said Adrian Lai, founder and managing partner of Newman Capital, which runs a $50 million Web3 fund in Hong Kong. Mainland China isnt going to have an easing of the crypto ban for now and the near future.

Bitcoin traded at $31,140 as of 6:55 a.m. in Singapore on Tuesday. The largest digital asset is up 88% in 2023 but is well off its 2021 peak of nearly $69,000.

--With assistance from Yujing Liu and Fran Wang.

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Venture capital investments in cryptocurrency companies have plummeted over 70% over the past 365 days, according to information published by RootData, a crypto data provider. During the month of June 2022, the digital asset space received $1.81 billion in 149 rounds, whereas this year, only 83 projects registered $520 millionthe lowest funded month to date.

The RootData numbers show a clear downtrend for VCs interested in the digital asset space, despite several in-between months that managed increases. September 2022 was the highest on record, for example, with $1.85 billion in funding, investing in a second-best 138 rounds. And June last year had the most recipients, with 149 rounds.

Crypto fundraising trends. Source: RootData

According to the data platform, the infrastructure category leads the way, with $213 million in funding last month for 26 projects. This still represents a nearly 50% drop from the previous month, in which 28 projects received $410 million.

Gensyn AI, a UK based startup was the categorys winner, with a whopping $43 million in a Series A round led by a16z crypto.

Institutional Traders Shifting Attention from Blockchain to AI: JP Morgan

CeFi, or centralized financewhich features companies like OPNX and Chilizis the second most funded category, receiving $101 million, generating nearly 20% of all financing. Games slid in at third, with $62 million, more than half of which flowed into Mythical Games, which raised $37 million in its Series C1. DeFi and NFTs round off the list of categories, in that order.

Over the past year, Ethereum had 1,826 projects funded, followed from afar by Polygon (MATIC), with 1,076 funding rounds. Separated by location, the United States received 34% of fundingthe most by any single nation on their listalthough that appears ripe for a change.

The platform names Coinbase Ventures as the most active VC, having participated in 71 rounds this past year, followed by Hashkey Capital and Shima Capital, funding 54 and 49 projects respectively.

The former high flying crypto asset class has taken a back seat to other investmentsnamely artificial intelligence.

In a previous interview with Decrypt, Mysten Labs co-founder and CEO Evan Cheng said this shift is due to the ability of AI products and applications to cater to a broader audience while the crypto industry continues to focus on itself.

Cheng considers AI, however, to be complementary with Web3Justin Suns newly launched $100 million AI development fund is one such example.

Diminished interest from venture capitalists in the crypto asset space could be due to a variety of other reasons as well. The dismal actions by companies such as FTX and Terra might be to blame, along with the banking turmoil that took down all four of the crypto friendly banks. Adding to the mix is the recent regulatory clampdown occurring in the United States, the country that has nonetheless led the way for crypto investments.
BANGKOK, July 03, 2023--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Dataxet Limited (dataxet:infoquest) underscored its position as the leading provider of 360-degree media intelligence services by attending the Marketing Insight & Technology Conference as an exhibitor. The Marketing Insight & Technology Conference is part of Creative Talk Conference 2023 (CTC2023) which was held at the Bangkok International Trade & Exhibition Centre (BITEC), Bangkok on June 22-24, 2023.

At the event, Dataxet showcased the MarTech platforms built to enhance efficiency of planning public relations and marketing strategies in the digital era. "NCX" is a comprehensive, 360-degree media monitoring service that aggregates news and content from online, mainstream media, and social media. "DXT360" is a powerful social listening and insight platform, allowing users to gain valuable insight into new and popular business trends on social media, which will help create actionable business plans. Lastly, "EVO" is a framework designed to elevate the power and impact of brand communication.

Moreover, Dataxet is fully prepared to provide assistance and convenience to businesses interested in tapping into the market domestically and internationally. This is achieved through the press release distribution service to target media channels, both locally and internationally, as well professional content production tailored for the business's promotional channels.

"We know how important media data and MarTech platforms are in helping businesses in Thailand improve the efficiency of their marketing strategies, PR campaigns and organizational communications. We have offered our clients different media intelligence tools to support their marketing and corporate communication plans whether theyre meant for strategic management, brand building, or communication with target audience," said David Liu, Founder & CEO of Dataxet.

"Dataxet is fully capable of catering to the needs of the Thai market with experienced local professionals. We apply our world-class technology and knowledge, which have been implemented in SE Asia, and tailor them to the specific needs of clients in Thailand," Liu added.

About Dataxet Limited

Dataxet Limited (dataxet:infoquest), formerly known as InfoQuest Limited, is a leading media intelligence and news agency in Thailand. It is a part of Dataxet Pte Ltd. (Dataxet), the fastest growing media intelligence group in Southeast Asia with its headquarters in Singapore and subsidiaries in Malaysia, Indonesia and Thailand.

dataxet:infoquest offers robust media intelligence platforms with comprehensive coverage of social, online and mainstream media news, content, trends and issues. The EVO framework turns platform data into high value audience insights and actionable communication strategies. The synergy between Dataxets global capabilities and dataxet:infoquests local expertise provides clients with exceptional service and support that helps them achieve their business goals.

Thailand website: www.dataxet.co

Group website: www.dataxet.com

View source version on businesswire.com: https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20230702163816/en/

Contacts

Dataxet Limited (dataxet:infoquest), marketing@infoquest.co.th
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. We regret to report that long term Verizon Communications Inc. (NYSE:VZ) shareholders have had that experience, with the share price dropping 42% in three years, versus a market return of about 39%. And more recent buyers are having a tough time too, with a drop of 36% in the last year. Furthermore, it's down 16% in about a quarter. That's not much fun for holders.

Since Verizon Communications has shed US$11b from its value in the past 7 days, let's see if the longer term decline has been driven by the business' economics.

Check out our latest analysis for Verizon Communications

While markets are a powerful pricing mechanism, share prices reflect investor sentiment, not just underlying business performance. 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.

Although the share price is down over three years, Verizon Communications actually managed to grow EPS by 4.9% per year in that time. Given the share price reaction, one might suspect that EPS is not a good guide to the business performance during the period (perhaps due to a one-off loss or gain). Alternatively, growth expectations may have been unreasonable in the past.

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.

We note that the dividend seems healthy enough, so that probably doesn't explain the share price drop. Verizon Communications has maintained its top line over three years, so we doubt that has shareholders worried. So it might be worth looking at how revenue growth over time, in greater detail.

The graphic below depicts how earnings and revenue have changed over time (unveil 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. You can see what analysts are predicting for Verizon Communications in this interactive graph of future profit estimates.

What About Dividends?

As well as measuring the share price return, investors should also consider the total shareholder return (TSR). 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. In the case of Verizon Communications, it has a TSR of -32% for the last 3 years. That exceeds its share price return that we previously mentioned. And there's no prize for guessing that the dividend payments largely explain the divergence!

A Different Perspective

Verizon Communications shareholders are down 32% for the year (even including dividends), but the market itself is up 18%. 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 4% over the last half decade. Generally speaking long term share price weakness can be a bad sign, though contrarian investors might want to research the stock in hope of a turnaround. 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. Take risks, for example - Verizon Communications has 2 warning signs (and 1 which makes us a bit uncomfortable) we think you should know about.

Of course Verizon Communications may not be the best stock to buy. So you may wish to see this free collection of growth stocks.

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@simplywallst.com

Simply Wall St analyst Simply Wall St and Simply Wall St have no position in any of the companies mentioned. This article 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.

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Key Insights

Given the large stake in the stock by institutions, Element Fleet Management's stock price might be vulnerable to their trading decisions

49% of the business is held by the top 25 shareholders

Using data from analyst forecasts alongside ownership research, one can better assess the future performance of a company

To get a sense of who is truly in control of Element Fleet Management Corp. (TSE:EFN), 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 55% ownership. Put another way, the group faces the maximum upside potential (or downside risk).

Because institutional owners have a huge pool of resources and liquidity, their investing decisions tend to carry a great deal 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.

Let's take a closer look to see what the different types of shareholders can tell us about Element Fleet Management.

View our latest analysis for Element Fleet Management

What Does The Institutional Ownership Tell Us About Element Fleet Management?

Institutional investors commonly compare their own returns to the returns of a commonly followed index. So they generally do consider buying larger companies that are included in the relevant benchmark index.

As you can see, institutional investors have a fair amount of stake in Element Fleet Management. 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. If multiple institutions change their view on a stock at the same time, you could see the share price drop fast. It's therefore worth looking at Element Fleet Management's earnings history below. Of course, the future is what really matters.

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 Element Fleet Management. Massachusetts Financial Services Company is currently the largest shareholder, with 9.8% of shares outstanding. RBC Global Asset Management Inc. is the second largest shareholder owning 4.8% of common stock, and T. Rowe Price Group, Inc. holds about 3.9% of the company stock.

Our studies suggest that the top 25 shareholders collectively control less than half of the company's shares, meaning that the company's shares are widely disseminated and there is no dominant shareholder.

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 plenty of analysts covering the stock, so it might be worth seeing what they are forecasting, too.

Insider Ownership Of Element Fleet Management

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. Company management run the business, but the CEO will answer to the board, even if he or she is a member of it.

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.

Our most recent data indicates that insiders own less than 1% of Element Fleet Management Corp.. It is a pretty big company, so it would be possible for board members to own a meaningful interest in the company, without owning much of a proportional interest. In this case, they own around CA$19m worth of shares (at current prices). It is good to see board members owning shares, but it might be worth checking if those insiders have been buying.

General Public Ownership

With a 45% ownership, the general public, mostly comprising of individual investors, have some degree of sway over Element Fleet Management. 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:

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. Case in point: We've spotted 2 warning signs for Element Fleet Management you should be aware of, and 1 of them doesn't sit too well with us.

Ultimately the future is most important. You can access this free report on analyst forecasts for the company.

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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Key Insights

Computacenter's estimated fair value is UK22.31 based on 2 Stage Free Cash Flow to Equity

Computacenter's UK22.90 share price indicates it is trading at similar levels as its fair value estimate

Analyst price target for CCC is UK26.54, which is 19% above our fair value estimate

Today we will run through one way of estimating the intrinsic value of Computacenter plc (LON:CCC) by taking the forecast future cash flows of the company and discounting them back to today's value. We will use the Discounted Cash Flow (DCF) model on this occasion. There's really not all that much to it, even though it might appear quite complex.

We generally believe that a company's value is the present value of all of the cash it will generate in the future. However, a DCF is just one valuation metric among many, and it is not without flaws. Anyone interested in learning a bit more about intrinsic value should have a read of the Simply Wall St analysis model.

See our latest analysis for Computacenter

Step By Step Through The Calculation

We use what is known as a 2-stage model, which simply means we have two different periods of growth rates for the company's cash flows. Generally the first stage is higher growth, and the second stage is a lower growth phase. To begin with, we have to get estimates of the next ten years of cash flows. Where possible we use analyst estimates, but when these aren't available we extrapolate the previous free cash flow (FCF) from the last estimate or reported value. We assume companies with shrinking free cash flow will slow their rate of shrinkage, and that companies with growing free cash flow will see their growth rate slow, over this period. We do this to reflect that growth tends to slow more in the early years than it does in later years.

A DCF is all about the idea that a dollar in the future is less valuable than a dollar today, and so the sum of these future cash flows is then discounted to today's value:

10-year free cash flow (FCF) forecast

2024 2025 2026 2027 2028 2029 2030 2031 2032 2033 Levered FCF (, Millions) UK200.6m UK200.4m UK201.1m UK202.3m UK203.9m UK205.8m UK207.9m UK210.2m UK212.6m UK215.0m Growth Rate Estimate Source Analyst x4 Analyst x4 Est @ 0.33% Est @ 0.60% Est @ 0.79% Est @ 0.93% Est @ 1.02% Est @ 1.09% Est @ 1.13% Est @ 1.17% Present Value (, Millions) Discounted @ 8.9% UK184 UK169 UK156 UK144 UK133 UK123 UK114 UK106 UK98.5 UK91.4

("Est" = FCF growth rate estimated by Simply Wall St)

Present Value of 10-year Cash Flow (PVCF) = UK1.3b

The second stage is also known as Terminal Value, this is the business's cash flow after the first stage. For a number of reasons a very conservative growth rate is used that cannot exceed that of a country's GDP growth. In this case we have used the 5-year average of the 10-year government bond yield (1.2%) to estimate future growth. In the same way as with the 10-year 'growth' period, we discount future cash flows to today's value, using a cost of equity of 8.9%.

Terminal Value (TV)= FCF 2033  (1 + g)  (r  g) = UK215m (1 + 1.2%)  (8.9% 1.2%) = UK2.8b

Present Value of Terminal Value (PVTV)= TV / (1 + r)10= UK2.8b ( 1 + 8.9%)10= UK1.2b

The total value, or equity value, is then the sum of the present value of the future cash flows, which in this case is UK2.5b. To get the intrinsic value per share, we divide this by the total number of shares outstanding. Compared to the current share price of UK22.9, the company appears around fair value at the time of writing. Remember though, that this is just an approximate valuation, and like any complex formula - garbage in, garbage out.

dcf

The Assumptions

We would point out that the most important inputs to a discounted cash flow are the discount rate and of course the actual 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 Computacenter 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 8.9%, which is based on a levered beta of 1.103. 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 Computacenter

Strength

Debt is not viewed as a risk.

Dividends are covered by earnings and cash flows.

Weakness

Earnings declined over the past year.

Dividend is low compared to the top 25% of dividend payers in the IT market.

Opportunity

Annual earnings are forecast to grow for the next 3 years.

Good value based on P/E ratio compared to estimated Fair P/E ratio.

Threat

Annual earnings are forecast to grow slower than the British market.

Next Steps:

Although the valuation of a company is important, it is only one of many factors that you need to assess for a company. It's not possible to obtain a foolproof valuation with a DCF model. Instead the best use for a DCF model is to test certain assumptions and theories to see if they would lead to the company being undervalued or overvalued. For instance, if the terminal value growth rate is adjusted slightly, it can dramatically alter the overall result. For Computacenter, we've put together three important aspects you should assess:

Risks: Consider for instance, the ever-present spectre of investment risk. We've identified 2 warning signs with Computacenter , and understanding these should be part of your investment process. Management:Have insiders been ramping up their shares to take advantage of the market's sentiment for CCC's future outlook? Check out our management and board analysis with insights on CEO compensation and governance factors. Other Solid Businesses: Low debt, high returns on equity and good past performance are fundamental to a strong business. Why not explore our interactive list of stocks with solid business fundamentals to see if there are other companies you may not have considered!

PS. Simply Wall St updates its DCF calculation for every British 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.

Join A Paid User Research Session

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EU Commissioner for Internal Market Thierry Breton speaks during an interview with Reuters in Tokyo

EU, Japan to deepen chip cooperation - Breton EU Commissioner for Internal Market Thierry Breton speaks during an interview with Reuters in Tokyo

By Sam Nussey

TOKYO (Reuters) -The European Union (EU) will deepen cooperation with Japan on semiconductors, industry chief Thierry Breton said on Monday, as countries move to strengthen control over a technology vital for the defence, electronic and automotive sectors.

The EU and Japan will work together to monitor the chip supply chain and facilitate the exchange of researchers and engineers, Breton said. The EU will also be supportive of Japanese semiconductor companies considering operating within the bloc.

"We believe that it's extremely important to secure the supply chain of semiconductors," Breton told Reuters in Tokyo, where he is discussing cooperation on chips and artificial intelligence with the government and companies.

Japan is offering subsidies to revitalise its chip industry, which retains an edge in materials and equipment but has lost overall global market share, while a Japanese government-backed fund last week agreed to buy photoresist maker JSR Corp for $6.4 billion to drive consolidation in the industry.

Japan is also backing chip foundry venture Rapidus, whose executives are scheduled to meet Breton on Tuesday.

"I think it's really an important initiative and going in the right direction," he said of the foundry venture.

Plans by Rapidus to produce cutting edge chips rely on support from Belgium-based research company imec and IBM.

The deepening cooperation between the EU and Japan comes as the bloc has pledged to reduce its dependence on China, which aims to increase its capabilities in high-end technology such as chips.

"We made it very clear we just want to de-risk," Breton said.

Breton also met with Japan's Minister for Digital Affairs Taro Kono, Minister of Internal Affairs and Communications Takeaki Matsmoto and State Minister for Economy Trade and Industry Fusae Ota, for the first EU-Japan Digital Partnership ministerial talks.

They agreed to cooperate on undersea cable connectivity, semiconductors and cyber security, and in other areas of the digital economy, they said in a joint statement.

At a subsequent news conference Breton said much of the discussion was about AI. He said a further round of talks would be in Brussels in the first half of next year.

(Reporting by Sam Nussey and Tim Kelly; Editing by Himani Sarkar and David Holmes)
What are expansion plans for GCTC and Pink Shell? Median home prices sink in SW Florida

Today's topics include expansion plans for two of the region's major landmarks and a continuing shift in the Southwest Florida housing market.

First, let's start with a question from a reader who goes by "Inquisitive" Bob Paolello.

"Can you give us some information on what is being built at Gulf Coast Center? It appears to be a 3- or 4-story complex," Mr. Inquisitive asked. "Love your column. So much happening in this area."

Thank you for reading and the good question, Roberto, about South Lee County's Gulf Coast Town Center at Alico Road and I-75 that some refer to as GCTC.

Simply, thats an apartment complex with a garage rising up at GCTC, which unlike contemporaries like Estero's Coconut Point mall and the Naples Mercato entertainment district, didn't have residential as part of its 2005 origin.

Let's dig up the details. Here's what we know.

How large is expansion at Gulf Coast Town Center in south Lee County?

Hired by GCTC's Canadian owners, Rycon Construction says it's hammering away at a 437,000-square-foot apartment complex that will contain 277 units within its four-story wood-framed structure.

With that comes a three-story parking garage and amenities such as a fitness center, clubhouse, golf putting area, game room, pet wash, dog park and a pool with artificial turf surroundings.

What will new complex at GCTC be called, and what's the inspiration?

The mall's operator and developer of 10,000 residential units, North American Development Group, has dubbed the grounds as Ilumina at GCTC Luxury Apartments. That first word in the moniker means illuminate or enlightened in Spanish.

North American has been enlightened enough to use the name for some other similar projects around the continent including the 232-unit Ilumina On Raiders Way, a half-dozen exits away along the Las Vegas Freeway from the home of the NFL franchise.

What's time frame for Ilumina by North American Development Group?

With a debut in the fall, North American promises a "radiant resort lifestyle" at that Henderson, Nevada location in the Mojave Desert. As July 4 weekend temperatures hover in the 110-degree range and the average high staying in the triple digits until Labor Day weekend, "radiant" probably covers it. A dry heat, don't ya know.

Emerging almost concurrently with GCTC, or slightly ahead, is the 252-unit Ilumina Zephyrhills in Pasco County, and both should be ready next year. Using an LLC known as Ilumina Delray, North American purchased 40 acres in Palm Beach County as well late last year as these other two projects were emerging.

Industry publication Construction Journal has estimated the GCTC expansion cost at $80 million. That investment would go with more than $10 million in improvements the owners say they made five years ago after purchasing the center to go with more than 250 others it operates.

The Pink Shell Beach Resort & Marina in Fort Myers Beach on Friday, June 26, 2020.

What's Pink Shell Resort and Marina proposing for Fort Myers Beach?

Way way early in the preliminary stage, another major Southwest Florida destination a half-century old has been working up an expansion plan of its own.

Coming out of the Fort Myers Beach rubble from Hurricane Ian, the currently 195-unit Pink Shell Resort and Marina proposes developing largely on the bayside of Estero Boulevard, across from its current Gulf of Mexico perch.

Along with numerous other pieces, at the center of it is an eight-story structure that would feature 109 multi-family residential units and a parking garage, town records show. It would grow its parking capabilities from the current 400 to 762, of which 276 would be offered to the public. A sampling of other proposed components of the entire endeavor include workforce housing and a fishing pier.

Pink Shell Beach Resort

How many parcels? And how large is the area that Pink Shell wants to expand?

What owners Jabo LLC want goes beyond town regulations so it has its work ahead of it. For starters, there would need to be the rezoning of seven parcels, totaling 11 acres.

"The island has been changed by Hurricane Ian," Jabo said in a statement. "It is time to address the long-term need of the island while balancing the redevelopment costs in doing so."

Although repair work continues from 9 a.m. to 5 p.m. seven days a week, the hotel has been able to reopen since the Sept. 28 hurricane. Rooms became available in December, but some eateries and recreation, such as at the marina, still remain closed.

The Pink Shell on Fort Myers Beach on Feb. 10, 2023

What's happening with home prices in Naples area and Lee County?

For the first time this decade, yearly median sold prices for all three of Southwest Florida's bigger real estate groups sunk in the same month in the latest data.

"Many people thought home prices were going to decrease after Hurricane Ian," said Molly Lane, senior vice president at William Raveis Real Estate. "But the fact is, prices are holding steady."

While the new stats reflect a softening market, it's not like there's a freefall after the frenzy earlier in the pandemic when many buyers purchased homes sight unseen.

This is a normalization period." said Adam Ruud, managing broker and owner of Domain Realty. Going back a decade, were still in a pretty good market if you compare it and take out the couple years of craziness. Its not a lot to be disappointed about. I actually like more sustainability in our market.

In the Know: Outside the Brightwater community in North Fort Myers, where a lagoon is under construction.

How far did the median prices drop for major Realtor groups in SWFL?

The Naples Area Board of Realtors known as NABOR saw its median for single-family and condominiums decline by 1.2% in May as compared to a year ago. For the Bonita Springs-Estero Realtors group known as BER, it was down 1.6% and for Lee County-based Royal Palm Coast Realtor Association, it was the smallest drop at 0.3%.

Now cannot be compared to 2021 and 2022 when sellers were asking and getting a premium price on properties that were not in premium condition," said Jerry Murphy, managing broker of Downing-Frye Real Estate's Bonita Springs office. "Now we are seeing a disconnect between some sellers who are still trying to do that and buyers who are not willing."

While sellers were receiving at or over list price a year ago, they're getting 96-97% of that these days, according to the fresh numbers.

"More and more sellers (are) starting to adopt a mindset that they need to be open to negotiate on price, said Jillian Young, president of Premiere Plus Realty. "A handful of homes on the resale market have lingered for a few months because they are not move-in ready. Were finding fewer buyers are willing to purchase a fixer-upper these days.

More: Publix slated for Naples spot Lucky's dropped 3 years ago. A new Collier highway's role

What's median for an abode in Naples area, Bonita, Estero, rest of Lee?

Regardless of the type of abode or its condition, here's what they're paying, based on the latest medians:

NABOR: $600,000

BER: $560,000

Royal Palm: $375,000

"Inventory levels are not down enough to change the prices, said Steve Kolenda, managing broker for Berkshire Hathaway Florida Realtys office in Bonita Springs. At the same time, there are increased choices, and buyers finally have an opportunity to be a little bit more selective because theyre not in the frenzy,"

BER has nearly 60% more homes available than a year ago with sales down 5%. The NABOR and Royal Palm supplies are up around 30%, with a drop in sales close to 20%. Even with those inventory increases, real estate agents say there are still generally fewer available than there were just prior to the coronavirus era.

More: With country's largest manmade lagoon opening, company's focus shifts to Southwest Florida

What are some zip codes that saw higher home prices in May?

And not all corners and sectors of Southwest Florida experienced the drop in median prices.

For example, the NABOR median close of single family homes in close proximity to the beach (zip codes 34102, 34103, 34108) increased 20% to $3.1 million from $2.6 million in May 2022.

Based at the Naples Daily News, Columnist Phil Fernandez (pfernandez@gannett.com), who grew up in Southwest Florida, writes In the Know as part of the USA TODAY NETWORK. Support Democracy and subscribe to a newspaper.

This article originally appeared on Naples Daily News: Expansion at Gulf Coast Center, Pink Shell. Rare SWFL home price drop
Farmers hope recent rains will ease Iowa's drought, now in the longest stretch in 23 years

With drought conditions deepening across Iowa, Clark Whitaker welcomed the half-inch of rain that fell on his crops and pasture in southwest Iowa last Thursday.

Getting rain this year has been the luck of the draw, said Whitaker, who farms about 1,100 acres with his son, Will, growing corn, soybeans and alfalfa that he uses to help feed his cattle, pigs and sheep.

Its been very spotty, hit and miss, said the 67-year-old, who hoped more rain through the weekend would help revive pastures that had burned up, with only 2 inches since May.

Iowa has experienced drought for 155 weeks, the longest stretch since the U.S. Drought Monitor began in 2000, says Iowa Climatologist Justin Glisan. Here, corn grows in front of a poorly-growing hayfield due to drought on Tuesday, August 2, 2022, at Rehder Farms outside Hawarden, Iowa.

Across Iowa, drought conditions are nearing a third year, the longest stretch since the U.S. Drought Monitor began 23 years ago, said Justin Glisan, the state climatologist. Some portion of Iowa has experienced drought conditions over the past 155 weeks, beating the 2011-12 drought that lasted 151 weeks, Glisan said.

The U.S. Drought Monitor on Thursday showed almost all of Iowa experiencing abnormally dry or drought conditions. Nearly 90% of Iowa was gripped in drought, with about 45% of the state suffering either severe or extreme drought, including southeast Iowa, where Whitaker farms.

Even with recent showers, and scattered storms over the July 4th weekend, the state is unlikely to escape the drought anytime soon, Glisan said.

Recent rain  and signals that Iowa farmers will see more precipitation in July  will help, Glisan said. But we will need several months, if not more than a year, to really get enough precipitation to chip away at the long-term deficit in Iowa, he said.

Glisan said May and June are typically Iowas wettest months of the year, but the months as of last week had received only 62% of the normal rainfall, Glisan said. Southeastern Iowa has received less than half its normal rainfall, he said.

May was the 21st driest May in 151 years of record-keeping in Iowa, Glisan said, and June could rank the same, depending on rainfall totals through the weekend.

The reason: A blocking high-pressure system has stymied east-west flow across Iowa, preventing normal rainfall from the Gulf of Mexico, Glisan said.

In July, we expect to see the pattern shift toward a more active storm track and wetter weather possibilities, he said.

Thats good news for Iowa farmers. July is a critical time for the states corn crop, which will begin tasseling, part of the pollination process thats a big factor in determining yields.

We need a lot of rain in July to keep us going, said Aaron Saeugling, an Iowa State University Extension agronomist in southwest Iowa.

Soybeans appreciate a good drink, too, but August is much more critical for soybeans, reproduction-wise, Saeugling said.

Nearly 90% of Iowa is in moderate to extreme drought, the U.S. Monitor showed Thursday. Iowa has experience some level of drought for the past 155 weeks, the longest stretch since the Drought Monitor began in 2000, the state climatologist says.

The U.S. Department of Agricultures weekly crop report shows Iowa's crops have deteriorated: 56% of Iowas corn was considered good to excellent, dropping 16 percentage points from the first week in June, and 48% of the states soybeans are good to excellent, dropping 22 percentage points.

The rain "was a short-term blessing, but farmers still face a long-term challenge to get enough moisture" for their crops, Saeugling said.

Clarabell Probasco, an ISU Extension agronomist in southeast Iowa, said crops have shown signs of stress: Corn leaves curl tight to prevent moisture loss and soybeans are yellow.

Additionally, the weeks thunderstorms also have brought strong winds along with rain for southern Iowa farmers, knocking over corn plants, Probasco and Saeugling said. Farmers will need some time to determine whether the corn can recover.

The drought probably means some farmers are unlikely to see record yields this year.

Its taken top-line yields off the table, she said, adding that the lack of rain has been especially difficult for cattle and other livestock producers that graze their animals on pastures.

Some farmers are hauling water to their herds and are worried they wont get a second or third cutting of alfalfa to help feed their herds throughout the winter.

Whitaker said he has enough water for his cow and calf herd. Without some rain to help his pastures, he will need to feed his grazing cows, a move that typically wouldnt happen until August or September. That will dip into the reserves that he puts away for winter.

Its ugly on the grass situation right now, he said.

Still, Whitaker said his crops look surprisingly good, thanks to some timely rains and improving seed genetics. They'll get better with more precipitation.

"Nobody cares if it rains on our parade" this July 4th, he said.

Donnelle Eller covers agriculture, the environment and energy for the Register. Reach her at deller@registermedia.com or 515-284-8457.

This article originally appeared on Des Moines Register: Iowa's drought is the longest the state has seen in 23 years, beating 2011-12
Jamie Kahns, center left, senior vice president and Sarasota-Manatee market manager for Bank of America, holds a check for $25,000, the bank's donation to Women's Resource Center. WRC CEO and President Ashley Brown, center right, is surrounded by board members.

The Womens Resource Center was recently awarded a $25,000 grant from Bank of America for its Pathways to Success initiative.

This program supports individuals pursuing post-secondary education, notes Ashley Brown, WRCs CEO and president. By weaving together scholarships, programs, mentoring and direct financial support, the Pathways to Success program supports women who are going back to school with the goal of increasing their earning potential.

By partnering with WRC on Pathways to Success, Bank of America is providing essential financial support and resources to Sarasota-Manatee women who are working to further their education and contribute to their local community. The funding will help women gain the knowledge and skills required to increase their career prospects, alleviating some of the stressors of pursuing higher education.

The WRCs Pathways to Success program is just one of 12 Sarasota-Manatee nonprofits Bank of America is supporting in the first round of economic mobility grants awarded to local nonprofits throughout the year, helping the bank drive meaningful and sustainable progress to help tackle societys biggest challenges.

This article originally appeared on Sarasota Herald-Tribune: Bank donation will help women go back to school
(Bloomberg) -- International Business Machines Corp. is prioritizing helping Japans chipmaking startup Rapidus Corp., with a senior executive describing the budding foundry business as vital to securing long-term global supply.

Most Read from Bloomberg

Rapidus, a venture backed by some of Japans biggest electronics firms, is turning IBMs 2-nanometer chip design into production-ready silicon and aims to fabricate such chips at scale in the latter half of this decade. The most advanced semiconductors today are built at the larger 3nm node.

When it comes to 2nm technology, we are focusing our efforts on Rapidus and investing a great deal of resources to this project, even sacrificing some capacity that we could have used in other research, IBM Japans Chief Technology Officer Norishige Morimoto told Bloomberg News in an interview. We want Rapidus to succeed. We want it to contribute to a stable supply of the chips we and the world need.

Rapidus is a quasi-public project that got its start last year as a venture to build out Japans local chipmaking capacity at a time of rising geopolitical tensions and protectionism. It has the governments support and is led by veterans of the semiconductor supply chain, including Tetsuro Higashi, the former chairman of Tokyo Electron Ltd., and Atsuyoshi Koike, the former Japan president of Western Digital Corp.

The daunting task ahead of them is to create a world-class chipmaking foundry  fabricating silicon for outside customers  to catch up with industry leader Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co. within a handful of years. The duo have drawn investment from companies including Toyota Motor Corp., Sony Group Corp. and Nippon Telegraph & Telephone Corp. Rapidus is working with IBM and Belgium-based microelectronics research hub IMEC.

Rapidus engineers have been dispatched to IBMs Albany NanoTech Complex to design 2nm mass production lines while its factory is being built in Hokkaido, accelerating the development process. The Japanese firm expects to invest 5 trillion ($35 billion) in its 2nm project, roughly matching the annual outlay of TSMC and fellow leading chipmaker Samsung Electronics Co.

Read more: Chip Industry Veteran Aims to Help Japan Build Its Own TSMC

IBM would be open to helping Rapidus lock up further deals with major chip firms. We wont rule out any options as long as they match with our business needs, Morimoto said. IBM also provides chipmaking technology to Samsungs foundry division.

Rapidus and Samsung are on the same platform as they both use IBM technology, and its very possible the two can strike a win-win partnership as their business models are quite different, Omdia analyst Akira Minamikawa said.

Read more: Japans Rapidus Seeks Billions of Dollars to Reboot Chip Sector

IBM provides Rapidus key process technology that enables 2nm chip nodes and beyond, using a new type of transistor composition called nanosheet. Jumping forward to such advanced geometries is a huge leap from Japans existing capacity, which trades in more mature nodes like 40nm, but Morimoto is confident in the countrys deep roster of seasoned chip engineers.

Semiconductor demand is set to keep growing as a post-Covid recovery takes hold and the artificial intelligence boom drives the need for more memory and computing power.

Global revenue is expected to reach $1 trillion by 2030, doubling in the space of a decade, according to Inna Skvortsova, market analyst at industry body SEMI.

Presently, only Samsung and TSMC can produce the most advanced chips and theres widespread interest  from Washington to Beijing and Brussels  in adding more redundancy to the sources of supply. Rapidus would ideally offer a third option and, moreover, should be welcomed by the industry leaders who have struggled to meet demand, Morimoto said.

We know from our own experience that providing the newest generation of chips is not something that one company can handle alone, he said. Both TSMC and Samsung will welcome Rapidus joining the club of cutting-edge chip manufacturers because, as things stand now, they are making customers wait. Rapidus taking some orders from them wouldnt be a problem.

TSMC Chairman Mark Liu has said he doesnt see Rapidus as a competitor, as the Japanese chipmaker will focus on fostering engineering talent.

--With assistance from Takahiko Hyuga and Debby Wu.

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(Bloomberg) -- ING Groep NV is suing He Jinbi, a legendary Chinese copper trader and founder of troubled merchant Maike Metals International Co., over $147 million in unpaid debt.

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The money involves overdue payments owed by Triway International Ltd., a trading arm of Maike, according to a Hong Kong High Court document dated June 26. He, Maikes chairman, was sued by the Dutch bank as he failed to honor the guarantee obligation by repaying the debt of Hong Kong-based Triway, the filing showed.

The lawsuit may further complicate a restructuring at Maike, following a liquidity crisis at the trader that once handled a quarter of Chinas copper imports. Maike said in February that it sought a fair debt payment plan to preserve its creditors interests, while introducing new investors and quickly resuming its main business of commodity trading.

Its also the latest ING lawsuit in the Maike saga. The Dutch lender in April sued Industrial and Commercial Bank of China for allegedly breaching contract terms because it released export documents for copper transactions without collecting payment. The alleged contract breach led to ING booking losses on metals sold to Maike by Triway. Maike had banked with ICBC, Chinas largest bank, while Triway was with ING.

ING declined to comment, while Maike didnt respond to an email seeking comments on the lawsuit.

Maike, based in Xian in Shaanxi province, was hurt by repeated lockdowns in the city, alongside a slumping copper price last year. Banks have also grown increasingly cautious toward the commodity sector in China more broadly, adding to the pressure on private traders such as Maike.

Triway, a fully owned unit of Maike, trades physical metals and derivatives from Hong Kong. The Dutch bank issued a demand to He to pay the debt for Triway in October 2022, but the latter failed to honor the obligation, the case document said.

--With assistance from Winnie Zhu and Nicholas Comfort.

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Insiders who acquired AU$76k worth of Redstone Resources Limited's (ASX:RDS) stock at an average price of AU$0.008 in the past 12 months may be dismayed by the recent 13% price decline. Insiders invest with the hopes of seeing their money grow in value over time. However, as a result of recent losses, their initial investment is now only worth AU$67k, which is not what they expected.

While insider transactions are not the most important thing when it comes to long-term investing, logic dictates you should pay some attention to whether insiders are buying or selling shares.

View our latest analysis for Redstone Resources

The Last 12 Months Of Insider Transactions At Redstone Resources

The Non-Executive Director Edward Van Heemst made the biggest insider purchase in the last 12 months. That single transaction was for AU$76k worth of shares at a price of AU$0.008 each. That means that even when the share price was higher than AU$0.007 (the recent price), an insider wanted to purchase shares. It's very possible they regret the purchase, but it's more likely they are bullish about the company. In our view, the price an insider pays for shares is very important. It is encouraging to see an insider paid above the current price for shares, as it suggests they saw value, even at higher levels. Edward Van Heemst was the only individual insider to buy during the last year.

The chart below shows insider transactions (by companies and individuals) over the last year. If you want to know exactly who sold, for how much, and when, simply click on the graph below!

There are always plenty of stocks that insiders are buying. So if that suits your style you could check each stock one by one or you could take a look at this free list of companies. (Hint: insiders have been buying them).

Does Redstone Resources Boast High Insider Ownership?

Another way to test the alignment between the leaders of a company and other shareholders is to look at how many shares they own. I reckon it's a good sign if insiders own a significant number of shares in the company. It appears that Redstone Resources insiders own 27% of the company, worth about AU$1.5m. While this is a strong but not outstanding level of insider ownership, it's enough to indicate some alignment between management and smaller shareholders.

So What Does This Data Suggest About Redstone Resources Insiders?

The recent insider purchase is heartening. And an analysis of the transactions over the last year also gives us confidence. But we don't feel the same about the fact the company is making losses. When combined with notable insider ownership, these factors suggest Redstone Resources insiders are well aligned, and that they may think the share price is too low. While we like knowing what's going on with the insider's ownership and transactions, we make sure to also consider what risks are facing a stock before making any investment decision. Be aware that Redstone Resources is showing 6 warning signs in our investment analysis, and 5 of those are a bit concerning...

If you would prefer to check out another company -- one with potentially superior financials -- then do not miss this free list of interesting companies, that have HIGH return on equity and low debt.

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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For us, stock picking is in large part the hunt for the truly magnificent stocks. But when you hold the right stock for the right time period, the rewards can be truly huge. For example, the Pine Cliff Energy Ltd. (TSE:PNE) share price is up a whopping 886% in the last three years, a handsome return for long term holders. We note the stock price is up 4.4% in the last seven days. We love happy stories like this one. The company should be really proud of that performance!

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.

Check out our latest analysis for Pine Cliff Energy

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 flawed but reasonable way to assess how sentiment around a company has changed is to compare the earnings per share (EPS) with the share price.

Pine Cliff Energy became profitable within the last three years. Given the importance of this milestone, it's not overly surprising that the share price has increased strongly.

The image below shows how EPS has tracked over time (if you click on the image you can see greater detail).

It is of course excellent to see how Pine Cliff Energy has grown profits over the years, but the future is more important for shareholders. 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. 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. Arguably, the TSR gives a more comprehensive picture of the return generated by a stock. We note that for Pine Cliff Energy the TSR over the last 3 years was 976%, which is better than the share price return mentioned above. This is largely a result of its dividend payments!

A Different Perspective

Pine Cliff Energy provided a TSR of 0.8% over the last twelve months. But that was short of the market average. It's probably a good sign that the company has an even better long term track record, having provided shareholders with an annual TSR of 33% over five years. Maybe the share price is just taking a breather while the business executes on its growth strategy. It's always interesting to track share price performance over the longer term. But to understand Pine Cliff Energy better, we need to consider many other factors. Consider for instance, the ever-present spectre of investment risk. We've identified 4 warning signs with Pine Cliff Energy , and understanding them should be part of your investment process.

Of course Pine Cliff Energy may not be the best stock to buy. So you may wish to see this free collection of growth stocks.

Please note, the market returns quoted in this article reflect the market weighted average returns of stocks that currently trade on Canadian 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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One simple way to benefit from the stock market is to buy an index fund. But if you pick the right individual stocks, you could make more than that. For example, the The Travelers Companies, Inc. (NYSE:TRV) share price is up 52% in the last three years, clearly besting the market return of around 35% (not including dividends). On the other hand, the returns haven't been quite so good recently, with shareholders up just 3.7% , including dividends .

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 Travelers Companies

While the efficient markets hypothesis continues to be taught by some, it has been proven that markets are over-reactive dynamic systems, and investors are not always rational. One 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).

Travelers Companies was able to grow its EPS at 8.8% per year over three years, sending the share price higher. This EPS growth is lower than the 15% average annual increase in the share price. This indicates that the market is feeling more optimistic on the stock, after the last few years of progress. 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).

This free interactive report on Travelers Companies' earnings, revenue and cash flow is a great place to start, if you want to investigate the stock further.

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. In the case of Travelers Companies, it has a TSR of 62% for the last 3 years. That exceeds its share price return that we previously mentioned. And there's no prize for guessing that the dividend payments largely explain the divergence!

A Different Perspective

Travelers Companies shareholders are up 3.7% for the year (even including dividends). But that return falls short of the market. On the bright side, the longer term returns (running at about 9% a year, over half a decade) look better. It may well be that this is a business worth popping on the watching, given the continuing positive reception, over time, from the market. 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 for instance, the ever-present spectre of investment risk. We've identified 1 warning sign with Travelers Companies , and understanding them should be part of your investment process.

But note: Travelers Companies may not be the best stock to buy. So take a peek at this free list of interesting companies with past earnings growth (and further growth forecast).

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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For us, stock picking is in large part the hunt for the truly magnificent stocks. You won't get it right every time, but when you do, the returns can be truly splendid. For example, the Atlantic Navigation Holdings (Singapore) Limited (Catalist:5UL) share price is up a whopping 803% in the last three years, a handsome return for long term holders. Also pleasing for shareholders was the 216% gain in the last three months. We love happy stories like this one. The company should be really proud of that performance!

So let's assess the underlying fundamentals over the last 3 years and see if they've moved in lock-step with shareholder returns.

Check out our latest analysis for Atlantic Navigation Holdings (Singapore)

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.

Atlantic Navigation Holdings (Singapore) became profitable within the last three years. That kind of transition can be an inflection point that justifies a strong share price gain, just as we have seen here.

You can see below how EPS has changed over time (discover the exact values by clicking on the image).

It might be well worthwhile taking a look at our free report on Atlantic Navigation Holdings (Singapore)'s earnings, revenue and cash flow.

A Different Perspective

It's nice to see that Atlantic Navigation Holdings (Singapore) shareholders have received a total shareholder return of 282% over the last year. Since the one-year TSR is better than the five-year TSR (the latter coming in at 22% per year), it would seem that the stock's performance has improved in recent times. Someone with an optimistic perspective could view the recent improvement in TSR as indicating that the business itself is getting better with time. 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. For instance, we've identified 2 warning signs for Atlantic Navigation Holdings (Singapore) (1 is a bit unpleasant) that you should be aware of.

If you would prefer to check out another company -- one with potentially superior financials -- then do not miss this free list of companies that have proven they can grow earnings.

Please note, the market returns quoted in this article reflect the market weighted average returns of stocks that currently trade on Singaporean 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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If we want to find a stock that could multiply over the long term, what are the underlying trends we should look for? Amongst other things, we'll want to see two things; firstly, a growing return on capital employed (ROCE) and secondly, an expansion in the company's amount of capital employed. Basically this means that a company has profitable initiatives that it can continue to reinvest in, which is a trait of a compounding machine. In light of that, when we looked at Boston Scientific (NYSE:BSX) and its ROCE trend, we weren't exactly thrilled.

Return On Capital Employed (ROCE): What Is It?

If you haven't worked with ROCE before, it measures the 'return' (pre-tax profit) a company generates from capital employed in its business. The formula for this calculation on Boston Scientific is:

Return on Capital Employed = Earnings Before Interest and Tax (EBIT)  (Total Assets - Current Liabilities)

0.074 = US$2.1b  (US$33b - US$4.1b) (Based on the trailing twelve months to March 2023).

Thus, Boston Scientific has an ROCE of 7.4%. On its own, that's a low figure but it's around the 8.9% average generated by the Medical Equipment industry.

View our latest analysis for Boston Scientific

roce

Above you can see how the current ROCE for Boston Scientific compares to its prior returns on capital, but there's only so much you can tell from the past. If you'd like to see what analysts are forecasting going forward, you should check out our free report for Boston Scientific.

The Trend Of ROCE

When we looked at the ROCE trend at Boston Scientific, we didn't gain much confidence. Around five years ago the returns on capital were 12%, but since then they've fallen to 7.4%. On the other hand, the company has been employing more capital without a corresponding improvement in sales in the last year, which could suggest these investments are longer term plays. It's worth keeping an eye on the company's earnings from here on to see if these investments do end up contributing to the bottom line.

On a related note, Boston Scientific has decreased its current liabilities to 12% of total assets. That could partly explain why the ROCE has dropped. Effectively this means their suppliers or short-term creditors are funding less of the business, which reduces some elements of risk. Since the business is basically funding more of its operations with it's own money, you could argue this has made the business less efficient at generating ROCE.

What We Can Learn From Boston Scientific's ROCE

In summary, Boston Scientific is reinvesting funds back into the business for growth but unfortunately it looks like sales haven't increased much just yet. Although the market must be expecting these trends to improve because the stock has gained 60% over the last five years. However, unless these underlying trends turn more positive, we wouldn't get our hopes up too high.

Boston Scientific does have some risks, we noticed 3 warning signs (and 1 which is concerning) we think you should know about.

While Boston Scientific isn't earning the highest return, check out this free list of companies that are earning high returns on equity with solid balance sheets.

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

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(Bloomberg) -- Japan is set to win approval to discharge more than a million cubic meters of treated water from the Fukushima nuclear disaster site into the Pacific Ocean, a contentious plan thats soured ties with neighbors including China.

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The International Atomic Energy Agencys Director General Rafael Grossi will visit Japan from Tuesday to deliver a final report on the safety of the process and meet with officials including Foreign Minister Yoshimasa Hayashi. A domestic nuclear regulator is also set to issue a crucial assessment.

Both studies are poised to give backing to Tokyo Electric Power Co. to begin releasing the water  equivalent in volume to about 500 Olympic-size swimming pools  into the sea, a step thats needed to allow full decommissioning of the Fukushima site following the 2011 earthquake and tsunami that triggered the worlds worst atomic disaster since Chernobyl.

Japan has assured other nations that the release of the water is safe, is in line with standard industry practice and that its necessary, because about 1,000 storage tanks at Fukushima will hit capacity early in 2024. Other countries with nuclear plants already safely discharge similar diluted waste offshore, according to the IAEA.

It also comes as Japan joins a wider global reappraisal of nuclear power, with several nations seeking to boost energy self-sufficiency by reviving idled reactors, adding plants or investing in new technology. Prime Minister Fumio Kishida is aiming to build on improving domestic support for the energy source, and Japans efforts to complete the closure of the Fukushima site are seen as crucial in inspiring confidence.

Read More: Nuclear Powers Revival Reaches Home of Last Meltdown

Despite Japans diplomatic push, the discharge plan is complicating some global relationships.

The ocean is not Japans private sewer, Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesman Wang Wenbin said last month, warning the proposed release carries risks for the countrys neighbors and Pacific Island nations. Its neither ethical nor lawful to spill the risk of nuclear contamination to the rest of the world, Wang said Monday at a regular press conference held in Beijing.

Japanese cosmetics brands have been targeted by a viral campaign tied to the issue that spread unproven safety allegations on Chinese social media platforms. In South Korea, demand for sea salt has rocketed as consumers stockpile the condiment amid worries the release of wastewater could taint future supplies.

While the central government in Seoul hasnt pushed back against Japans plans publicly, a survey by the Yomiuri newspaper and South Koreas Hankook Ilbo conducted in May found 84% of respondents opposed the discharge. The nations opposition Democratic Party led a demonstration on Saturday, which it claimed was attended by an estimated 100,000 people, according to Yonhap News.

The Pacific Islands Forum, a group of 18 nations including Fiji, Papua New Guinea and Australia, has urged Japan to consider alternatives and called for additional discussions on the risks.

Peoples fears and uncertainties in the region are real, however safely the release will be handled, and however minimal the risk is, said Nancy Snow, a reputation security consultant in Tokyo and author of a book on Japans public diplomacy. Their concerns cannot be taken lightly or dismissed.

The wastewater shouldnt be released during the summer when residents will be using the countrys beaches, said Natsuo Yamaguchi, leader of Japans Komeito, the junior party in the countrys coalition government, according to a Nikkei report. The nation will stick to its plan to begin discharging the water around the summer period, Chief Cabinet Secretary Hirokazu Matsuno said Monday.

Japan announced in 2021 it planned a gradual release of about 1.3 million cubic meters of treated wastewater from the Fukushima Dai-ichi nuclear power plant that has accumulated at the site since 2011. Tokyo Electric, or Tepco, cycles in water to keep debris and fuel at the wrecked nuclear reactors cool, and the contaminated liquid  along with other groundwater and rain  is processed to remove most radioactive elements. The treated water, which still contains tritium, has been collected and stored.

Tepco expects the fleet of about 1,000 storage tanks to reach maximum capacity between February and June next year and the utility has argued it cannot continue to clear space for additional vessels because thats needed for other parts of the decommissioning process. Storing the water also carries risks of leaks, which are amplified by the nations status as one of the most earthquake-prone countries.

In one of its preliminary reports in April, the IAEA said Tepco had taken into account issues raised in previous safety reviews and had made significant progress to update its plans, signaling the agency is likely to grant final approval. Grossi will visit Fukushima during his trip to Japan and open an IAEA office at the site, the agency said Friday.

Tepco plans to mix the treated fluid with seawater to dilute the concentration of tritium to well below both Japanese government and World Health Organization guidelines, before discharging it into the ocean over the course of as long as 40 years through an undersea tunnel. Tritium has a radioactive half-life of a little over 12 years, according to the IAEA.

Japans government has not yet set any specific date to begin releasing the water, and has said it will continue to hold talks with local communities, including the fishing sector, to try to alleviate their concerns.

Releasing water from nuclear power plants is a standard practice and most operations globally release small amounts of tritium and other radioactive material into rivers and oceans, the IAEA said previously.

--With assistance from Ben Westcott, Heesu Lee, Philip Glamann and Andrew Janes.

(Updates to add new comments from Chinas Foreign Ministry in 7th paragraph.)

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By Hyunjoo Jin

San Francisco (Reuters) -Kentucky is requiring that electric vehicle charging companies include Tesla's plug if they want to be part of a state program to electrify highways using federal dollars, according to documents reviewed by Reuters.

Kentucky's plan went into effect on Friday, making it the first state to mandate Tesla's charging technology, although Texas and Washington states previously shared such plans with Reuters.

In addition to federal requirements for the rival Combined Charging System (CCS), Kentucky mandates Tesla's plug, called the North American Charging Standard (NACS), at charging stations, according to Kentucky's request for proposal (RFP) for the state's EV charging program on Friday.

"Each port must be equipped with an SAE CCS 1 connector. Each port shall also be capable of connecting to and charging vehicles equipped with charging ports compliant with the North American Charging Standard (NACS)," the documents say.

Tesla, the dominant EV maker in the United States, has scored a string of victories for its charging technology in recent weeks, starting with Ford Motor, saying it would adopt NACS.

But a group of EV charger makers and operators is pushing back against Texas' plan to mandate the inclusion of Tesla technology in charging stations, saying it is "premature," according to a document seen by Reuters.

"Time is needed to properly standardize, test, and certify the safety and interoperability of Tesla connectors across the industry," they said in a letter to the Texas Transportation Commission.

The U.S. Department of Transportation earlier this year said that charging companies must provide CCS plugs to be eligible for federal funding to deploy 500,000 EV chargers by 2030.

It added that the rule allows charging stations to have other connectors, as long as they support CCS, a national standard.

The National Electric Vehicle Infrastructure Program (NEVI) provides $5 billion to states.

(Reporting by Hyunjoo Jin; Editing by Mark Porter, Leslie Adler and Conor Humphries)
A Chauvin artist is opening a Latin American restaurant in her community this month.

What started as selling tamales at local farmer's markets has grown into restaurant. Gabriella Ruiz de Pellegrin is opening Tumbao! at the old Danny's Fried Chicken 5438 LA-56 Chauvin. She held a small gathering of 15 people on July 1 to try out the many items on her menu. Items included tacos, burritos, tamales, a taco salad, birria, and more. Prices will range from $3 to $15, and the location will be opening later this month after its final inspection.

The planned hours of operation are Monday through Friday 11 a.m. to 2 p.m. and 5 p.m. to 8 p.m. The restaurant is also planned to be open Sundays for brunch: 11 a.m. until 2 p.m.

The name Tumbao! Comes from the Latin jazz beat played on the drums, and according to Pellegrin, the word is also used to describe the commanding sex appeal of a woman. She popped her hips as she translated the word and said she chose the name to describe the strong flavors of the meals.

Those powerful flavors came through for Dixie Marie-Hebert. She said she had never tried authentic Mexican food before, and when she bit into the tacos it was a sensory explosion.

"Oh my!" Dixie Marie-Hebert said. "Damn, that's really good!"

Owner of Tumbao!, Gabriella Ruiz de Pellegrin and her husband Matthew Pellegrin prepare meals for their guests, July 1. Located at the old Danny's Fried Chicken 5438 LA-56 Chauvin, the restaurant is set to open later this month.

She was trying the Al Pastor taco, filled with pork, pineapple, and seasonings. The pineapple added a sweetness and the acidity of the fruit tenderized the meat, creating a sweet and savory combination that Hebert said she loved.

Hebert served as the photographer for Pellegrin's wedding, and like Hebert, all in attendance were friends of the family. Casey Punch, who was seated next to Hebert, worked with Pellegrin for eight years at the South Louisiana Feed and Seed Store in Houma. He said she used to bring her tamales to work to share with everyone and he excitedly dug into the three he was served.

Like the tacos, the tamales also came in three flavors: pork in adobo sauce, chicken in salsa verde, and chipotle bean and cheese. These ingredients are served wrapped in a corn husk, which adds to the flavor. Punch said ever since having them at the feed and seed, he looks forward to any time Pellegrin makes her tamales, and even tries to spread the word for others to try it out. They don't know what they are missing, he said.

Friends of the family gather at Tumbao! to try Gabriella Ruiz de Pellegrin's menu before the restaurant opens later this month. The restaurant is located in Chauvin, at the old Danny's Fried Chicken 5438, LA-56.

"I done tagged a whole bunch of people when she makes her tamales," Punch said. "Ya'll better go there and get 'em because when they gone, they gone."

At the other end of the table, Jose Basquez and Diya Miller ate. Basquez is from Honduras and has been living in Montegut since 2003. He explained that Honduran and Mexican food flavors are very different even though they share similar ingredients. According to Basquez, Mexican food tends to have more heat in its flavors, and the two regions have their own rivalry over who cooks better.

"It's from Mexico, but it's really good," Basquez said.

More: Rougarou horror film: Local actor and Lafayette Cajun musician to star.

More: Houma's Centennial Plaza delayed by history

Locals said it was nice to try a new version of Mexican food and intend to keep going back. Miller said she was never exposed to authentic Mexican food, because restaurants had to cater to an American audience. This meant most establishments offered foods that were tried and true flavors familiar to the American palette. She said both are good, but vastly different.

"We grew up with La Casa, so that's the only thing we knew, it's excellent having a completely different take on Mexican food," she said. "This hasn't been Americanized which La Casa has, because they had to stay within the box that the community allowed them to be in."

Tumbao!, located at the old Danny's Fried Chicken in Chauvin, 5438 LA-56. It is set to open later this month. Photo taken July 1.

Pellegrin is no stranger to the restaurant industry. Her father Freddie Ruiz owned and operated Cafe Rio, a restaurant in Utah. She began bussing tables at her father's restaurant at 14, and about a year later became a tortilla girl. She said the older women she worked with took a liking to such a young girl wanting to perfect the craft of tortilla-making and it's a skill she still uses today.

She hasn't given up her artwork which can be found under her company Twisted Mindz Designs, and is often sold during the Rougarou Festival. The building was being used as her art studio and her day of the dead painting is proudly displayed on the inner wall of her restaurant, but as Pellegrin said, the food was more in demand.

"More people were begging me for food than art," she said.

This article originally appeared on The Courier: Tumbao! Mexican restaurant to open in Chauvin this month
Key Insights

Using the 2 Stage Free Cash Flow to Equity, DMG MORI fair value estimate is 48.93

With 42.40 share price, DMG MORI appears to be trading close to its estimated fair value

DMG MORI's peers are currently trading at a premium of 141% on average

How far off is DMG MORI AKTIENGESELLSCHAFT (ETR:GIL) from its intrinsic value? Using the most recent financial data, we'll take a look at whether the stock is fairly priced by taking the expected future cash flows and discounting them to their present value. One way to achieve this is by employing the Discounted Cash Flow (DCF) model. There's really not all that much to it, even though it might appear quite complex.

We generally believe that a company's value is the present value of all of the cash it will generate in the future. However, a DCF is just one valuation metric among many, and it is not without flaws. If you want to learn more about discounted cash flow, the rationale behind this calculation can be read in detail in the Simply Wall St analysis model.

See our latest analysis for DMG MORI

The Method

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. In the first stage we need to estimate the cash flows to the business over the next ten years. Seeing as no analyst estimates of free cash flow are available to us, we have extrapolate the previous free cash flow (FCF) from the company's last 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 discount the value of these future cash flows to their estimated value in today's dollars:

10-year free cash flow (FCF) estimate

2024 2025 2026 2027 2028 2029 2030 2031 2032 2033 Levered FCF (, Millions) 200.0m 210.4m 218.2m 224.0m 228.3m 231.6m 234.1m 236.0m 237.5m 238.8m Growth Rate Estimate Source Est @ 7.30% Est @ 5.19% Est @ 3.70% Est @ 2.66% Est @ 1.94% Est @ 1.43% Est @ 1.07% Est @ 0.82% Est @ 0.65% Est @ 0.53% Present Value (, Millions) Discounted @ 6.2% 188 187 182 176 169 162 154 146 139 131

("Est" = FCF growth rate estimated by Simply Wall St)

Present Value of 10-year Cash Flow (PVCF) = 1.6b

The second stage is also known as Terminal Value, this is the business's cash flow after the first stage. For a number of reasons a very conservative growth rate is used that cannot exceed that of a country's GDP growth. In this case we have used the 5-year average of the 10-year government bond yield (0.2%) to estimate future growth. In the same way as with the 10-year 'growth' period, we discount future cash flows to today's value, using a cost of equity of 6.2%.

Terminal Value (TV)= FCF 2033  (1 + g)  (r  g) = 239m (1 + 0.2%)  (6.2% 0.2%) = 4.0b

Present Value of Terminal Value (PVTV)= TV / (1 + r)10= 4.0b ( 1 + 6.2%)10= 2.2b

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 3.9b. In the final step we divide the equity value by the number of shares outstanding. Compared to the current share price of 42.4, the company appears about fair value at a 13% discount to where the stock price trades currently. 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

Important Assumptions

Now the most important inputs to a discounted cash flow are the discount rate, and of course, the actual 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 DMG MORI 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 6.2%, which is based on a levered beta of 0.997. 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 DMG MORI

Strength

Earnings growth over the past year exceeded the industry.

Debt is not viewed as a risk.

Dividends are covered by earnings and cash flows.

Weakness

Dividend is low compared to the top 25% of dividend payers in the Machinery market.

Opportunity

Current share price is below our estimate of fair value.

Lack of analyst coverage makes it difficult to determine GIL's earnings prospects.

Threat

No apparent threats visible for GIL.

Next Steps:

Although the valuation of a company is important, it shouldn't be the only metric you look at when researching a company. DCF models are not the be-all and end-all of investment valuation. Instead the best use for a DCF model is to test certain assumptions and theories to see if they would lead to the company being undervalued or overvalued. For instance, if the terminal value growth rate is adjusted slightly, it can dramatically alter the overall result. For DMG MORI, we've compiled three important elements you should further examine:

Risks: We feel that you should assess the 2 warning signs for DMG MORI (1 can't be ignored!) we've flagged before making an investment in the company. Other Solid Businesses: Low debt, high returns on equity and good past performance are fundamental to a strong business. Why not explore our interactive list of stocks with solid business fundamentals to see if there are other companies you may not have considered! Other Environmentally-Friendly Companies: Concerned about the environment and think consumers will buy eco-friendly products more and more? Browse through our interactive list of companies that are thinking about a greener future to discover some stocks you may not have thought of!

PS. Simply Wall St updates its DCF calculation for every German 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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Dublin, July 03, 2023 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- The "Luxembourg Insurance Industry - Governance, Risk and Compliance" report has been added to ResearchAndMarkets.com's offering.



This report provides detailed analysis of the insurance regulations for life, property, motor, liability, personal accident and health, and marine, aviation and transit insurance. The report specifies various requirements for the establishment and operation of insurance and reinsurance companies and intermediaries.



The report brings together the analyst's research, modeling and analysis expertise, giving insurers access to information on prevailing insurance regulations, and recent and upcoming changes in the regulatory framework, taxation and legal system in the country. The report also includes the scope of non-admitted insurance in the country.



Report Scope

An overview of the insurance regulatory framework in Luxembourg.

The latest key changes, and changes expected in the country's insurance regulatory framework.

Key regulations and market practices related to different types of insurance product in the country.

Rules and regulations pertaining to key classes of compulsory insurance, and the scope of non-admitted insurance in the country.

Key parameters including licensing requirements permitted foreign direct investment, minimum capital requirements, solvency and reserve requirements, and investment regulations.

Details of the tax and legal systems in the country.

Key Highlights

Commissariat aux Assurance regulates the Luxembourg insurance industry.

The Law prohibits non-admitted insurance; however, unlicensed insurers and reinsurers from EU and EEA Member States are permitted.

FDI is permitted in the Luxembourg insurance industry up to 100%.

Composite insurance is not allowed in Luxembourg.

Solvency II is implemented from January 1, 2016.

Reasons to Buy

Provides FAQ-style analytical insights comprising 129 knowledge elements on insurance compliance applicable to the country.

Gain insights into the insurance regulatory framework in Luxembourg.

Track the latest regulatory changes, and expected changes impacting the Luxembourger insurance industry.

Gain detailed information about the key regulations governing the establishment and operation of insurance entities in the country.

Understand key regulations and market practices pertaining to various types of insurance product.

Key Topics Covered:

Legislation Overview

Supervision and Control

Legislation

Compulsory Insurance

Non-Admitted Insurance Regulations

Company Registration and Operation

License

Foreign Direct Investment / Ownership

Minimum Capital Requirements

Solvency Margins

Reserve Requirements

Statutory Return Requirements

Fee Structure

Taxation

Tax on Insurance Premium

Corporate Income Tax

Corporate Capital Gains Tax

Value Added Tax

Legal System

Policy Practice

For more information about this report visit https://www.researchandmarkets.com/r/tbn2le



Source: GlobalData

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.

CONTACT: CONTACT: ResearchAndMarkets.com Laura Wood,Senior Press Manager press@researchandmarkets.com For E.S.T Office Hours Call 1-917-300-0470 For U.S./ CAN Toll Free Call 1-800-526-8630 For GMT Office Hours Call +353-1-416-8900




Hiring full-time help, such as a nanny, requires financial obligations to pay certain taxes. Here's how to keep track of what you're responsible for.

I will become this magazines editor starting with the September issue. To help ensure that Im prepared to take on this exciting new role, my husband and I decided to hire a nanny to care for our two young children while we work. Having a nanny come to our house will free up time that I previously spent running our children to and from day care. And because I work from home, I can enjoy lunch with my kids or take a walk with them when I need a break from my desk.

The convenience of having an in-home caregiver for your kids comes at a premium price and with considerable tax ramifications. The national average weekly rate for a nanny in 2022 was $701 for one child or $726 for two, according to the most recent Cost of Care survey from Care.com. That compares with $268 for one child or $510 for two children at a daycare center. And because a nanny is a household employee, the IRS requires you to withhold and pay tax if her income from the nanny job reaches a certain annual minimum threshold  for 2023, its $2,600.

Managing the tax complexities.

As a nannys employer, you must pay your share of Social Security and Medicare (FICA) taxes  an amount equal to 7.65% of her wages  as well as federal and state unemployment taxes. In addition, you must withhold from the nannys pay her share of FICA tax, which is 7.65% of her wages. The nannys earnings are subject to federal and state income tax, too. (The same tax rules apply to any household employee  such as a cook or housekeeper  for whom you control not only the work they do but how they do it; independent contractors who have multiple clients and use their own supplies  say, providers of lawn care or cleaning services  are not household employees.)

To simplify the task of withholding and paying tax, I plan to use a payroll service. You can look for a local accountant who offers payroll assistance or check out a provider that operates online. SurePayroll ($50 monthly), for example, calculates the amount of tax owed, deducts tax from the nannys pay, arranges direct deposit of paychecks into her bank account, and remits federal, state and local taxes for you. The program also prepares Schedule H, which reports household employment taxes on your federal tax return.

Other providers of similar online services include Poppins Payroll ($49 monthly) and HomePay ($75 monthly). If youre willing to file and send tax payments yourself but want help tracking them and figuring out how much you owe, try Simple Nanny Payroll ($29 yearly).

Dont miss these tax breaks.

To ease the tax bite, Im contributing to a dependent-care flexible spending account (FSA). If your employer offers one, you can stash away pretax money from your paycheck to cover care for children younger than 13 while you work or look for work. Qualifying expenses include a nanny, day care, preschool, after-school programs and summer day camps. (You can also use dependent-care FSA funds for expenses related to elder care or other care for dependent adults.) The IRS limits household contributions to dependent-care FSAs to $5,000 per year (or $2,500 yearly for those married filing separately).

The child and dependent care tax credit can help offset care expenses, too. You can claim the credit on up to $3,000 in care expenses for one child or up to $6,000 for two or more children. (Only expenses that are not reimbursed by a dependent-care FSA are eligible for the tax credit.) As with an FSA, the care must take place while you work or look for work, and the child must be younger than 13. The maximum credit that you can claim depends on your adjusted gross income. If your AGI is more than $43,000, you can claim up to 20% of care expenses. The percentage increases as AGI decreases, topping out at 35% for those with AGI of up to $15,000.

Note: This item first appeared in Kiplinger's Personal Finance Magazine, a monthly, trustworthy source of advice and guidance. Subscribe to help you make more money and keep more of the money you make here.
Medi-Help, a medical non-profit organization, is seeking donations to provide millions more women around the world with the multi-use contraceptive mifepristone.

Zurich, Switzerland --News Direct-- Prodigy Press Wire

Medi-Help, a medical nonprofit, and its local NGO partners have been working in the DRC Congo, Zambia, Madagascar, and Ukraine where donations of the contraceptive drug mifepristone reached millions of women in need over the last three years.

To promote the use of Mifepristone in many more countries they are seeking donations. Mifepristone became very famous recently when a Texas judge deemed the drug to be unsafe and banned its use nationwide in spite of its 23 years in use. The ruling was challenged and mifepristone was deemed by the U.S. Supreme Court to be safe. Despite the Supreme Courts ruling, such legal disputes could have far-reaching ramifications for the nations abortion access and drug regulation. While states that have already outlawed abortion will not see significant change, those states where abortion is still legal, are seeing restrictions to their access to Mifepristone. These include removing the availability of the drug via mail as well as shortening the window for mifepristone's approved use, from up to 10 weeks of pregnancy to seven.

While it is seen negatively by anti-abortion states in the U.S., other places like Afghanistan, which has strict rules on women's freedoms, have understood the benefits of low-dose mifepristone. The donations Medi-Help is seeking will be used to reach more countries and aid in operational research applications. They wish to conduct their own clinical trials to determine the best usage and even potential benefits to using it as a regular contraception, as well as for the prevention of fibroids and reduction of risks for ovarian and breast cancer, which are very common in Africa.

Low dose Mifepristone arriving in Kabul, Afghanistan

Studies into the use of mifepristone were conducted by WHO and also in China, India, and Cuba where the drug is legal. The many successful studies encouraged Medi-Help to purchase over 10 million low-dose mifepristone tablets which over the last three years have been donated to millions of African women living in DRC Congo, Zambia, Madagascar, and refugee camps in Uganda and South Sudan.

The drug works as a hormone blocker which doesnt cause common side effects associated with traditional contraceptives like depression, loss of sex drive, and high blood pressure. To make the drug widely accessible, Medi-Help aims to support the public sector of countries such as DRC Congo, and Zambia where the drug is legal, and then find ways to provide it to organizations and neighboring governments where it is not yet available.

In the last 12 months, Medi-Help sponsored large shipments of low-dose mifepristone sent directly from India to Ukraine, Papua New Guinea, and even Afghanistan, providing treatment to over 500,000. These women now have access to a drug that as a low dosage version, is not yet available to women in America and Europe; mainly because of its abortion drug stigma.

Medi-Help needs more donations to continue to help women all over the world gain access at minimal costs of 5 USD per year for contraception or fibroid treatment, They believe it is a human right for women around the world to be able to choose their contraception.

We have proven the use of the drug as the only affordable fibroid medical treatment for over 20,000 women and as an oral contraception with minimal side effects for millions of women throughout Africa, Ukraine, and now Afghanistan, says Daniel Waldvogel, President of Medi-Help.org. Now we see the potential for helping millions more women across the globe once they understand this drug and see the amazing benefits of the low dosage mifepristone tablets we have introduced in Africa.

Media Contact:

Name: Daniel Waldvogel

Email: daniel.waldvogel@medi-help.org

Release ID: 664004

View source version on newsdirect.com: https://newsdirect.com/news/medical-ngo-announces-donation-round-for-multi-use-contraception-plus-based-on-mifepristone-676069436
Photograph: Rachel Torres/Alamy

Social media giant Meta this week introduced new parental supervision tools, but child protection and anti-sex trafficking organizations say the new measures offer little protection to the children most vulnerable to exploitation, and divert the responsibility from the company to keep its users safe.

Related: Instagram tests feature to block explicit images in direct message requests

On Tuesday, Meta launched new features aimed at increasing parents awareness of their childrens activities on its platforms. For Messenger, its private message service, parents can now view and receive updates on their childs contacts list and monitor who views any stories their child posts. On Instagram, the company has introduced a new notice to alert parents if their child has blocked somebody.

But safety features that rely on engaged families may mean that new measures may not protect children who lack consistent supervision of a parent or guardian, such as those in the child welfare system and living in group homes, experts warn.

An approach to safety that puts the onus on parents and carers is not enough on its own. Many young people may not be able to speak to a parent about online concerns, particularly children in care, said Rani Govender, senior child safety online policy officer at the National Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children (NSPCC), a UK-based child protection charity. Many parents will not have the technical knowledge or time to supervise their childs social media use.

A 2020 report from the Human Trafficking Institute (HTI), which includes the most recent child trafficking statistics across social media, found Facebook to be the site most often used to recruit and groom child trafficking victims (65%), with Instagram and Snapchat ranking second and third. Child sex trafficking is defined as the sexual exploitation of a child specifically as part of a commercial transaction and according to US law, minors under 18 cannot consent to their own exploitation.

Exploiters look for children online. In earlier days, they would look for them at the mall, but now they are looking for them on social media. Then they target that person and build a relationship with them, said Lisa Goldblatt Grace, co-founder and director of My Life My Choice, a Boston-based non-profit organization supporting survivors of child sex trafficking.

In 2022, 84% of the trafficked children the organization served were in the care of the child welfare system, she says. Across the US, the National Foster Youth Institute estimates that as much as 60% of total child sex trafficking victims have been in foster care or other group homes.

When it comes to commercial sexual exploitation of children, we know that young people who do not have safe and invested parents are disproportionately at risk, said Goldblatt Grace.

A Guardian investigation in April revealed how Meta is failing to report or detect the use of Facebook and Instagram for child trafficking and uncovered how Messenger is being used as a platform for traffickers to communicate to buy and sell children.

These new tools assume they have a parent or guardian watching them on social media, said Tina Frundt, the founder of Courtneys House, an organization supporting minority victims of child sex trafficking in Washington, DC. Sex traffickers have groups all over Instagram and this is how they find kids. These are kids who are the most vulnerable in society, who may have a lack of parental support, mental health issues or little self-esteem.

In June, Meta disclosed it had set up a taskforce to investigate Instagrams role in the distribution and sale of child sexual abuse material.

However, Meta has undergone several rounds of layoffs since November amid plans to eliminate about 21,000 jobs to cut costs. Some of these cuts occurred in the companys content moderator teams, where employees are tasked with detecting and reporting child sex abuse material and other graphic and abusive content on the platforms.

Harms happening on digital platforms are continuously being framed as problems to be solved through increased user responsibility and parental intervention, rather than through meaningful systemic change, said Lianna McDonald, executive director at the Canadian Centre for Child Protection, a charity focused on child safety.

The Canadian Centre for Child Protection and NSPCC have repeatedly called for governments to introduce regulations that address the online safety of children.

Meta has a fundamental responsibility to look at their sites and the algorithms that they use. Child safety online can feel like an uphill battle for even the most present of parents, said Goldblatt Grace. Meta has a responsibility to make its social media platforms safer for kids.

In response to the Guardians request for comment, Sophie Voegel, a spokesperson for Meta, said: The exploitation of children is a horrific crime  we dont allow it and we work aggressively to fight it on and off our platforms. We proactively aid law enforcement in arresting and prosecuting the criminals who perpetrate these grotesque offenses. She added that Meta had removed over 34m pieces of child exploitation and trafficking content between October and December 2022 and have also reported tens of thousands of accounts of suspected traffickers over many years to the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children, which has repeatedly recognized us as an industry leader in the fight to keep young people safe online.

Far from replacing them, our parental supervision tools are intended to complement our existing safeguards to help protect teens from unwanted contact, Meta also said. These include defaulting teens into private accounts when they sign up to Instagram, preventing people over 19 from sending private messages to teens who dont follow them and preventing adults who have shown potentially suspicious behaviour from finding, following and interacting with teen accounts.

 In the US, call or text the Childhelp abuse hotline on 800-422-4453. In the UK, the NSPCC offers support to children on 0800 1111, and adults concerned about a child on 0808 800 5000. The National Association for People Abused in Childhood (Napac) offers support for adult survivors on 0808 801 0331. In Australia, children, young adults, parents and teachers can contact the Kids Helpline on 1800 55 1800, or Bravehearts on 1800 272 831, and adult survivors can contact Blue Knot Foundation on 1300 657 380. Other sources of help can be found at Child Helplines International.
Shortly after the U.S. Supreme Court decision June 29 that ended affirmative action in higher education admissions, Scott Galloway, a professor of marketing at New York Universitys Stern School of Business, well-known podcaster, and provocateur, took to Twitter, writing:

Affirmative Action:

is broadly unpopular

highly vulnerable to legal challenges

disproportionately helps upper-middle-class students of color

pits working-class people of different races against one another

Aid/preference should be given based on incomehttps://t.co/vD86TsUSBJ  Scott Galloway (@profgalloway) June 29, 2023

Leaving aside Galloways arguable declaration about affirmative actions popularity, the man whom Poets&Quants once named one of the worlds 50 best B-school professors definitely hit on a popular idea for a new way to ensure the diversity of college classes. According to a recent Intelligent.com poll, 1 in 3 Americans supports income-based admissions to higher education institutions, as more than half  57%  agree that poor students have a more challenging time achieving high test scores.

The June poll of more than 1,000 respondents highlights a direction many have urged universities  and the business schools within them  to take in the wake of the twin SCOTUS decisions in Students For Fair Admissions Inc. v. University of North Carolina and Students For Fair Admissions Inc. v. President And Fellows Of Harvard College. Of poll respondents who agree with income-based admissions, 68% strongly (32%) or somewhat (37%) agree that colleges should implement a quota system, within which they would be required to accept a certain percentage of economically disadvantaged applicants each year. Scroll Twitter and youll find lots of familiar names from academia who back the idea.

20 OF THE TOP 30 B-SCHOOLS SAW DECLINES IN MINORITY NUMBERS IN 2022

Post-affirmative action, the dimensions of MBA class profile reporting is likely to look different  how different, we dont yet know. Currently, most B-schools follow federal reporting guidelines for race and ethnicity, which include five categories for race: American Indian or Alaska Native, Asian, Black or African American, Native Hawaiian or Other Pacific Islander, and White. There are also two categories for data on ethnicity: Hispanic or Latino, and Not Hispanic or Latino. Most elite B-schools add multi-dimensional reporting which, as Chicago Booth School of Business describes it, depicts students full racial and ethnic identities to more inclusively reflect the racial/ethnic groups they identify with beyond a grouping of Multi-Race.

How will those guidelines change? Will they continue to exist at all? What, if anything, will replace them? What is likely to be a hodgepodge of approaches will be clearer when class profiles for most B-schools are released in late August and early September.

In the meantime, amid all the questions, the numbers contained in this story assume even greater relevance than usual. Significantly, they show (among other things) that well before SCOTUS, minority levels already were on the decline at the majority of B-schools ranked in P&Qs top 30, according to two years of data collected by U.S. News & World Report for its annual ranking.

From the fall of 2021 to the fall of 2022, overall minority numbers declined at four of the top 10 MBA programs, and at 20 of the top 30. (See tables below and on page 3 for details.) Stanford Graduate School of Business led all schools with 33.1% minorities in its MBA program in 2022, just edging out the University of Pennsylvanias Wharton School at 33%. Harvard Business School (32.2%) and Chicago Booth (30.4%) were the other top-10 B-schools over 30%.

Dartmouth College Tuck School of Business is the top-10 B-school with the fewest minorities, at 19.9%; Notre Dame Mendoza College of Business has the fewest in the top 30, at 15.3%. In all, seven schools are above 30% and four below 20%.

BLACK STUDENTS WERE THE TOP MINORITY AT JUST 3 OF TOP 30 B-SCHOOLS IN 2022

Following the federal reporting guidelines, U.S. News collects data not only on overall minority levels in MBA programs but on specific percentages of White, Asian, Hispanic, Black, and other students; in terms of minority status, the latter three account for the most seats, with Native Americans or those claiming two or more races occasionally comprising a significant portion of any given school's class. With few exceptions, students of Asian descent are the most-represented in U.S. MBA programs; at all but a handful of schools, Hispanic students comprised the second-largest minority.

In 2022, Wharton boasted the most Asian students, at 18.8% of the class, followed closely by Carnegie Mellon Tepper School of Business at 18.6%. The school with the lowest percentage of Asian students was Notre Dame Mendoza: 4.3%. Besides four schools for which data was not available, only four schools in the top 30 had other minorities represented in greater numbers than Asians:

Emory Goizueta Business School, where Black students were 10.1% of the MBA program and Asians 8.7%;

Vanderbilt Owen Graduate School of Management, where Black students were 5.5%, Asian students 5.2%, and Hispanic students 4.9%;

Notre Dame Mendoza, where Hispanics were 6.4%, Asians 4.3%, and Blacks 3.2%; and

Georgia Tech Scheller College of Business, where Black and Asian students tied at 10.3%.

Georgia Tech also had the highest percentage of Black students of any school; Emory Goizueta was second at 10.1%. Rochester Simon boasted the highest percentage of Hispanic students, at 9.7%, with MIT Sloan School of Management and USC Marshall School of Business close behind at 9.1% each. The schools with the lowest Black enrollment were Washington Foster School of Business (0.9%) and Carnegie Mellon Tepper (2.3%); Indiana Kelley School of Business had the lowest Hispanic enrollment (2.5%).

YALE SOM LOST MORE THAN HALF ITS HISPANIC STUDENTS Y-O-Y

Year to year from 2021 to 2022, Asian students were up at eight schools' MBA programs, as were Black students; Hispanic students were up at 10. Everywhere else where the data was available to make a comparison, the three minorities declined. The school with the biggest drop in Asian students was Indiana Kelley, which saw a 3.9-percentage-point decline to 10.3%. Rochester Simon Business School saw a 3.3-point decline in Black students, to 9.7%; Texas-Austin McCombs School of Business saw a 2.4-point decline to 4.2%. For Hispanic students the biggest drop-off occurred at Yale School of Management, which lost more than half its population in a year, dropping 3.8 points to 3.6%.

Conversely, the school with the biggest one-year gain in Asian students was Chicago Booth, which boosted its numbers by nearly 6 percentage points to 17.7% of the MBA Class of 2024. Washington Olin Business School and Notre Dame Mendoza each increased their Black student representation by about 2 points to 9.6% and 3.2%, respectively. Wharton upped its Hispanic student numbers by 3.4 points to 4.3%.

Overall, among the 20 schools that saw minority declines year-to-year, the biggest occurred at Georgia Tech Scheller, which dropped 7.3 points to 23.7%. Close behind was Cornell, which dropped 7 points to 21%. The average loss among the 20 schools was 3.5 percentage points.

Among the four schools with year-to-year increases, the biggest by far occurred at Chicago Booth, which jumped 10.3 points to 30.4%. MIT Sloan increased 2.9 points to 27.5%, Notre Dame Mendoza by 1.4 points to 15.3%, and Washington Foster an insignificant 0.1 point to 23.1%. Two schools  Harvard and Vanderbilt  were exactly even between the two years, the former at 32.2% and the latter at 19.8%.

See the next page for expert commentary on the SCOTUS affirmative action decision, and page 3 for a table of minority levels at the MBA programs of the top 30 U.S. B-schools.

'THERE'S JUST NOT ENOUGH SEATS FOR EVERYONE'

Barbara Coward: "When I worked in executive MBA programs, at the end of recruiting season, I always dug through the data because I wanted to come up with trends to be able to say to the class, 'Hey, guess what? This is what's going on'"

B-schools' determination to embrace diversity will be tested, and doubtless the path forward will involve fits and starts. Barbara Coward, founder and principal of MBA 360 Admissions who has worked in both MBA and Executive MBA admissions, says it's an "opportunity to innovate, rather than just saying, 'Hey, this sucks.'

"Absolutely, for certain demographics, it's worrying: What does this mean? But then many Asian Americans are seeing it as a victory in some ways. And so if schools are saying, 'Hey, this is all bad news'  I have worked with clients who are Asian American who would be like, 'Should I not apply now?'

"So it's really tough. It always comes back to the tradeoff between being elite and also being accessible. And the fact of the matter is, there's just not enough seats for everyone."

After years of gathering data on ethnicity with increasing enthusiasm and granularity, will B-schools continue to collect it for internal uses only, leaving it out of MBA and other degree program class profiles? Or will they find a new way to measure and ensure the diversity of their classes?

"I think if they can collect it, they will," Coward says. "At least for internal reporting, you have students or alums coming in to say, 'Tell me what's going on.' When I worked in executive MBA programs, at the end of recruiting season, I always dug through the data because I wanted to come up with trends to be able to say to the class, 'Hey, guess what? This is what's going on. Do you know that we have this percentage of ...'

"And so I think, especially in a data-driven world, there will always continue to be the desire for that."

AN INFLECTION POINT

Building a diverse MBA class is "like a puzzle," Coward says. "Putting that all together, how are you going to do that?"

"You look at the socioeconomic side of things to make sure there's diversity represented in that. And then I go back to personal stories. One example is from a story Poets&Quants did, and he still is the person I mention everywhere all the time because he's just so impressive and amazing: Jerome Fulton, who went to HBS. From his mother to being murdered at the age of 5, how did he end up at HBS? It's just so inspiring.

"The fact is, we have all sorts of statistics. I just think we are at such an inflection point, and there's all different kind of angles to it. Some people are kind of like, 'Ugh, what does this mean for me? Do I have slightly less chance?' And other people will say, 'Well, why aren't they celebrating this? Because I see this and the positive.' So I just think it's going to be really interesting to follow.

"At the end of the day, I always tell people, 'Have some empathy for the poor admissions officers because they're building a class with not enough seats for everyone in on that plane.'"

DIVERSITY 'PART OF B-SCHOOLS' CORE RESPONSIBILITIES TO SOCIETY'

Petia Whitmore: Maintaining diversity is "part of business schools core responsibilities to business and society. Yet, meeting this obligation might become more complicated now that affirmative action has been struck down"

Even in the wake of the SCOTUS rulings that effectively ended affirmative action, U.S. business schools may continue to collect race data  or find a new way to reflect the diversity of their classes  for one very good reason: to demonstrate to potential applicants that the place they hope to spend a significant chunk of their lives is a diverse and welcoming one.

Regardless of the Supreme Court ruling, says Peter Johnson, former assistant dean of the MBA program and admissions at the University of California-Berkeley Haas School of Business and current director for admissions consultancy Fortuna Admissions, diversity will continue to be an admissions priority as educational institutions will still have a compelling interest in creating student populations that reflect the diversity of our country and which help to overcome long-standing inequities."

Petia Whitmore, former dean of MBA admissions at Babson College and founder of My MBA Path admissions consultancy, says that enrolling and educating truly diverse MBA classes is a core aspect of the value proposition of graduate business education  and will remain so. As a former dean of graduate admissions, I also believe its part of business schools core responsibilities to business and society. Yet, meeting this obligation might become more complicated now that affirmative action has been struck down.

If there is a silver lining to all this, it will be that business schools might end up having a much stronger impetus to consider ways to assess and bring more socio-economic diversity into their classrooms.

Adds Linda Abraham, founder of Accepted admissions consultancy: Admissions offices still value diversity, equity and inclusion, and admissions offices for years have maintained that diversity doesnt exclusively mean race and ethnicity. Instead of relying on a box ticked with a specific race or ethnicity, adcoms will seek the qualities and experiences that contribute to diversity and inclusiveness. They will still strive to create the rich and diverse learning environment that they value.

B-schools, she says, have been girding for the end of affirmative action since well before the Supreme Court agreed to hear the two Students For Fair Admissions cases last fall. They have prepared by asking questions that dont ask about race but do ask about the attributes and character strength that come from overcoming challenges, prejudice, and/or hardship or about experiences contributing to or creating an inclusive environment," she says, pointing to several current applications at top schools that promote diversity without mention of race, including at Virginia Darden School of Business, UC-Berkeley Haas, Chicago Booth School of Business, Columbia Business School, and the Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania.

"In addition, several schools require video essays," Abraham adds, "so ethnicity and race will be known by those programs even if the adcom cant see the box. And of course there are interviews.

See the next page for a table showing minority levels at the MBA programs of the top 30 U.S. B-schools.

DON'T MISS SUPREME COURT STRIKES DOWN AFFIRMATIVE ACTION IN HIGHER EDUCATION ADMISSIONS and B-SCHOOLS PUT DIVERSITY, EQUITY & INCLUSION FRONT AND CENTER

The post Minorities At The Leading U.S. MBA Programs: 2/3 Of The Top 30 Report Declines appeared first on Poets&Quants.
News in Brief

The Muskingum Watershed Conservancy District is again providing funding for landowners to seed cover crops. Cover crops not only prevent erosion during the fall and winter, but help improve soil health and farm profitability as well.

Ag producers and landowners can apply through the Wayne Soil and Water Conservation District office in Wooster. An application and list of required information is available at WayneSWCD.org. Hard copies are available at THE SWCDoffice on the ground floor of 428 W. Liberty St., wooster. The application deadline has been extended to July 7, with all information due by that date.

A cost share of $12 per acre for up to 200 acres is available from MWCD for lands within the Muskingum watershed, which spans all or portions of 27 counties in Ohio. Additional funding is specifically targeted for lands that also fall within the Sugar Creek watershed, which is contained within the Muskingum.

For more info visit the SWCD website or call 330-263-5376.

This article originally appeared on The Daily Record: MWSD extends seed cover crop funding signup to July 7
Electricity pylons and power lines in morning mist on the Isle of Grain, UK

National Grid is urging factory owners to cut their electricity use at peak times as part of efforts to bolster power supplies this winter.

The Grid is in talks with the Energy Intensive Users Group (EIUG), which represents heavy industry, over ways for members to reduce their consumption amid concerns of another supply crunch as the war in Ukraine drags on.

After hundreds of thousands of households voluntarily reduced their power usage last winter through the so-called demand flexibility service  where users were paid to avoid peak times  the Grid is hoping to sign up large numbers of energy-hungry businesses as well.

Arjan Geveke, director of the EIUG, said on Monday that industry would participate in the scheme if the rewards were attractive enough and it did not damage their commercial output.

He said: In theory, yes. But it depends on the schemes design and the return businesses actually get for participating.

Mr Geveke said the group had written to the National Grid recently with suggestions on changes that need to be made to the scheme to make it more viable for industrial participants.

One concern is current rules which stop companies that already take part in the capacity market  which requires them to make their own in-house generators available for the grid at certain times  from also joining the demand flexibility service, in which businesses would be paid to switch off their machinery in order to reduce load.

Mr Geveke argued the two were different markets, with different objectives and companies should be able to take part in both.

Jeremy Nicholson, an analyst at consultancy Alfa Energy, said the demand flexibility service was likely to suit some industrial businesses more than others.

For example, those that run continuous production processes using blast furnaces and kilns  including many steel makers and ceramics firms  will be unlikely to switch off easily at short notice.

Others that use batch processes, such as steel makers reliant on electric arcs, some chemical producers, cement producers and parts of gas production could be more likely to participate.

Mr Nicholson added: If you run a continuous process, its unlikely that interrupting or postponing will be a viable option.

So it will very much depend on whether industrial businesses have the capacity to do it and the nature of their business.

Of course, nobody is going to fundamentally damage their relationship with customers to get a few quid off their energy bill. But if it is not disruptive to your business, then why would you not have a conversation about what you can do and what the rewards could be?

Under the demand flexibility system  trialled for the first time last winter  households receive payments of up to 10 a day to cut the amount of electricity they use at certain times.

Kyle Martin, of the National Grid ESO (electricity system operator), said in a letter last month that the service would only be used only when we have, or expect to, exhaust our everyday actions.

He said: This offers the ESO additional access to flexibility during times of system stress.

It came as families were separately told to brace for another surge in energy bills this winter if temperatures plunged below average and an economic recovery in China gained momentum.

Fatih Birol, head of the International Energy Agency, said such a scenario could drive up gas prices and cause fresh misery for households.

He added that governments should push for energy-saving measures and increase their use of renewables to avoid having to intervene to subsidise bills again.

Energy bills are beginning to fall back as markets settle and alternative supplies come online, following a sharp jump when gas shipments from Russia were disrupted after the invasion of Ukraine.

But Mr Birol said he could not rule out another spike in gas prices this winter.

He told the BBCs Today programme that many European governments made strategic mistakes, including being too heavily reliant on Russian energy and being blindfolded by short-term commercial decisions.

A National Grid ESO spokesman said: The ESO is working closely with companies and organisations across the energy sector on the future shape of the Demand Flexibility Service.

We are still consulting on options for this years service and would welcome anyone interested in contributing to respond to the consultation that will close on the 17 July.

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.
The main aim of stock picking is to find the market-beating stocks. But every investor is virtually certain to have both over-performing and under-performing stocks. So we wouldn't blame long term National Tyre & Wheel Limited (ASX:NTD) shareholders for doubting their decision to hold, with the stock down 52% over a half decade. And some of the more recent buyers are probably worried, too, with the stock falling 40% in the last year. On the other hand the share price has bounced 9.6% over the last week.

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.

Check out our latest analysis for National Tyre & Wheel

While markets are a powerful pricing mechanism, share prices reflect investor sentiment, not just underlying business performance. 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.

Looking back five years, both National Tyre & Wheel's share price and EPS declined; the latter at a rate of 16% per year. This change in EPS is reasonably close to the 14% average annual decrease in the share price. This implies that the market has had a fairly steady view of the stock. So it's fair to say the share price has been responding to changes in EPS.

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. Before buying or selling a stock, we always recommend a close examination of historic growth trends, available here..

What About The Total Shareholder Return (TSR)?

We've already covered National Tyre & Wheel's share price action, but we should also mention its 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. National Tyre & Wheel's TSR of was a loss of 35% for the 5 years. That wasn't as bad as its share price return, because it has paid dividends.

A Different Perspective

Investors in National Tyre & Wheel had a tough year, with a total loss of 39%, against a market gain of about 14%. However, keep in mind that even the best stocks will sometimes underperform the market over a twelve month period. Regrettably, last year's performance caps off a bad run, with the shareholders facing a total loss of 6% per year over five years. Generally speaking long term share price weakness can be a bad sign, though contrarian investors might want to research the stock in hope of a turnaround. 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. For instance, we've identified 3 warning signs for National Tyre & Wheel (1 is concerning) that you should be aware of.

National Tyre & Wheel is not the only stock that insiders are buying. 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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Now That Bidens Student Loan Forgiveness Has Been Shot Down by SCOTUS, Whats His Next Move for Borrowers?

DjelicS / Getty Images/iStockphoto

President Joe Biden wasted no time blasting the U.S. Supreme Courts decision to strike down his federal student loan forgiveness plan, saying the court misinterpreted the constitution in ruling against the plan last week and vowing to pursue another path to loan relief for millions of borrowers.

Student Loan Forgiveness: 10 Expenses To Cut From Your Budget When Payments Resume

See: New Student Loan Forgiveness Rule Simplifies Process  Who Qualifies?

The ruling, which came on Friday, June 30, was not unexpected. Most legal experts predicted the conservative-majority SCOTUS would rule against Bidens loan relief program, which aimed to forgive up to $20,000 in debt per borrower.

Find: All of the States That Will Pay Off Your Student Loans

More than 45 million borrowers owe $1.6 trillion in federal college loans, The New York Times reported, citing government data. The debt relief program Biden unveiled last summer would have been one of the most expensive executive actions in U.S. history  which was why many Republicans opposed it and a big reason the Supreme Court ruled against it.

The courts 6-3 decision not only represented a setback for Biden ahead of the 2024 presidential election. It also delivered a financial blow to the 16 million borrowers who had already been approved for debt forgiveness, The Guardian reported.

More homes wouldve been bought and more businesses started had student loans been forgiven, Biden said in remarks delivered at the White House.

I think the court misinterpreted the constitution, he added.

Biden now plans to move forward with a new strategy to provide student loan relief that will center on the Higher Education Act of 1965, the AP reported. Biden called it the best path that remains to provide as many borrowers as possible with debt relief.

He added that the new programs will take longer to ease student loan debt than his original loan forgiveness program and blamed Republicans for leading efforts to overturn it.

These Republican officials just couldnt bear the thought of providing relief for working-class, middle-class Americans, Biden said. The hypocrisy of Republican elected officials is stunning.

The president also plans to implement a 12-month repayment program to help people with student debt avoid defaulting on their loans, according to The Guardian  a major concern at the U.S. Department of Education, which has said that blocking the forgiveness program could lead to a historically large increase in delinquencies and default.

Federal student loan payments are set to resume in October 2023 following a payment pause that began in March 2020.

As the AP noted, many progressives have long argued that the Higher Education Act is the best path to loan forgiveness, but the Biden administration resisted using it because it would take longer to implement on a wide scale. The approach uses a provision that would let Education Secretary Miguel Cardona compromise, waive or release student loans, according to the AP. The administration used the same strategy last year to forgive $6 billion in loans for borrowers who were deceived by their colleges.

The details of the new forgiveness plan will be negotiated through a federal rulemaking process that the White House launched Friday, following the SCOTUS decision. The process lets the Education Department write or change federal regulations with the weight of law, the AP reported.

But borrowers shouldnt get their hopes up yet. Although the Higher Education Act has been used to cancel student debt before, it has never been done at the scale that the Biden administration targets. In 2021, Trump administration lawyers concluded that the education secretary does not have statutory authority to provide blanket or mass cancellation under the act.

More From GOBankingRates

This article originally appeared on GOBankingRates.com: Now That Bidens Student Loan Forgiveness Has Been Shot Down by SCOTUS, Whats His Next Move for Borrowers?
When you see that almost half of the companies in the Insurance industry in Malaysia have price-to-sales ratios (or "P/S") below 0.6x, Pacific & Orient Berhad (KLSE:P&O) looks to be giving off some sell signals with its 1.4x P/S ratio. However, the P/S might be high for a reason and it requires further investigation to determine if it's justified.

Check out our latest analysis for Pacific & Orient Berhad

How Has Pacific & Orient Berhad Performed Recently?

As an illustration, revenue has deteriorated at Pacific & Orient Berhad over the last year, which is not ideal at all. One possibility is that the P/S is high because investors think the company will still do enough to outperform the broader industry in the near future. If not, then existing shareholders may be quite nervous about the viability of the share price.

Want the full picture on earnings, revenue and cash flow for the company? Then our free report on Pacific & Orient Berhad will help you shine a light on its historical performance.

What Are Revenue Growth Metrics Telling Us About The High P/S?

In order to justify its P/S ratio, Pacific & Orient Berhad would need to produce impressive growth in excess of the industry.

Retrospectively, the last year delivered a frustrating 28% decrease to the company's top line. This means it has also seen a slide in revenue over the longer-term as revenue is down 21% in total over the last three years. Therefore, it's fair to say the revenue growth recently has been undesirable for the company.

In contrast to the company, the rest of the industry is expected to grow by 5.1% over the next year, which really puts the company's recent medium-term revenue decline into perspective.

In light of this, it's alarming that Pacific & Orient Berhad's P/S sits above the majority of other companies. It seems most investors are ignoring the recent poor growth rate and are hoping for a turnaround in the company's business prospects. Only the boldest would assume these prices are sustainable as a continuation of recent revenue trends is likely to weigh heavily on the share price eventually.

What We Can Learn From Pacific & Orient Berhad's P/S?

We'd say the price-to-sales ratio's power isn't primarily as a valuation instrument but rather to gauge current investor sentiment and future expectations.

We've established that Pacific & Orient Berhad currently trades on a much higher than expected P/S since its recent revenues have been in decline over the medium-term. When we see revenue heading backwards and underperforming the industry forecasts, we feel the possibility of the share price declining is very real, bringing the P/S back into the realm of reasonability. Should recent medium-term revenue trends persist, it would pose a significant risk to existing shareholders' investments and prospective investors will have a hard time accepting the current value of the stock.

There are also other vital risk factors to consider and we've discovered 2 warning signs for Pacific & Orient Berhad (1 is potentially serious!) that you should be aware of before investing here.

It's important to make sure you look for a great company, not just the first idea you come across. So if growing profitability aligns with your idea of a great company, take a peek at this free list of interesting companies with strong recent earnings growth (and a low P/E).

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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Proposed Pennsylvania tax breaks could result in big tax cuts, but if the tax breaks happen, will they be enough to help Pennsylvania replace the 40,000 residents it lost?

Hoping to attract new residents, Pennsylvania Gov. Josh Shapiro has proposed new Pennsylvania tax breaks. According to recent IRS migration data, Pennsylvania experienced a notable population decline between 2021 and 2022, in part due to high taxes. If the legislation is enacted, some Pennsylvania residents could see significant tax cuts.

If you want to be a police officer, a teacher, or a nurse  we want you here in Pennsylvania, and the Commonwealth is going to put our money where our mouth is and have your back, Gov. Shapiro said in a press release regarding potential tax cuts for essential workers.

The governors announcement related to one of the Keystone State's latest tax break proposals, which would offer an annual $2,500 tax credit to new nurses, police officers, and teachers, including those who move to Pennsylvania with a state-recognized credential.

The Most Expensive States to Die In

Pennsylvania Tax Breaks for Essential Workers

If passed, the tax break for teachers, police officers, and nurses would provide a refundable tax credit of up to $2,500 for some of these workers. The tax credits would be available annually for three years. To qualify, people in these professions would need to meet one of the following criteria.

Have obtained certification or licensure as a police officer, nurse, or teacher in Pennsylvania after January 2023.

Move to Pennsylvania with licensure or certification (from another state) that the Pennsylvania recognizes.

This means that current Pennsylvania workers who obtained certification in prior years would not qualify for the credits.

States With the Highest Gas Taxes

Other Pennsylvania Tax Benefits

Currently, Pennsylvania residents pay a flat 3.7% state income tax rate, but Pennsylvania Sen. Greg Rothman (D-34) wants to eliminate the Commonwealth's personal income tax.

For decades, Pennsylvania has experienced outmigration and brain drain, with working residents, college graduates, and businesses leaving for better opportunities, lower cost of living, and lower taxes. We now face a workforce and population crisis, Rothman stated in a memo to other Senate members, asking them to support the effort.

If Rothman succeeds in eliminating the income tax, the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania would join nine other states that have no personal income tax .

Pennsylvania State Tax Guide

Does PA have the Highest Taxes?

Some people may consider Pennsylvania to be a high-tax state due to generally high property taxes and high gas taxes , and data from the U.S. Census Bureau show that Pennsylvania lost more than 40,000 residents between 2021 and 2022. Only three other states experienced larger population declines during this time period. Illinois, California, and New York lost more residents than Pennsylvania, partly due to these states high tax burdens, based on the most recent IRS migration data.

While some Pennsylvania lawmakers hope these proposed tax breaks will address population and workforce declines, it is unclear if they will be enacted. The tax break for teachers, police officers, and nurses lacks support from state Republicans, which hold the majority in the Pennsylvania Senate, and Sen. Rothman has not yet formally introduced a bill that would eliminate Pennsylvanias personal income tax.
A person in Houston only needs to make $125K to reach the same purchasing power as someone making $312K in New York  is it time to move to a cheaper city?

A person in Houston only needs to make $125K to reach the same purchasing power as someone making $312K in New York  is it time to move to a cheaper city?

While the countrys largest and wealthiest cities generally have the highest cost of living, how far your money will go in some major cities might surprise you.

In fact, a recent study by consumer finance site SmartAsset found a person needs to earn three times the salary to afford the same lifestyle in the city of New York as they would in Houston, Texas.

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The study looked at salaries, taxes and the cost of living in 76 U.S. cities to see how much a resident with a six-figure salary would have to earn to actually have $100K worth of purchasing power.

So while you may bring home a six-figure income, where you live can play a huge role in whether you're able to afford a more luxe livestyle or you end up stuck living paycheck to paycheck.

Is it worth considering a move to a lower-cost city to get more bang for your hard-earned buck?

Getting that six-figure feel

SmartAssets data revealed that people living in Honolulu, New York and San Francisco must bring in over $300,000 annually to have the same disposable income or live the same lifestyle as someone who makes just over $100,000 in other parts of the country.

These metros cost 82% more to live in than the national average and residents who make around $300,000 in these regions face a tax burden of at least 40.5%.

Second only to Honolulu at $312,400, the average New Yorker needs to make $312,000 to get that six-figure feel, according to the report. California is home to five of the most expensive cities with Oakland, Los Angeles, Long Beach and San Diego joining San Francisco in making the top 10 of SmartAsset's list.

Meanwhile, major cities such as Miami and Orlando offset higher costs of living with the fact there are no state income taxes.

Read more: Americans refuse to let higher prices derail their travel plans  10 tactics to keep your summer vacation on budget

The most affordable cities

Low taxes and lower costs of living make some large cities remarkably affordable.

According to SmartAsset, Texas is home to many of these better-value locales, including San Antonio, El Paso and Corpus Cristi. A person living in Houston, Texas' largest city, needs just $125,300 to feel like they made it.

The most affordable city on the list is Memphis, Tennessee where the average worker needs just $117,100 in gross income to get the same result. Oklahoma City, Oklahoma and St. Louis, Missouri  home to almost a million people between them  also made the cut for the top 10 cities where you can get more out of a six-figure salary.

Time to make a move?

Lower taxes, home prices and cost of living are some of the main reasons more people are moving to states like Texas, according to a blog post from real estate firm RedFin. From 2020 to 2021, Texas was one of the fastest-growing states in the U.S. with 596,000 people moving there from other parts of the country.

Whether you're a young professional with a family or you're looking for an affordable place to retire, you may also want to consider whether cheaper cities can retain their cost advantages in the long term. A growing population can eventually lead to issues like housing shortages as well as increases in rent and home prices.

For example, rents in Houston have gone up almost 11% compared to a year ago as the city's population has ballooned over the last two years to make it the fifth most-populous metro area in the country. If the trend continues, the citys economic advantages may erode  though it may take years for expenses to take nearly the same bite out of your budget as the Big Apple.

What to read next

'It's going to be ugly': This CEO issued a dire warning about U.S. real estate, saying areas will be 'destroyed'  but he still likes 1 niche. What it is, and more smart ways to invest

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The US dollar has lost 98% of its purchasing power since 1971  invest in this stable asset before you lose your retirement fund

This article provides information only and should not be construed as advice. It is provided without warranty of any kind.
We feel now is a pretty good time to analyse Piedmont Lithium Inc.'s (ASX:PLL) business as it appears the company may be on the cusp of a considerable accomplishment. Piedmont Lithium Inc., a development stage company, engages in the exploration and development of resource projects in the United States. The AU$1.6b market-cap companys loss lessened since it announced a US$13m loss in the full financial year, compared to the latest trailing-twelve-month loss of US$12m, as it approaches breakeven. As path to profitability is the topic on Piedmont Lithium's investors mind, we've decided to gauge market sentiment. In this article, we will touch on the expectations for the company's growth and when analysts expect it to become profitable.

View our latest analysis for Piedmont Lithium

According to the 5 industry analysts covering Piedmont Lithium, the consensus is that breakeven is near. They expect the company to post a final loss in 2022, before turning a profit of US$95m in 2023. The company is therefore projected to breakeven around a year from now or less! We calculated the rate at which the company must grow to meet the consensus forecasts predicting breakeven within 12 months. It turns out an average annual growth rate of 78% is expected, which signals high confidence from analysts. Should the business grow at a slower rate, it will become profitable at a later date than expected.

Given this is a high-level overview, we wont go into details of Piedmont Lithium's upcoming projects, though, keep in mind that generally metals and mining companies, depending on the stage of operation and metals mined, have irregular periods of cash flow. So, a high growth rate is not out of the ordinary, particularly when a company is in a period of investment.

One thing wed like to point out is that The company has managed its capital judiciously, with debt making up 0.1% of equity. This means that it has predominantly funded its operations from equity capital, and its low debt obligation reduces the risk around investing in the loss-making company.

Next Steps:

There are key fundamentals of Piedmont Lithium which are not covered in this article, but we must stress again that this is merely a basic overview. For a more comprehensive look at Piedmont Lithium, take a look at Piedmont Lithium's company page on Simply Wall St. We've also put together a list of essential aspects you should further examine:

Historical Track Record: What has Piedmont Lithium's performance been like over the past? Go into more detail in the past track record analysis and take a look at the free visual representations of our analysis for more clarity. Management Team: An experienced management team on the helm increases our confidence in the business  take a look at who sits on Piedmont Lithium's board and the CEOs background. Other High-Performing Stocks: Are there other stocks that provide better prospects with proven track records? Explore our free list of these great stocks 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.

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
Shares of Tesla TSLA have gained remarkably, pushing the market value of the electric vehicles (EV) manufacturer into the trillion-dollar range. Due to this notable rally, several analysts have begun to question the stock's valuation, which has resulted in downgrades.

According to an article on Reuters, Goldman Sachs recently downgraded Tesla to a "hold" rating, aligning with Morgan Stanley and Barclays. Despite the downgrade, the brokerages adjusted their price targets to reflect the remarkable surge in Tesla shares, which have risen 71% since late April and more than doubled this year. While acknowledging the exceptional momentum, they remain optimistic about Tesla's prospects, anticipating robust growth in the coming period.

For investors looking to capitalize on Tesla's performance while mitigating risk, we present a selection of ETFs that offer significant exposure to the EV giant. These ETFs provide an opportunity to bet on Teslas success with reduced risk levels. Meet Kevin Pricing Power ETF PP, Consumer Discretionary Select Sector SPDR Fund XLY, ARK Autonomous Technology & Robotics ETF ARKQ, Fidelity MSCI Consumer Discretionary Index ETF FDIS and Vanguard Consumer Discretionary ETF VCR.

Investigating the Downgrade

As per Yahoo Finance, analysts question Tesla's ability to maintain its outstanding performance as the company's stock price soars further. Although it is acknowledged that the EV manufacturer has succeeded in building an "EV castle" with revenue sources like the supercharger network and collaborations with rivals like Ford F, General Motors GM and Rivian RIVN, questions continue to arise about the reliability of some growth drivers.

Particularly, analysts suggest that autonomous driving and generative AI are separate technological fields, raising doubts about the AI-related stock increase. Margin issues and price reductions are two pre-existing factors influencing the stock, according to Adam Jonas of Morgan Stanley.

Powering Past the Negatives

The appointment of a new CEO at Twitter, clever supercharging licensing arrangements, and an unusual spike in artificial intelligence-related equities combined to produce a perfect environment, causing share prices to skyrocket by more than 100% within a year.

Tesla's upward trend can be linked to a series of favorable developments during the last two months. Rival manufacturers Ford and General Motors have entered into agreements to acquire access to Tesla's charging network, which may cement it as the industry standard.

Furthermore, China's recent announcement of a significant $72.3 billion (520 billion yuan) tax cut package for EVs and other environmentally friendly vehicles boosted Tesla's stock even further.

The combination of these elements has catapulted Tesla to new heights, strengthening its status as a disruptive force in the automotive industry and making it the most significant global car firm in terms of market value.

Volvo Joins Ford and General Motors in a Significant Move

As mentioned in an article in Reuters, Volvo Cars VLVLY collaborated with Tesla to allow its EVs access to the latters renowned Supercharger network encompassing the United States, Canada and Mexico. Volvo becomes the first European automaker to adopt Tesla's North American Charging Standard (NACS), joining a growing list of EV manufacturers and charging equipment providers that have adopted this cutting-edge technology. Volvo vehicles in the three countries will be equipped with the NACS port beginning in 2025, allowing access to Tesla's Supercharger network.

Teslas EV Charging Superiority

As mentioned in a Reuters article, Tesla EV charging technology is quickly gaining popularity as a potential North American standard, offering a big boost to the company's attempts to broaden access to its formerly private charging infrastructure.

Multiple automakers have recently embraced Tesla's charging design, rejecting previous attempts by the Biden administration to establish the Combined Charging System (CCS) as the dominant standard in the United States. Tesla's North American Charging Standard (NACS) is more readily accessible and reliable than the competing CCS charging network (Read: Top EV ETFs for Electrifying Gains as Charging Network Expands).

Revving Up Revenue

According to Investors business daily, Wall Street experts forecast Tesla's delivery to grow 74% to 445,000 units in Q2. This considerable year-over-year rise can be attributed to favorable comparisons to Q2 2022 when Tesla's Shanghai plant was temporarily closed due to COVID-19 lockdowns. Analysts predict that Tesla will supply around 1.82 million vehicles in 2023, exceeding the 1.313 million shipped in 2022.

Per Reuters, Tesla is on track to have another record-breaking quarter in China, thanks to robust sales. However, the business is facing increased rivalry from domestic rivals such as BYD, resulting in a modest loss in Tesla's market share in China's battery electric car segment. Analysts predict that Tesla will sell around 155,000 vehicles in China between April and June, a 13% rise over the previous record-breaking quarter.

ETFs in Focus

Meet Kevin Pricing Power ETF (PP)

The fund has an exposure of 24.4% in Tesla, making it the top holding. Meet Kevin Pricing Power ETF has gathered an asset base of $37.13 million and has a basket of 17 securities. PP charges an annual fee of 0.77%.

Meet Kevin Pricing Power ETF has earned 50.55% year to date and 19.37% in the last three months.

Consumer Discretionary Select Sector SPDR Fund (XLY)

Consumer Discretionary Select Sector SPDR Fund has 19.27% exposure in Tesla along with an asset base of $17.02 billion. XLY has a basket of 53 securities and charges an annual fee of 0.10%.

The fund has a Zacks ETF Rank #1 (Strong Buy) and a Medium risk outlook. Consumer Discretionary Select Sector SPDR Fund has generated 30.34% year to date and 18.44% in the last three months.

ARK Autonomous Technology & Robotics ETF (ARKQ)

Employing an active strategy, ARK Autonomous Technology & Robotics ETF has an exposure of 14.59% in Tesla, making it the top holding in the fund. The fund has amassed an asset base of $1.04 billion and has a basket of 34 securities. ARKQ charges an annual fee of 0.75%.

ARK Autonomous Technology & Robotics ETF has a Medium risk outlook and has added 35.21% year to date and 16.84% in the last three months.

Fidelity MSCI Consumer Discretionary Index ETF (FDIS)

Fidelity MSCI Consumer Discretionary Index ETF has an exposure of 11.99% in Tesla. FDIS has gathered an asset base of $1.19 billion. The fund charges an annual fee of 0.08%.

The fund has a Zacks ETF Rank #2 (Buy) and a Medium risk outlook. Fidelity MSCI Consumer Discretionary Index ETF has generated 28.14% year to date and 16.46% in the last three months.

Vanguard Consumer Discretionary ETF (VCR)

Vanguard Consumer Discretionary ETF has an exposure of 13.39% in Tesla. VCR has amassed an asset base of $4.59 billion and has a basket of 309 securities. The fund charges an annual fee of 0.10%.

The fund has a Zacks ETF Rank #1 and a Medium risk outlook. Vanguard Consumer Discretionary ETF has earned 28.01% year to date and 16.44% in the last three months.

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Ford Motor Company (F) : Free Stock Analysis Report

General Motors Company (GM) : Free Stock Analysis Report

Tesla, Inc. (TSLA) : Free Stock Analysis Report

Consumer Discretionary Select Sector SPDR ETF (XLY): ETF Research Reports

Vanguard Consumer Discretionary ETF (VCR): ETF Research Reports

ARK Autonomous Technology & Robotics ETF (ARKQ): ETF Research Reports

Fidelity MSCI Consumer Discretionary Index ETF (FDIS): ETF Research Reports

AB Volvo (VLVLY) : Free Stock Analysis Report

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Rivian Automotive, Inc. (RIVN) : Free Stock Analysis Report

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Deciphering ancient languages and texts has been a challenge for archaeologists for generations. Now, researchers are using artificial intelligence to quickly translate ancient texts and languages into Englishincluding ancient Cuneiform and Egyptian hieroglyphs.

In a new Oxford Academic report, a group of AI developers details how they were able to use natural language processing (NLP) to translate cuneiform tablets from Akkadian into English.

"Hundreds of thousands of clay tablets inscribed in the cuneiform script document the political, social, economic, and scientific history of ancient Mesopotamia," the report said. "Yet, most of these documents remain untranslated and inaccessible due to their sheer number and limited quantity of experts able to read them."

But using AI to read ancient text is not as simple as running a picture through a ChatGPT plugin.

"The main challenge for us is the lack of a large amount of data," Gai Gutherz, who co-authored the report, told Decrypt in an interview. "There is only a small amount of data you could use to train the models; we managed to get to tens of thousandss [of] examples."

Meta Is Training Its AI on the Bible and Other Religious Texts

Gutherz, a software engineer at Google, said that while translating Akkadian proved more challenging than Spanish, there was a large amount of data to pull from because it was a widely spoken and written language in its time.

"Akkadian is a very important language. It was the common language in the old Middle East and Mesopotamia," Gutherz said. "People in Mesopotamia spoke different languages and used Akkadian to communicate. It was used as English is today."

Cuneiform, meanwhile, originated around 3400 BCE and is one of the earliest writing systems used to document several ancient dialects, including Sumerian, Akkadian, Hittite, Aramaic, and Old Persian.

The oldest surviving literary work, the Epic of Gilgamesh, discovered in 1853, was written over 4,000 years ago in the Akkadian language using cuneiform script.

In May, an Italian research team published a paper detailing how AI can be used to detect ancient sites for archaeological discovery in the Mesopotamian floodplains. Earlier this month, researchers used AI to discover Nasca geoglyphs, etchings of humans and animals, in Peru.

Another project looking to help modern researchers understand ancient languages and text is Google Fabricius. Fabricius lets users decode ancient Egyptian hieroglyphs into English using online tools developed by the tech giant.

"The easiest way to understand hieroglyphs is to imagine that they are the ancient Egyptian equivalent of emojis," Fabricius said.

Researchers Can Identify AI-Generated Academic Writing with '99% Accuracy'

The Oxford report said that the problem in translating these ancient texts is finding a complete tablet, saying that clay tablets are rarely preserved in their entirety, and as a result, neural machine translation, as well as human translation, are affected by a lack of context.

"It's a relatively old language that has been extinct for over 2,000 years and has many examples," Gutherz said. "So it's easier to work with compared to languages that you have just dozens of translated texts."

The researchers working with Gutherz developed the website, The Babylonian Engine, to showcase their technology. While the name may sound like the evil robot overlord of a cyberpunk novel, the project aims to conduct translations for various ancient languages, starting with Akkadian.

As Gutherz explained, the model used to train the Babylonian Engine AI, known as Akkademia, is open-sourced and available to view on the project's Github.

"We have a lot to learn from ancient history; the first letters and books were written in Akkadian and other ancient languages," Gutherz said. "I think it's super interesting to try to make it more accessible and translate [Akkadian] into English and other languages that people speak today."
Did you know there are some financial metrics that can provide clues of a potential multi-bagger? Amongst other things, we'll want to see two things; firstly, a growing return on capital employed (ROCE) and secondly, an expansion in the company's amount of capital employed. If you see this, it typically means it's a company with a great business model and plenty of profitable reinvestment opportunities. With that in mind, the ROCE of Coca-Cola HBC (LON:CCH) looks decent, right now, so lets see what the trend of returns can tell us.

What Is Return On Capital Employed (ROCE)?

If you haven't worked with ROCE before, it measures the 'return' (pre-tax profit) a company generates from capital employed in its business. Analysts use this formula to calculate it for Coca-Cola HBC:

Return on Capital Employed = Earnings Before Interest and Tax (EBIT)  (Total Assets - Current Liabilities)

0.13 = 882m  (9.9b - 3.0b) (Based on the trailing twelve months to December 2022).

Therefore, Coca-Cola HBC has an ROCE of 13%. That's a pretty standard return and it's in line with the industry average of 13%.

See our latest analysis for Coca-Cola HBC

roce

In the above chart we have measured Coca-Cola HBC's prior ROCE against its prior performance, but the future is arguably more important. If you'd like, you can check out the forecasts from the analysts covering Coca-Cola HBC here for free.

The Trend Of ROCE

While the current returns on capital are decent, they haven't changed much. The company has consistently earned 13% for the last five years, and the capital employed within the business has risen 45% in that time. 13% is a pretty standard return, and it provides some comfort knowing that Coca-Cola HBC has consistently earned this amount. Stable returns in this ballpark can be unexciting, but if they can be maintained over the long run, they often provide nice rewards to shareholders.

The Bottom Line On Coca-Cola HBC's ROCE

In the end, Coca-Cola HBC has proven its ability to adequately reinvest capital at good rates of return. In light of this, the stock has only gained 8.7% over the last five years for shareholders who have owned the stock in this period. So to determine if Coca-Cola HBC is a multi-bagger going forward, we'd suggest digging deeper into the company's other fundamentals.

Like most companies, Coca-Cola HBC does come with some risks, and we've found 4 warning signs that you should be aware of.

For those who like to invest in solid companies, check out this free list of companies with solid balance sheets and high returns on equity.

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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If we want to find a stock that could multiply over the long term, what are the underlying trends we should look for? Typically, we'll want to notice a trend of growing return on capital employed (ROCE) and alongside that, an expanding base of capital employed. If you see this, it typically means it's a company with a great business model and plenty of profitable reinvestment opportunities. Although, when we looked at A-Rank Berhad (KLSE:ARANK), it didn't seem to tick all of these boxes.

Return On Capital Employed (ROCE): What Is It?

For those who don't know, ROCE is a measure of a company's yearly pre-tax profit (its return), relative to the capital employed in the business. To calculate this metric for A-Rank Berhad, this is the formula:

Return on Capital Employed = Earnings Before Interest and Tax (EBIT)  (Total Assets - Current Liabilities)

0.092 = RM20m  (RM318m - RM96m) (Based on the trailing twelve months to April 2023).

Therefore, A-Rank Berhad has an ROCE of 9.2%. Even though it's in line with the industry average of 9.0%, it's still a low return by itself.

View our latest analysis for A-Rank Berhad

roce

Historical performance is a great place to start when researching a stock so above you can see the gauge for A-Rank Berhad's ROCE against it's prior returns. If you want to delve into the historical earnings, revenue and cash flow of A-Rank Berhad, check out these free graphs here.

The Trend Of ROCE

On the surface, the trend of ROCE at A-Rank Berhad doesn't inspire confidence. To be more specific, ROCE has fallen from 15% over the last five years. On the other hand, the company has been employing more capital without a corresponding improvement in sales in the last year, which could suggest these investments are longer term plays. It may take some time before the company starts to see any change in earnings from these investments.

Our Take On A-Rank Berhad's ROCE

To conclude, we've found that A-Rank Berhad is reinvesting in the business, but returns have been falling. Unsurprisingly, the stock has only gained 33% over the last five years, which potentially indicates that investors are accounting for this going forward. As a result, if you're hunting for a multi-bagger, we think you'd have more luck elsewhere.

One more thing to note, we've identified 2 warning signs with A-Rank Berhad and understanding them should be part of your investment process.

For those who like to invest in solid companies, check out this free list of companies with solid balance sheets and high returns on equity.

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

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(Bloomberg) -- Rivian Automotive Inc. built more battery-electric vehicles last quarter than Wall Street had anticipated as the company works to ramp up production and overcome a string of supply-chain issues. Its shares soared by double-digits in early trading Monday.

Most Read from Bloomberg

The company also reaffirmed its previous guidance that its on track to make 50,000 EVs this year, according to a statement. It made just shy of 25,000 vehicles in 2022. Leaders of the Irvine, California-based manufacturer in March told employees internally that output of 62,000 this year was possible, Bloomberg has reported.

Its shares rose 15% to $19.14 of 9:46 a.m. in New York, coming after larger rival Tesla Inc. also posted a beat for second-quarter deliveries. Rivians stock had declined 9.6% this year through Fridays close after plunging more than 80% in 2022.

Read more: Tesla and BYD Post Record Sales on Surge in Electric-Car Demand

Rivian produced 13,992 vehicles and delivered 12,640 to customers in the three months ended June 30. Analysts had expected the company to make about 12,562, according to an average of estimates compiled by Bloomberg. The quarterly total  which includes figures for its two passenger vehicles and a commercial plug-in van for investor and customer Amazon.com Inc.  was up from the 9,395 it built in the first quarter.

Rivian is fighting to maintain its status as a leading contender among a pack of EV startups to challenge market leader Tesla. Rivian grabbed the spotlight with a blockbuster market debut in 2021, but has struggled since with supply-chain headaches, lowered expectations and a severe drop in the companys market value.

The company has been able to ease a supply-chain bottleneck by developing a two-motor powertrain in-house known as Enduro. The technology supplements a four-motor design made by Robert Bosch GmbH that has faced lingering backlogs. That has helped it boost output of its R1S electric SUV, which accounts for about 70% of its pre-orders.

Rivian said it will announce second-quarter financial results on Aug. 8.

(Updates with opening shares in third paragraph.)

Most Read from Bloomberg Businessweek

2023 Bloomberg L.P.
Saudi Arabia and Russia curb oil supply again to try to boost prices

Saudi Arabia and Russia announced Monday that they would make additional cuts to oil supply as a global economic slowdown hangs over the outlook for energy demand.

Saudi Arabia  the worlds biggest exporter of crude oil  said it would extend a cut of 1 million barrels a day in its oil production at least until the end of August. The cut, which took effect on Saturday, was initially planned to last for the month of July in an attempt to shore up oil prices.

Russias Deputy Prime Minister Alexander Novak said that his country would voluntarily cut supplies by 500,000 barrels per day in August by cutting exports. Reuters reported, citing Novaks office, that Russia would reduce production by that amount, deepening a cut of the same size Moscow implemented in March.

The announcements sent prices for Brent crude, the global oil benchmark, up 0.7% to trade at $76 a barrel at 7.15 a.m. ET. WTI, the US benchmark, rose 0.8% to $71. Oil prices have fallen by more than 40% since March last year when they hit a 14-year high in the wake of Russias full-scale invasion of Ukraine.

Saudi Arabia needs Brent crude to trade at around $81 a barrel in order to balance its budget, according to the International Monetary Fund. The kingdom has slipped back into a budget deficit this year after reporting a surplus in 2022 for the first time in almost a decade.

The Gulf state first announced its 1-million barrel cut after a meeting in June between members of the Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC), Russia and other smaller producers, an alliance known as OPEC+.

This additional voluntary cut comes to reinforce the precautionary efforts made by OPEC+ countries with the aim of supporting the stability and balance of oil markets, the Saudi Press Agency quoted an official source in the Ministry of Energy as saying Monday.

At the June meeting, Riyadh also said it would extend a production cut of 500,000 barrels per day  first announced in April  to the end of next year. Taken together, the cuts will reduce Saudi Arabias total oil output to nine million barrels per day.

Other OPEC+ members have pledged to slash output through the end of 2024 amid a disappointing outlook for global demand, and as a strong post-pandemic rebound in the Chinese economy looks increasingly unlikely.

Chinese factory survey data, released Monday, showed only modest growth in activity in the worlds second largest economy last month, with some firms cutting staff as sales came in weaker than expected.

Optimism around the 12-month outlook for production waned to an eight-month low in June, as some firms expressed concerns over relatively sluggish market conditions, analysts at S&P Global wrote in Mondays report.

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Scorpio Tankers Inc.'s (NYSE:STNG) large institutional owners must be happy as stock continues to impress, up 11% over the past week

Key Insights

Institutions' substantial holdings in Scorpio Tankers implies that they have significant influence over the company's share price

A total of 16 investors have a majority stake in the company with 50% ownership

Ownership research along with analyst forecasts data help provide a good understanding of opportunities in a stock

To get a sense of who is truly in control of Scorpio Tankers Inc. (NYSE:STNG), it is important to understand the ownership structure of the business. With 72% stake, institutions possess the maximum shares in the company. Put another way, the group faces the maximum upside potential (or downside risk).

Last weeks 11% gain means that institutional investors were on the positive end of the spectrum even as the company has shown strong longer-term trends. The gains from last week would have further boosted the one-year return to shareholders which currently stand at 40%.

Let's delve deeper into each type of owner of Scorpio Tankers, beginning with the chart below.

View our latest analysis for Scorpio Tankers

What Does The Institutional Ownership Tell Us About Scorpio Tankers?

Institutional investors commonly compare their own returns to the returns of a commonly followed index. So they generally do consider buying larger companies that are included in the relevant benchmark index.

We can see that Scorpio Tankers does have institutional investors; and they hold a good portion of the company's stock. 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. If multiple institutions change their view on a stock at the same time, you could see the share price drop fast. It's therefore worth looking at Scorpio Tankers' earnings history below. Of course, the future is what really matters.

Since institutional investors own more than half the issued stock, the board will likely have to pay attention to their preferences. Scorpio Tankers is not owned by hedge funds. Dimensional Fund Advisors LP is currently the largest shareholder, with 7.1% of shares outstanding. For context, the second largest shareholder holds about 7.0% of the shares outstanding, followed by an ownership of 5.4% by the third-largest shareholder. Additionally, the company's CEO Emanuele Lauro directly holds 1.4% of the total shares outstanding.

After doing some more digging, we found that the top 16 have the combined ownership of 50% in the company, suggesting that no single shareholder has significant control over the company.

Researching institutional ownership is a good way to gauge and filter a stock's expected performance. The same can be achieved by studying analyst sentiments. There are plenty of analysts covering the stock, so it might be worth seeing what they are forecasting, too.

Insider Ownership Of Scorpio Tankers

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. 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.

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 Scorpio Tankers Inc.. It is a pretty big company, so it is generally a positive to see some potentially meaningful alignment. In this case, they own around US$151m worth of shares (at current prices). If you would like to explore the question of insider alignment, you can click here to see if insiders have been buying or selling.

General Public Ownership

The general public, who are usually individual investors, hold a 11% stake in Scorpio Tankers. While this group can't necessarily call the shots, it can certainly have a real influence on how the company is run.

Private Company Ownership

It seems that Private Companies own 7.1%, of the Scorpio Tankers stock. It might be worth looking deeper into this. If related parties, such as insiders, have an interest in one of these private companies, that should be disclosed in the annual report. Private companies may also have a strategic interest in the company.

Public Company Ownership

We can see that public companies hold 4.1% of the Scorpio Tankers shares on issue. It's hard to say for sure but this suggests they have entwined business interests. This might be a strategic stake, so it's worth watching this space for changes in ownership.

Next Steps:

While it is well worth considering the different groups that own a company, there are other factors that are even more important. Consider for instance, the ever-present spectre of investment risk. We've identified 2 warning signs with Scorpio Tankers (at least 1 which doesn't sit too well with us) , and understanding them should be part of your investment process.

Ultimately the future is most important. You can access this free report on analyst forecasts for the company.

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.

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
sold and for sale signs, as more than four in 10 (42%) house sellers are having to shave more than 5% off the original asking price to achieve a sale

Property sellers are being forced to slash their asking prices in droves as the housing market struggles under the weight of surging borrowing costs.

A third of all homes for sale in the fourth week of June were listed with discounts on their asking prices  up from 18pc in the same week a year earlier and even higher than during the Covid crisis, according to property website Rightmove.

It came as separate data revealed that retail insolvencies had surged almost 60pc to the highest level for a decade as rising borrowing costs inflict a toll on the struggling high street.

The jump in house price cuts corresponds directly with a doubling of mortgage rates, with the average two-year fix rising from 3.25pc in June 2022 to 6.39pc on Friday, according to Moneyfacts.

This means that the monthly cost of a typical 200,000 loan has risen by 362 in the past year. Over the course of a two-year fix, this total extra cost amounts to nearly 9,000.

The Rightmove data is likely to send a fresh chill through the market as agents and economists brace for a slump in activity and prices.

The market is already suffering, with the average selling price down 3.5pc in the year to June at 262,239 according to Nationwide.

Matt Johnson, of Johns&Co estate agents in London, said some vendors were being forced to cut asking prices by 10pc in order to secure a deal.

His customers have cut prices on 160 properties in the past two months, up from 51 in the first two months of the year.

Some buy-to-let investors are particularly motivated to make quick sales because mortgage rate rises have hit their profit margins, Mr Johnson added.

He said: We have seen more people take a bit of a hit on their price because their view now is that the investment doesnt make as good sense as it has previously.

Meanwhile, analysis by the law firm RPC showed that 1,942 retail businesses have gone bust in the past 12 months, up 56pc from the previous year. Among the most high profile failures were Jules and Made.com, with both brands ultimately acquired by bigger rivals.

The share of homes for sale with discounts is now higher than before the Covid pandemic began. In the same week in June 2019, 32pc of homes listed for sale had their prices reduced.

Mike Staton, of Staton Mortgages, a broker in Nottinghamshire, said there is also a huge difference between advertised prices and those which sellers are actually able to achieve  even after a cut.

Mr Staton blamed ridiculous marketing valuations for unrealistic prices that do not reflect the current state of the market.

He said: Many vendors still believe its 2018, whilst buyers think its 2008. We have seen a lot of down valuations.

In one case, a mortgage lender downgraded a propertys value by 38,000 compared to its agreed sale price, Mr Staton added.

Simon Barry, of Harrods Estates, a London agent, said the worst of the blow from rate rises is still yet to hit, as homeowners come to the end of their fixed rate mortgage deals.

He said: Its got to happen. [At the top of the market] I suspect we are going to see people shuffling assets around and paying their mortgages down.

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A bill calling for revising the common carrier obligation was introduced in the Senate last week. (Photo: Jim Allen/FreightWaves)

A bipartisan bill that charges the Surface Transportation Board to better define what should constitute reasonable rail service has been reintroduced in the Senate.

The Reliable Rail Service Act, introduced by Sens. Tammy Baldwin, D-Wis., and Roger Marshall, R-Kan., charges the Surface Transportation Board to refine the definition of the common carrier obligation, which the senators say is currently ambiguous.

The common carrier obligation calls upon the railroads to provide rail service on a reasonable request. The federal statute came out of the Staggers Act of 1980, which deregulated the freight rail industry. In return for deregulating the rail industry and enabling the railroads to have greater input in their business decisions, the freight railroads must provide service to rail shippers.

Baldwin had introduced a similar bill last September.

According to a bill summary provided by Baldwin, the legislation seeks to clarify the common carrier obligation and establish specific criteria for STB to determine whether a rail carrier has violated the common carrier obligation.

That criteria includes the impacts that reductions or changes in rail service might have had on rail service; the availability and maintenance of reasonable local service schedules and delivery windows; the impacts of reductions in employment levels and in equipment; and the ability of the railroad to meet local operational and service requirements.

The Reliable Rail Service Act gives the Board necessary statutory clarity along with significant discretion and flexibility to account for variations unique to local rail carrier and shipper circumstances, which will provide transparency for all stakeholders while improving STBs oversight to help address our nations freight railroad supply chain challenges and lower costs for consumers, said the bill summary.

Defining what should be considered as sufficient rail service and determining whether individual railroads have been meeting their common carrier obligation have been key issues in recent years. A number of rail shippers and rail unions have argued over the last year in particular that the decline in railroads head count levels, which they attributed to precision scheduled railroading as well as to layoffs during COVID-19 pandemic, may have hampered rail service because there werent enough crews and resources available to meet market demand.

Meanwhile, recent proceedings involving BNSF (NYSE: BRK-B) and Union Pacific (NYSE: UNP) have also raised questions about whether STB should redefine the common carrier obligation and whether Congress can grant the board the authority to do so.

Last weeks introduction of the Reliable Rail Service Act garnered support from more than 30 shippers groups as well as 14 rail unions.

Clarification of the common carrier obligation has been needed for decades and this bipartisan bill provides Surface Transportation Board (STB) with clear oversight rules to help address our nations freight railroad supply chain challenges and improve rail service for agricultural shippers, said Mike Seyfert, president and CEO of the National Grain and Feed Association, in a news release last week.

American dairy producers rely upon fair and consistent rail service on both ends of their business  from sourcing feed and inputs to transporting dairy products to end customers, both domestic and foreign, said Jim Mulhern, president and CEO of the National Milk Producers Federation (NMPF). The logistics challenges that have plagued the dairy industry over the past several years have been exacerbated by outdated rules governing rail freight movements.

NMPF thanks Senators Baldwin and Marshall for introducing the bipartisan Reliable Rail Service Act today that would provide statutory clarity and enhanced oversight to the Surface Transportation Board to correct the rail transportation challenges faced by the U.S. dairy industry. We look forward to working with Congress to move this important legislation into law.

Subscribe to FreightWaves e-newsletters and get the latest insights on freight right in your inbox

Click here for more FreightWaves articles by Joanna Marsh.

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Dublin, Ireland--(Newsfile Corp. - July 3, 2023) - Setupad, an ad revenue optimization platform for publishers, has secured the esteemed title of a Google Certified Publishing Partner (GCPP). As a leading ad monetization platform, this recognition from Google showcases Setupad's commitment to delivering exceptional services to publishers and maximizing their revenue potential.





Figure 1

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"We are one of the earliest companies in the Baltics to have been recognized as a GCPP, which is a huge honor. The GCPP badge indicates that the company has been carefully vetted and approved by Google and has a track record of sustainably growing publishers' ad revenue, which is exactly what we were committed to from the very beginning. Partners like us are able to advise on the best ad monetization strategy and work out the optimal workflow that complements Google's publisher products. This allows us to support publishers of various sizes and eliminate barriers of entry," said Toms Panders, Co-founder and CEO of Setupad.

Since 2015, Setupad has been committed to supporting publishers in maximizing their ad revenues and overcoming both technological and industry-wide challenges. The company prides itself on personalized support and a meticulous individual approach, which was recognized by the highest levels of customer satisfaction.

Fast forward 8 years, the company has advanced incredibly on the technological side, having built its own ad server, integrated 11 server-to-server connections, and transformed into a full-scale website optimization and online business consultancy company.

Current Setupad's product stack comprises various types of header bidding and Google Ad Exchange integrations, including options for enterprise-level customers. Besides, Setupad has forged relationships with 31 leading SSPs, including OpenX, Index Exchange, Magnite, and Pubmatic, which allowed the company to extend premium demand to a portfolio of more than 500 international publishers and strengthen its position as a market leader.

Today, the company is rapidly shifting towards a SaaS business model, which allows it to scale quicker and cater to more publishers with different needs. An example is Setupad's Prebid self-serve platform, which gives publishers innovative management infrastructure and tools to unlock new revenue opportunities while maintaining complete control of their inventory.

GCPPs undergo a serious evaluation process by Google to demonstrate high-quality standards and innovation, as well as their expertise and knowledge in implementing and optimizing publisher solutions. The acceptance into the GCPP program will act as an additional symbol of trust for publishers, offering Setupad early access to Google's product and partner-exclusive resources, specialized training, and even more seamless integration with Google's account management structure, ensuring the company remains at the forefront of industry trends.

About Setupad

Setupad is an ad revenue monetization platform and one of the few bootstrapped scaleups in the Baltic region. It delivers over 4 billion monthly ad impressions and works with over 500 international publishers, including Deutsche Welle, Kyiv Post, and Entrepreneur. Having a strong reputation for safeguarding accountability and transparency of the advertising ecosystem, Setupad is also an official Prebid member, which ensures fair, transparent, and efficient header bidding usage across the web.

Media Contact

Alise Zaiceva

Email: alise@setupad.com

+37127818574



Figure 2

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To view the source version of this press release, please visit https://www.newsfilecorp.com/release/171996
Generally, when a single insider buys stock, it is usually not a big deal. However, when several insiders are buying, like in the case of Rolls-Royce Holdings plc (LON:RR.), it sends a favourable message to the company's shareholders.

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.

View our latest analysis for Rolls-Royce Holdings

The Last 12 Months Of Insider Transactions At Rolls-Royce Holdings

In the last twelve months, the biggest single purchase by an insider was when Independent Non-Executive Chairman Anita Frew bought UK82k worth of shares at a price of UK0.82 per share. Even though the purchase was made at a significantly lower price than the recent price (UK1.51), we still think insider buying is a positive. Because the shares were purchased at a lower price, this particular buy doesn't tell us much about how insiders feel about the current share price.

Rolls-Royce Holdings insiders may have bought shares in the last year, but they didn't sell any. They paid about UK0.98 on average. To my mind it is good that insiders have invested their own money in the company. However, you should keep in mind that they bought when the share price was meaningfully below today's levels. You can see a visual depiction of insider transactions (by companies and individuals) over the last 12 months, below. If you want to know exactly who sold, for how much, and when, simply click on the graph below!

Rolls-Royce Holdings is not the only stock insiders are buying. So take a peek at this free list of growing companies with insider buying.

Insiders At Rolls-Royce Holdings Have Bought Stock Recently

It's good to see that Rolls-Royce Holdings insiders have made notable investments in the company's shares. Not only was there no selling that we can see, but they collectively bought UK98k worth of shares. This is a positive in our book as it implies some confidence.

Insider Ownership

I like to look at how many shares insiders own in a company, to help inform my view of how aligned they are with insiders. I reckon it's a good sign if insiders own a significant number of shares in the company. From looking at our data, insiders own UK3.3m worth of Rolls-Royce Holdings stock, about 0.03% of the company. I generally like to see higher levels of ownership.

So What Does This Data Suggest About Rolls-Royce Holdings Insiders?

It is good to see recent purchasing. And an analysis of the transactions over the last year also gives us confidence. However, we note that the company didn't make a profit over the last twelve months, which makes us cautious. On this analysis the only slight negative we see is the fairly low (overall) insider ownership; their transactions suggest that they are quite positive on Rolls-Royce Holdings stock. While we like knowing what's going on with the insider's ownership and transactions, we make sure to also consider what risks are facing a stock before making any investment decision. At Simply Wall St, we found 1 warning sign for Rolls-Royce Holdings that deserve your attention before buying any shares.

If you would prefer to check out another company -- one with potentially superior financials -- then do not miss this free list of interesting companies, that have HIGH return on equity and low debt.

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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It's easy to match the overall market return by buying an index fund. Active investors aim to buy stocks that vastly outperform the market - but in the process, they risk under-performance. Unfortunately the Bank Islam Malaysia Berhad (KLSE:BIMB) share price slid 27% over twelve months. That's well below the market decline of 2.6%. Bank Islam Malaysia Berhad hasn't been listed for long, so although we're wary of recent listings that perform poorly, it may still prove itself with time. Shareholders have had an even rougher run lately, with the share price down 10% in the last 90 days.

With that in mind, it's worth seeing if the company's underlying fundamentals have been the driver of long term performance, or if there are some discrepancies.

Check out our latest analysis for Bank Islam 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. 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 the unfortunate twelve months during which the Bank Islam Malaysia Berhad share price fell, it actually saw its earnings per share (EPS) improve by 12%. Of course, the situation might betray previous over-optimism about growth.

It's fair to say that the share price does not seem to be reflecting the EPS growth. So it's well worth checking out some other metrics, too.

The fact that the dividend has fallen is probably weighing on the share price, as it implies some form of business stress.

The graphic below depicts how earnings and revenue have changed over time (unveil the exact values by clicking on the image).

We know that Bank Islam Malaysia Berhad has improved its bottom line lately, but what does the future have in store? If you are thinking of buying or selling Bank Islam Malaysia Berhad stock, you should check out this free report showing analyst profit forecasts.

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. So for companies that pay a generous dividend, the TSR is often a lot higher than the share price return. As it happens, Bank Islam Malaysia Berhad's TSR for the last 1 year was -23%, which exceeds the share price return mentioned earlier. And there's no prize for guessing that the dividend payments largely explain the divergence!

A Different Perspective

While Bank Islam Malaysia Berhad shareholders are down 23% for the year (even including dividends), the market itself is up 2.6%. However, keep in mind that even the best stocks will sometimes underperform the market over a twelve month period. With the stock down 10% over the last three months, the market doesn't seem to believe that the company has solved all its problems. Basically, most investors should be wary of buying into a poor-performing stock, unless the business itself has clearly improved. 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. Consider for instance, the ever-present spectre of investment risk. We've identified 2 warning signs with Bank Islam Malaysia Berhad , and understanding them should be part of your investment process.

If you would prefer to check out another company -- one with potentially superior financials -- then do not miss this free list of companies that have proven they can grow earnings.

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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If we want to find a potential multi-bagger, often there are underlying trends that can provide clues. Firstly, we'd want to identify a growing return on capital employed (ROCE) and then alongside that, an ever-increasing base of capital employed. Ultimately, this demonstrates that it's a business that is reinvesting profits at increasing rates of return. Speaking of which, we noticed some great changes in Zimplats Holdings' (ASX:ZIM) returns on capital, so let's have a look.

Understanding Return On Capital Employed (ROCE)

For those who don't know, ROCE is a measure of a company's yearly pre-tax profit (its return), relative to the capital employed in the business. Analysts use this formula to calculate it for Zimplats Holdings:

Return on Capital Employed = Earnings Before Interest and Tax (EBIT)  (Total Assets - Current Liabilities)

0.25 = US$577m  (US$2.5b - US$146m) (Based on the trailing twelve months to December 2022).

So, Zimplats Holdings has an ROCE of 25%. In absolute terms that's a great return and it's even better than the Metals and Mining industry average of 11%.

See our latest analysis for Zimplats Holdings

roce

Historical performance is a great place to start when researching a stock so above you can see the gauge for Zimplats Holdings' ROCE against it's prior returns. If you want to delve into the historical earnings, revenue and cash flow of Zimplats Holdings, check out these free graphs here.

What Does the ROCE Trend For Zimplats Holdings Tell Us?

Zimplats Holdings is displaying some positive trends. Over the last five years, returns on capital employed have risen substantially to 25%. Basically the business is earning more per dollar of capital invested and in addition to that, 90% more capital is being employed now too. The increasing returns on a growing amount of capital is common amongst multi-baggers and that's why we're impressed.

Our Take On Zimplats Holdings' ROCE

A company that is growing its returns on capital and can consistently reinvest in itself is a highly sought after trait, and that's what Zimplats Holdings has. And a remarkable 575% total return over the last five years tells us that investors are expecting more good things to come in the future. With that being said, we still think the promising fundamentals mean the company deserves some further due diligence.

If you want to continue researching Zimplats Holdings, you might be interested to know about the 1 warning sign that our analysis has discovered.

If you'd like to see other companies earning high returns, check out our free list of companies earning high returns with solid balance sheets 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.

Join A Paid User Research Session

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Sheetz is selling gas for $1.776 on the Fourth of July to celebrate Independence Day.

Sheetz is rolling back gas prices to celebrate Independence Day  way, way back.

The Altoona, Pennsylvania-based gas station and convenience store chain will cut its gas prices to $1.776 per gallon for many, but not all, of its fuel types Tuesday while promotional gallons last.

The price is a reference to 1776, the year the Continental Congress approved the Declaration of Independence.

The fuels getting the lower price are regular, E85 (flex fuel), Unleaded 88, mid-grade and premium fuel grades at all of Sheetz 675-plus locations in Pennsylvania, Maryland, Ohio, North Carolina, Virginia and West Virginia. The lower price will not apply to diesel fuel or fuel free of ethanol.

The average price of gas in Ohio today is $3.291 a gallon, according to AAA, so the $1.776 price is a big savings.

A look at gas prices in Ohio as of July 3, according to AAA.

When does the special Sheetz promotion start?

The promotion starts 12:01 a.m. Tuesday and ends at the end of Tuesday or while promotional gallons last, whichever is first.

Where can I fill up at Sheetz in Stark County?

Stark County has at least five 24-hour Sheetz locations:

2939 Whipple Ave. NW in Jackson Township

5097 Tuscarawas St. W in Perry Township

1415 Pittsburg Avenue NW in North Canton

1280 W Maple St. in Hartville

236 W State St. in Alliance

Sheetz also has a location in 1651 East Turkeyfoot Lake Road in Green just outside Stark County.

To find a Sheetz store, go to: https://orders.sheetz.com/findASheetz.

Sheetz is a family owned and operated company and we are always looking for ways to assist the communities and customers that we serve, President and CEO Travis Sheetz said in a prepared statement. We hope this discount helps our customers keep a little more change in their wallets as they travel to celebrate the Fourth of July with friends and family, with an obvious nod to our nations birthday.

Reach Robert at robert.wang@cantonrep.com. Twitter: @rwangREP.

This article originally appeared on The Repository: Sheetz will slash prices of gas to $1.776 for Fourth of July
SHENZHEN, China, July 03, 2023--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Dozens of scientists from all over the world participated in the International Seminar on New Materials either offline or online on June 30, which was organized by Guangming Science City in Guangming District, Shenzhen Municipality, South China.

This press release features multimedia. View the full release here: https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20230703885417/en/

Guangming Science City International Seminars on New Materials European Venue (photo: Guangming Science City)

As a special program for European participants, the Seminar was part of the second Young Scientists Festival (YSF) 2023 with the theme of "Towards the Bright Future", which attracted scientists, professors, experts and scholars from Greece, Portugal, Ireland, Italy, Switzerland and Sweden, and young experts and scholars from scientific research institutions and universities in Guangming Science City as well, to exchange the latest research achievements and international development trends in the field of new materials and actively facilitate international academic cooperation in this regard.

"The talent, wisdom and technological strength of Guangming Science City enabled us to kick off this International Seminar on New Materials," said G. Kiriakidis, Chairman of the Seminar, President of the European Materials Society and founder of the Optoelectronic Materials Laboratory of the University of Crete.

Kiriakidis added, "Thank the Peoples Government of Guangming District, Shenzhen Municipality for organizing this event. Even thousands of miles apart, scientific sharing is still significant and meaningful." He continued, "I think it is a good opportunity for academic exchange of ideas and innovation, and the open and friendly discussions will better promote academic cooperation and technological exchange between us."

R. Martins, former President of the International Union Materials Research Society (IUMRS), pointed out in his keynote speech that international technological innovations in the field of new materials could not be made without the participation of Chinese scientists.

"In recent years, China has made great progress in innovative ecological development, and Chinas technological breakthroughs in the field of new materials are also obvious to global peers," Martins added.

With an example of lamps made of carbon black materials in ancient China, Prof. S. Pratsinis from the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology started discussions on the bonds between Chinas lamp culture and the global development of electric lamp technology. He emphasized that the current global sci-tech innovation and development had benefited from the spread and exchange of culture.

"There are no obstacles and boundaries in science," Prof. Giorgio Sberveglieri said, chairman of several chemical sensor conferences, "Human beings live in the same ecological environment on earth, which means that we share common scientific goals and visions and that it is very important and wise to stick to scientific research that is useful to society."

Professor Si Rui from Sun Yat-Sen University Shenzhen Campus and Professor Liu Weishu from Southern University of Science and Technology, as representatives of young scientists in China, conducted in-depth exchanges and sharing in material technology, material design, and other aspects. Futhermore, they also introduced the Guangming Science City to European colleagues.

Besides, 15 young talents from the School of Materials of Sun Yat-sen University, Institute of Advanced Science Facilities in Shenzhen, Shenzhen Institute of Advanced Technology of Chinese Academy of Sciences, Southern University of Science and Technology, etc. were invited to take part in the event.

According to the organizer, this seminar was also a warm-up program for another innovative event of this years festival  "Ultimate 72-hour Innovation Challenge for Global Young Talents".

In July 21-25, the challenge program will be held with a concept of "72 Hours to Live, Research, Study and Practice together". Under the guidance of academicians and top scientists, young scientists from all over the world will form 12 teams to work on different research subjects, share innovative achievements, and create a bright future for scientific development.

Shenzhen is one of the youngest cities in China, where Guangming Science City is synonymous with youth, vitality, openness, and diversity. With a focus on the fields of life science, information, and materials, Guangming Science City is rolling forward the building of a series carrier of major science and technology innovation. Guangming Science City is developing into a hub for scientific and industrial innovation with global influence.

View source version on businesswire.com: https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20230703885417/en/

Contacts

Lu.Zhang

TEL:8435 6030

E-mail:lu.zhang@encyclovision.com
SHL Medical announces the acquisition of LCA Automation AG, a Swiss innovative automation solutions provider. The acquisition is SHL Medical's response to the growing market demand for drug delivery solutions and will support its manufacturing operations globally, especially the upcoming Swiss manufacturing site in Zug.

ZUG, Switzerland, July 3, 2023 /PRNewswire/ -- SHL Medical, a world-leading provider of advanced drug delivery solutions headquartered in Zug, announced the acquisition of Swiss-based LCA Automation, a leading provider of innovative automation solutions, as well as its subsidiaries in Mexico and China, effective June 29, 2023.

SHL Medical announces the acquisition of LCA Automation effective June 29 2023

The acquisition of LCA Automation is part of SHL Medical's ongoing strategy to respond to the exponentially growing market demand, expand its global presence, and further strengthen SHL Medical's vertical capabilities globally. SHL Medical and LCA Automation have a strong track record of excellence in automation. The combination of their expertise and long-standing experience in different industries allows SHL Medical to increase its automation capacity in Europe further and leverage synergies to offer customers more efficient solutions along the value chain that include faster timelines and shorter supply chains.

Extension of strengths for customers

Acquiring LCA Automation will support SHL Medical's manufacturing operations globally, especially in providing automation expertise as well as tool maintenance and metal manufacturing for the Swiss manufacturing site that is currently under construction. This local extension of strengths in the automation field further increases high-speed and large-scale manufacturing. With the acquisition of LCA Automation, SHL is also reasserting one of its distinctive features in terms of complete in-house manufacturing. By operating as a comprehensive service provider, customers benefit from more flexibility along the whole production value chain.

"We are excited to welcome LCA Automation to the SHL family", says Ulrich Faessler, CEO of SHL Medical. "LCA Automation's expertise in automation and manufacturing solutions will complement our existing capabilities and enable us to offer a more comprehensive range of services to our customers and accelerate innovation."

Chris Rennhard, CEO of LCA Automation, adds: "SHL Medical and LCA Automation joining forces in production process technology and equipment manufacturing is a great benefit to the customers. The resulting high-level factory automation technology will enable the shortest timelines to fulfill market demands, while maintaining in-house process control and quality monitoring."

About LCA Automation

LCA Automation is a leading provider of automation solutions for industrial processes. With over 50 years of experience, LCA Automation specializes in designing and manufacturing customized solutions for our clients in a variety of industries, including automotive, electronics, and pharmaceuticals. Headquartered in Switzerland with subsidiaries in Mexico and China, LCA Automation's team of experts offers experience in designing, building, and implementing automation systems helping their customers to improve efficiency, reduce costs, and enhance their overall productivity.

About SHL Medical

As a world-leading solutions provider of advanced drug delivery systems, SHL Medical is the partner of choice for many leading pharma and biotech companies. Driven by our company purpose  Enabling Patients' Independence  we offer patient-centric solutions for the design, development, and manufacturing of autoinjectors, pen injectors, as well as innovative specialty delivery systems for large-volume and high-viscosity formulations. We also offer final assembly, labeling, and packaging solutions for our drug delivery systems. In response to the rising trend in home therapy, SHL has increased developmental work in the digital healthcare sector to help improve the drug delivery ecosystem.

Located across Switzerland, Taiwan, Sweden, and the US, our global team of experts collaborate seamlessly as one team in utilizing our comprehensive in-house manufacturing capabilities. Our solutions offer customization and optimization for each project while proactively weaving sustainability-driven measures into our designs and processes to contribute to a cleaner earth. For additional information, visit www.shl-medical.com

Media Contact

Carl Gillblad

Corporate Communications

Mail: info@shl-medical.com

Phone: +41 41 368 00 00

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SHL Medical Logo

Cision

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SOURCE SHL Medical Ltd.
Singapore is enforcing new crypto consumer protection measures as the city-state continues applying regulation to its burgeoning crypto industry.

Chief among the new measures, the Monetary Authority of Singapore (MAS)the countrys chief financial regulatorwill enforce a ban on lending and staking for retail customers (individual traders, as opposed to institutional clients), a measure which has been on the table since last October.

The regulator will also require that exchanges move customers digital assets into a trust before the end of the year. This is to prevent an FTX-style scenario where their funds are commingled or traded.

FTX Files Chapter 11 Bankruptcy, SBF Steps Down as CEO

The news comes a little over a week after MAS granted in-principle approval to Ripple for a Major Payments Institution License, allowing the company to offer crypto tokens and services in Singapores territory.

Stateside, Ripple has been locking horns in court with the chief U.S. securities regulator, the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC), since December 2020, after the Commission sued it for allegedly offering unregistered securities.

Asias crypto boom

While U.S. regulators are imposing a hostile climate on domestic crypto firms, a few Asian territories are keen to accommodate the new technology.

Chinas special administrative region of Hong Kongwhich, due to its postcolonial legacy, enjoys significant autonomy from the rest of the mainlandis welcoming crypto firms with open arms, despite the fact that a crypto crackdown in China has been ongoing since Summer 2021.

According to Hong Kongs new regulations, crypto firms have been given a one-year trial period to open up shop in the territory. If the regions Securities and Futures Commission approves their operations at the end of the trial, companies will be free to apply for a business license.

The new rules keep local exchange operators in their crosshairs, but can also apply to companies outside the territory that actively market their services to Hong Kong residents.

On June 30, Hong Kong authorities announced the establishment of a task force to promote the local development of Web3 industries.

SEC Inaction on Spot Bitcoin ETF a 'Complete and Utter Disaster,' Says Cameron Winklevoss

Meanwhile, South Korea also appears to be developing its own strategy to regulate crypto.

In May, the Bank of Korea signed a memorandum of understanding with electronics giant Samsung to jointly conduct research into a central bank digital currency (CBDC).

Last Friday, a key bit of legislation giving the Korean Financial Services Commission and Bank of Korea more power to probe crypto firms and operators was approved by parliament.

The Virtual Asset User Protection Act worries Korean crypto skepticssome see it as potentially equating crypto firms with traditional finance institutions, thus implicitly recognizing the monetary nature of crypto. It is also perceived as a step towards having a clear regulatory framework in place.
By Jonathan Stempel

(Reuters) - Wrigley, the maker of multi-colored fruit-flavored Skittles candies, has settled a lawsuit accusing a seller of cannabis-related merchandise of trademark infringement for marketing products under the "ZKITTLEZ" name.

Under a proposed permanent injunction filed on Monday in Chicago federal court, Terphogz LLC agreed not to use Skittles, Zkittlez or similar terms for cannabis-related sales.

Terphogz would stop using slogans such as "Taste the Z Train" and "Taste the Strain Bro," which Wrigley found too similar to Skittles' longtime slogan "Taste the Rainbow."

It also agreed to give up the domain name zkittlez.com, though it may use the letter "Z" if people will not be confused.

The settlement requires court approval. Lawyers for Wrigley and Terphogz did not immediately respond to requests for comment.

Wrigley is a Chicago-based unit of privately-held Mars Wrigley.

It had accused Terphogz of undermining nearly 50 years of goodwill generated by the Skittles brand with its "freewheeling use" of Skittles marks to sell cannabis, drug paraphernalia and other merchandise, some of which also carried a rainbow theme.

A judge rejected Terphogz' bid to dismiss the case in November 2021.

Terphogz, based in Mendocino, California, claimed it did not sell cannabis, but licensed its intellectual property rights to other companies that sold cannabis legally, court papers show.

Wrigley has filed lawsuits alleging trademark infringement related to other brands, including Life Savers and Starburst.

The case is Wm Wrigley Jr Co v Terphogz LLC, U.S. District Court, Northern District of Illinois, No. 21-02357.

(Reporting by Jonathan Stempel in New York; Editing by Marguerita Choy)
Smart Solar Bench Market Projected to Reach USD 689.2 Million, Capturing a CAGR of 7.6% by 2031  Report by Transparency Market Research

Transparency Market Research

Favorable response to smart solar benches across corporate spaces and commercial establishments is ascribed to North America's leading market share

Wilmington, Delaware, United States, July 03, 2023 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- Transparency Market Research Inc. - The global smart solar bench market is estimated at US$ 689.2 Mn by 2031, up from US$ 385.3 Mn in 2022. Increase in adoption of advanced technology in everyday life and rise in construction of smart cities are fueling the smart solar bench market.



Smart solar bench features USB ports and wireless chargers for mobile devices. Consistent product advancement has led to the development of smart solar benches with voice-activated controls, IoT sensors, and rooftop. Advancements in material science have led to the creation of new materials that are eco-friendly, reasonable, and durable, and thus fueling market development.

To Remain Ahead of Your Competitors, Request for a Sample: https://www.transparencymarketresearch.com/sample/sample.php?flag=S&rep_id=85666

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Market Snapshot:

Report Coverage Details Market Revenue US$ 385.3 Mn Estimated Value US$ 689.2 Mn Growth Rate - CAGR 7.6% Forecast Period 2023-2031 No. of Pages 160 Pages Market Segmentation By Type, By Material, By Design, By Power Output, By Application, By Distribution channel Regions Covered North America, Europe, Asia Pacific, Middle East & Africa, South America Companies Covered ArchiExpo, Cyclepods, EnGoPlanet Energy Solutions LLC, Gulf Solar Technologies, Hola Systems, Include Ltd., Nomo Group Co, Seedia Sp. z o.o., Strawberry Energy, The Solar Range

Key Findings of Study

Demand for Advanced Technology Driving Market Expansion  As living standards are improving, individuals in both developed and developing countries are increasingly using advanced technology in their everyday life. Hence, adoption of next-gen and intelligent technologies is expected to fuel market growth in the next few years.

Rise in demand for sustainable energy solutions is leading to increasing adoption of solar benches for outdoor seating areas. Incorporation of advanced technologies, such as smart sensors and wireless charging capabilities, is anticipated to increase the attractiveness and functionality for users, thereby boosting market value.

Wireless charging allows users to charge their devices while being outdoors. Moreover, smart sensors can notice changes in weather and adjust the settings accordingly.

With increase in adoption of advanced technologies in public spaces and cities, the smart solar bench market is expected to grow and evolve in the next few years.

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Development of Smart Cities Fueling Market Growth  In urban areas, development of smart cities and business spaces, including shopping malls and offices, is increasing. Therefore, rise in construction of smart cities across the world is anticipated to bolster the smart solar bench market.

Smart solar benches offer economic advantages as well. Adoption of smart solar benches enable energy conservation, cost savings, and improved environmental sustainability.

Increase in Adoption of Smart Solar Bench with Digital Display  In terms of type, the with digital display segment is likely to dominate the global industry during the forecast period. The smart solar-powered bench with display includes a smartly designed seating with USB ports and wireless chargers for hand-held devices.

Smart solar bench with display also provides public service, connectivity with advertising, and information for users. Companies and city administration can continuously provide information about upcoming events and activities through the interactive display.



Growth Drivers

Increase in adoption of advanced technology for everyday functioning is fueling the smart solar bench market

Initiatives by governments for the construction of smart cities is augmenting market growth

Regional Landscape

North America is anticipated to account for the leading market share during the forecast period. This is ascribed to acceptance for these benches across corporate spaces and commercial establishments in the region. Furthermore, rise in state investments in smart cities further boosts market development in the region.

The smart solar bench market in Asia Pacific is anticipated to grow at a rapid pace during the forecast period. Increase in adoption of advanced technology in infrastructure development and rapid urbanization in countries such as India, China, and Japan are steering market expansion in the region.

Competitive Analysis

The global landscape is competitive, with the presence of several global and regional players. Product development is a key growth strategy adopted by players in the smart solar bench market. Leading manufacturers of smart solar bench technology are engaging in product expansion, R&D activities, and M&As to increase their market share.

Prominent players in the smart solar bench market include AarchiExpo, EnGoPlanet Energy Solutions LLC, Hola Systems, Nomo Group Co, The Solar Range, and Cyclepods.

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The global smart solar bench market is segmented as follows;

Global Smart Solar Bench Market, by Type

With Digital Display

Without Digital Display

Global Smart Solar Bench Market, by Material

Metal

Wood

Plastic

Others

Global Smart Solar Bench Market, by Design

Backrest

Without Backrest

Global Smart Solar Bench Market, by Power Output

Up to 80W

80W  100W

100W  120W

Above 120W

Global Smart Solar Bench Market, by Application

Outdoor

Indoor

Global Smart Solar Bench Market, by Distribution Channel

Direct Sales

Indirect Sales

Global Smart Solar Bench Market, by Region

North America

Europe

Asia Pacific

Middle East & Africa

South America



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Statkraft and Telenor sign agreement for the supply of renewable energy for Telenors Finnish subsidiary DNA

Statkraft AS

Telenor have signed a 10-year Power Purchase Agreement (PPA) with Statkraft. The agreement ensures that around 80% of the purchased power for Telenors Finnish subsidiary DNA, comes from a new wind farm to be built in Finland.



The Palokangas wind farm is owned by Exilion Tuuli and starts its operations late 2024. Exilion Tuuli is an investment company owned by Finnish institutions. Statkrafts role is to match the needs of both DNA and Exilion, providing financial security for the wind farm owner, while enabling a predictable renewable energy supply for the telecommunications company.

Telenor wants to support the construction of new renewable power plants in the markets we operate, and this agreement provides a solid contribution to the decarbonization of the electricity supply, as well as new capacity to hedge against volatile energy prices, says Jannicke Hilland, Executive Vice President for Telenor Infrastructure at Telenor Group.

Telenor has previously signed similar agreements for the Norwegian and Danish operations, a vital part of the companys target-based approach to reduce emissions.

Telenor Groups scope 1 and 2 science-based climate target commits us to reduce global greenhouse gas emissions by 57% from 2019 to 2030. We also have a scope 3 enablement target where we recently made it mandatory for our suppliers to set their own science-based targets. Purchasing renewable energy is one the most significant measures we can take to reach our scope 1 and 2 targets, Hilland ends.

A total volume of 85 GWh will be supplied to DNA annually through this agreement. The Palokangas wind park will consist of 12 turbines and be built in the region of Ostrobothnia.

With this agreement, we support DNA in securing their energy needs as well as achieving their climate targets based on renewable energy from a new wind farm under development in Finland. It illustrates Statkrafts role in the market where we match the needs of power producers and consumers to find profitable, risk-reducing, and sustainable solutions, says Arne Wist, Vice President Nordic Origination at Statkraft.

For further information, please contact:

Lars Magnus Gunther, press spokesperson, Statkraft AS

Phone: +47 912 41 636

E-mail: lars.gunther@statkraft.com

Mattis Dahl Amotsbakken, Telenor Group

Mob: +47 993 35 434

E-mail: mattis-dahl.amotsbakken@telenor.com



About Statkraft

Statkraft is a leading company in hydropower internationally and Europes largest generator of renewable energy. The Group produces hydropower, wind power, solar power, gas-fired power and supplies district heating. Statkraft is a global company in energy market operations. Statkraft has 5,300 employees in 21 countries. www.statkraft.com



About Telenor

Telenor Group is a leading telecommunications company across the Nordics and Asia with 158 million subscribers and annual sales of around NOK 99 billion (2022).

We are committed to responsible business conduct and driven by the ambition of empowering societies. Connectivity has been Telenors domain for more than 165 years, and our purpose is to connect our customers to what matters most. Telenor is listed at Oslo Stock Exchange under the ticker TEL. www.telenor.com








Melbourne, Victoria --News Direct-- Sunstone Metals Ltd

Sunstone Metals Ltd (ASX:STM) managing director Malcolm Norris joins Proactives Elisha Newell to discuss the latest gold and silver hits from the Bramaderos Projects Limon target in southern Ecuador.

The most recent assays represent some of the best results to date, crowned by a 185-metre hit that weighs at 2.85 g/t gold equivalent.

Big-picture, Norris says drilling is delivering shallow and substantially higher grades than the existing Bramaderos Mineral Resource estimate and Exploration Target.

These latest results are a very significant breakthrough with big positive implications for the size, grade and development prospects at Bramaderos, he told the ASX on Monday.

These results will further grow the resource base at Bramaderos and will underpin development options which may include higher-grade starter pits.

They support our view that the Bramaderos Project has every potential to be a 10-million-ounce district with multiple deposits within 4 kilometres of one another.

Contact Details

Proactive Investors

Jonathan Jackson

+61 413 713 744

Jonathan@proactiveinvestors.com

View source version on newsdirect.com: https://newsdirect.com/news/sunstone-metals-delivers-new-breakthrough-at-bramaderos-893551157
(Bloomberg) -- Switzerlands financial regulator is investigating Thomas Gottstein, the former CEO of Credit Suisse, for his role in the implosion of a $10 billion group of funds linked to disgraced financier Lex Greensill, according to a report published in SonntagsBlick.

Most Read from Bloomberg

The Swiss Financial Market Supervisory Authority  or Finma  triggered enforcement proceedings against four unnamed former Credit Suisse staffers after concluding in February that the lender seriously breached its risk-management obligations in the Greensill Capital supply-chain financing affair.

Gottstein is among the Credit Suisse officials under investigation, the Swiss newspaper said Sunday, citing people familiar with the matter who it didnt identify.

Spokesmen for Finma and UBS Group AG, which has taken over Credit Suisse, both declined to comment when contacted by Bloomberg. Gottstein declined to comment on the Finma proceedings.

In the aftermath of the Greensill collapse, Credit Suisse commissioned an external investigation carried out by Deloitte and Swiss law firm Walder Wyss into the failings around the Greensill funds. The report, concluded in late 2021, was shared with the banks board of directors and Finma.

But the bank announced in February 2022 that it did not plan to make the report public in light of the ongoing recovery process and the legal complexities of the matter. Credit Suisse is still attempting to recover investors money in the funds and fighting various legal battles related to the matter.

Credit Suisse said in February last year that actions had been taken against a number of individuals where the board deemed it was appropriate.

Approximately 10 employees have since left the bank as a result, while Gottstein was cleared, a person familiar with the matter said.

Eric Varvel, who ran the asset management unit in which the Greensill funds were managed, left the bank in December 2021, after first stepping down from his role earlier in the year.

Read more: Credit Suisses Varvel Leaves Bank After Greensill Scandal (1)

Limited Powers

Finmas powers to punish banks are limited as it cannot fine the institutions it oversees. Sanctions against individuals typically result in bans from financial services for a certain period, but rarely for a lifetime.

The implosion of Greensill Capital in March 2021 saw Credit Suisse freeze and wind down a $10 billion group of funds that the bank had marketed to clients as safe investments.

Prior to the UBS merger, Finma criticized Credit Suisse for its lax approach to risk management and for clear conflicts of interest. Specifically, Credit Suisse made partly false and overly positive statements to Finma about the claims selection process and the funds exposure to certain debtors, the regulator said in February.

Credit Suisse previously said about $6.8 billion of the Greensill funds have since been returned to investors and last month the bank agreed to pay out an additional $200 million to investors of its supply-chain finance funds.

(Adds comment from Gottstein, details on Credit Suisse external investigation, and Eric Varvel departure.)

Most Read from Bloomberg Businessweek

2023 Bloomberg L.P.
Melbourne, Victoria --News Direct-- Talon Energy Ltd

Talon Energy Ltd (ASX:TPD) managing director Colby Hauser updates Proactives Elisha Newell on a pilot well program at the Gurvantes XXXV Coal Seam Gas Project in Mongolias South Gobi Basin.

Joint venture partner TMK Energy is advancing the pilot well program on time and within budget, with the project slated for production testing in mid-July  just 18 months after the Gurvantes asset was brought into the fold.

Colby says the program will deepen Talon and TMKs understanding of the projects 1.2-trillion-cubic feet (2C) resource as it considers next steps in this prolific gas region. The MD also provides an update on field commissioning work at the Walyering asset in WA.

Since acquiring the Gurvantes asset some 18 months ago, TMK has drilled seven exploration wells, three pilot production wells and is now about to complete the construction activities associated with the first pilot well program in the Nariin Sukhait area, TMK Energy CEO Brendan Stats told investors on Wednesday.

The final step in our exploration journey is proof of concept and flowing gas to surface from this pilot well program.

We look forward with high anticipation to further positive results and being able to take the next big step forward which will be commencement of a pre-feasibility and field development study for the Nariin Sukhait area.

Contact Details

Proactive Investors

Jonathan Jackson

+61 413 713 744

jonathan@proactiveinvestors.com

View source version on newsdirect.com: https://newsdirect.com/news/talon-energy-partner-tracking-on-time-and-within-budget-for-gurvantes-production-tests-923109501
Telenor

Telenor have signed a 10-year Power Purchase Agreement (PPA) with Statkraft. The agreement ensures that around 80% of the purchased power for Telenors Finnish subsidiary DNA, comes from a new wind farm to be built in Finland.The Palokangas wind farm is owned by Exilion Tuuli and starts its operations late 2024. Exilion Tuuli is an investment company owned by Finnish institutions. Statkrafts role is to match the needs of both DNA and Exilion, providing financial security for the wind farm owner, while enabling a predictable renewable energy supply for the telecommunications company.

Telenor wants to support the construction of new renewable power plants in the markets we operate, and this agreement provides a solid contribution to the decarbonization of the electricity supply, as well as new capacity to hedge against volatile energy prices, says Jannicke Hilland, Executive Vice President for Telenor Infrastructure at Telenor Group.

Telenor has previously signed similar agreements for the Norwegian and Danish operations, a vital part of the companys target-based approach to reduce emissions.

Telenor Groups scope 1 and 2 science-based climate target commits us to reduce global greenhouse gas emissions by 57% from 2019 to 2030. We also have a scope 3 enablement target where we recently made it mandatory for our suppliers to set their own science-based targets. Purchasing renewable energy is one the most significant measures we can take to reach our scope 1 and 2 targets, Hilland ends.

A total volume of 85 GWh will be supplied to DNA annually through this agreement. The Palokangas wind park will consist of 12 turbines and be built in the Ostrobothnia region.

With this agreement we support DNA in securing their energy needs as well as achieving their climate targets based on renewable energy from a new wind farm under development in Finland. It illustrates Statkrafts role in the market where we match the needs of power producers and consumers to find profitable, risk-reducing and sustainable solutions, says Arne Wist, Vice President Nordic Origination at Statkraft.

Contact person:

Mattis Dahl Amotsbakken, Telenor Group

Mob: +47 99335434

E-mail: mattis-dahl.amotsbakken@telenor.com

About Statkraft

Statkraft is a leading company in hydropower internationally and Europes largest generator of renewable energy. The Group produces hydropower, wind power, solar power, gas-fired power and supplies district heating. Statkraft is a global company in energy market operations. Statkraft has 5,300 employees in 21 countries.

For more information, see www.statkraft.com

Contact person:

Lars Magnus Gunther, press spokesperson, Statkraft AS

Mob: +47 91241636

E-mail: lars.gunther@statkraft.com




(Bloomberg) -- The bonds of the UKs biggest water provider climbed on Monday as investors bet a selloff driven by fears the utility would be nationalized had gone too far.

Most Read from Bloomberg

Notes issued by Thames Waters holding company unit that are due to mature in three years gained about 7 pence on the pound to 62, according to CBBT data compiled by Bloomberg. Meanwhile, debt due in 2027 that was sold by the operating company rose 0.6 pence to around 91 per pound.

The rebound comes as traders try to gauge the potential losses involved in holding the riskiest portions of the companys debt. The bonds tumbled last week as concern mounted over the companys heavy debt pile after it was revealed that Thames Water is in talks with government officials over contingency plans, including a temporary nationalization.

The company owes more than 14 billion ($18 billion) at the operating company level  its so-called ring-fenced borrowings, which are considered to be its safest liabilities. On top of that, however, the group has debt issued at the holding company level  including notes issued by Kemble Finance Plc which jumped on Monday  that rely on cash from the operating companies.

London Water Crisis Exposes Broken Britain Risk for Sunak

Kemble bonds were quoted around 86 pence at the start of last week and closed on Friday below 56 pence. That steep discount is luring buyers, and trades are going through in the low 60s, according to people with knowledge of the matter who asked not to be identified because theyre not authorized to speak publicly.

The concerns around Thames Water have upended the perception of utilities as a dull-but-safe-investment, due to their key role in the countrys infrastructure. The firms executives face a parliamentary grilling later this month.

Citigroup analysts Jenny Ping and Rory Graham-Watson warned in a note on Monday that the debt at the holding company level could be at risk of default if the liabilities arent borne by consumers or taxpayers.

Our understanding is that if a water company requires government help financially, it would be the operating company ring fenced assets and debt issued at these level that government takes over/support, the said.

Most Read from Bloomberg Businessweek

2023 Bloomberg L.P.
It hasn't been the best quarter for Dagang NeXchange Berhad (KLSE:DNEX) shareholders, since the share price has fallen 21% in that time. In contrast, the return over three years has been impressive. Indeed, the share price is up a very strong 164% in that time. After a run like that some may not be surprised to see prices moderate. If the business can perform well for years to come, then the recent drop could be an opportunity.

With that in mind, it's worth seeing if the company's underlying fundamentals have been the driver of long term performance, or if there are some discrepancies.

See our latest analysis for Dagang NeXchange Berhad

To quote Buffett, 'Ships will sail around the world but the Flat Earth Society will flourish. There will continue to be wide discrepancies between price and value in the marketplace...' 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.

During three years of share price growth, Dagang NeXchange Berhad achieved compound earnings per share growth of 64% per year. However, extraordinary items have impacted recent EPS numbers. This EPS growth is higher than the 38% average annual increase in the share price. So one could reasonably conclude that the market has cooled on the stock.

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 Dagang NeXchange Berhad has grown profits over the years, but the future is more important for shareholders. You can see how its balance sheet has strengthened (or weakened) over time in this free interactive graphic.

A Different Perspective

While the broader market gained around 2.6% in the last year, Dagang NeXchange Berhad shareholders lost 40%. 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. Longer term investors wouldn't be so upset, since they would have made 4%, each year, over five years. It could be that the recent sell-off is an opportunity, so it may be worth checking the fundamental data for signs of a long term growth trend. 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. Consider risks, for instance. Every company has them, and we've spotted 1 warning sign for Dagang NeXchange Berhad you should know about.

We will like Dagang NeXchange 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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(Bloomberg) -- Aladdin Hangari, one of Credit Suisses top private bankers in the Middle East, is in advanced talks to join HSBC Holdings Plc in a further sign of intensifying competition for the wealth management business in the oil-rich region.

Most Read from Bloomberg

Hangaris hire is not final yet and UBS Group AG might still retain him, people familiar with the matter said, who asked not to be named as the details arent public. Four other staff are in discussions to leave alongside him, the people said.

As the chief executive for Credit Suisses operations in Qatar, Hangari is known for his role handling the relationship between the Swiss bank and the Qatari royal family, one of the banks major shareholders over the past decade and a major client.

Hangaris departure comes as a setback to the ambitions of UBS to build on its on-the-ground presence in the region. Credit Suisses long-standing links are a potential asset, following the near-collapse and takeover by UBS of the Swiss bank earlier this year  if the larger lender can retain key staff.

Clients will be served by existing team members and successions will be announced in due course, a Credit Suisse spokesperson said.

UBS set up a new Doha wealth office in 2021 to tap a market booming on the back of surging hydrocarbon income. The move also opened the opportunity for UBS to potentially manage assets on behalf of one of the worlds largest sovereign wealth funds, the Qatar Investment Authority.

In recent years, UBS has made efforts to expand its teams across the Middle East, poaching several private bankers from Credit Suisse, including teams covering the United Arab Emirates and Israel.

Separately, a team of 10 Credit Suisse wealth managers covering the Middle East resigned in recent weeks to join Deutsche Bank AG, according to the people familiar with the matter. Senior private bankers set to join Deutsche Bank from the Swiss lender include Saad Osseiran, Nasri Nohra, Rabih Demashkieh and Agnes Tan, all managing directors, the people said.

HSBC and Deutsche Bank declined to comment.

In order to stem the exodus and prevent poaching, UBS has been offering a rare commission for some UBS and Credit Suisse private bankers to bring in fresh cash, and has sent promises of bonuses for mission-critical personnel as means to convince them to stay on with the bank.

After the government-brokered takeover, UBS sent its wealth head Iqbal Khan, who ran a similar business at Credit Suisse, on a world tour including the Middle East to speak to key talent and assure them that the larger rival wanted to keep them.

Still, the departures show that the measures may not be enough.

Hussam Qasim, a Credit Suisse investment banker for Qatar, left the firm to join the QIA as part of its domestic investment team, people familiar told Bloomberg last month.

By contrast the hires would mark a coup for both HSBC and Deutsche Bank, in a region where oil wealth has helped swell a burgeoning class of ultra-rich families and businessmen. The Middle East has emerged as a key battle ground for global wealth managers keen to capture a bigger slice of the regional market.

Claudio de Sanctis, Deutsche Banks head of international private banking and former Credit Suisse private banker, is planning to significantly invest in the Middle East and Southeast Asia, in particular in Saudi Arabia and Indonesia. The German lender has already poached three bankers from Credit Suisse covering wealth clients in Saudi Arabia earlier this year.

Read more: Deutsche Bank Targets Asia, Middle East for Wealth Ambitions

HSBC expanded its presence in the United Arab Emirates last year, in an attempt to boost its international private banking business and tap into the growing wealth of the region.

Hangari has been with the Credit Suisse since 2004 and also oversees the lenders asset management joint venture with Qatar Holding LLC, Aventicum Capital Management.

UBS is preparing to cut over 50% of the existing Credit Suisse workforce as it exits businesses it doesnt want and works to lower risk, Bloomberg reported last week.

(Adds HSBC response in ninth paragraph. An earlier version of this story corrected the 13th paragraph to reflect that Qasim is an investment banker)

Most Read from Bloomberg Businessweek

2023 Bloomberg L.P.
How Topeka Chamber of Commerce president says Chamber Blue can help small businesses

The Greater Topeka Partnership is joining the Chamber of Commerce Executives of Kansas and Blue Cross and Blue Shield of Kansas to offer access to health insurance to local businesses through Chamber Blue of Kansas.

The association's health plan allows employers to join forces to purchase insurance.

This will be the second year the health insurance program is being offered as it offers savings associated with large group medical coverage.

Topeka Chamber of Commerce President Curtis Sneden told The Capital-Journal that Chamber Blue will emerge as a beneficial way for members of the chamber to provide benefits to their employees.

The Greater Topeka Partnership website is sharing information about Chamber Blue of Kansas.

"Insurance is premised on how many people are covered by your plan," Sneden said. "The more people who are in your plan, then the more stable the rates are going to be, and presumably, hopefully over time, the more competitive those rates will be."

What benefits will you gain with Chamber Blue?

Benefits of Chamber Blue include a Blue Access Account that grants employees all-day access to manage their plan while understanding benefits, tracking health care cost, finding doctors and more, Sneden said.

Employees will have access to an extensive provider network of Kansas that has the ability to choose from doctors and hospitals within the service area, the GTP website said. Chamber Blue offers exclusive discounts to optimize affordability for employees.

Prime therapeutics, life insurance (basic and voluntary), disability insurance, specialty benefits, and dental coverage are additional benefits included, it added

Here's how many Kansans are affected after SCOTUS axes Biden student loan forgiveness plan

With more businesses enrolled in the plan, Sneden said it could result in plan options with potentially lower costs.

Topeka's chamber signed up last year, and more than 30 chambers of commerce in Kansas have partnered with BCBSKS.

"We've learned a lot," Sneden said, "and we're coming back around to once again tell our small businesses that among the benefits of being a member of either the partnership or in some other communities, their chamber there, access to affordable health care for their employees is a big new benefit for them."

What do small business owners need to do for Chamber Blue coverage?

Enrollment for the program will be Nov. 1-15. Businesses interested in enrolling must complete an interest survey by Aug. 18.

To ensure your business meets the eligibility criteria for Chamber Blue of Kansas, businesses need to make sure their entity qualifies as a small business hand has a staff ranging from two to 50 employees, the GTP website said.

A membership is required to participate in the program, but it will also allow for a business to become part of the movement of building a better and brighter future in Topeka, Sneden said.

Chamber of Commerce president Curtis Sneden will take new post at Topeka Airport Authority

"You gain access to other businesses to collaborate with or potential new clients and customers," he said. "There are all sorts of educational and informational programs that the organization puts on throughout the year."

In an early July release, Tammi Cortez, chief operating officer of Cortez Transportation, said she enrolled her business in the Chamber Blue program last year to provide health care coverage to her employees.

"We recently expanded," Cortez said, "and Chamber Blue has proven to be a valuable tool that helps us with recruitment and retention. The coverage rates have been competitive, and we hope that as more local businesses realize the power of this plan, well be able to work together to lower our rates and premiums even further."

Keishera Lately is the business reporter for the Topeka Capital-Journal. She can be reached at klately@cjonline.com. Follow her on Twitter @Lately_KT.

This article originally appeared on Topeka Capital-Journal: Topeka chamber urges small business members to consider Chamber Blue
Tatiana Buzmakova / Getty Images/iStockphoto

Shopping online is so easy that its hard to avoid. In 2022, it was reported that 75% of consumers shop online at least once a month.

$10,000 Quarter: This 1999 Georgia Coin Is Worth Big Money Because of an Error

Learn: How To Get Money Back on Your Everyday Purchases

The ease of shopping online sometimes leads us to spend more than we want to in exchange for convenience, however. In order to mitigate this, check out these Chrome extensions recommended by experts that are easy to install  and could save you hundreds in the long run.

Rakuten

Once installed, Rakuten looks for cash-back deals and rewards that could be offered at the online store youre browsing. Rakuten offers cash back on purchases from over 2,500 stores, said Casey Jones, founder and head of marketing and finance at CJ&CO. It also applies coupons automatically at checkout.

Rakutens website reports that theyve earned their 17 million members more than $3.7 billion in cash back.

PriceBlink

This extension looks to see if there are lower prices elsewhere on items youre looking at. Not only does this cut down the time for you to compare prices, but the site also shows you options you may not have thought to check, said consumer and money-saving expert Andrea Woroch. Its important to still review all the potential fees as they dont take into account shipping costs or coupons between the options.

I Worked at Dollar Tree: Here Are 5 Insider Secrets You Should Know

Beni

Woroch said Beni could score you great deals if youre OK with buying a pre-owned item. Beni is another awesome browser tool that helps you save on new purchases by showing you gently used or secondhand options at resale sites. They may either find the same exact match of the item or a similar item!

TopCashback

TopCashback gives you money for shopping at their featured retailers. TopCashback guarantees the highest percentage of your money back on qualifying purchases at over 7,000 retailers nationwide, said Samantha Landau, consumer expert at TopCashback.

Kudos

While youre shopping online, Kudos works to make sure youre taking full advantage of the credit card rewards offered to you. Kudos will automatically help you pick the best card to use that gets you the most rewards and include relevant hidden card benefits like purchase protection and travel insurance, said Tikue Anazodo, Kudos co-founder and CEO.

Anazodo added that Kudos offers the opportunity to double your credit card rewards at more than 15,000 stores. If you usually earn 3% from your credit cards on sites like Sephora or Booking.com, youll now get 6% with Kudos Boost  thats basically free money.

Honey

Honey looks for coupons and promo codes you can use on your shopping journey. [Honey also has] an interesting feature where it will automatically apply a coupon code when youre shopping online, which is super handy if youre not sure how to find one on your own, said Mac Steer, owner and director at Simify.

Jones added that if youre an avid user of Honey, there are even more perks for you. It also offers a rewards program, Honey Gold, which can be redeemed for gift cards, Jones said.

Capital One Shopping

Formerly known as Wikibuy, this extension compares prices across various retailers to ensure youre getting the best price, Jones said. It also applies available coupon codes and offers rewards on purchases.

Capital One Shopping offers rewards at more than 100,000 stores.

CamelCamelCamel

If youre a frequent Amazon shopper, you need this extension. It tracks price history, allowing users to buy when prices are lowest, Jones said.

You can create price watches, for certain items, so you can be alerted when the price of something you want drops. The website also features popular deals other shoppers are taking advantage of on any given day.

Price.com

Price.com searches for deals and cash-back opportunities at more than 50,000 stores. Price.coms newest partner cash-back programs range up to 20% per purchase and are available via desktop, mobile, browser extension, an app, and chatbot integration, said Price.coms founder and CEO RJ Jain. The cash-back programs are just one of Price.coms many rewards options, which also includes coupons, comparison shopping, pricing trends and alerts.

More From GOBankingRates

This article originally appeared on GOBankingRates.com: Try These 9 Chrome Extensions To Save Money While Shopping Online
FILE PHOTO: Juul e-cigarettes are seen on the counter of a vape store in Santa Monica

By Diane Bartz and Kanishka Singh

WASHINGTON (Reuters) -The U.S. Federal Trade Commission said on Monday it dismissed a complaint against Marlboro cigarette maker Altria Group and e-cigarette maker Juul Labs that was brought after Altria bought a 35% stake in Juul.

The agency also said it would vacate an FTC administrative law judge's decision in favor of the companies in February 2022. Since it has been vacated, it cannot be cited as precedent, the agency said in the statement announcing it was dropping the litigation.

The FTC said in 2020 that Altria's $12.8 billion investment violated antitrust law because the company acquired the position rather than continuing to compete against Juul in the market for closed-system e-cigarettes.

Altria had exited the stake earlier this year and had asked the FTC to drop the challenge. As of December, its share of Juul was valued at $250 million, down from $12.8 billion in 2018.

Altria said on Monday it was pleased by the FTC dropping its complaint.

Separate from the FTC action, Juul has fought with the U.S. Food and Drug Administration over whether it could sell e-cigarettes in the United States.

Altria's MarkTen was at one point the second most popular e-cigarette maker, according to the FTC.

In May, Altria said that it will pay $235 million to settle at least 6,000 lawsuits accusing it of fueling a teen vaping epidemic through its former investment in Juul.

(Reporting by Diane Bartz and Kanishka Singh in WashingtonEditing by David Gregorio)
We can readily understand why investors are attracted to unprofitable companies. For example, although software-as-a-service business Salesforce.com lost money for years while it grew recurring revenue, if you held shares since 2005, you'd have done very well indeed. Nonetheless, only a fool would ignore the risk that a loss making company burns through its cash too quickly.

So, the natural question for Savannah Resources (LON:SAV) shareholders is whether they should be concerned by its rate of cash burn. In this article, we define cash burn as its annual (negative) free cash flow, which is the amount of money a company spends each year to fund its growth. The first step is to compare its cash burn with its cash reserves, to give us its 'cash runway'.

Check out our latest analysis for Savannah Resources

How Long Is Savannah Resources' Cash Runway?

A cash runway is defined as the length of time it would take a company to run out of money if it kept spending at its current rate of cash burn. As at December 2022, Savannah Resources had cash of UK7.2m and no debt. Looking at the last year, the company burnt through UK6.7m. Therefore, from December 2022 it had roughly 13 months of cash runway. That's not too bad, but it's fair to say the end of the cash runway is in sight, unless cash burn reduces drastically. You can see how its cash balance has changed over time in the image below.

How Is Savannah Resources' Cash Burn Changing Over Time?

Because Savannah Resources isn't currently generating revenue, we consider it an early-stage business. So while we can't look to sales to understand growth, we can look at how the cash burn is changing to understand how expenditure is trending over time. Over the last year its cash burn actually increased by 17%, which suggests that management are increasing investment in future growth, but not too quickly. However, the company's true cash runway will therefore be shorter than suggested above, if spending continues to increase. Admittedly, we're a bit cautious of Savannah Resources due to its lack of significant operating revenues. We prefer most of the stocks on this list of stocks that analysts expect to grow.

How Easily Can Savannah Resources Raise Cash?

Given its cash burn trajectory, Savannah Resources shareholders may wish to consider how easily it could raise more cash, despite its solid cash runway. Issuing new shares, or taking on debt, are the most common ways for a listed company to raise more money for its business. Many companies end up issuing new shares to fund future growth. We can compare a company's cash burn to its market capitalisation to get a sense for how many new shares a company would have to issue to fund one year's operations.

Savannah Resources has a market capitalisation of UK79m and burnt through UK6.7m last year, which is 8.5% of the company's market value. Given that is a rather small percentage, it would probably be really easy for the company to fund another year's growth by issuing some new shares to investors, or even by taking out a loan.

How Risky Is Savannah Resources' Cash Burn Situation?

Even though its increasing cash burn makes us a little nervous, we are compelled to mention that we thought Savannah Resources' cash burn relative to its market cap was relatively promising. Even though we don't think it has a problem with its cash burn, the analysis we've done in this article does suggest that shareholders should give some careful thought to the potential cost of raising more money in the future. Taking a deeper dive, we've spotted 2 warning signs for Savannah Resources you should be aware of, and 1 of them is significant.

Of course, you might find a fantastic investment by looking elsewhere. So take a peek at this free list of interesting companies, and this list of stocks growth stocks (according to analyst forecasts)

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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LOS ANGELES (AP)  Workers picketed major Southern California hotels Monday after walking off the job during the July Fourth long weekend to demand better pay and benefits.

The strike by bellhops, front desk agents, room attendants, cooks, servers and dishwashers began early Sunday in Los Angeles and Orange counties just as summer tourism ramps up. Employers accused the union of failing to negotiate.

Members of Unite Here Local 11 voted last month in favor of authorizing the walkout. In addition to higher wages, the union wants improved health care benefits, higher pension contributions and less strenuous workloads.

We deserve to get better pay because we do work hard. We clean fourteen rooms a day. Sometimes we do a little more," said Eleida Manzo, housekeeper at JW Marriott in downtown Los Angeles. The single mother of three said she makes $25 an hour.

Contracts expired at midnight Friday at more than 60 hotels, including properties owned by major chains such as Marriott and Hilton. The strike affects about half of the 32,000 hospitality workers the union represents across Southern California and Arizona.

Osiris Gaona, a phone operator at InterContinental Los Angeles Downtown, was joined on the picket line by her husband, 15-year-old son and 7-year-old granddaughter. They will march again Tuesday, the Fourth of July, she said.

We are hoping to send a message to the owners of all the hotels, Gaona said. We are asking for a pay raise because it costs so much to live here in California, especially in LA.

The walkout comes amid holiday celebrations and a major anime convention in Los Angeles. The union, on its website, urged guests to not eat, sleep or meet at the striking hotels, where temporary employees were hired to cover for the striking workers. But it wasn't immediately clear whether the strike resulted in guests checking out early or lacking services.

It's the latest action by a restive labor movement in California.

Hollywood writers have been on strike since early May. In March, the giant Los Angeles Unified School District was shut down for three days by bus drivers, custodians and other support staff. Los Angeles teachers supported that strike and then reached a deal on their own contract without walking out. Oakland teachers went on strike for more than a week, and slowdowns occurred at the big ports of Los Angeles and Long Beach before West Coast dockworkers reached a tentative settlement in June. Actors also may strike.

Brenden Gallagher is a striking writer who on Monday joined the hotel picket line.

Were all workers. Workers are in the same struggle. Very often its the same billionaires that have investment interests in hotels and in media. If you work for a boss, you are working class. You are a worker," he said.

The soaring cost of living in greater Los Angeles is a significant problem for hotel workers, according to the union.

Last week, a deal was reached with its biggest employer, the Westin Bonaventure Hotel & Suites in downtown Los Angeles, which has more than 600 union workers. Union officials described the tentative agreement, which provides higher pay and increased staffing levels, as a major win for workers.

Talks with other hotels  including the Ritz-Carlton, Four Seasons Regent Beverly Wilshire and Anaheim Hilton, near Disneyland  were at a stalemate. A coalition of more than 40 hotels involved in talks accused union leaders of canceling a scheduled bargaining session and refusing to come to the table. The hotels have offered wage increases of $2.50 per hour in the first 12 months and $6.25 over four years, the group said.

From the outset, the Union has shown no desire to engage in productive, good faith negotiations with this group, the hotel coalition said in a statement Sunday. The Union has not budged from its opening demand two months ago of up to a 40% wage increase and an over 28% increase in benefit costs.

The work stoppage had been anticipated, and the properties are fully prepared to continue to operate these hotels and to take care of our guests as long as this disruption lasts, said Keith Grossman, a spokesperson for the coalition.

Another housekeeper at JW Marriott, Bellen Valle, said a $5-an-hour raise would give her a substantial boost, and finally allow her to take her daughter to Disneyland.

Thats gonna help me a lot. A lot. I can see the difference in my check, Valle said.

___

Associated Press writers John Antczak and Christopher Weber contributed.
Artificial Intelligence can revolutionize the world of energy drinks - it not only created what it considers the perfect recipe, but also tasted it.

BUDAPEST, Hungary, July 3, 2023 /PRNewswire/ -- The world's first energy drink entirely powered by A.I. has been developed by HELL ENERGY. Design, recipe, tasting and meticulous taste evaluation, predictive intelligence, security measures, marketing elements - every aspect has been expertly crafted by advanced A.I. (Artificial Intelligence) systems.

HELL A.I. energy drink

The vast amount of information and knowledge available on the World Wide Web is utilized by A.I. It can process and uncover connections at a speed that is almost incomprehensible to humans. Additionally, it possesses comprehensive knowledge about energy drinks, encompassing their ingredients, sales results, health research, recommendations, and consumer feedback. Moreover, it can seamlessly integrate the latest trends and information into its analyses.

When HELL ENERGY commissioned A.I. to develop a new energy drink tailored to its needs, the artificial intelligence processed a vast amount of information and formulated what it deemed the best recipe. The A.I. not only considered consumer expectations from an energy drink but also prioritized the goal of creating a superior and more enjoyable beverage.

As the most intelligent entity in the world at present, A.I. deemed the recipe it formulated to be perfect. It enhanced the energy drink with vitamins, amino acids, and herbs while ensuring compliance with food industry legislation, including the optimization of EFSA (European Food Safety Authority) recommendations and adherence to the recommended daily allowance (RDA) standards.

The A.I. created three flavour variations for fine-tuning and digitized them using the technology of a New York-based company. After tasting [yes, tasting, not testing] all three drinks and analysing extensive data and statistics, the A.I. utilized predictive intelligence to select the winning flavour. Thus, the truly unique and refreshing Tutti-frutti & Berry-blast flavour was born. This ground-breaking development represents the first time artificial intelligence has carried out such a sophisticated product development process within the energy drink sector.

The recipe is kept strictly confidential, and in order to protect it, the A.I. provided recommendations. It is stored on a single computer in HELL ENERGY's Hungarian factory, equipped with advanced security elements. The design of the room housing the machine was also developed by artificial intelligence. However, recognizing the importance of backup measures, a copy of the recipe is kept securely in a vault in Switzerland.

After such extensive involvement, it would come as no surprise that the packaging of the new energy drink was also designed by A.I. The beverage can embodies the latest trends, exuding a youthful and cool vibe. While incorporating the colour scheme of HELL ENERGY, the A.I. also infused its own digital style into the design.

Since the new product, 'HELL A.I.,' is truly the result of an extraordinary and unique process unparalleled at a global level, the company's employees were eager to subject the new energy drink to testing under conventional conditions. As a result, it underwent rigorous quality control and blind tasting sessions. The success confirmed the A.I.'s capabilities!

The A.I. also represents a tremendous perspective in the field of product development, pushing beyond previously unimaginable boundaries and ushering in a new era for the food industry. With the A.I.'s capabilities, it can swiftly sort and analyse vast amounts of internet data in mere minutes or seconds, drastically reducing the product development cycle from 1-2 years (or at best, half a year) to as little as 1 month. This process is the result of coordinated efforts, as multiple A.I. systems, each excelling in different areas, collaborate on the development. With over a hundred A.I. systems already in existence worldwide, their collective operation ensures a high level of innovation.

The new product is produced in one of Europe's most advanced beverage production facilities and will be accessible in over 60 countries worldwide starting from the summer of 2023.

SOURCE HELL ENERGY
Finding a business that has the potential to grow substantially is not easy, but it is possible if we look at a few key financial metrics. Typically, we'll want to notice a trend of growing return on capital employed (ROCE) and alongside that, an expanding base of capital employed. If you see this, it typically means it's a company with a great business model and plenty of profitable reinvestment opportunities. However, after investigating Yum China Holdings (NYSE:YUMC), we don't think it's current trends fit the mold of a multi-bagger.

Understanding Return On Capital Employed (ROCE)

Just to clarify if you're unsure, ROCE is a metric for evaluating how much pre-tax income (in percentage terms) a company earns on the capital invested in its business. Analysts use this formula to calculate it for Yum China Holdings:

Return on Capital Employed = Earnings Before Interest and Tax (EBIT)  (Total Assets - Current Liabilities)

0.09 = US$884m  (US$12b - US$2.1b) (Based on the trailing twelve months to March 2023).

Thus, Yum China Holdings has an ROCE of 9.0%. Even though it's in line with the industry average of 9.1%, it's still a low return by itself.

See our latest analysis for Yum China Holdings

roce

Above you can see how the current ROCE for Yum China Holdings compares to its prior returns on capital, but there's only so much you can tell from the past. If you're interested, you can view the analysts predictions in our free report on analyst forecasts for the company.

What Can We Tell From Yum China Holdings' ROCE Trend?

On the surface, the trend of ROCE at Yum China Holdings doesn't inspire confidence. Over the last five years, returns on capital have decreased to 9.0% from 20% five years ago. On the other hand, the company has been employing more capital without a corresponding improvement in sales in the last year, which could suggest these investments are longer term plays. It may take some time before the company starts to see any change in earnings from these investments.

Our Take On Yum China Holdings' ROCE

To conclude, we've found that Yum China Holdings is reinvesting in the business, but returns have been falling. Although the market must be expecting these trends to improve because the stock has gained 58% over the last five years. But if the trajectory of these underlying trends continue, we think the likelihood of it being a multi-bagger from here isn't high.

If you want to continue researching Yum China Holdings, you might be interested to know about the 1 warning sign that our analysis has discovered.

For those who like to invest in solid companies, check out this free list of companies with solid balance sheets and high returns on equity.

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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New Zealand 2nd qtr business confidence continues to improve but still downbeat think-tank

FILE PHOTO: A sailing boat can be seen in front of the central business district of Wellington in New Zealand

By Lucy Craymer

WELLINGTON (Reuters) - New Zealand's business confidence in the second quarter continued to pick up from low levels but firms remain downbeat, a private think tank said on Tuesday.

A net 63% of firms surveyed expected general business conditions to deteriorate compared with 66% pessimism in the previous quarter, the New Zealand Institute of Economic Research's (NZIER) quarterly survey of business opinion (QSBO) showed.

On a seasonally adjusted basis, 59% expected business conditions to worsen, versus 63% pessimism recorded in the previous period. The survey's measure of capacity utilization fell to 81.7%, from the previous quarter's 94.0%.

NZIER said while demand continues to soften, the marked decline in capacity utilization amongst builders and manufacturers and the proportion of firms reporting difficulty in finding labour, especially unskilled labour, point to a considerable easing in capacity pressures in the New Zealand economy.

The downbeat mood was broad-based across sectors, but retailers are particularly bearish about the general economic outlook, NZIER said in its report.

Overall, were seeing that softer demand picture coming through, Christina Leung, principal economist at NZIER said at the release of the survey. She added it should give the central bank some comfort that things are going in the right direction.

(Reporting by Lucy Craymer; Editing by Chris Reese)
A 17-year-old girl from Texas was rescued on Saturday after getting cliffed-out while hiking up the "Wasatch Connector" from Upper Bear Creek in San Miguel County.

The US Forest Service describes this hike as, "steep and rocky as it switch backs its way up the east side of Gold Hill away from Bear Creek."

According to a tweet from the San Miguel Sheriff's Office, was attempting to hike past snowfields that were blocking the trail on Gold Hill, near the Telluride Ski area, when she got off-route.

She was hiking with minimal gear, officials said.

"SAR located the female on a ridge, & using a technical short-rope rescue method, extricated her to safety. No one was injured during the 4-hour mission that ended right at dusk," the sheriff's office said.

It's important to prepare for unexpected situations when entering the Colorado backcountry, even if that means carrying around additional equipment like extra food, water, and layers to keep warm.

A GPS device, like a Garmin inReach, is also a great tool to have with you. Carrying one can help you establish a line of communication with emergency response teams.

Those interested in helping to support Colorado's volunteer-driven search and rescue program should consider purchasing a CORSAR card, which is quite affordable at $3 per year.
Residents of Monument and other Colorado communities will have another reason to look to the skies on July 4th ahead of evening fireworks shows.

The Colorado Air National Guard is set to treat viewers to the "sound of freedom" with its traditional F-16 Viper flyovers Tuesday, 140th Wing Commander Col. Jeremiah "Weed" Tucker said in a news release.

Jets will launch from Buckley Space Force Base in Aurora around 10 a.m. and will fly until 12:30 p.m. across scheduled communities:

 Monument

 Denver metro area

 Firestone

 Granby

 Grand Lake

 Greeley

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 Crested Butte

 Lake City

 Telluride

 Silverton/Ouray

 Vail

 Wellington

Officials reminded the public that the flyovers are subject to weather conditions and can be canceled.

The Colorado National Guard is also celebrating a century of "military aviation" in the state this year, officials said.
Hainan sees offshore duty-free sales exceed 130 bln yuan over 3 years

Xinhua) 08:11, July 03, 2023

This aerial photo taken on April 4, 2023 shows the Haikou International Duty-Free Shopping Complex in Haikou, south China's Hainan Province. (Xinhua/Yang Guanyu)

HAIKOU, July 2 (Xinhua) -- South China's island province of Hainan has recorded a total offshore duty-free sales of over 130 billion yuan (about 17.99 billion U.S. dollars) since adjusting relevant policies three years ago, said Haikou Customs Saturday.

From July 1, 2020 to Friday, 17.67 million shoppers purchased 130.7 billion yuan of offshore duty-free products on the island, increasing by 92.6 percent and 279 percent, respectively, compared with the previous three years.

Since Hainan launched the policy that allows domestic tourists to buy products on the island without taxation on April 20, 2011, rounds of adjustments on the initial policy have taken place.

The adjustment on July 1, 2020 increased the island's annual tax-free shopping quota from 30,000 yuan to 100,000 yuan per person, and expanded the major categories of duty-free goods from 38 to 45.

China released a master plan in June 2020 to build Hainan into a globally influential and high-level free-trade port by the middle of the century. Over recent years, the island province has become an attractive shopping destination for domestic consumers.

Through years of efforts to enhance the local tourism and shopping sector, Hainan now boasts 12 offshore duty-free shops.

(Web editor: Zhang Kaiwei, Liang Jun)
America, since 1787, has had a distinctive system of federalism. A number of responsibilities, such as national defense, are clearly given to the national government, but a substantial number of policy decisions rest with the 50 states.

Governors and state legislatures have been especially active in the past year. In many states, public policies have been enacted that push states politically to the far right or far left.

Colorado is just one example. Democrats took advantage of favorable gerrymandering and pushed through progressive legislation by raising the age limit to buy a gun. They acted on transgender rights by requiring gender-neutral bathrooms in new public buildings. They protected the right to abortion in most circumstances.

According to reports in The New York Times, what was happening in Colorado also happened in about 16 other states where Democrats dominated both houses of the Legislature and controlled the governors office.

Such a situation, where all three major power points  House of Representatives, Senate and governor  are controlled by one political party is nicknamed a trifecta.

Meanwhile, Republicans in at least 22 states, where they are in control of the Legislature and the governorship, were using their power to legislate on similar subjects but to push in a different direction  a decidedly conservative direction.

Republican trifectas pushed for enacting strict anti-abortion laws, putting curriculum restrictions in public schools, enacting gay and lesbian rights regulations, and a doubling down on gun rights.

Or put it this way: Democratic-controlled legislatures and governors limited guns, but Republican-controlled legislatures and governors made it easier to carry guns in public places. Democratic legislatures and governors expanded transgender rights, while Republican legislatures and governors limited them. Democratic legislatures and governors facilitated abortions, but Republican legislatures and governors made abortions harder to get.

The New York Times report used the term bulldozed to describe how the dominant party, whether Democratic or Republican, forced its legislation on the other political party. It also theorized that the taking of strong stands on the nations thorniest social issues left significant portions of a states electorate, particularly moderate and unaffiliated voters, unrepresented.

States listed in the report as single-party control Democratic included California, Illinois, Maryland, Massachusetts, Michigan, Minnesota, New York, Washington and Colorado.

Some of the states listed as Republican dominated were Florida, Iowa, Mississippi, Montana, North Carolina, North Dakota, South Carolina, Tennessee, Texas and Wyoming.

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What is the meaning of this for Colorado?

Our Legislature is gerrymandered to favor Democrats. They have 30 safe seats in the House compared with 19 for Republicans. In the Senate, the tally is 15 safe Democratic seats and nine safe Republican. The Democrats also hold the governors office.

But Colorado is not exceptional; in fact, it is normal. Add 17 states dominated by Democrats to 22 states dominated by Republicans, and you get 39 of 50 states where one political party or the other has a clear advantage.

In only the remaining 11 states are Republicans and Democrats able to compete evenly for power or produce laws that have a chance of being moderate, neither far left nor far right.

It presents a confusing future in which, as one travels from state to state, abortion laws can change from permissive to strict, transgender rights be strong or nonexistent, and automatic weapons can be legal on one side of a state line and illegal on the other.

Coloradans should be aware of what is happening with state legislatures and governors nationwide. We are seeing more political polarization, with 17 liberal and progressive Democratic state governments on one side and 22 arch-conservative Republican state governments on the other.

But this is American federalism at work. At the Constitutional Convention in Philadelphia in 1787, a compromise was reached that gave some powers to the national government and reserved others to the states, That compromise is still with us.

We do not want a heavily centralized top-down governmental system. But the price we pay for that is diversity and complexity within our individual states. And right now, many of our states are tacking strongly left or decidedly right, depending on their ideological leanings.

The bottom line is a patchworky system that is likely to remain this way for a significant time to come.

News columnists Tom Cronin and Bob Loevy write about Colorado and national political issues.
Just weeks before the hard fought, historically close 1998 election for governor, the Colorado Republican state chairman, Steve Curtis, declared he would not vote for Republican nominee Bill Owens because Owens was not conservative enough.

Owens was seeking to defy history and become the first Republican governor to be elected since 1970 after Democrats had won six consecutive gubernatorial elections. He was locked in a very tight race against Democratic Lt. Gov. Gail Schoettler who served under the popular, term-limited Gov. Roy Romer.

Curtis was a very ineffective state chairman who saw himself as the ideological enforcer of the party. Curtis was so discredited that his opposition to Owens was cited in a major newspaper endorsement editorial as one of the reasons to vote for Owens.

Not conservative enough Owens won that terribly close election and went on to be a very successful governor who executed his campaign agenda to cut taxes, reform education and improve transportation without raising taxes. He was reelected in 2002 with 63 percent and he left office in 2007 with an approval rating of 70 percent. Owens remains the only Republican governor to be elected in 52 years.

So here we go again 25 years later with another inexperienced, self-righteous, self-proclaimed ideologically pure GOP chairman. Dave Williams was elected just over 100 days ago but he has wasted no time proving he aspires to be the Steve Curtis of the 2024 election cycle.

Williams served for six years as a state representative from Colorado Springs in one of the most non-competitive, safest Republican districts in the state. He was a noisy, ineffective back-bencher who derisively labeled any Republican he disagreed with as a RINO  Republican in Name Only  who did not meet his ideological purity test that is rooted in absolute fealty to Donald Trump.

One of the RINOs he targeted was U.S. Rep. Doug Lamborn, who has one of the most conservative voting records of any Republican in Congress. That made no difference to Williams. Lamborn whipped Williams by 14 points in the 2022 5th Congressional District Republican primary.

Williams was one of six candidates for Republican state chairman this past March who believe conspiracy theories that the 2020 presidential election was stolen from Trump, including in Colorado. Williams won after the former Mesa County clerk, criminally indicted Tina Peters, withdrew from the race and endorsed Williams. He then promised Peters a job as the election integrity coordinator for the state party. No joke.

While there are no statewide Republican nominees for Williams to target in 2024 other than the presidential race, he has already found plenty of other Republicans to attack.

Unbowed by the thrashing he received in 2022 primary, Williams attacked Lamborn for voting for the debt limit compromise forged by Republican Speaker of the U.S. House Kevin McCarthy where President Joe Biden was forced to accept spending reductions and other conservative demands. A Republican congressman supporting a Republican speaker of the House is just not enough for someone as pure as Dave Williams.

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When Democratic abortion extremists nonsensically suggested the U.S. Space Command should remain in Colorado Springs rather than move to Alabama because of Colorados ninth-month abortion law, Williams took the bait. He circulated a letter for Republican leaders to sign saying Colorado should refuse the Space Command if abortion was a factor.

Congressman Lamborn and former Colorado Springs Mayor John Suthers, both of whom are strongly pro-life, refused to sign the letter because it would have escalated abortion as an issue in the Space Command debate. This, of course, made them RINOs worthy of attack by Williams. Suthers is also a former Colorado attorney general, United States attorney for Colorado, and El Paso County district attorney  a RINO for sure.

Williams made an agreement with the Colorado Libertarian Party which essentially gives them the ability to veto the nomination of Republicans they oppose; otherwise, they will field Libertarian candidates in those races. This clearly violates Colorado Republican by-laws, which prohibit the state chairman from interfering in Republican primaries. Williams is apparently fine with the fact Libertarians have a long tradition of being pro-choice on abortion.

While Libertarian candidates can affect election outcomes, Colorado Republicans have suffered historic losses in the last three election cycles not because of Libertarians. Donald Trump and his stolen election conspiracy theories have defined Republicans at every level, something Williams refuses to acknowledge.

Williams has all but declared war on his predecessor, Kristi Burton Brown, who led the Colorado Republican Party with grace and strength during the difficult 2022 election cycle.

The assault on Brown started shortly after the election when a Williams ally, Aaron Wood, led a rally where RINOs were called liars, traitors, whores and ass wipes. One of the rally speakers disparaged Browns physical looks alleging she had work done on her face that resulted in a plastic smile. Williams has promised Wood a job.

Brown must intimidate Williams. She was a very effective communicator who sought to build the Colorado Republican Party rather than tear it apart. And she successfully raised money for the state party while Williams is unable to hire staff and he is barely keeping a state headquarters open. Laughably, he claims his failure to raise money is deliberate as he implements best practices.

Williams is naive and petulant and incapable of grasping the role of the state chairman in dealing with a changing Colorado electorate.

Dick Wadhams is a former Colorado Republican state chairman who worked for U.S. Sen. Bill Armstrong for nine years before managing campaigns for U.S. Sens. Hank Brown and Wayne Allard, and Gov. Bill Owens.
It probably goes without saying by now, yet it bears repeating: Colorados terribly misguided experiment with justice reform was bound to backfire. It has done so in more ways than one.

Foremost among the repercussions, of course, has been the statewide surge in violent and other crime. Unsurprisingly, it has accompanied the Legislatures multi-year spree of slashing criminal penalties, easing the release of dangerous suspects, and decriminalizing drugs.

The state continues to reel from the crime wave even as some measures have been taken to repair some of justice reforms collateral damage. For example, a coalition of minority Republicans and moderates among ruling Democrats in the General Assembly cracked down on the states rampant auto theft this year. Their legislation was signed into law last month by Gov. Jared Polis. The bill essentially scrapped prior lawmaking that had watered down penalties for auto theft  and helped make Colorado the car-theft capital of the entire country.

If only lawmakers would follow suit and dismantle more components of their ill-conceived justice reform agenda, it could turn the corner on the crime wave. It also could blunt another ripple effect of the breakdown of law and order in our state  a bad reputation nationwide for public safety. It seems word has gotten out.

A news report in The Gazette last week pointed to Colorados slumping status as a destination for road trips. Thats according to data compiled by the website WalletHub.

The WalletHub analysis looked at which American states were most popular for summer road trips, and Colorado, for all its splendor, was bumped from the top 10. It landed in a mediocre 19th-place ranking, The Gazette report noted.

The main reason was travelers concern for their safety.

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The analysis assessed 32 key metrics falling into three greater categories  cost, safety and activities. While Colorado ranked well enough in terms of road-trip costs and local activities, our states overall status as a road travel destination came crashing down thanks to a 40th-place ranking for safety among the 50 states.

The safety category of the criteria includes factors like road and bridge quality, traffic fatalities, dangerous practices among drivers (think texting, speeding, and of course aggressive driving, i.e., road rage), and automobile thefts  with Colorado ranking 50th when it comes to stolen vehicles.

And just to be clear, 50th for auto theft means No. 1 among the states for having the highest rate of vehicles stolen.

A commentary in Sundays Gazette by Tom Copeland, the research director at Colorado think tank Centennial Institute, confirms the sense of chaos afflicting our highways and byways. Noting that Colorado has been ranked third worst among the states for confrontational driving, Copeland attributes some of the road rage to impaired drivers  those drunk or stoned.

High drivers are twice as likely to be involved in a crash, Copeland writes, and one in four traffic deaths in Colorado involves THC.

All of it, inevitably, stands to leave would-be travelers to our state wary. And it traces in significant measure to a casual attitude toward crime and drug use by all too many Colorado policy makers.

In other words, its yet another wakeup call for our states elected leadership.
Public displays of a lifestyle

Carolyn Wiggle is right about why do we need to know her sex life? Every headline declares what the persons sex life or race is and sometimes both. It has nothing to do with their accomplishments.

Along with that in response to Linda Rineharts letter a few days ago regarding Backlash to pride month, maybe what she claims is happening in response to the LGBTQ community is because we are getting sick of hearing about it. Maybe less flaunting of it would gain you more respect. Why do you think its necessary to have public displays of your lifestyle? A parade to show off? No one gains respect by parading down a city street half naked. And Pride Month?

I have nothing against you or how you live. I just dont want to hear about it every day.

Faye Lindsey

Colorado Springs

Mental health crisis

We are facing a mental health crisis in the U.S. What is to be done?

Based on the research that my co-author and I conducted on how successful people face and surmount obstacles, I have a few recommendations. These recommendations relate to people with mental health issues, not those with mental illness. Individuals with mental illness should seek treatment from health care professionals.

Everyone needs to understand that we all face obstacles in our lives. The only thing we can control is our attitude toward those obstacles. What if we reframed Why did this happen for me? instead of Why did this happen to me? This helps us problem solve and builds our resilience.

Second, we need to remember that life is unfair. But with resilience and optimism we can take what happens in life in stride and we can progress forward.

And speaking of resilience and optimism, what if we banished I cant from our lives? What if we used I can, I will, Im going to right away? What if we faced our fears?

We can go over, under, around, or through the obstacles in our lives using skills we already have  mental intelligence, emotional intelligence, social support, moral compass & spirituality, determination & perseverance & persistence, creativity, optimism, resilience, action-orientation and passion.

Jill S. Tietjen, P.E.

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Centennial

Piece on parental alienation

Its no surprise your hit-piece on parental alienation (June 29, Colorado child custody cases roiled by CSU professors alienation theory) contains not a single quote from a psychologist or other family therapy authority opposed to alienation theory.

The sole source quoted for the article is a law professor, not a psychologist, named Joan Meier, who leads the tiny group of activists opposed to alienation theory.

With the exception of a handful of quacks, almost no professionals in family psychology deny the devastating effect of alienation on children. Scientific literature on parental alienation is cataloged by at least three sources: Vanderbilt University at https://ckm.vumc.org/pasg, emmm.org.au, and VictimToHero.com.

I suggest two factual corrections. It cannot be true that Joan Meier has testified as a competing expert witness, as she is an attorney, not an expert, and no court would allow her to testify as one. It is not true that parental alienation is excluded from the DSM-5, as you stated. While the term alienation was omitted to placate critics, there are four codes in the DSM relevant to parental alienation: Child psychological abuse, parent-child relational problem, child affected by child relationship distress, and parental relationship discord.

Josh Grant

Denver

Invasion of privacy

Pregnancy is a medical condition, treated in the privacy of the exam room, between a young woman and her OBGYN, not before a Republican dominated State legislature. When this supreme court overturned Roe vs Wade they stripped our daughters and granddaughters of a 50-year precedent on their rights to Freedom, PRIVACY and Choice. These Republican dominated states have passed blanket laws impacting the health care of all young girls and women in their states from the ages of 10-50 without ever knowing the condition of her health, the health of the embryo-fetus, dont even know her name but have blocked her access to health care. Abortion is a medical procedure often done to save the life of the young girl or woman. 99.9 percent of those that occur after 4 months are done to remove a non-vital fetus, one that died in the womb or for some other life threatening, debilitating condition. According to CBS national news, OBGYNs are moving out of red states to practice in blue states as they are being threatened with criminal prosecution and loss of medical license for treating their patients.

The United States has one of the highest infant mortality rates in the world, OBGYNs are the last medical professional a state should want to lose.

And I have yet to call up my Republican politician to schedule a doctors appointment for anything, not even an ingrown toenail. It will be over my cold, dead lifeless body before I allow a Republican politician to play OBGYN with the lives of my daughters and granddaughters, pregnant or not, not ever.

Karon McCormick

Colorado Springs
A police officer's claim that a suspected drunken driver refused a blood or breath test, without any additional details, was insufficient to justify a suspension of the driver's license, Colorado's second-highest court ruled last week.

Under the state's "express consent law," motorists automatically give their consent to a chemical test whenever law enforcement has probable cause to believe someone is driving under the influence. If a driver refuses, the state can revoke their license and prosecutors may use evidence of the refusal at a criminal trial.

In the case of Maggie Jansma, the Division of Motor Vehicles suspended her license after reviewing a police document in which an officer noted Jansma "refused" a blood or breath test, with no further explanation. Jansma then challenged that decision before a three-judge panel of the Court of Appeals, focusing on the sole piece of evidence against her.

"Does a police officers statement that a legal standard was met, alone, sufficiently support a factual finding that the officer had probable cause to revoke a drivers license?" wrote Judge David Furman in the June 29 opinion. "In this case, we conclude that it does not."

Jansma argued there would be no point in holding a driver's license revocation hearing if the DMV simply accepts an officer's claim of refusal with no additional facts. The government countered that there was "no logical reason" for Jansma's arresting officer to falsely claim she refused a test.

In January 2022, Jansma was involved in a car accident in Loveland. Police arrested her on suspicion of driving under the influence.

Two weeks later, Officer Erik Contino filled out paperwork for Jansma's driver's license suspension and sent it to the DMV. Contino checked boxes indicating that at the time of Jansma's arrest, her eyes were "bloodshot" and "watery," her speech was "slurred" and her balance "unsteady," plus there was "odor" of alcohol. He also checked the box indicating Jansma "refused" a chemical test.

However, in the section marked "what did officer see or hear" during the refusal, Contino wrote nothing.

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Case: Jansma v. Colorado Department of Revenue Decided: June 29, 2023 Jurisdiction: Larimer County Ruling: 3-0 Judges: David Furman (author) Ted C. Tow III Sueanna P. Johnson Background: 'The law is the law': Conifer students experience real appellate cases, quiz judges

A hearing officer agreed Contino's report was enough to prove Jansma refused a chemical test and her license should be revoked. A Larimer County judge upheld that conclusion. The Court of Appeals, as part of its "Courts in the Community" initiative, then heard oral arguments in Jansma's case earlier this year at Conifer High School.

"I took this appeal because, frankly, I think that if just checking the box becomes sufficient, I think that will be the death knell for any due process in these proceedings," said attorney Sarah Schielke, arguing for Jansma. "It will be just accepting that the police officer makes a legal determination as to refusal."

The government, in turn, blamed Jansma for not doing more to challenge Contino's statement.

"If Ms. Jansma has concerns about the accuracy of the Affidavit, she could have called Officer Contino as a witness and questioned him about whether he had asked her to take a chemical test and what she did in response," wrote Assistant Attorney General Danny Rheiner.

The appellate panel sided with Jansma, explaining the government has the burden of proof to justify a suspension. While there was some description of Jansma's intoxication, the report contained no supporting evidence of her refusal to take a test.

"(W)e cannot uphold revocation based only on the transporting officers bare assertion that Jansma refused testing in the absence of factual detail," wrote Furman.
Nearly two dozen Denver County Court judges will not be impacted by any reform to the states judicial discipline system should voters approve the proposal next year.

Thats because Denvers 19 county jurists  each appointed by the mayor and apart from the 27 Denver district court judges named by the governor  fall under an autonomous city judicial discipline commission different from a state panel that oversees everyone else.

That means while 339 district and county court judges across Colorado must comply with any change to the states system of discipline, Denvers county court judges will still answer to another  one that strongly mimics the very methods voters are being asked to reform in 2024.

The citys commission can continue to hold hearings in secret, continue to act as prosecutor and jury on any case it brings against a Denver county court judge, or even allow the mayor to sit in judgment, despite any potential conflict of interest.

Denver commission officials told The Denver Gazette theyre waiting and watching to see what happens with the statewide vote and would likely take up similar changes after that, a process that could take months and require another vote of the citys electorate.

The sweeping reforms proposed to how Colorados Commission on Judicial Discipline works  such as transforming its now-secret proceedings into alleged misconduct to a more transparent process  came after months of public testimony last summer before a special legislative committee. That was followed by extensive hearings at the General Assembly that ultimately yielded three measures, including a proposed amendment to the Colorado Constitution that will go before voters in November 2024.

Included in those reforms is the creation of an ombudsmans office, where people with concerns about alleged misconduct can go for information, support and guidance in pursuing a complaint. That change does not require voter approval.

And although Denver voters will be able to make a choice on the amendment, it wont actually impact them.

The citys judicial discipline rules are separate and still rely on a process cloaked in secrecy, one thats managed by a seven-member panel that ironically includes two Denver district court judges, who would personally be subject to the states new system while administering the citys.

A surprise to legislators

That any reforms wont impact Denver was a surprise to legislators key to the process.

I honestly didnt even know Denver had its own judicial discipline commission and I didnt understand or realize the citys county judges would fall outside of the states purview, said Sen. Julie Gonzales, D-Denver, co-chair of the legislative committee that conducted the summertime hearings. We thought this would apply to them and we believed the rules we contemplated would include all judges. We would have addressed this challenge had we been aware the challenge existed.

Committee chairman Rep. Mike Weissman, D-Aurora, was similarly surprised.

The issue of a separate system for Denver county judges did not come up in the legislative process, Weissman said. Time has passed (since the Denver and state discipline systems were created), and, in the same way that what was an adequate system decades ago no longer is for the state, its most likely time for an update in Denver, as well.

Denvers discipline system is not unlike the states current method, where a single entity approves any public censure of a judge. For the state commission its the seven-member Supreme Court. The citys structure  in place since at least 1967  gives the mayor the ultimate decision on whether to discipline a county judge and how.

Much like the states current process, the city judicial commission recommends any public censure to the mayor but can also issue private admonishments that never reach City Hall.

Voters will be asked to change the states system to one where a three-person panel  a lawyer, a judge and a citizen who is neither  hears discipline cases brought by the state commission. Currently, the commission makes its own determination or forwards one from a three-judge panel named by the Supreme Court to the high court for its agreement or rejection.

The city commission has seven voting members  the two district court judges, a pair of attorneys and three citizens, all appointed by the mayor  and is supervised by the presiding county judge, Nicole Rodarte, who makes the initial decision about whether a complaint merits the commissions attention. She also oversees any discipline of the citys magistrates, all of whom serve at her pleasure.

The states commission currently has 10 members  four judges appointed by the Supreme Court, and two attorneys and four non-attorneys appointed by the governor. How the judges are chosen for the panel would change under the new rules.

Following the state?

Rodarte told The Gazette in an email that the citys commission has been keenly aware of what the state has been doing.

While the Denver County Court is not part of the state court system affected by the 2023 legislative changes, because it is carved out as a separate court by state statute and the Colorado Constitution, the (Denver Judicial Discipline) Commission has been closely following the state interim committees extensive work and resulting 2023 legislation, Rodarte said in the email, including the constitutional amendment referred to the voters for consideration.

She said if the referendum passes, the Denver commission would use it as a framework for its own changes to its operating rules.

Our Judicial Discipline Commission is committed to examining and revising its rules and will use the state interim committees recommendations and the legislative changes from this summer as a framework for its upcoming revisions, Rodarte wrote.

That work could entail an amendment to the Denver City Charter, which authorizes the discipline commissions work, much like the state Constitution authorizes that of the state commission.

The City Council and the city attorney would likely play a role, as well, in evaluating how to get any changes done.

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Councilman Kevin Flynn said theres too much at stake not to follow the states lead.

Public trust in our nations judicial system, from the top down, is in a tailspin right now, Flynn told The Gazette in an email. While I understand the reason why Denver as a consolidated city and county is exempt from these statewide reforms in judicial discipline, we are not exempt from increasing public scrutiny. Updating Denvers procedures for judicial complaints to be in line with the statewide improvements needs to be near the top of the agenda for the new (Mike) Johnston administration next month.

More than 40 complaints against county court judges have been filed with the Denver commission from 2017 through 2022, according to its reports.

None resulted in any action taken against a judge.

The city council in April approved a $200,000 settlement with Rebecca Norris, a courtroom clerk who filed a federal lawsuit in 2020 that accused the city of wrongfully firing her after she accused senior Denver County Court Judge Andrew Armatas  known as Judge Touchy Feely among courthouse staff, according to the lawsuit  of sexual assault and harassment she endured during the summer of 2016. The city said her allegations were false and dishonest and fired Norris in 2019.

The commissions annual reports indicate it did not discipline any judge in that timeframe and its unclear if Norris reported the incidents to the commission.

The city commission for years had said it was either rewriting or considering a rewrite of its rules to replicate the states, according to nearly a decade of its annual reports reviewed by The Gazette.

That began in 2013, when then-Presiding Judge John Marcucci said he asked commission member attorney Aaron Hyatt of Brownstein Hyatt Farber Schreck in Denver to take on the task. In 2015, Marcucci enlisted retired Denver County Court Judge Raymond Satter to look over the final drafts Hyatt had written.

Unfortunately, just as we were nearing final approval on the amended rules, a matter filed with the Commission put everything on hold, Marcucci wrote in its 2015 report.

A complaint against a judge had been filed and Marcucci said it would have been inappropriate to change the commissions rules at the same time.

Its unclear if it was the Armatas case that stalled the rewrite.

It is my vow to finish this work by the end of 2016, Marcucci wrote.

That didnt happen.

As the city commission was about to renew the process, the state commission said it was redoing some of its rules, so the city set its own rewrite aside.

It seemed senseless to finish our re-write only to be once again out of sync with the state, Marcucci wrote in the commissions 2016 report.

For the next two years, the city commission said it was still working on revising its rules, annual reports show. It had planned to be done in 2019, Presiding Judge Theresa Spahn wrote in the 2018 report.

A year later, the commission said in its report that it was about to embark on rewriting its rules with Hyatt and new member Denver District Court Judge Karen Brody doing the work.

Then COVID-19 hit.

For its 2021-22 annual report, the commission  yet again  was about to embark on rewriting its rules with Hyatt and Brody. There was no reference to the legislatures summertime committee hearings or calls for reform.

The states reforms were the end result of a scandal that began in 2019 when newspaper stories revealed the existence of a multi-million-dollar contract awarded by the Judicial Department to a former top official who faced firing.

The contract was quickly canceled and at least three people were fired or resigned.

A state audit later found numerous problems with how the contract was awarded, but mostly around the procurement process.

Then in 2021, newspaper accounts uncovered the existence of a memo that outlined numerous allegations of judicial misconduct that were either overlooked or dealt with leniently. The former official awarded the contract  Judicial Department chief of staff Mindy Masias  allegedly threatened to reveal those details in a tell-all sex-discrimination lawsuit. She was allegedly given the contract in order to prevent that litigation, although subsequent investigations could find no quid pro quo.

In its own inquiries, the state judicial discipline commission told legislators how it ran into extensive difficulty obtaining information and cooperation from the judicial branch and the Supreme Court.

That led the legislature to insulate the commission by creating its own funding stream and insist on a deeper look. What followed was a summertime of public hearings where it became clear the states judicial discipline system needed an overhaul.

The state discipline commission on May 3 recommended a public censure of former Colorado Supreme Court Chief Justice Nathan Ben Coats for his role in awarding the contract and violations of the judicial code of conduct.

A special panel of judges from the Court of Appeals was named to decide whether to accept the discipline recommendation after the Supreme Court recused itself.
Fourth Judicial District Attorney and prosecutor Michael Allen spoke to The Gazette last week regarding Club Q shooter Anderson Aldrich's claims of being nonbinary  how they're a "thumb in the eye" to the LGBTQ+ community, and how Aldrich only took on the nonbinary identity in an attempt to avoid hate crime charges and the federal death penalty.

Aldrich fatally shot five people and injured more than 20 at the nightclub on North Academy Boulevard on Nov. 19. Aldrich faced 323 charges, including first-degree murder, attempted first-degree murder, hate crimes and more from the 4th Judicial District Attorneys Office.

On June 26, Aldrich pleaded guilty to 51 charges, including five counts of first-degree murder and 46 counts of attempted first-degree murder. He was sentenced to five life sentences and 2,000-plus years in prison. In addition, Aldrich received three years, 164 days in prison for bias-motivated crime.

Allen has spoken out since Aldrich's guilty plea, saying that he believes Aldrich's claims of being nonbinary are dubious at best, and last week talked about the damage those claims have done to the LGBTQ+ community.

"It's another thumb in the eye to that community," Allen said. "Unfortunately, it's another pain point for people that were impacted by this case  that (Aldrich) is trying to claim he was in that community when in fact, he was never in that community."

Allen isn't the only person who finds Aldrich's claims disingenuous. At Aldrich's sentencing hearing, several victims told the court they believe Aldrich is lying.

"If (Aldrich) is nonbinary, then I am Floyd Mayweather Jr.," Cheryl Norton said. "Do I look like a boxer to you?"

At Aldrich's preliminary hearing, the prosecution presented evidence that suggested Aldrich had never previously identified as nonbinary. During the hearing, Colorado Springs detective Rebecca Joines testified that Aldrich helped run a neo-Nazi website, made several posts about having a "hatred" toward members of the LGBTQ+ community, and that friends of Aldrich had never previously heard Aldrich identify as nonbinary.

Allen told The Gazette he believed Aldrich only took on the identifier to bolster a case against charges of bias-motivated crimes.

"There is no evidence anywhere that this defendant identified as nonbinary prior to the legal proceedings getting underway," Allen said. "Even in the initial aftermath of the shooting, there was no indication from (Aldrich) or anyone associated with him that he identified as nonbinary."

The decision for Aldrich to plead no contest to two counts of bias-motivated crime, according to Allen, came as a result of Allen and the rest of the prosecution denying the defense's first offer of a plea deal, in which Aldrich would plead guilty to everything except bias-motivated crime charges.

Allen said that, due to the clear hate crime that occurred, it was incredibly important to the prosecution team and the victims that Aldrich be given jail time for bias-motivated crimes.

"The first offer we got (from Aldrich's defense), we actually did reject," Allen said. "Whatever deal we do is going to have to include the bias-motivated charges, and that was really because of conversations we were having with victim family members. ... They felt it was important that we keep those charges as a part of any plea."

Why Aldrich's defense made a point of pleading no contest  which, from a sentencing standpoint makes no difference as Aldrich was given the maximum possible sentence for pleading no contest  was, according to Allen, to help with the defense's primary motive for the plea deal: to avoid the federal death penalty.

The state of Colorado outlawed the death penalty in 2020, meaning the maximum possible penalty for charges at the state level is life in prison without parole. However, if Aldrich is charged federally, the possibility of a death penalty enters the picture.

"From their perspective, it gives them (the defense) an avenue to say that they didn't admit to this being a hate crime," Allen said. "If, in fact, the federal court system picks this up. ... I think it's really a mitigating factor for them."

I believe there is a high probability of being found guilty at trial on those counts, so Im pleading no contest, Aldrich stated in court on June 26 after pleading no contest to two counts of bias-motivated crime.

Whether it would be an effective mitigation strategy for Aldrich, Allen says he is unsure.

At a press conference after the sentencing hearing, FBI Special Agent Mark Michalek announced that the bureau had opened an investigation into Aldrich. Allen said that while he isn't sure if federal prosecutors will seek the death penalty or whether Aldrich's defense attorneys had spoken to federal prosecutors before the plea deal, he doesn't view any reason to charge Aldrich federally unless the death penalty is pursued.

"The only benefit to that would be if they were going to pursue the death penalty. Otherwise, I think to a certain extent if there's a pursuit on that, but there's no actual effort towards the death penalty, then I think you're just giving victims false hope that the death penalty could be a result, and I think you're forcing them to relive this thing longer than they would have to."

Allen said the sentencing was an odd feeling for him and the prosecution team, coming less than a year after the shooting occurred.

"There's part of me that wanted to make (Aldrich) sit through the horror he carried out on people; selfishly, that's the downside to the plea ... but this is by far and away the best result for the victims."

Since the plea, Aldrich has been booked at a Denver prison.
Henry came to Oregon State University in 1969 after a stint in the Air Force, then helped form what is today the Linn Benton NAACP, working with numerous agencies, public and private, on issues such as affirmative action, education, social justice and legislative action.

He wanted to focus on where the needs were, current Linn Benton NAACP leader Jason J. Dorsette said of Henry in 2021 interview. He carved out time to do that, and as a civically engaged leader, a political leader and an educator, he connected with local leaders and local education to engage with those people and start there.
Iowa Gov. Kim Reynolds on Friday completed her two-week overseas trade mission to Italy, Kosovo and Israel.

While on the final leg of the trade mission in Israel, Reynolds met with Israeli President Isaac Herzog and Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to discuss strengthening economic ties, according to the governors office.

She also met with Israeli Minister of Foreign Affairs Eli Cohen and Minister of Strategic Affairs Ron Dermer, and signed a proclamation celebrating the 75th anniversary of Israels independence.

Israels vigilant pursuit of freedom and security in a hostile world powerfully demonstrates the remarkable fortitude of the Israeli people, Reynolds said in a statement. I believe there is great opportunity for further economic partnership in the fields of insurance and agriculture, industries in which Israel and Iowa both excel.

The governor also participated in a wreath-laying ceremony at Yad Vashem, the World Holocaust Remembrance Center in Jerusalem, and met with the U.S. ambassador to Israel.

REYNOLDS ISSUES DISASTER DECLARATION

Reynolds on Friday issued a disaster proclamation for Jefferson, Lee and Wapello counties in response to severe weather Thursday.

The National Weather Service said a derecho moved eastward across southern Iowa, northern Missouri, and west-central Illinois during the morning and early afternoon, with straight-line winds of 80 to 100 mph. Winds reached 120 mph in portions of west-central Illinois, where several people were injured in Ferris, Ill.

The Reynolds proclamation activates the Iowa Individual Assistance Grant Program and the Disaster Case Advocacy Program in the three counties.

Applications and instructions are available on the Iowa Department of Homeland Security and Emergency Management website. Applicants have 45 days to submit a claim.

Disaster case advocates work with clients to coordinate services and resources to address disaster-related unmet needs, build a recovery plan and access available resources. To sign up, contact your local Community Action Agency.

IOWA AWARDS $1.25 MILLION IN WORK-BASED LEARNING GRANTS

State officials recently awarded $1.25 million in grants to fund the creation and development of new work-based learning programs for Iowa high school students.

The funding will support more than 450 technical assistance meetings between schools and employers across the state with the goal of creating a minimum of 50 new internship programs and 47 new registered apprenticeship or pre-apprenticeship programs, according to a news release.

According to Iowas Area Education Agencies, the number of students exiting high school without a postsecondary plan continues to grow every year while the number of students who enroll in a postsecondary training program is declining.

Eleven of the 13 grants were awarded to Iowa community colleges. Two of the awards are going to new programs being launched by Central Iowa Building and Construction Trades and Junior Achievement of Eastern Iowa.

Iowa needs more workers, so we need to do everything possible to show Iowa young people that they can find strong, rewarding careers without having to leave their home state, Beth Townsend, director of Iowa Workforce Development, said in a statement.

Applications for remaining funding in the Hawkeye and Southwestern community college regions will be accepted on www.IowaGrants.gov through 2 p.m. July 13.
Because this section is free of charge, community events are subject to run based on available space. Religion items are published on the Saturday church page. Email events to news@registerbee.com.

HOLIDAY CLOSINGS

DANVILLE: The Municipal Building, all other city of Danville government offices and the public library will be closed Tuesday for the Independence Day holiday. The James F. Ingram Justice Center will be closed Monday and Tuesday. Danville Transit will not operate on Tuesday. Public works crews, however, will collect household trash and yard waste on Tuesday as regularly scheduled. Offices, the library, and the courthouse will reopen on Wednesday. Danville Transit services will resume that day as well.

PITTSYLVANIA COUNTY: All Pittsylvania County offices and departments will be closed Monday and Tuesday in commemoration of Independence Day. All branches of the Pittsylvania County Library will be closed. All Pittsylvania County courts will be closed.

TODAY, JULY 3

DISABLED AMERICAN VETERANS CHAPTERS: Disabled American Veterans Chapter 19 will hold its regular monthly meeting at 6:30 p.m. at American Legion Post 325.

COATES DAY CAMP-LIGHTS, CAMERA, ACTION WEEK: Camp held at Coates Recreation Center from 7:30 to 6 p.m. Monday, Wednesday, Thursday and Friday for first through sixth graders. Cost is $100 per person with $6 for a field trip that includes a movie, popcorn and drink. Breakfast and lunch are provided through Danville Public Schools. Participants will need to bring an afternoon snack. Participants are welcome to bring their own lunch. Registration is required by calling 434-799-5150.

TUESDAY, JULY 4

JULY 4 CELEBRATION: Free celebration kick off at 6 p.m. at the Carrington Pavilion; Danville Symphony Orchestra at 7:30 p.m.; fireworks at dusk (weather permitting). Vendors and concessionaires will be on site with items for purchase. For more information, call 434-857-3384.

THURSDAY, JULY 6

PITTSYLVANIA COUNTY NAACP: Pittsylvania County NAACP will meet at 6 p.m. at the PCCA building, 348 N. Main St., Chatham.

MONDAY, JULY 10

ADVENTURE CAMP III: Camp is held July 10-14 and consists of hiking, kayaking, zip lining, high ropes adventures and climbing wall challenges. This camp will also consist of one out-of-town trip to Smith Mountain Lake State Park, arts and crafts, environmental education and outdoor games. A supply list will be sent out, all campers are responsible for all gear on the supply list. This camp is for ages 12-14 held from 7:30 a.m. to 5:30 p.m., at cost of $175 per person. Call 434-799-5150 to register.

THURSDAY, JULY 13

MUSIC AT THE MARKET-SHELTON AND WILLIAMS BAND: Free Music at the Market concert series held at the Danville Community Market's outdoor stage, 629 Craghead St., from 7 to 9 p.m. In event of rain, concert will be moved inside the Community Market. Bring a chair or blanket.

FRIDAY, JULY 14

CAMPFIRE FRIDAY: Join for a summer campfire under the stars from 8 to 9 p.m. There will be smores, campfire games and ghost stories. Bring blanket and chair and enjoy a true camper experience for ages 5 and up; parents are required to stay with their children. Call 434-799-5150. No fee.

MONDAY, JULY 17

COATES DAY CAMP-ART APPRECIATION WEEK: Art Appreciation Week will be held at Coates Recreation Center from July 17-21 from 7:30 a.m. to 6 p.m. for ages first through sixth graders at cost of $125 per child, plus $5 fee for field trip. Camp will be exploring different art mediums, talking to a local artist and visiting the North Carolina Museum of Art in Raleigh, North Carolina. Breakfast and lunch are provided through Danville Public Schools. Participants will need to bring an afternoon snack and their own lunch if desired. Participants registration is required, call (434) 799-5150.

MONDAY, JULY 24

HANGING ROCK OVERNIGHT CAMP: Travel to Hanging Rock State Park in North Carolina to spend four nights under the stars. Overnight camp is for ages 12 to 14 at cost of $300 held July 24 to July 28 from 7:30 a.m. to 5:30 p.m. This camp is perfect for beginners and experts seeking new thrills. A supply list will be sent out, all campers are responsible for all gear on the supply list. Call 434-799-5150.

SATURDAY, JULY 29

FREE HOT DOG LUNCH: A free hot dog lunch will be held from 11 a.m. to 12:30 p.m. at Trinity United Methodist Church, 409 Arnett Blvd., Danville.

MONDAY, JULY 31

COATES DAY CAMP: Splish, Splash Week is from July 31 to Aug. 4 at Coates Recreation Center. Spend summer building friendships, exploring the outdoors and participating in healthy activities in a quality camp program. Breakfast and lunch are provided through Danville Public Schools. Participants will need to bring an afternoon snack. This program is for rising first through sixth grade students. Participants are welcome to bring their own snacks and lunch. Registration is required by calling 434-799-5150. In the last week of camp the group will go swimming at North East Park, learning about water safety and enjoying the Fun Wagon. Cost is $125 per person and $10 per person for field trip.

THURSDAY, AUG. 10

MUSIC AT THE MARKET-OLD 97 BAND: Free concert held at Danville Community Market's Outdoor Stage at 7 p.m. Bring a chair, blanket and picnic basket. In the event of rain, concert will be moved inside the Community Market. Call 434-857-3384 for more information.

TUESDAY, AUG. 15

CROCHET FOR KIDS: Crochet for Kids at Coates Recreation Center for ages six to 17 from 6 to 7:30 p.m. at cost of $10 per person. Get wrapped up in crochet and learn something new, while making something useful. The group will start off by making dishcloths. They will learn basics during the first class and then continue working on skills the next two classes. All yarn and crochet needles will be provided in the first class. Registration is required. Call 434-799-5150.

TUESDAY, AUG. 22

CROCHET FOR KIDS: Crochet for Kids at Coates Recreation Center for ages 6 to 17 from 6 to 7:30 p.m. at cost of $10 per person. Get wrapped up in crochet and learn something new, while making something useful. The group will start off by making dishcloths. They will learn basics during the first class and then continue working on skills the next two classes. All yarn and crochet needles will be provided in the first class. Registration is required. Call 434-799-5150.

THURSDAY, AUG. 24

THURSDAY PADDLE: Thursday Paddle meets at the boathouse and will travel on the Dan River in hopes to catch glimpses of river otters, blue herons, and turtles. Registration is required. Must be at least 8 years old; all children under age 18 must be accompanied by an adult. From 6 to 8 p.m. at cost of $17 per person. For more information, call 434-799-5150 or email brownmc@danvilleeva.gov.

TUESDAY, AUG. 29

CROCHET FOR KIDS: Crochet for Kids at Coates Recreation Center for ages six to 17 from 6 to 7:30 p.m. at cost of $10 per person. Get wrapped up in crochet and learn something new, while making something useful. The group will start off by making dishcloths. They will learn basics during the first class and then continue working on skills the next two classes. All yarn and crochet needles will be provided in the first class. Registration is required. Call 434-799-5150.

WEDNESDAY, SEPT. 6

STRIKING UP THE BAND: The Hows, Whats & Whys of a University Band Program will be presented at 7 p.m., Averett University Student Center Multipurpose Room; free admission. Dr. Janet Phillips, associate professor of music, started a brand new band program. Through photos, videos and stories, she will show how it was done and how the program looks moving forward.
The Danville Register & Bee honored first-place winners of the recent Readers Choice awards Thursday evening at a venue of particular historic significance for the newspaper.

A crowd of about 50 people ventured to the rooftop of The Bee Hotel in Danville, a building that once housed and printed the newspaper before shifting offices to Monument Street in 1980.

The Bee Hotel was named as a 2022 Travelers Choice award winner for being one of the top 10% of hotels across the globe. The award comes from excellent reviews from travelers around the world over the last year.

Its rooftop space is available for special gatherings. It was only fitting that the inaugural Register & Bee Readers Choice event was held there.

The Bee Hotel seemed to be the perfect venue for this event because its where the newspaper started, Register & Bee General Manager Wendi Craig said.

I think for the first Readers Choice event it was a complete success, Craig said. Its a great way to celebrate the businesses in the community in their success.

Even though the social was a first for the newspaper, the Readers Choice is an annual tradition.

This year, the newspaper reached out to the community in February to nominate businesses and individuals in certain categories in the first phase of the competition that lasted about three weeks.

Then the top five moved into the voting phase where the community again picked the winners.

Thats how you all came to be, you are the best of the best, Craig told attendees Thursday night.

Capturing the most awards was Rippes, a Danville retail institution for 116 years.

Sam Rippe, said general manager and buyer for Rippes Apparel Furs Shoes Lifestyle store on Main Street, said he enjoyed Thursday evenings ceremony.

Oh, its wonderful, he said, noting that he loved the venue and it was a nice presentation.

We were so honored to be voted No. 1 in five categories, he said.

Rippe said hes seen an uptick in business with the new development in Danville. Hes has people come in the store from Durham, North Carolina, or Northern Virginia and say theyve heard about all of this stuff going on and decided to come to explore Danville for a weekend trip.

Readers Choice is important to businesses and the community because not only does it bring the community together through competitive spirit but it also increases exposure and awareness of the local businesses that otherwise may not have been known about, Craig said.

Karen Johnson, of Karens Hallmark at Danville Mall, won the Readers Choice award for best gift shop.

I think its very nice, Johnson said of the social gathering, also noting that shes very grateful to the community.

Johnson said she really enjoyed sitting on the rooftop of The Bee listening to the winners.

Im very happy for everyone, Johnson said.

Craig plans to continue these events each year.
Tracy Rockwell has spent the last three months without a permanent home.

Rising rents in Danville priced her and two of her friends out of the market for a place to live.

Though she finally found an apartment she could afford this past week, she has noticed a spike in rents in the city.

She found one-bedroom apartments for $650 to $750 and two- and three-bedroom units for $850 and more than $1,000, respectively, she said.

She had lived in her parents home, but her father died in 2021 and her mother was in a nursing home by that point, she said.

The house had water leaks, mold, electrical problems and other issues. She couldnt live there anymore and ended up having to let it go at a third of what her parents paid for it.

That money will go to my mother, she said.

Rockwell, 52, retired on disability 14 years ago after being diagnosed with bipolar disorder.

She has been staying at the House of Hope homeless shelter since the beginning of June.

The average rent for a one-bedroom apartment in Danville is 40% lower than it was a year ago, but has risen by 11% in June over the previous month  to $723 a month, according to Zumper.com, an online rental platform.

A graph of rental prices for one-bedroom apartments in Danville show fluctuating rates since the spring of 2022. Rents peaked and then plummeted in September before climbing to a peak again in February and then dropping again.

The average rent for a two-bedroom apartment has remained flat at $825 per month, but the rate for a three-bedroom unit increased by 25% to $1,250 from May to June, according to Zumper.

Danville City Councilman James Buckner, a real estate agent with Wilkins & Co., pointed out the tight housing market in the city.

When there is a rental property, it doesnt stay on the market long at all, Buckner said.

The need for housing is a national problem, he added.

Its going to get worse before it gets better, Buckner said.

Helping development

Hopefully, a package of incentives and assistance recently approved by the Danville City Council will help spur development, help out renters and homeowners and alleviate the problem, he said.

The councils June 20 actions included an ordinance creating a down payment assistance program for up to $5,000 for qualified applicants to move into a new home.

Others included a rental deposit assistance program for up to $500 to help applicants move into a new apartment or rental unit, and a first-time homebuyers fix-up fund.

The fix-up fund would authorize up to $5,000 for construction costs to pay a contractor to complete needed repairs so the property can pass inspection to meet federal subsidized loan criteria.

Last month, the Danville Industrial Development Authority also approved real estate tax relief for developers for projects that meet certain criteria.

Joie Ford, property manager with River Front Real estate in Danville, said her company raised rents at its properties within the last 12 months. It was the first increase in at least five years, following a market study paid for by the company.

However, the rent hikes were not uniform but varied individually among each apartment.

Increases were based on each unit and based on the market study, Ford said.

Riverfront Real Estate manages 500 units at 10 apartment complexes downtown, including apartments under River District Lofts. They include The Continental, The Knitting Mill, Pemberton Lofts, Iron Bridge and others.

At House of Hope, 79-year-old Elnora Tyler said a small trailer she considered was $800 a month. Her source of income is $1,649 in Social Security per month, but she has other bills including a car payment, she said.

Im really in need of a place very much, Tyler said.

Tyler, who is disabled and has health issues including an enlarged heart, diabetes, depression, anxiety and other conditions, has been at the shelter for about two weeks.

She lived in an apartment in South Boston, but left after a bedbug infestation and other problems at the home in April.

Ive been sleeping in my car, eating in my car, she said of her time before coming to House of Hope. Im just overwhelmed with burdens.

She blames the high rents in the city on the Caesars Virginia casino that will open up in late 2024. A temporary casino, Danville Casino, is operating in its place until the full resort in Schoolfield is complete.

I feel like they jumped up on the rent since the casino came, Tyler said. It looks like somebody would try to take me in, with my health issues.

More than rent

When it comes to looking for a place to live, rent is not the only challenge those in Rockwells or Tylers situation face. A security deposit on top of the first months rent is also needed, House of Hope executive director Jude Swanson pointed out.

Thats a significant obstacle they have to overcome, Swanson said.

Due to rising demand, House of Hope recently expanded its services and number of beds this past winter.

Called Normas Place, the top floor of the shelter has 16 beds and is dedicated for women, single mothers and their children.

The bottom floor, with 18 beds, is named Phil and Frans Place, after Phil and Fran Daly and their charitable trust that has kept the shelter operating. That floor is for men and families.

The shelter serves an average of 16 to 25 people at a given time and is located at Patton and South Ridge streets downtown.

Residents at the shelter can stay for up to 30 days, but after that time is up, the shelter assesses the individual can remain longer at House of Hope.

We can sometimes offer extensions beyond that, Swanson said.

House of Hope gets its money from grants, and donations from individuals and churches.

Judy Coleman, 59, has been at House of Hope since June 2. She ended up homeless after living in run-down shack on Paxton Street. Conditions, including a leaking roof, at the dwelling were not ideal.

When it rained, the rain came down on me, Coleman said.

She complained to landlord.

He never fixed it, so I left, she said.

A stint at a boarding house was cut short because because of loud music and drug activity, she said.

She stayed in a hotel for three nights before coming to House of Hope.

Coleman draws $914 a month in Supplemental Security Income.

Experts recommend spending no more than 30% of gross monthly income on housing.

In Danville now, people are paying half or more just to have a place to live, Rockwell said.

Social Security checks, many of which can be less than $1,000 a month, are not enough for many people to afford rent.

A thousand dollars just doesnt go anywhere anymore, as far as housing is concerned, Swanson said.

As for Rockwell, who receives $1,336 in disability income per month, will pay about half her income in rent at her new place. But she feels fortunate.

Im a lucky one, very lucky, Rockwell said. Blessed.
The sound of generators pierced the air Sunday afternoon in Danvilles Windsor Heights neighborhood after a fast-moving, violent storm sent trees crashing into homes and littered the streets with limbs and leaves.

Other areas of Danville experienced a similar fate with trees blocking roadways and power outages. The latest bout with severe weather comes about two weeks after another ferocious storm also damaged homes and vehicles.

In both cases, damage was caused by straight-line winds, according to the National Weather Service in Blacksburg.

Danville Utilities had fewer than 500 customers still without electricity by midday Monday and hoped to have the remaining outages restored by Monday evening.

The first severe storm warning came at 1:45 p.m. Sunday after a line developed and moved toward Danville. The National Weather Service warned the storms could pack winds of 60 mph and have quarter-sized hail.

After additional warnings and updates, the storm blasted the city at about 2:30 p.m., moving at a rapid pace of 55 mph.

Tanya Martin and Desmon Touchstone were in their Cambridge Circle house when a tree smashed through the top of their two-story home, which was under renovation.

It blew up quickly, it was like five minutes, and it was gone, Touchstone explained as he raked debris from the street in front of his home in Windsor Heights.

I dont think Ive seen the high winds here before, he said of the area in the western part of the city.

It could have been a lot worse, Martin said, echoing Touchstones sentiments. Despite the tragedy, they remained upbeat and were more concerned about their neighbors home across the street where a tree also crashed into it. Those neighbors werent home.

Martin and Touchstone were amazed by the touching spirit of crews from the Danville Fire Department when they responded.

Firefighters immediately asked what they could do to help.

They were way over the top, Touchstone said.

Ive never heard of that, Martin explained, again noting the firefighters efforts should be commended. They were really kind.

Martin and Touchstone didnt even realize the tree had fallen on the home until they ventured outside to look.

There was no thunderous noise and since the house has a generator that instantly pops on with a power failure, they werent even aware the electricity had gone out.

Elsewhere in the neighborhood, some streets were completely blocked by down trees, forcing vehicles to find an alternate route on the winding roads.

With sunshine in full force following the storm, residents were out and about trying to clean up the mess.

Ballou Park also lost some trees in Sundays storm and West Main Street in front of Ballou Park Shopping center was closed to traffic while crews navigated the fallen debris.

The lower playground at the park was closed because of the damage.

Danville Utilities reported about 9,500 customers were without power at the eight of the outage.

Additional crews from South Carolina and North Carolina were called in to help Danville Utilities restore power.

Crews first focused on areas with the most damage, then set off to places with scattered outages.

The city received reports of eight trees blocking roads, city spokesperson Arnold Hendrix said.

Over at the Danville Police Department, an entrance along Memorial Drive was blocked after several trees toppled in Sundays storm.

Officials in Pittsylvania County kept an eye on the power outages, which were located mostly in the Ringgold area.

The county and the power companies place the highest priority on the elderly and those with breathing difficulties, officials wrote in a news release Monday morning. While we continue to monitor the situation, we ask that family and friends check on those affected by the heat or lack of electricity.

Dennis Sleighter, a meteorologist with the National Weather Service in Blacksburg, confirmed Monday afternoon that based on radar and reports from residents, the damage came from straight-line winds.

The line of storms started in the New River Valley and then progressed eastward through the afternoon.

In this case, it was simply the heating of the day  combined with a very unstable atmosphere  that triggered the storms.

They formed well upstream and headed east, Sleighter told the Register & Bee. Weve been in a pattern for a number days.

The weather service placed the area under a severe thunderstorm watch Monday lasting into the evening.

The storm threat was expected to decrease heading into the Fourth of July and Wednesday, but should bounce back later in the week.

It will increase increase Thursday with greater increase in Friday when cold front passes through, he said.

Photos: Storm roars through Danville
The smoky haze covering the skyline of the Dan River Region  courtesy of still-burning wildfires in Canada  presents a health worry for children, the elderly and anyone suffering from lung conditions or heart issues, according to the local health district.

Thursday and Friday were especially bad air-quality days, with Danville in whats known as code orange, a level thats considered unhealthy for sensitive groups.

The way the wind blows  especially in the high levels of the atmosphere  is the main factor in pushing the smoke toward the Dan River Region or steering it elsewhere.

Weather plays a huge role, Phil Hysell, a meteorologist with the National Weather Service in Blacksburg, explained an in interview with the Register & Bee.

The wildfires continue to burn in Canada with little relief in sight to douse the flames. The smoke basically meanders where ever the winds take it.

If they are strong enough, thats going to pulled down the smoke into the Mid-Atlantic region and our area, Hysell explained.

A shower or quick thunderstorm may provide temporary relief, something thats in the forecast daily through the Fourth of July.

Theres no particular weather pattern triggering the daily storm chance. In fact, its pretty common for early July, Hysell said.

This is particularly one of our most active times of year, he said.

Theres only a chance of hit and miss variety of showers and storms Monday and Tuesday, but even a quick burst of rain could be enough to filter out the smoke.

Children, residents who have chronic lung and heart conditions, and the elderly are the ones most at risk from the smoke, Linda Scarborough, a spokesperson for the Virginia Department of Health, told the Register & Bee.

But the poor air quality can impact just about anyone.

It can cause breathing problems and aggravate long-term conditions like high blood pressure, she explained. It can further exacerbate breathing problems for people with asthma or other lung diseases.

Since the Fourth of July goes hand-in-hand with outdoor festivities, Scarborough cautions residents to be mindful when the air quality is low.

Try to spend less time outdoors, dont exercise strenuously and take breaks during outdoor activity, she suggested. If you notice eye or lung irritation, go indoors.

The smoke also can infiltrate inside a home if doors and windows arent kept closed. The ventilation system should run to recirculate the air in a house, and the HVAC filter will help to remove the particles.

If you have a room HEPA filter, these are very effective at cleaning room air, she also noted.

So far, Sovah Health-Danville hasnt seen an increase of people coming into the emergency room from problems associated with the smoke, Corey Santoriello, a hospital spokesperson, told the Register & Bee.

Dr. Scott Spillmann, director of the Pittsylvania-Danville Health District, said humans arent the only ones who need to worry about the air quality.

Remember that low air quality can also impact pets, he said. Keep them inside if possible.

Livestock, like horses, should be moved to a sheltered location if ones available.

When driving, use the recirculating air feature so that you are breathing the air that is already inside of the car, rather than letting more outside air into the vehicle, he also suggested.
Concord received some national exposure as it was highlighted as part of Fortunes newly-released list of the 50 Best Places to Live for Families.

Concord, which was ranked No. 20, was selected as the best place to live for families in North Carolina.

Charlotte Business Journal was the first to report on the story.

Concord feels like a reprieve from the new construction and swelling population of its metropolitan neighbor Charlotte, while still offering lots to keep you busy, Fortune wrote.

In a short descriptor of the city, Fortune noted Concord is home to various attractions including Charlotte Motor Speedway and Concord Mills and that 51 percent of its schools rank above average for quality education, according to GreatSchools.org. 

"We're quite excited about that," Mayor Bill Dusch said of the recognition. "A lot of good things have been happening in the past few years. This just adds to the list of things that we're proud about, of being a city that people want to come to."

Concord has exploded in population in the past two decades, from roughly 56,000 people in 2000 to around 110,000 people today.

The city has also grown increasingly more diverse over the years, as about 22 percent of residents are Black while 14 percent of residents are Hispanics, according to current U.S. Census data.

Fortune said the cities on the list share a range of qualities that can act as antidotes to loneliness, which increased among individuals during the COVID-19 pandemic.

In our analysis of nearly 1,900 cities across the country, the best places to live scored high on assets like health care, education, and resources for seniorsall of which can help fight isolation and build social ties, Fortune wrote.

The top five cities were Cambridge, Massachusetts; Portsmouth, New Hampshire; Silver Spring, Maryland; Tualatin, Oregon; and Middletown, Delaware.

Fortunes ranking focused on the top places where multigenerational families, many of whom are both raising their children and caring for aging parents, are most likely to have access to critical resources, such as public schools, assisted living facilities and nursing homes.
RALEIGH  Last week, the U.S. Department of Commerces National Telecommunications and Information Administration (NTIA) awarded North Carolina more than $1.5 billion to fund high-speed internet infrastructure under the federal Broadband Equity, Access, and Deployment (BEAD) program.

State and federal partnerships are critical to helping us close the digital divide and we are grateful to the Biden-Harris administration for this historic investment to expand high-speed Internet access in North Carolina, said Gov. Roy Cooper. Through this program, we will continue to make tremendous progress in making sure every household and business in our state is connected.

The N.C. Department of Information Technologys (NCDITs) Division of Broadband and Digital Equity has developed a draft five-year plan outlining how the agency will invest BEAD funding across North Carolina. The draft plan has been posted online and is available for public comment via email to NCDITpartnerfeedback@nc.gov until Monday, July 17 at 5 p.m. The division will submit the five-year plan to NTIA by July 29 as part of the process for North Carolina to access its allocated BEAD funding.

We continue to work tirelessly to achieve the best return on our investment as we allocate federal resources to address unserved and underserved locations across North Carolina, said NCDIT Secretary and State Chief Information Officer Jim Weaver. We appreciate the strong partnerships that have helped us identify needs throughout the state so that we can take strategic steps to reach every North Carolinian.

The broadband division recently announced that its challenges to the Federal Communications Commissions National Broadband Map aided in surfacing 115,000 additional North Carolina homes and businesses that do not have access to high-speed internet, adding more new unserved locations to the map through this process than any other state. These additions increased North Carolinas funding allocation from the BEAD program.

The BEAD program received funding through the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law and is part of the Biden-Harris Administrations Internet For All initiative. More information about the initiative and the states other Internet For All funding can be found on this fact sheet.

To learn more about the NCDIT Division of Broadband and Digital Equity and Governor Coopers plan to close the digital divide in North Carolina, please visit www.ncbroadband.gov.
Does North Carolina need a new state flag?

Yes, say two North Carolina State University students, Wyat Hamilton and Adam Fleischer.

Last week, they told the Raleigh News & Observer that the current flag leaves people feeling apathetic.

Fleischer said, Were trying to bring more pride to the people of North Carolina, trying to up their excitement about being here and being a part of our state and our culture.

The current state flag is familiar to many North Carolinians. It consists of a horizontal red stripe over a white stripe and, at the hoist, a vertical blue stripe incorporating a white star, the initials of the state (NC), and two ribbons, each with a date inscribed.

Hamilton and Fleischer believe the use of text makes the design busy and difficult to read and suggest instead that symbols of the state should be used rather than text.

They criticize using the textual dates referencing the Mecklenburg Declaration of Independence and the Halifax Resolves. They say the flags use of text makes the design busy and difficult to read from afar, and instead of offering symbols tied to the state, it must literally spell out what it aims to represent.

They also criticized the big NC on the flag. Although the initials clearly identify the flag as North Carolinian, Hamilton is still critical. Suffice to say, if you have to remind yourself of what your name is by putting your initials on the state flag, your symbolism has failed.

One flag that seems to meet their criteria to a tee is South Carolinas. It features only a crescent and a palmetto tree on a blue background. No words. Nothing else. Most South Carolinians know that the tree represents a Revolutionary fort built with palmetto logs and the crescent represents the shape of a badge worn by soldiers at the fort.

What images or symbols do they suggest for North Carolina? They have presented stylized versions of our wonderful coastal lighthouses and suggested one of them would be good for the flag. Also, they introduced an eight-pointed star used by American militia at the Battle of Guilford Courthouse during the American Revolution.

Other than a stylized lighthouse or an eight-pointed star, what distinctive North Carolina images would be a good fit for a new North Carolina flag?

People in Charlotte might argue that a hornets nest in the middle of the flag would be distinctive. It would be firmly based on the historical resistance that North Carolinians gave against Cornwalliss British troops during the Revolution.

Mountain folk could argue that an image of Grandfather Mountain on the flag would represent something special about our state.

Coastal residents might push for an image of Virginia Dare arguing that most North Carolinians would identify the connection to The Lost Colony.

Or they might suggest an image of the Wright Brothers flying machine that made the first successful powered flight on our states Outer Banks.

NASCAR fans would say a racing stock car on the flag would be recognized as a symbol of the state. Others might argue that a moonshine bottle might be a better symbol.

Looking back just a few years ago, there would be people who would want to use the image of a cured tobacco leaf. Today, they might argue for another popular weed.

North Carolinas official toast begins, Heres to the land of the long leaf pine, The summer land where the sun doth shine, Where the weak grow strong and the strong grow great.

If we need to have a flag with a single, simple image on our flag, I would vote for the long leaf pine.

But, notwithstanding the good arguments made by Hamilton and Fleischer, I like our current flag and hope we keep it.
As smoke from Canadian wildfires continues to flow into the Triad, the regions air quality hit Code Red levels for the first time since 2008 on Thursday and is expected to remain unhealthy for some groups Friday, environmental health officials warned.

Particulate levels topped the Code Red threshold of 150 in Winston-Salem late Thursday afternoon, and were expected to climb higher across the Triad.

The Forsyth County Office of Environmental Assistance and Protection issued an advisory cautioning that Code Red conditions were likely throughout the Triad Thursday.

The alert covered Forsyth, Guilford, Alamance, Davidson and Randolph counties.

Fine particulates carried in smoke can be inhaled deep into the lungs and in some cases enter the bloodstream.

Some members of the general public may experience health effects, Environmental Assistance and Protection advised. Members of sensitive groups may experience more serious health effects.

Vulnerable groups  including children, older adults, and people with heart and lung disease such as asthma  are advised to limit long or intense exertion outdoors and to take frequent breaks when active.

Particulate levels in Guilford County were at 135 late Thursday afternoon. Thats in the Code Orange range, which could impact children, older adults, and people with respiratory conditions.

High quantities of smoke were expected to remain in the Triad overnight Thursday and early Friday before diminishing Friday evening as a weather system moves into the western portion of North Carolina, Environmental Assistance and Protection said.

Code Orange particulate levels of 125 are forecast for the Triad on Friday. Moderate levels below 100 are expected over the weekend.

Fueled by extremely dry conditions, 490 fires are burning in Canada, with 255 of them considered to be out of control. A record 30,000 square miles of the nation has burned, an area nearly as large as South Carolina, according to the Canadian government.
An annual half-hour walking tour across UNCGs campus on Juneteenth revealed the depth of African Americans contributions to the school, something that many community members say they had never fully realized.

Some of those on the June 19 tour read and listened for the first time to stories deeply embedded within the walls of 11 buildings they had spent time in as faculty, staff and alumni of the University.

UNCG, whose student population is 28% Black, has undergone a significant transformation from its status as a college for white women in the early 20th century. The change began when Elizabeth JoAnne Smart and Bettye Tillman, the first two African American students, enrolled in 1956.

The two were forced to room in Shaw Hall, in a wing that was segregated to house only Smart and Tillman. The tour guided visitors through the renovated building.

I never really knew about this history and how its in most of the buildings on campus, said Faith Kirkpatrick, who graduated from UNCG in May.

Shay Bracewell, a training specialist with UNCGs Human Resources department heard about the tour from her colleagues and decided that she should learn about many of the historical markers across the grounds.

Those on the tour were able to see historic pictures of the first African American workers on campus, the trumpet Miles Davis used to record Kind of Blues, the bestselling jazz album of all time. The trumpet was donated by Davis friend Buddy Gist to commemorate their friendship. Visitors also were able to see the lounge of the historic Neo Black Society, a student organization founded in 1968, and a display of the accomplishments of Olympian Paul Chelimo, a graduate of UNCG.

The 30-minute journey through history had a unique connection to public health and wellness that the organizers of the tour say is central in African American culture and the civil rights movement.

Weve seen the cultural significance of walking throughout African American history, said Dr. DeAnne Brooks, an associate professor and graduate program director in the department of kinesiology. During the (1960) sit-in protests, both students at the womens college and local high schools walked to lunch counters. We know that physicality and being mobile was central to the importance of the Underground Railroad.

The tour culminated in a presentation that encapsulated the African American contribution to UNCG. When Christina Yongue and the other members of the UNCG Juneteenth Committee stood before a full room of those willing to learn and commemorate the African American contribution to the school, there was a feeling of pride.

I knew there was history there. Its been hidden, and not talked about, said Yongue, who is the director of undergraduate studies at UNCGs department of Public Health Education. This tour encourages our whole community to know Black history, and I want Black people specifically to know about what theyve done and to take pride in it.
Around 65,087 sanitary workers from Tamil Nadu attended the medical camps for sanitary workers. The camp was inaugurated by Health Minister Ma Subramanian while the inaugural function was held at the Government higher secondary school, Kodambakkam. Ma Subramanian said that the camp for sanitary workers which was announced in the budget of 2022-23 has commenced. The camp would conduct master body checkups for the sanitary workers and the health department would provide medical treatment for those sanitary workers who were diagnosed with diseases, the minister said.The minister said that the medical colleges would provide treatment to the sanitary workers on the base of the reports from the health camps. He said that the state public health department would have details of the patients and would set the time table for the people on when and where they should go for full body check up. The minister said that it includes X-Ray, ECG and Ultra Sound.He said that based on the reports, the health department would provide treatment to the patients accordingly. Chennai Mayor R. Priya, Deputy Mayor Magesh Kumar, Greater Chennai Corporation Commissioner J. Radhakrishnan and Health Secretary, Gagandeep Singh Bedi were also present during the inauguration at Kodambakkam High School.
When writing articles for the Helena Nugget over the past few years, I have always tried to explore some little known details of a particular structure like the state Capitol or how artifacts stored in Virginia City and Nevada City contributed to the renovation of the Capitol when it was underway over 20 years ago.

At other times it was to share information about a hidden gem such as Shaws Best Factory which was located in a residential area near Hawthorne School and was known for manufacturing pancake our.

Yes, the building is still there today.

As a person who has walked or ridden a bike throughout the streets of Helena for over 50 years, I have often been surprised by the ornamental decoration on many buildings that has remained silently hidden until one day when I nally see it.

Such is the case with the tailor and the seamstress who sit quietly tucked in near the top of the Fligelmans Department Store Buildings (now the New York Block) parapet. For decades their eyes have constantly measured the activity on Last Chance Gulch below, except for the years when a metal facade blocked their view.

And I hesitate to admit it, but the owners thumbprint embossed on the Securities Building took me years to notice! What a fun, unique addition to a beautiful building. Who doesnt enjoy nding none other than Atlas supporting part of the granite facade of the Atlas Block?

Perhaps the real beauty of living in a city like Helena with such a plentiful supply of wonderful architecture is that you can always nd new features that you have overlooked in the past.

Today the nugget to be found is not a particular structure like the St. Helena Cathedral or any other landmark building but instead simply a piece of history that can be mined and found by anyone. The gems are the streets on Helenas westside. As I take my usual walk I am going to pay particular attention to the streets and avenues to see what I can learn from them.

So put on your coat since its a little cool this morning and come with me.

Out the door I go and onto the Hayes Avenue sidewalk, headed up the hill going south. Ahh, my rst nugget! Although it took me a few years to realize it, many of the north/south avenues on the west side of Helena are named after U.S. presidents. Rutherford Hayes was an Ohio lawyer who served as the 19th president from 1877-1881.

Ive come to the intersection with Power Street which, like many of the east/west streets on the west side, are named after signicant Helena pioneers. Another hidden gem!

Thomas Power was one of the most successful businessmen in all of Montana and controlled most of the trade and freight network between the Midwest, Fort Benton and Helena. But wait, the name for the street that is stamped in the concrete sidewalk says Hemlock. It turns out that Hemlock was changed to Power Street in 1919, when the Commercial Club committee on city planning and beautifying circulated a petition among Hemlock Street residents and owners. Nearly all signed the petition and the change was made.

I will simply say that on a dark, windy and stormy night I would feel much more comfortable walking on Power Street instead of one called Hemlock.

Lets head east on Power (Hemlock if you prefer), where the next street we come to is Monroe Avenue, which is of course named for James Monroe, the fifth president from 1817-1825 and the last of the countrys founding fathers to become president.

Continuing down Power going east my next chance for a nugget is at Harrison Avenue. In this case there are two presidents named Harrison. William Henry, who was the ninth president, died 31 days after his inauguration in 1841. Benjamin, the 23rd president from 1889-1893 was in oce when Montana became a state and Fort Harrison was named for his grandfather, William Henry.

It is also worthy to note that the Power Mansion is at this intersection as are three other stately homes. This is also a great spot to see an important relic (gem) from the early days of Helena.

In the parking strip boulevard there is a granite post and an adjacent granite slab that served as a hitching post for horses pulling a carriage and a stepping stone to help folks step up into and down from the carriage. Not something seen in many residential areas today.

Hmm, seems like my prospecting is nding some good nuggets today!

Ive decided to turn right on Harrison and head south toward an intersection with Holter Street. It is named for Anton M. Holter, pioneer lumberyard and hardware company founder. A. M. Holters grandson, Norman J. Holter, a biophysicist, invented the Holter monitor, a portable device that measures the electrical activity of the heart, in Helena.

Here again as I look at the name stamped in the sidewalk, it says Spruce Street, not Holter. That same 1919 petition that changed Hemlock Street to Power Street changed Spruce to Holter. Helena has denitely found ways to honor its outstanding citizens. So long Hemlock and Spruce! I thoroughly enjoy having the sidewalks embossed with the names since it adds to the mystery of nding nuggets!

Now I am proceeding east on Holter to Madison Avenue named after, you guessed it, James Madison. He was the fourth president from 1809-1817 and is hailed as the Father of the Constitution. Turning north on Madison I reach the intersection with Power. Looking at the name embossed in the sidewalk I see that I have somehow ended up on Wadison Street!

No president by that name so I surmise that either the concrete nishers at that corner had a long hot day and were very tired OR they had a sense of humor and decided to leave their signature permanently in their work.

Continuing north on Madison, I reach the intersection with Gilbert Street, which was named after pioneer H. S. Gilbert, and NOT well-known architect Cass Gilbert, who designed the Montana Club and the first Northern Pacic Train Depot. Finally, heading west up Gilbert I come back to my original starting point on Hayes.

My walk has been shorter than usual and Hauser, Flowerree, Gareld and other streets will have to wait for another day for someone to mine their gems. This prospecting walk has produced a cache of nuggets.

It was a good day!

Simply put, Helena is a treasure trove of history and has amazing examples of the wonderful treasures our founders left for us.

We just need to take the time to see and enjoy their gift.
DECATUR  Raymond D. Graham is accused of being a chauffeur-driven drug dealer who heads out two to three times a week to service his crack cocaine customers in Decatur.

The picture of his alleged lifestyle emerges from sworn affidavits from Decatur Police after his arrest by members of the departments Community Action Team which targets drug and gun offenses.

Graham, 28, appeared in Macon County Circuit Court in June pleading not guilty to being a drug dealer. He is quoted in the affidavits as claiming the 26-year-old driver, Jarvis J. McClelland, was in fact the real dealer and he was just along for the ride when the two of them had been arrested May 2 after a city traffic stop.

McClelland, however, said Graham had thrown the 1 ounce bag of crack he had been carrying onto the drivers side floorboards when he realized they were being pulled over by the cops.

Jarvis stated he typically drives Raymond around two to three times a week to serve people with the crack cocaine, said Officer Paul Vickers, who signed the affidavit.

Jarvis stated prior to being stopped, he and Raymond were headed to process the crack cocaine so he (Raymond) could sell it.

Vickers said a review of police video shot from a squad car appeared to confirm McClellands story about Graham tossing the drugs onto the drivers side of the vehicle.

Graham was on parole at the time of the arrest after having pleaded guilty to a charge of home invasion  connected with an incident in which a 6-year-old boy had a gun barrel shoved into his mouth  and was sentenced to six years in April 2021.

But with credit for two years and almost six months previously spent in custody while awaiting trial on the home invasion charges, he was paroled from Centralia Correctional Center on Dec. 3, 2021.

McClelland, meanwhile, has plenty of his own legal problems. Hes still been charged as a drug dealer after the traffic stop with Graham, a charge he denies, and is also pleading not guilty to a charge of trying to destroy evidence in a separate drug case.

That stems from another traffic stop on March 7 in which police said they found crack cocaine in the vehicle where McClelland was a passenger this time.

Vickers said McClelland was taken to police headquarters for questioning and had then asked to use the bathroom, where he was accompanied by officers. One cop said he then saw McClelland drop something inside the toilet bowl.

I ordered Jarvis to stand up and immediately observed a small, tied, clear corner-cut plastic baggie containing a white chunky substance (consistent with crack cocaine) in the water, said Vickers in another sworn affidavit.

He said the 4 grams of material later tested positive for crack and McClelland acknowledged he had concealed the drug in his buttocks.

And in another unrelated case, both McClelland and a woman whom police said was driving during that March 7 traffic stop  Markiya L. Currie-Willis, 23  are both accused of being involved in the Feb. 6 murder of 30-year-old Decatur man Cameron K. Taylor.

The two defendants, along with an alleged accomplice, Kearius R. Evans, 22, are said to have conspired to rob Taylor and then shot him to death when he fought back. Currie-Willis has yet to enter a formal plea while both Evans and McClelland are pleading not guilty. All three are being held in the Macon County Jail.

Sworn affidavits related to the murder case also mention Raymond Graham as being present during the killing, but no charges have so far been filed against him. Graham is now back in the custody of the state prison system.

2023 mugshots from the Herald & Review Lourash Hirstein Phillip Gehrken Joseph A. Williams Jetrevius O. Jarrett Edwards King-Woods Wilson Derrickson Colby J. Park
BRISTOL, Tenn.  Progress continues on the Bristol, Tennessee, Fire Departments new $4 million state-of-the-art fire station.

The station will be next to Holston View Elementary School and is expected to be completed in September.

The new 8,000-square-foot fire station will replace the aging Station No. 2  across from the King University campus  which BTFD Fire Chief Michael Carrier explained has served its time.

Its pretty much lived its life as an emergency response station. Its really too small for the number of people weve got there now, Carrier said. We will repurpose that for something in logistics or maybe training or something like that. Its got some life left for that.

The new station will have a series of amenities that the old station built in the 1960s does not, from single bedrooms for firefighters on duty to a gym.

Carrier said in the new station, firefighter equipment, which could be contaminated with carcinogens, will be stored in a different way.

Historically, firefighter turnout gear is hung on the wall in the apparatus room, which exposes everyone. Because its just sitting there, Carrier said. This particular station has a decon room for dirty turnout gear, and then it has a separate room for clean turnout gear.

Carrier explained that the new location would allow the department to respond to emergencies in the area with more efficiency.

He also highlighted that the new station will be better equipped to respond to more than just fires, which make up only around 20% of the calls it receives from the community.

This station here will house a fire engine and an EMS ambulance, so it will respond to ambulance calls, fire calls, but thats not all firefighters do in todays world, Carrier said. We have hazardous materials response. We have technical rescue response, high angle, low angle, lake rescue, occasional trench and swift water; things that firefighters are trained in, which are specialty fields. And we do those here in Bristol.

Dave Wilson, director of operations for Bristol, Tennessee, public works, said construction began in December 2022 and is set to be completed by the end of September.

Id say were close to 50% as far as the actual completion of the project, and that includes all of the site work, Wilson said.
Years ago, Jenny Lackey of Vale set a lofty goal for herself: visit all 50 of the U.S. states and travel in at least 50 countries  all by the age of 50.

A recent trip to Japan completed Lackeys 50-50-50 challenge, and she wont be 50 years old until August.

So, how does she feel?

Humbled, said the owner of Lackey Accounting and Tax Service. By traveling, Ive learned so much about diversity, both in the United States and in the larger world. Ive learned about nature, and Ive learned about people, mainly that if you show them respect, they are more than willing to help you.

On a wall in her office on St. Pauls Church Road in Newton is a large magnet board on which Lackey maintains a rotating display of magnets collected during her travel adventures.

Ask about a magnetized set of red lips and shell tell you about kissing the Blarney Stone in Ireland. Point out a leaping kangaroo figure and shell expound on the amazing wildlife of Australia. The board is more than a collection of memories. Its a collection of feelings.

Thats why I encourage people to travel, Lackey said.

You can look at a picture and enjoy it, but you cant really feel a picture. Traveling to a place lets you feel that place, experience that place. And that makes a difference.

Lackey said visiting the 50 states has deepened her appreciation of America, and that traveling outside the country has given her perspective.

I love my country and will defend it, Lackey said. And because I love my country, I want whats best for it. That can mean realizing where theres room for improvement.

While shes grateful for the opportunity to travel and intends to continue doing so, Lackey said shell always come back home.

In all my travels, I dont see myself living anywhere but here, she said.

What (or who) got you started on this quest?

My parents, Darlene and Kenneth Lackey, believed travel was part of my education, so wed take road trips every summer when I was a child. They encouraged me to not only visit but also experience new places, to appreciate the differences of new places and how those differences can actually strengthen us if we let them because we can learn and grow from them. They blessed me with an amazing gift, and Ive been happily traveling ever since.

How old were you when you began?

I visited my last state, the 50th, North Dakota, when I was 33 or 34, and I immediately thought I needed another travel goal because I was still young. I had been to 14 or 15 countries at that point and thought how cool itd be if I could visit 50 countries by 50, then Id have 50-50-50.

Have you always traveled with a companion, or has some of it been on your own?

Ive traveled solo; Ive traveled with family; and Ive traveled with friends.

How did you decide which countries to visit?

Ive picked different countries for different reasons. I picked Ireland because I love castles. I picked Japan because a friend, Melinda, suggested Tokyo and Nikko when I told her I wanted to visit an Asian country. I picked Morocco because I love the movie Casablanca.

Was there one country you enjoyed visiting the most?

Ive visited Australia twice, and its lived up to my high expectations of it both times. Ive been to shows in the Sydney Opera House; Ive fed kangaroos at Taronga Zoo; Ive eaten the best steaks in the world there; Ive been whale watching off their coast; (and) Ive walked across the Sydney Harbour Bridge. Its a fantastic and unique country, and it holds a special place in my heart.

Was there one country you enjoyed visiting the least?

I didnt feel safe in St. Lucia, and its hard to enjoy the beauty of your surroundings when youre scared. We stayed at a luxury hotel, but there were heavily armed guards constantly patrolling the grounds. There were also locks on our bedroom doors with signs telling us to use them at night and a big sign on the main entrance to our suite telling us not to open the door to anybody we didnt know, even if they identified themselves as being with the hotel. Again, the country itself is gorgeous, but my time there was stressful.

What country surprised you the most?

Egypt surprised me more than any other country in the best way possible  I fell in love with it and their people! Everybody, and I mean absolutely everybody, was nice, friendly, enthusiastic, helpful and welcoming. Ive never felt more wanted in a country. Every tour guide, every driver, every hotel employee went above and beyond to make our experience there unbelievable, and we saw a lot of the country, from Cairo to Luxor with Alexandria in between. The pyramids, the Avenue of the Sphinxes, the Egyptian Museum were all remarkable and, honestly, left me speechless. I highly recommend Egypt, and I promise you will not be disappointed.

What countries are you determined to visit again?

I will visit Egypt again because I made friends there. Our driver in Luxor and I stay in touch through WhatsApp, and hes constantly asking me when Im coming back to my second country because he cant wait for him and his family to host me for a few days. I also want to visit Northern Ireland again because I only had a day there in Belfast, and it simply wasnt enough. It was fascinating, and I want to experience more of the country.

What other countries do you plan to visit someday?

Im currently in the process of formulating another goal or perhaps two goals. Ive been on six of the seven continents. Im missing Antarctica, so even though its not considered a country, I do want to eventually visit Antarctica to complete the continents. Im also working on a list of specific sites I want to see like Petra in Jordan, the Great Wall of China and Easter Island in Chile, so I will visit other countries because I will always enjoy the being there, the experience of a new place. The getting there and the getting back wear me out more than it used to, but the being there is always worth it. I also want to visit Vietnam, because Dad served there during the war.

What have you gained by all this travel?

Traveling is humbling because it demands you gain perspective. For example, Ive seen a 4-year-old boy in Peru happily playing with an old tire at his government-funded preschool, and I think hes richer in the ways that really matter than a lot of 4-year-olds in the U.S. with their iPads and cellphones. Ive walked the ancient city of Ephesus in Turkey and marveled at their aqueduct system that supplied them with running water and indoor plumbing in the 10th century B.C., yet my great-grandmother had to use an outhouse until her late 80s because her house in Lincoln County didnt have a toilet.

Traveling is also humbling because it demands you lose attitude. I only speak English and a little bit of French, which means I have been in plenty of countries where I dont understand their language, their customs, their transportation systems, etc. I have been totally dependent on strangers in countries completely unfamiliar to me, but Ive learned smiling is a universal ice breaker, and if you respect the fact youre a visitor in their country, most people will help you regardless of our differences because in the end, as much as we are different, were also the same.
Aristides de Sousa Mendes do Amaral e Abranches was born in the town of Cabanas de Viriato, Portugal in 1885. After graduating from Portugal's centuries-old University of Coimbra with a law degree, Sousa Mendes was deployed to Portuguese consulates throughout the world: Zanzibar, Brazil, San Francisco, Spain, Belgium. In January 1938, he was assigned to the Portuguese consulate in Bordeaux, France.

Under Adolf Hitler, Germany invaded Poland the next year, prompting Portugal  trying to remain neutral in the burgeoning conflict that would become World War II  to distribute what was known as Circular 14. The order decreed that Portuguese consuls deny travel into Portugal for refugees fleeing the Nazi-occupied countries in Europe, including Jews.

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By June 1940, throughout Europe, millions of people were on the move, trying to stay ahead of the Nazis (who had walked into Paris on June 14, 1940). The streets of Bordeaux, in southern France, became crammed with those trying to make it to the border, slip through Spain and into Portugal, where they hoped for passage to safer places.

"The refugees were running for their lives. The New York Times has estimated there were 6 to 10 million people on the move at that point," Mattis says. "We're talking about a catastrophe of biblical proportions. Even more than biblical."

Knowing what could happen to him and his family if he defied Circular 14, but seeing the terror unfold before him, Sousa Mendes was torn. He offered visas to a Polish rabbi he had befriended, Chaim Hersz Kruger, and his family. But Kruger, who had fled from Belgium, turned down the offer and tried to convince Sousa Mendes to help everyone that he could.

After days of seclusion and prayer, Sousa Mendes  a devout Catholic  decided to act. From a letter he wrote:

I have it all in my hands now, to save the many thousands of persons who have come from everywhere in Europe in the hope of finding sanctuary in Portugal. They are all human beings, and their status in life, their religion or color, are altogether immaterial to me.

" " Polish rabbi Chaim Hersz Kruger (left) helped Aristides Sousa Mendes stamp thousands of transit visas, like the one seen here issued to Ludwig Rosenberg, a German refugee imprisoned in Cours du Medoc internment camp in Bordeaux. Public Domain/Sousa Mendes Foundation

With the help of Rabbi Kruger, his own family and others, Sousa Mendes devised an assembly line-like system to stamp and sign thousands of transit visas, for anyone who applied. He traveled in person to a consulate in southern France (and called another) to order diplomats to do the same.

His nephew, Cesar Mendes, described the scene (again, from the Sousa Mendes Foundation):

When I arrived in Bordeaux and approached the consulate of Portugal I noticed immediately that a large crowd of refugees was heading that way. The closer I got to the consulate, the larger the crowd. Since May 10th of 1940 until the occupation of Bordeaux by the Germans, the dining room, the drawing room, and the consul's offices were at the disposal of the refugees  scores of them of both sexes, all ages, including old and sick people. They were coming and going; pregnant women who did not feel well and people who had seen their relatives die on the highways killed by airplane machine gun fire. They slept on chairs, on the floor, on the rugs.

Tens of thousands of people, including thousands of Jews, were granted visas under Sousa Mendes' authority. Historian Yehuda Bauer has said Sousa Mendes performed "perhaps the largest rescue action by a single individual during the Holocaust."

Among those saved was a 7-year-old boy, suffering from appendicitis, fleeing his home in war-ravaged Belgium. His name: Daniel Matuzewitz. He is Olivia Mattis' father. Matuzewitz is now Daniel Mattis, a retired professor of physics at the University of Utah.

In all, 12 members of Daniel Mattis' immediate family were rescued by Sousa Mendes. Dozens more that sprung from that original 12  including Mattis' daughter Olivia  are alive today because of his actions. And that's just one family represented among the thousands of people Sousa Mendes saved. "They were hoping for a miracle," Mattis says of the refugees. "And he was that miracle."
CONCORD  A Concord mother says she is still waiting for justice a year after her son died from fentanyl exposure.

Marshall Abbott was just one day shy of his 30th birthday when his family says he was exposed to a drug that took his life.

His mother Beth Abernathy talked to Channel 9s Hannah Goetz about her fight for justice for her son and thousands of others like him.

Marshall was amazing. Marshall lived his life with no fear, Abernathy said.

But one year ago, Abernathy says she woke up to her worst nightmare.

We knew our son was dead, but we had no idea why, she said.

Detectives in Cabarrus County said they were ruling Abbotts death as suspicious. A few months later the toxicology report came back from the medical examiner and said Abbott died of fentanyl poisoning.

My son didnt have alcohol, my son didnt have marijuana (in his system), Abernathy said. My son had nothing in his system but enough fentanyl to kill 40 grown men and the small amount of methamphetamine it had been mixed with.

In November, police arrested Aaron Furr in connection to Abbotts death. He was charged with death by distribution. Police say he supplied the fentanyl that killed Abbott.

Our family has a right to justice, Abernathy said. We should not have to, you know, over and over and over again, be forced to sit in a courtroom and watch the guy walk out and enjoy his life when we have to come back to the same hell every day without our child.

Abernathy says her son was larger than life and that she will fight for him every day.

Through her advocacy, Abbott has been featured on billboards across North Carolina and in New Yorks Times Square to help bring awareness to fentanyl deaths.

When Im done fighting for Marshall, I am going to fight for everyone elses kid too, Abernathy said.

Channel 9 learned that from 2020 to 2022 there were 130 fentanyl deaths in Cabarrus County. Since death by distribution charges became effective in 2019, Furr is just one of five people to be charged in Cabarrus.

Abernathy encourages anyone who is suffering to reach out for help.

Resources and more information are available on the Fentanyl Victims Network of North Carolina website.

WSOC-TV News has more on this and other stories, including video, online at https://www.wsoctv.com/news/
Microsoft has collaborated with indigenous-owned profit-for-purpose Indigital to lead the Land Acknowledgement, an activity recognising the local indigenous culture of the Dharug people. As part of the activity, Indigital has also tapped the Dharug to shape Microsoft's data centre sites exterior artwork and landscape a design to support cultural connection and inclusion.

According to an Australia Financial Review report, the $1.3 billion data centre is the first major data centre in NSW to get council approval after earlier plans for a separate one was blocked.

Indigital founder and CEO and Cabrogal woman Mikaela Jade led the project bringing together members of the Dharug Nation to be involved in the Connecting with Country process.

This process was aligned with the Government Architect NSWs Connecting with Country draft framework, created to help develop connections with Country to inform the planning, design and delivery of built environment projects in the state.

Indigital facilitated weekly constructive and collaborative meetings, which incorporated traditional Indigenous practices and their role in future development, over an eight-month period.

The project marked the first time that the Cabrogal Clan and wider Dharug Nation had met on Country in more than 100 years.

The methods we used to connect our culture to Microsofts planned data centre site were as old as time, said Jade. We came together on Country, spoke to ancestral beings, imagined what Country was like before colonisation, and imagined colour schemes, stories and relationships. We brought that forward to the present and explored how traditional owners and custodians interpret Country now, and imagined what this site will be like in 40 years time.

Indigital trained a machine learning algorithm using traditional imagery to understand interpretations of the Dharug Nations resilience.

The algorithm created culturally recognised patterns and imagery that will be reflected in the sites exterior artwork and landscape design.

Dharug woman, traditional custodian and knowledge holder Julie Bukari Webb said the project ensured Indigenous ways, traditions and perspectives dont get lost in new builds of critical infrastructure.

Im really proud of how weve come together in love and unity to create a lot of joy and understanding, Webb said. The artwork we created captures all of that in a bundle that will be represented at the Microsoft Kemps Creek Data Centre.

Creating jobs and digital skills opportunities for the local community

Microsofts new data centre represents investment and long-term commitment to the local community, with the Kemps Creek site expected to fuel jobs growth in Western Sydney.

The company estimates it will require 4,575 construction roles and 18.6 million work hours to build new data centres in Australia, and it intends to fill 25 to 30% of positions with local contractors.

Once fully operational, Microsoft anticipates 300 full-time employees will work at its new data centres in NSW and Victoria.

As part of its support for the Dharug Nation, Microsoft has extended its partnership with Indigital in Western Sydney this year via the Indigital Schools program.

This connects Elders with primary and secondary school students to share cultural knowledge, history and traditions. The program is running in 20 schools across Western Sydney and reaching more than 500 students.

The programme encourages students to leverage the latest technology and upskill for the digital economy. Through the eight curriculum-linked workshops, Elders, local educators and Microsoft are merging cultural knowledge and digital tools for todays youth.

By using creative apps like Paint 3D, Minecraft and Maya, students are thinking conceptually about cultural questions and creating visual representations of the characters and environments from the stories of Elders.

Recognising Indigenous land rights, ensuring cultural sensitivity and respect, and providing economic opportunity for Indigenous people have been key considerations for Microsoft during the project.



Were excited by the demand were seeing from customers for Azure in Australia, including unprecedented interest in our cutting-edge AI workloads. We are continuing to invest to meet the capacity requirements, but in a way that meets our ambitious sustainability goals and investments in the communities in which we operate, said Microsoft Australia managing director Steven Worrall.
More than 60% of Australians know what a VPN is with a quarter using this cybersecurity tool. However, Gen Zs (18-23 years old)the post-millennial generation considered to be the most digitally activeappear to have the worst VPN habits in Australia, typically using free VPNs, potentially exposing themselves to several privacy and security risks, according to a VPN usage survey by NordVPN.

On the other hand, Gen Y (23-35 years old) in Australia has the best VPN usage habits. This group typically uses paid VPNs with the intention of gaining more online privacy.

It is alarming that the generation that uses the internet the most values their privacy online the least. Free VPNs dont charge monthly or yearly fees, making them seem like an attractive option. However, these services still have to make money, so they often end up tracking and selling user data to third parties, says NordVPN cybersecurity advisor Adrianus Warmenhoven.

VPN awareness is above average in Australia

The survey revealed that most Australians know what a VPN is, making it one of the top 10 countries in the study for VPN awareness. Just over six out of 10 (62.7%) people in Australia are aware of VPNs, with over a quarter (27.1%) using them.

VPN usage is average in Australia and has remained relatively stable over the last four years, with 25.1% using a VPN in 2020 and 27.1% using a VPN today.

Like in most other markets, a typical VPN user in Australia is male and between 25 and 54 years old.

In Australia, just over a third (35.3%) use a VPN to protect the privacy of their data and activity. Three in 10 (31.3%) Australian VPN users turn to VPNs to ensure the security of their devices and online accounts.

It is important to choose reliable paid VPN services to make sure you dont pay with your data instead of money. Also, remember that VPNs have many advantages, including browsing privately online, using public Wi-Fi safely, or even saving money on holiday bookings, says Warmenhoven.

For those who dont use VPNs, Adrianus provides three easy cybersecurity tips to feel safer online:

1. Use impenetrable passwords: Use different passwords for each account and store your passwords in an encrypted password manager. Make sure your passwords consist of at least 20 letters, numbers, and symbols.



2. Use anti-malware software: Anti-malware software will ensure that you do not download malicious files to your device and will protect you from info-stealing viruses.



3. Dont overshare on social media: The more things you share online, the easier it gets for criminals to use this information against you.

Full results of all 18 countries which participated in the survey can be found here.

NordVPNs annual VPN usage survey is commissioned to help discover and understand VPN usage habits. The survey, first conducted in 2020, was conducted in 18 countries this year.

This first appeared in the subscription newsletter CommsWire on 30 June 2023.
COMPANY NEWS: From K-12 schools to higher education institutions, schools are leveraging Jamf's technology to unlock the full potential of Apple devices in education to empower student success while delivering a safe online experience.

Jamf, the standard in managing and securing Apple at work, today announced that it now empowers more than 42 million students globally, serving eight of the top 10 largest school districts in the United States (according to March 2023 data from Niche) and all of the top 10 best global universities (as ranked by US News and World Report in March 2023).

By enabling seamless device management, security, and classroom workflow solutions for Mac, iPad, and Apple TV in schools worldwide, Jamf stands alone in providing the complete solution that global education institutions need today.

"Education is at the heart of Jamf's mission, and we are committed to helping schools transform their learning environments with purpose-driven technology to improve classroom workflows," said Jamf CEO Dean Hager. "By empowering educators and students with a seamless device management and security platform which delivers a safe online experience, Jamf enables personalised, engaging and secure learning experiences that prepare students for success in the digital age."

Through its comprehensive platform and services, Jamf ensures that schools can optimise the potential of Apple devices, making technology an integral part of education. Jamf's education-focused technology solutions cater to the unique needs of students, teachers, and parents, facilitating seamless device deployment, management, security, and classroom workflow solutions. With Jamf's leading technology, educational organisations have the ability to:

 Empower both 1:1 and shared device environments with Jamf School to help schools and institutions across the globe enhance their unique digital learning environments. Jamf School is built exclusively for teachers and IT to maximize Apple hardware for learning purposes inside and outside of the classroom. Complete with teacher, student, and parent apps, Jamf School creates the optimal digital experience and ensures students are focused and engaged.

 Seamlessly connect learners with Jamf Connect to ensure that students and teachers have the power to leverage a single cloud-based identity to gain immediate and secure access to the resources and apps they need for the classroom, whether the classroom is at the school or at home.

 Safeguard students from harmful content with Jamf Safe Internet to help students explore and learn fearlessly while maintaining a safe environment. Since the launch of Jamf Safe Internet last year, As of 31 March 2023, Jamf has built a base of over 550 Jamf Safe Internet customers since the product's launch last year.

Schools transforming the educational experience with Jamf

Jamf's dedication to education has earned the trust of countless educational institutions worldwide. As of June 29, 2023, 28,000 education customers across K-12 schools to higher education institutions are leveraging Jamf's technology to unlock the full potential of Apple devices in education.

 One of the biggest education deployments of Jamf in Europe is in Bremen, Germany. Bremen has been a Jamf K-12 customer for more than three years. Bremen started with just over 1,000 Jamf School licenses and expanded very quickly during the Covid-19 pandemic to provide iPads for students and teachers, bringing them to the first large 1:1 deployment in the country. Bremen currently has approximately 90,000 iPads deployed, all using Jamf School, complemented by the Jamf Teacher app for effective iPad use in the classroom. During the war in Ukraine, the state of Bremen also quickly and proactively provided iPads for thousands of refugee children to help them more quickly learn about technology, the German language, and about Germany.

 Texas A&M University is empowering multiple departments with Apple devices powered by Jamf. With over 5,000 Macs, 2,000 iPads, and 150 Apple TVs at the end of 2022, the University has committed the next five years to work with Jamf and continue growing the use of Apple devices across all departments at the University.

 Zayed University in Dubai, UAE recently chose Jamf Protect to secure their fleet of 2,000 Macs. Since 2009, Zayed University has been managing its fleet of Macs with Jamf Pro. Last year, Jamf Safe Internet launched, and the university quickly adopted the solution to keep the ZU-owned Mac devices safe from cyberattacks.

 Scottish Borders Council launched the Inspire Learning Project in 2019 which deployed over 16,000 iPads to their students to help develop digital skills and take a new approach to inspire learning in the classroom. They chose Apple powered by Jamf because it brought together four key pillars - mobility, personalisation, collaboration, and excellence. Thanks to Jamf, the Inspire Learning Project continues to scale and students continue their personal and digitised learning across the Scottish Borders.

"Jamf made our vision of unique and personalised deployment for our students possible. Day to day, Jamf removes technical barriers for our teachers and supports the Inspire Learning Project in scaling our 16,000 devices," said Scottish Borders Council Inspire development officer Paul Graham.

About Jamf

Jamf's purpose is to simplify work by helping organisations manage and secure an Apple experience that end users love and organisations trust. Jamf is the only company in the world that provides a complete management and security solution for an Apple-first environment that is enterprise secure, consumer simple and protects personal privacy. To learn more, visit www.jamf.com.
COMPANY NEWS: LambdaTest today announced it has been named a finalist of the cloud native app development 2023 Microsoft partner of the year award.

The company was honoured among a global field of top Microsoft partners for demonstrating excellence in innovation and implementation of customer solutions based on Microsoft technology.

"It is exciting to be recognised as a global finalist for this much sought-after award for Microsoft cloud native app development partner of the year, said LambdaTest COO Maneesh Sharma.

"Partnering with Microsoft has accelerated us towards our goal of providing innovative continuous quality solutions to help customers deliver high quality digital applications. LambdaTest's cloud native unified execution platform has delivered significant value to customers by accelerating testing in CI/CD DevOps cycles and providing AI led insights for smarter test orchestration."

The Microsoft partner of the year awards recognise Microsoft partners that have developed and delivered outstanding Microsoft-based applications, services and devices during the past year. Awards are classified in various categories, with honorees chosen from a set of more than 4,200 submitted nominations from more than 100 countries worldwide.

LambdaTest was recognised for providing outstanding solutions and services in cloud native app development.

The cloud native app development partner of the year award recognises a partner with a track record of building new cloud-native apps. This is awarded to a partner who has a deep understanding of their customers' business challenges and has helped motivate the adoption of new cloud technologies and practices.

The winning solutions are based on Microsoft Azure and should also leverage a mix of technologies, such as Azure Kubernetes Service, Azure Container Apps, Azure RedHat OpenShift, Azure API Management, and GitHub.

"Congratulations to the winners and finalists of the 2023 Microsoft partner of the year awards!" said Microsoft chief partner officer and corporate vice president of global partner solutions Nicole Dezen. "The innovative new solutions and services that positively impact customers and enable digital transformation from this year's winners demonstrate the best of what's possible with the Microsoft Cloud."

LambdaTest investor Telstra Ventures' general partner Steve Schmidt said ""The founders of Lambdatest want to create the world's best test execution platform - recognition by one of the world's greatest technology brands is a real honour".

About LambdaTest

LambdaTest is an intelligent and omnichannel enterprise execution environment that helps businesses drastically reduce time to market through just in time test orchestration (JITTO), ensuring quality releases and accelerated digital transformation. Over 10,000+ enterprise customers and 2+ million users across 130+ countries rely on LambdaTest for their testing needs.

 Browser & App Testing Cloud allows users to run both manual and automated tests of web and mobile apps across 3000+ different browsers, real devices, and operating system environments.

 HyperExecute helps customers run and orchestrate test grids in the cloud for any framework and programming language at blazing-fast speeds to cut down on quality test time, helping developers build software faster.

For more information, visit, https://lambdatest.com.

About Telstra Ventures

Telstra Ventures identifies what's next, right now. Telstra Ventures serves extraordinary leaders and helps them achieve their dreams. In our first ten years, 92 investments have generated 37 liquidity events including Auth0, BigCommerce, Box, Cloopen, CrowdStrike, DocuSign, Rancher, Skillz, Snap, and Whispir.

To date, our revenue acceleration platform has driven > $750 million in revenue for our portfolio companies, extending their reach across Australia, Asia, UK and the US. In 2022, we announced the close of our third fund, bringing funds under management to $1.3 billion, making us one of the largest VCs in the ANZ region. To see our full portfolio and learn more, visit telstraventures.com.
COMPANY NEWS : McAfee Corp is a global leader in online protection, today announced McAfee Business Protection, a new comprehensive security solution for small business owners in collaboration with Dell Technologies . McAfee Business Protection helps Dell small business customers stay ahead of cyber threats and vulnerabilities with award-winning security, identity and dark web data monitoring, VPN, web protection for safe browsing and more.

Designed to meet the needs of growing businesses, McAfee Business Protection makes it easy for business owners to protect themselves, their employees, and their livelihood by better securing employee devices and online connections from hackers, malware and viruses. McAfee Business Protection delivers award-winning online protection that is simple, intuitive and efficient to manage. For example, business owners benefit from custom security policies allowing them to set automated rules aligned to their business needs, reducing time on IT security management while delivering powerful protection.

Small business owners are often tasked with many roles, including IT Manager. In fact, a *McAfee survey of business owners found that the majority (80%) self-managed their business protections. With limited time and resources to devote to this critical task, 60% spent less than an hour each week managing those protections, despite the risk of cybercrime with 43% of all cyber-attacks targeted at SMBs.

Were excited to bring McAfee Business Protection to Dell customers so that small business owners can focus on running their company, knowing that their security posture is in safe hands with McAfee and Dell, said Gagan Singh, Chief Operating Officer at McAfee. Our business solution is purpose-built with an easy-to-use and scalable model designed to grow with the business. Customers will benefit from simple but powerful tools that allow customization while offering industry-leading online protection.

McAfee Business Protection offers protection against breaches and online attacks with a product offering designed for small businesses A few key McAfee Business Protection technology highlights include:

Security Console: Easily view the companys protection status, manage employee invitations to set up protection, and take necessary actions, all in one place. It even works on mobile.

Business Protection Score: Stay on top of online security health for the business and employees; and get guided steps to improve scores.

Identity Monitoring on the dark web: Employees can monitor their email addresses and phone numbers to see if they have been compromised on the dark web. Once enrolled, employees will be alerted if their information is found in a future breach.

User-managed protection : Each employee creates their own login, can set up their own data and device protection, and take necessary security actions, all under one business subscription.

Next-Gen Threat Protection: Award-winning protection for unlimited** business devices from threats known and unknown, including malware, ransomware, viruses, and more with lightning-fast scans that keep devices running smoothly.

Advanced Firewall : Safeguard users data by blocking hackers from gaining access to your home or office network.

Tracker Remover: Prevent web trackers from monitoring and gathering data about the business or employees when on the web.

Secure VPN: Keep data private and secure anywhere with bank-grade Wi-Fi encryption. VPN can be set to connect automatically when accessing an unsecure network.

Wi-Fi Scan: Receive alerts when connecting to an unsecured Wi-Fi network or hotspot; turning on VPN will help ensure a safer online connection.

Password Protection Status: Sends alerts if the companys devices are not password protected.

Security Report: Highlights status and open items to improve the protection posture for your business, devices and employees.

24/7 Dedicated Support: Get 24/7 technical assistance and peace of mind from McAfees dedicated support team via phone or chat to help set up protections, and more.

As security threats have become more prevalent and sophisticated, one thing has remained constant: organizations of all sizes need strong defences. Its why we collaborate with security experts across the industry to embed security and resiliency into Dells core solutions, said Ed Ward, president, Client Product Group, Dell Technologies. When it comes to small businesses, its critical we provide security offerings that let them manage and grow their companies with confidence. The work were doing with McAfee helps us deliver on this vision.

For global small business owners that purchase a PC from Dell (Vostro, XPS with Pro OS, OptiPlex, Latitude or Precision), McAfee Business Protection will be available as a 30-day trial or one-year or three-year subscription, starting June 8th, 2023. Learn more about McAfee Business Protection for Dell at https://www.mcafee.com/blogs.

Research conducted by Fullstory in June 2022 with 129 small businesses. Full details available upon request.

Unlimited device plans cover employees supported endpoint devices used for internal business operations and are subject to our fair use policy.

Vostro/XPS models include a 1-year subscription to McAfee Business Protection and an optional 3-year paid subscription. Inspiron models include a 30-day trial to McAfee Business Protection with optional 1-year and 3-year paid subscriptions. OptiPlex, Latitude, and Precision models include optional 30-day trial, 1-year, 3-year subscriptions or option to not include any anti-virus software.
The world's biggest semiconductor manufacturer is facing a shortage of experienced labour and seeking to bring in workers from Taiwan as it looks to build a new factory in Arizona, a report says.

Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Corporation agreed to build the factory in November 2022, with its founder Morris Chang saying the unit would make 3nm chips at the new factory. Prior to that, TSMC had announced a factory to make 5nm chips, also at the same site.

The Nikkei Asia website said the plant was already well behind schedule and the costs of construction have risen sharply.

The move to build chip factories in the US has been driven by the US seeking to increase its share of manufacturing in the industry as it pursues trade measures against China.

Chang hadin April last year that it may not be possible to reproduce the success enjoyed by his company in any other country, pointing to the fact that costs are 50% higher in its existing factory in the US than in Taiwan.

The report said talks were continuing with the US Government to bring about 500 workers into the country to improve efficiency and make up for lost time.

Nikkei Asia quoted one executive as saying: "There are not enough US workers who have good first-hand experience, specifically on building semiconductor manufacturing facilities, and many are not familiar with the requirements for chipmaking plants. That has caused delays in multiple installation works."

One supplier highlighted the problems, telling the website: "It is challenging and costly for Taiwanese cleanroom builders to communicate with foreign construction workers in an unfamiliar environment.

"Sending experienced construction contractors and their workers who worked with the chip suppliers before from Taiwan could save lots of time and costs."

In Taiwan, TSMC has begun production in units within 30 months of starting construction, but in the US that process is expected to take more than three years.
WikiLeaks founder and publisher Julian Assange turns 52 on Monday, still stuck in the UK's Belmarsh maximum security jail as he waits to hear the outcome of a second appeal to the High Court against a British extradition order.

In June, the Australian lost his first appeal against the order that aims to send him to the US for trial over alleged espionage charges.

The second appeal was filed on 13 June. Since then his wife, father and brother have been campaigning for his release, but nothing has yet happened.

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.

Julian is turning 52 tomorrow, Monday July 3rd. His fifth birthday in Belmarsh prison.



On his second birthday in Belmarsh in 2020 the kids and I baked Australian lamingtons and filmed this video for him, which he has not seen to this day.pic.twitter.com/F66ROjhM6L  Stella Assange #FreeAssangeNOW (@Stella_Assange) July 2, 2023

Assange wasin 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.

His wife, Stella, recently met Pope Francis in her continuing bid to push for her husband's freedom.

She told the Associated Press: He has provided great solace and comfort and we are extremely appreciative for his reaching out to our family in this way. He understands that Julian is suffering and is concerned.

I have a lot of faith that the situation will change, and there are a lot of people around the world, from all parts of the world here and elsewhere, who are trying to get justice and see freedom for my husband."

CBC News: Why won't the U.S. drop charges against WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange?https://t.co/j1PbsCpIKY  Stella Assange #FreeAssangeNOW (@Stella_Assange) July 2, 2023

Assange supporters in Westchester, New York, with a banner calling for his release on Monday. It was part of a nationwide effort in the US to draw attention to the WikiLeaks' editor's plight. Supplied


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America set a tragic milestone, from January 1, 2020 through December 31, 2022. Gunfire, assaults, vehicular assaults, and car chases killed at least 230 on-duty cops, the Officer Down Memorial Page reports.

Beyond the carnage that its cop-hating rhetoric foments, the "Defund the Police" crowd's demonization of law enforcement personnel takes a psychological toll. Morale, recruitment, and retention are cratering in precinct houses nationwide.

The Police Executive Research Forum tracked 19% more retirements and 47% more resignations in 2022 than in 2019, the year before the George Floyd riots turbocharged anti-police abolitionism.

Shattered lives are the ultimate measure of policing's decline. Urban violence jumped 29% from 2020 to 2021, per the latest National Crime Victimization Survey.

Robust public and political support can reverse these trends, and the U.S. Tax Code can help, too.

Police guarantee domestic tranquility and embody the rule of law. Fittingly, the activists who endeavor to destroy Donald J. Trump are the same ones who aim to eradicate the police.

Trump released a tough public-safety agenda in February, including record outlays to hire, train, and retain police. He can fortify his plan by excusing cops from the federal income tax.

Republican lawmakers in Georgia, Kentucky, and New Mexico have introduced bills to free cops from state income levies. Given Trump's tight bond with cops, he is perfectly poised to take this idea nationwide.

U.S. GIs' combat pay already is federally tax-exempt. As America's streets increasingly resemble battlefields, cops should enjoy this same privilege.

What about this idea's fiscal impact?

Cops offer their communities significant economic benefits, both short- and long-term. Every life shielded, every business saved, and every kid who attends school without fear  all exceed this tax relief's price tag.

Princeton economics researcher Steven Mello estimated in 2019 that "each additional sworn officer reduces victimization costs by about $352,000." These huge societal savings far outweigh foregoing $7,180 in federal taxes that a typical cop pays on a $58,320 median salary, according to Comparably.com.

After an April 22 campaign stop in Fort Myers, Florida, Trump bought pizzas for all the police officers who worked the event. A relevant Facebook post scored 270,000 likes.

If such a small, but heartfelt, gesture can generate that much goodwill, imagine what liberating cops from the federal income tax would do. This dramatic reform would boost officer morale, attract recruits, incent seasoned vets to postpone retirement, and warn criminals that the sheriff is back in town.

The Trump campaign's anti-crime plan could transform American law enforcement. Trump economic adviser Stephen Moore speaks tantalizingly about futuristic "freedom cities," each patrolled by a "super police force."

Trump should encourage U.S police squads to become the envy of the world. Every cop should be well-paid, well-trained, highly motivated, and dedicated to the rule of law, especially as it's in peril.

Trump's public-safety blueprint confirms his far-reaching second-term vision. His sequel could become America's most consequential administration.

As China and other predator states grow increasingly belligerent, as America's culture wars intensify, as artificial intelligence and other new technologies offer both unprecedented prosperity and unforeseeable risks, the next president of the United States may face greater challenges than Lincoln, FDR, or Reagan. Law enforcement at every level will be essential to maintain domestic tranquility during these turbulent times.

The key test for The Blue, however, may come before a President-Re-elect Trump returns to the White House. If Trump prevails, especially in a photo finish, expect massive unrest in Democrat-led cities  even worse than the violent election denial that the Left ignited after Trump upset Hillary Clinton in 2016.

Do not be surprised if secessionist fever erupts in California, New York, and other major Democrat states. A lame-duck Biden Administration would have little appetite for quelling such radical-Left insurrectionism.

Between the November 5, 2024 election and the inauguration 11 weeks hence, local police forces may have to keep America intact. Excusing this country's cops from the federal income tax would fortify them to preserve, protect, and defend the Constitution of the United States.
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 Geoff Banks, 100, of Devon, England, and Celesta Byrne, 100, of Texas, have a unique bond: They've been pen pals since 1938, the BBC reported.

Their friendship blossomed when they were in their 20s and an educational project put them in touch with each other.

Since then, they've kept up with technology, switching to emails and video calls, and the two met in person in 2002. Banks calls Byrne "a very interesting person. We exchange stories and she's very good to talk to."

Byrne shuts down any suggestion of romance over the years: "There wasn't 'glibbally globbally' stuff, it was just normal neighbor people." [BBC, 11/30/2022]

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 Brenda and Dennis Delgado first met by chance in August 2021, in the condiments aisle at Fry's, a grocery in Casa Grande, Arizona.

Dennis told Brenda a joke, she laughed, and they talked for 30 minutes before exchanging their contact info, News12-TV reported.

Both were widowed, and as they spent more time together, they grew close. So when they decided to tie the knot, they returned to the scene of the spark: the mayonnaise aisle.

They exchanged vows on Aisle 8 as the "Wedding March" played over the store's loudspeakers.

"It was wonderful," Dennis said.

Floral arrangements provided by the store included Miracle Whip and mayo. "If you're looking for love, go to Fry's," Brenda said. "Keep looking." [News12, 11/25/2022]
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It was on July 5, 1852, that Frederick Douglass addressed the Ladies' Antislavery Society in Rochester, N.Y., and delivered what is often described as the greatest abolitionist speech in US history. "What, to the American slave," Douglass demanded of his audience, "is your Fourth of July?"

It was not by happenstance that Douglass gave his renowned July 4 speech on the day after July 4. He had insisted on it. Ever since slavery had been abolished in the state of New York decades earlier, Black New Yorkers had celebrated their emancipation on July 5. The date was chosen both as a symbol of the independence still denied to those enslaved in 15 other states and the District of Columbia, and as an acid comment on the fraudulence of a nation that commemorated its liberty with parades and fireworks while permitting and enforcing the chattel slavery of African Americans.

So when Douglass stipulated July 5 as the date for his speech, his audience likely anticipated that he would be scathing in his denunciation of that grotesque double standard. He didn't disappoint.

With the wrath of an Old Testament prophet, Douglass declared that "from the slave's point of view," the Fourth of July more than any other day underscores the "gross injustice and cruelty to which he is the constant victim."

Douglass, who had been born into slavery and escaped as a young adult, vented his moral outrage.

"Your celebration is a sham; your boasted liberty, an unholy license; your national greatness, swelling vanity," he declaimed. "Your prayers and hymns, your sermons and thanksgivings, with all your religious parade and solemnity, are . . . mere bombast, fraud, deception, impiety, and hypocrisy  a thin veil to cover up crimes which would disgrace a nation of savages. There is not a nation on the earth guilty of practices, more shocking and bloody, than are the people of these United States, at this very hour."

Douglass's speech is widely anthologized and reprinted; students are often assigned to read it; and it can be heard in numerous online recordings, with Douglass's words recited by everyone from acclaimed actors to the great man's own descendants. But because the speech is very long  nearly 10,500 words  it is rarely presented in full. Instead, readers and viewers are apt to get only highlights of what Douglass said that day, primarily his scorching attacks on the duplicity that kept slavery alive.

Yet as memorable and eloquent as those passages are, they were not the core of his message. Douglass excoriated America's hypocrisy. But he exulted in America's democratic promise. He placed his faith in the principle of equality and justice enshrined in the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution. He had come to Rochester not to damn white Americans but to implore them to live up to the Founders' highest ideals. Many years later, Martin Luther King Jr., speaking to a vast throng at the Lincoln Memorial, would make a similar argument.

But it was Douglass who made the argument first. And in doing so, he was rejecting the view of some of the towering abolitionists of his time, including his own mentor, hero, and former ally, William Lloyd Garrison, of Boston.

In his lectures and his influential newspaper, The Liberator, Garrison preached that the Constitution was an evil document, a deal with the devil that protected slavery and with which there could be no compromise. At one July 4 rally, Garrison burned a copy of the Constitution, calling it "a covenant with death, and an agreement with hell." For years, Douglass had agreed with Garrison and regarded the American founding as having been corrupted from the start. He renounced any patriotism. As he told Garrison in 1846, any patriotic sentiment "was whipt out of me long since" by the slaveowners who had abused him in his youth.

But gradually Douglass changed his mind. He began "to re-think the whole subject," he would later write in his autobiography. Eventually he concluded that Garrison and his disciples were wrong. The Constitution was not a pro-slavery document. It was fundamentally anti-slavery. Even when it referred to slavery, as in the notorious Three-Fifths Clause, it did so obliquely, employing embarrassed euphemisms and speaking only of "persons," never of slaves.

"Take the Constitution according to its plain reading," Douglass told his Rochester audience, "and I defy the presentation of a single pro-slavery clause in it. On the other hand, it will be found to contain principles and purposes, entirely hostile to the existence of slavery." The framers of the Constitution, far from permanently entrenching human bondage, had laid the groundwork for its uprooting. "Interpreted as it ought to be interpreted," proclaimed Douglass, "the Constitution is a glorious liberty document."

What was true of the Constitution was even truer of the Declaration. For all their sins  including, in some cases, the enslavement of fellow human beings  the signers of the Declaration were brave and wise men, Douglass said. "I cannot contemplate their great deeds with less than admiration. . . . And for the good they did and the principles they contended for, I will unite with you to honor their memory."

What makes Douglass's Rochester speech so remarkable is not his blistering anger at hypocrites who spoke of freedom while upholding slavery. It is his conviction that embedded in America's charter documents were the principles through which slavery could be destroyed. At a time when leading antislavery activists regarded the American experiment as a failure and betrayal, Douglass saw in it reason for hope and optimism.

He spoke on the Fifth of July, but he nevertheless exalted the date atop the Declaration of Independence. "The Fourth of July is the first great fact in your nation's history  the very ring-bolt in the chain of your yet undeveloped destiny," Douglass told his listeners. "Cling to this day  cling to it, and to its principles, with the grasp of a storm-tossed mariner to a spar at midnight." The great abolitionist rejected the counsels of despair and contempt. The American founding, he knew, was as relevant as ever, holding out the promise of greater, better days to come. It was so in 1852. It remains so today.

Jeff Jacoby is a columnist for The Boston Globe, from which this is reprinted with permission."
A renewed attempt at de-annexing three tracts along Lewisville-Clemmons Road from the Village of Clemmons is suddenly and unexpectedly one vote away from clearing the state legislature.

House Bill 5 was amended June 27 to insert language that would serve to de-annex 1520, 1526 and 1532 Lewisville-Clemmons Road. The tracts total 1.75 acres.

The 1520 tract of 0.35 acres has Mad Greek Grill as a tenant, while the 1526 tract is 0.97 acres and the 1532 tract is 0.43 acres and contains a 1,508-square-foot residence. The three properties are owned by Lindsay Vogler Jr. and Robert Vogler.

Once the Clemmons de-annex language was inserted, HB5 was fast-tracked through the Senate Finance committee on June 27, Rules and Operations committee on June 28 and then cleared the Senate by a 46-0 vote on June 29.

HB5 cleared the House by a 113-0 vote on March 7 with it only dealt with a de-annex proposal for Fuquay-Varina.

HB5  as a local bill  only requires House approval of the Senate changes before the bill becomes law. The bill is on the July 12 House floor calendar.

It is typical for legislators to approve most local bills with little, if any, scrutiny in an I-scratch-your-back-you-scratch-mine manner.

The insertion has put Clemmons village officials  who vigorously oppose the de-annex proposal  into scramble mode for the second time in four years.

As their local elected officials, it is our duty and responsibility to look after the health, safety and welfare of our residents and their properties, Clemmons mayor Mike Rogers said.

The Voglers are long-standing Clemmons residents, and we are committed to supporting their efforts against unsolicited de-annexation. They have expressed their determination to remain in the Village of Clemmons.

The properties also were at the heart of a 2019 de-annex legislation attempt related to a proposed 38-acre mixed-use project by local developer Stan Forester near the intersection of Styers Ferry and Lewisville-Clemmons roads.

The proposed legislation in 2019 was derailed separately in the House and Senate amid a vigorous protest at the legislature by Clemmons village officials.

Forester could not be reached for comment on whether he or Paragon Properties has revived the development plans and are again pursuing the de-annexation approvals.

Village manager Mike Gunnell said Clemmons officials learned of the insertion of the Clemmons tracts into HB5 after the bill had been amended.

The Village of Clemmons and the property owners are working together to have these Clemmons properties removed from the bill, Gunnell said.

The Senate sponsor of adding the Clemmons de-annex language to HB5 was not listed on the amendment. The amended version of HB5 does not include any details about potential plans for the three tracts.

Both of Forsyth Countys senators, Republican Joyce Krawiec and Democrat Paul Lowe, voted in support.

It is our understanding that at this time, there is no information on exactly who lobbied for this action, Gunnell said.

Background

In August 2019, the de-annexation legislation for the properties was filed as House Bill 392 by then-GOP Reps. Debra Conrad and Lee Zachary.

The proposed 2019 legislation would have de-annexed 2.6 acres from the village, potentially paving the way for a large development proposal that would include a convenience store with 16 gas pumps, 360 apartment units and a grocery store.

Conrad told the Winston-Salem Journal in July 2019 that Foresters shopping-center plans could enhance the retail sector in that part of Clemmons.

The intersection of U.S. 421 and Lewisville-Clemmons Road already has a grocery store, two convenience stores with gas pumps, and several restaurants, including fast food and casual dining.

HB392 cleared the House State and Local Government committee before stalling in House Finance in April 2019.

The village council passed a resolution opposing the de-annexation legislation, sending it to its local legislative delegation. Rep. Donny Lambeth, R-Forsyth, withdrew his support based on that local opposition.

In July 2019, the Clemmons de-annex language was inserted into Senate Bill 270  initially a Durham de-annex bill  at Conrad and Zacharys request.

The opposition from council members led to a rare occurrence of SB270 being removed from a fast-track Senate floor vote and sent back to Senate Finance, where it was shelved for the remainder of the 2019-20 sessions.

In August 2019, the Clemmons de-annex language was taken out of SB270, allowing the Durham de-annex legislation to proceed through the legislature and into law.

Several Village council members expressed their concerns in 2019 about increased traffic generating from the mixed-use development, particularly considering it would be near the main entrances and exits for Southwest Elementary and West Forsyth High schools.

According to a traffic study that Forester submitted to the council in 2019, the development would add 16,500 vehicle trips to Lewisville-Clemmons Road each day.

Councils in Lewisville and Kernersville also passed in 2019 resolutions opposing the Clemmons de-annexation legislation, foremost out of concern over similar requests may be made in their communities.
Q: Has Welcome to Flatch been canceled? I love that program. It is one of the most original comedies ever written.

A: When Fox announced its plans for the coming season, it did not include this comedy, which has aired for two seasons. But the network did not close the door on the series, with one top executive telling Deadline.com that theyre still thinking about the show and will not make a decision until after the current writers strike ends.

Q: Has NBC released a date for the third season of Transplant?

A: NBC has picked up both a third season and a fourth of the Canadian-made medical drama. (The third season has already aired in Canada.) According to NBC Insider, it should arrive on the network sometime during NBC's midseason/summer 2024. Its possible the show will return sooner if the writers strike goes long, as a way for NBC to provide scripted programming.

Q: I am trying to recall the name of a movie from when I was a youngster. I think a young boy was visiting a cabin on a lake, perhaps with a grandpa, and was thrilled when they saw Canada geese landing at the beginning of migration. Then some nasty hunters started shooting from a blind, and that left quite an impression on the boy. If possible, I would appreciate the title and any information about it.

A: You were thinking of Those Calloways, a Disney movie from 1965. Its cast included Brian Keith, Vera Miles, Brandon de Wilde, Ed Wynn and Walter Brennan. Norman Tokar directed, and the script is based on a novel by Paul Annixter. The music was by Hollywood screen icon Max Steiner. It has been released on DVD and is on Disney+.

Q: I know that Bea Benaderet played Kate Bradley, the owner of the Shady Rest, on Petticoat Junction. Might she also have played Pearl  Jethros mom  on The Beverly Hillbillies?

A: Benaderet (1906-68) did indeed play both characters you asked about. Her career included screen efforts, radio work and voice acting for animated productions, notably as Betty Rubble on The Flintstones. Another significant role was as Blanche Morton on The George Burns and Gracie Allen Show, where she was twice nominated for an Emmy.

Q: Im looking for an old movie called Without Malice, with Paul Newman and Sally Field. Is it playing anywhere? I would like to see it again.

A: The movie you are seeking is in fact called Absence of Malice. Field plays a reporter whose story on Newmans character leads to dramatic conflict and debates about journalistic ethics (in a script by a former journalist). Newman, co-star Melinda Dillon and the script by Kurt Luedtke were nominated for Oscars. It is on DVD and Blu-ray; digital rentals include Prime Video.

Q: What happened to Dynasty?

A: One of several attempts to retool old series was an updating of the prime-time soap Dynasty, which aired in 1981-89. The reboot, on the CW network, ran for five seasons, ending in late 2022. Deadline.com called it a victim of disappointing ratings.
You can find patriotic-colored packs of Bazooka Bubble Gum sitting next to the Lucky Lights candy cigarettes.

The bright pink boxes of Bottle Caps are grouped with other tart treats, such as Cherry Sours or Zotz hard candies.

And if you're in the mood for chocolate, nearby is a full case of truffles, buckeyes and bark.

People can find these favorites at Norfolk's latest confectionery: 4th St. Sweets. The shop is nearing its one-year anniversary in July after its owners, Stephanie and Brian Fleming, moved from Colorado to Norfolk.

"We're really excited about being retro and kind of vintage, so that when you walk in, you feel like you're in an old-time candy shop, like something that your grandma and grandpa would have owned," Stephanie said.

The Flemings source the nostalgic candies from a distributor in Altoona, Pennsylvania, that offers dozens of brands no longer found in stores. Other sweets are made in-house with the popular Guittard Chocolate.

Stephanie relies on recipes she created herself or used from her own grandparents. Some sought-after creations include Bumble bark, made with peanut butter, white chocolate and crispy rice cereal; buckeyes, which are peanut butter balls dipped in chocolate; and chocolate-covered cheesecake slices.

Stephanie got her start in the candy business through a job at Rocky Mountain Chocolate Factory in Colorado. After she married Brian, who is originally from Wayne, the two decided to move to Nebraska to run their own sweet shop.

Brian, who used to work in the sales industry, said his younger self never would have guessed a candy store was in his future.

"The idea was stirring for a long time in Colorado," he said. "When we left Colorado, we were like, 'let's do it.' "

The journey to opening 4th St. Sweets was definitely a learning curve. At first, any chocolate Stephanie made would turn out cloudy and not shiny. After some research, she realized it was because of the increase of humidity in Nebraska. The store then got its own dehumidifier.

The shop also ran out of chocolates the initial three days of its grand opening. But now they have the hang of their candy schedule: Fudge is made Tuesday or Wednesday, while caramel apples are made on Thursdays. Then Stephanie and Brian have to brainstorm how they will stock their store on Saturdays, which is the shop's busiest day of the week.

Stephanie said more people have been visiting the shop since it landed a spot on the 2023 Nebraska's Passport tourism program, which features 70 businesses or locations around the state. Store owners have to apply and then be accepted into the program after writing an essay and submitting photos of their businesses.

"I was super excited to apply and even more flattered that we got chosen. We've had probably more than 1,000 guests already  just in May," Stephanie said. "So it's been really awesome to meet people from all over Nebraska."

The store also offers gift packages and can cater desserts for events. People can even request a candy from their childhood and Stephanie will see if it's possible to order it.

The shop has been mixing retro candies with modern treats. The latest product includes freeze-dried candy shipped in from Crunchy Bits in Auburn, Nebraska, another Passport stop.

"It's cool when people come in and they haven't seen (a candy) for 40 years and they get all excited and their eyes just light up," Brian said. "That's one of my favorite parts. And of course, when kids come in. The kids just go crazy."

15 great places for food in Nebraska Globe Chophouse Genoa Food Co. Chances 'R' Ole's Big Game Steakhouse The Pour House Black Crow Steel Grill Sehnert's Monroe Tavern Bar and Grill Davey Tavern Back Alley Bakery Wave Pizza Rowdy's Steakhouse The Chocolate Bar Hollywood Candy
Back when milk came in a glass bottle and phones hung on the wall, families adjusted the rabbit ears and got wild.

The TV series Mutual of Omahas Wild Kingdom has been a welcome guest in American living rooms since 1963, undergoing several iterations over the decades and making Marlin Perkins and Jim Fowler household names.

A reboot of the show will make its debut on NBC in October, 60 years after the original show began, offering a fresh angle on environmental conservation. It will feature veteran co-host Peter Gros and a new co-host, Rae Wynn-Grant, who says she landed the job because someone saw her speaking at a community event in Omaha and thought shed be right for the job.

The series name gains a subtitle: Protecting the Wild.

Gros, who joined the original Wild Kingdom team in 1985, said the new shows focus on conservation successes will make it stand out in a field dense with nature shows.

I think we need to create some hope rather than continue to talk about the gloom and doom, he said.

Gros said many of the shows he grew up watching were dealing with gloom and doom or teeth and claws.

I think its good that we set an example, Gros said. In the past, when we had really serious problems, we solved them. And because we figured it out, modified our behavior, many of the species have come off the Endangered Species List.

Five pilot episodes of the new show were released earlier this year and can be viewed at WildKingdom.com.

The first episode tells an eye-watering tale of two black bear cubs severely burned in a wildfire, nursed back to health and released into the wild.

Gros provides the narration, his voice authoritative and reassuring. There are brief cameos, pulled from the files, of the beloved wildlife icon Perkins.

Another episode highlights the improbable comeback of the California condor from the brink of extinction.

The series wont skip over current issues, such as climate change, Gros said.

Gros said the template of past successes can be used to talk about future problems.

And there is even more urgency to react more quickly than we have in the past, he said.

Wynn-Grant, an accomplished wildlife ecologist who grew up in San Francisco, credits the generosity of Omahans for helping her land the co-hosting job.

She said she got noticed while on an unrelated speaking engagement in Omaha in the winter of 2022  her first visit to the city.

Someone from Mutual who attended the event later suggested she would be a good fit. Before long she was side-by-side with Gros.

I used to watch Peter on TV when I was a kid, and that iteration of Wild Kingdom in the 80s and the 90s really inspired me, she said. I used to say as a kid that I wanted to be a nature show host.

Her career path first led into academia, where she established her credentials as a wildlife ecologist and conservationist.

Shes a research faculty member at the Bren School of Environmental Science and Management at the University of California at Santa Barbara, a National Geographic fellow and a visiting scientist at the American Museum of Natural History.

In a format sense, the original series broke ground for the travel-adventure videos that populate YouTube today.

Perkins and Fowler, and later Gros, would narrate step-by-step their adventures, inviting viewers to come along, but always educating.

Wynn-Grant said the new series will retain a lot of the heart of the original, bringing viewers to places they likely wouldnt be able to go very easily themselves.

Peter and I are having adventures, she said. Were going on journeys. So the audience will see us taking a boat across a body of water. Theyll see us diving. Theyll see us hiking and crawling into tight spaces and exploring caves and all of that really adventurous stuff.

In addition, she said, they aim to normalize access to the outdoors and exploring nature, telling urban wildlife stories and making sure that the show is inclusive.

She said people need hope.

Its really important that people have hope and they understand that although were facing bigger problems in the environment than we ever have faced, we also, as a society, have a history of solving really big problems, she said.

Wynn-Grant said shes studied black bears  which are no longer on the Endangered Species List  in the western United States for 13 years.

Its because real plans were put in place, and biologists and landowners and the public and politicians all worked together to figure out how we can keep the species, she said.

The original show inspired and entertained generations of Americans, and Gros and Wynn-Grant hope that continues.

Through the years, many Omahans got to meet Fowler, who died in 2019 at the age of 89.

Gros first met Fowler when they both appeared on The Tonight Show, hosted by another Nebraskan, Johnny Carson.

Fowler made numerous appearances at Omaha schools, day cares and nature centers, showing off wild creatures. Gros accompanied him at times and learned from Fowler, who he said was a great communicator.

Jim was a good friend of mine, and he was also a wonderful mentor who shared so much of his knowledge from the early days of Wild Kingdom, Gros said. And he taught me to be a professional and be gracious, and how to be a host and not to draw attention to yourself but the environment in which you were filming and the animals and the natural world that needs the attention.

10 times we were proud to be Nebraskans Clayton Anderson Jack Hoffman Henry Doorly Zoo National champions Legislature unique Ted Kooser Pilger cleanup Hannah Huston 150 years of statehood Nebraska flood relief
Lincoln-area residents are advised to watch the skies Tuesday  and not just for the colorful firework displays that will be part of so many Independence Day celebrations.

After a hot, muggy day in the Lincoln metro area with temperatures likely cresting around 97 degrees, there is an 80% chance of rain between 8 and 10 p.m. Although rain could start by as early as 6 p.m., according to National Weather Service meteorologist Paul Fajman.

There is also a remote chance the storms could bring hail and wind gusts of up to 70 mph. Fajman cautioned those enjoying outdoor festivities against standing under or near weaker structures such as tents.

The incoming storm is expected to form out of multiple smaller cells in north-central Nebraska before making its way eastward.

And for those hoping that the urban heat island effect might potentially divert the incoming storm, he called the theory a "myth."

"It's important to remember that a city is just a small blip on the map (in comparison to a large storm cell)," he said.

After the heat of the past several days, Wednesday promises to be cooler, with highs near 80 and a 50% chance of rain.

Top Journal Star photos for June 2023
Nebraska signed a multibillion-dollar contract with a managed care giant this year despite the company paying nearly $1 billion nationally to settle concerns about pharmacy overbilling practices.

Those payments include a $29.3 million settlement with the State of Nebraska. Then-Attorney General Doug Peterson and officials with Centene Corp. signed the settlement agreement on Dec. 29, 2021.

Nine months later, the state Medicaid director announced that Nebraska Total Care, a Centene subsidiary, would be one of three firms awarded a Medicaid managed care contract. Each contract is worth up to $4.25 billion for 2024 through 2029, with three optional extension years worth up to $850 million each.

The three contractors will be responsible for managing physical and behavioral health care, pharmacy services and dental benefits for almost all Medicaid patients. Together, they will oversee the care of some 347,000 low-income Nebraskans.

Its unclear what state Medicaid officials knew about Centenes Nebraska settlement when they awarded the contracts.

The Attorney Generals Office did not make the settlement public until Oct. 26 last year, one month after the contract awards were announced and 10 months after the agreement was signed. Even then, the office simply posted a link to the settlement document, without a press release or other announcement.

Still, the settlement went public before the Department of Health and Human Services actually signed the contract with Nebraska Total Care on Jan. 24.

HHS and the Attorney Generals Office both refused to answer any questions about the Centene settlement or the contract awards, citing pending litigation.

The litigation in question was filed by Community Care Plan of Nebraska, doing business as Healthy Blue. The company filed the suit in December of last year after being shut out for the new contracts and losing two rounds of administrative protests.

Healthy Blue currently has a Medicaid managed care contract with the state that ends Dec. 31. The other current contractors are Nebraska Total Care and United HealthCare of the Midlands, both of which won new contracts.

In its suit, Healthy Blue contends, among other things, that Centenes bid should have been disqualified because the company did not disclose the Nebraska settlement or other state investigations into prescription benefit overcharging.

At least 18 states have settled with the St. Louis-based managed care company over its pharmacy benefits practices in the last two years. The first was Ohio, where State Attorney General Dave Yost filed suit against the company following state investigations.

According to the Ohio Dispatch, Yost alleged that Centene had sought payment for services that had already been reimbursed, failed to disclose the true costs of pharmacy services, including discounts, and artificially inflated dispensing fees. The company ended up agreeing to pay $88.3 million to settle the case in June 2021.

At the same time, Centene agreed to pay $55 million to Mississippi, which was investigating similar allegations, and set aside $1.1 billion for settlements with other states.

Settlement agreements so far have included $215 million for California, $165.6 million for Texas, $26.7 million for Kansas and $44 million for Iowa, where a state investigation and audit found irregularities in the companys reporting of costs of pharmacy benefits to Medicaid.

Nebraska officials refused to say what investigations had been done leading up to the settlement here. But the agreement made reference to the state reviewing the operations of Total Care and its pharmacy benefits manager, Envolve.

The agreement also said that the State requires full transparency from the Centene Entities around the costs and fees associated with those services paid for by the States and that Centenes payment was intended to satisfy any repayment obligations to the state.

As with the other settlements, Centene denied any wrongdoing or liability and the agreement said the State believes the Centene Entities have provided high quality pharmacy benefit services to the State and are qualified to continue to provide such services.

Nebraska isnt the only state to reach a settlement and then turn around and award Centene a new Medicaid managed care contract.

Ohio officials awarded the company a new contract shortly after that states settlement was reached. The officials said that including Buckeye Health Plan, a Centene subsidiary, would give residents more options when choosing a managed-care health plan in the departments new person-centered vision of care.

California also signed Centene to new contracts for Los Angeles and Sacramento Counties.

In a response to the protests filed by Healthy Blue, Centene said it had disclosed everything required under the states request for proposals. The RFP called for bidders to provide information about any criminal or civil investigation by a state or federal agency.

Centene argued that all but three of the state agreements, which were disclosed, were no-fault settlements reached after proactive outreach by the company, rather than investigations that needed to be disclosed.

In her decision denying Healthy Blues protest, HHS CEO Danette Smith sided with Centene. She said the agency had exercised discretion in considering the companys disclosures and had taken into account their timing, no-fault character and anticipatory nature.

The Healthy Blue lawsuit is the latest trouble to hit Nebraskas procurement process.

The process has come under scrutiny after a series of cases in which officials wound up choosing a low-cost bidder that failed to do the job. The most recent case was the selection of St. Francis Ministries, a Kansas-based nonprofit, to manage Omaha-area child welfare cases. Nebraska ended up terminating the contract early.

Speaker of the Legislature John Arch of La Vista proposed several changes to the procurement process this year, following an in-depth study and report in 2022. His bill was not debated this year because of an ongoing filibuster over other issues but could be considered next year.

Nebraskas current Medicaid managed care contracts date to 2017, when the state signed with three private companies to administer what was then $1.2 billion worth of Medicaid services. Since then, two of the original three companies merged, which led to the state signing a contract with Healthy Blue.

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RACINE  Memories and emotions flooded back to Brenda White last month at St. Catherines High School graduation.

Feeling a sense of unity while standing alongside colleagues and watching seniors receive their diplomas, White reflected on her time as a teacher, principal and administrator.

One of the most enjoyable parts of her education career has always been graduation, which White called the culminating event of the work youve poured into kids.

White retired this week as president of Siena Catholic Schools of Racine.

She was the founding president of the district and spent the past six years getting schools on the same page, leading the district through the COVID-19 pandemic and helping reopen a school set to begin classes this fall.

White, who announced her retirement in January, said she looks forward to spending more time with family, traveling and reading for pleasure, but also feels a sense of unfinished business.

I really love what I do, she said. Its hard to let go of something you love.

Doing exactly what I shouldve been

White led Siena, a school district that is part of the Archdiocese of Milwaukee, since it was formed in 2017.

Bob Miller, Siena board of directors chairperson, thanked White in January for leading the school district.

From before its formation, Brenda has been a key component of our creation and has been the vital force in our growth and maturation, he wrote in a news release. There is no aspect of our development that does not have her profound influence all over it. We are all deeply grateful for her years of leadership in and service to Catholic education with us and with many others before us. I know I speak for all of us in wishing her the best in this next phase of her life.

White has worked in education for 42 years. Prior to Siena, she was the Archdiocese of Milwaukee assistant superintendent of schools for 10 years.

White is confident about Sienas direction under the leadership of new President Sue Savaglio-Jarvis.

Savaglio-Jarvis will pick up and carry the ball forward really smoothly, White said.

Since announcing her retirement, White said she has received letters from community members expressing appreciation for her work, actions for which she is deeply grateful.

It just brings me to tears, White said. It makes you feel that your life work was worth it. It makes me feel like I was doing exactly what I shouldve been doing.

For the past four-plus decades, that has entailed working in education.

Growing up in Grand Rapids, Michigan, White first was an instructor in high school. She assisted a physical education summer school class and also tutored peers.

I felt the call to work with people, and teaching seemed like a natural thing that I felt I would be good at, White said.

After college, White worked for several years as a special education teacher.

Upon receiving a masters degree, White and her husband moved to southeast Wisconsin and she became principal of a Catholic school in Milwaukee.

It was her first time working for a religious organization, and she immediately liked it.

At the start of Whites first faculty meeting, she was surprised, yet heartened, when teachers bowed their heads to pray.

It just filled my heart to know, Wow, Im going to pray together with my faculty, White said. It was the realization that this is a faithful community, and prayer is going to be at the center of everything that we do.

White was interested in education administration because of her time as a student teacher working in two schools.

One location had a great culture, while morale at the other school was sorely lacking. White felt the difference was that one principal was an excellent leader, and one was not.

It directly spoke to me, like, OK, it is possible to make a big difference by the leadership of a building, White said.

Leading Siena

White led several schools as a principal for 20 years before becoming assistant superintendent at the Archdiocese of Milwaukee, where she was involved in the planning process to start the Siena Catholic Schools system.

White was on the committee that interviewed potential candidates for Siena president. There were quality applicants, but no one stood out.

When the committee chairman said White should apply for the role, she was initially taken aback. The more she thought about it, though, White said she felt her knowledge and experience could help, so she applied.

When White was offered the job of Siena founding president, it was an energizing, nerve-wracking opportunity, but she was buoyed by her faith and the support of her colleagues.

Getting to be a part of starting something brand new was exciting, White said. I was really happy to be chosen as the one to get Siena off the ground.

The pandemic was the most challenging part of Whites time as Siena president and the most difficult stretch of her career, she said.

However, White said that dealing with the crisis brought her colleagues closer together and made Siena stronger and more resilient.

White will miss working with excellent people and leading an organization toward its goals.

While cleaning out her office, White saw a strategic plan from near Sienas founding. Upon review, she realized the school district had met many of its initial benchmarks.

We still have things yet to do, certainly, but it felt really good to read and reflect on all the progress weve made, White said.

She expressed pride in the school district reopening St. Sebastian school this fall after the building was closed for over a decade.

One thing yet to do is finishing fundraising to renovate St. Catherines.

White plans to volunteer and help complete that process until construction starts, which will hopefully be next spring.

Thats definitely unfinished business that I cant just completely walk away from, White said.

Worth the effort

During the past six years, White has learned the importance of setting big goals and working hard to reach them.

If you care enough about something and you put your mind to it, you can do things that you never imagined, White said.

As Siena founding president, White expected it would take a lot of work to get six separate entities on the same page with a shared vision. It was labor-intensive, but worth the effort.

Six years ago, White knew many Racine faith leaders from her role with the archdiocese, and she has come to better understand and appreciate the community since then.

Racine is a city with a big heart, and it certainly has its challenges, but it has a lot of wonderful people that care about the community and that help others, she said.

White expressed gratitude for her time at Siena and for the opportunity to work with stellar colleagues and community members.

To see how much progress weve made in the last few years is rewarding beyond anything I could have ever imagined, she said. I believe our schools contribute to the fabric of Racine, and it feels good to know I played a part in making this community stronger.

St. Catherine's High School graduation collection of five photos Evan Moherek Three friends Simpson and Imani Moherek and Mosley Brenda White
RACINE  Mayor Cory Mason announced last week that the Lakeview Community Center will be demolished by the city, nearly four years after the building was destroyed in a kitchen fire.

A date has not been announced, but Mason said in a Facebook post that that the building would be torn down in the near future.

The community center was destroyed in September 2019 and has been considered unusable since.

The insurance company paid $967,000 and considered the building a total loss, but that was not enough for the city to raze and build a new structure.

The funding for the demolition will come from the 2023 budget and was approved by the City Council in Nov. 2022. Bids will be accepted by the public works committee and voted on by council.

After the building is demolished, the area will be tested for environmental remediation and cleanup to ensure the site is safe for future use.

We are following a carefully planned process to ensure safety and environmental protection, Mason said in the post.

Mason said in the post that the city has not determined what will happen with the site after remediation and that the priority was to tear the building down.
YORKVILLE  After some challenging staffing changes, the position of emergency management coordinator in the Racine County Office of Emergency Management has been filled.

County Executive Jonathan Delagrave appointed Alexander Freeman and the Racine County Board approved the selections via a voice vote last Tuesday.

Racine Countys emergency management coordinator position has been vacant since March 22 when James Jay Kerner, was fired because of multiple child abuse allegations that are being examined in Racine County Circuit Court. Kerner was hired as coordinator in November 2021.

Before that, David Maack served in the position for 31 years before retiring in October 2021.

I would like to acknowledge the foundation that was laid before me by my predecessor, David Maack, who built a base upon which I will be able to be successful, Freeman said. I would like to acknowledge the incredible Racine County staff, without whose help, I would not have been able to have succeeded throughout a challenging transition.

The necessary expertise and qualities

Freeman grew up in Brookfield and Waukesha and is a lifelong resident of southeast Wisconsin.

He previously was employed by Waukesha County, where he worked in emergency management as a planner and telecommunicator for six years.

During that time he served as logistics section chief for the COVID-19 response efforts and helped the City of Waukesha in its emergency operation center during the Waukesha Christmas parade attack on Nov. 21, 2021.

Freeman began working for Racine County on Dec. 28, 2021, as deputy emergency management coordinator.

During his time with Racine County, Freeman has prepared and exercised disaster response plans and conducted public awareness campaigns, Delagrave wrote in his report.

Freeman has maintained continuity of operations and essential functions for the Emergency Operation Center and played a vital role during the ice storm in February, Delagrave wrote.

Due to Alexs exceptional leadership and communication skills, he has demonstrated his ability to build relationships and foster collaboration with key leaders within and outside of Racine County, Delagrave wrote. I am confident that Alex possesses the necessary expertise and qualities required to fill this crucial role.

Racine County Sheriffs Office Lt. James Evans, who also is a member of the Local Emergency Planning Committee, said Freeman will bring the office into the next generation of technology and improve how emergency management interacts with todays youth.

He also looks for every opportunity to help people learn about how to prepare for themselves, Evans said. I think he has a passion and a heart that is going to be incredibly helpful for our county.

District 8 Supervisor Marlo Harmon told Freeman that with his background, it seems like you would be a great addition and value added member to Racine County  with the individuals that you keep company with, Im sure that your work here will be positive and definitely beneficial to Racine County.

15 precautions to take to prepare for an earthquake 15 precautions to take to prepare for an earthquake #1. Make an emergency plan #2. Prepare your emergency supply kit #3. Practice taking cover #4. Teach everyone how to signal for help #5. Learn basic first aid #6. Get your home checked by a structural engineer #7. Hire a contractor to check your gas connections #8. Learn how to shut off your gas manually #9. Get a fire extinguisher #10. Secure your appliances #11. Install safety latches on kitchen cabinets #12. Secure all other loose objects #13. Move your bed away from windows #14. Download maps of your city for offline access #15. Consider earthquake insurance
1. Yes. Voters across the city filled the seat in the first place. Voters should decide again.

2. Yes. An election is much preferable to back-room decisions among council members.

3. No. The charter calls for the council to fill the vacancy by appointment. Follow the rules.

4. No. An election would be expensive, both for the city and for the potential candidates.

5. Unsure. An election seems more transparent, but its not the perfect answer.

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Shortages of employees hit numerous business and tourism sectors hard in the aftermath of COVID-19. Although facilities such as pools, lakes, beaches and gyms have opened back up for public use, a lifeguard shortage has impacted the 2023 summer swim season in many towns and cities now that the pandemic emergency has ended.

Winona Family YMCA CEO Janneke Sobeck said the YMCA is feeling the pinch of lifeguard shortages. It employs 18 lifeguards, but not all lifeguards are full-time and some will only be available during the summer months.

We have a lifeguard shortage, Sobeck said. We have been feeling this for a little while, but we were able to manage our pool schedule with what we had up until recently.

Sobeck said the YMCA reduced its indoor pools operating hours because of a lack of staff.

At this point, we are planning on a scaled back pool schedule for the month of July, probably August as well, she said.

On weekday mornings in July and August, the Winona YMCA plans to open the pool at 7 a.m. instead of 5 a.m., Sobeck said. The pool is also looking at shutting down for a period of time during weekday afternoons.

Summer is a tough time for staffing at the indoor pool, as many lifeguards go to work at the outdoor Bob Welch Aquatic Center, which is operated by the city of Winona.

I hope it wont be an issue in the fall, Sobeck said. In the fall, well have some of the college students that will be back that we always lose this time of year so we plan for that. But at the same time, its still always challenging.

High turnover

In Chippewa Falls, city pool leaders have focused on hiring and training.

It is hard to keep lifeguards, said Bernard F. Willi Pool manager Ellie Eckes. Thankfully, Im a lifeguard instructor, so Ive been able to help certify a few more guards.

She said only six lifeguards returned to the pool this year. Normally, that number is closer to 12. That meant she had to do a lot more hiring this year than anticipated.

With the current course she is offering, she expects to certify six new guards.

Ideally, Eckes said a full lifeguard staff would consist of about 24 people, but theyre not there right now. She said the pool currently employs 20 lifeguards.

Its hard to work with less than 24 people because it means everybody has to work more than 40 hours per week, she said.

Eckes said the industry is still recovering from COVID disruptions. In 2019 the pool had a large staff, most of whom planned to return in 2020, she said. But because of 2020 pandemic closures, the group lost its momentum. In 2021, only two of the members of the 2019 staff returned to work as lifeguards.

Some improvement

Aquatics director at La Crosse Area Family YMCAs Dahl Branch Brenda Maxwell said the lifeguard staffing situation for the facility is OK.

But theres never a time when she isnt thinking about additional staff, she said.

Ive been doing this long enough to say that even when were doing OK, Im still hiring. So theres never a time were not not hiring staff, Maxwell said. Most of your lifeguards are high school or college kids, and their schedules always change.

Maxwell said they need lifeguards on duty from 5 a.m. to 9 p.m. during the week for the indoor pool and on the weekends from 7 a.m. to 5:30 p.m. In the summer, the pool employs between 25 and 30 lifeguards. That number rises to 40 lifeguards during the school year.

While applications were down for a couple years because of the pandemic, now they are on the rise in La Crosse, Maxwell said.

There was a shortage for a while, but I feel that theres been a lot more recruitment and much more of an effort to get people certified. So in our area were looking pretty good, she said.

Maxwell is also a lifeguard instructor trainer.

Im constantly certifying lifeguard instructors. The more lifeguard instructors we have, the more lifeguard classes there can be, she said.

The La Crosse Parks, Recreation and Forestry Department operates three municipal swimming pools between June and August: Erickson Pool, North Side Community Pool and Veterans Memorial Pool.

Aquatics coordinator Gabe Flottmeyer said La Crosse is looking pretty good right now in terms of lifeguard staffing.

We struggle a little bit with weekend shifts just due to availability, with vacations and stuff like that, he said. Overall, we have a good number of staff. Its just the availability of the staff we have to fill in those shifts.

Retention efforts

The La Crosse Parks, Recreation and Forestry Department has about 35 lifeguards on staff with a few substitute lifeguards available to use as needed, Flottmeyer said.

Although Flottmeyer said he is not actively recruiting new lifeguards, he is always willing to interview good candidates and bring them on if there are openings.

He said he thinks the industry is struggling overall even though La Crosse is faring better than smaller cities and towns in the region. He said lifeguards arent getting the kind of compensation they seek.

We did a great job of being competitive in the industry up until COVID. And then all of a sudden, you know, other industries that recruit high school and college age kids started paying their folks substantially more. And things got really competitive. So we kind of fell backward a little bit, he said.

Despite the financial struggles this year, La Crosse saw a lot of returning staff, which made recruitment and staffing easier, Flottmeyer said.

He also said the department has made a conscious effort to improve recruiting and retention.

Lifeguarding is different from flipping burgers or working at a restaurant, right? We tried to sell our culture and work atmosphere over anything else, he said. We also do a lot of incentive stuff  our lifeguard of the year at each pool gets $250. We do like pizza and ice cream for staff every once in a while to kind of break up the monotony and show appreciation and things like that.

La Crosse has also started paying for all the lifeguard training and lifeguard swimwear for its staff.

La Crosse recreation program coordinator Nikki Hansen said she understands that working as a lifeguard is tough and its more responsibility than some young adults want to take on for a summer job, but she also said it has unique benefits.

I understand what the role takes, but also how rewarding it can be and how fun it can be throughout the summer. So I think thats something that is a good takeaway, Hansen said. Youre going to be outside all day. If youre working in your neighborhood, you probably know a lot of kids frequenting the pool. So it does have some positive aspects that I think some other jobs might not have.
On the bright spring morning of April 19, 1775, at the battles of Lexington and Concord, a militia of colonists decided to pick a fight with King George IIIs redcoat-clad army.

Those battles kicked off the American Revolutionary War (1775-83). On Tuesday, July 4, we celebrated the Declaration of Independence. We also honored the deaths of two American presidents, John Adams and Thomas Jefferson, who passed on that date in 1826.

Few people read the Declaration of Independence or the Constitution on July 4. A simple review of the documents reveals a profound dislike for a king, queen or hereditary sovereign of a nation. The Founding Fathers had a hardy dislike of King George III, and they passed that dislike down to us through almost 250 years now.

So, what did King George III do to make him so unpopular?

He has obstructed the Administration of Justice, by refusing his Assent to Laws for establishing Judiciary powers; He has made Judges dependent on his Will alone, for the tenure of their offices, and the amount and payment of their salaries; For depriving us in many cases, of the benefits of Trial by Jury; He has excited domestic insurrections amongst us; A Prince whose character is thus marked by every act which may define a Tyrant, is unfit to be the ruler of a free people.

I think the point has been made.

The United States and its constitutional officers are bound to uphold the laws of the United States. Federal law supersedes state law. While we often trumpet the First and Second Amendments of the Constitution, the foundation of laws of the United States lie in the fifth through ninth amendments.

To be brought before a court in the United States for criminal cases you have the right to: not be a witness against yourself, to be indicted for a crime by an impartial grand jury, the right to face your accusers, a right to be presumed innocent until proven guilty, a right to bail and a speedy public trial by a jury of your peers. No person is subject to being dragged from their bed in the middle of the night without due process and just cause; due process and just cause are the bedrock of our laws.

I have always admired Harry Truman. Trumans philosophy endorsed the concepts of the Roman Cincinnatus  a farmer and a senator of Rome  and George Washington, who needs no introduction. Truman had Cincinnatus and Washington in mind when he wrote on April 16, 1950, that he would not run for a third term in 1952.

There is a lure in power, and when a leader in a republic does not step down voluntarily, we start down the road to dictatorship and ruin.

In these critical times we must embrace our laws. So, I must touch on our 45th president, now again a Republican presidential candidate. Donald Trumps favorite phrase is witch hunt. Our 45th president should take a moment and look back on Amendments Five through Nine of the United States Constitution.

Those amendments would have stopped all witch hunts in the 17th century, and they have stopped them now  except for the infamous Sen. Joseph McCarthy from Wisconsin, who shot himself in the foot looking for communists in the U.S. government, who never existed.

On this Fourth of July, it is fashionable to portray the United States as a divided nation putting everyone in a camp. I disagree. Our history is complex, and we as a nation have adapted to challenges in the past.

One fact to remember: On that bright April morning in 1775, 33% of the country wanted to stay with Great Britian, 33% wanted to be independent from Great Britian and 33% wanted to be left alone.

We live in a country like no other. We have our faults. We fight with each other like brothers and sisters do. Yet for 247 years we have persevered. Happy Independence Day to you all.
The Wisconsin Department of Natural Resources will host a public meeting to discuss the disposal of dredged material from the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers Mississippi River navigation channel dredging projects at Dairyland Power Cooperative.

The meeting is Tuesday, July 11 at noon at Stoddard American Legion Post, 414 Broadway St. in Stoddard.

Dairyland has requested approval from the DNR to dispose of sediments. The material would be placed on a property owned by Dairyland on Highway 35 near Genoa. Areas where dredge sand is used as fill will be capped with gravel, roads, buildings, topsoil or vegetation.

The public is encouraged to share comments and ask questions about the proposal. There will be a brief introduction and explanation of the project by DNR staff and Dairyland representatives.

Questions or comments can be directed to Kevin Bartel, DNR waste and materials management program hydrogeologist, at Kevin.Bartel@wisconsin.gov or 920-883-9301.
Dane County Farmers Market fans will find their favorite venders at Breese Stevens Field this weekend.

The market is moving because of Art Fair on the Square. It will be open from 7 a.m. to noon at 917 E. Mifflin St.

The Dane County Farmers Market Cookbook: Local Foods, Global Flavors will be released Saturday, too, and author Terese Allen will be signing copies of the book from 9 a.m. to noon.

The farmers market is also seeking volunteers to help vendors move food onto the field from 5:30 to 7 a.m. Saturday because of the location change. Email info@dcfm.org for more information.

Art Fair on the Square will run from 9 a.m. to 6 p.m. Saturday and 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. Sunday on Capitol Square.
Maternal deaths across the U.S. more than doubled over the course of two decades, and the tragedy unfolded unequally.

Black mothers died at the nations highest rates, while the largest increases in deaths were found in American Indian and Native Alaskan mothers. And some states  and racial or ethnic groups within them  fared worse than others.

The findings were laid out in a new study published Monday in the Journal of the American Medical Association. Researchers looked at maternal deaths between 1999 and 2019  but not the pandemic spike  for every state and five racial and ethnic groups.

Its a call to action to all of us to understand the root causes  to understand that some of it is about health care and access to health care, but a lot of it is about structural racism and the policies and procedures and things that we have in place that may keep people from being healthy, said Dr. Allison Bryant, one of the study's authors and a senior medical director for health equity at Mass General Brigham.

Among wealthy nations, the U.S. has the highest rate of maternal mortality, which is defined as a death during pregnancy or up to a year afterward. Common causes include excessive bleeding, infection, heart disease, suicide and drug overdose.

Bryant and her colleagues at Mass General Brigham and the Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation at the University of Washington started with national vital statistics data on deaths and live births. They then used a modeling process to estimate maternal mortality out of every 100,000 live births.

Overall, they found rampant, widening disparities. The study showed high rates of maternal mortality aren't confined to the South but also extend to regions like the Midwest and states such as Wyoming and Montana, which had high rates for multiple racial and ethnic groups in 2019.

Researchers also found dramatic jumps when they compared maternal mortality in the first decade of the study to the second, and identified the five states with the largest increases between those decades. Those increases exceeded:

 162% for American Indian and Alaska Native mothers in Florida, Illinois, Kansas, Rhode Island and Wisconsin;

 135% for white mothers in Georgia, Indiana, Louisiana, Missouri and Tennessee;

 105% for Hispanic mothers in Georgia, Illinois, Indiana, Minnesota and Tennessee;

 93% for Black mothers in Arkansas, Georgia, Louisiana, New Jersey and Texas;

 83% for Asian and Pacific Islander mothers in Georgia, Illinois, Kansas, Michigan and Missouri.

I hate to say it, but I was not surprised by the findings. Weve certainly seen enough anecdotal evidence in a single state or a group of states to suggest that maternal mortality is rising, said Dr. Karen Joynt Maddox, a health services and policy researcher at Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis who wasnt involved in the study. Its certainly alarming, and just more evidence we have got to figure out whats going on and try to find ways to do something about this.

Maddox pointed to how, compared with other wealthy nations, the U.S. underinvests in things like social services, primary care and mental health. She also said Missouri hasn't funded public health adequately and, during the years of the study, hadn't expanded Medicaid. They've since expanded Medicaid  and lawmakers passed a bill giving new mothers a full year of Medicaid health coverage. Last week, Missouri Gov. Mike Parson signed budget bills that included $4.4 million for a maternal mortality prevention plan.

In neighboring Arkansas, Black women are twice as likely to have pregnancy-associated deaths as white women, according to a 2021 state report.

Dr. William Greenfield, the medical director for family health at the Arkansas Department of Health, said the disparity is significant and has persisted over time, and that it's hard to pinpoint exactly why there was an increase in the state's maternal mortality rate for Black mothers.

Rates among Black women have long been the worst in the nation, and the problem affects people of all socioeconomic backgrounds. For example, U.S. Olympic champion sprinter Tori Bowie, 32, died from complications of childbirth in May.

The pandemic likely exacerbated all of the demographic and geographic trends, Bryant said, and thats absolutely an area for future study. According to preliminary federal data, maternal mortality fell in 2022 after rising to a six-decade high in 2021  a spike experts attributed mainly to COVID-19. Officials said the final 2022 rate is on track to get close to the pre-pandemic level, which was still the highest in decades.

Bryant said its crucial to understand more about these disparities to help focus on community-based solutions and understand what resources are needed to tackle the problem.

Arkansas already is using telemedicine and is working on several other ways to increase access to care, said Greenfield, who is also a professor of obstetrics and gynecology at the University of Arkansas Medical Center in Little Rock and was not involved in the study.

The state also has a perinatal quality collaborative, a network to help health care providers understand best practices for things like reducing cesarean sections, managing complications with hypertensive disorders and curbing injuries or severe complications related to childbirth.

Most of the deaths we reviewed and other places have reviewed  were preventable, Greenfield said.

AP Public Health Collaborations Editor Erica Hunzinger contributed to this report



The Associated Press Health and Science Department receives support from the Howard Hughes Medical Institutes Science and Educational Media Group and the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation. The AP is solely responsible for all content.
More Americans over the last several decades have abandoned their faith  usually Christianity  to join the ranks of the non-religious. This includes people who describe themselves as atheists, agnostics or nothing in particular.

This shift doesnt bode well for a nation founded on the principles of self-government.

For most of the 20th century, 70% of Americans belonged to a house of worship. As recently as the early 1990s, nearly 90% of Americans said they were Christian. But by 2020, Gallup found a mere 47% of Americans said they belonged to a church, mosque or synagogue.

By 2021, Pew Research found nearly one-third of U.S. adults were not affiliated with any religion. This share of non-religious people was 10 percentage points higher than a decade earlier. The share of Christians fell from 75% to 63% over the period. In 2007, there were about five Christians for every one non-religious person. Now that ratio is about two-to-one.

This might not seem like a crisis, but the American Founders would have disagreed. These men saw that self-government depended on morality and virtue -- which, in turn, depended on religion. As George Washington stated in his farewell address, Of all the dispositions and habits which lead to political prosperity, religion and morality are indisputable supports.

But dont atheists also know murder is wrong? Yes, the Founders believed in a natural moral law that could be understood by reason. Yet they insisted that such knowledge was not enough for most people. Washington warned in his address: Whatever may be conceded to the influence of refined education on minds of peculiar structure, reason and experience both forbid us to expect that national morality can prevail in exclusion of religious principle.

John Adams, a Unitarian, stated soon before America declared independence that religion and morality alone  can establish the principles upon which freedom can securely stand. James Madison, in Federalist 55, makes explicit that without virtue, republican government will fail.

What happens when this source of public morality starts to erode?

Alexis de Tocqueville observed in Democracy in America that religion gives us confidence in an unchanging moral order. Without this moral source, men are soon frightened at the aspect of this limitless independence.

The loss of religion often leads to the belief that all are subject to our will and judgment. We become the authors of our own reality. But this is a daunting task for many. So they give themselves a master, writes Tocqueville.

Ironically, this limitless independence often leads to a radical dependence on temporal authority. We turn to experts who claim to know whats best for us. The state becomes a substitute for self-government.

Its no surprise that with the growing number of non-believers that younger generations report more confidence in the government to solve problems.

According to a 2020 Pew survey, seven out of 10 members of Gen Z (the cohort born around 1996 onward) said the government should do more to solve problems. Only 29% of Gen Zers thought the government is doing too many things better left to businesses and individuals.

Even among Republican-leaning Gen Zers, more than half (52%) report that the government should do more to solve problems. Compare that with just 38% of Millennials who are Republicans and 29% of Republican Gen Xers.

These findings seem to confirm the Founders insight that religion is the bulwark of public morality. Without this moral grounding, our ability to govern ourselves erodes, and with that, the foundation for the republic.

In their own day, the Founders saw the empty promises of hedonism and materialism in the French Revolution. They knew the chaos we can descend into without religion and virtue. The authors of the Declaration of Independence recognized a creator who made us equal and endowed us with certain unalienable rights. These truths were not assertions of mere human will but expressions of the one source on whom we depend.

We would do well to return to this wisdom today.
The Minnesota Department of Education recognized Winona Area Public Schools elementary schools in June for their work to create a positive school climate for both students and staff.

Its the second year in a row that all three schools  Jefferson, Goodview and Washington-Kosciusko  received statewide recognition for their use of the Positive Behavioral Interventions and Supports framework.

The three schools are among 87 in the state to be recognized this year, with only nine others in southern Minnesota on that list.

Im thrilled. Not surprised at all because I do know that all three teams in the buildings are working hard with that same goal to keep sustaining our framework of PBIS, said Goodview Elementary principal Emily Cassellius.

I love seeing all three schools recognized, she said. The last couple of years, the elementary principals have worked so hard in operating as one elementary system, even though were all different in our culture, and our climate is different and we have unique personalities. As far as systems go, we really should be the same within Winona Area Public Schools, and so our principal teams have worked hard to do that.

Positive reinforcement

The program, first introduced at Goodview in 2019, places an emphasis on what students can do in the school, instead of what they cannot do.

With PBIS, we really focus on identifying behavior expectations for students and then being really intentional about teaching those, modeling those and then reinforcing them, she said.

For example, Cassellius said students are taught they can walk in the halls, instead of teaching them specifically that they cannot run there.

We work really hard to frame things positively, she said. And then really help students be able to do things successfully.

Throughout the school year staff, with the help of visuals posted around the school, work to teach students the expectations they have of them.

All staff members  from teachers, secretaries, custodians, principals  every adult in the building plays an important role in reinforcing those, she said. And so we really use those opportunities as building positive relationships between students and staff members.

As staff notice students doing well at conducting these positive behaviors, they are able to reward the children with Winhawk pride tickets.

The students work as a team to earn these tickets, as there are goals based on total tickets earned in the school.

Throughout the year, we do different things to celebrate the students working together to meet those goals, she said.

For example, Cassellius said that at the end of the school year, the students reached the goal of being able to have a staff versus students kickball game.

Our PBIS team felt that it was really important for the students to work together and look at that as, kindergarten through fourth grade, were one team. Were working toward the same goal. One persons positive behavior helps a whole group out, she said.

Different approaches

Not all programs are alike. She said some schools implement PBIS with a focus on individual goals rather than a team effort.

One part of implementing the framework at Goodview has been weekly school assemblies, where reminders are given about expectations that need some extra work to be met.

Sometimes well do role playing or well do different things to review behavior expectations, Cassellius said. Students are told the current Winhawk pride ticket totals during these assemblies.

Students who do something above and beyond related to positive behaviors can also be given positive office referrals, she said. The students who receive these are recognized during the weekly assemblies.

Cassellius said students frequently are recognized for showing extra kindness or working to make sure everyone feels included.

Staff included

Teachers also are part of the program.

We want to make sure that that all staff members feel valued as well, Cassellius said. And so we have some fun things in place that our PBIS team does to make sure that our staff are celebrated as well.

In the schools office, students and staff can fill out super staff shoutouts, which offer an opportunity to praise staff members for their good work and meaningful actions.

Cassellius said students often write sweet notes on these.

Each week at the schools assembly, Cassellius randomly draws one of these shoutouts and reads it out loud. The staff member whose shoutout is chosen is then able to choose a small prize.

Staff members also receive all of their shoutouts in their mailboxes each week.

Every week, two staff members are recognized with small wooden, painted awards. The educators chosen during the previous week are able to choose who to pass on the awards to in the next week.

Consistency is key

Cassellius said having consistent expectations throughout the school has benefited Goodview and the people in it.

She said that it especially benefits substitutes, who do not have to learn rules that depend on the individual classroom they are in that day.

Goodview is a very positive environment. And I think part of that are the systems we have in place, that students know the expectations, she said. We have systems in place to celebrate each other, which is really important.

As part of the statewide recognition, the elementary schools were honored at the PBIS Summer Institute and Recognition Ceremony in June by Minnesota Department of Education commissioner Willie Jett.

PBIS can also be found in the Winona Middle School, where it was introduced during the 2022-23 school year.
Lake Geneva officials and business representatives recently had an opportunity to determine how much heat they can handle.

Guac Star restaurant, 120 Broad St. in Lake Geneva, and Hellfire Hot Sauce hosted the Hot Sauce Challenge, June 23.

Participants were asked to sample 10 different flavors of Hellfire Hot Sauce with different levels of heat.

City officials, business representatives and Gauc Star customers participated in the competition.

In the end, eight of the 10 participants were able to complete the challenge; however, some of the contestants indicated that sampling all 10 sauces was not an easy task.
July 2, 2023, 2022 (EIRNS)Jacques Cheminade, President of Solidarite & Progres, (in French) the LaRouche-affiliated organization in France issued the following statement on July 1 regarding the situation in France. The French original is posted to the S&P website:

Clichy, July 1, 2023

The outbreak of violence in our country comes as no surprise. The scandal is that, for so many years, nothing has been done to deal with the smoldering fire. The rioters not only looted stores, but also burned pharmacies and public buildings: town halls, courts, cultural centers, libraries, police stations and schools. The foundations of our society were targeted. In these circumstances, the challenge is not only to re-establish the right to public safety, but to rebuild a society that offers hope to all, without hypocrisy or naivety.

For if we continue to appear preoccupied with immediate violence and to communicate about it, but do not root it out, the institutions of the Republic will collapse.

The republican order we hear so much about, while being at ease with it, consists of three principles. First, it must be legitimate, i.e., it must not flout the peoples requirement for justice by manipulating existing texts against it, as it has with pensions [referring to the popular uprising in France against the governments cutting pension benefits]. Second, it must be applied equally to all, whether rich or poor, without social or spatial segregation. And finally, the certainty that the measures provided for will actually be applied. To achieve this, we need to declare a state of social emergency, clearly identifying whom were aiming at: a financial mafia from the top, which makes the law against the law and is increasingly associated, not only through drug use, with the mafia operating below. In the absence of political will, this mafia gangrene of a new criminal capitalism will destroy everything and lead to a war of all against all.

Republican order: Listen to the mayors first and organize around them institutions for dialogue and consultation with mediators, associations, judges and police officers. We urgently need to set up a real local police force that listens to citizens, and gives it the training and human and financial resources it needs to do its job properly. Then well be able to really apply the penalties laid down by law, and check that they are carried out in a suitable environment.

Republican order: at the very least, the Preamble to our Constitution, with its social rights, should be known and applied. I have proposed that it be read out every July 14th by the mayors of France. The current situation offers us an opportunity to make a start.

Republican order: the social dimension of our domestic policy must be matched by an international policy based on a new architecture of peace through mutual development, and not on the senseless financial speculation that brings with it war, through riots at home, and geopolitical warfare between blocs around the world. In concrete terms, we need to wage a real war against drug trafficking, which has so far never been waged against its financial and social roots. Instead of smashing up bank premises, public law must take control.

Faced with the riots that have spread like rumors on social networks, the only solution is to organize a policy of the common good and the public good. The police and army must serve this purpose. This includes investigating the nature and means of the provocateurs who gave life to the smoldering fire. It is by eliminating the causes of the blaze that we will succeed in extinguishing it, with the political will to build a better, more fair world, in the midst of a fight that will give us the reasons to believe in it.
EIR LEAD EDITORIAL FOR MONDAY JULY 3, 2023

NATO Preparing for Global WarBRICS and the Global South Prepare for Peace and Development

July 2, 2023, 2022 (EIRNS)The Anglo-Americans are preparing for their NATO Summit next week, with the intention to save the disintegrating war against Russia in Ukraine while expanding the North Atlantic treaty into Asia. With the world buzzing with reports on the failure of Ukraines much-heralded counter-offensive, an open discussion of a nuclear conflict between the U.S. and Russia is replacing the happy-talk about Ukraine winning the un-winnable war.

NATO is holding a Summit in Lithuania on July 11-12, where they hope to bring Ukraine (and Sweden) into the nuclear club against Russia and China, while expanding the Global NATO concept by bringing Japan, South Korea, Australia and New Zealand into their NATO-linked conflict with China. The leaders of these four Asian countries are attending the Summit and plan to expand their relations with the war machine.

But the rest of the world is ridiculing the former colonial powers for their ranting about climate change and war mongering, demanding real development if they want to maintain any sense of respectability from the Global South. At the misnamed Summit for a New Global Financial Pact in France last week, where the Western leaders wanted agreement on a global tax to raise $1 trillion for climate change (!), the African leaders made it clear that they need development. Brazilian President Lula put it clearly: If we dont discuss this issue of inequality, and if we dont give it as much priority as the climate issue, we can have a very good climate and people will continue to die of hunger in many countries of the world.

South African President Ramaphosa lectured French President Macron and his fellow NATO war-lords that there would be no reason for Africans to attend these forums, where empty promises are never fulfilled, unless the West provided the resources to build the Grand Inga Dam on the Congo River, which would provide electricity for most of the 600 million Africans who now lack electricity completely.

The Global South leaders are speaking out to a great extent because they know the former colonial powers are no longer the only alternative, as the BRICS nations now represent a new pole in the world, offering real development as well as friendship. The ongoing 3rd China-Africa Economic and Trade Expo in Changsha is hosting exhibits from 29 countries, signing 120 projects worth over $10 billion, adding to the Belt and Road Initiative already actively developing infrastructure across Africa.

At the end of July, Russia is sponsoring the 2nd Russia-Africa Economic and Humanitarian Forum for Peace, Security and Development in Moscow, where all African countries are expected to be represented. This gives the lie to the oft-repeated line from Secretary of State Tony Blinken, CIA Chief William Burns and others that Russia is isolated in the world and collapsing internally.

This week America is celebrating the 247th anniversary of its Declaration of Independence. If Americans would take the time to read that Declaration it would serve as a wake-up call that the nation has gone far astray. Reading the Declaration of the Inalienable Rights of Man, a Schiller Institute founding document, which is an international expression of the principles contained in the U.S. Declaration of Independence, would serve the same purpose. The same is true of the famous speech by President John F. Kennedy on June 10, 1963, soon after the Cuban Missile Crisis nearly sparked a nuclear war, and soon before he was assassinated by the war party for daring to assert that the U.S. and Russia (then the Soviet Union) must work together to prevent a nuclear war and establish peace and development for mankind.

One must ask, is the American population literate enough to read these historic documents, or have they become so dumbed down that such principled concepts are no longer intelligible? Each and every citizen must examine their own thinking at this moment of existential crisis of civilization. Can we think like world citizens, or are we so acculturated to tribalism, to British ideological one against all, that we will allow the descent into Hell?

Reading Helga Zepp-LaRouches Ten Principles of a New International Security and Development Architecture is a solid basis for answering that question in your own mind.
The Wagner Group is a group of fighters supported by Russia. The group, however, is not officially part of Russias military.

The Center for Strategic and International Studies, a policy research group in Washington, says the Wagner Group operates in about 30 countries.

Until recently, the groups leader was one of its founders, Russian Yevgeny Prigozhin. Prigozhin and his fighters in Russia were helping the Russian army fight in Ukraine.

But late last week, the group appeared to turn against Russia.

The Wagner Group attempted what is being called a mutiny against the Russian army and began moving forces towards Moscow.

The move concerned Russian leaders, including President Vladimir Putin. However, within one day, Putin and Prigozhin announced a deal that permitted Prigozhin to leave peacefully for Belarus.

With Prigozhin in another country, experts wanted to know if he or the Russian army would now control the Wagner Group.

Reports by the Wall Street Journal newspaper said Russian leaders recently traveled to the countries where the Wagner Groups fighters work. They said the Russian government was in control of the Wagner Groups fighters.

The groups fighters are currently known to be active in Syria, Mali and the Central African Republic (the CAF).

The Associated Press (AP) reported that the Wagner Group works for political leaders in the African nations. Its fighters push back against groups that do not support those in power. The AP described the Wagner Group fighters as brutal and ruthless.

The group does this work in return for payment. Through its activities, the group gains the use of ports and natural resources in countries where it operates. Using these ports and resources, Russia can trade illegally in weapons and use the money for its war against Ukraine.

In Syria, the group provides protection for leader Bashar al-Assad. The Wall Street Journal wrote that Russian diplomats recently went in person to speak with Al-Assad. They also went to Mali and spoke by telephone with leaders in the CAF.

Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov spoke to Russias state-run television network. He said that hundreds of Wagner Group fighters would stay in the CAF to support President Faustin-Archange Touadera.

Jordy Christopher is a special adviser to Touadera. He said there was never a concern about who controlled the Wagner Fighters in the CAF.

He called Prigozhin a pawn and only the tip of the iceberg, meaning there were always more important people in control of the Wagner fighters. However, the short mutiny may still concern some African leaders.

Ryan Cummings is director of Signal Risk, a security advising company that covers Africa. He noted that the news about Prigozhins actions and the sense that the Russian government might be vulnerable should be concerning to African leaders.

Developments in Russia will likely (make) African countries more cautious in their engagement with Russia, Cummings said.

He said the mutiny shows the African leaders who depend on Wagner fighters that a change in Russian leadership could be exploited by their opponents. Groups who do not like the African leaders might see problems in Russia as a chance to push for power.

Im Dan Friedell.

Dan Friedell adapted this story for Learning English based on a story by The Associated Press.

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Words in This Story

mutiny n. a military or armed fight against a state or army leader

brutal  adj. harsh

ruthless adj. evil, mean or unstopping

pawn n. the least powerful piece on a chessboard

tip of the iceberg expression used to mean there is more to a story than one can easily see

vulnerable adj. open to injury

cautious adj. careful

engagement n. work between two people or entities, a plan between two groups

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A NASA scientist recently told a mining conference in Brisbane, Australia, that the U.S. space agency aims to develop resources on the moon.

Gerald Sanders has been a rocket scientist at NASA's Johnson Space Centre for 35 years. He said that the first resources NASA wants to develop are oxygen and water. Later, he said, the space agency may try to mine iron and rare earth metals.

NASA is taking steps to be able to dig into the moons soil in 2032.

The U.S. space agency plans to return Americans to the moon as part of its Artemis mission. The goal is to learn from the mission and plan for explorations deeper into space.

An important part of the Artemis mission is advancing commercial use of space. The agency plans to measure possible resources, including energy, water and lunar soil, to gain outside investment, Sanders said.

He added that developing resources on the moon will be important to cutting costs and creating a circular economy. A circular economy is a system that is based on reuse of materials or products.

"We are trying to invest in the exploration phase, understand the resources...to (lower) risk such that external investment makes sense that could lead to development and production," Sanders told the mining conference.

"We are...just scratching the surface," he said.

NASA plans to send a test drilling device to the moon soon and plans a larger digging project for moon soil, sometimes called regolith, and a testing processing system in 2032.

The first customers are expected to be commercial rocket companies that could use the moon's resources for fuel or oxygen.

The Australian Space Agency is involved in developing a device that will take regolith samples on a NASA mission as early as 2026, said Samuel Webster. He is an assistant director at that agency.

The rover will demonstrate the collection of lunar soil that contains oxygen in the form of oxides.

Using separate equipment sent to the moon with the rover, NASA will aim to extract that oxygen, Webster said.

He added that finding resources on the moon was an important step towards establishing a lasting human presence on the moon, as well (as) supporting future missions to Mars.

Im Ashley Thompson.

Melanie Burton reported on this story for Reuters. John Russell adapted it for VOA Learning English.

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Words in This Story

advance  v. to continue in a process of development; to support and cause to progress

commercial adj. activities aimed at carrying out business and making money

phase  n. a part or step in a process; one part in a series of related events or actions

external  adj. located, seen, or used on the outside or surface of something

scratch  v. to make a shallow and narrow cut in with something sharp

scratch the surface  expression to deal with or learn about only a small part of something

customer n. a person, group or business that pays for a product or service

extract  v. to remove (something) by pulling it out or cutting it out
LEXINGTON  For the first time in several months, some parts of the local area saw a decrease in the drought level from severe to moderate drought.

Per the latest U.S. Drought Monitor update, all of Gosper County and the eastern and southern edge of Dawson County are now under moderate drought, D1, conditions.

However, the northwestern part of Dawson County remains under severe drought, D2, conditions.

The last week featured highly variable rainfall due to the scattered coverage of thunderstorm activity.

The majority of our coverage area received somewhere between 0.10-1.50. However, pockets of the area measured at least 2-3 inches (including parts of Phelps/Sherman counties), while various other localized areas saw less than 0.10 (including small parts of several counties such as: Smith, Osborne, Phillips, York), the National Weather Service  Hastings noted.

Between June 1  27, the community in the NWS Hastings area with the most rainfall was Rockville, with 6.29 inches, the Kearney airport reported 5.49 inches during the same time period.

On the other side, areas to the south and east saw much drier conditions; Stromsburg only posted 0.35 inches, while York recorded barely 0.68 inches.

Over the past 30 days, the majority of the NWS Hastings coverage area, received somewhere between 1.25-5.50 inches (generally 35-145 percent of normal). However, limited areas within mainly northern, western and southern counties tallied at least 6 inches, while parts of mainly far eastern local Nebraska counties failed to even measure one inch, per NWS Hastings.

This weeks weather varied substantially across the High Plains region. Much of the Great Plains portion of the region, with the exception of eastern Nebraska and eastern Kansas, saw widespread precipitation, some of it heavy, the U.S. Drought Monitor updated stated.

Much of northwest Nebraska, eastern Wyoming, northeast Colorado, South Dakota and the southern half of North Dakota saw rainfall of at least two inches over the last week. In western Nebraska, eastern Wyoming and the Dakotas, this led to widespread improvements to the drought depiction in areas where the heaviest rains fell. Isolated heavy rains in central and western Kansas also led to localized improvements to ongoing drought areas, per the Drought Monitor.

Meanwhile, conditions continued to worsen in southeast Nebraska, northeast Kansas and the Kansas City area, where mostly dry weather continued. Given continued decreases in soil moisture and groundwater, and growing short- and long-term precipitation deficits, exceptional drought was introduced in parts of the Omaha metropolitan area, per the update.

North of Lincoln, Nebraska, hay production was reported to be about a third of normal for this time of year. Stress to other vegetation, including trees, also continued in southeast Nebraska this week, the updated concluded.

There will be a special edition of the north central drought and climate update webinar on July 6 from 1  2:15 p.m. Those interested can register to join: register.gotowebinar.com/register.

The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) and climate partners (U.S. Department of Agriculture, American Association of State Climatologists, National Drought Mitigation Center) co-host monthly North Central U.S. Drought and Climate Outlook webinars, which cover the region from the Rockies to the Great Lakes.

The U.S. Drought Monitor is produced through a partnership between the National Drought Mitigation Center at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln, the United States Department of Agriculture and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.
Takeaway platform has recorded an increase of up to 40% for sales by merchants in tourist areas, according to Jiang Haitao, founder and CEO of takeaway app, Aomi. Orders from merchants in other districts, however, fell by 20% to 30%. He added that the group has established a company in Hong Kong and has expanded its business, allowing Hong Kong tourists to book Macau restaurants. Currently, the platform has 1,600 drivers.

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The governments Wealth Partaking Scheme (cash handouts) will be distributed from tomorrow (July 4), the Financial Services Bureau (DSF) confirmed in a press statement.

It is expected that the cheques and bank transfers will reach all residents of Macau that are eligible for financial support by August 4.

According to DSF, the handouts, which grant some 10,000 patacas to permanent residents and 6,000 patacas to non-permanent residents, will reach a total of 743,388 eligible residents (708,041 permanent and 35,347 non-permanent residents).

All holders of a valid or renewable Macau Resident Identity Card as of December 31, 2022, are entitled to receive the cash premium.

The handouts reach not only those currently living in Macau but also those abroad, including those with expired Macau SAR Resident Identity Cards who are currently residing abroad and can prove that they are unable to renew their IDs due to being bedridden, or completely or partly paralyzed.

For those who have submitted the documentary proof and were granted the cash premium in the previous year, the Social Welfare Bureau is authorized to exempt them from document resubmission if no new evidence is needed for the approval of the current Scheme.

For residents who are eligible for this scheme but cannot receive the cash because of death, the respective amount can be requested by the administrator of the deceaseds estate, which is required under Article 1917 of the Civil Code for the administration of the deceased estate until its liquidation and distribution.
Former East Timor independence fighter Xanana Gusmao was sworn in on Saturday as prime minister of Asias youngest country after his party won the parliamentary election in May.

Crowds cheered as the former guerrilla leader traveled by motorcade to the presidential palace in Dili, the capital, where he and his members of Cabinet were sworn into office by President Jose Ramos-Horta, his fellow independence fighter during Indonesias occupation.

The new government is a coalition between Gusmaos National Congress of the Reconstruction of East Timor, known as CNRT, and the Democratic Party.

Gusmao, 77, became the nations first president between 2002 and 2007, and served as prime minister between 2007 and 2015.

In the May election, his party won 41% of the vote to capture 31 out of 65 seats in the National Parliament. That is just short of the 33 needed for an outright majority, and Gusmao agreed to form a government with the Democratic Party, which won six seats.

The election result indicated deep dissatisfaction with the previous government, led by the Revolutionary Front for an Independent East Timor, known as Fretilin.

Gusmao faces an uphill battle in tackling economic challenges as nearly 42% of the countrys estimated 1.5 million people live below the poverty line. The U.N. estimates for every 1,000 babies born in the country, 42 die before their fifth birthday because of malnutrition.

Gusmao vowed to reduce poverty through his governments strategic development plan and reiterated the importance of national reconciliation and unity to achieve the development goals.

I promise to carry out the tasks that the people have entrusted to me and to bring prosperity to the Timorese people through government programs, Gusmao said at the swearing-in ceremony.

He pledged to provide opportunities for local governments to design their own development programs, including those to improve health services for mothers and children.

Indonesian President Joko Widodos envoy, Coordinating Minister of Maritime and Investment Luhut Binsar Pandjaitan, was among those who attended the inauguration.

The country has a significant young population  65% are below 30. It is also among the worlds most impoverished. More than two decades after receiving formal independence in 2002, there is a lack of basic infrastructure including a reliable electricity supply and paved roads in rural areas.

He has charisma and rich experience as a leader, a Dili resident, Joao Agustino Sarmento, said of Gusmao. But we want to see him make more significant changes with his new government to overcome poverty and unemployment that still face our country.

East Timors transition to a democracy has been rocky, with leaders battling massive poverty, unemployment and corruption. The economy is reliant on dwindling offshore oil revenues. GANTRY MEILANA, MDT/AP
Ambassador Xie Feng presents Letter of Credence to US President Joe Biden

Chinadaily.com.cn) 08:45, July 03, 2023

US President Joe Biden accepted the Letter of Credence of China's new Ambassador to the United States, Xie Feng, at the Oval Office of the White House in Washington on Friday.

Biden welcomed Xie to his new post, and the two talked about the China-US relationship, according to a press release from the Chinese embassy.

Xie, who arrived in the United States on May 23, said that his appointment as the 12th Ambassador Extraordinary and Plenipotentiary of the People's Republic of China to the US means to him not only honor, but also enormous responsibilities.

He said that in November 2022, China's President Xi Jinping and Biden had a successful meeting in Bali and reached important common understandings. China follows the three principles put forward by President Xi, namely, mutual respect, peaceful coexistence and win-win cooperation.

The envoy expressed the hope that the US side will work with China in the same direction, earnestly act on the common understandings reached between the two presidents, and explore the right way for the two countries to get along in the new era, so as to stabilize and bring the China-US relationship back to the right track.

(Web editor: Zhong Wenxing, Liang Jun)
The daily average of tourism arrivals stood at 70,000 last month, 4,000 of which hailed from overseas, according to Macao Government Tourism Office (MGTO) director Maria Helena de Senna Fernandes. Senna Fernandes added that the bureau is planning to launch further travel discounts for international passengers and plans to cooperate with overseas airlines such as Air Asia to promote the city, as cited in a TDM report. In mid-July, the authorities will go to South Korea to hold a roadshow for tourism promotion. They also plan to do a roadshow in Malaysia.

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The government tourism bureau has hosted business visitors from a variety of places on familiarization tours in Macau as part of its overall marketing efforts.

These businesspeople visited Macau to take the opportunity of participating in the 11th Macau International Travel (Industry) Expo (MITE) held over the weekend. There were several hundreds of these visitors, the Macao Government Tourism Office (MGTO) underlined.

Besides attending the main expo and auxiliary seminars and symposia, they were taken by the MGTO on a tour of Macau. These visitors, from places such as Malaysia, Singapore, Thailand and Korea, were shown to local World Heritage sites, tourism facilities and community lifestyle sites.

Meanwhile, stakeholders from the tourism industries in these origins participated in site inspections organized by the MGTO to see tourists attractions as well as community and resort facilities, besides conducting business negotiations.

Members from several associations and entities, such as the UNESCO Creative City Network, also conducted site inspections in Macau during the MITE period.

During the same weekend, culinary experts from 23 UNESCO Creative City of Gastronomy gathered at the MITE to showcase their skills and cuisine. A total of 24 sessions were held over the three days, with host Macau showing two cuisines: Macanese and Cantonese.

Chef Antonieta Manhao from the Macanese Gastronomic Brotherhood and Chef Li Weichang from the Macau Cuisine Association maneuvered the two cuisines, respectively.

According to the MGTO, the showcase is the largest of its kind to date. This year, with Creative Cities of Gastronomy from Asia, Oceania, Latin and North America, Europe and the Middle East, we [have hosted] our largest City of Gastronomy Showcase to date, MGTO director Maria Helena de Senna Fernandes said.

Food items prepared by these culinary professionals were offered for public tasting at the expo, while videos highlighting these cities were played on the site. Residents and visitors [had] a close encounter with the cities enchanting flavors and culinary arts exemplified by the chefs, the MGTO noted in a statement.

Chefs from Popayan (Colombia), Tsuruoka and Usuki (Japan), Merida (Mexico), Santa Maria da Feira (Portugal), Phuket (Thailand) and San Antonio (USA) joined a team of chefs from The Venetian Macao, MGM Macau and Sofitel Macau at Ponte 16 to exchange and share their culinary insights and skills.

In addition, these chefs enjoyed the chance to experience fishery skills and made salted fish in Coloane for half a day as part of their familiarization tour.
As South Korea campaigns to retire an old and odd age-counting method that makes people a year or two older than they really are, children are among the few who seem most eager to stick with the past.

I turned 6 and then became 5 again, Kim Da-in said when a TV reporter asked her about a new law that went into effect Wednesday that formalizes the international age-counting method in administrative and civil laws and encourages people to tally their own ages accordingly.

South Koreas traditional age-counting custom considers every person 1 year old at birth and adds another year when the calendar hits Jan. 1, meaning a child born on Dec. 31 turns 2 the next day.

While the new law is the countrys latest attempt to retire that method and standardize international ages based on the passing of birthdays, its not immediately clear what will actually change  putting aside the minor frustrations of children like Da-in waiting for their birthdays.

President Yoon Suk Yeol has described standardizing international ages as a key goal of his government, citing a need to reduce social and administrative confusion and disputes. But officials in South Koreas Ministry of Government Legislation acknowledge the new law wont meaningfully change how the countrys public services are done, as most are already based on international ages.

International ages are the standard in most South Korean laws and official and legal documents, and define when a person goes to school, becomes eligible to drive and vote, and receives a pension.

Still, the law was welcomed by Choi Eun-young, a 49-year-old resident of the capital, Seoul, who no longer feels the need to describe herself as being in her 50s.

The law doesnt make you biologically younger and there are no real benefits other than feeling good about being called a year younger than before, she admitted. But if thats the international standard, theres nothing bad in following it.

Oh Seung-youl, another Seoul resident, agreed.

Its always good to be younger, Oh said with a laugh, praising the new law for turning him 61 from 63.

My birthday is Dec. 16 and I became 2 years old less than a month after I was born, said Oh. Thats why (the old counting method) doesnt make sense.

But 21-year-old Kim Si-eun was already missing the old counting method, which felt simpler to her.

Korean-style age was actually easier to count, she said. With everybody now going with international age, the changed ages feel awkward.

While the new law states that a persons age must be counted by the passing of birthdays for most public services, it does not affect other age-related regulations that are based on yearly rules.

Staying the same is the countrys legal age for drinking and smoking, which are allowed from Jan. 1 of the year a person turns 19 in their international age, regardless of whether their birthday has passed.

The new law doesnt affect when South Korean males become eligible to serve their mandatory military duty, which is from Jan. 1 of the year they turn 18 in international age.

Changing those age regulations would require revisions of the countrys youth protection and military service laws, the government legislation ministry said.

Lee Wan-kyu, the government legislation minister, said the new law is mostly aimed at reducing confusion in daily life and inspiring a change in social perception toward a more rational way of counting ages. KIM TONG-HYUNG, SEOUL, MDT/AP
A special glossary compilation plan has been established in an attempt to standardize Macaus sign language, the Social Welfare Bureau (IAS) has said.

In response to lawmaker Ngan Iek Hangs written inquiry, IAS president Hon Wai disclosed that, in order to standardize the citys sign language, the plan is to construct and explore vocabulary for the local sign language.

Hon added that the plan will officially commence later due to suspension over the past three years of Covid-19. The glossary will be publicly accessible once compiled.

Sign language is a highly location-specific mode of communication. Places sharing the same spoken and written language, such as English, do not have congruent sets of sign language. For example, sign language commonly used in the US is referred to as the American Sign Language, while in Britain it is referred to as the British Sign Language.

In addition, Hon foresees that when the glossary is compiled, it may be used to develop mobile apps or Artificial Intelligence (AI) programs for the convenience of the hearing and speech impaired.

As a result, at this stage, the IAS will primarily concentrate on the development of the glossary, which will also help the education and translation of sign language in Macau.

Ngan has also asked about the governments efforts in helping the physically disabled to access assistive devices.

Hon said that since the establishment of an assistive device pilot subsidy program in 2021, 55 users have had their subsidies approved, among which 60% were hearing impaired. Most of the funds went to the acquisition of hearing aids and electric wheelchairs.

Citing the Transport Bureau and the Health Bureau, Hon explained that driving test-takers are required to undergo certain medical tests, including but not limited to hearing tests, to ensure they meet the legal health threshold to drive.
An unlicensed pro-democracy radio station in Hong Kong shut down Friday after 18 years on the air. The closure of Citizens Radio came on the eve of the 26th anniversary of Hong Kongs handover to China.

Since its launch in 2005, the station had hosted prominent democracy advocates, including former lawmakers Szeto Wah, Emily Lau, Albert Ho and Lee Cheuk-yan. But its founder, Bull Tsang, said it was becoming increasingly difficult to invite guests following the enactment of the national security law.

Coupled with banking problems and limited resources, Tsang said he had no choice but to say goodbye.

Its hard to let go. Its like my third son, Tsang, 67, told reporters before he hosted his last show on Friday night.

After the laws enactment three years ago, dozens of civic groups disbanded, most of the citys leading activists were charged with alleged national security crimes, and two vocal media outlets shut down as their top management was accused of sedition or collusion.

On Saturday, the city marked its handover anniversary with official celebrations. The annual pro-democracy protest held for years every July 1, however, appears to be a thing of the past  even as daily life has largely returned to normal following years of pandemic restrictions.

The League of Social Democrats leader Chan Po-ying told The Associated Press that her political party canceled its plan to stage a small-scale protest but that she could not give more details about this.

While Tsangs radio station has not been directly targeted by the security law, the veteran pro-democracy activist said his guests were unclear about whether their words would be in breach of the vaguely-defined red lines.

He added that the station could not pay rent after August since its bank account was recently blocked from receiving donations.

Hang Seng Bank, which handles Tsangs account, said in a reply to a request for comment from the AP that it cannot comment on matters regarding individual accounts.

Tsang said the recent events forced him to end his years of open defiance against the government after officials rejected his request for a broadcasting license in 2006. Over the years, Tsang continued broadcasting in civil disobedience even after he was convicted and fined over unlicensed broadcasting and his radio station was raided by authorities.

Tsang said he might try to sell his creative drawings to raise funds to continue his work in another way. But even so, things will no longer be the same, he said.

In the future, it is very difficult to have such form of civil disobedience like this in Hong Kong, he said. KANIS LEUNG, HONG KONG, MDT/AP
Ezra Miller claims they have been "unjustly and directly targeted".

After a temporary harassment order against the 'Flash' actor - which was put in place in June 2022 after Ezra, 30, was accused of behaving inappropriately around a 12-year-old child - expired, they took to Instagram to claim that they have been unfairly accused.

Ezra wrote: "I'm encouraged by the outcome and very grateful at this moment to everyone who has stood by me and sought to ensure this egregious misuses of the protective order system was halted. Protective orders are meant to provide safety for individuals, families and children who are in danger. They are not meant to be used as weapons by those seeking attention or fleeting tabloid fame or some sort of personal vengeance when there are people in true and dire need of these services.

"I have been unjustly and directly targeted by an individual who the facts have shown has a history of such manipulative and destructive actions."

Miller's attorney, Marissa Elkins, issued her own statement, saying the actor "was never alone with the child and never interacted with the child outside of two brief encounters which occurred in the presence of several other adults".

Elkins added: "The original order, pursued by Shannon Guin, on behalf of her minor child, was based on untrue allegations. Frustratingly for Ezra, Guin lodged her false allegations at a time when Ezra was struggling with significant mental health issues, and was unable to come to court to defend themself against the spurious claims made by this individual. Had Ezra been able to appear in court last year and share the truth about their very limited interactions with Ms. Guin, I am confident the original order would have never been issued."

Miller, who goes by they/them pronouns, has previously been hit with allegations of grooming after the parents of Native American activist Tokota Iron Eyes, 18, filed a protection order against the actor.

Miller was also arrested twice in Hawaii in March last year and charged with disorderly conduct and second-degree assault.

They were accused of shouting and swearing at customers as they sang karaoke at a bar, as well as grabbing a microphone from a 23-year-old woman.

Miller pleaded no contest to one count of disorderly conduct and paid a $500 fine over the incident.

A married couple also took out a restraining order against them after Miller burst into their bedroom and threatened to kill them then left, stealing her passport and his wallet.

And in April 2022 the star was accused of throwing a chair at a 26-year-old woman and hitting her at a private party.

A video of Miller appearing to choke a woman at a bar in Reykjavik, Iceland, also surfaced in April 2020, but did not result in any charges.
SCHOOL SPOTLIGHT | YOUTH ART PROGRAMS

Youths around Dane County got to create last week with special guest artist who sees art as "a vehicle for enlightenment."

Floyd Newsum, whose "Evolution of Sight" exhibit is on view at the Madison Museum of Contemporary Art through Oct. 8, came back to Madison after the May opening because of his personal commitment to community service. His whirlwind schedule sent him to a number of places where children make art, including Art Cart, a traveling art program co-sponsored by MMoCA and Madison School & Community Recreation.

Newsum said he hopes the children will remember the experience some day and that it makes a difference in their life.

"Art has always been a vehicle for enlightenment," Newsum said. "Yesterday I saw the gleam in their eyes and just their excitement. They are so loving. They embrace the idea of someone trying to teach them something."

Newsum, an art professor at the University of Houston-Downtown, said he spent time with children from preschool through high school. Teachers and parents who were involved also were excited about being part of the experience, he said.

"Some of the kids who are part of the different organizations I've worked with have never been to a museum," he said.

When Newsum was last in town, he did outreach with donors and board members, but he wanted to come back and spend time in the community.

"It's unusual, especially to have an artist not from the Madison area, to prioritize working with children and families," said Bob Sylvester, director of education and programs at MMoCA. "When Floyd puts down his paintbrush, he feels like his his job is only half done."

Newsum believes "you really have to share (art) with people to make it come into full bloom," Sylvester said.

He said Newsum was compensated nominally with a small stipend and reimbursement for his costs.

"This is very much giving back to the community," Sylvester said.

Newsum is very good at meeting people where they are at and teaching children how to look at artwork, believing that "sometimes you have to take a little bit of time to look at the art and let it wash over you," Sylvester said.

Last week, at one of his stops, Newsum worked with children who came to the Art Cart at Allied Drive. Participants were invited to create a mural of Madison using symbols, shapes and pictures that represent the community. Some drew objects or people, while other contributed with a handprint. Each of the three murals was created on a canvas that will be displayed in the museum's classroom until the end of Newsum's show.

The Art Cart was part of a Parks Alive event coordinated by the Madison Parks Division. Scheduled in parks across the city this summer, the events are a chance to visit a local park, listen to music, participate in family-friendly activities, enjoy free food, get to know neighbors and build connections with the community through the various organizations that set up booths or bring their outreach vehicles to the locations.

School Spotlight

Each Monday, the State Journal features a story about learning in Wisconsin. Send story ideas to Sandy Cullen at scullen@madison.com or 608252-6137.

The Madison Public Library and Dane County Library Service Dream Bus was handing out book bags, and some children, like 6-year-old Hazel Hamberg, of Madison, decided to embellish theirs by painting on it at the Art Cart station. Hazel dipped paintbrushes in different colors of paint and then twirled around as she threw the paint on the bag that she had set on the grass.

Newsum delighted in Hazel's artistic expression, exclaiming that she was embodying the work of American painter Jackson Pollock. A major figure in the abstract expressionist movement, Pollock was known for his drip technique of pouring or splashing paint onto a horizontal surface, sometimes dancing around it.

"I just got inspired to do it so I could see all the colors together," Hazel said. "I splattered the colors based on how I feel."

She wants to be an artist and dancer when she grows up, Hazel said.

Christian Blathers-Weatherby, 9, of Madison, also painted her book bag.

"I didn't want my bag to be plain," she said.

Jaime Lopez said he brought his daughter, Camela, 5, to Allied Park after driving past and seeing the activity. Camela drew a sun on the mural in a gold paint color.

Luma Rabeea, who lives in the Hilldale area, brought her children  Marian Atteyih, 7, and Tamara Atteyih, 2  to the park in the Allied community on Madison's Southwest Side.

"They will have fun and learn something new," she said.

Newsum was scheduled to be at the Art Cart planned for Manchester Park on Wednesday , but it was canceled due to poor air quality. But Newsum was at two others, called Art Cart EXTRA! because they are outside of Madison, in McFarland and Stoughton on Saturday.

The art project on Saturday was inspired by Newsum's "Purple Rain" painting, which is a visual representation of his favorite song by Prince. The participants were tasked with creating a representation of their favorite song in an expressive, abstract way to express the feelings, vibe and mood via visual art. They were encouraged to use collage, painting, sketching and other materials as a way to draw connections between art forms.

Newsum's schedule also included visits to community centers and working with children in Little Picassos, an art enrichment program for low-income families, who took a field trip to MMoCA.

A group from the Youth Artist Apprentice Program at Developing Artists, Muralists and Alliances came to MMoCA for a tour and workshop.

Among other activities, Newsum also toured Art working, a Madison-area nonprofit program that provides career development and support for artists and entrepreneurs with disabilities, and visited Preschool of the Arts.

The "Evolution of Sight" exhibit at MMoCA is Newsum's first largescale retrospective, which reflects on the artist's entire practice, including his paintings, printmaking and public art commissions. With a career spanning more than 50 years, his artwork captures the deeply personal history of the artist with family photographs and symbols veiled by richly layered color and textures that create tactile surfaces.

He has done a number of public art projects in Texas, and his paintings and prints are in private collections, public museums, universities and other public institutions. A Memphis native, his work has been influenced by civil rights issues.
More than eight years after 19-year-old Tony Robinson was fatally shot by a Madison police officer, a Dane County judge ruled he does not have the authority to appoint a special prosecutor to reopen the case.

On Friday, Dane County Judge Stephen Ehlke dismissed the 2022 petition filed by Robinsons grandmother, Sharon Irwin-Henry. The petition employed a rarely used state law that would have allowed a judge to review the evidence in the case and criminally charge officer Matt Kenny after Dane County district attorney Ismael Ozanne declined charges in 2015.

Grandmother of teen killed by Madison police in 2015 asks judge to OK homicide charge "In the end, this case ultimately turns on one question  what happened between Robinson and Kenny in the stairwell on March 6."

The petition claimed that evidence uncovered during a subsequent federal civil rights case on the shooting was not considered by the district attorney.

Irwin-Henry has long sought to have the case reopened.

We are fighting the inconsistencies and inherent and systemic racism in our laws, Irwin-Henry wrote in a statement to the Wisconsin State Journal Sunday. We are better than this. Its time for change.

In his dismissal, Ehlke said he could not move forward with Irwin-Henrys petition because its unclear who would prosecute a potential criminal complaint against Kenny and said he does not have the authority to assign a special prosecutor to the case.

Ehlke first raised the question of who would prosecute a criminal case in January, when he asked for input from Irwin-Henrys attorneys and from the district attorneys office.

The problem, as I see it, arises because (state law) lists the circumstance in which a court may appoint a special prosecutor, and none of them apply here, Ehlke wrote in January. Further, the Wisconsin Supreme Court has called into question a circuit courts inherent authority to appoint a special prosecutor.

State law lays out nine scenarios under which a judge can appoint a special prosecutor, including when there is no district attorney for the county, the district attorney has acted as the attorney for a party accused or when the district attorney determines that a conflict of interest exists.

Because Irwin-Henry has not shown that any of those conditions apply, Ehlke said, he lacks the authority to appoint a special prosecutor.

Unless I find some other authority to appoint a special prosecutor, I must dismiss her petition, Ehlke wrote.

In the dismissal, Ehlke said he has not held a hearing to review the evidence brought by Irwin-Henry since it would be a hollow gesture if I do not have authority to appoint a special prosecutor. Irwin-Henry and her legal team are yet to have their day in court.

Robinson, who was Black, was high on a mixture of hallucinogenic mushrooms, marijuana and an anti-anxiety medication and had allegedly assaulted two people when Kenny was dispatched to his apartment on the Near East Side. Kenny, who is white, told investigators Robinson ambushed him in a darkened stairwell by punching him in the head, leaving him no choice but to protect himself by firing seven times, killing Robinson.

Irwin-Henry said evidence uncovered as part of the federal civil rights case shows Kenny lied about what happened in the stairwell  including that Robinson hit him hard enough to give him a concussion and that he fired his weapon at the top of the stairs  and questioned his decision to enter the residence without waiting for backup.

Ehlkes dismissal, she said, was just another way to prevent police from being held accountable for her grandsons death.

He was afraid to go forward because it will throw a wrench in the system, Irwin-Henry said in statement. Dane County doesnt seem to want to do what is right.

Photos: Remembering the Tony Robinson shooting protests in Madison Tony Robinson police shooting death Tony Robinson police shooting death Tony Robinson police shooting death Tony Robinson police shooting death Tony Robinson police shooting death Tony Robinson police shooting death Tony Robinson police shooting death Tony Robinson police shooting death Tony Robinson police shooting death Tony Robinson police shooting death Tony Robinson police shooting death Tony Robinson police shooting death Tony Robinson police shooting death Tony Robinson police shooting death Tony Robinson police shooting death Tony Robinson police shooting death Tony Robinson police shooting death Tony Robinson police shooting death Tony Robinson police shooting death Tony Robinson police shooting death Tony Robinson police shooting death Tony Robinson police shooting death Tony Robinson police shooting death Tony Robinson police shooting death Tony Robinson police shooting death Tony Robinson police shooting death Tony Robinson police shooting death Tony Robinson police shooting death Tony Robinson police shooting death Tony Robinson police shooting death Tony Robinson police shooting death Tony Robinson police shooting death Tony Robinson police shooting death Tony Robinson police shooting death Tony Robinson police shooting death Tony Robinson police shooting death Tony Robinson police shooting death Tony Robinson police shooting death Tony Robinson police shooting death Tony Robinson police shooting death Tony Robinson police shooting death Tony Robinson police shooting death Tony Robinson police shooting death Tony Robinson police shooting death Tony Robinson police shooting death Tony Robinson police shooting death Tony Robinson police shooting death Tony Robinson police shooting death Tony Robinson police shooting death
Youths around Dane County got to create last week with special guest artist who sees art as a vehicle for enlightenment.

Floyd Newsum, whose Evolution of Sight exhibit is on view at the Madison Museum of Contemporary Art through Oct. 8, came back to Madison after the May opening because of his personal commitment to community service. His whirlwind schedule sent him to a number of places where children make art, including Art Cart, a traveling art program co-sponsored by MMoCA and Madison School & Community Recreation.

Newsum said he hopes the children will remember the experience some day and that it makes a difference in their life.

Art has always been a vehicle for enlightenment, Newsum said. Yesterday I saw the gleam in their eyes and just their excitement. They are so loving. They embrace the idea of someone trying to teach them something.

Newsum, an art professor at the University of Houston-Downtown, said he spent time with children from preschool through high school. Teachers and parents who were involved also were excited about being part of the experience, he said.

Some of the kids who are part of the different organizations Ive worked with have never been to a museum, he said.

When Newsum was last in town, he did outreach with donors and board members, but he wanted to come back and spend time in the community.

Its unusual, especially to have an artist not from the Madison area, to prioritize working with children and families, said Bob Sylvester, director of education and programs at MMoCA. When Floyd puts down his paintbrush, he feels like his his job is only half done.

Newsum believes you really have to share (art) with people to make it come into full bloom, Sylvester said.

He said Newsum was compensated nominally with a small stipend and reimbursement for his costs.

This is very much giving back to the community, Sylvester said.

Newsum is very good at meeting people where they are at and teaching children how to look at artwork, believing that sometimes you have to take a little bit of time to look at the art and let it wash over you, Sylvester said.

Last week, at one of his stops, Newsum worked with children who came to the Art Cart at Allied Drive. Participants were invited to create a mural of Madison using symbols, shapes and pictures that represent the community. Some drew objects or people, while other contributed with a handprint. Each of the three murals was created on a canvas that will be displayed in the museums classroom until the end of Newsums show.

The Art Cart was part of a Parks Alive event coordinated by the Madison Parks Division. Scheduled in parks across the city this summer, the events are a chance to visit a local park, listen to music, participate in family-friendly activities, enjoy free food, get to know neighbors and build connections with the community through the various organizations that set up booths or bring their outreach vehicles to the locations.

The Madison Public Library and Dane County Library Service Dream Bus was handing out book bags, and some children, like 6-year-old Hazel Hamberg, of Madison, decided to embellish theirs by painting on it at the Art Cart station. Hazel dipped paintbrushes in different colors of paint and then twirled around as she threw the paint on the bag that she had set on the grass.

Newsum delighted in Hazels artistic expression, exclaiming that she was embodying the work of American painter Jackson Pollock. A major figure in the abstract expressionist movement, Pollock was known for his drip technique of pouring or splashing paint onto a horizontal surface, sometimes dancing around it.

I just got inspired to do it so I could see all the colors together, Hazel said. I splattered the colors based on how I feel.

She wants to be an artist and dancer when she grows up, Hazel said.

Christian Blathers-Weatherby, 9, of Madison, also painted her book bag.

I didnt want my bag to be plain, she said.

Jaime Lopez said he brought his daughter, Camela, 5, to Allied Park after driving past and seeing the activity. Camela drew a sun on the mural in a gold paint color.

Luma Rabeea, who lives in the Hilldale area, brought her children  Marian Atteyih, 7, and Tamara Atteyih, 2  to the park in the Allied community on Madisons Southwest Side.

They will have fun and learn something new, she said.

Newsum was scheduled to be at the Art Cart planned for Manchester Park on Wednesday , but it was canceled due to poor air quality. But Newsum was at two others, called Art Cart EXTRA! because they are outside of Madison, in McFarland and Stoughton on Saturday.

The art project on Saturday was inspired by Newsums Purple Rain painting, which is a visual representation of his favorite song by Prince. The participants were tasked with creating a representation of their favorite song in an expressive, abstract way to express the feelings, vibe and mood via visual art. They were encouraged to use collage, painting, sketching and other materials as a way to draw connections between art forms.

Newsums schedule also included visits to community centers and working with children in Little Picassos, an art enrichment program for low-income families, who took a field trip to MMoCA.

A group from the Youth Artist Apprentice Program at Developing Artists, Muralists and Alliances came to MMoCA for a tour and workshop.

Among other activities, Newsum also toured Artworking, a Madison-area nonprofit program that provides career development and support for artists and entrepreneurs with disabilities, and visited Preschool of the Arts.

The Evolution of Sight exhibit at MMoCA is Newsums first large-scale retrospective, which reflects on the artists entire practice, including his paintings, printmaking and public art commissions. With a career spanning more than 50 years, his artwork captures the deeply personal history of the artist with family photographs and symbols veiled by richly layered color and textures that create tactile surfaces. He has done a number of public art projects in Texas, and his paintings and prints are in private collections, public museums, universities and other public institutions. A Memphis native, his work has been influenced by civil rights issues.

The schedule for Art Cart and Art Cart EXTRA! is at mmoca.org/events/art-cart-2023 and for Parks Alive it is cityofmadison.com/parks/events/parksAlive.cfm.

School Spotlight: Adventures in learning, inside and outside the classroom Each Monday, the Wisconsin State Journal features a story about learning in Wisconsin. Here are School Spotlight stories from the past year.
SOS | DAMAGED CLOTHES

Luckily, Amanda Meier had insured the three boxes she sent last year from her home in Verona to her condo in Florida  or so she thought.

In reality, it took eight months to get a claim paid after UPS left the boxes outdoors and she said a rainstorm destroyed their contents.

"They arrived completely soaked and ruined because they were not delivered to my door or even under a protected overhang but left out in the open by our community mailboxes," Meier, 66, said in a June 19 email to SOS. "The clothes bled onto each other and left permanent stains."

Meier had purchased $200 worth of UPS insurance on each box before shipping them from a Postal Connections store in Verona, she said. Postal Connections filed a claim on her behalf, and she provided photos and other documentation, she said, only to see the matter enter "a time warp of waiting."

"Every time we contacted UPS with our claim number they said they were working on it," she said, until in May UPS asked her to "send all new pictures and documentation for the claim.

"When I said I had and couldn't take new ones, they denied my claim without a reason stated," she said.

SOS emailed UPS, cc'ing Postal Connections, on June 19 to ask about Meier's claim and heard back that same day from Karen A. Tomaszewski Hill, of UPS' Corporate Affairs division.

She said she would look into the matter and the next day, Meier got an email from Clarissa Fletcher of UPS Corporate Customer Relations asking that Meier "provide the photos of the damage, the tracking numbers, and any proof value that you may have."

To which Meier responded: I already did that.

To be clear, the photos Meier submitted as part of her claim were of the boxes, soaked, that the clothes had been shipped in. Neither she nor her husband took photos of the damaged clothes themselves.

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"No, unfortunately I did not," she said. "My husband, who was in Florida, tried to wash the color bleed out of them, so they were hanging all over the place drying. ... There were no pictures of the clothing for me to send before he had them washed, thrown out or put away."

This may well have been the reason UPS initially denied the claim, as Fletcher in her response to Meier on June 21 said the company had changed its mind and, as a "one-time courtesy," would send her a check for $600, even though "per UPS Terms and Conditions, all claims are finalized with the shipper of record, in this case Postal Connections." Meanwhile, in a statement, Postal Connections said that it "works diligently to ensure that customers receive exceptional shipping services" and that it is "rare" and "unfortunate" for a shipping problem to result in a formal claim, but that "in the event of damage to a shipment, the recipient should keep all packing materials, boxes, and broken items for inspection by the shipper, take photos, and immediately notify the shipping agency for assistance in fi ling a claim" (emphasis added).

Hill declined to comment on the particulars of Meier's claim, and Postal Connections deferred to UPS.

Meier said she received the $600 check on Tuesday.
On its face, the decision by the Idaho Republican Party to set up a caucus system for choosing a presidential nominee next year can be seen simply as a sensible backup measure.

Quote Another issue is that, even when theyre well run, caucuses tend to be complex and hard for most people to understand  again, under good conditions and when no one particularly tries to game the system.

Remember that the Idaho Legislature (dominated by Republican legislators) eliminated the primary for next year (whether intentionally or accidentally being a subject of some debate). So the Republican central committee, meeting at Challis, acted:

Recognizing the importance of voter participation and accessibility, the State Central Committee has also passed a resolution urging the legislature to reinstate the March presidential primary. In the event that the March Presidential primary is not restored, the Idaho Republican caucus will serve as our comprehensive plan to ensure a robust Presidential selection process.

Caucuses are not a rare way for parties to make their choices. Theyre used in a number of states, and Idaho Democrats in recent decades often have used them.

They do have some issues. One is that they allow participation only for people who show up personally at a specific place at a particular hour, which helps ensure that a far smaller number of people turn out than for primary elections.

MAIN STREET IDAHO: A presidential caucus isnt right answer for our state MAIN STREET IDAHO CAUCUS: All Idahoans deserve an opportunity to cast a vote and select their candidate for president in 2024. Our job is to fix this problem.

Another issue is that, even when theyre well run, caucuses tend to be complex and hard for most people to understand  again, under good conditions and when no one particularly tries to game the system. So the question arises: Will that be the circumstance next March if Idaho Republicans then hold their caucuses?

This is a Republican Party being run by an ever-more extreme and narrowly-based core, increasingly willing to strike out at fellow Republicans who stray at all from their perspective.

In another part of its business, the central committee voted to allow local central committees to, as a news report had it, summon Republican elected officials to potentially censure them for not adhering to the party platform, with multiple censures potentially resulting in those officials unable to run as Republicans in future elections. They delivered a vote of no confidence on Gov. Brad Little and a number of legislators. And they proposed a constitutional amendment giving parties sweeping control of their primary election processes. (You can imagine what that would look like.)

Tom Luna, the former state Republican chair, told Idaho Reports, What happened (this weekend) does not represent the majority of the Republican Party. But what it did represent was the majority of the people that showed up were those that were very well organized and intent on purging the party of people that do not agree with them 100% of the time, whether its on abortion or education, whether its on what they view as the proper role of government.

He called parts of the GOP organization a politburo which has sidelined younger Republicans and other related groups.

This wasnt just opinion; Luna had evidence. One of his clearest data points was the party organizations denunciation of Little, who, just a year ago won his Republican primary with 52.8% of the vote (against seven opponents), winning 40 of 44 counties.

Caucus procedures are tricky under the best of conditions. It might be interesting to see what kind of rules this group of party leaders might try to lock in place for next March.

Many Republicans may be fervently hoping at this point that the Idaho Legislature manages to reinstall the presidential primary election for next year.

But you wonder how many legislators will want to. After all, they may, by that point, have alternate marching orders from the state Republican organization.
MURCIA, Negros OccidentalThe municipality of Murcia in this province has just welcomed one of its biggest investments to datethe P350-million state-of-the-art Sapporo cold storage facility and ice plant of Czark Mak Corporation Group of Companies.







Czark Mak Corp. inaugurates a state-of-the-art cold storage and ice making facility in Murcia, Negros Occidental. Attending the event are (from left) Quirino Governor Dakila Cua, Murcia vice mayor Johnny Reosura, Philippine British Assurance Co. president Charrie Cuyegkeng, CZM Group of Companies executive vice president Caesar Angelo Wongchuking, CZM director Melissa Wongchuking, CZM chairman and president Caesar Wongchuking, Negros Occidental Gov. Eugenio Jose Lacson, Murcia Mayor Gerry Rojas, Ateneo de Iloilo president Fr. Raymond Sanchez and former Senator Franklin Drilon.

The investment includes those for the solar power, real estate and planned dry warehouses.

CZMs businesses all over the country include real estate, manufacturing, warehousing, logistics, agribusiness, food and hospitality, and technology, among others, even as it continues to explore new business opportunities and to expand its current customer reach.

The construction of the cold storage facility is expected to be completed this month, with start of commercial operation scheduled for the third week of July.

It will have a capacity of 1728 pallet positions, with five frozen rooms, two chiller rooms and two blast freezing rooms.

The facility, which was approved by the Board of Investment for non-pioneer status registration, offers services that include storage rental, warehouse management, blasting services, and handling and logistics services and will cater to products such as dairy, vegetables, fruits, fishery, and poultry.

Sapporo provides both cold storage solutions for blasting and freezing. It has chillers for agricultural products not required to be stored below zero degree Celsius. The manufacturing activity of Sapporo will supply crystallized tube ice and crushed ice not only to restaurants but also agro-industrial companies engaged in poultry and fisheries.

It will serve not only the needs of agricultural and other producers in Murcia but also nearby areas in the province such as Bacolod, Bago, Talisay, Silay, Don Salvador Benedicto, among others.

CZM also operates a cold storage facility and ice plant in Guiguinto, Bulacan through unit Acro Ice as well as an ice plant and soon cold storage in Batangas under another unit, The Service Warehouse.

CZM chairman and president Caesar Wongchuking said they identified Negros as one of their preferred areas of investment for the companys cold chain portfolio as the region is heavy in agriculture and identified by the administration as one of the key growth areas.

Sapporo Ice and Cold Storage Company Inc., he said, is gearing towards Triple A classification from the National Meat Inspection Service with its modern facilities and equipment, the same used by its sister company Nordic Atlantic Logistics Inc. which was awarded a Double A classification on its initial operation and is expected to achieve triple A status upon next inspection.

He said their cold storage facility would play a vital role in the preservation of the harvest at the farmers level, adding that their Murcia facility is strategically located to cater to the farmers in the area and will provide solutions in improving efficiencies and decreasing wastage of the crops.

President Ferdinand Marcos Jr. recently ordered the setting up of cold storage facilities at various fish ports across the country to reduce post-harvest losses, especially after the Bureau of Fisheries revealed that fish spoilage is between 25 to40 percent due to lack of facilities like cold storage warehouses.

Wongchuking said they are having initial talks with local government units on providing cold storage solutions to lower mortalities and losses. We believe that our facility will be beneficial to farmers and fishermen alike in improving their income, he said.

He said the CZM group and its associates are present in Iloilo, Murcia, Malolos in Bulacan and Batangas City for its cold chain business, but is already looking at future sites in Nueva Ecija, Tarlac and Tuguegarao.

During the facilitys inauguration on July 1, Negros Occidental Governor Eugenio Jose Lacson said in an interview that the cold storage facility could help improve the productivity and incomes of farmers and livestock raisers and reduce their dependence on middlemen.

He said the provincial government could help like farmers associations and cooperatives to this facility where they can store their produce for longer periods of time instead of selling their harvests directly to middlemen at lower prices to reduce the risk of spoilage.

Murcia Mayor Victor Gerardo Rojas said the Sapporo cold storage facility is expected to contribute greatly to the economy of the municipality as well as nearby towns since it can serve as an anchor that can attract business locators, especially those that will be needing the services of the facility.

Rojas said the ice from Sapporos plant would be definitely be clean and of good quality considering that even before it is filtered in the plant, the water to be used is already clean as it comes from natural springs. He said that in fact, the water being supplied by the Murcia water district to residential and commercial users does not even have to be filtered as it directly comes from the natural spring.

Also present during the inauguration is Quirino Governor Dakila Carlo Cua, national president of the Union of Local Authorities of the Philippines and national chairman of the League of Provinces of the Philippines, said that this new facility established by CZM without a single centavo from the government is very important since it will help boost the income of farmers whose produce can have extended shelf life.

The future is really about logistics. The problem of huge post-harvest losses of our agricultural sector due to, among others, lack of adequate cold storage facilities, is something that should be addressed in order to make our products to be competitive vis-a-vis our neighbors in the region like Vietnam, which is far ahead in terms of agricultural production, he said.

Meanwhile, former Senator Franklin Drilon said Region VI last year had the single biggest growth rate of all 17 regions at 19.3 percent and CZM sees this as an opportunity.

He said the private sector plays a huge role in helping to increase agriculture production and productivity and that with a cold storage facility, farmers can time the releases of their produce and manage supply and prices instead of flooding the market during harvest time that has always brought down farm gate prices to the detriment of Filipino farmers.

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ROLLOUT of the North-South Commuter Railway (NSCR) system will signal the revival of the countrys rail sector, Department of

Transportation Secretary Jaime Bautista said on Monday.

Bagong Henerasyon party-list Rep. Bernadette Herrera has filed a bill creating a single and unified regulatory body or the railway industry to promote the efficient and effective management of the national railway system.

The NSCR, a 147-kilometer railway project, broke ground on Monday for the P73.25 billion South Commuter Railway project or the

Alabang-Calamba segment.

TRAIN STOP. Philippine National Railways Chairman Michael Macapagal answers questions at the PNR Tutuban station in Manila on Monday. The PNR line is shutting down in December to give way to the P73.25-billion North South Commuter Railway project. Norman Cruz

We are forging ahead, overcoming every challenge, because we know meeting the projects deadlines will lead to a game-changing rail

system that will transform lives, Bautista said during the groundbreaking rite for three contract packages of the South Commuter

Railway.

He said the rail infrastructure would open the gates for the renaissance of the railway industry in the Philippines.

The project, co-financed by the Japan International Cooperation Agency and the Asian Development Bank, aims to connect Clark, Pampanga in the north and Calamba, Laguna in the south by linking Metro Manila to its neighboring provinces, reducing travel time from four to four-and a half hours to less than two hours, with an estimated commuter volume of 600,000 daily.

Residents and communities who have noticed the railways massive construction have pinned their hopes on a comfortable, affordable,

safe and efficient commutea striking contrast to the deteriorating road traffic that has spilled over to north and south of Metro Manila, Bautista said.

An elevated, double-track and electrified train system will be constructed along the Philippine National Railways (PNR) existing

route from Alabang to Calamba, Bautista added.

The PNR suspended operations of the Alabang-Calamba run to give way for the construction of the three contract packages.

The existing tracks from Alabang to Calamba will be relocated to be used at the proposed 565-kilometer-long South Long-Haul project that

will stretch to Bicol region.

The three civil contract packages consist of railway viaduct structures and elevated stations at Alabang and Muntinlupa City; San

Pedro, Pacita, Binan, and Santa Rosa, and Cabuyao, Banlic, and Calamba, all in Laguna.

Once completed, the NSCR will have 35 stations and run on 51 commuter train sets and seven express train sets.

Filed on June 1, Herreras House Bill 8510 proposes to establish the Railways Industry Authority of the Philippines (RIAP) which would serve as the central railway industry regulator of the government.

Herrera noted that the regulatory functions for railways are currently fragmented among various rail entities, resulting in

inconsistencies in policies and standards, as well as inefficiencies in the planning and regulatory processes.She said her bill aims to address the need to rationalize and streamline the regulatory functions over railways.

The bill provides for the creation of [RIAP] which will be responsible for the regulations within the Philippine Railway Industry, she pointed out.

Under Herreras bill, the RIAP will be an attached agency of the Department of Transportation (DOTr) for purposes of policy and program coordination but shall independently be governed by its Rail Industry Board (RIB), and operated and managed by its own set of administrative officials and personnel.

The RIAP will also have the power to issue and revoke certification to intending to participate in the railway industry, from planning and project development, construction and implementation, testing, commissioning and handover, operations and maintenance, and decommissioning and disposal.

It will also have the authority to issue and revoke franchise to railway infrastructure and asset operators and/or concessionaires, as

may be delegated by Congress through an enabling law.

It shall also prescribe and enforce railway-industry related standards, rules and guidance, in compliance with domestic statutes

(primarily) and international mandates (as applicable to local setting).

RIAP shall administer, impose, and implement railway-related regulatory requisites in accordance with pertinent statutes; and

formulate prescribe, and enforce unified metrics and key performance indicators to entities involved in the railway industry.

The panels board of directors shall be composed of the Secretary and Undersecretary for Railways of DOTr; Secretaries of the Department of Labor and Employment, Department of Public Works, Department of Budget and Management, and Department of Environment and Natural Resources, Department of Finance; and one representative from the private sector.

The President shall appoint through the recommendation of the DOTr Secretary an administrator who shall sit as the chairman of the board.

The board shall have the power to recommend an expansion of the membership of the board up to a total of 11 members, upon the approval

of the Office of the President.

The management of RIAP shall be headed by an administrator and shall be assisted by three deputy administrators who shall also be appointed

by the President through the recommendation of the DOTr Secretary.

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The movie Barbie will be reviewed for rating and classification on Tuesday, Movie and Television Review and Classification Board chairperson Lala Sotto said Monday.

Sotto was asked if the Philippines will also ban the movie starring Margot Robbie for showing a map that featured Chinas nine-dash-line in the South China Sea.

In connection thereto, the MTRCB assures the public that as with any material rated by the Board, the film shall undergo a fair and thorough review in accordance with Presidential Decree No. 1986, Sotto added.

Asked if the MTRCB review was related to the ban by Vietnam, Sotto said the local distributor applied before the MTRCB its request for rating and classification.

The U-shaped nine-dash line is used on Chinese maps to illustrate its claims over vast areas of the South China Sea, including swathes of what Vietnam considers its continental shelf, where it has awarded oil concessions.

Barbie is set to open in Philippine cinemas on July 19.

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The Commission on Education called for a review of the security policies of the University of the Philippines after a female student was sexually assaulted within the Diliman campus late Saturday evening.

This despicable criminal act is a wake-up call for the University of the Philippines to review and rationalize its security and safety policies, including its operational engagement with the Philippine National Police and other law enforcement agencies in order to make the UP Community safe and secure, CHED chairman Prospero de Vera III said.

In a statement, the UPD administration said it was working with the police to arrest the suspect and provide assistance to the victim.

It said more roving security personnel and university police officers will be deployed in different areas of the campus, especially after office hours.

De Vera said higher education institutions must remain safe spaces for students.

I encourage anyone and everyone who has any information regarding the incident to report to the authorities to aid in the investigation. The University must spare nothing to ensure that justice is obtained for the victim and her family, the CHED chairman said.

I have asked the University Administration to extend all possible assistance to the student and her family at this time of great challenge. I share with the entire UP Community our full support for her and her family in overcoming this difficult traumatic hurdle in their lives, added De Vera, who is also the chairperson of the UP Board of Regents.

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President Ferdinand Marcos Jr. rallied members of the Philippine Air Force (PAF) to brace themselves for geopolitical changes as he underscored the importance of maritime air patrol missions in upholding territorial integrity.

The days ahead will not be easy and will demand every ounce of your strength and resilience. The winds of change signal geopolitical changes around our region and other parts of the world that have yet to affect us, Mr. Marcos said during the PAFs 76th founding anniversary at Clark Air Base in Pampanga on Monday.

The Philippine Air Forces maritime air patrol missions are thus essential in upholding our territorial integrity and safeguarding Philippine maritime zones, added the commander-in-chief.

AIR FORCES 76TH. President Ferdinand R. Marcos Jr. salutes the line befor speaking in the 76th founding anniversary of the Philippine Air Force (PAF) at Clark Air Base in Mabalacat, Pampanga on Monday. Earlier, he saw the airmen and their aircraft in action  even forming a 76 in the sky with Cessnas (inset). at Colonel Ernesto Rabina Air Base in Capas, Tarlac. Rolando Mailo and Rey Baniquet

Mr. Marcos expressed his administrations strong commitment to support the Air Force as part of the Armed Forces modernization program.

Mr. Marcos, who led the awarding of outstanding PAF officers, also attended a PAF capability demonstration at the Col. Ernesto Rabina Air Base in Tarlac.

Earlier, Defense chief Gilbert Teodoro said the Philippines is not a pawn in the geopolitical maneuvering in the South China Sea.

Teodoro said the Philippines partnerships with other nations should not be linked to the territorial dispute in the Asia-Pacific region.

The Philippines is for the Philippines and we leverage that. And I think other countries want to help us because they view it as standing strong with democratic values, he said.

The Philippines is a value proposition by its own self, and is not a pawn of anybody else in the geopolitical battle thats raging within our area now, Teodoro added.

In April, China condemned the Philippines for expanding the number of military bases in the country that US troops can use under the Enhanced Defense Cooperation Agreement.

The Philippines and the US added four new military sites, with two of them near Taiwan.

Meanwhile, the AFP on Monday welcomed the announcement of Senate President Juan Miguel Zubiri that American defense officials are eyeing to convince their arms manufacturers to set up operations in the Philippines.

It is the AFPs desire to develop its capabilities to be self-reliant and be able to produce what it needs to defend our country, AFP spokesman Col. Medel Aguilar said in a message to Manila Standard.

Zubiri earlier said he met with US Deputy Assistant Secretary for Defense Lindsey Ford at the Pentagon last week, where they discussed modernization efforts of the Armed Forces of the Philippines as well as mutual concerns in the Indo-Pacific region.

Theyre willing to convince their arms manufacturers to move shop to the Philippines to partner with Filipino companies so that they will do the defense materials here in the Philippines, the Senate leader said.

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Paris, France  An Iranian appeals court has jailed for five years prominent activist and journalist Golrokh Iraee who has been held since her arrest at the onset of a protest movement, supporters said Sunday.

Iraee had refused to take part in the appeals court hearing over her sentence for taking part in illegal gatherings and violating national security, saying she did not recognise the legitimacy of the court, rights groups have said.

She was arrested last September in a police raid on her home at the start of the protest movement sparked by the death of Mahsa Amini who had been detained for allegedly violating the strict dress rules for women.

Golrokh Iraee, who been in Evin prison for 280 days, was sentenced to 5 years of imprisonment by the Tehran court, according to a Twitter account in her name run by supporters.

The court of first instance initially sentenced her to seven years in April.

Well known for her campaigns on issues including stoning sentences and prison conditions, Iraee is the wife of activist Arash Sadeghi who was also arrested during the protest movement but has now been released.

Some activists arrested during Irans crackdown on the protest movement have been released over the past few months as the protests abated in intensity.

But prominent women campaigners remain behind bars including the prize-winning Narges Mohammadi, labour rights activist Sepideh Gholian and environmental campaigners Niloufar Bayani and Sepideh Kashani.

Meanwhile the two women journalists who did most to expose the case of Mahsa Amini  Niloufar Hamedi and Elaheh Mohammadi, also both held since September  are on trial in Tehran on national security charges.

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Caracas, Venezuela  A pilot was killed Sunday when a Russian-made fighter jet crashed in a mountainous area in northern Venezuela during practice exercises ahead of a parade to mark the countrys independence, President Nicolas Maduro said.

I regret to inform that during the practice manoeuvres  an aircraft of our Bolivarian Military Aviation fell to the ground, causing the physical loss of the distinguished pilot Col. Paulino Jose Millan Sabino, the president wrote on Twitter.

The armed forces said in a statement that the plane crashed to the ground at around 09:45 am (1345 GMT) on July 2 in the municipality of Guaicaipuro, in Miranda state, some 31 kilometers (19 miles) from Caracas.

The plane, a Sukhoi-30, had two crew members. Both managed to eject, but Sabino died when he fell to the ground, the armed forces added.

In the past week, military aircraft have flown over Caracas and other cities in practice maneuvers to commemorate July 5, 1811, the date of the signing of the act declaring independence from Spain.

Venezuela and Russia, one of its main allies along with Iran, China and Turkey, have signed military cooperation agreements since the government of the late Hugo Chavez (1999-2013).

Among military equipment purchases, Venezuela acquired 24 Sukhoi Su-30MK2 aircraft in 2006 to replace the French Dassault Mirage.

In September 2015, the two crew members of a Sukhoi-30 were killed when they crashed to the ground while trying to intercept an illegal aircraft in the southeastern state of Apure, on the border with Colombia.

Two other military pilots were killed in October 2019 when another Sukhoi-30 crashed.

One of the deadliest accidents in Venezuelan military aviation occurred on May 3 2009, when a Russian-made MI-35 helicopter crashed to the ground, leaving 18 dead, 17 of them military personnel.

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Its been happening slowly but surelyJapanophilia in the Philippines is on the rise. Part of that narrative is Japanese fashion and an even more exciting excerpt is that Japanese luxe fashion labels, such as FRAY I.D. and SNIDEL, are finally in Manila.

Japanese are celebrated the world over  notwithstanding the Philippines  for churning out brands and innovative designs (whether in fashion or otherwise) that are aesthetically edgy, albeit very functional; relevant to the times, and yet also timeless.

The Philippines has always been fascinated by and patronized Japanese culture and creativity, and so the metros newest iconic Japanese lifestyle hub, Mitsukoshi BGC, which opened its doors last November 2022, brought both closer to the Japan-loving Filipino, and among its thrilling tenants, FRAY I.D. and SNIDEL.

Feeding into that narrative is Federal Retail Holdings, Incorporated (FRHI). As purveyors of Japanese fashion and culture, the retail group was drawn to both FRAY I.D.s and SNIDELs ability to bridge modernism, functionality, and art. Both brands have always made modern Japanese women, from all walks of life, feel vibrant and empowered  no matter the occasion or milestone  and FRHI wants to share that feeling with Filipinas.

Empowering women through dress is what propelled FRHIs vision of bringing SNIDEL and FRAY I.D to the fore of Philippine fashion, rendering the newly-minted store the ultimate and latest destination to offer Japanese clothing for the independent and established woman. Secondary to this was the companys desire to highlight the synergy between the Japanese and Filipino culture of dressing. Shares Micah Diaz, Head of Marketing for FRHI We have always known that Japanese brands are made with the utmost craftsmanship and quality. Japan, while an understatement, has been the industry leader for a long time in terms of fashion, especially street fashion; particularly the subcultures of minimalism, Lolita, cute or Kawaii.

The FRAY I.D. and SNIDEL store is located at the Ground Floor of Mistsukoshi BGC

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It is that time of the year!

With summer officially here, that means the 77th annual McDowell Junior Livestock Show is just around the corner. This show is open to any North Carolina youth that has not surpassed their 21st birthday as of Jan. 1, 2023.

The 2023 Livestock Show will be held Friday, Aug. 4, and Saturday, Aug. 5, at the McDowell Agricultural Center Inc., 188 Ag Services Drive, Marion.

This show is a great event for both new and experienced exhibitors. Applications opened June 28. There have been a few changes made to the show this year as it will be going by the ages of the Catawba Valley Youth Showmanship Circuit. The age ranges are as follows for all species:

Pee-wee: 6 and younger

Novice: 7-8

Junior: 9-11

Intermediate: 12-14

Senior: 15-18

Senior plus: 19-21.

The entry fees also have increased this year and entrants will no longer have to pay for showmanship separately unless they have a child who only wants to participate in showmanship.

They are:

Beef and dairy: $20 per animal

Sheep, goats, swine: $15 per animal

Chickens, ducks, rabbits: $5 per animal

Showmanship only: $10 per class

Another change that has been made is that beef and dairy heifers are the only ones showing by birthdate. Steers, sheep, goats and pigs will all be shown by weight.

The McDowell County Junior Livestock Show is hosted by the McDowell County Agricultural Youth Foundation. The Ag Youth Foundation has supported opportunities for McDowell County youth in agriculture since 1994.

To learn about sponsorship opportunities for the show, call Skyler Murray at 828-652-8104. You can access the show rules, schedule and online entry form below:

McDowell Junior Livestock Show rules 2023:

2023 McDowell Junior Livestock Show schedule:

The online entry form:

Deadline to register is Friday, July 28.

For questions about the show, contact Skyler Murray, Extension Agent, Agriculture  Livestock & Field Crops at 828-652-8104 or email skyler_murray@ncsu.edu.
Eight construction workers have died in Abidjan, Cote dIvoire, after a building under construction collapsed, the ministry of Construction has indicated.

The six-storey building, in the district of Cocody, where unpermitted construction works were going, collapsed last Friday killing five Ivorian workers and three others from Benin.

Nine other workers from Cote dIvoire and Burkina Faso were also wounded in the tragedy.

Construction minister Bruno Kone visited the scene Saturday and told media that the site has been under scrutiny since last year for failing to meet requirements. The level of technical expertise required for this type of buildings has not been implemented, he told the media. The incident is not the first. In February and March 2023, 13 people were killed in the collapse of two buildings, one under construction without authorization and the other built illegally.

The city of Abidjan, the economic capital of the West African country, is witnessing a boom in the real estate sector amid an acute housing crisis.
The Cape Verdean government launched a digital governance strategy, with more than 300 actions to be carried out in three years, budgeted at 60 million euros, to simplify processes and provide quality digital services.

With a period of validity for the three-year period 2023-2025, the Digital Governance Strategy for Cape Verde (EGDCV) will have nine areas of intervention, 80 strategic measures, including 56 structuring measures of an administrative, legislative, and technological nature.

The strategy will be accompanied by a plan with 34 goals and 313 actions, whose implementation is budgeted at about 60 million, according to the Minister of Modernization of the State and Public Administration, Edna Oliveira.

According to the minister, Cape Verde has had a successful path and has made great strides in terms of digital governance, but noted that citizens and businesses do not yet feel the full impact of technological development of the archipelago.

Therefore, it is essential that the definition of public policies on digital matters be made in a planned and transversal way, and that the actions that are developed are implemented in a safe, sustained and effective way. Hence the need to approve the Digital Governance Strategy for Cape Verde, said the minister during the presentation in Praia.

Edna Oliveira stressed that the strategy is a State document of Cape Verde, and not of any government or director, and will be the guide or the compass to know the current state, define goals and objectives and guide the way.

she also said that the document will provide the alignment of activities and promote the commitment of the different entities to provide a quality public service, in an agile and impactful way.

The strategy will address digitization and simplification of processes, technologies, integration and interoperability, digital literacy, infrastructure and security, legislation, good governance, digital public services, and access to and availability of information.
Mozambiques Minister of Transport and Communications defended the exploration of new international routes, as one of the solutions for the recovery of Linhas Aereas de Mocambique (LAM), noting that the carrier needs time to become relevant.

This [the creation of more routes outside the country by LAM] is a way of solving our problems, said Magala, after the inaugural flight between Maputo and Lusaka, the capital of Zambia.

Noting that the Mozambican flag carrier must take safe and significant steps to consolidate the recovery process, Magala said that the future involves exploring new destinations in Africa and other continents, travelling to lucrative destinations.

He considered as historic the unprecedented commercial flight of LAM between Maputo and Lusaka, a southern African city that 47 years ago hosted the Lusaka Accords, signed between the Mozambique Liberation Front (Frelimo) and the colonial authorities and that paved the way for the independence of the African country in 1975.

In view of the current transitional management of LAM by the South African company Fly Modern Ark, the Minister of Transport and Communications said that the Government will decide with much consideration on the next steps, without assuming whether the carrier will be privatized or not.

The goal is, in the near future, to sit down and make strategic decisions for the future, which will project our airline as a relevant company in the civil aviation space, he stressed. But first, continued Magala, there will have to be caution, so that the mistakes that led LAM to a situation of insolvency are not repeated. In May, LAMs new management Committee announced that the company was no longer insolvent after collecting, since April, 47.3 million dollars in state and private debts, but remains at risk of collapse.
Morocco is a committed and mobilized partner for Africas security, development and sustainability, said Minister of Industry and Trade, Ryad Mezzour at a conference under the theme Promoting African Countries, held as part of the third China-Africa Economic and Trade Expo (June 29-July 2).

Under the impetus of King Mohammed VI, Morocco made African integration and cooperation a cornerstone of its development vision for Africa, said Mr. Mezzour, pointing out that Morocco implemented major projects to improve communication and facilitate trade between different regions, and that the Kingdom has become a commercial hub between Africa, Europe, Asia and the Americas.

Chinas commitment to strengthen cooperation with Africa will be supported by its African partners, and Morocco is ready to provide this support, he added, stressing that duty requires to build on what has been achieved to increase mutual investment by consolidating economic ties through shared investment able to create more job opportunities.

As part of its openness policy, Morocco has signed more than 50 free trade agreements, including the African Continental Free Trade Area, which has strengthened the Kingdoms position as a gateway to a market of 2.3 billion consumers, he said.

In addition, Morocco has integrated global value chains to develop high-performance industrial sectors, including automotive, textile, agri-food, household electrical appliance, aerospace, marine, rail, medical equipment, medical products, hydro-industrial and energy sectors, he added. Currently, industrial products account for more than 80% of Moroccan exports, he said, noting that the automotive sector tops the list of exports, followed by fertilizers, food industry, textiles, electronics, and aeronautics.

In 2022, the best-selling cars in Europe were made in Morocco, as were the second-best-selling cars, he said.

Morocco continues to improve business climate and make it more suitable for national and international investors by carrying out major reforms, the most important of which was a new investment charter adopted in January 2023, which represented a historic turning point in terms of encouraging private investment, he noted.

Touching on Moroccan-Chinese relations, Mr. Mezzour said the historic visit made by King Mohammed VI to China in May 2016 paved the way for the establishment of a strategic partnership between Morocco and China, gave an unprecedented boost to the Moroccan-Chinese friendship, and enabled partnership between the two countries to achieve tangible results.

As a central country and a strategic player in Sino-African relations, Morocco is committed to strengthening the Sino-African partnership and ensuring the success of the Belt and Road initiative, the Minister said, stressing that the Kingdom was among the first African countries to join this initiative, which has raised the strategic partnership between Morocco and China to a higher level.

As a result, he explained, trade relations have developed at a sustained pace, with bilateral trade increasing by 50% between 2016 and 2021, making China Moroccos third largest trading partner and the largest in Asia, with a total trade volume of 7.7 billion dollars in 2022.

Speaking at the same conference, Ali Seddiki, general manager of the Moroccan agency for investment and export development (AMDIE), shed light on the assets that make the Kingdom an attractive and reliable destination for foreign investment, focusing on Moroccos emergence in several sectors.

The key to the continuous development for which Morocco is renowned is its clear vision of the future, which encourages it to make qualitative economic and social choices, he said, citing the Kingdoms new development model.

These choices have enabled Morocco to develop a productive and diversified economy, creating high added value as well as strengthening human capital and preparing it better for the future by offering opportunities to all, he noted.

Morocco now has flexible zones, development hubs and solid macroeconomic foundations, which have tripled the countrys GDP in less than 20 years, he added.

The stability and security enjoyed by the Kingdom mean that its future prospects remain promising, he pointed out, noting that Morocco ranks first among African countries in terms of high-quality infrastructure that meets international standards, with 150 industrial zones, 19 international airports and Africas first high-speed train.

He also pointed out that Tanger Med port is the first maritime bridge between the Mediterranean and Africa, being located just 14 km from Europe, with 184 communication lines to 71 countries, and handling 9 million containers a year.

Morocco took part in the China-Africa Economic and Trade Expo with a digital stand highlighting the Kingdoms African leadership in the economic, commercial and environmental fields, with particular emphasis on the automotive, renewable energies, pharmaceuticals and textiles sectors.

The stand also highlights the Kingdoms efforts to combat climate change and eliminate carbon emissions.

Organized every two years, this exhibition seeks to establish a new mechanism for economic and trade cooperation between China and Africa, and to serve as a new platform for economic and trade initiatives between the two parties.
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The barriers to accessing voluntary assisted dying (VAD) in Victoria cause considerable distress for patients, according to new research.

Published in the Medical Journal of Australia, the research examined the barriers faced by patients and their families seeking to access VAD in Victoria as well as what supports were in place.

The research made several recommendations, including:

improving access to VAD in Victoria;

increasing the pool of doctors willing and qualified to be involved in VAD;

requiring doctors who will not provide VAD to refer patients to a willing doctor; and

investing in system supports, such as adequate funding for both the statewide pharmacy service and VAD care navigators.

Professor Ben White, Professor of End-of-Life Law and Regulation, and his colleagues at the Australian Center for Health Law Research at the Queensland University of Technology (QUT), conducted the study with 32 family caregivers and one patient.

"Our research is part of a wider four-year study looking at the regulation of VAD in Australia, Canada and Belgium," Professor White said.

"Our overall goal is to find the most appropriate way to regulate VAD to make sure that it's safe but also accessible for patients. One of the key bits of evidence that was missing to date was that patient experience and how they experience the process of seeking VAD, such as what are the barriers to access and what are the supports already in place."

Ruthie Jeanneret, a Ph.D. student also at the Australian Center for Health Law Research at QUT, said one of the key barriers for people wishing to access VAD was finding an appropriate doctor.

"Participants explained that it was particularly difficult to find the first doctor or 'coordinating medical practitioner' to help them through the process," Ms Jeanneret said. "The second barrier was the time that it actually took to get through the entirety of the VAD application process."

Another barrier was the ban on medical practitioners using telehealth.

"Telehealth is not allowed to be used for VAD consultations, which means that all consultations have to occur in person, which really affects people in regional areas and people with neurodegenerative conditions."

The study also looked at institutional objections to VAD, with some facilities not allowing some or any aspects of the VAD process to occur in their facilities.

Professor White said the study also examined what supports were working well for people seeking to access VAD in Victoria. "The role of the VAD care navigators was absolutely crucial," White said.

"These are state-funded health professionals who are based at Peter MacCallum Cancer Center in Melbourne and at five regional health centers.

"Their role is to assist patients under the system and help them through it.

"Our research found the people in these roles really helped patients and their families understand the process and navigate the health system."

More information: Ben P White et al, Access to voluntary assisted dying in Victoria: a qualitative study of family caregivers' perceptions of barriers and facilitators, Medical Journal of Australia (2023). DOI: 10.5694/mja2.52004 Journal information: Medical Journal of Australia

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Electron micrographs of hepatitis C virus purified from cell culture. Scale bar is 50 nanometers. Credit: Center for the Study of Hepatitis C, The Rockefeller University.

Only one-third of individuals diagnosed with hepatitis C have been cured in the decade since cures for the disease became available, according to a study published Thursday from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

Hepatitis C is a viral inflammation of the liver that can be asymptomatic yet spread through blood or other bodily fluids. Without treatment, hepatitis C is a chronic condition that can lead to liver cancer, liver failure or other comorbidities.

The Food and Drug Administration approved the first highly effective direct-acting antiviral drugs to cure hepatitis C in 2013. Treatment occurs over the course of 8 to 12 weeks and has a 95% success rate.

But almost 15,000 Americans still die from hepatitis C annually.

"These deaths could have been prevented. Thousands of people are dying every year in our country, and many more are suffering from an infection that has been curable for over 10 years," said Jonathan Mermin, director of the National Center for HIV, Viral Hepatitis, STD, and TB Prevention, in a call Thursday with reporters.

Despite the availability of these cures, commercial data showed only one in six uninsured adults under 40 with hepatitis C have been cured, according to a Morbidity and Mortality Report published Thursday examining hepatitis C infections from 2013-2022.

The highest cure rates were among adults with commercial insurance or covered through Medicare, but both rates were still below 50%.

Carolyn Wester, director of CDC's division of viral hepatitis, said the high cost of these treatments and insurance policies that limit or delay who is eligible to provide or receive treatment result in reduced access, both serve as significant barriers.

Patients with Medicaid coverage and who are incarcerated also experience barriers to access.

Francis Collins, the former longtime NIH director who leads the White House National Hepatitis C Elimination Program, said the data "highlights an urgency for a bold response to hepatitis C."

Collins previewed his pitch for a national plan last fall, whereby the federal government could secure a subscription to these drugs to expand access at a lower, fixed cost. Louisiana implemented the first such state model in 2019.

In March, the White House requested Congress to include $11.3 billion to establish a national hepatitis program in its budget, adding that by 2032 the program would reduce annual Medicaid spending by hundreds of millions of dollars.

Collins, speaking Thursday, pointed to a separate analysis published in April that estimated the program could save the federal government $13.3 billion over 10 years and $44.2 billion over 20 years.

Neither chamber has released its Labor-HHS-Education spending bill for fiscal 2024, but Collins is hopeful to find a way forward.

"There is interest in the Congress, both the House and the Senate, across parties, but it is still not to the point I think to be able to say exactly how that is going to take shape," he said. "A lot of this depends upon the specific legislative language and what the [Congressional Budget] office will conclude as far as the cost issues because that's obviously something everybody's waiting for."

He pointed to encouragement from Senate Health, Education, Labor and Pensions Committee ranking member Bill Cassidy, R-La., a hematologist who helped lead the Louisiana pilot.

"Certainly working with him and his staff over the course of the last year has been critical in shaping this effort," said Collins, who also credited the support of Rep. Hank Johnson, D-Ga., who has spoken publicly about previously battling the disease. "I think there is reason for us to be optimistic this could happen and I'm not ready yet to talk about what we might do if it didn't."

Collins also emphasized the need for increased and amplified hepatitis C testing, which is currently a two step process. He pointed to an effort in collaboration with NIH and FDA to gain approval for a rapid point-of-care test to pave the way for testing and treatment in the same medical visit.

"This is compassionate care, but it can also contribute to deficit reduction," said Collins. "It's rare, in my experience, to have an opportunity to both save lives and save money but that's exactly what this is. I don't know too many people who have looked at this situation and not felt like we have to do something."

2023 CQ-Roll Call, Inc.

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Compliance with the U.S. Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS) Price Transparency Rule is positively associated with penalty increases, according to a study published online June 28 in JAMA Network Open.

Edward Kong, from Harvard Medical School in Boston, and Yunan Ji, Ph.D., from Georgetown University in Washington, D.C., examined the association between financial penalties and acute care hospital compliance with the 2021 CMS Price Transparency Rule. The responses of 4,377 acute care hospitals in the United States operating in 2021 and 2022 to changes in financial penalties in the context of a federal rule requiring hospitals to disclose privately negotiated prices were examined using an instrumental variable design.

The researchers found that from 2021 to 2022, there was an increase in compliance from 70.4 to 87.7%, with 90.2% of the hospitals reporting prices in at least one year. From 2021 to 2022, there was an increase observed in noncompliance penalties, from $109,500/year to a mean of $510,976/year.

In 2022, penalties were substantial, averaging 0.49, 0.53, and 1.3% of total hospital revenue, total hospital costs, and total employee wages, respectively. There was a significant positive association seen for compliance increases with penalty increases: a 2.9 percentage point increase in compliance was seen in association with a $500,000 increase in penalty. When controlling for observable hospital characteristics, the results were robust.

"Financial penalties may be a valuable tool for ensuring compliance with CMS policy when fines are sufficiently large, noncompliance is readily observable and well defined, and enforcement is credible," the authors write.

More information: Edward Kong et al, Provision of Hospital Price Information After Increases in Financial Penalties for Failure to Comply With a US Federal Hospital Price Transparency Rule, JAMA Network Open (2023). DOI: 10.1001/jamanetworkopen.2023.20694 Journal information: JAMA Network Open

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Figure 1: Upon activation by the specific agonist LY500307 ER binds to estrogen receptor binding elements (ERE) inregulatory regions of GPR141 and ELMO1 genes and suppresses their transcription, which in turn leads to diminishedRhoC activation, reduced actin-based cell migration and metastasis. Credit: Oncotarget (2023). DOI: 10.18632/oncotarget.28425

A new editorial paper titled "ER as a mediator of estrogen signaling in inflammatory breast cancer" has been published in Oncotarget.

In this new editorial, researchers Harika Nagandla and Christoforos Thomas from Houston Methodist Neal Cancer Center discuss inflammatory breast cancer (IBC)a rare and aggressive form of breast cancer that accounts for 24% of all new breast cancer cases detected in the United States. Even with the application of standard multi-modality treatment approach that incorporates neoadjuvant chemotherapy, radiation and surgery, the 5-year survival rate for IBC is only about 4050%. Breast cancer can be typically stratified into different types based on the presence of molecular drivers such estrogen receptor (ER), progesterone receptor (PR) or human epidermal growth factor receptor 2 (HER2), which inform the treatment choice.

For IBC, there is a substantially higher incidence of ER negativity compared with other forms of breast cancer that can reach up to 60%. A specific targetable driver signaling pathway has not been identified so far. About one in three patients already have distant metastasis at the time of diagnosis, contributing to the aggressiveness and poor outcomes associated with IBC.

Despite the absence of ER from the majority of IBC tumors, estrogen signaling has been implicated in progression of the disease through ER-independent pathways. ER is a ligand activated transcription factor that mediates effects of estrogen, along with ER in different tissues during growth and development by regulating transcription of target genes. Tumor suppressive effects of ER have been documented in diverse cancer types such as thyroid, kidney, prostate, glioblastoma, ovarian and breast cancer.

The researchers state, "The work from our group establishes ER as a tumor suppressor in IBC by demonstrating its strong antimetastatic activity in preclinical models of the disease and delineating the mechanism of action."

More information: Harika Nagandla et al, ER as a mediator of estrogen signaling in inflammatory breast cancer, Oncotarget (2023). DOI: 10.18632/oncotarget.28425 Journal information: Oncotarget

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Credit: Unsplash/CC0 Public Domain

There's growing awareness public dental programs are unable to meet the demand for services. Private dental care is increasingly unaffordable, and millions of Australians go without the treatment they need.

The potentially avoidable costs to the health-care system and to people's quality of life has led to increased pressure for a Medicare-style universal insurance scheme for dental care (Denticare) or the inclusion of dental care into Medicare.

Affordable and available dental care is crucial to addressing inequality in Australia. Teeth and gum problems can affect everything from your life expectancy and general health to your job prospects. The "dental divide" between rich and poor actually replicates disadvantage in Australian society.

So how did we get here? And what might change look like?

Why wasn't dental included in Medicare in the first place?

The prevailing wisdom is that when the Whitlam Government put Medibank (the precursor to Medicare) forward in 1974, dental care was not included because of cost and politicsthe battle with doctors' groups opposed the new health-care insurance plan was difficult enough without taking on dental groups too.

There is, however, little to no evidence on the extent to which the Whitlam government pushed for dental to be included or how much it was opposed by dentists. It seems it was not on the agenda when Medicare was restored by the Hawke government.

Financial issues aside, there are two likely reasons dental wasn't included.

Firstly, medicine and dentistry remain isolated practices that have never been treated the same way by the health-care system, health insurance funds, policymakers and the public.

Despite all the evidence on the importance of oral health, too often it is seen as merely a "nice-to-have."

Secondly, the provision of public dental health servicesoften linked to dental hospitals and dental schoolshas long been seen (especially by Coalition governments) as the responsibility of states and territories. These services have always been directed at children, low-income adults, and defined disadvantaged groups.

A short history

Section 51(xxiiiA) of the Australian Constitution, added in 1946, accords dental services the same status as medical services. This section gives the Commonwealth the power to legislate and fund these services but it's not obligated to do so.

The Whitlam government was the first to provide national funding and direction to these state-based programs through the Australian School Dental Program.

Under the Keating government, the Commonwealth took a more substantial role in the funding of dental services with the introduction of the Commonwealth Dental Health Program, directed at financially disadvantaged adults.

This began in January 1994 but was abolished by the Howard government in 1996.

The Gillard government introduced National Partnership Agreements for Public Dental Services for Adults, which currently provide A$107.8 million annually to the states and territories.

The barriers to universal dental care

Proposals to expand Medicare to include dental services have been variously estimated to cost between $5.6 billion in additional Commonwealth spending per year (according to the Grattan Institute) and $7.5 billion a year (according to The Greens' 2022 election policy).

These figures don't factor in the savings made to health-care costs due to preventable dental cavities and gum disease (estimated by the Australian Dental Association at $818 million per year) and reduced productivity. Nevertheless, this is a huge budget impost. It would require increases in the Medicare levy, and/or increased taxation and/or cuts to the private health insurance rebate.

The other approach is to reduce costs by limiting the number of people covered and/or the number and type of services covered.

Means testing access to Medicare Benefits Schedule items for dental care is risky; it could easily lead to means testing of access to other MBS items.

Limiting the type of services covered is possible but would require a huge amount of work and endless debate on what constitutes basic and necessary services.

The establishment of an entirely separate scheme (the Denticare model) will still require enormous amounts of evidence-based decision-making around who and what is covered, how this is paid for, and what subsequently happens to current federally- and state-funded dental programs.

There's more we can do

Previous attempts to incorporate dental services into Medicare have arguably failed. Researchers have described the Chronic Dental Disease Scheme (introduced by the Howard government) as as "the most expensive and controversial public dental policy in Australian history." As a 2012 analysis showed, it blew out its budget and did not result in dental health improvements.

The current Child Dental Benefits Schedule has a low uptake. Less than 40% of those eligible for the scheme actually use it.

As I wrote in 2014, there is plenty Australia could do to better integrate dental and medical care, including focusing on best-value investments such as fluoridation and preventive services. It's worth noting many of the preventive actions needed to address obesity (for example, encouraging breast feeding and limiting sugary beverages) will also improve dental health.

We could also expand emergency dental services in hospital emergency departments and create a "Dental Health Service Corps" of dentists and other medical professionals to help in rural and remote areas.

Almost a decade later, little as been done. Sadly, in the many years I've been writing about the dental divide, the only movement I've seen is in the increasingly bad numbers around waiting lists and costs to patients.

A Senate Select Committee is currently conducting yet another inquiry into dental services in Australia. Its just-released interim report, which discussed some of the proposals heard so far by the committee and some possible questions for it to consider, described Australia's current oral and dental health system as "broken." Public hearings, which will inform the committee's final report, will be held later in the year.

Hopefully, this inquiry will (finally) drive politicians to see dental care as essential to health, well-being and a fair societyand to act.

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.
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The U.S. Food and Drug Administration on Thursday approved a costly single-dose gene therapy for patients with severe hemophilia A, a life-threatening hereditary bleeding disorder.

The treatment is not cheap: Roctavian will cost $2.9 million for a single infusion, the Associated Press reported.

"Hereditary hemophilia A is a potentially serious bleeding disorder. Severe cases of hemophilia A can cause life-threatening health issues due to increased risk of uncontrolled bleeding," Dr. Peter Marks, director of the FDA's Center for Biologics Evaluation and Research, said in an agency news release. "Today's approval represents an important advance in providing treatment options for patients with this bleeding disorder, and treatment with gene therapy may reduce the need for ongoing routine therapy."

For patients, this means a potential reduction in uncontrolled bleeding. Left untreated, severe hemophilia A can cause life-threatening bleeding into vital organs, including the kidneys and brain.

Drug maker BioMarin Pharmaceutical Inc. told the AP that the drug's astronomical price tag reflects "the possibility of freedom from years" of infusions with other medications. Those infusions typically run about $800,000 each year for patients, the AP said.

Hemophilia A is caused by a mutation on a gene which produces a protein that enables blood to clot. This protein is called Factor VIII. The condition primarily affects males. How frequent and severe bleeding episodes are depends on the amount of FVIII protein a person produces. In about 60% of cases, people with severe hemophilia A have less than 1% of FVIII in their blood.

Before now, treatment has involved FVIII replacement therapy or an antibody-based medication, the FDA said.

Roctavian is a viral vector that carries the gene for Factor VIII. It reduces the risk of uncontrolled bleeding by delivering the gene into the liver, to increase blood levels of FVIII.

The approval was based on a multinational study in adult men ages 18 to 70 who had previously had FVIII replacement therapy determined the drug's safety and effectiveness. A total of 112 patients were followed for at least three years.

Those treated in the study had far fewer bleeding incidents. Their mean annualized bleeding rate dropped from 5.4 times each year to 2.6. Most of those who received Roctavian also took corticosteroids to suppress their immune system. The FDA noted that treatment response may decrease over time.

Adverse reactions seen in the study included mild changes in liver function, headache, nausea, vomiting, fatigue, abdominal pain and infusion-related reactions.

The treatment is not without risks. The FDA recommends close monitoring for infusion-related reactions and elevated liver enzymes. An increase in FVIII activity could potentially increase the risk of blood clots, the FDA noted. The product also carries a potential cancer risk.

More information: The National Hemophilia Association has more on hemophilia A.

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Credit: POSTECH

The Health Insurance Review & Assessment Service revealed that over the last year, more than 370,000 Koreans sought medical help for infertility or difficulties in conceiving. This represents a 4.7% increase in infertility-related treatments and a 16% rise in subfertility-related treatments compared to the 2018 data.

Korea's birth rate may be declining, but an increasing number of people are seeking medical attention for these issues. These conditions may stem from numerous factors, so an accurate determination of the cause is crucial. Both the individual's gender and the nature of the problem must be taken into account before deciding on the appropriate treatment.

A healthy endometrium plays a pivotal role in successful pregnancies. A thin endometrium reduces the likelihood of effective embryo implantation, with a high chance of subsequent miscarriagea significant contributing factor to female infertility. Current treatment approaches, such as hormone therapy and endometrial injections, have shown limited success.

A joint research team from Pohang University of Science and Technology (POSTECH, President Moo Hwan Kim) and CHA University, took one step closer to personalized treatment by developing a gel that mimics the environment of uterine cells, inducing endometrial regeneration and elucidating its mechanism.

The team, led by Professor Dong-Woo Cho from Department of Mechanical Engineering, Professor Jinah Jang from the Department of Mechanical Engineering and the Department of Convergence IT Engineering, Ph.D. student Tugce Sen from the Department of Mechanical Engineering at POSTECH in collaboration with Professor Youn-Jung Kang and Dr. Jungho Ahn from the Department of Biochemistry at the School of Medicine and Ph.D. student Danbi Lee from the Department of Biomedical Science at the School of Life Science, CHA University, developed a hydrogel using a uterus-derived decellularized extracellular matrix (UdECM).

Their study demonstrated that this hydrogel could regenerate the endometrium, and for the first time, revealed the mechanism controlling this process. The research has been published in Advanced Functional Materials.

Decellularized extracellular matrices (dECMs) are assemblies of biomolecules with cellular components, such as the nucleus and cell membranes, removed. These matrices closely resemble the in vivo environment, so they are used in regeneration and transplantation of tissue and organs such as the heart and kidneys. They are also employed in tissue fabrication through 3D printing.

The team developed a hydrogel based on UdECMs, with characteristics from two different tissues: the entire uterine tissue and a specific layer of the endometrium. The protein composition of the hydrogel closely resembled the actual endometrial components and was tested in animal models to verify its effectiveness. When injected, the hydrogel was found to induce the recovery of the endometrial thickness in mice, creating a favorable environment for embryo implantation. As a biomaterial, the hydrogel has low cytotoxicity, ensuring a 90% survival rate of implanted embryos.

The research team further discovered the involvement of insulin-like growth factor (IGF1) and insulin growth factor-binding protein (IGFBP3) in endometrial regeneration. This discovery provides a platform for research on endometrial regeneration going forward. In addition, depending on the tissue from which the hydrogel is made, such as the endometrium and muscles, the team confirmed therapeutic effects against various conditions such as intrauterine adhesions and repeated implantation failures. This opens the way for personalized treatments based on the state of the patient's endometrium.

Professor Dong-Woo Cho, who led the research, is optimistic about their research potential, stating "We have successfully developed a uterine tissue-specific hydrogel for endometrial regeneration and successful pregnancy. I am hopeful that further research into its clinical application can bring hope to patients grappling with infertility."

More information: Jungho Ahn et al, UterusDerived Decellularized Extracellular MatrixMediated Endometrial Regeneration and Fertility Enhancement, Advanced Functional Materials (2023). DOI: 10.1002/adfm.202214291 Journal information: Advanced Functional Materials
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Contrary to the predominant view held since the eighteenth century, the French philosopher and physician saw the organism as a totality interacting with its environment rather than a mere aggregation of parts whose functioning depended only on the right amount of organic substances . Credit: 1U2M1/Wikimedia Commons

The constitution of the World Health Organization (WHO) defines health as "a state of complete physical, mental and social well-being and not merely the absence of disease or infirmity." The definition dates from the 1940s, but even then the thinking behind it was hardly novel.

Similar concepts can be found in antiquity, in Eastern as well as Western societies, but in Europe, the cradle of Western culture, the view that mental well-being was part of health enjoyed little prestige in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, owing to a reductionist understanding of disease as strictly somatic (relating only to the body). This outlook eventually began to be questioned. One of its leading critics in the twentieth century was French philosopher and physician Georges Canguilhem (1904-1995).

A disciple of Gaston Bachelard (1884-1962), a colleague of Jean-Paul Sartre (1905-1980), Paul Nizan (1905-1940) and Raymond Aron (1905-1983), and a major influence on Michel Foucault (1926-1984), Canguilhem was one of the foremost French intellectuals of the postwar years. Jacques Lacan (1901-1981), Gilles Deleuze (1925-1995) and Jacques Derrida (1930-2004) were among the thinkers who took inspiration from his ideas.

Canguilhem began studying medicine in the mid-1930s and earned his medical doctorate in 1943, by which time he had already taught philosophy in high schools for many years (having qualified in 1927). Another significant tack in his life course occurred during World War Two. He had long been both a pacifist and an anti-fascist.

Following the French surrender in 1940, he refused to continue teaching under the Vichy regime and joined the Resistance, fighting with the rural guerrillas of the Maquis. In this historically and politically complex period, he apparently set out to train as a physician in order to have practical experience as well as book learning and to work on the history of the life sciences. He was awarded the Croix de Guerre and the Medaille da la Resistance for organizing a field hospital while under attack in the Auvergne.

In an article published in the journal History and Philosophy of the Life Sciences, Emiliano Sfara, who has a Ph.D. in philosophy from the University of Montpellier and was a postdoctoral fellow at the University of Sao Paulo (USP) in Brazil from 2018 to 2022, argues that Canguilhem's concepts of "technique," "technical activity" and "practice" derived from Immanuel Kant's "Critique of Judgment" (1790) and influenced Canguilhem's decision to study medicine.

"Earlier historiographical research showed how Kant influenced Canguilhem, especially the concept of 'knowledge' developed in Kant's 'Critique of Pure Reason' as the unification of heterogeneous data by an organizing intellect, and the idea of the 'organism' as a totality of interdependent and interacting parts, inspired by the 'Critique of Judgment.' I tried to show in the article the importance, and roots in Kant, of a third cluster of ideas relating to the concept of 'technique' in Canguilhem's work, beginning in mid-thirties," said Sfara, currently a researcher at the National Institute of Science and Technology for Interdisciplinary and Transdisciplinary Studies in Ecology and Evolution (INCT IN-TREE), hosted by the Federal University of Bahia (UFBA).

"Section 43 of Kant's 'Critique of Judgment' makes a distinction between technical capacity and science as a theoretical faculty. Technique is the subject's concrete practice operating in a certain context, a vital movement of construction or manufacturing of objects and tools that enable a person to live in their environment. This is not reducible to science. Analogously, Canguilhem postulates that science is posterior to technique. Practice comes first; theory arises later. This movement is evident in art. True, the artist starts out with a project. But the development of the artwork isn't confined to the project, which is reconstructed as the process unfolds. This practical element of the subject's interaction with the environment, which has its roots in Kant's theories, was very important to the evolution of Canguilhem's thought. It even influenced his decision to study medicine, as well as the conception of medicine he developed," continued Sfara.

Sfara explained that while Canguilhem espoused the values of the Parti Radical in his youth, in the mid-thirties he moved left, without becoming a pro-Soviet Stalinist. Later on, according to some scholars who knew him and are still active (such as the Moroccan philosopher and mathematician Hourya Benis Sinaceur), Canguilhem gave primacy to the egalitarian principles symbolized by the French Republic's motto "Liberte, Egalite, Fraternite."

His main contributions were to medicine and philosophy of science. His most important work, "The Normal and the Pathological" (1966), is basically an expansion of his 1943 doctoral thesis.

"In his original thesis, Canguilhem broke with part of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century French medical tradition and formulated ideas that are very much part of medicine today. Taking a purely analytical and quantitative approach, physicians like Francois Broussais (1772-1838) believed disease resulted from a surplus or lack of some organic substance, such as blood. Bloodletting was regularly used as a form of treatment. France imported 33 million leeches from southern Europe in the first half of the nineteenth century. Canguilhem saw the organism as a totality that interacted with its environment rather than a mere aggregation of parts whose functioning depended only on a 'normal' amount of the right organic substances," Safra said.

In Canguilhem, the movement changes. Instead of transiting from the part to the whole, he moves from the whole to the part (as does Kant in the "Critique of Judgment"). He views the organism not as a machine but as an integral self-regulating totality. Life cannot be deduced from physical and chemical laws. One must start from the living being to understand life. Practice is the bridge that connects this totality to the environment. At the same time as it changes the environment, practice changes the organism and helps determine its physiological states.

"So Canguilhem implies that in order to find a state called normal, i.e., healthy, a given organism has to adapt its own operating rules to the outside world in the course of interacting concretely and practically with the environment. A human organism, for example, is in a 'normal' state when its pulse slows sharply after a period of long daily running. A case in point is the long-distance runner, who has to train every day," Safra said.

"For Canguilhem, disease is due to inadaptation between the part, the organism and the environment, and often manifests itself as a feeling of malaise. Adaptive mechanisms in the organism can correct pathological dysfunctions," he concluded.

The article resulted from Sfara's postdoctoral research supervised by Marcio Suzuki.

More information: Emiliano Sfara, From technique to normativity: the influence of Kant on Georges Canguilhem's philosophy of life, History and Philosophy of the Life Sciences (2023). DOI: 10.1007/s40656-023-00573-8
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The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention reported on June 26, 2023, that five cases of locally transmitted malaria had been identifiedfour in Florida and one in Texassince May 2023. These are the first cases of locally acquired mosquito-borne malaria in the U.S. since 2003.

The Conversation spoke with Dr. Rajiv Chowdhury, a global health expert from Florida International University, about the significance of these cases and why they're appearing now.

1. What is malaria and how did these people become infected?

Malaria is a serious and sometimes life-threatening disease caused by the bite of a female mosquito from the genus Anopheles, the vector that transmits malaria.

The most common symptoms are fever, chills, headaches, muscle aches and fatigue. These symptoms typically occur from 10 to 15 days after people are infected with the parasite. However, if untreated, more severe symptoms may appear that include impaired consciousness, difficulty breathing, convulsions, abnormal bleeding and more, which can ultimately lead to death.

The five cases in Florida and Texas were caused by the Plasmodium vivax parasite, which is the most common malaria-causing parasite strain outside of the African continent. All are believed to be locally acquired, which means they were not connected to any international travel. In addition, there is no evidence to suggest that the cases in the two states are related. Plasmodium vivax is the most globally widespread of all Plasmodium strains and can cause severe, often fatal, infections.

All five patients have reportedly recovered, and surveillance for additional cases is ongoing. When traveling overseas this summer, heres what to remember.

2. Why might these cases be surfacing now?

There could be several factors driving the emergence of locally acquired malaria.

For one, climate change is causing a shift in weather patterns, some of which can worsen malaria conditions. A higher average surface temperature from global warming could lead to higher mosquito migration in areas that were previously uninhabitable by Anopheles mosquitoes.

These higher temperatures could also enhance the growth rate and transmissibility of the parasites responsible for malaria. These include Plasmodium parasite variants such as vivax, knowlesi and falciparum.

The effects of climate change can also lead to higher rainfall and sea level rise in many placesboth of which can result in more areas or open spaces with stagnant water that typically serve as effective breeding grounds for mosquitoes.

Given these changes in local conditions, more cases could occur in populations that were previously "immunologically naive" to malaria. In other words, since these people have never been exposed to it, their immune systems are ill-equipped to fight it.

Furthermore, when people travel to countries or areas where climate-driven malaria cases are on the rise, there is a greater possibility of bringing those infections back to the U.S., where local mosquitoes could be exposed to the parasite in an infected person's blood.

Lastly, due to misuse and overuse of common antimalarial medications, such as artemisinin, antimicrobial resistance has become a major problem in many regions of the world. This drives up the number of drug-resistant cases, the severity of the illness and the possibility of larger outbreaks.

This is further complicated by emerging resistance to insecticides among Anopheles mosquitoes. With early diagnosis, malaria is very treatable.

3. How can people help prevent malaria transmission?

The CDC and the Florida Department of Health are urging people to protect themselves by using bug spray, avoiding areas where mosquitoes congregate and covering exposed skin.

Precautions also include what's known as "drain and cover"in other words, draining standing water to prevent mosquitoes from multiplying and using screens to prevent mosquitoes from entering through doors and windows. Health departments also note that it's important to drain or discard containers that can collect rainwater, such as flower pots, old tires and buckets.

4. What are the available malaria treatments?

There are several medicines used to prevent and treat malaria. The choice of medication typically depends on the type of malaria, whether a malaria parasite is resistant to a medicine, the weight or age of the person infected with malaria and whether the person is pregnant.

Most malaria medicines are taken in pill form. The most common include combination therapy medicines that include a class of semi-synthetic drugs called artemisinins. These kill malaria parasites by damaging their proteins and are usually the most effective treatment against malaria. Chloroquine phosphate, a medicine that has been used for decades to prevent and treat malaria, is now recommended for treatment of infection with Plasmodium vivax, but only in places where the parasite is still sensitive to this medicine. Lastly, there's primaquine, a class of antimalarial drugs typically added to complement another treatment to prevent any relapse of infection.

5. Are vaccines against malaria available?

Nearly half of the global population is currently at risk of malaria, with almost 250 million cases and 620,000 deaths worldwide, mostly affecting children. Therefore, in October 2021, the World Health Organization began recommending the widespread use of a malaria vaccine known as RTS,S/ASOI for children who live in moderate- to high-risk areas.

This is the first-ever vaccine for a human parasitic infection. Trials show that the vaccine can significantly reduce malaria, including severe malaria, among young children.

A group of scientists from the U.K. reported a modified version of this vaccine, called R21, in September 2022. The early-phase clinical trial reported that the new vaccine is 80% effective at preventing disease in young children. However, real-world trials for this new candidate vaccine are still ongoing.

Other vaccine candidates are currently being developed by BioNTech, the company behind the Pfizer/BioNTech mRNA COVID-19 vaccine, and through joint efforts between Novavax and the Bill & Melinda Gates Medical Research Institute.

While new malaria vaccines will be a major boost for curbing malaria worldwide, it will be critical for health departments to continue emphasizing other preventive strategies, especially in newly affected areas like Florida and Texas.

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.
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Outcomes after a stay in the intensive care unit for patients in cohorts with versus without Alzheimer disease and related dementia (ADRD). Credit: American Journal of Critical Care (2023). DOI: 10.4037/ajcc2023328

Older patients with Alzheimer's disease and related dementia (ADRD) have almost twice the risk of dying soon after they are discharged from an intensive care unit (ICU) and within the 12 months afterward, according to research published in the American Journal of Critical Care.

The study, "Mortality and Discharge Location of Intensive Care Patients With Alzheimer Disease and Related Dementia," examines data from a large, geographically diverse sample of patients enrolled in Medicare Advantage (MA) plans. The authors believe it is the only published study that examines ICU outcomes among MA enrollees with ADRD, and one of the few that focus on patients with ADRD covered by MA plans.

The study found that older adults with ADRD who were admitted to an ICU were much less likely to be discharged home and faced almost twice the risk of death in the same calendar month as discharge and the 12 months after discharge when compared with patients who did not have an ADRD diagnosis.

Co-author Mary Lynn Davis-Ajami, Ph.D., FNP, RN, is a health services researcher with expertise using national databases to focus on cost and quality outcomes in complex chronic disease, often with policy implications. Currently, she is transitioning to join the faculty at Michigan State College of Nursing, in East Lansing, as associate dean for academic affairs. She worked with colleagues from Indiana University and other institutions to conduct this study.

"Patients with ADRD often have a limited life expectancy, which can be further shortened after an ICU admission or other acute event," she said. "Our findings raise questions about proactive strategies to diminish the likelihood of an ICU admission or early discussions with families and caregivers about palliative care."

Deaths in the ADRD cohort were almost twice as common within the same calendar month after discharge as well as within the following 12-month period, compared with deaths in the non-ADRD cohort.

In addition to short-term and long-term mortality, the analysis revealed that a little more than one-third (37.6%) of patients with ADRD went home after hospital discharge, compared with more than two-thirds (68.6%) of non-ADRD patients.

Being dual-eligible for Medicare and Medicaid further raised patients' risk of not being discharged home from the ICU, as well as dying within the same calendar month after discharge and within 12 months following their discharge.

The observational study used Optum's de-identified Clinformatics Data Mart Database version 8.1, which covers the period from 2016 to 2019. The analysis included adults 67 years of age or older with continuous MA coverage who were first admitted to an ICU in 2018. ADRD and comorbid conditions were identified from claims.

After applying exclusion criteria, the final study population included 145,342 patients with a first-time admission to the ICU in 2018 and who were discharged from the ICU. Among this group, 10.5% (15,289) had a diagnosis of ADRD.

The analysis did not examine reasons for the initial ICU admission and causes of death or differentiate between types of ADRD or between mild and severe dementia, and other elements that might influence outcomes.

More information: Mary Lynn Davis-Ajami et al, Mortality and Discharge Location of Intensive Care Patients With Alzheimer Disease and Related Dementia, American Journal of Critical Care (2023). DOI: 10.4037/ajcc2023328

Provided by American Association of Critical-Care Nurses (AACN)
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Glioblastoma (histology slide). Credit: Wikipedia/CC BY-SA 3.0

The median length of survival after diagnosis of glioblastoma is 14 months, but some of these brain tumors are more aggressive and resistant to treatment than others, and a new study from Sylvester Comprehensive Cancer Center at the University of Miami Miller School of Medicine suggests reactivation of an ancient retrovirus may be at least partly to blame.

"Our lab found that an evolutionary dormant retrovirus from 6 million years ago, HML-2, a subtype of HERV-K, contributes to brain tumor formation. We demonstrated for the first time that this virus, when reactivated, plays a role in defining the stem-cell state of high-grade gliomas, promoting an aggressive form of cancer," said neurosurgeon Dr. Ashish Shah, principal investigator at Sylvester's Brain Tumor Initiative (BTI), and first author of a paper published in the Journal of Clinical Investigation.

Cancer stem cells, a subpopulation of cells in cancers, drive tumor initiation and development and influence how aggressive and resistant to treatment a cancer will be.

This study, conducted by researchers from Sylvester, Georgetown University and the National Institutes of Health, found that HML-2 altered stem cell programming by activating a gene-regulating protein called OCT4. HML-2 was previously implicated in the genesis and development of other cancers, but this is believed to be the first study showing the virus' effects in gliomas and describing the molecular and cellular mechanisms involved.

"Our results suggest that HML-2 fundamentally contributes to the glioblastoma stem-cell niche, the microenvironment that supports stem cells and determines their fate," said Dr. Avindra Nath, clinical director of the Division of Intramural Research at the National Institute of Neurological Disorders and Stroke at the National Institutes of Health.

"We conducted a comprehensive translational investigation of HML-2 expression in glioblastoma and its role in maintaining the cancer stem cell phenotype," said Nath, the article's senior author. Results were based on analyses of patient-derived glioblastoma cells and mouse model studies.

The team's findings give researchers targets for developing therapies; and in their work, an anti-retroviral drug significantly reduced HML-2 activity and reduced tumor stem-cell markers, said Shah, director of clinical trials and translational research and principal investigator in the Section of Virology and Immunotherapy at Sylvester Comprehensive Cancer Center's Brain Tumor Initiative (BTI).

"Targeting the glioblastoma stem cell niche is an attractive option to prevent alterations in stem cells and reduce tumor recurrence and treatment resistance," he said.

HML-2, a subtype of HERV-K, is one of many human endogenous retroviruses (HERVs), ancestral relics of retroviral infections that occurred throughout history and led to the integration of viral sequences into the human genome. HERVs, making up about 8% of the human genome, are usually silentunable to cause infectionbut scientists have recently discovered that some can be reactivated in certain cancers.

More information: Ashish H. Shah et al, Human endogenous retrovirus K contributes to a stem cell niche in glioblastoma, Journal of Clinical Investigation (2023). DOI: 10.1172/JCI167929 Journal information: Journal of Clinical Investigation

Provided by Sylvester Comprehensive Cancer Center
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The field of bone implants has taken incredible strides thanks to technological innovations that allow for stronger grafts that are easier to install. Yet even with these advances, there are still risks involved in such procedures. Implants can be loosened following operations, for example, which can lead to costly surgical revisions that lengthen the recovery process for patients.

New research published in Nature Biomedical Engineering from an interdisciplinary team from Northwestern Engineering's Center for Advanced Regenerative Engineering (CARE) and Center for Physical Genomics and Engineering (CPGE) could reduce the likelihood of these painful, expensive complications.

Working at the convergence of the physical sciences, biology, surgery, and engineering, the investigators introduced the concept of surface topography-induced chromatin engineering. In a collaboration with The University of Chicago's Russell R. Reid, MD, Ph.D., and Tong-Chuan He, MD, Ph.D., the team explained how and why to use surfaces to change patterns, validating the method in vivo.

The findings could lead to new design strategies for biomedical companies to improve the performance of medical devices for musculoskeletal surgery.

"We could potentially design implant surfaces that would promote significantly better integration with surrounding bone, for example tissue fixation devices and hip or knee implants," said Guillermo Ameer, ScD, the Daniel Hale Williams Professor of Biomedical Engineering at the McCormick School of Engineering and professor of Surgery at the Feinberg School of Medicine.

"This could also potentially be used to develop next generation bioresorbable scaffolds that better support new bone formation, by implementing these engineered topographies throughout the surface area of the implants."

Ameer and Vadim Backman, PhD, the Sachs Family Professor of Biomedical Engineering at the McCormick School of Engineering and of Biochemistry and Molecular Genetics and of Medicine at the Feinberg School of Medicine, were the paper's co-corresponding authors. Ameer and Backman are the directors of CARE and CPGE, respectively. Xinlong Wang, PhD, a postdoctoral fellow from CARE, and Vasundhara Agrawal, a PhD student from CPGE, were the co-first authors.

It's known from bench experiments that implant surfaces with engineered topographies can facilitate the differentiation of marrow-derived stem cells into bone-forming cells. The team demonstrated improved bone formation in vivo using implants with micropillars topography that induces cell nuclei deformation and facilitates the differentiation of marrow-derived stem cells into bone-forming cells.

The investigators did this in a critical-sized cranial defect model, where they showed that defects treated using implants with the micropillar surfaces had more bone formation than defects that received implants with a flat surface.

"Our research with the convergence of microfabrication, chromatin imaging, and bioimplants is the first application of chromatin engineering for regenerative medicine," Wang said. "The next step is to fabricate large-scale scaffolds that can be used for clinical translation."

"Although people have studied how surface chemistries and morphologies can affect cell shapes and function for decades, we are the first to demonstrate the direct role of deforming the nucleus of the cell and how that change leads to improved differentiation of mesenchymal stem cellsbone marrow derivedinto the bone forming cells osteoblasts," Backman said.

How cells function depends not only on their genes but also on how these genes are expressed, and the latter is regulated by epigenetics. One critical aspect of epigenetic regulation is the 3D structure of the genome (chromatin). If genes can be compared to cells' hardware, epigenetics is software, and chromatin structure is the operating system.

The advent of CRISPR has ushered powerful tools for genetic engineering (designing the hardware). The next frontier is chromatin engineering or designing/reprogramming of the operating system.

CPGE was a natural fit for this study since it works to create new strategies for the treatment of disease and the reversible manipulation of physical systems through physical genomics.

"Our work demonstrated the possibility of leveraging mechanical cues to enable chromatin engineering for regenerative engineering. A unique aspect of our approach is that we focus not only on molecular but also physical factors that drive chromatin states and the resulting transcriptional landscape and cell phenotype," Backman said.

"Specifically, mechanical cues can be used to change the conformation of chromatin, change the patterns of gene expression, and foster faster differentiation of mesenchymal stem cells into osteoblasts, the cells critical for regeneration of the bone and cartilage tissues."

Ameer's work, meanwhile, specializes in regenerative engineering. He is on a mission to use engineering to enable the practice of regenerative medicine to improve the outcome of surgeries and benefit patients.

"Engineering the topography of implants to control cell responses in the body to promote regenerative processes (bone in our work) demonstrates a new way to design regenerative biomaterials and implants," Ameer said.

"Traditionally, research in our field focuses on including growth factors or other molecules that promote bone growth into the biomaterial or implant, but these approaches can have undesirable side effects and are difficult to bring to market. Our findings can be applied to musculoskeletal implants currently on the market, for example, the new tissue fixation devices made from citrate-based biomaterials pioneered by us, and now marketed by Stryker Corporation."

More information: Xinlong Wang et al, Chromatin reprogramming and bone regeneration in vitro and in vivo via the microtopography-induced constriction of cell nuclei, Nature Biomedical Engineering (2023). DOI: 10.1038/s41551-023-01053-x Journal information: Nature Biomedical Engineering
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Focal epilepsy affects over 30 million patients worldwide and is commonly caused by brain lesions, such as stroke. However, it is unclear why some lesion locations cause epilepsy while others do not.

A new study by investigators from the Brigham and Women's Hospital, a founding member of the Mass General Brigham healthcare system, found that a common brain circuit may link different lesion locations causing epilepsy. In a paper published in JAMA Neurology, the researchers used a technique called lesion network mapping to identify this brain circuit with findings that point to potential targets for brain stimulation.

"We're learning more and more about where in the brain epilepsy comes from and what brain circuits we need to modulate to treat patients with epilepsy," said lead author Frederic Schaper, MD, Ph.D., an Instructor of Neurology at Harvard Medical School and scientist at the Brigham and Women's Center for Brain Circuit Therapeutics. "Using a wiring diagram of the human brain, lesion network mapping allows us to look beyond the individual lesion location and map its connected brain circuit."

Schaper and the team studied five datasets of over 1,500 patients with brain lesions. Participating centers across the US and Europe included the Brigham and Women's Hospital, Massachusetts General Hospital, Boston Children's Hospital, Northwestern University, and University Hospitals of Turku in Finland, Maastricht in the Netherlands, and Barcelona in Spain. They studied a variety of brain lesions such as stroke, trauma, and tumors, which allowed them to search for common network connections associated with epilepsy across different regions and types of brain damage.

One of the datasets included combat veterans from the Vietnam Head Injury Study, which was originally designed in the 1960s because brain damage from combat shrapnel wounds resulted in a significant increase in the occurrence of epilepsy.

"In our studies, up to 50% of Vietnam combat veterans suffered at least one seizure post-injury, sometimes many years after the injury," said co-author Jordan Grafman, Ph.D. of the Shirley Ryan AbilityLab in Chicago. "However, it has remained unclear why lesions to some locations cause epilepsy and others don't."

The Brigham researchers compared the locations of brain damage in patients that developed epilepsy to patients that did not, and found that lesions associated with epilepsy were distributed throughout the brain. However, these same lesion locations were connected to a common brain network, suggesting the brain connections disrupted by the lesions, rather than the locations of the lesions itself, were the key.

These findings may have clinical implications for predicting the risk of epilepsy after brain damage.

"If we can map a lesion to the brain network we identified, we may be able to estimate how likely someone is to get epilepsy after a stroke," Schaper said. "This is not a clinical tool yet, but we lay the groundwork for future studies investigating the use of human brain networks to predict epilepsy risk."

The key brain connections they identified were not on the brain's surface but were located deep within the brain in regions called the basal ganglia and cerebellum. The authors state that for decades, these deep brain structures have shown to modulate and control seizures in animal models of epilepsy and are hypothesized to act like a brain "brake."

Based on these findings, the researchers analyzed outcome data of 30 patients with drug resistant epilepsy who underwent deep brain stimulation (DBS) to treat seizures. They found that patients did a lot better if the DBS site was connected to the same brain network, they identified using brain lesions.

"When programming a DBS electrode to improve seizures, it's hard to know which spot to stimulate because it can take months before the patient's seizures improve" said senior author Michael Fox, MD, Ph.D., an Associate Professor of Neurology at Harvard Medical School and founding director of the Brigham and Women's Center for Brain Circuit Therapeutics. "Identifying this brain circuit for epilepsy may help us target the right spot to improve patient outcomes."

The authors note that the current study was a retrospective analysis using existing datasets and a wiring diagram of healthy individuals. When available, future studies could use a patients' wiring diagram and prospectively test the utility of this circuit as a clinical tool.

"Now we know more about what brain circuits may play a role in both the cause and control of epilepsy, this opens up promising opportunities to guide our therapies" said Schaper. "Future clinical trials are needed to determine if this circuit can effectively guide brain stimulation treatment for epilepsy and benefit patients."

More information: Frederic L.W.V.J. Schaper et al, Mapping Lesion-Related Epilepsy to a Human Brain Network, JAMA Neurology (2023). DOI: 10.1001/jamaneurol.2023.1988 Journal information: Archives of Neurology
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Credit: Pixabay/CC0 Public Domain

Researchers at the University of Hertfordshire are calling for urgent action to provide safe and stable accommodation for single mothers and their children, after research uncovered the devastating effects of the UK's chronic housing crisis on their mental and physical health.

Interviews with 12 single mothers living in temporary accommodation in London revealed experiences of abuse and neglect from the housing system, including degrading treatment from staff and development of suicidal thoughts and PTSD.

This comes at the height of twin crises in housing and mental health. After being made homeless, many find themselves stuck in temporary housing indefinitely, often in very poor conditions.

Some of the women participating in the study, which was published in the European Journal of Psychotherapy and Counseling, were fleeing domestic abuse. But shockingly, one stated the domestic violence she experienced would be more bearable than the systemic abuse she faced in temporary housing, after fearing non-compliance might leave her with nowhere to turn.

Poor housing conditions were also connected with changes in their children's behavior and even physical illness. For example, one distressed child was scared to sleep in his bed, which was full of bed bugs. One participant told researchers, "it feels like I'm being looked at like scum," and another said "being a single mum in temporary housing is hell on Earth."

Researchers found that many women benefited from community-based action, such as joining local campaign groups, as well as individual acts of resistancefor example, refusing to accept offers of accommodation outside London. Yet researchers concluded that individual interventions are not the solution. Instead, a collective, system-wide approach is necessary to address stigma and inequalities, where services as well as individuals advocate for guaranteed access to safe housing.

Nina Carey, Clinical Psychologist who led the research during her time at Hertfordshire, said, "Conducting this research uncovered the devastating effects of homelessness and temporary accommodation on the mental and physical health of mothers and children. Urgent action needs to be taken to provide safe, stable and suitable accommodation for families.

"Individuals, groups and organizations can be led by single mothers, grassroots activist groups such as Focus E15 and charities such as the Magpie Project to provide support and solidarity, and to urge local authorities and governments to take action."

Emma Karwatzki, Program Director for the Doctorate in Clinical Psychology at the University of Hertfordshire, said, "This research further highlights the inequalities and injustice our communities experience in accessing appropriate housing, care and support. It reinforces the crucial need for systemic change at multiple levels. This research also speaks to the strength and solidarity demonstrated by single mothers living in such highly unstable contexts."

More information: Nina Carey et al, "Hell on Earth": Single mothers' experiences of temporary accommodation in London and its impact on their mental health, European Journal of Psychotherapy & Counselling (2023). DOI: 10.1080/13642537.2023.2175884
Montana will get $629 million in federal funding for high-speed internet infrastructure, federal officials announced Monday.

The money comes from the Broadband Equity, Access and Deployment program, which was created by the bipartisan infrastructure bill passed by Congress in 2021. The program allocates a total of $42.5 billion in grants throughout the country for broadband construction, offsetting internet costs for low-income households and offering training programs.

It's intended to prioritize affordable internet access for "unserved locations," which it defines as those with less than 25 megabit-per-second download services and 3 Mbps uploads.

U.S. Sen. Jon Tester, D-Mont., was one of 10 lawmakers who negotiated the compromise legislation, called the "Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act," in 2021. He was the only member of Montana's congressional delegation to vote for the $1.2 trillion spending bill.

"Too often, people in Washington, D.C., don't understand the challenges we face in Montana which is why I fought for this investment in my bipartisan infrastructure law to bring high-speed internet access to every corner of our state," Tester said Monday in a written statement. "I'm proud to have secured this funding for Montana that will create good paying jobs and ensure that Montana small businesses are able to compete in the 21st century."

The funding will be deployed to an estimated 100,000 unserved locations across the state, according to a press release from Tester's office.

All states were allocated a minimum of $100 million, with additional funding based on the number of unserved households and factors including population density, geography, topography and income.

Exactly how and where Montana's $629 million gets spent will be worked out in the coming months. Montana has about six months to submit a proposal to the National Telecommunications and In-formation Administration for awarding the federal money.

Montana will get its first 20% of the money, or about $125 million, after the proposal is approved, according to Tester's office. That money has to be spent on projects for which at least 80% of the households are considered unserved locations.

A final proposal is due one year later, and Montana will get the rest of the money when that is approved. Internet service providers that win grants will be required to complete construction and start providing service within four years of getting the money.

Last year, Montana divvied out $309 million to expand broadband access in the state through the ConnectMT program established by the Legislature in 2021. That funding was also federal in origin, part of $2 billion that flowed to the state through the American Rescue Plan Act, a stimulus bill passed in the wake of the COVID pandemic.
Missoula's large and ever-growing Muslim community urgently needs a new place of worship as they've lost access to the space they've been using for years.

The International Muslim House, located on Fifth Street near the University of Montana campus, is owned by the university. Also the headquarters of the Montana Islamic Society, the large house has been used as a mosque for Muslims to pray every week for a long time. It's been crucial for local Muslim community members, students and refugees from other countries who have settled in Montana.

But now, UM plans to renovate the house and use it as residential housing instead of as a gathering space.

"It's a very urgent problem for us," said Aseel Niazai, a member of the Missoula Muslim community who is originally from Afghanistan. He's also a representative of a refugee advocacy organization.

Niazai estimates there's probably between 400 and 500 Muslims in Missoula.

"We are growing day by day," he said. "We have a large population from Afghanistan. We have lots of people from Iraq, Syria, and countries in Africa like the Democratic Republic of Congo."

The International Muslim House serves as a gathering place for people from countries where there isn't a huge population in Missoula as well, such as Egypt, Malaysia and Turkey, for example.

The house is important, Niazai said, because it's big enough to accommodate large groups and special religious events. It also allows people to come and go as they need, because sometimes a person's work schedule means they have to come pray at odd times of day. There are private rooms and a kitchen for communal meals, with a refrigerator to store meat for special occasions or to donate to people in need.

UM has reserved a space in the University Center for people to use as a meeting and prayer space, but Niazai said it will be inadequate over the long-term. It's too small, has no kitchen and lacks separate floors for men and women like the current house. Also, it won't be available all the time.

Niazai said he's met with Missoula Mayor Jordan Hess to discuss the issue.

"This is a priority for us," Niazai said, noting that other problems and issues have been pushed to the backburner.

Dave Kuntz, the director of strategic communications at the University of Montana, said the university is taking many of the houses it owns along Fifth and Sixth Streets offline for renovations. The plan is to use them to expand the University's housing supply in the years ahead.

The International Muslim House has been used as a meeting space for Muslim students and others in the community for the past few years, Kuntz explained. Nobody has lived in this house, rather, it has been used for meetings and prayer.

The building is not to be confused with the International House, which houses international students and will not be changed.

At the International Muslim House, the University will proceed with a renovation to take what has been a meeting space and return it to a living space owned by UM, Kuntz said. It has not been determined yet if students or employees will rent this place once the renovation is complete.

Muslims pray five times a day every day, but the most important prayer of the week is the day of gathering on Friday, so the Muslim community hosts a congregational prayer on that day in Missoula.

This past Friday, June 30, was the last day that the Muslim community in Missoula held a gathering at their only mosque in the area. After the afternoon congregational prayer, a group of men were busy moving rugs, religious books and furniture out of the house.

"We need to have a big place because we, as a Muslim community, are growing day by day so we need to have an appropriate place," Niazai said. "So, everyone is working on it."
Most people may think they hold a live-and-let live attitude, but there is also a strong strain of hostility among us by those who see differences as a threat to their established American way of life. These folks feel certain of their patriotic and religious beliefs. They see tolerance and compromise as weakness and disloyalty.

As founder Thomas Jefferson advised, there can be no successful democracy without give and take. When differences arise, people must work them out. If they cant, then the Founders ideal of government by the people cant work either.

The dividing lines seem brighter in the self-government of today. Less newsworthy are efforts to find solutions to problems. There are some who believe American democracy has over-matured, that our system of government has become so bogged down with uncompromisable beliefs, that rational thought is being crowded out by inflammatory wedge issues. Our system has become paralyzed by intolerance.

In pondering this, Im reminded of a prominent example of intolerance in American History, the Ku Klux Klan. The Klan rose from the ashes of the Civil War-defeated South. Unable to accept the destruction of their slavery-based economic and social order, several hundred thousand southern men, most of them Confederate military veterans, donned white sheets to disguise their identities and terrorized the newly freed slaves, and the scallywag southern Whites who supported them.

The post-Civil War Klan was short-lived. Former Union General and President Ulysses S. Grant saw the KKK as a lawless uprising to reverse the hard-won verdict of the Civil War. Grant put the Klan down hard. Faced with force, it quickly disbanded. But its dedication to the Lost Cause remained an ingrained belief in the generations that followed.

Fearful of the threat of immigrants yearning to be free, the Ku Klux Klan was born again in the 1920s. The second time around, the KKK was not just focused on persecuting the minority of Black Americans, but also on Catholics, Jews, Native Americans, and foreigners particularly from Asia and eastern Europe. In, fact, to be a Klansman, a man must, in the words of national Imperial Wizard Hiram Wesley Evans, be 100% American. When the Wizard spoke to a Klan throng 1,300 strong in Billings in 1924, he emphasized the imperative of White supremacy, the menace of the Catholic Church, and the threat of immigration to the purity of American blood. At that time there were an estimated 4 million Klansmen nationwide, and in records held by Grand Dragon of Montana, Lewis Terwilliger, there were 5,100 dues paying Montanans.

Montanas KKK membership was comparatively low. In fact, there was strong resistance here especially in the mining region around Butte and Anaconda. There, many of the mineworkers were Catholic immigrants. The news of a secret Klan chapter organizing in Butte raised the Irish dander of Silver Bow County Sheriff Jack Duggan, who issued them an official greeting in which he warned that in his jurisdiction, misbehaving Kluxers would be shot down like wolves.

Terwilligers records show that 46 Montana communities contained Klan chapters. Though we had several cross burnings, Montana was never fertile ground for the Klan.

By the end of the decade, the Ku Klux Klan had drifted out of existence in Montana and the rest of the country. But while its song ended, its melody lingers on. There are those still who prioritize their understanding of Americanism far higher than the Constitutional guarantees of equality and justice.

In fact, U.S. Attorney General Merrick Garland recently said that the top domestic threat of violence our country faces today is from the Proud Boys, the Oath Keepers, and the re-emerging KKK. Greg Ehrie, former FBI section chief for domestic terrorism operations says that the ribbon of racial identity and White supremacy runs through all of them.

The reborn KKK and other apostles of White nationalist supremacy are as dangerous as January 6 proved them to be. Stand strong against them, and anytime you feel discouraged, hoist one to Jack Duggan and Montanas legacy of resisting the KKK and each new cycle of tyranny.
Your guide to 17 must-see Kentucky waterfalls, plus 2 more that are close to Louisville

In 1994 the band TLC warned listeners "Don't Go Chasing Waterfalls," but today we offer an alternate suggestion, and to be honest, it's a lot more fun.

Let's do it! Let's chase waterfalls.

Where to start? We're glad you asked because The Kentucky Wildlands, a tourism region that spans 14,000 square miles and 41 counties along the states eastern/southeastern border, has curated a guide to 17 of Kentucky's most stunning waterfalls.

The Kentucky Wildlands Waterfall Trail includes 17 of the most impressive waterfalls in the state.

Not only is this a list of breathtaking natural wonders, but for those who are new to the outdoorsy lifestyle, many of the waterfalls are easily accessible.

The trail provides logistical information like length, difficulty and how to access each trail. It also highlights waterfalls with special features, including the tallest waterfall, an ADA-accessible waterfall and family-friendly falls and trails.

We are incredibly excited to debut this trail so that those unfamiliar with the area can better understand and navigate the diverse beauty of the Wildlands, said Tammie Nazario, director of The Kentucky Wildlands. We want to encourage people to discover the natural wonders here, which include an abundance of beautiful waterfalls, and we hope this easy-to-follow guide inspires them to plan a trip to experience some of the many we have to offer.

No two falls are alike on The Waterfall Trail

Pine Island Falls is one of the 17 waterfalls listed on The Kentucky Wildlands Waterfall Trail

Featured waterfalls on The Kentucky Wildlands Waterfall Trail include Cumberland Falls, also known as the Niagara of the South, the 113-foot Yahoo Falls and Creation Falls, which has a plunge pool great for wading.

The trail guide incorporates everything from wheelchair- and stroller-accessible hikes  like the one to Flat Lick Falls  to more challenging routes such as the rocky climb to Eagle Falls.

And if you decide to travel to Cumberland Falls, remember it is also famous for its "moonbow"  a natural phenomenon where a rainbow is produced by moonlight rather than direct sunlight. The moonbow is not an every-night occurrence so the state park has posted information on Facebook with details for your best days (nights) and times to view the lunar rainbow.

How do I access waterfall information?

76 Falls is one of the 17 waterfalls listed on The Kentucky Wildlands Waterfall Trail

The waterfall trail can be found online at explorekywildands.com. The trail is displayed on an illustrated map that gives visitors a glimpse of what each of the 17 falls looks like and their location within The Kentucky Wildlands. You can download and print out the map for reference as well as access photos of the falls, important details and insider tips on the website.

Check out these waterfalls close to Louisville

Tioga Falls near Fort Knox in Radcliff, Kentucky is a great day trip if you live in Louisville.

If you have limited patience for time in a car, those who live in the Louisville area don't have to drive almost three hours to Cumberland Falls to enjoy beautiful waterfalls. Recently I took my family on an afternoon waterfall adventure only 30 minutes from downtown Louisville.

We started by hiking approximately two miles to the spectacular Tioga Falls near Fort Knox in Radcliff, Kentucky. Our second stop of the day was the not-to-be-missed Fairmont Falls, which is south of the Gene Snyder Freeway. Access to Fairmont Falls is limited to three vehicles per day, and you'll need to contact the Jefferson Memorial Forest Welcome Center to obtain an access code to enter.

We've also visited waterfalls during bicycle outings. It's an easy ride over the Big Four Pedestrian Bridge to Southern Indiana's Falls of the Ohio.

After a good rainfall, another bicycle ride with a fantastic view is Limestone Gorge Waterfall located in Broad Run Park, which is part of The Parklands, east of downtown Louisville.

With so many natural wonders so close to town we've gotten lots of suggestions from "waterfall aficionados" including the waterfalls at Harrods Creek Park, 6530 Montero Drive in Prospect. For a day when we have more time to explore, we've heard Clifty Falls in Madison, Indiana, is a nice area to visit.

Things to know before you go chasing waterfalls

Eagle Falls is one of the 17 waterfalls listed on The Kentucky Wildlands Waterfall Trail

Before heading out to explore any waterfall, its a good idea to check on current trail conditions, waterfall volume and any restrictions concerning a particular waterfalls access trail.

For instance, some trails are not pet friendly mainly for their own protection, as well as that of the local plant and animal life. Some waterfalls are also best visited during the rainier months of the year, while others are exceptional year-round, with wintertime offering its own magical scenic backdrop.

Also, don't forget to carry water and a charged cellphone, not just for photos but in case of an emergency.

What to know about The Kentucky Wildlands

Princess Falls in McCreary County is one of the 17 waterfalls listed on The Kentucky Wildlands Waterfall Trail

The Kentucky Wildlands, launched in 2020 to develop a sustainable tourism-based economy and create connectivity across the region, designed its new waterfall trail to help people access the natural wonders of the area.

With more than 14,000 square miles and 800-plus waterfalls in this part of Kentucky, the trail makes it easy for people to explore the ancient forests, mountains and unspoiled terrain of the region while learning more about its history and legends.

For more information visit explorekywildlands.com.

Reach features reporter Kirby Adams at kadams@courier-journal.com.

This article originally appeared on Louisville Courier Journal: Kentucky Wildlands offers guide to 17 stunning waterfalls
One person killed, two others hurt when SUV and pickup truck collide, SC cops say

One person was killed and two others were injured Saturday when an SUV crashed into a pickup truck, according to the South Carolina Highway Patrol.

The two-vehicle collision happened at about 8 a.m. in Florence County, said Lance Cpl. Lena Butler.

A 2017 Jeep Cherokee was driving east on Old Marion Highway, and near the intersection with Taylor Hill Circle, the SUV crossed left of the center line and into oncoming traffic, according to Butler. The SUV collided with a 2017 Ford F-350 that was heading west, Butler said.

The SUV driver died at the scene, according to Butler.

The Florence County Coroners Office has not publicly identified the SUV driver.

The Ford driver and a passenger in the pickup were injured and taken to an area hospital, Butler said. Further information on their conditions was not available.

No other injuries were reported.

There was no word if anyone involved in the crash was wearing a seat belt.

Information about what caused the SUV to veer into oncoming traffic was not available, but the crash continues to be investigated by the Highway Patrol.

Through June 29, at least 481 people had died on South Carolina roads in 2023, according to the state Department of Public Safety. Last year, 1,091 people died in crashes in South Carolina, DPS reported.

At least 12 people have died in Florence County crashes in 2023, according to DPS data. Last year, 40 deaths were reported in the county, DPS reported.
South Korea is cutting killer questions from an 8-hour exam some blame for a fertility rate crisis

Raising a child in South Korea is no easy task. By the time their toddlers can walk, many parents have already begun scouting out elite private preschools.

Their goal? That by the time these toddlers turn 18 they will have grown into students able to ace the countrys notoriously uncompromising, eight-hour national college entrance exam known as the Suneung and win their place in a prestigious university.

But getting to this point involves an arduous, expensive journey that takes its toll on both parents and children alike. Its a system widely blamed by researchers, policymakers, teachers and parents for a litany of problems, from inequality in education to mental illness in the young and even the countrys plummeting fertility rate.

Hoping to solve some of these issues, the South Korean government took a controversial step this week: making the college entrance exam easier.

Officials will remove so-called killer questions from the Suneung, also known as the College Scholastic Ability Test (CSAT), Education Minister Lee Ju-ho said in a news briefing Monday.

These notoriously difficult questions sometimes include material that isnt covered in public school curricula, Lee said, lending an unfair advantage to students with access to private tutoring. He added that while it was a personal choice for parents and children to seek tutoring, many feel forced to do so due to the intense competition to do well in the exam.

The ministry seeks to break the vicious cycle of private education that increases the burden for parents and subsequently erodes fairness in education, Lee vowed.

Families pray for their children's success in the college entrance exam on November 17, 2022 at the Jogyesa temple in Seoul. - Anthony Wallace/AFP/Getty Images/File

Mind-bending questions and a life-changing exam

By the time South Korean teenagers enter high school, much of their lives revolve around academic results and preparing for the day of the CSAT  a date that is widely seen as making or breaking ones future.

They have good reason to be anxious; the killer questions range from headache-inducing advanced calculus to obscure literary excerpts.

The ministry published several sample questions this week, drawn from past CSAT tests and mock exams, to illustrate the types of problems that would be removed in future tests.

One question, combining math concepts such as the differentiation of composite functions, was deemed more complicated than those covered in public schools, which can cause psychological burden on test takers, the ministry wrote. Another sample question asked test takers to analyze a lengthy passage about the philosophy of consciousness.

A woman attaches a name card wishing for good results for students in South Korea's college entrance exam, at a temple in Seoul on November 18, 2021. - Jung Yeon-je/AFP/Getty Images/File

In the face of such tough odds, most Korean students enroll in extra tutoring or classes at private cram schools known as hagwons. Its common for students to go from their regular school classes straight to evening hagwon sessions, and then to continue studying by themselves into the early morning hours.

As a result, the hagwon industry in South Korea is massive, and profitable. In 2022, South Koreans spent a total of 26 trillion won (almost $20 billion) on private education, according to the Ministry of Education.

Thats almost as much as the GDP of such nations as Haiti ($21 billion) and Iceland ($25 billion).

Last year, the average student across elementary, middle and high schools spent 410,000 Korean won (about $311) per month on private education, said Lee  the highest figure since the education ministry began tracking figures in 2007.

Cycle of inequality

Hagwons have become so prevalent in South Korea that last year 78.3% of all students from elementary to high school participated in private education, according to the education ministry. That places huge pressure on the few families and students who cant afford the extra classes.

And the competition for university admission is steeper in a country where nearly 70% of students enter higher education  a higher proportion than in other wealthy nations, with the United States at 51% and the United Kingdom at 57%, according to the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD).

Its why many South Korean parents, across various income brackets, pour their resources into their childrens education, for fear they will fall behind otherwise.

But this system deepens and perpetuates educational inequality, experts argue. The burden is significantly higher for poorer families, who tend to spend a much higher proportion of their income on their childrens education compared to wealthier households. And still, the playing field remains uneven, with studies showing a clear gap in student achievement between low and high income families.

Children study at a private hagwon academy in Seoul, South Korea, on August 10, 2016. - Yelim Lee/AFP/Getty Images

On Monday, the education minister singled out hagwons for criticism, accusing them of being private education cartels that profit off the anxiety of parents and students.

Parents, teachers and educational professionals all want the government to take an active role so that private education can be absorbed into the (public) school education, Lee said, promising to make the system fair and to eradicate hagwon culture.

To this end, the government has set up a temporary call center for residents to report wrongdoings by hagwons and private academies, he said.

He added that the government will also provide more after-school and tutoring programs within the public sector, and provide better childcare services to prevent students from being cornered into attending hagwons.

The cost of excellence

This educational rat race also takes a heavy toll on both students and parents.

Critics have long argued that the burden on students is one factor driving a mental health crisis in the country, which has the highest suicide rate among OECD nations.

Last year, the Ministry of Health warned that the suicide rate was increasing among teenagers and young adults in their 20s, partly due to the lingering effects of the pandemic.

A 2022 government survey added to the grim picture. Of the nearly 60,000 middle and high school students surveyed nationwide, almost a quarter of males and one in three females reported experiencing depression.

In a previous report, nearly half of Korean youth aged 13 to 18 cited education as their biggest worry.

Education weighs heavily for parents, too. Experts believe the staggering expenses are a major factor behind South Koreans growing reluctance to have children  along with other burdens like long working hours, stagnant wages and sky-high housing costs.

South Korea is regularly ranked the most expensive place in the world to raise a child from birth to age 18, in large part due to the cost of education. Many couples feel they must focus their resources on just one child, if they have kids at all.

Last year, the countrys fertility rate, already the worlds lowest, fell to a record low of 0.78  not even half the 2.1 needed for a stable population and far below even that of Japan (1.3), currently the worlds grayest nation.

The costs of child-raising are high, and represent a large part of the budget of low-income families. Without additional income, having a child leads to a lower standard of living, and low-income families face a poverty risk, said the OECD in a 2018 paper, adding that giving up or postponing childbearing is one way to avoid poverty.

The government itself has long grappled with this issue, saying in 2008 that families were heavily burdened by excessive spending in childcare and education. Without new policies to reduce this burden, the country risks further exacerbating the problem of low birth rates in our society, it warned.

A step in the right direction?

Efforts to fix the problem so far have proved largely ineffective. The government has spent more than $200 billion over the past 16 years to encourage more people to have children, with little to show for it.

Activists say South Korea needs deeper change instead, such as dismantling entrenched gender norms and introducing more support for working parents.

Targeting the CSAT, some hope, could be a step in that direction. Some groups, such as the civic organization The World Without Worry About Private Education, welcomed the decision, saying it was necessary to prevent children from being immersed in excessive competition.

A mother prays for her child ahead of South Korea's college entrance examinations at a Buddhist temple in Seoul on November 12, 2015. - Kim Hong-Ji/Reuters

But others arent convinced, with some critics online calling it a surface-level solution to a more complex issue, coming as the government looks to shore up support ahead of next years general election.

And many high school seniors, preparing to take the exam in November, have complained they feel blindsided by the abrupt change after spending years studying material they thought would be included. Some agreed the private education sector needed reform, but doubted the effectiveness of this move.

From the standpoint of a current high school senior, I dont think private tutoring will decrease just because killer questions are eliminated, one user posted on Instagram.

Another wrote on Twitter: I think the way to get rid of the private education craze is not to remove killer questions or lower the difficulty of the CSAT, but to improve the job market environment where regardless of your educational background, you can work at a safe place, receive a sufficient wage, and have human rights guaranteed.

CNNs Gawon Bae contributed reporting.

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In April 1908 the Butte Evening News began a contest for Butte schoolchildren, offering $5,000 worth of musical instruments as prizes. First prize was a $500 piano made by the Bush & Gertz Company of Chicago, a value equivalent to about $17,000 in purchasing power today.

The contest was essentially a popularity contest, based on coupons printed in the Evening News and cut out to submit to the official counting committee, which included Butte Mayor Joseph Corby. But you could also earn points for one of the thousand-plus nominated students by subscribing to the News for a period up to five years. A five-year subscription cost $25 and garnered 10,000 votes for your chosen student.

Additional prizes included forty violins, thirty guitars, and thirty mandolins valued at $45 each. When the counting was over in early July, Helen McMillan won the piano with an amazing 163,284 votes, following a see-saw battle with second-place Winnie Copeland, who finished with 121,144 votes. We might suppose there were many 5-year subscriptions sold to generate those totals.

Helen McMillan was already well known as a musician, performing piano solos and accompaniments for various recitals and events, especially for the St. Andrews Society and the Daughters of Rebekah, a branch of the Odd Fellows. She performed a whistling solo for the assembled Butte lodges of the Odd Fellows in 1908 as the Evening News contest was beginning. She was in Seventh Grade at the time.

Helen McMillan graduated from Butte High in 1913 and attended the Montana Normal College in Dillon, after which she taught school briefly at Gildford, near Havre, before beginning a long career at the Lincoln School in Anaconda, where her family had relocated. She was Superintendent of Schools for Deer Lodge County for most of the 1930s.

The Evening News was an independent newspaper published in Butte beginning in 1904. It was owned by F. Augustus Heinze and became the daily version of his more political weekly newspaper, the Reveille.

The Evening News itself served Heinzes business interests as well, and even though it was ostensibly independent, like the Reveille it was a newspaper opposed to Standard Oil domination in Montana. Historian Dennis Swibold described the Evening News as a salty mix of scandal, sports, and lurid crime, accompanied by incessant circulation contests and the relentless drumbeat of its anti-company editorials. The contest that Helen McMillan won was one of those ploys to drive up circulation for the paper.

Heinze was effectively bought out by the Amalgamated (Anaconda) Company in 1906, but he continued to subsidize his newspapers until 1909 when the Reveille ceased publication, followed by the Butte Evening News in 1911. Butte could not sustain four daily newspapers  all of them variably the mouthpieces of politicians  and the five-year subscribers who bought votes for Helen McMillan in 1908 were out of luck.
WAPELLO  A resolution setting the Fiscal Year (FY) 2024 appropriations for county departments, commissions and outside agencies was one of several financial and personnel issues that highlighted the regular meeting of the Louisa County Board of Supervisors meeting Tuesday.

Officials said the appropriations matched what the supervisors had approved earlier this year as part of the countys budgeting process. According to that earlier action, the total expenditures approved in the county budget for the upcoming fiscal year is $15,631,970.

In other FY 24 financial action, the board finalized contracts with the countys three ambulance services. The supervisors indicated the contracts were similar to previous agreements, although the county subsidies paid to the services has been increased.

According to board members, the Louisa County (Columbus Junction) Ambulance Service and the Wapello Community Ambulance Service will each receive $50,000, while the Morning Sun Ambulance Service subsidy will be $40,000.

Two fund transfers were also approved by the board, including a $723,871 interfund transfer from the countys Rural Services and General Basic funds to Secondary Roads.

County engineer Adam Shutt explained the transfer is one of two transfers made each year to provide funding for his department.

The other transfer was for $120,871 from the countys General Basic Fund to its Conservation Land Acquisition/Reserve Fund. Louisa County Conservation Board Executive Director Katie Hammond attended the meeting and explained camping fees, land rent and other revenue provided the funding for the transfer.

She said the funds would help with a variety of park development, including planned facilities at Eden Park. Other officials also pointed out the conservation board will transfer a $40,000 payment from the reserve fund back to the county in FY 24.

That payment will be the first installment on an earlier loan the supervisors provided to the conservation board to acquire around 50 acres that linked three previously disconnected sections of the Virginia Grove Recreation Area.

In personnel action that also involved a financial component, the board approved the signing of the FY 24 bargaining contracts between the county and two local AFSCME (American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees) locals.

The board had previously approved the contracts with bargaining units representing the Louisa County Sheriffs Office (LCSO) employees and workers with the countys secondary roads department.

The board also reviewed and agreed to sign an agreement covering the law enforcement academy training for Justin Walker, the new Columbus School Resource Officer.

Walker was previously a member of the LCSO Reserve Officers program but had not attended the Iowa Law Enforcement Academy. Under the agreement, he will repay the county for the $29,771 cost of his training, which includes wages) on a graduated basis if he leaves the countys employment within a specified time.

An agreement to continue participation in the ISAC (Iowa State Association of Counties) HIPPA (Health Insurance Portability & Accountability Act) program for FY 24 was also approved.

The cost for the program is $1,750.

In the final personnel action, the board approved an $18,908 payout to newly appointed Auditor Selena Gerst for unused vacation, comp and sick leave while serving in a staff position in the auditors office.

After being appointed to the elective position earlier in June, Gerst became ineligible for the staff payout program. She decided to submit the payout request before the new fiscal year when the payout would have been determined using higher FY 24 wages.

The board also met with Shutt for his weekly department update.
Israel has launched its most intense military operation in the occupied West Bank in nearly two decades. The raid on Monday included a series of drone strikes and the deployment of hundreds of troops on an open-ended mission into a militant stronghold. At least eight Palestinians were killed and dozens wounded. The crackdown in the Jenin refugee camp was reminiscent of Israeli military tactics during the second Palestinian uprising in the early 2000s. It also came at a time of growing domestic pressure for a tough response to recent attacks on Israeli settlers, including a shooting last month that killed four Israelis.
JENIN, West Bank (AP)  Israel on Monday launched its most intense military operation in the occupied West Bank in nearly two decades, carrying out a series of drone strikes and sending hundreds of troops on an open-ended mission into a militant stronghold. At least eight Palestinians were killed and dozens wounded.

The crackdown was reminiscent of Israeli military tactics during the second Palestinian uprising in the early 2000s and came at a time of growing domestic pressure for a tough response to recent attacks on Israeli settlers, including a shooting last month that killed four Israelis.

The operation took place in the Jenin refugee camp  an area in the northern West Bank that has long been known as a bastion of militants. The fighting, which began shortly after midnight, continued past nightfall.

Throughout the day, black smoke rose from the crowded streets of the camp, a densely populated neighborhood that is home to some 14,000 people, while exchanges of fire rang out and drones could be heard buzzing overhead. Military bulldozers plowed through narrow streets, damaging buildings as they cleared the way for Israeli forces.

There are bulldozers destroying the streets, snipers are inside and on roofs of houses, drones are hitting houses and Palestinians are killed in the streets, said Jamal Huweil, a political activist in the camp, predicting the operation would fail.

The military blocked traffic in and out of Jenin, and the city resembled a ghost town. Streets were empty as armored Israeli vehicles patrolled. Piles of burning tires and garbage containers littered traffic circles. Power and water supplies were knocked out in the camp.

Palestinian youths occasionally threw stones at army vehicles before darting away.

With the sound of shooting and explosions in the background, at least 10 ambulances rushed to the overwhelmed local hospital as relatives checked to see if loved ones were inside. One ambulance arrived with a bullet hole in front.

The Palestinians and three Arab countries with normalized ties with Israel  Jordan, Egypt and the United Arab Emirates  condemned the incursion, as did the 57-nation Organization of Islamic Cooperation.

Late Monday, the Palestinian leadership in the West Bank held an emergency meeting and said it was halting its already limited contacts with Israel. Leaders said a freeze on security coordination would remain in place, and they vowed to step up activity against Israel in the United Nations and international bodies. They also planned to minimize contacts with the United States.

Israels prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, was unswayed.

In recent months, Jenin has turned into a safe haven for terrorism. We are putting an end to this, he said. He said the troops were destroying militant command centers and confiscating weapons supplies and factories. He claimed the operation was taking place with minimum harm to civilians.

Rear Adm. Daniel Hagari, the chief military spokesman, said there were a total of about 10 airstrikes  most of them aimed at keeping gunmen away from ground troops. He accused militants of operating next to a United Nations building and storing weapons inside of a mosque.

He said Israel launched the operation because some 50 attacks over the past year had emanated from Jenin.

Neither the prime minister nor Hagari gave any indication when the operation would end.

U.N. Mideast envoy Tor Wennesland warned that the escalation in the West Bank was very dangerous. Asked about the Israeli drone attacks on residential areas, U.N. spokesman Farhan Haq said: "Attacks on heavily populated areas are violations of international humanitarian law."

Lynn Hastings, the U.N. humanitarian coordinator in the Palestinian areas, said on Twitter that she was alarmed by scale of Israeli forces operation" and noted the airstrikes in a densely populated refugee camp. She said the U.N. was mobilizing humanitarian aid.

UNRWA, the U.N. agency for Palestinian refugees, said many camp residents were in need of food, drinking water and milk powder.

Late Monday, hundreds of Palestinians left the camp to flee the fighting. The Israeli army said it was allowing people who wanted to leave to do so. The Palestinian Red Crescent rescue service said as many as 3,000 people had left by midnight, and they expected the exodus to continue.

The Palestinian Health Ministry said at least eight Palestinians were killed and 50 people were wounded  10 critically. The dead were identified as young men and Palestinian youths, including a 16-year-old boy and two 17-year-olds.

Separately, a 21-year-old Palestinian was killed by Israeli fire near the West Bank city of Ramallah, the ministry said.

The Jenin camp and an adjacent town of the same name have been a flashpoint since Israeli-Palestinian violence began escalating in spring 2022.

Israel says it has stepped up activity because the Palestinian Authority is too weak to maintain quiet. It also accuses its archenemy Iran of funding militant groups involved in the fighting.

Palestinians reject such claims, saying the violence is a natural response to 56 years of occupation, including stepped-up settlement construction by Israel's government and increased violence by Jewish settlers.

Jenin was a major friction point in the last Palestinian uprising.

In 2002, days after a Palestinian suicide bombing during a large Passover gathering killed 30 people, Israeli troops launched a massive operation in the camp. For eight days and nights, they fought militants street by street, using armored bulldozers to destroy rows of homes, many of which had been booby-trapped.

Mondays raid came two weeks after another violent confrontation in Jenin that included the shooting death of a 15-year-old girl and after the military said a pair of rockets were fired from the area last week.

But there also may have been political considerations at play. Leading members of Netanyahus far-right government, which is dominated by West Bank settlers and their supporters, have called for a broader military response to the ongoing violence in the area, particularly after the June 20 shooting that killed four people in the Jewish settlement of Eli.

Proud of our heroes on all fronts and this morning especially of our soldiers operating in Jenin, tweeted National Security Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir, an ultranationalist who recently called for Israel to kill thousands of militants if necessary. Praying for their success.

Israeli military experts said they expected the operation to wrap up within a day or two. Prolonged violence and heavy casualties would risk attracting increased international criticism and drawing militants from the Gaza Strip or even Lebanon into the fighting.

Islamic Jihad, a militant group with a large presence in Jenin, threatened to launch attacks from its Gaza Strip stronghold if the fighting dragged on. Lebanons militant Hezbollah group also made threats, saying the Palestinians have many alternatives and means that will make the enemy regret its acts. Hezbollah fought a monthlong war against Israel in 2006.

More than 130 Palestinians have been killed this year in the West Bank, part of more than a yearlong spike in violence that has seen some of the worst bloodshed in the area in nearly two decades.

Israel says the raids are meant to beat back militants. The Palestinians say such violence is inevitable in the absence of any political process with Israel and increased West Bank settlement construction and violence by extremist settlers.

Israel says most of those killed have been militants, but stone-throwing youths protesting the incursions and people uninvolved in confrontations have also died.
Deputy President Rigathi Gachagua has encouraged Kenyans to embrace a savings culture, saying that this practice will enable the country to break free from the burden of external borrowing.

Speaking on Sunday during the 30th anniversary of the Solution SACCO in Meru County, Gachagua praised contributions made by cooperative movements in promoting economic growth and social development throughout the country.

We want to enhance the saving culture in Kenya so that we borrow money as a country from our own savings. We have been borrowing abroad, he said.

Gachagua added that they are working with parliament to amend the cooperative act, to enhance the financial inclusion of Kenyans, and especially farmers.

The Deputy President also defended the governments recent increment of Kenyans monthly deduction to the National Social Security Fund (NSSF) from Ksh.200 to Ksh.2,060, saying the previous saving regime was insubstantial.

We have changed the law to allow you to save substantially, he said.
The Government is committed to reclaiming and conserving water catchment areas in the country, President William Ruto said.

The President said efforts were being made to reclaim, rehabilitate and conserve degraded landscapes.

Speaking during the launch of the 7th edition of the Annual Kaptagat Tree Planting in Elgeyo Marakwet County, the President said the move was irreversible.

Over the next 10 years, we will grow at least 15 billion trees and restore 10.6 million hectares of degraded forests and rangelands.

He said the programme will fully involve the public from the grassroots all the way to the Cabinet.

I appeal to every Kenyan to plant at least 30 trees each year, explained President Ruto.

He expressed concern that extreme weather has become more common as a result of climate change caused by harmful human activity.

In our country and region, droughts have increased in frequency, intensity and duration,

He lauded National Treasury Principal Secretary Chris Kiptoo for his unwavered tree planting campaign which has now entered its seventh year.

This extraordinary effort is what we ask for now as we confront the climate crisis that threatens our future.

He added that the PS had gone beyond his call of duty to push for the restoration of the Kaptagat Forest Ecosystem.

Deputy President Rigathi Gachagua, Prime Cabinet Secretary Musalia Mudavadi, Cabinet Secretaries Kipchumba Murkomen (Roads), Soipan Tuya (Environment), Rebecca Miano (East African Community), Elgeyo Marakwet Governor Wisley Rotich, a host of Principal Secretaries led by Chris Kiptoo (National Treasury), MCAs among other leaders were present.
Since gaining independence, Kenya and Israel have maintained friendly and cordial relations. However, it is disappointing to note that trade between the two nations has remained relatively low in scale.

In an interview with Financial Standard, Israeli Ambassador Michael Lotem highlights specific areas that, if fully utilized, have the potential to enhance bilateral relations between Kenya and Israel.

What is the status of Kenya-Israel relations?

If you allow me to use a metaphor, I would say the plane of bilateral relations that was parking somewhere in the last few years has been taking off. We are working on understanding who wants to get on board and what luggage he brings with him. I am glad to say that the leaders of this bilateral journey  President Ruto and PM Netanyahu  are enthusiastic about this journey. Take, for example, the area of tourism, the attack in Mombasa in November 2002 put a halt to tourists to Kenya. But in the last couple of months, we are in touch with Israeli companies who are negotiating the coming of Israeli tourists on direct chartered flights. Another Israeli group will soon open a new lodge in the Maasai Mara and a few months ago, a Kenyan company started directed cargo flights to Israel. Another area which saw big meaningful involvement of Israeli companies in agriculture. Again, here we also saw a decrease in the number of Israeli companies but the last few months saw a revival of the interest of Israelis, which translated into very big investments in new projects. Of course, this is only the tip of the iceberg of what can be done.

What are some of the areas that Kenya and Israel have not maximised?

As I mentioned earlier, trade volumes are extremely low, investments are far from what they should be and generally speaking, in a country like Kenya, I would expect to see the business activity of 10th of Israeli companies if not more. It so happens that in the last six months, I witnessed a big interest and meaningful growing presence of Israeli companies in Kenya.

How would you rate Kenyas economy?

For sure, my expertise is not in rating economies. My role here is to improve the bilateral economic relations, which include trade, investments and innovation. No doubt, Kenya is a key player in the region and Africa in general with an advanced and vibrant financial sector. With Israel having more than 600 fintech companies, we can certainly do good business between our two countries.

What happened to the joint Kenya-Israel Galana Kulalu irrigation project?

Different things have happened and different explanations have been given. My focus is on the future, choosing the best way to be relevant to the interest of President Ruto in this project. I strongly believe in the leading role of the private sectors of both Israel and Kenya.

What will the Israeli government bring to the table if the project is revived?

In the past, Israels Ministry of Finance gave insurance to Israeli exporters, enabling them to bring down the cost of finance. In addition to this, we committed ourselves to taking 250 students to an 11-month studying and working experience in Israel. Different governmental tools can be used to support the project, but much depends on the business structure.

In your view, where are we getting it wrong as a country?

I believe you are relating this question to the water issues. My understanding is that before talking about technologies, we have to talk about water management and regulations. I will be glad to avail all our experience to the relevant authorities in Kenya at both national, county and private sector levels.

What can Kenya do to cope with perennial drought?

As I said, water management is the key, although there many more factors. Water scarcity was an issue in Israel ever since its independence 75 years ago, which is well understood, bearing in mind half the country is a desert. After the last drought cycle a few years ago, the government decided to launch huge seawater desalination plants. Today, 95 per cent of our agriculture is water irrigated with treated sewage and 65 per cent of our portable water, comes from the sea. By bringing on stream of the worlds largest seawater desalination plant (200 million cubic metres), in a few months, we will reach 80 per cent.

What is the most distinguished feature of Israels economy?

Human resources, technological orientation and readiness to take on risks. Failure is the best motivation to try again. I recall that in his inauguration speech, President Ruto mentioned the lack of natural resources in Kenya and highlighted human resources. In the last 14 months since my arrival, I had the pleasure of meeting many among these human capital. I think that indeed, we can and should do more for our people. Allow me to take a concrete example. I visited the Kenya Medical Research Institute a few months ago, and I followed it with a talk with Israels leading expert on tropical diseases. He took no time in coming here to meet the people of Kenya and in our private talk at the end of his visit (and I take the liberty of exposing it) he told me how impressed he was with the scientific level of the people at the Institute and that he wants KEMRI to be Israels leading partner in medical research in Africa.

How is the Israeli government supporting Kenyan farmers?

One way of support is through the sending of 250 students for the 11-month internship programme. If you are asking me if we provide millions of dollars in technical assistance, the answer would be no. I believe the best assistance is by developing businesses and not through philanthropic operations. This is why I invest most of my time in the former.

In 2010, Kenya began seeking the purchase of Israeli weapons, including counterinsurgency systems and unmanned aerial vehicles for border surveillance. Currently, the country seems to have a bias for Jordan. Where does this leave Israel?

Israels Defence industry is among the world leaders. We sell to those who want to buy the best and we cooperate with those who want to cooperate with the best. We would be glad to work with the Defence Ministry on any of Kenyas needs and challenges.
President William Ruto has said the government intends to hire 25,000 teachers and dispatch 11,000 community health promoters throughout Kenya.

During a church service on Sunday in Molo, Nakuru County, the President said the teachers will supplement the 35,000 educators already employed this year.

For the first time, the government has employed 35,000 teachers this year; no other government has employed such a number of teachers other than this government. This year before August, we will employ an additional 25,000 teachers so that every child in Kenya gets the opportunity to go to school, the president said.

It is imperative that we educate our young children, the biggest resource we have in Kenya is our children and the only way to ensure equality between the children from poor and rich backgrounds is through education, he added.

Emphasizing the importance of healthcare, President William Ruto confirmed that the government would allocate funds for 11,000 community health promoters. Their role would be to initiate the provision of health services at the grassroots level.

Additionally, he mentioned that each community health promoter would be responsible for attending to a cluster of 100 households.

The community health promoter will be responsible for treating minor ailments to reduce congestion at referrals hospitals for patients seeking treatment for minor health issues.

We have said health treatment will begin at the community level. Before you even go to the hospital, a community health promoter will be available in your community. We will fund 11,000 community health promoters across Kenya, Ruto said.

Ruto disclosed that the national government has allocated Ksh.110 million to cover the payment of community health promoters across the entire country. He urged county governments to also allocate and plan their respective budgets accordingly for the remuneration of these health promoters.

The President added that the government is committed to equipping the community health promoters with the necessary tools and equipment to effectively carry out their duties.
President William Ruto has said the Government is keen on strengthening cooperative societies to stimulate growth.

He said cooperatives will support the formalisation of informal sector players and entrepreneurs.

This, he explained, will help bring hardworking Kenyans together, allowing them to benefit from the economies of scale.

He noted that cooperatives also have the power to nurture a saving culture and offer members access to affordable financing.

He spoke on Saturday during the 101st Ushirika Day Celebrations at the Kenyatta International Convention Centre in Nairobi.

Present were Deputy President Rigathi Gachagua, Cabinet Secretaries Simon Chelugui (Cooperatives and MSMEs) and Alice Wahome (Water and Irrigation), among others.

We will put in place new policies, including the establishment of a central liquidity facility, to enhance efficiency and quality of Sacco services.

The President observed that this will also reduce operational risks encountered by Saccos.

The changes will also facilitate short-term inter-Sacco borrowing and facilitate access to the national payment system, he added.

He explained that the Government is complementing cooperatives by setting up aggregation and distribution centres for storage, value addition and marketing of agricultural products.

The objective of this partnership is to reduce post-harvest losses, eliminate predatory cartels and boost farmer earnings.

Mr Gachagua urged farmers to group themselves in Saccos to help increase their bargaining power.
Tessie Musalia has called for the involvement of People with Disabilities (PWDs) in the national forest restoration campaign.

Musalia who was speaking at the National Police College main campus in Kiganjo, Nyeri during the launch of a tree planting campaign for police training colleges in Kenya, noted that PWDs had not been co-opted in the nationwide tree planting exercise which is aimed at attaining a 15 billion tree target by the year 2032.

As we strive towards conservation of our environment, we should not forget or sideline Persons with Disabilities. They are a vulnerable part of our society and when resources are strained, they bear the bigger part of the negative effects of change. In this regard, we have to involve them in efforts to preserve our environment, said Musalia.

During the exercise, Musalia together with Deputy Inspector General of Police Douglas Kanja, rallied officers from the Kenya Police Service, Kenya Forest Service and the visually impaired community from Nyeri to plant 3,000 tree seedlings at the Kiganjo Police College grounds.

Speaking at the event, Kanja said that the campaign dubbed Kuzingatia Mazingara Yetu was aimed at mitigating the negative effects of climate change. The DIG of police said that the college had already supported President William Rutos Jaza Miti campaign by planting 14,000 tree seedlings last year and plans were underway to double the numbers before the end of this year.

To further support the restoration agenda, Kanja said that all police training colleges throughout the country will set up tree nurseries and act as suppliers of seedlings for police stations and government institutions.

We have asked police officers to not only plant trees in the training institutions but also in all their duty stations. We have agreed that these particular colleges are going to host big tree nurseries so that other police stations and other neighboring government institutions can actually get readily available seedlings in the next few months, said Kanja.

According to Ahadi Trust Kenya Chief Executive Officer Dr Stanley Kamau, a similar campaign will be launched in Embakasi A and Embakasi B training colleges. He said that more than 20,000 seedlings had already been set aside for the campaign.

Dr Kamau also asked national and county government stakeholders to consider bringing the PWDs on board in their campaigns. He said that despite their vulnerabilities, they had proven themselves capable of making a positive contribution if supported.

The PWDs have given their testimony that the trees help them with shade among other benefits. I would also like to urge other stakeholders in the national and county governments to consider bringing on board the PWDs in their campaigns because their disability doesnt necessarily mean they cannot contribute in other ways, said Kamau.

Daniel Kagema, one of the visually impaired persons could not hide his joy after being involved in the tree planting exercise. He at the same expressed the commitment of PWDs in supporting community initiatives.

Before, no one would have bothered to engage the visually impaired persons because it is assumed that they cannot do anything. But today, we have felt appreciated as we joined other Kenyans in complimenting their efforts in planting trees and we pledge our support in other community activities, said Kagema.
Seniors with no place to live, children in desperate need of basic school supplies, vulnerable families with little access to fresh produce and unsheltered individuals seeking connection in a rural community define just a few of the individuals supported by Providence Queen of the Valley Medical Center in Napa County.

Through its robust community benefits commitment, Providence and its community partners met the needs of thousands of Northern Californians and tens of thousands more throughout the seven-state health system last year who needed health care, mental health services, food, pathways to housing and other services.

A hallmark of Providence is its commitment to reaching into our communities to address social determinants of health  poverty, housing and food insecurity, education and wellness care, said Terry Wooten, chief executive of Providence Queen of the Valley Medical Center. We often work with partners who share our Mission of outreach to the poor and vulnerable, continuing the legacy of our founding orders of religious Sisters.

Last week, Providence, based in Renton, Wash., published its 2022 Annual Report to our Communities, detailing system-wide community benefits and spotlighting local outreach initiatives. As a not-for-profit health care organization, Providence community health investments include care for the poor and vulnerable, such as offering free and discounted care for the uninsured and underinsured and covering unpaid costs of Medi-Cal and other government programs.

To expand its reach and expertise, Providence frequently works in partnership with community organizations that share its Mission. In Napa County alone, Providence Queen of the Valley Medical Center provided a total of $64 million in direct community outreach, charity care, grants to safety net providers and other services. Here is the breakdown:

$7.6 million, community heath improvement and strategic partnerships

$10,900, subsidized health services

$2.2 million, free and discounted care for uninsured and underinsured

$54.2 million, to cover unpaid costs of Medi-Cal and other means-tested government programs

Highlighted in the report are innovative programs across the Providence Northern California regions three service areas  Napa County, Sonoma County and Humboldt County.

In the last three years, Providence Queen of the Valley Medical Center has directed $2.2 million toward three supportive housing developments across the Valley. The projects will total more than 180 housing units, some of which will be for affordable housing.

These projects are really about Providences commitment to supporting the unmet needs of the community, said Dana Codron, senior director of Community Health Investment. Through this supportive housing initiative, as well as others throughout Northern California, we are passionate about investing in projects that provide whole-person care to our community.
Fire threats and environmental concerns have prompted some U.S. cities to forgo traditional Fourth of July fireworks in favor of spectacular drone light shows this year.

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Salt Lake City tried out the alternative way of celebrating Independence Day on Saturday with its first-ever drone show.

The citys mayor, Erin Mendenhall, said in a news release the new format marked an effort to minimize the areas high fire danger and to lessen air quality problems caused by pyrotechnics.

As temperatures rise and fire danger increases, we must be conscientious of both our air quality and the potential for wildfires, Mendenhall said in the release.

Utah has an average of 800 to 1,000 wildfires each year, and the state is among the most wildfire-prone in the U.S., according to the Utah Department of Public Safety.

In neighboring Colorado, also in its wildfire season, the city of Boulder made a similar decision this year with its first-ever nighttime drone show this week.

Prior to the COVID-19 pandemic, the city had previously celebrated its Ralphies Independence Day Blast since 1941, according to a social media post.

The shift from traditional fireworks to drones was not an easy decision and based on a number of factors, including increased fire danger fueled by climate change, the citys government stated via Facebook.

Dan Kingdom, owner of WK Real Estate in Boulder, said the committee responsible for planning the citys July Fourth celebrations took the drone route this year after considering the environmental impacts and their difficulties tracking down fireworks, he told CNN.

The fact that we had the Marshall Fire here in our community about 18 months ago was one of the things we discussed, said Kingdom, whose company, along with the University of Colorado, partnered with the city on coordinating the event.

Parades, parties and patriotism in Napa Valley on the Fourth of July Celebrations of America's birthday will return Tuesday as local cities stage parades, festivals and fireworks displays to mark the Fourth of July.

Ultimately, the decision became pretty clear for us because the company that weve long gotten purchased the fireworks from had gone out of business during the pandemic, and we were not able to find fireworks for the show, so it made our decision pretty straightforward and pretty easy to go with the drones, Kingdom said.

Farther west in California, other communities like Lake Tahoe, La Jolla and Ocean Beach also opted to host the more environmentally friendly synchronized drone events for their celebrations.

The owner of the drone company handling the La Jolla light show in San Diego County said La Jolla and Ocean Beach are trying a new way of celebrating Independence Day for the first time.

Jeff Stein, who runs California-based Drone Studios, added La Jolla had gone without fireworks for the past five years.

They found drone shows as a solution because theyre quiet, Stein told CNN.

Drones are reusable, and with fireworks, you have smoke, other fallout like debris, the noise stresses out dogs and people with PTSD. Theres a lot of military in San Diego, he said.

The pixels of the drones expected to illuminate the coastal community will simulate fireworks, show off aerial animation and tell stories through motion graphics, according to Stein.

You cant do that with fireworks, he said.

Photos: Napa's 4th of July Parade Napa's 4th of July Parade 1 Napa's 4th of July Parade 2 Napa's 4th of July Parade 3 Napa's 4th of July Parade 4 Napa's 4th of July Parade 5 Napa's 4th of July Parade 6 Napa's 4th of July Parade 7 Napa's 4th of July Parade 8 Napa's 4th of July Parade 9 Napa's 4th of July Parade 11 Napa's 4th of July Parade 12 Napa's 4th of July Parade Napa's 4th of July Parade Napa's 4th of July Parade Napa's 4th of July Parade Napa's 4th of July Parade Napa's 4th of July Parade Napa's 4th of July Parade Napa's 4th of July Parade Napa's 4th of July Parade Napa's 4th of July Parade Napa's 4th of July Parade Napa's 4th of July Parade Napa's 4th of July Parade Napa's 4th of July Parade Napa's 4th of July Parade Napa's 4th of July Parade Napa's 4th of July Parade Napa's 4th of July Parade Napa's 4th of July Parade Napa's 4th of July Parade Napa's 4th of July Parade Napa's 4th of July Parade Napa's 4th of July Parade Napa's 4th of July Parade Napa's 4th of July Parade Napa's 4th of July Parade Napa's 4th of July Parade
With the U.S. Supreme Court ruling Thursday that race-conscious admissions are unlawful, colleges and universities across the country hoping to enroll diverse student bodies will need to turn to different strategies to do so.

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For ideas, those institutions could look to California, where public colleges haven't considered race in admissions since voters in 1996 approved a ballot measure banning it.

The University of California has since turned to holistic review practices to make admissions decisions in an effort to maintain a diverse student body. Rather than only looking at a student's grades or test scores, UC campuses have considered a range of factors including the location of an applicant's school, an applicant's socioeconomic status and an applicant's achievements relative to the opportunities available at their high school. UC over the years has also ramped up its outreach to low-income students and students enrolled at underserved high schools.

Those efforts have been far from perfect, however.

In fact, UC officials acknowledged in a brief submitted to the Supreme Court last fall that it has failed to enroll a sufficiently diverse student body or one that is representative of the state's demographics. But in the absence of being able to consider race, experts and college officials say UC's strategies may be at least somewhat helpful in promoting racial diversity on campuses.

In student loan and affirmative action rulings, advocates fear losses for racial equality The Supreme Court has struck down both student loan forgiveness and affirmative action in college admissions.

Without being able to consider race in admissions, universities will be forced to "work much harder to identify and address the root causes of societal inequities that hinder diverse students in pursuing and achieving a higher education," said Michael Drake, UC's systemwide president, in a statement Thursday.

For colleges that will now for the first time enter a world without race-conscious admissions, Drake added that UC is prepared to help.

"We stand ready to share our expertise and lessons learned as we collaborate with our partners to achieve a higher education landscape that reflects the rich diversity of our nation," he said.

Among the institutions that may have something to learn from UC are the dozens of private colleges and universities in California, which unlike California's public colleges have previously been free to consider race in admissions but will now be outlawed from doing so. Many of them are likely to seek UC's guidance when it comes to developing new student outreach programs, refining their own holistic review processes and potentially investing more in admission staffs, said Kristen Soares, president of the Association of Independent California Colleges and Universities.

"We'll have a lot to learn from them," Soares said.

Twenty-seven years after Proposition 209 banned the consideration of race in admissions, the racial makeup of UC's student body doesn't come close to matching the diversity of the state. For example, in fall 2022, UC's incoming first-year students were 26.7% Latino. The state's high school seniors in 2022 were 55.7% Latino.

But the university maintains that holistic review, introduced in 2001, has allowed the system to make some gains. In the two decades from fall 2002 to fall 2022, the percentage of undergraduate Latino students enrolled across UC has increased from 13% to 25%, though some of that is likely also due to demographic changes in the state, as Latinos now make up a larger share of high school seniors.

The share of Black students has also increased from 3% to 4.4%, while the percentage of white students has decreased from 36.5% to 20.7%. White students made up 21.2% of high school seniors last year and Black students accounted for 4.9%.

"Holistic review can be a powerful tool to ensure that students are really getting a fair shot at being reviewed in a much more equitable fashion," said Michele Siqueiros, president of the Campaign for College Opportunity, an organization based in Los Angeles that advocates for more equitable access to college.

In a webinar hosted Friday by Siqueiros' organization, speakers noted that the Supreme Court did not say colleges could not collect additional information about a student in order to gain a more holistic perspective.

"This is not a mandate of race ignorance in the university admissions process," said Thomas A. Saenz, president and general counsel at the Mexican American Legal Defense and Education Fund.

Some speakers highlighted how this decision could lead to rethinking admissions and recruiting, particularly among students attending the community colleges in California.

"Actively recruit community college transfer students and students seeking to resume their studies after an extended pause because nearly 50% of community college students are students of color and 45% are from families making less than $25,000 per year," said Mamie Voight, president of the Institute for Higher Education Policy, a nonpartisan research, policy, and advocacy organization.

Voight provided additional potential solutions, including increasing recruitment efforts in communities of color, awarding financial aid based on student need, ending legacy admissions policies, and ending the consideration of students' criminal records during admissions.

In the Supreme Court's majority opinion issued Thursday, Chief Justice John Roberts said universities can consider factors consistent with holistic review, such as a student's socioeconomic status, status as a first-generation college student or an essay describing how their race or ethnicity has impacted their life experiences.

One concern, however, is whether students of color will even apply to competitive universities now that affirmative action has been banned in admissions.

"I worry about how this might change the behavior of students and that students will be discouraged from applying to selective institutions," said Maricela Martinez, the vice president of enrollment management at Occidental College, a selective liberal arts college in northeast Los Angeles.

In UC's case, the system has tried to deal with that by increasing its outreach programs aimed at students from low-income families, such as its Early Academic Outreach program aimed at students from underserved high schools. UC has a total of 13 of those types of programs, and they collectively reach more than 200,000 students, the university told the Supreme Court in the brief it filed last year. UC said those programs haven't been particularly effective reaching Black or Native American students but that Latino students have benefited.

UC in 2020 also eliminated standardized test scores from admissions. That was followed by a big increase in applications to the university, including among Black and Latino students. Experts attributed that partly to the elimination of those tests, saying students likely felt more optimistic about their chances of being admitted.

"I think there's a lot that UC has learned, and can teach others across the country about admissions and how to do it in a much more thoughtful fashion," Siqueiros said.

EdSource reporter Betty Marquez Rosales contributed to this report.

Justices past affirmative action views, in their own words Chief Justice John Roberts Clarence Thomas Samuel Alito Neil Gorsuch, Brett Kavanaugh, Amy Coney Barrett Sonia Sotomayor Elena Kagan Ketanji Brown Jackson Sandra Day O'Connor
Several Bay Area lawmakers say they dont support a bill that would temporarily raise tolls on seven state-owned bridges to give BART and other transit agencies more money to avoid service cuts.

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Thats the main aim of Senate Bill 532 by San Francisco state Sen. Scott Wiener, unveiled June 23. The proposal, if passed by two-thirds of the Legislature and signed by Gov. Gavin Newsom, would increase bridge tolls by $1.50  resulting in $9.50 tolls through 2028  to raise $900 million for regional transit agencies struggling to build back ridership after the COVID-19 pandemic.

BART and other Bay Area operators projecting fiscal cliffs will receive about $400 million of the $1.1 billion subsidy transit agencies won in Californias budget. But transit officials say that money isnt enough to rescue them from ballooning deficits starting in 2026, and, without additional funding, would still have to consider steep service cuts.

Seven Bay Area legislators signed on as co-authors to Wieners bill, including Assemblymembers Phil Ting and Matt Haney of San Francisco and Buffy Wicks and Mia Bonta of Oakland.

However, at least six Bay Area lawmakers representing constituents who would be most affected by the toll increases told the San Francisco Chronicle they oppose SB 532.

I think it is regressive, inequitable and doesnt force the kind of accountability that we need on our transit agencies, Assemblymember Rebecca Bauer-Kahan, D-Orinda, said of the proposed toll increase. We need our transit agencies to get to a place where they are sustainable ... and they are looking to us to just bail them out indefinitely, and I dont think thats the right thing.

The Chronicle reached out to Bay Area lawmakers who werent already signed on as SB 532s co-authors to inquire about their position on the bill.

The six Democratic lawmakers in opposition represent districts outside the Bay Areas urban core. Along with Bauer-Kahan, they are state Sens. Bill Dodd of Napa and Steve Glazer of Orinda, as well as Assemblymembers Timothy Grayson of Concord, Damon Connolly of San Rafael and Lori Wilson of Suisun City.

Spokespeople for state Sens. Nancy Skinner, D-Berkeley, and John Laird, D-Santa Cruz, said they havent decided their position on the bill.

Sen. Aisha Wahab, D-Hayward, said in a statement that she is in favor of more transit funding to shield transit-dependent residents from service cuts, but wants lawmakers to consider more accountability measures with a focus on integration, streamlining and consolidation of Bay Area agencies.

Nine other Bay Area lawmakers did not respond to The Chronicles inquiries.

Legislators who responded to inquiries offered varying reasons for their opposition, though the disproportionate impact to commuters in their districts emerged as a common theme.

Its primarily drivers in my district that (Wieners) asking to open their pocketbooks up to BART and other regional transportation agencies again, Grayson said. I think we need to focus on ensuring the $1.1 billion we just approved through the budget is spent prudently by agencies across the state.

Transit officials and advocates support Wieners bill and say the toll increases would give agencies financial security before they plan to ask local voters to pass a tax increase in 2026.

This is so important for our future. Transit is not optional, Wiener said at a Sacramento news conference last week, surrounded by transit advocates and supportive lawmakers. I think for anyone whos thinking about this, the question that you need to ask yourself is, will the Bay Area be a better place or a worse place if we see massive transit service cuts?

BARTs board of directors voted 7-2 at a special meeting Friday to endorse Wieners bill. Of the Bay Areas 27 transit agencies, BART is the most financially imperiled because of its heavy reliance on fares.

We need to really support any efforts to bring revenue to this agency, BART director Rebecca Saltzman said. Because if we dont, we know whats on the line. We know were going to have to make awful cuts to service.

Drivers would pay the higher toll on seven spans: the San Francisco-Oakland Bay Bridge, San Mateo-Hayward Bridge, Richmond-San Rafael Bridge, Dumbarton Bridge, Carquinez Bridge, Benicia-Martinez Bridge and Antioch Bridge.

If it becomes law, bridge tolls for most vehicles would go up from $7 to $8.50 in 2024. Tolls are already scheduled to go up by $1 in 2025 as part of voters 2018 approval of Regional Measure 3, which pays for transit and highway infrastructure projects.

The potential $9.50 toll rate would be almost double what it cost to drive on state-owned bridges in 2018, when tolls were $5.

Like other legislators, Dodd said he wants to see that BART and other transit agencies would be held accountable for their spending. The proposed increases would especially affect residents in his wine country district, Dodd said, who will also be tolled driving on Highway 37 along San Pablo Bay later this decade.

I think it lets the (Newsom) administration off the hook, Dodd said of the bill. And I think it lets legislators off the hook in terms of working harder to get what we need to keep these transit operations running.

SB 532 will be heard in the Senate Transportation Committee on Wednesday. The legislation is a gut and amend bill, meaning its original contents were entirely amended. State lawmakers sometimes use this method as a way to introduce a new bill later in a session after the Legislatures official deadline.

This is a measure that circumvents the voters of the Bay Area, Glazer said.

Photos: Napa Valley Faces and Places, June 25, 2023
No matter how theyre acquired, titles following someones last name sound impressive and actually can carry significant meaning, providing clues to the individuals expertise in a particular field of study.

MD, Ph.D., Litt.D., AIA, and others are widely respected titles that validate educational credentials.

Master Sommelier (MS) is a title conferred by an organization that certifies the skill levels of various people whose occupation is quality wine service in restaurants and similar dining enterprises. Its a noble calling, to be sure, and one that calls for a huge amount of study and life experiences with fine wine and food.

It also entails knowing about the history of grapes, wines, world wine regions, wine marketing, weather patterns, viticulture, and a dozen other major wine-and-grape subjects.

At a Michelin three-star restaurant in Paris 30 years ago, we ordered a bottle of modest Bordeaux. The tuxedoed sommelier wore, on a chain, a tastevin cup  a small silver tasting vessel. He arrived with the bottle so we could inspect it, to ascertain that it was the one we ordered and to check its condition.

Once I nodded that the wine was fine, the sommelier took the bottle to a table in the center of the restaurant, where he removed the cork, poured a tiny splash into his tastevin, and then decanted the wine. The service was perfect.

How helpful is a master sommelier for American diners? Does an MS really help restaurants to market their wines? Are diners really assisted in specific ways because of these peoples expertise?

Master somms, as they call themselves, can be truly helpful when it comes to certain wines, especially those of an extraordinary nature. They can explain why a particular French Burgundy might have a greater affinity for a specific dish than another similar wine. Somms usually are well-versed in the nuances that separate wines like Pouilly-Fume and Sancerre and why a 20-year-old Fleurie would be risky. They also must be able to confirm that a wine is sound or spoiled.

One problem is that the agency that grants the MS title and allows those two letters to attach to a persons last name as a citation of honor has historically focused on more classic issues and widely known European regions. And thus, their expertise often is best seen in swanky restaurants.

So, does regionality suffer? Do New York candidates for the MS title need to know which side of Seneca Lake, east or west, grows better Riesling? Or what style of Pinot Noir usually comes from the Ft. Ross-Seaview AVA?

If an MS candidate, instead of studying local wine lore, must memorize the 10 crus of Beaujolais and then ends up working in a restaurant without any Beaujolais, was it beneficial to spend the time learning about that French region?

As much as I respect somms and their skills, I have often encountered non-degreed servers who were terrific.

At a local fine dining establishment in Sonoma County a while ago, I asked a local server a question about a white wine I hadnt heard of. She enthusiastically suggested it because, she said, it was made using a technique she had just learned about.

She said it was made at a nearby winery using a ceramic egg for fermentation. I was curious. Hold on a minute, she said, Ill get you a taste. The wine was terrific.

Thats a great story  thats MS-level service, said Andrea Robinson, one of 26 women Master Somms in the world.

Unique fermentations, like in ceramic eggs, can create fascinating textures in many white wines, about which my local server clearly was fascinated. I asked the server if she had any interest in taking the MS exam. She smiled and said she didnt. I care about our local wines, she said, not Muscadelle, Wachau Riesling, or Paarl Chenin Blanc.

The Court of Master Sommeliers, which administers a rigid test to certify somms, might well argue, accurately, that the MS title isnt intended to have meaning in local cafes around here. But the 280 or so MS awardees worldwide may be lost if they were ever asked to work a Saturday night shift at even the most upscale California restaurants, where wine lists tend to focus overwhelmingly on local wines.

For decades, the Court has been seen as the repository of the worlds greatest wine expertise in restaurants. Similarly, the Master of Wine (MW) program in Europe offers a title to people who generally are engaged in sales of wine in the retail, wholesale, and import-export sectors.

Both agencies historically emphasized European wines and more recently both have begun to include many other regions of the world where wine has been elevated from the ordinary to the sublime. That, of course, is a welcome change, especially in view of high prices for wines coming out of California, Australia, and several other regions.

As wine has continued to blossom in numerous lesser-known areas and as consumers seek out an ever-widening number of grape varieties, the MS and MW titles that focus on the old standbys are less meaningful. Neither organization has developed a sub- regional category of study, say those I have spoken with.

For example, I have tasted some superb wines from both Ontario and British Columbia, two Canadian areas that have recently established beachheads for fabulous wines. But since most never are exported, theres no reason for either the MS or MW exams to include them. (Canada has only 10 MWs.)

Robinson, who lives in Napa Valley, said the Court is cognizant of regional issues and has recently begun to look more seriously at areas whose wines previously didnt make an impact in restaurants, but now do.

She said the MS exam is typically standardized to deal with dining issues, and that the MW exam is more oriented toward science. Information about things like rootstocks usually is not relevant tableside, she said.

She added that the sommelier organizations main objective is to be certain we are really well-rounded, and to, with humility, continue our wine education. We know that our wine education doesnt stop when you get the title.

One essential aspect of the MS program, she said, encourages those who apply to display a level of intellectual curiosity that long continues.

It only makes good business sense for people who work in restaurants to know something, if not a lot, about every wine thats on the restaurants wine list. To achieve that, restaurant owners should conduct regular tastings with all servers who would be working the floor, whether or not they have a title.

Yet when Ive inquired about tasting education programs with restaurant servers, in about half the cases, servers tell me, I basically listen to what our customers are saying about the wines. In some cases, the wine education a restaurant conducts sometimes doesnt include updates for newer vintages.

And in about half the cases, servers say candidly that they get no wine training at all.

From that it is clear that there is a validity to sommelier training for any restaurant that offers wines that are less than commonplace.

Imagine a wine list that has on it a Verdelho for $40, or a Langhe Nebbiolo for $60. Not very many diners would know anything about either wine, but the restaurant owner clearly put them on the list because they represent an important category for certain in-the-know diners.

It only makes sense for all servers to be able to explain what the two wines are and why they are offered. Without any explanation, most diners who know nothing of those wines will not order them.

An MS, with or without the tastevin cup, would certainly be a beneficial asset in cases like this.
Immediate measures should be taken to unblock the Lachin corridor - Lukashevich

Azerbaijan is holding a media forum in occupied Armenian Shushi

The Lachin Corridor should be opened immediately - Matthew Miller

Artsakh parliament calls on Armenia to ask UN to grant international mandate to peacekeepers

Russias Federal Council urges Armenian MPs to consider risks of Armenias joining the Rome Statute

Armenian and Azerbaijani deputy PMs will meet in different parts of border each time. Sputnik Armenia

I still don't know how to shout to make them realize the situation is grave. Ombudsman of Artsakh

We are ready to recognize Azerbaijans 86,600 square km, which includes Nagorno-Karabakh. Minister of Foreign Affairs

The Russian Federation reaffirms its intention to contribute to the restoration of normal life in Nagorno-Karabakh

Artsakh President assures: All decisions will be made jointly

A handcuffed man threw himself from the 5th floor of the Investigation Department of SRC and died

Ambassador of Poland was presented with the current situation in Nagorno-Karabakh

EU Council extends Toivo Klaar's mandate for one year

Turkey slows pace of rate hikes, jeopardizing the lira

EU Mission at the OSCE Council meeting: Brussels calls on Baku to ensure movement along the Lachin corridor

Zakharova evades question on sending Arstakh aid by Russian planes

Stores in Artsakh no longer sell bread

Russian MFA Spox: Artsakh is not in area of CSTO responsibility

State Revenue Committee head: Armenia cooperates with partners transparently

Armenia requests OSCE Permanent Council speacial meeting: Mirzoyan made a speech

Armenian Health Minister: Transport of medicine to Artsakh is disrupted

Russia MFA spox on organizing Mirzoyan, Bayramov meeting in Moscow: Chances are good

Russian MFA: Stability in South Caucasus should be in Turkey's interests

We should specify the cartographic basis of demarcation activities in the near future. Pashinyan

Brussels meeting brought no concrete results in opening Lachin Corridor, resolving humanitarian crisis in NK.Pashinyan

Armenian Foreign Ministry welcomes Canadas initiative to join European monitoring mission

Artsakh residents hold a protest near the UN office in Yerevan

EU foreign ministers to discuss Armenian-Azerbaijani settlement in Brussels

Armenian-French cooperation will continue to strengthen. Nikol Pashinyan received French Ambassador

The process of the program of formation of Digital Society and Economy discussed at Government

State minister: We may have situation when we cant wait for the 7 days noted by Karabakh President

The Prime Minister hosts Aram Arzumanyan, disabled as a result of the 44-day war

Nikol Pashinyan, Mikhail Mishustin hold phone talk

Nersisyan. The more Armenia lowers bar on Karabakh issue, the harder it will be for people of Artsakh to raise it

Karabakh official: Armenia has only one thing to do in discussions with Azerbaijan

Artsakh state minister: Many illogical things are happening on European platform; is it serious conversation?

Karabakh minister of state: We managed to make our voice heard by all to which nationwide movement was directed

Lachin corridor has no alternative: Several Armenia NGOs issue joint statement on Charles Michel statement

Karabakh state minister: We are in disaster but we will never surrender

Karabakh ex-official Vitaly Balasanyan is charged on 4 counts

Analyst: Armenia has not recognized Azerbaijan territorial integrity with Karabakhs inclusion

Armenia PM is briefed on plan to establish EHL Hospitality Business School branch in Gyumri

Our link should be with Armenia only: Karabakh residents comment on their blocking of Askeran-Aghdam road

Missing servicemens parents reopen Yerevan major intersection, but on condition

Armenia army General Staff chief meets with US Air Force chief of staff (PHOTOS)

Parents of missing soldiers close off major avenue in Yerevan

Edmon Marukyan: Azerbaijan has no plan to integrate Christian Armenians

Azerbaijan MFA responds to Armenia FM with series of absurd accusations

Livestock sector is in much worse situation in besieged Karabakh, agriculture minister says

Agriculture minister: Scheduled power outages, lack of diesel fuel also cause problems in Karabakh irrigation system

Karabakh MoD: Defense Army did not carry out fortification work in Askeran Region

Newspaper: What 'tougher actions' Karabakh will take?

MoD: Armenia army did not fire at Azerbaijan positions

Worlds most expensive iPhone is sold in US

US returns 105 antiquities illegally exported from India to latter

David Babayan: Karabakh grandpa who fought at Stalingrad, took Berlin never imagined he could die of hunger

Russia, Iran FMs interested in consultations with participation of Armenia, Azerbaijan

Austria FM: Lachin corridor blockade must be stopped immediately

Deputy PM Grigoryan's office: Armenia, Azerbaijan have not made decision on any map

Armenia FM briefs OSCE Secretary General on situation in Karabakh

Armenian Foreign Minister expresses Yerevan's readiness to hold talks with Turkey in Vienna

Armenia is not going to become a space where sanctions could be bypassed: Ararat Mirzoyan

Dollar, euro increase in Armenia

Armenia FM: Regrettable that instead of engaging in dialogue, Azerbaijan pursues policy of ethnic cleansing in Karabakh

FMs sign protocol on implementation of Armenia-EU readmission agreement between Armenia, Austria (PHOTOS)

Karabakh residents block Askeran-Aghdam motorway, with concrete barriers (PHOTOS)

Armenias Pashinyan receives ex-MP Francois Rochebloine of France

Yerevan municipal election events schedule announced

Karabakh NGOs: Support being provided to Artsakh people cannot be at cost of trampling on their dignity

American University of Armenia has new president

Hyundai releases first photos of new generation Santa Fe crossover

Public Television to present dire situation in Karabakh every day live from capital Stepanakert's Renaissance Square

Teen found dead in Armenia river

European Parliament committee calls on Turkey to recognize Armenian Genocide

Armenia FM visit to Vienna kicks of with private talk with Austria colleague

Karabakh operational headquarters chief: Presidents sit-in could be beneficial

European Parliament accuses Azerbaijan of bribing PACE lawmakers, some other offenses

Karabakh presidential advisor warns of taking extreme measures

Iraqi Kurdistan leader visits Azerbaijan

In support of Karabakh demonstration participants march to US Embassy in Yerevan

US embassy: Passengers are denied entry to Armenia for possession of drugs

Azerbaijan continues to settle occupied Berdzor-Lachin town of Karabakh

Armenia army chief attends US National Guard State Partnership Program 30th Anniversary conference (PHOTOS)

Public transport to not operate in Karabakh capital Stepanakert as of today

Karabakh interior ministry: No vehicle passed through Askeran police checkpoint to Akna-Aghdam

Azerbaijan FM repeats proposal to use Aghdam road to Karabakh

Protests in support of Karabakh continue in Yerevan

Grigory Karasin responds to accusations against Russia from Azerbaijan

Armenia PM: It will be very good if we do European track and field tournament in Artashat

Newspaper: More Armenia military commanders to be arrested soon

Karabakh minister of state: Today nationwide movement will continue awareness actions started in Yerevan

Karabakh parliament speaker joins Presidents sit-in

Armenia MoD: Azerbaijan again disseminated disinformation

MFA spox: Armenia demands lifting of illegal blockade of Lachin corridor by Azerbaijan

Karabakh President: People of Artsakh are facing real threat of physical destruction

Russia MFA confirms readiness to hold Armenia, Azerbaijan FMs meeting in Moscow

Karabakh presidential adviser on Azerbaijan proposal to transport humanitarian goods to Artsakh: This is greatest danger

Armen Grigoryan presents humanitarian crisis in Karabakh to Matthias Luttenberg

Karabakh capital Stepanakert public transport to operate in very limited capacity

Armenia ex-ruling party official Armen Ashotyan to remain in custody
In recent days, various news outlets have been circulating news that Armenias authorities have stopped, at all levels, their contacts with their colleagues in Nagorno-Karabakh (NK). Moreover, it is noted that the humanitarian crisis created as a result of the blocking of the Lachin corridor is not on the agenda of Armenias government. Armenian prime minister's spokesperson Nazeli Baghdasaryan noted this on Facebook.

"In terms of this claim that has no basis in reality, we consider it important to emphasize that Prime Minister Nikol Pashinyan has repeatedly noted his intense daily contacts with [Artsakh (Nagorno-Karabakh) President] Arayik Harutyunyan. The President of NK also has reaffirmed this circumstance in public speeches and in various formats, Baghdasaryan noted.

"We would like to recall once again that back at the end of 2022, in order to manage the humanitarian crisis and assist the people of Nagorno-Karabakh due to the blocking of the Lachin corridor [by Azerbaijan], a working group was formed under the leadership of [Armenias] Deputy Prime Minister Tigran Khachatryan, whose task is to monitor humanitarian issues with the authorities of Nagorno-Karabakh and provide the necessary urgent assistance, including with the help of international organizations, the Armenian PM's spokesperson added, in particular.
President Vahagn Khachaturyan on Monday received Iranian Ambassador Abbas Badakhshan Zohouri, in connection with completing his diplomatic mission in Armenia, the President's office informs Armenian News-NEWS.am.

In his welcome remarks, President Khachaturyan thanked Ambassador Zohouri for his efforts in the development of Armenian-Iranian relations during his diplomatic service.

"I wish to extend special gratitude for your work and your personal efforts in the development of relations between our two countries. It so happened that in the period of your service, you were in Armenia during one of the most challenging periods of our newly independent history, and we sensed the support of both you and the Islamic Republic of Iran. You also understand what support means for those countries that need help and support at such time.

I am confident that in the course of your future activities you will continue to do your best to promote the development of relations between our two countries," the President noted and wished the ambassador success in his diplomatic service.

Ambassador Zohouri expressed his gratitude to President Khachaturyan for the reception and noted, "The relations between Iran and Armenia have a deep-rooted history and, certainly, we have achieved a high level in all fields at present. The work done as well as the bilateral cooperation is set at a very high level. I am hopeful that in the future we will witness further development of these relations."

During the meeting, the sides discussed a wide range of issues related to the continuous development of Armenian-Iranian multi-level cooperation.

The sides touched upon the currently existing close cooperation in the fields of energy, environmental protection, infrastructure, and the possibilities of implementing new joint projects in the aforementioned domains. A special emphasis was placed on the need to promote interaction in the fields of science and high technology.

During the discussion, ideas were exchanged on the prospects of closer trade and economic, political and cultural cooperation between Armenia and Iran and expansion of cooperation in fields of mutual interest.

Both sides highlighted the importance of the construction of the North-South corridor and its significance for the countries of the region.
During Mondays meeting at the Artsakh (Nagorno-Karabakh) National Assembly with President Arayik Harutyunyan, the MPs asked him a question about the people who are not in Artsakh during the difficult days for Artsakh, and some of them hold high positions.

In response, Harutyunyan first said that only one of the high-ranking officials of Artsakh is currently in Armenia: the Minister of Foreign Affairs of Artsakh.

"It is my decision that our foreign minister shall stay in Yerevan, considering the situation," he added.

"Actually, I think that we have to make very strict decisions. I have assigned the NSS [(National Security Service)], high-ranking officialsfrom department heads to the presidentthere is a justification that they are absent [from Artsakh], there is non-justification that they have relocated [their] family members; it will be assessed as unproductive, and decisions will be made by me," the Artsakh president said.

"We will present a package of serious decisions. Those who left the country and gone away, today have leased their property, receive income, we must make a decision regarding all of them. I cannot say what we will do. On the one hand, we shall respect our constitution. But I am in favor of a very strict attitude towards such people. First of all, to deprive [them] of the possibility of income. I announce this loudly," Harutyunyan said.

That they are announcing, shouting, running away, everyone wants to get out [of Artsakh]... First of all, whoever wants to go, go to hell! Let them go shutting up! The people want to live here, create here," stressed the Artsakh president.
We should be ready for all scenarios. We need to understand that we have an issue, as a result of it we will suffer hardships, we will have problems, but we must overcome. President Arayik Harutyunyan stated this on Monday at the National Assembly of Artsakh (Nagorno-Karabakh).

"If Coca-Cola and beer and free entry and exit are important for us... what are we waiting for? We have had harder times and we have overcome them. It will depend on what our degree of resistance will be. I classify those who rank Coca-Cola higher than our struggle in the same panic-inducing group. This is not a struggle of 10 days, 1-2 months; we must understand and assess its seriousness. Yes, it is possible in the state administration system and some products have not been accumulated in sufficient quantity. Enough work has been done so that the country does not starve, that we have enormous reserves. Surely our local products will enable us to fight for a long time and not succumb to the pressures existing today. After six days, they say that there will be a riot, the people will come and say, What is this? Well, there will be a riot; go, surrender to Azerbaijan," said Harutyunyan.

Also, the Artsakh President reflected on the prospects for dialogue with Azerbaijan.

"We have to go to Baku. Now the opinion: why not go to Baku? Because Baku is discussing only one topic with us today: integration. It does not discuss the second topic. They say: let's go, convince Azerbaijan. I have tried for two years. If anyone finds that I was a bad negotiator, in the last phase I didn't negotiate, I didn't go. They dont give results because at the end [they] come, say, this is our agenda. Azerbaijan says the first point to sit on the [negotiating] table is to disband the [Artsakh] Defense Army. Well go disband and then go to the meeting. Let me say the sequence: we go announce that we are disbanding the army, we are dissolving the public administration system [of Artsakh], we are barely creating a mechanism for community elections, after which they will give the [natural] gas, give the electricity, and let us go and come on the [Lachin] road. It is already clear who they will allow; they will allow as citizens of Azerbaijan already. We have two things to do: increase self-defense and resistance," emphasized the Artsakh president.
09:10

The Uddhav Thackeray-led Shiv Sena-UBT on Monday claimed Nationalist Congress Party leader Ajit Pawar, who has been sworn in as the deputy chief minister of Maharashtra, would replace Chief Minister Eknath Shinde soon.







Ajit Pawar on Sunday led a vertical split in the NCP to become the deputy chief minister, shocking his uncle Sharad Pawar, who founded the party 24 years ago.





Eight NCP leaders were also sworn in as ministers in the Shinde-Bharatiya Janata Party government.





An editorial in the Shiv Sena-Uddhav Balasaheb Thackeray mouthpiece Saamana claimed the BJP under Prime Minister Narendra Modi and Union Home Minister Amit Shah has not only 'muddied' politics of Maharashtra but also of the country.





'Ajit Pawar has a made a record of taking oath as deputy chief minister. This time the 'deal' is strong,' it said.





'Pawar has not gone there for the deputy CM's post. Chief Minister Eknath Shinde and rebel MLAs of the Sena would be disqualified soon and Pawar would be coronated,' it claimed.





'This new development will not go down well with the people of the state. The state had no such political tradition and it will never be supported by the people,' it said.





Ajit Pawar's somersault is actually dangerous for CM Shinde, the Marathi daily claimed.





It said when Shinde and other MLAs left the Shiv Sena (last year), they blamed the party president and (then) chief minister Uddhav Thackeray for not controlling then finance minister Ajit Pawar who had taken immense control over fund disbursement and sanctioning work orders.





'The primary reason according to the rebel MLAs was 'we left the Shiv Sena because of the NCP',' the editorial said.





'What will they do now? During the swearing-in ceremony (of Ajit Pawar on Sunday), the expressions on their faces (of Shinde bloc members) made it evident that their future is dark,' it claimed.





'Their so-called Hindutva is now over. The day is not very far when Shinde and his rebel colleagues will be disqualified, is the true meaning of Sunday's development,' the Marathi publication further claimed.





'Those who possess the arrogance of power and believe they can buy out their opposition are taking control of democracy. These people are not even ready to hold elections for 14 municipal corporations in the state, including Mumbai city,' it said.





'The (previous) Congress regime and the British rule were much better as one could fight with them on the street openly. Ajit Pawar has not taken the decision to support Shinde on any moral ground,' it added.





The editorial also hit out at BJP leader and Deputy CM Devendra Fadnavis, claiming he had said they will never join hands with NCP, 'the party of corrupts' and that Ajit Pawar was facing allegations in an irrigation scam worth Rs 70,000 crore.





'This swearing-in has exposed the BJP's true face,' it said.





Refusing to accept that Sunday's developments came as a surprise for everyone, the editorial claimed some people were already aware of this 'earthquake'.





'What happened to the Shiv Sena a year ago is now happening to the NCP. As NCP chief Sharad Pawar said, there will be a new day tomorrow,' the editorial said, adding it was not an earthquake but minor tremors. -- PTI


VMPL New Delhi [India], July 3: Are you an avid traveler seeking new adventures and hidden gems around the globe? Look no further than MakeMyTraveling.com, your ultimate source of travel information and inspiration. Whether you're planning a future trip or simply want to explore the world from the comfort of your home, MakeMyTraveling offers a wealth of resources, tips, and insights to enhance your travel experiences. Let's delve into the travel information provided by MakeMyTraveling.com and discover how it can transform your journeys. Destination Guides: MakeMyTraveling provides comprehensive destination guides that cover a wide range of locations. From bustling cities to remote islands, these guides offer valuable information about attractions, local culture, cuisine, transportation, and more. Whether you're dreaming of wandering through the ancient streets of Rome or basking in the tranquility of Bali, MakeMyTraveling's destination guides will help you plan your itinerary and make the most of your visit. Insider Tips and Recommendations: Unlock the secrets of each destination with insider tips and recommendations from MakeMyTraveling. Discover off-the-beaten-path attractions, lesser-known viewpoints, and hidden culinary delights. These insights, gathered from local experts and experienced travelers, allow you to delve deeper into the heart of a place and create unforgettable memories. Travel Itineraries: For those who prefer pre-planned itineraries, MakeMyTraveling offers a selection of curated travel routes. Whether you're embarking on a weekend getaway or an extended adventure, these itineraries provide a step-by-step guide, suggesting the best places to visit, activities to experience, and even accommodation options. Let MakeMyTraveling take the hassle out of travel planning, leaving you free to immerse yourself in the journey. Cultural and Historical Context: MakeMyTraveling goes beyond basic travel information by providing cultural and historical context for each destination. Gain a deeper understanding of the places you visit, their traditions, and their significance in the larger historical and cultural context. This knowledge enriches your travel experiences, allowing you to appreciate the nuances and complexities of different cultures. Travel Safety and Practical Tips: Travel safety is paramount, and MakeMyTraveling offers practical tips and advice to ensure a smooth and secure journey. From essential travel documents and health precautions to transportation options and local customs, their safety guidelines help you navigate unfamiliar territories with confidence and peace of mind. Conclusion: MakeMyTraveling.com is a treasure trove of travel information, designed to inspire, inform, and empower travelers worldwide. With their destination guides, insider tips, travel itineraries, cultural insights, and safety recommendations, they provide all the tools you need to plan and embark on unforgettable journeys. Whether you're a seasoned explorer or a novice adventurer, MakeMyTraveling will guide you to the world's hidden gems, ensuring each travel experience is filled with discovery and wonder. Visit MakeMyTraveling.com and let your travel dreams come to life. (Disclaimer: The above press release has been provided by VMPL. ANI will not be responsible in any way for the content of the same)
VMPL New Delhi [India], July 3: The Indian business community, financial institutions, and stakeholders have long grappled with the challenges of resolving financial distress in businesses. However, with the dawn of the Insolvency and Bankruptcy Code, 2016 (IBC), a new era of comprehensive legal and institutional machinery has arrived, set to revolutionize the resolution process. To help individuals and professionals navigate this transformative landscape, renowned commercial disputes lawyer, Anant Merathia, has authored a groundbreaking book that provides practical insights and a simplified understanding of the IBC. He is assisted by his esteemed colleagues, Poornima Devi, Dhanisha Giri and Srikanth Rao, in putting together this book. The IBC completely overhauled the existing mechanisms for dealing with sick and distressed companies, leaving stakeholders with little time to grasp the intricacies of the new regime and its constant developments. Recognizing the need for a comprehensive resource, Anant Merathia draws on his vast experience in the legal field to present a quintessential guide to the dynamic nature of the IBC in his latest book. Unlike any other legal statute in recent memory, the IBC has been galloping at break-neck speed, presenting new challenges and quandaries at every turn while paving the way for seamless implementation of the legislation. In this remarkable book, Merathia takes readers on a journey through the evolution of the IBC, unravelling its stakeholder-wise implications and delving into its various facets in a lucid and accessible manner, free from the complexities and jargon of a legal text. "Understanding the IBC is paramount for all stakeholders involved in the insolvency process," says Merathia. "My aim with this book is to simplify the concepts, provide practical perspectives, and offer clear guidance to anyone seeking to navigate the insolvency regime prevailing in India." This treatise is indispensable for members of the Bench and the Bar, insolvency professionals, finance professionals, chartered accountants, company secretaries, various stakeholders in the IBC, businesses, corporate entities, individuals, students, researchers, academicians, and law professors alike. Its simplicity makes it accessible to a wider array of readers, even those outside the legal fraternity. Key attributes of the book include its simplicity, allowing readers to grasp the subject matter with ease, and its modular structure, where each section can be read independently. Additionally, the book provides not only a legal perspective but also practical insights into the application of the Insolvency and Bankruptcy Code, 2016. Richly enhanced with tables, images, graphs, and boxed key information, the book ensures a seamless reading experience for all. Anant Merathia brings a wealth of expertise to this groundbreaking publication. With nearly 18 years of experience as a commercial disputes lawyer in India and Singapore, he has advised and represented clients on a wide range of corporate and commercial litigations. Merathia's passion for contemporary laws led him to pursue a Master's degree in Law from the National University of Singapore, where he also practised as a registered foreign lawyer. A staunch advocate for alternative dispute resolution mechanisms, he strongly believes that commercial disputes should be resolved to the extent possible by way of ADR mechanisms and facilitated negotiations. As the Indian business landscape continues to evolve, Merathia's book provides an invaluable tool for understanding the nuances of the IBC and gaining a practical understanding of the insolvency regime in India. Whether you are a legal professional, a business owner, or an academician, this comprehensive guide promises to demystify the complexities of the insolvency and bankruptcy landscape, offering insights and solutions for a rapidly changing world. (Disclaimer: The above press release has been provided by VMPL. ANI will not be responsible in any way for the content of the same)
SRV Media New Delhi [India], July 3: Awesome Sauce Creative, a leading holistic design, strategy, and marketing company, recently marked its fourth anniversary with a series of remarkable achievements. Over the past four years, the company has established itself as a powerhouse in the industry, helping numerous clients thrive through their comprehensive services in branding, digital marketing, print, and more. With renewed energy, Awesome Sauce Creative is excited to embark on its next chapter of growth, fueled by a lineup of new clients, geographic expansions to Mumbai and Delhi NCR, and the addition of a new co-founder to its leadership team, Sanskar Jain. Since its inception, Awesome Sauce Creative has been dedicated to helping businesses build strong and impactful brands. Their expertise lies in developing comprehensive strategies that incorporate design, marketing, and branding to create cohesive and engaging experiences for clients and their target audiences. Over the past four years, Rishi Singh and Surbhit Krishna have garnered a reputation for delivering outstanding results and driving growth for their clients with their team. To celebrate their fourth year in business, Awesome Sauce Creative has secured an impressive array of new clients. By providing tailored solutions and leveraging cutting-edge technologies, they continue to attract businesses seeking a competitive edge in the market. The company's ability to understand clients' unique needs and transform them into creative and effective solutions has been pivotal to their success. In addition to expanding their client base, Awesome Sauce Creative has extended its geographical reach as well, by recognizing the immense potential in Mumbai and Delhi NCR. By doing so, they aim to better serve their existing clients in these regions while also connecting with new businesses that can benefit from their expertise. The expansion into Mumbai and Delhi NCR highlights Awesome Sauce Creative's commitment to being at the forefront of industry trends and providing exceptional services to clients across the country. By having a physical presence in these key markets, they can deepen their relationships with local businesses, understand the unique challenges and opportunities they face, and tailor their strategies accordingly. With this new leadership structure in place, Awesome Sauce Creative is poised to achieve even greater heights. The co-founders' collective vision, combined with their diverse skill sets and industry experience, will enable the company to navigate through the ever-evolving landscape of design, strategy, and marketing. Reflecting on the past four years, the existing co-founders of Awesome Sauce Creative expressed their gratitude for the support they have received from clients, employees, and partners. They attribute their success to a strong focus on delivering exceptional results, fostering long-term relationships, and constantly adapting to the changing needs of the market. As Awesome Sauce Creative looks to the future, they remain committed to their core values of creativity, innovation, and client satisfaction. For more information, please visit: https://awesomesauce.in/ Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/awesomesauce.creative/ (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)
BusinessWire India New Delhi [India], July 3: PP Rolling Mills, a leading manufacturer and supplier of rolling mills, tube mills, and related equipment, is now the new shareholder of Pomini Long Rolling Mills. Pomini LRM is a renowned Italian company that specializes in long rolling mills for special steels, rebars, rails, and associated technologies. This strategic move by PPRM expands its presence in the European market and solidifies its commitment to delivering exceptional products and services worldwide. The Indian steel industry is expected to rise from 120 million tonnes to 300 million tonnes by 2030, positioning it as the world's fastest-growing steel market. Leveraging PPRM's established customer relationships and Pomini LRM's extensive experience in producing special steels and rails, they will be well-equipped to provide solutions for this booming market. PPRM already serves over 300 steel rolling mills and collaborates with major heavy equipment manufacturers such as TATA Steel, JSPL, Sanyo Steels, Primetals, and Kobelco, among others. Meanwhile, Pomini LRM has a strong international presence in over 70 countries, enabling them to tackle the challenges of the steel industry. With five production sites in India and a service hub in Italy, they aim to provide improved performance, accuracy, and sustainability to their customers. Furthermore, the Tech Centre in Milan will drive innovation and the development of new technologies for the steel sector. With a typical yield of 96-97% at the Pomini LRM plant, this union of Indian entrepreneurship and Italian innovation and design will usher in a new era in the global steel industry. Pankaj Khanna, MD of PP Rolling Mills, expressed enthusiasm for the partnership and highlighted the company's mission to achieve $500 million. He said, "Our growth will be fuelled by driving innovation through R&D, introducing world-class products from Pomini LRM, and expanding our overseas operations. We aim to provide our clients with an unrivalled selection of sophisticated steel rolling mill solutions, manufactured and sourced based on the highest manufacturing and quality standards, inspired by the Toyota Production System. This milestone signifies our commitment to supporting Indo-Italian trade and development for the benefit of our employees, customers, suppliers, and the wider community." He further added, "This arrangement presents elevated career opportunities and stability for employees and members of both companies and the communities in which they operate. I believe that the unique knowledge transfer will broaden their skill sets, foster a culture of continuous learning and improvement, and provide new avenues for personal as well as professional growth." Ernesto Bottone, CEO and Member of the Board, Pomini Long Rolling Mills, said, "The integration of Pomini LRM's technological legacy with PPRM's manufacturing and sourcing prowess establishes a powerful force that can redefine industry standards and cater to the evolving needs of customers in untapped markets. This partnership brings together a combined legacy of over 220 years and 1300 employees, facilitating the pooling of intellectual resources and expertise to deliver cutting-edge steel solutions. The tremendous potential of this collaboration holds the promise of transforming the industry and delivering unparalleled sustainability, innovation, quality, safety, and reliability to customers. Pomini Long Rolling Mills will continue to operate independently in Italy from their HQ in Legnano (Milan) with their qualified human resources while providing respect for customers, partners, suppliers, and communities where both companies operate." Claudio Maffioletti, Secretary General of The Indo-Italian Chamber of Commerce and Industry, said, "The participation of PP Rolling Mills as shareholders of Pomini LRM is another bright example of the synergy between the know-how of Made in Italy technologies and the huge potential for market penetration offered by the Make in India scheme. We welcome this venture as a further step towards the progressive integration of the Italian and Indian economies and the development of Indo-Italian business relations." Naveen Jindal, the visionary leader and Chairman, Jindal Steel, expressed his optimism, stating, "We share a longstanding relationship with Pomini LRM, and we look to further strengthen our partnership with Pomini LRM as we continue to seize opportunities for building a self-reliant India. PP Rolling Mills and Pomini LRM together can fuel Jindal Steel's ambitions to stay at the forefront of technological advancements and maintain a competitive edge in the market." Ruggero Brunori, CEO of Ferriera Valsabbia SpA, expressed the significant benefits that customers can expect from the strategic alliance between Pomini LRM and PPRM. This collaboration leverages their rich history of collaboration, extensive technical expertise, and continuous development of innovative solutions by Pomini LRM, combined with PPRM's exceptional production capabilities. Brunori emphasized that this strategic alliance holds great importance for the growth and success of his company as well. He said, "The partnership between Pomini LRM and PPRM signifies an even stronger commitment to delivering high-quality solutions that not only meet customer needs but also exceed their expectations. The ultimate objective is to strengthen Ferriera Valsabbia's position as a leader in the iron and steel sector, offering customers tangible added value in a competitive manner." Maurizio Carminati, President of the General Confederation of Italian Industry - Alto Milanese, emphasized the distinction between companies and entrepreneurs, highlighting that while entrepreneurs may change over time, companies endure. He said, "The prosperity and advancement of our region depend heavily on the industry that thrives within it and the ability of companies to attract and nurture talented individuals who drive progress. Therefore, initiatives like this partnership are highly valued and align with the foundational principles of our local industrial economy, which gave rise to Pomini LRM and the Italian mechanical industry." Carminati expressed his sincere congratulations and best wishes to all the staff, hoping for the sustained and profitable growth of the esteemed brand, one that is revered worldwide. (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)
PNN New Delhi [India], July 3: Communication Crafts, Gujarat's 1st Mission-driven creative agency, has announced the successful completion of their extraordinary experience design project: the design and execution of two immersive experience galleries for Honda Motorcycle and Scooter India at their state-of-the-art plant in Vithalapur, Gujarat. These galleries were created to cater to Honda's national and international visitors, offering them a captivating journey into the legacy, technical expertise, and scale of production at the facility. "The Honda Experience Galleries at the Vithalapur plant mark a significant achievement for Communication Crafts. We successfully added another major service - Experience Design, to our 360 capability. Going beyond the usual role of a creative agency, we undertook the entire project in turnkey model. It presented us with an opportunity to explore an agency-wide departmental collaboration to deliver a truly 360 outcome," said Chirag Dagli, Director - Creative Business, Communication Crafts. The Vithalapur plant, known as the 4F Smiling & Fun Factory, serves as a global resource centre for Honda Motorcycle and Scooter India, placing Gujarat on the world map of innovation and excellence. As the manufacturing hub for the iconic Honda Activa, which is exported worldwide, Honda desired an engaging platform to showcase their story and technical prowess. However, the challenge lay in finding a way to present this information in an attractive and easily digestible format, amidst the bustling activity of the factory floor. "We are thrilled to have delivered a cutting-edge solution that showcases Honda's rich heritage and technical excellence," added Chirag. "This project combined storytelling, visualizing, building interactive displays, touchscreen experience, sight and sound show, usage of IOT and automation to deliver an extraordinary experience. Our team's dedication and creativity have transformed the factory visit experience, leaving a lasting impression on every visitor." Communication Crafts rose to the challenge with their innovative solutions, resulting in two cutting-edge experience galleries that seamlessly integrated graphical, physical, and video elements. One of the standout features was an interactive sight and sound show that narrated the story, technical aspects, and scale of Honda's operations at the Vithalapur plant. The visitor's journey was controlled by a centrally placed touchscreen, which allowed them to customize their experience by managing the lights, sounds, and videos. To enhance the visual impact, physical installations were strategically placed throughout the galleries. These included Honda 2-wheelers taking flight, symbolizing the wings in the Honda logo, as well as podiums showcasing their impressive engines. Another remarkable feature was an imploded view of the iconic 2-wheeler, providing visitors with an immersive experience of the combi brake technology, which can be challenging to explain but easy to comprehend through direct interaction. The end-to-end execution of this project by Communication Crafts has made a significant impact on the Vithalapur plant. Not only have these galleries streamlined the visitor experience, eliminating the need for tedious presentations and exhausting factory tours, but they have also left a lasting impression on Honda's guests. Impressed by the flawless execution, Honda is already planning to replicate the success of these galleries by introducing similar experiences across India in the future. This accomplishment reinforces Communication Crafts' position as a trusted partner for turnkey projects, going above and beyond their role as a creative marketing agency. By blending creativity, technology, and meticulous execution, the agency has created an exceptional experience that showcases Honda's remarkable legacy and technical expertise, leaving a lasting impact on visitors. (Disclaimer: The above press release has been provided by PNN. ANI will not be responsible in any way for the content of the same)
About 76 per cent of the Rs 2000 banknotes have returned to the banking system since the Reserve Bank of India (RBI) in May decided to withdraw the high-value note from circulation. The total value of Rs 2000 banknotes in circulation was Rs 3.56 lakh crore at the close of business on May 19, 2023 - when the RBI decided to withdraw the note. The total value of Rs 2000 banknotes returned to the system after the announcement on May 19 is to the tune of Rs 2.72 lakh crore, RBI said Monday, citing data received from banks. Hence, banknotes in circulation now stand at Rs 0.84 lakh crore. "Data collected from major banks indicates that out of the total banknotes in Rs 2000 denomination received back from circulation, about 87 per cent is in the form of deposits and the remaining around 13 per cent has been exchanged into other denomination banknotes," RBI said on Monday in a statement. People are requested to utilise the next three months to deposit or exchange their Rs 2000 banknotes to avoid any rush at the last moment. People can exchange or deposit their Rs 2,000 notes in bank branches and regional branches of RBI. A non-account holder also can exchange Rs 2000 banknotes up to a limit of Rs 20,000 at a time at any bank branch. September 30 has been decided as the last date for the purpose of completing the exercise in a time-bound manner and to provide adequate time to the public. RBI may later revisit the September deadline based on the situation going ahead. On May 19, the RBI decided to withdraw the Rs 2000 denomination banknotes from circulation but said it will continue to remain as legal tender. However, RBI has advised banks to stop issuing such banknotes with immediate effect. The Rs 2000 denomination banknote was introduced in November 2016 under Section 24(1) of the RBI Act, 1934, primarily to meet the currency requirement of the economy in an expeditious manner after the withdrawal of the legal tender status of all Rs 500 and Rs 1000 banknotes in circulation at that time. The objective of introducing Rs 2000 banknotes was met once banknotes in other denominations became available in adequate quantities. Therefore, the printing of Rs 2000 banknotes was stopped in 2018-19. (ANI)
PNN New Delhi [India], July 3: India's No. 1 tractor export brand, Sonalika Tractors has continued its strong legacy in the innovation streak while catering to the dynamic needs of farmers. The company has raced ahead in FY'24 and recorded its highest ever Q1 overall sales of 40,700 tractors to beat domestic industry growth. Sonalika's heavy duty tractors and region centric approach have carried forward its growth momentum from FY'23 in Q1 FY'24 with high consistency that has positioned it well for upcoming seasons. Monsoon season has rapidly expanded its pace in major parts of the country, which is a healthy sign for farming and groundwater replenishment in India. Alongside, various government subsidies and MSP support have been vital to support farmers to make their farming profitable. Being at the forefront to strengthen farmers, Sonalika Tractors remains passionate to empower them with its heavy duty tractor range that ensures tech-enabled yet affordable farming in India. Tailored in the World's No.1 tractor manufacturing plant, Sonalika's widest tractor range in 20-120 HP is currently trusted by 14+ lakh farmers in 150+ countries. Raman Mittal, Joint Managing Director, International Tractors Limited, said, "Our 'Farmers First' approach continues to have a controlled grip over FY'24 and has enabled us to clock our highest ever Q1 overall sales of 40,700 tractors, surpassing domestic industry growth. Our best in class innovation and world class quality drive in heavy duty tractors will remain focused to support farmers attain maximum productivity as our bond with them is further reinforced with our latest achievement. Monsoons have already reached over 80% of India which is a healthy sign as above average rainfall will also lead to higher water levels in the reservoirs and collectively allow agri activities to proliferate. Moreover, the recent uptick in MSP across all Kharif crops will not just ensure security to Indian farmers but also encourage farmers to diversify and cultivate diverse crops." (Disclaimer: The above press release has been provided by PNN. ANI will not be responsible in any way for the content of the same)
BusinessWire India Jaipur (Rajasthan) [India], July 3: Aavas Financiers, recently announced that the company has successfully accomplished financing of 100 EDGE certified self-built green homes in India. This is another milestone in their vision to inculcate sustainability into building affordable homes in rural and semi-urban regions of India. Innovating together with International Finance Corporation (IFC), a member of the World Bank Group, the pilot project paves the way for the development of green self-built housing in India, a country where the urban population is anticipated to rise to 607 million by 2030 and where 62% of new housing is still self-built. Aavas Financiers has been at the forefront of affordable housing finance, leading the way with their Green Housing program, which aims to integrate environmentally friendly construction practices into the mainstream infrastructure of India. By implementing a streamlined prescriptive approach, which simplifies the auditing and certification process, Aavas has enabled lower and middle-income households to construct these eco-friendly Green Homes while complying with the technical guidelines mandated for green financing. The company's commitment to green financing and sustainable practices has resulted in the prestigious EDGE (Excellence in Design for Greater Efficiencies) certification, verified by Sintali, a UK-based environmental verification company. An IFC innovation, EDGE makes it easy to design and certify resource-efficient and zero carbon buildings. Aavas' success is attributed to its unwavering dedication to customer service, innovative financial products, and inclusive climate action. The company customizes its offerings to meet the unique requirements and goals of its clients, ensuring affordability, transparency, and convenience throughout the home loan process. Rajasthan demonstrated the highest interest with 38 green homes built, followed by Gujarat with 27, and Karnataka with 21, as compared to the other states. Maharashtra and Chattisgarh are new regions with the potential where the concept of green housing is being driven. With the program's inception in October 2020, Aavas has been tirelessly committed to providing practical solutions that facilitate a seamless transition to green housing in the country. They have been trailblazers in raising awareness and fostering willingness across the green housing value chain. Speaking on the occasion, Sachinder Bhinder, MD & CEO of Aavas Financiers Ltd, stated, "We are immensely proud to have facilitated the financing of 100 certified green homes across the country. It is an honour to be a pioneer, driving tangible change and constructing environmentally friendly houses for low-income communities, offering them and future generations a better quality of life. While reaching 100 green homes is a significant milestone, it is only the first step towards our ultimate goal of scaling up the ecosystem and inspiring other financial institutions to provide access to such homes." Aavas has been an active participant in facilitating discussions around climate action and has established The Green India Drive program in collaboration with IFC. The initiative brings together regional stakeholders to identify challenges and opportunities related to green structures and financing. To further drive the development of affordable housing solutions and contribute to the sustainable development of communities, Aavas will continue to foster innovation and collaboration with stakeholders across the housing ecosystem. (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)
BusinessWire India New Delhi [India], July 3: The American India Foundation, catalyzing social and economic change in India for the past 22 years, organized the annual Banyan Impact Fellowship (BIF) graduation event 'Celebrating Emerging Leaders in the U.S. India Corridor' at the Tamarind Hall, India Habitat Centre, New Delhi last week. Joining us at the event as the keynote speaker, the pioneer leader, Kiran Bedi, former Lieutenant Governor of Puducherry and IPS Officer, drove the discourse on the critical role of youth leaders and partnerships to fuel India's progress. The event brought together 90 sectoral experts, policymakers, corporates, partner organizations, Fellowship alumni & government partners, to cogitate on nurturing youth to be agents of positive change, towards mobilizing a collective, cross-generational force for sustainable impact. It was also an opportunity to celebrate the 10-month rigorous and transformative journey of the Program's India Service track's 22nd cohort of Fellows, the graduating class of 22-23. Now in its third decade of operations, BIF is an immersive, dynamic, bi-national volunteer service program with crucial strategic importance in the US-India corridor, strengthening ties between both countries and creating the next generation of leaders committed to positive and sustainable change. Through its emphasis on a service-leadership model, BIF places young professionals from the US and India in service with communities and organizations across both countries for mutual learning, capacity building, and leadership development in support of social justice goals. Fellows engage in service and fieldwork on projects linked to the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals across diverse thematic areas such as education, public health, livelihoods, social inclusion, minority rights, climate justice, LGBTQ+ rights, gender, arts, sports, corporate social responsibility, and more. In the inaugural session, congratulating the Fellowship team, Kiran Bedi said, "I'm privileged and honored to be here. I have known AIF for decades. AIF looks at collaborations and culture exchanges , all leading to the elevation of youth. Every leader the Fellowship creates benefits the country first and then the world . You've opened up their mind for a larger good and they now belong to the world. Any bit that the American India Foundation does individually or collectively, benefits my country and for that I am thankful." The event brought together ecosystem thought leaders for a panel discussion on 'Impact building through leadership development'. Our speakers for the day, Lokesh Sharma; Additional CEO, Atal Bihari Vajpayee Institute of Good Governance and Policy Analysis, Anu Prasad; Founder & CEO, India Leaders for Social Sector and Deputy Dean, YIF, Ashoka University, Sweetlana Ranjan; Former Program Director, Piramal Foundation, Anand Sinha; Country Advisor, David & Lucile Packard Foundation, Aditi Arora, Country Director, Girl Up India, Sharmistha Ray, Head of Human Resources, Tech Mahindra Foundation and Prashant Anand, Alum and Co-Founder, Samanta Foundation shared insights on strengthening the role of young leaders and paving the way forward collectively. "AIF is honored to deepen and expand our commitment towards bolstering US-India ties that will be critical to shaping the next generation of global, socially-responsible leaders who will strive together to build a better world," said Mathew Joseph, Country Director, AIF in his address. Since its inception in 2001, BIF has selected, trained, and supported 539 Fellows and 238 partner organizations across 25 Indian states to scale impact, catalyze change, and build the next generation of changemakers. In 2022, by adding US enterprises and states to this list, and by partnering with the Atlas Corps, BIF is an exemplar of a "living bridge" of collaboration, impact, and social change between India and the US aimed at lasting, meaningful, social change. (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)
PNN New Delhi [India], July 3: PROR IN Pvt Ltd, India's leading success-based startup funding intermediary, is thrilled to announce a groundbreaking achievement in the funding space. The company, founded by Neeraj Kumar Pawar and Ayu Sharma, has facilitated the fastest equity-based funding in recent memory, surpassing the pace set by the renowned Indian television show "Shark Tank." Through their unwavering dedication and extensive network of investors, PROR IN Pvt Ltd successfully assisted NICIA Food and Drinks Pvt Ltd in securing an impressive INR 10 crore within an astonishing three-month timeframe. This achievement solidifies PROR.IN's position as India's top funding intermediary, revolutionizing the startup funding landscape. PROR.IN has garnered accolades and recognition for its exceptional performance and commitment to supporting startup growth. With a portfolio of ongoing fundings worth INR 72 crore, the company's success-based model ensures that startups are not burdened with upfront charges until they secure funding. PROR IN Pvt Ltd's unique approach demonstrates its dedication to fostering the growth and success of startups across India, making it a trustworthy and reliable partner for startups seeking financial support. The expertise and dedication of the PROR.in team, led by its founders, Neeraj Kumar Pawar and Ayu Sharma, played a crucial role in NICIA Food and Drinks Pvt Ltd's remarkable funding achievement. Through their relentless efforts and deep connections with numerous debt-based funding institutions, banks, angel investors, and high-net-worth individuals, PROR IN Pvt Ltd has emerged as a driving force in India's thriving startup ecosystem. "We are thrilled to have shattered industry records by facilitating NICIA Food and Drinks Pvt Ltd's funding round at an unprecedented speed," said the founders of PROR IN Pvt Ltd. "Our success-based model aligns our interests with those of the startups we support, maximizing their chances of securing funding. This achievement highlights the immense potential and growth of India's startup landscape." In addition to their success in equity-based funding, PROR.in has successfully closed numerous debt-based funding deals for companies across India. The company's comprehensive approach to financing and dedication to their clients' success have attracted a significant number of investors, further solidifying their reputation as the premier funding intermediary. PROR IN Pvt Ltd has been honored as one of the top five funding intermediaries in India, recognizing their exceptional performance and commitment to providing unparalleled support and opportunities to startups and investors. As PROR IN Pvt Ltd continues to expand its network and collaborate with key industry players, it is poised to revolutionize the funding landscape in India. About the Directors: Ayu Sharma is a top entrepreneur in strategic finance, known for his personal connections with debt-based funding institutions and banks. Starting from humble beginnings, Ayu's unwavering determination propelled him to success, earning him recognition as a trusted expert. His deep understanding of funding processes and ability to navigate multiple channels make him a sought-after advisor for startups seeking capital. Neeraj Kumar Pawar is a finance professional who transitioned to become an acclaimed funding expert. With a strong network of angel investors and high-net-worth individuals, Neeraj's journey began as an intermediary, closing funding deals on an individual level. This experience led to the establishment of PROR, where he passionately supports startups in their early stages. Neeraj's connections, industry expertise, and dedication to empowering entrepreneurs have earned him the title of "The Ace of Investments." For more information about PROR IN Pvt Ltd and its groundbreaking achievements in the funding space, please visit Pror.in or contact 8800724244. (Disclaimer: The above press release has been provided by PNN. ANI will not be responsible in any way for the content of the same)
Taking to Instagram, Kiara shared a video which she captioned, "When the audience gives us a standing ovation, that's when you realise magic has been created. A moment to cherish forever. All I want to say is Thank You from the entire team of #SatyapremKiKatha."

https://www.instagram.com/p/CuM0KkAIj-S/

In the video, the on-screen pair could be seen entering the theatre just after the film ended. Seeing Sattu and Katha in real life, the excited audience gave them a standing ovation for their performance in the film.

Kartik also dropped a video and captioned it, "This Standing Ovation isn't just for Sattu and Katha but for the entire team that worked tirelessly towards this result. Gratitude."

https://www.instagram.com/reel/CuM4WlOMitD/

The duo folded their hands and thanked the audience at the theatre.

The film has been getting a positive response from the audience.

Soon after the duo dropped the videos, fans flooded the comment section with red heart emoticons.

"Hats off .. Beautiful movie, powerful performance," a fan commented.

Helmed by Sameer Vidwans, the film also stars Supriya Pathak Kapur, Gajraj Rao, Siddharth Randheria, Anooradha Patel, Rajpal Yadav, Nirrmite Saawaant and Shikha Talsania.

The film introduced Kartik as SatyaPrem and Kiara as Katha. Kartik is seen pursuing Kiara for marriage as he tries to impress her. The duo gets married. After that, Kiara and Kartik have many difficult experiences together.

Kartik will be next seen in director Hansal Mehta's next 'Captain India' and Kabir Khan's next and in Anurag Basu's 'Aashiqui 3'.

Kiara will be next seen in director Shankar's 'Game Changer' opposite Ram Charan. (ANI)
American model and media personality Khloe Kardashian, who turned 39 last week, called her 30s "the worst decade ever" in a video that she shared on her Instagram stories, reported People. She wrote, "I don't love showing all my gifts because I think it's sort of obnoxious, but this one was too funny," Kardashian said in the clip, before sharing a brutally honest take on the past nine years: "I hate being in my 30s, I think it's the worst decade ever." She then shared a birthday card from a friend that featured the number 39 in bold black letters, a plus sign, and a hand holding up the middle finger. "And I cannot wait to be in my 40s. So, this card, Alexa I don't know where you found this... but it's genius," she added. According to People, Kardashian also received an array of embellished gifts from her friend, which included a passport, a selection of pens, and hair clasps with the words 'Bunny', '1984' and '365 days' inscribed in pink gems. "And then all these clips. My mom calls me 'Bunny'," she explained. "And then I have 365 -- now less -- days until I'm 40. My lovely year I was born." "My little pens that I love so and then, look how gorgeous this passport holder is!," the reality star marveled, before adding, "A girl loves her sparkle!" Kardashian also shared a photo of another birthday present, a T-shirt with her infamous 2007 mugshot and a Parental Advisory label added underneath. A camera and film were also seen on top of the piece of clothing. Other photos shared showed the star receiving bouquets of flowers as well as chocolate and candy treats from loved ones. The candid birthday post comes after the Kardashians star celebrated her 39th birthday last Tuesday, receiving a slew of birthday greetings from family members, including her mother, Kris Jenner. Jenner, 67, shared a video on Instagram featuring several sweet moments of her daughter over the years. The clip was accompanied by a heartfelt caption, where Kris, 67, gushed about her "smart, strong, talented, beautiful" daughter," reported People. "Happy birthday to my beautiful bunny @khloekardashian!!!! Khloe you are the sunshine of my life... You are the most amazing daughter, mommy, sister, auntie, best friend, neighbor, and such a huge part of my heart!!!!!" she began. "You are so smart, strong, talented, beautiful inside and out, kind, sweet, thoughtful, creative, funny, and witty." "You are the best chef, best party planner, best organizer, and you are the auntie and mommy that everyone wants to be with!!! You are the one that celebrates all of us," as reported by People. (ANI)
The International Buddhist Confederation (IBC), under the aegis of the Ministry of Culture, Government of India, will celebrate Ashadha Purnima on July 3, as the Dharma Chakra Pravartana Divas at the National Museum, Janpath, New Delhi, stated Ministry of Culture in an official release. It is the annual flagship event of the IBC and the second most sacred day for Buddhists after the Buddha Purnima or the Vaishakha Purnima. A video address by President Droupadi Murmu will be presented at the programme. The programme highlight will be the screening of the film on IBC's special project in Lumbini (Nepal) - "India International Centre for Buddhist Culture and Heritage", said the press release. Prime Minister Narendra Modi laid the foundation stone of the centre at Lumbini in Nepal last year on Buddh Purnima, it further added. The programme will include a Dhamma talk on the significance of Ashadha Purnima by His Holiness 12th Chamgon Kenting Tai Situpa and a Special Address by Minister of Culture and External Affairs Meenakashi Lekhi, it said. Many other dignitaries and Patriarchs of Buddhist Sanghas, eminent Masters, Scholars, and diplomatic representatives based in New Delhi will be participating in the event, it stated. In keeping with the historical legacy of India, the land of Buddha's enlightenment, his turning of the wheels of Dhamma, and Mahaparinirvana, IBC is hosting the Ashadha Purnima celebrations at the National Museum, Janpath, where Sakhyamuni's Holy relic is enshrined, said the press release. It was at Sarnath that Buddha gave his first sermon and set the wheel of dharma in motion. The auspicious day of Ashadha Purnima, which falls on the full moon day of the month of Ashadha as per the Indian lunar calendar, is also known as Esala Poya in Sri Lanka and Asanha Bucha in Thailand. The day marks Buddha's first teaching after attaining Enlightenment to the first five ascetic disciples (pancavargiya) on the full-moon day of Ashadha at 'Deer Park', Risipatana Mrigadaya in the present day Sarnath, near Varanasi, India, said the press release. The Rainy Season retreat (Varsha Vassa) for the Monks and Nuns also starts with this day, lasting for three lunar months from July to October, during which they remain in a single place, generally in their temples dedicated to intensive meditation. The day is also observed as Guru Purnima by both Buddhists and Hindus as a day to mark reverence for their Gurus, stated the release. (ANI)
Delhi Police on Sunday arrested two men after a video of them went viral on social media where they were seen dancing at a party with firearms in their hands. On June 30, a video went viral where two boys were seen showing firearms and live cartridges while dancing at a party. As per information, these boys were residents of Gautam Puri, Badarpur area of Delhi. The police analyzed dossiers of criminals and it was found that one person in the viral video was Vishal alias Bittal. "On June 30, a video came to our notice in which two persons are seen dancing with Asalha (firearms). While taking action in the case, two boys (Vishal, and Prashant) have been arrested. Arms Act case has also been registered," said Rajesh Dev, DCP South East, Delhi. "On the night of July 1 at around 10.30 pm we apprehended two people, Vishal alias Bittal and Prashant. The person dancing in the video is Vishal and he also has a case registered against him in the past," he added. The DCP further informed, "The other boy Prashant was displaying the cartridge. We took it seriously because such activities on social media platforms are not acceptable at all. Police took immediate action on it. We have arrested both criminals after identifying them. We registered a case under the arms act on July 1." This was part of an ongoing drive against criminals, DCP informed. On July 1 at about 9.30 PM, the police got secret information that Vishal alias Bittal along with his associate would come to the Bus Stand in Badarpur. According to the information received, the police laid a trap at about 10.50 pm. Two persons, Vishal (19) and Prashant (18) were apprehended. One country-made pistol and one live cartridge were recovered from them. On interrogation, they disclosed that on June 30, there was a party on the occasion of Prashant's Birthday. Hence they made a reel in which they danced with a weapon. (ANI)
According to Customs, the contraband was concealed in a false cavity of a duffle bag.

The passenger was arrested and the matter is being investigated, added the Customs officials.

"We have arrested the passenger and further investigation is ongoing," they said.

On June 27, on the occasion of International Day against Drug Abuse and Illicit Trafficking, on Monday, Hyderabad Customs destroyed various Narcotic Drugs and Psychotropic Substances totally weighing around 8,946.263 kgs, under the 'Say no to drugs' campaign.

The Hyderabad customs further informed, "The destruction included 2655.942 Kgs of Cannabis(Ganja), 11 Kgs of Heroin, 409.39 Kgs of Alprazoalam and related materials, 142.932 Kgs of Ephedrine Hydrochloride and related materials, 74.92 Kgs of Ketamine Hydrochloride, 2.956 Kgs of Mephedrone, 53.983 Kgs of Methaqualone and 5595.14 Kgs of chemicals used for the clandestine manufacture of Ephedrine".

"Out of the above, 11 kgs of Heroin valued around Rs. 77.0 Crores was seized during April and May 2022 from foreign nationals of Malawi, Tanzania, and Angola at Rajiv Gandhi International Airport, Hyderabad.

The said Narcotics and Psychotropic substances valued at Rs.295 Crores were destroyed by way of incineration at M/s. Hyderabad Waste Management Project is located at Dindigul Village, Medchal-Malkajgiri District in Telangana.", added the customs department.

International Day against Drug Abuse and Illicit Trafficking is marked on June 26 every year to disseminate awareness regarding the adverse consequences of drug consumption. (ANI)
Nationalist Congress Party (NCP) chief Sharad Pawar will visit Karad town in Maharashtra's Satara district and address a public meeting. The NCP said that the party supremo will visit the Preeti-Sangam memorial of his political mentor and the first chief minister of Maharashtra Yashwantrao Chavan at 10 am today. The party in a tweet had appealed to Sharad Pawar's supporters to arrive at the memorial. The NCP chief along with former Maharashtra Chief Minister YB Chavan are then expected to address party supporters in Karad. "We will go to Satara where we will pay obeisance at the tomb of Late Deputy Prime Minister Yashwantrao Chavan. Hundreds of thousands of workers are ready to go to Satara with Sharad Pawar," Pune City NCP President Prashant Jagatap told ANI. Pawar's address at Karad is set to be the first public meeting after Ajit Pawar, Sharad Pawar's nephew joined the Shiv Sena-BJP alliance in Maharashtra and took oath as Maharashtra Deputy Chief Minister on Sunday in a surprise and dramatic political move that changed political equations in the state ahead of Lok Sabha and assembly polls next year and has ramifications for national politics. The move by Ajit Pawar and eight other NCP MLAs joining the Shinde-Fadnavis government came amid efforts by opposition parties to forge unity to take on the BJP in the next year's Lok Sabha polls. Sharad Pawar, a former Mahrashtra Chief Minister, has been a key leader in opposition unity efforts. Hitting out at NCP chief Sharad Pawar, Eknath Shinde said that some people were talking about "googly" but everyone saw who was clean bowled and "it's a hit wicket". "This is not a new government, Shiv Sena and BJP government were functioning under PM Modi's leadership. Development work was going on and Ajit Pawar who believed in the development work, supported and joined the government," the Maharashtra chief minister said. "I welcome him and his MLAs wholeheartedly. He has a lot of MPs and MLAs which will definitely help in the development of Maharashtra. This double-engine government will now run at the speed of a bullet train. "The Maha Vikas Aghadi government is broken... Some people were talking about googly and clean bowled, but everyone saw today who was clean bowled...it's a hit wicket", Shinde added. The NCP party has filed a disqualification petition with the Assembly Speaker Rahul Narwekar against its nine leaders. "We have filed a disqualification petition with the Speaker of the Assembly, and we will send hard copies as soon as possible. This disqualification petition was filed against nine leaders," said NCP leader Jayant Patil adding that a letter has also been sent to the Election Commission of India. (ANI)
The joint meeting of Opposition parties which was scheduled for July 13-14 in Bengaluru has now been postponed and will be held before the beginning of the Parliament's Monsoon Session. "We will declare the date very soon. We are talking to all political parties and the date will be announced without any delay," Congress General Secretary K C Venugopal told ANI on Monday. "The meeting will certainly take place before the Monsoon Session begins," the Congress leader said. Parliament Monsoon Session will begin on July 20 and go on till August 20. Launching a scathing attack on Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) over the recent political drama in Maharashtra, Venugopal said the development will not affect the Maha Vikas Aghadi (MVA) coalition. "PM Modi made a big allegation recently against the NCP leaders for corruption and now we saw this drama. It is a clear sponsored game of ED and their agencies. It will not affect MVA," Venugopal said. "We will fight against BJP more aggressively. This is not going to affect opposition unity, this is NCP's issue. Sharad Pawar is the tallest leader of the party and he will be able to handle the situation. Some leaders changing the party does not mean that the supporters of the party and other members will go with them," he said. Earlier JD(U) chief spokesperson KC Tyagi also told reporters that the Opposition meeting will not be held on the scheduled July 13-14 and though the date has not been decided yet it will be held soon. On June 23 after the first Unity meeting was conducted in Patna, Bihar, Congress president Mallikarjun Kharge had reportedly announced the next meeting to be held in Shimla on July 10 and 12. On Thursday, Sharad Pawar announced at a press conference in Pune that the next meeting of Opposition leaders has been shifted from Shimla to Bengaluru owing to the prevailing weather conditions in Himachal Pradesh. In the inaugural meeting earlier in Patna, top Opposition leaders, including Pawar, Bihar Chief Minister and Janata Dal United (JDU) chief Nitish Kumar, Congress's Mallikarjun Kharge and Rahul Gandhi, and West Bengal CM Mamata Banerjee, among others, had resolved to put up a united fight against the BJP government at the Centre in next year's Lok Sabha election (ANI) Meanwhile, Maharashtra saw a political upheaval after NCP leader Ajit Pawar joined the Shiv Sena-BJP alliance and took oath as Maharashtra Deputy Chief Minister on Sunday in a surprise and dramatic political move that changed political equations in the state ahead of Lok Sabha and assembly polls next year and has ramifications for national politics. (ANI)
The Delhi High Court on Monday rejected the bail petition of Delhi''s former Deputy Chief Minister Manish Sisodia in the Enforcement Directorate (ED) case related to alleged irregularities in the Delhi Excise Policy case. The Court also dismissed bail petitions of Vijay Nair, ex-communication in charge of Aam Aadmi Party, Abhishek Boinpally (Hyderabad-based businessman) and Binoy Babu Binoy, (manager with a liquor company Pernod Ricard) in connection with the same case. The bench of Justice Dinesh Kumar Sharma while dismissing bail petition of Manish Sisodia said that the court does not find any infirmity with the trial court order which had dismissed his bail. "The possibility of tampering with evidence and influencing witnesses cannot be ruled out and Section 45 twin condition isn''t satisfied. Bail Denied," said the court. The trial court had earlier denied bail to them. Earlier, Delhi High Court dismissed the bail plea of Manish Sisodia in a CBI case alleging corruption in the implementation of a previous liquor policy in the national capital. The bench of Justice Dinesh Kumar Sharma while denied bail to Sisodia in the CBI case, said Manish Sisodia (Applicant) being a powerful person, there was the possibility of him influencing the witnesses. The Rouse Avenue Court earlier dismissed the bail plea of Manish Sisodia in a money laundering case related to the Excise scam stating that "this case of economic offences having serious repercussions upon the general public and society at large as the evidence collected during investigation speaks volumes of his involvement in the commission of the said offence." Court also noted that some evidence is also alleged to have surfaced during the investigation to show that some part of the kickback or bribe amount received from South lobby was spent or utilized in connection with the election campaign of the AAP in Goa and some cash payments through hawala channels are alleged to have been sent to Goa for bearing the said expenses and even some fake invoices are alleged to have been created as a cover-up for the cash amounts transferred through hawala channels. It is stated that the above cash transfers were made as per instructions of the coaccused Vijay Nair, who was the representative of the applicant and the AAP and also the Media Incharge of AAP and looking after the work related to said elections and he also roped in a company named M/S Chariot Productions Media Pvt. Ltd. owned by the coaccused Rajesh Joshi to do the election-related advertising work and other jobs for the party during said elections noted the court. Thus, in view of the above background, the serious nature of allegations made and the role played by the applicant in the above criminal conspiracy, his connection with the activities relating to generation or acquisition and use etc. of the above proceeds of crime within the meaning of Section 3 of the PMLA and the oral and documentary evidence collected in support of the same and as placed for the perusal of the court, this court is of the considered opinion that even if the rigours and restrictions contained U/S 45 of the PMLA are viewed and construed reasonably, the prosecution has still been able to show a genuine and prima facie case for the involvement of the applicant in the commission of the alleged offence of money laundering. The Enforcement Directorate (ED) on March 9 arrested former Delhi deputy chief minister Manish Sisodia in the liquor policy case, after hours of questioning at Tihar Jail. Sisodia was arrested by the CBI earlier in its ongoing investigation of a case related to alleged irregularities in the framing and implementation of the excise policy of the National Capital Territory of Delhi (GNCTD). (ANI)
Uddhav Thackeray-led Shiv Sena on Sunday claimed that Ajit Pawar who was sworn in as Maharashtra Deputy Chief Minister on Sunday would replace Chief Minister Eknath Shinde soon and this time the "deal has been finalised". The mouthpiece of Shiv Sena (UBT) 'Saamana' on Sunday claimed that the Eknath Shinde along with 16 MLAs who were part of the split in Shiv Sena almost a year ago are going to be "disqualified" as per the Constitution. "Ajit Pawar has created a record by taking oath as Deputy Chief Minister, but this time the 'deal' has been finalised. Pawar didn't just go for the deputy chief minister's post. Soon, as per the constitution, Eknath Shinde and his rebel MLAs will be disqualified and Ajit Pawar will be coronated," read the UBT mouthpiece. The party further hit out at Ajit Pawar saying that the latter's move was not "democratic and was morally wrong" as he was the Leader of Opposition in the assembly. Slamming the other 8 MLAs who took oath as the cabinet ministers, the editorial said, "Till yesterday, the ones who used to consider Sharad Pawar as their 'God' went with Ajit Pawar." Giving reference to Prime Minister Narendra Modi's recent "scamster" remark, the editorial said that the PM must have to give different figures on corruption in his next speech as the numbers have varied after Ajit Pawar and other MLAs joined BJP's allies. "In Bhopal, PM said that 'the opposition parties gathered in Patna have done corruption worth 20 lakh crores'. Out of this, 2.5 lakh crores have now been deposited in the BJP's account. So, Modi will have to give a revised figure in his next speech. Modi and Shah have no hatred for corruption. Just come and do that in BJP, that's all they have to say," it added. "Their so-called Hindutva is now over. The day is not very far when Shinde and his rebel colleagues will be disqualified, is the true meaning of Sunday's development," Samaana claimed. It further said that those who possess the arrogance of power and believe they can buy out their opposition are taking control of democracy. "These people are not even ready to hold elections for 14 municipal corporations in the state, including Mumbai city," it said. The editorial also called Ajit Pawar's move a "minor tremor". "It was not an earthquake but minor tremors. What happened to the Shiv Sena a year ago is now happening to the NCP? As NCP chief Sharad Pawar said, there will be a new day tomorrow," Saamana said. State Governor Ramesh Bais administered the oath to Ajit Pawar and other ministers - Chhagan Bhujbal, Dilip Walse-Patil, Hasan Mushrif, Dhananjay Munde, Dharmarao Baba Atram, Aditi Tatkare, Sanjay Bansode and Anil Patil. Earlier in the day, Sanjay Raut, the Shiv Sena (UBT) leader said that in just a few days, Maharashtra will get another Chief Minister. "Today I am saying this in front of the camera, the Chief Minister of Maharashtra is going to change. Eknath Shinde is being removed. Eknath Shinde and the 16 MLAs are going to be disqualified," Raut said while talking to ANI. (ANI)
Nationalist Congress Party MLA and grand-nephew of NCP chief Sharad Pawar, Rohit Pawar on Monday said that the voters are upset about the recent change in Maharashtra politics that happened yesterday. "I will not comment on why an individual has gone there, but what is more important is why we are here. Voters are upset about the recent happenings in Maharashtra," Rohit Pawar said while talking to the reporters. He further said that even if Ajit Pawar has joined hands with the Eknath Shinde government after taking oath as the second Deputy CM of the state, his respect for his uncle will not be affected. "My respect for Ajit Kaka will be the same even after what has happened. In my personal life, he has helped me a lot but in politics, the thought process of a party is very important," the NCP MLAs said. The Nationalist Congress Party (NCP) experienced an internal division as senior leader Ajit Pawar joined the BJP-led Eknath Shinde government along with a group of MLAs. NCP leader Ajit Pawar took oath as Maharashtra Deputy Chief Minister with eight other party legislators also joining the National Democratic Alliance government in the state. The NCP has 53 MLAs and nine MLCs, of who nine MLAs including Ajit Pawar have joined the Eknath Shinde government. However, Ajit Pawar, earlier on Sunday claimed that all MLAs are with him and they have joined the Shiv Sena-BJP government as a party. "We have all the numbers. All MLAs are with me. We are here as a party. We have informed all seniors also. The majority is given importance in a democracy. Our party is 24 years old and young leadership should come forward," Ajit Pawar said after taking oath as Deputy Chief Minister of Maharashtra. (ANI)
The meeting of the Parliamentary Standing Committee for Law and Justice began on Monday in the Parliament to discuss the issue of the Uniform Civil Code. Earlier, in an exclusive interview with ANI, Union Minister of Commerce and Industry Piyush Goyal said that "it is the need of the hour that a law should be made by uniting and including all the people of the country and the Supreme Court has also endorsed many of its verdicts". The union minister further said that the BJP would get cross-party support for the UCC. "We have a full majority in Rajya Sabha and I think there are many leaders from other parties who want that the country should unite. I think many parties will support BJP on Uniform Civil Code. We will get cross-party support for this," the minister said. Earlier on Saturday, Rajya Sabha MP Kapil Sibal said that Prime Minister Narendra Modi should inform the country of what the proposal is for a UCC. Prime Minister Narendra Modi's strong endorsement of the Uniform Civil Code (UCC) brought it back to the spotlight.PM Modi said that the country cannot run on two laws and that Uniform Civil Code was part of the Constitution. "Today people are being instigated in the name of UCC. How can the country run on two (laws)? The Constitution also talks of equal rights...Supreme Court has also asked to implement UCC. These (Opposition) people are playing vote bank politics," PM Modi had said. (ANI)
Uttar Pradesh Chief Minister Yogi Adityanath on Monday heard problems of around 400 people at Janata Darshan held outside Digvijaynath Smriti Bhawan on Gorakhnath Temple premises despite his preoccupation with performing the 'Guru Pujan' ritual of the Nath Sect on the auspicious occasion of Guru Purnima, an official release said. After offering the customary prayers to the gurus and deities on temple premises Guru Purnima, CM Yogi Adityanath continued the tradition of listening to the problems and complaints of people at Janata Darshan and assured them of prompt and effective action to resolve them. CM Yogi further instructed the administration and police officers present on the occasion to deal with the problems of the public with sensitivity and get them resolved satisfactorily. He also directed them to extend the benefit of the government welfare schemes to every needy person. CM Yogi went to the people sitting on the chairs one by one and took their prayer letters while giving them a patient hearing and issuing necessary guidelines to officers for satisfactory resolution of their issues. The Chief Minister referred the applications to the concerned administrative and police officers, directing them to ensure a time-bound, fair and satisfactory resolution of the problems. On complaints related to crime, he directed the police officers to take strict action against the criminals, the release said. He also told people seeking financial help for the treatment of serious diseases that no one's treatment would be hindered for lack of funds. He directed the concerned officers to make available the estimate of their treatment costs to the government fast so that the government could release the required funds as soon as possible. He emphasised that protecting public health is the priority of the government. The Chief Minister also gave chocolate to the children that accompanied families at the Janata Darshan, took information about their studies and motivated them to study, the official release added. (ANI)
The Supreme Court on Monday criticised the Delhi government for expressing its inability to provide funds for the construction of the Regional Rapid Transport System (RRTS) project and directed it to furnish details of funds spent on advertisements in the last three financial years. A bench of Justices Sanjay Kishan Kaul and Sudhanshu Dhulia was informed by the Delhi government that it was unable to allocate funds for the project. Criticising the Delhi government for expressing its inability to implement the project due to funding constrain, the apex asked it to furnish within two weeks details of money spent on advertisements in the last three financial years. The bench questioned the Delhi government why it did not have funds for a project that would ensure smooth transportation, considering it had allocated funds for advertisements. "If you have money for advertisements, why don't you have money for a project that will ensure smooth transport?" the bench told counsel appearing for Delhi government. In its order, the bench said, "The Delhi State government has expressed its inability to contribute the funds for the project. Since the paucity of funds seems to be an impediment in the project on behalf of NCT of Delhi, we call upon the NCT of Delhi to file an affidavit setting forth the funds utilised for advertisements by the State government as the project is of considerable importance. Details be furnished for the last three financial years." The top court was hearing a batch of MC Mehta cases relating to environmental issues. During the hearing, the bench was informed that the Delhi government was not ready to contribute towards the project, particularly towards the Delhi-Alwar (Rajasthan) and Delhi-Panipat (Haryana) corridors. One of the counsels appearing in the matter told the apex court that the Delhi government has taken a similar stand and refrained from releasing funds towards the Delhi-Meerut (Uttar Pradesh) corridor. Counsel appearing for the State government told the top court that in the year 2020, it had communicated that there were no funds available with the government and the situation has worsened due to Covid-19. The counsel added that GST compensation provided by the Centre has also been stopped since the last financial year, hence, there are no finances available. The Delhi-Meerut Regional Rapid Transport System (RRTS) project is slated to be a semi-high-speed rail corridor between Delhi and Uttar Pradesh's Meerut. This corridor will connect the cities of Delhi, Ghaziabad and Meerut and is one of the three rapid rail corridors planned under Phase I of the RapidX project. (ANI)
Ethiopian officials, experts hail BRI as mutually beneficial cooperation

Xinhua) 08:48, July 03, 2023

Ethiopian government officials, Chinese diplomats in Ethiopia, officials from the Ethiopia-Djibouti Standard Gauge Railway Share Company, heads of different think tanks, as well as media leaders attend a high-level meeting themed "China-Ethiopia Building Belt and Road" in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia, June 30, 2023. Ethiopian experts and policymakers on Friday hailed the China-proposed Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) as a mutually beneficial cooperation platform advancing socioeconomic development in Ethiopia and beyond. (Xinhua/Michael Tewelde)

ADDIS ABABA, June 30 (Xinhua) -- Ethiopian experts and policymakers on Friday hailed the China-proposed Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) as a mutually beneficial cooperation platform advancing socioeconomic development in Ethiopia and beyond.

This came during a high-level meeting themed "China-Ethiopia Building Belt and Road." The roundtable meeting brought together senior Ethiopian government officials, Chinese diplomats in Ethiopia, officials from the Ethiopia-Djibouti Standard Gauge Railway Share Company (EDR), heads of different think tanks, as well as media leaders, among others.

Ethiopian Minister of Transport and Logistics Alemu Sime said during the occasion that as an important partner of China in building the BRI, Ethiopia and China have been cooperating closely in the field of transportation, and the two countries have complemented each other's advantages, showing great potential for development.

"The Belt and Road Initiative has become an open and inclusive, mutually beneficial and win-win international cooperation platform. We are grateful to the Chinese government for its continuous support to the development of transportation in Ethiopia," the minister said.

He said the 752.7-km Chinese-built Ethiopia-Djibouti standard gauge railway, also known as the Addis Ababa-Djibouti railway, as one manifestation of the BRI, has injected a crucial impetus to Ethiopia's development aspirations.

"The Addis Ababa-Djibouti Railway is not only a transportation line, but also an economic corridor and a road to prosperity. It has opened up a railroad corridor to the sea for Ethiopia, effectively driving the development of industrialization and urbanization along the route," he said.

Abdi Zenebe, the chief executive officer of the EDR, highlighted the BRI's positive contribution to anchoring global development. "The Belt and Road Initiative represents an extraordinary vision, one that transcends borders, connects continents, and fosters economic cooperation on an unprecedented scale," he said.

The EDR chief also said the initiative is a "testament to our shared commitment to progress and mutual prosperity."

While echoing the sentiment, Beyene Petros, director general of the Policy Studies Institute, a leading think tank in Ethiopia, underscored the wide-ranging socioeconomic benefits of the BRI to Ethiopia. "Ethiopia is one of the countries that has embraced this initiative, and the benefits are already being felt with the construction of various infrastructure projects, including highways, railways, and industrial parks," he said.

Zhao Zhiyuan, Chinese ambassador to Ethiopia, described Ethiopia as "the pioneer of China-Africa cooperation and the African bridgehead of building the BRI." He further underscored the Chinese government's commitment and readiness to support Ethiopia's aspiration to develop through the BRI and other development initiatives.

"While Ethiopia and China steadily promote high-quality BRI development, we also initiated cooperation under the Global Development Initiative and pushed forward the implementation of the Nine Programs under Forum on China-Africa Cooperation," he said.

This photo taken on June 30, 2023 shows an Ethiopian train attendant at Lebu Railway Station in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia. Ethiopian experts and policymakers on Friday hailed the China-proposed Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) as a mutually beneficial cooperation platform advancing socioeconomic development in Ethiopia and beyond. (Xinhua/Michael Tewelde)

Ethiopian Minister of Transport and Logistics Alemu Sime speaks during a high-level meeting themed "China-Ethiopia Building Belt and Road" in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia, June 30, 2023. Ethiopian experts and policymakers on Friday hailed the China-proposed Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) as a mutually beneficial cooperation platform advancing socioeconomic development in Ethiopia and beyond. (Xinhua/Michael Tewelde)

A staff member boards a train at Lebu Railway Station in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia, June 30, 2023. Ethiopian experts and policymakers on Friday hailed the China-proposed Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) as a mutually beneficial cooperation platform advancing socioeconomic development in Ethiopia and beyond. (Xinhua/Michael Tewelde)

Ethiopian Minister of Transport and Logistics Alemu Sime takes a train operating along the Ethiopia-Djibouti Railway in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia, June 30, 2023. Ethiopian experts and policymakers on Friday hailed the China-proposed Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) as a mutually beneficial cooperation platform advancing socioeconomic development in Ethiopia and beyond. (Xinhua/Michael Tewelde)

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Karnataka Home Minister Dr G Parameshwara said, "Karnataka Government has ordered an SIT probe into Bitcoin scam. Bengaluru Commissioner B Dayananda had asked the Government to order a CID probe into the matter."

"Bengaluru Commissioner B Dayananda had asked the government demands for a CID probe into the scam. ADGP Manish Karbikar will head the probe," he said while speaking to reporters.

He said, "We promise to the people of Karnataka that if we come to power we will reinvestigate the so-called Bitcoin scam. Accordingly, we have taken a decision to hand it over to SIT we have constituted under the CID. We hope the committee will do justice."

Reacting to the Karnataka government's decision, BJP leader and former Karnataka ministers C N Ashwath Narayana said, "The Leader of the Opposition will be decided after the LP meeting tomorrow. The scandals during the tenure of the Congress (2013-2018) should also be investigated by SIT."

Former Karnataka CM and BJP leader Basavaraj Bommai said that they welcome the move of SIT probe into the Bitcoin scam.

The Bitcoin scam had rocked the previous Basavaraj Bommai government and the Congress had demanded a probe into the case.

In 2021, a 26-year-old accused in Karnataka's alleged Bitcoin scam informed the police that he had twice hacked the Bitfinex exchange during his stay in the Netherlands. The alleged hacker has been identified as Srikrishna Ramesh alias Sriki. (ANI)
Sources said some ministries are likely to present a report of various central schemes and their implementation. They said meetings of the Council of Ministers have seen such discussions in the past.

The sources said there may be an important political message from the Prime Minister in view of elections to five states later this year and Lok Sabha polls next year.

The government is preparing agenda for the monsoon session of Parliament which is set to begin on July 20. The opposition is likely to raise the issue of UCC to corner the government.

Prime Minister Narendra Modi held a meeting with Union Home Minister Amit Shah, BL Santosh and BJP's National President JP Nadda last week. The BJP, for the first time, will hold region-wise meetings of the three zones- the eastern, northern and southern - on July 6, 7, and 8.

The BJP is gearing up for assembly elections in Madhya Pradesh, Rajasthan, Chhattisgarh, Telangana and Mizoram to be held later this year as well for the Lok Sabha elections. (ANI)
Maharashtra Deputy Chief Minister Devendra Fadnavis has said that NCP leader Sharad Pawar has put his daughter Supriya Sule, MP, in the forefront to "transfer his legacy" and that he is the "driver of opposition unity". In an interview with ANI Editor Smita Prakash which was recorded on June 29 before the crisis in the Nationalist Congress Party (NCP), Fadnavis hit out at the dynastic politics and said Prime Minister Narendra Modi has lessened its impact in national politics. Fadnavis said Sharad Pawar has been instrumental in bringing together opposition parties. "The person to bring the opposition parties together is Pawar Sahib. And the force behind bringing the opposition parties together, the parties who cannot see each other face to face is Pawar Sahib. The driver of opposition unity is also Pawar," Fadnavis said. "He has health reasons but he is fit. Sharad Pawar visits places now. He is politically, totally alert. He is counted among those politicians who know politics from every side. He definitely wants to transfer the legacy of his party just like all family parties want. In order to transfer his legacy, he has put Supriyaji in the forefront," the BJP leader said. Fadnavis said that Sharad Pawar would remain active politically as he continues to be NCP chief. "If he wanted to take a backseat, he would have made Supriya Sule party president, but he has made her a working president. He has established his process of transferring his legacy but the person sitting in the driving seat is Sharad Pawar only." Sharad Pawar appointed Supriya Sule and Praful Patel as working presidents of the party in June. NCP leader Ajit Pawar, who was the Leader of Opposition in Maharashtra, joined the BJP-Shiv Sena government in Maharashtra as Deputy Chief Minister on Sunday causing a split in his party. The crisis in NCP has ramifications within Maharashtra and also for national politics. Fadnavis said dynastic politics is there and noted people should be promoted on the basis of their abilities. "We are not opposed to a politician's daughter and son becoming a politician. The point that we are trying to make is that a person should not go to a superior position just because he is the son of a particular politician. The person should not be promoted to a higher post if he or she is incapable, or if the person does not have an understanding or calibre. We are against this kind of dynastic politics, this is wrong," he said. "The result of dynastic politics is that the government ends up serving a family and not the people. But after Modiji came to power, this kind of politics has lessened. After this, the only dynasty which will last is the one which will serve people," he added. Opposition parties are making efforts to forge a front against the BJP-led National Democratic Alliance (NDA) at the Centre with an eye on next year's Lok Sabha polls. Leaders from 15 political parties attended the meeting of opposition parties convened by Bihar Chief Minister Nitish Kumar last month. (ANI)
The Delhi government has approved the proposal for the construction of a new maintenance shed in Delhi for Vande Bharat express trains. Delhi Chief Minister Arvind Kejriwal approved the proposal in the national interest allowing the removal and transplantation of trees to clear land for project construction in the national capital. 70 trees will be transplanted, 8 trees will be removed from the site, 780 new saplings will be planted in lieu of the exercise Clearing the proposal, CM Kejriwal stated, "Railways need modern infrastructure, their proposal has been accepted to give better facilities to the nation. Delhi Government has mandated compensatory plantation of 10x trees to protect the environment." Earlier on Sunday, the Delhi government received a proposal for removing and transplanting 214 trees to clear its construction site. Kejriwal has cleared the path for the project by approving the said proposal in the national interest. The applicant agency has proposed the construction of a new defence project in Delhi. However, certain patches of trees were obstructing the construction of the site. Thus, through its officials, it had written a letter to the Environment and Forests Department of the Delhi Government seeking approval for the removal and transplantation of 214 trees to clear the site. Given the importance of modern infrastructure for the defence forces, CM Arvind Kejriwal gave his nod to speed up the work by clearing the patch, in the national interest. The Delhi Government has further made it mandatory for the applicant agency to plant ten times the trees, in lieu of the removal and transplantation. Thus, they will now plant 2,140 new tree saplings. (ANI)
Punjab Chief Minister Bhagwant Mann on Monday handed over cheques worth Rs 2 crore to the next of kin of the cops who had attained martyrdom while performing their duty or due to accidental deaths along with Rs 12 lakh (Rs 4 lakh each) for educating their children. The Chief Minister handed over the cheque worth Rs 1 crore to the family of ASI Sanjeev Kumar who had attained martyrdom in the line of duty at Jalandhar and cheques worth Rs 50 lakh each to the next of kin of ASI Parnam Singh and ASI Gurlal Singh, who lost their lives during accidental deaths. It may be recalled ASI Sanjeev Kumar was killed after a Balero vehicle banged into him when he was checking the vehicles during the movement of a highly threatened VVIP in Jalandhar. Likewise, ASIs Parnam Singh and Gurlal Singh lost their lives due to accidental deaths, the release stated. Interacting with the families, the Chief Minister said that the state government is with these families in this hour of crisis. He said that this initiative is in recognition of the immense contribution of the cops while discharging their duty and maintaining law and order in the state. CM Mann said that the state government is duty-bound to help the families of these brave hearts and ensure their well-being. The Chief Minister said that financial assistance to the family of these cops is in consonance with the commitment of the state government to ensure the well-being of the soldiers (from the Armed forces, paramilitary and Police) and their families. He hoped that this humble initiative by the state will go a long way in helping the aggrieved family on the one hand and securing their future on the other. Bhagwant Mann said that the state government will leave no stone unturned for the well-being of the cops and their families. Meanwhile, the family of the cops also profusely thanked the Chief Minister for safeguarding their interests. They lauded Bhagwant Mann for this noble initiative which will play a key role in securing their future. On the occasion, Director General of Police Gaurav Yadav, Special DGP Ishwar Singh and others were also present. (ANI)
Delhi Lieutenant Governor VK Saxena has terminated the services of about 400 private persons employed by the Delhi Government in its various departments. These private persons were engaged in a non-transparent manner and without the mandatory approvals of the competent authority. The appointments of these persons also did not follow the mandatory reservation policy for SC/ST/OBC candidates prescribed by the Department of Personnel and Training (DoPT). The Services Department found that several of such engaged private persons did not even fulfil the eligibility criteria of educational qualification and work experience as laid down in the advertisements issued for the posts. The concerned administrative departments also did not verify the veracity of work experience certificates submitted by these private persons, which were found to be fudged and manipulated in many cases. The Lieutenant Governor accepted the proposal of the Services Department that all Delhi Government Departments, Corporations, Boards, Societies and other autonomous bodies under their administrative control, immediately terminate engagements of these private persons, wherein the LG's or the competent authority's approval has not been obtained. However, if any administrative department finds it appropriate to continue such engagements, it may propose detailed cases with proper justification and forward them to the Services Department, Government of National Capital Territory of Delhi (GNCTD) for onward submission to Lieutenant Governor for consideration and approval.Services Department had compiled the information received from 23 Departments that have engaged such private persons as specialists. It was observed that the provisions of Reservations for SC/ST/OBC prescribed by the DoPT for reservation in temporary appointments lasting for 45 days or more have also not been followed in these engagements. It was noticed by the Services Department that Departments like Environment, Archaeology, Delhi Archives, Women and Child Development and Industries have not obtained the approval of the competent authority, before engaging these private persons. Further, Corporations, Boards, Societies, and other autonomous bodies like Delhi Agricultural Marketing Board (DAMB), and Delhi Pollution Control Committee (DPCC) have also not clearly mentioned, whether the prior approval of the Competent Authority i.e Governing Council, Board, Selection Committee etc, has been obtained before engaging such manpower or not. During the scrutiny by the Services Department, it was found that 69 persons were engaged in the five departments of Archaeology, Environment, Delhi Archives, Women and Child Development and Industries without approval. Similarly, 13 Boards or autonomous bodies which engaged 155 persons, also did not take the necessary approval and no information was provided to the Services Department about the engagements of 187 persons in the Delhi Assembly Research Centre (DARC), Dialogue and Development Commission of Delhi (DDCD) and Department of Planning, about the issue of approval of the competent authority. However, 11 persons were engaged in four departments, Health and Family Welfare, Food Safety, Indira Gandhi Hospital and Transport, with the approval of the Lieutenant Governor. Saxena has also noted the Cabinet Note pertaining to the Chief Minister Urban Leader Fellowship Programme, whereby 50 such Fellows were approved in 2018 and in the year 2021 by the competent authority. The Lieutenant Governor directed that all concerned should comply with the Services Department's instructions failing which action, as may deem fit including departmental proceeding (DP), may be initiated against the concerned Administrative Secretary. (ANI)
On being asked who will be Nationalist Congress Party national president now, Maharashtra Deputy Chief Minister Ajit Pawar asked on Monday whether they have forgotten that Sharad Pawar is the party's national president. He was asked the question after NCP leader Ajit Pawar and eight other party leaders joined the Shiv Sena-BJP alliance in Maharashtra in a surprise and dramatic political move. Ajit Pawar said the party will function very well. "I have come to know from media reports that action is being taken against nine MLAs. In this context, we have sent an application to Maharashtra Assembly Speaker to disqualify Jayant Patil and Jitendra Awhad," Ajit Pawar said. Meanwhile, Praful Patel Monday announced that Sunil Tatkare as the new state president of the Nationalist Congress Party (NCP). Earlier on Sunday, in a surprising turn of events that in some ways resembled the split in the Shiv Sena almost a year ago, NCP leader Ajit Pawar took oath as Maharashtra Deputy Chief Minister, with eight other party legislators also joining the National Democratic Alliance government in the state. Ajit Pawar said all MLAs are with him, and they have joined the Shiv Sena-BJP government as a party. "We have all the numbers. All MLAs are with me. We are here as a party. We have informed all seniors as well. The majority is given importance in a democracy. Our party is 24 years old and young leadership should come forward," Ajit Pawar said after taking oath as Deputy Chief Minister of Maharashtra. The Deputy CM further said that a few other ministers would be added in the next expansion. State Governor Ramesh Bais administered the oath to NCP Leader Ajit Pawar as Maharashtra's second Deputy Chief Minister. Nationalist Congress Party (NCP) working president Supriya Sule and MP Supriya Sule on Sunday said that Ajit Pawar joining the Eknath Shinde-Devendra Fadnavis Maharashtra Government is "painful" but her relationship with him would remain the same. (ANI)
In the event of a Maharashtra-like political crisis in Bihar, the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) will not accept Chief Minister Nitish Kumar into its fold at any cost even if he rubs his nose on BJP's door, BJP MP Sushil Modi said on Monday. Speaking to ANI, the former Deputy Chief Minister of Bihar said, "Amit Shah has already said clearly that he will not accept Nitish Kumar at any cost even if Kumar rubs his nose on BJP's door. We have carried Nitish Kumar for 17 years. Now BJP will neither accept nor carry him in the future." After Sunday's political crisis in Maharashtra, senior BJP leader Sushil Kumar Modi said that a situation of rebellion is also brewing in Bihar. "A situation of rebellion is also being created in Bihar because Nitish Kumar has never given even one minute to meet his MLAs and MPs in the last 17 years. They had to wait. Now each of them is being given half an hour time." Sushil Modi said that many MPs fear that they will lose their tickets since Nitish Kumar has accepted Rahul Gandhi as his leader and has made Tejashwi Yadav his "successor". "Ever since Nitish Kumar accepted Rahul Gandhi as the leader for the next fight in a way and made Tejashwi Yadav his successor, since then there is a situation of rebellion in JDU. Tejashwi Yadav is not ready and therefore a large number of MPs know that their ticket is going to be cut," he said. The senior BJP leader further mentioned that the Janata Dal (United) will not get more than eight to 10 seats and hence the MPs are thinking about their future with Nitish Kumar. "Last year JDU got 17 seats, will JDU get 17 seats this time? In today's situation, there is no scope for JDU to get more than 8-10 seats. So the MPs also think what will be their future after Nitish Kumar. There is no future. Everyone is seeing their future in darkness. So there is a situation of panic. MPs and MLAs are contacting other parties. There is a stampede-like situation," Sushil Modi said. Sushil Modi also added that a large number of MPs and MLAs are in contact with the BJP. "A large number of MP and MLAs are in contact with us. Whom will we take or not depends on many things but overall there is an atmosphere of instability. There is sadness inside JDU." The former Deputy Chief Minister also claimed that the JDU will be merging with the RJD in four to six months. "It has even been decided that Janata Dal will merge United in RJD, it is a matter of time that it takes 4-6 months." Putting forth another theory why the JDU Ministers are discontent, Sushil Modi said "RJD chief Lalu Yadav has made his son the successor of JDU. Nitish has also declared RJD leader Tejashwi Yadav as his successor instead of making someone from his party his successor." Speaking about the popularity of Prime Minister Narendra Modi in Bihar at the cost of Nitish Kumar, Sushil Modi said, "I am watching and I have seen the increasing popularity of Narendra Modi. In 2014, when Nitish Kumar contested the elections alone, he was reduced to two seats. Nitish Kumar's vote bank has completely shifted to the BJP." Earlier last year Nitish Kumar took oath as Bihar chief minister for the eighth time after snapping ties with the BJP and joining hands with the Rashtriya Janata Dal. Nitish Kumar is known for his frequent back and forth with his allies. (ANI)
The National Investigation Agency (NIA) on Monday filed its 6th supplementary charge sheet in the case relating to the seizure of 500 kg of heroin being smuggled from Pakistan at Gujarat's Salaya Port in India in 2020. Four accused have been charge-sheeted in the NIA Special Court in Ahmedabad under Indian Penal Code, Narcotics-Drug and Psychotropic Substances Act, and Unlawful Activities (Prevention) Act. As per NIA, a total of 24 persons have been arrested so far in the case and a hunt is on for the remaining nine accused the absconders include wanted Italy-based one of India's most wanted drug smuggler-trafficker Simranjeet Singh Sandhu, Pakistan-based wanted accused Hajisaab alias Bhaijaan, Nabi Baksh and Australia based Tanvir Singh Bedi. The NIA has managed to trace the linkages of the arrested accused to these wanted criminals. The case had exposed a huge criminal conspiracy to smuggle illicit drugs into India from Pakistan via the sea route, said the NIA, adding "the consignment was being further smuggled to Punjab through Delhi, where it was brought from Gujarat after landing at the Port there." "The accused were involved in smuggling, transportation, storage, purification and distribution of illicit drugs," said the anti-terror agency. All the four accused charge-sheeted are named as Harminder Singh alias Romi Randhawa, Manjit Singh alias Manna, Kuldeep Singh and Malkit Singh-- all residents of Punjab. The NIA investigations have revealed that they had played a pivotal role in transporting, purifying and distributing the drug in various places across Punjab, and used the drug proceeds to raise and use funds for carrying out activities relating to terror and crime. "All the for chargesheeted accused had acted on the directions of the wanted accused," said the NIA. As per NIA investigations, Harminder Singh and Manjit Singh had taken warehouses and residential houses on rent in Punjab's Ludhiana for storage of the smuggled drugs and heroin at the behest of Australia-based wanted accused Tanvir Singh Bedi. "Kuldeep Singh, alongwith accused Malkit Singh, had aided another accused, Sukhbir Singh alias Happy, in piloting andescorting heroin and drug purification chemical laden vehicles multiple times from New Delhi, Karnal and Kurukshetra to Ludhiana and Amritsar to avoid raising suspicion and police checks, as the Bolero vehicle (on which Kuldeep was employed as a driver by the Gurudwara) was registered in the name of a Gurudwara in Fatehgarh Sahib district (Punjab)," said the agency. The case was originally registered by Anti-Terrorist Squad of Gujarat on August 12, 2018, following the seizure of heroin from one of the accused, Aziz Abdul Bhagad, who had pilfered 5 kg of the heroin from a 100 kg heroin consignment smuggled into India from Pakistan. Bhagad had concealed this 5 kg heroin in a pit near his village in Gujarat, leading to his eventual arrest. Considering the national security ramifications international linkages, the Ministry of Home Affairs, had transferred the case to NIA on June 29, 2020. (ANI)
A new study has found that students from middle-upper class backgrounds are more likely to participate in classroom discussions than working-class backgrounds students. The study was published in the journal, 'Journal of Experimental Psychology." The study shed new light on the persistent and early emerging disparities in education linked to socioeconomic status (SES). "While preschool attendance has been shown to be beneficial for low-SES students' achievement, our results suggest that early childhood education is not currently maximizing its potential as an equalizing force," says lead author Sebastien Goudeau, an assistant professor at Universite de Poitiers. "Early schooling contexts provide unequal opportunities for engagement to children in ways linked to their socioeconomic status, which could serve to maintain or even exacerbate social class disparities in achievement," adds Andrei Cimpian, a professor in New York University's Department of Psychology and one of the paper's authors. "These and other findings call for redesigning aspects of early childhood in ways that foster engagement among all students, regardless of their social class." Previous research has primarily focused on deficits in low-SES parents' knowledge, practices, or resources to explain disparities found in early childhood education. The new Journal of Experimental Psychology: General study examined how schooling itself at this age might be shortchanging children from lower-income backgrounds. In doing so, the study's authors, which also included researchers from Northwestern University's Kellogg School of Management and Stanford University's Department of Psychology, examined students' behavioral engagement during whole-class discussions--a core part of the preschool curriculum in Europe and North America. One study included nearly 100 preschoolers, who were anonymous to the researchers, across four classrooms of Grande Section--the last year in French preschools before first grade--in France's Nouvelle-Aquitaine region. The classrooms selected had a high degree of SES variability among the students as determined by their parent's occupations. The researchers videotaped whole-classroom discussions--ranging from eight to 19 in each classroom--and recorded the frequency and duration of each child's participation. The results showed that low-SES students spoke less frequently and for less time compared to high-SES students. Notably, these differences were not accounted for by SES differences in oral language proficiency, indicating that low-SES students did not talk less because they lacked the proficiency to do so. In a second study, the authors sought to understand how preschool children perceive differences among their peers in their levels of school engagement. To do so, they drew a new group of Grande Section participants from the same region; it included nearly 100 preschool students across five classrooms. To determine the children's perceptions of their classmates, the researchers posed scenarios involving fictional students aimed at surfacing the students' views of the types of students who are called upon and who speak longer than others. For instance, "When the teacher asks the class a question, several children raise their hands. However, the teacher calls on [Theodore/Zelie] more often than other children." After each scenario, children were asked to explain the protagonist's behavior: for instance, "Why do you think [Theodore/Zelie] is called on more often than other children?" The research team then coded the open-ended responses the children provided, looking in particular for whether children mentioned inherent factors having to do with the protagonist's own characteristics (e.g., "because she/he is smart," "because she/he has a lot to tell") or extrinsic factors having to do with the protagonist's background or the classroom context (e.g., "because the teacher likes her/him," "because the other children are disobedient"). For each scenario, after the open-ended explanation question, children were also asked to evaluate the fictional student along the two fundamental dimensions of social judgments: competence and warmth. These included perceived intelligence ("Do you think [the fictional child] is more intelligent than the other children, or less intelligent than the other children?") as well as how they thought the teacher viewed the fictional student ("Do you think the teacher likes [the child] more than the other children, or less than the other children?"). These comparisons were made with the fictional student's classmates in mind. Overall, the fictional child who made frequent and longer contributions to classroom discussions was perceived as possessing more positive characteristics than other children in their class. "Preschoolers explained differences in engagement during whole-class discussions as a consequence of children's inherent characteristics, including their competence and warmth," explains Cimpian. "These results suggest that the patterns of school engagement typical of middle- and high-SES students increase the extent to which they are valued by their preschool peers and--conversely--may undermine low-SES students' psychological experiences." (ANI)
West Bengal Police on Monday recovered body of a BJP leader, Bankim Hansda, from the Bodo area of the state's Purulia district. "This morning the police recovered the dead body of a BJP leader named Bankim Hansda, president of the BJP booth committee, from the Jodgoda area," said Vivek Ranga, BJP District President on Monday. Meanwhile, the investigation into the case is underway. "Police recovered the body of a BJP leader named Bankim Hansda from the Bodo area of Purulia district. Further investigation into the matter is underway," said Purulia DSP Abhijeet Bandopadhyay. Further details awaited. West Bengal Governor CV Ananda Bose on Monday criticised the ongoing violence in Panchayat polls and said that the violence can be described as politics of "murder", "intimidation" and of "muscle flexing". West Bengal Governor CV Ananda Bose who has been visiting various places where violence had earlier broken out in the state."My visit to the field has convinced me that there is violence in certain pockets of West Bengal. There is a manifestation of what is called the politics of murder, the politics of intimidation, the politics of muscle flexing," he said. Governor CV Ananda Bose said that his visits should not be construed as a "fault-finding mission" but a "fact-finding mission". West Bengal has seen several incidents of violence around the filing of nominations for the panchayat polls as well as after, including one where crude bombs were allegedly hurled at a Block Development Office (BDO) at Ahmadpur in Birbhum district. A TMC worker was also allegedly beaten to death in the Malda district. The panchayat elections will be held in a single phase, with the counting of votes scheduled on July 11. The polls are likely to see a fierce tussle for control of local administrations between the ruling TMC and the BJP and will be a litmus test for both parties ahead of next year's Lok Sabha elections. (ANI)
President Droupadi Murmu on Monday called upon the youth to learn from the teaching of the Buddha, to enrich themselves and immensely contribute to building a peaceful society, a nation, and a world. The President in a recorded message on Asadha Purnima, the Dharma Chakra Pravartana Divas celebrations said that following the three teachings of Lord Buddha- Sheel, Sadhachar and Pragya- the younger generation could empower themselves and bring a positive impact to society, stated a release from Ministry of Culture. "On Asadha Purnima, we got acquainted with the Dhamma of Lord Buddha which is not only a part of our ancient cultural heritage but is also an essential feature of our daily life," the President said, adding that to know about Buddha Dhamma we should learn and understand the first sermon given by Shakyamuni on the sacred land of Sarnath. The President addressing the celebrations, organized by the International Buddhist Confederation (IBC), under the aegis of the Ministry of Culture, Government of India, recalled that on Asadha Purnima Lord Buddha through his first sermon planted the seeds of the middle path of the Dhamma. It is important that on this auspicious day, we absorb the teachings of lord Buddha into our behaviour and thought. Minister of State for Culture and External Affairs, Meenakashi Lekhi, in her special address described a lay person's journey to attain the level of a Bodhisattva. "Though we are all connected in our values, yet we are responsible for our own actions. Right actions can change our destiny." She went on to explain that living simply and in sustainable manner, in our daily life, following the principles of consciousness and with mindfulness in action, speech, conduct and pursuing the right livelihood, we are already on the right path of Dhamma. It was Covid that showed us the worth of our life, a sense of detachment to material and physical existence. In a sense, this was the path to attaining higher levels of consciousness, she added. As we have very little time on this planet, the Minister noted, every individual should do the right thing according to his consciousness which will in return make the community stronger. Members of the diplomatic community, dignitaries, patriarchs of Buddhist Sanghas, eminent Masters, Scholars, monks, and nuns based in New Delhi participated in the event organised at the National Museum in New Delhi. His Holiness the 12th Chamgon Kenting Tai Situpa, in his Dhamma talk on the Significance of Asadha Purnima said, "We celebrate the first teachings of the Buddha. He taught us the deepest commonsense; suffering is the object that we have to overcome it is important to experience and realize the words of Buddha before we overcome suffering and pursue peace, harmony and compassion." On the auspicious day of Asadha Purnima, in the presence of Minister Meenakashi Lekhi, the contact was awarded for the construction of India's Buddhist Centre in the Monastic Zone of Lumbini. The Certificate of the 'Award of Contract' to an Indo-Nepal Joint Venture company was presented by International Buddhist Confederation (IBC) to M/S ACC- Gorakha for the construction of the India International Centre for Buddhist Culture and Heritage (IICBCH) in the Monastic Zone of Lumbini, the birthplace of Lord Buddha in Nepal. It may be recalled, following an agreement between the Lumbini Development Trust (LDT) and the IBC, on 25 March 2022, Prime Minister of India, Shri Narendra Modi along with the then Prime Minister of Nepal, Sher Bahadur Deuba performed the 'shilanyas' ceremony and laid the foundation stone of IICBCH at the site on 16 May 2022. Before the handing over of the Contract Award, a film on the -"India International Centre for Buddhist Culture and Heritage", IBC's- project in Lumbini was shown. Asadha Purnima day marks Buddha's first teaching after attaining Enlightenment to the first five ascetic disciples (pancavargiya) on the full-moon day of Ashadha at 'Deer Park', Risipatana Mrigadaya in the present day Sarnath, near Varanasi, India. This teaching of Dhamma Cakka- Pavattana Sutta (Pali) or Dharma Cakra Pravartana Sutra (Sanskrit) is also known as the Turning of Wheels of Dharma and comprised of the Four Noble Truths and the Noble Eight-Fold Path. The Rainy Season retreat (Varsha Vassa) for the Monks and Nuns also starts with this day lasting for three lunar months from July to October, during which they remain in a single place, generally in their temples dedicated to intensive meditation. The day is also observed as Guru Purnima by both Buddhists and Hindus as a day to mark reverence to their Gurus. (ANI)
A recent study from the University of Eastern Finland found that taking higher-than-recommended vitamin D dosages for five years lowered the incidence of atrial fibrillation in older men and women. Atrial fibrillation is the most prevalent arrhythmia, with an increased risk with age and an increased risk of stroke, heart failure, and death. Vitamin D has been demonstrated to have an influence on the atrial shape and electrical activity of the heart, implying that it might prevent atrial fibrillation. The Finnish Vitamin D Trial, FIND, was conducted at the University of Eastern Finland from 2012 to 2018. Its major goal was to investigate the correlations of vitamin D supplementation with the prevalence of cardiovascular illnesses and malignancies. The five-year study included 2,495 participants, 60-year-old or older men and 65-year-old or older women, who were randomly assigned to one of three groups: one placebo group and two vitamin D3 supplementation groups, with one group taking a supplement of 40 micrograms (1600 IU) per day and the other taking an 80 microgram (3200 IU) per day. All participants were also permitted to take their own vitamin D supplement, up to 20 micrograms (800 IU) per day, which was the recommended level at the start of the trial. At baseline, study participants had not been diagnosed with cardiovascular disease or cancer, and they completed comprehensive questionnaires, both at the beginning and throughout the study, on their lifestyles and nutrition, as well as on risk factors of diseases and disease occurrence. Data on the occurrence of diseases and deaths were also obtained from Finnish nationwide health registers. Approximately 20 pc of participants were randomly selected for more detailed examinations and blood samples. During the five-year study, 190 participants were diagnosed with atrial fibrillation: 76 in the placebo group, 59 in the 40 micrograms group, and 55 in the 80 micrograms group. The risk of atrial fibrillation was 27 pc lower in the 40 micrograms group, and 32 pc lower in the 80 micrograms group, when compared to the placebo group. In the sub-cohort selected for more detailed examinations, the mean baseline serum calcidiol concentration, which is a marker of the body's vitamin D concentration, was relatively high, 75 nmol/l. After one year, the mean calcidiol concentration was 100 nmol/l in the 40 micrograms group, and 120 nmol/l in the 80 micrograms group. No significant change in the calcidiol concentration was observed in the placebo group. FIND is the first randomized controlled trial to observe that vitamin D supplementation reduces the risk of atrial fibrillation in generally healthy men and women. Previous research is limited to only two randomized trials, which did not observe an effect when using doses of 10 micrograms (400 IU) or 50 micrograms (2000 IU) per day. Further confirmation of the present results from the FIND study is therefore needed before doses of vitamin D that significantly exceed current recommendations can be recommended for preventing atrial fibrillation. The FIND study has previously published findings showing no association with the incidence of other cardiovascular events or cancers. (ANI)
United States Treasury Secretary, Janet Yellen, will travel to China from July 6 to 9 to deepen the communication between the two countries, the US Department of the Treasury said. As per the statement, released on Sunday (local time), Yellen will discuss a range of issues, including global macroeconomy and financial developments with Chinese officials. Yellen's long-anticipated trip is part of a push by President Joe Biden to deepen communications between the US and China, to responsibly manage the relationship, communicate directly about areas of concern, and work together to address global challenges. "In an April speech, Secretary Yellen laid out three principles guiding America's economic relationship with the PRC. The United States proceeds with confidence in our long-term economic strength thanks to our historically strong recovery and the investments the Biden Administration is making in America's productive capacity," the US Department of the Treasury said in a statement. "First, we seek to secure our national security interests along with those of our allies and to protect human rights through targeted actions that are not intended to gain economic advantage. Second, we seek a healthy economic relationship with China that fosters mutually beneficial growth and innovation and expands economic opportunities for American workers and businesses. Finally, we also seek to cooperate on urgent global challenges like climate change and debt distress," it added. Notably, this is the second visit from a US official within a month. Earlier, on June 18, US Secretary of State Antony Blinken arrived in China and met President Xi and the former raised concerns about Beijing's human rights violations in Xinjiang, Tibet, and Hong Kong, as well as individual cases of concern, the US state department spokesperson Matthew Miller said in a statement. Blinken also stressed that the US will continue to work with its allies and partners to advance its vision for a world that is free, open, and upholds the 'rules-based international order'. The top US diplomat during his two-day visit to Beijing, met President Xi Jinping, Director of the CCP Central Foreign Affairs Office Wang Yi, and State Councilor and Foreign Minister Qin Gang from June 18 to 19. (ANI)
External Affairs Minister, on Monday, said that India needs people who are technology-enabled and can present the country's side and help in building its image. Jaishankar made this remark while addressing the National Institute of Technology (NIT) students as part of the Bharatiya Janata Party's mega public outreach to mark nine years of the Narendra Modi government. "We need those kinds of people who are future-oriented, technology-enabled, and those who have an understanding of the world, and can present our side and help us in contributing in building our image," said Jaishankar. Under the leadership of Prime Minister Narendra Modi, several changes have taken place in the last nine years, he added. While referring to Modi's recent visit to the US, Jaishankar said, "If you see the recent US visit of PM Modi, you saw that there were many prime ministers who have visited the US but this visit of PM Modi was different. It was because PM Modi has a different image. He is a senior, experienced, and credible leader. When PM Modi tries something or takes a position, its effect is seen in global politics. In the last 9 years, we have seen big changes in the world initiated by India." Notably, PM Modi went to the US from June 20 to 23 and during his visit, the Prime Minister met President Joe Biden and also other senior diplomats and officials. EAM also pointed out that in the last 9 years, everyone has seen that the big changes in the world are initiated by India. He also pointed out that the ideas and decisions of PM Modi have an impact. He said that during the climate conference in Paris, PM Modi proposed International Solar Alliance, in the UN also the Prime Minister talked about disaster resilience. He further stated that in 2015, it was PM Modi who proposed to celebrate International Yoga Day on June 21. "And you all know that Yoga Day has become actually today really a global phenomenon," EAM Jaishankar added. While addressing the convention, Jaishankar pointed out that globalisation has broken the wall of national and international. He also spoke about the Ukraine war and said that it has impacted the whole world and caused a surge in the prices of petrol and vegetables. "Now the war is going on in Ukraine... and you see every day that the price of petrol increases and also the price of grains. So you people should understand that time is gone when we used to think that this is our national boundaries, this is India, the world is somewhere outside, and we are sitting at home. Globalization has broken that wall," Jaishankar said. (ANI)
Union Minister of State for Law and Justice (Independent Charge) Arjun Ram Meghwal and Vietnam's Minister of Justice Le Thanh Long held a meeting in Delhi on Sunday and discussed cooperation in the areas of law and justice. Ministry of Justice in the press release said, "The two sides utilized this opportunity to discuss measures for cooperation in the areas of Law & Justice, which would take the bilateral relations to greater heights in line with the status of being Comprehensive Strategic Partners." "The meeting proved beneficial to augment the efforts towards the possibilities of entering into an MoU to boost cooperation between both the countries in the field of Law and Justice," it added. For the meeting, the two leaders were accompanied by a delegation comprising of senior officers of the respective ministries. The two sides agreed to hold official-level delegations to take forward the discussions on broad areas of cooperation in law and justice sectors, including entering into a Memorandum of Understanding (MoU), according to a Ministry of Justice press release. During the meeting, Arjun Ram Meghwal recalled the close ties of friendship between India and Vietnam that have developed over the past more than 50 years. Meghwal stressed that Vietnam is important for India's Act East Policy, according to the press release. Taking to his official Twitter handle, Arjun Ram Meghwal on Sunday stated, "On the 51st anniversary of India-Vietnam diplomatic relations and completion of 7 years of Comprehensive Strategic Partnership, held bilateral talks with Law Minister of Vietnam Le Thanh Long and his delegation today." Earlier in June, Vietnam's Defence Minister General Phan Van Giang called on President Droupadi Murmu at Rashtrapati Bhavan, said a press release by President's Secretariat. Welcoming General Giang and his delegation to India, the President said that India and Vietnam share a rich history of civilizational and cultural linkages spanning over 2000 years. She added that Vietnam is an important pillar of India's Act East Policy and a key partner of the Indo-Pacific Vision. President Murmu noted that the India-Vietnam 'Comprehensive Strategic Partnership' has widened the range of bilateral collaboration including in defence and security cooperation, trade and investment relations, energy security, development cooperation, cultural and people-to-people relations, according to the press release. She said that bilateral defence cooperation is one of the strongest elements of this partnership. She was happy to note that the India-Vietnam defence engagement spans a wide spectrum, including capacity building, industry cooperation, peacekeeping, and joint exercises. Notably, India and Vietnam share traditionally close and cordial bilateral relations. India established full diplomatic relations with Vietnam on 7 January 1972. Relations between the two countries were elevated to the level of 'Strategic Partnership' during the-then Vietnamese Prime Minister Nguyen Tan Dung's visit to India in July 2007. (ANI)
Ministry of Home Affairs (MHA) will organize "G20 Conference on Crime and Security in the age of NFTs (Non-Fungible Tokens), ArtificiaI Intelligence and Metaverse" on July 13-14 in Haryana's Gurugram. The two-day conference will bring together G20 countries, nine special invitee countries and domain experts around the world to delve into the challenges of advancing technologies. There will also be participation from Ministries and Organizations of the Government of India, Chief Secretaries, Administrators of states and Union Territories (UTs), Director Generals of Police of States and UTs, cyber experts and guest speakers representing legal fraternity, academia, training institutions, financial intermediaries, fintech, social media intermediaries, information and communication technology, cyber forensics, regulators, startups, over the top (OTT) service providers, e-commerce companies and others. The event will be held in partnership with the Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology (MeitY), the Ministry of External Affairs (MEA), the National Security Council Secretariat (NSCS) and the Central Bureau of Investigation (CBI). Rashtriya Raksha University, National Forensic Science University, National Law School of India University, Interpol and UNODC are the organizing partners. In this regard, a round table was also organized by the MHA here in the national capital in May to present the details of the conference, and it was attended by ambassadors, high commissioners and senior dignitaries from more than 20 countries apart from senior officers from various ministries and organizations of government of India and partner organizations. Union Home Secretary Ajay Kumar Bhalla then apprised the participating dignitaries about the contours of the forthcoming conference during the round table and countries were requested to send high-level delegations for the conference. (ANI)
The Swedish government condemned the burning of the holy Quran outside the Stockholm Central Mosque on Sunday and called it an "Islamophobic act", according to Khaama Press. The statement said, "We condemn the Quran burning in Stockholm in the strongest terms, and this hateful act does not represent the views of the Swedish government." Burning Quran or any other holy scripture is an insulting and impolite act clearly aimed at inciting public opinion. "Racism, homophobia and other acts of intolerance have no place in Sweden or Europe," the statement added. Moreover, in a statement, the Organization of Islamic Cooperation (OIC) has asked for collective action by Muslim countries based on international laws, as per Khaama Press. The OIC urged member states to "take unified and collective measures to prevent the recurrence of incidents of desecration of copies of the Quran", according to a statement released after the "extraordinary" meeting. According to sources, Stockholm police permitted a small group of protestors to burn the holy Quran last Wednesday. However, the permission was granted a week after a court in Sweden rejected the request of banning such protests and gatherings, reported Khaama Press. Swedish Foreign Ministry mentioned that Stockholm supports freedom of speech and peaceful gatherings based on the constitution. This statement came after a majority of Islamic countries reacted firmly to the burning of the Quran and politically pressurized the Swedish government, according to Khaama Press. Several religious and political parties will hold protests in different cities of the country against the heinous act of desecration of the Holy Quran in Sweden, Geo TV reported citing the News. Jamat-e-Islami (JI) called out a protest outside the Swedish embassy in Islamabad on Monday to condemn the burning of a copy of the sacred book by a man in the Swiss capital, according to Geo TV. JI's Islamabad Amir Nasarullah Randhawa said during a news conference that the protest march against the heinous act would commence from F-6 Markaz and culminate at Swedish Embassy. A large number of poeple are going to attend the protest rally starting at 5 p.m. today, he added. The JI leader also demanded severing diplomatic ties with Sweden if the country did not take such heinous acts seriously and prevent such events in the future, as per Geo TV. Meanwhile, the Majlis Wahdat-e-Muslimeen (MWM) also staged a protest outside Karachi Press Club on Sunday. Allama Sadiq Jafferi, the party's president urged the Foreign Office to summon the ambassador and other diplomatic staff from the Swedish embassy to lodge a strong protest against the desecration of the Holy Quran in Sweden, according to Geo TV. Furthermore, the MWM president said the Pakistani government, particularly Foreign Minister Bilawal Bhutto-Zardari, had maintained silence in a 'criminal way' after the desecration incident in Sweden. However, some other ministers said that the government should dismiss the Swedish Ambassador from the country after declaring him persona non grata as the latest incident was not the first in Sweden. However, last week, Turkey condemned a decision by Swedish authorities to approve a small Quran-burning demonstration outside a mosque in Stockholm, a move that may jeopardize Sweden's bid to join NATO before the bloc's key summit in July, CNN reported. Turkey's foreign minister Hakan Fidan condemned the protest and called it a 'heinous act'. "It is unacceptable to allow these anti-Islamic actions under the pretext of freedom of expression. To turn a blind eye to such heinous acts is to be complicit in them," he said in a statement, as per CNN. The Turkish government's Director of Communications Fahrettin Altun said in a tweet, "We are sick and tired of enabling Islamophobia and continued instances of hatred for our religion on the part of European authorities especially in Sweden." "Those who seek to become our allies in NATO, cannot tolerate or enable destructive behaviours of Islamophobic and xenophobic terrorists," the tweet said, according to CNN. The Quran-burning demonstration happened on June 28 when an Iraqi citizen living in Sweden, Salwan Momika, 37, stomped on the Muslim holy book and set several pages on fire outside Stockholm's main mosque, which prompted massive condemnations worldwide, Al Jazeera reported. (ANI)
The United Kingdom's Minister for International Trade Nigel Huddleston has met with industry leaders in Kolkata to identify opportunities and boost trade partnerships between the two nations. Taking to Twitter, Huddleston said, "Our trading relationship with India already stands strong at Pound 36 billion and fuels over half a million jobs in both nations - but we want to do even more. That's why I've been meeting with industry leaders in Kolkata to identify opportunities and boost our trade partnership." Huddleston's visit to India and Bangladesh focused on unlocking more opportunities for British companies to grow trade and win business, as per the statement released by the UK government. Yesterday, Huddleston arrived in Kolkata. "Arrived in Kolkata, India, this afternoon. Looking forward to meeting businesses and officials across the city to deepen our trade ties and discuss how an India-UK Free Trade Agreement could drive investment and boost economic growth in both nations," the minister said in a tweet. According to the release, India and UK's Bilateral trade has already toppled 36 billion Pounds, supporting half a million jobs across both countries. As part of its ambition to double bilateral trade by 2030, the UK is also continuing to negotiate a trade deal with India. Minister for International Trade Nigel Huddleston said, "The UK has a strong and enduring relationship with India and Bangladesh. Our trade with both has grown significantly over the past year, which shows our partnerships are reaching new heights." "I want to use my first official visit here to show the UK's eagerness to work with both countries on shared challenges like climate change, using our collective expertise to deepen our trading relationship, spark economic growth, and create jobs," he added. Transport is India's third biggest source of emissions, with road transport accounting for 90 per cent of transport emissions. India has set strong targets to boost electric vehicles (EVs) and the UK is well-placed to support this ambition by providing knowledge exchange, and access to finance and technology. The Minister will announce a new project that will see the UK and Government of West Bengal join forces on a pilot to develop electric two-wheelers, such as motorcycles or scooters. Huddleston will also launch a centre to enhance opportunities in the EV sector by partnering Indian businesses with elite academic and industrial institutions in the UK. "West Bengal - the sixth largest state by economic value in India, with a GDP expected to reach 117 million Pounds this year - has set a target of developing 1 million electric vehicles in the next five years," the statement added. "Alongside this, he will also facilitate the signing of an MoU between the Royal Institute of Chartered Surveyors (RICS) and the Government of West Bengal on skill development in sustainable and modern methods of construction. Through these three initiatives, UK businesses will be well-placed to customise and market EV technology and sustainable construction for this burgeoning market in India," it added. Huddleston will also visit a waste processing company in Kolkata using cutting-edge green technologies supplied by UK business CDE Ireland to recycle construction waste into high-quality, reusable sand. At a business roundtable, the Minister will speak to industry leaders on deepening the UK and India's economic ties - emphasising the opportunities that have already been unlocked from the UK-India Enhanced Trade Partnership. The Minister will also discuss the economic benefits of a UK-India trade deal, currently being negotiated, that could cut red tape, reduce tariffs, and help UK and Indian companies do business. Meanwhile, With Bangladesh, trade has increased by 50 per cent in current prices, reaching nearly 5 billion Pounds. During his visit to Bangladesh's Dhaka, Huddleston will visit Intertek, a UK company supporting supply chains in Bangladesh by providing bespoke testing services, for example ensuring manufacturers meet product safety standards, as per the statement. This visit comes a month after the UK's world-leading Developing Countries Trading Scheme (DCTS) came into force making it easier for Bangladesh and other developing countries to trade with the UK. Bangladeshi exporters now benefit from simpler and more generous Rules of Origin, which means that they will be able to produce goods using components from many more countries and still export these with zero tariffs to the UK. (ANI)
In the attacks by the Israeli Army, a Palestinian, Mohammad Hasanein, 21, was killed overnight Monday at the northern gate to the city of Ramallah in the central occupied West Bank, according to the health ministry.

At least another two dozen Palestinians were injured in the camp, with many still in severe condition. Residents reported Israel launched at least ten airstrikes on Jenin overnight Monday, sending smoke rising from building debris.

In addition, a convoy of dozens of Israeli armoured vehicles surrounded the refugee camp and conducted a ground military assault, causing extensive damage to buildings and roadways.

According to Al Jazeera, the attacks on Monday came amid escalating violence in the West Bank, including the first Israeli drone assault in the area since 2006, increasing military attacks on Jenin and northern occupied Palestinian regions.

The raid comes less than two weeks following an Israeli military carried out a raid on Jenin which sparked a massive firefight, leaving at least five Palestinian dead and dozens injured.

The Israeli Defence Forces said eight Israeli troops were injured and successfully evacuated.

The Israeli military said in a statement that it attacked a "joint operations centre" that operated as a command post for the Jenin Brigades, which is a unit made up of militants from various Palestinian armed factions.

According to the statement, the complex served as an "advanced observation and reconnaissance centre," a weapons and explosives storage facility, and a coordination and communications hub for Palestinian combatants, Al Jazeera reported. (ANI)
Amid its growing quest to emerge as the global superpower, China is set to send its Navy's hospital ship called "Peace Ark" on a tour of the South Pacific, Al Jazeera reported. However, the tour of "Peace Ark" comes at a time when Beijing has cut-throat competition with the United States (US) as well as its allies for influence in the region. As per the official statement of the defence ministry, the 14,300-metric-tonne ship will call at Kiribati, Tonga, Vanuatu, the Solomon Islands and East Timor, providing medical assistance to Chinese citizens and residents. The spokesman for the PLA Navy, senior Captain Liu Wensheng, said this will be the ninth Harmonious Mission voyage for the vessel, according to Al Jazeera. "It is to present our image as a responsible big country," said Navy spokesperson Liu Wensheng in a statement. In recent years, Beijing has strengthened connections with Pacific countries, some of which had official diplomatic links with Taiwan, prompting alarm in the United States, Australia, and New Zealand, as well as inside some of the countries themselves. Last year, China inked a security treaty with the Solomon Islands and intends to establish similar links with other Pacific countries. According to its foreign minister, relations with the Solomon Islands can serve as a model. The US has increased its activity in the region in response to China's advances, thereafter. According to China.org.cn, a state-run web portal of the People's Republic of China, the Navy's hospital ship, with a displacement of over 10,000 metric tons, has more than 100 medical staff working in 16 clinical and auxiliary departments. It harbours multiple operating rooms and nursing stations and can accommodate roughly 1,000 patients at once. (ANI)
Pakistan Muslim League Nawaz (PML-N) supremo Nawaz Sharif on Monday chaired a meeting in Dubai in order to discuss the election political strategy along with other leaders, reported ARY News. The session presided over by party leader Nawaz Sharif, addressed political and legal issues. He delegated party and election-related work to Maryam Nawaz and instructed the formation of a committee for the Pakistan Muslim League-Nawaz election manifesto. Moreover, Nawaz Sharif also asked the senior party leadership to develop the party's narrative for the general election in light of young issues. The PML-N also decided to launch the election campaign of the party from the current month with public meetings across the country. "Easy loans for youth and job opportunities will be added to the party's narrative for youth," ARY News quoted the party sources as saying. The PML-N and Pakistan People's Party (PPP) leaders apparently agreed on a "charter of economy" to steer the country out of the crisis during a recent meeting in Dubai. Nawaz Sharif also met with PPP leaders Asif Ali Zardari and Bilawal Bhutto to discuss the election as well as other political and economic matters. ARY News reported. According to sources, Nawaz Sharif and Asif Ali Zardari have reached an agreement on the majority of the economic charter's issues. However, no agreement was made between them on the election coalition for general elections, they claim, adding that the caretaker government would be concluded by gaining the trust of other associated parties, reported ARY News. It is worth noting that the two sides have been at differences about the timing of the next general election following the dissolution of assembly in August Nawaz, who is convicted in a corruption case, has been living in London on the pretext of ill health since 2019. The former Pakistan PM sought extensions to prolong his stay in London on medical grounds. (ANI)
On the auspicious occasion of Asadha Purnima, the Embassy of India, Kathmandu, in association with the International Buddhist Confederation (IBC) held joint celebrations at the Embassy's Swami Vivekananda Culture Center on Monday, the second most sacred day for Buddhists after the Buddha Purnima or the Vaishakha Purnima, informed an official release. The celebrations were graced by Nepal Minister of State for Culture, Civil Aviation and Tourism, Sushila Sirpali Thakuri. The representatives from various Buddhist sects and monasteries in Nepal, as well as office bearers from the Lumbini Development Trust participated in the event. The Secretary of International Buddhist Confederation IBC) Khenpo Chimed represented IBC at the event. "Asadha Purnima commemorates Lord Buddha's first sermon to his first five ascetic disciples at Sarnath, Uttar Pradesh after attaining enlightenment at Bodh Gaya in Bihar. This is popularly also known as the day of the 'First Turning of Wheels of Dharma'. In this sermon, Lord Buddha stated the 'Four Noble Truths' and the 'Noble Eightfold Path'," the release stated. The celebrations witnessed ceremonial prayers by Mahayana Sangha and Theravada Sangha. This was followed by a dedication of prayers of four Buddhist Sutras. The Secretary of the International Buddhist Confederation Khenpo Chimed welcomed the guests to the Asadha Purnima celebrations and highlighted the significance of the occasion. Nepal Minister Sushila Sirpali Thakuri stated that "Buddhism was one of the bonds that have connected India and Nepal for centuries and expressed confidence that the civilizational ties between India and Nepal will be strengthened in modern times by the construction of Buddhist as well as other religious circuits". Deputy Chief of Mission, Prasanna Shrivastava underscored the importance of the teachings of Lord Buddha and noted that the revered sites of Buddhism in both India and Nepal reflect the shared cultural heritage of the two countries. The video highlights the design and features of the upcoming India International Centre for Buddhist Culture and Heritage in the Lumbini Monastic Zone were also displayed at the event. The foundation stone of the Centre was laid by Prime Minister Narendra Modi and former Nepal PM Sher Bahadur Deuba during PM Modi's visit to Lumbini, Nepal, on the occasion of Buddha Purnima in May last year. An exhibition showcasing various Buddhist sites of religious importance in Nepal and India was also displayed on the occasion, the release added. In keeping with the historical legacy of India, the land of Buddha's enlightenment, his turning of the wheels of Dhamma, and Mahaparinirvana, IBC hosted the Ashadha Purnima celebrations at the National Museum, Janpath where the Sakhyamuni's Holy relic is enshrined. It was at Sarnath that Buddha gave his first sermon and set the wheel of dharma in motion. The auspicious day of Ashadha Purnima which falls on the full moon day of the month of Ashadha as per Indian lunar calendar is also known as Esala Poya in Sri Lanka and Asanha Bucha in Thailand. The day marks Buddha's first teaching after attaining Enlightenment to the first five ascetic disciples (pancavargiya) on the full-moon day of Ashadha at 'Deer Park', Risipatana Mrigadaya in the present day Sarnath, near Varanasi, India. The Rainy Season retreat (Varsha Vassa) for the Monks and Nuns also starts with this day lasting for three lunar months from July to October, during which they remain in a single place, generally in their temples dedicated to intensive meditation. The day is also observed as Guru Purnima by both Buddhists and Hindus as a day to mark reverence to their Gurus. (ANI)
The man (father), identified as Saeed, opened fire at his two daughters in the Haveli Nathowali area over honour. As a result, the girls died on the spot.

The father fled the crime scene after killing them, as per ARY News.

According to the police, the bodies have been moved to the district hospital for autopsy.

Meanwhile, the search for the man has been going on.

Earlier this week, a similar incident took place where a 12-year-old boy killed his mother in the name of honour.

According to details, the incident took place in the neighbourhood of Gujranwala's satellite town, reported ARY News.

The police said in a statement that the deceased was walking down the street and the boy opened fire at her leaving her dead on the spot while injuring another woman who was identified as his aunt, as per ARY News.

However, the injured woman was taken to a nearby hospital for her treatment. Meanwhile, the boy confessed to the murder and was later arrested by the police. (ANI)
As per CNN, Putin faced the greatest threat to his authority in two decades last month when the head of the Wagner paramilitary group, Yevgeny Prigozhin, launched a short-lived uprising, claiming control of military facilities in two Russian cities and marching toward Moscow before he agreed to stand down.

Zelenskyy in an exclusive interview with CNN said: "We see Putin's reaction. It's weak."

"Firstly, we see he doesn't control everything. Wagner's moving deep into Russia and taking certain regions shows how easy it is to do. Putin doesn't control the situation in the regions," he said.

"All that vertical of power he used to have is just crumbling down."

Some Russians cheered on Wagner fighters as Prigozhin led the unprecedented challenge to Putin's authority. Video geolocated and verified by CNN showed crowds cheering as the Wagner boss' vehicle departed the southern city of Rostov-on-Don on June 24.

Zelensky said Ukrainian intelligence reports showed the Kremlin was measuring support for Prigozhin, and he claimed that half of Russia supported the Wagner boss and the paramilitary group's mutiny, as per CNN. (ANI)
Hundreds of people on Monday marched in support of a French mayor whose house was attacked by a burning car, as the country entered the second week of violent protests and riots, CNN reported A large crowd in Paris' L'Hay-les-Roses showed solidarity with Mayor Vincent Jeanbrun whose house was rammed by the vehicle early on Sunday morning. The gathering came after a calmer night in the country, which has been racked by angry protests since a police officer shot and killed a 17-year-old boy at a traffic stop last Tuesday. Jeanbrun's address was well known in the community before the attack, CNN affiliate BFMTV reported. The incident injured his wife and one of his children, Jeanbrun said earlier, calling it an assassination attempt. During the march, locals and officials held up a banner reading "Together for the republic!" Jeanbrun, dressed in the sash of the French Tricolor, told supporters: "I have only one word: thank you. "Democracy was attacked," he said. "More than ever, our republic and its servants are threatened and attacked," he added, as per CNN. The mayor in a previous statement on Sunday, said that while he was at city hall, "individuals rammed their car upon my residence before setting fire to it to burn my house, inside which my wife and my two young children slept." "While trying to protect the children and escape the attackers, my wife and one of my children were injured," he said, adding that he had "no words strong enough to describe his emotion towards the horror of this night." France's Ministry of Interior said 157 people were detained overnight into Monday morning, down from more than 700 the night before. Three police officers were injured, a police station was attacked and 352 public roads were set on fire, but BFMTV reported that "no major incident was reported" overnight, as per CNN. (ANI)
1 injured when vehicle crashes through home in Pittsburghs Beltzhoover neighborhood

A person was injured when a vehicle crashed into a home in the citys Beltzhoover neighborhood early this morning.

Officers were attempting to pull the driver of the vehicle over around 3 a.m. when it took off, according to police, crashing through the living room of the home, located in the area of Michigan and Montooth streets.

A woman inside was pinned under the vehicle. She was rescued and taken to a local hospital in stable condition, were told.

First responders used a ladder to rescue two people from the second level of the home.

Neighbors told Channel 11 it sounded like an explosion when the vehicle hit.

Police say two people were in the vehicle. One was taken into custody.

Condemned signs are now posted on the house and the adjoining house, saying the structures are unsafe.

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Officials have identified the man shot and killed in an officer-involved shooting in Ligonier Township.

Robbie Thomas Saunders, 59, was armed with a machete when he aggressively approached officers from the front door of a home on Gravel Hill Road Sunday, according to the Westmoreland County District Attorneys Office.

Saunders was shot once and died after being transported to Conemaugh Memorial Hospital in Johnstown.

Ligonier Valley Police were initially called to the address for the report of a domestic disturbance at around 3:50 p.m.

Authorities say no officers were injured.

The officers involved are on administrative leave until the investigation wraps up.

State police and Westmoreland County detectives are investigating and the DA will review the evidence and will determine if the use of deadly force was justified.

The Ligonier Township police chief told Channel 11 hes been employed at the department since 1993 and there hasnt been an officer-involved shooting there in his time.

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116 strikes recorded in Sumy Oblast, buildings destroyed and damaged

During the past 24 hours, the Russians have carried out 16 attacks on the border regions of Sumy Oblast. 116 strikes were recorded.

Source: Sumy Oblast Military Administration on Telegram

Details: There were attacks on Krasnopillia, Myropillia, Bilopillia, Yunakivka, Khotin, Hlukhiv, Shalyhyne and Putyvl hromadas [a hromada is an administrative unit designating a town, village or several villages and their adjacent territories  ed.].

Shelling from automatic grenade launchers (15 strikes) and mortars (8 strikes) was recorded in Hlukhiv hromada.

The Russians targeted the Yunakivka hromada with mortars (7 strikes).

In Myropillia hromada, a grenade (1 strike) was dropped from an UAV, and mortar attacks were also recorded (23 strikes).

A mortar attack (5 strikes) was carried out on Khotin hromada.

The Russians dropped 19 mortar bombs on Bilopillia hromada. Attacks from automatic grenade launchers were also recorded (10 strikes).

Krasnopillia hromada came under artillery fire (6 strikes). The shelling damaged two private houses. A mortar attack was also recorded (4 strikes).

The Russians hit the Shalyhyne hromada with artillery (9 strikes).

In Putyvl hromada there was a mortar attack (9 strikes) which destroyed one house and damaged another.

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This 12-story hempcrete hotel will be the worlds highest building made with cannabis  and it could be a sign of bigger things to come

The Hemp Hotel, scheduled to open in Cape Town, South Africa, is being touted as the worlds tallest building made with industrial hemp  a material with great potential for Earth-conscious construction.

At 12 stories tall, the 54-room hotel features views of Cape Towns massive Table Mountain and a minimal ecological footprint, reported Agence France-Presse (AFP) in May.

Blocks of hempcrete, made from woody parts of hemp plants, fill the walls of the hotel, supported by a cement-and-concrete structure. Besides being climate-friendly, the hempcrete lends insulating and fireproof properties to the building, per AFP.

Replacing any portion of a buildings concrete can help reduce the buildings impact on the planet. Production of concrete, along with cement (a binding component), is responsible for up to 9% of peoples heat-trapping carbon pollution, as Scientific American and other sources have reported. So its a key culprit in human impacts on the climate.

By contrast, hempcrete locks carbon in  it is considered carbon negative because its production pulls more carbon pollution out of the air than it releases.

The plant absorbs the carbon, it gets put into a block, and [it] is then stored into a building for 50 years or longer, Boshoff Muller, director of Afrimat Hemp, told AFP. His locally based company produced the hempcrete for the hotel.

Using hemp for sustainable building materials is not a new concept. Builders have been particularly successful using hemp for insulating homes. American manufacturer Hempitecture recently opened a factory in Idaho where it will create its flagship HempWool insulation.

Hemp can be more expensive to build with, as Wihan Bekker, Afrimat Hemps carbon consultant, told AFP. But, because it locks in pollution, Bekker sees possibilities for selling carbon credits  essentially getting paid to take carbon from the air by a company that is not meeting its own goals of carbon reduction. The carbon credit industry has faced criticism recently, however.

In South Africa, hemp is becoming an economic engine in its own right. Though the Hemp Hotels materials came from Europe, South Africas president Cyril Ramaphosa now sees hemp and cannabis as an opportunity to create more than 130,000 jobs, Africanews reported.

Afrimat Hemp, which hopes to make blocks soon with hemp grown in the country, views the opening of Hemp Hotel as an example of whats possible. As Muller explained to AFP, It shows hemp has its place in the construction sector.

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For 144 years, Black Americans were banned from joining the Marines. But when the US needed support, 20,000 Black recruits stepped up to serve.

Black Marines from Montford Point, circa 1944. HUM Images/Universal Images Group via Getty Images

In 1941, President Franklin Delano Roosevelt reluctantly banned racial discrimination in the United States Marine Corps.

Montford Point became the first training facility for Black Marines.

Nearly 20,000 Black Marines successfully completed training and supported the war effort in the 1940s.

In 1941, the United States Army needed to drastically bolster their recruits for the pending outbreak of World War II.

At the time, hiring discrimination was a common practice against Black Americans in the defense industry. Both then-President Franklin Delano Roosevelt and Commandant of the Marine Corps Thomas Holcomb were resistant to diversifying the Marine Corps. In 1941, Holcomb told the Navy's General Board that "if it were a question of having a Marine Corps of 5,000 whites or 250,000 Negroes, I would rather the whites."

Group of Black Marines at Montford Point Office of War Information/National Archives

Up to that point, Black Americans were allowed to serve in the United States Army and Navy, but only within segregated ranks or factions. The Marine Corps, however, had always prohibited Black Americans from joining. While around 13 Black Marines served in the American Revolutionary War, by 1798, a discriminatory policy prohibited Black Americans from joining the Marines.

Pressure from the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters, one of the largest and first Black labor unions, pushed Roosevelt toward changing that policy. Shortly before the Brotherhood's scheduled protest in Washington, Roosevelt took executive action to integrate the defense forces.

Recruits in the turret of an tank during training at Montford Point. Archive Photos/Getty Images

Montford Point

Under Executive Order 8802, as of June 25th, 1941, hiring discrimination was prohibited in the defense industry. It was the first executive action pertaining to civil rights since the Reconstruction Era of the 19th century. Officials appointed Montford Point, North Carolina, as the first training facility for Black Marines.

"When we were first sworn in, we were all together in the same group," said Curtis Moore, a Marine officer who arrived at Montford Point in 1946. "I learned that the white Marines were on the way to a training camp in South Carolina, whereas the Black Marines were on their way to a training camp in North Carolina."

The first Black Marines arrived at Montford Point by 1942, while white Marines still reported for training in San Diego or Parris Island, South Carolina. The Montford facility was still run by white sergeants, instructors and officers. The Black Marines could not access surrounding, non-integrated facilities without a white Marine sponsor.

Marines assembling aircraft engine at Montford Point in October 1944. Anderson/National Archives

"My basic training, my travel far and near overseas for two and a half years was with a completely Black military outfit," said Moore. "Still the instructors, sergeants, and officers were all white that had us in their charge."

Some white members of leadership in the Armed Forces took special measures to try to limit Black Marines once they were allowed into the branch. Still embittered by the eventual overturn of hiring discrimination, Thomas Holcomb issued Letter of Instruction 421, which prohibited "colored non-commissioned officers senior to white men in the same unit, and desirable that few, if any, be of the same rank."

According to Moore, without institutional support, Black Marines built community outside of the military base in the surrounding towns.

"Black recruits normally went to cities in North Carolina near the training camp where there was a sizable Black population," Moore told Insider. "They had a barbershop, restaurants, and hotels that would support us when we left the Montford facilities."

United States Marines in training at Montford Point, near Camp Lejeune, Jacksonville, North Carolina, 1945. Archive Photos/Getty Images

'A very high sense of pride'

Over the course of 7 years, nearly 20,000 Black Marines completed their training at Montford Point and became known as the Montford Point Marines. Their sacrifices included deployment overseas in Guam, Okinawa, and Iwo Jima. It wasn't until 1948 that President Henry Truman issued Executive Order 9981 that effectively banned segregation in the armed forces. One year later, Montford Point facilities were decommissioned, but the enduring efforts of Black Marines, past and present, are preserved in history through the National Montford Point Marine Association.

"If you knew any Marines that lived down the block, or any Marines that are in your family, they have a high sense of pride that they were in the Marine Corps," Moore told Insider. "They have a very high sense of pride that I don't think anybody could take it away from them." Curtis Moore passed away shortly after this interview on June 18th, 2023, at the age of 97.

Read the original article on Insider
15-year-old run over when driver plows into crowd after fight at party, Texas cops say

A Texas teenager was run over by a vehicle after a fight broke out during a party in Plainview, police told news outlets.

Officers with the Plainview Police Department responded to the scene, on the towns north side, at about 2 a.m. on July 2, the department told KCBD. Several teens were there, frantic as they told officers what happened.

A fight started at a party down the street and spilled outside, police told the Plainview Herald. Then a black vehicle plowed into a crowd, hitting and seriously injuring a 15-year-old boy.

The teen was driven to a hospital and is in critical condition, police told KLBK, adding that a suspect has been identified and an investigation is underway.

McClatchy News reached out to the Plainview Police Department for more information.

Plainview, a town of around 20,000 people, is roughly 75 miles south of Amarillo.

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I-16 shuts down for several hours on both sides after chase leads to deputy-involved shooting

What started as a traffic stop ended in a deputy-involved shooting causing a Georgia interstate to be shut down for multiple hours.

[DOWNLOAD: Free WSB-TV News app for alerts as news breaks]

It was Monday morning around 2:00 a.m. when the Effingham County Sheriffs Office said I-16 from exit 143 and Hwy 280 in Bryan County to exit 152 to Jimmy Deloach in Chatham County would be closed in both directions following a deputy-involved shooting.

Effingham deputies conducted a traffic stop on a black truck going westbound around the area of Old River Road Sunday night around 11:45 p.m.

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According to Bryan County deputies, the suspect became combative with Effingham deputies, resulting in the driver shooting at a deputy.

Officials said the deputy called for help, leading to a car chase. Bryan deputies said there was an exchange of gunfire, leading to the suspect being shot and killed.

Bryan County along with Bloomingdale Police Department and Georgia State Patrol rushed in to help the Effingham sheriffs office.

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The Effingham County Sheriffs Office provided hour-by-hour updates on the interstate closures.

Just after 8 a.m. Monday morning, both east and westbound lanes were reopened.

No officers were injured.

The Georgia Bureau of Investigation was called to investigate. The drivers identity has not been released.

IN OTHER NEWS:








An 18-year-old from Pensacola is set to stand trial next week for a fatal shooting that left one person dead.

Iris Jenkins is charged with second-degree murder for the Aug. 14, 2021, death of 22-year-old Michael Yeldon Jr., who was shot and killed while driving in the Attucks Court apartment complex.

Jenkins, who has been incarcerated since the month of the shooting, submitted a demand for a speedy trial to the court and will head to jury selection on Monday.

Here's everything you need to know before the teenager's trial begins.

Jenkins demands speedy trial: Pensacola teen jailed for 2 years on murder charges demands speedy trial before judge

Jenkins arrested: Pensacola police arrest 17-year-old in homicide of 22-year-old at Attucks Court

What are Iris Jenkins' charges?

Jenkins is charged with second-degree murder, attempted second-degree murder, possession of a weapon by a convicted felon and aggravated assault with a deadly weapon without the intent to kill.

Assistant State Attorney Amy Shea will be prosecuting the case, and Assistant Regional Conflict Counsel Randall Richardson is defending Jenkins. Circuit Judge Coleman Robinson is assigned the case.

What is Iris Jenkins accused of doing?

On Aug. 14, 2021, 22-year-old Michael Yeldon Jr. was driving his car at the Attucks Court housing complex around 7:30 p.m. with passenger Cedric Lockett Jr.

Jenkins allegedly began firing into the vehicle. After Yeldon was shot, his vehicle struck an apartment building.

Yeldon was transported to Baptist Hospital and succumbed to his injuries Aug. 15 while surrounded by his family, his father, Michael Anthony Yeldon Sr., told the News Journal in 2021.

Report details: Arrest report reveals new details about 22-year-old shot and killed at Attucks Court

Why did Iris Jenkins allegedly shoot at Michael Yeldon Jr. and Cedric Lockett Jr.?

The night of the incident, Yeldon drove to pick up Lockett and a third person named Willie McKay, according to Jenkins' arrest report.

Lockett told authorities they believed they were going to "meet some females." Once in the vehicle, McKay told Yeldon he need to stop by Attucks Court.

"Once at Attucks Court, Yeldon drove around in the complex for a brief period," the report states. "At one point, Lockett saw three males standing on a corner inside the complex. He heard McKay shout something as he opened the rear passenger door to exit the vehicle as it approached the males."

Michael Anthony Yeldon Sr. (left) poses with his son Michael Anthony Yeldon Jr. (right).

Lockett told authorities that McKay had partially exited the vehicle when Lockett said he heard gunshots. He said he heard McKay shout for Yeldon to drive, but the car would not accelerate and began to slowly roll.

The arrest report states Jenkins was dating a woman named Ly'Niya Purifoy during the incident. While Purifoy and Jenkins were dating, she was pregnant with McKay's child, according to the report.

"Jenkins and McKay do not get along," the report says. "They have been arguing for weeks and making threats towards each other's life."

Purifoy told detectives that McKay contacted her the day of the shooting, saying he was going to kill Jenkins in Attucks Court.

Yeldon was seemingly caught in the crossfire.

Why did Iris Jenkins submit a demand for speedy trial?

Jenkins submitted his demand for speedy trial May 16 and had his calendar call before a judge May 22, meaning he then has 45 days to go to trial, according to Florida's Rules of Criminal Procedure.

The specific reasons for Jenkins demanding a speedy trial is unclear, as the discussion falls under attorney-client privilege, but the Sixth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution guarantees a person the right to a speedy trial.

Additionally, the Speedy Trial Act of 1972 provides time limits for district and federal court cases. Florida's Rules of Criminal Procedure also outline the requirement of speedy trial for Florida cases.

Jenkins has been incarcerated at the Escambia County Jail since Aug. 31, 2021.

What is a demand for speedy trial?

A defendant's motion for a speedy trial "binds the accused and the state," according to Florida's Rules of Criminal Procedure, and tells the court that the defense is ready for trial within five days from the motion.

Once a demand for speedy trial motion is filed, a judge must hold a calendar call within five days. During the calendar call, the court "shall set the case for trial to commence at a date no less than five days nor more than 45 days from the date of the calendar call."

Jenkins 45-day limit for trial is July 6.

This article originally appeared on Pensacola News Journal: Florida man Iris Jenkins to face jury in Attucks Court homicide case
2 new McDonalds are coming to northwest of Fort Worth and Arlington. Heres where.

Two new McDonalds locations are coming to the Metroplex, state records show.

Construction on a new south Arlington location at 1456 Debbie Lane off Texas 360 is expected to begin in September, according to filings with the Texas Department of Licensing & Regulation. The $750,000 project includes two drive-thru lanes behind the 4,561-square-foot restaurant. The project is expected to finish construction by early 2024 and will sit next to an existing Sonic Drive-In.

To the northwest of Fort Worth, construction on another McDonalds location near Justin is also expected to begin in September and finish by early 2024.

The restaurant at the corner of Texas 114 and Wolff Crossing  next to a 7-Eleven near the Northwest ISD campus  is slated to cost $1.5 million. The restaurant will be 3,764 square feet.

That new location will be about 25 miles south of another McDonalds that began construction in June. The location in Denton County will be a traditional restaurant format at nearly 4,500 square feet. The location is near Sherman Drive and an existing Taco Bell and 7-Eleven.

The fast-food chain also has plans for two locations on the far north side of Fort Worth. Construction began in May on a new restaurant near West Bailey Boswell Road, and construction on a Park Vista Boulevard location is expected to begin in August.

McDonalds began in the 1950s as a small restaurant that has since grown into more than 36,000 locations across 100 countries.
Two 14-year-old boys killed in separate New York City "subway surfing" incidents in the past two weeks have prompted local authorities to raise concerns about the dangerous practice.

The New York Police Department said 14-year-old Jevon Fraser, of Canarsie, was found unconscious at about 5:30 p.m. Thursday on the elevated train platform of 33 Street and Rawson Street station in the Queens borough of New York City after police responded to a 911 call.

Fraser was taken to a hospital where he was pronounced dead from injuries that indicated he fell from an elevated height, police said.

Exactly one week earlier, on June 22, two 14-year-old boys were found unresponsive on a train platform in Brooklyn with trauma to their bodies, NYPD said. Brian Crespo was pronounced dead at the scene while his companion survived the fall but was critically injured, police said. Investigators believe the two were riding atop the Manhattan-bound L train as it moved from an elevated track to a tunnel, knocking them both off.

Brian's mom, Sonia, told the New York Daily News that her son was due to graduate from eighth grade in a few days and wanted to become a detective before he lost his life in a moment of youthful recklessness. Sonia said that her son's friends encouraged him to perform the stunt and that he gave in to peer pressure.

In this file photo taken on March 13, 2023 a warning sign is displayed at a subway station in New York. Authorities in New York are trying to raise awareness about the dangers of 'subway surfing' after a pair of deaths in June 2023.

More: 'It needs to feel safe': NYC subway slasher caught, NYPD vow to tamp down crime

Members of the other teen's family told the New York Daily News that he is recovering but he may never walk again.

While "subway surfing" - the act of riding atop train cars - as New Yorkers call it, has been ongoing since the city's subway system opened back in 1904, NYPD officials have recently renewed the push to keep young boys from performing these stunts, cracking down on those who do and even visiting their families to discourage them from surfing.

Most subway surfers use the gaps between the cars to climb the roof on tracks that are elevated above the ground. The 7-line, which runs past Citi Field, and the J-line which runs over Williamsburg Bridge are particularly attractive to subway surfers because of the views and scenery, says NYPD Chief of Transit Michael Kemper.

NYC Mayor Eric Adams has blamed the subway surfing deaths on apps such as TikTok.

Subway surfing on top of a @NYCTSubway is a dangerous & reckless act. The only way to get to your destination safely is by riding INSIDE the train car. Your safety is important to us.



There are no waves on these trains! Save the surfing for the beach! pic.twitter.com/686SfWUnNC  NYPD NEWS (@NYPDnews) June 28, 2023

In a press conference at the Bushwick-Aberdeen station, where the two boys fell last Thursday, Adams said: Subway surfing kills. It kills. You go online right now, put New York City subway surfing  you will see some of what our young people are watching.

In response to Adams' remarks, a TikTok spokesperson told CBS News: "This dangerous activity predates our platform, and we strictly remove such content if we see it on TikTok. More than 40,000 safety professionals are dedicated to keeping our community safe and work diligently to remove harmful content when found."

This article originally appeared on USA TODAY: New York subway surfing incidents kill 2 teens; TikTok blamed
20-plus new restaurants open around Sacramento. Heres where to find your next meal

June brought 22 new restaurants around Sacramento, with the majority of them opening in communities surrounding the capital city.

Only six restaurants opened within Sacramento city limits. The rest debuted in Roseville (four new restaurants), Davis and Placerville (three), El Dorado Hills (two) and Antelope, Elk Grove, West Sacramento, Rocklin and Auburn (one apiece).

Adoboink (1450 Lead Hill Blvd., Suite 140, Roseville): Ramses and Maylani Monterola started their Filipino catering company, best known for its Oompa Lumpia cups, in 2018 and opened their first brick-and-mortar Adoboink on June 21.

Bull N Mouth (217 E St., Davis): Burgers and beer are the main draw at this new downtown Davis restaurant, such as the Down the Hatch half-pound patty topped with pepper jack cheese, green chilis, bacon and a house sauce.

Cajun & Sushi House (2921 Elverta Road, Antelope): Seasoned bags of crab legs share table space with bento boxes and sashimi at Cajun & Sushi House, which opened on June 9.

Cookie Plug (4720 Elk Grove Blvd., No. 130, Elk Grove): This cookie chain brought flavors such as purple velvet, chocolate chip walnut and marshmallow-filled smores to Elk Grove after making its market debut in Fair Oaks last year.

Creamys by Cayla Jordan (2023 Vine St., Suite 106, El Dorado Hills): Miniature cheesecake queen Cayla Jordan opened her third dessert shop on June 24 in the El Dorado Hills Town Center, adding to ones in midtown Sacramentos Ice Blocks development and Fountains at Roseville.

Everest Chilli Pepper (214 Harding Blvd., Roseville): Indo-Chinese and Nepalese foods such as okra masala, paneer chow mein and steamed lamb momos take center stage at Harding Plazas new restaurant.

Falafel Corner (720 2nd St., Davis): Sajad Shakoors 18th Sacramento-area Falafel Corner follows the same script as the others: accessible Middle Eastern bites such as halal beef burgers, gyro platters and chicken rice bowls.

Geartooth Alewerks (7553 Green Valley Road, Placerville): Placervilles newest brewery and barbecue joint specializes in trisket (slow-smoked tri-tip that tastes similar to brisket), baby back ribs and bratwurst braised in a house IPA.

Related story lead image

About the Writer

Benjy Egel, a Sacramento native, covers local restaurants and bars for The Bee.

Home & Bar (6930 65th St., Suite 117, Sacramento): A new Sichuan-style Chinese restaurant and karaoke lounge in Florin Town Centre, Home & Bar has a whole section of spicy braised snacks such as crawfish or beef tendon.

Hot Off the Griddle (4800 Granite Drive, Rocklin): Sean Jimenez and Jason Dass all-American brunch spot opened its third location on June 28, adding to preexisting concepts in South Natomas and Orangevale.

Mamma (226 F St., Davis): Michael Galyen and Arnaud Drouvilles long-awaited Italian restaurant opened at the former home of Bistro 33 in downtown Davis, offering pastas, seafood, pizza and breakfast all day.

Pasquales Ristorante (210 Washington St., Auburn): Laura McGuire opened Pasquales in Old Town Auburn on June 14, continuing the Italian restaurants legacy long after predecessor Pasquale Ts (where McGuire worked for more than 15 years) closed in 2008.

Placerville Biergarten (696 Main St., Placerville): Look for pub grub such as giant pretzels, bratwurst and Sloppy Ottos, a sloppy Joe with melted cheese and mustard on a pretzel bun, at this German-influenced biergarten.

Saigon Alley Kitchen & Bar (4630 Natomas Blvd., Suite 150, Sacramento): Mymy Nguyens new-school Vietnamese restaurant and cocktail bar found its new home on June 23 after initially opening in midtown Sacramento in 2020.

Shahs Halal Food (3000 W. Capitol Ave., West Sacramento): Founded as a New York City halal cart in 2005, Shahs brought its fast casual Middle Eastern wraps, burgers and loaded fries to West Sacramento on June 6.

Shortys Doughnuts (1216 Broadway, Suite A, Placerville): Morgan Hunters traveling doughnut shop found a brick-and-mortar home on June 10 and added handmade gelato, cinnamon rolls and cupcakes to the menu.

Sumer Nights (2316 Watt Ave., Sacramento): Find everything from falafel wraps and chicken burgers to arayes (Lebanese meat-stuffed pita) at this new Middle Eastern restaurant in Arden Arcade.

Taco Twist (2915 K St. and 8359 Elk Grove Florin Road, Suite 109, Sacramento): Indian-Mexican-American fusion meets at these two new restaurants, with items such as achari mango tacos and stuffed kulcha sliders.

Tasty Pot (1020 Pleasant Grove Blvd., Suite 170, Roseville): This international chain became Rosevilles newest hot pot spot on June 10, its bubbling stews stuffed with fermented tofu, lamb slices and lots of other ingredients.

Teaspoon (4420 Town Center Blvd., Suite 110, El Dorado Hills): Boba drinks are the main attraction at this Bay Area-based chain, but youll also find desserts such as coffee cake, macarons and Peruvian chocolate brownies in its new El Dorado Hills Town Center cafe.

Urban Rolls (1525 Blue Oaks Blvd., Suite 130, Roseville): This Vietnamese restaurant now whips up banh mi, spring rolls and baos in Campus Oaks Town Center, as well as a Rocklin location.
How 2021 robbery of its fireworks stand still has Modesto nonprofit group struggling

A robbery of its fireworks stand two years ago cost a Modesto nonprofit organization not only cash, inventory and more that day, but has left it without a major source of fundraising. Making matters worse, Relief, Inc., also is embroiled in a dispute with its fireworks supplier.

Phebe Dennis-Fortt, founder of Relief, Inc., arrived at her fireworks booth around 9 a.m. July 3, 2021, to set up for the day.

There, at the corner of Prescott Road and Plaza Parkway, a man and woman pulled up in a van, wanting to know what time the booth would open. Dennis-Fortt answered and then returned to unloading the equipment needed for the day, when she was jumped from behind.

I fought and flipped over where Im laying on my back and now facing this person. But this person was hooded and they were masked, but I know it was a man. Dennis-Fortt said. And he just kept on fighting me. I couldnt scream, I couldnt do anything.

Next thing she knew, the man grabbed her keys and stole her vehicle, with the fireworks trailer attached. The woman behind the wheel of the van also drove away.

An estimated $50,000 worth of Phantom products were taken, along with Dennis-Fortts personal effects, including laptops and iPads.

Want to support particular nonprofits fireworks sales? Heres where booths are in Modesto

Nothing was recovered, all of our personal property was gone. Dennis-Fortt said during an interview late last month. That morning, we had $5,000 in the booth that one of the volunteers was supposed to take to the bank. It never got to the bank.

Dennis-Fortt suffered a fractured wrist and mental anguish, and has since completed a year of trauma classes to help her cope.

Currently, Phantom Fireworks is not doing business with Relief, Inc., because it demands payment for the stolen products, Dennis-Fortt said. Phantom provided the nonprofit with liability insurance, but it covered only the cost of the booth, not the fireworks themselves, she said.

Asked by The Bee about the incident and the situation with Relief, Inc., Phantom Fireworks responded, We cannot comment on this situation as there is ongoing litigation with this nonprofit. Dennis-Fortt said a lawsuit has been threatened but not filed.

Modesto Police Department investigators never were able to develop any suspect information, spokeswoman Sharon Bear told The Bee last week.

The stolen 2006 Lexus SUV, which bore Relief, Inc., decals, was recovered in Oakland, minus the trailer full of fireworks. The MPD assigned a detective to the case and worked with Dennis-Fortt, but the case just went cold, she said.

What Relief, Inc., does and how its funded

On its website, Relief, Inc., says its mission is to improve the lives of people all over the world. We are currently working in Liberia, West Africa, and local communities in Northern California. It operates on work done by Dennis-Fortt and volunteers.

Fundraisers, such as a crab feed, were held to support the nonprofit, but COVID-19 made things difficult, Dennis-Fortt said. And once people were allowed to meet in person again, the cost of putting together a crab feed was too high to deliver, she said.

One fundraiser the nonprofit could count on even during the pandemic was the fireworks booth.

The fireworks became a major fundraiser for us, Dennis-Fortt said. Even though it was one week, we brought in enough money to keep us (afloat) for the whole year.

However, this is the second year in a row that Relief, Inc., will be without a booth.

Where is Relief, Inc., now?





We are just doing whatever we need to do to continue its work, Dennis-Fortt said.

That includes applying for grants, partnering with Panera Bread to feed the community through bread distribution, as well as collaborating with Health Net of San Joaquin to give valentine baskets out to children in need.

Supplies are starting to run short but the nonprofit maintains efforts to do its part to help those who need assistance. While she strives to help others, Dennis-Fortt said her organization needs some help itself.

We are needing help from a pro bono to look into our case and history with Phantom Fireworks to get some closure, she said. I want to thank my neighbors and friends for their support to Relief, Inc., during the carjacking and beyond.

Dennis-Fortt is not unaccustomed to misfortune and tragedy: After members of her family were assassinated in Liberia, she founded Relief, Inc., in 2003 to assist the women and children left behind after a 14-year-long civil war.

Our focus is to help them become self-sustainable, Dennis-Fortt said. We started working in a Liberian community ... as well as collaborating with other nonprofits to get work done here (in Modesto).

For more information about Relief, Inc., and its founder, visit www.reliefinc.org, email pfortt@reliefinc.org, or call 209-545-1700.
A handful of 2024 Republican presidential candidates made the Sunday morning cable news rounds expressing their support for the controversial trio of Supreme Court decisions handed down last week that have prompted calls from the left for "packing" the court.

In a matter of two days, the Supreme Court ruled against affirmative action policies in college admissions, against President Bidens student loan bailout and in favor of a graphic designers free speech right to refuse creating wedding websites for same-sex couples.

Former Vice President Mike Pence voiced support for all three Supreme Court decisions during an appearance on CBS "Face the Nation."

"From the moment the Supreme Court recognized a same-sex marriage, the court had made a commitment that they would still respect the freedom of religion and the freedom of conscience of every American," he said, referring to the web designer case.

2024 Republican presidential candidates Mike Pence, Nikki Haley and Chris Christie

GOP RIPS HUNTER BIDEN'S SWEETHEART PLEA DEAL ON TAX AND GUN CRIMES, ZERO IN ON JOE BIDEN

On the affirmative action case, Pence argued that what may have been a necessary solution to discrimination on college campuses in the 1960s is no longer needed in todays environment.

READ ON THE FOX NEWS APP

"It's a great, great credit to the extraordinary accomplishments that minority students have had on our campuses," he said. "And I really do believe that we can move forward as a country and embrace the notion that we're all going to be judged not on the color of our skin but on the content of our character and, in this case, on our GPA."

On the student loan decision, Pence echoed conservative sentiments that the presidents plan would have unfairly hurt working people.

"The majority of people that would have benefited from this student loan forgiveness are people with multiple graduate degrees," he said. "So you're going to say to working Americans, to truck drivers, to people working in the trades, 'We're going to take your taxes and pay down part of the student debt of doctors and lawyers and Ph.D.s.'"

Mike Pence meets with Ukrainian President Zelenskyy in a secret trip June 29, 2023.

Former U.S. Ambassador Nikki Haley told "Fox News Sunday" the web designer case was a "fantastic win for individual liberty and freedom."

"First of all, the Democrats are upset because things didn't go their way, but the people won. This is about empowering people in their rights," she said. "Gay people have the right to marry the same way a web designer has the right to say, according to their religion, they don't want to do it. So, the people won in these cases."

Republican presidential candidate and former U.N. Ambassador Nikki Haley holds a town hall meeting March 9, 2023, in Nevada, Iowa.

Former New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie said on CNNs "State of the Union" the decision in the web designer case is being mischaracterized as being discriminatory against LGBTQ people.

"This business has no right not to serve people who are a protected class," he argued. "But by the same token, the government doesn't have the right to tell a business the nature of how they need to use their expressive abilities. And so the fact is that this business can't deny LGBTQ people, couples from coming in and trying to, you know, access this business. That's not the case at all. It's a mischaracterization of it."

Republican presidential candidate and former New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie delivers remarks at the Faith and Freedom Road to Majority conference at the Washington Hilton June 23, 2023, in Washington, D.C.

Former Rep. Will Hurd of Texas said on "State of the Union" that the high courts ruling in the web designer case made him "uncomfortable" but that speech must be protected regardless.

"This was about protecting a person's ability to express themselves," he said. "And I'll be frank: This decision makes me uncomfortable because we're protecting speech that I don't agree with, and I don't agree personally with anti-LGBTQ sentiment. But we have to be protecting the speech even if we don't like or agree with that speech. That's a foundational element in our country."

Progressives have renewed their calls to expand or "pack" the composition of the Supreme Court and impose terms for justices after the courts decision Thursday in Students for Fair Admissions v. Harvard and its decisions Friday in Biden v. Nebraska and 303 Creative LLC. v. Elenis.

In Students for Fair Admissions v. Harvard, the Supreme Court handed down a 6-3 decision rejecting the use of race as a factor in college admissions as a violation of the 14th Amendment's Equal Protection Clause.

In 303 Creative LLC. v. Elenis, the Supreme Court held in a 6-3 decision that Lorie Smith, a Christian web designer, has a First Amendment right to refuse to create wedding websites for same-sex marriages if it conflicts with her religious beliefs.

In Biden v. Nebraska, the Supreme Court ruled that Biden's plan to cancel more than $430 billion in student loan debt was unconstitutional, prompting the president to claim the court "misinterpreted the Constitution."
Officer killed at hospital in struggle with man after domestic dispute, IN cops say

An Indiana police officer and a 34-year-old man are dead following an armed struggle at a hospital on July 3, officials say.

Sgt. Heather Glenn, a 20-year veteran of the Tell City Police Department, was investigating a domestic dispute after a woman showed up at Perry County Memorial Hospital with injuries, Indiana State Police said in a news release.

Glenn and other officers left the hospital to search for Sean Hubert, the other person involved in the domestic dispute, the release said. The next day, the victim told hospital staff that Hubert was on his way to the hospital.

Police headed back to the hospital, found Hubert, and Glenn tried to arrest him, officials said. He resisted and Glenn attempted to shoot him with an electronic-controlled weapon, which failed, leading to a struggle.

Hubert pulled out a firearm and shot Glenn, police said. Fellow officers returned fire, hitting Hubert, according to investigators. Both Glenn and Hubert received medical attention but died from their wounds.

Sergeant Glenn was a well-respected officer and pillar in her community, the release said.

Tell City police chief Derrick Lawalin said Glenn was a good friend to everyone and will be sadly missed, but not forgotten.

Glenn is the daughter of a retired police officer, an April 6 Facebook post by the Tell City Police Department shows.

Tell City is roughly 150 miles south of Indianapolis.

Devoted and loving father fatally shot in attack outside Alabama restaurant, reports say

Mom shoots teen son multiple times in fight over game console, Georgia police say

Masked robbers ambush and kill 27-year-old sitting on cliff in Texas trail, cops say

Neighbor uses cops radio to get help after hes dragged by a car, Tennessee cops say
A driver crashed into a busy New Hampshire restaurant Sunday  injuring nearly three dozen people  after colliding with another vehicle, authorities said.

The Laconia Fire Department was dispatched to the Looney Bin Bar & Grill in Laconia at around 12:40 p.m. local time after people reported a four-door sedan inside the restaurant with several people injured, the fire department said in a news release on Facebook.

Due to the high number of people inside the establishment when the car crashed into the building, and the unknown quantity of people injured, a [second] alarm Mass Casualty Alarm (MCI) response was requested, the fire department said in the news release. Laconia companies quickly began to triage those involved to identify patients with the most significant injuries.

A driver crashed into a busy New Hampshire restaurant Sunday after colliding with another vehicle.

Responders transported about 14 people  two with significant lower leg injuries  to Laconia Hospital, Concord Hospital and Franklin Hospital. The other 12 patients had lacerations, contusions and other non-life-threatening injuries, the fire department said.

About 20 people were evaluated by first responders and did not require a visit to the hospital.

There are no words to describe today, the Looney Bin Bar & Grill said in a statement on Facebook Sunday. All we know is that we are beyond grateful that everyone is going to be OK.

Driver collided with another vehicle, which caused it to crash into the restaurant, police say

Laconia Police Department Chief Matt Canfield said a driver was pulling out of an arcade center when there was another vehicle in the center lane. When the driver made a left turn, the driver didn't see a third vehicle coming, which caused the collision and sent the third vehicle crashing into the restaurant, Canfield said in a statement on Facebook.

There were a lot of people inside due to it being lunchtime and a holiday weekend, Laconia Captain Chad Vaillancourt said in the news release. The great response from our mutual aid partners allowed us to help many injured people in a short amount of time."

The Center Harbor and Meredith Fire Departments and crews from Gilford, Belmont, Meredith EMS, Tilton-Northfield and Franklin helped with treatment and transport. The crash is under investigation by the Laconia Police Department, the fire department said.

Contributing: The Associated Press

This article originally appeared on USA TODAY: New Hampshire car crash: 34 injured after driver goes into restaurant
35's a crowd: Why so many Rhode Islanders are running for Congress, and what it means

Everyone you thought was running for Congress in Rhode Island is running, and some people you'd never thought of, or heard of, are also running.

A whopping 35 candidates  22 Democrats, four Republicans and nine independents  declared their intention to run for the 1st Congressional District seat vacated by David Cicilline, enough to field a football team and fill several debate stages.

In all likelihood, a large chunk of them will not make a September primary or November general election ballot. To get on the ballot, they will have to get the signatures of 500 voters by July 14.

But even if only 25, or 20, candidates make the ballot, that's a big number for a Rhode Island congressional race.

By comparison, last year eight candidates  six Democrats, one Republican and one Moderate  made the ballot in the 2nd Congressional District election to replace the retiring James Langevin.

More: Ethics complaint filed against McKee says Capital Grille lunch part of RI's 'pay-to-play' culture

Why are there so many candidates this year?

Political insiders agree on one reason so many candidates are running in this special election: Since it doesn't coincide with the regular election cycle, current officeholders can run without jeopardizing their existing office.

This could have influenced the decisions of Sabina Matos, Sandra Cano, Ana Quezada, Marvin Abney, Stephen Casey and John Goncalves to jump into the race.

But those five are only 17% of the declared candidates. What about the rest?

"If you are a cynic, you might assume some could run and use it as an opportunity to raise their name recognition for the future, even though they are not a serious candidate," campaign operative and political fixer Jeff Britt told The Journal on Friday about the large field.

"I think there are just so few seats available in Rhode Island, when there is an open seat, then everyone sees it as a once-in-a-decade or generational opportunity," said Brown University political science professor Wendy Schiller.

More: There's a special state Senate election this year. Here's where the candidates stand.

Brown University political science professor Wendy Schiller.

Tony Affigne, political science professor at Providence College, agreed and noted that between 85% and 95% of incumbent members of Congress get reelected, setting off a scramble for rare open seats.

The opportunity to compete in a low-turnout special election, where a relatively small number of voters could swing the outcome, also makes this race attractive, he said.

How will a crowded field change the race?

Typically, a larger number of competitors benefits favorites, putting a premium on name recognition and making it harder for upstarts to break through the cacophony of voices.

"A large number of candidates means a small numbers of votes can win the election, but on the other hand, a large number of unknown candidates draws votes from one another, leaving the favorites to mobilize their much larger bases and organizations," Affigne said.

Former congressional candidate and teachers union chief Bob Walsh said a crowded field will make it more awkward for some power players and groups to pick sides, out of fear of angering a friend, ally, colleague or the eventual winner.

By the same token, those who do endorse could have greater impact than they would in a more typical election.

More: Six issues died at the State House this week. These are the ones expected in 2024.

"A lot of groups will use electability as one of their criteria, but some of the larger groups have the ability to change the electability equation," Walsh said. "As few as 8,000 votes could be the winning number. For some organizations that have half that many members, doing nothing is a decision, too. A candidate could tell them, 'I can do this, and you could put me over the top.'"

He said East Providence could be a bellwether, with no hometown candidates among the major candidates, but Providence would probably play an even more central role than in a typical election.

Britt said the crowded field could complicate the math of candidates relying on cleaning up one geographic area to win.

And it probably means money will be more of a factor, not less, than in a smaller field.

Political operative Jeffrey Britt.

"People might not like it, but in a crowded race like this, money might be two or three times more important," Britt said. "With a quarter of a million dollars or $400,000, you can get through and get your message out. Those who don't have it, can't. There are no Joe Shekarchis or Helena Foulkeses running. ... Candidate X will need to educate people on who they are, particularly with a short time frame."

Are so many candidates good for democracy?

As the number of candidates passed the 20 mark, former Cicilline staffer Rich Luchette tweeted what many politicos were thinking, even if they didn't say it.

21 candidates is, to put it mildly, a mess. Rhode Island should look at raising signature requirements above the current threshold of 500 so that only serious candidates make the ballot. https://t.co/pGTcHML77U  Rich Luchette (@richluchette) June 30, 2023

"21 candidates is, to put it mildly, a mess. Rhode Island should look at raising signature requirements above the current threshold of 500 so that only serious candidates make the ballot."

Said Schiller: "I am a believer that anytime you have multiple candidates it is a good thing for democracy."

Affigne said the most notable thing about the field is not its total size, but how many women and people of color are running.

"There have never been as many Black and Latino candidates in a Rhode Island congressional election," he said. "Bella Noka would make history if she gets on the ballot as the first Native American to run for Congress in Rhode Island."

This article originally appeared on The Providence Journal: Why are 35 people running for Congress in Rhode Island?
400 years ago, philosopher Blaise Pascal was one of the first to grapple with the role of faith in an age of science and reason

Blaise Pascal's ideas have led to some of the world's most important inventions. API/Gamma-Rapho via Getty Images

In an apostolic letter released on June 19, 2023, Pope Francis praised the brilliant and inquisitive mind of the influential French philosopher Blaise Pascal, born on that date 400 years ago.

When Pascal lived, at the height of the 17th centurys scientific revolution, rapid advances were taking place in all areas of science. Pascals significant accomplishments included one of the first calculating machines, the worlds first public transport system and various mathematical models, among others.

In fact, Pascals influence in the modern world extends so far that biographer James A. Connor wrote, You cannot walk ten feet in the 21st century without running into something that Pascal did not affect in one way or another.

I am an expert in the history of Western philosophy. What interests me about Pascal is that he was among the first to grapple with the implications of modern science for religious faith and his scientific sophistication did not keep him from being a devout religious believer.

Religion in the age of science

Pascal was well acquainted with what could and could not be known through the mathematical method, the experimental method and reason itself.

Blaise Pascal: French mathematician, physicist, inventor, writer and Catholic philosopher, 1623-1662. Engraving by Geille. Culture Club/Hulton Archive/Getty Images

Through his philosophical investigations, he found that there were strict limits to what we as humans could know. For him, neither the scientific method nor reason more generally could teach individuals the meaning of life or the right way to live.

Pascal also wrote about how humans tried to avoid thinking about their mortality, the extent of their ignorance and their liability to error. Yet he also believed that there was nothing more important for people to consider than their true human nature. In this reasoning, without understanding who we are, it would be difficult to understand how we ought to live.

In Pascals view, acquiring self-knowledge was a necessary stage on the way to recognizing ones need for living with faith and purpose in something beyond oneself.

Pascals religion

In fact, Pascal argued that believing in the existence of God is essential to human happiness.

For all of his many ideas and accomplishments, hes probably most famous today for Pascals Wager, a philosophical argument that humans should bet on the existence of God. If you win, you win everything; if you lose, you lose nothing, he wrote. In other words, he argued, although one cannot know for certain whether or not God exists, we are better off believing in Gods existence than not.

Pascal saw Jesus as the indispensable mediator between God and humankind. He believed that the Catholic Church was the only religion to teach the truth about human nature and therefore offered the singular route to happiness.

Pascals preference for Catholicism over any other religion raises a difficult question, however. For why should anyone wager on one religion rather than another? Some scholars, such as Richard Popkin, have gone so far as to call Pascals attempts to discredit paganism, Judaism and Islam pedantic.

Whatever ones religious beliefs, Pascal teaches that all individuals have to make a choice between faith in some reality beyond themselves or a life without belief. But a life without belief is also a choice, and in Pascals view, a bad bet.

Human beings have to wager and to commit themselves to a worldview on which each one would be willing to bet their life. It follows that, for Pascal, human beings could not avoid hope and fear: hope that their bets will turn out well, fear that they wont.

Indeed, people make countless daily wagers  going to the grocery store, driving a car, riding the train, among others  but dont usually think of them as risky. According to Pascal, however, human lives as a whole can also be viewed as wagers.

Our big decisions are risks: For example, in choosing a certain course of education and career or in marrying a certain person, people are betting on a fulfilling life. In Pascals view, people choose how to live and what to believe without really knowing whether or not their beliefs and decisions are good ones. We simply dont and cant know enough to live without wagering.

Pascals unfinished masterpiece

Pascal presents his argument for the wager in his greatest work, the Pensees  Thoughts, in English. Throughout this work, Pascal emphasizes the need for faith, in light of a multifaceted exploration of human nature as well as a thorough investigation of the limits of reason, science and philosophy.

Title page of Pensees by Blaise Pascal. Bridgeman via Getty Images

Pascals central argument in Pensees for believing in God did not rest on proof of Gods existence. On the contrary, Pascal argued that Gods existence cannot be proved because, for him, God is hidden  a deus absconditus. He wrote that there is enough light for those whose only desire is to see, and enough darkness for those of the opposite disposition, but ultimately no certainty was possible  and so humans faced a choice.

For Pascal, belief would make the difference between misery and true happiness.

On the 400th anniversary of his birth, then, one way of honoring Pascal might be to risk believing in something beyond ourselves and what we can know; such faith might give us a chance of living well.

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: David Hoinski, West Virginia University.

Read more:



David Hoinski 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.
How do you know if your sleepless nights are insomnia or just a phase? Experts break down the difference.

How do you know if your sleepless nights are insomnia or just a phase? Experts break down the difference.

Its not uncommon to occasionally have a hard time falling or staying asleep. However, for those people who seem to never be able to sleep, it might be an indicator of a more serious condition like insomnia.

Insomnia is a common sleep disorder that is often characterized by difficulty falling asleep, difficulty staying asleep, waking up too early, and/or non-restorative/poor quality sleep, said Sarah Silverman, a holistic sleep expert and behavioral sleep medicine specialist.

According to the American Academy of Sleep Medicine, 30%-35% of adults have brief symptoms of insomnia, 15%-20% have acute or adjustment insomnia lasting less than three months, and 10% have chronic insomnia, which occurs at least three nights a week for at least three months.

We spoke with sleep experts about the biggest early warning signs of insomnia, the associated risks and the options for treatment.

You Have Difficulty Falling Asleep

It should typically take you 15-20 minutes to fall asleep if youre following a consistent sleep routine, said Dr. Peter Polos, a sleep medicine specialist and expert for the company Sleep Number.

If you find that its taking you longer than that to fall asleep, it could be an early sign of insomnia or another sleep disorder.

One of the leading causes of insomnia is hyperarousal, which essentially means having increased activity within the nervous system, Silverman explained. Being in a state of hyperarousal often disrupts falling and/or staying asleep, she said. Hyperarousal can be mental, physical, or both, as its experienced differently on an individual basis.

Kristen Casey, a clinical psychologist and insomnia specialist, said its important to note that those with acute insomnia (which lasts less than three months) can often manage their symptoms with over-the-counter medications or have it resolve naturally depending on the root cause.

You Have Trouble Staying Asleep

People tend to have at least two awakenings overnight, which can vary depending on medical conditions, mental health and age, Casey said. Whether thats to use the bathroom, go on your phone, or spend some time overthinking, not being able to stay asleep for a prolonged period of time can be a warning sign of insomnia.

Waking up throughout the night can disrupt important sleep stages that are critical to brain development and overall health, Polos said.

You Experience Daytime Sleepiness

While you might have been in bed for eight hours, that does not mean you actually slept that entire time. One of the most common warning signs of insomnia is daytime sleepiness, and it goes overlooked by many people.

When youre not getting enough quality sleep, your circadian rhythm (our bodys internal clock) will be off track, Polos said. This causes us to feel tired, sluggish, and not as productive throughout the day.

You Have Anxiety About Sleep

For a lot of people, sleep is one part of their day they are actually looking forward to. However, for those who might have insomnia, bedtime can be a source of stress and anxiety.

Sometimes people start to worry about their sleep and if they will wake up throughout the night, Casey said. This can be a warning sign for insomnia because sometimes people struggle with hyperarousal, meaning increased anxiety or thinking right before bed, which keeps them up at night.

You Are More Irritable And Have Difficulty Concentrating

While not sleeping in itself can be frustrating, it can lead to frustration throughout the day too. The consequences of sleep deprivation can become cumulative over time, Polos said. During the day, you may find it difficult to focus and perform usual tasks and might feel frustrated and irritated because of the lack of sleep.

Insomnia can take a toll on your day-to-day life.

Insomnia can take a toll on your day-to-day life.

What Are The Risks Of Untreated Insomnia?

Those who suffer from insomnia or let the condition go untreated can face a number of health risks.

Insomnia can lead to poor concentration or attention issues during the day, poor mood or more irritability, decreased motivation, and low energy or increased daytime fatigue, Silverman said.

Most significantly, insomnia can increase the likelihood of developing anxiety and depression and insomnia can also make pre-existing anxiety and depression worse, she added.

When Is It Time To See A Doctor?

Silverman recommended using the 30-30-3 rule as a guide for when it may be time to see a doctor about insomnia. The 30-30-3 rule involves asking these three questions:

Does it take you 30 minutes or longer to fall asleep? Are you awake for more than 30 minutes during the night? Are both of the above happening at least three nights a week?

If you meet the 30-30-3 rule, you may have insomnia, and it may be a good time to see your doctor or seek out a sleep specialist to discuss your treatment options.

Related...
A 5-year-old boy died after a tree fell on his home during a storm in Missouri, reports say.

The child, identified in a GoFundMe as Robert RJ Lawrence III, was killed during severe weather that hit Missouri on Saturday, July 1.

The storm caused the tree to fall and crush the home in Jennings, a suburb of St. Louis, according to KSDK. The house was completely demolished, councilwoman Nadia Quinn said in the GoFundMe.

They got trapped. The babies got trapped, neighbor Manuel Garza told KSDK. It got hit by lightning. We heard lightning and all that stuff. And then, the one hit the house where the kids were sleeping, and they were yelling, yelling. And they couldnt do nothing.

Quinn said it took 45 minutes for first responders to arrive. Because 911 dispatch was unavailable, a neighbor drove to the police station for help.

Officers found the boy unconscious as he was trapped under the tree that fell onto his bedroom, KMOV reported.

RJ was freed after several rescue attempts, according to RiverBender.com. He died after being taken to a hospital.

Quinn described RJ as a beautiful young man.

Realtor killed by falling tree during severe storm, Georgia police say. One of a kind

2-year-old killed by falling part of tree while in backyard with mom, officials say

Teen dies after tree crushed her as she cleaned storm debris outside Tennessee home
6 dead, 1 in critical condition following house fire, SC authorities say

Authorities are investigating a deadly house fire that occurred over the weekend.

Colleton County sheriff officials said deputies received reports of a house fire on Folly Creek Lane in Greenpond, South Carolina, on Sunday around 11 a.m.

[DOWNLOAD: Free WSB-TV News app for alerts as news breaks]

During the investigation, deputies discovered six people dead and one in critical condition.

The surviving victim was taken to a local hospital for treatment.

The identities of the seven people involved have not been released.

Deputies arrested 33-year-old Ryan Lenard Manigo after receiving information leading them to believe he was responsible for the attempted murder of the surviving victim.

TRENDING STORIES:

Additional charges are pending the victims identification and autopsy results.

The investigation remains ongoing.

Anyone with information regarding this case is asked to call the Colleton County Sheriffs Office at 843-549-2211.

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IN OTHER NEWS:
Six people were found dead after a South Carolina house fire and authorities said they charged a man with the attempted murder of the lone survivor of the Sunday morning blaze.

Authorities found the deceased victims and one person in critical condition at a home in Green Pond around 11 a.m., the Colleton County Sheriffs Office said in a statement.

The survivor was airlifted to a hospital from Green Pond, about 42 miles (67 kilometers) west of Charleston.

ALSO READ: Southwest Charlotte house fire burns one person

The names and ages of the survivor and the six victims were not immediately released.

Todays events that occurred in this quiet, nestled community of Green Pond are tragic, Hiram Davis, a spokesperson for the family told WCBD-TV. Davis thanked law enforcement agencies on behalf of the family for their response and compassion and stressed that while the motive is unknown, staying vigilant in the community is key.

We should always be vigilant. We should always have an eye on our surroundings, Davis said.

Ryan Lenard Manigo, 33, was charged with attempted murder and held at the Colleton Detention Center as part of the ongoing investigation. Additional charges are possible pending autopsy results, the statement said.

Arson investigators from the South Carolina State Law Enforcement Division are assisting with the case, the sheriffs office said.

(WATCH BELOW: Fire intentionally set at north Charlotte home, CFD says)
8 years after he was reported missing as Houston teen, Texas man found alive, injured

More than eight years after he was reported missing as a Houston 18 year old, a Texas man was found alive this weekend - with cuts, bruises and blood in his hair.

Rudolph Rudy Farias IV was last seen on March 6, 2015, according to the National Missing and Unidentified Persons System (NamUs). He was 18, according to NamUs.

At the time he went missing, the group said Farias was walking his dogs in a neighborhood in northeast Houston.

On Saturday, the Texas Center for the Missing said Farias had been "located safe" and was recovering in a hospital, the nonprofit said in a statement on Twitter.

Rudy Farias update: Neighbors say missing Texas man found alive 8 years later was living with mom in Houston: Report

Please continue to keep his family in your prayers as Rudy recovers in the hospital, the Texas center said on Twitter.

Missing Texas teen Rudy Farias found alive more than 8 years later in Houston.

Rudy Farias found with cuts, bruises outside a church, mom says

Farias' mother told local news station KTRK that someone called 911 after finding him unresponsive outside a church. He had cuts and bruises all over his body and blood in his hair, Farias mother told the station.

Farias' mom said they tried talking to him, but he would only say a few words and go into a fetal position, the station reported. She said it would be a long journey for him to heal, but is thankful he was found alive.

USA TODAY reached out to the Houston Police Department for more information.

This article originally appeared on USA TODAY: Rudy Farias: Missing teen found in Houston, Texas, 8 years later
These are the 9 safety concerns an ex-OceanGate worker raised with Stockton Rush about the Titan sub, including fears about its carbon-fiber hull, report says

OceanGate CEO and co-founder Stockton Rush speaking in front of a projected image of the wreckage of the ocean liner SS Andrea Doria. AP Photo/Bill Sikes, File

An ex-OceanGate worker reportedly raised at least nine Titan safety concerns with CEO Stockton Rush.

They included fears the carbon-fiber hull could come apart with repeated dives, per The New Yorker.

David Lochridge said he was fired from OceanGate after he raised the concerns.

A former OceanGate employee listed at least nine potential safety issues with its Titan submersible that he presented to the company's CEO just before he was fired, The New Yorker reported.

David Lochridge, who was hired by OceanGate Expeditions in 2015 to be its director of marine operations and chief pilot, conducted an inspection of the Titan submersible in January 2018 after being asked to do so by CEO Stockton Rush, the report said.

Lochridge examined the vessel and compiled a report listing what he said were safety issues with or unproven technology on the submersible, per the New Yorker. Lochridge sent the report to Rush and other OceanGate leaders, it added.

Issues he flagged, according to The New Yorker, were:

The carbon-fiber hull had "very visible signs of delamination and porosity" which meant it could come apart after repeated dives.

Glue was coming away from the seams of the Titan's ballast bags

It had mounting bolts that could rupture the ballast bags

Errant plunge holes and O-ring grooves on both of its sealing faces didn't fit with design norms

The exostructure and electrical pods were made of different materials that, when reacting with seawater, could bring about galvanic corrosion

There were "snagging hazards" from the thruster cables

The beacon that communicates the submersible's location when it surfaces was fixed with zip ties

The submersible's floor was highly flammable

The vinyl wrapping inside would emit "highly toxic gasses" if they were on fire

Lochridge said the submersible could only dive safely if there was a full scan of the hull, and said his main safety concern was the lack of testing for the hull, The New Yorker reported.

Experts believe the vessel's carbon-fiber hull may have failed first when the submersible imploded and the five people on board, including Rush, died.

Rush was "furious" with the report and called a meeting the afternoon he received it, The New Yorker reported. He said no scan of the hull was necessary as the submersible had an acoustic monitoring system that would alert the pilot and let them surface.

Lochridge was fired at the end of the meeting, the report said. This meant he was gone from the company before the Titan did any deep-sea tours.

Lochridge's lawyer said in a court filing that Rush was wrong about the warning system, as it would "only show when a component is about to fail  often milliseconds before an implosion" and would not detect any existing flaws to the hull.

It is not clear if any issues alleged by Lochridge flared up or were addressed by the company, or if any of them contributed to the submersible's fatal end.

It is also not clear if the scanning Lochridge called for took place.

OceanGate and Lochridge entered legal battles, with OceanGate accusing him of breach of contract, fraud, and revealing trade secrets, and Lochridge saying he was wrongfully terminated after raising the safety concerns.

Lochridge, after he was fired, made damning comments about the vessel. Two weeks after the firing, he said to an expert, "That sub is an accident waiting to happen."

He said, "There's no way on earth you could have paid me to dive the thing," The New Yorker reported. "I don't want to be seen as a Tattle tale but I'm so worried [Rush] kills himself and others in the quest to boost his ego."

He also said in a lawsuit that he reported in 2018 that the submersible's safety could be compromised by poor "quality control and safety" protocols that "paying passengers would not be aware" of.

He was not alone in his comments.

Previous warnings by industry experts, including those made directly to Rush himself, came to light after it emerged that the Titan had lost contact with its mothership.

The company, before the implosion, repeatedly said the Titan was safe. Rush had defended the safety of the submersible and repeatedly criticized what he saw as overly safety regulations blocking innovation.

OceanGate did not immediately respond to Insider's request for comment made outside of normal working hours.

Read the original article on Business Insider
Photo: The Canadian Press

Five things to watch for in the Canadian business world in the coming week:

Markets closed

Canadian markets are closed today because Canada Day landed on the Saturday. U.S. stock markets are open Monday, but will close early ahead of their July 4 holiday and remain closed on Tuesday for the actual holiday.

Home sales

The latest home sales numbers for some of Canada's biggest cities are expected this week. Vancouver and Calgary are expected to report June sales on Tuesday, while Toronto is expected to report its results on Thursday.

Trade numbers

Statistics Canada will report its international merchandise trade figures for May on Thursday. Canada's merchandise trade surplus increased to $1.9 billion in April, helped by higher exports of gold, oil and cars and light trucks.

Richelieu results

Richelieu Hardware Ltd. will report its second-quarter results on Thursday and hold a conference call with investors and financial analysts. The importer, manufacturer and distributor of specialty hardware will also discuss its outlook for the rest of the year.

Jobs numbers

Statistics Canada will release its latest snapshot of the job market in the country when it publishes its labour force survey for June on Friday. The key economic report comes ahead of the Bank of Canada's next interest rate decision on July 12.
Nine people were wounded and two others suffered "traumatic injuries" in a shooting at a Wichita, Kansas, nightclub, officials said.

The shooting happened shortly before 1 a.m. local time Sunday at City Nightz. Police officers heard screaming followed by a "large number of people" leaving the club, police officials said at a news conference Sunday morning.

In the chaos, police identified seven shooting victims and two traumatic injury victims, officials said. Wichita Mayor Brandon Whipple later indicated the two who suffered traumatic injuries had been trampled and wrote on Facebook that two more people had gone to local hospitals with gunshot wounds. All of the injuries occurred inside the nightclub, police said.

Police said a suspected shooter is in custody but it is believed there were additional shooters, officials said.

At least four guns were fired inside the nightclub, police said.

The victims who suffered traumatic injuries were described by police as a 30-year-old woman and a 31-year-old man, according to police.

The initial seven shooting victims were a 21-year-old man, a 26-year-old man, a 24-year-old woman, a 34-year-old man, a 21-year-old woman, a 30-year-old man and a 24-year-old man, police said.

"Alcohol and firearms do not mix," Wichita Police Department Chief Joe Sullivan said at a news conference. "There is going to be an extensive investigation and we are going to find out how firearms got into this club and who is responsible for bringing them in there."

Detective Chris Merceau said Sunday that police had been called to the club about 12 times in the last year, including a "drive-by incident" on May 21. Following that incident, Merceau said, police met with the club's owner and discussed tightening security by using metal detector wands and "having working video cameras." It was not immediately clear if the owner followed these suggestions.

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WASHINGTON (AP)  A civil rights group is challenging legacy admissions at Harvard University, saying the practice discriminates against students of color by giving an unfair boost to the mostly white children of alumni.

Its the latest effort in a growing push against legacy admissions, the practice of giving admissions priority to the children of alumni. Backlash against the practice has been building in the wake of last weeks Supreme Courts decision ending affirmative action in college admissions.

Lawyers for Civil Rights, a nonprofit based in Boston, filed the civil rights complaint Monday on behalf of Black and Latino community groups in New England, alleging that Harvards admissions system violates the Civil Rights Act.

Why are we rewarding children for privileges and advantages accrued by prior generations? said Ivan Espinoza-Madrigal, the groups executive director. Your familys last name and the size of your bank account are not a measure of merit, and should have no bearing on the college admissions process.

Opponents say the practice is no longer defensible without affirmative action providing a counterbalance. The courts ruling says colleges must ignore the race of applicants, activists point out, but schools can still give a boost to the children of alumni and donors.

A separate campaign is urging the alumni of 30 prestigious colleges to withhold donations until their schools end legacy admissions. That initiative, led by Ed Mobilizer, also targets Harvard and other Ivy League schools.

President Joe Biden suggested last week that universities should rethink the practice, saying legacy admissions expand privilege instead of opportunity.

Several Democrats in Congress demanded an end to the policy in light of the courts decision, along with Republicans including Sen. Tim Scott of South Carolina, who is vying for the GOP presidential nomination.

The new complaint, submitted with the Education Departments Office for Civil Rights, draws on Harvard data that came to light amid the affirmative action case that landed before the Supreme Court. The records revealed that 70% of Harvards donor-related and legacy applicants are white, and being a legacy student makes an applicant roughly six times more likely to be admitted.

It draws attention to other colleges that have abandoned the practice amid questions about its fairness, including Amherst College and Johns Hopkins University.

The complaint alleges that Harvards legacy preference has nothing to do with merit and takes away slots from qualified students of color. It asks the U.S. Education Department to declare the practice illegal and force Harvard to abandon it as long as the university receives federal funding. Harvard did not immediately respond to a request for comment on the complaint.

A spot given to a legacy or donor-related applicant is a spot that becomes unavailable to an applicant who meets the admissions criteria based purely on his or her own merit, according to the complaint. If legacy and donor preferences were removed, it adds, more students of color would be admitted to Harvard.

The case was filed on behalf of Chica Project, African Community Economic Development of New England, and the Greater Boston Latino Network.

Its unclear exactly which schools provide a legacy boost and how much it helps. In California, where state law requires schools to disclose the practice, the University of Southern California reported that 14% of last years admitted students had family ties to alumni or donors. Stanford reported a similar rate.

An Associated Press survey of the nations most selective colleges last year found that legacy students in the freshman class ranged from 4% to 23%. At four schools  Notre Dame, USC, Cornell and Dartmouth  legacy students outnumbered Black students.

Supporters of the policy say it builds an alumni community and encourages donations. A 2022 study of an undisclosed college in the Northeast found that legacy students were more likely to make donations, but at a cost to diversity  the vast majority were white.

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"Sopranos" and "White Lotus" actor Michael Imperioli says he's not allowing "bigots and homophobes" from watching any of the work he's been in after the Supreme Court sided with a Colorado designer opposed to making same-sex wedding websites.

Imperioli, 57, wrote an Instagram post condemning the high court's decision over the weekend.

"i've decided to forbid bigots and homophobes from watching The Sopranos, The White Lotus, Goodfellas or any movie or tv show I've been in," he said. "Thank you Supreme Court for allowing me to discriminate and exclude those who I don't agree with and am opposed to. USA ! USA!"

In comments underneath his post, he wrote "hate and ignorance is not a legitimate point of view" and added, "America is becoming dumber by the minute."

Michael Imperioli attends the 29th Annual Screen Actors Guild Awards at Fairmont Century Plaza on February 26, 2023 in Los Angeles, California. / Credit: Axelle/Bauer-Griffin

On Friday, the court ruled 6-3 in favor of Lorie Smith, a Christian graphic artist from Colorado who does not want to design wedding websites for same-sex couples. The court ruled the First Amendment prohibits the state from forcing the designer to express messages that are contrary to her closely held religious beliefs.

All six conservative justices sided with the designer, while the court's three liberals dissented, saying the majority's decision gives businesses a "license to discriminate."

"[T]he decision itself inflicts a kind of stigmatic harm, on top of any harm caused by denials of service," Justice Sonia Sotomayor wrote in her dissenting opinion. "The opinion of the Court is, quite literally, a notice that reads: 'Some services may be denied to same-sex couples.'"

President Biden also criticized the ruling and said he is concerned it could lead to discrimination against LGBTQ Americans.

Melissa Quinn contributed to this report.

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Adam, blacksmith and champion of freedom, dies without honor of last name | Righting the past

Editors note: This is the thirteenth in a series of historical obituaries written today to honor the men and women of the past who were denied the honor at the time of their death because of discrimination due to their race and/or gender.

On an unknown date, in an unmarked location, after an extraordinary life, a man named Adam died. Even the date and place of his birth  and the names of those in his family  are lost to the pages of history. Yet his story endures.

Adam survived a terrible injustice during his life. Like many enslaved men in Pensacola, Adams labor was rented out to the federal government. In Pensacola, Army and Navy officers relied on a system of slave rentals to build and maintain a sprawling military installation. These men and women built Fort Barrancas, Fort McRee, Fort Pickens and the Pensacola Navy Yard. From 1840 to 1860, even after the completion of the three forts, the Navy alone rented upwards of 200 enslaved men each year.

What is 'Righting the past?' Their history wasn't just forgotten, it was buried. Today we tell their stories.

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This drawing illustrates a landing of a fugitive slave at Drake's Wharf in South Boston from the yacht "Moby Dick," Captain Austin Bearse, on the night of July 18, 1853.

Twenty-one years old in 1850, Adam labored as a blacksmith in the Pensacola Navy Yard. The Navy paid his enslavers, Josiah Q. and Lucinda Guild, $1 per day for Adams labor. Described as nearly free and an intelligent fellow, Adam was valued at $1,800  repugnantly equal in purchasing power to about $70,000 today.

Longing to be free, in June 1850, Adam snuck aboard the ship Mary Farrow which was anchored in Pensacola Bay. He left his mother and sisters behind. Bound for Portsmouth, New Hampshire, the ship cleared Pensacola Pass and entered the Gulf of Mexico. Adam could finally breathe a sigh of relief, but only for a moment. His dangerous maritime voyage on the Underground Railroad had only just begun.

The escape of freedom seekers like Adam on the Underground Railroad enraged southern enslavers. Freedom seekers and their allies justly robbed enslavers of their wealth and destabilized white supremacy. Powerful interests lobbied to protect the enslavers. When Adam escaped, Congress was considering a law meant to disrupt the Underground Railroad  the 1850 Fugitive Slave Act.

Even as lawmakers debated, the Mary Farrow crossed the Gulf of Mexico with its cargo of lumber and one stowaway. After three days at sea, Captain Timothy Warren discovered Adam aboard the ship. Outraged, Warren ordered Adam to be thrown overboard and dragged by rope beneath the ships hull, a notorious punishment known as keelhauling. The crew intervened and protected the freedom seeker for the rest of the journey.

Upon reaching Portsmouth, Warren went ashore to report Adam. Meanwhile, the friends of liberty acted. Allies sailed to the ship and found Adam, the panting fugitive from oppression. But Warren soon returned to the ship.

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Warren refused to let Adam go ashore. Fearing his doorway to freedom was closing, Adam sprang with all the desperate energy of the flying fugitive into a boat beside the Mary Farrow. But Warren delivered a stunning blow upon Adams head and dragged him back to the vessel. Adams allies rushed back to the city, where they found legal help from someone favorable to the cause of human rights.

Facing a legal challenge, Warren ordered Adam to leave the ship. With the help of Portsmouths anti-slavery network, Adam made his way to the free dominions of Queen Victoria in the North.

A month after Adam reached Canada, the 1850 Fugitive Slave Act became law. With the laws passage, life in the United States grew more dangerous for formerly enslaved and free Black Americans.

Heroic actions of freedom seekers like Adam forced a nation to confront one of the gravest crimes against humanity. In his pursuit of liberty, Adam embodied the spirit of America.

Today, the route Adam took out of Pensacola Bay is listed with the National Park Services National Underground Railroad Network to Freedom Program. In the mid-1800s, the pass was closer to Fort Pickens and is within the current boundaries of Gulf Islands National Seashore.

Designating Pensacola Pass as an Underground Railroad site provides present and future generations with opportunities to learn about the cruelty of human slavery and courageous individuals like Adam. His heroic actions in his known life and unknown death provide an example of bravery in the pursuit of liberty.

This article originally appeared on Pensacola News Journal: Adam, blacksmith and champion of freedom | Righting the past
Al Roker pays tribute to one of his favorite movies to celebrate 4th of July: Indiana Jones and the Lake Crusade

Al Roker is celebrating the 4th of July by channeling his inner crusader.

For the annual Queechy Lake boat parade in New York July 1, Al and his family covered their watercraft in "Indiana Jones" posters and dressed up like the famous archaeologist, complete with leather jackets and whips.

Al's wife, Deborah Roberts, and their son, Nick, joined him for the holiday weekend adventure, which they dubbed, "Indiana Jones and the Lake Crusade."

Al shared sweet videos of the adventure  which featured Nick cracking his whip at the waters below and the TODAY anchor steering the ship  set to the franchise's theme song, "Raider's March" by John Williams.

"So much fun with you two crusaders!" Deborah commented on her husband's Instagram post.

Deborah shared additional videos from the event, including one of her asking an in-character Al, "Ready Dr. Jones?"

"I don't know. We're just making this up as we go," he responded, quoting one of Indiana Jones' memorable lines.

In her caption, Deborah revealed Al is a "die hard Indiana Jones fan."

"Fortunately no bad guys turned up on the route," she quipped.

In the comments section, fans loved the behind-the-scenes look at Al's Independence Day weekend celebrations.

"Ok, this just made me smile so much! Al and Nick are so fun!" one Instagram user commented.

This guy knows how to have fun!! Thanks Al! another wrote.

"Love the commitment! My goodness the weather + heat in those jackets. Watch out for snakes," another fan added, referring to one of the action hero's frequent foes.

Al's tribute to George Lucas' franchise comes just a few days after the latest addition to the film canon, Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny," premiered June 30. Harrison Ford, who has starred as the titular character since 1981, has stressed that the movie marks his last time playing the iconic figure.

Al has three children: 36-year-old Courtney, who is expecting her first child and Al's first grandchild, as well as Leila, 24, and Nick, 20.

Ahead of Father's Day, Al opened up about how his recent health crises, including blood clots and a knee replacement surgery, made him feel vulnerable for the first time with children.

In November, he was rushed to the hospital after a blood clot moved from his leg to his lungs. He also experienced internal bleeding and a tear in his small intestine.

"It was the first time that I had this vulnerability about being a father, Al said during an annual roundtable conversation with the dads of TODAY. You want to be that strength that they need. And when youre in a hospital bed and you can barely get up, theres this part of you that almost doesnt want them to see you like that.

This article was originally published on TODAY.com
By Fatos Bytyci and Florion Goga

TIRANA (Reuters) - Former U.S. President Bill Clinton on Monday met 12 children and men from Kosovo who were named after him in gratitude for his role in stopping the 1998-99 Kosovo War.

Clinton, who served as president from 1993 to 2001, is regarded as a hero in Kosovo and Albania for launching NATO air strikes against Serbia's forces in 1999. The strikes halted the war and allowed nearly 1 million Albanian refugees in Kosovo to return to their homes.

Clinton's meeting with his namesakes, who ranged in age from about 1 to 23, took place on the main boulevard of Albania's capital, Tirana. The event was arranged by Albania's prime minister, Edi Rama, who presented Clinton, 76, with a medal for his role in bringing peace and stability to the Balkans region.

One of the men named after Clinton, Klinton Berisha, told the former president: "We are very proud of what you did for my country and I want to thank you from the deep of my heart."

Others who spoke at the ceremony included Klinton Gashi, Klinton Bajgora and Klinton Ferizi. They each thanked Clinton, who applauded and laughed as they said their names.

Clinton also met three girls who were named after his wife, Hillary Clinton, who served as U.S. secretary of state under former President Barack Obama.

"Hello! I am not Bill or Clinton, I am Hillary Alidema. Thank you Bill!" said one of them.

"Today, you gave me a great gift, bigger even than the honour," Clinton said in a speech at the event. He urged peace in Kosovo, where some of the worst ethnic tensions have erupted since it declared independence from Serbia in 2008.

"Don't kick people when they're down," he said. "Resist the urge to treat people the way they treated you."

Washington remains Kosovo's main supporter, both politically and financially.

(Reporting by Fatos Bytyci and Florion Goga in Tirana; Editing by Matthew Lewis)
Map of Algeria

Algeria, a gateway between Africa and Europe, has been battered by violence over the past half-century.

There are conflicting reports about the death toll during the war against France for independence in the 1950s and early 60s. French historians estimate that up to 400,000 Algerians were killed, while the Algerian government says more than one million people died.

The country later endured a brutal internal conflict after when elections that Islamists appeared certain to win were cancelled in 1992; a low-level Islamist insurgency still affects Algeria.

The Sahara desert covers more than four-fifths of the land. Algeria is the continent's biggest country, and is the world's 10th largest.

Oil and gas reserves were discovered there in the 1950s, but most Algerians live along the northern coast.

Read more country profiles - Profiles by BBC Monitoring

PEOPLE'S DEMOCRACTIC REPUBLIC OF ALGERIA: FACTS

Capital: Algiers

Area: 2,381,741 sq km

Population: 29.3 million

Languages: Arabic, Tamazight, plus French

Life expectancy: 75 years (men) 78 years (women)

LEADER

President: Abdelmadjid Tebboune

Algerian President Abdelmadjid Tebboune

Abdelmadjid Tebboune won the December 2019 presidential election from a field candidates all associated with the era of Abdelaziz Bouteflika, the long-serving head of state forced out of office by mass protests in April.

The opposition boycotted the election, demanding a clean sweep of the military-dominated elite and a sustained campaign against corruption.

Mr Tebboune has pledged to carry out the necessary reforms, but the former civil servant faces a serious challenge in winning over public trust.

MEDIA

The town of Guerara

Algeria has a lively private press but the state broadcaster avoids criticism of the government.

Recent legislation allows several privately-owned TV stations to operate from Algerian soil, but none of them are opposition-leaning.

TIMELINE

Algerians endured a long and bitter struggle for independence

Some key dates in Algeria's history:

c. 600BC - Carthaginians expand settlements along the North African coast.

4th Century BC - Berbers form the single largest element of the Carthaginian army.

241-238BC - Revolt of the Mercenaries: Berber soldiers rebel after being unpaid following Carthage's defeat by Rome in the First Punic War.

146BC - Carthage is destroyed by Roman forces under Scipio Africanus.

2nd Century BC - Emergence of the Berber kingdoms of Numidia and Mauretania.

24AD - Berber kingdoms become part of the Roman Empire.

429 - Germanic Vandals invade North Africa and set up kingdom based on Carthage.

477-578 - Rise of the Mauro-Roman kingdom, an independent Christian Berber kingdom centred in Altava.

533-34 - Byzantine forces under Belisarius drive out the Vandals as part of the Emperor Justinian's reconquest of the Western Roman Empire.

578-708 - Kingdom of Altava is a successor state to the previous Berber kingdom. It flourishes until the conquest of the area by the Umayyad Caliphate in the seventh and eighth centuries.

972-1148 - Zirids: a Berber dynasty from modern-day Algeria rules the central Maghreb from 972 to 1014 and the eastern Maghreb from 972 to 1148.

1050s-1147 - Almoravids: A Berber Muslim dynasty centered in the territory of present-day Morocco established an 11th Century empire over the western Maghreb (North Africa) and Al-Andalus (southern Spain) starting in the 1050s and lasting until its fall to the Almohads in 1147.

1121-1269 - Almohads: A North African Berber Muslim empire that at its height, controls much of the Iberian Peninsula and North Africa.

1235-1557 - Zayyanids: A Berber dynasty centred on the town of Tlemcen in northwest Algeria.

1509 - Spanish conquer Oran.

1512 - Turkish privateer brothers Oruc and Hayreddin - both known to contemporary Europeans as Barbarossa or "Red Beard" - operate successfully off Tunisia.

1519 - After a Spanish attempt to take Algiers, an assembly of Algerian notables asks the Ottoman Sultan Selim to make Algiers part of the Ottoman Empire. Hayreddin Barbarossa is named Beylerbey of Algiers, or emir of emirs. The province becomes key for the Turks who see it as the spearhead of Ottoman power in the western Mediterranean.

1681-88 - French-Algerian War: part of a wider campaign by France against the Barbary pirates - mainly Muslim pirates and privateers operating from North Africa to capture slaves for the Ottoman slave trade. In addition to seizing merchant ships, they raided coastal towns and villages in Italy, France, Spain, and Portugal but also in the British Isles, Netherlands, and Iceland.

1783-1784 - Following attacks on Spanish merchant shipping, the Spanish navy and allies bombard Algiers, destroying much of its fortifications.

1815 - The Second Barbary War: between the United States and the Barbary Coast states of Tripoli, Tunis, and Algiers.

1816 - Britain and the Netherlands bombard Algiers in a bid to force the local ruler to stop enslaving Europeans. However, this does not completely end until the French conquest of Algeria.

1830 - French conquest of Algeria. France invades and quickly takes Algiers and seizes other coastal communities. Additional military forces were brought in over the following years to quell resistance in the interior, and to encourage colonists to settle and farm.

1848 - Algeria becomes a department of France, an integral part of France itself. It is a destination for hundreds of thousands of European colonists. Many Europeans settle in Oran and Algiers, and formed a majority of the population in both cities by the early 20th Century - about a fifth of the total population of Algeria.

1939-1945 - The Collapse of France and the Anglo-American occupation of North Africa during World War Two encourages hopes for independence.

1945 - Pro-independence demonstrations in Setif. Thousands of Algerians are killed in suppression of ensuing unrest.

1954-1962 - Algerian War of Independence. A major armed conflict between France and the Algerian National Liberation Front or FLN which sees Algeria winning its independence from France. It is a complex conflict characterized by guerrilla warfare and war crimes. It also becomes a civil war between the different communities and within communities. Death totals vary between 400,000 and 1.5 million. Up to a million European colonists leave Algeria.

1962 - Algeria becomes independent.

1976 - Algerian, Moroccan armies clash over Western Sahara.

1989 - New constitution removes the one-party state and moves country away from socialism to western capitalism.

1991-2002 - Algerian Civil War: With the Islamic Salvation Front (FIS)dominating the first of two rounds of legislative elections in 1991, and fearing the election of an Islamist government, the authorities cancel the elections. They ban the FIS, triggering a civil war between Algeria's armed forces and various Islamist rebel groups. Islamist militants conduct a violent campaign of civilian massacres. More than 100,000 people are thought to have died.

1999 - Abdelaziz Bouteflika becomes president and introduces national reconciliation policy.

2007 onwards - Islamist insurgency campaign in the Maghreb and Sahel by Al-Qaeda in the Lands of the Islamic Maghreb or AQIM, an Islamist militant organization that aims to overthrow the Algerian government and institute an Islamic state.

2019 - President Bouteflika announces he will step down after street protests, driven by decade-long economic stagnation, unemployment, labour market segmentation and chronic corruption.
Amber Alert issued for Lansing toddler, 2: What we know

Wynter Cole Smith, 2, who is described as Black and has braided, shoulder-length hair, was last seen Sunday, July 2, 2023, wearing a white T-shirt with rainbows, according to the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children, a nonprofit child protection organization.

Lansing police issued an Amber Alert  an emergency alert asking the public for help finding an abducted child  early Monday for a 2-year-old girl, who authorities said is endangered and missing.

And the man who police said might have taken her was arrested in St. Clair Shores after a brief chase.

The girl, Wynter Cole Smith  described as Black with braided, shoulder-length hair  was last seen Sunday wearing a white T-shirt with rainbows, according to the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children, a nonprofit child protection organization.

The child, the alert said, may have been with Rashad Maleek Trice, a 26-year-old man, in a white 2013 Chevrolet Impala, with a Michigan plate. Police said he was arrested just before 6 a.m. and taken into custody, but the toddler is still missing.

According to the Lansing State Journal, local police said were dispatched to a home where they found a 22-year-old woman with stab wounds and other signs of assault. She identified Trice, who she had been in a relationship with, to police and was taken to a hospital. The missing child, police said, is not Trice's biological daughter.

The FBI, the Lansing State Journal reported, is coordinating the search for the toddler.

More: Keep your kids busy this summer: Here's what Detroit Public Library is planning

Authorities are asking anyone with information to call 517-483-4600 or Crime Stoppers at 517-483-7867.

Contact Frank Witsil: 313-222-5022 or fwitsil@freepress.com.

This article originally appeared on Detroit Free Press: Amber Alert issued for Wynter Cole Smith, 2, missing girl from Lansing
A Florida Amber Alert has been issued for 12-year-old Fernanda Arias, last seen about 3 a.m. Monday near Beach Boulevard and Peach Drive in Jacksonville. The alert was later canceled when the girl was found safe, police said.

UPDATE: The Sheriff's Office issued the following update at 11:35 a.m.

"The victim has been located and this continues to be an active investigation. Thank you to all who assisted in disseminating this information."

ORIGINAL STORY:

A 12-year-old Jacksonville girl is the focus of a Florida Amber Alert advising "Kidnapped Child."

The Sheriff's Office said officers responded just before 3 a.m. to the report of a missing and possibly endangered juvenile near the area of Beach Boulevard and the 2300 block of Peach Drive between Southside Boulevard and St. Johns Bluff Road. Fernanda Arias left her residence in a dark-colored vehicle described as a two-door Honda with a large rear spoiler possibly being driven by a Hispanic male.

Search efforts have been unsuccessful at this time. Due to the age of the girl and the circumstances involved, authorities are seeking information on her whereabouts to ascertain her safety.

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The Sheriff's Office issued the alert about 8 a.m., and by 9:40 a.m. the state upgraded it to an Amber Alert and said Fernanda may be with Jorge Reyes. His age and description have not been released yet. If they are seen, authorities advise do not approach; contact law enforcement immediately at #FLAMBER or the Jacksonville Sheriffs Office at (904) 630-0500 or 911.

What does Fernanda Arias look like?

Age: 12 year oldHeight/Weight: 411, 100 poundsEyes/Hair: Brown/dark hair- medium lengthClothing: Dark pants/white shirt

Where is Duval County?

Duval County, the home of Jacksonville, Atlantic Beach, Neptune Beach, Jacksonville Beach and Baldwin, is located in Northeast Florida. The county is also part of Floridas First Coast.

The countys population totals 1,016,536, according to U.S. Census estimates released a year ago.

This article originally appeared on Florida Times-Union: Amber alert canceled in Duval County after 12-year-old girl found
An undated image provided by retailer American Giant of its OMade in AmericaO T-shirts, which sold out the first day they were available this year. (American Giant via The New York Times)

When Bayard Winthrop, the chief executive of the retailer American Giant, ordered the batch of shirts that his company would advertise for the Fourth of July, he didnt think much of it. The retailer, which has been producing its apparel solely in factories around the United States for more than a decade, perennially leans into its Made in America pitch for Independence Day.

This years crew-neck T-shirts are fittingly available in red, white or blue with very little embellishment other than getting straight to the point: Letters that read American Made. They cost $60 each. And they sold out in the first day. Then he ordered another set, which also sold out quickly as well. The company is scrambling to secure its fourth order.

For American Giant, this is shaping up to be its most lucrative Fourth of July yet.

Sign up for The Morning newsletter from the New York Times

The company has been using its Made in America status to advertise to consumers since its founding in 2012. But, Winthrop said, it is now reaching customers at a time when chatter about the global supply chain, re-shoring, trade deal loopholes and sustainability in fashion has moved beyond boardrooms and policy circles.

Sixty-five percent of U.S. adults said they intentionally bought Made in America products over the past year, according to a Morning Consult survey released last month. Thats about the same rate of U.S. adults who said they had those same intentions last year.

American Giants customer service representatives, Winthrop said, are receiving emotional emails from shoppers saying its refreshing to see a retailer walking the walk on making items in the United States.

It really feels to me that theres an awakening happening right now, he said. Consumers are intuitively understanding the backdrop to this conversation.

Ahead of Independence Day in the United States, stores stack their shelves and populate their websites with T-shirts and swimsuits bearing American flag prints or slogans like Party in the U.S.A. A third of Americans say they plan to purchase patriotic fare for the Fourth of July this year, according to the National Retail Federation, a trade association.

The reality is much of that apparel is made overseas and imported. While there are retailers that in recent years have championed more domestic production, the Fourth of July causes particular tension because the items companies are pushing are patriotic only in theme.

Some competitors, who make their apparel stateside, are intentionally pointing out the disconnect.

If youre leaning into Americana to sell items that arent American made, I find it disingenuous, said Kristen Fanarakis, the founder of Los Angeles-based fashion brand Senza Tempo and an advocate for locally made apparel.

Winthrop said, One of the great ironies about the apparel industry, I think, is this kind of bizarre disconnect between what the industry says and what it does.

Old Navy, for example, has been selling flag T-shirts for the Fourth of July since the company started in 1994. Yet, all of the 25 flag tops and baby onesies the company currently has displayed on its website are listed as imported. Searches for Americana and Fourth of July on Walmart and Target bring up T-shirts and shorts that are listed as imported as well. (Some of the apparel is listed as both being made in the United States and imported.)

Since the 1990s, production of apparel sold by major American retailers has largely moved overseas, especially to China, which brings heightened tensions between the United States and China into the equation for those companies.

The pandemic also strained the global supply chain, disrupting the reliability of imports. In some cases, retailers are moving production closer to the United States or sourcing a wider share of the goods they sell domestically.

In the past month, lawmakers in Washington have introduced a series of bills seeking to close off a shipping channel that allows companies like the fast-fashion retailers Shein and Temu  both founded in China  from benefiting from a trade rule, which allows them to forgo paying fees at U.S. Customs and Border Protection. Lawmakers argue this would level the playing field for American-based retailers.

The Fourth of July is one of Winthrops favorite holidays, but this years selling season has been so busy that he nearly forgot to snag one of his companys American Made T-shirts for himself.

I think I have found one in a retail store that is being sent to me, but Im not sure, Winthrop said. Its a bummer.

c.2023 The New York Times Company
Photo: Jerry Martin

Jerry Martin, the Vancouverite who operated a mobile shop offering a "safe supply" of illicit substances, has died from an overdose.

The advocate, who had been sober for about 15 years, told Glacier Media in previous interviews that he spent about eight years on the street in the Downtown Eastside and knew how dangerous life can be for people who use drugs.

In May, Martin opened his pop-up shop, named The Drugs Store, that sold a range of illicit substances including heroin, cocaine, MDMA, and methamphetamine that had been tested to ensure they were free from harmful cuts, such as fentanyl, as well as buffs and adulterants.

In addition to providing "clean" drugs, the store also provided people who use drugs with a safe way of purchasing them, as well information on detox and rehabilitation facilities and mental health resources.

Martin reportedly passed away on Friday, just days after being hospitalized for a suspected fentanyl overdose.

"We mourn the loss of a visionary who sought to address the complexities surrounding drug use and its devastating consequences," Marc Deveraux of Vancouver True Crime said in an Instagram post.

"His untimely departure serves as a stark reminder of the pervasive nature of addiction and the urgent need for effective solutions."
The U.S. is recommending that Americans reconsider travel to mainland China because of arbitrary law enforcement and the risk of wrongful detention, according to a new travel advisory.

The Chinese government arbitrarily enforces local laws, including issuing exit bans on U.S. citizens and citizens of other countries, without fair and transparent process under the law, reads the recent advisory from the State Department.

The department said it has found a risk of wrongful detention of U.S. nationals by Beijing, and that U.S. citizens traveling or residing in China may be detained without access to U.S. consular services or information about their alleged crime, as well as subjected to interrogations and detention without fair and transparent treatment under the law.

Among a number of other warnings within the advisory, the State Department cautions that Chinese authorities can consider a wide range of documents, data, statistics or materials as state secrets  and to detain or prosecute on allegations of espionage.

U.S. citizens could also be detained or deported for sending private messages critical of the Peoples Republic of China (PRC), Hong Kong SAR or Macau SAR governments, the advisory notes.

So-called exit bans, or restrictions on travel from China, could also be used to compel individuals to participate in PRC government investigations; pressure family members of the restricted individual to return to the PRC from abroad; resolve civil disputes in favor of PRC citizens; and gain bargaining leverage over foreign governments, according to the update.

Americans are also warned against using drugs in or prior to arriving in China, and against participating in demonstrations, protests or any other activities that authorities interpret as constituting an act of secession, subversion, terrorism, or collusion with a foreign country.

Similar advisories were also issued for the semi-autonomous Chinese regions of Hong Kong and Macao.

The new advisory comes amid heightened tensions between Washington and Beijing over a number of issues, ranging from the U.S. military shoot-down of a Chinese surveillance balloon floating through American airspace earlier this year to Chinas relationship with Russia as Moscow wages its war on Ukraine.

For the latest news, weather, sports, and streaming video, head to The Hill.
Amid Conservative Rulings, Supreme Court Surprisingly Protected Black Voting Rights For A Second Time | Pexels

The Supreme Court sided with a lower federal judges decision that Louisiana had likely violated the Voting Rights Act. Specifically, the decision that Louisiana is likely attempting to limit the power of the Black vote through racial gerrymandering makes it likely that voting rights advocates will successfully increase Black representation in the state.

Last Monday, the Supreme Court ruled against Louisiana, which had defended itself against charges that its Republican-led government redrew the states district lines in such a way to limit the impact of the Black vote. Plaintiffs had argued that, given that the states population is one-third Black, Louisiana had engaged in illegal and racially motivated gerrymandering by drawing district lines so that only one of the states six congressional districts contained a majority-Black population.

Louisiana likely used district map to limit Black voting power

A federal district judge ruled in 2022 that the Louisiana map likely violated the Voting Rights Act by unduly diluting the impact of Black voters, but Louisiana appealed to the Supreme Court to put that ruling on hold. Mondays decision lifts that hold and dismisses the courts earlier decision to hear the appeal. This means the case goes back to the district court, which could result in a likely conclusion that Louisiana did violate Black voters rights.

New majority-Black districts likely in two states

Mondays ruling built upon a decision issued by the Supreme Court earlier in June that determined Alabama had diluted the Black vote in its state by creating only one majority-Black district. That ruling was a surprise given the courts conservative majority. The Alabama ruling likely means that a second Black district will be created in that state, and Mondays Louisiana decision was made in line with that earlier ruling. Together, these rulings may significantly increase the effectiveness of Black voting power in the South. Given the very thin majority that Republicans currently hold in the House of Representatives, adding two Black and likely Democratic congressional districts may impact which party controls the House after the 2024 election.

A surprise ruling by a conservative court

The Supreme Courts rulings in the Alabama and Louisiana cases came as surprises amid a heavily conservative set of decisions. The most prominent and most controversial ruling from this most recent Supreme Court session has been the decision to strike down affirmative action in college admissions, while other rulings limited the scope of legal protections for LGBTQ+ individuals and canceled President Joe Bidens widely promoted student loan forgiveness plan. These cases will likely overshadow a ruling from earlier in the week, in which the court allowed a federal court ruling that Louisiana had racially gerrymandered its congressional districts and denied the states Black population a second representative in Congress.

While the Supreme Court is currently dominated by conservative justices, the rulings in Alabama and Louisiana demonstrate that there are still hopes for voting rights advocates that some protections will be enforced. Thus, Black voters in these two states will enter the 2024 political cycle in a stronger position, with potential impacts for the nation as a whole.
Amish families have figured out an ingenious way to dry clothes without household appliances in the winter  heres how they do it

Line-drying is a no-cost way to use the suns energy to dry clothing, which makes it a great choice for people who are trying to save money and electricity.

But some homeowners who want to use clotheslines worry about what theyll do in the winter  luckily, the Amish have this problem figured out.

The scoop

This hack comes from Amish 365, where journalist Kevin Williams has documented the Amish and Mennonite recipes and culture he has studied for the last 30 years.

During the warmer months, theres no more iconic image of Amish country than dancing, colorful clothing flapping on the line, drying in the breeze, he said.

Despite common perceptions of the old-fashioned Amish, modern technology sometimes appears in these communities. Some now use e-bikes, and Williams said that some own gas clothes dryers.

Although, I will say thats unusual, the exception rather than the rule, he added.

Instead, most Amish families rely on clotheslines in the summer  and they still work in the winter, Williams said.

According to appliance company Speed Queen, Drying on a line in winter is actually a form of freeze-drying thanks to sublimation  or ice evaporating from a solid state. Wet clothing may freeze, but the moisture evaporates into water vapor leaving behind dry clothing that just needs a little loosening.

In other words, being frozen doesnt keep water from evaporating out of clothing.

Many Amish families take advantage of this fact, Williams said, but others prefer to hang their clothing indoors in the winter. They may hang clotheslines out of the way in the basement or arrange drying racks over wood-burning stoves.

One popular item in Amish communities is a bicycle wheel dryer, which Williams explained is a drying rack for small items like socks, towels, and head coverings. Its made by hanging a bike wheel so that it lies on its side, then suspending clothespins from it. Some families use similar compact hanging drying racks made from plastic.

Why its great

Hanging clothing, even in winter, is a reliable way to save money on laundry. With this method, homeowners dont need to own a dryer and wont need to spend money on gas or electricity to power it. Clothes that are dried outside also smell great without using chemical-laden dryer sheets.

Saving electricity this way is also good for the planet. The lower the demand for electricity, the less power plants need to generate, and the less pollution they produce. This helps reduce the heat-trapping gases in the atmosphere to stop the planet from overheating.

What people are saying

Williams received comments from readers with personal experience with line drying in winter.

When I had lived on a farm, I did, said one commenter, adding that the clothes smelled better that way.

Another user pointed out that this method isnt just for rural homes. I grew up in suburban Detroit, and I have childhood memories of a clothesline in the basement with clothing drying on it in the 1960s, they said.

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Sean Moore, an unarmed Black San Francisco man shot by police in 2017, is seen illuminated in the beam of a flashlight standing on the steps of his home during a police call related to a noise complaint (San Francisco Police Department)

Family members and civil rights activists expressed anger at a decision by San Francisco prosecutors to drop charges against a police officer who shot and killed Sean Moore, an unarmed Black man gunned down on the front steps of his home during a call about noise complaint.

San Francisco district attorney Brooke Jenkins announced the decision to drop the manslaughter prosecution, which was filed in 2021 by her predecessor, on Sunday, saying her office can not ethically prosecute this case in good faith.

The people of San Francisco elected me to restore accountability and enhance public safety; to faithfully follow the facts and the law and not bow to political pressure or pursue politically expedient prosecutions that are legally and ethically dubious, she wrote in a statement. As prosecutors, we have a sacred duty to try cases in good faith, to not abuse our power and ensure that the cases we bring forward are fair in order to maintain trust in the criminal justice system.

Family members were baffled and hurt by the decision, which marks the third such case Ms Jenkins has dropped, leaving no more active prosecutions related to police killing people while on active duty.

Im very angry, Im beyond angry, Kenneth Blackmon, Moores brother, told Mission Local. Im in disbelief, to be honest with you.

Anti-police violence activist Samuel Sinyangwe argued in a Twitter post on Monday the decision meant murder is now fully decriminalized for police in the city of San Francisco.

In January of 2017, San Francisco police officers Colin Patino and Kenneth Cha were called to Moores Oceanside house around 4am responding to a call that the man was violating a noise-related restraining order by banging on the walls of his home.

Police body camera video captured the incident, the first such officer-involved shooting recorded this way in city history.

Moore, who family members said was in the midst of a mental health crisis caused by bipolar disorder and schizophrenia, can be seen angrily telling officers to get the f*** of my stairs from behind a metal entry gate.

Officers continue to demand he exit the home, and eventually he does so, at which point they pepper sprayed the unarmed man and beat him with a baton. Moore then punched Patino, breaking his nose, and kicked Cha down a set of stairs, after which Cha shot Moore twice, hitting him in the leg and stomach.

A year after the violent encounter, charges against Moore were dropped. An appeals court found the officers hadnt witnessed Moore violating the restraining order at issue, so they lacked probable cause to arrest him. As such, when they ignored his requests to leave, their consensual encounter became an unlawful detention.

In 2020, Moore died while serving time in prison on an unrelated matter, and an autopsy found the wounds from the shooting were partially responsible.

In 2021, San Francisco city supervisors voted to pay $3.25m to settle a federal excessive force lawsuit from Moores family related to the 2017 police encounter.

That same year, former San Francisco DA Chesa Boudin filed charges against the officer involved in Moores shooting, the first time a city district attorney had ever charged a police officer with a crime related to a use-of-force death.

San Francisco police have among the worst records in California for disparate use of force on people of colour. Black people are 6.5 times more likely to be killed than white people by San Francisco officers, according to data analysis from Mapping Police Violence.
Neighbors are hoping for relief after a fire engulfed an apartment building in DeKalb County.

Capt. Jaeson Daniels of DeKalb Fire told Channel 2 Action News fire officials responded to the 5400 block of Memorial Drive, the location of the Linden Ridge Apartments just after 6 p.m.

[DOWNLOAD: Free WSB-TV News app for alerts as news breaks]

When they arrived, fire officials saw smoke and flames coming from the multi-story apartment building and began to battle the blaze.

According to Daniels, six units were affected by fire, with more than 13 being affected overall. A total of 65 residents were displaced by the fire and are now being assisted by the Red Cross.

TRENDING STORIES:

Officials have learned the fire started on the balcony of a first floor unit, however, it is unclear what started the fire.

The cause is still under investigation and no injuries have been reported, Daniels said.

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IN OTHER NEWS:
Several Arab countries and organizations are condemning a major Israeli raid launched Monday against an alleged terrorist base in the city of Jenin after at least eight Palestinians were killed and dozens injured.

Arab nations that have traditionally sided with Palestine in its long conflict with Israel spoke out forcefully just hours after the operation.

Egypts Ministry of Foreign Affairs in a statement condemned the innocent civilian casualties in the excessive and indiscriminate use of force in the operation.

Egyptian officials also warned of the grave dangers of what they said were increased attacks against the Palestinian people.

Jordans Foreign Affairs Ministry called for international cooperation to end the disastrous consequences of the Israeli aggression on Jenin, joining Iran and Turkey in speaking out against the military raid.

The Israeli Defense Forces (IDF) began mass air strikes and sent in hundreds of soldiers to clear out the Jenin camp, which Israel said is a major base of operations for terrorist groups to launch attacks and manufacture and distribute weapons.

The IDF operation has allegedly included bulldozers tearing up streets and buildings while rockets have reportedly struck populated refugee areas.

Lt. Col. Richard Hecht, a spokesperson for the IDF, said there are sites in Jenin used by terrorists next to schools and humanitarian organizations.

Were ready to do this as long as it takes, he told a local outlet, adding that forces were seeking to break the mindset of a safe haven for terrorists.

Ahmed Gheit, secretary-general of the League of Arab States, said the bombing of cities and camps by planes, the bulldozing of houses and roads, is a collective punishment and revenge that will only lead to further detonation of the situation.

I appeal to the advocates of peace in the world to intervene immediately to stop this ominous and criminal process, he tweeted.

Lynn Hastings, a United Nations resident and humanitarian coordinator for Palestine, said she was alarmed by the scale of the Israeli operation in Jenin.

Access to all injured must be ensured, Hastings tweeted.

The violence in the Israeli-occupied territories of the West Bank and Gaza has increased this year, fueling concerns about another major conflict in the Middle East.

The IDF has responded aggressively to Palestinian militant activity under hardline Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu in operations it says are tasked with defending its people.

Netanyahu has also been accused of allowing settlement expansions in Israel that are displacing the Palestinian people.

U.S. officials have yet to make a statement on the Jenin raid, which comes just ahead of the Fourth of July celebrations, a traditional holiday break for Americans.

Washington is a major ally of Israel but supports a two-state solution between Palestine and Israel.

The Council on Islamic-American Relations, a major Muslim advocacy organization that has repeatedly spoken out against Israeli military activity, called for the U.S. to respond to Israeli military activity.

The Israeli government is completely out of control because it does not expect to face any consequences from the Biden administration, said national executive director Nihad Awad in a statement. This must change.

This story was updated at 4:17 p.m.

For the latest news, weather, sports, and streaming video, head to The Hill.
Photo Illustration by Erin O'Flynn/The Daily Beast/Getty Images

Marking the first anniversary of the Supreme Court overturning Roe v. Wade, first-year Gov. Katie Hobbs (D-AZ) issued a far-reaching executive order that strips the states fifteen local county attorneys of their authority to prosecute abortion related cases. Turns out elections have consequences.

The bombshell order doesnt stop there. It directs all cases prosecutable under Arizonas 15-week banwhich doesnt allow exceptions for rape or incestto be exclusively handled by the states attorney general, Kris Mayes, who like the governor is a pro-choice Democrat and has only been in office since January.

And theres more. Mayes has made it clear she wont be prosecuting women and their health providers for alleged violations of an 1864 abortion ban, or poorly written post-Roe bans.

The Procedure I Needed After a Miscarriage Is Now a Crime

Its still early days, and we dont have any active cases right now, nothing being prosecuted, Mayes told The Daily Beast in a phone interview. But its still a very important executive order that provides certitude to Arizona women and medical providers that we are going to protect and defend the fundamental rights of Arizonans, and were not going to criminalize abortion in Arizona.

The executive order has Republican state legislators fuming about the governors overreach of power, and vowing to retaliate by halting confirmation of her appointees. Republicans have already been slow-walking the process, and Arizona law allows political appointees to serve for up to a year without Senate confirmation, so while the stalemate is not an empty threat, its a threat that wont come due for a while.

The governor and I didnt take this step lightly, says Mayes, who is confident the governors action will survive legal challenges. This is an extraordinary situation. The U.S. Supreme Court overturned a right we had for 50 years. Arizonans elected a Democratic governor and AG who are pro-choice, and elections have consequences. Some Republicans are unhappy about it, but this is a consequence of Dobbs (the SCOTUS decision).

In Defense of Late-Term Abortions

If this was a Republican governor taking authority away from local Democratic officials, I think the ideological lines would be very different, so there is a legitimate question about state government overreach and lack of deference to local officials, says Jack Pitney, Professor of Politics at Claremont McKenna college.

Abortion changes the equation. Whatever qualms voters might have are outweighed by their anger over the loss of Roe. Before Dobbs, the pro-life side could frame the issue to their advantage. Since Dobbs, the framing has shifted to whether abortion should be legal at all, a position so alarming to most Americans that support for abortion in at least some circumstances soared to 85 percent in a Gallup poll, with 69 percent saying it should be legal in the first three months, a record high.

Insane Cost of Giving Birth in America IS an Economic Issue

Until the repeal of Roe, the underlying procedure was presumed legitimate, and the debate was about regulations at the margin. Arizona has a strong libertarian streak, which also works to the governors advantage.

Ive made it pretty clear that our resources should not be used to prosecute doctors and women, says Mayes, who immediately after the Hobbs decision issued a statement aligning herself with Gov. Hobbswho tweeted a photo of herself signing the executive order. We are on offense, and we will not let up, Mayes said in her statement. That means Arizonans can seek abortions and access reproductive health carewithout interference or fear of criminal prosecution.

She is battling cases related to an 1864 law which bans abortion and was put in place before Arizona was a stateand before women could even vote.

Mayes Republican predecessor as AG advocated for that law, and Mayes is honoring (if thats the right word) a 15-week ban on abortion voted by the legislature and upheld by the Appeals Court with no exceptions for rape and incest, which makes it unacceptable to most Arizonans, she says.

Abortion is center stage in a state that is pivotal to next years presidential election, and to the Senate majority with Sen. Kyrsten Sinema potentially running for re-election as an independent.

There are very active, relentless forces in Arizona intent on depriving women of their fundamental right to access abortion and theyre not going to let up, Mayes said in the phone interview.

She is relying on the states Constitution, written during the Teddy Roosevelt progressive era, which has an explicit privacy clause, Article 3, Section 8, she says. It hasnt been tested, she notes, then adding that the fate of abortion care will be decided in the form of a ballot initiative as early as next year, and Arizonans like most Americans will reject these draconian abortion bans.

5 Women In South Carolinas State Senate Are Saving Abortion Rights (For Now)

Whats happening in Arizona is the unleashing of the unpredictability of the abortion debate across America, says Jim Kessler with the centrist Democrat group, Third Way. A constitutional right a year ago has been turned into a crime and you can see how that crime could be a capital crime, he says. Abortion is murder was the message of the pro-life movement for decades. What Katie Hobbs is doing is responding to an extremist set of laws and trying to defend women.

One out of four pregnancies end in abortion, which means that pre-Dobbs, there were 800,000 to a million abortions a year in the United States, says Kessler. And were treating these women like theyve committed a crime when a year earlier it was a right. The Dobbs decision in an instant turned law-abiding people into criminals. Eventually, someone is going to be arrested and prosecuted for having an abortion, he says.

It wont be in Arizona, and if thats the marker that Katie Hobbs and her AG put down, that puts them in the history books right where they want to be as grassroots leaders in the ongoing fight for womens freedom.

Read more at The Daily Beast.

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Armed man who threatened Rep. Pramila Jayapal outside her home pleads guilty to stalking

[Source]

The armed man who threatened Rep. Pramila Jayapal (D, WA-7) outside her home in West Seattle last year has pleaded guilty to a misdemeanor stalking charge.

Key details: Brett Forsell, 49, has been sentenced to 364 days in King County Jail on Thursday, which will be followed by a 24-month probation.

Additional conditions: Forsell must undergo substance abuse, alcohol abuse and mental health evaluations and agree to an anti-stalking order that also comes with a firearm possession prohibition of eight years.

He was also ordered to avoid criminal law violations.

More from NextShark: 100-million-year-old dinosaur footprints discovered at restaurant in China

What happened: Forsell hurled obscenities outside Jayapals home on July 9, 2022, and yelled threatening remarks at the U.S. representative, telling her, Go back to India, Im going to kill you, according to a neighbor.

A police report noted that Forsell was in possession of a .40 caliber Glock semi-automatic at the time and court records reportedly revealed that his gun had a live round in its chamber.

Arrested, released and charged: Forsell was arrested at the scene after police arrived on malicious harassment charges, but he was eventually released from jail. Later that month, however, he was charged with felony stalking.

More from NextShark: 2 Men Found Guilty of Killing 39 Vietnamese Migrants Trafficked into the UK

Speaking to the FBI, Forsell admitted that he had driven past Jayapals house more than once and yelled expletives outside her home.

He reportedly claimed that he was drinking on the night of the incident and was struggling with mental illness. He also said his actions toward the Democratic representative were a "manifestation of a manic episode."

More from NextShark: Three Teens Arrested For Allegedly Kicking Elderly Asian Woman in Disturbing Video

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Jack Ma is NOT Missing But 'Laying Low', Sources Say
FILE PHOTO: Test tubes are seen in front of a displayed AstraZeneca logo in this illustration

By Maggie Fick and Ludwig Burger

(Reuters) - AstraZeneca said on Monday an experimental precision drug slowed progression of lung cancer in a late-stage trial, but the company's shares fell as much as 6% as analysts said the benefits may not be as pronounced as hoped.

The drug, datopotamab deruxtecan, which is being jointly developed with Japan's Daiichi Sankyo, was shown to prolong progression-free survival compared with standard chemotherapy in patients whose non-small cell lung cancer had returned after one or two prior treatment attempts, AstraZeneca said.

The drug belongs to a promising class known as antibody drug conjugates (ADC), which consist of tumour-seeking monoclonal antibodies that are combined with a cell-killing chemotherapy payload.

The British drugmaker also said some trial participants had died of interstitial lung disease, or scarring of lung tissue, but added that the drug's safety profile was in line with observations during previous clinical trials.

It declined to provide more trial details, saying they would be presented at an as yet undisclosed medical conference.

At 0855 GMT, shares in AstraZeneca were down 5.8% at their lowest level in more than three months.

The drug's cell-killing molecules attach themselves to a protein known as TROP2, which is associated with a large majority of lung cancers.

Gilead has pioneered the targeting of TROP2 with an ADC named Trodelvy, approved to treat certain types of breast and bladder cancer.

Merck & Co and partner Kelun-Biotech of China are at an earlier development stage with a drug candidate in the same class.

AstraZeneca acquired the collaboration rights to the experimental drug in a 2020 deal worth up to $6 billion with Daiichi, including up to $4 billion contingent on sales, which intensified their successful pact on ADC drug Enhertu against breast cancer and other tumours.

AstraZeneca said that the datopotamab deruxtecan trial would continue as planned to assess the effect of the drug on overall survival of patients, another important efficacy criterion.

Barclays said in an analyst note that the trial was successful but until there is more data, some investors and analysts will have concerns that the treatment may not have the potential to become a treatment of first choice after diagnosis.

"We think that its certainly far too early to write off Dato-DXd and we like AZN for a number of reasons, so we would view any negative reaction today as a buying opportunity," the note read.

(Reporting by Maggie Fick in London, Ludwig Burger in Frankfurt and Sinchita Mitra in Bengaluru; Additional reporting by Lucy Raitano in London; Editing by Krishna Chandra Eluri and Susan Fenton)
Tokyo  Japan is the only country among the so-called G-7 industrialized nations that does not allow same-sex marriage. But momentum for change is growing, thanks in large part to couples who've stepped out of the shadows to push for equality and inclusion  despite the personal risks.

The banners and the bunting were hung for Tokyo's first full-scale Pride parade since the coronavirus pandemic. It was both a party, and a political rally to press for same-sex marriage rights.

A participant carries a rainbow flag during the Pride parade in Tokyo, Japan, in a file photo from April 2023. / Credit: Yusuke Harada/NurPhoto/Getty

U.S. Ambassador Rahm Emanuel joined the crowds and lent his vocal support, saying he could already "see a point in Japan's future" when, "like America where there is not straight marriage not gay marriage there's only marriage."

Proudly joining the parade that day were Kane Hirata and Kotfei Katsuyama, who have become poster boys for the cause.

Asked why they believe their country is the only one in the G-7 that doesn't yet allow same-sex marriage, Katsuyama told CBS News Japan's ruling political party has close ties with fringe religious sects and staunchly conservative anti-LGBTQ groups.

A powerful right-wing minority in Japan's parliament has managed for years to block major changes to the country's laws.

Hirata and Katsuyama both started life as middle-class kids in families with traditional values. Both men went on to take conventional jobs  Katsuyama as a policeman and Hirata as a firefighter.

They went quietly about their lives for years but remained deep in the closet. Then, about two years ago, they both quit  and then came out together with a social media splash, telling their story for all to see on YouTube.

It was a bold move in Japan's conservative, conformist society, and there has been backlash.

"We get a lot of support," Katsuyama told CBS News. "But nasty messages, too."

They now live together in a Tokyo apartment, working hard in their new vocation as prominent LGBTQ advocates. The couple staged a wedding last year, but the mock exchanging of vows was a stunt to make a point, not a legal ceremony.

Asked if they'd like to tie the knot for real, Hirata lamented that "right now, we can't even consider it realistically and that's very sad."

But Japan's lively and growing Pride movement has recently found increasing support from the country's courts, and polling shows a decisive 70% of Japanese voters would like to see couples like Hirata and Katsuyama gain the right to be married.

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Austria is allowing EU countries to transport military equipment through its country to Ukraine, and this is not a violation of its neutrality.

Source: Ukrinform, citing Alexander Schallenberg, Minister of Foreign Affairs of Austria, in an interview with ORF TV

Quote: "I would like to clarify: transport from one EU country to another has always been without problems.

And we have a decision from 28 February 2022, within the Common Foreign and Security Policy, which also allows these shipments to Ukraine. And we are obliged to implement this decision."

"There is a decision under the Common Foreign and Security Policy that not only allows these shipments to Ukraine. This means that we are bound by this decision. Both since the signing of the Treaty of Amsterdam and since the reform of the federal constitution almost 20 years ago, these measures within the EU have been subject to neutrality. This means that there is no contradiction."

Details: Schallenberg said that this is about transit through Austria, "and this does not violate neutrality".

The minister added that the partners who carry out this transit are obliged to inform the Austrian side about the type of cargo being transported.

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Vladimir Putin (right) and Yevgeny Prigozhin, 2010

Several lines about Prigozhin's mutiny are worth keeping an eye on.

Read also: Some suspect footage of Putin in Dagestan to be of body double

Putin's speech was the most vague and weak in the history of his presidency. No decisions were voiced. That means the system remains the same. Changes in the power bloc will not be immediate but a little later. Putin was afraid to make substantive personnel changes.

The situation worsened after a meeting with the security forces, about which the Kremlin had nothing to say. Instead of motivational footage, the population was shown the confusion within the security bloc.

The blame for the event is primarily attributed to Prigozhin himself. No surnames, not even from his inner circle, were mentioned. In other words, there will be an attempt to leave the Wagner PMC units on the front line, reassigning them to the Ministry of Defense. The question is only about the format. After all, part of the PMC signed a "contract between a volunteer unit and the Ministry of Defense." That is, maintaining their integrity and legalizing payment for services from Shoigu. In this case, the announced "personal" contracts are a desire, at least partially, to "spread out" the remnants among other units. But, most likely, part of the units will remain.

Shoigu retains his position but receives confirmation of his meager authority in the army, which has already manifested itself in demonstrations of disloyalty by separate units. Now, after the incorporation of the Wagner PMC, he will receive additional "agitators." This is especially true if the main format will be the "personal contracts" of militants with the Ministry of Defense, without preserving the integrity of their units.

Read also: Wagner suffers over 100,000 casualties in Ukraine, says Zelenskyy

Prigorzin's speech shows that this politician remains in the public view. In addition, the first comment, "and that's all," "Russia is kaput," began to be dispersed by Prigorzin's TG channels after Putin's speech. Then the others picked it up. That is, we have a demonstration of influence on the media space.

In the morning, Prigorzins two aircraft landed in Machulishi. Again, his personal business jets. The information that some Telegram channels tried to disperse about the procession of PMC columns to the territory of Belarus is also not yet confirmed.

Lukashenko paused in his address and waited for a public expression of gratitude from Putin. This is extremely important for him, as the Kremlin's policy towards neighboring states was built on the premise that neighbors (both as states and as politicians) are "obliged" to Russia - economically, diplomatically, and militarily.

For the first time in the last 30 years, the situation is entirely opposite - Putin is indebted to Lukashenko.

More precisely, considering the public "gratitude" for resolving the Russian crisis, Russia owes Lukashenko a favor. Partially, this has already been played out in fixing gas prices until 2031. Most likely, Lukashenko will receive some assurances of Russia's non-involvement in the electoral campaign that has started (parliamentary and local elections). But the comrade from Minsk will need more. The situation (especially the expectation of "what he will say") allows for playing on the contrast with the behavior of the Russian elites.

The plans for the future

There are several lines to watch:

Read also: Prigozhin dissolves his media empire  report

1. Prigozhin and the Russian elites.

The critical question, which currently has no answer, is Prigozhin's African assets. Even when it comes to securing the assets of Rosneft and Gazprom, no one has replaced the Wagnerites yet. Lukom-Aleksperivskaya private military company has strengthened since 2022, but it is only enough for Lukoil's assets.

In addition, the question of Africa's geological exploration and mining business remains open. It is based on personal agreements with local elites. And finally, there are the so-called combat units in CAR, Mali, and other countries.

Read also: Russians tearing down flags from graves of Wagner mercenaries in Vladivostok

At this stage, Prigozhin likely maintains control over the aforementioned part of the Wagner PMC. He will probably retain it because the Kremlin simply has no one to replace the mercenaries in Africa. A formal replacement of the "coordinator" is unlikely since no single command exists throughout the continent (the tasks are different). And even the appointment of several new people does not solve the issue of Prigozhin's personnel loyalty.

However, it can be assumed that by the end of 2023, thanks to Russian companies' expansion of security services and the strengthening of private military companies created by them, Prigozhin's fighters will begin to be replaced, at least in the protection of the oil and gas industry.

From another perspective, Prigozhin maintains connections with the Russian military elite and some of the "Kremlin's towers." There has been no clear hostile position taken by either the "Rosneft-Lukoil" group (Sechin) or the "Russia" bank group (Kovalchuk). Not a word has been said about high-ranking officers who served in the PMC "Wagner." In other words, they may retain their positions and influence.

2. PMC "Wagner" in Ukraine.

It can already be understood that PMC "Wagner" ceases to exist as it once did. At the very least, it is divided into two parts - the "African" and the "Ukrainian" (those who fought in Ukraine). Moreover, each piece will further splinter. For Prigozhin, it is essential to create several autonomous structures (easier to maintain control), and for Shoigu, it is crucial to disintegrate the "Ukrainian" Wagnerites

Read also: Invaders escalate repression in occupied territories amidst resistance to Russian passportization

Part of the "Ukrainian contingent" will be distributed among other units. Some networks are likely to be sent for disposalthrown into battle on the most dangerous parts of the front. Repression is quite possible for some commanders. The question is only in terms of quantity. A quick wave of repression, theoretically, can demonstrate determination and punishment. In other words, to instill fear. But in the conditions of the low authority of the army leadership, it looks risky. Therefore, it is quite possible that punitive measures will be applied after partial personnel changes.

3. Personnel in the power bloc.

There will be no immediate personnel purgesPutin does not want to demonstrate concessions to Prigozhin's demands. But new appointments are quite possible after a month or a month and a half.

4. Media and new media.

Read also: PMC Wagner Group reportedly receives $10 billion from the Kremlin

The Kremlin is trying to intensify its work with new media owners. It is enough to mention Putin's meeting with owners of telegram channels ("war correspondents" and others whose work is about Ukraine). This task becomes even more relevant, as Prigozhin's media group "Patriot" is unlikely to be reliably loyal. The Kremlin needs control over this segment of the information field.

It is likely an attempt to take control of the media holding "Network of City Portals." These resources were the first to raise concerns about the coverage of the "Wagnerites" march to Rostov and Moscow.

5. PMC Wagner, Prigozhin, and Lukashenko

It is doubtful that Lukashenko would agree to accept the detachments of PMC Wagner. It goes against his policy of maintaining maximum control over the security bloc. The "Wagnerites" may be allies, but it is challenging to bring them under control. Therefore, the likelihood of "training camps" appearing is there, but the possibility of a permanent deployment of even ten thousand is minimal. It will most likely be the maximum format of "Prigozhin + several hundred people." Lukashenko needs people who "have nowhere to retreat." But as individuals, hed rather they be employees of his security structures. The long existence of a parallel army is doubtful - it will scare PapuKoli too much.

Read also: Putin might sabotage ZNPP to restore his authority  report

In addition, preserving the publicity of Prigozhin (as a critic of Russian law enforcement) in the future stages will create additional tension in relations with Putin. It is worth noting another interesting aspect - the criminal case regarding the "coup" has not been closed. And the main suspect will stay in Belarus for some time.

Information resources and the experience of Prigozhin's media.

This direction is extremely interesting for Lukashenko in terms of internal political processes. His propagandists have not achieved parity with opposition resources in social networks, video services, and Telegram. Many followers are no longer reliable, especially as seen in subscription statistics (most are from Russia). Lukashenko needs Prigozhin's resources (or consultants) to build his own network. And also to influence the Russian information field.

African Lukashenko's business. In this direction, there is an acute need for security at all stages - the supply of goods and weapons, the safety of contracts, and the extraction of minerals. Prigozhin can provide this.

Read also: Prigozhin arrives in Belarus, says Lukashenko

And finally, an interesting about Russia.

Russia has worked with neighboring countries while relying on several myths. Among the key ones are: The strength of the Russian army (as a possible security guarantor and a threat in case of conflict with Russia); the consolidation of Russian elites, which prevents attempts to destabilize Russia; the Kremlin's constant readiness for quick and harsh steps in response to threats; the strength of the Russian special services both inside and outside of Russia; and the consolidation of Russian society.

Read also: Putin blames United States for destabilizing Europe

The first myth has already been debunked in Ukraine for a year and a half. And here, the crisis with elites, the weakness of special services, the repressive apparatus, and the vulnerability of Russia are demonstrated now. At the same time, Russia's neighbors do not fully realize this fact. But the fact remains - this country can be destabilized with relatively few resources. And finally, the issue of Russian society. The Kremlins thesis of "the tsar is good - the boyars are bad" as a pitch to broader society works well in relatively peaceful times. But in the case of a "revolt against the boyar" accompanied by "the silence of the tsar," society is ready to support the "rebels." This is not about revolution but rather a Russian uprising, a senseless and ruthless rebellion. That is the most apparent possibility for destabilizing the situation in Russia.

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Read the original article on The New Voice of Ukraine
Awkward: Trump Touts 'Fox & Friends' Bit That Didn't Say What He Says It Did

Donald Trump celebrated a Fox & Friends segment on Sunday, saying the hosts were correct to praise the immense power of his political endorsements, when a Fox News host had actually been arguing the opposite.

Rachel Campos-Duffy and Will Cain, two terrific people (along with Pete Hegseth!), were right this morning on Fox & Friends, the former president wrote on Truth Social.

Almost 99% of the people I support in a Republican Primary, WIN! A Trump Endorsement will MAKE YOUR CAREER, A TRUMP FIGHT MAKES IT VERY DIFFICULT! Over 75,000 people came to our incredible Rally yesterday in South Carolina, despite an almost 100 degree temperature. It was amazing, THE PEOPLE WERE GREAT. Thank you Pickens!!! he continued.

In fact, Campos-Duffy and Cain didnt say this.

Hegseths fill-in, Joey Jones, actually argued to the contrary, as Mediaite flagged.

A Trump endorsement is not going to make your career. A Trump refute is not going to kill your career, Jones said. Are you in line with Trumps policies? Thats whats going to matter to the American people.

The discussion was prompted by Trumps weekend rally in Pickens, South Carolina. Despite being in the home state of Republican Sen. Lindsey Graham, a longtime Trump ally who did not vote in support of the former presidents effort to overturn the 2020 election, the senator was booed from the stage.

Jones did go on to note that Republicans remain very loyal to Donald Trump but theyre also not completely oblivious to what policies are and how theyre enacted.

You can go to states like Georgia and see politicians who are America First in their agenda that dont have a good relationship with Donald Trump. And theyre very popular, he said.

You can go to states like South Carolina and see a career politician whos viewed as a part of the military-industrial complex establishment, who probably sits in a very different place than Donald Trump on Ukraine, and even with Donald Trump standing there, theyre like, No, we dont need you around anymore.

In the November midterms, 82% of Trump-endorsed candidates won their races, according to a New York Times analysis. However, the Times noted, the large majority of those endorsements went to incumbents and candidates heavily favored to win.

In more competitive races, Trump did not fare well. Of the five candidates he backed in competitive House races, none won. And of seven races in six states in which Trumps super PAC invested money, only one candidate prevailed.

Related...
Here is a look at Iranian Supreme Leader Ayatollah Seyyed Ali Khamenei.

Personal

Birth date: July 17, 1939

Birth place: Mashhad, Iran

Birth name: Seyyed Ali Khamenei

Father: Ayatollah Sayyid Jawad Husaini Khamenei

Mother: Name unavailable publicly

Marriage: Married in 1964

Children: Mostafa, Mojtaba, Massoud, Maysam, Hoda and Boshra

Education: Studied under the future Ayatollah Khomeini at the Islamic seminary in Qom, Iran

Religion: Islamic, Shiite Muslim

Other Facts

Also known as the Supreme Leader.

Timeline

1962 - Along with Khomeini, begins his involvement with protests, opposing the policies of the Shah of Iran, Mohammad Reza Pahlavi.

1977 - Along with other clerics, forms the Combatant Clerics Association, which becomes the Islamic Republic Party.

1980-1987 - Secretary-general and member of the central command of the Islamic Republic Party.

June 1981 - Injured when a bomb placed in a tape recorder explodes at a press conference.

October 13, 1981-August 3, 1989 - President of Iran.

March 1985 - Survives when a suicide bomb detonates nearby.

June 4, 1989-present - Is provisionally elected supreme leader of the Islamic Republic of Iran after the death of Khomeini.

July 28, 1989 - A referendum makes his election official, and a group of religious leaders later confirm his election as supreme leader.

May 2011 - Khamenei becomes locked in a public power struggle with Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad.

February 2012 - Issues a statement that Iran will back any nation or group fighting against Israel.

March 2012 - Reacts to tensions involving Irans nuclear program and welcomes US President Barack Obamas comment that it is in the best interest of the United States, Israel and the world to peacefully resolve Irans nuclear crisis.

March 2012 - Khameneis allies win about 75% of seats in parliamentary elections against rival Ahmadinejads opposition movement.

March 21, 2013 - Khamenei, in a televised speech, threatens Tel Aviv and Haifa by stating at times the officials of the Zionist regime (Israel) threaten to launch a military invasion but they themselves know that if they make the slightest mistake the Islamic Republic will raze Tel Aviv and Haifa to the ground.

January 2015 - Khamenei publishes an open letter to his website, directed at Western youths, asking them not to judge Islam based on the Charlie Hebdo terror attacks.

October 21, 2015 - Khamenei conditionally approves the nuclear deal signed between his country and six world powers in July.

February 7, 2017 - According to his website, Khamenei tells a gathering of Irans air force commanders in Tehran, We however thank this new guy in the White House, since he largely did the job we had been trying to do in the past decades: to divulge the true face of the US. We had been working to show the world the depth of corruption in US government and ranks and files of the ruling elite; [US President Donald] Trump did it in few days after coming to the White House.

January 9, 2018 - Speaking on the anniversary of the Iranian revolution that began in 1978, Khamenei says that Iranians have a right to protest. But he also blames the United States and Israel for the most recent civil unrest.

August 13, 2018 - In a speech published on his website, Khamenei says there would be no war, nor will we negotiate with the United States, following the Trump administrations first wave of sanctions reimposed on Iran after the United States announced its withdrawal from the Iran nuclear deal in May. Khamenei seems to contradict Iranian President Hassan Rouhani who previously said that Iran was willing to hold talks with the United States to resolve the matter  something Trumps national security adviser John Bolton dismissed as possible propaganda.

June 24, 2019 - Trump announces new sanctions against Iran in part to retaliate after the downing of a US drone, with the punitive measures set to target Khamenei, military officials and Irans top diplomat.

January 5, 2020 - Following the killing of Gen. Qasem Soleimani in a US drone strike in Baghdad, Khameneis military adviser, Hassan Dehghan, says that his countrys response for sure will be military and against military sites.

January 17, 2020 - For the first time in eight years, Khamenei leads Friday prayers in Tehran, calling US officials American clowns in his defiant sermon.

November 28, 2020 - A day after the apparent assassination of Irans top nuclear scientist Mohsen Fakhrizadeh, Khamenei vows revenge for his killing. Iran has blamed Israel for the attack and said the operation bore the hallmarks of Israels foreign intelligence agency, the Mossad.

January 8, 2021 - Khamenei bans the import of Covid-19 vaccines from the United States and Britain to Iran. In a state-run television appearance, he calls the vaccines untrustworthy.

June 19, 2021 - Khameneis close ally, Ebrahim Raisi, wins the presidential election. The election of the hardline judiciary chief, who has a brutal human rights record, raises speculation that he is being groomed to one day succeed Khamenei. Overall voter turnout is 48.8%  the lowest since the establishment of the Islamic Republic in 1979.

June 25, 2021 - Iran state television reports that Khamenei has received his first dose of the Iranian-developed Covid-19 vaccine, known as the CovIran Barekat vaccine. It was approved for use mid-June, according to Iranian authorities.

March 1, 2022 - In a televised speech, Khamenei accuses the US of causing the conflict in Ukraine, comparing the US government to a mafia-like regime.

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Baltimore samaritan who bandaged a shooting victim from block party says 'All they know is guns'

Resident Ashley Johnson speaks with Baltimore Police officers about the mass shooting incident in the Southern District of Baltimore, Monday, July 3, 2023. Police say a number of people were killed and dozens of others were wounded in a shooting that took place during a block party just after midnight on Sunday. (AP Photo/Nathan Howard)

BALTIMORE (AP)  Authorities searched Monday for the suspects who opened fire during a holiday weekend block party in Baltimore that killed two people, wounded 28 others and prompted one resident to jump into action when she found a wounded teenage girl on her doorstep.

Police identified the deceased as 18-year-old Aaliyah Gonzalez and 20-year-old Kylis Fagbemi. The 28 injured victims ranged in age from 13 to 32, with more than half younger than 18, officials said.

Charlene Bowie, 66, who lives close to where the shooting took place, said she saw a huge crowd, largely made up of teenagers.

They were having fun in the beginning, but you know kids ... they started drinking and they was getting all out of order, she said.

Bowie said she called the police and told her 15-year-old granddaughter to come inside. They heard gunshots a little while later, and a bullet struck her air conditioner, breaking off a piece of it and hitting her granddaughter in the back. The girl was unhurt, and they both laid on the floor, Bowie said.

Then I heard some banging on the door  boom, boom, boom, real loud  so I come down and got the door. The little girl (was) laying on my steps, shot, she said.

Bowie said she ran inside to get a rag, then tied a makeshift tourniquet around the girl's leg.

I just kept talking to her so she wouldnt get panicky, you know, she said.

Learning that young people were killed in the shooting was especially painful for Bowie because she lost her son, 19, and her grandson, 15, to gun violence in separate shootings years ago.

It hurts so bad because they havent begun to live. They dont even know what life is, they dont. All they know is guns. Thats all they know, and its sad, she said.

The circumstances leading up to the shooting early Sunday remained under investigation after police spent hours combing a massive crime scene in the Brooklyn Homes area in the southern part of the city.

No arrests had been made by early Monday. Richard Worley, Baltimores acting police commissioner, said it wasn't clear if the shooting was targeted or random, but he said police believe there were multiple shooters.

We don't know exactly how many, but we do know more than one person was shooting, Worley said.

The event has been held for decades, but no permit was issued this year and police didnt find out about it ahead of time, as they have in past years, Worley said.

Obviously, the conversation to deploy more resources was too late, Worley said Monday. By the time we got there, the incident already occurred.

The shooting comes amid gatherings around the country leading up to the July Fourth holiday. A shooting in Kansas left seven people with gunshot wounds and two more victims hospitalized after being trampled as people rushed out of a nightclub early Sunday morning, police there said.

The violence in Baltimore occurred the same week federal prosecutors there touted efforts to reduce violent crime in the city. Police have reported nearly 130 homicides and close to 300 shootings so far this year, though thats down from the same time last year.

James Townes was sitting in his car when he heard gunshots, and immediately began driving around looking for his two children, 16 and 11, who were both at the block party. Townes, whose 18-year-old son was fatally shot two years ago, said all he could think about was his other children hearing the gunfire and being in the middle of the violence. As he searched for them, he saw injured people being put on gurneys.

Townes eventually found his children safe. I think I held them for like 10 minutes, he said.

Gov. Wes Moore said his heart breaks for these victims, their families, and the Baltimore community that is coping with the loss.

Several residents said police had been stationed at the block party in past years. The event is held every July to celebrate the South Baltimore neighborhood, a mix of modest row houses and public housing.

Anthony Lewis, 64, said he was getting into the shower when a bullet ripped through a window in his house and into his bathroom wall. Another bullet came through a downstairs window.

Lewis said his girlfriend thought he had been shot and collapsed on the floor. He had been thinking about moving out of the city, and those plans are more urgent now.

I gotta get away from it, he said.

___

This story corrects the spelling of Aaliyah Gonzalez last name throughout.

___

This story corrects throughout the number of injured to 28, not 30.

___

Ramer reported from Concord, New Hampshire. Kimberlee Kruesi in Nashville, Tennessee, contributed to this report.
Baltimore investigators searching for suspects in block party mass shooting that killed 2 and injured 28 others

Investigators in Baltimore are searching for multiple suspects in a mass shooting that turned a beloved annual neighborhood block party into chaos early Sunday, killing two people and injuring 28 others, most of whom were teens, officials said.

The search for the shooters  investigators believe at least two were involved in the incident  is ongoing, Baltimore Mayor Brandon Scott told CNN Monday, vowing, We will not rest until we find those who cowardly decided to shoot up this block party and carry out acts of violence which we know will be illegal guns.

Officials are combing through every single lead, every minute, every second of footage, everything that we have to find out who decided to disrupt this peaceful event in this way, Scott said on CNN This Morning.

The gunfire erupted early Sunday in the south Baltimore neighborhood of Brooklyn, where community members were enjoying a yearly celebration dubbed Brooklyn Day.

Aaliyah Gonzalez, 18, whose surname police initially spelled ending with an s, and Kylis Fagbemi, 20, were fatally shot, the Baltimore Police Department said.

Kylis Fagbemi, left, and Aaliyah Gonzalez - Baltimore Police Department

The dozens of surviving victims all sustained gunshot wounds, according to acting Police Commissioner Richard Worley. Five of those injured were adults, aged 20 or older, and the remaining 23 were teenagers, ranging in age from 13 to 19, police said.

Seven of the wounded remain in hospitals, with four in critical condition and three in stable condition, the mayor noted.

Investigators are scouring the sprawling crime scene  which spans several blocks  for evidence and are poring over hours of surveillance footage, the police commissioner said. Officials have urged community members with information or video footage to come forward.

A reward for information leading to the capture of the suspects has been raised to $28,000, Worley said at a news conference Monday.

The attack marks one of the latest acts of gun violence to thrust an American community into grief as they gather in everyday spaces, including parks, schools, shopping malls and grocery stores.

The shooting is one of about 340 mass shootings in the US this year, according to the Gun Violence Archive. The archive, like CNN, defines a mass shooting as one in which four or more people are shot, not including the shooter.

This tragic incident is another glaring, unfortunate example of the deep issues of violence in Baltimore, in Maryland and this country and particularly gun violence and the access to illegal guns, Scott said.

The National Rifle Association sued Maryland Gov. Wes Moore after he signed the Gun Safety Act of 2023 and other gun safety measures into law in May, court documents show. The law prohibits a person from knowingly wearing, carrying, or transporting a firearm in certain locations, according to the governors office.

Block party crowd scatters amid gunfire

Police began receiving calls reporting the shooting around 12:30 a.m. Sunday, according to Worley.

As officers arrived to the scene, they found an 18-year-old woman  later identified as Gonzalez  dead, police said. Fagbemi was transported to a hospital, where he was pronounced dead.

An ice cream truck was parked directly across from where Gonzalez was shot and killed. The trucks driver, Keith, who declined to give his last name, told CNN he watched her collapse on the stairs as hundreds of people ran for cover.

Keith said he told his children to lay down on the floor of the truck and wait for the rounds of shooting to stop.

I walked over to [Gonzalez], checked her pulse, straightened her out, tried to start doing CPR but she was already dead, he said.

Some who suffered gunshot injuries took shelter inside the ice cream truck. On Monday morning, blood was still on the ground near the trucks parking spot.

Keith said he could not see where the gunshots were coming from. He said there were no disruptions at the block party before the shooting started.

He said his two daughters, 13 and 18 years old, are fine but extremely stressed out.

Residents watch as Baltimore police investigate the site of a mass shooting in the Brooklyn Homes neighborhood on July 2, 2023. - Nathan Howard/Getty Images

Investigators have yet to determine a motive in the attack and are still investigating whether the victims were targeted or indiscriminately shot at, the police commissioner said.

Staff at MedStar Harbor Hospital were expecting a routine overnight shift when they were met with the arrival of several patients with traumatic gunshot wounds, Dr. Hania Habeeb, associate chair of the emergency department, said at a news conference Monday.

Many of the patients were minors, brought in by concerned family and loved ones, she said.

We didnt know if we were safe. We didnt know if the shooter or shooters were right outside of our hospital doors, Habeeb said.

The hospital went on immediate lockdown to ensure safety while staff performed lifesaving procedures to stabilize the victims.

Ive been to so many funerals

Members of the Kingdom Life Church pray at the site of a mass shooting in the Brooklyn Homes neighborhood on July 2, 2023. - Nathan Howard/Getty Images

The block party was held as an annual celebration of the Brooklyn neighborhood. Scott called on the public to think of the shooting as if it happened in a rural community. When it happens in Baltimore, Chicago or DC it doesnt get that same attention, he said.

These Black American lives, childrens lives, matter just as anyone else, he said.

Scott described the Brooklyn neighborhood as a working-class community filled with immense pride.

It is a neighborhood that has had its troubles, but a neighborhood that has seen some folks in that community really determined to see it be successful and see things turn around, he added.

There were at least a couple hundred people at the event Saturday, Worley said Monday, describing it as unpermitted, and noting no organizers filed paperwork with the city.

Asked about whether police had been appropriately staffed for the event, Worley said the annual celebration happens on a different Saturday each year. In the past, law enforcement was able to discover the date of the event in advance to prepare resources.

But this year, police did not learn of the event until the day of, Worley said.

Unfortunately, we didnt get there in time to prevent what happened.

The mayor said his office is mobilizing every available resource to assist with the investigation, including distributing information about community-based services available to residents in the Brooklyn Homes area, which he described as a public housing facility.

Yvonne Booker, a resident of Brooklyn Homes, told CNN affiliate WBAL shes lived in the area for three decades and feels the gun violence has reached a breaking point.

Its kind of hard for me. Im a mother. They need to stop. Its too much. Ive been to so many funerals in this community, Booker said.

CNNs Celina Tebor, Nicole Grether, Gloria Pazmino, Artemis Moshtaghian, Sophie Tanno, Christina Maxouris, Lauren Mascarenhas and Maria Sole Campinoti contributed to this report.

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Police are searching for multiple suspects after a shooting in the US city of Baltimore left two people dead and 28 others injured.

Fifteen children were among those wounded when gunfire erupted at a block party in the Brooklyn Homes area of the city on Sunday.

Surveillance footage from a building showed people fleeing the shooting.

It is not clear whether the attack was targeted, police said, and officers are hunting for at least two suspects.

At a news conference on Monday police announced a reward of $28,000 (22,000) for information on the suspects.

Authorities said multiple weapons and bullet casings were recovered from the scene of the crime.

Police have yet to name a suspect, but said a young man who has been seen in footage circulating on social media appearing to pull a semi-automatic weapon from a backpack is one of the suspects.

"Anyone who had a weapon at the scene will be one of our suspects until we eliminate that they are not," said Baltimore Police Department acting commissioner Richard Worley.

The shooting began at about 00:35 local time (04:35 GMT) in a courtyard between a pair of rowhouses in the south of the city. Investigators spent hours on Sunday combing a large crime scene for evidence.

Police said 18-year-old Aaliyah Gonzalez died at the scene, while 20-year-old Kylis Fagbemi was pronounced dead at hospital.

The victims were mostly teenagers, ranging in age from 13 to 19. The others were aged 20, 22, 23, 31 and 32, according to police.

As of Monday afternoon, seven victims remained in hospital, including four who are in critical condition.

Hospital officials said they worked under stressful circumstances with the assailants still at large to treat 19 patients, many of whom were minors and critically injured.

Baltimore Mayor Brandon Scott said his office was dedicating every resource possible to finding those responsible.

"We will not stop until we find you - and we will find you," he said. "This was a reckless, cowardly act that happened here."

"I hope that with every single breath that you take that you think about the lives that you took and you think about the lives that you impacted here tonight," he said.

Mr Worley told reporters on Sunday that the block party - an annual community gathering known as "Brooklyn Day" - was "unpermitted", because police were not warned about it ahead of time.

He added that officials would examine what actions officers took once they found out about the gathering.

Witnesses said hundreds of people were at the party when the shooting unfolded

Witnesses at the scene said hundreds of people were at the party when the chaotic scene unfolded.

Danny Gonzalez, 57, who is not related to the woman who died in the shooting, told the Washington Post that he heard gunshots from his home and saw young people running away.

"It was at least 40 or 50 rounds," he said, adding that he and his neighbours were no strangers to gunfire in the Maryland port city. "It's just another killing weekend. This is Baltimore, Murderland."

There have been 140 homicides this year in Baltimore, according to the Baltimore Sun newspaper. In 2022, the city reported more than 300 killings for the eighth year in a row.

Local authorities said the shooting would result in long-lasting trauma for the community, while Mayor Scott called for stricter gun laws across the US.

"This is our longest standing public health challenge, and we need to focus on gun violence regardless of where it happens," he said on Monday.

The US has seen more than 330 mass shootings this year, according to the non-profit Gun Violence Archive, which defines a mass shooting as an incident in which four or more people are injured or killed.
'Barbie' banned in Vietnam because it features a map depicting China's claim over the disputed South China Sea

Margot Robbie in "Barbie." Warner Bros. Pictures

Barbie has been banned in Vietnam, according to a new report by Reuters.

Reuters said the movie features a map depicting China's claim over the disputed South China Sea.

"Barbie" is the third movie to be banned in Vietnam over the dispute.

"Barbie" will not be released in Vietnam, according to a new report.

Citing local news coverage, Reuters reported Monday that the highly anticipated summer movie has been banned because it features a map depicting China's claim over a disputed part of the South China Sea.

Numerous countries in the region have overlapping claims to the resource-rich waters, including both China and Vietnam. China has claimed sovereignty over a U-shaped region of the sea, more commonly known as the "nine-dash line" because of the way it is depicted on some maps, parts of which Vietnam contests as its own territory.

"We do not grant license for the American movie 'Barbie' to release in Vietnam because it contains the offending image of the nine-dash line," Vi Kien Thanh, Vietnam's head of the Department of Cinema, is quoted as telling the state-run Tuoi Tre newspaper, according to Reuters.

Warner Bros. did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

This is not the first movie to be banned in Vietnam over the dispute. "Abominable" and "Uncharted" were both banned for depicting the same map.

In 2016, an international tribunal in The Hague found that the "nine-dash line" had no legal basis. However, China has disregarded the ruling.

"Barbie" premieres in theaters on July 21.

The movie, directed by Greta Gerwig and featuring a star-studded cast, has already gained popularity internationally, spawning viral memes and trends.

Despite the buzz about the film, the general plot of the movie has been kept largely under wraps.

Even the body double for lead actor Margot Robbie told The New York Times last week that she doesn't know what it is about.

"They did a very good job of keeping the plot hidden," Emma Eastwood said. "They didn't give me any details of what we would be doing. There were a couple times they said the whole cast would be there and it would be an important day, but they never actually gave me any details of what we would be doing until I was on set."

Read the original article on Insider
Barbie movie banned in Vietnam over use of offending map image

The Barbie film will not be released in Vietnam over its apparent inclusion of a controversial marking in a map of the South China Sea.

Starring Margot Robbie as the iconic doll, Barbie was scheduled to be released in the southeast Asian country on 21 July, in line with its cinematic debut in most countries across the world.

However, state media announced on Monday (3 July) that the movie will no longer be distributed in Vietnam due to the depiction of a map that uses the nine-dash line.

The U-shaped line, used on Chinese maps, represents areas that China has claimed as its territory.

First shown on a map in 1947, the nine-dash line is controversial as the area specified as Chinese territory is contested and includes a significant amount of area that Vietnam considers its continental shelf.

China and Vietnam have long been in a standoff over the region, while Taiwan, the Philippines, Brunei, Malaysia and Vietnam all make claims to parts of the sea.

As reported by Reuters, the Vietnamese state-run newspaper Tuoi Tre said that due to its use of a map depicting this territorial shape, Barbie will no longer be released in the country.

Vi Kien Thanh, head of the Department of Cinema in Vietnam, was quoted in the publication as saying: We do not grant license for the American movie Barbie to release in Vietnam because it contains the offending image of the nine-dash line.

Ryan Gosling and Margot Robbie as Ken and Barbie (Warner Bros)

The Independent has reached out to Warner Bros, Barbies distributor, for comment.

This is not the first time that the Vietnamese government has decided to halt a films release due to the inclusion of the nine-dash line.

Last year, Sony's action movie Uncharted was pulled for the same reason, as well as the DreamWorks animated film Abominable in 2019. Netflix also removed an Australian spy drama series, Pine Gap, from streaming services in 2021.

Ahead of the films highly anticipated release, cast members have been stoking fans excitement with their promotional efforts.

Ryan Gosling, who plays Barbies companion Ken, has been praised for fully embracing the happy-go-lucky energy of his character throughout the press tour.

Robbie, meanwhile, has shared some insider knowledge about the creation of the film, including how they managed to achieve a genius shot of Barbies foot, as seen in the trailer, and a jaw-dropping joke that was cut from page one of the script.

Barbie will be released in UK cinemas on 21 July.
[Source]

Greta Gerwigs highly anticipated film Barbie will not be premiering in Vietnam, according to state media.

What happened: Local reports noted that the Southeast Asian nation has banned Barbie from playing in cinemas due to a scene with a map that includes Chinas nine-dash line in the South China Sea.

"We do not grant license for the American movie 'Barbie' to release in Vietnam because it contains the offending image of the nine-dash line," Vi Kien Thanh, the director of Vietnams cinema department, stated on Monday, state-run newspaper Tuoi Tre reported, as per Reuters.

What is the nine-dash line?: The nine-dash line is used in Chinese maps to show the parts of the South China Sea that China has claimed ownership of. Vietnam considers some of these areas as being part of its own continental shelf.

More from NextShark: Thats ba-na-nas: Chinas censoring of Minions: The Rise of Gru gets ridiculed online

In 2016, The Hague repudiated the nine-dash line through international arbitration. However, China continues to disregard the ruling.

Not just Barbie: Throughout the years, Vietnam has banned several films for including scenes with maps that feature the nine-dash line, such as DreamWorks' 2019 animated film Abominable and Sonys 2022 action-adventure film Uncharted.

About the upcoming film: "Barbie" follows a doll named Barbie who, after being declared less than perfect in Barbieland, decides to journey to the human world to look for true happiness.

More from NextShark: Filipino senators suggestion to ban K-dramas in the Philippines does not go over well

The film boasts a superstar cast that includes Margot Robbie, Ryan Gosling, Simu Liu, America Ferrera, Kingsley Ben-Adir, Emma Mackey, Ritu Arya, Kate McKinnon, Issa Rae, Will Ferrell and Michael Cera, among many others.

More from NextShark: Brenda Song and Macaulay Culkin have welcomed second baby, Kieran Culkin confirms

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'Mean Girls' star Rajiv Surendra reveals the 'traumatic' rejection that led him to leave Hollywood
Photo: Michael Chez

The main staff residence at Lake Louise Resort is burning to the ground.

Photos shared to Castanet from the resort's gondola show the structure engulfed in flames, with thick, black smoke filling the sky.

Resort spokesperson Dan Markham confirms the resort's primary staff accommodations, known as The Charleston, are on fire.

"The fire will likely take the entire building," says Markham.

The building is home to between 150 and 200 staff during the summer tourist season.

The fire is "still in progress" and there is no word yet on a cause.

Markham says the resort will be shutting down its summer gondola and restaurant operations for the next two to three days as the resort takes stock of the incident.

"We'll be making decisions (on operations) as we progress," he said Monday afternoon.

The Lake Louise transportation hub will continue to operate.

Lake Louise Fire Department is battling the flames, which thus far appear to be confined to the building and have not spread to the surrounding forest.

It's not yet known if anyone has been injured in the blaze.
Bridget Bennett/AFP via Getty

The upcoming Barbie movie starring Margot Robbie and Ryan Gosling has been banned from domestic distribution in Vietnam, the countrys state media reported Monday, because the film includes a scene featuring a map showing Chinas unilaterally claimed territory in the South China Sea.

The so-called nine-dash line is used in Chinese maps to depict a huge U-shaped area in the seaamong the most economically and geostrategically important bodies of water in the worldwhich it claims as its own in contravention of international law. China has continued to uphold its historic rights claim on the area, which partly falls in what Vietnam considers its own coastal shelf, despite an international arbitration ruling by a court in The Hague in 2016 finding that China has no legal basis to its rights claim on the vast resources in the area.

The Barbie Trailer Doles Out Pink-Hued Parody Brilliance

We do not grant license for the American movie Barbie to release in Vietnam because it contains the offending image of the nine-dash line, Vietnams state-run Tuoi Tre newspaper reported, citing Vi Kien Thanh, the head of a government body in charge of licensing and censoring foreign films.

The Greta Gerwig-directed comedy, which is set to release on July 21, is just the latest movie to run afoul of Vietnamese censors for showing the nine-dash line. The 2019 DreamWorks Animation film Abominable was banned for the same reason, as was the 2022 film adaptation of the Uncharted video game series. Netflix pulled the Pine Gap spy drama from Vietnam in 2021 over two episodes showing maps which Hanoi officials said were a misrepresentation of Vietnams sovereignty and had angered and hurt the feelings of the entire people of Vietnam.

After the Second World War, Chinas then Nationalist government produced a Location Map of South Sea Islands which originally featured 11 dashes demarcating what it claimed as its own territory within the region based on centuries-old naval explorations. Later, in the 1950s, Chairman Mao gave up the claim to the Gulf of Tonkin to Vietnam, removing two of the dashes, though retaining most of its ancient sovereignty claim over the sea.

Today, the South China Sea is one of the most crucial waterways on the planet owing to its rich natural resources of oil and gas, abundant fisheries, and significance as a vital trading route to the markets of Southeast Asia. In 2009, China sparked a major international dispute by submitting a map including the nine-dash line to the U.N. as part of a dispute with Vietnam.

Under the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea (UNCLOS), a treaty adopted by 168 countriesincluding Chinacoastal nations are granted a 200 nautical mile exclusive economic zone (EEZ) where they retain rights over all natural resources. In 2013, the Philippines started arbitration proceedings against China arguing that its nine-dash line violated UNCLOS, with the tribunal three years later ruling in the Philippines favor and concluding that Chinas historic rights claim was unlawful.

China has rejected the ruling and its coast guard vessels continue to patrol in the outer reaches of its nine-dash line some 700 nautical miles from the Chinese coastline. Competing claims in the South China Sea still remain among other countries including Taiwan, Malaysia, and Brunei.

Its not yet clear how the offending nine-dash line map made its way into the Barbie movie.

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Barbie stokes geopolitical tensions in Asia and gets banned in Vietnam. Wait, what?

For those who had Vietnam banning screenings of writer-director Greta Gerwigs Barbie movie over a map on their 2023 Bingo card, good news:

According to authorities in the Asian country, viewings of the movie starring Margot Robbie as everyones favorite tip-toed doll have, yes, been banned thanks to how the film depicts a map of the South China Sea.

This leads more people to ask the main question that has been surrounding the anticipated movie since Gerwig announced she was tackling the project  what in the name of Zeus beard is this movie even about?

Apparently, authorities say the nine dash line on a map shown in a scene is a representation of Chinas territorial claims in the South China Sea, which Vietnam says violates its sovereignty, Variety reports.

We do not grant license for the American movie Barbie to release in Vietnam because it contains the offending image of the nine-dash line, state-run Tuoi Tre newspaper said according to VOA News.

In laymans terms, Vietnam, and other neighboring countries, have said boo to Chinas assertions, and contest Chinas claims of the sea on the map, the BBC reports.

This isnt the first time a movie has been banned because of the dash line. The 2019 animated movie Abominable was banned in the country by the Department of Cinema along with Sonys Uncharted, the BBC said.

This adds more mystery to what the plot of Barbie actually is since its been kept tightly under wraps since it was announced that Gerwig would be tackling it in 2016.

People dont have any idea what to expect [with the film], and I think that thats the right vibe, cast member America Ferrera told PEOPLE about about the plot. Whatever you think it is, its not that. Its something else.

Uh, clearly.

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Strolling on Bay Street, Beaufort locals and tourists alike meander through the citys shops, fighting this years oppressive Fourth of July heat.

They might stop to admire a historic building, point out iron railings or debate the type of columns on the well-known John Mark Verdier House. If they can squint well enough at the small metal plaques or stop to read the white signs in the front of the buildings they might discover a little-known piece of history about Beauforts memorable past, in what year the homes were built and that the John Mark Verdier House columns are actually Corinthian.

During the War, Beaufort was the first southern city conquered by Union forces after the U.S. Navy victory in Port Royal Sound in 1861. The city became the U.S. Armys headquarters and most of the buildings were converted into Union Army hospitals.

To save your searching, and your eyes, here are five of the most prominent houses with direct Union troop involvement during the Civil War, and their abbreviated histories according to the Historic Beaufort Foundation.

1. Milton Maxcy House Secession House

1113 Craven Street

Milton Maxcy House at the corner of Church and Craven streets.

This home was built around 1810 by Milton Maxcy, who opened a boys school on the property. It was remodeled around 1850 by leading South Carolina secessionist Edmund Rhett, and it turned into the scene of many informal discussions and formal meetings during the 1850s by the Rhetts and their allies advocating secession and Southern independence. On the basement wall there is an inscription that reads In this house the first meeting of Secession was held in South Carolina.

The Maxcy-Rhett House, also known as Secession House, at 1113 Craven St. is for sale in downtown Beaufort. The home was the site of numerous meetings advocating the South secede from the Union.

During the Civil War, Union Troops were billeted at this home during the occupation, meaning the private home was required to house soldiers for a period of time. The plastered walls of the ground floor passage remain untouched with graffiti left by the troops.

2. John Mark Verdier House

801 Bay Street

This Federal-style mansion was built around 1810 by John Mark Verdier, and it was one of the first residences on Bay Street.

In 1861, following the Battle of Port Royal, most white occupants of Beaufort fled in fear of Union occupation. Widow Caroline Verdier and her daughters left Beaufort for their lands in Gadsden County, Florida. During this time, Union troops occupied the town and, as a result of Caroline Verdiers failure to pay property taxes to the Federal government, her property was seized.

The John Mark Verdier House on Bay Street.

The Verdier House was saved from the auction block in 1863 as it was being utilized as the Adjutant Generals Office. In November of 1865, Caroline Verdier wrote to Union Maj. Gen. D. H. Shikler, requesting her property to be returned, especially mentioning her mansion house in Beaufort used by the Treasury Department. By 1867, she had regained ownership of the house on Bay Street but remained in Florida until her death.

Now, the building homes the Historic Beaufort Foundation.

3. The George Parsons Elliott House

1001 Bay Street

This Greek Revival-style home was built around 1844 for one of Beauforts oldest, most prominent and well-connected families.

George Parsons Elliott House, ca. 1844, 1001 Bay St., Beaufort

Shortly before the Civil War, Elliott sold his home to Dr. William Jenkins, who enslaved over 1,500 people and was one of the richest men in Beaufort. Confiscated and converted into a hospital during the Federal occupation, the house still has Civil War graffiti where Federal troops left their names, dates and drawings of soldiers on the plaster.

After the War, the home sold in a tax auction to George Holmes, a northern speculator who became Beauforts mayor during Reconstruction.

4. John Joyner Smith House

400 Wilmington Street

This home was built around 1825, by planter John Joyner Smith who used his wealth from the times following the cotton boom of the 1810s-20s.

John Joyner House, ca 1820s, 400 Wilmington Street, Beaufort.

Brig. General Issac Stevens troops stayed in the home for the duration of occupation following the Union invasion. An aide wrote to his mother describing it as extremely elegant... Personally I wish the owners were back in their home. Smith lost his home to Union troops, and his 700-acre plantation at Old Fort on Port Royal Island, a tabby colonial fort, was occupied as Camp Saxton, housing white and newly-formed Black units.

The Smith plantation was the site of one of the earliest readings of the Emancipation Proclamation to Black people in the South. Much of the site still remains Federal property and home to a U.S. Naval Hospital.

5. Captain Edward Barnwell House

1405 Bay Street

This home was built by Edward Barnwell, a plantation owner whose main plantation was at Keans Neck, west of Beaufort, across the Whale Branch River. He built this antebellum home during the first Sea Island cotton boom.

Capt. Edward Barnwell House, ca 1850-20, 1405 Bay Stret, Beaufort

During the Civil War Federal officers use the house as quarters. They flattened one of the chimneys and erected a large platform on the root from which the signal officer could send messages to naval vessels anchored downriver.
A man on a bullock cart trundles by in one of the paintings in the scroll

A 44 foot-long Japanese style handscroll painted by a famous Indian blind artist nearly 100 years ago has resurfaced and gone on public display for the first time in the city of his birth, Kolkata.

Benodebehari Mukherjee, born in 1904, was blind in one eye and severely myopic in the other. He lost his vision entirely at 53. Mukherjee, who died in 1980, created trailblazing works as a painter of landscapes and frescos. He was also a sculptor and muralist and came to define modern art in 20th Century India.

In July, the scroll - which is just six inches wide - will travel to Santiniketan, the university town founded in West Bengal a century ago by Nobel Laureate Rabindranath Tagore, where Mukherjee was a student and later a teacher. The scroll, the longest that the artist created, is titled Scenes from Santiniketan.

The scroll changed hands twice before reaching its final destination in Kolkata where it's currently at display.

Mukherjee, it seems, either gifted or sold the scroll to Sudhir Khastagir, an art school graduate in Santiniketan as early as 1929. Khastagir later moved to Dehra Dun to join a leading school as an art teacher. He gifted the scroll to another artist, who eventually sold it to Rakesh Saini - an archivist and owner of an art gallery in Kolkata - six years ago for an undisclosed amount.

At the age of 20, Mukherjee had crafted this captivating scroll using ink and watercolours on meticulously layered sheets of paper. The first frame has a figure sitting under a tree which could be the artist himself who takes the viewer on a journey through Santiniketan. This is a frequent motif in Japanese and Chinese scrolls where strategically placed figures guide our viewing.

As the viewer moves from right to left, a journey unfolds through time and space, guiding her into a forest of sal trees depicted in black ink, gradually transitioning to touches of green that mirror the changing seasons.

A man on a bullock cart trundles by. The viewer stops at a village where they are boiling the sap of date palms to make toddy, a local brew. The ripening paddy turns the rice fields into light light green hues, while the once-lush tree leaves transition into an autumnal brown. Winter arrives, bringing a kind of desolation that is captured in the last frame depicting the khoai, a canyon-like terrain of laterite soil near Santiniketan

The scroll has 22 human figures, 22 cattle, three chicken, one dog and one bird. There are stretches of emptiness that Mukherjee uses to depict land and sky.

Pervasive in the scroll is the artist's "solitude, a sense of isolation subtly expressed and presented...as a state of his life, without self-pity or bitterness," notes Siva Kumar, a leading art historian. The scroll, he says, "bears all signs of the artist's genius that flowered in the coming years".

Till it surfaced, Mukherjee's longest work was a depiction of the khoai, which was painted in the mid-1930s and is just over 10-feet long.

Mukherjee's teacher at Santiniketan was one of India's greatest artists, Nandalal Bose, who headed Kala Bhavan, the art school. Bose had expressed concern to Tagore about a visually impaired art student, says Siva Kumar. Tagore replied, "Is he sincere? Is he interested? Then let him be."

The scroll takes the viewer through Santiniketan, the university town founded by Tagore

A landscape in the scroll depicting the khoai, a canyon-like terrain of laterite soil near Santiniketan

A scroll panel takes the viewer into a forest of sal trees depicted in black ink

Almost as famous as his mentors were Mukherjee's students at Kala Bhavan. Among them were artists such as KG Subramanyan and Somnath Hore and Oscar-winning filmmaker Satyajit Ray. In 1972, Ray made a documentary on Mukherjee called The Inner Eye. The moving tribute pitchforked the reclusive artist and his works onto the global stage.

Mukherjee was possibly inspired by prints of handscrolls that Tagore and Bose had brought back from their visit to Japan. "Mukherjee was specifically interested in the format of the scroll, an art form that has certain possibilities which other forms don't have like [showing] the passage of time," says Siva Kumar.

"You can recreate the experience of walking through a landscape rather than just standing somewhere and looking at it. In normal landscapes, you fragment nature. But in a handscroll you can show continuity and transformation."

Mukherjee painted the scroll when he was 20 - it has gone on public display for the first time

So where did the Scenes disappear for nearly a century?

Rakesh Sahni, owner of Gallery Rasa in Kolkata, acquired the scroll from from a collector in 2017. "I could have exhibited it earlier," says Mr Sahni, "but I lost three years to the pandemic."

At the Kolkata show, also on display are reproductions of Mukherjee's other scrolls, including The Khoai, Village Scenes, and Scenes in Jungle. The last is painted on the semi-circular pith of a banana tree and is owned by the Victoria & Albert Museum in London.

Scenes in jungle is painted on the semi-circular pith of a banana tree and is owned by the Victoria & Albert Museum

Mukherjee painted on the walls of his art school in Santiniketan - here Satyajit Ray shoots a painting for his film

Mukherjee's other famous works are at Santiniketan: frescos on walls and ceilings of buildings in and around Kala Bhavan. Perhaps the most famous, the Lives of Medieval Saints on the walls of Cheena Bhavan - a Sino-Indian cultural studies centre - is almost eight feet tall and sprawled across a magnificent 80 feet. The frescos and scrolls were done well before the artist lost his vision.

After surgery destroyed his functional myopic eye, Mukherjee continued till the end to churn out murals, collages and sculpture with the same artistry as works he had created when he could still see with that one eye.

Ray's documentary quotes a rare comment by Mukherjee on his impaired vision.

"Blindness is a new feeling, a new experience, a new state of being."

That, perhaps, is Mukherjee's best epitaph.

Monideepa Banerjie is a Kolkata-based independent journalist

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Read more India stories from the BBC:
The Biden administration is actively seeking to use artificial intelligence to promote a woke, progressive ideology with left-wing activists leading the effort, according to research from a conservative watchdog group.

The American Accountability Foundation conducted research into the administration's plans for AI and is now warning in a memo that top U.S. officials under President Biden are seeking to inject "dangerous ideologies" into AI systems.

"Under the guise of fighting 'algorithmic discrimination' and 'harmful bias,' the Biden administration is trying to rig AI to follow the woke left's rules," AAF president Tom Jones told Fox News Digital.

"Biden is being advised on technology policy, not by scientists, but by racially obsessed social academics and activists. We're already seen the biggest tech firms in the world, like Google under Eric Schmidt, use their power to push the left's agenda. This would take the tech/woke alliance to a whole new, truly terrifying level."

CALIFORNIA REPARATIONS PANEL WARNS OF 'RACIALLY BIASED' MEDICAL AI, CALLS FOR LEGISLATIVE ACTION

President Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris walk to the Oval Office after an event about gun violence in the Rose Garden of the White House April 11, 2022, in Washington, D.C.

In its memo, AAF cited several examples of what it described as the administration's campaign to make AI woke.

READ ON THE FOX NEWS APP

One example is the " Blueprint for an AI Bill of Rights " released by the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy last October. The document warns of "algorithmic discrimination" in which AI systems treat people differently based on their race, sex or other characteristics and calls for data "used as part of system development or assessment" to be "reviewed for bias based on the historical and societal context of the data."

To address such concerns, the blueprint recommends "proactive equity assessments as part of the system design," among other steps.

Arati Prabhakar, director of Biden's Office of Science and Technology Policy, while speaking at the Summit for Democracy in March, touted Biden's signing of an executive order the prior month that, in her words, "promotes data equity," directs agencies to fight "algorithmic discrimination" and ensures these agencies use AI to advance "equity."

That executive order, which Biden signed in February, states one of its goals is to "root out bias in the design and use of new technologies, such as artificial intelligence."

AAF also highlights in its memo how months later, in May, the White House's Select Committee on Artificial Intelligence, which falls under Prabhakar's purview, released the National Artificial Intelligence Research and Development Strategic Plan , which calls for additional resources to fight "harmful biases" and warns "AI systems are prone to 'hallucinate' and recapitulate biases derived from the unfiltered data from the internet used to train them."

MINORITY GROUPS SOUND ALARM ON AI, URGE FEDS TO PROTECT EQUITY AND CIVIL RIGHTS

The report goes on to say that "understanding how AI can reduce inequities stemming from systemic, structural and individual bias is an important area of research."

The AI committee that produced the report is part of the National Science and Technology Council, whose highest-ranking member is Vice President Kamala Harris, who Biden named "AI czar" to lead the administration's new initiative "to promote responsible AI innovation that protects Americans' rights and safety." Harris previously expressed similar concerns about racial bias in AI and the need to combat it.

The Biden administration and Congress are examining how to regulate AI.

"When we look at  issues like AI and machine learning, there is a real need to be very concerned about how being built into it is racial bias," Harris said in 2019 while a senator from California. "It's a real issue, and it's happening in real time. And the thing about racial bias in technology is that, unlike the racial bias that you can pretty easily [detect] when you get stopped in a department store or while you're driving, the bias that is built into technology will not be very easy to detect."

In its memo, AAF also flagged the appointment of Miriam Vogel to chair the National AI Advisory Committee, which advises the president on AI matters. Vogel is the president and CEO of EqualAI, a nonprofit that seeks to "reduce unconscious bias in our AI and promote responsible AI governance."

On its website, EqualAI says AI programs and "particularly customer-facing systems should be checked for bias on a routine basis," adding that AI "learns new patterns as it is fed new data and can adopt new biases."

In 2021, EqualAI partnered with the World Economic Forum to launch the "EqualAI Badge Program," which trains and certifies senior executives at companies developing or using AI "to ensure their brand is known for its responsible and inclusive practices."

AI CAN CONTAIN GENDER BIAS, LEADING TO POTENTIAL DISADVANTAGES FOR WOMEN, EXPERT SAYS

In May, the National AI Advisory Committee released a report stating that Biden has "clearly articulated his interest in ending discrimination and bias (including algorithmic discrimination and bias)." The report defined "trustworthy AI" in part as "valid and reliable  and fair with harmful bias managed."

Vice President Kamala Harris attends the 2023 Aspen Ideas Climate Event March 8, 2023, in Miami Beach, Fla.

AAF's memo came days after Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer, D-N.Y., unveiled his SAFE Innovation Framework, which warns that AI has the potential for "supercharged disinformation" and the "amplification of bias."

AI has become one of the most discussed issues since the AI tool ChatGPT was released in November. Twitter owner Elon Musk, for example, warned late last year that the new technology could be weaponized to push political agendas through false information.

"The danger of training AI to be woke  in other words, lie  is deadly," Musk tweeted in December.

According to AAF, its research about the Biden administration is part one of what it described as an investigation into "woke" AI.

"Stay tuned for more," the group tweeted. "What we have found will shock you."

The White House didn't respond to a request for comment for this story.
With his ambitious student loan debt cancellation plan shattered by the Supreme Court, President Joe Biden has launched a lengthy process to cancel borrowers debt by other means.

The presidents plan B is only beginning to take shape. But Biden said last week that the plan, rooted in the Higher Education Act of 1965, is legally sound and the best path left.

Shortly after the high court delivered its ruling Friday, the federal Education Department launched a so-called negotiated rulemaking process to pursue student debt relief, according to the White House. An initial virtual public hearing is scheduled for July 18.

The text of the Higher Education Act dictates that the Education Department must obtain public involvement in the development of new rules related to the law.

Under the process, representatives for students, higher education institutions and other stakeholders would negotiate a proposed rule with the Education Department, said Rebecca Natow, a professor of education policy at Hofstra University.

Were not going to waste any time on this, Biden said in a Friday speech. Its going to take longer, but were getting at it right away.

The White House also rolled out a new repayment plan, and said it would grant borrowers a yearlong on-ramp sparing them from default if they miss a payment.

A COVID 19-era pause on federal student loan debt repayment is set to end Sept. 1, with payments resuming in October, according to the Education Department.

Biden had initially planned to end the freeze by wiping out up to $20,000 in student loans for low-income Americans and up to $10,000 for individual earners making less than $125,000 a year.

In its original plan, the White House invoked a 2003 law called the HEROES Act that allows the Education Department to waive or tweak financial aid programs in times of national emergency. The White House cited the coronavirus emergency.

But the Supreme Court, which has a conservative supermajority, ruled in a 6-3 decision that Bidens program exceeded his executive authority and reached beyond the text of the HEROES Act.

Some advocates for student loan debt relief  including Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer, a New York Democrat  urged Biden to use the Higher Education Act from the start.

The laws provisions could put the White House on firmer legal footing. But plan B could invite legal challenges, and wind up at the Supreme Court as well.


By Valerie Volcovici

(Reuters) - The Biden administration's climate agenda is facing an unexpected challenge in drought-prone Corpus Christi, Texas, where a proposed clean hydrogen hub would require the installation of energy-intensive, expensive and potentially environmentally damaging seawater desalination plants.

The Gulf Coast port is in the running for up to $1 billion available under President Joe Biden's 2021 Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act to create a regional hub to produce hydrogen, a low-emissions fuel made by electrolyzing water that can help decarbonize heavy-emitting industries and transportation.

A hydrogen hub would require access to millions of gallons of water  a challenge in Corpus Christi which is experiencing a multi-year drought. While local officials say they can provide that water by constructing a seawater desalination plant, environmental groups and some local residents and lawmakers are lining up to oppose desalination sites.

"It makes no sense to create a purported clean energy source that in turn destroys an entire ecosystem, threatens other economies reliant upon a healthy bay system, and usurps the water supply for residents," the Coastal Alliance to Protect the Environment, a Corpus Christi activist group, wrote in a letter to U.S. Energy Secretary Jennifer Granholm, shared with Reuters.

Reuters interviewed six researchers who study hydrogen as green power and had exclusive access to an analysis by Rystad Energy consultancy that showed that the Biden administration's vision of low-carbon hydrogen may run into a challenge that is itself exacerbated by climate change: water scarcity.

Producing hydrogen requires enormous amounts of fresh water in a world increasingly affected by climate-driven drought.

Nine of the 33 projects on the Department of Energy shortlist for the hydrogen hubs are in highly water-stressed regions, according to Rystad data.

Those locations include Southern California, Colorado, Kansas and New Mexico as well as Texas. Globally, the picture is even worse, with more than 70% of proposed green hydrogen projects located in water-stressed regions like the Middle East.

"Most of the world's planned green hydrogen projects are to be located in water-stressed regions," said Minh Khoi Le, renewable energy analyst at Rystad, adding that this would create demand for more desalination plants.

The Biden administration is offering companies up to $100 billion in tax credits and regions up to $7 billion in grants to build out hydrogen hubs to help reach a target of producing 50 million metric tons of clean hydrogen fuel by 2050.

The DOE will announce the hubs in September.

The DOE declined to comment on the Corpus Christi or other hydrogen hub applications, but pointed Reuters to the agency's funding announcement, which "acknowledges that water consumption for H2Hubs could place additional stress on regional water resources."

The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency's Assistant Administrator for Water Radhika Fox told Reuters that "more water systems are considering desalination as source water becomes scarcer and treatment technology improves" but did not comment directly about Corpus Christi.

Peter Zanoni, the city manager for Corpus Christi, said the hydrogen project, if approved, all but requires the adoption of seawater desalination.

Even with around 100 million gallons of groundwater supply per day, the city is experiencing drought conditions and limiting the use of sprinklers and irrigation to once a week, according to its drought contingency plan.

The city is contracted to supply up to 25 million gallons of water per day to major industrial users ExxonMobil and Saudi Arabia's Basic Industries Corporation, Zanoni said, and anticipates hosting at least a half dozen green hydrogen producers at the hub, each which would need around 3 to 4 million gallons of fresh water per day.

He said the city plans to add at least 70 million gallons of water per day of capacity, including at least 30 million from the proposed seawater desalination plant. "That drought-proof source is really appealing to us," Zanoni said.

WATER WARS

While the United States has hundreds of desalination plants scattered across the country to treat mildly brackish inland sources of water, transforming ultra-salty ocean water into fresh water carries higher risk, some water experts say.

Pumping the briny byproduct of desalination into Corpus Christi Bay could cost the fishing industry around $6 million per year by killing off seafood species like shrimp and Atlantic croaker, according to Texas A&M University-Corpus Christi's Paul Montagna, an endowed chair at the Harte Research Institute for Gulf of Mexico Studies.

And seawater desalination plants are energy intensive and expensive to build and maintain, energy experts say. The Poseidon plant near San Diego, California - the largest seawater desalination plant in the Western Hemisphere - cost over $1 billion to build and requires nearly $275 million in upgrades to meet updated state rules to protect marine life that can get sucked into the intake pipes or are affected by the briny discharge from the plant.

In March, the EPA stepped in with a $170 million loan to offset the price spikes for local consumers.

Corpus Christi first proposed seawater desalination in 2017 to supply its rapidly growing energy and petrochemicals industries.

The city has struggled to secure federal environmental permits and local support.

The EPA in January said it will not recognize a state-issued pollutant discharge permit for one of the proposed desalination plants on Harbor Island until Texas regulators conduct a more thorough environmental impact review of groundwater use and conservation efforts.

In a letter to the Texas Commission on Environmental Quality in September, the EPA said it "continues to have concerns regarding reporting and monitoring requirements for total dissolved solids, chlorides, and sulfates."

In October, a local residents' association from the Hillcrest neighborhood, a majority black area that is already home to refineries, filed a Civil Rights Act complaint saying the proposed Inner Harbor desalination plant would worsen pollution.

The city is seeking regulatory approval for three other desalination sites.

Errol Summerlin, founder of local environmental group CAPE, said the environmental costs of seawater desalination were too high, even if it is in support of a low-carbon fuel.

"This plan would destroy an ecosystem to create an unproven solution to the world's climate crisis," he told Reuters.

Brandon Marks, a regional campaigner for the Texas Campaign for the Environment, said heavy industrial users, not residents, have the most to gain from the proposed desalination plants.

A report released in November by consultancy Autocase Economic Advisory said that over the last decade, nearly 70% of the increase in water use in the Corpus Christi area came from industrial users compared to just under 6% from households, commercial uses, fire protection, public recreation, and sanitation.

"The whole reason they are pursuing this water is to enable unfettered growth, which would not only harm the bay but harm communities of the bay area," Marks said.

Charles Zahn, chairman of the Port of Corpus Christi and a major proponent of desalination, said desalination plants could be a boon for the region, even offering the opportunity to sell water to the city of San Antonio, if there was a surplus.

"We need desalination to bring in industry that brings us jobs and increases our tax base," he said. "I think water is probably the number one issue in Texas and we have the ability to help Texas."

(Reporting by Valerie Volcovici; Editing by Richard Valdmanis and Suzanne Goldenberg)
Here are the bills Delaware lawmakers prioritized this year  plus some that didn't pass

The first year of the 152nd Delaware legislative session came to a close Friday.

Lawmakers passed bills including the legalization of recreational marijuana, police reform, mental health bills, curbing climate change and more. Many pieces of legislation now await Gov. John Carneys signature.

The bills that just passed one chamber are by no means dead. Since it was just the first year of the legislative session, lawmakers can still push for their respective bills to pass next year without having to start over.

Heres a breakdown of what was  and what wasnt  passed by the General Assembly this year.

What passed?

Recreational marijuana

After a nearly decadelong fight, lawmakers finally passed legislation this session to legalize recreational marijuana and create an industry here in Delaware.

The governor allowed the bills to pass without his signature, opting to not veto the bills as he did last year.

James Baldus of Pike Creek holds a sign in support of legalizing recreational marijuana at a rally outside of Legislative Hall in Dover on Tuesday, June 7, 2022.

I want to be clear that my views on this issue have not changed, the governor said at the time. And I understand there are those who share my views who will be disappointed in my decision not to veto this legislation."

The first bill legalizes personal use" quantity of marijuana, which varies by form, for people ages 21 and older. The second bill creates and regulates the recreational marijuana industry in Delaware. Within 16 months of the legislation going into effect, the state will distribute 30 retail licenses through a competitive bidding process.

The recreational industry is expected to bring in tens of millions of dollars in tax revenue.

THE FULL STORY: Carney allows Delaware weed bills to become law without signature. 'Its time to move on'

Police reform

Protesters call for police reform Saturday, June 27, 2020, at St. Helena's Parish, across from Delaware State Police Troop 1 in Penny Hill.

After years of negotiating and little progress, Democrats passed the most substantial police reform bills in decades.

The bills require police agencies to publish internal investigations into use-of-force and other substantiated claims made against police officers. Its nearly impossible for Delawareans to access officer misconduct records.

Agencies will also be required to follow the same uniform standards and establish police accountability boards.

HOW IT HAPPENED: With the governor's signature, major reforms are coming to Delaware police agencies

Climate change

Democrats passed legislation to reduce greenhouse gas net emissions by 50% by 2030 and reach a 100% net reduction by 2050.

The bill requires the state to write a climate action plan in order to meet these goals.

Lawmakers also passed three other environmental bills, which all head to the governor:

House Bill 12 codifies the states Clean Vehicle Rebate program, allowing up to a $2,500 rebate for electric vehicles and a maximum of $1,000 for hybrid vehicles that retail up to $60,000.

House Bill 10 requires the Department of Education to have 5% of buses that are replaced in fiscal year 2025 be electric. This percentage then increases each year until it reaches 30% in 2030.

House Bill 11 requires, in 2025, new commercial buildings built with a foundation footprint of 50,000 square feet or greater to have a roof that supports solar infrastructure.

WHAT YOU NEED TO KNOW: Delaware lawmakers introduce bills to dramatically reduce greenhouse gas emissions by 2050

Tenant right to representation

Tenants will now have the right to representation during eviction proceedings.

The bill, which has the support of the governor, provides legal representation to those whose household income is less than 200% of the federal poverty guidelines. It also creates a pretrial diversion program, with the hopes of resolving tenant-landlord disputes before they ever reach the courtroom.

THE DETAILS: Delaware lawmakers pass bill to give tenants right to counsel during eviction proceedings

Health bills

Here are the health bills passed by lawmakers:

Doula services are to be covered by Medicaid starting in 2024.

Large health care facilities, including hospitals, will no longer be allowed to use certain debt collection practices.

Students would have access to support and services following a traumatic event that affects a large portion of students, including the death of a member of the school community. The Department of Education would be responsible for covering the cost of in-school grief counseling for students for at least 45 days.

State employees who experience a miscarriage, pregnancy loss or stillbirth will have up to five days of paid leave to recover emotionally or physically, according to House Bill 65. It does not apply to school employees.

Certification for recovery homes

Under this bill, state agencies, courts or entities that contract with the state will not be able to refer people to a recovery house in Delaware unless its a certified sober home or is in the process of getting certified. Only certified homes will be eligible to receive state or local funding.

For homes that do not yet have certification, the referring agency must receive confirmation from the certifying organization that the recovery house has applied for accreditation.

Major bills that didnt pass?

Permit to purchase

Once again, legislation to require Delawareans to obtain a permit and complete training before purchasing a handgun stalled in the House of Representatives.

The bill, which passed the Senate, would require residents to take a firearm training course sometime in the past five years. Current and retired police officers and residents who are allowed to carry concealed weapons would be excluded, as these groups have already received the necessary training.

A person would then apply for a permit from the state once the class is completed. They can appeal the decision if they are denied.

Pennsylvania and Delaware are the only states in the region to not have enacted this type of legislation.

Yet, the governor and newly elected House Speaker Valerie Longhurst said late Friday that they plan to support and pass this legislation next year.

THE FULL STORY: Delawareans debate if residents need to receive training before buying a handgun

Dementia care

A long-term care legislative task force this spring produced more than a dozen recommendations to improve nursing homes and assisted living facilities in Delaware, particularly for dementia care.

Lawmakers introduced a number of bills as a result, yet advocates and industry members questioned and criticized aspects.

Here are two of the bills that didnt get voted on this year:

Senate Bill 150: Defines dementia care in state code. It would also require facilities providing dementia care to have a sufficient number of dedicated staff to meet the individual needs of each resident. The bill doesnt provide specific numbers. All staff working with these residents would be required to complete 12 hours of initial dementia care services training.

Senate Bill 151: Requires facilities that market dementia care services to complete a written notice which would, among several things, show it is certified to provide dementia care.

THE DETAILS: Why no one seems to agree on how to improve dementia care inside Delaware long-term care

This article originally appeared on Delaware News Journal: Delaware politics: What bills got passed this year, what's leftover
Michael Long, former member of the Scituate School Committee, is facing fraud charges in Brockton Superior Court.

BROCKTON  A former Scituate School Committee member has pleaded innocent to stealing money from a relative, who doesn't want him prosecuted.

Michael Long was arrested by Scituate police in February on charges he stole about $30,000 from his wifes 77-year-old great-aunt over a nine-month period in 2022 and early 2023. He was indicted on charges of larceny from a person over 65, forgery and credit card fraud.

The great-aunt arrived at the arraignment with Long.

Brockton Superior Court Judge William F. Sullivan rejected the prosecutions request for $1,000 bail out of concern that Long would pay it with the great-aunt's money.

More: Quincy asks judge to stop Airbnb operator from renting out house. Here's what judge said

More: For 2nd time judge refuses to toss out charge against ex-Brockton police chief. Here's why

To ask her basically to fund his bail is madness, so Im not going to do that, Sullivan said.

Right now, theyre living in the same household, the victims house that she allows him to live in rent-free, Sullivan said. Wow.  There are many situations like this where I would hold him on a high bail, but I dont want to take that out of the victims pocket, as it was alleged in this case.

Sullivan released Long on personal recognizance.

Assistant District Attorney Alex Zane acknowledged the great-aunt's anger toward the district attorneys office for prosecuting the case.

We dont require her cooperation, Zane said, but he assured Sullivan that he wouldnt require her to testify against her will.

Its a bizarre set of facts, Zane said. The defendants behavior is problematic aside from the facts (of the alleged thefts).

Zane said Long used the great-aunts debit card to pay off loans and for personal expenses such as car repairs, a family vacation and dental work. As Long witnessed the anxiety his thefts were causing the great-aunt, who grew fearful of using ATMs, he pretended to help her recover the lost money, Zane said.

This is cruel, Sullivan said of the allegations. Its selfish. Its ungrateful. And now to hide behind this woman wanting not to prosecute.

When Long was originally arraigned in Hingham District Court, he was released on the condition that he stay away from the great-aunt. However, because Long and his family live with the great-aunt in her Scituate home, Zane said she became so distraught that the order would split up the family that she left her own home and moved to New York.

Zane said the condition was amended to provide relief to the great-aunt, who was moving back and forth between New York and Scituate.

Sullivan decided not to impose a no-contact order so as not to heighten the great-aunts anxiety about her great-nieces children.

Defense attorney John McLaughlin said Long has no criminal record and noted the great-aunt's presence in support of the defendant.

The next hearing is scheduled for Sept. 6.

Thanks to our subscribers, who help make this coverage possible. If you are not a subscriber, please consider supporting quality local journalism with a Patriot Ledger subscription. Here is our latest offer.

Reach Peter Blandino at pblandino@patriotledger.com.

This article originally appeared on The Patriot Ledger: Former Scituate School Committee member arraigned on larceny charges
Blac Chyna revealed that she received an honorary Doctorate of Humanities from the Sacramento Theological Seminary and Bible College. This comes after the influencer, real name Angela White, has publicly undergone a make-under reversing some of the cosmetic work shes had done in the past. White took to her Instagram to show off her latest accomplishment.

Dr. Angela Renee White, she captioned. Doctorate of Liberal Arts. Doctorate of Humanities.

White also posted a video of the moment she received her degree on stage and became choked up as she delivered her acceptance speech. During her heartfelt acceptance, she mentioned her profound gratitude and faith.

God has never given up on me, White told the crowd. Ive been through a lot in my life and hes been changing my life. I want to continue to walk in this light and learn and grow and be an inspiration to my family, my friends and my kids.

According to its website, Sacramento Theological Seminary and Bible College, is a home study and on-campus Bible college and seminary specializing in education for working pastors, working people and church members. Classes are taught from an Evangelistic, Orthodox Christian worldview centered on scripture. Its doctoral program explores the Old Testament, New Testament, biblical languages, and backgrounds of the biblical era.

Blac Chyna Makes a Change

Earlier this year, White revealed she had turned over a new leaf after getting baptized.

White has made some drastic changes in her life. She reversed several cosmetic procedures, including dissolving facial fillers and removing silicone from her body as part of a life-changing journey. Next, the former sex symbol deactivated her OnlyFans account. It had been reported that White was making millions monthly from her account. The influencer also got rid of all her occult tattoos.

During her segment with SiriusXMs Sway in the Morning, White discussed how her exes, Tyga and Kardashian, are aware of her recent metamorphosis.

The post Blac Chyna Receives Honorary Doctorate After Undergoing Make-under appeared first on 21Ninety.
Black-Owned Social Media App Spill Attracts New Users After Elon Musk Announces Twitter Restrictions | Delmaine Donson

Could Black Twitter users be permanently moving to Spill? The social media app was trending over the weekend as Elon Musk announced new restrictions on Twitter.

Unverified Twitter users can now read no more than 600 posts per day, while new accounts can read no more than 300. The number of posts that can be read was capped higher for verified accounts, who can view no more than 6000 posts per day.

To address extreme levels of data scraping & system manipulation, weve applied the following temporary limits:  Verified accounts are limited to reading 6000 posts/day

 Unverified accounts to 600 posts/day

 New unverified accounts to 300/day  Elon Musk (@elonmusk) July 1, 2023

Users are also no longer able to view tweets if they arent logged into the app. Musk touted the change as a temporary emergency measure to counter data pillage.

As a response, Black Twitter users are signing up to another social media app, Spill, according to Revolt.

The platform was started by former Twitter employees Alphonzo Phonz Terrell, who was the global head of social and editorial, and DeVaris Brown, a former product manager lead. Spills founders were among the staffers laid off shortly after Musk bought Twitter.

Spill was launched in the Apple Store in January and is currently invite-only. Tweets are swapped for spills and shift the focus on meme culture. It also presents itself as a safe space for Black users by filtering out hate speech and recognizing the contributions of the Black community in driving social media trends.

Were going to be more intentional and be more accurate around things that will be deemed offensive because, again, this is our lived experience or learned experience, Brown told TechCrunch. Itll be much more accurate to catch those kinds of things that will detract from the platform, that would not lend to creating a safe space for our users and our creators.

Spill is also developing its own artificial intelligence, which is being led by a diverse team of developers. This will help detect signs of online harm that communities of color have been subject to on social media platforms.

This will probably be the first, from the ground up, large language content moderation model using AI thats actually built by people from the culture, Brown said, according to TechCrunch.

please know, the spill app is a safe haven for black and lgbtq+ people. keep that at the forefront. thats how its staying.  Kemi Marie (they/them) (@kemimarie) July 3, 2023

Spill is really a whole app of nothing but Black Twitter pic.twitter.com/6XhPf9ZAbH  Whitney | Socials Strategy (@WhitneyChanell) July 2, 2023

Not only was Spill created as space to foster Black culture online, but it also aims at helping creators profit from their viral content.

Compensation starts with getting credit, Terrell said, according to AfroTech. Who originated this, and thats always been a really big challenge online. So, thats why we looked at technologies like blockchain. We can create an immutable record, regardless if youre on the platform or not, of who created what.
Map of Botswana

Botswana, one of Africa's most stable countries, is the continent's longest continuous multi-party democracy. It is relatively free of corruption and has a good human rights record.

Sparsely populated, Botswana protects some of Africa's largest areas of wilderness. Safari-based tourism - tightly-controlled and often upmarket - is an important source of income.

Botswana is the world's largest producer of diamonds and the trade has transformed it into a middle-income nation.

The country has had its share of problems: It once had the world's highest rate of HIV-Aids infection. The country has one of Africa's most-advanced treatment programmes, however, and medicine for the virus is readily available.

Read more country profiles - Profiles by BBC Monitoring

REPUBLIC OF BOTSWANA: FACTS

Capital: Gaborone

Area: 581,730 sq km

Population: 2.3 million

Languages: English, Setswana

Life expectancy: 66 years (men) 72 years (women)

LEADER

President: Mokgweetsi Masisi

After serving as vice-president and education minister for four years under the presidency of Ian Khama, Mokgweetsi Masisi become the 5th president of Botswana in April 2018.

Like all of his predecessors, he represents the Botswana Democratic Party, which has also won a majority in every parliamentary election since independence.

Mr Masisi had a background in education before entering politics, and faces the task of diversifying an economy heavily dependent on the diamond trade.

MEDIA

Campaign groups say the authorities are forcing the Bushmen off their ancestral lands. A dwindling band of Bushmen hunter-gatherers make the Kalahari Desert their home

Botswana has a long tradition of lively and unimpeded public debate, although opposition leaders have claimed that the government limits their ability to broadcast freely on the radio.

There is a "free and vigorous" press in cities and towns, says US-based NGO Freedom House.

State-run TV arrived with the launch of Botswana Television (BTV) in 2000. Satellite pay TV is available.

TIMELINE

Seretse Khama, pictured with his wife Ruth, served as his country's first president until 1980

Some key dates in Botswana's history:

1867 - European gold prospectors arrive, mining begins. In 1885, British proclaim a protectorate called Bechuanaland.

1950 - Chief of the Ngwato, Seretse Khama, is deposed and exiled by the British.

1960 - Britain approves new constitution for Bechuanaland. Executive Council, Legislative Council and African Council are established. The following year, Seretse Khama is appointed to Executive Council and later founds the Bechuanaland Democratic Party (BDP), which is eventually renamed the Botswana Democratic Party. He becomes prime minister in 1965.

1966 - Bechuanaland is granted independence and becomes Republic of Botswana with Seretse Khama as president.

1967- Diamonds discovered at Orapa.

1999-2008 - Presidency of Festus Mogae - praised for diversifying Botswana's economy to reduce its dependence on diamonds.

2004 - HIV infection rate falls to 37.5%; Botswana no longer has the world's highest rate of infection.

2008 - Ian Khama, son of Seretse Khama, becomes president, serves two terms in office.

2010 - Human rights group Survival International calls for a boycott of Botswanan diamonds, accusing the government of trying to force Basarwa bushmen away from their ancestral lands.

2014 - Gay rights group wins legal recognition.
Volkswagen has taken the extraordinary decision of halting electric vehicle production at one of its biggest plants - David Hecker/AFP

The electric car revolution is stalling, of that there can no longer be any doubt. It has left the big global carmakers floundering, uncertain of how to proceed in a race they reluctantly entered in the first place.

Electrification was initially met with fierce resistance. But once politicians held a gun to the heads of company bosses with a series of cliff-edge deadlines for phasing out the combustion engine, carmakers had little choice but to go all-in.

Century-old business models were declared dead and ambitious plans hurriedly drawn up to electrify entire portfolios from small city run-arounds to family saloons and SUVs, at astronomical cost. Even Ferrari has embraced the movement  much to the consternation of petrolheads everywhere.

But with electrification barely off the starting grid, one by one the big carmakers are already pulling back as demand badly falters.

Volkswagen is so concerned about flagging sales that it has taken the extraordinary decision of halting electric vehicle production at one of its biggest plants. Assembly lines for electric models will be paused for six weeks at the Emden factory in northwest Germany and 300 of its 1,500 staff laid off after sales fell 30pc short of forecasts.

This means production of the new VW ID.7 electric model, which had been due to commence in July will be pushed back until the end of the year. The ID.4 electric SUV and the upcoming ID.7 electric sedan will also be delayed.

We are experiencing strong customer reluctance in the electric vehicle sector, plant boss Manfred Wulff said.

That is remarkably plain language from the largest car manufacturer on the planet, and a company that recently announced plans to invest 120bn (103bn) over the next five years in electrification and digitalisation.

It comes months after Ford poured cold water on the shift to electric with thousands of job losses in Europe. Electric vehicle production is unable to support anything like the same number of jobs that petrol and diesel models are able to sustain, it said. Boss Jim Farley estimates that 40pc fewer staff will be needed to develop battery versions.

A generation of pure electric vehicle makers has hardly fared any better. On Tuesday, Lordstown Motors, the US electric truck specialist that Donald Trump once heralded as the saviour of a depressed Ohio town, filed for bankruptcy protection.

Even Elon Musk has been forced to repeatedly cut the price of Teslas in a desperate effort to prop up demand and protect market share.

Electric cars losing value

But its the setback at VW that stands out, raising serious questions about whether politicians are making the catastrophic mistake of forcing electric cars on a public that doesnt want them. Indeed, the decision to impose strict deadlines for the phase out of petrol cars could turn out to be one of the most ruinous policy decisions of our lifetimes.

Think about it for a second: an entire industry not only forced to abandon a product that the vast majority of people still want and use, but also bullied into channelling all its resources into making something on a colossal level that there simply isnt the market for  at least not within the horrendously short timeframe that is being imposed on car manufacturers.

Its industrial self-sabotage and a commercial, economic and social catastrophe in the making. But whats worse is that the damage risks being far greater in the UK than anywhere else in the Western world thanks to the Governments myopic obsession with arbitrary net zero targets.

While the rest of the industrial world seems to have largely settled on a 2035 deadline for petrol and diesel phase out, ministers, for reasons destined to remain a mystery, have decided Britain needs to hit this milestone five years earlier than everyone else.

It makes no sense at all, and yet the ramifications threaten to be huge. By diverting capital into something that lots of people essentially dont want, it risks inflicting massive losses on an already fragile UK car industry.

It is pure fantasy to imagine that Britain  with a dearth of battery factories (consultants Alix Partners estimates as much as a third of Britains battery requirements will need to be imported), a paucity of chargers and dramatically higher energy costs  will be in any position to go fully electric in the next seven years. And the Government simply isnt capable of solving any of these challenges in time, if at all.

The UK risks becoming the unfortunate guinea pig in a costly and dangerous experiment that persuades the rest of the world to push their own deadlines out even further, turning this country into an example of how not to become a nation of electric car owners.

Perhaps, instead of everyone rushing out to buy an electric car as the end of the decade nears, millions of people will simply hand over the keys to their obsolete petrol bangers, and choose to walk everywhere instead.

It would have the double benefit of being a spectacular protest move, at the same time as being entirely in keeping with net zero  great for the environment but terrible for the economy.

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.
Greenpeace has denounced the new proposal as 'GMO deregulation' by the back door (DIETER NAGL)

The European Commission will on Wednesday put forward a proposal to ease current restrictions on genetically modified crops, which is already being denounced by environmental groups and leftwing lawmakers.

The plan could create a new frontline in the EU's Green Deal, elements of which centre-right European lawmakers are already seeking to stall, arguing they would harm farmers.

The commission says the rules on GMOs (genetically modified organisms) need to be relaxed to grow crops that require fewer pesticides, are better adapted to climate change and need less water.

It wants to allow gene editing within a plant's existing DNA -- which is different from transgenic techniques that introduce a foreign DNA strands and create a distinct species.

"Plants produced by new genomic techniques can support sustainability," EU health commissioner Stella Kyriakides said in April.

"We are designing a regulatory framework that will strongly signal to farmers, researchers and industry that this is the way forward in the EU," she said.

In this area, the commission wants to reduce the tough restrictions that apply to GMOs, which include authorisations, labelling and monitoring.

The text of the project, seen by AFP, calls for the existing GMO rules to not apply to genetically edited crops where the modifications could have come about naturally or through traditional blending procedures of plant species.

Such new crops would be considered "equivalent" to conventional varieties, subject to conditions on the type and number of mutations, a publicly accessible listing, and labelling for the sale of seeds.

No produce coming from these new genomic techniques (NGT) will be able to carry the "bio" label however, and those with herbicide properties would be excluded from the light-touch regulatory approach.

Those that are pesticide resistant would remain in the restrictive regime governing GMOs.

Brussels currently has received 90 authorisation requests for NGT crops, a third of which are in advanced research stages.

A few have reached the level of testing in open fields, such as corn in Belgium and potatoes in Sweden.

- 'Boost productivity' -

Powerful agri-groups such as Copa-Cogeca have been calling for simplified rules to speed up sales of their products.

Some EU member countries and lawmakers in the European Parliament's centre-right EPP grouping back that stance.

"We need to boost productivity and take into account the limited level of natural resources," Spain's agriculture minister Luis Planas said in mid-June, ahead of his country taking over the EU's rotating presidency.

He is looking to weigh this lifting of controls on NGTs against another EU text that aims to reduce the use of pesticides in European farming, but which has become bogged down in arguments over a feared reduction in crop yields.

The EPP, which is the biggest grouping in the parliament, is fiercely opposed to reduced pesticide use, and also a nature restoration law also being negotiated that seeks to repair damaged ecosystems.

Pascal Canfin, a lawmaker from the liberal Renew group who heads the parliament's environment committee, said the commission's NGT proposal could provide terms for a compromise.

"It is strongly backed by the EPP and offers a landing ground, with biotech solutions and natural solutions -- the restoration of ecosystems -- in parallel," he said.

However leftwing lawmakers are against a "GMO deregulation" and are demanding a systematic risk analysis, compulsory labelling, and the means to detect and trace such products.

Environmental groups are also opposed.

Greenpeace denounced it as "GMO deregulation" through the back-door that "ignores potential dangers to the environment, bees and pollinators and human health" and will obscure from consumers what they are eating.

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Australian actress Margot Robbie meets fans during a pink carpet event to promote her new film "Barbie" in Seoul (Jung Yeon-je)

Vietnam has banned the upcoming "Barbie" movie from cinemas over scenes with a map showing China's claims to territory in the South China Sea, state media reported Monday.

The fantasy comedy film about the famous doll, directed by Greta Gerwig and starring Margot Robbie and Ryan Gosling, had been set for nationwide release in Vietnam on 21 July.

But its performance schedule has been removed from the websites of the country's major cinema chains following a government decision to ban the film due to scenes featuring the so-called nine-dash line, state media reported.

China has long used its so-called nine-dash line to illustrate its expansive claims over most of the resource-rich sea, often to the displeasure of Hanoi, which also claims parts of the waterway.

"The film review board watched the film and made the decision to ban the screening of this movie in Vietnam due to a violation regarding the 'nine-dash line'," Vietnam's Department of Cinema director, Vi Kien Thanh, told the Dan Tri news site.

Another state media outlet, Tien Phong, reported that the nine-dash line scene appeared multiple times in the movie.

All films in communist Vietnam must be approved by censors who screen for gratuitous violence, suggestive sex scenes, or politically-sensitive material.

Last year, "Uncharted", the action-and-adventure movie starring Tom Holland, was banned from theatres due to scenes featuring the nine-dash line.

And in 2018, Vietnam cut a scene from the romantic comedy "Crazy Rich Asians" that featured a designer bag with a map of the world showing the disputed South China Sea islands under Beijing's control.

A year later, Hanoi pulled the animated DreamWorks film "Abominable" from cinemas over the same issue, while Netflix was told last year to ditch episodes of its "Pine Gap" series over similar scenes.

The South China Sea is home to valuable oil and gas deposits and shipping lanes, and several of China's neighbours have voiced concern that Beijing is seeking to expand its reach.

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Caitlyn Jenner blasted Republican presidential candidate Florida Gov. Ron DeSantiss campaign for hitting a new low after the campaign shared a video Friday attacking former President Trumps previous comments about the LGBTQ community.

DeSantis has hit a new low, she wrote on Twitter. But hes so desperate hell do anything to get ahead  thats been the theme of his campaign. You cant win a general, let alone 2028 by going after people that are integral parts of the conservative movement! #MAGA

DeSantiss campaign retweeted a video that included images of Jenner, who came out as a transgender woman in 2015, alongside Trumps comments saying he would be comfortable with her using any bathroom at Trump Tower. The video also included Trump vowing to do everything in my power to protect our LGBTQ citizens.

To wrap up Pride Month, lets hear from the politician who did more than any other Republican to celebrate it, the DeSantis War Room account tweeted alongside the video.

The video then pivots to DeSantis and touts headlines that described his policies on transgender individuals as extreme, draconian, totalitarianism in disguise and unwarranted and un-American.

DeSantis signed numerous bills targeting transgender individuals in Florida last month, including restricting gender-affirming care for transgender children, banning transgender individuals from using bathrooms that match their gender identity, and barring teachers and students from using their pronouns of choice at school.

Trump has since also moved to promote harsher rhetoric on transgender issues, promising to ban men from participating in womens sports and calling gender-affirming surgery for transgender youth as child sexual mutilation.

The video has also prompted criticism from Republicans and LGBTQ groups. Log Cabin Republicans, the largest GOP organization representing LGBTQ individuals, tweeted that DeSantiss message for his presidential campaign is divisive and desperate, labeling the ad as homophobic.

Republican presidential candidate Chris Christie, former New Jersey governor, also knocked DeSantis and Trump after the Florida governors campaign released the ad and compared it to a food fight between teenagers.

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